New blow for snowbound passengers

THESSALONIKI, Greece -- A train derailed on Wednesday while carrying passengers -- including 116 people who were rescued after being stranded for 17 hours in sub-zero temperatures on board another train -- as snow storms hit Greece.

The Greek accident capped a week of deaths and injuries from blizzards, heavy rain and winds after severe winter weather hit much of Mediterranean Europe.

No injuries were reported when the first three train carriages of the train carrying the rescued travellers came off the tracks three kilometres outside Thessaloniki, authorities said.

The total number of people on board was not immediately clear. The train was travelling from the city of Alexandroupolis, near the Turkish border, to Thessaloniki.

The passengers included those who had spent Monday night on board another train stuck in two metres of snow near the northern village of Petrades, about 900 kilometres north of Athens and close to the border with Bulgaria. Those passengers had been taken to Alexandroupolis.

That train had lost power, cutting the heating supply to the passengers, which included seven children, as temperatures plunged to -10C (14F).

They were evacuated on Tuesday afternoon by soldiers using tracked vehicles after rescue helicopters were hampered by bad weather and one other train engine sent to assist also became stuck.

Many of the people aboard were soldiers headed home for the Christmas holidays.

The passengers were to be transferred onto a third train in order to complete their journeys to Thessaloniki and Athens, authorities said.

Meanwhile in Russia, the chief of the country's electricity monopoly flew on Wednesday to the southern resort of Sochi, where electricity and heating to most of the city were cut by a heavy snowfall that damaged power lines.

The Black Sea resort, about 1,400 kilometres (875 miles) south of Moscow, was receiving just about 15 percent of the electricity required on Tuesday, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

Heating was being supplied only to hospitals and to children's institutions such as schools and day-care centres. Temperatures in the city hovered at around 5 degrees Celsius (41 F), ITAR-Tass said.

Heavy snow and ice storms on Monday broke six main power lines carrying electricity from the nearby Krasnodar region of southern Russia, ITAR-Tass said, citing Anatoly Chubais, the head of Russia's Unified Energy Systems.

Thirteen settlements with a total of 320,000 residents had their power cut completely, while power was cut partially to six settlements that are home to 130,000 people, the news agency said.

Chubais canceled his scheduled meetings in Moscow and flew to Sochi to take part in a meeting on restoring energy supplies to the city.

In Romania temperatures reached a 25-year low of minus 31 degrees Celsius (minus 24 Fahrenheit) in the Romanian town of Miercurea Ciuc overnight, the state meteorological institute said on Wednesday.

The Transylvanian town lies in a depression encircled by mountains 280 kilometres (175 miles) north of the capital and is known as the coldest place in Romania.

Ironically the U.N. weather agency reported that the average temperature on Earth for the year is expected to be the second-warmest since global records began 140 years ago.

World Meteorological Organization officials on Tuesday called the data more proof of global warming caused by humans. They said the warming temperatures led to an increase in the severity and frequency of storms and droughts and other unusual weather conditions.

"Temperatures are getting hotter, and they are getting hotter faster now than at any time in the past," said Michel Jarraud, the organization's deputy secretary-general.

The global average surface temperature in 2001 was expected to be 57.96 Fahrenheit, the World Meteorological Organization said. The record, set in 1998, was 58.24 Fahrenheit.