A severe cyclone has killed more than 580 people in Bangladesh and left thousands injured or missing, triggering an international relief effort on Friday to help the disaster-prone country cope with its latest emergency.

Local officials and Red Crescent workers said 587 deaths had been confirmed. Hundreds more were injured or missing after Cyclone Sidr struck overnight packing winds of 250 kph (155 mph).

The Category 4 cyclone triggered a 15-foot (5-metre) high tidal surge that devastated three coastal towns and forced 3.2 million people to evacuate, officials and aid agencies said.

Pakistani opposition politician Imran Khan has been arrested after making his first public appearance since emergency rule was declared, police have said.

The former cricketer was detained after going to the University of Punjab in Lahore to address a protest by students against President Pervez Musharraf.

Mr Khan was initially held for an hour by students from the Jamaat-e-Islami party after a confrontation on campus.

On Tuesday, Mr Khan said there should be no negotiations with Gen Musharraf.

A huge blaze has broken out in east London close to where the main stadium for the London Olympics will be built.

The London Fire Brigade were called at 1206 GMT on Monday to reports of a fire at a disused warehouse in Waterden Road, Hackney Wick, near Stratford.

About 75 firefighters are tackling the fire which has created a huge plume of black smoke that can be seen across the city's skyline.

Waterden Road runs through the site where the 2012 Olympics will be held.

Georgia's parliament on Friday prepared to endorse President Mikhail Saakahvili's state of emergency decree banning independent media and mass meetings, defying criticism from Western allies and domestic opponents.

As traffic returned to normal in central Tbilisi and soldiers took a lower profile, foreign governments and human rights organizations pressed Saakashvili to lift the state of emergency he declared on Wednesday and to allow a free press.

But a deputy speaker of parliament, Mikhail Machavariani, said the 15-day emergency would be approved by the assembly, where Saakashvili's party and its allies control some two-thirds of the seats. A debate was planned at 4 p.m. (7:00 a.m. EST).

"We think we will approve the decree on the state of emergency," Machavariani said. "We have a lot of information that Russian intelligence services are interfering in Georgian affairs."

Flood alerts remain in force in the UK and the Netherlands, but latest reports suggest fears of storm-driven tidal surges have not materialised.

Despite some flooding along Britain's North Sea coast, authorities said the peak of the surge had passed without major incident.

A tidal surge in 1953 killed more than 2,000 people in the two countries.

Overnight, thousands of people were evacuated in England and surge barriers closed at the Dutch port of Rotterdam.

Several oil platforms were closed off the Norwegian coast and gales are forecast in Germany and Denmark.

Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has been served a 30-day detention notice.

The move came as she tried to leave her Islamabad home, which has been blocked off by police stopping her joining a planned rally in nearby Rawalpindi.

Police in the city clashed with Bhutto supporters defying a ban on rallies imposed under emergency rule.

Ms Bhutto has vowed to a campaign aimed at forcing President Pervez Musharraf to stand down as army chief.

Officers in riot gear blocked off the road to the former prime minister's house with barbed wire on Friday, with no-one being allowed in or out.

NASA scientists said they discovered a fifth planet orbiting a star outside our own solar system and say the discovery suggests there are many solar systems that are, just like our own, packed with planets.

The new planet is much bigger than Earth, but is a similar distance away from its sun, a star known as 55 Cancri, the astronomers said on Tuesday.

Four planets had already been seen around the star, but the discovery marks the first time as many as five planets have been found orbiting a solar system outside our own with its eight planets, said Debra Fischer, an astronomer at San Francisco State University.

Separation surgery on a two-year-old Indian girl who was born with four arms and four legs has been successful, doctors say.

Lakshmi Tatma was joined at the pelvis to what was, in effect, a headless, undeveloped twin.

A team of surgeons in the southern city of Bangalore operated on Lakshmi for 27 hours to separate her spinal column and kidney from that of her twin.

It is hoped the procedure will allow her to survive beyond adolescence.

"Lakshmi is stable and sound," the doctor leading the operation, Sharan Patil, told a news conference which was shown live on television channels across India.

Charles Prince, the chairman and chief executive of one of the world's biggest banks, Citigroup, has resigned.

He will be replaced as chairman by former US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, while Sir Win Bischoff will serve as interim chief executive.

Investor calls for Mr Prince to go have increased since the bank reported a 57% drop in quarterly profits, after losses in the sub-prime mortgage market.

He is the second head of a leading US bank to step down within a week.

The head of Merrill Lynch, Stan O'Neal, resigned after reporting heavy losses.

India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, has bought his wife a luxury jet with entertainment cabins, a sky bar and fancy showers for her birthday, a newspaper said on Friday.

Ambani, who owns the country's biggest private company, Reliance Industries Ltd, gifted the $60 million Airbus plane to wife Neeta on her 44th birthday on Thursday, the Mumbai Mirror newspaper said.

The jet is custom-fitted with an office and a cabin with game consoles, music systems, satellite television and wireless communication, the report said.