A fire in the Moroccan city of Casablanca has killed 55 people and injured 12 others. The fire broke out on the ground floor of a mattress factory and was so fierce that it tool firefighters many hours to get inside. It's not yet clear what caused the blaze. The Moroccan Interior Minister Chakib Benmoussa said he was opening an investigation into to the disaster.

"We consider this a disaster because the number of victims. At this point of time we have 55 confirmed dead, most of them are workers in this building. Some people succeed in escaping after the fire broke out but many people were trapped and perished in the fire."

The European Galileo Project that hopes to rival the American satellite navigation system GPS has launched the spacecraft to test some of its new technologies. The European craft has lifted off from Kazakhstan on a Russian Soyuz rocket. One of its main amis is to monitor the behaviour in space of the atomic clocks, the precise timing underpins sat-nav applications. Galileo is designed to more than double existing GPS coverage