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Hail battered a Delta Air Lines passenger jet bound for New York shortly after taking off from Milan on Monday, forcing it to divert safely to Rome’s main airport, Italian media and the airline said. The aircraft sustained damage to its nose and on the fuselage near the wings, Italian media said. According to Delta, Flight DL185 “from Milan to New York JFK (was) diverted to Rome after encountering severe weather after take-off.” A Delta statement didn’t specify the kind of damage. The plane had taken off from Milan’s Malpensa airport. “The flight landed safely and passengers deplaned normally. The aircraft sustained some damage during the bad weather which is being reviewed by our local maintenance team,″ the airline’s statement said. Delta didn’t say how many passengers and crew were aboard the flight, nor whether they were booked on another flight Monday or might have to spend the night in Rome after landing at Leonardo da Vinci airport. Milan is in the Lombardy region, which in recent days has been pummeled by several storms with hail the size of tennis balls and whipped by strong winds. On Monday, a 58-year-old woman walking to work in a factory died was killed by a falling tree in Lombardy, Italian Rai state TV said. In Milan, firefighter divers rescued a man trapped in his flooded garage after heavy rain.<br/>

One of Libya’s rival prime ministers on Monday returned to the capital of Tripoli from Italy on a charter flight with a commercial airline, the first direct flight between the two countries in a decade. Abdul-Hamid Dbeibah, who heads the Tripoli-based government, boarded the flight from Fiumicino airport in Rome. Flight AZ894 is operated by Italy’s national airline, ITA Airways. “From Rome to Tripoli through the Italian airways, ITA,” Dbeibah wrote on Twitter attaching a photo of the flight ticket. The flight landed in Mitiga airport, the only functioning airport in the Libyan capital. Dbeibah said Monday that Libyans would be able to book direct flights to Italy in September after the Italian government agreed earlier this month to lift a 10-year-long ban on civil aviation in the North African nation. He said Sunday that flights between Libya and Italy would help pave the way for the opening of airspace with other countries. Dbeibah said his government would work to resume flights between Rome and the Libyan eastern city of Benghazi, according to his office. In Rome, Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni’s office hailed the ITA flight as “another tangible sign of the direction that the Italian government wants to impress in its relations with Libya and in its relations with the States of the broader Mediterranean” region. Oil-rich Libya plunged into chaos after a NATO-backed uprising toppled and killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. In the disarray that followed, the country split into rival administrations in the east and west, each backed by rogue militias and foreign governments. The eastern-based government is headed by Prime Minister Ossama Hamad, who was appointed the country’s House of Representatives after Libya failed to hold elections back in December 2021. Hamad’s government is backed by powerful military commander Khalifa Hifter, whose forces control eastern and southern Libya.<br/>