■ India
Bus crash kills 22
A tourist bus skidded off a mountain road and plunged into a gorge in western India, killing 22 people and injuring 30 others, a news report said yesterday. The accident occurred just before midnight on Saturday on a mountain road near Mahabaleshwar, a hill resort 150km southeast of Mumbai, India's financial center, Press Trust of India news agency said, quoting police. The bus's driver was negotiating a bend in the road when he lost control of the vehicle which skidded and crashed into a gorge, nearly 60m below.
■ Afghanistan
Two dead in clashes
Fighting in northern Afghanistan killed two people as clashes between the militias of rival warlords entered their third day yesterday, a local commander said. A woman and child died in the clashes in Sari Pul province, said General Abdul Sabor, a commander under Tajik warlord General Atta Mohammed. At least three fighters had died in the fray on Saturday. The violence began Friday night in Kohistanat district, with forces under Uzbek General Abdul Rashid Dostum and his Tajik rival, Mohammed, battling with Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
■ Pakistan
Musharraf regals audience
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf yesterday said economic cooperation was the key to Asia's development, but observed that tensions in South Asia and instability in Afghanistan adversely affected such endeavors, China's state press reported. "It is an urgent task to enhance comprehensive and integrated development, build complementarity, reinforce Asian values, abate tensions and seek for peaceful resolution to political disputes in Asia," Musharraf told the Boao Forum for Asia in southern China's Hainan province. Trends towards regional and sub-regional integration is a character of the global scenario, Musharraf was quoted by the Xinhua news agency as saying.
■ Nepal
French clean up
A team of French environmentalists has removed nearly three tonnes of garbage including beer bottles and batteries from around the base camp of the world's seventh-tallest summit, Mount Dhaulagiri. The five-member team supported by 10 trekking staff and 20 Sherpas and porters spent nearly a month at the base camp of the 8,167m mountain. Breffni Bolze, 27, a recycling engineer who lives near Paris, said his team had collected empty cans, beer bottles, plastic material and highly toxic lithium batteries among other rubbish. But they left behind a body which they came across somewhere above the camp. "We were very much disturbed to see this very old dried body but we did not dare to remove it for burial or cremation," he told reporters in Kathmandu.
RSS