Fifteen people were killed yesterday in a train accident in north India, an official said, amid a political row over a plan to raise fares to pay for a safety upgrade on the network.
A train traveling across Uttar Pradesh State crashed into an overloaded jeep carrying 19 people as it tried to pass an unmanned crossing in Mahamaya Nagar District, 296km from the state capital, Lucknow.
“The jeep was thrown 6m away,” a state home ministry official who declined to give his name said, adding that 15 passengers were killed instantly and four were critically injured.
Photo: AFP
The accident occurred at about 7:30am yesterday, he added.
Many rail crossings in India are unmanned and lack functioning signals, raising the risk of collisions for vehicle drivers attempting to cross.
The cash-strapped train system has a notoriously bad safety record, with a recent official report revealing that almost 15,000 people are killed every year crossing rail tracks — a figure that the government described as a “massacre.”
Last week, then-national rail minister Dinesh Trivedi pledged to make safety his top priority on the network and hiked fares for the first time in nearly a decade, earning criticism from the opposition and his own party.
Trivedi resigned on Sunday after being forced out by the head of his Trinamool Congress Party, a minority coalition partner in the government which called the fares hike “anti-poor.”
India’s rail network carries 18 million people daily and is still the main form of long-distance travel, despite fierce competition from private airlines.
The previous most recent major train accident occurred in July last year, when a packed express train traveling from Kolkata to New Delhi derailed at high speed in Uttar Pradesh, killing 69 people.
The nation’s worst rail accident was in 1981, when a train plunged into a river in the eastern state of Bihar, killing an estimated 800 people.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.