INDIA
Bus crash kills 29
At least 29 people were killed yesterday after a bus careered off one of India’s busiest roads, which has become known as the “highway to hell” because of its poor safety record. The driver was suspected to have fallen asleep before the bus crashed into a railing and fell into a drain between two flyovers on the Yamuna expressway, which connects New Delhi with Agra, the city famed for the Taj Mahal. Eighteen people were injured, some critically, police said. The 165km expressway was India’s longest six-lane highway when it opened in 2012, but about 900 people been killed on the road since, according to authorities. The state-run bus was taking more than 50 people from Lucknow in northern Uttar Pradesh to Delhi when the accident happened at about 4.15am about 20km outside of Agra. It fell more than 12m into a drain below the road, crushing the roof of the bus. Running water in the drain complicated rescue efforts, police said. “Twenty nine persons have died and 18 others are injured,” Agra district magistrate N.G. Ravi Kumar said.
TAJIKISTAN
Prisoner poisoning probed
The nation has opened a criminal investigation after 14 prisoners were fatally poisoned while they were being transported between jails, the Ministry of Justice said yesterday, suggesting that another inmate might have given them contaminated bread. The incident happened on Sunday as more than 100 prisoners, including eight women, were being transferred in a convoy from prisons in the north of the Central Asian country to jails in the south. The ministry said in a statement that a prisoner handed around bread to a group of 16 inmates traveling in one of the vehicles during a stop on the journey. It said that “16 prisoners, who were in the back of one of the cars, experienced nausea, dizziness, vomiting” half an hour after consuming the bread. Medical staff were only able to save the lives of two of the prisoners, according to the statement, which was relayed by the Khovar state information agency. The state prosecutor had opened a criminal case into the incident, the ministry said.
NIGER
More US forces sought
President Mahamadou Issoufou called for greater US involvement in the fight against Islamist insurgencies in west Africa — at a time when US President Donald Trump is scaling back the US’ military presence on the continent. Too little is being done to combat the fighters, Issoufou said on Saturday in an interview in the capital, Niamey. Militants have carried out attacks in Mali, Nigeria, Chad, Burkina Faso and Niger. Other countries in the region, including Ivory Coast and Ghana, have stepped up security in the face of the growing threat. Niger is already at the center of an international effort to fight the insurgencies in the Sahel, an arid area on the southern fringe of the Sahara. France and the US have a military presence in Niger — the US built a US$110 million drone base in northern Niger and has deployed special forces on the ground. “I propose an international coalition, like you see in Syria or Iraq, to fight terrorism in the Sahel and the Lake Chad basin,” Issoufou said. “When I say an international force, this also includes the US.” The extent of US involvement in Niger was unclear until four US soldiers were killed in an ambush by more than 100 Islamist militants in the southwest of the country in 2017. Their deaths prompted an investigation by the Pentagon and a fierce debate about US military involvement in Africa.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency