Friday, December 25, 2009 LIMA: A passenger bus plunged into a ravine in the high Andes of southern Peru on Thursday, killing at least 40 people and wounding some 10 others, police said.Authorities said more than 50 people were aboard when the bus traveling between Arequipa, Peru's second largest city, and the town of Santo Tomas, near Cusco, veered off the road and tumbled 200 meters (yards) down a mountainside, police captain Juan Suarez said. "There are 40 dead at the moment and I don't have the exact number of wounded, there are about 10," Suarez told media, adding that the crash occurred early Thursday about 1,100 kilometers (680 miles) from the capital Lima. Suarez said the bus left late Wednesday and had been traveling to Santo Tomas, a peasant village in Chumbivilca province, when it crashed. Highway police General Enrique Medrie told reporters that "there were reports of overcrowding of passengers," with a travel crush common on Christmas Eve.Edilberto Tenquipa of the Espinar fire company near the crash site said police and fire brigades were at the scene seeking to transfer the wounded to hospital, but that rescue efforts were difficult. "The rains that fell this morning and a possible mechanical failure may have caused the crash," Tenquipa told media. Peru's public transport sector suffers from a lack of regulation, and deadly accidents are common. Buses involved in crashes are routinely found to have had mechanical problems, and the country's roads, notably in the Andes mountains, are in poor condition.
BEIRUT: Thousands of people converged Saturday on central Beirut to mark the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Lebanese former premier Rafiq Hariri.Waving Lebanese flags and carrying pictures of the slain leader, men, women and children gathered under sunny skies in Martyr's Square where members of the parliamentary majority were to address the crowd. The rally comes as final preparations are underway in The Hague for the launch of the international tribunal set up to bring Hariri's killers to justice. It also comes as the country prepares for legislative elections in June that will pit Western-backed political parties against a Hezbollah-led alliance backed by Syria and Iran.Hariri died in a massive car bombing on February 14, 2005 that also killed 22 others. The assassination was widely blamed on then Lebanese power-broker Syria, which has denied any involvement. The attack on the Beirut seafront was one of the worst acts of political violence to rock Lebanon since t...
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