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.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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