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.
Friday, August 14, 2009 MUMBAI: A 26-year-old woman died Thursday of H1N1 swine flu in the southern city of Bangalore, raising India's death toll from the virus to 20, authorities said.The death was the first reported in India's information technology capital, the Press Trust of India reported.Meanwhile in Pune, the worst-affected in India, two more victims of the virus died Thursday, raising the death toll in that western city near Mumbai to 12, the report said. The victims were an 11-month-old boy and a 75-year-old old woman.US media reported movie halls, schools and colleges were ordered closed Thursday for three days to a week in Mumbai, the commercial and financial capital of the country, as fear of the pandemic spread.Prajakata Lavangare, a spokeswoman for the government of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said similar orders were issued in Pune, which is also located in the state.The woman who died in Bangalore was identified only as Roopa, a teacher in
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