At least 32 people were killed and more were taken to hospital after a tour bus crashed on a highway in Taiwan on Tuesday night.

The bus was carrying 45 people and 13 of them were sent to nearby hospitals, according to the local fire department.

Television footage showed pictures of rescue crews trying to raise the overturned bus on the side of the highway with ambulances and fire trucks lined up along the bend of the road.

Many of the injured were older passengers, local television reported. It was unclear what caused the accident.

 
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French car manufacturer Peugeot has bought India’s most iconic car brand from its maker Hindustan Motors in a deal that signifies the passing of an era in India’s motoring history.

Over the weekend, the C.K. Birla Group that owns Hindustan Motors said it had signed an agreement with Peugeot SA to sell the Ambassador for 800 million rupees ($12 million).

The hulking Ambassador sedan remained largely unchanged for more than five decades, ferrying India’s elite, including prime ministers, visiting heads of states and celebrities. It was a throwback to an era when India’s policy of economic self-sufficiency meant domestically produced cars were the norm.

First manufactured in 1948, the Ambassador was the only luxury car available in India till the mid-1980s. By the early 1990s, economic reforms had opened India’s doors to many small car manufacturers.

Hindustan Motors stopped making Ambassadors in 2014 after about 2,200 cars were sold in 2013.

Fondly referred to as the “Amby,” the Ambassador was modeled after the British Morris Oxford III. Its lumbering shape, often compared to a bowler hat on wheels, was suited for India’s pot-holed roads and rugged terrain. But poor gas mileage and a lack of luxury features led a rising Indian middle class to aspire to own cheaper, newer models that were easier to maneuver in crowded cities.

Displaced by Japanese and Korean cars, the sturdy Ambassadors were relegated to use by taxi services and government departments. But even that has changed with the Indian government switching to smaller, swifter cars than the bulbous Ambassador.

It is unclear what exactly the French car maker plans to do with the Ambassador brand.

Peugeot pulled out of India after a joint-venture effort in the 1990s collapsed. Last month it signed an agreement with Birla to return to the fast-growing market, saying it will invest $107 million in a Hindustan Motors manufacturing facility in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

That deal includes hiking manufacturing capacity to 100,000 vehicles a year, to take advantage of the rapid growth in India, where car sales expanded 7 percent to 2.96 million cars last year.

 
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An international rights defender has accused Pakistan and the United Nations refugee agency of complicity in promoting “unlawful and coerced” repatriation of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees.

In a report released Monday, Human Rights Watch alleges that in response to deadly security incidents and deteriorating political relations with Afghanistan over the past two years, Pakistani authorities have mounted a concerted campaign to drive Afghans out of Pakistan.

“In the second half of 2016, a toxic combination of deportation threats and police abuses pushed out nearly 365,000 of the country’s 1.5 million registered Afghan refugees, as well as just over 200,000 of the country’s estimated one million undocumented Afghans,” the report noted.

HRW senior researcher Patricia Gossman, while sharing details of the report at a news conference in Kabul, said the exodus amounts to the world’s largest unlawful mass forced return of refugees in recent times.

“The way Pakistan carried that out was through a range [of] abuses toward the refugee[s] and the undocumented Afghans in Pakistan. And this included, detentions, extortion, extracting bribes, the closure of Afghan schools, raids on people’s homes and other threats, including from the local population that Afghans we[re] no longer welcome.”

Pakistan denies coercion

Pakistani authorities maintain that areas where Afghan refugees reside have lately become security challenges and safe havens for anti-state militants, and after hosting them for four decades, host communities also want the refugees to be relocated. But Islamabad denies allegations of any concerted campaign of abuse and coercion.

Gossman warned that the refugee families pushed out of Pakistan are returning to expanding armed conflict in Afghanistan where they also face widespread destitution and a near-total absence of social services.

The report harshly criticized the U.N. Refugee Agency, or UNHCR, for allegedly facilitating repatriation of refugees from Pakistan, saying the agency was actually complicit in this forced return of displaced families.

“Rather than saying something, speak out publicly when this concerted campaign by Pakistan began, UNHCR in Pakistan remained silent and in fact increased its cash grant to the refugees all of which facilitated the return of hundreds of thousands of people in conditions that cannot be called voluntary.”

UNHCR promptly responded to the allegations, saying it disagrees with the conclusions of the HRW report. In a statement sent to VOA, the agency said that throughout 2016, it has informed Afghans of their rights, intervened in cases of unlawful arrest and detention, and intervened in nearly 6,000 cases of arrest, securing the release of almost all.

“UNHCR does not promote returns to Afghanistan given the enduring conflict in different parts of the country and its limited absorption capacity. At the same time, the agency does help those who decide to return based on the options available to them,” the agency said in the statement.

Complex situation

It maintained that the multiple drivers behind the surge in the returnees are complex and influenced by shifting regional dynamics and relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“They include pressures by authorities amidst broader security operations, changing attitudes among host communities, uncertainty about the renewal of refugee ID cards, economic hardship, stricter border controls disrupting trade and family ties. There was also a campaign by the Afghan government in Pakistan to encourage Afghans to return home.”

Speaking in Kabul, Gossman also slammed Afghan authorities for encouraging the refugees to return when the conflict has worsened and the government is unable to deliver on its resettlement incentives.

“It is very reckless and irresponsible at the very least to promise land or other advantages to people who return when that is actually not forthcoming.”
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Several Chinese cities have shut down their poultry markets in the wake of a bird flu outbreak that has killed at least two dozen people this year across China.

Live poultry sales have now been suspended in Changsha, the capital of central China’s Hunan province, as well as markets across the eastern province of Zhejiang, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Sunday, as authorities deal with dozens of new cases of H7N9 bird flu.

Nearly 300 markets and slaughterhouses were shut down in the southwestern Chinese city of Suining, where authorities are also cracking down on unauthorized poultry businesses.

Xinhua reported that 21 people in Jiangsu province died in January after contracting H7N9. Hunan authorities have reported at least five deaths this year, and an infant girl has died in southwestern Yunnan province.

A major H7N9 bird flu outbreak in humans first struck China in March 2013, killing more than 40 people and devastating the poultry industry. H7N9 is considered less virulent than the H5N1 strain, blamed by the World Health Organization for hundreds of deaths worldwide over the last decade.

Most people infected with H7N9 are believed to contract it by touching infected poultry or entering contaminated areas, according to a WHO alert published last month. Experts do not believe the virus can be spread widely between humans, the WHO said.

In Guangzhou, China’s third-largest city, more than 30 percent of the live poultry markets were found to be contaminated with H7N9, state media reported Saturday. Authorities in Guangzhou have announced temporary three-day suspensions of the poultry trade to try to contain the virus.
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A Malaysian aid ship was heading to a Bangladeshi port Monday bringing relief goods for some of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims who’ve fled Myanmar.

Shaheenul Islam, the military’s public relations spokesman, said the ship anchored near Sonadia island off the coastal district of Cox’s Bazar then had to be sent to Chittagong because the island had no unloading jetty facilities.

“There has been a change after the ship anchored near Cox’s Bazar town. Now it is heading back to Chittagong seaport where the port authorities will arrange everything,” Islam said. “This is purely an issue of how the goods would be unloaded, no other issues are involved.”

“There will be an official handing over ceremony tomorrow morning and then the goods will be sent to Teknaf,” he said.

Ali Hossain, chief government administrator in Cox’s Bazar, said they had received a list of goods to be unloaded from the ship, but the plan was changed as Malaysian authorities wanted better handling infrastructure.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya are camping in Teknaf officially and in unregistered camps.

The ship is carrying around 2,300 tons of food, medicine and other supplies.

Rohingya Muslims have long faced discrimination in majority-Buddhist Myanmar.

More than 300,000 have been living in Bangladesh for decades, while about 66,000 more have crossed the border since October amid renewed persecution and targeted attacks by soldiers and majority Buddhists in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

 
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