Rescuers in Nepal resume search for 66 missing due to landslide

Rescuers continued their search on Saturday after a landslide in Nepal swept two passenger buses carrying over 60 people into the Trishuli River on Friday.

Police said they were unable to find any signs of the buses or the people on board in the river, which has been swollen due to continuous rainfall over the past few days.

With weather conditions improving slightly on Saturday, heavy equipment was deployed to clear the landslide from the highway, allowing rescuers to conduct their search more efficiently.

Indradev Yadav, the chief district officer of Chitwan, said a Kathmandu-bound bus and another bus heading to Gaur in the Rautahat district from Kathmandu fell into the river after a landslide occurred at 3.30am on Friday.

The landslide pushed the buses through concrete barriers and down a steep embankment, reported AFP.

“We will search all possible places,” Mr Yadav said.

“We will employ all our abilities for search and rescue despite the water levels, current and the water’s muddiness.”

District official Khimananda Bhusal said that the buses had at least 66 passengers between them. However, three passengers were thrown from the buses and were being treated at a nearby hospital.

“Chances of finding survivors are slim because over 30 hours have passed since the buses were swept into the river. The water level has receded this morning, but it is still very murky,” Mr Bhusal told Reuters.

As of Friday evening, the identities of 17 passengers had been established. They included 14 Nepalis, seven Indians, and three who belonged to the bus crew.

A third bus was hit by another landslide a short distance away on the same highway. The driver died at the hospital while undergoing treatment and it was unclear if there were more casualties.

Nepal’s prime minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, said he had directed all agencies to search and effectively rescue the passengers. “I am deeply saddened by the loss of nearly five dozen passengers and the loss of property due to floods and landslides in different parts of the country,” he said.

Nepal, nestled in the Himalayas, experiences severe weather conditions during the monsoon season from June to September. The rains bring flash floods, lightning strikes and landslides, killing dozens of people nearly every year.

This year, at least 62 people were killed in rain-related incidents in June alone, the home ministry said on 7 July.

Nepal’s topography and extensive river network make it highly susceptible to disasters, a situation that is likely worsened by climate change.

Gruesome hit-and-run puts spotlight on impunity for India’s rich and powerful

Indian police have arrested an influential politician’s son for allegedly mowing down a woman while returning from a late night party, putting the spotlight on how the country’s rich and powerful disregard laws with near impunity and manipulate the system to get away with it.

Mihir Shah, 24, son of Rajesh Shah, a member of the ruling faction of the Shiv Sena party in the western Maharashtra state, was driving back from a weekend party in Mumbai when he crashed his BMW into a fisherfolk couple on a scooter and sped away.

The victims were later identified as Kaveri Nakhwa, 45, and her husband Pradip Nakhwa, 50.

Mr Shah dragged the woman for almost 1.5km, stopped to remove her dead body from under the engine and switched seats with his driver who had been riding in the passenger seat, CCTV footage seen by the Mumbai police showed.

Mr Nakhwa was said to be recovering from his injuries.

After removing Nakhwa’s body from under the car and leaving it on the roadside, the police said, Mr Shah sat in the passenger seat while the driver reversed and ran over her once again.

He made frantic calls to his father in the early hours of Sunday and, with his help, evaded arrest for three days, the police said. The politician was released on bail. The driver, Rajrishi Bidawat, was arrested and charged with culpable homicide.

Mr Shah and his friends were inebriated, police said.

The hit-and-run case is the latest in a series of gruesome incidents involving the children of the rich and powerful that has sparked public anger over glaring procedural lapses in the prosecution of the accused.

In most of the cases the victims were poor people.

In 2022, an unidentified person ploughed their speeding BMW car, a status symbol of India’s rich, into several vehicles near Red Fort in the national capital Delhi and injured at least five people.

That year, according to the Crime in India report, about 148,716 people died in road accidents in the country. Nearly 44.5 per cent of them were riding motorbikes and scooters and 19.5 per cent were pedestrians.

In early 2023, Anjali Singh, 20, was dragged under a drunk driver’s car for over an hour following a hit and run on New Year’s Day. She was riding a scooter when she was hit and dragged more than 13km before one of the five occupants, including a politician from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, noticed her.

In an eerily similar case to Mr Shah’s, the teenage son of a prominent real estate magnate,Vishal Agarwal, in Mahrashtra’s Pune city killed two young software engineers after ramming his Porsche into their motorcycle on 19 May.

He was reportedly four months shy of 18, the legal age to drive a car in India, and was allegedly driving drunk.

The teenager, who was not named, was quickly released with a Pune judge asking him to undergo treatment for his drinking habit, take counselling sessions, work with police for 15 days and write an essay about the accident as conditions for his bail. The perceived leniency shown by the judge sparked outrage in the country.

In the wake of the outrage, the Pune police arrested his father, mother and grandfather as well as the owners of two bars that had allegedly served him alcohol. The legal drinking age in Maharashtra is 25.

The father and grandfather had pressured the family’s driver to take the blame for the accident by offering money and threatening him, the police claimed. The mother was accused of giving her blood to be swapped with her son’s which had been collected after the incident to test for alcohol.

The police also arrested doctors Ajay Taware and Shrihari Halnor from the city’s Sassoon hospital for allegedly destroying evidence.

In Mr Shah’s case, a police official told news agency PTI that his influential father was an “active participant” in ensuring his escape.

“I asked him to stop, yet he didn’t stop. He ran away. She must have been in so much pain. Everyone knows this but no one is doing anything. There is no one for the poor,” Mr Nakhwa said, recalling the accident.

The incident sparked condemnation from state leaders who have asked the state government to not offer Mr Shah “political refuge”.

“I will not go into the political leanings of Mr Shah, the accused of the hit-and-run, but I hope the police will act swiftly to catch the accused and bring him to justice. Hopefully, there will be no political refuge by the regime,” said Aaditya Thackeray, an opposition lawmaker from a rival faction of the Shiv Sena.

“The culprit has to be caught. We hope there will not be political support to the culprit.”

Maharashtra chief minister Eknath Shinde said he was “deeply alarmed” by the rise in hit-and-run cases in the state.

“It is intolerable the powerful and influential misuse their status to manipulate the system. Such miscarriages of justice will not be tolerated by my government. The lives of ordinary citizens are precious to us,” he said on social media platform X.

“I have directed the state police to handle these cases with the utmost seriousness and ensure justice is served. In addition, we are implementing stricter laws and harsher penalties for hit-and-run offenders. No one, whether rich, influential, or the offspring of bureaucrats or ministers, affiliated with any party, will have immunity as long as I am the chief minister of the state. I have zero tolerance for injustice.”

But, as an editorial by the news website The Print noted, “Shinde’s stern warning after the Mumbai hit-and-run is the least one expects”. “It won’t do the job of rooting out reckless, power-drunk killers at the wheel,” it added. “Their impunity comes from privilege the system provides. Laws that are not harsh enough, inadequate policing and atrocious parenting are to blame.”

US sanctions Israeli settler group and outposts in occupied West Bank

The US has imposed new sanctions on an Israeli settler group and four unauthorised outposts in the West Bank, in the latest effort by the Joe Biden administration to confront land grab and instability in occupied Palestinian territories.

The sanctions target Lehava, an umbrella group for Israeli settlers sanctioned by the UK, and members of Tsasv9, a group that blocked aid from reaching the starving Palestinians in Gaza.

The sanctions also hit four illegal Israeli settler outposts that have been “weaponised” for “violence to displace Palestinians” by disrupting their grazing lands, limiting access to wells and conducting attacks on the residents.

One of the outposts is a farm owned by Isaschar Manne.

“It was established on pastureland belonging to the Palestinian community,” the State Department said, “and settlers from this outpost regularly attack community shepherds and prevent their access to the pastureland through acts of violence.”

It described Lehava, which has over 10,000 members, as the “largest violent extremist organisation in Israel”.

“The United States remains deeply concerned about extremist violence and instability in the West Bank, which undermines Israel’s own security,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Thursday.

“We strongly encourage the government of Israel to take immediate steps to hold these individuals and entities accountable. In the absence of such steps, we will continue to impose our own accountability measures.”

Sanctions by the Biden administration against Israeli settlers have upset members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government. They support the expansion of Jewish settlements to ultimately annex the West Bank, making a Palestinian state unviable.

The Israelis targeted by the latest sanctions include Lehava founder Ben-Zion Gopstein, a close associate of Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who himself lives in a West Bank settlement.

The sanctions include an updated red flag alert that will warn financial institutions about potential “suspicious activity”. America’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network will raise an alert in case a sanctioned individual or an entity tries to circumvent the controls.

Human Rights Watch, which has campaigned to highlight settler violence in the West Bank, welcomed the US measures as the most far-reaching to date.

The rights group, however, called for direct action against the Israeli government for its support of the settlers.

“In this case we are pleased that the Biden administration is going farther than before with the alert,” Sarah Yager, Washington director of the Human Rights Watch, said. “Now it’s time for sanctions against the Israeli authorities that are approving and inciting. We want to see the US, UK, Canada and others focus on power behind all this in the West Bank.”

All settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law, while outposts, a subset of the settlements, are considered illegal even under Israeli law.

According to the activist group Peace Now, there are about 200 outposts scattered throughout the West Bank.

Jailed Delhi leader Arvind Kejriwal gets bail in corruption case

India’s supreme court on Friday granted interim bail to jailed opposition politician Arvind Kejriwal in a corruption case.

It was not immediately clear if, and when, he would be released from jail as federal police have arrested him in another case.

Mr Kejriwal, chief minister of Delhi and head of the Aam Aadmi Party, was arrested on 21 March by the Enforcement Directorate, an agency controlled by prime minister Narendra Modi’s federal government.

He is lodged in the capital’s notorious Tihar jail.

The Modi critic is accused of accepting bribes to favour certain private retailers in a now-scrapped liquor policy. He denies wrongdoing and calls the case politically motivated.

Mr Kejriwal’s arrest, just weeks before the national election, sparked protests by opposition parties which denounced it as political vendetta by the Modi government.

His lawyers challenged his arrest in the top court, which referred the matter to a larger bench while giving him temporary relief on Friday.

“Given that right to life and liberty is sacrosanct and Arvind Kejriwal has suffered incarceration for over 90 days,” the court said, “we direct that Arvind Kejriwal will be released on interim bail”.

The court said Mr Kejriwal was an elected chief minister, a post that held “importance and influence”.

“While we do not give any directions as we are doubtful whether a court can direct an elected leader to step down or not to function as a chief minister or a minister, we leave it to Arvind Kejriwal to make a call,” it said.

The top court ruled that “mere interrogation” could not be grounds for arrest.

Mr Kejriwal was granted bail by a Delhi court in June after it found the federal agency had failed to provide any direct evidence against him.

The bail was stayed five days later by the state’s high court, which said the lower court had granted it without going through ED’s entire material.

The same day, Mr Kejriwal was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s equivalent of the FBI, in connection with a corruption case related to the alleged excise policy scam.

His lawyer Vivek Jain said he would move the Delhi high court for bail in the CBI case on 17 July.

A Delhi court, meanwhile, extended the chief minister’s judicial custody in that case until 25 July.

Mr Kejriwal was let out on bail by the supreme court in May to campaign for the general election. He returned to jail on 2 June.

Mr Kejriwal is among three leaders of his party to have been arrested on corruption charges. He is also the first serving chief minister to be arrested in independent India.

His arrest and incarceration has deepened fears of a constitutional crisis under the Modi government and sparked protests in Delhi and the northern state of Punjab, which is also ruled by Mr Kejriwal’s party.

Three Gorges Dam on alert as heavy rain and floods kill 6 in China

The Three Gorges Dam, China’s largest, is on high alert as floods triggered by torrential rains wreak havoc in the southwestern part of the country.

Record rainfall in Chongqing has caused flooding in a dozen districts and counties since Thursday, raising the water levels in 29 rivers, state news agency Xinhua reported.

Six people have died in the region which has received over 250mm of rain, according to the Chongqing Hydrological Monitoring Station.

An aerial drone showed a township submerged in muddy waters.

Dianjiang county in Chongqing received 269.2mm of rain on Thursday, the highest in a single day ever.

The rains have affected over 40,000 people, forced the evacuation of several areas and damaged 1,800 hectares of crops, CCTV reported.

The rains and subsequent flooding have also disrupted operations at the Chongqing railway station, leading to the suspension of 26 train journeys on Thursday.

The Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters on Thursday raised the flood emergency response to level 3 in the four-tier response system in which level 1 is the most severe.

“As flood preparedness and response enter a critical period, we should strengthen warnings and monitoring and timely evacuate people in areas at risk of geological disasters,” Chongqing’s mayor, Hu Henghua, said on Thursday. “It’s better to be extra careful to prevent any potential losses.”

Authorities are also facing challenges along the Yangtze river basin as the water level in the Three Gorges Dam reservoir has risen to 161.1 metres, the highest ever in July, according to China’s Ministry of Water Resources.

Heavy rainfall is anticipated in the upper reaches of the river over the next 10 days, with a new round of floods expected to flow into the reservoir around 16 July, Changjiang Water Resource Commission said.

A flood with a peak flow of 45,000 cubic metres per second is forecasted to enter the reservoir on Friday, and two other significant water surges are expected in mid-July.

Indian customs to pay £9,250 to Chinese woman left stuck for 5 years

A court in India has ordered the customs department to pay Rs1m (£9,250) to a Chinese woman stuck in the country since being wrongly arrested in 2019.

Cong Ling, 38, a mother of two children, was arrested at the Mumbai airport in 2019 for allegedly smuggling gold worth £277,524 into the country.

She was acquitted in October 2023 but remained stuck in India after the customs department refused to give her a no-objection certificate while it challenged the lower court’s ruling.

On Friday, the Bombay high court directed the customs department to issue a no-objection certificate so Ms Cong could obtain an exit permit to leave India within a week.

The court said the “unnecessary victimisation and harassment” of Ms Cong would “reflect in bilateral relations between two countries”.

It said the compensation amount shall be recovered from the salaries of the customs officials responsible, The Indian Express reported.

“This is nothing but victimising the petitioner without any reason,” the court said.

The conduct of the customs officials was “wrongful, vindictive, reprehensible” and amounted to “gross abuse of their powers”, it added.

The ruling noted that the “state has an obligation to protect the liberty of such foreigners who come to this country and ensure that their liberty isn’t deprived except in accordance with the procedure established by law”.

“Notwithstanding the said guarantee under Article 21 of the constitution, in this case, the customs department acted in a most brazen and perfunctory manner.”

Ms Cong said she took a flight to Delhi from Beijing on 12 December 2019 but the aircraft was forced to land in Mumbai due to bad weather in the capital.

She was intercepted by customs officials at the Mumbai airport who examined her baggage and allegedly found 10 bars of 24-carat gold. She was arrested shortly after on charges of smuggling.

She was acquitted of the charges by a magistrate court on 10 October 2023. The acquittal was later upheld by a sessions court.

But the customs department denied Ms Chong’s application for an exit permit, forcing her to spend nearly five years in India away from her daughters.

In 2017, a former Chinese army surveyor was allowed to go home after being trapped in India for more than 50 years.

Wang Qi claimed he had accidentally crossed the border into India in 1963 and was unable to leave because he wasn’t given the correct exit visa.

Nearly 90% Amazon India workers don’t get enough time to use bathroom

Nearly 90 per cent of Amazon India’s warehouse employees say they are not allowed sufficient time to use the restroom, according to a new survey that adds to a growing body of evidence of poor working conditions at the multinational corporation.

The results of the survey – conducted by the UNI Global Union, the Amazon India Workers Association and Jarrow Insights, a workers’ cooperative based in London – are detailed in an exhaustive report on the conditions that warehouse workers and drivers of the e-commerce giant in India have to daily endure.

The survey, conducted online between 2 February and 22 March this year, records the responses of 1,238 Amazon India warehouse workers and 600 delivery drivers, accounting for 2 to 5 per cent of the company’s warehouse and delivery workforce in the country.

It comes on the heels of a series of reports about hazardous working conditions at Amazon India’s warehouses.

The Independent last month reported an incident at the company’s Manesar warehouse in the northern Haryana state where workers were allegedly asked to make a pledge that they would not take any breaks, including to drink water or go to the bathroom, until they met their targets as they worked amid a brutal heatwave.

India’s labour ministry intervened after the national human rights commission asked for an investigation.

Responding to the ministry, Amazon India confirmed the incident but played it down as “unfortunate and isolated”.

The survey paints a contradictory picture.

Nearly 81 per cent of Amazon India warehouse employees say work targets set by the company are difficult or very difficult to achieve.

The targets are so demanding, in fact, they barely have time to rest, socialise and sometimes even eat.

“We aren’t even able to talk to anyone at work due to work pressure,” one warehouse worker tells The Independent, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisal.

The workers describe labouring for 10 hours straight on their feet in 35C heat, all for pay of Rs 10,000 (£94) a month.

A typical workday at the Manesar warehouse starts at 8.30am and ends at 6.30pm, with two 30-minute breaks in between. A worker in the inbound department unloads four trucks a day on average, each containing around 10,000 parcels. The number can go up when Amazon offers sales, according to The Indian Express.

Nearly 87 per cent of the company’s warehouse workers say they do not have enough time to use the toilet at work.

A worker who spends her day sorting products says managers come looking for employees they think take too long in the bathroom.

“The designated break rooms are small and unbearably hot, so many female workers end up resting in the bathrooms during their breaks,” she says, responding to the survey.

“But managers come searching for us if they feel we have stayed too long, pressuring us to return to work.”

Another worker says they are ticked off for being late if they take more than 10 minutes in the washroom.

Amazon claims the allegations are “factually incorrect and unsubstantiated”.

“We have not been given access to the material being quoted by The Independent,” a spokesperson for the company tells The Independent, referring to the survey.

“However, from the small amount of information that has been shared with us, we believe these claims are factually incorrect, unsubstantiated, and contradict what our own employees tell us directly. Moreover, the methodology to gather this data appears at best questionable and at worst deliberately designed to deliver on a specific narrative that certain groups are trying to claim as fact.”

An internal survey conducted by the company shows that 87 per cent of the workers at the Manesar facility are satisfied with their jobs, the spokesperson claims, “with as many as eight out of 10 recommending Amazon as a great place to work”.

“The reality is there’s nothing more important to us than the safety and wellbeing of our employees and associates, and we comply with all relevant laws and regulations. Our facilities are industry-leading and provide competitive pay, comfortable working conditions, and specially designed infrastructure to ensure a safe and healthy working environment for all,” the spokesperson says.

The report by the worker associations, however, notes that Amazon enforces productivity targets through a “combination of human managers and automated systems” which creates an uncompromising structure and penalises workers for human error.

Amazon workers have previously said the rigid nature of the targets and the attendance policy leads to many being blacklisted.

A blacklisted worker is essentially barred from ever working for Amazon again.

“They blacklist people on small issues, issue warning letters and terminate them from the company,” a worker says, responding to the survey. Another says workers “are placed in the identity blocklist” if they do not meet targets.

“If we miss a day due to health reasons or family emergencies, our IDs are blocked, impacting our livelihoods,” the Hindustan Times newspaper quoted an unnamed worker as saying.

The Amazon spokesperson claims the productivity targets are in keeping with industry practice.

“Like most companies, we have performance expectations for every employee and associate and we measure actual performance against those expectations. When setting those targets we take into account time in role, experience and the safety and wellbeing of our employees and associates,” the spokesperson says.

“We support people who are not performing to the levels expected with dedicated coaching to help them improve. We are confident that our targets are comfortably achievable by the trained associates. We also expand the associate pool whenever we find it necessary.”

The report by the worker associations, however, notes that 44.9 per cent of warehouse workers and 47.3 per cent of delivery drivers feel the working environment at Amazon is unsafe.

The drivers say they have to resort to unsafe driving to meet targets. “Sometimes, due to delivery targets, we have to drive fast. Then, whom should we ask to look out for our safety? There is no hearing of our grievances,” the report quotes a driver as saying.

“The company says that the weight of an order is upto 40kg but we are given upto 70kg,” says another. “While carrying it, we have to take care of our own safety and that of others which sometimes leads to situations that can become very difficult.”

The report records 46.4 per cent of Amazon India warehouse workers and 37.2 per cent of drivers complaining that their salaries are insufficient to meet basic needs.

The financial strain is exacerbated by stagnating pay amid rising inflation. “I have been with Amazon for eight years. There has been no pay raise in four years. Now the new joining associates and the old associates are on the same salary,” says a warehouse worker.

Amazon says that it provides “fair and competitive wages” and regularly reviews its wage structure against industry benchmarks, “ensuring adherence to all applicable wage laws across the states where we operate”.

“Our comprehensive wage package aims to incentivise and reward our associates through a combination of fixed pay, monthly attendance bonuses, and additional incentives, enabling them to enhance their earning potential,” the company spokesperson tells The Independent.

“In addition, all associates working at our buildings are entitled to Provident Fund and Employees’ State Insurance Corporate benefits, in accordance with applicable laws. All associates have medical, personal accident and term insurance, over and above the minimum statutory requirement of ESIC.”

Amazon has faced scrutiny for making workers labour in abysmal conditions in other countries as well, including the US and the UK.

A 2019 report found that workers at an Amazon warehouse in the UK were having to urinate in plastic bottles rather than go to the toilet during their shifts. Worker unions said they were taking action after more than 600 reports were made from Amazon warehouses to the health and safety executive in the past four years.