BTS member Jungkook causes minor car accident

MANILA -- Jeon Jungkook, the youngest member of the K-pop boy band BTS, admitted to committing a traffic law violation after he was involved in a car accident last week, his agency BigHit Entertainment said in a statement.

While driving his car, the 22-year-old K-pop star had a “minor collision with another vehicle due to his own mistake,” according to the BigHit statement translated and published Monday by the Korean entertainment website Soompi.

The police have yet to close the case so details surrounding the incident cannot be revealed, according to BigHit.

“Jungkook and the victim did not sustain any major injuries,” the statement added.

After the accident, Jeon admitted to committing a traffic law violation, underwent police questioning, and settled with the victim, said BigHit.

Jeon debuted in 2013 as a member of the septet BTS, which has become one of the most popular K-pop acts in recent years, gaining a massive global following.

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Fireball near Bologna airport after road crash explosion

ROME - A tanker truck ploughed into a lorry on a motorway near Bologna airport in northern Italy on Monday, exploding in flames and sending a huge ball of fire and black smoke into the sky.

At least two people were killed and more than 60 injured, according to local authorities.

Police closed off the road where the crash took place as well as the surrounding area of Borgo Panigale, on the outskirts of the city of Bologna.

Video of the incident showed the tanker truck, which contained inflammable materials, slamming into the back of a lorry which had come to a halt because of heavy traffic.

The tanker immediately caught fire and then exploded, causing part of a road bridge to collapse. The fire spread to a car dealership below and several other vehicles burst into flames.

"The shockwave from the blast was extremely violent. Many of the injured received cuts from flying glass, which had shattered," said Giovanni Carella, the emergency coordinator for the local fire service.

He said he thought the tanker had probably been carrying liquid petroleum gas.

A video shot from a parked car appeared to show someone being engulfed by flames when the tanker exploded.

In a separate incident on Monday, 12 migrant laborers died in the southern Italian region of Puglia when the van they were travelling in smashed into a lorry. 

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Taxi plows into Moscow crowd including soccer fans, injuring 8

MOSCOW - A taxi drove into a crowd of pedestrians near Moscow's Red Square on Saturday, injuring 8 people including 2 Mexicans in the city for the soccer World Cup which Russia is hosting, officials and eyewitnesses said.

The incident took place as residents and visiting soccer fans thronged the center of Moscow on a balmy summer evening, a short distance from the Kremlin.

Moscow's traffic management authority said the taxi driver had a driver's licence issued in Kyrgyzstan, a mainly Muslim ex-Soviet republic. It cited the driver, who was in police custody, as saying he had not driven into the crowd on purpose.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in a post on Twitter: "There was an unpleasant incident with a taxi. The driver lost control of the vehicle."

The city's police said they had opened a criminal investigation into a suspected violation of the traffic code.

Eight people were hurt and had been taken to hospital, Moscow city's healthcare department said in a statement. It said 7 were in a satisfactory condition, while one woman was seriously hurt.

The Mexican embassy in Moscow said 2 Mexican women had been lightly injured. Also among those hurt were a Ukrainian and 2 Russian citizens, Russia's TASS news agency quoted a source in the emergency services as saying.

Video of the incident posted on social media showed the yellow Hyundai taxi pull sharply out of a line of stationary traffic, accelerate and mount the narrow pavement, which was packed with pedestrians.

The vehicle drove for about 10 meters along the pavement, bowling over pedestrians, with some of them being carried along on the bonnet of the car.

The taxi came to a halt after hitting a traffic sign. As bystanders tried to pull open the driver's side door, the driver, dressed in black trousers and black T-shirt, jumped out and sprinted away.

More bystanders chased after him and could be seen trying to tackle him to the ground as the footage ended.

MEXICO SOCCER MATCH

A witness told Reuters that some of the people hit were wearing Mexican team colors. Mexico take on Germany on Sunday in their first World Cup match at Moscow's Luzhniki stadium, and thousands of Mexican fans are in the Russian capital.

A second witness at the scene told Reuters about the driver of the taxi: "He was pulled out of the vehicle, he ran off but bystanders apprehended him. He was shouting: 'It wasn't me'."

Another witness, Viktoria Geraimovich, said she called the emergency services on her mobile phone.

Describing the actions of the driver, she said: "He ran into a group of Mexicans. There were shouts, moans. He was only stopped because he hit a traffic sign."

"Someone gave him a punch in the face. He stayed in the car, people came up to him, said what are you doing, punched him in the face, he opened the door and tried to run away."

"It's scary that it was in the center (of Moscow) and I was right opposite," she said.

Moscow's traffic management authority said the driver was not drunk and Interfax news agency cited a source saying there was no alcohol in his blood.

The same source told Interfax the driver said he had fallen asleep at the wheel and accidentally pressed the accelerator pedal. The driver also said he had worked all night and that he tried to run away because he was scared, TASS agency cited an emergency source as saying.

The same source told TASS that a court will hold a sentencing hearing on Monday.

Authorities have vowed a safe soccer World Cup, which Russia is hosting for the first time ever. It is taking place in 11 cities until July 15.

In central Moscow, authorities have installed heavy concrete blocks across the entrances to pedestrianized areas following a spate of incidents in European cities in which vehicles were used to mow down people.

The US State Department on Friday updated its travel advice on Russia, saying terrorist groups were plotting attacks.

"Terrorists may attack with little or no warning, targeting tourist locations, transportation hubs, markets/shopping malls, and local government facilities," the travel advice stated.

DRIVER'S LICENCE

The Moscow traffic authority posted on Twitter a copy of what it said was the taxi driver's licence. It gave his name as Chingiz Anarbek Uulu and said he was born on April 22, 1990.

It gave his birthplace as the town of Kochkor-Ata in Kyrgyzstan, near the border with Uzbekistan.

An account on Russian social media platform Odnoklassniki for someone with the same name and date of birth was last updated 2 years ago.

The last video he posted on his page depicted chapter 82 of the Koran, Islam's holy book, which discussed judgment day. There was nothing on the page to suggest any links to, or sympathies with, Islamist militant groups.

People walking around in central Moscow on Saturday evening said they were aware of the taxi incident, but it did not put them off spending time in the city. The streets were packed with people listening to street musicians perform, or sitting at pavement cafes.

"We're not scared but disappointed," said Youseff Fraige, 27, from Monterrey, Mexico.

"We didn't expect something like this to happen in a place like this. It could happen anywhere in the world, but that it happens here in Moscow, in the middle of the World Cup, it's shocking for us."

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Uber suspends self-driving car program after Arizona crash

Uber Technologies Inc suspended its pilot program for driverless cars on Saturday after a vehicle equipped with the nascent technology crashed on an Arizona roadway, the ride-hailing company and local police said.

The accident, the latest involving a self-driving vehicle operated by one of several companies experimenting with autonomous vehicles, caused no serious injuries, Uber said.

Even so, the company said it was grounding driverless cars involved in a pilot program in Arizona, Pittsburgh and San Francisco pending the outcome of investigation into the crash on Friday evening in Tempe.

"We are continuing to look into this incident," an Uber spokeswoman said in an email.

The accident occurred when the driver of a second vehicle "failed to yield" to the Uber vehicle while making a turn, said Josie Montenegro, a spokeswoman for the Tempe Police Department.

"The vehicles collided, causing the autonomous vehicle to roll onto its side," she said in an email. "There were no serious injuries."

Two 'safety' drivers were in the front seats of the Uber car, which was in self-driving mode at the time of the crash, Uber said in an email, a standard requirement for its self-driving vehicles. The back seat was empty.

Photos and a video posted on Twitter by Fresco News, a service that sells content to news outlets, showed a Volvo SUV flipped on its side after an apparent collision involving two other, slightly damaged cars. Uber said the images appeared to be from the Tempe crash scene.

When Uber launched the pilot program in Pittsburgh last year, it said that driverless cars "require human intervention in many conditions, including bad weather." It also said the new technology had the potential to reduce the number of traffic accidents in the country.

The accident is not the first time a self-driving car has been involved in a collision. A driver of a Tesla Motors Inc Model S car operating in autopilot mode was killed in a collision with a truck in Williston, Florida in 2016. A self-driving vehicle operated by Alphabet Inc's Google was involved in a crash last year in Mountain View, California, striking a bus while attempting to navigate around an obstacle.

The collision comes days after Uber's former president Jeff Jones quit less than seven months after joining the San Francisco-based company, the latest in a string of high-level executives who have departed in recent months.

In February, Alphabet's Waymo self-driving car unit sued Uber and its Otto autonomous trucking subsidiary, alleging theft of proprietary sensor technology.

(Reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York; Editing by Frank McGurty and Bill Rigby)

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13 dead in California tour bus crash: authorities

LOS ANGELES - Thirteen people were killed and 31 injured on Sunday when their tour bus collided with a truck on a major highway in southern California, the authorities said.

"They believe everyone was asleep on the bus," an emotional California Highway Police chief Jim Abele said, giving condolences to families of the victims, who were believed to have been visiting casinos.

The front of the bus was a mangled mass of metal after apparently plowing into the back of the large truck, news photographs showed.

"Because of the impact where the bus entered the back of the big rig, the majority of the people who were killed were in the front section of the bus," Abele said.

Although it was not known what caused the deadly crash, the bus was traveling fast -- faster than the truck it rammed, he added.

"The investigation will be ongoing," he said. The bus driver was killed; the truck driver survived. None of the victims was immediately identified.

"Unfortunately, several passengers have not been identified," Abele said. "Some IDs were not valid."

The bus belongs to USA Holiday, a Los Angeles area-based tour company that ferries customers to casinos.

The crash happened around 5:00 am (1200 GMT) in Palm Springs, some 110 miles (180 kilometers) east of Los Angeles.

Most of the passengers on the bus that initially left Los Angeles were Hispanic, the CHP chief said.

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