3 DEAD IN HONG KONG ROAD ACCIDENT
HONG KONG: Three people died and 48 were injured in a crash involving two double-decker buses and a taxi in Hong Kong on Monday, police said. Rescue crews rushed to treat dazed and injured passengers at the scene of the pile-up in the eastern district of Shau Kei Wan. Several victims were trapped in the wreckage.

“The taxi driver and the two passengers in his car were confirmed dead,” traffic police official Tam Wing-leung told reporters, adding that the cause of the accident was under investigation. A passenger on one of the buses told that reporters that the driver collapsed at the wheel before the crash.

ICE CREAM WOMAN TRIED FOR KILLING 2 MEN
VIENNA: A woman described as “singularly cold-blooded” went on trial in Austria on Monday accused of murdering two men and setting their sawn-up body parts in concrete in the cellar of her ice cream parlor. Dubbed the “trial of the year” in Austrian media, Goidsargi Estibaliz Carranza Zabala, who has joint Spanish-Mexican citizenship, is charged with shooting dead her husband in 2008 and in 2010 her new partner. Prosecutors allege that she then sliced up the bodies of her first victim Holger Holz and the second, Manfred Hinterberger, with a chain saw and concealed the pieces in lumps of concrete that she mixed in the cellar under her “Schleckeria” shop in Vienna.

NEPAL ON VERGE OF BUDGET CRISIS
KATHMANDU: Nepal’s president on Monday gave warring political factions three days to avert a budget crisis that could leave 500,000 public workers unpaid, and also to agree a date for elections. Nepal has not had a parliament or fully functioning government since June and the Maoist caretaker administration has failed to fulfil a pledge to arrange polls which were due this week. The Himalayan country’s opposition parties have said that they will not agree on a new election date or support the budget without the resignation of Maoist Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai.     

VOTE FOR SARKOZY SUCCESSOR ENDS IN CHAOS
PARIS: The battle to succeed Nicolas Sarkozy at the helm of France’s right-wing opposition UMP party turned into a shambles on Monday, with both candidates claiming victory amid accusations of vote-rigging. Jean-Francois Cope, the party’s populist secretary-general, declared to cheering supporters after voting closed on Sunday that he was the victor, but ex-prime minister Francois Fillon announced just minutes later that he had won. Both camps claimed there had been irregularities—and even some cheating—in voting in several areas and it was unclear how long it would take the electoral commission to check the ballots and announce a winner. AFP