【纽约时报12.14】中国校车事故 15人死亡

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Half-Filled School Bus Crashes in China, Killing 15 Children   
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/world/asia/school-bus-crash-in-china-kills-15-children.html
    BEIJING — A half-filled school bus ferrying students home from a primary school in rural China rolled into an irrigation canal, killing 15 children and injuring 8 others, officials said.        

The accident Monday evening in Jiangsu Province has renewed public indignation over school bus safety and, more broadly, complaints about inadequate government spending on education.        
It was nearly one month ago that a coal truck in the northwestern province of Gansu slammed into an overloaded minivan that was being used as a school bus, killing 21 kindergartners and 2 adults. The loss of life, and the anger, were compounded by the fact that the nine-seat vehicle was crammed with 64 people.        
At the time, many Chinese and a number of media outlets accused the government of miserly spending on school transportation while directing enormous sums toward the purchase of new cars for bureaucrats.        
Overcrowding, however, apparently played no role in the latest accident. The vehicle had a capacity of 52 but had only 29 students on board, according to the state-controlled Xinhua news agency. The driver lost control of the bus after he swerved to avoid a pedicab, and it rolled, landing upside down in a canal with less than two feet of water.        
“Students became trapped at the bottom of the overturned bus and drowned as water gushed into the wreck,” Zhang Bin, an official in Fengxian County told Xinhua. The news agency said the bus driver was detained for questioning.        
The accident occurred one day after the State Council, China’s cabinet, issued proposed regulations on school bus safety. After the accident in Gansu last month, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao promised to address the problem of substandard school transportation. The new rules lay out the safe operation of school buses, including a mandate for local school districts to hire full-time bus maintenance crews and a requirement that buses must be replaced after eight years or about 125,000 miles. They do not indicate how new vehicles and staff will be paid for.        
The accident in Jiangsu prompted anger and complaints on microblogs in China. “All the attention the first school bus crash drew cannot keep history from repeating itself,” one comment read. “All we get from the government is lip service. I’m speechless.”        
On Tuesday, the state news media reported on another school bus accident, this one involving 59 students in the southern province of Guangdong. The accident, which was also on Monday, injured 37 students, according to Xinhua.        

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