Global stocks sank Wednesday after US President Donald Trump said he was not satisfied with talks that are aimed at averting a trade war with China. Equities were also dented by poor eurozone economic data, and as Trump cast doubt on a planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. “Trump (is) continuing to drive uncertainty over global trade,” said analyst Joshua Mahony at trading firm IG. “European markets are following their Asian counterparts lower, as a pessimistic tone from Trump is compounded by downbeat economic data,” he added. Markets had surged Monday after US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He said they had agreed to pull back from imposing threatened tariffs on billions of dollars of goods, and continue talks on a variety of trade issues. However, Trump has declared that he was “not satisfied” with the status of the talks, fuelling worries that the world’s top two economies could still slug out an economically pain
Fifty-two people were killed Thursday when the bus they were travelling on caught fire in Kazakhstan, the central Asian nation’s emergency services ministry said in a statement.
“On January 18 at 10:30 am (0430 GMT), a bus caught fire … 55 passengers and two drivers were on board. Five people who managed to escape are receiving medical assistance. The rest died on the spot,” the ministry said, without elaborating on the cause of the blaze.
The bus driver said the passengers were Uzbek nationals while the vehicle was registered in Kazakhstan, emergency services ministry official Ruslan Imankulov told AFP.
He said the fire spread through the bus extremely quickly.
Video broadcast by Russian and Kazakh media showed black smoke and flames billowing from the vehicle on a flat stretch of road carving through a snowy steppe. A photograph taken later showed the vehicle completely charred.
The ministry named the vehicle as a Hungarian-made Ikarus. These buses are still widely used in ex-Soviet nations, even though they are often decades old.
The bus was headed from the Russian city of Samara on the Volga river to the town of Shymkent in southern Kazakhstan, the ministry said.
The tragedy, which struck in the area around the city of Aktobe, came less than three years after 16 people, including three children, died in the country when a minibus collided with a van on April 20, 2015.
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