Eighteen people were killed and 29 injured when a passenger bus flipped over on a mountainous road in China’s Himalayan region of Tibet, a local policeman said Monday.

Several hundred Tibetan exile leaders gathered in northern India on Sunday for a landmark meeting widely expected to determine the direction of the movement that has struggled for decades to win autonomy from China.

Hundreds of leading Tibetan exiles will gather mid-November in northern India for a watershed meeting that could forge a tougher stance on China and pose a political challenge for their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

Chinese state media says six people have died in heavy snow storms in Tibet. The official Xinhua News Agency said the storm that started Sunday has dumped close to 25 inches (64 centimeters) of snow in the south of the region.

A rare condition still haunts the poorest villagers on the Tibetan plateau but improvements in nutrition and grain handling could help eradicate it, the head of a Belgian group fighting Kashin-Beck disease said on Tuesday.

A Tibetan monk who was imprisoned after helping make a film about the Olympics and Tibet has been released but was severely tortured while in prison, according to the film makers.

Tibet is cutting admission fees to key attractions in an effort to boost tourism to the region after riots in March led to a dramatic drop in visitor numbers, Chinese state media said Friday.

Eight Buddhist monks convicted of bombing a government building in Tibet during an anti-government uprising in March have been sentenced to prison, two of them for life, a judge said Tuesday.

China closed schools in Tibet’s capital for safety reasons on Tuesday, the day after a huge earthquake killed at least 10 and a teenager died in a crush of evacuating high school students.

Rescuers rushed tents, food and water to villagers in Tibet on Tuesday after an earthquake and scores of aftershocks rattled the capital and surrounding areas, killing at least 10 people and collapsing hundreds of houses.