Submit your Article

Visiting delegation of France-Nepal Parliamentary Friendship Group paid a courtesy call on President Bidya Devi Bhandari on Thursday.

During the meeting held at Sheetal Niwas, they discussed issues of mutual interest and common concerns.

High ranking officials of the Nepal government were also present in the meeting, Sagar Acharya, spokesperson at the President’s office said.

The three-member French delegation led by Group's chairperson Veronique Riotton arrived in Nepal last Tuesday on a five-day state visit.

The delegation arrived here at the invitation of Nepal-France Parliamentary Friendship Group chairperson Madhav Kumar Nepal.

The labour desk set up at the Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) by the government has been removed. 

The desk set up by the government targeting workers going for foreign employment was removed. It was removed after Minister for Labour, Employment and Social Security, Krishna Kumar Shrestha directed for the same. 

The desk's relevancy has ended as the government has been issuing electronic stickers to outbound Nepali migrant workers, said the Ministry.  

As per the process, the foreign job aspirants will receive e-sticker in their cell phone or e-mail. So, they would be able to clear the immigration after presenting the print out of the sticker or showing it on their electronic devices (mobile phones, laptops or tablets) to the authorities. 

The removal of the desk followed complaints that the desk provided trouble to Nepali migrant workers going for foreign jobs in the name of helping them clear the immigration, it has been said. 

Minister for Labour, Employment and Social Security Krishna Kumar Shrestha and officials reached the airport today and removed the desk. 

With this, now foreign job aspirants can easily get their immigration cleared at the TIA without the need for them to line up hours for the same in the past. 

An airstrike on a hospital in the port of Mariupol killed three people, including a child, the city council said Thursday, and Russian forces intensified their siege of Ukrainian cities, even as the top diplomats from both sides met for the first time since the war began, Associated Press reported.

The attack a day earlier in the besieged southern city wounded 17 people, including women waiting to give birth, doctors and children buried in the rubble. Bombs also fell on two hospitals in another city west of the capital, Kyiv.

The World Health Organization said it has confirmed 18 attacks on medical facilities since the Russian invasion began two weeks ago.

As the war entered its third week, Western officials said Russian forces have made little progress on the ground in recent days, but they have intensified the bombardment of Mariupol and other cities, trapping hundreds of thousands of people, with food and water running short. Temporary cease-fires to allow evacuations have often faltered, with Ukraine accusing Russia of continuing their bombardments. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 35,000 people managed to get out on Wednesday from several besieged towns, according to Associated Press.

The Mariupol city council posted a video Thursday showing buses driving down a highway, with a note saying that a convoy bringing food and medicine was on the way despite several days of thwarted efforts to reach the city.

Images from the city, where hundreds have died and some victims have been buried in a mass grave, have drawn condemnation from around the world. Britain called the attack on a children’s hospital a war crime. Two other hospitals were also hit in Zhytomyr, a city west of Kyiv, Mayor Serhii Sukhomlyn said on Facebook. He said there were no injuries.

“Everyone is working to get help to the people of Mariupol. And it will come,” said Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko, Associated Press reported.

On the western edge of Kyiv, artillery fire could be heard Thursday, Deputy Interior Minister Vadym Denysenko said. He told Ukrainian TV channel Rada that residents had a “rather difficult” night on the outskirts of the capital in which Russian forces started by targeting military sites but then hit residential areas.

Nepal Police on Wednesday arrested two persons on the charge of making unfounded statements and assassinating character through YouTube channel. 

The cyber bureau has arrested Hari Pariyar of Nagarjuna Municipality-8, Bhimdhunga and Nishan Chiluwal, 27, of, Rainas Municipality, of Lamjung, currently living in Tarkeshwor Sheshmati, for spreading fake news through YouTube.

Bureau spokesperson, Senior Superintendent of Police Navind Aryal said that Pariyar and Chiluwal had spread fake news through their respective YouTube channel ‘Nepal Media’ and ‘Bishal Nepal’. 

They have been charged with doing so with the purpose of influencing the ongoing criminal investigation over a serious case.

Spokesperson Aryal said that they were arrested for committing a crime under the Electronic Transaction Act, 2063 BS. 

According to the bureau, the two have been remanded to judicial custody for seven days following permission by the district court. RSS

Nepal logged 112 new Covid-19 cases on Thursday. 

According to the Ministry of Health and Population, 6,801 swab samples were tested in the RT-PCR method, of which 77 returned positive. Likewise, 2,527 people underwent antigen tests, of which 35 tested positive.

The Ministry said that no one died due to the virus today also.

The Ministry said that 429 infected people recovered from the disease in the last 24 hours.

As of today, there are 5, 340 active cases in the country.

The Nepal Stock Exchange (NEPSE) gained 52.31 points to close at 2,566.90 points on Thursday.

Similarly, the sensitive index surged by 6.34 points to close at 493. 53 points.

A total of 5,610,631 unit shares of 226 companies were traded for Rs 2.79 billion.

In today’s market, all sub-indices saw green. Life Insurance topped the chart with 372.79 points.

Meanwhile, Emerging Nepal Limited was the top gainer today, with its price surging by 9. 98 percent. Mountain Energy Nepal Limited was the top loser as its price fell by 3.08 percent.

At the end of the day, total market capitalisation stood at Rs 3. 63 trillion.

The first person in the world to get a heart transplant from a genetically-modified pig has died, BBC reported.

David Bennett, who had terminal heart disease, survived for two months following the surgery in the US.

But his condition began to deteriorate several days ago, his doctors in Baltimore said, and the 57-year-old died on 8 March.

Mr Bennett knew the risks attached to the surgery, acknowledging before the procedure it was “a shot in the dark”.

Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center were granted a special dispensation by the US medical regulator to carry out the procedure, on the basis that Mr Bennett – who was ineligible for a human transplant – would otherwise have died, according to BBC.

He had already been bedridden for six weeks leading up to the surgery, attached to a machine which was keeping him alive.

Mr Bennett underwent the surgery on 7 January, and doctors say in the weeks afterwards he spent time with his family, watched the Super Bowl and spoke about wanting to get home to his dog, Lucky.

But his condition deteriorated, leaving doctors “devastated”.

“He proved to be a brave and noble patient who fought all the way to the end,” surgeon Bartley Griffith, who performed the transplant, said in a statement released by the hospital.

But Mr Bennett’s son, David Jr, said he hoped his father’s transplant would “be the beginning of hope and not the end”, according to news agency AP.

“We are grateful for every innovative moment, every crazy dream, every sleepless night that went into this historic effort,” he added, BBC reported.

Dr Griffith said previously the surgery would bring the world “one step closer to solving the organ shortage crisis”. Currently 17 people die every day in the US waiting for a transplant, with more than 100,000 reportedly on the waiting list.

The possibility of using animal organs for so-called xenotransplantation to meet the demand has long been considered, and using pig heart valves is already common.

In October 2021, surgeons in New York announced that they had successfully transplanted a pig’s kidney into a person. At the time, the operation was the most advanced experiment in the field so far. However, the recipient on that occasion was brain dead with no hope of recovery, BBC reported.

The first pig-heart transplant was a landmark moment in medicine.

The biggest barrier to using organs from another species is “hyperacute rejection”. The body sees the tissue as so foreign that it starts to kill the donated organ within minutes.

The hope was the 10 genetic modifications made to the pig meant its organs would be acceptable to the human body.

It was a nervous moment when the heart went in, but there was no hyperacute rejection and that monumental barrier had been cleared, according to BBC.

Russia’s war in Ukraine entered its third week on Thursday with none of its key objectives reached despite thousands of people killed, more than two million made refugees, and thousands forced to cower in besieged cities under relentless bombardment, Reuters reported.

Ukrainian forces including citizen-soldiers who only last month never dreamed of firing a weapon in anger were holding out in Kyiv and other frontlines, while Russian troops, tanks and artillery made slow progress from the north, south and east.

Moscow’s stated objectives of crushing the Ukrainian military and ousting the pro-Western elected government of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy remained out of reach, with Zelenskiy unshaken and lethal Western military aid pouring across the Polish and Romanian borders.

Western-led sanctions designed to cut the Russian economy and government from international financial markets were beginning to bite, with the Russian sharemarket and rouble plunging and ordinary Russians rushing to hoard cash, according to Reuters.

Zelenskiy accused Russia of carrying out genocide after Ukrainian officials said Russian aircraft bombed a children’s hospital on Wednesday, burying patients in rubble despite a ceasefire deal for people to flee the besieged city of Mariupol.

The attack, which authorities said injured women in labour and left children in the wreckage, underscored U.S. warnings that the biggest assault on a European state since 1945 could become increasingly attritional after Russia’s early failures.

The White House condemned the hospital bombing as a “barbaric use of military force to go after innocent civilians”.

Russian had earlier pledged to halt firing so at least some trapped civilians could escape the port city, where hundreds of thousands have been sheltering without water or power for more than a week. Both sides blamed the other for the failure of the evacuation, Reuters reported.

“What kind of country is this, the Russian Federation, which is afraid of hospitals, is afraid of maternity hospitals, and destroys them?” Zelenskiy said in a televised address late on Wednesday.

Zelenskiy repeated his call for the West to tighten sanctions on Russia “so that they sit down at the negotiating table and end this brutal war”. The bombing of the children’s hospital, he said, was “proof that a genocide of Ukrainians is taking place”.

The Donetsk region’s governor said 17 people were wounded in the attack.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, asked by Reuters for comment, said: “Russian forces do not fire on civilian targets.” Russia calls its incursion a “special operation” to disarm its neighbour and dislodge leaders it calls “neo-Nazis.”

Ukraine’s foreign ministry posted video footage of what it said was the hospital showing holes where windows should have been in a three-storey building. Huge piles of smouldering rubble littered the scene, according to Reuters.

The U.N. Human Rights body said it was verifying the number of casualties at Mariupol. The incident “adds to our deep concerns about indiscriminate use of weapons in populated areas,” it added through a spokesperson.

Among more than 2 million total refugees from Ukraine, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Wednesday that more than 1 million children have fled the country since the invasion started on Feb 24. At least 37 had been killed and 50 injured, it said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said houses had been destroyed all across Ukraine. “Hundreds of thousands of people have no food, no water, no heat, no electricity and no medical care,” it said, Reuters reported.