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Three persons died after being hit by a car near BP Chowk in Nepalgunj on Sunday. 

The deceased have been identified as Samina Idrisi (65) of Nepalgunj-11, Ali Idrisi and five-year-old Kasim Idrisi, said Police Inspector Himalaya Shah Chief of Banke District Traffic Police Office.

Inspector Shah further said that the car (Province 3-01-23 Cha 8481) hit the pedestrians last night. 

The car driver had taken all the critically injured pedestrians to the Teaching Hospital Nepalgunj. 

The hospital pronounced them dead after 15 minutes of their arrival. 

Police arrested car driver Indra Bahadur Thapa (28) of Nepalgunj sub-metropolitan city-10 and started an investigation into the incident, Inspector Shah said. RSS

The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority held chief of Land Reform and Land Revenue Office with bribe amount Rs 500,000 in Dhanusha.

The arrestee has been identified as Sunil Kumar Jha.

A team deployed from the CIAA Office in Bhanuchowk, Janakpur nabbed Jha while taking kickback from a service seeker in Bardibas.

Jha had allegedly demanded the bribe for settling the land dispute case.

Sri Lanka’s doctors have warned they are almost out of life-saving medicines and say the country’s economic crisis threatened a worse death toll than the coronavirus pandemic, The Guardian reported.

Weeks of power blackouts and severe shortages of food, fuel and pharmaceuticals have brought widespread misery to Sri Lanka, which is suffering its worst downturn since independence in 1948.

The Sri Lanka Medical Association (SLMA) said all hospitals in the country no longer had access to imported medical tools and vital drugs.

Several facilities have already suspended routine surgeries since last month because they were dangerously low on anaesthetics, but the SLMA said that even emergency procedures might not be possible very soon.

"We are made to make very difficult choices. We have to decide who gets treatment and who will not,” the group said on Sunday, after releasing a letter it had sent President Gotabaya Rajapaksa days earlier to warn him of the situation. “If supplies are not restored within days, the casualties will be far worse than from the pandemic.”

Mounting public anger over the crisis has seen large protests calling for Rajapaksa’s resignation, according to The Guardian.

Thousands of people braved heavy rains to keep up a demonstration outside the leader’s seafront office in the capital of Colombo for a second day.

Business leaders joined calls for the president to step down on Saturday and said the island nation’s chronic fuel shortages had seen their operations haemorrhage cash.

Rajapaksa’s government is seeking an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout to help extricate Sri Lanka from the crisis, which has seen skyrocketing food prices and the local currency collapse in value by a third in the past month, The Guardian reported.

Finance ministry officials have said sovereign bond-holders and other creditors may have to take a haircut as Colombo seeks to restructure its debt.

The new finance minister, Ali Sabry, told parliament on Friday that he expected $3bn from the IMF to support the island’s balance of payments in the next three years.

A critical lack of foreign currency has left Sri Lanka struggling to service its ballooning $51bn foreign debt, with the pandemic torpedoing vital revenue from tourism and remittances.

Economists say Sri Lanka’s crisis has been exacerbated by government mismanagement, years of accumulated borrowing and ill-advised tax cuts, according to the Guardian.

Around 96.47 percent of the land-acquisition process for the Kathmandu-Tarai expressway has been completed—save for the stretch in Bungamati and Khokana areas of Lalitpur district. The army says land-acquisition in these places have been halted over a compensation row. But the halt has more to do with the cultural significance of these areas.  

As the town planning principles and traditional architecture of Kathmandu valley were transplanted to Khokana and Bungamati in the seventh century, these settlements represent not just a Newari townscape. They also have architectural, aesthetical, and symbolic values. 

The expressway’s construction through these areas will destroy several heritage sites and ancient settlements. Besides the fast track, seven other projects are proposed in these areas. These “development undertakings” could further impact the local heritage, fear experts.  

In 1996, King Birendra had proposed Khokana as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Today, the village is at risk, says Sanjay Adhikari, a public interest litigator for natural and cultural heritage.  

“The 27-meter-wide expressway will destroy the proposed heritage site,” he says. “The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, of which Nepal is a signatory, as well as our constitution, advocate for the rights of indigenous people. But we are ignoring our commitment.” 

Full story here.