Dahal says fresh elections vague, risky idea

More documents

Recommendations

Info

PAGE 6 www.thehimalayantimes.com NATIONAL DEO cracks down on illegal schools Himalayan News Service Illam, October 10 District Education Office Ilam today padlocked four private schools which are running illegally in the district. The closed schools are Chamaita English Pratistan, Garden Boarding School of Kanyam, Siddhartha Valley Boarding School of Kanyam and Golden Flower Boarding School. According to Under Secretary Gahendra Dahal, the monitoring team also took away the attendance register of the teachers and students, bill pads, stamps and other important documents from the schools. The DEO has started monitoring the schools after receiving information from the Resource Centre that over 21 private schools are running illegally in the academic year. The documents of five schools have already been seized by the monitoring team and they are planning to monitor the other remaining schools before Dashain, said Dahal. District Education Officer Dilanath Puri said that they would take necessary action against the schools which are running illegally and the schools will be closed from which the monitoring team has seized its documents. Puri further said that the office has sent the notice time and again to take the permission, but the operators neglected the warning. The District Education Office had monitored the schools with the help of the Nepal Police and Armed Police Force. ‘Govt to take decision within a week’ Himalayan News Service Pokhara, October 10 • REGIONAL INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT in the previous agreement. He assured them that the International Airport would be Chief Secretary Leela Mani struction. be “taken within a week about ing peaceful protests so far, but constructed at any cost. Paudel today said the govern- He met the PCCI members new process,” he added. if the government ignores Tourism trader Bashu Tripathi ment would take the decision on his way back to Kathmandu Placating the PCCI mem- there genuine cause then they said that many festivals as regarding the construction of from Myagdi. bers, the chief secretary said he will be compelled to stage Dashain, tihar and chhath are the Regional International Paudel made it clear saying is also from the western region stern protests. approaching so it would be Airport in Pokhara within a though the government is seri- and assured them that he will Paudel reached Pokhara to- better to postpone the strike. week. ous about the construction of work to provide compensation day to address the locals who Much on the same line, for- Speaking to the representa- the International Airport in to the ones whose land has have been staging relay strike mer chairperson of PCCI Krtives of the Pokhara Chamber Pokhara it could not ahead been encroached for the con- at the airport. He informed ishna Mohan Shrestha said of Commerce and Industry with the earlier arrangement struction of airport. that the Tourism Ministry is that they will discuss about (PCCI), Paudel assured them as it found the processes During the discussion, working on the new agreement the postponement of the strike that the government is serious flawed. members of the PCCI told as there were some differences as the festive season is ap- about the issue of airport con- However, a decision would Paudel that they have been do- in the laws of Nepal and China proaching. Chief Secretary Leela Mani Paudel addressing the participants of a hunger strike for the proposed Regional International Airport in Pokhara on Wednesday. Teachers boycott classes in Rajbiraj Himalayan News Service Rajbiraj, October 10 Part-time teachers at the Rajbiraj-based Mahendra Bindeshwori Campus, who have been agitating for the past few days with a five-point demand including the demand for appointment on contract basis, have boycotted classes from today. They also padlocked the campus main gate today. Citing the non-implementation of the assurance given to them by then campus chief Devidatta Sah that they would be appointed on contract basis and their remuneration would be on par with other teachers, the part-time teachers have resorted to the agitation again. Four days ago, they had also padlocked the campus chief’s office as well as accounts, administration and exam sections. THT After the talks between the campus administration and the teachers failed to bear any fruit, they have decided to boycott their classes from today. The teachers have accused the administration of neglecting their demands. “We are in favour of solving the problem and expect everyone’s cooperation,” said Nepal Part-time Teachers Association Chairperson Nanda Kishor Yadav. EU hands over energy project to Nepal Himalayan News Service Kathmandu, October 10 European Union handed over the Renewal Energy Project (REP) to Nepal government today. The project – infrastructure development for renewal electricity generation – has benefitted one million rural population from all the 21 districts in the country. Dr Alexander Spachis, head of the European Union Delegation to Nepal, said that the REP is a successful example of a joint undertaking between the Government of Nepal and the EU that has made a significant contribution in improving the quality of life in rural areas of the country. “Nepal attaches top priority to tap the immense renewable energy potential that it possesses for reducing poverty through promoting inclusive, green and sustainable economic development,” said the ambassador. Despite the huge potentials in hydro power generation, the country could not able to produce it said Spachis. “The post-conflict period and political instability has delayed the comple- tion of the project,” he said, urging for sustainable awareness and replication of the programme. The project was carried out at the cost the EUR 15.675 million to which the European Union contributed EUR 15 million; while the Government of Nepal had invested EUR 675, 000 through its Alternative Energy Promotion Centre (AEPC). The REP has established the foundation for rural communities in Nepal to move towards the sustainable use of resources, conservation of the environment and enhancement of their local economies. The project has also provided solar systems to over 206 health posts, 378 schools, 29 community computer literacy programmes, 59 community entertainment centres and 124 community telecommunication centres. The REP has also put renewable energy infrastructures in remote rural areas to facilitate income generation, sustainable growth and delivery of social services for poverty alleviating by installing of 933 Photovoltaic and 38 thermal systems. THE HIMALAYAN TIMES, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2012 • ONCE-OVER Vehicles plying via landslide damaged road section of Helambu Road near Phedi on Wednesday. Shops monitored THT LEKHANATH: In view of possible malpractices during the festive season, authorities today monitored shops at Lekhanath Chowk and Gagangauda in Kaski district. A team led by Antar Bahadur Silwa, Assistant Chief District Officer, Kaski, with the help of representatives of the local consumer forum, Standards and Meteorology Office, FNCCI Lekhanath chapter and journalists visited shops in Lekhanath Chowk. The team visited a number of shops and instructed the shop owners to keep price list at their outlets. Some substandard and date-expired food items including soft drinks and cooking oil were seized and destroyed during the monitoring drive. The team also instructed local grocery stores to abide by the government-set MRP list. —HNS Police beef up security BIRATNAGAR: Morang police have beefed up security in and around Biratnagar from today as robbery cases have gone up in the area. Morang’s DSP Uma Prasad Chaturbedi said the security has been tightened after they received a tip off that a gang of robbers from Bihar had entered Biratnagar. Police claimed that the same gang was behind the robberies that took place during last year’s Dashain- Tihar and Chhath festivals. Police surmised that the gang comprises around 30 members. Chaturbedi said, “Some of them are on India’s Most Wanted list.” A 16-member police team has been formed to nab the two criminals identified with the help of a bank’s CCTV. — HNS
THE HIMALAYAN TIMES, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2012 www.thehimalayantimes.com INTERNATIONAL • THE WORLD OVER Lirak Bejko, 47, a former Albanian political prisoner setting fire to himself in Tirana on Wednesday. Authorities say a second former political prisoner has set himself on fire to protest delays in government compensation for victims of the communist regime. French terror plot AP / RSS PARIS: French police discovered bomb-making materials in an underground parking lot near Paris as part of a probe of an “extremely dangerous terrorist cell” linked to an attack on a kosher grocery, a state prosecutor said on Wednesday. Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said the discovery late on Tuesday in Torcy, east of the capital, led authorities to invoke a rarely used legal clause to allow them to extend questioning of the 12 suspects by a day - and possibly two. Authorities have been on high alert for possible terror attacks by radical Islamists after a man who claimed links to Al-Qaeda shot and killed three Jewish children, a rabbi and three paratroopers in southern France in March. — AP Court-martial files WASHINGTON: The US military’s highest court is hearing arguments on whether the American public should have access to written records in the court-martial of an Army private charged with giving reams of classified information to the secretsharing website WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange are among those represented by the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights at the hearing on Wednesday before the Court of Appeals for Armed Forces in Washington. They are seeking reversal of a lower court order denying them access to written motions, opinions and other records that are generally available in civilian courts. — AP Democrats on edge Associated Press Washington, October 10 It’s more than President Barack Obama’s lacklustre debate performance that has some Democrats on edge a month from Election Day. Party loyalists, in Washington and in battleground states are fretting that Obama’s campaign has been slow to rebound after Republican Mitt Romney’s commanding debate. They’re worried that the Democratic ticket isn’t aggressive enough in blocking Romney’s postdebate pivot to the political centre. And they fear Romney’s new effort to show a softer side gives the Republican nominee an opening with female voters, who are crucial to the president’s re-election prospects. “I’m not feeling very positive,” said Awilda Marquez, a prominent Democrat in Colorado. “I know it’s only the first debate, but he can’t seem to change the relentless negative coverage. Romney has been able to take control.” Her nervousness was echoed by roughly a dozen Democrats in interviews across the country this week before Obama’s next opportunity to get his campaign back on track - Vice President Joe Biden’s debate Thursday against Republican Paul Ryan. Obama’s campaign says it’s sticking to its homestretch plan and doesn’t expect major strategy changes. Nevertheless it’s seeking to reassure handwringing Democrats that key factors still favour the president. Turkey vows more force against Syrian shelling Associated Press Ankara, October 10 Turkey’s military chief vowed today to respond with more force to any further shelling from Syria, keeping up the pressure on its southern neighbor a day after NATO said it stood ready to defend Turkey. General Necdet Ozel was inspecting troops who have been put on alert along the 910-kilometre border with Syria after a week of cross-border artillery and mortar exchanges escalated tensions between the neighbours, sparking fears of a wider regional conflict. Turkey has reinforced the border with artillery guns and also deployed more fighter jets to an air base close to the border region since shelling from Syria killed five Turkish civilians last week. “We responded and if the shelling continues, we will respond with more force,” the private Dogan news agency quoted Ozel as saying during a visit to the town of Akcakale. Yesterday, NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the alliance was ready to defend Turkey, its strongest show of support to its UK to police social media Reuters London, October 10 Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service is holding discussions on laws governing social media, with the aim of publishing guidelines by Christmas, after a flurry of cases concerning inflammatory Twitter and Facebook comments. Police have expressed concern about growing number of such cases. This week alone, two people have been sentenced for social media offences. Teenager Matthew Woods was sentenced on Monday to 12 weeks in jail for offensive jokes on Facebook about missing Welsh five-yearold April Jones. A day later Azhar Ahmed, 20, was given 240 hours of community service after writing "all soldiers should die and go to hell" on Facebook following the death of six British soldiers in Afghanistan. ally since the firing began. The solidarity, however, is largely symbolic. NATO member Turkey has sought backing in case it is attacked, but despite publicly supporting Syria’s rebels Ankara isn’t seeking direct intervention. And the alliance is thought to be reluctant to get involved militarily at a time when its main priority is the war in Afghanistan. Syrian activists, meanwhile, said the rebel units of the Free Syrian Army took control of Maaret al-Numan, a strategic city along the main highway in Idlib province that connects the central city of Homs with northern city of Aleppo and the capital Damascus. Fadi Yassin, an activist in Maarat al-Numan told the AP on Skype that rebels are in control of the town, although fierce fighting continued around the military barracks in the eastern part today, three days after the FSA launched a “liberation battle,” he added. “The city has been liberated,” Yassin said of the biggest city in Idlib province with a population of 130,000. Holding on to Maaret al-Nu- Associated Press Stockholm, October 10 Two American researchers won the Nobel Prize in chemistry today for studies of protein receptors that let body cells sense and respond to outside signals like danger or the flavour of food. Such studies are key for de- veloping better drugs. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka had made groundbreaking discoveries, mainly in the 1980s, on an important family of receptors, known as G-protein-coupled receptors. About half of all medications act on these receptors, including beta blockers and antihista- man would be a significant achievement for the rebels, enabling them to cut the army’s main supply route to two battered cities of Aleppo and Homs, both of which came under bombardment from the regime’s helicopters and artillery today, according to activists. Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency reported fighting between Syrian rebels and forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime around the Syrian town of Azmarin, in Idlib province, across from the Turkish border. It said Syrians were fleeing homes in the Azmarin region, some crossing into Turkey on rowing boats over the river Orontes. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been fiercely critical of Assad, said today that Syria was “the bleeding heart of humanity and the whole Islamic world.” Erdogan told a meeting of the Islamic Conference in Istanbul that Turkey had refrained from responding to half a dozen shells from Syria, but when five people were killed last week “we had to retaliate in the strongest way that we could.” American scientists win Chemistry Nobel Lefkowitz mines, so learning about them will help scientists to come up with better drugs. The human body has about 1,000 kinds of such receptors, structures on the surface of cells, which let the body respond to a wide variety of chemical signals, like adrenaline. Some receptors are in the Kobilka nose, tongue and eyes, and let us sense smells, tastes and light. Lefkowitz, 69, is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. Kobilka, 57, worked for Lefkowitz at Duke before transferring to Stanford University School of Medicine in California, where he is now a professor. PAGE 7 US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta addressing a press meet next to NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen (left), Supreme Allied Commander Europe US Navy Admiral James Stavridis (second right) and US Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford (first right) during a NATO defence ministers’ meeting in Brussels on Wednesday. Benghazi attack: State department toes Republicans Associated Press Washington, October 10 The State Department now says it never believed the September 11 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was a film protest gone awry, giving congressional Republicans new fodder for criticising the Obama administration’s initial accounts of the assault. The State Department’s extraordinary break with other administration offices came in a department briefing yesterday, where officials said “others” in the executive branch concluded initially that the protest was based, like others in the Middle East, on a film that ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad. That was never the department’s conclusion, a senior official told reporters. The Republican-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee holds a hearing today on diplomatic security in the attack that killed US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Amer- icans. The attack has become a political football in the final weeks before the election. The committee’s chairman, Republican Darrell Issa, a California Republican, has accused the State Department of turning aside pleas from its diplomats in Libya to increase security in the months and weeks before the attack in Benghazi. One scheduled witness today, Eric Nordstrom, is the former chief security officer for US diplomats in Libya who told the committee his pleas for more security were ignored. Briefing reporters ahead of the hearing yesterday, department officials were asked about the administration’s initial — and since retracted — explanation linking the violence to protests over an American-made anti- Muslim video circulating on the Internet. One official responded, without specifying, that it was a question for others to answer. Romney braces for Ohio battle Associated Press Washington, October 10 Reuters Republican challenger Mitt Romney is spending a second day in Ohio today, a must-win state in the November election, as he tries to build on a shift in momentum that has him closing in on President Barack Obama after the incumbent’s dismal performance last week in the first presidential debate. No Republican candidate has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio, the Midwestern state that Obama also visited a day earlier. He returned to the White House after a fundraising trip through California and a stop yesterday at Ohio State University, where he urged students to cast their ballots early. Romney is trying to drive home his economic message in the key state where Obama has held a significant polling advantage because of his decision early in his presidency to pump vast amounts of federal money into the failing auto industry. Since then Ohio’s economy, which is heavily dependent on that industry, has fared better than most states, with unemployment falling to levels below that national average. As the tight race for the presidency grows closer, US voters still say that fixing the struggling economy and accelerating the creation of jobs is uppermost in their minds with Election Day less than a month away. “This economy is not creating the jobs it should. We’ve got to fix it,” Romney said yesterday in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. “We’re going to do it here in Ohio.”
Page 1 and 2: Nepal’s No. 1 English Daily Turke
Page 3 and 4: THE HIMALAYAN TIMES, THURSDAY, OCTO
Page 5: THE HIMALAYAN TIMES, THURSDAY, OCTO

Dahal says fresh elections vague, risky idea

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?