KATHMANDU: The Government has made some changes to the hierarchy of public officials, putting the former ministers below the sitting members of parliament. The former ministers and high court chief judge are now put in number 9 in the order.
Sharing the decisions made by the Council of Ministers in the past week in Kathmandu on Thursday, Minister for Communications and Information Technology Gokul Prasad Baskota said the cabinet endorsed the agreement implementation protocol of Nepal-China transit treaty and authorized the Commerce and Supplies Secretary to sign it.
The government has appointed Pit Kumar Shrestha of Morang as the Executive Director of the Local Development Training Academy. Likewise, the Nepali Ambassador to India and the Nepali Ambassador to the US will be given the status in par with a Minister of the Government of Nepal, Baskota said.
The cabinet meeting last week also re-appointed Anjana Tamrakar as the General Manager of the National Productivity and Economic Development Center Limited.
KATHMANDU: Nepal Army can be mobilized at the direct recommendation of the prime minister in line with the new Bill on National Security Council, a report in Annapurna daily said.
The Bill on National Security Council has been tabled at the parliament. According to the provision of the bill the prime minister can directly recommend the President to mobilize the Nepal Army in case of grave national crisis arises.
Prime minister can do so if the the national security council meeting could not be held due to some difficult circumstances and the president can mobilize the army to maintain law and order.
KATHMANDU: Basantapur is one of the most favored tourist destinations in the historic Kathmandu valley.
The country has seen an influx of over 200,000 tourists in two months alone, a 33 percent up as compared to the same period last year, according to the Department of Immigration. Altogether, 216,214 tourists visited the country in January and February (91,793 in January and 97,694 in February).
Photo: RSS
Photo: RSS
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(Agencies)
KATHMANDU: The World Kidney Day has been marked by organizing kidney-related awareness programs across the country on Thursday. Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli attended a program to mark the Day at the TU Teaching Hospital (TUTH) this morning.
Speaking at the program the Prime Minister urged people to maintain proper food habits, do regular physical exercises for the safety of kidneys. The PM also participated in a walkathon along with the hosts as part of the program.
The program was organized by the TUTH’s Department of Nephrology, Physician for Social Responsibility Nepal and Free Students’ Union. Talking to Khabarhub, Dr. Pukar Chandra Shrestha, executive director and kidney transplant specialist at Shahid Dharma Bhakta National Transplant Center, Bhaktapur, said a total of 3 million Nepali people are suffering from kidney ailments in Nepal. Of the total 3 million kidney patients, the 3,000 patients’ kidneys fail annually, Shrestha added.
The number of kidney patients receiving government treatment allowance has been increasing. The data maintained by the Nursing and Social Security Division (NSSD) shows that, in the Fiscal Year 2018/19, the number of patients taking government subsidy on kidney disease has doubled. A total of 4,661 kidney patients took government subsidy for the medicine, according to the division.
According to the statistics maintained by the Division, in the 2017-18 Fiscal Year, 2, 625 kidney patients received government allowance, of which 2,197 took the subsidy for hemodialysis, 88 took allowance for peritoneal dialysis service. Similarly, the 142 people took the service for transplantation service while 198 people took government subsidy for medicine.
In the Fiscal Year 2016/17, 4,300 people had received the government treatment subsidy, of which 1,939 patients took government allowance for haemodialysis, 85 took allowance for peritoneal dialysis while 157 received allowance for transplant services. Similarly, 222 people took subsidy for medicine, according to the data maintained by the NSSD.
Of them, 4,110 kidney patients took subsidy for haemodialysis, 188 took subsidy for peritoneal dialysis while 249 took subsidy for kidney transplantation while 114 took subsidy for medicine.
According to the record of the Division, a total of 8, 246 kidney patients have undergone haemodialysis while 361 peritoneal dialysis. Similarly, 548 patients underwent kidney transplantation service while 534 took government subsidy for medicine.
Given the data above, the number of kidney patients is growing every year. According to Dr. Shrestha, the kidneys fail due to unhealthy lifestyle and when the people do not undergo kidney-checking. High blood pressure and diabetes are the major causes of kidney failure, Shrestha told Khabarhub. Shrestha advise people to visit the hospital for kidney check-up once a year.
Govt. provides subsidy for kidney patients
The government has defined kidney disease as acute ailment and been providing subsidy to the patients for dialysis, transplantation and medicine. The government has been providing Rs. 400,000 to those kidney patients willing to undergo kidney transplantation in Nepal while those undergoing dialysis will get Rs. 100,000, among others.
Similarly, the government provides Rs. 50,000 each to kidney donors and receivers for their lab test, Rs. 2,500 for haemodialysis per session and 90 packets for peritoneal dialysis.
KATHMANDU: The government is ready to offer, Netra Bikram Chand aka ‘Biplav,’ a red carpet welcome if he renounces violence and choses to resolve his issues through a dialogue, said Gokul Banskota, the minister for Information and Technology.
The minister was addressing the press in terms of briefing the decisions taken by the cabinet on Tuesday evening.
“People in the country do not have the strength to suffer the consequences of armed violence again,” said the minister.
The minister said that the government had fulfilled its responsibilities and duties by imposing a ban on the ‘Biplav’ led Nepal Communist Party (NCP).
The minister also informed of the cabinet decision that prohibits commoners to possess arm. Those possessing arms are required to hand it over to the government within 35 days of the notice issued.
The cabinet took the decision following the arrest of ‘Biplav’ cadres with arms in various parts of the country.
To those who fail to surrender arms within the stipulated time, the government will declare them ‘criminals and destructive’ and initiate action accordingly, informed the minister.
NAWALPARASI: Two trucks were torched at Tulasipur Chok of Sarawal rural municipality-1 as part of the strike called by Netra Bikram Chand aka ‘Biplav’ Nepal Communist Party, today.
An unidentified group set ablaze two parked trucks, according to the police.
The strike has disrupted normal life in the district, affecting educational institutions and transportation the most.
KATHMANDU: Nepal has entered semifinal of SAFF women’s championship 2019. After defeating Bhutan 2-0 today, Bangladesh along with Nepal have also entered into the semifinals.
Nepal will play against Bangladesh on March 16. The teams have three points after winning the first game with Bhutan. Bhutan lost both games against Nepal and Bangladesh. Maldives will play against Sri Lanka on Friday.
In the today’s match, Mishrat Jahan (47′) and Sabina Khatun (85′) have scored the goal for Bangladesh to enter into semifinals.
CALIFORNIA: Facebook Inc. struggled to restore its services fully on Thursday after a 17-hour partial outage made the world’s largest social network inaccessible to users across the globe, driving a wave of online complaints.
Number of reports on the crowd-sourced Down Detector website – one of the internet’s most used sources of numbers on outages – peaked at just over 12,000 gradually falling to a couple of hundreds by early Thursday.
But with thousands of users complaining on Twitter under the hashtag #facebookdown, a number of media reports put the number affected in the millions.
The BBC and a handful of other media outlets said it was the platform’s longest ever outage. Reuters was not immediately able to verify those claims.
Facebook representatives took to Twitter to update users on the problems.
A Facebook spokesman, asked by Reuters for more details, would only repeat the company’s initial statement on the outage on Wednesday, saying that it was working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook apps were down for much of Wednesday, although the photo-sharing social network said it was back up early on Thursday. Facebook was yet to provide an update on its other services.
“Anddddd… we’re back,” Instagram tweeted here along with a GIF image of Oprah Winfrey screaming in excitement.
Social media users in some parts of the United States and Europe as well as in Japan were hit by the disruption, according to DownDetector’s live outage map here.
The Menlo Park, California-based company, which gets a vast majority of its revenue from advertising, told Bloomberg that it was still investigating the overall impact “including the possibility of refunds for advertisers.”
On Twitter it also said that the matter was not related to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
In a DDoS attack, hackers use computer networks they control to send such a large number of requests for information from websites that servers that host them can no longer handle the traffic and the sites become unreachable. (Reuters)
KATHMANDU: Nepal Communist Party (NCP) Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal has accused Netra Bikram Chand ‘Biplav’ of mobilizing a team to assassinate him.
Speaking at a program organized by Nepal Communist Party at Perisdanda in the capital on Thursday, Dahal said, Biplav who also took part in the Maoist insurgency is now conspiring to take his life.
“I am the first target of Biplav-led group, among others. They have also mobilized a team to this effect. A government source informed me about it this morning,” Dahal said. “Will federalism be saved following my assassination?” asked Dahal.
Meanwhile, he advised Biplav to think twice before taking a plunge into the conflict saying that the current situation is different than the past.