GAIGHAT: Udayapur District Court has convicted two teenage boys of rape and murder of a minor girl, slapping life imprisonment on them.

A single bench of Judge Tejendra Prasad Sharma handed down the verdict against 16-year-old and 17-year-old boy on the charge of raping and murdering Aljina Khadka, 13, of Lafagaun in Rautamai Rural Municipality-3 in Udayapur on October 23.

NEW DELHI: India has topped the list of the most polluted cities in the world, according to a study by IQAir AirVisual and Greenpeace. Seven among the most polluted cities are in India.

The most polluted city on earth is Gurugram, a home to 1 million people situated about 30 kilometers southwest of New Delhi, followed by Ghaziabad.

Other  Indian cities include Bhiwadi (5), Noida (6), Patna (7), Lucknow (9) while Faisalabad (3) and Lahore (10) are in Pakistan and Chinese city Hotan is placed in the 8th position.

There, average air pollution levels in 2018 were more than 13 times the level permitted under WHO guidelines, although air quality had actually improved slightly since the previous year.

Air pollution is an insidious killer. If you are among the 91% of the world’s population who breathes air the World Health Organization (WHO) deems unsafe, then every time you inhale, microscopic particles are being drawn into your lungs.

They get into your bloodstream, causing cancers, strokes and heart disease, stunting children’s growth and development, and even reducing your intelligence.

The research focused on the levels of fine particulate matter known as PM2.5. These microscopic particles 20 times smaller than the width of a human hair are the most dangerous to human health.

(Agencies)

GORKHA: Three cadres of the Netra Bikram Chand ‘Biplav’-led group have abandoned the faction citing dissatisfaction over the party’s recent activities.

The group’s district member Anil Kumal, youth member Gokul Kumal, and area committee member Meghraj Kumal abandoned the party by issuing a statement.

They said they decided to leave the group owing to the party’s activities saying they now would live as independent citizens.

KATHMANDU: Tejshree Thapa, a human rights lawyer, who worked in crises and conflicts in the Balkans, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, passed away on Tuesday from an illness New York City.

Tejshree, who was senior South Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, was 52. She first joined Human Rights Watch in 2004 and was our senior South Asia researcher.

Daughter of former Ambassador Dr. Bhekh Bahadur Thapa and Rita, she is survived by her daughter.

KATHMANDU: Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Keshav Gokhale has held a meeting with his counterpart Shanker Das Bairagi on Thursday.

They discussed bilateral interest between the two countries during the meeting.

Indian diplomat Gokhale arrived in Kathmandu this morning  on a two-day official visit to  Nepal 15 days after his appointment as the foreign secretary of India.

According to the Ministry of Affairs, Gokhale will also hold meetings with Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and Foreign Minister Pradip Gyawali.

Facebook Inc has banned praise, support and representation of white nationalism and white separatism.

This has been a move that drew qualified approval from New Zealand where a massacre of 50 people in mosques was live streamed this month.

Civil rights groups have alleged social media giants of failing to confront extremism. It was under the spotlight earlier in March after a suspected white supremacist broadcast live footage of the attacks in Christchurch of New Zealand.

Facebook has tightened its content monitoring teams.

Earlier, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called for social media platforms to be accountable for what users post. (Agencies)

DOHA: National museum of Qatar is opening for the public from today. The 560,000-square-foot Museum is designed by Jean Nouvel.

Sheikha Amna bint Abdulaziz bin Jassim Al Thani, director of the National Museum of Qatar said, “We believed we had the potential to go beyond even the most exciting existing museum displays and develop something truly immersive. And we believed the substance of those experiences ought to come from the Qatari people themselves.”

A mile-long path through the museum’s alien, spacecraft-like discs starts where it all began—literally. A film rushes through 700 million years of life on Earth, with fossils and animal models on display. The succeeding galleries move on to human life on the Qatari peninsula, with films and artifacts about life in the desert and the once-lucrative pearling trade.

It’s the second half of the museum that brings the history of Qatar, tracing the tribal conflicts that culminated with the rise of the Al Thani ruling family. Then it’s on to oil and gas, and the discoveries that dramatically transformed what was historically an obscure desert peninsula into indispensable cog in global energy security.

“To construct a building 350 meters long, with its great big inward-curving disks, and its intersections and cantilevered elements—all the things that conjure up a desert rose—we had to meet enormous technical challenges,” said the building’s architect, Jean Nouvel, in a statement. “This building is at the cutting-edge of technology, like Qatar itself.”

(Agencies)

KATHMANDU: A study has found that the local units have been the most corrupt after the country adopted federal setup, Rajdhani daily reported.

The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) pointed out embezzlement taking place in the social security allowance. The anti-graft body has filed over two dozen graft cases at the Special Court.

According to the report, the local government staffers are found to have been receiving allowances for their deceased parents and buying a land plot with it.

Pradeep Kumar Koirala, spokesperson of the CIAA, said they received over 3,600 cases related to misuse of social security allowance  in the last six months.