The parliament has formed a task force including five MPs from five parties to probe the complaints registered at the Parliamentary Special Hearing Committee (PSHC) against the four nominees for permanent judges of the Supreme Court.

The PSHC, on Wednesday, formed the task force, which includes Ram Baran Yadav (NC), Astalaxmi Shakya (UML), Dinanath Sharma (Maoists), Dr. Minendra Rijal (NC-Democratic) and Lilamani Pokharel (People’s Front) as members.

The task force will probe complaints received against Damodar Prasad Sharma, Ram Kumar Prasad Shah, Kalyan Shrestha and Gauri Dhakal – who are currently working as temporary judges at the apex court.

Reports say that the nominees will be called on Friday to defend their cases before the PSHC.

As per the interim constitution, the judges need to go through parliamentary hearing before they can be appointed as SC justices.

Tourist arrivals to Nepal via air have increased by 9.6 percent in the month of June. Nepal Tourism Board said a total of 23,502 visitors entered Nepal through air.

According to the figures released by Immigration Office at Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA), the European market has recorded a strong increase by 39 percent, keeping on the ascending trend of arrivals. The Indian market recorded a negative growth of 12.8 percent, nevertheless this market alone contributed more than 50 percent in the total arrivals by air.

Overall Asian market registered a commendable upsurge in arrivals with a notable rise of 289.5 percent from China, 235.4 percent from Taiwan and 11.7 percent from Japan.

The major tourist generating markets from both Europe and Americas registered a healthy growth this month, despite some records of negative trend from France and Italy. Canada and USA market grew by 81.4 percent and 50 percent respectively. Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway recorded a remarkable growth, more than double arrivals, compared to the corresponding month last year. Other major markets with bigger share in total arrivals from European segment like UK, Germany and Spain also showed a good growth of 48.1 percent, 7 percent and 71.7 percent respectively.

The total arrival figures till June 2007 has reached to 167,133, up by 45,538 arrivals compared to the same period last year.

“This clearly shows that tourism sector is manifesting the strong message of gradual recovery. The drop in the arrivals from Indian market, considered as a major volume market, is a matter of concern,” the NTB press release states.

“Frequent strikes, street protest and demonstration, hurdles in vehicle movement in the country, mainly in the Terai region are some of the factors contributing indirectly to retard the healthy growth of tourism,” NTB further said.

Three persons were killed when a car they were traveling in met with an accident in ’54 Kilo’ road section of the Araniko highway in Kavre district late Wednesday night.

The Police have identified the deceased as Tanka Lal Shrestha, a resident of Sindhupalchowk district, Padam Thapa, a businessman from Bhuminthan VDC of Sindhupalchowk district and Kishor Shrestha of Dolakha district.

The private car with the number plate Ba 1 Cha 7575, which was driven by Tanka Lal Shrestha, had skidded off the road that had become slippery because of the incessant rainfall and fell some 100 metres down before becoming ablaze with fire.

The police suspect that the extra gallon of petrol the car was carrying may have caused the fire. The charred bodies of the three have been brought to Kathmandu for postmortem.

Student and youth organisations affiliated with the eight political parties are all set to submit a memorandum to the government Thursday afternoon to forbid the royal palace from throwing ‘high tea’ and ‘luncheon’ during King Gyanendra’s 61 st birthday celebrations. It also warned that if the King’s birthday bash is allowed to be held, then they would take to the streets in protest.

The ‘joint meeting’ of aforesaid student and youth organisations held Thursday morning at the Bagbazar office of CPN-UML aligned Democratic National Youth Federation (DNYF) in the capital city had reached the decision to this effect, and comes a day after the majority of the diplomatic corps in Kathmandu made it clear that they won’t be attending the King’s birthday bash saying ‘it would not send a helpful signal’.

The students have concluded that the public reception planned by the royal palace is against the spirit of Loktantra. They have said that the King who is not recognised by the constitution cannot throw such party in the capacity of the monarch.

The eight party affiliated student organisations also decided to stage a “huge demonstration and rally” on King Gyanendra’s birthday on Saturday. Student leaders said they would soon start the publicity campaign for the demonstrations.

The students also decided to put pressure on the government against setting aside any amount of money for the royal palace in the coming fiscal year’s budget and instead spend that money to set up an education fund and said they would take a joint initiative for establishing democratic republican set up.

The Special Court Thursday ordered the police to detain suspended Governor of the Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) Bijay Nath Bhattarai until tomorrow’s hearing on the corruption case filed against him by the Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA).

The order came from a three-member bench of judges Bhup Dhoj Adhikari, Komal Nath Sharma and Cholendra SJB Rana after it interrogated Bhattarai in connection with the graft charge. Bhattarai had reached the court at around 10:30 am to record his statement.

Police took him into custody from the court premises as soon as the court order came.

On Monday, the bench had asked Bhattarai to appear before the court within 15 days. On the same day, the bench released co-accused Surendra Man Pradhan, the executive director of the bank’s Financial Institutions Regulation Department, on bail of Rs 50,000.

Bhattarai and Pradhan have been accused of embezzling Rs 24.5 million in terminating a contract of a foreign company in the multi-million dollar Financial Sector Reforms Programme launched with foreign aid.

The CIAA had filed the graft case against the NRB bosses on June 28.

The Office of the Controller of Examination (OCE), Sanothimi, is making final preparations and ‘check-over’ for publishing the results of this year’s School Leaving Certificate (SLC) examinations, possibly Thursday evening.

Officials at the OCE said the SLC results would be published later in the evening provided no “technical problems” arise in the last moment.

According to of Examinations Harka Prasad Shrestha, an official at the OCE, the officials are busy verifying the marks obtained by few examinees and doing other last-minute checks and that if this gets finished by 4 pm today the meeting of the SLC Examination Committee will immediately convene to decide on the time of the result announcement.

The SLC board examination was held in Chaitra last year by the OCE.

Considered as ‘iron gate’ by teachers, students and guardians alike because of the sheer number of students who fail in the exams – passing rate has been below 50 percent – some 3,52,000 students in both regular and exempted category had appeared in this year’s SLC examinations.

The OCE had earlier decided to make public this year’s SLC results via SMS and telephone a day before the actual publication of the results in the paper.

In a clear break of the tradition of Gorkhapatra Daily carrying the SLC results, this year the honour of publishing the results has gone to the Kathmandu Post, sister publication of Kantipur Daily.

Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) has criticised the government policies and programmes saying it lacked solid agenda to bring the situation in the country to normalcy.

“We had hoped it would address the issues raised by Madhesis and Janajatis. Unfortunately, it does not do so,” said RPP president Pashupati SJB Rana.

He said that without addressing Madhesi issues and improving law and order, the Constituent Assembly (CA) election process cannot proceed in Terai.

Meanwhile, the RPP central committee meeting did not take any decision on whether to attend or not attend the King’s birthday reception. It has decided to let the leaders decide on their personal capacity on whether to attend the party or not.

The general secretary of the Unified Marxist Leninist (UML) Madhav Kumar Nepal has said that the UML should lead all the democratic republican forces.

“At this juncture, UML should bring all the democratic republican forces together and lead them,” he said, speaking at a party programme in the capital.

Likewise, standing committee member of the UML Bamdev Gautam added that the party should play its role to bring the radical leftists to the mainstream. “It is the job of the UML to bring them to the mainstream,” he said.

Similarly, another standing committee member Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli urged the party to have faith in its strength.

Eleven days on, the 15th central committee meeting of the CPN (UML), which was initially planned for five days, still strives to fine-tune the party’s strategies for the upcoming constituent assembly polls.

The meeting, which kicked off on June 24, opened debate on general secretary Madhav Nepal’s political paper from June 28 and the debate is likely to continue for 2-3 days more, party sources said. The general secretary’s 23-page dossier basically lays emphasis on how the party should prepare itself for the electoral battle.

Some central members are learnt to have demanded the 8th general convention of the party to elect a new leadership before the CA election, but the majority has backed the current leadership until the polls. Leaders are also divided over the idea of ‘leftist alliance’ in the polls.

Curiously enough, while reporting to the central committee meeting, almost all zonal in-charges claimed that the party was in a winning position in most of the electoral constituencies in their respective working areas.

The central members have unequivocally complained about the fragile security situation in the wake of forceful activities of the Maoist youth wing, the Young Communist League (YCL) and the killings and abductions carried out by various groups in Terai.

On Thursday, central committee members Shankar Pokharel, Ram Nath Dhakal, Raghuji Pant and Bishu Poudel commented on Nepal’s political paper.

In today’s meeting the leaders stressed the need to initiate dialogue within the eight-party alliance to forge consensus on the agenda of democratic republic, a statement issued by Amrit Bohara, the secretary of the Central Secretariat, said.

The central committee meeting will resume 10 am Friday.

Over 58 percent of 274,000 regular examinees who had appeared in this year’s School Leaving Certificate (SLC) examinations have passed the ‘iron gate.’

According to the SLC results, which were published late night on Thursday, 58.64 percent of regular examinees have passed the exams along with 31.5 percent of the exempted ones. In total, there were over 352,000 students who appeared this year’s SLC.

Last year, only 46.51 percent of regular examinees had passed the SLC test.

As per the Office of the Controller of Examination (OCE), Sanothimi, 56,153 students have passed in first division; 89,662 in second division and 7789 in third division.

Likewise, over 7000 students have passed securing distinction marks. Like in the past year, the OCE has not published the names of top ten students.

The results of this year’s SLC will be published in daily newspapers including Gorkhapatra, The Kathmandu Post and Annapurna Post. They will also be made available in websites of the ministry of education and department of education ( www.moe.gov.np; www.doe.gov.np), among others. Likewise, they can also be availed through SMS to 1400 number of Nepal Telecom.

This year’s SLC had been held on April 4-12. This year the Ministry of Education held the examination based on the curriculum of grade 10 alone – unlike previous years when the exams were based on curricula of grade 9 and 10.