Free Republic

The Biden administration is funding a $4 million project to determine a connection between child labor and climate change in the South Asian country of Nepal. One of the desired outcomes is "increased understanding of the link between climate change and vulnerability to child labor and/or forced labor risks," while another is "increased implementation of child-centered, gender-sensitive and socially inclusive climate adaptation initiatives," according to documents released on the federal government's grant website. "Locally-led" climate change strategy, according to the grant details, should be collaborative with the Nepalese government to address the "priorities of climate-vulnerable populations, such as children, women,...

Since July 20, India has maintained an embargo on non-basmati rice amid the threat of El Niño weather disruptions.Neighbours Nepal and India are in a kitchen give and take. While India has started importing tomatoes from Nepal amid a record-high spike in prices in the country, Nepal has written to the Indian government to send rice and sugar. The first lot of tomato imports is likely to reach by Friday in Varanasi, Lucknow and Kanpur cities in northern India, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman told the parliament in New Delhi, according to Reuters. Tomato prices have surged more than 1,400 percent...

A helicopter crash in Nepal, near Mount Everest, has left six people dead, according to Nepal's Civil Aviation Authority. File Photo by Narendra Shrestha/EPA-EFE July 11 (UPI) -- A helicopter crash in Nepal, near Mount Everest, has left six people dead. Five of the victims were Mexican citizens on a sightseeing tour, while the sixth was a Nepalese pilot. The passengers, who have been identified as Maria Jose Sifuentes, Fernando Sifuentes, Abric Gonzalez, Ismael Rincon and Olacio Luz Gonzalez, were all from the same family. The pilot was identified as Nepalese citizen Chet B. Gurung, according to the Civil Aviation...

According to USA Spending, a site that tracks how and where taxpayer dollars being spent, at least $2,315 worth of grants from the Biden State Department have gone to the Nepal Federation of Sexual and Gender Minorities between April 16, 2023 and this week. Never mind, apparently, that the United States is nearly $32,000,000,000,000 in debt and we're potentially days away from Biden bumbling his way into the first default in U.S. history. Nope, the Biden administration is still throwing taxpayer dollars at woke causes around the globe. The description of how the State Department grant funds — read: taxpayer...

The propellers of both engines of the Yeti Airlines aircraft that crashed in Nepal last month and killed 71 people, including five Indians, did not have power during its descent, a PTI report quoted government-appointed panel probing the aviation disaster as saying. During the analysis and investigation, the propellers of both engines were found to have gone “feathering in the base leg in the course of landing,” My Republica newspaper reported, quoting the panel. Yeti Airlines flight 691, after taking off from Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport on January 15, crashed on the bank of the Seti River between the old...

Anju Khatiwada, 44, joined Nepal’s Yeti Airlines in 2010, following in the footsteps of her husband, Dipak Pokhrel, who was killed four years prior when the small passenger plane he was piloting for the air carrier crashed minutes before landing. On Sunday, Khatiwada was in the co-pilot’s chair on a Yeti Airlines flight from Kathmandu that went down into a gorge as it approached the city of Pokhara, in what was Nepal’s deadliest aviation disaster in three decades “She got her pilot training with the money she got from the insurance after her husband’s death,” Bartaula added. “On Sunday, she...

A group of five friends on holiday can be heard laughing on a Facebook live stream as the plane comes into land at an airport in Nepal. His phone kept broadcasting and captured the moment the plane crashed and was engulfed by fire. Footage shows him filming out of the window while one of his friends can be heard saying “it’s a lot of fun” as the rooftops of the city can be seen below. The landing seems routine until suddenly the screen turns orange and screams are heard as the cabin appears to shake. Sonu’s phone keep broadcasting as...

A plane with 72 people on board has crashed near an airport in central Nepal and at least 40 bodies have been recovered, officials say. The Yeti Airlines flight from Kathmandu to the tourist town of Pokhara crashed on landing, catching fire. Videos posted on social media show an aircraft flying low over a populated area before spinning sharply. There were 68 passengers on board, including at least 15 foreign nationals, and four crew members.

A French serial killer portrayed in BBC drama The Serpent is to be freed from a Nepalese prison, after a court ruling. Charles Sobhraj, who spent 19 years in jail for the murder of two tourists in Kathmandu in 1975, has been ordered to return to France within 15 days. Sobhraj was linked to a string of other tourist murders in the 1970s, and spent 20 years in prison in India. His victims were mostly young Western backpackers on the hippie trail in India and Thailand.

An earthquake in western Nepal killed at least six villagers, four of them children, as the tremor destroyed mud and brick houses in remote communities living in the foothills of the Himalayas. The quake struck in the early hours of Wednesday when all families would have been at home and asleep. Its epicentre was located close to a national park in the sparsely populated Doti district, 430 km (270 miles) west of Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu. Local television news channels showed rescuers clearing the rubble in the search for casualties and survivors, while women looked on, sitting in the open with...

Hilaree Nelson, 49, was skiing down from the 26,775 feet summit with her partner Jim Morrison when she fell off the mountain... Bad weather hampered rescue efforts Monday. But visibility was good in improved weather conditions Tuesday while a helicopter was hovering over the mountain to see any signs of the missing climber... Nelson, from Telluride, Colorado, and Morrison, from Tahoe, California, are extreme skiers who summited Mount Lhotse, the world’s fourth-highest peak, in 2018. Nepal’s government has issued permits to 504 climbers to attempt to scale high mountain peaks during the autumn season. Most of them are on Mount...

Loot, a despicable word, was evidently among the first few Hindustani expressions to enter the British lexicon. It aptly illustrates the brand of British colonisation like no other word. On a chilly evening in the first week of December in 1862, British Empire’s railway engineer E.B. Harris reached a small riverside market village called Sultanganj on the south bank of Ganges some twenty miles west of Bhagalpur. Here his 4,771 workers were excavating a vast mound of bricks on the hillside to build a railway yard. Harris, recognised among the railway engineers for the construction of the challenging Jamalpur tunnel,...

Deforestation, Poaching, and White People Created the Man-Eater of Champawat In the first decade of the 20th century, the most prolific serial killer of human life the world has ever seen stalked the foothills of the Himalayas. A serial killer that was not merely content to kidnap victims at night and dismember their bodies, but also insisted on eating their flesh. A serial killer that, for the better part of ten years, eluded police, bounty hunters, assassins, and even an entire regiment of Nepalese Gurkhas. A serial killer that happened to be a Royal Bengal tiger. Specifically, a tiger known...

The Yale University Art Gallery has finalized plans to return a sculpture of a Buddhist goddess to Nepal, the university said Friday. The return is the latest in a series of museum repatriations of Nepali artifacts. Yale acquired the artifact in 2015, though the donor has never been disclosed. The decision to bring the work back home to Nepal was a “collaborative one” done in tandem with the country’s government last year, the museum’s director, Stephanie Wiles, said. Bishnu Prasad Gautam, acting consul general for Nepal, said in a statement that the return “will help Nepal preserve its history and...

With the world focused on the war in Ukraine, China has been busy engaging in diplomacy with neighboring countries, especially in South Asia. During the last 10 days of March, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nepal; attended the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; and hosted a series of international conferences on Afghanistan. Wang’s trip to India is particularly noteworthy. Memories of bloodshed in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley, where Chinese and Indian soldiers clashed in mid-2020, killing dozens, are still fresh. Given this, the high-profile visit by Wang inevitably leads many...

A video posted on Chinese microblogging website Weibo by the Russian embassy of a party held today to celebrate the 160th anniversary of Vladivostok sparked online outrage with Chinese diplomats, journalists and users referring to the city by its old name ‘Haishenwai’. Vladivostok which once used to be part of China’s Qing dynasty and was known as Haishenwai was annexed by the Russian empire in 1860 after China’s defeat by the British and the French in the Second Opium war. Reacting to Russian embassy’s tweet, Shen Shiwei, a journalist working with the state-owned broadcaster CGTN, tweeted: “This “tweet” of #Russian...

Gere's What You Need to Remember: Ideological and financial concerns mean there are a lot of things India won’t buy from the United States or Europe, leaving Russia as their sole source of weapons. Like a lot of countries, India wants the best weapons it can afford. But ideological and financial concerns mean there are a lot of things it won’t buy from the United States or Europe. That pretty much leaves, well, Russia. India has been a big buyer of Russian weapons for 50 years. Those haven’t been easy years for New Delhi. India’s defense contracts with Russia have...

Beijing [China], December 17 (ANI): The US administration is concerned over China's increasing military capability near its border with India as it tries to expand its strategic alliance in the region, according to a report. The US Defense Department is newly concerned about China's further military build-up near the demarcation line across its Himalayan border with India after Beijing deployed long-range strategic bombers to the area last month in another apparent warning to New Delhi, according to Foreign Policy magazine. Further, the build-up along the Indian border fits the pattern of Chinese regional aggression witnessed in other parts of the...

Dong Jingwei, who has been rumored to be a high-ranking defector to the United States, attended a meeting in Beijing on June 23, according to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security (MPS). The MPS announced on its website that Dong participated in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) security meeting in Beijing on Wednesday, as a member of the China team which was led by Zhao Kezhi, China’s public security minister. In the announcement, the ministry released a photo, in which Dong was sitting at the right end of the table. This is the first time that the Chinese regime has...

MAY/JUNE 2013 Historical Fiction: China’s South China Sea Claims Mohan Malik The Spratly Islands—not so long ago known primarily as a rich fishing ground—have turned into an international flashpoint as Chinese leaders insist with increasing truculence that the islands, rocks, and reefs have been, in the words of Premier Wen Jiabao, “China’s historical territory since ancient times.” Normally, the overlapping territorial claims to sovereignty and maritime boundaries ought to be resolved through a combination of customary international law, adjudication before the International Court of Justice or the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, or arbitration under Annex VII...