Kathmandu: After a decade of guerrilla war, they made news by returning to Parliament and pledging to lock up their arms. And now, Nepal’s Maoist rebels will hit the headlines again, in a very different way.
Come March and they will appear in a place unusual for guerrillas — the Playboy magazine.
The communist insurgents have very conservative notions about sex and nudity, will appear in the Japanese version of the Playboy, a much more serious edition brought out by Shueisha, a leading Tokyo-based publisher. Around 1990, when Nepal was going through a pro-democracy movement that opposed the ban on political parties and absolute power usurped by monarchy, a Japanese journalist, Kiyoko Ogura, came to Nepal and fell under its spell.
This month, her second book on the Maoist movement, written in Japanese and published by Japan’s NHK, hit the bookstores. Interested by the book, Japanese Playboy approached her to do an article on the Maoists. The six-page feature is scheduled to appear in the March issue.

Kathmandu: The picture of Nepal’s unpopular King Gyanendra will be replaced by that of Mount Everest on the Himalayan country’s 10-rupee notes, the finance minister said on Friday. The cabinet picked the world’s highest mountain over Lord Buddha on Thursday to replace the monarch’s image. Officials had earlier suggested that currency notes carry the picture of Buddha, born a prince in Nepal more than 2,600 years ago.
“We decided to go in for Sagarmatha instead of the Buddha because some Buddhist religious organisations were against having his picture on c u r re n cy notes,” finance minister Ram Sharan Mahat said. Sagarmatha, which means head of the sea, is the Nepali name for the world’s highest peak that stands at 8,850 m. The move to remove Gyanendra’s picture comes months after he was stripped of nearly all his powers following mass protests last year that ended nearly 15 months of his absolute rule.
Mahat said the government would take a decision later on what picture should be used to replace the king’s image on other rupee denominations.
Elections are due in June for a special assembly which will map out Nepal’s future including the fate of the monarchy. The landlocked nation is home to eight of the world’s 14 highest mountains including Mount Everest.

via Times of India

A recent report has revealed that Kathmandu is the most polluted city among 20 cities of Asia.

A study report prepared by a team led by Cornie Huizenga with the assistance of Asian Development Bank showed that Kathmandu is in the top of the list of sensitive cities from the air pollution point of view.

The study was released as Asian environment ministers held the first governmental meeting on Asian urban air quality this week in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

“There is high possibility of human loss due to the diseases caused from pollution,” the report warned.

WHO scientists estimate 537,000 people in Southeast Asia and the Pacific die prematurely each year due to air pollution.

The level of PM10 in the air of Kathmandu is 120 microgram per square meter. As per the standard of the World Health Organization, the level of PM10 should be 20 microgram per square meter.

The level of PM10 is higher than the official standard in most of the places of Kathmandu valley.

The Indian capital Delhi and Indonesian capital Jakarta also fall in the list of sensitive cities from the pollution point of view.

The report was prepared based on research at major cities of Asia.

The report studied 22 Asian cities and one of its key findings is that the concentration of the fine particulate matter PM10 is �serious� in Beijing, Dhaka, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Kathmandu, Kolkata, New Delhi, and Shanghai.

“Asia�s growth in population, urbanization, motorization and energy consumption remain key challenges to efforts to counter air pollution,” the report adds.

The Kantipur Daily quoted Suman Sharma of Ministry of Environment as criticizing the report as it failed to mention the official source of information and was prepared without direct involvement of any organization.

However, environmentalist Bhusan Tuladhar said that there is a need of immediately improving the pollution level of Kathmandu

A day after the parliament enacted the new Citizenship Act, its opponents have claimed that the act would turn Nepal into Fiji. “There is a possibility of Nepal turning into Fiji,” said Narayan Man Bijukchhe, president of Nepal Workers and Peasants Party (NWPP) ? a constituent of the ruling Seven Party Alliance who had voted against the citizenship bill at the parliament on Sunday.Bijukchhe, talking to Nepal FM, said that the act was “incomplete” and would only help “to provide Nepali citizenship to agents of foreign multinational companies, thereby turning domestic capitalists into street vendors.”Likewise, lawyer Sadhya Bahadur Bhandari, a member of the Citizenship Abuse Resistance Campaign, has said that making “birth” instead of “descent” as the precondition for providing citizenship in a small country sandwiched between two populous countries could be suicidal.

“There are so many foreign immigrants in our country from refugees from Sri Lanka and Tibet to Iraq, Iran and Myanmar. Besides, there is a huge presence of nationals from our southern neighbor apart from 300,000 Bhutanese refugees. If, indeed, this citizenship act is implemented then our indigenous Terai people will become a minority in short time,” Bhandari.

Bhandari also argued that the new act was not aimed at providing citizenship to genuine indigenous people of Terai. “If it had aimed so, why keep the provision of providing citizenship based on birth. Anyone can be born here,” he said, adding that the political parties should rather have formed all party team and identified genuine Terai people with the help of local elders and then provide citizenship to them.

Bhandari added that Nepal was moving on the path of becoming another Fiji ? where a few years ago the indigenous people were in a minority and a person of Indian origin got elected as president.

On the other hand, Terai-based parties like Nepal Sadbhavana Party (NSP-Anandidevi) have celebrated the new act. Rajendra Mahato, general secretary of the NSP-Anandidevi, said that with the new act four million Nepalis of Terai region would get the citizenship. “The parties had committed to give them their rights of citizenship before the elections to Constituent Assembly,” he said.

Almost all political parties have voted in favor of the new act. The eight parties including the Maoists, on November 8 agreement, had agreed to pass the bill ensuring citizenship rights of Terai people. The agreement had stated, “Considering mid-April 1990 as the base (cut off) year, all Nepalese citizens who were born before that date and have been continuously living in Nepal since then will be provided with citizenship certificate

what is this that any one can get citizenship certificate after producing three nepali citizens who say he/she is nepali citizen…. inviting Biharis in terai….. and Muslims from india???

and this indicates all Bhutanese refugees will get citizenship certificate …. what’s this… we need true patriotic nepalese not biharis muslims and bhutanese..