- Friday, 30 January 2026
TRN Online
Karma becomes investigative journalist in Shatkon
By A Staff ReporterKathmandu, Apr. 23: Actor Karma said that he did not come to become a star in Nepali cinema, therefore, he has more choices, he said. Speaking at a press meet organised in the capital on Thursday to promote Shatkon, his film, he said, “I did not come to the cinema to become a star. I don’t even want to be a star. The star is to shine. It’s a different matter. For me, movie is an art and I am more concerned to present my art skills through movie rather than trying to be a star of Nepali cinema industry.” The lead actor Karma is playing the role of an investigative journalist in the film. Directed by Milan De Kapri, the film is produced by Biraj Kadariya. Speaking at the press meet, director Kapri said that it was a psychological thriller movie made by a team of youth. “We have tried to make it different from other movies produced in Nepal. My movies do not have the same actors fighting a while ago and singing and dancing after a while. It has only the songs that fit the story. Therefore, we have tried to make it a different movie,” said director Kapri.The movie, produced under the banner of Clementine Production and Travelers Crew Films, will be released in cinemas across Nepal from May 6. The production team said that they are ready to release the film as they are waiting for its release before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Nepal. Apart from Karma, actors including Bholaraj Sapkota, Lokendra Lekhak, Suyasha Adhikari, Biraj Kadariya, Shishir Limbu Wanem and child actor Asim Lama have done the film. Mahesh Dawadi has written the dialogue of the movie which has the story and script of Shishir Limbu Wanem. The cinematography of the film is directed by Angchen Lama while Sagar Khanal has edited the film.
CDS provides wheelchairs to children
By A Staff ReporterKathmandu, Apr. 23: Child Development Society (CDS) organised wheel chair presentation ceremony in the presence of Agni Prasad Sapkota, Speaker of House of Representatives, in Kathmandu, recently. Speaking on the occasion, Speaker Sapkota lauded the role played by the CDS for the continuous service towards children and their rights. Sapkota also committed for necessary assistance in the days to come for the welfare of children. On the occasion, in assistance of ‘Wheelchairs for Kids-Australia’, 150 sets of wheelchairs were handed over to CDS to be provided to differently abled children. Consulate General of Nepal in NSW, Australia, Dipak Khadka, Member of Legislative Council (MLC) Australia and chairman of ‘Wheelchairs for Kids’ Shaoquett Moselmane were present on the occasion. On the occasion, Moselmane said that the wheelchairs were provided for those children who need support to walk. Uddhab Kharel, mayor of Budhanilkantha Municipality, thanked CDS for providing such assistance to differently abled children.
SEE held on first day peacefully
BY A STAFF REPORTERKathmandu, Apr. 23: The Secondary Education Examination (SEE) of compulsory English concluded peacefully across the country on Friday, the National Examination Board (NEB) informed.The SEE of the academic session 2078 has kicked off from Friday.Arjun Rayamajhi, Controller of the SEE, informed that the examination of compulsory English was held in a peaceful manner on the first day today.The NEB stated that a total of 514,967 examinees are appearing in the examinations this time.The answer sheets will be collected at the Education Development and Coordination Unit (EDCU) of the concerned district and will be sent to answer sheet checking centres at different places, Rayamajhi saidMeanwhile, according to our Bajura correspondent, a total of 3,188 examinees, including 1,633 boy and 1,555 girl students of 61 community and four private schools appeared in the examination in the district. Of them, 78 students, 31 boys and 47 girls, appeared in the grade upgrading examination.According to the Education Development and Coordination Unit, Bajura, 3,188 students appeared in the SEE from 15 examination centres of the district.Harka Bahadur Singh, chief of the Education Development and Coordination Unit, Bajura, said that three to five security personnel have been deployed in each examination centre. Similarly, according to our Humla correspondent, four candidates with disabilities have participated in the SEE in the district. Three of them are boys. Superintendent of Mansarovar Secondary School Amar Bahadur Shahi said that three candidates with sight impair participated in the examination. Those students were studying in Balmandir Secondary School. Meanwhile, one student with poor eye sight took the examination from Balmandir Secondary School.According to Tilak Bhattarai, head of the Education Development and Coordination Unit of the district, more than 94.50 per cent candidates are participating in the examination from all the six examination centers of the district. A total of 1,146 candidates have applied for the SEE examination while only 1,083 candidates have appeared in the examination of the first day. The number of girl students participating in the examination is 521 and the number of boys is 562. The SEE will conclude on May 3.Meanwhile, the NEB has also published the examination routine of grade 11 which will begin from June 12.
Warmer Summers Threaten Antarctica’s Ice Shelves
Jennifer ArthurDuring the Antarctic summer, air temperatures get warm enough to melt snow and ice on the surface of the great ice sheets that make up around 99 per cent of Antarctica. This melted water collects to form thousands of lakes around the edges of this vast continent. Most of these lakes form on gigantic platforms of floating ice called ice shelves, which extend out from the continent into the sea.Lakes forming on the surface of these ice shelves can sometimes cause them to break up. The most famous example is the collapse of Larsen B ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, which shattered entirely over a matter of weeks in 2002.HydrofracturingSatellites recorded the appearance and drainage of thousands of lakes on Larsen B’s surface before it broke up. Scientists believe meltwater from these lakes widened and deepened cracks and crevasses within the shelf in a process called hydrofracturing.Ice shelves act as doorstops, supporting vast masses of ice known as glaciers that lie further inland. But if hydrofracturing forces them to break up, these rivers of ice that feed into the ice shelf flow faster into the ocean, contributing to rising sea levels.Scientists have recently found that lakes are more extensive around the Antarctic ice sheet than previously thought. Endurance swimmer Lewis Pugh even swam one kilometre through one of these lakes in 2020 to raise awareness of climate change. But how much does the meltwater stored in these lakes vary between years, and how is this linked to climate conditions? This is something my colleagues and I have explored in a new study, published in Nature Communications.Our research uncovers for the first time how meltwater lake coverage and volumes vary between years around the whole Antarctic ice sheet. We analysed over 2,000 satellite images of the East Antarctic sheet – the world’s largest – to record the changing size and volume of these lakes over the past seven years.Until now, observations of surface meltwater lakes on the East Antarctic ice sheet were relatively scarce and their year-to-year changes were largely unknown, making it difficult to assess whether some ice shelves were close to breaking up under the effects of climate change.We found that total lake volume varies between years by as much as 200 per cent on some ice shelves and by up to 72 per cent across the entire ice sheet, with large differences between ice shelves. Across the whole ice sheet, total meltwater stored in lakes peaked in 2017. That water could have filled about 930,000 Olympic swimming pools. Melting at the surface of the sheet doesn’t just form lakes: the water also seeps into air spaces in the layers beneath the surface, where it freezes as temperatures get colder. These layers, called firn, are made up of old snow that has not yet been compressed into ice.If more melting occurs than snowfall each year, air in the firn becomes replaced with refrozen meltwater. When that happens, meltwater forming the next summer is forced to collect on the surface as lakes. The more surface melting there is, the more the firn gets saturated like a sponge and so the more lakes form on the surface, increasing the risk of fracturing.To investigate lake variability between years, we ran model simulations of firn air content, surface melt and runoff on Antarctic ice shelves where lakes form. We found that across the whole ice sheet, summer air temperatures and the amount of air in the firn are important factors affecting the total area and volume of meltwater lakes. We’ve noticed on satellite images that on some ice shelves lake coverage is already expanding into regions vulnerable to fracturing.Lake formationInterestingly, we found large differences between where we’ve observed lakes in satellite images and the amount of meltwater that can form lakes predicted by our models. This means local climate conditions are more important than we thought in predicting surface melting and therefore lake formation. Our climate models still need refining to allow these processes to be fully captured to better predict future surface meltwater around Antarctica.In a warming world, these lakes are likely to continue to spread onto ice shelves that are vulnerable to breaking up. Our work is a step forward in understanding not just where lakes are forming now across the whole ice sheet, but what controls the way they change every year. This is key to predicting which ice shelves are most at risk of collapse, as well as for improving model projections of Antarctica’s contribution to sea-level rise.(Jennifer is a PhD student in Cryospheric Remote Sensing, Durham University, UK.)-- theconversation.com
Relevance Of Earth Day
Aashish MishraFriday, April 22, was Earth Day – the 52nd Earth Day to be exact; the 52nd year global leaders came together to pay lip service to the cause of environmental conservation, pollution reduction et cetera and et cetera then promptly went about forgetting it and focusing on the “more pressing issues” at hand.It has been like this from the start. There has always been something more pressing and more urgent than our planet that required our attention. Even in 1970, on the day of the very first Earth Day, American investigative journalist Isidor Feinstein Stone criticised Senator Gaylord Nelson, the person who launched Earth Day, as a man propagating a con. “This is a beautiful snow job,” he said, “Designed to distract attention from government military and spending policies.”“The country is slipping into a wider war in Southeast Asia and we’re sitting here talking about litterbugs.”But Nelson was not just talking about litterbugs. He was talking about the planet we all live in, the planet that is the only feasibly inhabitable world we have to date and a planet that is fast swerving toward the edge of the precipice.Policymakers at the time and now claim to stand with Senator Nelson’s view but have unfortunately seemed to internalise Journalist Stone’s opinions because, as mentioned above, they always have their hands full with something other than the foundation for the survival of our species.After the war in Vietnam, that Stone was referring to, ended, the focus shifted to the increasingly intensifying Cold War, then to the Afghanistan War, then the collapse of the Soviet Union and the integration of the post-Soviet states into the mainstream world order, then global terrorism, then the COVID-19 pandemic and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, the climate crisis rages on. The air we breathe grows more toxic by the day, the water we drink seems to have more chemicals in it than actual water molecules and the less said about the food we eat the better. Our planet is dying and it is killing us with it and yet, it is still not a sufficiently important enough issue to be prioritised by our governments and our societies.To borrow Stone’s phrase, “Our home is on fire and we’re sitting here talking about the bedbugs we think have infested our mattress.”This is a clichéd phrase but one that warrants repetition. Without Earth, there is nothing.Everything we have ever done and will ever do and everyone we have ever known and will ever know is this third rock from the sun. Without Earth, there is no us. Our planet concerns all of us and thus, all of us should work together to protect it. We are all residents of a common home that we ourselves seem hell-bent on dismantling. We must change our collective habits, if not to reverse the damage already done then to at least prevent further destruction. Bodies like the United Nations must lead international efforts and make nations do their part whether by incentives or by pressure. There is absolutely no time to lose because every second we delay is a second closer to the apocalypse.The word ‘apocalypse’ may seem like an exaggeration. Some may even call it fear mongering. But it is not untrue. We are getting a glimpse of the future that awaits us. Rains these days are either droughts or floods, hurricanes are getting stronger than ever, tornadoes are touching down in places that had never even conceived of such a weather phenomenon, let alone seen it (remember the storm that swept across Bara and Parsa on March 31, 2019?). Things are going to get worse if we do not take the right action now.
Online game leads to rape of underage girls
By Purushottam P. KhatriKathmandu, Apr. 23: Can you imagine a 13-year-old girl has been raped after getting addicted to an online ‘Free Fire game’? But this has happened in Kathmandu recently. Kathmandu District Police Office has arrested Mahesh Udas, 27, of Palpa on the basis of the victim’s complaint. According to Superintendent of Police (SP) Dinesh Raj Mainali of the Police Office, Mahesh invited the girl to come to Kathmandu from Palpa after they became friend through the game ‘Free Fire.’ A preliminary police investigation has shown that Mahesh enticed the girl with the promise of marrying her. But, instead of getting married, the girl was raped by her online gaming friend. The man was undergoing further investigation after a 10-day remand order from the Kathmandu District Court on Wednesday. SP Mainali said that the police will file a rape charge sheet against him under Section 219 of the Chapter 18 of the National Criminal Procedure Act 2017. How it happened A preliminary investigation of the police has revealed that a 13-year-old girl was raped by a young man at Basundhara in Tokha Municipality-6, Kathmandu, on April 13. According to the Criminal Code Act, adolescents under the age of 18 are not allowed to have sexual relationship even with consent. Now, actor Pal Shah is doing his time in a jail on the order of the district court for having sex with a minor girl. According to SP Mainali, Mahesh had committed the crime by pledging to marry the girl. Some time ago, the girl’s family had lodged a complaint with the police alleging that she had gone missing. After that, the Kathmandu Metropolitan Police and its subordinate police offices started searching for the girl. During the search, the girl was found at Matatirtha in Chandragiri Municipality-8, Kathmandu, on Monday this week. After finding the girl, Mahesh’s deeds were exposed during interrogation. It has been revealed that Mahesh and the girl got acquainted a year ago. The medium of their acquaintance was the ‘Free Fire’ game. While playing the game, they started talking through messenger. Not only that, their chats on mobile phones had increased, said the police. It has been revealed that Mahesh brought the girl from Palpa to Kathmandu on a motorcycle saying that they would get married on April 12. It is mentioned in the complaint filed by the victim that she was raped by him. Additional caseThis year in January, a fake Facebook account named Sangam Maharjan was used to rape a girl by establishing friendship with her. Police had arrested Sujan Shrestha, a resident of Panauti Municipality-1, in Kavrepalanchok on charge of being involved in the incident.According to the police, Sujan had initially made video calls to the girl persuading her to show her private parts and recorded the video call. He then started threatening to show the video to her friends at school and family and make it viral on social media.It has been revealed through the police investigation that she was called to meet him in an under construction house near Budhanilkantha in Kathmandu on January 11. SP Mainali said that with the increase in the use of technology and online gaming, different forms of criminal incidents are taking place in society. Lately, criminal activities resulting from online streaming game platforms, including Free Fire, has been on the rise. As a result, such apps have been banned in many countries, said SP Mainali.
Nine new cases, 25 recoveries in 24 hours
In 2,133 Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests done in the past 24 hours, a total of nine people were found infected with SARS-CoV-2, informed the Ministry of Health and Population (MoHP) in its regular update.
WHO Director General Dr Tedros calls on President Bhandari
Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus paid a courtesy call on President Bidya Devi Bhandari today morning.
Renu Dahal resigns as mayor of Bharatpur
Mayor of Bharatpur Municipal Corporation of Chitwan Renu Dahal has resigned from the post.
WHO Director General Tetros appreciates Nepal govt campaign against COVID-19
Visiting Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has appreciated the Nepal government's national campaign against COVID-19, saying that it was effective management.
New species of wild carnivores recorded in Humla
By A Staff Reporter, Kathmandu, Apr. 22: Three new species of wild carnivores have been recorded from Humla district, north-western Nepal. The Steppe polecat, scientifically called Mustela eversmanii, Pallas’s cat, scientifically called Otocolobus manul (Palas biralo) and Eurasian lynx, scientifically called Lynx lynx (Pahan biralo), were documented from the Limi Valley in Upper Humla during July-September 2021, representing the first records of these species outside the protected areas network in Nepal. Steppe polecat has no Nepali name. The Steppe polecat record was obtained through a live observation while the records of Pallas’s cat and Eurasian lynx were from camera trapping surveys, said a press statement issued by the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation (DNPWC).These findings were made during the fieldwork of the research titled ‘Sustainable ecosystem protection: Conservation of the wildlife communities of Upper Humla through an understanding of wolf behaviour and local communities’ by Himalayan Wolves Project/Resources Himalaya Foundation in collaboration with the Department of Forests and Soil Conservation, DNPWC, Division Forest Office, Humla, Namkha Rural Municipality, Humla and Green Governance Nepal.The Steppe Polecat was recorded as a new species in Nepal from Annapurna Conservation Area (Upper Mustang) in 2014 and there has been no record of the species thereafter. This current record is the second record of the species for Nepal seven years later. Since the earlier records were night-time camera trap images, the current record represents the first live observation of the species in Nepal. “More importantly it enriches the southernmost records of the species in Asia. Interestingly, the IUCN range map of the species does not include Nepal although it mentions Nepal as a country where the species is native,” the statement reads. The Steppe polecat is assessed as Data Deficient in Nepal.The Pallas’s cat was also recorded as a new species for Nepal from Annapurna Conservation Area (Upper Manang) in 2012. It has also been recorded from Shey-Phoksundo National Park. Interestingly, the current record represents the first family photo of the species in Nepal showing two adults with a cub. All previous records are of single individuals. The Pallas’s cat is also assessed as Data Deficient in Nepal, according to the statement.The Eurasian lynx is a protected priority species of Nepal according to the National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act 1973. Confirmed records of the species in Nepal are available from Annapurna Conservation Area (Mustang), Dhorpatan Hunting Reserve and Shey-Phoksundo National Park (Dolpa). The current record provides the first conclusive evidence for Eurasian lynx in Upper Humla. The Eurasian lynx is assessed as vulnerable in Nepal.Records of Steppe polecat, Pallas’s cat and Eurasian lynx from Upper Humla add to the fascinating diversity of wild mammals in the area. The Trans-Himalayan habitats in Upper Humla are home to the last remaining wild yaks of Nepal and are a stronghold of Tibetan wild ass/Kiang as the area supports the largest population of the species in the country. Other important wild mammals found in Upper Humla include Tibetan argali, Tibetan gazelle, Tibetan fox, Himalayan wolf, musk deer, and snow leopard. The present findings call for more dedicated conservation actions to protect the unique biodiversity of Upper Humla. With the current records, Upper Humla represents the westernmost distribution range of the three species in Nepal. All of these findings are being written up as formal scientific articles that shall be available soon.
Humla Cooperative members start Collective Vegetable Farming
Cooperative members of Humla have started collective vegetable farming. The motive of this farming was to generate a source of income and employment opportunities.
U.S. Congressional Delegation Arriving Nepal today
A United States high-ranking Congressional delegation team will arrive in Kathmandu today for an official visit as a part of the ongoing bilateral partnership between Nepal and the United States of America.
National team announced to play ODIs and T20 cricket series against Zimbabwe
Cricket Association of Nepal (CAN) today announced the national cricket team for three ODIs and three T20 cricket series against Zimbabwe.
Export increases 69.44 per cent in nine months
Country has witnessed an increase in export by 69.44 per cent in the last nine months of the current fiscal year 2021/22 as compared to the corresponding period in the last year 2020/21.
