ICYMI: Here are our top stories from Thursday, January 30
These are some of the stories from The Kathmandu Post (January 30, 2020). Passengers arrive at Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu. Kiran Panday/TKP
Thes are some of the stories from The Kathmandu Post (January 30, 2020).
Distressed and panicked, Nepalis in Hubei say they want to come home
Panic has set in among Nepali students and workers in the Chinese city of Wuhan and the greater Hubei province with the death toll from the coronavirus outbreak rising to 132.
At least 177 Nepali students and workers living in Hubei Province, including Wuhan, have asked the Nepali Embassy in Beijing to evacuate them, officials at the embassy told the Post.
Terror suspects arrested in India say they were using Nepal as a base but security agencies are clueless
On January 9, the special cell of the Delhi Police arrested three alleged Islamic State operatives from a north Delhi locale. Although Khaja Moideen, Abdul Samad and Syed Ali Nawaz, all residents of Tamil Nadu, were arrested from Delhi, they had travelled to India from Nepal, where they had set up a base and met their “foreign handler”, according to the Times of India.
“Moideen, along with Syed Ali Nawaz and Abdul Samad, went to Kathmandu, Nepal after illegally crossing the border with fake documents. After setting up a base in Nepal to be used as a hideout, they had come to Delhi,” read the Times of India report.
Bookstores' decision to halt imports places attention once again on taxes on books
On Tuesday, Nepal Mandala Book Shop, a book shop based in Pokhara, announced that it would no longer be bringing in any new books. Announcing their decision on Instagram, the book store said that its decision was prompted by an inability to pay 10 percent customs duty on all books imported from India.
“There are a lot of books that are still at the customs department at various border points,” Pratima Sharma, one of the owners of the book shop, told the Post. “We buy books from India, but the government wants us to pay tax based on the dollar or pound price that is printed on the book. This is just not sustainable for us. It hurts us to say this but we won’t be able to import new books for our readers anymore.”
Nepali authorities being too slow to recognise disease outbreak threats is not new, experts say
Samit Thapa, a Nepali doing a PhD in civil engineering at the Harbin Institute of Technology in Heilongjiang, China, returned to Kathmandu on January 24 when the coronavirus outbreak had already become a global concern. The death toll and the number of new cases were rising. Nepal too had already reported a confirmed case in a Nepali student who had returned from Wuhan, where the virus originated.
Thapa said he was screened three times at the Beijing airport before boarding the plane.
International experts and animal welfare campaigners urge Nepal to end elephant abuse
As many as 50 international elephant experts and animal welfare campaigners have urged the Nepal government to stop the possible elephant abuse during Visit Nepal 2020, a campaign Nepal has launched with an aim to attract two million tourists over the year.
The group of experts and campaigners, in a joint letter to Forest and Environment Minister Shakti Bahadur Basnet, has said they are alarmed by the promotional activities involving animal abuse as part of the tourism campaign.
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