At least 25 dead and more than 400 injured as storm hits villages in a farming region south of capital Kathmandu.

Rescuers are struggling to reach villages in southern Nepal that were cut off by a rainstorm that has killed 25 people and injured hundreds more.

The storm swept through villages in a farming region of Bara and Parsa districts in southern Nepal, about 120km south of capital Kathmandu, on Sunday night.

Nepal’s Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli said he received a report of 25 people killed and 400 injured.

Police official Sanu Ram Bhattarai said people were crushed by falling walls of their own homes and other debris.

Bhattarai said police officers and soldiers from neighbouring areas reached the districts on Monday and were trying to reach the villages.

Police said cars were flipped by the high winds and passengers were killed in one bus that got blown off the highway. 

“The thunderstorm uprooted trees, electricity poles and telephone poles. Most casualties occurred after people were struck by them,” said Bhattarai.

Thunderstorms normally hit the country in the spring between April and May, but experts say Sunday’s disaster was unusually severe. 

New Delhi, March 30 Nasheman News : An Indian man has been killed and his wife injured after they were stabbed by an immigrant near Munich in Germany, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj tweeted on Saturday.

“Indian couple Prashant and Smita Basarur were stabbed by an immigrant near Munich. Unfortunately, Prashant has expired. Smita is stable. We are facilitating the travel of Prashant’s brother to Germany. My heartfelt condolences to the bereaved family,” Sushma Swaraj wrote on Twitter.

She told the Indian mission in Munich to take care of the couple’s children.

AFPIn Bangladesh,  the death toll from the fire at a high-rise office building in the capital has risen to 25. A massive fire engulfed a 22-story building in Dhaka’s Banani area yesterday. 

Local media reported that  25 deaths have been confirmed and 76 people have been injured. Fire officials said the blaze erupted on the eighth floor of the building and engulfed the ninth, 10th and 11th floors. 

The blaze erupted on the eighth floor of the building and gradually went upward engulfing other floors. It is not clear yet what sparked the fire. 

Meanwhile, an eight-member probe committee has been formed to look into the tragic incident.

Agencies

Kabul, March 26 (Nasheman News) Over 92,600 Afghan refugees have returned from neighbouring countries Pakistan and Iran since January this year, the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported on Tuesday.

“(A total of) 92,698 Afghans returns from Iran and Pakistan since January 1,” said IOM in a statement. 

A total of 88,516 Afghans have reportedly returned to their homeland from Iran as the value of local currency had fallen and job opportunities were low, reports Xinhua news agency.

Another 4,182 Afghans were back from Pakistan during the period.

More than 849,000 Afghan refugees had returned or were deported to Afghanistan in 2018, according to figures from Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriations. 

[Nasheman News] Havana  Britain’s Prince Charles and Duchess of Cornwall Camilla have arrived in Cuba on their first royal visit to the country.

The royal couple arrived on Sunday and was greeted by Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Ana Teresita Gonzalez at the Jose Marti International airport here, Xinhua news agency reported.

They set off for the Revolution Plaza first and attended a wreath-laying ceremony at national hero Jose Marti’s monument.

According to the schedule released by the Cuban Foreign Ministry, the royal couple will tour Havana’s colonial quarter on Monday.

They will be formally welcomed by Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel later when official talks would be held.

On Tuesday, the foundation stone laying ceremony of a solar farm at the Special Development Zone of Mariel is scheduled. Later they will attend a Cultural Gala at the Havana’s Grand Theater “Alicia Alonso”.

On Wednesday afternoon they will depart on a private flight to the Cayman Islands.

This is part of their 12-day Caribbean tour, which has already taken them to Saint Lucia, Barbados, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Grenada.

New Delhi, March 22 (Nasheman News) India will not send any official representative to the Pakistan National Day event at the Pakistan High Commission here on Friday in protest against the invitation extended to Hurriyat leaders from Jammu and Kashmir, informed sources said.

The invitation to the separatists indicated that Pakistan was again meddling in India’s internal affairs and hence the time was not conducive to send an official representative to the event, the sources said.

Diplomatic ties between India and Pakistan have been strained due to heightened tension between the two countries since the February 14 Pulwama suicide bombing for which Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed responsibility. 

Pakistan National Day is observed every year on March 23 though the Pakistan High Commission decided to organise the event this year a day earlier.

In India, we have seen hatred towards Muslims being fuelled and sustained by words and deeds.

Size does not matter. A small country can outshine big ones by moral clarity and strategic vision in the leadership stakes, as New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has shown.

Ms Ardern’s exemplary words and actions after a terrorist shot dead 50 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch unequivocally signals that New Zealand, a country of about five million people, is pluralistic, and that it will ferociously push back against the ideological infrastructure which nourishes majoritarian visions. Ms Ardern could have chosen to express shock, horror and stop at condemning the terror attack. But she went way beyond. Her first response, even before all the details were known, leaped out to millions across the world. She said: “They have chosen to make this their home. They are us.”

By this simple statement, Ms Ardern had bridged the “us and them” divide that stalks natives and those of immigrant stock, and minority populations everywhere. What she said was to affirm a simple but much-needed message — the terrorist who had come from Australia killed Muslims who were not “they” but “us” New Zealanders.

Ms Ardern has been covering her head while meeting families of the victims — a mark of cultural sensitivity. She has also shown her astuteness by declaring that she would never take the name of the terrorist, thereby denying him, and people like him, the notoriety they seek. She asks people to remember the victims by name instead. This is not just symbolism. The conscious de-personalisation of the terrorist shows an astute way to deal with extremism and terrorism. Concretely, Ms Ardern has followed up with plans to overhaul New Zealand’s gun laws.

If Jacinda Ardern’s words and deeds were mealy-mouthed platitudes, they would not have resonated with so many people across the world. They resonate, including with this writer, and many others in India, because they are the powerful signals we are looking for in an increasingly polarised society where the “us and them” divide is leading to rising stigmatisation and violence.

It is as important to neutralise and counter the ideological infrastructure that pushes people to become terrorists as to catch the terrorists and their allies. At a time when anti-minority rhetoric threatens to rip apart social cohesion in democracies across the world, Ms Ardern matters, because she is explicitly telling people who are visibly or culturally different from the “majority” that they are part of the same family, not outsiders. This is intended to make them feel secure when they are at their most fragile. Crucially, Ms Ardern did not resort to what-aboutery in the hour of crisis.

This should make us in India introspect deeply. Our multi-cultural fabric is being ripped apart by an ideology that is gaining traction and that privileges the sentiments of the most bigoted members of the majority community. One of the most worrying trends on the social media, which is playing an increasingly important role in shaping public opinion in this country, is the tendency to conflate two very different things — radical Islamic terrorist groups and ordinary Muslims. It is dangerous what-aboutery to start talking about Islamic terrorist groups each time Muslims are targeted by terrorists simply because they are Muslims, though they have nothing to do with terrorism. The Christchurch attack was an act of terror by a white supremacist who unapologetically hates Muslims and every other minority group.

In India, we have seen hatred towards Muslims being fuelled and sustained by words and deeds. Take the most recent example of the attacks on Kashmiri students and shopkeepers in different parts of the country when an Islamist terrorist linked to Jaish-e-Mohammed attacked a CRPF bus in Pulwama, killing over 40 jawans.

What would have helped is an immediate, unambiguous signal, which went beyond just expressing grief, anguish or condemnation. Like an immediate, unequivocal statement from the Prime Minister that while terrorists and their minders will be dealt with severely, ordinary Kashmiris were “us” and attacks on them of any kind is an attack on us. He needed to make it very clear at once that the ideological infrastructure that equates every Kashmiri and every Muslim with all that is bad will not be tolerated.

These statements were made, but they were weak, and they came late. Nor was this identification with victims of terror demonstrably shown each time an ordinary Muslim was lynched, whether in the name of protecting the cow or anything else. Instead, what we have seen are immediate and provocative statements by other lawmakers. Take just one example: Bharatiya Janata Party MP Vinay Katiyar was quoted in the media as saying, while replying to questions on mob lynching: “When such incidents happen, people from the other community should also think about it. They shouldn’t touch cows when they know Hindus get aggressive over it. They shouldn’t kill cows.” This emboldens extremist peddlers of hate and leads to hate crimes.

Here is some data. “The Observer Research Foundation in March 2018 released a study based on a statistical mapping of hate speech and counter-speech on the social media pages active in India. The study, a first of its kind, revealed that religion and ‘religio-cultural’ practices related to food and dress, were the most explicit basis for hate as expressed in Indian social media: they accounted for a rise from 19 to 30 per cent of the incidents over the one-year timeframe of the study,” points out Maya Mirchandani in a August 2018 paper titled “Digital hatred, real violence: Majoritarian radicalisation and social media in India”. She wrote: “The data was gathered from public pages in two separate month-long time periods spread over 12 months starting from July 2016. Most of the comments incited bodily harm or violence against people belonging to India’s Muslim community who comprise about 180 million of the country’s 1.2-billion-strong population… Subjects that evoked hate speech ranged from opposition to inter-faith marriage between Hindus and Muslims, positions on universal human rights, and the contentious issues of cow protection and beef consumption.”

There is a moral as well as a business case for social cohesion. No country or society can realise its potential if specific groups of people are made to feel they don’t belong and made to cower in fear of physical and psychological attacks. Jacinda Ardern understands this. India’s political leaders, from the top to the bottom, could learn a lot from her.

Agencies

Christchurch, March 18 Nasheman News :A court here on Monday refused to grant bail to an 18-year-old teenager accused of sharing a video of the March 15 Christchurch mosques shootings in which the gunman livestreamed his massacre of 50 people.

The teen faces two charges: one of sharing the video and a second for posting a photograph of one of the mosque’s attacked with the message “target acquired” along with other chat messages “inciting extreme violence”, The New Zealand Herald reported.

The teenager appeared at the Christchurch District Court today and was granted name suppression. However his request for bail was refused by Judge Stephen O’Driscoll.

The police has said that the teen was not involved in the shootings at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Avenue Masjid that also left 40 others injured.

He is due back in court next month.

The teen was initially charged with publishing insulting material with intent to excite hostility or ill will against a group of persons on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origins. 

That charge was withdrawn on Monday and replaced by the two new charges.

The maximum sentence for each of the charges is 14 years in prison.

Wellington, Nasheman News : New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Monday vowed to unveil reforms to the country’s existing gun laws in the wake of the March 15 Christchurch mosques shootings that claimed the lives of 50 people.

At a news conference here, Ardern said her cabinet has agreed “in principle” on proposals to change the country’s gun laws in response to the terror attack, but she stopped short of revealing what those changes might be, CNN reported.

Ardern said more details will be released once her cabinet “has worked through the in-principle decision” taken on Monday.

“As a Cabinet we were absolutely clear, the terror attack on Friday (March 15) was the worst act of terrorism on our shores,” she said.

Echoing the Prime Minister’s remark, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters, who also appeared beside Ardern, said: “This was a cabinet decision… The reality is after March 15, our world changed forever, and so will our laws,” Peters said.

New Zealand First is part of the ruling coalition along with Ardern’s Labour Party. It’s the third-largest political party in the country and leans to the right on many issues, including immigration.

Ardern also confirmed there would be a review of security agencies’ actions following the shootings at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Masjid that also left over 40 others injured, The New Zealand Herald reported.

The review will look at what the agencies knew, or should have known, and whether there were any blocks to information-sharing.

It will also probe accused gunman, the 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant’s travel and use of social media.

Regarding the injured persons, health authorities said on Monday that nine people were still in a critical condition.

David Meates, chief executive of Canterbury District Health Board, said in a statement that two others would be released from hospital on Monday.

“There is still a four-year-old girl in a critical condition in Starship Hospital in Auckland,” Meates said. “Her father has been transferred to Auckland and remains in a serious but stable condition.”

Meanwhile, TradeMe, one of New Zealand’s biggest internet auction websites, said in a statement that it will pull all semi-automatic weapons from its platform, following their use in the attacks.

The site said that it would halt the sale of semi-automatic weapons while it waited “for more clarity from the government”.

Kuala Lumpur, Nasheman News : AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes has deleted his Facebook account over the circulation of a video of the Christchurch mosques carnage that claimed the lives of 50 people, saying the social media giant needed to “clean up and not just think of financials”.

Fernandes, who had 670,000 followers, announced his decision in a series of tweets on Sunday, reports CNN.

“The amount of hate that goes on in social media sometimes outweighs the good,” he said in a tweet. 

“Facebook could have done more to stop some of this.”

For at least 17 minutes on March 15, the suspected gunman livestreamed his massacre at one of the two mosques.

New Zealand police alerted Facebook about the livestream, and Facebook said it quickly removed the shooter’s account and the video. 

But that was not enough for Fernandes. Although the CEO said he was a “social media fan”, the livestream caused him to leave Facebook.

“It is a great platform to communicate,” he tweeted. “Strong engagement and very useful but New Zealand was too much for me to take along with all the other issues.”

On Saturday, Facebook said that it removed 1.5 million videos of the attack.