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1 week ago | 
globalvoices.org | Filip Noubel |Mong Palatino |Sonia Awale |Qian Sun
Chinese president Xi Jinping has declared a monopoly on narratives not only about today's China but also about its ancient and more recent past. In that process, any diverging narrative or piece of historical testimony that could contradict the grand official narrative is erased and censored. Yet, historical memory has managed to survive in Chinese society to this day.
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1 week ago | 
globalvoices.org | Mong Palatino |Kevin Rennie |Sonia Awale |Qian Sun
The prime minister of Vanuatu, Jotham Napat, expressed dismay over an Australian documentary that discussed Chinese-funded buildings which were damaged during the December 2024 earthquake. The prime minister criticized the reporters’ “bias,” but a global media watchdog warned that the leader’s remarks could undermine critical reporting. Vanuatu is a south Pacific island nation with a population of more than 300,000.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
nepalitimes.com | Sonia Awale
The new year 2025 started literally with a bang. The 7.1M jolt in Xigatse on Tuesday swayed buildings in Kathmandu 400km away, and coincided with the approaching 91st anniversary of the 1934 Great Earthquake. The National Earthquake Safety Day on 15 January commemorates the 1934 8.3M disaster that killed 10,000 people in Kathmandu, leaving many collapsed buildings. Thousands of people of Kathmandu took shelter in tents in Tundikhel as aftershocks rattled the country (pictured).
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
nepalitimes.com | Sonia Awale
Just as Nepal was recovering from the Covid pandemic in 2022, the government with GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, inoculated almost 8 million school-children against typhoid. What was even more remarkable was that this vaccine was earlier trialled among 20,000 people in Lalitpur, showing a significant reduction in typhoid incidence with efficacy rate of an impressive 80%, and was the subject of a research paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2019.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
nepalitimes.com | Sonia Awale
Next week from 31 October-4 November is the festival of lights, and that is when domestic demand for electricity will surge as it does this time every year. However, this year the the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) will be hard pressed to ensure adequate supply because of the damage to power plants and transmission lines on 28 September. In a flash, Nepal lost nearly half its electricity generation capacity as a dozen power plants were knocked out.
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Oct 10, 2024 | 
nepalitimes.com | Sonia Awale
Lovers of all things pizza must have tried Kathmandu’s very own Fire and Ice Pizzeria at least once. They will, now that the restaurant was featured recently in The New York Times’ 15 of Our Readers’ Favourite Pizza Places Around the World. It’s their Pepperoni and Mozzarella pizzas that made the cut. A comment in NYT reads: ‘Italian pizza by Italian owner using local ingredients in just about the last place you’d imagine.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
nepalitimes.com | Sonia Awale
This late monsoon storm was not a surprise. Weather forecasts had warned of heavy precipitation a week before, the Met Office predicted heavy rain on 27-28 September, SMS warned people to take precaution, radio stations issued bulletins, and night buses were banned in 56 districts. The tragedy was compounded because we knew what was coming, and did not do enough to prepare. The accurate weather forecast made no real difference on the ground.
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Sep 13, 2024 | 
nepalitimes.com | Sonia Awale
Halucha is a carpenter living a happy life with his big family in Kathmandu’s Maru Hiti in the 1960s handcrafting chairs, tables and temple woodwork. He observes festivals of his Newa community including Yenya, Indra Jatra, enjoys his favourite choila baji and with friends, and occasionally momocha. Read also: Wine and women during Yenya, Pratibha Tuladhar But then a big new furniture factory is set up nearby, which takes away the jobs of those with the ancestral occupation of carpentry.
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Aug 30, 2024 | 
nepalitimes.com | Sonia Awale
Political resolve to improve air quality will add 3-5 years to the lives of Nepalis30 August 2024Parliamentary proceedings were brought to a halt on Wednesday in Kathmandu after a heated exchange between the UML and opposition MPs over the use of the word ‘violence’ to describe the Maoist conflict. The real peacetime violence being perpetrated on Nepalis is actually political failure to control lethal air pollution.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
nepalitimes.com | Sonia Awale
The Thame flood showed climate risk is a given, and Nepal has no choice but to be prepared21 August 2024At exactly 9AM on 16 August, a 4.5M earthquake hit Xizang on the Tibetan Plateau. Four hours later, 65km away in Nepal, a glacial lake burst unleashing a cascade of destruction downstream. It is not certain if that tremor so nearby caused the lake to burst — either because an avalanche on the south ridge of Mt Tengi Ragi Tau fell into it, or heavy monsoon rain led to the collapse of a moraine.
