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The Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) has decided to administer second dose of Pfizer vaccine from February 6-17.

A meeting of the District Coordination Committee, Kathmandu held on February 3 made the decision to this effect.

According to a notice issued by Balaram Tripathi, Chief of Health Department in KMC, the vaccination programme will be conducted all the days except Saturday from 10 am to 4 pm.

Children between 12 and 17 years of age who are eligible for the second dose will have to bring their vaccination card handed to them during the first dose, when they visit the vaccination booths.

The KMC has urged the concerned authority to follow health safety protocols while conducting the vaccination programme.

Shree Panchami also known as Basanta Panchami  is being celebrated today across the country by worshipping Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, wisdom, learning, art, music and culture.

The day is very special for students and new learners. Students take early bath, observe the mass Saraswati Puja in schools, visit temples and listen to Basanta Shrawan.

Many educational institutions arrange special prayers or pujas in the morning to seek blessing of the goddess. Poetic and musical gatherings are held in some communities in reverence of Saraswati.

Many families mark this day by sitting with young children, encouraging them to write their first words with their fingers, while some just study or create music together.

Goddess Saraswati is worshiped with various names such as Bharati, Sharada, Jagatmata, Bageshwari, Kaumari, Baradayani and Kamdhenu.

People from Hindu and Sikh communities, mainly in Nepal and eastern India, observe this festival.

It is believed that the festival marks the beginning of the spring season. RSS

His collar turned up against the cold, the head of the International Olympic Committee looked out over the stadium and spoke of the ideals that had brought together athletes from all over the world.

"In our fragile world, where division, conflict and mistrust are on the rise, we show the world that it is possible to be fierce rivals while at the same time living peacefully and respectfully together," Thomas Bach, a gold-medalist fencer nearly 40 years ago, said Friday at the Winter Games' opening ceremony.

The Olympic mission is clear, he said: "Always building bridges, never erecting walls."

Critics of Bach and the IOC say those ideals are nonsense, and talk of respect and bridge-building is overshadowed by Olympic officials cozying up to some of the world's most powerful authoritarian rulers. Starting with holding this year's Games in a country accused of widespread human rights violations.

The IOC knows that Beijing has locked up hundreds of thousands of minority Uyghur Muslims, those critics say, and arrested countless people who dared voice criticism of the government.

The IOC's "failure to publicly confront Beijing's serious human rights violations makes a mockery of its own commitments and claims that the Olympics are a 'force for good,'" Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said shortly before the Games opened.

Some rights activists are calling these Olympics the "Genocide Games," and leaders of a string of democratic nations, including the U.S., Great Britain, Australia and Canada, are avoiding the Games, citing either Beijing's human rights violations or its sweeping coronavirus restrictions.

Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping is hosting a parade of fellow strongman leaders, including Russia's Vladimir Putin, who met Friday with Xi before attending the opening ceremony, as well as the leaders of Egypt and Serbia, who were meeting with China's leader on Saturday.

The Games come at a time when democracy can look like it's in retreat.

Over the past year there was a military takeover in Myanmar, Beijing's tightening grip over Hong Kong and a brutal political crackdown in Nicaragua. There are authoritarian rulers from Turkey to the Philippines.

The IOC rarely mentions any of this.

Bach, for his part, has studiously steered around talk of human rights in China. He did say he would meet Peng Shuai, the Chinese tennis star who largely dropped from sight after accusing a former top Communist Party official of sexual assault, then later insisted she'd been misunderstood. Bach said she'd told IOC officials that she "that she can move freely, that she's spending time with her family and friends."

He said he'd support Peng if she wants an investigation. "But it's her life, it's her allegations," he added.

Avoiding controversy has long been Bach's rule.

"Sport must be politically neutral, but sport cannot be apolitical," he once wrote, threading the phrasing needle so carefully his actual meaning is unclear.

But he knows it's a gamble to make a stand on issues like human rights.

"If we are getting in the middle of tensions, disputes and confrontations of the political powers then we are putting the Games at risk," he told reporters at a Beijing press conference.

Olympic organizers have a long history with authoritarian rulers, from Adolf Hitler in the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin to Vladimir Putin and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

"There's not a glorious history to look back on," said Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College who has extensively studied the Olympics.

Take those Berlin Games. By 1936, Nazi antisemitism was blatantly clear, with laws that excluded German Jews from citizenship and banned marriage or sex between Jews and "citizens of German or kindred blood."

Yet the Games went ahead. And two Jewish runners on the US team, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, were pulled from the 4-X-100 meter relay squad one day before the race. US officials insisted it had been done to bring in faster runners, but Glickman saw it differently.

"Here were two rather obscure Jewish athletes who could be kept off the podium so to not embarrass Adolf Hitler," he said years later in an interview.

Zimbalist says the Olympic Committee is so risk-averse that it's tarnishing its reputation.

"They pretend that they're apolitical even though they make choices that are inherently political," he said in an interview. They are "giving a level of approval to the Chinese by hosting the Games there. That's a statement."

He said the IOC can look for ways to speak out on issues like human rights while being careful not to spark a political firestorm.

"They've been working with the Chinese Olympic Committee. They know the limits (of speaking out) better than you or I," he said. "I'd like to see the IOC testing some of those limits."

Instead, the committee remains silent, and not just about China.

Putin, for instance, attended the Games' opening even though sports sanctions mean the country's team must play as the "Russian Olympic Committee" because of a sophisticated doping scheme.

Putin and Xi used their meeting to project themselves as a counterweight to the United States and its allies. China has also been showing growing support for Moscow in its dispute with Ukraine, which has an estimated 100,000 Russian troops massed along its border, a predicament Washington fears could lead to all-out war.

With billions of dollars at stake for the host country, not to mention TV rights and sponsorships, the Olympics can seem as much about money as sports. The IOC is desperate for the Games to remain "brand safe," so that sponsors, some of whom have reportedly paid hundreds of millions of dollars, don't see those investments backfire. These include some of the world's best-known brands, from Coca-Cola to Visa to Toyota. The last thing they want is for their products to be associated with Chinese human rights abuses.

But Christopher Magee, a professor at Bucknell University, noted that the IOC is just one of many players in China's immense economy.

"It's fair to criticize them for prioritizing money over humanitarian concerns," he said. "But a lot of firms and countries do that. It's hard not to."

The economies of nearly every nation in the world - including those whose leaders are boycotting these Games - are deeply intertwined with Beijing's.

And every once in awhile, the IOC does speak up.

Maybe.

Some observers say Bach appeared to make an oblique reference to Ukraine in his opening speech, urging political leaders to "observe your commitment to this Olympic truth: Give peace a chance."

But if it was a Ukraine reference, it was so oblique that many political and Olympic analysts didn't even notice.

Propelled in part by the wildly contagious omicron variant, the US death toll from COVID-19 hit 900,000 on Friday, less than two months after eclipsing 800,000.

The two-year total, as compiled by Johns Hopkins University, is greater than the population of Indianapolis, San Francisco, or Charlotte, North Carolina.

The milestone comes more than 13 months into a vaccination drive that has been beset by misinformation and political and legal strife, though the shots have proved safe and highly effective at preventing serious illness and death.

"It is an astronomically high number. If you had told most Americans two years ago as this pandemic was getting going that 900,000 Americans would die over the next few years, I think most people would not have believed it," said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.

He lamented that most of the deaths happened after the vaccine gained authorization.

"We got the medical science right. We failed on the social science. We failed on how to help people get vaccinated, to combat disinformation, to not politicize this," Jha said. "Those are the places where we have failed as America."

President Joe Biden lamented the milestone in a statement Friday night, saying, "After nearly two years, I know that the emotional, physical, and psychological weight of this pandemic has been incredibly difficult to bear."

He again urged Americans to get vaccinations and booster shots. "Two hundred and fifty million Americans have stepped up to protect themselves, their families, and their communities by getting at least one shot - and we have saved more than one million American lives as a result," Biden said.

Just 64% of the population is fully vaccinated, or about 212 million Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nor is COVID-19 finished with the United States: Jha said the US could reach 1 million deaths by April.

Among the dead is Susan Glister-Berg, 53, of Sterling Heights, Michigan, whose children had to take her off a ventilator just before Thanksgiving after COVID-19 ravaged her lungs and kidneys.

"She's always cared more about people than she did herself. She always took care of everyone," said a daughter, Hali Fortuna. "That's how we all describe her: She cared for everyone. Very selfless."

Glister-Berg, a smoker, was in poor health, and was apparently unvaccinated, according to her daughter. Fortuna just got the booster herself.

"We all want it to go away. I personally don't see it going away anytime soon," she said. "I guess it's about learning to live with it and hoping we all learn to take care of each other better."

The latest bleak milestone came as omicron is loosening its grip on the country.

New cases per day have plunged by almost a half-million since mid-January, when they hit a record-shattering peak of more than 800,000. Cases have been declining in 49 states in the last two weeks, by Johns Hopkins' count, and the 50th, Maine, reported that confirmed infections are falling there, too, dropping sharply over the past week.

Also, the number of Americans in the hospital with COVID-19 has declined 15% since mid-January to about 124,000.

Deaths are still running high at more than 2,400 per day on average, the most since last winter. And they are on the rise in at least 35 states, reflecting the lag between when victims become infected and when they succumb.

Still, public health officials have expressed hope that the worst of omicron is coming to an end. While they caution that things could still go bad again and dangerous new variants could emerge, some places are already talking about easing precautions.

Los Angeles County may end outdoor mask requirements in a few weeks, Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer said Thursday.

"Post-surge does not imply that the pandemic is over or that transmission is low, or that there will not be unpredictable waves of surges in the future," she warned.

Despite its wealth and its world-class medical institutions, the U.S. has the highest reported toll of any country, and even then, the real number of lives lost directly or indirectly to the coronavirus is thought to be significantly higher.

Experts believe some COVID-19 deaths have been misattributed to other conditions. And some Americans are thought to have died of chronic illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes because they were unable or unwilling to obtain treatment during the crisis.

The Rev. Gina Anderson-Cloud, senior pastor of Fredericksburg United Methodist Church in Virginia, lost her dementia-stricken father after he was hospitalized for cancer surgery and then isolated in a COVID-19 ward. He went into cardiac arrest, was revived, but died about a week later.

She had planned to be by his bedside, but the rules barred her from going to the hospital.

"I think it's important for us not to be numbed. Each one of those numbers is someone," she said of the death toll. "Those are mothers, fathers, children, our elders."

When the vaccine was rolled out in mid-December 2020, the death toll stood at about 300,000. It hit 600,000 in mid-June 2021 and 700,000 on Oct. 1. On Dec. 14, it reached 800,000.

It took just 51 more days to get to 900,000, the fastest 100,000 jump since last winter.

"We have underestimated our enemy here, and we have under-prepared to protect ourselves," said Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "We've learned a tremendous amount of humility in the face of a lethal and contagious respiratory virus."

The latest 100,000 deaths encompass those caused by both the delta variant and omicron, which began spreading rapidly in December and became the predominant version in the US before the month was out.

While omicron has proved less likely to cause severe illness than delta, the sheer number of people who became infected with it contributed to the high number of deaths.

Ja said he and other medical professionals are frustrated that policymakers are seemingly running out of ideas for getting people to roll up their sleeves.

"There aren't a whole lot of tools left. We need to double down and come up with new ones," he said.

COVID-19 has become one of the top three causes of death in America, behind the big two - heart disease and cancer.

"We have been fighting among ourselves about tools that actually do save lives. Just the sheer amount of politics and misinformation around vaccines, which are remarkably effective and safe, is staggering," Sharfstein said.

He added: "This is the consequence."

Nepal recorded 1, 714 new Covid-19 cases and nine deaths on Saturday. 

With this, the country's active caseload mounted to 1,099,303. Similarly, the death toll has climbed to 11,803. 

According to the Ministry of Health and Population, 5,225 swab samples were tested in the RT-PCR method, of which 1,103 returned positive. Likewise, 3,288 people underwent antigen tests, of which 611 tested positive.

The Ministry said that 4,771 infected people recovered from the disease in the last 24 hours.

As of today, there are 52,780 active cases in the country. 

The Ministry said that 51,434 people are staying in home isolation while 1, 346 are in institutionalized isolation.

Of them, 251 are in Intensive Care Unit and 41 are on ventilators.

Meanwhile, the Kathmandu Valley reported 463 new cases today.

According to the Ministry, 316 cases are reported in Kathmandu, 104 in Lalitpur and 43 in Bhaktapur.

Two persons died when a jeep they were travelling in met with an accident at Dhobadi in Biruwa Rural Municipality-3 in Syangja.

The deceased have been identified as jeep driver Bal Bahadur Thapa (26) and Bhesh Bahadur Thapa (32) of Biruwa Rural Municipality, DSP Rajendra Prasad Adhikari said.

The incident occurred when the jeep (Ga 1 Ja 5939) heading towards Khali from Biruwa fell some 500 metres down the road, he said.

The bodies have been sent to the District Hospital Syangja for postmortem, police said.

The number of people found frozen to death in a small Turkish town near the border with Greece has risen to 19, officials said Thursday, a week after a rare winter storm blanketed both countries in snow, CNN reported.

A statement from the governor's office in the Turkish city of Edirne said search and rescue activities were continuing in the region where the bodies were found.

Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu on Wednesday said those who died were part of a group of 22 migrants.

Soylu said the 19 people froze to death in Ipsala, a border town often used by those seeking to enter the European Union.

Where the migrants came from and why they were stranded in frigid conditions remains unclear, but Greece and Turkey have blamed each other for the tragedy.

Soylu alleged on Twitter that the group was turned away by Greek border officials and stripped of their shoes and clothing. He tweeted blurred images that appeared to show the dead bodies of at least eight individuals, partially clothed and lying in the mud. 

Soylu called the Greek border patrol units thugs, and said the European Union was "remediless, weak and void of humane feelings."

Greek Immigration Minister Notis Mitarachi, however, denied Soylu's allegations of wrongdoing. The deaths on the Turkish border were a tragedy, he said in a statement, but added, "the truth behind this incident bears no resemblance to the false propaganda pushed out by my counterpart."

Mitarachi said that those who died "never made it to the border."

"Any suggestion they did, or indeed were pushed back into Turkey is utter nonsense," he said. "Rather than pushing out unfounded claims Turkey needs to live up to its obligations and work to prevent these dangerous journeys." 

The Greek foreign ministry did not immediately respond to CNN's request for comment about Turkey's allegations.

The Council of Europe and migrants themselves have for years alleged that the Greek Coast Guard and border patrols push back migrants, sometimes at sea. Though the United Nations Human Rights Agency has documented "credible reports" of such incidents, the Greek government has repeatedly denied them.

There is a possibility of rain and snow in most parts of the country even today due to the effect of the western low-pressure system. 

Presently, light to moderate rain is taking place in some places in Province 1, Madhes, Bagmati and Gandaki, according to Weather Forecasting Division. 

It has been cloudy in Kathmandu Valley since morning and light rain is also falling in some places. The weather in the valley will improve in the afternoon. 

However,  both domestic and international flights are being operated from Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) despite the adverse weather conditions. The IFR technology is being used when visibility is weak, the TIA office said.

According to the weather bulletin of the Division, there will be partial to normal cloud cover in Province No. 1, Madhes Province, Bagmati and Gandaki Provinces and partial cloud cover in other provinces. Light snowfall is expected in a few places in the high hills and mountains of the eastern and central parts of the country. 

Even during the night, there will be partial to normal cloud cover in Province 1, Madhes Province and Bagmati Province and there will be partial cloud cover in other hilly areas of the country. 

The weather will gradually improve from Sunday, the Division said. The weather will be generally clear with partly cloudy weather across the country on Sunday. RSS