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Chief Minister of Province No. 2 Lal Babu Raut Gaddhi has said that a nation cannot prosper until social transformation and positive changes were maintained. 

Positive and progressive thoughts in the society could only lead the nation towards prosperity, the Chief Minister said on Sunday while addressing a programme at Dibya Kanya Higher Secondary in Kalikamai Rural Municipality, Parsa. 

Gaddhi added that poverty could be uprooted with the quality changes in health and education by gradually transforming the society. 

The Chief Minister reiterated that the campaign of 'Save Girl Child, Teach Girl Child' was unveiled to end the ill-practices prevalent in the society and urged one and all to join in this campaign. 

Gaddhi shared that 50 per cent seats for women have been reserved for girls in the province police service of the Province No. 2 to make the campaign effective. 

He also announced that the seat for women would be reserved in other services to be catered by the province government. RSS

KATHMANDU: The government has formed a four-member committee to look into the activities of Nepal Sanskrit University Vice-Chancellor Kul Prasad Koirala. The committee is mandated to submit a report to the government after carrying out investigation into Koirala’s reported attempt to go abroad without leave approval and allegations related to financial irregularities. RSS

Kathmandu : Minister for Foreign Affairs Pradip Kumar Gyawali has said some European nations are willing to invest in Nepal’s energy and infrastructure development. Talking to media persons upon his arrival after his weeklong visit to Portugal, Luxembourg and Belgium, Minister Gyawali said the European nations were more interested in Nepal’s energy, infrastructure and agriculture sectors.

Gyawali said that he had urged European leaders to allow Nepali goods into European markets as Europe was a vital trade and development partner of Nepal. The foreign minister shared that the European leaders put forth their concerns about Nepal government’s economic poli­cy, investment environment and inclusion in constitution.

“Nepal is willing to benefit from the economies of India and Chi­na. I found them concerned about Nepal’s ability to move ahead by maintaining geopolitical balance,” Gyawali stated. On the occasion, Gyawali said that he urged European leaders to immediately resolve the issues that have hindered Nepal’s air services to Europe. RSS

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is com­ing to Nepal, in what will be his fourth visit, to attend the fourth summit of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIM­STEC) being held in Kathman­du on August 30 and 31. This regional body is comprised of four countries from South Asia (Bhutan, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka) and two countries from South-East Asia (Myan­mar and Thailand).According to a Foreign Ministry source, along with Modi, there is a high chance that the executive heads of all seven countries will participate. During the last Nepal-India Eminent Persons Groups meeting in Kathmandu, the Indian EPG members had also informed that Modi would be coming to Kathmandu for the BIMSTEC summit.

The source said Nepal’s emphasis during the summit will be on coming up with a BIMSTEC charter, which the member countries have been unable to agree on in the 20 years of the organiza­tion’s existence.

Kathmandu: Nepal has been grouped together with India, Bangladesh and Myanmar in the qualifying games for the women's football category in the 2020 Olympics to be held in Tokyo, Japan. 

The first round of the Asian qualifying for Nepal will begin on coming November 8 with a game against India, according to calendar released on Saturday. Likewise, Nepal will face Myanmar on November 11 and Bangladesh on November 13. 

A total of 18 countries are taking part in the first phase of qualifying among the Asian countries. They have been divided into four groups of four and Nepal is in Group 'C'. Of them 12 including the group winners and runners-up and the best two among the remaining go to the second round.

However, only two will qualify for the Olympics from Asia, as Japan qualifies automatically as the host nation. A total of 12 countries will compete for the gold medal in women's football category. RSS

Asian countries have voiced concern about the potentially devastating impact of a US-China trade war, with ministers calling for the acceleration of talks for a gigantic Beijing-backed free-trade deal that excludes the United States. 

Fear that a simmering trade spat between the world's top two economies could spiral into a full-blown trade war -- with painful consequences for China's neighbours -- was among topics dominating discussion at a regional summit in Singapore on Saturday. 

Tit-for-tat tariffs have fuelled months of tensions that were notched up Friday as Beijing threatened to impose levies on $60 billion of American goods, from beef to condoms. 

The measures, which the White House ridiculed as "weak" but China said were "fully justified", came after Washington said it would increase the rate of additional tariffs on Chinese goods worth $200 billion. 

The prospect of a trade war is a "real threat" to Asian countries, Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah told reporters Saturday on the sidelines of the summit. 

"The threat is making many countries very concerned and... is becoming more complex," he said. Other top Asian diplomats at Saturday's forum, hosted by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), spoke out against protectionism, warning that it places the region's development in jeopardy. 

"Rising anti-globalisation and trade protectionism among major countries is fuelling tensions and threatening our aspirations for sustained economic growth," said South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha. 

Countries in the region must "explore creative ways to further deepen and broaden our cooperation", in the face of such challenges, she said. 

Some ministers have called for the early conclusion of talks for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a 16-nation pact poised to become the world's largest free-trade agreement, covering about half the global population. 

The planned RCEP deal would group the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. 

'Protectionism on the rise' 

But it would not include the United States, which had been leading another regional trade pact -- the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) -- until US President Donald Trump abruptly abandoned it last year. 

Even with the lure to access to the world's largest economy withdrawn, the eleven remaining TPP countries, who make up 13.5 percent of the global economy, signed a slimmed-down version of the pact in March. 

It cuts tariffs and requires members to comply with a high level of regulatory standards in areas like labour law and environmental protection. 

RCEP also aims to cut tariffs but has far less regulatory standards attached than TPP. 
Nonetheless, Washington's abandonment of TPP has given the RCEP negotiations a fresh shot in the arm. 

"Given the current global situation where protectionism is on the rise, Japan would like to achieve a swift conclusion of our RCEP negotiations," Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono said. 

Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has said he hoped the RCEP pact would be complete by the end of the year, while Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan urged countries facing "headwinds against free trade" to rally together. 

The US imposed 25 percent tariffs on $34 billion of Chinese goods in early July, sparking retaliatory measures from China. 

Days later, Washington unveiled a list of another $200 billion in Chinese goods from electrical machinery to seafood that would be hit with 10 percent import duties. 

Trump upped the ante this week by threatening to lift the tariff rate to 25 percent. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended the US position and hit back at China. 

"President Trump inherited an unfair trade regime where American workers and American companies were not treated reciprocally by the Chinese," he said Saturday. "Efforts of the Trump administration are to right that, to correct it, to adjust that." AFP

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Non Fiction

THE CASE AGAINST SUGAR

Gary Taubes

Published: 2017Publisher: Portobello Books

Language: English

Pages: 365, paperback

Used to heaping two teaspoons of sugar in your coffee every morning? Guilty of having an entire bar of chocolate for lunch? Or are you one of those people who like a scoop of ice cream after din­ner? Then don’t read Gary Taubes’ ‘The Case Against Sugar’. You will be left questioning your life choices and fretting how much harm you have done to your body. But if you constantly wonder why you don’t lose weight despite eating clean and exercising or have a family history of diabetes and hypertension and want to lead a healthy life to prevent these conditions then Taubes’ book, a result of six years of research, could very well be an eye-opener. The Case Against Sugar starts by questioning whether sugar should be called a food or a drug. Then Taubes argues why it should be the latter. With a detailed and infor­mative history of sugar and the sugar industry, Taubes points out that our addiction to the sweet stuff leads to a lot of health problems we have come to ‘wrongly’ attri­bute to saturated fat. He talks about how sugar has “a unique physiolog­ical, metabolic and hormonal effect on our bodies” and how that has far-reaching health implications.

He also provides a history of sugar usage in the tobacco industry and how that might have contributed to the rise of smoking. He goes on to narrate how sugar triggers a genetic predisposition to obesity by lead­ing to insulin resistance, a condi­tion that contributes to diabetes, gout, and irritable bowel syndrome, among others health problems, and paints a picture of how sugar ulti­mately kills far more people than cigarettes. But while Taubes excels at making his point with detailed his­torical narrative as his backup, many of his claims also seem one-sided.

For instance, Taubes recounts an old struggle between American researcher Ancel Keys (who believed saturated fat was the primary cause of coronary heart diseases) and Brit­ish researcher John Yudkin (who thought sugar was the culprit). He says Keys was funded by the sugar industry and portrays Yud­kin as a moral person who was telling the ‘truth’. A little research will tell you that Yudkin was funded by the dairy, egg, and edible oil industries, all of which wanted to pin the blame on sugar. Taubes neglects to mention this. He relies on incomplete historical narrative rather than facts and evidence to present his case and that kind of writing is something that you will find throughout the book.

But Taubes also doesn’t conclude that sugar is bad for our health based on a superficial understand­ing of the subject, though in some places it feels like he is looking at the issue through glasses heavily tinted by his own beliefs. However, he has done a lot of research and left few stones unturned. We recom­mend you read the book to allow the information to improve your eating habits, whether by removing sugar completely, reducing its consump­tion, or by making dietary modifica­tions. Because that’s definitely what you will be tempted to do.

The worst part about the parliamentary hear­ing process of the proposed Chief Justice Deepak Raj Joshee was that it was never sup­posed to come that far. If Joshee was unfit to be chief justice, he was surely unfit to be a justice of the Supreme Court as well. With his questionable aca­demic credentials and a history of troubling decisions in lower courts, how did he get through the vetting processes of first the judiciary and then the parliament when he was first nominated for the apex court?

Not just in Joshee’s case but generally too there is a lot of politicking in the appointment of senior judges in Nepal. Not that other supposedly more mature democracies are free from this malaise. The American president invariably appoints Supreme Court judges along partisan lines and the Senate hearing committee is likewise divided along party lines. But where the American and Nepali systems dif­fers the most is that a controversial figure like Joshee, who apparently failed to clear his school leaving exams, would never have been considered for such an important role to start with. (Even Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees have impeccable academic and intellectual credentials.)

Another big difference is that while the Nepali par­liamentary hearings are considered no more than for­malities to rubberstamp the names proposed by the executive, similar hearings in more mature democra­cies involve rigorous vetting. This is because the con­cept of separation of powers is already institutional­ized there. On the other hand, the reason there was such skepticism about Joshee’s hearing was because hearing committee members were seen as taking cues from the executive.

On the positive side, the proposal of Joshee as chief justice again highlighted the vital role that the media plays in upholding democratic principles in Nepal. Were it not for front-page exposés of Joshee’s checkered past, the parliamentary hearing committee could have easily waved through his name. (Of course, if the ruling coalition wanted Joshee as chief justice, it was in a posi­tion to successfully push his name in the committee, never mind the vetting process.)

It is thus vital that we put in place a system that keeps bad eggs from contaminating an all-important institu­tion like the Supreme Court. Pluck them out early. The appointment of the head of the supreme law interpret­ing body of the land is not something to be taken lightly.