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Two Indian nationals have been arrested in possession of seven grams of brown sugar from Mechi bridge of Kakarbhitta.

The suspects have been identified as Megabir Limbu (30) and his brother Buddha Bir Limbu (23) of East Sikkim, India.

A joint team deployed from the Area Police Office and Drugs Control Bureau apprehended the duo from Old Mechi bridge of Kakarbhitta, Mechinagar Municipality-2 while they were heading towards Nepal from India during a regular security check.

Police said that they have recovered three mobile phones from their possession.

Further investigation into the incident is underway, police said.

An aircraft of Yeti Air that took off from Pokhara for Kathmandu returned to Pokhara after the plane’s engine encountered failure on Friday.

According to Dev Raj Subedi, Information Officer at the airport, the aircraft, which took off at 8:55 am today, gave an indication of engine failure as soon as it left the runway.

There were 45 passengers on board the aircraft with call sign 9N ANG.

Subedi said that the aircraft returned to Pokhara six minutes after taking off from the airport.

1. My Old School

When 16-year-old Brandon Lee transferred to a new school near Glasgow in 1993, everyone there noticed something unusual about him. Some even thought he might be living a double life. But no one imagined the scale of the deception that would eventually come to light. In Jono McLeod's documentary, Lee's former classmates and teachers tell his bizarre story – and if you don't want to know the ending, don't Google his name. Lee himself didn't want to appear on screen, so his testimony is lip-synced by Alan Cumming (The Good Wife), and flashbacks to the 1990s are rendered as animated cartoons. Alissa Wilkinson at Voxsays the results are "flat-out fun… like listening to a bunch of friends tell you about the wildest memory they share".

Released on 19 August in UK & Ireland

2.  Luck

In the first full-length film from Skydance Animation, Tony Award-nominee Eva Noblezada provides the voice of Sam, "the unluckiest person in the world". Having grown up in the care system, she hopes to nab some extra good luck for a fellow foster child, and finds her way to a realm where magical creatures – including a black cat voiced by Simon Pegg and a dragon voiced by Jane Fonda – manipulate the human race's fortunes. It may sound faintly sinister, but the director, Peggy Holmes, promises that Luck is full of "positivity and inspiration". Talking to Jackson Murphy at Animation Now, she says, "We've all been through a really hard time together in the world. People really want to sit back, relax, and really be inspired to just keep going. When those bad luck days come, just keep going because there are some good luck ones coming, too."

Released on 5 August on Apple TV+ worldwide

3. Mack & Rita

From Freaky Friday to Big, 13 Going on 30 to 17 Again, lots of comedies have imagined young minds zapping into older bodies, and vice versa. But the new film from Katie Aselton (The Freebie, Black Rock) puts a fresh spin on the formula, by ageing up, rather than using teens and adults. Written by Paul Welsh and Madeline Walter, Mack & Rita features a 30-year-old author (Elizabeth Lail) who has always felt that she was a 70-year-old woman on the inside. After going to a new-age workshop in Palm Springs, she is magically transformed into a 70-year-old woman on the outside, too. In her new identity (Diane Keaton in an all-too-rare lead role), she is a happy, relaxed "glammy granny" social-media influencer, but can that make up for losing 40 years of her life?

Released on 12 August in the US, Canada and Spain

4. Bullet Train

David Leitch was Brad Pitt's stunt double on Troy, Fight Club and Mr and Mrs Smith, and has since become the director of such ridiculously-fun action movies as Hobbs & Shaw, Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2. And now the two old buddies have teamed up for Leitch's latest shooting-and-punching-fest: Bullet Train. Pitt plays an assassin who is sent by his handler (Sandra Bullock) to grab a briefcase from one of the passengers on a Japanese train, but little does he know that the train is full of other shady characters (Brian Tyree Henry, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Zazie Beetz, Michael Shannon). Adapted from a novel by Kōtarō Isaka, Bullet Train "is the kind of summer popcorn movie that knows it's a summer popcorn movie," says Nick Romano at EW. "But because it's Leitch at the helm, the action is sharp, slick, dynamic, and always advancing the story."

Released on 3 August in the UK and 5 August in the US

5. Blind Ambition

This intoxicating Australian documentary, directed by Robert Coe and Warwick Ross, has such a perfect underdog story that it would seem far-fetched in a Hollywood comedy. Its four heroes are all refugees who fled from Zimbabwe to South Africa, and found work as waiters, then as sommeliers, before eventually forming Zimbabwe's first-ever competitive wine-tasting team. Their next stop is Burgundy in France, for "the Olympics of wine tasting". Open a bottle of your favourite rosé and enjoy. "While there is a focus on the road to the championship and the outcome of the competition," says Jojo Ajisafe in Little White Lies, "the real joy of Blind Ambition is watching the strength and ambition in the team. How they not only changed the lives of themselves and their families, but also exposed the world to the untapped talent present in Zimbabwe."

Released on 12 August in the UK and Ireland, and 2 September in the US

6. Emily The Criminal

Emily (Aubrey Plaza) is indeed a criminal. In John Patton Ford's darkly-satirical urban thriller, she gets involved in a low-level credit card scam organised by Youcef (Theo Rossi), and builds up to bigger, more violent crimes from there. But maybe, just maybe, her wrongdoings are understandable. Ford makes the case for Emily that with $70,000 in student loans to pay off, and patronising bosses offering her nothing but unpaid internships, she is short of other options. The film is "an entertaining and sharp-edged look at the world in which so many millennials find themselves," says Alissa Wilkinson at Vox, "saddled with enormous debt, a lousy job market, an exploitative gig economy, and the sinking feeling that nothing’s going to get better if you don’t escape the system".

Released on 12 August in the US and Canada

7. The Feast

There aren't many folk-horror movies in which the characters all speak Welsh, but The Feast, directed by Lee Haven Jones, would be worth tucking into whichever language it was in. The setting is a swanky dinner party in the Welsh countryside. A politician (Julian Lewis Jones) hopes to charm some local farmers into letting a mining company onto their land. But their waitress for the evening, the mysterious Cadi (Annes Elwy), has another outcome in mind. "With delicate sleight of hand," says Sara Michelle Fetters at MovieFreak, "the filmmaker examines issues relating to classism, climate change, wealth inequality, sexism and so much more with deliciously malevolent precision. Jones also does not skimp on the blood and gore, the resulting mixture of social commentary and ghoulish mystical terror beautifully upsetting on a primal level."

Released on 19 August in the UK

8. Three Thousand Years of Longing

Seven years on from the turbo-charged Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller is back at last with another film – and the contrast could hardly be greater. In place of bloodthirsty survivalists racing around post-apocalyptic Australia, we have a demure English academic (Tilda Swinton) at a literature conference in Istanbul. A djinn (Idris Elba) materialises in her hotel room and offers her three wishes, but the academic has read enough myths to know that wishes tend to backfire, so the djinn tries to charm her with fabulous tales from his past. Miller's romantic fantasy, which premiered at Cannes, is a long way from Mad Max territory, but there is a thread connecting the two films. "Like Mad Max: Fury Road before it," says Ben Croll at The Wrap, "Three Thousand Years of Longing is another kind of blockbuster that tries to lead by example, a big-budget fantasia that argues there are more imaginative and original ways for Hollywood to employ its tools."

Released on 31 August in the US and Canada

9. Bodies Bodies Bodies

This "Agatha Christie-style Gen-Z slasher farce" is "one of the horror highlights of the year", says Matthew Turner at Nerdly. Amandla Stenberg and Maria Bakalova (from Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) play a young couple who go to a hipster house party at a rich friend's mansion. Late at night, the twenty-somethings play a game of "bodies bodies bodies", in which the murderer "kills" his victims by touching them. But then, of course, someone actually gets killed. Halina Reijn, the film's director, satirises our resentments, insecurities and social-media obsessions – but also delivers a cunningly-plotted murder mystery. "In short, Bodies Bodies Bodies is a thoroughly entertaining, deliciously twisted horror farce that demands to be seen with as big an audience as possible," says Turner. "Agatha Christie herself would be proud."

Released on 5 August in the US, 12 August in Canada and 9 September in the UK

10. I Came By

Playing a rather different character from the ones he's known for in Downton Abbey and Paddington, Hugh Bonneville co-stars in I Came By as a snooty high-court judge named Sir Hector Blake. Starring alongside him is George MacKay, who plays a Banksy-like graffiti artist whose speciality is to sneak into the homes of Britain's wealthiest aristocrats and do some unauthorised redecorating. But when he is in Sir Hector's London town house, he uncovers a dark secret that puts his life in danger. Directed and co-written by the Bafta-winning Babak Anvari, this Netflix crime thriller promises "classic Hitchcockian suspense via contemporary themes of establishment privilege and corruption".

Released on 19 August in cinemas in the UK and Ireland, and 31 August on Netflix internationally

(BBC reported)

1. My Old School

When 16-year-old Brandon Lee transferred to a new school near Glasgow in 1993, everyone there noticed something unusual about him. Some even thought he might be living a double life. But no one imagined the scale of the deception that would eventually come to light. In Jono McLeod's documentary, Lee's former classmates and teachers tell his bizarre story – and if you don't want to know the ending, don't Google his name. Lee himself didn't want to appear on screen, so his testimony is lip-synced by Alan Cumming (The Good Wife), and flashbacks to the 1990s are rendered as animated cartoons. Alissa Wilkinson at Voxsays the results are "flat-out fun… like listening to a bunch of friends tell you about the wildest memory they share".

Released on 19 August in UK & Ireland

2.  Luck

In the first full-length film from Skydance Animation, Tony Award-nominee Eva Noblezada provides the voice of Sam, "the unluckiest person in the world". Having grown up in the care system, she hopes to nab some extra good luck for a fellow foster child, and finds her way to a realm where magical creatures – including a black cat voiced by Simon Pegg and a dragon voiced by Jane Fonda – manipulate the human race's fortunes. It may sound faintly sinister, but the director, Peggy Holmes, promises that Luck is full of "positivity and inspiration". Talking to Jackson Murphy at Animation Now, she says, "We've all been through a really hard time together in the world. People really want to sit back, relax, and really be inspired to just keep going. When those bad luck days come, just keep going because there are some good luck ones coming, too."

Released on 5 August on Apple TV+ worldwide

3. Mack & Rita

From Freaky Friday to Big, 13 Going on 30 to 17 Again, lots of comedies have imagined young minds zapping into older bodies, and vice versa. But the new film from Katie Aselton (The Freebie, Black Rock) puts a fresh spin on the formula, by ageing up, rather than using teens and adults. Written by Paul Welsh and Madeline Walter, Mack & Rita features a 30-year-old author (Elizabeth Lail) who has always felt that she was a 70-year-old woman on the inside. After going to a new-age workshop in Palm Springs, she is magically transformed into a 70-year-old woman on the outside, too. In her new identity (Diane Keaton in an all-too-rare lead role), she is a happy, relaxed "glammy granny" social-media influencer, but can that make up for losing 40 years of her life?

Released on 12 August in the US, Canada and Spain

4. Bullet Train

David Leitch was Brad Pitt's stunt double on Troy, Fight Club and Mr and Mrs Smith, and has since become the director of such ridiculously-fun action movies as Hobbs & Shaw, Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2. And now the two old buddies have teamed up for Leitch's latest shooting-and-punching-fest: Bullet Train. Pitt plays an assassin who is sent by his handler (Sandra Bullock) to grab a briefcase from one of the passengers on a Japanese train, but little does he know that the train is full of other shady characters (Brian Tyree Henry, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Zazie Beetz, Michael Shannon). Adapted from a novel by Kōtarō Isaka, Bullet Train "is the kind of summer popcorn movie that knows it's a summer popcorn movie," says Nick Romano at EW. "But because it's Leitch at the helm, the action is sharp, slick, dynamic, and always advancing the story."

Released on 3 August in the UK and 5 August in the US

5. Blind Ambition

This intoxicating Australian documentary, directed by Robert Coe and Warwick Ross, has such a perfect underdog story that it would seem far-fetched in a Hollywood comedy. Its four heroes are all refugees who fled from Zimbabwe to South Africa, and found work as waiters, then as sommeliers, before eventually forming Zimbabwe's first-ever competitive wine-tasting team. Their next stop is Burgundy in France, for "the Olympics of wine tasting". Open a bottle of your favourite rosé and enjoy. "While there is a focus on the road to the championship and the outcome of the competition," says Jojo Ajisafe in Little White Lies, "the real joy of Blind Ambition is watching the strength and ambition in the team. How they not only changed the lives of themselves and their families, but also exposed the world to the untapped talent present in Zimbabwe."

Released on 12 August in the UK and Ireland, and 2 September in the US

6. Emily The Criminal

Emily (Aubrey Plaza) is indeed a criminal. In John Patton Ford's darkly-satirical urban thriller, she gets involved in a low-level credit card scam organised by Youcef (Theo Rossi), and builds up to bigger, more violent crimes from there. But maybe, just maybe, her wrongdoings are understandable. Ford makes the case for Emily that with $70,000 in student loans to pay off, and patronising bosses offering her nothing but unpaid internships, she is short of other options. The film is "an entertaining and sharp-edged look at the world in which so many millennials find themselves," says Alissa Wilkinson at Vox, "saddled with enormous debt, a lousy job market, an exploitative gig economy, and the sinking feeling that nothing’s going to get better if you don’t escape the system".

Released on 12 August in the US and Canada

7. The Feast

There aren't many folk-horror movies in which the characters all speak Welsh, but The Feast, directed by Lee Haven Jones, would be worth tucking into whichever language it was in. The setting is a swanky dinner party in the Welsh countryside. A politician (Julian Lewis Jones) hopes to charm some local farmers into letting a mining company onto their land. But their waitress for the evening, the mysterious Cadi (Annes Elwy), has another outcome in mind. "With delicate sleight of hand," says Sara Michelle Fetters at MovieFreak, "the filmmaker examines issues relating to classism, climate change, wealth inequality, sexism and so much more with deliciously malevolent precision. Jones also does not skimp on the blood and gore, the resulting mixture of social commentary and ghoulish mystical terror beautifully upsetting on a primal level."

Released on 19 August in the UK

8. Three Thousand Years of Longing

Seven years on from the turbo-charged Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller is back at last with another film – and the contrast could hardly be greater. In place of bloodthirsty survivalists racing around post-apocalyptic Australia, we have a demure English academic (Tilda Swinton) at a literature conference in Istanbul. A djinn (Idris Elba) materialises in her hotel room and offers her three wishes, but the academic has read enough myths to know that wishes tend to backfire, so the djinn tries to charm her with fabulous tales from his past. Miller's romantic fantasy, which premiered at Cannes, is a long way from Mad Max territory, but there is a thread connecting the two films. "Like Mad Max: Fury Road before it," says Ben Croll at The Wrap, "Three Thousand Years of Longing is another kind of blockbuster that tries to lead by example, a big-budget fantasia that argues there are more imaginative and original ways for Hollywood to employ its tools."

Released on 31 August in the US and Canada

9. Bodies Bodies Bodies

This "Agatha Christie-style Gen-Z slasher farce" is "one of the horror highlights of the year", says Matthew Turner at Nerdly. Amandla Stenberg and Maria Bakalova (from Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) play a young couple who go to a hipster house party at a rich friend's mansion. Late at night, the twenty-somethings play a game of "bodies bodies bodies", in which the murderer "kills" his victims by touching them. But then, of course, someone actually gets killed. Halina Reijn, the film's director, satirises our resentments, insecurities and social-media obsessions – but also delivers a cunningly-plotted murder mystery. "In short, Bodies Bodies Bodies is a thoroughly entertaining, deliciously twisted horror farce that demands to be seen with as big an audience as possible," says Turner. "Agatha Christie herself would be proud."

Released on 5 August in the US, 12 August in Canada and 9 September in the UK

10. I Came By

Playing a rather different character from the ones he's known for in Downton Abbey and Paddington, Hugh Bonneville co-stars in I Came By as a snooty high-court judge named Sir Hector Blake. Starring alongside him is George MacKay, who plays a Banksy-like graffiti artist whose speciality is to sneak into the homes of Britain's wealthiest aristocrats and do some unauthorised redecorating. But when he is in Sir Hector's London town house, he uncovers a dark secret that puts his life in danger. Directed and co-written by the Bafta-winning Babak Anvari, this Netflix crime thriller promises "classic Hitchcockian suspense via contemporary themes of establishment privilege and corruption".

Released on 19 August in cinemas in the UK and Ireland, and 31 August on Netflix internationally

(BBC reported)

The US and Chinese leaders have warned each other over Taiwan during a phone call that lasted more than two hours, BBC reported. 

President Joe Biden told his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, that the US strongly opposed any unilateral moves to change the island's status.

But he added that US policy on Taiwan had not changed. 

Beijing said Mr Xi had told Mr Biden to abide by the one-China principle, warning him that "whoever plays with fire will get burnt". 

Tensions over the issue have increased ahead of a rumoured plan for US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to visit Taiwan.

The state department says Ms Pelosi has not announced any travel, but China has warned of "serious consequences" if she were to proceed with such a visit.

Last week, Mr Biden told reporters "the military thinks it's not a good idea", but his White House has called Chinese rhetoric against any such trip "clearly unhelpful and not necessary".

Ms Pelosi, who is next in line to the presidency after the vice-president, would be the highest-ranking US politician to travel to Taiwan since 1997.

During Thursday's phone call, Mr Biden and Mr Xi also discussed arranging a possible face-to-face meeting, a senior Biden administration official said, describing the bilateral as "direct" and "honest".

When Mr Biden was US vice-president he hosted Mr Xi during a visit to the US by the Chinese leader in 2015, but they have not met in person during Mr Biden's presidency, according to BBC.

China sees Taiwan as a breakaway province that must become a part of the country - and has not ruled out the possible use of force to achieve this.

Under the one-China policy, Washington does not recognise Taipei diplomatically. But the US does sell weapons to the democratically self-governed island so that it can defend itself.

The White House said that apart from Taiwan, the two leaders discussed a range of other issues, including climate change and health security.

The Biden administration has been considering whether to lift Trump-era tariffs on Chinese imports, arguing that such a move could ease soaring US inflation. But the US president did not discuss that issue with Mr Xi on Thursday, the senior US official said. 

Analysts believe that both Joe Biden and Xi Jinping want to avoid an open conflict, the BBC's State Department Correspondent Barbara Plett Usher reports. But neither has made any attempt to alter their competing narratives, which was illustrated again by their contrasting statements about Thursday's call. 

In a brief summary, the White House said it was part of efforts to "responsibly manage differences" and work together where "interests align". 

In a much longer one, Beijing said many of their interests did align. But it blamed the US for the deteriorating relationship, criticising the Biden administration's view of China as a "primary rival" and Washington's "most serious long-term challenge."

The US economy has shrunk for the second quarter in a row, a milestone that in many countries would be considered an economic recession, BBC reported.

That is not the case in the US, which uses additional data to make that call.

But the contraction, at an annual rate of 0.9% in the three months to July, has drawn widespread attention as worries about the economy grow.

Prices for groceries, petrol and other basics are rising at the fastest pace since 1981.

As the US central bank raises borrowing costs quickly to try to cool the economy and ease price pressures, fears are rising that a recession is coming - if it has not officially started already.

Faced with sinking public confidence, US President Joe Biden has tried to make the case that the economy remains sound, noting that the unemployment rate remains at a low 3.6% and hiring has remained strong.

"If you look at our job market, consumer spending, business investment - we see signs of economic progress," Mr Biden said Thursday, noting the historic post-pandemic gains the US experienced last year. "There's no doubt we expect growth to be slower than last year .... That's consistent with a transition to stable, steady growth and lower inflation."

This week, ahead of the data from the Commerce Department, he told reporters that the economy was "not going to be in a recession". That prompted his opponents in the Republican party to accuse the White House of trying to redefine the term.

"White House recession 'rebrand' won't reduce Americans' suffering," they said.

In the first three months of the year, the US economy shrank at an annual rate of 1.6%. At the time, economists attributed the decline in gross domestic product (GDP) to quirks in trade data, according to BBC.

But Thursday's report showed more marked slowdown, with growth weighed down by declines in the housing market, business investment and government spending. Consumer spending grew at a slower annual rate of 1%, as people spent more on healthcare, accommodation and dining out, but cut back on goods and groceries.

Harvard professor Jeffrey Frankel previously served on the National Bureau of Economic Research committee, the group of academics that is charged with making the official declaration of recession. 

He said he did not think a recession started at the beginning of the year, noting the strong jobs growth. But after that he was less confident.

"Things have already slowed down, so I'm not saying that everything is great," he said. "Odds of a recession going forward are substantially higher than for a random year."

Inflation in the US hit 9.1% in June, the fastest pace of price appreciation in more than four decades. 

On Wednesday, the US central bank responded to the problem with another unusually large increase to its key interest rate, its second 0.75 percentage point rise since it started raising rates in March.

By making borrowing costs more expensive, the Federal Reserve is hoping to reduce spending on items such as homes and cars, in theory easing some of the pressures putting up prices. But lower demand also means a decline in economic activity. 

Recent reports have shown consumer confidence falling, the housing market slowing, and the first contraction in business activity since 2020, BBC reported. 

The US stock market has sunk since the start of the year, and companies from social media giant Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, to carmaker General Motors have said they plan to slow hiring. Some other firms, especially in the property sector, have announced job cuts.

Russia has carried out deadly strikes across Ukraine, as Kyiv stepped up its efforts to retake the occupied southern Kherson region, BBC reported.

Five people were killed and 26 injured when missiles struck the central city of Kropyvnytskyi, officials said. Three people died in Bakhmut, in the east.

Near Kyiv, 15 people were hurt at a military base. Ukraine's northern and southern regions were also hit.

This comes as Ukraine seeks to isolate Russian troops in the country's south.

A key bridge into the city of Kherson is out of action after Ukrainian forces struck it with long-range rockets supplied by the US. This makes it impossible for Russia to send deployments and weaponry over the Antonivsky Bridge.

UK defence officials say the only Ukrainian regional capital seized since the start of the Russian invasion on 24 February is now "virtually cut off from other occupied territories".

However, the Ukrainian military has warned that Moscow is now redeploying its forces from eastern Ukraine to defend the Kherson region.

Pictures have emerged purportedly showing Russian troops trying to set up a pontoon crossing near the damaged bridge.

Control over Kherson is important for Russia, as it provides a land corridor to Crimea - Ukraine's southern peninsula annexed by the Kremlin in 2014, according to BBC.

Kropyvnytskyi - the capital of the Kirovohrad region - was hit by two Russian missiles at about 12:20 local time on Tuesday (09:20 GMT), regional head Andriy Raikovych said at a briefing.

He said the missiles struck hangars of a local flight school, and that the wounded did not have life threatening injuries.

In Bakhmut, which lies in the eastern Donetsk region, at least three people were killed and another three injured in Russian shelling, regional head Pavlo Kyrylenko said. Twelve residential buildings were damaged.

Separately, 15 people were hurt when six Russian Kalibr missiles hit a military base in Liutizh, about 10km (six miles) north of the capital Kyiv, senior Ukrainian military official Oleksiy Hromov said. He did not specify whether there were any deaths.

Elsewhere, one person was killed and two injured in Russian shelling of Ukraine's central-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, local officials said, BBC reported.

And in the southern city of Mykolaiv, one person was injured and a school was destroyed in a "massive" Russian missile attack, regional head Vitaliy Kim said.

Police have arrested seven cadres of the Netra Bikram Chand-led Communist Party of Nepal for showing black flags to US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Affairs, Donald Lu on Thursday.

The cadres showed black flags to Lu, who arrived in Kathmandu on a two-day visit to Nepal this afternoon, at Gaushala while he was heading towards the hotel. 

They showed the black flags demanding annulment of Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and State Partnership Program (SPP).

Police arrested All Nepal National Independent Students Union-Revolutionary (ANNISUR) Chairman Prakash Shahi, General Secretary Lalit BK, Secretariat member Tara Sanjel, central members Prem Sijapati, Lalit Bam and Ramesh Rawat and Bhaktapur Coordinator Ashok Mahara, Secretariat member Subash Joshi said.