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A man accused of opening fire on a Fourth of July parade near Chicago contemplated a second attack after the deadly shooting, authorities say, BBC reported.

According to police, the 21-year-old suspect drove for more than two hours to Wisconsin after the shooting, which left seven dead and dozens wounded. 

He saw another Independence Day celebration there and allegedly considered attacking it, police said.

During a court hearing, prosecutors also said he confessed to the shooting. 

At Wednesday's court appearance, a judge ruled that the suspect, Robert Crimo, would be held without bail and assigned a public lawyer.

At a news conference following the hearing, police said investigators had determined that Mr Crimo attempted to dump his phone in Madison, Wisconsin after the Monday morning attack in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park.

Police said the gunman told them he had disguised himself as a woman so he could escape Highland Park alongside fleeing residents.

In the brief hearing, Assistant State Attorney Ben Dillon said surveillance video showed the suspect leaving the area and dumping a rifle. He then took his mother's car and drove about 150 miles (240 km) north-west to Madison.

Madison's police chief said in a news conference that the FBI called around 17:00 local time (22:00 GMT) on Monday to request that the force mobilise its SWAT team due to the suspect being in their area, according to BBC.

But before the tactical team was ready, the police learned that the suspect had been caught.

According to Mr Dillon, the gunman then confessed after being caught, telling police he "looked down his sights, aimed, then opened fire at people across the street".

If convicted, the seven murder counts the suspected gunman currently faces would carry a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole. Dozens more charges are expected before the investigation ends.

Prosecutors said on Wednesday that 83 spent shell casings, as well as rifle magazines, were recovered from the scene of the shooting. 

The new information comes as questions are being raised over how the suspect was able to buy guns. 

He passed background checks meant to prevent potentially dangerous individuals from buying weapons, even though he had previously made threats that were reported to authorities, BBC reported.

Three other firearms were also found at his home. Police said the suspect had two prior contacts with law enforcement but was still able to purchase five guns in the past year. 

In April 2019, police were called to the suspect's home one week after he reportedly attempted to take his own life. And in September 2019, police were called by a family member who said he had made violent threats to "kill everyone". 

Police responded and seized 16 knives, a dagger and a sword from his home. He was not arrested and no further action was taken. 

In a separate and more recent incident, Mr Crimo reportedly behaved suspiciously during an April visit to a local synagogue during Passover. A volunteer security co-ordinator told The Forward, a Jewish news organisation, that he believed the suspect was "sizing up" the facility, although he left without incident. 

Illinois state police said that the suspect's father sponsored his application for a firearms licence in December 201 when he was just 19. His uncle denied this in a statement to the Chicago Sun. 

Illinois is one of 19 US states with so-called red flag laws, designed to keep guns out of the hands of people who may pose a danger to themselves or others. Some commentators have pointed to the Highland Park shooting as evidence that similar regulations are ineffective.

Allison Anderman, an attorney at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said that "implementation seems to have been an issue" in his case.

The Illinois law came into effect in January 2019, just months before police first encountered the gunman. 

Ms Anderman added that red flag laws do not require individuals to be taken into custody. Instead, they simply prevent them from having guns until they "get their crisis under control". 

"It's very possible that law enforcement officers did not know about it or did not know how to properly use it," she said. "A single instance where a law was not properly implemented does not call into question the effectiveness of these laws".

Experts believe that data suggests that red flag laws are at least somewhat effective. In Florida, for example, data shows that judges have acted more than 8,000 times under that state's version of the law to restrict gun access.

"These are people who were either troubled or emotionally dysregulated. or expressing homicidal threats, that had guns taken away," said Dexter Voisin, a social sciences professor and gun violence expert at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

"It's not that the laws don't work. It's that folks actually have to work with the system".

The heads of UK and US security services have made an unprecedented joint appearance to warn of the threat from China, BBC reported.

FBI director Christopher Wray said China was the "biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security" and had interfered in politics, including recent elections. 

MI5 head Ken McCallum said his service had more than doubled its work against Chinese activity in the last three years and would be doubling it again. 

MI5 is now running seven times as many investigations related to activities of the Chinese Communist Party compared to 2018, he added. 

The FBI's Wray warned that if China was to forcibly take Taiwan it would "represent one of the most horrific business disruptions the world has ever seen".

The first ever joint public appearance by the two directors came at MI5 headquarters in Thames House, London. 

McCallum also said the challenge posed by the Chinese Communist Party was "game-changing", while Wray called it "immense" and "breath-taking".

Wray warned the audience - which included chief executives of businesses and senior figures from universities - that the Chinese government was "set on stealing your technology" using a range of tools, according to BBC.

He said it posed "an even more serious threat to western businesses than even many sophisticated businesspeople realised". He cited cases in which people linked to Chinese companies out in rural America had been digging up genetically modified seeds which would have cost them billions of dollars and nearly a decade to develop themselves. 

He also said China deployed cyber espionage to "cheat and steal on a massive scale", with a hacking programme larger than that of every other major country combined.

The MI5 head said intelligence about cyber threats had been shared with 37 countries and that in May a sophisticated threat against aerospace had been disrupted. 

McCallum also pointed to a series of examples linked to China. These included a British aviation expert who had received an approach online and had been offered an attractive employment opportunity. He travelled to China twice to be "wined and dined" before being asked for technical information on military aircraft by a company which was actually a front for Chinese intelligence officers. 

"That's where we stepped in," said McCallum. He also said one engineering firm had been approached by a Chinese company which led to its technology being taken before the deal was then called off, forcing the company, Smith's Harlow, to go into administration in 2020.

And he pointed to the interference alert issued by Parliament in January about the activities of Christine Lee. He said these types of operations aimed to amplify pro-Chinese communist party voices and silence those that questioned its authority. "It needs to be challenged," the MI5 head said. 

In the US, the FBI director said the Chinese government had directly interfered in a congressional election in New York this spring because they did not want a candidate who was a critic and former protester at Tiananmen Square to be elected, BBC reported.

They had done so, he said, by hiring a private investigator to dig up derogatory information. When they could not find anything, he said there had been an effort to manufacture a controversy using a sex worker before even suggesting staging a car accident.

Wray said China was drawing "all sorts of lessons" from the conflict in Ukraine. This included trying to insulate themselves from any future sanctions of the type that have hit Russia. If China did invade Taiwan, the economic disruption would be much greater than that seen this year, he said, with western investments in China becoming "hostages" and supply chains disrupted. 

"I don't have any reason to think their interest in Taiwan has abated in any fashion," the FBI director told journalists after the speech.

The MI5 head said new legislation would help to deal with the threat but the UK also needed to become a "harder target" by ensuring that all parts of society were more aware of the risks. He said that reform of the visa system had seen over 50 students linked to the Chinese military leaving the UK, according to BBC.

"China has for far too long counted on being everybody's second-highest priority," Wray said, adding: "They are not flying under the radar anymore."

Perhaps having once led a guerrilla army to overthrow the state, Finance Minister Janardan Sharma found it much easier to bat away charges of working for vested interests while drafting the national budget. He was accused of bringing in a pair of unauthorized personnel into the Ministry of Finance the night before budget-presentation. The pair, as first reported in Annapurna Post, proceeded to dictate certain tax and excise rates to top ministry officials. The rates they set later appeared in the national budget. Sharma denies the charges. The best way to establish his innocence would have been to make public the ministry’s CCTV footage of the night. But when requested to produce the footage, the ministry put out an astonishing statement that the 13-day-old record had been deleted: legally, government bodies are required to keep such records for at least three months. The malafide intent of Sharma and his cronies in the ministry was thus established.     

Such a grave breach of law called for Sharma’s immediate sacking and the start of a judicial inquiry. The public image of the Sher Bahadur Deuba government was deteriorating the longer the tainted finance minister stayed in office. More than that, if there was to be no consequences for such open misuse of power, people’s belief in rule of law would have been shattered. 

A lot was at stake. If the taxes people paid with their hard-earned money were being so brazenly misused, tomorrow they would have all the right in the world to stop paying. Again, Sharma’s wrongdoing had strained the delicate trust between the government and the electorate. Thankfully, he has now stepped down and a parliamentary probe against him has been started. What we want is an impartial investigation and if he is found guilty, legal measures befitting the crime. At the same time, the tax and excise rates that appeared in the national budget at the insistence of vested interests must be changed in the interest of the people. This wonderful opportunity to set a strong precedent for Nepal’s present and future rulers must not be lost.

The Indian rupee hit a record low against the US dollar on Tuesday as concerns of a wider current account deficit came to the forefront after the country’s trade deficit hit an all-time high in June, Reuters reported.

Data late on Monday showed India’s June trade deficit widened to a record high of $25.63 billion, following a rise in crude oil and coal imports, from $9.61 billion a year earlier.

Analysts and economists are expecting the country’s current account deficit to widen to around 3.2% of the GDP in fiscal year 2023 compared with 1.2% in 2022.

The partially convertible rupee closed trading at 79.37/38 per dollar, after hitting a life low of 79.3750. It had touched the previous record low of 79.12 last week and had closed trading at 78.95 on Monday.

“We expect India’s widening current account deficit to remain an ongoing drag for INR, with limited offsets from India’s FDI and overseas investment inflows, exacerbated by ongoing FPI outflows,” Sonal Varma, economist at Nomura, said.

“Therefore, we expect USD/INR to reach 82 by Q3 2022 and 81 by Q4 2022. One risk to our view is the RBI’s USD selling intervention, which could slow the pace of INR depreciation.”

The domestic share market turned negative towards the end of trade to close down 0.2%, adding to the pressure on the rupee, according to Reuters.

Foreign portfolio outflows from equities in the month of June stood at $6.6 billion, the highest since March 2020, taking the total outflows so far in 2022 to over $30 billion.

Traders said the central bank sold dollars sporadically and helped stem a steeper fall in the local unit, but expectations of aggressive rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve and the resultant wider interest rate differential is expected to keep the weakening bias in the rupee.

Goldman Sachs in a recent note said given the changes in the brokerage’s balance of payments forecast, they have revised their 3, 6 and 12 month forecasts on the USD/INR to 80, 81 and 81 compared with 79, 79 and 78 previously, Reuters reported.

Nepal reported 113 new Covid-19 cases on Wednesday.

According to the Ministry of Health and Population, 1, 549 swab samples were tested in the RT-PCR method, of which 90 returned positive. Likewise, 1, 175 people underwent antigen tests, of which 23 were tested positive.

The Ministry said that no one died of virus in the last 24 hours. The Ministry said that 20 infected people recovered from the disease

As of today, there are 471 active cases in the country.

The CPN (Maoist Centre) leader Barsha Man Pun claimed that Janardan Sharma would become the finance minister if the parliamentary committee could not prove him guilty.

Saying that Sharma just paved the way for the Investigation, Pun said that he would return to the post of finance minister if the allegations are not proved.

Talking to journalists at the Parliament building, he said that the CPN (Maoist Centre) would not send a new finance minister until the investigation is completed.

Following widespread criticism and public outcry, Finance Minister Janardan Sharma resigned from his post today.

Sharma was embroiled in controversy after he invited two unauthorized persons to tweak taxes a day before he presented the budget in the Parliament on May 29.

Following widespread criticism and public outcry, Finance Minister Janardan Sharma resigned from his post on Wednesday.

He announced his resignation after putting his views in the Parliament meeting this afternoon.

Sharma was embroiled in controversy after he invited two unauthorized persons to tweak taxes a day before he presented the budget in the Parliament on May 29.

Leaders from the ruling and the opposition parties had been demanding resignation of him.

Earlier this afternoon, the House of Representatives formed a parliamentary committee to investigate Finance Minister Janardan Sharma's alleged role in inviting outsiders to change tax rates. 

The House of Representatives formed a parliamentary committee to investigate Finance Minister Janardan Sharma's alleged role in inviting two unauthorized persons to tweak taxes just before he presented the budget.

During the Parliament meeting held on Wednesday, Speaker Agni Prasad Sapkota formed an 11-member special committee.

The committee will have four members from the CPN-UML, two members each from the Nepali Congress and the CPN (Maoist Centre), and one member each from CPN (Unified Socialist), Janata Samajbadi Party and Democratic Socialist Party.

Khagraj Adhikari, Dev Prasad Gurung, Pushpa Bhusal, Pradeep Gyawali, Bhanubhakta Dhakal, Bimala BK, Laxman Lal Karna, Shakti Bahadur Basnet, Sarala Kumari Yadav, Sita Ram Mahato and Surendra Prasad Yadav are the members of the committee.