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CPN (Maoist Centre) Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal opined that the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) should be tabled in the parliamentary committee instead of Parliament for discussions.

During a meeting of the ruling coalition held in Baluwatar on Sunday morning, Dahal urged Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba to table the $500 million compact in the parliamentary committee rather than in the Parliament, Dahal’s secretariat said.

But, Prime Minister Deuba was adamant on his stance to table the MCC in the Parliament.

“If you want to table the MCC in the Parliament at any cost, it will be better to present the MCC in the Committee for discussions. But, the Prime Minister expressed his reluctance to table the compact in the Committee,” the secretariat said.

But, the ruling coalition has already made a decision to table the MCC in the House of Representatives.

The Parliament meeting is scheduled to be held at 1 pm today.

The ruling coalition has decided to table the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) in the House of Representatives.

A meeting of the ruling coalition held at Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba’s official residence in Baluwatar on Sunday morning made the decision to this effect.

“The coalition has agreed to table in the Parliament,” a leader who attended the meeting said.

Following the agreement, Prime Minister Deuba is preparing to table the $500 million compact in the Parliament today.

Evidence suggests Russia is planning "the biggest war in Europe since 1945", Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said, BBC reported.

He told the BBC's Sophie Raworth in an interview: "All the signs are that the plan has already in some senses begun."

Intelligence suggests Russia intends to launch an invasion that will encircle Ukrainian capital Kyiv, Mr Johnson said.

"People need to understand the sheer cost in human life that could entail," he said.

The prime minister was speaking from Munich, where world leaders are meeting for an annual security conference. 

The latest estimates by the US government suggests that between 169,000 and 190,000 Russian troops are now stationed along Ukraine's border, both in Russia and neighbouring Belarus - but this figure also includes rebels in eastern Ukraine.

Western officials have warned in recent weeks that Russia could be preparing to invade at any time, but Russia has denied the claims, saying troops are conducting military exercises in the region.

Asked whether a Russian invasion is still thought to be imminent, Mr Johnson said: "I'm afraid that that is what the evidence points to, there's no burnishing it.

"The fact is that all the signs are that the plan has already in some senses begun."

The prime minister said US President Joe Biden had told Western leaders intelligence suggested Russian forces were not just planning on entering Ukraine from the east, via Donbas, but down from Belarus and the area surrounding Kyiv.

"I'm afraid to say that the plan we are seeing is for something that could be really the biggest war in Europe since 1945 just in terms of sheer scale," the prime minister said. 

People needed to not only consider the potential loss of life of Ukrainians, but also of "young Russians", he added. 

Mr Johnson was speaking after meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and telling world leaders in a speech that any invasion of Ukraine by Russia would "echo around the world".

The full interview will be broadcast on BBC One's Sunday Morning programme at 09:00 GMT.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, facing a sharp spike in violence in and around territory held by Russia-backed rebels and increasingly dire warnings that Russia plans to invade, on Saturday called for Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet him and seek resolution to the crisis, Associated Press reported.

“I don’t know what the president of the Russian Federation wants, so I am proposing a meeting,” Zelenskyy said at the Munich Security Conference, where he also met with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. Zelenskyy said Russia could pick the location for the talks.

“Ukraine will continue to follow only the diplomatic path for the sake of a peaceful settlement.”

There was no immediate response from the Kremlin.

Zelenskyy spoke hours after separatist leaders in eastern Ukraine ordered a full military mobilization on Saturday while Western leaders made increasingly dire warnings that a Russian invasion of its neighbor appeared imminent.

In new signs of fears that a war could start within days, Germany and Austria told their citizens to leave Ukraine. German air carrier Lufthansa canceled flights to the capital, Kyiv, and to Odessa, a Black Sea port that could be a key target in an invasion.

The officials fled to a bomb shelter before hustling from the area, according to an Associated Press journalist who was on the tour.

Violence in eastern Ukraine has spiked in recent days as Ukraine and the two regions held by the rebels each accused the other of escalation. Russia on Saturday said at least two shells fired from a government-held part of eastern Ukraine landed across the border, but Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba dismissed that claim as “a fake statement.”

Sporadic violence has broken out for years along the line separating Ukrainian forces from the Russia-backed rebels, but the recent shelling and bombing spike could set off a full-scale war.

The United States and many European countries have alleged for months that Russia, which has moved about 150,000 troops near the Ukrainian border, is trying to create pretexts to invade. 

“They are uncoiling and are now poised to strike,” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Saturday during a visit to Lithuania. 

Harris opened her meeting with Zelenskyy by saying the world was at “a decisive moment in history.”

Earlier Saturday, Denis Pushilin, the head of the pro-Russia separatist government in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, cited an “immediate threat of aggression” from Ukrainian forces in his announcement. Ukrainian officials vehemently denied having plans to take rebel-controlled areas by force. 

“I appeal to all the men in the republic who can hold weapons to defend their families, their children, wives, mothers,” Pushilin said. ”Together we will achieve the coveted victory that we all need.”

A similar statement followed from his counterpart in the Luhansk region. On Friday, the rebels began evacuating civilians to Russia with an announcement that appeared to be part of their and Moscow’s efforts to paint Ukraine as the aggressor. 

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said the evacuation orders could be a tactic to provide the spark for a broader attack. 

“To say it very clearly, Ukraine did not give any grounds for the evacuation that was ordered yesterday,” she said. “Those are the facts on the ground. We must not allow supposed reasons for war to be constructed out of hot air.”

U.S. President Joe Biden said late Friday that based on the latest American intelligence, he was now “convinced” that Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine and assault the capital.

“As of this moment, I’m convinced he’s made the decision,” Biden said. “We have reason to believe that.” He reiterated that the assault could occur in the “coming days.”

Biden was briefed on Harris’ meetings in Munich and has been getting regular updates on the Ukraine situation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement Saturday. Biden will discuss Ukraine during a meeting with his National Security Council on Sunday, she said.

Meanwhile, Russia conducted massive nuclear drills on Saturday. The Kremlin said Putin, who pledged to protect Russia’s national interests against what it sees as encroaching Western threats, was watching the drills together with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko from the situation room.

Notably, the planned exercise involves the Crimea-based Black Sea Fleet. Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula after seizing it from Ukraine in 2014. .

Underscoring the West’s concerns of an imminent invasion, a U.S. defense official said an estimated 40% to 50% of the ground forces deployed in the vicinity of the Ukrainian border have moved into attack positions closer to the border. 

The shift has been underway for about a week, other officials have said, and does not necessarily mean Putin has decided to begin an invasion. The defense official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal U.S. military assessments.

The official also said the number of Russian ground units known as battalion tactical groups in the border area had grown to as many as 125, up from 83 two weeks ago. Each group has 750 to 1,000 soldiers.

Lines of communication between Moscow and the West remain open: the American and Russian defense chiefs spoke Friday. French President Emmanuel Macron scheduled a phone call with Putin on Sunday. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov agreed to meet next week.

Immediate worries focused on eastern Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces have been fighting the pro-Russia rebels since 2014 in a conflict that has killed some 14,000 people. Violations of a 2015 ceasefire agreement, including shelling and shooting along the line of contact, have been common. 

A car bomb exploded in the center of the rebel-controlled city of Donetsk on Friday. Adding to the tensions, two explosions shook the rebel-controlled city of Luhansk early Saturday. No injuries were reported in the incidents.

Ukraine’s military said two of its soldiers died in firing from the rebel side on Saturday.

By Saturday morning, the separatists in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, which form Ukraine’s industrial heartland known as the Donbas, said that thousands of residents of the rebel-controlled areas had been evacuated to Russia. 

Russia has issued about 700,000 passports to residents of the rebel-held territories. Claims that Russian citizens are being endangered might be used as justification for military action.

Pushilin, the head of the Donetsk rebel government, alleged in a video statement that Ukraine was going to order an imminent offensive in the area.

Metadata from two videos posted by the separatists announcing the evacuation show that the files were created two days ago, the AP confirmed. U.S. authorities have alleged that the Kremlin’s effort to come up with an invasion pretext could include staged, prerecorded videos.

Authorities in Russia’s Rostov region, which borders eastern Ukraine, declared a state of emergency because of the influx of evacuees. Media reports on Saturday described chaos at some of the camps assigned to accommodate the people from eastern Ukraine. The reports said there were long lines of buses and hundreds of people waiting in the cold for hours on end to be housed without access to food or bathroom facilities.

Putin ordered the Russian government to offer 10,000 rubles (about $130) to each evacuee, an amount equivalent to about half of an average monthly salary in eastern Ukraine.

Nepal Oil Corporation (NOC), the state-owned monopoly, hiked the prices of petroleum products on Thursday.

The NOC has decided to increase Rs 3 per litre each in petrol, diesel and kerosene.

As per the new revised rate, the petrol will now cost Rs 145 per litre and diesel and kerosene will cost Rs 128 per litre.

The NOC, however, has not increased the price of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG).

The decision will come into effect from today midnight.

As The Annapurna Express continues to break new grounds in reporting and analysis, we now bring to you our new weekly feature ‘InDepth’ under which we will surgically evaluate an issue of national importance for 10 consecutive weeks. To kick things off, we delve into the Kathmandu-Tarai fast track. 

The proposed Nijgadh International Airport in Bara district is among the 22 ‘national pride projects’. But its construction has been halted following a 2019 Supreme Court order. The court ruled that the project, which includes the feeling of potentially millions of trees, was a threat to local wildlife and ecosystem. 

To connect the airport with Kathmandu, a 72.5-km Kathmandu-Tarai expressway would be built. While airport construction has stopped, work on the expressway (fast track) continues, albeit at a leisurely pace: Nepal Army, which has been entrusted with the project, last reported a 16.1 percent progress. (The project was supposed to be completed by November 2021.) 

Like most other big projects in Nepal, the fast track too has been mired in controversy since the army bagged it in 2017. The project has been hamstrung by allegations of foul-play, cost and time overruns as well as fears over its expected social and environmental impacts. Why this mess? What can be done to improve things? What role should the army play? And how to mitigate the project’s negative impacts? We will analyze them all over the next 10 weeks. We start with a photo feature to give our readers a glimpse of the state of the road project.

1. Photo feature (February 17) 
2. Roundtable discussion (February 24) 
3. Explainer (March 03) 
4. Army’s involvement, pros and cons (March 10) 
5. What if… it was completed in Sept 2021? (March 17) 
6. Environmental concerns (March 24) 
7. The politics behind it (March 31) 
8. Social and cultural impact (April 07) 
9. Land politics (April 14) 
10. What next? (April 21)

A man walks at a construction site of Kathmandu-Nijgadh fast track at Bandare Kholchha, where excavators are cutting the hillside to make way for the expressway. 

A signboard lies on the ground near the site of the Lendanda tunnel construction. 

A dirt track opened at Godawari Municipality in Lalitpur. 

A view of the worker living quarters and machine parking area at Bandare Kholchha.

Track opening work in progress on a hillside at Makawanpurgadhi Rural Municipality, Makawanpur. 

A view of the track opened at Dakshinkali Municipality, Kathmandu. 

A temporary base for Nepal Army soldiers working for the fast track project at Makawanpurgadhi Rural Municipality, Makawanpur. 

Workers build metal components for the fast track at Bakaiya Rural Municipality, Makawanpur. 

A view of Khokana village in Lalitpur, whose residents have been opposing the fast track that passes through their land. 

A construction site at Bakaiya Rural Municipality, Makawanpur, where tunnel portal works are underway. 

An excavator works at a track opening site at Bandare Kholchha. 

A worker welds a metal frame for the fast track at Bakaiya Rural Municipality, Makawanpur. 

An opening cut through a hill to make way for the fast track at Godawari Municipality, Lalitpur. 

Shikali Temple at Khokana, Lalitpur, which the Nepal Army had previously planned to move to make way for the fast track. The plan was withdrawn following local protests.

Leave it to Elon Musk to stir up controversy without saying - or tweeting - a word.

In November, according to a regulatory filling, the Tesla CEO donated to charity about 5 million shares of company stock, worth $5.7 billion. Since the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission was made public Monday, Tesla hasn't responded to a request for comment. Nor has Musk mentioned the donation on Twitter, his favorite communications forum, Associated Press reported.

Yet that hasn't quelled debates in and out of philanthropy, about transparency, tax deductions and congressional legislation, along with speculation about where exactly the money was donated. Some experts say Musk likely donated his shares to his donor-advised fund, or DAF for short. DAFs are essentially charitable investment accounts in which donors can claim a tax deduction upfront but aren't legally required to distribute the money.

Experts say that would be the most advantageous strategy for Musk, currently the world's richest man with an approximate net worth of more than $220 billion. A DAF donation would allow him to claim a tax deduction of as much as 30% of his 2021 adjusted gross income, instead of 20% if he had donated it instead to his foundation. Musk could also deduct the fair market value of the stock, instead of its original value.

"He can do whatever he wants with his money - anyone can," said John Arnold, a billionaire philanthropist who co-founded the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and Arnold Ventures with his wife, Laura. "But if he's getting a subsidy from society through this tax deduction, then there's a responsibility that goes with it."

Whether or not Musk donated his Tesla shares to a DAF, Arnold said, the possibility that he did highlights a questionable tax loophole for many wealthy Americans.

"Society is giving them this tax deduction, this subsidy to encourage more resources to get to communities," Arnold said. "But the way that the tax law is structured today, it doesn't necessitate that that happens. You can get the tax deduction today, and there's no requirement for that money ever to get to the community. You can give money to a donor advised fund and keep it in a tax-free investment account forever."

Arnold and others who want to address that loophole have formed a coalition, the Initiative to Accelerate Charitable Giving, that seeks to tighten requirements for DAFs and other financial vehicles used by the wealthy.

This month, a bipartisan group of lawmakers proposed a bill in the House of Representatives that would limit how long donations can remain in a DAF untaxed. Similar bipartisan legislation was introduced last year in the U.S. Senate.

Many DAF proponents oppose the changes, arguing that DAFs, with an average payout rate of around 20%, are distributing money faster and more robustly than many private foundations, whose average distribution is generally only slightly above the 5% annually required by law, according to the Stanford Law School Policy Lab on Donor Advised Funds.

If Musk did place Tesla shares in a DAF, the tax law's intent backfired, Arnold said. The community received neither the tax revenue generated by Musk's income on the shares or the philanthropic benefit that the tax deduction was meant to create.

DAFs also allow for anonymity. Benjamin Soskis, a historian of philanthropy and a senior researcher at the Urban Institute, suggested that Musk's donation shows norms may be tipping towards a lack of disclosure about where large gifts are landing.

"When you're giving away that much money, it is by definition a matter of public interest where it's going to," Soskis said.

Generally, Musk's approach to donations has differed from that of many other wealthy donors, who are often accused of publicizing their gifts as a way to burnish their reputations.

About a month before donating his stock, the notoriously provocative Musk engaged in a Twitter fight with the head of the United Nations World Food Programme, who had urged billionaires to donate $6 billion on a "one time basis" to help end starvation.

Musk said he would sell $6 billion of Tesla stock and donate the proceeds to the agency if it could show how the money would solve world hunger. David Beasley, the organization's executive director, said this week that it had yet to receive a donation from the Tesla CEO.

Soskis, of the Urban Institute, has suggested that there's room for Musk to be more transparent about his gifts while still signaling his "contempt" for "elite public opinion," as the Tesla CEO frequently does.

At times, Musk does provide transparency about his donations. Last year, he gave $50 million to St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. He also donated about $30 million to a variety of public schools and nonprofits in south Texas, where SpaceX builds its rockets.

His private foundation's latest IRS filing shows he donated 11,000 Tesla shares to the charity in 2019. From July that year to June 2020, the foundation distributed $23.6 million in grants. Some of that went directly to working charities, but a large chunk - $20.7 million - went to Fidelity Charitable, a grantmaker that sponsors DAFs.

Some who have worked with Musk explain his style of philanthropy by saying he isn't focused on looking good.

Marcius Extavour, vice president of climate and energy at XPrize, which manages Musk's $100 million prize for carbon removal, says Musk wanted the project to be focused on finding impactful solutions and didn't want it to use his image everywhere. That's in contrast to some other donors, who, Extavour asserts, seem more concerned about invitations to speaking engagements and other events.

"It's been pretty nice to work with the Musk Foundation as a donor who is not.. nitpicking on how we describe this or how we describe that," Extavour said. "Or making sure they get the shine or the limelight."

Steve Greanias, general manager of fundraising solutions for the fundraising platform GiveSmart, says that like most people working in philanthropy, he is curious about where Musk's money went and how it was or will be used. Yet he doesn't think it's necessarily everyone's business to know. His own platform, which serves about 8,000 nonprofits and has processed about $800 million in donations, accepts anonymous donations.

"If you have this kind of money and you want to do good with it and you don't feel the need to be recognized for it, that's OK," Greanias said. "That's between you and the organization. As long as your relationship's OK with them, it shouldn't matter if the world wants to know where money came from."

The CPN (Unified Socialist) has decided to allow Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) to table in the Parliament for discussions.

A Standing Committee meeting of the party held on Saturday made the decision to this effect, party spokesperson Jagannath Khatiwada said.

The party, however, said that some of the provisions of the MCC should be amended before endorsing it.

He opined that the MCC should be taken ahead only after forging consensus among the ruling coalition parties.

The meeting concluded that the coalition should not break down because of the MCC.