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An impeachment motion has been filed against  Chief Justice Cholendra Shamsher JB Rana on Sunday.

As many as 98 lawmakers from the ruling coalition filed the motion against Chief Justice Rana at the Parliament Secretariat this afternoon.

Maoist Centre Chief Whip Dev Gurung said that the motion was filed as per Article 101 (2) of the Constitution.

Lawmakers from the Nepali Congress, CPN (Maoist Centre) and CPN (Unifed Socialist) registered the impeachment motion, he said.

Rana will be suspended from the position with immediate effect after the Parliament Secretariat wrote to the President’s Office and the Judicial Council about the motion.

Senior-most justice Deepak Kumar Karki will take charge of the Supreme Court as acting chief justice after the suspension of  Rana.

The Nepal BAR Association has been protesting against Rana for over three months demanding resignation of the Chief Justice.

Rana is the second Chief Justice to face an impeachment motion in Nepal’s judicial history.

Sushila Karki was the first person to face the impeachment motion on May 1, 2017.

President Joe Biden told Russia’s Vladimir Putin that invading Ukraine would cause “widespread human suffering” and that the West was committed to diplomacy to end the crisis but “equally prepared for other scenarios,” the White House said Saturday, Associated Press reported.

It offered no suggestion that the hourlong call diminished the threat of an imminent war in Europe.

Biden also said the United States and its allies would respond “decisively and impose swift and severe costs” if the Kremlin attacked its neighbor, according to the White House.

The two presidents spoke a day after Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, warned that U.S. intelligence shows a Russian invasion could begin within days and before the Winter Olympics in Beijing end on Feb. 20.

Russia denies it intends to invade but has massed well over 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border and has sent troops to exercises in neighboring Belarus, encircling Ukraine on three sides. U.S. officials say Russia’s buildup of firepower has reached the point where it could invade on short notice.

The conversation came at a critical moment for what has become the biggest security crisis between Russia and the West since the Cold War. U.S. officials believe they have mere days to prevent an invasion and enormous bloodshed in Ukraine. And while the U.S. and its NATO allies have no plans to send troops to Ukraine to fight Russia, an invasion and resulting punishing sanctions could reverberate far beyond the former Soviet republic, affecting energy supplies, global markets and the power balance in Europe.

“President Biden was clear with President Putin that while the United States remains prepared to engage in diplomacy, in full coordination with our Allies and partners, we are equally prepared for other scenarios,” the White House statement said.

The call was “professional and substantive” but produced “no fundamental change in the dynamic that has been unfolding now for several weeks,” according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters following the call on condition of anonymity.

The official added that it remains unclear whether Putin has made a final decision to move forward with military action.

Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s top foreign policy aide, said that while tensions have been escalating for months, in recent days “the situation has simply been brought to the point of absurdity.”

He said Biden mentioned the possible sanctions that could be imposed on Russia, but “this issue was not the focus during a fairly long conversation with the Russian leader.”

Before talking to Biden, Putin had a telephone call with French President Emmanuel Macron, who met with him in Moscow earlier in the week to try to resolve the crisis. A Kremlin summary of the call suggested that little progress was made toward cooling down the tensions.

Putin complained in the call that the United States and NATO have not responded satisfactorily to Russian demands that Ukraine be prohibited from joining the military alliance and that NATO pull back forces from Eastern Europe.

In a sign that American officials are getting ready for a worst-case scenario, the United States announced plans to evacuate most of its staff from the embassy in the Ukrainian capital. Britain joined other European nations in urging its citizens to leave Ukraine.

Canada has shuttered its embassy in Kyiv and relocated its diplomatic staff to a temporary office in Lviv, located in the western part of the country, Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly said Saturday. Lviv is home to a Ukrainian military base that has served as the main hub for Canada’s 200-soldier training mission in the former Soviet country.

The timing of any possible Russian military action remained a key question.

The U.S. picked up intelligence that Russia is looking at Wednesday as a target date, according to a U.S. official familiar with the findings. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and did so only on condition of anonymity, would not say how definitive the intelligence was.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he told his Russian counterpart Saturday that “further Russian aggression would be met with a resolute, massive and united trans-Atlantic response.”

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to project calm as he observed military exercises Saturday near Crimea, the peninsula that Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.

“We are not afraid, we’re without panic, all is under control,” he said.

Ukrainian armed forces chief commander Lt. Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhny and Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov issued a more defiant joint statement.

“We are ready to meet the enemy, and not with flowers, but with Stingers, Javelins and NLAWs” — anti-tank and -aircraft weapons, they said. “Welcome to hell!”

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, also held telephone discussions on Saturday.

Further U.S.-Russia tensions arose on Saturday when the Defense Ministry summoned the U.S. Embassy’s military attache after it said the navy detected an American submarine in Russian waters near the Kuril Islands in the Pacific. The submarine declined orders to leave, but departed after the navy used unspecified “appropriate means,” the ministry said.

Adding to the sense of crisis, the Pentagon ordered an additional 3,000 U.S. troops to Poland to reassure allies.

The U.S. has urged all American citizens in Ukraine to leave the country immediately, and Sullivan said those who remain should not expect the U.S. military to rescue them in the event that air and rail transportation is severed after a Russian invasion.

The Biden administration has been warning for weeks that Russia could invade Ukraine soon, but U.S. officials had previously said the Kremlin would likely wait until after the Winter Games ended so as not to antagonize China.

Sullivan told reporters on Friday that U.S. intelligence shows that Russia could take invade during the Olympics. He said military action could start with missile and air attacks, followed by a ground offensive.

“Russia has all the forces it needs to conduct a major military action,” Sullivan said, adding that “Russia could choose, in very short order, to commence a major military action against Ukraine.” He said the scale of such an invasion could range from a limited incursion to a strike on Kyiv, the capital.

Russia scoffed at the U.S. talk of urgency.

“The hysteria of the White House is more indicative than ever,” said Maria Zakharova, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman. “The Anglo-Saxons need a war. At any cost. Provocations, misinformation and threats are a favorite method of solving their own problems.”

Zakharova said her country had “optimized” staffing at its own embassy in Kyiv in response to concerns about possible military actions from the Ukrainian side.

In addition to the more than 100,000 ground troops that U.S. officials say Russia has assembled along Ukraine’s eastern and southern borders, the Russians have deployed missile, air, naval and special operations forces, as well as supplies to sustain a war. This week, Russia moved six amphibious assault ships into the Black Sea, augmenting its capability to land marines on the coast.

Biden has bolstered the U.S. military presence in Europe as reassurance to allies on NATO’s eastern flank. The 3,000 additional soldiers ordered to Poland come on top of 1,700 who are on their way there. The U.S. Army also is shifting 1,000 soldiers from Germany to Romania, which like Poland shares a border with Ukraine.

Russia is demanding that the West keep former Soviet countries out of NATO. It also wants NATO to refrain from deploying weapons near its border and to roll back alliance forces from Eastern Europe — demands flatly rejected by the West.

Russia and Ukraine have been locked in a bitter conflict since 2014, when Ukraine’s Kremlin-friendly leader was driven from office by a popular uprising. Moscow responded by annexing the Crimean Peninsula and then backing a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine, where fighting has killed over 14,000 people.

A 2015 peace deal brokered by France and Germany helped halt large-scale battles, but regular skirmishes have continued, and efforts to reach a political settlement have stalled.

Properties worth around Rs 8 million were destroyed when a fire destroyed four shops in Gaighat, the district headquarters of Udayapur, on Sunday.

The fire destroyed the shops constructed on the land of Baburaja Prajapati near Green City Party Palace in Triyuga Municipality-12 at around 1:30 am today.

According to the District Police Office, Udayapur, the fire was taken under control with the help of locals, Nepal Police and Armed Police Force personnel backed by three fire engines at around 4 am.

Nepal logged 836 new Covid-19 cases and four deaths on Saturday.

According to the Ministry of Health and Population, 4, 260 swab samples were tested in the RT-PCR method, of which 491 returned positive. Likewise, 2,394 people underwent antigen tests, of which 245 tested positive.

The Ministry said that 1,826 infected people recovered from the disease in the last 24 hours.

As of today, there are 26, 102 active cases in the country.

Scott Morrison says Australian citizens in Ukraine should leave the country as soon as possible as the situation there is increasingly dangerous, the Guardian reported.

“Our advice is clear, this is a dangerous situation ... you should seek to make your way out of Ukraine,” the Australian prime minister said in Sydney on Saturday.

He said the federal government had begun warning Australians in the troubled eastern European nation to “put themselves in a position of safety” late last year.

“We have continued that well into last month and it has been a clear message for some time now that Australians in Ukraine should be seeking to get out of the country.”

The prime minister said the government’s advice was “very clear”.

His comments come after the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who left Australia on Saturday, said Russia could invade Ukraine at any time and the US and other countries urged their citizens to leave.

Following talks as part of the Quad strategic partnership, Blinken said the US would maintain its dual-track approach to Russia and the forces it has amassed at the border “unprovoked”.

That strategy involved the US keeping diplomatic dialogue open, while also building deterrences and defences if Russia chooses to invade.

“[We’ve been] making it clear to Russia that if it chooses the path of renewed aggression, it will face massive consequences,” Blinken said on Friday.

An estimated 4,000 foreign fighters, including Australians, have joined Ukraine’s militias and regular armed forces. Numbers are likely to increase if Russia invades.

Blinken said what happens in Ukraine matters in Australia and the Indo-Pacific region, in an apparent reference to China.

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“What’s at stake is not simply, as important as it is, Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Its sovereignty, its independence,” he said.

“But very basic principles that have been hard fought for after two world wars, and a cold war: undergirded security, peace and prosperity for countries around the world.

“Principles like one country can’t simply change the borders of another by force. Principles like one country can’t simply dictate to another its choices, its policies, with whom it will associate.

“If we allow those principles to be challenged with impunity, even if it’s half a world away, that will have an impact here as well. Others are watching. Others are looking to all of us to see how we respond.”

In Friday’s Quad meeting with counterparts from the US, India and Japan, the Australian foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, said she reiterated her “very deep concerns” about the presence of Russia’s military on the Ukrainian border.

“We will continue to support our allies and partners to deter this sort of aggression and to raise the costs of this kind of behaviour.”

The meeting came a week after China’s Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin of Russia signed a joint statement calling on the west to “abandon the ideologised approaches of the cold war”, as the two leaders showcased their warming relationship in Beijing at the start of the Winter Olympics.

This so-called “no limits” agreement was one of the developments discussed at Friday’s meeting of the Quad foreign ministers.

Payne said Russia and China’s agreement was “concerning because it doesn’t represent a global order that squares with those ambitions for freedom and openness and sovereignty and the protection of territorial integrity”.

She said rules and norms were “under pressure, in particular from authoritarian regimes”.

“Australia, in our actions, works to support a world order that favours freedom – where rules, not power and coercion, resolve disputes,” she said.

Payne reiterated Australia’s “strong support for Ukraine sovereignty and territorial integrity” and signalled Australia was ready to join an international sanctions packagetargeted at Russia.

Earlier, Morrison met with the visiting foreign ministers and said he appreciated their support as Australia weathered“coercion and pressure” from China.

“We live in a very fragile, fragmented and contested world, and that is no more accentuated than here in our Indo-Pacific,” Morrison told the earlier meeting.

A meeting of the top leaders of three major political parties held at the Prime Minister's official residence in Baluwatar to forge consensus on the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) ended inconclusively on Saturday.

Prime Minister and Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur held the meeting with CPN (Maoist Centre) Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal and CPN (Unified Socialist) Chairman Madhav Nepal this afternoon.

During the meeting, the leaders discussed tabling MCC in the Parliament.

PM's press advisor Govinda Pariyar said that the next meeting will be held this evening.

Prime Minister Deuba is in favour of endorsing the MCC compact at the earliest while Dahal and Nepal against ratifying the compact in the existing form.

A journalist has been shot dead in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, the fifth killed in the country this year, state authorities said.

Heber López, director of the online news site Noticias Web, was killed leaving a recording studio in the port city of Salina Cruz, said an official with the Oaxaca state security agency, who requested anonymity.

Oaxaca state prosecutor, Arturo Peimbert Calvo, told Milenio TV that two suspects in the killing were in custody.

López’s murder follows those of four journalists in January.

On 31 January, Roberto Toledo, a camera operator and video editor for the online site Monitor Michoacan, was shot by assailants as he prepared for an interview in Zitacuaro, Michoacan.

In the border city of Tijuana, reporter Lourdes Maldonado López was found shot to death inside her car on 23 January, and six days earlier crime photographer Margarito Martínez was gunned downoutside his home in the same city.

Reporter José Luis Gamboa was killed in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz in an attack on 10 January.

Over 12 million children in the US have tested positive for COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic, according to the latest report of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children's Hospital Association. 

A total of 12,042,870 cases of COVID-19 in children had been reported across the country as of February 3, and children represented 18.9 percent of all confirmed cases, according to the report published late Monday. 

COVID-19 cases among children have spiked dramatically across the U.S. during the Omicron variant surge. 

Almost 4.2 million child cases were reported since the beginning of January. For the week ending February 3, nearly 632,000 additional child COVID-19 cases were reported, according to the report. 

Over 1.4 million child cases have been added in the past two weeks. 

This marks the 26th week in a row child COVID-19 cases in the U.S. are above 100,000. Since the first week of September, there have been nearly 7 million additional child cases, according to the AAP.

Source(s): Xinhua News Agency