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The mayor of the besieged port city of Mariupol put the number of civilians killed there at more than 5,000 Wednesday, as Ukraine collected evidence of Russian atrocities on the ruined outskirts of Kyiv and braced for what could become a climactic battle for control of the country’s industrial east, Associated Press reported.

Ukrainian authorities continued gathering up the dead in shattered towns outside the capital amid telltale signs Moscow’s troops killed civilians indiscriminately before retreating over the past several days.

In other developments, the US and its Western allies moved to impose new sanctions against the Kremlin over what they branded war crimes.

And Russia completed the pullout of all of its estimated 24,000 or more troops from the Kyiv and Chernihiv areas in the north, sending them into Belarus or Russia to resupply and reorganize, probably to return to the fight in the east, a US defense official speaking on condition of anonymity said, according to the Associated Press.

In his nightly address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that the Russian military continues to build up its forces in preparation for the new offensive in the east, where the Kremlin has said its goal is to “liberate” the Donbas, Ukraine’s mostly Russian-speaking industrial heartland. He said Ukraine, too, was preparing for battle.

“We will fight and we will not retreat,” he said. “We will seek all possible options to defend ourselves until Russia begins to seriously seek peace. This is our land. This is our future. And we won’t give them up.”

Ukrainian authorities urged people living in the Donbas to evacuate now, ahead of an impending Russian offensive, while there is still time.

“Later, people will come under fire,” Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said, “and we won’t be able to do anything to help them.”

A Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence estimates, said it will take Russia’s battle-damaged forces as much as a month to regroup for a major push on eastern Ukraine.

Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko said that of the more than 5,000 civilians killed during weeks of Russian bombardment and street fighting, 210 were children. He said Russian forces bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death.

Boichenko said more than 90% of the city’s infrastructure has been destroyed. The attacks on the strategic southern city on the Sea of Azov have cut off food, water, fuel and medicine and pulverized homes and businesses, Associated Press reported.

British defense officials said 160,000 people remained trapped in the city, which had a prewar population of 430,000. A humanitarian relief convoy accompanied by the Red Cross has been trying for days without success to get into the city.

Capturing Mariupol would allow Russia to secure a continuous land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.

In the north, Ukrainian authorities said the bodies of least 410 civilians have been found in towns around Kyiv, victims of what Zelenskyy has portrayed as a Russian campaign of murder, rape, dismemberment and torture. Some victims had apparently been shot at close range. Some were found with their hands bound.

At a cemetery in the town of Bucha, northeast of Kyiv, workers began to load more than 60 bodies apparently collected over the past few days into a grocery shipping truck for transport to a facility for further investigation.

Zelenskyy accused Russia of interfering with an international investigation into possible war crimes by removing corpses and trying to hide other evidence in Bucha.

“We have information that the Russian troops have changed tactics and are trying to remove the dead people, the dead Ukrainians, from the streets and cellars of territory they occupied,” he said in his address. “This is only an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more.”

Switching from Ukrainian into Russian, Zelenskyy urged ordinary Russians “to somehow confront the Russian repressive machine” instead of being “equated with the Nazis for the rest of your life.”

He called on Russians to demand an end to the war, “if you have even a little shame about what the Russian military is doing in Ukraine.”

More bodies were yet to be collected in Bucha. The Associated Press saw two in a house in a silent neighborhood. From time to time there was the muffled boom of workers clearing the town of mines and other unexploded ordnance, according to the Associated Press.

Police said they found at least 20 bodies in the Makariv area west of Kyiv. In the village of Andriivka, residents said the Russians arrived in early March and took locals’ phones. Some people were detained, then released. Others met unknown fates. Some described sheltering for weeks in cellars normally used for storing vegetables for winter.

The soldiers were gone, and Russian armored personnel carriers, a tank and other vehicles sat destroyed on both ends of the road running through the village. Several buildings were reduced to mounds of bricks and corrugated metal. Residents struggled without heat, electricity or cooking gas, Associated Press reported.

Given the limited expectations from his visit, the three-day India trip of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba was a bit of a mixed bag. Easily the most notable agreement was the one allowing more export of Nepali electricity to India, and potentially even to Bhutan and Bangladesh under the Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal (BBIN) framework. Save for that, the trip achieved precious little.

PM Deuba’s delegation made much of the fact that the border row had been raised in bilateral talks with Narendra Modi. But then the end result was the same-old commitment to settle the issue through existing bilateral mechanisms. India’s reluctance to include the border issue in the final joint statement (which never came), also suggests that it is in no mood for concession. Nor was there any mention of the pending EPG report that the Indian prime minister has refused to receive.

On Pancheshwar, too, the same old bromides were repeated. There were also moments of controversy. For instance, the Nepali prime minister chose to visit the headquarters of the ruling Indian party while making no effort to reach out to any of the main opposition parties. While many Nepali Congress leaders tend to frown upon the cozy relations of Nepali communists with their Chinese counterparts, this was also unbecoming of the leader of Nepal’s oldest democratic party.

Despite Deuba’s visit, Nepal-India relations are still passing through difficult times, something that has continued since India’s 2015-16 border blockade. So long as India does not show the willingness to listen to Nepal's concerns—on the border, on the ever-widening trade deficit, on the EPG, and on not favoring hydropower built solely with its investment—it is hard to expect Nepal-India ties to improve much.

India has been increasingly concerned about the possibility of Nepal slipping out of its influence and going into the Chinese camp. That is a remote possibility given the deep and multi-faceted Nepal-India ties, whatever the political persuasions of the ruling parties in Kathmandu. Nevertheless, irrespective of the hardening of China’s Nepal stand in recent times, India’s reluctance to help Nepal overcome its pressing problems will continue to make it look north for help. 

India has decided to allow Nepal to sell an additional 325 MW of electricity in the competing Indian market.

During a press conference organized at the Ministry of Energy, Water Resources and Irrigation on Wednesday, Minister Pampha Bhusal said that India has given permission to sell 325 MW of electricity to its market.

Earlier, India had given permission to sell 39 MW of electricity while Nepal had been urging India to buy additional electricity.

During his visit to India, Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi had held a discussion on the buying and selling of electricity.

Following the discussion, the India’s Energy Ministry gave a permission to sell electricity to the Indian market from the Nepal Electricity Authority.

Nepal has been buying electricity from India at present.

Nepal reported 13 new Covid-19 cases on Wednesday.

According to the Ministry of Health and Population, 3, 358 swab samples were tested in the RT-PCR method, of which 10 returned positive. Likewise, 1, 449 people underwent antigen tests, of which three were tested positive.

The Ministry said that no one died of virus in the last 24 hours. The Ministry said that 57 infected people recovered from the disease.

As of today, there are 765 active cases in the country.

The Nepal Stock Exchange (NEPSE) plunged by 23. 41 points to close at 2,428.66 points on Wednesday.

Similarly, the sensitive dropped by 2. 63 points to close at 455. 60 points.

A total of 4,379,042 units of the shares of 226 companies were traded for Rs 1.99 billion.

Meanwhile, NESDO Sambridha Laghubitta Bittiya Sanstha Limited was the top gainer today with its price surging by 10 percent. Likewise, Emerging Nepal Limited was the top loser with its price dropped by 10 percent.

At the end of the day, the total market capitalization stood at Rs 3. 44 trillion.

Snuggled in the second floor of Labim Mall, Pulchowk, Social by Exotic Cafe and Lounge welcomes you with its lively atmosphere and amiable hospitality. It is a halal-certified restaurant that specializes in fragrant and flavorsome Indian food.

The menu offers elegant breakfast options to a lavish dining experience. Haluwa and Gelato ice creams are its most popular dessert items. 

The place also provides a variety of coffee options while its bar, famous for its cocktail Kayak and mocktail Mango Twakka, compliments the space designed for socialization. 

Social by Exotic has a seating capacity of around 60 people. It also has a meeting room that holds 12 people at a time. It’s an ideal place to be with your friends for weekend night outs. There is also live music every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evenings.  

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 Naan and Butter Chicken

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Scientists have observed an enormous planet about nine times the mass of Jupiter at a remarkably early stage of formation - describing it as still in the womb - in a discovery that challenges the current understanding of planetary formation, Reuters reported.

The researchers used the Subaru Telescope located near the summit of an inactive Hawaiian volcano and the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope to detect and study the planet, a gas giant orbiting unusually far from its young host star. Gas giants are planets, like our solar system's largest ones Jupiter and Saturn, composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, with swirling gases surrounding a smaller solid core.

"We think it is still very early on in its 'birthing' process," said astrophysicist Thayne Currie of the Subaru Telescope and the NASA-Ames Research Center, lead author of the study published on Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. "Evidence suggests that this is the earliest stage of formation ever observed for a gas giant."

It is embedded in an expansive disk of gas and dust, bearing the material that forms planets, that surrounds a star called AB Aurigae located 508 light years - the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km) - from Earth. This star got a fleeting moment of fame when its image appeared in a scene in the 2021 film "Don't Look Up."

About 5,000 planets beyond our solar system, or exoplanets, have been identified. This one, called AB Aur b, is among the largest. It is approaching the maximum size to be classified as a planet rather than a brown dwarf, a body intermediate between planet and star. It is heated by gas and dust falling into it, according to Reuters.

Planets in the process of formation - called protoplanets - have been observed around only one other star.

Almost all known exoplanets have orbits around their stars within the distance that separates our sun and its most faraway planet Neptune. But this planet orbits three times as far as Neptune from the sun and 93 times Earth's distance from the sun.

Its birth appears to be following a different process than the standard planetary formation model.

"The conventional thinking is that most - if not all - planets form by slow accretion of solids onto a rocky core, and that gas giants go through this phase before the solid core is massive enough to start accreting gas," said astronomer and study co-author Olivier Guyon of the Subaru Telescope and the University of Arizona.

In this scenario, protoplanets embedded in the disk surrounding a young star gradually grow out of dust- to boulder-sized solid objects and, if this core reaches several times Earth's mass, then begin accumulating gas from the disk, Reuters reported.

"This process cannot form giant planets at large orbital distance, so this discovery challenges our understanding of planet formation," Guyon said.

Instead, the researchers believe AB Aur b is forming in a scenario in which the disk around the star cools and gravity causes it to fragment into one or more massive clumps that form into planets.

"There's more than one way to cook an egg," Currie said. "And apparently there may be more than one way to form a Jupiter-like planet."

The star AB Aurigae is about 2.4 times more massive than our sun and almost 60 times brighter. It is about 2 million years old - an infant by stellar standards - compared to about 4.5 billion years for our middle-aged sun. The sun early in its life also was surrounded by a disk that gave rise to Earth and the other planets, according to Reuters.

"New astronomical observations continuously challenge our current theories, ultimately improving our understanding of the universe," Guyon said. "Planet formation is very complex and messy, with many surprises still ahead."

Nepali Ambassador to Pakistan Tapas Adhikari held a meeting with General Qamar Javed Bajwa, Chief of Army Staff of Pakistan, at the latter's office in Rawalpindi on Tuesday.

During the meeting, the duo discussed matters related to mutual interest and measures to improve the bilateral ties between the two countries, according to Nepali Embassy in Islamabad.