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The Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) and Nabil Bank have reached an agreement to allow public to use bank's washrooms for free.

As per the agreement, public can use toilets set up in 17 bank branches including its central office in the city for free for five years. The service is completely free and repair, tidy and water management will be borne by the bank itself.

Following the election of Balendra Shah to the KMC mayor, the metropolis has urged and intensified cooperation with private sector in a bid to address the problems of public toilets in the city. As per the effort, private sector has been asked to open their toilets for public use for free.

For uniformity and identification of private toilets that are allowed for public use for free, 'Sarbajanik Shauchalaya' (Public Toilet) against the blue background has been written in the Nepali language.

As per the decision taken by the first meeting of the KMC under the leadership of Mayor Shah, 58 public toilets within the city would be reused after repair, and 60 more would be open for public use for free through cooperation with private sector, said the KMC administration chief Mahesh Kafle.

People in Thailand can now grow cannabis plants at home and sell the crop after the nation removed marijuana from its banned narcotics list, BBC reported.

The nation is the first to advance such a move in South-East Asia, a region known for its stringent drug laws.

But recreational use is still banned, even though advocates say the easing effectively decriminalises marijuana.

The government is hoping that developing a local cannabis trade will boost agriculture and tourism.

It's even giving away one million cannabis seedlings to citizens to encourage pick-up.

"It is an opportunity for people and the state to earn income from marijuana and hemp," said Anutin Charnvirakul, deputy prime minister and health minister, on his social media accounts last month, according to BBC.

He shared a photo on Facebook of a chicken dish cooked with cannabis, adding that anyone could sell the dish if they followed the rules - the main one being that products must contain less than 0.2% of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the compound that gives users that "high" feeling.

From Thursday, households will be able to cultivate up to six cannabis pot plants at home if they register with authorities, and companies can also farm the plant with a permit. 

Diners will also be able to order cannabis-infused dishes and drinks at restaurants.

Clinics across the country can also more freely offer cannabis as a treatment. Thailand was the first in Asia to legalise medicinal cannabis use in 2018.

However, using the drug for personal use is still illegal. Officials have warned people against smoking in public, saying it's considered a public nuisance and offenders risked arrest, BBC reported.

Under the plan the government says it also aims to release about 4,000 prisoners convicted of cannabis-related offences.

Thailand, with its year-round tropical climate, has long had a history with cannabis which many locals commonly used in traditional medicines.

A wider draft law on cannabis control is currently being considered in Thai parliament. Advocates believe that coming years could see a gradual relaxing on the rules governing use, according to BBC.

Scientists have for the first time found microplastics in freshly fallen Antarctic snow, BBC reported.

Researchers from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand collected samples from 19 sites in Antarctica and each contained tiny plastic fragments.

Microplastics stem from the erosion of plastic materials and are smaller than a grain of rice - sometimes even invisible to the naked eye.

The researchers found an average of 29 particles per litre of melted snow, according to BBC.

They identified 13 different types of plastics and the most common was polyethylene terephthalate (PET), mostly used in soft-drink bottles and clothing. This was found in 79% of the samples.

Workers pulled scores of bodies from smashed buildings in an “endless caravan of death” inside the devastated city of Mariupol, authorities said Wednesday, while fears of a global food crisis escalated over Ukraine’s inability to export millions of tons of grain through its blockaded ports, Associated Press reported.

At the same time, Ukrainian and Russian forces battled fiercely for control of Sievierodonestk, a city that has emerged as central to Moscow’s grinding campaign to capture Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland, known as the Donbas.

As the fighting dragged on, the human cost of the war continued to mount. In many of Mariupol’s buildings, workers are finding 50 to 100 bodies each, according to a mayoral aide in the Russian-held port city in the south.

Petro Andryushchenko said on the Telegram app that the bodies are being taken in an “endless caravan of death” to a morgue, landfills and other places. At least 21,000 Mariupol civilians were killed during the weeks-long Russian siege, Ukrainian authorities have estimated.

The consequences of the war are being felt far beyond Eastern Europe because shipments of Ukrainian grain are bottled up inside the country, driving up the price of food.

Ukraine, long known as the “bread basket of Europe,” is one of the world’s biggest exporters of wheat, corn and sunflower oil, but much of that flow has been halted by the war and a Russian blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. An estimated 22 million tons of grain remains in Ukraine. The failure to ship it out is endangering the food supply in many developing countries, especially in Africa, according to Associated Press.

Russia expressed support Wednesday for a UN plan to create a safe corridor at sea that would allow Ukraine to resume grain shipments. The plan, among other things, calls for Ukraine to remove mines from the waters near the Black Sea port of Odesa.

But Russia is insisting that it be allowed to check incoming vessels for weapons. And Ukraine has expressed fear that clearing the mines could enable Russia to attack the coast. Ukrainian officials said the Kremlin’s assurances that it wouldn’t do that cannot be trusted.

European Council President Charles Michel on Wednesday accused the Kremlin of “weaponizing food supplies and surrounding their actions with a web of lies, Soviet-style.”

While Russia, which is also a major supplier of grain to the rest of the world, has blamed the looming food crisis on Western sanctions against Moscow, the European Union heatedly denied that and said the blame rests with Russia itself for waging war against Ukraine.

“These are Russian ships and Russian missiles that are blocking the export of crops and grain,” Michel said. “Russian tanks, bombs and mines are preventing Ukraine from planting and harvesting.”

The West has exempted grain and other food from its sanctions against Russia, but the U.S. and the EU have imposed sweeping punitive measures against Russian ships. Moscow argues that those restrictions make it impossible to use its ships to export grain, and also make other shipping companies reluctant to carry its product, Associated Press reported.

Turkey has sought to play a role in negotiating an end to the war and in brokering the resumption of grain shipments. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu met on Wednesday with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. Ukraine was not invited to the talks.