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Nepal's marijuana ban could soon be up in smoke as lawmakers mull a return to the liberal drug policies that once made the Himalayan republic a popular pit stop on the overland 'hippie trail', AFP reported.

Half a century ago, thousands of fun-seeking backpackers from around the world made their way to Kathmandu to buy potent hash strains from government-licensed stores on 'Freak Street' - a lane named for long-haired and unkempt foreign visitors.

Washington's global war on drugs, and its accompanying pressure on foreign governments, prompted the closure of the capital's dispensaries in 1973, along with a cultivation ban that forced farmers to rip up their cannabis plants.

Now, with Western countries easing their own prohibitions on marijuana, the government and legal reform campaigners say it is time to stop criminalising a potent cash crop with centuries-old ties to the country's culture and religious practices.

'It is not justifiable that a poor country like ours has to treat cannabis as a drug,' Nepal's Health Minister Birodh Khatiwada told AFP.

'Our people are being punished... and our corruption increases because of smuggling as we follow decisions of developed countries that are now doing as they please.'

Khatiwada sponsored Nepal's first parliamentary motion advocating an end to the ban in January 2020, and two months later a bill was put to lawmakers seeking partial legalisation.

A change in government has stalled progress since, but in December of that year Nepal backed a successful campaign to have the United Nations reclassify cannabis out of its list of the world's most harmful drugs.

Nepal's home ministry has since launched a study into the medicinal properties and export potential of marijuana that is expected to support a revived parliamentary push to end the ban.

'It is a medicine,' said prominent activist Rajiv Kafle, who lives with HIV and began campaigning for legalisation after using the drug to treat his symptoms.

Kafle said ending the ban would be an 'important booster' to Nepal's tourism industry, which is still reeling from the Covid pandemic, and would also benefit Nepalis suffering from chronic illnesses, according to AFP.

While the current law allows for medicinal cannabis, there is no established framework for therapeutic use and the government still enforces a blanket ban on consumption and trafficking.

'So many patients are using it, but they are forced to do it illegally,' Kafle told AFP. 'They can get caught anytime.'

Enforcement of the ban is already patchy - tourists visiting Nepal's backpacker haunts are unlikely to encounter the long arm of the law for lighting up a joint in a Kathmandu back alley.

Authorities also look the other way during an annual festival held to honour the Hindu deity Shiva, the destroyer of evil, who is regularly depicted clasping a chillum pipe used to smoke cannabis.

Ganja smoke wafts around the grounds of Kathmandu's Pashupatinath Temple each year as holy men gather to celebrate and worshippers fill their own chillums with Shiva's 'gift'.

But elsewhere, penalties are harsh and regularly enforced. Marijuana dealers risk up to 10 years' jail time and police seize and destroy thousands of cannabis plants across the country each year, AFP reported.

'Part of our culture'

Prohibition interrupted a long tradition of cannabis cultivation in Nepal, where plants grew wild and their stems, leaves and resin were used in food, as clothing fibres or as a component of traditional Ayurvedic medicines.

'The ban destroyed an important income source in this region,' a farmer in western Dang district told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity. 'It ignored how it was part of our culture and everyday life, not just... an intoxicant.'

Several Western countries have ended their own bans on marijuana use in recent years, including parts of the United States, which once spearheaded the global campaign to criminalise the drug, according to AFP.

In California, dispensaries sell 'Himalayan Gold', a strain that originated from Nepal and calls to mind the country's historic associations with weed culture.

A rejuvenated marijuana trade tailored to burgeoning export demand and cashing in on Nepal's existing 'international brand value' could prove highly lucrative, said Barry Bialek, a doctor working at a cannabis research centre at Kathmandu University, AFP reported.

'As a cash crop it can be good locally but also in the global market,' he told AFP. 'It can be a leader in the world.'

An unusually early, record-shattering heat wave in India has reduced wheat yields, raising questions about how the country will balance its domestic needs with ambitions to increase exports and make up for shortfalls due to Russia's war in Ukraine, Associated Press reported.

Gigantic landfills in India's capital New Delhi have caught fire in recent weeks. Schools in eastern Indian state Odisha have been shut for a week and in neighboring West Bengal, schools are stocking up on oral rehydration salts for kids. On Tuesday, Rajgarh, a city of over 1.5 million people in central India, was the country's hottest, with daytime temperatures peaking at 46.5 degrees Celsius (114.08 Fahrenheit). Temperatures breached the 45 C (113 F) mark in nine other cities.

But it was the heat in March - the hottest in India since records first started being kept in 1901 - that stunted crops. Wheat is very sensitive to heat, especially during the final stage when its kernels mature and ripen. Indian farmers time their planting so that this stage coincides with India's usually cooler spring.

Climate change has made India's heat wave hotter, said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Imperial College of London. She said that before human activities increased global temperatures, heat waves like this year's would have struck India once in about half a century, according to the Associated Press.

"But now it is a much more common event - we can expect such high temperatures about once in every four years," she said.

India's vulnerability to extreme heat increased 15% from 1990 to 2019, according to a 2021 report by the medical journal The Lancet. It is among the top five countries where vulnerable people, like the old and the poor, have the highest exposure to heat. It and Brazil have the the highest heat-related mortality in the world, the report said.

Farm workers like Baldev Singh are among the most vulnerable. Singh, a farmer in Sangrur in northern India's Punjab state, watched his crop shrivel before his eyes as an usually cool spring quickly shifted to unrelenting heat. He lost about a fifth of his yield. Others lost more.

"I am afraid the worst is yet to come," Singh said.

Punjab is India's "grain bowl" and the government has encouraged cultivation of wheat and rice here since the 1960s. It is typically the biggest contributor to India's national reserves and the government had hoped to buy about a third of this year's stock from the region. But government assessments predict lower yields this year, and Devinder Sharma, an agriculture policy expert in northern Chandigarh city. said he expected to get 25% less.

The story is the same in other major wheat-producing states like Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

Overall, India purchased over 43 million metric tons (47.3 million US tons) of wheat in 2021. Sharma estimates it will instead get 20% to nearly 50% less, Associated Press reported.

Even though it is the world's second-largest producer of wheat, India exports only a small fraction of its harvest. It had been looking to capitalize on the global disruption to wheat supplies from Russia's war in Ukraine and find new markets for its wheat in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

That looks uncertain given the tricky balance the government must maintain between demand and supply. It needs about 25 million tons (27.5 million US tons) of wheat for the vast food welfare program that usually feeds more than 80 million people.

Before the pandemic, India had vast stocks that far exceeded its domestic needs - a buffer against the risk of famine, according to the Associated Press.

South Africa may be entering a fifth COVID wave earlier than expected after a sustained rise in infections over the past 14 days that seems to be driven by the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron sub-variants, health officials and scientists said on Friday, Reuters reported.

The country that has recorded the most coronavirus cases and deaths on the African continent only exited a fourth wave around January and had predicted a fifth wave could start in May or June, early in the southern hemisphere winter.

Health Minister Joe Phaahla told a briefing that although hospitalisations were picking up there was so far no dramatic change in admissions to intensive care units or deaths.

He said at this stage health authorities had not been alerted to any new variant, other than changes to the dominant one circulating, Omicron, according to Reuters.

Infectious disease specialist Richard Lessells told the same briefing that waning immunity from previous waves could be contributing to the earlier-than-expected resurgence in cases.

He said the rising share of infections attributed to the BA.4 and BA.5 sub-lineages of Omicron suggested they had a growth advantage over other Omicron sub-variants like BA.2.

But so far there was no sign that BA.4 and BA.5 were causing significantly more severe disease, said Waasila Jassat from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases.

South Africa has reported more than 3.7 million COVID cases and over 100,000 deaths during the pandemic. On Thursday, the WHO’s Africa office flagged the rise in South Africa’s infections as the main driver of an uptick on the African continent, Reuters reported.

Senior health official Nicholas Crisp also said on Friday that the country had enough vaccine doses and was not planning to procure more. He added the government was not intending to buy Pfizer’s (PFE.N) COVID treatment pill Paxlovid for public sector patients, partly because it was very expensive, according to Reuters.

Three persons died when a jeep they were travelling in met with an accident at Nakkale in Tinpatan Rural Municipality-5 of Sindhuli district on Friday. 

The identities of the deceased are yet to be ascertained.

The jeep (Bagmati Province-01-026 Cha-0456) carrying vegetables met with the accident this afternoon, DSP Manoj Lama of the District Police Office, Sindhuli said. 

He said that police personnel and locals are carrying out rescue operations.