Journalist arrested for blackmailing politician with sex tapes

Kathmandu, Jul 14: After staking claim to Indian territories of Lipulekh-Kalapani in  a new controversial map,  Nepal Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli on Monday claimed that Ayodhya, the birthplace of Lord Rama, is in Nepal and Lord Rama was Nepali.

“Although real Ayodhya lies at Thori, city in the west of Birgunj, India has claimed that Lord Rama was born there. Due to these continuous claims, even we have believed that deity Sita got married to Prince Rama of India. However, in reality, Ayodhya is a village lying west of Birgunj,” Oli claimed at an event organised at Prime Minister's residence in Kathmandu.

The Prime Minister also blamed India of cultural encroachment by “creating a fake Ayodhya.”

“Balmiki Ashram is in Nepal and the holy place where King Dashrath had executed the rites to get the son is in Ridi. Dashrath’s son Ram was not an Indian and Ayodhya is also in Nepal,” he claimed.

In an attempt to save self from criticism, Oli questioned how Lord Rama could come to Janakpur to marry Sita when there were "no means" of communication. He further said that it to be impossible for Lord Rama to come to Janakpur from present Ayodhya that lies in India.

“Janakpur lies here and Ayodhya there and there is talk of marriage. There was neither telephone nor mobile then how could he know about Janakpur,” Oli said.

Kota, Jan 4: Following the death of an infant in the morning, the death toll in JK Lon Hospital here has risen to 107, officials said on Saturday.

A three-member state government committee of doctors, who was sent to investigate the matter on December 23 and 24, found that Kota's JK Lone Hospital is short of beds and it requires improvement.

However, the committee gave a clean chit to the doctors for any lapses over the recent death of infants admitted there.

A Central government team reached the hospital on Saturday to take stock of the situation.

As per the government report, at least 91 infants lost their lives at the government hospital in December last year.

Meanwhile, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has issued a notice to Chief Secretary of Rajasthan to submit a detailed report within 4 weeks about the steps being taken to address the issue.

The Commission also asked the Chief Secretary to ensure that such deaths of the children do not recur in future due to lack of infrastructure and health facilities at the hospitals.

New Delhi, Feb 12: The Centre on Wednesday said the NRC data in Assam is safe even though some technical issues were visible and that will be resolved soon.

The Union Home Ministry clarification came in view of reports that data of the final list of the National Register of Citizens has been made offline from its official website.

"The NRC data is safe. Some technical issues are in visibility on cloud. These are being resolved soon," a home ministry spokesperson said.

The data was not available for a couple of days and it created panic in the public, mostly among the people excluded from the list as the rejection certificates were yet to be issued.

NRC State Coordinator Hitesh Dev Sarma accepted that the data has been made offline, but refuted the allegation of any "malafide" intent in it.

The cloud service for the huge set of data was provided by IT firm Wipro and their contract was till October 19 last year. However, this was not renewed by the previous coordinator.

So, the data got offline from December 15 after it was suspended by Wipro, Sarma said.

He said the state coordination committee had decided to do necessary formalities in its meeting on January 30 and wrote to the Wipro during the first week of February.

"Once Wipro makes the data live, it will be available for public. We hope people will be able to access it in the next 2-3 days," Sarma said.

The complete detail of exclusion and inclusion of bonafide Indian citizens in the NRC was uploaded on its official website http://www.nrcassam.nic.in after the final list was published on August 31, 2019.

The final NRC was published by excluding 19,06,657 persons. A total of 3,11,21,004 names were included out of 3,30,27,661 applicants.

After the earlier NRC State Coordinator Prateek Hajela relinquished the charge on November 11 following his transfer to home state Madhya Pradesh on a direction from the Supreme Court, Sarma was appointed in his place on November 9.