Word: nepal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mahad Abdullahi Hassan had never heard of Nepal before the day he landed there. When the 28-year-old Somali boarded a flight from Dubai to Kathmandu on May 23, 2007, he was hoping he would finally reach his dream destination: Sweden. He had, after all, shelled out $4,000 to a human trafficker who promised to smuggle him to the Scandinavian country...
...loss, perhaps, but not alone. Gradually, Hassan integrated himself into the close-knit community of 84 Somali refugees living in Nepal, the largest nationality of some 300 United Nations-recognized urban refugees now living in Kathmandu. The Somalis began to arrive in Nepal in early 2006. Most of them are from Mogadishu, and nearly all of them are victims of trafficking. Many say they, like Hassan, were promised passage to Europe; some claim that they were supposed to go to Naples, Italy, but ended up in Nepal because of the similar-sounding names...
...Tibet is for China.) The plant is part of a systematic effort by China to assert its presence on the rim of the subcontinent, where India has long been the acknowledged superpower. In both Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the Chinese are funding new ports. The Chinese Foreign Minister visited Nepal last December to launch construction of a new highway connecting central Nepal to China, and soon after, China announced plans to extend a controversial railway to Tibet as far as the border with Nepal. India is countering: after Beijing agreed to develop a massive copper field in Afghanistan, New Delhi...
...Indiana can have two time zones, there's no reason that Russia, 180 times larger and with many millions more people, can't change its clocks to please its easternmost citizens. Two years ago, the U.S. saved energy by starting daylight saving three weeks earlier. Nepal is 15 minutes ahead of India but an hour and 15 minutes behind China. Iran can't decide what to do about daylight saving; its parliament wants to observe it, while President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says no. And in 2007, President Hugo Chávez set Venezuela's clocks forward 30 minutes, supposedly to make...
...northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as part of its territory. Indian strategic analysts believe Beijing's stance has hardened in recent years, perhaps as a consequence of its increasing economic and military edge over India as well as growing Chinese influence in smaller South Asian countries like Nepal and Bangladesh. Comments made last month by India's outgoing navy chief that the country could not hope to match China's hard power capabilities set off a bout of national hand-wringing. "There's a nervousness among some policymakers that the Chinese see India as weak and vulnerable to coercion...