tibet and news

A 6.8 magnitude earthquake has been experienced in Kathmandu, Pokhara and other parts of the country. The earthquake occurred around 6.25 pm (this evening) and its reported that at least five people have been killed and several others have been injured. The epicentre of the earthquake is said to be somewhere along the Indo-Nepal border. Reported till now is of Magnitude 4.8 6.8 in SIKKIM, INDIA. Kathmandu, however experienced magnitude 6.8 on Richter Scale Earthquake.

The National Seismologic Centre (NSC) in Kathmandu said that the quake was measured 6.8 on the Richter scale with its epicentre in the border region of Taplejung of Nepal and Sikkim of India.
epicenter of the earthquake Earthquake in Sikkim, India shakes Kathmandu and other Parts of Nepal


The earthquake lasted for few seconds and people in Kathmandu are already full of panic.


We are following tweets to report damages and injuiries.

It has been reported that three persons have been injured as the wall of the British embassy to Nepal crumbled in Lainchaur.
According to Metropolitan police in Kathmandu, three persons (two adults and a child), were killed in the earthquake. They were killed when a compound wall fell on the car they were traveling at Laichchaur, Kathmandu.
Those killed have been identified as Sajan Shrestha, 36, and his eight-year-old daughter Anisha of Gorkha and one other man Bir Bahadur Majhi, according to police inspector Dan Bahadur Thapa, chief of Metropolitan Police Range, Sohrakhutte.
TV channels reported two persons were killed in Dharan. 20-year-old Santosh Pariyar and his six-year-old Kamal Pariyar died when the wall of their house collapsed, District Police Office Sunsari informed.
The Home Ministry came up with a statement saying the earthquake destroyed around 58 houses across the nation with 10 in the capital.

The Earthquake also interrupted the ongoing House session of CA in Kathmandu.

Source: News One
Kathmandu, Sep 8 (IANS) Nearly six years after the then US president George W. Bush proposed to resettle in America around 5,000 Tibetan refugees, regarded as living in danger in Nepal, there is still uncertainty and a shroud of secrecy surrounding the project.

In the past, the US successfully lobbied with the Nepal government to allow the over 100,000 Bhutanese refugees living in Nepal to be offered new homes in the US and other western countries. Subsequently, more than 50,000 refugees have already exited Nepal.

However, the Tibetan resettlement programme, though it involves a handful of refugees by comparison, continues to hang fire due to Nepal’s reluctance to ruffle the feathers of its giant northern neighbour China.

Soon after the Bush proposal was announced in September 2005, China objected to it, saying it would be tantamount to interfering in its internal affairs and violating Nepal’s One China policy, which regards Tibet to be an integral part of the Chinese republic.

Beijing considers there are no Tibetan refugees, only illegal migrants, who should be punished as per the law of the land.

However, two years later, there were indications that the dragon was mellowing.

In May 2007, the then Chinese ambassador to Nepal, Zheng Xianglin, held a meeting with the then American ambassador to Nepal, James F. Moriarty to discuss the Tibetan and other issues.

In a ‘frank conversation’, Zheng implied that ‘limited resettlement’ in the US might be possible. However, he cautioned Moriarty that ‘large and public resettlement plans were not a viable option’.

Emphasizing the importance of a ‘stable Tibet’, the Chinese envoy indicated that a ‘large’ US resettlement policy could have the potential fallout of encouraging outward migration from Tibet.

Answering diplomatically, the American ambassador said his government viewed Tibet as a part of China and only sought to assist the Tibetans who were stranded in Nepal, not create ‘a new wave of migration’.

The apparent Chinese thaw caught the Americans by surprise.

When Moriarty briefed his superiors in Washington, he said the Chinese envoy’s comments about Tibetan refugees were ‘most surprising’.

‘While we would not advise reading too much into his remarks, we will continue to explore with the government of Nepal the option of quietly resettling a few Tibetans,’ Moriarty said in the confidential document that is part of the recent cache published by WikiLeaks.

The US offer to resettle only 5,000 Tibetan refugees, while the diaspora has more than 20,000 members in Nepal, has been greeted with doubts by the Tibetans, who wonder why the US was ready to absorb 60,000 Bhutanese refugees but only a fraction of Tibetans.

They also feel that resettlement in the US for them would be tougher than resettling the Bhutanese refugees as tiny Bhutan could not bring the same political pressure on Nepal to scuttle the move as China could.

September 3, 2011 9:55 AM EDT
After its long survival for 3.7 million years, the fossil of a species of wooly rhinoceros finally saw the light of day as it was uncovered in Tibet's Zanda Basin, a hotspot where scientists expect for most unexpected discoveries to come from.

The woolly rhino's fossil was discovered on the Tibetan Plateau in 2007 by paleontologists from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the Chinese Academy of Science.

The complete 3-foot-long skull and lower jaw, along with a neck vertibra were uncovered in southwestern Tibet.
Digital composite photo of the skull and lower jaw of the woolly rhino. Courtesy of Xiaoming Wang
Digital composite photo of the skull and lower jaw of the woolly rhino. Courtesy of Xiaoming Wang

Based on the new fossils, they argue that some mega-herbivores first evolved in Tibetan foothills of the Himalayas, and then migrated to other regions. The fossil is believed to be the oldest sample of its kind ever discovered.

Around 1 million years before the Ice Age when the known woolly rhinos roamed around, the newly discovered wooly rhinoceros lived in the Himalayas utilizing its large body, long hair and snow-sweeping structures to adapt a cold environment, according to researchers.

"The cold winters in high Tibet served as a habituation ground for the mega-herbivores, which became pre-adapted for the Ice Age, successfully expanding to the Eurasian mammoth steppe," researchers said.

Equipped with a flat shovel-like horn, which it would have used to sweep away snow and find vegetation, the rhino, scientists estimate, was roughly the size of today's Indian and black rhinos. But since the fossils did not include hair, paleontologists can only guess how woolly it might have been.

The fossil is "quite well preserved - just a little crushed, so not quite in the original shape; but the complete skull and lower jaw are preserved," Xiaoming Wang from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County told BBC News.

While scientists have thought it a reasonable idea that some mammals adapted to the global cooling well before it happened, Wang and his colleagues were able to provide proof with their finds from the Zanda Basin, which sits 3,700 to 4,500 meters above sea level and is surrounded by higher peaks.

"It just happens to have the right environment to basically let animals acclimate themselves and be ready for the Ice Age cold," Wang added.

The rhino, dubbed as Coelodonta thibetan, also had teeth with high crowns, which could have made it easy for it to handle tough and high-altitude vegetation. Scientists suspect that the giant spread to northern Asia and Europe after the Ice Age set in 2.6 million years ago.