US Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Maria Otero on Monday called on Nepali Prime Minister Jhala Nath Khanal at the latter’s official residence, Baluwatar.

During the meeting the duo held discussion on various contemporary issues including the ongoing peace process and new statute writing in the country.

Meanwhile, the Under Secretary also asked the PM to resume the installed bilateral talks between Nepal and Bhutan.

According to spokesperson of the Government of Nepal, Gangalal Tuladhar, PM Khanal responded to Under Secretary Otero that the government was committed in resolving the issue at the earliest.

Exiled leaders on Monday have asked their friends and well-wishers from Nepal to create pressure on the Government of Nepal to resume bilateral talks with Bhutan so that doors of repatriation would open.

Dr Bhampa Rai of the Bhutanese Refugee Representative Repatriation Committee and DP Kaphle of the People’s Forum for Human Rights in Bhutan made such a request to local leaders of different political parties and human rights organizations of Jhapa district amidst a program at Goldhap.

According to Dr Rai, refugees have been neglected by Nepali people since a few years. “Even the government is not serious towards our issue,” he said.

Meanwhile, Kaphle expressed sadness over the visiting US Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs Maria Otero for not paying a visit to camps. He said that she could have given audience to some of the exiled leaders to listen at their concerns in person.

The new Camp Management Committee of Goldhap organised the program where Nepali leaders of various political parties including the major three – UCPN (Maoist), CPN-UML and Nepali Congress – were present.

Nepali leaders who expressed their views at the program mentioned that they would extend all kinds of supports in the democratic struggle of the exiled Bhutanese.

However, most of them said it is the refugees who need to decide what kinds of programs are favourable to be launched.

Reported by Parsu Ram Niraula from Goldhap for BNS

A doctor accused of running a filthy “abortion mill” for decades in an impoverished Philadelphia neighborhood delivered babies alive, killed them with scissors and allowed a woman who had survived 20 years in a refugee camp to be overmedicated and die at his clinic, prosecutors said.

The Associated Press has reported that Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 69, was charged Wednesday with eight counts of murder for the deaths of seven babies and one patient. Nine employees also were charged, including four with murder.

Prosecutors described the clinic as a “house of horrors” where Gosnell kept baby body parts on the shelves, allowed a 15-year-old high school student to perform intravenous anesthesia on patients and had his licensed cosmetologist wife do late-term abortions. A family practice physician, Gosnell has no certification in gynecology or obstetrics, the report said.

Four months after Karnamaya Mongar reached the United States after spending nearly two decades in camps in Nepal she was dead at Gosnell’s clinic. The 41-year-old mother of three died of cardiac arrest when she was given too much Demerol and other drugs, prosecutors said.

“Pennsylvania is not a third-world country. There were several oversight agencies that stumbled upon and should have shut down Kermit Gosnell long ago. But none of them did, even after Karnamaya Mongar’s death,” city prosecutors charged in a nearly 300-page grand jury report. (Download here)

The report also mentioned that the “Women’s Medical Society” opened in 1979 and was inspected by the state Department of Health only sporadically. The last inspection was in 1993. Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams accused state health officials of “utter disregard” for Gosnell’s patients, who were mostly poor minority women like Mongar.

Gosnell made millions performing thousands of dangerous abortions. A second woman, a 22-year-old mother of two from Philadelphia, died in 2000 from a perforated uterus, it added.

According to the report Mongar with her husband Ash had gone to the clinic in November 2009. Gosnell wasn’t at the clinic at the time. His staff administered the drugs repeatedly to the 4-foot-11, 110-pound Mongar as they waited for him to arrive.

“Those are the kind of stories that break your heart,” said Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation, which rejected Gosnell from membership years ago because he did not meet its standards of care. The group’s 400 members perform about half the abortions in North America, she said.