Beggars sitting on the streets outside the Mayadevi Temple and other stupas here and some of them carrying unclothed small children has become a common sight in this Buddhist pilgrimage site that lies in Lumbini of the Rupandehi district.

They approach the visitors, desperately ask them for money and even do not hesitate to halt their movement by grabbing their legs if visitors seem reluctant towards their calls. Such tendency really makes visitors uncomfortable and sometimes leaves them irritated.

According to the available data, a large score of domestic and foreign tourists visit this Buddhist shrine every year.

It is a daily routine of some beggars to spend the money they collected through beggary to consume alcohol and sit on the street again in the hope of getting more money, said security personnel deployed here. The site remaining in the list of the UNESCO world heritage sites is witnessing an increasing number of beggars mostly from India day by day.

However, security personnel deployed for the security of this famous Buddhist temple are aware of the situation, they prefer to remain silent on the matter. There complain is that the Lumbini Development Trust doesn’t feel it necessary to respond to their frequent calls to address the problem facing tourists here due to beggars. “The Trust does not want to discuss this issue,” said one of the security personnel.

Morano, born on November 29 1899, died at her home in Verbania, in northern Italy, the reports said.

“She had an extraordinary life, and we will always remember her strength to move forward in life,” said Silvia Marchionini, the mayor of Verbania, a small village of some 2,000 residents.

According to the US-based Gerontology Research Group (GRG), Morano ceded the crown of the world’s oldest human being to Jamaican Violet Brown, who was born on March 10, 1900.

Morano’s death, at the age of 117 years and 137 days, means there is no one living known to have been born before 1900.

Her first love died in World War I, but she married later and left her violent husband just before the Second World War and shortly after the death in infancy of her only son. That was 30 years before divorce became legal in Italy.

She had clung to her independence, only taking on a full-time carer a couple of years ago, though she had not left her small two-room apartment for 20 years.

She had been bed-bound during her latter years.

In an interview with AFP last year, she put her longevity down to her diet.

“I eat two eggs a day, and that’s it. And cookies. But I do not eat much because I have no teeth,” she said in her home at the time, where the Guinness World Records certificate declaring her to be the oldest person alive held pride of place on a marble-topped chest of drawers.

 ‘Age at a slower rate’ 

She also refused to be taken to hospital, with the exception of a cataract operation.

Her Eyesight did become very poor and she latterly spent much of her days sleeping.

But she kept her sense of humour till the end.

“How does my hair look,” she asked before blowing out the candles on her 117th birthday cake last year.

“What impresses me most is her memory. She forgets nothing,” Yamile Vergara, her nurse for over 40 years, said at the time.

“Her sense of humour is her therapy”.

The eldest of eight children, Morano outlived all of her younger siblings.

Robert Young, director of the Los Angeles-based GRG’s Supercentenarian Research and Database Division, said he had been following Morano ‘s progress for the past seven years, calling her an example of “super-ageing individuals who seem to age at a slower rate than normal — maybe even a few percentage points slower, but enough to make a difference”.

The world longevity record, he noted, remained with French woman Jeanne Calment, who died at 122 in 1997, having outlived both her daughter and grandson. “That’s superconfirmed,” Young said.

Emma Morano goes into the record books as the fifth longest life ever verified.

In 1900, when Violet Brown was born, Jamaica was part of the British West Indies, so her records are from the British government, in Queen Victoria’s time.

“Unless a surprise candidate comes out of the trees, she is the oldest living Victorian,” said Young.

Here is the list of the ten oldest living people on the planet, all of whom are women, according to the US-based group.

The list is dominated by Japanese and Italian women with the oldest man coming in at 16th place at the age of 113.

– Violet Brown, 117 years old, Jamaica

– Nabi Tajima, 116, Japan

– Chiyo Miyako, 115, Japan

– Ana Vela-Rubio, 115, Spain

– Marie-Josephine Gaudette, 115, Italy (born in US)

– Giuseppina Projetto-Frau, 114, Italy

– Kane Tanaka, 114, Japan

– Maria-Giuseppa Robucci-Nargiso 114, Italy

– Iso Nakamura, 113,, Japan

– Tae Ito, 113, Japan

“Your Egg-venture doesn’t stop there,” said the San Francisco-based app developer. Players will also level up faster and gain double XP for every action they take, while Eggs will also be 50 per cent off in the in-game shop — this means players can earn a whopping four times the XP they normally would when using a Lucky Egg.

The event will run until 4:00 a.m. on April 20 (Taiwan time).

The Easter event is expected to be a moneymaker for Niantic, as it encourages players to make extra purchases of lucky eggs. Though Pokemon GO may not be the powerhouse it once was, it still boasts a massive userbase.

Niantic said last week that the mobile game still sees a jaw-dropping 65 million-plus monthly active users.

“We owe the continued momentum and recognition to the dedicated players exploring the world and creating adventures together in Pokemon Go,” Niantic said in a blog post. “Each and every award Pokemon Go has won is a testament to the game’s awesome and supportive community.”

The game developer also hinted that many more updates are on the way.

“With spring arriving in the northern hemisphere, players can look forward to all new cooperative social gameplay experiences in Pokemon GO that will give Trainers new and exciting reasons to get back into the sunshine.”

Also last week, Niantic released a software update which added Traditional Chinese language support for Pokemon GO to version 0.61.0 for Android and 1.31.0 for iOS.

The free-to-play augmented reality game “Pokemon Go,” which allows players to catch virtual monsters, was launched on July 6 last year and arrived in Taiwan on August 6. The game lets players use a smartphone’s GPS function to locate and capture over 100 virtual monsters, which may appear on streets, in parks and even in government buildings.

The news comes amid reports of activity at a nuclear test site in North Korea ahead of Saturday’s 105th anniversary of the birth of the country’s founder Kim Il-Sung, fuelling speculation it could carry out a sixth test.

A statement on KCNA, which cited Washington’s recent missile strike on Syria, said the administration of President Donald Trump had “entered the path of open threat and blackmail against the DPRK”.//AFP

But the new president’s boasts of breathing life into the world’s biggest markets may come with an unwelcome corollary: a rising dollar and the Trump campaign promises it threatens.

Trump acknowledged as much this week in a Wall Street Journal interview.

“I think our dollar is getting too strong and partially that’s my fault because people have confidence in me,” he said. “That will hurt ultimately.”

Since his shock rise to the White House, major indicators have continued to portray an economy in increasingly good health. Consumer sentiment and Wall Street have both hit successive records, boosted by Trump’s promises of tax cuts, infrastructure spending and slashed regulation.

As a result, investors have pumped cash into American equities markets, driving up a dollar which had already been on the rise. It is up more than six percent against a basket of six major currencies in the last year.

“The dollar is high because the US economy is a stronger performer right now than any other advanced economy,” said Barry Bosworth, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Contradicting a core message

Trump cannot claim credit for all of this. By hiking its benchmark interest rates twice since December, the Federal Reserve has also bolstered the dollar by tightening the flow of credit and enticing investors with the prospect of higher returns.

To be sure, a strong dollar is not all bad: it lowers import prices while also supporting access to lower-cost credit by supporting the inbound flow of cash.

On the other hand, it hurts American exports and directly threatens Trump’s campaign pledge to correct the US trade deficit, particularly in the manufacturing sector, which has withered from Chinese and Mexican competition.

“There’s a contradiction that goes back to one of the core messages of his campaign,” said Nathan Sheets, who served as under secretary for international affairs at the US Treasury under former president Barack Obama.

Eswar Prasad, a professor at Cornell University, said Trump was acknowledging he had arrived at a certain impasse.

“Mr Trump seems to recognize the economic reality that a stronger dollar will make it harder to achieve some of his policy objectives,” he said.

Since the mid-1990s, the United States has consistently defended a strong dollar policy, saying it stood for a robust, attractive economy.

But with one eye on the colossal US trade deficit, Trump sees things a little differently.

“Look, there are some very good things about a strong dollar, but usually speaking the best thing about it is that it sounds good,” he told The Journal.

Still, Trump has only narrow room to maneuver.

His remarks on the dollar sparked a selloff against the euro but such a strategy is unsustainable.

“Comments by presidents and finance ministers about exchange rate have a very short life expectancy,” said Bosworth of Brookings.

Stacking the Fed with doves?

With several vacancies open at the Federal Reserve, Trump could be tempted to appoint central bankers who favor lower interest rates in the hope of diluting the dollar’s value.

But such an unprecedented tack would risk angering Congress, which confirms Fed nominees.

In reality, Trump’s only hope to dull the effect of the strong dollar is to use import duties to make foreign goods less competitive.

And, according to Prasad, Trump’s remarks suggest his administration could be ready “to get tough on trade.”

But first Trump should clarify his administration’s position. In late February, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he supported a strong dollar in the “long term,” which he said should remain a stable reserve currency.

“The new administration is still working through its thinking,” said Sheets. “It remains to be seen which of those two narratives the administration will ultimately adopt.”

The sharp language came after President Donald Trump said the North Korea problem “will be taken care of”, as speculation mounts that the reclusive state could be preparing another nuclear or missile test.

“Lately, tensions have risen… and one has the feeling that a conflict could break out at any moment,” Wang said. “If a war occurs, the result is a situation in which everybody loses and there can be no winner.”

Whichever side provoked a conflict “must assume the historic responsibility and pay the corresponding price,” he said in a joint press conference with his French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault.

Trump has sent a aircraft carrier-led strike group to the Korean peninsula to press his point, one of a series of signals that indicate his willingness to shake up foreign policy strategy.

The US military on Thursday dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb it possesses on Afghanistan, targeting a complex used by the Islamic State group.

Trump also flexed his military muscle last week by ordering cruise missile strikes on a Syrian airbase the US believed was the origin of a chemical weapons attack on civilians in a northern Syria town.

The moves are seen as an implicit warning to North Korea that Washington is not afraid to use force.

Trump has repeatedly said he will prevent Pyongyang from its goal of developing a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile capable of reaching the mainland United States.

A White House foreign policy advisor said Friday that the US is assessing military options in response to the North’s weapons programs, saying another provocative test was a question of “when” rather than “if.”

There are reports of activity at a nuclear test site in North Korea ahead of Saturday’s 105th anniversary of the birth of the country’s founder Kim Il-Sung, which have fuelled speculation it could carry out a sixth test.

But Beijing has long opposed dramatic action against Pyongyang, fearing the regime’s collapse would send a flood of refugees across its borders and leave the US military on its doorstep.

“Dialogue is the only possible solution,” Wang said.

Any US strike on North Korea could prompt retaliation against allies or US forces in South Korea or Japan.

But there are few good diplomatic or economic options for the Trump administration.

The North is already under multiple sets of United Nations sanctions over its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and appears to see these programs as insurance against regime change.

Rattled by Trump’s behaviour, Beijing — Pyongyang’s sole major ally and economic lifeline — has adopted a tougher line against its neighbour, including suspending coal imports from the country for the remainder of the year.

China is the world’s largest consumer and producer of tobacco, and the industry provides the government with colossal sums.

In 2015, it recorded 1.1 trillion yuan ($160 billion) in profits, up 20 percent year-on-year.

But a report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said Friday that the Asian giant will suffer an economic toll if it does not urgently reduce its smoking population.

The paper — called “The Bill China Cannot Afford” — estimated that the total annual economic cost of tobacco use in the country in 2014 was 350 billion yuan, up tenfold from 2000.

“If nothing is done to reduce [the death rate] and introduce more progressive policies, the consequences could be devastating not just for the health of people across the country, but also for China’s economy as a whole,” WHO China representative Bernhard Schwartlander said in a statement.

The calculation includes both the direct costs of treating tobacco-related illness and the indirect costs such as lost work productivity.

“The rapid increase in costs associated with tobacco use in China is unsustainable,” Schwartlander added.

Twenty-eight percent of all adults and 50 percent of men in China are estimated to smoke regularly.

Rural-to-urban migrants are more likely to be smokers, the report said, adding that they risk descending into poverty when smoking-related medical costs become too great — a reality at odds with the government goal of eradicating poverty nationwide by 2020.

The organisations recommended a smoke-free policy across the country akin to laws in Beijing and Shanghai, where smoking is banned in most public places.

However, enforcing anti-smoking measures can be difficult in China as the state-owned China National Tobacco Corp, which enjoys a near-monopoly, shares offices and senior officials with the national tobacco regulator.

The report also urged further raising tobacco taxes to make smoking less affordable. While retail tobacco prices increased following a taxation hike in 2015, the average price of a cigarette pack remains just ten yuan.

A 50 percent increase in the retail price of cigarettes would prevent 20 million premature deaths over 50 years, the report said.