Nepal will restart commercial flights in mid-August, the country announced Tuesday, in a bid to jump-start its battered tourism sector.
Nepal’s airports will reopen to international and domestic commercial air travel beginning Aug. 17, as decided Monday in a cabinet meeting. At first, flights will go only to countries less affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic; more destinations will be added gradually.
To enter or exit the country, travelers will need to carry a certificate confirming that they don’t have COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Incoming international travelers will also need to self-isolate, but authorities did not specify for how long. New guidelines are coming, said Health and Population Ministry spokesman Samir Kumar Adhikari, according to The Himalayan Times.
Nepal also announced Tuesday that it would end its nearly four-month lockdown at midnight.
“We are ending lockdown from tonight, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t have any threat of health risks,” government spokesman Yubaraj Khatiwada told reporters in Kathmandu.
The lockdown, which began in March, came at the height of Nepal’s tourism season, when mountain climbers and other tourists typically flood in. The shutdown cost the tourism industry over 10 billion rupees a month, or over $83 million a month, reported The Himalayan Times. The Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation said Tuesday that it would allow all tourism-related activities slated for the fall to go ahead, starting in mid-August.
The announcements come shortly after India reimposed restrictions on movement in two of its states bordering Nepal, reported the Nepali Times. Nepal’s land borders with India and China will stay closed to most people until at least Aug. 16.
Nepal has recorded nearly 18,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 40 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. About 5,500 cases are active.
A good liberal education will provide students with a basic cultural literacy about those aspects of the human condition sufficiently important to warrant a place in the curriculum. We have argued in earlier chapters that a major purpose for studying history and literature is the understanding and insight they provide into the human condition. History is a record of social, political, moral, and religious experiments; it provides interpretations of the suffering and flourishing of humankind. The study of literature gives students imaginative insights into how people have thought and felt about the world in different times and places. History and literature provide students with a multitude of vicarious experiences so that they are not at the mercy of their limited and inevitably inadequate personal insights and experiences. So, for example, it is impossible to understand matters of racial justice (and so specific a policy issue as affirmative action) without understanding a good deal of history, and the insights gained from imaginative literature (art, drama, and film) will be immensely valuable in making that history come alive. Indeed, one major criterion for choosing the history and literature we teach should be its relevance to deepening students’ understanding of what is central to the suffering and flourishing of humankind.
As we suggested in Chapter 2, a liberal education has both conservative and liberating aspects. A good liberal education will initiate students into cultural traditions, shaping their moral identities in the process. We are not social atoms, but inheritors of languages, cultures, institutions, and moral traditions. From the beginning it has been a purpose of public education to make students into good citizens, good Americans. In teaching history we provide students with a past, a sense of identity, a role in developing stories, a set of obligations.
