Nepal's Maoist-led government on Tuesday called polls to elect a new parliament in April or May, offering hope for an end to the political deadlock that has crippled the deeply-divided nation.

Elections had originally been scheduled for this week but legal problems, and the failure of the main political parties to agree on how and when it should take place, had led to the plan being dropped.

As Gyani Maiya Sen nears the end of her life she worries that her final words may the last ever spoken in her mysterious mother tongue.

The 76-year-old, part of a vanishing tribe in remote western Nepal, is the only surviving native speaker of Kusunda, a language of unknown origins and unique sentence structures that has long baffled experts.

In the Nepalese hamlet of Simen, five days' walk from the nearest town, children pay for schooling with wood or animal dung, and life appears untouched by modernity -- but change is coming.

Just two valleys away in Dho Tarap village, business is booming and satellite dishes that beam in American wrestling are set up beside traditional prayer flags as the high Himalayan landscape of Upper Dolpa opens up to the outside world.

British experts have arrived in Nepal to investigate the plane crash that killed 19 people including seven Britons heading to the Mount Everest region for a trekking holiday, the government said Sunday.

Nepal's aviation ministry said two staff from the Air Accident Investigation Branch had come to Kathmandu to assist local authorities looking into the accident, which also killed four Chinese, an American and seven locals.

A plane flying 19 people towards Mount Everest went down in flames on the outskirts of the Nepalese capital Friday, killing everyone on board including seven Britons and five Chinese, police said.

The twin-propeller Sita Air plane had just taken off from Kathmandu and was headed to the town of Lukla, gateway to the world's highest mountain, when it plunged into the banks of a river near the city's airport around daybreak.

France's foreign ministry on Monday confirmed that four French climbers were dead and two missing after an avalanche in Nepal.

"According to a preliminary toll, four French citizens are dead at this stage," the minister in charge of French citizens abroad, Helene Conway-Mouret, said in a statement. "The search continues for two of our citizens."

An avalanche swept away climbers on a Himalayan peak in Nepal on Sunday, leaving at least nine dead and six others missing, officials said.

Police official Basanta Bahadur Kuwar said the bodies of a Nepalese guide and German man were recovered and that rescue pilots have spotted seven other bodies on the slopes of Mount Manaslu in northern Nepal. The mountain is the eighth highest in the world.

Nepal's ruling Maoist party on Friday welcomed a U.S. decision to remove it from a blacklist of terrorist groups after the end of a bloody insurgency, saying it would boost ties with Washington.

"The move has opened up avenues for cooperation between Maoists and the U.S. government. It will help strengthen our relations," Foreign Minister Narayan Kaji Shrestha told Agence France Presse.

Raj Kumar Pun took in HIV-positive orphans no one wanted, and when no one wanted to teach them either, he created a school in the shelter. But now they are running out of money, support and time.

Ten children ages 3 to 10 live in the Saphalta HIV Shiksya Sadan School — the Successful HIV Home and School — in a pink two-story house just outside the capital of this Himalayan nation. But Pun has had to sell the building — his own house — and they must be out by the end of October.

A Nepalese farmer who was bitten by a venomous snake took revenge by sinking his teeth into the reptile and killing it, police said on Thursday.

Mohamed Salmo Miya was farming near his village 200 kilometers (125 miles) southeast of Kathmandu when he encountered the deadly common cobra, district police chief Uma Prasad Chatrubedi told Agence France Presse.