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The Nepal Airlines Corporation (NAC) Executive Chairman Yuvaraj Adhikari has been sacked on Thursday.

A Cabinet meeting held on Thursday decided to remove Adhikari from the top post of the NAC, a minister said.

He was accused of renting a twin otter plane against the law and not being able to keep the officials and staffers of the NAC in discipline.

A probe committee was formed to look into the issue.

The committee had proposed the Council of Ministers to sack Adhikari.

Based on the committee’s proposal, the government sacked him today.

Police have arrested six persons on the charge of abducting a Chinese couple.

The District Police Range, Kathmandu said that police apprehended six persons for abducting a Chinese couple from Lainchaur and taking them hostage at Gongabu on Wednesday night.

They have also been accused of robbing Rs 800, 000 in cash and 27 sets of mobile phones from the couple.

It has been learnt that the kidnappers had demanded a ransom of Rs 10 million from the Chinese couple.

Police said that they are looking into the case.

The government has decided to hold the federal and provincial elections on November 20.

A Cabinet meeting held on Thursday decided to hold the federal and provincial elections in a single phase, government spokesperson Gyandendra Bahadur Karki said.

The Election Commission, however, had recommended the government to hold the election on November 18.

A meeting of the ruling coalition leaders held on Wednesday had agreed to hold the elections on November 20.

The term of the members of the House of Representative and Province Assembly is expiring on November 22.

As most of Nepal’s recent foreign policy documents suggest, it’s in the country’s interest to diversify its relations and reap economic benefits from friends near and far. History has time and again shown that over-reliance on any of its two giant neighbors is fraught with danger. This is why Nepal in the late 1940s started reaching out to the US and European states. As a country precariously placed between two regional behemoths, it is a wise course. In this light, the recent announcement that Nepal was being ‘promoted’ from a ‘dialogue partner’ to an ‘observer’ in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)—the Eurasian grouping with now 10 members including Russia, China, India and Pakistan—is something to be celebrated. 

Interestingly, Nepal expressed its interest in the organization way back in 2001 when Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala wanted to explore the import of petroleum products from Central Asia via China. This is not as dreamy as it sounds. Nepal and China are already discussing a cross-border electricity grid. A cross-border railway has also long been talked about. So why not a cross-border pipeline to bring Central Asian oil and gas? Alas, the geopolitical chessboard is seldom as simple to figure out. The SCO is basically a Russia-China construct to challenge the supremacy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the post-World War II grouping of Western countries. In other words, the organization has a huge strategic component. 

If so, should Nepal embrace one strategic grouping, the SCO, while it shuns another in the form of the American Indo-Pacific Strategy (IPS)? With no official statement coming from the government, it is unclear what exactly we want to achieve through a bigger SCO role. Nepal, the current SAARC head, has been unable to play a meaningful role in bringing the moribund organization back to life. Shouldn’t the SAARC be higher on Nepal’s priority than the SCO? The question is not about the rightness or wrongness of joining the SCO. It is rather that those lobbying for Nepal’s greater participation in it haven’t thought it worthwhile to explain their logic. Perhaps they too don’t have a clue.   

Top leaders of Afghanistan's Taliban were holding discussions on Wednesday about how to respond to a US drone strike in Kabul that the United States said killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, three sources in the group said, Reuters reported.

The United States killed Zawahiri with a missile fired from a drone while he stood on a balcony at his Kabul hideout on Sunday, US officials said, the biggest blow to the militants since Osama bin Laden was shot dead more than a decade ago.

The Taliban have not confirmed Zawahiri's death.

Officials of the Islamist group, long-time allies of al Qaeda, initially confirmed the Sunday drone strike but said the house that was hit was empty.

"There are meetings at a very high level on whether they should react to the drone strike, and in case they decide to, then what is the proper way," a Taliban leader who holds an important position in Kabul told Reuters.

The official, who said there had been lengthy leadership discussions for two days, declined to be identified. He did not confirm that Zawahiri was in the house that the missile struck.

How the Taliban react could have significant repercussions as the group seeks international legitimacy, and access to billions of dollars in frozen funds, following their defeat of a US-backed government a year ago, according to Reuters.

Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor, was closely involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and was one of the world's most wanted men.

Suspected drones flew over outlying Taiwanese islands and hackers attacked its defence ministry website, authorities in Taipei said on Thursday, a day (Aug 4) after a visit by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi that outraged China, Reuters reported.

Taiwan has been on alert as China conducts a series of military exercises in response to a visit to the island this week by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, some of which were to take place within the island’s 12-nautical-mile sea and air territory, according to the defence ministry in Taipei.

That has never happened before and a senior ministry official described the potential move as “amounting to a sea and air blockade of Taiwan”.

China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, said on Thursday its differences with the self-ruled island were an internal affair.

“Our punishment of pro-Taiwan independence diehards, external forces is reasonable, lawful,” the Beijing-based Taiwan Affairs Office said.

China’s Xinhua news agency has said the exercises, involving live fire drills, will take place in six areas which ring Taiwan and will begin at noon (0400 GMT).

On Wednesday night, just hours after Pelosi left for South Korea, unidentified aircraft, probably drones, had flown above the area of the Kinmen islands, Taiwan’s defence ministry said.

Major General Chang Zone-sung of the Army’s Kinmen Defence Command told Reuters that the Chinese drones came in a pair and flew into the Kinmen area twice on Wednesday night, at around 9pm and 10pm.

“We immediately fired flares to issue warnings and to drive them away. After that, they turned around. They came into our restricted area and that’s why we dispersed them,” he said.

The heavily fortified Kinmen islands are just off the southeastern coast of China, near the city of Xiamen.

“We have a standard operating procedure. We will react if they come in,” Mr Chang said, adding that the alert level there remained “normal”.

He said he believed the drones were intended to gather intelligence on Taiwan’s security deployment in its outlying islands.

Last week, Taiwan’s military fired flares to warn away a drone that “glanced” at its Matsu archipelago off the coast of China’s Fujian province and was possibly probing its defences, Taiwan’s defence ministry said.

The first Taiwan Strait crisis broke out in 1954 when Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists placed thousands of troops on the Taiwan-ruled Kinmen and Matsu islands, according to Reuters.

China, then led by Mao Zedong, responded with artillery bombardments of the islands.

Beijing's forces would intermittently shell Kinmen until a stalemate in 1979, in attempts to dislodge the Nationalist forces there.

Taiwan's defence ministry also said on Thursday that its website suffered cyber attacks and went offline temporarily, adding it was working closely with other authorities to enhance cyber security as tensions with China rise.

Earlier this week, several government websites, including the presidential office, were subject to overseas cyber attacks,some of which authorities said were launched by China and Russia.

Pelosi, the highest-level US visitor to Taiwan in 25 years, praised its democracy and pledged American solidarity during her brief stopover, adding that Chinese anger could not stop world leaders from travelling there.

China summoned the US ambassador in Beijing and halted several agricultural imports from Taiwan.

Security in the area around the US Embassy in Beijing remained unusually tight on Thursday as it has been throughout this week.

Although Chinese social media users have vented fury on Pelosi, there were no signs of significant protests or calls to boycott US products.

After Pelosi's departure on Wednesday, Taiwan's defence ministry announced that 27 Chinese warplanes had entered the island's air defence identification zone (ADIZ).

Over the last two years, Beijing has ramped up military incursions into Taiwan's ADIZ - which is not the same as the island's territorial airspace, but includes a far greater area, Reuters reported.

The ministry published a map that showed 16 Su-30s and 6 J-11s had crossed the so-called "median line" of the Taiwan Strait - an unofficial boundary in the narrow waterway, which separates the island from the mainland and straddles vital shipping lanes.

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will meet top South Korean political leaders on Thursday, a day after she concluded her high-profile visit to Taiwan by renewing Washington’s “ironclad” commitment to defending democracy on the self-governing island despite vehement protests from China, Associated Press reported.

Pelosi and other members of Congress flew to South Korea on Wednesday evening as part of their Asian tour that already took them to Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan. After South Korea, they will travel to Japan.

On Thursday, Pelosi will meet South Korean National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin Pyo and other senior members of Parliament for talks on regional security, economic cooperation and climate issues, according to Kim’s office.

Later in the day, Pelosi planned to visit an inter-Korean border area that is jointly controlled by the American-led UN Command and North Korea, a South Korean official said requesting anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to media on the matter.

If that visit occurs, Pelosi would be the highest-level American to go to the Joint Security Area since then-President Donald Trump went there in 2019 for a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Sitting inside the 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) -wide Demilitarized Zone, a buffer created at the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, the JSA is the site of past bloodshed and a venue for numerous talks. US presidents and other top officials have often travelled to the JSA and other border areas to reaffirm their security commitment to South Korea.

On Wednesday, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry slammed the United States over Pelosi’s Taiwan trip, saying that “the current situation clearly shows that the impudent interference of the US in internal affairs of other countries.”

Also on Thursday afternoon, Pelosi will speak by phone with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who is on a vacation this week, according to Yoon’s office. No face-to-face meeting has been arranged between them. Yoon, a conservative, took office in May with a vow to boost South Korea’s military alliance with the United States and take a tougher line on North Korean provocations, according to Associated Press.

Pelosi’s Taiwan visit, the first by an incumbent House speaker in 25 years, has infuriated China, which views the island nation as a breakaway province to be annexed by force if necessary. China views visits to Taiwan by foreign officials as recognizing its sovereignty. 

“Today the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy,” Pelosi said in a short speech during a meeting with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday. “America’s determination to preserve democracy, here in Taiwan and around the world, remains ironclad.”

The Biden administration and Pelosi have said the United States remains committed to the so-called one-China policy, which recognizes Beijing but allows informal relations and defense ties with Taipei. The administration discouraged but did not prevent Pelosi from visiting.

In response to Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, China announced it would launch its largest military maneuvers aimed at Taiwan in more than a quarter of a century. China also already flew fighter jets and other war planes toward Taiwan, and blocked imports of citrus and fish from Taiwan, Associated Press reported.

A 62-year-old French man survived for 16 hours at sea by using an air bubble inside his boat after it capsized, BBC reported.

The 12-metre vessel, which had set sail from Portugal's capital Lisbon, sent out a distress signal late on Monday evening from the Atlantic Ocean.

Spanish coastguards found the upturned boat, but the sea was too rough to rescue him - so the sailor had to wait until morning.

The man's survival was "verging on the impossible", said coastguard divers.

His boat sent a distress signal at 20:23 local time on Monday, 14 miles (22.5 km) from the Sisargas Islands, near Spain's north-west Galicia region.

A rescue ship carrying five divers as well as three helicopters set off to find and rescue the man, who has not yet been named. 

A diver was winched onto the ship's hull to seek signs of life and the man responded by banging from inside.

The sea was rough and the sun had gone down, so the rescue team attached buoyancy balloons to the boat to stop it from sinking and waited until morning.

The next day, two divers swam under the boat to help the sailor out, who they found wearing a neoprene survival suit and submerged in water up to his knees, according to BBC.

The man then jumped into freezing water and swam under the boat towards the sea's surface. 

In a tweet, Spain's Maritime Safety and Rescue Society said: "Each life saved is our biggest reward."