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Arun Subedi has been appointed as the foreign affairs advisor of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba.

A Cabinet meeting held on Thursday decided to appoint Subedi as the foreign affairs advisor of the Prime Minister.

He is a political analyst.

The government is preparing to hire around 100, 000 temporary police personnel for the federal and provincial elections slated for November 20.

Nepal Police spokesperson Tek Prasad Rai said that the process to hire the temporary police personnel will be taken ahead soon.

“We will move ahead by making a centralized security plan,” he said, adding, “There is a possibility to hire around 100, 000 temporary police personnel for the elections. We will move ahead by evaluating the security threat.”

Earlier, the government had hired 119, 000 temporary police personnel for the local level elections.

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.