Submit your Article

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has told Nepal to pursue independent domestic and foreign policies.

He made such a remark in a meeting with Nepali counterpart Narayan Khadka on March 26. 
According to media reports carried out by Chinese government-affiliated media, Wang stressed that China will unswervingly implement friendly policies toward Nepal.

While deepening mutually beneficial cooperation, no matter how the international and domestic situations of the two countries change, according to Chinese media. 

The Chinese diplomat also voiced support for Nepal to pursue independent domestic and foreign policies.
China always believes that all countries are equal regardless of size, and respects the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries, Chinese government-affiliated media, CGTN has reported. 

Nepal and China have agreed to carry out a joint inspection of the Nepal-China boundary through mutual consultation.

Two sides reached such an understanding in the meeting between Nepalese Foreign Minister Narayan Khadka and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on March 26. 

“Underlining the importance of continuously maintaining the Nepal-China border peaceful and tranquil in the spirit of the Boundary treaty, the two Foreign Ministers agreed to carry out joint inspection of Nepal-China boundary through mutual consultation,” the statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Nepal says.

Earlier, a team dispatched by Nepal’s Ministry of Home Affairs came up with a report that there are border borders between two countries mainly in the Humla section.

Two major Sri Lankan newspapers are suspending their print editions because of a lack of paper, their owner said, the latest casualties in the island nation’s economic crisis, Aljazeera reported.

The South Asian nation of 22 million people is facing its worst economic meltdown since independence from Britain in 1948 after its foreign reserves hit rock bottom.

Privately owned Upali Newspapers on Friday said their English-language daily, The Island, and its sister Sinhalese version, Divaina, will only be available online “in view of the prevailing newsprint shortage”.

Other main national dailies have also reduced pages after costs soared by more than a third in the past five months and because of difficulties securing supplies from abroad.

School tests for nearly three million of Sri Lanka’s 4.5 million pupils were postponed indefinitely last week after the authorities failed to source enough paper and ink, according to Aljazeera.

The dollar shortage has caused energy shortages affecting all sectors and led to skyrocketing prices with inflation at a record 17.5 percent in February, the fifth consecutive monthly high.

Motorists have to queue at gasoline pumps and at least four people have died in the past week while waiting long hours to top up.

Energy ministry officials said they managed to raise $42m by Friday to pay for a cargo of diesel and aviation fuel, held up at the Colombo port for nearly two weeks because there were no dollars to pay for it.

Earlier this month, the government allowed the rupee to depreciate and announced it will seek an IMF bailout to restructure its foreign debt, Aljazeera reported.

Sri Lanka needs nearly $7bn to service its external debt this year while the country’s foreign reserves have hit $2.3bn, down from $7.5bn when the current government came to power in November 2019.

The island is also seeking more loans from India, China and other countries to overcome its currency crisis.

Sri Lanka was in a deep economic crisis when the pandemic hit, reducing foreign worker remittances and crippling the lucrative tourism sector, a key source of dollars for the economy, according to Aljazeera.

About 300 people were killed by the Russian airstrike last week that blasted open a Mariupol theater that was being used as a shelter, Ukrainian authorities said, marking what could be the war’s deadliest known attack on civilians yet, Associated Press reported.

The death toll announced Friday fueled allegations that Moscow is committing war crimes by killing civilians, whether deliberately or by indiscriminate fire.

Russia, meanwhile, seemed to signal an important shift in its war objectives. US officials said Russian forces appear to have halted, at least for now, their ground offensive aimed at capturing the capital, Kyiv, and are concentrating more on gaining control of the Donbas region in the country’s southeast — a shift the Kremlin seemed to confirm.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy again appealed to Russia to negotiate an end to the war, but pointedly said he would not give up any Ukrainian territory for the sake of peace, according to the Associated Press.

“The territorial integrity of Ukraine should be guaranteed,” he said in a nightly video address to the nation. “That is, the conditions must be fair, for the Ukrainian people will not accept them otherwise.”

For days, the Mariupol government was unable to give a casualty count for the March 16 bombardment of the grand, columned Mariupol Drama Theater, where hundreds of people were said to be taking cover. In an attempt to ward off such an attack, the word “CHILDREN” was printed in Russian in huge white letters on the ground outside.

The city government cited eyewitnesses when it announced the death toll on its Telegram channel. But it was not immediately clear how witnesses arrived at the figure or whether emergency workers had finished excavating the ruins.

US President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said the theater bombing was an “absolute shock, particularly given the fact that it was so clearly a civilian target.” He said it showed “a brazen disregard for the lives of innocent people” in the besieged port city, Associated Press reported.

The Ukrainian Parliament’s human rights commissioner said soon after the attack that more than 1,300 people had taken shelter in the theater, many of them because their homes were destroyed. The building had a basement bomb shelter, and some survivors did emerge from the rubble after the attack.

“This is a barbaric war, and according to international conventions, deliberate attacks on civilians are war crimes,” said Mircea Geoana, NATO’s deputy-secretary general.

He said Putin’s efforts to break Ukraine’s will to resist are having the opposite effect: “What he’s getting in response is an even more determined Ukrainian army and an ever more united West in supporting Ukraine.”

Ukrainian officials continued to push for more military support. Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, on Friday called for a lend-lease program, referring to US policy of heavily supplying its World War II allies.

Ukraine needs real-time military intelligence and heavy weapons, Yermak said in an address.

While the Russians continue to pound the capital from the air, they appear to have gone into a “defensive crouch” outside Kyiv and are focused more on the Donbas, a senior US defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the Pentagon’s assessment, according to the Associated Press.

“They don’t show any signs of being willing to move on Kyiv from the ground,” the official said.

A man died after a bus hit a bike in Bhaktapur on Friday.

The deceased has been identified as Ramesh Timilsina (36) of Sudan, Changunarayan Municipality-8.

The incident occurred when the bus (Ba 4 Kha 2001) heading towards Sallaghari from Radhe Radhe hit the bike (3-02-006 Pa 6114) yesterday, police said.

Critically injured in the incident, Timilsina breathed his last during the course of treatment, the Metropolitan Police Range, Bhaktapur said.

Police said that they are searching for the bus driver who fled the scene after the incident.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has proposed ‘China-India Plus cooperation in South Asia to forge a cooperation-based model with healthy interaction, so as to achieve mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation at a higher level and in a wider range’. 

He made such proposal in the meeting with Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval. According to China’s official media, the top Chinese diplomat stressed that the two countries should take part in the multilateral process with a cooperative posture. Since 2017, China is proposing two-plus one cooperation in South Asian countries including in Nepal. China is proposing to initiate the implementation of such proposal from Nepal.  India, however, has not accepted it. 

He said that when China and India speak with one voice, the whole world will listen, and if the two countries join hands, the whole world will pay attention.

Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba will virtually address the 5th Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) Summit to be held on March 30.

The Nepali delegation led by the Prime Minister will include Minister for Foreign Affairs Narayan Khadka, Personal Secretary to the Prime Minister Bhan Bahadur Deuba, Chief Secretary Shanker Das Bairagi, Foreign Secretary Bharat Raj Paudyal and senior officials from the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, read a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Minister for Foreign Affairs Narayan Khadka will participate in the 18th BIMSTEC ministerial meeting in-person to be held in Colombo, Sri Lanka on March 29. On the sidelines, he will also hold bilateral meetings with his counterparts from BIMSTEC member states. 

He will leave for Colombo March 28 and will return to Kathmandu on March 31, the Ministry said.

Similarly, the Nepali delegation led Ghanshyam Bhandari, Joint Secretary and Head of Regional Organization Division at the Ministry, will participate in the 22nd BIMSTEC senior officials' meeting physically on March 28.

The Fifth BIMSTEC Summit and its preceding meetings are being held in and from Colombo, Sri Lanka, from 28 – 30 in a hybrid mode, the statement read.

The theme of this year's Summit is ‘BIMSTEC – Towards a Resilient Region, Prosperous Economies, Healthy Peoples’.

Nepal reported 18 new Covid-19 cases on Friday.

According to the Ministry of Health and Population, 2, 822 swab samples were tested in the RT-PCR method, of which 12 returned positive. Likewise, 1, 520 people underwent antigen tests, of which six were tested positive.

The Ministry said that no one died of virus in the last 24 hours. The Ministry said that 271 infected people recovered from the disease.

As of today, there are 1, 960 active cases in the country.