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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.

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.

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.