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Speaker of the House of Representatives Agni Prasad Sapkota held a virtual meeting with Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China Li Zhanshu on Friday.

During the meeting, the two sides exchanged in-depth views on various aspects of Nepal-China relations and underscored the need to have frequent exchanges of high-level visits between the parliaments of two countries, read a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

On the occasion, Speaker Sapkota and Chairman Li extended invitations to visit each other’s countries at mutually convenient time in future.

Senior officials of the Federal Parliament Secretariat and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the Nepali side and Chairpersons of various committees of National People's Congress and Vice Minister of Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the Chinese side were also present during the virtual meeting.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan could face removal from office this weekend, after the country's top court ruled his move to block a no-confidence vote was unconstitutional, BBC reported.

Last Sunday, Mr Khan's ruling party blocked a no-confidence vote which he was widely expected to lose.

His government then dissolved parliament and called a snap election.

Furious opposition members launched an appeal with the Supreme Court to decide the legality of the blocked vote. 

The Supreme Court said in a ruling late on Thursday that the vote should go ahead, according to BBC.

In response to this, Mr Khan announced that he had called a cabinet meeting and would address the nation on Friday evening. 

"My message to the nation is that I have always fought for Pakistan and will continue to fight till the last ball," he wrote in a Twitter post.

Sri Lankan president Gotabaya Rajapaksa has constituted an expert panel to bail his country out of an unprecedented economic crisis characterised by shortage of essential commodities and widespread protests, The Times of India reported.

The panel of eminent economists has been mandated to address the $8. 6 billion of debt and the soaring inflation by engaging with IMF and other probable lenders.

The Presidential Advisory Group on Multilateral Engagement and Debt Sustainability would include Indrajit Coomaraswamy, former governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka and former director of the economic affairs division of the commonwealth secretariat, said a statement issued by the president’s office late on Wednesday. The other members of the panel include Shanta Devarajan, a former senior director of development economics at the World Bank, and Sharmini Coorey, a former director of IMF’s Institute of Capacity Development.

The statement said “among the responsibilities that the Presidential Advisory Group will undertake are to engage in discussions with relevant Sri Lankan institutions and officials engaging with the IMF, and to provide guidance that will address the present debt crisis and lead towards sustainable and inclusive recovery for Sri Lanka. ” After Ali Sabry resigned on Tuesday, a day after he was appointed, the president is yet to appoint a new finance minister, according to The Times of India.

In a bid to garner some quick revenue, the Sri Lanka parliament on Thursday passed, without voting, a retrospective surcharge tax bill with amendments. This would enable the government to impose a 25% windfall tax on groups of companies, individual companies, partner- ships and individuals who earned more than 2 billion Sri Lankan rupees in the financial year 2020-21. The government estimates a revenue of 100 billion rupees through this tax. Former finance minister Basil Rajapaksa had proposed the bill to increase government revenue.

With public protest picking up pace, a special security arrangement would be ensured at important places like the president’s house, presidential secretariat, prime ministerMahinda Rajapaksa’s residence-cum-office and parliament, Colombo police said, The Times of India reported.

The United States has sharply increased the number of Ukrainians admitted to the country at the Mexican border as even more refugees fleeing the Russian invasion follow the same circuitous route, Associated Press reported.

A government recreation center in the Mexican border city of Tijuana grew to about 1,000 refugees Thursday, according to city officials. A canopy under which children played soccer only two days earlier was packed with people in rows of chairs and lined with bunk beds.

Tijuana has suddenly become a final stop for Ukrainians seeking refuge in the United States, where they are drawn by friends and families ready to host them and are convinced the US will be a more suitable haven than Europe. 

Word has spread rapidly on social media that a loose volunteer coalition, largely from Slavic churches in the western United States, is guiding hundreds of refugees daily from the Tijuana airport to temporary shelters, where they wait two to four days for US officials to admit them on humanitarian parole. In less than two weeks, volunteers worked with US and Mexican officials to build a remarkably efficient and expanding network to provide food, security, transportation and shelter, according to the Associated Press.

US officials began funneling Ukrainians Wednesday to a pedestrian crossing in San Diego that is temporarily closed to the public, hoping to process 578 people a day there with 24 officers, said Enrique Lucero, the city of Tijuana’s director of migrant affairs.

Vlad Fedoryshyn, a volunteer with access to a waiting list, said Thursday that the US processed 620 Ukrainians over 24 hours, while about 800 others are arriving daily in Tijuana. Volunteers say the US was previously admitting a few hundred Ukrainians daily.

CBP didn’t provide numbers in response to questions about operations and plans over the last two days, saying only that it has expanded facilities in San Diego to deal with humanitarian cases. 

On Thursday, Ukrainians steadily arrived and left the bustling recreation center, wheeling large suitcases. Some wore winter coats in unseasonably warm weather.

A Tijuana camp that had held hundreds of Ukrainians near the busiest border crossing with the US was dismantled. Refugees dispersed to the recreation center, churches and hotels to wait, Associated Press reported.

The volunteers, who wear blue and yellow badges to represent the Ukrainian flag but have no group name or leader, started a waiting list on notepads and later switched to a mobile app normally used to track church attendance. Ukrainians are told to report to a US border crossing as their numbers approach, a system organizers liken to waiting for a restaurant table.

“We feel so lucky, so blessed,” said Tatiana Bondarenko, who traveled through Moldova, Romania, Austria and Mexico before arriving in San Diego with her husband and children, ages 8, 12, and 15. Her final destination was Sacramento, California, to live with her mother, who she hadn’t seen in 15 years.

Another Ukrainian family posed nearby for photos under a US Customs and Border Protection sign at San Diego’s San Ysidro port of entry, the busiest crossing between the US and Mexico. Volunteers under a blue canopy offered snacks while refugees waited for family to pick them up or for buses to take them to a nearby church.

At the Tijuana airport, weary travelers who enter Mexico as tourists in Mexico City or Cancun are directed to a makeshift lounge in the terminal with a sign in black marker that reads, “Only for Ukrainian Refugees.” It is the only place to register to enter the US, according to the Associated Press.

The waiting list stood at 973 families or single adults Tuesday.

“We realized we had a problem that the government wasn’t going to solve, so we solved it,” said Phil Metzger, pastor of Calvary Church in the San Diego suburb of Chula Vista, where about 75 members host Ukrainian families and another 100 refugees sleep on air mattresses and pews. 

Metzger, whose pastoral work has taken him to Ukraine and Hungary, calls the operation “duct tape and glue,” but refugees prefer it to overwhelmed European countries, where millions of Ukrainians have settled.

The Biden administration has said it will accept up to 100,000 Ukrainians, but Mexico is the only route producing big numbers. Appointments at US consulates in Europe are scarce, and refugee resettlement takes time, Associated Press reported.