Abbasi meets Nepal’s Oli, discusses Saarc
KATHMANDU: Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi met his Nepali counterpart K P Sharma Oli on Monday and discussed bilateral relations and ways to revive the Saarc process.
The visiting Pakistani premier said he was positive about taking forward the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) process.
Abbasi congratulated Oli for being appointed the new prime minister of Nepal after the recent elections, and extended an invitation to him to visit Pakistan, sources said. Oli hosted a dinner in honour of Abbasi.
Abbasi, who is in Nepal on a two-day visit at the invitation of Oli, was received by finance minister Yuvaraj Khatiwada at the Tribhuwan International Airport. He was accorded the guard of honour at Army Pavilion at Tundikhel Ground in the presence of Prime Minister Oli.
Abbasi is the first high level foreign leader to visit Nepal after Oli assumed office last month.
He will also call on President Bidyadevi Bhandari at her offical residence Sheetal Niwas on Tuesday and will meet other top officials of Nepal.
This is the first official bilateral visit by any Pakistani prime minister to Nepal after a gap of 24 years. In 1994, the then prime minister Benazir Bhutto travelled to Nepal on a bilateral visit.
Former premier Nawaz Sharif visited Nepal to attend the 18th SAARC Summit in 2014.
The 19th SAARC Summit, scheduled to be held in Islamabad in November 2016, was cancelled after India’s boycott citing Pakistan’s involvement in the Uri terror attack. ISTANBUL: An aid convoy has begun to enter the besieged, rebel-held Syrian enclave of eastern Ghouta, two weeks into a renewed regime offensive that has killed more than 700 civilians.
The convoy of 46 trucks, sent by the International Committee for the Red Cross, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and the United Nations, started to cross a final Syrian army checkpoint at al-wafideen on Monday morning, a witness told Reuters.
The aid delivery – the first in weeks – will offer a brief respite for some of the 400,000 residents of the enclave near the capital, Damascus, who have endured two weeks of intense violence despite a UN security council resolution last week demanding a ceasefire and the delivery of aid. The carnage has continued despite a daily five-hour truce ordered by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
The UN’S office for humanitarian affairs and the World Food Programme said Monday’s convoy to the town of Douma consisted of 46 truckloads of health and nutrition supplies, along with food for 27,500 people .
Doctors on the ground said 712 people had been killed and more than 5,600 wounded since 19 February.
The airstrikes and artillery bombardment have been coupled with a ground offensive by the regime of Bashar al-assad and his allied Shia militias, whose advances are aimed at splitting eastern Ghouta in half and cutting off rebel fighters.