A Chinese envoy was due to hold talks in India from yesterday aimed at fixing a dispute about the Himalayan border that divides Asia’s largest nations — part of a push to make progress on the festering row before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits China.
Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi (楊潔篪) is visiting India from yesterday through tomorrow for the 18th round of boundary talks, India’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
The talks are the first since Modi took office. The nationalist prime minister is keen to resolve the dispute that has clouded rapidly expanding commercial links, and any progress would shed a positive light on his expected visit to Beijing in May.
However, there is no simple solution to a conflict that largely dates back to British colonial decisions about Tibet.
The disagreement over the 3,500km border led to a brief war in 1962 and involves large swathes of remote territory.
China lays claim to more than 90,000 square kilometers disputed by New Delhi in the eastern sector of the Himalayas. Much of that forms the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China calls South Tibet.
India says China occupies 38,000 square kilometers of its territory on the Aksai Chin plateau in the west.
In September last year, the two armies were locked in a face-off in the Ladakh sector in the western Himalayas, just as Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was visiting India for the first summit talks with Modi.
Yang’s visit to India is at the invitation of Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, Modi’s close aide, who is known to take a hard line on security issues.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
RSS