Beijing, April 22:Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping will hold a summit meeting in Wuhan city in China from April 27 to 28 to improve bilateral relations, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced in Beijing on Sunday.

Modi will be visiting the central Chinese city at the invitation of Mr. Xi, Mr. Wang said at a joint media event with visiting External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj after their talks.

Ms. Swaraj is in China for talks with Mr. Wang and to take part in the two-day meeting of Foreign Ministers of the eight-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) from April 23.

Sources said that it will be an informal summit meeting between Mr. Xi and Mr. Modi during which both leaders will try to work out a new paradigm for the bilateral ties bogged down with a host of disputes and differences.

This will be fourth visit of Mr. Modi to China after he came to power in 2014. He is again due to visit China to take part in the SCO summit to be held at Qingdao city on June 9-10.

The Modi-Xi summit meeting is taking place in the backdrop of series of high level interactions between the two countries, starting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang’s visit to India in December, the first after Doklam standoff.

It was followed by two meetings between National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi and the visit early this year by Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale to Beijing.

The two countries also held 11th Joint Economic Group meeting and the fifth Strategic Economic Dialogue (SED) in Beijing recently.

Besides meetings between officials from the two Foreign Ministries, both sides held working mechanism meeting on border affairs and cross border rivers as well disarmament and non-proliferation dialogue in which India’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) was discussed and culminated in Sunday's talks between Ms. Swaraj and Mr. Wang.

 

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ISLAMABAD: At least two more cases of poliovirus were reported in Pakistan, taking the number of infections to 52 so far this year, a report said on Friday.

“The Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at the National Institute of Health has confirmed the detection of two more wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) cases in Pakistan," an official statement said.

The fresh infections — a boy and a girl — were reported from the Dera Ismail Khan district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.

“Genetic sequencing of the samples collected from the children is underway," the statement read. Dera Ismail Khan, one of the seven polio-endemic districts of southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, has reported five polio cases so far this year.

Of the 52 cases in the country this year, 24 are from Balochistan, 13 from Sindh, 13 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and one each from Punjab and Islamabad.

There is no cure for polio. Only multiple doses of the oral polio vaccine and completion of the routine vaccination schedule for all children under the age of five can keep them protected.