China

According to China's Center for Disease Control (CDC), the number of critically ill patients in hospital peaked in the first week of January, then rapidly declined by more than 70 per cent, says the Guardian report. The number of deaths also reached its highest level that week, the CDC data revealed.

"The country (India) has always charted its own course without a true alliance system, and that is still mostly the case. But China's actions have caused India to change its strategic posture in the last few years," Pompeo wrote. "In June 2020, Chinese soldiers clubbed twenty Indian soldiers to death in a border skirmish. That bloody incident caused the Indian public to demand a change in their country's relationship with China," he added.

Among the religious sites and objects destroyed in Drago county were three colossal Buddha statues, a Buddhist school, a building housing with 45 giant prayer wheels, the home of a revered spiritual leader and Drago Monastery's prayer flags, which were removed and burned, the report by London-based Free Tibet says.

China, which annexed Tibet in 1951, rules the western autonomous region with an iron hand and says only Beijing can select the next spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, as stated in Chinese law. But Tibetans believe the Dalai Lama chooses the body into which he is reincarnated, a process that has occurred 13 times since 1391, when the first Dalai Lama was born, RFA reported.

It was the first decline since 1961, the final year of the famine brought on by failing economic policies during Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward", the campaign to transform China from a mostly agrarian society into an industrial one that ended in disaster, RFA reported.

"'China, China, China!', our US colleague starts chanting this infamous mantra and blaming China as a 'spoiler' to the island's negotiation with the IMF during her recent interview with a UK television program on Sri Lanka's debt issue," the Chinese Embassy in Colombo said on Twitter and also in a statement.

"I can tell this assembly that the talks are successful," he said as the Indian Ocean island nation is awaiting the International Monetary Fund bailout to relieve worst ever economic crisis the country is going through. "Very soon we will have an answer," Ranil Wickremesinghe said.

While the number swamps the few dozen deaths previously recorded in the official tally - which drew widespread criticism both at home and abroad, including from the World Health Organization (WHO) - experts say it's still likely to be an underestimate given the enormous scale of the outbreak and the mortality rates seen at the height of omicron waves in other countries that initially pursued a Covid Zero strategy.

Responding to a query on China's assistance to Sri Lanka's debt restructuring, Chen Zhou has said: "Several Ministries and financial institutes of China are working closely on this issue for quite a long period. I'm confident that Sri Lanka will have good news very soon."

At 7:03 a.m. local time, a high-speed train left the Hong Kong West Kowloon Station for Shenzhen, the first of such trains since the pandemic disrupted the cross-border bullet train services, Xinhua News Agency reported. Liao Jun, a student from Jiangxi Province who studies in Hong Kong, was excited to catch the first train back to the mainland.