While US lawmakers and private citizens had been vocal for support to India as the second COVID-19 wave broke across the country, the Biden administration was widely criticized for being slow to act.
Major powers are wading deeper into the South China Sea in a series of moves that promise to rile China while answering US calls for like-minded nations to counter jointly Beijing’s rising assertiveness.
China’s latest squeeze on Australia may be largely symbolic, meant as a warning shot for Canberra and other middle powers in the age of US-China rivalry, observers said.
China suspended an economic dialogue with Australia, stepping up a pressure campaign that began over Australian support for a probe of the coronavirus and has disrupted exports to the country’s biggest foreign market.
With no signs of a decline in new COVID-19 cases in hard-hit areas, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said that the state of emergency — now in effect in Tokyo, Osaka, Hyogo, and Kyoto prefectures — will be extended.
A police officer was injured in a bomb explosion in Naypyitaw’s Pyinmana Township, residents told Myanmar Now, just hours after two bombs went off in Yangon the night before.
A third wave of COVID-19 is inevitable, given the amount of virus circulation, K. VijayRaghavan, principal scientific adviser to the government of India, has warned.