WORLD

At his virtual summit with US counterpart Joe Biden on Tuesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping projected China as a peace-loving nation and said it never started a war nor claimed an inch of land of others as he played down the criticism that Beijing is increasingly getting aggressive over its territorial claims.

"Chinese people have always loved and valued peace. Aggression or hegemony is not in the blood of the Chinese nation," Xi told Biden.

A screen shows Chinese President Xi Jinping attending a virtual meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden via video link, at a restaurant in Beijing (Reuters)

China has surpassed the United States to become the richest nation in the world as global wealth tripled over the past two decades, according to a new report by the research arm of consultants McKinsey & Co.

The report has been prepared after examining the national balance sheets of 10 countries, representing more than 60 per cent of world income. In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Jan Mischke, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute in Zurich, said, "We are now wealthier than we have ever been."

The worldwide net worth rose to $514 trillion in 2020, from $156 trillion in 2000, according to research conducted by McKinsey & Co. China emerged at the top of the worldwide list, accounting for almost one-third of the increase.

Artificial intelligence amplifies human mind and ingenuity in amazing ways across virtually every domain. It is the engine driving the latest technological disruption that is shaking the foundations of society. My use of the term includes the entire ecosystem of technologies that AI propels forward, such as quantum computing, semiconductors, nanotechnology, medical technology, brain-machine interface, robotics, aerospace, 5G, and much more.

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Sri Lanka has called for an in-person BIMSTEC summit, the date of which is yet to be decided. This will be the 5th such summit of the grouping.

BIMSTEC or Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation has 7 members - India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. The grouping is more than 20 years old and was formed in 1997. The last summit took place in Kathmandu in 2018 with PM Modi and other member-leaders attending the meet.

Sri Lanka is the chair of the grouping and had earlier proposed holding a virtual summit on 9th December which has now been postponed. Before that it had proposed August for the summit.

This is the 2nd time Colombo had to post the summit, the reason for which has not been given. First April saw BIMSTEC foreign minister meet taking place virtually during which agenda for the leaders' summit was taken up.

At the Paris summit on climate change in 2015, world leaders agreed to contain global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, and strive to bring Earth's average temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius, below the pre-industrial levels. But how to do it has been a bone of contention. Now, at the Glasgow summit, a deal between the United States and China offers fresh hope.

The US and China are the world's two largest carbon emitters. A day before the Glasgow summit concludes, the two countries signed a deal on Thursday to increase cooperation on tackling climate change.

They did not declare new carbon emission targets but announced a commitment to work together to speed up emissions reductions required to meet the 2015 Paris Agreement. The US-China agreement raised hopes for the COP26 global summit to conclude positively on Friday night.