China faces worst outbreak since 2020

Australia's vocal criticism of China's human rights record has long angered Beijing. When Canberra called for an investigation into the origin of the coronavirus in 2020, Beijing slapped high tariffs on some Australian products.

Authorities enraged pet lovers with an order to cull more than 2,200 hamsters after tracing an outbreak to a worker in a shop where 11 hamsters tested positive. Imported hamsters from Holland into the Chinese territory had been cited as the source. All hamster imports remain banned.

Can Xi Jinping's China pull it off? Can happy pictures of a torch relay reduced to 72 hours and tightly cropped images of top-level competitions make the world forget about the empty seats, the Covid bubble, the artificial snow, the tight security and the pressure on sponsors over human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong?

China's decision to have a Uyghur athlete light the Olympic cauldron has drawn criticism from human rights groups, who saw it as cheap propaganda ploy to whitewash the oppression of the country's ethnic Uyghur minority.

With China gearing up for the Beijing Winter Olympics, other countries are sticking to their pledge of a diplomatic boycott on human rights grounds, especially after documentation of the government's treatment of Uyghurs. One LA business owner has turned his restaurant into a form of activism.

Taiwan 'most dangerous flashpoint' in US-China relations

San Francisco-born Eileen Gu, who lifted the host country to the top of the medals table at the Beijing Olympics with a freeski Big Air gold on Tuesday, remained evasive on whether she was still holding an American passport.

In China, all eyes are on the ongoing Winter Olympics. Although the Games have come under scrutiny for a number of reasons beyond sport, they are also the culmination of an impressive campaign to convert more than 300 million people into winter sport aficionados. Our correspondents report. We also speak to Susan Brownell, a professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri–Saint Louis.

South Koreans expressed frustration on Wednesday (February 9) after seeing their traditional costume used in last week's Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing, but the Chinese Embassy in South Korea defended the use. A woman wearing what appeared to be a Korean hanbok dress was among those representing China's different ethnic groups during the ceremony. Some South Koreans have complained about recent Chinese assertions that various aspects of Korean culture are of Chinese origin.

Former US diplomat Robert Daly, an expert on Sino-US relations, tells DW's Brent Goff on "The Day" that the formation of the new US-UK-Australia alliance is meant to send a signal that Chinese hegemonic dominance of the western Pacific is "not going to be accepted by much of the rest of the world."

The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics are being held in a "closed-loop" system, where participants and visitors are separated from the public because of Covid-19. It's the perfect environment to push the limits of modern technology and Beijing is showcasing a whole host of innovations, from 5G to robots and from 8K broadcasting to its digital currency, the e-CNY. Peter O'Brien takes us through some of the breakthroughs and controversies surrounding tech at the Games.

The first case of wild polio to be reported in Africa in five years has been confirmed in Malawi. Africa had been declared polio-free in August 2020.