The number of people confirmed killed in the province as of late Sunday is 32,173, Sichuan Communist Party chief Liu Qibao said, according to Xinhua.

Another 9,509 people remained buried and 29,418 others were missing, Liu said.

The new toll was announced as China came to a standstill on Monday exactly one week after its earthquake tragedy, observing three minutes of silence to mourn the tens of thousands of people killed in the disaster.

Across the vast country, millions of people stopped where they were and fell silent, while air-raid sirens blared and motorists honked their horns.

The silent memorial began precisely at 2:28 pm (0628 GMT), the exact moment a week earlier when the quake struck southwestern China.

The junta said 92.4% voted “yes” in the ballot and reported a turnout of 99%.

The vote was held in two-thirds of the country, but was postponed for two weeks in areas hit by Cyclone Nargis.

Human Rights Watch labelled the result an “insult to the people of Burma”, while an opposition group said the vote had been “full of cheating and fraud”.

The junta pressed ahead with the referendum on 10 May despite the plight of tens of thousands of people left stricken by the devastating cyclone.

A former Olympic athlete, the national coach and a government minister blown up by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber in April 2008 were among the high-profile victims, but numerous others have been maimed or killed in recent months.

The violence in Sri Lanka is often described as the result of an ‘ethnic conflict’ between Sinhalese and Tamil people dating back to ancient times. Yet many of the human rights abuses which have taken place in Sri Lanka have been within, rather than between, communities (of which there are several). And cultural symbols have often been exploited by those seeking political and economic gain.

A closer look at the Sri Lankan experience may throw some light on other situations where struggles supposedly based on ethnicity or religion turn out to be more complex – and where human rights are of critical importance.

For mile after mile through the vast flat expanse of the Irrawaddy Delta, the evidence of the destructive power of Cyclone Nargis lay on either side of the rutted road; uprooted trees, downed pylons, entire villages of flimsy, feeble homes blown flat.

To the south and west of here, a 120mph fury had lifted a wall of water 12ft tall from the Andaman Sea on Friday night and driven it in a deadly surge across much of the delta. The bamboo huts of Burma’s coast would have been the first to meet the destructive power of the storm as it made landfall, and they would have offered no meaningful resistance to Nargis.

The road between Rangoon and Bogale, through the delta, marks a journey to the very heart of the destruction caused by the cyclone; damage that has left more than 22,400 dead, 41,000 more missing and perhaps a million people homeless. Ten thousand are believed to have died in Bogale alone. No one yet knows how many more open graves like Bogale are waiting beyond the reach of the outside world.

EU Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development Mariann Fischer Boel said here on Tuesday that the change of dietary habits in China and India and bad weather are driving food prices high worldwide, reported EuAsiaNews.

“Those who see biofuels as the driving force behind recent food price increases have overlooked not just one elephant standing right in front of them, but two,” she said in a speech at the European Policy Centre, a think-tank in Brussels.

“The first elephant is the huge increase in demand from emerging countries like China and India. These countries are eating more meat. It takes about 4 kg of cereals to produce one kg of pork, and about two kg of cereals to make one kg of poultry meat. So a dietary shift towards meat in countries with populations of over 1 billion people each has an enormous impact on commodity markets,” noted the Danish commissioner.