A Taliban delegation met China's special representative for Afghanistan in Beijing on Sunday to discuss the group's peace talks with the United States, a spokesman for the Islamist insurgency said.

Two Pakistani parliamentarians and human rights campaigners were released on bail in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province after four months in detention, their lawyer said on Saturday.

The Maldives are not "mired in a Chinese debt trap", the Chinese government's top diplomat told the visiting Maldivian foreign minister, amid fears in the Indian Ocean country of debts as high as $3 billion owing to Beijing.

China's state-run Aerospace Long-March International Trade Co (ALIT) on Friday rejected Sri Lanka President Maithripala Sirisena's allegation of misappropriating 2 billion rupees ($11 million) in a deal to work on the construction of South Asia's tallest tower.

A senior U.S. defence official in Afghanistan's capital city Kabul on Friday said Islamic State fighters were hiding among pine nut harvesters when a U.S. drone strike in eastern Afghanistan killed at least 32 people.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Friday promised to introduce measures to prevent civilian casualties in the ongoing war against militants, a day after at least 30 civilians were killed in a U.S. drone strike in eastern Nangarhar province.

A U.S. drone strike intended to hit an Islamic State (IS) hideout in Afghanistan killed at least 30 civilians resting after a day's labour in the fields, officials said on Thursday.

Twelve days ahead of the pine-nut harvest season, the governor of Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province received a letter from village elders in the Wazir Tangi area about their plans to recruit 200 labourers and children to pluck the dry fruit.

Sri Lanka's leading presidential candidate, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, would "restore relations" with the country's top lender China if he wins the Nov. 16 vote, his adviser said on Thursday.

A U.S. drone strike intended to hit an Islamic State (IS) hideout in Afghanistan killed at least 30 civilians resting after a day's labour in the fields, Afghan officials said on Thursday.