Nearly 8,000 people were killed in Sri Lanka's war-torn north during the government's final offensive to crush the Tamil Tiger rebels, Colombo's census department said Saturday.

The figure is in stark contrast to estimates by international rights groups, which say up to 40,000 civilians perished in the final months of the civil war and have heavily criticized Sri Lanka's actions at the end of the conflict.

At 10:25 a.m., a dark brown eye was removed from a man whose lids had closed for the last time. Five hours later, the orb was staring up at the ceiling from a stainless steel tray in an operating room with two blind patients — both waiting to give it a second life.

S.P.D. Siriwardana, 63, remained still under a white sheet as the surgeon delicately replaced the cornea that had gone bad in his right eye following a cataract surgery. Across the room, patient A.K. Premathilake, 32, waited for the sclera, the white of the eye, to provide precious stem cells and restore some vision after acid scalded his sight away on the job.

Police have arrested the Sri Lankan caretaker of a property belonging to Hollywood actress Gillian Anderson following allegations of fraud, police said Thursday.

The caretaker, a Sri Lankan national, was remanded in custody Wednesday following a complaint he misappropriated up to 17.8 million rupees ($154,000) from the X-Files star's property at Pasyala, a village outside Colombo.

Thousands of rangers and volunteers have climbed into treetop huts near reservoirs and watering holes in Sri Lanka to carry out the island nation's first full count of its dwindling wild elephant population.

The government says the three-day census through Saturday is aimed at devising a plan to protect the elephants. But several conservation groups have boycotted the count, accusing the government of using it as a "smoke screen" for capturing and domesticating the best young animals for use in temples, tourism and labor.

Three baby elephants were killed when they were hit by a passenger train in Sri Lanka on Saturday, an official said.

The trio were crossing the tracks in a forested area near Ambanpola, 93 miles (150 kilometers) north of Colombo, when they were struck by a passenger train bound for the capital, railway general manager Wije Samarasinghe said.

Exotic and organic teas are wooing tea drinkers and challenging traditional black tea's dominance as never before, tea industry experts say, as a tea factory in Dubai bids to become the world's largest.

The shift in global tea-drinking trends is felt at the Jebel Ali Free Zone, despite it being more than 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) from the nearest tea bushes in the lush misty mountains of South Asia and East Africa.

Under a cloak of secrecy, the first film adaptation of controversial author Salman Rushdie's celebrated novel "Midnight's Children" has finished shooting in Sri Lanka.

Canadian director Deepa Mehta chose the South Asian island as a location instead of India or Pakistan, where the book is set, to avoid problems with religious fundamentalists.