COVID-19 was probably not a biological weapon and most US analysts believe it was not genetically engineered at all, but a final conclusion on the virus’ origins is impossible without cooperation from China, a declassified US report said.
The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday released its long-awaited public findings on the virus’ origins — a declassified version of the secret report submitted to US President Joe Biden earlier this year.
The intelligence community remains divided on where the outbreak began, but believes two causes are plausible — that it spread through animals to humans or that it sprang from an incident at a lab in Wuhan, China.
Photo: AFP
“China’s cooperation most likely would be needed to reach a conclusive assessment of the origins of COVID-19,” the report said. “Beijing, however, continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information, and blame other countries, including the United States.”
The report sets out key outstanding questions, including information about the earliest cases of COVID-19, Chinese hospital occupancy rates and information on animals traded on Wuhan markets.
Meanwhile, China on Friday recorded its highest number of new daily COVID-19 infections in more than six weeks.
Nationwide, 59 new locally transmitted infections were reported, the Chinese National Health Commission said yesterday, up from 48 a day earlier.
It was the highest number of new local infections since Sept. 16.
Most of the cases were in northern China, with infections reported in Heilongjiang Province, Inner Mongolia, Gansu Province, Beijing and Ningxia.
There were no new deaths, leaving the death toll unchanged at 4,636.
Although the tally is tiny compared with infections elsewhere in the world, recent widespread outbreaks have forced officials to toughen restrictions, squeezing the service sector, including tourism and catering companies.
China’s border towns, faced with a higher risk of infection from overseas and with relatively few resources, have tended to experience more severe disruptions than richer cities.
In Inner Mongolia, the government in Ejina Banner, a remote administrative division on China’s border with Mongolia that went into lockdown last week, said it would transfer more than 9,400 stranded travelers to low-risk areas in the coming days, the official China Daily reported.
Additional reporting by Reuters
The Burmese junta has said that detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi is “in good health,” a day after her son said he has received little information about the 80-year-old’s condition and fears she could die without him knowing. In an interview in Tokyo earlier this week, Kim Aris said he had not heard from his mother in years and believes she is being held incommunicado in the capital, Naypyidaw. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was detained after a 2021 military coup that ousted her elected civilian government and sparked a civil war. She is serving a
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘NO AMNESTY’: Tens of thousands of people joined the rally against a bill that would slash the former president’s prison term; President Lula has said he would veto the bill Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday demonstrated against a bill that advanced in Congress this week that would reduce the time former president Jair Bolsonaro spends behind bars following his sentence of more than 27 years for attempting a coup. Protests took place in the capital, Brasilia, and in other major cities across the nation, including Sao Paulo, Florianopolis, Salvador and Recife. On Copacabana’s boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, crowds composed of left-wing voters chanted “No amnesty” and “Out with Hugo Motta,” a reference to the speaker of the lower house, which approved the bill on Wednesday last week. It is
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS