Covid-19 began with an accident in a Chinese laboratory

Other news of the day: hundreds of cases of poisoned schoolgirls in Iran. Clashes between the Indian Army and Kashmiri militants. Japan’s foreign minister will not be present at the G20 meeting in India. The Burmese military junta continues to demolish civilian homes. For Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, Donbass is an “outpost of the Russian world”.

UNITED STATES-CHINA

According to the FBI, the origin of the covid-19 pandemic it is most likely due to an accident at a government laboratory in China. Beijing denies that the disease spread from a Wuhan bacteriological center – where it first appeared – and accuses the US of spreading defamatory news.

IRAN

Hundreds of Iranian schoolgirls have suffered mild episodes of poisoning in the last few months. The pathologies arose in coincidence with the protests over the death of the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini while she was in the custody of the morality police. The poisonings are suspected to be the work of religious groups opposed to women’s education.

INDIA

indian soldiers two Kashmiri militants were killed yesterday in a 12-hour standoff in a village south of Srinagar. The trigger was the murder of a Hindu security guard in another town in the region. Kashmir has been the scene of a conflict between the central government and pro-Pakistani separatist and Islamist groups for decades.

JAPAN

Japan’s Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi will not attend today and tomorrow the G20 meeting in Delhi and will be replaced by one of his deputies. Disagreements over Russia’s war against Ukraine risk ruining the meeting. Hayashi will instead participate on March 3 in a meeting of the Quad, the forum for dialogue between the US, Japan, India and Australia.

MYANMAR

the burmese board demolished more than 100 homes in recent days in Mandalay, the second city of the country. The military justified the eviction of the residents by claiming that the houses were located on State land. Since the February 2021 coup, the UN estimates that the army has evicted 50,000 people, destroyed 38,000 homes and created 1.1 million displaced people.

RUSSIA

Patriarch Kirill met in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow with a group of young athletes from Donbass, a region he defined as the “outpost of the Russian world”. The meeting was organized by the “Save Childhood” Orthodox Church Foundation, which has been working in Donbass since last June to organize the reception of children and young people from Ukraine.

UZBEKISTAN

President Mirziyoyev promised “not to shut down the media,” despite the fact that “they have proposed it to me,” he said during a visit to a new school in the Kashkadar region. He assured that “we like the air of freedom, although sometimes it is difficult. But I have not heard any protest from the people for being a closed country.