Asia (except ME & Indian SC)

BEIJING, July 22 (Xinhua) -- The claim that the SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a Wuhan lab goes against science, a senior official of the National Health Commission (NHC) said Thursday.

Zeng Yixin, vice director of the NHC, said he was surprised to hear that some people have claimed the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The claim is disrespectful to common sense, and goes against science, Zeng told a press conference on the coronavirus origin-tracing work, which is held by China's State Council Information Office.

TOKYO (AP) — Tokyo hit another six-month high in new COVID-19 cases on Thursday, one day before the Olympics begin, as worries grow of a worsening of infections during the Games.

Thursday’s 1,979 new cases are the highest since 2,044 were recorded on Jan. 15.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, who is determined to hold the Olympics, placed Tokyo under a state of emergency on July 12, but daily cases have sharply increased since then.

BEIJING (AP) — The bodies of all 14 workers trapped when a tunnel under construction was flooded last week have been recovered, authorities in southern China said Thursday.

A brief statement on the Zhuhai city government’s social media site gave no further information about the cause of the July 15 disaster or the deaths.

The Shijingshan tunnel is a section of an expressway under construction that passes beneath a reservoir in the Guangdong province city that lies close to Hong Kong and Macao.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Top U.S. and South Korean officials agreed Thursday to try to convince North Korea to return to talks on its nuclear program, which Pyongyang has insisted it won’t do in protest of what it calls U.S. hostility.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman was in Seoul as part of her regional tour that will take her to China this weekend. She’ll be the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit China since President Joe Biden took office in January.

DABANCHENG, China (AP) — The Uyghur inmates sat in uniform rows with their legs crossed in lotus position and their backs ramrod straight, numbered and tagged, gazing at a television playing grainy black-and-white images of Chinese Communist Party history.

TOKYO (AP) — The Tokyo Olympic organizing committee fired the director of the opening ceremony on Thursday because of a Holocaust joke he made during a comedy show in 1998.

Organizing committee president Seiko Hashimoto said a day ahead of the opening ceremony that director Kentaro Kobayashi has been dismissed. He was accused of using a joke about the Holocaust in his comedy act, including the phrase “Let’s play Holocaust.”

BEIJING (AP) — China cannot accept the World Health Organization’s plan for the second phase of a study into the origins of COVID-19, a senior Chinese health official said Thursday.

Zeng Yixin, the vice minister of the National Health Commission, said he was “rather taken aback” by the call for a further into the pandemic’s origins and specifically, the theory that the virus might have leaked from a Chinese lab.

He dismissed the lab leak theory as a rumor that runs counter to common sense and science.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Indonesia has converted nearly its entire oxygen production to medical use just to meet the demand from COVID-19 patients struggling to breathe. Overflowing hospitals in Malaysia had to resort to treating patients on the floor. And in Myanmar’s largest city, graveyard workers have been laboring day and night to keep up with the grim demand for new cremations and burials.

BAIKONUR COSMODROME /Kazakhstan/, July 21. /TASS/: Russia’s Nauka multipurpose laboratory module has successfully separated from the upper stage of the Proton-M carrier rocket, the presenter announced at the Baikonur spaceport.

"The Nauka module has separated from the third stage of the carrier rocket," the presenter said.

A Proton-M launch vehicle with the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 5:58 p.m. Moscow time on July 21.

VIENTIANE, Jul 21 (NNN-KPL) – Seven people are missing, in northern Laos’ Xieng Khuang province, after the ground collapsed under them, while they were drilling for gold on Sunday.

The incident occurred in Choi village, Phoukout district, in Xieng Khuang province, some 180 km north-east of the Lao capital, Vientiane, local daily Vientiane Times reported today.

The group of seven, including one woman, had drilled about 10 metres deep, when the ground collapsed, an official from the province’s Department of Information, Culture and Tourism, told the daily.