The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has much to lose, both domestically and internationally, if the truth comes out. A muddled debate about the origins of the virus serves China just fine. Evading accountability — and suffering no little negative fallout — for unleashing a pandemic on the world that killed millions of people is not a bad outcome. And the economic results may even be better for China than for the rest of the world, thereby strengthening the CCP further.
China stands ready to work with all parties to build a closer Belt and Road partnership, President Xi Jinping said Wednesday in a written message to the Asia and Pacific High-level Conference on Belt and Road Cooperation.
Xi said the joint building of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that he proposed is aimed at carrying forward the spirit of the Silk Road, working together to build an open platform of cooperation, and providing new impetus for cooperation and development among countries.
Bangladesh and nations in Southeast Asia are welcoming the Group of Seven’s new answer to China’s One Belt, One Road initiative, saying it will be another source for financing their burgeoning infrastructure needs.
But because the U.S.-led Build Back Better World Partnership (B3W) initiative is scant in details, officials of some governments in the region and analysts say they also are waiting for more information to see how it can help their countries. China has an eight-year head start and has pumped huge amounts of money into its global infrastructure-building program (OBOR).
Taliban fighters overran a key district in Afghanistan’s northern province of Kunduz on June 21 and surrounded the provincial capital, police said.
Fighting around Imam Sahib district began late on June 20 and by noon on June 21 the militants had overrun the district headquarters and were in control of police headquarters, said provincial police spokesman Inamuddin Rahmani.
The setbacks come at a harrowing moment for Afghanistan, just as American and international troops are set to leave the country in coming weeks.
The Taliban entered two provincial capitals in northern Afghanistan Sunday, local officials said, the culmination of an insurgent offensive that has overrun dozens of rural districts and forced the surrender and capture of hundreds of government forces and their military equipment in recent weeks.
The Afghanistan government’s top peace negotiator has voiced concern that the withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan could cause a “security vacuum, an increased level of fighting and perhaps a slower pace of negotiations,” saying the solution “has to be through negotiations, not through battle.”
Every few hours this weekend, the Taliban released videos of triumphant insurgents inspecting yet another Afghan district headquarters that had been lost in battle by government forces or surrendered without a fight.
Afghanistan’s Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation (MoRR) says that an estimated 6.5 million Afghans are living as migrants or asylum seekers in about 70 countries.
Addressing a press conference on the occasion of World Refugee Day (June 20), Abdul Basit Ansari, a spokesman for the MoRR, said that Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey host the largest number of Afghan refugees.
“Currently, about 6.5 Afghans are living as migrants in more than 70 countries, and that most of them have migrated to Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey,” Ansari said.
He added that more than four million Afghans, have been forced to flee their homes due to ongoing clashes across the country.
Meanwhile, at an event organized by the Afghan government and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to mark World Refugee Day, President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, reaffirmed the government’s strong commitment to enabling voluntary repatriation in safety and dignity, and sustainable reintegration of Afghan refugees.
“They are an integral part of Afghanistan and without them, the Afghan nation is incomplete”, Ghani said.
The UNHCR in a statement stated that Afghans constitute the world’s largest protracted refugee situation around the globe, with millions displaced at different time intervals.
According to the statement 2020 recorded about 132,700 Afghan refugees, though an overall reduction in numbers in 2020, Afghans still remain the third-largest population displaced across borders with a total of about 2.6 million refugees.
More than 85 percent of Afghan refugees are hosted in Iran and Pakistan, the statement noted.
“Afghan refugees and diaspora abroad have accumulated a wealth of human capital, skills, and assets with which they can play an important role in the nation-building, and reconstruction and development of Afghanistan,” President Ghani said.
Speaking on the occasion of World Refugee Day, Caroline Van Buren, UNHCR’s Representative in Afghanistan commended Government’s efforts in including returnees and displaced Afghans in the national priority programs particularly health, education, and livelihood sectors.
“Inclusion and addressing the vulnerabilities of returnees displaced population through coordinated and comprehensive area-based humanitarian and development investments to build the resilient communities is at the heart of our (government and UNHCR’s) strategies in Afghanistan,” she said.
In the recent summit between U.S. President Joseph Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, cyberattacks and ransomware were high on the agenda.
According to Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Christopher Wray, cyberattacks from U.S. adversaries are reaching a crisis point.
It took 25-year-old Wardini and her two young children almost two months to travel with smugglers by road from Jordan, through Iran, to western Afghanistan. By the time they were arrested by Afghan border guards, she had burned their Indonesian passports. They were not going home, she told an Indonesian consular officer who visited her in a Kabul prison in 2019. With the end of days near, she and her children, both then under three, would live in “Khorasan, the blessed land”, she said.