Beijing
Reuters
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China restated its case that Covid-19 may have originated in the United States in a white paper on its pandemic response released on Wednesday, after President Donald Trump’s administration blamed a lab leak in China.

The White House launched a Covid-19 website on April 18 in which it said the coronavirus came from a lab leak in China while criticizing former President Joe Biden, former top US health official Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization (WHO).

In the white paper, released by the official Xinhua news agency, China accused the US of politicizing the matter of the origins of Covid-19. It cited a Missouri lawsuit which resulted in a $24 billion ruling against China for hoarding protective medical equipment and covering up the outbreak.

China shared relevant information with the WHO and the international community in a timely manner, the white paper said, emphasizing that a joint study by the WHO and China had concluded that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely.”

The US should not continue to “pretend to be deaf and dumb,” but should respond to the legitimate concerns of the international community, the white paper said.

“Substantial evidence suggested the Covid-19 might have emerged in the United States earlier than its officially-claimed timeline, and earlier than the outbreak in China,” it said.

The CIA said in January the pandemic was more likely to have emerged from a lab in China than from nature, after the agency had for years said it could not reach a conclusion on the matter. It said it had “low confidence” in its new assessment and noted that both lab origin and natural origin remain plausible.

An official at China’s National Health Commission said the next step in origin-tracing work should focus on the US, according to Xinhua, which cited a statement about the white paper.

CNN
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Tensions between India and Pakistan have escalated further after a top Pakistani official claimed early Wednesday to have “credible intelligence” that New Delhi will carry out a military action against Islamabad within the next two days.

The claim came as both the United States and China urged restraint.

“Pakistan has credible intelligence that India intends carrying out military action against Pakistan in the next 24-36 hours,” Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said in an unusual middle of the night post on X. He did not elaborate on what evidence Pakistan had used to make the claim.

Tarar’s comments come just one week after militants massacred 26 tourists in the mountainous town of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir, a rampage that has sparked widespread outrage.

India has accused Pakistan of being involved in the attack — a claim Islamabad denies. Pakistan has offered a neutral investigation into the incident. CNN has contacted India’s defense ministry for response to Tarar’s claims.

The Director Generals of Military Operations of both countries spoke over a hotline on Tuesday, India’s state broadcaster and Pakistan’s military confirmed on Wednesday – the first conversation between the military officials since the Pahalgam attack.

Kashmir, one of the world’s most dangerous flashpoints, is controlled in part by India and Pakistan but both countries claim it in its entirety.

The two nuclear-armed rivals have fought three wars over the mountainous territory that is now divided by a de-facto border called the Line of Control since their independence from Britain nearly 80 years ago.

Last week’s attack sparked immediate widespread anger in India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is under tremendous pressure to retaliate with force.

India conducted airstrikes inside Pakistan in 2019 following a major insurgent attack on paramilitary personnel inside Indian-administered Kashmir. It was the first such incursion into Pakistan’s territory since a 1971 war between the two neighbors.

The latest attack on tourists in Kashmir has sparked fears that India might respond in a similar way.

Modi vowed to pursue the attackers “to the ends of the earth” in a fiery speech last week. The massacre set off an escalating tit-for-tat exchange of hostilities between the two countries over the past week.

Pakistan’s Tarar on Wednesday claimed any “military adventurism by India would be responded to assuredly and decisively.”

US and China react

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke with India’s external affairs minister and Pakistan’s prime minister, urging the two countries to work together to “de-escalate tensions,” according to State Department readouts of the two calls on Wednesday.

In his call with Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Rubio “spoke of the need to condemn the terror attack on April 22 in Pahalgam” and urged Pakistani officials’ cooperation in investigating the attack in the Kashmiri town. Rubio also encouraged Sharif to “re-establish direct communications” with India, the readout said

New Delhi is considered an important partner for Washington as it seeks to counter China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region. Pakistan is also considered a key US partner.

China, which also claims control of part of Kashmir and has grown closer to Pakistan in recent years, has also urged restraint.

China’s foreign minister Wang Yi spoke to Pakistan’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister Ishaq Dar last week, saying any conflict between Pakistan and India would “not serve the fundamental interests of each side” and posed a risk to regional security, state broadcaster CGTN reported.

India and China’s relationship has proved fractious in recent years, with clashes at their contested border. Meanwhile, Beijing and Islamabad have strengthened ties, with China continuing to invest in Pakistan under its Belt and Road Initiative.

In the days after the Pahalgam attack, both countries swiftly downgraded ties with each other.

India canceled visa of Pakistani nationals, and Pakistan responded with a reciprocal move. Both countries have told diplomats and citizens to return home before April 30.

India has also suspended its participation in a crucial water-sharing pact and both sides have now banned each other’s airlines from their respective air spaces.

The Indus Water Treaty has been in force since 1960 and is regarded as a rare diplomatic success story between the two fractious neighbors.

The treaty governs the sharing of water from the enormous Indus River system, a vital resource supporting hundreds of millions of livelihoods across Pakistan and northern India. The Indus originates in Tibet and flows through China and Indian-controlled Kashmir before reaching Pakistan.

Islamabad has called any attempt to stop or divert water belonging to Pakistan an act of war.

This week, New Delhi and Islamabad have both been flexing their military might.

Pakistan shot down an Indian drone that was used for “espionage” in the disputed Kashmir region on Tuesday, Pakistani security sources told CNN.

Two days earlier, India’s navy said it had carried out test missile strikes to “revalidate and demonstrate readiness of platforms, systems and crew for long range precision offensive strike.”

Tensions have been also been simmering along the Line of Control and gunfire has been exchanged along the disputed border for six straight nights.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Editor’s Note: Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series committed to reporting on the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with CNN to drive awareness and education around key sustainability issues and to inspire positive action.

CNN
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The world’s smallest elephants are still big. Measuring around nine feet (2.7 meters) tall, Bornean elephants are the smallest subspecies of the Asian elephant, and are two feet (60 centimeters) shorter than their African counterparts.

Found only on the island of Borneo, mostly in the Malaysian state of Sabah, there are fewer than 1,000 Bornean elephants left in the wild, and they are classified as endangered.

In the last 40 years, Sabah has lost 60% of the elephant’s natural forest habitat to logging and palm oil plantations. According to one study, between 1980 and 2000, more wood was exported from Borneo than from the entirety of Africa and the Amazon combined. This has left elephant populations fragmented and squeezed into small areas of preserved forest, such as those in the Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary, an area in the floodplains of the Kinabatangan River where pockets of native forest exist within large agricultural estates.

But Malaysian elephant ecologist Dr. Farina Othman is determined to connect these habitats by building corridors of wild trees through palm oil plantations. She founded conservation organization Seratu Aatai, meaning “solidarity,” in 2018 to raise awareness of the elephants and address the rise in human-elephant conflict.

Due to encroaching plantations, the elephants have come into more frequent contact with humans, sometimes damaging crops and buildings. This leads to conflict, and between 2010 and 2020, 131 Bornean elephants were killed, primarily due to human-related causes, such as accidental poisoning or retribution killings. Othman said that while many people understand the importance of elephants as ecosystem engineers through spreading seeds, and know that they are under threat, there is still a “not in my backyard” attitude towards them.

It became her goal to change this mindset. “Who else can take that responsibility? I’m Malaysian, so I think it’s time for me to also try to educate and raise awareness,” she told CNN.

On Wednesday, she was one of six conservationists given the 2025 Whitley Award, which includes a £50,000 ($66,000) prize for her project. The award, presented by the Whitley Fund for Nature, a UK charity, supports grassroots conservationists in the Global South.

Othman will put the new funding towards expanding the network of elephant corridors across Sabah. “If only one plantation wants to do this, it won’t work. We need to create a consortium of several plantations so that we can connect this corridor back to the wildlife sanctuary,” she said.

The first challenge was getting the farmers on side. For a long time, Othman said she was unable to get palm planters in the same room with her, but eventually, they found common ground.

“As planters, they actually know the need of preserving biodiversity and also the health of the soil, because this is all contributing back to the trees that they’re planting,” she said.

She added that some farmers have now agreed to plant native trees alongside their oil palms, as well as “food chests” of plants that elephants like to eat, to encourage them to use the wildlife corridors.

Othman and her team are now working with plantations to monitor the elephants to better understand their behavior. This will include training planters on how to assess herd dynamics and recognize individual elephants. Larger plantations will also be offered sessions on sustainable farming and pest control, hopefully helping to reduce the number of accidental poisonings.

She has also set up a team of elephant rangers, with members of the local community, who will monitor populations and help to ensure palm planters know how to interact with elephants safely.

Edward Whitley, founder of the Whitley Fund for Nature, said of Othman: “Her innovative project recognizes the key role that oil palm companies can play in (elephant) conservation, and her connection to and love of these beautiful giants has helped empower community members to become guardians of their environment.”

Othman worries that with the rise of human-elephant interaction, the nature of the elephants might change, from docile to more aggressive. But she hopes that through their work to build forest corridors and community outreach, this can be avoided. When an encounter does happen, she says people should act calmly and kindly, and that the elephants will respond in the same way.

She recalls times when elephants could have hurt her in the past, but didn’t. “I believe that they can really read your heart and what is in your mind,” she said.