At the World Health Organization’s (WHO) main annual meeting, U.S. representatives called for (AFP) a new robust, expert-led inquiry into the origins of COVID-19, while a Chinese delegate said Beijing considered (WSJ) a WHO-led probe in China earlier this year to be complete and that further investigations should focus elsewhere.
 
The WHO report released in March said it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus originated in a lab. But researchers had limited access to data in China, and WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus later said further investigation (FT) was needed. Australia, Japan, and Portugal were among other countries that called for additional research. On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. intelligence services found that three staff members at a lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus was first reported, were hospitalized with COVID-19-like symptoms in November 2019. The WHO probe found (CNN) that no lab workers had tested positive for the virus.

The Nomura Research Institute calculated that canceling the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics could cost Japan around $17 billion (Kyodo), less than the economic cost of declaring a state of emergency if the games proceed and COVID-19 cases surge.

The U.S. military has completed an estimated 16–25 percent of the process of withdrawing from Afghanistan (VOA), U.S. Central Command said. Military officials told the New York Times they hope to have U.S. troops fully withdrawn by mid-July.
 
CFR’s Max Boot examines the United States’ September 11 withdrawal deadline.
 
India: Cyclone Yaas killed at least three people and forced more than 1.2 million to evacuate (Al Jazeera) as it made landfall eastern India. It is the second cyclone to hit the country in two weeks.

Syria holds an election today (DW) that is predicted to give President Bashar al-Assad a fourth seven-year term. The foreign ministers of the United States, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom released a joint statement criticizing the election as “neither free nor fair.”
 
Iran: The country’s Guardian Council blocked (FT) two prominent moderate candidates from running in next month’s presidential election. A top reformist, Azar Mansouri, said reformists are “deprived of an active participation.”
 
In this 2020 Foreign Affairs piece, Sina Toossi discussed how Iran’s hard-liners consolidated power.

At the start of his trial, former South African President Jacob Zuma pleaded not guilty (Reuters) to eighteen charges related to a $2 billion arms deal that occurred when he was deputy president. A separate probe is investigating corruption that allegedly happened during his presidency.
 
Nigeria: To migrate toward a single exchange rate, the country’s central bank replaced (Bloomberg) the naira’s fixed exchange rate with a more flexible rate used by investors and exporters. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank had criticized the previous dual-rate system.

The European Union will send (VOA) at least one hundred million COVID-19 vaccine doses to low- and middle-income countries this year and invest $1 billion to boost vaccine manufacturing capacity in Africa, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.
 
UK: Former Downing Street advisor Dominic Cummings testified to Parliament (Guardian) about the UK’s handling of the pandemic, saying that senior officials “fell disastrously short” of the standards the public should expect and that Health Secretary Matt Hancock lied several times, including by saying that everyone who needed treatment could get it.

Costa Rica became the thirty-eighth member (AFP, Tico Times) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It is the fourth Latin American nation to join, after Chile, Colombia, and Mexico.
 
Mexico: In a blow to Mexico’s airline industry, U.S. authorities downgraded Mexico’s air-safety rating (WSJ) to Category 2 following an audit that began in October, citing concerns over training, political independence, and compensation.

Dozens of countries currently face severe oxygen shortages and low COVID-19 vaccination rates, which could soon lead to oxygen crises akin to that recently seen in India, the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports. In seven countries, including Afghanistan, Thailand, and Vietnam, oxygen use jumped by more than 100 percent in May and fewer than 11 percent of residents are vaccinated.
 
This photo essay shows India’s COVID-19 crisis.