by the chair, which will be its centrepiece. nicholas witchell, bbc news, westminster abbey. time for a look at the weather. here s darren bett. chilly today but there is colder weather on the way as we head into next week. today is the first day of meteorological spring, it s also st david s day and it s been pretty cloudy. the cloud is thick enough to give us more showers around today. still got high pressure close by so the really wet weather is being deflected into southern parts of europe. that s the storm that brought all of the rain we saw in majorca, that s moving away. just to the north of that there is clear skies. it looks like we will tap into some of that tonight and tomorrow, so may be some changes on the way. today the winds are coming in from off the north sea, picking up in from off the north sea, picking up a lot of cloud. that s pushing our way. the best sunshine in western scotland. the cloud still ringing quite a peppering of showers in those temperatures
[cheering and applauding] stupid but before we get to the nitty-gritty president bidee has a special messagsie for us,a day late but cut him some slacke happy valentines. make no mistake.mi i mean it. [laughs] come on man it s a true story. [applause] greg: yes. all right. well said. i, like that i just ate a bag of expired medications, but at least his heart is in the right place. wow, how lucky for him that every day is valentine s day and it certainly is for his wife dr. jill. talk about an oral examination. maybe she forgot her tongue depressor. then again, she is a doctor, but what is it with jill biden and other people spouses? they don t just keep it in the family to keep it in the second family. oh stop it. save your clapping from when it matters. back to the matter at hand, the latest joe biden scandal and it s not about hunter or his junk, it is about joe s brother jimbo and i hope to god it is nothing to do with his junk, i ve seen enough of the joe
the second world war or new assessment of the worst pandemic since 1918 china is front and center tonight. on ukraine members of the administration spoke today and over the weekend warning beijing that arming russia would be a mistake. we are confident that the chinese leadership is considering the provision of lethal equipment that would be a very risky and unwise bet. bill burns, the cia director. on covid we learned yesterday that the department of energy has assessed in a newly updated intelligence report that it most likely originated from a laboratory leak. cnn has just learned the reason for that updated report. three sources telling cnn that the department of energy shift was based in part on information about the research that the chinese centers for disease control, the chinese cdc in wuhan, was doing around the time of the outbreak on a coronavirus variant. cnn has previously reported that the lab was studying coronaviruses m bats but it is unclear how closely
workers in the lab at that time. if you are able to go back and look at those blood samples and say, did they show antibodies to the covid virus, then that would be another pretty definitive piece of data. and then you would obviously want to have a complete forensics investigation of the lab. but it is these things, these types of things that we do not have still. that has been the lack of transparency that so many people have been talking about. i think the answer to the question that everybody is answering ins noble, but we don t know it because we don t have all the data. sanjay it s interesting because you even spoke to some of the scientists who worked in wuhan. what did they say about how hard it is to get information in china? they say it is really hard. it s interesting because there is this world health investigation i talked to peter dasha who also runs ecohealth alliance, the organization that was doing research in wuhan. so he had sort of two halves that he w
outbreak on a coronavirus variant. cnn has previously reported that the lab was studying coronaviruses in bats but it is unclear how closely related the variants were to the strain which started the pandemic. as for the energy department s new assessment, it is described as low confidence and a minority view apparently within the intelligence community. that said, it sparked new calls today from transparency from china. we would wish to see from the prc a greater degree of responsibility, a greater acknowledgment that it is in the interests of the chinese people, yes, we better understand the origins of covid-19, but it is in the or to understand the origins of covid-19. today s development also prompted to leading house republicans to send letters demanding the state department of energy and the fbi to provide testimony and documents related to the ongoing probe of the ten pandemics origin. china s foreign minister also weighed in, calling on relevant parties to quote,