Afternoon Update: Fauci takes aim at News Corp journalist; Bikram Lama’s body returns home; and what to do about cultural collapse

Want to get this in your inbox every weekday? Sign up for the Afternoon Update here, and start your day with our Morning Mail newsletter Dr Anthony Fauci, the pandemic-era US chief medical adviser, has described a book by News Corp investigative journalist Sharri Markson backing the “lab leak” theory of Covid-19’s origins as a “bunch of nonsense” in his newly released diaries. This week, Fauci, 85, was subpoenaed by the Republican senator Rand Paul to appear at a Senate hearing on the origins of Covid-19, where he refused to answer questions, invoking the fifth amendment and accusing Paul of having an “unhinged obsession” with him. Ahead of Fauci’s appearance, Paul published 1,141 pages of Fauci’s pandemic-era journal entries, Caitlin Cassidy reports. In the entries, Fauci criticised reporting in The Australian newspaper and a book by Markson that claimed a facility in Wuhan was “immersed in genetically manipulating bat-coronaviruses in perilous experiments”. Fauci, who served under seven US presidents but became a household name in 2020, wrote in his private diary that Markson’s reporting “does not make any sense”. But Markson backed her work, saying sh