Trump fires chief US lawyer who defied him on migrant ban

Beijing, May 24: The Chinese virology institute in the city where COVID-19 first emerged has three live strains of bat coronavirus on-site, but none match the new contagion wreaking chaos across the world, its director has said.

Scientists think COVID-19 -- which first emerged in Wuhan and has killed some 340,000 people worldwide -- originated in bats and could have been transmitted to people via another mammal.

But the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology told state broadcaster CGTN that claims made by US President Donald Trump and others that the virus could have leaked from the facility were "pure fabrication".

"Now we have three strains of live viruses... But their highest similarity to SARS-CoV-2 only reaches 79.8 percent," she said, referring to the coronavirus strain that causes COVID-19.

US demands immediate start to WHO review

The United States called on the World Health Organisation on Friday to begin working immediately on investigating the source of the novel coronavirus, as well as its handling of the response to the pandemic.

One of their research teams, led by Professor Shi Zhengli, has been researching bat coronaviruses since 2004 and focused on the "source tracing of SARS", the strain behind another virus outbreak nearly two decades ago.

"We know that the whole genome of SARS-CoV-2 is only 80 percent similar to that of SARS. It's an obvious difference," she said.

"So, in Professor Shi's past research, they didn't pay attention to such viruses which are less similar to the SARS virus."

Conspiracy rumours that the biosafety lab was involved in the outbreak swirled online for months before Trump and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brought the theory into the mainstream by claiming that there is evidence the pathogen came from the institute.

The lab has said it received samples of the then-unknown virus on December 30, determined the viral genome sequence on January 2 and submitted information on the pathogen to the WHO on January 11.

Wang said in the interview that before it received samples in December, their team had never "encountered, researched or kept the virus."

"In fact, like everyone else, we didn't even know the virus existed," she said. "How could it have leaked from our lab when we never had it?"

The World Health Organization said Washington had offered no evidence to support the "speculative" claims.

In an interview with Scientific American, Shi said the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence did not match any of the bat coronaviruses her laboratory had previously collected and studied.

Jun 12: The global number of COVID-19 cases has increased to over 7.5 million, while the death toll was nearing 421,000, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

As of Friday morning, the overall number of cases stood at 7,500,777, while the deaths increased to 420,993, the University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) revealed in its latest update.

The US continues with the world's highest number of confirmed cases and deaths at 2,022,488 and 113,803, respectively, according to the CSSE.

In terms of cases, Brazil comes in the second place with 802,828 infections.

This was followed by Russia (501,800), the UK (292,860), India (286,605), Spain (242,707), Italy (236,142), Peru (214,788), France (192,493), Germany (186,691), Iran (180,156), Turkey (174,023), Chile (154,092), Mexico (133,974), Pakistan (125,933) and Saudi Arabia (116,021), the CSSE figures showed.

Regarding fatalities, the UK continues in the second position after the US with 41,364 COVID-19 deaths, which also accounts for the highest number of fatalities in Europe.

The other countries with over 10,000 deaths are Brazil (40,919), Italy (34,167), France (29,349), Spain (27,136) and Mexico (15,944).

Washington, Jun 16: The United States will reduce its troop strength in Germany from the nearly 52,000 at present to 25,000, President Donald Trump has said in Washington.

In an interaction with reporters at the White House on Monday, Trump attributed the move to high costs and Germany being "delinquent" in its payment to NATO.

"We have 52,000 soldiers in Germany. That's a tremendous amount of soldiers. It's a tremendous cost to the United States and Germany, as you know, is very delinquent in their payments to NATO.

"They are paying one per cent and they're supposed to be a two per cent. And then two percent is very low. It should be much more than that. So they are delinquent of billions of dollars," Trump alleged.

"So, we're putting the number down to 25,000 soldiers. We'll see what happens, but Germany has not been making payments. In addition to that, I was the one that brought it up. Everybody talks about Trump with Russia. Well, I brought this up a long time ago. Why is Germany paying Russia billions of dollars for energy and then we're supposed to protect Germany from Russia? How does that work? It doesn't work," the US president said.

US soldiers, he said, are paid well. "They live in Germany. They spend vast amounts of money in Germany. Everywhere around those bases is very prosperous for Germany. So, Germany takes. And then on top of it, they treat us very badly on trade. We have trade with the EU, Germany being the biggest member, and very, very badly on trade and we are negotiating with them on that. But right now, I'm not satisfied with the deal they want to make," Trump said.

"They've cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars over the years on trade," he said.

The US protects them and then they take advantage of America on trade, the president said.

"So we are working on a deal with them, but it's very unfair and I would say by far, the worst abuser is Germany," he said.