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Washington, Feb 6: U.S. president Donald Trump drew on staunch Republican support to defeat the gravest threat yet to his three-year-old presidency on Wednesday, winning acquittal in the Senate on impeachment charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Only the third U.S. leader ever placed on trial, Trump readily defeated the Democratic-led effort to expel him from office for having illicitly sought help from Ukraine to bolster his 2020 re-election effort.

Trump immediately claimed "victory" while the White House declared it a full "exoneration" for the president -- even as Democrats rejected the acquittal as the "valueless" outcome of an unfair trial.

Despite being confronted with strong evidence, Republicans stayed loyal and mustered a majority of votes to clear the president of both charges -- by 52 to 48 on abuse of power and 53 to 47 on obstruction of Congress -- falling far short of the two-thirds supermajority required for conviction.

"Two thirds of the senators present not having found him guilty of the charges contained therein, it is therefore ordered and adjudged that the said Donald John Trump be, and he is hereby, acquitted," said Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts, who presided over the trial.

The months-long impeachment of the 45th US leader shone a harsh light on America's political divide, with Trump's core support base united behind him in rejecting it as a "hoax."

One Republican, senator Mitt Romney, a longtime Trump foe, risked White House wrath to vote alongside Democrats on the first count, saying Trump was "guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust." He voted not guilty on the second charge.

But the verdict was never truly in question since the House of Representatives formally impeached Trump in December, and has now cleared out a major hurdle for the president to fully plunge into his campaign for re-election in November.

Trump to speak Thursday

Responding to the verdict, Trump announced he would deliver a formal statement Thursday from the White House "to discuss our Country's VICTORY on the Impeachment Hoax!"

Shortly before, the president tweeted a montage depicting a fake cover of Time magazine declaring him president for all eternity.

The White House declared that Trump had obtained "full vindication and exoneration."

But Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker and top Democrat in Congress, said that by clearing Trump, the Republicans had "normalized lawlessness."

"There can be no acquittal without a trial, and there is no trial without witnesses, documents and evidence," she said.

"Sadly, because of the Republican Senate's betrayal of the Constitution, the president remains an ongoing threat to American democracy, with his insistence that he is above the law and that he can corrupt the elections if he wants to."

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said the acquittal was "virtually valueless" since Republicans refused witnesses at his trial.

'Forever impeached'

The Democrats' intense 78-day House investigation faced public doubts and high-pressure stonewalling from the White House.

Concerned about the political risk for the party, Pelosi rejected a call early last year to impeach Trump on evidence compiled by then-special counsel Robert Mueller that he had obstructed the Russia election meddling investigation.

But her concerns melted after new allegations surfaced in August that Trump had pressured Ukraine for help for his 2020 campaign.

Though doubtful from the outset that they would win support from Republicans, an investigation amassed with surprising speed strong evidence to support the allegations.

The evidence showed that from early in 2019, Trump's private lawyer Rudy Giuliani and a close political ally, Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, were scheming to pressure Kiev to help smear Democrats, including Trump's potential 2020 rival Joe Biden, by opening investigations into them.

"We must say enough -- enough! He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again," Adam Schiff, who led the House investigation, argued on the Senate floor this week.

"He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again," Schiff said.

'Colossal' mistake

In the trial, Trump's defence was not seen as having undermined the facts compiled by Schiff's probe, and several Republican senators acknowledged he did wrong.

But his lawyers and Senate defenders argued, essentially, that Trump's behaviour was not egregious enough for impeachment and removal.

And, pointing to the December House impeachment vote, starkly along party lines, they painted it as a political effort to "destroy the president" in an election year and insisted voters should be allowed to decide Trump's fate.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said impeachment will benefit Republicans.

"Right now this is a political loser for them. They initiated it. They thought this was a great idea. At least for the short term, it has been a colossal political mistake."

London, Mar 27:  British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Friday he has tested positive for the new coronavirus, but remains in charge of the U.K.'s response to the outbreak.

Johnson's office said he was tested on the advice of the chief medical officer after showing mild symptoms.

It said Johnson is self-isolating at his 10 Downing St. residence and continuing to lead the country's response to COVID-19.

In a video message, Johnson said he had a temperature and a persistent cough.

Over the last 24 hours I have developed mild symptoms and tested positive for coronavirus.

I am now self-isolating, but I will continue to lead the government’s response via video-conference as we fight this virus.

Together we will beat this. #StayHomeSaveLives pic.twitter.com/9Te6aFP0Ri

— Boris Johnson #StayHomeSaveLives (@BorisJohnson) March 27, 2020
"Be in no doubt that I can continue, thanks to the wizardry of modern technology, to communicate with all my top team, to lead the national fightback against coronavirus."

Earlier this week Britain’s Prince Charles announced that he had tested positive for the virus.

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.