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Berlin: Germany called on Donald Trump to play by the rules and accept the result of the U.S. presidential election in what amounted to a rare diplomatic foray by a key Western ally. Trump’s appeal to end the counting of ballots “doesn’t comply with the democratic culture” of the U.S., German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told public broadcaster ARD on Thursday. “It’s easy to be a winner, but sometimes it’s quite hard to be a loser,” he said. “It’s important that in the end the result will be accepted by everybody.” Until now, European leaders have chosen to keep quiet...

BEIJING — China’s Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng said Thursday he hopes the next U.S. administration will take steps to work with the Asian country. As the world waits for news on who will become the next U.S. president, Le said he hoped the election would proceed stably and smoothly. “The Chinese attitude on China-U.S. relations is clear and consistent,” the report said, citing Le. “Although there are disagreements between China and the U.S., there is vast room for mutual benefit and cooperation. (I) hope the new U.S. administration will meet China halfway.” That approach would include “upholding a principle...

When the Supreme Court resolved the 2000 presidential election in favor of George W. Bush, former Vice President Al Gore conceded defeat — something he doesn't believe President Trump will do if he loses to Joe Biden in the Nov. 3 election. In an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, Gore, a Democrat who served as Bill Clinton's vice president, accused Trump of "attempting to put his knee on the neck of democracy" by attacking mail-in ballots and absentee voting. “He seems to have no compunctions at all about trying to rip apart the social fabric and the political equilibrium of...

Negative perceptions of China have soared over the past year across many advanced economies, reaching all-time highs in a number of countries including the UK, Germany and Australia, a Pew Research Center poll published last week has found. ........ Nevertheless, Xi was not the least popular world leader. In most countries surveyed, the people had more faith in the Chinese leader than they did in America's President Donald Trump. For example, 78% of Germans had no confidence in the Chinese premiere, while 89% said the same of Trump. Overall, on average across the nations surveyed, 83% of respondents had no...

British ministers have been told to forge links with the White House frontrunner Joe Biden after “writing off” Donald Trump’s chances of re-election, amid fears that the UK could be left out in the cold if the former vice-president wins. Boris Johnson has been warned that Trump is on course for a landslide defeat with his Democratic opponents set to land a historic “triple whammy” by seizing control of the presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Private polling and computer models shown to No 10 last month put Biden’s chances of victory at more than 70 per cent....

Boris Johnson is reportedly trying to woo US Presidential candidate Joe Biden with Downing Street increasingly convinced that Donald Trump will not be re-elected. Johnson has been shown private polling that shows Biden is on track for a landslide victory, spurring him to try to build ties with the former Vice President. The Sunday Times reports that a foreign secretary Dominic Raab and the UK’s ambassador to the US Dame Karen Pierce have been conducting backroom talks with close Biden allies. A senior Tory source told the Times: “They’re writing off Trump in Number 10 now.” Downing Street is worried...

Is the United States losing its grip on world supremacy? Many people in Germany feel that it is and that China will be the country to take its place as dominant power in the coming decades, a new survey shows. Some 42% of Germans feel that the United States is likely to slip from its position as leading world power in the next few decades, with China moving up to replace it, a survey published on Tuesday has shown. Just 14% of those surveyed by the UK-based YouGov polling institute believed that the US would retain its supremacy. Some 23%...

BEIJING: Chinese President Xi Jinping has written a letter expressing thanks to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the organisation's "generosity" and support tackling a deadly virus epidemic, state media said Saturday. The outbreak of the new COVID-19 strain has claimed 2,345 lives in mainland China and infected more than 76,000 people, with cases in more than 25 countries. Earlier this month the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation committed up to USD 100 million for the global response to the outbreak. "I deeply appreciate the act of generosity of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and your letter of...

The Chinese government has been “transparent, open” and “very quick” in its response to the coronavirus outbreak, Beijing’s ambassador to the United Kingdom said Thursday. Liu Xiaoming urged international cooperation during the pandemic and said “blaming” and “bullying” would just create a wedge between nations. The United States thinks “they can bully China, they think they can bully the world," he continued in an online news conference with a member of Britain's House of Lords. "If WHO [the World Health Organization] do not act in their way, they stop supplying, they stop support. They criticize WHO to be China-centric, that’s...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N) kicked off construction on Wednesday of its $10 billion petrochemical complex in south Chinese city Huizhou, state news agency Xinhua reported. The complex, which consists of a 1.6 million tonnes per year ethylene facility, is one of the few mega petrochemical projects in China wholly owned by a foreign investor.

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed to oppose President Donald Trump’s decision to suspend funding for the World Health Organisation (WHO), a move widely criticised as dangerous and harmful during a global pandemic. “The president’s halting of funding to the WHO as it leads the global fight against the coronavirus pandemic is senseless,” Pelosi said in a statement. “This decision is dangerous, illegal and will be swiftly challenged.” Trump announced his intention to suspend the funding on Tuesday, accusing the United Nations’ public health agency of “severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus”. Payments would be held...

On Jan. 22, two days after Chinese officials first publicized the serious threat posed by the new virus ravaging the city of Wuhan, the chief of the World Health Organization held the first of what would be months of almost daily media briefings, sounding the alarm, telling the world to take the outbreak seriously. But with its officials divided, the W.H.O., still seeing no evidence of sustained spread of the virus outside of China, declined the next day to declare a global public health emergency. A week later, the organization reversed course and made the declaration. Those early days of...

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union joined worldwide condemnation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to halt funding to the World Health Organization, saying on Wednesday it was unjustified during the coronavirus pandemic. “Deeply regret U.S. decision to suspend funding to WHO. There is no reason justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Twitter. The United States is the WHO’s biggest overall donor.

It’s never good for a sitting president heading into reelection to be compared to Jimmy Carter. In 1980, with the country in an economic and diplomatic crisis, the beleaguered former president took on Ronald Reagan, then considered a weak challenger, and won only six states. Now as 2020 nears, President Trump is finding himself constantly behind Democrats in reelection polls and the latest has compared the Republican to Carter. “Perhaps the closest analogy to Trump in terms of approval ratings is Jimmy Carter, whose average approval rating for his term was 45 percent,” said a survey from the Wason Center...

DETROIT (AP) — Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden is joining a growing call for the release of comprehensive racial data on the coronavirus pandemic, which he says has put a spotlight on inequity and the impact of “structural racism.” Biden’s Medium poston Thursday said he is joining Democratic congressional members Ayanna Pressley, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren and others who have also called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies to release more data. Biden said he wants data released on income, too, to better help allocate resources to communities in need. Biden acknowledged this...

President Trump said Tuesday that he did not learn of two memos written in January and February by his own economic adviser warning that a COVID-19 pandemic could kill as many as 2 million Americans until “maybe a day ago.” “I heard he wrote some memos talking about pandemic,” Trump said during a White House coronavirus task force briefing, “I didn’t see them. I didn’t look for them, either.” On Jan. 29, Peter Navarro warned his colleagues at the White House that if the administration did not mount an aggressive containment strategy for the coronavirus, it could kill more than...

With more than 400,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and 14,000 deaths in the United States, a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that Americans are souring on President Trump’s leadership during the pandemic. After a brief period during which some polls found more Americans approving of Trump's coronavirus response than not, half of them (50 percent) now disapprove, according to the Yahoo News/YouGov survey, compared to only 42 percent who approve. Among registered voters, that gap is even wider: 54 percent disapprove vs. 43 percent approve. The public also gives New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo high marks for his performance: 69 percent...

China demanded an explanation from Brazil Monday after the far-right government's education minister linked the coronavirus pandemic to the Asian country's "plan for world domination," in a tweet imitating a Chinese accent. In the latest incident to strain ties between Brasilia and Beijing, Education Minister Abraham Weintraub insinuated China was behind the global health crisis. "Geopolitically, who will come out stronger from this global crisis?" he wrote on Twitter Saturday. "Who in Brazil is allied with this infallible plan for world domination?" In the original Portuguese, his tweet substituted the letter "r" with capital "L" -- "BLazil" instead of "Brazil,"...

China has sold nearly four billion masks to foreign countries since March, officials said Sunday, as they tried to stem widespread fears over the quality of medical exports. Despite Chinese cases dwindling, Beijing has encouraged factories to increase production of medical supplies as the pandemic kills over 60,000 globally and parts of the world face a protective equipment shortage. China has exported 3.86 billion masks, 37.5 million pieces of protective clothing, 16,000 ventilators and 2.84 million COVID-19 testing kits since March 1, customs official Jin Hai said, with orders to more than 50 countries. She added the country's medical supply...

... Remdesivir has been recently recognized as a promising antiviral drug against a wide array of RNA viruses (including SARS/MERS-CoV5) infection in cultured cells, mice and nonhuman primate (NHP) models. ..... Chloroquine, a widely-used anti-malarial and autoimmune disease drug, has recently been reported as a potential broad-spectrum antiviral drug.8,9 Chloroquine is known to block virus infection by increasing endosomal pH required for virus/cell fusion, as well as interfering with the glycosylation of cellular receptors of SARS-CoV.10 Our time-of-addition assay demonstrated that chloroquine functioned at both entry, and at post-entry stages of the 2019-nCoV infection in Vero E6 cells (Fig. 1c,...