Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.
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Question: Paragraph: The governor, who is also a pediatric neurologist, worked to comfort victims of Friday’s shooting and their families, while helping coordinate the massive government response. He discussed the shooting with President Donald Trump in a private phone call, stood shoulder to shoulder with other elected officials at a news conference and pressed for tighter gun control to national audiences. The subject of widespread mockery after the racist photo from his medical school yearbook surfaced, the Democratic governor appears determined to project that he’s up to the task. “Actions speak a lot louder than words. And I will have the leadership that’s needed,” Northam said in an interview with NPR after the shooting, while discussing potential plans to push for increased gun regulations. Police said 12 people were killed and several others injured when DeWayne Craddock, an engineer with the city’s utilities department, opened fire inside a municipal building Friday afternoon. Northam quickly left Richmond after the shooting and drove to Virginia Beach, speaking to local, state and other officials on the way down to coordinate responses and share information. After a news conference Friday evening, Northam took a call from Trump to discuss the shooting, with the president offering the federal government’s full support. Michael Berlucchi, a Virginia Beach City Council member, praised the governor and other officials for their work to address the shooting’s aftermath from the city’s emergency operations center. “Nobody carried their baggage into that room,” Berlucchi said Sunday. “The only thing I saw was public servants coming together to address the worst tragedy in the history of our city.” On Saturday, Northam attended a vigil at a church where he told those gathered that “God is in control.” He visited a hospital to meet with survivors and thank doctors and staff. In broadcast interviews with national media, Northam stressed the need for action to prevent similar deadly shootings. “We lost 12 lives yesterday. If you look at the commonwealth of Virginia, we lost over 900 lives over the past two years to gun violence, gun-related accidents,” Northam said on CNN. “So I will make decisions in the upcoming days but we need to look at our laws: are they safe, do they keep people protected in the Commonwealth of Virginia?” The governor has long been an advocate for stricter gun control. He made the issue a top priority of his 2017 gubernatorial campaign, drawing from his experience as a pediatrician and Army doctor who has treated children and soldiers wounded by firearms. But a package of bills Northam pushed this year, including legislation to limit gun magazine size and give local governments broader authority to ban guns in city buildings, went nowhere in a staunchly pro-gun Republican-controlled Virginia General Assembly. Northam hinted Saturday in media interviews that he may be considering some kind of executive action related to gun control efforts that would bypass the legislature, but his office declined to say what specific actions he may take. Any dramatic moves by the governor would face stiff resistance from his political opponents. Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, said Northam doesn’t have any real power to impose new gun limits and any efforts to do so would be an attempt to deflect attention away his scandal. “He’d be very happy to try and change the focus away from the blackface stuff,” Van Cleave said. Northam has been battling for months to regain a sense of normalcy in office after a picture surfaced in February of man in blackface and another person wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit on his medical school yearbook page. Northam has denied being in the picture, and investigators recently said they can’t conclusively establish the identities of either person in the 35-year-old photo. The governor withstood widespread pressure for him to resign, which weakened after scandal soon enveloped his potential successors . Two women publicly accused Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexual assault, which he denies, and Attorney General Mark Herring announced he’d also worn blackface in college, just days after calling on Northam to resign. Both Fairfax and Herring have also resisted calls to resign. Fairfax was also in Virginia Beach after the shooting. He attended a church service Sunday where and pledged to take “serious action” to prevent future mass shootings. “I think that thoughts and prayers from politicians are not enough,” Fairfax said. “We’ve had too many thoughts and prayers over the years and we’ve not acted in the ways to prevent these mass shootings in the future.” ___ This story has been corrected to say pediatrician, not pedestrian. ___ Contributors include Associated Press writer Ben Finley. Claim: Shooting poses Virginia governor’s first test since scandal.

Answer: Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam wasted little time getting to Virginia Beach after a gunman killed a dozen people in a city office building, the first major test of his leadership since a blackface scandal almost forced him from office four months ago.


Question: Paragraph: The ruling Communist Party’s Politburo said on Friday it would step up macroeconomic policy adjustments and pursue more proactive fiscal policy, state media reported. With the world’s second-biggest economy expected to shrink for the first time in four decades this quarter, China is set to unleash hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus. The Politburo called for expanding the budget deficit, issuing more local and national bonds, guiding interest rates lower, delaying loan repayments, reducing supply-chain bottlenecks and boosting consumption. “We expect government ministries to roll out more tangible measures in the coming weeks as this Politburo meeting gave them no choice but to do more,” Goldman Sachs analysts said. The Politburo did not elaborate on plans for the central government to issue special treasury bonds, which would be the first such issuance since 2007. China should issue at least 2 trillion yuan ($282 billion) of such bonds to aid the economy, Morgan Stanley Chief China Economist Robin Xing said. Restrictions on foreigners entering the country went into effect on Saturday, as China reported no new locally transmitted infections and a small drop in so-called imported cases. Airlines have been ordered to sharply cut international flights from Sunday. Beijing has in recent days emphasized the risk posed by imported virus cases after widespread lockdowns within China helped to sharply reduce domestic transmissions. The Politburo said it would shift its focus to prevent more imported cases and a rebound in locally transmitted infections. “We must be extremely vigilant and cautious, and we must prevent the post-epidemic relaxation from coming too soon, leading to the loss of all our achievements,” the Communist Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper said in a front-page editorial. The authorities also reversed planned reopenings of movie theaters, the state-owned China Securities Journal reported, citing sources. With local transmission of the virus basically under control, China shifts focus toward rebooting paused businesses. China’s Ministry of Commerce said on Saturday nearly all of the country’s major supermarkets, convenience stores, shopping malls and farm produce retail markets have reopened, while all e-commerce platforms are operating. Meanwhile, 80% of restaurants and 60% of hotels are back in business, ministry official Wang Bin told a news conference. In a sign of businesses getting back to normal, wholesale prices of vegetables have dropped 16.5% from end-February, while pork prices have fallen 7.4% from a mid-February high. However, many street shops such as beauty salons are not yet open as “sentiment is reviving slowly, while people remain cautious about going out shopping”, Wang said. In China’s central Hubei Province, authorities had removed all highway checkpoints except those in its capital city Wuhan - the virus epicenter - and allowed traffic to leave the province as of Friday, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Saturday. Hubei officials vowed to help businesses re-open and people get back to work. Gong Dingrong, mayor of Hubei’s Qianjiang, dubbed “lobster city”, said the government would promote sales across the country both online and offline, adding “there’s nothing to fear” eating lobsters from the city. China’s National Health Commission said on Saturday that 54 new coronavirus cases were reported on the mainland on Friday,  all imported cases. There were 55 new cases a day earlier, one of which was transmitted locally. The number of infections for mainland China stands at 81,394, with the death toll rising by three to 3,295, the commission said. Hubei province reported no new cases, and three new deaths. The province of 60 million, where the virus was first detected, has recorded 67,801 coronavirus cases and 3,177 deaths. Shanghai reported the highest number of new cases, with 17. An additional 11 cases were reported in Guangdong, six in Fujian, five in Tianjin, four in Zhejiang, three each in Beijing and Liaoning, two each in Inner Mongolia and Jilin, and one in Shandong. Chinese President Xi Jinping told U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday that China would support U.S. efforts to fight the coronavirus. The number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States rose by at least 16,000 on Friday to nearly 102,000, the most of any country. George Gao, the director-general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, urged people to wear masks to control the virus’s spread overseas. Gao told the journal Science in an interview published on Friday that the “big mistake in the United States and Europe has been the failure to wear masks, which “can prevent droplets that carry the virus from escaping and infecting others”. Claim: China readies stimulus measures as local virus cases dwindle.

Answer: China plans stronger steps to revive an economy hit by coronavirus, as the nation on Saturday reported no new locally transmitted infections for the previous day.


Question: Paragraph: Trump even suggested Thursday that the release could have been intentional. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the clearinghouse for the web of U.S. spy agencies, said it had ruled out the virus being man-made but was still investigating the precise source of the global pandemic, which has killed more than 220,000 people worldwide. Though scientists suggest the likeliest origin of the pandemic remains natural, that it spread from an infected animal to a human, Trump claimed to have seen evidence to support the theory that the origin was an infectious disease lab in Wuhan, the epicenter of the Chinese outbreak. He said the U.S. now “is finding how it came out.” “It’s a terrible thing that happened,” the president said. “Whether they made a mistake or whether it started off as a mistake and then they made another one, or did somebody do something on purpose.” The intel statement said the federal agencies concur “with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.” “The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” In recent days the Trump administration has sharpened its rhetoric on China, accusing the geopolitical foe and vital trading partner of failing to act swiftly enough to sound the alarm about the outbreak or to stop the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19. U.S. officials have said the Chinese government should “pay a price” for its handling of the pandemic. This all comes as the pace of Trump’s own original response continues to come under scrutiny, questioned as too meager and too slow. Earlier Thursday, before Trump’s comments, the Chinese government said that any claims that the coronavirus was released from a laboratory are “unfounded and purely fabricated out of nothing.” Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang cited the institute’s director, Yuan Zhiming, as saying the lab strictly implements bio-security procedures that would prevent the release of any pathogen. “I would like to point out again that the origin of the virus is a complex scientific issue, and it should be studied by scientists and professionals,” Geng said. He also criticized those in the U.S. who say China should be held accountable for the global pandemic, saying they should spend their time on “better controlling the epidemic situation at home.” At the White House, Trump repeatedly blamed China for its handling of the outbreak, criticizing the country for restricting domestic travel to slow the virus but not international travel to keep it from spreading abroad. “Certainly it could have been stopped,” Trump said during an event in the East Room on his administration’s efforts to aid seniors during the outbreak. “They either couldn’t do it from a competence standpoint, or they let it spread.” “It got loose, let’s say, and they could have capped it.” Earlier this month, Trump addressed the lab theory saying, “More and more, we’re hearing the story.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added at the time, “The mere fact that we don’t know the answers — that China hasn’t shared the answers — I think is very, very telling.” Pompeo also pressed China to let outside experts into the lab “so that we can determine precisely where this virus began.” While Trump and Pompeo have made their feelings clear, a U.S. intelligence official disputed the notion that there was pressure on agencies to bolster a particular theory. The intelligence official was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue and spoke only on condition of anonymity. Scientists say the virus arose naturally in bats. Even so, Pompeo and others have pointed fingers at an institute that is run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It has done groundbreaking research tracing the likely origins of the SARS virus, finding new bat viruses and discovering how they could jump to people. “We know that there is the Wuhan Institute of Virology just a handful of miles away from where the wet market was,” Pompeo said two weeks ago. The institute has an address 8 miles, or 13 kilometers, from the market that is considered a possible source. U.S. officials say the American Embassy in Beijing flagged concerns about potential safety issues at the lab in Wuhan in 2018, but they have yet to find any evidence the virus originated there nearly two years later. Scientists studying the virus for months have made clear they believe it wasn’t man-made but are still working to determine a point at which it may have jumped from animals to humans. Early attention focused on the live-animal market in Wuhan where the first cases were reported in December. But the first person identified with the disease had no known connection to that market. Kristian Andersen, who studies the virus at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, puts the odds of it being accidentally released by the Wuhan lab at “a million to one,” far less likely than an infection in nature. But virus expert David O’Connor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said he thinks too little is known to rule out any source, except the idea the virus was man-made. Finding the source is important, he said, because it may harbor the next pandemic virus. The U.S. was providing funding to the Wuhan lab for its research on coronaviruses, Michael Morell, former acting director and deputy director of the CIA, said Thursday. He said State Department cables indicate that there have been concerns in past years among U.S. officials about the safety protocols at that lab. If the virus did escape from a Chinese lab, it not only reflects negatively on China but also on the United States for providing research funding to a lab that has safety concerns, Morell said during an online forum hosted by the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy and International Security at George Mason University. “So if it did escape, we’re all in this together,” Morell said. “This is not a gotcha for China. This is a gotcha for both of us.” ___ Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann in Washington and Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report. Claim: Trump speculates that China released virus in lab ‘mistake’.

Answer:
President Donald Trump has speculated that China could have unleashed the coronavirus on the world due to some kind of horrible “mistake,” and his intelligence agencies said they are still examining a notion put forward by the president and aides that the pandemic may have resulted from an accident at a Chinese lab.