50 Top Obama Officials To Work For Donald Trump Administration

January 20, 2017

Washington, Jan 20: About 50 top officials who have been working in outgoing US President Barack Obama's administration will continue serving in those positions for Donald Trump's incoming government, future White House spokesman Sean Spicer said on Thursday.

Obamatop

Spicer said that Trump is aware of the importance of "guaranteeing continuity" in the government and, therefore, he has asked some 50 people occupying "key" positions in the current administration to continue in their posts for the time being, Efe news reported.

Among the several dozen people are Deputy Defence Secretary Robert Work and the undersecretary of political affairs at the State Department, Thomas Shannon, who will function as the acting chiefs of those agencies until the Senate can confirm the nominees proposed by Trump to head them.

Also to remain in their posts temporarily will be the interim administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chuck Rosenberg, Obama's special envoy for the fight against the Islamic State, Brett McGurk, and the director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, Nicholas Rasmussen.

Another official who will remain in his post is Adam Szubin, who is in charge of terrorism and financial intelligence policy at the Department of the Treasury.

Trump arrived on Thursday in Washington to begin the series of events leading to his inauguration which will take place on Friday at a ceremony in front of the Capitol.

Spicer said that the magnate is continuing to work on his inauguration speech, which he said will be "a very personal and sincere statement about his vision for the country" and "more of a philosophical document" than an agenda for his moves as President.

The incoming White House spokesman did not provide any details about the executive orders that Trump was intending to sign on Friday after his inauguration.

However, he did say that executive orders on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and North America Free Trade Agreement trade treaties will be signed "very quickly".

On the other hand, Spicer said that, for the moment, there are no foreign leaders scheduled to visit the White House next week, Trump's first week as President.

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News Network
March 25,2020

Hubei, Mar 25: As a bus departed from its terminus at Hankou Railway Station at 5:25 am Wednesday morning, Wuhan started to resume bus service after nine weeks of lockdown.

Apart from a driver, a safety supervisor was also on each bus, whose duty was to make sure all passengers are healthy.
"For those who do not use smartphones, they should bring with them a health certificate issued by the health authorities," said Zhou Jingjing, a safety supervisor aboard bus No. 511 departing from the Wuchang Railway Station complex.
The once hardest-hit city in central China's Hubei Province during the COVID-19 outbreak took unprecedented traffic restrictions on Jan 23. All of its public transport and all outbound flights and trains had been suspended in an attempt to contain the virus within the region.

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Agencies
January 6,2020

The Cambridge Analytica scandal is far from over. New explosive details leaked by a whistleblower shows that the extent of the rot is far deeper than previously thought.

An anonymous Twitter account, @HindsightFiles, has started releasing the documents, apparently on behalf of Brittany Kaiser, a former employee of the now defunct British data analytics and consulting company Cambridge Analytica.

"Democracies around the world are being auctioned to the highest bidder. We release the documents that explain how," reads the biography of the @HindsightFiles.

The document will reveal previously unreleased emails, project plans, case studies, negotiations and more spanning over 60 countries.

"Over the past two years I have given evidence to investigators, journalists and academics to analyse what happened at Cambridge Analytica, and how our data was used to influence democracies around the world. In the name of shedding light on these dark practices, I am releasing documents and emails in full for the public good," Kaiser, who worked with Cambridge Analytica from 2014 to 208, was quoted as saying.

"I do this to strengthen the case for data rights and enforcement of our electoral laws online globally. We should all be seeking more ethical digital future for ourselves and our children," added Kaiser who starred in the Oscar-shortlisted Netflix documentary "The Great Hack".

The details released so far includes links to material on the firm's activities in Malaysia, Kenya, Brazil and Iran, an addition to the John Bolton archive.

Over the next months, more than 100,000 documents relating to work in 68 countries are set to be released, according to a report in The Guardian.

More than one and a half year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal first became public, US regulators last month said that the now-defunct British data analytics and consulting company engaged in deceptive practices to harvest personal information from tens of millions of Facebook users for voter profiling and targeting.

According to Kaiser, the Facebook data scandal was part of a much bigger global operation designed to manipulate people in collaboration with governments, intelligence agencies, commercial companies and political campaigns.

The unpublished documents contain material that suggests the firm collaborated with a political party in Ukraine in 2017 even while under investigation as part of Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, said The Guardian report.

"There are emails between these major Trump donors discussing ways of obscuring the source of their donations through a series of different financial vehicles. These documents expose the entire dark money machinery behind US politics," Kaiser was quoted as saying.

Similar tactics were deployed in other countries that Cambridge Analytica operated in, including Britain, she claimed.

The files released by Kaiser suggest that Cambridge Analytica offered to help United Malays National Organisation (Umno), the party of Malaysia's Former Prime Minister Najib Razak, to influence the voting of 40 parliamentary constituencies in the 14th General Election (GE14) in 2013.

Umno, according to the leaks, requested the company to prepare a proposal to regain 13 seats, The South China Morning Post reported on Saturday.

In 2018, Razak claimed that he had never engaged Cambridge Analytica in any way.

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News Network
June 29,2020

Paris, Jun 29: More than half a million people have been killed by the novel coronavirus, nearly two thirds of them in the United States and Europe, according to an news agency tally at 2200 GMT Sunday based on official sources.

The official death count for the disease now stands at 500,390 deaths from 10,099,576 cases recorded worldwide. The United States has suffered the highest death count (125,747), followed by Brazil (57,622) and the United Kingdom (43,550).

The tallies, using data collected by AFP from national authorities and information from the World Health Organization (WHO), probably reflect only a fraction of the actual number of infections.

Many countries are testing only the most serious cases.

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