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Gaddafi ‘aid' adds to Sarkozy's woes

[email protected] (AFP)
April 30, 2012

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Paris, April 30: The French presidential race entered the home straight on Sunday with both incumbent right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist frontrunner Francois Hollande battling to shake off the taint of scandal.

Sarkozy accused Hollande supporters in the media of mounting a "despicable" smear against him by publishing a document purporting to show Muammar Gaddafi's former Libyan regime agreed to fund his previous presidential campaign in 2007.

Meanwhile, the Socialists were embarrassed when several senior figures in Hollande's campaign attended an ally's birthday party and found that disgraced former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn had also been invited.

Both events revived interest in these long-running scandals just one week before France goes back to the polls and just days before Hollande and Sarkozy were to face off in a televised debate which could prove decisive. The latest opinion poll published by the LH2 institute for web portal Yahoo! forecast that Hollande would comfortably win the May 6 run-off by 54% of the vote to Sarkozy's 46%, a smaller gap than in LH2's last estimate. But polling has yet to take into account the effects, if any, of the latest controversies, neither of which appear fatal to either campaign, but which may reinforce the voters' disdain for the political class.

On Saturday, investigative news website Mediapart published a copy of an internal Libyan regime document recording an alleged 2006 illegal funding deal between Tripoli and Sarkozy's 2007 campaign. According to the note, which Mediapart claims to have obtained from former Libyan regime figures, Tripoli agreed to pay Sarkozy's 2007 campaign $66 million.

"It's despicable. It's a forgery . Mediapart is well used to dishonesty. It's an agency in the service of the left," Sarkozy said.

And the man to whom the memo was supposedly addressed - Bashir Saleh, Gaddafi's former chief of staff and head of Libya's 40-billion-dollar sovereign wealth fund - denied ever receiving such a communication. Meanwhile, Socialist figure Julien Dray invited Hollande's campaign director Pierre Moscovici, communications director Manuel Valls and former partner Segolene Royal to a drinks party to celebrate his birthday.

But he apparently failed to tell them he had also invited Strauss-Kahn , who is now a political pariah and under judicial investigation for his alleged ties to a prostitution network. Royal said she had left as soon as she heard Strauss-Kahn was coming, without seeing him.


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News Network
June 3,2020

Islamabad, Jun 3: Pakistan has reported a record 4,132 fresh cases of the coronavirus in the last 24 hours, taking the total number of infections to 80,463, the health ministry said on Wednesday.

The Ministry of National Health and Services said the new infections were detected after conducting a maximum of 17,370 tests in a day.

Of the total cases, Sindh has so far detected 31,086 patients of the coronavirus, Punjab 29,489, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa 10,897, Balochistan 4,747, Islamabad 3,188, Gilgit-Baltistan 779 and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir reported 289 patients of the viral disease.

"In total 67 patients died in the last 24 hours, taking the tally of deaths to 1,688. Another 28,923 people have fully recovered from the disease," the ministry said in a statement.

The authorities have so far carried out 595,344 tests in the country.

Officials said that Pakistan has more than 100 labs that can conduct over 30,000 tests per day and the number of daily tests will be gradually increased to the maximum level.

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News Network
February 22,2020

Washington, Feb 22: US President Donald Trump will raise the issue of religious freedom with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to India next week, the White House said on Friday, noting that the US has great respect for India's democratic traditions and institutions.

"President Trump will talk about our shared tradition of democracy and religious freedom both in his public remarks and then certainly in private. He will raise these issues, particularly the religious freedom issue, which is extremely important to this administration," a senior official told reporters in a conference call.

The official was responding to a question on whether the president was planning to speak to Modi on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act or the National Register of Citizens.

"We do have this shared commitment to upholding our universal values, the rule of law. We have great respect for India's democratic traditions and institutions, and we will continue to encourage India to uphold those traditions," the official said, requesting anonymity.

"And we are concerned with some of the issues that you have raised," the senior administration official said, in response to the question on CAA and NRC.

"I think the President will talk about these issues in his meetings with Prime Minister Modi and note that the world is looking to India to continue to uphold its democratic traditions, respect for religious minorities," the official said.

"Of course, it's in the Indian constitution -- religious freedom, respect for religious minorities, and equal treatment of all religions. So this is something that is important to the president and I'm sure it will come up," said the official.

Pointing out that India has a strong democratic foundation, the official said India is a country rich in religious, linguistic, and cultural diversity.

"In fact, it's the birthplace of four major world religions," the official noted.

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Agencies
August 7,2020

Moscow, Aug 7: Russia will register its first vaccine against the coronavirus on August 12, Deputy Health Minister Oleg Gridnev said on Friday.

The vaccine has been developed jointly by the Gamaleya Research Institute and the Russian Defence Ministry.

"The vaccine developed by the Gamaleya centre will be registered on August 12. At the moment, the last, third, stage is underway. The trials are extremely important. We have to understand that the vaccine must be safe. Medical professionals and senior citizens will be the first to get vaccinated," Gridnev told reporters at the opening of a cancer centre building in the city of Ufa.

According to the minister, the effectiveness of the vaccine will be judged when the population immunity has formed.

Clinical trials of the vaccine began on June 18 and included 38 volunteers. All of the participants developed immunity. 

The first group was discharged on July 15 and the second group on July 20.

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