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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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Agencies
August 4,2020

Washington, Aug 4: US President Donald Trump gave popular Chinese-owned video app TikTok six weeks to sell its US operations to an American company, saying Monday it would be "out of business" otherwise, and that the government wanted a financial benefit from the deal.

"It's got to be an American company... it's got to be owned here," Trump said. "We don't want to have any problem with security."

Trump said that Microsoft was in talks to buy TikTok, which has as many as one billion worldwide users who make quirky 60-second videos with its smartphone app.

But US officials say the app constitutes a national security risk because it could share millions of Americans' personal data with Chinese intelligence.

Trump gave the company's Chinese parent ByteDance until mid-September to strike a deal.

"I set a date of around September 15, at which point it's going to be out of business in the United States," he said.

Whatever the price is, he said, "the United States should get a very large percentage of that price because we're making it possible."

Trump compared the demand for a piece of the pie to a landlord demanding under-the-table "key money" from a new tenant, a practice widely illegal including in New York, where the billionaire president built his real estate empire.

"TikTok is a big success, but a big portion of it is in the country," he said. "I think it's very fair."

But Trump also threw a surprise new condition in any deal, saying the sale of TikTok's US business would have to result in a significant payout to the US Treasury for initiating it.

"A very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the Treasury of the United States, because we're making it possible for this deal to happen," Trump told reporters.

"They don't have any rights unless we give it to them," he said.

Sell or shut down

The pressure for a sale of TikTok's US and international business, based in Los Angeles, left the company and ByteDance facing tough decisions.

Trump has made TikTok the latest front in the ongoing political and trade battles between Washington and Beijing.

The app has been under formal investigation on US national security grounds because it collects large amounts of personal data on all its users and is legally bound to share that with authorities in Beijing if they demand it.

Both its huge user base and its algorithm for collecting data make it hugely valuable.

But being forced by the US government to sell at least its US business or be shut down -- and to then split the sale price with the US Treasury as Trump is demanding -- was an almost unheard-of tactic.

Shutting down could force users to switch to competitors, and many content creators are already encouraging followers to follow them on other social media platforms.

"The most obvious beneficiaries are Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter, with Snapchat likely being the biggest beneficiary," said investment analysts at Lightshed Partners.

Earlier Monday, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming acknowledged the hefty pressure and said in a letter to staff, reported by Chinese media, that they were working around-the-clock "for the best outcome."

"We have always been committed to ensuring user data security, as well as the platform neutrality and transparency," Zhang said.

However, he said, the company faces "mounting complexities across the geopolitical landscape and significant external pressure."

He said the company must confront the challenge from the United States, though "without giving up exploring any possibilities."

According to Britain's The Sun newspaper Monday, as a possible consequence of the pressure, ByteDance is planning to relocate TikTok's global operations to Britain.

Pushing back

China's foreign ministry pushed back Monday, calling Washington hypocritical for demanding TikTok be sold.

"The US is using an abused concept of national security and, without providing any evidence, is making presumptions of guilt and issuing threats to relevant companies," said spokesman Wang Wenbin.

"This goes against the principle of market economy and exposes the hypocrisy and typical double standards of the US in upholding so-called fairness and freedom," he added.

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News Network
February 19,2020

Beijing, Feb 19: The death count from China's new coronavirus epidemic jumped to 2,000 on Wednesday after 132 more people died in Hubei province, the hard-hit epicentre of the outbreak.

In its daily update, the province's health commission also reported 1,693 new cases of people infected with the virus.

This brings the total number of cases in mainland China past 74,000.

Most of the cases are in Hubei, where the virus first emerged in December before spiralling into a nationwide epidemic.

Wednesday's jump in the death count was an increase on Tuesday's figures, although the number of new cases reported in Hubei were the lowest for a week.

A study released by Chinese officials claimed most patients have mild cases of the illness.

Outside of hardest-hit Hubei, which has been effectively locked down to try to contain the virus, the number of new cases has been slowing and China's national health authority has said this is a sign the outbreak is under control.

President Xi Jinping, in a phone call with the British prime minister, said China's measures were achieving "visible progress", according to state media Tuesday.

However, the World Health Organization has cautioned that it was too early to tell if the decline would continue.

On Tuesday the director of a hospital in the central Hubei city of Wuhan became the seventh medical worker to succumb to the COVID-19 illness.

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News Network
April 11,2020

Apr 11: The number of global coronavirus deaths has increased to 102,753, while the total number of cases worldwide has surpassed 1.6 million, according to the latest update by the Washington-based Johns Hopkins University.

As of Saturday morning, the overall number of infections increased to 1,698,416, while the tally of those who recovered from the deadly disease stood at 376,677, according to the varsity's Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE).

In terms of cases, the US had the highest in the world at 501,301, followed by Spain 158,273, Italy 147,577 and France 125,931.

Italy accounted for the highest death toll at 18,849, with the US in the second place with 18,769 fatalities.

Other countries with more than 10,000 deaths include Spain (16,081) and France (13,197).

Although the pandemic originated in China last December, it now only accounts for 3,343 deaths with 83,003 confirmed cases.

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