Category: Corruption

A former executive fired from TikTok’s parent company ByteDance made a raft of accusations against the tech giant Friday, including that it stole content from competitors like Instagram and Snapchat, and served as a “propaganda tool” for the Chinese government by “suppressing or promoting content favorable to the country’s interests.”

The allegations were made in a complaint last week by Yintao Yu, the head of engineering for ByteDance’s U.S. operations from August 2017 to November 2018, as part of a wrongful termination lawsuit filed earlier this month in San Francisco Superior Court. Yu claims he was fired for disclosing “wrongful conduct” he saw at the company.

In the complaint, Yu alleges the Chinese government monitored ByteDance’s work from within its Beijing headquarters and “provided guidance on advancing core communist values.”

A state investigation released last week found that elected and appointed officials actively worked to benefit a prominent Bergen County developer, confirming claims made by another developer in a lawsuit years ago.

The New Jersey State Commission of Investigation report outlined how many Edgewater officials had connections to Fred Daibes, a local developer with property along the Hudson River, and that some of the ties included business contracts and, in one case, discounted rent for a luxury apartment.

Accusations, lawsuits and the most recent investigation have tied up the borough and its officials for years.

BERLIN – The German security authorities believe that China is still conducting police activities on German soil even though Beijing assured Berlin in February that it had ceased to do so, the German foreign and interior ministries said on Monday.

“The security authorities continue to assume that there are two so-called overseas police stations in Germany,” a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said at a regular press conference.

Berlin called on Beijing in November to shut down extraterritorial police stations in the country.

CAIRO (AP) — Sudan’s military chief has ordered the freezing of all bank accounts belonging to a rival paramilitary force. The two sides have battled for weeks across Sudan, pushing the troubled country to the brink of all-out war.

The decree, issued on Sunday by Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, will target the official accounts of the Rapid Support Forces in Sudanese bank, as well as the accounts of all companies belonging to the group, the state news agency SUNA reported.

It remains unclear what immediate effect the freezing would have on the RSF and how Burhan’s orders are to be enforced.

The military chief also announced the replacement of the governor of Sudan’s Central Bank, a move likely tied to the freezing decree. Over the past decade, the RSF amassed great wealth through the gradual acquisition of Sudanese financial institutions and gold reserves.

There may be more “Chinese police stations” operating in Canada, the Public Safety Minister told a Canadian TV station on Sunday, months after police said they were investigating whether two community centers in Montreal were being used to intimidate or harass Canadians of Chinese origin.

“I am confident that the [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] have taken concrete action to disrupt any foreign interference in relationship to those so-called police stations, and that if new police stations are popping up and so on, that they will continue to take decisive action going forward,” Marco Mendicino told CTV’s Question Period in an interview.

WASHINGTON – Google, a unit of Alphabet, has agreed to pay US$8 million (S$10.7 million) to settle claims it used deceptive advertisements to promote the Pixel 4 smartphone, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Friday.

The search and advertising giant, which also makes Android smartphone software and owns YouTube, has been scrutinised for antitrust and consumer protection infractions by both the federal government and state attorneys general. The federal government has filed two antitrust lawsuits.

In this instance, Paxton’s office alleged that Google hired radio announcers to give testimonials about the Pixel 4 even though the company had refused to allow them to use one of the phones.

“If Google is going to advertise in Texas, their statements better be true,” Paxton said in a statement. “In this case, the company made statements that were blatantly false, and our settlement holds Google accountable for lying to Texans for financial gain.”

A former Virginia Department of Corrections employee donated hundreds of execution documents, including these photographs, to the Library of Virginia more than a decade ago. NPR is now exclusively publishing a selection of the documents. Library of Virginia, Chiara Eisner and Monika Evstatieva/NPR Library of Virginia, Chiara Eisner and Monika Evstatieva/NPR   In January, NPR aired excerpts from four tapes recorded behind the scenes during Virginia executions. It was only the second time in history that audio from inside an…

United States to provide $1.2 billion in new military aid to Ukraine, including air defenses and ammunition. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says it is “only a matter of time before we can restore a sustainable and just peace for our part of Europe, for Ukraine.” Agence France-Presse journalist Arman Soldin was killed by rocket fire in eastern Ukraine where journalists were with a group of Ukrainian soldiers. The U.S. said Wednesday that for the first time it has sent an…

WASHINGTON (AP) — California Sen. Dianne Feinstein returned to the Senate on Wednesday after a two-and-a-half-month absence due to illness, giving majority Democrats a much-needed final vote as they seek to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominees and raise the nation’s debt ceiling in the coming weeks. Looking noticeably thinner and frail, Feinstein is using a wheelchair to get around the Capitol as she continues to recover from a case of shingles. She missed the Senate’s first votes on Wednesday morning…

LONDON – Britain is set to formally blacklist Russia’s mercenary force Wagner group as a terrorist organisation to increase pressure on Russia, The Times newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Wagner mercenaries have spearheaded Russia’s months-long assault on Bakhmut in the industrial Donbas region.

After two months of building a legal case, proscription or a formal blacklisting of the group was “imminent” and likely to be enacted within weeks, the newspaper reported citing a government source.

Construction workers build along State Road 836 in 2018 in Miami. HB 1191 would compel the Florida Transportation Department to study using phosphogypsum in paving projects. Roads in Florida could soon include phosphogypsum — a radioactive waste material from the fertilizer industry — under a bill lawmakers have sent to Gov. Ron DeSantis. Conservation groups are urging DeSantis to veto the bill, saying phosphogypsum would hurt water quality and put road construction crews at a higher risk of cancer. Here’s…

A new leak found that Iran concealed weapons within earthquake aid to Syria to target U.S. troops, The Washington Post reported. A new leak of U.S. documents that circulated on the online platform Discord and obtained by The Post appear to show that Iran hid military equipment in aid shipments to Syria after the region was hit by an earthquake in February. According to the leaked assessment, the military equipment hidden in shipments included small arms, ammunition and drones. The…

A maintenance contractor’s error, and lack of adequate oversight by the Navy, led to the spill of 1,300 gallons of toxic fire suppressant at the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage site near Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, on Nov. 29, 2022. Military investigators found that the contractor improperly installed an air vacuum valve on the system that carries Aqueous Film Forming Foam, used to suppress fires caused by flammable liquids, just inside the underground facility’s Adit 6 tunnel in April…

Source: Iran Press TV Saturday, 06 May 2023 4:26 PM The United States is preparing an express weapons delivery for Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), despite Bejing’s repeated warnings to Washington against arming the self-ruled island, which China considers a part of its territory. The administration of US President Joe Biden will use the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) to expedite the arms shipment to Taiwan, Bloomberg reported. In a report on Friday, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg said the…

Mr Karimi was among the first celebrities who vehemently criticised the deadly crackdown on the protests which erupted in September. The footballer, known as the Maradona of Asia, lived in the UAE at the time.

The protests were sparked by the death in custody of a Kurdish Iranian woman. Mahsa Amini, 22, died after allegedly being beaten by morality police who arrested her for what they said was her failure to wear her headscarf properly.

The protests spread nationwide, but have been violently suppressed. Human rights groups say security forces have killed at least 530 protesters – including around 70 children – since the protests began.

One of the documents seen by BBC Persian says Mr Karimi “was invited [to Iran] by our agent nine times and has received serious warnings”.

UN chief Antonio Guterres addresses envoys during talks on Afghanistan in Qatar on May 2, 2023 The UN reaffirmed its “commitment to stay” in Afghanistan on Friday, in a review assessing its operations in the country in light of the Taliban banning women from working for the world body. The United Nations announced on April 4 that the Taliban had barred Afghan women from employment in UN offices countrywide, a prohibition that had previously only affected NGOs but spared the…