relations between France and Egypt.Cairo, Jan.13.– Egypt's President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi expressed, on Monday, Egypt’s aspiration to benefit from French expertise in achieving its development plans.
The President added that this relates particularly to railway projects and the national plan for developing villages.
Beijing poured hundreds of millions of dollars into US Ivy League institutions, including a $1 million donation to Columbia University to underwrite an educational program that the State Department has since branded part of China’s “global influence and propaganda apparatus."
Beijing, Jan. 4.– Chinese officials believe that President-elect Joe Biden will “restore normalcy” in US-China relations — claiming that “a new window of hope” is opening with the exit of the uncompromising Trump administration.
“China-US relations have come to a new crossroads, and a new window of hope is opening,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in an interview with state-owned broadcaster CGTN.
Kiev, Dec. 27.– At a press conference in Interfax Ukraine, the Member of the Parliament of Ukraine Andrii Derkach 
unveiled new records of conversations between “Biden and Poroshenko”. The main topics of the tapes released by Derkach, and now widely disclosed to the world, were the IMF loan guarantees, the operations of Naftogaz, tariff increases, the Burisma case, the nationalization of PrivatBank and others.
According to Derkach, on one of the records, Biden demanded that Poroshenko keep the CEO of Naftogaz NJSC, Kobolyev in place, whom the then Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman wanted to dismiss. Poroshenko assured Biden that he would deal with this. Commenting on this record, Derkach stated that Kobolyev was backed by the Americans.
As for the Burisma Holdings' issue, Biden boasted in a television interview sponsored by the Council for Foreign Relations in 2018 about his pressure on the Ukrainian government to dismiss the Attorney General investigating that company in a corruption case.
Mr. Dey is a rights activist, founder of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan and a firm believer in Participatory Democracy.
New Delhi, Dec. 18.– India’s Right to Information (RTI) Act, which was promulgated in 2005, is considered one of the most advanced and powerful pieces of rights legislation in the world. Although an evolved law that forces governments to become more transparent and accountable, almost every regime has shown reluctance to uphold the spirit of the law. In 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government managed to amend the Act in a manner that allowed it to wrest control of an independent institution.
In an interview with Frontline, Nikhil Dey, well-known rights activist and founder of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), the organisation that spearheaded the RTI, spoke about the resilience of the Act, its ability to withstand government pushback and how it could even help with the COVID-19 pandemic. Nikhil Dey, a believer in participatory democracy, said that “in a democracy, people are the sovereign. It is their right to ask. If you are stopping people you are stopping the sovereign.” Excerpts:
Washington DC, Dec.12.– Senior advisor to the president Jared Kushner told reporters shortly after the president’s announcement that Morocco — like other signatories onto the Abraham Accords — will immediately open liaison offices in Israel, start scheduling direct flights from the country to Israel, and foster “cooperation” between companies in both nations.
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