FRANCE
Huawei not to be banned
President Emmanuel Macron has said that the country is not excluding Huawei Technologies from its upcoming 5G telecommunication networks, but favors European providers for security reasons. Macron spoke after meeting with visiting Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) in Paris on Friday. He said he had already told Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) about his preference for companies such as Ericsson and Nokia, saying “you would do the same as me.” “It’s normal that ... we want a European solution” because of the importance of “the security of our communication,” Macron told reporters. The French information security agency last month said that Huawei would not be banned from the country, but local telecoms that buy its technology would only be able to get licenses limited to eight years.
UNITED STATES
Remdesivir use expanded
Regulators are allowing the use of experimental antiviral drug remdesivir for all patients hospitalized with COVID-19, drugmaker Gilead Sciences said on Friday. The Food and Drug Administration has expanded its emergency use authorization, which lets doctors administer the intravenous drug during the COVID-19 pandemic, it said. Until now, that was limited to patients with severe COVID-19. Foster City, California-based Gilead applied to the agency on Aug. 10 for formal approval of remdesivir, to be sold under the brand name Veklury.
UNITED STATES
Hurricane kills at least 14
At least 14 people were killed after Hurricane Laura slammed into the southern states of Louisiana and Texas, authorities and local media said on Friday. Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards confirmed at least 10 people had died in his state, half from using carbon monoxide-producing portable generators indoors in the aftermath of the storm making landfall on Thursday. Four of the remaining deaths were caused by trees falling on people’s homes, Edwards said, while a man drowned after his boat sank in the storm.
NEW ZEALAND
Cyberattacks probed
The government and its foreign spy agency are getting involved after cyberattacks disrupted trading on the nation’s stock market several times this week. The attacks have affected the private company NZX, which hosts the market, halting trading for up to several hours at a time. Minister of Finance Grant Robertson on Friday said that ministers had asked the Government Communications Security Bureau intelligence agency to help stop the attacks. “We as a government are treating this very seriously,” he said, adding that security concerns prevented him from saying much more.
UNITED STATES
College bars closed
As waves of schools and businesses around the country are cleared to reopen, college towns are moving toward renewed shutdowns because of too many parties and too many COVID-19 infections among students. With more than 300 students at the University of Missouri testing positive for COVID-19 and an alarming 44 percent positivity rate for the surrounding county, the local health director on Friday ordered bars to stop serving alcohol at 9pm and close by 10pm. Iowa’s governor has ordered all bars shut down around the University of Iowa and Iowa State, while the mayor of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, did the same in the hometown of the state’s flagship university.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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