News Headlines - 09 August 2020

▽More than a dozen killed in 'devastating' India plane crash | Al Jazeera

At least 18 people were killed and more than 150 others injured when a passenger jet skidded off a hilltop runway after landing in heavy rain in the southern city of Kozhikode in India.
Hardeep Singh Puri, the Indian civil aviation minister, told ANI news agency on Saturday 18 people including two pilots were killed in Friday's "unfortunate" crash.

▽Mahinda Rajapaksa sworn in as Sri Lanka's PM after record victory | Al Jazeera

Former Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa has been sworn in as the country's prime minister for the fourth time after his party secured a landslide victory in parliamentary elections that cemented his family's hold on power.
Mahinda took oath on Sunday before his younger brother, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, at a prominent Buddhist temple on the outskirts of the capital Colombo.
Mahinda served as the island nation's president from 2005 to 2015 and is highly popular among the ethnic majority Sinhalese for ending the country's 25-year civil war with Tamil rebels in 2009.

▽First Somaliland representative to Taiwan arrives - Focus Taiwan

Foreign Minister Joseph Wu on Sunday welcomed Somaliland's first representative who arrived in the country Friday in preparation for the upcoming opening of the self-claimed African state's representative office in Taiwan.
In a tweet, Wu welcomed the arrival of Mohamed Omar Hagi Mohamoud, saying he has "braved Chinese pressure" to take up the post in Taiwan. "The fact 'sovereignty & friendship aren't for sale' deserves international recognition," Wu tweeted.
Wu was referring to a Somaliland media report earlier this month that Somaliland President Muse Bihi Abdi rejected an offer by the Chinese government in exchange for ending exchanges with Taiwan.

▽Washington aims Clean Network program directly at stopping China and Huawei | ZDNet

United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Wednesday the extension of Washington's 5G Clean Path program to encompass carriers, app stores, cloud computing, and subsea cables under the Clean Network umbrella.
Pompeo said the extension was needed to guard against "aggressive intrusions" by the Chinese Communist Party, and called other nations to create a "Clean fortress" around citizen's data.
Under the Clean Carrier label, the United States will seek to ensure Chinese carriers aren't connected to US telco networks.

▽US Lawmakers Ask 6 Top Universities to Hand Over Records of Foreign Donations | Voice of America

Three members of the U.S. Congress are asking six of the nation’s top universities to hand over records of donations they have accepted from certain foreign nations, including China and Russia, citing concerns that these multimillion-dollar donations present a growing national security threat.
Letters aimed at helping the members to “further understand the effects of adversarial foreign direct investments in the U.S. higher education system” were sent to the presidents of Harvard, New York University, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago and University of Delaware. The letters sent this week ask the presidents to provide all records of gifts from China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia since January 2015.