LONDON MAYOR KHAN APPOINTS SECOND DEPUTY OF INDIAN ORIGIN
LONDON: London mayor Sadiq Khan has appointed Shirley Rodrigues as the deputy mayor for environment and energy, making her the second Indian-origin person named to such a post after Indore-born Rajesh Agrawal was appointed for business in June.
Rodrigues was born in Nairobi and her family has roots in the villages of Siolim and Aldona in Goa. The family migrated to Britain in 1967. As deputy mayor, she will push forward Khan’s agenda for a cleaner and greener London.
Before her appointment, Rodrigues was acting executive director for climate change at the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, a charity that works to transform the lives of poor and vulnerable children in developing countries. She oversaw a £155 mn global strategy and portfolio.
Rodrigues has a track record of developing and implementing new environmental policies in London, having worked in senior policy roles from 2005 to 2009. She helped implement London Low Emission Zone and programmes to retrofit the city’s residential and commercial buildings.
The mayor’s office said Rodrigues will also oversee the delivery of the “Energy for Londoners” project, helping residents generate more low-carbon electricity and help boost recycling rates and cut landfill.
Khan said: “Shirley Rodrigues brings with her a wealth of knowledge and experience and is the perfect person to deliver my agenda to make London a cleaner and greener city.”
Agrawal has been tasked with championing London’s interests in the wake of the Brexit vote. AKRON : Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump urged the Justice Department on Monday to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate if donors to the Clinton Foundation got special treatment from the State Department when it was run by his rival, Hillary Clinton.
Trump made the appeal at a rally before thousands of cheering supporters in Akron, Ohio, as he tries to rebound from a slide in national opinion polls with little more than two months to go until the November 8 election.
Trump accused former President Bill Clinton and his wife of turning the Clinton Foundation charity into a “pay-for-play” scheme in which wealthy donors, foreign and domestic, got favours from the State Department during Hillary Clinton’s 2009-2013 tenure as the country’s top diplomat.
Trump faulted both the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation for not indicting Clinton over her use of a private email server as secretary of state. FBI Director James Comey cited her careless handling of classified emails but opted not to prosecutor her.
“The Justice Department is required to appoint a special prosecutor because it has proved to be, sadly, a political arm of the White House,” Trump said. “Nobody has ever seen anything like it before.”
Trump’s appeal came the same day a conservative watchdog group, Judicial Watch, released 725 pages of State Department documents, including some it said were examples of preferential
treatment provided to donors at the request of former Clinton Foundation executive Douglas Band.
Trump’s call for the probe followed an announcement by the Clinton Foundation that it would no longer accept foreign donations if Clinton is elected. Her campaign fired back , saying the foundation had already laid out stepsthecharitywilltakeif Clinton becomes president.