IOC pledge 500,000 euros to help ensure Notre Dame ready for Paris

Estanguet said the Olympic family "wanted to show its solidarity with Parisians and all French people"

Paris: The International Olympic Committee on Thursday pledged 500,000 euros to help ensure Notre Dame is restored in time for the 2024 Paris Games.

"The aim of completing the reconstruction in time for Paris 2024 will be an extra motivation for all of us," IOC president Thomas Bach told 2024 Games chief Thomas Estanguet in a letter.

"All the Olympic movement and in particular the IOC have been extremely touched by the instantaneous connection the French have made between Notre Dame cathedral and the Paris 2024 Olympic Games," he wrote.

Estanguet said the Olympic family "wanted to show its solidarity with Parisians and all French people".

The IOC's contribution joins donations totalling 850 million euros made since the landmark was gutted by fire on Monday evening.

Notre Dame figures on the route for the 2024 Olympic marathon and on the road cycling circuit.

Last week, YouTube's new tool for battling misinformation mistakenly linked videos of the massive fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the US and later issued an apology for the "wrong call".

As images of the iconic tower falling played on newscasts around the world on Monday - and on the YouTube channels mirroring those newscasts - "information panels" appeared in boxes below the videos providing details about the collapses of New York's World Trade Center after the terrorist attack, which killed thousands of people.

The video giant later said that the new fact-checking tool made "the wrong call" when it displayed text about 9/11 in several videos of the Paris cathedral burning.

"We are deeply saddened by the ongoing fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral," a YouTube spokesperson was quoted as saying by ABC News. "These panels are triggered algorithmically and our systems sometimes make the wrong call. We are disabling these panels for live streams related to the fire."

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