Coronavirus infections in England have fallen by about a third over lockdown, according to a major study.Some of the worst-hit areas saw the biggest improvements – but, despite this progress, cases remained relatively high across England.Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the data showed the country could not “take our foot off the pedal just yet”.The findings by Imperial College London were based on swabbing more than 100,000 people between 13-24 November.The React-1 study is highly respected and gives us the most up-to-date picture of Covid-19 in the country.Its researchers estimated the virus’s reproduction (R) rate had fallen to 0.88. That means on average every infection translated to less than one other new infection, so the epidemic is shrinking.Run alongside pollster Ipsos MORI, the Imperial study involved testing a random sample of people for coronavirus, whether or not they had symptoms.The results of these tests suggested a 30% fall in infections between the last study and the period of 13-24 November.Before that, cases were accelerating – doubling every nine days when the study last reported at the end of October.Now cases are coming down, but more slowly than they shot up – halving roughly every 37 days.In the North West and North East, though – regions with some of the highest numbers of cases – infections fell by more than half.The findings suggest cases are now highest in the East Midlands and West Midlands.Lockdown came into force across England on 5 November but national data, based on people with symptoms, suggests there was a spike in cases in the week after.This was put down to pre-lockdown socialising, since it takes five days on average after catching the infection for it to be detectable by a test.Source: BBC
Nigeria’s national power grid collapsed again on Sunday afternoon plunging the country into a total blackout.
A message from Kaduna Electric to its customers via its Twitter handle, says “We regret to inform you that the loss of power supply in our franchise – Kaduna, Sokoto, Kebbi and Zamfara states – is as a result of the collapse of the national grid. The collapse occurred at about 11:26 am this morning.
Supply shall be restored as soon as the grid is back up. We regret all inconveniences.”
Similarly, EKEDC, in a text message sent to its customers, said, “Dear customer, there is a system collapse on the national grid. Supply will be restored as soon as the issue is resolved. Apologies for the inconvenience.”
The grid, which is being managed by government-owned Transmission Company of Nigeria, has suffer system collapse several times over the years due to a lack of spinning reserve that is meant to forestall such occurrences.
Maradona’s death may trigger family inheritance battle
Diego Maradona’s tormented private life, with its tangled relationships and paternity suits, suggests distributing his inheritance will be a complex task for lawyers bracing for claims from a slew of children — those he recognized and those he didn’t.
“There’s going to be a big fight. He didn’t leave a will,” according to a source close to the family who declined to be named.
Maradona made and wasted millions over his years at the pinnacle of his fame with Barcelona, Napoli and Argentina, and he also made some shrewd investments. Some reports circulating since his death estimate his estate at around $90 million.
Angered over a dispute with his daughter Giannina last year, he threatened to donate all his wealth, including properties, luxury cars and sponsorship contracts, to charity.
“I know that now, as you get older, people are more concerned about what you leave behind than what you are doing,” he was quoted as saying at the time.
“And I tell them all that I’m not going to leave them anything, that I’m going to give it all away. Everything I’ve got in my life I’m going to give away,” he said.
Under Argentine law, however, a person can only give away a fifth of their assets. At least two-thirds must be left to the spouse or offspring of the deceased.
Giannina, 31, had sparked the row by accusing the former star’s entourage of not taking proper care of him, which seems to have been a recurring theme of their relationship.
Father and daughter had reconciled by his 60th birthday in October, Giannina lauding him in a series of affectionate messages posted on social media with her sister Dalma.
“He is my great example of all the things to do and all the things not to do. I have admired him, yesterday, today and always. He taught me to forgive, to forgive myself,” Gianinna wrote.
– Complex ties –
Claudia Villafane was Maradona’s childhood sweetheart since the age of 15. His only wife, they divorced in 2003.
Their two daughters, Dalma, 33 and Giannina — were the only children he recognized for many years.
But there were others, spawning the joke that Maradona had fathered his own soccer team. It threatens to make the task of distributing his inheritance a complicated one for his lawyer Matias Morla.
The football icon has been forced to acknowledge three children over the years, including Diego Junior, born a few months before Dalma.
Conceived with Italian singer Cristiana Sinagra, and born in 1986, months after he captained Argentina to World Cup glory in Mexico, it took Maradona 29 years to acknowledge his paternity. Ill with Covid-19, Diego Junior was unable to travel from Italy to his father’s funeral.
In 2008, the football legend recognized Jana, born in 1996 to her mother Valeria Sabalain, the former girlfriend he was closest to during the last months of his life.
Another son Diego Ojeda was born in 2013 from his relationship with ex-girlfriend Veronica Ojeda.
But others have staked paternity claims against Maradona, including according to his lawyer, at least three in Cuba where Maradona spent years in a drug rehabilitation program.
Spats between the ex-partners and Maradona’s children have been a recurring theme of his life and have been given a full airing on social media and Argentine television channels.
His eldest daughters and their mother appeared to be the ones in control of the funeral arrangements on Thursday.
However, the World Cup winner was in a legal dispute with his ex-wife over ownership of hundreds of items of memorabilia from his career.
An Indonesian man collapsed as he was flogged nearly 150 times Thursday for raping a child in conservative Aceh province, where public whipping is a common punishment for violating Islamic law.
The 19-year-old grimaced and cried out as a masked sharia officer lashed his back with a rattan stick in the town of Idi.
He pleaded for the punishment to stop and was briefly treated by doctors before the flogging restarted.
The man was arrested earlier this year on charges he molested and raped the victim, whose age was not revealed.
He was sentenced to 146 lashes, a particularly high number reserved for the most serious crimes.
“The maximum sentence is meant to be a deterrent,” Ivan Nanjjar Alavi, an official from the East Aceh prosecutor’s office, told reported
Aceh, on the western tip of Sumatra, is the only region in Muslim-majority Indonesia to impose Islamic law under an autonomy deal with the central government that ended a long-running separatist insurgency.
Also on Thursday, a 40-year-old and a 21-year-old man were whipped 100 times each for having sex with underage partners.
Aceh’s public whippings — widely criticised by rights groups — can attract hundreds of spectators, but crowds have dwindled in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
The province allows whipping for a range of charges — including gambling, adultery, drinking alcohol, and having gay or pre-marital sex.
It has wide support among Aceh’s mostly Muslim population.
Source: AFP
Today’s football superstars Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo “could not even dream” of being admired as much as Diego Maradona was, says his former Argentina team-mate Ossie Ardiles.
Three days of national mourning have begun in Argentina after Maradona died on Wednesday at the age of 60.
His body will lie in state at the Casa Rosada, the seat of the Argentina government, during that time.
“To be Diego Maradona was incredibly beautiful,” Ardiles told the BBC.
“But on the other hand, it was not easy at all. Right from a really early age, he was subject to the press all the time. He didn’t have a normal childhood, he never had normal teenage years.
“Everybody wanted to be with him, everybody wanted a piece of him, so it was incredibly difficult.”
Maradona, who played for clubs including Barcelona and Napoli, was captain when Argentina won the 1986 World Cup, scoring the famous ‘Hand of God’ goal against England in the quarter-finals.
Former Tottenham midfielder Ardiles, who played alongside Maradona at the 1982 World Cup, said he was “a god” in Argentina, in Naples and all around the world.
“He will be remembered as a genius in football,” he added. “You can see the extraordinary amount of interest that he generates.
“People like [Juventus and Portugal striker] Ronaldo, or people like [Barcelona and Argentina forward] Messi, they couldn’t even dream of having this kind of admiration.
“That was the Maradona phenomenon – all the time.”
A post-mortem examination was due to take place on Maradona’s body later on Wednesday after he died at about midday local time at his home in Tigre, near Buenos Aires.
The former Argentina attacking midfielder and manager had successful surgery on a brain blood clot earlier in November and was to be treated for alcohol dependency.
A minute’s silence took place before Wednesday’s Champions League matches and the same will happen before all other European fixtures this week.
Messi and Ronaldo were among current players to pay tribute, while Brazilian football great Pele said he hoped one day they would “play ball together in the sky”.
Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola said Maradona “made world football better”.
“There was a banner in Argentina, one year ago, that I read that said: ‘No matter what you have done with your life, Diego, it matters what you do for our lives,'” former Barcelona and Bayern Munich boss Guardiola added.
“It expresses perfectly what this guy gave us. The man of joy and pleasure and his commitment for world football.”
Former Tottenham manager and Argentina defender Mauricio Pochettino said: “Broken with pain. Diego, you were my hero and friend. I was so fortunate to have shared football and life with you.”
The Vatican said Pope Francis, an Argentine and a football fan, would be remembering Maradona in his prayers.
Source: BBC
A surrender deadline for Tigray forces is just hours away with Ethiopia’s military threatening to bombard the regional capital – a city of half a million people.
Ethiopia’s prime minister on Wednesday rejected growing international demands for dialogue and a halt to deadly fighting in the northern Tigray region as “interference”, saying his country will handle the conflict on its own as the 72-hour surrender ultimatum expires at 16:30 GMT.
We respectfully urge the international community to refrain from any unwelcome and unlawful acts of interference,” a statement from Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s office said as government forces encircled the Tigray capital, Mekelle, with tanks.
“The international community should stand by until the government of Ethiopia submits its requests for assistance to the community of nations. We reject any interference in our internal affairs.”
A news agency in Ethiopia’s Amhara region, meanwhile, reported more than 10,000 Tigrayan troops had been “destroyed” during the three-week conflict raging in the mountainous north.
The report by the regional government-run AMMA agency in Amhara, where authorities back Abiy’s federal forces, could not be verified and there was no immediate response from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
Abiy, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, insists on calling the conflict a “law enforcement operation” while his ultimatum for TPLF leaders to surrender ends ahead of a final push to arrest them.
Abiy’s government has warned Mekelle’s residents to move away from TPLF leaders and military installations saying there will be “no mercy” – language the United Nations human rights chief and others have warned could lead to “further violations of international humanitarian law”.
Communications remain almost completely severed to the Tigray region of some six million people and it is not clear how many people in Mekelle are aware of the warnings and the threat of artillery fire.
Diplomats on Tuesday said UN Security Council members in a closed-door meeting expressed support for an African Union-led effort to deploy three high-level envoys to Ethiopia.
Three AU envoys – former Presidents Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and Kgalema Motlanthe of South Africa – were due to arrive in Addis Ababa on Wednesday, two diplomatic sources told the Reuters news agency.
‘Great concern’
The European Union foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said late on Tuesday the fighting is seriously destabilising the region and hostilities should halt.
I expressed my great concern regarding increasing ethnic-targeted violence, numerous casualties, and violations of human rights and of international humanitarian law,” said Borrell after speaking to Ethiopia’s foreign minister.
Tigray’s regional leader Debretsion Gebremichael could not immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday.
The TPLF dominated Ethiopia’s government for more than a quarter-century but was sidelined after Abiy took office in 2018 and sought to centralise power in a country long ruled along ethnic lines. The TPLF opted out when Abiy dissolved the ruling coalition, then infuriated the federal government by holding an election in September after a national vote was postponed by COVID-19. Each side now regards the other as illegal.
The international community has urgently called for communications to be restored to the Tigray region so warring sides’ claims can be investigated, and so food and other desperately needed supplies can be sent as hunger grows.
Source: Aljazeerah
Best selling author Danielle Steel has shared her isolation experience in the ongoing pandemic.
The Author who shared her feelings in a Facebook post called on everyone to hang in there.
“I have not left my apartment in 7 weeks. I have not jogged, gone for walks, been in the fresh air, seen my loved ones, family or friends, I’m isolated and alone far from home. I’m working and finding it incredibly difficult. Sometimes I’m scared, sometimes I’m okay. After I watch the news, I’m anxious for days. I wake up in the night and don’t sleep much. I talk to my kids a lot. I’m worried much of the time about my kids. I pray. I walk in the house and try to keep busy, I cry easily and am not a crier usually. And it means the world to me when I hear from someone I love. This is HARD, for everyone, and for some people more than others, depending on the circumstances they are confined in. I’m comfortable, I have food, I can’t complain, but no matter where you are, this is tough, and it is stretching out with no idea for anyone when it will end. So, Friends, we’re in the hard part now. The lonely part. The endurance part. The part where you think you’ve run as hard and as far as you can, and you find out that you have to run twice as far as you thought, over rough terrain, with obstacles that look insurmountable. But there’s no turning back now. We can’t give up. We just have to keep going. And we WILL get to the finish line!!! Each one of us is tougher than we thought we were. We will prevail and the crisis WILL end!!! And we’re saving lives and stopping the contagion while we stay confined. A REALLY worthwhile cause!!
US President-elect Joe Biden will name on Tuesday the first picks to be part of his administration, his chief of staff said, as Donald Trump refuses to concede his loss to the Democrat.
Biden has been pushing ahead with preparations to take over as president in January despite Trump’s moves on multiple fronts to try to undo the results of the November 3 vote.
“You are going to see the first of the president-elect’s cabinet picks on Tuesday of this week,” Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.
“You’ll have to wait for the president-elect to say that himself on Tuesday,” he added.
With the clock ticking down to Biden’s January 20 inauguration, Trump’s team has focused on trying to stop battleground states from certifying election results while continuing to pursue legal challenges that have so far failed.
A Pennsylvania judge on Saturday threw out Donald Trump’s claims of widespread electoral fraud there in a scathing ruling which excoriated the Trump team’s legal strategy.
“Donald Trump’s been rejecting democracy. He has been… launching baseless claims of voter fraud, baseless litigation rejected by 34 courts,” Klain told ABC.
“It’s corrosive, it’s harmful, but… it’s not going to change the outcome of what happens here at 12 noon on Jan. 20: Joe Biden will become the next president of the United States.”
Source: AFP
The Federal Government says it is making Nigeria more business friendly by offering tax incentives through the 2020 finance bill.
The Vice President Prof Yemi Osibanjo made this known while delivering his address at the virtual third Nigeria diaspora investment summit ,Friday in Abuja.
According to Osibanjo,“what we have done in furthering our own economic policy is to attempt to make the fiscal environment as attractive as possible. What we have done is to use the instrumentality of the Finance Acts to make or propose significant reforms.”
The proposed incentives include, reduction in duties on tractors from 35 to 10 per cent,reduction in duties on motor vehicles for the transportation of goods from 35 to 10 per cent,reduction of levy on motor vehicles for the transportation of persons (cars) from 35 per cent to 5 per cent, 50 per cent reduction in minimum tax; from 0.5 per cent to 0.25 per cent for gross turnover for financial years ending between January 1st, 2020 and December 31st, 2021 and granting of tax relief to companies that donated to the COVID-19 relief fund under the private sector coalition (CACOVID) .
In her opening remarks, the Chairman Nigerians in Diaspora Commission Honorable Anime Dabiri-Erewa shed light on the aim of the summit which she said is geared towards increasing diaspora investment in Nigeria.
“The objective of this summit is to establish a platform where Diaspora Investors can interact with potential sponsors, partners, collaborators and government agencies with a direct roundtable deals for mutual benefits”.
According to her in addition to the fact that the summit will strengthen investment profile, expand business network and provide an opportunity to showcase global best practices, it will “provide opportunity to meet key decision makers and industry influencers, brand exposure and many more that will help you in contributing to National development. As we are all aware, Nigeria is our country and it is important to bring together all expertise from various fields especially from the diaspora to develop Nigeria”.
Dabiri-Erewa attested to the fact that Nigerians in Diaspora are experiencing increased ease of doing business.
In her welcome remarks, the converner of the Summit , Dr Badewa Adejugbe- Williams stressed the relevance of Nigerians in Diaspora to nation building especially with the current realities occasioned by the covid-19 pandemic.
“We need our Diaspora Community more than ever before because they possess the pertinent resources and are at the cutting edge of technology and development. There is no doubt therefore that our Nigerian Diaspora are an asset to their host countries and Nigeria in terms of their resources, skills and talents. The engagement of Nigerians in Diaspora in resurging the economy is more pertinent now as the post COVID-19 economy recovery plan requires global best practices for which the Diaspora are best suited”.
She expressed optimism that the summit will result in mutually beneficial business relationships.
“This 2-day Virtual Summit is therefore aimed at creating an avenue for prospective, meaningful and sustainable Diaspora Investment to be relied upon to boost economic growth in Nigeria and also about ensuring that the Nigerians at home and the Nigerians in the Diaspora works together closely to develop a great country”.
The theme of the first ever virtual diaspora investment summit is ““Post-Covid EconomyResurgence: Targeting Diaspora Investment”
Key areas of focus in the summit are Healthcare, Education, Agribusiness, Creative Entertainment and Sports, Telecommunication, ICT/Fintech and Manufacturing.
The Speaker of the House of Representative, Femi Gbajabiamila has confirmed the death of a newspaper vendor shot by one of his security aides on Thursday.
Gbajabiamila who, in a series of tweets on his official handle in the early hours of Friday, narrated how the incident took place, explained that the vendor was hit by a stray bullet meant to disperse a crowd when he went to greet newspaper vendors while leaving the National Assembly.
“A horrible incident has taken place. This evening as I left the national assembly, I stopped, as usual, to exchange pleasantries with the newspaper vendors at the corner,” he explained.
“Many of them have known me since I first moved to Abuja and it was a friendly exchange. Unfortunately, after the convoy set out in continuation of movement, unidentified men obstructed the convoy which got the attention of security men in the convoy who shot into the air to disperse them.”
The Lagos lawmaker narrated that some hours after they got to their destination, he was informed that someone had the victim simply identified as Ifeanyi had been hit by a stray bullet.
He said this was “contrary to an earlier report by men in the convoy that they applied their security discretion to shoot in the air.
“In the meantime; the officer who fired the fatal shot has been suspended from the convoy pending the conclusion of the investigation.”
While sending his condolences to the family of the deceased, the Speaker expressed distraught about the incident.
“For one of them (vendors) to have been shot by my security detail is horrific and I cannot begin to imagine the grief and loss Ifeanyi’s family must feel on this sad day. No family should have to go through this,” he added.
“I have caused a report to be made to the local police station and an investigation has commenced. My value for human life and my respect for all people – irrespective of social-economic status – is what endeared me to these vendors and these are the reasons why I stop my convoy quite often to connect with them.”
Source: Channels TV
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