Tanzania said on Tuesday it had summoned the top official at the US embassy to object to an advisory that warned of “exponential growth” of Covid-19 cases in the east African nation. The embassy’s “health advisory” published earlier this month contained inaccurate information, the foreign ministry said in a statement. The advisory reported, for instance, that “many hospitals” in Dar es Salaam, the economic capital, “have been overwhelmed in recent weeks”. This claim “is not true and could cause panic among Tanzanians and foreigners”, the foreign ministry’s statement said. The US embassy’s charge d’affaires, Inmi Patterson, met with Wilbert Ibuge, permanent secretary at the foreign ministry, who reminded Patterson about the two countries’ “historical cooperation”, the foreign ministry said....
YouTube The leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, Tuesday advised Biafrans to dedicate three days to pray for her fallen heroes. Kanu who disclosed this in a statement sent to newsmen by the groups publicity scretary, Emma Powerful, said this years Biafra day would start with prayers and end with prayers. He said there would be no sit-at home, noting that people have stayed longer at home during the coronavirus lockdown. “IPOB wouldn’t like to bother people with another lockdown in form of sit-at home”, he said. The statement reads, “We, the global and indefatigable family of Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) ably led by Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, the prophet and liberator of our time, wish to announce to the people of Biafra, friends of Biafra, enemies of Biafra, love...
The UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) has encouraged African countries to make right investments toward developing a digitally transformed economy. Mr Jean-Paul Adam, Director, Technology, Climate Change and Natural Resources at UNECA, made the call on Tuesday during a webinar monitored in Abuja. The webinar was organised by Africa Information and Communication Technology Alliance (AfICTA) in collaboration with UNECA with the theme “Unlocking Africa’s Digital Potential Amid COVID-19”. Adam said that the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic had caused a disruption in activities, hence the need for a paradigm shift. “Africa needs to address issues that have limited their digital growth. There are issues of gender imbalance, speed of bandwidth, poor internet access. “When we get some of the...
Kano State Government on Tuesday said the delay in the early completion of the Sani Abacha Stadium (SAS) Isolation Centre was necessitated by the review of the project initial plan. Malam Muhammad Garba, the state Commissioner of Information, made the clarification in a statement in Kano. Garba, who was reacting to a viral social media video clip on the project, dismissed the footage as a “mischievous attempt to misrepresent facts on the ongoing installation works at the isolation centre, donated by the Coalition Against COVID-19 (CACOVID). The project, which was initiated in April, was designed with a 500-bed capacity for the treatment of COVID-19 patients. The News Agency of Nigeria reports that the three and a half minutes video clip, showed ongoing installation works at the isolation c...
Manchester United manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer said on Tuesday he is confident of having Paul Pogba and Marcus Rashford fit should the Premier League season restart next month. Pogba has missed the majority of the campaign with an ongoing ankle injury, while Rashford seemed set to miss the rest of the season when he suffered a double stress fracture in his back in January. United returned to training in small groups last week and preparations are expected to be ramped up further for a return to action when Premier League clubs vote on resuming contact training on Wednesday. “Hopefully now we’ve proved we can do this safely and we can move to the next step. It’s been really enjoyable being on the training ground again,” said Solskjaer. “They (Pogba and Rashford) are looking good, they’ve jo...
Chairman, Bayelsa COVID-19 Task Force, Inodu Apoku, on Tuesday announced that an average of 25 samples are sent on a daily basis to University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital (UPTH), for testing. Mr Apoku, who is also the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Health, made this known to newsmen in a statement in Yenagoa, the state capital. “Our surveillance is gathering momentum by the day and we are testing more cases daily. “We now use the UPTH COVID-19 Laboratory. In the past weeks, we have been sending an average of 25 samples daily to this facility. Most of these samples are contacts of confirmed cases,” he announced. On the confirmed new case in the state by the NCDC on Monday, the chairman said it had brought the total number of cases in Bayelsa to 12. “This new case is a 48-year...
Five rebels and two soldiers were killed early Tuesday when jihadists crossing from Nigeria attacked a military position in northern Cameroon, sources said. The overnight attack took place at Soueram, a village close to the Nigerian border in Cameroon’s Far North region, an army colonel and a local official told AFP. “Two Cameroonian soldiers were killed” in the assault, while five jihadists died in the counter-attack, the colonel said. He attributed the attack to Islamic State West Africa Province, a splinter group of Nigeria’s Boko Haram, which has led a bloody 11-year campaign against perceived western influence. An army vehicle was destroyed and the jihadists made off with a piece of heavy weaponry, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. A local leader, who also asked not to be i...
The House of Representatives has reiterated its resolve to probe into the allegation of mismanagement of over N40 billion by the interim management committee (IMC) of the Niger Delta development commission (NDDC). The chairman of the House Committee on NDDC, Mr Olubunmi Ojo made this known to reporters at the National Assembly complex in Abuja. The lawmaker denied the allegation from a member of the NDDC IMC that his committee , alongside that of the Senate benefited from a contract to the tune of about N3 trillion from the NDDC. Ojo who claimed that he, alongside members of his committee had received threat to their lives by militants maintained that no amount of blackmail will deter his committee from probing into the allegation of wrongdoings in the NDDC. According to him: “It’s unfortu...
The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Munich, Germany, contains no ordinary supercomputer. Sure, it has thousands of servers, or nodes, stacked in rows in a windowless vault with technicians working diligently on huge data crunching conundrums for research organisations; running simulations to try and better predict future natural disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes. But it is eerily quiet. Almost too quiet. The familiar whir of hot air being whooshed away by power-hungry computers is almost entirely absent. Where are all the fans? Almost all gone, as it turns out. The LRZ SuperMUC NG, which uses massive arrays of Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SD650 servers, requires nearly no fans at all – just those for cooling the power supply units and in the in-row-chillers on every eighth row. As a r...
Bayern Munich head coach Hansi Flick says the absence of spectators for Tuesday’s top-of-the-table Bundesliga clash at Borussia Dortmund will be a “missing factor”. Reigning champions Bayern thrashed second-placed Dortmund 4-0 last November in front of 75,000 fans at the Allianz Arena. But the teams will meet again in Dortmund with the stands at Signal Iduna Park — usually packed with 82,000 people — empty after the Bundesliga became the first top European league to return, behind closed doors, following the coronavirus lockdown. “It is a very special game,” Flick said on Monday, with Bayern heading to Dortmund with a four-point lead. “As a coach, there is no question that the fans are a missing factor.” Ten of the 18 league games since the restart have been won by the away team. “The atmo...