US President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to close down social media platforms after Twitter labelled two of his tweets “unsubstantiated” and accused him of making false claims.
“Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen,” Trump tweeted.
(AFP)
Femi Adesina, the Special Adviser on Media and Publicity to President Muhammadu Buhari, has said that Nigerians were lucky to have a leader like his principal.
Adesina made the remark while dismissing attempts to pitch him against his principal.
The presidential spokesman maintained that Buhari was leading Nigeria well.
In a post on his Facebook, Adesina wrote: “A quote from mischief-makers is making the rounds, ascribed to me. I just dey laugh.
“I am a Buharist any day, no apologies, and I believe the president and I believe the president is leading the country well. In fact, we are lucky to him at a time like this.
“All attempts to demonize me will fail.”
Just a few days ago, a former Presidential Adviser, Tanko Yakassai had passed a vote of no confidence on Buhari.
Yakassai had described Buhari as an incompetent leader who can’t fix the problems in the country.
The National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) has sanctioned three broadcast station for their reports on COVID-19 considered inappropriate.
Another 25 stations were also sanctioned and fined for other various offences in the first quarter of 2020.
The Acting Director General, Prof. Armstrong Idachaba, announced this while briefing the media on the amendment to the broadcast code and other issues.
The stations sanctioned on the account of their report on COVID-19 are Breeze FM and Adaba FM in Akure, Ondo state.
Adaba station, it was also learnt, was sanctioned twice.
They are to pay N250,000 for the offences. Ababa will pay twice.
On the broadcast code, the DG said it amended code will soon be published.
Also, the DG said a new time table for the Digital Switch Over (DSO) roll out will be announced immediately after the lockdown.
Idachaba also said part of the plan was to roll out in the three major cities of the country Lagos, Kano and Port Harcourt.
He said the commission has received assurance from signal distributors to ensure the success of the roll out.
Details shortly…
TheNation
Pastor Osagie Ize-Iyamu has emerged the consensus candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) faction believed to be loyal to National Chairman of the party, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole.
Ize-Iyamu, a former Secretary to Edo State Government (SSG), emerged on Tuesday night in Abuja through consensus arrangement.
He is expected to slug it out with Governor Godwin Obaseki for the direct primary of the party slated for June 22.
He was presented by chairman of the screening committee, Senator Francis Alimikhena, the representative of Edo North Senatorial District.
Other members of the screening committee were a former Edo Deputy Governor Lucky Imasuen; Gen. Cecil Esekhaigbe; ex-Edo Speaker Thomas Okosun; former Minority Whip of the House of Representatives Samson Osagie; ex-member of the House of Representatives Patrick Obahiagbon and Deputy Leader of the House of Representatives, Peter Akpatason.
Aside from Ize-Iyamu, who was last week granted waiver to contest by the national leadership of APC, the other screened aspirants were a former Minister of State for Works Chris Ogiemwonyi; ex-Deputy Governor of Edo state, Dr. Pius Odubu and Gen. Charles Airhiavbere (rtd.)
Solomon Edebiri, The Nation learnt, withdrew from the race on Tuesday morning.
While the screening was ongoing in Abuja, National APC Chairman, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, a former Edo Governor, was at his Iyamho hometown in Etsako West Local Government Area of the state for Eid-el-Fitr celebration.
But he returned to Abuja in the evening and addressed the aspirants while congratulating Ize-Iyamu.
A chieftain of APC, who was at the screening told The Nation on phone the former SSG was considered as the consensus candidate in view of his popularity and having raised teeming supporters across the three senatorial districts of Edo state.
The source added Ize-Iyamu’s impressive performance during the 2016 governorship election as PDP candidate was also considered for his choice.
Chairman of the screening committee, while formally presenting Ize-Iyamu as the consensus candidate to slug it out with Governor Godwin Obaseki on June 22 with direct mode of governorship primary election, wished him success.
He expressed optimism that Ize-Iyamu would be the standard bearer of the party for the September 19 poll and inaugurated Governor on November 12.
PUNCH
Gone are the lively meetings, the distribution of flyers on busy campuses. The coronavirus pandemic has put an abrupt stop to traditional US political means of courting young voters – forcing presidential candidates to turn to Snapchat instead.
The photo-sending app that boasts 229 million users – better known for filters that turn your face into a puppy or a vampire – is a new battlefield for opponents President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden, both of whom are in their 70s.
The stakes are high: Gen Z (ages 18-23) and millennials (ages 24-39) together make up more than 35 percent of the American voting population.
For them, traditional forms of social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, are increasingly growing passe.
In the race to win them over, Trump’s reelection team boasts a solid lead, nor have they suffered from lockdowns to slow the spread of COVID-19.
“The President’s campaign has always prioritized digital tools and data infrastructure, so it was a very natural shift to 100 percent digital campaigning,” Ken Farnaso, the Trump campaign deputy press secretary, told AFP.
The 100-person strong team is also backing a candidate who is infamous for his own prolific social media use.
“It’s clear that we’re wiping the floor with Biden’s campaign,” Farnaso said.
As a result, the number of subscribers to Trump’s Snapchat account tripled in eight months, easily reaching 1.5 million.
Biden’s team declined to share its number of Snapchat subscribers.
“I’m sure we can do better on the internet,” Biden himself admitted during an interview shared on Snapchat two weeks ago, from his home in Delaware.
He had been sheltering there until Monday, when he made his first public appearance in months for a Memorial Day ceremony, sporting a black face mask.
“The fact is, we’re trying,” he said.
His team has refused to provide details on its arsenal but insists that it has been working twice as hard on digital campaigning since the start of the pandemic.
Top staffers for his former rivals Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris have also been recruited to beef up the ranks.
On his Snapchat profile, the former number two to President Barack Obama keeps it cool: he is shown without a tie but with his signature aviator sunglasses. Followers can try on the same pair thanks to a custom campaign filter.
Subscribers to Trump’s account, meanwhile, are invited to relive one of the president’s rallies in Wisconsin, a state crucial to winning the election on November 3.
Trump’s team also posts videos openly mocking his opponents gaffes on Snapchat that are then shared on a massive scale.
If Snapchat — whose initial premise was sending self-deleting photos — is popular among the candidates, it is also because the platform has expressed a desire to independently and actively participate in American political life.
“Snapchat believes that there is no more powerful form of self-expression than helping its users engage in democracy and exercise their right to vote,” a spokesperson told AFP.
The app, according to the spokesperson, reaches 75 percent of Gen Z-ers and millennials on a daily basis — a figure it intends to take advantage of.
The platform had already inspired 450,000 young people to register to vote for the mid-term elections in 2018, and it plans on developing new in-app features as the election approaches.
Recently, Snapchat began offering users voter registration links during the week following their 18th birthday. Between 300,000 and 500,000 Snapchat turn 18 per month.
Conversely, its competitor TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has opted to stick with the app’s traditionally light-hearted aesthetic. But that doesn’t stop political content from flourishing on the platform.
A video of a man in a hotdog costume listing all the reasons why he thought Biden — whose campaign has been rocked by a sexual assault accusation — was a “pervert” has racked up more than 530,000 likes on TikTok.
(AFP)
A man, identified simply as Joel, has lost his life after he was allegedly refused treatment by the Isolo General Hospital in Lagos State over fear of being a COVID-19 patient.
It was gathered that Joel slumped on Sunday while playing football and was rushed to the hospital, but he was allegedly refused treatment on the fear that he might be a COVID-19 patient.
A family friend of the victim, identified simply as Amaka, who narrated the incident on Twitter, alleged that the nurses on duty claimed that they were busy and refused to attend to Joel.
She tweeted, “The medical system failed my family friend today and I’ll never get over it. He was said to be playing football in the field this morning and slumped and stopped breathing, he was immediately rushed to the Isolo general hospital in other to get attended to fast, getting there, they refused to let him in because they said they don’t know if he has Coronavirus!
“His family members kept begging and begging because time was running and he wasn’t getting any better, he was still not breathing…The nurses still insisted on not attending to him, because according to them, they have their plates full. They had to return him to the car and resulted in prayers.
“In tears, his elder sister still went back in and requested to see any doctor on duty, after so much argument a doctor came out, heard the whole story from the nurses on duty and without taking a look at him in the car or bringing him in to check him out, the doctor then certified him dead and asked them to transfer him to the mortuary. His mother collapsed on the spot…This life is so unfair.
“Bro Joel like I will always call him, you will forever be missed, I have known you to be the calmest and humble person ever since I was a toddler, it was so unfair for you to pass on just like this, but God knows best. Keep sleeping on till we meet again.”
When contacted, the Chief Medical Director of the hospital, Dr Godwin Akhaboa, who stated that the facility was not in the habit of rejecting patients, said the victim was brought in dead.
“There are parameters to look at before certifying a patient dead and no doctor will say a patient is dead without checking those parameters. It’s never done; no nurse or doctor will do that. The patient had a cardiac arrest on a football field and he was brought in dead,” Akhaboa said.
PUNCH
A video of a handcuffed black man dying while a Minneapolis officer knelt on his neck for more than five minutes sparked a fresh furor in the US over police treatment of African Americans Tuesday.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey fired four police officers following the death in custody of George Floyd on Monday as the suspect was pressed shirtless onto a Minneapolis street, one officer’s knee on his neck.
“Your knee in my neck. I can’t breathe… Mama. Mama,” Floyd pleaded.
Bystanders filmed the scene as Floyd, thought to be in his 40s, slowly grew silent and motionless, unable to move even as the officers taunted him to “get up and get in the car.”
He was taken to hospital where he was later declared dead.
Frey expressed outrage as calls rose for the officers to be prosecuted for murder.
“What I saw was wrong at every level,” he said of the video.
“For five minutes, we watched as a white officer pressed his knee into the neck of a black man,” Frey said.
“Being black in America should not be a death sentence.”
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump said he had been retained by Floyd’s family.
Crump said in a statement that Floyd had been stopped by police over a forgery accusation, a charge often used for writing bad checks or using fake banknotes for purchases.
“This abusive, excessive and inhumane use of force cost the life of a man who was being detained by the police for questioning on a non-violent charge,” he said.
Floyd’s death recalled the 2014 choking death of New Yorker Eric Garner by police, who was being detained for illegally selling cigarettes.
His death helped spark the nationwide Black Lives Matter movement.
Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo said he had passed the case to the FBI for investigation, which could turn it into a federal rights violation case.
But there were mounting calls for the officers’ arrest on homicide charges.
“This is pure evil,” tweeted Nekima Levy Armstrong, an African American Minneapolis civil rights attorney.
“Those same officers need to be charged and convicted of murder,” she said.
Floyd’s death comes on the heels of two other deaths of African-Americans that involved police wrongdoing.
On March 13 in Louisville, three white Kentucky policemen forced their way into the home of a black woman, Breonna Taylor, and shot her in a drug investigation.
And police and prosecutors in Brunswick, Georgia allegedly covered up the killing of a young black jogger by the son of a retired investigator for local law enforcement.
The police allegedly withheld for two months a video showing Ahmaud Arbery, 25, being followed and then shot with a shotgun in broad daylight.
The families of Arbery and Taylor are also being represented by Crump.
The American Civil Liberties Union said the Minneapolis case showed that US police continue to use harsh treatment on African Americans accused of minor charges.
“This tragic video shows how little meaningful change has emerged to prevent police from taking the lives of black people,” said ACLU policing specialist Paige Fernandez.
“Even in places like Minneapolis, where chokeholds are technically banned, black people are targeted by the police for low-level offenses and are subjected to unreasonable, unnecessary violence,” she said in a statement.
Just before I interviewed this man across the street from the third precinct, one of the officers in riot gear walked down the line of police chanting something close to “Take the precinct back,” as if he were trying to pump them up. They repeated it, like a call and response. pic.twitter.com/OIjqUFb5zK
— Jared Goyette (@JaredGoyette) May 27, 2020
The Guardian/NDTV/247NNU
The World Health Organisation on Monday announced the suspension of clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for COVID-19.
The organisation’s Director-General, Tedros Ghebreyesus, disclosed this in his opening remarks at a virtual press conference.
Ghebreyesus attributed the suspension to a recent report on the effect of the drug on patients.
He said, “As part of our continued response to the pandemic globally, WHO continues to work aggressively on research and development.
“As you know, more than two months ago, we initiated the solidarity trial to evaluate the safety and efficacy of four drugs and drug combinations against COVID-19.
“Over 400 hospitals in 35 countries are actively recruiting patients and nearly 3,500 patients have been enrolled from 17 countries.
“On Friday, the Lancet published an observational study on hydroxycholoroquine and chloraquine and its effects on COVID-19 patients that have been hospitalised.
“The authors reported that among patients receiving the drug, when used alone or with a macrolide, they estimated a higher mortality rate.
“The Executive Group of the Solidarity Trial, representing 10 of the participating countries, met on Saturday and has agreed to review a comprehensive analysis and critical appraisal of all evidence available globally.
“The review will consider data collected so far in the solidarity trial and in particular robust randomised available data, to adequately evaluate the potential benefits and harms from this drug.
“The Executive Group has implemented a temporary pause of the hydroxychloroquine arm within the solidarity trial, while the safety data is reviewed by the Data Safety Monitoring Board. The other arms of the trial are continuing.”
The WHO chief stated the concern relating to the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine in COVID-19, reiterating that the drugs were accepted as generally safe for use in patients with autoimmune diseases or malaria.
He promised that the organisation would provide further updates when there were more developments.
Ghebreyesus noted that the figures of confirmed cases and deaths as a result of the pandemic in Africa did not appear real.
He said, “So far, although around half of the countries in the region have community transmission, concentrated mainly in major cities, Africa is the least-affected region globally in terms of the number of cases and deaths reported to WHO.
“Africa has just 1.5 percent of the world’s reported cases of COVID-19, and less than 0.1 percent of the world’s deaths.Of course, these numbers don’t paint the full picture.
“Testing capacity in Africa is still being ramped up and there is a likelihood that some cases may be missed.
“But even so, Africa appears to have so far been spared the scale of outbreaks we have seen in other regions.”
The WHO chief said the early set-up of a leaders coalition led by the African Union, under the chairmanship of President Ramaphosa of South Africa, was key to rapidly accelerating preparedness efforts and issuing comprehensive control measures.
He noted that countries across Africa had garnered a great deal of experience from tackling infectious diseases such as polio, measles, Ebola, yellow fever, influenza and many more.
He added, “Africa’s knowledge and experience of suppressing infectious diseases has been critical to rapidly scaling up an agile response to COVID-19.
“There has been solidarity across the continent. Labs in Senegal and South Africa were some of the first in the world to implement COVID-19 diagnostic testing.
“And beyond that, they worked together with Africa CDC and WHO to extend training for laboratory technicians for detection of COVID-19 and to build up the national capacity across the region.
“Furthermore, health clinicians, scientists, researchers and academics from across Africa are collectively contributing to the worldwide understanding of COVID-19 disease.
“For many years and from the outset of this pandemic, WHO has been working through our country offices to support nations in health emergency preparedness and developing comprehensive national action plans to prevent, detect and respond to the virus.”
PUNCH
Former Roma youngster, Joseph Bouasse Perfection has tragically passed away at the age of just 21 after suffering a heart attack on Sunday night May 24th.
The Cameroonian midfielder represented the Serie A side’s prestigious academy following a successful trial in 2016. He trained alongside the likes of Daniele De Rossi, Edin Dzeko, Radja Nainggolan and Francesco Totti in Rome, but never played for the first-team.
He made his professional debut for Serie B side Vicenza while on loan from Roma in 2017.
Prior to his passing, he represented Universitatea Cluj in Romania, having signed for them in February.
According to ESPN, Bouasse was trafficked into Italy at 16 as a migrant from Cameroon, seeking a new life in Europe. He was abandoned at Rome’s Termini Station before he was approached by a man who promised him a career as a footballer.
Ex-Roma and Cameroonian footballer, Joseph Bouasse who was trafficked into Italy at 16, has died at the age of 21 after suffering a heart attack
He later ended up showcasing his talent with Liberi Nantes — Italy’s only all-refugee team before he was eventually spotted and offered a trial by Roma boss Luciano Spalletti who later invited him to first-team training.
After he signed a deal with Roma, the Cameroonian youngster trained with big stars at the club. He featured 11 times in the club’s youth team.
Paying tribute to their former player on Twitter, Roma wrote: ‘The club is desperately saddened to learn of the untimely death of former Primavera player, Joseph Bouasse Perfection.
‘The thoughts of everyone at #ASRoma are with all those closest to him.’
LaLiga side Sevilla added: ‘Heartbreaking news. Our thoughts are with Joseph’s family, friends, and everyone at AS Roma. Rest in peace, Joseph.’
247NNU
Nigerian music star Burna Boy has reportedly been arrested by the police after neigbours complained about noises coming from his house.
A video has been circulating online which purportedly shows some of Burna Boy’s neighbours complaining about the music star.
His father is also said to have been arrested; all though Pulse has not been able to confirm any of the reports.
In the video, a supposed neighbour complains of the music star and compares him to Nigerian footballer Odion Ighalo who he says also stays in that same neighbourhood without disturbing anyone.
It is also alleged that Burna Boy has not made complete payment for the land he built his house on, and reportedly owing N100M.
View this post on Instagram
Burna Boy’s Neighbours call in police officers to arrest him and his father over noise
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