The Lagos State Government has partnered with a firm, to market and project the artistic products as well as the tourism potential of the state to the global world.

The Programme Director, Dozie Atueyi, disclosed this at a news conference on Friday in Lagos.

Atueyi said that the partnership would ensure proper harnessing of Lagos music, arts, dance, crafts, culture and tourism potential to be projected to the world.

He said in the process of executing this project, the state tourism and cultural potential would be transported for exhibitions in cities like Toronto, Istanbul and London.

He noted that the exhibition which would be tagged “Lagos Arts and Tourism Expo”, would go a long way in attracting tourists to the country as well as boosting Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings.

“We are out to project Nigeria, most especially Lagos to the world, we want to reverse a trend of people wanting to go abroad but there are lots of opportunities here.

“We will be projecting Lagos aquatic offerings, tourism potential, cultural assests, fabrics of adire, artworks and all manner of crafts.

“This is to make Lagos the most preferred destination for tourism, leisure and business.

“These tourism, cultural potential, arts and crafts will be exhibited in Istanbul from Oct. 5 to 9, in London from Nov. 16 to 20 and in Toronto from Dec. 14 to 18,” he said.

Atueyi appreciated the state government for the support enjoyed so far.

Also, Ayoola Sadare, Founder, Lagos International Jazz Festival, one of the partners for the project, said that authentic music from the city of Lagos would be projected cutting across Fuji, Jazz and Afrobeats.

According to him, the project is not a relocation plan for Nigerians to travel abroad but an opportunity for the products of their creativity to be exported for patronage.

He said the exhibition would create viable marketing platforms for Nigerian music, arts, tourism and culture.

Todin Olukuade, Creative Director, FC Accessories, who specialises in turning storytelling of cities to works of arts, said he would be relaying the stories of Lagos in some works of arts which would be exhibited as accessories.

Olukuade said these accessories would be coming in form of household materials and souvenirs.

Triumph Dominon, the sponsorship consultant, expressed her love for the rich and diverse culture of Lagos State, urging Nigerians to take pride in their culture.

“I love Nigeria and specifically Lagos State with its huge wealth of culture, we should learn to appreciate ourselves.

“People said Lagos is crazy but New York is crazier, we must learn to appreciate our Lagos,” she said.

A car which was once used by the late Diana, Princess of Wales has sold for £650,000 at auction.

Princess Diana, who died nearly 25 years ago, drove the black Ford Escort RS Turbo for nearly three years from August 1988.

She was pictured with the car outside the boutique shops of Chelsea and in Kensington.

The car, registration C462FHK, was eventually sold by Silverstone Auctions in Warwickshire to a buyer in Cheshire.

The Leamington Spa-based auction house told people at the sale it was the “car of the day”.

Auctioneer Jonathan Humbert said there had been huge interest in the vehicle, which had received the firm’s largest number of telephone bids in 12 years.

The bidding began at £100,000 and soon became a contest between hopeful buyers in Dubai and Coventry.

But at around the £450,000 mark, the main bidding came from Cheshire and Dubai – with the UK-based buyer eventually winning out.

The auctioneer expressed his surprise when bidding climbed, commenting: “£500,00 for a Ford Escort? I’ve never said that before.”

Humbert had earlier said the car represented a “piece of history”.

Princess Diana preferred to drive her own car and a member of the Royalty Protection Command (otherwise known as SO14) sat in the passenger seat.

The car sold on Saturday is believed to be unique as the first and only black RS Turbo Series 1 – as agreed between S014 and Ford for reasons of discretion – instead of the usual white manufactured model.

In June 2021, another Ford Escort used by Princess Diana sold at auction for £52,000.

Before the sale, Silverstone Auctions’ classic car specialist Arwel Richards said the “lucky bidder” would have invested in two things.

He said: “He is going to have one the finest preserved examples of this model anywhere, and also the slice of social history that comes with the car.

“This car was known as the ‘people’s sports car’ and the fact it was driven by the People’s Princess just nails it.”

On Friday, the chair of the Advisory Board of the NLNG $100,000 literature prize, Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, announced the shortlisted poets whose books made the final cut for the coveted award.

The shortlisted books for the 2022 edition of the literature prize are ‘Memory and the Call of Water’ by Su’eddie Vershima Agema, ‘Nomad’ by Romeo Oriogun and ‘Your Crib, My Qibla’ by Saddiq Dzukogi.

The finalists were selected out of a longlist of 11 announced recently by the board.

The Nigeria Prize for Literature, sponsored by Nigeria LNG to promote and reward excellence in writing, rotates yearly amongst four literary categories of prose fiction, poetry, drama and children’s literature.

The 2022 edition of The Nigeria Prize for Literature initially had 287 poets compete for the $100,000 Prize.

The judges will announce the winner and outcome of the 2022 edition of The Nigeria Prize for Literary Criticism on October 14.

Author and professor of Law at Babcock University, Ilishan Remo, Ogun State, Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia, won the 2021 prize with her novel, Son of the House.

Actors in a heavily bombarded city in southern Ukraine have returned to the stage, putting on their first performance, since the war, in an underground shelter converted into a tiny theatre.

A few dozen theatre-goers descended steep concrete steps into the subterranean venue on Thursday for the opening night of a show put on by the Mykolaiv Art Drama Theatre. Their usual venue, an ornate 450-seater hall, has been closed due to the six-month war.

“Of course, many plays have been cancelled, because some male actors went away to fight, some went abroad as temporary refugees. So, our theatre company has become smaller,” said actress Violeta Mamykina, speaking in her cramped dressing room before going on stage.

Theatre manager Artem Svystun described the performance as “art-therapy”, giving local people who have stayed on in the city some brief respite from the stress of the war.

Ievhen Studzinskyi, who was in the audience for Thursday night’s show, agreed.

“When I went outside, I said it plain and simple, ‘it was fun’,” he said. “There were tears. There was food for thought. There was a philosophy, depth. I felt really good.”

On the outskirts of Caracas, dozens of children and older residents are hard at work carefully gluing plastic bottle caps onto a cement wall, which in just two weeks has turned into a colorful mural displaying the edges of two enormous, blue-winged macaws.

The “eco-mural” in Guatire, 42 kilometers (26 miles) east of Venezuela’s capital, is the design of 25-year-old artist Oscar Olivares.

Olivares, who used social media to invite the public to contribute waste plastic, said the project will recycle around 300,000 bottle caps.

“Many people are recycling for the first time in their lives thanks to this mural,” he said. “We hope they’ll keep up the habit.”

Schoolteacher Osmara Aponte, who brought half a dozen children to work on the mural, said it was a great way for them to learn about recycling. “They can learn that anything from a lid to any type of plastic can become useful,” she said.