Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister on Monday criticized the terror group Hezbollah for sending three unmanned aircraft toward an Israeli gas installation last week, saying it was an unnecessarily risky action.
Najib Mikati’s comment came two days after Hezbollah launched three drones headed for the Karish gas field in the Mediterranean Sea.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that it had shot down the three drones, whereupon Hezbollah issued a statement saying they were unarmed and were sent on a reconnaissance mission. “The mission was accomplished and the message was received,” Hezbollah said.
Energean Israel, the company that currently operates the Karish gas field, said the gas rig was safe and that its ongoing operations had not been disrupted by the incident.
Lebanon claims the Karish gas field is disputed territory under ongoing maritime border negotiations, while Israel says it lies within its internationally recognized economic waters.
“Lebanon believes that any actions outside the state’s framework and diplomatic context while negotiations are taking place is unacceptable and exposes it to unnecessary risks,” Foreign Minister Abdallah Bouhabib said, citing Mikati’s statement.
Israel and Hezbollah are bitter enemies that fought a monthlong war in the summer of 2006. Israel considers the group its most serious immediate threat, estimating it has some 150,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israeli cities.
The incident in the Karish gas field took place soon after US mediator Amos Hochstein visited Lebanese and Israeli officials, as talks were advancing.
Mrs Doreen Damisah, the Convener of Winning Women Initiative, says good marriage is the bedrock of a strong society because it provides the foundation of strong families which leads to better nation.
Damisah said this on Sunday at the third anniversary of the initiative, which has the theme “Marriage and relationship in the 21sth century”.
The convener added that strong family could lead to progress and development of any society and helped to address ills that might manifest.
She said the Winning Women Initiative was set up in 2019 to equip, empower and support women.
“The initiative has created learning platform where women are taught empowerment lessons, topical issues on health, relationships, career, business, family, ministry and other life transforming topics applicable to life situations,” she added.
Damisah said that the initiative had helped women to take control of their physically, spiritually, mental and life.
“These sessions have also helped in equipping us with wisdom, knowledge and strength to overcome challenges of our lives,” she said.
According to her, the organisation will now focus on mentorship and offering leadership coaching for members.
“Plans are ongoing to access Federal Government loans and grants as a demonstration of our commitment to truly see every woman being a winner in the economy,” the convener said.
Mrs Funmi Olubakin, a marriage coach, said it entailed responsibilities, companionship, sacrifice, commitment and forgiveness.
She spoke on the theme “Marriage and relationship in the 21sth century”.
She advised couples to shun deceit, irresponsibility and falsehood, to make their marriage work.
“Close your ears from the noise of people in the market square and face what you have come to get in your marriage.
“Little challenges and stories should not cause distraction to you, whatever battles you have to loose to make your marriage work, is worth it,” Olubakin said.
She advised couples to prioritise their marriages and focus on life time companionship.
“Reintroduce and revive cultures such as hugging, kissing, chatting, strolling, shopping together and cooking together, this simple things rejuvenate the home,” she added.
Mrs Adebola Onesi-Lawani, who spoke on ‘Parenting, children and teenagers in the 21st century’, urged parents to be abreast with the happenings in the world.
Onesi-Lawani, a family counsellor, said being abreast with trends in the society, would equip parents on various ways to advise and train the children in a more understanding and friendly manner.
She cautioned parents against negative behaviour, saying that children copied and imbibed what their parents were doing.
“Don’t concentrate on only the academics of your children; check what is influencing your child and talk about it, work it out better with the child.
“We have sexual abuses, yahoo and yahoo plus. We have what is known as LGBTQ, meaning lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender.
“Fight for your children and protect them against wrongs, expose them to everything and speak of the dangers of indulging in such acts,” she added.
She pleaded with parents to also pray more for their children and play with them.
Mrs Esther Reng, an Etiquette coach, advised women to talk less, ensure personal hygiene and proper etiquette to sustain their marriage.
“Learning trades, crafts and indulging in empowerment programes to assist a man is necessary, as well as obidence and submissiveness were key to sustainable marriages
The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC) and Sahara Group, through their joint venture business, WAGL Energy Limited, are set to develop jetties across West African countries to boost the supply of Liquefied Petroleum Gas, popularly called cooking gas.
The Managing Director, WAGL Energy Limited, Emmanuel Ubani, said in a statement made available to journalists that discussions were already at advanced stages for the first in the lot.
He said the move was part of several efforts by the company to take advantage of the opportunities in the energy transition space, adding that WAGL had embarked on developing infrastructure to take beneficial advantage in the emerging energy transition era.
The statement reads:
“All parts of the value chain must be in place and functional, that is, a distribution system to enable feasible access for the users must exist, a ready and vibrant market network and most importantly, acceptable and accommodating uses of the alternative energy source.
“Ensuring this requires both public and private investments at a level that allows for economies of scale, supporting in making the sector commercially viable.”
While acknowledging growing LPG demand in Africa, Ubani, advised that more strategic policies and investments were required to further promote and deepen the product’s utilisation in rural communities on the continent.
New York officials denied required air permit renewals to a bitcoin-mining power plant on the grounds that it was a threat to the state’s climate goals.
The permitting decision was another example of New York putting the brakes on a cryptocurrency bonanza that has alarmed environmentalists. It also comes at a time when cryptocurrency prices have plunged, wiping out fortunes, fueling skepticism and sparking calls for tighter scrutiny.
The state’s permitting decision involved Greenidge Generation, an old coal-fired plant by the shore of Seneca Lake which had once been shut down, but was converted from coal to natural gas several years ago and began bitcoin mining in earnest in 2020.
A majority of the electricity produced by the plant is now used to run more than 15,000 computer servers for bitcoin mining, which guzzles massive amounts of electricity.
In rejecting the renewals, the state Department of Environmental Conservation said the plant’s conversion to a cryptocurrency mining operation meant it was creating a significant new demand for energy “for a wholly new purpose unrelated to its original permit.”
“Instead of helping to meet the current electricity needs of the state as originally described, the facility is operating primarily to meet its own significant new energy load,” the agency said in its letter to the company.
In a bid to restore confidence in the inflation-hit national currency, Sierra Leone has introduced a new family of banknotes, stripping three zeros off the Leone,
The Bank of Sierra Leone announced the move last August, saying that the public’s purchasing power would not be affected by the change.
A new note of 10 Leones is the equivalent of an old 10,000 Leones note, which changes hands for around 75 US cents.
“We have removed three zeros from our banknotes but the money yesterday is the same value as today,” President Julius Maada Bio said at ceremonies at the central bank where the new bills were unveiled.
Year-on-year inflation in the West African state was 24.87 percent in May, according to the national statistics agency.
Rising prices had driven the printing of banknotes, resulting in a mountain of paper money that is costly to sustain and unwieldly for the public.
It takes huge quantities of banknotes for Shoppers to make the littlest of purchases, and unscrupulous bank tellers sometimes pilfer notes from sealed bundles of bills.
We are removing the ‘zeros of shame’ to get the currency properly aligned,” Morlai Bangura, a central bank director said, adding that the bank had begun distributing the new paper notes to commercial banks last week.
On Friday, customers braving the rain, queued at commercial banks to swap their old banknotes for new ones.
One sierra Leonian said “The changing of our currency is necessary — we were used to carrying bags to the bank to withdraw our money, but not anymore,”
The new banknotes have a similar design to the old ones but are smaller in size.
“Our current currency is too big to fit into a wallet and we spend too much money printing oversized banknotes,” Kelfala Murana Kallon, the central bank governor, told reporters last August when he announced the move.
The Federal Government has said terrorists are sabotaging efforts to provide steady and reliable power supply to Nigerians, especially in the North East region.
The Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu, said this at the end of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting presided over by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.The minister, who cited the case of the North East, North West and North Central, said after power infrastructure were brought down by vandals and restored, they were again vandalised.
Aliyu added, 10 transformers to be installed across the country to improve power transmission.
FG PROMISE 5,505 Megawatts electricity SUPPLY for peak generation
The Federal Government has activated a partial Power Purchase Agreement, PPA, with electricity generation companies, GenCos, for the supply of 5,505 Megawatts (mw) of electricity for peak generation and a base load of 4,893mw.
The move, which is part of efforts by the government to improve electricity supply, takes effect from today, July 1, 2022. The agreement was reached on Tuesday with the operators.
The agreement guarantees payment for gas supplied to the GenCos by gas companies and also ensures that the generation companies are paid for power supplied to the national grid.
With the new agreements it means all the 25 power generation plants on the grid now have an agreement in place to generate a certain amount of power and get paid for it.
The Chairman of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, had earlier in June assured consumers that the sector would generate about 5,000mw from July 1, 2022.
A Consultant Paediatrician Dr. Abdurrazzaq Alege, has cautioned parents against engaging in harmful practices and interventions when their children have a febrile convulsion.
According to the Paediatrician at the Nephrology Division, Federal Teaching Hospital, Katsina, putting a spoon, hand, cow urine concoction, and rags in the mouth of a convulsing baby could cause more problems for the child.
Such harmful practices, he warned, could even result in the death of the child.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with Newsmen, Dr. Alege, said there are practices in Nigeria that people do that are very harmful when a child is convulsing.
These harmful practices, he said, may not only cause complications for the child but could also introduce infections to the body of the child.
The child expert said though there are different forms of convulsion, the most common one in children, he said, is called a febrile convulsion, adding that it is often associated with fever.
A febrile seizure (febrile convulsion), according to Mayo Clinic – a medical center focused on integrated health care, education, and research is a convulsion in a child that’s caused by a fever.
“The fever is often from an infection. Febrile seizures occur in young, healthy children who have normal development and haven’t had any neurological symptoms before.
“It can be frightening when your child has a febrile seizure. Fortunately, febrile seizures are usually harmless, only last a few minutes, and typically don’t indicate a serious health problem”, the clinic said.
Dr. Alege explained, “Seizures convulsion could be of any form but the commonest one that we see that happens to children is called febrile convulsion.
“It is a convulsion that is associated with fever. It is known to occur in children between the ages of six months of age up to five years of age. It is usually common as a result of a high body temperature.
“When the baby’s body temperature gets high and gets so high to a particular point, then the child tends to convulse (hyperpyrexia).
“A baby that has high body temperature, tends to convulse. Febrile convulsion commonly runs in families (genetic).
“It is so rampant in our society once a child convulses, everybody starts to panic.
“Typically, what causes complications in convulsion most times is not necessarily the convulsion that child had or even sometimes it may not be the fever.
“The common complications that occur are typically what we do in terms of interventions – the bad practices.
Dr. Alege pointed out that a child that has a fever either caused by malaria, typhoid infection, ear infection, or pneumonia could have a febrile convulsion.
According to him, before attending to the cause of a febrile convulsion, it is important to reduce the body temperature of the child because it is associated with fever.
“When the temperature is taken care of quickly, most times the child will not get to that point as to convulse.
“If this is done, we can prevent the child from convulsion and even if he has a risk factor for it in the family.
“But the problem we have in our society is that most people do not have a thermometer while some of those who have it do not know the normal temperature range.
“Everybody believes that once you touch the body and it’s not warm, the child does not have a fever.
“Children will not show warmth until the temperature is already very high,” he said.
The paediatrician said parents need to be aware that part of convulsion is the clenching of the teeth, adding that febrile convulsion does not last more than 15 minutes.
patient placed in the recovery position from convulsion
The child health expert said, “People believe that once a child is clenching the teeth during a convulsion, the child will suffocate and die.
“They don’t want that child to clench the teeth and because of that, they put all sorts of things in the child’s mouth.
“You will see the mother even putting her hands in the baby’s mouth. This alone can cause problems. They bring rags and put them in the baby’s mouth.
“The commonest thing that they do is that they use a spoon, anything that is around, they just want to put it in the baby’s mouth.
“This will cause a lot of problems in the sense that the child in the process may end with injuries because what you are putting in his mouth may injure his tongue and his teeth. These could also introduce infections to the body of the child.
“They will give the child cow urine concoction. And cow urine concoction causes profound hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) which on its own can even result in loss of consciousness and death.”
He warned that all these harmful practices would increase recovery time besides being inimical to child survival.
On what parents are supposed to do when a child is convulsing, the paediatrician explained, “Once a child is convulsing, lay the child on the left side with the head turned to the side.
“The head should not be turned up. Loosen the child’s clothes, and remove sharp objects around him. Allow the child to convulse, holding the child down will cause more problems.
“It doesn’t last more than 15 minutes and before it gets to 10 minutes, parents are already on their way to the hospital or any nearby healthcare centre.”
Continuing, he said, “For families that have children with a history of convulsion, the mothers should have at least paracetamol at home. The type of paracetamol that is recommended is rectal paracetamol.
“Once it happens, she should quickly get rectal paracetamol and put it inside the anus of the child. It works the same way as injection paracetamol will do.
“It works faster than just giving it into the mouth because it goes directly from the into the blood.
“Once the seizures are controlled, the child should be quickly taken to the hospital for proper medical evaluation and treatment.”
In a 2022 article published in Springer Open Access Journal, titled: “Perspectives of febrile convulsions among parents: A local cross-sectional study”, the authors said febrile convulsions occur when the body temperature of babies reached more than 38 °C.
According to the authors, most parents do not properly respond to febrile convulsion management.
“Most parents, especially those who had a febrile convulsion child for the first time, could be terrified as they consider it a lethal condition.
“It is of paramount importance that knowledge about febrile should be available to all society members,” the authors said.
Schools and government offices closed in Iran’s capital and several other cities in the country on Monday, after yet another sandstorm blanketed Tehran and the surrounding region.
State-run TV warned of poor air quality and advised the elderly, those sick and children to take precautions.
Banks and the Tehran Stock Exchange would remain open, the report said.
This is the second time that Tehran shuttered schools and government offices and the fourth bad sandstorm since mid-April.
Schools and government offices in Tehran were closed for the first time on account of a sandstorm in May.
However, the country’s west, along the border with Iraq, has seen frequent closures of schools and offices due to sandstorms.
Tehran is among the most polluted cities in the world. Experts blame poor government policies, desertification and low water levels, as well as climate change, for the frequency and intensity of recent sandstorms.
The Federal Government has disclosed it is making arrangements to assist the Nigerian students who fled war-torn Ukraine to gain admissions into the Nation’s tertiary institutions and continue their education.
In a statement published, Monday, the government urged the affected students to visit the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the online registration.
The statement, signed by the spokesperson for the Ministry, Francisca Omaluyi, was titled: “The Federal Government of Nigeria facilitates admission into Nigerian tertiary institutions for Nigerian students affected by the conflict in Ukraine.”
The statement reads: “The Federal Government of Nigeria wishes to inform Nigerian students who returned from Ukraine following the conflict in that country, that efforts are being made to facilitate their placement into various Nigerian tertiary institutions, to enable them continue their studies.
“In this connection, Interested students should visit the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website: https://www.foreignaffairs.gov.ng and complete the online Nigerian Student in Ukraine (NSU) registration form with the required information on or before 15th July, 2022.”
Soroca Fort is a very old historic fort which is located in the city of Soroca in the northern part of the Republic of Moldova, overlooking the Dnister River and the border with Ukraine.
Considered to have played an important part of the Moldovan defense system, the fort was constructed in 1499 by the Voivode of Moldavia, Stephen the Great, and completed by his son, the Voivode Petru Rareş.
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At first there was a wooden fortification that defended the city, and together with the other three fortifications on the Dnister River, two on the Danube River, and additional three to the northern border of medieval Moldova, played a really important role in the protection from invading forces.
As a matter in fact, it was Petru Rareş that completely rebuilt the fort in stone, and it remained almost intact as we are able to see it nowadays.
There are 4 rounded bastions with additional rectangular bastion that serves as the main entrance, with each of them situated at equal distances from each other. Having the shape of a circle, the entire structure is somewhat 30 meters (98 feet) in diameter, while the towers are 4 meters (13 feet) in diameter.
As the walls are not built straight, however, they have a curved shape which helps to resist better to projectiles, it was unfortunately at the end of 14 century when the Soroca Fort began losing its importance.
Due to the widespread use of gunpowder, the walls of the fort were not as good as they were in the past, so it was a bit easier for invaders to conquer it.
Still, the fort is considered one of the greatest monument of the small nation, as it is the only medieval monument in Moldova which has been preserved entirely as it was designed.
Today the bastions which were once used for defense are the place where medieval exhibits are taking place, and with the long history it has, it definitely attracts the right crowd that wants to learn a bit more Moldovan history.
All in all, easily recognizable from the unique bastions’ roofs, Soroca Fort shall continue to be the beacon of the glorious medieval times for which Moldova is really proud of.
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