Islamic State West Africa Province ISWAP has released many humanitarian workers and other civilians after negotiations.
The abductees who were captured during iswap attacks in northeast nigeria were released on negotiations.
Others released were a Senior Christian Cleric Reverend Zango, Former Staff of the Nigerian Ports Authority, Barka Wasinda, and some aid workers abducted from a facility in Dikwa in march.
Vice President Of Nigeria, Yemi osinbajo, has been captured in a video driving first made in nigeria electric car, Kona.
Yemi osinbajo drove Kona, at the made in nigeria exhibition event at eagle square, Abuja, Nigeria’s capital.
Also, the DG of the nigeria Automotive Development Council Jelani Aliyu and the Industry Minister Otunba Niyi Adebayo were in the car with Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo.
The U.S. Congress takes up the issue on Tuesday of yet another area where big tech firms in this case, Amazon.com and Alphabet’s Google dominate, this time in smart home devices where they battle smaller companies like speaker maker Sonos Inc.
The hearing takes place at a time of extraordinary interest in tougher antitrust enforcement, much of it focused on the biggest U.S. technology companies. One result has been a series of investigations and several federal and state lawsuits filed against Google and Facebook as well as a long list of antitrust bills.
Senator Amy Klobuchar, who chairs the antitrust subcommittee, is hoping to act before the existing tech giants, in this case Amazon and Google, establish themselves as unassailable.
In the smart speaker market, she cited data that showed that Amazon was at 53 percent market share while Google was at 31 percent.
“This is an area where we can look forward and see around the corner and not just respond years later,” she said, noting that people are buying everything from smart speakers to smart door locks and more. “We know that this is a growing market.”
Smart home technology can be smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo or Google’s Nest, security systems or televisions.
Witnesses will include Ryan McCrate, Amazon’s associate general counsel, and Google Senior Public Policy Director Wilson White, along with Sonos Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus.
Last year, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence told a congressional committee that Google and Amazon used their dominance of search and online retail, respectively, to subsidize the smart speaker market and, potentially, dominate the market for other smart home devices.
FedEx Corp and robotics company Nuro on Tuesday announced a multi-year agreement to test self-driving vehicles in the package delivery company’s network, starting with a pilot program in Houston.
The partnership comes as parcel companies race to reduce the cost of last-mile delivery, which surged during the pandemic.
The companies will target delivery scenarios where Nuro’s low-speed, unmanned vehicle can provide “the biggest bang for your buck,” Cosimo Leipold, Nuro’s head of partnerships, told Reuters in an interview.
That will likely include inefficient tasks like late-night pickups in out-of-the-way places, said Rebecca Yeung, FedEx vice president for advanced technology and innovation.
“Instead of dispatching a driver to get those packages, a device like Nuro could be super helpful,” said Yeung, who called the FedEx/Nuro tie-up a “very serious, long-term commitment” that aims to reduce headaches, not human drivers.
Nuro vehicles are already making deliveries for U.S. supermarket operator Kroger Co and Domino’s Pizza Inc in the Houston area. Nuro continues to test its technology in Arizona.
Nuro, whose R2 unit has space for delivery cargo but not a human driver, said last year it has raised $500 million.
In a separate project, FedEx is using DEKA Research & Development Corp’s smaller robot, dubbed “Roxo,” for on-demand, same-day deliveries in Plano, Texas.
Rival United Parcel Service Inc is centering its unmanned delivery efforts on drones.
UPS has ordered electric delivery vans from British startup Arrival. Those vehicles are fitted with sensors and cameras that should gradually enable autonomous features, but will still require a human driver.
Transporting people via self-driving taxis is proving more difficult and expensive than delivering packages and food. As a result, freight and logistics companies are exploring ways to roll out the technology on predictable and simple routes, including on highways.
Britain’s competition watchdog said it would investigate whether Apple and Google’s dominance of mobile phone operating systems, app stores and web browsers hurt consumers, launching its latest probe into the tech giants.
The Competition and Markets Authority said it would undertake a “market study” into the matter to see whether the pair’s effective duopoly was stifling competition and ripping off consumers, or hurting businesses like app developers.
Governments around the world are looking at strengthening the regulation of U.S. tech giants that have become even more powerful during the pandemic, and there are multiple investigations globally into their market positions including in the United States and the European Union.
Britain is setting up a dedicated unit within the CMA to keep the tech giants in check and encourage digital competition but said it needed to start work probing iPhone maker Apple and the Google-powered Android system as soon as possible.
“Our ongoing work into big tech has already uncovered some worrying trends and we know consumers and businesses could be harmed if they go unchecked,” CMA chief executive Andrea Coscelli said in a statement on Tuesday.
The CMA said the new study into mobile ecosystems would be broader than some of the other competition probes it already has into Apple’s App Store and Google’s Privacy Sandbox.
Last year, the CMA concluded an investigation into digital advertising, concluding that Google and Facebook have developed unassailable market positions, with the two accounting for nearly 80% of UK’s digital advertising spend. It recommended regulatory changes as a result.
Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants could face more scrutiny and potential sanctions in the European Union after the bloc’s top court backed national privacy watchdogs to pursue them, even when they are not the lead regulators.
Consumer lobbying group BEUC welcomed Tuesday’s ruling by the EU Court of Justice (CJEU), which backed the right of national agencies to act, citing enforcement bottlenecks.
“Most Big Tech companies are based in Ireland, and it should not be up to that country’s authority alone to protect 500 million consumers in the EU,” BEUC Director General Monique Goyens said after the judgement.
Along with Google, Twitter and Apple, Facebook has its EU headquarters in Ireland, putting it under the oversight of the Irish data protection regulator under privacy rules known as GDPR, which allow for fines of up to 4% of a company’s global turnover for breaches.
The CJEU got involved after a Belgian court sought guidance on Facebook’s challenge to the territorial competence of the Belgian data watchdog, which was trying to stop it from tracking users through cookies stored in the company’s social plug-ins, regardless of whether they have an account or not.
“The BE DPA (Belgium’s data watchdog) now needs to analyse the judgment in more details to determine whether any of the situations described … apply to the case it has opened against Facebook in 2015,” Hielke Hijmans, Chairman of the Belgian Data Protection Authority’s Litigation Chamber, said.
Several national watchdogs in the 27-member EU have long complained about their Irish counterpart, saying that it takes too long to decide on cases. Ireland has dismissed this, saying it has to be extra meticulous in dealing with powerful and well-funded tech giants.
Ireland’s cases in the pipeline include Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp as well as Twitter, Apple, Verizon Media, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn and U.S. digital advertiser Quantcast.
“Under certain conditions, a national supervisory authority may exercise its power to bring any alleged infringement of the GDPR before a court of a member state, even though that authority is not the lead supervisory authority,” the CJEU said.
Nigeria needs to sell some of its assets, including its oil company, the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), to enable efficient management and more revenues, Ekiti State Governor Kayode Fayemi canvassed on Tuesday.
Fayemi was speaking at the launch of the World Bank’s Nigeria Development Update (NDU) launched both virtually and physically in Abuja.
The World Bank report recommended that for Nigeria to wriggle out of its numerous challenges, critical reforms are needed to cut down high inflation levels and accelerate economic recovery.
During discussions on the report, Fayemi admitted the failure of governance to check anomalies in the system which have held down the country’s developmental quest, including petroleum subsidies which gulp as much as N100bn monthly and N1.2 trillion annually.
The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and its other major partners lost over $99.8 million from the temporary shutdown of the Trans-Forcados Pipeline (TFP), the second-largest network in Niger Delta, where more than 90 percent of Nigeria’s crude is explored.
The Trans-Forcados pipeline is a major trunk line in the Forcados Pipeline System used by both international oil companies and indigenous oil firms operating in the western Niger Delta to evacuate crude oil from about 15 producing fields to the Forcados export terminal.
In its latest Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC), NNPC said the $99.8 million loss comes from 1,456,500 million barrels of crude oil it could not take to the market due to shut-in of pipelines at Trans-Forcados pipeline.
According to the FAAC report, the state-owned oil corporation listed industrial actions, production curtailment due to leaks, and brief repairs as reasons behind production losses of over 1.4 million barrels based on the May 2021 average Brent price of $68.53 in the Trans-Forcados pipeline.
Ghana, the world’s no. 2 cocoa grower, is headed for its biggest harvest in at least a decade after good weather and government interventions helped boost its output, according to a Bloomberg report citing two people familiar with the matter.
Favorable conditions, improved farmer prices and better farming practices, such as hand pollination and pruning, raised production to 965,493 tons by June 3, when the main-crop harvest ended, said the people who asked not to be named because the information isn’t public
That’s already the highest in five years, before accounting for some main-crop deliveries still underway and a 12-week mid-crop season that ends in September. Earlier projections estimated that the smaller harvest would produce 50,000 tons of cocoa.
The Ghana Cocoa Board now expects the annual output to exceed the 1 million-mark for the first time since 2010-2011, the people said. A spokesman for the regulator did not immediately comment when reached by phone.
Ghana and neighboring Ivory Coast, which produce almost 70% of the world’s cocoa, expanded output just as the pandemic locked down cities around the world, hurting demand. The two countries secured a pay raise for cocoa farmers by charging companies from Hershey Co. to Nestle SA a premium of $400 per ton from Oct. 1. But a drop in consumption has left growers unable to sell their crop.
Italy orders inquiry into Eni-Shell Nigeria corruption prosecutors
Italy’s justice ministry ordered an inquiry on Tuesday into the conduct of two prosecutors in a corruption case involving energy groups Eni and Shell in Nigeria.
According to Reuters, Milan prosecutors Fabio De Pasquale and Sergio Spadaro were placed under official investigation by magistrates earlier this month for allegedly not filing documents that would have supported Eni’s position.
De Pasquale and Spadaro declined to comment on the latest development. Milan’s top prosecutor said last week that he backed the two men, after a trial lasting more than three years.
The Justice Ministry said in a statement it had decided to move in the wake of the judicial investigation and following criticism of the pair by the trial judges.
India’s antitrust watchdog plans to expedite a restarted probe into allegations of anti-competitive behaviour at Amazon.com Inc and Walmart Inc’s Flipkart, as it intensifies scrutiny of big-tech firms, two people close to the matter said.
The comments come as major U.S. technology firms including Twitter Inc and Facebook Inc are at loggerheads with the government over issues such as data privacy bills and policies some industry executives have called protectionist.
The Competition Commission of India (CCI) initiated a probe in January last year on the basis of a complaint alleging Amazon and Flipkart promoted select sellers on their e-commerce platforms and that deep discounts stifled competition.
The companies have denied wrongdoing.
Near-immediate legal challenges from the pair stalled the probe for over a year until a court last week allowed it to resume, having dismissed arguments that the CCI lacked evidence.
Though Amazon and Flipkart are likely to appeal, the CCI plans to demand information from them related to the allegations “as quickly as possible”, said one of the people, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.
The investigation “will be expedited”, the person said. Such investigations in India typically take months to complete.
Amazon declined to comment. Flipkart and the CCI did not respond to requests for comment.
© 2025 LN247. All Rights Reserved
