SpaceX’s Starlink is now live in Nigeria, according to the company.
The Elon Musk-owned firm confirmed this in a tweet on Monday, stating that Nigeria was the first African country to enjoy its services.
It tweeted, “Starlink is now available in Nigeria – the first African country to receive service.”
Nigeria is the 47th country in the world to get Starlink Internet services.
Starlink seeks to deliver a global broadband network, using a constellation of Low Earth Orbit to provide high-speed internet coverage with the capacity to penetrate rural and geographically isolated areas.
According to the Nigerian Communications Commission, broadband penetration hit 47.36 per cent as of December 2022. Nigeria hopes to increase its broadband penetration to 50 per cent in 2023 and 90 per cent in 2025.
The ‘Nigerian National Broadband Plan: 2020–2025,’ reads in part, “The new Broadband Plan is designed to deliver data download speeds across Nigeria of a minimum 25Mbps in urban areas, and 10Mbps in rural areas, with effective coverage available to at least 90 per cent of the population by 2025 at a price not more than N390 per 1GB of data (i.e. 2 per cent of median income or 1 per cent of minimum wage).
Commercial banks in Nigeria will still accept old naira notes from customers after the February 10 deadline, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, told the House of Representatives on Tuesday.
Emefiele stated this while appearing before the ad hoc committee set up by the House on the CBN naira redesign policy.
It would be recalled that the lawmakers had accused Emefiele of breaching section 20 of the CBN act.
The Speaker of the House, Femi Gbajabiamila, had accused the CBN governor of breaching Section 20 of the CBN Act which, according to him, mandates commercial banks to accept old notes even after the deadline.
“After the expiration date, such naira notes changed will no longer be legal tender but it also says that even five months, three months, or two months after, even in June, all the old notes presented to the bank shall be redeemed by the bank,” Gbajabiamila had stated in a Thursday speech.
Emefiele, while addressing the ad hoc committee, said he agreed with the lawmakers on Section 20 of the CBN Act.
“Section 20 says even after the old currency has lost its legal tender status that we are mandated to collect that money. And I stand with the House of Reps on this,” he stated, adding that, “if you have your money that you have not been able to send to the bank. We will certainly give you the opportunity to bring them back into the CBN to redeem it. Either you pay it to your bank account or you want to do an exchange — we give you. You will not lose your money. This is the assurance I give to Nigerians.”
Touch and Pay Technologies, a fintech company, has announced that rail passengers across Lagos can access the newly launched Blue Rail Line using its contactless Cowry card.
According to the firm, its partnership with the Lagos State government would enable individuals to use the Cowry card across the 13 kilometres of track proposed for the project.
It stated that the first phase of the track from Marina to Mile-2 would support 200,000 daily passengers, who can now enter and exit stations through TAP’s state-of-the-art turnstiles.
In a statement, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Touch and Pay Technologies, OlamideAfolabi, said, “We are thrilled to be facilitating and digitising payment on behalf of the Lagos Metropolitan Area Transport Authority. We have deployed our NFC payment solutions on BRT buses, ferries, and now trains.
“Our contactless payment solutions have been a huge success. We have created a 21st-century solution for today’s passengers. Up until now, train fares typically worked on low-value cash transactions, whereas most electronic cards don’t allow for payment below $10, which was problematic for many passengers.
“Our Cowry card, which enables microtransactions between 10 cents and $10, bridges this gap. People can now use a digital and modern method to pay for their train journeys without carrying huge amounts of cash. We are optimistic that even more passengers will discover the benefits of this fast, yet reliable technology, which unifies transportation in Lagos – for the first time.”
The Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer of Touch and Pay Technologies, Michael Oluwole, added, “Payment is a social issue, not a technological one, which is why solutions to solve transit payment issues are a priority for us.
A University of Michigan student is one of the world’s foremost “speedcubers,” a person capable of quickly solving a Rubik’s Cube. He also is an accomplished violinist.
Stanley Chapel says the two fields go hand in hand.
Not only does Chapel say he has equal interest in both, but the 21-year-old says the violin has aided in his speedcubing success.
“Repetition, breaking things down into their smallest fundamental elements, all of these different things that we use to improve at an instrument, and being able to take these into the world of cubing has certainly been a huge help to my progression,” said Chapel, a junior majoring in violin performance at the university’s school of music, theater and dance.
Chapel, who grew up in Ann Arbor not far from the Michigan campus, solved his first 3×3 Rubik’s Cube as a 14-year-old. Five weeks later, Chapel entered his first competition, solving the cube in an average of 22 seconds.
Fast-forward a year to 2017 in Paris, with Chapel placing fifth in both the 4×4 blindfolded and 5×5 blindfolded categories at the World Cube Association World Championship.
At the 2019 world championship in Melbourne, Australia, the recent high school graduate won both events.
Factoring in the time it takes for him to review the cube before placing the blindfold over his eyes, Chapel can solve one in around 17 seconds.
“The deeper I go into the realm of cubing technique, the more I find interest in pushing the boundaries of what’s possible there,” he said.
Chapel has certain inherent abilities: He is capable of remembering and applying thousands of algorithms to solve a Rubik’s Cube and performing one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s violin sonatas from memory.
But he also spends hours upon hours honing his craft, including doing regular hand stretches that help Chapel avoid the kinds of aches and pains that come with the frequent and frenetic turning of the cube’s sides.
Chapel says years of playing the violin also has contributed to him having “very, very fine motor control already built up.”
Later this year, Chapel intends to defend his world titles in South Korea. Since the 2021 event was canceled due to the pandemic, Chapel is the reigning champion in both heading into the 2023 event in Seoul.
Orsay Museum curator Christophe Leribault, stands beside "A Boating Party" by French painter Gustave Caillebotte at the Orsay Museum, Monday, Jan. 30, 2023 in Paris. France has acquired the stunning impressionist masterpiece for its national collection of art treasures, using a donation from French luxury goods giant LVMH to pay the 43-million euro ($47 million) price tag for Gustave Caillebotte's "A Boating Party." (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)
France has acquired a stunning Impressionist masterpiece for its national collection of art treasures, with a donation from luxury goods giant LVMH paying the 43 million euros (nearly $47 million) for “Boating Party” by 19th-century French artist Gustave Caillebotte.
The oil on canvas shows an oarsman in a top hat rowing his skiff on languid waters. The work, remarkable in its realism, delicate colors and almost cinematic perspective, as though the artist was in the boat with the rower, went on display Monday in the Musée d’Orsay. It is the latest addition to the Paris museum’s already impressive collection of Impressionist art.
The painting was sold by Caillebotte’s descendants. It had been one of the last Impressionist masterpieces still in private hands, said Jean-Paul Claverie, an adviser to LVMH boss Bernard Arnault.
“A work of art of this level, this quality, an absolute masterpiece, there are nearly no more left in the Impressionist period,” he said. “This painting was, of course, sought after by the biggest museums in the world,” he said.
Managing to keep the painting in France represented “a beautiful victory,” said the government’s culture minister, Rima Abdul Malak.
Although a prolific painter in his own right, Caillebotte was long better known as a millionaire patron of France’s Impressionist artists who revolutionized Western painting in the late 19th century.
Born into a wealthy family, Caillebotte accumulated an enviable collection of dozens of works by his friends Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and other artists he helped support financially. Before his death, he bestowed their artworks to the French state, hoping they’d be displayed in the Louvre.
After Caillebotte died at age 45 in February 1894, France took possession of 38 of his paintings by Monet, Renoir, Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne and other artists for its national collection. That donation later formed the core of the Impressionist collection at the Musée d’Orsay, opened in 1986 in a former railway station.
His reputation as an important collector and donor of Impressionist art long overshadowed Caillebotte’s own contributions to the movement as a painter, partly because he didn’t include his own work in the collection he bequeathed to the French state.
When Caillebotte died, unmarried and without children, his brother Martial Caillebotte inherited 175 of the artist’s works.
Much of his work stayed in his descendants’ hands and just a sliver of it ended up in French museums.
Amina Luqman-Dawson’s book “Freewater” won the John Newbery Medal for Children’s Literature on Monday. The award is considered the highest honor for a children’s book in the United States.
Set in the early 1800s, the novel follows 12-year-old Homer, his sister and other members of a community of Black people who had escaped slavery to settle in the Great Dismal Swamp. The village they create is called Freewater.
“I’m so extraordinarily surprised and shocked,” Luqman-Dawson told KidsPost after the announcement. “The best feeling is that hopefully ‘Freewater’ will give teachers, parents and especially kids a new way of talking about history, [about] the terrible hardship of slavery — and also the resistance to it, the strength and love of Black people back then.”
The book grew out of the author’s research into how real-life escapees were able to survive in this dangerous Southern swamp, Luqman-Dawson said in an interview in February. She lives in Arlington, Virginia. “Freewater” also received the Coretta Scott King Award, which honors books by Black authors that show “appreciation of African American culture and universal human values.”
Kolmanskop is an interesting deserted ghost town that is located in the Namib Desert, in the southern part of the South African Republic of Namibia.
Partially swallowed by the desert sand, there are always some eerie pictures that are popping out from time to time to remind everyone that the nature is something with which we need to cooperate if we want to keep whatever we want to keep for a longer period.
The town was quite popular around 1908 when Zacharias Lewala found a quite sparkling stone in the area, and since then there were other diamonds discovered, which made the people to flock to Kolmanskop with high hopes for a better life.
Zacharias at the time was a simple worker on the railroad which was being built, and when it was confirmed to his supervisor August Stauch that the sparkling stone was a diamond, the news spread like wildfire.
Soon after the German government declared a large area as a Sperrgebiet, which means forbidden territory, and as the first diamond miners became enormously wealthy, the town was built in the architectural style of every German town.
At the time, the town had a hospital, ballroom, power station, school, theater, sport shall, casino, ice facotry, as well as the first X-Ray station in the southern hemisphere was located here.
The only railway link was to Lüderitz, which is still today a harbor town in the Karas Region.
Before the beginning of the First World War, there were some 907 kilograms (2,000 pounds) of diamonds taken out from the sands of the Namib Desert, and since the price of the diamonds dropped considerably during the war, the interest to live and work in Kolmanskop quickly declined.
Nonetheless, even if the First World War interrupted the mining operations, there was some work, however, by the early 1930s, the area was in significant decline.
Also, at that time larger diamonds were found south from the town, this time in the town of Oranjemund, which was the reason for people by 1956 to completely abandon the small town of Kolmanskop.
Since then, the town has been slowly reclaimed by the desert sands, and considering the fact that there are some strong winds, the traditional German architecture has been battered by decades, still trying to survive in the dry air.
The desert nowadays encroaches into the buildings, gradually filling the empty rooms with smooth rolling drifts, and the roofs are slowly being laid bare, whereas only fragments from the tenants remain, such as a battered kettle in a beautifully tiled kitchen, a warped wardrobe resting wearily on its side etc.
Today, this eerie and impressively alluring town is a popular tourist destination to those who are in love with abandoned places, only if one would get the permit to visit the town which can be obtained at the gate that leads into the town, where there are guided tours that are offering every single visitor the visit of every building that has been left in the town, making it even more attractive.
1865 Congress passes, by vote of 121-24, the 13th Amendment of US Constitution, abolishing slavery in US
1865 General Robert E. Lee named Commander-in-Chief of Confederate Armies during US Civil War
1943 Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrenders to Soviet troops at Stalingrad
1950 US President Harry Truman publicly announces support for the development of a hydrogen bomb
1985 South African President P. W. Botha offers to free Nelson Mandela if he denounces violence
Historical Events Today Events In 2022
Today In Film & TV
1949 1st daytime soap on TV “These Are My Children” (NBC in Chicago)
Today In Music
1679 Jean-Baptiste Lully’s opera “Bellerophon” premieres at the Palais-Royal in Paris
Today In Sport
2015 17-year-old Lydia Ko of New Zealand becomes the youngest golfer in men’s or women’s golf history to be ranked No. 1 in the world
2019 Colonization of the America’s in the late 1500s killed so many people it cooled the planet and led to a “Little Ice Age”, according to a scientific report published in “Quaternary Science Reviews”
1747 The first venereal diseases clinic opens at London Lock Hospital, London
Famous Weddings
1560 Spanish King Philip II (10) marries Elisabeth of Valois (13), daughter of Henry II of France
1842 10th US President John Tyler’s daughter Elizabeth marries in the White House
1960 American songwriter Adolph Green weds (for 3rd and final time) American actress and singer Phyllis Newman in NYC
Draw ceremony for this year’s Africa Under-17 Cup of Nations will hold on Wednesday at the Cercle Nationale d’Armee in Algiers, capital city of Algeria.
Five-time world champions Nigeria is one of the 12 countries whose names will go into the pot for the draw, as all participating teams get to know their group phase opponents for the tournament scheduled for 8th – 30th April in Africa’s largest nation.
All the 12 participating nations are now known: Algeria, Nigeria, Morocco, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia, South Sudan, Zambia, South Africa, Cameroon and Congo.
The 12 teams will be drawn into three groups of four teams each, with the four top-placed teams qualifying to represent Africa at this year’s FIFA U17 World Cup finals taking place in Peru later this year.
A deep purple strapless gown designed by Victor Edelstein and worn by Princess Diana recently sold for more than six times its estimate at a Sotheby’s auction.
A buyer went well past the high estimate of $100,000, winning the 1989 dress and its tulip-shaped stiffened skirt with a bid of $480,000 ($604,800 with fees). This is a new record for a Diana dress sold at auction.
The dress had been previously sold by Christies New York on June 25, 1997, as part of a charity sale of nearly 80 dresses on behalf of the AIDS Crisis Trust and the Royal Marsden Hospital Cancer Fund.
The dress, which was designed for Diana and also owned by her, was worn by the princess in two photographs and was also featured in a painting of her.
An official portrait was taken by Antony Armstrong-Jones, the first Earl of Snowdon in 1991, and was widely published in magazines like Life and Hello. That same year, British painter Douglas Hardinge Anderson depicted Diana in the gown in a namesake artwork. The painting now hangs at the Royal Marsden Hospital where Diana visited and served as president.
Finally, in 1997, Diana wore the dress as part of a photoshoot with photographer Mario Testino for a Vanity Fair cover story. It took place only five months before her death. Several of those photographs were also included in an exhibition at Kensington Palace in 2005.
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