PDP Logo

By Emmanuel Oloniruha

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Monday inaugurated the Caretaker Committee for the Ebonyi State chapter of the party.

The PDP National Chairman, Mr Uche Secondus, represented by the Deputy National Chairman North, Sen. Suleiman Nazif, inaugurated the committee.

He pledged that the PDP would continue to give opportunities and sense of belonging to Igbo people.

Secondus said that the PDP would continue to be a household name in Ebonyi and South East.

The people of the South East are people that we love, people that we admire, people who have contributed to the development of this country.

You have a safe haven in PDP. You are known in the PDP. PDP is a household name in the South East.

PDP will continue to be a household in Ebonyi, he said.

The National Organising Secretary, retired Col. Austin Akobundu, said that the party would do everything possible to stabilise the party in Ebonyi and the enture South East.

Akobundu , represented by the Deputy National Secretary, Mr Emmanuel Agbo, encouraged the PDP leaders in the zone not to be discouraged by the recent defection of the State Governor, Mr Dave Umahi, to the All Progressives Congress (APC).

He said that the party still had its base and structure with the people of the state at the grassroots.

I call on my brothers and sisters, do not be daunted. Do not take this as any minus at all.

This is supposed to strengthen you, because as at the last roll call, the three senators from Ebonyi and all the members of House of Representatives stand tall with you.

In partisan politics, the closer you get to the grassroots in terms of officials in the party, that is the true strength of the party.

So, with you all, I make bold to say that the coming by-elections in the next 10 days, PDP will still take the day, he said.

He said that the stakeholders in Ebonyi and the South East were properly consulted before the NWC constituted members of the inaugurated committee to pilot the affairs of the party in the state.

The Chairman of the caretaker committee, Mr Fred Udeogu, commended the NWC for its actions, assuring that the PDP would continue to win in Ebonyi.

On behalf of our members, we assure you that we will win the state as we have been doing.

We will deliver Ebonyi 100 per cent to PDP, Udeogu said.

Other members of the committee inaugurated are Luke Nkwegu Secretary, Gideon Osi Publicity Secretary, and James Alaka Organising Secretary.

In attendance were former Senate President, Sen. Pius Ayim; Sen. Sam Ekwu, Amb. Frank Ogbuewu, and the two other serving senators from Ebonyi. (NAN)

Source: NAN News

Ahmad Ahmad banned

By Ijeoma Okigbo

World football governing body, FIFA has banned Ahmad Ahmad, president of the Confederation of African Football (CAF), for five years.

This decision was made by the adjudicatory chamber of the Independent Ethics Committee via a statement on FIFA official twitter handle on Monday.

The adjudicatory chamber of the independent Ethics Committee has found Ahmad Ahmad, President of (CAF) and a FIFA Vice-President, guilty of having breached article 15 (Duty of loyalty).

Article 20 (Offering and accepting gifts or other benefits) and article 25 (Abuse of position) of the 2020 edition of the FIFA Code of Ethics, as well as article 28 (Misappropriation of funds) of the 2018 edition.

The investigation into Ahmads conduct in his position as CAF President during the period from 2017 to 2019 concerned various CAF-related governance issues.

This also includes the organisation and financing of anUmrahpilgrimage to Mecca, his involvement in CAFs dealings with the sports equipment company Tactical Steel and other activities.

FIFA said in its decision that following an extensive hearing, the adjudicatory chamber ruled that, based on information gathered by the investigatory chamber, Ahmad had breached his duty of loyalty.

He had also offered gifts and other benefits, mismanaged funds and abused his position as the CAF President, pursuant to the FIFA Code of Ethics.

Consequently, the adjudicatory chamber sanctioned him with a ban from all football-related activity (administrative, sports or any other) at both national and international level for five years.

In addition, a fine in the amount of CHF200,000 has been imposed on Ahmad, the statement said.

The committee also added that the terms of the decision were notified to Ahmad today, the date on which the ban comes into force.

In accordance with article 78 paragraph 2 of the FIFA Code of Ethics, the full motivated decision will be notified to Ahmad in the next 60 days, after which it will be published onlegal.fifa.com, the statement concluded.(NAN)

Source: NAN News

Pope Francis

Pope Francis says he can relate directly to COVID-19 sufferers given his own near-fatal brush with death from a respiratory disease decades ago.

Francis was hospitalised in his native Argentina in August 1957, when he came down with a lung infection.

He was in his second year of seminary, aged 20.

For months I did not know who I was, if I was going to live or die; not even doctors knew whether Iwould make it, the 83-year-old pope recalled in a forthcoming book.

One day Iasked my mother, hugging her, to tell me if I was going to die.

I know from experience how coronavirus patients attached to a ventilator are feeling while fighting to breathe, he added.

The quotes are from Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, a book Francis co-wrote with his English biographer, Austen Ivereigh, due to come out on Dec. 1.

An excerpt was published on Monday by La Repubblica, an Italian newspaper, and it was picked by Vatican News, the Vaticans official news site.

In the book, Francis recalled two other so-called COVID-19 situations in which he felt isolated and lonely, like a patient under quarantine.

One was his 1986 months-long stay in a Jesuit theology school in Frankfurt, Germany, to learn German and do research for a doctorate.

I felt like a fish out of water, he wrote.

Argentina won the football World Cup during that period, and the pope said that having no-one to celebrate that victory with made him feel even more homesick. (dpa/NAN)

Source: NAN News

Photo taken on Sept. 10, 2020 shows explosive belts and chemical substances seized in an anti-terrorism operation in Temara, Morocco. The Moroccan security services had raided a cell linked to the Islamic State (IS) militant group and arrested five of its members. (Xinhua).

The Moroccan security services on Monday bust a cell linked to the Islamic State (IS) militant group and arrested three persons.

The Central Bureau of Judicial Investigation, Moroccos intelligence bureau said in a statement that the suspects, aged 26 to 28, were arrested in the cities of Inezgane and Ait Melloul.

According to the bureau, many materials were seized during the operation included large and medium-sized knives, electronic devices, and extremist documents.

Preliminary investigations revealed that the cell was planning terrorist operations aimed at undermining the security and stability of the North African country, it added.

The bureau said that the suspects would be brought to justice upon the completion of the investigation.

In September, Moroccan security services busted a cell linked to the IS militant group and arrested five of its members.

Security operations carried out simultaneously in the cities of Tangier, Tiflet, Temara and Skhirat led to the arrest of the five suspects aged between 29 and 43, according to a statement by the Moroccan Central Bureau for Judicial Investigations.

Two of the suspects were arrested in Tiflet, 80 km east of the capital Rabat, and in Temara located in the suburb of Rabat.

Three explosive belts, electronic devices, large-sized knives and swords, chemical substances and nearly three kg of ammonium nitrate were seized during the operation.

Initial investigations revealed that the suspects were planning to carry out terrorist attacks on sensitive sites in Morocco using explosive belts, said the statement.

Source: NAN News

Military

By Deborah Coker

The 4 Brigade of the Nigerian Army in Benin has released telephone helplines to reach the Exercise Crocodile Smile VI as well as the Edo Joint Security Operation.

The Assistant Director, Army Public Relations, Maj. Ojo Adenegan, disclosed this in a statement released on Monday.

According to Adenegan, the helplines are 08079831567 and 08079839190.

He said the telephone numbers were released for the general public to avail the brigade of useful information on any breach of security in the state.

This is also in order to activate quick response.

Please be informed that these helplines are operational 24/7, he said. (NAN)

Source: NAN News

Deputy Head of Mission, Embassy of Russian visits NAN headquarters in Abuja

By Emmanuel Oloniruha
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Monday called for renewed partnership with the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Nigeria, to project positive perceptions about the two countries through its reportage.

The Managing-Director of the agency, Mr Buki Ponle, made the call while playing host to Mr Valery Shaposhnikov, Deputy Head of Mission (Trade and Economic Affairs) of the embassy, in Abuja.

Ponle said that NAN in the 80s had a good working relationship with Russian news agency, Information Telegraph Agency of Russia (ITAR-TASS), formerly known as Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS).

He identified ITAR-TASS as one of the prominent news agencies that NAN worked with in the past, with mutual benefits on both sides.

According to him, NAN was able to make Russia visible in the Nigerian news reports, while NAN also benefited from the training programmes by ITAR-TASS and coverage of events in Russia federation.

Part of the programmes also allowed our reporters to even come over to the federation for training and to cover events, but midway the exchange stopped, he said.

Ponle told the Deputy Head of Mission that NAN had written a letter to ITAR-TASS to resuscitate the exchange programme, but was yet to receive any response.

He also called for other areas of collaboration that could promote positive publicity for the two countries and boost NAN service delivery to its numerous clients.

We cannot afford not to be part of you (Russia) as a power block; not to feed our Nigerian audience and subscribers with activities going on in Russia.

Also, we want our own activities to be projected by Russia, as a news agency, so as to eliminate some of the negative perceptions about us and your country too.

When we give information, people change their attitudes and perceptions about events, individuals, country and in other areas too.

Of course, in the areas of culture, we can also influence and let people know what is going on over there.

This is what we want to do and we hope and believe that you will be willing facilitators to help achieve that goal, Ponle said.

The NAN managing-director said that the agency wanted to create more foreign offices, including reopening the one in Russia, when its financial situation improved.

He recalled that in the past, NAN had foreign offices in 10 countries including Moscow, Russia, but due to inadequate funding the number was reduced to three.

These, according to him were in Johannesburg, South Africa; Abidjan, Republic of the Cte dIvoire and New York.

In his response, Mr Shaposhnikov pledged to speed up the communication between NAN and ITAR-TASS towards resuscitating the initial exchange programme between the two agencies.

He said the Russian Embassy valued NAN and its service delivery in promoting the image of the two countries, including Nigerias important position on the Africa continent.

Nigeria is the giant of Africa and we must have a good working relationship. We should keep on building and strengthening this relationship.

At the embassy, we will do our best in resuscitating and activating the process, Shaposhnikov said.

NAN reports that Shaposhnikov was accompanied by the Press Secretary of the Embassy, Mr Ivan Lydkin.

Source: NAN News

OPEC Sec-Gen, Muhammad barkindo

By Edith Ike-Eboh

The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has projected 6.2 million barrel per day (bpd) growth in oil demand in 2021.

The OPEC Secretary General, Mohammad Barkindo, disclosed this in his address at the Crescent Ideas Forum on Monday via video conference.

Our OPEC outlook for 2020 oil demand is now slightly above 90 million bpd.

This represents a sharp decline of nearly 10 million b/d from where we started the year, and almost an 11million b/d contraction compared to what we forecast in January.

In 2021, we expect growths to bounce back to 6.2 millionb/d to just over 96 million b/d, compared to our pre-Coronavirus (COVID-19) expectations for demand reaching almost 102 million b/d next year.

The recent revisions are due to the easing pace of the economic recovery and recent COVID-19 containment measures, which are assumed to impact transportation and industrial fuel demand well into next year, Barkindo said.

He said that the crucial market rebalancing efforts were
further complicated by high stock levels.

He said that preliminary data for October, showed that total Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) commercial oil stocks were 208 million barrels above the latest five-year average.

This, he said, was compared to 13 million barrels below the five-year average in January.

The OPEC scribe noted that the total global inventories have surged by more than one billion barrels since the beginning of 2020.

These figures would have been dramatically higher and clearly unsustainable had it not been for the unprecedented cooperative efforts taken to address the imbalance in fundamentals and stabilise the
market, he said.

Barkindo further said that in spite the current outlook, crude oil would continue to be relevant in the foreseeable future, up to 2045.

He said that oil demand was expected to rise by almost10 million bpdfrom2019slevels to around109 million bpdin2040,and then begin to plateau.

Non-member countries of the OECD will be the growth powerhouse and members will account for around 68 per cent of overall oil demand by 2045, with the economic tigers of India and China leading this growth.

In absolute terms, we expect oil demand in the developing and emerging economies rising by22.5 million bpdto around74 million bpdin2045.

The outlook for crude oil may look anemic now, but we anticipate a gradual normalisation of demand growth as the world recovers from the COVID-19 shock.

Our analysts foresee global oil demand returning to relatively robust annual growth and reaching nearly 104 million bpd by 2025, he said.

The OPEC scribe said that in the longer term, there are a number of factors that would drive consumption, such as population and economic growth, especially in developing and emerging economies.

We expect the global economy to be more than double from 2019 to 2045, to 258 trillion dollars and the population to grow by at least 20 per cent, to 9.5 billion.

Simply put, our world will continue to thirst for energy. TheWorld Oil Outlookanticipates that oil will remain the dominant fuel in the global energy mix for the foreseeable future, accounting for a nearly28 per centshare in2045, followed by gas at around25 per cent.

It is important to point out that it is the mainstream consensus of the leading reporting agencies that oil and gas will retain their prominence in the energy mix for the foreseeable future. Barkindo said.

He expressed optimism that the promising vaccine developments, apart from the hope that they could quickly be brought to market to save lives, could also help reboot the global economy.

Nonetheless, theoil markettoday is over shadowed by the resurgence ofCOVID-19and a slower pace of economic recovery than we had envisioned in the second half of the year.

In this respect, our OPEC outlook for 2020 oil demand is now slightly above 90 million bpd, he stated.

Barkindo added that OPECs outlook showed that petrochemicals and transportation would drive demand for crude oil going forward.

He said that electricity generation was the only area expected to see a decline, as oil gives way to renewables and natural gas( NAN)

Source: NAN News

Gunmen

By Friday Idachaba

The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), Kogi chapter, has appealed to security agencies and the state government to rescue Dr Azubuike Iheanacho, its member abducted on Nov. 21 in Anyigba.

The association in a statement on Monday in Lokoja, said Iheanacho, the Medical Director of Peace Hospital, Anyigba in Dekina Local Government Area of the state, was kidnapped by unknown gunmen.

The statement was jointly signed by Dr Omakoji Oyiguh, the branch Chairman and Dr Famotele Tolorunju, the Secretary.

The association said that the yet-to-be-identified gunmen stormed the doctors residence between 9.00p.m and 9.30p.m. last Saturday night.

The doctor was said to have been abducted in front of his house while returning from an outing in a vehicle with his wife and a friend.

The NMA added that the gunmen ordered the victims wife and his friend out of the car and zoomed off with him to an unknown destination.

It said it had reported the ugly incident to security agencies and the state government.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that two medical doctors, Ebiloma Aduku of Zonal Hospital, Ankpa and Kelechi Mgbahurike of Christ the King Hospital, Anyigba,were abducted on Oct. 6.

They were later released, following intervention of the security agencies. (NAN)

Source: NAN News

Amaechi apologies for Abuja-Kaduna train breakdown

By Aisha Cole

Minister of Transportation Rotimi Amaechi has apologised to Nigerians for the breakdown on the Abuja-Kaduna rail locomotives which occurred between Nov.18 and Nov. 20.

The minister made the plea on Monday at the Moniya rail station during the routine inspection of the ongoing rail project in Ibadan.

I want to apologise to Nigerians over what happened at the Abuja-Kaduna rail station.

We now have new locomotives and we have called the Chinese because we never expected the mechanical fault at this early stage.

On behalf of the Federal Government, the ministry and the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC), we apologise to Nigerians and I have instructed the NRC to fix it or invite the Chinese.

If this is happening now, then they should bring back our old locomotives, it will just affect turnaround times because we get the new locomotive to increase the turnaround time, he said.

Amaeachi called for an increase in the pace of work by the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) adding that Covid-19 pandemic was no longer an excuse.

The minister said although the CCECC were doing well, they need to increase their pace to enable the ministry to deliver the project on schedule.

The Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Transportation, Mrs Madeleine Ajani, said there was significant improvement in the ongoing work from what it was in October.

Ajani said the ministry was not shifting their date of the commissioning but would rather put more pressure on the CCECC to enable them achieve their targets.

She explained the need for Lagos to have standard gauge train due to the population adding that in less than one and half hours that the train would move from Lagos to Ibadan.

Ajani said that the establishment of the Standard gauge railway would also decongest both the road transportation and movement of cargo from the ports while people living in Ibadan could come and work in Lagos on a daily basis

The Managing Director, Nigeria Railway Corporation, Mr Fidet Okhiria, said there was improvement in the construction output by the contractors adding hopefully by December some of the stations would be completed.

We also need to have more stations so that passengers will not need to wait for the train to leave Ebute-Meta Station before getting to Agege station which means that the two trains can be in a section.

This can be done with the help of signal and communication hence train should be able to communicate with train as well as station should be able to communicate with station simultaneously.

The delay in the rail construction along Apapa ports corridors is due to the Oando pipeline along Apapa corridor, Okhiria said.

He disclosed that the train would start operating from Lagos to Moniya in Ibadan by Dec. 7.

According to Okhiria, 24 coaches, four passenger locomotives, nine freight locomotives and shunting locomotives had arrived Lagos while two of the freight locomotives would be transferred to Warri for a project. (NAN)

Source: NAN News

Guatemala parliament on fire

Guatemalas Congress on Monday shelved a controversial budget that triggered protests leading to the parliament building being set on fire.

To maintain the governability of the country and social peace, we have agreed to suspend the budget process, parliament speaker Allan Rodriguez said in a video message, accompanied by other legislators.

The draft budget had been criticised over cuts in the social and educational sectors and high levels of debt, and was also accused of a lack of transparency.

Rodriguez denied the accusations and claimed that the protests had been planned since late October to break the constitutional order.

He added that the budget would no longer be sent to President Alejandro Giammattei for final approval.

The government said on Sunday that there had been an attempt to force a real coup dtat and called for an intervention by the Organisation of American States (OAS), which backed its call for dialogue and condemned acts of violence.

People demonstrating against the budget and against Giammattei broke into the parliament building on Saturday and set part of it ablaze.

Protesters also stoned police, who fired tear gas into the crowd. At least 14 people were injured and 37 arrested.
Human rights ombudsman Jordan Rodas accused the security forces of an excessive use of force.

Hundreds of people marched against the budget also on Sunday. Protests have taken place in several cities.

The budget for the coming year had been criticised by numerous social groups, ranging from entrepreneurs to social movements, and the education sector to the Catholic Church. (dpa/NAN)

Source: NAN News