Western officials indulging in escalatory rhetoric should realize that they are effectively invoking the specter of an all-out nuclear war, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned in a speech to legislators in Moscow on Thursday. He also once again accused the West of instigating the Ukraine conflict. Putin addressed the topic in the opening minutes of his annual state-of-the-nation speech, a key event in which the president declares his plans and priorities in a televised address to both houses of the Federal Assembly of Russia, the national legislature. President Putin insisted that recent claims by Western officials, that Moscow is planning…

MTN Nigeria says multiple fibre cuts are responsible for the service outage experienced by its subscribers on Wednesday. Several users had complained about suffering network disruption. According to a post on its X page on Wednesday, MTN said the outage is affecting voice and data services. The telecommunications company also expressed regret at the downtime experienced by its customers. “You have been experiencing challenges connecting to the network due to a major service outage caused by multiple fibre cuts, affecting voice and data services,” MTN said. “Our engineers are working hard to resolve with services gradually being restored in some…

Two senior executives at Binance have been detained in Nigeria as the country cracks down on cryptocurrency exchanges, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The executives flew to Nigeria following the country's decision to ban several cryptocurrency trading websites last week but they were detained by the office of the country's national security adviser and their passports seized, the report said. Binance did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The crackdown follows a period after several cryptocurrency websites emerged as platforms of choice for trading the Nigerian currency, which has suffered…

Nigeria’s central bank took a vital step toward restoring confidence in the battered naira by aggressively raising interest rates and pledging to dig the country out of its present “mess.” Announcing a much-bigger-than-expected 400 basis point rate increase to 22.75%, Governor Olayemi Cardoso said that the central bank was not responsible for the nation’s woes, but was working hard to put things right. “We are part of the solution,” he told a media briefing in Abuja, the capital, on Tuesday after the monetary policy committee held its first gathering since July. “We are determined to ensure that we work hard…