Stephen Hawking may have been misdiagnosed and actually a victim of polio, a US medical expert has suggested. Christopher B Cooper, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the probability the physicist’s famously debilitating condition was in fact amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) was “low”. He said Hawking’s relatively young age of diagnosis, 21, and his 55-year period of survival does “not match our understanding of ALS”. In a letter to the Financial Times, the medic argued it is more likely Hawking’s neurological and motor system impairment was caused by poliomylitis, of which there…

Defence Minister, Mr Mansur Dan-Ali, has given hopes that the 110 abducted students of Government Girls Science and Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe State, might be released by Boko Haram in the next two weeks, noting that the federal government was closing in on them. The minister, who dropped the hint on a live Channels TV programme, Sunrise, weekend, said intelligence reports at his disposal indicated that the girls would soon be released, reinforcing President Muhammadu Buhari’s earlier disclosure that the Federal Government would rather negotiate the release of both Dapchi and Chibok school girls to ensure their safety. Asked to…

Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board has said it will release no fewer than 1.3 million results of candidates that sat for 2018 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination on Monday (today) after they had gone through security checks and found to be without malpractice. JAMB Head of Information, Mr Fabian Benjamin, who stated this on Sunday in an interview with our correspondent, added that UTME results of Computer-Based Test centres where CCTV showed malpractices had been cancelled. The board said CCTV showed “strange things” such as CBT centre owners collecting money from candidates to engage in malpractices and also threatening JAMB officials…

Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic criticized Facebook and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, after reports surfaced that another company, Cambridge Analytica, improperly harvested information from 50 million Facebook users. A British lawmaker accused Facebook on Sunday of misleading officials by downplaying the risk of users' data being shared without their consent. Conservative legislator Damian Collins, who heads the British Parliament's media committee, said he would ask Zuckerberg or another Facebook executive to appear before his panel, which is investigating disinformation and "fake news." Collins said Facebook has "consistently understated" the risk of data leaks and gave misleading answers…