Special Reports

Thursday, 15 February 2024 04:52

Cooking gas, diesel prices rise, as power generation dips - Report

Nigeria’s households and businesses are going through very difficult times as a result of the continued escalation of cooking gas, diesel and other resources. This becomes unbearable as their incomes have not experienced any meaningful increase in the past few years, which also recorded a significant drop in the value of the Naira, currently going for N1,515/$ at the official market. A market survey by Energy Vanguard, weekend, indicated that the price of cooking gas (12.5kg) that was N11, 250 in December 2023, has risen to N15, 000, indicating an increase of 33.3 per cent. Similarly, the price of diesel…

Sunday, 11 February 2024 04:55

Cry of hunger grows louder nationwide as rice approaches N80,000 per bag, beans N65,000

This is not the best of times for Nigerian families, who have had to adopt bizarre cost-cutting measures to cope with the recent hardship occasioned by the dramatic hike in the prices of goods and services. Several of them lamented that their income could no longer take care of their daily needs, adding that the prices of staples had almost tripled in the market. Rice, which is arguably one of the commonest consumed staples in the country, has risen to N77,000 per bag. In December, the National Bureau of Statistics stated that the country’s inflation rate hit a 27-year high…

Wednesday, 07 February 2024 04:49

Housing shortfalls worsen, rents spike as costs of building materials, labour soar 200% - Report

Like every other sector, the building and construction industry may be witnessing one of its worst moments, as exchange rate, building materials, and labour prices have triggered an increase in construction costs by 200 per cent in the last two years. Nigeria’s inflation rate as of December 2023 climbed to 28.9 per cent. The recent upsurge in inflation is primarily linked to the effects of petrol subsidy removal and the devaluation of the official exchange rate, both exerting substantial impacts on consumer prices. The exchange rate crisis has worsened the woes of the building sector. The direct effect of exchange…

Sunday, 04 February 2024 04:42

‘My life will be short. So on the days I can, I really live’: Dying people explain what really matters

Philippa Kelly ‘I don’t sweat the small stuff any more’ Mari Isdale, 40, Greater Manchester, England In 2015, Isdale, then 31, was diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer and given 18 months to live. Despite a period of remission and 170 rounds of chemotherapy, the disease has since spread to her lymph nodes. I always thought, “I’ll get my career sorted, then we’ll get married, have children, go travelling.” And then cancer happened. You grieve for your future self. Your imagined children and your career. If I died tomorrow, what I’d be saying on my deathbed is I regret not…

Tuesday, 30 January 2024 04:53

2,423 persons killed, 1,872 others abducted since Tinubu became president - Report

Civil society groups, under the aegis of the Civil Society Joint Action Group, said 17,469 Nigerians were abducted under the Muhammadu Buhari and Bola Tinubu administrations from 2019 to date. Addressing a press conference in Abuja on Monday, the Civil Society Joint Action Group, revealed that 2,423 persons had been killed, while 1,872 others had been abducted since the inauguration of President Tinubu. Speaking on behalf of the group, the Executive Director of the Civil Society Legislative and Advocacy Centre, Auwal Musa Rafsanjani, said insecurity had persisted over the last three administrations, with 24,816 Nigerians killed and 15,597 persons abducted…

Monday, 22 January 2024 04:48

Red Sea crisis: What it takes to reroute the world's biggest cargo ships on a 4,000 mile detour

The Red Sea, a vital shipping lane, is under attack – what are the alternatives? You can see exactly where the drone attack hit. Just look for the grisly black scorch marks staining the ship's white paint. On 17 January, the MV Genco Picardy, a US-owned bulk carrier, became the latest victim of Houthi rebel assaults on commercial ships sailing through the Red Sea. One of the world's busiest shipping lanes is now, surely, the most dangerous. Since November, Yemen's Houthi rebel group has targeted vessels passing through the strait of Bab al-Mandab, a 20 mile (32km) wide channel that…

Sunday, 21 January 2024 04:47

As kidnappings increase nationwide, communities devise measures to avoid attacks. Here’s what people are doing across the country

Many citizens are taking to self-help to combat the recent spike in kidnapping and killings across the country, especially in the urban centres. Some residents of the Federal Capital Territory as well as Taraba, Kaduna, Borno, Katsina and Plateau states, who spoke to our correspondents, said they were making life-changing adjustments, including forming neighbourhood guards and vigilantes, to be able to resist the criminals who had shattered their peace and caused them unprecedented loss. In the FCT alone, over 200 violent attacks have been recorded across the six area councils since President Bola Tinubu assumed office on May 29, 2023.…

Saturday, 20 January 2024 04:58

Insecurity can be ended in 6 months if Tinubu wishes to do so - Retired Generals

•Regret that no President has been decisive with military and consequences of their failure since 1999•Want definitive order to security chiefs•Say current strategies weak, already known to terrorists, bandits Following the spate of killings and kidnappings across the country, Saturday Vanguard got some retired generals of the Nigerian military to bare their minds on the unending menace and what should be done to tackle the scourge. The retired Generals and their equivalent in the Navy and Airforce agreed to speak only on conditions of anonymity. we obliged them. One retired Airforce Generals said: “One of the reasons insecurity is not…

Wednesday, 17 January 2024 04:30

Are fingerprints unique? Not really, AI-based study says

“Do you think that every fingerprint is actually unique?” It’s a question that a professor asked Gabe Guo during a casual chat while he was stuck at home during the Covid-19 lockdowns, waiting to start his freshman year at Columbia University. “Little did I know that conversation would set the stage for the focus of my life for the next three years,” Guo said. Guo, now an undergraduate senior in Columbia’s department of computer science, led a team that did a study on the subject, with the professor, Wenyao Xu of the University of Buffalo, as one of his coauthors.…

Friday, 12 January 2024 04:58

Growing cocoa in this Nigerian forest is illegal. Farmers do it nonetheless, govt looks the other way, foreign companies knowingly buy it: This is how it all goes

Men in dusty workwear trudge through a thicket, making their way up a hill where sprawling plantations lay tucked in a Nigerian rainforest whose trees have been hacked away to make room for cocoa bound for places like Europe and the U.S. Kehinde Kumayon and his assistant clear low bushes that compete for sunlight with their cocoa trees, which have replaced the lush and dense natural foliage. The farmers swing their machetes, careful to avoid the ripening yellow pods containing beans that will help create chocolate, the treat shoppers are snapping up for Christmas. Over the course of two visits…

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Thursday, 04 January 2024 04:44

Children born poor have little margin for mistakes or bad decisions, regardless of race

Gary Fields Alfred King was lying in the parking lot of a small apartment building, mortally wounded when police in Alexandria, Louisiana, got to the intersection of 12th and Magnolia streets shortly before 1:30 a.m., Jan. 20. The 34-year-old was the first fatal shooting of 2023 in the small city where I grew up and a large portion of my family lives. Alfred’s death was similar to some I have covered since my first in 1985, a 38-year period when hundreds of thousands of people of all races and ethnicities have died violently in the U.S. I know the details…

Sunday, 31 December 2023 04:20

This is what your napping habit is actually doing to your brain and body

This is the justification you need for your next nap. We are a nation of nappers. Dads ‘resting their eyes’ in front of the TV, commuters getting a quick 30 minutes in while heading home from work and young children needing to recharge their batteries. If there’s one thing we’re going to do, it’s sleep it off. In fact, according to Online-Bedrooms.co.uk, one in five of us have a nap lasting between 20-30 minutes every single day. Guilty. But, is it good for us? Should we be saving that sleep for our actual bedtime? Well, if you keep your naps…

Wednesday, 27 December 2023 04:38

Where does the modern state come from? Economists attempt to answer a profound political question

It is part metaphor, part myth and part history. Thomas Hobbes thought life there was nasty, brutish and short. John Locke disagreed, proclaiming that it was where people first learnt how to own things. Jean-Jacques Rousseau described it as the place where people were born free, before they became ensnared in chains. Robert Nozick thought that people were so desperate to escape it, there was an inevitable result: the creation of a state. Ideas about the “state of nature”—how people lived before politics organised itself into governments—have held the attention of philosophers for centuries. Discovering whether it played out as…

Sunday, 17 December 2023 04:35

The more fertile you are, the sooner you may die - Study

The genes that boost fertility mean you're more likely to die younger, according to a new study. One of the puzzles of evolution is why we peter out into old age once we can no longer reproduce. Now, scientists believe that aging may actually be a consequence of how we evolved to reproduce, and it's all a result of natural selection over millions of years. A study analyzing the genes of 276,406 UK Biobank participants found that people carrying gene variances promoting reproduction are less likely to survive to old age. "We confirm a hypothesis called the antagonistic pleiotropy hypothesis,…

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