Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others were sentenced to death by hanging by by the General Sani Abacha regime. Saro-Wiwa led a nonviolent campaign against environmental degradation of the land and waters of Ogoniland. He criticised the Nigerian government for its reluctance to enforce environmental regulations on the foreign petroleum companies operating in the area. His execution provoked international outrage and resulted in Nigeria's suspension from the Commonwealth of Nations.
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Good Morning. Bali, the Indonesian Province, has joined the ranks of places looking to lure white-collar types to work from the beach. With $130k in the bank, you can get a new visa to stay for 10 years.
Bali invites you... with your money.
Social Media. Elon Musk is preparing to lay employees off at Twitter. Barely a day after Musk acquired the platform, rumors swirled that he would cut the workforce by 50%. Meanwhile, Kanye West’s Twitter account was reinstated. Kanye’s Twitter account was suspended for making anti-Semitic sentiments. He has yet to compose a new tweet, and his anti-Semitic post has not been removed.
Brazil. Challenger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has won the election to become the next president by a whisker, defeating incumbent Jair Bolsonaro after a bitterly fought campaign. According to the country’s election authority, Lula secured 50.8 percent of the vote compared with 49.2 percent for Bolsonaro on Sunday. The vote also marked the first time that the sitting president failed to win re-election.
South Korea. President Yoon Suk-yeol has declared a period of national mourning following a deadly Halloween crush in the country’s capital, Seoul, as distraught relatives flocked to the city’s hospitals searching for their missing family members. “This is truly tragic,” Yoon said in a statement on Sunday, hours after some 153 people were killed in a crowd crush in Seoul’s Itaewon district. Fire officials said most of the victims were women and young people in their 20s and included 19 foreigners from Iran, Uzbekistan, China and Norway. A further 133 people were also injured, 37 seriously.
NIGERIA
Agro-Processing Zones as Cashcows
The Story
The federal government last week launched the Special Agro-Processing Zones (SAPZ) in Nigeria as part of efforts to diversify the country's economy. The response from stakeholders has been immediate, and positive.
What's their response?
The African Development Bank (AFDB), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) will be investing more than $500m in the project. The AFDB President, Akinwumi Adesina, who emphasized the potential benefits of the project, said the Special Agro-Processing Zones will not only reduce rural-urban migration but also help to transform Nigeria's rural economies from misery to prosperity, boost wealth, and improve livelihoods.
What are the details of the project?
According to Lamin Barrow, the Director General of AfDB Nigeria, the SAPZ will help to develop access roads, 2,300 hectares of irrigated land, 15 Agricultural Transformation Centers, and eight agro-industrial Processing Hubs. The initiative, he added, would supply certified agricultural inputs, offer extension services, provide training and skill-development for farmers and SMEs, and will be implemented in seven states: Cross River, Imo, Kaduna, Kano, Kwara, Ogun, and Oyo, as well as the Federal Capital Territory.
Over a seven-year period, the AFDB, IFAD, and IDB will be investing $210m, $160m, and $150m respectively in the project. The SAZPs, according to Adesina , are new economic zones that are situated in rural areas and will be supported by infrastructure (roads, power, water, digital infrastructure, and logistics), which would enable food and agribusiness enterprises to establish operations there. SOURCE
ASIA
Xi Wants Kids
The Story
According to a social media post about a newlywed in China (and tens of thousands of other comments), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is getting involved in Chinese citizens’ bedrooms.
Getting involved, how?
The post on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, detailed a story about the poster’s newlywed colleague who received phone calls from her local government asking if she was pregnant. The stories seem to be in line with party policy - last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared at the CCP's 20th Party Congress that the country would establish new policies to boost birth rates.
What's the country's current birthrate?
After implementing a one-child policy from 1980 to 2015, China’s population has begun shrinking a bit too fast for the government’s taste. Births in 2022 are set to dip below 10 million compared to last year’s 10.6 million, which was an 11.5% decrease from 2020’s birth levels. The government has already begun pushing rhetoric about women's traditional roles and scaling back abortion protections, but the check-ins with newlyweds are a new development.
According to the post, the Nanjing municipal government said that it “wants newlyweds to be pregnant within a year and their target is to make a phone call every quarter.” The post blew up, garnering tens of thousands of comments, with many people sharing similar stories. It was eventually taken down, along with all of the comments. SOURCE
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SCIENCE
Getting Rid Of Nightmares
The Story
In a development that will excite people haunted by recurring nightmares, neuroscientists have demonstrated a technique that may help to get rid of the bad dreams.
What technique?
The researchers conducted an experiment with a technique called Targeted Memory Reactivation (TMR). Using this method, a sound is played while someone is paying attention to something, then it is played again while they are sleeping. Experiencing the cue during sleep, which is crucial for memory storage, may reactivate and reinforce the associated memory. In a report in Current Biology, researchers said that adding TMR (a memory-boosting technique) to the standard treatment for nightmare disorder reduced the average number of nightmares experienced weekly by a small group of patients from three to almost nil.
What's the standard treatment for nightmares?
The Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (IRT) has been the standard treatment for nightmare disorder. In this therapy, patients reimagine their nightmares with a fresh perspective and mentally relive the new plot while still awake. For the majority of people, it reduces nightmares but fails for almost a third of them. In the new study, 36 participants with nightmare disorders received IRT training, with half of them being randomly assigned to mentally relive their reimagined nightmares in quiet. A brief piano chord (the TMR cue) played every 10 seconds for five minutes as the other half relived theirs.
Potential treatment for PTSD
In addition to helping with nightmare disorder, neuroscientist Sophie Schwartz of the University of Geneva and her colleagues are looking at the potential use of the technique in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). More studies will have to be conducted to determine if the new technique is generally applicable. Future research, according to Schwartz, might examine the possibility of using TMR and IRT to treat PTSD, a condition characterized by nightmares that repeatedly replay terrible experiences. “I’m not sure we’ll succeed with these particular patients. But if we do, this would be a really important addition to the methods we have for treating PTSD", Schwartz said.
In the new experiment, those trained on TMR saw their nightmares almost completely eliminated, with their weekly average reduced from 3 to 0.2, while also experiencing happier dreams. There was improvement in the group that received only IRT as well, but not as much as the TMR group, as they still averaged 1 nightmare/week. After 3 months, the average number of nightmares/week for the TMR-IRT group increased only marginally from 0.2 to 0.3, while it increased to 1.5 for the IRT-alone group. SOURCE
HISTORY
Why You Fall Asleep Watching TV
Reddit Question: How come you can be falling asleep watching TV, then wide awake when you go to bed five minutes later?
The brain is like a group of people talking to each other. When you're watching TV, the part of your brain that watches TV says "Shut up guys, I'm watching TV," so you can focus without thinking about cake or math. As a result, the others sit silent, grow bored, and fall asleep, until only the TV watcher part of the brain is left. Left by himself, he too gets bored and falls asleep.
When you're in bed, assuming you aren't counting sheep or something, the entire brain is kind of in free time mode, and any part of the brain can speak up if it wants to. They start talking to each other, and even if one of them starts to drift to sleep, the others wake it up either by deliberately talking to the sleepyheads or just being noisy.
Eventually more and more of the parts of the brain fall asleep from sheer exhaustion no matter how loud the others are, and eventually the last one passes out and you are asleep.
Terror alert: Special forces soldiers, policemen, DSS agents flood Abuja
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Nobody can sack me as PDP chair –Ayu
Brothels raided in Rivers, rescue 50 girls ‘forced into prostitution’
CBN has my backing to redesign naira notes, says Buhari
Nigeria beats Germany to claim bronze in U17 Women’s World Cup
Russia alleges Canadian-made parts in drones targeting ships
Tunisia could be banned from competing at Qatar 2022
Death toll from bridge collapse in India’s Gujarat rises to 132
EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY
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Metwest Steel Limited was founded in the year 2008.Since then, we have emerged as a manufacturer and distributor of premium steel and non-ferrous products in West Africa. Our product portfolio includes steel billets, rebars, sections, wires, fasteners as well as aluminum, copper and lead ingots and more.We are a fully integrated scrap-based manufacturing unit located in Asaba, Delta State.
Interested and qualified candidates should send their CV to: hr@metwest.ng Cc: Blessing@metwest.ng , Durga@metwest.ng using the Job position as the subject of the email.
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BIOGRAPHY
Alexander the Great
Alexander III of Macedon, commonly known as Alexander the Great, was a king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon. He succeeded his father Philip II to the throne in 336 BC at the age of 20, and spent most of his ruling years conducting a lengthy military campaign throughout Western Asia and Egypt.
By the age of thirty, he had created one of the largest empires in history, stretching from Greece to northwestern India. He was undefeated in battle and is widely considered to be one of history's greatest and most successful military commanders.
He founded more than twenty cities that bore his name, with the most prominent being the city of Alexandria in Egypt.
Alexander became legendary as a classical hero in the mould of Achilles, featuring prominently in the historical and mythical traditions of both Greek and non-Greek cultures.
His military achievements and unprecedented enduring successes in battle made him the measure against which many later military leaders would compare themselves, and his tactics remain a significant subject of study in military academies worldwide.
TRIVIA
Three Headlines and a Lie
If you read Freshly pressed last week, then you will know that three of these headlines are real and one is faker than a Nigerian Christian mum handing out trick-or-treats for Halloween. Can you spot the fake?
- Marijuana company sued for not making customers high enough
- A Kentucky man posed as a dead body on TikTok for 321 days. Now he’s going to be on CSI
- Abuja workers directed to stay at home last Friday because of terror threat.
- Iranian hermit who didn't wash for half a century dies at 94, after finally getting a bath.
If you love Three Headlines and a Lie, pay attention to our openings and What Else is Fresh this week to dive deeper into these weird headlines.
BESHEL'S CORNER
PLEASE BE SAFE
| TRIVIA ANSWER |
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We made up the Abuja workers headline. Hehe |
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Written by Seun, Mercy, Kingsley, and Tosin.
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