Damn It, Naija I hail...

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Explosion Rocks Manhattan Injuring Tens of People

"it does not appear to be linked to terrorism." Mayor Bill de Blasio said...

New York City's mayor said an explosion in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan Saturday night that injured 29 people was an "intentional act."

The explosion happened around 8:30 p.m. Saturday in front of 131 West 23rd Street, between Sixth and Seventh avenues.

Twenty-eight of the people hurt suffered minor injuries, and one person's injuries are being described as serious. All 24 patients taken to area hospitals have been treated and released.

Debris landed on nearby cars and shattered some windows. Two cars on West 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue had their back windows blown out. An 8-year-old who was in the back seat was injured.

The incident was captured on multiple surveillance cameras.
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Mayor Bill de Blasio said that while the blast appeared to be intentional, it does not appear to be linked to terrorism.

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Iranian Para-cyclist Bahman Golbarnezhad dies after crash

"He Had Been Cycling for 12 Years and He Was Our Best Cyclist." Ashrafi Said...

An Iranian Para-cyclist has died after a crash during the men's C4-5 road race at the Rio Paralympics.

The International Paralympic Committee said Bahman Golbarnezhad, 48, suffered cardiac arrest after the incident on a "mountainous stretch" of circuit.

"The ambulance then diverted to the nearby Unimed Rio Hospital in Barra where he passed away soon after arrival," a statement added.

Golbarnezhad also competed at the London Paralympics in 2012.

An investigation into the circumstances of the accident has been launched.

"We're looking to gather as much information as we can and as quickly as possible - it should take a matter of days," said Piers Jones, sports director of cycling's governing body UCI.

The Iranian flag has been lowered to half-mast in the Paralympic Village and a period of silence will be observed during Sunday's closing ceremony.

Masoud Ashrafi, the secretary general of Iran's National Paralympic Committee, said it had requested the body of Golbarnezhad be flown to Iran on Sunday. The Committee also asked for a full report of the incident from the IPC.

Ashrafi added: "He had been cycling for 12 years and he was our best cyclist. He was married and has a wife and one son.

"He was the kind of man who was a family man. He loved his family."

Golbarnezhad's death is the first in competition at a summer Olympics or Paralympics since Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen in the 100km team time trial at the 1960 Rome Olympics.

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Muhammadu Buhari plagiarised quotes from US President Barack Obama

"Those responsible" would be punished

Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari plagiarised quotes from US President Barack Obama in a speech promising change in the West African country, according to a statement by his office.

Buhari made the address last week to launch a campaign entitled "Change begins with me," part of his credo to end corruption in Africa's biggest economy, which is gripped by mismanagement and poverty despite sitting on vast energy reserves.

However, his office said on Friday that a paragraph in the speech urging Nigerians not to fall back "on the same partisanship, pettiness and immaturity that have poisoned our country so long" was copied from Obama's victory speech after his election in November 2008.

"It was observed that the similarities between a paragraph in President Obama's 2008 victory speech and what President Buhari read in paragraph nine of the 16-paragraph address ... are too close to be passed as coincidence," his office said in a statement.

"President Buhari urges Nigerians to look beyond this incident and focus on the message of change which the country needs in order to restore our cherished value systems," the office said after a Twitter user joked about the incident.

"Those responsible" would be punished, the office said, adding that a deputy director in the presidency had admitted the mistake.

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South Africa kills Animals to Prevent Them From Dying

South Africa Kills 350 Hippos And Buffallos Due To Drought

Rangers in South Africa's biggest wildlife park are killing about 350 hippos and buffalos in an attempt to relieve the impact of the region's most severe drought in more than three decades.

The numbers of hippos and buffalos in Kruger National Park, about 7,500 and 47,000 respectively, are at their highest level ever, according to the national parks service. Officials plan to distribute meat from the killed animals to poor communities on the park's perimeter.

The drought has left millions of people across several countries in need of food aid.

Hippos and buffalos consume large amounts of vegetation, and many animals are expected to die anyway because of the drought, said Ike Phaahla, a parks service spokesman. A drought in the early 1990s reduced Kruger park's buffalo population by more than half to about 14,000, but the population rebounded.

Rangers are targeting hippos in "small natural pools where they have concentrated in unnatural high densities, defecate in the water, making it unusable to other animals," Phaahla wrote in an email to The Associated Press.

Parks officials have described drought as a natural way of regulating wildlife populations. Earlier this year, they said they didn't plan any major intervention to try to save wild species in Kruger park, but the drought's impact intensified. Hippos are in particular trouble because they can't feed as widely as other animals, returning to water by day after grazing by night.

The hippo species in Kruger park is not defined as endangered, though it faces threats from poaching and human encroachment elsewhere in Africa. There are large populations of buffalos in parts of the continent.

South Africa's parks service stopped killing elephants to reduce overpopulation in 1994, partly because of public opposition.

Around 1900, hunting had cleared out elephants in the area that became Kruger park. Today, there are an estimated 20,000 elephants there. Poachers killed 36 elephants this year in the park, raising concerns that the Africa-wide slaughter of elephants for their ivory is finally affecting South Africa.

Poachers have already killed large numbers of rhinos in the park, which borders Zimbabwe and Mozambique and is almost the size of Israel.

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 Generations ago, an estimated 15,000 people lived in the area that was officially proclaimed as Kruger park in 1926. Some communities were removed from the wildlife reserve under white minority rule at that time.

"These people were pure hunter-gatherers and we greatly underestimate their role in shaping this ecosystem," Phaahla said. "We have removed this important driver from the Kruger ecosystem and we are researching ways to simulate the return of their role again and the removals or offtakes (of some animals) aim to do just that."

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Edward Albee, America playwright of his generation Dies at 88

RIP Edward Albee

Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, who challenged theatrical convention in masterworks such as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “A Delicate Balance,” died Friday, his personal assistant said. He was 88.

He died at his home in Montauk, east of New York, assistant Jackob Holder said. No cause of death was immediately given, although he had suffered from diabetes. With the deaths of Arthur Miller and August Wilson in 2005, he was arguably America’s greatest living playwright.

Albee was proclaimed the playwright of his generation after his blistering “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened on Broadway in 1962. The Tony-winning play, still widely considered Albee’s finest, was made into an award-winning 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

“It’s just a quirk of the brain that makes one a playwright,” Albee said in 2008. “I have the same experiences that everybody else does, but... I feel the need to translate a lot of what happens to me, a lot of what I think, into a play.” “I think if a writer gets ideas, you’ve got to get them out of your head,” he said.

His unconventional style won him great acclaim but also led to a nearly 20-year drought of critical and commercial recognition before his 1994 play, “Three Tall Women,” garnered his third Pulitzer Prize. His other Pulitzers were for “A Delicate Balance” (1967) and “Seascape” (1975).

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Cavani opened the scoring after 12 minutes

Cavani On Fire!!!

Edinson Cavani silenced his critics when he scored four goals in Paris St Germain’s 6-0 victory at Caen in Ligue 1 on Friday.

The Uruguay striker, who wasted a handful of chances in the French champions’ 1-1 home draw against Arsenal in the Champions League on Tuesday, found the back of the net four times before the break in a one-sided encounter.

The result meant that PSG, who had bagged only one point from their last two league encounters, move to the top of the standings with 10 points from five games.

Cavani opened the scoring after 12 minutes when he latched onto a Maxwell cross from the left and doubled the tally from the penalty spot after Syam Ben Youssef fouled Lucas in the box.

Maxwell again set up Cavani for the third, the forward tapping in from a cross at the near post seven minutes from the break. Cavani added a fourth on the stroke of halftime, poking the ball home from Thomas Meunier’s cross.

Unai Emery’s side’s domination continued after the break as Lucas fired home from just outside the box in the 67th. Forward Jean-Kevin Augustin added a sixth, converting Adrien Radiot’s assist 11 minutes from time.

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OMG!!! Inmates On Roof Top

Planning a Prison Break???

#BREAKING: 
Somewhere in Australia, Three inmates on roof of Wacol Youth Detention Centre, with reports the facility is in lockdown.

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Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign manager calls Trump a psychopath

Trump is “basically a psychopath running for president.” “He meets the clinical definition,”  David Plouffe

David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and later served as a senior adviser in his administration, on Sunday diagnosed Donald Trump during an NBC interview as “a psychopath running for president.

Plouffe defended his opinion by pointing to what he said are the hallmark symptoms of psychosis.

“Well, listen, grandiose notion of self-worth, pathological lying, lack of empathy and remorse,” he said.

He acknowledged, however, that he lacked authoritative medical credentials when Todd asked him whether he was qualified to make an off-the-cuff diagnosis.

“Right, I don’t have a degree in psychology,” he said.

Plouffe postulated an abnormal mental condition as the likely reason that Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is not running a better campaign and has not proved competitive in swing states such as Colorado and Virginia, where Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton now appears to have an insurmountable lead.

Plouffe said he initially assumed that Colorado and Virginia would be tough states for Clinton because he expected that “Trump would try and do some things to appeal to the middle of the electorate, to appeal to suburban, college-educated women.”

Trump instead, political strategists in both parties believe, has failed to reach out meaningfully to college-educated and women voters.

His unconventional tactics have confounded GOP leaders and strategists in Washington for months.

Plouffe said that’s because Trump is “basically a psychopath running for president.”

“He meets the clinical definition,” he said.

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Gabonese President; Ali Bongo Ondimba vying for re-election

More than 600,000 voters are registered to participate

LIBREVILLE, Gabon (AP) — Voting closed Saturday evening in Gabon, where the president is vying for re-election and voters weighed whether to maintain a family dynasty that stretches back to the 1960s.

Ali Bongo Ondimba took power in 2009 following the death of his father, Omar Bongo, who ruled the oil-producing country of about 1.5 million people for more than 40 years. In his campaign Bongo has touted his efforts to diversify Gabon's economy and accused the opposition of inciting violence.

The most formidable challenge among nine opponents comes from Jean Ping, a former chair of the African Union Commission who managed to get several other aspirants to rally around his candidacy.

Bongo's bid for a second seven-year term is aided by the fact that Gabon does not have a runoff system, meaning he does not have to receive more than 50 percent of the votes in the first round to win.

After casting his ballot, the president told reporters he was confident the process would go smoothly and said he hoped "all Gabonese can vote in calm and serenity."

Ping, meanwhile, said there had been a "total rejection" of Bongo and warned his supporters to be on guard against fraud.

The tense campaign has featured efforts to get Bongo's candidacy annulled based on claims he was born in Nigeria and therefore is ineligible to be president — claims Bongo has dismissed as unfounded.

Bongo's victory in 2009 sparked looting and clashes between protesters and security forces. The office of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Friday issued a statement calling on candidates to avoid "any acts of incitement or the use of inflammatory statements."

More than 600,000 voters are registered to participate. Voting was scheduled to end at 6 p.m., though polling stations that opened late could remain open to accommodate voters waiting in line, according to an announcement by Rene Aboghe Ella, president of the electoral commission.

Provisional results are expected early next week.

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