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  The Federal Government on Thursday inaugurated the national implementation committee on the revitalisation and repositioning of the teaching profession in Nigeria. The committee aims to improve the quality of teaching and learning. The committee chaired by the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Sonny Echono, was subdivided into 12 sub-committees to ensure focus on specific areas of intervention. The inauguration, according to the Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu, kicks start the processes to implement the new policies recently pronounced by the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd), aimed at attracting the best brains into the teaching profession, encourage teachers delivery and produce quality students with the capacity to boost national development. Some of the policies included special teacher salary scale, harmonized retirement age and teaching service years, special teacher pension scheme, creation of career path policy, enhanced entry poin...

  The Federal Government and the World Food Programme are jointly distributing cash and food items worth about $4m to vulnerable households in urban centres to cushion the harsh effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on beneficiaries of the intervention. WFP Representative in Nigeria, Dr Paul Howe, said on Friday in Abuja that his agency was injecting a total of $3m into the local economies of three urban hotspots in Abuja, Kano and Lagos. He further stated that the Federal Government was providing food from the national strategic grains reserve, a contribution worth over $1m for the intervention in urban hotspots in Abuja, Lagos and Kano. Howe, who disclosed this during the distribution of cash and food items to beneficiaries in Karmajiji, a suburb in Abuja, stated that the Federal Government and WFP were providing assistance in three council areas of the Federal Capital Territory. “WFP plans to reach some 67,500 beneficiaries in Abuja under this intervention programme. So far, WFP has ...

  Twitter confirmed Saturday it will hand control of the presidential @POTUS account to Joe Biden when he is sworn in on inauguration day, even if President Donald Trump has not conceded his election loss. "Twitter is actively preparing to support the transition of White House institutional Twitter accounts on January 20th, 2021," the social network said in a statement to AFP. "As we did for the presidential transition in 2017, this process is being done in close consultation with the National Archives and Records Administration," the statement said. The handover will see all existing tweets on @POTUS, as well as @FLOTUS (the First Lady), @VP (vice president) and other official accounts, archived. The accounts will then be reset to zero tweets and transferred to the incoming Biden White House that day.  Trump, who still has not conceded his November 3 loss, used Twitter to help build his political brand and, later, wield the power of the presidency -- though he main...

  If you’re a former US president, there’s one guaranteed way to be remembered fondly – make sure you’re followed by a truly awful successor. It certainly worked for Barack Obama: you only had to mention his name these last four years to send millions of Americans (and others) into a reverie of nostalgic longing. The gulf in calibre between Donald Trump and his predecessor was so wide that each day Trump sat in the Oval Office, Obama’s reputation shone a little brighter. Not that he needed the comparison. Even before Trump took office, Obama left the White House with unusually high approval ratings: 59% of Americans thought well of him, according to Gallup – and that figure has held ever since. Outside the US, Obama recently displaced Bill Gates as the world’s most admired man, according to YouGov, which is handy as Obama is married to the world’s most admired woman. If you had to construct the unTrump, Barack Obama is what you’d come up with: cerebral and well-read; deliberative; ...