Author: damazah@gmail.com

Last September, the dismembered, decomposed remains of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez were found in the front trunk of a Tesla sitting in a Los Angeles impound lot. The car was registered to David Anthony Burke, better known as D4vd, a rising singer-songwriter who’d become a Gen Z favorite with his brooding, moody bedroom pop. While links between Burke and Rivas Hernandez quickly began to emerge online, it wasn’t until April that Burke was arrested and formally charged with murdering Rivas Hernandez to cover up his sexual abuse of the girl.  Not long after he was taken into custody, Rolling Stone…

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has said Nigeria’s domestic economy expanded by 3.87 per cent in 2025, an improvement over the 3.38 per cent recorded in 2024. The CBN said this in its recently released annual report for the 2025 fiscal year. According to the apex bank, broad-based growth followed gains from the continuing implementation of a cocktail of reforms in key sectors and the rebasing of the economy to accommodate emerging subsectors. It said that headline inflation declined to 15.15 per cent in December 2025, from 34.80 per cent at the end of 2024. It said that this…

Ameerah Legacy Foundation has officially launched, marking its inaugural community outreach with an event that brought academic recognition and free healthcare together for over 200 students, parents and teachers across two public schools in Surulere, Lagos. The event, held on July 24 2026, at Community High School, Tafawa Balewa Crescent, Surulere, featured Academic Excellence Awards recognising outstanding students from the host school and Lagos Progressive Secondary School.  It also offered free health checks to members of the community, a pairing the Foundation says reflects its core belief that education and health are inseparable pillars of community development. Ameerah Legacy Foundation…

For many Nigerian university students, learning often extends beyond the lecture hall. Large classes, limited access to lecturers and the high cost of private tutoring mean that understanding difficult concepts frequently depends on personal study or help from classmates. Increasingly, however, students are turning to artificial intelligence-powered education platforms for academic support, signalling a shift in how learning takes place on campuses. One such platform, Florence, has gained traction among students by providing curriculum-based academic assistance through chat applications such as Telegram and WhatsApp. Rather than relying on advertising campaigns, the platform has spread largely through recommendations among students seeking…

If you’re worried about car accidents caused by deer, you might want to look into bringing some cougars into town.A study published Wednesday in the journal Current Biology finds that car accidents involving deer in the US could go down as much as 76% in areas where there is a healthy population of the big cats. The presence of cougars around roads cutting through forests or around a development edging up to the woods, the researchers found, made deer avoid these areas, leading to fewer accidents.Cougars—also called mountain lions, panthers, or pumas—are native to the Americas. But due to habitat…

Scientists using the world’s most powerful solar telescope have captured the surface of our Sun in new, unprecedented detail.Images and footage show “whirlpools” of activity that it has not been possible to see before. It is the Sun’s magnetic field being twisted and moved by the motion of hot gas.That constant swirling is a driving force behind bursts of energy from the Sun, creating so-called space weather, that can disrupt Earth’s power grids and satellites, and could even injure astronauts. “The Sun is the source of that energy and of all of that space weather,” explained Dr David Boboltz from…

Super Falcons head coach Justin Madugu has hinted that Toni Payne could be handed a starting role in midfield to replace the suspended Jennifer Echegini in Nigeria’s decisive Women’s Africa Cup of Nations Group C clash against Egypt, while firmly rejecting claims that sentiment influences his squad selection. Nigeria head into the must-win encounter without two influential players. Midfielder Echegini is suspended after accumulating two yellow cards during the group stage, while defender Oluwatosin Demehin will also miss the game after her red card in the victory over Zambia. Speaking during his pre-match press conference, Madugu revealed that team selection…

The New York Film Festival unveiled the Main Slate for its 64th edition with Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner’s Everytime, winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes, and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, which took the Grand Prix. Other Cannes prizewinners include Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland (Best Director); Emmanuel Marre’s A Man of His Time (Best Screenplay); The Dreamed Adventure (Jury Prize); All of a Sudden (Best Actress shared by Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto); and La Gradiva (Critics’ Week Grand Prize). Markus Schleinzer’s Rose premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, winning Sandra Hüller the Silver Bear for her…

Every wedding has a moment guests remember long after the cake is cut. The  Habeeb Hamzat, known professionally as Peller and Amadou Elizabeth Aminata known as Jarvis wedding ceremony on Saturday, August 1, 2026,  witnessed glamorous moment  courtesy of a masked guest known as Oga9ja. He arrived by Bentley, flanked by two female companions and a full entourage, moving through the crowd in an elaborate, regal-style outfit and a mask that gave away nothing about Witnesses described the entrance as cinematic: a slow, deliberate approach, phones instantly raised, and a wave of murmurs spreading through the venue before he had said a single…

It was over almost as quickly as it began. But the human cost of the mayhem in Ceuta over the last seven days, and the disunity it exposed within the EU, will take a lot longer to fix.To recap: more than 70,000 people swam or waded into the tiny Spanish enclave in north Africa from neighbouring Morocco in a matter of hours at the end of last week. The exact circumstances in which the heavily securitised border came suddenly to be open are still unclear.What is clear is that at least 88 people died. Some drowned, others were trampled in…