Author: damazah@gmail.com

Air quality in the Midwestern city of Detroit is currently the worst in the world, Swiss air quality tracker IQAir said, followed by Minneapolis, Chicago and Toronto. Republican lawmakers in the state of Michigan have penned an open letter, external to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney asking for better management of the country’s wildfires, expressing frustration for a third year in a row.”A year has passed, the season has come around again, and nothing has changed except that our patience has run out,” said the letter, signed by four state House representatives .Pete Hoekstra, the US ambassador to Canada, struck…

Middle East oil producers plan to build new pipelines to reduce their dependence on the Strait of Hormuz, as Iran disrupts the Gulf states’ seaborne crude exports with near daily attacks on tankers. But new pipelines will not end the threat to the region’s energy exports, analysts said. This infrastructure is just as vulnerable to the low-cost, asymmetric attacks that have targeted ships in Hormuz, they said. The U.S. is supporting Iraq’s effort to rebuild a crude oil pipeline that runs from its northern city of Kirkuk through Syria to the Mediterranean Sea, a State Department official told CNBC Thursday.…

Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence startup xAI has sued a South Carolina man arrested ⁠earlier this year on charges of sexually exploiting minors, alleging he misused the company’s AI system Grok to ⁠create child sexual abuse ⁠material.xAI ​alleged in the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Texas on Tuesday, that Terry Harwood violated the company’s ⁠terms of service. The case is one of the first brought by an AI company against one of its users ⁠for allegedly using an AI system to generate child sexual abuse material.Spokespeople for xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment ‌on Wednesday. The company’s…

A chieftain of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Okonkwo, has said the exit of Peter Obi from the party left the South-East region disadvantaged and thrown into confusion during the process that led to the emergence of Rotimi Amaechi as the party’s vice presidential candidate. Okonkwo spoke on Thursday during an interview on Channels Television’s Morning Brief, while responding to questions on why Amaechi is yet to publicly acknowledge his vice presidential candidacy on his social media pages, and why Okonkwo’s position appeared to have shifted after Atiku Abubakar nominated him as spokesperson, despite his earlier reservations that the former…

Thomas Tuchel says he is “100 per cent” committed to continuing his role as England boss into the next European Championships in two years, and he has hit back at critics who have questioned his tactics, saying instead it is a problem with English football’s “DNA”.Tuchel has been heavily criticised in the aftermath of the semi-final loss in Atlanta, accused of negative tactics which turned the game in Argentina’s favour, and turned a 1-0 lead into a 2-1 defeat. But now, the head coach has chimed back, saying that it wasn’t his formation that was wrong in Atlanta; the problem…

Christopher Nolan’s $250m Imax blockbuster version of Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey looks set to be among the director’s best-received of his career, and could be a frontrunner for next year’s best picture Oscar.The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw was among the vast majority of critics who awarded it five stars, calling it a film “with thrilling ambition, boldness, seriousness, generosity and flair. There are some broad-brush moments in the dialogue, yes, but even these are applied with a muscular flourish.”In the Independent, Clarisse Loughrey said the film was “Nolan’s best work to date” and “deserves to be the film that defines…

At one point Britain was able to produce more than 80% of the food it consumed. Today it is 57%, meaning the country cannot produce enough to feed its population, a situation described by the government as a national security risk. So, what happened? Josh Toussaint-Strauss looks back at how we got here, and explores the reasons why the UK is at a high risk of food shortages and how it compares with other countries 

The Lagos State Government has approved and released the 2026/2027 Harmonised Academic Calendar for public and private primary and secondary schools. The calendar fixes September 14, 2026, as the resumption date for the new session. The Commissioner for Basic and Secondary Education, Jamiu Alli-Balogun, disclosed this in a statement on Thursday. He noted that the document followed consultations with education stakeholders facilitated by the Office of Education Quality Assurance. The statement read, “According to the Commissioner, the calendar was finalised after two stakeholders’ meetings where participants reviewed and agreed on key dates for the new academic session.” According to the…

The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) is rolling out V-Pass, a biometric identity verification system designed to make domestic air travel faster, safer and more seamless. Developed in partnership with M/S Verxid Technologies Limited, the system will let passengers confirm their identities through facial recognition, reducing the need to rely on physical ID documents at airports. The rollout was reviewed during a strategic meeting between FAAN and Verxid Technologies Limited, where both sides discussed deployment plans, security measures and ways to improve the passenger experience. FAAN said the initiative shows its commitment to using technology to improve passenger facilitation…

New York Governor Kathy Hochul might have just signed a moratorium on new AI data centers in the state, but she’s not against using the technology herself. During an interview with Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, Hochul said that her team is using “AI to analyze every single rule, regulation, [and] policy” to check for outdated legislation.Some of the antiquated laws mentioned by Hochul in the interview include a $25 fee required to take a dog hunting, or a stipulation that pregnant people need a permit to work after midnight. Hochul added that it “probably would have taken five years at…