Prof. Bem Angwe, Executive Secretary, National Human Rights Commission
The National Human Rights Commission says it will not hesitate to prosecute all those responsible for hate speeches and electoral violence during the 2015 elections.
The Executive Secretary, Prof. Bem Angwe, stated this in Abuja on when he inaugurated a special committee to investigate hate speeches and violence around the 2015 general elections.
He said the commission is taking this step to ensure that each and every person who took part in electoral violence or hate speech is held accountable.
Prof. Angwe said this done in fulfillment of its promise to Nigerians to investigate these electoral crimes. He added that gone are the days when people committed electoral violence and go free.
Angwe noted that in the realm of human rights, there was no immunity for impunity, adding that no one will be spared, no matter how highly placed.
The Deputy Chairman, House Committee on Human Rights, Rep. Mahjud Alabi, expressed concerns that election, which was the most civilised way of choosing representative sometimes took the toga of acrimony and rancour.
Alabi, who was the chairman of the occasion, noted that hate speeches violated the right to decency and dignity of the human person.
According to him, using foul language to gain support or votes is criminal and punishable under the law.
The Rep recalled that a report released by NHRC prior to the 2015 elections showed that 58 people had lost their lives due to hate speeches.
The Chairman, Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, appealed to the panel to also explore ways to putting a stop to cyber hate speeches.
Yakubu, who was represented by Mr Oluwale Uzi, Director Voter Education and Publicity, said it was more effective to monitor hate speeches and nip them in the bud before they escalated.
The Chairman pledged INEC’s support to the commission to help rid the country of hate speeches, particularly during elections.
The Committee’s Chairperson, Mrs Oti Ovrawah, while Responding on behalf of members, pledged that the committee would give fair hearing to all parties involved.
The Committee, which has two months to presents its findings, is expected to investigate all petitions received on hate speeches and violence during the 2015 general election and also identify all persons or organisations responsible for such electoral crimes and make recommendations.
Conspiracy theorists claim, JonBenet Ramsey (L) - who was found dead in the basement of her family's home in Boulder, Colo. in 1996 - actually grew up to be pop star Katy Perry(R).
Ramsey, a 6-year-old girl from Boulder, Colo. was found strangled in the basement of her family home in 1996, but to this day, the case remains unsolved. For some reason, this has fueled speculation that the pre-teen beauty queen’s death was actually faked, and she instead grew up to be famed pop star Katy Perry. A YouTube video of the conspiracy was posted back in December 2014 by Dave Johnson, but recently started getting attention. “JonBenét Ramsey did not die, nobody died, nobody got hurt,” Johnson says in the video. "But she was sacrificed: That sacrifice was in name only, and that sacrifice was to get something, and that something was to become a star.” “JonBenét Ramsey became Katy Perry. That's a fact," he added. “So if any of you continue to lie about this person dying, you are in fact a false witness to murder and death.” Throughout the video, Johnson provides pieces of evidences he believes will back his theory. For one, he states that Perry's parents, pastors Keith Hudson and Mary Perry, look eerily similar to Ramsey's parents, Patsy and John Bennett Ramsey. Patsy Ramsey died of cancer in 2006. Another YouTube user, Jungle Surfer, posted their own take on the parents' looks, even pointing out their eyebrow shape, in a seperate conspiracy video. “You're born with your eyebrows,” Jungle Surfer said. “They're very close, very close indeed, aren't they? … As you know, this whole entertainment industry is just a charade — you really don't know the truth.” Johnson claims that Perry, 31, had been in hiding since the news of the murder case broke in 1996 until she rose to fame for her single “I Kissed a Girl” in 2008. The singer was born on Oct. 25, 1984 as Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson in Santa Barbara, California, while Ramsey was born on Dec. 25, 1990. Twitter user Ryan Witalison was quick to point that the math doesn’t add up. “Apparently some believe Katy Perry is really JonBenét Ramsey, despite being born 6 years before Ramsey. Too many crazy people in this world,” he tweeted on Friday. In the YouTube video posted by Johnson, a photo of young Ramsey slowly transitions into a recent photo of Perry, pointing out their strikingly similar facial features. The video has more than 180,000 views with a follow-up garnering more than 12,000 hits. The theory comes on the heels of the Internet buzzing over whether or not presidential candidate Ted Cruz is in fact the Zodiac Killer. “Ted Cruz is the Zodiac killer. Katy Perry is actually JonBenet Ramsey,” Twitter user Justin Prochaska wrote. “The Internet is teaching me so much.”
Gianni Infantino vowed on Friday to lead FIFA out of years of corruption and scandal after the former UEFA general secretary was elected to succeed his Swiss compatriot Sepp Blatter as president of soccer's world governing body.
"We will restore the image of FIFA and the respect of FIFA, and everyone in the world will be proud of us," the 45-year-old law graduate, who for the last seven years has been the leading administrator for Europe's governing body, told an extraordinary FIFA Congress in Zurich.
"I feel a lot of emotion and have not realized yet what has happened today."
After a first round of voting in which he narrowly beat Asian Football Confederation President Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa of Bahrain, Infantino appeared to gather up almost all the votes that had been cast for the two trailing candidates, Prince Ali and Jerome Champagne.
He won 115 of the 207 votes in the second round, giving him a simple majority ensuring a European again holds the top job until 2019 and frustrating the hopes of those looking for a swing to Asia.
Infantino owed his candidacy to the fact that Europe's preferred candidate, his former boss and UEFA president Michel Platini, was banned from soccer last year along with Blatter for ethics violations.
"I thank Michel Platini for everything that he has taught me and given me and the work we have done together," Infantino said. "I have strong, dear thoughts for Mr Michel Platini right now."
Only the ninth president in FIFA's 112-year history, he inherits a very different job from that enjoyed by Blatter, who toured the world for 17 years like a head of state, dispensing development funds to his global support base.
Before the election, the Congress had overwhelmingly passed a set of reforms intended to make FIFA more transparent, professional and accountable.
That package should mean the new president faces much closer scrutiny than Blatter did -- his salary will be published for the first time -- and have less influence over the day-to-day management of the organization's business affairs.
Elias Demetracopoulos, an enigmatic journalist who fled Greece after a military coup in 1967 and accused the ruling right-wing junta of illegally funneling a half-million dollars into Richard M. Nixon 1968 presidential campaign, died on Feb. 16 at a nursing home in Athens. He was 87.
Mr. Demetracopoulos evidence of secret donations provided President Lyndon B. Johnson with a chance to damage, if not sink, Nixon campaign, Robert Dallek wrote in 1998 in Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973. The evidence may even have been among the documents that burglars were seeking when they broke into the Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate office complex in 1972.
During his self-imposed exile in Washington, Mr. Demetracopoulos lobbied Congress and the White House indefatigably to suspend support for the Greek military dictatorship, which the American government somewhat grudgingly viewed as a bulwark against encroaching Communism in southern Europe.
The junta collapsed in 1974 after Turkey invaded Cyprus, and democracy was eventually restored. So was Mr. Demetracopoulos Greek citizenship. But he remained in Washington as a bon vivant. He returned to Athens last year.
His ambiguous role as a journalist with a political agenda and his anomalous and mutable cadre of allies and enemies defined him as a cryptic character in the capital, where he never learned to drive and conducted business from a telephone-equipped table at the Jockey Club.
According to Mr. Dallek and other sources, Mr. Demetracopoulos told Lawrence F. Brien Jr., who was managing Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey presidential campaign in 1968, that the Greek junta had pumped $549,000 (about $3.7 million in today dollars) into Nixon coffers and that Richard Helms, the director of central intelligence, could confirm the transaction. Brien took the story to the president, but Johnson, according to what Brien told Demetracopoulos, refused to act on it, Mr. Dallek wrote. €œHe would neither ask Helms to investigate the report nor consider leaking it to the press, should it prove to be true.
Mr. Dallek concluded that President Johnson had three reasons: that he considered Mr. Demetracopoulos a €œtroublemaker to whom the State Department had originally hoped to deny asylum; that he was by then personally disinclined to help Humphrey; and that he did not want to further provoke Nixon, fearing, as he confided to the White House counsel without elaborating, that he might be prosecuted if Nixon became president.
The State Department exasperation with Mr. Demetracopoulos boiled over again in 1977 when he was blamed for derailing the Carter administration nomination of William E. Schaufele as ambassador to Greece. Mr. Schaufele had questioned the territorial status of Greek islands off the Turkish coast.
Also in 1977, an article in The New York Times, citing statements and records attributed to officials of the Central Intelligence Agency, cast doubt on Mr. Demetracopoulos insistence that he been an underground resistance fighter against the Nazis in Greece in World War II. It also raised doubts about his assertion that he had volunteered his services to foreign intelligence agencies.
To redeem his reputation, Mr. Demetracopoulos sued the C.I.A. In 1983, the agency concluded that nothing in its files substantiated the original allegations.
Elias Panayotis Demetracopoulos was born in Athens on Dec. 1, 1928. His father, Panayotis, was an archaeological guide at the Acropolis. His mother was the former Panayota Bokolas.
He married a former United States Information Service officer in 1953; they divorced a year later. He has no immediate survivors.
He attended the Athens School of Economics and Business (now the Athens University of Economics and Business) and in 1950 became the political editor of the morning newspaper I Kathimerini, a post he held until 1958.
Until 1967, he was a political and diplomatic editor for other Greek newspapers, a reporter for several magazines and a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance and The New York Herald Tribune.
When he moved to America, Mr. Demetracopoulos was a consultant for Brimberg & Company, a New York stockbroker, advising investors on foreign affairs. From 1979 until 1984 he also worked as a correspondent for the Greek newspapers Makedonia and Thessaloniki.
With doors closed to him as a journalist, he used his international and domestic connections to support himself as an information broker, Mr. Barron wrote in his forthcoming biography, tentatively titled The Greek Connection. He became a political intelligence gatherer, connecting friends from both parties with his Wall Street clients, he continued, but his primary focus remained the overthrow of the Greek dictatorship.
Mr. Barron wrote that Mr. Demetracopoulos was honored in 2008 by the Hellenic Republic a champion of freedom and democracy who had performed outstanding services to Greece. With Reuters
Actors Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck at the 2013 Oscars.
Despite the ugliness of the past year, Ben Affleck is the love of Jennifer Garner’s life, she tells Vanity Fair in its March issue. Garner, who has been a class act and quiet as the scandal swirled around her collapsed marriage, talked about keeping her focus, their children and how she feels about her ex. "He's the love of my life,” she said. “What am I going to do about that? He's the most brilliant person in any room, the most charismatic, the most generous. He's just a complicated guy" Garner, 43, “didn't marry the big fat movie star; I married him,” she said. "And I would go back and remake that decision." Promoting her latest film, “Miracles from Heaven,” she comes across as honest, grounded and very real. It was a day after their 10th anniversary in June, a marriage that has produced Violet, 10, Seraphina, 7, and Sam, 4, that Hollywood’s once golden couple announced they were splitting. A month later, it was the age-old story: reports that Affleck and the nanny, 28, were having an affair. He has denied it, and the nanny is no longer around. “We had been separated for months before I ever heard about the nanny,” she said. “She had nothing to do with our decision to divorce.” Since, Garner acknowledges she’s had trouble sleeping and their oldest, Violet, often bunks with her. And as the paparazzi went into a frenzy, she stayed mum. Some took that to mean she didn’t care. Rather, Garner said, she cared so much she needed to just stop being in the press constantly. “I took a silent oath with myself last summer,” she said. As of now, Garner has not dated. Getting kissed on set was the first time she had been kissed in eight months. And she likely won’t date until the divorce is final. Realizing that the dating game has changed, she said: “I want flowers; I don't want to text. What does that make me? What kind of dinosaur am I?” Given that they have three children and were part of each other’s lives for so long, Garner expects she and Affleck will always have a bond. “We still have to help each other get through this,” she said. “He’s still the only person who really knows the truth about things. And I’m still the only person that knows some of his truths.”
