Author: Agencies

The European Parliament voted on Tuesday, February 14, to approve a ban on new sales of carbon-emitting petrol and diesel cars by 2035, clearing a final legislative hurdle. EU member states have already approved the legislation and will now formally nod it into law, despite opposition from conservative MEPs, the parliament’s biggest group. Supporters of the bill had argued to that it would give European carmakers a clear timeframe in which switch production to zero-emission electric vehicles. This in turn will support the European Union’s ambitious plan to become a “climate neutral” economy by 2050, with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.…

Russia will cut oil production from next month in response to a price cap imposed by western nations, the country’s top energy official has said, in the first sign Moscow is seeking to weaponise oil supplies after slashing natural gas exports to Europe last year. The cut of 500,000 barrels a day, the equivalent of almost 5 per cent of Russia’s production, or 0.5 per cent of world supply, was a response to the “destructive energy policy of the countries of the collective west”, Alexander Novak said on Friday. Christyan Malek, global head of energy strategy at JPMorgan, said Moscow’s…

From the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, How to Stand Up to a Dictator is an impassioned and inspiring memoir of a career spent holding power to account. In 2021, Filipino journalist Maria Ressa won the Unesco Press Freedom Award, and was one of two journalists awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In her Nobel lecture, she said: “An invisible atom bomb exploded in our information ecosystem, and the world must act as it did after Hiroshima. Like that time, we need to create new institutions, like the United Nations, and new codes stating our values, like the universal…

You can’t fight city hall. And you really can’t fight the White House, Congress, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and governments of various U.S. states and European countries — much less all of them combined. Or so one would conclude based on Akio Toyoda’s Jan. 26 announcement that he is leaving his post as chief executive of Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s second-largest automaker, as of April 1. The car industry’s most prominent skeptic of the transition to electric vehicles, Toyoda — a grandson of the company’s founder — had frequently expressed reservations about both the feasibility and necessity, in climate-change…

1: Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse” Two lighthouse keepers battle insanity as they are trapped on a lighthouse island together. Where is the breaking point for the mind? The Lighthouse is all about madness, myth, and superstition. Robert Eggers’ nautical nightmare follows a pair of 19th-century lighthouse keepers — Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) — who spend their days getting drunk and feeling isolated. Paranoia and psychosis eventually set in. Through it all, the lighthouse stands a symbolic depiction of strength, inaccessibility and constancy. So close, yet so far. One goes through life reaching for the heart’s desire,…

Every January, the day arrives that South Africans know can decide their fates: the “matric” exam results are announced. In 2022, 753,964 full-time and 167,915 part-time candidates registered to write the secondary school exit exam – the largest cohort ever. They’ll receive the results on 20 January 2023. Many probably feel ambivalent about this massive moment in their educational journey. On the one hand, there is the feeling of completeness because the school years are done. On the other, there is a basket of emotions: stress, anxiety and excitement at the prospect of the unknown. Matrics (or Grade 12s) and their parents…

As Nigerians inch closer to the February 2023 presidential election, the seventh since the current wave of liberal democracy formally started in 1999, there are at least 10 key issues that are likely to drive and determine the outcome. Political scientist, Jideofor Adibe, explores them all. 1. Ethnicity and regionalism Four of the 18 presidential candidates in the election, regarded as the front runners, come from the three dominant ethnic groups in the country: Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba and Igbo. From the north are Atiku Abubakar, a former vice-president of the country (1999-2007) and the presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party; and Rabi’u Musa…

During his planned visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and South Sudan in February 2023, Pope Francis intends to be in dialogue with African Catholics – but also to listen to political leaders and young Africans. This visit comes at a defining moment in what is regarded as a fairly progressive papacy. Pope Francis has convened a worldwide consultation on the future of the Catholic church. This consultation, called a synodal process, began in 2021 and will conclude in 2024. It is the most ambitious dialogue ever undertaken on bringing changes in Catholic beliefs and practices since the Second Vatican Council’s…

When Pope Gregory XII, the last pope to resign before Benedict, died in 1417, the world was not watching. Gregory had stepped down two years earlier in 1415 and spent his remaining days in virtual obscurity hundreds of miles from Rome. He was quietly buried in Recanati, a town near the northern Adriatic coast. It will be vastly different with the passing of ailing 95-year-old Benedict. The Vatican has painstakingly elaborate rituals for what happens after a reigning pope dies but no publicly known ones for a former pope. It will be at least partially scripting new protocols. They could…

VATICAN CITY, Dec 31 (Reuters) – Former Pope Benedict, who in 2013 became the first pontiff in 600 years to step down, died on Saturday aged 95 in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican where he had lived since his resignation, a spokesman for the Holy See said. “With sorrow I inform you that the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed away today at 9:34 in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican. Further information will be provided as soon as possible,” the spokesman said in a written statement. For nearly 25 years, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict was the…