OLISEH SIGNS FIVE-YEAR CONTRACT AS EAGLES COACH

Former Nigerian International `Sunday Oliseh has penned a contract with the NFF to coach the super eagles.

Keshi should have been sacked a long time ago--- Crown Fm OAP

Sports analyst for Crown FM in Ile-Ife Osun state, Wesley Gbadegesin,  has said the sacking of Super Eagles coach Stephen Keshi came a little bit late.

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner divorce.. #sad

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner are divorcing amicably. They intend to remain great friends and even continue to live together to parent their three carefully named children. 

Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis have officially tied the knot.

The ex "That 70's Show" co-stars got married this weekend .. and in classic Ashton form ... the whole thing was very top secret.

COLUMN OF THE DAY. (SAM OMATSEYE)

He lived for 106 years, but his claim to immortality happened for only six months. Even those six months he tucked away in the silence of a selfless memory. It is a lesson in humanity for the Nigerian elite.

It happened in 1939 when Adolf Hitler loomed with his Nazi nightmare. With its death showers, starvation, rapes, torture, etc, the concentration camp beckoned all Jews. The world was numb with ignorance. The camps – in Auschwitz, Sobribor, etc – were not before then and had not since then ever installed human butchery and barbarism of that scale. Jews, whether father, mother or child, were rolled rudely into chambers and incinerated or burned to ashes through what was known as showers of death.

Nicholas Winton, who just died at 106, did not then know about the concentration camps the way we know it today or the way the world came to understand it towards the end of the Second World War in 1945.

He acted swiftly when he heard that Hitler’s army under the cover of its deafly air force known as Luftwaffe, would soon mow down Czechoslovakia. He called off his luxury pastime of skiing, and moved to the east European country for a mission of charity. He planned to save as many as 900 children by shipping them away from the underbelly of horror in Czechoslovakia. But he succeeded only with 669.

Although of Jewish origin, all his family lived in Britain. He had no family ties in that country. He just knew children were in danger of falling into the jaws of tyranny. He did not have time. Hitler could plunge into the country any time, and so he materialised in the refugee camps in the country, and took down names and photos of the children.

So, he made several trips in early 1939 between London and Prague. Aided by his mother, he set up the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, raised money, called for volunteers who could host the children. He raised some money but not enough. He made the difference from his own purse.

It was a dark time, and he could not transport the children without bribing the Nazi officials. Never a moral purist, he bribed the Nazi police chief known as criminal rat because of his rank known in Germany as Kriminalrat. He cooperated and the bribes reached down to the train operators and officials in Customs and Immigration. The bribes greased the trains through barriers.

He planned and paid for eight trains to take the kids from the country through Cologne, Nuremburg and other ramparts of Nazism through Holland. They were ferried to Essex, from there they took a train to London where British families received them, who took them on as children. It started in March and ended in August. Seven trains had eluded the Nazi monster. The last and eighth train had 250 children, but before it left, September 1 had dawned savagely when Hitler ordered every border shut down. The children the last train bore were never seen again, and it was assumed that they descended into the oblivion of the concentration camps.

Within six months, he had written himself into the annals of charity and into the front rank of human love. For the rest of his 106 years on earth, nothing so spectacularly was associated with him. “One crowded hour in a glorious life,” penned the poet Thomas Mordaunt, “is worth an age without a name.”

Yet everyone, in Britain and everywhere else, forgot Winton’s act. Not even the beneficiary children sought the man. He hid the scrapbook containing entries of the names of the kids and letters, etc of those months in his attic. He never even told his wife of his heroics. He was a disinterested hero. His wife saw them and probed him for answers. Even at that, he did not think it was any significant what he did. She thought differently, and made the information available to the media, and that was how the world woke up to a good interred in Winton’s bones.

Most of the beneficiaries did not see their parents after the war. Hitler’s Nazi bears had lapped them up. Some of the parents tearfully parted with their children on train platforms and some of the children yowled not to part with their parents. Today, they call themselves “Winton’s children.” Some of them have soared to do good to their world. One of them, Renata Laxova, discovered a congenital abnormality named after her. Hugo Marom was a founder of the Israeli Air Force. Joe Schlesinger is a well-known Canadian broadcast correspondent. Karel Riesz is a filmmaker and director, among others, of “The French lieutenant’s Woman.”

Winton operated in a time so perilous that the poet W.H. Auden described it as when “the clever hopes expire/ of a low dishonest decade,” when “the unmentionable odour of death offends the September night.”

What has happened to our elite? How many of us have done so much good and cut ourselves out of our comfort zone for the weak and vulnerable among us? The irony is that we pride ourselves as weaned on the communal ethos. This column has called for the rich to adopt wards in hospital, students in indigent schools, chaperon the wild and wayward orphan, etc. It is taken for granted in the West where the individual is king. Yet here the rich stash their loot, their mansions and skyscrapers defy heaven, while their posh cars splash rainwater on the lolling poor.  Too many are poor, but where is the balm from the well-heeled? Boko Haram victims teem everyday among us, but we moan in the retreats of our cosy homes and wait only for the government. The rich make money mainly from the government, perhaps that explains why they do not think they owe anybody, after they grease back the palm that first oiled them.

We should imitate Winton. It is good men like him that make a good society.

TOP HEADLINES OF THE DAY

 .    Former President Goodluck Jonathan urges support and prayers. for President Muhammadu Buhari.

EDITORIAL OF THE DAY

THE move by the Central Bank of Nigeria to publish the names of chronic bank debtors is doubly ominous. For one, Nigerians are rightly worried that the rising volume of banks’ non-performing loans, if not quickly arrested, could presage fresh systemic stress in the financial sector. Second, many will view the “name-and-shame” option as tepid. The prevailing national mood, however, demands vigorous measures by the regulators to protect the system and recover all loans from recalcitrant debtors.

FUNNY KID LETTERS TO GOD

JUST CHECK ON SOME HILARIOUS WRITINGS DONE BY LOVELY KIDS, TO GOD.

Oprah Talks to Christiane Amanpour

We are used to hearing or seeing Christiane Amanpour interviewing people. Below is an excerpt of an interview done on her by Oprah, from 2005.

Amanpour

Oprah

TOP TEN HEADLINES OF THE DAY

1.     BOKO HARAM KILLS 150 PEOPLE IN BORNO STATE.

2.     US RESTATES COMMITMENT TO ASSIST NIGERIA TO FIGHT BOKO HARAM

Child's Definition of LOVE.

How do you define LOVE....

A group of professional people posed this

question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds, "What

does love mean?" The answers they got were

broader and deeper than anyone could have

imagined.  See what you think:

INSPIRATIONAL

God's Coffee 
 

A group of alumni, highly establi

shed in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life. 
 
Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups - porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some 
expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to the coffee. 
 
When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said: 
 
"If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. 
 
Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee. In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink. 
 
What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups... And then you began eyeing each other's cups. 
 
Now consider this: Life is the coffee; the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of Life we live. 
 
Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee God has provided us." 
 
God brews the coffee, not the cups.......... Enjoy your coffee!  
 
"The happiest people don't have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything." 
 

Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly. Leave the rest to God.

Author unknown

Satya Nadella is Microsoft's New CEO

Microsoft has made official what we all pretty much expected: Its new CEO, replacing Steve Ballmer, is Satya Nadella. Nadella has spent 22 years at Microsoft, and was previously Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Cloud and Enterprise. Nadella also takes a position on Microsoft’s Board of Directors, and founder Bill Gates will increase his involvement in the company.

Nigeria’s university starts degree program in Chinese language

At least 25 students have been admitted into the University of Lagos in southwestern Nigeria to study the Chinese language at degree level in the institution, a top official has said. Duro Oni, the university deputy chancellor in charge of management services, disclosed this while speaking at the annual Confucius Institute spring festival gala held to celebrate the Chinese lunar New Year on Wednesday. Oni told Xinhua that the students would be required to spend the first year in Nigeria while the second and third years of the course would be observed at a university in China, adding that the fourth and final year would be observed in Nigeria to complete the proficiency program in the Chinese language. He said learning to speak the language became necessary because China had become the new destination for economic growth and technology development. The deputy chancellor added that the program would bring about effective communication between nationals of the two countries.

Women's Nightmares Are About Relationships; Men's Are About Disasters

A new study from the journal Sleep peers into the gendered nature of the unconscious and maybe finds that we've all been incepted by the patriarchy. Dream scientists already know that women have already found that women report having significantly more nightmares than men do, but few studies have attempted to explore why that occurs or what it means. This new Sleep study does that, among other things, and it finds that nightmare themes vary by gender. Whereas men are more likely to have nightmares about natural disasters, being chased, or insects, women more frequently have them about interpersonal conflicts. At Slate, Katy Waldman points out that women's nightmares also tend to feature "feelings of humiliation, frustration or inadequacy." It's worth noting that here a nightmare is defined not as a scary dream, but rather as a "disturbing mental experience" that result in the sleeper waking up. Therefore, it doesn't necessarily mean that women are more likely to have bad dreams about relationships — the study's findings just indicate that the fear of interpersonal fallout and associated emotions — guilt, shame, embarrassment, etc. — may "elicit a more intense emotional response in women leading to a greater proportion of such dreams ending in a nightmare awakening." For men, I guess, bugs and volcanoes and pursuers will do that. Waldman asked Antonio Zadra, one of the study's authors, what he thought of the gender discrepancy. His explanation was that "for women, on average, social or interpersonal dimensions may be more emotionally salient." Anecdotally, this makes sense to me: although I have bad dreams that touch on a whole slew of themes, I only ever feel distressed enough to wake up when I do irreparable dream-damage to an important relationship. I've had several bad dreams about, like, malicious wizards and zombies and so on in the past year, but I only ever woke up in a state of terror when I dreamt that I'd angrily poured beer in my best friend's eye and then we became worst enemies (beer in the eye will do that to a friendship). What reoccurring nightmare-themes do you have? Do you feel incepted by the patriarchy? Discuss.