Pictured: Ukraine opposition leader Yulia

Tymoshenko emotional 

reunion with daughter 

after release from prison

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Eugenia Tymoshenko, daughter of opposition leader Yulia, says she hopes her mother's release from prison will usher in a new era of democracy for Ukraine

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Reuters / Getty

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Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko's daughter reacts to mum's release from prison

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Photographers captured the emotional moment Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko was reunited with her daughter after being released from prison.

Daughter Eugenia wept tears of joy as she saw her mother for the first time after her two-and-a-half year prison term.

After being released from jail in Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, Tymoshenko was immediately flown to Kiev to make a speech in front of thousands of supporters in the city's Independence Square.

Yulia Tymoshenko, one of president Viktor Yanukovych's fiercest rivals, was jailed over a controversial deal with Russian energy company Gazprom, in which a court decided she had abused the powers of her office.

The real couples who

 met and fell in love at salsa dancing class

As Cuban Fury is released three if of the real couples who met on the dance floor discuss their salsa experiences

Furious dancing: Nick Frost (Bruce Garrett) in Cuban Fury

In the new Brit romcom Cuban Fury, salsa dancing is the way to meet the woman (or man) of your dreams.

Funnyman Nick Frost plays Bruce, an overweight, washed-up former teen dance champ who falls for his new boss, Julia, played by Rashida Jones, who’s mad about the sizzling Latin American dance.

And he decides that the only way she’ll fall in love with him is if he dusts off his Cuban heels and starts wiggling his hips.

Wife killer, Arowolo, gets death sentence

 

 

 

| credits: Odutayo Odusanya

A Lagos High Court in Ikeja has sentenced to death Akolade Arowolo for the murder of his banker wife, Titilayo, who he repeatedly stabbed to death with a knife at their residence in Isolo, Lagos, on June 24, 2011.

Justice Lateefat Okunnu, in her judgment on Friday, held that even though there was no eyewitness to the incident, the circumstantial evidence adduced by the prosecution proved the murder charge against the convict beyond all reasonable doubts.

“I pronounce the defendant guilty as charged and accordingly sentenced to death,” the court held.

The 32-year-old man, decked in white short sleeve shirt and black trousers, broke down in the dock and shouted, “Jesus, I did not do this,” shortly after the judge made her pronouncement.

“Jesus, what will happen to Olamide (the daughter the deceased had for her)?” he asked rhetorically.

The convict, who came into the courtroom with a Bible and a diary, began speaking in tongues as he was being led out of the court room. He held on to the Bible and the diary even after the prison warders handcuffed him and led him out of the courtroom.

The prison warders, who were assisted by the convict’s lawyer, Mr. Olanrewaju Ajanaku, had tough time dragging him to the temporary detention cell within the court premises.

Intermittently, Akolade would bow down, while the warders tried to pull him up, and rise up to say, “in the name of Jesus, I’m going to come out. I will not be condemned because I did not do this”.

He was led into the courtroom at about 9.36am. Before the judge arrived the courtroom at about 9.46am, he was alternately going on his kneels to pray and reading his Bible.

 

 

 

Undergraduates make fortune scavenging in Lagos waste dump

 

It is mostly believed that only a mad person or somebody who is psychologically demented that would go to a heap of dirt, relax and patiently rummage the dirt with hands and legs and analyse what he picks at the dumpsite.

But in Nigeria, it is not just the mentally deranged that go to the waste dump, sane, able-bodied men and women get their daily bread by scavenging at  dumpsites.

They could easily pass for mentally deranged people in their dirty clothes. But a closer encounter with them would give them away as normal Nigerians merely looking for survival.

Felicia Aje (not real name), a student of Lagos State Polytechnic, is one of them. Aje spends her holidays and mid-semester breaks at the Oko filling waste dump in Igando (Lagos), picking used bottles of soft drinks, water and canned containers. Aje doesn’t even care that she is  being ridiculed by her mates who see what she does as dirty and menial for an undergraduate. She confided in our correspondent that others scavenging with her were undergraduates from different institutions.

While some other undergraduates would be having fun, traversing from one joint or cinema to another enjoying their holidays, Aje is at a waste dump, scavenging, while hoping she would get a junk that she could sell.

Her fate is not any different from so many Nigerian youths and even older men and women who have turned to waste dump scavengers in order to earn a living.

These people pick empty bottled water, peel off the label, put them in a sack and get them ready for buyers which are mainly recycling companies.

The steady rise in the unemployment rate in the country has forced many people to dwell and work at waste dumps so as to make a living. While Lagos residents pay to dispose their wastes through the compactor trucks, they, indirectly, feed these scavengers whose daily meals come from what they make from the used bottles and junk they gather from waste dumps.

B’Haram: Outdated weapons hinder military operations

 

 

Boko Haram

There are strong indications that the ongoing military operations against  insurgents in the North-East may have been seriously hampered by lack of modern military hardware and the prevalence of aging equipment in the Armed Forces.

Saturday PUNCH learnt that the military had been faced with the difficult challenge of using mostly refurbished military hardware in the critical campaign against the deadly members of the Boko Haram sect.

It was learnt that a good number of the military hardware in the country such as the Armoured Personnel Carriers, the Alpha Fighter Jets, the MIG Fighter Jets and the Helicopter gunships that were being used in the ongoing fight against the insurgents were acquired between 1979 and 1982 by the Alhaji Shehu Shagari regime.

A very senior military source, who spoke to one of our correspondents on Thursday, on the condition of anonymity, said that the successive military administrations that took over the governance of the country did not pay adequate attention to the importation of military tanks, fighter jets, helicopter gunships, APCs and other hardware.

It was further learnt that the situation persisted from 1999 under President Olusegun Obasanjo to the Goodluck Jonathan administration. It was gathered that Shagari had obtained the hardware to position the Nigerian Army as a force in the sub region.

Our correspondents gathered that a good number of the APCs deployed during critical military operations against the Boko Haram insurgents had either failed to fire or had broken down in the middle of action.

The source said that the APCs which looked new with their bright paints were merely mostly refurbished.

It was stated that the situation had resulted in the deaths of some Nigerian soldiers in the hands of the insurgents.

Beyond the ‘valentine’s day’…

Chukwuneta Oby

The body language between a couple is enough to give one an idea of how close they are. A ‘trained eye’ can also detect a ‘shallow public display of affection’ from afar. While at a restaurant (on that ‘V’ day), a man held his woman by the hand as they walked in. Ordinarily, the sight of a couple (walking hand in hand)shouldn’t have elicited a special interest in anybody on that day…considering the enough ‘show of love’ all over the place. However, something about the couple is another huge lesson (from life) to me. I kept stealing glances at them- every once in a while…they seemed to laugh a lot with each other. And when it was time for them to take their leave, they left the same way they came in…with him holding her, as she ‘limped’ along…she had some kind of deformity on the leg.

I told ‘somebody’ that the most beautiful sight I beheld all through that ‘V’ day wasn’t the brightly dressed men and women (painting the town in red and white) in the mood of ‘love’ but that man that held the hand of his ‘limping’ woman, in a manner that should make the rest of us question how much of a ‘pillar of support’ that we have been to our loved ones…especially at ‘not so rosy’ moments.

That beautiful sight took my mind back to the message that a lady sent me, sometime back. The deformity(on one of her legs) turned out to be the cause of cruel remarks from her husband (the father of her children), who never wasted time in reminding her (at the slightest opportunity) that he actually stooped so low-by marrying her. I can’t even find the right words to describe how broken those cruel words left that lady. Eventually, the man left her and went in search of what he called ‘a complete woman.’ Same man came running back to the wife; shortly after…he never lasted with any of his ‘complete women.’ I hear he is now a changed man.

Brit Awards 2014: Jessie J regrets lilac lipstick but says she ‘can do whatever I want’

Jessie J doesn’t care what people say about her style (Picture: AP)

Exclusive: Jessie J doesn’t care what her haters say about her fashion choices because she can ‘do whatever I want’.
The 25-year-old – who lost out on the Brit Award for best female solo artist to Ellie Goulding – says she won’t let anyone stop her from wearing her favourite sparkly jumpsuit or a pair of stripper shoes if that’s the mood she’s in.
‘I’m a woman I can do whatever I want in my style,’ she told me at the Universal Music Brits party hosted by Bacardi at the Soho House pop-up venue under Waterloo Bridge.
‘If there’s a phase in my life where I want to be a little more tame and natural then I will,’ she added, ‘Or if I want to be more fiery then I will, depends on how I feel in the area of my life.’
But the Price Tag singer – who previously admitted she thought she looked like a ‘drag queen’ – says the days of her heavy make-up and ‘unapproachable’ clothing are long gone because she wants to be taken ‘seriously’.