Civil servants in Lagos State, Monday, said they would receive nothing less than N50,000 as minimum wage.

The workers gathered in front of the Lagos State House of Assembly after a peaceful march from Ikeja under bridge yesterday.

Chairman of the State chapter of the Nigerian Labour Congress, NLC, Funmi Sessi, said the special nature of Lagos called for the new demand.

Sessi said that the new demand was coming as part of the workers request to mark the World Day for Decent Work which is celebrated every October 7 worldwide.

The workers marched through the major streets of Lagos to the Alausa Secretariat brandishing placards with inscriptions such as, ‘Employers: Respect workers rights to join union’; ‘We have the right to good wage, decent work’; ‘No to wage poverty, yes to living wage’; ‘Invest in care economy, promote universal health care for children and elderly.’

The NLC chairman insisted that Lagos State workers presently faced more hardship to get to work, hence the reason why N30,000 could no more be acceptable.

“For a simple reason, Lagos is a special state, transportation and house rent are higher and so many hazards on the roads. When you go to work, market, it’s not the same as Ogun State. Rent in Lagos has been increased by 400 percent, transport, 200 percent.

“Our demand is that no junior worker besides the N50,000 minimum wage should go home with less than N15,000 hazard allowance.”

According to Sessi, the workers were not well remunerated, noting that things have continued to deteriorate.

“The leaders are only enriching themselves. When Senate and House of Representatives members collected their N30 million and N25 million welcome packages respectively, do you hear any news? But to pay N30,000 minimum wage which took two years to negotiate has become a problem.”

Chelsea defender Fikayo Tomori says he made the decision to commit his international future to England because it’s difficult to say no to the Three Lions when they come calling.

Despite representing Canada and later England at different youth level , the 21 year old was eligible for Nigeria and was even contacted by the coach of the senior national team of Nigeria Gernot Rohr over the possibility of switching allegiance to Nigeria and in his response according to Rohr he asked for more time.

Tomori was thorn between playing for Nigeria, Canada or England but decided on England after he was called up by coach Gareth Southgate for their upcoming Euro 2020 qualifiers against Czech Republic and Bulgaria respectively.

Explaining his decision to accept the call up, Tomori said he was disappointed not to have been called up by any of the country during the last international break and this time around only England gave him a call up.

He said he spoke with his family and they all agreed on his choice of representing England insisting that he did consider playing for Nigeria where his father hails from.

‘The last international break I didn’t get a call-up from anyone. This international break, I was waiting for a call up and England called me up”, Tomori said.

‘It wasn’t England all the way. I had certain people and certain things that I had to consider.
‘I spoke to my family and people that I care about it and that’s the decision I came to.

‘When England came calling, it was difficult to say no.’

The France international winger was dismissed late on during a Liga clash with Sevilla for allegedly questioning the performance of the match referee

Lionel Messi did his best to save Ousmane Dembele from a red card in Barcelona‘s clash with Sevilla as he explained to the referee that his team-mate doesn’t speak Spanish very well.

Dembele was dismissed during the latter stages of the  Liga fixture on Sunday.

There were just two minutes left on the clock when the France international winger was given his marching orders and it came just 60 seconds after debutant Ronald Araujo was also dismissed in Barca’s 4-0 win.

Messi had hoped to avoid seeing Dembele join Araujo in heading down the tunnel, with the World Cup winner accused of verbally abusing match referee Miguel Antonio Mateu Lahoz.

The 22-year-old is said to have told the match official “you’re very bad”, with a red card then flashed in his direction.

Messi was among the first on the scene to remonstrate with Lahoz, with the Argentine claiming there had been a misunderstanding.

He suggested that Dembele does not know how to express himself properly in Spanish and deserved to be let off the hook as a result.

— Messi tried to save Dembélé by telling the referee that Ousmane cannot express himself in Spanish.

Messi (to Lahoz): “He can’t speak.

Messi’s argument fell on deaf ears, with Dembele now facing the threat of missing out on a Clasico clash with Real Madrid on October 26.

The length of his ban is yet to be determined, but Barca have only one more Liga outing to take in – against Eibar – before welcoming their arch-rivals from the Spanish capital to Catalunya.

Gerard Pique was another who tried to prevent the Frenchman from being stung with a suspension.

He joined the protests alongside Messi, with the experienced centre-half claiming that Dembele had said “very badly” rather than calling Lahoz “bad”.

No leniency was shown, though, much to the frustration of those in the Barcelona ranks.

Blaugrana boss Ernesto Valverde expressed his surprise after a convincing win over Sevilla at seeing Lahoz so quick to reach for his pocket, especially as Dembele barely speaks Spanish.

He told reporters: “The red cards? It’s the referee’s decision. Everyone has their opinion. I’ve seen a pretty clean game.

“I don’t know what Dembele may have said to the referee but I don’t think it’s a long sentence because it’s hard to hear him speak Spanish.”

China signaled it would hit back after the Trump administration placed eight of the country’s technology giants on a blacklist over alleged human rights violations against Muslim minorities.

Asked Tuesday whether China would retaliate over the blacklist, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters “stay tuned.” He also denied that the government abused human rights in the far west region of Xinjiang.

“We urge the U.S. side to immediately correct its mistake, withdraw the relevant decision and stop interfering in China’s internal affairs,” Geng said in Beijing. “China will continue to take firm and forceful measures to resolutely safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interests.

The Trump administration’s move, which was announced after U.S. markets closed, came on the same day negotiators from the two sides began working-level preparations for high-level talks due to begin Thursday in Washington. A U.S. Commerce Department spokesman said the “action is unrelated to the trade negotiations,” and China confirmed Vice Premier Liu He would lead the delegation as planned.

The blacklist, first reported by Reuters, still takes President Donald Trump’s economic war against China in a new direction, marking the first time his administration has cited human rights as a reason for action. Past moves to blacklist companies such as Huawei Technologies Co. have been taken on national security grounds.

The companies on the blacklist include two video surveillance companies — Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. and Zhejiang Dahua Technology Co. — that by some accounts control as much as a third of the global market for video surveillance and have cameras all over the world.

Also targeted were SenseTime Group Ltd. — the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence startup — and fellow AI giant Megvii Technology Ltd., which is said to be aiming to raise up to $1 billion in a Hong Kong initial public offering. Backed by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the pair are at the forefront of China’s ambition to dominate AI in coming years.

Entities on the list are prohibited from doing business with American companies without being granted a U.S. government license, although some have maintained relationships with banned companies through international subsidiaries. Hikvision and Dahua were suspended from trading Tuesday, but iFlytek Co. — one of the eight singled out — slid 2.7% in Shenzhen.

“Specifically, these entities have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups” in Xinjiang, the U.S. Commerce Department said in a federal register notice published Monday.

The foreign ministry’s Geng accused the U.S. of having “sinister intentions.” “The measures taken by China to eliminate extremism from the roots are fully in line with Chinese law and international practice,” he said.

SenseTime and Dahua weren’t immediately available for comment outside of normal business hours.

“Hikvision strongly opposes today’s decision by the U.S. government and it will hamper efforts by global companies to improve human rights around the world,” the company said in a statement. “Punishing Hikvision, despite these engagements, will deter global companies from communicating with the U.S. government, hurt Hikvision’s U.S. businesses partners and negatively impact the U.S. economy.”

Megvii said the U.S. had “no grounds” to put it on the list, and noted that Human Rights Watch had corrected a report that implicated the company. It added that it hadn’t earned revenue from Xinjiang in the first part of the year, and the impact on its business from the designation was minimal.

The blacklist comes as Trump faces growing pressure at home to support pro-democracy protests in the Chinese-controlled territory of Hong Kong. On Monday, Trump said he was hoping for a “humane solution” in a city where protests have grown increasingly violent.

The move targets Chinese surveillance companies involved in the crackdown in Xinjiang, where as many as a million Uighur Muslims have been placed in mass detention camps, prompting criticism from around the world. The White House in May had readied the sanctions package for surveillance technology companies accused of human rights violations, but decided to hold back because of the trade negotiations.

In June, the Trump administration again considered the sanctions and had planned to roll them out with a human rights speech by Vice President Mike Pence on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Bloomberg has reported. The speech was postponed indefinitely, so that Trump could secure a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Osaka, Japan.

Also to be placed on the Commerce Department’s “entity list” are the Xinjiang region’s public security bureau and 18 other municipal and county public security bureaus as well as the province’s police college.

“The U.S. government and Department of Commerce cannot and will not tolerate the brutal suppression of ethnic minorities within China,” Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said in a statement on Monday. “This action will ensure that our technologies, fostered in an environment of individual liberty and free enterprise, are not used to repress defenseless minority populations.”

Three scientists have been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for “ground-breaking” discoveries about the Universe.

James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz were announced as this year’s winners at a ceremony in Stockholm.

They were jointly awarded the prize for work on the evolution of the Universe and the discovery of a distant planet around a Sun-like star in 1995.

The winners will share the prize money of nine million kronor (£738,000).

James Peebles, of Princeton University in New Jersey, was honoured for his contributions to the understanding of the evolution of the Universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos.

With others, he predicted the existence of cosmic microwave background radiation, the so-called afterglow of the Big Bang.

Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz were awarded the prize for finding 51 Pegasi b, a gas giant orbiting a star 50 light-years away.

Michael Moloney, chief executive officer of the American Institute of Physics, said: “Their groundbreaking work on discovering the fundamental nature of the Universe and new worlds in distant solar systems has opened up whole new areas of research in cosmology and exoplanet science.

“The discovery of a planet orbiting a star outside our own system has changed our perceptions of our place in the Universe – a Universe that still holds many mysteries to solve.”

– A divisional Police officer has been honoured by the governor of Lagos state, Babajide Sanwo-Olu

– Celestine Kalu a superintendent of Police was honoured on Monday, October 7, for helping a robbery victim

– Kalu saved Friday Ojabor after he was shot in the abdomen by some robbers who attacked by the robbers The Lagos state governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu on Monday, October 7, honoured a divisional police officer, SP Celestine Kalu, for rescuing a Lagos resident, Friday Ojabor, who was a victim of armed robbery.

Kalu was said to have saved Ojabor after he was shot in the abdomen by some robbers who attacked by the robbers.

The police officer and other officers of the Ogudu Police station on getting the distress call promptly rushed to the scene.

It was gathered that the victim was taken to several hospitals who could not handle the severity of his injuries before taking him to the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH).

At the teaching hospital, Kalu stood as Ojabor’s surety, covered all the expenses and offered to donate blood during the surgical procedure.

Speaking on her bravery, Sanwo-Olu said: “Her magnanimous attitude saved the life of an innocent young man.

“We are inspired by this amazing and courageous woman. Her character, exemplary attitude and compassion will go a long way in restoring our faith in the Nigerian Police and humanity in general. Thank you for all that you do SP Celestina Kalu,” the governor said.

Arsene Wenger says he has turned down offers to manage in the Premier League because he is “too linked” to Arsenal.

The Frenchman, who turns 70 this month, left his role as manager of the Gunners in May 2018 after 22 years at the club.

He is yet to decide on his next move, but says it could have been back in England.

Security in and around the National Assembly Complex had been tightened ahead of the arrival of President Muhammadu Buhari for the presentation of the 2020 Appropriation Bill.

Men of the Department of State Services, Nigerian Police Force, Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps and Sergeant-at-arms were present at all entry points to restrict access into the premises.

Apart from lawmakers and those accompanying the president, only accredited workers and journalists were allowed in.

Banks and other businesses are to close shop today.

Details later.

The Emir of Kano, Mohammadu Sanusi II has blamed the increasing spate of kidnapping, drugs, banditry and armed robbery to the huge population of Nigeria.

Sanusi, a former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, made the remark during a roundtable session on ‘Nigeria in 2050 – Boom or Bust?’ at the ongoing 25th Nigerian Economy Summit in Abuja, on Monday.

The monarch insisted that all the current social vices, including the Boko Haram insurgency, herdsmen/farmers clashes, drug addiction, out-of-school children had direct bearing to the consequences of population.

Sanusi said: “I think we should get away from this question of it (population) is an asset or liability- it is a liability.

“And all the issues you have from herdsmen/farmers clashes, Boko Haram, drug addiction, out-of-school children- these are all tied to the population we have and the question is how do you turn that into a productive one?”

The monarch also lamented the high rate of divorce between husbands and wives and called on the authorities to create an obstacle to divorce.

Sanusi observed that the process of a divorce appeared to be too cheap for a man who oftentimes, gets away with no responsibility given him to cater for the family he left behind, thereby leaving a trail of poverty.

“This population problem is perhaps the most important developmental challenge we have to face. If we don’t have a demographic transition, we will never have economic transition,” he said.