A former Niger Delta militant leader, Asari Dokubo, has said he is disappointed in President Bola Tinubu for allegedly supporting former Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike in destabilizing the state.
Dokubo’s comments come amid the ongoing power struggle between Wike and current Governor, Siminalayi Fubara, which began in 2023 after the general elections.
Speaking on Arise TV, Dokubo warned that “something will happen” if Fubara is impeached. He said that his concern is not personal gain but rather the well-being of the people of Rivers State.
His words: “What I’m trying to say is that with Bola Tinubu becoming president, I should be able to tell him the truth. What is happening in Rivers State where Bola Tinubu is supporting Nyesom Wike to destabilise Rivers State and disturb the peace of Rivers State, and as a stakeholder in Rivers State, I feel totally disappointed for the president to allow his minister serving under him to run amok and procure judgement and all sort, threatening the people of Rivers State.
“What they are trying to do is that we’re going to remove Fubara, and nothing will happen. What I’m saying is that if you try to remove Fubara, something will happen. That is what I’m talking about. I’m not talking of any personal benefit; I can’t be appointed minister or to any board; I didn’t lobby for anything.”
Asked whether he still stands by his words that he should be held responsible if President Tinubu fails to deliver, Dokubo said:
“I still stand by that statement. That is why I’m crying out, because I’m vigorously liable for any expectation of the Nigerian people, not just Niger Delta people. This is because I stood in front of everybody, and I’m not going to deny what I said.
“Even if it’s tomorrow and Ahmed Bola Tinubu encounters any difficulty, I’ll still stick out my neck and stand. At the stand he stood for me, I would have been dead and not be in this programme talking. Obasanjo would have killed me if not for people like Tinubu who stood by me. So, I’m not going to be in a hurry to forget that.”
“What is happening in Rivers State where President Tinubu is supporting Nyesom Wike to destabilize Rivers State. If you remove Fubara, something will happen,” DokuBO-ASARI alleged. pic.twitter.com/tRplKo7yFh
Nigeria’s superstar singer-songwriter Ayra Starr graces the cover of the latest issue of Dazed, the British lifestyle magazine. In the interview, she talks about her music, reflecting on her childhood, personal style, and songwriting journey.
At just 22, Ayra Starr has already achieved remarkable success in her music career. She’s released two critically acclaimed studio albums and an EP, earned a Grammy nomination, collaborated with major stars both locally and internationally, and performed on some of the world’s biggest stages.
Despite her rising fame, Ayra remains deeply connected to her roots. “It’s very important for me to highlight my culture. People tell me I can tap into this market by singing more in English [but] I’m like, I’m not going to dilute my culture. This is my identity,” she says, firmly. “People listen to Spanish and all types of music, what makes the African one so bad? Why don’t we love ourselves? Why don’t we see how beautiful our culture is?”
For Dazed‘s Autumn 2024 ‘The Impossible Issue,’ Ayra Starr opens up about her rapid rise to pop’s A-list at 19, the influence of her family’s tight bond, and the creation of her second album, “The Year I Turned 21.”
Read exceprts from the interview:
On writing songs for her debut album, “19 & Dangerous”
“[I would write about] everything from life to TV shows. My friends would tell me ‘Ohh, my boyfriend did this’ and I’d be like, ‘That would make a good song,’” she laughs. “I would just watch people. I was a viewer, and I loved to listen.”
Growing up in an African household
“I’ve always been in charge of my siblings because I’m African and I’m a woman… As long as you’re a girl, you’re in charge of everybody, so even as a middle child I was in charge,” she says. “I had to cook before school, and before classes, and I had to be back home so that everybody [could] eat when I was back.”
Being signed to Mavin Records
It had always been my dream to get signed to Mavin because that’s the best and the biggest record label: when they sign you it means you are going to be a star – it’s a no-brainer. They’ll work on you. They’ll build you up. You know how K-pop groups are?”
Read the full interview here.
See some behind-the-scenes moments from the shoot below:
Credits:
Photography @zorasicher Styling @kyleluu Hair @laidby.kc Make-up @lakesanu Nails @leslydidthem Set Design @itsmyjello Production @goodthingstektime
At 35, Brandon Miles May has stunned strangers with his youthful appearance, often being mistaken for a teenager. His age-defying looks are not the result of genetics alone but stem from a disciplined lifestyle he shared online.
Lifestyle Shielding from the sun
Brandon’s commitment to protecting his skin from the sun’s harmful rays is the foundation of his anti-aging regimen. Since the age of 13, he has been vigilant about sun exposure. “I wear a hoodie to block the sun and use physical coverings on the backs of my hands,” Brandon shares. Daily use of sunscreen and UV-protective clothing have become second nature to him, ensuring minimal damage from UV rays.
Lifestyle Nutrition: The building block of youth
Brandon’s diet is proof of his dedication to health. He consumes fresh fruit, plant-based foods, and fishwhich he believes contribute to his youthful energy. Since his teens, he has made dietary adjustments to optimize his health. At 15, he began incorporating green tea and more plant-based foods into his diet. By 19, he had cut out sugars, grains, and carbohydrates, focusing instead on organic foods and low-mercury fish.
“I was really into nutrition at that stage and keeping my body young,” Brandon recalls. His daily intake includes berries like blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries, known for their anti-inflammatory properties, and sardines rich in Omega-3.
Lifestyle Moderate exercise for longevity
Brandon’s exercise routine is designed to avoid stress on his body. “I don’t go heavy on exercise. Too much exercise can cause stress on the body – it can age the body,” he notes. His regimen includes moderate activities like walking, yogaand some strength training to maintain physical fitness without overexertion.
Lifestyle The balance of flexibility and discipline
Despite his disciplined lifestyle, Brandon allows for some flexibility. He enjoys chocolate with a high cacao content daily and doesn’t shy away from occasional indulgences like bread and olive oil during dinners out. “I eat chocolate every single day. I have 92 percent to 100 percent cacao. It’s super bitter,” he shares.
Lifestyle The philosophy behind the practice
Brandon’s approach to anti-aging is not about living forever but maintaining his health and feeling good. “I want to feel good. Feeling young is part of looking young. Living forever isn’t a priority. It’s about maintaining my health,” heemphasizes. His mindset is as crucial as his physical practices, believing that “the body follows the mind.”
Brandon’s lifestyle may seem rigorous, but he insists it’s simple to follow. His commitment to health and longevity has not only kept him looking young but has also made him feel young. “I think I look better than I did ten years ago. I feel physically and emotionally young,” he concludes.
For those seeking the secrets to agelessnessBrandon Miles May’s journey offers valuable insights and inspiration.
A few weeks ago around lunchtime, more than 100 journalists at TheWall Street Journal staged a walkout, an hour-long protest that culminated outside of editor in chief Emma Tucker’s office. Angered by yet another round of layoffs—the latest of which hit a handful of people on the US News team earlier that day—and fed up with stalled contract negotiations, members of the union decorated Tucker’s glass walls with their discontent. Staffers took turns sticking Post-its, scrawled with messages like “EXPLAIN YOURSELVES” and “The cuts are killing morale,” to the exterior of the office, navigating around Tucker’s executive assistant, who was standing guard in front of the door. “Do you think this is helpful? Are you going to stick them on me?” she asked, scolding staffers for being impolite and eventually, as a sea of fluorescent-colored squares amassed, calling security. The episode was over a few minutes later, with nary a sticky note in sight by the time Tucker, who’d been absent for the whole fiasco, returned to her office.
When I stopped by the Journal a week later, Tucker seemed unfazed by the turmoil. “I would expect morale to be low because if you’re changing things, that’s normal,” she told me. “But I would also dispute that all morale is low,” she added. “The people we’ve promoted—and there have been very many people that we’ve promoted—I don’t think their morale is low.”
Tucker, a personable and somewhat irreverent Brit, took over the Journal in February 2023. In a little over a year, the 57-year-old journalist has brought color, voice, and a renewed metabolism to America’s business newspaper of record. Sure, you’ll still find stories about interest-rate cuts and investment income. But you’ll also find investigations into Elon Musk’s unusual relationships with women at SpaceX and drug usethe succession battle for the luxury empire LVMH, and messages that Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar sent to compatriots and mediators. (An attorney for Musk told WSJ that he’s never failed a drug test at SpaceX.) Tucker’s goal is to make the paper “audience-first” and “to grow and retain subscribers,” she told me. It might not sound like the most visionary mission. But the Journal today is, well, better—a more compelling product that a wider swath of people might pick up and read.
“The problem a lot of people face with the Journal is they don’t think of the Journal as for them—that it’s for a very small subset of people on Wall Street,” one senior Journal editor told me. “She has a broader view of what makes something a Journal story.” Tucker’s approach seems to be working: Dow Jones, the publisher of the Journal, recently announced record-breaking digital subscription numbers, with digital subscriptions for its properties—which also include Barron’s and MarketWatch—achieving the largest rate of sequential growth to date.
Upon arriving at the paper, Tucker quickly replaced the old guard with her own people, addressed legitimate editing bottlenecks, and pushed for sharper, more ambitious stories. Staff were generally on board, until she started firing a bunch of their colleagues, with the Washington DC bureau hit especially hard. Some are still Tucker fans, seeing her as the kind of change agent necessary to shake up the Journal, a place mired in vestigial structures and traditions. But she’s lost large pockets of the newsroom in the process of “restructuring,” an effort that, to staff, has largely manifested in pushing out well-regarded editors and esteemed reporters. With no end in sight and little consolation or explanation from Tucker, the newsroom is on edge. “From the outside, it feels like she’s moving incredibly quickly, with sort of summary executions,” an editor from a rival news organization told me. “But from the inside, this has been going on for so long that everyone is in a panic because they don’t know the next person who’ll be taken out and shot.”
It’s a culture shock for a newsroom where people tend to stay 10, 20, 30 years, and whose culture is built upon collegiality and institutional knowledge. It is a place particularly averse to change. Under Tucker, Journal staffers are waking up to something that looks more like the UK’s Fleet Street model: take it or leave it, and fuck you if you don’t like it. Reorganizations are a fact of life in British newsrooms; Tucker, who’s never worked at an American newspaper before now, may have underestimated the culture gap.
Over the course of reporting, I spoke with more than two dozen current and former Journal staffers, whose opinions of the paper’s new editor run the gamut from savior to villain. “She’s a bit of a Daenerys Targaryen, where it was all optimistic. She was a hero freeing us from pronouns and attributions. But now we’ve realized she was put here to slash the Journal down to size and turn us into a metrics-obsessed, subscriber-obsessed, churn-reduction factory,” said one current reporter. Said another: “She may be improving the journalism, while seriously hurting the journalists.”
“There’s no point in me setting out a vision and then going, ‘But we’re just going to carry on doing everything we’ve done before,’” Tucker said. “Everyone said when I got here, We’ve got to change, we’ve got to change. But I’m not naive. I know that everyone says that until it affects them, and then they don’t like it so much.”
Courtesy of IAPE 1096.
Staffers in the Journal’s DC bureau had been anticipating cuts for months; in October, bureau chief Paul Beckett was reassigned, allegedly because he refused to implement them. They were not, however, expecting a “red wedding,” as one staffer described the events of February 1, which was when managing editor Liz Harris, Tucker’s No. 2, went down to the nation’s capital to announce a restructuring of the Washington bureau.
News of the layoffs—which had leakedto other outlets in the days prior—came at 9 a.m., when Harris sent an email inviting the bureau to a conference room for a meeting set to last only 10 minutes. There, Harris, flanked by three other suits, read the news of the reorganization from a piece of paper, but staffers struggled to hear over the wail of a nearby motorcade. “Speak up!” they shouted. Harris kept talking over the noise, telling staff that those impacted would “receive an invitation to meet with us individually today.” She didn’t take any questions. Later, staff watched colleagues get up one by one to meet with HR. By the end of the day, at least 30 staffers were gone; some were told they could apply for other positions. People were crying in the newsroom. Tucker and her team were seen as oblivious to what damage they’d caused, and clueless about how they could’ve done this better.
“Any job loss is bad for the people involved. But at the end of the day, the net total of jobs that we closed in DC was 16, and there were over 90 people in that office,” Tucker said. “We created a bunch of new jobs, as well,” she added. “It wasn’t just slash and burn.”
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