Trump labels Obama and Clinton as 'co-founders' of Islamic State

Republican Presidential Candidate, Donald Trump called U.S. President Barack Obama and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton "co-founders" of Islamic State on Thursday, igniting fresh criticism of his inflammatory campaign style.

The New York real estate developer has previously attacked Obama and Clinton, secretary of state from 2009-13, for how the United States pulled out of Iraq after the war, saying it helped create the militant Islamist group that has seized swaths of Iraq and Syria.

The idea that a sitting U.S. president created a militant group determined to kill Americans and other Westerners took that line of attack to a new level. Trump first made the assertion in a speech Wednesday night in Florida. He repeated it in an interview Thursday morning with CNBC.

Panama Papers show how a prominent Nigerian oil mogul was brought down

Aluko's Luxurious Galactica Star

 

In September last year, Beyoncé and her husband, Jay Z, paid a reported $900,000 to sail the Mediterranean Sea on the Galactica Star, a 65m private superyacht.

Just after their trip, the yacht’s owner, Kolawole Aluko, was accused of defrauding the Nigerian government, including allegations that the yacht was bought with profits from crude oil sales that had been illegally diverted.

Held through a shell company created by the law firm at the heart of the Panama Papers scandal, Mossack Fonseca, the yacht became caught up in a huge investigation in Nigeria.

Aluko, a petroleum and aviation mogul, is one of four defendants accused of helping to cheat the Nigerian government out of $1.76billion it was owed from oil sales.

Finance Minister stresses Investment in Capital and Diversification of Nigeria Economy

The Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, has warned that for Nigeria to outlive the present economic difficulties, it must be disciplined in its expenditure, invest in capital and diversify the economy.

The minister spoke at a town hall meeting organized by the Ministry of Information and Culture in collaboration with the Alumni Association of the National Institute yesterday in Abuja.

Adeosun said the current challenges in Nigeria could have happened anywhere, given that the economy was heading in this direction consistently in the past 7 to 8years.

She said while the growth in GDP was not inclusive, there was an outrageous increase in debt while only 10% of the budget was allocated to capital expenditure.

She said what was first done when she came into office was to attack the problem of recurrent expenditure because the country was paying N165bn every month on salaries until it was slashed to N159bn as a result of discrepancies and also from activities of ghost workers which she said was still being investigated.

Also speaking, the Minister of Budget, Senator Udo Udoma ,said  34 key actions were set out within the time frame of the budget implementation including low interest spending.

The Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar, urged policy makers to initiate policy changes and be open to suggestions from all angles. He said the realization of the budget relied on the effective impact of its implementation, adding that the time for government to get it right was now since it was never short of robust policies to implement.

Rio Olympics 2016 set for opening ceremony

The 31st Olympic Games officially start in Rio on Friday with the opening ceremony at the Maracana Stadium.

Athletes from 206 nations and a refugee team are in Brazil to compete in 31 sports and be watched by a global audience of billions.

The build-up has been dominated by a Russian doping scandal, the Zika virus and issues with the city's security, infrastructure and venues.

But it is time for the sporting action to take centre stage as the first Olympics in South America begin.

The Games officially take place between 5 and 21 August, but they have actually already started.

The opening ceremony is at midnight BST on Friday night but the action kicked off two days ago with the women's football.

Defending Olympic men's tennis champion Andy Murray will be Great Britain's flag bearer inside Rio's Maracana stadium on Friday.

An estimated three billion people will watch the ceremony, which has taken five years to produce and includes 300 dancers, 5,000 volunteers and 12,000 costumes.

There will be 10,500 athletes from a record 207 nations competing in Rio, including the Refugee Olympic Team, while it will be the first time Kosovo and South Sudan have taken part in the Games.

With 554 athletes, the United States has the largest Olympic team, but spare a thought for 100m runner Etimoni Timuani, who is the only athlete from the South Pacific nation of Tuvalu.

The build-up to Rio has been overshadowed by events in Russia, after the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) report into state-sponsored doping in the country.

It seemed at one stage that no Russian athletes would be at the Games after Wada recommended a blanket ban.

But the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said individual sporting federations must rule on whether Russians can compete. Their decisions were then ratified by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) before a three-man IOC panel made the final decision.

On Thursday, the IOC cleared 271 Russian athletes to compete in Rio of the country's original entry list of 389, though the country's track and field athletes have been barred by athletics' governing body.

Funding the Expensive Road to Rio

Competing in the Olympics is the high-water mark in any athletic career.

The Olympics is an expensive undertaking, costing athletes tens of thousands of dollars annually for coaching, equipment, and space.

In years past, athletes have depended on part–time jobs, donations from family and friends, not to mention funding from local or sometimes national athletic groups. One new way athletes headed to the Rio Olympics have raised funds is via crowdfunding platforms, which allow athletes to set up campaigns and solicit donations online. The Rio games get underway on Friday.

Crowdfunding platforms are by now familiar to many consumers and businesses. Each has a slightly different focus. Indiegogo and Kickstarter tend to specialize on projects or business startups, for example. GoFundme concentrates on personal causes, and this year’s Olympic athletes have in particular turned to it to raise funds.

Jeremy Taiwo, who will be competing in the decathlon as part of the U.S. Olympic team, is GoFundMe’s most successful fundraiser, pulling in $62,000 from more than 300 people since December 2015.

That money will be extremely handy to Taiwo, 28, who says he’s been living below the poverty line, sometimes struggling to pay his rent. (He lives with his girlfriend, the French track Olympian Justine Fedronic, in Seattle.) These financial restrictions have also limited his ability to compete this year, he says. Decathlon, considered one of the most challenging events of the games, requires athletes to participate in 10 track and field heats, including running, jumping, pole vault, javelin, shotput, and discus.

Refugee Olympic Team: How Symbols of a Crisis Got to the Games

Tegla Loroupe, a former Olympian and the first African woman win a major marathon, and who still holds world records in three long-distance categories, has been working for more than a decade to use sports as a path toward peace and healing.

Before anyone had the notion of fielding an Olympic team made up of refugees, there was a June 2014 footrace on the dusty outskirts of Kenya's Kakuma camp, home to nearly 200,000 Africans displaced by violence and famine.

The goal, at the time, was relatively modest: to bring hope and fun to a place without much of either.

Zimbabwe pastor calls for massive but peaceful uprising against Robert Mugabe

The Zimbabwe pastor who launched a social media campaign criticising the government and then left the country for his safety is calling for a massive but peaceful uprising.

Evan Mawarire told an emotional crowd at Wits University last week that Zimbabwe once was promising but had been reduced to “horror and unimaginable disappointment.”

Frustration has been growing in the southern African nation amid a collapsing economy and allegations of corruption. People across the country had staged the largest anti-government strike in nearly a decade.

President Robert Mugabe, who has been in power since 1980 and is the world’s oldest head of state at 92, has responded by saying that people who aren’t happy should leave.

Mawarire said Zimbabwe’s government “cannot deal with people that are genuinely peaceful,” and he called on fellow citizens to rewrite the country’s future. “Catastrophe has been our story for far too long,” he said.

He also addressed concerns that he had left the country for good, while acknowledging the risks involved in speaking out.

“My country is Zimbabwe. It is my home. I live there,” he said. “If you are going to arrest me, you will arrest me at home. If you are going to kill me, you will kill me at home.” Mawarire has refused to engage in violence.