A young man believed to be in his
thirties has committed suicide after
he was jilted by his lover.
According to the police a note and a
picture of a lady was found by the
deceased who hanged himself on a
mango tree in Tema on Wednesday.
In an interview with Citi News the
Public Relations Officer of the Tema
Police Command Corporal Joseph
Barabu stated that when a search was
conducted at the scene, a picture of a
lady was found and a note.
According to him, the note reads
“because of you I am committing this
suicide by hanging.”
The note further stated that they had
planned to get married but after
spending a lot of money on her she
went ahead to marry somebody else.
“So as I am dying, you are the cause
of my death” the note stated.
According to the police, the lady has
been invited to the police station
because her telephone number was
in the note, to aid them in
investigations.
“The body of the deceased has been
sent to the police morgue for
preservation and autopsy” the police stated.
Daily Archives: May 2, 2013
Kpegah’s Suit Against Akufo-Addo Is “Frivolous” Says Court
A High Court in Accra has dismissed a suit filed by a former Justice of the Supreme Court, Francis Yaonasu Kpegah against the main opposition New Patriotic Party’s 2012 Presidential candidate, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.
The former Supreme Court judge filed the suit, accusing the presidential candidate of the NPP of impersonation and holding himself out as a lawyer, when the evidence available to him proves otherwise.
But the court, presided over by Justice Cecelia Sowah dismissed the case, describing it as frivolous.
Frank Davies, counsel for the 2012 NPP flagbearer told Citi News in an interview that the “ruling has put to rest the lingering talks about Nana Addo not being a lawyer.”
“The court has delivered a ruling to the effect that Nana Adoo Danquah is, was and has always been a lawyer.”
Native American tribe plans to dub ‘Star Wars’ in Navajo
The largest Native American tribe in the United States is seeking to dub the classic 1977 movie “Star Wars” movie in Navajo as a way to help preserve its traditional language.
Fluent Navajo speakers have been invited for a casting call in Window Rock in northern Arizona on Friday and Saturday to dub the roles of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia and others, tribal officials said.
Manuelito Wheeler, the director of the Navajo Nation Museum, said he first came up with the idea 13 years ago as a way to preserve the consonant-rich Navajo language, believed to be spoken by about 170,000 people, according to government figures.
“We thought this would be a provocative and effective way to help try to preserve the language and at the same time preserve the culture,” Wheeler told Reuters. “What better movie to do this than ‘Star Wars?'”
Wheeler said he believes the popular science fiction movie will resonate with the Navajo people with its universal theme of good versus evil.
The project was given the go-ahead about 18 months ago.
A team of five Navajos then spent 36 hours translating the original script, hampered by the many words in English that do not translate word for word into Navajo. Instead, several words in Navajo are sometimes needed to convey the proper meaning.
For example, he said there is no direct translation for “May the force be with you,” one of the most recognizable lines in the movie.
Wheeler declined to reveal the Navajo words used for that and other catch-phrases, as a way to “build momentum” leading up to the movie.
“What we want to avoid is like the Kung Fu movies of the past where the lips didn’t match up with the words they were speaking,” he said.
Casting for the voices of the movie’s major roles will be held at the museum in Window Rock. About 75 people have registered to audition.
The finished movie, which will include English subtitles, will be shown during the tribe’s Fourth of July celebration in Window Rock and again in September at the Navajo Nation Fair.
Man accused of stealing skateboard at gunpoint
Florida police said a 21-year-old man is facing charges for allegedly stealing a skateboard and a watch from a 14-year-old boy.
The Ocala Police Department said Cary Lamar Howard, 21, allegedly approached the teenager, who is visiting the United States from Ecuador, during the weekend and showed the boy he was carrying a pistol, the Ocala (Fla.) Star-Banner reported Wednesday.
Police said Howard took the boy’s skateboard and demanded cash, but the boy did not have any money. Howard allegedly took the boy’s watch instead and fled.
Howard was arrested by an officer who saw he matched the description of the suspect. Howard, who had an outstanding warrant for violation of probation, was identified by the teenager as the person who committed the robbery, the Star-Banner said.
Howard was charged with armed robbery.
Armless man fights ticket for failing to buckle seat belt
An armless man in western Canada says he will do whatever it takes to fight a ticket for failing to wear a seatbelt.
Steve Simonar, 55, of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, who lost his arms when he was electrocuted almost 30 years ago, has a custom truck that allows him to drive, QMI News Agency reported. But he is unable to buckle up, and last week he was issued a $175 ticket.
“I’ll go to the Supreme Court, I’ll go to jail over this. I’m not ever gonna pay this ticket,” he told the news agency Wednesday.
Simonar said he presented Saskatoon police with a doctor’s note the day after he got the ticket. He described the officer who cited him as “arrogant and ignorant” and said his behavior was the same after he saw the note: “He said, ‘I treat everybody the same, and you people expect things different.'”
Simonar said he only learned after he got the ticket that he needs an exemption from Saskatchewan Government Insurance.
Alyson Edwards, a police spokeswoman, said officers have discretion not to issue tickets, but once they have done so the matter is in the hands of traffic court.
Man called 911 80 times seeking ‘Kool-Aid, burgers and weed’
Police in Florida said they arrested a man accused of calling 911 about 80 times because he wanted “Kool-Aid, burgers and weed” brought to his home.
St. Petersburg police said Jarvis Sutton, 34, allegedly called the emergency number about 80 times Sunday and the arrest report said he told officers he “wanted Kool-Aid, burgers and weed to be delivered to him,” the Tampa Bay (Fla.) Times reported Wednesday.
Sutton, who was arrested on a charge of misusing the 911 system, allegedly chewed foam attached to the metal caging in the back of a police cruiser during his arrest.
Sutton was jailed in lieu of $150 bail.
Starving Virginia settlers turned to cannibalism in 1609
Settlers at Virginia’s Jamestown Colony resorted to cannibalism to survive the harsh winter of 1609, dismembering and consuming a 14-year-old English girl, the U.S. Smithsonian Institution reported on Wednesday.
This is the first direct evidence of cannibalism at Jamestown, the oldest permanent English colony in the Americas, according to the Washington-based museum and research complex.
A recent excavation at the historic site revealed not just the remains of dogs, cats and horses eaten by settlers during the cold “Starving Time” of that year, but also the bones of a girl known to researchers simply as “Jane.”
Jane probably was part of a relatively prosperous household, possibly a gentleman’s daughter or maidservant, said Smithsonian forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley, who analyzed her bones after they were found by Preservation Virginia, a private nonprofit group.
Her back molars had not yet erupted, putting her age around 14 years, and there was a lot of nitrogen in her bones, indicating she ate a meat-rich English diet, Owsley said in a telephone interview.
It is not known whether Jane was killed or died of natural causes. The Smithsonian said there is no evidence of murder.
After her death, in a year when many Jamestown colonists starved, Jane’s body was hacked apart by a butcher or butchers who barely knew what they were doing. She may have been chosen because others in her household were already dead and there was no one to bury her, Owsley said.
UNSKILLED CHOPPING
“There was very clear post-mortem dismemberment that involved chops to the forehead, chops to the back of the head that cracked the skull open,” the scientist said.
“A puncture to the left side of the head was used to essentially lever and open the … head to remove the brain. There are cuts all over the face and on the mandible, inside as well as out.”
By 1609, Owsley said, the settlement was effectively operating under siege, with many of the male colonists killed by hostile Native Americans after venturing out.
Those who remained inside Jamestown’s confines were often women, children and the sick. Those who dismembered Jane might well have been women, he said.
The cuts were “very tentative, hesitant,” Owsley said. “This is not someone who’s skilled in terms of kitchen work or butchery, and yet they know, out of sheer need, that this is what they have to do.”
The brain, tongue, cheeks and leg muscles appear to have been eaten, with the brain probably consumed first because it decomposes soon after death, the Smithsonian said in an online announcement.
Scholars have speculated that extreme drought, hostile relations with the local Powhatan Confederacy and a lost supply ship made the Jamestown colonists desperate enough to eat humans. Writings had suggested it, but no hard physical evidence existed until now.
William Kelso, lead archeologist on the project, and his team discovered the girl’s remains last summer.
“We found a deposit of refuse that contained butchered horse and dog bones,” Kelso said. “That was only done in times of extreme hunger. As we excavated, we found human teeth and then a partial human skull.”
Family dog mistakenly euthanized by animal control
The Minton family of Lexington, Kentucky are recovering after a sad mistake by animal control. Their chihuahua Peanut had gone missing on Saturday after he followed 7-year-old Alyssa Minton to her neighborhood friend’s house. The search for Peanut was unsuccessful so the family called animal control on Monday to see if anyone had found their dog. Alyssa’s father, Jonathan Minton, told WKYT, “They made a report of it. Then Tuesday morning, that’s when they came and said, Sunday we euthanized him.”
Animal Care and Control’s policy is to keep stray dogs for five days, but Peanut was euthanized after only one day. While the dog was not micro-chipped, nor wearing a collar, Minton told WLEX Lex 18, “They should have triple checked their paperwork before they decided to do anything like that!” Officials said that an employee mistakenly thought that Peanut had been there for five days and when he was brought in, the dog failed a health and temperament screening so the decision was made to euthanize him.
Animal control insisted that an incident like this one had never happened before and the worker responsible for the mistake was fired. On Tuesday evening an animal control representative arrived in person to return Peanut’s ashes to the Minton family. The gesture was appreciated and helped ease the family’s pain, but Minton wanted to share his story to warn others saying, “Know that if their animal does go to animal control, or something, you know something like this could happen. I mean, there was nothing wrong with him at all. He was a happy dog.”
Ashesi University’s Patrick Awuah talks to CNN
Having just quit a highly lucrative job with tech giant Microsoft in the United States, where he’d made millions working as a program manager, Patrick Awuah would wake up once in a while wondering if he’d done the right thing.
“And then I read the words of Goethe,” remembers Awuah: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it — begin it now.”
What Awuah wanted to begin was to create a university in his native Ghana, a state-of-the-art education hub that would help educate the country’s next generation of leaders.
Inspired by the saying of the famous German writer, Awuah moved with his family back to Ghana. There, he invested his own money and with the help of other donors he founded Ashesi University.
“Africa needs to have a renaissance,” says Awuah, as he explains what drove him to take the risky decision.
“The world needs to change in this way and I strongly believe that people like me who have had the privilege of a great education need to be part of the solution; that I need to be really actively involved in helping to drive this change in Africa so that 30, 50 years from now, the world will be a different place for all people of African descent in the world.”
Located about an hour’s drive from the capital Accra, Ashesi, which appropriately translates to “beginning,” is the first Ghanaian university to combine technical majors with a liberal arts approach.
Its vibrant campus, set on 100 acres in a town called Berekuso, was designed to be inspiring for the more than 500 young Ghanaians studying there.
And while Ashesi has already come a long way — when the school first opened in 2002 there was no campus, just a couple of rented buildings for its 30 students — Awuah plans to expand his offering as part of his dream of finding and developing Africa’s next problem solvers.
“In this country, only 5% of college-age kids go to college,” he says. “And there’s two problems with that number: one is it’s too small, but the second is that everyone who goes to college by definition is going to be running this country one day, the 5% — they’re going to be running the courts, they’re going to be designing roads and buildings and infrastructure, they’re going to be running the hospitals, the schools, the businesses.
“So when I look at universities I see Africa fast-forward 30 years. When this 20-year-old is now in his or her 50s, that person is going to be a leader. And so I felt that engaging how that leadership, that future leadership core, is educated could be catalytic.”
Awuah, who grew up in Accra, left Ghana in 1985 to pursue his own education in the United States. There, he got a job at Microsoft, spearheading software design for dial-up internet access, making millions in the process.
He admits that quitting Microsoft was not an easy decision and credits his American wife for supporting him.
“I won’t lie to you — it was tough,” says Awuah. “But I can tell you that when I mentioned this idea to my wife, she immediately agreed,” he adds. “She’d never been to Africa before she met me and part of her conviction that this sounded like a good idea and her willingness to go ahead with it was very encouraging.”
Committed to providing greater education opportunities in Ghana, he went back to school himself, earning a Master’s degree at Berkeley, one of the world’s top business schools. For his efforts, he’s won many awards.
Today Ashesi, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, offers degrees in business, information systems and computer science, with plans to offer engineering and economics majors in the near future. Its graduation rate is between 70 and 90%, according to Awuah.
Total fees costs $9,000 a year, including tuition, housing and meals. Awuah says the university brings together a diverse mix of students from different backgrounds, including scholarship-winning undergraduates from humble beginnings who are the first in their families to attend college.
“Our last freshman class, 50% of that class paid full tuition, 25% were on full scholarships and 25% on partial scholarships,” he says.”The reason why diversity’s so important is that the most important conversation on campus is a conversation about the good society — what is the good society we would like to see in Africa?’ That conversation is a lot more interesting if you have diversity in the classroom,” adds Awuah.
“Because each person has an important perspective to share, but each person also has certain blinders that need to be peeled away — that can be peeled away if they’re in a room with others who have other perspectives as they do.”
Looking ahead, Awuah says he hopes Africa’s universities will cultivate a new generation of bold and innovative leaders, helping the continent to transform itself.
“If you come back in 30 years, universities will be competing for the best and brightest students,” he says. “I hope that universities will also be competing on things such as whose students are the most ethical,” he adds.” If that happens, it will change the continent.”
Newbie: Wear Ghana (WG) makes fashion industry entry!
Wear Ghana (WG), a new local fashion brand, has announced his readiness for the market.
Awura Abena Agyeman, Founder, Wear Ghana says “We are a team of young, innovative enthusiasts who like to break barriers and do the impossible. We create history each day with fabrics, buttons, stitches, shapes, colours, patterns, sizes and a can-do- spirit.”
Her team she says “have always believed that as proud as we are as a people with truly rich cultural heritage, we should proudly Wear Ghana always. It is this ideal that led to us transforming our passion for Ghanaian fashion into a machinery that is serving to get Ghanaians to Wear Ghana all the time. We have always been passionate about quality.
“And we have always insisted that each outfit should have a life of its own. That is why no two Wear Ghana outfits are ever the same. That is why we ensure that whatever we create exhumes confidence, spreads hope and remind the wearer of he need to do more develop Ghana and Africa.”
Check out some of WG’s designs.
News from all parts of Ghana and beyond 