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Imo Women Elite Club unfolds plans for the female gender

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Imo State women in the diaspora are waxing stronger in the United States as they launched an international  foundation to further the interests of the female gender.

Tagged “Every Woman Wins Initiative”, it was launched at the weekend in Atlanta Georgia in the United States.

The leader of the group, Mrs Nkemdi Onyirimba unfolded the agenda of the group, Imo Women Elite Cub (IWEC) which origin dates back to 2020 when Imo women in the US decided to foster a common forum.  

“The Every Woman Wins Initiative is a project that we have structured to support the women and also help every girl child to navigate through various mental issues that the society throws up to the women,” Onyirimba stated.

She expressed her profound gratitude to the executive members of the club and all members for their tireless efforts towards ensuring that IWEC makes a positive impact on the society through the foundation.

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Hear her: “Today we share our ideas with everyone who has identified with us, hoping that together we can make this great impact planned.

She enjoined all members to come together to ensure the success of the project the club is embarking on even as she thanked them of their immense contributions.

While thanking all for their immense contribution in any capacity, the president urged all to join hands with the members of the club as they swing into action, towards making the whole idea of the project a success

The club also elected a new executive council that will run the affairs of the association for the next three years.

At the head is Mrs Onyirimba as the president while she is being assisted by Mrs Juliana Egbezien. The spokesperson for the club is Envangelist Evelyn Childs.

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Mrs Uche Chigozie – Secretary ably assisted by Lolo Carol Offor as assistant secretary.

Others are Mrs Patience Ejim and Mrs Ugboaku Onuoha as financial and assistant financial secretary respectively.

Dr. Edith Okwandu was elected treasurer, Lolo Victoria Maduako as Provost, assisted by Ogechi Anyasor.

The others are Chief Agnes Obasi and Mrs Christy Obilor both of whom were elected as Social director and assistant social director while Nkeiru Anusionwu got elected as the assistant public relations officer.

At the prompting of the president, members observed a minute’s silence for the soul of Chief Tony Offor, the husband of one of their members, Lolo Carol Offor, who died in the year 2020, while the club was at its formative stage.

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Kunle Solaja is the author of landmark books on sports and journalism as well as being a multiple award-winning journalist and editor of long standing. He is easily Nigeria’s foremost soccer diarist and Africa's most capped FIFA World Cup journalist, having attended all FIFA World Cup finals from Italia ’90 to Qatar 2022. He was honoured at the Qatar 2022 World Cup by FIFA and AIPS.

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Imo women Elite Club felicitate with Imo State Congress of America

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Evangelist Evelyn Childs, the public relations officer of the Imo Women Elite Club (IWEC)

Imo State of Nigeria women in the United States under the auspices of Imo Women Elite Club have sent good wish message to the Imo State Congress of America ahead of their 2023 Annual Convention holding in Houston Texas from 20 to 23 July.

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According to a media release issued by Evangelist Evelyn Childs, the public relations officer of the Imo Women Elite Club (IWEC), are in forefront of advancing the progress of the female gender.

Through their foundation, they have been supporting women and girls in navigating mental and health problems.

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TRAGIC! Titanic sub destroyed in ‘catastrophic implosion,’ all five aboard dead

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The Titan submersible, operated by OceanGate Expeditions to explore the wreckage of the sunken Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland, dives in an undated photograph. OceanGate Expeditions/Handout via REUTERS

A deep-sea submersible carrying five people on a voyage to the century-old wreck of the Titanic was found in pieces from a “catastrophic implosion” that killed everyone aboard, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday, ending a multinational five-day search for the vessel.

A robotic diving vehicle deployed from a Canadian ship discovered a debris field from the submersible Titan on Thursday morning on the seabed some 1,600 feet (488 meters) from the bow of the Titanic, 2 1/2 miles (4 km) beneath the surface, in a remote corner of the North Atlantic, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger told reporters.

The Titan, operated by the U.S.-based company OceanGate Expeditions, had been missing since it lost contact with its surface support ship on Sunday morning about an hour, 45 minutes into what should have been a two-hour dive to the world’s most famous shipwreck.

Five major fragments of the 22-foot (6.7-meter) Titan were located in the debris field left from its disintegration, including the vessel’s tail cone and two sections of the pressure hull, Coast Guard officials said. No mention was made of whether human remains were sighted.

“The debris field here is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vehicle,” Mauger said.

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Even before the Coast Guard’s press conference, OceanGate issued a statement saying there were no survivors among the five men aboard the Titan, including the company’s founder and chief executive officer, Stockton Rush, who was piloting the Titan.

The four others were British billionaire and explorer Hamish Harding, 58; Pakistani-born businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, both British citizens; and French oceanographer and renowned Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, who had visited the wreck dozens of times.

“These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans,” the company said. “Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time.”

Search teams and support personnel from the U.S., Canada, France and Britain had spent days scanning thousands of square miles of open seas with planes and ships for any sign of the Titan.

Intense worldwide media coverage of the search largely overshadowed the aftermath of a far greater maritime disaster stemming from the wreck of a migrant vessel off the coast of Greece last week, killing hundreds of people

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SOUNDS FROM THE DEEP

Mauger said it was too early to tell when Titan met its fate. Search teams had sonar buoys in the water for more than three days in the area without detecting any loud, violent noise that would have been generated when the submersible imploded, Mauger said.

But the position of the debris field relatively close the shipwreck and the time frame of the last communication with the Titan seemed to suggest the failure occurred near the end of its descent on Sunday.

The U.S. Navy separately acknowledged that an analysis of its own acoustic data had detected “an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” near the submersible’s location when its communications were lost.

“While not definitive, this information was immediately shared” with commanders of the search mission, a senior Navy official said in a statement first quoted by the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal, citing unnamed U.S. defense officials, said the sound was picked up by a top-secret system designed to detect enemy submarines.

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In an interview with Reuters on Thursday, filmmaker James Cameron, who directed the Oscar-winning movie “Titanic” and has ventured to the wreck in submersibles himself, said he learned of the acoustic findings within a day, and knew what it meant.

“I sent emails to everybody I know and said we’ve lost some friends. The sub had imploded. It’s on the bottom in pieces right now. I sent that out Monday morning,” he recounted.

Sonar buoys dropped by aircraft had picked up some sounds on Tuesday and Wednesday that temporarily offered hope that the Titan was still intact and that its occupants were alive and trying to communicate by banging on the hull.

But officials said analysis of the sound was inconclusive and that the noises probably emanated from something else.

“There doesn’t appear to be any connection between the noises and the location on the sea floor,” Mauger said on Thursday.

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REMOTE-CONTROLLED VEHICLES

Robotic craft on the seabed will continue to gather evidence, Mauger said, but it was not clear whether recovering the victims’ remains will be possible given the nature of the accident and extreme conditions at those depths.

“We will begin to demobilize personnel and vessels from the scene over the course of the next 24 hours,” the admiral said.

The search had grown increasingly desperate on Thursday, when the submersible’s estimated 96-hour air supply had been expected to run out if the Titan were still intact, a countdown that proved irrelevant.

The RMS Titanic, which struck an iceberg and sank during its maiden voyage in 1912, killing more than 1,500 people aboard, lies about 900 miles (1,450 km) east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and 400 miles (640 km) south of St. John’s, Newfoundland.

The undersea expedition to the wreck, which OceanGate has been operating since 2021, cost $250,000 per person, according to the company’s website.

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Questions about Titan’s safety were raised in 2018 during a symposium of submersible industry experts and in a lawsuit by OceanGate’s former head of marine operations, which was settled later that year.

The sweeping search covered more than 10,000 square miles of ocean. On Thursday, the deployment of two specialized deep-sea robot vehicles expanded the search farther into the ocean’s depths, where immense pressure and pitch-black darkness complicated the mission.

The fate of the tourist submersible captured global attention in part due to the mythology surrounding the Titanic. The “unsinkable” British passenger liner has inspired both nonfiction and fiction accounts for a century, including the blockbuster 1997 “Titanic” movie, which rekindled popular interest in the story.

-Reuters

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Explosions rock Kyiv as African peace mission visits Ukraine

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South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Ukraine's Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin visit a site of a mass grave, in the town of Bucha, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, outside of Kyiv, Ukraine June 16, 2023. REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko

At least two explosions rocked Kyiv on Friday and air raid sirens blared as African leaders began a peace mission, hoping to mediate between Ukraine and Russia.

The African delegation, which includes leaders from South Africa, Senegal, the Comoros and Egypt, was expected to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and then hold talks Russian President Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg on Saturday.

A Reuters witness in central Kyiv said he heard two explosions. Mayor Vitali Klitschko also reported explosions in the central Podil district, and warned that more missiles were headed towards the capital.

Another Reuters correspondent in the capital saw the smoke trail of two missiles in the air. It was not clear if those missiles were fired by Russia or by Ukrainian air defences.

A Reuters television crew saw the African leaders arriving in Kyiv in a convoy of cars and entering a hotel to use its air-raid shelter.

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The leaders had begun their visit with a trip to Bucha, near Kyiv, which is one several places where Ukraine says Russian troops committed large-scale atrocities following their full-scale invasion in February 2022. Russia denies the allegations.

The African peace mission, which includes South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Senagal President Macky Sall, could propose a series of “confidence building measures” during initial efforts at mediation, according to a draft framework document seen by Reuters.

The document states that the objective of the mission is “to promote the importance of peace and to encourage the parties to agree to a diplomacy-led process of negotiations”.

Those measures could include a Russian troop pull-back, removal of tactical nuclear weapons from Belarus, suspension of implementation of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant targeting Putin, and sanctions relief, it indicated.

A cessation of hostilities agreement could follow and would need to be accompanied by negotiations between Russia and the West, the document stated.

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The mission is being launched shortly after the start of a Ukrainian counteroffensive that has pushed Russian forces back in some areas though Kyiv has regained only a fraction of the territory Russian forces occupy in Ukraine.

Kyiv says its own peace initiative, which envisages the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian land, must be the basis for any settlement of the war.

-Reuters

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