[Premium Times] Nigeria only had two athletes at the tournament, but they won one gold, one silver, and one bronze medal.

[Unicef] Johannesburg -- Ahead of World Children's Day 2024, data from multiple countries reveal children's awareness of their rights, but significant barriers to education persist

[The Herald] "Young people these days are more afraid of getting pregnant than they are of getting HIV."

[Lesotho Times] THE Ministry of Health, through its Department of Pharmaceuticals, has urged the public to use medicines safely and to report any side effects that they may feel after taking medications.

[Daily Trust] Nigeria recorded a total of 3,372 Lassa fever cases between 2022 and this year, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention ( NCDC), has said.

[Daily Trust] A total of 361 persons across 24 states died from Cerebrospinal Meningitis (CSM) between 2023 and 2024, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC), has said.

[Leadership] Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC) has said that between 2023 and 2024, the country recorded 4915 suspected and 380 confirmed cases of meningitis, with 361 deaths across 174 local government areas (LGAs) in 24 States, including the Federal Capital (FCT).

[Liberian Observer] A group of Physician Assistants, Nurses, Pharmacists, and OR-Technicians, representing the Professional Health Workers Association of Liberia, has formally petitioned the Liberian Senate to include provisions in the 2025 National Budget for the implementation of the Reclassification Policy for Health Workers and the hiring of volunteer healthcare workers.

An explanation as to the origin of the drying sensations produced by red wines

Let's lay this ol' chestnut to rest once and for all. The tongue map just ain't true

[Premium Times] This year, the COP29 agenda is expected to be anchored on climate finance, mitigation, and adaptation, with the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) designed to provide support for vulnerable communities in global climate solutions.

[Daily Trust] 45 journalists across four countries in West Africa have been shortlisted for the 2024 Digital Public Infrastructure Fellowship, organised by the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) and Co-Develop.

[This Day] The National Senior Citizens Centre came into existence through the instrumentality of an Act of the National Assembly signed into law in 2017 with a mandate to cater for the needs of senior citizens in Nigeria. Indeed the enabling law states in Section 16(2)(d) of the 1999 Constitution that "it shall be a State policy to provide adequate social services and an improved quality of life for the elderly".

[Dabanga] This week, the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, hosts the main event commemorating the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists. This year's theme, "Journalists' Safety in Crises and Emergencies," resonates deeply in Sudan.

[RSF] The political turbulence rocking Mozambique since the start of the protests against fraud in the general elections, which were held on 9 October, has made journalism a dangerous practice. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns the repeated attacks on media professionals and calls for their protection as they carry out their work.

[CPJ] The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Ethiopian authorities to accept and implement recommendations on improving press freedom conditions and guaranteeing the safety of journalists during the United Nations' upcoming review of its human rights record.

[Dabanga] Amsterdam -- Since the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began clashing on April 15, 2023, independent media--particularly those operating abroad--have become critical sources of information. However, the warring parties have escalated efforts to silence these channels, seeking to enforce a total media blackout.

[Namibian] Dear media colleagues,

[CPJ] Dakar -- The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Cameroonian authorities to investigate and hold accountable those responsible for detaining and violently abusing Nsoyuka Guy-Bruno Maimo, a reporter with the privately owned Volcanic Times newspaper, while he covered a demonstration on October 24.

¡Hermosísima canción que funciona perfectamente!

January 6, 2006 – A new credit card scam has appeared in New York and appears to be moving west. Victims of the scam receive a call that they think is from their credit card company. Unfortunately, a lot of people are falling for this new telephone pitch, and having their credit ruined in the process.

January 31, 2006 – In the new year, a variety of state legislatures continue to debate credit freeze law. Among these are states, on opposite sides of the country are working on unique credit freeze solutions. One of them is probably the best credit freeze law proposed in any state. The other is dumbest credit freeze proposal that we have ever seen.

January 4, 2006 - Last month, H&R Block sent a promotional mailing to both existing customers and prospects. A portion of the recipients were surprised to find out that their Social Security Numbers were embedded in a string of numbers on the mailing label.

January 9, 2006 - On Friday, Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich announced that he wants to ban the unauthorized sale of phone records within his state. The practice, know in the industry as “pretexting”, occurs when someone pretending to be the phone company’s customer calls the phone company and gains access to all of the call information available for the actual customer. Surprisingly, no state currently outlaws this practice. And disturbingly, this lack of regulation has seen the birth of a new cottage industry that allows nearly anyone the purchase the phone records of any person they desire.

February 14, 2006 – ACCESS has been concerned for months that the State Department’s plan to include RFID chips in passports has not been well thought out. The original plan would have placed an RFID chip in every passport which would have contained unencrypted data about the passport holder. After a storm of protest, the State Department revised the standard to include some encryption. Now, a Dutch television news program has along and broken that encryption in less than two hours. The ramifications of this to passport holders are anything but positive.

August 10, 2005 – There are a lot of people carrying large credit card balances which they will be lucky to pay off in their lifetime. Some consumers are being hit with interest rates in excess of 30% even though they have never been late on their credit card payments. The reason for this is that many credit card companies now use a system called "universal default", which allows them to raise your interest rate for reasons other than being late in the payment of your credit card bill.

If you have overdue books at the local library, you may want to return them now. That’s because a number of cash strapped libraries have started using collection agencies to collect fines and fees that are owed to them for overdue books. And once your name is turned over, there is a pretty good chance that you will find your library fines showing up as unpaid bills on your credit report.

MyPerfectCredit.com (MFC) is a website that supposedly provides consumers with copies of their credit report for free. But what the company is actually doing to consumers is anything but ethical, and it certainly isn’t free.

On October 17th a new bankruptcy law goes into effect across the United States. While Congress claimed that the purpose of the law was to crack down on deadbeats, it is apparent that little or no thought went into how the law treats victims of circumstances that are beyond their control. ACCESS has made note on a number of occasions that this group is largely made up of people who lose their jobs and those that lose their medical coverage and then get hit with catastrophic medical bills. But there is another category of people who may wind up getting hit just as hard unless they are truly prepared; homeowners who become victims of natural or manmade disasters.

September 1, 2005 – As of today, residents of every state are eligible to receive their credit reports free of charge from the credit repositories (Experian, Equifax and Trans Union). These free credit reports were mandated by Congress with the passage of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) in late 2003. Under the law, eligibility to receive free reports was phased in nationally, from west to east.

September 2, 2005 – ACCESS continues to receive a number of complaints about Boyajian Law Offices and JBC. This firm is under investigation in at least 13 states, has lost its license to act as a collection agent in one other, and was recently turned down in its request for a collection license by the state of Connecticut. Consumers are obviously fed-up, but other than complaining to the FTC and their state attorney general, most have felt relatively helpless. Well, there may be something else that you can do.

September 15, 2005 - If you are one of the 35 million Americans who only make minimum payments on your credit cards, you are going to be in for a rude surprise over the next year. The amount that you are going to be required to pay is going to double due to a little publicized federal lending rule that is about to go into effect. Unfortunately, most lenders don’t want you to know about the payment increases until after October 15th. That’s the date that new federal bankruptcy laws go into effect.

January 17, 2006 – Three months ago today, the United States new bankruptcy law went into effect. The law was hailed by Congress and the banking industry as a way to crack down on “abuses” by dead-beats who ran up their bills with the intent of never paying them. But if the past three months are any indication, those so called dead-beats are few and far between.

January 24, 2006 – Yesterday, Ameriquest Mortgage agree to pay $325 million in restitution to those who had borrowed money from the company. The agreement settles legal disputes with 49 states and the District of Columbia, and is the second largest in US history.

January 30, 2006 – In his State of the Union Speech tomorrow night, President Bush will propose a new approach to dealing with soaring costs associated with health insurance. But the proposal he will make does little to make insurance more affordable at the consumer level, and does nothing to address the underlying causes for the steep rise in insurance prices. Those who don’t have insurance for affordability reasons, or who can’t get it because for some reason they have been declared uninsurable will find virtually no light at the end of the President’s tunnel.

Today podcasting got 'Wired' with an article called 'Podcasts: New Twist on Net Audio'. Shortly afterwards Cnet published the article 'Building a 21st century radio'. Dave Slusher was interviewed for the Wired article and has some comments. A month ago i googled 'podcasting', which gave me around 15-20 results. Now it's exactly 13.000. Interesting to see the impact of these two articles.

Blogging and the podCasting concept will be the final nails in the coffin of traditional online marketing. Interestingly enough, the chief marketer of McDonald's is spreading the news in general terms: "In today's atomized marketing world ... mass marketing mass messages to masses of people via mass media is a mass mistake". Welcome to the podomized world.

I'm using Feedburner for months now and haven't noticed a single glitch. That's a good omen for their latest innovation: SmartCast. By introducing SmartCast, Feedburner again stays ahead of the curve. It enables any feed publisher (RSS 1.0 and Atom included!) to create Podcasts: "If a publisher isn't able to create a feed that has the enclosure element, they can use our service and we'll turn it

A few weeks ago I mused about the possibilities of 'location based services' through podcasting and GPS. At the moment though only a tiny fraction of mobile handsets are GPS-enabled.That's why this press release from seekerwireless.com in Australia caught my eye: "Seeker Wireless have developed capabilities that use existing GSM, CDMA and 3G handsets to enable the location of a mobile subscriber

Customised Podcasting is an excellent information tool for businesses and organizations. Cerado.com started a Customised Podcast Service as a companion to their existing (Competitive Intelligence) briefing documents. More here.

Adam Curry and Dave Winer mused about the concept of a commercial Podcasting Network for some months, but their commercial partnership never materialized. So others walked the talk and the 'The Podcasting Network' opened its doors yesterday. Its run by Mick Stanic and Cameron Reilly, the duo behind G'day World Podcast. "The Podcast Network will be the best collection of podcast’s available

Common questions about RSS, feeds, syndication, namespaces, extensions, and podcasting. Feel free to send our webmasters any RSS questions and we will post the answers in the RSS knowledgebase.

RSS Feed Knowledgebase

Just as the second generation of search engines and directories evolved into niche topic specific portals we are seeing the same occur in the area of RSS feed directories and search engines. While some directories are admittedly more niche than others the trend is obvious.
Financial Industry
If you are in the finance industry you can monitor currency exchange rates, bank rates and track investments using RSS feeds. Financial institutions have found RSS to be an optimum way to communicate CD rates, interest rates, currency conversions, and even investors are using to monitor stocks. Use RSS to track currency conversions, stocks, bonds, bank rates and other financial related information.

Why Niche RSS Feeds

You have an RSS feed and you have worked hard to get the word out. According to your logs you have subscribers! Now the hard part: how to retain the subscribers to your RSS feed. Follow these simple steps to insure that your subscriber base will grow.

1. Original Content
A consistent stream of original content will do well to earn subscribers loyalty. The best RSS feeds provide content that is compelling and unique. Do not rehash existing content, look for a unique angle or spin if you wish to cover something that is hot in the blogosphere.

13 Tips to Maintaining an RSS Feed Subscriber Base

Schools all over the country have flocked to podcasting as a new medium to assist the teaching profession. Professors are using podcasts to instruct students and get their messages out. Podcasting is not restricted to one educational sector, professors at prestigious colleges from Bentley to Purdue have flocked to this medium.

Podcasting Just Might Be the Tool to Revolutionize Education

There is little argument from webmasters and publishers that RSS brings in traffic. So once you've made the leap and created a feed, how do you tell your visitors about the feed?


1. Submit Your RSS Feed to RSS Directories.
This will not only increase the number of sites linking to your website and increasing your link popularity, it will also increase the RSS feeds profile. A number of RSS search engines and RSS directories exist that allow you to freely submit RSS feeds. Feeds are generally categorized and grouped together by subject. Web surfers looking for RSS feeds about a specific subject will often search the RSS directories, to locate a feed that matches their specific criteria. Topic specific RSS feed and podcasting directories are also emerging. Choose a web feed's category carefully and only submit relevant feeds to topic specific directories.

Publicize Your RSS Feed

RSS is growing at a lightening speed. What was once only known as a techie tool, RSS is becoming a tool that is continuously being used by the general population. Along with the good comes, the not so good. And while some have mentioned the emergence of RSS spam, where content publishers dynamically generate nonsensical feeds stuffed with keywords, the real concern relates to security. While an annoyance to the search engines, spam in RSS feeds pales in comparison to the possible security concerns that could be in RSS future.

RSS Feed Security

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a new way to broadcast corporate news and structured information. RSS offers a quick, easy corporate communication channel. The RSS contents are published as a feed and the feed's content keep customers, partners and journalists abreast of corporate news and information. The RSS feeds are read using a tool referred to as a news aggregator, or an RSS reader. The aggregator periodically checks to see if the RSS feed has been updated. As the feed is updated, new information will automatically appear in the RSS reader.

RSS Feed Innovation

As publishers have moved towards monetizing RSS feeds, their have been vibrant discussions as to whether advertisements in feeds are viable or whether they will drive subscribers away. At the end of the day while it appears that many are discussing the philosophical approaches to ads in RSS feeds few are taking the time to examine the options available for inserting advertisements in feeds. Ultimately the advertisements served are going to determine the success of RSS as an advertising medium.

Advertising in RSS Feeds