Time magazine names German leader

Time magazine names German leader Angela Merkel its Person of the Year

The girl who would grow up to be called the most powerful woman in the world came of age in a glade dappled by the northern sun and shadowed by tall pines.

Her family’s house stood three stories, and the steep rake of its tile roof held an attic window in the shape of a half-open eye. Strangers walked on the paths below, passing residents who often moved at curious gaits. Cries of anguish were sometimes heard. To adults, Waldhof was home to the Lutheran seminary run by Merkel’s father, an isolated compound—“forest court” in English—that hosted students and other short-term visitors while also functioning as a home and workplace for mentally disabled adults. But to a child of 3, Angela’s age when her family arrived, it was a world unto itself, and would remain so until she went to school in the adjoining town of Templin. There, she came to realize that, like the 17 million other residents of East Germany, she actually was living within the walls of fortress.

Merkel remained a captive for the first 35 years of her life, biding her time. As an adult, she lived in East Berlin, riding an elevated train beside the barricade whose 1961 construction she recalled as the first political memory of her life. When it fell in 1989, she gathered the qualities cultivated as a necessity in the East—patience, blandness, intellectual rigor and an inconspicuous but flife but the course of history.

The year 2015 marked the start of Merkel’s 10th year as Chancellor of a united Germany and the de facto leader of the European Union, the most prosperous joint venture on the planet. By year’s end, she had steered the enterprise through not one but two existential crises, either of which could have meant the end of the union that has kept peace on the continent for seven decades. The first was thrust upon her—the slow-rolling crisis over the euro, the currency shared by 19 nations, all of which were endangered by the default of a single member, Greece. Its resolution came at the signature plodding pace that so tries the patience of Germans that they have made it a verb: Merkeling.

The second was a thunderclap. In late summer, Merkel’s government threw open Germany’s doors to a pressing throng of refugees and migrants; a total of 1 million asylum seekers are expected in the country by the end of December. It was an audacious act that, in a single motion, threatened both to redeem Europe and endanger it, testing the resilience of an alliance formed to avoid repeating the kind of violence tearing asunder the Middle East by working together. That arrangement had worked well enough that it raised an existential question of its own, now being asked by the richest country in Europe: What does it mean to live well?

Six-month-old baby survives Kogi bus crash

A six-month-old baby today survived an accident involving three vehicles in Lokoja, which resulted in the death of six people.

The crash occurred when a commercial bus with the registration number GKP 12 YN tried to overtake a tipper truck on Jimgbe Bridge, very close to Salem University in Jimgbe village, out correspondent learnt.

 In the process, the bus however veered off the road killing six occupants, including the driver.

Another truck with the registration number LKJ 690 XA also veered into the bush while trying to avoid head on collision with both vehicles.

 Both truck drivers survived the crash as well and were taken to a close by hospital.

When contacted, the Police Public Relations Officer in the state, Mr. William Aya, said he would get back to our correspondent as soon as he has details of the crash.

Scientists in the United Kingdom have confirmed the existence of a new sexually transmitted disease called mycoplasma genitalium.

The confirmation of the bacterial disease, which causes painful urination among other things, as an STD comes more than two decades after it was first discovered.

A team of fourteen researchers arrived at the conclusion after conducting a national survey of the sexual lifestyles and attitudes of British men and women.

The researchers said the study, which involved testing urine from 4,507 sexually experienced participants aged 16 to 44 years for MG, “strengthens evidence that MG is an STI”.

They added, “MG was identified in over one per cent of the population, including in men with high-risk behaviours in older age groups that are often not included in STI prevention measures.”

The study found that men of black ethnicity were more likely to test positive for MG and showed that the prevalence of the disease was 1.2 per cent in men and 1.3 per cent in women.

It also found that for both men and women, the disease was strongly associated with reporting risk behaviours such as increasing the number of total and new partners and unsafe sex in the past year.

Although it recorded no positive MG tests in men aged 16 to19, prevalence peaked at 2.1 per cent in men aged 25–34 years, while prevalence in was highest in 16 to 19-year-olds at 2.4 per cent and decrease with age.

It added, “Men with MG were more likely to report previously diagnosed gonorrhoea, syphilis or non-specific urethritis, and women previous trichomoniasis.”

Health.com in an article about the study quoted a clinical associate professor, Raquel Dardik, as saying the symptoms for women included irritation, painful urination and bleeding after sex, while those for men included painful urination and watery discharge from the penis.