How we do bus conductor at day, rob at night – suspects

Two bus conductors in Lagos State, identified as 22-year-old Lateef Sodiq and Tunde Lawal, 21, have been arrested by men of the Lagos State Police Command after robbing a motorist of his Honda saloon car.
The two young men confessed to belong to a car-snatching gang operating in the state.
The suspects said they support their bus conductor’s work with robbery.

Sodiq told Punch that he was nabbed in a bus by men of the Alakara Police Division, Lagos, who were trailing him without his knowledge.
According to him, after concluding his conductor work on Wednesday, he went to join the other members of his gang and they snatched the Honda at Sabo area of Yaba, Lagos and dumped the driver of the vehicle at Obanikoro along Ikorodu Road.
Sodiq said, “We did not beat the owner of the vehicle, we just asked him for the security codes of the car.
“This is the second time I would follow the gang to snatch a vehicle. I was given N50,000 the first time my gang took me along on an operation. Our leader is called Coded. He has not been caught since he ran way.

“I have been an armed robber for just one month. I came to Lagos from my state, Kwara, last year when I could no longer stand the farming business my father forced me into when he could no longer sponsor me to school.
“Now, I really feel bad about what I have done. I regret my life now. By the grace of God, if I am released, I will run back to my village immediately.”
Sodiq said he was not educated beyond primary school.
“When I finished primary six, my father did not have money for me to continue schooling,” he said.
Lawal on the other hand, said he saw robbery as an easy way to make money than his normal bus conducting work.
He said, “My work as a bus conductor is a tough job. that’s why I decided to join the robbery gang. But now, I know better, the problem in robbery is worse. I wish I can just be released to go back to my conductor business.”
Lawal further claimed that he was brought into the gang by Sodiq.
He said his duty in the gang was to ransack any vehicle they snatched and gathering every valuable found in such vehicles.
According to him, “I don’t hold a gun, all I did was gather money, phones and other valuables,” he said.
Lawal, who hails from Oyo State said he did not know other members of the gang except Sodiq.
He said the first operation he participated in, they were almost arrested when policemen were chasing them but they escaped.
Meanwhile, the Commissioner of Police in the state, Fatai Owoseni, has said efforts were being made to arrest other members of the gang.

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Igbo can achieve Biafra through unity – Al- Mustapha

Former Chief Security Officer, CSO, to ex-Military Head of State, late Gen Sani Abacha, Major Hamza Al- Mustapha, has advised the Igbo race to be united in order to achieve their purpose.
Mustapha made the appeal yesterday at this year’s Odumegwu Ojukwu’s memorial service in Owerri, Imo State.
Noting that Ojukwu was a committed military leader, the former CSO said the Igbo race has all it takes to lead the world.

According to Mustapha, “In the absence of unity of purpose, Ndigbo will end up wasting their time and achieving practically nothing.
“We equally feel the pains of Ndigbo. There are palpable traces of poverty in every street in this land”.

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Dogs Remember Even the Stupid Things We Do

 

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Dogs pay more attention to us than previously thought, with new research showing that they remember our actions and other events even when the occurrences didn't hold any particular importance at the time they happened.
The discovery, reported in Current Biology, adds dogs to the short list of other animals — including rats, pigeons and primates — that are known to have what's called "episodic memory." This is opposed to "semantic memory," which is a recollection of facts and rules that an individual knows without the need of remembering a specific event.
"So the difference between episodic and semantic memory can be thought of as the difference between remembering and knowing," lead author Claudia Fugazza of MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group in Budapest, Hungary, told Seeker.

People use episodic memory all of the time, she said. For example, if someone asks you, "What did you do first when you woke up this morning?" you could think back to that time, like rewinding video, and play the moment back in your head.
Now it's known that dogs can do something very similar.

The skill is usually tied to self-awareness, so the findings intriguingly hint that dogs could possess that form of cognition too, although Fugazza says it's "extremely challenging to design a study to test for it in dogs."
RELATED: Your Grouchy Dog May Actually Have Autism
As it stands, she and her colleagues Ákos Pogány and Ádám Miklósi had to overcome difficulties in testing canine memory skills. They took advantage of a dog trick called "Do as I Do." Dogs trained to "Do as I Do" can watch a person perform an action and then do the action themselves. For example, if their owner jumps in the air and then gives the "Do it!" command, the dog would jump in the air too.
Successfully performing the trick is not enough to prove that a dog has episodic memory, though. That's because they had to demonstrate that dogs remember what they just saw a person do even when they weren't expecting to be asked or rewarded.
To get around this problem, the researchers first trained 17 dogs to imitate human actions with the "Do as I Do" training method. Next, they did another round of training in which dogs were trained to lie down after watching the human action, no matter what it was. Examples included silly things like grabbing a purse covered with dog photos, or touching an umbrella.
After the dogs had learned to lie down reliably, the researchers surprised them by saying "Do It!" and the dogs did what they saw the person do earlier. In other words, the dogs recalled what they'd seen the person do beforehand, even though they had no particular reason to think they'd need to remember.
RELATED: Would Your Dog Choose Praise Over Food?
In addition to showing that dogs have episodic memory, the study is the first "to assess memory of actions performed by others, not by the subjects themselves," Fugazza said, adding that it also suggests dogs remember much of what we do all of the time, "although it may seem irrelevant for them."
"This is a skill," she continued, "that might be useful for a species living in a rich and complex environment where there is so much to discover, and their human companions can be considered as knowledgeable partners to learn from."
Next, she and her team plan to investigate whether dogs understand the goals of others, or if they are just imitating the observed movements, regardless of the goal. They are curious about such matters, Fugazza said, because dogs may prove to be a great model for studying the complexity of episodic memory "especially because of their evolutionary and developmental advantage to live in human social groups."

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Why Fewer Americans Say They Want to Lose Weight

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Americans today are less likely to say they want to lose weight, compared to those surveyed a decade ago, according to a new poll.
The poll, from Gallup, found that an average of 53 percent of American adults who were polled between 2010 and 2016 said that they wanted to lose weight. That's down from an average of 59 percent who said that they wanted to lose weight in polls done from 2000 to 2009.
What's more, the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as overweight has also decreased in recent decades. In the 1990s, 44 percent of Americans said that they were overweight, compared to 41 percent in the 2000s and 37 percent in the years 2010 to 2016, Gallup said.
The findings seem to be in contrast to other data that show that obesity rates are rising in the United States. Over the past 15 years, the nation's obesity rate rose from 30.5 percent in the years 1999 to 2000, to 37.7 percent in 2013 to 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The reason for the findings is not clear, but Gallup also found that Americans' perception of their ideal weight is changing. Americans surveyed in the 1990s said that their ideal weight was 153 lbs., on average. But in polls that were done in the 2000s, the average ideal weight was 159 lbs., and in polls done in 2010 to 2016, it was 161 lbs., Gallup said. [Lose Weight Smartly: 7 Little-Known Tricks That Shave Pounds]
"The benchmark for their ideal weight continues to be set higher," Gallup said.
Previously, Gallup reported that in 2015, 49 percent of Americans said that they wanted to lose weight, marking the first time in at least 25 years that less than half of Americans said that they wanted to lose weight.

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