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PLASGEOC Seeks Public Support to Combat Gender-Based Violence

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Gender Based Violence

The Plateau State Gender and Equal Opportunities Commission (PLASGEOC) has urged citizens to promptly report incidents of gender-based violence and human rights abuses, stressing that timely intervention can help curb the rising trend across the state.

The call was made during a one-day training workshop held on Saturday in Jos, aimed at equipping journalists with tools for gender-sensitive reporting and inclusive storytelling.

Speaking at the event, Nene Dung, Director of Information at PLASGEOC, emphasized that gender-based violence affects both men and women. She encouraged male victims to speak up rather than suffer in silence, assuring that the commission treats all cases with equal seriousness, regardless of gender.

“Abuse is not gender-exclusive. Men, too, face harassment and violence, and they must feel safe to come forward. Silence only deepens the trauma and hinders justice,” Dung said.

She also urged women experiencing harassment or bullying to break the silence and report to the commission, stressing that speaking out is the first step toward ending the cycle of abuse.

Earlier in her welcome address, Olivia Dzem, a lawyer and Acting Chairperson of PLASGEOC, acknowledged the challenges faced by the commission in addressing certain cases, citing entrenched cultural beliefs and societal norms as significant barriers.

“While our mandate is clear, cultural resistance remains a major obstacle. We need public cooperation and a shift in societal attitudes to advance gender equality in Plateau State,” Dzem said.

The event also featured remarks from Joyce Ramnap, Plateau State Commissioner for Information, and Caroline Darfur, Commissioner for Women Affairs and Social Development. Both commended the commission’s efforts in championing gender equity and supporting vulnerable groups since its inception.

Ayuku Pwaspo, Chairperson of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Plateau State Council, pledged continued support for PLASGEOC, reaffirming the media’s role in holding institutions accountable and exposing injustices.

“Journalists are key agents of change. We are committed to reporting responsibly and amplifying voices that are often ignored,” Pwaspo said.

Facilitator Jumai Madaki advised journalists to avoid using images, words, or framing that could retraumatize victims or heighten tensions. She called for ethical and empathetic coverage of gender-based violence, with emphasis on fairness, accuracy, and sensitivity.

The workshop concluded with a shared commitment to foster safer reporting practices and enhance collaboration between the media and PLASGEOC in the fight against gender inequality and abuse in Plateau State.

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Nigeria receives multiple funding offers from investors, lenders — Minister

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Nigeria has received multiple funding offers from investors and institutional lenders, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Taiwo Oyedele, has said.

Speaking in an interview with Bloomberg TV, Mr Oyedele said the current market environment presents an opportunity for the country to refinance some of its existing debt while mobilising additional resources for development.

“We think that the timing is good for us to be able to maybe even refinance some of our expensive past debts, but also to raise more funding for our development at this critical time,” he said.

Responding to questions on whether Nigeria would pursue a Eurobond issuance or other commercial financing options, the minister said any decision would depend on prevailing market conditions, the amount of funding required and the speed at which the government intends to access the funds.

He noted that the country currently has several financing options available.

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“We have a lot of offers, there is a lot of interest in Nigeria by investors, which is good for us,” Mr Oyedele said.

He added that Nigeria is also engaging with institutional lenders, including the African Finance Corporation (AFC), the African Development Bank (AfDB) and Afreximbank, alongside financing arrangements involving other countries.

“We have many options,” he noted.

ALSO READ: Nigeria eyes debt refinancing, fresh funding — Oyedele

Mr Oyedele explained that the government would carefully evaluate the cost, risks and suitability of available funding sources before deciding on the most appropriate financing strategy.

According to him, the objective is to ensure efficient use of resources while supporting the country’s development priorities.

“The goal is to get the best results from every dollar or every naira that we spend,” he said.


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Mira Murati steps back into the spotlight, carefully

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Mira Murati isn’t a natural creature of the conference stage. As the CTO of OpenAI, she was present but rarely the public face of the company. As CEO of her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, she has been even harder to find. So when she sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday — her first major media appearance in roughly 18 months — it was worth paying attention, even if she was careful not to say too much.

The timing makes sense. Thinking Machines has spent the better part of a year and a half operating largely in the background: raising capital, hiring researchers, and shipping one product, Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-source AI models.

In the meantime, the companies competing for the same talent, customers, and headlines have only grown more omnipresent. OpenAI, where Murati spent six years as CTO, is constantly in the news cycle. Anthropic’s momentum is all that anyone can talk about right now. And xAI, Elon Musk’s AI venture, has been folded into SpaceX ahead of what is expected to be its massive public offering, generating its own gravitational pull on attention and investment. In that environment, staying heads down has diminishing returns; at some point, you have to make some noise just to remind the market you exist.

Murati used the Bloomberg appearance to do exactly that and not much more. She previewed what Thinking Machines is calling “interaction models,” which she described as a fundamentally different kind of AI interface. Rather than the turn-based, prompt-and-response dynamic that defines most AI products today, she told interviewer Emily Chang, the company’s models are designed to process continuous streams of audio, text, and video in 200-millisecond intervals. The idea is that they can pick up on the texture of human communication — the interruptions, the mid-thought corrections, even pauses to think — in something closer to real time. But Murati was careful to frame it as a first step, not a finished product, and she declined to put a specific release date on anything.

She also answered questions about the episode that first put her more squarely in the public eye: the chaotic week in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and she became interim CEO. Inside OpenAI it came to be called “the blip.” Murati said she felt clear about her decisions in each moment — that protecting the mission and the team was the through-line that made the choices feel obvious even as the situation appeared to be falling apart from the outside. She said the company would have “imploded” if not for her involvement through that strange five-day stretch and its immediate aftermath. But she acknowledged that clarity of intent is not the same thing as clarity about consequences. In retrospect, she said, she would have pushed harder for more information, a better transition plan, and more transparency. What she did not say, at least not directly, is whether she thinks things turned out well.

Asked whether she still trusts her former boss, she sidestepped the question, steering the conversation toward a larger concern that she returned to several times: the concentration of consequential decisions in too few hands — not just at OpenAI but across the industry. Her worry, she said, is less about the character of any individual leader (though she acknowledged that matters) and more about the absence of structural checks. Good people make bad calls. Well-intentioned organizations drift. Too much attention has been paid to virtue and too little to governance, she suggested.

Chang also politely pressed her on the departures of several high-profile researchers from Thinking Machines in recent months , a subject Murati has largely avoided in public and that she downplayed on Thursday. First, she said, building a frontier AI lab from scratch compresses years of normal organizational volatility into months. She also acknowledged that compensation — the nine-figure packages that have become standard currency in the war for AI talent — captures people’s imaginations, but she suggested it isn’t usually the whole story. To some audience laughter, she said of her own competitive instincts, “When I wake up in the morning, I am not thinking about how to kill the competitor.”

Naturally, Chang asked about what comes next for AI broadly, including for the humans who AI companies once said would be empowered by AI but who’ve more recently grown scared by talk of mass job displacement, not to mention a future where AI is used to create chemical weapons.

Murati, who was born in Albania and speaks with a slight Eastern European accent, was measured in her response. She pushed back on the framing of inevitable dystopia or inevitable utopia, arguing that neither outcome is predetermined and that the period we’re in right now is the one that will determine which way things go. Still, she said — and not for the first time during the interview — that if humans take their hands off the wheel too soon, the future will look very different, and not better.

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