Draghi said it's "such a gray zone." He said Germany's biggest company has already paid in rubles and that most gas importers have already opened accounts in the Russian currency.

The Republic of Benin, Niger Republic and Togo made no payment for the electricity supplied to them from Nigeria in the second quarter of 2021, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission has said.

In its just released Second Quarter Report 2021, the NERC stated that the power firms of the three nations and some other special customers were issued a total bill of N770m by the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading company and the Market Operator of the Transmission Company of Nigeria.

It, however, noted that nothing was paid by the neighbouring countries and other special customers for the power supplied to them from Nigeria during the period.

The neighbouring countries’ power firms include Societe Nigerienne d’electricite – NIGELEC, in Niger Republic; Societe Beninoise d’Energie Electrique – SBEE, in Benin Republic; and Compagnie Energie Electrique du Togo– CEET, in Togo Republic.

The commission said, “During the quarter under review, NBET and MO issued a total of N0.77bn in respect of energy sold by NBET and services rendered by MO to the special (Ajaokuta Steel Co. Ltd and other bilateral customers) and international customers (Societe Nigerienne d’electricite – NIGELEC, Societe Beninoise d’Energie Electrique – SBEE and Compagnie Energie Electrique du Togo– CEET).

“No payment was made by these customers during the quarter under review. It is hoped that as the economy of these customers improves post-COVID-19 lockdown so that they will resume the settlement of their bills in full.”

On the performance of distribution companies in Nigeria with respect to the payment of electricity sold to them by the NBET, the power sector regulator stated that the firms did not pay up all their bills.

“During the second quarter of 2021, a total invoice of N259.7bn was issued to the eleven Discos for energy received from the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Plc and for service charge by MO, out of which a sum of N130.11bn was settled, representing remittance performance of 50.11 per cent.

“This represents a 1.78 percentage point decrease from the final settlement rate recorded in the first quarter of 2021.”

The NERC stated that apart from Eko Disco, none of the other Discos met their expected minimum remittance thresholds to NBET in the quarter under review.

It stated that overall, the total Disco remittance to NBET was 76 per cent of expected total for the quarter, as the average aggregate remittance performances to MO and NBET decreased by 1.78 percentage points from 51.88 per cent in first quarter 2021 to 50.1 per cent in the second quarter.

“Discos remittance performance level ranged from 10.51 per cent (Yola) to 63.69 per cent (Eko) for NBET and 28.76 per cent (Yola) to 99.88 per cent (Eko) for MO,” the NERC stated.

It added, “Ikeja recorded zero remittance to MO in the months of May and June 2021 as they wait to resolve Service Level Agreement dispute.”

On commercial performance, the report stated that the total billing to and collection from electricity consumers by all the 11 Discos stood at N268.97bn and N185.29bn respectively during the quarter under review, implying a collection efficiency of 68.89 per cent.

It said the level of collection efficiency indicated that as much as N3.11 out of every N10 worth of energy sold during the second quarter of 2021 remained uncollected from consumers.

“Thus, only a marginal improvement in the collection efficiency is noticeable over the 68.55 per cent recorded in the first quarter 2021,” the NERC stated.

Conservative MP Sir David Amess, 69, was stabbed to death while meeting constituents at Belfairs Methodist Church in Leigh-on-Sea, near Southend, Essex.


The murder of Tory MP Sir David Amess has been declared a terrorist incident with potential links to Islamist extremism, police said as two addresses were being searched.

The 69-year-old, who had been an MP since 1983, was fatally stabbed while meeting constituents at Belfairs Methodist Church in Leigh-on-Sea, near Southend, at midday on Friday.

In a statement, the Met said Senior National Coordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Dean Haydon, had formally declared the incident as terrorism.

The investigation is being led by counter-terrorism officers.

The early investigation has revealed “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”, the force said.


A 25-year-old man arrested at the scene on suspicion of murder is in custody at an Essex police station.

Official sources told the PA news agency the man is believed to be a British national with Somali heritage.

As part of the investigation, officers were also carrying out searches at two addresses in the London area, the Met said.

The force believe the man acted alone and are not seeking anyone else in connection with the matter at this time, but inquiries into the circumstances of the incident are continuing.

Home Secretary Priti Patel has asked all police forces to review security arrangements for MPs “with immediate effect” following the attack.

Chief constable of Essex Police Ben-Julian Harrington said 69-year-old Southend West MP Sir David was “simply dispensing his duties when his life was horrifically cut short”.

Tory veteran Sir David, who was described by Prime Minister Boris Johnson as “one of the kindest, nicest, most gentle people in politics”, had been an MP since 1983 and was married with five children.

Ms Patel met police and representatives of the security and intelligence agencies after the stabbing, which took place as Sir David held a surgery in his Southend West constituency.

“The Home Secretary has asked all police forces to review security arrangements for MPs with immediate effect and will provide updates in due course,” the spokesman for Ms Patel said.

The Daily Telegraph said the review would examine Operation Bridger, a nationwide police protective security operation established in 2016 after several threats to MPs following Parliamentary debates on Syria.

Ms Patel will make a statement to Parliament on the review on Monday, The Times reported.

The attack on Sir David came just five-and-a-half years after Labour MP Jo Cox was killed by a far right extremist in her Batley and Spen constituency in West Yorkshire.
The Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle said police were contacting all MPs to check on their security in the wake of Sir David’s killing.

“It is about doing the right things working with the police constabularies right across the United Kingdom because it is about joining that up,” Sir Lindsay told BBC2’s Newsnight.

“I know that they are contacting all the MPs to check about their safety, to reassure them, because in the end we have got to make sure that is a priority.”

He added: “Those people who do not share our values or share democracy, they will not win and we won’t let them win. We will continue to look at security, that is ongoing and it will continue.”

Sir Lindsay said earlier that while it was right that security was reviewed following the latest incident, it was important to avoid “knee-jerk” reactions.

He told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme: “What we want to do is make sure MPs can carry out their duties. We have got to make sure MPs are safe.”

His sentiments were echoed by the the Father of the House – the longest-serving sitting MP – Sir Peter Bottomley.

“I predict all over the country this weekend, next weekend and in the months to come, MPs will hold advice sessions. That is what we do,” he told the PA news agency.

“There is no perfect security for anybody. My view has always been that in many other walks of life you are at far greater risk than a Member of Parliament.

“MPs may get exceptional publicity. We are not exceptional people. We’re ordinary people trying to do an ordinary job as well as we can. We accept the risks.

“The question is – should MPs stop meeting their constituents face-to-face? The answer is we will go on meeting our constituents face-to-face.”

It is unclear at this stage whether the attacker had booked an appointment to see Sir David at his surgery, was waiting for him or arrived during the surgery.

After a fireball streaked through the Canadian sky, Ruth Hamilton, of British Columbia, found a 2.8-pound rock the size of a large man’s fist near her pillow

Ruth Hamilton was fast asleep in her home in British Columbia when she awoke to the sound of her dog barking, followed by “an explosion.” She jumped up and turned on the light, only to see a hole in the ceiling. Her clock said 11:35 p.m.

At first, Ms. Hamilton, 66, thought that a tree had fallen on her house. But, no, all the trees were there. She called 911 and, while on the phone with an operator, noticed a large charcoal gray object between her two floral pillows.

“Oh, my gosh,” she recalled telling the operator, “there’s a rock in my bed.”

A meteorite, she later learned.

The 2.8-pound rock the size of a large man’s fist had barely missed Ms. Hamilton’s head, leaving “drywall debris all over my face,” she said. Her close encounter on the night of Oct. 3 left her rattled, but it captivated the internet and handed scientists an unusual chance to study a space rock that had crashed to Earth.

“It just seems surreal,” Ms. Hamilton said in an interview on Wednesday. “Then I’ll go in and look in the room and, yep, there’s still a hole in my ceiling. Yep, that happened.”

Meteoroids hurl toward Earth every hour of every day. When they’re large enough, survive the trip through the Earth’s atmosphere and stick a landing, they become meteorites. People collect them. Others end up in museums. Some are sold on eBay. In February, Christie’s held a record-shattering auction of rare meteorites, raking in more than $4 million.

On the night the meteorite crashed Ms. Hamilton’s sleep in Golden, a town of 3,700 people about 440 miles east of Vancouver, other Canadians had heard two loud booms and seen a fireball streaking across the sky. Some caught the phenomenon on video, according to University of Calgary researchers.

After Ms. Hamilton called 911, an officer who went into her house suggested at first that the stray rock may have originated from a blast from roadwork at a nearby highway, she said. But the workers had not done any blasting that night.

Then the officer took another guess: “I think you have a meteorite in your bed.”

Then the officer took another guess: “I think you have a meteorite in your bed.”

Ms. Hamilton did not sleep the rest of that night, she said, and sat in a chair, sipping tea as the meteorite sat on her bed. Ms. Hamilton told local news outlets that she kept the news to herself at first, but she later reported the episode to researchers at the University of Western Ontario, where Peter Brown, a professor there, confirmed the rock was a meteorite “from an asteroid.”

Ms. Hamilton, who is retired and said she used to be the manager of a local chamber of commerce, also told her family and friends. “My granddaughters can say that their grandmother just almost got killed in her bed by a meteorite,” she said.

Meteorites have landed in people’s homes and yards before. In 1982, a six-pounder crashed into a house in Wethersfield, Conn., tore through its second- and first-floor ceilings, rolled into the living room and ricocheted through a doorway and into the dining room. In 2020, an Indonesian coffin maker was startled by a 4.4-pound meteorite that came through his roof.

The odds of a meteorite hurtling into someone’s home and hitting a bed in any given year is about one in 100 billion, Professor Brown said.

Ms. Hamilton’s rock was one of two meteorites that hit Golden that night. Researchers about 160 miles east, in Calgary, said they had traveled to the town to find the second one in a field less than a mile away from Ms. Hamilton’s house, after triangulating its location based on photographs and videos that several people around the area had sent in.

Alan Hildebrand, an associate professor at the University of Calgary who studies meteorites, said that he and his fellow researchers were so happy to get their hands on the rock that “I think we hugged.”


Meteorites offer a rare opportunity for scientists to learn more about the solar system and the asteroid belt. Researchers can sample their materials instead of gazing at them from afar.

Scientists said they could also use the meteorites to reconstruct their paths from outer space through the atmosphere to the ground, at which point the rocks may have lost about 90 percent of their mass. During the trip through the air, meteorites can heat up to around 2,000 degrees Celsius, or more than 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, while traveling at 50 times the speed of sound, though they may be cool to the touch by the time they reach the ground.

After the researchers are finished studying the meteorite, Ms. Hamilton said, she planned on keeping it since it landed on her property. She suggested she was lucky. Asked if she had bought a lottery ticket the next day, she said, no; she had already won.

“I never got hurt,” she said. “I’ve lived through this experience, and I never even got a scratch. So all I had to do is have a shower and wash the drywall dust away.”

The family accused Idris of luring the teenager with millions of naira.

"He went as far as bribing this girl with a gold of over N200million, iPhones, buying cars for her, giving her millions of naira – all to buy her attention. He started meeting different people that he wanted to know the girl’s family; he married the girl, just like that.

Two US researchers have won the 2021 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for work that unlocked the secrets of the sense of touch.

Prof David Julius, a physiologist at the University of California in San Francisco, and Prof Ardem Patapoutian, a neuroscientist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, were honoured for their discovery of receptors in the skin that sense heat, cold and touch – making them crucial for survival. The work paves the way for a range of new medical treatments for conditions such as chronic pain.

The award, announced on Monday by the Nobel assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, is worth 10m Swedish kronor (£845,000), to be shared equally between the winners.

Prof Abdel El Manira, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute and member of the Nobel committee, said without the receptors we would not be able to sense our world, to feel the urge to pull our hand from a flame, or even stand upright. The discoveries, he said, had “profoundly changed our view of how we sense the world around us”.

“During the last year we have been socially distancing from each other, we have missed the sense of touch, the sense of the warmth that we give to each other during a hug,” he added. “And during a hug, these are the receptors that give us a feeling of the warmth, the closeness to each other.”

Through experiments that began in the 1990s, the scientists pieced together how nerve impulses are triggered in the skin so that temperature and pressure can be perceived.

Julius turned to capsaicin, the compound that makes chilli peppers burn, to identify sensors in the nerve endings in skin that respond to heat. Meanwhile, Patapoutian studied pressure-sensitive cells and discovered further receptors that respond to being poked and prodded.

The first breakthrough came when Julius and his co-workers created a library of millions of strands of DNA that corresponded to genes in sensory nerve cells. Through a painstaking effort that involved adding the genes one by one to cells that did not normally react to capsaicin, they finally identified a single gene that made cells respond to the burning compound. The gene allowed cells to build a protein named TRPV1, which turned out to respond to heat perceived as painful.

Working independently of one another, Julius and Patapoutian went on to use menthol to discover a receptor for sensing the cold, named TRPM8, and a host of others activated by a range of different temperatures.

On the back of their success, Patapoutian and his colleagues set out to understand how cells respond to touch. Through more laborious experiments into 72 genes they hit on one that allowed cells to respond – with a small electrical signal – when poked with a micropipette.

The gene carried the blueprints for a receptor the scientists named Piezo1, after the Greek word for pressure. Soon after they found a similar touch-sensitive receptor, Piezo2, which had a critical second role of sensing body position and movement, or proprioception.

Prof Patrick Haggard, at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said: “Julius and Patapoutian have shown, in beautiful mechanistic detail, how the full range of different bodily sensations work. Their research brilliantly reveals how the different sensory qualities that we experience every day, such as temperature and touch, each correspond to a specific individual molecule or set of molecules embedded in the membranes of sensory neurons that are found throughout the body.

“Their work on temperature sensations is particularly thought-provoking. Temperature is a single physical continuum, but we experience it through two different sensory systems, one for warmth and one for cold, and each depending on a distinctive molecule.

“The idea that the sensation of cold comes down, ultimately, to the presence of the TRPM8 molecule is just fascinating: it’s about the closest scientists have got to a truly mechanistic understanding of our own conscious experiences.”

The 2021 Nobel prize in physics will be announced on Tuesday followed by the chemistry prize on Wednesday.

A Tory police boss was forced to apologise for "disgraceful victim-blaming" after he said murdered Sarah Everard should never have "submitted" to her fake arrest.

[bold] North Yorkshire's Police and Crime Commissioner Philip Allott drew widespread fury after he said women should be "streetwise" in an alarming interview with the BBC on Friday. [/bold]

Sarah Everard, described as "beautiful" and "caring" by her grieving mum Susan, was raped and murdered by serving Met Police officer Wayne Couzens.

The killer deceived the 33-year-old marketing executive by falsely claiming she had breached Covid rules.

But Mr Allott, whose job as PCC is to hold North Yorkshire Police to account and represent people in the area, said women must be "streetwise" about when they "can and can't be arrested".

[bold] He said: "So women, first of all, need to be streetwise about when they can be arrested and when they can't be arrested. She should never have been arrested and submitted to that. [/bold]

"Perhaps women need to consider in terms of the legal process, to just learn a bit about that legal process".

Mr Allott later hastily deleted a tweet in which he appeared to double down on the statement.

It said: "Nobody is blaming the victim what I am saying is that we need to inform women far better of their rights, something I intend to action here in North Yorkshire ASAP."

He then posted a full apology, saying: "I would like to wholeheartedly apologise for my comments on BBC radio York earlier today, which I realise have been insensitive and wish to retract them in full."

Couzens was sentenced to a whole life sentence at the Old Bailey on Thursday.

Miss Everard's murder has sparked national outrage and intensified calls for the police and government to do more to protect women from male violence.

The Met Police is also under fire for issuing advice to women telling them they should run and call 999

Shadow domestic violence minister Jess Phillips told the Mirror: "This is disgraceful but unsurprising victim blaming we have become used to.

"This man is the exact problem we are talking about when we say the culture is wrong. Streetwise won't stop our rapes, streetwise won't stop our beatings, streetwise wouldn't have saved Sarah."

SNP leader and First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon called the comments "appalling".

She tweeted: "It’s not up to women to fix this. It’s not us who need to change.

"The problem is male violence, not women’s ‘failure’ to find ever more inventive ways to protect ourselves against it. For change to happen, this needs to be accepted by everyone."

MP for Newcastle North Catherine McKinnell tweeted: "This is a jaw dropping utter disgrace. Sickening sexist arrogance and ignorance. Violence against women is NEVER the fault of the victim. FULL STOP."

Lucy Arnold, who organised a vigil in York when Miss Everard died, said: "I think frankly that was a horrifically offensive thing to say.

"Does anyone really feel like they can stand up to a police officer?

"I am very confident I know my rights, I know the law, but no I wouldn't feel confident at all."