{Rwanda National Police (RNP) has celebrated 17 years since its inception , a ceremony that coincided with the graduation of 364 cadet officers including 33 females at Nyamirambo Stadium.}
The officers that graduated began trainings on 31st August 2016.
Twenty of the graduates are from Rwanda Correctional Service (RCS). The training, on commencement, attracted 370 trainees but seven of them didn’t complete on account of various disciplinary and health reasons.
The ceremony has kicked off with presenting graduating officers to the Minister of Justice, Johnston Busingye and parade.
Established in 2000, police has so far contributed a lot to maintain national security and involved in international peacekeeping missions.
It was also involved in societal transformation activities where it connected citizens with off-grid electricity, availed safe water facilities among other activities carried out annually during the Police Week.
{Nurses and midwives have expressed concern over the standards of accreditation tests which are not related to their profession, leading to massive failures from joining the association of nurses and midwives, limiting their employment opportunities and or promotion.}
The accreditation tests are prepared by the Association of Nurses and Midwives. In the results released last week, only 171 (13%) of the 1231 practitioners passed to join the association.
The exams were attended by nurses and midwives that completed the first university degree (A1).
Nurses and midwives who talked to the media attributed the failure to malice and complicated examinations beyond their education level.
“They gave us tough exams beyond our education level that we all left the room complaining,” said Mushimiyimana Angeline who has been a nurse for 20 years.
“We performed well at our respective schools but the accreditation exams were very complicated,” said another nurse with 14 years of service.
Others expressed frustrations that the accreditation examinations are not related to the country’s curricula suspecting them to be copied from internet. They prayed thatacquiring accreditation in the association of nurses and midwives should be based on experience other than written exams.
The Secretary General of nurses and midwives, Julie Kimonyo explained that the accreditation exams are picked from schools’ curricula.
“A patient can’t select who to cure him/her. All patients must be cured by professionals with adequate knowledge and skills who can’t put their lives at risk. Such exams are prepared from their curricula and are related to their career,” he said.
{The Minister of Defense, Gen James Kabarebe has said that moral values, the spirit patriotism, high discipline, persistence, and commitment to goals and same vision gave RPA soldiers strength to win the liberation struggle and stop genocide despite the bitter experiences. }
Kabarebe made the observation yesterday during the launch of one month civic education bringing together Rwandan youth studying abroad ‘Indangamirwa’ held in Rwanda Defense Force’s Gabiro Combat Training Center in Gatsibo district, Eastern Province.
He explained that visionary leadership helped defeat state’s military backed by foreign support including Zaire.
“As we began the liberation struggle in 1990, the former Zaire president, Mobutu sent military support of ‘special division (commando)’. They evicted us from this position in Gabiro and withdrew into the park. We later reorganized and returned. We fiercely fought Zaire soldiers. Some of them lost lives here while others ran away. They robbed , crossed Rwamagana, Kigali, Gisenyi robbing until they reached Goma,” he said.
“We defeated them despite having small weapons. We had Paul Kagame as the only military expert from United States military academy. Our skills were below soldiers of Habyarimana who had attended ‘Ecole de Guerres’ (schools of war) in Belgium, France among others. They had advanced military education but we too outperformed them in terms of having constant moral values including farsighted leadership because having Paul Kagame as commander of the struggle brought apparent difference. He contributed 90% to winning the struggle,” he added.
Gen Kabarebe said discipline was the greatest weapon to defeat the enemy.
RPF liberation struggle which began in 1990 ended in 1994 after stopping genocide.
{Mukaruliza Monique, the High Commissioner of Rwanda to the Republic of Zambia and Permanent Representative to COMESA has presented her letters of credence to COMESA Secretary General Sindiso Ngwenya. }
Her Excellency Mukaruliza has since pledged unwavering commitment as permanent Representative to COMESA in putting her efforts to collaborate with the Secretariat to ensure that COMESA programmes are implemented in Rwanda and other member states by using her experience from the East African Commission (EAC).
“Rwanda is a member of COMESA enjoying the fruits of the various programmes being implemented by COMESA in our country ranging from trade facilitation for cross border trade and Climate change mitigation programmes,” Mukaruliza said.
She said Rwanda believes in the power of regional integration and it’s no wonder programmes like Cross Border Trade facilitation have changed the lives of the citizens of the country adding that it is also one way of increasing intra COMESA region trade.
Rwanda also trades in leather products within the COMESA region as well as other regional economic blocks like EAC where the country is also member.
She appreciated the facilities that COMESA has put in place like the tripartite arrangement among EAC-SADC and COMESA which she said “if implemented shall facilitate the free movement of goods and services, business people as well as free movement of labor across the region and result in accelerated development of the member states as well as the region at large.”
Accepting her letters of credence, Secretary General SindisoNgwenya appreciated the role Rwanda plays in fostering the regional and continental integration agenda sighting many programmes that Rwanda is hosting under COMESA.
The Secretary General made an assurance that the secretariat shall work together with the Permanent Representative to ensure that dreams of the fore father of having a fully integrated Africa be realized by implementing programmes that work towards achieving that goal.
The Secretary General said Rwanda’s economy is flourishing because of the visionary leadership of his excellence Paul Kagame the President of the Republic of Rwanda who has propelled the country from era of genocide to becoming one of the fastest growing economies on the continent.
“We are happy that Rwanda is hosting our Upper Airspace Programme funded by the African Development Bank AfDB called the Communication, Navigation, Satellite and Air Traffic Management Programmes (CNSATM) and shall now start implementation as the just ended Directors of Aviation meeting in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe have agreed on all the aspects of implementation,” Ngwenya said.
He said the COMESA region air space shall become more secure now that programmes is starting the implementation phase which will see COMESA manage its own air space and improve on the management of the upper air space and improve on the safety of the air space through integration with the lower air space.
“Quiet a good number of accidents happen during landing and takeoff and not in the upper air space and its for this reason that your signing of Credentials shall fast-track the implementation of the programme so that as a region our people can start reaping the benefits that comes with it,” He said.
The secretary General also said that COMESA is implementing many trade facilitation programmes that have enabled Small scale cross border traders to trade free with reduced cost of doing business.
{dfcu Bank has shed the Crane Bank Rwanda assets and liabilities off its books, choosing to focus on the Ugandan market.}
On Thursday, CBA Group issued a statement confirming that had been a rumour for over a month that it was acquiring Crane Bank Rwanda.
“Commercial Bank of Africa Limited (CBA) is pleased to announce that it has signed a definitive Sale and Purchase Agreement (SPA) to acquire 100 percent of Crane Bank Rwanda from dfcu Bank Limited (dfcu),” reads the notice issued by Mr Isaac Awuondo, the CBA Group Managing Director.
In January 2017, dfcu Bank acquired liabilities and assets of Crane Bank from Bank of Uganda (BoU) for an undisclosed fee. The acquisition included the Crane Bank Rwanda. It is understood that dfcu Bank did not have any interest in retaining the Crane Bank Rwanda assets on its books.
The majority shareholder of dfcu Bank, Arise B.V owns a 14.6 percent stake in Banque Populaire du Rwanda Ltd (BPR), which has 19 branches in the country. Crane Bank Rwanda had two branches in Rwanda in Kigali, the capital.
The amount CBA will pay remains undisclosed. CBA has operations in Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, and has a customer base of 27 million in East Africa mostly due to its micro-lending partnerships with Safaricom, MTN Uganda, MTN Rwanda and Vodacom Tanzania.
The Daily Monitor also understands that one of the reasons for the delay in disclosure of some details about the dfcu Bank rights issue at the AGM last week was because the Crane Bank Rwanda sell was still being negotiated.
“The transaction is subject to regulatory approval by National Bank of Rwanda (BNR), Bank of Uganda (BoU) and Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) as well as other relevant capital markets regulatory authorities,” reads the notice.
Dfcu Bank is expected to disclose details of its transactions around Crane Bank in a right issue prospectus at the end of this month.
Crane Bank Rwanda was the only Ugandan owned bank that had been operating in a foreign country. It was opened in 2014. The only other Ugandan owned bank to ever operate out of the Ugandan borders was Greenland Bank. It collapsed in 1999.
Mr Sudhir Ruperalia lost control of Crane Bank (a bank he started in the 1990’s) in October 2016. BoU took over its operations after a complete Shs220 billion capital wipe out; bringing an end to the questionable banking practices at what was Uganda’s third largest bank. On January 27, 2017, Crane Bank assets and liabilities were sold to dfcu Bank.
Dfcu Bank has since borrowed Shs180 billion from its largest shareholder to shore up its capital to meet BoU requirements.
An audit on Crane Bank also declared the former Crane Bank shareholders not to be “fit and proper” to own and operate a bank. This effectively meant that Crane Bank Rwanda could not stay in the hands of Mr Ruperalia.
{The 5th edition of the East Africa International Arbitration Conference (EAIAC) will be hosted in Kigali, Rwanda on the 28th and 29th of September.}
This year’s conference theme will be ‘Linkages between International Arbitration and Africa’s economy’.
EAIAC 2017 will deliberate on the success of the previous conferences held in Addis Ababa (2013), Nairobi (2014), Dar es Salaam (2015) and Kampala (2016) while crafting to look at the economic implications of international arbitration including the opportunities and challenges on the region’s business environment, foster capacity building in International arbitration while profiling East Africa’s competitiveness as an international trade and investment destination.
Kigali is the perfect host for this year’s event because Rwanda has made huge strides to become Africa’s model for doing business.
According to the 2017 World Bank Doing Business Rankings, Rwanda is rated second best place when it comes to Ease of Doing Business in Africa after Mauritius.
This year’s conference is hosted at the Kigali International Arbitration Conference, which is one of the earliest arbitration centers in East Africa.
{{A must-attend annual regional forum}}
EAIAC has grown to become a must-attend annual regional forum, attracting delegates representing leaders of different sectors of the region’s economy, regulators and governments.
The conference is also a perfect platform for international law firms – which include judges, magistrates, and arbitration professionals – to showcase their Africa practice at the same time giving the members of the general public a chance to show their inventive prowess.
Discussion points will include; East Africa’s mega projects and monetary value involved in East Africa-related international arbitration; the value of awards and how much money is potentially lost by countries (damages); and the potential of international arbitration as a money maker for African institutions and arbitrators, considering institutional fees and arbitrator fees.
EAIAC will also discuss the International Centre for Settlement of Investments Disputes (ICSID), New York Convention and local award enforcement.
Registration and conference details please email : info@gbsafrica.co.uk or visit the conference website : http://eaarbitration.com/
{A marimba-playing robot with four arms and eight sticks is writing and playing its own compositions in a lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The pieces are generated using artificial intelligence and deep learning.}
Researchers fed the robot nearly 5,000 complete songs — from Beethoven to the Beatles to Lady Gaga to Miles Davis — and more than 2 million motifs, riffs and licks of music. Aside from giving the machine a seed, or the first four measures to use as a starting point, no humans are involved in either the composition or the performance of the music.
The first two compositions are roughly 30 seconds in length. The robot, named Shimon, can be seen and heard playing them at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j82nYLOnKtM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MSk5PP9KUA.
Ph.D. student Mason Bretan is the man behind the machine. He’s worked with Shimon for seven years, enabling it to “listen” to music played by humans and improvise over pre-composed chord progressions. Now Shimon is a solo composer for the first time, generating the melody and harmonic structure on its own.
“Once Shimon learns the four measures we provide, it creates its own sequence of concepts and composes its own piece,” said Bretan, who will receive his doctorate in music technology this summer at Georgia Tech. “Shimon’s compositions represent how music sounds and looks when a robot uses deep neural networks to learn everything it knows about music from millions of human-made segments.”
Bretan says this is the first time a robot has used deep learning to create music. And unlike its days of improvising, when it played monophonically, Shimon is able to play harmonies and chords. It’s also thinking much more like a human musician, focusing less on the next note, as it did before, and more on the overall structure of the composition.
“When we play or listen to music, we don’t think about the next note and only that next note,” said Bretan. “An artist has a bigger idea of what he or she is trying to achieve within the next few measures or later in the piece. Shimon is now coming up with higher-level musical semantics. Rather than thinking note by note, it has a larger idea of what it wants to play as a whole.”
Shimon was created by Bretan’s advisor, Gil Weinberg, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology.
“This is a leap in Shimon’s musical quality because it’s using deep learning to create a more structured and coherent composition,” said Weinberg, a professor in the School of Music. “We want to explore whether robots could become musically creative and generate new music that we humans could find beautiful, inspiring and strange.”
Shimon will create more pieces in the future. As long as the researchers feed it a different seed, the robot will produce something different each time — music that the researchers can’t predict. In the first piece, Bretan fed Shimon a melody comprised of eighth notes. It received a sixteenth note melody the second time, which influenced it to generate faster note sequences.
Bretan acknowledges that he can’t pick out individual songs that Shimon is referencing. He is able to recognize classical chord progression and influences of artists, such as Mozart, for example. “They sound like a fusion of jazz and classical,” said Bretan, who plays the keyboards and guitar in his free time. “I definitely hear more classical, especially in the harmony. But then I hear chromatic moving steps in the first piece — that’s definitely something you hear in jazz.”
Shimon’s debut as a solo composer was featured in a video clip in the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) keynote and will have its first live performance at the Aspen Ideas Festival at the end of June. It’s the latest project within Weinberg’s lab. He and his students have also created a robotic prosthesis for a drummer, a robotic third arm for all drummers, and an interactive robotic companion that plays music from a phone and dances to the beat.
{Acting on a tip off from residents, Police in Gasabo district unearthed four sacks of cannabis that were hidden in a DR Congo-registered petroleum trailer.}
According to the Central Region Police Spokesperson, Superintendent of Police (SP) Emmanuel Hitayezu, residents of Nyacyonga village in Akamatamu of Jabana sector saw unusual sacked loaded behind the driver’s seat in a trailer that is meant to only transport petroleum products and reported to police.
“The truck had just arrived at the trailers’ parking spot in Jabana when resident called the police reporting unusual sacks on the truck. Our officers immediately followed up the reports and as they searched the trucks, they found the four sacks that had just been offloaded from the truck with plate number 7073AB19,” said the Central Region Police Spokesperson.
He went on to say that, upon seeing police officers, the drivers of the trailer escaped from the scene but police is still going on with the investigations to identify them and bring them to book.
“This is the result of your strong partnership and ownership by the public in ensuring own safety and security. These are the same substances that fuel most conflicts and crimes such as gender based violence, child abuse, assault and even parents who abandon their family responsibilities and spend most of the time consuming these psychotropic substances,” said SP Hitayezu.
Making and selling of these substances contravenes the law, especially articles 593 and 594 of the penal code, and article 24 of the law governing narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances and precursors in Rwanda.
Article 24 of the law on narcotics, also states that “any drink that exceeds forty five percent of alcohol and any other drink which doesn’t have the required quality for consumption, shall be considered as narcotic drug.”
The arrangement of the photoreceptors in our eyes allows us to detect socially {significant color variation better than other types of color vision, a team of researchers has found. Specifically, our color vision is superior at spotting “social signaling,” such as blushing or other facial color changes — even when compared to the type of color vision that we design for digital cameras and other photographic devices.}
“Our color vision is very strange,” says James Higham, an assistant professor in NYU’s Department of Anthropology and one of the study’s co-authors. “Our green receptor and our red receptor detect very similar colors. One would think that the ideal type of color vision would look different from ours, and when we design color detection, such as for digital cameras, we construct a different type of color vision. However, we’ve now shown that when it comes to spotting changes in color linked to social cues, humans outshine the type of color vision we’ve designed for our technologies.”
The study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences, focuses on trichromatic color vision — that is, how we process the colors we see, based on comparisons among how red, green, and blue they are.
One particularly interesting thing about how our visual system is structured is how significantly it differs from that of cameras. Notably, the green and red photoreceptors we use for color vision are placed very close together; by contrast, the equivant components in cameras are situated with ample (and even) spacing among them. Given that cameras are designed to optimally capture color, many have concluded that their ability to detect an array of colors should be superior to that of humans and other primates — and wondered why our vision is the way it is.
One idea that has been well-studied is related to foraging. It hypothesizes that primate color vision allows us to detect between subtle shades of green and red, which is useful, for example, when fruit are ripening against green leaves in a tree. An alternative hypothesis relates to the fact that both humans and primates must be able to spot subtle changes in facial color in social interactions. For instance, some species of monkeys give red signals on their faces and on genitals that change color during mating and in social interactions. Similarly, humans exhibit facial color changes such as blushing, which are socially informative signals.
In their study, the researchers had 60 human subjects view a series of digital photographs of female rhesus macaque monkeys. These primates’ facial color has been known to change with their reproductive status, with female faces becoming redder when they are ready to mate. This process, captured in the series of photographs, provides a good model for testing the ability to not only detect colors, but also to spot those linked to social cues — albeit across two species.
In different sets of photographs, the scientists developed software that replicated how colors look under different types of color vision, including different types of color blindness, and the type of trichromatic vision seen in many artificial systems, with even spacing of the green and red photoreceptors. Some of the study’s subjects viewed photos of the transformation of the monkeys’ faces as a human or primate would see them while others saw pictures as a color-blind person would and others as a camera would. During this period, the study’s subjects had to discriminate between the different colors being exhibited by the monkeys in the photos.
Overall, the subjects viewing the images using the human/primate visual system more accurately and more quickly identified changes in the monkeys’ face coloring.
“Humans and many other primates have an unusual type of color vision, and no one is sure why,” first author Chihiro Hiramatsu of Japan’s Kyushu University notes. “Here, we provide one of the first experimental tests of the idea that our unusual vision might be related to detecting social signals in the faces of others.”
“But, perhaps more importantly, these results support a rarely tested idea that social signaling itself, such as the need to detect blushing and facial color changes, might have had a role in the evolution or maintenance of the unusual type of color vision shown in primates, especially those with conspicuous patches of bare skin, including humans, macaques, and many others,” concludes co-author Amanda Melin of the University of Calgary.
{What you know is what will empower you; you are bound by what you know, and you can hardly go beyond that.}
There are some truths some people have come to discover in their life and it’s working for them, and there are truths that others haven’t yet discovered and don’t know the power in it.
These truths below might sound simple, but they are very powerful when honestly applied:
{{1. No one owes you anything }}
Wake up every morning with this mindset that no one owes you anything. Some people limit what they can do by thinking the world is unfair to them and people owe them certain things, but this is untrue. Everything you need to succeed is deep within you, all you need do is reach out within and bring out that inner zeal or fire.
{{2. You can’t please everyone }}
Stop living to please people, because you limit yourself when you do this. If you are aiming to please everyone and live the way others want you to live, it’ll be impossible for you to achieve anything great. You can’t fulfil everyone’s expectations; so create your own expectations and try to fulfil it.
{{3. Everything starts with your mind }}
Every great thing was first conceived in the mind, formed and then believed that it will become great. Your mind is your most powerful tool; it’s what you conceive in it that will be actualised in your life.
Positivity and negativity starts from the mind, and it’s the force that can determine just how far you can go.
{{4. Action is everything }}
People want the best things, they want to achieve impossible feats and they want to achieve great things in life, but they are afraid of starting; they are afraid of the part called ACTION. Action is very important if you must realise that great dream. Saint Francis of Assisi said: “Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”
{{5. Change starts from within }}
You’re the change that you want to see, you have the power to change everything around you, but the problem lies when you wait for others to change what you should change.
If you can realise that change starts from within, then you’d go a long way.
