What’s being billed as the world’s largest sleep study suggests that getting too much sleep might be just as bad as not getting enough of it.

The study, led by Western University in London, Ont., was launched in June 2017 and involved more than 40,000 people from around the world.

According to researchers, the data suggests that consistently sleeping more or less than the recommended seven to eight hours per night can have a major impact on brain functions.

“The key thing here is that that’s on a regular basis,” said Dr. Conor Wild, the study’s lead author and a research associate at the university’s Owen Lab.

“So if you’re sleeping 11 hours every single day over a month, that could have an effect on your brain much like sleeping too little every day for a month.”

Western’s Brain and Mind Institute collected data from more than 40,000 people around the world for the study, with participants filling out an extensive questionnaire before moving on to a series of online cognitive tests.

“These are tests we’ve used for decades to understand specific functions in the brain and we’ve adapted them to turn them into little games to play on your iPad, phone, or your PC and that gave us information about how their brains were functioning.”

Speaking on London Live on 980 CFPL, Wild added that researchers were most surprised at the number of people reporting less sleep than recommended. Roughly half of the 40,000 participants reported typically sleeping less than 6.3 hours per night.

“A lot of people were sleeping four hours a night on average, and that had an effect of being 10 years older in terms of their performance on some of these tests.”

The research found that reasoning and verbal abilities were most strongly impacted by too much or too little sleep, while short-term memory performance was relatively unaffected

Wild noted that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to sleep.

“However, on average, across all the people we were looking at, this seems to be the trend,” he explained.

“One of the things we really want to dig in a bit more with this data and some more studies is really kind of examining this individual variability and how much does this result hold for individuals or are there some things that, maybe if you do this a lot or it’s part of your occupation, maybe it doesn’t have an effect. There are still some lingering questions.”

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Uganda is set to celebrate world food day that is aimed at Heightening awareness on hunger, food security and promotion of yield enhancing technologies to increase productivity in agricultural sector.

According to Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics, more than 1 billion people suffer from hunger as 36 million lose their lives. This means that one in every six people on Earth don’t get enough food to live a healthy life. Every five seconds a child under five years dies because of hunger, or of directly related causes.

The climax of activities will take place on October 6,at the Nabuin Zonal Agricultural Research and Development Institute in Karamoja sub-region. Under that theme ‘A Zero Hunger World by 2030 is Possible’, celebrations will focus on hunger, under nutrition, malnutrition and how these variables impact on development.

In the intervention to promote food and nutrition security, Ministry of agriculture has developed a number of policies which include the Food and Nutrition Policy (2003), the National Agricultural Policy (2013) and the National Action Plan for Nutrition (2015) and the National Agricultural Extension Policy (2015).

The Agriculture Sector Strategic Plan (2015/16-2019/20) which pushes for dietary diversification to ensure food security and promotes 15 priority commodity interventions for maize, bean, rice, cassava , banana, fruits (citrus, pineapples, mangoes), vegetables, coffee, tea, potato and dairy, beef, fisheries, poultry and apiary commodities products.

FAO indicates that Zero tolerance to hunger can help build a safer and prosperous world for everyone. FAO notes that, a dollar invested in hunger prevention could return between $15 and $139 in benefits and Zero hunger could save the lives of 3.1 million children a year.
“Ending child under nutrition could increase a developing country’s GDP by 16.5 percent and ending nutrition-related child mortality could increase a workforce by 9.4 percent,”

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South Africa has ratified the Tripartite Free Trade Agreement (FTA)becoming the fourth country to do so after Egypt, Uganda and Kenya. This is according to a notification sent by the South African Government to the Chair of the Tripartite Task Force, Ms. Chileshe Kapwepwe, who is the Secretary General of COMESA.

“This is excellent news,” said the Secretary General. “This development moves the tripartite process to near operationalization.”

The process of ratification has been set in motion in a number of member states and it is expected that this target will be reached by end of April 2019, which is the deadline that the Tripartite member states set for themselves. With this latest development, 10 more ratifications are now needed for the Agreement to enter into force.

“This development adds to the aura of expectations around the Tripartite Free Trade Area Agreement which groups 29 of the 55 countries negotiating the African continental Free Trade Area,” the COMESA Director of Trade and Customs, Dr Francis Mangeni, who is also a member of the technical negotiating team, said in Lusaka today, adding that all the Annexes to the TFTA Agreement have been concluded.

Transitional arrangements

On the basis of the provisions on transitional arrangements, he explained, once the threshold for minimum number of ratifications is achieved, then implementation of the Agreement commences immediately, on the basis of the principle of variable geometry. This is aided further, by the fact that exchange of tariff offers is near complete.

All the member states, save for Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU) countries, EAC countries and Egypt chose to offer their respective Regional Economic Communities’ preferential arrangements and were therefore not negotiating tariff offers.

“The negotiations between EAC and Egypt are complete,” Dr Mangeni said. “Those between SACU/Egypt and SACU/EAC are nearing completion. In the latter case, divergence has narrowed down to just one product line. All the negotiating parties have agreed to a deadline of December 2018.”

Rules of Origin

Negotiations on the Tripartite rules of origin are highly advanced. From the total of 5,387 tariff lines, Rules of Origin have now been developed for 3,267 tariff lines (At 6-digit HS 12 version), representing 60.8 per cent of all the tariff lines. In addition, a draft manual on application of the Rules of Origin has been developed and is ready for use. Trade can therefore commence on all the aforesaid tariff lines.

A number of tripartite instruments have also been developed and are now ready for use. The tripartite guidelines on implementation of Trade Remedies are ready for use and so are certificates of origin, export declaration and import declaration forms among others.

In addition, the Tripartite Agreement on the Movement of Business Persons has also been finalized and will be ready for use once it undergoes legal scrubbing.

“This latest ratification, moves the Tripartite process one step closer to the implementation stage, and it is likely to present more scope for early harvest and by extension, prospects for fast tracking the continental integration agenda,” Dr Mangeni said.

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The indigenous people of the contested Kyangwali refugee settlement have demanded for an independent investigation into their eviction, crimes against humanity and torture allegedly by officials from the Office of the Prime Minister.

The residents made the demand while meeting the Committee on Presidential Affairs during a fact-finding visit to the contested land in Hoima district. The MPs were in the area between October 5-7, 2018.

“Government efforts to better the lives of refugees has rendered us landless in our own country,” Said Issayana Peter, a father of six, who claims he owned 10 acres of land in the area on which he had a banana plantation, fruit trees and other food crops.

During the public hearing held at Kyangwali refugee camp headquarters, witnesses narrated gruesome acts of torture by the army and police allegedly aided by the Principal Settlement Officer, Bafaki Charles, who works with the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) and Lutaaya Vianey from Ministry of Lands.

“By the 1950s, I was not born when this refugee settlement was established; I also rely on documents available,” Bafaki responded while making his presentation to the Committee.

The locals rubbished the 2013 Oketta Report which recommended forceful eviction.

On 20 August 2013, over 60,000 residents were evicted by the army and police in Bukinda Parish to secure land for hosting Congolese refugees. The families later sued government, claiming to have lived with refugees since the 1960s when the refugee resettlement was started.

On 27 April 2015, Justice Simon Byabakama, who was the then Masindi Resident Judge, ordered the boundaries of the contested land to be resurveyed to ascertain whether the land claimed by the evicted families is within the resettlement scheme.

A joint survey report was submitted to court, which is yet to rule on the matter.

During the hearing of the case, some families were allowed back on the land.
“Currently we are being squeezed in one acre per family, forced to relocate and given no compensation for the development on our land. We pray that we follow the 1998 survey and life continues,” said the representative of Bukinda residents, Nestori Tumwesigye.

Sunday Matia, a resident of Bukinda village says the refugee settlement camp officials and the police came to his home one afternoon and directed him to leave in three days as his land had been allocated to a refugee family. Sunday, who is 39 years, blames government for reportedly grabbing his ancestral land.

Hon. Daniel Muheirwe (Buhaguzi County) who presented the petition to Parliament on 19 September 2018, said the land hosting Kyangwali refugee settlement was donated by the Bunyoro kingdom in 1950 to host Rwandan refugees.
“In 1998, government demarcated boundaries for the 91 square-km piece of land and the boundaries have been respected by the local communities. I wonder why government plans to extend the boundaries of Kyangwali refugee settlement by annexing 28 villages in Kasonga Parish,” said Muheirwe in his petition.
As a result, on 20 September 2018, Parliament directed the Office of the Prime Minister to immediately halt the proposed expansion of Kyangwali refugee settlement until the contested issues are resolved.
Parliament has tasked the Committee to assess the problem and report back to the House.

The Committee will also visit Bunyoro Kingdom authorities to ascertain the size and boundaries of the land, which was allocated to host Rwandese refugees in the 1950s.
Communities neighboring the refugee settlement are living in fear of eviction and have appealed to their leaders to intervene since some families have already been relocated.

The evicted people are from 31 villages in Kasonga parish.

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