Ghanaian Highlife legend Daddy Lumba is set to return to the stage in the United States and Canada after more than 20 years.
Fans who have eagerly awaited his comeback will finally have the chance to experience his electrifying performances live. With an opportunity to sing along to his timeless hits and relive cherished memories, the tour promises to be an unforgettable celebration of Highlife music.
The Daddy Lumba Live in USA & Canada Tour is expected to bring back the classic rhythms and soulful melodies that have shaped Ghanaian music for generations. For many, this marks a long-awaited reunion with one of Ghana’s most celebrated musicians, whose influence continues to transcend time.
Beyond the music, the tour is more than just a concert—it is a celebration of culture and unity. Ghanaians in the diaspora will get the opportunity to reconnect with their roots, while non-Ghanaians will experience authentic Ghanaian entertainment at its finest.
The highly anticipated event is being organized by TM Entertainmentz, led by CEO Terry Masson. Known for its work in promoting Ghanaian and African artists globally, the company promises a world-class concert experience.
Organizers say the official tour dates will be announced soon.
Across North America, crowds gathered to witness a rare celestial event as a total solar eclipse cast its shadow on Monday, marking the first such occurrence in seven years.
From a Mexican beach resort where the eclipse made landfall to the banks of the Ohio River and beyond to Niagara Falls at the U.S.-Canadian border, skywatchers marveled at the spectacle with cheers, music, and even matrimony.
In Russellville, Arkansas, nearly 400 couples exchanged vows under the eclipse’s shadow in a mass wedding event called “Elope and the Eclipse.”
Meanwhile, at Niagara Falls State Park, despite cloudy skies, two weddings and a marriage proposal added to the magic of the moment for the gathered 2,000 people.
As the eclipse reached totality, the crowd erupted in awe and joy, shouting praises for the breathtaking sight.
A band serenaded the retreat of the lunar shadow with a rendition of R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon,” adding to the festive atmosphere.
Across the border in Niagara Falls, Ontario, a record-breaking 309 people dressed as the sun, setting a new world record for the largest solar costume gathering.
Participants from around the globe, including Singapore and London, joined in this celestial celebration, highlighting the unity and wonder sparked by this rare astronomical event.
The media talked to him as part of a bigger investigation into reports of child sexual abuse in the church over many years, called The Truth.
Many people have named a hotline to report sexual abuse in the church. This person’s name is just one of over 700 names given to the hotline.
The group claims it is dealing with all accusations of abuse.
The church doesn’t have a name, but it’s often called The Truth or The Way. People think it has around 100,000 members all over the world, with most of them in North America.
Two women who were also abused by a church leader as kids set up a hotline last year to hear from other people who have been abused. The hotline has helped show how widespread the abuse may be. People called to say that they were also hurt, and their stories go back a long time until now.
Former and current church members tell the media that the church’s secretive and closed-off ways have allowed abuse to thrive. There are many rules in this group. One of them is that people in the group should marry each other and not spend too much time with people from outside the group.
A Scottish evangelist started the church in Ireland in 1897. The church is based on ministers sharing teachings from the New Testament by talking to people.
One important thing about it is that ministers give away their things and stay with church members as they go from place to place, telling people about the gospel. The children who visit these homes are more likely to be hurt by people who live there, according to the insiders.
Michael Havet, who used to go to the church, said he was hurt by Robert Corfield when he was 12 years old in the 1980s.
“Mr Havet says that people used to call him ‘Bob’s little companion’ and it made him feel bad. He still feels this way. ”
After hurting him, Mr. Havet says Mr. Corfield would make him kneel next to him and pray.
“He says I had to work hard to move past that and start praying again. ”
When the media asked Mr. Corfield about the child abuse accusations, he admitted that it happened for six years in the 1980s.
This is the first time he has admitted to hurting children in public. Before this, people from his church talked to him about it and he wrote two letters to Mr. Havet in 2004 and 2005 asking for forgiveness and saying he was getting help from a therapist. In a letter, Mr. Corfield said he was “making a list of victims”.
“I want to make sure everyone I hurt gets help,” he wrote.
But when the media asked Mr. Corfield about it, he said there were no other victims like Michael. He also admitted to giving massages to two or three other teenagers.
Abuser gets a new chance to start over.
Mr Havet and 11 other people have told the media that there has been a lot of abuse in The Truth for a long time, but it has been ignored or hidden. Some of the people who have been accused of the abuse have stayed in important jobs for many years.
Mr Havet thinks that the way the church handled his case is a perfect example.
In 1993, he told Dale Shultz, the top church leader in Saskatchewan, about the abuse he experienced. Dale Shultz is also known as an “overseer”. Overseers are leaders of the church. There is one for each US state and Canadian province with active followers.
Mr Shultz didn’t tell the police. Later, he attacked Mr. Havet because he thought Mr. Havet had told other people about the abuse accusations.
“Mr Havet grabbed me and yelled, then he slammed my head against a hard pole, which made it start bleeding. ”
Mr Havet says that Mr Shultz told him to leave the church. Meanwhile, Robert Corfield, who abused him when he was a child, was relocated to be a minister in Montana.
Mr Corfield told the media that he thought it was Mr. Shultz’s choice to send him to Montana, and he stayed there for 25 years.
“He told me that it would give me a new start and also create distance between me and the victim. ”
Last year, Mr. Corfield was fired as a minister after someone in the church told him about Michael’s abuse. The media saw emails from inside the church about this. One email also said “there might be more people who were hurt. ”
The former minister said to the media that he left his job on his own when Michael accused him. He also said that he has not been told about any other accusations.
When the BBC asked Dale Shultz about the information, he said in an email that most of it was wrong. But, he refused to give more information.
A big problem happening all over the world.
Mr Havet is one of over 1,000 people who used to be in a group and now talk to a hotline set up by Advocates for The Truth.
The group started last year by Americans Cynthia Liles, Lauren Rohs and Sheri Autrey.
They claim to have been given the names of over 700 people who are suspected of something.
All the women used to be part of The Truth, and Lauren Rohs and Sheri Autrey say they were hurt by the same man.
The man was Ms Rohs’ dad, a senior minister named Steve Rohs.
In 2019, Lauren Rohs found Ms. Autrey after reading her story of being abused as a child on the internet.
In the post, Ms Autrey talked about how her abuser used to sing a song called Maneater by the 80s pop duo Hall & Oates to her when she was in his bedroom at night.
Ms Rohs realized right away that the man they were saying did the bad thing was actually her father, because he used to sing the same song to her when she was little.
“I was shocked,” said the 35 year-old. “I was extremely confused. ”
She says that her father hurt her in many ways for a long time, since she was very young.
At the same time, Ms. Autrey says Steve Rohs stayed at her family’s house in Tulare County, California, for two months in 1982. She was 14 years old at the time, and he sexually abused her every day.
He sang Maneater because he wanted to manipulate me by making me look like a seductive person, the 54-year-old says.
The two women are 20 years apart in age. When his daughter was born, Mr. Rohs stopped working and started a family in San Diego, California. They went to live in Washington state, Idaho, and Colorado afterwards.
Lauren Rohs says her dad gave different reasons for why they moved a lot, like saying, “God wants us to be in a new place”.
The BBC sent Mr. Rohs emails and messages on social media asking about the accusations, but he didn’t answer.
Abuse culture continues to exist.
Ms Rohs says that when she was in the church in the 1990s and 2000s, the workers were like very important people who were never criticized, and people who call the abuse hotline now say that this is still happening.
Just like Mr. Autrey said she told people about her abuser, but he was still protected.
“I was really afraid, soiled, embarrassed, and felt guilty,” said Ms. Autrey, who was 17 years old at the time and thought she would be in a lot of trouble.
But her mother believed her immediately and told the California state overseer, who has passed away since then.
On 11 May 1986, Mr. Rohs wrote a letter admitting to kissing and touching a teen and asking for forgiveness. The overseer saw the letter and the BBC also read it.
Mr Rohs came to Ms. Autrey’s house with some people and said sorry to her.
Ms Autrey remembers saying that he wasn’t sorry because if he was, he would have apologized a long time ago.
Even though Mr. Rohs confessed to hurting children, he still had a lot of respect and power in the church. His daughter says he got a higher position in the church in 1994. He became an elder, a person who leads meetings in his own home.
The media knows that he lives in Minnesota.
The gates for the water to come in are being opened.
The hotline was started because the person in charge of Oregon, Dean Bruer, died in 2022.
He was a very important leader for The Truth and worked for the group for 46 years in six different US states.
His replacement wrote a letter saying Mr. Bruer has a history of hurting and sexually assaulting young victims.
It’s not known why the letter was written, but it got out and ended up on Facebook and TikTok.
Then more people began to come out and share their own experiences of being mistreated.
“I believed the hotline was only for Dean Bruer’s victims, but it actually allowed many more people to come forward,” Ms. Rohs explains
The friends now want justice that they couldn’t get before.
Ms Rohs says finding Sheri was a very special and powerful healing experience.
Ms Autrey says it has been upsetting for survivors to hear the amount of bad and evil things again.
Our situation was already bad, but seeing other people in such terrible situations makes me very angry. It has been not very nice, but also worth it. Ms Autrey left the Advocates in December.
Michael Havet with his dog. Picture from Advocates For The Truth.
The media sent an email with the allegations to over 20 people in charge in North America because The Truth does not have a main leader.
The only person who replied was Rob Newman, who is in charge of California.
“We take all abuse claims seriously and investigate them,” he wrote in an email, before Mr. Corfield admitted to wrongdoing.
“Our main worry is that victims get the right kind of help from experts. ” We take all reports of abuse very seriously. We think it’s important for everyone to get training on how to report abuse. We also encourage everyone to report any issues to the right legal authorities.
Ms Autrey thinks that things will not get better until those responsible for making mistakes are put in jail.
“It’s a very effective tool for criminals,” she says.
“It’s a very good system that has been around for 120 years. “
A 10-foot-long (3-meter-long) relative of duck-billed dinosaurs crushed stiff plant stems and leaves with its strong teeth and jaws about 100 million years ago in what is now Utah.
It probably wasn’t paying attention to the changing environment around it since it was too busy chewing. The bones of this newly discovered species, however, provide information about life during the middle of the Cretaceous Period (145 million to 66 million years ago), when hotter air and rising sea levels changed the structure of leafy ecosystems on land.
The plant-eater was an early ornithopod — a group of mostly bipedal herbivorous dinosaurs. By the Cretaceous’ end, ornithopods had become the era’s most successful vegetarians, including duck-billed hadrosaurs, sometimes called “cows of the Cretaceous,” and crested Parasaurolophus, among others.
Ornithopods first appeared during the Jurassic (201.3 million to 145 million years ago) and though early species were once common across North America, populations dwindled and died out as Earth warmed. These new fossils provide evidence that some early lineages persisted despite the changing climate, researchers reported June 7 in the journal PLOS One.
Analysis of the bones surprised them — the animal appeared to be a close relative of rhabdodontomorphs, a type of ornithopod previously known almost entirely from European fossils.
The newfound species, named Iani (YAH-nee) smithi, is the first early ornithopod from this part of the Cretaceous to be discovered in North America. It’s an important find because it offers a glimpse into a time in North America from which very little is known about the continent’s dinosaurs, said Darla Zelenitsky, an assistant professor in the department of geoscience at the University of Calgary in Canada.
“This new fossil suggests that species of Rhabdodon-like ornithopods were more diverse and lingered around longer in North America than previously realized,” Zelenitsky, who was not involved in the study, told CNN in an email.
The dinosaur’s genus name — Iani — is a nod to its changing world. It references the two-faced Janus, the Roman god of transitions, the study authors reported.
Paleontologists excavated the fossils in 2015 at a site called the Mussentuchit Member in southern Utah, said lead study author Lindsay Zanno, head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and an associate research professor in biological sciences at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
The bones included a skull, some ribs and vertebrae, limb bones and parts of the pelvis. Well-preserved Cretaceous skulls from this part of North America are extremely rare; the region once bordered a vast inland sea, and bones fossilize poorly in coastal humidity, Zanno told CNN in an email.
“Most of the specimens we find in the Mussentuchit are highly fragmentary or in rough shape,” Zanno said. By comparison, these fossils were in such good condition that the researchers were even able to identify the specimen as a juvenile.
“The bones of its spine are not fused together, leaving room for it to grow,” Zanno explained.
Because rhabdodontomorphs are known almost exclusively from Europe (with some possible species identified in Australia), the scientists weren’t expecting to find one in late Cretaceous deposits in North America.
However, a number of features in the animal resembled those of rhabdodontomorphs, including unique cheekbones; large, deeply ridged teeth; and the position of an opening in the skull for an artery. Other features, such as the shape of the braincase and palate, and the positions of teeth toward the front of the face, indicated that it was a new species.
Because I. smithi is a primitive ornithopod, it can offer clues about how the group became so successful during the late Cretaceous, Zelenitsky said in the email.
Hadrosaurs, which evolved tens of millions of years after I. smithi, adapted to share ecosystems with tyrannosaurs, some of the fiercest land predators ever known. And they managed to do so without the benefit of horns or armor that protected other herbivorous dinosaurs, Zelenitsky said.
“Perhaps ornithopod species evolved a certain way or adopted certain behaviors to succeed,” she said. “Primitive forms, like Iani, are near the root of the ornithopod evolutionary tree and surely will provide some answers.”
I. smithi’s fossils also provide a crucial puzzle piece from a time in Earth’s past when changing climate transformed the planet, extinguishing many North American dinosaur species. Preserved remains from such times could offer valuable insights into navigating a warming world today, Zanno added.
“The more we can understand about how these changes impacted ancient animals, the better we can prepare ourselves for what we stand to face in the future.”
