Gunmen shoot former NHRC boss in Benue

Former Executive Secretary of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Prof. Bem Angwe, was on Saturday shot by some yet to be identified gunmen in Gboko town, Gboko Local Government Area of Benue State.

Sun newspaper reports that the former NHRC boss was shot in the leg at a filling station around Gyado area of the town at about 10am on Saturday.

The situation created pandemonium in the area as people scampered for safety while the gunmen suspected to be political thugs were said to have left the scene unchallenged after carrying out their mission.

Benue State Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), DSP Catherine Anene, confirmed the shooting to journalists in Makurdi.

However, she noted that the state Police Command was yet to get full details of the incidence at the time of filing this report.

Meanwhile, the former NHRC boss was initially moved to a hospital in Gboko but had to be moved again to the Benue State University Teaching Hospital (BSUTH) in Makurdi for “security” reasons.

- DAILY POST

4 states record slow growth in food prices as inflation hits 11.31%

Benue, Delta, Kogi and Ondo states have recorded a slow growth in food prices just as consumer price index (CPI) slowed to 11.31% in February.  

This is according to the February CPI and inflation report the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released on Friday.

The report said year on year, CPI which measures inflation, was lower by 0.06 percent points than the 11.37% rate recorded in January.

Urban inflation rate also increased by 11.59 percent (year-on-year) in February from 11.66 percent recorded in January, while the rural inflation rate increased by 11.05 percent in February from 11.11 percent in January 2019.

“The consumer price index, (CPI) which measures inflation increased by 11.31 percent (year-on-year) in February 2019. This is 0.06 percent points lower than the rate recorded in January 2019 (11.37) percent,” the report read.

“On month-on-month basis, the Headline index increased by 0.73 percent in February 2019, this is 0.01 percent rate lower than the rate recorded in January 2019 (0.74) percent.

“The percentage change in the average composite CPI for the twelve months period ending February 2019 over the average of the CPI for the previous twelve months period was 11.56 percent, showing 0.24 percent point from 11.80 percent recorded in January 2019.

“On month on month basis…February 2019 food inflation was highest in Taraba (2.95%), Ogun (2.73%) and Nasarawa (2.42%), while Benue, Delta, Kogi and Ondo all recorded food price deflation or negative inflation (general decrease in the general price level of goods and services or a negative inflation rate) in February 2019.”

Benue, Delta, Kogi and Ondo states have recorded a slow growth in food prices just as consumer price index (CPI) slowed to 11.31% in February.  

This is according to the February CPI and inflation report the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released on Friday.

The report said year on year, CPI which measures inflation, was lower by 0.06 percent points than the 11.37% rate recorded in January.

Urban inflation rate also increased by 11.59 percent (year-on-year) in February from 11.66 percent recorded in January, while the rural inflation rate increased by 11.05 percent in February from 11.11 percent in January 2019.

“The consumer price index, (CPI) which measures inflation increased by 11.31 percent (year-on-year) in February 2019. This is 0.06 percent points lower than the rate recorded in January 2019 (11.37) percent,” the report read.

“On month-on-month basis, the Headline index increased by 0.73 percent in February 2019, this is 0.01 percent rate lower than the rate recorded in January 2019 (0.74) percent.

“The percentage change in the average composite CPI for the twelve months period ending February 2019 over the average of the CPI for the previous twelve months period was 11.56 percent, showing 0.24 percent point from 11.80 percent recorded in January 2019.

“On month on month basis…February 2019 food inflation was highest in Taraba (2.95%), Ogun (2.73%) and Nasarawa (2.42%), while Benue, Delta, Kogi and Ondo all recorded food price deflation or negative inflation (general decrease in the general price level of goods and services or a negative inflation rate) in February 2019.”

- THECABLE

Great start for Zidane’s second coming as Real Madrid coach

Zinedine Zidane’s second spell as Real Madrid coach got off to a promising start with a 2-0 win at home to Celta Vigo in La Liga on Saturday.

The two goals came thanks to goals from Isco and Gareth Bale, who had fallen out of favour with previous coach Santiago Solari.

Spain midfielder Isco was handed his first start in the league since October by returning hero Zidane and broke the deadlock in the 62nd.

He only had to tap in a low cross from Karim Benzema at close range.

Luka Modric had a goal ruled out for offside earlier in the second half and Bale, who had struck the crossbar in the first period, sealed victory with a shot in off the post in the 77th minute.

The goal further lifted the mood at the Santiago Bernabeu.

Real are third in the league standings with 54 points after 28 games, two behind second-placed Atletico Madrid who visit Athletic Bilbao later on Saturday.

They are nine points behind leaders Barcelona who play at Real Betis on Sunday.

This was not quite as resounding a performance as the 5-0 win over Deportivo La Coruna in Zidane’s first game as Real coach in 2016.

Yet it was still a therapeutic win for a team which had looked lost since the Frenchman announced his resignation after last year’s Champions League final.

Zidane had said on his return that changes were needed at Madrid after haphazard results had seen Julen Lopetegui sacked in October.

Lopetegui’s replacement Solari was also dismissed and the team was left with no trophies left to fight for this season.

The Frenchman’s line-up showed he was serious as he brought back goalkeeper Keylor Navas, as well as Isco and Marcelo into the side.

Those were players who had all started in the Champions League final win over Liverpool but had been cast aside by Solari.

Navas was called into action early to palm away a goal-bound header from Maxi Gomez, but Madrid had the better of the first half.

They nearly took the lead when Bale smashed against the bar, while Sergio Ramos and Toni Kroos also came close.

Madrid looked to have gone ahead when Modric’s shot bounced into the net.

The goal was however ruled out after a pitchside Video Assistant Referee (VAR) review ruled Raphael Varane had been offside and obstructing Celta goalkeeper Ruben Blanco’s view.

Isco soon brought a smile back to the Bernabeu faithful by guiding Benzema’s cross into the net after an impressive run by Marco Asensio.

Much has been said about whether Zidane’s return could mean the end of Bale’s career in Madrid, but the Wales forward capped a strong display by sealing victory.

He has now scored three goals in his last two games under Zidane and further adding to the celebratory mood. (Reuters/NAN)

FA : Poorest performance yet - Solskjaer

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer says Manchester United took a big step backwards after producing their poorest performance under him in their 2-1 FA Cup quarter-final defeat to Wolves.

Second-half goals from Raul Jimenez and Diogo Jota saw Wolves go through to the semi-finals with Marcus Rashford's stoppage-time goal not enough to save United at Molineux.

It means after a run of nine away wins in a row, Solskjaer has seen his side lose back-to-back games against Arsenal and Wolves.

"It was a big step backwards I have got to say," said Solskjaer. "That was the poorest performance since I got here.

"Last week we were happy with the performance but today we never had the urgency or the quality on the ball.

"Without the ball we did OK first half but the tempo on the ball wasn't high enough so we played into their hands really.

"I think we felt too comfortable in possession. We never managed to put their goalkeeper under pressure.

"We know we played well against Arsenal last week and didn't get what we deserved. This week we did get what we deserved because we never deserved to win this game."

With United still chasing a place in the Premier League's top four and having a Champions League quarter-final against Barcelona to look forward to, Solskjaer is not too downbeat.

"Of course, you can't sit down and sulk too long," he added. "Of course we are disappointed, everyone is disappointed with the result today.

"But we are ready to go again after the internationals. We have so much to play for. Manchester United in April and May always find our form.

"We cannot wait for the challenge for third and, of course, big nights like when Barcelona come. There are so many highlights to look forward to.

"Don't worry about the players' attitude because when we come back again we will give it a good go."

- SKY SPORTS

Formerly Homeless Student Gets Into 17 Colleges, on His Own

The odds were stacked against Dylan Chidick in the summer of 2017. A Jersey City high school student, he was homeless and struggling to study in a shelter. His twin brothers had heart conditions and needed extra care. His mother had lost her job.

But this week, he learned that he had been accepted to 17 colleges, including Siena College, Kean University, Caldwell University and York College of Pennsylvania. His academic efforts stood in sharp contrast to the stories of privilege and wealth that emerged from the wide-ranging college admissions scam, in which dozens of wealthy and high-profile parents allegedly bought their children’s admission into elite universities.

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After the many lessons that Dylan, 17, has had to learn about life’s odds, here was one more.

“I think it is unfair that people could just buy their way in,” said Dylan, speaking on Thursday during a break from classes. “But I know that it has been happening for a long time, and there is always going to be someone with more privilege and more connections, to have it easier than others.”

“And that means that you have to work harder to achieve the same goals,” he said.

Any lingering faith in a system of meritocracy was challenged on Tuesday when federal prosecutors charged 50 people in what they called the “largest college admissions scam ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice.” The prosecutors alleged that the parents involved paid millions of dollars in bribes to secure spots for their privileged children.

By contrast, other students across the country spoke to The Times this week about the obstacles they had to overcome to prepare for college, such as finding jobs to help their families pay bills or to save for tuition, as well as taking tests over and over, without the benefit of tutors, in hopes of improving their scores and their prospects.

Dylan’s college application process was a fraught period of test-taking, late nights and hopeful anticipation.

The first time he took the SAT, he realized he had not started studying for it early enough, and he thought he could do better. He spent long nights studying the second time around, and started preparing further in advance, in hopes of becoming the first person in his family to go to college.

Dylan’s family immigrated from Trinidad when he was 7 and settled in Brooklyn, later moving to Jersey City when they were priced out.

He enrolled at Henry Snyder High School, where he became an honors student and took advanced placement classes. His mother, Khadine Phillip, found work as a home health care aide. His brothers, who are now 11, needed open-heart surgery and suffered from fainting spells, which Dylan said meant that he had to watch them extra carefully at the playground.

In mid-2017, Ms. Phillip lost her job and the family lost their home, Dylan said.

They moved into a shelter, where they stayed for several months. Even though he would have preferred having a quiet place to study, where he could stay up late to work without having to follow a curfew, Dylan made the most of it and persisted.

He took advanced placement classes that summer, worked at a recreation center, and returned to the shelter at 9 p.m. to study.

Eventually, with the help of Women Rising, an organization in Jersey City that helps women and their families find housing, counseling and social services, Dylan and his family found a permanent place to live.

It was then Dylan started preparing to apply to colleges. Helped by fee-waivers that are available to first-generation college students and those from low-income families, he cast a wide net in his potential choices. He also pushed aside the words imprinted in his memory from other students and from educators who had doubted him as a child.

“It taught me to be persistent,” he said. “Just because you hear ‘no' once doesn’t mean you are going to hear ‘no’ again.”

Hard work helped form his character, he said. He is now hoping to receive his 18th acceptance notice from his first choice school — the College of New Jersey, where he has friends. He plans to ultimately become a lawyer.

“Even before me and my family were homeless, I always knew I wanted to go to college,” he said.

But after everything they went through, he became even more determined. “I vowed to never let my family get into that situation again,” he said.

- THE NEW YORK TIMES

DNA from 200-year-old pipe sheds light on life of enslaved African woman

Archaeologists used DNA taken from a broken clay pipe stem found in Maryland to build a picture of an enslaved woman who died around 200 years ago and had origins in modern-day Sierra Leone. One researcher called the work “a mind-blower”.

“In this particular context, and from that time period, I think it’s a first,” team member Hannes Schroeder told the Washington Post.
“To be able to get DNA from an object like [a pipe stem] is quite exciting. Also, it is exciting for descendent communities … Through this technology, they’re able to make a connection not only to the site but potentially back to Africa.”

The pipe stem was found at the Belvoir plantation in Crownsville, Maryland, where enslaved people lived until 1864 and where a likely slave cemetery was recently found. DNA taken from the pipe linked back to a woman either directly from or descended from the Mende people, who lived in west Africa, in an area now part of Sierra Leone.
Julie Schablitsky, the chief archaeologist with the Maryland state highway administration, told the Post the discovery, based on saliva absorbed into the clay pipe, was a “mind-blower”.

She also said records show the existence of a slave trade route from Sierra Leone to Annapolis, plied by British and American ships.
“As soon as people stepped on those slave ships in Africa,” she said, “whether they were from Benin or whether they were from Sierra Leone, wherever they were from, that identity was lost.

“Their humanity is stripped from them. Who they are as a people has gone.”

The new analysis is part of ongoing research around Belvoir that has given descendants of the people enslaved there new insight into the lives of their ancestors.
Speaking to the Post, Nancy Daniels, a genealogist from Laurel, Maryland who thinks she is a descendant of enslaved families from Belvoir but was not linked to the research on the pipe, called the discovery “overwhelming”.

“I’m sitting here about ready to cry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so happy … Thank God for the DNA.”
Analysis of the pipe stem was carried out at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The results were then passed to Schroeder at the University of Copenhagen, which holds a database of African DNA.
The subsequent discovery was first reported in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

This year, events and ceremonies are being held to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved people in America, at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619.

Slavery was effectively abolished in the US on 1 January 1863, with the issue by Abraham Lincoln of the Emancipation Proclamation. It formally ended in December 1865, after the civil war, with the ratification of the 13th amendment.

- THE GUARDIAN 

New Zealand’s Gun Laws Draw Scrutiny After Mosque Shootings

The shootings that killed at least 49 people at two mosques in New Zealand on Friday have placed new scrutiny on New Zealand’s gun laws and sparked a fervent debate about whether they were a factor in the gunman’s decision to carry out his attack there.

The man was identified in court papers as Brenton Harrison Tarrant, 28, and officials have said he was an Australian citizen, which has led to comparisons between gun laws in Australia and in New Zealand.

While New Zealand’s laws governing the purchase of semiautomatic rifles are more restrictive than those in the United States, the country is much freer with firearms than Australia is, allowing most guns to be purchased without requiring them to be tracked.

“New Zealand is almost alone with the United States in not registering 96 percent of its firearms — and those are its most common firearms, the ones most used in crimes,” said Philip Alpers of GunPolicy.org, a clearinghouse for gun law data worldwide. “There are huge gaps in New Zealand law, even if some of its laws are strong.”

New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said on Saturday that five firearms, including two semiautomatic weapons, were used in the attacks.

“If he went to New Zealand to commit these crimes,” Mr. Alpers said, “one can assume that the ease of obtaining these firearms may have been a factor in his decision to commit the crime in Christchurch.”

In the years since a gunman killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1996, Australia has embarked on one of the world’s most expansive efforts to rid a society of gun violence. Officials significantly strengthened gun laws, severely restricted semiautomatic weapons and engaged in a buyback program that took more than 650,000 firearms off the streets.

The gun laws in New Zealand are more layered, and do not fit easily into a pro or anti-gun rubric.

Semiautomatic rifles and handguns, for example, require special licenses; a person can only buy one semiautomatic weapon at a time. “The police will look very askance at you if you want four or five of them,” Mr. Alpers said. “It gets harder and harder if you want more and more.” Still, Mr. Alpers said, it is possible to obtain a large cache of weapons — either by acting alone or if more than one person is purchasing.

As the law stands now, any person age 16 or older with an entry-level firearm license can keep any number of common rifles and shotguns without an official record of those guns being kept.

Most of the guns in circulation can be sold on the internet or through ads in newspapers, and the most popular types of firearms can lawfully change hands in private homes or even hotel parking lots with no requirement that a record of the transaction be kept.

Still, the country has generally been safe from gun massacres. Its last mass shooting, which left 13 people dead, was in 1990 — and it led to tighter rules around semiautomatic weapons.

Police officers do not generally carry firearms and murders are rare; the death toll from Friday’s terrorist attack is roughly equivalent to the number of murders that occur in the country each year. The annual tally of gun homicides specifically is even lower.

“New Zealanders are by and large safe users of firearms and that has led everybody to relax,” Mr. Alpers said. “It’s led New Zealanders to think they don’t have a problem.”

At the same time, however, New Zealand’s gun culture is significant and deeply ingrained. Like the United States, Australia and Canada, New Zealand’s frontier history has led to a proliferation of guns used for sport, for protecting wide open spaces from animals, and for dealing with problems like wounded cattle.

Of the 3.9 million New Zealanders of gun licensing age, 238,000 — 6 percent — have a firearm license, according to GunPolicy.org.

“Our gun laws will change, now is the time,” Ms. Ardern said Saturday, though she did not say what that legislation would look like. “People will be seeking change, and I am committed to that.”

Mr. Alpers predicted that lawmakers would work to make guns harder to obtain.

“This will certainly change things in New Zealand,” he said. “I can’t think of a country that’s more likely to change its gun laws after something like this.”

- THE NEW YORK TIMES

Police blows hot as unknown gunmen kill sergeant

The Police Command in Bayelsa State, said on Saturday that it was on the trail of those who killed a police sergeant and wounded another policeman on Friday night in Yenagoa.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that unknown gunmen on Friday night attacked the two policemen who were on guard duty at Udeme Hotels in Yenagoa, the Bayelsa capital.

The Spokesman of the police command, DSP Asinim Butswat, said efforts have been intensified to arrest the gunmen.

He said that the gunmen, operating in a Toyota Camry car, opened fire on the policemen at about 9pm without any provocation.

“The Policemen fired back at the armed robbers and in the ensuing gun battle, one sergeant was fatally wounded, he was rushed to the Federal Medical Center, Yenagoa, where he was later confirmed dead.

“The other Policeman is responding to treatment. The unknown gunmen escaped with bullets wounds.

“Based on a tipoff, a notorious criminal hideout was raided, where their cohorts were arrested and they have volunteered useful information.

“Efforts have been intensified to arrest the gunmen,” Butswat said.

An eyewitness had told journalists on condition of anonymity, that the gunmen drove into the hotel in a Toyota Camry, while pretending to be customers.

“They turned at the car park and drove towards the gate where they opened fire on the policemen,” he said.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) recalls that few days to the Feb. 23 Presidential and National Assembly polls, gunmen attacked a checkpoint under Julius Berger flyover in Yenagoa, killing a policeman and carting away two riffles.

- DAILY POST