News on Youtube Jul 7 2018

President Muhammadu Buhari on Friday, July 6, in Monguno, Borno, reiterated his determination to fish out and punish politicians who were instigating violence in some states for cheap political goals.

The president's senior special assistant on media and publicity, Malam Garba Shehu, said Buhari stated this at the closing events of the 2018 Army Day celebrations which was staged at the one-time stronghold of Boko Haram terrorists, Monguno, 136 kilometres from the state capital, Maiduguri.

According to the president, solution is being found to the deadly clashes between farmers and herdsmen, and whosoever is found culpable will be brought to justice.

While thanking the armed forces for keeping the country safe, President Buhari acknowledged that there were still challenges faced by the nation. He said: "This does not mean there are no challenges. There are pockets of violence in several states.

"Some deliberately instigated by disgruntled politicians who have lost all arguments and are desperate to cause mayhem as a way of seeking relevance. "We shall fish them out and punish them according to the provisions of the law.

The president noted that his administration had worked tirelessly to ensure and preserve the dignity and sanctity of life.

"When I was sworn in as the president and commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, I promised that this administration would tackle the challenges of insecurity, poor economy and fight corruption.

"We are all witnesses to the fact that our once battered economy as a nation has exited recession and is once again vibrant. "Our nation is safe again, thanks to the efforts of our security agencies,'' he said.

President Buhari used the opportunity to reassure the world, Nigerians and the families of the remaining kidnapped Chibok girls and Leah Sharibu of the Dapchi girls' School that his administration would not relent in its efforts to see that "they are all released.

He also reassured all Nigerians that the issue of Farmers and Herdsmen clashes was being tackled and all those found culpable would be brought to justice.

He, however, enjoined all citizens to always be tolerant, loving and ready to give peace a chance.

President Buhari reiterated what he said to the Christian Association of Nigeria, Northern Chapter, on Thursday in Abuja, that none of our religions or cultures permitted the killing of one person by another.

Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno, who spoke at the occasion, said triumphantly that: "We have cut the rubicon of insurgency in the northeast.

The Minister of Defence, Mansur Dan Ali, commended the army for establishing a Motorcycle Battalion meant to enhance quick mobility and security in areas of unfavourable vehicular movements.

He also lauded the Air Force for setting up Rapid Response groups in the six geopolitical zones of the country. He assured that appropriate measures were being put in place to address security challenges across the country.

"The Armed Forces are currently handling Operation Delta Safe in the South-South; Operation Safe Haven in the north central and Operation Awatse to combat militant activities in the Arepo general area and other parts of the South-West.

"Recently, the Nigerian Army established Operation Whirl Stroke to tackle insecurity in the north central states,'' he added.

For more infomation >> I will fish out, punish sponsors of violence in states - Buhari - Duration: 4:20.

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First endangered bee in the United States named - Duration: 3:33.

 The bee could be disappearing for a number of reasons, according to Serina Jepson, Director of Endangered Species and Aquatic Programs for the Xerces Society

    "Disease and pesticides are the two biggest threats to the existence of the rusty patched bumblebee, compounded by loss of habitat," Jepson said

"Of additional concern is the widespread use of persistent, long-lasting, highly toxic insecticides within the range of the rusty patched bumblebee, which pose a threat to its continued existence

"  Colonies of the rusty patched bumblebee have decreased by at least 87 percent since the 1990s

The bee once thrived in 31 states across the eastern U.S. and the upper Midwest. They also flourished in parts of southern Canada

 Now, the bee occupies only 13 states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin, along with one Canadian province

    Eric Lee-Mäder, the pollinator program co-director at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, said the dwindling bee population could have a major impact on the fruits and vegetables produced for Americans to eat

 "Bumblebees are among the most widely recognized and well-understood group of native pollinators in North America and contribute to the pollination of food crops such as squash, melon, blueberry, cranberry, clover, greenhouse tomato and greenhouse pepper, as well as numerous wildflowers," Lee-Mäder said

 He also feels without the rusty patched bumblebee pollinating the various crops, the financial impact could be devastating

 "Native pollinators in the U.S. provide essential pollination services to agriculture which are valued at more than $9 billion annually," said Lee-Mäder

 There have been efforts to try to preserve the bee's habitat all over the country

 "We have already seen incredible leadership from the agricultural community in restoring and protecting hundreds of thousands of acres of habitat for the rusty patched bumblebee and other native pollinators," Lee-Mäder said

 Source: Fox News

For more infomation >> First endangered bee in the United States named - Duration: 3:33.

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States Aren't Waiting for the Supreme Court to Solve Gerrymandering - Duration: 19:49.

 For Americans who want to fight the mapmaker's tyranny over politics, the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered the classic losers' consolation: Wait 'til next year

Or the next. Or forever.  The court passed up two chances at the end of its term to declare extreme partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional, sending cases from Wisconsin and Maryland back to lower courts

Then, the justices ducked again, remanding a North Carolina gerrymandering case—and making it less likely they'll confront partisan district-drawing in their next term

Then Justice Anthony Kennedy retired, depriving gerrymandering's opponents of a potential fifth vote, without resolving Kennedy's long search for a legal standard on the practice

It's a clear message to Americans who are sick of how gerrymandering lets politicians pick their voters, creates grotesquely-shaped one-party districts and encourages the partisan divide

With three years to go before the entire nation redistricts after the next census, if gerrymandering's opponents want better, fairer maps, they'll have to demand them, state by state

 Ohio just showed how it can be done.  On May 8, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly for a bipartisan plan, conceived by a GOP-controlled Legislature, that will give the minority party much more say in the drawing of congressional maps starting with the 2021 redistricting

Ohio, a key swing state, is one of the most gerrymandered states in the nation. Yet it came up with a solution, which hasn't gotten a lot of attention nationally, that could result in fairer maps and more competitive elections for Congress starting in 2022

Ohioans think their reform could be a model for how states can fix gerrymandering on their own, without waiting for the Supreme Court

 "It's very clear the courts are taking their time to determine that gerrymandering is unconstitutional," says Catherine Turcer, executive director for Common Cause Ohio, which backed the new law

"We have a very good understanding of the manipulation of district lines. There are very real consequences to rigging elections

"  The anti-gerrymandering movement is growing. "In Ohio and other states, we've looked at ways to move the state Legislature to action," says Turcer

"When we couldn't, we started collecting signatures for a citizens' initiative."  Initiative petitions—a citizens' right in 24 states—have become a key tool against the gerrymander

Redistricting reform may make the November ballot in Michigan, Utah, Colorado and Missouri

In Ohio, it was a petition drive for reform that pressured state legislators to act

Unlike most initiative proposals, which usually propose independent redistricting commissions, Ohio has kept control of mapmaking with lawmakers, at least until they reach an impasse

It also sets new mapmaking rules to thwart gerrymandering's worst abuses, such as the use of precise software to create more safe districts for incumbents

It's a model, say conservative and liberal Ohioans, that could break through partisan impasses over gerrymandering in other states

 "There have to be clear rules to prevent the skullduggery that often happens," says Ohio state Senator Matt Huffman (pictured), a Republican who helped broker the deal

"It's designed to force the majority and minority parties to get serious about what they want, to get a deal struck

"  Over the past several decades, Ohio has considered many proposals to reform redistricting

Until this year, they all failed. In 1981, Democrats controlled Ohio's redistricting, so Republicans allied with good-government groups and proposed a constitutional amendment to give the power to an independent commission

It failed at the polls by a whopping 16-percentage-point margin.  In 2005 and 2012, with Republicans in control, it was the Democrats' turn to offer similar proposals

Voters rejected them even more strenuously. Turcer, who backed those two proposals, says "almost any problem you frame not as addressing an unfairness but a partisan grab," tends to lose at the polls

Opponents portrayed reformers as "people not in power who are just whiners," she says, "or grabbing power, or just greedy

"  Still, Ohio's 2011 redistricting, controlled by Republicans, had been an example of gerrymandering at its worst

Mischievously, Republicans pitted two incumbent Democrats, Marcy Kaptur and Dennis Kucinich, against each other by connecting parts of Toledo and Cleveland, 115 miles apart, into a thin congressional district along Lake Erie that came to be nicknamed the "snake along the lake

"  Ohio has voted for the winner of every presidential election since 1964. It leans slightly Republican, but Democrats have a shot: Trump beat Clinton there by 8 points, while Obama beat Romney by 2 points in 2012 and McCain by 4 in 2008

Yet the 2011 Republican mapmakers, working in secret in a Columbus hotel suite, divided the state into 12 Republican-leaning congressional districts and four Democratic-leaning districts

The previous map had been gerrymandered less ruthlessly, creating five swing districts that changed hands between 2006 and 2010

Not so with the new map, which has performed as designed, producing 12-4 Republican congressional delegations in 2012, 2014 and 2016

Republicans won 62 percent of the state's congressional elections from 2002 to 2010; they've won 75 percent of them since

"You get at a point where the mapmakers have more to say about who gets elected than the voters," says Turcer

 The ugly map led to regrets on the Republican side too. Huffman, who authored the 2011 redistricting and took part in the campaign against the 2012 reform proposal, came out thinking there had to be a better way

"I remember saying there aren't any parameters," Huffman says. "People can't look and say, 'That's the rules

'" Even as he raised money to defeat the 2012 ballot initiative, he heard pressure for a different solution

"What I heard from Republican groups was, 'Hey, we're against this, we'll help contribute to beat that, but we don't want to keep doing this every five to 10 years

'"  In November 2014, Huffman proposed reforms that would give the minority party a say in redistricting

After a month of negotiations during the Legislature's lame-duck session, legislators reached a rare bipartisan agreement on a constitutional amendment: Starting in 2021, state House and state Senate districts will be drawn by a seven-member, bipartisan commission

If two members of the minority party don't vote for a map, it'll be in effect for only four years, not 10

Voters approved the amendment in 2015.  But congressional redistricting was left out of the deal

Democrats blamed Ohio's own John Boehner, then speaker of the U.S. House, for keeping the reform from applying to the all-important congressional elections

So liberal and good-government groups launched a petition drive in 2017 that proposed a constitutional amendment to apply the reform to the congressional map

"Once we got to about 100,000 validated signatures," says Turcer, "the state Legislature started having conversations

"  Legislators struck a new deal: a four-step process for redistricting, meant to encourage bipartisan mapmaking

In Round 1, the Legislature draws a map that would need a 60 percent supermajority and votes from 50 percent of the minority party to pass

If that doesn't happen, redistricting goes to the same commission that writes the state legislative maps, where it needs two minority-party votes to pass

If the commission can't agree, redistricting returns to the state Legislature, where a map could pass with one-third of the minority party's support

Or, the majority could pass a map on its own—but that map would be valid for four years, not 10

 The reform also creates new rules for compact districts and transparent mapmaking

Rules limit how many of Ohio's 88 counties can be split up. That'll prevent grotesque map shapes like the "snake along the lake," as well as most individual requests to move a town or a corporate headquarters into a certain district

 "We wanted to make sure we weren't dividing communities," says Huffman, "and that individual interests, whether a person or interest group, wouldn't be able to come in and easily say, 'Let's put the line there because it's good for me and what I want

'"  The armistice was strategic: Republicans and Democrats could both focus money and time on candidates in the November elections, not redistricting

Reform groups would win changes to the rules before the 2020 Census rather than take their chances on the ballot with a more sweeping reform

 "Our [plan] is very pragmatic, which will not be appealing to some folks," says Turcer

"But Ohioans are a pragmatic people, and we've been at this for a very, very long time

" Read More Fourth Estate The State of New Jersey Wants to Subsidize News. Uh-oh

Book Club What Politicos Are Reading This Summer Politics The Tunnel That Could Break New York  Skeptics say the new law doesn't go far enough

The ACLU of Ohio declined to support the ballot proposal, saying it still allows for partisan gerrymandering

But both parties endorsed the reforms. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by former U

S. Attorney General Eric Holder, contributed $50,000 to the campaign for it, and Holder spoke in favor of it at a public appearance in Cleveland

"We just want the system to be fair, so Democrats can compete on a level playing field," says Kelly Ward, executive director of the NDRC

"Any effort that gets us closer to that, we want to be supportive. We want to move the needle a step in the right direction

"  Neither side thinks Ohio's 2021 mapmaking will be easy. Turcer says her coalition plans to recruit "an army of citizen mapmakers" to hold the Legislature and redistricting commission accountable

"It'll be ugly," says Huffman, "a lot of the usual back and forthing and press conferences

" But he thinks both sides will eventually agree on a 10-year map that'll be fairer than today's lines

 For now, the anti-gerrymandering movement's focus is shifting to other states. Michigan, Ohio's northern neighbor, just certified an initiative proposal for November's ballot, though it still faces a challenge at the state Supreme Court

The Michigan proposal would create an independent citizens commission to draw future maps

"No matter where we were in the state, no matter who we talked to, people see a huge conflict of interest with politicians drawing their own political lines," says Katie Fahey, the founder of Voters Not Politicians, the group behind the initiative

 In the 26 states that don't allow for citizens' initiatives, fighting gerrymandering will be harder

Reformers say sustained pressure from ordinary people will be the key to fixing gerrymandering without the federal courts' help

"In states where he the Legislature makes those decisions, we all really need to lean in on elected officials, who can, prior to 2021, make the criteria and process more fair," says Ward

"Then, once the redistricting process starts in 2021, we need a full court press of democracy to get officials to do the right thing

" Share on Facebook Share on Twitter The Friday Cover Read more 

For more infomation >> States Aren't Waiting for the Supreme Court to Solve Gerrymandering - Duration: 19:49.

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Liberal states impose new individual mandate ahead of ObamaCare rollback - Duration: 4:41.

Liberal states impose new individual mandate ahead of ObamaCare rollback

Last year's sweeping Republican tax bill killed the federal tax penalty for individuals who refuse to get health insurance as mandated under ObamaCare.

But as that penalty disappears for Americans in January, a growing number of liberal states are moving to enact their own individual mandates requiring residents to purchase health insurance – a last-ditch effort to preserve a critical part of former President Barack Obama's 2010 health care law.

Since Republicans passed the tax bill in December, New Jersey, Vermont and Washington, D. , have passed laws enacting an individual mandate, joining Massachusetts, which famously enacted an individual mandate while Mitt Romney was governor in 2006.

Conservatives are railing against the moves.

"Just when you think the move for government control of health care couldn't get any worse, somehow it manages to," Christopher Jacobs, a conservative health policy expert, said when the D.C. Council passed its individual mandate requirement in June.

Under Obama's health care law, the individual mandate required most people to have health insurance meeting specific standards. The law imposed tax penalties for violations.

But under last year's final tax-reform bill, people no longer face a penalty for noncompliance as of January 2019.

"We eliminated the individual mandate that said that people had to buy government-approved insurance," Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told Fox News in a recent interview. "In a sense, it blew a big hole in ObamaCare.".

The idea behind the mandate was to make sure young and healthy customers are buying into the system, to offset the cost of taking on more sick and elderly customers. The looming rollback has triggered warnings of more disruptions to the market. .

"The ACA was about standardizing, and now we are going back to more divergence," Heather Howard of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs told the Washington Post. "It is much more of a patchwork quilt.".

Earlier this year, New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill enacting an individual mandate. It goes into effect Jan.

"Protecting the viability of the individual mandate is needed to maintain a foundation for the insurance market and to allow the success of the (Affordable Care Act) to continue," New Jersey state Sen. Joe Vitale, D-Middlesex, a champion of the bill, said.

Vermont passed legislation enacting an individual mandate in May, though the details are still being worked out and it won't take effect until 2020.

"We are committed to maintaining Vermont's low uninsured rate," a spokesman for Republican Gov. Phil Scott said at the time. Council in June passed its own individual mandate, which would require city residents to have health insurance coverage.

"Establishing an individual mandate here in the city will ensure that people will continue to have insurance," D.C. Council member Vincent Gray said.

It comes as Democrats are embracing protecting ObamaCare – specifically the requirement to provide coverage to people with pre-existing conditions -- as an issue in the 2018 elections.

Democratic leaders are also signaling that they will use it an issue in the upcoming battle over President Trump's next Supreme Court nominee, though Republicans blame the law for rising premiums. .