Gunmen shot dead a mother in Kaduna

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04/11/2020

By Ismail Auwal

Aisha Muhammad, a mother of three who was also 2-month pregnant, was shot dead in her home at Rigachikum, Kaduna state, by gunmen during a failed kidnapping attempt on Wednesday.

Aliyu Saidu, Director General of Kaduna State Contributory Health Management Scheme, posted the news on his Facebook wall. According to Saidu, Aisha was initially abducted in her residence, but the kidnappers decided to kill her in a desperate attempt to escape from soldiers and vigilantes who tried rescuing her.

Ibrahim Muhammad, a resident of Rigachikum, told the Sahelian Times that the unfortunate incident occurred around 3 am on Wednesday. “We were sleeping when sporadic shootings suddenly woke us up in the middle of the night. The shootings stopped when we heard sirens blowing from an ambulance coming towards Ka’aki hospital.”

Muhammad further lamented that, nowadays kidnappings have become very rampant around the axis of Kaduna and Zaria.

Sahelian Times learnt that the deceased has been buried in Rigachikum at the time of filing this report.

What is the Electoral College? how does it work and what is its role in the 2020 US election?

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04/11/2020

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In the US election, Americans vote for candidates called ‘electors’ in their state who are supporting the candidate they want to become president – this process is called the Electoral College.

The more people to live in a state, the more electors there are for that state. So, California for example, with a population of 38.8 million, has 55 votes – while Delaware, (pop. 936,000), has just three votes.

There are currently 538 electors in total, corresponding to the 435 Representatives (congressmen and women) and 100 Senators, plus the three additional electors from the District of Columbia. The Constitution prohibits any federal official, elected or appointed, from being an elector.

The candidate with the most electors wins all the state’s electoral college votes and the first candidate to win enough states to get to 270 electoral votes is elected to that office.

Follow live 2020 US election results

Who can become president?

The President of United States can be a man or a woman of any race or any religion, but they must:

be at least 35 years old
have been born in the US
have lived in the US for at least 14 years

The rules also state that one person can only be in the job for a maximum of eight years. (The only exception to this was Franklin D Roosevelt, who was elected for a special third term during the height of World War Two).

The two Presidential Candidates in the 2020 Election are the current President Donald Trump, who represents the Republican Party, and Democrat Joe Biden, who was the Vice President under the Obama administration from 2009 to 2017.

What is the Electoral College?

The Electoral College chooses the president of the United States. When an American citizen casts their vote, they are not directly choosing a presidential candidate. Instead, they are choosing an official, who will represent them in the ‘college’. The word ‘college’ translates to a large group of people (the elected officials) who have the job of choosing the president, and this role is carried out a few weeks after the results of the election day.

Why do we have an Electoral College?

The nation’s founders established the Electoral College to ensure the entire country had a more equal say in the choosing of a national president.

In a time when the states were more autonomous and the federal government didn’t have as much power as it does today, the framers wanted to offset the chance that a single populous state or region would choose a “favorite son” candidate who would almost exclusively represent the contender’s home state and at the expense of other, smaller parts of the country.

What happens if the Electoral College fails to elect a president or vice president?

Each elector is required to cast one vote for the president and another vote for vice president.

If no candidate receives a majority for president then the House of Representatives selects the president, with each state delegation (instead of each representative) having only one vote.

If no candidate receives a majority for vice president, then the Senate will select the vice president, with each senator having one vote.

How many times has this happened?

On five occasions the Electoral College system has resulted in the election of a candidate who did not receive the most popular votes in the election:

1800, 1824, 1876, 2000, and, most famously, and recently in 2016, when the Democratic candidate, Hilary Clinton claimed 2.1% more of the popular vote than Donald Trump, who, with 304 votes compared to 227, won the Electoral victory, and, therefore, his place in the White House.

How does the Electoral College work?

In almost every state, the candidate to gain the highest number of votes will win the ‘electoral’ vote for that state. This individual will then, therefore, receive this number of seats in the ‘Electoral College’. Then, the elected figures from each of the 50 states gather, and vote for the president.

The structure of the Electoral College means some states, known as the ‘Swing States’, carry more weight and overrule the popular vote. The power of these swing states was seen in the results of the 2016 election, when Hillary Clinton claimed 2.1% more of the popular vote than Trump, however, she failed to win over the swing states, and consequently lost the Electoral College vote, and with it, the election.

Electoral College votes

With the Electoral College holding such a grip over the outcome of this presidential battle, both Mr Trump and Biden are, above all, fighting for seats in the College. With 538 electoral votes up for grabs, the presidential candidate needs 270 to steal the majority, and therefore, win the Electoral College vote overall.

Though the official results of the 2020 election will take days, or even weeks, to confirm by the Electoral College, figures from the election night will start to emerge once the first polls start to close around 7pm EST (12am GMT).

You can track these results on The Telegraph live stream here.

Electoral College States

Among the 50 states, there are eight states, known as ‘swing states’, or battleground states, which have the ability to transform the election results.

The eight swing states are:

Arizona
Florida
Georgia
Michigan
Minnesota
North Carolina
Pennsylvania
Wisconsin

What makes these states so powerful? It comes down to the ‘winner takes all’ system in all states (except Maine and Nebraska), the winning party claims all electoral votes across the entire state. Therefore, for example, if the majority of people vote for the Democrat’s in Florida, the Democrat party will take all 29 electoral votes.

In the 2020 election, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin are all crucial to the overall outcome, as they were states which only marginally voted for Mr Trump in 2016, and therefore assisted him in his electoral college victory.

Electoral college forecast 2020

Currently, Mr Biden holds a narrow advantage over President Trump across five of the all-important eight swing states. These states are Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona and Michigan. The state of Michigan is fundamental to Biden’s victory, as the state has large white suburbs, union members and black voters, and so a loss in Michigan would be detrimental for Biden’s presidency chances.

At present, there is a 10-poll average which indicates that just over half of Americans intend to back Mr Biden while Mr Trump’s support falls behind by five or six points.

culled from The Telegraph

Trump, Biden locked in close race as vote-counting stalls

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04/11/2020

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Democrats expecting a comfortable victory in the presidential election found themselves in a nail-biter instead, as the race remained in limbo past midnight Tuesday.

By early Wednesday, Joe Biden led with 236 electoral votes to 213 for President Trump, both well short of the 270 necessary to win the presidency. Biden also had a narrow edge in the popular vote.

On the eve of the election, Biden led in virtually every national poll and in most battleground states. But Trump appeared to gain ground in several states in the final week of the campaign, during which he crisscrossed the country, concentrating on Florida and the Midwest, holding multiple rallies nearly every day.

Biden addressed supporters in Wilmington, Del., shortly after midnight, saying, “We feel good about where we are. We really do. I’m here to tell you tonight we believe we’re on track to win this election.”

At 2:20 a.m., President Trump spoke to a crowd in the White House, running down the list of states where he was ahead or in a position to take the lead. “We had such a big night,” he boasted. “They knew they couldn’t win, so they said, ‘Let’s go to court.’

“Frankly, we did win this election. We will be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”

Trump’s remarks met with criticism from some unexpected sources, including Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator, who said on CNN, “I was very distressed by what I just heard the president say.”

Bolstered by unexpected strength among Hispanic voters, Trump won comfortably in Florida and Texas, states that Democrats had hoped to flip to their side. Biden won Arizona, and although he was behind in the count in Georgia, he had a shot at winning that Republican state as well, after a burst water pipe delayed the counting of votes in the heavily Democratic suburbs of Atlanta.

But the election appeared to be coming down to the same three states — the traditionally Democratic “blue wall” of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — that decided the 2016 contest for Trump.

Trump held a lead in early returns in those states, reflecting the expected Republican advantage in same-day voting, which got counted first. Democrats were hoping to make up the difference with mail-in ballots. The coronavirus pandemic led many states to expand early-voting options, and a record number of ballots, more than 100 million, were cast either in person or by mail before Election Day.

Most states allowed mail ballots to be opened weeks ahead of Election Day so they could be counted quickly, but in the three key states, Republican-controlled legislatures refused to allow election clerks to open mail ballots in advance.

Trump, who had for months been attacking the use of mail ballots on the grounds that they could be used fraudulently, insisted that the vote counting should stop on election night. Republicans brought lawsuits in state and federal courts seeking to prevent election officials in various states from counting late-arriving mail-in votes. Most of those efforts failed, although appeals were planned or still in progress in some cases.

“If people wanted to get their ballots in, they should have gotten their ballots in long before [Election Day], a long time,” Trump told reporters Sunday, adding: “We’re going in the night of — as soon as the election is over — we’re going in with our lawyers.”

Groups that included Trump’s own former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and former Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, launched $6 million in TV ads this week trying to educate the public that Trump cannot stop the counting of legitimate ballots.

Trump has also said he does not want mail ballots in Pennsylvania to be counted if they arrive after Election Day, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled they can be counted up until this Friday, Nov. 6, as long as they were postmarked by 8 p.m. on Election Day, or if they had no postmark or an unclear postmark.

The Republican Party took that issue to the U.S. Supreme Court, which deadlocked 4-4 two weeks ago on this issue, which meant the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision stood. But Trump has signaled that the GOP will go to court quickly to try to stop that, hoping that the newly confirmed conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Amy Coney Barrett, might cast a tie-breaking vote in their favor.

Most mail ballots in Pennsylvania — at least 2.5 million out of 3 million requested — arrived before or on Election Day, so they must be counted no matter what. But if Republicans are able to stop even a few hundred thousand mail ballots from being counted, that could have a significant impact on the results there, and possibly for the presidency.

Republicans have also filed a lawsuit to throw out mail ballots that were received after elections officials in some counties contacted voters to alert them to problems with their ballot, in a process known as “curing.”

Last week, a federal appeals court ruled that Minnesota ballots received after Election Day wouldn’t be counted, even though the instructions said they could be received up to seven days after Tuesday, as long as they were postmarked on or before Nov. 3. Pennsylvania — which has a Democratic governor, secretary of state and attorney general — has announced it will separate ballots that arrive after Election Day from the ones that came earlier, so that a court ruling invalidating late-arriving votes can be obeyed without having to throw out all mail ballots.

Democrats have been sounding the alarm for months that Trump might contest election results or declare victory based on early returns, which were expected to favor him. A premature victory proclamation would have no legal standing. States have until Dec. 8 to finish ballot counting and appoint their representatives to the Electoral College, which meets on Dec. 14.

Culled from Yahoo news

BREAKING: Trump claims victory, threatens to go to supreme court

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04/11/2020

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President Donald Trump, on Wednesday, claimed that he had won the US election, despite the final results not yet being given, and said he would go the Supreme Court to dispute the counting of votes.

“We did win this election,” Trump said in an extraordinary speech from the ceremonial East Room of the White House.

“For the good of this nation, this is a very big moment. This is a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So, we will be going to the US Supreme Court,” Trump said.

The Republican, who according to initial results is in a neck-and-neck race with Democrat Joe Biden, said he would go to court and “we want all voting to stop.”

Details Later…

US election: John Biden defeats Trump in Arizona

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04/11/2020

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Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump in Arizona, the Associated Press projected, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since 1996.

Biden benefited from a more diverse electorate in Arizona, which Trump won by 3.5 percentage points in 2016. The state represents 11 of the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House.

Bill Clinton was the last Democrat to win Arizona, claiming it for his re-election.

US election: Trump defeats Biden in Florida

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04/11/2020

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President Donald Trump won Tuesday in Florida, one of the most important battleground states in his battle for reelection against Democratic challenger Joe Biden, US media projected.

With 29 electoral votes, the Sunshine State was seen as a must-win for Trump. He also won the state in 2016, besting Democrat Hillary Clinton by less than a percentage point.

The state is famous for nail-bitingly close election results, perhaps the most famous in 2000 between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, and its voters have picked the winner in 18 of the past 20 presidential elections.

Meanwhile, Democrats flipped a US Senate seat in Colorado Tuesday in their bid to regain control of the upper chamber of Congress, but Republicans countered by ousting a vulnerable Democrat in Alabama, networks projected.

With control of the Senate up for grabs, Democrats put their stamp once again on the House of Representatives, securing another two years as the party in power with Speaker Nancy Pelosi — President Donald Trump’s chief nemesis in Washington — likely to preside over her flock again.

“I’m very, very proud of the fact that tonight — relatively early — we are able to say we have held the House,” Pelosi said.

In the more closely-watched Senate showdown, Democrats drew first blood when Colorado’s former governor John Hickenlooper, a 68-year-old businessman and geologist, handily defeated one-term Senator Cory Gardner to pick up a seat.

“Thank you, Colorado! Serving you is the honor of my life, and I can’t wait to be your Senator,” Hickenlooper said on Twitter.

Republicans are scrambling to preserve their 53-47 Senate majority, with polls showing several races tilting towards Democrats. Election forecaster FiveThirtyEight.com give Democrats a three in four chance of winning Senate control.

Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s party would need to gain four seats to seize the chamber — or three seats if Biden wins the White House, as a US vice president breaks a tie in the Senate in the event of a 50-50 vote.

Republicans got a defensive boost though when retired American football coach Tommy Tuberville, 66, handily defeated Senator Doug Jones in a race that was widely expected to result in a Republican pick-up.

Jones had faced steep reelection odds in a ruby-red southern state after winning in a 2017 special election upset against Roy Moore, a Republican who faced sexual misconduct allegations.

US election: It’s not Trump’s place to declare winner —Biden

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04/11/2020

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Joe Biden, on Tuesday night, said that it is not his place or incumbent President Donald Trump’s place to declare the winner of Tuesday election.

Biden, who spoke live from Wilmington, Delaware, said it is the place of the American people to declare their next president through the ballots.

He said, “We know this is gonna go long but who knows if it is gonna go longer. But we feel good about where we are. We believe we are on track to win this election.”

“We know because, beyond president’s early votes, the mailing votes is going to take a while. We gonna have to be patient until the hard work of counting votes is finished, until every vote is counted. But we’re feeling good about where we are.” he added

Biden said that: “It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare the winner of this election. That’s the decision of the American people. But I am optimistic about this outcome.”

Already, polls are gradually closing across the United States and a long night of waiting for results lies ahead.

The first results are dropping in, with US media projecting wins for the Republican incumbent so far in 13 states including Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia — all states he won in 2016.

Democratic challenger Joe Biden has captured 11 states including his home state Delaware and big prize New York, plus the US capital Washington. As with Trump, so far, all states claimed by Biden were won by Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

So far, that gives Biden 126 electoral votes and Trump 89. The magic number is 270. Observers expect the hotly contested race for the White House to come down to a handful of key battleground states.

Kidnappers abduct wife, daughter of ABU staff

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03/11/2020

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By Ismail Auwal

Unknown gunmen have reportedly abducted the wife and the daughter of Dr. Rabiu Abdussalam Magaji, at his home in the official staff quarters of Samaru campus, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Zaria.

Dr. Magaji works with ABU’s department of Human Physiology as a Senior Lecturer.

According to the sources who spoke to Sahelian Times, the gunmen invaded the staff quarters of ABU, on Monday, around 11pm, and abducted Mrs Rahma and her 13-year old daughter.

Efforts to speak to Dr. Magaji proved abortive at the time of filing this report.

Sahelian Times learnt that Mrs Rahma is a nurse with the ABU Medical Center. It’s not immediately clear what the demands of her abductors are.

Sexual assault: Man gets seven years jail term, N1m fine in Kano

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03/11/2020

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A 42-year-old man, Salisu Tanko has been sentenced to seven years jail term in addition to a fine of N1 million for sexually assaulting a teenage girl in Kano State.

Tanko, a resident of Waika, Gwauron Dutse, Dala Local Government Area of Kano State was accused by the National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffick in Persons, NAPTIP before a Federal High Court on a one-count charge of sexual assault.

The presiding Judge, Justice Sa’adatu Mark on Tuesday while delivering the judgment however ordered that failure by Tanko to pay the fine of N1million should be made to serve an additional one-year jail term.

Mark said, “the only way to discourage wild spread ill in our society is to punish those found guilty severally.

“To this end, the court sentenced the defendant to seven years imprisonment with hard labour and a N1 million fine.” he added
In the event, the convict cannot pay the N1million, he should serve the term of an additional one year,”

Justice Mark stated. Earlier, the Prosecution Counsel, Abdullahi Babale said sometime in January 2020, the convict procured one Khadija Idris, 13-year-old, and sexually exploited her by defilement inside an uncompleted building.

Reacting to the judgments, the NAPTIP Kano Zonal Commander, Desmond Garba however expressed satisfaction with the judgment, describing it as a welcome development and more of such to come.

Put airport concession on hold, Reps tell FG

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02/11/2020

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The House of Representatives Committee on Aviation has called on the Federal Government to put on hold its planned concession of four international airports.

This was conveyed by the Chairman, House Committee on Aviation, Nnolim Nnaji, at a meeting between the committee and officials of Federal Ministry of Aviation citing the need for resolution of some contentious issues as the main reason for the request.

While recognizing the imperative of the concession, Nnaji said the aviation industry cannot afford to indulge in industrial dispute especially with the concerns raised by labour unions.

Chairman of the committee said, “Among the concerns were the lack of transparency in the exercise, labour issues, the Chinese loans, the legal issues that may arise from the existing concessions and the lack of proper valuation of the present status of the affected airports, among others.

“Based on the outcome of the meeting with the labour unions, the committee invited the Minister of Aviation and the heads of agencies under him to discuss the issue of the airports’ concession. Several dates were fixed for the meeting but for one reason or the other, they failed to attend.

“In view of this, the House of Representatives Committee on Aviation hereby requests that the concession of the four airports should be put on hold pending the resolution of the contentious issues raised by the unions and other stakeholders to avoid industrial actions that may further cripple the already distressed industry.”

The Federal Government has earlier, in June, 2020, revealed that it has commenced the concession process of four airports. The Minister of Aviation, Senator Hadi Sirika, in a tweet said, “Received outline business case certificate of compliance from ICRC for the concession of our 4 airports. Our roadmap is on course. Aviation has become the fastest growing sector of our economy under our watch. Thank you Mr President, thank you all!” He also, at public hearing on revenue projections for 2021-2023 MTEF/FSP organized by the Senate Joint Committee on Finance and National Planning in August, emphasised that the need to properly fund the aviation sector informed government’s latest move to concession the airports.

The four airports planned for the concession are Lagos, Kano, Port Harcourt and Abuja