United States Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr Stuart Symington has urged Nigeria’s leaders and citizens to unite across divides to stop the unwarranted killings in some parts of the country. The envoy gave the advise yesterday at a reception to celebrate U.S. 242nd Independence anniversary in Abuja. He said, “Every day, all across this land, we work with good people to save lives and bend upwards the curve of economic growth, so that real opportunity and hope will outpace need. “But, far too often, we see the deaths of innocents whose hopes are stopped forever, by those whose awful acts reflect…

U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday handed Donald Trump one of the biggest victories of his presidency, upholding his travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries and rejecting the argument that it represented unconstitutional religious discrimination. The 5-4 ruling, with conservative justices in the majority and liberal justices dissenting, ended a fierce fight in the courts over whether the policy amounted to an unlawful Muslim ban, while confirming broad presidential powers over immigration and national security policy. Trump quickly claimed "profound vindication" after lower courts had blocked his travel ban announced in September, as well as two prior versions, in legal challenges…

Less than half of Nigeria’s 36 states have made their 2018 budget available online to the public. Of the 15 states that have done so, only 13 states provided full details of the budget, a civic transparency group, BudgIT said on Tuesday. The group, therefore, urged Nigerians to demand that their states make details of their budgets available. Mr Abiola Afolabi, the organisation’s communications lead, listed states that have made the budgets public to include “Borno, Delta, Edo, Ekiti, Gombe, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kogi, Kwara, Lagos, Nasarawa, Ondo, Plateau and Yobe.” Two of these, Lagos and Kwara, however, did not…

Nigeria has overtaken India as the country with the largest number of extreme poor as of 2018, a report by Washington-based Brookings Institution has stated. The report titled, ‘The Start of a New Poverty Narrative,’ obtained on the institution’s website, pointed out that Democratic Republic of the Congo could soon take over the number two spot. It said, “At the end of May 2018, our trajectories suggest that Nigeria had about 87 million people in extreme poverty, compared with India’s 73 million. What is more, extreme poverty in Nigeria is growing by six people every minute, while poverty in India…