The White House’s strange, illogical response to Netanyahu

To all those who imagined President Obama would not let Iran keep its illegal nuclear program and then get a green flag for breakout after 10 years , you were wrong . Yes, Obama actually is capitulating entirely after years of saying that negotiations would make clear Iran had to give up its nuclear ambitions . It was his argument that Iran wanted to be included in the family of nations , and later ( after he opposed sanctions ) his argument was that sanctions had forced Iran to the table . But now he concedes all that was wrong .

In his very odd response to Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’ s speech , Obama did not dispute he is making these huge concessions and he did not argue they are wise. Instead , he argued Netanyahu said nothing new ( well, Obama knew he had bargained away an awful lot, but many Americans did not , which is why Obama had to put it out there in an interview on the eve of Netanyahu’ s speech ) . And Obama groused that Netanyahu did not provide an alternative.

Let’ s take the latter argument . There is a whole list of
problems with the president’ s complaint .

First, the speech did contain an alternative: Hold firm
and increase sanctions . Many have said Netanyahu is
insisting on regime change . But that is not correct. He’ s demanding that Iran change its behavior , just as Obama was supposed to be demanding that Iran give up its quest for nuclear weapons . Maybe the president should say exactly what he promised : If no deal was reached , he’ d be the first one back asking for more sanctions .

Second, since when does a president demand that an ally , whom he has ignored and who has found the fatal flaw in his negotiations ( the details of which Obama has tried to conceal) , come up with a solution to get him out of his mess ? Some chutzpah. If the deal is bad, Obama has said no deal is better. What was his alternative supposed to be if no deal was the better course of action?

Third , the original deal in Obama ’ s mind is “unattainable , ” as Susan Rice insisted, because Iran said no. But how does he know Iran won’ t stay at the table or change its mind . A regime that has cheated and still is cheating and has concealed its illegal program, you might suspect , would conceal its threshold for economic pain and come up with all sorts of threats to try to keep what it has already acquired .

Perhaps Obama is just a rotten negotiator — just as we saw in his dealings with the Castros.

Fourth, I thought the president had said Iran is
“isolated , ” and his policy was working. If Iran is truly
isolated , why does he fret so that the alliance won ’ t hold together?

His arguments made no sense for all these reasons and
more because they are not real arguments, but excuses — excuses to conceal that his negotiators were inept , excuses to avoid the perception that he failed to understand the nature of the regime, and excuses for not having gotten more leverage .

It is also fascinating that Obama does not dispute
Netanyahu’ s accusation that he is seeking an alliance
with Iran to defeat the Islamic State . That in a way is a
far more grievous and fundamental error than his
nuclear negotiations posture, for it involves selling out all our allies in the region and cozying up to a nation that wants to destroy Israel , tyrannize its own people and sponsor terrorism . How could we conceivably go along with all that ? Perhaps Obama imagines that if we give Iran the bomb and let it run amok , it will change its ways. But the regime’ s behavior has gotten worse . What victorious dictatorship voluntarily gave up territory and weapons?

The president throws a fuss and tosses insults, and his
loyal lapdogs in Congress pretend to be “ insulted, ” but
right about now in Jerusalem , Cairo , Amman and Riyadh our allies are shaking their heads in disbelief.

The president is as feckless and confused as they feared . They stand unprotected by the United States as they stare into the jaws of a regime bent on destroying them . Well, perhaps they , too , will come and speak to Congress . Or Congress can invite Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper or Czech President Milos Zeman. It would be interesting to see whether they share Netanyahu ’ s views or Obama’ s .

And the invited guests don’ t even need to say anything new or offer us an alternative. Just tell America what they think . They can ’ t all be “electioneering ” or out to create trouble for Democrats ,can they ? Maybe it is Obama who is isolated , not Iran.

Russia's Putin says he doesn't want rerun of gas rows with Ukraine

Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that he did not want a gas conflict with Ukraine similar to ones that took place in the past, and that Kiev only had enough pre-paid gas from Russia to last two days.

Moscow cut off gas supplies to Kiev from June until
December in a dispute over pricing and unpaid bills that
marked the third such stoppage in a decade, after price rows in 2006 and 2009.

Previous "gas wars" have led to supply disruptions to
Europe, which gets around a third of its gas from Russia, and 40 percent of this via Ukraine.

Gas supplies to Europe have been unaffected by the latest row, but Ukraine's chaotic finances have left it struggling to keep up with regular pre-payment for its gas from Russia's state-controlled producer Gazprom.

"(There is) pre-paid gas for exactly two days, no action has been taken yet," Putin told a governmental meeting on Wednesday.

"I would ask the prime minister and Gazprom to pay more attention to this, given that no one needs conflicts similar to those in previous years. We are ready to strictly fulfil (our) contractual obligations, but under pre-payment only."

The European Commission helped to negotiate a "winter gas deal" between Moscow and Kiev, under which Ukraine paid off some of its gas debts and imported over 1 billion cubic metres of gas. The deal expires at the end of March.

Russia and Ukraine have agreed to discuss a summer
package later this month, with Kiev winning an assurance at EU-mediated talks this week that it would not have to pay for energy delivered to rebel-held areas.

With economic output falling and a pro-Russian rebellion simmering in its eastern industrial heartland, Ukraine's gas consumption is likely to fall to some 40 billion cubic metres (bcm) this year from 42.5 bcm in 2014, the UNIAN news agency quoted the energy minister as saying.

More than 30 coal miners trapped underground after deadly explosion in Ukraine

DONETSK, Ukraine — An explosion ripped through a coal mine before dawn Wednesday in war-torn eastern Ukraine, killing at least one miner and trapping more than 30 others underground, rebel and government officials said. One injured miner reported seeing five bodies.

The explosion at the Zasyadko mine in Donetsk, an eastern city under separatist control, was not caused by shelling, rebel authorities said. Eastern Ukraine has been wracked by fighting between government forces and Russian-backed rebels for almost a year, a conflict that has killed more than 6,000 people.

The blast Wednesday occurred more than 1,000 metres
underground as 230 workers were in the mine, separatist authorities in Donetsk said in a statement, blaming a mixture of gas and air — a common cause of industrial mining accidents.

Rescue operations were continuing and at least 157 workers had been evacuated from the mine, Donetsk rebel officials said.

One lightly wounded miner being evacuated, who gave his name only as Sergei, told The Associated Press that he saw five bodies being pulled out, but provided no further details.

Another injured miner, 42-year-old Igor Murynin, said at a hospital in Donetsk that he was blown off his feet by the impact of the explosion.

“When I came to, there was dust everywhere. People were groaning,” said Murynin, who doctors said had burns over 20% of his body.

Murynin said the mine had installed new equipment and that nothing appeared to be out of order.

The rebels said 14 miners were sent to medical centres in Donetsk, and a doctor there, Emil Fistal, was quoted as saying that at least six were in grave condition.

There was no immediate way to reconcile the varying
numbers given of miners working, injured, possibly trapped or dead.

The speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, Volodymyr Groysman, said he can confirm only one death, pedaling back on an earlier claim that 32 miners had died. It was unclear what his source for the information was, since rebel authorities do not
answer to the government in Kyiv.

“For now, I can say only that 32 people are below ground. One person has died,” Ivan Prikhodko, administrative head of the Kyiv district in Donetsk, where the affected mine is located, told Donetsk News Agency. “Until rescuers get to them, speaking about how many people have died would be unethical, to say

A mine rescue services representative, Yuliana Bedilo, also said only one death had been confirmed.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said in Kyiv that rebels had prevented a team of 60 Ukrainian rescue workers from reaching the mine to provide assistance. But leading rebel representative Denis Pushilin denied that Ukrainian authorities had offered any help.

“If we truly need assistance, we will turn to Russia,” Pushilin was quoted as saying by the Donetsk News Agency.

Separatist officials trickled into the grounds of the mine throughout the morning, but all refused to respond to questions or provide details about how many workers were still trapped. That stance frustrated many miners’ families.

He was supposed to retire next year. Everyone is angry that they say on TV that 32 people died but nobody tells us anything,” she said.

Miners arriving for their morning shift, hours after the
accident, complained volubly about the long history of safety violations at the Zasyadko mine, which is considered particularly dangerous for its high methane content.

One, who gave only his first name, Kostya, said two of his brothers had been injured in earlier blasts at the same time

“We work like crazy for peanuts. We want this place to be safe. We want our children to be able to work here,” he told the AP.

The mine has a history of deadly accidents, including one in November 2007 that killed 101 workers, and two more in December 2007 that killed 52 miners and then five more workers.

Ninety-nine people were killed in Ukraine’s coal mines in
2014, according to mining safety oversight bodies.

Thirteen of those deaths were a direct result of the war in the east, where mines have frequently been struck in artillery duels between rebel and Ukrainian government forces.

The son of Ivory Coast legend Didier Drogba said he would prefer to play for England than the Ivory Coast.

Drogba, who is Ivory Coast’s all-time top goal-scorer, has lived in England since first signing for Chelsea in 2004, and his 16-year-old son Isaac, who is part of the Chelsea youth set-up and was born in Paris, says he would choose the Three Lions over the Elephants if he becomes an international footballer.

“When I asked him (Isaac) which country he would like to play for as an international, he told me neither Ivory Coast nor France but England,” Drogba senior told Sports Illustrated .

The 36-year-old said he does not know the reasoning behind his son’s decision, yet will leave the choice up to him should he reach that level.

“I cannot tell why he doesn't want to play for my country Ivory Coast if he had to choose a national team someday,” the striker said. “That would be his choice.”

Drogba retired from international duty last year, ending a glittering career with the African giants having scored 65 goals in 104 appearances for the newly-crowned African Cup of Nations champions.

4 s*xual Sins Every Christian Should Avoid

There are at least four primary s*xual sins the Word of God speaks of: adultery, fornication, uncleanness and
lewdness.

Here are the
definitions of these four s*xual sins:

1- Adultery: Unlawful s*xual intercourse involving at least one married person. Adultery is incompatible with the harmonious laws of family life in God’s kingdom, and is under God’s judgment since it violates God’s original purpose.

2- Fornication: p****graphy, illicit s*xual intercourse
including prostitution, whoredom, inc*st, licentiousness
(lack of moral restraint), and habitual immorality (would include s*xual fantasies that lead to self service).

3- Uncleanness: Often refers to homosexuality and
lesbianism

4- Lewdness: unashamed indecency, unbridled lust,
unrestrained depravity (a disposition or settled tendency to evil, the innate corruption of unregenerate man), the person with this characteristic has an insolent defiance of public opinion, sinning in broad daylight with arrogance and contempt. Again, this often refers to s*xual sin. Here’s where many people err in their understanding of their se*uality. Notice the following verses. “Foods for the stomach and the stomach for foods, but God will destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for s*xual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God both raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His power” (1 Cor. 6:13-14).

Paul is correcting the dangerous misconception among
the Corinthians who believed, “as the stomach is
designed for food, the private parts are created for
s*xual experience.” This mind-set is not only common
among unregenerate human beings but also among
Christians who justify s*xual immorality. Paul shows how this analogy is false because your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost and belongs to Christ. Eating food is a secondary and temporal arrangement, but se*uality reaches into the eternal and metaphysical depths of one’s being. An essential identity exists between the present physical body and the future glorified body (v 14). s*xual intercourse is more than a biological experience; it involves a communion of life.

Since Jesus is one with the born-again believer’s spirit, it is unthinkable to involve Him with immorality; thus the strong admonition not to let the sin of fornication and all uncleanness “even be named among you” (Eph. 5:3;emphasis added). se*uality is a uniquely profound aspect of the personality involving one’s entire being. s*xual immorality has far-reaching effects, with great spiritual significance and social implications (v18).

Such immorality is not only a sin against the body but against the Holy Spirit, who dwells in the body. It is one of the ways we are to discern the Lord’s body, which when consistently neglected, as I stated earlier, often brings weakness, sickness, and even premature death. Regardless of how satisfying and fulfilling s*x is in its rightful place within the marriage, it is still a temporal arrangement and not a part of our eternal existence. And yet by it we procreate and give birth to eternal spirits. s*xual immorality messes with the power of procreation with someone to whom you are not married. The s*xual drive is not sinful, but it is hurtful if not kept in its proper place. Scripture
forbids s*xual immorality in order to protect you.

Politicians, businesses, schools and our public
institutions are not qualified to handle the subject of
s*xual immorality and deviate s*x problems we have in
our culture. They are a part of the problem, not the
solution. Sadly though, the church has fallen so short of addressing this problem from a strong scriptural
perspective. Some churches no longer even believe what.the Bible says about s*xual immorality is pertinent. One high-ranking church official said that the church is going to have to come to an understanding of homosexuality according to the changing culture. That is one of the biggest problems in the church today. Many of us are conforming to the standards of the culture around us.

Another well-known charismatic television preacher told his audience that homosexuality is not sin but
brokenness. “What do you think David and Jonathan
were doing? What do you think Ruth and Naomi were
doing?” implying that they were involved in homosexual
and lesbian relationships. I had to shake my head at that one. And yet this preacher is considered one of the
greatest preachers in America with a very large following. It turns out that one of his own children is a homosexual.

Although this is a very crushing trial for any godly
parent to have to face, one cannot be loyal to his family at the expense of betraying God’s holy Word.

When influential preachers say erroneous things like that, it opens the door for deception and compromise among masses of people who respect these preachers.

This will lead to a flood of evil, immorality, and all kinds of perversion among the hearers of such. It is sad to see the dilution of sound doctrine in much of the church
today. It is grievous to the Holy Spirit to see such
cowardice and compromise among preachers who have
either departed from the true faith or who are afraid to
teach sound doctrine in the area of s*xual morality. As a result, our children and young people are getting
educated by the reprobate minds of the world. Let the
preachers of righteousness speak up with strength and conviction, for the time is here when many are not
enduring sound doctrine, but with itching ears are
heaping up teachers unto themselves.

– 7 Ways To Keep Your man-hood healthy!!!

You can take steps to protect
your man-hood health and overall health. For example:

1. Be sexually responsible. If you are not married, abstinence is the key. Use condoms and be faithful to your partner who’s been tested and is free of sexually transmitted infections.

2. Get vaccinated. If you’re age 26 or younger, consider
the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to help prevent private part warts.

3. Stay physically active. Moderate physical activity can significantly reduce your risk of erectile dysfunction.

4. Practice good hygiene. If you’re not circumcised,
regularly clean beneath your foreskin with soap and
water.

5. Know your medications. Discuss medication use and
possible side effects with your doctor.

6. Pay attention to your mental health. Seek treatment
for depression and other mental health conditions.

7. Stop smoking and limit the amount of alcohol you
drink. If you smoke, take the first step and decide to quit— then ask your doctor for help.

Remember, some man-hood problems can’t be prevented.
However, routinely examining your man-hood can give
you greater awareness of the condition of your man-
hood and help you detect changes. Regular checkups can also help ensure that problems affecting your man-hood are diagnosed as soon as possible.

While you might find it difficult to discuss problems
affecting your man-hood with your doctor, don’t let
embarrassment prevent you from taking charge of your
health.

Female Student Arrested For Staging Her Kidnap To Extort N500,000 From

A female student of Delta State University, Belynda
Chinwe Bosa, has been arrested by the police in the
state for staging her own kidnap in a desperate bid to
extort money from her parents.

Mrs Beatrice Bosa reported that her
daughter, Belynda, who resides in Lagos, was travelling
from Lagos to Abraka in Delta State when she was
kidnapped along the way by unknown gunmen.

She claimed her abductors were demanding a ransom of N500,000.00 but was surprised that her boyfriend and his brother demanded N10million from her parents. The boyfriend, who was also arrested, confessed to the crime…

He claimed that he came from overseas and that both of them wanted to use the money to settle down – rent a flat, equip it and use part of the money to start a
business in Nigeria. What was he doing abroad?

Sequel to the report, operatives of Special Anti-
Kidnapping Squad, Asaba, swung into action and
arrested one America Sunday Ogagawotu at Oyiobo,
Port-Harcourt, Rivers State, after withdrawing the
ransom money which was paid into his Ecobank account in Port-Harcourt.

Commissioner of Police, Delta State, Alkali Baba Usman,when contacted by Daily Independent revealed that the victim, on leaving Lagos went to her boyfriend, one George Itietie in Port-Harcourt where she, her boyfriend and America Sunday Ogagawatu planned to inform her parents that she was kidnapped so as to extort money from them.

He further disclosed that the female student, Belynda,
got N100,000.00 as her own share from the ransom of N500,000.00 paid by her parents.

The trio of Belynda, Itietie and Ogagawatu have
confessed to the crime.

Belynda’s parents are sad, they couldn’t believe their
“decent daughter” would be involved in such mess.

FCT Minister’s 19-Year-Old Nephew Kidnaps Brother, Demands N10m

The Bauchi state Police command have arrested a 19 year old man identified as Salisu Salmanu, who claims to be a nephew of the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Senator Bala Mohammed, for conniving with three of his friends to kidnap his own three year old younger brother, Abdulkadir Salmanu, and demanding a ransom of N10m from his father. Salisu is said to be the son of the elder brother of the FCT Minister.

According to a report by Punch, the state police
spokesperson, DSP Haruna Mohammed confirmed the
incident and said Salisu in company of his friends
identified as ; Imrana Abdullahi, 17, Abdullahi Mohammed, 19, and Umar Musa, 19, all residents of the Kofar Idi area of the Bauchi metropolis were arrested on February 28th.

“The suspects conspired with four others, now
at large, to kidnap one Abdulkadir Salmanu,
male and three years old Kofar Idi, took him to
Gwallameji and demanded 10m ransom from the
parents. The victim was liberated by the police
and efforts are ongoing to apprehend the other
fleeing suspects after which they will be
charged to court.”he said
When interrogated, Salisu said it was greed that
motivated him to kidnap his own brother.

“When we planned the kidnap, we agreed that
if we succeeded in getting the N10m, we should
buy a car. We also agreed that the rest of the
money should be left for spending as individual
deemed fit. Honestly, my father meets all my
needs. He pays my school fees and every other
thing I need. It is just greed and selfishness
which the devil put in our hearts. By God’s
grace, our hearts have totally changed since
this is our first time of doing this, and we pray
that God prevent a future recurrence.”

One of his accomplice, Abdullahi Mohammed when
interrogated said when they kidnapped the boy, they had no intention of  harming him…

“We took the child, not with the intention of
harming him, but so we could get money from
his father and release him. We demanded N10m,
but the father said he would pay N3m and we
insisted it was too small. We finally agreed
that he should pay N5m. Honestly, if we had
succeeded, we would not have returned the
money, but this would have been our first and
last operation,” he said.

The police say investigations into the matter is ongoing.

Source: Punch

Women's View About man-hood Size

Whoever coined the reassuring catchphrase “size
doesn’t matter” may have lied.

According to a new study in The Journal of s*xual
Medicine, one-third of women who frequently have
vaginal orgasms claim they’re more likely to climax when having s*x with men with larger penises.

Researchers asked more than 300 women how often they had s*x, how frequently they had vaginal and/or clitoral orgasms, and whether or not man-hood length influenced their ability to climax during intercourse.

Out of the 160 women who often experienced vaginal-only orgasms and had enough partners to compare sizes, one third said they preferred longer-than-average penises.

What exactly does “average” count for these days?
According to a study, you can compare your man-hood to the length of a 20-pound banknote or U.S. dollar bill, so 5.8 inches and 6.1 inches, respectively.

But before you start freaking out that you don’t measure up, keep this in mind: 60 percent of the women in the survey did report that size made no difference. What’s more, when Men’s Health surveyed 3,289 women on how happy they are with their s*x lives, only 7 percent of sexually satisfied women said that man-hood size was critical to their pleasure.

So sure, size may matter to some women, for some types of orgasms. But the good news is you can outsmart your size even if you come up short. Your secret weapons?

Passion, foreplay, and variety. Here’s how to make them work for you.

1. Give Her a Rubdown.

It isn’t your man-hood that keeps women coming back
for more, it’s your passion, says Yvonne K. Fulbright,
Ph.D., sexologist and Astroglide’s Health and Wellness
Ambassador. But that doesn’t always mean ripping her
clothes off as soon as you close the bedroom door.
Try this: Before you begin rounding the basis, start
small. Run your fingers through her hair, caress her jaw line, and return to massaging her scalp. Continue to work your fingers down her neck and on to her shoulders, stopping the massage every so often to briefly kiss her on the back of her head or on her ear.

2. Ice, Ice Baby!

If foreplay to you means a couple minutes of hands-on-
br**sts action, it’s time for a serious upgrade. You need
to show her you’re not in a hurry.
Try this: Remove her bra so you can kiss, nibble, and lick all over her br**sts. Take her bosom in your mouth and roll your tongue around its perimeter. Then pop an ice cube in your mouth and repeat the process. Once her bosom’s erect from temperature spike, remove the cube and continue until your mouth and tongue is warm again.

3. Enhance Your Erection.

Once she’s ready to go, choose a flattering position.
“Avoid missionary,” says Jen Landa, M.D., author of The s*x Drive Solution for Women. “You’re not able to
penetrate as deep and the angle doesn’t really
accentuate your size.” Instead, try these two positions,
the Flatiron and the cowgirl.

Why Men Sleep After S*x

Since the inception of se*uality, many reasons have
been given why men sleep just immediately after s*x;
with ‘they are selfish’ point topping the list of
reasons, many need to know the real reasons why this
has been prominent with men.

Although s*x has been referred to as one of the most
enjoyable things between a man and woman, the woman race has been on the search to know why men nods straight to sleep after a good s*x. With most women thinking ”dropping” straight into sleep by their men is a complete negative phenomena, the general notion has been that men are actually selfish to sleep immediately not minding how their mates feel about it.

Although men argue that the nature of sleeping
immediately after s*x is due to tiredness from its rigors,
Scientists have however found a good argument for men by confirming that ”men sleep after s*x because they just cannot help it”. In a recent publication by Punch, it has been ascertained that men sleep after s*x because they have little power over their bodies at that point in time, hence, not being able to stay awake after the whole rigor of s*x.

Scientists have said that men really do need to sleep
after s*x when they climax because their brains become
flooded with sleep-inducing chemicals such as oxytocin,
serotonin and prolactin. Also, the blood rush after the
climax depletes the muscles of energy-producing glycogenand because men typically have higher muscle density than women, they become more tired after s*x.

A research made it known that after s*x, a man’s
cerebral cortex, which is the ‘thinking’ area, shuts down
almost immediately after climax, in which two other
areas, the cingulate cortex and amygdale make the rest
of the brain to deactivate from s*xual desire. This
successive s*xual behavior has however been linked to
only humans alone according to research.

However it has been said that wives can talk to their
partners about how they feel after s*x, urging their
husbands to dedicate few minutes for them immediately after s*x, so as to help enhance the sleeping nature of their husbands after s*x. According to a Consultant Psychologist, Prof. Toba Elegbeleye, said s*x takes a lot of energy to complete and that there is tendency for the brain and the entire system to want to rest when such intense energy is exhibited.

He also made it known that
the location where the s*xual activity takes place also
has a way of affecting the man. In his words: “When you indulge in s*x, which usually takes place at night when people sleep naturally, it comes with a level of intensity that involves all your energy and whatever you can muster to make it have a shaking effect, after which the multi-nerve ends are relaxed. This makes people sleep easily.

“It also depends on where you do it. Usually, if it is a
legal encounter, which takes place in your own bedroom where you are comfortable, you might sleep, which is different from when you do it in your car or somewhere else under duress, that is not so comfortable.

“Another factor that could aid sleeping well after s*x is
eating good food prior to the act because you may not be able to do it well if you are hungry and the body
entertains only one urge at a time and hunger is as
strong an urge and a drive as s*x is. Other factors could be to have a pleasant room atmosphere with a good bed and if there is no thought of threatening financial burden or security issues in mind.”

How To Keep Your Manhood Up And Hard For Longer In 20 Ways

An erection is a funny thing. When it stays hard, you
feel great about yourself but when it goes limp, no
matter how hard you try, it can be the cause for some
serious psychological concern.

If you’re not really suffering from anymedical
conditions and still have a hard time keeping it hard,
there are ways to keep it up and raring to go when you
need it most. Just use these 20 tips on how to keep an
erection up and it’ll definitely make a difference in your
life in a couple of weeks.

1. Talk about your fantasies. Distract yourself from
your little head and use your big head in bed. Indulging in dirty talk and fantasies can help reignite the pleasure of s*x for both of you.

2. Get kinky. Speak about your secret fantasies and
fetishes with each other and indulge in them. Sometimes, all you need to bring your little guy up is a whole new s*xual experience!

3. Be comfortable in bed. Don’t carry your own weight
on your arms for too long when you’re on top of her.
Feel relaxed and avoid any scenarios that bother you like sweating too much, overeating before s*x or having s*x when you’re too tired.

4. Get innovative. Too much of a good thing can get
boring. Your girl may be the sexiest thing alive, but
unless you create new ways to enjoy each other in bed,
one of you may get bored which will eventually lead to
you feeling less satisfied and less horny.

5. Take time, don’t rush in. This is something most
guys don’t know and don’t care to know. Foreplay
always helps the guy hold on longer. You may think it’s
pointless, but by indulging in foreplay for 15 minutes
before penetration, your little guy would get more time to warm himself up for the act. Just don’t think about your erection until you have to penetrate her. And when it’s time, you can rest assured that he’ll be ready.

6. Don’t concentrate on your little head. Instead, just
focus on satisfying and pleasuring your partner. When
you spend too much time pondering over over how erect you are, you’d kill the fun which will in turn kill your erection.

7. Talk about it with your partner. When you can’t hold
on to a long erection, it’ll definitely leave both of you
upset. Learn to talk about it and reassure each other.
Always ensure that bad s*x is not getting in the way of
good love.

8. Breathe. Breathe deeply in the mornings. It helps
increase the oxygen in your blood flow and also calm you down when you’re stressed.

9. Work out and look sexy. Better yet, start working
out. A good cardio workout makes you feel fit and
healthy, and it greatly improves your flexibility and blood circulation. When you look good, you’d feel alive down there. And the increased blood circulation would ensure that your boneless buddy would be upright and hard for a long time.

10. Quit smoking if you can. Smoking destroys your
lungs which in turn affect the amount of oxygen your
lungs can absorb, which increases the fatigue in your
muscles and leaves you tired all the time. The more
oxygen in your body, the easier it will be for that all
important muscle to function down there.

11. Don’t self service too often. self service can be good
to control the problem of premature Release, but it’s not good if you want to keep it hard for a long time.

12. Party. Go out, meet people and have fun every day.
When you have an active lifestyle, your body will come
back alive because it would be loaded with happy
hormones that get activated when you interact with
others.

13. Flirt with others. The longer a man stays away from
flirting, the more his testosterone drops. Keep your libido on a high by indulging in a bit of flirty talk now and then and you’ll always enjoy s*x.

14. Don’t change positions too often in bed. You may
have heard that changing positions can be more fun. But by doing that, you’ll end up worrying too much about whether your member will continue to stay erect during each penetration and end up feeling more stressed.

15. Stop worrying about the last time. Well, yeah, you
had a hard time having a hard time the last time. But
guess what, this is not last time. You can’t expect s*x to feel awesome every time. And when you do have a dry spell, don’t let that bother you. Just indulge in foreplay,have fun and stop thinking about what went wrong thelast time.

16. Shed your inhibitions. Love your body. Many men
and women don’t like looking at their own bodies while
having s*x because they think it looks ugly. If your
physique bothers you, do something about it and get
over it as soon as you possibly can.

17. Remember the good times. Think of the first time
you and your girl had s*x or made out. And talk about it in bed. There’s something so sexually exciting about first times that it’ll bring the excitement and s*x appeal back instantly.

18. Don’t hurry it up. It may seem like a good idea to
slip it in quickly as soon as you know it’s hard, and feel
relieved that you were erect enough to penetrate her. But this routine will make you lose your confidence gradually and scare you away from slow and relaxed penetration over time.

19. Don’t think only about penetration. Lovemaking
isn’t all about putting it in. If you want to get it hard
and keep it hard, you need to learn to understand that
lovemaking isn’t just about the act of penetration. When you pay all the attention on penetration, it’s inevitable that you’ll end up putting a lot of pressure on yourself.
Take time to please her in other ways and you’ll see how relaxed and sensual s*x really can be.

20. Avoid s*x for a month. If nothing else works for
you, this definitely should. Take s*x out of the calendar
for an entire month, and that includes even seeing each
other unclad. But woo each other and arouse each other by going out often. Grind at parties, kiss in public and pet each other when you feel horny. By restricting s*x for a while, you can bring the arousal and curiosity back into bed. And that will definitely help you keep an erection up for as long as you have to perform.

My husband sleeps with my House Help – A woman’s cry for Help

A typical tale of what happens in homes these days…

As Alice drove to her friend’s place, she rehearsed what
to tell her. How would she tell her friend that Mike, her
husband, had impregnated Peace, her maid again? This
was the third time she would be seeking her friend’s
help in terminating the poor teenager’s pregnancy! She
made up her mind that this would be the last.

But Mary, her friend, disagreed with her vehemently.
“Alice, I cannot follow you to the clinic for another
abórtion. What if she loses her womb or her life in the
process? I think it is high time something was done to
your husband. He must stop sleeping with your maids,”
she said.

Alice felt humiliated by her friend’s outburst. She sat on
the chair and cried. Mike had always been a thorn in her flesh! For almost 12 years of marriage, she could not point at any good deed he had done in her life or the marriage. Her mind flashed back to the last discussion she had with him at home:

“You are always complaining that I have not done
anything for you in this marriage. Don’t you have four
beautiful children? How many of your mates have four
boys in their marriages?”

“But Mike, I am not talking about the children, I am
referring to the vices you have wrought in this marriage in the last 11 years. I am tired! You keep digressing to inanities when serious issues are discussed. So, how do you explain the pregnancy Peace is carrying?” Alice said accusingly.

“Pregnancy? Peace? Look here, woman, I don’t have a
clue of what you are insinuating and I have told you I
don’t want to have anything to do with either you or the stupid maids you bring to this house,” Mike said and left the house in anger. Things had always taken this pattern in their marriage!

She worked in a bank and had risen to a managerial
level. From the first year of their marriage, Alice had
always hired helps to mind the home, especially her
children, who all came in quick succession.

She had lost count of the number of domestic helps her
husband had slept with. Whether old or young, Mike was a randy man, who slept with her maids.

Ruth, the first child minder she hired after the birth of
her firstborn, was a Ghanaian. Plump and pretty, the
middle aged nanny was hired through a colleague. Ruth
was a single mother and had come to Nigeria to fend for her four children. Initially, Alice never suspected any foul play between the woman and her husband.

She was a very good nanny, who also helped with housekeeping and this saved Alice a lot of stress. Before she returned from work, there was food on the table and her baby would have been well taken care of.

Since her husband worked in the civil service, he arrived
home first and she was happy that he helped supervise
domestic staff especially the nanny. But after the birth
of Godson, their second child, Ruth insisted on leaving!

Alice begged that the nanny should wait and help nurture her baby because she was resuming work in less than a month. Ruth did not budge but said she wanted to go and stay with her children in Ghana.

When she resumed and lamented to her colleague who
brought Ruth to her, she was shocked to learn that Ruth was not in Ghana but had rented an apartment in town.

Alice got the address and traced the house where the
nanny lived. She wanted to beg her to return to her
home. It was a work day and she had closed early to
check on nanny Ruth. Was she shocked when she met
Mike there? He laid on the bed dressed in a pair of
boxers! She didn’t utter a word but left. Obviously, Mikerented the apartment for the nanny so that they wouldhave time for their escapade- her second baby wouldhave posed a hindrance.

If he apologised over Ruth’s case, he never did on Uzo,
the teenage girl she brought from the village. Suddenly,
she observed the flat chest of the girl was sprouting!

Though Uzo never got pregnant, the girl told Alice’s
mother that ‘daddy is always sleeping with me when
auntie goes to work.’

She managed to get a crèche where she put her children but when she was pregnant the third time, she could not help but get another maid. This time, she was a 14-year- old from her pastor. If Alice thought her husband would be scared of their pastor and not come near the girl, she was wrong! In fact, Susan, the maid, was the first teenager she took for an abórtion! The girl agreed to terminate the pregnancy after her mother collected over N100, 000 from Alice. It was to seal the promise not to tell the pastor or anyone in the church!

That marked the beginning of series of abórtions she had for over five girls. But her husband kept denying his action.

“I still believe Peace should keep this pregnancy and have the baby,” she heard Mary said as she jolted to reality.

“Why should I keep a pregnancy Mike has denied
paternity? What if she had slept with someone else?”

Alice said. “Both of us know your husband is responsible. That girl was brought by my sister from Togo and I don’t know what to tell her if anything happens to her,” Mary said.

For Alice, it seemed her world had come to an end.

Tambuwal Urges Politicians To Put National Interest Above Personal

Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Aminu
Waziri Tambuwal, yesterday warned of ominous signs in the polity that point to the possibility of a return to
“dark days”, especially with the present efforts to scuttle free and fair elections.

He, therefore, called on politicians to avoid placing their
personal interests above the national interest as doing
that is capable of throwing the country into crisis.

The speaker stated this yesterday when a delegation of the Nigeria Civil Society Situation Room visited him in his office at the National Assembly.

“We recognise the importance of the civil society and
what you do to our democracy. I believe you will not rest on your oars in this hour of our need”, he said.

Tambuwal, who was responding to the call by the group not to allow further extension of the election timeline, said “our ambitions should not be greater than the survival of our country. If you decide to do what pleases you and at the end of the day, crisis breaks, what will you do?”

The speaker, who said only the National Assembly can
declare Nigeria being at a state of war, also questioned
the grounds upon which some people were talking about interim government in the country, saying it was entirely unconstitutional, except a coup was in the offing.

Leader of the group, Clement Nwankwo and his deputy,
Festus Okoye urged members of the National Assembly
not to allow for another rescheduling of the election
dates as such a move could elicit a negative reaction
from the people.

Politics Fayose Empowers Ekiti Carpenters With N1.2billion Contract

Ekiti state governor, Ayo Fayose has
awarded a N1.2bn contract to the
Carpenters and Furniture Association in
the state; PUNCH reports.

Representing the Governor at the
signing of the Memorandum of
Understanding for the contract, Chief
Dipo Anisulowo, Chief of staff to the
Ekiti governor said, ''This is an
empowerment project. We are awarding
the furniture aspect of the Millennium
Development Goals project to these local
furniture makers. The project covers
about six local government areas in Ekiti
State, so they will make the chairs and
the tables for all the schools in the six
LGAs.

''The whole project would cost the
government about N1.2bn. This gesture
by the governor is the first of its kind in
Ekiti State. The governor did this to
make good his promise to empower local
contractors and artisans in the state.

''I hope you would not disappoint the
governor because he has reposed a lot of
confidence in you to have given you this
project. I pray you will reciprocate his
kind gesture by doing a very good job'',
Anisulowo said.

U.S., Iran Resume Nuclear Talks After Netanyahu Warnings

The top U.S. and Iranian diplomats have begun a third day of talks over Iran's nuclear program in the Swiss resort of Montreux.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign
Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif resumed their discussions on March 4, hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that a deal meant to rein in Tehran's nuclear program could "pave Iran's path to the bomb" rather than block it.

The United States and five other powers are seeking a deal with Iran under which Tehran would limit its nuclear program, which Western nations fear could lead to the development of nuclear weapons, in exchange for sanctions relief.

Reacting to Netanyahu's speech to the U.S. Congress,
President Barack Obama said Netanyahu had offered no viable alternative.

The negotiating sides have set an end-of-March deadline for a framework agreement and a June 30 deadline for a full deal.

Thirty Two Killed In Ukraine Mine Explosion

Thirty two people have been killed and 70 more are
trapped underground following an explosion at a coal mine in rebel held eastern Ukraine.

The blast took place at a mine in the Donetsk region of the country and emergency services have launched a rescue attempt to reach those trapped.

Miners arrive to help with the rescue effort "More than 30 people were killed. Rescue workers have not yet come to the place of the explosion, they are removing
the poisonous gas and then will go down," said Vladimir Tsymbalenko, head of the local mining safety service.

One of the men caught up in the blast and taken to
a Donetsk hospital said: "I was blown away by an
explosion. I came round. There was dust everywhere and people were moaning."

Families of those caught up in the disaster have been
gathering at the entrance to the mine in Zasyadko, Donetsk.

The mines in Donbass are among some of the most
dangerous in the world due to the high levels of methane produced which increase the risk of explosions.

Separatist authorities in Donetsk said the blast occurred at a depth of more than 1,000 metres (0.6 miles) and that 230 workers were in the mine at the time.

The statement added the explosion was caused by a
mixture of gas and air - a common cause of industrial
mining accidents.

Some 300 men die in mine accidents in the region every
year.

He kept that quiet! Chris Brown 'has nine month old daughter' with close friend

Chris Brown is reportedly a father.

TMZ reports that the 25-year-old singer has a nine-month- old daughter.

According to the website, the baby's mother is Nia, a 31- year-old former model who has known Chris for "several years".

While the pair are not together romantically, sources
close to both parties tell TMZ that they are "on very good terms" and Chris is "happy about being a father".

There is no word yet on the child's name or any custody arrangement the parents have in place.

However, TMZ reports that there doesn't appear to be any formalagreement where custody is concerned.

The website has revealed the first photo of the infant,
who certainly looks to have inherited her famous father's big brown eyes, similar nose and cheeky smile.

The star has been in a tumultuous on-off relationship
with 26-year-old model Karrueche Tran since 2011.

Following numerous run-ins with the law over the years, Chris was ordered to serve 131 days in jail for violating the terms of his parole on May 9 last year.

Due to overcrowding in the jail, he was given early
release on June 2, 2014, which means he may well have
missed the birth of his daughter.

Appeal Court Gives Jonathan Green Light, Rules He is Qualified to Seek Re-election

PDP congratulates president on verdict.

The Court of Appeal in Abuja Tuesday dismissed an appeal challenging the eligibility of the President Goodluck Jonathan to seek another term of four years in office, holding  that the president is eligible to re-contest in the March 28 residential election.

The court dismissed an appeal filed by Cyriacus Njoku
against a judgment of an Abuja High Court which had earlier dismissed the case.

A panel of five justices of the appellate court, headed by Justice Abubakar Yahaya, in a unanimous judgment, held that the appellant’s suit was speculative and imaginary.

In the lead judgment delivered by Justice Yahaya, the court held that Jonathan had only spent one term in office as the president going by the provision of the constitution.

The court noted that the appellant lacked the locus standi to challenge the president’s qualification to contest adding that where a party lacked locus, the court could not assume jurisdiction.

On that ground, the court upheld the decision of the lower court which dismissed Cyriacus’s suit for lack of locus standi.

“We agree with the lower court that the appellant has no locus to sue”, the court held.

On the cause of action, the court held that the case of the appellant was speculative and imaginary as none of the reliefs he sought accrued any benefit to him.

On the issue of taken oath of office and allegiance twice by Jonathan, the court pointed out that the constitution was the grundnorm.

It held that court of law was duty bound to consider the entire provision of the constitution.

Justice Abubakar said: “In this appeal, it is not controverted by the appellant that the first oath taken by the first defendant (Jonathan) was the oath he took as the vice- president and not as president.

“But he took the oath in May 2010 to complete unexpired tenure of late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

“Section 37(1)(b) disqualifies a person from contesting for president if he had been elected twice.

“Disqualification is through election and not oath taking.

Election is a process of choosing a person to occupy a
position by voting. When election is given its literal meaning, it connotes when a voting is employed to choose a person for political office.

“This did not take place when Jonathan stepped into the shoe of his principal who went to the great beyond.

To say these things were done is to import words not used by the constitution. Section 146(1) of the constitution cannot be deemed an election for a vice president to step into the office of a president.

“Election involves conducting primaries by party, nomination, election and announcement of results. All these processes were not done. If a vice-president succeeds a president that dies, that cannot be challenged. It is a mode of stepping into the vacant office provided for by the constitution.

“When a president dies, the vice-president automatically becomes president as provided for by Section 130 (1)(2) of the 1999 Constitution.”

In addition, the court also held that oath taken by Jonathan in May 2010 was a constitutional process.

He noted that going by Section 135 (2)(b) of the Contitution, the president took the
oath of office for the first time in May 2011, adding that the 2010 oath was to complete the unexpired term of Yara’Adua.

The court also noted that if Jonathan was disqualified as prayed by the appellant, the system of election would have then been altered.

“It was not election that produced the first respondent in May 2010, the oath he took then was not an oath of elected president as provided for by Section 180 of the constitution.

“The process which produced the first respondent in 2010 was not election but a constitutional process.

This was different to what happened in 2011.
“The process of election was followed in 2011. The oath of office taken in 2011 was the first oath taking by the first respondent as an elected president having fulfilled all the process, of election,” the court further held.

Meanwhile, the PDP has congratulated President Jonathan for his victory at the Court of Appeal.

PDP National Publicity Secretary, Olisa Metuh, in a
statement yesterday said the court ruling represents a
positive step towards President Jonathan’s impending
overwhelming victory at the polls come March 28.

The party described the verdict as “victory for democracy and the rule of law especially in protecting the inalienable rights of eligible citizens to freely participate in the electoral process without any form of hindrance” adding that the development has helped to enrich the judiciary and further deepened the nation’s democratic evolution.

The PDP also applauded President Jonathan for always remaining focused and upholding democratic principles, which enable Nigerians to operate in an environment that allows for full expression of fundamental rights.

Commending the judiciary for its stabilising role in the polity, the PDP urged its members and supporters across the country to close ranks and stand on the platform of this judicial victory to intensify efforts for eventual electoral victory for the president and other candidates of the party in the general elections.

Don’t allow PDP buy you with dollars – Fashola warns Nigerians

Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola, has
advised Nigerians against voting for politicians
with no good track record.

The governor gave this charge yesterday, while
commissioning nine network of roads in Maidan-
Aina-Agiliti area of Mile 12, Kosofe Local
Government Area of the state.

Fashola told them not to be carried away by the
empty promises being made by the incumbent
federal government as it was yet to fulfill any in
the last four years.

He advised Nigerians not to be bought by dollars
and other incentives being shared by the Peoples
Democratic Party, PDP, as inducement in its
desperation to win elections in the state.

Fashola said, “”If you collect dollars, know that you
have collected your security, your roads and your
infrastructure. Tell them your dignity cannot be
bought by naira or dollars.”

Fashola also commissioned 18 Classroom Blocks at
Aiyedire Ajibola Senior High School, in Ketu area of
the state, saying the road project was an evidence
of his government’s slum regeneration and urban
renewal plan.

He said whoever had visited the area before the
construction would understand why the whole
residents had turned up to witness the
commissioning.

Buhari Is Not Just Fit To Govern Nigeria! – Danjuma Lamido

The argument on which General Buhari is
being promoted as the alternative choice is
not only wobbly but pitifully immature.

History matters. Records are not kept simply
to assist the weakness of memory, but to
operate as guides to the future. Of course,
we know that human beings change.

Public offence, crimes against humanity must
be answered in the public domain, not in
caucuses of bargaining. On General Buhari,
we have been offered no evidence of the
purest prospect of change. On the contrary,
all evident suggests that this is one
individual who remains convinced that this
is one ex-ruler that the nation cannot call to
order.

General Buhari was one of the Generals who
treated the Oputa Panel with palpable scorn.
Like Babangida and Abdusalami, he refused
to put in appearance even though complaints
that were tabled against him involved a
career of gross abuses of power and blatant
assault on the fundamental human rights of
the Nigerian citizenry. Prominent against
these charges was an act that amounted to
nothing less than judicial murder, the
execution of a citizen under a retroactive
Decree.

Who brought about Decree 20 that executed
three youths – Lawal Ojuolape (30), Bernard
Ogedengbe (29) and Bartholomew Owoh (26)?

To put it quite plainly, one of those three
Ogedengbe – was executed for a crime that
did not carry a capital forfeit at the time it
was committed.

This was an unconscionable crime, carried
out in defiance of the pleas and protests of
nearly every sector of the Nigerian and
international community religious, civil
rights, political, trade unions etc.

Gen. Buhari and partner-in-crime, Late
Tunde Idiagbon persisted in this heartless act
for one reason and one reason only: to place
Nigerians on notice that they were now under an iron, inflexible rule, under governance by fear.

The execution of those youthful innocent for
so he was, since the punishment did not
exist at the time of commission – was
nothing short of premeditated murder, for which the Gen. Buhari should normally stand trial upon their loss of immunity.

Are we truly expected to forget this violation
of our entitlement to security as provided
under existing laws? And even if our
sensibilities have become blunted by
succeeding seasons of cruelty and brutality, if
power itself had so coarsened the
sensibilities also of rulers and corrupted their
judgment, what should one rightly expect
after they have been rescued from the snare
of power. At the very least, a re-evaluation,
leading hopefully to remorse, and its
expression to a wronged society. At the very
least, such a re-evaluation should engender
reticence, silence. In the case of Buhari, it
was the opposite. Since leaving office he has
declared in the most categorical terms that he
had no regrets over this murder and would
do so again.

Human life is inviolate. The right to life is
the uniquely fundamental right on which all
other rights are based. The crime that Gen.
Buhari committed against the entire nation
went further however, inconceivable as it
might first appear.

That crime is one of the most profound
negations of civic being. Not content with
hammering down the freedom of expression
in general terms, Buhari specifically forbade
all public discussion of a return to civilian,
democratic rule. Let us constantly applaud
our media those battle scarred professionals
did not completely knuckle down.

They resorted to cartoons and oblique,
elliptical references to sustain the people’s
campaign for a time-table to democratic rule.
Overt agitation for a democratic time table
however remained rigorously suppressed
military dictatorship, and a specifically
incorporated in Buhari and Idiagbon was
here to stay. To deprive a people of volition
in their own political direction is to turn a
nation into a colony of slaves. Gen. Buhari
enslaved the nation. He gloated and gloried
in a master-slave relation to the millions of
its inhabitants. It is astonishing to find that
the same former slaves, now free of their
chains, should clamour to be ruled by one
who not only turned their nation into a slave
plantation, but forbade them any discussion
of their condition.

Tai Solarin who stood at street corners,
fearlessly distributing leaflets that took up
the gauntlet where the media had dropped it
was incarcerated by that regime and denied
even the medication for his asthmatic
condition. Tai did not ask to be sent for
treatment overseas; all he asked was his
traditional medicine that had proved so
effective after years of struggle with asthma!
Shehu Shagari’s National Party of Nigeria
had already run out of steam and was near
universally detested except of course by the
handful that still benefited from that regime
of profligacy and rabid fascism.

Responsibility for the national condition lay
squarely at the door of the ruling party,
obviously, but against whom was Buhari’s
coup staged? Judging by the conduct of that
regime, it was not against Shagari’s
government but against the opposition.

The head of government, on whom primary
responsibility lay, was Shehu Shagari. Yet
that individual was kept in cozy house
detention in Ikoyi while his powerless
deputy, Alex Ekwueme, was locked up in
Kirikiri prisons. Such was the Gen. Buhari
notion of equitable allotment of guilt and
responsibility.

Shall we revisit the tragicomic series of trials
that landed several politicians several
lifetimes in prison? You may recall the
judicial processes undergone by the
septuagenarian Chief Adekunle Ajasin. He
was arraigned and tried before Gen. Buhari’s
punitive tribunal but acquitted. Frustrated,
Buhari ordered his re-trial. Again, the
Tribunal could not find Chief Ajasin guilty of
a single crime, so once again he was
returned for trial, only to be acquitted of all
charges of corruption or abuse of office.

Was Chief Ajasin thereby released? No! He
was ordered detained indefinitely, simply for
the crime of winning an election.

The conduct of the Gen. Buhari regime after
his coup was not merely one of double,
triple, multiple standards but a cynical
travesty of justice. Audu Ogbeh, former PDP
Chairman was one of the few figures of
morality within the NPN. Just as he has done
in recent times with the PDP, he played the
role of an internal critic and reformer,
warning, dissenting, and setting an example
of probity within his ministry.

For that crime he spent months in unjust
incarceration; guilty by association? Well, if
that was the motivating yardstick of the
administration of the Gen. Buhari justice,
then it was most selectively applied.

The utmost severity of the Buhari-Idiagbon
justice was especially reserved either for the
opposition in general, or for those within the
ruling party who had showed the sheerest
sense of responsibility and patriotism.

Do we need to remind the Nation of Buhari’s
deliberate humiliating treatment of the Emir
of Kano and the Oni of Ife over their visit to
the state of Israel? I hold no brief for
traditional rulers and their relationship with
governments, but insist on regarding them as
entitled to all the rights, privileges and
responsibilities of any Nigerian citizen. This
royal duo went to Israel on their private
steam and private business.

Simply because the Gen. Buhari regime was
pursuing some antagonistic foreign policy
towards Israel, a policy of which these
traditional rulers were not a part, they were
subjected on their return to an unjust
treatment. Since when, may one ask, did a
free citizen of the Nigerian nation require
the permission of a Head of State to visit a
foreign nation that was willing to offer that
tourist a visa?

One is only too aware that some Nigerians
love to point to Buhari’s agenda of discipline
as the shining jewel in his scrap-iron crown.
To inculcate discipline however, one must
lead by example, obeying laws set down as
guides to public probity.

Example speaks louder than declarations, and
rulers cannot exempt themselves from the
disciplinary structures imposed on the overall
polity, especially on any issue that seeks to
establish a policy for public well-being.

On the theme of double, triple, multiple
standards in the enforcement of the law, and
indeed of the Decrees passed by the Gen.

Buhari regime at the time, let us recall the
notorious case of Triple Alhaji Alhaji Alhaji,
then Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of
Finance. Who was caught, literally, with his
pants down in distant Austria. That was not
the crime however, and private conduct
should always remain restricted to the
domain of private censure.

There was no Decree against civil servants
proving just as hormone driven as anyone
else, especially outside the nation’s borders.
However, there was a clear Decree against
the keeping of foreign accounts, and this was
what emerged from the Austrian escapade.

Alhaji Alhaji kept, not one, but several
undeclared foreign accounts, and he had no
business being in possession of the large
amount of foreign currency of which he was
robbed by his overnight companion. The
media screamed for an even application of
the law, but Gen. Buhari had turned
suddenly deaf.

By contrast, Fela Anikulapo languished in jail
for years, sentenced under that very
draconian decree. His crime was being in
possession of foreign exchange that he had
legitimately received for the immediate
upkeep of his band as they set off for an
international engagement. A vicious sentence
was slapped down on Fela by a judge who
later became so remorse stricken at least
after Gen. Buhari’s overthrow that he went
to the King of Afro-beat and apologized.

These were not exceptional but mere sample
cases from among hundreds of others,
victims of a Decree that was selectively
applied, a Decree that routinely penalized
innocents and ruined the careers and
businesses of many.

What precisely was Ebenezer Babatope’s
crime that he should have spent the entire
tenure of Gen. Buhari in detention? Nothing
beyond the fact that he once warned in the
media that Gen. Buhari was an ambitious
soldier who would bear watching through the
lenses of a coup-detat. Babatope’s father died
while he was in Gen. Buhari’s custody, the
dictator remained deaf to every plea that he
be at least released to attend his father’s
funeral, even under guard.

But then, speaking the truth was not what
Gen. Buhari, as a self-imposed leader, was
especially captivated of enquire of Tunde
Thompson and Nduka Irabor both of whom,
faithful to their journalistic calling,
published nothing but the truth, yet ended
up sentenced under Gen. Buhari’s Decree.

Jonathan promises to involve more youths in governance, if re-elected

President Goodluck Jonathan has pledged to
get more Nigerian youth involved in governance if
re-elected.

The President also said that he would be driving
‘Made in Nigeria cars’ very soon and would have
them as part of his convoy to demonstrate
confidence in the growth of automobile industry in
the country under his administration.

NAN reports that the Jonathan gave the assurance
at an interactive session with a across section of
Nigerian youth in Lagos.

The event “Meet The President”, was organised by
a group called the Participate, Vote for Your Choice
Candidate (PVC) and was held at the Eko Hotel and
Suites, Lagos.

Responding to some of the questions, the Jonathan
said that his administration had involved many
young Nigerians at all levels of governance and
would involve more in his second tenure.

“We have had different programmes for the
Nigerian youths including job creation, employment
and scholarships.

“We have been working with a number of young
people from grass root to the national level and will
get more young people involved.”

The President expressed appreciation for the
opportunity to hear directly from the youth.
“I intend to make this kind of interaction a part of
our administration by going round the six geo political
zones for town hall meetings with the youth.

“If the President will get this kind of for a regularly
it will help in understanding the youth and their
desires” he said.

Jonathan explained that it had not been easy to
hold such interactive sessions in the past due to
time constrains.

“Governance is a serious business. I know many will
wonder why this is holding now that elections are
near. It is because when elections are getting close
the president spends time going round.

“After the President is inaugurated, much of the
time is spent working on issues that will benefit the
country.

“But we will find time in our busy schedule to make
this more regular in coming year” he added.

He also explained that his visits to Baga, Mubi and
other North Eastern states few days ago were not
as a result of the imminent elections.

“As the Commander In Chief, I rely on intelligence
reports to make such moves.”

Monroe Freedman, Expert on Legal Ethics, Dies at 86

Monroe H. Freedman, a dominant figure in legal
ethics, whose work helped chart the course of
lawyers’ behavior in the late 20th century and
beyond, died on Thursday at his home in
Manhattan. He was 86.

His granddaughter Rebeca Izquierdo Lodhi
confirmed the death.

At his death, he was a professor of law at Hofstra
University , on Long Island. Professor Freedman’s
book “ Understanding Lawyers’ Ethics ,” written
with Abbe Smith and currently in its fourth
edition, is assigned in law schools throughout the
country.

“He invented legal ethics as a serious academic
subject,” Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard Law
School professor, said in a telephone interview
on Monday. “Prior to Freedman, legal ethics was
usually a lecture given by the dean of the law
school, which resembled chapel: ‘Thou shalt not
steal. Thou shalt not be lazy.’ But Monroe
brought to the academy the realistic complexity
of what lawyers actually face.”

For half a century Professor Freedman was, by
his own account and that of colleagues, a gleeful
jurisprudential provocateur. On one occasion, he
waggishly titled a law-review article “ In Praise of
Overzealous Representation: Lying to Judges,
Deceiving Third Parties and Other Ethical
Conduct.” On another, he moved a future chief
justice of the United States Supreme Court to call
for his disbarment.

In his published writings and his many
interviews in the news media, Professor
Freedman persistently raised questions about
lawyers’ professional conduct that entailed deep
reflection, impassioned argument and — all too
often — discomforting answers.

“He was on my speed dial for everything I ever
did involving legal ethics,” Professor Dershowitz
said. “And I brought him to my classes every
single year: A legal education without Monroe
Freedman was incomplete.”

Drawing on a scholarly background that let him
invoke Hebrew Scripture, Christian Gospels, St.
Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant in support
of his legal arguments, Professor Freedman was
concerned in particular with defining the scope
of lawyers’ responsibilities toward their clients.
Central to his concern was the lawyer-client
relationship as it played out in criminal court.

“It is 50 years since the case of Gideon v.
Wainwright ,” the noted civil-rights lawyer
Michael E. Tigar said on Monday, invoking the
landmark Supreme Court case of 1963 that
established a criminal defendant’s right to an
attorney. “The law books are full of cases of what
is now called ‘ineffective assistance of counsel.’
Monroe championed a view of the lawyer’s role
and responsibilities that makes the promise of
Gideon a reality.”

Professor Freedman’s views on ethics sprang
from his early work as a civil-liberties lawyer,
and throughout his career he maintained that the
two fields should dovetail seamlessly.

“That’s how he saw legal ethics,” his co-author
Professor Smith, who teaches at the Georgetown
University Law Center, said on Monday. “To him,
access to justice was — and is — central.”

At midcentury, for instance, Professor Freedman
took the American Bar Association to task on
civil libertarian grounds for its longstanding ban
on professional advertising. For one thing, he
argued, the ban violated lawyers’ First
Amendment rights. For another, he said, it
denied low-income Americans ready access to
information about legal services. His work helped
pave the way for the lifting of the ban in 1977.

Likewise, as Professor Freedman told the CBS
News program “60 Minutes” in 1994, “I believe
that there is a professional responsibility on the
part of lawyers to chase ambulances.” He added:

“We are here to help members of the public. And
we are not helping members of the public the
way we’re supposed to do it if we are not there
to tell people who are ignorant of their rights
that they’ve got rights.”

In 1966, in what was undoubtedly his most
controversial public stance, Professor Freedman
published an article in The Michigan Law Review
titled “ Professional Responsibility of the Criminal
Defense Lawyer : The Three Hardest Questions.”

In it, he argued that a lawyer’s obligation to
represent clients vigorously (and to protect their
privacy just as vigorously) should trump all other
considerations — including the lawyer’s
knowledge that a client plans to lie on the stand.

Though lawyers should advise clients not to
commit perjury, Professor Freedman wrote, if it
became clear that the client was going to anyway
— or already had — the lawyer’s overriding
obligation was to remain silent.

“His argument is still resonating in the halls of
every courtroom and every deposition, because
perjury is still rampant in our legal system,”
Professor Dershowitz said on Monday. “He wrote
the article to provoke a discussion.”

But what it provoked was a firestorm. Several
prominent jurists, including Warren E. Burger,
then a federal appellate judge and later the
United States chief justice, called, without success,
for Professor Freedman’s disbarment.

“Monroe’s position was really based upon a view
that the lawyer’s primary obligation is the
defense of a client who is, after all, facing an
adversary with superior resources,” Professor
Tigar explained. “And with everything arrayed
against the accused, Monroe put this primary
value on the advocate’s obligation of undivided
loyalty and zeal.”

Monroe Henry Freedman was born on April 10,
1928, in Mount Vernon, N.Y.; his parents,
Chauncey Freedman and the former Dorothea
Kornblum, ran a pharmacy there. The young Mr.
Freedman earned a bachelor’s degree from
Harvard, followed by bachelor’s and master’s
degrees from Harvard Law School.

Near the start of his career, Professor Freedman
served as a volunteer counsel to the Mattachine
Society , the early gay-rights group; from 1960 to
1964, he was a consultant to the United States
Commission on Civil Rights. In the early 1980s,
he was the first executive director of what
became the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum .

Professor Freedman taught at George
Washington University before joining Hofstra in
1973. As the dean of Hofstra’s law school from
then until 1977, he was credited with helping to
give the school, founded in 1970, a national
profile as a teaching and research institution. He
was also a visiting professor at Georgetown.

Professor Freedman’s wife, the former Audrey
Willock, whom he married in 1950, died in 1998.
Besides his granddaughter Ms. Izquierdo Lodhi,
his survivors include a brother, Eugene; a sister,
Penny; a son, Judah; a daughter, Alice; six other
grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. A
son, Caleb, and a daughter, Sarah Freedman-
Izquierdo, died before him.

His other books include “Lawyers’ Ethics in an
Adversary System” (1975) and “Group
Defamation and Freedom of Speech: The
Relationship Between Language and
Violence” (1995), which he edited with Eric M.
Freedman. With Professor Smith, he was the
editor of “How Can You Represent Those
People?” (2013), a collection of articles about a
lawyer’s obligation to take on distasteful clients.

As an index of his willingness to puncture all
manner of sacred cows, Professor Freedman, in a
series of articles in the 1990s, squared off against
possibly the most venerated figure in American
jurisprudence: Atticus Finch, the hero of Harper
Lee’s 1960 novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Among the moral transgressions for which
Professor Freedman takes Finch to task is the fact
that he defends Tom Robinson, a black man
accused of raping a white woman, not
voluntarily but because he was appointed by the
court.

“Atticus Finch never in his professional life
voluntarily takes a pro bono case in an effort to
ameliorate the evil — which he himself and
others recognize — in the apartheid of Maycomb,
Ala.,” Professor Freedman wrote in The Alabama
Law Review in 1994.

“Throughout his relatively comfortable and
pleasant life in Maycomb, Atticus Finch knows
about the grinding, ever-present humiliation and
degradation of the black people of Maycomb; he
tolerates it; and sometimes he even trivializes
and condones it.”

Professor Freedman added:

“For Finch, the civil rights movement of the
1960s is inevitable, but decades too soon.”

Charlotte Spiegel, Politician Who Safeguarded New York’s Windows, Dies at 92

Charlotte Spiegel, a civic leader and Democratic
politician from the Lower East Side who created
New York’s pioneering, lifesaving window guard
program in the 1970s, died on Friday in
Manhattan. She was 92.

Her death, at NYU Langone Medical Center, was
confirmed by her daughter Maura Spiegel.

As director of the health department’s Window
Falls Prevention Program, Ms. Spiegel
transformed what was a modest but promising
publicity campaign, called Children Can’t Fly,
into a formal health code requirement that
landlords provide window guards to tenants in
apartments occupied by children age 10 and
under.

It was widely described as the first window
guard requirement in the nation.

At first, the health department bought tens of
thousands of window guards at $3 apiece and
distributed them free of charge. When it ran out
of money, it shifted the burden to building
owners.

Landlords were originally required to install the
guards only if a tenant requested them. They
were later made responsible for determining
whether tenants were eligible for the guards and,
if so, installing them.

“If a child falls, the landlord is liable,” Ms.
Spiegel said, even if the landlord was the city’s
own Housing Authority, which she accused of
“foot dragging” in complying with the window
guard regulations.

In 1976, when the regulations were enacted, 217
children were injured in window falls and 24
died. In 2013, according to the health
department, six were injured and one died
falling from windows that should have been
equipped with guards.

A decade before the window guard campaign,
Ms. Spiegel found herself in the political
vanguard. In 1963, when Edward N. Costikyan
announced that he was retiring as the leader of
the Manhattan Democratic organization,
historically known as Tammany Hall, Ms. Spiegel
filled in as the acting New York County leader.

She was then elected chairwoman of the county’s
executive committee. She was the first woman to
hold each post.

Charlotte Sandra Neuman was born in
Manhattan on March 22, 1922, to Morris Neuman
and the former Ida Mitnitsky, a seamstress. An
uncle was treasurer of a Lower East Side
Democratic club. She was 15 when she was
admitted to Hunter College, having already
graduated from Washington Irving High School.

She went on to receive a master’s degree in
English from Columbia University, where she
overcame her painful shyness.

In 1944, she married Samuel A. Spiegel, who
represented the Lower East Side as an
assemblyman before being elected to the State
Supreme Court and to the Surrogate’s Court. He
died in 1977. Besides her daughter Maura, Ms.
Spiegel is survived by another daughter, Jill
Spiegel, and two grandchildren.

Ms. Spiegel taught in the same elementary school
that she had attended, Public School 188 on the
Lower East Side, worked briefly for a public
relations company and was a partner in a small
interior decorating firm before she got involved
in civic groups, like the Grand Street Settlement
House and the League of Women Voters, and
Democratic politics.

In 1985, when she was 63, Ms. Spiegel was on a
cruise with the ship Achille Lauro when it was
hijacked in the Mediterranean by Palestinian
terrorists. She was one of the so-called beach
people who vacationed in the same condominium
complex on the Jersey Shore and was among 11
of them who had taken the cruise together.

Ms. Spiegel was one of five members of the group
who were not on board when the hijacking took
place; they were on a bus tour in Egypt at the
time, from Alexandria to Port Said. Her
childhood friend Leon Klinghoffer, who was in a
wheelchair, was shot and thrown overboard. His
wife, Marilyn, survived the hijacking and died a
year later.

Maura Spiegel recalled that her mother was
appointed to the health department directorship
by Mayor Abraham D. Beame , after she had
worked on his 1973 campaign and lost the
clubhouse district leadership she had held for
nearly two decades.

In government, Ms. Spiegel discovered how much
she could still accomplish, even during a fiscal
crisis, her daughter said. Under Children Can’t
Fly, her window guard program, reported falls
declined by 50 percent from 1973 to 1975.

Terrorism Case Against Pakistani Man Is Going to Jury

As arguments in Abid Naseer’s trial on terrorism
charges came to a close on Monday, jurors had
heard from British intelligence officers in
disguise, an F.B.I. attaché who observed Osama
bin Laden’s dead body and Mr. Naseer himself
arguing that he was an innocent man.

Mr. Naseer, 28, a Pakistani, is accused of
planning to attack a Manchester, England,
shopping mall in a plot by Al Qaeda that would
have also included the New York City subway
system and a Danish newspaper. But the alleged
plot was never carried out.

The strongest link between Mr. Naseer and
terrorist activity was in emails: a series of
messages that he wrote to the address
sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com that discussed
women and marriage in often-awkward phrases.

The Yahoo account was that of a Qaeda handler
who also corresponded with an admitted Qaeda
supporter and terrorist plotter, Najibullah Zazi .
Like Mr. Naseer’s emails to sana_pakhtana, Mr.

Zazi’s were full of references to his “marriage,”
which Mr. Zazi testified was code for a bombing
plot.

Mr. Naseer argued that his emails were innocent
chatter about girls with a friend he met in an
Internet chat room — who he had no idea was a
Qaeda affiliate.

Now, jurors in Federal District Court in Brooklyn
will decide which side to believe. Was Mr. Naseer
going into Tesco stores because that is what a
typical student in England would do? Or was he
scouting for bomb ingredients? Was he returning
home to Pakistan to see his family, or to train
with Al Qaeda? Did he delete all emails from his
account the day he sent his final email to the
sana_pakhtana address because he needed more
space, or because he was covering his tracks as
the attack neared?

In the government’s closing argument, a
prosecutor, Zainab Ahmad, hit on the danger of
the alleged plot.

“That man wanted to drive a car bomb into a
crowded shopping center and watch people die,”
she said.

She spent much of her time discussing the emails.
“The fact that Sohaib is emailing with the
defendant shows you the defendant is Al Qaeda,”
she said, using a name for the sana_pakhtana
account holder.

She dismissed exchanges like “How are you?” and
“What’s the weather like?” as “chitter-chatter.”

“They want to make these emails seem normal,”
Ms. Ahmad said. “They want to make sure these
emails don’t arouse suspicion.”

The important passages, she said, were those
where Mr. Naseer went into detail about women
and cars — a car bomb was one of the methods
he was considering, she said.

For instance, Mr. Naseer wrote once that a
woman named Huma seemed “weak and difficult
to convince.” That, Ms. Ahmad argued, referred
to a hydrogen peroxide bomb, which requires a
long time to become concentrated enough to
work, though the prosecutor did not point to
evidence in the trial backing up that point.

“Think about what good code it is: two guys
speaking about cars and girls,” she said.
She also highlighted apparent inconsistencies in
Mr. Naseer’s argument. In Mr. Naseer’s final
email to the sana_pakhtana address, days before
he was arrested in England, he refers to his
wedding later in the month.

Mr. Naseer had broken up with his girlfriend by
that point and was not speaking to her, Ms.
Ahmad said, making it hard to believe that he
was planning to marry her. In the email, he also
says he wishes sana_pakhtana could be at the
wedding. Either “the defendant wants his
random Internet friend to come to his wedding,”
Ms. Ahmad said, or he is alerting his Qaeda
handler that an attack is ready.

Mr. Naseer is representing himself, and much of
his summation was tedious; he spent more than
two hours reading transcripts aloud.

However, when he broke from that, he was
engaging, making eye contact with jurors as he
read from a white legal pad as he said that the
government had not proved its case.

“Did anyone say anything about the defendant’s
extremist views?” he said. “Did anyone give
evidence to the fact that Abid Naseer and his
friends were preparing explosive material?”

Did anyone say “that I’m the one who can tell
you that the defendant Abid Naseer was trained
by Al Qaeda?” he said. Did anyone “tell the court
during this trial that Abid Naseer is connected to
Al Qaeda?”

“We all know the answer. It is a two-letter word:
no,” he said.

“With all the resources, with all the PowerPoint
slides,” he said, “with all this showing off, no
promise was fulfilled.”

He argued that he had represented himself and
testified “so he can be candid and honest about
everything.”

He also told jurors that he and the men arrested
with him in Britain were released by the
authorities there because “there was insufficient
evidence to prosecute anybody by the U.K.

government,” which is consistent with earlier
accounts of the case.

Jurors will begin deliberating on Tuesday about
whether Mr. Naseer provided support to a
terrorist organization, was part of a conspiracy
providing support to a terrorist organization,
and conspired to use a destructive device (a
bomb, in this case).

China Names 14 Generals Suspected of Corruption

BEIJING — China’s military authority on Monday
released a list of 14 generals who are under
investigation or have been convicted of graft,
among them the son of one of China’s once
highest-ranking generals.

The generals were the latest prominent officers
to fall under President Xi Jinping’s sweeping
anticorruption campaign.

Published on the official website of the People’s
Liberation Army three days before China’s
rubber-stamp legislature convenes for its annual
meeting in Beijing, the list identifies a host of
leading officers, the majority of whom are in the
political and logistics departments of the
military, navy, missile corps and other branches.

The investigators’ focus on the military
bureaucracy highlights two distinct types of
corruption that the Communist Party believes
undermine military readiness, experts say:
bribery in political departments relating to the
sale of positions; and embezzlement within
logistics departments, which handle large
amounts of money as well as contracts.

Among those being investigated is Rear Adm.
Guo Zhenggang, the son of Guo Boxiong, the
retired vice chairman of the powerful Central
Military Commission, which oversees the 2.3
million members of China’s armed forces, the
world’s largest.

Admiral Guo, 45, the deputy political commissar
of military command in the coastal province of
Zhejiang, was put under investigation last month,
suspected of “serious legal violations and
criminal offenses,” a common official euphemism
for corruption.

In what appeared to be a well-timed media
campaign coordinated to discredit the admiral,
the investigative magazine Caijing published a
long exposé of his family’s corrupt land dealings
online, 10 minutes after the list of generals was
released.

According to the article, Admiral Guo’s wife and
mother-in-law were sued by investors after their
real estate company took in over 500 million
renminbi, more than $80 million, to build a five-
story hardware market that was never
completed.

Speculation that members of the Guo family were
being investigated on corruption charges has
swirled for months, despite the government’s
attempts to keep their names off social media.
Last year, the elder Mr. Guo, once the military’s
top uniformed officer, was rumored to have tried
to flee the country dressed in women’s clothing.

Although there was no proof verifying the rumor,
censors quickly blocked search terms like “Guo +
dress in drag” on the popular microblog platform
Sina Weibo, according to China Digital Times, a
website based in Berkeley, Calif., that covers
China news and digital media. Mr. Guo has not
officially been accused of corruption.

The military notice also announced that Lan
Weijie, a former deputy commander in the
central province of Hubei, was sentenced to life
in prison in January for accepting bribes,
owning property purchased with “unidentified
sources” and the illegal possession of firearms.

Last year, China’s widening military corruption
scandal ensnared the military’s former No. 2
official, Xu Caihou, who was indicted in October
on bribery charges. Mr. Xu is one of the highest-
ranking targets of the anticorruption campaign
begun by President Xi, who is also head of the
Central Military Commission.

Mr. Xi has vowed to clean up the military as part
of his campaign to strengthen party rule by
reining in corruption. The campaign comes as
China is upgrading its military capabilities to
bolster claims over disputed maritime territories
in the South and East China Seas, with an eye on
countering the influence of the United States in
Asia and the Pacific.

On Monday, the People’s Liberation Army
published a separate commentary on its website
lauding the investigations as proof that the
military was serious about fighting corruption.

“They show the military’s courage to cut the
poison off the bones with a knife and make steel
out of raging fire,” it said, adding, “Let us praise
the People’s Army that is truly worthy of the
people’s trust.”

But the military’s anticorruption drive also
appears intended to fortify Mr. Xi’s hold on
power by targeting rival factions and alerting
members of his own about the limits of
corruption he will tolerate, according to Phillip C.

Saunders, director of the Center for the Study of
Chinese Military Affairs at the National Defense
University in Washington.

So far, investigators have only investigated
former senior members of the Central Military
Commission, rather than those appointed by Mr. Xi.

“It seems to be strategic in who they’re going
after and not going after,” Mr. Saunders said.
“There are people being made an example of
within the P.L.A., but it’s not the people at the
very top. This achieves the purpose of warning
them to tone down corruption without the
political cost.”

Libyan General’s Promotion Could Hinder United Nations Peace Talks

MISURATA, Libya — The speaker of Libya’s
internationally recognized Parliament named
Gen. Khalifa Hifter on Monday to the recently
created position of commander in chief of the
army, potentially hindering United Nations-
sponsored talks to end the country’s internal
strife.

General Hifter has had many roles: He was an
ally of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi when he came
to power; later became an opponent; returned to
join the uprising against him in 2011; and last
year announced an abortive military takeover of
Libya’s transitional government.

Since the spring of 2014, General Hifter has been
leading a military campaign with the stated goal
of ridding Libya of Islamists, whether they are
the extremists based in and around Benghazi or
the more moderate politicians who played a
major role in the first transitional Parliament.

A narrow majority of Libya’s internationally
recognized Parliament has been seated since last
summer in Tobruk, an eastern Libyan town
under Mr. Hifter’s control, where it has aligned
itself with his efforts. His appointment on
Monday for the first time gives him formal
legitimacy as the top military commander under
that government. The appointment should
ostensibly make General Hifter accountable to
Parliament.

But he and certain regional militias allied with
him are fighting a rival militia coalition that
includes both hard-line and more moderate
Islamists, and that coalition, known as Libya
Dawn, considers the general an aspiring autocrat
and its greatest enemy. Libya Dawn controls the
capital, Tripoli. It claims its own provisional
Parliament and prime minister, and it includes
the city of Misurata on the central coast.

The United States, Britain and other allies have
been hoping to help broker an agreement
between the two factions. They have threatened
to use sanctions to isolate those on either side
who oppose a reconciliation, including trying to
marginalize the Islamist extremists in the Dawn
faction and General Hifter, who christened his
military campaign Operation Dignity. His
appointment as commander in chief may make it
harder to separate him from the Tobruk-based
Parliament and the rest of the faction.

Many in eastern Libya have embraced General
Hifter as their best hope to tame extremist
militias that have dominated the eastern city of
Benghazi and to restore order to Libya. But
seemingly everyone in the Libya Dawn coalition,
meanwhile, rejects any government that includes
him.

“He just wants to be on top of the throne,” said
Fathi Bashaagha, a local leader in Misurata who
has participated in, and argued for, the unity
talks. “If any unity government appoints Hifter,
he will eat the unity government.”

Europe Unlikely to Meet Climate Goal, Study Finds

BERLIN — The European Union will fail to meet
an ambitious goal of significantly reducing
greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 unless it takes
more aggressive measures to limit the use of
fossil fuels and adopts new environmental
policies, according to a report scheduled for
release on Tuesday.

Although European countries are on track to
meet, and even surpass, the goal of reducing
1990-level greenhouse gas emissions by 20
percent by 2020, existing policies are not robust
enough to ensure that the 2050 targets are met,
the report said. Those targets, scientists have
said, are critical to forestalling the most
catastrophic effects of climate change , which are
linked to carbon emissions caused by human
activity.

“The level of ambition of environmental policies
currently in place to reduce environmental
pressures may not enable Europe to achieve long-
term environmental goals, such as the 2050 target
of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95
percent,” the report said.

The report also noted that transportation
continues to account for a quarter of all carbon
emissions within the European Union, and
reducing those by 60 percent by 2050 will require
“significant additional measures.”

The report, which will formally be released on
Tuesday, was compiled by the European
Environment Agency, based in Copenhagen, and
is produced every five years to assess how the
Union is progressing toward its environmental
goals and to inform European policy. It will be
presented to the European Commission and
debated in the European Parliament later this
month.

The findings are significant because Europeans
have taken a lead role in seeking to avert the
worst effects of climate change , in some cases
putting aside their own economic prospects and
political pressures to enact policies that could also
serve as models for other countries and regions.

The European Union’s failure to achieve its goals
could discourage efforts by more reluctant
nations, like China and India, and could loom
large later this year as nations gather in Paris to
discuss a global climate treaty.

Hans Bruyninckx, the executive director of the
European Environment Agency, characterized
the report as an alarming call that provides the
28 European Union member states with a fresh
opportunity to set a global example.

“Although we have colored the outlook red, it
doesn’t have to be red,” Mr. Bruyninckx said. He
named increased energy efficiency, ecological
innovation and improvements to transportation
systems as potential areas in which Europeans
could adjust their policies to meet their long-term
goals.

“Although we have all of these very different
countries with very different energy profiles, in
the long run, the commitment to these targets is
there, the level of ambition to reach the 80
percent is high on the political agenda,” Mr.
Bruyninckx said.

Setting global emissions targets, however, has
proved elusive for years, and the latest
assessment of Europe’s progress illustrates that
once targets are reached, significant difficulties
remain in holding countries to their agreed-to
goals.

Even a country like Germany, where support for
the environment borders on a religion, has faced
unforeseen challenges as it aims to revamp its
energy sector from reliance on traditional
sources of energy, such as nuclear and fossil
fuels, to renewable sources, including wind, solar
and biofuels.

The race to shutter the country’s nuclear reactors
by 2022, for example, has resulted in many
power providers using brown coal, or lignite, the
cheapest and dirtiest of all fossil fuels to keep the
power flowing to customers. This, in turn, has led
to an increase in carbon emissions.

According to the report, Germany, whose
economy is the best in Europe, was the only
country with a significant rise in both its
emissions reductions and energy consumption
last year. Along with Belgium, it is one of only
two countries not on track to meet its 2020
targets in either category. According to the
German Association of Energy and Water
Industries, the country increased its carbon
omissions by 20 million tons from 2012 to 2013,
instead of reducing them.

In order to meet its goals, Germany must reduce
emissions annually by 3.5 percent over the next
six years, a feat that will result in substantial
increases in energy costs, and generate political
pressure to block measures that could hurt the
economy.

Harro van Asselt, a researcher at the Stockholm
Environment Institute’s Oxford Centre, said
Germany saw a drop in emissions after many
polluting industrial sites in the former East
Germany were shuttered between the late 1990s
and early 2000s. The closings occurred just as
Europe began tackling climate change, which
assisted the European Union in meeting its 2020
targets, he said.

“The question is not why they might stumble
now; the main question is why did they reach
their targets before,” Mr. van Asselt said.
Now the hard part begins, he said, as the
European Union faces the need to undertake
more difficult and costly measures in areas like
transportation and agriculture to ensure that
emissions targets remain on track.

“As long as the European Commission doesn’t
undertake more measures in these sectors, they
are going to have difficulties in even reaching
their goals for 2030,” Mr. van Asselt said.
Globally, the environmental news is not all bleak.
The United States failed to adopt the Kyoto
Protocol in 1997, in part because Congress feared
it would hurt the country economically. But last
year President Obama and President Xi Jinping
of China reached an agreement that set new goals
for those countries to curb their carbon
emissions within the next 15 years. The deal was
seen as a breakthrough, helping to resolve some
of the differences between two of the world’s
biggest polluters, whose dispute was partly the
reason a climate agreement was not reached in
Copenhagen in 2009.

European leaders are counting on recent
international efforts to help reach a global
agreement in Paris. The most recent report
issued by the United Nations last year warned
that failure to reduce emissions could alter the
climate so drastically that it could endanger life
as we know it. The Europeans hope this added
pressure, coupled with the moral example they
tried to set decades ago, will contribute to a
lasting global agreement on emissions
reductions.

“I think the role of Europe is essential and we
have demonstrated that we can make solid
multinational agreements that can work,” Mr.
Bruyninckx said.