Barack Obama on Thursday endorsed Hillary Clinton to succeed him as US president, declaring in a video message “I’m with her.”

Obama’s endorsement comes after a hard fought Democratic primary season, in which Clinton struggled against leftist rival Bernie Sanders.

“Tens of millions of Americans made their voices heard. Today I just want to add mine,” Obama said.

“I don’t think there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office.”

“I have seen her judgment. I’ve seen her toughness. I’ve seen her commitment to our values up close,” Obama said of Clinton.

The endorsement — while long expected — is a shot in the arm to the Clinton campaign and could end concerns about party unity after a bitter contest.

Obama earlier hosted Sanders in the Oval Office in another bid to heal those wounds.

Obama’s backing will give Clinton a potent surrogate on the campaign trail.

After nearly eight years in the White House, Obama is still one of the country’s most popular politicians.

His approval ratings among black, Hispanic, young and liberal voters are stratospheric.

Clinton welcomed the vote of confidence: “Honored to have you with me, @POTUS I’m fired up and ready to go!” she tweeted, echoing one of Obama’s own campaign rallying cries from 2008.

In that election Obama bested Clinton to become the first black president.

They later made peace, with Clinton becoming Obama’s first secretary of state.

Now Clinton is trying to make history of her own by becoming the first female president.

Standing in her way is bombastic businessman Donald Trump, who shocked the world by becoming the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

Clinton’s campaign announced that a first joint campaign event with Obama would take place in Green Bay, Wisconsin on Wednesday, June 15

Niger Delta Militants, Biafra agitators and kidnappers cannot hold us to ransome

It is one year today since the All Progressives Congress (APC) took the centre stage in Abuja, to terminate the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP’s) occupation of the Presidency. It has also been one year of trials and attempting to do things differently. The man in the centre of it all, President Muhammadu Buhari took time off his tight schedule to speak to some editors last Thursday on his experience so far in the seat of power. 

Looking at the last one year, how would you assess what has happened in terms of your expectations when you took office, the challenges you met and the progress made or lack of it?
I am sure you will recall that during our campaign, we identified three problems for our country. First, was security –the situation especially in the northeast then. Second, was the economy – unemployment, and third was corruption. I am sure you can recall that these were what we identified. In the northeast, when we came in, Boko Haram occupied 14 local governments and they had hoisted their flags and called the areas their Caliphate. Today, Boko Haram is not holding any local government, but they have progressed to using IEDs (improvised explosive devices) on softer targets – people in mosques, churches, market places, motor parks, and killing school children.  So I think we have made substantial progress in that area. If you know anybody living in Maiduguri or Yobe, he or she will tell that people are going back to their homes, those who moved to Kano, Kaduna or even here in Abuja are now moving back and they are trying to continue with their lives.

On the economy, again we were unlucky. We are a mono-economy and everybody is dependent on oil revenue. The oil price collapsed and we were exposed. From 1999 to 2014, the average price of Nigerian crude that was sold was $100 per barrel, but when we came in, it plummeted to about $30 per barrel and now it is between $40 and $50 per barrel. At some stage, I got the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria to give me a list of the things we have been spending our foreign exchange on and it showed food items such as tomato purée, grains, rice, wheat and even toothpicks. I didn’t believe it and I still don’t believe it because if he said we were building so many factories, buying essential raw materials and spare parts machineries, I would have believed it. But to show me that what we were consuming were majorly just food items? I believe about 60 per cent of Nigerians from all parts of the country eat what they produce because they cannot afford to buy foreign food.

So, what was happening was that people, who had plenty of naira, just filled the papers that they were importing food, and would be given foreign exchange and they go and invest the money outside in whatever form. My belief was strengthened when we got into trouble about the import of petroleum products. We conducted a survey and we found out that one-third of what Nigerian marketers claimed to be bringing in, they were not bringing it in. They were just signing the papers and taking the money out. So people were doing the same thing with food products. But I think subsequently when we get to the court with some people, you will hear more about it.

The third one was on corruption, I would speak about that in two days’ time (today) and also on subsequent attempts to prosecute where we have found evidence; about where the monies have gone and the different banks either here or outside the country, we would let you know.

We know that your party did not support the idea of a National Conference when it was held, but one year after, it is like the clamour is rising again given some of the challenges, such as security and the economy, and people say all these issues were addressed by the National Conference report. Would you have a rethink by going back to see what is good in that report?

No, I don’t want to tell different stories. I advised against the issue of National Conference. You would recall that ASUU was on strike then for almost nine months. The teachers in the tertiary institutions were on strike for more than a year, yet that government had about N9billion to organise that meeting (National Conference) and some (members) were complaining that they hadn’t even been paid. I never liked the priority of that government on that particular issue, because it meant that what the National Assembly could have handled was handed to the Conference, while the more important job of keeping our children in schools was abandoned. That is why I haven’t even bothered to read it or ask for a briefing on it and I want it to go into the so-called archives.http://guardian.ng/

Ministry presents National Water Resources Master Plan to Buhari

The Ministry of Water Resources has presented the National Water Resources Master Plan to President Muhammadu Buhari with a pledge to achieve 100 per cent supply of water to Nigerians before 2030.

The Minister of Water Resources, Alhaji Suleiman Adamu made this known to State House correspondents after the presentation of the document at the Presidential Villa, Abuja on Wednesday.

According to him, the master plan x-rays all what the ministry supposes to undertake between now and 2030 with specific interventions to achieve the objectives contained in the plan.

“The National Water Resources Master Plan identifies all the key issues (projects) the ministry should undertake between now and 2030.

“So, we (President Buhari) x-ray that master plan and he (President Buhari) accepted it and he came out with some specific interventions that we think it would take the water resources sector to a more robust level by the year 2030.

“So, essentially, that is what we came to do.

“When we were appointed we had a retreat in Dec. 2015 and we came out with specific action plans and we kept developing them and now we are in the position to inform the president and to seek his blessing, and that is why we are here.’’

The minister lamented that over 50 million Nigerians were yet to have access to water supply as the country only achieved 69 per cent coverage of water supply in the country.

“You know we subscribed to the Millennium Development Goals.

“By last year, 2015, we were supposed to have achieved 75 per cent coverage for water supply and certain percentage for sanitation.

“Unfortunately, we were not able to meet that. We made the water supply by only 69 per cent and we did very, very poorly in sanitation,’’ he added.

According to the minister, the smooth implementation of master plan will enable the country meets the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) targets in the water resources sector.

He said that the master plan would also be unveiled in details at the forthcoming National Council on Water Resources, next week.(NAN)

Japan: No apologies for Hiroshima–Obama

— 26th May 2016

The United States President, Barack Obama has made it clear he will not be apologising for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, when he visits on Friday.

But are Japanese people even asking him to?

Eleven United States presidents have been elected since President Harry S. Truman decided to drop an atomic weapon on Hiroshima, and none has set foot in that traumatized city in the 71 years since, at least not while in office.

President Obama intends to end that streak with his visit on Friday, a decision that speaks volumes not only about his presidency but also about the increasingly worrisome struggle among powers great and small in East Asia.

Mr. Obama’s predecessors had good reasons to avoid Hiroshima. None wanted to be seen by American voters as apologizing for a decision that many historians even today believe, on balance, saved lives.

And there were worries about how such a visit would be viewed in China, South Korea and other countries in Asia that suffered from the brutal World War II killing machine that was Imperial Japan.

President Obama in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Monday. Mr. Obama this week lifted a decades-old embargo on military sales. He will visit Hiroshima, Japan, on Friday, where the United States dropped an atomic bomb 71 years ago.

But Mr. Obama and his closest aides have become increasingly disdainful of what they view as Washington’s conventional wisdom.

No American president had visited Cuba in nearly 90 years. Mr. Obama did. None had visited Myanmar. He has gone twice. Few saw merit in negotiating with Iran’s autocratic mullahs. Mr. Obama struck a nuclear deal with the Iranians that he ranks among his greatest accomplishments. And in Vietnam this week, he lifted a decades-old embargo on military sales.

Mr. Obama has made clear that he will not apologize for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but with no election left for himself he cares far less that any remorse he expresses might be included in what opponents have caricatured as an “apology tour” of foreign cities

ENUGU—The Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, has said that Biafra can be realised through civil disobedience or direct action contrary to the belief in some parts of Igboland that it cannot be achieved through demonstrations alone. IPOB potesters grounding Onitsha, the commercial city of Anambra State, South-east Nigeria, during their 1 Million March, to call for the immediate release of their leader, Nnamdi Kanu. Kanu was arrested by the Department of State Services, DSS, on his way into Nigeria from UK This was contained in a statement issued by IPOB and made available to Vanguard in Enugu yesterday. The statement by Emma Powerful, entitled, ‘Biafra can be achieved with civil disobedience and direct action,’

Read more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2016/05/biafra-can-realised-civil-disobedience-ipob/

Culture&Arts Class series 4

                        A 19th-century engraving showingAustralian natives opposing the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1770

Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a physical object. Humanity is in a global "accelerating culture change period", driven by the expansion of international commerce, the mass media, and above all, the human population explosion, among other factors. Culture repositioning means the reconstruction of the cultural concept of a society.^[9]

Full-length profile portrait ofTurkman woman, standing on a carpet at the entrance to a yurt, dressed in traditional clothing and jewelry

Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. These forces are related to both social structures and natural events, and are involved in the perpetuation of cultural ideas and practices within current structures, which themselves are subject to change.^[10] (Seestructuration.)

Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of cultural change. For example, the U.S.feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors. For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last ice age, plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to the invention ofagriculture, which in turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.^[11]

Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce—or inhibit—social shifts and changes in cultural practices. War or competition over resources may impact technological development or social dynamics. Additionally, cultural ideas may transfer from one society to another, through diffusion or acculturation. In diffusion, the form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For example, hamburgers, fast food in the United States, seemed exotic when introduced into China. "Stimulus diffusion" (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. "Direct Borrowing" on the other hand tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to another. Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.

Acculturation has different meanings, but in this context it refers to replacement of the traits of one culture with those of another, such as what happened to certain Native American tribes and to many indigenous peoples across the globe during the process of colonization. Related processes on an individual level include assimilation (adoption of a different culture by an individual) and transculturation. The transnational flow of culture has played a major role in merging different culture and sharing thoughts, ideas and belie

Culture & Arts class Series 3

Culture (/ˈkʌltʃər/) is, in the words of E.B. Tylor, "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."^[1] Alternatively, in a contemporary variant, 'Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discourses, and material expressions, which, over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held in common.

As a defining aspect of what it means to be human, culture is a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. The word is used in a general sense as the evolved ability to categorize and represent experiences with symbols and to act imaginatively and creatively. This ability arose with the evolution of behavioral modernity in humans around 50,000 years ago.^{[citation needed]} This capacity is often thought to be unique to humans, although some other species have demonstrated similar, though much less complex abilities for social learning. It is also used to denote the complex networks of practices and accumulated knowledge and ideas that is transmitted through social interaction and exist in specific human groups, or cultures, using the plural form. Some aspects of human behavior, such as language, social practices such as kinship, gender andmarriage, expressive forms such as art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies such as cooking, shelter, clothing are said to becultural universals, found in all human societies. The concept material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including, practices of political organization and social institutions), mythology, philosophy, literature (both written and oral), and science make up theintangible cultural heritage of a society.^[5]

In the humanities, one sense of culture, as an attribute of the individual, has been the degree to which they have cultivated a particular level of sophistication, in the arts, sciences, education, or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been seen to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture, popular culture or folk culture of the lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital. In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification, clothing or jewelry.^{[dubious – discuss]} Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in the 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory, have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the lower classes and create a false consciousness, such perspectives common in the discipline of cultural studies. In the wider social sciences, the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from the material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions.

When used as a count noun, "a culture" is the set of customs, traditions and values of a society or community, such as an ethnic group or nation. In this sense, multiculturalism is a concept that values the peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultures inhabiting the same territory. Sometimes "culture" is also used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society, a subculture(e.g. "bro culture"), or a counter culture. Within cultural anthropology, the ideology and analytical stance of cultural relativism holds that cultures cannot easily be objectively ranked or evaluated because any evaluation is necessarily situated within the value system of a given culture

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MooMedia: Additu trailer

MooMedia: Additu trailer

MooMedia: Culture and the arts Class series 1

MooMedia: Culture and the arts Class series 1: Culture and the arts The word  culture  is derived from the  Latin  root  cultura  or  cultus  meaning to "inhabit, cultivate, or...

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The Arts-Culture and Arts Class Series 2

The arts represent an outlet of expression, that is usually influenced by culture and which in turn helps to change culture. As such, the arts are a physical manifestation of the internal creative impulse. Major constituents of the arts include literature – including poetry, novelsand short stories, and epics; performing arts – among them music, dance, and theatre; culinary arts such as baking, chocolatiering, andwinemaking; media arts like photography and cinematography, and visual arts – including drawing, painting, ceramics, and sculpting. Some art forms combine a visual element with performance (e.g. film) and the written word (e.g. comics).

From prehistoric cave paintings to modern day films, art serves as a vessel for storytelling and conveying humankind's relationship with its environmen

Culture and the arts Class series 1

Culture and the arts

The word culture is derived from the Latin root cultura or cultus meaning to "inhabit, cultivate, or honour". In general, culture refers to human activity; different definitions of culture reflect different theories for understanding, or criteria for valuing human activity. Present day Anthropologists use the term to refer to the universal human capacity to classify experiences and to encode and communicate them symbolically. They regard this capacity as a defining feature of the genus Homo. Since culture is learned, people living in different places have different cultures. There can be different cultures in different countries, and there can also be shared cultures among continents.

The arts are a vast subdivision of culture, composed of many creative endeavors and disciplines. It is a broader term than "art," which as a description of a field usually means only the visual arts. The arts encompasses visual arts, literary arts and the performing arts - music, theatre, dance, spoken word and film, among others.

Art, in its broadest meaning, is the expression of creativity or imagination. The word art comes from the Latin word ars, which, loosely translated, means "arrangement". Art is commonly understood as the act of making works (or artworks) which use the human creative impulse and which have meaning beyond simple description. Art is often distinguished from crafts and recreational hobby activities. The term creative arts denotes a collection of disciplines whose principal purpose is the output of material for the viewer or audience to interpret. As such, art may be taken to include forms as diverse as prose writing, poetry, dance, acting or drama, film, music, sculpture, photography,illustration, architecture, collage, painting, craft and fashion. Art may also be understood as relating to creativity, æsthetics and the generation of emotion

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