No ‘Northern’ or ‘Southern’ citizen in Nigeria – President Jonathan

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <br /> #President Goodluck Jonathan, has on Thursday urged Nigerians not to see themselves as “Northern” or “Southern” citizens, but as people and a race bound by the same history and constitution.<br /> <br /> Jonathan gave the advice in Abuja at the annual National Migration Dialogue, organised by the National Commission for Refugees, Migrants and internally Displaced Persons.<br /> Vice-President Namadi Sambo, who represented the President, called for an end to the classification of Nigerians as “indigenes” or “non-indigenes”of any particular state.<br /> “We must insist that in relating among ourselves as a nation, there are no Northern or Southern citizens neither are there citizens of any particular state in the East or in the West.<br /> “We are citizens of Nigeria, a people and a race bound by the same history and constitution.<br /> <br /> ‘We must continue to insist and uphold our constitution that guarantees the right of all Nigerians to live anywhere in Nigeria without any fear of economic, political, religious, or social exclusion.<br /> “Our ethnic diversity, ideally, should be a source of strength, not weakness; a country where people freely profess and practice their respective religious beliefs anywhere within our national boundaries, without any fear of discrimination.<br /> <br /> “The future I see is of a nation where people are no longer identified by their ethnic or religious affiliation but by the very virtue of their Citizenship as Nigerians,” he said.<br /> According to him, the Nigerian Constitution and the recommendationsof the recently concluded National Conference guarantee the right of every Nigerian to reside anywhere in the country without discrimination.<br /> <br /> While acknowledging the role migration plays in national development, the President noted that the country has the highest volume of international migrants, and the largest remittances in sub-Saharan Africa worth 20.76 billion dollars in 2013.<br /> He, therefore, stressed that Nigeria, while aiming to mitigate the negative impact of migration, would continually deploy strategies to encourage Nigerians in the Diaspora to invest remittances in social infrastructure,human capital development and other activities.<br /> The President further stated that his administration had made it a cardinal principle that Nigerians must be treated humanely and with dignify in any country of their residence.<br /> <br /> On internally displaced persons, the President said he had directed that victims must be given due care and maintenance without any form of social exclusion.<br /> Jonathan expressed the hope that the national migration dialogue would help shape Nigeria’s national migratory orientation.<br /> <br /> In her remarks, the Federal Commissioner for Refugees, Hajiya Hadiza Kangiwa, noted that Nigeria was the first country in ECOWAS sub-region to institute the dialogue.<br /> She said the dialogue was conceived as a strategy for mainstreaming migration into the post development agenda, and was also a derivation of the draft National Migration Policy document.<br /> <br /> According to her, the objective of the dialogue is to provide a platform for debating the impact and linkages between migration and development thereby shaping Nigeria’s national migratory linkages.<br /> She said the dialogue would also provide opportunity for reviewing the various operational challenges at the implementation level.<br /> <br /> The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that participants at the dialogue were drawn from the 36 States of the federation.<br /> It also has the participation of international development partners such as the International Organisation for Migration<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /></div>

No ‘Northern’ or ‘Southern’ citizen in Nigeria – President Jonathan

#President Goodluck Jonathan, has on Thursday urged Nigerians not to see themselves as “Northern” or “Southern” citizens, but as people an...

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NASA’s Kepler Reborn, Makes First Exoplanet Find of New Mission

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <br /> <h3> <img height="254" src="https://scontent-a-lhr.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xap1/v/t1.0-9/10407668_685407904906433_4762830622546606335_n.jpg?oh=03149957f5247f7fc623e80d15c3730a&oe=550B23E1" width="320" /><br />The artistic concept shows NASA's planet-hunting Kepler #spacecraft operating in a new mission profile called K2. Using publicly available data, astronomers have confirmed K2's first exoplanet discovery proving Kepler can still find planets.</h3> <h3> <br />Image Credit:NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T Pyle<br />NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft makes a comeback with the discovery of the first exoplanet found using its new mission -- K2.<br />The discovery was made when astronomers and engineers devised an ingenious way to repurpose Kepler for the K2 mission and continue its search of the cosmos for other worlds.<br />"Last summer, the possibility of a scientifically productive mission for Kepler after its reaction wheel failure in its extended mission was not part of the conversation," said Paul Hertz, NASA's astrophysics division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "Today, thanks to an innovative idea and lots of hard work by the NASA and Ball Aerospace team, Kepler may well deliver the first candidates for follow-up study by the James Webb Space Telescope to characterize the atmospheres of distant worlds and search for signatures of life."<br />Lead researcher Andrew Vanderburg, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studied publicly available data collected by the spacecraft during a test of K2 in February 2014. The discovery was confirmed with measurements taken by the HARPS-North spectrograph of the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands, which captured the wobble of the star caused by the planet’s gravitational tug as it orbits.</h3> <h3> <br />The newly confirmed planet, HIP 116454b, is 2.5 times the diameter of Earth and follows a close, nine-day orbit around a star that is smaller and cooler than our sun, making the planet too hot for life as we know it. HIP 116454b and its star are 180 light-years from Earth, toward the constellation Pisces.<br />Kepler’s onboard camera detects planets by looking for transits -- when a distant star dims slightly as a planet crosses in front of it. The smaller the planet, the weaker the dimming, so brightness measurements must be exquisitely precise. To enable that precision, the spacecraft must maintain steady pointing. In May 2013, data collection during Kepler's extended prime mission came to an end with the failure of the second of four reaction wheels, which are used to stabilize the spacecraft.</h3> <h3> <br />Rather than giving up on the stalwart spacecraft, a team of scientists and engineers crafted a resourceful strategy to use pressure from sunlight as a “virtual reaction wheel” to help control the spacecraft. The resulting K2 mission promises to not only continue Kepler’s planet hunt, but also to expand the search to bright nearby stars that harbor planets that can be studied in detail and better understand their composition. K2 also will introduce new opportunities to observe star clusters, active galaxies and supernovae.<br />Small planets like HIP 116454b, orbiting nearby bright stars, are a scientific sweet spot for K2 as they are good prospects for follow-up ground studies to obtain mass measurements. Using K2’s size measurements and ground-based mass measurements, astronomers can calculate the density of a planet to determine whether it is likely a rocky, watery or gaseous world.</h3> <h3> <br />"The Kepler mission showed us that planets larger in size than Earth and smaller than Neptune are common in the galaxy, yet they are absent in our solar system," said Steve Howell, Kepler/K2 project scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "K2 is uniquely positioned to dramatically refine our understanding of these alien worlds and further define the boundary between rocky worlds like Earth and ice giants like Neptune."<br />Since the K2 mission officially began in May 2014, it has observed more than 35,000 stars and collected data on star clusters, dense star-forming regions, and several planetary objects within our own solar system. It is currently in its third campaign.</h3> <h3> <br />The research paper reporting this discovery has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.<br />Ames is responsible for Kepler's mission concept, ground system development, science data analysis and K2 mission operations. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colorado, developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes Kepler science data. Kepler is NASA's 10th Discovery Mission and was funded by the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.</h3> <h3> <br />For more information about the Kepler mission, visit:<br />http://www.nasa.gov/kepler</h3> </div>

NASA’s Kepler Reborn, Makes First Exoplanet Find of New Mission

The artistic concept shows NASA's planet-hunting Kepler #spacecraft operating in a new mission profile called K2. Using publicly avai...

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