The Presidency on Tuesday said a duly authorised committee under the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami (SAN) is working to reconcile, recover and transfer all Stamp Duties into Stamp Duties Central Account. The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Malam Garba Shehu, disclosed this in a statement titled “Stamp Duty: Facts Nigerians Need to Know”. The presidential spokesman provided more clarification following the controversy over the purported trapped N89 trillion which started last Friday when the Secretary of the dissolved Presidential Committee on Reconciliation and Recovery of Stamp Duties Revenue, Muhammadu Gudaji Kazaure, said President Buhari secretly constituted the committee and that he was being denied access to Mr President to provide progress report. Shehu, who had earlier on Saturday said nothing gave credence to wild accusations made against the administration and dismissed the notion that Hon.Gudaji was stopped from meeting with the President, said President Buhari had not “completely ignored these matters.” He said the work of the Malami committee “is ongoing, it is not finished yet and the President will continue to show his keen interest in the matter of Stamp Duty collection.” The statement read: “Our good friend and a committed party member, Hon Gudaji has tried to draw me into a public debate which I don’t consider a good idea. “In a video clip in Hausa and a press release in English both by this good friend of the administration, Hon. Gudaji Kazaure, invited me to answer questions, some of which are completely lacking in imagination. “I would have ignored the allegations therein. Yet, a wise man once said that a lie can travel the world while the truth is still wearing his shoes. It is on the basis of the above that I decided to put some things straight and respond directly to Hon. Kazaure’s questions posed to me. “Specifically, I will respond to each of his questions as follows: “(A) “The money with CBN I & E window Account stood at $171 billion dollars as at 2020 what is the source of that money? To my knowledge, the CBN-established Investors and Exporters (I&E) Window is a foreign exchange trading platform where banks and other authorized dealers can buy or sell foreign exchange. These trades are recorded by the CBN daily and reported as turnover or activity in the market. “Contrary to Hon. Kazaure’s assertion, the I&E window is NOT an “account” where foreign exchange is deposited. It is simply a platform for trading foreign exchange. As of April 2020, the total amount of foreign exchange traded (either bought or sold) in the window was about $171 billion. The size of this amount suggests that there is adequate liquidity or availability of foreign exchange and that anyone who wants to buy or sell would easily find a counterparty to trade with. The amount does not mean that we have $171 billion stacked away in some vault or saved in any account.”

  Nyesom Wike, Rivers governor, says he has no issue with Atiku Abubakar, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate. The governor said this on Tuesday when political associates and Rivers elders visited him at his residence to make his 65th birthday. “I have no problem with the presidential candidate. All I am saying is what is the interest of Rivers people? What is the interest of the south-south and the south?” Wike asked. “I don’t regret I ran for presidency. In the name of God, I am happy to make Rivers state proud. I am happy as far as I am concerned. If they had allowed it to be what it is supposed to be, I would have won the election. But it’s okay. It has happened.   “People said because I lost election; it doesn’t matter. I didn’t lose election. This is my first time of trying to run for the president of Nigeria and we made impact. If it is easy, let them go ahead. Are they not the ones begging?” Over the past months, five PDP governors — Wike, Samuel Ortom of Benue, Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia, Seyi Makinde of Oyo, and Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi of Enugu — have been at the forefront of calls for Ayu to resign as the party’s chairman. The call for Ayu’s resignation, according to the PDP stakeholders, is that the party’s presidential candidate and national chairman cannot be from the same region. However, Ayu has maintained that he will not resign. Amid the crisis, Wike and his allies pulled out of the PDP presidential campaign council. Meanwhile, Wike’s latest comment comes days after Abubakar said he had done his part on resolving the crisis, and was awaiting the position of the Rivers governor. “I have met Wike two times in Port Harcourt, two times in Abuja, one time in London — personally,” he said. Speaking further on why the crisis was not yet resolved since both parties had met, Abubakar added: “It’s not on my part. It’s on the other side. I’m waiting.”

  At least 100 people have been killed after flooding in parts of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). According to Associated Press, Prime Minister Jean-Michel Lukonde said a search was ongoing for more bodies. Earlier on Tuesday, the death toll had stood at 50 according to Sylvano Kasongo, Kinshasa’s police head, Reuters reported. “We are already at around fifty deaths and that is not yet final,” Kasongo was quoted as saying at the time. According to him, the rains caused landslides and roads to submerge. Images shared online showed entire neighbourhoods flooded with muddy water and roads ripped apart by sinkholes. One video appeared to show a major highway cut in half by a giant hole that had swallowed several vehicles in Mont-Ngafula district. TheCable has not been able to immediately verify these images. In a statement on Tuesday, Félix-Antoine Tshilombo, DRC’s president, extended his condolences to the families. “The Head of State, Félix-Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo learned, with great sorrow, of the death of several people including children, following the torrential rains which fell on Kinshasa, in the night from Monday to Tuesday,” the statement reads. “The Head of State presents his most heartfelt condolences to the bereaved families, asks the national and provincial governments to come to their aid and speed up the rainwater drainage works to prevent this type of disaster from happening again.”

  President Joe Biden signs the Respect for Marriage Act, Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2022, on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) United States President Joe Biden has on Tuesday signed gay marriage legislation into law against a backdrop of an ongoing conservative backlash over gender issues. “This law and the love it defends strike a blow against hate in all its forms,” Biden said on the South Lawn of the White House. “And that’s why this law matters to every single American.” Singers Sam Smith and Cyndi Lauper performed. Vice President Kamala Harris recalled officiating at a lesbian wedding in San Francisco. And the White House played a recording of Biden’s television interview from a decade ago, when he caused a political furor by unexpectedly disclosing his support for gay marriage. Biden was vice president at the time, and President Barack Obama had not yet endorsed the idea. “I got in trouble,” Biden joked of that moment. Three days later, Obama himself publicly endorsed gay marriage. Lawmakers from both parties attended Tuesday’s ceremony, reflecting the growing acceptance of same-sex unions, once among the country’s most contentious issues. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., wore the same purple tie to the ceremony that he wore to his daughter’s wedding. His daughter and her wife are expecting their first child in the spring. “Thanks to the millions out there who spent years pushing for change, and thanks to the dogged work of my colleagues, my grandchild will get to live in a world that respects and honors their mothers’ marriage,” he said. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the crowd that “inside maneuvering only takes us so far,” and she thanked activists adding impetus with “your impatience, your persistence and your patriotism.” Despite Tuesday’s excitement, there was concern about the nationwide proliferation of conservative policies on gender issues at the state level. Biden criticized the “callous, cynical laws introduced in the states targeting transgender children, terrifying families and criminalizing doctors who give children the care they need.” “Racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, they’re all connected,” Biden said. “But the antidote to hate is love.” Among the attendees were the owner of Club Q, a gay nightclub in Colorado where five people were killed in a shooting last month, and two survivors of the attack. The suspect has been charged with hate crimes.

  The National Agency for Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) says it has confiscated counterfeit alcoholic drinks worth more than one million naira in seperate raids in Onitsha and Aba markets. Dr Christiana Esenwah, Deputy Director, NAFDAC’s Directorate of Investigation and Enforcement, made this known in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Tuesday in Asaba. She said that the raids followed a petition by Mowet -Hennessy Group, makers of Mowet and Hennessy spirit drinks. She said the agency’s enforcement task force for South-South and South-East received a petition from Jackson Etti & Edu Co. legal representative of the Mowet and Hennessy Group on Aug. 18, 2022. ”We got a petition from the legal representative of the Mowet-Hennessy Group that some unscrupulous persons are faking their brands in the market. ”So, we first of all undertook a thorough surveillance to determine the source and location of the said counterfeit drinks. ”After that, we then swung into action to carry out sanction on those carrying out the illegal activities. ”When we got there, we discovered they were using recycled bottles with the trade mark of the original owners of the Mowet and Hennessy brands. ”What they do is to put their own labels on the bottle, use super glue to seal the corks and sell the counterfeit drinks to the public,” Esenwah said. She said that the agency’s taskforce team also discovered empty bottles, corks and assorted packaging materials being used in the illegal production. According to her, no fewer than 10 cartons of counterfeit Mowet and Hennessy drinks with a market value of over one million naira were recovered from the various shops in Aba and Onitsha. The NAFDAC deputy director said that before the agency’s team got to the market, the perpetrators had gotten a tip off and ran away from their shops. She, however, said that the taskforce recovered exhibits used in the production of the counterfeit drinks from the suspects’ shops. Esenwah said the NAFDAC team got the line chairmen at the market to witness what was going on and also help the taskforce to produce the suspects for interrogation. ”I want to appeal to members of the public to be wary of the products they are buying in the open market most especially during the Christmas season. ”People should rather go to reputable stores and supermarkets to buy their products because most times, what you are buying is not what you actually want to buy. ”The content of these counterfeit products could be highly hazardous because the alcohol used in the production are not food grade. ”This is why these products are usually sold at very cheap prices compared to the price of the original products,” she said. The NAFDAC deputy director said that the agency’s taskforce would return to the markets to effect the arrest of the suspects if they failed to come forward for interrogation.