AS Nigeria joins the world to celebrate World AIDS Day, the United Nations has said that the number of new HIV infections and deaths from AIDS are falling globally.

NIGERIA, on the verge of major — some say decisive — transitional elections in 2011, is suddenly faced with growing security challenges that could spell doom unless there are appropriate measures to tackle them. These threats are both internal and foreign, considering situations within and the constant interception of imported arms.

IT’S been a week since former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, emerged the consensus candidate of the Northern Political Leaders Forum (NPLF) led by Adamu Ciroma who has been in the vanguard of the call for a president of Northern extraction to finish what some members of the Northern political establishment say is the unfinished term of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua who died earlier in the year.

THE country will take its rightful place among the comity of nations. In partnership with like–minded politicians that abound in other parts of the country this new crop of Northern liberal leaders will ensure that Nigerian politics will return to the politics of values and openness that make for the vibrancy, stability, dynamism, consistency and competitiveness seen in other lands.

FROM the moment Emmanuela Okechukwu was brought into the office of Nigeria Down Syndrome Foundation in Lagos, her sobs and restlessness gave her mother a tough time. She constantly dabbed her eyes with a soaked handkerchief.

AFTER several years of failed trial, the Hydro-Power Producing Areas Development Commission, HYPADEC Bill was recently passed by the two chambers of the National Assembly and assented to by President Goodluck Jonathan.

EVEN as global attention focuses on the challenge of HIV and AIDS on ocassion of this year’s World AIDS Day tomorrow, Director General of the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA), Prof. John Idoko, says significant progress has been made in Nigeria since Declaration of Universal Access in 2005.

THE nullification of the election that brought former Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, to power by the Appeal Court, Benin, has been described as an indictment on the party. A university Don, Prof. Gabriel Yomere, who stated this, noted that the re-run election ordered by the court should afford the PDP the opportunity to prove its popularity and re-claim its mandate.

THE Edo State Board of Internal Revenue, Monday, sealed off the Federal Government-owned multi-billion dollars Independent Power Project, IPP, over alleged failure of the company handling the project, Marubeni Engineering West African Limited, to remit its Pay As You Earn, PAYE, for both the expatriate staff and Nigerian employees in the company, estimated at over N53million.

MEMBERS of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Health, yesterday, expressed concern over activities of drug and food counterfeiters in the country.