RICHMOND, Va. — Democrats passed a new congressional map through the Virginia legislature on Friday that aims to help their party win four more seats in the national redistricting battle. It’s a flex of state Democrats’ political power, however hurdles remain before they can benefit from friendlier U.S. House district boundaries in this year’s midterm elections.
A judge in Tazewell, a conservative area in Southwest Virginia, has effectively blocked a voter referendum on the redrawn maps from happening on April 21 by granting a temporary restraining order, issued Thursday.
Democrats are appealing that decision and another by the same judge, who ruled last month that Democrats illegally rushed the planned voter referendum on their constitutional amendment to allow the remapping. The state’s Supreme Court picked up the party’s appeal of the earlier ruling.
The judge’s order prohibits officials from preparing for the referendum through March 18. But early voting for it was slated to start March 6, meaning Democrats would have to get a favorable court ruling within two weeks to stick with that timeline.
If Democrats get to carry out a referendum, voters will choose whether to temporarily adopt new congressional districts and then return to Virginia’s standard process after the 2030 census. Democrats wanted to publish the new map ahead of the April vote.
President Trump launched an unusual mid-decade redistricting battle last year by pushing Republican officials in Texas to redraw districts to help his party win more seats. The goal was for the GOP to hold on to a narrow House majority in the face of political headwinds that typically favor the party out of power in midterms.
Instead, it created a burst of redistricting efforts nationwide. So far, Republicans believe they can win nine more House seats in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio. Democrats think they can win six more seats in California and Utah, and are hoping to fully or partially make up the remaining three-seat margin in Virginia.
Democratic lawmakers in Virginia have sought to portray their redistricting push as a response to Trump’s overreach.
“The president of the United States, who apparently only one half of this chamber knows how to stand up to, basically directed states to grab power,” Virginia’s Democratic Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell said in February. “To basically maintain his power indefinitely — to rig the game, rig the system.”
Republicans have sounded aghast. House Minority Leader Terry Kilgore described the remap as a way for liberals in northern Virginia’s Arlington, Fairfax and Prince William counties to commandeer the rest of the state.
“In southwest Virginia, we have this saying … They say, ‘Terry, you do a good job up there, but you know, Virginia stops at Roanoke,” Kilgore previously said, referring to how some people across Virginia’s Appalachian region feel unrepresented in state politics. “That’s not going to be the same saying anymore, because Virginia is now going to stop just a little bit west of Prince William County.”
Virginia is currently represented in the U.S. House by six Democrats and five Republicans who ran in districts imposed by a court after a bipartisan legislative commission failed to agree on a map after the 2020 census.
Legislation that would put the Democrats’ more gerrymandered map into effect if voters approve the referendum now awaits the signature of Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who has indicated that she would support it.
“Virginia has the opportunity and responsibility to be responsive in the face of efforts across the country to change maps,” Spanberger said as she approved the referendum.
Democratic candidates are already lining up in anticipation. “Dopesick” author Beth Macy and former U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello launched campaigns in red areas that would be moved into districts with more registered Democrats.
Virginia Del. Dan Helmer and former federal prosecutor J.P. Cooney, who helped investigate Trump and was fired by him, have launched campaigns in a formerly rural district that would now mostly include voters just outside the nation’s capital. And former Democratic congresswoman Elaine Luria is mounting a comeback against Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans, who ousted her in 2022, in a competitive district that the map has made slightly more favorable to Democrats.
The routine of gently but skillfully pushing wooden canoes into the water body at the shores of Kainji Lake each dawn has been part of the lives of generations of fishermen in North-central Nigeria.
The lake was not always calm – vigorously exhaling and flooding the banks, then intermittently receding – but was inevitably connected to the lives that many communities have held firmly to across Kebbi, Niger, and Kwara states.
Today, that ancestral connection between the communities and the lake is evaporating rapidly. And it is not merely ecological. In some villages where government presence is absent, and terrorists have assumed authority, fishermen now wait for permission from non-state actors before casting their nets. In other areas within the Kainji region, they pay informal levies to armed groups operating from the forests. For decades, Nigeria’s national parks were imagined as spaces apart: buffers of nature against human pressure and political failure. Sambisa Forest shattered that illusion long ago when the Boko Haram terror group took control of it, transforming from a conservation zone into the most notorious symbol of jihadist insurgency in the country. Now, further west, a quieter but no less consequential transformation is unfolding.
The Kainji Lake National Park (KLNP), sprawling across three states and bordering Benin, has slipped from a wildlife sanctuary into a strategic corridor where poverty, climate stress, criminal enterprises, violence, jihadist ideology, and Sahelian militancy intersect.
Kainji Lake National Park spans three states in Nigeria’s northern region and borders two countries. Map illustration: Mansir Muhammed/HumAngle.
A corridor
Security analysts increasingly describe Sambisa as a “fortress-base” model of insurgency: entrenched, ideological, territorially assertive. Kainji Lake fits a different and more elusive pattern—a “corridor-node” model.
Here, armed actors do not raise flags or announce governance structures. They pass through, networking, training, recruiting, and trading, before vanishing. The park links Nigeria’s troubled North West to the Middle Belt and, increasingly, to the destabilised Sahel. It connects Kebbi to Benin Republic’s Alibori and Atacora regions, Niger State to Niger Republic’s Tillabéri zone, and local grievances to transnational jihadist ambitions.
This distinction matters. Sambisa attracted relentless military pressure for more than a decade because it became a visible symbol of territorial breach. Kainji Lake did not. It appeared peripheral, quiet, manageable. In that absence of sustained attention, the park matured into something arguably more dangerous: a fluid connector for multiple armed actors rather than a single-group stronghold.
Communities along the lake, from Yauri and Ngaski in Kebbi to Borgu in Niger State and Kaiama in Kwara, depend on a fragile interweaving of fishing, floodplain farming, pastoralism, and cross-border trade. Fishing sustains thousands of households. Smoked and dried fish move through informal networks to Ilorin, Ibadan, southern Niger, and beyond. Seasonal farming follows the lake’s unpredictable pulse: millet, sorghum, maize, rice, and cowpea are cultivated on land that appears and disappears with the water’s rise and fall.
Fishing sustains thousands of households. Map illustration: Mansir Muhammed/HumAngle
Pastoralism runs through it all. Herders move cattle along routes that long predate colonial borders, grazing across Nigeria, Benin Republic, and Niger Republic as if the lines on maps were suggestions rather than laws. Weekly markets in Bagudo, Wawa, Babana, Kaiama, and Borgu draw traders from Benin’s north and Niger’s Tillabéri. Grain, livestock, fuel, kola nuts, dried fish, and cloth circulate through these hubs. Some of it is smuggling.
These networks matter because armed groups do not need to invent new pathways. They insert themselves into existing ones. The same tracks used by herders and traders now carry militants, arms couriers, recruiters, and ideological emissaries.
Climate stress as an accelerant
Climate change has exacerbated existing security vulnerabilities around Kainji Lake.
Erratic rainfall patterns and fluctuating water levels have made fishing yields unpredictable. Floodplains that once reliably supported seasonal farming now vanish early or arrive late. Pasture availability shifts without warning, intensifying competition between herders and farmers. Each shock further compresses livelihoods, forcing households to adapt through debt, migration, or risk-taking.
In this environment, armed groups offer something deceptively valuable: predictability. Access to grazing land. Protection from rivals. Permission to fish or farm. Even informal dispute resolution. Where the state provides uncertainty – sporadic enforcement, unclear rules, delayed response – armed actors provide immediate answers, enforced by violence if necessary.
Climate stress, in this sense, is not just an environmental issue but a governance crisis multiplier.
Fieldwork conducted by HumAngle across several local government areas in Kebbi, Niger, and Kwara states identified at least five active extremist factions operating within and around the park. These include the Mahmudawa (Mahmuda faction), Lakurawa, elements of Ansaru and Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (JAS) led by Sadiku and Umar Taraba, and a newly emerged cell linked to Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin.
The groups do not operate in isolation. Many originate from northwest Nigeria and southern Niger, with local cover, as they undertake terror attacks in distant locations and return to their various hideouts within the region. What has emerged is a hybrid threat ecosystem where ideology, criminality, climate stress, and grievance reinforce one another.
Brokers, enforcers, and ideologues
The Mahmudawa illustrate the new logic of this ecosystem. Despite sustained air and ground operations by the Federal Government between September and December 2025, the group remains influential. Fragmented into smaller camps, some closer to the Benin border, they act as brokers linking criminal networks of jihadist actors. They facilitate training, arms movement, ransom negotiations and sanctuary for fighters arriving from outside the region.
Official claims regarding the arrest of their leader, Malam Mahmuda, remain unconfirmed in border communities, where continued attacks and coordinated leadership are still attributed to the group.
If the Mahmudawa are brokers, the Lakurawa are enforcers. With an estimated 300 fighters, they have become one of the most active jihadist–terrorist hybrids affecting Kebbi’s border communities. Operating from within and around KLNP, they routinely launch incursions into Bagudo and Suru LGAs, combining attacks on military targets with ideological messaging aimed at delegitimising the Nigerian state.
Their leadership shows signs of Sahelian exposure. Their fighters are drawn from local nomadic tribal networks and northwest terrorist pools. Kebbi, long considered peripheral, is now firmly part of the frontline.
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The relocation of Sadiku and Umar Taraba, both veteran jihadist operatives, to the Kainji axis in 2024 marked a shift. Their presence injected technical expertise into a space previously dominated by loosely organised armed groups.
IED knowledge, structured training, and a sharper focus on high-value targets followed. Collaboration with criminal terrorist groups deepened. The abduction of foreign nationals near Bode Sa’adu illustrated this fusion starkly: JAS elements, Mahmudawa fighters, and allied terrorists executing a single operation where ideology and profit were indistinguishable.
JNIM’s shadow on the lake
The most alarming development emerged in late November 2025: the appearance of a group believed to be affiliated with JNIM along the Kebbi–Benin border corridor.
Witnesses describe predominantly foreign fighters, many believed to be Tuareg, moving at night in disciplined formations, wearing military-style uniforms with turbans on their heads, and engaging communities with a calculated restraint unfamiliar to local armed groups. So far, they have avoided major attacks.
That restraint is likely strategic.
Their presence suggests Kainji Lake could become a staging ground for Sahelian expansion into northwestern Nigeria — a shift that would fundamentally alter the region’s security calculus. Unlike local groups, JNIM brings external financing, battlefield experience, and a long-term vision.
Communities adapting under pressure
Communities in the lake basin are not passive observers. They are recalibrating in real time. Some negotiate access quietly to avoid displacement. Others maintain layered loyalties, sharing information selectively as a survival strategy. Vigilante groups that once patrolled forest edges retreat under sustained pressure. Traditional rulers face coercion or marginalisation. In certain settlements, schools and community buildings are repurposed by armed actors for operational use.
Access to fishing grounds, farmlands, and trade routes increasingly depends on permissions issued by commanders operating from forest camps rather than on decisions by local councils or chiefs. Authority has shifted, not through formal declaration, but through incremental control of movement and livelihoods.
How conservation and governance hollowed the ground
The transformation of Kainji Lake into a security corridor is as much the product of ideology as it is the cumulative outcome of governance failure layered over decades.
The creation of Kainji Lake National Park in 1976 displaced communities and restricted access to land and water without meaningfully integrating residents into conservation planning. Fishing zones were closed, grazing was curtailed, and farming was criminalised in places where alternatives did not exist. Promised livelihoods rarely materialised.
Park rangers – tasked with enforcing vast conservation boundaries – were underpaid, poorly equipped, and often absent. Their presence, when felt, was frequently punitive rather than protective.
Local governments in Bagudo, Suru, Kaiama, Borgu, and Ngaski remain chronically weak.
When armed violence escalated across the northwestern region, security deployments focused on Zamfara, Katsina, and parts of Niger State. Kebbi’s borderlands were treated as peripheral, stable, and low-risk. That assumption proved costly.
Border governance failed as well. Coordination with Benin and the Niger Republics remains distant, reactive, and politicised. Joint patrols are rare. Intelligence sharing is uneven. Communities know this. Armed actors understand it better.
Armed groups arrived first as guests, then as protectors, and finally as power brokers, filling gaps the state created—sometimes violently, sometimes persuasively.
Poverty caused by the absence of authority
In the absence of legitmate sate authority, people seek alternative systems of order. Armed groups exploit this vacuum expertly. They tax, regulate, punish, and reward. In some communities, the question is no longer whether armed groups are legitimate, but whether they are avoidable. Increasingly, they are not.
The Kainji axis experienced seven major attacks between 2025 and Feb. 2026: The Nov. 2025 abduction of 303–315 students from St. Mary’s School in Papiri (Niger State); the market raid in Kasuwan Daji that claimed the lives of about 30-42 people on Jan. 3, 2026; the Jan. 23 park ambush killing six; the Feb. 1 raids in Agwara and Mashegu (dynamiting a police station and church), and the Feb. 4 massacre in Kaiama. Map illustration: Mansir Muhammed/HumAngle.
Once a symbol of Nigeria’s conservation ambition, KLNP has become a largely ungoverned hub exploited by a mix of violent actors: jihadist cells, armed terrorist factions, and transnational militants with roots beyond Nigeria’s borders.
From the northwest’s perspective – particularly Kebbi State – the park functions as a rear operational hub. Armed groups operating in border local governments use it for recruitment, logistics, training, and cross-border movement into the Benin Republic. Its sheer size, rugged terrain, and weak oversight enable a dangerous convergence: criminal armed groups blending with jihadism.
This shift carries national implications
Kainji’s forests and waterways provide mobility, with the lake economy providing revenue streams and border proximity offering escape and reinforcement routes.
While Sambisa became synonymous with territorial insurgency, Kainji signals the maturation of a corridor-based conflict economythat binds Nigeria’s northwest to wider Sahelian instability through forest reserves and lake communities.
When conservation spaces double as conflict connectors, the impact extends beyond biodiversity loss. Human buffers weaken first as communities negotiate survival under parallel authorities. Ecological buffers follow as enforcement fractures and resource exploitation become embedded in armed group financing.
Communities adapt under the rule of local armed terror groups in the absence of state and local government authorities. Density map of settlements in the Kainji axis where terrorists control.
The lake basin lies close to Kainji dam, a critical energy infrastructure, touches sensitive international borders, and anchors trade and livelihood systems that extend deep into the country’s interior.
In 2026, the geographic corridor surrounding the lake and its forest reserves recorded some of the highest levels of mass killings and large-scale abductions in Nigeria. Armed groups operate with increasing confidence, widening their reach across rural settlements and mobility routes connecting Niger State to Kebbi, Zamfara, and beyond toward the Sahelian belt.
The warning signs are not limited to a single park
In April 2025, the Conservator-General of Nigeria’s National Park Service, Ibrahim Musa Goni, told HumAngle that six national parks across the country were overrun by terrorists. Two years earlier, the federal government had created 10 additional parks to prevent further takeovers. However, only four of those new parks are currently operational. In addition to the seven existing parks, only eleven national parks are currently functioning nationwide.
Even where reclamation has occurred, the process is complex. The Conservator General pointed to Kaduna State as an example, describing what he termed a “mutual understanding” between authorities and armed groups.
“They have agreed to resolve their issues,” he said. “[As a result], most of the forest and game reserves, and even the national park in Kaduna State, have today been freed of banditry.” This, he argued, has brought “relative peace” and enabled forest and game guards, including officers in Birnin Gwari, to resume operations.
The National Park Service has also redefined its institutional posture. “The government classified the National Park Service as a paramilitary organisation,” Goni explained. “And as a paramilitary organisation, the act provides that we can bear arms.” Rangers affiliated with the Service have received training from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to address wildlife crime and respond to terror-related takeovers. According to Goni, this training has strengthened Nigeria’s capacity to confront forest-based criminality linked to armed groups and insurgents.
The approach is not solely security-driven. The Service engages surrounding communities through alternative livelihood programmes, skills training, and starter packs intended to reduce dependence on park resources. “This has, in a great deal, diverted the attention of most of them from the resources of the national parks,” Goni said, adding that it has helped contain hunting and wildlife trafficking.
Yet resource limitations remain significant. “Apart from managing wild animal resources and the plants, we also have to manage the human population,” he acknowledged, noting that the Service cannot meet the needs of every community bordering the parks.
Reporting from Sacramento — For all of the unprecedented elements of President Trump’s federal budget plans, there’s an item buried in the list of detailed spending cuts that has a familiar, contentious political legacy in California.
Trump has proposed canceling federal government subsidies to states that house prisoners and inmates who are in the U.S. illegally. He’s not the first president to try it, and undoubtedly will get an earful from states like California.
For sheer bravado, the award for defending that subsidy probably goes to former Gov. Pete Wilson. In a letter sent to federal officials in 1995, two days after Christmas, Wilson threatened to drop off one of the state’s undocumented prisoners — in shackles, no less — on the doorstep of a federal jail. (He never actually did it.)
“The intent of federal law is unequivocal,” Wilson wrote about the subsidy program. “The federal government must either reimburse the state at a fair rate for the incarceration of any undocumented inmate which it identifies or… take the burden of incarceration off the state’s hands.”
Wilson had won a second term the year before, with a blistering campaign attacking illegal immigration. His time in office was also marked by persistent state budget problems, and the money mattered. The state never got as much as it wanted, though, and years of squabbles followed over the fate of the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, established as part of the sweeping immigration reforms of 1986.
Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did his fair share of complaining about skimpy SCAAP funding. In 2005, he and a bipartisan group of western U.S. governors demanded a boost in the program to a total of $850 million. That didn’t happen.
The past two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, offered their own proposals to cancel the program. Trump’s budget scores the possible savings at $210 million. His budget blueprint lampoons SCAAP as “poorly targeted,” and describes it as a program “in which two-thirds of the funding primarily reimburses four states” for housing felons who lack legal immigration status.
Want to take a guess which state gets the most? OK, that’s an easy one.
California’s state government received $44.1 million in the 2015 federal budget year, according to Justice Department data. Add to that another $12.8 million that was paid directly to California counties, with the largest local subsidy being the $3 million paid to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
More than one-third of the entire program went to California. No other state’s share was even close. A win on this issue for the president would be particularly bitter for the state, where political animosity toward Trump is widespread.
In Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget unveiled last month, he assumed $50.6 million in federal help for prison costs related to felons in the U.S. illegally. A budget spokesman for Brown said the governor will ask for help from the state’s congressional delegation in saving the program. Still, it’s safe to say the estimate is now in doubt.
When President Obama tried to nix the subsidy, conservatives warned it would endanger public safety. So far, few are making the same case now that it’s coming from Trump — a curious development, given California’s most famous illegal immigration critic once insisted the program was essential.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that California this fall may use its new election map, which is expected to send five more Democrats to Congress.
With no dissents, the justices rejected emergency appeals from California Republicans and President Trump’s lawyers, who claimed the map was a racial gerrymander to benefit Latinos, not a partisan effort to bolster Democrats.
Trump’s lawyers supported the California Republicans and filed a Supreme Court brief asserting that “California’s recent redistricting is tainted by an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”
They pointed to statements from Paul Mitchell, who led the effort to redraw the districts, that he hoped to “bolster” Latino representatives in the Central Valley.
In response, the state’s attorneys told the court the GOP claims defied the public’s understanding of the mid-decade redistricting and contradicted the facts regarding the racial and ethnic makeup of the districts.
Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed re-drawing the state’s 52 congressional districts to “fight back against Trump’s power grab in Texas.”
He said that if Texas was going to redraw its districts to benefit Republicans so as to keep control of the House of Representatives, California should do the same to benefit Democrats.
The voters approved the change in November.
While the new map has five more Democratic-leaning districts, the state’s attorneys said it did not increase the number with a Latino majority.
“Before Proposition 50, there were 16 Latino-majority districts. After Proposition 50, there is the same number. The average Latino share of the voting-age population also declined in those 16 districts,” they wrote.
It would be “strange for California to undertake a mid-decade restricting effort with the predominant purpose of benefiting Latino voters and then enact a new map that contains an identical number of Latino-majority districts,” they said.
Trump’s lawyers pointed to the 13th Congressional District in Merced County and said its lines were drawn to benefit Latinos.
The state’s attorneys said that too was incorrect. “The Latino voting-age population [in District 13] decreased after Proposition 50’s enactment,” they said.
Three judges in Los Angeles heard evidence from both sides and upheld the new map in a 2-1 decision.
“We find that the evidence of any racial motivation driving redistricting is exceptionally weak, while the evidence of partisan motivations is overwhelming,” said U.S. District Judges Josephine Staton and Wesley Hsu.
In the past, the Supreme Court has said the Constitution does not bar state lawmakers from drawing election districts for political or partisan reasons, but it does forbid doing so based on the race of the voters.
In December, the court ruled for Texas Republicans and overturned a 2-1 decision that had blocked the use of its new election map. The court’s conservatives agreed with Texas lawmakers who said they acted out of partisan motives, not with the aim of denying representation to Latino and Black voters.
“The impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a concurring opinion.
California’s lawyers quoted Alito in supporting their map.
Appledore is a beautiful village in north Devon. It is hoping to showcase all it has to offer to even more visitors when its Clean Maritime Innovation Centre opens later this year
Appledore is a picturesque village in north Devon(Image: Getty Images)
A small coastal village steeped in history and a rich shipbuilding heritage, with a vibrant seafood scene and colourful cottages, is hoping a futuristic, million-pound project will put it firmly on the map.
The tiny village of Appledore isn’t one of the most well-known places in Devon, but can certainly be characterised among the most beautiful, with narrow, winding lanes, a bustling quayside to explore, and pastel-coloured houses and coastal views. Its estuary shore is suitable for beachcombing and exploring rock pools.
Located in north Devon at the meeting of the Rivers Torridge and Taw, the village is built on the centuries-old traditions of shipbuilding and fishing.
Renowned for its maritime heritage and vibrant seafood scene, Appledore is also celebrated for its art and creativity, hosting regular arts festivals and resident craftspeople showcasing ceramics, photography, jewellery and more in independent shops and markets.
But while the village has a multitude of offerings for those already in the know, Appledore is hoping to boost its popularity among people outside the local area with the opening of its Clean Maritime Innovation Centre later this year.
The global innovation centre has received £15.6million in government funding and aims to support research in clean propulsion, autonomous vessels and marine sustainability.
Due to open in late 2026, the centre will also provide a base for floating offshore wind activity in northern Devon, with the electricity generated able to power approximately three million homes and create 3,000 jobs.
The maritime sector has played such a significant role in Appledore’s history and this project will be a real opportunity for the village to move into a national maritime future. The project is being delivered with funding support from the UK government through the Levelling Up Fund, the Community Regeneration Partnership, and the Devon and Torbay devolution deal. Devon County Council is overseeing the financial management.
Initial construction involves enhancements to the wall along New Quay Street, with full-scale building work set to start in the autumn. Preliminary works began in April, including the creation of a new quay to improve estuary access.
Councillor Ken James, leader of Torridge District Council, said: “This is a very exciting step in the journey of this project, not just for Appledore, but for the wider district. We hope that the delivery of this centre will put Appledore and Torridge at the forefront of innovation and investment in clean maritime energy. By getting as many local tradespeople involved in the build as possible, we hope that this will be just the start of future job creation and investment in the area.”
Reviews of Appledore praise the villages colourful look and picturesque charm.
One reviewer wrote: “Appledore is a lovely place with lots of interesting nooks and crannies with brightly-coloured houses. It’s a lot less busy and touristy than some of its bier neighbours.”
Another said: “Appledore is great – very pretty with small craft shops, cafes, restaurants and is incredibly dog-friendly. Would definitely visit again.”
