Former Actors’ Guild of Nigeria president Segun Arinze has called for the resignation of the Director-General of the Censors Board. His statement below…
Please tell Madam Patricia Bala of Nigeria Film and Video Censors Board to release the movie Half of a Yellow Sun. She has no reason to hold on to the movie. She has no right to censor the movie only to classify it. She saw it in Canada and even partnered with the producers in Canada during the premiere. What she is doing now is an embarrassment to government and a big insult to our dear ind
(Nine Serving Generals to Face Court-Marshal for Treason)
TREASON: Chief of Army Staff, Lt-Gen. Minimah is leading the investigation of 9 Generals/Senior Military Officers on suspicion of selling military-grade weapons to Boko Haram.
Also, the Generals allegedly gave Boko Haram tips on troops’ movement, operations and were involved in illegal movement of weapons from the Nigerian Army armouries in various northern states.
Senior Military sources confirmed that during interrogation Boko Haram suspects named the officers and Generals as their arms suppliers. The Army’s investigation was prompted by loud accusations from independent foreign media and strong evidence provided by US/EU military intelligence sources that top Nigerian military chiefs were colluding with Boko Haram resulting in the terrorists gaining rapid offensive capability and upper hand over frontline troops.
THERE YOU HAVE IT, NIGERIANS! How much corruption and indignities can one nation take? How much official criminality is enough? When did treasonable felony become a recipe for successful military career? How can we expect our frontline troops to put their lives on the line for Nigeria when Generals and commanding officers are getting filthy rich on the treasonable felony of selling offensive weapons to terrorists?
For six months various frontline troops have told us in confidence that they refused to go out to fight Boko Haram because the terrorists always seem to know where our troops were going to be even when troops movement decisions were supposedly made at the last minute. Further our troops told us that Boko Haram had offensive sophisticated weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades, Israeli Uzis, Russian Kalashnikovs, mortars, AK-47 rifles, Bazookas and Improvised Explosives Devices while our unpaid frontline troops constantly suffer from typhoid and malaria fever from being forced to drink dirty water from boreholes.
The bombs went off in a market and bus terminal in the country's central city. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the twin car bombs, but they bore the hallmarks of Boko Haram, an Islamic extremist group.
Smoke rises after a bomb blast at a bus terminal in Jos, Nigeria, Tuesday, May 20, 2014. The blasts could be heard miles away and clouds of black smoke rose above the city as firefighters and rescue workers struggled to reach the area as thousands of people fled.
JOS, Nigeria — Two car bombs exploded at a bustling bus terminal and market in Nigeria's central city of Jos on Tuesday, killing at least 118 people, wounding dozens and leaving streets strewn with bloodied bodies.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the twin car bombs. But they bore the hallmarks of Boko Haram, the Islamic extremist group that abducted nearly 300 schoolgirls last month and has repeatedly targeted bus stations and other locations where large numbers of people gather in its campaign to impose Islamic law on Nigeria.
The second blast came half an hour after the first, killing some of the rescue workers who had rushed to the scene, which was obscured by billows of black smoke.
Dozens of bodies and body parts were covered in grain that had been loaded in the second car bomb, witnesses said. A Terminus Market official said he helped remove 50 casualties, most of them dead. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to give information to reporters.
"It's horrifying, terrible," said Mark Lipdo of the Stefanos Foundation, a Christian charity based in Jos, who described the sickening smell of burning human flesh.
A woman's body, her legs blown off and her hand reaching out of the flames, lay on the edge of an inferno consuming other bodies. Another woman, unconscious and wrapped in a brightly colored cloth, was being carried away in a wheelbarrow on a road strewn with glass shards.
Tensions have been rising between Christians and Muslims in Jos, the capital of Plateau state in Nigeria's Middle Belt region that divides the country into the predominantly Muslim north and Christian south. It is a flashpoint for religious violence.
Boko Haram has claimed other recent bomb attacks, including two separate bomb blasts in April that killed more than 120 people and wounded more than 200 in Abuja, the nation's capital. One went off at Abuja's busy bus station.
A suicide car bomber killed 25 people in northern Kano city on Monday. Police there detonated a second car bomb Monday. They said both would have killed many people but the first exploded before it reached its target of restaurants and bars in the Christian quarter of the Muslim city.
Lipdo said at least one of Tuesday's blasts could have been averted if authorities had acted in time. He said a white van that held the first bomb was parked for hours in the market place, raising suspicions of vendors and others who reported it to the authorities, but nothing was done.
He said authorities also had another warning of impending violence: A man with explosives strapped to his body was arrested on Saturday and told police that many militants had been ordered to plant bombs around churches and public areas in Jos.
An injured woman is carried after bombs exploded at a bus terminal and market in Jos, Nigeria, Tuesday, May 20, 2014. Two car bombs exploded at a bustling bus terminal and market in Nigeria's central city of Jos on Tuesday, and witnesses said dozens of people were killed. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the twin car bombs, but they bore the hallmarks of Boko Haram, an Islamic extremist group.
President Goodluck Jonathan extended sympathies to affected families and said in a statement that he "assures all Nigerians that the government remains fully committed to winning the war against terror."
"This administration will not be cowed by the atrocities of enemies of human progress and civilization," the statement said.
The Nigerian government and military's failure to curtail the 5-year-old Islamic uprising, highlighted by the mass abduction of at least 276 schoolgirls and lack of progress in rescuing them more than a month later, has caused national and international outrage.
Jonathan has been forced to accept help from several nations including Britain and the United States, in the hunt for the girls, who were kidnapped in northeast Nigeria. It also has brought massive attention to the shadowy extremist group, which is demanding the release of detained insurgents in exchange for the girls — a swap officials say the government will not consider.
Diplomats said Nigeria on Tuesday asked a U.N. Security Council committee monitoring sanctions against al-Qaida to add Boko Haram to the list, with an arms embargo and asset freeze.
The wreckage of a charred vehicle remains in front of burning shops following a bomb blast at Terminus market in the central city of Jos on May 20, 2014.
The extremists are threatening to sell the girls into slavery if Jonathan does not free detained insurgents, which officials say he will not do.
Boko Haram, whose name means "Western education is sinful," has targeted schools, as well as churches, mosques, marketplaces, bus terminals and other spots where large numbers of civilians gather in its campaign to turn Nigeria into an Islamic state. Half of Nigeria's population of 170 million is Christian, as is most of the population of Jos. The militants have increased the reach of their attacks this year, and their deadliness.
On Christmas Eve in 2010, bombs allegedly planted by Boko Haram exploded in Jos, killing as many as 80 people.
Meanwhile, more than 300 people have been killed in assaults on towns and villages in recent weeks, and the extremists also are blamed for an attack last week on a Chinese camp in neighboring Cameroon in which one Cameroonian soldier was killed and 10 Chinese workers abducted.
Militants' attacks have been coming with increasing frequency despite a year-old military state of emergency in three of Nigeria's states to curtail the uprising.
The Senate on Tuesday voted to extend the emergency for another six months, but only if Jonathan devotes more money to the military campaign and to better arming demoralized soldiers, who say Boko Haram is better equipped. A letter with the conditions was sent to the president.
More than 2,000 people have been killed in the insurgency this year in Africa's most- populous nation, compared to an estimated 3,600 between 2010 and 2013.
A suicide car bomber killed five people on a street of popular bars and restaurants in the northern Nigerian city of Kano on Sunday evening, in an area mostly inhabited by southern Christians, police said. Kano police spokesman Musa Majiya said the bomber struck Gold Coast Street in the Sabon Gari or "foreign quarter" of the North's biggest city.
"I heard a loud blast. And there was a lot of smoke. Soldiers came in to cordon off the place and ambulances were rushing people to hospital," witness Abdul Dafar, who lives a block away from the blast, said, adding that he had seen four dead bodies in the aftermath. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but blame is likely to fall on violent Islamist group Boko Haram, whose struggle against the Nigerian state has killed thousands over the last five years. The militants also operate in neighboring Niger, Cameroon and Chad, and President Goodluck Jonathan described them as West Africa's al-Qaeda on Saturday in Paris, where regional leaders met France's President Francois Hollande to discuss how to tackle the growing threat posed by the group. The Islamists grabbed world headlines with abduction of more than 200 school girls a month ago from a remote village in the northeast. Britain, the United States and France have pledged to help rescue them. See also: Kenya fumes as Western security warnings drive tourists out Boko Haram has frequently attacked Sabon Gari, whose liquor stores are also a cause of friction with Kano's Islamic police. The area has for decades housed ethnic Igbo traders from the South, who are predominantly Christian. Nigeria's population of 170 million is split roughly evenly between Christians and Muslims. Multiple bomb blasts in Sabon Gari killed at least 15 people in July and an attack on a bus station there in March 2013 killed 25. The focus of Boko Haram's insurgency is on the northeast border area with Cameroon, where it has repeatedly attacked military outposts and massacred villagers with growing ferocity. But two bombs on the outskirts of the capital Abuja last month that killed 105 people between them showed the Islamists can strike across north and central Nigeria. Boko Haram is now seen as the main security threat to Africa's biggest economy and top oil producer, although it has so far spared the commercial hub of Lagos and the oil fields in the South. Outrage over Boko Haram's kidnapping of the school girls has prompted Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, criticized at home for his government's slow response to the crisis, to accept U.S., British and French help in the hunt for the girls.
Amid global outcry, Sudanese government says pregnant Christian has chance to appeal penalty for changing religion.
Sudanese officials are downplaying the death sentence ruling given to a pregnant young Christian woman for apostasy, amid an international outcry.
"Sudan is committed to all human rights and freedom of faith granted in Sudan by the constitution and law," Foreign Ministry spokesman Abu-Bakr Al-Siddiq said, the Reuters news agency reported on Friday.
He added that his ministry trusted the integrity and independence of the judiciary.
The parliament speaker Fatih Izz Al-Din told local radio that the media campaign about the "apostate woman" is aimed at distorting the image of Sudan - a position often deployed by Sudanese officials when met with outrage over controversial events.
He also said the verdict would go through all the judicial stages to reach the constitutional court and that there would be a chance to appeal. His comments were reported on Friday by the state news agency, SUNA.
The case of Mariam Yehya Ibrahim Ishag has sparked international outrage.
Ishag, a pregnant 27-year-old Christian, was convicted of apostasy for refusing to renounce her faith. The govenment said it had given her three days to "return to Islam".
They also sentenced her to 100 lashes for marrying a Christian man, which is unrecognised under Islamic law.
Ishag says she was born to a Sudanese Muslim father, who was absent, and raised by an Ethiopian Christian mother.
But Izz Al Din maintained she was a Muslim raised in an Islamic environment and said that her brother, who is also a Muslim, had filed the charges.
Her brother's complaint alleged she had gone missing for several years and that her family was shocked to find out she married a Christian, according to her lawyer.
Political distraction
Experts in Islamic law called the ruling outrageous.
"The punishment has little to do with religion and serves as a political distraction," Mohamed Ghilan, an expert in Islamic jurisprudence, told Al Jazeera. "This is a ploy by the Sudanese regime to appear as 'defenders of Islam' to mitigate their corruption."
Faced with these challenges, the Sudanese government found itself politically marginalised, Ghilan said. "The punishment is an attempt to give the regime legitimacy with the more conservative crowd."
"Historically, this sort of punishment was only implemented in cases where people didn’t just simply convert due to lack of conviction, but they would also join an opposing force," Ghilan said.
In this context, apostasy was tantamount to treason, according to Khaleel Mohammed, associate professor of religion at San Diego State University.
"One did not get sentenced to death simply for converting. Unfortunately, this does happen in certain places like Afghanistan and Sudan, but these judges are not very educated in Islamic law and are working from a tribal perspective."
Further, even in the context of war, women were historically excluded from punishment, Ghilan said. "Women could not be executed because of the vehement declaration of the prophet not to harm women."
Researchers say they have made a discovery in Argentina of a dinosaur that would've been the largest animal ever to walk the earth.
The dinosaur would have been triple the size of a T-Rex weighing in at 77 tons.
Jose Luis Carballido of Argentina's Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio told CNN the discovery is "Like two trucks with a trailer each, one in front of the other, and the weight of 14 elephants together."
This news was perceived with a very controversial response from the UK Muslim Public Affairs Committee, saying that “Your Husband Has Killed More Muslim Girls Than Boko Haram Ever Could, #We Can’t Bring Back Our Dead.”
Do you agree with their point of view?
This post has received various responses among the members of MPAC as well, with some of them saying that a good cause is a still a good cause, and others supporting his point of view.
The campaign was started to make the world hear about the abducted Chibok girls and has spread worldwide. Over 200 girls were abducted in April 2014 from their school in Chibok and military forces and volunteers have been looking for them ever since.
Meanwhile, Boko Haram has claimed responsibility for kidnapping the girls and has just released a video showing supposedly some of them.
