Teachers Without Borders

JOS, Nigeria, March 10 (Reuters) - Sporadic shooting rang out overnight in the central Nigerian city of Jos and witnesses said at least one person was killed by soldiers enforcing a curfew days after attacks on three nearby Christian villages.

Jos, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and Christian south, has been tense since raiders attacked the villages of Dogo Nahawa, Zot and Ratsat just south of the city on Sunday, violence in which hundreds are feared to have died. Fierce competition for control of fertile farmlands between Christian and animist indigenous groups and Muslim settlers from the north have repeatedly triggered unrest over the past decade.

"Last night until this morning everybody kept vigil. Nobody slept," said Felvis Aduba, a Jos resident who owns a shop selling electronic goods. Jos was already under a dusk-to-dawn curfew after clashes between Christian and Muslim mobs in January which killed more than 400 people, according to community leaders.

Villagers in central Nigeria buried dozens of bodies, including those of women and children, in a mass grave on Monday after attacks in which several hundred people were feared to have been killed.

Armed police and soldiers stood guard as residents of Dogo Nahawa, about 15 km (9 miles) south of the central city of Jos, carried bodies wrapped in multi-coloured cloth from trucks and lowered them into a large open pit in the red-brown earth.

Acting President Goodluck Jonathan called an emergency meeting with security service chiefs in the capital Abuja to try to prevent the violence in Nigeria's volatile "Middle Belt" from spreading to neighbouring states. "For many years people have been living together peacefully ... We don't know what happened," one Dogo Nahawa resident, Dan Yamu, told Reuters at the burial ceremony.

a panel of educators convened by the nation’s governors and state school superintendents released a set of proposed common academic standards on Wednesday. The standards, posted on the panel’s web site, lay out the panel’s vision of what American public school students should learn in math and English, year by year, from kindergarten to high school graduation.

If a majority of states were to adopt them over the next few months, which experts said was a growing possibility, the new standards would replace the nation’s motley current checkerboard of locally written standards, which vary greatly in content and sophistication. And adoption of the new standards would set off a vast new effort to rewrite textbooks and standardized tests.

The Obama Administration quickly endorsed the effort. Under the Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative, in which states are competing for a share of $4 billion in school improvement money, states can earn 40 points of the possible 500 for participating in the common effort and adopting the new standards.

The situation in the central city of Jos is calm today, after violence at the weekend resulted in the deaths of 500 people. The authorities believe the attacks on three Christian villages near the Plateau State capital were an act of revenge carried out by members of the Muslim Fulani community.

Focus on Africa's reporter in Kaduna, Abdullahi Kaura Abubakar, spoke to the Secretary General for the northern zone of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Sa'idu Dogo.

Abuja — Federal government yesterday said it will stop at nothing in dealing with the sponsors and perpetrators of the Jos crisis, even as it assured that such ugly incidents will not recur. Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) and Minister of Justice, Prince Adetokunbo Kayode commiserated with the families of the victims, saying: "It will not happen again."

"Our national action plan for promotion and protection of human rights contains explicit provisions on how we intend to achieve this. In addition, the NCT is our national mechanism to investigate allegations of torture, extra judicial executions and other unlawful killings". He said with the process, a culture of accountability within the nation's security agencies would be engendered and that impunity under whatever guise would be punished.

Jos, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and Christian south, has been tense since raiders attacked the villages of Dogo Nahawa, Zot and Ratsat just south of the city on Sunday, violence in which hundreds are feared to have died.Fierce competition for control of fertile farmlands between Christian and animist indigenous groups and Muslim settlers from the north have repeatedly triggered unrest over the past decade.

Jos was already under a dusk-to-dawn curfew after clashes between Christian and Muslim mobs in January which killed more than 400 people, according to community leaders.Aduba said the city had been put on edge by SMS messages sent to mobile phones warning that militants from the Muslim Hausa-Fulani ethnic group, blamed for Sunday's attacks, were coming from the northern city of Maiduguri to wage war.

Gunfire also rang out from the Tudun Wada neighborhood of the city overnight, where residents said panic was sown when a resident from another state received a truckload of cows.Many of the herders around Jos are Hausa-Fulani and when a vigilante group saw the animals, they took the man for a northern Muslim and mobbed him, before the security forces opened fire to disperse them, killing one person.

Pope denounces 'atrocious' Nigeria bloodshed AMINU ABUBAKAR March 11, 2010 - 12:44AM Ads by GoogleCAFM/CMMS FacilitiesDeskWeb-based integrated CAFM/CMMSMaintenance, Asset & Space mgmtwww.manageengine.com/FacilitiesDesk Pope Benedict XVI denounced the "atrocious" bloodshed in Nigeria on Wednesday after a massacre of Christian villagers, as police said 49 people would be charged over the killings. As new gunfire added to the tensions around the flashpoint city of Jos, the pope added his voice to a chorus of international revulsion over the weekend slaughter which police say left 109 people dead but the state information commissioner said left more than 500 dead.

"Violence does not resolve conflicts but only increases the tragic consequences," he added. The three-hour killing spree in the early hours of Sunday was the latest wave of sectarian violence to engulf the Jos region where several hundred people were killed in Muslim-Christian clashes in January. The security forces have faced heavy criticism over their failure to intervene to stop the latest killings at a time when a curfew was meant to be in force.

Jang told reporters he had alerted Nigeria's army commander about reports of movement around the area and had been told that troops would be heading there. "Three hours or so later, I was woken by a call that they (armed gangs) had started burning the village and people were being hacked to death. "I tried to locate the commanders, I couldn?t get any of them on the telephone."

DOGO NA HAWA, Nigeria — Nightmare images haunt this dusty sun-baked village, fresh memories of tall young men emerging from darkness to slash the unarmed with long knives in a frenzy of ethnic and religious hatred.

On Tuesday, a day after hundreds were buried in mass graves here, groups of villagers in this Christian farming community a few miles south of the central Nigerian metropolis of Jos sat mutely among their mud-brick homes, remembering Sunday’s horror.

Some of the small houses had been burned in the attack: tin roofs were caved in and twisted, facades were charred and carbonized hulks of vehicles littered the dirt streets. Traces of blood were evident in the sandy soil.

Hundreds of people, including many women and children, were killed in ethnic violence near the city of Jos in Nigeria at the weekend, officials say.They said villages had been attacked by men with machetes who came from nearby hills. Troops have now been deployed in the area and dozens of arrests are said to have been made.

Jos has been under a military curfew since January when at least 200 people died in clashes between Christians and Muslims.

The authorities say the villages are now calm after troops and military vehicles entered them. An adviser to the Christian-dominated Plateau state government, Dan Manjang, told AFP: "We have been able to make 95 arrests but at the same time over 500 people have been killed in this heinous act."