Group items tagged

Boko Haram’s abduction of more than 100 Nigerian schoolgirls last week is sending political shock waves through a key U.S. counterterrorism ally in Africa as President Muhammadu Buhari weighs whether to seek re-election.

won 2015 elections on a campaign to defeat the Islamist insurgency and liberate more than 200 Chibok schoolgirls, whose 2014 abduction prompted a global outcry.

The kidnapping of 110 girls from the Dapchi Government Girls Science and Technical College in northeastern Yobe state has emboldened his critics, who draw parallels to the Chibok abductions and the potential political fallout in Africa’s most-populous nation and biggest economy.

In his first meeting at the White House with a sub-Saharan African leader, President Trump said controversial remarks he reportedly made, in which he referred to some developing nations as "shithole countries," didn't come up. Trump, however, didn't deny making the comment, and as Nigeria's president, Muhammadu Buhari, chuckled, Trump said at a news conference Monday, "You do have some countries that are in very bad shape — and very tough places to live in." Trump also chose not to apologize, when given the opportunity, for his immigration

Apologizing, Trump said, "wouldn't make 10 cents' worth of difference." Instead, he called U.S. laws "a disaster" and said the U.S. and those laws are laughed at all over the world "for their stupidity."

NPR and other news outlets reported in January that during a closed-door meeting with lawmakers at the White House Trump questioned why the United States continues to admit immigrants from "shithole countries" like Haiti and African countries.

At first, the attack had all the hallmarks of a typical Boko Haram assault. Armed fighters stormed a town on the border with Nigeria, shooting every man they saw.

Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group terrorizing this part of the world, is on the hunt — for food.

After rampaging across the region for years, forcing more than two million people to flee their homes and farms, Boko Haram appears to be falling victim to a major food crisis of its own creation.

Nigeria's president visited the White House Monday, meeting with President Trump in the same room where the U.S. president had reportedly said that Nigerians admitted to the U.S. as refugees could never be convinced to "go back to their huts."

"I’m very careful about what the press says about others and myself," Buhari said in response to a question from reporters during a joint news conference Monday in the Rose Garden. "I’m not sure about the validity of whether that allegation against the president was true or not, so the best thing for me to do is keep quiet."

Although the White House did not initially deny the remark, Trump later tweeted that he did not say anything derogatory about Haitians and had never said, as had been reported, to “take them out.”"The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used," Trump said in a tweet following the reports, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. "What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made — a big setback for DACA!"

SARS, which stood for Special Anti-Robbery Squad, was supposed to be the elite Nigerian police unit dedicated to fighting crime, but it was really a moneymaking terror squad with no accountability.

SARS officers would raid bars or stop buses on the road and arbitrarily arrest young men for such crimes as wearing their hair in dreadlocks, having tattoos, holding a nice phone or a laptop, driving a nice car. Then they would demand large amounts of money as “bail.”

In 2012 Mr. Iloanya was 20 when SARS officers arrested him at a child dedication ceremony in Anambra State. He had committed no crime

Africa’s most populous country and biggest oil producer has been convulsed by protests that started with anger over police brutality and have now broadened, drawing worldwide attention.

Tens of thousands of Nigerians have been demonstrating for weeks against a notoriously brutal and corrupt police agency, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad — a show of popular anger, fueled by longstanding grievances over corruption and lack of accountability, that posed the biggest challenge to the government in years.

Commonly known as SARS, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad was created in 1984 in response to an epidemic of violent crime including robberies, carjackings and kidnappings. While it was credited with having reduced brazen lawlessness in its initial years, the police unit was later accused of evolving into the same problem it had been designed to stop: a criminal enterprise that acts with impunity.

The seizure of more than 300 boys brought immediate comparisons to the 2014 kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls. But an anguishing six days later, a state governor said the boys had been released.

extremist group Boko Haram

were with a group of men he described as “bandits” rather than with Boko Haram.

The Nigerian government restored access in the country to Twitter on Thursday after a seven-month suspension that was imposed after the social media site deleted a post by Nigeria’s president that threatened a violent crackdown on secessionist groups.

The government blocked access to the site in June, but reversed course on Wednesday after Twitter agreed to several demands. Twitter will establish an office in the country, pay taxes there, appoint a representative and “act with a respectful acknowledgment of Nigerian laws and the national culture and history,”

Nigerians have been able to access the service only using a virtual private network.