Two car-bomb attacks have killed at least 38 people in the Somali capital Mogadishu, officials say. The first took place outside the presidential palace late on Friday. The second hit a nearby hotel. Dozens of people were wounded. The Islamist militant group al-Shabab, which has been trying to oust Somalia’s government, says it was behind both. A gun battle followed ...

The UN Security Council has unanimously approved a resolution demanding a 30-day ceasefire in Syria to allow aid deliveries and medical evacuations. However, some of the biggest jihadist rebel groups, and their associates, are not covered by the truce, raising questions about its real impact. The Eastern Ghouta rebel enclave near Damascus has been bombarded by government forces for the ...

  India and Pakistan have exchanged artillery fire in the disputed Kashmir region forcing hundreds of people to flee, police in Indian Kashmir said, raising fresh doubts about a 15-year-old ceasefire between the nuclear-armed rivals in the area. It was not clear what triggered the latest fighting on Saturday in the Uri sector on the so-called Line of Control (LoC) ...

Delta Air Lines and United Airlines on Saturday became the latest major corporations to sever marketing ties with the National Rifle Association as the fallout from last week’s massacre at a Florida high school took its toll on the gun advocacy group. The exodus of corporate names, ranging from a major insurer to car rental brands and a household moving ...

Raymond Ozoji, Awka It was a display of shame and derision at Aroma junction Awka as an errant police traffic warder named Mmaduekponam Martins with staff number 10142 brutally manhandled a correspondent of the News Agency of Nigeria on duty, beating the journalist to a pulp. The NAN correspondent who was taking a shot of another police female  traffic warder ...

A mathematics teacher in a secondary school in the Aguata Local Government Area of Anambra State, Chiadikobi Ezeibekwe, has married his 17-year-old sister, claiming that God told him to do so. Speaking with our correspondent on Saturday, Ezeibekwe said he had a revelation where God told him to marry his sibling. The teacher quoted Bible passages in Deuteronomy to illustrate ...

Ekiti State Governor, Chief Ayodele Fayose, has expressed concern over the suffering and hardship facing the Nigerian masses and called for well meaning leaders to salvage their precarious condition.  He also lamented that the corporate existence of Nigeria was being threatened by selective administration of justice, marginalisation, and vendetta against perceived political opponents of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration. This is just ...

Canadian skier David Duncan was arrested on charges of stealing a car in South Korea, where he was competing at the Winter Olympics, officials and Canadian media said on Saturday. Duncan’s wife Maja and manager Willy Raine were also arrested, the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) said. Raine was charged with impaired driving, CBC News and the Canadian Press reported. The ...

  Punch Editorial Board As Nigeria’s steady and seemingly inexorable drift into an abyss of anomie continues, it is difficult not to notice the striking resemblance between the way Boko Haram was propped up in the not-too-distant past, by those in a position to have nipped its incipient danger in the bud, and the way the marauding Fulani herders are ...

  The Chairman of the Police Service Commission (PSC), Mr. Mike Okiro, recently disclosed in Abuja that more than 150,000 of the nation’s policemen are attached to certain highly placed officials and some unauthorised persons in the country. The PSC boss lamented that the commission could not afford to have a half of the policemen in the country in private hands. ...