Suicide Bomber Hits Magali Bauchi Killing 6, several others injured

Remains of a Female Suicide Bomber.

Suicide bombers killed a minimum of six people and wounded fourteen in a over flowing market in the northeastern Nigerian city of Madagali on Friday, the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said.
A police representative had earlier said 15 were killed, and didn't establish any suspects.
Suicide bombings are common in Nigeria's northeast, the centre of a bloody campaign by Islamist group Boko Haram to form an Islamic state. Madagali was also hit last month, when female child suicide bombers killed as many as 56 people in an exceedingly coordinated attack on a market.
Friday's attacks, which bore the hallmark of islamist militant group Boko Haram, followed a twin attack of bombings last week in Borno state, where the Boko Haram insurgence began, undermining a presidential announcement last month that the militants had been pushed out of their last defence in the northeast.
A man claiming to be Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau has appeared in a video denying President Muhammadu Buhari's statement that the Islamist group had been ousted from the region.
Boko Haram's seven-year-old insurgence, aimed toward establishing a medieval-style caliphate in the northeast of Africa's most populous nation, has killed there about 15,000 people and displaced up to 2 million people.
Aid teams and international organisations now warn of a looming humanitarian crisis as people displaced by the insurgence have become prone to illness and famine, even within camps established to shelter them.
In early 2015, Boko Haram controlled an area about the dimensions of Belgium, but has been driven out of much of it over the past year by Nigeria's army and troops from neighbouring countries.
Boko Haram insurgents have since disengaged to a base within the Sambisa forest, an enormous former game reserve in Borno state.
Security analysts say the jihadists' ability to carry out attacks in neighbouring Niger, Cameroon and Chad suggests that it has multiple bases.

Boko Haram attacks; 5 soldiers killed

Kano - Not less than 5 soldiers were killed in a surprise weekend attack by Boko Haram Islamists on a military base in northeast Nigeria, senior officers told afp on today.

A group of Boko Haram fighters launched an attack on the military facility in the city of Buni Yadi at sundown on Saturday, resulting in an "intense battle", one officer said on condition of obscurity.

"We lost 5 soldiers in the attack, as well as a captain who was recently deployed to Buni Yadi," he said, asking not to be identified as he wasn't authorised to talk to the media.

"We are still making an attempt to have a sense of the casualties on the part of the terrorists as their bodies are scattered in the bush."

The Boko Haram gunmen are believed to have regrouped when Nigeria's military chased them out of the group's Sambisa Forest fortress in the neighbouring state of Borno last month.

Nigeria's military and government maintains the Islamic State cluster affiliate is a spent force because of sustained pressure that has driven them out of swathes of captured territory.

Israeli soldier Aziria faces verdict over Hebron death

  

Sgt Azaria

The fate of only one low-ranking Israeli soldier was hanging within the balance. However several Israelis, the guilty ruling declared on Wednesday was a vital twist in the battle for the character of the state.

When the military judges found Sgt. Elor Azaria of homicide for shooting a Palestinian attacker in the head as he lay wounded on his back, they were ruling not simply on his conduct however also on the host of ethical and political issues it raised. Since the shooting in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron in March, the case has polarized Israelis and rocked the pedestal on that the military ordinarily stands.

With the 50th day of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank approaching, the tremendously charged trial had fueled a dialogue concerning military ethics and also the place of the military in Israeli society. The Ruling did very little to heal the rifts the trial had exposed: Hours once it had been rendered, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined a chorus of voices demanding for the soldier to be pardoned.

“This could be a backbreaker and painful day for us all,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a Facebook post supporting a pardon, which may be granted by Israel’s president or the army’s prime officers. referring to the Israel Defense Forces, he added, “The troopers of the I.D.F. are our sons and daughters, and that they ought to stay above any dispute.”

 Prof. David Enoch, an expert in the philosophy of law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said he thought the homicide conviction was “justified” however added, “I’m unsure this ruling will be accepted by several of the troopers and much of the general public.”

The military’s rules illuminate that assailants should be quickly incapacitated, however that after the threat is over, they ought to not be killed. Rights teams and other critics have accused Israeli troopers and law enforcement officials of being too fast to pull the trigger, notably in response to a recent spate of deadly stabbings, shootings and automobile attacks by Palestinians.

Abed al-fatah al-shariff after being shot by Sgt Azaria

The Hebron killing, caught in chilling completeness in a video that quickly went viral worldwide, for several critics crystallized the question of excessive force, and even military leaders said Sergeant Azaria acted without justification. However in Israel, a country where military service could be a a part of national identity, several Jews demanded backing up young soldiers sent on dangerous missions and said that Sergeant Azaria had been in an not possible scenario and had very little probability of an final judgment, since that will have place his commanders during an unhealthy lightweight.

Israel’s defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, referred to as Wednesday’s decision “a powerful verdict.”

“The very first thing I ask of all folks — those { people who} like the verdict and those like Maine who like it much less — we have a tendency to area unit all obliged to respect the court’s ruling,” Mr. Lieberman said. “We are obliged to keep up restraint.”

Politicians to Mr. Netanyahu’s right and left have also called for a pardon, including the education minister, Naftali Bennett, and Shelly Yacimovich of the Labor Party, who said that “Azaria’s shoulders are too narrow to bear the entire weight of the fissure” the case has exposed.

Some Israeli experts compared the Azaria verdict to the Kafr Qassem ruling of more than 60 years ago, after border police officers fatally shot 49 Arab men, women and children as they returned from work in the fields, unwittingly breaking a curfew. The murder convictions of officers in that case established that security forces must refuse to follow a “patently illegal order” that carries a “black flag” of criminality.

It helped shape the army’s ethos. Now, some fear that in the lower ranks, it has begun to erode.

In a measure of the tensions, the verdict was handed down in a special court inside the walled and heavily guarded compound of the military’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, rather than in the courtroom where the trial was held, to keep demonstrators at bay.

Mend Falls Apart with FG

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta gave its supreme support for the organization of President Muhammadu Buhari, the group on Sunday pulled back their support for the administration.

The representative of the defunct activist group, Jomo Gbomo, expressed this in an electronic proclamation issued on Sunday where it passed a vote of no certainty on the government, blaming her for playing legislative issues with the issue of discourse and advancement of the area.


Describing President Buhari as wily, the group said: "We thus request that President Muhammadu Buhari must put a stop to his shrewdness, cunning and un-statesman talk about the Niger Delta region as they have just effectively jeopardized the delicate peace in the area." It additionally asked him to "direct the applicable organization of government to promptly initiate discourse with the Niger Delta district; as appropriately and capably spoke to by PANDEF."

The announcement bemoaned that President Buhari has, for reasons best known to him, held the Niger Delta locale in disdain "while charging or potentially blackmailing the leadership of the area of not being prepared for dialogue though it is the Federal Government who are not prepared or willing to name a group to discourse with the general population."


It alleged that the administration had neglected to respect concessions reached before it consented to declare a truce with militants in the region including the release of the Okah siblings and a few other political prisoners and detainees of underground deception by the present government.

Berlin market attack suspect killed in Milan

At the German government’s daily press conference the ministerial officials are coming under huge pressure to explain why Anis Amri was able to move freely in Germany and plan his attack under the nose of authorities, particularly following the emergence of the footage showing that he was monitored entering an Isis (Islamic State)-associated mosque in Berlin on 14 and 15 December and again leaving it seven hours after the attack.

The officials are very defensive, and have several times answered journalists that they cannot answer many of the questions, and that it would be disrespectful to speculate while many of the victims of the attack have not even yet been buried.