The U.S. government and human rights activists called Tuesday for Nigeria to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the deaths of more than 200 unarmed people in renewed violence between Christians and Muslims.
Acting President Goodluck Jonathan had promised that the fighting would stop after more than 300 people were slain in January. Jonathan fired his national security adviser late Monday night following the weekend violence.
“After the January killings, the villages should have been properly protected,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said. “Clearly, previous efforts to tackle the underlying causes have been inadequate, and in the meantime the wounds have festered and grown deeper.”
President Barack Obama stumped Sunday for the Democratic candidate in Massachusetts’ knife-edge Senate election, saying that his legislative agenda depended on her winning.
The seat, which was occupied by Edward Kennedy for almost five decades before his death in August, was considered a Democratic stronghold. But candidate Martha Coakley finds herself struggling ahead of Tuesday’s vote against Republican opponent Scott Brown.
A win by Brown would strip the Democrats of their 60th Senate seat, meaning their majority was no longer big enough to easily override Republican opposition to Obama’s bitterly fought health care reforms and other major projects.
“A lot of these measures are going to rest on one vote in the United States Senate,” Obama told a noisy Coakley rally in Boston.
“That’s why the opponents of change and progress have been pouring money in,” he said. “They want to keep things as they are.”
US black leaders said Monday they had unreservedly forgiven Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for racially insensitive comments, adding it was time to focus on pressing policy issues.
Reid created a firestorm with remarks published in the just-released book “Game Change,” saying that Americans had warmed to the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama because he was a “light-skinned” African-American with “no Negro dialect.”
Representative Barbara Lee, leader of the Congressional Black Congress, said Reid had phoned her over the weekend, and she had accepted his apology without qualms.
“He apologized for his unfortunate remarks concerning the president, and he understands the gravity of such remarks,” said Lee, who said it was time to move past the controversy.
Agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation are in Ghana to find out about the sojourn in the country of a Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a US airliner, a Ghanaian minister said Monday.
“The investigation will allow the FBI agents to gather more information on the suspect’s stay in Ghana,” Deputy Information Minister James Agyenim-Boateng told AFP.
He did not say when the FBI team arrived in Ghana and how long the agents plan to stay in the west African country.
It is Ghana’s first known official comment on the allegations by Nigerian authorities that the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, arrived in Lagos on December 24 on a Virgin Nigeria flight from Ghana.
Agyenim-Boateng said Abdulmutallab flew in to Ghana on December 9 on an Ethiopian Airlines flight out of Addis Ababa where he was believed to have connected from Dubai.
On his immigration form in Ghana he stated a Dubai address. Although he gave one hotel name as his address in Accra, he checked into a different one, said the minister refusing to give names of the hotels.
China’s Ambassador in London today went to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office after being summoned to explain her country’s execution of Akmal Shaikh, a British citizen.
Mr Shaikh, a convicted drug smuggler who is believed to have suffered from bipolar disorder, was killed by lethal injection early today, despite the personal intervention of Gordon Brown in a telephone call to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Premier.
The execution was condemned by the Prime Minister and David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, with the Foreign Office minister Ivan Lewis declaring that it made him feel “sick to the stomach”.
Mr Shaikh’s family said that they were “deeply saddened, stunned and disappointed” by the execution.
The family of a Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a US passenger jet promised Monday full cooperation with security agencies and said his behaviour had only “very recently” given rise to concern.
In its first public statement, his family said that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had broken contact weeks ago and his parents had become so worried that they had contacted Nigerian and foreign security agencies. Text of the statement
Abdulmutallab, 23, was prevented by passengers and crew from detonating explosives on the plane carrying 290 people as it came in to land in Detroit on Christmas Day.
“The disappearance and cessation of communication which got his mother and father concerned to report to the security agencies are completely out of character and a very recent development,” the statement said.
