Former Mexican President Vicente Fox says US Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump reminds him of Adolf Hitler.
"Today, he's going to take that nation (US) back to the old days of conflict, war and everything. I mean, he reminds me of Hitler,” he told CNN on Friday.
Fox, who was president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, said Trump “has offended Mexico, Mexicans, (and) immigrants. He has offended the Pope. He has offended the Chinese. He's offended everybody."
Last week, Pope Francis said that anyone who embraced Trump’s border-security positions “is not Christian.” Trump has vowed to expel undocumented immigrants and build a wall on the US-Mexico border.
The former president earlier denounced Trump's proposal that Mexico should be made to pay for the wall.
Trump, who has never held elected office, is still leading the Republican presidential primary field, despite the fact that his campaign has been marked by controversial statements, including with disparaging remarks about Mexican immigrants and Muslims.
He vowed to deport 11 million undocumented workers from the United States and establish a “deportation force” for this purpose.
It is not the first time that he was compared to the German dictator. Former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman said in December that Trump’s rhetoric about banning Muslims from entering the US reminds him of Hitler.
"If you go and look at your history and you read your history in the lead-up to the Second World War, this is the kind of rhetoric that allowed Hitler to move forward," Whitman said.
The New York real-estate mogul has created a furor in the US and around the world by proposing a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims” entering the United States, following a mass shooting in California.
He has also called for a database to track Muslims across the United States, and he has also said that the US would have "absolutely no choice" but to close down mosques.
Motorists are groaning as queues reappeared in fueling stations across Ibadan the Oyo State capital.
The situation has started creating panic among residents.
Going round some major roads within Ibadan, Channels TV reported that only a handful of petrol stations were selling petrol while majority were not selling.
Both the independent and major marketers appeared to be affected as most were not selling.
Some motorists are suspecting that some filling stations are possibly hoarding the products as no explanation has been given for the non-availability of the product.
Some of the station managers denied this allegation and said that they were not dispensing fuel because they did not have product to sell.
However, managers of some of the few stations selling claimed that they had no idea why there should be any form of fuel scarcity.
These few stations sold at the official pump price but there were fears that they might not be doing so for long if the fuel scarcity continues.
Efforts to get the NNPC or the leadership of IPMAN for comments were unsuccessful
Hundreds of Somali soldiers erected new security checkpoints across the capital, a day after attacks by Islamic extremists killed at least nine civilians and wounded several others, according to AP.
Government security forces patrolled the streets of Mogadishu Saturday following the attacks Friday night on a hotel and a nearby public garden.
Police said at least five militants from the group al-Shabab were also killed in the attacks on SYL Hotel and the Peace Garden, which each involved suicide car bombers.
The first blast, at the hotel, sent a loud booming sound across the city, shattering windows and ripping the roofs off many nearby buildings. The truck packed with 200 kilograms (440 pounds) of explosives bomb may have been the most powerful bomb used by al-Shabab in recent years, said Somali security minister Abdirizak Omar, told AP.
At the scene of the hotel blast Saturday, an elderly Somali woman raised her hands in grief, shouting "God have mercy on him" as she looked at the wreckage of her son's car which was near the truck bomb.
Somali resident Barre Ali said the explosion at the hotel "felt like there was an earthquake." In his bedroom, Ali pointed to cracks in the wall of his house, which is located 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from the scene of the blast.
More than 20 of the wounded are being treated at local hospitals, said Mohamed Abbas, the director of Daru Shifa hospital. Inside one hospital on Saturday, some victims of the attacks lay bleeding on the ground, screaming in pain, in the report.
Somali Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Sharmarke condemned the bombings.
"Such acts were perpetrated to terrorize (the) public and wreck the stability and development of the country," he said in the statement.
Despite being pushed out of Somalia's major cities, al-Shabab continues to launch deadly guerrilla attacks across the Horn of Africa nation.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, on Wednesday, February 24, 2016 arraigned the quartet of Abdulaziz Dalha Musa, Abbah Muhammad Bello, Bala Mohammed Zakari and Salisu Yusuf Juji before Justice Faruk Lawan of Kano State High Court on a two count charge bordering on conspiracy and obtaining by false pretence.
The accused persons are all executive members of the Amalgamated Traders/Artisans Welfare Development Association, AMATA, Kano State Chapter.
The complainant, Alhaji Yusuf Yakubu Mika’il, a trader in Singa Market Kano alleged that, sometimes in February and September 2013 he was approached by the executives of the AMATA, Kano Chapter over some plots of land which they had for sale.
According to Mika’il, after series of negotiations, a sum of N3.5million (Three Million, Five Hundred Thousand Naira) was paid to the accused persons and he was subsequently issued with receipts.
However, the accused persons could not deliver on their promise as agreed and efforts of the victim to recover his money yielded no result.
The accused persons pleaded not guilty to charges when they were read to them.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, on Wednesday, February 24, 2016 arraigned one Abdulaziz Abdullahi Eleyeye before Justice J. K. Omotosho of the Federal High Court sitting in Kano on one count charge bordering on obtaining by false pretence.
Eleyeye, a graduate of Bayero University Kano was arrested on June 17, 2014 in Lagos following a complaint by one Khalid Ahmad Umar who alleged that the accused person defrauded him to the tune of N1.3m (one million, three hundred thousand naira).
The said amount was to be used for procuring America Visa for the victim.
According to Umar, having no doubt of Eleyeye who claimed to be a travel agent, he paid the said sum into the accused person’s account domiciled in three new generation banks.
Umar claimed that, when he presented himself for the visa interview at U.S.A Embassy he was turned down. Consequently, the accused advised him to re-apply, this time in Kuwait.
It was discovered to be a phony deal when the complainant was deported from Kuwait International Airport back to Nigeria on the grounds that, the travel documents he presented were forged.
Efforts of the victim to get service for his money or recover same were unsuccessful.
The charge reads:
“That you, Abdulaziz Abdullahi sometimes between June and December, 2013 within the jurisdiction of the Federal High Court, Kano knowingly retained the sum of Seven Hundred and Sixty Thousand Naira (N763,000.00) in your Guaranty Trust Bank Plc. Account with account number 0020927933 being proceeds of your illegal act to wit: obtaining the said sum from one Khalid Ahmed under the false pretence that you will secure a visa for him to United States of America, Qatar, South Africa or Kuwait and you thereby committed an offence contrary to Section 17 (a) of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (Establishment) Act 2004 and punishable under Section 17 (b) of the same Act.”
The accused pleaded not guilty to the charge when it read to him.
In view of his plea, counsel to EFCC, Salihu Sani asked the court for a date for trial.
Justice Omotosho adjourned the case to March 7, 2016 for hearing of the bail application and commencement of trial
The accused person is to be remanded in prison custody.
Prof. Bem Angwe, Executive Secretary, National Human Rights Commission
The National Human Rights Commission says it will not hesitate to prosecute all those responsible for hate speeches and electoral violence during the 2015 elections.
The Executive Secretary, Prof. Bem Angwe, stated this in Abuja on when he inaugurated a special committee to investigate hate speeches and violence around the 2015 general elections.
He said the commission is taking this step to ensure that each and every person who took part in electoral violence or hate speech is held accountable.
Prof. Angwe said this done in fulfillment of its promise to Nigerians to investigate these electoral crimes. He added that gone are the days when people committed electoral violence and go free.
Angwe noted that in the realm of human rights, there was no immunity for impunity, adding that no one will be spared, no matter how highly placed.
The Deputy Chairman, House Committee on Human Rights, Rep. Mahjud Alabi, expressed concerns that election, which was the most civilised way of choosing representative sometimes took the toga of acrimony and rancour.
Alabi, who was the chairman of the occasion, noted that hate speeches violated the right to decency and dignity of the human person.
According to him, using foul language to gain support or votes is criminal and punishable under the law.
The Rep recalled that a report released by NHRC prior to the 2015 elections showed that 58 people had lost their lives due to hate speeches.
The Chairman, Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, appealed to the panel to also explore ways to putting a stop to cyber hate speeches.
Yakubu, who was represented by Mr Oluwale Uzi, Director Voter Education and Publicity, said it was more effective to monitor hate speeches and nip them in the bud before they escalated.
The Chairman pledged INEC’s support to the commission to help rid the country of hate speeches, particularly during elections.
The Committee’s Chairperson, Mrs Oti Ovrawah, while Responding on behalf of members, pledged that the committee would give fair hearing to all parties involved.
The Committee, which has two months to presents its findings, is expected to investigate all petitions received on hate speeches and violence during the 2015 general election and also identify all persons or organisations responsible for such electoral crimes and make recommendations.
Conspiracy theorists claim, JonBenet Ramsey (L) - who was found dead in the basement of her family's home in Boulder, Colo. in 1996 - actually grew up to be pop star Katy Perry(R).
Gianni Infantino vowed on Friday to lead FIFA out of years of corruption and scandal after the former UEFA general secretary was elected to succeed his Swiss compatriot Sepp Blatter as president of soccer's world governing body.
"We will restore the image of FIFA and the respect of FIFA, and everyone in the world will be proud of us," the 45-year-old law graduate, who for the last seven years has been the leading administrator for Europe's governing body, told an extraordinary FIFA Congress in Zurich.
"I feel a lot of emotion and have not realized yet what has happened today."
After a first round of voting in which he narrowly beat Asian Football Confederation President Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa of Bahrain, Infantino appeared to gather up almost all the votes that had been cast for the two trailing candidates, Prince Ali and Jerome Champagne.
He won 115 of the 207 votes in the second round, giving him a simple majority ensuring a European again holds the top job until 2019 and frustrating the hopes of those looking for a swing to Asia.
Infantino owed his candidacy to the fact that Europe's preferred candidate, his former boss and UEFA president Michel Platini, was banned from soccer last year along with Blatter for ethics violations.
"I thank Michel Platini for everything that he has taught me and given me and the work we have done together," Infantino said. "I have strong, dear thoughts for Mr Michel Platini right now."
Only the ninth president in FIFA's 112-year history, he inherits a very different job from that enjoyed by Blatter, who toured the world for 17 years like a head of state, dispensing development funds to his global support base.
Before the election, the Congress had overwhelmingly passed a set of reforms intended to make FIFA more transparent, professional and accountable.
That package should mean the new president faces much closer scrutiny than Blatter did -- his salary will be published for the first time -- and have less influence over the day-to-day management of the organization's business affairs.
Elias Demetracopoulos, an enigmatic journalist who fled Greece after a military coup in 1967 and accused the ruling right-wing junta of illegally funneling a half-million dollars into Richard M. Nixon 1968 presidential campaign, died on Feb. 16 at a nursing home in Athens. He was 87.
Mr. Demetracopoulos evidence of secret donations provided President Lyndon B. Johnson with a chance to damage, if not sink, Nixon campaign, Robert Dallek wrote in 1998 in Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973. The evidence may even have been among the documents that burglars were seeking when they broke into the Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate office complex in 1972.
During his self-imposed exile in Washington, Mr. Demetracopoulos lobbied Congress and the White House indefatigably to suspend support for the Greek military dictatorship, which the American government somewhat grudgingly viewed as a bulwark against encroaching Communism in southern Europe.
The junta collapsed in 1974 after Turkey invaded Cyprus, and democracy was eventually restored. So was Mr. Demetracopoulos Greek citizenship. But he remained in Washington as a bon vivant. He returned to Athens last year.
His ambiguous role as a journalist with a political agenda and his anomalous and mutable cadre of allies and enemies defined him as a cryptic character in the capital, where he never learned to drive and conducted business from a telephone-equipped table at the Jockey Club.
According to Mr. Dallek and other sources, Mr. Demetracopoulos told Lawrence F. Brien Jr., who was managing Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey presidential campaign in 1968, that the Greek junta had pumped $549,000 (about $3.7 million in today dollars) into Nixon coffers and that Richard Helms, the director of central intelligence, could confirm the transaction. Brien took the story to the president, but Johnson, according to what Brien told Demetracopoulos, refused to act on it, Mr. Dallek wrote. €œHe would neither ask Helms to investigate the report nor consider leaking it to the press, should it prove to be true.
Mr. Dallek concluded that President Johnson had three reasons: that he considered Mr. Demetracopoulos a €œtroublemaker to whom the State Department had originally hoped to deny asylum; that he was by then personally disinclined to help Humphrey; and that he did not want to further provoke Nixon, fearing, as he confided to the White House counsel without elaborating, that he might be prosecuted if Nixon became president.
The State Department exasperation with Mr. Demetracopoulos boiled over again in 1977 when he was blamed for derailing the Carter administration nomination of William E. Schaufele as ambassador to Greece. Mr. Schaufele had questioned the territorial status of Greek islands off the Turkish coast.
Also in 1977, an article in The New York Times, citing statements and records attributed to officials of the Central Intelligence Agency, cast doubt on Mr. Demetracopoulos insistence that he been an underground resistance fighter against the Nazis in Greece in World War II. It also raised doubts about his assertion that he had volunteered his services to foreign intelligence agencies.
To redeem his reputation, Mr. Demetracopoulos sued the C.I.A. In 1983, the agency concluded that nothing in its files substantiated the original allegations.
Elias Panayotis Demetracopoulos was born in Athens on Dec. 1, 1928. His father, Panayotis, was an archaeological guide at the Acropolis. His mother was the former Panayota Bokolas.
He married a former United States Information Service officer in 1953; they divorced a year later. He has no immediate survivors.
He attended the Athens School of Economics and Business (now the Athens University of Economics and Business) and in 1950 became the political editor of the morning newspaper I Kathimerini, a post he held until 1958.
Until 1967, he was a political and diplomatic editor for other Greek newspapers, a reporter for several magazines and a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance and The New York Herald Tribune.
When he moved to America, Mr. Demetracopoulos was a consultant for Brimberg & Company, a New York stockbroker, advising investors on foreign affairs. From 1979 until 1984 he also worked as a correspondent for the Greek newspapers Makedonia and Thessaloniki.
With doors closed to him as a journalist, he used his international and domestic connections to support himself as an information broker, Mr. Barron wrote in his forthcoming biography, tentatively titled The Greek Connection. He became a political intelligence gatherer, connecting friends from both parties with his Wall Street clients, he continued, but his primary focus remained the overthrow of the Greek dictatorship.
Mr. Barron wrote that Mr. Demetracopoulos was honored in 2008 by the Hellenic Republic a champion of freedom and democracy who had performed outstanding services to Greece. With Reuters
Actors Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck at the 2013 Oscars.
Despite the ugliness of the past year, Ben Affleck is the love of Jennifer Garner’s life, she tells Vanity Fair in its March issue. Garner, who has been a class act and quiet as the scandal swirled around her collapsed marriage, talked about keeping her focus, their children and how she feels about her ex. "He's the love of my life,” she said. “What am I going to do about that? He's the most brilliant person in any room, the most charismatic, the most generous. He's just a complicated guy" Garner, 43, “didn't marry the big fat movie star; I married him,” she said. "And I would go back and remake that decision." Promoting her latest film, “Miracles from Heaven,” she comes across as honest, grounded and very real. It was a day after their 10th anniversary in June, a marriage that has produced Violet, 10, Seraphina, 7, and Sam, 4, that Hollywood’s once golden couple announced they were splitting. A month later, it was the age-old story: reports that Affleck and the nanny, 28, were having an affair. He has denied it, and the nanny is no longer around. “We had been separated for months before I ever heard about the nanny,” she said. “She had nothing to do with our decision to divorce.” Since, Garner acknowledges she’s had trouble sleeping and their oldest, Violet, often bunks with her. And as the paparazzi went into a frenzy, she stayed mum. Some took that to mean she didn’t care. Rather, Garner said, she cared so much she needed to just stop being in the press constantly. “I took a silent oath with myself last summer,” she said. As of now, Garner has not dated. Getting kissed on set was the first time she had been kissed in eight months. And she likely won’t date until the divorce is final. Realizing that the dating game has changed, she said: “I want flowers; I don't want to text. What does that make me? What kind of dinosaur am I?” Given that they have three children and were part of each other’s lives for so long, Garner expects she and Affleck will always have a bond. “We still have to help each other get through this,” she said. “He’s still the only person who really knows the truth about things. And I’m still the only person that knows some of his truths.”
Nigeria-based Boko Haram is thought to have killed 20,000 people since 2009 [Reuters]
Cameroon's army has killed at least 92 members of the Boko Haram armed group and freed 850 villagers in a joint operation with Nigerian forces, Cameroon's government said.
The operation in the northeastern Nigerian village of Kumshe, close to the border with Cameroon, was conducted under the auspices of a multinational force fighting Boko Haram, the statement from Communications Minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary said on Friday.
"Two Cameroonian soldiers were killed [during the operation] by an accidental mine explosion. Five other soldiers were wounded," Bakary said, adding that the army captured weapons and ammunition and found a centre for production of homemade mines.
There was no immediate comment from Nigeria, or independent confirmation of the operation or toll.
Boko Haram seeks to implement Islamic law in northeastern Nigeria and has staged a campaign of suicide and other attacks in Cameroon, Chad and Niger over the past year, including killing as many as 1,000 in Cameroon.
In January, at least 86 people were killed in a series of attacks on a village in northeastern Nigeria by suspected Boko Haram fighters. According to witnesses, the armed fighters firebombed huts and opened fire on civilians in the village of Dalori.
Earlier this month, two suicide bombers killed at least 12 and injured 50 others in a suspected Boko Haram market attack in northern Cameroon.
The US military calls Boko Haram the most violent armed group in the world.
Some 20,000 people have been killed and about 2.3 million displaced since Boko Haram started its violent campaign in 2009.
Children have been particularly targeted by Boko Haram and have often been the victims of sexual abuse, forced marriage, abductions and brutal killings. Terrified and traumatised, many families are keeping their children away from school classes.
"A lot of parents in the northeast would not send their children to school because they'd be afraid of what would happen," Hafsat Maina Muhammed, executive director of the Choice for Peace Gender and Development NGO in Damaturu.
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