Nigerian troops rescue 195 hostages from Boko Haram: army

 Nigerian troops have rescued 195 Boko Haram hostages and killed a number of "terrorists" in raids on villages across the restive northeast, the army said Thursday.

Troops descended on towns suspected to be controlled by the Islamist group in the state of Borno and "rescued 195 persons held hostage," it said in a statement.

"Quite a number of Boko Haram terrorists were killed," it added, while a spokesman also listed a range of equipment and livestock seized.

Photos released by the army show a modest camp with shelters made of logs and thatched grass and shacks constructed with rusted corrugated steel.

Seized equipment included two trucks, 180 motorcycles, 750 bicycles and a generator. The militants have recently been using bicycles to attack villages in the absence of better vehicles.

Army spokesman Colonel Sani Usman added they also recovered 300 cows, 200 sheep and 130 goats rustled by the insurgents.

The offensive follows a major assault against a key Boko Haram base in Nigeria by the Cameroonian army, who seized heavy machine-guns, rocket-launchers, AK-47s, grenades and training rifles.

In Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, the group has killed at least 17,000 people and made more than 2.6 million others homeless since their six-year campaign for an independent Islamic state began.

Boko Haram's continued attacks in the region come despite the government's insistence it has "technically" defeated the Islamic State group affiliate.

source: http://news.yahoo.com

Nigeria: Corruption - Buhari Vows Not to Spare Anyone

President Muhammadu Buhari has vowed that he will leave no stone unturned in his efforts to rid the country of corruption.

Speaking at the Aso Rock Presidential Villa in Abuja on Thursday at a reception for members of the Diplomatic Corps, Buhari assured that his administration would fight corruption within the ambit of the law.

Buhari's deputy, Yemi Osinbajo, had recently disclosed that the president was under intense pressure from the elite to "cool down" on the anti-corruption war.

But Buhari explained that because pervasive corruption would make it impossible to build a stable and prosperous Nigeria, it had become necessary for his government to wage a relentless war against "the cancer of corruption".

"We are resolved to build a stable and prosperous Nigeria; a country that is inclusive of all her diverse peoples and a country that is at ease with itself. Building such a country will not be possible where corruption is pervasive. Mindful of this, it has become necessary to wage a relentless war against the cancer of corruption. So long as corruption holds center stage in the affairs of Nigeria, the country will continue to suffer incalculable harm.

"You are witnesses to the preliminary findings that have emerged in the past few weeks from our investigations into corrupt practices in different sectors of Nigeria's Public Service. I will leave no stone unturned in the efforts to rid Nigeria of corruption. I must however, add that in doing this, we shall operate within the ambit of the law.

"In a similar fight in the past, and armed with the might of military muscle, I led a government that required persons presumed to be corrupt to prove their innocence. Today, as committed democrats, and in a culture of deepening democracy, we respect the law that presumes all persons innocent until they are proven to be guilty.

"Nigeria has no choice, nor can the country afford to be an island in itself. Against this backdrop therefore, since my assumption of office, I have demonstrated my commitment to interact with my colleagues in Nigeria's neighbours and beyond. This is consistent with the pledge that I made at my inauguration to steer the affairs of the country in a manner that will allow us to play the role that is expected of us.

"It is for this reason, that the Foreign Policy vision which we are currently pursuing is anchored on meaningful engagement with our neighbors, the African continent and the world at large", Buhari stated.

The president also said that unlike before he assumed office when Boko Haram insurgents were fully in control of 14 local governments in the northeast; they held no territory in the country today.

According to him, the insurgents are currently hiding in Sambisa forest in Borno State and occasionally undertake cowardly attacks on innocent citizens in soft targets.

source:allafrica.com

Samuel Eto'o stops explosive 'revenge porn' book written by former mistress being sold in France

Former Chelsea football star Samuel Eto’o has managed to stop an explosive kiss and tell ‘Revenge Porn’ book written by his former mistress being sold in France.
The 34-year-old married father of four is furious that Nathalie Koah, 24, has decided to go public about their passionate seven year affair.

She has insisted that she simply want to use ‘Revenge Porn – Football, sex, money: the testimony of Samuel Eto’o’s ex’ to warn others off sleeping with celebrities.
Ms Koah said she felt ‘humiliated and betrayed’ when the footballer allegedly leaked nude pictures of her to the media.

The book, which was due to go on sale today, claims the affair took place between 2007 and 2014, when Eto’o was at the height of his career with Chelsea, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Inter Milan.

But lawyers for the former Cameroon international argued successfully that the book contravened France’s strict privacy laws.
Judges banned the book on Thursday, although lawyers for the publishers have now lodged an appeal.
Olivier Pardo, for the Paris-based ‘Editions du Moment’, told French news agency AFP: "I’m extremely shocked and flabbergasted by this ‘totally unjustified’ decision."
Mr Pardo added: "The book not only lays bare the life of Mr. Eto’o but also that of Nathalie Koah."

Ms Koah, who is from Cameroon, insists Eto’o published the intimate photos of her on the Internet as revenge when they broke up.
She said:

"I won’t let myself be knocked down. I’m a victim in this story. I’m not being allowed to tell the truth as it is."

In turn, Eto’o has accused her of ‘fraud and breach of trust’.

Eto'o, who is now playing for Turkish club Antalyaspor, married his childhood sweetheart Georgette in 2007, and the couple now have four children.

source:lindaikejisblog

NIGERIA POP STAR Wizkid featured on Vogue as Nigeria’s Best-Dressed pop-star

International Fashion and Lifestyle magazine, Vogue.com, did a feature on Wizkid today where they described him as Nigeria's Best Dressed and biggest Pop star. In an interview with the magazine, Wizkid says his style Icon is Pharell...


"I love Pharrell’s style. It inspires me. It’s not about the brands, you know, it’s how you put them together. Everything he rocks, he makes it look so good"he said

Excerpts from the Vogue.com Feature/Interview with Alex Frank

Do you wear a lot of traditional Nigerian clothes?

Wizkid: When I’m back home, all I wear is African fabric. All I really rock is the traditional stuff. That’s the in thing right now. That’s really coming back. Back in the day, our parents used to wear it every day, and they still do, but now it’s cool for wee young ones to wear it. It’s amazing. We’re doing it differently. We’re having it a little bit more fitted. We have styles on it, embroideries and stuff, by local people, made by hand, designed on it.

How would you describe Lagos style?

Wizkid: Lagos style is fresh and different. Even with the tailors, they get very innovative with their stuff, with the cuts. When my parents used to make the traditional wares, it was a little bit baggy. But now the tailors are able to infuse the European style, making it slim-fit. Lagos style is different, man. Innovative.

And tailors are everything in Nigeria.
One hundred percent. The clothes I make back home are proper—properly fitted. Proper, proper. Tailors are A1 back home.

What’s your process when you get something made for you?

Wizkid: I design everything myself, and I get them to make it. I do a little sketch; sometimes I just sit down with a tailor and describe what I want. Sometimes we go back and forth, like, for days, trying to get it right. Sometimes it’ll take a day to make it, sometimes three, four days. I have a lot of tailors. If I want something made in 12 hours, it will be made in 12 hours.

What kind of clothes did you love growing up?

Wizkid: Growing up in Lagos, I wasn’t fortunate enough to get the fresh stuff when it was new. There was this place we used to go to find stuff that had been shipped from America, like secondhand clothes. I used to rock a lot of Reebok, just a lot of sporty stuff.

Now you can get the expensive shit.

Wizkid: We thank God!

I notice that you’re almost never seen without a pair of sunglasses. How many do you own?

Wizkid: Oh, wow. That’s hard for me. I buy sunglasses every time I travel, just pick up a pair at the airport. Ray-Bans are my favorite. They’re ready to go. And I lose them every time. My friends take them away from me, but I love it.

Did I see on Instagram that you met Christian Louboutin?

Wizkid: Yeah! And I have a lot of his shoes. I rock everything from high-end fashion to skateboard stuff. We were just at the store getting some shoes, and he walked in. And I was like, That’s the guy! Like, Oh, you owe me some checks, boss.

What do you like about his shoes?

Wizkid: The shoes are comfortable and fashionable. I can rock them for my shows or just chilling.

I notice you love a bright, colorful shoe.
Well, I’m actually doing white right now. But I like colorful shoes because most of the time I wear black, so I want it to be where my shoes are popping. I’m wearing Harrods shoes right now.
Everything is super-clean with you.
Fresh, fresh, fresh. That’s how I like to keep it. It’s hard for me to wear the same thing twice.

You’re also not afraid to wear really skinny jeans.

Wizkid: No, I’m not afraid to wear skinny jeans! Yeah, I don’t care, man. I rock skinny jeans!

What’s your closet situation like?
 Wizkid: It’s mad. I have my little cousins in my house all the time taking my stuff.

Would you ever do your own clothing line?

Wizkid: I’m hoping to release a clothing line after my EP, planned for April. It’s going to be tracksuits, T-shirts, hats, and African attire as well. I’ll have a special line for traditional [clothes] with my tailors. Taking Africa to the world.

It’s important to you to do this for Africa.
Yeah, it’s a lot of responsibility. Even for my T-shirts, I’m having the real African prints used as the design on them. I’m getting them locally made in the villages in Nigeria. The proper, proper materials.

Ojuelegba is the name of a neighborhood, right? Why is it important to you to shout out where you’re from?
 Wizkid: Ojuelegba is where I grew up. It’s crazy, rough, tough. That’s what built me into what I am today. The streets of Lagos are definitely different from anywhere else in the world. Making it out of there is just madness. You have to experience it. You have kids on the street hawking, just the hustle and bustle. If you stay in the car and drive past Ojuelegba, you will feel the vibe and you will feel the hustle. It’s a very, very, very, very important place to me, because it’s where one of the studios I started recording is [located]. I was there every day of my life for like three, four, five years.

Where do you live now? Are you clubbing? Is Lagos the place to be?

Wizkid: I live in Lekki now. There are new clubs popping up every day. We go to places like Escape, Sip, and it’s madness. December is the craziest time to be in Lagos. I just left there, so I’m pretty exhausted from going hard. Africa is the next thing right now. Talking fashion, music, anything—Africa is on top of all that.

source:lindaikejisblog.com

Kanye West shares cute pic of his daughter...calls her his heart!

Singer Tyreses doesn't believe in celibacy

The 37 year old singer and actor says that he can’t marry a woman until he knows what he's getting in the bedroom. He revealed this on "The Doctors" recently when the subject of waiting for marriage before sex came up.

Tyrese slammed the ideology and claims it just can’t work in a society of high divorce rates:

“It’s enough people getting married and filing for divorce. There’s enough people out here saying, ‘I’m a born again virgin. I’ve had sex before, but I’m just going to hold back.”

“I don’t know, I’m still trying to figure it out. I’m not going to have sex, I’m not going to touch you because it’s biblical.

“However, I would say, I’m not willing to potentially marry bad sex. If I have one car to test drive, you gotta jump in and do a couple turns. Put in reverse, back up. I’m not marrying bad sex!”

“I believe that God’s correction is for your protection. He’s not saying don’t have s*x so he can hold something from you. There are STDs out there. And think about it. If you’re a woman, would you give a man a key to your apartment on the first date?

source: lindaikejisblog.com 

TECHNOLOGY: Autonomous Vehicles Could Drive Car Insurance Companies Out Of Business

When autonomous vehicles rule the roads, they will eliminate the estimated 90 percent of traffic accidents caused by human error, which could save 30,000 lives per year and, according to an advisor to car insurance companies, wipe out car insurance companies.

“Cars are not going to crash nearly as frequently, and they’re not going to crash as severely as we’ve seen in the past, so you could say it could be the demise of the car insurance industry,” said Lawrence Burns, a retired GM executive and professor who advises corporations, including Allstate and Google, on mobility issues.

A study last year found driverless cars are more likely than human-operated vehicles to be in accidents, but the accidents documented in the study were all the fault of the human drivers of other cars. None of the driverless cars caused an accident. Often, the driverless cars were struck because they were adhering to traffic laws, Burns said, like making sure an intersection is clear before proceeding when a light turns green, only to get rear-ended.

Those human-error accidents should also disappear as the system goes driverless.

“There will be liability,” Burns said Wednesday at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, “but most traffic safety issues will be resolved when we eliminate 90 percent of the crashes.”

Burns wouldn’t reveal Allstate’s plans to survive this transformation—”I do advise Allstate. I can’t talk specifically about what they’re doing. But because I’ve studied the insurance industry more broadly I can tell you the opportunities and the risks that they see.”

Among the opportunities—connectivity allows insurance companies to gather specific data about individual drivers, freeing them from basing rates and coverage on categories and averages.

“A connected vehicle allows an insurance company to really look at you individually in terms of your actual driving and your real risk and real time situational awareness, so they can innovate a lot of products and a lot of pricing strategies aimed at trying to keep you out of harm’s way, and almost pivot from selling insurance to selling assurance.

“So the goal isn’t to financially reward you when you get injured in a car crash. The goal is to not have you get in a car crash.”

But if a driverless transportation system is fully realized, individual auto insurance itself makes little sense. To survive in that new world, car insurance companies would have to reinvent themselves.

Car insurers have always provided consumer coverage in the event of accidents caused by human error. With driverless vehicles, auto insurers might shift the core of their business model, focusing mainly on insuring car manufacturers from liabilities from technical failure of their AVs, as opposed to protecting private customers from risks associated with human error in accidents. This change could transform the insurance industry from its current focus on millions of private consumers to one that involves a few OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] and infrastructure operators, similar to insurance for cruise lines and shipping companies.

Any liability in a driverless system is likely to trace back to the manufacturer, leading some analysts to worry that a shift of liability to manufacturers could discourage manufacturing.

Liability law itself might have to evolve “so that lawsuit concerns do not drive manufacturers and their suppliers out of business,” according to the Insurance Information Institute.

“RAND has suggested some kind of no-fault auto insurance system. Others foresee something akin to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, a no-fault compensation program for vaccine recipients who suffer a serious adverse reaction when vaccinated. The legislation was passed in 1986 in response to the threat that life-saving vaccines might become scarce or even unavailable if manufacturers, overwhelmed by claims of injury, scaled back or terminated production.”

On the whole, liability coverage should cost less—perhaps 10 percent what it does now,according to Jonathan Walker of the Rocky Mountain Institute. That means less cash flow for car insurance overall, and likely casualties among its providers.

Before economists, scientists and policy experts convened by the Energy Policy Institute of Chicago, Burns suggested which would survive:

“I think the companies with really strong brand positioning, if they get out in front of this and use the big data and analytics and real time situational awareness, they’ll do just fine to create new value,” he said, “but those who get behind could be in trouble.”

Burns cautioned that autonomous vehicles aren’t perfect—accidents will happen:

“There will be crashes. There will be people injured and killed in these vehicles,” he said. “We’re going to have to hang in there and be ready for these kinds of things.”

But few would quibble with a 90 percent reduction in accidents. For every American killed in an accident, another eight are hospitalized, accordion to the McKinsey report, and another 100 are treated and released from emergency rooms:

“The overall annual cost of roadway crashes to the US economy was $212 billion in 2012. Taking that year as an example, advanced ADAS [advanced driver assistance systems] and AVs reducing accidents by up to 90 percent would have potentially saved about $190 billion.”

They can also retire Mothers Against Drunk, because as the Rocky Mountain Institute has pointed out, robots don’t drink and drive.

SOURCE:FORBES.COM

Idris Elba’s New Action Flick, “Bastille Day” [Video]

source:bossip

TRUMP: I'd 'send cease-and-desist letters to China and Mexico'

Donald Trump on Thursday made voters a promise: If he's elected, he'll keep sending cease-and-desist letters. But he'll address them instead to China and Mexico.

Trump, the Republican presidential frontrunner, was asked during a Thursday CNN town-hall event whether he would send cease-and-desist letters to China and Mexico, two major US trade partners that Trump asserts are "ripping off" the US.

"Yeah, maybe to China, to stop ripping us off. I'd be sending them to other countries to stop ripping us off. I'd send them to Mexico."

"And when I say cease-and-desist orders, maybe it'd be equivalent. Maybe I'll do it with my mouth."

Cooper's comments came days after Trump sent Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-Texas) campaign a cease-and-desist letter. The letter threatened a lawsuit if the campaign did not take down a television ad in South Carolina showing a clip from a 1999 Trump interview with Tim Russert. 

Earlier this week, Cruz challenged Trump to file the lawsuit, saying he may take the case himself.

"Even in the annals of frivolous lawsuits, this takes the cake," Cruz said. "So Donald, I would encourage you — if you want to file a lawsuit challenging this ad, claiming it is defamation, file the lawsuit. It is a remarkable contention that an ad that plays video of Donald Trump speaking on national television is somehow defamation."

source:businessinsider

Young Thug Reads His Lyrics As Clearly As He Can For The Confused [Video]

See video after the cut

source: bossip.com