Thousands flee Boko Haram

Yola - Dauda Bello came face-to-face with Boko Haram militants but managed to escape their hail of bullets, fleeing to safety after a marathon drive on a brutal mountain road.

"It was terrible... [Boko Haram] was firing in every direction," he told AFP in Yola, the capital of northeast Nigeria's Adamawa state, where he fled from the town of Mubi in late October.

Bello is just one of more than 1.5 million Nigerians forced from their homes by the raging Islamist insurgency, which has left 13 000 dead since 2009 and raised fears of a humanitarian crisis.

18 Critical Things Former President Obasanjo Said About President Jonathan In His New Book

"In the area of corruption, we have been going back steadily from the inception of Yar’Adua’s administration when the ‘hunter’ became the ‘hunted’," Obasanjo states. "Under Jonathan we seem to have gone from frying pan to fire. If in the past corruption was in the corridors of power, it would seem now to be in the sitting room, dining room and bedroom of power."

 his scathing new autobiography, My Watch, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo made a series of critical assertions against current President Goodluck Jonathan.

CIA chief defends agency's record

Washington - CIA Director John Brennan defended his agency on Thursday from accusations in a Senate report that it used inhumane interrogation techniques against terrorist suspects with no security benefits to the US.

Brennan opened a rare news conference by recounting the horrors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, his agency's determination to prevent another such assault and the fact that CIA officers were the first to fight and early to die in the Afghanistan war.

Nigerian girl, 13, found wearing explosives vest

Kano - Nigerian police arrested a 13-year-old girl wearing an explosives-packed vest in the northern city of Kano hours after an attack by two female suicide bombers, a security source and a witness said on Thursday.

The girl turned up at a clinic on the outskirts of Kano hours after a double bombing at a market in the city.

Goodluck Jonathan to contest Nigeria election

Abuja - Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan won party primaries on Thursday while the opposition coalition continued voting to choose a challenger for February presidential elections in Africa's most populous nation.

The 14 February vote is expected to be the most closely contested since decades of military rule ended in 1999 in the continent's biggest oil producer.

Jonathan was the sole candidate at the governing party primaries though his election early on Thursday flouted an unwritten party rule that the presidency should rotate between a Christian southerner, like himself, and a northern Muslim.