KANO: Gunmen in northern Nigeria set fire to a staff residential building at a girls’ secondary school yesterday but the 195 students sleeping in their nearby dormitories were unharmed, police and a teacher said. The attack in Bauchi state came less than a week after Boko Haram Islamists kidnapped 129 teenage schoolgirls from the Chibok area of Borno state in the northeast. Forty-four of those girls have since escaped. Bauchi’s police spokesman Haruna Mohammed said they burnt “several buildings including a staff quarters of a girls’ secondary school, an eight-block police quarters, a Shariah court and the local government secretariat,” he said.
CAR on brink of genocide: Tutu
JOHANNESBURG: Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu warned yesterday that the Central African Republic was “on the brink of genocide”, as he urged warring sides to reconcile their differences and “re-learn to live together”. “Over the past 13 months, the nation’s seemingly incessant struggles for political power and resources have degenerated into anarchy, hatred and ethnic cleansing — the country stands on the brink of genocide; some would say it has already commenced,” Archbishop Emeri-tus Tutu said. In his message, Tutu called on people on all sides of the conflict — Christian, Muslim and Atheist — to “rekindle the spirit of tolerance”.
Scottish couple donate £3m
LONDON: A Scottish couple who won the lottery has donated at least £3m ($5m) of their winnings to the campaign for an independent Scotland, making them Britain’s biggest political donors, a newspaper reported yesterday. Colin Weir, a former cameraman, and his wife Chris, a former nurse, are from a seaside resort near the Scottish city of Glasgow and won £161,653,000 ($271.72m) in the Euromillions draw in 2011. The Sunday Times said its analysis had shown that the couple had given at least £3m to those campaigning for an independent Scotland ahead of a referendum on September 18. Opinion polls suggest Scotland will vote to reject independence but that the contest is tightening a little and supporters of a breakaway have made some ground in recent months.
Obamacare alert
NEW YORK: Americans with accounts on President Barack Obama’s health insurance enrollment website, HealthCare.gov, were advised that their passwords had been reset to guard against the “Heartbleed” bug, in a message posted on the site. A message on HealthCare.gov said users who visited the website would need to create a new password to access their accounts.
Agencies
