Or more appropriately, veil, but it's soccer Thursday here at the Propaganda Pre$$ Monitor.:
"14 dead in bombing in northeast Nigeria" by Adamu Adamu and Michelle Faul | Associated Press June 19, 2014
DAMATURU, Nigeria — Survivors of a bomb blast at an illegal World Cup viewing site in northeast Nigeria that killed at least 14 people said Wednesday the force of the explosion blew off limbs and knocked people senseless.
Unrelated to the attack, police said security forces arrested nearly 500 people, including a ‘‘terror kingpin,’’ in the southeast of the country.
At least 26 people were wounded in Tuesday night’s blast as soccer fans were viewing the Brazil-Mexico match in Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state, police said.
Ruined a great match.
‘‘The bomb just threw me, and I didn’t even know where I was,’’ survivor Babagana Mohammed said. He recovered consciousness in the hospital.
Another wounded victim, Musa Mohammed, said some people lost limbs in the blast. He said he had stopped by to buy airtime for his cellphone when a normal evening turned nighmarish.
‘‘I stopped at the viewing center to buy a recharge card and suddenly the blast went off,” he said. “It was just like a flash of light, and many people were killed. Some were amputated. . . . But, thank God, mine was a lesser injury.’’
Witnesses said a suicide bomber drove a tricycle taxi packed with explosives into the area. But Police Assistant Superintendent Nathan Cheghan said the explosion came from a car parked and abandoned on the road in front.
Cheghan said such viewing sites were banned in Yobe state two months ago because they have become a target of Boko Haram, an armed Islamist group that wants to turn Nigeria into an Islamic state.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but he blamed Boko Haram.
The government spokesman on the insurgency, Mike Omeri, said Wednesday that Boko Haram plans to attack crowded areas in Abuja, the capital in the center of the country, with petrol tankers loaded with improvised explosive devices. Omeri spoke at a daily news briefing. Two separate car bombs in April killed about 100 people in Abuja.
Security experts had warned that Islamist militants might attack crowds watching the World Cup in public places in Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda, as they did in 2010 in Uganda. The explosions in Kampala, Uganda, at two sites where people watched the 2010 World Cup final on TV killed 74 people. Al Shabab, a Somali insurgent group, set off those bombs.
See: "Al-CIA-Duh" Expanding Operations in East Africa
It caused quite an uproar at the time, but if it's not one thing it's another.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defense said it has detained ‘‘a terror kingpin in the list of wanted terrorists.’’
A statement Tuesday night said he was found among 486 suspects arrested while traveling at night in a suspicious convoy of 33 buses in southeast Enugu state.
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Notice anything missing (hint: kidnapped girls)?
Maybe they are in Kenya:
"Kenya’s president blames deadly raids on local groups" by Isma’il Kushkush and Dan Bilefsky | New York Times June 18, 2014
NAIROBI — Kenya’s president said Tuesday that lethal assaults over the past two days that left an estimated 63 people dead were the work of “local political networks,” and were not carried out by Al Shabab, a Somali extremist group that has claimed responsibility for the violence.
Really?
“The attack in Lamu was well planned, orchestrated, and politically motivated ethnic violence against a Kenyan community,” President Uhuru Kenyatta said, addressing the nation and referring to the county targeted by the violence. He did not provide evidence to support his assertion.
He's seen what has happened in Africa, and he doesn't want to be the next nation to be occupied.
“This, therefore, was not an Al Shabab terrorist attack. Evidence indicates local political networks were involved in the planning and execution of the heinous attacks,” he said. “This also played into the opportunist network of other criminal gangs.”
Kenyatta said police officers who had been unable to prevent the attacks had been suspended and would be immediately charged in court.
“We are all hurting. Many of us are angry,” he said, calling for the country to unite.
Some analysts questioned whether the attempt by Kenyatta to shift the blame from Al Shabab was a ploy to deflect attention from the government’s failure to protect civilians from the spate of violence. Others saw the president’s words as a reaction to mounting criticism by the main opposition party, which has forcefully rebuked the government for its apparent weakness in the face of attacks that many believe were orchestrated by the Islamic militant group based in neighboring Somalia.
Kwamchesti Makokha, a columnist for The Daily Nation, a Kenyan newspaper, was skeptical of the president’s statement.
“One has to give the president the benefit of the doubt, but there are huge inconsistencies in that narrative,” he said. “It would be very worrying if political issues would be allowed to spill into security matters. It does not make sense. He has more explaining to do.”
How does it feel to be an Amerikan?
Militants killed at least 15 people on Kenya’s coast overnight Monday, a day after they conducted a nighttime raid on the coast that left at least 48 dead, news services reported.
Al Shabab claimed responsibility for the two nights of slaughter, Reuters said. It quoted the group’s spokesman for military operations, Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, who told the news agency that it had raided villages near Mpeketoni on Monday night and had killed as many as 20 people, a majority of whom were members of the police.
“Our operations in Kenya will continue,” Reuters quoted him as saying.
Joseph Ole Lenku, the Cabinet secretary for the interior, said, “These attacks are unfortunate and the perpetrators must be held accountable.” He said 15 people had died in the Tuesday attack. He was speaking from Mpeketoni, Reuters said, where he was greeted by residents angered by the government’s inability to prevent the attacks.
The violence began Sunday evening as residents of Mpeketoni, a town near the tourist resort of Lamu Island, were watching the World Cup on television, officials said. After emerging from two vans, the militants targeted a police station and two hotels. The attackers took aside some of the men watching the matches at the Breeze View Hotel, and then shot and killed them in front of the women.
If this happened at all. That's the state of the relationship between my regional flag$hit paper and me these days. Sorry.
The gunmen went from house to house, seeking to determine whether the men they found were Muslim and spoke Somali, the Associated Press reported, citing witnesses. The men who did not provide satisfactory answers were killed, the AP reported.
The Kenyan military went into Somalia in 2011 as part of a drive to push back Al Shabab, but the group has since expanded its terrorist campaign inside Kenya. The attack Monday is likely to fuel an already growing debate about what to do with several thousand Kenyan troops deployed in Somalia.
Hmmm.
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Also see: Soccer Monday: Getting By Ghana
That sets you up for this:
"West Africa’s Ebola death toll rises to 337" Associated Press June 19, 2014
DAKAR, Senegal — An Ebola outbreak continues to spread in three West African countries, with more than 330 deaths reported, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.
Health officials have struggled to contain what is one of the deadliest recorded outbreaks of Ebola. Most of the cases and deaths have been in Guinea, where the outbreak is believed to have begun.
In an update published on its website Wednesday, the UN health agency said that more than 500 suspected or confirmed cases of the virus have been recorded. It said 337 reported deaths have been linked to the virus.
Daniel Bausch, director of the Emerging Infections Department at the US Naval Medical Research unit in Peru, said this appeared to be the largest number of cases ever recorded, but cautioned that not every Ebola case is captured, either in previous outbreaks or the current one.
‘‘I don’t think there’s any denying that this is a very large outbreak, and it’s unfortunately going to get larger for a while,’’ said Bausch, who is a doctor and professor at Tulane University and has traveled to West Africa to help with the response.
The figures released Wednesday appear to show a large uptick since the last update, published about a week earlier, when the agency reported about 240 deaths have been linked to the disease. But there is sometimes a significant lag in tallying cases, and the organization said the numbers are constantly in flux as tests come in.
‘‘The jump in cases is due to reclassification, retrospective investigation, and consolidation of cases,” Fadela Chaib, a spokeswoman for the UN health agency, wrote in an e-mail.
This is the first time Ebola has struck three countries at once. The disease causes horrible bleeding, and there is no cure.
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The only thing Africa is catching is dead bodies.
