‘Hundreds dead’ in Boko Haram village rampage

MAIDUGURI: Hundreds of people are feared dead in a suspected Boko Haram attack on four villages in northeast Nigeria, in the latest upsurge in violence claiming increasing numbers of civilian lives.

Some community leaders put the death toll from the Tuesday attacks in the Gwoza district of Borno state as high as 400 to 500, although there was no independent verification because of poor communications in the remote area.

If confirmed, the attacks in the villages of Goshe, Attagara, Agapalwa and Aganjara would be among the deadliest in the five-year insurgency and top the more than 300 who were killed on May 5 in nearby Gamboru Ngala.

"The killings are massive but nobody can give a toll for now because nobody has been able to go to that place because the insurgents are still there. They have taken over the whole area," lawmaker Peter Biye told.

"There are bodies littered over the whole area and people have fled," added Biye, who represents Gwoza in Nigeria´s lower chamber of parliament, the House of Representatives.

Boko Haram´s bloody reign of terror in northeast Nigeria is forcing 800 people to flee from their homes every day and has claimed more than 3,000 lives in the past year, the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) said.

Another 45 people were killed when suspected Boko Haram gunmen pretending to be itinerant preachers opened fire on a crowd in the village of Barderi near the Borno state capital, Maiduguri, on Wednesday evening.

One survivor, Mallam Bunu, said: "They... lied to us that they had come to preach to us and when almost all the villagers had gathered, another set of insurgents emerged from nowhere and opened fire on the congregation before we all scampered for safety."

On Thursday four people were killed near the home of a state governor in northeast Nigeria when a pick-up truck loaded with grain bags exploded, a government source told.

The blast happened near the private residence of Gombe state governor Ibrahim Dankwambo in the upscale Government Reserve area of the state capital.

Gombe state borders Borno, Yobe and Adamawa, which have been at the centre of the violence.

A separate attack was reported on Thursday in the town of Madagali, just 25 kilometres (15 miles) by road from Gwoza in Adamawa state.

Gunmen razed a Roman Catholic church and torched a local government office after firing at troops manning a nearby checkpoint, said the chairman of the local government in the town, Maina Ularamu.

No deaths had been confirmed, he added, although one resident reported that two civilians were killed in the crossfire.

No one to bury the dead
Reports from Gwoza said the insurgents were stealing livestock and food and burning property with impunity, despite a year-long state of emergency in the restive region.

"Hundreds of dead bodies are lying there... because there is nobody that will bury them," said one community leader in Attagara, who requested anonymity.

He said the attackers on Tuesday only spared women and that young boys were "snatched from the backs of their mothers and killed".

Men, women and children fled the villages but gunmen on motorcycles tracked them down, shooting as they ran, he added.

Gwoza shares a border with Cameroon and is surrounded by mountains and the Sambisa forest, a known Boko Haram stronghold and the focus for a Nigerian military search for more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped on April 14.

Many people fled across the border as soldiers were deployed to fight the heavily armed militants, who hoisted their black flag over at least seven villages, Biye said on Wednesday.

The community leader described the situation as a grave "humanitarian crisis", while others called for relief agencies to be allowed in to enable the dead to be buried.

Another elder, Zakari Habu, said women and the elderly were in desperate need of food, water, medication and shelter.

Nigeria´s National Emergency Relief Agency (NEMA) has previously said the country faces huge pressures in dealing with internally displaced people from Boko Haram attacks.

The IDMC, run by the Norwegian Refugee Council, added that 3.3 million Nigerians have been driven from their homes by the insurgency and other violence.

Nawaz approves end of hundreds of SROs

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has approved withdrawal of hundreds of concessions given through SROs to net Rs 230-240 billion in the national kitty in the new budget.

“Yes the PM has approved 90 to 95 percent of proposals finalised by Finance Ministry and FBR during the budget-making process on the subject of withdrawal of SROs and exemptions through the coming Finance Bill, 2014-15 on Friday evening,” official sources who participated in high-level meeting confided to The News here on Friday night.

The PM, according to these sources, has directed the authorities to protect the poor and middle classes from the increasing tax burden and to ensure that the prices of essential items do not go up.

On the issue of surrendering the powers of SROs to Parliament, the sources said that it is up to the government to take a decision on this subject. “The FBR has shown its willingness to surrender this power to Parliament,” added the sources.

There are certain free trade agreements, preferential trade agreements and avoidance of double taxation agreements with other countries so these SROs would be protected. The government has decided to withdraw those SROs which are individual or company-specific in their nature. In case of huge involvement of tax revenues, the FBR will bring those sectors into normal tariff regime after withdrawal of SROs.

“We have committed to the IMF to withdraw SROs and abolish tax exemptions in the next three years so in the upcoming budget only first phase will be made part of the Finance Bill,” added the official.

Philly skyscraper-sized Tetris game wows hundreds

PHILADELPHIA: Hundreds of Tetris fans had a little fun Saturday with a big version of the classic video game.

The Philadelphia skyscraper-sized version created a spectacle against the night sky that organizers hoped inspired onlookers and players to think about the possibilities of technology.

The 29-story Cira Centre, which has hundreds of LED lights embedded in its glass facade, normally displays colorful geometric patterns at night. On Saturday, images of supersized shapes "fell" on two sides of the mirrored tower as competitors used joysticks to maneuver them into place.

It wasn't the first time Tetris has been played on a building. But the 100,000-square-foot "screen" - which includes the north and south faces of the structure - could be a record.

City resident Sam Robinson, 30, said he signed up on a whim for the lottery to play because he figured "it would be cool to play the world's largest game of Tetris."

"It has been probably 15 years since I played Tetris last on a Game Boy, and it's much different playing on the side of building that's a half-mile away," he said. "Everything's happening so quick."

The spectacle kicked off a citywide series of events called Philly Tech Week. It also celebrated the upcoming 30th anniversary of Tetris, a game revered as the epitome of elegance and simplicity, said Frank Lee, an associate professor of digital media at Drexel University.

Lee, a game designer who oversaw creation of the giant display, said putting it on an office building was like making a huge virtual campfire.

"This project began as a personal love letter to the games that I loved when I was a child - Pong last year, Tetris this year. But it ended up as a way of uniting the city of Philadelphia," Lee told the crowd.

Lee already holds the Guinness World Record for the world's largest architectural video game display for playing Pong on one side of the Cira Centre last year. Pong, the granddaddy of all video games, is an electronic version of paddleball developed by Atari in 1972.

Tetris, created by Russian computer programmer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984, challenges players to rotate and arrange falling shapes into complete rows.

It became a global phenomenon in the late 1980s after game designer Henk Rogers, who had seen Tetris at a trade show in Las Vegas, acquired the rights and struck a deal to put it on Nintendo's original Game Boy.

Rogers, who was among the players on Saturday in Philadelphia, said he can't believe the longevity of Tetris, which decades later continues to mesmerize players on more than 30 platforms.

"If a game lasts a year, that's amazing," said Rogers, now managing director of The Tetris Co. "They usually go out of style very quickly."

Rogers said several new Tetris products and initiatives are planned for release around its June 6 anniversary. He declined to discuss details.

Hundreds of millions with tropical diseases lack treatment

PARIS: At least 1.4 billion people worldwide require treatment for a group of "neglected" tropical diseases and almost two-thirds are going without adequate medical care, eradication campaigners said on Wednesday.

Ailments including intestinal worms, elephantiasis and river blindness-lumped together as "neglected tropical diseases" (NTDs)-mostly affect poor people living in remote rural areas, slums or conflict zones.

A new report from the World Health Organisation, released in Paris on Wednesday and supported by billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, found that 700 million people received some form of treatment for NTDs in 2012.

But many did not complete a full course of drugs, while hundreds of millions received nothing at all.

"We still need diagnostics and we still need drugs," Gates said at the launch of the WHO progress report dubbed "Uniting to Combat NTDs".

The list of NTDs also includes Guinea worm, blinding trachoma, bilharzia, leprosy, Chagas disease and visceral leishmaniasis (black fever).

The diseases are carried by parasites and bacteria that tend to spread in dirty, cramped living conditions with polluted water and poor sanitation.

They "shackle more than a billion people of the world and most of them are women and children," said WHO chief Margaret Chan.

Many of the diseases are treatable and avoidable, yet they kill, impair and disable millions every year.

More than 800 million children live in areas where worms are "intensively transmitted" and are assumed to be infected. That has an impact on their nutrition, education and general health.

"Funding shortfalls and constrained human capacity in many endemic countries continue to limit the scale-up of drug delivery," the report said.

The report said progress was gradually being made, with the pharmaceutical industry donating nearly 1.35 billion doses of treatments last year.

The World Bank Group will commit $120 million (87 million euros) for NTD treatment in low-income African countries, it said in a statement, while a group of donors announced on Wednesday they would give a similar amount to combat intestinal worms in poor communities.