Nothing has been heard of President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua of Nigeria for 45 days after he left the country for medical treatment The president is missing. The executive chair is empty, the in-tray overflowing, and 150 million people are crying out for leadership. This is the crisis enveloping Nigeria, political rivals and activists say, as rumours swirl around the health of President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua, not seen in public for 45 days.
Africa's most populous country has allegedly become a rudderless ship despite a series of urgent issues, including the arrest of the Nigerian al-Qaida suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, charged with attempting to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day. It has been more than six weeks since Yar'Adua left the country to be treated for a heart condition, reportedly in Saudi Arabia. The 58-year-old devout Muslim took off without informing the legislature and did not transfer power to his deputy.
Excerpted
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/08/crisis-nigeria-president-missing
Shifting sands of Yemeni tribes strengthen support for al-Qaeda
January 9, 2010
It is a telling photograph: a group of men in a hotchpotch of military uniforms, carrying weapons as they trudge through the rugged desert mountains of southeastern Yemen, heading for an attack. The picture is dated October 14, 1963, and hangs on a wall of the military museum in Aden. It was taken shortly after the British ordered the tribes of Radfan to hand in their weapons. They refused, and instead started shooting and declared the start of a revolution that would end almost a century and a half of British rule in Aden.
Now, in those same villages, tribesmen are again on the move. Al-Qaeda is powerful in the central areas of Marib, Jouf and Abyan, as well as in Arhab on the outskirts of the capital, Sanaa. Ideology, which fuelled the young Marxist fighters of the 1960s, may lure village boys here from the rural hinterlands into the ranks of the Islamists, or to fight again for independence for the south.
The new ideology sweeping the Arab world is Islamism, and its armed representatives are already in the dirt-poor villages of central and eastern Yemen, plotting their own brand of revolutionary chaos. A young teacher from Abyan province, less than 50 miles from Aden, said that in some areas the police would no longer go out in uniform with weapons for fear of being killed.
Excerpted
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6981511.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797093
The religion of peace has police fearing for their lives, who'd have thunk?