India Marks One Year of Being Polio-Free

New Delhi - Today marks the one-year anniversary of the last known case of polio in India, officials proudly but cautiously announced. This leaves the countries of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria as the only ones with major cases of polio.

Health advocates, who hoped the disease would be destroyed by the year 2000, feel elated about the news, though they are still cautious. Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad warned that India needed to push forward with its vaccination campaign to ensure the elimination of any residual virus.

"We are excited and hopeful. At the same time, vigilant and alert," he said in a statement.

Through Nata Menabde, the head of India's World Health Organization, the organization stated "We are all subject to relaxing a bit when we have achieved some goal but we simply cannot allow that to happen with polio. The important point is that while India may have stopped transmission of wild polio virus, it does not prevent such a virus from being re-imported or in fact the virus could be around and it has just not been detected.”

Overall however the 2.4-billion dollar plan has proven to be a large success. In 2010 there were 42 cases throughout the country, down from 742 in 2009. In 2011 there was only one case of the disease, a two-year-old girl named Ruksana Khatun on January 13^th of last year.

Although it's been a year, India won't be declared certified as polio free for about three years due to the possibility it may be transferred through human waste.

Nigerian President Admits Islamists Have Secret Backers in Government

By Monica Mark

The Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan, has confirmed for the first time that the Islamist group Boko Haram has secret backers among government and security officials.

Jonathan said Boko Haram presents Nigeria's greatest security challenge since the 1967 Biafra civil war, when a three-year campaign by the Igbo people to secede from the country's 150 other tribes left a million dead.

The organisation, whose name means "non-Islamic education is sacrilege", is fighting to impose a strict interpretation of sharia law across Africa's most populous country. A simmering low-level insurgency erupted on Christmas Day with four co-ordinated attacks that killed at least 30 people as they poured out of church services. Since then, a spree of violence at churches has claimed dozens of lives, prompting a state of emergency in the group's northern homebase states and threatening to ignite a sectarian conflict in a country split evenly between Muslims and Christians.

"During the civil war we knew and we could even predict where the enemy was coming from. But the challenge we have today is more complicated," Jonathan said.

Now, Boko Haram backers and sympathisers are "in the executive arm of the government; some of them are in the parliamentary/legislative arm of the government, while some are even in the legislative arm. Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security agencies," he said at a three-day literary service attended by authors Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

Achebe and Soyinka, both giants of the Nigerian literary scene, urged the population to refrain from retaliatory attacks amid reports of Christians fleeing the north, where Muslims are a majority, and vice-versa.
But less than a day later, they took to the streets along with tens of thousands of ordinary citizens to protest at the end to fuel subsidies in the oil-rich state – highlighting the other key challenge faced by state officials.
As a labour union strike and huge protests paralysed much of the country, analysts said Jonathan's admission was worrying given the size of the security budget, which this year was $5.7bn.

"The security angle explains why the group are often one step ahead of the government. It is also one of the reasons why members of the group have been floating around freely. The population are afraid to step forward as they think their security can't be guaranteed by security officials," said Shehu Sani, who heads the Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria and maintains close contact with the group.

In December, the US Congress said the group had morphed from homegrown criminals into terrorists capable of forging international links. Members of the group claim to have travelled to Somalia to share techniques and funding with al-Shabaab militants.

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Nigerian Comedia Gets the Biggest Laugh of All

Nigeria – Babtunde Omidina, 53, was arrested by Nigeria's National Drug Law Enforcement Agency while attempting to board a plane from Lagos to Paris. He was stopped after what seemed like little bags of powder appeared in his stomach.

After three weeks and 18 bathroom trips later agents have found nothing but porridge.

“If nothing incriminating is found on him, he will be going home a free man,” Bamidele Aturu, Ouidina's lawyer told Reuters.