When last weekend the leader of the Islamist group Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau, said Gwoza in Borno State had been declared an ‘Islamic Caliphate’, following its alleged capture, the military was quick to deny the claim.

There is no doubt that the outbreak of the Ebola disease, which started in Guinea , as a major health hazard, now has serious economic implications in the entire West African sub-region. The sectors most affected include aviation, export sub-sector, industries dominated by large scale buying and selling of goods, open markets for second-hand clothes and other places within the affected countries.

Last Sunday, this paper published the first part of the gambit the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, led by Professor Attahiru Jega, got itself into. And whereas the Commission would have been expected to attempt to address the concerns raised by the report, it chose to embark on a voyage of half-truths and deception in an advertorial explaining, rather vainly, ‘Why INEC is creating new Polling Units, PUs”.

At the end of a recent meeting in Kaduna, the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) issued a communiqué, which, among other things, contained an ultimatum to President Jonathan to secure the release of the abducted Chibok girls by the end of October 2014 or forfeit his 2015 re-election bid. Their logic is that by failing to secure the release of the girls, ‘Nigerians (read: the Northern Elders) would be left with the only conclusion that he had forfeited his right to ask for their mandate beyond 2015.’ Their diagnosis of the Boko Haram insurgency is, to say the least, bizarre.

THE second type of product defect is called design defect. It occurs when a product that meets the manufacturer’s own standards does cause an injury, and it is alleged by the plaintiff that the design or the manufacturer’s standards were inferior and should be judged defective.