Hurricane Sandy damage may exceed $20bn

A man on rescue operation                         (c) mail.com

 Hurricane Sandy’s economic toll is poised to exceed $20 billion after the biggest Atlantic storm slammed into the Eastern U.S., damaging homes and offices and flooding subways in America’s most populated city.
The total would include insured losses of about $7 billion to $8 billion, said Charles Watson, research and development director at Kinetic Analysis Corp., a hazard-research company in Silver Spring, Maryland. Much of the remaining tab will be picked up by cities and states to repair infrastructure, such as New York City’s subways and tunnels, he said.
“I think it is disproportionate going into the public sector side,” Watson said by telephone. The real extent of the damage won’t be known until the flood recedes and workers can inspect subway and utility tunnels.

Wave crash against a previously damaged pier  (c) dailymail.co.uk

Sandy, spanning 900 miles, slammed into southern New Jersey at about 8 p.m. New York time and brought a record storm surge of 13.88 feet (4.2 meters) into Manhattan’s Battery Park. U.S. airlines have grounded about 12,500 flights, stranding travelers, and U.S. stock trading is closed again today in the first back-to-back shutdown for weather since 1888.

The real extent of the damage won’t be known until the flood recedes and workers can inspect subway and utility tunnels

Record tides from the storm combined with hours of pounding wind and rain to flood electrical substations and shut down New York’s financial district. Consolidated Edison Inc., the city’s utility, killed power last night to parts of downtown Manhattan, including Wall Street, and Brooklyn, as the storm surge, boosted by high tide, sent saltwater pouring into its underground power network.

Science is the key to growth

Mitt Romney said in all three presidential debates that we need to expand the economy. But he left out a critical ingredient: investments in science and technology.
Scientific knowledge and new technologies are the building blocks for long-term economic growth — “the key to a 21st-century economy,” as President Obama said in the final debate.
So it is astonishing that Mr. Romney talks about economic growth while planning deep cuts in investment in science, technology and education. They are among the discretionary items for which spending could be cut 22 percent or more under the Republican budget plan, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The private sector can’t do it alone. We rely on companies to translate scientific discoveries into products. But federal investment in research and development, especially basic research, is critical to their success. Just look at Google, which was started by two graduate students working on a project supported by the National Science Foundation and today employs 54,000 people.

According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the plan, which Mr. Romney has endorsed, could cut overall nondefense science, engineering, biomedical and technology research by a quarter over the next decade, and energy research by two-thirds.
Mr. Romney seems to have lost sight of the critical role of research investments not only in developing new medicines and cleaner energy sources but also in creating higher-skilled jobs.

Research conducted at universities and national labs underpins the new innovations that drive economic growth

The private sector can’t do it alone. We rely on companies to translate scientific discoveries into products. But federal investment in research and development, especially basic research, is critical to their success. Just look at Google, which was started by two graduate students working on a project supported by the National Science Foundation and today employs 54,000 people.

If the United States is to remain strong and prosperous and a land of rewarding jobs, we need to understand this basic investment principle in America’s future: no science, no growth.

Richard K. Templeton, chief executive of Texas Instruments, put it this way in 2009: “Research conducted at universities and national labs underpins the new innovations that drive economic growth.”

Somali woman stoned to death for adultery

When Jihadists wage their war, it is often women that suffer most.  Some 5,000 women die in honor killings every year, which Islamic extremists declare imperative.
Last Thursday in Somalia, a young woman was stoned to death after being convicted of engaging in out-of-marriage sex.
Residents of Jamama town, 425km south of Mogadishu in Lower Juba region, said that militants loyal to Al-Shabaab carried out the stoning at the town’s main square in late afternoon.
“Many residents were called to attend the execution of the punishment,” a resident who requested anonymity for own safety told Kulmiye, an independent broadcaster in Mogadishu.

“This type of punishments that are compatible with Sharia will be administered,” said the official

He added that Al-Shabaab officials in the town witnessed the stoning.
“The woman admitted having out-of-marriage sex,” said an Islamist official who talked to the crowd after the stoning was completed.
“This type of punishments that are compatible with Sharia will be administered,” said the official
According to residents, the young woman was picked up from one of the neighbourhoods of the town, but there was no trace of the man partner involved in the alleged offence.
The judicial system of the Al-Shabaab is often criticised by rights groups for lack defence attorneys, proper evidences and harsh punishment, hastily meted out.

Can a child have 3 biological parents; scientists say YES

 Is it possible for a child to have three parents? That is the question raised by a paper just published in Nature by Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his colleagues at Oregon Health and Science University. And the answer seems to be “yes”, for this study paves the way for the birth of children who, genetically, have one father, but two mothers.
The reason this is possible is that a mother’s genetic contribution to her offspring comes in two separable pieces. By far the largest is packed into the 23 chromosomes in the nucleus of an unfertilised egg. In that, she is just like the child’s father, who provides another 23 through his sperm. But the mother also contributes what is known as mitochondrial DNA.
Mitochondria are a cell’s power-packs. They convert the energy in sugar into a form usable by the cell’s molecular machinery. And because mitochondria descend from a bacterium that, about 2 billion years ago, became symbiotic with the cell from which animals and plants are descended, they have their own, small chromosomes. In people, these chromosomes carry only 37 genes, compared with the 20,000 or so of the nucleus. But all of the mitochondria in a human body are descended from those in the egg from which it grew. The sperm contributes none. And it is that fact which has allowed doctors to conceive of the idea of people with two mothers: one providing the nuclear DNA and one the mitochondrial sort.
The reason for doing this is that mutations in mitochondrial DNA, like those in the nuclear genes, can cause disease. These diseases especially affect organs such as the brain and the muscles, which have high energy requirements. Each particular mitochondrial disease is rare. But there are lots of them. All told, there is about one chance in 5,000 that a child will develop such an inherited disease. That rate is similar, for example, to the rate of fragile-X syndrome, which is the second-most-common type of congenital learning difficulty after Down’s syndrome. Mitochondrial disease is thus not a huge problem, but it is not negligible, either.
New batteries, please
To find out whether mitochondrial transplantation could work in people (it has already been demonstrated in other species of mammal) Dr Mitalipov collected eggs from the ovaries of women with mutated mitochondria and others from donors with healthy mitochondria. He then removed the nuclei of both. Those from the healthy cells, he discarded. Those from the diseased cells, he transplanted into the healthy cells. He then fertilised the result with sperm and allowed the fertilised eggs to start dividing and thus begin taking the first steps on the journey that might ultimately lead to them becoming full-fledged human beings.

Apple may phase out iPad 2 for iPad Mini

Tablet buyers may see the iPad 2 sink away as the iPad Mini prepares to surface, says Evercore Partners analyst Rob Cihra.
Chira said he thinks Apple could phase out the iPad 2 because the company's vision leads toward "clearer product tiers," according to AppleInsider. Apple is expected to unveil the iPad Mini at a launch event on October 23.

Cihra predicts Apple will sell close to 7 million iPad Mini devices in the current quarter, adding up to total iPad sales of 26 million

Launched in March 2011, the 16GB iPad 2 is currently available through Apple at a price of $399 for the Wi-Fi only version and $529 for the Wi-Fi + 3G edition. In contrast, the new iPad starts at a price of $499 for the 16GB Wi-Fi version and shoots up to $829 for the 64GB model with Wi-Fi and 4G.

Google and Wall Street: an uneasy relationship

 Google's poor earnings figures, released prematurely, have not just shaken Wall Street's faith in the search engine, they have affected its confidence in the technology sector as a whole. Facebook stock fell almost four per cent with investors fearing a decline in online advertising revenue but IBM is down 2.6 per cent as well and Apple's shares fell 1.8 per cent.
There has been talk for a couple of years of a 'tech bubble', with investors fearing that the valuations of technology firms can't be sustained in the long term. But Investors, like the general public at large, don't always understand what technology firms are up to and business models for online companies can be murky.

Larry Page

Google's founders, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, brought Eric Schmidt in to run the company in 2001 because it was feared that Wall Street would consider them - both in their twenties - too young for the role. Page didn't take over as CEO until 2011

The geeks from Silicon Valley might not always be the best people to reassure Wall Street about this either. Google's founders, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, brought Eric Schmidt in to run the company in 2001 because it was feared that Wall Street would consider them - both in their twenties - too young for the role. Page didn't take over as CEO until 2011.

The challenge for the company now is bigger than convincing Wall Street: it needs to work out how to stop people leaking away from search

Can an online degree really help you get a job?

Time magazine has a great cover story this week on online education.  As the magazine underscores, online degree programs' reputations have taken a beating, thanks to unscrupulous diploma mills and a lack of respect from HR pros. That perception may finally be changing, but it still pays to be careful.

The University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit school in the United States, has been around since 1976. It has 328,000 students currently enrolled and an estimated 700,000 alumni. It offers more than 100 degree programs at the associate, bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels. As of 2010 it had more than 8,000 recruiters on staff. But until very recently it had no career-counseling service for its graduating students.
That’s finally changed with the school’s new “Let’s Get to Work” initiative announced late last month: a series of online tools designed to help students figure out early on what jobs might be good for them, what employers in those fields are looking for and what skills students need to get the job. The school says it’s been working on this program for a couple of years now, but it’s probably no coincidence that it was excoriated this summer in a Senate report for doing little to help place its graduates in jobs after school. (The school is facing other problems as well: following a 60% fourth-quarter loss in net income for its parent company Apollo Group Inc., Phoenix announced Oct. 17 that it would close 115 locations — a decision that will affect some 13,000 students.) But with the national unemployment rate hovering near 8%, getting a job is exactly why many adults pursue a degree, online or otherwise. The question is: Can an online degree help you land a job at all?

The newest players in the online-education space have no problem with name recognition. Unlike the University of Phoenix, the prestigious universities behind Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs — Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Princeton among them — have ironclad academic reputations

An increasing number of students are hoping that the answer is yes. The growth in online education over the past decade has been nothing short of meteoric: a November 2011 report by the Babson Survey Research Group found that more than 6.1 million students took at least one online class during the fall of 2010, a 10% increase over the previous year and nearly four times the number of students taking online courses a decade ago. While some of these students are enrolled in traditional brick-and-mortar schools that also offer certain courses online, many others take online courses through institutions like the University of Phoenix and ITT Technical Institute, which offer a majority of their degree programs over the Internet.

bindersfullofwomen.com rallies women against Romney

What has politics got to do with technology or vise versa.  You don't need to go too far to find out.  If you watched the second US presidential debate, you must have heard that phrase that has now become a buzzword - 'binders full of women'.

It has now become the catch phrase for everything women that Republican candidate Mitt Romney opposes.  Less than two minutes after Romney made the statement, the internet went ablaze.  The fire is yet to be put off.  Try googling the word 'binders' right now and even before you complete the word, Google helps out with the complete phrase.  That's how magnetic the phrase has become.
Critics say Romney’s now infamous “binder full of women” comment perfectly encapsulates why women prefer President Obama by double digits.
The domain name bindersfullofwomen.com was snapped up less than two minutes after the instantly viral phrase left Mitt Romney's mouth on Tuesday night.
The speed race winner was American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic super PAC. The group's biggest funder is hedge fund billionaire George Soros, who made a $1 million donation earlier this year.

Critics say Romney’s now infamous “binder full of women” comment perfectly encapsulates why women prefer President Obama by double digits

"We bought it because we could tell it would be a memorable moment from the debate," said Chris Harris, the PAC's communications director. "We were sort of on standby, knowing that Internet memes like this can solidify within seconds."
By Wednesday morning, the PAC has a Tumblr-powered website running at the domain featuring critical news articles and policy briefs about Romney's stance on women's issues.
Romney's tin-eared line -- referring to job candidates he reviewed while holding office in Massachusetts -- became an Internet sensation in record time. A scathing Facebook page drew more than 250,000 'likes' in less than 12 hours, and #BindersFullOfWomen took off like wildfire on Twitter.

A bra that could detect cancer

 Bras can do miraculous things these days (thank you underwire). But can they detect cancer?

That's the claim for First Warning Systems new bra, equipped with a series of sensors embedded in the cups that pick up temperature changes in breast tissue and, says the Reno, Nev.-based company, provide a thermal fingerprint that can alert doctors to the presence of malignant cells.

According to the company's website, the data generated by the sports bra can predict the presence of breast cancer with 90% specificity and sensitivity. Women wear it for 12 hours to accumulate a stable enough reading of temperature, and the measurements are fed into the company's algorithm that then spits out a result: normal, benign, suspected for breast tissue abnormalities, or probable for breast tissue abnormalities.

Sounds like a good idea, right? Except that the concept of using temperature to detect disease may not be ready for prime time just yet. "Hypothetically, it's conceivable that malignant processes would have a temperature gradient compared to non-malignant tissues," says Dr. Therese Bevers, medical director of the cancer prevention center at the Univ. of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. "But that gradient may not be very large."

studies have shown it can indicate cancer up to six years before a tumor can be detected by imaging

The idea of using thermograms to ferret out abnormally growing cells is already being used with an imaging device that takes a temperature reading of breast tissue. Tumors need nutrients to grow, and they start to siphon these off from their own blood supply, which they start to build as they amass more and more abnormally growing cells.

All of this metabolic work generates heat, and it's this temperature change that thermograms — and the First Warning bra's sensors — are designed to pick up. But when these profiles, which show "hot" and "cold" spots that are supposed to correlate to cancerous and non-malignant tissue, respectively, are compared to mammogram, MRI and ultrasound tests, their findings don't always match up.

"We see some thermograms come back as abnormal, and we do all kinds of imaging with mammogram, ultrasound and MRI and we follow the women and nothing develops," says Bevers. "And we have women with breast cancers that are not seen on the thermograms.

It's not perfect, and needs to undergo much more rigorous testing to understand what role temperature readings can play in cancer screening."

Why are Nigerians numb to slaughter?

One of the 4 students killed in Aluu, Rivers state

 In Nigeria, nobody speaks of terrible things. Where some unimaginable atrocity has been committed the news is often met with pursed lips, a double snap of the fingers and a swift motion over ones head to invoke a purge against evil. To speak of terror is to welcome it into one’s life.
A terrible thing happened in Nigeria on Independence Day. In the small town of Mubi in the North-east, 25 students were rounded up a few hours before midnight. Their names were called out one by one.
This was no typical roll call, however. The owner of each name that was called was swiftly executed by unidentified gunmen. No group has yet claimed responsibility. However Mubi is situated in Adamawa state which has become volatile of recent, an unwilling hotbed for the radical group, Boko Haram.
The cold blooded massacre is one of the worst to hit an educational institution in Nigeria and yet nobody is really talking about it.  It is not a hot topic at the workplace or on the streets. The public mood is palpably apathetic. Two full days later and the news is only just filtering through to many.

Even where there is a flicker of interest, pursed lips, double finger click, arms raised. Next topic. Thank you very much. The federal government has responded typically which is to say that the old book of cliches has been dusted down for frantic recital.

The cold blooded massacre is one of the worst to hit an educational institution in Nigeria and yet nobody is really talking about it

No stone unturned. Perpetrators brought to book. Remote and immediate causes will be investigated. The cliches are often peppered with words like probe and investigative and panel.
There is something sacred about learning institutions. When one thinks of the more infamous attacks on educational institutions — Dunblane, Columbine, Toulouse, Erfurt — it is shocking to see there is not a similar outpouring of grief in Nigeria over those who died in Monday’s attack.
The sad truth is that insecurity has now become a constant companion for many Nigerians. As a result there is no longer any shock value. Attacks segue seamlessly into more attacks at a pace that makes it impossible to distinguish, digest or mourn appropriately.
Disbelief has made way for indifference as no one simply knows how to respond anymore. One week a church is hit, another a mosque. Today a newspaper headquarters is bombed tomorrow a petrol station is set ablaze. The pattern of violence is predictably indiscriminate.
The strategy to combat the rising insecurity — if indeed there is a strategy — is not a winning one. Eyewitnesses to the Mubi killings say the shooting lasted for almost two hours uninterrupted after which the killers casually disappeared into the night.
The latest attack will once again question the imperative of a regional or state police force. The national police system is crumbling under the weight of increased responsibility. The argument, which is slowly gaining traction, is that a local police force would have a far greater appreciation of the terrain, natives and nuances of a particular place.

Disbelief has made way for indifference as no one simply knows how to respond anymore. One week a church is hit, another a mosque. Today a newspaper headquarters is bombed tomorrow a petrol station is set ablaze. The pattern of violence is predictably indiscriminate.

The current practice of stationing police officers in completely unfamiliar surroundings puts them at an obvious disadvantage.
However even if a state police system becomes a reality, the long term solution to tackling insecurity must go beyond fighting fire with fire. There are more fundamental issues at play.
The disparity that exists between Nigerians is greater now than it has ever been. There are no new interconnecting roads and bridges to reconnect cities and states. Strangers remain strangers. It will always be easier to maim or kill those that are unfamiliar to you.

Skydiver Felix Baumgartner lands highest ever jump

Austrian Felix Baumgartner has broken the record for the highest ever skydive by jumping out of a balloon 128,000ft (24 miles, 39km) above New Mexico.
The 43-year-old was hoping also to break the sound barrier during his descent - although that mark awaits confirmation.
Video cameras relayed the moment Baumgartner stepped from his balloon capsule to begin his fall to Earth.
It took just under 10 minutes for him to reach the desert surface below.
Only the last few thousand feet were negotiated by parachute. Once down, he fell to his knees and raised his fists in triumph. Helicopter recovery teams were on hand moments later.
None of the new marks set by Baumgartner can be classed as "official" until endorsed by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI).

Its representative was the first to greet the skydiver on the ground. GPS data recorded on to a microcard in the Austrian's chest pack will form the basis for any height and speed claims that are made.
Unofficially, the Austrian jumped from 128,097ft (24.2 miles; 39km). He fell for four minutes and 19 seconds, reaching a speed of 706mph (1,137km/h). These figures will undoubtedly change slightly once the chest pack information has been properly assessed.
There was concern early in the dive that he was in trouble. Baumgartner was supposed to get himself into a delta position - head down, arms back - as soon as possible after leaving his capsule. But the video showed him tumbling over and over.
Eventually, however, he was able to use his great experience, from more than 2,500 career skydives, to correct his fall and get into a stable configuration.
Even before this drama, it was thought the mission might have to be aborted. As he went through last-minute checks inside the capsule, it was found that a heater for his visor was not working. This meant the visor fogged up as he exhaled.
"This is very serious, Joe," he told retired US Air Force Col Joe Kiting, whose records he was attempting to break, and who was acting as his radio link in mission control at Roswell airport.

Anxious mum watches as son descends

Baumgartner's efforts have finally toppled records that have stood for more than 50 years.

The previous highest, farthest, and longest freefall was made by Col Kittinger, who leapt from a helium envelope in 1960. His altitude was 102,800ft (31.3km). (His mark for the longest freefall remains intact; he fell for more that four and a half minutes before deploying his chute.)
Col Kittinger, now an octogenarian, has been an integral part of Baumgartner's team, and has provided the Austrian with advice and encouragement whenever he has doubted his ability to complete such a daring venture.

Shuttle Endeavour makes final journey to Los Angeles museum

At its prime, the space shuttle Endeavour cruised around the Earth at 17,500 mph faster than a speeding bullet.  In retirement, it's crawling along at a sluggish 2 mph, a pace that rush-hour commuters can sympathize with.
Endeavour's 12-mile road trip kicked off shortly before midnight Thursday as it moved from its Los Angeles International Airport hangar en route to the California Science Center, its ultimate destination, said Benjamin Scheier of the center.
The shuttle rolled through the streets of neighboring Westchester for about three miles and then, in a massive feat of parallel parking, the 170,000-pound spacecraft was backed into a parking lot near a strip mall.
At the airport, Endeavour was briefly delayed after a minor problem developed with its trailer, Los Angeles police Sgt. Rudy Lopez said.
It reached the streets shortly after 2 a.m. Friday. The immense black-and-white spacecraft, its sides weathered by millions of miles in space and two dozen re-entries, rolled slowly on a 160-wheeled carrier.
Hundreds of people waiting in the predawn darkness snapped photos and gaped as it inched by with its tail towering over streetlights and its wings spanning the roadway. Some had pajama-clad children in tow.

The shuttle made stop-and-go progress, with some halts to check its balance and to prune trees in its path as it rolled past strip malls, storefronts, apartment buildings and front lawns.

Ushering a shuttle through an urban core is a logistical challenge that took almost a year to plan. Guarded by a security detail reminiscent of a presidential visit, police enforced rolling street and sidewalk closures as early as Thursday night in some locations and discouraged spectators from swarming side streets.

Nobel Prize awarded for stem cell breakthroughs

Scientists from Britain and Japan shared a Nobel Prize on Monday for the discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells that may one day regrow tissue in damaged brains, hearts or other organs.
John Gurdon, 79, of the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, Britain and Shinya Yamanaka, 50, of Kyoto University in Japan, discovered ways to create tissue that would act like embryonic cells, without the need to harvest embryos.
They share the $1.2 million Nobel Prize for Medicine, for work Gurdon began 50 years ago and Yamanaka capped with a 2006 experiment that transformed the field of "regenerative medicine" - the field of curing disease by regrowing healthy tissue.
"These groundbreaking discoveries have completely changed our view of the development and specialization of cells," the Nobel Assembly at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute said.
All of the body's tissue starts as stem cells, before developing into skin, blood, nerves, muscle and bone. The big hope for stem cells is that they can be used to replace damaged tissue in everything from spinal cord injuries to Parkinson's disease.

These groundbreaking discoveries have completely changed our view of the development and specialization of cells

Scientists once thought it was impossible to turn adult tissue back into stem cells, which meant that new stem cells could only be created by harvesting embryos - a practice that raised ethical qualms in some countries and also means that implanted cells might be rejected by the body.
In 1958, Gurdon was the first scientist to clone an animal, producing a healthy tadpole from the egg of a frog with DNA from another tadpole's intestinal cell. That showed developed cells still carry the information needed to make every cell in the body, decades before other scientists made headlines around the world by cloning the first mammal, Dolly the sheep.

Scientists once thought it was impossible to turn adult tissue back into stem cells, which meant that new stem cells could only be created by harvesting embryos - a practice that raised ethical qualms in some countries 

More than 40 years later, Yamanaka produced mouse stem cells from adult mouse skin cells, by inserting a few genes. His breakthrough effectively showed that the development that takes place in adult tissue could be reversed, turning adult cells back into cells that behave like embryos. The new stem cells are known as "induced pluripotency stem cells", or iPS cells.

Boko Haram kills at least 27 in college massacre in Adamawa

Federal Poly Adamawa main entrance    (credit AFP)

 Gunmen suspected to be members of the Boko Haram sect shot dead at least 27 students in an attack overnight on their college residence in northeast Nigeria, a college spokesman said on Tuesday.
The attack took place at the Federal Polytechnic Mubi in remote Adamawa state late on Monday night, the head of the information department at the college said by telephone.
"The killers went from room to room, slaughtering them one by one," said witness Mohammed Awal, who was not harmed in the attack. Some were shot, others killed with machetes, he said.

"The killers went from room to room, slaughtering them one by one"

Adamawa state, like much of the north, has been targeted by Islamist insurgents, but police were also investigating whether the killings might have been motivated by a political feud inside the college.
"We learned that when they came for the attack, they called out the names of some of the victims and killed them as they came out. Some they left alone, which gives us a clue that this was the work of insiders," said Adamawa police spokesman Mohammed Ibrahim. He put the toll confirmed by police at 25.

A security source and several witnesses put the overall death toll from the attack at 40

Students returning home after the school was closed down

He said the student halls had been raided by police last week as part of a sweep against Boko Haram militants. During the raid, police recovered weapons including a rocket propelled grenade, dozens of homemade bombs, knives and automatic assault rifles. He added that it could not be ruled out that Boko Haram militants who had infiltrated the students were behind it.
A security source and several witnesses put the overall death toll from the attack at 40.
The Boko Haram Islamist sect, which usually targets politicians or security forces, has also attacked students in the past and has cells in Adamawa. Security sources believe it has infiltrated several institutions, including colleges.
But police were also investigating the possibility that the killings were related to a dispute between rival political groups at the college over a student union election on Sunday, in a part of Nigeria that is awash with weapons.

Boko Haram declares war on govt officials’ wives, others

The Islamic insurgent group, Jama’atu ahlis sunnah lil daawati wal jihad, popularly known as Boko Haram, has declared war on Northern leaders, governors and government officials.
In an Hausa language video by its leader, Abubakar Shekau, posted on YouTube, the group said it would begin to target the leaders.
“This message is for those in authority (emirs, governors, and government officials). Wallahi you have no resting place again and no resting time again, either we are here or we are not,” the group said.
Shekau did not elaborate on the group’s reason for deciding to target Northern leaders, but said “you (the Northern leaders) have messed up yourselves and you have messed up your own situation.”
The insurgents also condemned what they described as the lies of negotiations with government officials. Shekau said his group was not negotiating and had no plans to negotiate with the government.

“The claim that we are negotiating with the state is untrue, that is the figment of their imagination.” 

He said: “We are not in dialogue with anyone, but this seems to feed their taste or their appetite for disinformation.”

While denying peace negotiation, the Boko Haram leader admitted that some of their members had been killed by security operatives.
“All I can confirm is that they are killing us rather than dialoguing with us,” he said.
Shekau also accused the security operatives of targeting female members of the sect. He alleged that the women are tortured after incarceration by security agencies.
“As at Saturday when I made this video, between 7 and 10 of them (women) have been incarcerated,” Shekau said. “We don’t know where they are kept or what they are doing to them.”
The Boko Haram leader said his group would retaliate by focusing its attack on women related to security and state officials.