Dozens have been killed and an estimated 4,000 have been displaced as a result of youths from the Ijaw and Itsekeri ethnic groups fighting in Warri, an oil-rich city in the Niger Delta.

Women from Ikebiri community in Apoi-Olodiama local government area of Bayelsa State have taken over an oil rig (Bintanc Kalamatani) belonging to Farashole Drilling, working for the Nigeria Agip Oil Company. The women, numbering about five hundred, most of them elderly, are protesting against Agip for not implementing parts of the agreement it signed with the community five years ago.

The National Human Rights Commission has been asked to investigate the alleged detention of a nine-month-old pregnant woman and her husband by the Anambra State police command on the instructions of a Lagos based businessman.

President Olusegun Obasanjo marked Nigeria's National Day on Wednesday with an impassioned defence of his reform programme, as organised labour threatened to strike over fuel price rises.

For questioning the judgment of a policeman who ordered a driver detained for failure to carry a road-worthiness certificate, Rotimi Oyekanmi, a reporter with The Guardian Newspaper, spent six hours in a police cell in Ogbomoso, Oyo State, South-west Nigeria, according to a story in Media in Nigeria, a weekly publication on developments within and affecting the media, communication and freedom of expression sector in Nigeria.

At least five people were killed when a leaking oil pipeline exploded and caught fire in southeastern Nigeria last week after it had been spilling crude oil into a river for two days, local residents reported.

The ambitions of the now-exiled Liberian President Charles Taylor fuelled Sierra Leone's long conflict, says David Crane, the chief prosecutor of the United Nations-created Special Court for Sierra Leone - a war crimes tribunal. Although Taylor has been given sanctuary in Nigeria, Crane says that he believes Nigeria will eventually turn him over to the Special Court. And, says Crane, Sierra Leone's Special Court is ushering in a new approach to war crimes.

Nigeria's police authorities on Friday returned 116 children brought into the country to provide cheap labour to the neighbouring Benin Republic, where they are believed to have originated, officials said. Nigeria's police chief, Tafa Balogun, also handed over five suspected traffickers who were said to be specialised in smuggling children from Benin into Nigeria, in a ceremony at Seme, the main border crossing point between the two countries.

Amnesty International has welcomed the decision by the Sharia Court of Appeal of Katsina State, in northern Nigeria to quash Amina Lawal's sentence to death by stoning handed down by a Sharia court at Bakori, in Katsina State on 22 March 2002. But Amnesty says the federal government of Nigeria should take steps to abolish the death penalty and amend all pieces of legislation which introduce the death penalty as well as cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments at all levels of the Nigerian legislation, including the Shari'ah penal legislation.

A Nigerian Islamic appeal court has cleared single mother Amina Lawal of adultery, for which she had been sentenced to be stoned to death. In a split verdict a panel of five judges at the Sharia Appeal Court in the northern city of Katsina, found in favour of the 31-year-old mother of four at her second bid to get the sentence lifted.

Oil has been spilling from a broken pipeline in the Niger delta for several days, polluting the farmland, fishing grounds and drinking water of five villages, residents in the affected area said on Tuesday.

In the first four years of his presidency, President Obasanjo has made an impressive impact locally, regionally and globally as a deliverer of strong messages, innovative programs and increased funding, says the Global Aids Alliance. “We urge him to continue in this same strong vein, inspiring and educating other nations in best practices for addressing the HIV/AIDS crisis from the top rungs of government. But, Nigeria faces an extremely critical point epidemiologically. The country truly hovers on the edge of a major crisis that is all too familiar to its neighbours to the south. Rapid, decisive action is essential to gain control over the epidemic,” says a new report from the Alliance.

Nigeria's new finance minister has pledged to try to rebuild the country's reputation with international lenders and increase transparency in areas such as public procurement. In an interview with the Financial Times, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, recently appointed to the job from her previous post as a vice-president of the World Bank, accepted that Nigeria had to show progress on reform before it could obtain relief on its $31bn (£19bn) foreign debt.

At least 10 people have been killed in southern Nigeria in clashes between security forces and armed youths that broke out three days ago after a pastor shot dead a gang member. Last month, dozens were killed in Warri, when clashes broke out between the Ijaw and Itsekiri ethnic groups, who are locked in a bitter dispute over political power and the spoils of Nigeria's oil wealth.

No fewer than 30 people have been confirmed dead within the last month in Gusau following an outbreak of cholera in the area. The UNICEF consultant at the Gusau General Hospital, Dr. Sa'adu Idris, said the hospital has admitted 150 patients suffering from the illness in the last month.

The Nigerian government has warned Liberia's former president Charles Taylor not to interfere in the affairs of his home country. The statement comes just days after the UN Secretary General's special envoy to Liberia, Jacques Klein, alleged that Mr Taylor had been meddling in Liberia's political affairs.

Nigerian authorities have uncovered a huge deficit in the state pension fund, confirming what many unpaid former state workers have feared for years. Retired civil servants have long complained of non-payment of their pensions, with many forced to queue for days to claim what they are owed. The revelation is likely to stir suspicions that some of the money may have been misappropriated.

These days there is a buzz in the upper storeys of Nigeria's finance ministry, a palpable feeling that at last Africa's most populous country could be on the verge of meaningful economic reform. Much is at stake as the new finance minister, former World Bank vice-president Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, prepares to take a machete to the corrupt and inefficient thickets of Nigeria's overgrown public sector.

More than 100 villages were flooded at the weekend after Nigeria's state power firm opened an endangered hydroelectric dam, a government spokesman said Monday. Mahmud Abdullahi, a spokesman for the northern state of Niger, told AFP that the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) had opened the gates on Nigeria’s largest hydroelectric station on Saturday.

Nigeria and Cameroon plan to create a cross-border park to protect rare birds and a type of endangered chimpanzee threatened by the bushmeat trade, a conservation group said last Thursday. The announcement was made at the 5th World Parks Congress in the South African port city of Durban, where more than 2,000 scientists, policymakers, and activists are meeting to examine the state of the world's protected areas.