In a video obtained by the AFP, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau admitted to kidnapping more than 200 girls from a school in northeastern Nigeria last month. "I abducted your girls" he said. "I will sell them in the market, by Allah. There is a market for selling humans."

At a busy bus station in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, a bomb went off early this morning, tearing through rows of buses and killing over 71. The source of the blast was, as Nigerian officials have confirmed, the Boko Haram militant group, an extreme Islamist group aiming to unseat the Nigerian state.

"It's Hell in Nigeria" is Mother Jones' assessment of gay life in Nigeria in the wake of the country's recent anti-gay law. It's all harrowing, though how it's affecting HIV treatment is particularly shameful. Read it.

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a dispatch from the "north Nigeria metropolis" of Bauchi, Nigeria, where, as it was reported last month, dozens of gay men were arrested in the wake of the so-called "Jail the Gays" bill. The Times reports that 10 men accused of being gay are being held in Bauchi's central prison.

Dozens of gay men in Nigeria reportedly have been arrested under the country's new Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, which sentences people to jail for 14 years for being married to a person of the same sex, and 10 years for belonging to gay-oriented groups. This is disgusting.

Two Americans–the captain and the chief engineer of a U.S-flagged oil ship–were abducted by armed pirates off the coast of Nigeria on Wednesday, according to U.S. Navy officials.

As far as drug stashes go, the inside of a roasted chicken is not the worst idea I've heard. But, alas, it wasn't clever enough for a Nigerian mechanic attempting to smuggle $150,000 of cocaine into Lagos from Brazil. Nigerian police arrested him at the Lagos airport after discovering over five pounds of poultry-covered cocaine, all wrapped inside egg-shaped tinfoil.

According to the Mumbai-based English-language daily The Indian Express, a Nigerian man from the MidEast state of Benue was allegedly forced by five of his wives to have sex with them until he croaked.

Following this afternoon's report on Arianna Huffington's AOL email account getting hacked, the new media mogul has confirmed the hack and revealed the culprits: Nigerian scam artists. Happens to the best of us.

In the U.S., Nigeria is well-known for419 scams, where fake princes scam dumb Americans out of millions of dollars in cash. Now even the website for the country's top tech authority has been hacked and turned into a phishing scam.

In his 87 years on Earth, Bello Maasaba has married 107 women. Currently he lives with 86 of them. What led Maasaba to ruin his life by surrounding himself with so many women like that?

We're living in a scammer's paradise: Here's a site selling 50 million AOL addresses for just $500. And $300 for 1.5 million farmers' email addresses. A perfect way to start your own phishing business!

Only those with the steeliest of stomachs should proceed. What you are about to see is video of a living 2-cm worm crawling beneath the surface of a lady's twitching eyeball, then getting extracted. It was there for six years.

It's not Friday yet, but I'm pretty sure this is the most startling headline of the week: "Nigerian man arrested with bags carrying 70 dead babies." Apparently a hospital in Lagos, Nigeria was dodging burial fees. [BBC, image via]

Goodluck Jonathan is Nigeria's new president.

Nigerian President Yar'Adua has died of a heart condition. He was 58.

So, there was an election in Iraq today. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became a 9/11 truther. And Al Qaeda's spokesman, Azzam the American, may have been captured! Here's all the stuff you missed while ogling the red carpet.

Nigeria is a country afflicted with rampant corruption, looting of the government treasury, oil piracy, illiteracy, grinding rural poverty, and a dire lack of clean water. But media mogul and public servant Nduka Obaigbena is committed to fixing all that and making Nigeria a model of good government. His unique prescription for social change: parties with Naomi Campbell, bespoke suits, and a penthouse at the Ritz Carlton:

Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project may be better named "No Laptop Per Child," at the rate it's going. Back in November, the Wall Street Journal essentially labeled the project a failure. Now, the group is being sued for $20 million by a Nigerian company for patent infringement. Let's hope OLPC doesn't get hit for the full amount. At almost $200 each, the judgment would be equal to more than 100,000 laptops — laptops that the OLPC can't give away, never mind sell. A copy of the lawsuit, obtained exclusively by Valleywag, is after the jump.

Last week I got an email from someone at Microsoft asking if my dad was the president of Nigeria. I almost deleted the email without responding until I looked at the person's email signature and it said "Executive Assistant to Bill Gates". So I responded and it turned out that Bill Gates was going to be in Nigeria over the weekend to meet with my dad and he wanted to chat before his trip.