CBS News
Mass kidnappings from Nigeria schools show “the state does not have control,” one expert says
Johannesburg — “In the past 10 years we have seen more than 17 mass kidnappings. It’s a bad record for any country and government, a total breakdown of the social contract,” regional security expert David Otto told CBS News over the weekend about the situation in Nigeria. “Most of the victims are women in these attacks, and when you attack women you have attacked society. The attacks of the last week — when 200-plus people are just taken — show after two decades of fighting insurgency, the government is still unable to protect society from terrorist groups.”
Otto spoke as the parents of more than 280 children voiced their anger over a mass abduction in Nigeria’s northern Kaduna state. The students, boys and girls between the ages of 8 and 15, were seized by armed men from the elementary and secondary schools in the town of Kuriga on Thursday.
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The parents told local media outlets that bandits, as kidnap gangs in the region are commonly called, had taken their children and they implored Nigeria’s government to pay any ransom being demanded to secure their safe return.
Before the sun came up on Saturday, gunmen abducted another group of children from a school in Sokoto, a town in northwest Nigeria.
That was a smaller kidnapping, with about 15 children said to be missing, but it was the third incident reported in just a week, following reports that as many as 300 internally displaced people had gone missing near a camp in the northeast state of Borno.
Abducted, or just a “return to Boko Haram”?
On March 1, United Nations and local officials said close to 200 people, mainly young women, were abducted while collecting firewood outside a camp for displaced people near the town of Ngala, in Borno state. Many reports suggested it was a mass abduction carried out by the Islamic militant group Boko Haram, but in the days since the group vanished, that claim has been called into question.
In Borno state’s capital Maidaguri, Gov. Babagana Zulum, during a meeting with visiting European diplomats, vowed to ensure that his state would be free of terrorism and safe for displaced people. But he urged caution on the number of displaced people who went missing from the Ngala camp, saying the situation was not quite what had been initially reported.
Otto, a defense and counterterrorism expert who serves as the director of the Geneva Center for Africa Security and Strategic Studies, said multiple sources in the region had confirmed to him that what happened near the Ngala camp was actually a classic case of recidivism.
“The situation in the IDP camp is so dire, I am told, that a large number of women and some young men did not return to the camp and instead chose to return to the bush, to live with their husbands fighting for Boko Haram,” he told CBS News during a visit over the weekend to the Nigerian capital Abuja. “The whole kidnapping story is untrue, it was not a Boko Haram attack.”
Otto said the government didn’t want to admit that displaced people living in camps “are in a worse situation than they would be in the bushes, living off the land.”
Jane Hahn for the Washington Post
Nigeria’s relatively new President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who campaigned on promises of restoring security across the country, released a statement Friday condemning the incidents in Borno and Kaduna.
“I have received briefings from security chiefs on the two incidents, and I am confident the victims will be rescued,” he said. “Nothing else is acceptable to me and waiting family members. Justice will be administered.”
He did not mention the most recent abduction, in Sokoto, which happened the day he spoke.
Shehu Sani, a former senator for the Kaduna area, told CBS News he was confident the children taken from the schools in Kuriga would be released soon.
Haidar Umar/AFP via Getty Images
“Knowing these are little children in a public school, the government will feel immense pressure and pay the ransom and get them out,” he predicted. He would not comment on whether any ransom demand had been made, and said the government would not disclose any negotiations.
“It’s very difficult to maneuver over 200 people, so my guess is the kidnappers will divide them up into smaller clusters to avoid airstrikes and then start negotiating quickly, as there is limited space for them to travel with so many people in the Kaduna area,” he said.
Omar Zaghloul/Anadolu via Getty Images
Mass abductions of schoolchildren have been a major security challenge across northern Nigeria for a decade, continuing despite promises of security in the wake of the highly publicized 2014 abduction of hundreds of girls from their school dormitory in Chibok, in Borno state. About 100 of those girls remain missing a decade later.
Kaduna state alone has had four large kidnapping attacks on schools in the last four years. Sani said terrorist groups target schools to use ransom payments as quick sources of cash to buy weapons or expand operations.
During a recent visit to the area, Gov. Zulum said he’d seen a number of women protesting their treatment at camps for displaced people and warning that if conditions in the camps didn’t improve, they would leave the camps.
“Ngala is one of the worst IDP camps in Borno, with over 70,000 households receiving minimal food assistance,” the governor said. “We must facilitate their access to livelihoods, otherwise there is a risk they will return to Boko Haram.”
Dr. Barkindo Mohammed Saidu, director-general of the Borno State Emergency Management Agency SEMA, said Sunday that nine of 102 displaced females who had vanished had since returned to the Ngala camp.
“We don’t believe they were abducted. We believe they only lost their way back home,” he said. “If they were abducted, there would have been a ransom demand, but no one has called.”
“These three recent incidents have shown the government cannot protect children at school, improve the lives of women at IDP camps, and ultimately that the state does not have control over the country’s security,” Otto said, adding that all of Nigeria had been “taken aback” by the recent events in the north.
CBS News partner network BBC News, along with many Nigerian outlets, reported Monday, meanwhile, that the country’s federal government had identified an unspecified number of schools in at least 14 different states and the capital Abuja as being vulnerable to attacks.
Hajia Halima Iliya, national coordinator of the state-run Financing Safe Schools in Nigeria program, said it had collected data to guide an intervention. The agency was formed after the 2014 abduction in Chibok.
CBS News
As sunscreen misinformation spreads online, dermatologists face real-life impact of online trends
With the holiday weekend in full swing, the anti-sunscreen movement’s recent spike is worrying dermatologists.
“It was not like this before,” Dr. Jeanine Downie, a board-certified dermatologist with her own practice in New Jersey told CBS News Confirmed. “I see easily six patients per week that are anti-sunscreen, where it used to be maybe one every other week or one a month. And now it’s just gotten crazy.”
Downie says in the last two weeks she’s diagnosed three squamous cell and two malignant melanomas, both of which can turn cancerous if not caught early. “And that’s me, just one little dermatologist,” she said.
This movement picked up steam in June, with creators on TikTok telling followers in no uncertain terms “stop wearing sunscreen.” At first, the posts received tens of thousands of views and likes. Dermatologists on the platform then began sharing their own reactions, with those videos gaining even more views. And more recently, influencer Nara Smith went viral sharing an at-home sunscreen recipe to her 8 million followers that dermatologists say does little to protect wearers from sun damage.
Dr. Shereene Idriss, a New York dermatologist who has amassed more than a million followers on her social media channels, is trying to leverage that influence to educate users about sunscreen and sun protection.
“It’s becoming more and more difficult, I think, as a consumer, to try to weed through the noise,” Idriss told CBS News Confirmed.
This misinformation reflects the surprising reality of how some young Americans view sun safety. A study by the Orlando Health Cancer Institute in March found that 1 in 7 adults under the age of 35 say daily sunscreen use is more harmful than direct sun exposure. “I tell my patients, if you want your face to look like a leather bag later, then that’s up to you,” Downie said. About 6.1 million adults are treated each year for basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas according to the CDC. Skin cancer is the most common type of cancer in the country.
“They only want the natural things,” said Downie. “But I tell them all the time, sitting in traffic here in the tri-state area, the level of pollutants in the air on a daily, weekly and monthly basis is significantly more toxic than any chemical they’re going to rub into their skin with sunblock.”
While there’s no evidence that sunscreens are unsafe, the FDA is currently investigating potential concerns. It’s called for more data on 12 ingredients often found in U.S. sunscreen. After conducting its own study into how certain ingredients are absorbed into the bloodstream, the FDA has called for more research into potential health effects on the body.
However, beachgoers on the Jersey Shore this week told CBS News that sun safety is top of mind this summer. CBS News Confirmed looked at Google Search trends and saw terms like “sunscreen” and “what does skin cancer look like” are at an all-time high since tracking began in 2004.
“You know what gets them to start wearing sunblock?” said Downie. “Young kids and young adults, Gen Z, Gen X, they hate pores. And once they hear that they’re going to have big pores that look like potholes, they put that sunblock on.”
The dermatologists CBS Newsspoke with say there is no such thing as a healthy tan. To best protect yourself this summer, they say to use sunscreen and reapply often; wear UPF clothing or UV visors; and avoid being outside during peak UV index between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.
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Reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian won Iran’s runoff presidential election Saturday, besting hard-liner Saeed Jalili by promising to reach out to the West and ease enforcement on the country’s mandatory headscarf law after years of sanctions and protests squeezing the Islamic Republic.
Pezeshkian promised no radical changes to Iran’s Shiite theocracy in his campaign and long has held Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the final arbiter of all matters of state in the country. But even Pezeshkian’s modest aims will be challenged by an Iranian government still largely held by hard-liners, the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, and Western fears over Tehran enriching uranium to near-weapons-grade levels.
A vote count offered by authorities put Pezeshkian as the winner with 16.3 million votes to Jalili’s 13.5 million in Friday’s election.
Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images
Supporters of Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon and longtime lawmaker, entered the streets of Tehran and other cities before dawn to celebrate as his lead grew over Jalili, a hard-line former nuclear negotiator.
But Pezeshkian’s win still sees Iran at a delicate moment, with tensions high in the Mideast over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, Iran’s advancing nuclear program, and a looming U.S. election that could put any chance of a detente between Tehran and Washington at risk.
The first round of voting June 28 saw the lowest turnout in the history of the Islamic Republic since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iranian officials have long pointed to turnout as a sign of support for the country’s Shiite theocracy, which has been under strain after years of sanctions crushing Iran’s economy, mass demonstrations and intense crackdowns on all dissent.
Government officials up to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei predicted a higher participation rate as voting got underway, with state television airing images of modest lines at some polling centers across the country.
However, online videos purported to show some polls empty while a survey of several dozen sites in the capital, Tehran, saw light traffic amid a heavy security presence on the streets.
The election came amid heightened regional tensions. In April, Iran launched its first-ever direct attack on Israel over the war in Gaza, while militia groups that Tehran arms in the region — such as the Lebanese Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels — are engaged in the fighting and have escalated their attacks.
Iran is also enriching uranium at near weapons-grade levels and maintains a stockpile large enough to build several nuclear weapons, should it choose to do so. And while Khamenei remains the final decision-maker on matters of state, whichever man ends up winning the presidency could bend the country’s foreign policy toward either confrontation or collaboration with the West.
The campaign also repeatedly touched on what would happen if former President Donald Trump, who unilaterally withdrew America from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, won the November election. Iran has held indirect talks with President Joe Biden’s administration, though there’s been no clear movement back toward constraining Tehran’s nuclear program for the lifting of economic sanctions.
More than 61 million Iranians over the age of 18 were eligible to vote, with about 18 million of them between 18 and 30. Voting was to end at 6 p.m. but was extended until midnight to boost participation.
The late President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a May helicopter crash, was seen as a protégé of Khamenei and a potential successor as supreme leader.
Still, many knew him for his involvement in the mass executions that Iran conducted in 1988, and for his role in the bloody crackdowns on dissent that followed protests over the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman detained by police over allegedly improperly wearing the mandatory headscarf, or hijab.