JOS, Nigeria (AFP) – Muslims attacked a Christian village in central Nigeria on Saturday, killing eight people with machetes and burning seven houses and a church in fresh religious violence, an army spokesman said.

The attack followed clashes in eastern Nigeria earlier in the week that also killed eight and left six mosques and a church burnt.

“It’s true eight people were killed,” Lieutenant Colonel Kingsley Umoh said.

An AFP correspondent saw the bodies, as well as the burnt houses and church in Mazzah village, near the city of Jos, where deadly religious clashes have occurred a number of times in recent months.

Umoh said Fulani Muslims entered Mazzah between 1:30 am and 5:00 am, shooting sporadically in the air to lure sleeping residents outside their homes before they were killed.

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HAVANA – Fidel Castro took questions from Cuban ambassadors at the Foreign Ministry on Friday and warned them of the threat of global nuclear war in his most overtly political public act since re-emerging from four years of near total seclusion.

It was the revolutionary leader’s fifth appearance in less than a week, and the first in which he met with senior government officials. The sudden media blitz has many observers wondering if the 83-year-old former president plans to reinsert himself into Cuba’s political scene at a particularly sensitive time. The government — now run by his brother Raul — is in the midst of freeing dozens of political prisoners, faces a severe economic malaise and has been cracking down on high-level corruption.

Castro has so far stayed clear of discussing national issues that would be in his brother’s domain, focusing instead on his apocalyptic theory that war is imminent pitting the United States and Israel against Iran.

“When something like this (nuclear war) begins, all the responses are preprogramed,” Castro warned. “It is only a question of seconds.”

With Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez at his side, the former president took questions for more than 90 minutes from Cuba’s ambassador corps, who were assembled in Havana for a regularly scheduled meeting. A taped broadcast of the session went out on national television Friday evening, and an article about the encounter was posted on the government-run Cubadebate website.

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BEIJING – China’s Twitter-like websites are facing new threats of censorship.

One of the country’s top microblogs is down for maintenance, and the other three have begun displaying a “beta” tag to indicate they are in testing, though they have been operating for months.

Users worry that the changes are cover-ups for further restraints on speech in China, where Twitter itself is blocked. They have deluged Chinese cyberspace and the microblog operators with questions and theories about the changes.

Long Weilian, a China-based tech blogger who uses the name William Long, was skeptical about China’s top four microblogs suddenly posting “beta” tags or going “under maintenance.”

“Such a long time to figure that one out,” he tweeted Wednesday.

Chinese officials often fear that public opinion might spiral out of control as social networking — and social protests — boom among the world’s largest Internet population. The government unplugged Twitter and Facebook last year but has allowed domestic versions to fill the void while keeping them under scrutiny.

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JERUSALEM – A Libyan charity’s ship carrying aid for the Gaza Strip was stalled in international waters on Wednesday, the Israeli military said, as questions persisted over whether it planned to defy an Israeli naval blockade of the Palestinian territory.

With Israel insisting the ship would not reach Hamas-ruled Gaza, the potential for a showdown on the high seas continued to loom. Framing the faceoff was an Israeli naval raid of another blockade-busting ship in May that turned deadly.

The captain of the Moldovan-flagged Amalthea told the Israeli navy just before midnight Tuesday that engine troubles had hobbled the ship, and that efforts were being made to repair it. The military, which had four missile ships tailing the Libyan vessel, said it was still idled about 80 miles (130 kilometers) from Gaza early Wednesday.

Israeli military officials said Tuesday that the captain informed Israel he was heading for the Egyptian port of el-Arish, near Gaza. Egypt had promised to transfer the ship’s supplies to Gaza if it docked there.

However, a spokesman for the Libyan mission insisted the ship still intended to try to reach the Palestinian territory — but wouldn’t violently resist any efforts to stop them.

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BEIJING – A leading Chinese Internet regulator has vowed to reduce anonymity in China’s portion of cyberspace, calling for requirements that people to use their real names when buying a mobile phone or going online, according to a human rights group.

In an address to the national legislature in April, Wang Chen, director of the State Council Information Office, called for perfecting the extensive system of censorship the government uses to manage the fast-evolving Internet, according to a text of the speech obtained by New York-based Human Rights in China.

China’s regime has a complicated relationship with the freewheeling Internet, reflected in its recent standoff with Google over censorship of search results. China this week confirmed it had renewed Google’s license to operate, after the company agreed to stop automatically rerouting users to its Hong Kong site, which is not subject to China’s online censorship.

The Internet is China’s most open and lively forum for discussion, despite already pervasive censorship, but stricter controls could constrain users. The country’s online population has surged past 400 million, making it the world’s largest.

Chen’s comments were reported only briefly when they were made in April. Human Rights in China said the government quickly removed a full transcript posted on the legislature’s website. But the group said it found an unexpurgated text and the discrepancies show that Beijing is wary that its push for tighter information control might prove unpopular.

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