Census extended amid violence

Reuters reports on a two-day extension of the census, announced today. The significance of this census, to all of us, is two fold: (1) it's the first in 15 years in a country that is Africa's most populous nation, but whose population is only very roughly defined (somewhere between 120 and 150 million); (2) questions of tribe and religion have been eliminated from the questionnaire, meaning that no one will no for sure how big a Muslim majority there actually is. Some in Nigeria believe that the size of the Muslim population has been vastly inflated, given the strongly northern-Muslim composition of Nigerian military.