Gunmen suspected of belonging to the Boko Haram Islamist sect late Sunday shot dead at least six people who were playing ludo game in the northern Nigerian city of Bauchi, the Red Cross said.

"Gunmen attacked some people in Zango area around 7:00 pm (1800 GMT). They killed six people and seriously injured nine others who are now in hospital,” Adamu Abubakar, secretary of the Nigeria Red Cross in Bauchi state, told Agence France Presse.

Nigerian soldiers fired live rounds in the air outside a mosque in the flashpoint city of Jos on Friday to disperse a crowd planning protests over a U.S.-made anti-Islam film, a spokesman said.

The soldiers "had to fire some warning shots in the air, but there were no casualties," Captain Salihu Mustapha, military spokesman in Plateau state, told Agence France Presss, putting the crowd at several hundred. "The placards they were carrying were denouncing America."

Striving for a Guinness World Record in oral hygiene, officials in Lagos have called on 300,000 students to take out their toothbrushes on December 5 and start scrubbing simultaneously at noon.

The current record was set in India on October 9, 2007, when 177,003 people gathered at 380 locations and brushed at the same time, according to guinnessworldrecords.com.

Floods in Niger have killed 81 people since July, the U.N. Office for Humanitarian Affairs announced Thursday, adding cholera outbreaks have killed a further 81 people.

"The last update of the toll of the floods dating from September 11 indicates that 527,471 people have been affected by the bad weather and 81 people have lost their lives," OCHA said in a statement in Niamey.

Flooding across Nigeria has killed at least 137 people and displaced more than 35,000 since July, the Red Cross said Monday, warning that latest forecasts suggest the damage could still worsen.

Heavy rainfall in two northern states has spilled contaminants into drinking wells, leading to a cholera outbreak that has killed at least eight and left scores of others hospitalized, according to local officials.

Suspected oil thieves have shot dead three employees of Nigeria's state oil firm, in the latest violence blamed on black market crude traffickers, the company said Monday.

Technicians from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) were dispatched to the village of Arepo near Lagos over the weekend to repair a damaged pipeline, NNPC spokesman Fidel Pepple said.

Flooding across Nigeria has killed 137 people and displaced more than 35,000 since July, the Red Cross said Monday, warning that latest forecasts suggest the damage could still worsen.

The states affected range from Lagos in the southwest to Adamawa in the northeast, where at least 30 people died following the release of water from a dam in Cameroon that caused Nigeria's River Benue to overflow.

The death toll from flooding in eastern Nigeria after heavy rain and the release of water from a dam in Cameroon has risen to 30, with some 120,000 people displaced, an official said Sunday.

Water was released from the Lagdo dam in late August in neighboring Cameroon after officials there warned Nigeria several weeks earlier. The opening of the dam led to flooding along the Benue River in Nigeria.

A deadly Islamist insurgency in northern Nigeria has harmed efforts to eradicate polio in the region, the WHO says, with a resurgence of the potentially paralyzing virus reversing gains.

Nigeria, one of only three countries still considered to have endemic polio, alongside Pakistan and Afghanistan, has accounted for 72 of the 123 polio cases recorded so far this year, a World Health Organization report said.

Nigeria's government has reached out to members of Islamist militant group Boko Haram through back-channel talks in a bid to end an insurgency that has killed hundreds, the president's spokesman said Sunday.

"The form of the dialogue is that backroom channels are being used to reach across with the sole objective of understanding what exactly the grievances of these persons are, what exactly can be done to resolve the crises," Reuben Abati told journalists.