TORONTO

BlackBerry maker’s CEOs step down, will be replaced

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion’s co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, are stepping down, RIM said Sunday.

The pair who founded RIM will be replaced by Thorsten Heins, a chief operating officer who joined RIM in 2008 from Siemens AG, RIM said.

Balsillie and Lazaridis have headed Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM together for the past two decades.

The once-iconic company has suffered a series of setbacks and has lost tens of billions in market value.

RIM said last month that new phones deemed critical to the company’s future will be delayed until late 2012. And its PlayBook tablet, RIM’s answer to the Apple iPad, failed to gain consumer support, forcing the company to give it deep discounts to move the devices off store shelves.

A widespread outage also frustrated tens of millions of BlackBerry users in October.

Lazaridis will take on a new role as vice chairman of RIM’s Board and chairman of the board’s new innovation committee. Balsillie remains a member of the board.

KANO, Nigeria

Death toll in bombings by extremists exceeds 150

People in this north Nigeria city once wore surgical masks to block the dust swirling through its sprawling neighborhoods, but children hawked the masks for pennies apiece Sunday to block the stench of death at a hospital overflowing with the dead following a coordinated attack by a radical Islamist sect.

The Nigerian Red Cross now estimates more than 150 people died in Friday’s attack in Kano, which saw at least two suicide bombers from the sect known as Boko Haram detonate explosive-laden cars.

The scope of the attack, apparently planned to free sect members held by authorities here, left even President Goodluck Jonathan speechless as he toured what remained of a regional police headquarters Sunday.

“The federal government will not rest until we arrest the perpetrators of this act,” Jonathan said earlier.

However, unrest continued across Nigeria as unknown assailants in the northern state of Bauchi killed at least 11 people overnight Saturday in attacks that saw at least two churches bombed, a sign how far insecurity has penetrated Africa’s most populous nation.

ZAGREB, Croatia

In light voting, Croatians say ‘yes’ to EU membership

Croatians voted Sunday in favor of joining the European Union despite a poor turnout for the referendum – a sign of how much the debt-stricken 27-nation bloc has lost its appeal within countries aspiring to join.

With nearly all ballots counted, Croatia’s state referendum commission said, about 66 percent of those who took part in the referendum answered “yes” to the question: “Do you support the membership of the Republic of Croatia in the European Union?”

About 33 percent were against, while the rest of the ballots were invalid. About 47 percent of eligible voters took part in the referendum. That compares to 84 percent who voted in a referendum for Croatia’s independence from the former Yugoslavia in 1992.

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