Wednesday, December 31, 2014

A New Year message to Nigeria’s youth from Muhammadu Buhari

...and here's Gen. Buhari's New Year message to Nigerian youths...
As we welcome the year 2015, I have shared a message to Nigerians in general, but I find it crucial to send another message directly to Nigeria’s youth, who are the major stakeholders of this enterprise.
The year 2014 was a challenging one for most citizens of our dear country.

AirAsia flight found upside down at the bottom of the sea, passengers found holding hands

Indonesian search officials have now confirmed they have located the fuselage of AirAsia flight 8501 on sonar radar, upside down on the sea floor, not far from where three of the bodies from the doomed AirAsia flight were found holding hands when discovered floating in the Java Sea. Officials from Basarnas, Indonesia's search and rescue agency, say the plane wreckage has been located in 24 to 30 metres of water and one of the seven confirmed recovered bodies was wearing a life jacket. 

Lieutenant Airman Tri Wobowo, who was co-piloting Indonesia's C130 Herclues aircraft, was the first to discover debris from the plane and witnessed the tragic scene. 

'There were seven to eight people. Three of them held hands,' he told a local newspaper. 

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

First ever female Nigerian helicopter Captain


Today, Captain Abimbola Jayeola (Captain AB) became Nigeria's first ever female Helicopter Captain. She flies the sikorsky S76 for Bristow helicopters Nigeria. Here's a photo of her being decorated with her commanders epaulets.

APC announces Prof. Yemi Osibajo as Gen. Buhari's running mate

APC Presidential candidate, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari has chosen erudite scholar, former Attorney General of Lagos state, and Pastor with the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Prof. Yemi Osibajo as his running mate for next year's general election.

Professor Yemi Osinbajo is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN and Senior Partner in the Law firm of Simmons Cooper Partners. Yemi Osibanjo is a professor of law and was the head of department of Public Law at the University of Lagos (1997-1999).


His tertiary education was at the University of Lagos and the London School of Economics and Political Science obtaining the LLB and LLM degrees respectively.
Previously served as the Special Adviser to the Attorney General of Nigeria (1988-1992), he later became the Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice of Lagos State in 1999 reappointed for a second term in 2003. During the period of his public service, he commenced the Lagos State justice reform project. A prominent feature of that project was the establishment of the Directorate for Citizens’ Rights (DCR) which provides free legal services and legal representation to indigent citizens of the state. This initiative gave a voice to many who would otherwise not have a way to access their rights.
Prior to that appointment, Osinbajo, a Professor of Law, was the Head of Public Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Lagos.
He is also the Ethics Adviser to the Advisory Board of the African Development Bank and is a non-executive Director of Citibank. He has served in various roles within the United Nations, United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations, the United Nations African Institute for Crime Prevention, the International Criminal court for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, the department of Peacekeeping operations and the United Nations Peace Operations in Somalia.
Prof. Osibajo is Co-founder & Board Member Convention on Business Integrity and the Justice Research Institute Ltd. In 2007, Prof. and his wife Oludolapo founded “The Orderly Society Trust”, a non-governmental organization that is dedicated to the promotion of Christian ethics and orderliness.
Professor Osibajo has authored, co-authored and edited several books and publications including “The Unification and Reform of the Nigerian Criminal Law and Procedure Codes” ; “Law Development and Administration”; “The Annotated Civil Procedure rules of The Superior Courts in Nigeria”; and “Cross Examination: A Trial Lawyer’s Most Potent Weapon”.
He also pastors at Olive Tree House of Prayer for All Nations, Banana Island, a parish of the Redeemed Christian Church of God and lives in Lagos with his wife and three children.

Monday, December 1, 2014

The Inspirational Story of Brand expert, Kenny Badmus, shares his story of living with HIV in the last 15 years

Today, Monday December 1st, is World AIDS day, and I'm celebrating my resolve to live with this damn virus all these many years without letting it define who I am. Every journey I take, every picture of me you see, and every new challenge I take on are all huge reminders that I must never stop living my best life. So, I decided to share my journey with you today. Honestly, I don’t know what exactly you are dealing with but I’m writing you this to hold tight to your dream. Here's a quick sketch of my journey from the first day I tested positive, 15 years ago. My upcoming book tells the full story.

Thursday, November 27, 2014

Photos from Governor Rauf Aregbesola's 2nd-term inauguration


Here are photos from the second term inauguration ceremony of Governor Rauf Aregbesola of Osun State which held at the Osogbo Township Stadium this morning. Aregbesola was re-elected Governor of the state in August 2014. More photos after the cut...

Dieziani Alison-Madueke elected first female president of OPEC

Nigeria's Minister of Petroleum, Dieziani Alison-Madueke has been elected the first female president of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). She was elected today at the ongoing 166th General Meeting of the body in Vienna, Austria.

She replaces former president of OPEC, Libyan Vice Prime Minister for Corporations, Abdourhman Atahar-Ahirish. She was elected for one year and is expected to immediately resume office.

Piers Morgan's piece on Ferguson police officer, Darren Wilson

  Read what Piers wrote about it all on MailOnline

Darren Wilson is the first 6ft 4in, 210lb five-year-old in history - by Piers Morgan 
"When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding Hulk Hogan…that's just how big he felt and how small I felt from grasping his arm.' 
This is how Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson justified shooting black teenager Michael Brown. Reading this particular piece of evidence from the vast dump of Grand Jury documents released last night, it'd be impossible not to sympathize with Wilson. 
A lone 'small' policeman in a patrol car confronted by a gigantic Hulk. There's just one problem. Wilson, by his own admission in his police interview, is 6ft 4in tall, the exact same height as Michael Brown.

Monday, November 10, 2014

Explosion in Senior Secondary School in Potiskum, Yobe state

  An unconfirmed report has it that a bomb went off this morning November 10th during Assembly at the Senior Science Secondary School Potiskum, Yobe state. The bomber is believed to be a student who was on the assembly ground with other students. Many students feared dead while several others injured. More details later

Dr Myles Munroe and wife die in plane crash in Bahamas

Renowned gospel leader, transformational leader, business coach and author of many motivational books, Dr. Myles Munroe and his wife, Ruth Ann, died in a plane crash in the Bahamas yesterday Nov. 9th. The couple and 7 others (pictured above moments before boarding the plane) were killed after the Lear 36 executive private jet they were traveling in struck a crane at the grand Bahamas ship yard, as it approached for landing, exploding on impact.

The plane which had nine people on board left the Lynden Pindling International Airport and was trying to make a landing at the Grand Bahama International Airport when it crashed. Everybody was killed.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

UK to return ex-Delta Governor James Ibori's £6.8m loot to Nigeria

The UK has agreed to return an additional £6.8m to Nigeria from the money seized from jailed ex-Governor of Delta State, Chief James Ibori.

This was revealed by UK Metropolitan Police Senior Investigator, Mr. Rupert Broad, yesterday November 4th in London according to a report by NAN. Out of the £8 million confiscated from Ibori, £1.2 million had so far been returned to Nigeria.


There are reports that an additional £80 million has been temporarily seized and a confiscation hearing has been fixed for April 2015 before the judge decides exactly how much was stolen out of the £80 million and then return it to Nigeria
 
Ibori who is still serving a jail term, was sentenced by the British Southcrown Court in April 2012 for 13 years after being convicted for fraud and money laundering.

Dike rejects $7,000 World Cup bonus

 

Oklahoma State Football team forward Courtney Dike has rejected the $7000 paid to her by the Nigeria Football Federation for participating at 2014 FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup in Canada saying the honour of playing for the country was enough reward for her.
The 19-year-old, who is the younger sister of Super Eagles forward Bright Dike, represented the country at the competition where she scored the fastest goal in the tournament’s history.
NFF Head of Competition Sanusi Mohammed told Sports Radio, Brila FM, that the player rejected the outstanding allowances accrued to her for representing the country at the 10-day tournament.
Sanusi told Brila FM, “When we called her mother to confirm the delivery of the allowances, she declined it and insisted that the opportunity of playing for Nigeria was all the reward the family needed.”
Dike’s elder brother, Bright, featured for Nigeria at the 2013 Confederations Cup in Brazil but missed the 2014 World Cup by a foot injury which side-lined him for four months.
Meanwhile, the head of the Nigeria Women League board Dilichukwu Onyedinma has said the player deserves a national award for her patriotic act.

Thursday, October 9, 2014

Linda Ikeji ignored my warnings — Aye Dee, man behind popular blog’s fall, speaks by Ben Ezeamalu

 Aye Dee

As the initial shock over Google’s removal of popular news and entertainment site, Linda Ikeji blog, begins to wane, one of those instrumental to the shutdown of the site said Ms. Ikeji ignored his repeated complaints over copyright infringement and plagiarism.
Mukhtar Dan’Iyan, the Editor-in-Chief of US-based The 15 Past Eight Media Group, said he merely spoke up after the blog used his tweets about developments in the war against the Boko Haram insurgency without his permission.
“I spoke up about the unauthorised use of my intellectual property that was taken from my TL (time line),” Mr. Dan’Iyan, who tweets via @MrAyeDee, told PREMIUM TIMES in an interview, Wednesday.
“(I) filed a formal DMCA complaint to Google which hosted her site.
“One complaint is not enough. But safe to assume when Google looked through other examples of unauthorised IP usage and other IP owners filing complaints, it all added up.
“I emailed her (Linda Ikeji) repeatedly. And it was not the first time people had plagiarised my content, but usually, I reach out and they take it down,” Mr. Dan’Iyan added.
A Digital Copyright Millenium Act, DMCA, is an avenue to report content that you would like removed from Google’s services under applicable laws.
According to Mr. Dan’Iyan, Ms. Ikeji had used over 10,000 copyrighted pictures and stories over the past five years without the authorisation of the copyright owners.
Google took down the blog on Wednesday following multiple allegations of copyright infringement.
Ms. Ikeji did not respond to our enquiries Wednesday.
Mr. Dan’Iyan’s accusations and subsequent threats of organising a class action against the popular blogger drew the ire of the numerous fans who accused him of envy and hate.
In her response on Tuesday to the accusations, Ms. Ikeji dismissed the plagiarism allegations and accused Mr. Dan’Iyan of using another name, Emmanuel Efremov, to stalk her, as well as register almost ten of her domain names.
But Mr. Dan’Iyan said Mr. Efremov is one of the directors in his company.
“15Past8.com has owners like any other company. He’s one of them,” Mr. Dan’Iyan said.
“Emmanuel (Efremov) has never tried to sell anything to Linda, nor has he ever demanded any sort of money from her. In fact, I doubt he’s ever had any interaction with here even in passing.”
Efforts to reach Google on Wednesday were not successful.
While the class action against Ms. Ikeji (whose blog is still ranked No. 10 on the Alexa rankings of Top 500 sites in Nigeria) and Google is still gathering momentums, Mr. Dan’Iyan said he had backed out.
“People are sending stuff in, but hopefully, when she bounces back, as I know she will, she will be the paragon of accountability when it comes to using material,” he said.
“In other words, she’ll only use that which she got permission for, this way tempers would cool and lawsuit won’t proceed by aggrieved parties (of which I am no longer one).
“Personally, I want Linda to win and win big. Her story is a huge inspiration to many, and should continue to be, as long as she does things the right way.”

Source: Premium Times

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Linda Ikeji’s Copyright Debacle By Seyi Taylor

 Linda Ikeji
Nigeria’s most successful blogger, Linda Ikeji, is under fire.
She’s severally been accused of plagiarism which is defined as “the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own“. In fact, Linda seems to be mostly guilty of taking content from another source without permission or attribution. Most recently, a certain @MrAyeDee accused her of using tweets and images he posted and using them on her blog without permission or attribution.
Linda Ikeji Range RoverLinda’s success is phenomenal. After 8 years of blogging, she has become a poster child for digital success – a self-made woman who rose from rags to riches with the aid of determination and the internet. She recently caused a minor uproar when she celebrated her birthday by posting pictures of her brand new Range Rover . Linda is a bit of a wunderkind in the Nigerian context – a single woman who achieved success without any obvious patronage from the establishment.
Yet, questions continue to trail her operations – one of the most critical being allegations of plagiarism from local and international sites. As we said earlier, the source in question in this case is an individual who tweets under the handle @MrAyeDee about security affairs in Nigeria, especially on the insurgency raging in the North-East of the country.
He told TechCabal that he noticed tweets and pictures being used on Linda Ikeji’s blog from around the end of September. Once he noticed this, he attempted to contact Linda through the email address on her site before using Twitter to reach out to her. He claims that the blog has used his content in between 7-8 stories, but only made DMCA Takedown requests for 3. They have since been taken down. He claims that has not been able to make any direct contact with Linda.
As the controversy raged on Twitter, Uduak Oduok, a US-based lawyer who frequently comments on entertainment issues, revealed that the owner of the domain on @MrAyeDee’s Twitter profile – 15past8.com – also owns LindaIkeji.net, suggesting that the two had a history and that perhaps, Alexander was guilty of domain squatting and perhaps to trying to extort Ms Ikeji.
Our investigation revealed that indeed, the domains were owned by the same person – Emmanuel Efremov. Alexander confirmed that his company – 15 Past 8 Media – had acquired the LindaIkeji.net domain name, but he was not privy to the details of his company’s domain operations. He however insisted that they acquired the domain for Linda and have made no money from it since registration. Our search confirmed that the domain has redirected to Linda’s blog practically since registration.
We have reached out to Linda Ikeji for comment but have yet to reach her.  We will update this story as soon as we get a response.

Is Using Tweets in a Story Plagiarism?

One of the questions that has bugged me the most is whether it’s illegal to utilize another person’s tweets in a story.  I’m not sure the answer to that question is “yes”.  Here’s Forbes and Mashable using tweets and pictures from a user’s Twitter account to explain a story about the Osama Bin Laden raid.  Some have argued that the proper way to use tweets is to use the embed function (that’s what we use on TechCabal) but even Forbes sometimes uses screenshots.

What Next for Linda?

So where does that leave one of Nigeria’s biggest content businesses? Linda Ikeji has obviously been a victim of her success. She has built a remarkable audience and generated lots of value as a result, proving that digital content is a viable business. As a result, she’s got the attention of the public – scrutiny was inevitable.
Linda’s business model is predicated on ridiculously low overheads – she keeps a lean staff and ensures that her content acquisition costs are low.  It is inconceivable that these attacks will reduce – and Linda might have to invest in building her content creation team, thereby thinning her margins in the long run.  She might also have to invest in acquiring her domains – which are owned by a bunch of people from Jonathan Santos (LindaIkeji.com), Tosin Odunfa (LindaIkeji.ng), Twinpine Advertising (LindaIkeji.mobi) and 15 Past 8 Media (LindaIkeji.net).  Hosting a site that some estimate delivers 500,000 page views a day will also not be cheap.
But Linda is not a stupid person by any stretch of the imagination.  She’s navigated the digital media landscape rather astutely, and private conversations have shown that, as long as she hasn’t lost her edge, she should be able to leverage this crisis to take her business to the next level.
We await.

source; techcabal

Monday, September 22, 2014

Nigeria can overcome Boko Haram — Tam-George



 
Dr. Austin Tam-George, a former lecturer at the University of Cape Town, currently the Executive Director of the Institute of Communication and Corporate Studies, Lagos, discusses with Sunday Vanguard. His PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, was based on the Niger Delta crisis. He spoke with Jide Ajani, Editor
Boko Haram is waging a war and seizing territory in Nigeria.   How did we get into the insurgency in the North East?
Boko Haram is not just a security threat. It poses the most serious existential threat to Nigeria since 1967. To continue to underestimate this insurgency is an extremely perilous mistake. But to tackle this menace, we must understand its origins. Despite their fundamentalist rhetoric against Western education, Boko Haram ultimately has its roots in politics and poverty.

Dr. Austin Tam-George
If the politics of a country is seen as a form of warfare, then masters of violence will dominate it. This is why thugs, the military, extremist clerics, ethnic bigots, touts and militia of all stripes have dominated Nigeria  s politics since 1960.   So you could say Boko Haram is the latest child of a toxic political tradition that is at least five decades in the making.
In its current form, Boko Haram is a vicious, nimble enemy with suicide bombers and a hateful ideology. It feeds on a global narrative of terror, and has aspirations for its own caliphate. There is credible suspicion that Boko Haram receives support from local politicians in Nigeria. They probably have jihadist networks that stretch as far as Syria.   But Nigeria can defeat Boko Haram.
We need to see a decisive, ironclad determination to confront this threat from its roots to its branches.   All Nigerians must work to confront this threat, with President Jonathan acting as the tip of the spear in this fight. We cannot continue to watch in powerless perplexity as towns are razed, and hundreds of innocent men, women and children are murdered.
The President has said that the military is holding back from launching an all-out operation because it wants the abducted Chibok girls back alive.
I understand the President’s sentiment and the moral horror he faces with every hard choice he makes on this insurgency. But there is a fast-changing reality on the ground. Since the abduction of the 219 Chibok girls, more than 400 innocent people have been killed, more have been abducted, towns have been razed, and thousands of Nigerians have fled to neighbouring countries as refugees. So why hold back?   Which is the greater evil? Why watch a virulent cancer spread?   We need to stop this sickening barbarity by Boko Haram.
In your opinion, what specific actions should the President take?
There are two main ways of resolving any conflict – negotiation during which the parties reach a compromise; or the greater force prevails.
In the case of Boko Haram, it is difficult to see the grounds for compromise since its goals are extreme. Boko Haram is driven not even by Islam, but by bloodlust.
It wants to impose a medieval caliphate on Nigeria. It rejects any form of modernity. It rejects education for children, especially for women and girls. It kidnaps people, bombs crowded markets and schools, rapes and kills at random in pursuit of these goals. How do you negotiate these?