Almost two months ago, I decided that I wanted to try working standing up, rather than sitting down. When sitting in my comfortable, reclining office chair, my posture was terrible, my attention span was narrowing rapidly, and I was constantly battling fatigue. After looking around online a bit, it sounded like standing was the way to go.

So I propped my keyboard and mouse up on a few encyclopedias and gave it a go. The first week was rough on my feet and legs, which ached constantly. I kept a bar stool handy for resting periodically on, but I really tried to stand at least 80% of the time. After that first week, though, things improved rapidly.

My attention span improved, too. I noticed an immediate increase in my ability to focus on a problem for longer, and with greater clarity. When I was blocked by some problem, I was able to just walk away from the desk, whereas before the effort of getting up from my chair often made me prefer to just sit and stew in my frustration.

So now, nearly two months later, I am able to replace my book-stack keyboard platform with a real stand-up desk, and I love it. When I was shopping around for a new desk, I quickly realized that I didn’t want stainless steel or plastic. I wanted wood, being the xylophile that I am. And of all the places that sold wooden stand-up desks, Standupdesks.com(the web outlet for Amish Country Furniture Sales) was the most compelling. I purchased a 4-foot-wide variant of this computer desk, and am very pleased with it so far (it just arrived yesterday). The workmanship is top-notch, and I love its simple elegance.

A U.S.-based Christian group took to the streets of Manila earlier this week to preach that the end of the world is fast approaching — on May 21 at sunset, to be precise.

Volunteers from the religious group Family Radio, a Christian radio network in the United States, donned neon-coloured t-shirts and walked along Manila’s main thoroughfares, handing out pamphlets to passerby with warnings of impending Judgement Day.

The designation of May 21 came from Family Radio president Harold Camping, who predicted that date through a series of mathematical calculations and the unravelling of codes behind the Bible story of the great flood.

He was convinced that God gave hints of doomsday in the scriptures and that it was their job to decode them.

One volunteer, Kenji Hoffman, left his family and his successful job as a mechanic in the U.S to join the Family Radio crusade around the world, used his savings to get to the Philippines.

He said he believed God had left clear signs that the world was coming to an end.

“He gave Abraham warning, he gave Noah warning, he gave Lot warning and he gave Ninevites warning, and so he’s giving us warning that he is about to come,” Hoffman said.

Camping had also predicted that the world would end in September 1994, following previous calculations. After this prediction failed, he said his prediction for 2011 would definitely come true.

But few people in this majority Catholic country appeared to be paying much attention to the warnings.

“It might really happen since there’s a lot of sin in the world. It will happen, but not in the way they were predicting,” said bus inspector Rico Almasan.

“Judgement Day can’t happen on May 21.”

Gerardo Lanuza, a professor at the University of the Philippines specialising in the Sociology of Religion, said that Judgement Day groups had increased in recent years due to the unstable political and economic climate around the world.

“They want to offer people some kind of security, a type of security amidst an insecure world. It’s like okay, the end of the world is coming, what do we do?” he said.

“It’s like they’re saying we have to convince people that they have to change their way of life.”

Despite the sceptical response, members of Family Radio — which was founded in 1959 — remained unfazed.

“The world is temporal. We are seeking for an eternal one, eternal things,” said Leo Arenas, a recent convert.

REUTERS

We need to look at the context as well as the words.

Jesus is the Way.
We find that Jesus is clearly discussing the way a person can find union with God. There is no doubt that a person can find God the Father through Jesus Christ. We must go beyond this. He is the exclusive way. We might fear there are not many roads, but why? If there is one well–marked road, is this not sufficient.

Jesus is the Truth.
He is the full revelation of God. The word 'truth' is used 22 times in the Gospel of John. If we know the Son, we also know the Father. This thought seems to tie back to John 1:1-3.

Last week a friend  wrote about Computer Village, on techcrunch  where many of the gadget-hounds in Lagos go to get their gadgety fix. But what about new technology being developed in the country? The city’s tech entrepreneur scene is small, but several people are working on changing that.

Oo Nwoye–  or @oothenigerian as he’s known on Twitter– is one of the more enthusiastic champions of this nascent scene. (That’s him on the left.) I met him two years ago in London, where he cornered me at an event and made a case for me going to Nigeria, so he was one of the first people I contacted when I finally did.

Since then, he’d moved back home. He’s working on a to-be-determined startup and spending the meantime trying to galvanize a startup community. He organized a fantastic demo day to give me a taste of what people are working on.

In the days leading up to the pitches, I spoke with half a dozen tech entrepreneurs in Nigeria who had a lot of complaints about the ecosystem. There was the ever-present emerging market complaint of not enough venture capital, but the entrepreneurs also complained about the extremely high costs of doing business in Nigeria given how small the online market is so far, the spotty infrastructure, and the lack of enough developers who want to work for startups instead of the big oil companies.

Victor Asemota (pictured at Demo Day with me to the left) moved to back to Nigeria after starting his mobile technology services company in Ghana, lured by the juicy 150 million person population. He pays the same amount for his office space in Nigeria that he used to pay for a house and a comparable office space in Ghana. More galling: Because the infrastructure is so poor in Nigeria, he also has to provided his own power and water backups. “I have to build my own city just to live here,” he said, exasperated.

Asemota also talked about a bigger challenge to building a tech company in Nigeria: The stigma of illicit 419 scams. He’d negotiated a deal with a customer in Florida one time and was wrapping up the meeting by handing the man his business card. Simply seeing that he was from Nigeria killed the deal instantly, Asemota says. The man wouldn’t even keep his business card. I noticed at the end of our dinner, when Asemota handed me his card it listed his company as located in Ghana. And, he says, ground down by the frustrations of doing business in Nigeria, he’ll probably move back there.

So I entered Demo Day halfway through my trip, desperately looking for some hope. I found the first glimpse of it, appropriately, in a guy wearing an Obama Hope T-Shirt. His name was Gbenga Sesan, and he runs a organization called Paradigm Initiative of Nigeria. It takes small delegations of Lagos’s techies into less developed and frequently more violent parts of Nigeria to convince 13-year-olds to get interested in computers. “If you don’t start at 13, they can’t be millionaires by the time they are thirty,” he says.

Another group called Co-Creation Hub immediately caught my attention. It is building an incubator to help entrepreneurs with business advice, funding and mentoring. Their focus is using technology to solve real problems Nigeria faces, not just copying what people read on TechCrunch. It welcomes more than just coders, but teachers, doctors, or anyone from any background that has a dramatic idea of how to make life in Nigeria better. A new co-working space to be opened later this year will operate like an open living lab for social change.

I love that strategy. I always advise entrepreneurs if they want to build a Western-facing consumer Internet company to move for the Valley; it will just be easier. But if they want to be pioneers in their own markets, focus on the problems and endemic strengths there. (And probably read sites like TechCrunch a little less too.)

So right away between Nwoye’s evangelism, Paradigm Initiative of Nigeria’s efforts to build a young generation of coders and Co-Creation Hub’s cushy nest for social change, there was a pretty impressive mix of people actively working to foster an ecosystem. Things were looking up for Nigerian entrepreneurs. The demos started, and I was impressed by many of the companies too. They ran a tight ship doing pitches of no more than five minutes, and there were only a few copy-cat Western Web ideas in the bunch. My favorites are below. I should mention there was also a Garage48 hacker event over the weekend in Lagos that I wasn’t able to attend. The demos from that day are here.

Gyst: This was one of two truly long-term, big-idea, swing-for-the-fences startups I saw in the country. (I’ll write about the other one on Saturday.) Sim Shagaya (pictured to the left) has a Harvard MBA, but don’t hold that against him. After studying in the US and bouncing around the tech and banking world, he returned home to build a traditional old media billboard business.

He’s now leveraging the cash-flow of that to build two exciting new media companies. One is a daily deal site called DealDey. The other is super exciting. It’s called Gyst, and it’s a very local business directory search engine. He hires a bunch of kids throughout the country and gives them each a smart phone with a camera. They go door-to-door, manually getting information and GPS coordinates on every small businesses in the city, gathering the information in a database. Amazingly, nothing like this exists in Nigeria– no Yellow Pages, no local search engines, no 411 service. Like most emerging markets, many cities in West Africa don’t even have a formal system of streets and addresses or a working postal system.

This is an insanely expensive and ambitious project, and it’s 100% bootstrapped by the parent company. The opportunity is huge. It’s Google on a local level combined with Yelp, JustDial,SMSOne, Gigwalk, and a bunch of other exciting companies who rethink cost effective ways to amass huge amounts of local data in one easy-to-access place. “It will take a long time to show the true value of this business, but we’re willing to wait,” Shagaya says. Right now the company has 20,000 business listings, and its ultimate ambition is to index every city in West Africa with more than one million people. And the company will make all that information completely free for users. Whoa.

There are obviously huge synergies between these three businesses. A daily deal site that is tied to billboards and the region’s onlycomprehensive small business directory is a lot more powerful and exciting than a run-of-the-mill Groupon clone. It’s a textbook example of how industries develop in parallel, not serial, in emerging markets, utterly transforming how they develop. Imagine if Clear Channel, Google and Groupon were all the same company. And I love the ambition: Shagaya said he is focused on building nothing less than the Naspers of Nigeria.

Naspers– the South African media conglomerate– is not only one of the most dominant new media companies in Africa, it’s investing in the most important new media companies in the emerging world. One of their companies, DealFish, was even a sponsor of this Demo Day. It’s about time a continent as big as Africa has more than one new media powerhouse. This company is one to watch.

Skoola: This company has taken several years of Nigeria and Western Africa’s standardized tests and converted them into a basic test prep app that can run on any mobile phone, smart or dumb. I asked how big the market is and the whole room laughed. This is the test everyone takes if they have any ambition of higher education.

The business– which is so clear that the entrepreneur pitched in under three minutes– is a no brainer on a lot of levels. More people have phones in the developing world than toilets so it’s the ideal medium, and it’s a way to kill time sitting in traffic and further your education at the same time. It’s a perfect example of how to build a mass market product in a country like Nigeria: It’s distributed on the broadest possible platform, solving a problem a huge percentage of the population has, and priced for volume at less than $.30 per test. The company is working on French translations so neighboring West African countries can use the product too. I’m amazed I haven’t seen something like this in India. I’m sure it already exists. If it doesn’t, it should.

Traffic Nigeria: Speaking of the need to kill time in traffic, this company uses crowd-sourcing to monitor the traffic in Lagos, delivering results over the Web or SMS. 

Also not featured on The Techcrunch Article we have 

9jabook.com a nigerian social network powered site who are presently offering members partnership options

9jax.net a link sharing and advert partnership site 

9jamovies.com a youtube embedding website 

http://ojoojoo.com  a search nigeria site powered by google search modified greatly for nigerian websites ! 

A stash of pornography was found in the hideout of Osama bin Laden by the U.S. commandos who killed him, current and former U.S. officials said on Friday.

The pornography recovered in bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive, according to the officials, who discussed the discovery with Reuters on condition of anonymity.

The officials said they were not yet sure precisely where in the compound the pornography was discovered or who had been viewing it. Specifically, the officials said they did not know if bin Laden himself had acquired or viewed the materials.

Reports from Abbottabad have said that bin Laden's compound was cut off from the Internet or other hard-wired communications networks. It is unclear how compound residents would have acquired the pornography.

But a video released by the Obama administration confiscated from the compound showed bin Laden watching pictures of himself on a TV screen, indicating that the compound was equipped with video playback equipment.

Materials carted away from the compound by the U.S. commandos included digital thumb drives, which U.S. officials believe may have been a principal means by which couriers carried electronic messages to and from the late al Qaeda leader.

Three other U.S. officials familiar with evidence gathered during investigations of other Islamic militants said the discovery of pornography is not uncommon in such cases.

(Reporting by Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria; editing by Warren Strobel)

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. 

if you house Mad Dogs be prepared to face the Grim fact that charity begins at home ! Scary to imagine what they would do to the US if they get the chance .

U.S. special forces flew in from Afghanistan to find and kill bin Laden at his hideout in a northern Pakistani town on May 2. Pakistan welcomed the killing of bin Laden as a major step against militancy but was outraged by the secret U.S. raid that got him, saying it was a violation of its sovereignty.
The discovery of bin Laden in the town of Abbottabad, near the country's top military academy, has, however, deepened suspicion in the United States that Pakistani security forces knew where he was hiding.
Bin Laden's followers have vowed revenge for his death and the Pakistani Taliban said the Friday attack by two suicide bombers on a paramilitary academy in the northwestern town of Charsadda was their first taste of vengeance.

"There will be more," militant spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said by telephone from an undisclosed location.
The attackers struck as the recruits were going on leave and 65 of them were among the 80 dead. Pools of blood strewn with soldiers caps and shoes lay on the road outside the academy as the wounded, looking dazed with parts of their clothes ripped away by shrapnel, were loaded into trucks.
Shahid Ali, 28, was on his way to his shop when the bombs went off. He tried to help survivors. "A young boy was lying near a wrecked van asked me to take him to hospital. I got help and we got him into a vehicle," Ali said.

Hours after the bombing, a U.S. drone aircraft fired missiles at a vehicle in the North Waziristan region on the Afghan border, killing five militants, Pakistani security officials said.
It was the fourth drone attack since bin Laden was killed, inflaming another sore issue between Pakistan and the United States. Pakistan officially objects to these attacks, saying they violate its sovereignty. It also says the civilians casualties complicate its efforts to fight militants by gaining the support of local villagers.

The United States says the drone strikes are carried out under an agreement with Pakistan and it has made clear it will go after militants in Pakistan when it finds them.

Pakistan Taliban turn against state

The bomb attack was a grim reminder of the militant threat Pakistan faces even as bin Laden's discovery 50 km (30 miles) from the capital has revived suspicion of Pakistani double-dealing.

The Pakistan Taliban, close allies of al Qaeda, are fighting to bring down the nuclear-armed state and impose their vision of Islamist rule. They launched their war in earnest in 2007, after security forces cleared militant gunmen from a radical mosque in the capital, killing about 100 people. Pakistan has long used militants as proxies to oppose the influence of its old rival India, and is widely believed to be helping some factions even while battling others.
It has rejected as absurd suggestions its security agencies might have known where bin Laden was hiding.
The United States has long pressed Pakistan to tackle Afghan Taliban taking shelter in Pakistani enclaves on the border but the chance of greater cooperation with the United States appears to have been dented by the U.S. raid to get bin Laden.
The chairman of Pakistan's joint chiefs of staff committee, General Khalid Shameem Wynne, has canceled a five-day visit to the United States beginning on May 22.

"He called his U.S. counterpart ... and informed him that the visit could not be undertaken under existing circumstances," a military official told Reuters. He did not elaborate but the decision to cancel the visit came as the cabinet defense committee said it was reviewing cooperation with the United States on counter-terrorism.

The parameters of such cooperation would be clearly defined "in accordance with Pakistan's national interests and the aspirations of the people," the committee said in a statement. The military and government have also come in for criticism at home, partly for failing to find bin Laden but more for failing to detect or stop the unauthorized U.S. raid to kill him.
Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani will be at a closed-door briefing by military officials to parliament later on Friday.
Some U.S. lawmakers have called for suspending aid to Pakistan because of doubts about its commitment in going after violent Islamists.
But President Barack Obama's administration has stressed the importance of maintaining cooperation with Pakistan in the interests of battling militancy and bringing stability to neighboring Afghanistan.

Officers of the Nigeria Police Force have arrested three men who specialise in stealing from mourners in Lagos. The suspects, Mukaila Musibau, Olatunji Kayode, and Uche Mba, were arrested at about 7p.m. on Tuesday by officers of the Area F police station, Ikeja at the wake keeping ceremony of Moses Aboyede Pearce, 87, at his residence on Oluwole Street, Ikeja.

The suspects had successfully stolen seven mobile phones, wristwatches and other valuables from unsuspecting mourners at the event when the vigilant officers who were strategically positioned and acting on a tip-off arrested the suspects. The suspects had earlier that day robbed mourners at another funeral event which was held for late Veronica Ojo, who until her death was a pastor with the Redeemed Christian Church of God.

Modus operandi

The robbers' modus operandi, according to the police, involved gathering information from newspapers about big funeral events, dressing up as mourners or cameramen, and during prayer sessions, or whenever people were not watching, stealing from the mourners who were usually too filled with grief to notice any crime being committed around them. The suspects luck ran out when the officers who had been briefed on the new strategy being employed by the robbers by victims from other funeral events, swooped on them while they were picking mourners' pockets during the prayer session for the deceased.

Mr Mba one of the suspects said he usually pretended to be a camera man at funeral events.

"I pretend to be a video coverage man so I will be recording people," Mr Mba said. "But when they are not looking, I will pick their handsets and other valuables from the table. Other members of my gang will pretend to be camera men taking false pictures whereas their main aim is to steal from the mourners."

Mr Musibau, a second member of the gang said the robbers capitalized on the sad state of mind of the mourners.

"There are bigger guys in our syndicate who will come to the funeral wearing fine clothes and driving big cars but their aim is to rob the mourners. We know ourselves whenever we meet at such event," Mr Musibau further confessed.

Another member of the gang, Mr Olatunji, revealed how the gang obtained information about their victims.

"We read papers. Like the one we went to, we got the information of the deceased from the PUNCH newspaper on Monday. We will read the obituary pages and see big men funeral, so we will know that other big men will come so that is how we get information about our targets," he said.

Motorcycle thieves

In another development, the Alapere divison of the police command on Wednesday arrested four persons for armed robbery. The suspects, Seyi John, Wasiu Adeyemi, Ibrahim Buhari, and Michael Gbadamosi, were arrested in a Mosque located at number 6, Onalaoluwapo street, Alapere.

The suspects, accused of stealing motorcycles, were almost lynched by a mob which attacked them with cutlasses and other dangerous weapons before they were rescued by the police. The suspects denied the allegations.

"We were just sleeping in the mosque for safety when members of the public swooped on us with dangerous weapons calling us thieves," one of them said. "But we are not thieves. We were coming from Bariga late in the night so we decided to sleep in the mosque till the next day."

Police spokesperson, Samuel Jinadu, said the suspects will be charged to court after a thorough investigation.

Councillor Tayo Situ, the Nigerian-born London Mayor in the Borough of Southwark, London South-East is dead. He was representing Peckham Ward. According to the Councillor’s spokesman and Publicity Secretary, Councillor Situ breathed his last breath at about 23:00 hrs, on Monday May 9, 2011 after a brief illness.

“With a grieved heart but thanks to God Almighty, I confirm that the once energetic, compassionate, servant leader and former number one citizen of London Borough of Southwark, Councillor Tayo Adelani Situ, departed this sinful world, to meet his creator at 23:01 Hours, last night, 9 May 2011, after a brief illness”, Mr Amos Akin Adejinmi announced on Tuesday morning.

His latest public engagement would have been the reception of Osun State governor, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola who arrived to receive a bequeathed honour from his domain, Borough of Southwark about ten days ago. By then, his health had waned which led to his eldest son playing host to the visiting governor.

“He is survived by his wife, five children (which includes set of twins) and two grand children,” added the statement issued by Mr Adejinmi. The Nigerian community in London has been mourning the illustrious Nigerian who has found his name in the history book of British politics as a Mayor.

Tayo Situ has stamped Nigeria’s emblem in the body politic of British politics and has represented the voice of Nigerian community as a councillor for long in London South-East Borough of Southwark. He hails from Iwo in Osun State and assumed his mayoral post just after last year’s British election, having been denied the position four years earlier after political events in the Borough favoured another party.

He was promptly installed with his party, Labour’s victory in the Borough just May last year. His spell in politics started in 2002 when he contested for the Peckham ward councilorship in the Southwark Council on the platform of the Labour Party and won to make representation for his ward. He has since been a major force of reckoning due to his political activities and humane representation, demonstration of humility, astuteness, loyalty and passionate servitude.

A councillor in Peckham since 2002, the Mayor came to the UK from Nigeria in 1985. He studied accountancy at South Bank University and ran his own business. As a Councillor, his priorities were to see more jobs for local people and better services for the young and vulnerable. He lived locally and was a trustee and elder of his church. He was a devoted husband, father to five children and also a grandfather. His wife Mrs Abike Situ is consort and his son Michael is also a councillor.

According to Adejimi, funeral arrangement for the departed will be communicated to his teaming fans across the world as soon as it is concluded. However, three condolence registers have been opened for the likable councillor who had impacted on the life of many in his doming, Southwark Council.

Councillor Situ assumed his mayoral duty last year just after the general election. He had been a major actor in the Southeast politics influencing the life of many other communities. Africans will always remember him for serving their interests. He will be seriously missed by all his close associates, youths alike and political rivals with whom he had had the privilege of impacting in their lives.

Since the result of Anambra Central Senatorial election was announced and Dr. Chris Ngige of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) was declared the winner by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Dora Akunyili’s immediate family members cannot help but laugh hilariously over her failure. A source close to the family informed that the family, who are not on good terms with the former NAFDAC boss, had earlier predicted her woes before the election. And when she failed, they went into jubilation as they condemned her being picked to contest the seat. “They never wished her success in her political aspiration because she is not good to them at all. She is always full of herself as she has fought every member of her family,” said our source

Why did you people not grant them access to Osama ! Una wait make him die ! Hi wifeys dem na terrorists ? 

PAKISTANI Interior Minister Rehis country would grant the United States (U.S.) investigators access to Osama bin Laden’s wives,

Also, former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has denied that his administration struck an agreement with the U.S. years ago to let American special forces kill or capture Osama bin Laden inside Pakistan.

Meanwhile, news outlets in Pakistan have made public the name of an American they identified as the CIA station chief, but a senior Pakistani intelligence official said on Monday the person named was not the station chief.

Referring to a name cited in the Pakistani newspaper, The Nation, the intelligence official said: “If we were going to release the name, we would release the right one.” The official said he did not know where the name came from.

A U.S. official said there is “no current plan to bring home the current chief of station” in Pakistan.

The remarks came amid reports suggesting Pakistani officials may have leaked the name of a CIA official in the country.

However, on Monday, a senior Pakistani intelligence source had said the United States could only question bin Laden’s wives if their “country of origin has been asked for permission.”

But Malik, in an interview yesterday with CNN, refused to give a timeline of when U.S. officials might speak with the wives and did not say where the access would take place.

Pakistani officials have said bin Laden’s family members will be repatriated to their home countries after initial interrogations. One of bin Laden’s wives is from Yemen, the official said, while a well-placed U.S. official who would not speak on the record said the other two are from Saudi Arabia.

All three were taken into Pakistani custody after the May 2 raid by U.S. commandos that killed bin Laden, the leader of the al Qaeda terrorist movement.

The 29-year-old Yemeni wife, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, was wounded during the raid. The U.S. official identified the other two women as Khairiah Sabar, also known as “Umm Hamza,” and Siham Sabar, or “Umm Khalid.”

While U.S. officials have raised questions about how bin Laden could have hidden for years in a compound in a city with heavy Pakistani military presence, Malik denied any suggestions that the world’s most wanted terrorist may have had a support network in the Pakistani government, military or intelligence services.

Militants against whom Pakistan has been battling would have been the ones providing support, Malik said.

Meanwhile, Musharraf’s denial follows a report in a British newspaper that Washington and Islamabad reached a secret deal nearly a decade ago allowing the U.S. to conduct operations against bin Laden and two other top al-Qaeda leaders on Pakistani soil.

“Pervez Musharraf has seen a media report, and let me make it clear that no such agreement had been signed during his tenure,” said Musharraf’s spokesman, Fawad Chaudhry. “Also, there was no verbal understanding.”

U.S. Navy Seals conducted a unilateral operation May 2 inside Pakistan that killed bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist. The pre-dawn raid was viewed by many Pakistanis as a national humiliation delivered by a deeply unpopular America.

In a report published last Thursday, The Guardian newspaper, quoting U.S. officials and retired Pakistani officials, said Musharraf and former President George W. Bush struck the agreement after bin Laden escaped U.S. forces in the mountains of Tora Bora in late 2001. If such a raid were conducted, the agreement was that Pakistani officials would publicly denounce the U.S. unilateral action.

“The Guardian report is baseless,” Chaudhry said.

In an Associated Press interview in January 2002, Gen. Tommy Franks, who headed the U.S. Central Command at the time, disclosed a deal with Pakistan allowing U.S. troops in Afghanistan to cross the border in pursuit of fugitive extremist leaders, including bin Laden. Pakistan denied such a deal existed.

“If there is any such agreement, the Pakistan government should place it in the parliament, and if there was any agreement, the American government should make it public,” Chaudhry told the AP from Dubai, where the country’s former military ruler is staying.

He added that during his tenure, Musharraf “always rejected the U.S. request about launc

Royal wedding: Sarah, Duchess of York speaks of 'difficult' snub Sarah, Duchess of York has spoken publicly for the first time about being snubbed by the Royal Family over the guest list to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.


The Duchess, who was a close friend of Prince William’s mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, told a US talk show that it had been “difficult” not to have been invited.
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, she said that she had gone to Thailand while the wedding was taking place.
Her daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, attended the Westminster Abbey service with their father, the Duke of York.
The two princesses attracted lively discussion in fashion forums for their striking choice of hats by the designer Philip Treacy.
The Duchess, who is to have her own show on Winfrey’s cable channel, is understood to have turned down a slew of lucrative offers from US television channels to offer commentary on the day of the wedding
Her spokeswoman said in February that she had “never expected” to be invited.
In the interview, to be screened in America today, she admitted that she would have liked to have been with her daughters and former husband the Duke of York.
But despite the snub she paid tribute to Prince William saying that the late Diana, Princess of Wales "would be so proud of her son."
Last year, the Duchess was filmed by an undercover reporter posing as an Indian businessman offering access to her former husband, Britain’s trade ambassador, for £500,000.

Sarah and Prince Andrew married at Westminster Abbey in 1986 -- they divorced a decade later in 1996.
Despite their split, Sarah said her ex-husband, the Duke of York, Prince Andrew, kept her involved in their daughters' wedding preparations and the spirit of Will and Kate's big day.

Businesses have reported requests from one in five people to have time off work and many are also keeping children away from school and heading to the beach or country for the day. Romans are taking it so seriously that local newspapers have even been publishing survival guides with tips of what to do – if – the ground starts to tremble. The panic has been fanned by Facebook, Twitter and text messages around a prediction by Raffaele Bendani, a seismologist who forecast in 1915 that a "big one" would hit Rome on Wednesday.
He is also said to have predicted other earthquakes which hit Italy during the last hundred years before his death in 1979.
Massimo La Rocca, headmaster of a school in the Trastevere district, said: "We have had quite a few parents calling in and saying they will not be sending their children in.

LAGOS-A Yaba Magistrate court has been told how a fake lawyer, Samuel Oladipupo Jibode allegedly duped a 75 years old man, Mr. Monsuru Adeyemi, of N10 million under the pretense of selling a property to him. advertisement In his testimony to the court weekend, Mr. Adeyemi, said Jibode hid his personality and used another prominent lawyer's name, Mr. David Olufemi, to swindle him of N10 million.

He told the presiding Magistrate A. O. Isaac that when the accused approached him, he had the inclination that the proposal for the purchase of the building may not afterall be genuine, but the moment he, the accused person, mentioned the name of the lawyer to him, he released the money. Under cross-examination by counsel representing the accused person, Mr. Adeyemi said on 14 May 2010, the agent, Mr, Ojo, and himself, one Mr. Oluyewola, the landlord of the building, Mr. Jegede, and two of Jegede's children went to Mr. Jibode's office at Oyingbo to pay the agreed sum of N10 million. He added that he was to pay a balance of N2 million after all the process have been completed. He told the court:

"I told him not to gamble with me. This is my retirement benefit from my pension from flour mill. I want to buy this house so that at my old age I will not suffer to train my children in school. "I complained about the Deed of Assignment which he prepared because there was no seal on it. Lawyer Jibode asked me not to worry. He called me three days latter on phone and told me that the landlord has been strangled to death by an unknown person." "I rushed down only to discovered that he has park out of his office and his phone numbers were no more reachable."