ONE of the youth corps members engaged in the ongoing registration exercise in Delta State has drowned in the River Niger.

The corps member, whose identity was not immediately ascertained was posted as one of the ad-hoc staff of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to register voters at Oko, a riverine community near Asaba....

The state police command, it was learnt had engaged the services of divers to fish out his corpse. Circumstances leading to the death were still sketchy at press time, but the State Police Public Relations Officer, PPRO, Mr. Charles Muka, told our reporter, yesterday, that "it is true that the corps member drowned in the River Niger. He was posted to Oko community and his clothes were found on the bank of the river."

Also confirming the incident, the INEC's Chief Public Affairs Officer, Mr. Livy Unuibe, said "the Commission is aware of the tragic incident."

Meanwhile, the member representing Oshimili South constituency at the State House of Assembly, Mr. Eugene Okonji has called on the people of Asaba and Oko communities to participate actively in the ongoing registration exercise.

Police say the nature of fraud, much of it involving modern technology, is "constantly evolving"

Fraud costs the UK economy £38bn a year, with more than half of that suffered by the public sector, according to official estimates.

The National Fraud Authority (NFA) said that if the total cost was broken down, every UK adult would be £765 worse off.

The NFA said "a stronger counter-fraud culture" was needed.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said the £21bn cost of public sector fraud could pay for 800 secondary schools or 615,000 nurses...

He said: "Contrary to what many people think, fraud and error is not just confined to benefits and revenue.

"It affects every government department and impacts on the government's ability to deliver better public services, while stripping the civil service of vital resources. We can't and won't allow this to happen any more."

The cost to the private sector was £12bn and charities lost £1.3bn, the NFA reported, while individuals' losses were estimated at £4bn.

Frauds included marketing scams, bogus operators, fake lotteries and online ticketing and rental crimes.

The scale of public sector fraud reflected better reporting procedures, said the researchers, who added that it remained a relatively small proportion of total spending.

Bernard Herdan, of the NFA, said the authority's annual fraud indicator was a "blueprint" for work to tackle the "rising tide" of fraud.

Everyone should make an effort to protect themselves and share information on suspicious behaviour with the authorities, he said.

"We want to develop a stronger counter-fraud culture, which helps to disrupt fraudulent activity across the UK and globally," Mr Herdan said.

Last year's first annual fraud indicator reported a total cost of £30bn, but the NFA said the two reports were not directly comparable because some areas of fraud had been included for the first time this year.

Tobechi Onwuhara (right) at a Dallas nightclub with Ezenwa Onyedebelu.   

FORTUNE -- A luxury suite at the W Hotel in Dallas is as good a place as any to conquer the world. At least it seemed that way in 2007 when Tobechi Onwuhara got the crew together. They'd meet there often, seven or eight of them. Some had nicknames from the Ian Fleming lexicon: C, Q, and E. Others were called Mookie, Orji, Uche. They would spread out on designer sofas and at the wet bar, open three-ring binders, and fire up laptops with hard-to-trace wireless cards. On a nearby table there'd be prepaid cellphones with area codes taped to them. A phone for Southern California. A phone for Northern Virginia. A phone for any place Onwuhara had found the "good money.".

In those days, the good money wasn't hard to find. The housing boom had flooded the country with capital. Lenders were making promiscuous loans to unsophisticated borrowers.

It was an ideal environment for Onwuhara, 27, a brilliant, pug-faced visionary who favored True Religion jeans and Ed Hardy shirts. Looking out over the neon skyline of downtown Dallas, it was easy for the crew to believe his assurances: He'd make them rich. When the sun glinted off one of his $100,000 diamond-encrusted Audemars Piguet watches, who could doubt it? Every few months he would buy a new Maserati or Bentley. He owned expensive properties in Miami, Dallas, and Phoenix. He even had a secret love condo in the W, where scantily clad women visited in such numbers that one bellhop became convinced that the first-generation Nigerian-American was a porn director.

The truth was very different. In his ancestral homeland, Onwuhara might have been a chief. In America he became one of the world's most successful cyberscammers, a criminal genius who used his talents to filet a poorly regulated banking and credit system. In less than three years Onwuhara stole a confirmed $44 million, according to the FBI, which believes the total may be anywhere from $80 million to $100 million. All he needed was an Internet connection and a cellphone.

Onwuhara called it "washing." He'd set up a boiler room in a fancy hotel (the Waldorf-Astoria was another favorite) to wash information on wealthy victims. Then he'd wash bank accounts. One group in his crew would do online research using databases and websites to harvest names, dates of birth, and mortgage information. They'd build profiles of victims for a second group, who would call banks posing as account holders. The callers cadged security information and passwords. Then Onwuhara would breach the accounts and wire funds from them to a network of money mules he had established in Asia. The money would be laundered and wired back to his accounts in the U.S.

"I call it modern-day bank robbery," says FBI special agent Michael Nail. "You can sit at home in your PJs and slippers with a laptop, and you can actually rob a bank."

Onwuhara specialized in hitting home equity lines of credit (HELOCs), the reservoirs of cash that banks make available to homeowners. Once Onwuhara gained access to a HELOC, he could siphon out vast sums in seconds. His weapon was persuasion. It got him enough money to start building a colonnaded fortress in Nigeria; enough to gamble at the high-stakes tables in Vegas casinos all night. Even his accomplices appear not to have known how much he was really pulling down -- not even his beautiful fiancée, Precious Matthews.

"He was playing all of us," says Paula Gipson, a member of the crew. "The banks, us, Precious, everybody."

Conversations with Gipson and other Onwuhara associates, interviews with his family and with investigators, and hundreds of pages of court documents reveal a digital scavenger of extraordinary creativity and guile. Onwuhara orchestrated his swindles using information about homeowners that is widely available online. In fragments, this information is innocuous. When assembled properly, it can be used like an electronic skeleton key to get into almost any credit account. Onwuhara needed only a few short years to rack up an illicit fortune. And he's still at large.

The son of an entrepreneur

The state of Abia in Nigeria stretches from the plains in the north to the riverine flats in the south and resembles, on a map, a giraffe's head. It is a swath of farmland filled with yam fields, cashew orchards, and the sorrowful memories of the Igbo people. The Igbo are Christian, but they jokingly call themselves "black Jews" because so many leave home to establish themselves in business. Abia is their heartland. In the late 1960s it was part of Biafra, a secessionist state with the misfortune of sitting atop vast oil deposits. When the Nigerian civil war erupted, more than a million Biafrans were killed or starved to death. Onwuhara's parents survived.

His father, Doris, was an entrepreneur, one of the first people in Nigeria to import satellite TVs. He built the first major hotel in Abia's capital, Umuahia. Visitors came from miles away to dance in the hotel's nightclub. As Umuahia expanded and land values appreciated, so did Doris's influence. He moved into politics, held office, and managed a successful campaign for a governor of Abia.

Onwuhara's mother, Katherine, was equally accomplished. A lawyer and literary critic, she served as chairwoman of Abia's board of education. The four daughters she had with Doris would go on to be nurses and ministers. But her fifth child, her only son, would be different. He would be American. Katherine was five months pregnant with Tobechi when she left Nigeria to attend school in Houston. "Tobe" was born there in 1979.

Katherine returned to Nigeria when Tobe was still a boy, leaving him with an uncle in Houston. She thought the tight-knit diaspora would look after him. But once Tobe reached his teenage years he started skipping school and getting into trouble. The family shipped him back to Nigeria at age 15 and enrolled him in a boarding school run by the Marist Brothers, a Catholic order known for educational discipline. Onwuhara graduated and enrolled in medical school at Abia State University. He was by all accounts an exceptionally clever, shy boy who spoke infrequently but eloquently. He longed to return to the U.S.

In 1999, Onwuhara moved back to Texas. He rented an apartment in Dallas and took classes at Brookhaven College. He found a job as a loan officer at Capital One (COF, Fortune 500). He learned how banks worked from the inside, studying documents and procedures. (Capital One declines to discuss Onwuhara.) Then he turned to crime. With the help of a friend who had connections at Discover Financial Services (DFS, Fortune 500), Onwuhara cooked up driver's licenses and credit cards under the names of real customers, according to court documents. He bought electronics at CompUSA. He hit up restaurants and clubs. That was how he met Precious Matthews, a pretty Baylor student majoring in speech communication. Matthews worked as a waitress; Onwuhara was a regular, flirtatious customer. When Precious warned him the establishment was suspicious of his transactions, Onwuhara was smitten. The two started dating and were soon engaged.

In 2002, Onwuhara was arrested three times in Texas for credit card fraud. The police raided his apartment and found incriminating evidence. Onwuhara had mastered some techniques of identity theft and stolen more than $100,000 with an accomplice, according to a statement he gave to the authorities, but he was still a fledgling criminal making silly mistakes. Chief among them was going into a store or a bank in person to commit fraud. He would learn later to distance himself from a crime and leave few traces of his involvement. But not yet.

When the heat in Texas got too great, Onwuhara left for Seattle to meet Abel Nnabue, a Nigerian friend known as "Q." On Dec. 12, 2002, the two men drove to a bank in Lynwood, Wash., their wallets packed with fake IDs and unauthorized credit cards. Nnabue waited in their gold Plymouth Neon rental car while Onwuhara entered the bank to try for a $5,000 cash advance. When the bank called the police, Onwuhara bolted outside and into the Neon, just as a cruiser arrived. Nnabue sped away on wet streets, gunning the Neon through stop signs. Two more cop cars joined the chase; Onwuhara threw his wallet out the window. The police cornered the men in the parking lot of a Korean church. Onwuhara fled on foot, and a K-9 unit found him hiding in a pond. In May 2003 he was sentenced to 12 months in prison.

"I'm deeply and sincerely sorry," he told a federal judge. "You'll never again see me in any kind of trouble with the law or hear anything negative about me from this day forward."

By the time Onwuhara got out of prison, the housing market was bubbling.

"He made it thunderstorm."

The Dallas Gentlemen's Club is one of Texas's bawdiest fleshpots, a highway-side warehouse of grinding booty and slack-jawed marks. The club attracts big spenders -- athletes, rap stars -- but Onwuhara made them look like flunkies. When he walked in, the strippers would beeline for him, their cellphones lighting up as they called their off-duty friends: "Get over here! T just showed up!" They knew what to expect -- $650 bottles of Cristal, $2,000 stacks of ones for his entourage, $50,000 in a briefcase he'd empty out. During a single song, he'd drop so much money the girls needed two more songs to scoop all the bills off the floor. He'd repeat this performance several times a week.

"He didn't just make it rain," one dancer would later tell the authorities. "He made it thunderstorm."

At the end of the night, Onwuhara liked to idle outside the club in his $300,000 Rolls-Royce Phantom waiting for the girls to exit, according to interviews with FBI investigators. When he saw one he liked, he'd simply point. She was coming back to the W. If women were his weakness, strippers were his vice. But Precious would eventually find out. Still engaged, she and Onwuhara had moved in together.

The studious, soft-spoken Tobe had disappeared. Onwuhara, now known as "T," was the owner of S.W.A.T. Up Entertainment, a rap label; a deluxe apartment in Dallas and a mansion in Miramar, Fla.; and a diamond chain the size of a tow rope that he wore around his neck. Dangling at the end of the chain was a grinning mini-T clutching sacks of money like a cartoon bank robber, which is what Onwuhara increasingly resembled.

In hindsight, it seems obvious that a savvy cybercriminal would target HELOCs. From 1998 to 2007, the percentage of homeowners with HELOCs jumped from 10.6% to 18.4%. Credit balances soared. All the information a scammer needed was available online. The trick was cobbling it together. Onwuhara taught himself how.

Using ListSource, a direct-marketing company, he'd collect mortgage information on married couples with million-dollar homes. They qualified for high HELOCs. He'd find lease or loan papers through public databases and pay sites, then use Photoshop to grab homeowners' signatures off documents. Next, he'd build a profile of the victim by paying for a background search through skip-tracing sites. That would give him birth dates, Social Security numbers, names of relatives, previous addresses, employment histories, and more. To get a mother's maiden name he would use Ancestry.com.

Profile in hand, he would run a credit check on victims through annualcreditreport.com, a website set up by the big three credit-reporting agencies. Onwuhara had discovered a flaw in the Experian portion of the site, which screened users with a personalized security question and several multiple-choice answers. Users had to click on the correct answer to proceed. But when Onwuhara refreshed his browser, he found that the site replaced certain answers with new ones. Clearly, these were red herrings. Onwuhara knew the correct answer to the security question would appear persistently on screen as he refreshed. Enough refreshing would eventually reveal the true answer and allow Onwuhara to access reports. (A spokesman for Experian says that the company is cooperating with law enforcement authorities and that "since this case we have refined our security protocol.") The reports provided Onwuhara with details about the victim's HELOC. He preferred credit union HELOCs: They were soft targets.

At this point artistry came into play. Onwuhara used a phone service called SpoofCard to make any number he wanted appear in a caller ID. This was key to his scam. With SpoofCard, Onwuhara could fool financial institutions into thinking his call originated from the victim's phone. Onwuhara knew the system. He knew the questions he'd get. Usually he had the answers, along with account numbers, balances, and passwords. Altering his gravelly voice like a professional actor, he could switch ethnicity, age, and accent on a whim. A customer service rep was easy prey.

Once in, Onwuhara would wire HELOC money out of the country. Financial institutions faxed wire transfer requests to his e-fax account, which converted faxes to e-mails. After attaching Photoshopped signatures and phony headers, he would send the forms back. The money would be wired to banks in Asia where mules that Onwuhara had recruited would withdraw the money, take a cut, and redeposit the funds into other accounts or with hawalas, informal money brokers who ask few questions.

Finally, the money would be wired back to the U.S. into accounts Onwuhara controlled. At one point he received a 40-million-euro transfer. He would further launder the money by depositing it in casinos and cashing out in checks days later. He would also buy ultra-expensive luxury cars, drive them for a few months, then ship them to Nigeria, where they would be resold at a steep markup. Onwuhara was clearing about $7 million every two weeks, according to the FBI.

The mastermind shared few details of the scam, even with his inner circle. Precious Matthews and Paula Gipson knew the most, mainly because Onwuhara couldn't impersonate women on the phone. He needed them to pose as female account holders and had to give them more information. Nnabue gathered mortgage information and loan documents. Ezenwa ("E") Onyedebelu, a promising young student from Dallas whom Onwuhara had tapped as his protégé, laundered money. Henry Obilo, a hulking pre-med student who doubled as Onwuhara's bodyguard, specialized in Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) information.

Onwuhara doled out profits according to a person's role. Callers received more than researchers, and members of the crew competed to work the phones. If they weren't slick enough, Onwuhara bumped them back to online scutwork. All the money, all the information, ran through him. He never stored sensitive data on his computer, keeping it instead on a flash drive he could easily destroy. But no matter the precautions he took to cover his tracks, something was bound to go awry. Sometimes you just hit the wrong man.

The net tightens

On Dec. 8, 2007, Robert "Duke" Short sat down in front of his PC. It was around 10 a.m., a few hours before Short was to take his wife to their regular weekend lunch near their home in Alexandria, Va. Short wanted to check his accounts at the U.S. Senate Federal Credit Union. A former U.S. Treasury agent, Short arrived in D.C. from South Carolina as the Treasury Department's national chief of investigations. He got into politics and became Strom Thurmond's chief of staff. He spent 30 years on Capitol Hill. He was, in other words, the wrong man to hit.

That morning, Short couldn't log into his account. His password had been changed, and the credit union was closed. Short called in on Monday. When he accessed his account, he saw that $280,000 was missing, most of it from his high-limit HELOC account.

"They said this money was transferred to Korea," he recalls. "They said, 'Are you sure you didn't do that?' I said, 'Listen, if that amount of money was transferred to Korea, I would know.'"

The credit union would protect Short from any losses -- in fact, almost all of Onwuhara's victims eventually had their monetary losses covered by their financial institutions, although they still had to cope with the shock of identity theft and ruined credit ratings.

Short called the Alexandria police department, the Secret Service, and the FBI. Within days an investigation was underway.

The investigators' first clue came from the IP addresses used to log in to Short's account. The FBI determined that someone had called the credit union to reset Short's password, sounding like an older white man. The caller claimed that the auto login to his account had vanished after his son had set up a new computer for him. He was convincing. But after the password was reset, the caller logged in to Short's account while still on the phone. The FBI now had a precise IP address to track. It belonged to a Verizon Wireless Internet card registered to a fictitious name and a real address in Miramar, Fla., just a few doors down from Onwuhara's mansion, a fact the FBI would discover later.

Onwuhara bought wireless Internet service with prepaid debit cards, making him virtually untraceable. But he still had to go to a Verizon store to make purchases. Two deposits had been made to the Verizon account tied to the Short crime. Both occurred in Plano, Texas. When investigators pulled security video from the store, they saw three men at a kiosk. One was wearing an Ed Hardy hoodie covered in rhinestone skulls. Investigators began looking for names.

They knew their thief had intercepted a call from the credit union to Short to confirm the wire transfer. Onwuhara had duped Short's phone company into remotely forwarding calls to Onwuhara's cell, a tactic he used often. But it backfired when investigators obtained a list of phones to which customers' home numbers were being forwarded. On the list, they found numerous prepaid phone numbers. Calls were being made from these numbers to banks across the country and to 1-800 numbers belonging to SpoofCard. These were the scammers' virtual fingerprints.

An FBI search warrant produced 1,500 recorded calls connected to the suspicious SpoofCard accounts. (SpoofCard says that it doesn't routinely record calls made over its system, but that callers may opt to do so.) The tapes were a jackpot for investigators. "There were so many different voices," says FBI special agent Hadley Etienne. "They all knew what to say. They all had it down."

For months investigators listened to the tapes, hoping for a break. "You know how it is when you're reading a good book and you're just reading and reading and reading," says Michael Nail, the lead FBI investigator. "It was like that. I was at home one weekend listening to calls. And this one call came up."

In it, Onwuhara does a pitch-perfect impersonation of a middle-aged white doctor calling in a prescription to a CVS (CVS, Fortune 500) pharmacy. The prescription was for Valtrex, a herpes medication. The patient was Tobe Onwuhara. At last, investigators had a name. They pulled a Texas DMV photo of Onwuhara. It matched the image of the man in the hoodie from the Verizon video. Their quarry was in reach, but they needed more evidence.

In April 2008, agents detained Onwuhara, Nnabue, Matthews, and Obilo at J.F.K. International Airport in New York. The group was flying home after a vacation in Nigeria. They had stayed at the Ritz in London during their stopover. Onwuhara had even brought his diamond chain. Investigators told the scammers they were being stopped as part of a routine travel check. Their real purpose was to confirm the voices and nicknames they'd heard on the tapes and the phone numbers used in the calls. Now they would begin to monitor Onwuhara's phone and station cars in the street outside his Miramar mansion to conduct surveillance.

The crew starts to unravel

If the airport stop rattled Onwuhara, he didn't show it. He still ate fish and rice at Pappadeaux's in Dallas. He still threw parties at the chic Ghost Bar on the roof of the W. But nerves were fraying within his crew, according to Paula Gipson. Nnabue complained about his pay. Gipson agonized over her crimes yet justified them by saying she was only hurting the banks. Matthews spiraled into a depression. She enjoyed the finer things Onwuhara provided her -- shopping sprees at high-end stores, weekends in the best hotels, a house with a new pool -- but their relationship had grown combustible. She and Onwuhara fought. After one argument he stormed through the Miramar house and smashed the screens of the plasma TVs.

It was around this time that Onwuhara grew suspicious that law enforcement might be on to him. FBI agents had placed both a pen register and a trap-and-trace device on his phone, which let them record all outgoing and incoming numbers. Onwuhara somehow found out. When he called Cingular/AT&T (T, Fortune 500), his cellphone carrier, the company "accidentally" revealed the name and number of the FBI technician tracking him, according to an FBI affidavit in support of a criminal complaint. But people who know Onwuhara don't think it was an accident.

"He has a way of getting people to tell him everything," Gipson says.

On July 30, 2008, he destroyed his cell and switched to another phone the FBI wasn't monitoring.

The FBI didn't know where he'd gone. Was he making an escape? Emergency arrest warrants were obtained. Two days later, on a perfect South Florida night, the agents watching Onwuhara's house noticed a commotion. Matthews ran outside, followed by a familiar-looking man. Matthews sped away in her Acura. The man followed in a black BMW X6 registered to Onwuhara. The agents gave chase as the cars rocketed down the highway at more than 100 mph.

"I got some calls," Nail says. "They were like, 'Hey, they're speeding. Should we stop them now?'"

Nail consulted Etienne and the assistant U.S. attorney on the case. They decided to make the arrest. The agents on the ground followed the speeding cars to the Hard Rock Casino in Fort Lauderdale. The Acura and the BMW screeched to a halt at the curb in front of the casino. The drivers rushed inside, where local police detained them. The man from the BMW wasn't Onwuhara but rather his protégé, Ezenwa Onyedebelu. In the seconds before the FBI arrived with handcuffs to make the arrest, Matthews whipped out her cellphone and fired off a text: "Leave now. They got us."

Somewhere inside the Hard Rock, maybe at one of his beloved craps tables, one of the greatest cyberscammers in history looked up from his phone, calmly headed for a back door, and hailed a cab. Then he melted into the night. He hasn't been seen since.

Floating between worlds

"I was taught by my dad not to be a follower," Onwuhara once said.

He is following his own treacherous path now, one that few have charted. A most-wanted fugitive, he has a $25,000 bounty on his head.

Almost all of Onwuhara's co-conspirators were indicted and pleaded guilty. Precious Matthews was sentenced to 51 months in prison. Daniel "Orji" Orjinta got 42 months. Abel Nnabue had his sentence reduced to 27 months after cooperating with prosecutors. Paula Gipson and Ezenwa Onyedebelu helped prosecutors and had their sentences reduced to 15 months and 14 months, respectively. Only Henry Obilo pleaded not guilty. He was sentenced to 88 months in prison.

As for Onwuhara, the FBI claims to have no clue where he is. One accomplice swears he's still in America. Maybe he's floating between worlds in cyberspace, probing for new cracks in new systems. "The boy is an enigma," says one of his sisters. "What can I tell you?

AS her husband, Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, recuperates from a debilitating stroke in a London hospital, President Goodluck Jonathan yesterday approved the appointment of the former Biafran warlord’s wife, Bianca, as one of his aides.

Odumegwu-Ojukwu is a chieftain of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA).

Besides Mrs. Odumegwu-Ojukwu, the President also approved the appointment of three other aides. The appointments, according to his spokesperson, Ima Niboro, takes immediate effect. Mrs. Odumegwu-Ojukwu was named Senior Special Assistant, Diaspora Affairs; Kingsley Kuku is the Special Adviser, Niger Delta Affairs; Ambassador Zakari Ibrahim, Coordinator, Anti-Terrorism and Mr. Oyewole Olugbenga Leke, Senior Special Assistant, Maritime Services...

Our Question still. To Serve your Country or to Serve your Husband .Ask what you can do for your Country and Not what your country can do for you . JFK

Who will now Aid the Ailing Warlord in these troubling times while his wife is aiding the President?

The Independent National Electoral Commission, last Tuesday evening, discovered four voter registration centres deep inside the Nziko forest at Nteje in Anambra State. The deputy governor of Anambra State, Emeka Sibeudu and the state resident electoral commissioner, Chukwuemeka Onukogu, led the team that made the discovery based on security reports made available to the governor, Peter Obi.

The REC said it was painful to discover four centres serving no one in the middle of a thick forest when there were not enough machines for potential voters in places like Awka, Onitsha, Nnewi, Adazi, and Agulu. The centres, located within the vicinity of a shrine, are at least a 40-minute drive from the nearest residential area. It was discovered that the registration officers, mainly National Youth Service Corps members sat idly, looking at the machines, with no one in sight to register.

The deputy governor who expressed his shock at the location of the registration centres said: “We have shortfalls in machines. But in the forest here, there are four machines lying idle. All the people we met here are not up to 10. But if you go to some other places, you will find thousands of people waiting to be registered. This, I can assure you, is part of the rascality of the past which the present government under Mr. Peter Obi is trying hard to stamp out of the state.”

According to him, these kinds of registration centres were used to commit electoral fraud.

In his reaction the resident electoral commissioner, Mr. Onukogu, said he had only heard of these types of voting centres.

“Today I have seen one,” he said. “I am sad that there are four machines wasting here, whereas there are no machines in Onitsha, Eke Awka, Ozubulu, Nnewi and parts of Anaocha where thousands of people are waiting to be registered.”

He said the four centres put together had registered only about 200 voters since the exercise started 10 days ago, when the same machines would have registered many people had they been located in densely populated areas..

“The irregular location of the centres also poses grave risks to the registration officers and the machines. How will I evacuate men and machines in the event of danger?” Mr. Onukogu asked.

He alleged that the centres must have been secured by an influential politician from the area. He said he would take away three machines and leave one behind. But he added that he would need to meet with the registration officials on the matter in his office before taking action. But Mr. Onukogu admitted that he was constrained by the fact that the “floating registration centres” deep in the forest were documented from the Abuja headquarters of INEC and assured it would be corrected.

THE Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), on Tuesday evening, discovered four voter registration centres in Nziko forest, at Nteje in Oyi Local Government Area of Anambra State.

The deputy governor of the state, Mr Emeka Sibeudu and the state Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), Professor Chukwuemeka Onukogu, led the team that made the discovery, acting on security reports made available to the governor, Mr Peter Obi.

Professor Onukaogu said it was "painful to discover four centres serving nobody in the middle of a thick forest when there were no enough machine for potential voters in places like Awka, Onitsha, Nnewi, Adazi, Agulu and others."

The REC said "I have heard of floating/flying polling booths. Today, I have seen one. I am sad that there are four machines wasting here, whereas there are no machines in Onitsha, Eke Awka, Ozubulu, Nnewi and parts of Anaocha, where thousands of people are waiting to be registered."

The centres, which took 40 minutes drive to access from the nearest residential area in Nteje, were located within the vicinity of a shrine with the registration officers, mainly corps members, virtually doing nothing, as there were no potential voters in sight.

The four centres together had registered only about 200 voters since the exercise started 10 days ago, while the irregular location of the centres also posed a risk to the registration officers and the machines.

He said he would take away three machines and leave one behind, adding that he would need to meet with the registration officials on the matter in his office before taking action.

The deputy governor expressed shock at the discovery, saying "we have shortfalls in machines but in the forest here, there are four machines lying idle. All the people we met here are not up to 10. But if you go to some other places, you will find thousands of people waiting to be registered.

Meanwhile, an attempt by two officials of the INEC in Edo State to re-capture the data of the Esama of Benin, Chief Gabriel Igbinedion, at his residence, in Benin City, the state capital, has landed them in police net.

The development apparently prompted the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the state to call for the prosecution of all persons involved in alleged conduct of voter registration at the residence of Chief Igbinedion.

The Edo State vice chairman of the PDP, Owere Dickson Imasogie, who stood in for the state chairman, Chief Dan Orbih, at a press conference on Tuesday , said the supposed culprits must be brought to book, as a way of assuring the electorate that the 2011 elections would be free and fair.

The two INEC voter registration officials were arrested for allegedly abandoning their registration unit at the Civil Service Training Centre, GRA, Benin City and went to Chief Igbinedion's residence to re-register him after the Direct Data Capture (DDC) machine failed to capture his data during an earlier registration at the registration unit.

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Nigerian Tribune gathered that Chief Igbinedion had, last week Saturday, gone to the registration unit in the area, near his residence, to be registered, but after his data was fed into the DDC machine, the machine shut down as a result of low battery, and the Benin high chief was asked to go with the assurance that he would be issued his voter card on Monday, which was two days ago.

It was also learnt that on Monday when Chief Igbine-dion was expecting to receive his voter card, two INEC officials walked into his residence and requested to re-capture him again, because their system malfunctioned and, therefore, they could not recover his data from the system.

However, Mr Lucky Eboh-Onokwe, an aide to Chief Igbinedion, in a statement on Tuesday, debunked what he described as the rumour doing the rounds as it affected the Benin high chief.

According to Eboh-Onokwe, Chief Igbinedion went to the polling centre close his residence on Saturday, "did all the registration formalities and left in the hope of collecting his voter card the next day, as it is the practice with the INEC officials.

He said Chief Igbinedion was approached on Monday that they were unable to print out his voter card due to malfunctioning of their machine and would, therefore, want re-do the exercise."

When contacted, the Public Relations Officer of the Edo State police command, Mr Peter Ogboi, said the police were working in conjunction with the INEC, adding that it was only INEC that could establish if there was any wrongdoing in the registration process and inform the police officially.

Abiola

But when we had a meeting in Abeokuta, they made it clear that there would not be any primary. They said they would just handpick candidates and submit same to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). And whoever is not picked should wait for an appointment or something like that.

And I think if that happens, I would move to a different party. And the different party I could move to is General Muhammadu Buhari’s party. The Congress for Progressive Change (CPC). Over the years, like in 2003 and 2007, I was part of General Buhari’s campaign train. He is somebody I love, somebody I admire and somebody I campaigned for. It is not that the party is strong in the south west, but since I could not get a fair deal in the ACN, I decided to go back to General Buhari’s party.

Why in politics?

We have general problem in Nigeria from Maiduguri to Port-Harcourt, Sokoto to Lagos and Enugu to Jos. There is problem of unemployment, economic problems, and leadership problem as well as problem of infrastructure. I hold the view that by 2011, every capable hand, every competent hand who have love and passion for this country should come out to salvage the country together.

But when you don’t have internal democracy in the political parties, the problems will persist because those people who are not popular, who are not competent and who don’t have wide support among the populace would be at the helms of affairs. And sadly they would not be able to perform because people would not have confidence in them. And when you don’t understand democracy, you would not understand the language of democracy and how democracy works to bring about dividends of democracy.

How long have you been in politics?

Every human being is a politician. It is not when you start running for an elective position that will make you a politician. We have been playing politics at home. We play politics with our wives, we play with our children and we play politics with our parents too at home. We are all political animals.

But I became more active in politics when my father was running for an election. Though I was young then, I can say I was part of the campaign team. I was following them up and down during the campaigns, watching what they were doing. And when there was annulment and the struggle to actualise the mandate ensued, I was with my mum, going up and down with her to see what could be done.

I was part of the marches to protest. Even in America, I was part of the protesters at the Nigerian Embassy. I even lobbied some American government officials to put some kind of sanctions on Nigerian government to force it to de-annul the election and so on. I am in politics with my roles to that extent. So in 2003 and 2007, I became part of Buhari campaign team in the south west, I think with Chief Olu Falae as the Head of the Campaign team. You can see now that I have been in politics but just that I am now fully in it as a candidate.

Why N’Assembly as a starter?

I want to start from the Federal level because some of the problems facing the country always come from the Federal government. Take for instance, the problem of insecurity is from the centre. Take a look also at roads like Lagos-Ibadan, Benin-Ore roads. They are Federal roads. Other examples are budgets and exchange rates and other stuff that are handled at the centre. If we can solve the problem from the top, other warehouses would fall in line. So, going to the House of Representatives will give me the opportunity to assist in solving the country’s problems from the centre.

Are you trying to step into your late father’s shoes?

No, no, no. You see, every human being has his own destiny. You can’t say you want to copy some one else life exactly. You should be able to have your own destiny. I agree my parents played politics for the enthronement of democracy that would make everybody in Nigeria enjoy. They did till they sacrificed their lives for genuine democracy to have roots in Nigeria.

Although that has not happened, we should remember that every thing in life is a process. We are in the process of achieving that. You know you can not get to paradise overnight. You have to work towards it. Basically, if we don’t have democracy in its real sense now, we should remember we are no more being ruled by the military. It is an advancement. We are progressing on that road since we have held three elections in this country. We hope we wont go back to dictatorship in this country.

The pro democracy war my parents fought and died for was a collective fight along with a lot of people. And with the elections we have held in this country, it means we are progressing.

What is required now is that the little achievements we have so far recorded must be sustained and nurtured. We hope that the coming election would be better than what we had in 2007. We hope that the democratic process as well as performance of our elected officers across board would be better.

What is your take on professionals in politics?

If you check all the people that have moved forward, you will realise that they put their best forward to lead them. You don’t have people that have nothing doing leading them. They won’t put people who don’t understand why the country is in bad shape in office. Those who don’t know why Naira is devalued when our crude oil is selling at high rate. Or those who don’t know the impact of devalued Naira on the economy.

I remember in the 1980s when naira went one-to-one dollar, one to two and one to three dollar, people started shouting. When it went from one to five to one to ten, people started screaming. When it moved from one to ten to one dollar to N22, people were wondering what was happening!

When Obasanjo took over it was one dollar to 87. Before you knew what was happening it went to one dollar to N117. Later it went to one dollar to N135. Now, it is one dollar to N155! You can imagine what is going on here. We need those who can identify the problem and proffer solution to it.

Also you look into the high rate of the current expenditure when the budget is currently going to the current expenditure. Our crude oil is basically spent on paying salaries and not in developing infrastructure. These are some of the issues I am going to the National Assembly to address by the grace of God.

What has being Abiola’s son done for you?

Well, I don’t ask from human being any special favour because I am MKO Abiola’s son. My parents have done their work and have gone back to their God and I pray that God gives them their rewards. I don’t seek unnecessary favour like saying, Lekan Abiola wants to contest and so, anybody that wants to contest should get out of the way. That was why I told the party leaders at a meeting in Abeokuta that, there should be primaries where all the card carrying members would decide who they want to fly the ACN flags.

It is not because of me.

What about those who are not Abiola’s sons like sons of Okada man, sons of artisan and peasant farmers and others like them?

I have gone round to meet people and campaign. They were supportive of my aspiration and looking forward to having a good primary.

When my father was contesting in 1993, they did not say, oh, MKO Abiola is coming, let everybody get out of the way for him. He fought a good fight since he had the Kingibes and Atikus to content with. It was a big fight in Jos. My father did not get his ticket of the SDP on a platter of gold. So I don’t expect my own to be on a platter of gold also.

So, even, if I was the one so handpicked, I would not want it. However, it has not discourage me in any way. It does not worth it, big or small. I am sure, anything God says is mine, In Sha Allah, I will have it. If God says on May 29, 2011, I will be sworn-in as House of Representatives member, nobody can stop it. When one door closes Allah will open another bigger one. So, I can’t be discouraged. I hope In sha Allah, I will be successful.

 Are they running out of cheeks ?

The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Borno State Chapter has called on Christians in the state to do everything possible to defend themselves against any aggression and attack by any group or individuals as Christians should no longer fold their arms and watch churches being destroyed and their members killed.

Addresing newsmen at the CAN secretariat in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital on Tuesday, the CAN Chairman, Reverend Yuguda Midurvwa, said the atrocities perpetrated by some group of "unidentified persons" who had taken it upon themselves to annihilate Christians in the state can no longer be condoned saying "enough is enough."

He said while they had visited mayhem on Christians in Borno State, destroying churches and killing Christians without any provocation whatsoever, the Christians though peaceful people who, believe in living peacefully with their neigbours as taught by the Holy Bible, failed to understand the failure of the security agencies in protecting life and property. He said Christians were no more prepared to look on while church members are being silently killed and churches destroyed.

"We call on all members to go back to God in prayer and fasting, we will resist any attack on our people as killings and destruction of our members and churches are still going on without any checks on these criminals," he explained.

Reverend Yuguda further said the decision of CAN Borno State to opt on self defence was informed by attacks on over 12 churches by some Muslim groups and the continuos silent killing of Christians in the state.

Argentina woman survives 23-storey hotel fall

The aftermath of the fall was captured by a passer-by with a mobile phone
A woman has survived after falling from the 23rd floor of a hotel in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires.
Her fall was broken by a taxi, whose driver got out moments before the impact crushed the roof and shattered the windscreen.
Eyewitness said the woman had climbed over a safety barrier and leapt from a restaurant at the top of the Hotel Crowne Plaza Panamericano.
She was taken to intensive care for treatment for multiple injuries.
The woman, who has not been named, is reported to be an Argentine in her 30s.
The taxi driver, named by local media as Miguel, said he got out of his vehicle just before the impact after noticing a policeman looking up.
"I got out of the car a second before. If I had not got out, I would have been killed," he told Radio 10.
"I was only 10 metres from the impact. It made a terrible noise," he added...
The Hotel Crowne Plaza Panamericano overlooks the Obelisk, one of the best known landmarks in Buenos Aires...

More:

Talk about finding a taxi at the exact moment you need one most.

An Argentine woman has reportedly survived a fall from the 23rd story of a hotel in Buenos Aires by landing atop a taxicab.

The woman plummeted an estimated 330 feet after hurling herself from the Hotel Crown Plaza Panamericano before she struck a cab on the street below, crushing the car's roof and shattering its windshield,

denisitabaires, Infobae.com / AP

A woman lies atop a taxi after falling from the 23rd floor of a hotel in downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Monday. The seriously injured woman was taken to a hospital, while the taxi driver managed to get out of the car before the impact.

Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, has been admitted to the Milpark Hospital, Johannesburg. A statement from Sello Hatang, spokesperson for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said Mr Mandela, "is in no danger and has been in good spirits after undergoing routine tests."..

Mr. Mandela who will be 93 in July served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999.

This article is part of our guide on how to use scalping techniques to trade forex. If you haven't already we recommend you read the first part of series on forex scalping.

As important as basic concepts like leverage and spreads are for forex scalpers, they are still secondary subjects in comparison to issues related to the broker, his attitude and preferences. Quite simply, the broker is the most important variable determining the possibility, and profitability of a scalping strategy for any trader. A scalper has control over his strategies, stop loss, or take profit orders, as well as his time frame for trading, but he has no say in matters such as server stability, spreads, and the attitude of the broker to scalping.

There are hundreds of brokers operating in the retail forex market today; naturally, each has a technical capability, and business model suitable to a different trader profile. These differences are immaterial to most long term traders, for swing traders they are meaningful but not that significant, but for day traders and scalpers they are the distinction between profit and loss. At the very basic level, the spread is a tax paid on profits and losses to the broker for his services, but the relationship goes a lot deeper than that. Let’s take a look at the various issues related to the scalper-broker relationship. (Once you've read this article make sure to stop by our forex broker review section to find more informations on the most popular retail forex brokers.)

Low Spreads

A trader who doesn’t use the scalping or day-trading strategies will open and close may be one or two positions, at most, in a single day. Although the cost of the spread is still an important variable, a successful trading style can easily justify the relatively small fees paid to the broker. The situation is quite different for the scalper however. Since the scalper will open and close tens of positions in a short period of time, the cost of his trades will be a very significant item on his balance sheet. Let’s see an example.

Suppose that a scalper opens and liquidates 30 positions on a day in the EURUSD pair, for which the spread is commonly 3 pips. Let’s also suppose that his trade sizes are constant, and that 2/3 of his positions are profitable, with an average of 5 pips profit per trade. Let’s also say that the average size of his loss is 3 pips per trade. What is his net gain/loss without the cost of the spread included?

(Positions in black) – (Positions in red) = Net profit/loss

(20*5)-(10*3) = 70 pips in total.

Which is a significant gain. Now let’s include the cost of the spread, and repeat the calculation.

(Positions in black) – (Positions in red + Cost of the Spread) = Net profit/loss

(20*5)-(10*3+30*3) = -20 pips in total.

A nasty surprise awaits our hypothetical trader in his account. The number of his profitable trades were twice the number of his losing ones, and his average loss was about half his average gain. And in spite of that remarkable track record, his scalping activity gained him a net loss. To break even, he would need an average net profit of 9 pips per trade, all else remaining the same.

Now let’s repeat the same calculation, with another hypothetical broker where the spread is just 1 pip in the EURUSD pair. The 5 pips per win, and 3 pips per loss (the same scenario which was examined in the beginning) with a one-pip spread would bring us an outcome of

(20*5)-(10*3+30*1) = 60 pips in total profit.

Why is there such a large discrepancy in our results? Although the numbers do speak for themselves, let’s remind the reader that while we earn money only on our profitable trades, we pay the broker for every position we open, profitable or not. And that is the problem.

In sum, we need to ensure that we choose the broker with the lowest spread for the currency pair we’d like to trade. A scalper must scrutinize the account packages of different brokers thoroughly before deciding to become a client of one of them.

Scalping Policy

What is a scalping policy? Although the majority of well-established firms with a history and a significant client base have an official policy of allowing scalpers freedom with their decisions, some brokers quite simply refuse to allow scalping techniques for clients. Others process client orders slowly, and make scalping an unprofitable endeavor. What is the reason?

In order to understand the cause of this, we should discuss how brokers net out their client’s positions before passing them to the banks. Supposing that a majority of a broker’s clients are losing money while trading, what would happen if at a time these losses were to reach such a large size that some triggered margin calls which could not be met? Since forex brokers are liable to liquidity provider banks for the profits or losses of their clients, they would have faced periodic crises of liquidity and even bankruptcy. In order to prevent such a situation from arising, brokers net-out the positions of clients by trading against them. That is, as a client opens a long position, the broker takes a short position, and vice versa. Since the result of two orders in the opposite direction is that the total exposure to the market is zero, the liquidity issue is resolved, and the firm is unimpacted by losses or profits in traders’ account.

But there’s a problem with this situation. We mentioned that the broker countertrades its clients’ positions, and what if the client makes a profit by closing a long position, for instance. The broker then has to close the short trade which had been opened to net out the trader’s long trade, and while doing so he incurs a loss. And well, isn’t this a great incentive for forex brokers to ensure that their clients are constantly losing money?

Well, not so much. First of all, most of the netting is done internally, where individual traders’ positions are netted out against each other without the broker having to commit any of its own funds. And the small remaining net position (the net long short or position that remains after the broker has netted out client orders against each other), is usually a losing position which can be counter-traded by the broker safely, because it is a well-established fact that the overwhelming majority of forex brokers lose money.

Now that we understand that scalping does not necessarily constitute a problem for a competent broker (just like the occasional winners are not problem for casinos), we are ready to understand why some brokers dislike scalpers so much. As we said, the broker needs to net out trader positions against each other to guarantee that its liability against banks is minimal. Scalpers disrupt that plan by entering trades all over the place, at awkward times, with difficult sizes which not only forces the broker to commit its own capital at times, but also ensures that the system is bombarded with crowded trades. Add to that the possibility that the broker’s servers are not exactly lightning-fast, or modern enough to cope with the rapid flow of orders, and there you have profitable scalpers as the worst nightmare of a broker with a slow outdated system. Since scalpers enter many small, rapid positions over a short period of time, an incompetent broker is unable to cover its exposure efficiently, and sooner or later kicks the trader out by terminating his account, or slows down his access to the system so much that the scalper has to leave by his own account, due to his inability to trade.

All this should make it clear that scalpers must trade with innovative, competent, and technologically alert brokers only, who possess the expertise and the technical capability to handle the large volume of orders arising from scalping activity. A no-dealing desk broker is almost a must for a scalper. Since trades are mostly automated in the system of a no-dealing desk(NDD) broker, there is little risk of external tampering as the system is left to sort out client orders on its own (still profitable of course).

Strong technical tools

Scalping involves technical trading. In the very short time frames preferred by scalpers, fundamentals have no impact on trading. And when they do have, market reaction to them is erratic and entirely unpredictable. As such, a sophisticated technical package which supplies an adequate number of technical tools is a clear necessity for any scalper.

In addition, since the trader will spend a considerable amount of time gazing at the screen, reading quotes, opening and closing positions, it is a good idea to choose an interface that is not too wearying on the eyes. A bright, graphically intense platform may be pleasant to use and look at at first, but after long hours of intense concentration, the visual appeal will be more of a burden than a benefit.

Also, a platform that allows the simultaneous display of multiple time frames can be very useful for a scalper as he monitors price movements on the same screen. Although scalping involves short term trading, awareness of the price action on longer timeframes can be beneficial for money management, and strategical planning.

No slippage, no misquotes, timely execution

We have mentioned in the section on brokers’ scalping policies that a scalper must always seek a competent, modern broker in order to ensure that his trading style and practices are welcome. But timely execution, and precise quotes are also important for ensuring that a trader can profit with a scalping strategy. Since the scalper trades many times in the short time frame of an hour, he must receive timely, correct quotes on a system which allows rapid reaction...

If there’s slippage, the scalper will be unable to trade most of the time. If there are misquotes, he will suffer losses so often that trading will be impractical. And we should not neglect the emotional pressures which will be caused by such a stressful, difficult, and inefficient trading environment either. Scalping is already a burdensome activity on one’s nerves, and we should not agree to suffer the added trouble of broker incompetence on top of all the other problems which we have.

To conclude this section, we’ll add that scalping is a high-intensity technical trading method which requires a highly competent and efficient broker with state-of-the-art tools. Anything less will diminish your profits, and increase your problems.

With the economy still in a fragile state entering 2011, small businesses are being urged by the Government to lead the recovery effort. The problem with running your own business is the deluge of time-consuming administrative tasks that have to be completed as part of your daily routine.

Traditionally, at the point where administrative tasks begin to take up too much of the business owners time, it is then standard practice to hire some backroom staff to deal with the workload. The problem with taking on permanent staff is all of the costs involved, ranging from pensions to insurance premiums, holidays, sick pay and increased taxation.

Virtual Assistants are the ideal way for a small business to grow quickly without needing to invest a huge amount of money into infrastructure first. There are virtual assistants to cater for almost every type of specialisation. The best tactic for a small business owner is outsource all of the processes that take up too much time or that they struggle with...

A VA can handle all sorts of administrative tasks on your behalf, or complete specialist tasks such as an Internet marketing campaign. They carry out these duties and can run your entire back office from the comfort of their own home office, using fax, phone and email for communication. The only thing a VA can't really do for you is to make you a coffee in the morning!

A Virtual Assistant is also far cheaper than setting up an office overseas. They can operate as a kind of freelance secretary dealing with all the administrative issues in their home country. Common tasks that international Virtual Assistants are given include call answering and first level support in their native tongue...

Some areas of your business really should not be outsourced unless your company has grown so large that you can no longer handle them in-house. Anything involving direct customer interaction (in your own language) is usually best dealt with by you or a trained member of staff...

Disclosure: The author Stefan Töpfer is CEO of WinWeb.com - a leading cloud based small business infrastructure provider (small business software, e-Commerce solutions & business process outsourcing) - the views and opinions expressed are his and are based on over three decades of personal experience as a serial entrepreneur, #1 small business blogger, mentor and angel investor in the SME/SMB sector.

By Ella Davies Earth News reporter

A polar bear swam continuously for over nine days, covering 687km (426 miles), a new study has revealed.

Scientists studying bears around the Beaufort sea, north of Alaska, claim this endurance feat could be a result of climate change.

Polar bears are known to swim between land and sea ice floes to hunt seals.

But the researchers say that increased sea ice melts push polar bears to swim greater distances, risking their own health and future generations.

We are in awe that an animal that spends most of its time on the surface of sea ice could swim constantly for so long in water so cold. George M. Durner

In their findings, published in Polar Biology, researchers from the US Geological Survey reveal the first evidence of long distance swimming by polar bears (Ursus maritimus).

"This bear swam continuously for 232 hours and 687 km and through waters that were 2-6 degrees C," says research zoologist George M. Durner..

"We are in awe that an animal that spends most of its time on the surface of sea ice could swim constantly for so long in water so cold. It is truly an amazing feat."

Although bears have been observed in open water in the past, this is the first time one's entire journey has been followed.

By fitting a GPS collar to a female bear, researchers were able to accurately plot its movements for two months as it sought out hunting grounds.

The scientists were able to determine when the bear was in the water by the collar data and a temperature logger implanted beneath the bear's skin.

The study shows that this epic journey came at a very high cost to the bear.

"This individual lost 22% of her body fat in two months and her yearling cub," says Mr Durner.

"It was simply more energetically costly for the yearling than the adult to make this long distance swim," he explains.

Swimming long distances puts cubs at risk

Mr Durner tells the BBC that conditions in the Beaufort sea have become increasingly difficult for polar bears.

"In prior decades, before 1995, low-concentration sea ice persisted during summers over the continental shelf in the Beaufort Sea."

POLAR BEAR FACTS Polar bears are the world's largest land carnivores They have black skin and transparent hairs but appear white, turning yellow with age On land, they can reach up to 40 kph (25 mph) when sprinting short distances to catch prey

"This means that the distances, and costs to bears, to swim between isolated ice floes or between sea ice and land was relatively small."

"The extensive summer melt that appears to be typical now in the Beaufort Sea has likely increased the cost of swimming by polar bears."

Polar bears live within the Arctic circle and eat a calorie-rich diet of ringed seals (Pusa hispida) to survive the frozen conditions.

The bears hunt their prey on frozen sea ice: a habitat that changes according to temperature.

"This dependency on sea ice potentially makes polar bears one of the most at-risk large mammals to climate change," says Mr Durner.

The IUCN red list identifies polar bears as a vulnerable species, citing global climate change as a "substantial threat" to their habitat.