Monday, 4 April 2011
Nigerian Elections Pushed Back a week
A day after an election official announced that Nigeria's parliamentary election was postponed for two days, the nation's election commission announced that all elections would be pushed back a week.
The Independent National Election Commission said the parliamentary, presidential and gubernatorial elections would be put off because of the late arrival of voting materials.
"We cannot proceed with these elections if we want them to be free, fair and credible if there are no result sheets," said Attahiru Jega, chairman of the election commission, on Saturday, when the parliamentary race was supposed to happen. "We cannot bury our heads and say there are no problems. It is regrettable. It is unfortunate. It should not have happened."
Jega also had said he took full responsibility for the fiasco but he said a vendor that was supplying results sheets and ballots was unable to deliver them on time. The vendor, said Jega, cited the diversion of planes to carry relief supplies to earthquake-stricken Japan as the reason for the delay.
Citizens of Africa's most populous nation were supposed to vote Saturday for 360 House of Representatives seats and 109 Senate seats. That vote will now be held April 9.
And they were scheduled to vote next Saturday in a presidential election and for state governors the following week, all of which has been bumped to April 16 and 26, respectively.
Before the logistical problems, the election, the most expensive in Nigeria's history, had already been marred by riots, bombings and assassinations.
"The unprecedented levels of violence that have seen several people either killed, maimed, kidnapped or intimidated for political reasons pose the single most significant threat to the conduct of general elections," warned the Nigeria Elections Situation Room -- a forum of groups focusing on the upcoming elections.
Human Rights Watch estimates at least 70 people have been killed in political violence in the run-up to the voting.
The European Union described Nigeria's 2007 elections as the worst they had ever seen anywhere in the world, with rampant vote rigging, violence, theft of ballot boxes and intimidation. Nigeria had hoped to
gain a cleaner image this year.
Culled from the CNN
CNN's Christian Purefoy contributed to this report.
Two Bodies Found After French Air Craft
Bodies of victims of the crash of Air France flight 447 have been found in the wreckage of the plane, a French government minister said in a radio interview Monday, nearly two years after the crash that killed 228 people.
"We have bodies... there are bodies that are still in the parts that have been found," Ecology Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet told Radio France Monday.
Air accident investigators have not confirmed that bodies were found, but the head of the agency investigating the crash said Monday he believed the main part of the wreckage had been found.
"It seems that we have discovered the wreckage site. Up until now we had only found a few elements of debris floating on the surface," Jean-Paul Troadec, head of the French Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses (BEA) told a different Radio France program.
The BEA said Sunday that a team -- led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution -- discovered parts of the aircraft during an underwater search operation conducted within the past 24 hours.
The agency did not immediately say what parts of the jet the team found.
Investigators have not yet established what caused the crash, and large parts of the plane -- including both flight recorders -- have never been located, despite an extensive search operation that included a French navy submarine.
The Air France plane went down in stormy weather, and most of the bodies were never recovered.
Studies of the debris and bodies that were found led the BEA to conclude the plane hit the water belly first, essentially intact. Oxygen masks were not deployed, indicating that the cabin did not depressurize, the BEA said in a 2009 report.
Automated messages sent from the plane in the minutes before the crash showed there were problems measuring air speed, investigators have said, though they said that alone was not enough to cause the disaster.
The area where the plane went down is far out in the Atlantic -- two to four days for ships to reach from the nearest ports in Brazil or Senegal in west Africa. The underwater terrain is rough with underwater mountains and valleys, the BEA has said.
Culled From The CNN
How To Make Money Online
How Do Websites Make Money
If you have ever wondered exactly how people make money online just by setting up a website, let me help you find out. The great thing about an income generating website is that you do not even need to sell anything directly yourself, which makes things so much easier; no stock, no shipping, no after sales issues, no online payments or any of that stuff. The other great thing is that your income continues to come in even if you are asleep or on holiday! However, that does not mean it does not take a lot of work - beware of anything you come across that suggests you can get rich quickly with no effort. The only people getting rich are the ones selling you this fraudulent idea.
How Do Websites Make Money - The Basic Principle
OK - here is the basic principle behind how websites make money:
You create a website about any subject you want, you attract loads of free visitors to it from search engines, some of whom will click on adverts and links to other sites. You get paid either for every advert click or whenever someone buys something from one of the other sites you provide a link to. You have to understand that this is a drastic simplification, but it sums up the mechanism for how you get your income from a site that sells nothing at all directly.
Your website really can be about absolutely anything, though you should be aware that some subject areas can be more lucrative than others, depending how much competition there is for advertisers and what products or services are available to be sold in that particular niche. By the way, niche is a word you will come across a lot in the field of online business. In order to succeed, it is quite important to find a niche market that is not being targeted by millions of other websites. It is easier to get to the top in a small field of competitors than one full of businesses with lots of money and expertise to throw at the problem of getting visitors.
How Do Websites Make Money - There Are No Magic Short Cuts
It is easier if the subject of your site is something you know a lot about or feel passionate about. The subject of your site is less important than the fact that you can find plenty to say about things relating to it. It is of course perfectly possible to research a subject you know little about and this is a great way to learn more about new subjects you are interested in. You need to set up a relatively simple, well structured website with lots of pages of information, advice or guides. This should be genuinely useful information that will be of interest to your target niche market.
There are no short cuts here. The only way you will get any income is if you get lots of visitors, and the only way you will get lots of visitors is to create a site that offers people interesting and useful information. Make no mistake, no matter what your website looks like, or what adverts and links you have on it, your income will only ever be in direct proportion to the number of people who actually visit your site. Ranking highly enough in search engine results to get visitors to your website is a big subject in itself (search engine optimization), but making sure your website is full of useful and unique content is the first step in this process.
The 3 Basic Steps To Building Your Making Website
This website currently gets about 1,200+ unique visitors every day from search engines. This traffic costs absolutely nothing and is achieved by targeting words and phrases that I know for sure people are searching for every day. Keyword research is the absolutely essential first step when you are trying to build a website that will attract visitors. Remember, unless you get lots of visitors you will make no money at all. You can create a wonderful looking site providing lots of great information, but unless your pages are targeted at what people are actually looking for, your lovely site will go unseen.
1. Keyword Research Tools
The only way to know what people are searching for is to use a keyword research tool. A good tool will tell you what words and phrases are actually being searched for on the search engines and it will tell you how many searches per month are being done on each one. It will also show you how many other websites are competing for those phrases. You can use this information to identify keywords with enough traffic to make them worthwhile targeting, but not so much competition that you will never achieve top rankings in search results.
You need to identify lots of words and phrases that you will optimise your pages for, which together will allow you to bring lots of free traffic to your site. There are only a few really good tools out there. I use one called Wordtracker, but a good alternative is Keyword Discovery. Without the vital information that these tools provide, anything you do on your site could be a complete waste of time. I tried to manage without them when I first started, but learned the hard way after getting to the top of Google for keywords that I then found out no-one was actually searching for. A keyword tool is one of the best investments I have made.
2. Domain Name And Web Host
Your domain name is the unique URL of your website, such as keithgarrow.com, and it is best to use your keyword research to find one that will help you get traffic. There are hundreds of websites you can use to find out which domains are available and to register one, but you can usually get one free when you choose a web host for your site.
The easiest approach is to find a good web host that will include a free domain name and you can register it when you sign up for hosting. All web sites must be hosted somewhere. A Web host provides powerful computers where you can store the pages of your website. They are stored on robust servers and that is where all visitors to your site are directed when they click on links to your pages. There are thousands to choose from and there are plenty that offer perfectly good hosting for very little money. However, you do need to take care to avoid the many that offer unreliable hosting and poor support.
There are some sites and systems that offer free hosting, but these are just not worth bothering with if you are interested in making money. They are too limited in what they offer and do not give you the control you need in order to optimize and promote the site properly.
You can find a list of recommended hosts on the main web host review page, but I can recommend Fat Cow as one of the best to begin with. Not least because of the next thing you need – a tool to help you build your site.
3. Website Design Tools
You can buy very expensive website design tools, such as Dreamweaver, but this is a big investment for anyone who is not doing web design professionally. This page is about how to make money from websites with very little initial outlay. By far the cheapest way to get started is to find a good web host that offers a free site building tool. For anyone with no knowledge of HTML, CSS, etc, this is the ideal way to begin.
One of the reasons for recommending Fat Cow on my web host page is that they offer a very good free site building tool as part of the deal. It is a very simple drag and drop tool and you can see a video of how it works below:
800 massacred in ivory coast
French peacekeepers in war-torn Ivory Coast were in control of the airport in the main city of Abidjan, the French Ministry of Defense said Sunday, as a battle for the city seemed to be looming.
An additional 350 French troops joined the United Nations peacekeeping mission overnight, the ministry added. There were about 7,500 troops already in the country under the U.N. mandate.
United Nations helicopters and French forces patrolled the skies over the city as a tense calm reigned Sunday morning, a local resident told CNN.
The uneasy peace came in the wake of claims of a massacre as fighters backing internationally recognized President Alassane Ouattara battle forces loyal to Laurent Gbagbo, who refuses to leave office.
Ivory Coast's humanitarian crisis Reported massacre in Ivory Coast
Map: Ivory Coast
RELATED TOPICS
Ivory Coast Politics
Cote d'Ivoire
Foreign journalists reported being targeted and scrutinized. A group of journalists from the French TV channel France 2 were fired on by Gbagbo's forces when they tried to leave the Novotel hotel in Abidjan, according to the channel and two journalists who did not want their names used to protect their security.
Since then, Gbagbo forces have been patrolling the hotel premises, preventing foreign journalists staying there from leaving, the sources said.
One resident, whom CNN is not naming to protect his safety, said he had been to church as usual, where another parishioner said he had seen dead bodies by the road on his way to the congregation.
A journalist in the city said many people were afraid to leave their homes, but were being forced to venture out to get water.
Seyi Rhodes, who is staying at a hotel in Abidjan, said people were risking being shot in order to get to a water pump near the hotel. He saw French journalists come under fire as they drove through the city, he said.
Much of the city has no electricity, he added, calling it "a really crude tactic to get people out on the streets."
The United Nations moved about 200 personnel within the country for their own safety as the situation got worse, spokesman Nick Birnback said Sunday.
"Peacekeepers and staff have been attacked over the last few days, we've taken some casualties, and we are doing everything we can do to guarantee security as best as possible. The situation is deteriorating and is getting worse," he said.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded Sunday that Gbagbo step aside immediately.
"Gbagbo is pushing Cote d'Ivoire into lawlessness," she said, using the French name for the country. "He must leave now so the conflict may end."
She also called "on the forces of President Ouattara to respect the rules of war and stop attacks on civilians."
British Foreign Secretary William Hague on Sunday said Britain renewed "our call for Gbagbo to get out, which would stop this violence," and raised the possibility of International Criminal Court prosecutions stemming from the conflict.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy met with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and requested the full implementation of a Security Council resolution, adopted last week, that calls on Gbagbo to step aside immediately, Sarkozy's office said.
A French plane evacuated about 170 foreigners from Abidjan to Dakar, Senegal, according to Col. Thierry Burkhard of the French Ministry of Defense.
Making Money with Google Adsense
How to Make Money on Google Adsense
Google AdSense is a new, fast and easy way for small and medium sites to make money free online by displaying relevant, text-based, un-obtrusive ads from Google AdWords (Google's own advertising program) and receiving a share of the pay-per-click payment.
Because the ads are related to what your users are looking for on your site, the results can be much better than you'd earn from banner networks and many affiliate programs.
For now, AdSense is the best way to make money free online from informational sites even if there are no obvious related affiliate programs. But you don't need to disregard affiliate programs. You can combine both these ways to make money free online and double your income.
AdSense is easy to join, it doesn't cost you anything, all you have to do is paste a few lines of code into your pages, and Google does the work of finding the best ads for them from hundreds of thousands of AdWords advertisers. You can check the relevance of the ads by looking at the text ads on the right side of this page.
How to get started
Go to Google AdSense.
Fill in the application form and confirm an email that Google will send you. If you own several sites, you need apply only once.
Google evaluates your site and will follow-up with you via email within 2-3 days (usually within 24 hours). If you're accepted, you'll be able to log in to your AdSense account.
Log in to your account using the email address and password that you submitted with your application, and agree to the AdSense Terms and Conditions.
Paste the AdSense ad code into your Web pages. There are 10 ad layout choices: 728x90, 468x60, 125x125, 120x600, 160x600, 120x240, 300x250, 250x250, 336x280, and 180x150. In addition to text ads, you have an option of running contextually targeted image ads.
You can choose the color palette from a long list of available palettes or create your own. You can even rotate your ads through up to 4 palettes.
The AdSense ad code is unique for your account and is not site/page-specific. You can place it on any page or site you own.
How to get the most out of AdSense
There are three obvious ways to increase your income from Google AdSense...
1) Increase traffic
Create more keyword-focused pages. See Building: Site Content: Choosing Keywords for more information on finding the most profitable keywords.
2) Increase click-through rate
Use simple design with the AdSense ads displayed prominently. According to Google, ads in the skyscraper format works better (especially on the right side of the page). Focus to only one topic per page - that should make it easier for Google to serve up the more tightly contextual ads which means better click-through.
3) Increase the value of clicks
Of course, you can't do it directly. However, you can find some "expensive" keywords and create pages optimized for them, within your site's theme. These keywords are highly competitive and you'll unlikely get high ranking for them, but visitors will arrive from other "inexpensive" pages and click on Google's ads.
To estimate the relative value of a keyword, search for it on FindWhat. The search results page will show the cost for each listing.
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