Thursday, 23 August 2018 10:43 Written by dailypost.ng
Global business magazine, Bloomberg has ranked Nigerians working in the United States as the eighth most hardworking foreigners in that country.
In a 2018 report released yesterday, Nigerians scored 71.0 percent in the list of the hardest and most skilled immigrant groups in the US which was topped by Ghana with 75.2 percent.
Bulgaria and Kenya were ranked second and third with 74.2 percent and 73.4 percent respectively. Other African countries in the report’s top 10 are Ethiopia (4th), Egypt (5th), and Liberia (9th).
This makes Africans in general the most productive immigrants in the US ahead of those from Mexico and Central America, who constitute more than 70 percent of foreign nationals in that country.
Mexico is by far the most common country of origin, but the population of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. (both documented and undocumented) actually fell 6 percent from 2007 to 2015, according to the Pew Research Centre.
The numbers of Salvadorans, Hondurans and Guatemalans in the U.S. continued to gro“If we want more high-skilled, hardworking, English-speaking, ready-to-integrate immigrants, it looks like the most obvious place to find them is in African countries where English is widely spoken,” Bloomberg journalist Justin Fox, who came up with the report, said.
The report, developed from the 2016 US Census Bureau American Community Survey, ranked Nigeria 8th among the Most-Educated Immigrant Groups in the U.S.
Nigeria sandwiched between Australia (7th) and Malaysia (9th).
The report put the number of Nigerian legal immigrants in the U.S. at 262,603.
According to the report, Kenya, Nigeria, Nepal and Ghana have the highest number of citizens pursuing higher education in the US after Saudi Arabia.
Immigrants from Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana are near the top in both employment-population ratio and higher-education enrollment, it said.
With Ontario Premier Doug Ford handing the province’s municipalities the right to prohibit retail cannabis stores in their communities, he has displayed a populist penchant for municipal autonomy.
But prohibiting cannabis retail stores, as Richmond Hill and Markham have done, might not be the best way to avoid the problems many associate with cannabis.
I say this because the idea that a municipality could ban the sale of intoxicants within their boundaries is older than Canada itself, is well-tested and has almost always been fraught with problems.
An 1864 law allowed municipalities to vote themselves “dry” by popular referendum, permitting a simple majority of electors to vote to end the retail sale (but not the manufacture) of alcohol in their communities.
Many dry communities saw little improvement. Others saw increased drunkenness.
And so many communities repealed the local option as soon as they could.
Liquor licensing
After Confederation, other alternatives to deal with drunkenness emerged. In 1876, the Ontario government took over liquor licensing. Although flawed, the law significantly decreased drunkenness in many communities.
But the temperance folks wanted Prohibition, and in 1878 the federal Liberal government passed the Canada Temperance Act. Under this improved version of the 1864 legislation, local options could be implemented at a county or city level, again by a simple majority.
Manufacturing could continue in dry communities, but it could not be sold there. Nothing, however, prohibited residents of dry communities, if they could afford it, from ordering booze from outside their town.
This 1871 depiction of a drunkard hitting his wife was a popular piece of anti-booze propaganda leading up to Prohibition in North America. (Library of Congress)
By 1887, 25 counties in Ontario were dry; two years later all dry counties in the province had repealed the Canada Temperance Act.
Clearly, the temperance law was a failure. At the Royal Commission on the Liquor Trafficthat toured Ontario in 1893-94, many witnesses —ranging from judges and priests to temperance supporters and liquor dealers —described how drunkenness continued in dry areas. Brewers and distillers provided their account books to show how productivity actually increased with large orders from dry counties pouring in.
Many described the various ways that the local option law was circumvented and how drinking often seemed to get worse.
People who might in the past have had a glass of lager in a tavern turned to whisky because it was stronger and more easily portable. Others ordered a barrel of beer to distribute from the back of a wagon. Some told how children made a game of getting their hands on whisky that had been secreted for later use, turning up drunk and sick. Horror stories abounded, and although there was doubtless exaggeration, many of the witnesses were reliable and respectable and provided their testimony under oath.
The local option a nuisance, not a deterrent
The local option saw a resurgence after the provincial government passed a law in the early 1890s allowing areas smaller than a county to vote themselves dry, but they required a higher proportion of support than a simple majority.
This was an attempt to ensure that only places with strong support for Prohibition could become dry. Many local option laws continued well into the 20th century, notably in places like Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood. But with the car replacing horse power, and the local option being implemented in small communities often adjacent to wet ones, it became more of an inconvenience than a deterrent to drinking.
The local option generally failed for several reasons.
First, booze was profitable and vendors in nearby towns could easily get it to thirsty customers in dry areas. Second, the requirement of only a simple majority to pass the law meant that a large portion of the community would look for ways around the law. Third, this system favoured the rich who could afford to have whole kegs of beer or whisky shipped to them, or could travel to other towns to buy their booze.
It disadvantaged the poor, whose finances and mobility were strictly limited. It became, as commentators argued, “class legislation” discriminating against the poor while only inconveniencing the rich.
With all these problems, even many who supported Prohibition argued that a well-controlled licensing system was preferable.
Cause for pause
This experience with the local option in Ontario should give today’s municipal governments pause before following the path of Richmond Hill and Markham.
When you institute local prohibition, you encourage illegality and inequity.
Experience has shown that prohibiting a popular substance encourages illegal use. A woman smokes a joint at the Fill the Hill marijuana rally on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on April 20, 2014. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang
The product you’re trying to restrict becomes more lucrative. This nurtures the very black market that the Cannabis Act is trying to squash.
Some people will not be able to get legal cannabis. The planned internet ordering system is convenient for people with credit cards and access to computers. It is not as convenient for poorer people.
So some people will have to find other ways to get their hands on cannabis, thereby encouraging the continuation of illegal sales. (Let’s save the elitist debate about whether poor people should be smoking pot for another day.) This could be dangerous, given the rise of synthetic cannabis and weed containing dangerous contaminants that wouldn’t normally be available through legal distribution channels.
Unless a vast proportion of residents in a community support such restrictions, such prohibition could encourage more illegality, more excess and more access to cannabis for those whom the law is designed to protect. Mayors who say that they’ve heard from people who don’t want cannabis shops in their town need to ask themselves if these voices are representative, or just loud.
Banning cannabis retail sales could cause more profound problems than it solves.
Author:Dan Malleck: Associate Professor, Medical History, Department of Health Sciences, Brock University
Paul Manafort, chairman of President Donald Trump’s campaign was found guilty on Tuesday of eight of the 18 charges he faced in a case of bank and tax fraud.
The jury, after almost four days of deliberations, found Manafort guilty of two of nine bank fraud charges, all five tax fraud charges he faced and one of four charges of failing to disclose foreign bank accounts.
Judge T.S. Ellis in the case that held in Alexandria Virginia, declared a mistrial on 10 of the 18 counts, after the jury told him it could not reach a verdict on those charges.
Earlier in the day, the jury had indicated it was unable to reach consensus on all of the counts.
The trial of Manafort, a veteran Republican operative, is the first stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia’s role in the 2016 U.S. election. The charges against Manafort largely predate his work on President Donald Trump’s successful campaign.
Manafort faced five counts of filing false tax returns, four counts of failing to disclose his offshore bank accounts and nine counts of bank fraud.
So I was surprised to recently come across an article about a 62-year-old Swedish divorcee named Maria Grette. She had set up a dating profile and soon received a message from a 58-year-old Danish man named Johnny who was working as an engineer in the United States.
They wrote back and forth, starting chatting on the phone, and a relationship blossomed. Her new love interest had a son who was studying at a university in England, and the man said that he was looking to retire to Sweden. They made arrangements for a trip to meet in person there. However, before heading to Europe, Johnny needed to take a side trip to Nigeria for a job interview.
That’s when things took a turn.
Maria received a desperate call from Johnny. He and his son had been mugged, the son had been shot in the head, and they were in a Lagos hospital without any money or identification.
They desperately needed funds transferred into his British bank account to pay for medical expenses and a lawyer, and Maria eagerly obliged.
Several thousand euros later, she realized that she had been had.
As a psychologist, I was struck by the tenacity of this scam and others like it. I wanted to know how they operate – and what psychological tendencies the Nigerian scammers exploit to continue duping people to this day.
The many flavors of ‘419 scams’
“Nigerian Prince” scams are also known as “419 scams,” a reference to the Nigerian penal code designed to deal with them. They are notoriously difficult to prosecute for both Nigerian and foreign authorities. Victims are often too ashamed to pursue the case, and even when they do, the trail quickly goes cold.
In its earliest incarnations, the scam involved someone claiming to be a Nigerian prince sending a target an email saying he desperately needed help smuggling wealth out of his country. All the target needed to do was provide a bank account number or send a foreign processing fee to help the prince out of a jam, and then he would show his gratitude with a generous kickback.
These scams really do appear to have begun in Nigeria, but they can now come from almost anywhere – people posing as Syrian government officials is one the current favorites. Nevertheless, the “Nigerian Prince” moniker persists.
But today’s 419 scams can involve dating websites, like the one that ensnared Maria Grette. Wealthy orphans claiming to need an adult sponsor, lottery winners saying they’re required to share their winnings with others, and inheritances trapped in banks due to civil war are also common ploys.
She reported that most scammers tended to be ordinary people, such as university students or people working low-paying jobs, who discovered that they could make fabulously more money – as much as $60,000 per year – scamming.
In most cases, after establishing a connection and cultivating a relationship, the scammers eventually get around to persuading their targets to provide their bank account or credit card information. They prefer to pursue 45-to-75-year-old widowed men and women. The thinking goes that this demographic is most likely to have money and be lonely – in other words, easy marks.
We did not evolve to live in a world of strangers. Our brains are wired to live in relatively small tribes in which everyone’s character and past behavior is well-known.
For this reason, we overconfidently ascribe qualities to someone we’ve never met in person but have corresponded with. Relationships – and trust – can form quickly over email and social media.
This inherent naivete makes us easy prey.
In addition, most of us profess unrealistic optimism about our own futures – our grades will be better next semester, a new job will be much better than an old one, and our next relationship will be the one that lasts forever.
Furthermore, research shows that we consistently overestimate our knowledge, our skills, our intelligence and our moral fiber. In other words, we truly believe that we are savvy and that nice things are likely to happen to us.
The good fortune coming our way courtesy of Nigeria may not seem so far-fetched after all.
Then there are the scammers’ methods. They utilize the foot-in-the-door technique – a small, innocuous request – to draw their targets in, perhaps something as simple as asking for advice about what to see on vacation in the mark’s home country. When victims acquiesce, they begin to perceive themselves as someone who provides help. Through a series of baby steps, they move from doing small favors that cost little to giving away the store.
Changing course is cognitively difficult because not only is it an admission of a bad decision, it also means giving up any hope of recouping our losses. So once someone invests money into something risky – whether it’s a pyramid scheme or a day at the casino – they may keep throwing good money after bad because it seems like the only way to get anything back.
Is this what happened to Maria Grette?
In a remarkable turn of events, she eventually tracked down the 24-year old man who had claimed to be “Johnny” and went to Nigeria to meet him. Incredibly, they formed a genuine friendship, and Grette ended up giving “Johnny” financial assistance so he could finish a degree at an American university.
And no, “Johnny” never did return the money – his scam turned out better than even he could have ever imagined.
AUTHOR: Frank T. McAndrewCornelia H. Dudley Professor of Psychology, Knox College
Saturday, 04 August 2018 19:36 Written by independent.ng
North Korea has not halted its nuclear weapons programme in a move that directly defies United Nations sanctions, a new UN report has found, despite Donald Trump’s claim the country no longer presented a nuclear threat, Independent.co.uk reports.
Findings of an investigation submitted to the Security Council late on Friday said the secretive communist state was engaging in “illicit ship-to-ship transfers” of petroleum products to contravene sanctions.
Independent experts said Pyongyang was also cooperating militarily with Syria and attempting to sell arms to Houthi rebels in Yemen.
“[North Korea] has not stopped its nuclear and missile programmes and continued to defy Security Council resolutions through a massive increase in illicit ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum products, as well as through transfers of coal at sea during 2018,” the 149-page report said.
Pyongyang also violated a textile ban by exporting more than $100m (£77m) in goods between October 2017 and March 2018 to China, Ghana, India, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey and Uruguay, the report said.
Experts also found North Korea’s “prohibited military cooperation with the Syrian Arab Republic has continued unabated.”
They said North Korean technicians visited Syria in 2011, 2016 and 2017 to engage in ballistic missile tests and other banned activities.
Pyongyang has yet to respond to the findings of the investigation.
The report comes as Russia and China suggest the Security Council discuss easing sanctions following the historic summit between US president Mr Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
However, the United States and other council members have insisted strict enforcement of sanctions must continue until Pyongyang acts.
Mr Trump has previously said denuclearisation talks with North Korea were going “very, very well”, but last month rowed back on his previous assertions the process would be completed quickly, now saying there was no time limit on the negotiations.
US secretary of state Mike Pompeo warned against violation of international sanctions, claiming it would reduce pressure on Pyongyang to denuclearise.
He said the US has new, credible reports that Russia is violating UN sanctions by allowing joint ventures with North Korean companies and issuing new permits for North Korean guest workers.
He added Washington would take “very seriously” any violations, and called for them to be roundly condemned and reversed.
“If these reports prove accurate, and we have every reason to believe that they are, that would be in violation,” Mr Pompeo said.
“I want to remind every nation that has supported these resolutions that this is a serious issue and something we will discuss with Moscow.
“We expect the Russians and all countries to abide to the UN Security Council resolutions and enforce sanctions on North Korea.”
The Security Council has unanimously sanctioned North Korea since 2006 in a bid to choke off funding for Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes – banning exports including coal, iron, lead, textiles and seafood, while capping imports of crude oil and refined petroleum products.
Following his meeting with Mr Kim, the US president tweeted: “Everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!”
The Soviet Union and now Russia under Vladimir Putin have waged a political power struggle against the West for nearly a century. Spreading false and distorted information – called “dezinformatsiya” after the Russian word for “disinformation” – is an age-old strategy for coordinated and sustained influence campaigns that have interrupted the possibility of level-headed political discourse. Emerging reports that Russian hackers targeted a Democratic senator’s 2018 reelection campaign suggest that what happened in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election may be set to recur.
Two sets of federal indictments – one in February and another in July – allege in detail how a private company linked to Putin and the Russian military itself worked to polarize American political discourse and sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Cybersecurity experts in the U.S. knew that the Russian intelligence agencies were conducting these acts of information warfare and cyberwarfare, but I doubt they had any idea how comprehensive and integrated they were – until now.
Russia’s propaganda machine duped American voters
The operation was complex. What is publicly known now is perhaps most easily understood in two pieces, the subjects of separate federal indictments.
First, a billionaire Russian businessman and Putin associate allegedly assembled a network of troll factories: private Russian companies engaging in a massive disinformation campaign. Their employees posed as Americans, created racially and politically divisive social media groups and pages, and developed fake news articles and commentary to build political animosity within the American public.
The people involved did not fit the stereotypical picture of internet trolls. One leading Russian troll factory was a company called the Internet Research Agency, reportedly with all the trappings of a real corporation, including a graphics department to create incendiary images, a foreign department dedicated to following political discourse in other countries and an IT department to make sure trolls had reliable computers and internet connections. Employees, mostly 18 to 20 years old, were paid as much as US$2,100 a month for creating fake social media accounts and blogs to distribute disinformation to Americans.
One ex-troll told a Russian independent TV network that his job included writing incendiary comments and creating fake posts on political forums: “
, producing propaganda videos, infographics, memes, reports, news, interviews and various analytical materials to persuade the public.
America never stood a chance.
An interview with an ex-Russian troll.
Focusing on social media
It’s no surprise that these Russian trolls spent most of their time on Facebook and Instagram: Two-thirds of Americans get at least some news on social media. The trolls spread out across both platforms, seeking to encourage conflict on any topic that was getting a lot of attention: immigration, religion, the Black Lives Matter movement and other hot-button issues.
When describing how he managed all of the fake social media accounts, the ex-troll said: “
, then you need to be a white guy from Minnesota, you’ve slaved away all your life and paid your taxes, and then 15 minutes later you are from New York posting in some Black slang.”
Then, the indictments reveal, the GRU entered this increasingly fraught online political discourse.
The GRU joins in
Like another significant political scandal, the GRU effort allegedly started with a break-in to Democratic National Committee records – but this time it was a digital burglary. It wasn’t particularly sophisticated, either, using two common hacking techniques, spearphishing and malicious software.
As the July indictment details, starting in March 2016, Russian military operatives sent a series of fake emails, disguised to look real, to more than 300 people associated with Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. One of the targets was Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, who fell for the scheme and unwittingly handed over more than 50,000 emails to the Russians.
Around the same time, the Russian hackers allegedly began searching for technical vulnerabilities in the Democratic organizations’ computer networks. They used techniques and specialized malicious software that Russians had used in other hacking efforts, including against the German Parliament and the French television network TV5 Monde. By April 2016, the hackers had gained access to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee systems, exploring servers and secretly extracting sensitive data. They located a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee staffer who also had privileges in the Democratic National Committee systems, and thereby got into the Democratic National Committee networks too, extracting more information.
When the Democratic National Committee realized there was unusual data traffic in its systems, the group hired a private cybersecurity firm, which in June 2016 publicly announced that its investigation had concluded that Russia was behind the hacking. At that point, the Russians allegedly tried to delete traces of their presence on the networks. But they kept all the data they had stolen.
Opposing Hillary Clinton
As early as April 2016, the GRU was allegedly trying to use the Democrats’ confidential documents and email messages to stir up political trouble in the U.S. There is evidence that the Russian government, or people acting on its behalf, offered key people in the Trump campaign damaging information on Clinton.
In July 2016, the indictments say, the GRU began releasing many of the Democrats’ documents and email messages, mainly through WikiLeaks, an internet site dedicated to anonymous publishing of secret information.
All of this effort was, according to the indictments, set up to undermine Hillary Clinton in the eyes of the American public.
, “Everything about Hillary Clinton had to be negative and you really had to tear into her. It was all about the leaked email, the corruption scandals, and the fact that she is super rich.”
The indictments describe in detail how information warfare and cyberwarfare were used as political tools to advance the interests of people in Russia. Something similar may be set to happen in 2018, too.
Author:Timothy SummersDirector of Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Engagement, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland
A Nigerian prince has been nabbed in the United States of America after he was found out to have scammed many job seekers.
Osmond Eweka
A Nigerian prince and his accomplice are accused of bamboozling hundreds of job seekers out of thousands of dollars by promising them high-paying gigs in New York.
The Manhattan District Attorney's Office said Osmond Eweka, 31, and his friend Kamel McKay, 27, pretended to run two consulting firms in Manhattan telling clients that if they paid a fee they would be placed at various jobs across New York City.
Prosecutors said some of the jobs Eweka and McKay promised their victims were for hotel housekeeping and front desk receptionists. The men used the popular job-seeking website Indeed.com to find their victims.
According to court documents, Eweka and McKay used office space in the Empire State Building and another building on fifth avenue to run two bogus employment agency firms, Stamford Consulting Firm and Howard Consulting Group.
They also used fake names, according to the New York Post. Eweka went by the name Sean Jackson and McKay reportedly used the name Tyrone Hayes.
Prosecutors said they would invite their victims to their office for an interview and then have them pay a fee, ranging between $300 and $700, the Post reports.
Prosecutor Catherine McCaw said they told victims the fee would cover the cost of uniforms, training and background checks. They also said that paying the high fee would result in higher-paying jobs.
'But in reality, there was no such job,' she said at Eweka's arraignment on Thursday in Manhattan Supreme Court.
After collecting the money, the men would send the job seekers to different businesses, where they were turned away by employers who weren't expecting them.
Eweka, 31, appeared in a Manhattan court on Thursday where he pleaded guilty
The victims then found that they could no longer get in contact with the alleged fraudsters or the consulting firm.
According to authorities, Eweka and McKay duped 250 people and pocketed more than $54,000. Prosecutors said they never provided a single job. They ran the alleged scam from January to June 2018.
Eweka is a prince from the Benin royal family in Nigeria, according to reports, and a United States citizen living in New Jersey. McKay is from the Bronx.
Both men were indicted on charges of larceny and scheme to defraud. McKay was arraigned last week and released on $200,000 bail, the New York Times reports.
Eweka was in court on Thursday and pleaded not guilty to the charges. He was released without bail.
In 2016, Eweka married attorney Imade Igbinedion in an elaborate wedding ceremony in Nigeria.
Representatives from the Benin family told the Times they could not confirm whether Eweka was a family member because the 'it is a very large family'.
U.S. President Donald Trump has asked for another $30 billion for the Defense Department to rebuild the armed forces and accelerate the campaign to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Trump made the request in a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan, a statement by the Department of Defense said the request was for 2017 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30
“The fiscal 2017 budget amendment provides 24.9 billion dollars in base funds for urgent war fighting readiness needs and to begin a sustained effort to rebuild the armed forces, according to the president’s letter.
“The request seeks to address critical budget shortfalls in personnel, training, maintenance, equipment, munitions, modernization and infrastructure investment.
“It represents a critical first step in investing in a larger, more ready and more capable military force.”
The request, Department of Defense said included 5.1 billion dollars in overseas contingency operations funds so the department could accelerate the campaign to defeat ISIS and support Operation Freedom’s Sentinel in Afghanistan, he said.
“He noted that the request would enable the Department to pursue a comprehensive strategy to end the threat ISIS poses to the United States, ” the statement read.
John Roth, the acting undersecretary of defense-comptroller, said “our request to Congress is that they pass a full-year defense appropriations bill, and that the bill includes the additional 30 billion dollars.
“We are now approaching the end of our sixth month under a continuing resolution, one of the longest periods that we have ever been under a continuing resolution”.
Roth said much of the money in the 2017 fiscal year request is funding for operations and maintenance.
“We’re asking for additional equipment maintenance funding, additional facilities maintenance, spare parts, additional training events, peacetime flying hours, ship operations, ammunitions and those kinds of things.
“This is the essence of what keeps this department running on a day-to-day basis. It keeps us up and allows us to get ready for whatever the next challenge is.
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