Another Human Cargo Grabbed

A GROUP OF YOUNGSTERS ON THE BUS

FOR THE second time in a week, another batch of human cargo was seized by the Techiman Police on Thursday, 5th August, 2010.

According to Chief Superintendent Gyau of the Techiman Police station, the human cargo, made up of 23 school-going children who were bound for Accra from Bolgatanga in a Benz bus with registration number AW4115 T, was intercepted by a police patrol team along the Tuobodom to Tamale highway at 1:30pm.
One Madam Atalata Abani, 42, who claimed to be a chop-bar operator in Bolgatanga and suspected to be the trafficker, has been arrested.
Three other women in the vehicle, who were heard coaching the children what to say to the police, were also arrested.
Chief Superintendent Gyau told DAILY GUIDE that investigations showed that the victims, whose ages range between 13 to19, hail from different parts of the Northern Region but majority of them told the police that they came from Bolgatanga.
He said the issue of human cargo and child trafficking is becoming rampant in recent times and charged the police patrol teams, particularly those on duties along the Techiman to Bolgatanga road, to intensify their searches in vehicles to help curb the menace. He also appealed to passengers to expose any child trafficker to the police for action.
In a related issue, another group of human cargo was intercepted by a joint operation of the Sunyani and Techiman patrol teams at Ahansua on the Techiman-Kumasi road. The 207 Benz bus with registration number AW 689 Y was carrying 28 children bound for Kumasi.
Chief Superintendent Gyau told DAILY GUIDE that the victims range from five to 14-years-old. He said the bus driver was escorted to Tongo, where the human cargo was loaded and warned the driver not to load human cargo again. He advised parents not to allow themselves to be tricked by the traffickers, who always promise greener pastures for their wards since “nowhere is cool,” as he put it.
It would be recalled that the 5th August edition of the DAILY GUIDE carried a similar story of child trafficking involving children between the ages of one and 14. In that incident, the bus was intercepted near Tuobodom in the Techiman Municipality.
The traffickers have adopted new tactics by giving the children money to board buses whiles they take the lead to wait for them in their final destination. This method is to avoid being arrested by the police, whiles with the children.
From Eric Bawah, Techiman
..READ MORE

Invest In Our Economy - Prez Mills

The President, Professor John Evans Atta Mills, yesterday received five envoys accredited to Ghana and appealed to them to impress on their respective business communities to come and invest in various sectors of the Ghanaian economy.

The envoys are Ms Jeanette Ndhlovu, South Africa; Mr Tullio Guma , Italy; Mr Omer Selim, Arab Republic of Egypt; Mr Gong Jianzhong, China, and Mr Costas Leontion, Cyprus.
According to President Mills, Ghana had immense economic and tourism potential and a flexible investment code from which investors from their respective countries could benefit.

President Mills proposing a toast to
Mr Tullio Guma, Ambassador of the
Republic of Italy, after he had presented
 his letters of credence

He said the country could boast fertile lands, massive water bodies and a skilled labour force which investors from those countries could easily access to start their enterprises.
President Mills explained that nature had also endowed the nation with large deposits of oil reserves and suggested that the investors could invest in various ancillary services associated with the industry.
He told the envoys that the country was also blessed with rich historical sites, nice beaches and wildlife which tourists from their countries could visit all y ear round.
President Mills assured the envoys that Ghana was a stable country and a bastion of good governance in the West African sub-region for which their investors could expect good returns on their investments.
President Mills further explained that the government was ready to facilitate the activities of the investors and safeguard their investments for as long as they operated within the confines of the law.
He thanked countries such as Italy, which had contributed immeasurably towards the development of the country, stressing that co-operation between Ghana and Italy dated as far back as to the First Republic under Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah.
President Mills said Italy, a developed economy, had more to share with Ghana in the area of scientific and technological expertise.
He also paid glowing tribute to China, Egypt and Cyprus and said those countries had contributed one way or the other to the present state of the country's development.
For their part, the envoys praised the democratic credentials of Ghana, describing the country as bulwark of democracy on the African continent.
According to them, Ghana, the first country South of the Sahara to attain independence from the British colonialists, has also shown the way toward genuine democratic development on the African continent.
They said the democratic experiment, which the country embarked upon in 1992 and which had seen successive governments, had won the country admiration within the international community.
The envoys pledged to deepen the existing bonds and relations between their countries and Ghana, stressing that investors in their countries were prepared to do business with their Ghanaian counterparts.
They praised President Mills for taking bold measures to improve the economy, improve the quality of life of the people, as well as contributing immensely to ensuring global peace.
...READ MORE

Ghana-based 'mystery shopper' scam unravels in Loudoun - USA

Have you fallen victim to a "mystery shopper" scam?

Loudoun officials recovered $2.1 million in counterfeit checks and money orders they said were part of a "mystery shopper" scheme that originated in Ghana. Now they are in search of anyone who may be a victim.

It worked as follows, according to authorities: People from across the country signed up online to be "mystery shoppers" to earn extra cash. When a paycheck arrived in the mail, it came with directions to wire some of the cash to another person.

By the time the shoppers discovered that the check was fake, it was too late.

"Most people don't wait for the check to clear," said Loudoun Sheriff's spokesman Kraig Troxell. "They just send their own money."

Troxell said the scheme began to unravel in February at a UPS store in Loudoun. An address on one package sent by a frequent customer was incorrect, so UPS contacted the company listed in the return address. Turns out that company didn't send the package.

Troxell said it appears that the scheme's ringleaders were using an unsuspecting Loudoun woman -- whose résumé they found online -- as a middleman. She was being paid to do administrative work for a Ghana-based textile company. The job appeared legitimate, but the checks and money orders she mailed were bogus.

A search of her home and the packages turned up fake checks that purported to be worth $2.1 million. Troxell said the woman has not been charged and that it appears she was not aware of the scam.

Potential victims of this or other scams are asked to call the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office Financial Crimes Unit at 703-777-0475.

Meantime, sheriff's officials put out these tips to avoid such schemes.

Do not respond to unsolicited (spam) e-mail.
No legitimate mystery/secret shopper program will send payment in advance and ask the employee to send a portion of it back.
Do not click on links contained within an unsolicited e-mail.
Be cautious of e-mail claiming to contain pictures in attached files, as the files may contain viruses. Only open attachments from known senders. Virus scan all attachments, if possible.
Avoid filling out forms contained in e-mail messages that ask for personal information.
Always compare the link in the e-mail to the link you are actually directed to and determine whether they match and will lead you to a legitimate site.
There are legitimate mystery/secret shopper programs available. Research the legitimacy of companies hiring mystery shoppers. Legitimate companies will not charge an application fee and will accept applications online.
...READ MORE

Nigerian parents shock doctors with white baby

A black British couple have amazed doctors after their daughter was born with white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes.

Medical experts say Benjamin and Angela Ihegboro’s daughter Nmachi is not an albino, but are at a loss to explain her looks, The Sun newspaper reports.

The couple, who live in London but are originally from Nigeria and are both dark-skinned, said they did not know of any white ancestry in their family.

The pair have a four-year-old son and two-year-old daughter who are also dark-skinned.

Ms Ihegboro, 35, told The Sun she was proud of her little girl, who was born yesterday.

“She’s beautiful — a miracle baby,” the newspaper quoted her as saying.

Mr Ihegnoro said he was shocked when his daughter made her first appearance into the world, joking, “Is she mine?”.

But the father-of-three said he had no doubt the baby was his.

“My wife is true to me. Even if she hadn’t been the baby still wouldn’t look like that,” he said.

“Actually the first thing I did was look at her and say, ‘What the flip?’”

“We both just sat there after the birth staring at her for ages.”

Geneticist Bryan Sykes, from Oxford University, told The Sun that Nmachi’s appearance was “extraordinary”.

Both parents would need to have had some form of white ancestry to pass on the genes but racial mixing in Nigeria was uncommon, he said.

The most likely explanation for Nmachi’s appearance was some form of unknown genetic mutation, he said.
....READ MORE...

African Undersea Cable Glut May Spell Price War for Operators

By Matthew Campbell and Nicky Smith - Aug 4,

After a decade of too little Internet capacity, telecommunications companies in Africa including Vodafone Group Plc and MTN Group Ltd. may face a different challenge: too much.

Five undersea cables connecting African countries such as Ghana and Kenya with Europe and India are under construction, entering service or became operational this year. Costing more than $2.5 billion, they could boost data capacity to more than 16 terabits a second in 2012 from almost none in 2000.

The new bandwidth may reduce broadband prices by as much as 90 percent, according to Cornelis Groesbeek, a Johannesburg- based independent telecommunications consultant, making it difficult for companies such as Cable & Wireless Worldwide Plc and France Telecom SA to make a return on cable investments. Operators may also find it hard to make up for some of the world’s lowest rates -- as little as $2.91 a month for voice service in Tanzania -- and very little data use.

“What nobody wants is a situation where there’s a price crash and it becomes hard to sustain the business,” said Taj Onigbanjo, Cable & Wireless’s head of Middle East and African operations, based in Lagos. “How to do it is the million dollar question.”

Excess capacity has sunk cable companies before. A bandwidth glut on transatlantic networks contributed to the 2002 bankruptcy of Global Crossing Ltd., then the fourth-largest corporate failure in U.S. history.

Some people ask “whether this is the Atlantic all over again,” said Richard Elliott, London-based managing director of Apollo Submarine Cable System Ltd., a transatlantic operator.

Cable Feast

What’s different in Africa is that more phone operators, rather than pure cable companies, are investing in infrastructure, seeking to make money from services they can offer through the pipes. The operators are banking on growth in Africa, where broadband penetration is currently just 3.2 percent, according to Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Pyramid Research.

“The Atlantic operators were aggressively selling in the wholesale market, and that was their main business,” Elliott said. “Many of the investors in African cables have significant other businesses.”

The East African Submarine Cable system, or EASSy, that went live on July 16, for example, is owned by 16 investors, all comprising phone operators, including Bharti Airtel and MTN. Glo-1, an $800 million link from the U.K. to Lagos, is going into service this year and is financed by Nigerian phone company Globacom Ltd.

‘Last Bastion’

Cable & Wireless is investing in the $600 million West Africa Cable System, or WACS, with MTN and Vodafone’s Vodacom Group Ltd. unit, linking the U.K. to South Africa. France Telecom SA is leading a group building the 17,000-kilometer, $700 million Africa-Coast-to-Europe, or ACE, cable.

The first 7,000-kilometer Portugal-Lagos phase of Main One, backed by the Africa Finance Corporation, African Development Bank and some Nigerian banks -- the only one of the five not affiliated with a phone operator -- goes into service this year.

“Africa was the last bastion a few years ago where you could generate a return from telecoms infrastructure, but for all practical purposes it’s either gone already or disappearing very quickly,” said consultant Groesbeek.

The price of international fiber capacity may plunge by 80 to 90 percent in the next 12 months, he said. Prices have been tumbling, with the list price for a one-megabit corporate connection in Kenya falling 80 percent from 220,000 Kenyan shillings ($2,747) a month in 2008 to 45,000 now.

Service Lure

Many phone operators are willing to accept a small or even a negative return on infrastructure investments in Africa if they can make money through services, Groesbeek said.

That too might be difficult as operators fight for the small number of consumers who can afford an Internet service.

“Device prices are a major obstacle,” in Africa, Kerem Arsal, an analyst at Pyramid in London wrote in a report.

Even with better international connections, high-speed Internet use in Africa may be limited in the next decade.

Broadband penetration will probably grow to 6.8 percent in 2015 from 3.2 percent today, according to Pyramid.

The increased capacity “may come back to haunt the operators,” said Arthur Goldstuck, the Johannesburg-based managing director of analysis firm World Wide Worx. “Probably, three years from now we will start seeing tremendous efforts to try and claw back revenue.”

Operators will also need to strengthen existing cable links. On July 5, the SEACOM cable linking eastern Africa to India and Europe failed due to a faulty component, slowing Internet access to a crawl in its service area.

Land Networks

Judging from other markets “you need a minimum of three cables to provide diversity and resilience,” said Carl Osborne, the director of network strategy and development in London for India’s Tata Communications Ltd., which invested in WACS to support its South African Neotel unit.

Some West African countries will, “have more capacity than they need” with WACS and ACE, he said.

Poor terrestrial networks may also hinder countries hoping to tap the surge of broadband capacity arriving on their coasts. For countries such as Mauritania, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, ACE will be the first submarine cable connection.

“There is still some investment to be done on the terrestrial side,” said Ini Urua, an executive at the Lagos- based Africa Finance Corporation, part of the Main One group.

The investments may be as much as twice the $2 billion to $3 billion being spent on new submarine cables, said Trevor Martins, MTN’s project manager for the 10,000-kilometer EASSy cable linking South Africa to Sudan.

Demand Driven

Countries that build new high-speed networks will gain from cheaper broadband access. In some African markets, 256 kilobit- per-second Internet access currently costs $100 a month, Cable & Wireless’ Onigbanjo said. In France, Internet of up to 20 megabit-per-second speed costs about 30 euros ($40) monthly.

The strength of Internet demand on the world’s poorest continent will determine long-term undersea capacity needs.

“Right now, people are migrating off of satellite and that’s driving demand; the longer-term question is harder to answer,” said Alan Mauldin, research director at TeleGeography Research in Bratislava. “But what we’ve seen around the world is that once broadband is available, people can’t get enough of it.”

Government Not Interested In Jailing Journalists

Vice President John Dramani Mahama has declared that the government does not take delight in putting journalists behind bars for expressing their views.

In his speech read for him by the Minister of Information, John Tia Akologo, at the 1st New Times Corporation Development Forum, which got underway in Accra Monday, he said, “The government is not interested in muzzling the press, or seeing journalists jailed for their views.”

“I can assure you that in the police debacle with Joy FM and the Ghanaian Times, the government had no visible hand in it. We believe that a government that succeeds in putting one journalist in jail, has only succeeded in giving birth to a dozen others more critical,” added the Vice President.

Touching on the forum, he said the government was going to take the proceedings of such a profession discourse and debate platform seriously, since they had potential to churn out workable and tailored solutions, specific to the Ghanaian context.

He pointed out that a critical look at the development history of the world’s richest nations, clearly revealed that national level dialogue and the brainstorming, helped in finding workable salutations to the many problems confronting their development process.

He commended the Board and Management of the New Times cooperation for creating the platform to deliberate on issues that were of national importance. The minister added that there was so much indiscipline in all spheres of daily activities, stressing that “indiscipline on our roads has become so rampant and ingrained.”

He, therefore, urged the media to play a role in stimulating an attitudinal change, saying, “it is only when the media is seen to be waging a sustained war against indiscipline, that we can overcome these negative attitudes,” and charged the media to also consider urging Ghanaians to patronize made in Ghana products.

Mr. Kofi Asuman, Managing Director of New Times Corporation, in his welcome address, also said the theme for the forum, “Re-orientation for Acceleration Development”, attests to the fact that it was high time Ghanaians eschewed wrong attitudes, indiscipline and wrong political, economic, social and spiritual choices that have been responsible for the country’s lack of sustainable progress as a nation.

“We say accelerated development, because we recognize that although the country is yet to come out of the woods, some progress has been made by successive governments to achieve this level of development,” Mr. Asuman stated.
....READ MORE....
Source: The Chronicle/Ghana

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Tullow Discovers `Major' Oil Field Off Ghana's Coast

Tullow Oil Plc, the U.K. explorer with the most licenses in Africa, discovered a “major new oil field” off the coast of Ghana.

The Owo-1 exploration well “encountered a gross vertical reservoir interval of 154 meters (505 feet)” in the Deepwater Tano license, the London-based company said today in a statement. Samples show it’s a light oil of 33 degrees to 36 degrees gravity on the American Petroleum Institute scale, Tullow said.

“This is a big well and a big result for Tullow, we’ve got here a very substantial light-oil discovery,” Angus McCoss, the exploration director at the company, said today in a phone interview. “It’s really looking to be another transformational oil field for Ghana.”

Tullow, which plans to start oil production from the Jubilee field off Ghana this year, also discovered the Tweneboa offshore field in the African nation. Tullow is the operator of Deepwater Tano while its partners include Anadarko Petroleum Corp., Kosmos Energy LLC and Ghana National Petroleum Corp.

Tullow rose as much as 5.9 percent to 1,249 pence, its biggest intraday gain since July 2, and was 5.1 percent higher at 1,239 pence at 9:03 p.m. London time. Anadarko climbed $1.76, or 3.6 percent, to $50.53 as of 4:01 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.

McCoss declined to give any guidance on Owo’s possible oil resources pending further appraisal of the discovery.

Exploration Potential

Tullow had been targeting a 1.4 billion-barrel find of oil equivalent in the Owo-Tweneboa-Ntomme area off Ghana, according to a July 1 company presentation.

“We are going to be partitioning the greater Tweneboa area into a very substantial, highly pressured oil field at Owo and the neighboring major oil and gas condensate field at Tweneboa,” McCoss said.

Tullow and Anadarko, based near Houston, are exploring African fields off Ghana, Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

“We expect to resume the westward expansion of our exploration activity in the Cretaceous Fan play, where we’ve identified more than 30 prospects and leads with size and geologic characteristics similar to the Jubilee field,” Bob Daniels, Anadarko’s senior vice president for worldwide exploration, said in a separate statement.
....READ MORE....

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EC To Exhibit Voters Register August 9

The Electoral Commission (EC) will exhibit the voters register at all polling stations throughout the country from Monday, August 9, 2010 to Sunday, August 15, 2010.

A statement signed by the Public Relations Officer of the EC, Mr Christian Owusu-Parry, and issued in Accra last Friday said both registers compiled from 2004 to 2008 and the one compiled in June 2010 would be on display during the one week exercise, which starts from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily.

The exhibition of the voters register is considered to be a very important exercise, given the perception by political actors that the register is bloated, hence the need for it to be cleaned up.

The EC is, therefore, urging the general public to take advantage of the exhibition to check their names in the register and help clean it of all errors.

“The exhibition of the voters register is an opportunity for all registered voters to check and confirm their participation in the register”, the Commission noted in the statement.

It reminded members of the public that only persons whose names appeared in the register were eligible to vote in public elections and, therefore, urged all registered voters to endeavour to check their names during the exercise.

The statement gave the assurance that persons, who had genuine voter ID cards but whose names were inadvertently omitted from the register would have the opportunity to apply for the inclusion of their names in the register.

It said the exhibition exercise was intended to clean the register of any errors, adding, “Registered voters can, therefore, ask for wrong spelling of names, wrong photographs and wrong ages and sexes to be corrected”.

The statement appealed to the general public to volunteer information on deceased relatives and other unqualified people whose names appeared in the register so that their particulars could be expunged.

Slavery Aborted : Police Save 118 Children

Shirley Asiedu-Addo



Three buses loaded with 118 children allegedly being trafficked to Half Assini in the Western Region were intercepted by the Central Regional Police Command at the Moree Barrier, near Cape Coast, yesterday morning.

The children, aged between three and 15, were being transported from Narkwa and Eku Mpoano in the Central Region on the three Benz buses, with registration numbers CR 782 09, GR 1006 T and GN 4231 Y, when the police pounced on the buses upon a tip off.

Twenty-four women on the vehicles and the three drivers were detained, along with the children at the Central Regional Police Headquarters in Cape Coast.

The Regional Police Public Relations Officer, Mr Raymond Asaaba, told the press that the police intercepted the vehicles because they suspected that the children were being trafficked to the Western Region to work in dangerous conditions for money.

He noted that it was an offence to engage children in perilous working conditions and said if investigations proved that the children were being trafficked, the police would take the next action of prosecuting the suspected offenders.

But one of the drivers of the intercepted vehicles, Mohammed Sagoe, denied that the children were being taken away to be engaged in hard labour.

He said the children lived with relatives at Narkwa and Eku Mpoano, where they attended school, but had been organised for holidays in Half Assini to assist their parents, who were mostly fishermen and fishmongers, with their fishing activities during the vacation.

He said the children usually engaged in that type of vacation practice until about three days to the re-opening of their schools when they were transported back to the Central Region to continue with their schooling.

Mr Asaaba said the police would commandeer the vehicles back to Narkwa and Eku Mpoano with a team of policemen to conduct further investigations, after which the police would take the next course of action.

.....Read More .....

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