A DAY IN THE LIFE OF PRESIDENT JONATHAN AND SHRIMP. We are shaped by our thoughts. We become what we think. – Budha I have recently become fixated in studying the early lives of our presidential contestants and public officials. We are shaped by our academic education and our professions. This is my current focus. Perhaps by visiting their past we can better predict our future. The early life of the “people’s General,” Muhammadu Buhari and how a military life of discipline stopped people like himself and his late partner, general Tunde Idiagbon from ever being caught smiling. General Buhari I believe said you only smile on annual occasions. I grew up with a personal relationship with General Tunde Idiagbon. I sat with him for tons of hours. He had a close friend that was the funniest man on the planet—a jester who cracked jokes about jokes, literally. Late Tunde Idiagbon never smiled, talk less laughed. These are a very disciplined crop of people. The army has changed these days where you see public pictures of its top chiefs popping bottles and raising glasses; obese and morose looking. But let’s not deviate. Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan had an interesting past—not talking about the fact that he did not just have shoes but had a thing for fancy shoes with really high heels—he studied zoology. I look for his thesis, but could not yet find it. I am eager to read it if/when it hopefully shows up. His field of training is in Zoology and water biology. In zoology, I was able to find a paper he wrote as a lecturer with the college of education. It is a very short academic paper titled, “Identification of West African Estuarine Shrimp and Crab Larva.” He is a specialist in shrimp, shrimp-life. As a published researcher myself, I know how engrossing and involving it is to study and research on items for possible publication in peer reviewed journals. President Jonathan’s teacher, Professor Charles Bruce Powell (Late), spent so much time studying the waters of the Niger Delta, that he ended up converting from a primary ecologist to an environmental activist engaged fully (even getting detained), in the protection of the Niger Delta from the effects of logging and oil pollution. We indeed are what we study/engage in. It’s ironical his student is in charge of the nation when pollution is now even 10x higher. I wanted to spend a day in the mind of Goodluck Jonathan, so I spent much of yesterday reading up on and studying the life of shrimp, his primary scientific specialization. Shrimp are crustaceans. All crustaceans love to groom themselves; shrimp are most notable for their addiction to grooming. They can literally spend hours of the day grooming their exoskeletons, cleaning their appendages, brushing, preening, nipping body parts to make them all nice and trim. They are very superficial creatures if you can call them such. For shrimp it is all about the clothes, the shoes; the appearance. It is interesting studying shrimp. You spend days and years if you are a marine biologist or zoologist academician watching these fascinating creatures groom and groom themselves. The other thing notable about these decapods (ten-leg) crustaceans is their cannibalism. As you watch them you see them pick on dead bodies of fellow shrimp and gobble them up. They find skin, animal parts and other dead stuff and eat it. They are scavengers. Some shrimp actually eat other shrimp alive. I watched video where ghost shrimp were eating each other alive. One day of studying the life of shrimp was a tasking and slightly harrowing experience. I’ll stick to just eating them. I congratulate our president on his academic prowess. I will be glad to soon read his thesis and any other collegiate academic publications to know more about this great person in Nigeria’s history. Dr. Peregrino Brimah

A DAY IN THE LIF OF PRESIDENT JONATHAN AND SHRIMP. We are shaped by our thoughts. We become what we think. – Budha I have recently become fixated in studying the early lives of our presidential contestants and public officials. We are shaped by our academic education and our professions. This is my current focus. Perhaps by visiting their past we can better predict our future. The early life of the “people’s General,” Muhammadu Buhari and how a military life of discipline stopped people like himself and his late partner, general Tunde Idiagbon from ever being caught smiling. General Buhari I believe said you only smile on annual occasions. I grew up with a personal relationship with General Tunde Idiagbon. I sat with him for tons of hours. He had a close friend that was the funniest man on the planet—a jester who cracked jokes about jokes, literally. Late Tunde Idiagbon never smiled, talk less laughed. These are a very disciplined crop of people. The army has changed these days where you see public pictures of its top chiefs popping bottles and raising glasses; obese and morose looking. But let’s not deviate. Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan had an interesting past—not talking about the fact that he did not just have shoes but had a thing for fancy shoes with really high heels—he studied zoology. I look for his thesis, but could not yet find it. I am eager to read it if/when it hopefully shows up. His field of training is in Zoology and water biology. In zoology, I was able to find a paper he wrote as a lecturer with the college of education. It is a very short academic paper titled, “Identification of West African Estuarine Shrimp and Crab Larva.” He is a specialist in shrimp, shrimp-life. As a published researcher myself, I know how engrossing and involving it is to study and research on items for possible publication in peer reviewed journals. President Jonathan’s teacher, Professor Charles Bruce Powell (Late), spent so much time studying the waters of the Niger Delta, that he ended up converting from a primary ecologist to an environmental activist engaged fully (even getting detained), in the protection of the Niger Delta from the effects of logging and oil pollution. We indeed are what we study/engage in. It’s ironical his student is in charge of the nation when pollution is now even 10x higher. I wanted to spend a day in the mind of Goodluck Jonathan, so I spent much of yesterday reading up on and studying the life of shrimp, his primary scientific specialization. Shrimp are crustaceans. All crustaceans love to groom themselves; shrimp are most notable for their addiction to grooming. They can literally spend hours of the day grooming their exoskeletons, cleaning their appendages, brushing, preening, nipping body parts to make them all nice and trim. They are very superficial creatures if you can call them such. For shrimp it is all about the clothes, the shoes; the appearance. It is interesting studying shrimp. You spend days and years if you are a marine biologist or zoologist academician watching these fascinating creatures groom and groom themselves. The other thing notable about these decapods (ten-leg) crustaceans is their cannibalism. As you watch them you see them pick on dead bodies of fellow shrimp and gobble them up. They find skin, animal parts and other dead stuff and eat it. They are scavengers. Some shrimp actually eat other shrimp alive. I watched video where ghost shrimp were eating each other alive. One day of studying the life of shrimp was a tasking and slightly harrowing experience. I’ll stick to just eating them. I congratulate our president on his academic prowess. I will be glad to soon read his thesis and any other collegiate academic publications to know more about this great person in Nigeria’s history. Dr. Peregrino Brimah

A DAY IN THE LIF OF PRESIDENT JONATHAN AND SHRIMP. We are shaped by our thoughts. We become what we think. – Budha I have recently become fixated in studying the early lives of our presidential contestants and public officials. We are shaped by our academic education and our professions. This is my current focus. Perhaps by visiting their past we can better predict our future. The early life of the “people’s General,” Muhammadu Buhari and how a military life of discipline stopped people like himself and his late partner, general Tunde Idiagbon from ever being caught smiling. General Buhari I believe said you only smile on annual occasions. I grew up with a personal relationship with General Tunde Idiagbon. I sat with him for tons of hours. He had a close friend that was the funniest man on the planet—a jester who cracked jokes about jokes, literally. Late Tunde Idiagbon never smiled, talk less laughed. These are a very disciplined crop of people. The army has changed these days where you see public pictures of its top chiefs popping bottles and raising glasses; obese and morose looking. But let’s not deviate. Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan had an interesting past—not talking about the fact that he did not just have shoes but had a thing for fancy shoes with really high heels—he studied zoology. I look for his thesis, but could not yet find it. I am eager to read it if/when it hopefully shows up. His field of training is in Zoology and water biology. In zoology, I was able to find a paper he wrote as a lecturer with the college of education. It is a very short academic paper titled, “Identification of West African Estuarine Shrimp and Crab Larva.” He is a specialist in shrimp, shrimp-life. As a published researcher myself, I know how engrossing and involving it is to study and research on items for possible publication in peer reviewed journals. President Jonathan’s teacher, Professor Charles Bruce Powell (Late), spent so much time studying the waters of the Niger Delta, that he ended up converting from a primary ecologist to an environmental activist engaged fully (even getting detained), in the protection of the Niger Delta from the effects of logging and oil pollution. We indeed are what we study/engage in. It’s ironical his student is in charge of the nation when pollution is now even 10x higher. I wanted to spend a day in the mind of Goodluck Jonathan, so I spent much of yesterday reading up on and studying the life of shrimp, his primary scientific specialization. Shrimp are crustaceans. All crustaceans love to groom themselves; shrimp are most notable for their addiction to grooming. They can literally spend hours of the day grooming their exoskeletons, cleaning their appendages, brushing, preening, nipping body parts to make them all nice and trim. They are very superficial creatures if you can call them such. For shrimp it is all about the clothes, the shoes; the appearance. It is interesting studying shrimp. You spend days and years if you are a marine biologist or zoologist academician watching these fascinating creatures groom and groom themselves. The other thing notable about these decapods (ten-leg) crustaceans is their cannibalism. As you watch them you see them pick on dead bodies of fellow shrimp and gobble them up. They find skin, animal parts and other dead stuff and eat it. They are scavengers. Some shrimp actually eat other shrimp alive. I watched video where ghost shrimp were eating each other alive. One day of studying the life of shrimp was a tasking and slightly harrowing experience. I’ll stick to just eating them. I congratulate our president on his academic prowess. I will be glad to soon read his thesis and any other collegiate academic publications to know more about this great person in Nigeria’s history. Dr. Peregrino Brimah

BIOGRAPHY OF THE NEW KING SALMAN BIN ABDULAZIZ OF SAUDI ARABIA The death on Friday of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah means Salman bin Abdulaziz has become the country's new ruler and the last to be born before the discovery of oil in the world's top crude exporter. As king, Salman, thought to be 79, will have to navigate regional turmoil caused by wars in Iraq and Syria, as well as a bitter rivalry with Shi'ite Muslim power Iran and a lingering threat from an al Qaeda wing in neighboring Yemen. His crown prince will be his youngest half brother Prince Muqrin, a former intelligence chief who was appointed as deputy crown prince in March. A reputed moderate with a deft understanding of the competing demands of conservative clerics, powerful tribes and an increasingly youthful population, Salman will also have the final say on social and economic reforms started under Abdullah. "It appeared to me he had a good handle on the delicate balancing act he had to do to move society forward while being respectful of its traditions and conservative ways," said Robert Jordan who was U.S. ambassador in Riyadh from 2001-03. A physically imposing figure, Salman controls one of the Arab world's largest media groups. He believes that democracy is ill-suited to the conservative kingdom and advocates caution on social and cultural reform, according to a 2007 U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks. For nearly 50 years Salman was governor of Riyadh Province, a role that involved working closely with both conservative traditionalists and liberal technocrats as he oversaw the development of the Saudi capital from a small desert town to a major metropolis. However, when two elder full-brothers, crown princes Sultan and Nayef died within a year of each other, Salman was appointed first Defense Minister and then heir apparent. The defense portfolio involved running the kingdom's top-spending ministry, which used massive arms purchases to bolster ties with allies such as the United States, Britain and France. He has been part of the inner circle of the al-Saud ruling family, which founded and still dominates the desert kingdom in alliance with conservative religious clerics, for decades. In a royal family that bases its right to rule on its guardianship of Islam's holiest sites in Mecca and Medina, Salman is reputed to be devout and relatively outward-looking. "He's intelligent, political, in touch with the conservative base but also quite modern-minded," said a former diplomat in Riyadh interviewed about the kingdom's succession process. RIYADH GOVERNOR As governor of Riyadh from 1962 until 2011, Salman had more to do with foreign governments than many senior royals. The role also meant he was responsible for arbitrating disputes between quarreling members of the ruling family, putting him at the center of the kingdom's most important power structure. The governor's office overlooks Riyadh's most appealing square where, if he worked on Fridays, he would have been able to watch as an executioner publicly beheaded malefactors. In a meeting with the U.S. ambassador in March 2007, described in a cable released by WikiLeaks, Salman said the social and cultural reforms instigated by King Abdullah had to move slowly for fear of a conservative backlash. He also argued against the introduction of democracy in the kingdom, citing regional and tribal divisions, and told the ambassador that a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was necessary for Middle East stability. Jordan said Prince Salman had initially refused to believe Saudis participated in the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, but his attitude changed in the face of increasingly solid evidence that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. "He doesn't blindly accept everything the United States says, but at the same time he understands the importance of the relationship, which goes beyond oil," Jordan said. ROYAL POWER With his strong, bearded features, Salman is the prince who is said to resemble his father, King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, more closely than do any of his brothers. Ibn Saud recaptured his family's old stronghold of Riyadh in 1902 with a small group of followers fired by an austere vision of Islam, setting off a three-decade campaign of conquest that carved out the modern borders of a kingdom founded in 1932. As one of the so-called "Sudairi seven" - the brothers born to Ibn Saud by his favorite wife Hassa bint Ahmed al-Sudairi - Salman has been at the center of royal power for decades. His full brothers in a family of more than 30 half-brothers include the late King Fahd and Crown Princes Sultan and Nayef, and former interior minister Prince Ahmed. Salman was born in 1936 in Riyadh, then a mud-brick oasis town deep in the interior of a new kingdom that had not yet discovered oil, depending instead on revenue from pilgrims to Mecca and Medina, date farming and camel herding. Yet one son, Prince Sultan bin Salman, became the first Arab astronaut, flying on the U.S. space shuttle Discovery in 1985. Prince Sultan is now the kingdom's tourism minister while another son, Prince Abdulaziz, is the deputy oil minister. In his five decades administering Riyadh and its surroundings, Salman oversaw the development of the capital from a large desert town into a metropolis of 4.6 million people. Prince Salman was taught in the "princes' school" set up in Ibn Saud's palace by the imam of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, signaling the importance that Ibn Saud attached to the centrality of pure Islamic belief in the kingdom he created.

BIOGRAPHY OF THE NEW KING SALMAN BIN ABDULAZIZ OF SAUDI ARABIA The death on Friday of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah means Salman bin Abdulaziz has become the country's new ruler and the last to be born before the discovery of oil in the world's top crude exporter. As king, Salman, thought to be 79, will have to navigate regional turmoil caused by wars in Iraq and Syria, as well as a bitter rivalry with Shi'ite Muslim power Iran and a lingering threat from an al Qaeda wing in neighboring Yemen. His crown prince will be his youngest half brother Prince Muqrin, a former intelligence chief who was appointed as deputy crown prince in March. A reputed moderate with a deft understanding of the competing demands of conservative clerics, powerful tribes and an increasingly youthful population, Salman will also have the final say on social and economic reforms started under Abdullah. "It appeared to me he had a good handle on the delicate balancing act he had to do to move society forward while being respectful of its traditions and conservative ways," said Robert Jordan who was U.S. ambassador in Riyadh from 2001-03. A physically imposing figure, Salman controls one of the Arab world's largest media groups. He believes that democracy is ill-suited to the conservative kingdom and advocates caution on social and cultural reform, according to a 2007 U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks. For nearly 50 years Salman was governor of Riyadh Province, a role that involved working closely with both conservative traditionalists and liberal technocrats as he oversaw the development of the Saudi capital from a small desert town to a major metropolis. However, when two elder full-brothers, crown princes Sultan and Nayef died within a year of each other, Salman was appointed first Defense Minister and then heir apparent. The defense portfolio involved running the kingdom's top-spending ministry, which used massive arms purchases to bolster ties with allies such as the United States, Britain and France. He has been part of the inner circle of the al-Saud ruling family, which founded and still dominates the desert kingdom in alliance with conservative religious clerics, for decades. In a royal family that bases its right to rule on its guardianship of Islam's holiest sites in Mecca and Medina, Salman is reputed to be devout and relatively outward-looking. "He's intelligent, political, in touch with the conservative base but also quite modern-minded," said a former diplomat in Riyadh interviewed about the kingdom's succession process. RIYADH GOVERNOR As governor of Riyadh from 1962 until 2011, Salman had more to do with foreign governments than many senior royals. The role also meant he was responsible for arbitrating disputes between quarreling members of the ruling family, putting him at the center of the kingdom's most important power structure. The governor's office overlooks Riyadh's most appealing square where, if he worked on Fridays, he would have been able to watch as an executioner publicly beheaded malefactors. In a meeting with the U.S. ambassador in March 2007, described in a cable released by WikiLeaks, Salman said the social and cultural reforms instigated by King Abdullah had to move slowly for fear of a conservative backlash. He also argued against the introduction of democracy in the kingdom, citing regional and tribal divisions, and told the ambassador that a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was necessary for Middle East stability. Jordan said Prince Salman had initially refused to believe Saudis participated in the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, but his attitude changed in the face of increasingly solid evidence that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. "He doesn't blindly accept everything the United States says, but at the same time he understands the importance of the relationship, which goes beyond oil," Jordan said. ROYAL POWER With his strong, bearded features, Salman is the prince who is said to resemble his father, King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, more closely than do any of his brothers. Ibn Saud recaptured his family's old stronghold of Riyadh in 1902 with a small group of followers fired by an austere vision of Islam, setting off a three-decade campaign of conquest that carved out the modern borders of a kingdom founded in 1932. As one of the so-called "Sudairi seven" - the brothers born to Ibn Saud by his favorite wife Hassa bint Ahmed al-Sudairi - Salman has been at the center of royal power for decades. His full brothers in a family of more than 30 half-brothers include the late King Fahd and Crown Princes Sultan and Nayef, and former interior minister Prince Ahmed. Salman was born in 1936 in Riyadh, then a mud-brick oasis town deep in the interior of a new kingdom that had not yet discovered oil, depending instead on revenue from pilgrims to Mecca and Medina, date farming and camel herding. Yet one son, Prince Sultan bin Salman, became the first Arab astronaut, flying on the U.S. space shuttle Discovery in 1985. Prince Sultan is now the kingdom's tourism minister while another son, Prince Abdulaziz, is the deputy oil minister. In his five decades administering Riyadh and its surroundings, Salman oversaw the development of the capital from a large desert town into a metropolis of 4.6 million people. Prince Salman was taught in the "princes' school" set up in Ibn Saud's palace by the imam of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, signaling the importance that Ibn Saud attached to the centrality of pure Islamic belief in the kingdom he created.

SAUDI ARABIA’s POWERFUL KING ABDALLA Bin ABDUL'AZIZ DIES AT 90. Saudi Arabia’s king, Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz has died, according to Saudi Arabia’s royal officials. His death comes weeks after he was admitted to the hospital for a lung infection. The 90-year-old king, who got on the throne in 2005, has already been succeeded by his 79-year-old half-brother, Salam. Abdullah bin Abdulaziz was the fifth of his brothers to take the throne and become king in 2005. US President Barack Obama has expressed his personal sympathies and those of the American people, on the death of King Abdullah. He said, “As a leader, he was always candid and had the courage of his convictions. One of those convictions was his steadfast and passionate belief in the importance of the US-Saudi relationship as a force for stability and security in the Middle East and beyond.” Vice-President Joe Biden tweeted that he would lead a delegation to Riyadh to pay respects. UK Prime Minister David Cameron said Abdullah would be remembered for his “commitment to peace and for strengthening understanding between faiths”.