Street Maintenance Planning Questions Form March 29, 2013: Fill & Download for Free

Here are the most viewed questions on quora and there answersQuestion 15:Why are there crushed stones alongside rail tracks?(This Question got more than 1 million views in Quora)While seeing this question, every one of us feels that yes, why? Am also the one who thinks about it. Sometimes very small things have huge valuable reasons, its one among them. Let’s see what are the discussions went on it and how we got valuable answers.Best Answers:Answered by: Dave Larsen, IBEW RSE Electrician, songwriter, nerd, on Sep 18, 2013 and this answer got 48.9k ViewsI found his answer is short and crisp.“I'm not an engineer (either kind) but I believe that the gravel is called road-bed.I would guess that gravel roadbed is used for a few reasons.As the train wheels roll along, the tracks flex slightly. The gravel helps distribute the constantly shifting point loads where monolithic support would tend to break up over time.The gravel ensures that the substrate under the tracks is adequately drained, which is critical for the tracks, especially when there is exposure to a freeze-thaw cycleGravel maintains support of and the distance between the cross tiesGravel is in a sense like a flexible stone. It is for practical purposes waterproof and can withstand heavy compression. It doesn't rot.Any engineers out there who can tell me if I'm on the right track?Yes, he is correct and the answer for it is clearly given here,Answered by:​ Shah Jayesh, B.tech from Dharmsinh Desai University, Nadiad, Updated on Nov 1, 2017 and this answer got 26.8k Views​Track ballast- the stones that you see lying close to the railway tracks are collectively called track ballast. Track ballast is packed between the sleepers, in the areas below, and on the sides of railway tracksSleepers- A railway sleeper is rectangular support that is usually kept perpendicular to the tracks. Means in the middle which is of concrete mainly (wood was mainly used in Britishers rule) to hold the rails and properly spaced.REASON FOR USING OF STONES:An important function is to absorb the vibrations and protect rigid structures by doing so.They provide support to the tracks. As sharp and edges stones are used (because when train moves so that they didn't move on each other) so that they maintain the space between the tracks.In preventing the growth of vegetation otherwise maintenance will cost much.It drains out any water that may be around the tracks that water doesn’t stayNear the tracks and compromise the support provided by of the ground below.Interesting thing:EPDM - Ethylene Propylene diene monomer is a rubber which is used in rail tracks to decrease the amount of vibration produced by trains because of its high resistance to heat, water and other mechanical strainsQUESTION 14:Photography: What are some of the most inspirational photos ever taken?(This Question got more than 1 million views in Quora)Photography is a passion for some and it’s a hobby for some. Let see the interesting answers with photos for this question in Quora.Best Answer:Answered by: Irshad Zeya, Change is the Only Constant, Answered on Jul 24, 2016, and this answer got 172.8k ViewsThis picture changed me “How I see my world!”.The picture has been taken in war-torn Palestine.A father is bathing his Daughter and Niece in a bathtub in their destroyed house.Dad has a splendid smile on his face and the kids could be seen to laughing.It looks that the “Destructive forces” was able to destroy everything except the high “Spirit” of this man.This Dad must be a super Dad who has lost too much but still making things fun.They are making things happier with whatever they are left with.And here I stood who would complain for a bad mess food, slow WiFi, Power cuts, and the list continues to the smallest to the smallest things.Hardly being thankful and satisfied for what I got.After thinking too much about this pic and observing it for long, I really feel inspired to be a better & thankful person from now on.Answered by: Hicham Mounadi, Student Answered Sep 22, 2015, and this answered got more than 2.3k ViewsDr. Religa monitors his patient's vitals after a 23-hour long heart transplant surgery. His assistant is sleeping in the corner. [1987]The patient not only survived the surgery but outlived his doctor.Flag Raising On Iwo Jima, Joe Rosenthal, 1945It is but a speck of an island 760 miles south of Tokyo, a volcanic pile that blocked the Allies’ march toward Japan. The Americans needed Iwo Jima as an air base, but the Japanese had dug in. U.S. troops landed on February 19, 1945, beginning a month of fighting that claimed the lives of 6,800 Americans and 21,000 Japanese. On the fifth day of battle, the Marines captured Mount ­Suribachi.An American flag was quickly raised, but a commander called for a bigger one, in part to inspire his men and demoralize his opponents. Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal lugged his bulky Speed Graphic camera to the top, and as five Marines and a Navy corpsman prepared to hoist the Stars and Stripes, Rosenthal stepped back to get a better frame—and almost missed the shot. “The sky was overcast,” he later wrote of what has become one of the most recognizable images of war.“The wind just whipped the flag out over the heads of the group, and at their feet the disrupted terrain and the broken stalks of the shrubbery exemplified the turbulence of war.” Two days later Rosenthal’s photo was splashed on front pages across the U.S., where it was quickly embraced as a symbol of unity in the long-fought war. The picture, which earned Rosenthal a Pulitzer Prize, so resonated that it was made into a postage stamp and cast as a 100-ton bronze memorial.Views For this answer: 323.7k ViewsThese are some answers I really felt interested in.QUESTION 13:If pi ended what number would it end on?(This Question got more than 2 million views in Quora)A Simple mathematical question but has more value for it.Best Answer:Answered by: Michael Mann, studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Answered on Mar 25, 2017, and this answer got over 2.3k ViewsBy “end” I assume you mean the decimal representation of that number has a finite number of digits. If this is the case, no number truly ”ends,” and it would probably be best for you to think of it in this manner to avoid confusion.The decimal representation of rational numbers is said to either terminate after a finite number of digits or proceed indefinitely with a certain set of digits repeating. However, those numbers which seemingly terminate after a finite number of digits could be written with a repeating digit of zero ad infinitum, which would make them identical to their non-terminating counterparts. Thus, rational numbers, in their decimal form, go on forever but repeat a certain set of digits. It may be the single digit 0, allowing it to be written in a simpler form.pi is irrational. Its decimal form does not ever end (like ALL real numbers) AND no pattern of digits repeats ad infinitum. So, it makes no sense to ask what number pi would end on if it ended. It would not be pi if it ended.Yes, Pi is irrational. Hence it can’t be ended.QUESTION 12:What is the greatest single image in movie history?(This Question got more than 2 million views in Quora)Best Answer:Answered by: Dan Munro, Author of Casino Healthcare and Forbes Contributor, Answered on Apr 22, 2017, and this answer got 48.7k ViewsIt’s a tough question because movies are moving images. Picking a single frame as a single “greatest” image isn’t entirely accurate because certainly some of the best — if not the greatest images — are tied directly to a collection of moving images (or scenes).Most of the images selected so far are good choices, of course, but my vote (not referenced so far) has to be this one from one of my all time favorite films — Lawrence of Arabia.This now famous image/scene is notable for many reasons — not the least of which is that cinematographer Freddie Young used a 482mm lens from Panavision for the scene. Panavision still has this lens, and it is officially known among cinematographers as the “David Lean lens.” It was created specifically for this one shot and has not been used since.By the genre of “Epic,” the American Film Institute selected Lawrence of Arabia as their #1 pick in their Top 10 list of all time. The other nine are:2) Ben Hur3) Schindler’s List4) Gone With the Wind5) Spartacus6) Titanic7) All Quiet on the Western Front8) Saving Private Ryan9) Reds10) The Ten CommandmentsThe whole scene is about 3mins long — and is arguably the single best entrance and introduction to a character (Sherif Ali — played by Omar Sharif) ever filmed.More answers are interesting but he gave a conclusion that movies are moving images, that line gave an exact answer for the above question.QUESTION 11:What are 20 random facts about yourself?(This Question got more than 2 million views in Quora)This question is simple but it gives us to know the people mentality, behavior clearly. Let’s see the best answer with high views.Best Answer:Answered by: Jayant Shilanjan Mundhra, I learn. I share. Updated May 4, 2017, and this answer got 110.6k Views#1. I hand-write drafts for almost all of my answers before I type them and post on Quora. And, thus I often end up not posting a lot of my answers out of my indolence.#2. The first girl I proposed was named Akanksha. She denied. The first proposal I received was from a girl named Akanksha. I denied. Then, I got in a relationship with another girl named Akanksha! I wonder what's with this name and me!#3. I have lived in various places of India- Siliguri, Hanumangarh, Bahadurgarh, New Delhi, Kota, Faridabad, Gwalior- 7 cities, 5 states of India.#4. My mother and I were born on the same date of 11th December. That is pretty rare. I have never met another person who shares his/her birthday with his/her parents.#5. I love to look good. I almost always dress up well if I'm heading out even for mere 5 minutes. I simply love to view myself in the mirror.#6. Average child laughs 315 times a day. Average adult laughs 15 times a day. I laugh almost 90-100 times a day.#7. I learnt to swim on my own. I was in 7th standard back then and used to go to swim with my friends. While my friends learnt the sport in mere 15 days with the help of a coach, I mastered its various forms on my own in 30 days.#8. I'm an avid coin and stamp collector. I have a collection of almost 295 coins from over 59 nations. These coins go back to the ages of 16th century. Also, I have 289 stamps from over 77 nations. Not even my closest friends know about it.#9. If you don't have proof of something. It's pretty tough for me to believe you. I have pretty strong respect for my rationale. And, I keep it's judgments in very high esteem.#10. I have seen the FRIENDS TV sitcom for 7 times. All ten seasons, seven times. I know that might be unpalatable to some. But, I simply can’t resist the Joey love.#11. At my peak I have performed 450 push-ups in a single day.#12. I'm very peculiar about the way things around me are used. One must use everything with utter care, else they can expect some rants from me. Call it OCD or anything else. But, I like everything properly and safely. I don't like it when people take anything for granted.#13. Other than my exam time, I read about 4-5 hours a day. Reading is the fuel that keeps me going. I have a huge appetite for learning more and more. And, my books are the greatest source for that.#14. I can't read even three pages straight from a physical book without yawning. I find physical/paperback books very displeasing. Kindle is my all-time best friend in this regard.#15. I know a lot about International politics, Israel, Mossad, Sayeret Matkal, Middle-East conflicts and Modern Indian history.#16. Be it Holi or Diwali, festivals don't excite me much. Visiting orphanages is much more my thing.#17. I have been caught cheating thrice. All the three times it was examinations of Sanskrit subject. All the times it was the same teacher. Misery!#18. Be it today or 20 years later. But, I'll definitely end up in Mumbai. I have been in love with the city ever since I visited it last year. There is no place like Mumbai to me in India.#19. I can't wait for episodes of sitcoms to be released. So, I binge watch them once the series is all over. I keep a lot of snacks laid around me, and I watch TV sitcoms straight for over 6-7 hours in a go.#20. I'm terrific at remembering dates. First hug. First proposal. The day I got 1 Million views on Quora. The day I began blogging. The day I began reading. Everything. I have it all imprinted in my head.Phew! My brain is super tired after this. Time for some rest.It’s worth reading his answer, he had spent more time to write it heartily.QUESTION 10:What made you sad today?(This Question got more than 3 million views in Quora)Best Answer:Answered by: Saumya Sharma, studies at National Institute of Fashion Technology (2021), Updated on Jun 5, 2017, and this answer got 439.2k V viewsA rich daughter insulting her not so rich father in public made me sad today!Today my mom and I went to a jewelry store to buy some diamond jewelry for her. Next to us was seated a girl with her parents. Uncle looked old and a normal middle-class person but had a beautiful smile on his face.He asked the shopkeeper to show some gold bangles for their daughter's wedding. When salesman showed him some bangles worth 60k he proudly said -Bhaiya thodi heavy si dikhaiye! Beti ki shaadi hai! Sb kuch isi ke liye hi toh joda (save) hai puri life!(English Translation-Please Show some heavier bangles! It's my dear daughter's wedding. All these years I have saved my hard earned money just for her!)Then he and his wife selected a pair of bangles worth 1.2 lakh for their daughter while she was busy in texting!The girl saw it and said in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, “oh please dad! How can you expect me to wear these cheap middle-class bangles! No need to buy if you can't afford something classy! I am successful now and can afford expensive jewelry! U leave it! I will buy with my money!” And asked the shopkeeper to show diamond bangles in range 4–5 lakh!I can never forget that sad expression on uncle's face. I guess she was one of the poorest people I have ever metIt’s a really sad answer.QUESTION 9:Are there any poor people on Quora, as Internet access is very cheap nowadays?It’s a real-time question that everyone has a doubt. This Question got more than 3 million views in QuoraBest Answer:Answered by: Mohammad Khan, works at Momekh, Answered on May 17, 2017, and this answer got 22.2k ViewsYes, because “poor” is a relative term. Unless you define it. And it has been defined by the good folks sitting in big buildings with free parking for their cars.If you earn less than $60 bucks a month, you’re below the poverty line. If you earn more than $60 per month, you are ABOVE the poverty line.People who earn less than $60 a month, they are not on Quora.So no, “poor” as per definition, are not on Quora.Less than 3.5 Billion are connected to the Internet in one form or the other. That leaves almost as much who are NOT connected to the Internet. So generally speaking, it is will be unwise to assume that poor people are using the Internet, using Quora etc.Being poor is and will remain a relative concept… a person who is showing us a wardrobe and a TV and a phone is NOT poorer than a few people I know who earn less than $80 bucks a month (here in Pakistan), and then have four kids to feed. And when you would ask that person if things are tough, he may first praise God for giving him so much, and then relate an incident or two of people poorer than him, people who are on “automatic fasting” because they dont have access to food.So even if there are poorer people on Quora, they are still on Quora and were blessed enough to speak and understand English and have access to the Internet. Most people don’t. And possibly won’t for years to come.QUESTION 8:What is the most private photo you have ever taken?(This Question got more than 5 million views in Quora)Best Answer:Answered by: Hope Pitney, Server at Hearth 'n Kettle (2017-present), Updated Aug 22, 2016, and this answer got 473.4k ViewsThis is a very funny and embarrassing story. My husband and I were separated for 11 months, meaning he left me due to family obligations and not because we split up. To keep our romance alive while we were apart, we'd have phone sex and send each other photos. Well, one day I took some racy topless pics because my man is a boob guy. I forgot to delete said pictures.Fast forward about a week or so and he sends me a pic of a pic from 14 years ago that he found in his belongings of when we were first together. I decided to go around work and show all my coworkers and my bosses because we were oh so cute. I handed the phone to my boss so she could get a better look and she accidentally swiped to the naked booby picture. She threw the phone back to me but not before her husband saw too. Oops. Now whenever I want to show them a pic, he says oh God it better not be your breasts or a dick pic. HahahaFunny heeeeeeeeee!QUESTION 7:What is the most under-rated pleasure?(This Question got more than 6 million views in Quora)Best Answer:Answered by: Vishak Raman, Still living, still learning. More importantly - still growing. Updated on Jun 13, 2017, and this answer got 787.9k ViewsImagine this.You are J.J wakes up at 6:30 am, brushes his teeth, takes a shower, eats breakfast, drives to work, finishes up at 5 pm, drives home, watches a little telly, eats dinner, reads a book, and goes to sleep.See anything wrong with J’s day? No?How about the fact J didn’t wake up to a blaring alarm clock, turn it off and go back to sleep thereby winding up late for work - only to have a flat tire on the way. J didn’t get reprimanded by his boss who told him to stay over-time. J didn’t have to finally leave his workplace around 7 pm, take a taxi over to the Wal-Mart Tire Repair Service to collect his car, only to realize he left his wallet at home, and J didn’t finally roll into his driveway at 10 pm, just in time to watch in horror as his house burned down because he left the gas on.What’s the most under-rated pleasure?QUESTION 6:What can I learn/know right now in 10 minutes that will be useful for the rest of my life?(This Question got more than 10 million views in Quora)Best Answer:Answered by: Dipak Rangote, former Civil Engineer at Larsen & Toubro ECC (2016-2018), Answered on Jan 6, 2018 and this post got 123.6k ViewsBelieve me, I have the best advice for you!Imagine, you are stuck somewhere and from last 3 hours you have a strong urge to go to toilet and get things done.Finally, you get freedom and you start running towards toilet. You take your pants down furiously with the speed of light and acquire toilet seat with great satisfaction.Ever in your life you must have gone through this.At the time of taking pants down you feel the strongest urge to get things done however you have controlled yourself for last 3 hours. In those 10 seconds if in any case you don't take your pants down then definitely you will get into disaster.That's same with your problems. They tend to appear much bigger when they are about to end. So, whenever your problems seem to get more complicated don't panic. Time has come to finish the problem but only thing you have to do is have patience and keep doing things in calm manner otherwise you know the disaster.Amazing yaarrr!!!!QUESTION 5:What are some great advertisements?(This Question got more than 15 million views in Quora)Best Answer:Answered by Vibhor Dhote, Philomath, Updated on Jun 13, 2015, and this answer got 13.9k views.Here are some of my favorites poster ads. Work of pure geniuses all of it. Will keep on adding as I find more.Orion Telescopes (Do note the 'Made in China' on the US flag)Poster ad for Canadian Paralympics:Organ Donor Ad:Anti-smoking ad:Brucciani: Free WiFiBiolink Shampoo Intense Moisture:Dove - Unstick your style:Kansas - city Library:Fiat-Drive Friendly:Ariel - Because color is everything:Eye testing:Hellenic Association of Blood DonSorry, I can’t give all the Ad pictures here. To see more check his page on Quora.QUESTION 4:What is a secret which you would not tell anybody in real life, but would on Quora using anonymity?(This Question got more than 15 million views in Quora)I hope this question gives more answers because who are all having fear to open out something outside they can use anonymity and expose their feelings here. Such interesting!!Best ANSWER:Answered by Anonymous, Updated Mar 4, 2018, and this post viewed by 361.8k Views peopleThen story of me becoming a slut….I'm a 28 year old woman in Tamil nadu, India.4 years back I was orphaned by the death of my widow mother. I had no options to live, I studied only till 12th standard. This is the time when I was cornered by my dad's old friends, who offered me a living in exchange for my body.I had no choice in that part of my life when I had to accept it. They gave me 10k per night to fuck a guy. Even now I regret doing that but I had no other options and I didn't do it intentionally. They used to offer 10k for every night twice every week. It was going on for two months when I met another guy who was so horny that he ended up fucking me for the whole night. He was so interested in me that he took me away with him saying that I'm worth more than 10k per night. He introduced me to the dark markets of the city. I made a lot of money for about a year. Sometimes business men came in group of four and offered me upto a lakh for that night. This was when I started using Quora to gain knowledge on sexuality. It made me think about my life. I started to understand how stupid I was in fucking every random guy I met to live a luxurious life.I wanted to stop it once for ever. I had a huge savings account. I started to search peace in life. I met an old acquaintance (uncle) of my family who had a grocery shop. I thought this was the right time to start living a normal life. I started working in the shop on a dialy basis. My uncle did not know about my past. This part of my life turned to be the most beautiful one. I started to write on Quora and got a bit popular. I met the love of my life, my uncle's son. I said about my past at the instant he proposed me. He said he loved me for my new life I live and he said that he'll forget the past. He wanted me to hide this information and not even tell about this to my uncle. I promised (sorry that I have broke his promise on Quora). He had me tested for STDs and it tested negative.Now I've been married to him for the past 1.5 years and we have a little girl. He has a stable job in a private firm and I continue to supervise in our grocery store. Last month I decided to discard the savings in my bank account. I talked about this with my husband and we decided it to donate it to an orphanage. I felt immensely happy during the moment we gave the cheque of 11.5 lakhs (18k USD) to the collector of a girl's orphanage. I felt like I had prevented lots of girls from becoming like me.Now I'm living a happy life with my family with this little secret which i hope will remain a secret forever.Edit 1: I thank all of the people who commented saying that faith in humanity is restored. I do believe that it's happening. And for all those people out there telling that I'm a stupid little teenager trying to become a budding writer, I can say only one thing, if you are trying to make me reveal myself then you fail my friends. I have seen a lot harsher things than your comments and I'll definitely ignore them. However I thank you people for the good comments and yes my husband is really a good person and I'm very lucky to have him.Edit 2: I'll try to answer many of the doubts raised. It's your wish whether you are gonna believe it or not.1. How is my English fluent?I said I studied till 12th standard and I do have some knowledge on English and I'm using Quora for the past two years.2. Then how did I get trapped inspite of some basic knowledge?I said “I was cornered by my dad's friends and there is a big story about it how I was forced to make such decision”3. How did you make money as high as 11.5 lakhs?If you were to ask this question then you are wrong, you have no idea how much people pay per intercourse. Try asking some people with knowledge on this sector.There are many answers interesting please into the questions and answers in Quora.QUESTION 3:What are some mind-blowing facts that sound like 'BS', but are actually true?(This Question got more than 20 million views in Quora)Best Answer:Answered by Mads Olsen, a Former intern at the Danish Parliament. Updated on Apr 29, 2017, and this answer got 128k ViewsYour mind can’t make up new faces. Every face you see in your dreams are not strangers. They are people you have encountered at least once in your lifetime. The creepy side of this is, that every time you have sex with someone in your dreams, it is most likely someone you know.You share 50% of your DNA with a banana. This one is really something that shocked me. 50% of my genes are in a banana? We also share 80 % of our DNA with cows, and 60% with chickens.United Airlines lost 180 million dollars due to a song. When in 2009 United Airlines broke a man’s 4500 dollar guitar, they refused to pay him. In revenge, he wrote a protest song that resulted in a 10% stock price fall, costing stockholders 180 million dollars. Apparently, they have a history of violence.London can be classified as a forest. Somehow, there are so many trees in London, that by UN definition that it could be classified as a forest. There are currently around 8.4 million trees, nearly 1 tree per person.Your brain shrinks during pregnancy. Now, there is no need to be worried about this. It is actually perfectly normal in healthy pregnancies. This happens late in pregnancy, and although no one knows exactly why, your brain will return to its normal size some time after pregnancy.Note: I will keep adding to this list as I discover some more fascinating facts. Thanks for reading!QUESTION 2:What is the most horrific picture you have ever seen?(This Question got more than 5 million views in Quora)Best Answer:Answered by Pranav Vasanthi, Research Scientist at Aston University, Updated on Mar 21, 2018 and this answer got 244.3k Views“Imagine, if you were crushed inside 0a glass bottle, such that you are completely immobilised. You can’t turn you head, you can’t move your body parts, you can’t look up or down, you are suffocating and you are extremely stressed and nervous. The only thing you can do is breathe. Now imagine that the only thing you breathe is cigarette smoke for 6–7 hours a day, 7 days a week, for several months. How would you feel?”This is probably what a rodent would ask you if it had the chance to.Because this has been their life for several decades now.You see that white stuff inside the glass canisters? That’s not cotton candy. Those are live rats. As in, alive for the next few months before they would develop cancer all over their body and be ripped apart to analyse the effect of cigarette smoke exposure. Rats generally avoid breathing cigarette smoke. So, they are deliberately enclosed in glass canisters and forced to inhale noxious gases for several hours a day!All for what? To analyse petty things like the effect of adding strawberry flavour to tobacco cigarettes or any other disgusting flavour to your E-cigarette.And for God’s sake, even the science is inaccurate. Rats are obligate nose breathers. They can only breathe cigarette smoke or E-cigarette vapour through their nose as opposed humans who inhale cigarette smoke through their mouth. Rats have less extensive bronchus branching compared to humans and the airway epithelial cells are ‘non-ciliated’ as opposed to the ciliated human bronchial epithelial cells. The mucus-producing glands of mice are much smaller and less in number compared to humans. In fact, some scientists argue that mouse do not have bronchiolar glands! It is a highly contentious issue. But almost all the scientists agree that this lack of sub-mucosal glands makes mouse a poor animal model for human diseases like chronic bronchitis. (Rats do have these bronchiolar mucus-producing glands but they are mostly concentrated on the upper region of airways as opposed to uniformly and evenly distributed mucosal glands in humans)Rats are not the only species which undergo this torture. If you haven’t had the misfortune of seeing the iconic ‘smoking beagles’ picture then here it is:(Sorry dog lovers, I had to! Profuse apologies)These beagles were used to test the efficacy of an apparently ‘safe cigarette’, which I believe is as much a reality as space-ships and aliens. It was the chutzpah of an audacious journalist called Mary Beith, that exposed this horrendous scientific practice to the world. It is probably this image which has made animal usage for science highly regulated now. Ever wondered how one person or one image can change the world? That’s Mary Beith and her photograph for you.Okay, how do we progress with science then without using animals?Well, the good news is that there has been tremendous recent advances in animal-free science specifically in airways disease modelling like lung-on-a-chip or air-liquid-interface in-vitro culturing (please ignore the jargons if you have to). Almost all the scientists throughout the world are trying to minimise the usage of animals unless it is absolutely necessary. It is an universal initiative called 3R’s- replacement, reduction and refinement of animal usage in laboratories. Such a global initiative would augur the progress of more human relevant science. Such an effort would also catalyse human medicines faster and more relevant drugs/vaccines be produced in a shorter span of time.Hence, save animals. Replace animals with better science. Use animals only when it is absolutely necessary. If not, don’t!And btw, if you think I am an animal sympathiser wasting my time here, you are wrong. I am a research scientist pursing my PhD in a subject quite relatable to what I have written here.Oh and for those of you wondering what the hell a lung-on-a-chip is, look at this badass:That thing there, the size of a USB stick, can literally mimic your lung action! It was developed by Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. For further details, Google.QUESTION 1:What are the most amazing photos you have ever taken?(This Question got more than 10 million views in Quora)Best ANSWER:Answered by Prasannjeet Singh, I know how to use a Camera!, Answered on Oct 27, 2015, and this answer got 3.7k ViewsMy story is about the image above. Pretty simple, right? Looks like yet another day.But wait, did you notice something peculiar above?You might be wondering why are the street lights lit up (4 of them in this pic) on a sunny day! And that's the thing which makes it special. I took this image at around midnight in complete darkness with a very basic mobile camera without flash.This is the time when I was in the 2nd semester of my engineering in Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal, Karnataka (India). I along with my friend skipped dinner because we were too busy playing Counter Strike and Celebrating Sachin's Double Century! Naturally, we were extremely hungry after midnight and planned to order food from a nearby 24/7 restaurant (Spice & Ice). Due to restrictions, we had to walk till the main gate of our campus to pick up the order.It was completely dark and raining heavily, thus we borrowed an umbrella and a phone with flashlight (Nokia N85). While waiting for the delivery boy, I noticed the frequency of lightning to be more than normal, and so I took out the N85 to take that dream shot (at least for me, especially with that camera!).Phone-Cameras those time were not as fast as they are now. It took me 35+ minutes and 200+ photos to finally synchronize my click with the lightning which I guess lasts just for a few milliseconds!Picture of the same place milliseconds later:Uncropped Full Image:I guess the lightning spanned for so little time that the sorry camera wasn't able to capture the whole thing in time!No. of tries (as saved in my folder) before I finally got the perfect picture (there are more but this explains it!):Date Taken: After midnight, April 24th, 2010.Camera: Nokia N85No, I am not a photographer!

"To my colleagues at CNN both in front of and behind the cameras. Without your collective efforts, this book would not have been possible. We truly did go “all in” to cover this story. And we will continue to do so, wherever it goes."A large commercial airliner going missing without a trace for so long is unprecedented in modern aviation. It must not happen again.— Tony Tyler, director general, IATAWhere’s that plane?” If there is one question I get asked most these days, this is it. From politicians and CEOs to doormen and cabdrivers, time and again they want to know, “What happened to that plane? Where is it?” Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 — with 239 people aboard — departed from Kuala Lumpur shortly after midnight on March 8, 2014, bound for Beijing, China, and has never been seen since. Despite the largest aviation search in history, virtually nothing was found of the aircraft in the wake of its disappearance. Sixteen months later, thousands of miles from the flight’s path, a piece of an airplane’s wing washed ashore on Reunion Island. Still, this bit of evidence and a flimsy trail of electronic satellite data are all we have to go on—plus a huge amount of speculation and confusion.“The most difficult search ever undertaken in human history.”When Australia’s prime minister Tony Abbott uttered those words in April 2014, it was not just the usual hyperbole of a politician. What happened to MH370 has been described as a unique, unprecedented, and extraordinary mystery. Planes may crash, but they are not supposed to disappear without a trace. Earlier ocean crashes, such as Air France 447 or Air India 182, have demonstrated that wreckages can typically be located within hours. Airlines today own the most modern aircraft, featuring up-to-date navigation technology, while regulations govern everything from the number of hours a pilot can fly to the fire-resistant fabric used in the passenger seats. Despite the precautions, no one has been able to pinpoint the final resting place of MH370 and those on board. All the while we know that if you lose your iPhone, it can be traced within minutes.At the heart of this mystery remains the question of the cause of the plane’s disappearance. Was it mechanical, or was it criminal: Did someone deliberately take over the aircraft and set it on a course to the south Indian Ocean, intending to kill all on board? Would that someone turn out to be an unknown hijacker or terrorist, or could it have been one of the pilots?Do I have a view of what might have happened? I do, and I will share it. In doing so, I am not blind to the obvious options, but prefer to keep an open mind on the eventual outcome. As will become clear in the chapters that follow, as a television journalist, I became frustrated, and even angry, with some of the pundits with whom I had to work who were quite prepared to convict the pilots long before any evidence had been found. Instead, this book will stick to the facts as we know them. In the end, you will be left to make up your own mind about where you think the evidence leads.The disappearance of MH370 has been a serious failure for the multibillion-dollar aviation industry, revealing disturbing facts and behaviors. That one of the most advanced aircraft in the world should vanish, while an airline left hundreds of desperate families waiting for news of their loved ones, is unpardonable. In response, airlines have rewritten their rules from top to bottom. An alphabet soup of international organizations responsible for air travel safety held high-level meetings and set up a task force to look at ways to ensure that planes are always being tracked in real time. Even CEOs I spoke to were as astounded as the general public that planes were not always being tracked to a fine point of precision. Some of the changes did not come soon enough: as suspicion about MH370’s pilots increased, discussions were held about a “two-person in the cockpit” rule, stipulating that if one pilot temporarily leaves the cockpit, he or she should be replaced by a flight attendant. Yet the considerable amount of talk led to very little action. If such a change had been made, the crashing of Germanwings 9525, in which a rogue pilot deliberately flew his airliner into a mountain, possibly would not have happened.When all is said and done, MH370 boils down to one simple fact. For the first time since the Wright brothers first flew, this industry, which prided itself on a policy of “safety first,” is having to cope with the unthinkable: a plane disappeared. It is no wonder the head of the airline organization IATA, Tony Tyler, decried, “A large commercial airliner going missing without a trace for so long is unprecedented in modern aviation. And it must not happen again.”The fascination with MH370 goes deeper than an aviation story.International diplomatic and political issues have been raised too. More than 60 percent of the passengers on board the plane were Chinese citizens, and the Chinese government wasted little time in flexing its muscles on their behalf. The relatives of Chinese victims were put up in a Beijing hotel where regular briefings were given by low-level Malaysian government and airline officials. These were acrimonious events, interrupted frequently by hysterical outbursts from distraught family members frustrated at the lack of information they were being given. The way the relatives were treated was shabby at best.Then there was the role of the Malaysian government itself. Were they a bunch of incompetents who had no idea what they were doing, doomed to make mistake after mistake? Or perhaps the truth was something more sinister: a cover-up for an erroneous military strike? Few people will deny that the first weeks of this crisis were not something of which the Malaysians can be proud. As the tensions rose across the South China Sea, the fate of MH370 rapidly became entwined in a diplomatic game of realpolitik, mystery, intrigue, and failure.As planes get bigger, and the ultra-long-haul flight becomes more common, the fact that MH370 happened is worrying, for it should never have happened.THE PLANE AND PASSENGERSAircraft Reg: 9M-MROAircraft Type: Boeing 777-200ERBuilt & Delivered: May 29, 2002 (11 years 9 months 9 days)Flight Hrs: 53,465Comms: 3 VHF radios, 2 HF radios, 1 SATCOM, 2 ATC transpondersSouls on Board: 239Crew: 12Pax: 227THE PILOTSThe Captain: Zaharie Ahmad Shah. Malaysian, age 53. Total flying hours: 18,365 hours. Experience on 777: 8,659 hours. Joined Malaysia Airlines in 1981.First Officer: Fariq Abdul Hamid. Malaysian, age 27. Total flying hours: 2,763. Experience on 777: 39 hours. Joined Malaysia Airlines in 2007.THE FLIGHTMH370, Kuala Lumpur to BeijingMARCH 8 (MALAYSIA STANDARD TIME)00:27 Push-back00:41 Takeoff00:42 Directed to Igari (waypoint)00:50 Directed to climb FL35000:50 Read-back FL35001:01 Advises reached FL35001:07 ACARS last transmission (provided total fuel remaining)01:07 Repeats FL35001:19 Handoff to Vietnam “Contact HCM 120.9 good night”01:19 Read-back “Good night Malaysian 370” LAST WORDSIn the case of the safety history of the 777, there was nothing to worry about. The 777, which first came into service in 1995, has an exemplary safety record. In almost twenty years, there had never been an accident where passengers had died in a plane crash. In 2013, Asiana 214 crash-landed in San Francisco. Two passengers died after they escaped from the aircraft and were run over by a fire truck responding to the accident. A third passenger died later in the hospital. The only other major 777 incident at the time of MH370 was the crash landing of the British Airways Flight 38 at London Heathrow. That came about because ice had formed in the fuel lines during a frigid flight from Beijing. When the ice jolted free, it blocked the line and starved the engines of fuel. The plane lost power and glided the last few miles to crash just short of the runway. Fortunately, everyone survived.Having seen the state of the crashed aircraft with both Asiana and British Airways, I find it a miracle that no one was killed when the planes hit the ground — a testament, I have no doubt, to Boeing’s ability to build superb airplanes (and the same is true for Airbus!). The 777 was, and still is, among the safest aircraft, and I had no hesitation in saying so on-air, then or now."We owe it to the grieving families, we owe it to everyone who travels by air, to get to the bottom of this mystery."—Tony Abbott, Australian prime ministerWell, he was voted out of power and that is that.In the following days, then weeks, months, and now years after MH370’s disappearance, Chris and all my other anchor colleagues have asked me the same question again and again. My answer has always been the same. “Yes, they will find it. They must.” As the time has gone by, sometimes I think I detect a certain wry smile on my colleagues’ faces as the words I uttered with such certitude come back to haunt me.So far I have been proved wrong, and with the exception of the single flaperon, nothing of the plane has been found. Some are now saying that the plane may never be found, that the task is too great. Assuming the Inmarsat data is correct, and the plane is lying along the seventh arc, the water is too deep, the ocean canyons too wide, the area too large. The search teams could be trolling right over the wreckage and never notice it.Of course we want to know what happened during those moments, on the morning of March 8, 2014, at 1:19, just after Captain Zaharie said, “Good night Malaysian 370.” But if we never discover the facts, there are plenty of other issues occasioned by the plane’s disappearance and it is these that must be resolved. There is the failure of air traffic control on that night, the confusion and political interference in the search operation, and the new methods of tracking planes and retrieving vital black-box data that are now being considered.Sixteen months after MH370 went missing, I was on assignment in Florida for CNN Business Traveller when I got the email. My producer Saskya Vandoorne wrote, “Twitter is abuzz with MH370 . . . probably a false lead but a wing has washed up near the Reunion Island.” She enclosed a picture of the object found in the western Indian Ocean. I was about ten miles from Legoland, where I was filming the next part of our show on theme parks. As I looked at the photo it was obvious that this was something significant. It was a part of a large aircraft wing, probably one of the flaps.Within hours, larger, better photos of the missing plane part had been published and we were comparing it to online schematics of the Boeing 777 wing. The pictures suggested that the piece was part of the control surfaces of the wing. Rather than the flaps, it appeared to be one of the plane’s two flaperons. A flaperon is a hybrid piece of equipment that combines the functions of the flaps and the ailerons, hence the name flaperon. The ailerons control the left and right banking of the aircraft by going up and down into the airflow, helping raise or lower the wing to make turns. The flaps extend on takeoff and landing and increase the wings’ size, giving the plane greater lift at slower speeds. The flaperons are part of a plane’s steering mechanism, and allow the pilot to bank the plane. At slower speeds they also extend marginally out of the wing in order to give greater stability and lift. As a passenger, you can see the flaperon in action if you sit behind the wing. It is on the trailing edge and is located nearer the fuselage. You will see it bouncing up and down on takeoff and landing as it stabilizes the aircraft, unlike the flaps, which extend in several sections then retract into the wing. The flaperon remains active throughout the flight (although at higher speeds it is far less noticeable).After some initial confusion over a number reportedly printed on the piece, it was confirmed as 657BB. It was described in the Boeing 777 maintenance manual as “flaperon Leading Edge Panel.”2 Another piece of debris was also recovered on the beach: the remnants of some sort of suitcase or backpack.While we waited for the aviation investigators to make a final determination on the source of the flaperon, I was being asked one vital question, hour after hour: Was it possible for a piece of debris from MH370 to have traveled 2,500 miles from the most likely crash site? It became obvious that the answer was, unequivocally, yes. If you look at a map, you’ll see that Reunion is on the opposite side of the Indian Ocean from Australia. It is a straight shot across the water from the most likely search zone to the coast of East Africa, where the island is located. Experts were put on-air reminding us that they had long predicted that the currents of the southern Indian Ocean Gyre, swirling around, creating a great sea garbage tank, would eventually cause the debris to drift across to the other side.In March 2014, the experts were telling us that eventually, something would be washed up on the western side of the Indian Ocean. It was all backed up by solid scientific evidence from the University of Western Australia, which showed us its drift-modeling forecast, which indicated that after eighteen months, wreckage would land in that region.If we were surprised by this development, our expert oceanographers were not.As the news of the find flashed around the world, it was particularly noted in Paris, where a new bureaucratic wrinkle was about to be added to the proceedings. Reunion has been under the control of France since the seventeenth century. It is now classed as an overseas territory and considered an administrative region, or prefecture, of France. Even though the French had played only a limited, advisory role in the MH370 investigation so far, the fact that the flaperon had washed up on French soil meant the French authorities took responsibility for handling the debris, which had to be transported to France for specialized examination. Thus, late on Friday, July 31, the flaperon was crated and boarded onto an Air France 777 flight bound for Paris. As I watched the video of the plane taking off I thought of the strange juxtaposition of one 777 carrying in its belly a vital part of another 777, taking it on a journey to release any secrets it had carried for the past sixteen months.As the piece was making its way to France, Boeing sources made it clear that yes, their experts recognized this as a flaperon from a 777 but they couldn’t say whether it was from 9M-MRO without further tests. This was backed up by comments from the Australian deputy prime minister, Warren Truss, who said the flaperon was a “major lead” and was “not inconsistent with a Boeing 777.”It was a very strange situation: everyone agreed that this was a 777 flaperon, but no one would say it’s the flaperon. Yet what else could it be? There were no other missing 777s in that part of the world. Though no 777 had reported losing a flaperon in flight — it’s the sort of thing a pilot would notice pretty quickly — everyone stopped short of weighing in definitively on the piece of debris. The French transferred the flaperon from Paris to Balma near Toulouse, and the headquarters of the Direction Générale de l’Armement (DGA). The DGA is part of the Ministry of Defense and is a specialist laboratory and testing center for the military and civilian aerospace industry. In many ways it was the perfect place to send the flaperon, as the DGA did much of the work on the wreckage of Air France 447, which had been in the water for years. This gave them expertise in analyzing pieces exactly like this one.The judicial authorities in France were now calling the shots because four of the passengers on board MH370 were French citizens. With a hijacking or other criminal act looming as a possibility, under French law the judicial authorities were given primacy to inquire into what had happened. The inspection of the flaperon was to be conducted under the control nd presence of three French judges carrying out their legal mandate. Inevitably a bureaucratic circus ensued. In Paris, meetings had been held between the French and Malaysian governments to determine how to handle this development. In Toulouse, there were representatives from the BEA, NTSB, the Malaysian DCA, Malaysia Airlines, the Australian ATSB, the Chinese, Boeing—it seemed everyone had to be there to make sure proper protocol was followed during the inspection of the flaperon. Its analysis didn’t begin until four days after the piece arrived in France. It left me and my colleagues wondering what on earth was going on and taking so long.Finally, on Wednesday, August 5, 2015, it was time to reveal what they had found. An announcement was expected at 8 p.m. Paris time, from a French prosecutor, and then a statement from the Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak. That was the plan, yet the Malaysians weren’t going for it. Ten minutes before the French were to present their findings, the prime minister spoke. From everything I have heard, the Malaysians were determined that because this was their plane and their investigation, it was their right to speak first. Here is the crucial part of Razak’s statement:An international team of experts have conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris found on Reunion Island is indeed from MH370. We now have physical evidence that, as I announced on 24th March last year, flight MH370 tragically ended in the southern Indian Ocean.Within minutes of the prime minister’s statement, the deputy prosecutor in France, Serge Mackowiak, held his news conference. We waited for a similar announcement of “conclusiveness.” It never came.What was a cut-and-dried conclusion for the Malaysians was a matter of “strong presumption” for the French.The prosecutor said that Malaysia Airlines representatives had seen specific similarities that linked the flaperon to the plane. But he didn’t say what they were. No one mentioned the presence of a serial number, which would seem to be the only conclusive proof of its origins.This was a shambles. The first time potentially hard evidence of the plane is found and the authorities managed to make a complete mess of it by differing in their wording. It beggars belief that something like this was able to happen.The families, scattered around the world, had been given an early warning of a few moments about the announcement. Some received it by text message, others by email, while luckier ones got a phone call from Malaysian embassy officials. They were given the prime minister’s version of the announcement: This flaperon was part of the plane. The plane went down in the southern Indian Ocean. Yet all of a sudden we in the media were questioning this conclusion. Not surprisingly, the families of the Chinese victims were having nothing of it. Soon they were out on the streets, protesting in front of the Malaysian embassy in Beijing.Now that the French authorities had said with “certainty” that the flaperon was from MH370, one key question had been definitively answered: the plane had indeed gone down somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean. Many of the more fanciful theories about the disappearance, including the ones about landing on Diego Garcia or in the Maldives, could now be put to rest. (The conspiracy theorists will never let up, and will claim the flaperon was planted by the Chinese, Americans, or someone else who shot down the plane.)An in-depth examination of the part will probably reveal how and when it separated from the aircraft, and whether this occurred in flight or as the plane hit the water. What the flaperon will not reveal is the exact location where the plane went down. This was confirmed by the ATSB in its report published in December 2015: “While this debris find is consistent with the current search area it does not provide sufficient information to refine it.”5 It seems the flaperon won’t reveal the secret of where the plane is.Nor will the flaperon reveal what happened at 1:19 after “Good night Malaysian Three Seven Zero.” Unless there was an explosion (almost certainly there wasn’t) and residue is found (highly unlikely after all this time), the only information that the piece can possibly yield will be how it separated from the aircraft.After an accident, finding the plane is essential. Of course, the recovery of bodies must be a top priority of the airline. But to discover what happened, and how to prevent its happening again, it is also necessary to retrieve, and to analyze the contents of, the black-box recorders. MH370 rightly created huge concern among both travelers and the aviation industry. Time and again on various shows, as I explained the difficulty of the search, anchors would look incredulous and ask the same question: “If we can find the location of our lost iPhones easily online, how come a modern jetliner could just disappear without a trace?” Every day people are using ordinary technology to find something as small and commonplace as a cell phone. Yet in the case of MH370, tens of millions of dollars were being spent during months of searching the deep ocean in appalling conditions, and no one could find something as large as a 777, which costs $250 million! Months after it disappeared, we had no certainty where the plane had flown, or where on the ocean bed it lay.To track a plane with certainty, air traffic control must know where it is at all times, even when the plane’s communications equipment has been switched off, disabled, or has failed. The goal must be to receive as much information as possible from the aircraft while it is still flying. Looking at MH370, I can trace all the problems back to what happened on the night when the 777 had been able to evade the most sophisticated air traffic technology. The plane’s transponders had been switched off, the ACARS system was disabled, and there were no radio signals. The plane had “gone silent.” It was able to continue flying without anyone noticing partly because of terrible human errors made by air traffic controllers and radar operators. But, even discounting these initial mistakes, it was the long, seven-hour flight over the southern Indian Ocean that turned an incident in Southeast Asia into the world’s biggest aviation mystery. It is only stating the obvious to say that surely the technology should be put in place so that no plane can fly for so long, anywhere in the world, without air traffic control knowing its whereabouts. The public has rightly said it’s a disgrace, and the industry has to make sure it can never happen again.What is galling about MH370 is that this was not the first occasion when a major jetliner went missing and it took several years to find it. The industry had had to cope with some of the very same issues five years before, in June of 2009, when Air France 447 went missing over the South Atlantic. By now you will recall that this was the A330 that had a problem with speed indicator pitot tubes. The pilots flew the aircraft into a stall and it crashed.No radar was tracking Air France 447 when the crash happened, and no air traffic control center was following it in real time. Most fliers are amazed to learn that planes are not always tracked by radar when they are in the air, crossing the globe. Air traffic control radar constantly monitors the airspace over landmasses like Europe or the United States, where the sheer number of planes in the sky demands full coverage. Any plane that deviates from its flight plan is quickly noticed. With Germanwings 8501, only three minutes and fifty-three seconds passed after Andreas Lubitz initiated the unauthorized descent over the French Alps before the air traffic controllers were calling him on the radio demanding an explanation (and some would say even this was too slow). During the next ten minutes, until the plane hit the mountains, fourteen additional radio calls from four different sources attempted to contact the pilots. Suffice it to say, over most stretches of populated land, air traffic control responses are typically swift.There are, however, large parts of the globe where no radar exists, including the airspace over the world’s oceans. Radar coverage requires ground-based facilities. At sea, both the distances and the costs involved mean it is neither practical nor reasonable to build floating sites for oceanic radar.Of course, the absence of radar doesn’t mean that planes aren’t being supervised as they cross the oceans. Consider the thousands of aircraft that cross the Atlantic each day between North America and Europe. As the plane travels over water, traditional radar coverage ends about 250 miles after they leave behind the Canadian or Irish coast. Radar doesn’t return until they are within similar range of land on the other side. Instead there is a complicated system of “tracks” where planes fly specific east- and westbound airways, which change daily with the changes in the jet stream. The pilots are given definite times when they must join the track to begin their oceanic crossing. The planes are spaced out, roughly ten minutes apart, and this long chain of aircraft moves through the sky. Throughout the journey they communicate their position regularly, using high-frequency radios or, more usually today, satellite-based systems. A similar track method called PACOTS is used across the North Pacific between the US and Asia. If tracks aren’t being used, then planes are directed to waypoints along standard airways. Again, the aircraft regularly reports its position so air traffic control can safely space out the planes.Air France 447 was out of Brazil’s radar coverage and had just passed over waypoint ORARO, heading for waypoint TASIL. Fortunately, the plane’s ACARS system was programmed to send its location automatically every ten minutes. Five minutes had elapsed between the last transmission and the crash into the water. After calculating the maximum distance AF447 could have traveled in those five minutes, the investigators came up with a search area of forty nautical miles, covering seventeen thousand square kilometers. It took several days before the first floating debris was spotted. In the end, AF447 was found just 6.5 miles from the last known position of the flight and searchers were able to retrieve the black box.I still believe they will find it. I say this not out of some simplistic view that missing planes are always found, but because the plane must be found; the vanishing of such a large aircraft is simply not acceptable. There are more than 1,200 of the 777 family of planes flying around the world today.After the search teams have finished covering the 46,000 square miles (120,000 square kilometers) currently designated as the most probable place where the plane went down, if nothing has been found there, the whole matter becomes much more problematic. The Malaysians and the Australians have said they will stop searching at this point, because in the absence of any new evidence of where to look, increasing the zone would cease to be feasible. They can’t search the entire length of the seventh arc.The search must somehow continue. That is what I really mean when I say, “They will find the plane, they must.” There can be no temptation to consign this to the history books as an aviation mystery that was too difficult to solve. If the searchers find nothing in their search, then they need to go back to square one. This will involve questioning everything that they have believed to be true and seeing if it remains valid. The inquiry should open its doors and its minds to other experts who may have a different perspective. There has been much criticism of the tight-fisted way information has been held, and there are independent experts who might have had something to contribute who have been shut out of the investigation.All of this is in the future. At the time of this writing, there is still more ocean to be searched. So far they have spent less than the list price of a single brand-new 777-300 searching for MH370. In the big scheme of aviation, I think the lives of 239 people, the confidence in 1,200 flying aircraft, and the reputation of the industry demand that yes, they find it. They must.Update April 19, 2016Two pieces of debris that washed up on African shores are "almost certainly" from the missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER that was operating the fateful MH370 flight.The first piece of debris, in South Africa, was initially identified as a segment from a 777 flap fairing panel by the presence of a stenciled part number. Although the stenciling did not match that used by Boeing, it was consistent with stencils used by Malaysia Airlines on its 777s, including the missing aircraft – 9M-MRO.The second part, in Mozambique, was also identified from a ‘No step’ stenciling, which again corresponded with Malaysian Airlines’ stencils but not those originally used by Boeing. The piece is part of the aircraft’s horizontal stabiliser.ATSB outlines analysis process for MH370 debrisAnd Here Come More Conspiracy Stories: May 3, 2016More than two years after it disappeared, the mystery of what happened to Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 continues to baffle the world. Wild rumours continue to circulate about the fate of the Malaysian Airlines jet.From the moment news broke that the Boeing 777 had gone missing, conspiracy theorists have given their explanations for both the disappearance and the investigators' failure to crack the mystery.North Korea? Vladimir Putin? The US military? Fake debris? Life Insurance scam? China?MH370 conspiracy theories: What happened to the Boeing 777?Update: May 12, 2016The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has identified two more pieces of debris recovered off the African coast as most likely coming from the Boeing 777-200ER that was operating Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.In an update report, the Bureau says that the two pieces were found independently at beaches in Mossel Bay, South Africa on 22 March, and Rodrigues Island in Mauritius on 30 March.Both pieces were sent to Canberra for analysis, following a request from the Malaysian government, and were handled in accordance with ICAO practice, as per two other pieces that the ATSB previously identified.‘Part 3’ was identified as a segment from an engine cowling due to the Rolls-Royce stenciling, and it conformed to applicable drawings from Boeing as being from a 777.Although the stencil was not consistent with that originally used by the manufacturer, it did conform with the one used by Malaysia Airlines on its 777s. Nonetheless, the Bureau says that there were no identifiers tracing it specifically to the missing jet, which was registered 9M-MRO.The other part, labelled ‘Part 4’ was identified as part of the R1 door assembly from a Malaysia Airlines 777. Specifically, a piano hinge attached to it was consistent with that used on a table hinge support, and the trim line was consistent with other aircraft.“There were no identifiers on the panel segment that were unique to 9M-MRO, however the pattern, colour and texture of the laminate was only specified by MAB for use on Boeing 747 and 777 aircraft. There is no record of the laminate being used by any other Boeing 777 customer,” the ATSB says.Although marine ecology analysis is continuing, the Bureau says that both parts are “almost certainly” from the missing 777. It also came to the same conclusion on the two other parts that were previously examined.ATSB identifies two more parts from MH370 jetUpdate, May 14, 2016Terrible, terrible news, if true.“We know the plane is in the southern Indian Ocean. Generally, airline pilots and other genuine aviation experts believe captain Zaharie Shah hijacked his own Boeing 777 in a planned suicide mission.Self-appointed armchair experts are often referred to as “aviation experts” by broadcasters, rather than the aviation consultants they actually are. Such people express opinions that may sound plausible to the non-pilot fraternity but are often rubbish.This search appears to have been conducted in the wrong area, based on the Australian Transport Safety Bureau unresponsive pilot scenario. Yet we know from the National Geographic recent Air Crash Investigations documentary, which held Shah responsible, that only three minutes elapsed from when he said goodnight to Kuala Lumpur air traffic control to when he disappeared electronically and turned southwest.If there was no pilot involvement the aircraft just would have flown itself to the programmed destination of Beijing. It was still under control 90 minutes later when it turned south just north of Sumatra.If, as generally believed, Shah was trying to hide the aircraft in as remote a location as possible to hide his crime then he would endeavour to fly as far as possible before the fuel ran out. As an experienced Boeing 777 captain, this is how I would manage this. Fly at long-range cruise speed mach 0.83 at as high an altitude as possible for maximum range. As the first engine flamed out due to fuel starvation I would start a slow-speed descent at 220 knots indicated airspeed with the second engine at idle. Just before second engine flame-out, I would select flap while still having hydraulic pressure to ensure my sea impact speed would not be so severe as to cause massive amounts of debris. Passing 5000 feet and flying on limited flight control hydraulic pressure from the automatically deployed air driven generator I would turn into wind and try to judge a ditching at low speed so that the aircraft would not break up into pieces. This speed would be still in the order of 250km/h or greater.I recently was well out to sea and observed how big the sea state can be, with very large waves in a 50km/h wind. In the latitudes south of 40 degrees the winds and sea state is even greater.Some pieces of debris — confirmed as coming from MH370 — have been turning up. The first was a right flaperon that I suspect was due to the right engine being shorn off, as they are designed to do, in a heavy impact with the sea.Later an associated piece turned up, also from the area immediately behind the right engine. And then a piece from the horizontal stabiliser (tailplane) leading edge, which also would support the shearing off of the right engine. The weakest part of the fuselage is at the juncture of the body and the wing. It appears to me that during the ditching the aircraft broke at this juncture and this is generally, depending on the seating configuration, where the partition between business class and economy occurs, so some panelling was dislodged.All this does not answer the question of why the ATSB did not listen to experts who would have placed the search area at least 400km farther south and west. That is why MH370 has not been found.”Byron Bailey, a veteran commercial pilot with more than 45 years’ experience and 26,000 flying hours, is a former RAAF fighter pilot and trainer, and was a senior captain with Emirates for 15 years, during which he flew the same model Boeing 777 passenger jet as Malaysia Airlines MH370.Debris confirms MH370 crash zone in Indian Ocean

On the night of Friday June 7, 2013, a pre-wedding party was in progress at the Cavalli Club – named after the renowned Italian fashion designer Roberto Cavalli – within the 5-star luxury Fairmont Hotel in Dubai. There was champagne in abundance and some of the performers on ground for the all-night gig included DJ Jimmy Jatt, leading comedian, Basketmouth, singer Wizkid and rapper Naeto C. It was the summer party to be at.The next day, the wedding proper held at the JW Marriot Marquis Hotel on the same street. Most of the floors at the hotel and the nearby Mirage Palace were occupied by the over 300 guests who had flown in for the wedding from Nigeria to attend. Over 40 private jets were buzzing in and out of the United Arab Emirates with sitting governors, senators, traditional rulers, government officials, politicians and businessmen.The entire weekend was, as tabloids will call it, awash with pomp and pageantry. The groom was Oluwatosin Omokore, first son of Olajide Omokore, a maverick oil trader; and his bride was Faiza Fari, first daughter of Abdulkadir Fari, then Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Petroleum Resources. Encomium Magazine reported that souvenirs at the wedding rumoured to have cost an estimated $8 million (N1.2 billion using the exchange rate at the time), included the Blackberry Q10 released in January of that year, other smartphones, Bang & Olufsen luxury speakers.In the aftermath, the then Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan, acting on the recommendation of his petroleum minister and Mr. Fari’s boss, Diezani Alison-Madueke,suspended and later redeployed the father of the bride to another parastatal. His accounts were also reportedly frozen by the Economic & Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC. An insider at the ministry told The Nation newspaper that the wedding was deemed too lavish for a civil servant to fund and that in allowing his daughter marry the son of a major player in his sector, Mr. Musa had triggered a conflict of interest.In reality, the wedding had been primarily funded by Mr. Omokore who understandably spared no cost to give his first son the gift of a good wedding. Mr. Fari who reportedly had been a little too strict in demanding due process on some deals relating to marginal oilfields, was simply the sacrificial lamb who had to go for delaying Mrs. Alison-Madueke’s desires. He was one of many in a revolving door policy that saw five group managing directors and several permanent secretaries exit the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, in the five years of Mrs. Alison-Madueke’s tenure.Back in May 2010, the death of Umaru Musa Yar’adua precipitated the ascension of Goodluck Jonathan as Nigeria’s president. There was pressure on him from his kinsmen and others within the enclave of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, to run for the 2011 elections. It was only expedient to turn to the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, a major source of election funding for incumbents since the return of democracy in 1999.To ensure a smooth process, Rilwanu Lukman, the incumbent minister who favoured a restructuring of NNPC into a full commercial entity, was replaced with Diezani Alison-Madueke in a cabinet reshuffle. Mrs. Alison-Madueke eventually became like an unofficial prime minister. From then till May 2015 when the Muhammadu Buhari presidency took over; anyone that stood in her way was removed either by her personally or the presidency acting on her recommendations.In an era where Nigeria earned over N51 trillion from oil and the commodity price peaked at $112 per barrel, it was the best of times to have the listening ears of the president and the discretionary powers of an oil minister as enshrined in the Petroleum Act of 1969. In that five-year period, Mrs. Alison-Madueke, whose name means ‘look before you leap’ in her native Ijaw, leapt to unbelievable levels of immense influence and the accompanying affluence.DIEZANI’S CHILDHOODBorn Diezani Kogbeni Agama in the city of Port Harcourt two months after Nigeria’s independence, the young girl had a decent childhood as the third of six children. Her father Frederick Agama – had a distinguished career at Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) as a management executive before retiring to become a traditional ruler of the Epie-Atissa Clan in Yenaka, Bayelsa State. Her mother, Beatrice Agama, is a retired schoolteacher. Though her parents were not as wealthy as rumoured, they lived a decent life by all standards. She grew up at the Shell residential camp in Rumuomasi, Port Harcourt and schooled in Warri, Port Harcourt and Mubi.An intervention from her maternal grandfather N. K. Porbeni, a renowned Ijaw chief from Delta State led her to study architecture rather than the creative arts. “He travelled all the way from Warri [to the UK] to tell me in no uncertain terms that my father hadn’t spent all that money on my education for me to study Fine Art”, she said in a 2007 interview.Mrs. Alison-Maueke began her architecture training in the UK. It is unclear why she abandoned her studies in the UK, but she later moved to the United States to do a 5-year architecture course at Howard University. She graduated in 1992. Right after her graduation from Howard, she was employed by SPDC and would continue to go through the ranks, heading strategy and planning team handling its joint ventures with the NNPC. By this time, she was married to a former military governor of Imo and Enugu State, Alison Madueke.In 2006, she was appointed Executive Director, Facilities, becoming the company’s first female Nigerian director in its entire history. Ann Pickard, the controversial American who headed Shell’s operations in Nigeria from 2005-2010 fast-tracked her from mid-level executive, singling out her and other promising young women for top roles. Perhaps Ms. Pickard, believed to have placed moles in the Nigerian government –according to US diplomatic cables leaked by Wikileaks – and described as “having a willingness to manipulate every available political angle to further the company’s interests”, saw a reflection of herself in the younger woman.While at Shell, she was rumoured to be involved in contract racketeering and it was not uncommon to see staff in the corridor whispering about her dirty deals during lunch breaks. “The Business Integrity Department takes time to act”, an insider in Shell Nigeria revealed on the condition of anonymity, because the company strictly forbids unauthorised persons from talking to the media. “It can be tracking an executive for years, so it would have caught up on her activities sooner or later. She got away with it because she was ED for just over a year.”In July 2007, she was named Minister of Transport. Her tenure was brief and uneventful save for when she wept openly in August that year while inspecting a bad road. Between December 2008 and March 2010, she was heading the Ministry of Mines & Steel Development.During her time in the Ministry of Mines & Steel Development, it funded ‘Hollywood Glamour Collection’, a new limited-edition collection of Nigerian gold and gemstone jewelry by the popular jeweler Chris Aire. The collection was unveiled at an exclusive event in Beverly Hills, California on April 7, 2010, barely hours after Mrs. Alison-Madueke had been moved to the petroleum ministry. In the months after, Mr. Aire registered new companies for the sole purpose of being awarded questionable contracts to handle crude lifting, earning over an estimated $30,000 daily.Her royal heritage, love for jewellery, style and the finer things of life inevitably drew swift comparisons with the late Princess Diana of Great Britain. In time, friends, well-wishers and hangers-on began to call her Princess Di.THE MENOne of these hangers-on was Donald Chidi Amamgbo, the lawyer who reportedly became her lover for a while when they met at Howard. Usually described by the Nigerian press as her cousin, he hails from Imo State, not Bayelsa and runs a thriving U.S.-based legal practice, Amamgbo & Associates. In 2012, he was put on probation by the state bar of California for misconduct.When government appointees and politicians in general assume office, friends, well-wishers, government contractors and stakeholders in their specific industry find ways to contact them through their network, sending unsolicited gifts to them and their relatives and taking out pages in the newspapers for congratulatory advertorials.“When someone sends you a $10,000 watch here or expensive jewellery there with no favours asked, you have to call one day to say thanks and have the person visit”, said a former staff of the ministry, who asked not to be named because he still works for the government and has not been permitted to talk to the press. “Or your daughter calls from Dubai that an unknown person paid her tuition for two years and sublet an apartment for her. Can you say no? Even the Bible says it that ‘A man’s gift maketh a way for him’.”No one knows for sure which gifts came to Mrs. Alison-Madueke from some of the men at the centre of the storm in her world today. But they worked regardless because they became her close associates soon enough. There was Kola Aluko, an oil trader seeking a big break; Mr. Omokore, a shipping magnate looking to diversify and swell his fortune. There were also the fronts and middlemen, Benedict Peters and Walter Wagbatsoma.One of the many billionaire conquests of supermodel Naomi Campbell, Mr. Aluko was born and bred in Lagos as one of the nine children of Akanni Aluko, a geologist and popular traditional chief in Ilesha, Osun State. His first reported stint in the oil business was in 1995, after years of wandering through the pharmaceutics and automobile industries, when he cofounded Besse Oil, an oil trading firm. By the mid-2000s, one of his serial companies, Exoro Energy International merged with a partner firm, Weatherford, to become Seven Energy. It was run by Aluko who had one per cent equity, alongside Mr. Omokore and a third man, Phillip Ihenacho.Kogi-born Mr. Omokore, who was given the title of Elegbe of Egbe in his hometown in October 2014 for his commitment to his town, was an affiliate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) from state to national level. As a government financier, he was rewarded with waivers and mega contracts from agriculture to oil & gas.From time to time, there were contingency bailouts requested by members of the inner caucus of government. After the 2012 flooding disaster, he donated N50 million to the victims.In February 2014, Lamido Sanusi, then governor of the central bank was suspended by Mr. Jonathan after a controversial statement about missing $20 billion in crude oil earnings. According to an insider in the oil & gas sector who did not want to be identified due to his current position, Mr. Omokore allegedly doled out $200,000 to a number of local journalists to begin a campaign against the outspoken central bank governor; Mr. Jonathan had apparently fallen for the bait and wanted the pressure off his beloved minister.In 2010, Shell was plagued with a lot of issues in its onshore operations. Oil spills across the Niger Delta had gotten it into a lot of legal tussles; its goodwill with the host communities had been on a decline since the days of slain environmental activist, Ken Saro Wiwa in the 1990s; militants had wreaked considerable havoc on its asset causing countless force majeures; the government was seeking to get more local marginal field operators out onshore. It has gone on a large-scale divesting spree since then. That same year, Shell fixed one of the major pipelines in the country – the 97 kilometre-long Nembe Creek Trunkline passing through 14 oil pumping stations – for $1.1 billion. By November 2013, it was on the market.The company went ahead then to divest its stake (45 per cent) in asset held in joint venture partnership with NNPC which held the remainder (55 per cent) on behalf of the Nigerian government, and focus on the less ‘dramatic’ offshore fields. The divested fields were the OMLs 4, 26, 30, 34, 38, 40, 41 and 42 and Shell sold them to indigenous operators, raking in a total $2.3 billion.Meanwhile NNPC transferred its shares to one of its many loss-making subsidiaries, the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company, NPDC, for $1.8 billion as valued by the Department of Petroleum Resources, DPR. Till date, over $1.7 billion is outstanding as only $100m has been remitted to NNPC which wholly owns it.On September 16, 2011, a Strategic Alliance Agreement (SAA) was signed between the NPDC and Septa Energy, a subsidiary of Seven Energy for OMLs 4, 38 and 41. Another SAA was signed with Atlantic Energy Drilling Concepts (AEDC) Ltd for OMLs 30 and 34. These companies were registered in tax havens like the British Virgin Islands and in the United Kingdom, limiting the revenue payable to the Nigerian government in form of taxes.The contracts were awarded by single-source procurement, in clear violation of Nigeria’s Public Procurement Act which stipulates that bids be subject to public tender and competitive. Mrs Alison-Madueke also contravened a guideline under the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Act 2010 that mandated companies wanting to lift Nigerian crude to show records of involvement in the industry in the preceding ten years.SAAs are usually signed between two or more companies for a number of reasons including collaborating to augment technical expertise, meet capital requirement or reduce high costs of operation. NNPC adopted this approach to meet the huge capital requirement for cash call and lack of required skill and manpower at the corporation.According to the terms of the SAAs, the partner company provides the capital outlay required to lift crude in the assets supplied by the NPDC as well as non-refundable entry fees of $0.30 per barrel and $0.010/mcf, 70 days after the start of exploration activity. It was to recoup its investment by lifting crude. Quite interestingly, another requirement was that the collaborating firm pay a fixed sum of $350,000 per asset annually for five years to facilitate the training of NPDC staff. This came to $1.4 million per year and Atlantic Energy never paid up.Till date, Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) is pursuing Atlantic Energy to get its tax returns. And while the NNPC has moved to terminate the SAAs so it can get new partners who will pay as at when due, a court order obtained in October 2016 by Seven Energy, may be restraining it from doing so.“NPDC has till date paid only $100m for those eight OMLs but is still enjoying the benefits of an owner”, says Waziri Adio, executive secretary of the Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI) which tracks revenues accruing to government.An alternate commercial valuation byPricewaterhouseCoopers in 2015 took Shell’s divested assets into consideration and roughly estimated these eight assets to be worth $3.4 billion in total.“NPDC brought them on as partners because they are supposed to have financial capacity and technical capacity even though the assumption is that NPDC itself has financial and technical capacity to manage the assets”, Adio explains. “These firms had neither and the same assets were used in raising the money. What stops NPDC from raising the money and hiring contractors to do this job as well?”Essentially, an unnecessary medium was created to pay the SAA partners for sourcing capital which they used the national assets to raise. All of this was possible because of Mrs Alison-Madueke’s discretionary powers.In 2014, Mr Sanusi told the Senate that Atlantic had lifted over $7 billion worth of oil between January 2012 and July 2013, but while the NPDC had paid $400 million as petroleum profit tax (PPT), its partner had paid nothing, flouting the PPT Act 2007.“The profit sharing arrangement was too good to be true”, The Cable screamed in its analysis. “Under Article 10 (d) (i)-(v), the two parties were to share “profit oil” and “profit gas” in ratios of 90% for NPDC to 10% for Atlantic (“profit oil” and “profit gas” with regards to undepreciated costs associated to capital costs prior to execution of agreement); 40% to 60% (upon full recovery of development costs by Atlantic); and, thereafter, it would be 70% to 30%.”“Up to the full recovery of development costs related to the continental resources, “profit oil” was to be shared 40% to 60% and, thereafter, 70% to 30%. For the “profit gas” upon full recovery of development costs regarding non-associated gas by Atlantic, NPDC would take 30% and Atlantic 70%, and reverse to 30% to 70% thereafter. Profit gas” from the continental resources was to be shared 30% to NPDC and 70% to Atlantic, and thereafter, 70% to NPDC and 30% to Atlantic.”“When you look at the depositions from the US courts, you see that it (the SAA) was a cover for Mrs Alison-Madueke and others to cream off things that should have come to the Federal Republic of Nigeria”, Mr Adio concludes. According to a July 2017 affidavit at a federal high court, Messrs. Aluko and Omokore owe the Nigerian government the princely sum of $1,762,338,184.40.Curiously, the 55% held by NPDC was not given to the National Petroleum Investment Management Services (NAPIMS), the NNPC subsidiary concerned with supervising Nigeria’s joint ventures (JVs), production sharing contracts (PSCs) and services contracts (SCs). Why then did the NNPC transfer them to the NPDC, which had no capacity for exploration?Back in March 1999, as former military head of state, Abdusalami Abubakar was wrapping up his eleven-month stint in office and preparing for the transition from military to democratic rule, the Deep Offshore and Inland Basin Production Sharing Contracts Act was sent to his desk. The bill was meant to stem declining investment in the upstream sector at that point in time due to the absence of a defined fiscal structure. Nigeria had also entered PSC agreements in 1993* and did not have legal backing for the agreements it was entering.Particularly significant was Section 16.For the purpose of the efficient management of Production Sharing Contracts and joint ventures under this Decree, the National Petroleum Investment Management Services (in this Decree referred to as “NAPIMS’) shall be incorporated into a limited liability company under the Companies and Allied Matters Decree 1990, as amended.Accordingly, NAPIMS shall be vested with the exploration and production properties and assets owned by the Federal Republic of Nigeria for the purposes of this Decree.It was following in a tradition of governments signing controversial or hard-hitting legislations at the end of their tenure. Nineteen days to Democracy Day (May 29, 1999), the bill was signed into law; however, a single clause present in the initial version had been deleted. It was Section 16.The amendment effectively opened the floodgates. “With that clause, JVs would have been incorporated”, says a source within the Ministry of Petroleum who requested to be named because he does not have the permission to on the matter. “If they were, as opposed to the unincorporated JVs agreement we run currently, quite a few things would not be permissible. NPDC would pay its bills, crude lifted will be accounted for, recently incorporated companies will not be given such juicy OMLs to operate, cash calls will not be paid ‘mistakenly’ etc.”“Will NPDC use shareholders’ funds to be doing rubbish?”, the source asked rhetorically. “Will an incorporated company setup to make profit be acting so silly? So many ifs.”If the deleted clause was a loophole, the discretionary powers given to the oil minister in the Petroleum Act was a spade that helped Mrs Alison-Madueke dig into depths previously unknown. The entire petroleum industry is controlled by the president and the minister; the former appoints the latter who is then empowered by law. Only the National Assembly could have checked her excesses, but it didn’t.“The political pressure on petroleum ministers to finance elections has turned NNPC into petty cash machine for government”, says Bassey (last name withheld for anonymity), an industry insider. “That the minister has discretionary powers that makes things worse and that’s what we’re trying to unbundle with the PIB. Discretion can make or mar our industry but it is clear what happens in Nigeria.”Who and what institutions dropped the ball and allowed her fully exercise those powers? “The CBN was definitely not one of them, because Mr Sanusi kept harping on the rot in the oil sector”, says Mr Bassey. “The greatest enablers of corruption are civil servants who keep quiet or look the other way to save their jobs because of the god complex of chief executives in Nigeria. Red flags were raised only because of inter-agency collusion with banks, audit firms etc.”“The government is one single unit”, emphasizes Kola Banwo of Abuja-based Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Center. “Institutions have roles but usually, with the nature of patronage and corrupt party system we operate, corruption is endemic. The NNPC has internal mechanisms and systems to prevent fraud. The relevant National Assembly Committees have oversight roles and could have prevented this. The Office of the Auditor-General could also have made some difference. The EFCC, ICPC, etc. However, these all formed part of the problem and so did nothing then. Some action from one or all of these, could have reduced if not prevented what happened during that period.”Those in the know say it was the impunitywith which Mrs Alison-Madueke broke the rules that set her apart from those before her. There were times when she stopped receiving visitors at the office and made them come to her in the comfort of her official residence. She would keep governors waiting for hours, dodge calls from CEOs and chairpersons of multinationals, employ domestic staff on the bill of the corporation and more.Mrs Alison-Madueke requested kickbacks from her collaborators to approve dubious contracts and the infamous oil swaps which Buhari ended in November 2015. Mr Aluko for instance, admitted paying rent for Mrs Beatrice Agama’s luxury home in Parkwood Point, St. Edmund’s Terrace, St. John’s Wood, London, describing it as “simply gifts to a friend, given long after Atlantic had signed its deal.”Under her, the NNPC ran accounts that CBN and Ministry of Finance were unaware of. The president would regularly send people to her with odd financial requests and she became the nation’s unofficial treasury with the state corporation as her petty cash ATM. As a result, she was not remitting funds and records to the Ministry of Finance which as in turn unable to remit to the CBN.In the run-up to the 2015 elections, pressure mounted again on Mrs Alison-Madueke to deliver funding and then something happened. In October 2014, Bernard Otti a director at the NNPC was appointed deputy group managing director (Finance and Accounts), a position created entirely out of thin air. The press release justified his appointment as needed to transform NNPC into a commercially-driven entity but the truth was that he had to close some deals to secure election funding.After the Mr Buhari’s inauguration, he ran to the UK after reportedly entering a plea bargain with the EFCC; With his help, the EFCC traced monies allocated for the Ekiti gubernatorial elections and other issues. His retirement was later announced by Kachikwu in August 2015.Audits by both PwC and KPMG showed that the NNPC had at its discretion, spent an average of $6 billion annually from 2011 to 2013 and there were no watertight records. A similar amount had also not been remitted on a yearly basis by NNPC to the CBN.After studying the patterns and making calculations, Mr Sanusi cried out in a September 2013 20-page memo to Jonathan that $20 billion was missing. The NNPC claimed the money had been spent on subsidy payments for kerosene and pipeline maintenance even though Mr Yar’adua had ended the payments in July 2009. Another audit by PwC was submitted before the 2015 elections but never released by the government.“Civil society has always suspected that there was corruption in the oil sector”, reveals Banwo. “When information of extravagant spending for maintain jet emerged, civil society raised alarm, called for investigations and her immediate resignation or removal, which the then president ignored. The NASS set up a committee to probe but nothing came out of it.”“When in 2015, the then CBN Governor alleged that she was responsible for the missing $20 Billion from the NNPC coffers, civil society also initiated a campaign for her investigation and removal. The impunity in the then government allowed her get away with the deeds.”If Mrs Alison-Madueke was Princess Di, then Mr Aluko, who was last seen in Porza-Lugano, Switzerland, in 2016, was The Fresh Prince. He owned quite a few private jets and an $80 million yacht, Galactica Star; in September 2013, it was rented to Jay-Z and Beyoncé at the cost of $900,000 a week for two weeks for the latter’s 32nd birthday party. A big fan of Ayrton Senna, he is also a car racing enthusiast and placed third with a Ferrari 458 GT2 at Rome’s Vallelunga circuit in December 2012. Mr Aluko was also the owner of the eighth most expensive condo in New York, costing a mere $50 million.Omokore likewise had expensive lovers including Porsha Williams of; Sanomi and co would reportedly send jets to different cities to pick random girls for weekend parties in cities in another continent. It was the good life.The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed a lawsuit under its Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative against the trio asking for the forfeiture of assets worth $144 million,proceeds from the oil contracts. Mr Aluko remains elusive while Omokore has been arraigned in court since July 2016. Mrs Alison-Madueke herself has been arrested even though she is yet to be tried in court. The proverbial mills of God that grind slowly, seem to at last be grinding well“She kept saying ‘when we come back’, says Mr Bassey. “She did not think that Jonathan would lose the elections. Maybe the opaque deals would have continued till now.”Beyond Mrs Alison-Madueke and her oil men, perhaps the biggest fear of stakeholders in the industry is that there could be deja vu in this administration or another. As the salacious details of her time in government circulate, the loopholes that made this possible remain open. The NNPC currently remains more of a political financing tool than a truly national oil company like her peers globally. Newcomers to the party will be happy to take notes – literally.This report was made possible by the BudgIT Media Fellowship 2017 with support from Natural Resource Governance Institute.http://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/242769-special-report-diezani-men-deals-bled-nigeria.html