Nigeria wants its OPEC oil quota revised upwards to around 2 million barrels per day (bpd), the level it was at before militancy in the Niger Delta curbed its output in recent years, the oil minister told reporters on Friday.

By Korieocha Emmanuel

The over razzmatazzed rally sponsored by former military dictator, General Ibrahim Babangida to flag off his much-touted presidential ambition come 2011 came to a sorry flop as the eight-year military president tactically reclined to his rough shell after security reports showed that he was not welcome in the south-west zone following a stern threat by National Association of Nigeria Students, NANS who vowed to disrupt the rally and to stone him (IBB), if he shows up for the exercise in Ibadan.

At least 140 passengers died when an overcrowded ferry hit a sandbank and capsized in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo), a local official said. The accident happened Wednesday on the Kasai River, a stretch of the Congo River in the DR Congo's western Bandundu province.

By Korieocha Emmanuel

The Senate committee on communication, one of the 54 committees of the Senate that were constituted in 2007 shortly after the inauguration of the Senate on June 5, 2007 has been dissolved. The Senate took the drastic action against the committee on Thursday over what it described as “attempts by the committee to ridicule the Senate”.

Royal Dutch Shell has offered to sell five oil leases in Nigeria's Niger Delta to domestic energy companies.

Shell is in talks with several Nigerian oil companies, including Midwestern Oil & Gas, Niger Delta Petroleum Resources, and Setplat Petroleum, for the sale of oil leases 26, 30, 34, 40 and 42 in the Niger Delta. 

 Diego Maradona was removed as coach of Argentina’s national team on Tuesday, ending an erratic 21-month stint that mirrored his own long history of unpredictable behavior and culminated in a humiliating exit in the World Cup quarterfinals.

Professor Itse Sagay, a renowned scholar of law and a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, has said that Nigerian lawmakers at the lower and upper chambers of the National Assembly are the highest paid legislators in the globe, saying their salaries and allowances represent a cruel anomaly in the country’s democratic governance. He accused Nigerian lawmakers of selfish pursuits and faulted the constitutional amendment recently carried out by the National Assembly.

Terrafugia has released specifications and computer graphics of its next generation flying-car design. The company made use of the world's biggest aviation industry platform – AirVenture 2010 – to detail the future shape of its Transition Roadable Aircraft which sports automotive-style crash safety features, a touch-screen interface, improved wing design and a folding mechanism that can be activated from inside the vehicle... plus sleeker lines than the proof of concept vehicle we've seen previously.

For those in the U.S. looking to be the first to get their hands on the Chevrolet Volt GM has announced that it is now taking orders for the vehicle that is due at the end of the year. The Volt will initially be available to customers in California, New York, Washington, D.C., Texas, Michigan, Connecticut and New Jersey, but will be available nationwide in about 12-18 months from the start of production this winter.

A whopping 511 days after the last Mac Pro update, Apple has finally unveiled the latest Mac Pro, which uses the latest quad-core and 6-core Intel Xeon processors in speeds of up to 3.33 GHz. “The new Mac Pro is the most powerful and configurable Mac we’ve ever made,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.

Heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko and former titleholder Samuel Peter will meet in a rematch on Sept. 11 in Frankfurt, Germany, their representatives told ESPN.com Wednesday. "The Sam Peter thing has been agreed to," Top Rank's Bob Arum, Peter's promoter, said. "They're coming into the [Las Vegas] office to sign [on Thursday]. It was a relatively easy negotiation."

A hacker has discovered a way to force ATMs to disgorge their cash by hijacking the computers inside them. The attacks demonstrated Wednesday targeted standalone ATMs. But they could potentially be used against the ATMs operated by mainstream banks. Criminals have long known that ATMs aren't tamperproof.

Nigeria's Sterling Bank said on Wednesday it swung to a 3.94 billion naira pre-tax profit in the first half of the year compared to a 7.04 billion naira pre-tax loss a year ago. Gross earnings for the period, which ended June 30, dropped to 16.29 billion naira from 18.47 billion in the same period of last year, it said in a filing to the Nigerian Stock Exchange.

Governor Peter Obi of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) victory in the governorship election held on February 6, 2010 has been upheld by the election petitions tribunal sitting in Anambra State. It could be recalled that, the Hope Democratic Party (HDP) had gone to the tribunal to contend that Obi was not duly returned and that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) committed an error by declaring him winner of the election.

By Korieocha Emmanuel

As governors from the oil-producing south-south zone met on Monday and called on President Goodluck Jonathan to declare his candidacy in next year's presidential polls and urged other parts of the country to back him, the governors of northern states also met on Tuesday to try to agree on whether the country's next president must be a northerner or not.