The 23-year-old had arrived in Singapore on Thursday after undergoing three operations in a Delhi hospital.

The attack earlier this month triggered violent public protests in India that left one police officer dead.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said he was "very saddened" and promised to channel "emotions and energies" into a course of action.

Six men have been arrested and two police officers have been suspended following the 16 December attack.

A statement from the hospital said the woman "passed away peacefully" early on Saturday with her family by her side.

"The patient had remained in an extremely critical condition since admission to Mount Elizabeth Hospital," hospital chief executive Kelvin Loh said.

"She had suffered from severe organ failure following serious injuries to her body and brain. She was courageous in fighting for her life for so long against the odds but the trauma to her body was too severe for her to overcome.

"We are humbled by the privilege of being tasked to care for her in her final struggle," Mr Loh said.

A team of eight specialists had tried to keep the patient stable, but her condition continued to deteriorate over the two days she was at Mount Elizabeth Hospital, he added.

Officials from the Indian High Commission were also present when the patient passed away. The Indian home minister said the government had decided to send the victim overseas on the recommendation of her doctors.

Arrangements are being made to take her body back to India, said Indian high commissioner to Singapore TCA Raghavan.

"The requisite formalities for sending the body are being completed. The deceased and family members to be flown out in a chartered aircraft later today," Mr Raghavan said.

In a statement issued in Delhi, Prime Minister Singh said: "It would be a true homage to her memory if we are able to channelise these emotions and energies into a constructive course of action.

"The need of the hour is a dispassionate debate and inquiry into the critical changes that are required in societal attitudes.

"Government is examining... the penal provisions that exist for such crimes and measures to enhance the safety and security of women. I hope that the entire political class and civil society will set aside narrow sectional interests... to help us all reach the end that we all desire - making India a demonstrably better and safer place for women to live in."

The victim and her friend had been to see a film when they boarded the bus in the Munirka area of Delhi, intending to travel to Dwarka in the south-west of the city.

Police said she was raped for nearly an hour, and both she and her companion were beaten with iron bars and thrown out of the moving bus and into the street.

On arrival at the hospital in Singapore, doctors said that as well as a "prior cardiac arrest, she also had infection of her lungs and abdomen, as well as significant brain injury".

The government has tried to halt rising public anger by announcing a series of measures intended to make Delhi safer for women.

These include more police night patrols, checks on bus drivers and their assistants, and the banning of buses with tinted windows or curtains.

The government has also said that it will post the photos, names and addresses of convicted rapists on official websites to shame them.

It has set up two committees - one looking into speeding up trials of cases involving sexual assaults on women, and the other to examine the lapses that might have led to the incident in Delhi.

But the protesters say the government's pledge to seek life sentences for the attackers is not enough - many are calling for the death penalty.

Since the Delhi incident, several cases have been highlighted of authorities failing to respond to reported rapes.

On Wednesday, a woman committed suicide in the state of Punjab, after having tried to report to police an rape which allegedly took place last month, local media reports said.

At least one police officer involved in the case has been sacked, according to local officials.

Culled The BBC

Berlusconi will keep the £60m villa where the couple lived with their three children, as part of a divorce deal reportedly filed on Christmas Day.

Ms Lario left Berlusconi in 2009 after he was seen at the 18th birthday party of an aspiring model, Noemi Letizia.

US magazine Forbes estimated his wealth at almost $6bn (£3.7bn) in March.

The Corriere della Sera newspaper reported that Ms Lario, 56, had initially asked for £35m a year.

Her 76-year-old ex-husband reportedly offered her about £3.1m.

The couple met in a dressing room in 1980 after Berlusconi saw Ms Lario perform in a Milan theatre.

They were married in 1990.

He has two other children from his first marriage and is currently engaged to 28-year-old Francesca Pascale .

Berlusconi was Italy's longest-serving post-war prime minister until he resigned in November 2011.

He says he will run for office again in 2013.

His third term in office saw slow growth and a national debt of $2.6 trillion and his government was slow to implement austerity measures in response.

He also became embroiled in a series of financial and sex scandals.

In October 2012, he was sentenced to four years in jail by a Milan court after being convicted of tax evasion.

He is currently appealing against the decision, and commentators say it is unlikely that he will serve any time in jail.

He is also standing trial on charges of paying to have sex with an underage girl in 2010.

Her identity was later revealed as Karima El-Mahroug, widely known as Ruby Rubacuori (heart-stealer), a Moroccan nightclub dancer who was 17 years old at the time.

He is also charged with abusing his powers to get Ms Mahroug released from police custody after she was arrested for shoplifting.

Berlusconi denies the charges.

BY VINCENT UJUMADU

AWKA- MEDICAL experts have observed that bleeding is the commonest cause of death among pregnant women in Nigeria

As of last week, the long gray line got longer still. Actually, there are two long gray lines: the proud one made up of graduates from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and the far more ignoble one made up of famous, powerful, middle-aged men who bring their lives and careers to ruin when they get caught dallying with women other than their wives. Gen. David Petraeus, whose just-revealed affair forced him to step down as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is the rare man who belongs to both.

In all the political and media froth that has been churned up since the scandal broke, one question that has been raised is the same one that always comes up at this point in these all-too familiar scandals: What the hell was he thinking? As recently as 1987 P.G. H. (pre-Gary Hart), politicians and other masters of the universe could get away with such randy antics pretty easily. But ever since Hart, who was on a glide path toward the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, crashed and burned when he was caught having an affair, the game has changed. There’s no such thing as the discreet peccadillo anymore—not if a headline-hungry media has anything to say about it. And since the dawn of the Internet age, in which it’s impossible to hide your electronic footprints, the game has only gotten more dangerous. The fact that Petraeus, the nation’s former top spook, was tripped up by e-mail, is nothing short of jawdropping.

By now we’re familiar with all of the psychological and evolutionary explanations for this kind of sublime recklessness. Powerful men are natural risk-takers, type-A strivers; they’re naturally acquisitive — of power, wealth, and yes, sex. They’re charismatic egotists, and they’re often away from home for long stretches of time. All of this can be equally true of powerful women, of course, and yet they’re far less inclined to cheat. We know the familiar evolutionary answers for that too: Men, with their lifetime supply of sperm, are hardwired to mate repeatedly and indiscriminately. Women, who make a far higher investment in breeding, are more selective. What’s more, it’s anthropologically true if politically incorrect that while men, as a rule, are irresistibly attracted to youth and beauty, women can be made equally dizzy by power and the access to resources it implies. (If you doubt that, try this: Picture Donald Trump‘s wives. Now picture Donald Trump. Any questions?)

The tougher riddle — the one that’s never so well-answered — is why these men are so heedless of consequences. They define themselves by their status; they have typically worked a lifetime to acquire it and will fight like wildmen to keep it. And they know with virtual drop-dead certainty that they will lose it all if they step out of line. And then they go right ahead and step. Maybe that doesn’t matter to an independently wealthy man like Trump or a political Houdini like Bill Clinton. But most of the rest of them — Edwards and Spitzer and Weiner and Ensign and  Sanford and the rest of the sorry queue — ought to be cautionary tales for anyone who comes later.

The explanation for the fact that that lesson so often doesn’t get learned may lie in the narcissism that can sit at the heart of power.  Narcissism has been a badly overworked word of late — applied to all manner of selfish or preening behaviors that really don’t rise to the level of the true narcissistic personality disorder, which affects no more than 3% of the population. But that 3% is disproportionately represented among the ranks of the famous. What’s more, like all behavioral traits, narcissism can exist subclinically: you can have many of the dangerous traits of a narcissist without being a truly diagnosable case.

For both capital-N and lower-case narcissists, some of what may be going on is a sort of learned double-think. Of course powerful men are smart enough to be aware of consequences, but the charmed ride they’ve enjoyed for so long leads them to believe — viscerally if not rationally — that those rules somehow won’t apply to them. One of the reasons young, professional athletes so often get into trouble for DWI or domestic battery or weapons possession is that they truly have grown up outside of the rules — passing classes they never attend, graduating from fine colleges despite poor grades, receiving $10 million signing bonuses before throwing a pitch or taking a snap. For most famous men, the ride starts later but the lesson of invulnerability is just as powerfully learned.

“With leaders like this, there truly is no awareness of the likelihood that they’ll suffer any consequences,” says psychologist Amy Brunell of Ohio State University at Newark. “The idea is, ‘This doesn’t apply to me; somehow I’m not going to get caught.’ We’ve done studies about decision-making and impulsivity in narcissists and they really don’t think about the consequence.”

Psychologist Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, who studies narcissists in relationships, has run similar experiments in which subjects play games of luck or skill and wager imaginary money on the results. A great deal about how aggressively they play seems to be linked to how high they score on questionnaires that measure narcissism. “On risk-taking and betting tests, narcissists tend to overpredict their performance,” Campbell says. “And they tend not to learn from the times they don’t win.”

A certain psychic drunkenness may also come into play. Narcissists are hooked on public adoration — from crowds, from interns, or, in Petraeus’s case, from hagiographic biographers. There’s a driving-while-impaired quality to their decision-making powers when they’re on this kind of high, and their judgment just flies out the window. ”This need for getting adored creates a myopia,” says psychologist Aaron Pincus of Penn State University. “They’re not thinking in the long term. So if the intern makes her self available in the Oval Office right now, that’s all I’m thinking about.”

Adds Campbell: “It’s not that guys like Tiger Woods are aliens. They’re like anyone else, but they have stronger needs for ego enhancement and validation. Throw in overconfidence and a habit of walking on people and you get self destructive behavior. It bites you in the ass over time.”

In some cases, once-bitten does not mean twice shy, but those cases are rare. Clinton was serially caught and serially wriggled free. But even he, to all appearances, at last fell into line after 1998, though the calming effects of age—to say nothing of his bouts with heart disease—may have played a role too. But other men get just a single strike. Petraeus, Edwards, Spitzer and the rest would surely like to turn back the clock, but barring a longshot bid at redemption (certainly impossible in Edwards’ case), the public is probably done with them.

There would, perhaps, be something good in all this if the tragedy of these men served as teachable moments for others — and the fact is they probably do. You can’t prove a negative, and we can never know of the career-wrecking affairs that didn’t take place because successful men looked at the narcissistically fallen and made a sharp turn in the other direction . But there are more than enough — as we repeatedly learn — who who plow straight ahead, and there probably always will be. David Petraeus, the latest in a very long line, is highly unlikely to be the last.

From the Magazine: Spyfall

By Thecla Ojeifo

Something really funny happened to me today.

Well, I got up early as usual, made breakfast for the kids and then lunch for the house( i like to prepare everything at once so i can relax after church). Got the kids ready for church, then decided to get myself ready for church while the kids were having their breakfast.

I put on my LBD (little black dress) which has gotten a little bit smaller now by virtue of the fact that my bum has finally decided to curve up (after all those years of praying and fasting that my flat  bum would swell up while i watched with envy as my friends rolled with every step they took)lol.

Hubby playfully patted the new addition to our family (my bum of course) and gave me a knowing wink while i was hurrying to get us all out of the house on time. I put on my accessories and make-up while he took the kids outside to the car.

I quickly grabbed a cup of coffee and a slice of bread and cheese which i planned to eat in the car so we wouldn’t get to church late.

We had been driving for about 10 minutes when hubby looked me over and asked where my wedding ring was. I said i had removed it when i was preparing breakfast and it was probably in the pocket of the dress i wore before taking a bath.

He sighed and said that i am always losing my ring and that since the ring is gold it wont tarnish if i do a little cooking with it on.

I tried to make a little joke about how i was  actually waiting for a huge diamond ring which i swore would never leave my finger.

Truth is I’m not really big on rings, so every time i have to do some sort of housework i take it off and wear it only when going out. Its just me .

I’m always joking so i asked him if he thought my not wearing a wedding ring was license to flirt as it is with men.

We laughed as i reminded him of the new 6 foot2″ young male attendant at the supermarket where i shop for groceries who is always quick to flash his “32 “at married women. At first i thought the young guy was only being friendly but when a guy is always following you around paying compliments, saying how gorgeous you look in your dress or how your hairstyle brings out your beautiful face, you know something dey wrong.

I see how he brings smiles to the faces of women when he tells them how beautiful they look. One time he asked a lady if she was a plus size model cos she had all the attributes of being in front of a camera and the lady blushed till all her blood left her heart! Its a big supermarket so its easy to hide behind any of the aisles and ‘discuss’ and i accidentally bumped into a married woman taking his number down behind the electronics aisle and when i walked in, they had this uncomfortable look and quickly said bye to each other! I no be judge oh abeg, she probably wanted to invite him to fellowship or something like that!

My sister worked with a  real estate firm and said her MD  had an affair with his head of HR which lasted for 2 years until he got a new hot sexy PA. The head of HR was married with a child but was obviously in love with her MD for whatever reason, so it killed her when a prettier and single girl was getting all the attention from her boss. The affair was so open that the MD would call the PA into the office for quickies and they would re-appear after some minutes with gloss on his lips and her blouse buttoned the wrong way up! This office na wa, my sister quick quick resign before she turn to pillar of salt with look look.lol.

My very good friend told me about a married woman in her late 40’s who was having an affair with a young boy who had just joined the corporation. The day the bobo brought his wedding card to invite the office to his wedding, the woman collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital! (Thank goodness, the boy no bring his babe to the office, na another story we for hear).

So now, the question is why do women cheat, we always talk about how men cheat and all that so what is the deal with women?

And, as I'm sure I've left some good ones out, feel free to have a go at me in the comments.

Like many sports, football has had its fair share of crazy players through the years.

The difference between the beautiful game and other sports, however, is that people from nearly every country on earth can converge in a few regions, where they are allowed to play with abandon on a football pitch.

That is a recipe for craziness, and every league has seen enigmas whose actions defy explanation and who seem to belong in therapy, rather than on a club team.

Out of those many insane current and former individuals, here are 15 who embody the term, for one reason or another, more than the rest.

In every country he has played, controversy has followed him. In France, he was convicted of driving without a license, and in England he developed the rather unsavory habit of spitting in the faces of fans, opposing players and even ball boys. He has also used racist slurs against those awful kids on the touchline and gotten into his fair share of brawls.

Greetings. I hear you have found a lovely woman you wish to spend the rest of your life with. I hear she is Igbo.  Congratulations. Before you go ahead, however, please permit me to say a few things concerning marrying an Igbo woman. I know unsolicited advice is as unwanted as armpit boils, but do spare me a second or two; this is important. See, I know you think the bride price you’ve been told to pay and the long list of traditional marriage items are your biggest issues…trust me, they are nothing compared with what you will face after the ceremonies have been completed and every member of her village has gone home with his/her share of the booty for which you mortgaged your father’s properties.

Now, take note of the following, dear friend:

1. Forget Authority: If you were marrying a Yoruba woman, she would have come to your house with her mother’s voice ringing in her ears that a husband’s house is a place where life’s lessons are learnt. It’s a different story for the Igbo woman. She comes from a long line of ‘unruly’ people who traditionally have no concept of a central authority figure.  Prepare to be stared down eyeball to eyeball in an argument. Prepare to be laughed at when you attempt to assert yourself as the ‘man of the house.’ When she’s done laughing, she’ll measure you, up and down with her left, and sneer: ‘Hian! See this one o; who do you think you’re talking to?’ She’ll clap and shake her head, then she’ll add something in Igbo and then saunter away, wriggling her backside.  It isn’t for nothing that the legendary Aba Womens’ Riot happened in…ABA.

2. Prepare to be Called Names: No, I am not referring to endearing (more like puke-inducing, actually) names like Baby, Darling, or Nkem. I’m talking about names that qualify your lineage and ethnicity in terms that are not exactly complimentary. If you are Yoruba, you and your people will be Ndi ofe mmanu (something about too much oil in your soup and fried things in your life); If you are a Northerner, you and your people will be Ndi beribe (something about possessing a mumu gene). Find solace in the fact that if you are truly Yoruba, you ‘know’ that Igbo people use kick to wake their mothers up from the mat in the morning.

3. Say Goodbye to your Waistline: Your waistline will increase in proportion to the years you spend with an Igbo woman who knows the well-beaten path to her mother’s kitchen. Gone are your days of adding stew to ewedu and okro, or eating egusi soup that was blended with tomatoes. Tufiakwa! The introduction of Ofe Akwu, Nsala, Oha, Onugbu, Ofe Owerri and Oporoko will ensure that when you sit, you fill up the chair. That’s what is called a man, a DIMGBA! Not one that looks like something some hungry wind blew in.  When the husband of an Igbo woman stands, people must see that a man is standing. Size matters. Don’t be deceived by the looks of people like Ebuka Obi-Uchendu and that six-pack nonsense; he’s not a proper Igbo man. Look more at people like his elder brother Ugo or imagine Noble Igwe a few years after marriage; now, those are real Igbo men!  Size matters to an Igbo woman.

4. Be Aware of the Oriaku Syndrome: You have not heard of the Oriaku Syndrome? Don’t worry, I will tell you. You see, when you marry an Igbo woman, you work for her. Your glory comes from seeing her shine. When she steps out, people must SEE your money on her body. If your wife looks like the dried fish she uses in cooking your soup, you are not a man! If she’s dressed like something that was sent to Lagos along with discarded wares, you have failed in your duties! The Oriaku Syndrome posits that your wife is the chopper of your money, simple. Don’t take this to mean that you are her provider and therefore she isn’t independent. When the Igbo man was planting yam, the Igbo woman was planting and harvesting cocoyam, and as every Igbo household can testify, the cocoyam is more useful than yam. Yam is only the king crop because the Igbo society, like others, is phallocentric. Don’t get it twisted.

5. Beware of the Illuminati: Do not marry any Igbo woman that is the first daughter of her father. All first daughters in Igboland are members of the real Illuminati. They sometimes call it by another name: Umuada. They are the most powerful group in Igboland and can do and undo. No one uses small spoon to measure their food. If you marry one and misbehave and she reports you, you are doomed. Even when you don’t marry one, you are still doomed if your wife ever reports you to them. They may decide that all the first daughters from her village will come and live in your house for a month. You may wish to consider suicide if that ever happens to you. It is the Igbo woman who has forgotten the path to her father’s house that suffers in a man’s house when she has the Umuada waiting.

6. The Catholic Church Intervention: When an Igbo woman is tired of you and your nonsense, she’ll simply pack her bag and return to her father’s house. If you do not run after her and collect your bride price back from her father, whatever child she bears anywhere she goes will bear your name. Yes, I’m serious. This is why there are no bastards in Igboland. But thank God for the Catholic Church, this doesn’t happen often. The average Igbo woman is Catholic and the Catholic Church has issues with divorce. Be smart: if you’re going to marry an Igbo woman, marry one who is a Catholic; it reduces her chances of leaving you by about 50%.

You may wish to ask why none of the above is often the case when an Igbo woman marries an Igbo man… well, I don’t know. Perhaps the Igbo man knows how to be ‘oga’ over the Igbo woman and has refused to share the secret with aliens.

Anyways, is your couch free for the night? Surely there’s no way I’m going home to that woman tonight after all this…

Nigeria’s foremost novelist Chinua Achebe has claimed that Nigerians, especially of the Hausa/Fulani and the Yoruba stocks, do not like his Igbo ethnic group because of the southeast’s cultural advantage.

He made this claim in his new book, There was a Country, which has generated controversy for his onslaught on the role of Obafemi Awolowo as the federal commissioner of finance during the Nigeria civil war. He accused Awolowo of genocide and imposition of food blockade on Biafra, a claim that has drawn rebuttals and contradictions of emotional intensity from some southwest leaders and commentators.

“I have written in my small book entitled The Trouble with Nigeria that Nigerians will probably achieve consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Igbo,” he wrote under the heading, A History of Ethnic Tension and Resentment. He traced the origin of “the national resentment of the Igbo” to its culture that “gave the Igbo man an unquestioned advantage over his compatriots in securing credentials for advancement in Nigerian colonial society.”

He observed that the Igbo culture’s emphasis on change, individualism and competitiveness gave his ethnic group an edge over the Hausa/Fulani man who was hindered by a “wary religion” and the Yoruba man who was hampered by” traditional hierarchies.”

He therefore described the Igbo, who are predominantly Catholic, as “fearing no god or man, was “custom-made to grasp the opportunities, such as they were, of the white man’s dispensations. And the Igbo did so with both hands.”

He delved into history with his claim, asserting that the Igbo overcame the earlier Yoruba advantage within two decades earlier in the twentieth century.

“Although the Yoruba had a huge historical and geographical head start, the Igbo wiped out their handicap in one fantastic burst of energy in the twenty years between 1930 and 1950.”

He narrated the earlier advantage of Yoruba as contingent on their location on the coastline, but once the missionaries crossed the Niger, the Igbo took advantage of the opportunity and overtook the Yoruba.

‘The increase was so exponential in such a short time that within three short decades the Igbos had closed the gap and quickly moved ahead as the group with the highest literacy rate, the highest standard of living, and the greatest of citizens with postsecondary education in Nigeria,” he contended.

He said Nigerian leadership should have taken advantage of the gbo talent and this failure was partly responsible for the failure of the Nigerian state, explaining further that competitive individualism and the adventurous spirit of the Igbo was a boon Nigerian leaders failed to recognize and harness for modernization.

“Nigeria’s pathetic attempt to crush these idiosyncrasies rather than celebrate them is one of the fundamental reasons the country has not developed as it should and has emerged as a laughingstock,” he claimed.

He noted that the ousting of prominent Igbos from top offices was a ploy to achieve a simple and crude goal. He said what the Nigerians wanted was to “get the achievers out and replace them with less qualified individuals from the desired ethnic background so as to gain access to the resources of the state.”

Achebe, however, saved some criticisms for his kinsmen. He criticised them for what he described as “hubris, overweening pride and thoughtlessness, which invite envy and hatred or even worse that can obsess the mind with material success and dispose it to all kinds of crude showiness.”

He added that “contemporary Igbo behavior(that) cab offend by its noisy exhibitionism and disregard for humility and quietness.

Culled: The Nation