With the first two intense days of project presentations and judges’ questions finally over, the 68 student teams participating in the Software Design competition at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup have been trimmed down to 15 teams that will go for the final stage tomorrow, Wenesday.

There appears to be atmosphere of anxiety and expectations as to which team wins the 2010 cup software competition in software design and embedded development even as the global software giant, Microsoft announced the finalists for the two categories.

It would be recalled that no fewer than 400 software incubators from 69 countries and regions around the world who can use technology to solve the world’s toughest challenges contested in the first round at on-going world’s premier student technology competition, the Imagine Cup 2010 initiated by the global software giant, Microsoft.

Running in its eighth series, Imagine Cup is one way Microsoft encourages young talents globally to apply their imagination, passion, and their creative technology innovations that can make a difference in solving the Millennium Development Goals, (MDGS) including poverty, disease, education, among others.

Sequel to the exclusive report which presented a secret position paper inspired by the Arewa Consultative Forum, ACF, in 2002, which we published last week, we bring you in this edition minutes of an expanded caucus meeting of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, which had Olusegun Obasanjo and President Goodluck Jonathan in attendance whereupon it was decided by a landslide vote that zoning should be observed and adhered to. In the light of the raging arguments for and against zoning, this report brings an uncommon illumination on the issue of zoning, its merits and demerits, its implications as well as the denial that zoning was never agreed to by the PDP.

“ Demobilization refers to the formal and controlled discharge of active combatants from armed forces or other armed groups. Demobilization may extend from the processing of individual combatants in temporary centres to the massing of troops in camps designated for purpose (cantonment sites, encampments, assembly areas or barracks). It also encompasses the support package provided to the demobilized, which is called insertion.

Their arrival signposts the commencement of the rehabilitation and reintegration programme of 20,192 ex-combatants that accepted the Federal Government amnesty, which was proclaimed, last year, by the former President, the late Alhaji Umaru Yar’Adua. An analogous attempt by the government in late 2009 to call the ex-militants to camp collapsed due to poor planning.

THE Federal Government, yesterday, released the list of recipients for 2009 National Honours Awards.

They argue that the N10 billion will serve a worthy purpose if judiciously and conscientiously deployed to the provision of basic amenities and infrastructures which are starkly lacking in the country.

THE Federal Government yesterday warned consultants and contractors handling different power projects under the National Independent Power Project, NIPP, to quicken their pace of works as the government was in a hurry to power supply to Nigerians in a shortest possible time.