Photos: Rev Chris Okotie shows off his exotic & very expensive rides

The Household of God Head Pastor recently acquired a Rolls Royce Phantom said to be worth N80m and a Range Rover Autobiography worth N30million. He said he bought these cars to celebrate 27 years as a pastor and 30 years as a born again Christian. He opened his garage doors to Encomium magazine and let them take photos of his exotic automobiles to show to the world. See more photos after the cut...

 

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We the admin of naijaswap, Are wishing all our reader a happy new year this year we gonna make am big.Amen keep swaping.

How to Clean Out Your Fridge for the New Year

If you’re anything like me—i.e., a person with a freezer too full of pig parts to close properly and an entire refrigerator shelf devoted to pickling—then New Year’s is the perfect time to get your culinary house in order. I don’t really dig on “resolutions,” but there’s something real and important about starting the year with all of your ducks, duck carcasses, and tubs of rendered duck fat in a row.

I like to start on New Year’s Eve, and I like to start with lots and lots of ice-cold vodka. Here’s how it works: Haul out all of those jars of tangy, salty pickled things (homemade or otherwise), and bring them with you to whatever fête you happen to be going to. Lay out a spread of fermented deliciousness, and stick a couple of bottles of decent vodka (nothing in a plastic bottle, but nothing that has figured prominently in a pop song, either) in a bucket of ice. Then, do like my Slavic brethren before me: Pour short shots of freezing liquor for anyone you can cajole into joining you, toast loudly, throw it back and chase with something zippy. Pickled garlic! Olives! Salted anchovies! Repeat until the vodka, pickles, or guests are finished.

Once I’ve succeeded in ruining enhancing the evening, and freeing up precious refrigerator space, I like to wake up, shake off the first hangover of the year, and get busy with the freezer. I take everything out, lay it on the counter, and survey my frosty domain. Such possibility! Such mystery! First order of business: pitch all of the Unlabeled Curiosities (I’m looking at you, lentil-y “thing”). Then I’ll thaw out a few of those clever Time-Saving Meal Solutions that I’ve been stockpiling over the course of the year (leftover bolognese! chicken soup!) to be eaten that night and over the course of the next week.

Next, I take stock of my Project Proteins—the lamb shanks, the beef tongue, the stock-bound chicken carcasses. The largest specimen (yes, a deer leg) will go into the fridge to thaw—call it motivation to host a weekend dinner party—while the rest get inventoried along with any other freezer treats that pass muster. I’ll post that list on the fridge, to be consulted on rainy Sundays and before trips to the grocery store. And voilà! A dark, frozen cave has been transformed into a glowing wellspring of possibility.

I find this whole process, from the vodka-and-pickle-pushing to the frozen-pig-part-sorting, to be soothing and deeply restorative. It’s the best way to reflect on a year of cooking—the successes, the failures, the excesses—and to look forward to a year of delicious possibilities. After all, now that that deer leg is thawing, there’s so much space in the freezer…

The Top 11 Buildings Of 2013

THE MOST AMAZING WAYS WE KEPT A ROOF OVER OUR HEAD IN THE LAST YEAR: THE GREENEST OFFICE BUILDING IN THE WORLD, A CITY ON WHEELS, A NEW TAKE ON THE COLLEGE DORM, AND MORE.

A building is so much more than just a roof over your head. Because buildings use 40% of all of our energy, they represent a huge opportunity: Redesign how our buildings work and we could go a long way toward solving our emissions issues. We saw the start of that this year, with the most energy efficient office ever opening in Seattle and a building in Germany that gets its power from algae that live in its walls.

But buildings are also where we spend most of our time, so they should make us happy to be inside them. And so projects like the giant skyscraper in Shanghai are incredibly important. It's filled with parks and open to the public, in an attempt to get people spending more time with nature. At the other end of the market, there's the $20,000 house designed initially for impoverished rural Alabamans. But the houses are so nice (and so cheap), they may soon hit the market for everyone.

We tend not take for granted the walls and roofs that surround us, but the new offices, new homes, and even new dorms we saw this year should show that that's a bad decision. Pick your house of the future out here (and read about last year's best buildings if you want more here).

1: This Impeccably Designed $20,000 House Could Soon Be Yours

For years, students at Auburn University's Rural Studio have been building cheap houses for impoverished locals. Now their designs are going mass market.

2: A 600-Foot-Tall City On Wheels, For When It's Time To Get Away From It All

Cities are so ... static. The Very Large Structure will let an urban population just roll down the road if commerce or resources dry up.

3: These Tiny Wooden Houses Are The College Dorm Of The Future

Housing is expensive. So why not have students live in cubes they can afford? That's the idea behind the “smart student unit."

4: The New Second Tallest Building In The World Is An Urban Green Space Wonderland

The just-topped 2,000-foot-tall Shanghai Tower will have huge 15-story parks throughout the structure--and it will let the public in to play in them.

5: The Greenest Office Building In The World Is About To Open In Seattle

The Bullitt Center is made from totally clean materials, has composting toilets, and catches enough rainwater to survive a 100-day drought. And it’s 100% solar-powered, in a city not known for its sunny days.

6: This Literal Treehouse Is A Glass House Built Around An Entire Tree

What's the best way to incorporate nature into your living space? How about just putting a whole tree in your house?

7: Take A Look At New York's New Smallest Apartment

The city today unveiled the winner of a contest to design livable tiny apartments to expand studio-scale housing in the Big Apple.

8: This Entire Building Is Powered By Its Algae-Filled Walls

A new building in Germany gets its energy from what’s growing inside it.

9: The Disaster Shelter You Want To Live In Way More Than A FEMA Trailer

If your house is destroyed in a disaster, you don’t want to live in a tent. The Rapid Deployment Module can be assembled in 20 minutes with no tools and will last at least 10 years.

10: This Beautiful Mexico City Building Eats The City's Smog

Using a new type of tile that converts the chemicals in pollution into less toxic substances, the Torre de Especialidades is fighting the city’s bad air--and looking good in the process.

11: This Gorgeous Campus Is The World's Largest Women's University--And It's In Saudi Arabia

Up to 60,000 women could eventually enroll at PNU, though their job prospects after graduation still leave something to be desired.

The Hardest Part About Moving into 2014

Eku Edewor gives men some tips on being romantic

Nigerian men clap for yourselves.Tv presenter Eku Edewor in an interview with Punch declared Nigerian men are actually romantic and for those who are not, she has some tips for you

The Nigerian men I have dated have been very romantic; I guess it depends on the type of man one attracts and also what one deems romantic. Know whom you’re with, some guys don’t want to say cheesy things and look into your eyes but they will always make sure your happiness comes first. Not everything has to be a large “romantic” gesture. Romance has to do with being selfless. Simple things like, choosing to stay with your girlfriend all weekend watching movies instead of being at the clubs all weekend with the boys is romantic; others are sending flowers for no reason at all, surprise dinners, heartfelt messages. If your partner really knows you and loves you, he’ll find ways to be romantic and find ways to make you happy. I actually find Nigerian guys far more active and good when it comes to making large romantic statements. A tip to guys, flowers always makes women happy, even if they say they don’t love flowers. They probably do and if sending chocolates with cards is what your lady wants, it really won’t hurt or take much time."

Hackers allegedly exploit Snapchat security hole and leak 4.6m usernames and phone numbers online

If you’re a Snapchat user, then you might be interested to know that someonemay have found a way to save the usernames and phone numbers for 4.6 million accounts. The website SnapchatDB.info allows anyone to simply grab either as a SQL dump or a CSV text file information that the creators claim was acquired through “the recently patched Snapchat exploit”.

Update: Developers Will Smidlein and Robbie Trencheny say they’ve set up a checker script that allows anyone to look to see if their account was included in the leak.

Although claiming that the stolen database was meant to raise awareness of Snapchat’s security hole, SnapchatDB’s creators say that they’ve “censored the last two digits of the phone numbers” in an effort to “minimize spam and abuse”. But the alleged generosity has its limits as there’s still a possibility that the unfiltered data could be released, affecting millions.

We did a quick WHOIS lookup on SnapchatDB’s domain and it was created on December 31. Although the registrant name is protected, the mailing address and contact number is listed as being in Panama. How genuine the information is in this database remains in question — it has not been authenticated yet by Snapchat. This could certainly all be an elaborate hoax taking advantage of the recent issues the ephemeral messaging service has had.

We’ve reached out to Snapchat and the creators of SnapchatDB for comment and will update if we hear back.

As noted in Hacker News, those that attempt to download the database may encounter some difficulties due to traffic congestion or perhaps the files are incomplete. Whatever the issue is, it’s unknown how many people are actually receiving the complete and edited dataset.

In December, Australia-based Gibson Security published a report highlighting two exploits in Snapchat claiming that hackers could easily gain access to users’ personal data. It’s said that user’s names, aliases, and phone numbers could be gathered through the service’s Android and iOS API.

Snapchat has since responded to the Gibson report, saying:

Our Find Friends feature allows users to upload their address book contacts to Snapchat so that we can display the accounts of Snapchatters who match the phone numbers found in the address book. Adding a phone number to your Snapchat account is optional, but it’s helpful for allowing your friends to find you. We don’t display the phone numbers to other users and we don’t support the ability to look up phone numbers based on someone’s username.

Theoretically, if someone were able to upload a huge set of phone numbers, like every number in an area code, or every possible number in the U.S., they could create a database of the results and match usernames to phone numbers that way. Over the past year we’ve implemented various safeguards to make it more difficult to do. We recently added additional counter-measures and continue to make improvements to combat spam and abuse.

While the purpose of this website is apparently to cause Snapchat to move further in closing its security gap and also to prove the company wrong in its response, one must wonder whether this is the right thing to do — exposing individual account information in this manner could be considered to be a tad extreme, even something of this magnitude.

What The Hell Is Happening At Fukushima Reactor 3?

We don't know exactly what's going on at Fukushima. But then, we're not supposed to.

We know that TEPCO was in the dangerous process of removing fuel rods from the No. 4 reactor, but since Japan is on the verge of passing a state secrets law that would make it a serious offense to leak information about Fukushima or for journalists to try to get that information, it's just highly unlikely that anyone will tell us if there's another nuclear disaster. We do know that steam has been observed coming from the Reactor 3 building three times this week, and we know what it's been associated with in the past -- which ain't much, but it's all we have:

Tepco (translation), Dec. 27, 2013: At around 7:00 am on December 27, and confirmed by the camera that from Unit 3 reactor building, 5th floor near the center, steam is generated. Have not been identified abnormal plant conditions of 54 minutes at 7:00 am the same day, the indicated value of the monitoring post (meteorological data of 50 minutes at 7:00 am, 5.1 ℃ temperature, 93.1% humidity).SOURCE: Tepco (July 24, 2013)

Tepco (translation), Dec. 25, 2013: At around 7:00 am on December 25, and confirmed by the camera that from Unit 3 reactor building, 5th floor near the center, steam is generated. Have not been identified abnormal plant conditions of 8:00 am the same day time, the indicated value of the monitoring post (meteorological data of 50 minutes at 7:00 am, 2.8 ℃ temperature, 76.7% humidity).

Tepco (translation), Dec. 24, 2013: At around 7:00 am on December 19, and confirmed by the camera that from Unit 3 reactor building, 5th floor near the center, steam is generated. Have not been identified abnormal plant conditions of 55 minutes at 7:00 am the same day, the indicated value of the monitoring post (meteorological data of 40 minutes at 7:00 am, 5.6 ℃ temperature, 93.7% humidity). Then, in 58 minutes around 7:00 am December 24, steam is no longer observed. It should be noted, have not been identified abnormal plant conditions in a 3-minute time at 8:00 am the same day, the indicated value monitoring posts, etc. (meteorological data of 50 minutes at 7:00 am, 4.1 ℃ temperature, 74.9% humidity).

- See more at: http://crooksandliars.com/2013/12/what-hell-happening-fukushima-reactor-3#sthash.ERXRjnxa.dpuf

Samsung Got A Bigger Tablet Boost For Christmas Than Apple, According To Onswipe

Touchscreen publishing company Onswipe has good news for Samsung. As Onswipe’s Chief Marketing Officer Jason Baptiste put it in an email, “Samsung clearly won Christmas when it comes to tablets.”

Specifically, the company looked at visitors to Onswipe-optimized sites for the period of Dec. 26-29 in comparison to Dec. 19-22, as a way to measure the growth that different tablet platforms saw over Christmas. The results? Samsung’s Galaxy tablets grew 50.4 percent, Nexus 7 tablets grew 33.8 percent, iPads grew 20.4 percent, and Kindle Fires grew 19.5 percent.

Now, the fact that Onswipe focused on percentage growth is an important caveat here. After all, Samsung was presumably starting from (much) less, so it didn’t need to sell as many tablets to see significant growth.

It’s also interesting to see the line about Samsung’s victory coming from Baptiste, who recently wrote a blog post telling people to “stop believing the fairy tales about the iPad’s demise.” I asked him if the data made him reconsider the post, and he said no: “Though they enjoyed more growth post holidays, Samsung is still very tiny compared to the iPad and the same goes for the rest of Android. What will be interesting is seeing whether people still use Android tablets 90 days out from now.”

Baptiste also provided some numbers about usage. He said the average session time from Samsung users was three minutes and nine seconds after Christmas, down from 3:32 before. On iPad, the average session was 4:03, compared to 4:12 before. And the Kindle Fire had the longest session time on average, 4:51.

As for how many people this data represents, Baptiste said Onswipe (which recently upgraded its platform) reaches 31 million unique visitors each month on the mobile web.

Home Depot Founder: Pope Francis’ Criticism Of Capitalism Will Scare Away Rich People

Ken Langone, the billionaire founder of Home Depot, is worried Pope Francis’ recent criticism of the wealthy and capitalism will be a “hurdle” for rich donors.

Langone is heading up an effort to raise $180 million for the restoration of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, and told CNBC that at at least one potential seven-figure donor was “concerned” about the Pope’s remarks. He’s apparently brought the issue up more than once with Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York: “I’ve told the cardinal, ‘Your Eminence, this is one more hurdle I hope we don’t have to deal with. You want to be careful about generalities. Rich people in one country don’t act the same as rich people in another country,’” Langone said, adding that “you get more with honey than with vinegar.”

Neither Langone nor Dolan, who appeared on the network separately, revealed the identity of the donor in question.The statements that have them worried came from Evangelii Gaudium, the first major written statement of Francis’ papacy:

Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor…

Dolan said he assured Langone that “the pope loves poor people” and “also loves rich people,” and that the donor had misunderstood Francis’ message. Langone himselfsuggested the pope’s view of capitalism has been skewed by his experiences in Argentina, arguing there’s a “vast difference” between that experience “and how we are in America.”

But this misses the point. As Elizabeth Stoker points out, the Pope’s point is fundamentally theological, not political, and thus policy differences between capitalism in Argentina and in American are irrelevant. Blind defense of free market capitalism “compromises fellowship between people by perpetuating the wedge of inequality” — and as of 2011, the United States was even more economically unequal than Egypt.

The idea that possessing significant wealth inherently makes it harder to behave morally is a bedrock part of Christian ethical thought. In a well-known passage from the New Testament, a rich man asks Christ what he must do to fully follow God’s law. When Christ responds “sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor,” the man walks away dejected, prompting Christ to observe that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”