Ever since I remember I have pondered a great deal as to what love meant. I have felt it, I have gazed at it in awe, in weakness, in strength, in every shade imaginable and it remains undefined without an exact array of words to lay down its foundations and build a mansion of explanations and logic from.

Love is a timeless enigma. Love crosses the extreme. It sets you free and yet anchors you with an aching burden you carry throughout mortally and it remains fresh as the blood that courses its destiny along the veins.

If it leaves such an unfathomable mark on an organ that beats against the chest then it must exist as a sacred wound immortally. We can only dig deeper in the wound and seek sanity and insanity in the pain that it elicits. That pain is a trustworthy companion never leaving your side. Your existence ceases without it.

Love makes you go around in circles indeed. It makes your world go around. Because love bounds you to sorrow and your soul is engraved with pain. You follow pain you end up where love resides. You follow love and you realize sorrow is a sweet intoxicant.

I am in love. I live in it everyday whether I am conscious or unconscious. I breathe it now with a sorrow and pain I have never thought I was capable of withstanding. I gaze in awe at my own state of dire misery. And I am beginning to realize the mystics behind it. They unfold each day, like a blossoming flower, exuberating a unique fragrance I never encountered. And with each inhalation of revelation I lose a part of me which leaves me cold till I cannot bear the beatings of my heart in my bosom. I have groped in the daylight seeking the meaning of its constant existence. I have brushed aside the vulnerability of this ache in the dark because I could not bear to witness the mirage of such a spectacle in my eyes during daylight. Pain courses its way through every pore of my being. And yet I defy all odds and try to put back pieces that fall apart but to no avail.

I bask in the glory of the knowledge that I alone know the extent of my self-destruction. Pain and sorrow has been demolishing every sense I valued for survival. And yet I live in this destruction as though it is the only life support I can cling to and if at any moment it is cut off my existence bears no meaning.

I will never bask in the glory of the knowledge that I have been loved back in return. I have never thought about it. And it never occurred to me. What tears me apart is the simple fact that the man I love the most does not realize it. Several times I have stood in front of him. Spoke with ease about every thought and feeling but this.

How my eyes have caressed the thoughts around the corner of his eyes when he broke into a smile or tears. My eyes searched his face with love and admiration but never gave away the depth of the delicious turmoil that I was subjected to unconsciously even when I did not think about it or wanted to think about it.

I have yearned in secrecy to cup his face in my hands and kiss him with a passion that leaves me insatiated to know him from the core of his soul rather than his body.

I have painted uncountable scenarios of his reflection of emotions and thoughts in my mind and engraved his pain on my soul. If I bleed with melancholy I do it in the expectation that he might bleed with joy, which, somehow touches him every time I know of his pain. Hence he is relieved of pain and I of happiness.

I have been tempted to run my fingers through the silkiness of his hair and feel his breath on my face with an urgency that seeked the secrets of my existence and not lust. I wondered at times how my breath would have affected him in return. Could I have evoked such a delightful consequence?

I cannot lie but there was lust at times. Love is the nest of lust among other mystic it holds so cautiously and yet with a certain ease and grace such that it is simply natural and essential for it to exist.

There were those moments when I wanted us bare, hungry and needy for bodily pleasures in all ways that might be obscene to someone who would not know the meaning of being completely in the state of a captivating insanity out of lust; out of love.

I had imagined the friction and heat of our flesh shrouding every pore sensitive and responsive to the touch of such enchantment. I lived a thousand lives in those delicate hours of ecstasy …….and yet not lived them at all.

I know the rhythms of life in the darkness of the night. I have seen the sunbeams kiss my skin during daylight. But I have never imagined I could love an impossibility. I have seen the marks of it on my face. I have felt the intensity of the impossibility with an affection that gave birth to itself in the deep unseen crevices of my soul.

I do not know how it will end for me because I cannot end it. There’s always a new beginning, a newly born desire that I cannot let go without questioning it in every angle possible. I let the false hopes in me burn like the wick on a candle. Soft and tender and yet full of hidden spite. If the flickering candle fell it would set the world around it ablaze. Raging with malice in an instant engulfing what was. I keep turning into ashes slowly and reluctantly without disappearing in flames.

My presence that ignites from the false hopes of an established impossibility out of love comforts him and keeps him alive. It radiates true hopes of a possibility out of my deception. I bask in the glory of the knowledge that he is safe and have been touched by love to the degree that I will never have.

I will burn eternally for him and I seek comfort in that possibility. The only possibility that I am honored to have because love is a timeless enigma.

The 10 biggest security risks: Crooks redirect your browser to their scam websites

As web surfers become more cautious, hackers are beginning to redirect users to their own fake websites...even if you key in the right URL on your computer.

Danger level: High | Likelihood: High | Target: Businesses

Odds are, you use Domain Name System servers every day. They translate human-friendly names like "www.pcworld.com" into the numerical IP addresses that computers use to find each other on the internet. Your ISP has its own DNS server, as do most companies. The internet can't get by without them.

But, more than a million DNS servers around the world--up to 75 percent of all servers, according to networking firm The Measurement Factory--run old or misconfigured DNS software. Such systems are subject to a wide enough range of serious attacks that the SANS Institute, a computer security research and education organization, lists DNS software as one of the top 20 internet vulnerabilities. For example, it was widely reported that cyber crooks used misconfigured DNS servers in lethal denial-of-service attacks that forced antispam firm Blue Security to shut its doors permanently in May.

Attacks work in several ways. One tactic is "cache poisoning", where an offender can simultaneously target everyone who uses the DNS server. A successful attack tricks a company's or ISP's server into sending everyone who uses it to a phishing or other malicious site. You might type "www.americanexpress.com" or "www.yahoo.com", but you will end up at a website that installs an arsenal of malware on your computer.

Another lethal ploy: when bad guys send spoofed requests to DNS servers that are recursive, the servers respond by sending answer messages to the intended victim. The responses contain more data than the original requests, which thus magnifies the attack beyond what the crooks could send themselves. The hapless victim is completely overwhelmed by garbage data and can't respond to genuine requests from regular users.

Defence

Ask your company's IT group to make sure your DNS server is not recursive and its software is up-to-date. For more information, consult the US-CERT report.

Britney Spears' ex-husband Jason Alexander alleges the troubled singer started taking drugs in her teenage years.

Alexander, whose brief 2004 marriage to Spears was annulled after 55 hours, tells British magazine Now that the Toxic star was no stranger to illegal substances.

Spears checked into a Malibu, California rehabilitation center last month for unspecified problems following months of incessant partying.

Despite Spears refusing to discuss drug allegations, Alexander recently claimed they had used ecstasy together three years ago.

He tells Now, "She got away with a lot of stuff (when she was younger) because she's Britney Spears.

"She wasn't a virgin when she was dressed up as a schoolgirl in those early videos and she's been taking drugs for eight years.

"If your life's been shaped for you, then you're going to rebel at some point and get confused - and that's where's she's at now.

"Britney first tried drugs when she was 17 or 18. I used to dabble and I knew that she did too, but we never said anything to each other. At least now she's trying to sort it out by going to rehab."

Alhagie Malick Ndow, the Chief of Niani District in the Central River Region, passed away on Friday March 2, at his native village of Jockul Ndowen at the age of 72.

The late chief had been in office since May 2000 succeeding Jalamang Keita upon his death. Born in 1935, Chief Ndow has been a senior member of the District Tribunal for 36 years from 1964 to 2000.

He was laid to rest on Saturday March 3, 2007, at his native Jockul Ndowen village.

The Governor of Central River Region, Alhagie Amulai Janneh, was among thousands of sympathisers, who paid their last respect to the late chief.

With three months to go before the rainy season triggers Mali’s annual malaria epidemic, the government and international public health donors have kicked off an unprecedented anti-malaria campaign targeting children and pregnant women.

There are 800,000 cases of malaria among Mali’s 11.7 million people every year, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). But Mali’s Health Ministry estimates the number of cases is closer to two million.

Malaria is a life-threatening parasitic disease transmitted by mosquitoes. The WHO’s statistics say malaria accounts for 17 percent of child deaths in Mali. One in five Malian children die before their fifth birthday, making the country one of the unhealthiest places to be born in the world.

Mali won multi-million dollar donations this year from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and from the US President’s Malaria Initiative, which will between them cover around 50 billion CFA (US$1 million) of the 120 billion CFA ($2.4 million) the government estimates the campaign will cost. Mali’s government says it will meet the balance.

Drugs to treat malaria will be distributed around the country in March and April. Pregnant women will receive mosquito nets and preventive treatment, and a campaign to spray mosquito repellent inside and outside houses and public buildings will be launched.

The government also promised that all children under five will receive free treatment at health clinics this year.

“The eradication of malaria is an urgent task, but also an achievable objective,” said Health Minister Zeinab Mint Youba. She said that 2007 “will mark the turning point” in the fight against malaria in Mali.

Of the one to three million people worldwide who die of malaria every year, 90 percent live in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria kills an African child every 30 seconds, according to WHO. Of those, several hundred thousand live in the Sahel region of West Africa, which encompasses Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad and parts of Senegal, Togo, Benin and Nigeria.

A combination of poverty, under-nutrition, and poor health services mean some 550,000 children die every year in the Sahel, around half of them from causes not related to hunger, according to United Nations statistics.

Mali has one of the highest rates of female genital excision in Africa, but organisations working to stop the practice say they are slowly making headway to change attitudes.

About 92 percent of all Malian girls between the ages of 15 and 49 have already undergone the procedure, according to the government. Excision is practiced in about 28 African countries as a traditional way of keeping women chaste and eligible for marriage.

It involves removing part or all of the external labia and clitoris and can lead to haemorrhage, infection, complications during pregnancy and long-term psychological scarring, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). The most severe form of the practice involves sewing the opening of the vagina to a hole about the size of a matchstick for the passage of menstrual blood and urine.

Records of female circumcisions taking place have been found from thousands of years ago, but the practice is now recognised by a growing number of African governments as posing serious hygiene and health problems.

Aissata Diakite, head of an association of women’s nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in Mali, said since 1991 at least 200 of the practitioners of the ancient ritual have put down their scalpels and vowed never to cut girls again.

“Another 15 large Malian villages are today on the way to abandoning the procedure too,” she said.

Excision is still practiced in all the regions of Mali, both in urban and rural areas, and by all the country’s religious groups, although the extent of the practice varies between regions and ethnicities.

Diakite said the greatest resistance to change is found in the south of Mali, while in the sparsely populated north excision is now rarely practiced.

Mali’s government set up a national committee to examine women’s and children’s health in 1996, which now has branches in all the regions of the country. The government in 1999 banned mainstream medical practitioners from practicing excision.

Mali’s Minister for Women, Children and Family, M’Bodji Sene, said education is the key to change.

“Communication is the beginning and the end of the process of change,” Sene said at a meeting on excision last month. “All the progress registered in the change of behaviour is owed to the positive impact of traditional and modern communications.”

To those who turn on their computers once a day to collect a few e-mails, Google is only a name that shows up a lot around the web. For the cyber crowd Google is a burgeoning, complex, impersonal entity that spells success or doom in a heartbeat. It is Caesar at the Coliseum with thumbs up or down.

Google is neither bad nor good it is only a vehicle and for the most part it does what it is supposed to do very well. To the average Joe it is a darned good search engine. To webmasters, online business enterprises and the like it is a morphing complex and ever changing behemoth whose every move must be carefully tracked studied and considered before making any decision to do with online commerce or any major form of web communications.

SEO (search engine optimization) has become the single most important body of knowledge in the cyber world, maybe even the whole world! This is the science of website promotion. The most basic elements are search engine rankings, keywords and advertising. Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines require pretty much the same things as Google in order to be successful but Google is the undisputed champ at the moment.

Google cannot be faulted for running its business like a business but as with so many other giants of industry the human element starts to disappear in almost equal and direct proportion to its own grandiosity.

More then ever warnings are trumpeted about the fatal errors involved in not following the Google guidelines for optimization. The wrong keywords, the wrong number of links, the wrong kind of tags and other elements of website promotion can spell sudden death to any site.

As a writer I have run up against a few of Google’s potential shoot me downs. To my chagrin it is a software program that decides my fate and not a real person.

I publish articles all over the internet and by checking sites and data bases that host my articles I can ascertain that about two or three hundred thousand people have read my work and it is increasing daily. I gleefully submitted articles to any decent article base I could find.
I always kept in mind that it was the message I was writing that was important to get out to as many people as possible. After all it is those people that are most important of all, I reasoned.

Now if my articles show up in too many places I can get the search engine axe. I can’t deny that getting the articles out was always my primary goal. I have no product to sell and I’m not hoping for fame but I still have to watch my step.
I can readily understand that there are thousands of outfits that are driven by greed or malice and would ride on the backs of the search engines to any place they could. But I doubt that a robot or software program knows the difference between me and them.

I have often pondered what I would do about all this if I were the CEO of Google. The answer always seemed obvious. I wouldn’t change the entire direction of Google but I would add something to insure that it could not lose its human element. I would create a department not as a mere appendage but as full blown arm of the company.

My department would be constantly searching for websites that show remarkable qualities. Sites with exceptionality would be chosen and become part of a feature known as “Google’s Choice.” Great web design would be on the list but not limited to that.
Real humans would search for not so great designs but with obvious fledgling intuitiveness and our department would offer and provide help to those sites to bring them up to the highest levels.

The department would seek out sites with important content. Sites that contribute to the entire web experience, to their particular area of concern or perhaps to the nation or the entire world at large.

No one would need to apply but rather we would apply ourselves to searching out and approaching these sites. We would develop them, contribute to them and promote them. Their success would be our reward and no more as long as their success was beneficial in some way to the entire web community.

Some mistakes would be made and it would require a willingness to experiment a bit but the rewards would be so great. The bad rap the internet gets now with all the porn and trash might at least be offset by such a truly humanitarian endeavor.

One of the most wildly successful books of the decade has been Rick Warren’s, The Purpose Driven Life. It has been said that this book is not the most important book of the decade but behind it was promotional machinery that could have been equally as successful with a book about raising hogs.
Just for the shear heck of it our new department would try to simulate this kind of success. Maybe we could take Martha’s little home and family pics site and turn it into the most marvelous internet gallery online. Why climb that mountain, to borrow a phrase, “because it is there.”

The present internet legacy is a draw between a good international business platform and a river of scams, schemes and scum. The bottom line is that it would help an internet giant to make the internet itself a giant contributor to the world at large. If I were the CEO of Google the new “Google’s Choice” would be the first order of business for me.

Mr Sang Correa, President of the Gambia Boxing Association (GBA) has shared his ordeal on the just concluded ZANOCA games in Mali.

Speaking to Pointsport recently, Mr Correa said the problem of Gambian delegation to the championship started upon their arrival in Dakar.

He said they were all accommodated in a stadium in Dakar in an open place where mattresses were spread without any proper accommodation being provided.

According to Sang Correa, the only thing that was provided was lunch, dinner and breakfast. He said upon their arrival in Tamba Counda in the early hours on Wednesday, the Senegalese were provided with breakfast while the Gambian delegation was not catered for.

He added that Mr. Fred Evans, second Vice-president of Gambia National Olympic Committee provided 1000 CFA Francs equivalent to D52.00 to each members of the delegation.

He further stated that when they arrived in Kaye, Mali, they were lodged at a School Classroom, where they met the Gambian head of delegation Momodou Demba.

“We explained to him that we cannot stay at the school but instead we want to be taken to the Stadium where accommodation was provided to the Senegalese,” he added.

Mr. Demba told us that he cannot do anything with the situation but promised to contact Col. Raul of Mali who was responsible for accommodations.

He revealed to them that the only remaining accommodation was reserved for the Guinean team.

“Later on we were transferred to join other countries at the Stadium” he disclosed. Still elaborating on the journey to Mali, he said they spent part of their money to buy food.

“An estimated budget was finalised together with Mr. Demba and heads of other sporting disciplines based on our expenditure and they agreed that ZANOCA would refund us our money which was equivalent to 20,000 CFA Francs each but the agreement was never fulfilled,” he said.

He stated that the opening of the Football Championship between The Gambia and Mali started late because the Gambians protested that they will not play unless and until their money are refunded, which was later done by the Malians.