Last year, the BBC's Sam Piranty was given access by the Catalan police, Mossos D'Esquadra, to an investigation into a Nigerian sex-trafficking gang. He spoke to traffickers and women rescued from sexual slavery before filming an early morning raid in November, which led to 23 arrests. He also discovered that the gang is now using London as a gateway into Europe.
Last year, the BBC's Sam Piranty was given access by the Catalan police, Mossos D'Esquadra, to an investigation into a Nigerian sex-trafficking gang. He spoke to traffickers and women rescued from sexual slavery before filming an early morning raid in November, which led to 23 arrests. He also discovered that the gang is now using London as a gateway into Europe.
It's 08:00 in the Catalan Police Headquarters on the outskirts of Barcelona and Xavi Cortes, head of the anti-trafficking unit, waits patiently for his 22 teams to confirm they are in position. Finally, he gives the order.
Two-hundred-and-fifty officers quietly climb out of their police vans. Single file, each team approaches a residential building watched by a few surprised neighbours.
On reaching the door, one of the masked police officers uses his fingers to count down. Three, two, one. The door is knocked down, the silence shattered, the officers rush inside.
The raid results in the arrest of the leaders of a Nigerian-based group running an international sex-trafficking ring in Barcelona. It's known as the Supreme Eiye Confraternity (SEC), or the Air Lords, and 23 people are now behind bars, with European Arrest Warrants issued for those who have left the country.
This operation was 18 months in the planning and involved monitoring more than a million phone calls, tapping dozens of mobile phones and months of surveillance.
Cortes and his team first came across the group in 2011 during a forgery investigation, but quickly discovered it was a huge network trafficking women and drugs.
He asks me to look at his screen. On it is a map detailing all the locations they have identified where members of the SEC operate. Cities are marked in Europe, North, West and East Africa, North and South America, the Middle East and Asia.
Eiye in Yoruba, the main language of south-western Nigeria means "bird". The group's insignia is an eagle and each city containing members is called a "nest", with the "mother nest" in Ibadan, about 100km (60 miles) north-east of Lagos.
The group was started at the University of Ibadan in the 1970s, and the original intention was to make a positive contribution to society. Over time, however, many members went astray, committing violence in Nigeria and delving into crime abroad.
The group now traffics human beings and narcotics (cocaine and marijuana) and forges passports. It has also facilitated the transport of stolen crude oil into Europe.
"They are able to earn money in many ways, but we are focused on human-trafficking and the victims," says Cortes.
His second-in-command, Alex Escola, then tells me something remarkable.
"You know, one of the tappings showed us that last year, on 7 July, around 400 members of SEC met in Geneva. They had a big meeting, all together."
It was an audacious display of arrogance. In a city where many of the world's global institutions are headquartered, including numerous UN agencies, a global criminal institution held its own parallel international gathering and no-one tried to stop it.
Benin City, Nigeria, is a human-trafficking hub, and a good place to observe how the criminal operation works.
After long negotiations, our team manages to speak to a recruiter, whose job it is to find girls. The recruiter explains that they either approach girls directly or through their families offering fake jobs abroad in a supermarket, or as a cleaner.
However, not everyone is tricked. Many women approach the recruiters themselves, often in full knowledge that they will be working as a prostitute in Europe. Some parents, also aware of this, approach recruiters on behalf of their children.
Destiny, who was 19 when she was trafficked to Spain three years ago, told me she knew sex would be involved but had never imagined she would be turned into a sex slave.
"If you live in Benin, there are many girls who came back from [Spain] with lots of money. They told us they had to have sex sometimes," she says. "We are not stupid but I did not know I would be beaten and raped and have to have sex every night of the week."
NGOs in Benin City say many of the recruiters now look outside the major cities in order to find girls who have not heard their warnings about the reality of life for trafficked women, or the stories of those like Destiny who have returned and are now alerting others to the dangers.
Once recruited, the girls are then taken to Lagos or to northern Nigeria where they are picked up by men known as "coyotes" or "trolleys".
Image captionLike many migrants, trafficked women are often taken across the Sahara Desert
The journey to Europe is perilous. Wire taps reveal how coyotes transporting women were stopped by armed groups in the deserts of Niger or southern Libya demanding thousands of euros for them to pass.
"One phone call from a coyote to SEC showed how a coyote was saying, 'I have a gun on my head and they want money,'" says Cortes.
A woman who was herself trafficked tells me about other horrors.
"The journey took weeks," says Sarah, who arrived in Spain in 2013 at the age of 21. "One of the girls kept asking for water. The men did not like it so they threw her out in the desert in Libya. They left her and we continued the journey. They told the boss on the phone that she was killed by terrorists. We were not human beings. We were animals."
Once girls are trafficked across the desert, they are then taken to "keepers", who often rape them before they cross to Europe.
"When we got to Libya they put us in a house," says Sarah. "This is when I knew we would not be working in a supermarket. One man was taking care of us. He would have sex with us, rape us. Then I became pregnant."
Women who insist they will not work as prostitutes are tied up in a position called "the crocodile". Their hands tied to their feet, they are left for days with no food or water. Some are left to die as an example to others.
Keepers often get the women pregnant prior to making the crossing to Spain. With a child or pregnant, they stand a better chance of not being deported, and the men can use access to the child as a form of blackmail to keep the women under control.
Two years ago, at a time when the coyotes reported Libya had become too dangerous, recorded phone calls show that the girls were taken instead to Greece, via Yemen, Iran and Turkey. And today, as the Mediterranean becomes more difficult to cross - and the authorities try harder to detect traffickers - the SEC has begun to use airports in the UK more frequently.
"This is a more expensive option for the group," Cortes tells me. "They use forged documents and passports from Nigeria to fly into places like Gatwick. The language is also easier for them. These documents are expensive though and need co-operation of people working in the government to get."
One evening in Barcelona, I head out with the undercover surveillance team. At around 10pm, plain-clothes officers in an unmarked car drive me to Badalona on the edge of the city.
We are taken to a top-floor flat where police have spent hundreds of hours watching the house opposite. A light is on in the window and shadows move between the curtains, before someone appears on the balcony - a madame.
Most of the women that make it to Europe live in flats with a few other women and their madame - almost always a trafficked woman, who has managed to pay off her debt. Girls arrive knowing they must earn a sum, which may be from 30,000 to 60,000 euros (£22,000 to £44,000), before they will be free.
There are two ranks of madame. Lower-ranking madames prowl the streets - many on la Rambla, the main tourist strip in the centre of Barcelona - constantly texting and calling their girls to check on their whereabouts. Girls are told to earn about 500 euros (£370) a night to stay in the madame's good books.
But clients, mostly tourists, may pay as little as 20 euros (£15) for sex, so this is often impossible.
After a night's work, girls return home and divide their earnings into three. One part goes to pay for the flat, the second to pay for food and the third goes to the SEC. If they are not earning enough or refuse to work, the madames may beat them.
Higher-ranking madames collect money from their subordinates to pass on to local SEC leaders known as ibakkas. Always men, the ibakkas run the whole operation. They facilitate payment through the hawala system - a form of money transfer based on trust and one that is difficult to trace.
Ibakkas make sure that if any of their girls step out of line, their families back home are threatened. Family members have been known to be abducted and "disappeared" when girls refuse to pay their madames.
One woman, Jessica, who was trafficked to Spain in 2009, says two of her daughters, now in their early 20s, left home in Benin to escape the gang. One is in Dubai, the other in Morocco waiting to cross to Spain.
But in escaping one group of traffickers, they have put themselves in the hands of another.
"In order to pay the debt, they will be prostitutes too," says Jessica.
Tragically, this is not an isolated case.
It's a few days after the raid and Cortes seems content. Back in the office, dressed in full uniform, he details the large quantities of phones, computers, fake passports and documents seized at the time of the arrests.
Despite that, there is a hint of frustration in his smile.
"The size of the network means those arrested will be replaced," he says.
According to recent wire taps, one of the major European co-ordinators of the group is looking to restructure the gang. The ibakka, based in London, was trying to get his 95 other European counterparts together for a meeting.
This kind of organised crime cannot simply be tackled locally. Arresting madames and taking women off the streets merely increases the demand for more women from Nigeria. This is an organised crime group, run by men, operating across the world. This is a network which requires a global police response.
Media captionOrla Guerin reports on the biggest operation yet against Nigerian crime bosses
SpaceX this week failed in its third attempt to land a rocket on an ocean platform.
The company has landed a reusable rocket successfully on land, but it has stepped up its efforts to land at sea.
The latest attempt, though not successful, was a step forward, SpaceX said.
It began at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The Falcon 9 rocket was supposed to deliver its payload, its primary objective, and then land on a drone ship out in the Pacific Ocean.
The rocket stuck the landing, touching down within 4 feet of the ship's center, but it touched down too hard and broke a leg as a result.
Maybe Next Time
While the landing was not a success, the rocket suffered much less damage this time around. It's a step closer to an ocean landing, and the folks at Space Florida are confident SpaceX will get it right, said Dale Ketcham, chief of strategic alliances for Space Florida.
"It is harder to do than the success they recently achieved at [Cape Canaveral], and that was far from easy," he told TechNewsWorld.
"This effort will continue to drive down the costs of expanding the Earth-bound economy out into the solar system. With the energy and resources available out there to feed this economy, we might be able to give Mother Earth a break," Ketcham said.
A sea landing isn't necessary, but it could be helpful. "If recovery can be achieved at sea, then more boosters can be returned to service, thus again lowering costs for all," he said.
Sea landings are more suitable for rockets returning at higher velocities, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said.
Many payloads on SpaceX's manifest will require different orbits, which will make it harder to return boosters, Ketcham noted.
Meet Jason-3
The rocket boosted its payload -- the Jason-3, or Joint Altimetry Satellite Oceanography Network, satellite -- into orbit without issue.
The satellite will beam down atmospheric data gathered from measuring sea levels to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, French space agency Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, according to SpaceX.
It will aid in forecasting the intensity of hurricanes, El Niño, La Niña, surface waves, and tides and currents for commercial ships. Researchers also will use the satellite to model coastal areas to aid efforts to preserve reefs and other marine animals.
Room for Space
The commercial spaceflight industry has been fighting for the right kind of attention, the type that doesn't tip trade secrets or undermine investor confidence. The fact that leading businesses and executives are behind the current push into space is generally good news, said Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT.
"They're replaced the often turgid bureaucracy of NASA with an entrepreneurial energy that has delivered on a number of once-unimagined achievements, including making the running of supplies to the International Space Station a viable business," he told TechNewsWorld.
While they make for some stunning YouTube clips, developments in space exploration are more than a marvel of modern science. They create new ways to help us understand life back on Earth, King noted.
"As it becomes increasingly common and affordable, it will also inspire in a broad range of new commercial products and services," he said.
Another reason to get behind the commercial space flight industry is because it reflects "who we are as a society," King added.
"The space-aimed efforts of the 1950s, '60s, '70s and '80s reflected a broader sense of national purpose and visionary optimism," he said. "That seems to be in short supply today, replaced by the melodramatic dumbassery of small-minded politicians and science-phobes."
Foxconn Technology Group has offered as much as US$5.3 billion to purchaseSharp, according to media reports this week.
Foxconn, formally known as "Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.," is said to have offered between $5.1 billion, or 600 billion yen, and $5.3 billion, or 625 million yen.
A response to the offer is not expected before the end of January, as the discussions are private.
The semipalmated sandpipers arrive in their thousands and spend several weeks resting and mating on the shore, before leaving southern Canada for the warmer climes of South America.
When they take to the skies, their flocks can be seen from a great distance. "We are talking about groups up to 100,000 birds," Beauchamp says.
Such a huge concentration of birds makes the sandpipers attractive targets to peregrine falcons. These birds of prey loiter nearby, waiting for the right moment to swoop in and attack. But several years ago, Beauchamp realised that the falcons were behaving oddly.
Studies have proven that those people who are able to view life through positive eyes, live happier and healthier lives than those who do not. The ability to process life with a half full glass rather than a half empty glass is an obvious strength. To many a positive outlook is indeed a gift in itself. Life has an abundant array of positive quotes to guide us in our life's journey. Those of us who truly embrace these very quotes and their meanings find ourselves fully loving life. That which is gained from these messages offers the reader reassurance and confidence as well as inner peace. In life challenges and hardships are common to everyone. However, the ability to handle what happens to us in a positive, healthy manner is what truly defines the person that we are.Positive thoughts breed positive results. Certainly these results lead to a rewarding and fulfilling life!! Take a few moments now to read and embrace the 25 MOST POWERFUL and inspiring quotes we offer here. We are dedicated to happy healthy lives and we believe our positive quotes will accomplish the same for you.
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You may not feel like the flotsam and jetsam that make up the facts of your life are important, but increasingly companies are using that dry data to make your every online step as indelible as if written in blood. Here's how to take back your digital dignity.
The Internet companies that power your online life know that data equals money, and they're becoming bolder about using that data to track you. If they get their way, your every online step would be not only irrevocable, but traceable back to you. Fortunately, there are some positive steps you can take to reclaim your online history for yourself.
Want to know what guys think when it comes to girls and relationships? Read these 30 facts about guys that’ll reveal everything you need to know. By Gerry Sanders
For girls, understanding a guy may need more than just experience.
You can date a few guys, but that still won’t help you understand them better.
To actually get to know a guy, you need to have fun, intellectual conversations with him and try to understand the way he thinks along the way.
But if you’re in a hurry to know everything there is about a guy and the way he thinks about you, love and his life, these facts about guys are all you need.
AP/Getty Images
Reuters
Studies have proven that those people who are able to view life through positive eyes, live happier and healthier lives than those who do not. The ability to process life with a half full glass rather than a half empty glass is an obvious strength. To many a positive outlook is indeed a gift in itself. Life has an abundant array of positive quotes to guide us in our life's journey. Those of us who truly embrace these very quotes and their meanings find ourselves fully loving life. That which is gained from these messages offers the reader reassurance and confidence as well as inner peace. In life challenges and hardships are common to everyone. However, the ability to handle what happens to us in a positive, healthy manner is what truly defines the person that we are.Positive thoughts breed positive results. Certainly these results lead to a rewarding and fulfilling life!! Take a few moments now to read and embrace the 25 MOST POWERFUL and inspiring quotes we offer here. We are dedicated to happy healthy lives and we believe our positive quotes will accomplish the same for you.
