October 1806: Behold Berlin's Brandenburg Gate

                           
Built between 1788 and 1791 by Prussian King Frederick William II as a key entry point to the city of Berlin, Brandenburg Gate was topped off with a statue known as the “Quadriga,” which depicted a statue of the goddess of victory driving a chariot pulled by four horses. The statue remained in place for just over a decade, before falling into the clutches of Napoleon Bonaparte and his Grand Army. After occupying Berlin that fall and triumphantly marching beneath the arches of the Gate, Napoleon ordered the Quadriga dismantled and shipped back to Paris. The horse and goddess were hastily packed up in a series of crates and moved across the continent. Napoleon, perhaps preoccupied with the crumbling of his recently established empire, appears to have forgotten about the statue, and it languished in storage until 1814, when Paris itself was captured by Prussian soldiers following Napoleon’s defeat. The Quadriga was returned to Berlin and once again installed atop the Brandenburg Gate, this time with one change: As a symbol of Prussia’s military victory over France, an iron cross was added to the statue. The cross was later removed during the Communist era, and only permanently restored in 1990 during the unification of Germany.

Horace King: From Enslaved Carpenter to Master Bridge Architect

                                                
Horace King was an African American architect, engineer, and bridge builder. King built the biggest American bridges in the mid 1800’s, and is considered the most respected bridge builder of the 19th century Deep South, constructing dozens of bridges in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. His work is still present in the amazing spiraling staircases of the Alabama State Capital.
King was born enslaved on September 8, 1807 in Chesterfield District, South Carolina. His ancestry was a mix of African, European, and Catawba. Taught to read and write at an early age, he had become a proficient carpenter and mechanic by his teenage years. Records indicate King spent his first 23 years near his birthplace, with his first introduction to bridge construction in 1824. When King’s enslaver died around 1830, he was sold to John Godwin, a contractor, who owned a successful construction business. King may have been related to the family of Godwin’s wife, Ann Wright.
In 1832, Godwin received a contract to construct a 560-foot (170 m) bridge across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus, Georgia to Girard, Alabama (today Phenix City). Initially living in Columbus, he and King moved to Girard in 1833. Although King was enslaved, Godwin treated him as a valued employee and eventually gave him considerable influence over his business. The pair began many other construction projects, including house building. They built Godwin’s house first, then King’s. This was followed by many speculative houses, resulting in nearly every early house in Girard being built by the pair. The Columbus City Bridge was the first known to be built by King, who likely planned the construction of the bridge and managed the enslaved laborers who built the span.
Between the completion of the Columbus City Bridge in 1833 and the early 1840s, King and Godwin partnered on no fewer than eight major construction projects throughout the South. By 1840, King was being publicly acknowledged as being a “co-builder” along with Godwin, an uncommon honor for an enslaved man. His prominence had eclipsed that of his enslaver and by the early 1840s, he was designing and supervising construction of major bridges at Wetumpka, Alabama and Columbus, Mississippi without Godwin’s supervision. Godwin issued five year warranties on King’s bridges because of his confidence in King’s high quality work.
While working on the Eufaula bridge, King met Tuscaloosa attorney and entrepreneur Robert Jemison, Jr., who soon began using King on a number of different projects in Lowndes County, Mississippi, including the 420-foot (130 m) Columbus, Mississippi bridge. Jemison would remain King’s friend and associate for the rest of his life. King bridged the Tallapoosa River at Tallassee, Alabama in 1845. Later that same year he built three small bridges for Jemison near Steens, Mississippi, where the latter owned several mills.
The partners also constructed some forty cotton warehouses in Apalachicola, Florida in 1834. It is thought by scholars that Godwin sent King to Oberlin College in Ohio, the first college in the United States to admit African-American students, in the mid-1830s. The two then went on to build the courthouses of Muscogee County, Georgia and Russell County, Alabama from 1839–1841, and bridges in West Point, Georgia (1838), Eufaula, Alabama (1838–39), Florence, Georgia (1840). They built a replacement for their Columbus City Bridge between Columbus and Girard in 1841, as the original had been destroyed during an 1838 flood.
In 1839, King married Frances Thomas, a free African American woman. The couple had had four boys and one girl. The King children eventually joined their father at working on various construction projects. In addition to building bridges, King constructed homes and government buildings for Godwin’s construction company. In 1841, King supervised the construction of the Russell County Courthouse in Alabama.
Despite his enslavement, King was allowed a significant income from his work and, in 1846, used some of his earnings to purchase his freedom from the Godwin family and Wright. However, under Alabama law of the time, a freed enslaved Black was only allowed to remain in the state for a year after manumission. Jemison, who served in the Alabama State Senate, arranged for the state legislature to pass a special law giving King his freedom and exempting him from the manumission law.
In 1849, the Alabama State Capitol burned, and King was hired to construct the framework of the new capitol building, as well as design and build the twin spiral entry staircases. King used his knowledge of bridge-building to cantilever the stairs’ support beams so that the staircases appeared to “float,” without any central support.

Horace King used bridge-building techniques to design the spiral staircase in the Alabama State Capitol so that a central support was not required.

Around 1855, King formed a partnership with two other men to construct a bridge, known as Moore’s Bridge, over the Chattahoochee between Newnan and Carrollton, Georgia, near Whitesburg. Instead of collecting a fee for his work, King took stock instead, gaining a one-third interest in the bridge. King moved his wife and children to the bridge about 1858, although he continued to commute between it and their other home in Alabama. Frances King and their children collected the bridge tolls and farmed at Moore’s Bridge. The earnings from Moore’s Bridge allowed King a steady income, though he continued to design and construct major bridge projects through the remainder of the 1850s, including a major bridge in Milledgeville, Georgia and a second Chattahoochee crossing in Columbus, Georgia.
As the American Civil War approached in 1860, King, like many African Americans in the South, opposed secession of the Southern states and was a confirmed Unionist. After the outbreak of hostilities, King attempted to continue his business as an architect and builder, constructing a factory and a mill in Coweta County, Georgia and a bridge in Columbus, Georgia. While working on the Columbus bridge, King was conscripted by Confederate authorities to build obstructions in the Apalachicola River, 200 miles (320 km) south of Columbus to prevent a naval attack on that city. After completing the obstructions on the Apalachicola, King was tasked to construct defenses on the Alabama River before returning to Columbus in 1863.
By this time, Columbus had become a major shipbuilding city for the Confederacy, and King and his men were assigned to assist construction of naval vessels at the Columbus Iron Works and Navy Yard. In 1863-64, King constructed a rolling mill for the Iron Works, providing cladding for Confederate ironclad warships. King’s crews also provided lumber and timbers for the Navy Yard, and was at least peripherally involved with the construction of the CSS Muscogee.
Many of King’s bridges were destroyed by Union troops. This included Moore’s Bridge, which King owned. Moore’s Bridge was destroyed by Union cavalry in July 1864. When Union soldiers assaulted Columbus in April 1865, they burnt all of King’s bridges in that city, including the one he had finished less than two years earlier.
In October 1864, his wife died leaving King a widower with five surviving children to care for. He remarried, immediately after the Civil War ended to Sarah Jane Jones McManus. Also after the war King began to prosper as he worked on the reconstruction of bridges, textile mills, cotton warehouses and public buildings destroyed during the conflict. Within six months after the war’s end, King and a partner had constructed a 32,000-square-foot (3,000 m2) cotton warehouse in Columbus and King had—for the third time—rebuilt the original Columbus City Bridge.
                         

King’s third rebuilding of the Columbus City Bridge in 1865, six months after his previous bridge at this location was burned by Union troops. View of entrance on the Alabama side.

Over the next three years, King would construct three more bridges across the Chattahoochee in Columbus, a major bridge in West Point, Georgia, two large factories, and the Lee County, Alabama courthouse.
King was elected as a Republican to the Alabama House of Representatives, serving from 1870 to 1874. When he left the Alabama Legislature in 1872, he moved with his family to LaGrange, Georgia. While in LaGrange, King continued building bridges, but also expanded to include other construction projects, specifically businesses and schools. By the mid-1870s, King had begun to pass on his bridge construction activities to his five children, who formed the King Brothers Bridge Company. King’s health began failing in the 1880s, and he died on May 28, 1885 in LaGrange.
King received laudatory obituaries in each of Georgia’s major newspapers, a rarity for African-Americans in the 1880s South. He was posthumously inducted into the Alabama Engineers Hall of Fame at the University of Alabama. The award was accepted on his behalf by his great grandson, Horace H. King, Jr. He was remembered both for his engineering skill and for his character.

Compiled by Rachard Armstrong

Suspected Kidnapper blames ‘CHANGE’ for action

                                              
A suspected kidnapper, (name withheld), was on Thursday arrested at Olowo Street, Odi-olowo, Lagos.
The suspect, who pleaded with an angry mob not to lynch him, said he takes to kidnapping because of the current economic situation in the country.
The victim, who was visibly shaken by the development, has been taken to hospital for treatment.
The suspect was also handed over to the police for further investigation into the matter.

July 6, 1967,The year Igbos will never forget

                                   
 The Nigeria-Biafra War started on July 6, 1967 and ended on January 15, 1970. The former Eastern Region of Nigeria seceded from Nigeria and declared its independence on May 30, 1967, following the massacre of the Igbo people who were living in the northern parts of Nigeria.
 One of the greatest enduring myths in Nigeria is the lie that Yakubu Gowon fought the Nigeria-Biafra war to keep Nigeria united, whereas in reality not only did Yakubu Gowon whose Northern region had originally intended to secede (Araba) after the July 1966 counter-coup cause the unnecessary war through his failure of leadership, his aim for fighting the war was never in the least a genuine desire to keep Nigeria united but purely because of Northern economic interests. The economic interests of the hitherto secessionist North became the principal reason for the volte face from secession to “one Nigeria” after the British government advised the Northern leadership of the economic disadvantages of secession.
The federal government of Nigeria responded to the secession with “police action,” that is, a partial military operation designed to crush what it perceived as a rebellion. These actions were the beginning of a war that lasted about thirty months. But what was originally interpreted as a domestic confl ict later took on an international dimension as state and non-state actors like Britain, the USSR, France, the Red Cross, and the World Council of Churches became involved in the confl ict.
The war received one of the highest humanitarian interventions in recent history. The massive number of children and women facing starvation att racted the att ention of groups like the World Council of Churches, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Caritas Internationalis, Interreligious Affairs for the American Jewish Committee, and UNICEF.
The relief effort resulted in unusual Jewish-Christian co-operation, 4 Countries like the United States, Germany, France, and the Nordic Countries made enormous contributions towards the relief effort.
5 The international media also highlighted the humanitarian crisis in the war-torn region and successfully brought this part of the world into global focus.
The New York Times, The London Times, La Stampa of Italy, and Le Monde of France were some of the newspapers that eff ectively covered the war.  The dominant argument in the historiography of the Nigeria-Biafra War, both within academia and the popular media, is that the Igbo were targeted for extermination by the Muslim north. A year before the war, during the 1966 massacres of Easterners in Northern Nigeria, the alleged indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets and the widespread hunger in secessionist Biafra did a lot to rouse the world’s conscience to the humanitarian crisis facing Biafran peoples.
The international media played a signifi cant role in exposing the humanitarian tragedies, especially in the Igbo-speaking parts of Biafra. And many years after the war, scholarly accounts of the war, mostly by scholars from the Igbo-speaking parts of Baifra, have privileged insights into some of the most hideous acts unleashed on Biafrans during the war.
Yet, not much has been reported about the atrocities perpetrated against the minorities in Biafra, both by the Nigerian military forces and the Biafran militias.  This is a gap in Biafra’s history.
 Nigeria continues to suffer severe social, economic and psychological dislocations as a result of the needless conflict. The nation has since become a disharmonious, dysfunctional and strife torn chaotic failed state Nigeria.Look at what is happening in the Eastern Part of Nigeria and you will cry for Igbos.

Compiled by Chukwuemeka Collins

Kenyan sentenced to 100 years for molesting 3 girls inside church

                        
A young Kenyan man who followed three young girls from a funeral to a church and locked them inside to sexually abuse them, was sentenced to 100 years imprisonment.
Harrison Kinyua, aged 20, was handed the sentence by a court in the central town of Embu after pleading guilty to "defiling" two 13-year-olds and a 10-year-old in a church in the village of Kangaru.
The court heard he had locked the girls inside the church as they returned chairs that had been borrowed for a funeral.
He was with the girls at the funeral and followed them to the church. After molesting them he bought them chips in exchange for their silence but they told their parents what had happened.
The girls were examined by a hospital doctor who confirmed the abuse.

Nigerians eat too much rice, that's why it is expensive" - Audu Ogbe

                                           
Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development of the Federal Republic of Niogeria, Chief Audu Ogbeh, on has said Nigerian businessmen demanded 2.5 billion dollars (about N492 billion) a week for importation of goods and services into the country.
Ogbeh made this known in a meeting with officials of VICAMPRO, an indigenous Agro Company investing in production of Irish Potato in Abuja.
He said that the ministry was willing to support local investors with capacity to produce goods and save the country’s foreign exchange.

He said that the consumption of rice in the country was rising and that a lot of people were not aware that the rice had some degree of arsenic.
The minister said that consuming rice in large quantity on a regular basis was a bit of health risk, adding that substituting it with potato would be welcomed development.
“The volume of importation of virtually everything into this country is too much.
“The demand for dollars in this country as at today is 2.5 billion a week; this is the quantum of dollars Nigerians are asking for to import things.

“Since 1986, we began this habit of importing everything and doing virtually nothing at home to sustain ourselves; now, we do not have the dollars and people are very hungry.
“This day was coming anyway, no matter who was in power; we have the most ridiculous method of devaluing our currency; every week, we auction the dollar and naira goes up.
“We sat and were hoping that by devaluation, we are going to arrive at Eldorado; if we continue like this, it will be a thousand naira to a dollar,’’ he said.
While commending the investor, Ogbeh said that any private sector effort that would develop local production of goods would be fully supported by the ministry.
“We should aggressively take the West African market; there is no reason why we should allow Irish potato from Ireland and France and Belgium into West Africa; it is the same story with onions.

Source:Daily Post

HISTORY:How James Meredith's Enrollment At The University Mississippi Caused A Deadly Race Riot

                                
In 1962, James Meredith attempted to enroll at the traditionally white University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), and was faced with a racist institution and a volatile crowd of 2,000 white protestors.