Onye Ozi (The Messenger)

COMING SOON...

PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria, April 13 (Reuters) - Nigeria's ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) won the governorship election in oil hub Rivers state with 1,029,120 votes, the electoral commission in state capital Port Harcourt said early on Monday. The candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the party of president elect Muhammadu Buhari, received 124,896 votes, the commission added. Incumbent governor Rotimi Amaechi defected from the PDP to the APC two years ago and has been feuding with President Goodluck Jonathan ever since. Tensions were high during the weekend polls and voting had to be extended in some districts after violence and theft of electoral materials marred the process.

Liu Xiang, world renowned 110 meter hurdler and Olympic gold medalist, announced his retirement on Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo with a 2,000-word article, ‘My track, my hurdle’. The news caused a sensation in China. While his newlywed wife posted words of encouragement and Nike, his biggest sponsor for 13 years, made a series of ads speaking highly of his athletic spirit, Chinese netizens seemed divided between those who hailed him as a national hero wishing him all the best and those who still resented his withdrawal from the 2008 Olympics and his stumble at the 2012 Olympics.

   Rapper Nelly, who also serves as a minority owner for the Charlotte Hornets, was arrested on felony drug charges on Saturday in Tennessee.

NAIROBI: A third year student succumbed to injuries following a stampede at the University of Nairobi’s Kikuyu Campus Sunday morning after a power transformer exploded. According the university’s Vice Chancellor Prof Peter Mibithi, 141 others were admitted to hospitals, 99 of them at the Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) one at Karen Hospital and 37 at Kikuyu Hospital. The students jumped from their hostels to the ground floors after the 4 am incident in which they mistook the explosion from the transformer for a terrorist attack. Some students jumped from the sixth floor of their hostels. “The explosion from the transformer went off and there was a succession of the same for about 20 seconds that made many of the students think it was Al-Shabaab who had attacked,” said a student who said he survived with a scratch in the face. Police who visited the students said the students scampered for safety after the 4 am incident. See also: Fate of Garissa University College unk

- Turkey has summoned the Vatican's ambassador in Ankara over the pope's comments describing the massacre of Armenians a century ago as "genocide", a senior official said on Sunday. Turkey, which has yet to make an official statement on Pope Francis' comments, summoned the ambassador to protest over the description of the events as "genocide", the official said, declining to be identified. Muslim Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians died in clashes with Ottoman soldiers beginning in 1915, when Armenia was part of the empire ruled from Istanbul, but denies hundreds of thousands were killed and that this amounted to genocide.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis on Sunday honored the 100th anniversary of the slaughter of Armenians by calling it "the first genocide of the 20th century" and urging the international community to recognize it as such, a politically explosive declaration that will certainly anger Turkey.

GUNNERS CRUISE....EIGHT IN A ROW

 One of the difficult aspects of parenting (and, really, life in general) is the balance between doing nothing and trying to control everything. But recognizing God as the one who is ultimately in control of the script of our lives doesn't mean that we do nothing. God is entrusting our children's lives to us as parents. He is asking us to take care of them in an imperfect world. We seldom know all we should or should not do in any given situation, and this is why we need to be in constant and personal communication with God so that we can receive His wisdom (James 3:17, 1 Cor. 1:25). One of the best ways to be a good parent to our children is to be a faithful son or daughter to our heavenly Father (because we can't give away something we don't have). When we need to give away wisdom, encouragement, strength, and forgiveness to our children, we need to be receiving those things from God as well. So what do we do in this tension of doing nothing or micro-m

Let the peace continue