By Tesfa-alem Teklem | Sudan Tribune
MEKELLE — A Dubai-based Sudanese communication company, MURD, installed an FM radio station in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray.
MURD carried out the project after it won an international tender announced by the government of Ethiopia.
According to Yikum Haile, General Manager of the radio station, a total of 6 million birr has spent to build station.
The General Manager believes that the newly established radio station will have a major value in bringing positive changes in different aspects.
“The radio station will play a great role in promoting the socio-economic and political part of the people in the Region” Yikum said adding “the transmission will cover Mekelle town and its environs within 100 kilometers radius”.
Sudanese electronic engineer and director of the project Mohamed Al-Mubarek told Sudan Tribune that the company, Murd, has similar contract deal to execute in Ethiopia
“We have a contract deal with the Addis administration to set up an educational FM Radio station in the capital, Addis Ababa” Mohamed said
He appreciated the Regional government’s close cooperation to successfully accomplish the project.
Mekelle Radio station which was inaugurated last week is expected to play significant Role by serving as a bridge between government and the people.
Established since 1996, MURD erected several radio stations in northern, southern and western part of the country. Currently it is working on AM station in Gedaref, eastern Sudan. The firm is also working on three radio transmission stations in the United Arab Emirates.
By Ayda Million
U.S.-based BirrituExpress.com claims to provide a secure, quick, cost-effective and easy way to remit money abroad.
“Sending money to Ethiopia does not have to be difficult or expensive. Your family, friends or business associates cannot wait weeks to receive funds, and cannot afford the expensive fees, complications and insecurities typical of traditional money remittance services. They can count on BirrituExpress.com, built by Ethiopians for the Global Ethiopian Community,” says General Manager Getachew Jirane.
This is my first in a series of articles introducing pioneering Ethiopian owned businesses. The following is a brief description of the company as stated on its web site:
BirrituExpress.com is the service that brings much needed value to money remittance to Ethiopia currently dominated by expensive and inconvenient companies. Much value is lost to the Ethiopian Community by hidden fees and exchange rate spreads that add cost to the sender, the recipient and the economy of Ethiopia. We aim to recover that lost value to the benefit of our customers and our beloved country, and serve our clients with an economical yet rich service. Over $370 million is remitted to the country annually, and BirrtuExpress brings transparency and low cost to funds sent through our system.
Convenient and Easy – our innovative site allows you to send money to Ethiopia from the comfort of your home or workplace or from any computer with an Internet connection. There are no long lines and no need to interrupt your busy day to travel to a merchant, agent or bank to send money. Simply log on to www.birrituexpress.com, register as a user, enter your recipients contact address and the amount you wish to send, and send the money. It’s that easy!
Fast and Flexible – You can charge the amount you would like to send to your credit card or debit card or deduct the money directly from your bank account. You can also use our exchange rate calculator to determine the amount your recipient will be receiving in birr. Your remittance will be processed instantly over the Internet and the money disbursed to your recipient thru cash pick-up at our affiliates The Cooperative Bank of Oromia/Ethiopian Postal Service or direct deposit to the beneficiaries account thru our affiliate bank within 48 to 72 hours. The recipient does not need to have a bank account or computer access. You can verify the status of your money transfer at any time by logging into our website. We will immediately send you confirmation regarding each step of your transaction until completion via email.
Secure and Regulatory Compliant – In addition, we have taken the anxiety out of international money transfers by incorporating industry-leading security features as the Strong 128 bit SSL encryption into the process while funds are handled by an FDIC-insured bank in the US and disbursed by the most accessible and trusted financial institutions in Ethiopia. Furthermore, all money transfers are completely regulatory compliant. This means, unlike many traditional remittance service providers, BirrituExpress.com remittances are processed in adherence with United States regulatory compliance requirements (U.S. Patriot Act, Anti-Money Laundering, Bank Secrecy Act, OFAC, NACHA, CHAPS and BACS processing policies), as well as the Laws of Ethiopia and Regulations of the National Bank of Ethiopia.
Low Cost – Typical transactions cost much less than western and traditional competitors operating in Ethiopia. You receive the most favorable exchange rate making the most out of every dollar for our esteemed customers.
(Ayda Million is the editor of Ethiopedia.com, an online encylopedia of Ethiopia)
Ethiopian Airlines has been making waves in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. The African airline, which offers several weekly from Washington D.C.’s Dulles International Airport to {www:Ethiopia}, was the official carrier at the Adventures in Travel Expo in Washington D.C. on February 21 and 22. The airline completed several events, including a special reception for dignitaries from the embassies of Angola, Botswana, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mauritius, Namibia, South Africa, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda.
The recession does not appear to have a huge impact on the airline. Gobena Mikael, director of North and South America for Ethiopian Airlines, said in a statement that the airlines is marking record revenues and profits; its year to date July-December 2008 revenue from the U.S. increased by 13 percent over that of the same period last year. In the short-term, the airline will continue operating four flights per week up to the summer, after which they will increase to five flights per week for the period June through August.
Interest in Ethiopia
The Lucy fossil exhibit, which has been in Houston, Seattle and is now moving to New York, has sparked interest in the African destination’s history, culture and religious significance.
NBA player Manute Bol serves as Ethiopian Airlines’ brand ambassador and in his position will appear at trade shows and special events, radio and TV interviews, and a launch of a co-branded Ethiopian Airlines Journeys itinerary.
Promotions
All of the U.S. promotions have been designed to support the Washington Dulles-Addis Ababa flights. Ethiopian Airlines Journeys is now the tour operator of Ethiopian Airlines and promotes travel packages to Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. Their new website, www.seeyouinethiopia.com features city guides, historical attractions and hotel databases to help visitors learn more about the destination.
Source: Travel Agent Central
By Katrina Manson
BURKINA FASO (Reuters) – A film set in Ethiopia about a bloodthirsty regime under which political dissidents and village children alike were ruthlessly killed has won best movie award at Africa’s top film festival.
“Teza,” a feature by award-winning director Haile Gerima set during Mengistu Haile Mariam’s 1974-1991 rule, won the top prize late on Saturday at this year’s 40th pan-African FESPACO film festival in Burkina Faso.
Judges praised the film, 14 years in the making, for its strength, depth and poetry conveying the dashed hopes of a returning intellectual elite. Stunning village vistas and shoulder-dancing amid ululations in bars capture an expressive, vital Ethiopian culture.
“The message of the film is peace,” Selome Gerima, associate producer of the film and sister of the United States-based, Ethiopian-born director, told Reuters while beaming and clutching her Etalon d’Or de Yennenga (Golden Stallion of Yennenga), Africa’s equivalent of an Oscar.
The plot follows a series of horrific experiences endured by hero Anberber, who trains as a medical research scientist in Europe. On his return to Ethiopia full of hope and eager to contribute to his country, he and his friends are violently and cruelly rejected at home and again back in Germany.
Shot in the Gerimas’ hometown of Gondar in northwest Ethiopia, the village cast was drawn from locals during three months of filming, many of whom had experienced the brutalities of the regime firsthand.
“Some had experienced the Red Terror. One mother started crying bitterly because it reminded her of when they took her daughter,” Selome Gerima told Reuters during the festival, referring to the violent purges that marked Mengistu’s rule.
Several entries among this year’s competition have raised a critical voice and urged change on the continent.
In the South African film “Nothing But The Truth,” which won second prize, director and lead actor John Kani plays a librarian denied promotion, and who believes post-apartheid freedom’s dividends have not been realized. In real life Kani’s brother was shot dead in a church by police while reading a poem at the grave of a nine-year old girl killed during an anti-apartheid riot.
HOPES FOR CINEMA HALLS
Since Teza premiered in Ethiopia at the start of 2009, Gerima says cinema halls showing the film, which has also won awards at the Venice Film Festival, are still sold out two months later.
On Saturday night, the winning film was screened in cinema halls across Burkina Faso’s hot, dusty capital Ouagadougou, where more than 300 films have shown in the past week.
At Cine Burkina, the country’s premier movie theater, three long queues formed in the dark in all directions, streaming back from any entry point local cinema-lovers could find.
“If it’s won the Etalon that means it’s a film we all need to see,” said Mamadou Boro, 26, a former economics student looking for work, who was still queuing at close to midnight for Saturday’s second screening. “We are really suffering to see this film, but we want to make sure we see it now because tomorrow we won’t be able to.”
Distribution woes have taken the spotlight at this year’s festival. As increasing numbers of cinema halls close down, African films are squeezed out by Hollywood action blockbusters and Bollywood musicals.
More directors are turning to mass-market digital movies such as the $450 million market in Nigeria.
“We need to establish an African filmmakers’ bank,” Selome Gerima told Reuters on winning the award. She is building four new 35mm cinemas for the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa and hopes it will help African cinema to go it alone. “Just like a construction bank or any other bank, we need to be there to keep African films going.”
(Editing by Daniel Magnowski and Charles Dick)
By Mary Engel | The Los Angeles Times
HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is one of the fastest-evolving entities known. That’s why no one has yet been able to come up with a vaccine: The virus mutates so rapidly that what works today in one person may not work tomorrow or in others.
A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature confirms that dizzying pace of evolution on a global scale.
“It’s very clear there’s a battle going on between humans and this virus, and the virus is evolving to become unrecognized by the immune system,” said Dr. Bruce Walker, one of the researchers and director of the Ragon Institute, at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “It does make clear what a huge challenge making a vaccine is.”
HIV evolves to escape the immune system, much in the same way that bacteria mutate under pressure by antibiotics, Walker said.
Researchers looked at HIV genetic sequences in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Botswana, Australia, Canada and Japan to see how they evolved in response to a key set of molecules in the human immune system, called human leukocyte antigens. These molecules direct the immune system to recognize and kill HIV and other infectious diseases.
Genes that encode human leukocyte antigens vary among humans, and even small differences can dramatically affect a person’s response to HIV infection. For example, an adult infected with HIV will survive on average about 10 years without anti-HIV drugs before developing acquired immune deficiency syndrome. But some people will progress to AIDS within a year, and others can survive without treatment for 20 years.
The study published online Wednesday found that mutations occurred not just in individuals but on a population level. That is, if a particular genetic immune sequence was common in a population, the HIV mutation that evolved to escape it became the most common strain of HIV, even in those without that particular human leukocyte antigen gene.
“What this study does is give an explanation for why there are different HIV strains in different parts of the world,” Walker said. “The genetic makeup of people in different regions is influencing the virus in specific ways.”
This would appear to be bad news for the director of the newly opened Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, which was founded to develop vaccines for HIV and other infectious diseases.
But Walker saw the results as hopeful. He said that mutations can actually make the virus less fit — that is, unable to replicate as quickly or do as much damage. His challenge is to find what kind of pressure results in this kind of mutation.
Researchers from the Ragon Institute, Oxford University in England, Kumamoto University in Japan, and Royal Perth Hospital and Murdoch University in Australia analyzed the genetic sequences of HIV and human leukocyte antigen genes in 2,800 people total.
Radical Approach to Block HIV Gets Some Results
By Brandon Keim | Wired Science
Faced with the continued failure of HIV-targeting microbicides, scientists have devised a radically different approach to preventing transmission of the killer virus: ignoring it.
Instead of aiming at the virus itself, they’re focusing on the body’s response to HIV’s initial attack. By muting distress signals sent by HIV’s first cellular victims, researchers hope to prevent the white blood cells on which HIV preys from responding and becoming infected themselves.
This cutting-fuel-to-the-fire approach is highly experimental, and has only been tried with a single compound. But it prevented infection in four of five macaque monkeys exposed to a close relative of HIV, signifying a potentially new direction in the fruitless search for a microbicide.
“If you can break one of the links in that chain, you can break the influx of target cells the virus needs,” said University of Minnesota microbiologist Ashley Haase, co-developer of the new microbicide, described Wednesday in Nature.
The science is still uncertain, but so is the entire field of anti-HIV microbicides. Hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of researchers have yet to produce a substance that, when applied before sex, can reliably prevent transmission of a virus that kills nearly 3 million people every year.
A growing number of scientists think the progression of the disease is driven by inflammation. Previous research showed that exposure to SIV — the simian equivalent of HIV — prompts the immune system to summon specialized white blood cells, which are the primary victims of both HIV and SIV. Once under attack, they call in more white blood cells. These also fall prey. The cycle repeats until infection is firmly entrenched.
“We’re trying to interfere with the host response on which the virus depends to establish infection,” Haase said.
His team previously found that glycerol monolaurate, an FDA-approved antimicrobial compound normally used in soaps and other household products, dampened the inflammatory response in cell cultures. Now they’ve shown the same effect in monkeys.
Whether human immune response to HIV parallels the monkeys’ response to SIV is unproven, but there are hints that it does: The same mechanisms can be observed in laboratory cultures of human cells, and high levels of vaginal inflammation are linked to higher HIV infection risks.
“Whether this particular drug would work in humans, nobody knows,” said Leonid Margolis, a National Institutes of Health HIV researcher who was not involved in the study. But its significance, he said, resides less in these early tests than in signaling a conceptually new approach to microbicides.
Haase’s team made its microbicide from a mix of glycerol monolaurate and K-Y lubricating gel. After testing its basic safety on macaques, they treated five monkeys who were then exposed to SIV. Over the next two weeks, only one of the monkeys became infected. In an unprotected control group, all five monkeys became infected.
The microbicide didn’t appear to otherwise affect the monkeys, and left their vaginal bacterial flora — important to maintaining an environment hostile to infection — fully intact.
The macaques used by Haase’s are far from a perfect model for studying HIV treatments, but are considered useful for modeling the disease’s transmission. Still, said Haase, more and longer-term research is needed in monkeys before glycerol monolaurate can be tested in humans.
If it has even a small protective effect, “you could combine it with other approaches into a microbicide that targets several things the virus needs,” said Haase. “Such an approach might be very effective — more effective than the components themselves might be.”
Should glycerol monolaurate itself not work, some other inflammation-dampening compound might do the trick. “Inflammation is, in my mind, the engine that drives HIV infection,” said Margolis.
Other scientists, however, warn against premature optimism.
Glycerol monolaurate also has surface-tension lowering properties in liquid, which could have directly inactivated the virus independent of any anti-inflammatory effects, said Robin Shattock, an HIV transmission specialist at St. George’s University of London and chair of the International Partnership for Microbicides.
Another surfactant microbicide candidate, nonoxynol-9, showed promise in monkeys but actually increased HIV transmission risk during clinical trials.
Even if glycerol monolaurate worked by reducing inflammation, said Shattock, it’s unclear whether it could sufficiently reduce real-world inflammation, which is often caused by multiple, sexually transmitted infections, of which HIV is only one.
“Only time will tell whether this is a major breakthrough, or if it is just another flash in the pan,” he said.
(Citation: “Glycerol monolaurate prevents mucosal SIV transmission.” By Qingsheng Li, Jacob D. Estes, Patrick M. Schlievert, Lijie Duan, Amanda J. Brosnahan, Peter J. Southern, Cavan S. Reilly, Marnie L. Peterson, Nancy Schultz-Darken, Kevin G. Brunner, Karla R. Nephew, Stefan Pambuccian, Jeffrey D. Lifson, John V. Carlis & Ashley T. Haase. Nature, Vol. 457 No. 7233, March 4, 2009.)
Starbucks does not know when it will open a support center for coffee farmers in Ethiopia that was scheduled to open last year, according to spokeswoman Deb Trevino.