Codeshare services on onward flights from Addis Ababa and Frankfurt / Lufthansa now offering all three travel classes on flights to Ethiopia
Lufthansa passengers now have a choice of four new codeshare destinations in Africa. The increase in services is due to the expansion of the German carrier’s partnership with Ethiopian Airlines, which with immediate effect will operate several onward flights from Ethiopia under a Lufthansa flight number. These include flights from Addis Ababa to Kigali (Rwanda), Entebbe/Kampala (Uganda), Nairobi (Kenya) and to the Tanzanian airports Dar es Salaam, Kilimanjaro and Zanzibar. Nairobi and Dar es Salaam will also continue to be served on a codeshare basis by SWISS.
Likewise, Ethiopian Airlines will be able to book its passengers under its own flight numbers on Lufthansa flights from Frankfurt to Amsterdam, Geneva, Stockholm, New York (John F. Kennedy and Newark), San Francisco and Los Angeles.
On existing codeshare flights between Frankfurt and Addis Ababa, which Lufthansa and Ethiopian Airlines have been operating since April 2008, customers will be able to book seats in First Class with immediate effect. This is because Lufthansa will in future deploy the Airbus A330-300 with three travel classes on its four-times-weekly flights.
The codeshare flights, which can be booked now, provide customers with greater flexibility and a wider choice of connections. As both airlines’ frequent flyer programmes have been linked since October 2007, members of Lufthansa Miles & More and Ethiopian Sheba Miles can collect and redeem miles on any of the partner’s flights.
By Shelly Paz | Jerusalem Post
Aleli Admasu, an unknown father of five from Rishon Lezion, surprised everyone by winning the 30th spot on the Likud Knesset candidates list in Monday’s primary, reserved for an immigrant.
“I didn’t believe the results myself. It was a great surprise for me, too, but I am very happy and glad that this is what Likud members and especially the members of the [Ethiopian] community wanted and chose,” he said Tuesday.
Admasu defeated candidates endorsed by party chairman Binyamin Netanyahu and Jewish Leadership faction leader Moshe Feiglin.
“The Ethiopian community in Israel has been loyal to the Likud for many years and this achievement is a big hug from the Ethiopian community,” Admasu said.
The first slot reserved for immigrants, No. 21, went to Netanyahu’s choice, current Kadima MK Ze’ev Elkin, who was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, in 1971 and made aliya at age 19.
Admasu said he did not have the financial resources to promote his candidacy.
By Tim Carman | City Paper
It just came to my wandering attention that News Channel 8 followed up on the Washington Post’s recent story about how the sagging economy and the city’s new meter system have affected cabbies and their ability to, essentially, subsidize the local Ethiopian restaurant community. At first I was sympathetic to this issue; but after supping at Etete, on a Monday night no less, when both levels of the joint were overflowing with customers, I’m thisclose to calling bullshit on the theory.
But I won’t. For one reason:
It’s based on only one visit, and that was to an elegant Ethiopian restaurant (read: accessible to Americans) just off the busy U Street NW drag. I suspect that the lesser lights among D.C.’s Ethiopian eateries are indeed suffering. But I wonder how much can be blamed on the new fare structure? Could there not be a glut of Ethiopian markets and restaurants? (Yes, there could be.) Could they have been suffering before the economy tanked and cabbies shifted to the new meter system? (Yes, they could have.)
What’s been your experience lately at Ethiopian haunts? Busy or not?
A California satellite technology provider has signed a deal to put a planned broadband Internet satellite into orbit above the U.S. in the first half of 2011.
The ViaSat-1 satellite will be launched on board an Arianespace rocket from the European space port in Kourou, French Guiana, according to the terms of the deal that was announced on Thursday.
The satellite will an overall throughput of 100G bps (bits per second) and that should enable it to support 2M bps service to about 2 million subscribers when operational.
It is expected to be the highest capacity satellite in the world at time of launch, and that should mean the price of transmitting each bit of data is about a tenth that of current services. In turn this should enable broadband Internet services at much lower prices than now, according to the company.
While ViaSat will own the satellite it intends on relying on other companies to offer the Internet service.
ViaSat is a California-based company that specializes in satellite communications systems with an emphasis on military, security and corporate applications. It already leases space on commercial satellites to operate a mobile broadband networks for both fixed locations and those that move like ships and aircraft.
The ViaSat plans are running in parallel with an effort by Eutelsat in Europe to launch a high capacity broadband satellite there in 2010.
– PC World
He died at his residence outside Moscow although here was no immediate word on the cause of death.
Patriarch Alexy II was an establishment figure who restored the authority of the church after decades of Soviet repression.
Born Alexei Ridiger, Alexy II made his ecclesiastical career at a time when the church was controlled by Soviet authorities before forging an alliance with the new Russian state under presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.
The patriarch was an impressive character with a benign expression and moral authority among millions of Russian believers but his personality was always locked in by the deeply hierarchical nature of his role.
Alexy II took stances on foreign policy issues that often matched the Kremlin line, criticising Nato strikes against Yugoslavia, the US-led war in Iraq and defending the rights of ethnic-Russians in the former Soviet Union.
But his role in the international arena was marked above all by wariness of Catholics, whom he accused of “proselytism,” and he refused repeatedly to meet Roman Catholic pope John Paul II and his successor Benedict XVI.
The main reason for the row was a property dispute between the Catholic and Orthodox churches in Ukraine, where the Greek Catholic church, which was banned by Stalin and dispossessed, took back hundreds of parishes from the Orthodox church at the beginning of the 1990s.
The creation of four Catholic dioceses in Russia also created suspicion among Orthodox leaders. Several rounds of negotiations between Catholic and Orthodox officials failed to smooth differences.
He was also, however, a unifying Orthodox figure who helped engineer a union with a branch of the Russian Orthodox church that separated from Moscow-based church authorities after the 1917 Soviet revolution.
Ridiger was born on February 23, 1929 in then independent Estonia, the son of an Orthodox priest. He worked in two cathedrals after Estonia became part of the Soviet Union and entered a religious seminary under Stalin.
He married but then divorced in order to become a monk in 1961 during the anti-religion campaigns launched by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. He was soon promoted to become an Orthodox bishop.
Ridiger had a successful career under Leonid Brezhnev at a time when the Orthodox church was effectively controlled by the KGB and dissident priests were thrown into jail.
The future patriarch conformed and rose rapidly through church ranks, becoming number two in the influential external affairs section of the patriarchate.
Despite his ties with the Communist establishment, he made some efforts to curb Soviet repression, including keeping a famous convent in Estonia open despite the threat of closure.
He became patriarch in 1990, shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union.
At the time, Ridiger was seen as more in touch with the reforms to the Soviet system being undertaken by Mikhail Gorbachev than another candidate, metropolitan Filaret, considered even closer to the Communist regime.
The new patriarch remained prudent after the fall of the Communist system, ruling out investigations against church officials accused of links to the Soviet secret services.
In close collaboration with Yeltsin Putin, Alexy II used his close relations with the authorities to rebuild the influence of the Orthodox church.
Seminaries were restored, churches were rebuilt and church finances were greatly boosted by income from customs duties granted by the Russian government during the 1990s.
The lavish Christ the Saviour cathedral in central Moscow, which was destroyed under Stalin and replaced by an open-air swimming pool, was rebuilt in full splendour during Alexy II’s patriarchate.
Religion gained influence in schools, prisons, hospitals and the armed services.
Within the church, Alexy II was never an innovative leader and opposed himself to liberal policies but he also rejected deeply anti-Semitic and nationalistic currents in religious thinking.
The patriarch died at a time when the Russian Orthodox church had not yet determined its preferred status, as an institution closely allied with political authorities or a church more in tune with the Russian people.
– Telegraph.co.uk
