CHICAGO – Two-time champion Berhane Adere will try to become the first woman to win three straight Chicago Marathon titles Sunday, with Olympic champion Constantina Tomescu-Dita among those out to prevent the three-peat.
Ethiopia’s Adere and Kenyan Daniel Njenga in the men’s race rounded out the elite field announced for Sunday’s race. Njenga has finished in the top three six times in Chicago, but will be seeking his first victory in the Windy City.
Njenga will have his work cut out if he is to end his run as Chicago’s nearly-man. Kenyan William Kipsang heads the field, having posted a course record of 2hr 05.49 in winning the Rotterdam Marathon in April.
Kenyan Emmanuel Mutai seemps poised to put some pressure on Kipsang, having finished fourth in the London Marathon in April with a personal best of 2:06.15. Adere will try to follow up on two dramatic Chicago victories. Last year she took Adriana Pirtea unawares, sprinting past the Romanian in the final meters.
In 2006, Adere and Russian Galina Bogomolova trailed Romania’s Tomescu-Dita, who had set a record pace through the first 16 miles. She was reeled in the 22nd mile of the 26.2 mile course, and Adere and Bogomolova battled shoulder to shoulder until the Ethiopian edged into the lead and won by five seconds.
This year, the 38-year-old Tomescu-Dita – who won on the fast, flat Chicago course in 2004 – arrives hot off an Olympic gold medal win in the women’s marathon in Beijing while her fellow Romanian Pirtea shaved five minutes off her marathon best with a 2:28:52 in London in April.
Tomescu-Dita’s feat in Beijing, where she became the oldest Olympic marathon gold medallist, has already inspired other athletes. Seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong cited her in his decision to return to road racing in 2009. Britain’s marathon world record-holder Paula Radcliffe, disappointed in the Games, has said she will try again in 2012, when she will be 38.
Njenga will be trying to break a Chicago jinx. He has finished second or third in each of his last six appearances, including a third-place showing last year behind the photo finish of Kenyan Patrick Ivuti and Morocco’s Jaouad Gharib.
Njenga has never lost to the same competitor twice – finishing behind a stellar roster of marathoners in Ivuti, Robert K. Cheruyiot, Felix Limo, Evans Rutto and Khalid Khannouchi. Njenga is one of six men in the field who have posted personal bests below 2:07:00.
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA – Quincy Police say an arrest could be coming soon in this week’s robbery and shooting of a convenience store owner Wondwessen Gizaw.
As business continues at the BP at the corner of Highway 90 and Ward Street in Quincy, the police chief says he’s close to getting a warrant in hand.
Three men are wanted for robbing and shooting the store owner Wondwossen Gizaw early Tuesday morning.
Gizaw, a native of Ethiopia, is still recovering from three gunshot wounds.
Tanesha Hall is one of Gizaw’s regular customers. She said, “It’s a disappointment how someone would try to rob him. Basically we know it’s young people and they know how he is. Why would you want to take from somebody like that?”
The chief says the men were black, wearing black clothes, red gloves and masks. He also says they may have a person of interest.
BOSASSO, Somalia (Reuters) – A ship laden with cement was hijacked in the pirate-ridden waters between Somalia and Yemen, a government official said on Friday.
The panama-flagged Wail was en route to Bosasso from Oman and was attacked between the Yemeni Island of Socotra and Bosasso just hours after Somali pirates received a $1.6 million ransom to release the MT Irene, a Japanese chemical tanker.
“A Panama-flagged ship, Wail, was hijacked on Thursday night between Socotra Island and Bosasso,” said Ali Abdi Aware, state minister for northern Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region.
He told Reuters the crew of 11 consisted of nine Syrians and two Somalis.
Piracy is rife off Somalia, which has been mired in anarchy since warlords overthrew dictator Siad Barre in 1991.
The vital sealane in the Arabian Sea between Yemen and Somalia links the Middle East Gulf and Asia to Europe and beyond via the Suez Canal and is critical to Gulf oil shipments.
Gunmen have boarded more than 30 vessels this year and received ransoms totalling between $18-30 million, according to British think-tank Chatham House.
The NATO military alliance decided on Thursday to join anti-piracy operations along Somalia’s 3,300 km (2,060 mile) coastline.
One of the highest-profile pirate attacks off Somalia this year involves the MV Faina, which has been held since the end of September with 20 crew members on board. Its cargo includes 33 T-72 tanks which were en route to Kenya’s Mombasa port.
(Reporting by Abdiqani Hassan; writing by Abdi Sheikh; Editing by Matthew Jones)
SINGAPORE (AP) – Oil prices plummeted to a one-year low below $83 a barrel Friday in Asia as investor fears of a severe global economic downturn sparked a panicked sell-off of equities and crude.
Light, sweet crude for November delivery was down $4.35 to $82.24 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange by midday in Singapore, the lowest since October 2007. The contract overnight fell $1.81 to settle at $86.62.
“The whole market has lost confidence in everything,” said Mark Pervan, senior commodity strategist with ANZ Bank in Melbourne. “Everyone is worried about global growth, and oil is the front line commodity for that. There’s just a lot of panic and fear in the market.”
Investors have been unimpressed by interest rate cuts by the U.S. and other leading central banks this week to help unclog the credit markets and promote lending. A credit crisis that began last year in U.S. sub-prime mortgages has spread across the globe, forcing governments to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out banks, brokerages and insurance companies.
Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index plunged more than 10 percent Friday while the Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 7 percent Thursday to its lowest level in five years.
“The problem is no one really knows how far and deep this will go,” Pervan said. “But we can see from the size of the rescue packages, this is a really serious deal. This isn’t a normal bear market.”
Oil investors even ignored signs that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries may cut production. OPEC said Thursday it will hold an extraordinary meeting Nov. 18 to discuss how the widening global financial crisis is affecting oil prices.
On Thursday, the head of Libya’s national oil company, Shukri Ghanem, called on oil producing nations to cut output.
“OPEC is trying to jaw-bone the price up, but they’ll have to come into the market because no one is going to be believe just jaw-boning with the market sliding so quickly,” Pervan said. “The market is so demand focused, it doesn’t even care what happens to supply.”
OPEC’s decision last month to cut production by 520,000 barrels a day failed to halt the losses, which have accelerated in recent days.
Oil prices have fallen about 44 percent since soaring to a record $147.27 on July 11.
“We haven’t seen the bottom of this yet,” Pervan said. “We thought $75 would be a floor but if the market mood doesn’t change, $50 to $60 a barrel is not out of the question.”
In other Nymex trading, heating oil futures fell 9.46 cents to $2.32 a gallon, while gasoline prices dropped 8.68 cents to $1.94 a gallon. Natural gas for November delivery rose 6.69 cents to $6.69 per 1,000 cubic feet.
In London, November Brent crude fell $3.66 to $79.00 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.
Does Obama have it all locked up? My colleague at Thomas Jefferson Street, Robert Schlesinger, thinks so. And he may very well prove to be right. When we look back over the course of the campaign some time after November 4, we may very well conclude that Barack Obama sprinted to a lead during the two weeks following the coagulation of credit on September 18. Obama’s coolness during the financial crisis, combined with John McCain’s impulsiveness, convinced many voters that Obama was the safer choice, the story line will go. And Obama’s big advantage in television advertising contributed to his advance in target states, as Republican blogger Patrick Ruffini argues. As Robert notes, Obama’s current leads in several Bush ’04 states means that McCain must change the basic tenor of the campaign in order to win; eking out a narrow margin in one or two states won’t do it in the current state of opinion. And no one has a clear idea of how McCain can change the dynamic. So, the argument goes, Obama has this thing locked up.
But maybe not.
When I was in the political polling business, I once wrote an optimistic report on a poll. My boss, Peter Hart, took me aside and said, “Whenever you put something on paper, keep in mind how it will read after the election and your client has lost.” This election has been compared to 1980, when, just about all analysts agree, voters were prepared to get rid of Jimmy Carter and only waited to see whether Ronald Reagan was an acceptable alternative. Reagan’s performance in the only debate convinced voters he was, and he went on to win by a 50 percent to 41 percent margin, carrying 44 states. Similarly, some say, Obama’s performance in the two presidential debates so far (and Joe Biden’s performance in the vice presidential debate) has resolved voters’ doubts and led a majority of them to conclude that Obama is an acceptable alternative to the candidate of George W. Bush’s party.
Karl Rove begs to differ. He thinks voters haven’t really decided yet and are still waiting for more evidence. The Carter-Reagan debate, after all, took place on the Thursday before the election. Voters had only five days left to make up their minds. Today, as I write, voters have 26 days left to decide. Maybe they’ll wait and see how things go before they make their final decisions.
One reason to doubt this is that early voting is much more common than it was in 1980. The Obama campaign has spent much time and effort on organizing registration, early voting, and turnout efforts. Marc Ambinder of theatlantic.com, usually a cool observer, is in awe of their efforts. But as Jim Geraghty of nationalreview.com notes, very few votes were cast during the one-week period of early voting in the crucial state of Ohio—far fewer than Geraghty (or I) expected. The most successful recent turnout drive was that of the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign, which relied on peer-to-peer volunteers, local people who made connections with neighbors with whom they had something in common (fellow members of a particular church, fellow accountants, nearby neighbors). The Obama campaign, in contrast, seems to be depending on youthful volunteers who seem unlikely to have such connections. Ambinder notes that, over the summer, the Obama organization concentrated on attracting more volunteers and only in September started concentrating on metrics of voter contacts.
A disciplined approach, certainly. But how effective are all those volunteers? Are they as effective as those stocking-capped Perfect Stormers of the Howard Dean campaign in Iowa in January 2004? You saw those orange stocking caps swarming all over Des Moines, but they didn’t end up producing many caucus votes. And that was in an early stage of the contest. As a supporter of George McGovern in 1972, I remember that it seemed relatively easy to knock on a strange voter’s door and get a commitment to vote for a then little-known candidate who stood near the left of the political spectrum. “Hey, if this nice young kid is willing to come over on a cold day, why not give this guy a vote?” But when you knocked on people’s doors in September and October, the response was more like: “Hey, kid, it’s nice that you’re motivated and I’d like to give you some milk and cookies, but big things are at stake, and I’m gonna vote for Nixon.”
The Obama candidacy is obviously in far better shape today than McGovern’s was in fall 1972, and there are surely more voters today who are persuadable. And there are surely a lot of marginally involved young and black Obama supporters susceptible to organization efforts—people who would not vote if not contacted but who will if urged and helped to do so. But as Sean Oxendine of thenextright.com argues, the one-week Ohio early voting numbers suggest that the Obama organizational efforts may not be producing as many votes as the Obama campaign hopes. We simply don’t know. There will be other metrics in the weeks ahead on which to base judgments. But I think we’ll have to wait until the actual election results start coming in to make a judgment on the effectiveness of these tactics. Which was the case in 2004. Journalists then provided good accounts of the easy-to-cover Democratic organizational efforts in black neighborhoods and university towns. They provided very little on the harder-to-cover Bush-Cheney ’04 organizational story. My working hypothesis is that peer-to-peer is a lot more productive than young, stocking-capped volunteers. The Obama campaign’s organizational efforts are obviously far superior to the McCain campaign’s. But I think it’s an open question whether they will produce the kind of turnout increase that the Obama campaign wants and, if the balance of opinion changes a bit, will need.
SILICON VALLY, CALIFORNIA – Two years ago, Joseph Zeleke rushed to a crowded hospital in Addis Ababa with a heavy heart, and several tons of donated American medical equipment for Ethiopian clinics waiting on the docks.
“The shipment was ready and now it could fall apart,” the Ethiopian immigrant remembered last week. “But I had to get to the hospital for personal reasons.”
Yemegnushal Haile, a nurse who was going to receive the equipment from Zeleke, had just died in the hospital from injuries suffered in an auto accident. This couldn’t be happening, Zeleke thought, saddened by her death and worried that the equipment might never get to the clinic.
The death of his sister Zenbech from breast cancer and AIDS in 2000 at age 45 had shaken him terribly. He put off college to start World Family, a charity based in Milpitas, California, that has delivered over $6 million in medical equipment to Ethiopia. A former importer in that desperately poor country, Zeleke knew he couldn’t let the latest shipment sit idly in storage waiting for thieves or corrupt officials.
As Zeleke gave his condolences to Haile’s husband, a chance meeting would solve the problem and much more. At Haile’s deathbed was her daughter, Emebet Billingham, a model and fashion designer from San Anselmo, an affluent Bay Area town. Before the accident, Billingham was helping her mother raise money in America for orphanages in Ethiopia.
Euyeal Joseph Zeleke and Emebet Bellingham are
co-directors of The World Family [Photo: Robert Tong]
After the funeral, Zeleke and Billingham rode together in a Toyota Landcruiser to the clinic where Billingham’s mother worked, the one set to receive those medical donations now on the dock. The more they talked, the more they uncovered similarities. They were the same age, now 40. Each has two kids, the eldest born in the same month and year. Each was an immigrant, now driven by the loss of a loved one, to help Ethiopia.
“Call it a karmic meeting or whatever,” Billingham said at the warehouse in Milpitas. “I think it was our destiny for Joseph and I to meet and, at least for me, to carry on my mother’s work.”
Slender and fit, Zeleke has sad eyes and brilliant, white teeth that somehow combine to power his quiet, articulate voice.
With a high school education — most Ethiopians never make it that far — he was making a decent living as a fresh-fruit broker in Ethiopia, but he wanted more. He won a lottery visa in 1999 to study in the United States. A year later, his sister died.
“I had no idea she had AIDS or when or where she got it,” he said, speculating that she kept it a secret because it’s a taboo disease in Ethiopian culture. Haunted by her death, Zeleke took a long hard look at his homeland and didn’t like what he saw.
When the World Health Organization surveyed Ethiopia’s medical landscape two years ago, it found only 112 hospitals serving a population of 75 million. There were only 2.6 doctors for every 100,000 people. AIDS was rampant. The country didn’t have a single dental school. Poor Ethiopians were more likely to visit untrained folk healers or tooth-pullers than see the inside of a modern clinic.
He started World Family in 2003 to fill the new health facilities with hardware. One of the first supporters he met in Silicon Valley was Vanessa Cooper, a local housing advocate who also advises charities trying to help Africa.
“I get a lot of people who want to start non-profits but most of them never get off the ground,” said Cooper, who was born in Kenya. “Joseph is rare. He had this passion from his personal story about his sister … and he had a business model.”
From his experience as a fruit-broker, Zeleke learned how to get things passed customs, deal with Ethiopian Woyanne bureaucrats and transport his goods from the docks to his customers. What he’s doing now is brokering between Silicon Valley hospitals that need to get rid of old equipment and Ethiopian clinics that need it. Those old medical machines, Cooper said, otherwise could end up in American landfills.
She said Zeleke’s pitch to American hospitals boils down to: “I’m going to save you the cost of unloading this equipment, but I’m going to make you feel good about it!”
Billingham, meanwhile, was a teenager in the mid-1980s when she moved to the Bay Area with her father. A brain-drain from Ethiopia was in full swing. After studying at the Fashion Institute of Design, she became a model and designer, married and started a family. Occasionally, she’d help her dynamic mother carry out ambitious medical and social plans for rural Ethiopia.
However, after her mother’s death, Billingham gave up her career to join World Family.
She concentrated on the social side, first raising money for a community center for orphans, which is named after her mother. She has plans for building many more.
With Zeleke as CEO, Billingham as president and an office manager on board, World Family recently moved into its first office in a Milpitas shopping center. From there the team marshals a small army of volunteers, from Ethiopian-American teenagers to technicians who test the medical equipment at a second, bigger warehouse in Oakland.
In only five years, World Family has shipped dozens of containers stuffed with over $6 million in donated medical equipment, enough to equip two hospitals and several clinics. At one hospital, Zeleke said, a grateful woman who had just give birth in the facility named her new son, “Hospital.” Partnering with the American Dental Association, they equipped Ethiopia’s first two dental schools.
World Family has scored a few hefty contributions. The Clinton Foundation, as in Bill and Hillary, gave them $260,000 in cash. Stanford Medical Center and the Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital are their largest equipment donors. The warehouse space in Milpitas and Oakland is donated.
Even so, Zeleke said World Family needs to raise $26,000 each month to cover costs, mostly for shipping and salaries. He’s also looking for a medium size forklift. And that’s just for now. They want to equip 200 more clinics and raise money for more community centers and orphanages by 2010, only two years from now.
That’s when Zeleke wants to retire from charity and move on to something else, like a cozy job in high-tech. Billingham said she’ll probably stick around longer.
“The problem is,” Billingham said, ”that the more successful you become the harder it is to leave. There is so much need.”
CHICAGO – Two-time champion Berhane Adere will try to become the first woman to win three straight Chicago Marathon titles Sunday, with Olympic champion Constantina Tomescu-Dita among those out to prevent the three-peat.