Kenenisa Bekele may receive a huge check this Friday at the sixth and final meet of the IAAF Golden League. Bekele will be racing the 5000 meters at the Memorial Van Damme meet in Brussels. Should he win the race, he may be pocketing up to $1 million dollars.
The IAAF Golden League, which includes six meets over the course of the summer, offers one of the largest cash prizes in athletics. In order to claim the million-dollar purse, an athlete must win their event in all six Golden League meets.
Kenenisa Bekele is one of three athletes still in the running for the jackpot. Sanya Richards and Yelena Isinbayeva have also won their respective events. If all three athletes win in Brussels, they will split the million-dollar jackpot, which is still a pretty hefty payday.
Bekele has attracted a great deal of attention over the summer for his dominating performances. He won both the 10000 and 5000 meters at the IAAF World Championships in Berlin, and many have called him the greatest distance runner of all time. Just yesterday, Ian Chadband at the Telegraph said, “Bekele is the Bolt of distance running, a record breaker, a ground breaker, a supreme champion who is well nigh unbeatable when he chooses.” Most believe that Bekele will move up to the marathon, where he could very likely be a contender to break Haile Gebrselassie’s world record.
So will Bekele win his share of the jackpot on Friday? It’s not smart to bet against him. On Friday, you can watch the action in Brussels on the live feed at UniversalSports.com, which starts at 12:50 p.m. in Dallas.
LEBANNON, PA (LDNews) — Two Ethiopian doctors visited several local medical facilities as part of an ongoing partnership with a Lebanon-based charity.
Since arriving in the United States on Monday, Dr. Abraham Asnake and Dr. Abiye Mulugeta visited the Hershey Medical Center, Good Samaritan Hospital in Lebanon and Physicians Surgical Center in North Cornwall Township.
“We are really fascinated by the facilities,” Mulugeta said Wednesday during a visit to the Alley Center for the Blind in North Lebanon Township.
Asnake said there are no facilities in Ethiopia like the ones they toured here.
“It’s very hard in our country,” he said. “Hopefully one day.”
Asnake, a general surgeon and administrator of Ras Desta Hospital in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, and Mulugeta, an ophthalmologist and chairman of the ophthalmology department at Ras Desta, arrived in the area Monday. They are scheduled to spend six days in the area as guests of the World Blindness Outreach and Sunrise Rotary Club of Lancaster.
The WBO, which is based in Lebanon, is a humanitarian organization that supports eye missions to treat correctable blindness and preventable eye diseases among indigent peoples throughout the world. Since 1990, the WBO has performed more than 5,000 eye surgeries on 50 missions to 20 countries.
Dr. Robert Alley, a Lebanon ophthalmologist and founder and president of WBO, said he invited Asnake and Mulugeta to come to this country for several reasons.
“I wanted to extend our
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hospitality to them because we have been there three times, and they have extended their hospitality to us, and they made us feel so much at home, and I feel very close to both these gentlemen, so I invited them here as friends,” said Alley, the namesake of the Alley Center for the Blind.
Alley said the goal of the visit was to give the doctors an overview of medicine in this country.
“I would hope they see some things they can apply when they get back home,” he said.
The Lancaster Sunrise Rotary Club has partnered with WBO on three surgical eye missions to Ethiopia in the past six years, during which 600 successful eye surgeries were performed on patients at Ras Desta. Another mission is scheduled for April 2010.
Asnake and Mulugeta were also guests at Monday’s WBO banquet in Hershey. At the banquet, they received awards in recognition of their support for three WBO surgical eye missions to their hospital.
Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) Immigration Department has deported two remaining Ethiopians whose arrest caused controversy after a defense lawyer was allegedly beaten up and thrown into custody by police over the weekend.
The deportation of the two Ethiopians early this week follows another deportation of a DRC national on Sunday, in what their lawyer Innocent Kalua said is a violation of a court order the High Court in Blantyre granted last week.
The foreigners’ lawyer said in an interview Thursday that the Immigration’s action to deport the two gives him more grounds to pursue committal to prison proceedings against chief immigration officer Elvis Thodi.
“The Immigration’s action is clear contempt of court. They have gone against a High Court order,” said Kalua.
The deported DRC national is Johan Mitterand and the two Ethiopians are Bashir Abute and Tego Lubako.
Kalua said there was a bail application at the High Court in Blantyre which was set for Wednesday, but it had been overtaken by events following the deportation of the remaining two Ethiopians.
“Now we are just waiting for the date from the High Court to commence the committal to prison proceedings,” Kalua said.
Thodi was not available for comment and the Immigration spokesperson Prudenciana Makalamba said he was in Mozambique and was expected back Thursday.
HARTLEPOOL, UK — IMMIGRATION officials are set to join the search for three Africans who went missing during an exchange trip.
The Ethiopian trio disappeared while visiting Hartlepool as part of the Global Xchange programme, which ended on Monday.
The Mail reported how Hartlepool Police joined forces with London’s Metroplitan Police in searching for three men who went missing during a short trip to the capital.
One later got back in touch with trip organisers and was deported before a female Ethiopian guest went missing last week.
Now the UK Border Agency says it will become involved once the missing visitors’ visas run out next Wednesday, September 9.
A spokeswoman for the UK Border Agency said: “We expect anyone coming to the UK to play by the rules and comply with the terms of their visa allowing them to stay here.
“We will seek to remove anyone with no right to be here. In 2008 nearly 68,000 people were removed from the UK or voluntarily departed.”
The Mail previously reported how three Ethiopian men went missing following a tour of the Houses of Parliament on July 15.
Zerihun Weldeyohans Alaro, 24, later contacted organisers after staying with family in London, but was deported.Exchange visitors Habtamu Debella, 27, and Muluneh Tilahun, 21, are still missing.
Konjit Assefa, 22, who was staying on the Headland, was the latest to go missing and has not been seen since Tuesday, August 25.
Programme leaders told the Mail that they will seriously think about which countries they work with in the light of the disappearances.
The Global Xchange programme involves 18 volunteers, nine from the UK and nine from Ethiopia, living in Hartlepool while working for community organisations.
The team has just finished the second part of the exchange, having already spent three months in Africa.
ISRAEL — Dozens of children of Ethiopian origin in Petah Tikva did not begin studies Tuesday as schools appeared to take pains to accept as few such students as possible. Education officials, however, said the latest problems were merely bureaucratic, after the deal Monday night to take all the students in.
Parents and children – many with school backpacks – crowded a narrow corridor on the fifth floor of the municipality’s education department, some waiting 12 hours to hear where their children would be enrolled. Many children arrived in schools throughout the city but were not placed in classes. Instead, they were sent to the library or the teachers’ lounge where they waited two or three hours until they were told to return to the municipality.
“I don’t believe anybody anymore – not the Education Ministry, not the city and not the school. Nobody wants us,” said Nena Balai, whose son was supposed to start first grade.
In the small offices of the municipality’s education department, city officials and the schools seemed to be bargaining over the placement of the children of Ethiopian origin. “Some principals said they would not accept the children until they saw how many were in another school,” said one person close to the situation.
Many parents had stories about children being sent home from school. On Monday night, Balai said that “they called from the city and said we should go to Morasha [a state religious school]. We got there at 8 A.M., but we did not go into the classroom. The boy sat in the teachers’ lounge and was given a piece of paper to draw on. At 11 A.M. they told us to go back to the municipality. The school said it could not accept us.”
According to David Maharat, the head of the Education Ministry’s advisory body on integrating Ethiopian schoolchildren, “this is one humiliation too many. Schools are competing with each other over who will have fewer students of Ethiopian origin.”
The Education Ministry, the municipality, the state religious schools and the private schools all had various explanations for what had happened. The Education Ministry said about 16 “new” students remained to be enrolled.
Tuesday afternoon, Education Ministry director general Shimshon Shoshani said at the Petah Tikva municipality that children had been mistakenly sent to the wrong school, or that student data was unclear. The city said students had gone to schools to which they were not enrolled. The families said there were language difficulties.
Many of the children who did not begin school Tuesday were turned away by state religious schools. These have been at the forefront in recent weeks in the fight against the three private religious schools that had refused to fully comply with Education Ministry directives on enrollment. The head of the parents’ committee of the state religious schools, Nir Orbach, said that “we agreed to accept 40 students [out of 100]. We will not accept more.”
Spokesmen for the three private religious schools said they had accepted all 30 students sent to them, but that the names and ages of the children did not always match those on their lists.
Stratex International PLC (AIM: STI) announced a move into Ethiopia via acquiring a stake in a PLUS-listed company that holds an exclusive exploration license (EEL) in the north of the country and entering a joint venture with its new partner to explore new {www:prospective} targets and licence areas.
So far, Stratex has been focusing on exploring, developing and then joint venturing projects in central and Western Turkey, and is now planning on repeating this in Ethiopia.
Stratex has put up £40,000 to take a 5.6 percent stake in Sheba Exploration (UK) PLC and has signed a binding letter of intent with Sheba to earn-in to an initial 60 percent of the prospective Shehagne project near the northern Ethiopian town of Adwa.
Additionally Stratex and Sheba have agreed a joint venture on a respective 70:30 basis to explore new prospective targets and license areas in northern Ethiopia. The company believes that potential license areas, which currently are under review, have excellent potential for gold and/or copper and massive sulfide occurrences. Under the terms of the new JV, Sheba may earn up to 50 percent of the JV by reimbursing Stratex a further 20 percent of the total exploration costs.
Stratex chairman David Hall said: “The Arabian Nubian Shield, which encompasses areas of Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia and Yemen as well as Ethiopia, is a region with high discovery potential as shown by Centamin’s Sukari gold mine in Egypt, and Nevsun’s Bisha gold-rich volcanogenic massive sulphide deposit in Eritrea.
“We believe that Ethiopia offers similar exciting opportunities for rapid low cost {www:discovery} and is not subject to many of the economic and political constraints that neighbouring countries are exposed to, such as product sharing agreements and security issues. Ethiopia is both logistically and financially an easy and cost effective place to explore,” he added.
The company can earn 60 percent in the 50 square kilometre Shehagne EEL by expending £100,000 in the initial three months and a further £250,000 over the subsequent 18 months. It may also earn a further 20 percent by taking the project to completion of a feasibility study.
The Shehagne EEL has already been explored by Sheba and extensive gold anomalism in soil has been identified. The main target to date is the Tsemmetti prospect in the south-eastern part of the EEL where Sheba has defined a large – 100 parts per billion – gold-in-soil anomaly over a three kilometre strike.
Stratex intends to undertake regional sediment sampling of the entire concession and complete systematic exploration of prospects already defined.
Ethiopia’s mineral resources’ potential is high – gold copper zinc and potash are the major minerals mined in Ethiopia, the company said.
