SANA’A – Yemeni police in Haradh border region has seized four Ethiopians, aged 34-39 years, who have sneaked into Yemeni lands illegally through the Saudi border in Haradh.
The security officials in Haradh border said that the four Ethiopians crossed Saudi border in an attempt to enter into Yemen, pointing out that it arrested them and referred them to migration authorities to deport them to their country.
It is worth mentioning that the Yemeni security agencies arrested last February about 500 Ethiopians who attempted to enter via the sea to Yemen and deported them back to their country.
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.”
(AFP) – The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) claimed it killed 24 Ethiopian {www:Woyanne} soldiers in the Ogaden’s eastern region of Degah Bur and added that the fighting was ongoing.
“24 Woyanne troops have been killed in this latest round of fighting since March 4, with dozens wounded,” it said in a statement.
The {www:ONLF} said the troops it was combating had recently been redeployed inside {www:Ethiopia} from southern Somalia, where they were part of the occupation forces the Woyanne regime finished withdrawing earlier this year.
It also said it captured an army weapons depot near Degah Bur.
The {www:Woyanne} military denied the ONLF’s claim and insisted it was not involved in fighting in that region.
“It is not true. We have seen what they said, but according to the information we got from Somali region officials, there is fighting between local people and their militias and local terrorists,” state secretary for information Ermias Legesse told AFP.
“Among these terrorists, one leader and two members of the ONLF have been killed by the militias. The Ethiopian Woyanne army is not involved,” he added.
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.
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.)
JOHANNESBURG (AP) – The International Criminal Court’s decision to pursue a sitting head of state on war crimes charges puts others around the world on notice, but it’s also raising questions about which leaders are being targeted.
International human rights organizations accuse Ethiopia’s dictator Meles Zenawi of crimes against humanity
African and Arab nations say they will support Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, fearing the warrant issued against him Wednesday will bring even more conflict in Darfur, where up to 300,000 people have died since 2003, and further destabilize Sudan.
And they question why only Africans have been charged since the ICC — branded “the white man’s court” by Sudan’s information ministry – began its work six years ago. A temporary court, the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, indicted Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 while he was still president of Yugoslavia.
The chairman of the 52-state African Union has accused the court of “double standards,” asking why no cases have emerged from conflicts in the Caucasus, Iraq or Gaza.
“The African states were the strongest supporters of establishing the ICC. It wouldn’t have been possible without them. But there has been a significant shift in the past year,” said Christopher Hall, senior legal adviser to Amnesty International.
Outside Africa, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo is investigating possible cases in Colombia, Georgia and Afghanistan as well as a Palestinian request for charges against Israel for its actions in Gaza.
In Africa, those considered possible targets of the court are leaders in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Chad, Ivory Coast, Rwanda and Central African Republic.
Even among the Africans, the court’s choices are questioned. Why is it prosecuting former Congolese warlord and vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba for alleged crimes his fighters committed in Central African Republic, and not the ousted Central African leader who invited Bemba’s forces?
Why not the many other Congolese warlords whose forces all are accused of gross atrocities, including those of President Joseph Kabila? And what about the leaders in Rwanda, Uganda and other African countries that sent troops to Congo?
“It’s a very uneven path,” said Reed Brody, legal counselor for Human Rights Watch. “We’re still in a situation where if you are powerful or protected by the powerful you can avoid a reckoning.”
South African Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu said African leaders are behaving shamefully and dismissed concerns that the court’s action would impede promoting peace.
“Are they on the side of the victim or the oppressor?” Tutu asked in a column in The New York Times. “Rather than stand by those who have suffered in Darfur, African leaders have so far rallied behind the man responsible for turning that corner of Africa into a graveyard.”
Al-Bashir’s presidential adviser, Mustafa Osman Ismail, branded the world’s first permanent international court to investigate war crimes “one of the tools of the new colonization” aimed at destabilizing the sprawling oil-rich nation.
Sudan is Africa’s biggest country, covering an area the size of Western Europe and bridging the continent’s northern Muslim Arabs and southern Christian and animist Africans in a union riven with conflict since independence from Britain in 1956.
In Darfur, the war began in 2003 when rebel ethnic African groups, many of them Muslim, took up arms against the Arab-dominated government they accuse of discrimination and neglect. Up to 300,000 people have died and 2.7 million have been forced from their homes in what the United States calls a genocide.
Those who argue that amnesty is a more powerful weapon for peace, though, point to Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony, who defaulted on a peace agreement after the court issued an arrest warrant against him.
In recent months, Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army is accused of killing more than 1,500 civilians in northeast Congo and driving some 100,000 from their homes.
“There is a balance between attaining justice and sustainable peace,” Uganda’s Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa said Wednesday.
While another rebel leader, Bosco Ntaganda, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, Congo chose rather to treat with him and integrate his fighters into the national army. The move appears so far to have diminished the most powerful rebel threat in eastern Congo.
Sudan has reportedly said that African nations opposed to al-Bashir’s arrest warrant would pull out of the ICC in protest, but none had done so as of Thursday.
Thirty of the court’s 108 member states are African. And every indictment it has brought acted on requests from African members â Uganda, Congo and Central African Republic. Al-Bashir’s arrest warrant is the exception, initiated by the U.N. Security Council.
That in itself shows hypocrisy, critics say, given that three of the council’s five permanent members — China, Russia and the United States – refuse to join the international court.
The precedent set by the court Wednesday could extend to former U.S. President George W. Bush, amid charges his officials were the architects of criminal detention policies that led to torture in Iraq and at Guantanamo detention center in Cuba. But that is an extremely remote prospect. The Security Council is unlikely to order that while Washington is a veto-wielding permanent member.
“The world’s justice looks with one eye,” complained Taher Nunu, spokesman for Hamas, the Islamic militant group that Israel has been battling in Gaza.”
(Michelle Faul is the AP’s chief of African news.)
BANTU, Ethiopia — This year, impoverished children in one Ethiopian village have something they’ve never known before—hope for the future.
Children attending the Bantu school, founded by Buckner International and Bright Hope, receive two meals a day, two school uniforms, daytime clothing, shoes, schoolbooks and supplies, personal hygiene materials and medical treatment.
“The people in this community earn about $11 a month,” said Bright Hope project manager Nebiyou Tesfaye. Isolated on a muddy dirt road, the community is occupied by farmers, walking barefoot with large bales of crops on their backs, and dozens of small children.
Ethiopian [puppet] President Girma WoldeGiorgis gave the land in Bantu to Buckner in 2006 to build the school for the community. But it’s much more than just a school.
“We are the ones who provide them with food, showers, soap, drinking water, clothes, shoes, vaccinations, everything,” Tesfaye said.
At the school, 200 children ages 4 to 7 learn everything from math to English in eight classrooms.
After morning classes end, all the children line up single file with their hands on each other’s shoulders to walk across the way to the dining hall. There they receive their largest meal of the day—a bowl of rice.
Café manager Fikru Gebremariam said most of the children do not have food at home.
“Food is important for the children because it builds their bodies and makes them strong,” he said.
Marta Admasu, the principal of the school, explained the community’s growing excitement since the school opened.
“We are experiencing great happiness at this time. The children have food, soap, shoes, toothbrushes, clothing. Because of this, they feel very happy.”
In addition to education, Tesfaye said, they help the community by “teaching them about sanitation and how to prevent disease and infection.”
Future plans for the school include building a house for guests and mission teams who choose to work with the children short term. They also hope to give the school “international” status, teaching American and British curricula, along with others, to promote future growth opportunities for students. The school’s ultimate goal is for every child to go to college.
“We desperately need books for the teachers and for the students,” Tesfaye said. “We need workbooks and educational books. If we want them to go to college, they need to read.”
Kyle Henderson, pastor of First Baptist Church in Athens, is part of the Buckner E-Team, a group of churches that helped support construction of the new school project and attended the inauguration in February.
Two years ago, he stood on an empty field with a group of pastors and the president of Ethiopia in the same location where a thriving school and community center resides today.
“I got to stand in a completed school with hundreds of children being reached,” Henderson said. “They recited English letters, numbers and animals. In just a few months, these kids have moved from dirt floors and no teaching aids to qualified teachers, in excellent facilities, and a new future.”
SANA’A – Yemeni police in Haradh border region has seized four Ethiopians, aged 34-39 years, who have sneaked into Yemeni lands illegally through the Saudi border in Haradh.
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.
(AFP) – The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) claimed it killed 24 
A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature confirms that dizzying pace of evolution on a global scale.
BANTU, Ethiopia — This year, impoverished children in one Ethiopian village have something they’ve never known before—hope for the future.