LAWRENCEVILLE – Detectives are searching for a fourth suspect, known on the streets as “Money Mark,” in the murder of Lilburn convenience store owner Tedla Lemma, an immigrant from Ethiopia.
Loran Zemedu Araya, suspect in the killing of Tedla Lemma
Another suspect in the killing, Loran Zemedu Araya, of Atlanta (also an Ethiopian native), recently told investigators of the unidentified man’s involvement while implicating another man — Marshae Brooks — in the crime, a detective testified in Brooks’ probable cause hearing Friday.
Brooks, of Riverdale, tied up the disabled man in his bedroom while two other men stole big-screen televisions and other valuables from Lemma’s upscale Kenion Forest Drive home, Gwinnett police Det. G. Lorenzo said Araya told a panel of investigators and attorneys last month.
Lemma was hog-tied, beaten and gagged so tightly he suffocated, police have said.
A Gwinnett Magistrate Court judge forwarded a single count of murder against Brooks to Superior Court for prosecution. He remains at the Gwinnett County Jail.
Lorenzo said phone company records indicate Brooks’ cell phone was used in the vicinity of Lemma’s home March 25 last year, the day he died.
Araya and Brooks join a third alleged accomplice – Quincy Jackson, of Riverdale – who, like Araya, has been in custody since July. Brooks and Jackson were roommates, the detective said.
Brooks first told investigators he’d never set foot in Gwinnett County, but later changed his story to say he was in the home but did not hurt or bind Lemma, said Lorenzo. He claimed he was in the neighborhood visiting model homes for “decorating tips.”
After switching his story, “(Brooks) said at one point he even tried to untie (the victim),” the detective said. Brooks told police didn’t call 911 because he feared he would be blamed.
Police say Araya, a former Lilburn resident, knew most of the victims. Her parents once sold a package store to Lemma’s family.
At the time of his death, Lemma, 51, a well-heeled convenience store owner from Ethiopia, was paralyzed from a robbery when he was shot in the head several years ago.
Brooks had long been a suspect in the murder, but detectives lacked evidence to arrest him, Lorenzo said.
Araya told investigators she pulled a vehicle into Lemma’s garage and waited while the three men ransacked the home. She said Brooks later admitted to her he bound and gagged Lemma, the detective said.
EDITOR’S NOTE: IMF and the World Bank are financiers of genocidal regimes such as the one in Ethiopia. Their blood money is fueling many of the civil wars in Africa. They claim that Ethiopia’s economy is the fastest growing in Africa while 15 million Ethiopians are facing starvation and less than 2 percent of the population has access to electricity.
By Yonas Abiye | Daily Monitor
Addis Ababa — Ethiopia’s economic growth could slow to 6 percent in 2009 as the world slowdown is likely to hit its coffee export, tourism, and transportation the country’s leading foreign exchange earners, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Wednesday.
This is seen to largely contradict with the 12.8 percent economic growth maintained by the government.
Last month, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said he saw only a 0.6 percent slide from the 12.8 percent economic growth last year owing to the world economic downturn, and said that was not to be considered significant compared to the economic achievements the country is registering, “in the face of the global financial crisis” “It is projected that the global crisis will continue to prevail for the next two or three years, on our side there is a hope that our economy will continue to grow at the same pace,” Meles told a press conference at his office.
But what did the IMF say on Wednesday?
The IMF said the country is one of the vulnerable countries to the unfolding crisis and it is expected to register only about 6% economic growth.
It said Ethiopia is in fact among the poorest the global financial crisis will weigh heavily on and it called for the international community to act “urgently” and “generously” to avoid devastating effects.
Speaking during a round table with the media and stake holders IMF Country Representative Sukhwinder Singh admitted the country was one of the fastest growing non-oil producing countries in Africa.
All the same, the country was no exception and will certainly be affected by the global downturn which is playing its ugly faces in all countries of the world-rich and poor, he said.
He said the impact on Ethiopia will be as bad as a six percent slash from what it managed to register last year.
The decline in export demand of coffee and its decreased price by 19%, the depreciation of effective foreign exchange rates by 30% last year, less tourism and revenue from airway transport are cited as the major factors behind the country’s poor economic performance this year.
85% of exports are going to industrial and emerging market countries who are already suffering major import declines.
He, however, indicated that the country could grasp positive advantage with the lower oil and fertilizer price at the global market.
He noted that in the middle of the year, USD 220 million Ethiopia incurred for importing oil has now gone down to USD 75 million.
He highlighted that, due to the shock induced by global crisis, economic growth projection in pre-crisis and at present is greatly varies.
The IMF forecasted the growth in SSA to be 5% a little bit earlier but it now expects only 3%, Sukhwinder said.
Current account balance in Ethiopia as elsewhere in SSA is worsening and it is currently -5.4% (while it is -2.6% in SSA) with low reserve level but risks are mounting, he said.
“We need 25 billion dollar concessional financing for Ethiopia and SSA as a whole who are most affected countries” he said.
He further indicated that Ethiopia has the highest inflation rate in Africa outside Zimbabwe (26%) and much weaker in fiscal reservation. The average in SSA is 2%.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Dominique Srauss-Kahn on Tuesday heralded that after first striking the advanced economies and then emerging markets, a third wave of the global financial crisis has begun to hit the world’s poorest and most vulnerable countries, threatening to undermine recent economic gains and to create a humanitarian crisis He also called on the international community to act urgently and generously to avoid the potentially devastating effects of the global financial crisis on the most vulnerable countries. Similarly, the report by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) said that the world’s poorest countries including Mozambique, Ethiopia, Mali, Senegal, Rwanda and Bangladesh are unable to insulate their citizens from the crisis, with an estimated 43 out of 48 low-income countries incapable of providing a pro-poor government stimulus According to UNESCO, reduced growth in 2009 will affect the 390 million people in sub-Saharan Africa living in extreme poverty and a loss of income around USD 18 billion (USD 46 per person).
ILO last month on its part announced that Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania, the three East African countries that have reaped from the Western economic growth, are suffering from the reduction of prices in the West as supermarket chains take unilateral commodity price cuts.
Saudi Arabia has announced the arrival of the first food crop harvested in Saudi-owned farms abroad, in a sign that the kingdom is moving faster than expected to outsource agricultural production.
Rice, harvested in famine-hit Ethiopia by a group of Saudi investors, was presented to King Abdullah recently and comes as other countries are still in the early stages of investing in overseas farms.
Maso Aliyi mourns his dead child, Shibre Aliyi, at his home in the village of Kararo in Ethiopia. Shibre had spent almost a month at a therapeutic feeding center. A lack of rain in the main February to April wet season has left at least 75,000 Ethiopian children under age 5 at risk from malnutrition, according to the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which also asserts that some eight million people need urgent food relief and another 4.6 million need emergency assistance (Oct. 2008)
The Ethiopian origin is likely to raise concerns about the trend to outsource food production to poor African countries, some of which suffer from chronic hunger.
In the past year the United Nations World Food Programme has helped to feed 11m people in Ethiopia, which has suffered crop failures and food distribution problems.
Some analysts argue that foreign investment in agriculture, even if earmarked for export, could ultimately help poor countries, providing them with employment, infrastructure, access to agricultural technology and export tax revenues.
However, western agriculture officials familiar with the Saudi plans say they are sceptical that the kingdom’s investment in food production overseas will help poor countries such as Ethiopia.
Riyadh has also provided the most detailed account to date of food-security plans known as the “King Abdullah initiative for Saudi agricultural investment abroad”.
Since the oil-rich kingdom announced last summer that it planned to grow “strategic food commodities” overseas and phase out the water-intensive production of domestic cereals, few details had emerged.
But in a note posted on its foreign affairs website, Riyadh has disclosed that it will “provide credit facilities to Saudi investors in agriculture abroad”, with the focus on “countries with promising agricultural resources and having encouraging government”. It did not say how much money it would make available in credits.
Hail Agricultural Development, a Saudi company, said last month that it would invest in agricultural production in Sudan, with the government providing 60 per cent of the funding.
The Jeddah-based Islamic Development Bank said this week that it was looking at investments to support agriculture, including the production of rice to be exported back to Saudi Arabia.
Saudi officials have so far visited Turkey, Ukraine, Egypt, Sudan, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Brazil, South Africa and Ethiopia, while delegations from other countries, including Australia, have visited Riyadh to discuss possible investments.
The investments “should be long-term through ownership or long-term contracts”, and Riyadh expects the “liberty of selecting the crops”.
The pursuit of foreign farm investments is the clearest sign of how last year’s price spikes in commodities such as rice, wheat and corn, and the global food crisis that ensued, are reshaping the politics of agriculture.
The move is not only a response to high prices, but also to the export restrictions imposed by leading providers of commodities – including India, Russia, Argentina and Vietnam. These exporters banned overseas sales to keep their local markets well-supplied and some of the restrictions remain in force.
After unblocking access for the past week to web sites that are deemed critical, Meles Zenawi’s dictatorial regime in Ethiopia has made them inaccessible again starting yesterday.
Ethiopian Review associates in Addis Ababa confirmed today that all of the previously blocked web sites once again cannot be opened using the Internet service provided by the state-run Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation (ETC).
The U.S.-financed regime of Tigrean People Liberation Front ({www:Woyanne}) has made it illegal for private companies to provide Internet services in Ethiopia.
The government-owned telecom monopoly, ETC, is run by a former Woyanne intelligence officer named DebreTsion GebreMichael whose primary responsibility is to restrict access to information technology to as many people as possible. As a result, currently, there are only 30,000 Internet subscribers in Ethiopia out of 80 million people. Ethiopia has the least developed Information Technology infrastructure in the world, which is done intentionally by the vampire Woaynne regime.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – The roll-out of antiretroviral therapy has led to a decline of about 50% in adult AIDS deaths in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, over a period of five years, according the findings of a study published in the February 20th edition of the journal AIDS.
The effectiveness of antiretroviral roll-out in sub-Saharan Africa has been widely reported as encouraging despite persistent concerns about universal access and adherence. However, there are still only limited data on its effects at a population level on deaths.
In Ethiopia, antiretroviral treatment was made freely available in public hospitals from October 2005. The investigators carried out the current study to find out what effect the availability of antiretroviral treatment had had on AIDS-related mortality.
The researchers used data from burial surveillance records and ‘verbal autopsy’ interviews. Burial surveillance was implemented in all Addis Ababa cemeteries in 2001 and records about 20,000 deaths per year. The surveillance is undertaken by cemetery clerks who receive regular training. They record a lay report of the cause of death as narrated by close relatives or friends of the deceased and other demographic details.
Verbal autopsies are post-mortem interviews conducted by researchers with close relatives or caretakers, about the signs and symptoms they witnessed during the terminal illness of the deceased. Causes of death described in the interviews were then confirmed through physicians’ review.
Two different physicians reviewed the verbal autopsies to assign cause of death to the described symptoms. Whenever the assigned cause of death by two physicians did not match, a third physician was used to review the verbal autopsy questionnaire. The data used in the current study were derived from 413 cases involving individuals aged 20 to 64 years. Physicians assigned causes of death, classified as either AIDS or non-AIDS deaths.
Epidemiological modelling was used by the investigators to determine mortality trends in the study population.
The investigators then compared projected deaths with observed numbers from burial surveillance.
To determine possible averted AIDS-related deaths, the investigators compared the estimated with the implied numbers of AIDS deaths in population projections. They estimated HIV prevalence using UNAIDS estimation and projections package (EPP 2007).
Results showed that the ratio of observed over projected deaths in adults peaked in 2001. However, between 2001 and 2005 the ratios dropped by about 11% (from 1.92 to 1.71) for women and 20% for men (from 1.80 to 1.44).This was a period when patients part-paid for treatment. The researchers attributed this average AIDS mortality drop of about 15% to treatment effect and noted that the drop was higher in men than women partly because of sex imbalances in access to healthcare financing.
The results further showed that between 2005 and 2007, there was a decline of about 25% for women (from 1.71 to 1.28) and 21% for men (from 1.44 to 1.13). The investigators attributed this drop of over 40% to free treatment, suggesting that treatment cost is an important factor in the decline of AIDS deaths.
To confirm whether the trends noted above resulted from reduced AIDS mortality, the investigators turned to the findings from the lay reports. They found a decline from 8467 deaths in 2001 to 4230 in 2007 (about 50%). The study further found that the decline was greater between 2005 and 2007 when treatment was free.
The researchers noted that the decline observed took place during a period when mortality was supposed to be very high. HIV infections in Ethiopia peaked in the late 1990s, demonstrating the impact of treatment. Assuming that the burial surveillance coverage was 85%, the scientists estimated a reduction of about 56% in AIDS deaths by 2007.
The 56% decline compared favourably with findings from São Paulo in Brazil, which reported a decline in AIDS deaths of about 65% between 1995 and 2002, noted the investigators. They further compared their findings to a New York study which showed a higher decline (63% in two years).
The researchers said that their findings demonstrate the effectiveness of treatment coverage on averting deaths in early phases of HIV care (long-term impact is not yet known). For Ethiopia and similar settings, the researchers said that the immediate worry is about short-term mortality because treatment coverage is still at its infancy (only 2% of adult patients are on second-line regimens in Addis Ababa).
The researchers also noted that their findings raise questions about whether and how the decline in mortality can be sustained, and whether improvements in access to antiretrovirals alone can achieve this goal. More proactive attempts to diagnose people earlier and initiate treatment earlier may be necessary in order to reduce death rates further, given the continued high risk of death during the first year of antiretroviral treatment in those who start treatment at lower CD4 cell counts in sub-Saharan Africa.
The investigators acknowledged that, even though their study was based on epidemiological models, model-based and observational estimates can be very different. The findings might have been limited further by shortcomings of burial surveillance such as under-reporting, said the scientists.
However, for adaptability to similar settings, the investigators noted that burial surveillance is logistically simple to implement because it uses existing structures and is usable in settings with no population-based data.
Reference: Reniers G et al. Steep decline in population-level AIDS mortality following the introduction of antiretroviral therapy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. AIDS, 23:511-518, 2009.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (PANA) – The Foreign Affairs Ministry in Ethiopia has lambasted the human rights report issued by the US State Department on Ethiopia. In a statement released here Wednesday by the ministry, the Ethiopian government said the report was “a deliberately Jaundiced view about Ethiopia’s progress on human hights”.
This is the second recent statement by the ministry criticizing such reports.
The Ethiopian dictatorial regime has similarly mocked at accusations of the Human Rights Watch late last year after the rights group accused Ethiopia of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Human rights watchdog said late last year that Ethiopian troops burnt down villages and killed, raped and tortured civilians in a counter-insurgency campaig n against the separatist Ogaden National Liberation Front after its fighters had killed 74 Ethiopian and Chinese oil-exploration workers in 2007.
Ethiopia’s government was so incensed by the description of “systematic atrocities” in the Ogaden that it commissioned a report of its own that dismissed Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) allegations as hearsay and its methods as slapdash.
Ethiopia has now labeled the new report a carbon copy of the report by the HRW, describing its approach very similar to that of Human Rights Watch.
According to the report, the report is bizarre “and, the methodology appears equally flawed”.
The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour, in its 2008 country reports on Human Rights Practices issued on 27 February, accused Ethiopia of various human rights violations.
Few of the human rights abuses the Bureau highlighted include limitations on citizens’ right to change their government in local and by-elections; unlawful killings, torture, beating, abuse, and mistreatment of detainees and opposition supporters by security forces, usually with impunity; poor prison conditions; arbitrary arrests and detention, particularly of suspected sympathizers or members of opposition or insurgent groups.
The ministry expressed government’s dismay over the US State Department’s continued reports of allegations from opposition groups, which, it said, kept on misre presenting the human rights situation in Ethiopia.
“The report was no more than a collection of unsubstantiated accusations from groups seeking to undermine Ethiopia’s process of democratization,” read the statement.
By Yonas Abiye | Daily Monitor
After unblocking access for the past week to web sites that are deemed critical, Meles Zenawi’s dictatorial regime in Ethiopia has made them inaccessible again starting yesterday.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – The roll-out of antiretroviral therapy has led to a decline of about 50% in adult AIDS deaths in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, over a period of five years, according the findings of a study published in the February 20th edition of the journal AIDS.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (PANA) – The Foreign Affairs Ministry in Ethiopia has lambasted the