TORONTO, ONTARIO – Bombardier Aerospace announced today that Ethiopian Airlines has signed a contract to purchase eight Q400 NextGen turboprop airliners, and has taken options on four additional Q400 NextGen aircraft. Including this transaction, the Dash 8/Q-Series aircraft program has recorded firm orders for a total of 1,001 aircraft.
Based on the list price of the Q400 NextGen airliner, the value of the Ethiopian Airlines firm order contract is approximately $242 million US, and could increase to approximately $366 million US if the four options are exercised.
Ethiopian Airlines, the country’s flag carrier, made its first flight between Addis Ababa and Cairo via Asmara on April 8, 1946. Today, it operates a fleet of jet and turboprop aircraft to 33 African cities and a total of 20 international points in the Middle East, Asia, Europe and North America.
Ethiopian Airlines won the Brussels Airport Marketing Award for long-haul operations in October, 2008. In the same month the airline also won the 2008 Best Airline in Africa Award from the Akwaaba Travel Market Organization and the 2008 Corporate Achievement Award in Johannesburg in August, 2008.
“The 360-knot speed, low operating costs and environmental credentials of the Q400 NextGen aircraft will enable us to maintain the high standards for which we have received numerous awards,” said Girma Wake, Chief Executive Officer, Ethiopian Airlines. “The aircraft’s excellent range and payload capability will allow us to deploy it on domestic routes within Ethiopia, as well as on regional routes up to 1,000 nm (1,850 km) from Addis Ababa.
“Another key reason for our selection of the Q400 airliner is its exceptional performance in terms of climb rate, single-engine ceiling and higher take-off weight, and thus greater payload, from hot and high elevation airfields,” Mr. Wake added.
“Ethiopian Airlines will utilize all of the extensive qualities of the Q400 aircraft,” said Gary R. Scott, President, Bombardier Commercial Aircraft. “And we welcome this award-winning airline to the growing Q400 airliner family.”
The transaction announced today increases Q400/Q400 NextGen aircraft firm orders to 330 aircraft, with 210 delivered as of July 31, 2008.
The Dash 8 turboprop program was launched in 1980. With the introduction of the Noise and Vibration Suppression (NVS) system in 1996, the name was changed to the Q-Series aircraft program, reflecting the aircraft’s quiet cabin amenities. The aircraft are in service with more than 100 operators around the world. In addition to their role in commercial airline service, Dash 8/Q-Series aircraft are also operating in coastal surveillance, firefighting, navigator training, medical evacuation, mixed passenger/cargo configurations, laser depth sounding of the ocean floor, resource exploration and many other special mission roles.
About Bombardier
A world-leading manufacturer of innovative transportation solutions, from commercial aircraft and business jets to rail transportation equipment, systems and services, Bombardier Inc. is a global corporation headquartered in Canada. Its revenues for the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2008, were $17.5 billion US, and its shares are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (BBD). Bombardier is listed as an index component to the Dow Jones Sustainability World and North America indexes. News and information are available at www.bombardier.com.
DebreTsion is in charge of the Ethiopian Information & Communicatiion Technology Development Agency, but his main job is to block most Ethiopians from having access to information.
The Meles dictatorship in Ethiopia has jammed a radio program that was being broadcast to Ethiopia from Europe by the Ginbot 7 Movement for Freedom and Democracy, according to Ethiopian Review sources in Addis Ababa.
Voice of Ginbot 7 was launched on September 11, 2008, and had been heard through out Ethiopia and most countries in eastern Africa.
Similar attempt by the {www:Woyanne} regime to jam the Voice of America (VOA) Amharic program had been successful only for a few days. The VOA countered by running its program on multiple frequencies, each with 500 kilowatt, making it too expensive to jam them. VOA’s transmission power can go up to 100 megawatt per frequency when supplemented with powerful antennas.
According to experts, it costs up to U.S. $10,000 per kilowatt to jam a radio program. To build and operate a facility that is capable of jamming multiple frequencies with 100s of kilowatt each, the Meles regime could be spending tens of millions of dollars. This is the money that could have been used to feed and cloth so many of Ethiopia’s starving children who are unable to attend school because they are too weak from hunger.
Sources inside ETC say that the facility that the Chinese built for the bloodsucking Woyanne regime can jam frequencies only up to 100 kilowatt.
The Meles dictatorship is also unable to jam Eritrean Radio’s Amharic Service, which uses both Short and Medium wave frequencies.
The jamming of radio programs and blocking access to web sites that are deemed critical of the dictatorship in Ethiopia is being carried out by Ato DebreTsion GebreMichael, a central committee member of the ruling Tigrean People Liberation Front (TPLF) and a protoge of Meles Zenawi.
Ato DebreTsion is chairman of the Ethiopian Telecommunication Corporation (ETC) and Director General of the Information and Communication Technology Development Agency (EICTDA). His main assignment, however, is not the development of information technology in Ethiopia. His primary objective as Ethiopia’s chief IT officer is to restrict access of such technology to most Ethiopians. He has been good at it. Under his watch, out of 80 million Ethiopians, only 2 million use mobile phones. There are only 20,000 internet service subscribers in Ethiopia — the lowest in Africa.
United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Implements New Pre-Travel Authorization for U.S.-Bound Travelers from Visa Waiver Countries
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has added seven countries to its Visa Waiver Program (VWP), and launched a new Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) requiring citizens of Visa Waiver Program countries to complete an online process before traveling to the United States. These changes do not affect the U.S. visa application process for citizens of Ethiopia, which is not part of the Visa Waiver Program, but may apply to foreign citizens living in Ethiopia. The ESTA requirement does not affect U.S. citizens traveling overseas.
Beginning January 12, 2009, all nationals or citizens of the following countries who plan to travel to the United States for temporary business or pleasure under the VWP will need to receive an electronic travel authorization through ESTA prior to boarding a U.S.-bound airplane or cruise ship: Andorra, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brunei, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
On November 17, 2008 the Czech Republic, South Korea, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Slovak Republic were formally added to the VWP. Eligible citizens or nationals of these newly admitted VWP countries may now travel to the United States under the VWP provided they have an e-passport and an approved authorization via ESTA. The requirement to register via ESTA for travelers from these countries begins immediately.
Currently, citizens of VWP countries complete a written I-94W form providing basic biographical, travel, and eligibility information while en-route to the U.S. On Aug. 1, 2008, DHS began accepting voluntary applications through the ESTA Web site at https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/. Until January 12, 2009, when ESTA is mandatory for all VWP travelers, ESTA applicants will also still need to complete an I-94W form en-route, for presentation at a U.S. port of entry.
Visa Waiver travelers can access ESTA at the following here.
When a traveler logs onto ESTA, the system will determine, almost immediately in many cases, if an individual is eligible for VWP travel, and if such travel poses any law enforcement or security risks. ESTA applications may be submitted at any time prior to travel, and once approved, will be valid for up to two years or until the applicant’s passport expires, whichever comes first. Authorizations will also be valid for multiple entries into the U.S. To facilitate the authorization process, DHS recommends that ESTA applications be submitted as soon as an applicant begins planning U.S.-bound travel, and not less than 72 hours prior to travel.
For additional information, please visit the ESTA website above, which includes a link to Frequently
Why, if you’re Barack Obama, would you choose Hillary Clinton to be your secretary of state?
Yes, since it was first reported last week that the two had met to discuss the possibility, there has been no shortage of theories in the press: He wants her out of the Senate and into a pliant administration post; he’s paying her back for conceding graciously and then campaigning for him; he wants to score points with women voters.
But if you ask some of the most prominent members of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, the consensus about her appeal as a potential secretary of state is much simpler: She’ll deliver.
“She is tough,” said Will Marshall, president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democratic think tank that advocates a muscular foreign policy. “Lingering doubts about Democratic resolve on national security questions are put to rest with Hillary in the job. She has a demonstrable quotient of backbone.”
More dovish experts are also excited about the prospect of Secretary Clinton, albeit for slightly different reasons.
“Her top, top, top advisers told me, ‘Steve, she will animate things in the Middle East—she will deliver a Palestinian state. Gold-plated,’” said Steven Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington. Mr. Clemons also noted the irony that Mrs. Clinton potentially would be tasked with preparing the road for the direct negotiations with antagonistic foreign leaders that she excoriated Mr. Obama over during the primary. “She criticized him so much for going to meet foreign leaders without preconditions; now she is the one who is going to have to go and get all the preconditions sorted out.”
The idea, essentially, is that Mrs. Clinton, by virtue of her worldview and independent public profile, would be able to expand the purview of the office and become an unusually powerful surrogate for Mr. Obama’s foreign policy ideas.
“He’s got to concentrate the first couple of years on the economy, and he needs a very high-profile secretary of state to handle the stuff abroad,” said Les Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
If her rhetoric on the campaign trail this year was anything to go by, her strong views about the rest of the world would almost certainly precede her. (Obviously exaggerated claims about dodging sniper fire in Bosnia and bringing peace to Northern Ireland notwithstanding.)
On the Middle East, for example, she criticized the Bush administration for allowing peace negotiations to falter. On Iran, though, she excoriated Mr. Obama as “naïve” for declaring that he would meet unconditionally with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And on the administration’s dealings with Russia, she said, “This is the president that looked in the soul of Putin, and I could have told him, he was a K.G.B. agent. By definition, he doesn’t have a soul.”
“I think she combines new security and old security, by which I mean she is not afraid of the use of force, and she understands great-power politics and will be plenty prepared to be tough where necessary, either on nonstate issues or on states like Russia if need be,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and an often-mentioned candidate for secretary of state during the primaries. “But at the same time, she really gets the transnational issues. I think she is much less about democracy per se than she is about human rights. In that sense she was influenced by the Clinton Global Initiative.
“The promise of her being secretary of state,” added Ms. Slaughter, “would be to unite those two worlds.”
Or as Representative Pete King, a Republican hawk, admiringly put it: “She is from the very realistic wing of the Democratic Party. I don’t think she is going to have any delusions about trusting her enemies.”
The question now is whether it will actually happen and, if a firm offer was made, whether Mrs. Clinton would give up her unassailable hold on a U.S. Senate seat to take the post.
Certainly, to the extent that she still aspires to the presidency, secretary of state hasn’t exactly been a good way to get there for a while. (The last secretary of state to be elected president was James Buchanan.)
At press time, things were still in the air.
A source familiar with Mrs. Clinton’s thinking said that Mr. Obama did indeed offer the job to her and that she was weighing the decision with her husband, who returned home on Nov. 17 from a speaking engagement in Kuwait. But, the source said, reports that she had decided to accept the position were premature and wrong. (The Obama transition would not comment as to whether any position was or was not offered. Mrs. Clinton’s referred questions, once again, to the Obama transition team.)
According to the Democratic source with knowledge of the Clinton’s thinking, the Obama transition team and Clinton team were, as of the afternoon of Nov. 18, still “working through” the parameters of Bill Clinton’s charitable activities to check for real or perceived conflicts of interest, and that the process was going “smoothly.”
“She is still weighing it,” said another source, a close associate of Hillary Clinton, who added that the sticking point of the negotiations was not Mr. Clinton’s willingness to be vetted, which the source said had been overblown in importance, but rather “a question of whether she wants to give up her Senate seat.”
The associate said that at this point, there was some concern among Clinton’s supporters that all the talk about the job has forced her hand, because declining it would create suspicion about her husband’s finances. But “that is no reason to take the job,” the associate said.
One Obama foreign policy adviser on the transition team, who is not involved in the negotiations, said on background: “Obviously, she has tremendous skills and it would be up to Senator Obama to make that decision in the end on how he feels comfortable with integrating her in. I’m totally confident that he is going to be able to manage his team to get done what he thinks needs to be accomplished.”
Ms. Slaughter said that if Mrs. Clinton did end up becoming secretary of state, it would be only natural that Mr. Clinton give up some of his activities.
“He’s going to operate within more constraints,” she said. “They will find a solution, but there is no question he will be less free to do the kinds of things ex-presidents can do in terms of boards and speeches and businesses deals. It’s a fair exchange.”
For Mr. King, who, though a Republican, is fond of telling people about his good personal relationship with the Clintons, it would make sense for the former first lady to move back into the executive branch.
“From where is she is sitting right now, it looks like Obama is going to be there for at least the next four years, maybe the next eight,” he said. “He is going to be the dominant force in the political scene for the next eight years. She in the Senate is not the chair of any committee or any major subcommittee. She will be less of a political force in a day-to-day sense, but she will be much more of a national force in an international sense. I think she is making the decision to go for history. Also waking up in the morning as secretary of state in the world in which we live is more exciting than being the junior senator from New York.”
Ms. Slaughter said that plucking a secretary of state from among the ranks of elected officials was a tradition that went back almost to the founding of the republic.
“But honestly,” said Ms. Slaughter, “if ever there were a time to do it, that time is now.”
Gondar or Gonder (Ge’ez: ጎንደር Gōnder, older ጐንደር Gʷandar, modern pronunciation Gʷender) is a city in northern Ethiopia, which was once the old imperial capital and capital of the historic Begemder province. As a result, the old province of Begemder is sometimes referred to as Gondar. Located in the Semien Gondar Zone of the Amhara Region, Gondar is north of Lake Tana on the Lesser Angereb River and southwest of the Simien Mountains. The city has a latitude and longitude of 12°36′N37°28′E / 12.6, 37.467 with an elevation of 2133 meters above sea level.
Based on figures from the Central Statistical Agency in 2005, Gondar has an estimated total population of 194,773 of whom 97,625 were males and 97,148 were females. The woreda has an estimated area of 40.27 square kilometers, which gives Gondar a density of 4,836.70 people per square kilometer.[1] The 1994 census reported this city had a total population of 112,249 of whom 51,366 were males and 60,883 were females. – Wikipedia.org
(Please add your own favorite photo of the city of Gondar or any other Ethiopian city by clicking here)
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – Extraordinary circumstances often bring out the best in ordinary people. Take, a businesswoman from the American west. Becky didn’t plan to become an angel to women suffering from a horrible condition in a far off African land, but it happened. VOA’s Peter Heinlein has the story of the Trampled Rose, how an average woman seized a chance to do good after she fell ill during a holiday in Ethiopia.
Nigistin doesn’t know how old she is but she remembers decades of hopelessness as an outcast. She suffers from fistula, a childbirth-related condition that leaves women leaking foul-smelling fluids.
“When I got fistula, my husband threw me out,” Nigistin said. “I was alone and thrown away, then Becky took me in.”
Becky Kiser is an unlikely angel. She is an affluent American who runs a cosmetics distributorship in Colorado. She came down with typhoid while on vacation in Ethopia in 2003. She asked the man who had saved her life what she could do for him. He asked her to help his sister who had fistula.
“So, I said, ‘Would you please translate fistula to English, because I had no comprehension of fistula,” Kiser said.
In the five years since, Kiser founded a halfway house for fistula victims in Addis Ababa. It’s called the Trampled Rose.
“I came in as a beauty consultant, a Mary Kay sales director from America with no backing,” Kiser said. “I’m sure they thought I was absolutely insane or trying to get money.”
The Trampled Rose has given hundreds of women like Nigistin shelter and taught them skills so they can return to society after a simple surgical repair. One goal is to help women recover from the social stigma.
“Your family doesn’t care about you,” Kiser explained. “Your husband asks you to leave the home, so they’re left with no one, and even believing that God has cursed them.”
For women like Nigistin, the Trampled Rose is salvation.
“I was really in a bad way, and now I have a good future,” Nigistin said. “I won’t go back.”
Nigistin is now the head cook at the Trampled Rose. In a country where most women are illiterate, she says the Trampled Rose offers hope and skills that might save them from a life of begging, or worse.
These days, more help is coming, in the form of donations and volunteers like Karen Sharp who find inspiration in Becky Kiser’s work.
“Becky was the first angel I saw,” Sharp said. “Becky through many ways — through her love, support, her incredible humility.”
“These are the lucky women,” Kiser added. “These are the ones who escaped a dark room where they are thrown food for years. These are the ones who escaped being starved by their families. These are the ones that escaped way worse.”
And still, Kiser speaks of thousands more women who suffer such humiliation.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – Extraordinary circumstances often bring out the best in ordinary people. Take, a businesswoman from the American west. Becky didn’t plan to become an angel to women suffering from a horrible condition in a far off African land, but it happened. VOA’s Peter Heinlein has the story of the Trampled Rose, how an average woman seized a chance to do good after she fell ill during a holiday in Ethiopia.