By Justin Lafferty | SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

SPRING VALLEY, CALIFORNIA – A lottery usually leads people to riches. For Monte Vista High cross country runner Misikir Mentose, a lottery led him to America.

In 2003, Mentose’s father, Ermias Wontamo, entered the U.S. State Department’s Diversity Visa Lottery and the family was approved for passage from Ethiopia to the United States.

“Really, I didn’t want to leave,” Mentose said. “I had to. I knew people that won the lottery in America, though. A lot of people come here to better their lives.”

Mentose and his family lived in Awassa, one of the largest cities in Ethiopia. Wontamo and his wife, Aster Gabore, wanted Mentose to receive his education in the United States. Wontamo and Gabore graduated from Ethiopian colleges, but their degrees don’t carry the same clout as those earned in America.

After 22 hours on a plane and a layover in New York City, Mentose and his family arrived in San Diego and met their sponsor.

“We expected it was going to be hard for a while, until we got settled,” Mentose said. “But we were prepared, so it wasn’t that bad.”

Mentose, a lifelong soccer player, was not immediately attracted to running. A friend, Muluken Beressa, also from Ethiopia, was a standout cross country runner for Monte Vista. Joining the team was a way to spend time with a fellow countryman, who now runs for Mesa College.

At first, Mentose wasn’t too serious about the sport, but his dedication grew. Mentose, a senior, is now a key runner for the Monarchs, who are ranked fifth heading into next week’s San Diego Section championships.

“It didn’t seem like he had much interest in his freshman year, but he matured in the spring and during track season, something just sparked,” Monarchs coach Bob Muschek said. “It was a nice turnaround.”

Muschek praised Mentose’s devotion to the team, a quality he saw in Beressa. Mentose has been an inspirational leader for his teammates, who have soaked up his Ethiopian culture.

Before a race last season at Valhalla, the Monarchs made a mark on their foreheads, mimicking a scar that Mentose jokes he received during a fight with a cheetah as a child. Monte Vista won the race, and Mentose made a strong case for captaincy.

“He’s not really a vocal leader, but when he says something, you pay attention,” senior teammate Mark Wassmer said. “He’s a really humble kid. During workouts, when you see him going hard, you know that you have to go hard.

“He does everything for the team. Last year, when he went to state (to compete as an individual), he really wanted the team to go with him.”

Mentose has told teammates about an Ethiopian runner’s secret – teff, a grain native to his country that he believes makes people run faster. Mentose said he will share some teff with the rest of the Monarchs later this season. First, they must reach a goal that Mentose would not reveal.

“I told them about it,” Mentose said. “But they have to earn something to get it.”

AS election fever hits South Africa, cellular services are playing a crucial role in voter registration.

The Independent Electoral Commission, which regulates the country’s elections, has introduced such a service to enable voters to check their registration status.

Through the initiative, prospective voters can sms their ID numbers to 32810 to check their status.

The Southern African country holds a crucial election in early 2009 which also include a presidential poll.

Analysts believe it is the most crucial election since the demise of apartheid in 1994 when retired president Nelson Mandela ascended to the presidential throne.

More than 21 million voters, 55 percent of them women, are on the IEC’s voters’ roll and 22 million are expected to be registered for the 2009 polls.

More than 130 registered political parties are on the IEC’s database but not all will necessarily contest the elections.

At least 19 705 voting stations have been identified for the 2009 polls, an increase from 14 650 stations in 1999 when the country held its first democratic polls.

– IT NEWS AFRICA

MinnPost photo by Sharon SchmickleDr. Michael Ssonko, left, and Dr. David Boulware study an x-ray of an HIV patient.

By Sharon Schmickle | MinnPost.com

Thanks to President Bush’s drive to combat HIV/AIDS, the United States is sending the life-saving medicine to Kiggundu and nearly 2 million others across sub-Saharan Africa. No nation has made a larger commitment to fighting a single disease than the United States has made under Bush’s leadership.

KAMPALA, UGANDA—Costa Kiggundu had one question for an American visitor to her home in a gritty Kampala slum: “What will happen if you stop sending the drugs?”

It’s a life-or-death question for Kiggundu, her son and all of her friends at the clinic where she gets medicine to help her body fight HIV infection, which killed her husband.

The Algerian parliament yesterday voted in favour of changes to the constitution that would allow President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to seek a third term in office.

The move by a parliament controlled by pro-government parties drew immediate criticism, with opposition parties describing the constitutional amendments as an act of “political swindling”.

Although Mr Bouteflika has not said overtly that he will seek re-election, he is expected to be a candidate in next year’s race.

The president has long made it known that he wanted to abrogate the two term limit in the constitution, but analysts say he has had to surmount resistance from the powerful military establishment which brought him to office in 1999.

“This is the third coup d’etat in Algeria’s history,” charged Mohsene Belabbas, a member of parliament from the opposition Rally for Culture and Democracy, whose deputies voted against the amendment. “It is not good for democracy and it is not good for Algeria because Mr Bouteflika wants to become president for life.”

The amendments give Mr Bouteflika – who had the support of deputies from the three parties which make up the governing coalition as well as that of some smaller parties – greater presidential authority and reduce the power of the prime minister.

Algeria, a big hydrocarbons producer that supplies 20 per cent of Europe’s natural gas needs, spent most of the 1990s in the grip of a bloody conflict sparked by the army’s interruption of an election in 1992 that an Islamist party had been set to win.

Although violence still sputters on in Algeria after local Islamic militants reorganised themselves into a group loyal to al-Qaeda, Mr Bouteflika is widely credited with having ended the civil strife.

Over the years he has offered amnesties to Islamic militants who laid down their arms, helping to deplete the ranks of the rebels already weakened by army strikes.

During his 10 years as president, Mr Bouteflika has managed to expand his powers at the expense of his backers in the army and intelligence services. However, he has also protected them from scrutiny of their human rights records during the civil war, in which 150,000 people were killed in atrocities committed by both sides. A constitutional amendment a few years ago made it a punishable crime to make accusations against the military.

Critics of the president say that, despite Algeria’s vast wealth in recent years as a result of high oil prices, Mr Bouteflika has failed to raise living standards for the country’s 34m people.

The economy remains for the most part undiversified, unemployment is high and hundreds of young men die every year at sea as they try to make the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to the shores of Europe.

By Heba Saleh in Cairo |- Financial Times

By Howard Kurtz | Washington Post

When a CBS correspondent reported last month that Barack Obama’s campaign had a malodorous airplane and a dismissive attitude toward the media, Robert Gibbs, the candidate’s top spokesman, was not pleased.

“Robert wrote a rather tendentious note to me,” Dean Reynolds says. “He would get in your face, not in a very heated way, but he would question your stories.”

Gibbs, who transition officials say is in line to become White House press secretary, can be funny, gossipy and an invaluable source of information about his boss, journalists say. He also monitors coverage intensively, pushing back against the smallest blog post he considers inaccurate.

“This is not someone who stays above the fray,” Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe says. “His manner allows him to do tough stuff in a softer way. He could deliver a harsh message, but do it with a little sense of humor, so you’d feel punched in the stomach but not in the face.”

Asked about complaints that he retaliated against reporters who were deemed unfair, Gibbs invokes the pressure of the campaign. “In hindsight, there are discussions I had in the heat of the moment that if I had to do over again, you would do differently,” he says. “I don’t doubt there’s countless episodes you would go back and do over again. I think you do better when you treat people with respect. There were a couple of times that I flew off the handle.”

Now the sparring will take place in the glare of televised briefings. After a career spent working for Democratic candidates and lawmakers, the 37-year-old Alabama native is about to become the public face of the Obama administration.

While he can be combative in private, Gibbs is affable and smooth-talking on camera, often deflecting uncomfortable questions with a quip. Colleagues say Gibbs channels the president-elect in a way that goes beyond their shared passion for college football. Obama had an initial tendency to overanswer questions, but Gibbs has taught him how to pivot back to his scripted point.

“He’s the last person Barack talks to when he’s thinking about how to handle reporters’ questions,” says Linda Douglass, a campaign spokeswoman. “We call him the Barack Whisperer. He completely understands his thinking and knows how Barack wants to come across.”

That quality was not lost on journalists covering the highly disciplined campaign. “A huge asset that Robert has is that he’s in the room with the president-elect,” says Jake Tapper, ABC’s senior White House correspondent. “He has his trust and his ear. He’s not just a press flunky who gets handed a piece of paper with talking points.”

Gibbs lives in Alexandria with his wife, Mary Catherine, a lawyer, and their 5-year-old son, Ethan. He has spent little time at home since hitting the campaign trail, but is grateful that his son has a relationship with Obama, who was photographed last month giving Ethan a fist-bump at Dulles airport.

The son of two Auburn University librarians, Gibbs got his first exposure to politics when his mother took him to voter registration drives. A political science major at North Carolina State University, Gibbs was also a goalie for the Wolfpack soccer team, though he admits that his playing time amounted to less than 45 minutes.

In 1991, while still a college student, Gibbs landed an internship with an Alabama congressman, Glen Browder, and later joined his staff. “Robert was good at talking,” Browder says. “We always kidded that he’d end up with his own TV or radio talk show, but he was also substantive.”

By 1998, Gibbs was the campaign spokesman for Sen. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina and two years later for the successful Senate campaign of Michigan’s Debbie Stabenow. It was in that role that Gibbs caught the eye of Jim Jordan, who hired him for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

“He’s one of the funniest guys I’ve ever known, which has really been a bonding point with Obama,” Jordan says. “They love the game.” Gibbs has “a strong personality,” and “all the skills of a good flack. He knew how to move a negative story.”

When Jordan was running John Kerry’s presidential campaign, he brought Gibbs along, but the spokesman quit in protest when Jordan was dumped in the fall of 2003. Gibbs drew flak when he joined a group called Americans for Jobs, Health Care and Progressive Values, which aired a commercial using a picture of Osama bin Laden in attacking a Kerry presidential rival, Howard Dean, for his lack of foreign policy experience. Gibbs said the group was independent and was trying to raise important issues.

After a period of unemployment, Gibbs got a call from longtime Obama adviser David Axelrod, inviting him to join the Democrat’s 2004 Senate campaign. Gibbs knew little about the Illinois lawmaker, but at their initial meeting, he says, “I found him remarkably easy to talk to.”

When sexual allegations about Obama’s Republican rival, Jack Ryan, became public, Gibbs urged Obama to steer clear of the controversy and not to return reporters’ calls, according to the book “Obama: From Promise to Power.” Ryan soon dropped out.

After two years as Obama’s Senate spokesman, Gibbs was the natural choice to be communications director of the fledgling presidential bid. In the run-up to the Iowa caucuses, CBS’s Reynolds says, Gibbs would walk up and ask if he needed anything.

“He became less and less helpful as Obama got more and more successful,” Reynolds says. “His stature became more elevated than just schmoozing the press. He became a strategist, an insider. The more he knew about what was going on, the less he was willing to spill the beans.”

Gibbs says there is a natural tension — especially on campaigns marked by “sleeplessness and over-caffeinated interactions” — between the media’s demand for access and the strategists’ insistence on driving a message. As a campaign strategist, “you’re putting forth a series of images and values,” he says. “You want the country to understand who a particular person is, what they stand for and what makes them tick.”

Several reporters say Gibbs shared extra tidbits with favored correspondents and froze out others who criticized Obama, refusing to return calls or e-mails for weeks. Shouting matches were not uncommon, say these reporters, who did not want to be quoted criticizing an official they have to deal with, and Gibbs sometimes went over their heads and complained to their bosses.

Last spring, when Newsweek ran a cover portraying Obama as the elitist “arugula” candidate, followed weeks later by a cover story in which editor Evan Thomas wrote Obama an open memo on dealing with race, the campaign suddenly stopped cooperating with the magazine’s quadrennial book project, which requires behind-the-scenes access. Thomas had to fly to Detroit and try to assuage Gibbs during a campaign flight before access was restored.

“I thought the Obama campaign was overreacting to those two covers,” Thomas says. “They thought we were overly concerned with race.” In light of the election, “maybe they were right.”

Journalistic resentment boiled over in June when reporters were trapped on the plane as it took off from Washington without Obama, with Gibbs saying only that the candidate had “scheduled some meetings.” Not until the flight landed in Chicago did Gibbs acknowledge that Obama had been secretly huddling with his defeated rival, Hillary Clinton.

In September, Charles Hurt, the New York Post’s Washington bureau chief, was barred from the campaign plane after writing in a column that Obama “simply doesn’t care if we win or lose the war in Iraq.” Hurt declined to be interviewed.

Gibbs calls the charge “as irresponsible a line as I’ve read in this country in years.” As for the other incidents, he says Reynolds, in his CBS blog post about the campaign’s shortcomings, “hurt the feelings” of his staff and made complaints that the newsman had not raised in person. Gibbs says he limited Newsweek’s access for pushing what he regarded as a false narrative that Obama could not connect with working-class voters.

Gibbs’s aggressive side was on public display last month when he went toe-to-toe with Sean Hannity, castigating the Fox News host for building a program around an activist who accused Obama of having trained years ago for “a radical overthrow of the government.” Over Hannity’s objections, Gibbs read a list of comments by the activist, Andy Martin, that included once calling a judge a “slimy Jew.”

“I find those comments despicable,” Hannity said.

“But you put him on your show,” Gibbs shot back. Fox executives later admitted that the booking had been a mistake.

Gibbs says he was trying to hammer home that it was “completely unacceptable” to give Martin a platform. But, he allows, “it was probably more fun than it should have been.”

The incident provided a revealing glimpse of Gibbs’s style. “I love dealing with reporters,” he says. “Anybody who does this has to like a little of the back-and-forth.”