ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA – More than 200 Somalian parliamentarians have found themselves stranded in Nairobi, lacking the money to pay for air tickets for their return home, BBC reported Friday.
Citing a spokesman for the parliamentarians, who had attended an international conference in the Kenyan capital, BBC said that the UN Development Program (UNDP) on Thursday did pay the fares of 27 stranded delegates for a flight back to Mogadishu.
But the UNDP denied this.
The Somalian parliamentarians had taken part in a meeting with representatives from other countries in the region to review the work of the transition government in Mogadishu. The Somalians were of the view that the meeting organisers were responsible for their travel expenses, said deputy Abdul Rashid Mohammed Iro.
‘If someone invites you, he has to cover your expenses and your transport. That’s why we are expecting IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development in Eastern Africa) to cover our expenses and transport.
‘We are trying to solve our own problems. Sometimes we get paid a salary on monthly basis but the last three months we didn’t get any pay,’ he added.
Police agencies often perform undercover stings at stores that sell alcohol. They send under-age buyers in to see if stores will sell them beer or liquor without asking for identification.
Last month, police pulled off such a sting in southwest Atlanta, but also stumbled across a veritable scavenger hunt of illegal narcotics: Bags of crack and powder cocaine and marijuana scattered throughout the store, according to a police report.
But because police couldn’t link the drugs to anyone, they only seized the drugs to have them destroyed, the report said.
The sting, called an alcohol compliance check, happened on Oct. 18 at the Stop-N-Shop in the 2000 block of Alison Court, the report said.
While the underage informant walked inside to buy alcohol, an unidentified man tried to sell marijuana to a police detective and another person involved in the sting outside.
The pair declined the offer and waited until the minor walked outside with a six-pack of Budweiser before switching gears and calling in a drug-sniffing police dog, the report said.
The dog sniffed out 70 bags of marijuana, 71 bags of suspected crack cocaine, six bags of powder cocaine and an uncut chunk of crack cocaine the size of a cookie, according to the report.
The locations of the drugs, police wrote, made them believe the store’s owner and manager should have known about them.
“One area in particular was behind the counter in a box on the shelf near the managers [sic] office, where the general public is not allowed,” a police detective wrote in the report.
Police arrested the store clerk, 38-year-old Yared Tedla, an immigrant from Ethiopia, whom they say sold the alcohol to the minor.
They also arrested one of the men at the store, Phillip Lookadoo, 24, of Atlanta, on a warrant for failure to appear on marijuana charges, the report said.
OLF statement on the ongoing mass arrest of the Oromo people by the TPLF Regime
Malicious Propaganda Does Not Cover Up The Truth
The TPLF/EPRDF regime is staging a hilarious drama alleging to have apprehended members of Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) leadership and others who were planning anti government activities. OLF unequivocally and emphatically dismisses such allegation as fabricated and completely false propaganda intended to confound the OLF with terrorism as well as to divert the attention of the general public from the current wave of mass persecution being committed against the Oromo people.
Contrary to what the EPRDF regime is trying to convince the peoples of the country, there is un- announced mass campaign targeting Oromos across all sectors of the society and regions. As of last week, waves of mass abduction and arrest are going on targeting Oromos in all the regions. Oromo business men, teachers, university lecturers, journalist, members of Oromo legal political organizations who have seats in the parliament, students and peasants are being rounded up and put behind bars. Even though complete list of those detained have not fully been compiled yet, an estimate of more than two hundred innocent Oromos have so far been arrested. The wave is still continuing in all regions.
The glaring evidence of this poorly managed fabrication is the exhibit of weapons displayed as evidence. The same weapons were shown while accusing another organization. How can the same weapons be in the hands of two different organizations with no relation what so ever, is a simple question of any lay person. The truth is that this propaganda of the TPLF is a fabrication that utterly failed from inception.
All these dreadful atrocities against the Oromo people is a sign of desperation and hopelessness of the EPRDF regime that thinks detention, intimidation, harassment and abduction will dampen the Oromo people’s determination and commitment to the legitimate struggle for freedom and democracy. The OLF takes this latest action of the regime as an intensification of its war against the OLF and the Oromo people. The OLF will continue to defend itself and the struggle and call upon Oromo people to intensify its struggle of self defense.
We also call on the peoples of Ethiopia and the world public at large to do everything possible to save the lives of innocent Oromo individuals who are inhumanly rounded up, incarcerated and exposed to all forms of torture in the prison cells of the TPLF regime.
KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN – Guest lecturer Zion Uness will discuss “The Journey of Ethiopian Jewry” in a free, public lecture at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 17, in Room 210 of the Bernhard Center at Western Michigan University.
Uness was born in 1977 in Ethiopia and immigrated to Israel at age 7. He served in the infantry of the Israeli Defense Forces and subsequently received a degree in occupational therapy from the University of Haifa. Since that time he has worked to improve Ethiopian-Israeli education and community life, and has spoken widely at Jewish community centers, film festivals, and universities about Ethiopian Jewry.
WMU Hillel, the Jewish student organization, is sponsoring the program. For more information, visit wmuhillel.com or contact Jay Pliskow, president of WMU Hillel, at [email protected].
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ADDIS ABABA (AFP) — Ethiopia will by 2010 see a four-fold increase in the number of orphaned children aged between nine and 19 who are heading families due to AIDS, poverty and conflict, a local NGO said on Friday.
Some 225,000 households will be run by children, up from 77,000 in 2005, Addis Ababa-based African Child Policy Forum (ACPF) said in a report.
“This is going to be an explosive problem,” said Assefa Bequele, the agency’s director.
“In some households, the oldest child is also the principal care-giver to a terminally-ill parent,” said the report.
Ethiopia is one of the world’s poorest countries. The government estimates that 1.5 million Ethiopians are infected with HIV, while the World Health Organization says nearly 2.8 million are infected.
Except for Figure 1, the images below come from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) carried aboard NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. The Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology (HIGP) at the University of Hawaii has developed an automatic system that uses the infrared satellite imagery from MODIS to plot thermal anomalies in near real-time, and publishes the results on its hotspots website. The detection of thermal anomalies – hotspots – is of course one of the fundamental tools of volcano monitoring. This post features MODIS images of the recent eruption in north-eastern Ethiopia generated by the HIGP system.
The first map below is an overview of volcanoes the Afar region of north-eastern Ethiopia (as registered by the Global Volcanism Program) from Google Earth, for reference. Below are screen captures from the Hawaii thermal alerts website, showing MODIS data for this region during the period 2-6 November 2008. This data shows the development of the hotspot associated with the eruption of 3 November, and would seem to support the contention that Dalaffilla is the volcano responsible. (Click on ‘more’ to see the MODIS images, which are under the cut.)
Figure 1. Volcanoes of north-eastern Ethiopia, created using Google Earth with the ‘volcanoes’ layer enabled. This layer integrates information from the Global Volcanism Program.
Figure 2. MODIS image for the Afar region, 2 November 2008. Nothing happening, but this gives a good sense of the terrain. In the centre of the image, running SE to NW, is the Danakil Depression with the volcanic Erta Ale ridge forming a kind of inland island in the middle. Erta Ale volcano itself is marked just below right of centre, and the phreatic explosion crater Dallol, formed in 1926, is marked top left.
Figure 3. Image from 3 November 2008. Eruption under way, with the presence of a sizeable heat source: the identification with Dalaffilla seems credible. A smaller hot-spot, interestingly, appears about 20km east of the main event.
Figure 4. Image from 4 November 2008. Indications of lava on the eastern flanks of the ridge.
Figure 5. Image from 5 November 2008.
Figure 6. The situation on 6 November 2008.
Figure 7. Cumulative image of hotspot development, 2-6 November 2008. Figures 2-6 above are reduced from the originals, but these detail views are at full size.
Figure 2. MODIS image for the Afar region, 2 November 2008. Nothing happening, but this gives a good sense of the terrain. In the centre of the image, running SE to NW, is the Danakil Depression with the volcanic Erta Ale ridge forming a kind of inland island in the middle. Erta Ale volcano itself is marked just below right of centre, and the phreatic explosion crater Dallol, formed in 1926, is marked top left.
