On May 10, 2008, Dr Berhanu Nega will be in Vancouver, Canada, for a town hall meeting. The meeting is organized by former students of Dr Berhanu who are now students of University of British Colombia (UBC).

ethiopiansforbarackobama.com

The phone-banking effort we completed in Pennsylvania last month made a difference in Pennsylvania. Although our numbers in Pennsylvania was not significant enough to deliver a victory to Senator Obama, our collective efforts to collect a database of Ethiopian-American phone numbers did not go unnoticed. We were able to reach a multitude of Ethiopian-American voters in Pennsylvania, our efforts contributed to galvanizing the Ethiopian-American community as they voted overwhelmingly for Senator Obama.

Now that we have concluded our effort in Pennsylvania, it is time to duplicate the effort in Indiana. There is a large Ethiopian community in Indiana, so we will conduct another phone-banking effort. Because the Indiana primary is less than two weeks away, we have to quickly collect the phone numbers and start making phone calls by Monday, April 29th.

Please email me at [email protected] if you plan on volunteering to collect phone numbers and contact information from the Ethiopian community in the state of Indiana.

I cannot tell you how heartening it is to hear an Ethiopian-American on the other end of the line and how happy they are to be called by a fellow Ethiopian. It is a special feeling for both parties involved. Please forward this to your friends and family, we have a tight knit and committed core of E4O volunteers, but we need to expand our numbers in order to be more effective at what we are doing.

(BBC) – Amnesty International has accused Ethiopian Woyanne troops of capturing 40 Somali children during a raid on a mosque last week, and called for their release.

The rights group condemned the killing of more than 20 people, including some religious scholars, during the raid.

It quoted witnesses as saying that many of the dead were unarmed civilians, and that some had had their throats cut.

Ethiopia Woyanne denied its troops were involved in the killings, which came during fierce clashes with insurgents.

“The safety and welfare of the children must be paramount for all parties,” said Amnesty’s UK Director Kate Allen.

“The UN Security Council must endeavour to investigate human rights violations committed during the armed conflict.”

Throats cut

Somalia’s Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein said his government was defending itself, with the support of Ethiopian Woyanne troops, during the weekend’s clashes in the capital.

But Amnesty said the throat-cuttings were a form of extra-judicial execution practised by Ethiopian Woyanne forces in Somalia.

The Ethiopian Woyanne forces said they would only release the children from their military base in north Mogadishu “once they had been investigated” and “if they were not terrorists”, witnesses told Amnesty.

Some 80 people were killed during the weekend, local residents say, including at least six religious leaders from the Tabliq Sufi sect, which is not involved in the conflict.

Ghanim Alnajjar, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Somalia, denounced the killing of civilians and called for an immediate ceasefire.

Locals have accused the Ethiopian Woyanne troops of shelling residential areas of the capital.

“The use of heavy weaponry in areas where civilians are concentrated left reportedly 81 civilians dead and more than 100 wounded,” said Mr Alnajjar.

The UN says more than half of Mogadishu’s population has fled recent fighting in the city, and has warned that Somalia faces the possible twin catastrophes of war and famine.

(ASSOCIATED PRESS) – Egyptian police have arrested 109 African migrants hoping to cross illegally into Israel from Egypt, an Egyptian security official said Wednesday.

95 migrants from Eritrea and 14 from Ethiopia were caught Wednesday in the city of Aswan, 685 kilometers (425 miles) south of Cairo, after crossing the border from Sudan on foot, said the official. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

During questioning, the arrested said they wanted to go to Israel for jobs and a better life. Before sneaking into Aswan, they said they had lived briefly in refugee camps in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan.

Other migrants have said they pay about US$500 to human traffickers for shelter in the Egyptian desert and a ride to the Israeli border.

By Andrew Cawthorne

NAIROBI (Reuters) – Amnesty International accused Ethiopian Woyanne soldiers on Wednesday of killing 21 people, including an imam and several Islamic scholars, at a Mogadishu mosque and said seven of the victims had their throats slit.

The rights group said the soldiers had also captured dozens of children during the raid on the Al Hidaaya mosque in the north of the Somali capital earlier this week during operations against Islamist insurgents.

Ethiopia Woyanne has thousands of soldiers in neighbouring Somalia to bolster a Western-backed government against rebels fighting an Iraq-style insurgency in the Horn of Africa nation.

The Ethiopian Woyanne and Somali governments have not responded publicly to accusations of atrocities at the mosque. But they have frequently denied abusing human rights in the fight against groups they call al Qaeda-backed terrorists.

Amnesty said those killed at the mosque included imam Sheikh Saiid Yaha and several scholars of the moderate Tabligh group that operated there.

“Eye-witnesses report that those killed inside the mosque were unarmed civilians taking no active part in hostilities,” Amnesty said. “Seven of the 21 were reported to have died after their throats were cut — a form of extra-judicial execution practiced by Ethiopian forces in Somalia.”

Some moderate Islamist leaders have reacted to the mosque incident, and a recent upsurge of fighting in Mogadishu, by postponing plans to join U.N.-sponsored peace talks.

More than 100 people have been killed since the weekend in clashes in the coastal capital, and the takeover of several small towns by the Islamists’ militant al Shabaab wing.

MORE CORPSES

Amnesty urged the Ethiopian Woyanne military to release all 41 children it said were held after the mosque raid.

“Witnesses have told Amnesty International that Ethiopian Woyanne forces would only release the children from their military base in north Mogadishu ‘once they had been investigated’ and ‘if they were not terrorists’,” it said.

Some of the children — whose ages were as low as nine — were reported to have been freed, though the majority were still in custody, Amnesty’s statement added.

Various witnesses told Reuters they had seen beheaded bodies lying outside the mosque after the fighting.

Another four corpses showed up in Mogadishu on Thursday, at the compound of the SOS children’s hospital that had also been occupied by Ethiopian Woyanne troops during clashes at the weekend.

“The Ethiopian Woyanne troops who occupied SOS hospital since the weekend left last night taking the hospital’s food and cooking oil with them and they also damaged the properties of the hospital,” SOS security officer Abey Saney Osman told Reuters.

“There are four dead bodies, one inside and three others outside the gate of the compound. We are now inside the hospital and trying to sort all the mess,” he said by phone.

An SOS employee, laboratory technician Mohammed Faagte, told Reuters a colleague died and four others were wounded while trying to flee the hospital when the fighting began.

Civilians have borne the burnt of Somalia’s near-incessant violence since the 1991 toppling of a dictator.

About one million of the nation’s 9 million population live as refugees in their own land.

(Additional reporting by Abdi Sheikh and Aweys Yusuf in Mogadishu)