Ethiopians for Obama is kicking off Project Yechalal Virginia. Our goal is to identify, database, and register 10,000 Ethiopian-Americans who live in the great state of Virginia . Virginia is home to the largest community of Ethiopians outside of Ethiopia . Our ability to register and vote presents a tremendous opportunity for us to be a significant voting bloc in the coming and future elections. Those who don’t vote don’t count—Ethiopians for Obama is encouraging every Ethiopian-American to be involved and register to vote.
Ethiopians for Obama will start a registration drive this weekend. We will be fanning out to various locations where Ethiopians have a robust presence. In addition to voting, we encourage as many Ethiopians to join our group so that we can be successful in our ongoing efforts.
If you would like additional information on our voter registration efforts or would like to join Ethiopians for Obama, you can email [email protected] You can also join our yahoo group so that you get up to date information and event notifications.
You can join Ethiopians for Obama at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ethiopiansforobama/
Our emphasis on Virginia does not mean that registration efforts in other states are not important. To the contrary, Ethiopians for Obama has members in almost every state where the Ethiopian community is vibrant. We are a large network of Ethiopian-Americans who are working together—united by our common hopes—to elect Senator Barack Obama the 44th President of the United States. Wherever you are located, it is vital that you register to vote and take part in the political process.
Beirut – The city of Beirut on Sunday hosted a marathon for peace aimed at showing the world that Lebanon is hopeful that last week’s election of a new president will bring much-awaited stability in the capital. The Beirut Marathon Association (BMA) and the Italian-inspired Vivicitta movement staged two events Sunday: an international half- marathon and a five-kilometre Run for Peace.
The half-marathon was sponsored by banking roup HSBC and featured Ethiopian favourites Dereje Tadesse Girma in the men’s race and Mare Dibaba in the women’s race.
The course took the athletes on a tour of east and west Beirut, along the famous Corniche, passing along the ‘green line’ that once separated the two sides of a warring nation.
The events finished in the iconic reconstructed downtown centre of bustling and modern Beirut.
BMA President May el-Khalil said the “HSBC Vivicitta Run for Peace is unique and its timing perfect in celebrating a new peace in Lebanon, and in sending out a message of hope through sports for all Lebanese.”
Beirut streets were lined with soldiers and armoured vehicles as the Lebanese army and police deployed en masse to assure security for the event on Sunday.
The marathon, with the slogan “Run for peace,” kicked off under a flurry of balloons and some runners wearing Red Cross T-shirts bearing the word “peace.”
A festive atmosphere prevailed, despite the high security, with some joggers running hand-in-hand with children along the route and street performers exchanging banter with soldiers.
More than 20,000 people had registered for the two races that were won by two young people from Ethiopia.
The election of former army commander Michel Suleiman as president on May 25 gave Lebanese hope that the country will head towards stability.
Suleiman called for unity in Lebanon after he was sworn in to replace Emile Lahoud whose post had stood vacant for six months amid political disputes, a boycott by the opposition and 19 failed attempts at convening a parliamentary session to elect a president.
The country passed through a difficult month in May, when six days of clashes between Hezbollah, which leads the opposition, and followers of parliament’s majority claimed 82 lives. Hezbollah managed to take control of large parts of Beirut in the fighting.
Lebanese had feared that a civil war similar to the 1975-90 civil war would erupt. But on May 21, rival political leaders managed to broker a deal to end the violence and elect a president at an Arab League meeting in Doha, Qatar.
ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Nineteen of 25 people killed by flash floods in Ethiopia’s eastern town of Jijiga this week were children, a regional official said on Saturday.
The region is prone to droughts and flooding. Last year, scores of people died after weeks of heavy rain.
“The force of the flash flood that hit Jijiga town on Thursday night swept away 200 houses, killing 25 people of whom 19 were children,” Nur Abdi Mohammed, spokesman for the Somali region, told Reuters.
Forty-five people were receiving hospital treatment, he said.
Nur said the flood occurred without warning after heavy rain around Chinaksen, 50 km (31 miles) north of Jijiga, and there had been no rain in the town itself on the day.
About 250 people whose houses were destroyed were receiving emergency assistance, he said.
(Reporting by Tsegaye Tadesse, editing by Wangui Kanina)
(ENA) — The famous American Actor, Chris Tucker is thinking to do a movie in Ethiopia, his favorite African country where he considers as “a second home”.
Chris Tucker [eonline.com]
The actor who was among more than 200 delegates who paid a two-day visit to Ethiopia before heading to Arusha, Tanzania, for the 8th summit of Leon H. Sullivan Foundation transplanted tree in Ethiopia on Friday.
Chris Tucker told ENA on the spot that “Hopefully, I can come back and do a movie. I have to figure out.”
He said “I love Ethiopia. It is my favorite African country. Because of the history… it is just beautiful and the people are beautiful and nice.”
He said “I am happy to be here, this is like my second home.”
“Hopefully I can come back in a year or two …and just show that Ethiopia has so much beautiful greenery. This is a great, great flourishing land.”
“This is my second time (to be in Ethiopia). I am looking forward to coming back. On my first time, I didn’t go out the countryside. Today we went out a little further out. And see beautiful trees and hills. That was really nice,” he said.
Another member of the delegation, CB Hackworth, is also planning to come back to Ethiopia on a film documentary project on Ethiopia.
He said he wanted to stopover before heading to Arusha for a number of reasons, one of which is because he “…wanted to have some meeting here to discuss the possibility of doing a film here in Ethiopia.”
“What we do … is we tell positive stories about Africa,” he said.
According to him, what people outside of Africa know about the continent is what they are told by the media. Mostly, he said, the international media make Africa look a bad place, which he observed is not the true story of Africa.
“People in the US don’t realize they can visit a beautiful city like Addis that there are wonderful hotels and it is peaceful, that they are safe, if people come to know this then they will visit. And it will increase tourism and help the economy. So that is what we are trying to do with the film.”
“We are trying to find positive stories,” he said adding, the initiative of Ethiopia to replenish its lost forest resources in connection with its millennium celebration, which he considers as a wonderful way of marking the millennium, is a positive story.
He said “… News is something happening. For large news organizations, they don’t rush out and spend money and resources to report good things are happening. They rush out and spend money and resources to tell you about a war or a famine. If things are going good they generally don’t consider that news. We are trying to bring some balance to that and say there is more to the world. There is more to Africa.”
“Ethiopia is very civilized. Ethiopia also fought against colonialism. So unlike a lot of parts of Africa, Ethiopia really was able to put its own imprint on its own country. So a lot of your developments are from Ethiopians. So I think that is unique, I think that is something that people who visit will find very interesting,” he said
(CNN) — Suspected insurgents fired mortar rounds at a plane carrying Somalia’s transitional president, but no one — including Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed — was harmed, a presidential spokesman said.
The attack happened while the plane was about to take off from Mogadishu’s airport Sunday around 11 a.m. local time, spokesman Hussien Mohammed Huubsireb said.
“Al-Shaabab has actually tried to harm the president, but thank God nobody was hurt,” Huubsireb said.
Sunday’s mortar attack is the second assassination attempt on Ahmed. The president survived a car bombing in September 2006 outside Somalia’s parliament in Baidoa that killed at least eight others.
Somalia’s Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi has been more frequently targeted by the insurgents seeking to destabilize the government.
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(Reuters) — Insurgents have fired mortars at a plane that was due to take Somalia’s president to Djibouti, but he was unharmed and travelled to a meeting with a UN security council delegation, officials and residents said.
President Abdullahi Yusuf was due to meet the delegation in Djibouti, where his interim government and opposition exiles living in Eritrea are participating in UN-backed peace talks. He was not due to take part in the talks, which started a day late on Sunday (local time).
“The president and delegates have left … the Islamists failed to achieve their goal and the mortars did not damage the plane,” presidential spokesman Hussein Mohamed Mohamud said.
An airport staff member said the mortars were aimed at a plane arriving to take Mr Yusuf to the talks in Djibouti.
“Around five mortars landed in the airport and people ran into the concrete building,” the staff member said.
Militants behind near-daily ambushes and roadside bombs targeting government troops and their Ethiopian allies are the remnants of an Islamist movement that was ousted at the start of last year.
The hardline opposition figures, including Islamist insurgent leaders in Somalia, say mediation efforts will go nowhere until Ethiopian Woyanne troops backing the government leave.
UN officials met the government and Islamist delegations separately, witnesses in Djibouti said.
A UN Security Council team touring troubled spots in Africa this week plan to visit Djibouti and meet the transitional government leaders, including Mr Yusuf.
Analysts say a meaningful peace pact looks impossible given opposition divisions and the presence of Ethiopian Woyanne troops in the Horn of Africa nation, which has been without central governance since the 1991 toppling of a dictator.
SHASHEMENE, Ethiopia — Nine-month-old Alfiya Galeto weighed just 10 lbs. when she arrived at the makeshift clinic here, her eyes dull and her arms as thin as drinking straws. There was no food in their village, her mother said, and for weeks she had been fed nothing but breast milk.
In the week after this clinic was opened by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, nearly 300 children like Alfiya were admitted for severe malnutrition. In the poor farming villages around Shashemene, in drought-ravaged southern Ethiopia, aid workers believe that hundreds and perhaps thousands more children are starving.
A serious drought and the worldwide surge in food prices are fueling one of Ethiopia’s gravest hunger crises in years, with 6 million children younger than five urgently needing food, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF. Relief workers say scores of children already have died.
But international humanitarian groups say the Ethiopian government Woyanne regime has been slow to respond. Prime Minister Dictator Meles Zenawi’s government hasn’t publicly declared an emergency and, the agencies say, has downplayed their estimates of the severity of the situation.
Arid, overpopulated and chronically hungry, Ethiopia receives more food aid than all but a handful of countries worldwide — most of it from the United States, which has provided $300 million in emergency assistance to relief agencies in the past year. U.S. officials defend Ethiopia, a key regional ally, arguing that the government was caught off-guard by the extent of the drought and by how quickly malnutrition rates rose in recent months.
But there were warning signs.
A U.S. humanitarian assessment mission warned in January that humanitarian conditions “could significantly deteriorate” in the impoverished southeastern Somali region. By February — as rainfall remained scant, maize and other staple crops failed and inflation soared — international aid workers reported that malnourished children were showing up at hospitals in southern Ethiopia.
In an address to parliament on March 18, Meles said reports of drought-related deaths were “false.” It wasn’t until late May that a delegation of Ethiopian emergency relief officials toured Shashemene and other parts of the drought-ravaged south. According to humanitarian officials who were briefed on the visit, the Ethiopians were “shocked” by the conditions and pledged to respond.
“It is absolutely critical at this stage that the government of Ethiopia recognizes the depth of its problem, and works to ensure that its children survive this crisis,” said one senior international aid official who, like several interviewed for this story, requested anonymity for fear of angering Ethiopian officials.
The head of another international relief group said: “Is it a lack of information or is it denial? The government needs to recognize this is an emergency, to convene donors and to facilitate the arrival of assistance in the country.”
Ethiopian Woyanne officials weren’t available for comment. But the inability to feed itself is at odds with the image that the government wants to project: that of a country on the rise, with annual economic growth of around 10 percent, fresh off a massive coming-out celebration last year to mark the year 2000 on the Ethiopian calendar.
At the Doctors Without Borders clinic in Shashemene, 150 miles south of Addis Ababa, 277 children were admitted in the first eight days. Hundreds more are in outpatient care in far-flung clinics in the countryside. In Seraro, a remote town about two hours from here, aid workers reported that 55 had died by mid-May.
The children in Shashemene are faring slightly better. Four have died, but the vast majority are slowly putting on weight thanks to a steady diet of fortified milk and Plumpy’nut — a protein-enriched, peanut butter-like paste often used in famine relief.
On a recent afternoon, a group of mothers smiled as 12-month-old Hirwot, who had been admitted a week earlier with persistent diarrhea, weighed in at 3 pounds heavier and was transferred out of the ward reserved for the most serious cases.
Alfiya, the 9-month-old, looked in awful shape when her mother brought her in from their village 50 miles away. Her limp body was swallowed by a pale green sweater and flies buzzed about her head, which was scabbed with sores.
But Veronique DeClerck, a Belgian midwife who inspected the child, pronounced that she would survive.
“Now that she’s here, she gets treatment and she’ll make it,” DeClerck said. “But the problem is when they go home, and there’s still no food.”
Relief agencies say they badly need more Plumpy’nut, vitamin-enriched milk, antibiotics and other treatments.
Some agencies complain that the government continues to impose heavy import duties on emergency supplements like Plumpy’nut, which is taxed at about 50 percent.
Of $50 million needed for life-saving food and medical care, UNICEF says donor countries have chipped in only $6 million.
“We are far from knowing the magnitude of the situation,” said Francois Calas, country coordinator for the Belgian arm of Doctors Without Borders. “We can expect the coming months to be very difficult as well.”
