This Honolulu Advertiser announcement of Barack Obama’s Aug 4, 1961 birth was published August 13, 1961 on page B-6. It is available only on microfilm in Hawaii libraries. The announcement is 4th from the bottom of the left hand column. Click here.
Despite the evidence, some conspiracy theorists in the blogsphere continue to argue that Obama was born in Kenya. Right before the election, a group of individuals took the matter to court to disqualify Obama’s candidacy. The court dismissed the case. A few days before the electin, Hawaii’s top health official tried to stop the rumor, which continues even now.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia – [The Woyanne regime in] Ethiopia has agreed to a brief delay in its troop pullout from Somalia to allow the international community time to organize a replacement force. VOA’s Peter Heinlein in Addis Ababa reports the African Union is issuing an urgent appeal for manpower and funding to strengthen its badly understaffed AMISOM peacekeeping mission.
African Union Commission Chairman Jean Ping and Peace and Security Commission chief Ramtane Lamamra were in Cairo for talks with leaders of the League of Arab States.
Commissioner Lamamra is to fly on to New York later this week to consult with the U.N. Security Council and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
The hastily-arranged trip is aimed at generating financial support for a rapid increase in the size of the AU AMISOM peacekeeping mission. AMISOM has worked alongside Ethiopian troops to prop up Somalia’s fragile U.N.-backed transitional government.
In a letter sent to potential donors this week, Commissioner Lamamra said Uganda and Burundi, the two nations that supply almost all the 3,400 AMISOM troops in Somalla, had each offered to supply an additional battalion of 850 troops. Military analysts said such a manpower surge would just about make up for the departing Ethiopian contingent of about 2,000.
AU officials said one country, Norway, has given a tentative positive response, while others promised to have an answer within a day or two.
An Ethiopian A Woyanne foreign ministry official, who asked for anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly, said Addis Ababa the Woyanne tribal junta has agreed to push back its self-declared December 31 troop-withdrawal deadline by, at most, a few weeks, to allow time for the AMISOM replacements to arrive.
But the official emphasized that Ethiopian Woyanne policymakers are losing patience with the international community’s seeming lack of concern at the possible collapse of Somalia’s fragile transitional government, and the likelihood it would be replaced by an administration led by religious extremists hostile to the West.
Ethiopia Woyanne and other regimes in the East Africa regional group IGAD have also expressed frustration at the failure of the transitional government’s leadership to settle internal feuds that are undermining stability in the Horn of Africa.
Last month, IGAD ordered sanctions against anyone considered an obstacle to peace. The order did not name anyone, but officials said it was clearly aimed at transitional president Abdullahi Yusuf.
Ethiopia Woyanne sent troops to Somalia in December, 2006. They drove out an Islamic group that had imposed Sharia law over much of the lawless Horn of Africa nation, and installed a U.N-supported government. But in the two years since, the troops have become bogged down in fighting with an increasingly potent mix of Islamist and clan-based militias. The transitional government, meanwhile, has been unable to extend its authority outside of parts of the capital, Mogadishu and the central town of Baidoa.
An agreement signed in Djibouti in October between the transitional administration and an opposition faction called for a ceasefire that would pave the way for Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s withdrawal. But violence has continued, along with a surge in piracy off Somalia’s strategic seacoast.
The United Nations describes Somalia as possibly the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. The U.N World Food Program estimates 3.2 million people, or 40 percent of the country’s population are in need of emergency humanitarian assistance.
The Kangaroo court of Ethiopia has delivered yet another unmerited verdict. This time, it is against the most popular singer Teddy Afro, who was falsely, based on the evidence submitted by the prosecutor, accused of a hit and run crime. The singer has been accused of hitting and killing a homeless man and has been imprisoned without a bail for close to a year.
As the trial clearly demonstrated, the prosecutor of the case was unable to prove the crime of the accused without a reasonable doubt. The witness against the accused and the evidence submitted in the trial contradict that the date the reported crime took place and the deceased date of the victim on the hospital death certificate were divergent. Moreover, the accused constitutional rights were violated and some of the evidence that were permitted in the trial were fabricated.
In light of the clear incapability of the prosecutor to prove the accused crimes, the court, with its premeditated plot, gave emphasis to circumstantial evidence, which was false hypothesis submitted by the prosecutor.
The court knows that the accused has neither guilty mind (Mens rea) nor the guilty act (Actus reus) he was falsely accused for was evidently proved. The court knows that the crime was not proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The court also knows that more rigorous test was needed to determine whether the evidence submitted by the prosecutor was sufficient to convict the accused.
It is an apparent fact that Teddy’s trial was influenced by politics as he was deprived of his constitutional rights from the very beginning. He was accused and arrested without bail based on fabricated evidence, and now convicted while there is a reasonable doubt. Teddy is known for criticizing the government through his music’s. He was patriot, kind and a loyal citizen. The court had no other cause for the false conviction rather than Teddy’s different political view and patriotism.
What the biased judges did to him, however, is another unambiguous proof that there is no impartial judiciary system in Ethiopia. Obviously, that implies that there is no justice at all.
This poses near-term dangers not only for long-suffering Somalis, whose plight is barely recorded, but for the world. Somalia is a failed state that has been without effective government now for 17 years. International trade is already hampered by the surge in piracy off its coast. If the al-Shabaab militia are able to seize the opportunity to gain more ground, they could turn Somalia into the breeding ground for international terrorism that the US feared it was becoming back in 2006, although there was little evidence for this at the time.
In the longer term, Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s withdrawal could take the wind out of Somali jihadist sails. The al-Shabaab derived legitimacy at home from nationalism, and further afield from their battle against essentially Christian invaders. Once these are gone, Somalis, Islamists included, are all too likely to resume fighting among themselves.
Blame for this debacle is not only Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s. Burnt by the UN intervention in Somalia in the early 1990s, western powers were reluctant to back a large-scale peacekeeping operation that would have allowed the Ethiopians Woyannes to withdraw sooner. If there is any hope, it is that the Somalis can now unite against an extremist form of Islam anathema to their own, and that fellow Muslim states will help them do it.
Before Ethiopia Woyanne invaded with Washington’s blessing, Somalia barely registered on the global jihadi radar. Two years later, the conflict is a significant mobilising force. Videos seeking recruits and financing for Islamist militias fighting the Ethiopian- Woyanne-backed transitional government have proliferated on jihadi web sites. Fighters from Zanzibar, the Comoros islands and as far away as Pakistan have been drawn to the insurgency. Ethiopia’s Woyanne’s intervention has bolstered extremist elements that the US and other western powers hoped – against the advice of most experts at the time – that it would contain.
In recent months, hardline al-Shabaab militias have gained control over much of southern Somalia. By contrast, the transitional government that Ethiopia Woyanne stepped in to install can claim influence over the town of Baidoa and only parts of the capital, where roadside bombs explode daily. Ethiopian troops are bogged down fighting an insurgency that gains strength from their presence, while the government they support shows no signs of becoming more effective. It is a familiar scenario for the US and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ethiopia Woyanne however, has announced its decision to cut its losses and withdraw by the end of the year.
If you believe that Barack Obama will pursue a policy in the Horn of Africa that is substantially different than that of George Bush, you are in for a deep disappointment. Only weeks after Ethiopian regime’s U.S.-instigated invasion of Somalia almost two years ago, Susan Rice, Obama’s choice for Ambassador to the United Nations, endorsed the aggression – an atrocity that has resulted in the displacement of 1.5 million Somalis and impending starvation of 3.5 million more.
Rice is a proponent of so-called “humanitarian military intervention” – but supports a U.S. Somalia policy that created “Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis,” according to the United Nations.
There is every reason to believe she will counsel the next president to continue George Bush’s policies in the Horn of Africa. In January, 2007, while Ethiopian regime troops attempted to crush Islamists who had brought a brief period of relative peace and stability to Somalia, and U.S. air and sea forces pounded the countryside with missiles and bombs, Rice revealed herself to be an apostle of George Bush’s War on Somalia (and the so-called War on Terror in general). Rice told the PBS News Hour that U.S. collaboration with the Ethiopian invaders was justified by what she called America’s “counterterrorism imperatives,” which she said “really are real in the context of Somalia.” In Rice’s words, “We have to go after the terrorist cells where we find them.”
The Bush regime gave no estimate of how many persons with ties to Al Qaida were operating on Somali soil, but the number appears to have been very small. The main goal of the Americans and their Ethiopian allies was to crush the government that had been created by Somali Islamists. The Islamic Courts regime, as Abukar Arman writes in the journal Global Politician, operated “schools, hospitals, and for six months before the occupation removed every checkpoint in Mogadishu and brought a semblance of peace.” Two years after the invasion, the Islamists have retaken much of southern and central Somalia, and the Ethiopians appear poised to withdraw – after killing, starving and displacing millions in partnership with the United States.
“On Darfur, Rice is more bellicose than Bush.”
The “humanitarian” component of Susan Rice’s militarism is quite selective.
She has long been a super-hawk on punishing Sudan for its behavior in Darfur. Back in October, 2006, Rice declared, “It’s time to get tough” with the government in Khartoum.” In a Washington Post column, she advised the Bush regime to give Sudan “an ultimatum: accept unconditional deployment of the U.N. force within one week or face military consequences.” (explain China and oil and Israel)
On Darfur, Rice is more bellicose than Bush. She sees no contradiction in calling for military action against Sudan, supposedly to end a “humanitarian crisis” in Darfur, while simultaneously backing a savage U.S.-Ethiopian assault that causes an even larger humanitarian calamity in Somalia. Rice claims to seek safety for civilians in Darfur, while supporting a total absence of security for Somali civilians. Darfur is a military/political convenience for “real-politic” operatives like Susan Rice. As Bruce Dixon wrote in his November 2007 BAR article, “If stopping genocide in Africa really was on the agenda, why the focus on Sudan with 200,000 to 400,000 dead rather than Congo with five million dead?” (See “Ten Reasons Why ‘Save Darfur’ is a PR Scam to Justify the Next US Oil and Resource Wars in Africa.“)
“Her sole concern is projection of U.S. power by any means – or pretext – that is available.”
Rice’s behavior in Africa has always been morally inconsistent. She was a member of Bill Clinton’s National Security Council during the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi minority. Later, she “swore” she would go “down in flames” if necessary to prevent future genocides. But after her promotion to Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, she failed to publicly advocate action against U.S. allies Uganda and by then Tutsi-ruled Rwanda – the main perpetrators in an ongoing war that his killed millions
Susan Rice’s brand of “humanitarian intervention” is a farce, a pretext to justify military aggression under the guise of preventing human suffering. She has amply demonstrated that her sole concern is projection of U.S. power by any means – or pretext – that is available.
Rice embraces a policy that causes mass death and starvation in Somalia and ongoing genocide in Congo. Although she’s no blood relative of Condoleezza Rice, on African issues she seems headed in the same direction as the current Secretary of State.
(BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected]This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )
Inside a Scientist’s Mission to Study HIV in Ethiopia
Some HIV patients suffer from terrible neurological disease. Then, there are others that never have any cognitive problems at all. The same virus, but very different responses. That’s why most days you can find Dianne Langford working in a lab on Temple University’s campus, researching how HIV affects the brain. But once a year, her research takes here around the world to Ethiopia. It’s a country ravaged by HIV with little capacity to treat those infected, including infants born to HIV positive mothers.
“An Ethiopian baby is born with an immune cell count as high as any other baby, but as they become adults, their cell count drops significantly below anybody else’s in the world and we don’t know why,” says Langford, Ph.D., assistant professor of neuroscience and neurovirology at Temple University School of Medicine. “It’s a population with unique characteristics not found in other African populations or any other population in the world tested so far.”
It is also a population suffering because of HIV. Federal figures show nearly one million people are living with HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia. And while AIDS killed 67,000 Ethiopians last year, it’s most devastating toll is on the children, leaving some 650,000 as orphans. Researchers trying to learn more about the killer disease are hampered since, for cultural and religious reasons, autopsies are rare.
That’s why little is known about HIV-1C, a subtype of the virus which accounts for more than 50 % of HIV infections all over the world. It is the most dominant form of the virus, yet it is only found in Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa and India. And it is very different from subtype B, the form of the HIV found in this country. HIV-1C may be different in its progression and how it affects the brain, which is why Langford focused on Ethiopia. For the past five years, she’s volunteered through the non-profit People To People, a non-governmental organization dedicated to easing the burden of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Ethiopia and other sub-Saharan countries, but it’s a mission that happened more by chance than choice.
“I was at an international NIH meeting in Baltimore in 2003 and people were giving power point presentations using all kinds of fancy graphics,” says Langford. “Then, a soft-spoken Ethiopian woman stood up and spoke about HIV in her home country. No presentations; just her own experiences and I was so impressed.”
Minutes after that woman’s presentation, Langford met the head of People To People, Dr. Enawgaw Mehari. She doesn’t know what made her say yes, but she found herself agreeing to go to Ethiopia. Three months later, she was on a plane for her first trip there to see in person the effects of HIV. And in the five years since that fateful encounter, she has worked with scientists at Addis Ababa University School of Medicine in Ethiopia to secure a $250,000 NIH grant to study what HIV-1C does to the brains of Ethiopians. As she has crossed continents, she has also lifted taboos. Government officials in Ethiopia agreed to allow her team to perform 200 autopsies to date.
“There was a lot of legal wrangling and delays, but we finally did the autopsies and we’re on the right track to finding out more about this devastating disease,” says Langford. “It mutates from patient to patient, within a patient and even as it travels around the globe and that’s why it’s so hard to find a vaccine.”
It may be hard, but Langford and her fellow researchers are determined to learn how and why HIV-1C is different from other subtypes. Their work could make a difference in how doctors treat the virus. Until then, Dianne Langford will continue on her life’s mission, one inspired by one woman’s story.
