EasterNile

AT THE END  of a long day, we walked up to the village of Korcho. Tropical boubou birds were singing their duets on the edge of a lake. Circular huts, made of sticks and crowned with grass roofs, lay scattered along a ridge. Boys were herding cattle toward the family stockades for the night. Korcho is a village of the Kara people, one of the 16 ethnic groups said to inhabit  Ethiopia ’s Omo-Turkana Basin. Ethiopia may be known for its rich and varied mix of ethnicities, but the diversity in the lower Omo River Valley in the southwest of the country, home to more than 200,000 people, is unparalleled. One of the cradles of humankind, the valley was  declared a World Heritage site  by UNESCO in 1980. Ancient stone tools unearthed there “offer evidence of the earliest known technical activities of prehistoric beings,” the UNESCO citation reads. The discovery of several hominid fossils has provided vital keys to an understanding of human evolution. Such ...

alth Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was a top official in the Ethiopian government at the same time that it was accused of widespread human rights violations. Tedros is now facing  increasing scrutiny  over  the WHO’s alignment with  China’s oppressive regime  throughout the coronavirus pandemic . Human rights watchdog groups repeatedly criticized the Ethiopian government’s poor human rights record while Tedros was a top minister. Tedros served as Ethiopia’s health minister from October 2005 until November 2012, during which time he was accused of covering up  three different cholera outbreaks . He then served as foreign minister from November 2012 until November 2016. During his time in as a high-profile Ethiopian official, the government was repeatedly castigated around the world for its human rights record, including the  detainment and torture of political opponents . When Ethiopia secured a non-permanent spot...

In 1932,  Mittie Maude Lena Gordon established the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, a black nationalist organization that amassed approximately 300,000 supporters to demand the repatriation of black Americans to Africa. At the time, Ethiopia was not merely a landlocked country in East Africa; it was an independent black nation that symbolized, to many, a kind of providence, both political and divine. It was a symbol of the right to self-determination among black people all across the diaspora. Three years later, in 1935, Mussolini’s army advanced on a defenseless Ethiopia, beginning a brutal occupation. Mussonlini experimented with new weaponry there, including chemical weapons like mustard gas. As the Ghanaian lawyer S.K.B Asante has  demonstrated , Black people around the world, from illiterate West African villagers to working-class women in Harlem, rose up in anger against the Italian assault. The defense of Ethiopia bound them all together. On the surface, the reason was ...

Arab and Gulf countries have been working to reach an agreement between Egypt and Ethiopia on the operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), Egyptian sources revealed. According to the sources, in February Addis Ababa  rejected  the US Treasury’s proposed agreement on the filling and operation of the dam which included technical input from the World Bank. Al-Araby Al-Jadeed  quoted diplomatic sources as saying that Egypt had succeeded in convincing  Sudan  to support its position in the negotiations despite the technical differences between the two sides. The sources said that Khartoum has accepted 90 per cent of the agreement’s terms, while Addis Ababa completely rejected them. The Egyptian sources explained that Sudan has changed its position after mutual visits between the Director of the Egyptian General Intelligence, Major General Abbas Kamel, and First Vice-President of the Sudanese Transitional Sovereign Council, General Muhammad ...

A CHINESE emergency medical assistance team composed of 12 members arrived in Addis Ababa recently. Minister of Health Dr Lia Tadesse and State Minister Ambassador Redwan Hussein welcomed the delegation at Bole International Airport. The Chinese carried a banner that read, “Through solidarity, we will prevail.” Together with the Chinese medical team, tons of medical supplies donated by the Chinese government also arrived on a charter plane to assist Ethiopia’s efforts in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. The deployment of the Chinese medical team and the donation of medical supplies is symbolic of the longstanding Ethio-China friendship and solidarity. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Meanwhile Ethiopian Airlines has said it has been exerting efforts to manage the impact of coronavirus through a fundamental shift to cargo services. The pandemic that severely affected the aviation...

Addis Ababa - The bodies of seven teenagers were discovered in a church in Ethiopia's eastern Oromia region, police officials said on Monday. "The teenagers were inside a room at the St Joseph Church which housed a generator," Commander Aschalew Alemu, spokesman for the East Shewa Zone police station, told the state news agency ENA. Alemu said six male and one female under the age of 20 had been discovered at about 3 am (0000 GMT) on Sunday, shortly before the country was due to celebrate Easter. Ethiopia, which has the largest Orthodox Christian population outside Europe, marked Easter on April 19. "We are now investigating if suffocation from the generator is the cause of the death," he said, adding that 11 people had been arrested in connection with the deaths. It is not yet clear how the teenagers managed to get inside the church. State-of-emergency regulations due to the coronavirus pandemic were put in place on April 10. The regulati...

The UN on Monday commended the UAE’s humanitarian efforts to provide medical and protective supplies to African countries for the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. "I would like to thank the African Union, the governments of UAE and Ethiopia, the Jack Ma Foundation and all of our partners for their solidarity with African countries at this critical moment in history," said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of World Health Organisation. His comments came as the first UN solidarity flight to take medical supplies to African countries took off. READ MORE Latest updates Trump administration to put WHO funding on hold Covid-19 pandemic validates the need for multilateral institutions, IMF chief economist says "Thanks to the government of the UAE for its generous support of this operation,” said Dr Ahmed Al Mandhari, the WHO's director for Eastern Mediterranean. "WHO’s regional logistics hub in Dubai has played a key role in mak...