Free Republic

Water: Egypt is beating the war drums against Ethiopia over its plan to build a giant dam on the Nile, affecting a quarter of Egypt's water supply. Given both countries' needs, it's a tough problem to solve. But it can be done. It's fairly shocking to think that with all the turmoil going on in the Middle East, a new — and surprisingly dangerous — problem has emerged in the water dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia. But senior Egyptian officials have literally threatened war over Ethiopia's $4.7 billion Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which Egypt believes will significantly cut its water...

Just last month, Secretary of State John Kerry quietly sent Egypt an additional $1.3 billion, even though Egypt has failed to live up to democracy standards. That largesse didn’t stop a prominent Egyptian politician from talking about Egypt’s “enemy” the United States in what some pundits are classifying as a classic and embarrassing “hot mic” moment. President Mohammed Morsi gathered a group of politicians last week who thought they were speaking privately at a parliamentary meeting. But as seen in an Egyptian television video of the meeting — excerpts of which were later translated by the Middle East Media and...

Egypt’s Morsi Government has initiated a return to covert war against Ethiopia, which controls the source of the Blue Nile, Egypt’s and Sudan’s principal source of water. The result will almost certainly lead to an increased level of insecurity in the strategic Red Sea/Suez sea lane and in the upper Nile riparian states, such as South Sudan, with some impact on global energy markets. Certainly it promises to see greater instability in the Horn of Africa at a time when Western media portrayals hint at a return to stability in, for example, Somalia. Significant, mounting public unrest in Egypt during...

In a humiliating example of self-inflicted electronic bugging, last week a live broadcast television microphone in Egyptian President Muhammed Morsi's Cairo office caught the president and Egypt's most senior political leaders plotting sneak attacks on the upstream Nile's biggest dam builder, Ethiopia. No denial on the Nile. When an audience of millions overhears pious Egyptian Islamists and well-heeled Egyptian liberals mull classic covert warfare options -- such as having Ethiopian rebels sabotage Ethiopia's new Blue Nile dams or deploying shady political agents to agitate in Addis Ababa -- the usual diplomatic salve, plausible denial, isn't an option. In point of...

Egypt's president on Monday hardened his stance against Ethiopia and its construction of a Nile dam, warning that "all options are open" in dealing with the project that threatens to leave Egypt with a dangerous water shortage. Speaking in a live televised speech before hundreds of supporters, Mohammed Morsi said Egypt is not calling for war, but it is willing to confront any threats to its water security. "If it loses one drop, our blood is the alternative," he said to a raucous crowd of largely Islamist supporters that erupted into a standing ovation. ... In the conference hall where...

http://www.memri.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/3857.htm

CAIRO — A battle over water has turned into a war of colorful rhetoric between Ethiopia and Egypt over the flow of the Nile, which begins in the African highlands but keeps Egypt from being swallowed entirely by desert. An ambitious Ethiopian dam project is diverting Nile waters that Cairo says will reduce the river's northward flow. The Egyptians have stumbled into crisis mode: At a meeting hosted by President Mohamed Morsi this week, several politicians, unaware TV cameras were rolling, suggested sabotaging or threatening to bomb the dam. Egypt can coordinate with Ethiopian rebels and "use them as a...

Nana Ekua-Hammond breaks down our relationship to the religion before American slavery and White Jesus piecesThis Easter, over two billion Christians around the world will celebrate "the Resurrection of Christ," and a large percentage of them will be Black. According to a 2007 Pew Report, 78% of Blacks in America identify as Protestant while a 2011 report by Pew notes that nearly 24% of Christians live in Sub-Saharan Africa. Christianity’s explosion across Africa led many to call for the Vatican to select a successor to Pope Benedict from the Continent with Ghanaian Cardinal Peter Turkson among the suggested shortlist. This...

President Obama decided this week that the Muslim Brotherhood-linked regime ruling parts of Somalia out of the capital city Mogadishu is eligible to receive U.S. military aid and weapons. Obama Paves Way to Arm Muslim Brotherhood-linked Regime in Somalia The New American 12 April 2013 President Obama decided this week that the Muslim Brotherhood-linked regime ruling parts of Somalia out of the capital city Mogadishu is eligible to receive U.S. military aid and weapons, sending a memo to Secretary of State John Kerry announcing the new finding and laying the ground work for even more foreign entanglements in Africa....

A 12-year-old girl kidnapped by a group of seven men in the Ethiopian city of Bita Genet was found several days after her abduction, safe under the watchful eyes of three lions. Not only were the lions guarding her, they allegedly chased off her captors. The girl was reportedly abducted by the seven men with the idea that she would be forced into marrying one of the them. According to the United Nations, about 70 percent of the marriages taking place in Ethiopia are the result of similar kidnappings. And nearly 100 percent of those abduction-marriages are not thwarted by...

President Barack Obama will have dinner with the first-ever black Miss Israel when he makes his first visit to the Jewish state as US leader next week. An advance party of White House officials insisted on inviting Yityish Aynaw, 22, to next Thursday's gala dinner hosted by Shimon Peres, Israel's president, after hearing how she became the first Israeli of Ethiopian origin to win the country's premier beauty queen contest last month.

Expansion work is to begin at the Aluto-Langano Geo-thermal Power Plant, in February, with the delivery of equipment to the site. The project, estimated to cost 35 million dollars, has already had 17 containers of materials delivered, with 10 more currently at the dry port, according to Miskir Negash, public relations officer of the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation (EEPCo). The Corporation will also import 400tn of international standard cement over the coming few weeks, Miskir said. The expansion includes the digging of four wells, up to 2,500m deep, boosting Aluto-Langano's geo-thermal capacity to 70Mw; the total potential for the country...

JERUSALEM, January 31, 2013, (LifeSiteNews.com) - After a series of back and forth accusations and denials among government agencies, the Israeli Health Ministry has for the first time acknowledged that it has been injecting Ethiopian immigrants who are religiously Jewish with the dangerous contraceptive Depo-Provera without their consent. The allegation that the women were coerced into accepting the shot was denied at first by both the Joint Distribution Committee, which runs the clinics at the transit camps, and by the Health Ministry. The practice has been said to be going on for years. Ethiopian Jews accounted for 57 percent of...

Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a buried Christian empire in the highlands of Yemen, leading to theories that there may have once been a church in Mecca. A stone carving of a Christian figure was found in Zafar, some 581 miles south of Mecca, and is thought to have been made in the era of the Prophet Muhammad. Paul Yule, an archaeologist from Heidelberg in Germany, has dated the 5feet 7inch tall relief which shows a man with chains of jewellery, curls and spherical eyes to around 530AD. ... The figure is barefoot, which was typical of Coptic saints....

Cereal fields in Ethiopia's Arusi-Bale plains, where the commodity exchange has facilitated trade between buyers and sellers. While government leaders, NGOs and corporations devise strategies to churn out more food for future generations, Eleni Gabre-Madhin is taking a different approach. Concerned by a 2002 famine in her home country of Ethiopia that followed bumper crops in 2000 and 2001, the Stanford-educated economist decided it was time to go beyond food production and take a hard look at distribution. The result? Africa's first commodity exchange. As the founder and outgoing CEO of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX), Gabre-Madhin established a reliable...

A $20 million contract to spark "private sector competitiveness" in Ethiopia has been awarded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). As U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor reported earlier this year, the agency's Finance and Business Services (FaBS) Project seeks to increase Ethiopian industry's access to financing in order to drive "sustainable economic growth" while reducing poverty (Monitor, April 26, 2012). CARANA Corp., an Arlington, Virginia-based consulting company, will carry out the project for USAID over the next five years. CARANA in October separately secured a $12 million USAID contract to execute the Nigeria Expanded Trade and Transport (NEXTT)...

Ethiopia's energy minister played down concerns on Monday about how it would finance the first of an array of mega-dams due to revolutionise east African power markets, saying it was on track to have three plants on line by 2015. The Horn of Africa country has laid out plans to invest more than $12 billion in harnassing the rivers that run through its rugged highlands to generate more than 40,000 MW of hydropower by 2035, making it Africa's leading power exporter. Energy chief Alemayehu Tegenu said the plan's centerpiece - the $4.1 billion-Grand Renaissance Dam along the Nile River in...

About 240 immigrants from Ethiopia - half of them children - are scheduled to arrive in at Ben-Gurion International Airport, Monday afternoon, on the opening flight of Operation Wings of a Dove, organized by the Jewish Agency, following the government's decision, in July, to speed up the pace of aliyah and close the bringing of the Falash Mura to Israel. A total of 600 Falash Mura are slated to be absorbed at the Ivim Absorption Center in the Sha'ar Hanegev Council region. The rest will be spread among the 16 absorption centers operated by the Jewish Agency and the Absorption...

Small teams of special operations forces arrived at American embassies throughout North Africa in the months before militants launched the fiery attack that killed the U.S. ambassador in Libya. The soldiers' mission: Set up a network that could quickly strike a terrorist target or rescue a hostage. But the teams had yet to do much counterterrorism work in Libya, though the White House signed off a year ago on the plan to build the new military task force in the region and the advance teams had been there for six months, according to three U.S. counterterror officials and a former...

Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya leader Mostafa Hamza, detained for terrorist activity and attempt on Hosni Mubarak's life, released Tuesday by President Morsi's pardon Egypt's security authorities released, Tuesday, Mostafa Hamza, a prominent radical Sheikh charged with attempting to assassinate former president Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia in1995. Hamza, a leading member of Islamic organisation Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya, was extradited to Egypt from Iran in 2004. He was detained following terrorism-related charges that included being a member of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. SNIP(The wire services are ignoring this news. We learned about it via FrontPageMag which highlighted that Hamza was behind the Luxor massacre. FPM excerpted...