Worancha ወራንቻ

BY RICHARD DOWDEN, 19 NOVEMBER 2013 ANALYSIS When you say to people in Britain: "I've just been in Ethiopia", they give you a look which says: "Poor you. Was it too terrible to talk about?" That is the trouble with the modern media. Faraway places of which we know little are only shown to us when something bad happens. In the case of Ethiopia, the 1984 famine and subsequent hungers have fixed its image in the global mind. It is as if the image of the collapsing Twin Towers in 2001 typified America. But of course we have other, more positive, images of America but none of Ethiopia. So I tell them: "Ethiopia? It's great. It's Booming!" Addis Ababa is being transformed as if by monstrous engines boring through the heart of the city. A new motorway flows into town sweeping aside all before it and an urban rail system is smashing through buildings, roads, gardens - everything accompanied by cranes and trucks, noise and dust. All along

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የአዋሳ ጠጠር መታው ተረከዜን ሁሉም አወቀበኝ በአንቺ መተከዜን።

Lady Gomez has remained famous or infamous - depending who refers to her - in Ethiopia's contemporary politics since her role as chief of the EU's team of election observers in the 2005 national elections. Known to have sided with the main opposition coalition, the CUD and one of its leaders now in exile, in the end she provoked perhaps the longest "letters to the editor" rebuttal ever published in the history of newspapers, by the late Meles Zenawi, which appeared in The Ethiopian Herald, a daily newspaper. The summit will be a three-day event, where members of parliament from the EU, and the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries will congregate to discuss politics, trade and goals set in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). There will be breakout sessions, where Ethiopia's policies on housing provision and employment opportunities for youth and women will be talked about. Co-chairs of the EU joint parliamentary assembly, Louis Michel and Joyce

OPINION It was yet another sad twist in the exercise of executive power that brought about the most recent directive, supposedly to correct the wrong doings of a previous directive on "Dividend Income Tax". This is after it had already inflicted grievous harm, not only to the law-abiding taxpaying business community, but also to the credibility of the country's legal framework - and of the country's highest executive authority, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, in particular. According to a report that appeared in the business and economy section of one of Addis Abeba's Amharic newspapers, I read that the Ministry of Finance & Economic Development (MoFED) had issued a new directive requiring enterprises to pay dividend income tax on undistributed profits(retained earnings) that have been kept for 12 months or more. It was stated that only "profits" reinvested and shown with all the proof and evidence laid down by the directive as paid up capi