Leid Stories – Benjamin Netanyahu Trolls Africa for Big-Money Deals and Old ‘Friendships’; Obama, Biden Hit the Road (at Taxpayer Expense) for Hillary – 07.05.16

Starting with Uganda—where, 40 years ago, his older brother Yonatan was killed in an Israeli Defense Forces-led commando raid on the airport at Entebbe to free hostages being held by pro-Palestinian hijackers–Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday began a foray into East Africa that also will include scheduled trips to Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia and include summit meetings with leaders from South Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia.

Netanyahu said that his trip to the region, the first in 30 years by an Israeli prime minister, is meant to indicate a renewed interest in forging bilateral economic and strategic ties with old friends. But new fears and suspicions abound in the African world about Israel’s ramped-up foreign-policy push on the continent. Abayomi Azikiwe, editor in chief of Pan-African Newswire, discusses Netanyahu’s historic visit to East Africa.

Both President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are hitting the road this week as pitchmen for Hillary Clinton. Obama makes his debut today at a rally in Charlotte, N.C.; Biden goes a-stumping Friday in Scranton, Pa., his hometown.

Leid Stories explains says that it isn’t so much a testament of Clinton’s clout and firepower that the Top Two are campaigning for her, but yet another indication of her political vulnerability as a distrusted candidate who will be the party’s nominee later this month.

GRAHAM PEEBLES – Hungry and Frightened: Famine in Ethiopia 2016

Millions of the poorest, most vulnerable people in Ethiopia are once again at risk of starvation. Elderly men and women, weak and desperate, wait for food and water; malnourished children lie dying; livestock, bones protruding, perish. According to a statement issued by the World Food Programme (WFP) on 6th February, over 10 million of the most vulnerable require urgent humanitarian …

Thomas C. Mountain – Millions Starve As Ethiopia Rejects Eritrean Ports

As famine stalks millions of Ethiopians, and aid ships wait forever to unload at Ethiopia’s port of Djibouti, offers of free use of Eritrea’s Red Sea ports fall on deaf ears in Addis Ababa. According to Oxfam between 50% to 90% of Ethiopia suffered all or major crop failure due to the latest, greatest drought (this is just a guess …

Thomas C. Mountain – Climate Disaster Hammers Ethiopia

This year the rains failed in southern Ethiopia and some 25% of a country of 90 million people are facing acute food shortages in the coming months. This climate disaster, brought on mainly by western industries damage to the environment, has left the Ethiopian government quietly begging the international community for a preliminary food aid package worth $500 million, desperately …

Will Hurd – US, UK, World Bank Among Aid Donors Complicit in Ethiopia’s War on Indigenous Tribes, Opening the Way to International Agribusiness

USAID, the UK’s DFID and the World Bank are among those covering up for severe human rights abuses against indigenous peoples in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, inflicted during forced evictions to make way for huge plantations, writes Will Hurd. Their complicity in these crimes appears to be rooted in US and UK partnership with Ethiopia in the ‘war on terror’. In …

Al Jazeera – Like all imperial powers before it, the US seeks to dominate the world in order to exploit it.

United States President Barack Obama is the most admired foreign leader in Africa because he has ancestral roots in our continent. This is partly the reason his ill-informed and stereotypical admonitions of our leaders attracted cheers from a large section of our elite class. But it is also because we African elites have internalised the ideology of our conquerors that …

BRICS Bank Opens for Business By Stephen Lendman

Its Shanghai-based New Development Bank (NDB) represents the beginning of a significant challenge to predatory Western financial institutions – the IMF, World Bank and other loan shark lenders of last resort. The IMF was established to stabilize exchange rates linked to the dollar and bridge temporary payment imbalances. The World Bank’s mandate was to provide credit to war-torn developing countries. …

Journalists Face Most Deadly and Dangerous Period in Recent History – Andrew Emett

According to a report released on Monday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) found that terrorist groups and governments have made recent years the most dangerous period to work as a journalist. Targeted by both terrorists and national security agencies, journalists across the world have been subjected to kidnapping, torture, murder, government surveillance, censorship, and imprisonment. As Islamic State continues releasing …

Obama Is Poised to Give GMO and Meat Companies Something They’ve Always Wanted -Tom Philpott

President Obama and his Senate GOP critics are locked in a long-simmering feud, but there’s one topic that has them clasping hands and singing kumbaya: global free-trade deals. The erstwhile foes are joining forces to push two massive ones: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which would knock down trade barriers for a group of nations including the US, Canada, Chile, Peru, …