Sheffield City Council appoints new Chief Executive

04/07/08

By – 24dash .com

John Mothersole has been appointed as the new Chief Executive of Sheffield City Council.

His appointment follows a rigorous assessment programme held earlier this week, in which he was competing against a very strong field, and selection by a cross party panel chaired by Council Leader Councillor Paul Scriven.

Mr Mothersole, 48, is currently the Interim Chief Executive, a position he has held since March 2008.

John joined the council in 1998 as Executive Director – Development, Environment, and Leisure, a position he held until taking on the Interim Chief Executive role. He takes on his new position with immediate effect.

The council had advertised nationally in its search for a new Chief Executive, and received applications from across the country.

Commenting on the appointment, Councillor Paul Scriven said: “I’m really looking to working with John. I think he will be an exceptional Chief Executive, and will take the step up from his role as Executive Director in his stride.

“We have searched far and wide to find the best candidate, and put all the candidates through a testing selection process. We look forward to working with John in taking the city to its next chapter and making Sheffield a place where everyone matters.”

Responding to his appointment, John Mothersole said: “Sheffield is a city that I, and my family, have come to love. To be given both the opportunity to be the Chief Executive, and to be given the trust of the Council in carrying out this role, can only be described as a deep honour.

“The City Council can be a huge force for good in this city. My job and my ambition is to work with the Council Leader to make sure that this is the case. This is the sort of job that you have to do with your heart and your head. That is exactly how I will do it.”

As part of the selection process candidates not only presented to and were interviewed by the selection panel, they also met with representatives from the private, public, and voluntary sectors.

In addition, for the first time four Sheffield residents were given the opportunity to put questions to the candidates in person, and their views on the answers they received contributed to the final decision.

Ogaden community in the UK holds a massive event

By- meadna news

04/07/08

The Ogaden community in the UK held a massive event in Northampton brining all Ogaden associations, organizations, communities as well as Member UK’s Member of Parliament, Councilors,  association and youth originations from Eritrea and Oromo.

The representatives of all the organizations gave speech highlighting the plight of the Ogaden people under the Ethiopian regime and expressing messages of solidarity.

Well known singers from Ogaden, Somalia and Kahsay Berhe of Eritrea, performed, adding flavor to the very moving even.

African Union Plans an African intervention force by 2010

We need to understand what African’s

think about Africa.

What is africa’s problem ?

The African Union (AU) at its 11th Summit of Heads of State and Government has called for bringing about the necessary financial and technical support for the creation of an African Rapid Intervention Force by 2010.

The African leaders, at the conclusion of their summit in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt on Tuesday, urged the AU Commission, concerned African organisations and groups as well as the member states to implement the recommendations of the African Defence and Security Ministers relating to the rapid intervention force. This was necessary to speed up its creation.

As for the latest progress on efforts to resolve the conflict between Djibouti and Eritrea, the African leaders “categorically” condemned the use of force.
They cited the need for respecting the sovereignty of the member states, their territorial integrity and independence in conformity with AU charter.

The African Heads of State reiterated their urgent call for normalising the situation on the Djibouti-Eritrea borders.

In this respect, they called for the immediate withdrawal of all the forces positioned on these borders since last February.

They invited all the parts involved to resort to peaceful means to solve disagreements, highlighting the possibility of reaching a formula helping facilitate the resumption of the good neighbourly relations and cooperation as soon as possible.

Concerning the situation in Sudan, the African leaders hailed the renewed commitment of the Sudanese government and the Sudan Popular Liberation Movement to work for the implementation of their peace agreement as well as the implementation of Abyei Protocol, in order to find a final solution to the crisis.

The African leaders underlined the serious repercussions of tensions which mark Sudanese-Chadian relations.
They deplored that the bonds between these two countries were always dominated by “distrust” in spite of the meetings held by the contact group chaired by Libya and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

For this purpose, the relevant resolution adopted by the 11th summit pointed out the agreement signed by the two countries last March in Dakar, by virtue of which they commit to put a term at the activities of armed groups and to prohibit the use of the territories of each of the two countries to undertake activities threatening the stability of the other.

Source: BuaNews

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African war crimes suspect transferred to International Criminal Court

UN NEWS CENTER

3 July 2008 –

Belgian authorities today transferred Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo, charged by the International Criminal Court (ICC) with multiple counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder and rape, to the Court’s detention centre in The Hague.Mr. Bemba – President and Commander in Chief of the Mouvement de libération du Congo (MLC), an armed group that intervened in the 2002-2003 armed conflict in the Central African Republic (CAR) – is alleged to be criminally responsible for five counts of war crimes and three counts of crimes against humanity committed on the territory of the CAR from 25 October 2002 to 15 March 2003.

“Justice is coming for the victims, for the victims of the Central African Republic, for the victims of massive sexual violence worldwide,” ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said, welcoming the transfer of Mr. Bemba.

He thanked the Belgian authorities for their efforts relating to the arrest and transfer of Mr. Bemba. “The case of Jean-Pierre Bemba is a text book example of how cooperation should work; it is such cooperation, by all States parties, which makes this Court, 10 years after the adoption of the Rome Statute, a reality,” he said.

Mr. Bemba’s initial appearance before the Pre-Trial Chamber is scheduled for tomorrow.

International Criminal Court orders release of Congolese rebel leader

UN NEWS CENTRE

04/07/08

3 July 2008 – The Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) today ordered the release of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, after ruling that the Congolese rebel militia leader accused of recruiting child soldiers could not receive a fair trial.The Court had suspended proceedings against Mr. Lubanga on 16 June, after finding that prosecutors had failed to disclose more than 200 documents to the defence that have the potential to prove his innocence.

According to the judges, the release is the “logical consequence” of the stay on the proceedings, “as it is at present impossible to secure a fair trial for the accused.”

However, since an appeal may be filed within five days, the order granting release will not be enforced until the expiry of the five day time-limit.

Mr. Lubanga, the founder and leader of the Union of Congolese Patriots in the Ituri region of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), has been charged with a series of war crimes, including conscripting and enlisting child soldiers into the military wing of his group and then using them to participate in hostilities between September 2002 and August 2003.

His trial was due to have been the first to be held by the ICC.

Ethiopia, Somali forces kill 71 insurgents – TV

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters)

0407/08

Allied Ethiopian-Somali troops in Somalia have killed 71 Islamist insurgents in an operation launched in central regions late last week, Ethiopia’s state television reported.

Hardline Islamists have been waging an 18-month insurgency that has drawn comparisons with Iraq to undermine the interim government and its Ethiopian backers since the rebels were ousted from Mogadishu and most of southern Somalia in 2007.

“The joint Ethiopian army and forces of the Somali Transitional Federal government destroyed a group of 71 terrorists in a military operation launched in Meteban and Gura’el areas on June 29,” the television report quoted a military spokesman as saying late on Thursday.

“A Canadian colonel, who was being sought for international terrorism, and 13 top leaders of the Islamic Courts Union and al Shaabab were among those killed in the operation,” the report said.

Insurgent troops were preparing to launch an offensive around Meteban and Gura’el areas in central Somalia, he said.

But a spokesman of the Islamist movement said only seven fighters were killed and nine others wounded in the clashes.

“The news from the Ethiopian State Agency is totally fabricated,” rebel spokesman Sheikh Abdirahim Issa Adow told Reuters. “We killed many Ethiopians and burnt their military vehicles but they do not admit to that.”

He denied the insurgents had a Canadian colonel in their ranks.

“Ethiopians claimed to have killed Colonel Abdi Ahmed, who we do not know,” Adow said adding that no government soldier was involved in the fighting.

The Horn of Africa country has been in near-perpetual conflict since the 1991 toppling of a dictator.

A Mogadishu-based human rights group said on Wednesday that at least 53 people were killed when the insurgents clashed with Ethiopian troops and Ugandan peacekeepers in separate battles.

Africa – the picture isn’t always black

04/07/08

Paul Hopkins

It is a vast continent where bad news prevails. However, with more trade and investment rather than handouts, Africa could flourish, writes Paul Hopkins

Sometimes progress can seem like one step forward and two steps back. Take Africa. This vast continent only makes it to the news page when the news is bad. Every day now, we are witnessing the murder and mayhem in Zimbabwe as the world stands by and watches its tyrannical leader Robert Mugabe run what was once the breadbasket of southern Africa further into the ground.

Or Kenya with its post-election violence after a suspicious result denied the opposition a likely victory.

Or the ongoing genocide in Darfur, or Somalia or Ethiopia where six million children are said to be in danger of malnutrition.

It’s not a pretty picture and those who see progress as one step forward and two back would argue that the more we do for this continent, the more aid we throw at it, the more our peace-keepers intervene, the worse the situation becomes. That, in short, Africa will never be able to stand on its own two feet.

But, despite these and other obvious ‘black spots’, the continent of Africa has never been in better shape and has never been more ready to take a place on the world stage.

At the turn of the century Africa had an annual growth rate of 3% and political skulduggery, conflicts and wars were an everyday feature for the peoples of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi and Sudan to name just some.

The continent was in danger of being brutally marginalised as globalisation gained momentum.

Today, the picture is a lot better. Sub-Saharan Africa has sustained growth rates in excess of 6% and the conflicts in the Horn of Africa have been stabilised, if not resolved.

There is a peace agreement between north and south Sudan, although the sorry situation in Darfur is the focus of peace-keeping efforts both on the continent and internationally.

Today, there are fewer dictatorships in Africa than at the Millennium and the continent’s self-regulation bodies — the African Union, the New Partnerships for Africa’s Development and the Africa Peer Review Mechanism — have created inroads to political and economic transparency and good governance, despite the sorry situation in Zimbabwe.

According to Freedom House, a non-governmental organisation that monitors democratic processes around the world, the number of free democracies in Africa has tripled from four to 12 since the year 2000 and more than half of the remaining 41 countries are in the transition process towards full and free democracy.

The first post-independence governments in Africa tended to largely mirror the autocracy of the colonial power. Despots, crackpots and tinpot leaders like Emperor Bokasso of the Central African Republic or Uganda’s Idi Amin ended up running one party states and lining their owns pockets at the expense of the ordinary people who suffered as much, if not more, under these systems as they had in the bad old colonial days.

What is happening in the last decade or so — as witnessed in Kenya and Zimbabwe today — is that increasingly the people are trying, more effectively than before, to win the right to govern themselves. This threatens power-holders like Mugabe who no longer have a mandate from the people and so are fighting back, with all the means at their disposal, in the desperate hope of stemming the tide.

In some places they have failed, in others they are winning. But, overall, we are seeing an unprecedented fight between power mongers and the push for democracy. While this battle is often tragically violent, and the good guys don’t always win it, there is now a ground-breaking attempt throughout Africa to move forwards.

In the last decade South Africa has emerged as one of the fastest growing investors in Africa. Led by the private sector, the country is opening mobile phone operators in quantum numbers, supermarkets, pay-TV channels and banks while its petro-chemical companies like Sasol and Petro-SA are involved in energy projects right across the continent.

China’s trade and investment in Africa has exceeded expectations and, while it is going after — some would argue plundering — much-needed minerals and raw materials, it is leaving in its wake a well-defined infrastructure.

The Chinese Export-Import Bank is now the largest lending institution to African countries and is set to surpass the World Bank and the African Development Bank combined in the next three years with some $20bn in infrastructure loans to Ethiopia, Angola and Nigeria.

Africa has oil and the commodity, for the obvious reasons, is being increasingly sought after. The US has declared interests and China now sources 25% of its growing demand for oil from Africa — much of it from Sudan.

Progress on the digital front is phenomenal, with the mobile phone proliferating at a staggering rate.

Internet and mobile usage has doubled every year since the Millennium and has allowed for an explosion of entrepreneurial activity that is creating a grassroots economic revolution in many countries.

The African professional class is contributing to the success of many of the leading industrialised democracies, the secret being to make sure that the benefits of that expertise can be passed down. Witness South Africa with its average growth-rate of 4.7% in the past three years while the rest of the world has been going into recession.

In Zimbabwe there is a highly-educated class, many among the opposition calling for change, others in exile, just waiting to move in when Mugabe is moved out, as are leading potential investors who wait on the sideline to see what happens next.

Last year alone foreign capital inflows into Africa were $38 billion, more than all the foreign aid to the continent.

In the meantime, the G8 leaders have insisted in keeping Africa on the international agenda and again attention has been refocused on the Millennium Development Goals — not least by Gordon Brown who will tell the leaders in Japan next week that they are not doing enough to honour the pledges of 2000 which promises to half poverty and achieve universal primary education by 2015.

There are other problems ahead like the consequences of removing agricultural subsidies and levelling the playing fields on international trade. And the daunting task of increasing food production to feed not just a growing Africa but a growing world.

At the end of the day the world needs to put its money where its mouth is: what is needed to pave the way for an African economic renaissance, and make it sustainable, is more trade and investment rather than more handouts and debt relief.

But, thankfully, it is all a far cry from what was once dubbed the ‘Hopeless Continent’.