Melat Yante, Miss Ethiopia 2009, gets a kiss from Cassie the Sea Lion while in Dolphin Cay at ATLANTIS, Paradise Island, Bahamas, August 6, 2009. Melat will represent Ethiopia the 58th annual Miss Universe competition being held in the Bahamas.Can she be the successor to the Venezuelan Dayana Mendoza? The... [view entry]

Naomi Sims had long legs and an angular face and a sweet smile. These were her assets. She also had silky dark skin. This was her crippling liability. Sims, who grew up in foster homes in Pittsburgh, had earned a scholarship to New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. Classmates urged... [view entry]

Famed Oromigna pop star Ali Birra denied he is quitting music, even though his newly released album was advertised as his last one. In an interview with Tadias Addis’s Siefu Fantahun last night, Ali said he has no plan to quit music and added he will be making more albums... [view entry]

Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter, has said claims from the Catholic Church in England that social networking “dehumanises” community life are “silly”. Archbishop Vincent Nichols, head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, last week said he was worried about the influence social networking sites were having on... [view entry]

I have had a chance to see her solo and group exhibitions a couple of times. Her works are memorable and evocative, with a sense of color and the subjects who are mostly tall, skinny and decorated women. You could see that she was an artist with an eye for... [view entry]

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says it will be up to her daughter Chelsea whether to accept a Kenyan man’s offer of livestock in return for Chelsea’s hand in marriage. The Kenyan man’s offer of 40 goats and 20 cows was first made in 2000, in a letter to... [view entry]

The celebrated French newspaper, Le Monde, gave a positive coverage of the Ethiopian grooves performance at Fiest’A Sète Sète. The paper on its online edition was full of admiration for the Ethiopian performers Getachew Mekuria who paired with the EX and Mulatu Astatke who performed with the Heliocentric. The relationship... [view entry]

Scores of protesters gathered outside a Sudanese courtroom Tuesday as the trial of a woman who faces 40 lashes for wearing clothes deemed indecent was postponed. Lubna al-Hussein, who says she was arrested for wearing pants that were too tight, faces a new trial date of September 7, her attorney... [view entry]

The Executive Director of the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA), Mahdere Paulos has reportedly gone into hiding. According to Ethio-Chanel, a pro-government newspaper, Mahdere is currently in Kenya and might have fled the country after the government accused her organization of providing ‘false information’ to American State Department, whose human... [view entry]

( Portrait of Billie Holiday, 23 Mar 1949 Carl Van Vechten) Along with the cinema, jazz is one of the most important artistic achievements of the 20th century. Since its emergence in the early years of the last century, America’s highly original contribution to the history of music has marked... [view entry]