Ethiopia

Researchers have some reassuring news for the legions of coffee drinkers who can't get through the day without a latte, cappuccino, iced mocha, double-shot of espresso or a plain old cuppa joe: That coffee habit may help you live longer. A new study that tracked the health and coffee consumption of more than 400,000 older adults for nearly 14 years found that java drinkers were less likely to die during the study than their counterparts who eschewed the brew. In fact, men and women who averaged four or five cups of coffee per day had the lowest risk of death, according to a report in Thursday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Lucy, that starlet among ancient human relatives, may have shared the stage with a hominin very different from herself, a newly discovered fossil suggests. Out of the Ethiopian desert, researchers have unearthed a rare, 3.4-million-year-old partial foot that resembles those belonging to Ardipithecus ramidus , a species thought to have roamed East Africa a million years before Lucy and other members of her species, Australopithecus afarensis . The findings, published in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature, provide the first good evidence that another bipedal human relative was still climbing trees at the same time that Lucy and her kind had their feet planted on the ground.

Here in this medieval city in eastern Ethiopia, the humans and the hyenas are living in peace. The truce began two centuries ago (or so the story goes) during a time of great famine. There was drought in the hills where the wildlife roamed, and hungry hyenas had sneaked into Harar and eaten people. Distressed, the town's Muslim saints convened a meeting on a nearby mountaintop. There, they devised a solution: The people would feed the hyenas porridge if the hyenas would stop their attacks.

At the beginning of her fourth marathon Sunday, 20-year-old Fatuma Sado liked the weather, which was nicer than expected, and her pace, which wouldn't be matched. The Ethiopia native dominated the 27th annual L.A. Marathon, posting a winning time of 2 hours 25 minutes 39 seconds, the fourth-fastest finish in race history and more than two minutes ahead of her personal record. "I am successful running marathons because I train with elite Ethiopian marathoners," she said through an interpreter after earning her second marathon win, following her debut win in Hamburg, Germany, last May. Sado crossed the finish line ahead of Simon Njoroge, the 31-year-old Kenyan who won the men's race in 2:12:12, his seventh marathon win and sixth in his last nine.

The photograph on page 1 (Oct. 29), depicted farmers suffering from the drought and famine that is affecting approximately 600,000 people in Ethiopia. On page 32 of the same edition, Vice President George Bush suggests we can use the tons of surplus corn stockpiled in the Midwest by turning it into low-pollution ethanol fuel. Why don't we send the corn to Ethiopia instead? CECELIA M. MANLEY Los Angeles

Haile Gerima's "Teza" throws you in the deep end and cares little if you swim. The scope of its events is epic; its perception epically narrow. It's a fragmented view of about 20 years of extremely turbulent times in Ethiopia, as seen through the eyes of a seemingly anhedonic intellectual who spends much of the film out of the country. For Americans who have paid little attention to the terrible undulations of power and seemingly endless civil war in countries such as Ethiopia, much of the strife in the film will be only vaguely understood: Marxist idealists abroad celebrate the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, only to find the brave new world to be full of chaos and brutality.

Once more we are being asked to come to the aid of the stricken people of Ethiopia. It would be unconscionable for the wealthiest country in the world to sit back and let people anywhere in the world suffer and die for want of food when we have vast stores of grains and other foodstuffs piling up each year. The people of Ethiopia and other sub-Saharan nations are no less our brothers and sisters than the people in our own communities. Once again we must show the greatness of our spirit and bring food and nourishment to our less fortunate neighbors.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak left Sunday for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to attend the Organization of African Unity summit.

Starbucks Corp. agreed to license Ethiopian coffee, ending a dispute over the country's efforts to trademark its beans. Starbucks, which had resisted Ethiopia's bid for a trademark, will license and distribute coffee from the country's Harar, Sidamo and Yirgacheffe regions, the company and Ethiopia's trademark office said. Starbucks last year wanted Ethiopia to seek the type of geographical certification that protects Italy's Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and France's Bordeaux wines.

Amir Mohamed Meshal, 24, who had been held in Ethiopia on allegations that he had supported Islamic militants, has been released and is home in New Jersey, his family and their lawyer said. "The Meshal family is thrilled that their son Amir has returned home after months of detention without due process," said lawyer Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. Hafetz said the family did not know why Meshal had been released.

Most of Africa's heads of state failed to turn up Thursday for the first African Union donor conference in Ethiopia to raise money for the Horn of Africa famine, leaving activists disappointed with the pledges. Of the African Union's 54 member nations, only the heads of Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea and Djibouti participated in the conference in Addis Ababa, along with the head of the transitional government in Somalia, the country hit hardest by the famine. Critics accused African leaders of failing to make good on their rhetoric about finding African solutions for African problems.

With hunger in the Horn of Africa dramatically worsening, the United Nations on Wednesday added three more regions of Somalia to the list of areas it says are stricken by famine. More than 12 million people are facing starvation, with children particularly vulnerable. The U.N. last month declared that two regions of Somalia were suffering from famine, and it said Wednesday that the famine was likely to spread across most of Somalia in coming months, as well as parts of Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia.

When tourist James Barker had dinner at the home of his Ethiopian hosts, he knew he'd have to be polite and eat whatever indigenous cuisine they offered him. He didn't know it wouldn't be cooked. Ethiopia is "a nation who generally live[s] on raw meat, and it cannot be supposed that they have made great advancement in their cuisine," the Briton wrote in "Narrative of a Journey to Shoa," an 1868 account of his Ethiopian odyssey. Nearly a sesqui-century later, it looks like Barker was prescient.

To save themselves, Rahmo Ibrahim Madey and three of her children escaped on foot this month from southern Somalia's Bakol region — a drought-racked land controlled by the Islamist militants of the Shabab group. Less than 20 miles from their destination, the battered capital of Mogadishu, Madey's 1-year-old daughter, Fadumo, died of starvation. Days later, under a shelter of plastic sheeting and castaway fabric at one of the makeshift refugee camps in the capital, the 29-year-old mother spooned small helpings of porridge into the mouth of her 4-year-old daughter, Batulo.

ETHIOPIA Presentation Author and photographer James Dorsey will share his images and stories in "Africa's Last Wild Tribes: The Omo Valley of Ethiopia. " When, where: 7 p.m. Tuesday at the REI store in Santa Monica, 402 Santa Monica Blvd. Admission, info: Free. (310) 458-4370 BERMUDA Slide show Mort Loveman will present "Bermuda Triangle With NCL. " When, where: 1 p.m. Wednesday at Roxbury Park Community Center, 471 S. Roxbury Drive, Beverly Hills.

Fassil Abebe drives in rush-hour traffic to a bustling stretch of Fairfax Avenue, where the smells of cumin and roasting coffee carry down the street. With handshakes and cries of "Salaam!" he greets a dozen men and women who have gathered in the back room of a friend's restaurant to organize a fundraiser for Seifu Makonnen, a fellow Ethiopian immigrant who is ill. Nearly every month in Los Angeles, Ethiopians host a benefit like this one. Last year, at events for two compatriots with cancer, Abebe's group raised more than $55,000.

Haile Gerima's "Teza" throws you in the deep end and cares little if you swim. The scope of its events is epic; its perception epically narrow. It's a fragmented view of about 20 years of extremely turbulent times in Ethiopia, as seen through the eyes of a seemingly anhedonic intellectual who spends much of the film out of the country. For Americans who have paid little attention to the terrible undulations of power and seemingly endless civil war in countries such as Ethiopia, much of the strife in the film will be only vaguely understood: Marxist idealists abroad celebrate the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, only to find the brave new world to be full of chaos and brutality.

On the sloping western shores of Lake Tana in central Ethiopia, where villagers gape at new tractors as if they were Ferraris and power lines pass over lean-tos lighted by candles, a poor nation's hopes hum inside a new hydroelectric plant. Lured by the plant's promise of powering villages and irrigating 350,000 acres of farmland, intrepid investors are venturing across misty hills and navigating sprawling savannas. The World Bank has lent the country $45 million to "unleash" the region's growth potential, and Ethiopian leaders have promised that development along the tributaries feeding the Blue Nile will raise crops for the hungry and bring jobs to a rustic swath of Africa.