Amoateng’s Fate To Be "Finally" Decided…

The Speaker of Parliament, Ebenezer Begyina Sekyi-Hughes has directed that concerns on the prolonged absence of Eric Amoateng, NPP MP for Nkoranza North should be settled with the leadership of the House. The directive was in response to questions raised by Alfred Agbesi- NDC-Ashaiman and Haruna Iddrisu, NDC Tamale South, on what the House intended to do about the long absence of the member of the House.Eric Amoateng and another Ghanaian Nii Okai Adjei are facing charges of conspiracy to transport and distributing heroin in the United States contrary to Federal Law and have both pleaded not guilty. Meanwhile Parliament on Friday rose for the Christmas break and is expected to reconvene on January 30, 2007. Five outstanding Bills have been scheduled to be considered during the next Meeting of Parliament.The bills are the Criminal Code (Amendment), the Domestic Violence, the Transfer of Convicted Persons, the Data Processing Control Board Decree (Repeal), Central Securities Depositary and the Restriction on the Use of Military Uniforms and Equipment (Amendment) Bills.Mr Felix Owusu-Adjapong, Majority Leader and Minister of Parliamentary Affairs, listed the outstanding Bills when he presented the proposed business statement for the first week of the next meeting. The Minister said all outstanding business and referrals, which were not completed at the end of the Second Session, would be referred to the succeeding meeting. He said work would be carried out on the electrical system of the Chamber Block during the recess.Meanwhile, the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) on Friday presented to Parliament a copy each of the Hansard from January 1993 to December 1995, and proceedings of the Consultative Assembly, that drafted the 1992 Constitution, 40 pocket size copies of the 1992 Ghanaian Constitution and two reference copies of Erskine May on Parliamentary Practice.
Source:GHP

TANZANIA ENJOYS FRUITS OF CO-OPERATION

By Rebecca Wanjiku,

When Peter Ulanga was invited to visit Brazil, last year, he knew that something was going to change in the management of dot Tz country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD).

Ulanga, and a colleague, Peter Shilla, benefited from training offered by the Brazilian government on management of domain name registries using open source software.

Within two years of the training, Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority is ready to launch the dot Tz ccTLD registry. The domain has been administered by the University of Dar es Salaam and individuals.

`The training worked well, we have bought necessary equipment and we are ready to launch Tanzania Network Information Centre, TzNIC,` said Ulanga.

Ulanga says that the training was useful and the tests were successful. He added that it will now be easier to register domains and if there are any problems, then there is a central point to channel complaints.
Tanzania benefitted from the south/south solidarity spearheaded by the South American power house. Kenya was the first to train on how to use the software, Tanzania soon followed suit, while Mozambique and Sudan are lining up for the services.
The gesture by the Brazilian government was calculated to ensure that Africa can access the less costly open source software solutions and transform African registries from manual to automation.
At the on-going Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(ICANN) conference, in Sao Paulo, renowned Brazilian Professor Hartmut Glaser could not hide his joy while confirming that he had been invited by the Tanzanian government to witness the fruits of his government´s generosity.
Apart from the training, Brazil offered technical assistance to the recipient countries in case of any problems with the software or even any technical hitches in their operations.
The drive to foster south/south cooperation started in 2002 when Brazil sent engineers to Togo to train local counterparts from more than 20 countries gathered in Lome.
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Finding Unity in Diversity

By Rebecca Wanjiku
African participants at Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(ICANN) meeting in Sao Paulo have formed a unified body that with articulate issues from participants drawn from various sectors.

Africa Regional At Large Organisation (AFRALO) will unite users wishing to articulate their issues to ICANN. AFRALO is expected to link Africa to the global At Large Organisation within ICANN.

Alice Munyua, a member of ICANN´s At Large Organisation says AFRALO will help Africa identify their peculiar issues and call attention to the global body.

¨Through the regional body, African users can identify their challenges and design ways to deal with them. For instance, if the fibre optic cable is laid, then more people can access the internet and then we can deal with other problems other than access,¨said Munyua.

With the growing mobile telephony and cutting edge technology that provides internet via mobile, Munyua says AFRALO will ensure that African voices are heard.

Though not officially launched, preparations of a Memorandum of Understanding are in top gear.

AFRALO is expected to face challenges of language and culture, multiplicity and diversity of digital challenges. Some countries are deemed to have developed ICT infrastructure while others have not.

Munyua expects all countries to meet and point out issues that affect all sectors and the changes they would like to see. The country representatives/ liasons will forward to AFRALO which will then link with the global body.

She recognises that it will be hard to reach consensus because of the diverse interests but she promises AFRALO will work hard to adequately represent african users.
Latin America and the Caribbean have already formed LAC-RALO ( Latin America and the Caribbean Regional At-Large Organisation) which is expected to maximize participation of user groups from the region
Paul Twomey ICANN president, told delegates during the opening ceremony that LAC-RALO will be the third Latin American organisation to help ICANN in its work. The other two are LACTLD (Regional ccTLD managers) and LACNIC (Regional Internet Registry for Latin America ).
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calling African Scholars

Calling African Scholars
By Rebecca Wanjiku

African scholars interested in developing and preserving indigenous languages have been challenged to take the lead in the Internationalised Domain Name (IDN) debate.


Prof. Maxime Z. Somé, from the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso called on African linguists to actively participate in the IDN project.

`Scientists and scholars should constitute themselves as an exceptional authority in African affairs and move the project forward, said Some.

Some is concerned that Cambodia, Japan, China, Korea and Arabic countries seem to be moving at a faster pace and leaving Africa behind.

In his opinion, linguistic experts as well as scientists in Africa should work together and move the agenda forward. He added that the IDN project requires linguists to agree on the language and terminologies of a particular language and the scientists to work on the technological aspects.

After the agreement of the scripts and language tables, the UNICODE consortium, which consists of computer makers and other bodies, will be expected to integrate the languages into most computers sold to the Africa region.

In this regard, if I have a computer, I can choose the language to use, just like I select to use French or German. In the case of French, the computer inserts the right accents and other letters that may not be available in the English key board.

Asked whether this will lead to development of many key boards, Some says experts can work on some regional languages like Bambara, used in Guinea, Mali, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso or Fulani, used in Nigeria, Senegal, Mauritania and Mali.

`We know that this project requires a lot of financial commitment and big businesses are not going to invest if not assured of profits. That leaves governments, which have been very non committal, ` he adds.

But he maintains that scholars can jumpstart the process by learning from other countries where experts volunteered their services for the sake of development.

Some spoke at the ongoing Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN) meeting in Sao Paulo, where the urgency of IDNs has taken
centre stage and its proponents are touting it as a solution to communication problems.

While there are workshops and follow-up meetings to discuss and update on issues relating to IDNs, Africa is stuck with the obsession of listing its numerous cultural and logistical problems as the hindrance to IDN progress.

In 2004, Adama Samassekou, head of the African Academy of Languages was quoted saying there was lethargy within African leadership to use local languages even at Africa Unity meetings Swahili was recommended in 1986
but was used at the AU meeting in July 2004. Swahili is widely spoken in 15
East and Central African countries.
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Have Camera Phone? Yahoo and Reuters Want You to Work for Their News Service

Hoping to turn the millions of people with digital cameras and camera phones into photojournalists, Yahoo and Reuters are introducing a new effort to showcase photographs and video of news events submitted by the public.
Starting tomorrow, the photos and videos submitted will be placed throughout Reuters.com and Yahoo News, the most popular news Web site in the United States , according to comScore MediaMetrix. Reuters said that it would also start to distribute some of the submissions next year to the thousands of print, online and broadcast media outlets that subscribe to its news service. Reuters said it hoped to develop a service devoted entirely to user-submitted photographs and video.
“There is an ongoing demand for interesting and iconic images,” said Chris Ahearn, the president of the Reuters media group. He said the agency had always bought newsworthy pictures from individuals and part-time contributors known as stringers.
“This is looking out and saying, ‘What if everybody in the world were my stringers?’ ” Mr. Ahearn said.
The project is among the most ambitious efforts in what has become known as citizen journalism, attempts by bloggers, start-up local news sites and by global news organizations like CNN and the BBC to see if readers can also become reporters.
Many news organizations turned to photographs taken by amateurs to supplement coverage of events like the London subway bombing and the Asian tsunami. Yahoo’s news division has already used images that were originally posted on Flickr, the company’s photo-sharing site. For example, it created a slide show of images from Thailand after the coup there in September.
Camera phone videos are increasingly making news themselves. Michael Richards, the actor who played Kramer on “Seinfeld,” was recorded last month responding to hecklers in a nightclub with racially charged epithets. The video was posted on TMZ, the celebrity news site.
The Yahoo-Reuters project will create a systematic way to incorporate images covering a wider range of topics into news coverage.
Starting tomorrow, users will be able to upload photos and videos to a section of Yahoo called You Witness News (news.yahoo.com/page/youwitnessnews). All of the submissions will appear on Flickr or a similar site for video. Editors at both Reuters and Yahoo will review the submissions and select some to place on pages with relevant news articles, just as professional photographs and video clips are woven into their news sites today.
“People don’t say, ‘I want to see user-generated content,’ ” said Lloyd Braun, who runs Yahoo’s media group. “They want to see Michael Richards in the club. If that happens to be from a cellphone, they are happy with a cellphone. If it’s from a professional photographer, they are happy for that, too.”
Users will not be paid for images displayed on the Yahoo and Reuters sites. But people whose photos or videos are selected for distribution to Reuters clients will receive a payment. Mr. Ahearn said the company had not yet figured out how to structure those payments. The basic payment may be relatively small, but he said Reuters was likely to pay more to people offering exclusive rights to images of major events. For now, no money is changing hands between Yahoo and Reuters, but if Reuters is able to create a separate news service with the user-created material, it will split the revenue with Yahoo.
Before photographs or videos are used on the Yahoo site or distributed by Reuters, photo editors at Reuters will try to vet them to weed out fraudulent or retouched images.
This is an imperfect process. Last summer, a blogger discovered that photos of the conflict in Lebanon by a freelance photographer working for Reuters had been digitally altered. Reuters stopped using the photographer and withdrew his work from its archive. The company is now trying to develop software that will help detect altered photographs.
The arrangement with Yahoo is one of several initiatives by Reuters to use the Internet to bring new sources to its news report. It has invested $7 million in Pluck, a company that distributes content from blogs to newspapers and other traditional media outlets. It has also backed two more experimental ventures: NewAssignment.net, an effort to foster reporting that combines the work of professional journalists with input from online readers, and Global Voices, a collection of blogs from less-developed countries.
Yahoo has its own ambitious plans for the You Witness News service. The images received will be used on its sports and entertainment sites. Over time, it wants to expand to local news and high school sports. And it will consider allowing users to contribute articles as well as images. For now, both Yahoo and Reuters are concerned that they do not have the resources to edit and verify such articles.
“News has special constraints on content quality,” said Elizabeth Osder, a senior director for product development at Yahoo. “If we publish text, we want to review it.”
CNN, which is owned by Time Warner and introduced its I-Reports section for user-submitted material on its site in August (www.cnn.com/exchange/), accepts text, images and video. Some submissions are included in its news broadcasts.
“Even the best reporters in most cases are approaching the story from the outside in,” said Mitch Gelman, the executive producer of CNN.com. “What a participant observer can offer is the perspective on that story from the inside out. We feel as a news organization we need to provide both to offer full coverage to our audience.”
Yahoo and Reuters will have other competitors besides mainstream news organizations when it comes to attracting submissions. People with compelling video, for example, may want the instant gratification of putting it on YouTube, the giant video site owned by Google, or some other site.
“The average person witnesses something that is considered news once every 10 years,” said Steve Rosenbaum, who created MTV Unfiltered, one of the first viewer-contributed video programs on television. “When it’s time to put something on the Internet, they will put it in the place they have used before. The numbers tell us that is YouTube.”
Indeed, Yahoo has had some trouble attracting submissions for another high-profile initiative, an effort to solicit videos for a site created jointly with Current, the cable network started by former Vice President Al Gore. As of Friday, that site is no longer accepting new videos.
Moreover, said Mr. Rosenbaum, who now runs Magnify Media, which helps Web sites post video contributions, it might be difficult to get the right sort of submissions.
“If you are asking your audience to know what is a national news story of interest to the world, it seems to me there are only two results: whether you get flooded with lots of car fires, or you get nothing. Neither is a particularly good effect.”

UN Humanitarian Response Depot for West Africa to be sited in Accra

Government and the World Food Programme (WFP) on Tuesday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to locate the United Nations Humanitarian Response Depot (UNHRD) in Accra to serve the West African Sub-Region. The decision to locate the UN Humanitarian Depot in Accra makes Ghana a key partner in the humanitarian logistics chain, delivering sustenance and succour in the world, which is overburdened with several avoidable conflicts. Signing on behalf of the Government, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, Minister of Foreign Affairs and NEPAD, underscored Ghana's commitment to a continued collaboration with the WFP in order to make the Humanitarian Response Depot a reality. "Our aim is to assist the WFP to respond promptly to multiple disasters on the scale of the South-East Asian Tsunami; the drought in Niger; the famine in Darfur; the Pakistani earthquake or the effect of land slide in the Philippines," he said. Nana Akufo-Addo said Ghana's choice was an indication of the confidence that the international community reposed in the country as an area of peace and stability in a region that had in the recent past been unfortunately bedevilled by various civil wars and ethnic strife. He said: "Ghana will continue to engage actively other actors on the international scene for the necessary collaboration to find lasting solution to the current situation in Cote d'Ivoire and Somalia, the ongoing tragedy in Darfur in the Sudan and the Israeli Palestinian conflict in the Middle East. Mr Mustapha Darboe, Regional Director of WFP, who represented the Executive Director of the WFP, Mr James Morris at the signing ceremony, noted that the number and frequency of cataclysmic natural disasters had increased significantly over the past decade. He said in 2005, the WFP, which is the food aid arm of the UN system, distributed four million tonnes of food to 96.7 million people in 82 countries. West Africa, Mr Darboe said ‘is faced with triple threats of poverty, food insecurity and civil conflicts’ and noted: "While Liberia and Sierra Leone were recovering from decades of conflicts, the situation in Cote d'Ivoire is still of concern." He said the WFP had supported Ghana for three years since the early 1990s and as such she was selected for the West Africa UNHRD for its strategic location, access to air, land and sea routes, stability and commitment to regional stability through the Kofi Annan Peacekeeping Centre.GNA

ARB Apex bank expands tentacles

The ARB Apex Bank, the umbrella body of all rural banks in the country is to expand its network to reach out to more people in the rural areas. The Bank would carry this mandate through the intensification of special support to distressed/marginal rural banks to enable them to better serve the rural folks. Mr Emmanuel Kwapong, Managing Director of the Bank, who announced this during a brief meeting with the President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Mr Lennart Bage; said new rural banks would be established in the Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regions. He said linkages would be promoted between rural banks and other rural micro-finance institutions as well as offer training in agricultural lending; credit management; financial literacy for women and product development. Mr Kwapong said appropriate funds mobilization of products and products targeting rural women would be developed as part of the new innovation of the Bank. He said ARB Apex was to establish an inspection unit to enable it undertake effective off-site and on-site inspection of the rural banks to ensure sound financial operations. The Managing Director expressed appreciation to the IFAD, which had so far supported the Apex Bank with 11 million dollars under the Rural Financial Services Project (RFSP). Giving an overview of the Bank's operations over the past five years, Mr Kwapong said its total assets as at 2005 was 2.26 billion cedis while total deposits and total loans stood at 1.68 billion cedis and 7.75 billion cedis, respectively. Its net worth increased from 73.3 million cedis in 2001 to 830.64 million cedis in 2005. Its stated capital increased from 9.58 million cedis in 2001 to 54.12 million cedis in 2005. Mr Bage lauded the Bank's achievements over the years and asked the Management to intensify operations to assist rural banks to make access to credit cheaper to rural farmers. He urged the Management to further develop more attractive products and specifically mentioned insurance products for the rural populace.GNA