Joanna Lumley OBE talks with Mulugeta Asrate Kassa Ethiopian embassy official

Ethiopia’s economic debate is increasingly shaped not by what appears in the national budget, but…

An investigation into how Jeffrey Epstein’s tentacles reached Ethiopia, and what it reveals about power, complicity, and the global reckoning with sexual predation

My concern is not purely academic. Two years ago, I lost my cousin. He was jogging early one morning near his residence in the Bole area when he was brutally murdered. He was an accomplished surgeon who had practiced medicine internationally, including in Greece and Bulgaria. To the best of my knowledge, he was not politically active and had no known personal enemies. His killers were never identified, and the limited public information surrounding the investigation has deepened the family’s sense of unresolved grief.

The World Bank never projected 9.3 per cent growth for Ethiopia. Their January 2026 Global Economic Prospects report clearly states 7.2 per cent for calendar year 2026. That’s not a rounding error, it’s a 2.1 percentage point discrepancy that represents tens of billions of birr in economic activity. Development economists who have followed Ethiopia’s trajectory note that this difference is enormously significant in real-world terms.

Dr. Jarecki describes Berhanu Nega as “the Epstein scholar for 2008”, and adds that he had been elected mayor of Addis Ababa before being jailed two years prior. Epstein’s reply is immediate, and it is telling though not in the way many have assumed. He is dismissive of Berhanu Nega’s intellectual standing: “He is hardly a scholar if any note no new theories, no new economic ideas, in fact not one of the top 50,000 economists in the world.” But then the tone shifts. The email takes a sharper, more provocative turn: “However, if you want to fund rebellion without all the easily seen through grandiose facade of scholar rescue, I’m in.”