Ato Amanuel Zeleke, a resident of Hawassa has become a local celebrity. His claim to fame? He insists he discovered the earth is flat long before it was cool on TikTok, and he has the injera and aliens to prove it. “It was simple,” Ato Amanuel explains, his voice booming with confidence. My mother was making injera, flipping it in the air. I thought, ‘What is on the other side?’ Just like injera, the earth is flat, with holes on the bottom from space rocks. He claims this culinary epiphany occurred at the tender age of seven, years before flat-earth theories began circulating online.  However, Ato Amanuel’s evidence extends beyond the kitchen. He recounts encounters with extraterrestrial visitors who share his passion for Ethiopian cuisine. “They loved genfo,” he says, his eyes twinkling at the memory, “They kept coming back for more. Gursha, they couldn’t manage, with their three fingers, but genfo, they loved it!” Unfortunately, this intergalactic blueprint was not available for viewing. Despite his lack of “official” scientific credentials (he claims to have lost his professorship at Haramaya University for exposing the “truth”),  Ato Amanuel remains undeterred. “I deserve Nobel Prize,” he declares with unwavering conviction. His story has garnered amusement and bewilderment in equal measure. While his claims are demonstrably false, his unwavering belief and the sheer absurdity of his reasoning have made him a local legend.  He is a walking reminder that sometimes, the most outlandish ideas can be the most entertaining. In a final twist, Ato Amanuel revealed his plans for the future.  He is currently working on a new theory: the sun is actually a giant, spherical injera, perpetually flipping in the cosmos, providing warmth and light to the flat earth below. 

ADAMA, ETHIOPIA—Wegebe Tadese (62), a resident of Adama, has become a local enigma. He has dedicated the last 37 years to pushing a massive boulder up a desolate hill on the outskirts of town. This Sisyphean task, which has resulted in numerous hospitalizations for severe back pain, exhaustion, and a peculiar incident involving a startled goat,…

Tigist Yifraw, a third-year Political Science undergraduate is suing Eastern-Occidental University, a small private liberal arts college, for years of personal pain and suffering. The affair started out as a complaint Tigist filed with the student-teacher affairs committee for what she claimed was the repeated use of an offensive term in a lecture. The lecture…

An 11-year-old from the small town of Anbi Tolo, in the Western Ethiopian region, won $500 as the national champion in the competitive national Spelling Bee competitions. The contest took place at Sheraton Hotel in Addis Ababa (ሰኞ, መጋቢት 26 2014). The final three contestants battled to spell the Amharic word for “fact” (haq). Two…