A new report released by the Somalian government suggests that far more children died in the country last year due to the ongoing drought than previously realised.
The study estimates that there were 43,000 excess deaths in 2022 in Somalia due to the deepening drought compared with similar droughts in 2017 and 2018.
Half of the deaths are likely to have been children under five. Up to 34,000 further deaths have been forecast for the first six months of this year.
Released on Monday by Somalia’s federal health ministry together with Unicef and the World Health Organization, the report was compiled by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London, who looked at retrospective estimates of mortality across Somalia from January to December 2022.
Accurate statistics are difficult to compile from a population spread across remote areas, and with about three million people displaced from their homes. The highest death rates are thought to be in the regions of south-central Somalia, including Bay, Bakool and Banadir, that are the worst hit by drought.
Somalia’s health minister, Dr Ali Hadji Adam Abubakar, found cause for optimism that famine had so far been averted.
“We continue to be concerned about the level and scale of the public health impact of this deepening and protracted food crisis in Somalia,” he said.
“At the same time, we are optimistic that if we can sustain our ongoing and scaled-up health and nutrition actions, and humanitarian response to save lives and protect the health of our vulnerable, we can push back the risk of famine for ever.”
If this did not happen, he said, “the vulnerable and marginalised will pay the price of this crisis with their lives.”
“We therefore urge all our partners and donors to continue to support the health sector in building a resilient health system that works for everyone and not for the few,” said Abubakar.
For the first time, a prediction model was developed from the study. A forecast from January to June 2023 estimates that 135 people a day might also die due to the crisis, with total deaths projected at being between 18,100 and 34,200 during this period.
The estimates suggest the crisis in Somalia is far from over and is already more severe than the 2017-18 drought.
Wafaa Saeed, Unicef’s representative in Somalia, said he was saddened by the grim picture of the drought’s impact on families, but added: “We know there could have been many more deaths had humanitarian assistance not been scaled up to reach affected communities.
“We must continue to save lives by preventing and treating malnutrition, providing safe and clean water, improving access to lifesaving health services, immunising children against deadly diseases such as measles, and providing critical protection services.”
There have now been six consecutive failed rainy seasons in the climate crisis-induced drought, which coincides with global food price rises, intensified insecurity in some regions, and the aftermath of the pandemic.
The study is the first in a planned series and was funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
‘You’re looking to die’: the Brazil river where illegal fishing threatens lives | Brazil
José Maria Batista Damasceno weeps as he describes his decades dodging death in the Brazilian Amazon.
There was the time, along the Japurá River, that an illegal fisherman threatened to butcher him if he didn’t get out of town. “You’d better leave or we’ll harpoon you,” Damasceno remembers being told.
A few years later he narrowly escaped being ambushed and murdered in another remote corner of the rainforest – just as Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips were last year.
“It was really, really heavy,” Damasceno says, breaking down as he describes how the failure of his boat’s engine saved him from running into a group of heavily armed assassins who were lying in wait.
Damasceno isn’t an Indigenous activist or journalist, like Pereira and Phillips, whose killings exposed the environmental battle raging deep in South America’s rainforests.
He is a fishing engineer who has dedicated his life to convincing small riverside communities that sustainable fishing programs will benefit them more than the quick, short-term profits offered by the illegal fishing mafias that pillage the region’s rivers and Indigenous lands.
José Maria Batista Damasceno, the fisheries engineer in charge of the pirarucu fish management project in the São Rafael community, the last stop of Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips, before they were ambushed and killed in a deserted stretch of the Itaguaí River. Photograph: João Laet/The Guardian
Those efforts to encourage green living have put Damasceno on the wrong side of environmental criminals, yet he insists on fighting on.
“I’ve always relied on God to protect me from evil – and here I am carrying on with my mission,” says the softly spoken sustainable fishing evangelist, who recently travelled to the region where Pereira and Phillips were killed hoping to promote sustainable fishing there.
In the wake of last year’s killings, members of Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right government portrayed the crime as the fruit of a local conflict unconnected to the devastation inflicted on the Amazon by his anti-environmental policies and dismantling of Indigenous protections.
But the killings exposed a far uglier reality: the rampant and highly lucrative illegal trade in fish and wildlife that plagues Brazil’s isolated and lawless tri-border with Colombia and Peru.
At the centre of that trade is Atalaia do Norte, the shabby, poverty-stricken river town where Pereira and Phillips began their final journey on 2 June last year.
The port of Atalaia do Norte, where Pereira and Phillips began their journey together last year. Photograph: João Laet/The Guardian
As the nearest town to the entrance of the Javari valley territory, Brazil’s second largest Indigenous reserve, Atalaia serves as a base for the Indigenous activists on whose work Phillips was reporting when he was killed. Its potholed streets offer an astonishing snapshot of the cultural and linguistic diversity of a region which is home to six Indigenous peoples, including the Matis and the Marubo, as well as 16 groups with little or no contact with the outside world.
After visiting Atalaia last year, congressional investigators concluded that “heavily armed and wealthy criminal associations” and “highly dangerous criminals” had set up camp in the region, bankrolling groups of illegal fishermen who plunder the protected waters and forests of the Indigenous reserve where wildlife is more abundant.
“We are certain that illegal fishing in the Javari valley region isn’t about river-dwellers trying to make a living but actually much larger organizations, making sizable investments and outrageous profits,” the investigators wrote.
Quick Guide
What is the Bruno and Dom project?
Show
What is the Bruno and Dom project?
Bruno Pereira, a Brazilian Indigenous expert and Dom Phillips, a British journalist and longtime Guardian contributor, were killed on the Amazon’s Itaquaí River last June while returning from a reporting trip to the remote Javari Valley region.
The attack prompted international outcry, and cast a spotlight on the growing threat to the Amazon posed by extractive industries, both legal and illegal, such as logging, poaching, mining and cattle ranching.
A year after their deaths, the Guardian has joined 15 other international news organisations in a collaborative investigation into organised crime and resource extraction in the Brazilian Amazon. The initiative has been coordinated by Forbidden Stories, the Paris-based non-profit whose mission is to continue the work of reporters who are threatened, censored or killed.
The goal of the project is to honour and pursue the work of Bruno and Dom, to foreground the importance of the Amazon and its people, and to suggest possible ways to save the Amazon.
Who was Bruno Pereira?
Pereira, 41, was a former employee of the Indigenous agency Funai where he led efforts to protect the isolated and uncontacted tribes who live in the Brazilian Amazon. After being sidelined from his post soon after the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro came to power, Pereira went to work with the Javari Valley Indigenous association Univaja, helping create Indigenous patrol teams to stop illegal poachers, miners and loggers invading their protected lands.
Who was Dom Phillips?
Phillips, 57, was a longtime contributor to the Guardian who had lived in Brazil for 15 years. A former editor of the dance magazine Mixmag, he developed a deep interest in environmental issues, covering the link between logging, mining, the beef industry and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. His reporting brought him into contact with Pereira, and in 2018 the pair took part in a 17-day expedition deep into the Javari Valley. In 2021 he took a year off to start writing a book, titled How to Save the Amazon. His return to the Javari was to have been the last reporting trip for the project.
What is the Javari Valley?
Sitting on Brazil’s border with Peru and Colombia, the Javari Valley Indigenous Reservation is a Portugal-sized swathe of rainforest and rivers which is home to about 6,000 Indigenous people from the Kanamari, Kulina, Korubo, Marubo, Matis, Mayoruna and Tsohom-dyapa groups, as well as 16 isolated groups.
It is also a hotspot for poachers, fishers and illegal loggers, prompting violent conflicts between the Indigenous inhabitants and the riverside communities which fiercely opposed the reservation’s creation in 2001. Its strategic location makes it a key route for smuggling cocaine between Peru, Colombia and Brazil.
What happened to Pereira and Philips?
On 2 June 2022, Pereira and Phillips travelled up the Itaquaí River from the town of Atalaia do Norte to report on efforts to stop illegal fishing. Two days later, members of the Indigenous patrol team with whom Pereira and Phillips were travelling were threatened by an illegal fisher. Early on 5 June, the pair set out on the return leg before dawn, hoping to safely pass a river community that was home to several known poachers.
They never arrived, and after a search by teams of local Indigenous activists, their remains were discovered on 15 June.
Three fishers are being held in high-security prisons awaiting trial for the killings: brothers Amarildo and Oseney da Costa de Oliveira and a third man, Jefferson da Silva Lima.
Federal police have alleged that a fourth man, nicknamed Colombia, was the mastermind of the killings.
Bruno Pereira’s attempts to fight that illegal trade by organizing Indigenous patrol teams put him on a collision course with such criminals. “It’s because of this that Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were killed,” a friend and former colleague, Armando Soares, told Forbidden Stories, the Paris-based non-profit coordinating the Bruno and Dom project. Earlier this year police named an alleged local illegal fishing boss as the mastermind behind the crime.
The Javari valley’s most prized asset is the arapaima, a giant air-breathing fish which Brazilians call the pirarucu and Peruvians know as paiche. One of the world’s largest freshwater fish, the arapaima can grow up to three metres (10ft) in length and often weighs about 90kg (200lb). It is considered a delicacy in major Latin American cities such as Lima, São Paulo and Bogotá.
Years of unregulated overfishing have pummeled arapaima stocks in the waters outside the Javari’s protected Indigenous lands – which outsiders are forbidden from entering without permission and where commercial fishing is banned. As a result poachers have increasingly taken to invading the territory to extract huge boat-fulls of the fish, as well as a river turtle called the tracajá.
A boat filled with pirarucu which was seized and picked up by police. The prized fish can grow up to 10ft in length. Photograph: Cícero Pedrosa Neto/Amazônia Real
“They use small boats and travel in small groups,” said Orlando Possuelo, an Indigenous expert who is continuing Pereira’s work with the patrol groups battling to thwart such invaders. “They are specialists in the area. Many of them were born in there [before the territory was officially created in 2001] so it’s not easy to find them.”
After being smuggled out of the Indigenous territory in wooden barges packed with ice, the fish are sold in a constellation of border towns including Leticia in Colombia, Islandia in Peru and Benjamin Constant, an edgy river town near Atalaia named after one of the founders of the Brazilian republic.
A year-long investigation by Forbidden Stories found that the illegal trade continues to flourish in the tri-border region between Brazil, Colombia and Peru, despite government pledges to stamp out environmental crime following last year’s killings. None of the three countries there have rigid controls over the origin of the arapaima being sold.
Brazil has yet to reopen the offices of its environmental agency, Ibama, in Tabatinga, the city nearest to the Javari, after it was shut down in 2019. Peru’s regional production department has no fishing inspectors in Santa Rosa de Yavarí, the Peruvian town across the river from Tabatinga. And Colombian authorities do not control the quantity of fish being caught by the 40 companies registered to operate in Leticia, on the Colombian side of the border.
Outside scrutiny is unwelcome. “There’s nothing here. You’re looking to fucking die,” one man warned a reporter from Peru’s OjoPúblico, one of 16 media outlets involved in the Bruno and Dom project, when he visited a riverside fishing warehouse in the Colombian border town looking for illegal fish.
Activists say the almost complete lack of controls means the illegal fishing trade continues to thrive despite the international scandal caused by the killings of Pereira and Phillips.
“I don’t think anything has changed,” said Possuelo, remembering how Indigenous activists received reports of illegal poachers operating within the Javari territory even in the days after the two men vanished on 5 June last year.
Despite the risks, Damasceno said he was determined to continue with his crusade to bring sustainable fishing to some of the most isolated and dangerous corners of the Brazilian Amazon, where he was born and raised.
Pirarucu fish on sale in a market in Leticia, Colombia. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Guardian
Now 65, the fishing engineer plans to retire after what will be his last – and perhaps most difficult – assignment: implementing such projects in São Rafael, São Gabriel and Ladário, the three fishing communities from which the alleged killers of Pereira and Phillips came.
Doing so involves helping those communities set up three different kinds of lakes that will help local pirarucu stocks recover and, hopefully, stop fishermen invading Indigenous lands: “permanent protection lakes” where fishing is forbidden, “maintenance lakes” which local families can fish to feed themselves, and “management lakes” where a quota of up to 30% of adult fish can be legally extracted after their numbers have reached certain levels. “So if there are 100 fish you can take 30, so stocks can recover,” Damasceno said.
The fishing engineer argued sustainable fishing was the only way to avoid further violence along the Itaquaí River and help deprived local families resist the temptation of supplying fish for organized crime. As proof that it was possible, he remembered how the fisherman who once threatened to harpoon him had since embraced sustainable fishing and become a close friend.
“I always say that sustainable fishing is the way out of this kind of conflict. It unites people. It raises awareness. It opens the door to equality, rights and acceptance,” insisted Damasceno, who hopes to retire to write a book about the pirarucu once his mission is complete. He plans to call it: “The union of people and sustainability in the Amazon.”
On a recent trip to the fishing villages near where Pereira and Phillips were killed, Damasceno urged locals to embrace the idea of legal, long-term survival rather than short-term, illegal gain.
“Lift up your heads. You must carry on,” he told them. “Think of your kids.”
Additional reporting by Ana Ionova (The Guardian), Rodrigo Pedroso (OjoPúblico) and Cécile Andrzejewski and Mariana Abreu (Forbidden Stories)
Prof Saurabh Bagchi from Purdue University explains the purpose of AI black boxes and why researchers are moving towards ‘explainable AI’.
For some people, the term ‘black box’ brings to mind the recording devices in airplanes that are valuable for postmortem analyses if the unthinkable happens. For others, it evokes small, minimally outfitted theatres. But ‘black box’ is also an important term in the world of artificial intelligence.
AI black boxes refer to AI systems with internal workings that are invisible to the user. You can feed them input and get output, but you cannot examine the system’s code or the logic that produced the output.
Machine learning is the dominant subset of artificial intelligence. It underlies generative AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2. There are three components to machine learning: an algorithm or a set of algorithms, training data and a model.
An algorithm is a set of procedures. In machine learning, an algorithm learns to identify patterns after being trained on a large set of examples – the training data. Once a machine-learning algorithm has been trained, the result is a machine-learning model. The model is what people use.
For example, a machine-learning algorithm could be designed to identify patterns in images and the training data could be images of dogs. The resulting machine-learning model would be a dog spotter. You would feed it an image as input and get as output whether and where in the image a set of pixels represents a dog.
Any of the three components of a machine-learning system can be hidden, or in a black box. As is often the case, the algorithm is publicly known, which makes putting it in a black box less effective. So, to protect their intellectual property, AI developers often put the model in a black box. Another approach software developers take is to obscure the data used to train the model – in other words, put the training data in a black box.
The opposite of a black box is sometimes referred to as a glass box. An AI glass box is a system whose algorithms, training data and model are all available for anyone to see. But researchers sometimes characterise aspects of even these as black box.
That’s because researchers don’t fully understand how machine-learning algorithms, particularly deep-learning algorithms, operate. The field of explainable AI is working to develop algorithms that, while not necessarily glass box, can be better understood by humans.
Thinking Outside The Black Box
In many cases, there is good reason to be wary of black box machine-learning algorithms and models. Suppose a machine-learning model has made a diagnosis about your health. Would you want the model to be black box or glass box? What about the physician prescribing your course of treatment? Perhaps she would like to know how the model arrived at its decision.
What if a machine-learning model that determines whether you qualify for a business loan from a bank turns you down? Wouldn’t you like to know why? If you did, you could more effectively appeal the decision, or change your situation to increase your chances of getting a loan the next time.
Black boxes also have important implications for software system security. For years, many people in the computing field thought that keeping software in a black box would prevent hackers from examining it and therefore it would be secure. This assumption has largely been proven wrong because hackers can reverse engineer software – that is, build a facsimile by closely observing how a piece of software works – and discover vulnerabilities to exploit.
If software is in a glass box, software testers and well-intentioned hackers can examine it and inform the creators of weaknesses, thereby minimising cyberattacks.
Saurabh Bagchi is professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of corporate partnerships in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University in the US. His research interests include dependable computing and distributed systems.
In today’s competitive job market, attracting and retaining top talent has become a crucial priority for organizations. One way companies can set themselves apart and create a positive work environment is by offering perks for parents in the workplace.
Recognizing the unique challenges faced by working parents and providing them with support can lead to increased employee satisfaction, improved work-life balance, and ultimately, higher productivity.
In this article, we will explore the compelling case for offering parental perks and discuss the benefits they bring to both employees and organizations.
1. Enhanced Work-Life Balance:
The demands of juggling work and parenting responsibilities can be overwhelming for working parents. By offering parental perks, employers can help alleviate some of the stress associated with managing these dual roles. Flexible work arrangements, such as remote work options or flexible schedules, allow parents to better manage their time and fulfill both their professional and personal obligations effectively. This flexibility promotes a healthier work-life balance and enables parents to be more present and engaged at work and home.
2. Increased Employee Satisfaction and Loyalty:
When companies demonstrate a commitment to supporting working parents, it fosters a sense of appreciation and loyalty among employees. Parental perks send a clear message that the organization values and respects the challenges faced by parents. This recognition leads to higher job satisfaction, increased morale, and a stronger sense of loyalty to the company. Satisfied employees are more likely to remain with the organization long-term, reducing turnover and recruitment costs.
3. Improved Productivity and Performance:
Studies have consistently shown that employees with a good work-life balance are more engaged, motivated, and productive. By providing parental perks, employers create an environment that enables parents to focus on their work without the distractions and worries associated with managing family responsibilities.
When employees feel supported, they are better equipped to perform at their best, leading to improved productivity and overall organizational performance.
4. Attraction and Retention of Top Talent:
In a competitive job market, companies must offer attractive benefits to attract and retain skilled professionals. Offering parental perks sets an organization apart as an employer of choice, particularly for working parents. Prospective candidates will be drawn to companies that prioritize work-life balance and demonstrate a family-friendly culture. By providing parental perks, organizations can attract top talent and retain employees who value the support offered by the company.
5. Positive Company Image and Employer Branding:
In today’s socially conscious world, a company’s reputation and image play a crucial role in attracting customers and top talent. By prioritizing parental perks, organizations can enhance their employer branding efforts and cultivate a positive company image. Demonstrating a commitment to supporting working parents not only improves the company’s reputation but also helps in attracting diverse and talented individuals who value a family-friendly work environment.
We can conclude that offering perks for parents in the workplace is not just a gesture of goodwill; it is a strategic investment in employee well-being, satisfaction, and overall organizational success. By recognizing the unique challenges faced by working parents and providing them with support, employers can create a positive work environment that fosters work-life balance and enhances employee productivity. As companies compete to attract and retain top talent, offering parental perks sets them apart as employers of choice, ultimately contributing to a more engaged and loyal workforce.
Investing in parental perks is a win-win situation for both employees and organizations, leading to happier, more productive employees, increased retention rates, and a positive company image. By embracing a family-friendly culture and prioritizing work-life balance, organizations can create a workplace where employees feel supported and empowered to thrive in their professional and personal lives.
We Can’t Thank You Enough For Your Support!
— Compiled by Team VoiceOfEU.com
— For More Info. & News Submissions: info@VoiceOfEU.com
— For Anonymous News Submissions: press@VoiceOfEU.com
