Guadeloupe protesters seize legislature in standoff with Paris


Protesters first entered the debating chamber of the regional council while it was meeting on Thursday (AFP/Benedicte JOURDIER)

Amandine Ascencio with Cecile Azzaro
Fri, December 24, 2021

Protesters in Guadeloupe on Friday occupied the local legislature in the French Caribbean overseas territory, in a new flare-up of a standoff with Paris sparked by Covid rules.

There have been tensions in Guadeloupe and the neighbouring island French territory of Martinique during the last weeks over rules including obligatory Covid vaccinations for healthworkers that have fed into long-standing local grievances.

Protesters first entered the debating chamber of the regional council while it was meeting on Thursday with several staying the night and deciding to continue their action into Friday. Councillors were able to leave peacefully.

They want to negotiate with Paris over the crisis, but officials have so far indicated that there can be no talks as long as such actions are carried out. The protesters notably want all sanctions halted against healthworkers who have refused the Covid jab.

With Christmas looming the protesters began to leave the chamber at 1:00 pm (1700 GMT) but would meet again Monday to prepare a new action next week, Elie Domota, a union leader and chief of the LKP association told AFP.

"We're here and as long as we don't have a commitment, because we have nothing at all, we have absolutely nothing, so as long as we don't have a firm commitment, an urgent meeting, we'll stay here," said Maite Hubert M'toumo, general secretary of the general union of Guadeloupean workers, said earlier in the legislature.

Raphael Cece, of the newspaper Rebelle, added: "We are not against the vaccine, but we are fighting against this injustice, the sanctions, the mandatory vaccines for healthworkers."

France's Overseas Territories Minister Sebastien Lecornu lashed out at their action, tweeting: "No demand justifies hindering the smooth running of an assembly of elected officials in the middle of a plenary session."

Covid vaccination rates in France's Caribbean territories are far lower than those in mainland France, and there are concerns that the new wave created by the fast-spreading Omicron variant could spark serious problems.

The crisis brought the island to a standstill last month when protesters set up barricades around major roads.

Healthworkers who did not want to be vaccinated will be suspended from December 31 but can be helped to transition into other work.

France's Caribbean territories, remnants of the colonial era, are seen as luxury holiday destinations by people in mainland France. But residents there believe they have long suffered from neglect by Paris, which has resulted in living standards well below the French average.

asa-caz-sjw/yad

RUSSIAN WHITE NATIONALISTS
Russian mercenaries deploy to eastern Ukraine - sources


Borodai the Prime Minister of the self proclaimed 'Donetsk People's Republic' 

attends a news conference in Donetsk

Thu, December 23, 2021
By Maria Tsvetkova and Anton Zverev

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian mercenaries have deployed to separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine in recent weeks to bolster defences against Ukrainian government forces as tensions between Moscow and the West rise, four sources have told Reuters.

In recent weeks, Russia has moved tens of thousands of regular troops to staging posts closer to Ukraine and followed up by demanding urgent security guarantees from the West designed, Moscow says, to prevent Ukraine and other neighbouring countries being used as a base to attack it.

The West and Ukraine have for their part accused Russia of weighing a fresh attack on its southern neighbour as soon as next month, something Moscow denies.

Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and backed pro-Russian separatists who seized a swathe of the industrial Donbass region of eastern Ukraine that same year, and continue to fight Ukrainian government forces there.

Of four sources, three described their offers from mercenary recruiters to go to Donbass. They said the recruiters did not disclose who they represented. All four sources declined to be named, citing fears for their safety.

Two of the three sources said they had accepted; the third said he had refused.

"There is a full house. They are gathering everybody with combat experience," said one of the two who accepted.

He said he had previously fought in Ukraine and Syria for groups of Russian security contractors whose operations have been closely aligned with Russia's strategic interests. He declined to identify the contractors.

The fighter said he was planning to join up with fellow mercenaries on the Russian side of the border with the separatist-held Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine.

The Kremlin says it has nothing to do with private Russian military contractors whose operatives it describes as volunteers with no connection to the state.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said: "It's the first we've heard of this and we don't know how reliable these assertions are."

Peskov said there were no Russian regular forces or military advisers in eastern Ukraine and never had been, and that Moscow was not considering sending any. Kyiv disputes that and says regular Russian army forces are present.

SPECIAL TRAINING

Alexander Ivanov, head of the Community of Officers For International Security, a non-governmental group representing Russian contractors in the Central African Republic, said he had "not a single confirmation" that any Russian mercenary had been deployed to Ukraine.

Three of the sources said they were not aware of any plans for a new Russian attack on Ukraine or of preparations that would suggest one was coming.

One of the sources, a contractor who has taken part in Russian operations abroad and had already arrived in eastern Ukraine, said the deployment was for defensive purposes. The first mercenary said the same.

Another source said he was not directly involved in the deployment, but was in touch with people on the ground who were undergoing special training. He said the aim of the deployment was what he called sabotage activities to undermine stability in Ukraine.

The Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) proclaimed its independence from Ukraine in 2014 after separatist fighters took control of a slice of eastern Ukraine. Backed by Russia, its self-proclaimed status has not been recognised internationally. Alexander Borodai, ex-prime minister of the DPR and head of the Union of Donbass Volunteers, said his organisation was not involved in the recruitment of any mercenaries for eastern Ukraine.

Members of his organisation have previously fought in Ukraine and Syria.

"If and when it's needed, we'll call people - but there has been no call for now," said Borodai, who is also a lawmaker for Russia's ruling party, United Russia.

Separatist spokesperson Eduard Basurin said he knew nothing of any recent Russian deployments of security contractors to eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine's military intelligence service declined to comment, while the state security service did not reply to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Maria Tsvetkova and Anton Zverev, additional reporting by Pavel Polityuk in Kyiv; Editing by Andrew Osborn, Kevin Liffey and Jon Boyle)

World's oldest family tree created using DNA

Paul Rincon - Science editor, BBC News website
Thu, December 23, 2021,

Scientists have compiled the world's oldest family tree from human bones interred at a 5,700-year-old tomb in the Cotswolds, UK.

Analysis of DNA from the tomb's occupants revealed the people buried there were from five continuous generations of one extended family.

Most of those found in the tomb were descended from four women who all had children with the same man.

The right to use the site was based on descent from one man.

But people were buried in different parts of the tomb based on the first-generation matriarch they were descended from.

This suggests that the first-generation women held a socially significant place in the memories of this community. The Neolithic tomb, or "cairn", at Hazleton North in Gloucestershire has two L-shaped chambers, one facing north and the other south.

Co-author Prof David Reich, from Harvard Medical School in Boston, US, who led the generation of ancient DNA from the remains, explained: "Two of the women, all of their children are in the south chamber - and their kids up to the fifth generation.

"And then the other two women, their kids are primarily in the north chamber - although some of them switch to the south chamber later in the use life of the tomb - probably reflecting the collapse of the north passage which meant it wasn't possible to bury there anymore."

Dr Chris Fowler of Newcastle University, UK, the first author and lead archaeologist in the study, said: "This is of wider importance because it suggests that the architectural layout of other Neolithic tombs might tell us about how kinship operated at those tombs."

The family tree for burials in Hazleton North cairn

The tomb dates to an important period just after farming was introduced to Britain by people whose ancestors had - several thousand years earlier - spread through Europe from Anatolia (modern Turkey) and the Aegean. The work will help researchers understand family dynamics among these Stone Age people and learn more about their culture.

"Hopefully this will be the first of many such studies," said Prof Reich. "It really makes vivid the lives of these people... who lived in this place a very long time ago."

There are also indications that "stepsons" were adopted into the family, the researchers say - males whose mother was buried in the tomb but not their biological father, and whose mother had also had children with a male related to the original founder.
Missing women

While two female family members who died in childhood were buried in the tomb, the complete absence of adult daughters suggests that their remains were placed either in the tombs of male partners with whom they had children, or elsewhere.

"There are missing women. So the question - because men and women are born at about the same rate - is where they are. It's a mystery - and it's not that they're in the next tomb over because overall the whole community is missing them," said Prof Reich.

"Are people cremated? There are some cremation practices. Are people disposed of in different ways in the landscape or are we seeing only people who achieve a certain social status?"

While the tomb reveals evidence of polygyny - men having children with multiple women - it also shows that polyandry was also widespread: women having children with multiple men.

Different women who had children with one man tended not to be related to one another. But in cases where women procreated with more than one man, those men tended to be close relatives.

Iñigo Olalde, from the University of the Basque Country, Spain, who was the lead geneticist for the study and its co-first author, said: "The excellent DNA preservation at the tomb and the use of the latest technologies in ancient DNA recovery and analysis allowed us to uncover the oldest family tree ever reconstructed and analyse it to understand something profound about the social structure of these ancient groups."

The study is published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

‘Extremely rare’ deep sea creature found in California ocean. ‘Once in a lifetime’



Helena Wegner
Wed, December 22, 2021

Researchers from a California aquarium were searching for deep sea jellies when they caught a glimpse of an “extremely rare” creature with glowing green eyes.

Monterey Bay Aquarium senior aquarist Thomas Knowles spotted the fish in the Monterey Bay on Dec. 1 from a distance but knew exactly what it was.

“As we slowly approached it, excitement grew in the control room as everyone began to realize what we had found,” Knowles said in a news release from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “We all knew that this was likely a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

The creature was a barreleye fish. With visible green bulb-like eyes inside its forehead, the bizarre fish can move them forward to see when its eating, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Though the researchers knew what they were looking at, it was the first time they

have seen the fish.

Researchers have logged more than 5,600 remote dives with more than 27,600 hours of video and they’ve only witnessed the fish nine times.

Though sightings of the strange fish are rare, Knowles said they did not capture the barreleye for their upcoming “Into the Deep” exhibit because they weren’t prepared to care for it at the aquarium.

“Just observing this animal living in its natural habitat is an amazing opportunity for science,” he said in the release.

The rare fish grows to a maximum size of about 6 inches and dwells in the midwater ocean — at depths between 2,000 to 2,600 feet.

These fish are found in the Bering Sea to Japan and Baja California.

“Most of the deep sea truly is unexplored territory, and it is still revealing it wonders to us,” Knowles said.

Trans-Pecos Black-headed Snake spends most of its life underground in Texas

Michael Price
Wed, December 22, 2021

The Trans-Pecos Black-headed Snake (Tantilla cucullata) is a harmless and secretive serpent that is one of five species of the genus Tantilla that call Texas home.

When it comes to rules, it seems that there is only one rule. And that is there are almost always exceptions to rules. But even that statement in and of itself is not a true rule, so maybe this isn’t the place to discuss philosophy.

My point about exceptions to the rules applies to the size of a species of rarely-seen serpent that, up until a decade or so ago, was known from less than 50 specimens.

The Trans-Pecos Black-headed Snake (Tantilla cucullata) is a harmless and uber-secretive serpent that is one of five species of the genus Tantilla that call Texas home. But unlike the other species of this genus which are quite diminutive (averaging less than 7 inches in total length), this variety of Black-headed snake is a true giant among its kinfolk. Most adults observed are well over 1 foot in total length, and many of those are larger, up to 16 inches in total length. The record-sized individual was just under 18 inches. In fact, it is more common to see the larger specimens than it is smaller individuals: out of the dozen or so of these creatures that I have been privy to find in the wild, only one was less than 12 inches.

Despite the markedly noticeable size differences, this species is like other family members in that it is rather unassuming in appearance. The body coloration varies slightly from tan to earthy-tone brown with no distinctive markings whatsoever. The head is entirely black, as if someone took the snake and dipped its head in a can of black paint. Occasionally, some individual populations will also have a white “ring” around the neck and a splash of white between the eye and the corner of the mouth. At one time, these two “morphs” were thought to be distinct enough from one another to allow for them to be taxonomically classified as two different subspecies of the same species, but genetic work has shown that these morphs are the same. The belly is an off-white coloration, and due to the dorsal scales being small and smooth, this snake oftentimes will have a glossy sheen appearance.

As their common name suggests, the Trans-Pecos Black-headed Snake has been observed throughout many of the high-elevation, heavily vegetated mountain ranges in western Texas. It is in these mountain ranges that it finds home in the grassland milieus where the soil consistency is conducive to the allowance of easy burrowing penetration. A secondary habitat is the fractured terrain in and among the mesas of the lower Stockton Plateau. Wherever it occurs, the soil must have a certain amount of moisture to hold the required high humidity that it prefers.

As with almost all other reptiles that reside in temperate climates, they undergo a period of inactivity during the coldest months of the year, allowing sexually mature adults to generate the sperm and eggs necessary for successful reproduction in the spring. Much akin to most other harmless snakes found in Texas, Trans-Pecos Black-headed Snakes are egg-laying animals. Mating occurs primarily during the month of May, and the 1-3 extremely elongate eggs are laid a month later in areas with sufficient humidity. After an approximate two-month incubation period the delicate babies hatch, and they are between a mere 5 inches in length, typically mimic the adults in color and pattern and are capable of fending for themselves from the moment they are born.

Trans-Pecos Black-headed Snakes are primarily fossorial, spending the clear majority of their life underground or beneath surface debris. It is in this habitat where they find their primary prey items of centipedes, spiders, scorpions, and insect larvae. When rainfall is abundant, this species will become surface active, and the vast majority of surface sightings are of individuals found crossing roadways in these conditions.

This species, while infrequently encountered (even by those who are actually looking for it!) is probably not as rare as once thought. However, it is listed as a Threatened Species with the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department and as such, it is protected from capture or harm.

This species is rear-fanged and has a mild toxin, but it lacks a sophisticated venom delivery system. The venom is rather weak as well, and is used for obtaining the fierce prey items rather than for defense. Therefore, like the majority of snakes that occur in this state, it is completely harmless to humans.

Michael Price is owner of Wild About Texas, an educational company that specializes in venomous animal safety training, environmental consultations and ecotourism. Contact him at wildabouttexas@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on San Angelo Standard-Times: Trans-Pecos Black-headed Snake often an underground dweller in Texas

Saudi Arabia appears to be building its own ballistic missiles with China's help, report says
Alexandra Ma
Thu, December 23, 2021

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.Saudi Royal Council via Getty Images


CNN reported that US intelligence believes Saudi Arabia is developing its own ballistic missiles.


It said intelligence found recent transfers of missile technology between China and Saudi Arabia.


Saudi Arabia has foreign-made ballistic missiles, but is not believed to have made its own before.

US intelligence agencies believe Saudi Arabia is building its own ballistic missiles with Chinese technology, CNN reported, citing people familiar with the findings.

CNN reported, citing its sources, that US intelligence showed multiple exchanges of ballistic-missile technology between the two countries.

Saudi Arabia is known to possess foreign-made ballistic missiles, but was not believed to have made its own before, CNN reported.

CNN also published satellite images showing a complex near Dawadmi, a town 200 miles from the capital Riyadh, that appeared to be manufacturing missiles.

Saudi Arabia and neighboring Iran, which also owns missiles, are bitter enemies. The US has been trying to negotiate a new agreement to halt Iran's nuclear development.

Neither the White House nor the Saudi embassy in Washington, DC, immediately responded to Insider's request for comment. The CIA declined to comment.

UCP SCREWS UP AGAIN

Northwest Alberta loses child psychiatrist as province makes shift in how doctors are paid

Paige Parsons 

© Bonnie Smith Bonnie Smith and her 14-year-old son Turner Smith. Turner lives with a rare chromosomal condition called Cri du Chat, or 5P- syndrome. His mom says seeing a psychiatrist has helped improve his quality of life.

When Turner Smith met Dr. Paul Soper, it changed the young boy's life.

Turner, now 14, lives with a rare chromosomal condition called Cri du Chat, or 5P- syndrome. In 2018, he was struggling at school with behavioural issues, like biting and aggression, and having trouble sitting and participating in class, says his mom Bonnie Smith.

Night brought sleeping difficulties, common in kids with 5P-.

"Before midnight he would move from his bed to my bed. It would turn the house upside down if he for some reason lost his way in between. There was no consistent sleep going on in the house. He was loud. He was chaotic," Smith said.

Sometimes he'd be up at 2 a.m., ready to start his day. But because he needs constant care, someone else needed to be up with him, Smith said.

But within a year of seeing Soper, a child psychiatrist based in Edmonton, things began turning around for the family from High Level, Alta., about 800 kilometres north of Edmonton.

"There was a diagnosis for him and it turned our whole life upside down," Smith said. "And then we met Dr. Soper, and once again, we're able to turn everything right side up."

But now the Alberta Health Services program that brought the two together is ending. Turner's last appointment with Soper was on Dec. 15.

 
Stipend contracts

For 14 years, Soper has spent three days a month treating children and adolescents in northwest Alberta under an AHS funding arrangement known as a stipend contract. Turner was one of about 150 youngsters on Soper's active patient list in that region.

Twelve stipend programs, including Soper's, will end on Dec. 31, as AHS works to remove a patchwork of agreements that make physician compensation inconsistent across the province, spokesperson Kerry Williamson said in an email.

Stipend programs are a holdover from when health services were provided by multiple regional authorities for care ranging from palliative services and maternity care to organ transplants and child psychiatry, according to the Alberta Medical Association (AMA).

Williamson said some stipend programs will move to a different compensation model called an alternative relationship plan, while others will be funded through the physician on-call program.

Sixty-three stipend programs will continue for limited periods while a transition is sorted out.

But a dozen programs, including Soper's, will end.

'Can't justify it anymore'

Soper said his remote work came at a cost to his family and the stipend allowed him to take time off to be at home.

"Without that, I can't justify it anymore," he said Monday.

Soper is in favour of being replaced with local specialists. To AHS's credit, he said, that's what was supposed to happen.

Soper was informed in the spring that two psychiatrists had been hired to offer services in northwest Alberta and his contract would not be renewed.

But in the summer, he learned one of the psychiatrists wasn't coming and the other, because of demand, would only see patients over age 16.

"So then I asked them again, 'Are we still going ahead with this, given that there isn't going to be anybody to replace me?' And it was on Oct. 20 that I was told for sure that mine was ending," he said.

Soper was able to refer some urgent cases to Grande Prairie. For other patients, he prepared to hand them over to pediatricians or family doctors, writing notes that detailed treatments and suggestions for next steps, along with an offer to be available by phone.

AHS is actively recruiting a new visiting child psychiatrist for the region, Williamson said.

Careful transition urged

The stipends were initially introduced to fill gaps in services available to Albertans, said AMA president Dr. Michelle Warren.

The AMA isn't opposed to ensuring pay is consistent and fair, but the 1,700-plus physicians affected by stipend program changes have concerns about how it's happening, she added.

"The problem that the AMA has had with this is that it was very much a top-down approach. So Alberta Health Services contacted the physicians and basically told them this is what was going to happen," she said.

Some AMA physicians launched a committee and have been working with the province on an alternate way to phase stipends out.

"Without a plan in place, we are going to see gaps in care," Warren said. "We are going to see those reasons that they came about in the first place rearing their heads again."

One of those gaps seems to be where Turner Smith has landed.

His mom plans to consult a pediatrician in the new year about connecting with psychiatric services, perhaps remotely.

It can be hard to get into a family doctor in the north, let alone see a specialist, and she's worried about what will happen to her son and other child psychiatry patients in the region.

"I just feel like here we go again," Smith said. "We're going to get turned upside down."

Do not give food to food banks. Give money
Tristin Hopper 

© Provided by National Post

As a fresh wave of lockdowns shuts down whole sectors of the Canadian economy, chances are good that these holidays are going to be having a lot more Canadians relying on their local food bank for sustenance. Since 2015, the National Post has greeted the yuletide season by publishing the video below. With a simple message of maximizing charitable giving by donating money to the food bank instead of canned goods, it is one of our most popular videos. It has also prompted food banks to caution us that maybe our can-bashing is a little overzealous. This is correct, but the core fact remains: With few exceptions the absolute best way that you can help feed Canada’s hungry is to give your food bank cold, fungible currency. Let us explain …

NOTE: The subtext of this article is to get you to kick some money over to food banks, not to get mad and suspend donations entirely. Please use Food Banks Canada’s food bank finder to find your nearest food bank.


The food bank is way better at buying food than you are

The author of this column is a congenitally cheap individual. I buy utility turkeys in bulk, cook them all at once and portion the meat into freezer bags to be used later. I maximize the per-ounce cost of condiments by buying them in gallon quantities. I once had an inside guy at a fruit importer who tipped me off whenever a case of bruised but usable bananas was headed for the dumpster. And yet I must still kneel in awe at a food bank’s ability to stretch a dollar. They buy in bulk, they capitalize on surpluses and they get spectacularly good deals by playing the charity card. For every $1 donated to the Calgary Food Bank, they claim to be able to buy food equivalent to $5 at retail prices. In California, some food banks claim to be able to boost that multiple to $6 . One of the most misguided charitable endeavors at this time of year is to go to the grocery store with the goal of explicitly buying food to be tossed into the workplace food hamper. Even the most skilled shopper must appreciate that however many cans of tuna they can buy, a food bank would probably have been able to buy five times as many.

© Darren Makowichuk/Calgary Sun/QMI Agency There is a zero per cent chance that former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi, pictured here at a 2013 food bank drive, would be able to buy food with an efficiency coming even close to that of an established food bank.

Money doesn’t have to be sorted and stored

If you gather up $15 worth of pennies (that’s 1,500 coins) and dump it in your nearest Salvation Army kettle, the attendant Bell Ringer will smile weakly and thank you for your generosity. Once that mountain of pennies is counted, rolled, transported and deposited, however, it’s entirely possible that your donation actually resulted in a net loss for the Red Shield. A similar problem exists with food donations. Your average box of random pantry items needs to be sorted, stored and shoehorned into a family’s meal plan. While pantry items are better than no pantry items, that sorting isn’t cheap. Two years ago the Greater Vancouver Food Bank revealed that it was costing them up to $40,000 a year to sort out unwanted donations such as half-eaten bread, tinned alligator and Jello packages from the 1960s. In Nunavut, the exorbitant costs of shipping mean that a donated food parcel can end up costing a food bank way more than than the value of the food it contains. Money doesn’t have any of these pitfalls. It doesn’t go bad, it doesn’t take up space and it’s not heavy: It sits patiently in a bank account generating more money until it’s needed to buy a pallet of peanut butter or fresh vegetables.

© Postmedia File A 1990 photo of workers at the London Food Bank preparing to sort through a mountain of physical food donations.

You don’t know what the food bank needs

Have you ever shown up to a potluck where everybody brought kale salad? Food banks face a version of this problem regularly. One month they’re drowning in peanut butter but desperate for tuna, the next they’re neck deep in creamed corn and need canned vegetables. Food banks also need to keep feeding people throughout the year, which makes it a little tricky when much of their donations come in a tidal wave of cans every Christmas. According to U.S. data up to 50 per cent of food bank donations are wasted, and the primary reason is because donations do not always jibe with the food needs of a community. Food banks would be more candid about this, but they know that if they look even slightly ungrateful they could swear off a donor for life. One reader emailed the National Post with a story of dropping off a hamper of pantry items at a food bank only to be told “what we really need is crackers” by a volunteer. “I now donate elsewhere,” wrote the reader.

© Mike Hensen/The London Free Press/Postmedia Network We really can’t stress enough how much time Canadian food banks have to spend sifting through random physical food donations.

If your food bank is inefficient, throwing more inefficiency at them is a terrible plan

Food banks know that many of their donors are happy to contribute food or time, but bristle at the idea of being asked for cash. “Some food banks … spend too much money on salaries & fund-raising. We will not donate money to them,” one reader wrote to the Post in 2016. This is absolutely not true of Food Banks Canada; it has been voted by Charity Intelligence as one of the most impactful spenders of donated money in Canada. But pretend that your local food bank does indeed suffer from financial mismanagement and high overhead costs. If that’s the case, how are these problems helped by following the equally inefficient route of exclusively donating food? As noted above, a dollar spent on food hamper donations at the grocery store could have purchased five times more food in the hands of a food bank purchaser. A loss of 80 per cent in your dollar’s efficiency is a terrible price to pay for mistrust of a charity. The practice makes even less sense when you consider it being applied to other charities. If people don’t trust the Red Cross, it’s not like they assuage their suspicions by only donating bandages and cans of gasoline. Conversely, one way for food banks to get around public mistrust of cash donations is to start allowing donors to contribute to funds in which the money will only be spent on food.

Food drives have their place, but you can still consider whether it’s the best use of your resources

This column should not be taken as an all-purpose indictment of food drives. By holding them, food banks are tapping into a subset of donors. People distrustful of monetary donations, people lured by the pageantry of a “fill the bus” campaign, people strapped for cash who can only donate spare cans from the pantry. If all food drives were shut down, these donors wouldn’t start cutting cheques — they would simply leave. “We are lucky because we are one of the only charities which has three legitimate and needed ways to donate. Food, funds and time,” said Lalonde. But for donors with spare cash who aren’t too interested in the means by which they help the poor, they should absolutely consider swearing off canned good donations. An increasing number of corporate donors are already taking the hint: Instead of dropping off truckloads of food at the food bank each year, they’re now handing out the much more impactful donation of a giant cheque instead.

© John Lappa/Sudbury Star See? Just as exciting as a truckload of food.

Food isn’t tax deductible

This is probably the most important point: Nobody’s going to give you a cut on your income taxes because you lobbed a few bouillon cubes into a cardboard box at the office. Not so with monetary donations. On the first $200 a Canadian donates to charity each year, 15 per cent of that is tax deductible. If you go above the $200 threshold in a given year, that rate jumps to 30 per cent . To review: If you hand your food bank a 30 pound office hamper filled with random food, you’re handing over a miniature logistical challenge that may or may not end up on the table of a hungry family. Hand over $20, and the food bank will be able to buy $100 worth of food, they’ll save on processing costs and Ottawa will kick you back up to $6.

In Africa, rescuing the languages that Western tech ignores

By MATT O'BRIEN and CHINEDU ASADU

In this photo taken Wednesday Nov 24, 2021, Kola Tubosun, is photograph in his house in Lagos, Nigeria. Computers have become amazingly precise at translating spoken words to text messages and scouring huge troves of information for answers to complex questions. At least, that is, so long as you speak English or another of the world's dominant languages. But try talking to your phone in Yoruba, Igbo or any number of widely spoken African languages and you'll find glitches that can hinder access to information, trade, personal communications, customer service and other benefits of the global tech economy. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)


LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — Computers have become amazingly precise at translating spoken words to text messages and scouring huge troves of information for answers to complex questions. At least, that is, so long as you speak English or another of the world’s dominant languages.

But try talking to your phone in Yoruba, Igbo or any number of widely spoken African languages and you’ll find glitches that can hinder access to information, trade, personal communications, customer service and other benefits of the global tech economy.

“We are getting to the point where if a machine doesn’t understand your language it will be like it never existed,” said Vukosi Marivate, chief of data science at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, in a call to action before a December virtual gathering of the world’s artificial intelligence researchers.

American tech giants don’t have a great track record of making their language technology work well outside the wealthiest markets, a problem that’s also made it harder for them to detect dangerous misinformation on their platforms.

Marivate is part of a coalition of African researchers who have been trying to change that. Among their projects is one that found machine translation tools failed to properly translate online COVID-19 surveys from English into several African languages.

“Most people want to be able to interact with the rest of the information highway in their local language,” Marivate said in an interview. He’s a founding member of Masakhane, a pan-African research project to improve how dozens of languages are represented in the branch of AI known as natural language processing. It’s the biggest of a number of grassroots language technology projects that have popped up from the Andes to Sri Lanka.

Tech giants offer their products in numerous languages, but they don’t always pay attention to the nuances necessary for those apps work in the real world. Part of the problem is that there’s just not enough online data in those languages — including scientific and medical terms — for the AI systems to effectively learn how to get better at understanding them.

Google, for instance, offended members of the Yoruba community several years ago when its language app mistranslated Esu, a benevolent trickster god, as the devil. Facebook’s language misunderstandings have been tied to political strife around the world and its inability to tamp down harmful misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. More mundane translation glitches have been turned into joking online memes.

Omolewa Adedipe has grown frustrated trying to share her thoughts on Twitter in the Yoruba language because her automatically translated tweets usually end up with different meanings.

One time, the 25-year-old content designer tweeted, “T’Ílù ò bà dùn, T’Ílù ò bà t’òrò. Èyin l’ęmò bí ę şe şé,” which means, “If the land (or country, in this context) is not peaceful, or merry, you’re responsible for it.” Twitter, however, managed to end up with the translation: “If you are not happy, if you are not happy.”

For complex Nigerian languages like Yoruba, those accent marks -- often associated with tones -- make all the difference in communication. ‘Ogun’, for instance, is a Yoruba word that means war, but it can also mean a state in Nigeria (Ògùn), god of iron (Ògún), stab (Ógún), twenty or property (Ogún).

“Some of the bias is deliberate given our history,” said Marivate, who has devoted some of his AI research to the southern African languages of Xitsonga and Setswana spoken by his family members, as well as to the common conversational practice of “code-switching” between languages.

“The history of the African continent and in general in colonized countries, is that when language had to be translated, it was translated in a very narrow way,” he said. “You were not allowed to write a general text in any language because the colonizing country might be worried that people communicate and write books about insurrections or revolutions. But they would allow religious texts.”

Google and Microsoft are among the companies that say they are trying to improve technology for so-called “low-resource” languages that AI systems don’t have enough data for. Computer scientists at Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, announced in November a breakthrough on the path to a “universal translator” that could translate multiple languages at once and work better with lower-resourced languages such as Icelandic or Hausa.

That’s an important step, but at the moment, only large tech companies and big AI labs in developed countries can build these models, said David Ifeoluwa Adelani. He’s a researcher at Saarland University in Germany and another member of Masakhane, which has a mission to strengthen and spur African-led research to address technology “that does not understand our names, our cultures, our places, our history.”

Improving the systems requires not just more data but careful human review from native speakers who are underrepresented in the global tech workforce. It also requires a level of computing power that can be hard for independent researchers to access.

Writer and linguist Kola Tubosun created a multimedia dictionary for the Yoruba language and also created a text-to-speech machine for the language. He is now working on similar speech recognition technologies for Nigeria’s two other major languages, Hausa and Igbo, to help people who want to write short sentences and passages.

“We are funding ourselves,” he said. “The aim is to show these things can be profitable.”

Tubosun led the team that created Google’s “Nigerian English” voice and accent used in tools like maps. But he said it remains difficult to raise the money needed to build technology that might allow a farmer to use a voice-based tool to follow market or weather trends.

In Rwanda, software engineer Remy Muhire is helping to build a new open-source speech dataset for the Kinyarwanda language that involves a lot of volunteers recording themselves reading Kinyarwanda newspaper articles and other texts.

“They are native speakers. They understand the language,” said Muhire, a fellow at Mozilla, maker of the Firefox internet browser. Part of the project involves a collaboration with a government-supported smartphone app that answers questions about COVID-19. To improve the AI systems in various African languages, Masakhane researchers are also tapping into news sources across the continent, including Voice of America’s Hausa service and the BBC broadcast in Igbo.

Increasingly, people are banding together to develop their own language approaches instead of waiting for elite institutions to solve problems, said Damián Blasi, who researches linguistic diversity at the Harvard Data Science Initiative.

Blasi co-authored a recent study that analyzed the uneven development of language technology across the world’s more than 6,000 languages. For instance, it found that while Dutch and Swahili both have tens of millions of speakers, there are hundreds of scientific reports on natural language processing in the Western European language and only about 20 in the East African one.

___

O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

ARYAN SUPREMACY

No place to pray: Muslim worshippers under pressure in India

Several states have brought in legislation criminalising conversion to Christianity and Islam, including through marriage -- or "love jihad" as Hindu hardliners call it (AFP/Sajjad HUSSAIN)

Jalees ANDRABI
Thu, December 23, 2021, 

Dinesh Bharti drives around with other activists on Fridays heckling and harassing Muslims praying outside in Gurgaon, the latest flashpoint of sectarian tensions under India's Hindu nationalist government.

Muslims praying in the open "create problems in the country and the entire world," the thickset Hindu man in his 40s said, a red tilak on his forehead marking him out as a devout member of India's majority religion.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's election in 2014 emboldened hardline groups who see India as a Hindu nation and its 200 million-strong Muslim minority as potentially dangerous outsiders.

Gurgaon is a modern satellite city of the capital New Delhi. Around 500,000 Muslims either live there, have migrated to the area for work or labour there during the day.

The city has 15 mosques for them, but the local government has refused permission to build more -- even as the number of Hindu temples has grown.

This has forced the community to hold Friday afternoon prayers -- the most important of the week for Muslims -- in open spaces.

In recent years, Hindu groups have sprayed cow dung at Islamic prayer sites and called worshippers terrorists and Pakistanis -- referencing India's Muslim-majority neighbour and arch-rival.

The local government, meanwhile, has steadily cut the number of approved outdoor worship sites.

- 'No longer tolerated' -

Earlier this month, the Haryana state chief minister, a member of Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, declared that outdoor prayers in Gurgaon "will no longer be tolerated".

Undermining their argument that religion can be practised only indoors, Hindu groups celebrated last Friday by setting up a makeshift temple and community kitchen to feed hundreds as devotional music blared.

Across town, hundreds of Muslims queued to take turns to worship at one of only six remaining prayer venues still available.

At another site, Muslims were heckled and forced to chant slogans such as "Hail Lord Ram" -- a Hindu deity -- that have proliferated under Modi among his supporters.

"If the government doesn't find a solution to the issue... it will become more complicated and serious," Sabir Qasmi, a Muslim cleric at the prayer meeting, told AFP.

- Lifelong hardliner -

Modi is a lifelong member of the hardline Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Hindu nationalist group.

He was briefly barred from the United States over religious riots in Gujarat in 2002 when he was state chief minister.

Since his coming to power, a string of lynchings of Muslims by Hindu mobs for so-called cow protection -- a sacred animal for many Hindus -- and other hate crimes has sown fear and despair in the community.

Several states have brought in legislation criminalising conversion to Christianity and Islam, including through marriage -- or "love jihad" as Hindu hardliners call it.

This week, a video emerged from a recent gathering of right-wing Hindu groups in which some delegates called for Muslims to be killed, reports said.

Hindu protesters in Gurgaon say outdoor prayers pose a "security" risk, cause traffic problems and prevent children from playing cricket.

But critics say the real reason is simply that Muslims have no place in Modi's new intolerant India, where Hindu zealots are dictating government policy.

Arati R. Jerath, a political commentator, said there is an agenda to convert India from a pluralistic and secular nation into a "Hindu country".

"Whether it is economic spaces or spaces for worship, or spaces for the food and customs or anything with a Muslim identity, that is going to be part of the project," Jerath told AFP.

"It is not necessarily a government-sponsored project, but certainly a project by the supporters of this government, who... get tacit support from the government."

On Sunday, the head of a Hindu umbrella group proposed a solution: Muslims should convert.

"They will have their temples to pray and this (prayer) issue will end," said Mahaveer Bhardwaj, chairman of the Sanyukt Sangharsh Samiti.

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