Month: June 2022

The territorial police in Serere has in custody 4 female siblings for the murder of their 65-year-old father, Okure John, who was a retired worker at Igola Research station, Serere, and resident of Igora II village Okulonyo parish, Orio sub-county in Serere district. The facts gathered reveal that on the 15.06.2022, a one Martha Akwango returned from school while crying, after she got possessed by evil spirits. When she reached at their home, her 3 other female siblings, started praying over her, to cast away the demons that had attacked her.

During the prayers, the 3 female siblings, while casting out demons from their younger sister, attacked their father inside the home they shared, and beat him to death. They further poked out both his eyes, which in their vision, was fired with evil spirit, and the cause of the demonic attacks on them.

The attack was so violent that blood splatter was seemingly everywhere and both eyes poked out. The siblings who include; Achumo Deborah, Achom Ester, Ikwadi Susan and Akwango Martha were arrested for the biological murder of their father. It is a spiritually influenced on their allegedly devilish father, that is very difficult for any normal person to comprehend. They are being processed on murder charges.

Source: Uganda Police Force

A global consortium of major space agencies is celebrating 50 years of collaboration in the provision of meteorological satellites vital for weather forecasts, life-saving early warning services and - increasingly - climate change monitoring and other application areas

The Coordination Group for Meteorological Satellites (CGMS) consists of satellite agencies from China, Europe, India, Japan, Republic of Korea, Russia and the United States, as well as international users including the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO.

Space agency heads have delivered congratulatory messages for the 50th anniversary ceremony on 17 June at WMO headquarters. The event will showcase the benefits of coordinated space-based observations based on the principal of working together. Participants will also look ahead to challenges in an era of threats of disruption from solar related “space weather” and growing pressure on scarce radio frequencies used for meteorological purposes; as well as to opportunities provided by supercomputers, IT cloud technology and Artificial Intelligence.

“In order to meet the expectations from governments, industry, and citizens for improved weather forecasts and early warnings of high impact weather events, the key priority of the CGMS is to continuously deliver high-quality and increasingly accurate observations from space,” says Phil Evans, EUMETSAT Director-General and head of the CGMS Secretariat.

“A globally coordinated response is necessary, and mechanisms like the CGMS will play a key role in this,” he says.

CGMS was established in 1972 by satellite agencies from Europe, Japan and the United States in order to coordinate the operation and use of fledgling geostationary satellites. Over the years, the membership and remit have expanded to cover an ever-growing number of weather, climate, ocean and environmental monitoring applications.

CGMS has more recently added coordination of climate and greenhouse gas observations as well as space weather (related to solar activity) to its priority areas of activity for the coming decade.

“The power of partnerships is pivotal and will be even more so in future as we embrace an Earth-systems approach to forecasts and predictions,” says WMO Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas.

“Satellite observations have greatly increased our understanding of what is happening in our atmosphere, in remote parts of the planet and deep in the oceans. We can predict storm tracks and precipitation patterns and monitor drought and wildfires. This underpins our efforts to strengthen disaster resilience and response and support decision-making on climate change mitigation and adaptation,” he says.

“CGMS exemplifies the international cooperation which is needed to realize the WMO Integrated Global Observing System as well as initiatives to increase access to early warning systems and to strengthen monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions,” he says.

Meteorological eyes in the sky

Over the years, the coverage of the “meteorological eyes in the sky” has become all-encompassing to include polar and elliptic orbit observations, in addition to geostationary satellites.

Joint collaboration between Europe, the US, and China enabled the expansion the constellation of international polar orbiting meteorological satellites from a two-orbit to a three-orbit system. In the past, EUMETSAT and NOAA operated mid-morning and mid-afternoon orbits and observations have now been greatly enhanced by an early-morning orbit from China’s polar orbiting satellites.

Combined, this three-orbit satellite system is able to provide more observations of everything from severe weather events, to forest fires, to ocean surface winds. Polar orbiting meteorological satellites are vital for global numerical weather prediction models as they provide around 90% of the satellite data used for reducing errors in forecasts.

CGMS standardizes processing and distribution of data to serve global users, in particular the WMO community. In addition, the development of global standards for metadata for satellite data and products have significantly improved the exchange of data between partners.

One of the overriding achievements of CGMS is the Establishment of a global back-up framework (contingency planning) – the concept of “helping thy neighbour.”

In the event of failure of one member’s assets, CGMS members have supported each other by moving satellites from their nominal positions in order to ensure continuity of observations over another part of the globe.

The same philosophy of “satellites serving society” characterizes many of CGMS-related activities.

Looking at the geostationary satellites as an example, EUMETSAT satellites help keep an eye on the Indian Ocean, providing data crucial for Indian Ocean islands and for eastern Africa and complementing the satellites of China, India, Japan, and the Republic of Korea. Japan’s Himawari-8 has brought the power of new satellite data to the Asia-Pacific region and China’s FY-4 satellite provides additional unprecedented information about the same region.

“We have the privilege and unique advantage of acting on behalf of a well-structured, user-driven community responsible for facing global challenges that will impact future generations. Let’s act together and deliver!” says Phil Evans, head of the CGMS Secretariat.

Source: World Meteorological Organization

The year 2021 was a challenging one for the communities, the world, and for the millions of young women and girls in East and Southern Africa. Despite the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that hampered our efforts in delivering a better region and a sustainable world through our Transformative Results, we rose with grit and grace to face these challenges.

Health systems strained under the weight of the pandemic, supply chains unraveled, and our programmes and services were delayed. In the middle of these health-related crossfires, women and girls became targets – vulnerable to gender-based violence and harmful practices, maternal deaths, and complications from the lack of access to family planning.

Through disruptions and changes, our resilience, our agility, our sense of purpose remained solid. Read how we rose to the challenge in our 2021 annual report.

Source: United Nations Population Fund

More than 1,600 confirmed monkeypox cases and almost 1,500 suspected cases have been reported this year from seven countries where monkeypox has been detected for years and 32 newly affected countries, according to the World Health Organization director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“Europe remains the epicenter of this escalating outbreak,” Dr. Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, said, with “85% of the global total.”

WHO is convening an emergency meeting next week to discuss the mounting outbreak and whether the name of the disease should be changed.

A group of scientists said in a statement recently on virological.com, “In the context of the current global outbreak, continued reference to, and nomenclature of this virus being African is not only inaccurate but is also discriminatory and stigmatizing. The most obvious manifestation of this is the use of photos of African patients to depict the pox lesions in mainstream media in the global north. Recently, Foreign Press Association, Africa, issued a statement urging the global media to stop using images of African people to highlight the outbreak in Europe.”

Monkeypox, according to a description on WHO’s website, “is a zoonosis: a disease that is transmitted from animals to humans.”

Human-to-human transmission is limited, according to WHO, but can occur “through contact with bodily fluids, lesions on the skin or on internal mucosal surfaces, such as in the mouth or throat, respiratory droplets and contaminated objects.”

Source: Voice of America

Weather disasters that happen more often because of climate change create conditions in which gender-based violence often spikes, according to new research.

The study, published in the journal The Lancet Planetary Health, reviewed research from five continents and found increased violence against women and girls in the aftermath of floods, droughts, hurricanes and other extreme weather events that are becoming more frequent as the planet warms. Humanitarian organizations that respond to weather disasters should be aware of this troubling trend when planning their operations, the study authors said.

“When we think of climate change effects, we think of some very drastic and very visual things, things like floods, disruptions of cities, supply chain disruptions — which are all very valid and very real risks of climate change,” said study author Sarah Savic Kallesøe, a public health researcher at Simon Fraser University in Canada. “But there are also some more veiled consequences that are not as easily visible or easily studied. And one of those things is gender-based violence.”

The researchers scoured online databases to find studies on rape, sexual assault, child marriage and other forms of gender-based violence following extreme weather events.

The initial search, based on broad keywords like “violence,” “women,” and “weather,” yielded more than 20,000 results, each of which Savic Kallesøe and her colleagues screened individually to determine whether they were relevant.

Only 41 studies that assessed links between gender-based violence and extreme weather made the cut. The researchers then graded the robustness of each study's methodology using standard rubrics for grading data quality. Although many of the papers were flawed and a few contradicted each other, most studies — especially the higher quality ones — reported a rise in gender-based violence following extreme weather, Savic Kallesøe said.

For instance, one study found that new moms were more than eight times as likely to be beaten by their romantic partners after Hurricane Katrina if they had suffered storm damage than before the storm hit. Five studies of good or fair quality linked drought in sub-Saharan Africa to upticks in sexual and physical abuse by romantic partners, child marriage, dowry violence, and femicide.

And interviews with survivors revealed that seeking disaster aid can make women more vulnerable: “The shelter is not safe for us. Young men come from seven or eight villages,” said one survivor to researchers following Cyclone Roanu in Bangladesh in 2016. “I feel frightened to stay in the shelters. I stay at my house rather than taking my teenage daughter to the shelters,” she added.

Lindsay Stark, a social epidemiologist at the Brown School of the Washington University in St. Louis, said the pattern “is something that those of us who are working in the humanitarian space know intrinsically, because we see it all the time. So, it is very nice to see this distillation of the evidence.”

Savic Kallesøe emphasized that climate change itself doesn’t directly cause gender-based violence. Instead, she and her colleagues found that gender-based violence is “exacerbated by extreme weather events because it's a type of coping strategy at the expense of women, girls, and sexual and gender minorities,” she said.

Extreme weather can place people under enormous stress, displace them, force them into crowded relief camps, destroy their livelihoods, and expose them to strangers who might do them harm. Layered over the gender roles that often drive gender-based violence, these risk factors make women especially vulnerable. For instance, a family might marry off a daughter early to have one less mouth to feed after a flood, or a man stressed after a hurricane might snap and strike his wife.

Researchers widely recognize that humanitarian crises, like conflict or forced migration, tend to expose women and girls to violence. That climate disasters would have similar consequences isn’t surprising, said Lori Heise, an expert on gender equity at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

However, the exact ways in which climate disasters lead to gender-based violence still aren’t clear from the data. Few high-quality studies are available — and almost no data has been collected on the challenges faced by LGBTQ people following extreme weather events. The new study highlights the need for more and better research and for humanitarian organizations to engage with women and girls in climate-stressed areas about how best to protect them when disaster strikes, Savic Kallesøe said.

“Gender-based violence is happening all the time, everywhere,” Stark said. “We need to be preventing gender-based violence now … and to understand that if we don’t act now, the situation is going to increase exponentially with the impending climate crisis that we all know is upon us.”

Source: Voice of America