World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus washes his hands as he arrives at Bunia National Airport in Congo on May 30. BUNIA, Congo - The World Health Organization chief traveled on Saturday to the Congolese province hardest hit by an Ebola outbreak, urging residents to seek treatment and practice safe burials as officials scramble to contain the fatal disease. The outbreak -- the 17th in Congo and the third-largest since Ebola was discovered half a century ago -- is outpacing the global response, something WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged this week before traveling to Kinshasa on Thursday. His visit came as Brazil said on Saturday it was investigating a suspected Ebola case in Sao Paulo state involving a man who recently visited Congo. Authorities said the patient was in isolation at a specialist hospital. After meeting Prime Minister Judith Suminwa Tuluka on Friday, Tedros flew on Saturday to Bunia, capital of Ituri province, where the first cases were confirmed earlier this month.

Warmongers and authoritarians are "suffocating" human rights across the world, the chief of the United Nations has warned. Speaking at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres depicted a world where human rights were "on the ropes and being pummelled hard". Highlighting the devastating effects of conflicts, including in the Middle East, Ukraine and Congo, Guterres noted abuses linked to economics, technology, climate change, migration, and gender. Guterres called out a "morally bankrupt global financial system" that favours profits over planet protections. He also spoke of those who might exploit artificial intelligence to harm people, and leaders who seek to demonise migrants or restrict women's rights.

We address the challenge of online convex optimization where the objective function's gradient exhibits sparsity, indicating that only a small number of dimensions possess non-zero gradients. Our aim is to leverage this sparsity to obtain useful estimates of the objective function's gradient even when the only information available is a limited number of function samples. Our motivation stems from distributed queueing systems like microservices-based applications, characterized by request-response workloads. Here, each request type proceeds through a sequence of microservices to produce a response, and the resource allocation across the collection of microservices is controlled to balance end-to-end latency with resource costs. While the number of microservices is substantial, the latency function primarily reacts to resource changes in a few, rendering the gradient sparse. Our proposed method, CONGO (Compressive Online Gradient Optimization), combines simultaneous perturbation with compressive sensing to estimate gradients. We establish analytical bounds on the requisite number of compressive sensing samples per iteration to maintain bounded bias of gradient estimates, ensuring sub-linear regret. By exploiting sparsity, we reduce the samples required per iteration to match the gradient's sparsity, rather than the problem's original dimensionality. Numerical experiments and real-world microservices benchmarks demonstrate CONGO's superiority over multiple stochastic gradient descent approaches, as it quickly converges to performance comparable to policies pre-trained with workload awareness.

The United States has condemned growing violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), blaming an armed group it says is backed by neighbouring Rwanda. Fighting has flared in recent days in the eastern part of the DRC between the M23 rebel group and government forces, resulting in dozens of soldiers and civilians being killed or wounded. The fighting has also pushed tens of thousands of civilians to flee towards the eastern city of Goma, which is located between Lake Kivu and the border with Rwanda. "This escalation has increased the risk to millions of people already exposed to human rights abuses including displacement, deprivation, and attacks," US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement. "The United States condemns Rwanda's support for the M23 armed group and calls on Rwanda to immediately withdraw all Rwanda Defense Force personnel from the DRC and remove its surface-to-air missile systems, which threaten the lives of civilians, UN and other regional peacekeepers, humanitarian actors, and commercial flights in eastern DRC," Miller added.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has accused Rwanda of carrying out a drone attack that damaged a civilian aircraft at the airport in the strategic eastern city of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province. Fighting has flared in recent days around the town of Sake, 20km (12 miles) from Goma, between M23 rebels – which Kinshasa says are backed by Kigali – and Congolese government forces. "On the night of Friday to Saturday, at 2-o-clock in the morning local time, there was a drone attack by the Rwandan army," said Lieutenant-Colonel Guillaume Ndjike Kaito, army spokesperson for North Kivu province. "It had obviously come from the Rwandan territory, violating the territorial integrity of the Democratic Republic of the Congo," he added in a video broadcast by the governorate. The drones "targeted aircraft of DRC armed forces".

In the moon-like landscape of northern Sudan, informal gold miners toil with spades and pickaxes to extract their prize from shallow pits that pockmark the terrain. Mining ore in the sweltering heat of the Nubian desert is the first stage of an illicit network that has exploded in the past 18 months following a pandemic-induced spike in the gold price. African governments desperate to recoup lost revenue are looking to Dubai to help stop the trade. Interviews with government officials across Africa reveal smuggling operations that span at least nine countries and involve tons of gold spirited over borders. That's a cause for international concern because the funds from contraband minerals dealing in Africa fuel conflict, finance criminal and terrorist networks, undermine democracy and facilitate money laundering, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. While it's impossible to say precisely how much is lost to smugglers each year, United Nations trade data for 2020 show a discrepancy of at least $4 billion between the United Arab Emirates' declared gold imports from Africa and what African countries say they exported to the UAE.

Acoustic sensors, big data, machine learning and protection of threatened animal species: all these elements go hand in hand in the Elephant Listening Project that is taking place in the jungles of the Republic of the Congo. For 24 hours a day, the sensors collect large amounts of data from the acoustic environment of the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park and neighboring forest areas. Among these data, the sounds of African elephants stand out, whose population has dropped by 30% in just 6 years, mainly due to poaching. But … what is the use of analyzing the sounds of elephants? Well to calculate the variations of its threatened population; but for this it is necessary to identify the sounds produced by the elephants from the rest of the jungle sounds, and then identify the elephants individually in order to count them, an impossible task to be performed from the air . This is possible thanks to Conservation Meetrics, a project promoted by Microsoft within its AI for Earth initiative, based on the use of machine learning to monitor wildlife and evaluate the results of conservation work.

An entrepreneur with a background in verifying the provenance of so-called conflict minerals is applying that expertise to keep tabs on one of the world's most widely traded commodities: coffee. Tracking this kitchen staple requires a mélange of emerging technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and the internet of things. The goal of his venture, bext360, is to help coffee buyers automate their dealings with fair-trade farmers, allowing them to more closely track the source and quality of the fair trade beans they're buying while speeding up payments for local growers. For buyers, the service promises deeper transparency, as well as a way of automating the verification process. For harvesters and growers -- largely women -- the service could mean more ready access to investment capital, according to bext360 CEO Daniel Jones.

Compared with the planet's other large tracts of tropical forests, the forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have remained relatively intact -- although that soon may be changing. Driven by factors such as shifting cultivation (slash-and-burn agriculture), fuelwood demand, logging, mining, infrastructure development, population growth and migration, rates of forest loss in the African country have doubled over the past 15 years. Based on an application of machine learning, the study focuses on a specific set of the DRC's most intact forested areas identified as containing critical biodiversity habitat; it predicts that without intervention, at least 820,884 acres of these critical forests could be lost by 2025. The collective size of this predicted forest loss -- an area the size of Luxembourg within a country the size of Western Europe -- may be small, yet millions of people rely on these forests for food, shelter and medicine. This underscores an urgent need to use this study to inform smart land-use decisions in the DRC. Within the DRC, our research focuses on the landscapes prioritized by the Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded program implemented by WRI and other partners.

LONDON, July 28 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A new technique using artificial intelligence to predict where deforestation is most likely to occur could help the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) preserve its shrinking rainforest and cut carbon emissions, researchers have said. Congo's rainforest, the world's second-largest after the Amazon, is under pressure from farms, mines, logging and infrastructure development, scientists say. Protecting forests is widely seen as one of the cheapest and most effective ways to reduce the emissions driving global warming. But conservation efforts in DRC have suffered from a lack of precise data on which areas of the country's vast territory are most at risk of losing their pristine vegetation, said Thomas Maschler, a researcher at the World Resources Institute (WRI). "We don't have fine-grain information on what is actually happening on the ground," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.