A concerted push by al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab to expand from Somalia into Ethiopia appears to have been “largely contained,” according to a senior U.S. military official, though he cautioned that the terror group was likely planning more such attacks in coming months.

Almost 500 al-Shabab fighters first crossed into eastern Ethiopia last week, clashing with Ethiopian forces along the border. U.S. assessments suggest they may have penetrated as much as 150 kilometers into Ethiopia before being stopped.

“It appears that the Ethiopians have largely contained and defeated this incursion,” General Stephen Townsend, the outgoing commander of U.S. Africa Command, said Thursday during a call with the Washington-based Defense Writers Group.

Ethiopian officials Thursday likewise confirmed the al-Shabab attack had been repulsed.

“Our brave soldiers foiled a plan al-Shabab was working on for at least a year and defeated the fighters they sent to Ethiopia within three days,” Mustafe Omer, the president of Ethiopia’s Somali region, told reporters.

Omar also said that Ethiopia is planning to create a “security buffer zone” aimed at countering al-Shabab attacks.

“We cannot merely watch an open border where the militants mobilize themselves on the other side [Somalia] to attack us,” he said. “We must prevent such a threat and not wait until they come to our border.”

AFRICOM’s Townsend agreed al-Shabab will try again.

“This is not a fluke. … I don’t believe this is a one-off,” he added in response to a question from VOA.

“It’s only been less than a year ago that al-Shabab emir [Ahmed] Diriye called for an increased emphasis on external attacks and increased emphasis on attacking Western targets in the Horn of Africa,” Townsend said. “This is a response.”

According to intelligence shared by U.N. member states, al-Shabab currently commands between 7,000 and 12,000 fighters and is spending approximately $24 million a year – a quarter of its budget – on weapons, explosives and increasingly on drones.

Townsend further warned Thursday that al-Shabab has been emboldened by recent political turmoil in Somalia, which consumed the attention of Somali officials and politicians for much of the last 18 months, as well as by the December 2020 decision by then-U.S. President Donald Trump to end a U.S. troop presence in Somalia.

That decision has since been reversed, and the AFRICOM commander said Somalia’s new president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, has also taken positive steps. “Al-Shabab got bigger, bolder, stronger,” Townsend said. “So now we’ve got to blunt the initiative that they’ve [al-Shabab] enjoyed for 15 months or more.

This past June, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced a probe into Tesla’s autopilot software. Data gathered from 16 crashes raised concerns over the possibility that Tesla’s AI may be programmed to quit when a crash is imminent. This way, the car’s driver, not the manufacturer, would be legally liable at the moment of impact.

It echoes the revelation that Uber’s self-driving car, which hit and killed a woman, detected her six seconds before impact. But the AI was not programmed to recognize pedestrians outside of designated crosswalks. Why? Because jaywalkers are not legally there.

Some believe these stories are proof that our concept of liability needs to change. To them, unimpeded continuous innovation and widespread adoption of AI is what our society needs most, which means protecting innovative corporations from lawsuits. But what if, in fact, it’s our understanding of competition that needs to evolve instead?

If AI is central to our future, we need to pay careful attention to the assumptions around harms and benefits programmed into these products. As it stands, there is a perverse incentive to design AI that is artificially innocent.

A better approach would involve a more extensive harm-reduction strategy. Maybe we should be encouraging industry-wide collaboration on certain classes of life-saving algorithms, designing them for optimal performance rather than proprietary advantage.

Every fix creates a new problem

Some of the loudest and most powerful corporate voices want us to trust machines to solve complex societal problems. AI is hailed as a potential solution for the problems of cross-cultural communication, health care and even crime and social unrest.

Corporations want us to forget that AI innovations reflect the biases of the programmer. There is a false belief that as long as the product design pitch passes through internal legal and policy constraints, the resulting technology is unlikely to be harmful. But harms emerge in all sorts of unexpected ways, as Uber’s design team learned when their vehicle encountered a jaywalker for the first time.

What happens when the nefarious implications of an AI are not immediately recognized? Or when it is too difficult to take the AI offline when necessary? Which is what happened when Boeing hesitated to ground the 737 Max jets after a programming glitch was found to cause crashes — and 346 people died as a result.

We must constantly reframe technological discussions in moral terms. The work of technology demands discrete, explicit instructions. Wherever there is no specific moral consensus, individuals simply doing their job will make a call, often without taking the time to consider the full consequences of their actions.

Moving beyond liability

At most tech companies, a proposal for a product would be reviewed by an in-house legal team. It would draw attention to the policies the design folks need to consider in their programming. These policies might relate to what data is consumed, where the data comes from, what data is stored or how it is used (for example anonymized, aggregated or filtered). The legal team’s primary concern would be liability, not ethics or social perceptions.

Research has called for taking an approach that considers insurance and indemnity (responsibility for loss compensation) to shift liability and allow stakeholders to negotiate directly with each other. They also propose moving disputes over algorithms to specialized tribunals. But we need bolder thinking to address these challenges.

Instead of liability, a focus on harm reduction would be more helpful. Unfortunately, our current system doesn’t allow companies to easily co-operate or share knowledge, especially when anti-trust concerns might be raised. This has to change.

Re-thinking the limits of competition

These problems demand large-scale, industry-wide efforts. The misguided pressures of competition pushed Tesla, Uber and Boeing to release their AI too soon. They were overly concerned with the costs of legal liability and lagging behind competitors.

My research proposes the somewhat counter-intuitive idea that the ethical positions a corporation takes should be a source of competitive parity in its industry, not a competitive advantage. In other words, a company should not stand out for finding ethical ways to run its business. Ethical commitments should be the minimum expectation required of all who compete.

Students of Umma University on Friday planted 100 fruit trees to celebrate Customer Service Week, in collaboration with non-governmental organisation, Fruity Schools Africa.

The tree planting was sponsored by Takaful Insurance and took place on the university’s grounds in Kajiado County.

University Vice-Chancellor Halima Abdullahi said the institution’s leadership is committed to change the ecology of their environment through planting fruit trees.

She urged the students, through the Red Cross Students Chapter and Environment Club to take care of the fruit trees and plant more around the university’s 75 acres of land.

Fruity Schools Africa plants and cares for grafted and export-grade fruit trees in public primary and secondary schools as well as selected public spaces across Kenya.

It works in partnership with organisations including the Standard Media Group, Kenya Forest Service, Kenya Forestry Research Institute, Kenya Agriculture and Livestock Research Organisation and the ministries of Education and Environment.

The goal is to plant over one million grafted fruit tree seedlings annually.

The NGO has been in operation for six months and so far has planted 17,430 grafted fruit tree seedlings in 353 schools within Nairobi and Machakos counties, with the help of Ashut Engineers Ltd and Jubilee Life Insurance.

Speaking during the planting session, Umma University Registrar Ali Adan said the trees will be beneficial to students’ health and the environment at large in an effort to make Umma University greener.

“I am very excited to have participated in the fruity trees planting exercise that will bring ecological restoration,” he said.

Takaful Insurance Africa Branch Manager Bishero Halakhe said that planting the trees on their corporate client’s land went beyond service as the trees will mature to give fruits and shade to all.

Student president Sidiq Hassan said they were committed to make the environment greener and promised that the students would take care of the trees to fruition.

The head of the Environment Club, Bushra Mohammed, said the tree planting will not end at the university but will also extend back to the villages when the students break for holidays.

Cabinet bans construction of industries in wetlands as it also directs that all industries must comply with environmental standards including gas emission and disposal of waste

Many industries have already been constructed in wetland areas and use the water system to dispose of wastage which has in most times ended up in Lake Victoria and other water bodies

The state minister in charge of the environment Beatrice Atim Anwar says anyone who licenses such industries will be prosecuted

Anywar also announced a total ban on manufacturing and usage of Kavera and treated poles for utility purposes.