Category Archives: Transhuman News

The world is abuzz, perhaps even befuddled, about the growing use of artificial intelligence. One of the most popular artificial intelligence (AI) tools available to the public today is ChatGPT, an AI-powered language model that has been "trained" and fed vast amounts of online information. After taking all that in, ChatGPT can regurgitate human-like text responses to a given prompt. It can respond to queries, discuss a lot of topics and crank out pieces of writing.

It isn't difficult to imagine a robot wheeling and dealing on the surface of Mars, factory-wired with ChatGPT or a similar artificial intelligence language model. This smartbot could be loaded with a suite of science devices. It could analyze what its scientific instruments are finding "on-the-spot," perhaps even collating any evidence of past life it uncovers nearly instantly.

That data could be digested, assessed, appraised and assembled in some scientific form. The product, in well-paginated condition, with footnotes to boot, could then be transmitted directly from the robot to a scientific journal, like Science or Nature, for publication.Of course, that paper would then be peer reviewed maybe by AI/ChatGPT reviewers. Sound far-fetched?

I reached out to several leading researchers, presenting this off-Earth, on-Mars scenario, with a variety of reactions in return.

Related: Artificial intelligence could help hunt for life on Mars and other alien worlds

"It could be done but there could be misleading information," said Sercan Ozcan, Reader in Innovation and Technology Management at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. "ChatGPT is not 100% accurate and it is prone to 'hallucination.'"

Ozcan said he's not sure if ChatGPT would be valuable if there is no prior volume of work for it to analyze and emulate. "I believe humans can still do better work than ChatGPT, even if it is slower," he said.

His advice is to not use ChatGPT "in areas where we cannot accept any error."

Steve Ruff, associate research professor at Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration in Tempe, Arizona, is keenly tied to studying Mars.

"My immediate reaction is that it's highly unlikely that 'on-the-spot' manuscripts would be a realistic scenario given how the process involves debates among the team over the observations and their interpretation," Ruff said. "I'm skeptical that any AI, trained on existing observations, could be used to confidently interpret new observations without humans in the loop, especially with new instrument datasets that have not been available previously. Every such dataset requires painstaking efforts to sort out."

For the near term, Ruff thinks AI could be used for rover operations, like picking targets to observe without humans in the loop, and for navigation.

In what world do we want to live?

Perhaps that is the strongest question, said Nathalie Cabrol, Director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

"First things first," Cabrol said. "AI is a formidable tool and should be used as such to support humans in their activity. We actually do that already every day, in one form or another," she added, "and improved versions might make things better."

On the other hand, like any human tools, they are double-edged swords and sometimes lead people to start thinking "nonsense," Cabrol added, and she believes that to be the case here.

"I do personally like writing papers. It is a great time where I see my work coming to fruition and can put my ideas together on paper," Cabrol said, and sees that as an important part of her creative process.

"But let's assume for a moment that I let this algorithm write it for me. Then, I am being told that it's okay because the paper will be reviewed," Cabrol said. "But by whom? I would assume that if you let algorithms do the job for you it's because you assume they will be less biased and do a better job? Following that logic, I would assume that a human is not qualified to review that paper."

Cabrol senses that a next question is: Where do we stop? What if all researchers ask AI to write their research grant proposals? What if they do and don't tell?

"This depends in which world you want to live and what part you want left to humanity," Cabrol said. "We are creative beings and we are not perfect," she continued, "but we learn from our mistakes and that's part of our evolution. Mistake and learning are other words for 'adaptation'," she said.

By letting AI getting into what makes us human, we are messing with our own evolution, Cabrol added, and she sees specters of "transhumanism" in all of this. Transhumanism can be defined as a loose ideological movement united by the belief that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology.

"Of course, that's not a chip in our brain and that's only a paper, you will say. Unfortunately, it is part of a much broader, and very disturbing, discourse on the (mis) use of AI," Cabrol concluded. "This is not trivial. It is not just a paper. It is about who we really want to become as a species. Personally, I see AI useful as a tool, and I will confine it as that."

"How funny that we still argue about the definition of life as we know it, and we're starting to use a tool in that search that also stretches the definition of life," said Amy Williams, assistant professor in Geological Sciences at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She is a participating scientist on the NASA Curiosity and Perseverance rover missions that have robots scouting about on Mars.

Williams reacted to the AI-ChatGPT off-world setting in full disclosure mode. "The first time I used ChatGPT was in preparing for this response, asking it: 'What organic molecules have the Mars rovers found?' The question was based on my particular field of expertise," she told Space.com.

"It was illuminating in that it did a great job providing me with statements that I would describe as robust and appropriate for a summary that I could give in an outreach talk to the general public about organic molecules on Mars," said Williams.

But it also demonstrated to Williams its limitation in that it could only access data from, in her case, September 2021 flagging it as a "knowledge cutoff."

"So its responses did not encompass the full breadth of published results about organics on Mars that I know about since 2021," she said.

Emphasizing that she is not a specialist in AI or machine learning, Williams said that future iterations of ChatGPT + AI will likely be able to incorporate more recent data and generate a complete synthesis of the recent results from any given scientific exploration.

"However, I still see these as tools to use in step with humans, instead of in place of humans," Williams remarked. "Given the limitations in data uplink and downlink with our current Deep Space Network, it is difficult for me to see a way to upload the knowledge base for something as complex as, for example, the current and historic data and context for the sources, sinks, and fates of organic molecules on Mars so that the onboard AI could generate a manuscript for publication," she said.

Williams views cutting edge planetary research as something that requires "retrospection, introspection and prospection." We push forward the boundaries of science by considering options, she added, that have never before been considered.

"Right now, my experience with ChatGPT showed me it is great at a literature search and turning that information into, effectively, an annotated bibliography. It could certainly save me time in looking up fundamental knowledge. It told me what we already know and typed it up very nicely! but it was not anything that any Mars organic geochemistry graduate student couldn't tell me."

In the end, Williams said that while ChatGPT + AI is a powerful tool that can positively augment the process of conveying information and new discoveries, "I don't see it replacing the human-driven process of synthesizing new information and putting it into context to generate new insights into science. However, if every AI sci-fi movie I've seen is predictive of the future, I may be wrong!"

Originally posted here:
ChatGPT on Mars: How AI can help scientists study the Red Planet - Space.com

This story was published in partnership with HuffPost.

Stewart Rhodes, the infamous leader of the anti-government Oath Keeper militia, was standing on a street in Conroe, Texas, a city about 40 miles north of Houston. The sky was clear blue, but remnants of darker days were everywhere. Residents were shoveling up splintered lumber and debris. A boy holding a broom was halfheartedly scooping lawn scraps into a garbage bag a few feet away from where Rhodes was conducting an on-camera interview.

A Category 4 hurricane named Harvey had just dumped feet, not inches, of water on the state, sparking one of the most expensive disasters in United States history. The scale of the damage was so vast that the then-director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, put out a request for volunteers. We need citizens to be involved, he said on August 28, 2017, a few days after the storm struck Texas. The Oath Keepers answered the call.

Rhodes was wearing an Oath Keepers cap and T-shirt. He was there with another Oath Keeper, the organizations Southeast regional assistant coordinator, Alex Oakes. The men were interviewing Beau Sullivan, a Conroe local who had been organizing hurricane relief efforts after the storm.

Thank you, gentlemen, for coming out here, Sullivan said, shaking Rhodes and Oakes hands. You know, normally yall gotta be a little more brass tacks, but yall come out here with a message of love this time, and camaraderie, and I really appreciate that. Thats whats needed now in this rebuilding effort.

The exchange, captured on video and disseminated by the Oath Keepers on AltCensored, a right-wing alternative to YouTube, neatly distills why a group mainly preoccupied with uncovering made-up evidence of government tyranny might participate in hurricane relief efforts: It wins people over.

For nearly a decade, the Oath Keepers which formed in 2009 in the wake of Barack Obamas election to the presidency have responded to disasters like hurricanes and floods by administering rescue operations, serving hot meals, and doing construction work. Disasters provide the Oath Keepers with opportunities to fundraise and gain the trust of people who might not otherwise be sympathetic to their anti-government cause. By arriving to crisis zones before federal agencies do, the Oath Keepers take advantage of bureaucratic weaknesses, holding a hand out to people in desperate circumstances.

This all serves to reinforce the militia members conviction that the government is fallible, negligent, and not to be trusted. And every time a new person sees the Oath Keepers as the helpers who respond when the government does not, it helps build the groups fledgling brand.

The group has been in disarray since some of its leaders and most active members, including Rhodes, were arrested, tried, and convicted for their participation in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021. Facing public backlash and social media bans, the Oath Keepers have retreated from the public sphere. For a time, they took down their website and stopped gathering in public. But the retreat has been short-lived. Militia groups are finding some footing again, said Hampton Stall, a research specialist at Princeton University who runs a watchdog site called MilitiaWatch. 2023 will be the year they start to reactivate.

The first phase of an Oath Keepers remobilization is taking place in Chino Valley, Arizona. A man named Jim Arroyo, the former state vice president for the Arizona Oath Keepers chapter the groups largest state contingent to date is on a mission to rebrand his chapter as a disaster assistance organization. His group, which he has registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is called the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, named after the county its based in. Arroyo is fond of calling the outfit, known as YCPT, a nonviolent, apolitical, nonpartisan organization.

Our main issue is disaster preparedness, he told Grist, an assertion local officials and others in Arizona have taken at face value. But thats not the full story. The fringe group is trying to ride the coattails of disaster preparation and relief work into the mainstream, experts told Grist. Its success thus far hints at a frightening post-disaster outcome in a warming world: What happens if the government fails to show up and communities start to rely on the extremists next door?

Rhodes founded the Oath Keepers on the premise that a violent clash between American citizens and the United States government wasnt just possible, it was inevitable. Rhodes subscribes to the far-fetched notion that the government is conspiring to strip its citizens of their rights and force them to participate in a new world order defined by a tyrannical, globalist, and socialist one-world government. Fear of government tyranny isnt a new concept; its one of the tenets upon which this nation was founded.

Anti-government militias are a key part of the so-called patriot movement, a loose coalition of nationalistic and often violent far-right groups. The Oath Keepers recruit current and former members of the military, first responders, and law enforcement. Like other sects of the patriot movement, the Oath Keepers are overwhelmingly white, but otherwise they look and act differently than many of their allies.

They live much more on the side of the spectrum that wants mainstream political legitimacy, Sam Jackson, a University of Albany professor and the author of Oath Keepers: Patriotism and the Edge of Violence in a Right-Wing Antigovernment Group, told Grist. One of the ways that Oath Keepers has done this is by trying to portray itself as a civic organization.

In 2013, Rhodes launched a program aimed at preparing communities for a natural disaster, a civil war, or anything in between. He originally said the program a national network of community groups akin to neighborhood watches was intended to create civilization preservation teams. He soon gave them a far more innocuous-sounding new name: community preparedness teams, or CPTs. CPTs provide volunteers with medical, disaster, and fire safety training. As the Oath Keepers grew, changed, and increasingly made themselves known in the public sphere, the CPT program remained a relative constant something the group seems to view as core to its identity, Jackson wrote in his book.

The CPTs kept their eye on events with potential for conflict with government agencies. In 2014, they responded to Nevada rancher Cliven Bundys call to arms, after he refused to pay federal land management agencies millions of dollars in required fees to graze his herd of cattle on public land. They defended a gold mine from the Bureau of Land Management in Oregon in 2015. They were present that same year in Ferguson, Missouri, providing security, according to the group, for business owners during widespread protests on the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager who was killed by police in 2014. And they provided relief in Conroe after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in 2017.

That year saw the dawn of a new era for FEMA. Harvey and two other hurricanes called Irma and Maria made landfall on U.S. soil in the same 30-day period, claiming thousands of lives, causing widespread destruction, and generating hundreds of billions of dollars in cumulative costs. The back-to-back disasters made it exceedingly clear that the federal government is unprepared for the consequences of climate change more intense hurricanes, heavier floods, rising sea levels.

Despite years of abnormal weather events that have laid its shortcomings bare, FEMA still doesnt have the personnel or the budget it needs to ready Americans for disasters or respond adequately when multiple disasters strike at the same time. Experts say that federal lawmakers, who decide how much funding FEMA gets every year, lack the foresight required to actually prepare for climate change. Instead, disaster management centers around response, which means FEMA is constantly playing a game of catch-up.

The agencys shortcomings leave gaps for militias to step in. Teams of Oath Keepers moved into Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico in the wake of the 2017 trio of hurricanes. They showed up again in Florida in 2018 after Hurricane Michael struck the state. Leaked Oath Keeper chats, shared with Grist by the nonprofit watchdog group Distributed Denial of Secrets, show that members of the group put out a call for volunteers following a damaging outbreak of tornadoes in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee in the spring of 2021.

Its not just the Oath Keepers. Armed vigilantes reportedly set up roadblocks and interrogated people fleeing wildfires in Oregon in 2020; a different militia tried to recruit people affected by the Oak Fire in central California last summer. Disaster relief in this country is pretty broken because of the way it often takes months to get federal funding activated, Stall said. Theres a long time during which groups can often get active.

And FEMAs large-scale efforts to help communities in the aftermath of disasters inadvertently provide these groups with fodder for their conspiracy theories. When a hurricane hits, FEMA goes to work building out a massive network of field camps, relief stations, and other physical infrastructure that makes the work of disaster aid possible. Where the unindoctrinated might see logistics at work, the far right sees a sinister plot unfolding.

Theres a long-standing conspiracy theory among the far right that everything that FEMA does is dual use, Jackson said. It has this surface-level purpose of responding to emergencies and disasters and all that kind of stuff. But also its building up the infrastructure so that one day when martial law is declared, there are these huge detention camps and there are deployed resources to be used by troops who are enforcing martial law.

Many Oath Keepers subscribe to that belief, but theyre not vocal about it. Publicly, Jackson said, they portray themselves as supplementing FEMAs efforts and even working in tandem with the agency. Its part and parcel of the groups founding ethos understand the system, work within the system, and be prepared to defeat the system when the time comes.

If theres one thing Jim Arroyo, leader of the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, understands, its how the system works. The 62-year-old gunsmith trained as an army ranger in the early 1980s, regularly volunteers with the Chino Valley Police Department, and assists his countys local emergency management program, in addition to serving as the Arizona chapter vice president for the Oath Keepers for several years starting in 2014. Arroyo insists that neither his organization nor the Oath Keepers qualify as militias, and he vehemently rejects accusations that the Oath Keepers are in any way anti-government.

Thats completely stupid, he told Grist. We are the government.

Grist reached Arroyo on his landline in mid-March. He answered questions with occasional coaching from his wife Janet, who helps him run YCPT. In 2022, as the groups that stormed the U.S. Capitol confronted mounting legal and social repercussions, Arroyo officially broke ties with Oath Keepers national. He says his chapter is no longer in contact with the larger organization or Stewart Rhodes. But he still puts up the Oath Keeper flag at meetings and sports branded Oath Keeper gear.

We still believe in the mission of the Oath Keepers, Arroyo said, though he admitted that his efforts to partner with local governments outside of Arizona since the Capitol insurrection have been difficult due to his association with the organization. For the time being, hes focused on building YCPT into a national network. At this stage of the game, our mission is to train individuals, he said. He declined to say what he aims to do with the group in the future, but the YCPT website claims the group has outposts in 14 U.S. states and three countries Canada, Panama, and the U.K.

Arroyo offers YCPT attendees training in person and via Zoom twice a month. He lectures in front of a large banner that lists some of the threats the group says its focused on mitigating: fires, floods, food shortages, and economic collapse, to name a few. Many of the trainings focus on skills that come in handy during natural disasters like contacting people by radio in the event that internet and cellular networks break down, or administering CPR and other emergency medical procedures. Topics have also included how to prepare for electrical outages, plant a garden, and keep warm in freezing conditions.

But the group isnt just preparing for hurricanes and floods; its getting ready for war. In fact, thats the bulk of the preparedness work its doing. Though the YCPT website makes it seem like the organization is primarily focused on teaching participants basic survival skills, recordings of the groups monthly general meetings make it clear that YCPTs agenda goes far beyond those mainstream offerings. At every meeting, Arroyo invites a guest to give a lecture or offers one himself, an Oath Keeper cap perched on his graying head and a handgun holstered to his hip.

At one recent meeting, a self-described information warfare officer and retired Army lieutenant colonel named Steven Murray preached a potent cocktail of misinformation. Trans, gay, transhumanist agendas were infiltrating the public sphere. China had undermined every office in Arizonas government, and the sovereignty of Yavapai County had been transferred to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which will ultimately usurp the constitution. FEMA had built a containment camp in Arizona, he said. That should bother everybody in this room. Each point Murray made was aimed at inspiring action. Our job now is to resist, he said, to outthink, outsmart, and out-act our enemy.

The next guest, the head of YCPTs security team, taught attendees how to build their own tripwires, decoys, and booby traps. One mechanism, a tripwire that makes a loud noise to scare off intruders, requires a shotgun blank, he said. It doesnt have to be a blank, a member of the crowd shouted.

Arroyo later warned the group about the legal consequences of putting a live cartridge in a trip alarm. But he closed out the meeting with a warning about the police state, which he said controls elements within federal, state, and local law enforcement as well as the media, corporations, and the court system. Those entities, he claimed, are preparing to attack. Im getting prepared for the inevitable, Arroyo said. Were already engaged in the preliminaries before we get ready to go full kinetic.

Arroyo told Grist that YCPTs goal isnt to teach people how to participate in a civil war. Face it, Arroyo said, the vast majority of our people here are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. We are not teaching them to fight in a war. Were teaching them how to survive it.

YCPT has the idea that there will be some eventual moment when they are going to need particular skills, said Rachel Goldwasser, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center who studies the Oath Keepers and has kept track of YCPT meetings. Theres going to come a day when the government is going to go, essentially, full tyrant. According to Arroyo, that day isnt too far off.

YCPTs political arm, a group called the Lions of Liberty, staked out ballot dropboxes in Arizona last November as early voters submitted their ballots. Arroyo told Grist that he organized the surveillance effort in Yavapai County, and said there is overlap between the groups. People who are Oath Keepers or people who come to the YCPT trainings and meetings also attend the Lions of Liberty meetings. The unauthorized surveillance came to a halt after roughly a week when the League of Women Voters of Arizona sued the Lions of Liberty for violating the Voting Rights Act.

Arroyo told Grist that he believes that the worlds economic systems are on the verge of collapse, that unnamed attackers might disable U.S. power grids with an electromagnetic pulse, that the U.S. has already entered a civil war, and that the globe is in the first phase of a third world war. Unlike his guest speaker, Arroyo says he doesnt believe that FEMA is currently planning to imprison Americans in its camps, though he told Grist he does think FEMA could overstep its authority at some point down the line.

Governments all the time can do crazy things, he said.

While Arroyos views may seem far out to the average American, its obvious theres an audience for them in Arizona and beyond. Arroyo said that between 100 and 150 people regularly show up to his gatherings. Goldwasser and other experts who track these meetings confirmed theyre well attended. Republican candidates running for seats in Arizonas House of Representatives, Senate, attorney generals office, and Department of Education have spoken at YCPT meetings. In 2022, Eli Crane, a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, spoke at a meeting. He subsequently ousted the Democratic incumbent in the midterm elections. An Arizona state representative, Quang Nguyen, has been a guest speaker at least three times. Mitch Padilla, candidate for local justice of the peace, spoke at a YCPT meeting before winning his 2022 race. Multiple current and prospective county sheriffs have given speeches.

For attendees, the risks are minimal. Though YCPT meetings are fueled by conspiracy theories, the organization has a harmless name and isnt bogged down by the controversy surrounding the national Oath Keepers organization. That may allow the group to expand its reach in coming years.

There is a gap now and a vacuum where Oath Keepers was, said Goldwasser, who thinks Arroyo will hoover up Oath Keepers who have been standing idly by as the national organizations leadership has splintered apart.

Disasters are already chaotic. Adding in teams of armed volunteers, jacked up on conspiracy theories about the government, civil unrest, and global war, adds an unpredictable dimension to already complicated and flawed state and federal relief efforts. The vast majority of Oath Keeper beliefs and activities are still embodied in YCPT, Goldwasser said. Even if Arroyo doesnt agree with an all-out coup attempt, the things he might agree to that are dangerous, that are intimidating, that are potentially in conflict with the government, those still exist.

Some well-established relief groups, like the Red Cross, might link up with the Yavapai County Preparedness Team without realizing its a spinoff of the Oath Keepers, Goldwasser said.

And then, of course, theres the matter of who, exactly, these groups are targeting for disaster assistance.

Its hard to say how these older, majority white veterans and other volunteers currently think about the communities they aim to provide disaster assistance to, but in the past, Jackson said, Oath Keeper relief missions have focused on helping predominantly white communities. Theyre focusing on the suburbs, and theyre seeing the inner city as a source of problems and threats that need to be patrolled rather than people that need help. FEMA has faced persistent criticism for shortchanging minorities and low-income Americans in its relief efforts. If the Oath Keepers bring racist bias to their disaster recovery work, it could make disasters even more dangerous for communities of color.

Arroyo disputes the idea that his group discriminates. Weve got transgenders in our organization, weve got members of the LGBTQ community, weve had Democrats come in and participate in our training, Arroyo said. The narrative that the Oath Keepers are white nationalist, white supremacist, thats a false statement.

As the planet warms, more calamities will strike the U.S. and, if the recent past is any indication, create new opportunities for militias and other extremist groups to mobilize and recruit. But researchers have been examining productive counter-extremist messaging methods for decades now, and experts told Grist they see a few interventions that could limit militias power during natural disasters.

Brian Hughes, co-founder of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, said his group has had success using credible messengers a trusted community group, a loved one, or an authority figure to teach potential recruitment targets to avoid being manipulated by extremists. Those targets are people who are disillusioned with the system or simply have too much time on their hands. We try to reach people as early in the radicalization process as possible and ideally even before it begins, he said.

Hughes has had success experimenting with a technique called pre-bunking, a mix of media literacy and counter-propaganda education. The method teaches people how to recognize extremist recruitment tactics and reject them on sight. You can say something like, If somebody is telling you a story that sounds like theyre saying you need to stockpile guns because society is going to collapse, theres a good chance this person is representing an extremist group or an extremist point of view, Hughes said. His labs research has shown that people who have been pre-bunked are less likely to find extremist messaging credible and are more likely to develop their own counterarguments against it.

States can also play a firmer role in curtailing extremist activity. Many states have laws on the books that prohibit private militias from operating, but most state attorneys general dont enforce them. In fact, some states are trending in the opposite direction. Idaho lawmakers recently passed a law that repeals legislation prohibiting militias and paramilitary activity.

The states seem reticent to enforce anti-militia laws, and some states dont even know that they can utilize this, Goldwasser said. But its something that is absolutely necessary moving forward.

Stall is particularly heartened by organizations that enlist retired law enforcement and veterans the same groups targeted by the Oath Keepers to do relief work while ditching the heavy dose of extremist ideology. Team Rubicon, a humanitarian organization headquartered in California, recruits veterans, first responders, and other volunteers to help communities prepare for and recover from disasters. The group has built out a network of 150,000 volunteers, half of whom are veterans, and conducted some 1,500 missions in its 13 years of operation. Art delaCruz, Team Rubicons CEO and a veteran himself, told Grist that the organizations work in disaster zones helps make the transition from soldier to civilian easier for its volunteers.

I like to say that military veterans and people who have retired out of law enforcement or fire departments, whatever it might be, you have muscles that youve built up over the years and you love to use them, delaCruz said. The ability to use those muscles in a manner thats meaningful is really, really powerful.

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How far-right groups like the Oath Keepers are exploiting climate ... - Grist

The National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), has underscored the urgent need to encourage marginalized persons to partake in this years district elections, to promote inclusive and participatory governance.

Mr Mawuli Agbenu, the Upper East Regional Director of the Commission, who made the call, noted that over the years, women and persons with disability had not been much involved in the district level elections due to their vulnerabilities.

He said the situation was worrying and defeated the principles of democratic governance and called on major stakeholders to work to remove barriers confronting them and support them to stand for leadership positions in the impending district and national elections to enhance good governance.

He was speaking to staff of the Upper East Regional Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority as part of activities marking this years Constitution week, one of the Commissions flagship programmes.

This years celebration was on the theme, Thirty years of consolidating Constitutional democracy: building national cohesion through civic education and participation in local governance.

Mr Agbenu said the 1992 Constitution had stood the test of time and outlived all previous Constitutions and all efforts must be made to ensure inclusive governance, to deepen the democratic credentials of the Constitution.Generally, he said participation of women in the Ghanaian political space had been poor, adding that out of the 275 Members of Parliament in the current Parliament, only 40 were women, representing an insignificant number of the total women population in Ghana.

This, he said, was even worse in the district level elections as many people did not have interest in such elections and the situation had always led to low turnout but the Commission was determined to change the narrative.

We know there are lots of issues of socio-cultural beliefs and practices, finances among others hindering vulnerable people like women from contesting in elections and we are intensifying education to encourage more people to show interest in district level elections and support more women this year.

We are also calling on the Parliament to pass into law the Affirmative Action Bill which has been in Parliament since 1999 to encourage more women into politics, he said.

On the threats of terrorism from the Sahelian region to the peace and security of Ghana, the Regional Director noted that conflicts between communities and herdsmen were major breeding grounds for terrorists to attack the country.

He said the border communities needed to be sensitized on the protocols on transhuman protocols of the Economic Community of West African States and urged the Customs Division who worked at the borders to help educate the residents to ensure peace among the people.

Mr Samuel Owusu, the Upper East Regional Sector Commander of the Customs Division, hauded the efforts of the NCCE for driving home civic education among Ghanaians and said the move would help consolidate the peace and security of the nation.

He said the Customs Division in the region was working with other security agencies to ensure the borders of Ghana were properly manned to prevent any spillover of the activities of the terrorists into the country.

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Encourage the marginalised to partake in district level elections ... - BusinessGhana

It's been confirmed that the new "Alien" series will begin production sometime this year, with Landgraf stating back in January that Hawley has written the scripts and had apparently met with his production designer in Austin, TX. With a production that should incorporate a great deal of VFX and world-building, it's likely that the series won't actually premiere until 2024 at the earliest.

Set roughly 70 years from now, Hawley's "Alien" will explore what a future Earth would look like by the end of the 21st century. Using Scott's original "Alien" and James Cameron's "Aliens" as the framework, the story sounds like it will focus on two warring corporations both working to achieve new advancements in technology that eventually lead us down a dark path. In an interview with Esquire last year, Hawley had this to say about his version of a future Earth:

"In the movies, we have this Weyland-Yutani Corporation, which is clearly also developing artificial intelligence. But what if there are other companies trying to look at immortality in a different way, with cyborg enhancements or transhuman downloads? Which of those technologies is going to win?"

Landgraf has also confirmed that there will be references totheWeyland-Yutani corporation that appears in every "Alien" movie and that Hawley has invented another corporation that operates in a different territory. While the Xenomorph will absolutely be making an appearance, it sounds like Hawley is using this famous quote from Ripley in "Aliens" as a jumping-off point: "I don't know which species is worse. At least they don't f*** each other over for a percentage."

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Everything We Know About The Alien TV Series, FX's Small Screen ... - /Film