- World Report 2024: Somalia (hrw.org)
An uptick in fighting in several parts of the country resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties and forced almost 650,000 people to flee. While famine conditions were averted, five consecutive below-average annual rains continued to have a devastating impact on the realization of the rights to food and health, with at least 4.3 million people in urgent need of food assistance.
- How to find and observe Eta Cas (TOTS#2) (eyesonthesky.com)
Eta Cas is a double star within our own Milky Way galaxy. It is quite close to Earth, at just 19.4 light years, so the photons reaching your eye from the star tonight are under 20 years old. What makes Eta Cassiopeiae so interesting is that the primary star is a G-class star much like our Sun. Our Sun would look similar from Eta Cas if we were peering back it it from there. It also has 97% of the mass, and is 101% of the radius of our Sun. It is much like a twin of our host star in many respects, though it is likely about a billion years older. Here is how to locate it.
- Somalia (Wikipedia)
Somalia, officially the Federal Republic of Somalia, is the easternmost country in continental Africa. The country is on the Horn of Africa and is bordered by Ethiopia to the west, Djibouti to the northwest, the Gulf of Aden to the north, the Indian Ocean to the east, and Kenya to the southwest. Somalia has the longest coastline on Africa’s mainland. Somalia has an estimated population of around 17.1 million, of which over 2 million live in the capital and largest city Mogadishu. Around 85% of its residents are ethnic Somalis. The official languages of Somalia are Somali and Arabic, though the former is the primary language. The people of Somalia are Muslims, the majority of them Sunni.
