Zimbabwe repatriates 20 poached DRC primates in transit to South Africa
After months of coordinated international effort the Jeunes Animaux Confisqués au Katanga (JACK) sanctuary welcomed 20 monkeys to their new home. The monkeys, natives of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), were confiscated in September 2020 following a surgical strike on an international wildlife crime syndicate that operates between the...
African rugby’s top woman, Kenya’s Paula Lanco traces her journey to the helm
As the world celebrated International Women’s Day and the dynamic women who have and continue to excel in their fields in all industries, it is fitting that we celebrate one of the leading women in Rugby Afrique Paula Lanco – a Rugby Afrique executive committee member and chairperson of the...
NBA, Basketball Africa League launch gender equality initiatives
The National Basketball Association (NBA) and the Basketball Africa League (BAL) marked this year’s International Women’s Day that was celebrated on March 8 with the launch of several initiatives to advance gender equality and economic inclusion in Africa. The initiatives will build on NBA family’s collective efforts to advance equality...
African and Canadian youths team up in women’s entrepreneurship project
The Africa Skills Hub, a youth employment organisation and business incubator in Ghana will partner with Canada World Youth or Jeunesse Canada Monde (CWY-JCM) to implement the Women’s Entrepreneurship and Livelihoods Initiative (WELI) on the continent, the two organisations have announced. They said when they announced the initiative on Monday...
You are always monitored; how to tell emails that remotely track you
Everyone sends emails these days: political parties, your book club, freelance journalists, the social networks you’re signed up to, your parents, that online store that you only bought one item from a decade ago, and many, many more. What do a lot of those email senders have in common? They...
Big Tech focuses more on engineered fixes rather than how AI exacerbate biases
The most prestigious machine learning conference, NeurIPS, has had at least two Big Tech companies as primary sponsors since 2015, according to the same 2020 study that analysed the influence of Big Tech money in universities. “When considering workshops relating to ethics or fairness, all but one has...
Beware of serious health risks posed by arsenic poisoning in water, food
Arsenic’s potent effect on humans has been known since at least the Roman Empire. For centuries, it was a popular poison for murderers because it can’t be seen, smelled or tasted in food or water. That made it difficult to detect. As chemical detection methods improved, its use as a...
Hashtag: A genie or ally governments around the world cannot rein in?
After Twitter drew world attention to schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram terror group, Nigerian security forces began to arrest protesters and later deployed armed police and water cannons onto the median. That scene would only provide more arresting footage to help drive the story further up the Twitter algorithm. Nigeria...
Social media: Powerful tool for galvanising civilians against dictators and crime
Watching the analytics skyrocket during a dentist appointment in San Francisco, Jack Dorsey was struck by how quickly a hashtag can move. The founder of Twitter had seen people fire off tweets to coordinate protests in Iran in 2009, and the next year, the website had galvanised crowds of millions...
How a hashtag went viral and incited a military intervention in Nigeria
Russell Simmons was finishing his morning yoga routine on a yacht floating in the turquoise Caribbean waters off St Barts, peacefully unaware that he was about to provoke a tidal wave. The man who founded the boom-bap hit machine Def Jam Records in a cramped Manhattan dormitory room and made...
