Resetting Afghan woman’s agenda: How woman defied Taliban, went to school, opened and now driving her car
When the Taliban seized power across Afghanistan last August, Aaila’s first reaction was to stage an act of quiet protest. As Taliban fighters swept into Bamiyan, the ancient city in central Afghanistan, the 37-year-old got behind the wheel of her white Toyota and drove around town. “I wanted to tell...
AI colonialism: South African experts argue that Artificial Intelligence is repeating patterns of apartheid history
Thami Nkosi points to the tell-tale black box atop a utility pole on a street once home to two Nobel Peace Prize laureates: South Africa’s first Black president, Nelson Mandela, and the anti-apartheid activist and theologian Desmond Tutu. It always happens this way, Nkosi says. First the fibre; then the...
New report details how Facebook is grappling with spectre of Russia’s half-truths and support for coups in Africa
Facebook is struggling to contain pro-Russian and anti-western posts that are contributing to political instability in West Africa, investigators and analysts have said. The platform, which has expanded rapidly across the continent in recent years, has made significant investment in content moderation, but still faces enormous challenges in curbing deliberate...
New study shows highly creative people like visual artists and architects have ‘unique brain connectivity’
The latest research into creativity compares the brain function of exceptionally creative visual artists and scientists with a highly educated group. Scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan participants’ brains while they performed tasks that tested creative thinking. The researchers found that the brains of exceptionally creative people...
Moving target: Rather than Nigerian police investigate crimes digitally, they profile young men for torture and extortion
In Nigeria, the meaning of “tech” is rapidly changing. In the last year, data centres have been spreading all across Africa. In response, Lagos-founded MainOne – the largest ISP and data centre operator in West Africa – was acquired by Equinix for $320 million in 2021, with the hopes of...
Cybercrime: Why international institutions are shunning internet traffic from Nigeria as scepticism on financial instruments grows
In November 2021, Oluwaseun Medayedupin was arrested by the Nigerian police in Lagos. An investigation found that he had been pursuing “disgruntled employees” from American companies and pushing them to release ransomware on internal enterprise servers, offering a percentage of the cut if they agreed to collaborate in the attack....
Irony of Colombia ‘socialising’ the idea that women victims of armed violence are responsible for their deaths
Many of the women under threat in the Colombian town of Tibú have nowhere to turn, aside from a small handful of human rights defenders. Authorities have lost grip of the rising insecurity that targets women to armed groups in the cocoa-growing region that borders Venezuela. “The women of Catatumbo...
How collapse in Colombian government authority has triggered femicides linked to armed groups
In Tibú, a small town along the border with Venezuela, a rising wave of violence in Colombia’s primary coca-producing region is targeting women, leading to an unprecedented spike in killings and forcing others to flee. Those who flee are often left in precarious economic situations far from their homes, too...
Inside Ukraine-Russia cyber warfare: Information hacking and leaking is ‘weaponised’ to unhinge the enemy
Names, birthdays, passport numbers, job titles – the personal information goes on for pages and looks like any typical data breach. But this data set is very different. It allegedly contains the personal information of 1,600 Russian troops who served in Bucha, a Ukrainian city devastated during Russia’s war and...
‘At the moment we need to recognise that climate crisis in Eastern Africa is actually the new normal’
The current stretch of failed rains in the Horn of Africa has hit a region that had barely begun to recover from the 2016-2017 drought. With no pause to enable pasture and water points to regenerate, estimated 20 million people’s ability to cope has been stripped away. In southern Ethiopia,...
