NAIROBI - In a school for the deaf in Kenya, children signed their excitement as a team demonstrated how a robotic arm could revolutionize their studies. Roughly 300,000 children in the east African nation are deaf or hard of hearing, according to the Kenya Society for Deaf Children, but just 20,000 were enrolled in schools as of 2024. Kenyan startup ZeroBionic, co-founded by 22-year-old Norah Kimathi, hopes to tackle some of the educational difficulties they face. It has built a mechanical hand that can translate a teacher's voice into sign language in real time, allowing deaf children to learn alongside their hearing counterparts. For the students at the Kasarani Treeside Secondary School for the Deaf in Nairobi, there is another element of the technology that is even more promising.

The signing of the Paris Agreement by 200 countries in 2015 was a rare moment of global unity, and the euphoria was real. To cheers and tears, the international climate treaty was approved by nearly every country in the world. Fundamental to the agreement was a commitment to keeping temperatures from rising beyond 1.5C (2.7F) above the pre-industrial levels of the mid 19th-century. But 11 years on, it is evident that the Earth is soon going to exceed that threshold because of the continued record burning of fossil fuels. A report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi, Kenya - called Limiting Overshoot - has found that even under the most optimistic scenario, the Earth will heat up by 1.8C (3.2F) above pre-industrial levels.

A trio linked with a US technology supplier have been charged over a ploy to smuggle American artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China, the Department of Justice said on Thursday. The individuals allegedly conspired to sell billions of dollars' worth of technology to buyers in China by faking documents and using dummy equipment to slip past audits, according to the DOJ. The goods in question included Nvidia-made semiconductors, highly coveted AI chips which are subject to export controls. In August 2025, two Chinese nationals were also arrested and charged with illegally shipping millions of dollars' worth of Nvidia chips to China. The DOJ said in a statement on Thursday that it had arrested US-citizen Yih-Shyan Wally Liaw and Taiwanese citizen Ting-Wei Willy Sun, while Ruei-Tsang Steven Chang, a Taiwanese citizen, remains a fugitive.

US's new scramble for Africa is biomedical imperialism Late in February, Zimbabwe pulled out of a proposed $367m United States health funding agreement after objecting to provisions requiring broad American access to sensitive health data. The five-year programme was presented as support for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and epidemic preparedness efforts. However, the terms demanded extensive sharing of national health intelligence, including epidemiological surveillance data and pathogen samples, while offering no binding guarantees that Zimbabwe would receive equitable access to medical technologies developed from them. Harare called the proposal an "unequal exchange", warning that Zimbabwe risked supplying the "raw materials for scientific discovery" while the resulting benefits could remain concentrated in the United States and global pharmaceutical firms. Critics increasingly describe this pattern as biomedical extractivism: a toxic combination of exploitative research practices and colonial thinking that reinforces Western dominance.

Charles Ojiambo Mutoka, 72, with portraits of his son Oscar, who he learned was killed in August, during a press conference where relatives of conscripts demanded urgent government action to repatriate their kin, in Nairobi on Jan. 27 | AFP-JIJI Nairobi - The scars on Victor's forearm remind him constantly of the day a Ukrainian drone attacked him after he was forcibly conscripted, like hundreds of young Kenyans, into the Russian military. It was a war that had nothing to do with him and which he was exceptionally lucky to survive. Four Kenyans -- Victor, Mark, Erik and Moses -- recounted the web of deception that took them to the killing fields of Ukraine. Their names have been changed for fear of reprisals. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

The first non-European Pope in more than 1,000 years, the Oscar-winning star of Annie Hall and The Godfather, a soul legend and one of the world's most famous designers - here are some of the well-known faces no longer with us. Among those we remember are Hollywood stars Robert Redford, Diane Keaton and Gene Hackman, and theatrical dames Joan Plowright and Patricia Routledge. Robert Redford's acting career spanned more than 50 films and won him an Oscar as a director. For many filmgoers though, he was simply the best-looking cinema star in the world - once described as a chunk of Mount Rushmore levered into stonewashed denims. As well as leading roles in hits such as All The President's Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Way We Were, Redford also launched the Sundance Film Festival to champion independent filmmakers. Los-Angeles-born Keaton shot to fame with her role in The Godfather, but enjoyed a long creative partnership with Woody Allen. Annie Hall, a comedy based on their off-screen relationship, earned her a Best Actress Oscar and they collaborated on several other films. She was nominated for three further Oscars - all in the best actress category - for her work in Something's Gotta Give, Marvin's Room and Reds. BASIL! - the unmistakable sound of Sybil Fawlty admonishing her pompous and incompetent husband, is probably how Prunella Scales will best be remembered. Apart from starring in sitcom Fawlty Towers, she played many other roles on screen and stage, including Queen Elizabeth II in Alan Bennett's play, A Question of Attribution.

Data Flows and Colonial Regimes in Africa: A Critical Analysis of the Colonial Futurities Embedded in AI Recommendation Algorithms Angella Ndaka, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Fátima Ávila - Acosta, Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany Harnred Mbula, Centre for Epistemic Justice, Nairobi, Kenya Christine Amera, Centre for Epistemic Justice, Nairobi Kenya Sandra Tiyani Chauke University of Pretoria, South Africa Eucabeth Majiwa Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Nairobi, Kenya Abstract In the last few years, Africa has experienced growth in a thriving ecosystem of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and systems, developed and promoted by both local and global technology players. While the sociotechnical imaginaries about these syst ems promote AI as critical to achiev ing Africa's sustainable development agenda, some of them have subtly permeated society, recreating new values, cultures, practices, and histories that threaten to marginalize minority groups in the region. Africa predominantly frames AI as an imaginary solution to address complex social challenges; however, the narrative subtly ignores deeper power - related concerns, including data governance, embedded algorithmic colonialism, and the exploitation that propag ates new digital colonial sites. However, the development of current AI ethics in Africa is in its infancy and predominantly framed through lenses of Western perspective, with the social and ethical impacts of the AI innovations and application on African epistemologies and worldviews not prioritized. To ensure that people on the African continent leverage the benefits of AI, these social and ethical impacts o f AI need to be critically and explicitly considered and addressed. This chapter will therefore seek to frame the elemental and invisible problems of AI and big data in the African context by examining digital sites and infrastructure through the lens of power and interests. It will present reflections on how these sites are using AI recommendation algorithms to recreate new digital societies in the region, how they have the potential to propagate algorithmic colonialism and negative gender norms, and what this means for the regional sustainable development agenda. The chapter proposes adopting business models that embrace response - ability and consider the existence of alternative socio - material worlds of AI. These reflections will mainly come from ongoing discussions with Kenyan social media users in this author's user space talks, which take place every month. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; algorithmic colonialism; Data; response - ability; digital sites Section 1: Introduction The growing global interest, combined with rising investments in AI skilling and infrastructure development, is a key driver of the expanding landscape of AI technologies and systems across Africa.

Explosions have been heard near the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, a day after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) said it would agree to a humanitarian ceasefire. Residents in Khartoum, which is controlled by the army, told the AFP news agency that they were woken overnight by the sound of drones and explosions. The blasts appeared to take place near a military base and a power station in the early hours of Friday morning, the residents said. The RSF has not addressed these accounts, but Sudan's military-led government said it would be wary of agreeing to a truce as the group did not respect ceasefires. The two sides have been embroiled in a civil war that has killed at least 150,000 people and forced 12 million others from their homes since it erupted in April 2023.