The United Nation's Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES), which last week chose to ban all commercial trade of pangolins, will come to a close today. The pangolin, also known as the scaly anteater, has been poached to near extinction. Wildlife conservationists hope the ban will help restore the species, which is harvested for meat and scales. But others say trade sanctions aren't enough – that a coordinated effort between governments, businesses, conservationists, and communities will be necessary to save this maligned mammal. "Hopefully this will be followed by increased resources and attention being devoted to saving this well armored – but utterly defensive – and wholly unique species," Jeff Flocken, North American regional director at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, told Reuters.

Never mind cancer research or climate change: IBM is finally bringing its Watson AI technology to bear on one of the real challenges still facing human civilisation – regulatory compliance. Big Blue has announced plans to snarf up Promontory Financial Group, a risk management and regulatory compliance consultancy, and combine the firm's expertise with Watson's cognitive capabilities in order to address the growing burden of regulation and risk management requirements. Promontory has about 600 workers in 19 offices across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East, and these are set to form the stout-hearted core of a new Watson Financial Services portfolio within IBM's Industry Platforms business. If all goes well, the transaction is expected to close before the end of 2016, but financial details of the deal have not been disclosed. According to IBM, more than 20,000 new regulatory requirements were created last year alone, and the complete catalogue of regulations is projected to exceed 300 million pages by 2020.

Africa's wildlife is in a constant state of danger. Between 2009 and 2015, Tanzania and Mozambique lost more than half of their elephants, many of them to poaching for ivory smuggling. The decline has propelled African vulture populations, who feed on elephant carcasses, toward extinction too. And attempts at curtailing poaching and ivory smuggling haven't helped the dwindling elephant population. In South Africa, rhinos are a prized poaching target too, for their horns.

A Somali police officer says a car bomb blew up at the entrance of a restaurant in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, killing two people. Mohamed Hussein said the blast Saturday occurred at the Blue Sky restaurant close to the presidential palace. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing, but the Islamic extremist group of Shabab often carries out such attacks. Shabab, Al Qaeda's East African affiliate, is fighting to impose a strict version of Islam in this Horn of Africa nation. Despite losing a lot of ground in recent years, the extremist group continues to carry out lethal attacks in many parts of the country, especially in the capital.

The Department of Defense announced on Friday that it is investing 100 million in a drone base located in Agadez, in central Niger. The base will serve as a central surveillance hub in the fight against both Boko Haram and roaming militant groups linked to al Qaeda. "At the request of, and in close coordination with, the Government of Niger, United States Africa Command is establishing a temporary, expeditionary cooperative security location in Agadez, Niger," a US Africa Command spokesperson told Reuters via email. "Agadez is an ideal, central location to enable ISR collection (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) to face the security threat across the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin region." The US already has a military presence in both Agadez and the national capital, Niamey.

The United States is planning to invest in a military air base in the Northwest African country of Niger. The base will have the capacity of deploying drones and the investment reportedly stands at at least 50 million. The development of the new military base is expected to see the transfer of U.S. assets in the region from the U.S.'s shared air base with France's anti-Islamist force -- Operation Barkhane -- in Niger's capital city of Niamey to the new facility in the city of Agadez. This includes the MQ-9 Reaper drones. The new base, which will provide the U.S. greater access to Islamist extremists in neighboring countries like Libya, Mali and Nigeria, will cost the country an estimated 50 million, BBC quoted Michelle Baldanza, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, as saying.

Facebook CEO and cofounder Mark Zuckerberg at an event at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters to celebrate Facebook Friends Day with users from around the world. SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook has been translated into three new languages -- and it has its users to thank. Be it "what's on your mind?" or the "like" or "share" buttons, a dedicated community of Facebook users want to make sure all the words and phrases on the social networking service are accurately translated into their native tongues. In all, Facebook is now available in 101 languages with the addition on Friday of Maltese (the official language of Malta that has more than 400,000 native speakers), Pulaar (a dialect of Fula spoken by more than 7 million across West and Central Africa), and Corsican (spoken by some 200,000 people and listed on UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.) Human-powered translation is critical to Facebook's growth.

Amazon has announced a new version of its Fire TV Stick, a compact streaming dongle that's a direct rival to Google's Chromecast. The new streaming device comes with improved hardware, a more affordable price and will ship starting this October. The new Amazon Fire TV Stick comes with a 1.3GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 processor along with the Mali-450MP4 GPU. Amazon claims that the new hardware should make the new dongle 30 percent faster than its predecessor. As for connectivity, it comes with 802.11ac

There are few highlights for most tech startups as sought after as cracking the international market and for most of these startups none quite as tantalising as breaking into Silicon Valley. The home of some of the world's biggest tech companies including Apple Inc., Facebook and Google, Silicon Valley is the leading hub and startup ecosystem for high-tech innovation and development. According to a January 2016 report from the Martin Prosperity Institute titled Rise of the Global Startup City, the San Francisco Bay Area, which spans Silicon Valley and San Francisco, remains the world's leading centre for venture capital investment attracting nearly 11 billion, more than a quarter of all global venture investment. A growing number of South African startups have also sought to grab a piece of the Silicon Valley slice, however, this does take some work. If you have your sights set on entering the international playing field, the most difficult thing is getting your foot in the door, says Daniel Schwartzkopff, commercial director and co-founder of Cape Town-based startup and machine learning specialists, DataProphet, who also spends part of his time in the US working with DataProphet's Silicon Valley-based clientele.

In July of 2013 Toby Shapshak, the South African speaker, strategist and editor of Stuff Magazine, did a TED talk called You Don't Need An App For That. Business leaders, innovators and experience designers would soon realize how profound this TED talk was to the rest of the world. Shapshak's astute observations and message to the rest of the world was years ahead of a revolution that Forbes would call "the new way we'll be interacting with computers." Toby's 2013 Ted talk touted that "while the rest of the world is updating statuses and playing games on smartphones, Africa is developing useful SMS-based solutions to everyday needs". Since 2013 his TED talk has been viewed 1,438,046 times as of July 19, 2016. Fast forward a couple of years and we see more apps than anyone knows what to do with, as well as a notable decrease in usage and app-downloads. This has businesses confused and frustrated.