Ghana welcomes Pope's apology over Catholic Church's role in slavery Ghana has welcomed Pope Leo XIV's apology for the Catholic Church's historic role in slavery, describing it as an act of moral courage that was important in the global pursuit of truth, human dignity and justice. The Pope issued the clearest apology yet for the Church's involvement in legitimising slavery and its delay in condemning it for centuries. The apology was published on Monday in the Pope's first major teaching document of his papacy, which also focused on the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) . Ghana was a major hub for the transatlantic slave trade when millions of people were captured and loaded on to ships, never to return home. Between the 16th and 19th Centuries, 12-15 million Africans were shipped to the Caribbean, with about two million dying during the journey.

Sudan's army has denied it carried out a deadly attack on a major hospital on Friday night in a city in the west of the country held by its rivals, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said 64 people - including 13 children, two nurses and a doctor - had died in the strike on el-Daein Teaching Hospital and 89 others had been wounded. Enough blood has been spilled, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posted on X, urging the warring parties to end the conflict, which started nearly three years ago. The RSF said an army drone had hit the hospital in el-Daein, the capital of East Darfur state, on the day Muslims were marking the festival of Eid. Sudan was plunged into a civil war in April 2023 when a vicious struggle for power broke out between the military and the RSF, who had once been allies after coming to power in a coup in 2021.

A drone attack launched from Sudan has killed 17 people in Chad, according to the Chadian government, which has pledged to retaliate against any further strikes as the civil war in the neighbouring nation rages on. A spokesman for the Chadian government announced the death toll on Thursday from the attack on the border town of Tine, which had been targeted despite "various firm warnings addressed to the different belligerents in the Sudan conflict and the closure of the border". Local government sources said it was not immediately clear who was behind the attack, according to Reuters. Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Deby called a meeting of the defence and security council on Wednesday night, ordering the army to "retaliate starting from tonight to any attack coming from Sudan", according to a presidency statement. Early on Thursday, the government said Chad had strengthened its security presence at the border and could potentially carry out operations on Sudanese territory.

The critical lack of structured terminological data for South Africa's official languages hampers progress in multilingual NLP, despite the existence of numerous government and academic terminology lists. These valuable assets remain fragmented and locked in non-machine-readable formats, rendering them unusable for computational research and development. Mafoko addresses this challenge by systematically aggregating, cleaning, and standardising these scattered resources into open, interoperable datasets. We introduce the foundational Mafoko dataset, released under the equitable, Africa-centered NOODL framework. To demonstrate its immediate utility, we integrate the terminology into a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline. Experiments show substantial improvements in the accuracy and domain-specific consistency of English-to-Tshivenda machine translation for large language models. Mafoko provides a scalable foundation for developing robust and equitable NLP technologies, ensuring South Africa's rich linguistic diversity is represented in the digital age.

I built this'AI aunt' for women after family tragedy in South Africa A gruesome killing in her own family inspired South African Leonora Tima to create a digital platform where people, mostly women, can talk about and track abuse. Leonora's relative was just 19 years old, and nine months pregnant, when she was killed, her body dumped on the side of a highway near Cape Town in 2020. I work in the development sector, so I've seen violence, Leonora says. But what stood out for me was that my family member's violent death was seen as so normal in South African society. Her death wasn't published by any news outlet because the sheer volume of these cases in our country is such that it doesn't qualify as news.

Coreference Resolution (CR) is a critical task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Current research faces a key dilemma: whether to further explore the potential of supervised neural methods based on small language models, whose detect-then-cluster pipeline still delivers top performance, or embrace the powerful capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, effectively combining their strengths remains underexplored. To this end, we propose \textbf{ImCoref-CeS}, a novel framework that integrates an enhanced supervised model with LLM-based reasoning. First, we present an improved CR method (\textbf{ImCoref}) to push the performance boundaries of the supervised neural method by introducing a lightweight bridging module to enhance long-text encoding capability, devising a biaffine scorer to comprehensively capture positional information, and invoking a hybrid mention regularization to improve training efficiency. Importantly, we employ an LLM acting as a multi-role Checker-Splitter agent to validate candidate mentions (filtering out invalid ones) and coreference results (splitting erroneous clusters) predicted by ImCoref. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ImCoref-CeS, which achieves superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

UN warns of potential'ethnically driven' atrocities in Sudan's el-Fasher At least 91 people have been killed in Sudan's besieged city of el-Fasher in attacks by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) over 10 days last month, the United Nations says. The attacks took place during intensified fighting between the RSF and Sudan's army around the city, the largest urban centre in the Darfur region that remains under the control of the military and its allies, known as the Joint Forces. UN rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday that the city's Daraja Oula neighbourhood was repeatedly attacked and subjected to RSF artillery shelling, drone strikes and ground incursions from September 19 to 29. He called for urgent action to prevent "large-scale, ethnically driven attacks and atrocities in el-Fasher." He said "atrocities are not inevitable", adding that "they can be averted if all actors take concrete action to uphold international law, demand respect for civilian life and property, and prevent the continued commission of atrocity crimes".

President Donald Trump evoked Elon Musk during his Oval Office meeting with South Africa's president on Wednesday, during talks about the ongoing attacks white farmers in the country are facing. Trump went back and forth with President Cyril Ramaphosa over whether what is occurring in South Africa is indeed a "genocide" against white farmers. At one point, during the conversation, a reporter asked Trump how the United States and South Africa might be able to improve their relations. The president said that relations with South Africa are an important matter to him, noting he has several personal friends who are from there, including professional golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, who were present at Tuesday's meeting, and Elon Musk. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk attend a UFC 309 at Madison Square Garden last November. Unprompted, Trump added that while Musk may be a South African native, he doesn't want to "get [him] involved" in the ongoing foreign diplomacy matters that played out during Tuesday's meeting.

In this study, we develop Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Transformer-based transfer learning models for English-to-Igbo translation - a low-resource African language spoken by over 40 million people across Nigeria and West Africa. Our models are trained on a curated and benchmarked dataset compiled from Bible corpora, local news, Wikipedia articles, and Common Crawl, all verified by native language experts. We leverage Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architectures, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), enhanced with attention mechanisms to improve translation accuracy. To further enhance performance, we apply transfer learning using MarianNMT pre-trained models within the SimpleTransformers framework. Our RNN-based system achieves competitive results, closely matching existing English-Igbo benchmarks. With transfer learning, we observe a performance gain of +4.83 BLEU points, reaching an estimated translation accuracy of 70%. These findings highlight the effectiveness of combining RNNs with transfer learning to address the performance gap in low-resource language translation tasks.

The use of drones by several African countries in their fight against armed groups is causing significant harm to civilians, according to a new report. More than 943 civilians have been killed in at least 50 incidents across six African countries from November 2021 to November 2024, according to the report by Drone Wars UK. The report, titled Death on Delivery, reveals that strikes regularly fail to distinguish between civilians and combatants in their operations. Experts told Al Jazeera that the death toll is likely only the tip of the iceberg because many countries run secretive drone campaigns. As drones rapidly become the weapon of choice for governments across the continent, what are the consequences for civilians in conflict zones?