Recent robbery and sexual-assault cases investigated by Kenyan authorities are highlighting the risks people can face when meeting strangers they first encounter through dating applications and social-media platforms. In one recent case, a Nairobi woman reported being robbed by a man she had met through a dating application and dated for several months. According to her account, the two had travelled together before later visiting Nakuru, where they stayed in a rented apartment. The woman said she left her phone and cash in the apartment while the pair went out for breakfast. The man later allegedly left the restaurant, saying…
Author: Special Correspondent
China’s leader Xi Jinping will visit the United States this week for talks with President Donald Trump, Beijing confirmed Monday, expressing hope they will strengthen “strategic stability” between the world’s two largest economies. Washington had already made clear that the leaders would meet in a bid to find common ground on trade disputes, artificial intelligence and broader strategic issues including Trump’s war in the Middle East. Xi will make a state visit to the United States from Wednesday to Friday, a government statement said. Foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said the two leaders would “have an in-depth exchange of views…
El Niño, meaning “little boy” in Spanish, is an innocuous name for a geographical phenomenon that can make half the world swelter while sending the other half scrambling for sandbags to control floods. The name has an interesting origin. Centuries ago, fishermen off the northern coast of Peru noticed that around Christmas, a southward warm current appeared near shore, briefly reversing the usual cold flow. It usually brought tropical fish rarely seen in those waters and occasional rainfall that briefly turned the desert green. The warm current was named El Niño after the Christ child. Don’t let the name fool…
Podcaster Waweru Njoroge interviewed Prime Cabinet Secretary and Minister of Foreign and Diaspora Affairs, Musalia Mudavadi, on a wide range of public interest topics, including the war against corruption, job creation and the need for democratic governance. Excerpts. Question: You entered Parliament in 1989. What is the one thing you have had to unlearn in relation to leadership?” Answer: One of the things that is completely different is the mode of communication. The scope and scale of that communication. Because when I entered politics, you literally had the dominance of one or two channels. The national broadcasting station, KBC. And…
South Sudan President Salva Kiir on Tuesday night announced the removal of the head of the East African country’s electoral body only three months before the country’s first election. Abednego Akok Kacuol was fired from his position as chairperson of the National Elections Commission without a reason being given publicly by Kiir. He will be replaced by Gabriel Bol Deng Majok, who served as the electoral commission’s secretary general. Akok, 71, was appointed as chairperson of the electoral body in August 2012 and reappointed in November 2023 after the commission was reconstituted under a 2018 peace agreement that ended a…
In July, a German court delivered a landmark ruling on a question at the heart of the generative AI boom: Can artificial intelligence companies use copyrighted works to train their models without the creators’ permission? The case involved Suno, an AI music-generation platform, and Germany’s GEMA, which represents music creators. On July 31, the Munich Regional Court largely ruled in GEMA’s favor, finding that Suno had infringed copyright by using six musical works from GEMA’s repertoire to train its AI models. The ruling prohibited Suno from reproducing the works for model training and ordered it to provide information and pay…
By Mbugua Ng’ang’a It is unconscionable, in my view, for nurses in public hospitals and health centres to withhold their services for 43 days in a row in a country where the line between bare survival and absolute poverty hangs on the balance of whether one will receive a call about an illness in their family. True, nurses, like all workers, are entitled to fair working conditions, just remuneration and clear career growth pathways. That, for sure, goes without saying. The problem arises when they stay away from their work stations for such prolonged periods, leaving emergency services paralysed, abandoning…
Legal experts from China and abroad have emphasized the crucial role of artificial intelligence in resolving international commercial disputes while highlighting the need for caution and greater awareness of potential risks. The experts shared their views on Wednesday at the Fifth Seminar of the International Commercial Expert Committee, organized by China’s Supreme People’s Court in Shanghai. Teresa Cheng, secretary-general of the International Organization for Mediation and former secretary for Justice of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, spoke about the rapid and unstoppable advancement of AI and its potential benefits. She advocated integrating AI into various aspects of life, including…
A top safety researcher at Anthropic has warned that AI is advancing so quickly he believes there is a greater than 10% chance it “could kill all humans” within the next decade. Evan Hubinger said in a post on X that the risk from the models which currently exist was “low” but he was “worried” the technology might develop and improve itself soon to the point where it posed an existential risk to humanity. It comes after the Financial Times reported Anthropic withheld its latest model from the UK’s AI Safety Institute (AISI), one of the leading bodies in the…
By Bernard Mwinzi Frank Whalley, the eccentric editor who took no hostages and painted newsrooms with the broad brush of bluster, died at his Spring Valley home in Nairobi on Monday, August 31, 2026 and was cremated a few hours later. Whalley was a man who divided opinion in the newsrooms he touched, and belonged to an era that defined, for better, Kenya’s journalism. I first met Whalley when he was the Training Editor at the Nation Media Group, and quickly confused him with Ian Beales, another British editor who, years earlier, had sat on the interviewing panel with then…
