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…
Author: Special Correspondent
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…
By Dr Samuel Ndogo In this article, I share with you a childhood journey through music, memory, imagination, faith and the enduring magic of Dolly Parton, who passed on at the age of 80 on 25 August 2026. Beneath the nostalgia her music brings, I offer you, my dear reader, a deeper reflection on fatherhood, childhood, cultural transmission, family memory, artistic legacy and the mysterious ways in which seemingly ordinary experiences become formative narratives in our lives. There are some musicians we deliberately discover, perhaps through recommendation from a friend, a record we happen to encounter in a music shop,…
Norway’s King Harald V has died at the age of 89, after he was taken to hospital last week for treatment for a rare blood condition. The palace in Oslo said he passed away peacefully at 06:35 local time (04:35GMT) on Friday at the national hospital in Oslo. The royal flag on the roof of the palace has been lowered to half-mast. In the 24 hours leading up to his death, members of the royal family had visited the king, and crowds had laid flowers at the palace. Harald was Norway’s first king born in Norway since the 14th Century.…
In the courtroom, criminal defense lawyer Ding Ning methodically presents evidence and points out uncertainties she has uncovered in a rape case. Rather than simply accepting a guilty plea, the young lawyer works to protect the legal rights of her client, a young nursing home caregiver accused of rape. The scene appears in the first episode of the suspense drama The Trembling of Cicada. Starring Hong Kong actor Francis Ng, Chinese mainland actor Zheng Yunlong and actress Zhong Chuxi, the drama premiered on Zhejiang TV on Aug 20 and is also available on streaming platforms including iQIYI, Tencent Video and…
Eddie “Papa” Musi was a South African-born boxing coach who found a home in Kenya. Born in Soweto in 1940, he entered Kenya in 1967 via the Namanga border in a group of young South Africans who had fled the brutal Apartheid regime. Kenya welcomed him, and he gave back immensely including being a part of the Kenya “hit squad” to the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane in 1982. Eddie settled in Nairobi and built a stable of champions and stars in Kariobangi, shaping generations of Kenyan elite boxers. Kariobangi with Eddie, Madison Square Garden in Nakuru under the Nakuru Amateur…
