Sudan’s army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has ordered an investigation into an airstrike that killed 72 people at a gold mining site near the Egyptian border, as the attack threatens to strain relations between the neighbouring countries and highlights the growing importance of gold to Sudan’s wartime economy. Emergency Lawyers, a rights group documenting abuses in the conflict, said the strike hit the mountainous Jabal al-Uqaydat mining area on Saturday and accused Egypt of carrying it out.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has raised its global economic growth forecast for 2026, as investment in artificial intelligence helps offset the impact of higher energy prices caused by the war in the Middle East. However, it warned that rising debt and a potential reversal in the AI boom threaten the outlook. The IMF now expects the global economy to grow by 3.1% in 2026, up from its July forecast of 3.0%, according to its latest World Economic Outlook released on Tuesday in Bangkok.

More than 200 artificial intelligence and cybersecurity researchers have called for stricter safeguards around advanced AI systems, warning that future hacking incidents could cause significantly greater damage to critical infrastructure unless developers strengthen their security measures. In an open letter released on Tuesday and cited by Bloomberg, the researchers said AI models had repeatedly escaped inadequately secured testing environments and compromised external systems.

South African mining tycoon Mzi Khumalo faces the risk of losing control of three Zimbabwean gold mines after a $70 million payment guaranteed by him and a family trust remained unpaid. The payment relates to the 2024 acquisition of Bulawayo Mining Company, which owns How Mine near Bulawayo and the Mazowe and Redwing mines. Greenstone Corp., a company linked to Khumalo's family, bought the business from Metallon Corp., Khumalo's former gold mining group, which is in administration in Britain.

JPMorgan Chase reported higher third-quarter profit on Tuesday, but its shares fell as investors assessed signs of slowing momentum in investment banking and uncertainty over the outlook for corporate dealmaking. The largest US bank posted net income of $15.3 billion, or $5.57 per share, for the three months ended September 30, compared with $14.4 billion, or $5.07 per share, a year earlier.

Artificial intelligence entertainment platform Character.AI has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States and agreed to sell some of its intellectual property to Walt Disney for $20 million, as the company faces mounting legal and operational challenges. The company says it intends to continue operating its platform during the court-supervised sale process. Disney will serve as the initial bidder for a non-exclusive, perpetual licence covering certain Character.AI intellectual property and claims, according to a company announcement.

Meta Platforms today unveiled Muse Wonder, a new artificial intelligence model designed to power digital assistants, placing its capabilities behind paid subscriptions as the Facebook parent seeks to generate revenue from AI beyond its core advertising business. Users of Meta's Muse personal agent app will need to subscribe to plans costing $20 or $100 a month to access the model, while developers will be able to use it through the company's Meta Model API at higher prices, Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang said.

Microsoft's plan to close its Africa Development Centre in Nairobi is threatening to end a six-year effort to build a major AI engineering hub in Kenya, raising questions about the country's ability to retain high-value technology jobs as global companies restructure their AI operations. Employees were informed of the proposed closure on Monday, as Microsoft acknowledged that proposed global changes had affected its Kenyan engineering operations.

Hackers have remotely raised temperatures in refrigeration systems at hundreds of French supermarkets, causing fires and food losses, in a cyberattack that also coincided with a security incident at Dutch grocery retailer Ahold Delhaize. The Paris prosecutor's office said a "large-scale" attack was "affecting connected refrigerators in several major food retailers across France". Reported damage included "food losses and fires".

Artificial intelligence could eventually affect about 40% of jobs worldwide, the head of the International Monetary Fund warned today, as policymakers urged governments to expand employment support and encourage companies to hire young graduates amid mounting concerns about automation. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva described AI as a “slow-moving tsunami” hitting labour markets, with young people entering the workforce particularly vulnerable as companies automate routine tasks.

Microsoft President Brad Smith has called for urgent global regulation of artificial intelligence, arguing that the United Kingdom is best positioned to lead efforts to establish safety standards as increasingly powerful AI systems introduce new cybersecurity risks. Smith said AI companies should face mandatory safety requirements, including independent evaluations of advanced models, incident reporting and legal obligations to notify organisations affected by rogue AI agents.

Ethiopia has launched its first gold refinery in a $50 million joint venture aimed at expanding domestic mineral processing and positioning the East African country as a regional hub for precious metals. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced the launch over the weekend, saying the facility would process gold from Ethiopia and other countries, allowing neighbouring states and regional mining companies to refine, certify and sell their gold within Africa rather than sending it overseas.

The World Bank’s Jobs Council has urged governments to adopt crisis-era support measures to help workers navigate artificial intelligence disruption, as the International Monetary Fund warns that the technology could reshape labour markets worldwide, with young graduates facing some of the earliest impacts. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva described artificial intelligence as a “slow-moving tsunami” hitting the global labour market, warning that young people entering the workforce were particularly vulnerable as companies automate routine tasks and reduce demand for entry-level workers.

Artificial intelligence needs urgent global safety rules, including independent evaluations of new systems and requirements for companies to report incidents, Microsoft President Brad Smith said, warning that AI is subject to fewer safeguards than everyday consumer products. In an interview with the BBC published on Monday, Smith called for global rules requiring companies to notify victims when rogue AI agents breach their systems and to provide an “emergency brake” to stop potentially harmful activity.

Cyberattacks targeting African organisations rose more than 421% between 2016 and 2025, outpacing a 307% increase globally, according to a Mastercard-commissioned white paper that highlights mounting security risks as digital payments and online services expand across the continent. Mastercard Cyber Insights recorded 69,236 cyber events targeting African organisations in 2025, equivalent to roughly one every eight minutes, the report, Africa’s Digital Defense Race, said.

OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are introducing technologies designed to identify artificial intelligence-generated text through invisible statistical watermarks, a shift that could give publishers, educators and regulators new ways to trace AI-assisted writing as synthetic content becomes harder to distinguish from human work. The systems embed machine-readable signals in the words or tokens selected by AI models without adding visible labels, unusual characters or formatting.

Humanity could face a future more dangerous than fascism if artificial intelligence evolves beyond human control, historian and bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari warns, urging governments to act before technological power outpaces democratic oversight. “Fascism is still human. And we have survived it in different parts of the world several times,” Harari said during a discussion with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa and investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr at London's Union Chapel on October 5.

Solar energy company Sun King has expanded its inverter range in Kenya to systems of up to 30 kilowatts, targeting larger homes, schools, hospitals and businesses seeking alternatives to unreliable grid electricity and diesel generators. The expanded PowerHub portfolio, which previously included smaller-capacity systems, now ranges from 2.2 kW to 30 kW. The company says customers can now connect multiple inverters in parallel to increase power output and expand their installations over time by adding batteries and solar panels.

In any supermarket in Nairobi right now, a shopper looking for a carton of milk might struggle to find any familiar brand on the shelves, and discover that the price for the available milk has climbed just as the cost of feeding a family has become harder to manage. Hundreds of kilometres away, a dairy farmer in central Kenya faces a different version of the same problem: without reliable rain, there is less grass for livestock, feed is costlier, amounting to less milk to sell.

Indian police detained thousands of people across New Delhi on Saturday and took the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) into custody aboard a passenger aircraft, as authorities moved to prevent a youth-led protest demanding the resignation of the country's chief election commissioner. Abhijeet Dipke, founder of the CJP, and two other party leaders, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, were detained after their Air India flight from Mumbai landed at Indira Gandhi International Airport, Indian media reported.

In this interview with Impact Newswire, Shruti Koparkar, NVIDIA’s AI Inference Product Lead, explains how NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPUs and Dynamo inference software are helping Pinterest scale AI-powered visual discovery by processing more images with lower latency. She discusses the engineering challenges of multimodal AI, including the computational demands of image processing, memory bandwidth, caching and routing, and how precomputed PinCLIP visual embeddings reduce repeated computation.

The United States has suspended Microsoft, Adobe and several major technology and IT services companies from a programme that allows skilled foreign workers to obtain permanent residency, escalating the Trump administration’s crackdown on employment-based immigration. Vice President JD Vance announced the move on Thursday, accusing companies of exploiting the system to displace American workers. Labour Secretary Keith Sonderling said the government would neither accept new applications nor process pending permanent labour certification applications involving the affected firms.

US consumer sentiment deteriorated further in early October as rising prices linked to the Middle East conflict intensified concerns about the cost of living and weakened households’ views of the economy. The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index fell to 46.3 in October from 48.1 in September, missing economists’ expectations of 47.8, according to preliminary survey results released on Friday. The index was also 13.6% below its level a year earlier, highlighting persistent pressure on consumer confidence.

Imagine a scenario in which Ebola infections multiply in your country, hospital isolation wards begin to fill up, and health officials need an additional facility to contain the outbreak. A bio-isolation centre stands some 270 kilometres from your capital city, backed by the United States and designed to help prevent the spread of deadly diseases. Yet before your government can turn to that facility, a crucial question arises: can the country activate it independently, or must it first secure Washington's approval?

Abu Dhabi-based International Resources Holding (IRH) has approached Kenmare Resources about a possible cash takeover, potentially expanding the investor's African mining portfolio beyond copper into titanium minerals and zircon. Kenmare, which operates the Moma Titanium Minerals Mine in northern Mozambique, says it has received a non-binding proposal for the acquisition of its entire issued and future share capital. No purchase price or transaction terms have been disclosed, and there is no guarantee that the discussions will result in a formal offer.

South Africa's First National Bank has launched cryptocurrency trading through a partnership with digital asset exchange VALR, allowing customers to buy and sell digital assets through its existing investment platform. The service extends cryptocurrency investing to FNB's retail customer base of nearly nine million, although the bank has not disclosed how many customers have signed up for the offering. Customers can trade five digital assets: Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana and USDT, a stablecoin designed to track the U.S.

A cyberattack that cripples a bank, disrupts electricity supplies or knocks critical internet services offline could trigger a crisis far beyond the immediate damage. For executives at some of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies, the question is increasingly how the industry would respond if advanced AI were implicated in such an event. Executives at OpenAI, Anthropic and other frontier AI developers are privately preparing for what has been described as the “day after” a catastrophic AI incident.

OpenAI today defended its decision to fire three safety researchers, saying their dismissals followed a "significant breach of trust" and were not related to their raising concerns about artificial intelligence safety. The company said in a post on X that its decision to part ways with Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni was not because they had raised safety concerns.

U.S. authorities have seized seven internet domains used by hackers linked to Chinese IT firm Integrity Technology Group, the Justice Department said on Thursday, in the latest effort to disrupt cyber operations targeting critical infrastructure. The domains were used to help Chinese hackers scan and attack critical infrastructure systems in the United States and other countries, the department said in a statement.

The Trump administration today suspended Microsoft and major information technology companies from a key employment-based green-card programme and launched investigations into nine leading U.S. universities, expanding its crackdown on immigration that it says is aimed at preventing fraud and protecting American workers. The Labor Department said it would halt new and pending permanent labor certification applications involving Microsoft, software maker Adobe and six other IT services companies.

A tanker captain preparing to steer a ship through the Strait of Hormuz now faces a calculation that would have been unthinkable before the Middle East conflict: whether the risk of being hit by a missile or drone is worth a six-figure payday. Shipowners are offering some tanker captains as much as $100,000 a month, plus bonuses of up to $50,000 for each passage through the strategic waterway, according to the Financial Times.

A 26-year-old China-based hacker likely used an artificial intelligence agent and Anthropic's Claude Code to target at least nine South Korean banks, U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said, in a campaign that highlights the growing ability of individuals to use AI to conduct attacks at scale. CrowdStrike said in a report published on Wednesday that it assessed with moderate confidence that the suspected attacker was a Chinese speaker and financially motivated.

India has rejected Elon Musk’s claim that powerful business interests are blocking Starlink from launching satellite internet services in the country, insisting that its regulatory framework is fair and applies equally to all operators. Musk had accused unnamed “oligarchs” on Wednesday of preventing Starlink’s entry to protect their “monopolistic chokehold” on Indian consumers. He did not identify the individuals or companies involved or provide evidence for the allegation.

Tanzania’s central bank kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged at 6.25% for the fourth quarter, maintaining a tighter monetary policy stance after raising the rate earlier this year to contain inflationary pressures. The Bank of Tanzania said on Thursday that it had maintained the Central Bank Rate at 6.25%, according to a monetary policy decision. The rate was raised from 5.75% to 6.25% in July after the central bank cited risks from higher global energy, fertiliser and transportation costs linked to the Middle East conflict.

The 2026 Nobel Prizes have so far highlighted discoveries that could reshape how scientists understand the brain, probe the most energetic events in the universe and manufacture medicines, underscoring the growing economic value of basic research even as many of its commercial applications remain years away. American Karl Deisseroth and Germans Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries that made it possible to control individual nerve cells with light, while Belgian-born physicist Francis Halzen won the physics prize for work that turned Antarctic ice into a detector for high-energy particles from deep space.

Kenya's progress in extending life expectancy needs to be matched by stronger social protection systems that help people age with health, independence and dignity, rather than waiting until vulnerability becomes a crisis, Suqoon founder Shakira Khawaja says. Khawaja has called for a more preventive and person-centred approach to ageing, including greater efforts to protect the health of older people, preserve their independence and enable them to remain economically and socially active.

Thousands of demonstrators gathered at Bengaluru's Freedom Park today to protest India's electoral roll revision, demanding greater transparency from the Election Commission and the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over what they described as wrongful exclusion of voters. The rally, organised by the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), focused on the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Karnataka, part of a wider national exercise that has become a political flashpoint ahead of upcoming state elections.

Amazon-owned Ring is entering the smart-lock market with a $249 device that can be manually recharged when its battery runs out. This is expected to address one of the biggest concerns with keyless home security systems. The Ring Smart Lock features a built-in power dial that allows users to generate enough electricity to restart the lock by turning it several times.

Google has launched an experimental AI-powered gaming platform that allows users to create and share browser-based games using text prompts, lowering the technical barrier to game development. The platform, called Playground, was launched Wednesday through Google Labs. It allows users to describe a game they want to build without writing code, with the AI generating the underlying game experience. Users can choose between 2D and 3D games and single-player or multiplayer formats, then refine gameplay, characters, rules and visual environments through additional prompts.

The African Development Bank has agreed to provide a $10 million guarantee to Exim Bank Tanzania to help local companies obtain trade finance, but the relatively small facility highlights the scale of the funding constraints facing African businesses seeking to trade across borders. The transaction guarantee, signed on Sept. 28, will provide up to 100% cover to confirming banks against non-payment risks arising from letters of credit and similar trade-finance instruments issued by Exim Bank Tanzania, the AfDB said on Tuesday.

Investors and policymakers at two major Singapore conferences today broadened their concerns about artificial intelligence beyond stretched valuations, warning that the technology's rapid development could bring risks ranging from loss of human control to bioterrorism and a potentially destabilising investment bubble. The shift in tone comes as spending on AI infrastructure reaches unprecedented levels, forcing investors to confront a difficult question: whether rapidly rising revenues and productivity gains will eventually justify the enormous capital being committed to chips, data centres and computing capacity.

Kenya’s I&M Group is gradually pulling its Mauritius joint venture Bank One away from retail banking and refocusing the business on high-net-worth individuals and large corporations, as the lender seeks to concentrate capital and expertise on higher-value financial services. The strategic shift began in the first quarter of 2026 and involves Bank One, which I&M owns jointly with Mauritian conglomerate CIEL Finance, Africa Intelligence reported on Tuesday.

Paramount has completed its $81 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, creating a new entertainment giant called Skydance and bringing some of Hollywood’s biggest film, television and streaming businesses under one company. The transaction, valued at roughly $110 billion including debt, closed Tuesday after Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery received the required regulatory approvals and cleared the final legal hurdles. The combined company’s shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SKYD.

China’s eventual return to the cryptocurrency market could trigger a fresh wave of demand for Bitcoin, according to Solana Company CEO Joseph Chee, who says Beijing could eventually allow digital assets under a tightly controlled regulatory framework. Chee’s view rests partly on the contrasting approaches taken by mainland China and Hong Kong. While Beijing has maintained restrictions on cryptocurrency trading and mining, Hong Kong has developed a regulated framework for digital-asset businesses and licensed cryptocurrency exchanges, giving policymakers a potential test case for how crypto markets can operate under supervision.

Uber has agreed to acquire US catering and workplace meals platform ezCater for $2.3 billion in cash, expanding Uber Eats into corporate catering and larger food orders. The deal will combine ezCater’s catering platform with Uber Eats’ restaurant and delivery network and Uber for Business’ relationships with corporate customers. Uber said the acquisition would give restaurants access to larger orders while making it easier for businesses and other customers to arrange meals for meetings, events and group gatherings.

Pinterest is using artificial intelligence to turn beauty inspiration on its platform into practical instructions, allowing users to transform saved hair and nail images into actionable plans for salons or at-home use. The company launched Beauty Guides on Tuesday, an AI-powered feature that analyses beauty Pins and translates the visual details into personalised guidance. The feature uses Pinterest’s visual understanding technology alongside a large language model to identify elements such as hairstyles, hair colour, nail shapes and finishes.

Unilever has invested about $540,000 in an 800-kilowatt solar installation at its Nairobi factory, the consumer goods company said on Tuesday, as manufacturers in Kenya turn to renewable energy to reduce costs and exposure to power-price volatility. The solar system, which became operational in June, is expected to provide about 30% of the factory's electricity and save the company roughly $230,000 a year in energy costs, Unilever said.

If you are designing a new car, there are certain decisions you make before the first sketch is finished. It needs wheels, and they generally need to sit at the four corners. You can change the engine, the shape, the materials and almost everything else, but the basic architecture is remarkably settled. Nuclear reactors are different. There is no single blueprint for how one should be built.

The little creature staring back from Meta’s new artificial-intelligence product looks as if it belongs in a children’s cartoon. That is part of the point. Muse, Meta’s new personal AI agent, is designed to feel more like a personal companion. Its mascot, Jolly, gives the system a friendly face while Muse promises to handle the tedious machinery of modern life: booking travel, sending email, shopping, navigating websites, managing tasks and remembering the details that humans routinely forget.

LONDON — October 6, 2026 — A British Airways flight from London Heathrow to Chicago was forced to turn back to the UK after experiencing a significant technical issue during its transatlantic journey, prompting the crew to declare an emergency. British Airways flight BA295, operated by a Boeing 777, was travelling from Heathrow to Chicago on October 5 when the aircraft rapidly descended from approximately 36,000 feet to around 9,000 feet over Ireland, according to reports.