Category: Semafor

The continent’s inventors are in the spotlight as Johannesburg prepares to host the final of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Africa prize. Previous participants have been given a boost in their quest to create life-changing tools. Atish Shah, who took part five years ago, told Semafor his Dar es Salaam-based ...

GSMA, the global telecoms industry body, has urged African governments to cut the cost of radio frequency spectrum, arguing the expense is holding back investment in faster mobile networks. Reforms could add more than $120 billion to the African economy by 2035, expand 4G and 5G coverage, and raise productivity, ...

Zambia’s state miner and Abu Dhabi-based International Resources Holding (IRH) say they have patched up their financing dispute over Mopani Copper Mines, the development of which is a cornerstone of the southern African country’s economic growth plan. In a letter in September, Zambia’s ZCCM-IH accused the Emirati company of failing ...

by Lawrence Wright. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, Wright profiles seven women facing execution in Texas and the nuns praying for their souls. The Sisters of Mary Morningstar, who live outside Waco, are solitary and mostly silent, but they provide the condemned inmates with “mercy, love, and ...

Anthropic said it would commit 5% of its shares — potentially more if it hits unspecified revenue targets — to a public-benefit fund, the latest effort by frontier AI labs to head off political backlash over the technology’s impact on jobs and society. Its rival OpenAI has similarly discussed handing ...

The News The leading contenders in Nigeria’s presidential election face a defining question: should the fuel subsidy be restored to ease the burden of rising energy costs? President Bola Tinubu, who is seeking a second term in January, has repeatedly defended his decision to scrap a years-long subsidy program in ...

The Scoop Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is tapping its portfolio companies to pay off 800 million riyals ($213 million) of debt held by the soccer club Al Nassr — where star Portuguese striker Cristiano Ronaldo plays — according to people familiar with the matter. Public Investment Fund (PIF) is ...

Medicine is moving toward a future in which a person’s DNA can help to predict disease risk, guide personalized treatment and inform therapies for genetic disorders. But as precision medicine and genetic therapies become more mainstream, the science behind these advances has a major gap: they do not work equally ...

The Scene A capital crunch is coming to the AI buildout that’s already plagued by shortages of chips, power and materials. “Soon, there will be shortages of capital” and lenders are starting to demand real returns, Tan Su Shan, who runs Southeast Asia’s largest bank said at a Semafor World ...

The News Control of the US Senate for the next two years could come down to how much the news media chooses to focus in the final weeks of the midterms on a tweet sent years ago by the younger half-sister of Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate. In 2012, Abdul El-Sayed’s ...