The Zeen

West Africa’s cocoa producers are under threat from this year’s El Niño, which threatens to be the worst on record. The weather phenomenon has been known to intensify the yearly Harmattan winds, which dry out topsoil and cause pods to fall. Côte d’Ivoire — the world’s top producer — is ...

The IMF and Senegal agreed on a $2.2 billion loan package, with the West African country announcing a plan to restore “debt sustainability.” The developments mark key steps in tackling an economic crisis sparked by the discovery of previously unreported debt. The IMF suspended an earlier program after the government ...

The scrapping of Nigeria’s fuel subsidy by President Bola Tinubu’s administration has emerged as a key battleground ahead of the country’s elections. The opposition African Democratic Congress said it will anchor its campaign on a promise to reinstate the multibillion-dollar program, whose removal three years ago drove up food and ...

International law, European action and UK public opinion point the same way. Britain should stop helping to sustain Israeli settlements economically In the Commons this week, the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, appeared to have accepted the principle of a trade ban between the UK and Israeli settlements, which Britain says are ...

Yesterday a16z published an article in which NYU Professor of Design, AI and Media Theory Ruby Thelot argued that “enshittification,” or the concept that technology platforms get worse after they lock in users, isn’t real. In reality, Thelot says, people use social media more than ever and report that they ...

The Texas sheriff’s office that used Flock to search more than 80,000 cameras nationwide for a woman who had a self-administered abortion used Axon’s Draft One AI tool to help write a police report about the incident, documents shared with 404 Media show. The tool was used in part to ...

Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for New York governor, posted an AI-generated video imagining New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul hanging out, bizarrely gardening together, riding bikes, and vaguely colluding about making the state unaffordable. “.@KathyHochul and @ZohranKMamdani think they can cure New York’s cost-of-living crisis ...

Axon says cops are asking it to make its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) look different from Flock cameras because Flock vandalism has become so widespread, according to comments Axon’s CEO made in a now deleted webinar. The comments highlight how Axon is trying to take advantage of sustained opposition ...

We start this week with Emanuel’s follow-up to his Amazon book scanning story, in which he spoke to someone who worked in the Amazon warehouse which destroys books to train Amazon’s AI products. After the break, Emanuel and Sam tell us about the same few names appearing in LLM output ...

Iranian media reports two children were among those killed when shrapnel hit a home. Iran then launched missiles and drones at US targets in the Middle East. ...