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Details of the tragedy, down to the name of the fishing trawler, remained murky for days. Surveillance footage released by FRONTEX, the European border agency, then revealed that the boat [...]

Misinformation and disinformation have become more potent and complex in the digital age. This can have real-world consequences, as seen in examples such as false rumors about Haitian migrants in Ohio leading to bomb threats and fear for their lives. The concept of an information ecosystem is important to understand, as it considers how information is generated, disseminated, and received within a society. Digital platforms have changed the information ecosystem by making news more entertainment-focused, shifting audience trust, and allowing misinformation to spread quickly. Addressing misinformation requires a systemic response that considers the dynamics of different audiences and their contexts. [Extracted from the article]

With great sadness, I have to share that this will be my last 'View From Africa' for New Internationalist. Over the last four years I have learnt so much through [...]

This article discusses the use of passive voice in Western media when reporting on Israel's war on Palestine. The author, Mona Chalabi, criticizes the media's tendency to name and blame "Hamas terrorists" and "Palestinian militants" for Israeli deaths, while Palestinians are simply described as being killed without specifying who is responsible. Chalabi argues that this language choice shapes Western perceptions and empathy towards Palestinians. The article includes illustrations that highlight the biases in language used by the BBC and the New York Times. Chalabi suggests that language choice is a form of misinformation that distorts the truth and perpetuates the narrative that some lives matter more than others. The payment for Chalabi's illustrations was donated to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate. [Extracted from the article]

A debilitating heatwave swept through Western Europe in late June, with temperatures topping 40 degrees centigrade in much of France and the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain, wildfires triggered by the [...]

Free Alaal Back in 2011, the world watched in awe as Egyptians took to the streets to demand the end of Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule. Cairo's Tahrir Square became a [...]

Across Sudan, thousands of people have been protesting a military coup that returned soldiers to the helm of Africa's third largest country in October 2021. As the military summarily ousted [...]

When, at the end of last year, Belarussian president Alexander Lukashenko lured hundreds of people into Belarus, with the unspoken promise of free passage to the European Union through Poland, [...]

Anyone who thinks that romantic stories set in Nairobi are implausible simply has not spent enough time in the city's parks. The thought occurred to me this weekend as I [...]

There's been a coup d'etat in Guinea. After 10 years in power, opposition stalwart Alpha Conde had already unjustly amended the country's constitution to extend his stay in office for [...]

The article discusses the importance of information in society and how it shapes our communities. It highlights the efforts of authoritarians to control the media and our ability to connect with each other, as they understand that knowledge reduces the likelihood of tolerating tyranny. The article also addresses the negative impact of information ecosystems driven by profit rather than the desire to connect, with social media and proprietary algorithms shaping our worldview. It emphasizes the need to protect the integrity of the information ecosystem and explores the concept of misinformation. The article also briefly mentions other topics such as the war-torn DRC and geopolitical tensions in Antarctica. [Extracted from the article]

It's difficult to capture the mood in Nairobi these days. The reality of the pandemic is bearing down upon us once again and, as I write, the western third of [...]

In April 2021, Chadian president Idriss Deby was reportedly killed in an ambush by rebel soldiers while he was visiting the frontline against a surging rebellion. The day before he [...]

Since 2020, EU countries like Greece have been engaged in illegal "pushbacks" of similar vessels - forcing them to turn around, out of EU waters - to deny passengers the right to seek asylum. According to the Missing Migrants Project, at least 27,000 people have died crossing the Med since 2014, but many more are likely unrecorded.1 The EU border agency has consistently said it will not assist those they consider "smugglers", going as far as prosecuting humanitarian vessels that offer vital aid to boats in distress. Those on what EU authorities call a "smuggler" vessel were primarily from Syria, Pakistan, Egypt and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, attempting to cross from Libya. [Extracted from the article]

Nairobi's tag line might be the 'green city in the sun', but over the past year there has been a constant assault on the green part. The government of Kenya [...]

Kenya faces serious security threats from Somali militants and their Kenyan sympathisers. The country hosts a large number of Somali refugees. The government wants to reduce this number fast by [...]

This year was supposed to be different--at least if all the mantras so many of us shared on social media and with our friends were to come true. The broad [...]

In this article, author discusses about the Bourgeois revolution, a term used in Marxist theory to refer to a social revolution that aims to destroy a feudal system or its vestiges, establish the rule of the bourgeoisie, and create a bourgeois state. It mentions about the societies with traditions of less industrialized but more sustainable methods of production and modes of consuming.

An interesting thing has been happening in the US, where simply asking people to wear masks in order to reduce the spread of Covid-19 has turned into a hot debate [...]

The president of the US stood at a podium with the White House seal emblazoned across the front and suggested that sunshine, household bleach and disinfectant might be a treatment [...]

A colleague recently sent me back an interesting note on a piece we were coediting. 'Why doesn't Africa need to act first?' they commented in reference to a sentence calling [...]

At the moment, my career as a political analyst involves a lot of travel to conferences and speaking engagements around the world, amounting to hundreds of thousands of miles in [...]

Lately it feels like the world is constantly on fire. Every time you switch on the television, radio or log on to the internet there is a new protest, another [...]

In 2007, incumbent Mwai Kibaki won a divisive presidential election in Kenya. Street protests escalated to ethnic violence in parts of the country, and by April 2008 more than 1,500 [...]

Hodan Nalayeh and I only met once. She was a guest speaker at an event that I was involved in to raise awareness about the increasing presence of anti-Somali rhetoric [...]

I've recently been travelling around the world to promote my book, which has led to a few routine collisions with the concept of passport privilege. For the untutored, passport privilege [...]

The sentencing of President Trump's former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, for financial fraud did not really register in Africa's news media, but it should have. For decades Manafort played the [...]

The Economist's famous Big Mac Index was invented as a way of judging what the exchange rate between two currencies ought to be. If a Big Mac costs a dollar [...]

On 6 November 2018, 85-year-old Paul Biya was sworn in for his seventh term as president of Cameroon, extending his 36-year rule. It is remarkable, more so considering that up [...]