The Brazilian Presidency’s flagship conservation finance initiative for COP30 – the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) – must be supported by sponsor governments also introducing stronger rules to close loopholes that allow the financing of deforestation, Global Witness has warned. The Government of Brazil today released its latest plans for the $125 billion initiative, which…
New York — Around a quarter of countries still have nationality laws that deny women the same rights as men to acquire, retain, or change their citizenship, or to pass citizenship onto their children or foreign spouses. Catherine Harrington, Campaign Manager for the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights. Credit: Ava McLaughlin Gagliardi These legal…
Solly Malatsi. Image c/o DCDT The department of communications & digital technologies on Friday gazetted the draft white paper on audio and audio-visual media services (AAVMS) and online safety for public comment by 10 August. This is the third version of the document (read it here), with the first and second editions published in 2020…
Ask most South Africans and they’ll tell you the country’s spam call epidemic is getting worse. Despite multipronged efforts to keep the problem at bay, telemarketers continue to plague phone users with endless spam calls. Telemarketers, scammers and robocalls persist in the face of third-party applications like Truecaller, efforts by device manufacturers to block spam…
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has raised alarm over persistent weaknesses in global tobacco control, despite more than 6.1 billion people now being covered by at least one of its flagship anti-tobacco measures. In its latest Global Tobacco Epidemic 2025 report, released Tuesday during the World Conference on Tobacco Control in Dublin, WHO noted that…
A recent judgement finds that Bitcoin can’t be regulated under apartheid-era exchange control rules. The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) is appealing a Pretoria High Court ruling that set aside its forfeiture of more than R16.4 million held by Standard Bank, ruling that apartheid-era exchange control regulations can’t be used to deal with modern-day crypto-currency…
By 2050 the global market for non-military drones is expected to have transformed how goods and people move across cities and rural landscapes. In South Africa, where road access remains limited in many regions and urban congestion chokes daily logistics, drones present an opportunity to leapfrog legacy infrastructure and reimagine mobility from the sky down…
