The relentless squeeze on Botswana’s wallets eased in September, as the country’s annual inflation rate fell to 7.8 percent, a decline of 1.5 percentage points from the 9.3 percent registered in August, according to the latest Consumer Price Index report issued by Statistics Botswana. The cooldown was propelled, in large part, by a loosening of the Transport group’s grip on the economy. Long the single heaviest weight on the national price basket, Transport still accounted...

For much of the past decade, the story of Botswana’s foreign reserves was one of slow erosion: a hard-won stockpile, accumulated over generations of prudent diamond stewardship, bleeding away as the pandemic, soft gem markets and widening budget deficits forced the government to lean on its savings. The latest ledger from the Bank of Botswana tells a markedly different story. As at July 31, 2026, the central bank’s total foreign assets stood at P63.21 billion,...

Botswana arrived in Beijing with a proposition larger than a trade mission and more urgent than a ceremonial embrace: a country long identified with diamonds wants to sell China more than diamonds, and it wants Chinese companies to help build what comes next. That proposition took shape at the Botswana–China Business Forum, where 30 Botswana companies met with Chinese businesses in an effort to convert a deepening political relationship into contracts, partnerships and investment. Organizers...

The nation’s top prosecutor arrived at a trade union gathering last week not to make peace, but to serve notice. He left having drawn a line across the whole of Botswana’s public life — and, within days, found a man standing on the other side of it, daring him to cross.

Aging may not be only a story of cells wearing out. It may also be a story of cells learning how to hide. Researchers have identified an immune-checkpoint protein that helps senescent cells – damaged, aging cells sometimes called “zombie cells” – evade the body’s defenses and remain lodged in tissues. In experiments involving mice, blocking that protein allowed the immune system to remove more of these cells and improved measures of metabolic health and...

For much of the past three years, the story of artificial intelligence has been told in superlatives. Trillions of parameters. Billions of dollars in compute. Data centers rising like cathedrals across the deserts of the American Southwest and the fjords of Northern Europe, each one a monument to the belief that intelligence scales with size. But a quieter, and in some ways more subversive, argument is now gathering force – and it is coming from...

She walked into the ring at Phala Phala with the unhurried bearing of an animal that did not yet know she was about to make history. By the time the gavel fell, Queen Arusha – ear tag NANK23 001, an in-calf Ankole heifer offered as Lot 20 – had sold for R6,4 million to an anonymous buyer, the highest price ever paid in South Africa for a female animal, across every cattle breed in the...

For six years, Khaby Lame conquered the internet without uttering a word. A shrug. A deadpan stare. Two upturned palms and that now-iconic gesture – this is the simple way. It was a language without translation, humor without captions, fame without borders. And it carried a laid-off factory worker from the outskirts of Turin to the summit of the world’s largest social platform. Now, in one of the most consequential transactions ever struck in the...