A sweeping new survey from International IDEA finds that armed conflict, military takeovers and hollowed-out elections have pushed democracy into retreat across much of Africa and West Asia. For a continent that once brimmed with the promise of the ballot box, the ledger now reads grimly in red. Between 2020 and 2025, democracy across Africa buckled under the weight of gunfire, palace coups and elections stripped of meaning, according to a sweeping new assessment released...

For the better part of two decades, Batlhalefi Moeletsi practiced the kind of law that rarely makes front pages: patient, procedural, argued in the measured cadences of a courtroom rather than the din of the political arena. On Wednesday, that changed. President Duma Boko named him Director General of the Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime, handing a soft-spoken attorney the country’s hardest brief.  

For nearly a decade, Eric Molale was one of the most durable figures in Botswana’s government, a cabinet fixture who steered ministries and, at one point, the country’s transport and public-works portfolio. This week, that portfolio caught up with him.

The warning was aimed at artificial-intelligence laboratories. The first people to feel it were investors. On Monday, shares tied to artificial intelligence and semiconductors fell across Asia, Europe and the United States after Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, called for companies to slow the development of increasingly capable AI systems. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, quickly backed the appeal, joined by other prominent figures in the technology industry. Markets that had...

Last Saturday morning, President Duma Boko stepped onto a freshly paved lot at the corner of Sekoma Road and Basotho Drive in Block 7 and unveiled a building that bore his own name.

A quiet partnership between a safari company, a trust and the government is betting that environmental education, not just policy, will save the country’s natural heritage. On a weekday morning at Tshwaragano Primary School, the lesson is not on the chalkboard. It is under the acacia tree outside, where a dozen children crouch over a patch of earth, turning soil between their fingers as an instructor explains how the Okavango Delta, the vast inland river...