US Business

Kenya Airways pilots went on strike Saturday, grounding nearly two dozen flights and stranding thousands of passengers, exacerbating woes facing the beleaguered carrier.

The airline, part owned by the government and Air France-KLM, is one of the biggest in Africa, connecting multiple countries to Europe and Asia, but it is facing turbulent times, including years of losses.

The Kenya Airline Pilots Association (KALPA) said no Kenya Airways flight flown by its members had departed Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport from 6:00 am (0300 GMT) onwards on Saturday.

The pilots announced the strike in defiance of a court order against industrial action and gave no indication of how long it will last.

The airline’s managing director and CEO, Allan Kilavuka, said 23 flights had been cancelled as of 11:00 am due to “the unlawful strike”, affecting over 9,000 passengers.

He urged the protesting pilots, who make up 10 percent of the workforce, to return to work by 10:30 am on Sunday.

“Failure to do so will lead to immediate disciplinary action,” he warned.

The Kenya Aviation Workers Union (KAWU) subsequently announced that ground staff would also strike from 2:00 pm onwards in a separate, long-running dispute with the Kenya Airports Authority (KAA) over salary increases.

“The Union has no option but to commence the industrial action,” it said on Twitter, citing a court order supporting its members’ right to strike until negotiations with the KAA are concluded.

– ‘Negotiate in good faith’ –

But the KAA later said it had appealed the court order. “Our staff have reported on duty and operations at all our airports are normal,” it insisted.

Kenya’s newly appointed Transport Minister Kipchumba Murkomen told reporters that the pilots’ strike was unwarranted and “akin to economic sabotage”.

“I am not saying their concerns are not valid,” he said, appealing to the “goodwill of the pilots to terminate” what he described as drastic action.

Frustrated passengers described huge queues at the airport, with many only learning their flights were cancelled when they arrived to check in.

“We have been told nothing,” US tourist Jill Lee told AFP as she waited in line after her flight to Tanzania’s financial capital Dar es Salaam was cancelled at the last minute.

The 65-year-old was booked to go on safari but said she had no idea where she would spend the night after her connecting flight from Nairobi was cancelled.

“Many people here have nowhere to go. It’s pretty horrible.”

On Saturday, KALPA blamed “the hardline stance adopted by” the airline’s management for throwing thousands of travellers’ plans into disarray.

It urged them to “come to the table and negotiate in good faith, if they truly sympathise with the plight of Kenya Airways passengers.”

– Injunction – 

The pilots are pressing for the reinstatement of contributions to a provident fund and payment of all salaries stopped during the Covid-19 pandemic.

On Monday, the airline won a court injunction stopping the strike, but an official at KALPA, which has 400 members, told AFP the pilots “were acting within the provisions of the law” and that they were yet to be served with a court order.

The carrier warned earlier this week that the strike would jeopardise its recovery, estimating losses at $2.5 million per day if the pilots went ahead with their plans.

The airline was founded in 1977 following the demise of East African Airways and flies more than four million passengers to 42 destinations annually.

But its slogan “The Pride of Africa” rings hollow as it operates thanks to state bailouts following years of losses.

The carrier saw its revenue nosedive after the pandemic grounded planes worldwide because of stringent travel restrictions, devastating the aerospace and tourism industries.

In August, the airline reported a $81.5 million half-year loss citing high fuel costs, despite the Kenyan government injecting some $520 million to keep it afloat.

On Wednesday, the airline’s management said it was on a path to recovery, flying at least 250,000 passengers each month, and aiming to cut its overall operating costs by 10 percent before the end of next year.

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk has pledged the platform will not devolve into a “free-for-all hellscape,” but experts warn that mass layoffs may deeply impair the social network’s ability to curb misinformation.

Twitter on Friday fired roughly half of its 7,500-strong workforce, only days before next week’s midterm elections in the United States, when a spike in fake content is expected across social media.

The cuts, which come after Musk’s blockbuster $44 million buyout of the company, hit multiple divisions, including trust and safety teams that manage content moderation as well as engineering and machine learning, US reports said.

“I would be real careful on this platform in the coming days… about what you retweet, who you follow, and even your own sense of what’s going on,” said Kate Starbird, a disinformation researcher and assistant professor at the University of Washington.

Starbird warned in her own Twitter post of an increased risk of “impersonation” attempts, “coordinated disinformation by manipulators” and “hoaxes that attempt to get you to spread falsehoods.”

Jessica Gonzalez, co-chief executive officer at the nonpartisan group Free Press, said she was concerned that Twitter’s content-moderation efforts could potentially slacken prior to the election, “when we know social media goes off the rails to misinform, intimidate and harm voters of color.”

“Twitter was already a hellscape before Musk took over, and his actions… will only make it worse,” said Gonzalez.

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, sought to soothe those concerns, saying the platform’s front-line moderation staff were least impacted by the cuts and combating harmful misinformation during the midterms was a “top priority.”

“While we said goodbye to incredibly talented friends and colleagues… our core moderation capabilities remain in place,” Roth tweeted.

– ‘Deeply troubling’ –

Free Press is part of a coalition of more than 60 civil society groups that on Friday called on advertisers to boycott the platform until it committed to being a “safe place.”

Members of the coalition met with Musk earlier this week after academic studies reported a dramatic increase in hate speech, Nazi memes and racist slurs after his acquisition of the company.

One study by Montclair State University found that Twitter’s acquisition by Musk, a self-professed free-speech absolutist, had “created the perception by extremist users that content restrictions would be alleviated.” 

“We  met with Elon Musk earlier this week to express our profound concerns about some of his plans and the spike in toxic content after his acquisition,” said the coalition, which uses the hashtag “Stop Toxic Twitter.”

“Since that time, hate and disinformation have continued to proliferate, and Musk has taken actions that make us fear that the worst is yet to come,” the group said in a statement.

But Musk rejected that assessment, tweeting that “we have actually seen hateful speech at times this week decline *below* our prior norms,” though he offered up no data to back up this assertion.

“To be crystal clear, Twitter’s strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged,” Musk wrote on Friday.

Musk had promised to reduce Twitter’s content restrictions, and since the acquisition has announced plans to create a “content moderation council” that will review company policies.

“While Musk has publicly committed to transparency, his decision to lay off the staff members dedicated to this work is deeply troubling,” said Zeve Sanderson, executive director of the New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics.

Musk insisted that the layoffs were necessary as the company was losing more than $4 million per day.

Twitter has long struggled to generate profit and has failed to keep pace with Facebook, Instagram and TikTok in gaining new users.

Kenya Airways pilots went on strike Saturday, grounding nearly two dozen flights and stranding thousands of passengers, as ground workers followed suit throwing the country’s aviation sector into chaos.

The airline, part owned by the government and Air France-KLM, is one of the biggest in Africa, connecting multiple countries to Europe and Asia, but it is facing turbulent times, including years of losses.

The Kenya Airline Pilots Association (KALPA) said no Kenya Airways flight flown by its members had departed Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport from 6:00 am (0300 GMT) onwards on Saturday.

The pilots announced the strike in defiance of a court order against industrial action and gave no indication of how long it will last.

The airline’s managing director and CEO, Allan Kilavuka, said 23 flights had been cancelled as of 11:00 am due to “the unlawful strike”, affecting over 9,000 passengers.

He urged the protesting pilots, who make up 10 percent of the workforce, to return to work by 10:30 am on Sunday.

“Failure to do so will lead to immediate disciplinary action,” he warned.

The Kenya Aviation Workers Union (KAWU) subsequently announced that ground staff would also strike from 2:00 pm onwards in a separate, long-running dispute with the Kenya Airports Authority (KAA) over salary increases.

– ‘Negotiate in good faith’ –

“The Union has no option but to commence the industrial action,” it said on Twitter, citing a court order supporting its members’ right to strike until negotiations with the KAA are concluded.

Kenya’s newly appointed Transport Minister Kipchumba Murkomen told reporters that the pilots’ strike was unwarranted and “akin to economic sabotage”.

“I am not saying their concerns are not valid,” he said, appealing to the “goodwill of the pilots to terminate” what he described as drastic action.

Frustrated passengers described huge queues at the airport, with many only learning their flights were cancelled when they arrived to check in.

“We have been told nothing,” US tourist Jill Lee told AFP as she waited in line after her flight to Tanzania’s financial capital Dar es Salaam was cancelled at the last minute.

The 65-year-old was booked to go on safari but said she had no idea where she would spend the night after her connecting flight from Nairobi was cancelled.

“Many people here have nowhere to go. It’s pretty horrible.”

On Saturday, KALPA blamed “the hardline stance adopted by” the airline’s management for throwing thousands of travellers’ plans into disarray.

It urged them to “come to the table and negotiate in good faith, if they truly sympathise with the plight of Kenya Airways passengers.”

– Injunction – 

The pilots are pressing for the reinstatement of contributions to a provident fund and payment of all salaries stopped during the Covid-19 pandemic.

On Monday, the airline won a court injunction stopping the strike, but an official at KALPA, which has 400 members, told AFP the pilots “were acting within the provisions of the law” and that they were yet to be served with a court order.

The carrier warned earlier this week that the strike would jeopardise its recovery, estimating losses at $2.5 million per day if the pilots went ahead with their plans.

The airline was founded in 1977 following the demise of East African Airways and flies more than four million passengers to 42 destinations annually.

But its slogan “The Pride of Africa” rings hollow as it operates thanks to state bailouts following years of losses.

Like other carriers around the world, Kenya Airways saw its revenue nosedive after the pandemic grounded planes worldwide because of stringent travel restrictions, devastating the aerospace and tourism industries.

In August, the airline reported a $81.5 million half-year loss citing high fuel costs, despite the Kenyan government injecting some $520 million to keep it afloat.

On Wednesday, the airline’s management said it was on a path to recovery, flying at least 250,000 passengers each month, and aiming to cut its overall operating costs by 10 percent before the end of next year.

The mysticism that has allowed tech firms to make billions of dollars from surveillance is finally clearing, the boss of encrypted messaging app Signal told AFP.

Meredith Whittaker, who spent years working for Google before helping to organise a staff walkout in 2018 over working conditions, said tech was “valorised” and “fetishised” when she first began in the industry in 2006.

“The idea that technology represented the apex of innovation and progress was fairly pervasive in government circles and popular culture,” she said in an interview on the sidelines of the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon this week.

But legislators and users were now reckoning with the “well-documented harms of allowing a handful of large corporations have the power to surveil almost every aspect of human life”.

She said people were now seeking out apps like Signal because they appreciated the “real existential dangers of placing their most intimate thoughts, their locations, their friend networks in the hands of corporate and state surveillance actors”.

Whittaker, who established the AI Now Institute at New York University in 2017 and has advised US government regulators, has emerged as a prominent critic of the business models built on extraction of personal data to use for targeted advertising.

– ‘Punching above our weight’ –

She became president of Signal two months ago and is pushing hard for the app to become a genuine alternative to the likes of WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage.

“We want to make sure that everyone in the world can pick up their device, quickly open Signal, use it to communicate with anyone else,” she said.

The odds are stacked against her firm –- WhatsApp, she says, has around 1,000 engineers and many thousands of support staff, while her company has just 40 people in total.

The app is governed by a non-profit organisation, the Signal Foundation, and is just beginning to ask users for small donations to keep it going.

The company’s David vs Goliath act was laid bare in January when co-founder Moxie Marlinspike left his post as CEO, detailing how hard it had been to keep the app going.

“I was writing all the Android code, was writing all of the server code, was the only person on call for the service, was facilitating all product development, and was managing everyone,” he wrote in a blog at the time.

Yet Signal has been downloaded more than 100 million times and, although Whittaker will not confirm the figures, reports last year estimated it has 40 million regular users.

And she is undaunted by the task, arguing that having talented staff helps close the gap with competitors.

“We have a small team that are extremely competent and yet we’re punching way way above our weight,” she said.

– ‘Gold standard’ –

Signal has increasing numbers of friends in the pro-privacy sector.

Email services like Proton, search engine DuckDuckGo and countless data analytics firms all market themselves as privacy-focused apps.

And Whittaker stressed that Signal was producing a “gold standard” open-source encryption protocol that is used by WhatsApp among others.

But the goal is not to emulate the other players in the field and push for evermore flashy new features.

“Our growth ambitions are not of the same nature as the ambitions of for-profit surveillance companies,” she said.

The aim instead was to create a “network effect of encryption”.

That would help to make sure “everyone in the world has the option of actually communicating privately without being subject to pervasive surveillance by states and corporations”.

Kenya Airways flights were disrupted Saturday as a strike by its pilots demanding better working conditions grounded over a dozen planes, affecting thousands of passengers, the country’s transport minister said.

The airline, part owned by the government and Air France-KLM, is one of the biggest in Africa, connecting multiple countries to Europe and Asia, but it is facing turbulent times, including years of losses.

The Kenya Airlines Pilots Association (KALPA) said that no Kenya Airways flight flown by its members had departed Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport starting from 6:00 am (0300 GMT) on Saturday.

“The strike is fully in force,” KALPA union secretary general Murithi Nyagah said in a statement released on Saturday.

The pilots announced the strike in defiance of a court order against the industrial action and have given no indication of how long it will last.

Kenya’s newly appointed Transport Minister Kipchumba Murkomen told reporters at the airport on Saturday that the strike was unwarranted and “akin to economic sabotage”.

He said around 10,000 passengers had been affected by the strike, which had led to the grounding of 15 planes.

“I am not saying their concerns are not valid,” he said, but added that their actions were drastic as he appealed to the “goodwill of the pilots to terminate the strike.”

Frustrated passengers described huge queues at the airport, with many travellers only learning about their cancelled flights when they showed up to check in.

“We have been told nothing,” American tourist Jill Lee told AFP as she waited in line to figure out her next course of action after her flight to Dar es Salaam was cancelled at the last minute.

The 65-year-old had booked a safari in Tanzania but said she had no idea where she would spend the night after her connecting flight from Nairobi was cancelled.

“Many people here have nowhere to go. It’s pretty horrible.”

– ‘Soften its stance’ –

Kenya Airways on Saturday reported high call volumes at its service centre due to the “ongoing unlawful industrial action”, urging customers to only contact the airline if they were travelling in the next 48 hours.

The pilots, who have had a particularly fraught relationship with management, are pressing for the reinstatement of contributions to a provident fund.

They also want back payment of all salaries stopped during the Covid-19 pandemic.

KALPA representatives said Friday that a series of meetings with airline management had failed to resolve grievances.

“Kenya Airways management’s actions have left us with no other option,” Nyagah said, adding that a 14-day notice on the industrial action had ended without a solution.

“We had hoped that the management of the airline would soften its stance and engage in negotiation on the issues raised.”

On Monday, the airline won a court injunction stopping the strike, but an official at KALPA, which has 400 members, told AFP the pilots “were acting within the provisions of the law” and that they were yet to be served with a court order.

The carrier warned earlier this week that the strike would jeopardise its recovery, estimating losses at $2.5 million per day if the pilots went ahead with their plans.

The airline was founded in 1977 following the demise of East African Airways and flies more than four million passengers to 42 destinations annually.

But its slogan “The Pride of Africa” rings hollow as it operates thanks to state bailouts following years of losses.

Like other carriers around the world, Kenya Airways saw its revenue nosedive after the pandemic grounded planes worldwide because of stringent travel restrictions, devastating the aerospace and tourism industries.

China said on Saturday that it would “unswervingly” stick to its zero-Covid policy, dampening the outlook for global markets following their recent surge on hopes that Beijing would cast aside some of its economically damaging virus curbs.

China is the last major economy wedded to a strategy of extinguishing outbreaks as they emerge, imposing snap lockdowns, mass testing and lengthy quarantines despite the widespread disruption to businesses and international supply chains.

Stock markets climbed on Friday in part on unsubstantiated rumours that Beijing was poised to announce significant changes to the policy or even lay out a path towards a full reopening.

But authorities poured cold water on the speculation, with National Health Commission (NHC) spokesperson Mi Feng confirming on Saturday that Beijing would “stick unswervingly to… the overall policy of dynamic zero-Covid”.

“At present, China is still facing the dual threat of imported infections and the spread of domestic outbreaks”, Mi said at a press briefing.

“The disease control situation is as grim and complex as ever,” he said. “We must continue to put people and lives first.”

China recorded 3,659 new infections on Saturday, the majority of which were asymptomatic, according to the NHC.

The thousands of domestic cases logged in the past week represent a tiny fraction of the country’s vast population, but have been enough for officials to take drastic action — sometimes with unpopular or tragic consequences.

A lockdown of the world’s biggest iPhone factory in the central city of Zhengzhou prompted large numbers of workers to flee on foot, alleging food shortages, inadequate medical care and poor treatment from their employer, Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn.

On Thursday, authorities in the northwestern city of Lanzhou made a rare apology after a three-year-old boy died of carbon monoxide poisoning following his denial of medical treatment during a weeks-long Covid lockdown.

Officials on Saturday criticised the use of “excessively layered” and “one-size-fits-all” policies in some locales but insisted the overall zero-tolerance virus approach was “correct”.

– Reopening rumours –

Chinese stocks jumped on Friday in part on rumours that China might loosen the policies, which include a ten-day quarantine for inbound travellers and a “circuit-breaker” on Covid-affected international passenger flights.

The Hang Seng Index closed up more than 5 percent, while bourses in Shanghai and Shenzhen rose 2.4 percent and 3.2 percent respectively.

But a reopening still appears to be a long way off, with areas contributing over 10 percent of China’s overall gross domestic product under some form of enhanced virus curbs as of Thursday, according to a calculation by Nomura.

The Japanese bank also warned that the impact of any policy easing “would likely be very limited” and said it foresaw a “very small probability to materially ending (zero-Covid) before March 2023”.

China’s year-on-year economic growth rebounded to 3.9 percent in the third quarter of this year, but analysts still expect Beijing to miss its stated goal of around 5.5 percent annual GDP growth by a wide margin.

President Xi Jinping, who has made fighting the pandemic a cornerstone of the ruling Communist Party’s legitimacy, lauded zero-Covid’s “significant positive results” at a congress last month as he sealed a precedent-busting third term in power.