Ngong Forest works halted, Cloudflare OS open, Google Assistant axed

The Environment and Lands Court has stopped excavation, tree felling, land clearance and construction at the eco-lodge site in the Sanctuary Block of Ngong Road Forest and along the Bomas-Talanta road corridor, pending the hearing of a petition by the Law Society of Kenya, the Green Belt Movement and JustAct. The conservatory orders from Justice Grace Kemei also bar Kenya Urban Roads Authority, Kenya Forest Service and developer Konyon Company from removing the forest's electric fence. The petitioners argue the projects bypassed environmental approvals, impact assessments and public participation. The forest, gazetted in 1932 at about 2,850 hectares, has shrunk to roughly 1,224 hectares through successive excisions. The ruling is a setback for infrastructure tied to Talanta Sports City.

Call and SMS termination problems, poor voice quality and billing disputes were the leading telecom consumer complaints to the Communications Authority of Kenya in the fourth quarter of 2025/26. The regulator's Consumer Complaints Report logged 44 voice-related complaints, 16 of them about call termination, followed by quality of service, fraudulent calls and unsolicited communication. SMS billing and charges drew 75 complaints, the largest single category. Of the 239 voice and SMS complaints received, 167 were resolved and 72 remain under investigation. The pattern tracks the real user experience on Kenya's main networks, and the CA reads it as rising expectations for reliable connectivity as more services move online.

The Competition Authority of Kenya takes an average of three years to conclude a cartel case, director general David Kemei said, blaming the pace on staffing and the complexity of price-fixing, bid-rigging and output-restriction investigations. Kemei put CAK's headcount at 75 serving a population comparable to the UK, where the Competition and Markets Authority employs around 1,130 people. The authority has spent Sh45 million on a forensic laboratory to shorten investigations and, with OECD input, is reviewing its penalty and settlement procedures, signalling more dawn raids. The practical consequence: businesses colluding on prices still face slow enforcement, though CAK argues its timelines are in line with established regulators elsewhere.

Smart Applications International has launched Smart PharmaLink, a pharmacy management platform that integrates procurement, dispensing, billing, reporting and business analytics in one system. The company says it gives pharmacies better inventory visibility, fewer stock losses and simpler regulatory compliance. It was unveiled at the Kenya Pharmaceutical Association's annual scientific conference in Mombasa. For small chemists still running stock on spreadsheets, one connected system removes a lot of manual work, and for the wider health sector it is a step toward the data-driven pharmacy operations regulators and insurers increasingly expect.

The Poultry Farmers Association of Kenya is pushing the government to protect local producers from competition by industrial-scale layer and broiler farms, many owned by Chinese investors. Farmers in Kajiado said they face high feed costs, scarce affordable financing and weaker technology, and warned that without intervention small and medium producers will be forced out, cutting jobs and deepening dependence on foreign-controlled food supply. PFAK wants legislation against unfair market practices, investment rules that complement rather than displace local producers, and better access to credit. Poultry supports hundreds of thousands of households, so this is as much an employment story as a food security one.

Cloudflare has open-sourced Cloudflare OS, the platform it built to give every employee an agent workspace grounded in company context and skills. A browser-based workspace can turn a conversation into a document, a live app or a scheduled workflow, with agents writing and running code in an isolated runtime. Access to internal systems runs through Gatekeepers, a security layer that replaces broad API keys with scoped, auditable permissions, and existing MCP servers plug in via server portals. Thousands of non-engineering staff have used it internally since May. For teams building agent platforms, the notable shift is treating security as part of the platform rather than something each app implements itself.

The rust-lang/rust repository is adopting an explicit LLM policy, laid out by Jynn Nelson on the Inside Rust blog. LLM-generated content is not allowed in public documentation, PR descriptions or GitHub comments unless clearly marked, reviewers are not required to review LLM-written PRs, and nobody is required to use LLMs to contribute. Policies must be written for humans first and only summarised for machines, and LLM reviews cannot substitute for human review. It is a practical answer to the flood of AI-generated contributions hitting popular open-source projects: it keeps the bar for human work intact while letting contributors use tools privately if they want.