Nurses back to work, Hassabis steps down, bank CEOs charged

The Employment and Labour Court in Mombasa has temporarily stopped the nationwide nurses' strike that began on 29 July, ordering the Kenya National Union of Nurses and Midwives to direct all members back to work immediately. Justice Monica Mbaru made the order national after Mombasa County and its Public Service Board enjoined the other 46 county governments. Any nurse absent without lawful cause faces show-cause proceedings and disciplinary action, and county labour officers must record attendance and report to court on 22 September. The strike, over delayed payments and an unfulfilled collective bargaining agreement, has stretched county health services. Expect services to ramp back up over the next few days as nurses weigh the legal risk of staying out.

The DPP has charged the chief executives of NCBA, KCB and Co-operative Bank with failing to report suspected proceeds of crime linked to the alleged theft of Sh363.32 million from First Assurance Investment Company. The three CEOs are expected to take plea on 11 August. Separately, a former nominated MCA has been charged with 120 counts, including conspiracy to defraud, stealing and 114 counts of making documents without authority, for allegedly forging co-director Lamu Governor Issa Abdalla Issa's signature on company cheques between May 2018 and April 2024. He pleaded not guilty and was released on a Sh10 million bond. The bank cases turn on whether the lenders flagged suspicious transactions as the law requires.

NCBA Group's net profit rose 12.2 percent to Sh12.4 billion in the six months to June, with the Kenyan bank the main driver, growing profitability 24.3 percent year on year to Sh13.7 billion, plus stronger contributions from Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda. Digital lending is the growth engine: NCBA disbursed Sh819 billion in digital loans, up 26.9 percent, while customer deposits rose 11 percent to Sh551 billion. The non-performing loan ratio of 10.5 percent sits well below the sector average of 15.3 percent, return on equity is 19 percent and capital adequacy stands at 21.7 percent. For borrowers, the balance sheet gives NCBA room to keep pricing digital credit aggressively.

Kenya's 2030 target of 100 percent renewable electricity is hitting policy bottlenecks, weak access to finance and thin storage capacity, industry players said at the Nairobi launch of GoodWe's EO G2 hybrid solar inverter. KEREA chief executive Cynthia Muhati said Kenya already generates about 90 percent of its electricity from renewables, mostly geothermal, hydro and wind, but developers still struggle to raise affordable financing, and regulatory barriers, technology transfer and skills gaps remain. GoodWe's Lucas Lu called storage the binding constraint: the grid is unstable, many remote communities are unconnected, and hospitals and schools face high power bills and outages. Battery energy storage systems look set to anchor Kenya's next wave of energy investment.

Google is shaking up its top AI leadership. Demis Hassabis is stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind to become the lab's chair and Alphabet's chief scientist, while continuing to run Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind's CTO, takes over as senior vice president of DeepMind, reporting directly to Sundar Pichai. In a second big change, veteran chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving after 27 years, along with Google Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, to found an AI-focused public benefit corporation called Discovery Loop, which Google will invest in. For developers building on Gemini and DeepMind technology, the reshuffle signals a strategy reset as Google fights to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic.

Researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk have shown that Apple's Private Relay, the opt-in Safari feature meant to hide your IP address, can be circumvented through flaws in three WebKit features, revealing users' real IP addresses. They published a website so anyone can test whether their traffic leaks, and TechCrunch confirmed the leak in its own test. The researchers said they did not report the issue to Apple because past reporting experiences were slow and inconsistent, and Apple had not responded to requests for comment. Anyone relying on Private Relay for anonymity, from journalists to people on hostile networks, should treat it as a privacy veneer rather than a guarantee until Apple ships a fix.