It begins in the kind of darkness that no family should ever have to know. In the early hours of a June morning, in the quiet village of Rogate, a teenage girl woke from sleep to find a figure standing over her bed. He was dressed entirely in black, his face hidden behind a balaclava, his hands covered in black latex gloves. In one hand he held pre-looped cable ties, and attached to a carabiner on his belt were ten more. It was not a random intruder, not a shadowy stranger from outside their world; it was Christopher Buxey, a…

On October 12 and 13, 2026, something quietly significant happened in Lomé, Togo. It wasn’t a political rally or a corporate launch; it was a workshop inside the University of Lomé’s UniPod, a space usually buzzing with student ideas and innovation. There, thirty digital content creators—YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagram influencers, bloggers, online journalists, and community managers—sat together with a shared mission: to learn how to stop the spread of lies online. The workshop was organized by Togo’s media regulator, the Haute Autorité de Régulation de la Communication Écrite, Audiovisuelle et Numérique, better known as HARC, in partnership with the university’s Public…