Election season in South Africa has always been about choices, but this year the choice feels heavier because it is becoming harder to know what to believe. Imagine waking up and scrolling through your phone only to see a photograph of a local candidate doing something shocking—accepting a bribe, saying something hateful, or cozying up to a shady businessman. Your heart races. You share it with your family group chat. You feel outraged. Then, hours later, you learn the image was not real. It was generated by artificial intelligence, or a picture from another context cleverly repurposed to smear someone.…

The National Medical Commission has quietly pulled the plug on a significant piece of regulatory machinery, withdrawing the Maintenance of Standards of Medical Education Regulations, 2023, with immediate effect. For anyone outside the world of medical education, this may sound like a bureaucratic footnote, but for the thousands of medical colleges, faculty members, and students across the country, it is a change with real consequences. The 2023 regulations had been designed as a blunt, transparent enforcement tool—a detailed rulebook that told institutions exactly what would happen if they failed to maintain the standards expected of them. Under that framework, the…