Benin has joined a developing listing of African states enforcing levies for the use of the net.
The authorities exceeded a decree in past due August taxing its citizens to access the net and social media apps. In July, the directive, first proposed in July, institutes a fee (hyperlink in French) of 5 CFA francs ($0.008) in line with megabytes ate up through offerings like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter. It additionally introduces a 5% rate on texting and calls on the pinnacle of taxes, in keeping with advocacy group Internet Sans Frontières (ISF).
The new law has been denounced, with citizens and advocates using the hashtag #Taxepamesmo (“Don’t tax my megabytes”) to name on officials to cancel the levy. The extended costs will not most effectively burden the poorest clients and widen the virtual divide. However, they may also be “disastrous” for the kingdom’s nascent digital financial system, says ISF’s executive director Julie Owono. A petition towards the levy on Change.Org has garnered almost 7,000 signatures since it was created five days ago.
The West African kingdom joins increasingly more African countries, which have brought new prices for having access to virtual spaces. Last month, Zambia accredited a tax on internet calls to protect massive telcos at the rate of already squeezed citizens. In July, Uganda additionally added a tax for gaining access to 60 websites and social media apps, including WhatsApp and Twitter, from cellular telephones. Officials in Kampala additionally improved excise duty costs on cell-money transactions from 10% to fifteen% in a bid to reduce capital flight and enhance the country’s tax-to-GDP ratio.
Digital-rights advocates say those measures are a part of wider actions to silence critics and the vibrant socio-political, cultural, and financial conversations taking region online. The adoptions of these taxes, they say, should have a high-priced effect no longer just on democracy and social concord, however on the monetary increase, innovation, and net neutrality. Paradigm Initiative, a Nigerian company that works to improve virtual rights, has stated it was involved Nigeria would follow Uganda’s and Zambia’s footsteps and begin levying over-the-pinnacle media offerings like Facebook and Telegram that deliver content material at the internet.
But taxing the virtual sector may have a negative effect ultimately. Research has already proven that Uganda’s advert hoc prices may want to feed its economic system $750 million in revenue this 12 months alone. “These governments are killing the goose that lays the golden egg,” Owono stated.
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South Africa has become a favorite destination for movie production crews capturing the place over the last few years. But even as Cape Town and its environs had been used for top advertising and marketing shoots and still productions for decades, it’s far comparatively lately that the big movie productions have commenced the usage of South Africa often as a high setting for movies starring large field workplace attractions such as Halle Berry, Denzel Washington, and Leonardo DiCaprio.
The state-of-the-art movie to be filmed in South Africa is Safe House, still in the publish-production segment and due for launch in February 2012. It stars Denzel Washington as a rogue ex-agent, Ryan Reynolds because the CIA agent shielding him and much of it’s far filmed on a place in and around the streets of Cape Town with lots of thrilling action sequences along the scenic coastal roads too.
Halle Berry has also been in Cape Town lately filming Dark Tide, a thriller, approximately a diving teacher, and near encounters with sharks. Filmed in Simon’s Town in the cold Cape wintry weather, Halle Berry still manages to game a bikini despite the cold. The movie remains in post-production and is ready to be launched toward the ceasing of 2011.
A big hit regardless of featuring local unknowns, District nine, launched in 2009, made headlines as one of the first South African movie productions to make it huge across the world. While the setting of urban decay, and the theme of extraterrestrial beings segregated through an unsympathetic authority, is unlikely to convey tourists flocking, the production becomes superb news for the South African movie industry.
Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and launched in 2006, become filmed by and large in South Africa, regardless of being set in Sierra Leone, more often than not because of the superior infrastructure available right here assisting this size of movie production.
Rumors are currently rife about the next James Bond movie being filmed in South Africa. Carte Blanche, Jeffrey Deaver’s newly launched Bond novel, is about in and around Cape Town for tons of its story, and hypothesis has it being filmed subsequent yr for release in the following 12 months. However, that is an unconfirmed rumor, although thrilling for Cape Town movie buffs and for the capacity increase to the tourist industry that might well come from the pondered glamour of 007 enjoying cocktails, shaken no longer. Stirred, in pinnacle Cape Town resorts!
All in all, South Africa and specifically Cape Town are properly on the map in terms of the worldwide movie industry, with global-class infrastructure supporting those mega-productions.
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