Month: September 2024

An explosion in a coal mine in eastern Iran killed at least 51 workers and injured over a dozen others, officials said Sunday, marking one of the worst mining disasters in the country’s history as others remained missing hours after the blast.

The blast struck a coal mine in Tabas, about 540 kilometers (335 miles) southeast of the capital, Tehran, on Saturday night. By Sunday, weeping miners stood alongside mine cars that brought up the bodies of their colleagues, all covered in coal dust.

Around 70 people had been working at the time of the blast. State television later said that 17 were believed to be trapped at a depth of 200 meters (650 feet) down a 700-meter (2,300-foot) tunnel. However, figures kept changing throughout Sunday regarding the disaster in the rural area with some reports suggesting the death toll was higher.

Authorities blamed the blast on a leak of methane gas. Such gases are common in mining, though modern safety measures call for ventilation and other measures to protect workers.

It wasn’t immediately clear what safety procedures were in place at the privately owned Mandanjoo Co., which operated the Tabas Parvadeh 5 mine. The firm could not be reached for comment Sunday.

But Iran’s mining industry has been struck by disasters before. In 2017, a coal mine explosion killed at least 42 people.

In 2013, 11 workers were killed in two separate mining incidents. In 2009, 20 workers were killed in several incidents. Lax safety standards and inadequate emergency services in mining areas were often blamed for the fatalities.

Oil-producing Iran is also rich in a variety of minerals. Iran annually consumes around 3.5 million tons of coal, but only extracts about 1.8 million tons from its mines per year. The rest is imported, often consumed in the country’s steel mills.

One of the candidates challenging Tunisian President Kais Saied in the country’s presidential election next month has been sentenced to prison on fraud charges that his attorney decried as politically motivated.

Two weeks after his arrest, a court in the city of Jendouba handed down a 20-month sentence for Ayachi Zammel on Wednesday evening, after convicting him of falsifying the signatures he gathered to file the candidacy papers needed to run for president. Zammel faces more than 20 charges in jurisdictions throughout Tunisia, including four that will be heard on Thursday.

The little-known businessman and head of Tunisia’s Azimoun party is one of two candidates challenging Saied in the North African nation’s Oct. 6 election.

His attorney Abdessattar Messaoudi said Zammel planned to conduct his campaign from behind bars.

“This is no surprise. We expected such a ruling given the harassment he has been subjected to since announcing his candidacy,” Messaoudi told The Associated Press.

Zammel is among a long list of Saied’s opponents who have faced criminal charges and prosecution in the volatile period leading up to October’s election. Last month, courts sentenced two candidates — Nizar Chaari and Karim Gharbi — on similar signature fraud charges.

After a court required Tunisia’s election authority to reinstate three candidates who had been ruled ineligible to run, one of them — Abdellatif El Mekki — was arrested on charges that stemmed from a 2014 murder investigation that critics have called politically motivated.

Saied’s two most prominent critics, the right-wing Free Destourian Party’s Abir Moussi and the Islamist party Ennahda’s Rached Ghannouchi, have also been in prison since last year.

Civil liberty advocates have decried the crackdown as a symptom of Tunisia’s democratic backslide. Amnesty International this week called it “a clear pre-election assault on the pillars of human rights and the rule of law.”

People queued at an Apple shop in London on Friday as new iPhone 16 models reach store shelves.

All the iPhone 16 models, with starting prices ranging from $800 to $1,200, are equipped to handle the new technology, which the company is marketing as “Apple Intelligence.”

That branding is part of an effort to distinguish the iPhone’s artificial intelligence from similar technology already available in smartphones released earlier this year by Samsung and Google.

The AI features are being promoted as one of the main reasons to buy an iPhone 16.

Visitors at the Apple shop on Regent Street were looking forward to exploring the phone’s new features.

Elif Eren, a student who bought a new iPhone 16, said she is excited to open the package and see the new AI features.

James Griffith, another customer and co-founder of Mous which makes iPhone cases, bought new models to test if their products are suitable for the iPhone 16.

The “big element (in) this launch is the Apple intelligence, which is going to be really interesting – Apple’s take on on AI,” Griffith said.

The AI technology is coming out in U.S. English only for now, but will expand into localized English in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the U.K. in December.

Apple plans to expand into other languages and countries next year.

The testing of the AI software is beginning just a few days after Apple released its latest mobile operating system, iOS 18, to all its earlier iPhones.

Coffee growers in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state are assessing the damage caused by a wildfire that devasted their crops in recent days, as the world’s largest coffee producing country faces its worst drought in more than seven decades.

In the municipality of Caconde, one of the state’s largest coffee producers, farmers and local residents joined forces to put out the fire that had reached around 50 farms, consuming an estimated 600 hectares, according to growers.

Coffee producer Helio Moreira de Araújo said he lost between eight and ten thousand coffee trees.

“We were expecting a harvesting of 500-600 bags but we’re going to harvest more or less half of it,” he said. “The other half burned down.”

Brazil’s ongoing drought is already affecting the start of the 2025/2026 season, according to a report released Thursday by the Center for Advanced Studies on Applied Economics at the University of Sao Paulo’s agribusiness school.

At the same time, Vietnam, the world’s second-biggest coffee producer, is experiencing heat and drought, affecting its crops. Potential supply shortages in both countries have started driving up global coffee prices, according to the report.

The market is closely monitoring how Brazilian coffee plants develop in the adverse climate conditions, which can cause flowers to stop blooming, fail to turn into beans or produce fewer or lower-quality beans.

“It could result in a smaller coffee harvest. Since the market tends to anticipate these movements, we’ve already seen the price of Arabica coffee in New York and Robusta in Europe trading at higher levels,” said Felippe Serigati, who coordinates the master’s program in agribusiness at the Getulio Vargas Foundation.

Coffee prices haven’t reached the record highs the world saw in the late 1970s, after a severe frost wiped out 70% of Brazil’s coffee plants. But they have been soaring in recent years.

In August, the International Coffee Organization’s Composite Indicator Price – which combines the price of several types of green coffee beans – averaged $2.38 per pound, up nearly 55% from the same month a year ago.

Despite challenging weather conditions, the International Coffee Organization expects coffee production to outpace demand this year, which should help temper price increases.

Following a series of pager explosions across Lebanon, which killed several people and wounded scores more, the US has insisted that it had no involvement in the incident. A Pentagon official says it is monitoring the situation, which comes amid already heightened tensions in the region.

On Tuesday, pagers belonging to scores of Hezbollah fighters exploded; not long after, casualties began streaming into hospitals, and blood banks opened to support health facilities and those wounded. Hezbollah relies strongly on pagers for communication, due to the risk of mobile phones being hacked.

The Iran-backed Lebanese militant group has blamed Israel for the incident. Israeli officials, meanwhile, have for the moment refused to comment.

The UN has described the attack as ‘extremely concerning’. It comes as Hezbollah and the Israeli army have been trading near daily fire across the Israel-Lebanon border following the October 7th Hamas attack. The hostilities have prompted fears of an all-out regional war, and have forced tens of thousands of people from their homes on both sides of the border.