Reggae icon Meta to headline Stereo Africa Festival in Dakar

The Iran war has exposed Africa's vulnerability to fuel chokepoints and is heading for a 86 million tonne fuel shortfall by 2040, the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) said Thursday.

Africa imports over 70 percent of its refined fuel and some $230 billion worth of essential goods, including fuel, food, plastics, steel, and fertiliser each year, the AFC said in a report released in Nairobi.

Its dependence on fuel imports will continue to rise from 74 million tonnes in 2023 to 86 million tonnes in 2040, said the report by the pan-African finance institution.

That is equivalent to almost three of the giant refineries run in Nigeria by the Dangote group -- by far the biggest in Africa.

"Not only is it importing fuel, but on the eastern side of the continent, those imports are vulnerable to chokepoints -- we've all learned about the Strait of Hormuz this year, and it's not the only chokepoint," said the AFC's chief economist Rita Babihuga-Nsanze at the report's launch.

The Strait of Hormuz, which accounts for a fifth of global fuel transport, has been effectively shut down by the war in the Middle East, leaving import-dependent countries in east Africa facing critical shortages.

Kenyan President William Ruto, speaking at the AFC summit, said the war showed the need for Africa to stop relying on outsiders.

"Our ambitions will remain unrealised if we continue to depend on external capital whose primary interest is securing raw materials for their own industries," said Ruto.

"We cannot continue to export raw materials and import finished products made from them," he added. 

- Infrastructure -

Kenya last year announced an infrastructure splurge, including 50 new hydroelectric dams and 10,000 megawatts of additional power generation within seven years, as well as plans to revamp roads, rail and airports.

"While historical injustices from colonialism to inequities in the global economic order are real, we must also acknowledge that other regions have faced similar challenges, but they have risen above them," Ruto told the summit. 

"We are constrained only by the extent that we accept the status quo through acquiescence, complacency, and limited ambition."

Fixing Africa's energy shortfall requires new hubs and better performance from existing assets, the AFC report said. 

Babihuga-Nsanze highlighted the example of Zambian dams that were not designed to cope with new drought conditions, and two gigawatts of Angolan hydropower that was not connected to the regional grid and therefore went to waste. 

She also highlighted the shortages of fertiliser due to the Mideast war, since a high proportion comes from the Gulf.  

Such vulnerabilities are "strange", said Babihuga-Nsanze, given that Africa has 80 percent of the world's phosphate reserves -- a key fertiliser source -- yet only produces 20 percent of the global stock. 

"There's a real opportunity for Africa to step in the gap here," she said.

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Rising reggae star Meta Dia will headline this year's Stereo Africa Festival in Dakar celebrating contemporary African music and the sounds of the diaspora.

Meta -- who sings in English, French, Wolof and Pulaar -- is renowned for his socially conscious music, unifying messages and captivating performances.

He will take the stage on May 9 for a special concert at the festival, which is now in its fifth year.

"Performing in Senegal is my greatest dream," the Senegalese-born singer-songwriter told AFP. 

Having settled in the United States nearly 25 years ago, his band, Meta and the Cornerstones, is set to release a new album, "Echoes of Time", on May 29.

The international reggae group blends Afro, soul and hip-hop influences atop a roots reggae foundation, and is acclaimed for its overall contributions to modern reggae.

"Senegal shaped me spiritually and that spirituality is the backbone of my music, it is the message I carry with me wherever I go", he said.

"I have travelled the world but I miss the place I call home, so having this opportunity to return and perform in Senegal is a true joy", he said.

The founder of the Stereo Africa Festival, Sahad Sarr, a singer-songwriter and frontman of the Senegalese band SAHAD, will also perform among some 30 concerts that run from May 5 to 10.

He called Meta and the Cornerstones "the ambassador of African reggae, currently the most talented in the world".

Since its inception, the Stereo Africa Festival has attracted more than 10,000 attendees and hosted 250 local and international artists.

It also features a "Stereo Revelations" programme, a springboard for young Senegalese talent which has awarded past recipients a year of professional guidance and support to help establish their careers.

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Environment ministers from G7 nations launched a two-day meeting in Paris on Thursday with climate change kept off the agenda to avoid a row with the United States.

The office of France's ecology minister Monique Barbut had said the Group of Seven would focus on "less contentious issues" to appease its largest and most powerful member, drawing criticism from activists.

Barbut said the G7 "must remain a forum for convergence" and France as host was prioritising unity at a time when environmental protection was slipping down the global agenda. 

"I hope we can send a strong message of unity and ambition", Barbut said at the opening of the meeting.

Italy, Canada, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom sent their environment ministers to Paris but Washington dispatched Usha-Maria Turner, an assistant administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Ocean conservation, funding for biodiversity, and the transformation of dry areas into desert are on the agenda, among other broad environmental themes.

Barbut's office said it "chose not to address the climate issue head-on because the United States' positions on this subject are well known".

President Donald Trump's administration has withdrawn the United States from global agreements on climate change and weakened environmental protections since he returned to office in 2025. 

Gaia Febvre from Climate Action Network, an alliance of activist groups, said "a G7 moving at the pace of the United States cannot claim to respond to the crises of the century".

"By yielding to pressure, it weakens collective action and renounces its potential leading role," she told AFP.

It takes place just days before more than 50 countries meet in Colombia for the first-ever global conference dedicated to phasing out fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change.

- Forests and funding - 

France is spearheading an initiative to raise public and private finance for the protection of biodiversity and hopes to win the backing of other G7 nations.

Barbut's ministry hopes to announce $800 million in funding for national parks in some 20 African countries, according to sources close to the matter.

Jean Burkard, advocacy director at WWF France, welcomed this inclusion on the G7 agenda but said any funding "must be additional and not compensate" for cuts elsewhere to state budgets for nature. 

The G7 meeting also hopes to reach a political declaration on desertification and security, while sessions on oceans will look to strengthen an alliance on marine protected areas. 

Other sessions are planned, including on water pollution, while a visit to the Fontainebleau forest south of Paris is also scheduled Thursday as part of a session dedicated to woodlands.

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Two commuter trains collided head-on near the Danish capital early Thursday leaving five critically hurt and 12 others with lesser injuries, emergency services said.

Police were unable to provide any information about the cause of the accident, which occurred near a level crossing in a rural wooded area about 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of Copenhagen, near the town of Hillerod.

"A total of 17 people were injured. Of them, five were deemed to be in critical condition at the scene," Anders Damm-Hejmdal, chief physician at Copenhagen's emergency medical responders, told reporters. 

Police said they were alerted to the crash at 6:29 am (0429 GMT).

The yellow and grey locomotives of the two trains could be seen smashed and buckled in, the glass from their windshields and windows shattered. Both trains and their carriages remained upright on the rails.

Thirty-eight people were on the two trains.

A large number of ambulances and police cars were dispatched and all the passengers were evacuated and the injured transported to hospitals.

The mayor of Gribskov municipality, Trine Egetved, said on Facebook that some of the injured were flown to hospital on helicopter.

- 'People thrown around' -

Emergency crews wound up their rescue efforts around three hours after the accident, as investigators continued their work at the scene.

"We can't provide any details for now about the cause," police official Morten Kaare Pedersen told reporters.

"We are in the process of gathering the necessary information about the course of events. So there are, and will continue to be for quite some time, a lot of investigations underway."

Damm-Hejmdal said the number of critically injured "could change" over the course of the day.

The number "is obviously dynamic and could change. But that is the status as of now," he told a press conference almost four hours after the accident.

"Initially it is difficult to get an overview of the exact injuries," he said.

"You can imagine two trains colliding. That causes a lot of different injuries, people get thrown around."

Egetved said she had been "deeply upset and shocked".

"This train is used by many residents of Gribskov, workers and students," she said.

Denmark prides itself on its safety record, but a 2019 train crash left eight dead and 16 injured.

In August last year, an express train hit a farm truck on a crossing killing one person and injuring 27.

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A US naval blockade of Iranian ports is likely to squeeze Iran's oil output in the coming weeks but claims it will throw the Islamic republic into economic free fall remain premature, analysts say.

After weeks of bombing and counter-strikes, focus has shifted to the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz, which ordinarily carries around a fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas.

In response to Iran's blockade of the strait since the start of the Middle East war, the US imposed a counter-blockade of the Islamic republic's ports, a push to force its leaders into a compromise in peace talks.

That bid, however, looks set to fail, at least in the short term.

"If the blockade lasts for more than two or three months, it can cause more damage" to Iran, economic analyst and professor at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran Saeed Laylaz told AFP.

"If Iran suffers any damage, the damage to the countries in the southern Persian Gulf will definitely be greater," he added. 

There's a limit on how long Iran can bide its time, however.

Arne Lohmann Rasmussen, chief analyst at Global Risk Management said Iran "was expected to run out of storage capacity within approximately one month, but it may already be forced to shut in part of its oil production within a couple of weeks".

- 'Collapsing financially'? -

Trump said Tuesday that Iran was "collapsing financially" under the blockade imposed by the US Navy on April 12, claiming that the country was "starving for cash". 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the blockade meant storage at Iran's Kharg Island, the main export terminal through which most of the country's crude is shipped, "will be full and the fragile Iranian oil wells will be shut in".

Jamie Ingram, managing editor of Middle East Economic Survey (MEES), told AFP it was likely the timeline for Iran to hit its oil storage limits would be measured in "weeks rather than days".

He added it was likely that "Iran will slightly reduce production before getting to the stage where storage constraints start to bite".

According to analysis by oil expert Homayoun Falakshahi shared by energy intelligence firm Kpler, Iran's crude production has already slowed since the start of the war. 

Output fell by around 200,000 barrels per day in March to 3.68 million bpd and is expected to drop a further 420,000 bpd in April to about 3.43 million bpd, reflecting "the broader impact of export disruptions and refining constraints linked to the ongoing conflict," Falakshahi said.

But Laylaz in Tehran said beyond the psychological effect of the blockade, the "real material effect has been small so far".

Ingram said Kharg Island "shouldn't be a particular bottleneck," for Iran. 

"This is the final storage facility used before oil is exported and Iran can divert crude oil to other facilities rather than straight to Kharg," he said.

- 'Mutually assured disruption' -

The MEES expert also said Iran's dependency on oil exports via Hormuz had "deepened due to the damage caused by US and Israeli strikes to other sections of the Iranian economy".

"But Iran has also proven its ability to withstand huge oil-revenue declines during previous rounds of sanctions. I would not underestimate the regime's resilience in this regard," he added.

As the initial two-week truce between Iran and the US was set to expire Trump had said Tuesday he would maintain the ceasefire to allow more time for peace talks.

Iran said it welcomed the efforts by mediator Pakistan but made no other comment on Trump's announcement, while vowing not to reopen Hormuz so long as the US blockade remains in place.

"It will take a long time before such economic pain forces Iran to compromise," Ingram said, explaining it is "more likely economic disruption... pushes China into exerting more pressure on Iran to negotiate". 

Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, said "Iran's economy was battered before the war, is contending with added strains caused during it, and now faces the combination of sanctions, seizures and potential strikes".

"Iran's leadership has previously shown a high threshold for pain even if the pressure on ordinary Iranians increases. It also likely calculates that its own efforts to subdue traffic through Hormuz act as a sort of mutually assured disruption," he added.

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Shares in EssilorLuxottica, the world's top maker of eyeglasses, slid on Thursday as analysts said investors have turned wary of AI glasses.

The French-Italian company has pushed hard into wearable tech and has a tie-up with Meta for its Ray-Ban AI glasses.

The nearly five percent drop in morning trading in Paris, whose overall market was up 0.1 percent, came despite the company posting Wednesday evening a 4.1 percent increase in first quarter sales to 7.1 billion euros ($8.3 billion).

EssilorLuxottica did not provide a breakdown of AI glasses, but said they supported growth and the launch of Ray-Ban Meta’s new optical-first styles had been a success.

EssilorLuxottica's foray into "AI glasses is now seen as a source of risk, after initially being viewed as a major opportunity," analysts at Oddo BHF said in a note.

"Following very satisfactory performance in previous quarters, the stock is going through a tougher patch in 2026," they added. 

While first quarter sales met analyst expectations, and represented a gain of 10.8 percent on an organic basis -- that is stripping out the effects of changes in exchange rates and in business operations.

But "given the macroeconomic uncertainties, we are cautiously lowering our expectations for organic growth in 2026 from 10 to nine percent," said analysts at Jefferies.

EssilorLuxottica does not provide detailed sales and earnings guidance.

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German airline giant Lufthansa Thursday lost a legal battle over a six-billion-euro ($7-billion) pandemic-era government bailout when the EU's top court ruled Brussels mishandled its approval of the cash injection.

Europe's biggest airline group by revenues received the bailout in 2020 to save it from collapse as government lockdowns to prevent the spread of Covid-19 brought air travel to a halt. 

The European Commission approved the move, but Irish no-frills carrier Ryanair and German airline Condor brought legal action, claiming this broke state aid rules.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) on Thursday dismissed a challenge from Lufthansa, and upheld an earlier ruling by a lower tribunal which had overturned the approval by the commission, the EU executive.

"The Court of Justice dismisses Lufthansa's appeal and thus upholds the General Court's ruling to annul the decision by which the Commission had approved the recapitalisation of Lufthansa," it said in a statement.

The lower court had correctly concluded that the commission had "infringed" emergency rules brought in to allow governments to support the economy during times of crisis, it said.

Lufthansa, which also operates Eurowings, Austrian, Swiss and Brussels Airlines and has acquired a stake in Italy's ITA, has paid back the bailout cash, and it was not clear what impact the court defeat would have. 

Lufthansa said in a statement that it took note of the judgement.

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Business activity in the eurozone contracted for the first time in 16 months in April, as the war in the Middle East drove energy prices up and disrupted global supply chains, a closely watched survey showed Thursday.

The Flash Eurozone purchasing managers' index (PMI) published by S&P Global, an important gauge of the overall health of the economy, registered a figure of 48.6 this month, down from 50.7 in March.

A reading above 50 indicates growth, while a figure below 50 shows contraction.

"The eurozone is facing deepening economic woes from the war in the Middle East, presenting a major headache for policymakers," said S&P chief business economist Chris Williamson. 

"The conflict has pushed the economy into decline in April, while driving inflation sharply higher."

The decline in output was driven by the service sector, which recorded the steepest pace of decline in more than five years. 

Manufacturing production instead continued to rise, expanding at the fastest rate since August. 

But this was partially down to customers placing extra orders to build stocks and secure purchases ahead of possible future price rises and supply shortages, the survey said. 

The fall in business activity was broad-based across the eurozone, with both Germany and France -- the 20-country single currency area's two biggest economies -- posting contractions. 

"In this environment, the ECB once again has the unenviable task of deciding whether to raise interest rates in the face of the worrying inflation picture, or whether this price spike will prove temporary and its focus should instead be on the need to prevent the economy sliding into a deeper downturn," said Williamson.

Analysts have raised their bets on the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank (ECB) hiking interest rates as soon as this month to keep inflation in check.

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The latest developments in the Middle East war:

- Iran gets first Hormuz toll -

A senior Iranian parliament official said on Thursday that Tehran has received the first revenue from tolls it imposed on the strategic Strait of Hormuz in its war with the United States and Israel. 

"The first revenue received from the Strait of Hormuz tolls was deposited into the Central Bank account," said deputy speaker of parliament Hamidreza Hajibabaei, according to Tasnim news agency. 

- Clearing Hormuz may take 6 months -

A Pentagon assessment said it could take six months to completely clear the Strait of Hormuz of Iranian-laid mines, which could keep oil prices high, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

Iran has all but blocked the vital waterway since the start of a war with the United States and Israel, sharply driving up oil and gas prices and disrupting the global economy.

- Hormuz standoff -

Iran vowed it would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz as long as the United States continues to blockade its ports.

"A complete ceasefire only has meaning if it is not violated through a naval blockade," said Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who led Tehran's delegation in the first round of talks in Islamabad.

"Reopening the Strait of Hormuz is not possible amid a blatant violation of the ceasefire."

- Iran execution -

Iran hanged a man after he was convicted of membership in a banned opposition group and alleged collaboration with Israel. 

"Sultan-Ali Shirzadi-Fakhr was hanged early this morning for membership in the terrorist group" of the People's Mujahedin Organisation (MEK) and "collaboration with the Israeli regime's spy service," the judiciary's Mizan Online website reported.

- Lebanon-Israel meeting -

Israel and Lebanon hold a new round of talks in Washington on Thursday, during which Beirut plans to request a one-month extension of a ceasefire due to expire within days.

Israel stated ahead of the talks that it has no "serious disagreements" with Lebanon, calling on it to "work together" against the pro-Iran Hezbollah, which is notably absent from and opposed to the negotiations. 

- US turns back 31 vessels -

US Central Command (CENTCOM) said late Wednesday that it had "directed 31 vessels to turn around or return to port" as part of its own "blockade against Iran".

It said on X "the majority of vessels have complied with US directions" adding that "most vessels turned around have been oil tankers".

- Oil jumps before easing -

Oil prices jumped four percent before easing Thursday after Iran vowed not to reopen the Strait of Hormuz so long as a US blockade remained in place.

At around 0025 GMT, the benchmark US oil contract West Texas Intermediate (WTI) climbed 4.1 percent to $96.73 per barrel. International oil benchmark Brent North Sea crude rose 3.6 percent to $105.63. 

Asian stocks mostly fell however, with Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney, Singapore and Wellington all down.

- Israel strikes journalists in Lebanon -

Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon, where a ceasefire is officially in place, killed veteran Al-Akhbar newspaper correspondent Amal Khalil and wounded freelance journalist Zeinab Faraj.

A Lebanese Red Cross official told AFP Faraj was rescued but Khalil died under rubble.

Lebanon's Information Minister Paul Morcos called the targeting of journalists "a grave crime and a blatant violation of international humanitarian law".

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An envoy to US President Donald Trump has asked world football's governing body FIFA to replace Iran with Italy at the World Cup, according to the Financial Times.

US special envoy Paolo Zampolli told the FT it would be a "dream" to see four-time World Cup winners Italy at the finals in the United States, Mexico and Canada despite the fact they lost in a qualification playoff last month.

The suggestion was an effort to repair ties between Trump and Giorgia Meloni after the Italian prime minister fell out with the president after criticising his attack on Pope Leo XIV over the Iran war, the newspaper reported.

"I confirm I have suggested to Trump and (FIFA President Gianni) Infantino that Italy replace Iran at the World Cup. I'm an Italian native and it would be a dream to see the Azzurri at a US-hosted tournament. With four titles, they have the pedigree to justify inclusion," Zampolli told the FT.

Italy missed out on the World Cup for the third successive time after losing a penalty shootout to Bosnia and Herzegovina in their qualifying playoff final.

Iran's participation in the World Cup has been thrown into doubt by the war with the US and Israel that broke out on February 28.

The Iranian football federation (FFIRI) had said in April it was "negotiating" with FIFA to relocate the country's World Cup matches from the United States to Mexico.

But Infantino told AFP last month, while attending Iran's friendly against Costa Rica in Turkey, that Iran will be at the World Cup and that they will play "where they are supposed to be, according to the draw".

Zampolli is an Italian-American socialite, businessman and former modelling agent who claims to have introduced Trump to his current wife Melania Trump.

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