Rockslides are a concern at the ancient theatre of Delphi

From established stalwarts like Fatboy Slim to rising artists like Australia's Ninajirachi, this year's edition of the annual Coachella music festival dedicated nearly half of its lineup to electronic musicians.

The traditionally rock-centric festival in Indio, California -- headlined this year by singers Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber and Karol G -- reflects the surge in popularity of electronic music in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.

"It's testament to the rise of electronic music, generally," Swedish DJ Adam Beyer told AFP.

"Much of it is so much more accessible. Also, there is a lot of electronic collaboration and influence in pop so it feels much more visible across the board now," he added.

Among the highlights of the festival's second weekend was the premiere of electronic musician Anyma's "ÆDEN" show on the festival's main stage, after the set was canceled the previous weekend due to high winds.

"I mean man, I love it, it's like... a rave after another, you know?" festival attendee John Good said as he left the Nine Inch Noize show, a joint act by industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails and German producer Boys Noize.

The second day of the festival featured a set by Beyer with trance legend Armin van Buuren, who popularized the subgenre for a global audience.

"The term is now so broad," van Buuren told AFP, referring to electronic music.

"It's no longer just 'house music,' but even tracks by Sabrina Carpenter have some sort of electronic drums in them. I guess electronic music has spread through and had an impact on all genres of music," he said.

Beyer and van Buuren agreed that the delineation between electronic and traditional genres has faded in recent years along with listening habits.

"This younger generation doesn't really approach music through strict genre labels anymore. It's more about mood, energy and context," van Buuren noted.

The 49-year-old Dutch DJ argued the festival setting was optimized for electronic acts.

"Festivals and large-scale shows have become more immersive and experience-driven, and electronic music is built exactly for this kind of setting," he said. "It's physical, emotional and repetitive in a way that works on this larger scale."

- 'Unpredictable' -

At the Sahara tent, Coachella's stage dedicated to electronic music, the lineup featured a variety of DJs from a range of subgenres.

Among them was Brazilian DJ Mochakk, who called his Coachella debut his "biggest gig to date." 

The 26-year-old's influences include Brazilian genres like MPB and Tropicalia, as well as artists like Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque. 

"Music always goes in cycles," he told AFP.

"With electronic music I think it's this mix of old and new that people connect with. 

"Also how open it is, you can blend so many genres in one set, keep switching energy, keep it unpredictable," he added. 

"That keeps it exciting, and I think that's probably why it's been growing so much everywhere."

- Techno-flamenco -

Another electronic music act at Coachella this year was the duo MESTIZA, consisting of Spanish artists Pitty Bernad and Belah, who brought their cultural influences -- including flamenco dancers -- to the stage.

"Electric music has something very special, and that's why it's understood all over the world," Belah said.

The genre, she added, "has no borders."

"For a long time it was hard to find places where we could go to listen to electronic music," said Pitty, adding that "it has evolved in a dramatic way." 

"Giving rise, for example, to this Coachella lineup," she said.

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Big names from the worlds of film, technology, music and sports gathered on Saturday in Santa Monica, California for the Breakthrough Prizes, popularly known as the "Oscars of Science." 

The awards, co-founded by philanthropists and tech entrepreneurs, recognize the research achievements of leading scientists around the world in three broad categories: Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics.

"These are some of the most heroic and inspiring people we get in the world," actor Edward Norton told AFP.

According to the "American History X" star, it was important to turn out and "to highlight what this kind of work contributes to all of us."

"The United States has the most anti-science administration in US history," the actor said. "It's always important, but if it was ever especially important, the moment is now."

In the last year, the Trump administration has slashed funding for science, halting projects and devastating workforces.

Rock climber Alex Honnold agreed with Norton, adding that he hoped the fluctuations "of the political climate... are short-term compared to the long-term effort required to make these kind of gains in human knowledge."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the collaboration between his company's artificial intelligence technology and some of the award-winning scientists "is moving things faster and faster, and letting them discover new things and bring them to the world faster than they could before."

"Change this fast is really disorienting. So there will be a lot of big questions that we'll have to sort through as a society," Altman told AFP.

The Breakthrough Foundation was started by Google co-founder Sergey Brin; Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan; science patrons Julia and Yuri Milner; and Anne Wojcicki, CEO of 23andMe.

Six prizes worth $3 million each were presented at the 12th edition of the awards.

French mathematician Frank Merle was honored for his work on nonlinear equations describing the behavior of waves, fluids and other systems.

Merle told AFP the funding is "essential" for science. 

"Science is one of the foundations of our civilization," he said.

Hollywood A-listers Ben Affleck, Lily Collins, Robert Downey Jr., Gigi Hadid, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Gal Gadot, Naomi Watts and her husband, Billy Crudup, also attended the event, alongside public figures like Bill Gates and Paris Hilton.

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An Australian former soldier charged with committing war crimes in Afghanistan vowed on Sunday to clear his name, saying he had never "run from a fight" in his first public comments since his arrest.

"For the past 10 years, my family and I have been subject to a campaign to convince Australians that I've acted improperly in my service in Afghanistan," Ben Roberts-Smith told journalists in Gold Coast.

"I categorically deny all of these allegations, and while I would have preferred these charges not be brought, I will be taking this opportunity to finally clear my name," he said.

Roberts-Smith was granted bail on Friday after a high-profile arrest on five counts of "war crime -- murder". Police alleged he was complicit in a string of unlawful killings between 2009 and 2012.

The Victoria Cross recipient has denied all the charges.

He was released from prison on Friday evening after 10 days behind bars.

"I'm proud of my service in Afghanistan. While I was there, I always acted within my values," he said on Sunday.

Australia's most decorated living soldier met Queen Elizabeth II, had his portrait hung at the Australian War Museum and was even honoured as the nation's "father of the year".

But the war hero's reputation was called into question in 2018, when a series of news reports linked him to the alleged murder of unarmed Afghan prisoners by Australian troops.

The soldier allegedly kicked an unarmed Afghan civilian off a cliff and ordered subordinates to shoot him, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald reported.

He was also said to have taken part in the machine-gunning of a man with a prosthetic limb which he later used as a drinking vessel with other soldiers.

Roberts-Smith has staunchly maintained his innocence throughout, launching legal action against the newspapers who aired the allegations.

But his efforts to sue The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald for slander would backfire, with a judge finding in 2023 many of the journalists' claims were "substantially true".

Such civil trials carry a lower burden of proof than the criminal proceedings Roberts-Smith now faces.

Australia deployed 39,000 troops to Afghanistan over two decades as part of US- and NATO-led operations against the Taliban and other militant groups.

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Artificial intelligence "agents" promise to save users time and energy by automating tasks, but the growing power of systems like OpenClaw is setting cybersecurity experts on edge.

Powered by a wave of hype, OpenClaw today claims more than three million users worldwide.

The system allows users to create so-called agents, tools based on a large language model (LLM) like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude that can carry out online tasks.

"We've moved from an AI you could talk with via a chatbot to an agentic AI, which can take action... the threat and the risks are definitely much greater," said Yazid Akadiri, principal solutions architect at Elastic France, an IT security company.

In an article titled "Agents of Chaos" that has yet to be peer-reviewed, a 20-strong team of researchers studied the behaviour of six AI agents created with OpenClaw.

They spotted a dozen potentially dangerous actions executed by the systems, from deleting an email inbox to sharing personal information.

Many users have posted similar stories of OpenClaw mishaps online.

"When you deploy agents, you have no control over what they'll do, and when you try to look at what they're doing, you'll find them going far beyond the limits you set," said Adrien Merveille, an expert at the Check Point cybersecurity agency.

And the security gaps are not limited to the agents' own mistaken actions.

To carry out useful work, the tools need access to personal accounts for email, calendars or search engines -- drawing the attention of cyberattackers.

- 'Delete your database' -

AI agents are likely to become top targets for hackers as their use spreads, said Wendi Whitmore, chief security intelligence officer at cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks.

"As soon as (attackers) are inside an environment, (they're) immediately going to the internal LLM (agent) that's being used and using that then to interrogate the systems for more information."

Palo Alto's Unit 42 research division said in early March that it had found traces of attempted attacks in the form of hidden instructions for agents added to websites.

One such command ordered any agent who might read it to "delete your database".

Other cybersecurity firms and researchers have warned that attackers could gain access to agents via so-called skills -- downloadable files that users can add to their systems to give them new abilities.

Among such files freely available for download, some include hidden instructions for malicious actions like exfiltrating data.

OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger says he is well aware of the risks.

"I purposefully didn't make it simpler so people would stop and read and understand: what is AI, that AI can make mistakes, what is prompt injection -- some basics that you really should understand when you use that technology," he told AFP in March.

Whitmore argued that expecting users to create their own guardrails for agents is "pretty unrealistic".

"People are going to adopt innovation and really see what it's capable of before they ask the questions about, 'how do I secure my own data?'," she predicted.

"That's going to cause some significant challenges in terms of data breaches in 2026."

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With a multitude of promotional events almost as long and diverse as its artist lineup, Coachella, one of the biggest music festivals in the world, is now an amusement park for influencers and a gold mine for brands.

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, or simply Coachella, has become the tone-setter for the US festival circuit.

Tickets for this edition -- now in its second weekend with pop stars Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber and reggaeton artist Karol G at the top of the bill -- sold out last year within four days of going on sale.

With that, organizers were expecting around 250,000 people to come over two weekends at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, where dozens of special events with fashion, beauty, beverage, and lifestyle brands were spread out among the festival's nine stages.

"I love how big it's gotten. I love how more people are open to it," 24-year-old Luz Maura told AFP at an e.l.f. Beauty station.

The pastel-colored space offered lip glosses as souvenirs, slushies to ease the high desert temperatures, makeup artists to touch up glittery festival looks, and hosted multiple selfie corners.

The "e.l.f.scape to Balm Desert" campaign drew a "six-figure audience," said Patrick O'Keefe, the company's vice president of integrated marketing, to AFP.

Promoting a moisturizing lip balm was not just about seizing on the arid, dry desert's climate -- it was also backed by sales data.

"We know that 92 percent of daily makeup users incorporate lip products into their routines," he added.

Its donut-shaped chairs and branded mirrors also serve as irresistible selfie backdrops that in turn promote the brand.

- 'Analog experience' -

At the festival that's sometimes dubbed the "influencer olympics," Pinterest chose to swim against the tide with a "phone-free" installation.

Amid the debate over digital fatigue, "we made a willing decision to sacrifice that sort of immediate coverage in order to tell a story about what we believe in and who we are, and our hope is that, you know, long term that sinks in," Sarah Pollack, the company's vice president and global head of consumer marketing, told AFP.

With their phones locked away in a pouch, visitors to the Pinterest space had to resist the urge to feed their social networks with images of the colorful bar for designing custom accessories or the makeup room.

For California resident Liz Mendoza, the "analog experience" was "a lot of fun."

"Especially in an environment like this where social media is such a big thing and you want to take pictures and post as much as you can, I think it's super nice to have a few minutes off of your phone and just be in the moment," Mendoza added.

Pollack maintained that Coachella, where they are taking part for a third year, "is a great place for us to connect with Gen Z, and Gen Z is our fastest growing demographic." 

She noted that 50 percent of Pinterest's audience was Gen Z.

- 'Cultural destination' -

In the Coachella Valley, where temperatures can climb past 86F (30C) this time of year, so-called "brand activations" also serve as oases of shade and, in some cases, air conditioning.

And the crowds those amenities attract are a gold mine for brands.

Absolut, a vodka brand, sets up Absolut Heat Haus each year. The space looks like a nightclub, with bars and a DJ in charge of the music -- a role that last year fell to Paris Hilton.

"Coachella is a standout moment for Absolut because it's more than a music festival -- it's a high-energy social occasion and a cultural destination," said the company's brand director, Bethan Hamilton.

Flor Ruiz, who was born the same year that Coachella began -- 1999 -- said the festival's extracurriculars are key to the experience.

"For me, there's no such thing as Coachella without this," she said, as she left one of the promo events. "It's not just about the music."

"For that, we'd just go to a concert."

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So-called bouillon restaurants are mushrooming all over France, reviving a traditional low-cost Gallic meal concept that can compete with fast-food on prices and easily beat it on quality. 

"It's exploding! 253 bouillon restaurants have opened in France in four years," Bernard Boutboul, a restaurant consultant, told AFP.

"It's an ultra-intensive expansion, driven by a trend of returning to traditions, with the reappearance of iconic French dishes at very low prices." 

Created in the 1850s by the butcher Adolphe-Baptiste Duval to fill workers' stomachs with hearty meals, Duval's ran 250 restaurants in the capital by the turn of the 20th century.

That made them France's first mass chain of restaurants, serving traditional recipes at low prices in high-volume and bustling restaurants.

But as eating habits changed, with higher quality and more expensive brasseries dominating the French food market, and international and fast-food trends appearing, the bouillon concept fell out of favour. 

Its revival began in 2005 with the resurrection of the Bouillon Chartier, an ornate Parisian landmark that had been slowly fading.

"A bouillon is the gateway to French gastronomy," explained Christophe Joulie, part of the gastronomic family who took over the Chartier.

He modernised the kitchens and put beef bourguignon with macaroni back on the menu.

"For me, you have to be able to have a starter, main course and dessert for under 20 euros," he said.

With its leek vinaigrette for one euro and bills scribbled on paper tablecloths by apron-clad waiters, the restaurant hums with activity as locals and tourists alike pack out its tables, which crucially cannot be reserved. 

"In a world where fast food is taking up more space, it's French-style fast food, because we serve a full dish for less than a sandwich at McDonald's," said Joulie.

- 'Dust off' -

Even multi-Michelin-starred French chef Thierry Marx has got in on the act, attracted by the idea of providing quality food at affordable prices. 

He has opened a bouillon in a northern Paris suburb.

"In the 1960s, it took the equivalent of an hour of the minimum wage to eat at a bistro," he told AFP. "Today, with an hour of minimum wage, you only get fast food, something from the bakery -- or a bouillon dish."

Other restaurateurs with a keen eye for the market have sensed an opportunity.

"We looked at needs and changing habits and realised there was demand for intergenerational social spaces with no price-based exclusion," Enguerran Lavaud, director of Groupe Bouillon Restaurants, told AFP.

"I wanted to dust off the bouillon -— its mass-market French dishes available from noon to midnight."

Boosted by its Instagram presence, his Bouillon Pigalle now serves 2,300 customers a day, often with long queues along the pavement.

Since 2017, the concept has spread, attracting more and more restaurateurs across France from Angers to Nancy and Toulouse.

Some are adapting the concept. 

In the Romainville suburb northeast of Paris, a family of Mauritian origin took over a large brasserie in 2026 to turn it into a "Mauritian-style bouillon".

There is an Italian bouillon in Paris too. 

Industry insiders say they do not fear competition around what has become a "bouillon culture".

"But there are bouillons and bouillons: those that can't sustain the low prices over time, and whose menus change all the time, won't make it to 2027 or 2028 because you have to protect the quality of the experience to protect volume — and therefore prices," warned Lavaud.

According to consultant Bernard Boutboul, you specifically need "at least 300 seats and not exceed an average bill of 18 euros". 

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South Korean sculptor Kim Yun Shin wields a chainsaw with a quiet focus, refining a craft the 91-year-old has honed over decades spent far from home.

Long overlooked in her home country, Kim has more recently gained recognition as a pioneering artist, featuring in a sweeping retrospective at South Korea's esteemed Hoam Museum of Art.

The solo exhibition, titled "Two Be One", is the institution's first since its founding in 1982 to spotlight a woman artist, and includes some of her signature abstract sculptures hewn from hardwood with her tool of choice.

"The saw is my body," Kim told AFP in her studio in Paju, a city northwest of the capital Seoul.

"When I lift it and cut (the wood), it has to move exactly like me -- the saw has to become me, and I have to become the saw."

Hoam is exhibiting about 170 of Kim's sculptures and paintings, reflecting her reverence for nature and blending spirituality with meditations on existence, material and form.

Born in 1935 in Wonsan, now in North Korea, she grew up playing alone in the countryside, talking to trees and rice paddies, and making eyeglasses out of sorghum stalks.

At the time, Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. Kim saw her older brother disappear after joining the independence movement, and pine trees in her town cut down for fuel.

"Those trees were my friends," she said, recalling the pain of seeing them uprooted -- and her drive to salvage and transform them into works of sculpture.

"I think I wanted them to endure -- to keep living on within that (art) form. Maybe that's why I've loved working with wood so much."

- Chainsaw carving -

Kim's family fled south during the horrors of the Korean War, and she later studied in France before returning to become an art professor in Seoul.

South Korea was then under a brutal military dictatorship. Authorities held artists in suspicion: a friend of Kim's was interrogated simply for using red, a colour associated with North Korean communism.

"Women, in particular, were virtually invisible," she told AFP, noting that her superiors would comment on the length of her skirt and tell her to refrain from smoking on college campuses.

At 48, drawn by the abundant trees in Argentina, she made the unusual choice to move to the South American nation, then just restoring democracy after a dictatorship of its own.

She ended up staying for 40 years, taking up chainsaw carving.

Kim focused on dense, durable wood such as palo santo and "algarrobo", and also worked with quarries in Mexico and Brazil, experimenting with stone sculpture using materials such as onyx and sodalite.  

She managed to forge her "own artistic world, nourished by the country's culture and nature", Tae Hyun-sun, senior curator at Hoam, told AFP.

- Pave the way -

Like many women artists of her generation, Kim has only recently gained global recognition, said Rachel Lehmann, the co-founder of Lehmann Maupin which represents Kim internationally and has shown her work in London and New York.

"Her perseverance and lifelong dedication have helped pave the way for subsequent generations of women artists," she told AFP.  

Kim returned to South Korea after a major 2023 solo show in Seoul that propelled her to the Venice Biennale the following year.

Among her former mentees in Buenos Aires is Korean-Argentine filmmaker Cecilia Kang, 40, an award-winning director who is now making a film about her. 

As the daughter of Korean immigrants, she felt pressure to follow a conventional path, but Kim -- whom Kang first met when she was 13 -- showed her "that pursuing a life doing what one loves is possible".

At 15, Kim, who was a war refugee, changed her name to Yun Shin – "truth and faith" – on the advice of a monk who urged her to spend her life discovering her "true colour".

Those words have always "stayed vivid with me", she said. "Sometimes I feel they are what have carried me through this life."

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Blue Origin, the US space company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on Sunday will reuse a  booster for the first time to launch its massive New Glenn rocket.

The novel approach comes amid fierce competition between Bezos's firm and fellow tech titan Elon Musk's SpaceX, and a successful outing Sunday could up the pace and lower the cost of future Blue Origin launches.

At nearly 100 meters (about 328 feet) tall, the New Glenn is slated for liftoff from Florida's Cape Canaveral sometime between 6:45 am (1045 GMT) and 8:45 am. It will carry a communications satellite for the company AST SpaceMobile.

The company has launched the New Glenn twice before, but only with new rocket boosters.

It has launched its far smaller New Shepard rocket, primarily used for suborbital space tourism, with reused components before in a less technically challenging operation.

In November, Blue Origin recovered a New Glenn booster for the first time, succeeding in the complex technical challenge that culminated with a controlled vertical landing on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. 

A previous attempt in January 2025 to recover the booster was unsuccessful after its engines failed to reignite during descent.

The booster that will be used in Sunday's launch was refurbished after its previous flight. For this first reuse, the company replaced all of its engines and make a few other modifications.

After liftoff, the rocket's two stages will separate at altitude. The upper stage will continue its journey carrying the satellite into space, while the booster will descend and attempt to land on a barge.

The operation's performance will be closely watched, as the New Glenn is at the heart of Bezos's space ambitions.

He is notably competing with Musk in NASA's Artemis lunar program, with their respective space companies both developing lunar landers for the US space agency.

The United States is doubling down on efforts to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon in 2028, before the end of President Donald Trump's term and a deadline set by Chinese rivals.

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Millions of married women and transgender Americans could find their ability to vote more complicated than ever if the "SAVE America Act" promoted by US President Donald Trump, currently being debated in the Senate, were to pass.

The draft law would require Americans to prove their citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections and present identification materials when casting a ballot, such as a passport, driver's license or birth certificate.

But many women change their names when they get married, meaning the names on their birth certificates no longer match what they currently use -- forcing them to provide additional documentation to justify the discrepancy.

The same issue would affect transgender voters, whose documentation may not consistently reflect their current identity.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute at New York University, "more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents. Roughly half of Americans don't even have a passport."

For Rick Hasen, an expert on election law at the University of California, Los Angeles, "women and transgender people are the ones who are most likely to be affected," along with low-income and working class Americans who do not have passports.

Republicans in the House of Representatives have already passed a version of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, but it faces steep obstacles in the Senate, where it appears Democratic opposition will be too strong to overcome.

- Name changes -

Letitia Harmon, the policy and research director at the grassroots voting activist group Florida Rising, was married and then divorced in Washington state, she told AFP. She changed her name twice.

"So the problem is I don't know which name is in the database records," Harmon said, making it difficult to know which set of documents she would need to take to her polling place.

Harmon said she will likely need to order proof of divorce from Washington state -- a costly and time-consuming process.  

The White House argues that the SAVE America Act is necessary to combat voter fraud, and prevent non-citizens from voting -- though current US law already forbids that.

As for the issue of married women, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said last month: "They just have to go through their state processes to update that documentation."

- Voting gender gap -

The prospect of millions of women struggling to vote matters because historically, men tend to skew Republican.

According to the Pew Research Center, 52 percent of men surveyed said they identified with or leaned toward the Republican Party in 2024, while only 44 percent of women said the same. 

"There has been a trend over the last decade and a half of mostly Republican states passing laws that make it harder to register or to vote, and mostly Democratic states passing laws that make it easier to register," Hasen explained. 

As of now, a handful of mainly Republican-led states have asked residents to prove citizenship in order to register to vote in at least some cases, according to Ballotpedia.

In 2014, Harmon was living in Kansas and said she could not vote in primary elections that year because officials demanded to see her birth certificate, not just a valid photo ID.

Four years later, a federal judge declared that state law unconstitutional after more than 30,000 people were unable to register.

Earlier this month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law his own version of the SAVE America Act, which will go into effect in January 2027, after the midterm elections.

Harmon said it was senseless to disenfranchise thousands, just to find a handful of cases of fraud.

Indeed, in 2025, two people were charged in Florida over lying about their citizenship in order to cast ballots.

But such cases remain extremely rare.

A Washington Post investigation unearthed 31 "credible incidents" of fraud out of one billion ballots cast from 2010 to 2014.

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On the banks of Iraq's Tigris River, Haidar Kazem mourned 300 tonnes of the fish he had carefully raised in ponds wiped out by a flood of polluted water.

Water supplies in Iraq, the eastern half of what is known as the region's fertile crescent and which the United Nations ranks among the countries most affected by climate change, are in a dire state.

"In just two hours, my entire project was gone -- fish I had spent a year-and-a-half raising. I am back to zero," the 43-year-old fish farmer told AFP.

Earlier this month, after yet another very dry season, a brief spate of rain led authorities to open the gates of the Hamrin Dam, sending water into the Diyala, a tributary that is choked with untreated sewage.

The flood then swept the contaminated water into the larger Tigris, and the pollution was so severe that it was visible in satellite images.

Images from Copernicus Sentinel analysed by AFP show that, following the late-March rainfall, a noticeably dark stream flows from Diyala to the Tigris throughout the period from March 28 to April 12.

"No one told us that polluted water was headed our way," Kazem said, adding that the contaminated stream reached his ponds on April 5, killed all his fish and caused losses exceeding a million dollars.

Kazem buried his stock -- carp for Iraq's beloved grilled dish masguf -- and now spends his days cleaning their floating cages on the banks of the Tigris, haunted by the question: how will he save his livelihood?

"I don't know any other trade, and I don't have the money to restart," he said.

- 1,000 tonnes -

Arkan al-Shimari, the head of the agriculture department in Kazem's province Wasit, said that the sewage stream has killed more than 1,000 tonnes of fish.

According to authorities, several water treatment plants discharge untreated sewage into the Diyala River, which years of drought in Iraq have left low and notorious for its foul odour.

Environmental open-source investigator Wim Zwijnenburg said that the Diyala consistently appears darker than the Tigris due to wastewater discharge, its low depth and weaker currents.

Normally, it would gradually mix into the Tigris, but this time heavy rain created a stronger current in Diyala, sending a less-diluted polluted water into the Tigris, and "thus affecting downstream fisheries and potentially also water treatment plants".

As the situation worsened, authorities restricted water supply -- normally treated water from the Tigris -- in several areas of Wasit, reporting 20 documented cases of poisoning and rash.

Declining rain over recent years, coupled with rising temperatures, has brought water levels in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to staggering lows, for which Baghdad also accuses upstream dams built by neighbouring Turkey and Iran.

- Black water -

Following the recent fish die-off, authorities vowed they would take the necessary measures to treat wastewater before discharge.

But decades of conflicts have left the country's infrastructure in a pitiful state and its water management systems in disrepair.

Iraq's new agency INA quoted a Baghdad official as saying that authorities will soon open seven more water treatment plants in the city.

In the town of al-Numaniyah, fish farmer Mazen Mansour, 51, gazed over the still water in his empty floating cages, which until recently held 38,000 fish he had been counting on selling next month.

Mansour said he did not realise polluted water had flooded the area until he saw his fish dying in the evening. He tried to save them by pumping air into his basins to provide oxygen, but it was too late.

"The water was black and filled with sewage," he said.

"All our work was gone in one night," added the father of four.

Now, he said, there is nothing he can do but wait and hope for compensation from the government.

"We urge the state to compensate us and hold those responsible accountable."

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