A French court on Friday convicted six teenagers in connection with the 2020 beheading of history teacher Samuel Paty, whose murder shocked the country.

The teacher had shown his pupils caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad in a class on freedom of expression, angering some Muslim parents. Most Muslims avoid depictions of prophets, considering them to be blasphemous.

Among those on trial was a teenage girl who had allegedly told her parents that Paty had asked Muslim pupils to leave the room before showing the caricatures.

The court found her guilty of having made false accusation charges and slanderous comments, as it was established that she was not in the class at the time.

The other adolescents were found guilty of charges related to taking part in a pre-meditated criminal conspiracy and helping to prepare an ambush.

Paty, 47, was killed outside his school in a Paris suburb by an 18-year-old assailant of Chechen origin, who was shot dead by police soon after the attack.

The court found those adolescents guilty of having pointed out Paty to the murderer.

Louis Cailliez, lawyer for Paty’s sister Mickaelle, told reporters his client was “satisfied with the full conviction,” but less so with the sentences, that she found “too lenient”.

Dylan Slama, a lawyer for one of the teenagers, said that though it was hard to talk about satisfaction in such tragic circumstances, there was a sense of relief for his client.

The heaviest sentence was given to an adolescent who was formally given a 6-month prison sentence, although he should be able to serve this at home while under electronic surveillance.

The girl who was found guilty of making false accusations and slanderous comments was given an 18-month suspended sentence and put on probation measures for two years.

All six teenagers’ suspended sentences are tied to them following a strict set of probation measures for two to three years.

Another trial in connection with Paty’s killing, involving adults this time, is set to take place at the end of next year.

China’s air force is set to officially debut its new stealth fighter jet, the J-35A, giving observers the first look at a highly anticipated asset that adds to the country’s fast growing military capabilities.

The fighter, an image of which was released during an air force press conference Tuesday, will appear at an air show in the southern city of Zhuhai next week, officials said.

The development of the jet is widely seen as part of Beijing’s bid to match the United States’ stealth fighter capabilities – as it pushes to modernize its armed forces and assert its military might in Asia.

The J-35A is “designed mainly for air combat operations and can also conduct air-to-surface attack,” according to a report from a Chinese military-affiliated outlet.

If the aircraft is commissioned into operation, it would make China the second country after the US to have two types of stealth fighter jets, according to experts cited by Chinese state media.

China’s J-20 stealth fighter entered service in 2017, officials said at the time.

Stealth fighters are those that are designed to evade radar and other monitoring to conduct missions without being detected or intercepted.

The J-35 is likely to be designed as a series and may also be used as carrier-based aircraft in the future, Chinese military expert Li Li told state broadcaster CCTV. This would “greatly improve the overall strength of China’s sea and air combat,” she said.

The fighter’s debut follows what analysts at Janes global open-source intelligence firm have described as China’s “bolstering” of its forward theater commands with additional J-20s.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force between July 2023 and this June inducted more than 70 J-20s, bringing the force’s operational fleet up to approximately 195, according to a Janes report published earlier this year.

It’s not clear when the new J-35A fighter would be commissioned into military use and where the fighters would be deployed.

The sparse details released about the fighter so far also make it difficult to compare with other stealth fighters, including the US’ F-22 and F-35.

Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center, said the J-35A, which has been in development for more than 10 years, was likely intended for the PLA Navy.

“The J-35 made its maiden flight in 2021, but as a derivative of an earlier prototype, it may be ready for production by early next year,” Schuster said, adding that the J-35A model likely improved on that earlier design with more powerful engines.

China’s development of stealth fighters has for years been dogged by accusations that it stole crucial stealth fighter technology from the US.

Beijing has vigorously denied those claims, which came to light with the 2015 publication by German magazine Der Spiegel of documents purportedly from US National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

The J-35A is a “new type of stealth fighter jet independently developed by Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC),” a Chinese military affiliated outlet said this week.

China’s J-35A is not the only technology that will be on show for the first time at next week’s airshow, which takes place in Zhuhai from November 12 to 17.

The H-19 surface-to-air missile system and new “reconnaissance and strike” UAVs will also have their public debut, Col. Niu Wenbo of the air force’s equipment department said Tuesday.

CCTV has also reported that Russia’s Su-57 stealth fighter would join the air show for the first time, among equipment from 49 different countries and regions that would be represented this year.

An American-Iranian journalist who once worked for a US-funded broadcaster is believed to have been detained in Iran, according to his former employer and multiple press freedom groups.

Reza Valizadeh was arrested in Tehran in September, a source close to his family told his former employer Radio Farda, the Iranian branch of the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).

Iran has not acknowledged detaining Valizadeh and the Iranian mission to the United Nations has declined to comment on his situation.

RFE/RL says it has had no official confirmation of the charges facing Valizadeh, who left Radio Farda in November 2022, but it is “profoundly concerned about the continued arrest, harassment and threats against media professionals by the Iranian regime.”

Reports of the journalist’s apparent detention come amid heightened tensions between the United States and Iran, whose Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday promised a “teeth-breaking” response to Israel and the United States after Israeli strikes targeted Iranian military sites late last month.

Pressured to return

In a post on his X account on February 20, 2024, Valizadeh suggested Iranian authorities had pressured his family to convince him to return to the country.

In a later post, on August 13, the journalist said he had arrived back in the Iranian capital on March 6, 2024.

“Before that, I had half-finished negotiations with the (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) Intelligence Organization. Finally, I returned to my country after 14 years, on my own responsibility and without a letter of amnesty, even verbally,” the post read.

RFE/RL said it was not clear under what circumstances Valizadeh had written the post.

Citing one of Valizadeh’s former colleagues, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fears of reprisal, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported in October that Valizadeh was being held without access to a lawyer in Iran’s Evin prison, which is notorious for housing critics of the Iranian regime.

The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which focuses on Iran, also believes Valizadeh is being held in Evin.

“Iranian authorities must immediately release journalist Reza Valizadeh and drop any charges levied against him,” said Yeganeh Rezaian, CPJ’s interim Middle East and North Africa program coordinator.

“I cannot say clearly enough to my fellow Americans what already appears on the Department of State’s website: ‘Do not travel to Iran, due to the risk of kidnapping and the arbitrary arrest and detention of US citizens.’ Simply put: Do not go to Iran,” the State Department spokesperson said.

Iran has a long history of using dual nationals as bargaining chips in its troubled relationship with the West. In 2023, it released five Americans designated by the US as wrongfully detained as part of a wider deal that included the US unfreezing $6 billion in Iranian funds.

It is currently marking the 25th anniversary of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, in which 52 US citizens were held captive for 444 days.

Incendiary devices that ignited in Germany and the United Kingdom in July were part of a covert Russian operation that aimed to start fires aboard cargo and passenger flights heading to the US and Canada, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Monday, citing Western security officials.

In July, device explosions at DHL logistics hubs in Leipzig, Germany, and Birmingham, UK, kickstarted a race to find the suspects, WSJ reported.

The devices, which were reportedly electric massagers implanted with a magnesium-based flammable substance, were sent to the UK from Lithuania and “appear to have been a test run to figure out how to get such incendiary devices aboard planes bound for North America,” the WSJ reported.

When the WSJ asked Russia for comment about the suspected Russian plot, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denied the allegations. “We have never heard any official accusations” of Russian involvement, adding: “These are traditional unsubstantiated insinuations from the media.”” He said according to WSJ.

Polish authorities in October said four people had been arrested under suspicion of being involved in international sabotage and a sabotage group, according to a statement from the national prosecutor’s office. An international search has been initiated for two more suspects.

The Polish statement, which does not name the sabotage group, says “parcels containing camouflaged explosives and dangerous materials” were sent via courier to the UK and European Union countries and “spontaneously ignited or detonated during land and air transport.”

It adds that the group’s goal “was [also] to test the transfer channel for this type of shipments which were ultimately to be sent to the United States of America and Canada.”

The spokesperson added that the investigation is ongoing, and they are “liaising with other European law enforcement partners to identify whether this may or may not be connected to any other similar-type incidents across Europe.”

Multiple security officials across Europe describe a threat that is metastasizing as Russian agents, increasingly under scrutiny by security services and frustrated in their own operations, hire local amateurs to undertake high-risk, and often deniable, crimes on their behalf.

The family of imprisoned human rights activist Narges Mohammadi have accused the Iranian regime of trying to bring about her “slow death” by depriving her of a vital surgery needed to confirm her cancer diagnosis.

It comes after her lawyer, Mostafa Nili, said on Sunday that doctors had recently detected a “bone lesion in her right leg suspected of being cancerous.”

For most of the past two decades, Mohammadi has been an inmate of Tehran’s Evin prison, which is notorious for housing critics of the Iranian regime. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 for “her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.”

“The Islamic Republic government is risking Narges Mohammadi’s life, effectively aiming for a ‘silent death’ without bearing direct accountability,” the Narges Foundation, which is run by her family, said.

The family warned that any further delays in procuring treatment for Mohammadi may prove “fatal.” The activist had already had to wait nine weeks for the most recent hospital transfer which detected the potentially cancerous lesion.

Her family and lawyer are now calling for “immediate medical furlough” to both carry out the biopsy and treat a range of other health conditions she is grappling with. According to her lawyer, a recent MRI revealed the progression of arthritis and disc disease while doctors have also called for a further angiography on one of her heart arteries after she suffered a heart attack in 2021.

Years of successive imprisonment and bouts of extended periods of solitary confinement “have severely compromised (Mohammadi’s) health leaving her with conditions that cannot be addressed through a short, incomplete hospital visit,” her family stressed.

High-profile figures such as former US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton have joined the call for Iranian authorities to release Mohammadi.

“By withholding medical care she needs, Iranian prison authorities are slowly killing detained activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi,” Clinton warned in a post on her official social media last Friday.

While in prison, Mohammadi has continued to campaign tirelessly for human rights causes, lobbying strongly for the rights of Iranian women and calling for a peaceful resolution to the war in Gaza.

As Moldova’s pro-EU president Maia Sandu celebrated victory in the early hours of Monday morning, in an election campaign she claimed involved “unprecedented” interference by Moscow, pro-Kremlin voices in Russia turned to the next page in their playbook: casting doubt on the result.

Sandu narrowly won a second presidential term in Sunday’s runoff vote, beating former prosecutor Alexandr Stoianoglu. According to Moldova’s Central election commission, with 100% of votes counted, Sandu had 55% of the total.

Konstantin Kosachev, deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, lamented the “disgraceful organization” of the election in a post on Telegram Monday, claiming the opportunity to vote overseas was “exclusively” provided to those who supported “one candidate” (implying Moldova provided more opportunities to vote to the diaspora in European countries, who typically favor Sandu, than to Moldovan citizens in Russia, who may have favored her opponent, who had promised friendlier ties to Moscow).

Another senior Russian senator, Andrey Klishas, took a similar line, suggesting Moldova had actively falsified the diaspora vote, which proved decisive in Sandu’s victory. “You count the votes, understand how many are lacking from the ‘correct’ candidate, and bring in the necessary number from overseas polling stations,” he wrote on Telegram Monday.

The Kremlin has officially denied accusations by Moldova that it orchestrated and funded a widespread interference campaign ranging from disinformation and cyber attacks to simple vote-buying to try to influence not only the presidential election but a referendum on October 20 on whether to enshrine Moldova’s intention to join the European Union in its constitution. That referendum secured a “yes” vote with a less than 1% margin.

And yet Moscow had a lot to gain from installing a Russia sympathizer in Chisinau and upending Moldova’s path to EU membership.

Russia already has a small military presence in Transnistria, an unrecognized breakaway republic in Moldova that borders Ukraine. Geographically, that region offers a potential staging ground for Russian attacks on Ukraine. But the concern for Moldova is that Russian intentions go beyond Ukraine.

In February, Transnistria appealed to Moscow for “protection” from what they claimed were threats from Moldovan authorities, echoing Russian claims of a similar appeal from Ukraine’s Donbas region, which Moscow used as part of its justification for its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Another region in Moldova’s south, Gagauzia, is also keen to build closer ties with Moscow. Its leader, a regular visitor to Russia, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in March.

In his congratulatory note to Sandu Monday, US President Joe Biden declared “Russia failed” in its attempt to undermine Moldova’s democracy. But both the tight victory for Sandu and Moldova’s electoral calendar in the year ahead offer clear incentives for Moscow to keep up the pressure.

News coverage in Russia is already emphasizing the fact that Sandu narrowly lost the election within Moldova but secured victory due to an unprecedented turnout by Moldova’s large expat population — more than 80% of which voted for her.

In her victory speech, Sandu acknowledged the divisions in the country, promising to be “the president for all of you.”

She now has less than a year to address those divisions before parliamentary elections next summer, which many fear could be another target for Moscow.

Lithuania’s foreign ministry wrote on X Monday, “With parliamentary elections around the corner, (the) EU should do its best to help Moldova investigate all of Russia’s malign interference & bring its perpetrators to justice.”

Recent parliamentary elections in Georgia, where the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party secured victory amid widespread reports of Russian interference, may have also given Moscow a taste of success.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is breathing a sigh of relief at the results of Moldova’s election.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately called to congratulate Sandu, vowing to strengthen the two country’s partnership.

And yet, Moldova looks at Ukraine with growing trepidation. Russia is currently advancing in the east in what Ukraine’s commander-in-chief described as “one of the most powerful Russian offensives since the start of the war.”

Attacks on Odesa and Ukraine’s Danube ports have already brought the war far too close for comfort for Chisinau.

Overnight into Monday, as Moldova counted its final votes, Romanian fighter jets took off less than 40 miles from Moldova’s southern border after Russian drones approached its airspace. If Russia’s gains turn from tactical to strategic, Moldova faces a threat much bigger than election interference.

The photos are happy occasions. A dad with two kids on holiday. Family pets with tails wagging. Teen daughters posing for selfies.

This is a gallery of the missing. DANA Desaparecidos is a social media effort to find those still unaccounted for in the devastating flash floods that swept through eastern Spain. At least 217 people are confirmed dead and the toll may climb higher.

In one miraculous rescue, a woman was found alive on Saturday after being trapped in her car for three days. Hopes are fading for those that remain missing, however.

Though the government has not released the number still missing, social media accounts such as DANA Desaparecidos have received dozens of reports of distressed families searching for their loved ones. Many communities have been cut off from communication for days.

The government hotline to report missing persons from the floods has been completely overwhelmed. Instead, their families and friends have turned to social media to get the word out.

On DANA Desparecidos, each photo has a description of one of those currently unaccounted for and details of their last known location. Others post photos of missing pets, their owners desperate to find animal companions.

One photo shows a woman linking arms with a friend, with a caption that reads: “Her name is Mila. She left yesterday at 1900 from Picanya to get to her home in Silla. She never arrived.”

Alba Lozano Asencio created the account with her boyfriend Luciano Esguerra. So far, about 30 people have been located and a number of pets, according to the DANA Desaparcideo organizers. Posts labeled “Localizado” – or “located” – are published to let users know when someone has been found, often simply cut off from communication. Now they are also getting requests for help with flood clean up.

The slow and uncoordinated response to the crisis has angered and frustrated many here in Valencia.

Spain’s King Felipe and Queen Letizia were berated by angry residents in a visit on Sunday to the hard hit area of Paiporta. Letizia, in particular, seemed shaken by the shouts of “murderers” as mud was flung at the royal couple. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was also there but was quickly whisked away by security.

The Spanish government announced Monday it was deploying 2,500 more troops to the eastern region, in response to the fury from residents. Over the weekend, 5,000 soldiers were sent to distribute food, help with cleanup efforts and protect stores from looting, Reuters reported citing Defence Minister Margarita Robles.

Meanwhile, thousands of volunteers also continue to make their way into affected areas, many of them hiking long distances through mud to help their neighbors.

Pedro de Juan, 18, had only seen scenes like this in the movies but he showed up with a broom and bucket to help.

“Frustrating is the word,” said Francisco Bosque, another volunteer who is hoping to help friends in flooded areas. “You feel completely powerless. All you can do is come here and show up.”

The weather system that triggered the floods is still impacting the area and some volunteer buses were turned back as a precaution.

Spain’s AEMET service issued a red alert for the Barcelona area due to heavy rain through Monday afternoon, but the alert has since passed. Barcelona City Council also issued a flood warning on its website, urging people to take care and avoid areas where flooding may occur.

Airport operator AENA said 70 flights from Barcelona’s El Prat Airport had been canceled or severely delayed, while 18 others had been diverted due to the storm. The weather was also affecting train and metro services accessing the airport, the operator said.

Video on social media showed one of the airport buildings partially submerged due to the heavy downpour, with water streaming through parts of the roof and some passengers wading through ankle-deep water.

AEMET also issued a new yellow and orange alert for the areas of Castellon, Valencia and Alicante, warning that sudden, heavy rains could cause more flooding in already-devastated areas.

A poorly maintained and overcrowded bus veered off the road and plunged into a deep gorge in northern India on Monday, killing at least 36 people and injuring several others, officials said.

The accident occurred in Almora district in the mountainous state of Uttarakhand. The bus was carrying around 60 people, and more than 20 have been injured, said Deepak Rawat, a senior state government official.

Authorities said earlier they believed there were 42 passengers, which was how many people the bus could accommodate.

Teams of rescue and relief workers were deployed to the site and officials feared the death toll may rise further, especially as seven passengers in hospital were in critical condition.

Television footage showed parts of the bus mangled and destroyed as it lay overturned on a rocky slope, close to a stream. Rescuers were seen working to pull out passengers and carrying bodies on stretchers.

The state’s chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami earlier said rescue teams were working to quickly evacuate the injured passengers to nearby hospitals and that authorities have been instructed to airlift those seriously hurt.

The state government has opened an investigation into the accident, said Vineet Pal, another official in the state. He added that preliminary information suggested that the dilapidated bus skidded before tumbling down a 60 meter- (200-foot-) -deep gorge.

A number of passengers managed to escape or were thrown out by the impact, and then alerted authorities about the accident. Two transport officials have been suspended for approving a bus that was in poor condition, Pal said.

India has some of the highest road death rates in the world, with hundreds of thousands of people killed and injured annually. Most crashes are blamed on reckless driving, poorly maintained roads and aging vehicles.

In July, at least 18 people died after a double-decker passenger bus collided with a milk truck in Uttar Pradesh state. In May, a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims skidded and rolled into a deep gorge on a mountainous highway in Indian-controlled Kashmir, killing at least 21 people.

Israeli police have arrested a top aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over allegedly leaking classified information to foreign media.

Opposition leaders say the intelligence was “faked,” and part of a ruse to thwart a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza.

The investigation centers on allegations that the prime minister’s office promoted to foreign media the claim that Hamas was planning on smuggling hostages out of Gaza over the Egyptian border and creating divisions in Israeli society to pressure Netanyahu into a hostage release and ceasefire deal.

Eliezer Feldstein, who has been named by opposition politicians as an aide to Netanyahu, is among several people being interrogated over the leak of “classified and sensitive intelligence information,” according to court documents. A court order made public on Sunday said that information taken from the Israeli military’s systems and “illegally issued” may have damaged Israel’s ability to free hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

A spokesperson for Netanyahu denied that there have been leaks from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), and that the “person in question never participated in security-related discussions,” apparently referring to Feldstein.

The PMO also downplayed the possibility that the leak impacted negotiations with Hamas over the release of hostages from Gaza, calling the claim “ridiculous.”

Opposition leader Yair Lapid on Sunday accused the prime minister’s office of leaking “faked secret documents to torpedo the possibility of a hostage deal – to shape a public opinion influence operation against the hostages’ families.”

Families of hostages held in Gaza have accused Netanyahu of repeatedly thwarting an agreement with Hamas, believing that an end to the Gaza war would force the prime minister to hold elections. Netanyahu is alleged to have, in the past, torpedoed agreements with 11th hour demands – something he denies.

The alleged leaks were the basis of two articles published in September, one in the Jewish Chronicle, in the United Kingdom, and another in Germany’s Bild, both citing Israeli intelligence sources and supporting a narrative being pushed by Netanyahu at the time.

The articles were published as ceasefire and hostage release negotiations were ongoing, but also as thousands of Israelis demonstrated almost daily calling on the government to strike a deal with Hamas and bring Israeli hostages home.

Those demonstrations intensified after the Israeli military announced on September 1 that six Israelis were killed in Gaza – four of them were due to be released in a first wave of the potential deal.

The next day, Netanyahu held a news conference and presented an alleged Hamas document he said was found in a tunnel in Gaza. The document, he said, showed that Hamas was trying to divide Israelis. “I am not going to surrender to this pressure,” Netanyahu said, and reiterated his demand that Israel control the Gaza-Egypt border, also known as the Philadelphi corridor. Doing so would “prevent the smuggling of our hostages to Sinai,” he said. “They can pop up in Iran or Yemen.”

Just days later, Jewish Chronicle published an article claiming that intelligence sources said “Sinwar’s plan was to smuggle himself and the remaining Hamas leaders along with Israeli hostages through the Philadelphi corridor to Sinai and from there to Iran.”

The article said that the information was gleaned “during the interrogation of a captured senior Hamas official, as well as by information obtained from documents seized on Thursday, August 29, the day the six bodies of the murdered hostages were retrieved.” It has since been deleted, but an archived version is still available.

The prime minister’s son, Yair Netanyahu, promoted the article on his social media.

During a news conference on September 10, the Israeli military’s spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, told a reporter: “I don’t know the kind of information you mentioned regarding Sinwar and the hostages in Philadelphi.”

During that same period, an article in the German newspaper Bild said a Hamas document it alluded was written by Yahya Sinwar allegedly showed how the group was drawing out the war and was trying to create divisions within Israel and build pressure on the families of the hostages’ families so they in turn could pressure the government. Bild cited an intelligence document and echoed the claims Netanyahu had made in his September 2 news conference.

In a statement on September 8, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the document cited by Bild was not written by Sinwar and that it was an old document found five months ago and “written as a recommendation by middle ranks in Hamas and not by Sinwar.”

The information did not “constitute new information,” the IDF said, adding that it was “presented to the decision makers several times, even before the document in question was located.” The statement added it is investigating the leak of the document, which “constitutes a serious offence.”

Following the court’s lifting of a gag order on Sunday, families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza pointed their fingers at the prime minister’s office, saying “suspicions indicate that people associated with the prime minister acted to carry out one of the biggest deceptions in the history of the country.”

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz – who quit Netanyahu’s wartime cabinet earlier this year – have seized on the alleged leaks as a failure at the very top of government, with Gantz calling it a “national crime.”

Both have blamed Netanyahu’s office for the leak, with Gantz accusing Netanyahu of leveraging the leaks for political gains. Lapid also questioned whether the leak might have been intentional as hostage negotiations with Hamas foundered earlier in the year, according to a joint statement by the two opposition leaders on Sunday.

“It is suspected that Netanyahu’s team published secret documents and faked secret documents to torpedo the possibility of a hostage deal,” Lapid said in a statement. “This affair came out of the Prime Minister’s own office, and the investigation must examine if it wasn’t at the Prime Minister’s orders.”

Dana Karni and Mike Schwartz contributed to this report.

In late August, a container vessel sailed out of Angola’s Port of Lobito carrying railway operator Lobito Atlantic Railway’s first shipment of copper from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to the US.

It was a milestone moment for the Lobito Corridor, an initiative backed by a US and Europe that aims to create an efficient transport link from Africa’s mineral-rich interior to the port on its west coast for export, by rejuvenating and expanding old railways.

It took the copper six days to travel from the city of Kolwezi in the DRC – home to some of the world’s largest copper and cobalt reserves – across more than 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) of rail lines to the Port of Lobito.

That’s about 30 days faster than a road journey, according to Francisco Franca, the CEO of Lobito Atlantic Railway (LAR), a consortium of firms that took over operations of the railway in January. Franca says LAR is investing $250 million to improve the rail lines and telecommunications infrastructure in Angola, and add 1,500 wagons to its fleet.

Momentum behind the corridor connecting Africa’s so-called Copperbelt to the Atlantic Ocean comes as Beijing and Washington jostle for supremacy in green technology, driving demand for critical minerals like copper, lithium and cobalt.

US financing

In recent decades, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has bankrolled railways, highways, communications infrastructure, ports and mines across the developing world. That includes loans to refurbish the 100-year-old Benguela Railway in Angola which was badly damaged during a 27-year civil war that ended in 2002.

China has also invested heavily in the DRC, and its access to minerals in Africa has given it a lead in industries like electric vehicle battery production, according to analysts.

That hasn’t gone unnoticed in Washington. In 2022, the US and its G7 allies formally launched the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI), which is aiming to mobilize $600 billion in global infrastructure funding by 2027, to act as an alternative to the BRI.

The US is providing hundreds of millions of dollars of financing for the Lobito Corridor, a flagship of the PGI, which is built on the bones of the Benguela Railway.

“This first-of-its kind project is the biggest US rail investment in Africa ever,” US President Joe Biden said during a late 2023 visit by Angola’s president to Washington. “A partnership between Angola and America is more important and more impactful than ever,” he added.

Today, most of the minerals leaving the Port of Lobito go to Asia, said David Reekmans, the managing director of AGL Lobito Terminal, which in March took over the port’s operations. AGL is investing more than $100 million to improve the port, which Reekmans hopes will lead to increased volumes flowing through it – and it may also act as a conduit for new trade flows.

In the future, Reekmans expects a “diversion of minerals that are now going to Asia” to the US and Europe.

Feasibility studies are under way for a second, more ambitious phase of the project, which will expand the railway 800 kilometers (500 miles) to Zambia. And the US hopes to one day extend the line to the Indian Ocean through Tanzania, connecting the east and west of the continent, although these plans could change under a Trump administration.

In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted delegations from dozens of African countries at a summit seeking to strengthen ties amid pressure from the west. On the sidelines of the event, Beijing signed an agreement to redevelop a railway between Zambia and a Tanzanian port.

“Economic development along the corridor”

About 30% of Angola’s 37 million people live below the poverty line, and youth unemployment is widespread. Across the border in Zambia and the DRC, the proportion of the population living in poverty is closer to 60%.

Critics say that the corridor’s focus on extracting and exporting raw materials will bring limited financial benefit to these countries. They argue that more focus should be put on developing local value-added processing.

But project proponents say that the corridor will create thousands of jobs and catalyze the growth of myriad sectors.

“Lobito Corridor is not just a railway line, but is the economic development along the corridor,” said Franca, the CEO of LAR.

For companies like his, the benefits of the Lobito Corridor are clear. “It’s very important in terms … of efficiency, of costs,” said Catarro.

“If we don’t have this logistic infrastructure installed in a country, it’s impossible to grow in the future,” he added.