Known a generation ago as an ecological jewel of green oases, today the town is a toxic wasteland rife with cancer, respiratory illness and bone disease

International News via Reuters:

Beneath a smog-choked sky, the once-glistening waters of Gabes in southern Tunisia run dark with rust-coloured streaks. Trees are dying, fish vanishing and a suffocating stench infuses the air. 

Known a generation ago as an ecological jewel of green oases, today the town is a toxic wasteland rife with cancer, respiratory illness and bone disease. 

The culprit – residents, environmentalists and officials say – is a phosphates processing plant run by the state-owned Tunisian Chemical Group, or CGT, whose smokestacks loom over rubbish-strewn beaches. 

This month, anger at the plant exploded into one of President Kais Saied’s biggest challenges since he took power in 2019. Police fired tear gas to disperse protesters who stormed the complex, and thousands returned to the streets last Wednesday.

Unlike other recent protests, those in Gabes are not demanding civic freedoms but rather an end to conditions they find unbearable. 

“The plant has poisoned everything – the trees, the sea, the people,” Safouan Kbibieh, a local environmental activist, told Reuters during a recent visit. “Even Gabes’ pomegranates now taste like smoke.” 

Saied has described conditions in Gabes as an “environmental assassination,” but blamed a previous government and called on ministries to fix chemical leaks. 

CGT did not respond to questions sent by Reuters. Tunisia’s health ministry could not immediately comment. 

‘LET US BREATHE’

Built a half-century ago, the Gabes complex is Tunisia’s biggest phosphates processing plant and accounts for over half of its output. The industry provides vital revenues for a government beset by soaring debt and weak growth. 

But residents describe a heavy cost. In the towns of Ghannouch and Chott Essalem on the plant’s outskirts, it is hard to find families whose lives are not shaped by sickness and loss. 

Rimel El-Haji, 45, described how her nine-year-old daughter started gasping and walking slower about a month ago, along with dozens of other students apparently affected by toxic emissions. 

Today the girl relies on her mother to help with even simple movements – the result of neurological damage, Haji said, caused by suffocation.      

“She can’t walk more than two steps,” Haji said. “She’s fading, like a flower under the burning sun.”     

About two kilometers away, Amina Mansour, 53, lives in a modest brick house caked with dust and chemical residue. Inside, her shelves are packed with medicines to treat osteoporosis and the throat cancer she discovered six years ago. 

“The doctors told me I need to leave this town to survive,” she says. “But where would we go? This is our home.”

She counted six relatives in her family diagnosed with cancer: “This pollution is slowly killing us,” she said.

Next door, her neighbour Maha Mahmoud clutches an inhaler she calls her “daily bread.”  

“We no longer ask for food or jobs. We want one thing: dismantle the chemical units. Let us breathe,” she said. 

Residents also blame the plant for a collapse of fishing stocks. One fisherman, Sassi Alaya, told Reuters his daily catch used to earn him up to 700 Tunisian dinars ($240) – but he is now lucky to make 20. After more than a quarter-century at sea, he’s turned to farming to feed his five children. 

“The sea was everything — our income and dignity,” he said. “Now, it’s a nightmare.” 

‘LIKE A WAR ZONE’ 

A July 2025 expert audit of the plant commissioned by CGT found “serious non-conformities relative to national standards and international requirements,” according to a copy seen by Reuters. 

The complex had dumped 14,000-15,000 tons of phosphogypsum — a byproduct of processing phosphates — into the sea and along the coast a day, along with high emissions of ammonia, nitrogen oxides and sulfates, the audit said. The discharges had “greatly damaged marine seagrass beds and led to desertification of large marine areas”. 

Phosphogypsum contains radium, which decays to form radon gas, the website of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says, noting that radium and radon are radioactive and can cause cancer. In the United States, the EPA requires that phosphogypsum be managed in engineered piles or stacks to limit public exposure from radon emissions.A lack of studies makes it hard to definitively link the pollution in Gabes to the diseases suffered by residents. But Kraiem Taoufik, a local doctor, confirmed he’d seen illnesses spike as conditions worsened. 

“The city feels like a war zone,” he said. “Where we once saw a few cancer cases quarterly, now they appear daily. Residents live atop a chemical time bomb.”

Caught between the unrest and flagging state finances, authorities have vowed to rehabilitate the plant. But the plans have done little to soothe activists and residents who say they are at breaking point. 

“For every ton of phosphate processed, a soul is lost,” Kbibieh, the environmental activist, said. “But we won’t abandon our land. We’ll keep fighting until Gabes can breathe again.”

Reporting by Tarek Amara, Editing by Alexander Dziadosz and William Maclean

The shortfall is largely driven by a pullback from foreign aid led by the United States and other wealthy donor governments

International News via Reuters:

Eradicating polio is still possible despite significant funding cuts to the effort, global health officials said on Tuesday as they outlined how they will cope with the shortfall.

The budget of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a partnership including the World Health Organization and the Gates Foundation, will take a 30% cut in 2026 and has a $1.7 billion funding gap up to 2029, the organisation says.

The shortfall is largely driven by a pullback from foreign aid led by the United States and other wealthy donor governments.

In response, the GPEI partners say they plan to focus more on surveillance and vaccination in areas where there is a high risk of polio transmission.

The GPEI will also collaborate more with other global health programmes like measles campaigns, and use strategies like fractional dosing – where as little as a fifth of a vaccine dose is used to stretch out supplies and cut costs, as studies have shown this still protects children from infection.

SOME ACTIVITIES WILL STOP

The partnership will reduce its work in lower-risk areas, unless there are outbreaks, as well as focusing on efficiencies.

“The significant reductions in funding… mean that certain activities will simply not happen,” said Jamal Ahmed, WHO director of polio eradication in a press conference on Tuesday.

Wiping out the paralysis-causing viral disease has been a global health aim for decades. Despite significant progress due to mass vaccination since 1988, ending the disease has proved challenging: the first missed deadline for doing so was in 2000.

Some infectious disease experts have questioned whether it is possible to eradicate the disease, which often causes no symptoms, making it harder to track the spread. Advocates say that it would be foolhardy to stop when the world is so close, despite challenges like conflict and vaccine hesitancy.

“Eradication remains feasible and is doable,” said Ahmed. “We need everybody to remain committed and ensure that no child is left behind.”

In 2025, there have been 36 cases of wild polio in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the two countries where it remains endemic and where essential activities will continue, the GPEI said.

There have been 149 cases of the vaccine-derived form of the virus this year in countries including Nigeria. Cases of both forms have fallen since 2024.

Vaccine-derived polio can occur when children are immunised with a vaccine containing a weakened version of the live virus. They are protected, but the virus excreted by these children can spread and mutate among an unvaccinated population.

Reporting by Jennifer RigbyEditing by Ros Russell

The second line at the port city of Tianjin near Beijing will increase Airbus’ manufacturing capability for best-selling A320neo-family single-aisle jets

International News via Reuters:

Airbus is poised to open a second assembly line in China with limited fanfare this week, days after securing an extra foothold in the United States as it walks a tightrope between divided trade powers, industry sources said.

The second line at the port city of Tianjin near Beijing will increase Airbus’ manufacturing capability for best-selling A320neo-family single-aisle jets, mirroring the addition of a second line in Mobile, Alabama, just over a week ago.

Unlike the inauguration of its first non-European assembly line, at a high-profile ceremony involving 600 guests in Tianjin more than 15 years ago, this week’s expansion will be a relatively low-key affair with no Western media allowed.

Airbus declined to comment.

Industry sources said earlier this month that the two back-to-back ceremonies in Mobile and then Tianjin were being designed to avoid falling foul of a tricky trade climate between China and the United States.

Since Airbus first announced the overseas expansion plans in 2022 and 2023, Washington and Beijing have plunged into a months-long trade war, leaving Airbus and some other European companies anxious to avoid offending either trade power.

Airbus relies on U.S. parts to assemble jets in China and Europe and also depends on smooth ties with the United States, where several of its major airline customers are based.

At the same time, Airbus has been negotiating to sell up to 500 planes to China, a goal first reported by Reuters in April. Sources have said it is likely to secure only part of the order to coincide with the new Tianjin factory expansion.

Boeing has been negotiating a similar 500-plane deal but this remains mired in the back-and-forth discussions over trade, industry sources said, confirming a Bloomberg report.

Airbus is increasing capacity to support higher production of its A320neo family to 75 jets a month in 2027. Doubling capacity at Mobile and Tianjin is part of the industrial plans.

Writing by Tim Hepher; Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Alexander Smith