A mineral railway to the Atlantic locks in its money, the clams that outlasted a mass extinction, and Japan's open-phone law meets its fees

In early July, the sponsors of the Lobito Corridor Railway reached what financiers call financial close, the point at which committed money is legally locked in and construction financing can be drawn. The package totals 753 million US dollars. Most of it, 553 million, is a 15-year senior secured loan from the US International Development Finance Corporation, with a further 200 million from the Development Bank of Southern Africa. The loan documents were signed in December 2025, and the Africa Finance Corporation and the advisory firm Eaglestone structured the financing across several jurisdictions.[1][2]

The line itself is not new. It is a 1,300-kilometre rehabilitation of an existing corridor running from the Atlantic port of Lobito to Luau, on Angola's border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. A joint venture between the commodities trader Trafigura and the Portuguese construction group Mota-Engil, operating as Lobito Atlantic Railway, holds a 30-year concession and began running trains in January 2024. On the Congolese side, a further 450 kilometres to the mining city of Kolwezi runs under a track-access arrangement with the state railway, SNCC.[3][2][4]

The point of the route is geography. Congo is the world's largest producer of cobalt and a major copper source, and Zambia sits on much of the rest of the region's copperbelt. Those metals have traditionally travelled to Durban in South Africa or Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, a journey of three weeks or more that congestion can stretch toward 45 days. From Kolwezi, the westbound run to Lobito can take as little as six. The operators put the target cut in transport costs for critical minerals at around 30 percent.[5][4][6]

Whether the corridor delivers depends on volume, and here the line starts from a low base. It carried a little over 200,000 tonnes in 2025, running about a dozen trains a week. The operators want to reach 20 trains a week by 2027 and an annual capacity near 4.6 million tonnes, more than twenty times what it moved in 2025, backed by 1,555 wagons and 35 locomotives on the Angolan section. A nearer-term goal is to move more than a million tonnes within five years.[4][2][6]

The Angolan financing is one piece of a larger and slower project. The full ambition is a 2,600-kilometre network, including a greenfield extension into Zambia targeted for 2029, at an estimated cost of 6 to 8 billion dollars. The corridor rests on a 2023 memorandum of understanding that binds an unusually mixed group of backers, including the European Union, the United States, Italy, the African Development Bank, the Africa Finance Corporation and the three host governments. Congo added its own piece in mid-July, when it approved a rehabilitation deal with Mota-Engil for the line serving the mining hubs around Kolwezi, Tenke and Lubumbashi. President Félix Tshisekedi has estimated some 30,000 direct and indirect jobs for Congo alone, against roughly 7,500 reported created so far across the three countries.[6][5][7]

The corridor is widely framed as a Western answer to a decade of Chinese investment in African mining and rail, a reading the mix of US and European money invites. That framing sits uneasily with the numbers. Even at its 2027 target the line would be running well below designed capacity, and the largest and most expensive segment, the new Zambian line, remains years and billions of dollars from completion. What financial close settled is narrow but real, that the first rehabilitated leg now has committed money behind it. The rest is still a promise on a map.[6][4]

The event in question is the end-Permian extinction, the die-off sometimes called the Great Dying, which struck roughly 252 million years ago. It remains the most severe biological crisis in the fossil record, erasing something like 96 percent of marine species and about 70 percent of land animals. The trigger is widely accepted, enormous volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia that loaded the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane, warming the oceans by an estimated 8 to 12 degrees Celsius over thousands of years.[2][5]

What has long been contested is why the losses fell so unevenly. Paleontologists have grouped marine life into a slow-turnover Paleozoic fauna of brachiopods and sea lilies and a modern fauna of mollusks, fish, and other echinoderms that came to dominate afterward. The new work quantifies the split. At the level of taxonomic families, the Paleozoic group lost about 79 percent of its diversity, while the modern group lost roughly 27 percent. The animals that walked away with the seafloor were not obviously tougher in any general sense. They were, the authors argue, better at one specific thing.[1][7]

The method is what sets the study apart from earlier accounts that inferred cause from the rock record alone. The Stanford-led team measured oxygen consumption in 14 living species of brachiopods, crinoids, clams, and snails, sealing them in chambers and varying the water temperature to see how their metabolic demand responded. Some animals were collected from around San Juan Island, Washington. Those measurements were combined with published physiology for 24 further species and with more than 21,000 physiological estimates drawn from the Ocean Biodiversity Information System, then matched against two large sets of fossil distribution records.[2][7]

The mechanism the data point to is a squeeze from two directions at once. Warmer water holds less dissolved oxygen, and at the same time warmth speeds up an animal's metabolism, raising the amount of oxygen it needs. Brachiopods and their kin, with relatively simple circulation and limited musculature, could tolerate low-oxygen water but had little capacity to pull more when heat pushed their demand up. Clams and snails carried stronger gills, better circulation, and muscular tissue that let them keep pace. "Our findings show that, across different organism groups, extinctions happened at much higher rates for those more vulnerable to increases in water temperature and decreases in oxygen availability," said the lead author, Jose Andres Marquez.[2][4]

The team frames the result as strong support for a physiological reading of the crisis rather than a wholly new cause, and some of the reasoning leans on living relatives standing in for animals dead a quarter-billion years. Still, the modern echo is hard to miss. The end-Permian warming unfolded over thousands of years, whereas current projections put warming of 1.5 to 4 degrees Celsius inside a century or two, a far faster push against the same oxygen physiology. As for the shells on the beach, the senior author, Erik Sperling, put the outcome plainly: "This is why we eat clam chowder and we don't eat brachiopod chowder. Brachiopods have almost no meat."[6][3]

The Act on Promotion of Competition for Specified Smartphone Software, known in Japan as the Smartphone Act, is an ex ante rule, meaning it sets conduct obligations in advance rather than punishing abuses after the fact. It designates four kinds of software as regulated, being mobile operating systems, app stores, browsers and search engines. Designated firms may not block rival app stores, force developers onto their own billing systems, stop apps from telling users about cheaper options offered on the open web, or preference their own services in search results without justification.[1] It is the first advance regulation of platform market power to reach the statute books anywhere in Asia, after parallel efforts stalled in India and South Korea.[2]

The mechanism has a narrow reach by design. In March 2025 the Japan Fair Trade Commission named just three entities as regulated providers, Apple Inc., its Japanese subsidiary iTunes K.K., and Google LLC.[2] The obligations took full effect on 18 December 2025, and both companies announced changes the same week.[8] Google began showing choice screens for browsers and search engines, opened its alternative billing program to all apps selling digital goods, and added a route for developers to complete a purchase on their own website.[3] Apple allowed third-party app marketplaces on iPhones in Japan for the first time and let developers process payments outside its own system. The stakes are not marginal, since exclusive distribution arrangements covered roughly 80 percent of Android phones sold in Japan as of late 2023.[4]

What the companies did next is the substance of the current dispute. Rather than drop their commissions, both kept charging them even when a developer never touches the platform's own payment system. Apple still takes a commission on those purchases, about 21 percent from a standard developer and about 10 percent from members of its small-business program, having removed only the roughly five percent that had covered payment processing.[9] Google left its headline commissions of 30 and 15 percent in place and still applies a service fee to sales made through outside billing, reduced only by the payment-processing portion rather than waived.[3][5] Critics call the result a de-facto nullification, arguing that a commission far larger than the low single-digit percentage it typically costs to process a card payment cancels the point of letting developers process it elsewhere.[5]

The obligation was to open the channel; the argument now is over the toll set on it.

The regulator anticipated this. Its July 2025 guidelines told designated firms to engage actively with third parties and to demonstrate fairness with evidence rather than lean on formal compliance, and the commission has said it will keep examining whether the fees are reasonable.[7] A first round of compliance reports from Apple and Google was published in February 2026.[5] The 21 July submission landed as the commission prepared to disclose a second round, with the eleven professors urging it to strengthen oversight and improve trading conditions for Japanese businesses.[6]

What gives the pressure teeth is the penalty. A violation can draw a surcharge of up to 20 percent of the relevant turnover, double the ceiling under Japan's general Antimonopoly Act.[1][5] That makes Japan a live test of a question regulators elsewhere are circling, whether a mandate to open a platform can be neutralized by the price set on the door, and whether an antitrust authority is willing to rule on the reasonableness of a fee rather than merely on access. The commission has not yet said where it will draw that line.[6]