World Bank approves over $1 billion for projects in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq
The biggest amount went to Iraq, where the World Bank approved $930 million to help improve the country's railway infrastructure, boost domestic trade, create jobs and diversify the economy.
The World Bank said the Iraq Railways Extension and Modernization Project will improve services and increase freight capacity between the Umm Qasr Port on the Persian gulf in southern Iraq to the northern city of Mosul.
'As Iraq shifts from reconstruction to development, enhanced trade and connectivity can stimulate growth, create jobs, and reduce oil dependency,' said Jean-Christophe Carret, director of the World Bank's Middle East division.
The World Bank also approved for war-torn Syria a $146 million grant to help restore reliable, affordable electricity and support the country's economic recovery. It said the Syria Electricity Emergency Project will rehabilitate damaged transmission lines and transformer substations.
Last month Syria signed an agreement with a consortium of Qatari, Turkish and U.S. companies for the development of a 5,000-megawatt energy project to revitalize much of its war-battered electricity grid.
For Lebanon, which is recovering from the 14-month Israel-Hezbollah war, the World Bank approved $250 million to support the most urgent repair and reconstruction of damaged critical public infrastructure and lifeline services.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
How Data Flywheels Reinvent SecOps For Renewable Energy
Founder and CEO/CTO of EcoSec Works, overseeing new Agentic AI SecOps technology for EV charging infrastructure and renewable energy. Traditionally, SecOps stands for security operations, the combination of IT security and operations teams working together to monitor, detect, respond to and mitigate cybersecurity threats in real time. Modern SecOps is evolving into AI-driven SecOps, where machine learning and agentic AI help detect complex threats faster, automate tier-1 tasks, reduce response time and enhance predictive analytics. This is especially important for complex renewable energy environments like EV charging networks, where infrastructure is distributed and always online. SecOps vendors and startups should not treat cybersecurity like a zero-sum game. Instead, they should design their software platforms around the flywheel effect. In this compounding system, each secured endpoint, every autonomous response and every data insight creates momentum that drives resiliency, availability and sustainability at scale. With the data flywheel strategy, the goal is not just to protect but to improve performance while reducing costs continuously. This is where the flywheel strategy can be used, which has been inspired by industry leaders. Jensen Huang, founder, president and CEO of Nvidia, is one of the most vocal advocates for flywheel thinking in AI. Since co-founding Nvidia in 1993, Huang and his company have emphasized the data flywheel as a strategic model: a self-reinforcing loop where investments in data, AI and accelerated computing lead to continuous learning, exponential performance gains and sustainable competitive advantages. Here's how Huang's vision mirrors an approach for SecOps in renewable energy ecosystems: • Sustainable Competitive Advantage: Just as Nvidia uses proprietary chip design data to train better AI models, agentic AI applications learn from field telemetry and threat interactions, becoming smarter and more predictive with every deployment. • Improved Performance And Efficiency: Both Nvidia's AI and agentic AI teaming of agents automate tasks—from anomaly detection to real-time remediation—reducing human workload and lowering costs like truck rolls and manual triage. • Continuous Learning And Improvement: In agentic AI, SecOps agents don't just act—they learn from incidents. Like Huang's AI stack, they evolve with every interaction, improving response times and reducing false positives over time. • Accelerating The Entire System: Echoing Huang's view (aligned with Amdahl's Law) that the entire AI stack must accelerate—from data ingestion to decision-making—these new approaches automate every layer: monitoring, detection, response, recovery and reporting. A renewable energy operator doesn't have just one flywheel—they have many. Anywhere AI or agentic AI is applied, a data flywheel can be created. For example: • EV Charger Operations: Each charging event, downtime incident or load fluctuation adds insight, making AI models more predictive, reducing failures and improving uptime. • Supply Chain Optimization: Machine learning models analyzing parts inventory, sourcing delays and logistics timelines improve with every transaction and supplier event. • Power Grid Relationships: Real-time grid interaction data can train AI agents to forecast demand, respond to grid signals and balance load with renewable inputs more efficiently. • Customer Support And Field Service: AI assistants learn from every support case, automating resolution, detecting systemic issues and improving service delivery. Each of these areas represents a unique data flywheel, and when connected, they drive system-wide acceleration and resiliency. The idea of using data flywheel strategies across an operations domain, supply chain, partnerships and support will become a robust framework for AI systems to become more autonomous and self-learn at the pace at which new proprietary data is obtained and processed. I believe we will see SecOps applications put data flywheels in practice, especially around renewable energy ecosystems such as EV charging super hubs with microgrids, battery energy storage systems (BESS), solar and other energy devices. Autonomous agents will continuously monitor and protect EV charging infrastructure, reducing dwell time and exposure. By integrating agentic AI with human SecOps, there can be an increase in charger uptime, even under attack or stress. In the area of lowering costs, automation can reduce truck rolls, staffing overhead and downtime. Agents operate 24/7, scaling instantly without added headcount. Agentic AI can deliver intelligent specialized agents that can see more environments, threats and edge cases; they can grow more effective, reinforcing the system's strength and autonomy. The implementation of a SecOps flywheel strategy can support climate-conscious, low-intervention renewable energy infrastructure, ideal for microgrids, BESS and EV charging networks that demand uptime and energy efficiency. As the market expands for agentic AI in SecOps to energy systems in buildings, data centers and manufacturing, IT and security professionals should learn how data flywheels and agentic AI can come together to bring in a new age of intelligence for cybersecurity and operations. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Trafigura-led consortium aims to finalise US loan deal by end-2025
By Nelson Banya (Reuters) -Lobito Atlantic Railway (LAR) aims to finalise by the end of this year a $533 million loan deal with the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) that is vital for the upgrade of its Angolan concession, LAR's CEO told Reuters. The U.S. development lender pledged the loan in 2024 to support the revamp of 1,300 kilometres (800 miles) of railways and provide a quick route to haul minerals that are critical to the global shift to cleaner energy. Angola in 2022 handed LAR, a consortium of Trafigura, Mota-Engil and Vecturis SA, a 30-year concession to operate the rail link and provide a quick route for copper and cobalt exports from the Democratic Republic of Congo through the Lobito port on the Atlantic coast. The company's newly appointed CEO Nicholas Fournier said the U.S funding was close to being concluded, despite concerns triggered by President Donald Trump's reversal of Biden-era climate and energy policies. "There will be no change. I know lots of people try to put this as a geopolitical thing, but it's really a commercial transaction we are doing," Fournier told Reuters in an interview. "There is an army of lawyers on both sides discussing the last comma and everything, so it's going in the direction. We're hoping to have this completed before the end of the year," he added. Fournier said LAR expected volumes on the Lobito line to double following ongoing upgrade work funded by the consortium partners, which have committed $555 million in investment. "We want in 2026 to double, doing 40,000 tons a month, one way and 40,000 tons the other way. And then continuing to be able to do 1.5 million tons a year during this decade," he said. LAR's cargo trains move mainly copper and cobalt to the Lobito port for export markets. They also haul sulphur mostly to DRC mines as well as agricultural commodities and industrial products from the port.
Bloomberg
4 hours ago
- Bloomberg
Iraq Orders Floating Power Plants to Ease Electricity Crisis
Iraq ordered two floating power plants from Turkey's Karpowership to help alleviate a growing electricity crisis. Karpowership unit BKPS signed a contract with Iraq's Ministry of Electricity to supply as much as 590 megawatts of power from two vessels to be moored in the southern port of Basra, according to an emailed statement from the Turkish company.
