Johannesburg is losing more than a third of its water supply, an estimated 655 million litres a day, to burst pipes, leaving residents across the city grappling with dry taps as South Africa heads toward local elections expected by November. The crisis has become a flashpoint for public frustration with municipal failures, eroding support for the ruling African National Congress.

In Hillbrow, 17-year-old student Thandani Masangu described the toll of the shortage after spending three hours pushing empty containers on a trolley through the neighbourhood in search of water. His apartment block has gone without running water for more than three years. He and his friend Raymond Maleka recently found a municipal tanker refilling a nearby tank, only to be told by a security guard that the supply was reserved for residents of the adjacent building.

Johannesburg Water, the municipally owned utility responsible for the system, acknowledges the scale of the problem. Senior manager for innovation and technology Zakhele Khuzwayo said much of the city’s infrastructure is more than 50 years old, and while officials know the improvements needed, implementation remains a work in progress.

Experts say the issue has been worsened by years of underinvestment in maintenance. Craig Sheridan, director of the Centre in Water Research and Development at the University of the Witwatersrand, who compiled the data on the city’s pipe losses, noted that maintenance spending is often deprioritised in favour of more visible projects, a pattern he said extends across the city’s public infrastructure. Climate change is compounding the problem, with analysts pointing to rising water loss through evaporation.

Underlying the infrastructure woes is a deepening budget crisis at the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, which accounts for more than a sixth of South Africa’s GDP. In July, the National Treasury withheld funding from the city after repeated failures to meet financial management standards, declaring its latest 97.1 billion rand ($6 billion) budget unfunded due to spending, including wage increases, that outpaces realistic revenue. A spokesperson for Johannesburg Mayor Dada Morero did not respond to a request for comment, though Morero was reported last month attributing unpaid debts to payment system glitches.

The ANC has felt the political cost of service delivery failures before. In the 2021 local elections, public frustration pushed the party’s share of the vote below 50 percent for the first time since apartheid ended, a decline that foreshadowed its loss of a national majority less than three years later. Maleka, who will be eligible to vote this year, said he will not be backing the ANC, a sentiment shared by 53-year-old Lindiwe Ndlovu, a former party member whose Hillbrow flat relies on tanker deliveries. Ndlovu and several neighbours said they were cut off from the water supply in 2019 over a billing dispute involving a broken meter that was never repaired, despite a court order in May directing the utility to restore their service, which has yet to happen.

Meanwhile, wealthier residents in the suburbs are increasingly bypassing the municipal system altogether, drilling boreholes alongside the solar panels and private waste collection contracts many already use to work around power and service failures. Albertus Lombaard of the Borehole Water Association estimates that Gauteng province, home to both Johannesburg and Pretoria, has seen roughly 10,000 boreholes drilled over the past decade. Litigation lawyer Thea Kilian said she spent 100,000 rand installing a borehole, tanks and filters after a particularly disruptive shutdown, a setup that now keeps her pool filled and garden green. While she said she feels for those still struggling with the shortages, she admitted the crisis “doesn’t bother me at all anymore.”

Libyan emergency crews are battling a massive fire at the Zawiya refinery west of Tripoli after the facility was struck in what officials believe was a drone attack on Monday evening, the third such incident to hit the area in two days.

The National Oil Corporation (NOC) said the strike directly hit a storage tank holding approximately 4.5 million litres of fuel, sparking a blaze intense enough to cause the tank’s collapse. The corporation warned it may suspend operations at the refinery entirely if attacks in the area continue. Libya’s Ambulance and Emergency Service reported no serious injuries from the fire on Tuesday, noting that most people treated were suffering from smoke inhalation.

Zawiya is Libya’s largest operating refinery, producing 120,000 barrels of oil per day. The NOC also condemned two earlier drone strikes in the same area in recent days, which targeted a naphtha storage reservoir and a water desalination plant, and called on authorities to launch an investigation into those responsible.

The string of attacks underscores the fragile security situation in Libya, a country that has remained divided since the civil war that followed the fall of longtime ruler Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi ruled the country for four decades after seizing power in 1969 before being overthrown and killed in 2011 during a NATO-backed uprising.

In the years since, Libya has been split between rival administrations: an eastern faction aligned with military commander Khalifa Haftar, and a western government based in Tripoli under Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah, with both sides continuing to compete for political and military control of the country.

UK radio station Radio Caroline has apologised after mistakenly announcing the death of the King, with the station blaming the incident on a technical issue and an off-air presenter who was unaware that the broadcast had been interrupted.

The station explained that the presenter was broadcasting remotely and did not realise the programme had gone off air.

Radio Caroline said the presenter “would not realise that they had gone ‘off air’ unless they were monitoring their output via an internet monitor.”

According to the station, its director was monitoring the AM output when the inaccurate announcement was aired but was on a telephone call at the time.

The director reportedly became aware that something was wrong after hearing continuous music instead of the programme that was scheduled to be broadcast. He then contacted the station’s engineer, who was already aware of the problem and investigating it.

The station later issued a brief apology, with the presenter acknowledging that the information previously broadcast had been “incorrect” and attributing the incident to “a technical issue.”

Radio Caroline said it “took the matter very seriously” and responded “as soon as possible” after becoming aware of the mistake.

The staff member involved was subsequently reprimanded, while the station also moved its obituary files away from the studio desktop in an effort to prevent a similar incident from happening again.

Radio Caroline said Ofcom received just two complaints concerning the incident. The station also highlighted that it is “100% volunteer-led” and operates without the financial and technical resources available to larger broadcasters.

Radio Caroline was founded in 1964 as an offshore pirate radio station and initially broadcast from a ship. It continued operating from a vessel until 1991, when the ship was wrecked off the Kent coast.

The station remains based off the north-east Essex coast, although many of its presenters now broadcast their programmes remotely.