By ANDREW KASUKU and JACKSON NJEHIA, Associated Press

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — A multi-story building under construction in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, collapsed Friday, leaving at least four people believed trapped.

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Rescue workers are digging through the rubble. The building was in an area of Nairobi known as South C, according to the Kenya Red Cross, which said in a statement that a multi-agency response team was at the scene “managing the situation.”

Geoffrey Ruku, the Cabinet secretary in charge of public service, told reporters that four people were believed trapped.

Safia Ali Aden, the sister of one of those trapped, told reporters at the scene that her brother made a phone call “while under there.”

“We are asking the government to be speedy in the rescue so we can find my brother alive,” she said.

There was no immediate comment from authorities on the likely cause of the collapse.

Building collapses are common in Nairobi, where housing is in high demand and unscrupulous developers often bypass regulations or simply violate building codes.

After eight buildings collapsed and killed 15 people in Kenya in 2015, the presidency ordered an audit of buildings across the country to see if they were up to code. The National Construction Authority found that 58% of the buildings in Nairobi were unfit for habitation.

By JON GAMBRELL, Associated Press

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump and top Iranian officials exchanged dueling threats Friday as widening economic protests swept across parts of the Islamic Republic, further escalating tensions between the countries after America bombed Iranian nuclear sites in June.

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Trump initially wrote on his Truth Social platform, warning Iran that if it “violently kills peaceful protesters,” the United States “will come to their rescue.” At least seven people have been killed so far in violence surrounding the demonstrations, sparked in part by the collapse of Iran’s rial currency.

“We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” Trump wrote, without elaborating.

Shortly after, Ali Larijani, a former parliament speaker who serves as the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, alleged on the social platform X that Israel and the U.S. were stoking the demonstrations. He offered no evidence to support the allegation, which Iranian officials have repeatedly made during years of protests sweeping the country.

“Trump should know that intervention by the U.S. in the domestic problem corresponds to chaos in the entire region and the destruction of the U.S. interests,” Larijani wrote on X, which the Iranian government blocks. “The people of the U.S. should know that Trump began the adventurism. They should take care of their own soldiers.”

Larijani’s remarks likely referenced America’s wide military footprint in the region. Iran in June attacked Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar after the U.S. strikes on three nuclear sites during Israel’s 12-day war on the Islamic Republic.

Ali Shamkhani, an adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who previously was the council’s secretary for years, warned that “any interventionist hand that gets too close to the security of Iran will be cut.”

People wave Iranian flags as one of them holds up a poster of the late commander of the Iran’s Revolutionary Guard expeditionary Quds Force, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. drone attack in 2020 in Iraq, during a ceremony commemorating his death anniversary at the Imam Khomeini grand mosque in Tehran, Iran, Thursday, Jan. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

“The people of Iran properly know the experience of ‘being rescued’ by Americans: from Iraq and Afghanistan to Gaza,” he added on X.

The current protests, now in their sixth day, have become the biggest in Iran since 2022, when the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody triggered nationwide demonstrations. However, the demonstrations have yet to be countrywide and have not been as intense as those surrounding the death of Amini, who was detained over not wearing her hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities.

Iran’s civilian government under reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian has been trying to signal it wants to negotiate with protesters. However, Pezeshkian has acknowledged there is not much he can do as Iran’s rial has rapidly depreciated, with $1 now costing some 1.4 million rials. That sparked the initial protests.

The protests, taking root in economic issues, have heard demonstrators chant against Iran’s theocracy as well.

Months after the war, Iran said it was no longer enriching uranium at any site in the country, trying to signal to the West that it remains open to potential negotiations over its atomic program to ease sanctions. However, those talks have yet to happen as Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have warned Tehran against reconstituting its atomic program.

Abe Woldeslassie spent seven years in St. Paul, guiding Macalester’s men’s basketball program to heights never previously imagined. The Scots reached a MIAC tournament title game and experienced multiple 15-win seasons under the head coach.

But when the Minneapolis native was contacted by a fellow Minnesotan about an opportunity to get back into Division I coaching, he felt the need to go.

Tim Bergstraser is a 34-year-old St. Cloud native who led Minnesota State-Moorhead to three straight Division II NCAA tournament appearances. In the offseason, Denver University hired Bergstraser to lead its program.

Bergstraser asked Woldeslassie to join him on his staff.

Woldeslassie obliged, noting Bergstraser was someone he knew and trusted. He liked that Denver is a private school with high academic expectations, like Macalester, and is in a large, pro-sports metro area like the Twin Cities.

Woldeslassie noted there would never be a “right” time to leave Macalester, but this made sense.

“I just turned 40 in October, and I felt like if I’m going to make this move, Macalester is in a great place, I’m leaving on great terms,” he said. “And not that it was ever going south, but I never wanted it to get to a point where you overstay your welcome.”

He enjoyed the process of he and fellow coach Conner Nord building Macalester from the ground up, and saw a chance to do something similar at Denver, a program that’s never been to the Division I NCAA Tournament.

“I thought, ‘Hey, it’d be cool if we were the first here,’” Woldeslassie said.

The Pioneers are off to a good start. A program that won just 11 games a season ago is 8-8 this season, already sporting impressive wins against the likes of Northern Colorado and Colorado State ahead of its Summit League conference opener Sunday in, yes, St. Paul.

A tilt with conference-favorite St. Thomas is a homecoming of sorts for many people in the program. Two players and three coaches — including associate coach Spenser Bland, a Plymouth native and Bethel alum — are Minnesota natives.

But it’s especially meaningful to Woldeslassie, for a number of reasons. He was a head coach in St. Paul just last season. He spent the first two years of his collegiate career playing junior varsity for St. Thomas, where he was recruited to by then-assistant coach Johnny Tauer — now a friend — before transferring to Macalester.

Woldeslassie has only seen photos of St. Thomas’ new arena and savors the shot to coach a game in the building on Sunday.

“We’ll have a lot of friends and family in the stands,” he said. “I think there will be a lot of red in the stands of the new arena.”

This may be Denver’s only trip to St. Paul in the foreseeable future. The Pioneers are replacing Gonzaga in the West Coast Conference next season, a move that figures to bring more prominence and visibility to the program but also more challenges. That’s one of the best mid-major conferences in the country.

Early returns suggest the new staff is built to handle it, just another adjustment for the Pioneers coaches who were thrown into the turbulence that is Division I athletics. Woldeslassie last coached at this level in 2018 as an assistant at Siena before taking the job at Macalester.

This was all before looser NCAA transfer portal rules, Name, Image and Likeness opportunities, revenue sharing and massive conference realignment.

“You almost couldn’t have envisioned, in 2018, what’s going on today,” Woldeslassie noted. “I think people would have laughed at you if you said this was going to happen.”

But it’s reality, one that makes quickly rebuilding a perhaps more feasible and more complex at the same time.

“It’s new for all of us, and it seems like every day it’s changing,” Woldeslassie said. “It’s like, ‘This is the rule today,’ and a week from now, that rule may not even exist. So, we have to adapt.”

Denver doesn’t have any high school kids committed for next season, its focus currently centered on transfers, junior college and international players. And the Pioneers won’t be able to afford every player they’d like to recruit.

But Woldeslassie thinks Bergstraser is doing a great job guiding the roster construction and connecting with those already in the program.

“I think we’ve done a great job getting the right people,” Woldeslassie said. “We’ve had some really great wins already this year, and I think we’re going to have a really good season in the Summit.”

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So much climate news comes out in any given week that it can be hard to keep up with it all. Much is gloomy, but there are positive developments all the time — so many, in fact, that it’s easy to miss some of the things that have been happening.

For the past few years, I’ve been compiling year-end lists of the more neglected good and bad climate stories to give an idea of the immense amount of change as the world transitions to new sources of energy amid a gathering environmental crisis.

Here’s my selection of major developments over the past 12 months:

You might not know it from the prevailing mood of Trump-era defeatism, but in some parts of the world, decarbonizing electricity is approaching its endgame. Roughly three-quarters of power generation in the UK and Europe this year came from non-fossil sources, putting them in about the same place as Brazil and Canada, whose vast hydroelectric resources traditionally gave them some of the cleanest grids.

With more renewables added each year, current projects under construction and in late-stage development should put Europe’s grid between 80% to 90% clean energy, the level at which further advances will start to get far more difficult without massive battery usage, new flexible technologies, or both. That means a looming slowdown in renewable deployment, something that many will regard as some sort of failure. In fact, it’s a testament to the monumental achievement so far, and an example the rest of the world should now emulate.

As much as 8% of the world’s emissions come from the production of cement — but the collapse of China’s real estate boom is turning that tide. The country’s output through October was the lowest since 2009, suggesting that the full-year total will be in the region of 1.7 billion metric tons. Combined with the sluggish 1% to 2% pace of growth forecast in the rest of the world, that suggests global consumption will be the lowest since 2012.

There may be further to fall. China still consumes 1.2 tons of cement per capita, about four times the rate of the rest of the world — but construction starts, a leading indicator for demand, are collapsing even faster, with commercial groundbreaking at its weakest since 2005. Developed countries use only about 16% of global cement, and China is now developed in all but name. A boom like the one we saw over the past decade will never return. Even India and sub-Saharan Africa won’t be big enough to take its place.

If you were looking only at the parlous state of electric vehicle sales in some developed markets — the U.S., say, or Japan or Italy — you might think the entire technology is faltering. Far from it. Plug-in cars have been comprising more than half of all sales in China and just under a third in Europe in recent months. More dramatic, though, is what’s been happening in less-noticed developing countries.

EVs have had a sales share of more than 20% in recent months in Turkey, Thailand, and Vietnam, while Indonesia isn’t far behind. Markets as diverse as Nepal, Ethiopia, Laos, Armenia and the United Arab Emirates are adopting EVs far faster than many developed countries. Some 27.3% of all passenger vehicle sales worldwide in the September quarter came with a plug, according to BloombergNEF. If you think the EV revolution is losing speed, it’s probably just a sign that your own domestic market is getting left behind.

I did a similar here’s-what-you-missed exercise last year. Here’s my attempt at an unbiased assessment of that:

China’s solar industry has endured a season in hell. We argued that rising sales and thinner spending would restore profitability. China’s big six solar players have indeed cut capital expenditures to about half of last year’s level, but new rules at home and ongoing trade protectionism elsewhere mean BloombergNEF expects installations this year to rise only about 16% — a pedestrian pace for this sector. Far from returning to the black, losses are deepening, with little sign of relief in sight.

Sales of plug-in cars in Europe hit a speed bump in late 2024, leading many to predict that the region’s shift to electric vehicles was stalling. We argued the slowdown was temporary, with performance in 2025 likely to far outstrip predictions of 3.2 million sales. That looks to be on the money. By the end of September, the year-to-date growth rate was 28%, which should translate into nearly 3.9 million sales across the full year, just a pip short of the 4 million number we pegged.

A key element of electricity-bill increases after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the pivotal role played by surging gas in setting the cost of power across the entire market. We argued that the rise of lithium-ion was likely to shave these peaks by giving batteries a bigger role and flattening the extreme spikes seen in previous years. That seems to be playing out in some places: Wholesale prices in Australia’s main grid fell about 8% from a year earlier in the September quarter, thanks in part to reduced volatility and batteries undercutting gas.

The course of the energy transition never did run smooth — but I’ve noticed over the past few years of writing these lists that events in retrospect look much better than the depressing prospect you get from a cursory look at the news. Let’s hope that pattern plays out in 2026, too.

David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

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