Five files open on the desk this morning, running from a copperbelt flashpoint to a continent-wide code patch.
FILE: KOLWEZI
A Tuesday-night lull in Lualaba did not hold. By Wednesday, protests by artisanal miners were back across the UCK, Kapata and Luilu districts of Kolwezi, hard by the mining zones. Schools sent pupils home, shops pulled their shutters, and traffic slowed to a crawl on the Kolwezi-Musonoie road, along with UCK and Kapata. The two prior days had already produced burning tyres, torched vehicles including trucks loaded with ore, and a police post gutted in the Dilungu cell. The diggers are angry about closures of ore treatment centres and buying counters, stalled delivery of the 33 artisanal zones promised by government, and the reopening of the Kamilombe site under new operators. Governor Fifi Masuka Saini met negotiators and Chinese counterparts Tuesday to try to calm things; a commission from Kinshasa is still working through the processing entities.
FILE: HIGHLAND VALLEY
Teck Resources has received a strike notice at Highland Valley Copper in British Columbia. The collective agreement at the operation expired on 30 September, and the notice puts a North American mine back on the list of supply risks just as COMEX copper nudges higher.
FILE: KANSANSHI
Zambia had the better copper news. First Quantum's $1.2bn Kansanshi expansion has exceeded its design throughput in its first year, with the mine now targeting 27 million tonnes of ore processed in 2026 as the new facilities bed in. It is a reminder that the Copperbelt's growth story and its unrest story are running on parallel tracks this week, not the same one.
FILE: SULPHUR
Sulphur gave up almost five percent in a session, dropping to 865 USD a tonne on the Chinese exchange print, while urea eased to 446.50 USD a tonne from 455.50. DAP held flat at 802.50. Softer diesel and gasoline cracks, both down more than five percent on the week, take some pressure off the freight side of the Gulf fertiliser trade even as the feedstock itself cheapens.
FILE: PHP2SHELL
Two pre-authentication memory-corruption flaws in PHP, disclosed this week and nicknamed php2shell, gave attackers a direct route into WordPress, Drupal and Joomla installs and a way to read memory from any PHP application. The PHP Foundation pushed its fix after the vulnerability leaked ahead of schedule, and Cloudflare says its own WAF rules went live hours before public disclosure, built around new logic that checks the request and the origin response together rather than the request alone.
Docket closed
Ghana says raw minerals will stop leaving the country entirely by 2030, the latest African producer to commit to a processing-at-home deadline. The Baltic Dry Index climbed 87 points to 2680. And COMEX copper ticked up to 14,487 USD a tonne even as LME inventories rose 11,475 tonnes, up eight percent in a week, a divergence that bears watching as London Metal Exchange week wraps up.