Major blackouts in Iran prompt rare apology from president

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran’s outgoing president offered a rare apology Tuesday for the country’s most severe summer power outages in recent memory, as blackouts cripple businesses and darken homes for hours a day.

In a government meeting broadcast live on state TV, President Hassan Rouhani acknowledged that chronic power outages over the past week have caused Iranians “plenty of pain” and expressed contrition in an unusually personal speech.

“My apologies to dear people who have faced these problems and pain,” he said.

In recent days, the regular blackouts have spread chaos and confusion on the streets of the capital, Tehran, and other cities, knocking out traffic lights, shutting factories, disrupting telecommunications and affecting metro systems. Repeaters — devices around cities that enhance mobile phone signals — have failed, along with electronic cash registers.

Some towns in Iran's north reported limited access to water because the power cuts affected the piped supply. Traffic police in the capital have said the sudden power cuts have caught officials completely by surprise.

The rolling outages have given Rouhani, a relative moderate who hands the reins to the hard-line President-elect Ebrahim Raisi in August, one of the last domestic headaches of his presidency. Footage on social media, shared widely by Farsi-language news channels based outside the country, show popular anger over the blackouts breaking into the open, swelling into scattered protests at local electricity offices and gatherings in paralyzed streets. In some videos, anti-government chants echo from darkened high-rises. The Associated Press could not verify the authenticity of the footage.

Officials have blamed the outages on the country's stifling heat, escalating electricity demand and...