Read the daily news to learn English

Britain’s pothole problem is no quick fix | Letters

Esther Addley (The pothole puzzle: the bumpy ride to fixing Britain’s broken roads, 23 May) quotes Phill Wheat, a professor of transport econometrics at the University of Leeds, describing the “spiral that we could get into” if funding for road maintenance is not increased. In truth, many highway authorities are already well down that spiral. Once holes and cracks start appearing in a road, they grow and proliferate quickly. Vehicle wheels act like jackhammers around every bump and dip. Once the surface starts breaking up and water loosens the lower layers of the road structure, the opportunity to dress or replace the surface soon passes, and rebuilding at much greater expense becomes unavoidable. So repair costs rise rapidly in the short term and multiply in the long term. Highway authorities need to prioritise and schedule all roads for resurfacing or rebuilding. That will significantly increase the funding requirement in coming years, but once the programme is well advanced, reactive repair costs will decline sharply. Highway authorities need to model cost projections to show central government that more funding now will save money in the longer term. There must be no cutting corners when rebuilding roads: if they continue to deform under the weight of ever-heavier vehicles, we’ll end up in a spiral again. At least some of the extra funding could be raised by local traffic authorities from levies on road users, utilities that dig up roads, and employers that provide staff parking. Taxes rarely win votes, but if they guaranteed better roads and pavements, and lower insurance premiums, people might grudgingly accept them. When road maintenance costs do eventually start falling, surplus revenue could be invested in better bus services. Now there’s a thought. Edward Leigh Cambridge • With over a quarter of a million miles of paved roads in the UK but over 40m vehicles, it is easy to see how the road network might come under considerable strain. This raises the important question of a flexible maintenance strategy and the need to keep up with repairs to our roads. A recent personal experience where the road outside of my home was dug up by the local water company to repair a broken pipe is a case in point. The pipe repair was duly completed and the road surface repaired, but the huge pothole around a gully grating not six feet away was ignored. A few weeks later a county council lorry with an extending mechanical arm filled in this pothole with bitumen, without either of the two operatives ever leaving the vehicle, and then reversed over it to flatten the surface. I watched with fascination, but within days this had taken on a distinct concave profile. A couple of weeks after this, another council lorry, this time with four operatives, arrived on the scene, dug up the gully pothole again, but on this occasion proceeded to manually refill and compact it properly. The moral of this tale must surely be: if you are going to do something, do it once and do it properly. Additionally, foster better interagency working by allowing road maintenance and utility crews some latitude to repair all surrounding potholes irrespective of agency responsibility. Surely some arrangement could be established for agency counter-charging, thus enabling pothole repair to become more efficient and a better use of taxpayers’ money. Anthony Millett Stockbridge, Hampshire • Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.

€16.4bn in funds unlocked for Hungary as part of deal with EU, Magyar says – Europe live

Fair to say that the Romanian president, Nicușor Dan, does not seem to share Putin’s doubts. He just spoke with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and said “the Russian drone incident” was “the most serious” event of this sort on Romanian soil since Russia’s large-scale aggression on Ukraine in 2022. He added: “As our allies and partners across Europe and the world have made clear today, Russia’s aggression does not stop at borders. By continuing to attack Ukraine and threatening neighbouring Nato members, Russia demonstrates total disregard for international law and innocent civilian lives. This must stop.” He added that “Russia must end its attacks and engage in meaningful dialogue toward a just and lasting peace in Ukraine.” In the meantime, Romania and Ukraine will look to “accelerate” their co-production of drones to help with defending the eastern flank of Nato, Dan said.

Canadian man admits sending ‘suicide packets’ to hundreds of people around world

A Canadian man who mailed “suicide packets” of poison to more than 100 people in dozens of countries – including Canada, the UK, the US, Italy, Australia and New Zealand – has pleaded guilty to 14 counts of assisting suicide. Kenneth Law appeared in a packed courtroom in Newmarket, Ontario, on Friday to enter the plea after prosecutors agreed to withdraw 14 murder charges. Sentencing is expected to take place in September. Law, 60, pleaded guilty to multiples charges of “counselling or aiding suicide”. He told Justice Michelle Fuerst he understood the scope of his crimes and was voluntarily entering a plea. Family members were emotional as the court read out each of the charges and Law confirmed his role in the deaths of 14 people, aged 16 to 36, across the province of Ontario. He also admitted sending the lethal substances that caused the death of 79 people in the UK. The closely watched case has highlighted the challenges of policing online forums that promote suicide and sell fatal substances. Bereaved families in the UK, where Law is linked to scores of deaths, have renewed their called for a public inquiry. The court was told that Law sent suicide kits to people in 40 countries and territories, but the vast majority were sent to people in the UK and the US. Law, a one-time engineer and cook at a Toronto hotel, ran a series of websites that sold lethal chemicals to at-risk people around the world. To evade detection, Law offered other products – including hot sauce – to give the illusion that he operated as an industrial food-prep wholesaler. The distinct silver packets warned that use of the product was the sole responsibility of the user. He also sold suicide paraphernalia and gave detailed instructions about how to use the items. Investigators say Law sent 1,209 packages to people in 41 countries before his websites were shut down. Law had previously denied reports that he was willingly selling products to help people kill themselves. Prosecutors submitted a statement of facts that exceeded 60 pages and was expected to take hours to read in court. In many of the deaths, the victims were found by parents. In a particularly harrowing case, a young man was heard vomiting by his family and pleaded for help from his parents after telling them he had consumed a toxic substance. In another, a 29-year-old man called 911 himself, asking for medical help. He said he had ingested a toxic substance, repeating: “Please, and I am going to die soon”, and then began crying. He became unresponsive and had difficulty breathing when first responders arrived, and was pronounced dead at the hospital. One man in his 30s, who was found in a rental car in Toronto, made a donation to first responders in anticipation of the trauma they would experience on finding his body. A victim in the UK called emergency services and told the operator he had taken a substance to kill himself but did not want to die and began panicking, according to a transcript of the call. Paramedics arrived less than 30 minutes later and found him lying face down on his bed with his phone in his hand, still connected to emergency services. They were unable to revive him. Packages from Law’s companies were often found near the victims. At the time of his arrest, Law had received C$296,981 in his Shopify and Paypal accounts linked to his four companies. An investigation by the UK’s National Crime Agency into Canadian websites found that 286 individuals in the UK had received packages from Law, leading to 112 deaths. A deal between Canadian prosecutors and the UK national crime agency, announced on Friday, means Law’s role in the UK deaths will also be considered by the judge in his sentencing. Families in the UK have said the impunity with which Law operated for years – and British authorities’ failure to prevent deaths linked to an online pro-suicide forum – necessitated a public inquiry. They pointed out that, beginning in 2019, 65 warnings were issued by coroners to three government departments. In October 2025, those families petitioned for a public inquiry, but were rejected in March. They now have less than a month to appeal against the decision. “The driving force that keeps all bereaving families going is the fact that other people are still losing their loved ones,” said Adele Zeynep Walton, who lost her sister, Aimee, to a supplied poison. “The online forums linked to these deaths are still accessible. Unless something changes, then more people are going to continue to lose someone.” While the case centred on the 14 confirmed deaths in Ontario, police in other parts of Canada and countries around the world have also investigated Law’s links to deaths deemed suicides. When prosecutors initially brought first-degree murder charges against Law, the scope of the allegations appeared poised to make it one of the largest murder cases in Ontario history. But a ruling from the Ontario appeals court in an unrelated case suggested that merely supplying a substance used in a suicide might not be enough to sustain a murder or attempted murder conviction. Prosecutors would probably have needed to prove that Law played a more active causal role in the deaths, potentially in a way that “overbore” the victims’ free will. Canada’s top court later pushed back, suggesting the distinction between murder and aiding suicide was not so rigid. But it stopped short of creating a definitive rule for cases such as Law’s, in which the accused allegedly supplied lethal substances to people who later took their own lives. As a result, prosecutors downgraded the charges. Still, Canada’s criminal code punishes anyone who “counsels or abets” a person to die by suicide with a sentence of up to 14 years in prison. Experts believe the scope of Law’s actions suggest he will receive a harsh sentence. Victim impact statements and sentencing are expected in September. • In Canada, you can call or text the Suicide Crisis Helpline on 988. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

First of trapped men rescued from flooded Laos cave

The first of seven men who have been trapped in a flooded cave in Laos for more than a week has been brought to safety by divers, in a perilous rescue mission that has required teams to crawl through narrow, deluged tunnels, navigating sharp rocks and collapse hazards. Four men remain inside a chamber about 300 metres (980ft) from the cave entrance, where they were found crouched and huddled together on a rocky ledge by rescuers on Wednesday. Two men are yet to be located. “The first one is out. Safe and sound!!!” wrote Manat Artmongkron, a rescue technician for Saithan Saphanboon Foundation, a Thai rescue group, in a Facebook post. Video posted on social media showed a man covered in mud clambering out of the cave to safety. He was met with some cheers and wrapped in an emergency blanket. International diving teams, including some who worked on the dramatic rescue of a young Thai football team in 2018, have battled for days to retrieve the men. Reaching them required skilled divers to crawl and twist through incredibly narrow passageways, moving through muddy water with poor visibility. Rescuers have been racing against time to pump water out from the cave, fearing that rains could soon begin again, further inundating the tunnels. Josh Richards, an Australian cave diver who joined the team on Friday, said rescuers planned to attempt to bring the four other men out tomorrow. He said the conditions the team were battling against, including unstable clay and mud walls, which affected the water, meant “you’re essentially diving in coffee. You’re not going to be seeing anything through it.” As sections of the tunnel between the miners and the surface were completely flooded, the team on the ground was trying to pump out as much water as possible in a two-pronged approach, Richards said. The plan had been that if they were not able to pump the water out then they would use scuba equipment to rescue the men, he added. Additional divers from Australia, Japan, France, Indonesia and Thailand were expected to arrive on Friday, while a Malaysian cave diver joined the efforts on Thursday. Kengkard Bongkawong, the head of operations for Metta Tham Rescue, another Thai group, said on Facebook: “One person has been brought out of the cave safely. Four others remain, awaiting assessment. The search for the remaining two will continue tomorrow.” Earlier, he warned that the search for the two missing men would be especially challenging, requiring teams to dive through a 25-metre-long narrow tunnel. “Diving in the narrow passage that has no space to make a U-turn, this is really dangerous so we need to evaluate the safety measures, principles, routes and expertise in the cave area,” he told local media. Heavy machinery is being used to clear a route to the cave site so that equipment can be transported more easily. The cave is in a remote area of central Laos’s Xaisomboun province, and reaching it involves a 3-mile (5km) hike up mountainous terrain. The group of seven men had been trapped inside the cave since last Wednesday, when they reportedly entered to search for gold ore and to hunt. Heavy rains inundated the cave, carrying in sand and gravel that blocked a crucial exit.

Nato ready to defend ‘every inch’ of territory as Russian drone hits Romania

The Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, has said the alliance is “ready to defend every inch” of its territory after a Russian drone hit an apartment building in Romania, a member state, during an overnight attack on neighbouring Ukraine. “Russia’s reckless behaviour is a danger to us all,” Rutte wrote on social media after a call with the Romanian president, Nicuşor Dan. “I affirmed that Nato stands ready to defend every inch of allied territory.” On Friday, Dan convened an emergency meeting of the country’s supreme council of national defence, and the foreign ministry summoned Russia’s ambassador. The incident in Galați, which injured two people, prompted swift condemnation and the threat of repercussions, even as Vladimir Putin attempted to suggest, without evidence, that the drone might have been a stray Ukrainian weapon. Romania’s foreign minister, Oana Țoiu, said on X: “We will officially communicate the consequences that this lack of responsibility on the part of the Russian Federation will have for the diplomatic relations between our countries, as well as the next steps at the European level regarding sanctions packages.” The foreign ministry said it had asked Nato to accelerate the transfer of anti-drone capabilities and suggested it would call on article 4 of the Nato treaty, which would trigger formal discussions within the organisation about threats to Romania’s security. It described the incident as a “grave and irresponsible escalation” and a serious breach of international law. The strike in Romania is the latest example of the war in Ukraine spilling beyond the country’s borders, amid growing concern over Russia’s wider campaign of hybrid warfare across Europe. Gen Gheorghe Maxim, a stand-in commander for the Romanian armed forces’ joint staff, told a news conference on Friday that the strike in Galati was not “an attack from Russia against Romania”, but that “Romanians should understand that Russia is a threat to the security of the countries in the area.” Speaking later on Friday, Putin told reporters he had only just heard of the incident, and suggested the drone wreckage should be handed over to Russia so it could conduct its own independent investigation. The incident came as Russia threatened to intensify its systematic strikes against Ukraine. Romania’s defence ministry said the drone was tracked by radar in Romanian airspace before it crashed into the roof of a residential building in Galați on Friday. The impact sparked a fire, injured two people and forced the evacuation of several residents from the building. Police and emergency services responded at the scene. Galați is on the Danube River, west of the borders with Moldova and Ukraine. Dan said his country would not accept the war of aggression waged by Russia against Ukraine being transferred to its citizens. He said he had instructed the foreign ministry to prepare a package of measures regarding Romania’s relationship with Moscow, “proportionate to this very serious situation”. France’s foreign minister also denounced the incident. “I want to condemn this irresponsible act by Russia,” Jean-Noël Barrot told the broadcaster France Inter, adding that the drone had struck “a country of the European Union and a Nato country”. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said Russia’s “war of aggression has crossed yet another line”. “We stand in full solidarity with Romania and its people,” she wrote on social media. “As we continue strengthening our security and deterrence, especially on our eastern border, we will keep increasing the pressure on Russia.” Ukraine’s foreign minister said the incident showed Russia posed a threat to the whole of Europe. “The recent incursion of a Russian drone into the Romanian airspace and its explosion … proved once again that Russian aggression poses a real threat to the Black Sea region and the entire Europe,” Andrii Sybiha said in a post on X. The Romanian military scrambled two F-16 fighter jets and a helicopter authorised to engage targets, while emergency alerts were issued to residents in the affected areas. The government reiterated that it had asked Nato to speed up the delivery of anti-drone systems to Romania. On Thursday the UN secretary general told the security council that in the first four months of this year more civilians had been killed in Ukraine than in the same period in 2025, 2024 or 2023. António Guterres called for greater diplomacy, immediate de-escalation and “a full and unconditional ceasefire”, warning of “unknown and unintended consequences” from the escalation and intensification of attacks. Russia has been using long-range ballistic missiles and drones to damage Ukraine’s power grid and hammer cities, and Ukraine has been bracing for further heavy bombardments. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said on Thursday that he was pressing the US to provide additional Patriot air defence missiles to counter Russian ballistic missile attacks. Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report

EU to release €16bn to Hungary previously frozen under Orbán

The EU is to release more than €16bn to Hungary that had been frozen under the rule of Viktor Orbán, with Ursula von der Leyen hailing the “winds of change” in the country since the election of Péter Magyar last month. The decision, described as a “historic breakthrough” by the new prime minister, comes as police in Hungary have said they will allow next month’s Pride parade in Budapest to take place. Last year they sought to block the event on the orders of the government of the rightwing Orbán. Last year’s march made headlines around the world after Orbán’s Fidesz party backed legislation – the first of its kind in the EU’s recent history – that created a legal basis for Pride events to be banned, citing a widely criticised need to protect children. Since Magyar was elected in a landslide victory, setting off celebrations across the country as Hungarians marked the end of Orbán’s 16 years in power, the new leader has repeatedly voiced support for equality and freedom of assembly. He has not, however, made any mention of Pride events, nor has his recently formed government moved to reverse Orbán’s legislation barring such events, leaving questions over the fate of this year’s events. Von der Leyen said Magyar had already convinced the European Commission that the country was “turning the page”, and the money was being released for housing, transport, energy and small and medium enterprises, as well as societal supports under cohesion funds. “We can already feel a strong wind of change across Hungary,” the president of the commission told a press conference. “In only a few weeks, you have driven forward long overdue reforms,” she told the conservative leader. Magyar told reporters in Brussels that he agreed with von der Leyen on all the steps that would allow the funds to be released, and that Hungary would be able to pass all the laws needed. This implies that any compromising of the rights of LGBTQ people will be corrected by Magyar. About €2.2bn of the funds being released are contingent on “academic freedom” being restored in Hungary’s universities, while another €500m is being held back until Hungary complies with last month’s ruling by the European court of justice over laws discriminating against the LGBTQ community. The organisers of Budapest Pride notified police this week of their intention to hold the 31st edition of the march on 27 June. They said they had little doubt that the event would go ahead, particularly after the EU’s top court ruled that Orbán’s 2021 anti-LGBTQ+ law – which was amended last year to serve as a basis for banning Pride – was discriminatory, stigmatising and in breach of the bloc’s rules. “After the extraordinary year of 2025, we trust in the cooperation of the authorities and their acceptance of the gathering,” Budapest Pride organisers said in a statement this week. “We warmly welcome everyone in June who took part in last year’s demonstration, as well as those who continue to believe in equal rights and a democratic Hungary and those who would like to once again celebrate the transition to democracy.” Police said they had given the march the green light to go ahead. In a statement to the news agency AFP, they said: “During the notification process for the 2026 Pride parade and the subsequent in-person consultation with the organisers, no grounds for prohibiting the assembly arose.” The statement said police had issued “prescriptive-restrictive decisions regarding three counter-demonstrations”, suggesting that those gatherings would also be allowed to take place but at a distance from the Pride parade. Last year’s march, despite the ban, was attended by a record 200,000 people, according to its organisers, transforming the event into a potent symbol of defiance of Orbán and his government’s steady rollback of rights. Orbán’s government had threatened to use facial recognition software to identify and potentially fine participants up to €500, but police later confirmed they would not take action against attenders. Key to last year’s march was the progressive mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karácsony, who stepped in as a co-organiser, rebranding the event as a municipal cultural event in an attempt to sidestep Orbán’s legislation. Months later, he was charged with organising the banned parade, with prosecutors seeking to fine him. Géza Buzás-Hábel, a Roma rights campaigner in Pécs, home to the only Pride march in Hungary outside the capital, also faces a fine for organising the fifth edition of the city’s parade last year.

US designates Brazil’s two largest gangs as terrorist organizations

The United States has designated Brazil’s two largest criminal gangs, the First Capital Command (PCC) and the Red Command, as foreign terrorist organisations. The announcement, made by Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, on Thursday, is being widely seen in Brazil as a setback for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president who had strongly opposed the designation – and a boost for Lula’s main challenger in October’s presidential election, the far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro. Chosen to run in place of his father, Jair Bolsonaro – the former president who is barred from running because he is in house arrest after being convicted of attempting a coup – Flávio spent this week in the US, where he met with Donald Trump and Rubio. The senator was at his lowest point in the campaign, after revelations that he had been caught on tape asking a banker accused of corruption for $26.8m (£20m) to fund a film about his father caused a significant drop in his poll numbers. Announcing the designation, Rubio wrote that the groups were “two of the most violent criminal organizations in Brazil. Their reach extends throughout our region and into our country”. Both groups emerged inside Brazilian prisons, originally as a response to torture and abuse. They are now among the largest criminal organisations in Latin America, exporting cocaine produced in neighbouring Colombia, Peru and Bolivia primarily to the US and Europe, while expanding into other parts of the world. The Red Command is the older of the two, emerging in the 1970s from interactions between political prisoners jailed by the military dictatorship and common criminals in a prison in Rio de Janeiro. The PCC was founded in the 1990s in a São Paulo prison, months after 111 prisoners were killed when police crushed a rebellion at another prison. The two groups compete for control of drug distribution and trafficking routes, but operate in distinct ways: while the Red Command has a more decentralised leadership structure and resembles the more overtly violent and conspicuous crime factions of Mexico and Colombia, the PCC functions almost like a corporation, with well-defined hierarchies and a low-profile, businesslike approach. Lula had opposed the US proposal to classify the groups as terrorist organisations, describing the move as an affront to Brazilian sovereignty and arguing that the country already actively combats them. Just hours before the US announcement, Brazil’s federal police launched a new operation targeting PCC infiltration into the country’s financial sector. The president has not yet commented on the US decision. Flávio Bolsonaro immediately celebrated it. “On a trip as a presidential candidate, we did more for Brazil and for the security of Brazilians than Lula,” he said. Months earlier, commenting on US attacks against boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that have killed 196 people, he said he felt “jealous” of those countries and suggested the US could do something similar in Rio’s Guanabara Bay. “Wouldn’t you like to spend a few months here helping us combat these terrorist organisations?” he wrote to Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defence. The US decision to classify the organisations as terrorist groups – following similar designations of organisations in Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela – had been widely anticipated for months, but was not mentioned during Trump’s meeting with Lula at the White House three weeks ago. Flávio’s visit to the White House last Tuesday was not listed on the president’s public schedule and, unlike Trump’s meeting with Lula – during which the US president even praised the Brazilian leftist – was not mentioned by Trump even in a social media post. There is still little clarity about the practical consequences of the designation. Analysts fear it could have financial repercussions even for innocent Brazilians, but the move is already being widely interpreted as another example of the growing pressure exerted by the White House across the region as part of its so-called “war on drugs”. A report published this week by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project found that US pressure drove an 18% increase in clashes between security forces and armed groups across Latin America and the Caribbean in 2025.

WHO puts Ebola outbreak death rate at ‘huge’ 30-50% as chief arrives in DRC

The death rate of the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is between 30% and 50%, the World Health Organization has said, as its head arrived in the country to support efforts to contain the disease. Anaïs Legand, from the WHO’s high threat pathogens team, said the revised death rate estimate is based on confirmed cases. “It’s huge. It means that up to five out of 10 people are likely to die,” Legand told reporters in Geneva. She also said that a patient had recovered from Ebola and was discharged from a health centre in the DRC on 27 May after two negative tests, the first recovery to have been confirmed in the outbreak. The WHO has recorded 10 confirmed and 223 suspected Ebola deaths in the DRC since the outbreak was declared on 15 May, among more than 1,000 confirmed and suspected cases. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the organisation’s director general, arrived in Kinshasa on Thursday and was due to travel to the centre of the outbreak, in the north-east Ituri province, on Friday. “That thing can be stopped,” Tedros told reporters, adding that the WHO did not support travel bans because they “don’t help much”. “Together, we will overcome this outbreak,” he said in a separate message to Congolese citizens, promising to do “everything in my power to help”. The true scale of the outbreak may be significantly larger, the WHO said, because the virus is believed to have circulated undetected for some time. The outbreak is the 17th recorded Ebola epidemic in the vast central African country, which has a population of more than 100 million. The disease was first identified there in 1976 and its death rate has averaged 50% across all outbreaks, according to the WHO. Complicating relief efforts, the outbreak is centred on a mineral-rich region fought over by armed groups. “Conflict and displacement make everything harder,” Tedros said. “I am making a direct appeal to all warring parties in this region: please declare a ceasefire. No cause, no conflict, no grievance is worth condemning innocent people to death from a preventable disease.” More than 245,000 people have fled eastern DRC to neighbouring countries since January 2025, according to the UN refugee agency. Armed groups operating in the area include the Rwanda-backed M23, which controls large parts of the North and South Kivu provinces south of Ituri. Early symptoms of Ebola include fever, exhaustion, muscle pain, headaches and a sore throat. These can progress to vomiting, diarrhoea, abdominal pain, rash and impaired kidney and liver function. The disease spreads through direct contact with the blood or body fluids of an infected person or someone who has died from Ebola. There is no approved treatment for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, responsible for the current outbreak. However, the WHO said on Thursday that its advisory groups had recommended clinical trials of vaccines and treatments. The head of the African Union’s health agency, Jean Kaseya, said a vaccine could be ready by the end of the year. Neighbouring Uganda, which has recorded one Ebola death and eight additional cases, announced on Wednesday it would immediately close its border with the DRC. The WHO warned that border closures could drive up informal crossings and make it harder to monitor and contain the disease. Meanwhile, Kenya’s high court temporarily suspended plans to establish a quarantine and treatment facility for affected US citizens in Kenya. The US had said it would deny entry to its territory to anyone infected with the disease. The judge, Patricia Nyaundi, ruled that Kenya was not allowed to admit anyone exposed to or infected by Ebola under the proposed deal with the US until a challenge to the deal brought by the Kenyan rights group Katiba Institute was heard. The group’s lawsuit said the plan “raises grave constitutional concerns regarding the rights to life, health, fair administrative action, public participation and parliamentary oversight”. Health officials had said the proposal could place additional strain on Kenya’s already stretched healthcare system. The country’s main medical union threatened on Thursday to take strike action unless the terms of the agreement with the US were released within 48 hours. US officials had said the 50-bed facility at an air force base would become operational on Friday. More than 30 staff from the US Public Health Service, a uniformed branch of the Department of Health and Human Services, left the US for Kenya on Wednesday after receiving three days’ training in Washington DC. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said on Thursday that the US government planned “to commit $13.5m [£10m] toward Kenya’s Ebola preparedness efforts”, adding that it had already pledged $112m to the regional response to the outbreak. “The United States’s highest priority remains protecting the health and security of the American people by working to prevent the Ebola outbreak from reaching our shores,” he said. Ebola has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa over the past 50 years. The deadliest outbreak in the DRC killed nearly 2,300 patients from 3,500 cases between 2018 and 2020. The WHO said it had received 4.6 tonnes of aid at the airport in Bunia, the capital of Ituri. Unicef, the UN children’s agency, said it would send 100 tonnes of aid. With Agence France-Presse and Reuters • This article was amended on 29 May 2026 to clarify that Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s comments were from two separate sources, a message to Congolese citizens and when speaking with reporters.