The agency currently has 23 field staff supporting epidemiological investigations and the DRC health ministry, Dr. Satish Pillai, the incident manager for the CDC’s Ebola response, said in a briefing

International News via Reuters:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday it would make available $107 million in emergency funding to strengthen its domestic and international response to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.

The agency currently has 23 field staff supporting epidemiological investigations and the DRC health ministry, Dr. Satish Pillai, the incident manager for the CDC’s Ebola response, said in a briefing. There are over 125 CDC staff across the DRC and Uganda working on the response, he said.

A month after the World Health Organization declared an international emergency, the outbreak of the rare Bundibugyo strain has grown to 875 confirmed cases, including 202 deaths, with warnings mounting that it could become the worst Ebola outbreak on record — surpassing the 2014 to 2016 West Africa epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people.

Less than 10% of pledges made to support the response in Congo and Uganda have been received from donors, Africa’s top health body said earlier on Thursday.

Donors have pledged $910 million, including $80 million from African Union member states, but so far less than $90 million has actually been released for the affected countries, an Africa CDC official said.

The United States says it is the biggest donor to the response and has asked others to contribute.

The U.S. CDC team in the DRC is helping with efforts to improve community acceptance of surveillance, isolation, and safe burial, Pillai said. They are also supporting assessments of entry ports and providing technical assistance to labs on diagnostic testing.

“Critically, we’re also working with the government of DRC to support preparedness in provinces immediately west of the outbreak zone to contain the spread of the outbreak,” he said.

The teams in Uganda are also helping with border health support, including airport screening assessments, Pillai added.

The risk to the United States remains low, he said, but the CDC is prepared for the “unlikely event” should there be a case in the country.

The agency’s World Cup preparedness team is closely coordinating with the Ebola response team, said team leader Cria Gregory. The CDC is holding calls twice a week with health officials in the 11 U.S. cities hosting matches to discuss Ebola and other potential threats, including measles and heat-related illnesses.

Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Additional reporting by Sneha S K in Bengaluru and Christian Martinez in Los Angeles; Editing by Devika Syamnath and Bill Berkrot

The U.S. president put his signature on Wednesday on the “memorandum of understanding” to end the war, as did Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, bringing it into effect two days earlier than previously expected

International News via Reuters:

Some 12.5 million barrels of crude sailed through the Strait of Hormuz overnight, U.S. Vice President JD Vance said on Thursday, hours after Donald Trump signed a deal with Iran to end the war that has disrupted global energy supplies.

But in Lebanon, where more than a million people are displaced by the fighting, Israeli forces launched fresh airstrikes early on Thursday, raising doubt about how far Trump will go to force his wartime allies to halt an offensive he has now pledged to end.

The U.S. president put his signature on Wednesday on the “memorandum of understanding” to end the war, as did Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, bringing it into effect two days earlier than previously expected. It calls for the immediate opening of the Strait of Hormuz and lifting of a U.S. blockade of Iran’s ports.

Vance, who will represent the United States at a formal ceremony in Switzerland on Friday to confirm the interim accord, said the United States expected Tehran would not have missiles that can “broadly threaten the entire world” as part of the deal agreed with Washington.

He said Thursday marked the start of the 60-day negotiation period to reach a final settlement to the war, which Trump launched in February alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Shippers say it will still take time for transit across the strait to reach pre-war levels, with a need yet to ensure safe access and clear mines.

Markets responded quickly to the news. Benchmark Brent crude futures prices fell by another 2% to below $78 a barrel, the lowest since the shooting began on February 28.

MEMORANDUM EXPLICITLY CALLS FOR END OF WAR IN LEBANON

But Israel, which launched an invasion of Lebanon in March and has since seized a large swathe of the south in pursuit of Hezbollah militants who opened fire across the border in support of Iran, was excluded from the negotiations.

Iran has always said any peace deal must also cover Lebanon. In an apparent major concession to Iran, the memorandum signed by Trump explicitly calls for the “permanent termination” of the war in Lebanon and for its “territorial integrity and sovereignty” to be ensured.

With Lebanon among the peace effort’s most delicate issues, Trump in recent days has become openly critical of his ally’s operations there, accusing Israel of unnecessarily destroying entire buildings to hit Hezbollah fighters.

Israel has said it has no intention of withdrawing from Lebanon, whatever Trump negotiates. It released a new map on Thursday showing an expanded southern area occupied by its troops, which it describes as a buffer zone.

Vance told reporters one goal of the deal with Iran was to allow the Lebanese authorities to police the south of the country.

“What we want to see is the Lebanese government, the elected representatives of the people of Lebanon, who are able to police southern Lebanon, so that Hezbollah has not taken over the country, the Israelis are not threatened, and then consequently the Israelis are not attacking southern Lebanon or Beirut either,” he said.

Two Israeli officials, including a senior official close to Netanyahu, told Reuters Israel was holding negotiations with the United States to keep Israeli troops in Lebanon.

The senior official described those talks with Washington as “stubborn” and said Israel would not back down. The other official said the outcome would depend on whether Trump “decides to force the issue” by threatening repercussions on Israel.

While fighting in Lebanon tamped down at the start of this week when Trump first announced the deal had been reached, it has ticked up again over the past few days, and continued on Thursday morning after Trump’s signature.

Lebanese state news agency NNA said three people were killed in Israeli airstrikes on the southern Lebanese towns of Kfartebnit and Zebdine on Thursday. Reuters reporters heard an Israeli drone flying low over Beirut and its southern suburbs.

‘IN LEBANON IT’S NOT OVER YET’, SAYS DISPLACED LEBANESE MAN

“Iran and the Americans are done. Fine. In Lebanon it’s not over yet,” said Mohammed Doghman, a man displaced from the southern city of Nabatieh to Beirut, who was sitting outside his tent on Thursday, squinting hard at his phone to read the news.

“They should give us a final answer: has the war ended for good, or will we return to it again?”

In Qlailieh, in southern Lebanon near the port of Tyre, a few displaced residents had ventured back to survey the ruins of their homes, flattened into piles of concrete rubble that many compared to Gaza.

Netanyahu has boasted for years of a particularly close relationship with Trump, which ultimately yielded the joint decision to wage war on Iran this year.

But Trump’s apparent shift over Lebanon has abruptly given rise to one of the biggest rifts in U.S.-Israeli relations in decades.

“Soon, Israel may be forced to choose: Either keep up the military pressure and lose Trump’s diplomatic support, or stay on his good side — but only by ending, or scaling back, the conflict that many see as the country’s most urgent fight,” the Times of Israel wrote on Thursday.

When Trump launched the war nearly four months ago, he said his aims were to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme, end its ability to strike its neighbours, prevent it from supporting allied militants in the region and make it possible for Iranians to topple their hardline leaders.

Though he initially demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender”, Trump ultimately signed the agreement with none of those objectives met.

U.S. officials say the upcoming negotiations could still yield a strong agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme, but his critics, including some hawks in his own party, say Iran is in a stronger position now than before the war, having withstood a superpower attack, exerted control of the strait and gained valuable waivers to financial sanctions.

Writing by Peter Graff and Jon Boyle; Editing by William Maclean and Daniel Wallis

Under the ETS, heavy industries have to buy permits to emit CO2, providing an incentive to emit as little as possible

International News via Reuters:

The European Union plans to grant industry additional free CO₂ permits this year to quickly help companies compete with foreign rivals, according to EU diplomats and draft conclusions for a summit of EU leaders. The move could, however, allow firms to increase emissions.  

The plan responds to pressure from countries including Italy, Poland and the Czech Republic to loosen the EU’s flagship climate change policy, the Emissions Trading System (ETS), when the Commission presents a revision of the scheme in mid-July.

Under the ETS, heavy industries have to buy permits to emit CO2, providing an incentive to emit as little as possible. But there is also a pool of CO2 permits firms get for free, and the Commission now intends to add to this allocation, despite opposition from some member states.

Draft conclusions for Thursday’s EU summit, seen by Reuters, show EU leaders would endorse a plan for the Commission to present “a separate proposal to address concerns expressed by some industrial sectors on ETS benchmarks”, alongside the overall revision of the ETS.

Diplomats told Reuters the cryptic wording referred to a deal done in Brussels earlier this week, in which the Commission agreed to propose quick changes to the rules determining how many free emissions permits the EU gives industries based on heat production and fuel use, called “fall-back benchmarks”.

An EU document published on Monday confirmed the Commission had agreed to put forward “a separate proposal aimed at increasing the free allocation determined on the basis of the fall-back benchmarks”.

The document said the deal would apply from 1 January 2026, which means that chemicals producers, refineries and other CO2 emitters could receive extra free CO2 permits this year.

A Commission spokesperson confirmed the details in the public document and declined to comment further. 

Reporting by Kate Abnett, Editing by William Maclean