The United Nations said Friday that the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed more than 2,500 people and is spreading faster than any outbreak of the disease on record. Julien Harneis, the UN’s senior Ebola coordinator, said the epidemic is “growing faster and wider” than the international response, covering an area now larger than France, with the money designated for containment expected to run out within weeks if additional funding doesn’t arrive. Al Jazeera has the report from Friday.
The pace is the thing. The death toll crossed 2,000 on August 11. More than half of those deaths came in the twenty days before that. In the ten days since August 11, another 500 people have died. This outbreak has now surpassed the 2018-2020 Kivu epidemic, which killed more than 2,200 people over two years, to become the deadliest in Congo’s history. The strain involved, the Bundibugyo virus, has no approved vaccine.
In 2014, when Ebola moved through Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, the World Health Organization waited several months before declaring a public health emergency of international concern. That delay became one of the case studies in global health response: a funding gap identified early, acted on late, and the cost measured in lives. The WHO has had the declaration in place for this outbreak since earlier this year. Harneis said Friday that the declaration hasn’t been enough. The response is still not keeping pace. That distinction matters.
On August 7, in Mecca, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed a mutual defense agreement committing each country to treat an attack on any one of them as an attack on all three. Egypt is in discussions about joining. The United States wasn’t at the signing. Foreign Policy reported on the pact and what it delivers.
On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance said the conflict with Iran has entered a “new phase” of economic pressure. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC on Wednesday that the measures to follow would amount to “the greatest coordinated economic isolation in the history of the world,” with details promised Monday. Iran said any new U.S. pressure would be met with a “devastating” response. CBS News reported on the exchange.
The two stories are part of the same picture. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan built a new security framework while the United States was pursuing an Iran strategy that those three countries aren’t formally part of. The Council on Foreign Relations published an assessment this week titled, without irony, “The U.S.-Led Middle East Order Is Over.” That analysis is here. Whether the Mecca pact holds depends on whether the interests that produced it hold, and that’s a different calculation for Riyadh, Ankara, and Islamabad than it is for Washington.
On August 19, the national debt crossed $40 trillion. The Treasury Department confirmed the figure Wednesday. It’s the kind of number that has stopped functioning as a number, and what remains useful is the rate at which it grew. The Washington Post reported on the milestone.
The debt crossed $38 trillion in October 2025. It hit $39 trillion in March 2026. It crossed $40 trillion this week. Five months between each of those last three markers. The debt has doubled in ten years and quadrupled in twenty. The Supreme Court’s ruling striking down the administration’s tariff structure required the Treasury to refund more than $100 billion in import taxes collected under authority the court found the administration didn’t have. That refund moved the calendar forward by several months.
In 1981, when the debt crossed $1 trillion for the first time, the figure was treated as a historic threshold. It has since grown fortyfold. The $40 trillion milestone got a day of coverage and then moved down the page. At some point the arithmetic becomes unavoidable. What that point looks like isn’t clear. What’s clear is that it’s closer than it was on August 18.
Eight people were killed Thursday when a charter aircraft went down near Cape Newenham, a remote radar installation in western Alaska, approximately 450 miles southwest of Anchorage. The Cessna 441, operated by Security Aviation of Anchorage, had departed Anchorage and was near its destination when it crashed around 12:15 p.m. local time. Two of those killed were U.S. Army Corps of Engineers employees. The National Transportation Safety Board is leading the investigation. NPR reported on the crash.
A 6.7 magnitude earthquake struck the Ayacucho region of southern Peru on Thursday afternoon, centered 38 kilometers northwest of Upahuacho. Two people were injured. Twenty-two homes, six schools, and twelve medical centers sustained damage in Parinacochas province. The quake was felt across five regions of the country, including Lima. A 4.2 aftershock followed at 4:30 p.m. The USGS and regional news have the details.
In the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, specialist cave divers pulled a man alive from an unexplored underwater cave system on Tuesday, fifteen days after he disappeared inside it. The man, a fisherman whose name hadn’t been released as of Friday morning, entered the cave on August 6 and didn’t return. Divers pushed into unmapped passages until they found him alive in an air pocket with room to stand. He was dehydrated. He was alive.
The underwater cave systems beneath Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula are among the largest on earth. Divers have been mapping them for four decades and haven’t finished. A man went into the dark and other people went in after him and found him. That’s the story as it happened.
