đIn Sudan, the war, like any other war, is against women; The world says we will end AIDS by 2030; Cannabis sales on a high
#610 | Ebola crosses the 1000 mark; Europe plays the floor is lava; Israel can't stop killing kids
Hello, and welcome back to The Kable. Weâre writing this issue from Goa, India where this week the rains have finally caught up with the calendar and the world is beginning to look pretty again. But enough of that delusion. Letâs dive back into the real world.
And the truth there is that Ebola is on a non-stop rampage. Confirmed cases in DRC have crossed 1000, with the latest report from Congolese health authorities pegging it at 1,155 cases, including 304 deaths. 37 new cases and âfive â new deaths just 24 hours after the previous update. No new cases have been reported from Uganda or anywhere else in Africa but France did report its first case in a doctor who returned from DRC, after having arrived as part of a humanitarian mission and spending one month in Ituri. Now ordinarily, we salute people who perform humanitarian service, especially when done truly altruistically. However, this doctor boarded a commercial flight to France when symptomatic - almost asymptomatic, according to authorities, which we believe is French for bullshit. So now, not only is this one doctor diagnosed, everybody else on that flight needs to be traced and monitored and potentially their contacts too. Très bien. Anyhoo, after this case was reported in France, authorities in DRC have tightened domestic and international travel rules.
In other Ebola news, the Africa CDC said the earlier $518 million estimate it had worked out with the WHO may not be enough to combat this outbreak. The agencyâs new estimate is $1.4 billion. However, at the rate this outbreak is spreading, combined with the slow rate at which pledged funding is actually coming in, weâre pretty confident that number may not be enough either. In Kenya, the government said it is pausing a planned facility to quarantine Americans exposed to Ebola. The WHO said it is deploying antivirals from Mapp and Gilead in a trial to see if either drug can reduce mortality in patients, either used individually or in combination. The drugs are coming, thanks to donations from the US and Gilead, surprising on both counts. Elsewhere, UNICEF and Gavi too have launched a joint call, asking manufacturers to pitch in for accelerated access vaccines for Bundibugyo.
With all of this happening in the Ebola front, one would think the world wouldnât have space for much more disastrous at the same time, right? Well, on Wednesday, two earthquakes - first, a magnitude 7.1 one, followed barely 40 seconds later by a magnitude 7.5 one, devastated Venezuela. On the same day, there were two other âlesserâ quakes - a magnitude 5.6 one in California, and a magnitude 6.9 one in Japan. But letâs stick with Venezuela because this was the strongest earthquake in over 125 years. Early estimates are at 235 lives lost, with more than 40,000 people still missing.
In Sudan, roughly around 8 months ago, the RSF took control of El Fasher, and the world was silent witness to everything that unfolded after. Ethnic cleansing, mass executions, forced displacement. Now, all of that history is looking very likely to be repeated in El Obeid, and once again, we will all bear silent witness.
A teeny-tiny bit of sunshine: at a UN meeting on HIV/AIDS earlier this week, countries were able to adopt a declaration to end AIDS as a menace to public health by 2030. Sure, it is just symbolic, and we are not gonna make AIDS less of a threat in four years. But it is good nevertheless to know that multilateral agencies can still get countries to pull together for a common cause, even in the face of the usual dissenters like the US, Israel, Russia, and five others and 14 abstentions.
In Australia, a second state has reported a case of bird flu, resulting in increased testing.
In France though, it is not bird flu but heat that is killing poultry by the hundreds of thousands. And people by the dozens. All as part of the heat wave roiling Europe. No ordinary heatwave this. France has already twice broken its record for hottest June day ever. In Switzerland, older people are flocking to movie halls to beat the heat. In the UK, they had to cancel a conference on climate change, because of climate change. Maybe Europe will now push to join the climate vulnerable countries list and maybe even support their push for a global funding framework.
One of the lesser-talked about facets of colonisation is how the English especially criminalised and taboofied any form of alternate sexuality in all the places they invaded in their quest for salt, spice, flavour and riches. And now, after a few decades of pretend-progressiveness, the UK government is back to its frigging friggishness, this week in the form of an act criminalising gender and sexuality conversion therapies.
In the US, not too long ago, all the establishment figures were talking about how they will no longer be subject to the tyranny of vaccines. Their âSecretary Of Warâ went on to make vaccines optional for military cadets because âMurrica wipes the floor with flu. Earlier this week, the flu shot was made mandatory for all recruits, thanks to a flu outbreak at a camp that, at last count, left at least 300 cadets wiping the floor, after possibly leaving all kinds of snot and snivel on it.
Was a time when techbros was a term exclusively reserved for one gender. Canât say that anymore. Regardless of gender, what hasnât changed is the obsession anybody that identifies as a techbro has with saving the world. OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Bill Gates are joining hands to pool $500 million into a new venture which wants to prevent the flu, and one day eliminate all respiratory viruses. Theyâve even already got all their acronyms in a row. Because all we needed was new air cleaning technologies to end respiratory viruses. Especially with money from industries already known to pollute air and water.
There was another announcement about fighting respiratory viruses on the same day, this time from the UK-based, fake-sounding but very real, Advanced Research + Invention Agency. This announcement actually has the legs to maybe effect some real change.
And finally, the US has been leaving no stone unturned in rolling back protections for endangered species on air, land, and water. But, at least, it is working with a âdeextinctionâ company to create a vault of genetic material from endangered and threatened species so that in 10,000 years, we can revive the dugong.
Stories Of The Week
War, and itâs always womenâs bodies on the line. A new UN human rights report sets out the scale and brutality of conflict-related sexual violence in Sudan since the war began in April 2023. Investigators verified 546 incidents across sixteen of the countryâs eighteen states, affecting at least 838 victims, all but fifteen of whom were women and girls. The report is explicit that these figures represent only a fraction of the true total, with stigma, displacement and the collapse of services leaving most cases undocumented. The violence has spread along the same routes as the conflict and the mass displacement it has caused, and has been used consistently to terrorise civilian populations.
The catalogue of abuses is extensive: rape and gang rape, sexual slavery, forced marriage, forced prostitution, sexual torture and trafficking. Almost a quarter of verified incidents involved gang rape, and in one case at least ten men raped a single girl. At least eighty-five women and girls were held in sexual slavery and forced into domestic labour or income generation. Most incidents were attributed to fighters in RSF uniforms, affiliated fighters and allied militias, though the national armed forces and other armed movements were also implicated. At least thirteen victims died, mostly following gang rape, and the youngest among them was nine years old.
The report identifies a clear ethnic dimension, with many Masalit victims from West Darfur reporting that attackers asked about their tribe before assaulting them. The UN finds reasonable grounds to believe that some of these acts, committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack on civilians, âmayâ (quotes ours) amount to crimes against humanity. It warns that without justice, victim-centred responses and serious efforts to address stigma, the prospects for peace and social cohesion in Sudan will be undermined for years to come, and it calls for independent investigations and accountability extending to those who held command responsibility.
(UN)
Target the kids. An independent UN commission of inquiry has concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces deliberately targeted Palestinian children, amounting to genocide and atrocity crimes in Gaza and war crimes in the occupied West Bank. The finding builds on the commissionâs earlier determination that genocide had been committed against the Palestinian population in Gaza, and states that the scale and systematic character of military operations have continued to produce death, injury and trauma among children. The report covers the period since late 2023, when an attack on Israel killed around 1,200 people and saw 250 taken hostage, followed by a war that has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians in the territory.
The commission reports that 20,000 children have been killed and a further 44,000 injured since October 2023. It documents children arrested and subjected to torture and other mistreatment in Israeli detention, with families left without information about their whereabouts, alongside the use of sexual violence against children. It points to the targeting of neonatal and maternity care, the destruction of schools and orphanages, and a blockade-driven starvation that has directly caused deaths. The commission stresses that the harm is not confined to those physically wounded, describing lasting and intergenerational psychological damage and a childhood that has, in its assessment, been erased.
The killing has not stopped under the âceasefireâ announced in October 2025. UNICEF reports that 265 Palestinian children have been killed in the eight months since, an average of one child a day during a period supposedly defined by restraint, with the children dying in their homes, in schools, and while playing football or fishing rather than in any battlefield. They were shot, bombed and struck by quadcopters, and the agency attributes more than 90% of these deaths to Israeli forces, citing shifting boundaries of occupation and a near-total absence of accountability. The child deaths form part of nearly 1,000 Palestinians killed and more than 3,100 injured since the ceasefire began. Conditions for survivors remain dire: no hospital in Gaza is fully operational, clean water is a daily uncertainty for 1.1 million children, nearly 1.9 million people have been displaced, and more than 770,000 children are experiencing heightened distress. Israeli authorities continue to block the spare parts and fuel needed to keep generators and water systems running.
The commission frames the targeting of children as an assault on the Palestinian peopleâs capacity to exist and to determine their own future, tying the survival and protection of children to the right of self-determination. It calls for an end to the violations, for Israel to end its presence in the occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem in line with the International Court of Justice advisory opinion, and for member states to uphold their legal obligations and prioritise accountability and access to justice. Heh.
(UN, UN)
Energy, energy, energy. Yet another SDG tracking report. Yet another shortfall. This time, it is with SDG 7: Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. The latest Tracking SDG 7 report finds that 655 million people worldwide still lack access to electricity, while around two billion continue to rely on polluting fuels for cooking. Sub-Saharan Africa carries a wildly disproportionate share of both deficits, with over 560 million people there living without electricity and roughly 970 million without clean cooking. Most regions are now close to universal access, but progress in Sub-Saharan Africa has slowed to the point where the pace of electrification would need to triple to hit the 2030 target. The rural electricity deficit in the region has actually grown since 2010, which is a striking direction of travel for a goal the world has formally committed to meeting.
However, unlike most recent reports, this report is not unrelievedly grim. Renewables now supply more than 30% of global electricity consumption, generating capacity has reached record levels, and off-grid solar and mini-grids are already serving hundreds of millions of people as a cost-effective route to access. The trouble is distribution. Generating capacity in low-income countries sits at 33.6 watts per person against 1,224 watts per person in high-income countries, a roughly thirty-sevenfold gap that rather punctures any narrative of shared progress. Affordability is the recurring obstacle, with many households unable to meet connection fees or wiring costs even where infrastructure exists.
Financing tells its own story. International public flows for clean energy to the poorest countries fell by 11% in a single year, and around 80% of what does arrive comes as debt, loaded onto economies already straining under the cost of borrowing. Clean cooking remains the largest gap of all, affecting a quarter of humanity and linked to roughly three million deaths a year from household air pollution, a burden that falls hardest on displaced populations and on the women and girls who spend their hours gathering fuel. The custodian agencies warn that on current trajectories the world will (surprise, surprise) miss this SDG entirely, and that closing the gap will require political will and grant-based support aimed squarely at the communities most at risk of being left behind.
(WHO)
Bottlenecks? What are bottlenecks? Many places around the world, historically and even today, are dealing with drug shortages leaving people resorting to shady marketplaces and alternative treatments for their various ailments. And then, there is this growth industry. The UNâs World Drug Report 2026 finds that traffickers are exploiting new technology and a generally unstable world to roll out novel products, test fresh routes and muscle into markets that were previously left alone. An estimated 331 million people used a drug in 2024, around 6.2% of the working-age population, up from 5.2% a decade earlier. Cannabis remains the runaway leader with 256 million users, trailed by opioids, amphetamines, cocaine and ecstasy. Innovation, that prized quality of legitimate enterprise, is flourishing here too: five times as many drug types turned up in seizures in 2024 as before 2000, and 755 new psychoactive substances were circulating, 118 of them appearing for the first time.
The product lines are shifting in revealing ways. Afghanistanâs 2022 opium ban has throttled plant-based supply, and the increases in Myanmar, Laos and Mexico have not made up the difference, so traffickers are pivoting towards synthetic opioids such as fentanyls and nitazenes, a turn that could permanently reshape the market and the harms that come with it. Methamphetamine has gone fully global, with seizures rising 13% a year on average and new footholds in the Middle East, Africa, parts of Europe and the Pacific Islands; the collapse of the captagon trade after the fall of the Assad regime appears to be nudging West Asian users towards meth instead. Cocaine production has more than quadrupled over ten years to beyond 4,000 tonnes in pure form, and supply may soon outpace even the expanding demand, which is precisely why the cartels are working so hard to open new customer bases in Africa and Asia. Cannabis use has climbed 40% in a decade, helped along by softening perceptions as legalisation spreads, with North America increasingly exporting to the rest of the world.
(UNODC)
Breakthroughs
Dirt strikes back. Good news, and for once it is not buried in a continent-sized caveat. A common soil bacterium has been hiding a whole pharmacy in plain sight. Researchers have found a so-called megacluster of genes in Streptomyces, one of the most studied bugs on the planet, that churns out five compounds at once, four antibiotics and a helper protein, all ganging up on different stages of the same essential metabolic pathway that bacteria need to grow. The pathway in question is the production of biotin, otherwise known as vitamin B7, which it turns out superbugs cannot live without. And because evolution spent who knows how many millennia perfecting this multi-pronged assault, the chemistry is already optimised, free of charge. The cherry on top is that hitting four targets in one pathway makes it fiendishly difficult for bacteria to wriggle out via resistance, which is rather the whole point given that drug-resistant infections are forecast to kill some 39 million people between 2025 and 2050.
The team confirmed the find by cloning a 65,808-base-pair stretch of DNA containing the whole cluster and dropping it into a lab strain to watch it work, then spotting the same arrangement conserved across several Streptomyces species, which suggests nature has been quietly running this combination therapy for ages while the pharmaceutical industry wrings its hands over why new antibiotics are so unprofitable. It is, frankly, a little humbling that the answer to one of medicineâs most expensive and intractable problems may have been sitting under everyoneâs feet, in the same genus that gave us streptomycin and the first real weapon against tuberculosis. There is the usual long road from petri dish to pharmacy, naturally, and nobody should start celebrating the death of the superbug just yet. But after a run of stories where the microbes are winning, it is genuinely cheering to report that the dirt has been keeping an ace up (down?) its sleeve (hole?), and that someone finally thought to look.
(Nature)
Bottom line
Setting the sky on fire. There is a special kind of genius in importing expensive gas to keep the lights on while simultaneously burning off vast quantities of the stuff at your own oilfields, and in 2025 the world managed it with real conviction. Global gas flaring rose for the third year in a row to 167 billion cubic metres, torching an estimated $54 billion worth of energy into the sky for no purpose whatsoever. To put the scale in perspective, that is nearly the entirety of Africaâs annual gas consumption and more than the LNG passing through the Persian Gulf in a year, set alight and waved goodbye to. Nine countries, including Russia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria and the United States, are responsible for over four-fifths of the bonfire while pumping nearly half the worldâs oil, which is at least a tidy correlation between producing the most and wasting the most.
The report shared by the World Bank is at pains to point out that the technology, policies, regulations and financing to capture this gas all exist and have done for years; what is missing is the will to bother. Ending routine flaring everywhere would cost somewhere between $70 and $100 billion, which is less than twice the value of the gas being wasted annually, making it one of the rare problems that pays for itself if anyone deigns to act. And action works when it happens: Kazakhstan has cut its flaring by 87% since 2012, including a further 16% in a single year, which rather demolishes the excuse that this is all too difficult. The rest is structural inertia, poor regulation and operators who simply do not treat the waste as their problem, with the bill, as ever, landing on the millions left short of reliable power while the flames keep climbing. Well.
(World Bank)
Long reads
The violence of climate change. How does climate change lead to an increase in FGM, you ask? The Conversation is here to answer that very question. One of those stories, which, once youâve read them, you wonder how it could ever have been any other way.
(The Conversation)
The mosquito migration. Gavi has a piece on the recent malaria outbreaks across Africa. Turns out the mosquito involved made its way from South Asia.
(Gavi)