The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has called for global concerted action to control a new mpox outbreak, announcing a response plan that will require at least $135 million over the next six months.
"Let me be clear: this new mpox outbreak can be controlled and can be stopped," Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a speech to WHO member states on Friday, later posted on social media platform X.
"Responding to this complex outbreak requires a comprehensive and coordinated international response," he said.
Transmission is mainly centred in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where there have been more than 16,000 suspected cases, including 575 deaths, this year alone.
The surge is being driven by two separate outbreaks of two strains of the mpox virus, or clades, in different parts of the country.
The rapid spread of a new offshoot, clade 1b, was the main reason behind his decision to declare mpox a global public health emergency on August 14.
Hundreds of thousands of people in Australia's Queensland state were without power on Sunday after Alfred, a downgraded tropical cyclone, brought damaging winds and heavy rains, sparking flood warnings.
An Israeli airstrike killed two Palestinians in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday, medical sources said, as mediators pushed ahead with talks to extend a shaky 42-day ceasefire agreed in January between Israel and Hamas.
Toronto Police said early on Saturday they were searching for three male suspects in a shooting that injured at least 12 people at a pub in the Canadian city.
Ex-tropical cyclone Alfred lingered off the south-east Australian coast on Saturday and forecasters said Brisbane is likely to miss the worst of the storm, a relief for millions of residents in the region who have been staying indoors.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol walked out of a detention centre in Seoul on Saturday after prosecutors decided not to appeal a court decision to cancel the impeached leader's arrest warrant on insurrection charges.