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Middle East crisis: Rubio says ‘some progress’ on US-Iran deal after Trump says ‘maybe we’ll just have to finish the job’ – as it happened

Donald Trump suggested there is still hope for a deal with Iran, but added that the US might have “to just finish the job” if they’re not satisfied with it. “We’re not satisfied with it. But we will be - either that or we’ll have to just finish the job,” he told a cabinet meeting on Wednesday. He later added that he could, “make a good deal now but maybe not a great deal, and if it’s not a great deal, we’re not making it.” His secretary of state Marco Rubio said there has been “some progress” made in talks, but added, “we’ll see over the next few hours and days whether progress can be made.” He reiterated that Washington would “prefer the negotiated, diplomatic route and we’re going to give it every chance to succeed”, but also warned that Trump has “other options available ... if that doesn’t work”. The sentiment was echoed by Trump’s defense secretary Pete Hegseth. Trump also issued an extraordinary threat to “blow up” Oman. Asked about reports that Iran and Oman are negotiating a deal to jointly manage the strait of Hormuz, the US president told reporters: “Oman will behave just like everybody else. Or else we’ll have to blow them up, they understand that, they’ll be fine.” The US president also insisted that November’s midterm elections are not motivating him to reach a deal to end his war more quickly. He once again dismissed Americans’ concerns over the cost of living as a result of his war, declaring: “I don’t care about the midterms.” He went on: “The primary urgency is that we can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.” Earlier, the White House blasted an Iranian state television report about a framework deal with the United States to end the Middle East war as a “complete fabrication”. The Iranian report cited a draft outline of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that it said included a US commitment to lift the naval blockade on Iran and withdraw its forces from the Gulf region. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said a return to war with the United States was unlikely, while warning that the Islamic republic stood ready against any attack. The statement came a day after Iran accused the US of breaching the ceasefire in place since April, and warned it was ready to retaliate after the most serious strikes since the truce took effect. Meanwhile in Lebanon, where Israel continues to wage war despite a ceasefire, Israeli airstrikes hit the outskirts of the southern city of Tyre on Wednesday, state media and an AFP correspondent reported, after the Israeli army issued an evacuation warning for swathes of the city and its surroundings. The state-run National News Agency (NNA) said that “Israeli enemy warplanes launched a strike on the outskirts of Tyre”, also reporting another raid near the city despite a ceasefire. The Lebanese army said a soldier had been killed in an Israeli air strike near his post in Bekaa and that it had retrieved his body. It said the retrieval was delayed from the previous day due to the security situation in the area. Hezbollah said it traded fire with Israeli soldiers in Lebanon as the Israeli military pushes deeper intp the country. The Iran-backed group said its fighters engaged in close-range combat with Israeli troops in Zawtar al-Sharqiyah, a town north of the Litani river and beyond the buffer zone that Israel has enforced in parts of southern Lebanon. Israeli airstrikes killed at least 31 people in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, according to health officials, in one of the deadliest attacks since a ceasefire took effect in April. The Israeli prime minister. Benjamin Netanyahu, said he had instructed the military to expand its operations in Lebanon with “large forces on the ground” and take control of new areas north of the Israeli-held buffer zone.

Israeli military tells residents of swathe of southern Lebanon to leave

Israel’s military has told residents across a swathe of southern Lebanon to leave and head north, as the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said his forces were escalating their offensive against Hezbollah. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a post on social media that all areas south of the Zahrani River, which runs about 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of the de facto Israel-Lebanon border, were considered combat zones. “In light of the repeated violations of the ceasefire agreement by the terrorist organisation Hezbollah, the IDF will act against it with great force,” the military’s Arabic-language spokesman, Avichay Adraee, wrote on X. The warning late on Wednesday was the first since a ceasefire that took effect on 17 April, and came a day after Israel launched more than 120 airstrikes against Lebanon in one of the heaviest days of bombing in weeks. The ceasefire brokered by the US last month now appears close to total collapse, complicating negotiations to bring a definitive end to the US-Israeli war with Iran. Tehran, which has a close relationship with Hezbollah, has repeatedly signalled that an end to Israel’s offensive in Lebanon is a condition of any deal with Washington. Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that Iran wanted to make a deal, but that the US was not satisfied with it yet. “Iran is very much intent, they want very much to make a deal,” he said. “So far they haven’t gotten there … we’re not satisfied with it, but we will be. We will be either that or we’ll have to just finish the job.” Observers said Israeli officials and military commanders wanted to inflict as much damage as possible on Hezbollah before a deal between Tehran and Washington imposed new limits on or stopped the current offensive. Israel’s military said it targeted 100 sites linked to Hezbollah across southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa valley area, including storage facilities, command centres and observation points that Israeli officials say are used to attack troops and residents in northern Israel. Lebanon’s national news agency said at least 10 people, including women and children, were killed in one strike on the town of Burj al-Shamali in southern Lebanon, while another strike on the eastern village of Mashghara killed 12 people including several members of the same family. Netanyahu said in a statement that the Israeli military was “operating with large forces in the field and capturing and controlling areas”. “We are fortifying the security strip to protect the northern communities [in Israel],” Netanyahu said in a reference to a self-declared security zone occupied by Israeli troops several kilometres inside southern Lebanon. The veteran Israeli leader, who faces a tough battle for re-election later this month, is under pressure to show results against Hezbollah, especially as few of the apparent aims of the war Israel launched with Iran in February have been achieved. Politicians and commenters in Israel have called in recent days for Netanyahu to ignore any pressure from Washington to limit its military operations in Lebanon. Writing in the Maariv newspaper, Avi Ashkenazi called for “sustained around-the-clock attack waves of strikes using hundreds of aircraft simultaneously”. “The ground in Lebanon must tremble. Residents of Beirut, Tyre and Sidon must sit in shelters just as residents of [Israel’s] north are being forced to remain confined to their homes,” he wrote. Beirut has so far been spared Israeli strikes since the start of the ceasefire, but the prospect of an escalation of the offensive has caused widespread concern. “By just saying a few words on TV, [Netanyahu] causes everyone to panic and flee their homes,” said Tony Aboud in Beirut’s bustling Hamra district. “I don’t know what’s going to happen and how long we can live like this.” There were reports on Wednesday of new fighting in southern Lebanon between Israeli troops and Hezbollah. Hezbollah said its fighters clashed with Israeli forces in a town north of the strategic Litani River in southern Lebanon – the current de facto boundary in Lebanon, with large areas to the south under Israeli military control. Strikes hit the outskirts of the southern city of Tyre on Wednesday, state media and an Agence France-Presse correspondent reported, after the Israeli army issued an evacuation warning for much of the city and its surroundings. Israel’s military has ordered residents not to return to dozens of villages in the buffer zone it is seeking to establish between five and 10 kilometres into Lebanon, where its troops have been destroying homes. An Israeli military official said the military was “operating in a targeted manner beyond the Forward Defense Line in order to remove direct threats to the citizens of the state of Israel [and Israeli soldiers]”. In recent weeks, Hezbollah has boasted that it was using new fibre-optic drones, which Israeli troops have struggled to intercept, hitting Israeli forces and northern Israeli villages. Israel has told people there not to gather in large numbers. On Wednesday, air raid sirens were activated in the area of Shlomi in the western Galilee after reports of a drone infiltration. “What this requires of us now is to increase the blows, to increase the intensity. We will smite them hip and thigh,” Netanyahu said earlier this week. Over 1 million people in Lebanon have been displaced in the latest round of hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, which began when the Islamist movement fired rockets into northern Israel in March, two days after Israel launched strikes against Tehran which killed the then Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. At least 3,213 people have been killed in Israeli strikes since the start of the war, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry, with more than 9,700 wounded. According to Netanyahu’s office, 23 Israeli soldiers and a defence contractor have been killed in or near southern Lebanon, and two civilians have been killed in northern Israel. The Israeli military said that 10 of its soldiers had been killed since the 16 April ceasefire, six of them by Hezbollah’s explosive drones. Hezbollah has not released figures for its own casualties. Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said the military had killed Mohammed Odeh, the new leader of Hamas’ military wing, during airstrikes in Gaza City, less than two weeks after killing his predecessor. At least five people were killed and 12 injured, according to local hospitals. Reuters, Agence France-Presse and Associated Press contributed to this report

Lifting of internet restrictions reveals Iranians’ anger over food inflation

The partial lifting of internet restrictions in Iran has revealed a rising tide of anger about food price inflation as ordinary Iranians decry annual price increases of 308% for vegetable oil, 190% for chicken, and 170% for rice. Iranian authorities on Tuesday began restoring the connection to the global internet that was severed on the first day of the US-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic on 28 February, as it had been during mass protests in January. Connectivity remained patchy on Wednesday, with mobile internet still largely disconnected and many sites remaining restricted. But even the partial restoration was enough to reveal an outpouring of anger over price inflation and food shortages. “Everything is so expensive. It has become a disaster,” wrote one user on social media. “You leave the market with a broken heart after spending all your savings. It is unbearable. We have no patience left to lead a normal life.” President Masoud Pezeshkian, who has been given some credit for lifting the internet restrictions, blamed the US for Iran’s economic woes, saying Washington “had moved to economic warfare after failing to bring the government down”. In a lengthy statement, the ministry of intelligence revealed its concerns that internet freedom could be used for “cognitive warfare”, warning that Iran’s adversaries aimed to “incite protesters and drag them on to the streets”. It said: “The enemy, defeated on the military front, now focuses its efforts on soft warfare, cognitive warfare, and social provocations.” The government announced the launch of a “resistance economy committee” to crack down on price gouging and address surging shortages, but hyperinflation is now endemic in Iran owing to trade sanctions, exchange rate pressure, and moves taken to reduce subsidies given to traders in January. Data from the International Monetary Fund showed food inflation had risen to between 140% and 200%, pushing overall inflation to 70%. Support for continuing internet restrictions was put at just 9% in a survey published on Wednesday. In an attempt to forestall support for Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah, government backers tried to flood the internet with claims directed at “youngsters returning to the internet” that Pahlavi had openly applauded the attacks mounted by Israel and the US. Others expressed simple relief that they could now talk to the wider world. The human rights activist Emadeddin Baghi wrote: “Three bloody months have passed, but not for those who lost a loved one or had their home destroyed. In this period our voices found no echo except on some internal platforms and to the best of our ability we spoke and wrote in defence of the rights of the voiceless.” The prominent rapper Toomaj Salehi, who was sentenced to death in 2024 for supporting protests in 2022 but was later released, said being connected to the internet was “not a favour to us – it is our right. And without filters as well. “Like free elections, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of parties, and many other freedoms, these are our rights and not favours,” he wrote on X.

Nearly half a million Russians killed in Ukraine war, UK spy chief says

Nearly half a million Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine since the start of Vladimir Putin’s invasion more than four years ago, according to a new estimate from the head of the British spy agency GCHQ. Anne Keast-Butler, the chief of the electronic intelligence agency, said in her first speech in the job that Russian forces were “going backwards on the battlefield” inside Ukraine for the first time since late 2022. She then offered a new Russian death toll estimate, which was higher than a recent estimate of 352,000, calculated by the exiled media outlets Meduza and Mediazona, who extrapolated their total from official probate records. Keast-Butler said there was “new intelligence showing that almost half a million Russian soldiers have now been killed since the conflict began”. An exact figure was not given, though the estimate is understood to be close to that total. Ukraine has been trying to lift the number of Russian soldiers it kills or seriously wounds above Moscow’s ability to raise new recruits in an attempt to halt more than three years of slow losses of territory in the east of the country. Russian casualties, killed and wounded, have been estimated by the west to be running at around 30,000 a month during April. This month, Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said that, of those, 15,000 to 20,000 a month were killed. The high casualty rates reflect Russia’s continued attempts to capture the eastern Donbas region, as demanded by President Vladimir Putin. Exact recruitment figures are hard to obtain but the economist Janis Kluge estimated Russia was recruiting around 800 to 1,000 a day, between 25,000 and 31,000 a month. Keast-Butler told an audience at Bletchley Park that GCHQ was “working tirelessly” to degrade and reduce the Russian threat to the UK and in Europe, warning, as trailed a day earlier, that Russia was relentlessly targeting Britain’s infrastructure and democracy. “One area in sharp focus for us is protecting the data and energy flowing through the critical cables and pipelines in and around British waters – we do this by exposing Russia’s intent, motive and underwater capabilities,” Keast-Butler said. In April, John Healey, the defence secretary, said a British warship and aircraft had tracked Russian Akula and Gugi submarines trying to survey undersea infrastructure in the north Atlantic, in a month-long operation. Keast-Butler said “no nation can face these threats alone” then mounted a defence of an 80-year-old UK-US intelligence sharing relationship at a time when the transatlantic alliance has been under acute political strain. It was, she said, “a powerful and robust partnership that remains fundamental for the security of both our countries”, and the “strongest intelligence alliance in the world”, paving the way for the Five Eyes alliance with the addition of Australia, Canada and New Zealand. During the spring, Donald Trump repeatedly voiced his unhappiness with Keir Starmer for not being willing to join the US-Israeli war on Iran launched at the end of February. Close cooperation continues between GCHQ and its US equivalent, the National Security Agency. The agencies are working together to develop security algorithms able to withstand attacks from ultra-fast quantum computers, which are expected to become operational in a few years. “Quantum computers will be able to complete, in a matter of seconds, tasks that currently take years,” Keast-Butler said. “That includes defeating the codes and encryption that keeps our secrets safe today. So we must protect our most critical systems from future quantum attacks.”

Carlo Petrini obituary

On 20 April 1986, Carlo Petrini was part of a group who cooked and distributed spaghetti to passers-by in Piazza di Spagna in Rome. The huge pot of pasta was their response to the opening, the previous month, of the biggest McDonald’s in the world just metres from where they stood. For Petrini and fellow members of Arcigola, a group dedicated to the pleasures of food and shared political ideals, the opening of McDonald’s in the centre of Rome represented an attack on Italian culinary identity, local biodiversity and the natural rhythms of life: the spaghetti was a declaration of resistance. A few months laters, during a meeting over dinner at Osteria dell’Unione in Treiso, Piedmont, in north-west Italy, the group came up with the idea of trying to stem the fast food invasion, whose single value was profit. The essayist Folco Portinari, then head of the Rai TV company, wrote the text, while Petrini gathered signatures, and on 3 November 1987, a manifesto was published on the front page of Gambero Rosso, a supplement of the communist newspaper Il Manifesto. The manifesto began with the title “A proposal aimed at all those who want to live better” and then gave a name to what they saw as the way to achieve this: “Slow Food”. The words that followed were both simple and revolutionary: a call to defend the pleasure of food, food biodiversity and local producers against the standardisation of the global agri-food industry. The page was illustrated with a snail, a symbol of productive tranquillity, the manifesto signed by 13 writers, intellectuals and artists. Following its publication and the creation of Arcigola-Slow Food, local groups known as convivia began to emerge all over Italy. Marjorie Shaw, an early member of the Rome convivium that met in an insalubrious hall in San Lorenzo, remembers how farmers, journalists, cooks, teachers and students gathered around a table, animated by the sense that something culturally fragile was at stake. Petrini’s Slow Food revolution had begun. Two years later, in Paris, more than 20 delegations from around the world signed the official Slow Food manifesto, and Petrini was elected president of the movement – a role he held until 2022, by which time Slow Food was a global network active in more than 160 countries, with 1,500 local branches and youth programmes, 6,000 products protected by the Ark of Taste catalogue, a publishing house and more than 600 Slow Food “presidia” intended to reintroduce supply chains, animal breeds, and plant varieties at serious risk of extinction. What Petrini created was a global system built around three words – good, clean and fair – that offered new ways of thinking about food: not merely as a source of nourishment, but as a matter of environmental sustainability, cultural identity and social justice. Carlo, known to many by the affectionate diminutive Carlin, was born in Bra, a town in Piedmont. His father, Giuseppe, a communist from a family of railway workers, who had spent several years in a Russian concentration camp after the second world war, was an auto electrician; his mother, Maria (nee Garombo), a schoolteacher from a farming background. Following his parents’ wishes, Carlo gave up an academic education for professional training, and enrolled in a technical institute for mechanics. Far better suited to humanities, he failed the mechanical components, recalling the comments following his oral exam as: “Petrini, can you promise never to become a mechanical engineer?” He enthusiastically agreed. He did, though, work alongside his father in order to support his studies in sociology, attending evening classes in Turin and travelling to Trento University for exams. In a 2025 interview Petrini described missing four of his final exams because there was too much to do; how he returned to Bra to open a grocery shop; became involved with the independent Radio Bra Onde Rosse and local politics; and wrote his first articles about gastronomy for the communist newspapers I’Unità and Il Manifesto. He became a political and cultural organiser within Arci (the Italian Recreational and Cultural Association), and then was a co-founder with Silvio Barbero of Arcigola. In 1996 Slow Food organised the first Salone del Gusto, a biannual food and wine Expo that brought together food artisans from all over the world in Turin. In 2004 the Salone gained a new dimension in the form of Terra Madre – mother Earth – a gathering aimed at giving a voice to those often marginalised in the global food system. Speaking about the need for Terra Madre, Petrini stressed the importance of food education in a post-industrial society where the transmission of knowledge from generation to generation is no longer physical, and of considering the act of eating as both an agricultural and a political gesture. An environmentalist who isn’t a gastronome is sad; a gastronome who isn’t an environmentalist is foolish, he would say. Later, Petrini would express the same dedication to Orti in Africa, a network cultivating thousands of sustainable community gardens across the African continent, to Slow Food projects in Mexico, to his role as UN special ambassador for Zero Hunger in Europe, and to the challenge to GM foods. In 2004 education was placed firmly at the centre of Slow Food with the creation of the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, near Bra, the first academic institution in the world to offer an interdisciplinary approach to food studies, an achievement Petrini acknowledged as being a particular source of pride. Since its founding, 5,000 students from 100 countries have graduated and are now scattered across the world, young people carrying ideas forward and planting – “those who sow utopia, reap reality,” said Petrini. His key principles have guided my own exploration of Italian food for almost two decades, while The Slow Food Osteria Guide has ensured that I can always find a good lunch. Encountering hundreds of Petrini’s students, on farms, running bakeries, volunteering, writing, organising, believing they can make a change and for the process to be a pleasure has been inspiring. One of them, Edward Mukiibi, a tropical agronomist from Uganda, who succeeded Petrini as the president of Slow Food. A diagnosis of prostate cancer followed Petrini’s decision to step aside from that role in 2022, but he continued to travel in order to listen and communicate about food, always returning to his home in Bra, where he lived with his younger sister, Chiara, who survives him. He also continued to write, adding to his dozens of published books, which included A Taste for Change (2023), with the economist Gaël Giraud, and Terrafutura (2020), in which Petrini addressed some of the most problematic aspects of our time in dialogue with Pope Francis, with whom he shared friendship and respect, a sense of humour, and hope for a world in which everyone has food that is good, clean and fair. • Carlo Petrini, activist and writer, born 22 June 1949; died 21 May 2026

UK will get no special treatment from EU, European ministers say

The UK will get no special treatment in its future economic relationship with the EU, European ministers have said, in a further blow to Keir Starmer’s hopes of negotiating a single market for goods. The EU’s ministers for Europe, who met on Tuesday, said they wanted deeper cooperation with the UK, but this had to be in line with fundamental principles, including no cherrypicking of EU policies, according to three diplomatic sources, who spoke about the private discussions. The Guardian revealed last week that the government had pitched the creation of a single market for goods between the UK and EU to Brussels, but the proposal was rejected by EU officials. A single market for goods, long hinted at by the prime minister and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, would be a radical departure for the EU. Since the Brexit vote nearly a decade ago EU leaders have said that the single market encompassed four freedoms: free movement of goods, services, capital and people. Europe ministers had no appetite for the British proposal of free movement of goods only, although the idea was only briefly mentioned at Tuesday’s meeting, EU sources said. “Member states reaffirmed the established legal framework underpinning the relationship and negotiations, with continued emphasis on the indivisibility of the four freedoms, balance of right and obligations, autonomy of EU decision making and the avoidance of cherrypicking,” an EU diplomat said. The diplomat said the EU commissioner in charge of UK relations, Maroš Šefčovič, had concluded “that the EU remains united in its ambition to deepen ties, while the UK’s red lines are increasingly constraining progress”. The European Commission declined to comment. France has said it would be willing to welcome the UK back to the European single market and customs union, reflecting the changed geopolitical landscape since Brexit. EU officials have also stressed that a customs union or alignment with the single market remains available to the UK. But some member states are sceptical about the UK’s willingness to be a rule taker. Joining the single market, minus EU membership, would leave the UK without a vote when new rules are being drawn up. A second EU diplomat said the relationship with the UK was “the best that we have had in a very long time” but “the UK still wants to have the cake and eat it”. EU member states, the person said, “value and cherish” stable relations and want to work with the UK, but “this does not mean the UK and the EU are equal partners”. Questions are growing about Starmer’s reset with the EU, with no date announced for a long-expected EU-UK summit, which is tentatively pencilled in for 13 July. The summit is meant to finalise a sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) agreement to ease trade in food, drink and farm products, an accord on linking emissions trading systems (ETS), and a youth experience scheme enabling young Europeans to work, study and travel across the UK and the EU. It is also seen as a moment to launch a future agenda for cooperation, with both sides interested in deepening ties on defence. Asked about the future EU-UK relationship, Ireland’s Europe minister, Thomas Byrne, told reporters: “We have matters to agree now: the ETS, SPS and youth experience scheme. Let’s focus on them before we get on to any other discussions, which also present difficulties. We certainly want to be as open as possible in the relationship.” Asked specifically about the UK’s single market for goods proposal, he said: “It presents challenges.”

WHO chief calls for DRC ceasefire to tackle Ebola outbreak

The head of the World Health Organization has called for an immediate ceasefire in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo to help tackle the Ebola outbreak there, as Uganda closed its border with its neighbour in an effort to stop the spread. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posted on social media that the region was in the midst of a “catastrophic collision of disease and conflict with the Ebola outbreak in Ituri province outpacing the response”. Tedros said on Monday that he would travel to the DRC this week. As of Sunday there had been 900 suspected cases and 223 suspected Ebola deaths in the DRC and seven confirmed cases and one death in Uganda, WHO data shows. The outbreak was confirmed on 15 May in Ituri, the DRC’s most north-eastern province, which borders South Sudan and Uganda. Diana Atwine, a senior Ugandan health official, told a press conference on Wednesday that Uganda’s border would be closed for four weeks, except to Ebola response teams, humanitarian and security operations and food and cargo transport. Any person who was authorised to enter Uganda from the DRC would be required to undergo mandatory self-isolation for 21 days, she said. Earlier this month, the WHO advised countries against closing their borders, saying it would push people to use informal border crossings, making it harder to monitor and stop the spread of the disease. Eastern DRC has a number of armed groups. Though the government still largely controls Ituri, insecurity had been worsening there before the Ebola outbreak. Almost 1 million people in the province have been displaced by conflict, according to the UN humanitarian office. The outbreak has spread south to rebel-held areas of North Kivu and South Kivu provinces, where the Rwandan-backed M23 group controls large swathes of the region. Tedros said: “Stopping this Ebola transmission depends entirely on humanitarian access. Yet ongoing clashes are driving mass displacement, pushing exposed contacts into overcrowded camps and severing critical containment corridors. “Frontline workers are risking everything, while attacks on health facilities make tracking cases and their contacts nearly impossible. We cannot build community trust or isolate the sick while bombs are falling. We urge all warring parties to agree to an immediate ceasefire to contain this outbreak.” The response to the outbreak has been complicated by the transient nature of many communities in Ituri, where goldmines attract migrant workers, as well as by international aid cuts. Philippe Guiton, the DRC director of the aid organisation World Vision, said: “For children, the risks are especially acute. Years of conflict have weakened community systems, and acute malnutrition has left many young bodies too fragile to withstand a virus as aggressive as Ebola.” The response has also been hindered by attacks on health facilities by people wanting authorities to release Ebola victims’ bodies for burial. Traditionally, burials involve families washing and touching the body. However, the bodies of Ebola victims are highly contagious and have been a key vector for spreading the disease in previous outbreaks in the region. On Saturday and Sunday, people attacked a hospital in Mongbwalu, in Ituri. Its medical director, Dr Richard Lokodu, told Reuters that 18 Ebola patients fled the facility on Saturday when “unidentified individuals” burned tents where patients were being isolated. On Sunday, seven more patients fled and an individual suspected of having Ebola died haemorrhaging in the attempt, he said. In Uganda, all seven confirmed cases were reported in Kampala, the WHO said. They included a driver who had transported another case; a Congolese woman who had travelled to Uganda for medical care; a Congolese health worker who worked with other Congolese people seeking healthcare in Uganda; and two Ugandan health workers who had cared for an Ebola patient. Reuters contributed to this report.

Zelenskyy asks Trump for help with air defences as Russia continues attacks – as it happened

… and on that note, it’s a wrap for today! Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has asked the United States for more ammunition for its Patriot air defence systems to counter Russian ballistic missiles (15:48). The request came in a letter written by Zelenskyy to the US president, Donald Trump, and the US Congress, arguing that Ukraine needs to be ready to defend itself amid continuing attacks from Moscow. Belgium has become the latest country to summon Russia’s ambassador over the Russian threats to strike Kyiv, after similar moves by Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the EU earlier this week (17:01). Separately, the head of the UK’s spy agency GCHQ Anne Keast-Butler said that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is “going backwards on the battlefield” in Ukraine, with “almost half a million Russian soldiers” killed since the conflict began (16:22). In other news, Iceland’s foreign minister has said she fears her country faces a “Brexit moment” in its looming EU referendum amid warnings over misinformation, foreign interference and AI (13:53). Lawmakers in Hungary have voted overwhelmingly for the country to remain a member of the international criminal court, reversing a decision made by the previous government of Viktor Orbán (15:27). Climate scientists have warned of “new reality” of heat extremes in Europe as the May heatwave continues across the continent (10:58, 14:39). Spanish police entered the ruling Socialist Party’s headquarters in Madrid on a judicial order to gather information on a possible illegal financing scheme (10:03), as the country’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez faces an anxious time as scrutiny grows over his family, party, administration and allies (10:30, 12:06). If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com. I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.