The head of the United Nations health agency is visiting the epicentre of a deadly Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), urging local communities to lead the fight against a disease whose confirmed cases have nearly doubled in two days.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization (WHO) director-general, arrived in Bunia, the capital of Ituri province, on Saturday.

“The international community is involved under the leadership of the government of DRC, and at the same time, community ownership is important; that’s why we’re here to discuss with the community to see how the response is you know, running, and if there are challenges, to help,” Tedros told reporters.

“The communities understand the problems better, and they know the solution, as well.”

Congolese authorities say the number of confirmed cases in DRC reached 225 on Friday, nearly double the figure of 121 reported two days earlier.

The outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo virus, a rare and severe form of Ebola for which there is no approved vaccine or treatment.

The WHO has declared the outbreak a global health emergency, its highest level of alarm, and the medical NGO Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, calls it one of the fastest-spreading Ebola outbreaks ever recorded.

Authorities have also recorded 1,028 suspected cases and more than 220 suspected deaths in DRC, while the disease has crossed into neighbouring Uganda, which has recorded nine confirmed cases and one death.

Ebola was first identified in this part of central Africa in 1976; this is the DRC’s 17th outbreak.

Bundibugyo is one of three virus types behind most major epidemics; the deadliest, the Zaire Ebola virus, drove the 2014–2016 West Africa outbreak, the largest on record, with more than 28,000 cases.

“Nobody knows the true scale and severity of this outbreak,” MSF said, warning that the response has not kept pace.

The WHO has cautioned that the death rate could reach 30 to 50 percent – the range seen in the previous two Bundibugyo outbreaks – though the rate among confirmed cases so far has been lower.

Al Jazeera’s Alain Uaykani, reporting from the eastern Congolese city of Goma on Saturday, said DRC’s health ministry had expanded testing, contact tracing and monitoring, uncovering infections that might otherwise go unrecorded.

Help has begun to arrive

As the virus spreads rapidly, the European Union has sent medical supplies to Ituri, and the United States has pledged more than $112m.

Even so, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), the African Union’s health body, says global funding for the response has more than halved, from $498m to $219m.

The outbreak recorded its first confirmed recovery this week, and WHO is working with both DRC and Uganda to assess experimental drugs and a candidate vaccine.

Tedros, who met DRC’s Prime Minister Judith Suminwa Tuluka in Kinshasa before flying to Bunia, said he was confident the country, which has battled Ebola repeatedly, could again bring it under control.

Still, containing the disease is made harder by years of conflict in eastern DRC. Health teams in Ituri have come under attack from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an armed group linked to ISIL (ISIS), and from local ethnic militias. The virus has also reached North Kivu and South Kivu provinces, where the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group controls major cities.

Anger over strict rules for handling victims’ bodies, which clash with local burial customs, has fuelled at least three attacks on health centres.

Regional countries are meanwhile on alert. Both Uganda and Rwanda have shut their borders with DRC, while Washington has barred most travellers who have recently visited DRC, Uganda or South Sudan.

The WHO advises against such steps, and Tedros has dismissed border closures as ineffective, arguing they discourage countries from reporting outbreaks openly.

Health ministers from the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an eight-nation East African bloc, met this week and agreed to redirect about $7m towards prevention across the region.

A US plan to open an Ebola quarantine centre in Kenya for exposed Americans was suspended by a Kenyan court this week after a rights group, the Katiba Institute, challenged it.

Africa CDC has also objected, warning the facility would strain Kenya’s health system, while Kenyan officials defended it as an international obligation.

The US says it expects to resolve the dispute.

LONDON (AP) — Samuel Smith spent years writing songs with a guitar in his hands.

Now, the London-based singer-songwriter is using artificial intelligence tools to help him continue making Americana music after Parkinson’s disease largely took away his ability to play guitar.

Smith, who was diagnosed with the progressive neurological disorder in 2020, recently released his second album, “The Art of Letting Go.” For one of the eight tracks, an instrumental piece titled “Horizon,” he relied on platforms that use AI to generate music to create demo arrangements that would convey his vision to the musicians who recorded the song.

The demos he created by humming rough melodies into his phone and uploading the recordings into song generators like Suno and Udio weren’t for mixing into the final studio version of “Horizon,” Smith stressed. But tremors, stiffness and fatigue, which are common symptoms of Parkinson’s, caused his guitar skills to deteriorate during the more than a year he worked on the album, he said.

“So then I’m faced with a question,” Smith, 49, said. “‘Don’t play, don’t be creative, or find a way out, find a route.’ And for me, this was the route.”

Generative AI has divided the music industry, whose artists and record labels have complained of their copyrighted work being used to train the models behind AI-powered music tools. Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records sued Suno and Udio in June 2024, although Universal later reached a settlement and partnership deal with Udio and Warner did the same with Suno.

Less discussed is what those platforms can do when employed by a serious musician like Smith, whose disease affects the tools central to his songwriting and identity as a guitarist: his hands. He released his debut album, “In the Springtime,” in 2023, saying he wanted to give his two sons a way to remember when he could perform and record music himself.

“I’d always written, I’d also played, I always sung,” he said. “And immediately it became clear to me that I was in trouble, that my music was going to be seriously compromised.”

From prompts to convincing demos

AI music generators use systems trained on large datasets of recorded music and audio. The platforms analyze patterns in melody, harmony, and rhythm before generating new audio based on prompts or uploaded recordings. Users don’t need musical talent to end up with a serviceable song, or even a popular one.

Smith said producing convincing demos from the synthetic tracks the apps generated often required “50, 100, 150 attempts” and extensive editing “to get something that sounds close to my music.” After humming a song into his phone and uploading the recording, he gives prompts describing instrumentation, mood and style. .

“AI is not replacing anything for me,” he said. “It’s unlocking, it’s enabling. It’s allowing me to keep writing. I upload my lyrics; AI doesn’t create my lyrics. I upload my music; AI does not create my music.”

He added: “It then brings it to life in a way that I can play to session players and say, ‘Here, that’s what I’m thinking, that is what I’m hearing.’”

A bittersweet guitar duet

The album was produced by Grammy-winning pianist and producer Matt Rollings, who assembled a group of established roots and bluegrass musicians for the project. They included dobro player and 16-time Grammy winner Jerry Douglas, Grammy-winning banjo player Alison Brown, fiddler Stuart Duncan, guitarist Bryan Sutton, bassist Viktor Krauss and singers Jonatha Brooke and Glen Phillips.

For Smith, the experience of singing in a Nashville studio alongside musicians he had admired for decades was “an extraordinary moment.”

Grammy-nominated guitarist Julian Lage, known for his jazz and acoustic recordings with Blue Note Records, performed on the album’s title track and on “Horizon.” The latter recording became a bittersweet high point in Smith’s career; despite the progression of his disease, he managed to play a guitar duet with his friend.

“I hadn’t been able to play for months, but I kept telling myself that if I wrote something to take to the studio, perhaps the clouds would part for a few minutes,” Smith said. “That’s what happened. I had a window of about 10 minutes in the studio when my arm freed up. … So in the end, I was able to capture the last breath of my guitar playing.”

New possibilities and perils

Experts said AI-assisted music tools could benefit other people with disabilities or illnesses.

Ruaidhri Mannion, a composer, music producer and sonic artist who teaches at Brunel University of London, said technology like affordable digital recording software “effectively democratized the making of music” in recent decades. By helping songwriters and musicians communicate ideas and collaborate more easily, AI tools that generate polished-sounding material from voice or text prompts could work in the same way, he said.

“If these tools are able to enable people to be able to participate with other creative groups and encourage more people to feel confident to be able to reach out to an ensemble or an orchestra or something, then I think that is all for the better,” Mannion said.

But an overreliance on technology could intefere with the trial and error, frustration and synergy that are necessary parts of a musician’s artistic development, Mannion said.

“What makes a lot of music-making meaningful is the collaborative element,” he said. “There’s a lot of experimentation and development and failure that’s part of musical discovery.”

Udio and Suno have denied copyright infringement allegations and said they wanted to work with the music industry, not in opposition to it. Some musicians are unconvinced. A group of recording artists and activists, including singer-songwriter Tift Merritt, David Lowery of the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, and ECR Music Group President Blake Morgan, published an open letter in February under the heading “So no to Suno.”

“Many in our community are embracing responsible AI as a tool for creation, and as a means for fans to explore and interact with our artistry. That’s wonderful,” the letter read. “But it’s not the same as creating an environment where AI-generated works sourced from our music are mass distributed to dilute our royalties or, worse yet, reward those actively seeking to commit fraud. Artists need to know the difference.”

‘Show us what you can do’

Smith said he thinks his experience demonstrated how AI could benefit society and expand creative access, if it’s developed responsibly.

“My message would be that if these companies want to show they’ve got a place, a role in society, then step up,” Smith said. “Engage with health professionals, engage with music therapists, engage with society and show us what you can do.”

On May 21, Smith collaborated with the Berklee Music and Health Institute for an event in New York that brought together music industry leaders, researchers and clinicians to examine how music can support people living with neurological conditions. Smith discussed his experience living with Parkinson’s and sang again alongside musicians who played on “The Art of Letting Go.”

Creating music is crucial to the legacy Smith hopes to leave for his children, ages 4 and 17.

“My 4-year-old is probably never going to remember me playing, and it’s heartbreaking,” he said. “But I’ve been able to pull this into something and refuse to be defined by this disease.”

JOHANNESBURG — An estimated 30,000 mostly Muslim Fulani militants are operating in Nigeria, causing “worsening insecurity and religious freedom violations,” according to an influential new report.

The report, by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), states “violence by Fulani militants caused the highest number of deaths among all religious communities in Nigeria over the last year, as compared to attacks by organized insurgent groups and criminal gangs.”

The Fulanis, so-called herders of livestock, have, according to the USCIRF report, “targeted Christian (farming) communities in the Middle Belt and, increasingly, the South, burning homes and churches as well as kidnapping, raping, and murdering.”

CHRISTIANS TARGETED IN SYSTEMATIC KIDNAPPING CAMPAIGN IN NIGERIA BY JIHADI HERDSMEN, EXPERTS SAY

But a former counterterrorism expert at the State Department told Fox News Digital that the kind of strikes the U.S., working with Nigerian government forces, have recently carried out in Nigeria’s North against Islamist terrorist organizations such as Boko Haram and Islamic State, wouldn’t work against the Fulanis in the predominantly Christian central areas of the country.

Sterling Tilley, former acting director within the Bureau of Counterterrorism, who has worked in Nigeria for the State Department, said that the U.S. “militarily dealing with the farmer-herder conflict is not advisable because it is likely to bring more instability in the country.” Tilley, now director of the Thomas R. Pickering Graduate Foreign Affairs Fellowship at Howard University, added, “There are some steps that can be taken to quell the violence, but there must be Nigerian political will to do so.”

This week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth commented on the recent strikes ordered by President Donald Trump on Nigeria, saying, “Maybe a year ago, [the president] heard the call of Nigerian Christians who were being targeted and killed by ISIS. And he said, ‘Pete, I want the War Department to focus on ensuring that we do everything we can to protect those Christians.’”

NIGERIA NAMED EPICENTER OF GLOBAL KILLINGS OF CHRISTIANS OVER FAITH IN 2025, REPORT SAYS

Christians make up approximately 48% of Nigeria’s population. Fulani militants, the USCIRF report stated, “have often carried out operations during Christian holidays such as Christmas or Easter to further maximize the psychological impact, terrifying those communities from gathering to celebrate or worship. During attacks, assailants sometimes utter slogans with religious connotations, such as “Allahu Akbar“ (Arabic for “God is great”). 

But, according to the report, Muslims are being attacked too. “Fulani assailants have not spared Muslims, raiding herders’ cattle and violently attacking non-Fulani Muslim communities,” the report added.

“Violence at the hands of militants from the Fulani tribe far outnumbers violence from all other militant groups such as Boko Haram or ISWAP (Islamic State West African Province),” Henrietta Blyth, CEO of Open Doors UK & Ireland, an organization that highlights the persecution of Christians, told Fox News Digital.  

While her organization was not part of the report, she said, “My heart has been broken as I have heard stories from women and men who have seen their beloved family members butchered in front of them or carried off into a life of slavery.” 

AFRICAN UNION CHIEF DENIES GENOCIDE CLAIMS AGAINST CHRISTIANS AS CRUZ WARNS NIGERIAN OFFICIALS

Blyth added: “The situation is complicated, and as the report concludes, it is too simplistic to say all perpetrators are religiously motivated. What is undisputable is that Christians are highly vulnerable and often the victims, paying the price in blood. They desperately need protection and, for hundreds of thousands driven from their homes, the chance to heal and rebuild their lives.”

The USCIRF report also stated, “Criticism of responses to Fulani militant violence from federal and state authorities has often described their responses as unsatisfactory at best and complicit at worst.”

Tilley told Fox News Digital that elections are to be held in Nigeria next year, and “the Fulani do have considerable political influence as a voting bloc. Thus, the Nigerian government seems reluctant to take actions necessary to quell the violence for fear that they could lose their base of support in the North and Middle Belt.”

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Fox News Digital reached out to the Nigerian government for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.