In the Democratic Republic of Congo, pressure is mounting on Justice Minister Constant Mutamba after explosive allegations over a multi-million dollar no-bid contract and suspicious fund transfers.

On Tuesday, lawmakers grilled the Attorney General for six hours and Mutamba for five. The focus: a $29 million deal awarded without competition, and a $19 million payment to Zion Construction—wired just one day after the company opened its bank account.

The funds didn’t come from the state treasury, but from FRIVAO, the agency managing $325 million in war reparations from Uganda. That agency falls under Mutamba’s direct authority. Defending himself, the minister admitted to “errors” and asked for forgiveness—but claimed he’s the target of political revenge.

He also blamed tensions with Prime Minister Judith Suminwa for a toxic work climate. Lawmakers say the accusations are serious, and the judiciary must be allowed to act. Mutamba’s future in government now hangs in the balance.

Four billion people, about half the world’s population, experienced at least one extra month of extreme heat due to human-caused climate change from May 2024 to May 2025, scientists say. The extreme heat caused illness, death, crop losses, and strained energy and healthcare systems, according to the analysis from World Weather Attribution, Climate Central and the Red Cross. “Although floods and cyclones often dominate headlines, heat is arguably the deadliest extreme event,” the report said.

Many heat-related deaths are unreported or are mislabeled by comorbid conditions like heart disease or kidney failure. Heat waves are silent killers, said Friederike Otto, associate professor of climate science at Imperial College London, one of the report’s authors. “People don’t fall dead on the street in a heat wave … people either die in hospitals or in poorly insulated homes and therefore are just not seen.” Low income communities and vulnerable populations, such as older adults and people with medical conditions, suffer the most from extreme heat.

The scientists used peer-reviewed methods to study how much climate change boosted temperatures in a heat wave and calculated how much more likely its occurrence was due to climate change. In almost all countries in the world, the number of extreme heat days has at least doubled. The report says strategies to prepare for heat waves include monitoring and reporting systems for extreme temperatures, providing emergency health services, cooling shelters, updated building codes, enforcing heat safety rules at work, and designing cities to be more heat-resilient.

While these strategies help people adapt to the increasingly frequent and severe heat waves, “only comprehensive mitigation, through phasing out of fossil fuels, will limit the severity of future heat-related harms,” the study said.

The mother of a pro-democracy activist imprisoned in Egypt is seriously ill in a London hospital after resuming a hunger strike aimed at pressing for her son’s release, her family said Friday. Laila Soueif was admitted to St Thomas’s Hospital on Thursday night with dangerously low blood sugar levels. “The bottom line is, we’re losing her,” her daughter, Sanaa Souief, said outside the hospital. She added: “(Prime Minister) Keir Starmer needs to act now. Not tomorrow, not Monday, now, right now.”

Laila Soueif has been on hunger strike since September 29 to protest the imprisonment of Alaa Abdel-Fattah, a British-Egyptian dual national who has been in prison in Egypt since September 2019. He was sentenced in December 2021 to five years in prison for spreading false news and should have been released last year, but Egyptian authorities refused to count the more than two years he had spent in pre-trial detention and ordered him held until January 2027.

Laila Souief spent weeks camped outside Britain’s Foreign Office and the prime minister’s Downing Street office to highlight her son’s case. She was previously admitted to hospital in February, with doctors warning she was at “high risk of sudden death.” She agreed in early March to move to a partial hunger strike after Starmer pledged to press Egypt to release her son. She resumed her full hunger strike on May 20, saying: “Nothing has changed, nothing is happening.”

The family says Souief has lost 42% of her bodyweight during the 242-day hunger strike. They say she has received glucagon treatment, which induces the liver to break down stored fat to obtain glucose, but continues to refuse glucose, which would provide her with calories. Abdel-Fattah has been on his own hunger strike for 90 days following his mother’s admission to hospital in February. Thousands of critics of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi have been locked up under dire conditions after unjust trials, human rights groups say.

The British government said that Starmer raised Abdel-Fattah’s case in a call with the Egyptian president last week, and Middle East Minister Hamish Falconer discussed it with Egypt’s Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty on Sunday. “We are concerned to hear of Laila’s hospitalization. We remain in regular contact with Laila and her family and have checked on her welfare,” the Foreign Office said in a statement. “We are committed to securing Alaa Abdel-Fattah’s release and continue to press for this at the highest levels of the Egyptian government.”