Declan Walsh is the Times chief Africa correspondent. He's been on the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the Ebola outbreak has now ballooned to the third largest on record, and where hospitals are struggling to keep up. In that small ward that we visited, we found a 5-year-old boy who had just come in the night before with incessant bleeding from his nose. He was lying on the bed with a tissue stuffed into his nose to staunch the bleeding with his dad watching over him. But just two beds away from that boy lay the body of a 21-year-old woman who had died during the night and her remains had still not been removed. Now, the bodies of people who have just died from Ebola are incredibly infectious. Yet, it was just covered by a thin sheet that had been pulled over. And that only added to that sense of danger inside that treatment facility. And in fact, people were being infected at the hospital because when we went into the next ward, we found the lab technician who himself had gotten apparently infected with Ebola as part of his job taking samples from other people. And we later learned that seven other staff members from that hospital had already died from the virus. That was just a sign of how bad conditions were. I was brought around the ward by a young Congalles doctor. He told me he was angry. He was angry at his own government which had taken so long to detect this outbreak. But he was also more broadly angry at the international response system towards Ebola. He turned around to me at one point and he said here we are in Mongalu in the town where the epidemic started where there are the highest number of cases and yet this is the best we can do.

Now it's important to say that there is aid coming into this area. Uh in the capital Buna where I'm currently speaking from you know there is an airport where planes are coming in bringing supplies much needed supplies. There are other treatment centers being set up as well. But we don't really know if these facilities are going to be enough because the aid effort is so far behind the curve it's not even keeping pace with this outbreak as of now.

The head of a legal nonprofit involved in the case celebrated the temporary pause, saying, quote, "No administration has the authority to spend public money through a political rewards program that Congress never authorized." The fund was announced last month as part of a remarkable deal Trump struck to end a case he had filed against the federal government. Trump had sued the IRS over a leak of his tax returns, but then abruptly dropped the case as the Justice Department announced the $1.8 billion fund and a provision giving Trump and his family immunity from any ongoing tax audits. Now though, the judge overseeing the tax return suit has ordered that case reopened, saying she wants to investigate what she called grievous allegations that the hasty deal was premised on deception. She said she wanted to look into whether Trump had effectively settled with his own government out of court to quote avoid judicial scrutiny. The White House did not immediately respond to questions from the Times, but a spokeswoman for the Justice Department has defended Trump's original decision to drop the case, calling it a routine move and saying there was quote nothing improper about this agreement.