Benjamin Netanyahu is once again firmly in control of Israeli politics.

The country’s longest-serving prime minister has pulled himself back from the abyss with what appears to be a wildly successful opening to a military campaign against Iran.

“Bibi had his Churchill moment,” said one Israeli official from within the coalition, using the prime minister’s nickname.

One day before launching what Israel dubbed Operation Rising Lion, Netanyahu’s government had faced a confidence vote from the opposition.

Two of the ultra-Orthodox parties threatened to vote against the government in what would have put major pressure on Netanyahu. But he survived the vote – with quite some margin.

Twenty-four hours later, Israel began attacking Iran. In one instant, Netanyahu’s political problems were swept away. No more ultra-Orthodox parties complaining about the military draft or far-right parties shouting about praying in the al-Aqsa compound.

“The cards are in his hands. If they weren’t a week ago, they are now,” said the official.

The weekly political protests – first over the judicial reform, then over the war in Gaza – that have dogged Netanyahu for much of his current term quickly vanished, with orders from Israel’s Homefront Command forbidding large gatherings of people. Netanyahu’s testimony in his trial on charges of corruption is on hold and out of the headlines. The stories of the hostages still held in Gaza for more than 600 days of war are no longer front-page news.

Netanyahu is well aware of the political consequences of such a successful military operation, according to an Israeli source in the prime minister’s orbit, though the source insists it’s not his focus right now

“If we are doing something good for Israel, it’s good to us,” the source said. “It’s good for you electorally, it’s good for you with the voters … He will harvest this in the future.”

The source also pointed out the complete reversal of the political opposition from attacking Netanyahu to supporting him.

“This time, we have unity almost all over the Knesset, except from the Arab parties, and we have unity in the people,” said the source.

Iran has been at the center of Netanyahu’s identity for nearly his entire political career. His time as Israel’s longest-serving leader is replete with warnings about Iran. Some have been borderline cartoonish, like when he held up a drawing of a bomb to warn of Tehran’s advancing nuclear program at the United Nations General Assembly in 2012. He has since returned to the same podium – and many others – to lecture the world repeatedly about the intent of the Ayatollahs.

Israel’s existential fear wasn’t a single one of its adversaries. It was all of them combined: an overwhelming attack from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and the Shiite proxies in Syria and Iraq. This was Israel’s nightmare scenario that Hamas tried to instigate with its attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

It quickly became evident that each entity had its own interests.

Hezbollah began launching attacks against Israel on October 8, but it was far from the massive barrages which worried the military’s leadership. Iran launched two retaliatory attacks against Israel last year in April and October. The Houthis began firing drones and ballistic missiles at Israel from Yemen, but never more than one or two at a time.

Over 20 months of war, Israel was able to defang each of its adversaries. Hamas is a shell of its former self, Hezbollah has been shattered, and the Houthis don’t have the arsenal to pose a major threat.

That allowed Israel to turn its focus to Iran without fear of massive retaliation from another front. From Netanyahu’s political perspective, the risk was far lower, especially since Israel’s spy agency has treated Iran like its playground for years.

“At his age, he has much less of a political career left to lose,” Shapiro said. “So it’s easier to throw the caution that held him back in the past to the wind, especially to reach for a career-defining goal.”

But whether the military campaign against Iran buoys Netanyahu’s long-sinking polling numbers is not a foregone conclusion, according to Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israeli Democracy Institute.

Polling in recent months has repeatedly shown Netanyahu far behind political rival Naftali Bennett. Crucially, it has indicated he would fall far short of being able to build a coalition with his current political partners, ousting him from leadership.

The Iran operation may not ultimately deliver the political salvation Netanyahu wants, Plesner said, because it is an issue with broad agreement from the left and the right.

Israel is also mired in the ongoing war in Gaza with no clear exit and lacking a comprehensive day-after plan. A second war, even with far more tangible accomplishments, presents another risk to Netanyahu if it drags on.

“The ability of the government to translate the military successes into an advantageous diplomatic outcome is yet to be determined,” said Plesner.

Spain’s government said Tuesday that the massive April power outage across Spain and Portugal that left tens of millions of people disconnected in seconds was caused by technical and planning errors that left the grid unable to handle a surge in voltage.

Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen, who manages the nation’s energy policy, told reporters that a voltage surge led to small grid failures, mainly in the south of Spain, which then cascaded to larger ones and brought the system down in the two Iberian Peninsula nations.

She ruled out that the failure was due to a cyberattack.

The outage began shortly after noon on April 28 in Spain and lasted through nightfall, disrupting businesses, transit systems, cellular networks, internet connectivity and other critical infrastructure. Spain lost 15 gigawatts of electricity — or about 60% of its supply. Portugal, whose grid is connected to Spain’s, also went down. Only the countries’ island territories were spared.

“All of this happened in 12 seconds, with most of the power loss happening in just five seconds,” Aagesen said.

Several technical causes contributed to the event, including “poor planning” by Spain’s grid operator Red Eléctrica, which didn’t find a replacement for one power plant that was supposed to help balance power fluctuations, the minister said. She also said that some power plants that utilities shut off preventively when the disruptions started could have stayed online to help manage the system.

Power was fully restored by the early hours of the following day.

The government’s report will be released later on Tuesday – 49 days after the event – and included analysis from Spain’s national security agencies, which concluded, according to the minister, there were no indications of cyber-sabotage by foreign actors.

The government had previously narrowed down the source of the outage to three power plants that tripped in southern Spain.

In the weeks following the blackout, citizens and experts were left wondering what triggered the event in a region not known for power cuts. The outage ignited a fierce debate about whether Spain’s high levels of renewable power and not enough energy generated from nuclear or gas-fired power plants had something to do with the grid failing, which the government has repeatedly denied.

Spain is at the forefront of Europe’s transition to renewable energy, having generated nearly 57% of its electricity in 2024 from renewable energy sources like wind, hydropower and solar. The country is also phasing out its nuclear plants.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez pushed back against such speculation and defended the country’s rapid ramping up of renewables. He asked for patience and said that his government would not “deviate a single millimeter” from its energy transition plans, which include a goal of generating 81% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

For the first time since the global outbreak of Covid-19, researchers claim to have pierced North Korea’s ironclad information blockade to reveal how some ordinary citizens endured the pandemic.

While Pyongyang insisted for more than two years that not a single case had breached its hermetically sealed borders, a new report paints a far darker picture, of a deadly wave of largely untreated illness that swept the country, but was barely talked about.

The 26-page report also details testimony of deaths by counterfeit or self-prescribed medicine, and official denial leading to a culture of dishonesty.

“Doctors were lying to the patients. Village leaders were lying to the party. And the government was lying to everybody,” said Dr. Victor Cha, one of the report’s lead authors.

Released by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in partnership with the George W. Bush Institute, the paper is based on 100 in-person interviews conducted discreetly inside North Korea between September and December 2023.

The testimony – gathered through informal, conversational methods known as “snowball sampling” – span all nine provinces and the capital Pyongyang. The result is what the authors describe as “arguably the first glimpse” inside the country’s most extreme period of isolation in modern history.

Snowball sampling is a recruitment method often used when studying hidden or hard-to-access populations. Researchers begin by identifying one or two trusted participants, who then refer them to others in their networks. Over time, the pool of participants “snowballs,” growing through word-of-mouth and personal trust.

While it lacks the scientific rigor of more conventional surveys, this method is often the only way of getting raw, subjective testimony from people living in repressive and totalitarian states, such as North Korea.

Cha, a former White House adviser and Korea Chair at CSIS, said the findings were evidence of “a total failure on the part of the government to do anything for the people during the pandemic.”

“Everybody was effectively lying to everybody during the pandemic,” he said. “Because of a government policy that said there was no COVID in the country. When they knew there was.”

Cha said Pyongyang’s policy of denial didn’t just attempt to deceive the outside world – it forced North Korea’s more than 26 million people into mutually enforced silence.

When North Korea closed its borders in early 2020 – as the virus made its way across the globe, on its way to infecting and killing millions – state media claimed it had kept the virus out entirely; no infections, no deaths. The world was skeptical. But the regime’s total control over borders and information made independent verification nearly impossible.

Two years later, North Korean television aired scenes of a military parade in Pyongyang. Crowds filled Kim Il Sung Square. Masks were scarce. Not long after, reports of a mysterious “fever outbreak” began appearing in state media. By early May, Pyongyang confirmed its first Covid-19 case. Three months later, it declared victory – claiming just 74 deaths out of nearly 5 million “fever” cases.

But according to the new survey, Covid-19 had by that point been circulating widely inside the country for at least two years.

Ninety-two percent of respondents said they or someone close to them had been infected. Most said 2020 and 2021 – not 2022 – were when outbreaks were at their worst.

“Fevers were happening everywhere, and many people were dying within a few days,” one participant reported. Another, a soldier, described a military communications battalion in which more than half the unit – about 400 soldiers – fell ill by late 2021. In prisons, schools, and food factories, respondents described people collapsing or missing days of work due to fever.

Even under normal conditions, the country’s isolated and underfunded healthcare system struggles to meet the needs of its people. But a pandemic-level event, coupled with official denial and an initial refusal to accept foreign vaccines, left people dangerously exposed, the report claims.

With virtually no access to testing, diagnoses came from Covid-19 symptoms that most of the world had grown familiar with: fever, cough, shortness of breath. Some respondents said even these symptoms were taboo. One woman recalled being told by a doctor that if she said she had those symptoms, “you will be taken away.” Another said bluntly: “They told me it’s a cold, but I knew it was COVID.”

In place of official care, citizens turned to folk medicine: saltwater rinses, garlic necklaces, even opium injections. One woman said her child died after being given the wrong dosage of adult medication. Another respondent described neighbors overdosing on counterfeit Chinese drugs. In total, one in five respondents reported seeing or hearing of deaths due to misuse of medication or fake pharmaceuticals.

Protective gear was nearly nonexistent. Just 8% of respondents said they received masks from the government. Many made their own, reused them, or bought them at black-market prices. One mother said her children had to sew their own because adult-issued masks were too big.

Cha says the failure was not just in what the government withheld, but in how it blocked the kind of grassroots survival that had helped North Korea’s “resourceful” citizens endure past disasters – including the 1990s famine, known inside the country as the “Arduous March.” That crisis gave rise to private marketplaces, which emerged as a lifeline when the state-run ration system collapsed. During the pandemic, however, those markets were shut down – officially to contain the virus, but also, Cha suggests, to limit the spread of information.

“They didn’t allow the people to find coping mechanisms,” he said. “Just shut them down, quarantine them, lock them down – and then provided them with nothing.”

The suffering extended beyond illness. With internal travel banned and markets shuttered, food shortages became acute. Eighty-one percent of those surveyed said they faced hunger. Respondents spoke of trying to survive quarantine periods with no rations, no access to medicine, and no way to seek help.

The rationing system, long unreliable, collapsed entirely under the weight of the lockdown. “If you didn’t have emergency food at home, it was really tough,” one soldier said.

Eighty-seven percent of respondents said they had no access to Covid tests at any point in the pandemic. Fewer than 20% received any vaccine — and most of those were administered only after Pyongyang acknowledged the outbreak in 2022 and accepted limited Chinese assistance. Soldiers reported receiving three shots as part of a campaign later that year. Civilian respondents described group vaccinations administered at schools or workplaces – months after the rest of the world had rolled out full vaccination programs.

Even the basic act of reporting illness became a risk. According to the report, local clinics and neighborhood watch units were required to report cases to central authorities. But only 41% of respondents ever received any information about those reports. Most said the results were either never shared or filtered through rumor. One respondent said: “I realized that serious illnesses and deaths were not reported because they were told not to call it COVID.”

This system of denial created what Cha calls a “double lie”: the government lied to its people, and the people lied to each other and to their government – each trying to avoid quarantine, censure, or worse.

The survey also documented a deep well of frustration with the regime’s response – and its propaganda. One participant said: “Our country can build nuclear weapons, but they can’t give us vaccines.” Others noted the contrast between their conditions and what they heard about other countries: free testing, access to medicine, the ability to travel.

In one of the report’s most striking findings, 83% of respondents said their experience did not align with what the government or its leader Kim Jong Un told them. More than half said they explicitly disbelieved the regime’s Covid-related announcements.

“When I saw the Supreme Leader touting his love for the people, while so many were dying without medicine,” one respondent said, “I thought of all the people who didn’t survive.”

India and Canada signaled a reset of relations on Tuesday, agreeing to reestablish high commissions in each other’s capitals, after nearly two years of strained ties following Ottawa’s accusations that New Delhi was allegedly involved in the killing of a Sikh separatist on its soil.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Mark Carney, who took office in March, announced the move after meeting on the sidelines of the Group of 7 summit in the Canadian Rockies.

Ottawa and New Delhi agreed to “designate new high commissioners, with a view to returning to regular services to citizens and business in both countries,” according to a statement from Carney’s office following their meeting

The move comes nearly two years after former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other Canadian officials publicly accused New Delhi of being involved in the murder of prominent Sikh separatist and Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in a Vancouver suburb in 2023.

Canadian authorities said they shared evidence of that with Indian authorities. However, Indian government officials repeatedly denied Canada had provided evidence and called the allegations “absurd and motivated.”

Relations between both countries plummeted in the wake of the accusation, prompting tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions, the temporary suspension of visa services and allegations from India of Canada harboring “terrorists” and encouraging “anti-India activities” – a claim the Canadian government rejects.

Carney invited the leaders of several other nonmember countries — Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Ukraine, Australia and South Korea — to also attend this year’s gathering.

There were no signs of tension on Tuesday as Modi and Carney shook hands in the western Canadian province of Alberta with the Canadian prime minister calling it a “great honor” to host the Indian leader at the G7.

“India has been coming to the G7 I believe since 2018… and it’s a testament to the importance of your country, to your leadership and to the importance of the issues that we look to tackle together,” Carney told reporters.

Modi’s comments toward Carney were similarly welcoming.

“Had an excellent meeting with Prime Minister Mark Carney,” he wrote on X. “India and Canada are connected by a strong belief in democracy, freedom and rule of law. PM Carney and I look forward to working closely to add momentum to the India-Canada friendship.”

The Canadian prime minister’s office said the two discussed opportunities to “deepen engagement” in areas such as technology, the digital transition, food security, and critical minerals.

Neither leader publicly mentioned discussing recent strained relations or the killing of Nijjar.

Nijjar, who was gunned down by masked men in June 2023 outside a Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia, was a prominent campaigner for an independent Sikh homeland in northern India, which would be known as Khalistan.

Campaigning for the creation of Khalistan has long been considered by New Delhi as a national security threat and outlawed in India – and a number of groups associated with the movement are listed as “terrorist organizations” under Indian law.

But the movement garners a level of sympathy from some in the Sikh community, especially in the diaspora, where activists protected by free speech laws can more openly demand secession from India.

Some demonstrators expressed outrage over Modi’s visit, while others demanded justice over Nijjar’s killing.

When asked about the murder of Nijjar during a news conference after speaking with Modi, Carney said: “There is a judicial process that’s underway, and I need to be careful about further commentary.”

Carney also told CBC’s Radio-Canada last week that he had spoken with Modi about Nijjar, when asked about the Sikh separatist and ongoing police investigation.

A volcanic eruption in Indonesia sent an enormous ash cloud more than six miles into the sky, disrupting or canceling dozens of flights to and from the tourist island of Bali.

Mount Lewotobi Laki Laki erupted at 5:35pm local time on Tuesday, unleashing a 6.8-mile (11-kilometer) hot ash column over the tourist island of Flores in south-central Indonesia, the country’s Geology Agency said.

Images showed an orange mushroom-shaped cloud engulfing the nearby village of Talibura with sightings reported up to 93 miles (150km) away.

Officials issued the country’s highest alert and urged tourists to stay away.

Dozens of flights were halted in Bali, according to Denpasar International Airport website, which marked the disruptions “due to volcano.”

They included domestic routes to Jakarta and Lombok as well as others to Australia, China, India, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore.

Fransiskus Xaverius Seda Airport was closed until Thursday, “to ensure the safety of the passengers,” airport operator AirNav said in an Instagram post.

Singapore’s Changi Airport website shows Jetstar and Scoot canceled flights to Bali Wednesday morning while AirAsia called off its midday flight to the Indonesian capital.

Holidaymakers Athirah Rosli, 31, and her husband Fadzly Yohannes, 33, woke up this morning to discover that their Jetstar flight home from Bail to Singapore was canceled.

“My husband and I looked at new flights, booked more accommodation and insurance and then had breakfast at our hotel,” she said.

“I see it was a blessing in disguise that we’re safe and well.”

Recent rumblings

The volcano’s eruption follows significant volcanic activities, including 50 in two hours, up from the average eight to 10 activities per day.

The 5,197-foot (1,584-meter) twin volcano erupted again Wednesday morning, spewing a 0.62-mile (1km) ash cloud, officials confirmed.

Dozens of residents in two nearby villages were evacuated, according to Avi Hallan, an official at the local disaster mitigation agency.

A danger zone is in place around five miles (8km) from the crater and residents have been warned about the potential for heavy rainfall triggering lava flows in rivers flowing from the volcano.

Tourists affected

More than a thousand tourists have been affected, particularly those traveling to Bali and Komodo National Park, famed for its Komodo dragons, according to a local tour operator.

Mount Lewotobi Laki Laki’s last erupted in May when authorities also raised the alert level to the most severe.

A previous eruption in March forced airlines to cancel and delay flights into Bali, around 500 miles (800km) away, including Australia’s Jetstar and Qantas Airways.

In November, the volcano erupted multiple times killing nine people, injuring dozens and forcing thousands to flee and flights to be canceled.

Indonesian, home to 270 million people, has 120 active volcanoes and experiences frequent seismic activity.

The archipelago sits along the “Ring of Fire,” a horseshoe-shaped series of seismic fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.