The news text highlights a high-stakes diplomatic standoff between Trump and Netanyahu, with the Israeli Prime Minister advocating for a more aggressive approach towards Iran, potentially involving military action. The text also explores the potential impact of such a move on the global economy, with oil tankers stuck in the Strait of Hormuz threatening to tip the global economy into recession.
are near an all-time high; his approval ratings are at an all-time low, and oil tankers remain stuck in the, threatening to tip the global economy into recession.
Trump is not good at taking responsibility.
“The buck stops with everyone else” is his version of Harry Truman’s motto, “The buck stops here”, which Truman had on a sign on his desk in the Oval Office. For once, though, Trump has a point. He has every right to be angry with the man who sold him the war: Israel’s Prime Minister,at which Trump accepted Netanyahu’s case for bombing.
It took place at the long table in the White House Situation Room, both men flanked by their top advisers.
“Netanyahu delivered his presentation in a confident monotone,” thereported. He told Trump that Iran’s ballistic missile programme could be destroyed in a few weeks, and the regime would be so weakened it could not choke off the vital Strait of Hormuz. Iran would be unable to land serious blows against US interests and allies in neighbouring countries. Netanyahu also said – and this may have been the clincher – that bombing would free Iran’s opposition groups to overthrow the regime.
Caption: TOPSHOT – A staff member of the CBCA Virunga Hospital checks a visitor’s temperature using a a contactless infrared thermometer, before allowing her access to the hospital in Goma on May 17, 2026. A first case of Ebola virus infection has been reported in Goma, a major city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo controlled by the M23 armed group, with the WHO declaring an international health alert on Sunday.
According to figures released Saturday by the African Union’s health agency , 88 deaths likely caused by the virus have been recorded, out of 336 suspected cases. One death has been reported in neighboring Uganda. As the epicenter of the outbreak is located in a hard-to-reach area, few samples have been tested in laboratories and the figures are based largely on suspected cases.
An outbreak of the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been declared an international emergency by the World Health Organisation . Ebola is a disease, often deadly, caused by a virus which normally infects animals – typically fruit bats. Outbreaks can occur after people handle infected animals. The virus spreads person to person through infected blood and bodily fluids.
Symptoms can begin as a fever, progressing to vomiting and diarrhoea, and can lead to organ failure. Caption: People wash their hands at the entrance to a hospital in Bunia, Congo, Sunday, May 17, 2026. At least 131 deaths from Ebola have been reported in the DR Congo and there have been over 513 cases suspected overall.
There have also been two cases and one death in Uganda, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . Africa CDC has warned that Rwanda and South Sudan are also at high risk. Rwanda has shut its borders with DR Congo. There is currently no approved vaccine for Bundibugyo, the particular species of Ebola that has spread in DR Congo.
Experimental vaccines are being developed. Scientists hope a vaccine used against a different kind of Ebola called Zaire may be of use. The head of a global partnership working to accelerate the development of vaccines said concern about a fast-moving outbreak of Ebola in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo was “pretty high” on Tuesday, warning it could prove difficult to contain in a conflict-hit region with limited health infrastructure.
At least 131 suspected deaths have been recorded, with more than 500 suspected cases and 33 confirmed cases in Congo, according to health authorities. Two confirmed cases have also been reported in neighbouring Uganda. Surgeons have successfully treated an aneurysm through a man’s eye socket – a UK medical first that avoids the need for a riskier form of brain surgery. Andrew Wood at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.
Mr Wood has been spared from undergoing a craniotomy after surgeons performed a UK-first operation displacing his eye to treat a brain problem. Surgeons at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust performed a keyhole brain aneurysm operation though the eye socket – the first time this operation has ever been carried out in the UK. Picture date: Tuesday May 12, 2026. PA Photo.
Photo credit should read: Richard McCarthy/PA WireUndated handout photo issued by Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust or the neruosurgery team operating on Andrew Wood at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. Mr Wood has been spared from undergoing a craniotomy after surgeons performed a UK-first operation displacing his eye to treat a brain problem.
Surgeons at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust performed a keyhole brain aneurysm operation though the eye socket – the first time this operation has ever been carried out in the UK. Issue date: Tuesday May 19, 2026. PA Photo.
Photo credit should read: Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder. Doctors usually remove parts of the skull and move parts of the brain to treat such cases.
Undated handout photo issued by Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust of consultant neurosurgeon Asim Sheikh and Maxillofacial Surgeon Mr Jiten Parmar during the operation on Andrew Wood at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. Mr Wood has been spared from undergoing a craniotomy after surgeons performed a UK-first operation displacing his eye to treat a brain problem.
Surgeons at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust performed a keyhole brain aneurysm operation though the eye socket – the first time this operation has ever been carried out in the UK. Issue date: Tuesday May 19, 2026. PA Photo.
Photo credit should read: Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder. Undated handout photo issued by Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust of the neruosurgery team operating on Andrew Wood at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.
Mr Wood has been spared from undergoing a craniotomy after surgeons performed a UK-first operation displacing his eye to treat a brain problem. Surgeons at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust performed a keyhole brain aneurysm operation though the eye socket – the first time this operation has ever been carried out in the UK. Issue date: Tuesday May 19, 2026. PA Photo.
Photo credit should read: Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder. Consultant neurosurgeon Asim Sheikh holding a bespoke 3D printed model of patient Andrew Wood’s eye socket at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.
Mr Wood has been spared from undergoing a craniotomy after surgeons performed a UK-first operation displacing his eye to treat a brain problem. Surgeons at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust performed a keyhole brain aneurysm operation though the eye socket – the first time this operation has ever been carried out in the UK. Picture date: Tuesday May 12, 2026. PA Photo.
Photo credit should read: Richard McCarthy/PA WireConsultant neurosurgeon Asim Sheikh said getting to the aneurysm without “having to touch the brain” reduced the risk of fatal complications. The 61-year-old patient only spent one night in hospital, compared to roughly a week for traditional brain surgery. Wood was asked to make toast and a cup of tea “to make sure my faculties were OK”, then was told he could go home. Andrew Wood at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.
Mr Wood has been spared from undergoing a craniotomy after surgeons performed a UK-first operation displacing his eye to treat a brain problem. Surgeons at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust performed a keyhole brain aneurysm operation though the eye socket – the first time this operation has ever been carried out in the UK. Picture date: Tuesday May 12, 2026. PA Photo.
Photo credit should read: Richard McCarthy/PA WireAndrew Wood at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. Mr Wood has been spared from undergoing a craniotomy after surgeons performed a UK-first operation displacing his eye to treat a brain problem. Surgeons at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust performed a keyhole brain aneurysm operation though the eye socket – the first time this operation has ever been carried out in the UK. Picture date: Tuesday May 12, 2026.
PA Photo. Photo credit should read: Richard McCarthy/PA WireWood, from Wakefield, has since returned to work as a builder.
“It has been perfect since, I’ve had no double vision, no pain,” he said. The unpopular Iran war is causing some once-loyal supporters of the Make America Great Again movement to criticise the US President. The outpouring of frustration means the Republicans could suffer at the ballot box at the US midterms in November, say experts.
Caption: LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – MARCH 08: Joe Rogan announces a fight during the UFC 313 event at T-Mobile Arena on March 08, 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Right-wing broadcaster Megyn Kelly recently retweeted someone who said the Iran war is “not worth losing the midterms over”.
Caption: TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA – DECEMBER 06: Former FOX News host and moderator Megyn Kelly takes the stage ahead of the NewsNation Presidential Primary Debate at the University of Alabama Moody Music Hall on December 6, 2023 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Republican presidential candidates Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and former New Jersey Gov.
Chris Christie will participate in the fourth Republican primary debate without current frontrunner and former U.S. President Donald Trump, who has declined to participate in any of the previous debates. A Politico-Public First poll in mid-April found that 59 per cent of Trump voters over 55 still support the war with Iran.
However, just 28 per cent of Trump voters aged 18 to 34 back his military mission in the Middle East. What will happen at the midterms? Dr John Hart, a US government expert, said the Republicans are expected to lose control of the House in November. The fate of the Senate is less clear, he said.
Beyond the midterms, there are signs of young Maga supporters turning away from Vice President JD Vance as Trump’s successor. Donald Trump has said it would be “tough” for Keir Starmer to survive as Prime Minister if he doesn’t make changes to immigration and energy policies, but did describe him as “a nice man”. Speaking on board Air Force One, the US President said Starmer’s “in trouble for two reasons, energy and immigration. He’s very bad on energy.
He should open up the North Sea”. Robert Gates, a grandee of America’s defence establishment as secretary of defence under Republican and Democratic presidents , delivered a withering assessment this week of Netanyahu’s pitch. Interviewed by CBS, he said that Netanyahu had told him in July 2009 all the same things he had told Trump in the Situation Room in February.
Gates said he had pushed back during that “no-punches-pulled discussion” of Iran, telling Netanyahu he was underestimating the resilience of the Iranian regime.
“He was saying in 2009, the regime is fragile, it’ll crumble at the first attack, and they won’t have time to do anything else … I told him then, he was dead wrong. ” Netanyahu has – almost comically – been warning that Iran is weeks or months away from getting a nuclear bomb for decades:“Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb.
”1996 :Iran is “a few months away” from nuclear capability. Iran will soon be “a few months, possibly a few weeks” from getting enough enriched uranium for their first bomb. Iran would be “weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons” if Barrack Obama’s nuclear deal went through. to bomb Iran the first time around almost a year ago, in June 2025.
“Look, Donald,” he was quoted as saying, “this has to be tackled, because they’re racing forward … You can’t have a nuclear Iran on your watch. ” In making these confident predictions, was Netanyahu simply passing on the assessments of his country’s intelligence services? Not necessarily. In 2011, on his final day as Mossad chief, Meir Dagan told a Knesset committee that “Iran will not have nuclear capability before 2015″.
In 2012, a leaked intelligence assessment said that Mossad believed Iran was still “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons”. This was while Netanyahu was claiming an Iranian bomb was, at most, months away. Trump did not have to take Netanyahu’s word for this. His own intelligence services contradicted the alarming claims.
Before last year’s bombing, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told a Senate committee that the US intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003. ” At the time, Trump declared, “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one”.
This March, when Gabbard reported that Iran had not rebuilt enrichment since last year’s bombing, Trump said simply: “She’s wrong. ” It is a mystery how Gabbard remains in her job. In the account we have of the crucial Situation Room meeting, there were supporters of the attack on Iran among Trump’s inner circle. The “Secretary of War”,, was reportedly the most enthusiastic.
Later, he was quoted as saying: “We’re going to have to take care of the Iranians eventually, so we might as well do it now. ” Trump’s special envoy, and golf buddy, Former US defence secretary Robert Gates, left, with Benjamin Netanyahu at the Pentagon during talks on Iran in 2009.
Gates has said the Israeli leader made the same unfounded claims regarding Iran’s perceived vulnerabilities to him years ago The CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, on the other hand, dismissed Netanyahu’s arguments as “farcical”; the Secretary of State and interim National Security Adviser, Marco Rubio, called them “bullshit”.has been a regular visitor to the White House, despite being a critic of the war. He told Lulu Garcia-Navarro’spodcast that on the eve of Operation Epic Fury Trump “didn’t seem enthusiastic at all.
There was no effort to say, once we do this, the United States will be at peace, we’ll be safe, we will be more prosperous. There was none of that. Zero. ” Netanyahu, he concluded, had a strange hold over Trump.
Carlson asked him: “How do you know? ” Trump replied: “Because it always is. ” As with every other important decision in his life and his presidency, Trump is winging it. Carlson said he warned Trump that a war with Iran would destroy his presidency.
If it does, he has only himself to blame. On election night in 2024, he said critics had accused him of wanting to start a war.
“I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars,” he said. But as Peter Bergen wrote in his book, Trump was constantly asking for “military options” to attack Iran during his first term. He came close several times back then. So far, in less than 18 months of his second term, Trump has bombed not only Iran, but also Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria and Venezuela.
He has threatened to attack Cuba, Panama, Greenland and even Canada. Though Netanyahu may have manipulated Trump, he was only feeding Trump’s deep desires. Whatever regrets he might have, Trump owns this war.
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