Just as Canada tries to exit one crisis, another one looms.

The country is finding its footing after a protracted political transition to a new leader, amid President Trump’s tariffs and sovereignty threats.

But now the western province of Alberta is laying the groundwork to hold a referendum asking voters whether they support seceding from Canada.

While the likelihood of such a divorce ever happening is slim — Canada’s Constitution would have to be amended, among other obstacles — the momentum to put the question on the ballot points to deep grievances bubbling to the surface. (Some Albertans actually prefer becoming a U.S. state.)

Many Albertans have long felt disgruntled with their place in Canada’s federal system, which they see as unfairly limiting the province’s vast oil-and-gas resources while dutifully collecting taxes.

The province, often referred to as “Canada’s Texas” because its oil and politics, is home to a small but dedicated minority of separatists. Their voice has been amplified in part because of Mr. Trump’s calls to annex Canada and by the re-election of a Liberal federal government, which many in traditionally conservative Alberta view as hostile to their concerns.

(A longstanding secessionist movement in the French-speaking province of Quebec has lost steam in recent months. Its most recent referendum, in 1995, narrowly failed to win a majority in favor of breaking away from Canada.)

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As federal police agents unraveled a Kremlin spying operation in Brazil, they confronted a mystery: How had so many deep-cover Russian spies managed to obtain seemingly authentic Brazilian birth certificates?

The police expected to find that the Russians had forged the documents or bribed municipal officials to create them and slip them into the registry as if they were from the 1980s and ’90s.

But when the forensic report came back in April, according to a senior Brazilian official, the analysis suggested something else entirely. The documents did not appear forged. And, most surprising, they weren’t even new.

Brazilian counterintelligence officers are now considering a more audacious possibility, one with echoes of the Cold War. Investigators suspect that K.G.B. operatives, working undercover in Brazil during the last years of the Soviet Union, may have filed birth certificates in the names of fictitious newborns — hoping that a future generation of spies would someday claim them and continue the fight against the West.

If true, it would represent an extraordinary level of foresight and mission commitment by intelligence officers during a time of great upheaval and unpredictability in the world. By the late 1980s, the Communist bloc had begun to crumble, along with the ideological divisions that had defined global politics — and the mission of Moscow’s spies — for decades.

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For President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, the meeting in the Oval Office was meant to be a chance to hit the reset button.

He did everything to get the mood right. He got President Trump to giggle with a joke about golf. He offered him a book. And he kept the compliments flowing, thanking Mr. Trump for providing South Africa with respirators during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“It really touched my heart,” Mr. Ramaphosa said.

In the build up to Mr. Ramaphosa’s meeting in the White House on Wednesday, South African officials stressed that they would not focus on Mr. Trump’s recent claims of white genocide, which are widely acknowledged as false. Instead they would talk about tariffs, South Africa’s valuable minerals and strengthening business ties between the two countries.

But Mr. Ramaphosa walked away from the meeting bruised and still carrying uncertainty over the future of his country’s crucial relationship with the United States. His effort to avoid the discussion of the so-called genocide and the recent arrival of 59 white South Africans labeled refugees by the Trump administration appeared to backfire spectacularly.

Now, South Africa finds itself with more work to do to avert steep tariffs, secure a new trade agreement and set the record straight on Mr. Trump’s continued accusations of racism against white people, who on the whole are much better off economically than the Black majority in South Africa.

“Today’s performance, if it does not lead to meaningful reconciliation, will only create more downward pressure on poor South Africans who struggle,” said Patrick Gaspard, the former United States ambassador to South Africa.

Israelis reacted with shock and horror on Thursday to the killing of two staff members at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called an “appalling antisemitic murder.”

The shooting took place as the two aides were leaving an event organized by the American Jewish Committee at the Capital Jewish Museum on Wednesday. The police said that they had arrested a suspect in connection with the killings who had shouted,“free, free Palestine,” after he was taken into custody.

The attack seemed likely to feed into growing worries among Israelis that the world had become far more hostile to them while living and traveling abroad since the war in Gaza began more than a year and a half ago.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry has identified the victims as Sarah Lynn Milgrim, who was responsible for organizing missions and visits to Israel, and Yaron Lischinsky, a researcher in the political department. Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, said that they were a couple about to be engaged.

David Schiff, who befriended Mr. Lischinsky at university, described him as “an incredibly talented guy — but more importantly, someone who was very kind.”

“He wanted to work in diplomacy. He was so excited to work at the embassy in D.C., and he loved D.C.,” Mr. Schiff, 31, said. “It’s all just shocking.”

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Ten days ago, Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, vowed to take “back control of our borders,” warning that uncontrolled immigration could result in the country “becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.”

On Thursday, the government estimated that net migration had dropped by almost half in 2024 compared to 2023, to 431,000, suggesting that Britain’s recent period of soaring immigration was ebbing, and perhaps even coming to an end.

The gap between Mr. Starmer’s alarming language and the statistics underscored how rising populism, fueled in Britain by the politics of Brexit, has distorted the debate on immigration, sometimes leaving it strangely disconnected from the facts.

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About 90 truckloads of aid had entered Gaza by Thursday, according to the United Nations, the first major influx of food that Israel has allowed in after a two-month blockade that deepened the humanitarian crisis in the territory.

The U.N. humanitarian affairs office and the Israeli military both confirmed that the aid deliveries were reaching warehouses and other points inside Gaza after days of delays. But aid officials said the shipment was a fraction of what was needed.

“Desperately needed aid is finally trickling in — but the pace is far too slow. We need more aid trucks coming in daily,” the World Food Program, one of the main U.N. agencies operating in Gaza, wrote on social media.

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