Author: Emmanuel

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — On the first day of his visit to the Middle East, President Trump combined business with diplomacy, reaching out to the nascent government in Syria, extending an olive branch to Iran and agreeing to what the White House hailed as the largest economic pact signed by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.The economic agreements include a $142-billion defense deal with Saudi Arabia, providing the kingdom with a slew of modern weaponry and offensive systems that Trump’s predecessor, President Biden, had been holding in reserve to incentivize the Saudi royal family to normalize relations with the Israeli government.In total, the White House said, Trump signed agreements with the Saudis on artificial intelligence, energy infrastructure, healthcare investment and aerospace manufacturing that are worth about $600 billion. That number could not immediately be verified.The financial deals, struck as the U.S.-Saudi Investment Summit was held in the Riyadh, the capital, lent a pragmatism to the president’s visit to a country that has proved to be an ethically challenging U.S. ally for decades. The moves on Syria and Iran had been advocated by the Saudis and their Arab allies since Trump returned to office in January. Dispensing with tradition, Trump expressed a willingness to engage directly with players in the region that are viewed with deep suspicion in Washington, including Syria’s new president and the leadership in Iran.“I have never believed in having permanent enemies,” Trump said in extensive remarks at an investment forum Tuesday. “I am different than a lot of people think.”“Far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins,” he added. “It is God’s job to sit in judgment.”In his speech, Trump addressed Iran’s ongoing nuclear enrichment program, stating once again that Tehran would “never have a nuclear weapon.”“I’m here today not merely to condemn the past chaos of Iran’s leaders, but to offer them a new path and a much better path toward a far better and more hopeful future,” he said. “But if Iran’s leadership rejects this olive branch, and continues to attack their neighbors, then we will have no choice but to inflict massive maximum pressure.”Trump also said he would end sweeping sanctions on Syria imposed during the country’s civil war, drawing a standing ovation from those assembled to hear his speech, and fulfilling a long-repeated request from Syria’s leaders and its Arab and international allies. Syria’s longtime leader, Bashar Assad, was overthrown in December, and the country is now headed by an Islamist government.Trump said he would order the cessation of the sanctions so as to give Syria “a chance at greatness.”“The sanctions were brutal and crippling and served as an important function, but now it’s their turn to shine,” he said. “So I say good luck, Syria. Show us something very special like they’ve done, frankly, in Saudi Arabia.”He said he was spurred in his decision by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.“Oh, what I do for the crown prince,” Trump quipped.Trump greeted by Saudi pompTrump arrived Tuesday in the Saudi capital for the first leg of his Middle East tour. He was welcomed with a pomp-and-circumstance-filled ceremony and a high-powered lunch with top business leaders and government figures before giving a speech at an investment forum. After Air Force One landed in Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport — escorted by Saudi Arabian F-15s — Trump emerged, pumped his fist in the air, then stepped off the plane onto a lavender carpet, where the crown prince greeted him with a jovial, two-handed handshake — a contrast to the seemingly reluctant fist bump he once gave President Biden.Trump and the prince then walked to an ornate hall where they engaged in a traditional coffee welcome ceremony, the first phase of a two-day visit suffused with similar displays of pageantry.Once done, Trump drove in the limousine known as “the Beast,” flanked by a phalanx of horsemen carrying Saudi and American flags, then stood before an honor guard and a military band that played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Saudi national anthem.Joining Trump was a raft of U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, special envoy Steve Witkoff and dozens of business leaders. In one unusual moment during the meeting, Trump offered a salute — typically reserved for U.S. service members — to a Saudi military officer.Later, at a lavish lunch in Al-Yamamah Palace, Trump and the crown prince began an hourlong glad-handing session featuring Saudi royals, officials and military commanders. Also on hand were elite business figures and star chief executives — all part of a 250-person guest list focusing on banking, tech, health, defense and artificial intelligence, including Elon Musk, a top aide to the president, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Los Angeles Times owner and biotech entrepreneur Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong also attended the lunch.Yet it was business deals promised to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars that were the main focus of the day.Trump employed his usual patter to the proceedings, touting American-made weapons as “the best military equipment in the world, by far.”“As you know, we have the biggest business leaders in the world here,” Trump said. “They’re going to walk away with a lot of checks for a lot of things that you’re going to provide.”He added that his 24 hours in the country would yield an estimated 2 million job opportunities in the United States. After the lunch, Trump and Mohammed signed a strategic economic partnership agreement, which, according to Saudi state media, included memorandums of understanding on energy, mining, mineral resources, defense and a cooperation agreement between NASA and the Saudi Space Agency.Trump will remain in the kingdom through Wednesday, when he will meet briefly with Syria’s de facto president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, for the first time — a significant gesture by the American president toward an unknown leader and former Al Qaeda member. Trump will travel to Qatar on Wednesday and end the trip Thursday in the United Arab Emirates.The business summit preceding Trump’s speech was an all-day affair of roundtable discussions and onstage debates replete with the aphorisms and announcements that are de rigueur in such events.CEOs of Saudi Arabia’s so-called giga-projects, sprawling construction sites that are already sprouting across the country, spoke glowingly of the kingdom’s potential as a tourist destination. Jerry Inzerillo, who heads a massive tourism project near Diriyah, compared the site’s future to Beverly Hills, touting it as a walkable mini-city with 6 million trees and six miles of parks.Still, the focus was squarely on AI, with leaders in Saudi Arabia’s new state-sponsored AI company, Humain, joining the stage with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to discuss the country’s plan to amass enough computing infrastructure to make it a major player in AI.In the hours before Trump’s address, business leaders who signed memorandums of understanding with the Saudi government assembled for a group photo with government officials. Later, Musk took to the stage and returned to the now perennial theme of autonomous taxis, which he promised would soon make their debut.As the sun waned, Trump and the crown prince arrived at the Ritz-Carlton, where the summit was held. (The hotel was once used as a gilded prison for dozens of officials and business figures ensnared in the government’s anticorruption drive shortly after Mohammed’s father, King Salman, took power.)The crown prince led Trump into a gallery with pictures depicting previous meetings between U.S. presidents and Saudi monarchs, starting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s meeting with King Ibn Saud on board the U.S. Navy cruiser USS Quincy in 1945.The leaders then toured a room with scale models showcasing the future form of the country’s giga-projects.When they entered the hall, the Saudis’ penchant for ceremony was again in full force, with strains of the theme from the movie “Air Force One” playing as the leaders walked to their positions near the stage, amid a scandal roiling Washington over a proposal by Trump to accept a historic gift from Qatar: A Boeing jet worth $400 million, which would serve as Air Force One for the duration of his term.Bulos reported from Riyadh and Wilner from Washington. More to Read

A deed to land that was owned by the author’s grandfather, superimposed over an image of the high-rise building on that site in Beersheba today. (Los Angeles Times photo illustration; Adel Bseiso images) My father, Jawdat Bseiso, was 23 when everything changed.As the favorite son of Mahrous Mustafa Bseiso — one of the largest landowners in southern Palestine — he was being groomed to inherit our family’s legacy. My grandfather was a prominent businessman in Beersheba, a thriving Palestinian city where Muslims, Christians and Jews once lived together in peace.Then came May 15, 1948. Palestinians know it as the Nakba — the Catastrophe. That day, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, including my entire family, were forcibly displaced during the founding of the state of Israel. Our lands, homes and businesses were seized, and we were labeled “absentees” even though we had been violently expelled and our properties expropriated.Overnight, my family became refugees. Our home, along with hundreds of thousands of acres of our land in Beersheba and elsewhere, was taken and handed over to the Israeli state. The property was listed under that government’s Custodian of Absentee Property, but we were never absentee: We were driven out and not allowed to return and regain our family properties.I was born in 1962 in Al Bireh, near Ramallah in the West Bank. My family eventually immigrated to the United States and became citizens. Like many other refugees, my parents shielded us from the past. My father rarely spoke of what had happened. He carried the pain silently, his eyes always seemingly fixed somewhere else, trapped between memory and loss.In America, I faced the usual immigrant struggles: racism, bullying and the pressure to assimilate. To protect myself, I turned to wrestling and martial arts. As an adult I eventually made a career in the music industry, but even then I felt I had to hide. Instead of working under my given name, Adel, I went by Eddie, then Edvardo, and finally Vardo Bissiccio, leaving my Arabic name out of my career. Success came, but the hunger for truth remained.I spent years searching for answers: what we had lost, who we really were and what had been stolen from us. Long after my grandfather and father passed away, I kept searching, and I found answers — a trove of evidence such as land deeds, tax records, sales contracts and letters of correspondence, painstakingly gathered and verified. They tell a story of prosperity before displacement, and of legal rights denied. They also preserve the legacy of my grandfather, a man who turned the desert into gardens, farms and industry around Beersheba in the early 20th century.Although this search began from a personal yearning, I realized the resulting collection could be valuable to many others. Indeed, when I invited scholars to verify and assess the files, we concluded that the Bseiso family archive is the largest known collection of original documents from a single Palestinian family, detailing legal land ownership before the 1948 Nakba.In 2019, I began digitizing the records, and Columbia University eventually agreed to house the collection within its modern Arab studies program. In 2025, we launched BFArchive.org, making Palestinian history more accessible to scholars, journalists and the public.May 15 marks the 77th anniversary of the Nakba. Our documents now serve as legal and historical evidence not only of our own story but also of a broader pattern of dispossession.None of this is meant to challenge the existence of the state of Israel or to erase any other group’s history. Our goal is justice. We aim to set the record straight and pursue compensation for the billions of dollars’ worth of property that was unlawfully taken from our family and from so many others.The global conversation is changing. Millions now march in support of Palestine. Nations around the world are recognizing Palestinian statehood and the right of return. What was once hidden is being brought to light. A “black swan” moment — a tipping point for justice — is approaching.The scale of what was taken from us is staggering: land, legacy, opportunity. But behind those material losses lies something deeper, a history, a rightful place in the narrative of the land we once called home.For decades, I’ve preserved not just documents but stories. Oral histories passed down from my grandfather, my father and our elders speak of a time before the Nakba — of community, coexistence and peace. They also bear witness to what came after: exile, erasure and ongoing injustice.My family’s archive exists to preserve those truths and to make them impossible to ignore.Adel Bseiso, an American Palestinian music producer, lives in Los Angeles. More to Read

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The first time President Trump visited Riyadh in 2017, he posed with a ceremonial orb, took part in a traditional sword dance and secured an agreement by Saudi Arabia to purchase $350 billion in weaponry, the largest arms deal in U.S. history.The sequel, coming eight years later — almost to the day — promises much the same in the way of pageantry and purchases, only more so.Even before the trip, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman vowed he would invest about $600 billion over the four years of Trump’s presidency (Trump asked him to round it up to $1 trillion).And although the orb will probably not make an appearance this time around, Trump is bringing with him a phalanx of business leaders for a Saudi-U.S. business summit Tuesday — the day he arrives — that will include BlackRock Chief Executive Larry Fink, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Palantir Technologies’ Alex Karp, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. The heads of other major firms, including IBM, Boeing, Qualcomm and Alphabet, also will attend. White House artificial intelligence and crypto czar David Sacks, meanwhile, is already in Riyadh.Trump will then attend a summit with gulf leaders on Wednesday, travel to Qatar that same day and end the trip Thursday in the United Arab Emirates. There will be more gifts: The UAE has pledged $1.4 trillion in U.S. investment packages over the next decade.“Trump is there to solidify a very close relationship,” said Ali Shihabi, a political and economic expert who is close to the Saudi government, adding that although he did not expect a breakthrough on security matters, the deals signed would nevertheless bring “economic ties and coordination to a very high level.”Not to be outdone by its two regional competitors, Qatar is in discussions about the “possible transfer” of a luxury Boeing 747-8 to replace Air Force One. Before departing on the current Air Force One, Trump found himself defending plans to accept the gift, which is thought to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. He dismissed those with concerns over the ethics and constitutionality of the gift as “stupid people,” suggesting he planned to proceed with it, a topic sure to fuel questions over his visit to Doha, the Qatari capital. Trump also visited Saudi Arabia on the first international trip of his first term, breaking a presidential tradition of visiting U.S. allies and major trade partners such as the United Kingdom and European countries. That Trump chose the gulf region as his first destination, commentators say, reflects the Mideast’s growing centrality to the U.S. in terms of political and security partners. (Technically, this is not his first overseas trip since returning to the White House because he attended the recent funeral of Pope Francis.)“The gulf nations succeeded in positioning themselves in a way that lets them play constructive roles in several issues,” said Hasan Alhasan, senior fellow for Middle East policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Bahrain. He pointed out that Saudi Arabia has sponsored talks between Russia and Ukraine and was involved in peacemaking efforts in Sudan.Qatar is a driving force in negotiations between Israel and Hamas and has helped to stabilize Syria. Oman, which is not on the itinerary but whose leader will take part in the summit, is hosting high-level talks between the U.S. and Iran.“Trump is not tied to the protocols of other presidents. He sees an overlap in aims, whether political or commercial,” Alhasan said.Israel is watching the visit with consternation on a host of fronts, expecting Trump to hear an earful from Arab governments on its continuing conflict with Hamas militants in Gaza and the role Israel is playing in the future of Syria. And Israeli officials are increasingly concerned that their voices will be drowned out as the Trump administration progresses in its negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.Any hint from Trump that he would tolerate the Iranians continuing with a civilian nuclear program will send reverberations throughout Washington, particularly on Capitol Hill, where Republicans have long opposed allowing Iran to continue any enrichment of uranium on its soil.Trump also appears unconcerned with limits placed by his predecessors on what countries can receive from the U.S. He has reportedly revoked the AI diffusion rule, the U.S. policy intended to control the export of advanced semiconductor chips and AI, paving the way for gulf nations to ramp up their already considerable advanced chip holdings.That’s especially true for the UAE, whose $1.4-trillion investment will be heavily weighted toward AI. Meanwhile, MGX, an investment fund based in the Emirati capital, Abu Dhabi, has pledged $100 billion in energy infrastructures and data centers in the U.S. to support AI.At the same time, G42, another UAE-based AI firm, has divested from Chinese companies and partnered with Microsoft in an attempt to appease U.S. lawmakers.There have also been reports that Trump will revive potential arms deals that were on the table from his first term but were never completed, including sales of F-35 fighter jets and Reaper drones to the UAE, and the co-production of advanced missiles with Saudi Arabia, said Prem Thakker, a partner with the global advisory firm DGA and a former official with the National Security Council under President Obama.Another issue on the table could be nuclear power for Saudi Arabia. President Biden made supporting a civilian nuclear program for the kingdom contingent on Riyadh agreeing to a peace deal with Israel similar to the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements forged with the UAE, Bahrain and others during Trump’s first term.Under Trump, that condition appears to have been dropped, with negotiations that could potentially allow Saudi Arabia to capitalize on its uranium reserves and a domestic enrichment program.“And this means that traditional nonproliferation concerns over Saudi Arabia have really subsided over the last few years,” Thakker said. “Twenty years ago no one in the U.S. would have contemplated such an agreement.”The trip dovetails with a raft of investments involving the Trump Organization. Its real-estate development arm, which is led by Trump’s son Eric, has announced since last year construction projects across the gulf region, including a $2-billion golf course in Qatar, an 80-story hotel and residential tower in Dubai and two Trump towers in Saudi Arabia — one in Riyadh and one in Jeddah.Though the deals appear gargantuan, experts say financial realities will cut them down to size. Many point out that Saudi Arabia’s investments during Trump’s first term did not reach the $450 billion he mentioned (the figure includes nonmilitary spending). Even the most generous of calculations would put the Saudi investments at less than $300 billion, experts say.Though its investments in the U.S. are likely to increase during Trump’s second term, Riyadh has focused much of its spending on gigaprojects such as NEOM. And current oil prices sitting below the government’s break-even price of around $100 a barrel means that it will be running a deficit, said David Butter, a Middle East energy expert at Chatham House, a think tank in London.He added that the Saudi government and its colossal sovereign fund, the Public Investment Fund, both of which own a part of Saudi oil giant Aramco, have not received performance-linked dividends for this year. The result, Butter said, is a looming financial crisis.“The investment numbers are fantasy,” he said.Bulos reported from Riyadh and Wilner from Washington. More to Read

To understand the new politics stance and other pro nationals of recent times, we should look to Silicon Valley and the quantified movement of the latest generation. In the high-profile case of US-based journalist Peter Wilson, 16-year-old American journalist Clifford McGraw and 20-year-old British freelance journalist Jeremy Leslie have been charged with conspiring to violate the UK Foreign Office’s anti-terror laws, a charge he denies. On Monday, UK attorney Andy McDonald revealed that he had spoken. “Few worry about catching Covid anymore, as it’s just a matter of time before they do,” says Tea, a teacher at a school for…