Trump in Saudi Arabia: US president to address Islamic leaders
US President Donald Trump is expected to underline the need to confront extremism in Islam when he makes a speech in Saudi Arabia later on Sunday.
His address, to a summit of regional leaders, will come on the second day of his first presidential trip abroad.
It is expected he will attempt to strike a collaborative tone in attempts to bolster support for the US fight against Islamic State (IS) militants.
On Saturday, the US signed trade deals of $350bn (£270bn) with Saudi Arabia.
This included the largest arms deal ever made in US history, which Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said was aimed at countering the "malign" influence of Iran, Saudi Arabia's regional rival.
Rouhani’s victory is good news for Iran, but bad news for Trump and his Sunni allies
The Saudis will be appalled that a (comparatively) reasonable Iranian has won a (comparatively) free election that almost none of the 50 dictators gathering to meet Trump in Riyadh would ever dare to hold
So it’s a good win for the Iranian regime – and its enormous population of young people – and a bad win for Trump’s regime, which would far rather have had an ex-judicial killer as Iranian president so that Americans would find it easy to hate him. Maybe Hassan Rouhani’s final-week assault on his grim rival candidate and his supporters – “those whose main decisions have only been executions and imprisonment over the past 38 years” – paid off. Who among Iran’s under 25s, more than 40 per cent of the population, would have wanted to vote for Ebrahim Raisi whose hands had touched the execution certificates of up to 8,000 political prisoners in 1988?
So the man who signed Iran’s nuclear agreement with the United States, who struggled (often vainly, it has to be said) to reap the economic rewards of this nuclear bomb “truce” with the West, who believed in a civil society not unlike that of former president Mohamed Khatami – who supported him in the election – won with 57 per cent of the vote, backed by 23½ million of the 41 million who cast their ballot. The corrupt and censorious old men of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the bazaaris and the rural poor – the cannon fodder of the Iran-Iraq war as they often are in elections – have been told they no longer belong to the future.
Trump's White HouseA Vortex of Scandal, Chaos and Absurdity
The White House is becoming more chaotic by the day. Now, a special counsel has been brought in to investigate possible connections between President Donald Trump's team and Russia. But the most important question is now whether Trump is mentally stable enough to be president.
By Mathieu von Rohr
On Wednesday, a few hours before the special counsel was set loose on him, Donald Trump was standing before the graduates of the Coast Guard Academy. He was supposed to hold an inspiring talk, to spread a positive message, as one does at graduation speeches. Instead, he once again spoke about himself. "Over the course of your life, you will find that things are not always fair," he said to the graduating students. "Look at the way I've been treated, especially by the media," Trump said. "No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly."
No politician in history. Not Nelson Mandela. Not Mahatma Gandhi, not John F. Kennedy. Him. There stood a billionaire, inhabiting the most powerful office in the world, complaining about how unfair the world was. Because there seems to be one rule with Donald Trump: He is never to blame, even though almost everything currently happening to him is his fault.
When a sniper bullet just misses a journalist — but destroys his GoPro
Ammar al-Waeli is a journalist covering the fighting in Mossul, a city in northern Iraq. A stunning video captured the moment a sniper bullet whizzed past his face, shattering the GoPro attached to his shoulder.
On May 12, al-Waeli was covering the Iraqi army offensive to recapture the western side of Mosul from Islamic State group forces. He was chatting with a colleague when a bullet narrowly missed his face, and his GoPro exploded.
The close call was filmed by Owen Holdaway, a British freelance journalist.
Killing CIA informants, China stifled U.S. spying
The New York Times
The Chinese government systematically dismantled CIA spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.
Current and former U.S. officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the CIA had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the CIA used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.
How Israel is targeting Palestinian institutions
Recent raid of Arab Studies Society's Jerusalem office highlights a long-standing problem, rights groups say.
When Israeli police showed up at the maps and survey department of the Arab Studies Society's office in Jerusalem last month, director Khalil Tufakji was surprised to receive a six-month shutdown order.
Police proceeded to confiscate computers and the main server, along with posters and maps that had hung on the walls. Tufakji, along with the equipment, was swiftly transferred to the Jerusalem-based Moscobiyeh interrogation centre, also known as the Russian Compound.
The Israeli order alleged that Tufakji's office was working for the Palestinian Authority (PA), and police later accused the office of investigating land sales to Israelis on behalf of the PA.
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