--:-- Tracy Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, May 13th.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Here's what we're covering. Early this morning, President Trump received a royal welcome in Saudi Arabia as he touched down for the first stop on his four-day tour of the Middle East.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: For the last 30 minutes of the flight, Air Force One was escorted by Saudi fighter jets, and a purple carpet was rolled out on the tarmac in Riyadh, where Trump was welcomed by the Saudi crown prince.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Trump, along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, will attend a U.S.-Saudi investment conference and a state dinner before continuing on to Qatar and the UAE.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: His trip comes at a time when there is a lot of important foreign policy measures at play in the region with different negotiations going on to try to end the war in Gaza.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: There's talks about a new Iranian nuclear deal. But those aren't really the point of this trip. This trip is about one thing, and that is economic deals.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: My colleague, White House correspondent Luke Broadwater, is in Riyadh. Donald Trump has told his advisors he wants to bring home pledges of $1 trillion in deals for the United States.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: We don't know exactly what they all will be yet, but we strongly suspect many of them have already been announced and will be sort of repackaged as new announcements for this trip so that the president can come home with a large dollar amount that he can sort of boast about.
--:-- Luke Broadwater: Saudi Arabia has already pledged to invest $600 billion over four years in the United States.
--:-- Luke Broadwater: Trump has asked them to round that up to $1 trillion. That's going to be very difficult for the Saudi government to pull off.
--:-- Luke Broadwater: They just don't really have that kind of cash on hand.
--:-- Luke Broadwater: Now, we already know at least one of the deals that will be announced is the State Department has already said that Saudi Arabia plans to buy $3.5 billion in air-to-air missiles from the United States.
--:-- Luke Broadwater: So it is very possible there will be deals made.
--:-- Luke Broadwater: But during President Trump's first term visit in 2017 to Saudi Arabia there were hundreds of billions of dollars announced in investments but an analysis of those shows that fewer than one of them actually came to fruition.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Last night, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court for permission to deport another group of Venezuelans they've accused of being gang members.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The court had temporarily blocked the roughly 200 migrants from being deported last month amid a series of legal challenges.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Now, in the filing to the court, the government claims that serious difficulties have arisen with detaining them.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It says that a few weeks ago, about two dozen of the migrants barricaded themselves inside the Louisiana detention facility where they were being held.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And for several hours, they blocked doors, covered surveillance cameras, and threatened to take hostages.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The government says the incident is proof the men pose a threat and need to be deported.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The Times reached out to a lawyer for the men to verify the account and didn't immediately hear back, but the filing offers a rare look into what's been happening at the facility.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Last month, journalists from Reuters flew a drone over it to see where the men were being held and captured photos of a group of detainees using their bodies to spell out the letters S.O.S.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The Trump administration has claimed the men are gang members who have invaded the U.S., giving the government the authority to deport them without a trial.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The Times investigation found that an earlier group of Venezuelan migrants who were deported, using that same justification, had very few documented links to gang activity, and that most of them had no criminal records beyond their immigration offenses.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Now, two other quick updates on the Trump administration.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: First, in Washington yesterday, there was a standoff at the Library of Congress, as staff there refused to let Trump administration officials access the building.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: President Trump has appointed Todd Blanche, his former personal lawyer who's now the deputy attorney general, to run the institution after he abruptly fired the previous librarian of Congress.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Yesterday morning, two of Blanche's deputies tried to enter the complex, holding a letter from the White House saying they were now in charge of some of the library operations.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But since the firing library staff have said they waiting for direct instructions from Congress on who their new boss is since the position is supposed to be confirmed by the Senate.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: When the two men showed up, the staff called the library's general counsel and the Capitol police, and the men walked away.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It's not exactly clear what will happen next in the separation of powers showdown.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In a joint statement, two Democratic lawmakers said, Congress must stand up for Article 1 of the Constitution and defend the nonpartisan library and the legislative branch from White House political control.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And in another moment of pushback, earlier this year, American farmers brought a lawsuit against the Trump administration for stripping climate data from the Department of Agriculture's website.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The information included data sets and interactive tools that farmers relied on to plan for heat waves, droughts, floods and other disasters linked to global warming.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The administration had scrubbed the info as part of its push to purge language related to climate change from federal documents.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Now, the department says it has started restoring the data in response to the lawsuit.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In California yesterday...
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It is time to take back the streets. It's time to take back the sidewalks.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Governor Gavin Newsom took a major step in cracking down on homeless encampments.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: He called on cities and towns across the state to effectively ban camping on public property and gave them a legal template to put that ban in place.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It simply cannot continue. It cannot be a way of life.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: California is home to about half of the country's unsheltered homeless population.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Tents and sleeping bags on the sidewalks have become a constant sight in many places, especially since the pandemic.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Newsom now wants municipalities to clear any camps, pointing to the tens of billions of dollars his administration has spent on housing and mental health services to address the issue.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: There are no more excuses, Newsom said in a statement.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: As one of the most well-known Democrats in the country, Newsom pushing to outlaw encampments suggests that the Democratic Party's approach to homelessness may be shifting.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In the past, many liberals have been against any actions that could be seen to punish those without shelter.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But frustration has been rising.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: According to a recent poll nearly 40 percent of California voters said they were so tired of encampments overtaking parks and sidewalks that they supported arresting people if they refused shelter.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Newsom's proposed ban doesn't specify any criminal penalties like that, but many advocates for the homeless still object to clearing encampments.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: They say it can traumatize vulnerable people and just moves the problem around.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Close one camp and another pops up.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Other critics of Newsom's plan pointed to an ongoing shortage of shelter space and said California needs even more housing and treatment options than the governor has pushed for.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And finally, there's been a breakthrough in flamingo research, which is a thing.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: If you've ever seen a flock of flamingos eating their food, it is a whole showy operation.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: They dip their long necks all the way down, dunk their heads underwater, and then shuffle their feet in this weird, splashy, cha-cha tap dance while they scoot around.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It looks really goofy, but scientists have now cracked exactly what the birds are up to.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The research shows that flamingos are not just hunting and pecking, hoping for snacks.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Instead, they are active predators who harness physics to sweep up their prey.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: High-speed cameras captured how, by quickly pulling their heads back, the birds can create a tornado-like vortex in the water that sucks in small crustaceans and insects.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And flamingos' beaks are specifically shaped to get those mini-tornadoes to flow directly into their mouths.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: So, food delivery via twister.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And when it comes to the little dance they do, flamingos' webbed feet can produce a vortex too.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: So all that shuffling is funneling even more food in.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: A biologist who led the research said the findings suggest flamingos are, quote, highly specialized super feeding machines that use their entire body for feeding.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Which, honestly, depending on how hungry I am, same flamingos, same.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Those are the headlines.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Today on The Daily, a look at the powerful influence that your siblings can have on your life.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.
