--:-- Tracy Mumford: From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Wednesday, May 14th. Here's what we're covering.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Tonight, the emir of Qatar is set to host President Trump for a lavish dinner at his palace as Trump continues his Middle East tour. His visit will mark a dramatic turnaround. Eight years ago, Trump railed against Cutter's leadership and denounced what he called their extremist ideology. Now Trump calls the emir a gentleman and a friend.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In recent years, Cutter's managed to basically remake its image on the world stage, thanks in part to massive investments it's made from its natural gas wealth. A big part of the makeover was the World Cup. In 2022, it hosted the soccer championship, the most popular sporting event on the planet, and that put it on the map for a lot of people.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Qatar outspent its rivals to get the hosting gig, sparking accusations of corruption. The country has also become a mediator in the region, most notably between Israel and Hamas, following October 7th. And Qatar's spent millions of dollars on lobbyists in D.C. and elsewhere.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: One of those was Pam Bondi, who is now Trump's attorney general. Now, Qatar may be looking to shore up its relationship with the U.S. even further with the gift of a $440 million luxury jet that could be used as Air Force One. Trump said yesterday he would be stupid not to accept it.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Even for some of the president's staunchest defenders, that's a step too far. Taking sacks of goodies from people who support Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Jazeera, all the rest, that's not America first. Like, please define America first in a way that says you should take sacks of cash from the Qatari royals.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: It just isn't America first. Conservative podcast host Ben Shapiro, right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, and others have blasted the idea, adding to a chorus of outrage and alarm from Democrats and ethics experts who have questioned the motives behind a gift like this coming from Qatar.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Today on The Daily, Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman has more details about the controversy surrounding the plane.
--:-- Maggie Haberman: Also on President Trump's Middle East trip... I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The president made a surprise announcement that the U.S. will lift its sanctions on Syria, throwing an economic lifeline to the country that's been devastated by a decade of civil war. The sanctions were brutal and crippling and served as an important function, nevertheless, at the time.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But now it's their time to shine. It's their time to shine. We're taking them all off. People were singing, they were chanting, there were fireworks going off, they were honking their horns, they were blasting music from their cars, and there was just this kind of elation in the country.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: My colleague Ben Hubbard was in Damascus when news of Trump's announcement broke. He says there's no timeline on when the sanctions will actually be lifted, but people were ecstatic at just the idea.
--:-- Ben Hubbard: The U.S. put the sanctions in place years ago to punish the country's now ousted dictator, Bashar al-Assad. And Syria's new government had been hoping they'd be lifted since they've made it nearly impossible to start rebuilding.
--:-- Ben Hubbard: They really strangled the economy. They cut off Syria from the international banking system. So you cannot use your ATM card. You cannot use a credit card here. If you're a Syrian living abroad, you can't transfer money to your relatives here.
--:-- Ben Hubbard: They made it very difficult to import many, many different kinds of goods, industrial machinery, all sorts of things. And it really just kind of ground down the economy.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Ben says Trump has been skeptical of the new Syrian government. Its president once led a branch of al-Qaeda before he broke ties. But Trump seems to have been persuaded by the leaders of Turkey and Saudi Arabia to roll back the sanctions.
--:-- Ben Hubbard: The argument by everyone who was trying to convince the United States to lift the sanctions was that a stable Syria is good for the region and it's good for the world.
--:-- Ben Hubbard: A stable Syria will prevent a lot of the problems that have come out of Syria over the last 13 years. This includes mass migration of refugees to neighboring Arab countries and Turkey.
--:-- Ben Hubbard: This includes mass migration to Europe. And if the country can stabilize, then hopefully it will just be more secure. You've had, you know, terrorist organizations operating here. ISIS took over a huge part of the country.
--:-- Ben Hubbard: And so having a stable central government in Damascus that can provide basic services and that can ensure security could hopefully prevent a lot of these problems that have come out of Syria during the war.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: In Israel, the Times has learned that some of the Israeli military's own officers are privately warning that Gazans are on the brink of starvation. Israel cut off food along with fuel and medicine to Gaza in March, saying it was part of a pressure campaign against Hamas.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Since then, it's claimed in public that there are still plenty of supplies inside the territory. But behind the scenes the Israeli officers have determined that if the blockade is lifted in the next few weeks many people will simply run out of food to eat.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The Israeli Ministry of Defense declined to comment on the predictions, though the dire timeline matches what aid groups have been saying. Just this week, a U.N.-backed group that monitors malnutrition in Gaza said famine there is imminent.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And Gazans that The Times has talked with describe an increasingly bleak situation. One 71-year-old retiree said all he ate on a recent day was a bit of fava beans from a can, and that over the course of the war, he's dropped from 210 pounds to 130.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: He also said his daughter, who recently gave birth, can't breastfeed because she's not eating enough, and there's no baby formula available either. We have life-saving supplies ready now at the borders. We can save hundreds of thousands of survivors.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: But Israel denies us access. Meanwhile, at an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council yesterday, the UN's humanitarian chief accused Israel of, quote, deliberately and unashamedly imposing inhumane conditions on civilians in Gaza.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: 14 of the council's 15 member countries called on Israel to immediately let aid in. The only one that didn't was the United States.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: I think if you work as a radiologist, you're like the coyote that's already over the edge of the cliff, but hasn't yet looked down so doesn't realize there's no ground underneath him.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: About a decade ago, Jeffrey Hinton, one of the world's leading experts in artificial intelligence, said he was so confident that AI was on the cusp of replacing human workers that he could predict which jobs would disappear first.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: People should stop training radiologists now. It's just completely obvious that within five years, deep learning is going to do better than radiologists because it's going to be able to get a lot more experience.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Hinton said that analyzing medical imaging, things like MRIs and CT scans, was exactly the kind of work that computers would soon do better than humans. But that's not what happened.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Amid a broader debate about if or when AI will steal our jobs, radiologists have become a kind of case study in how the technology can supercharge human experts instead of replacing them.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The Times recently visited the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where the radiology department has gone all in on AI while also boosting its staff. They use the new technology to predict disease, flag suspicious scans, or analyze tissue.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: For example, one kidney measurement that used to take a radiologist up to 30 minutes to do is now done in seconds. That has freed up the radiologists themselves to do things that AI isn't as good at, using their experience to advise surgeons, talking to patients, or putting together treatment plans based on people's individual medical history.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Since Hinton's prediction, the Mayo Clinic's radiology staff has grown by 55 percent. It now includes its own AI team of 40 people.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The head of the clinic's digital programs has made his own prediction, saying, quote, Five years from now, it will be malpractice not to use AI, but it will be humans and AI working together.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: And finally, the Cannes Film Festival kicked off last night in the south of France with one last-minute new rule for the celebrities walking the red carpet. The dress code now prohibits nudity.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Obviously, stars have been showing a lot of skin for a long time, with sky-high slits, revealing cutouts, sheer fabric, mesh, etc. On the red carpet, underwear is an outfit. But the so-called naked dressing trend has been picking up speed in recent years.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Maybe I'm getting old, but why don't people wear clothes anymore? With outfits cut down to just strategically placed beads. Bella Hadid frees the nipple in a stunning...
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Or at the Grammys this year, one fully transparent nylon slip hiding truly nothing. She's, I guess, wearing a, quote, mesh dress, which is totally invisible.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Notably, the new dress code at Cannes also bans too much clothing, basically anything with a giant train that would make it hard for people to walk around you and get into the theater.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: The Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman theorized that what the organizers may be trying to do is keep the attention focused on the films rather than the eye-grabbing outfits.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: So in that spirit, let's talk about the movies. There are a lot of big English-language movies this year at what's traditionally been a showcase of global cinema.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Spike Lee and Wes Anderson have brought their new films. And Tom Cruise's final installment of the Mission Impossible series—they don't even put the number in the title anymore, but this is the eighth one—premieres tonight.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: For more about what to watch for at this year's star-studded but slightly more clothed Cannes, go to nytimes.com.
--:-- Tracy Mumford: Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.
