The Headlines - A Lavish Welcome for Trump in Saudi Arabia, and a Standoff at the Library of Congress

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

Plus, California’s crackdown on homelessness.On Today’s Episode:Trump Administration Live Updates: President Kicks Off Gulf Tour in Saudi Arabia, by Jonathan Swan, Luke Broadwater and Vivian NereimTrump Administration Asks Supreme Court to Allow Venezuelan Deportations to Resume, by Abbie VanSickleTrump Installs Top Justice Dept. Official at Library of Congress, Prompting a Standoff, by Maya C. Miller and Devlin BarrettFarmers Sued Over Deleted Climate Data. So the Government Will Put It Back, by Karen ZraickNewsom Asks Cities to Ban Homeless Encampments, Escalating Crackdown, by Shawn HublerFlamingos Make Underwater Vortexes to Suck Up Prey, by Rachel NuwerTune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. Tell us what you think at: [e-mail].

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Tuesday, May 13th. 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. 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. 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. 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 in different cities to try to end the war in Gaza. 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.

My colleague, White House correspondent Luke Broadwater, is in Riyadh. Donald Trump has told his advisors he wants to bring home pledges of one trillion dollars in deals for the United States. He's going to be announcing various deals in various countries. 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. Saudi Arabia has already pledged to invest $600 billion over four years in the United

States. Trump has asked them to round that up to one trillion. That's going to be very difficult for the Saudi government to pull off. They just don't really have that kind of cash on hand. 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. And so it is very possible there will be deals made.

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 fourth of them actually came to fruition. So, you know, sometimes these big deals don't actually pan out. Last night, the Trump administration

asked the Supreme Court for permission to deport another group of Venezuelans they've accused of being gang members. The court had temporarily blocked the roughly 200 migrants from being deported last month amid a series of legal challenges. Now, in the filing to the court, the government claims that, quote, serious difficulties have arisen with detaining them. 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, and for several hours they

blocked doors, covered surveillance cameras, and threatened to take hostages. They say the incident is proof that the men pose a threat and need to be deported. 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. 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. 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.

A 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. Now, two other quick updates on the Trump administration. criminal records beyond their immigration offenses. Now two other quick updates on the Trump administration. 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. President Trump has appointed Todd Blanch, his former personal lawyer, who's now the

deputy attorney general, to run the institution after he abruptly fired the previous librarian of Congress. Yesterday morning, two of Blanch'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's operations. But since the firing, library staff have said they're waiting for direct instructions from Congress on who their new boss is, since the position is supposed to be confirmed by the Senate. When the two men showed up, the staff called the library's general counsel and the Capitol

police, and the two men walked away. It's not exactly clear what will happen next in the separation of powers showdown. In a joint statement, two Democratic lawmakers said, quote, Congress must stand up for Article I of the Constitution and defend the nonpartisan library and the legislative branch from White House political control. And in another moment of pushback at the Department of Agriculture,

Trump administration officials say they're starting to restore information on the department's website about climate change after farmers sued to get it put back. 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. The administration had scrubbed that info as part of its push to purge language related to climate change from federal documents.

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom took a major step in cracking down on homeless encampments. 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. It simply cannot continue. It cannot be a way of life. California is home to about half of the country's unsheltered homeless population. Tents and sleeping bags on the sidewalks have become a constant sight in many places, especially since the pandemic.

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. There are no more excuses, Newsom said in a statement. 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.

In the past, many liberals have been against any actions that could be seen to punish those without shelter, but frustration has been rising. According to a recent poll, nearly 40% of California voters said they were so tired of encampments overtaking parks and sidewalks that they supported arresting people if they refused shelter. Meanwhile, many advocates for those experiencing homelessness have denounced Newsom's plan. They say clearing encampments can traumatize vulnerable people and just moves the problem around. Close one camp and another pops up. Others pointed to an ongoing shortage of shelter space and said California needs even more housing and treatment

options than Newsom has pushed for. And finally, there's been a breakthrough in flamingo research, which is a thing. If you've ever seen a flock of flamingos eating their food, it is a whole showy operation. 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. It looks really goofy, but scientists have now cracked exactly what the birds are up to. The research shows that flamingos are not just hunting and pecking, hoping for snacks. Instead, they are active predators who harness physics to sweep up their prey. 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.

And flamingo's beaks are specifically shaped to get those mini-tornadoes to flow directly into their mouths. So food delivery via twister. And when it comes to the little dance they do, flamingos webbed feet can produce a vortex too. So all that shuffling is funneling even more food in. 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. And for your fun bird fact of the day, what a flamingo eats actually does affect its color. Their pinky orange hue comes from pigments that are in some crustaceans and algae. Put them on a diet without those foods that they usually eat and flamingo's feathers stay white. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, a look at the powerful influence that your siblings can have on your life. That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.