The Headlines - Qatar Woos Trump, and Israeli Officers Privately Admit Gazans Near Starvation

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

Plus, a new red carpet dress code: no nudity.On Today’s Episode:With Trump Visit, Qatar’s Image Makeover Scores Another Success, by Michael D. Shear, Adam Rasgon and Tariq PanjaTrump Meets Syrian President After Pledge to Lift Sanctions: Live Updates, by Vivian Nereim, Jonathan Swan and Qasim NaumanIn Private, Some Israeli Officers Admit That Gaza Is on the Brink of Starvation, by Natan Odenheimer and Ronen BergmanYour A.I. Radiologist Will Not Be With You Soon, by Steve LohrNo Naked Dressing? How Will Stars Make News?, by Vanessa FriedmanTune 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 is Wednesday, May 14th. Here's what we're covering. 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 Qatar's leadership and denounced what he called their extremist ideology. Now Trump calls the emir a gentleman and a friend. In recent years, Qatar'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. 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 Cutter's spent millions of dollars on lobbyists in DC and elsewhere. One of those was Pam Bondi,

who is now Trump's attorney general. Now, Cutter may be looking to shore up its relationship with the US even further with the gift of a $440 million dollar luxury jet that could be used as Air Force One. Trump said yesterday he would be stupid not to accept it. 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. 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 gif like this coming from Qatar. Today on The Daily, Time's White House correspondent Maggie Haberman has more details about the controversy surrounding the plane. 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 rapists.

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, really an important function nevertheless at the time. 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.

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. 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. 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, at least not through normal bank channels. It 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. — 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. 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. Even if you don't like this government and even if you have doubts about this president, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 isn't

lifted in the next few weeks, many people will simply run out of food to eat. 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 UN-backed group that monitors malnutrition in Gaza said famine there is imminent, 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Since Hinton's prediction, the Mayo Clinic's radiology staff has grown by 55%. It now includes its own AI team of 40 people.

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. 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. 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 with outfits cut down to just strategically placed beads or at the Grammys this year, one fully transparent nylon slip hiding truly nothing. Notably, the new dress code it can 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. 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 on the eye grabbing outfits. So in that spirit, let's talk about the movies. There are a lot of big English language movies this year what's traditionally been a showcase of global cinema. Tom Cruise's final Mission Impossible movie, they don't even put the number in the title anymore, but it's the eighth one, premieres tonight. Spike Lee and Wes Anderson also have new films at Cannes. And all eyes are peeled because this is where Oscar contenders usually emerge. Last year, Enora won the Palme d Palm Door, the top prize at Cannes, before

it went on to win Best Picture. The studio behind Anorah, NEON, has actually won five Palm Door in a row. It's hoping to go for six. For more about what to watch for at this year's star-studded but slightly more closed Cannes, go to nytimes.com. Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.