National security and military analyst Dr. Rebecca Grant joins'Fox & Friends First' to discuss President Donald Trump's historic business-focused trip to the Middle East and why a Trump-Putin meeting could be essential for peace in Ukraine. President Donald Trump secured 2 trillion worth of deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE during his trip to the Middle East last week in what some have argued is a move to counter China's influence in the region. While China has increasingly bolstered its commercial ties with top Middle Eastern nations who have remained steadfast in their refusal to pick sides amid growing geopolitical tension between Washington and Beijing, Trump may have taken steps to give the U.S. an edge over its chief competitor. But concern has mounted after Trump reversed a Biden-era policy – which banned the sale of AI-capable chips to the UAE and Saudi Arabia – that highly coveted U.S. technologies could potentially fall into the hands of Chinese companies, and in extension, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). U.S. President Donald Trump walks with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman during a welcoming ceremony in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.

Donald Trump's jaunt to the Middle East featured an entourage of billionaire tech bros, a fighter-jet escort, and business deals designed to reshape the global landscape of artificial intelligence. On the final stop of the tour in Abu Dhabi, the US President announced that unnamed US companies would partner with the United Arab Emirates to create the largest AI datacenter cluster outside of America. Trump said that the US companies will help G42, an Emirati company, build five gigawatts of AI computing capacity in the UAE. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who leads the UAE's Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Council, and is in charge of a 1.5 trillion fortune aimed at building AI capabilities, said the move will strengthen the UAE's position "as a hub for cutting-edge research and sustainable development, delivering transformative benefits for humanity." A few days earlier, as Trump arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia announced Humain, an AI investment firm owned by the kingdom's Public Investment Fund.

United States President Donald Trump will undertake a three-day tour of the Gulf for his first state visit since retaking office in January. The trip begins in Saudi Arabia, followed by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. It marks Trump's second foreign visit as president after he attended Pope Francis's funeral in Rome in April. Trump will fly out of the US on Monday and start his trip in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on Tuesday. He is expected to attend a Gulf summit in the city on Wednesday, visit Qatar later that day and conclude his visit in the UAE on Thursday.

United States officials are set to meet with their Ukrainian counterparts again after a round of talks with Russian negotiators on a partial ceasefire in Ukraine. A senior Ukrainian official told the AFP news agency that the meeting would be held later on Monday after US and Russian delegations wrap up their day's talks in Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh. Monday's US-Russia talks were primarily focused on ending attacks on Black Sea shipping, with a view to ushering in a broader ceasefire agreement that would bring an end to the three-year Russia-Ukraine war. US officials had already met the Ukrainian team on Sunday to discuss the protection of civilian and energy infrastructure, said Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov, who led the delegation and called the talks "productive". Reporting from Kyiv, Al Jazeera's Assed Baig said Ukraine was now keen to see Russia agree to a deal that would protect Black Sea shipping, particularly "the cessation of shelling of Ukrainian ports Odesa, Kherson and Mykolaiv".

Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff tells'Hannity' what's next in Russia-Ukraine peace talks after President Donald Trump's phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Peace talks between U.S. and Russian delegations aimed at ending the war in Ukraine are underway Monday in Saudi Arabia, according to media reports. The discussions come after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a delegation from his country had a "quite useful" meeting with an American team in Riyadh on Sunday. "Our team is working in a fully constructive manner, and the discussion is quite useful. The work of delegations continues. But no matter what we're discussing with our partners right now, Putin must be pushed to issue a real order to stop the strikes – because the one who brought this war must be the one to take it back," Zelenskyy said.

Russia pushed Ukrainian forces out of most of the territory they controlled in the Russian region of Kursk during the past week, raising questions about whether a weeklong US intelligence cutoff materially helped the Russian counterattack. The US said it had restored intelligence sharing and military aid to Ukraine on Tuesday night, after Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire plan discussed in Riyadh for nine-and-a-half hours. Russian efforts to recapture Kursk intensified on March 6, a day after the White House cut off military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine. Russian forces attacked 32 times in Kursk, said Ukraine's general staff. According to Russian military reporters, Russia had prioritised that front, moving some of its best drone operators there and deploying electronic warfare to prevent Ukrainian drone counterattacks.

A significant proportion of people today live in towns and cities that grew up around trade, industry, and cars. Think of the docks of Liverpool, the factories of Osaka, the automobile obsession of New York's Robert Moses, or the low-density sprawl of modern Riyadh. Few of these places were created with human health in mind. Meanwhile, as humanity has shifted its center of gravity to cities, there's been an alarming rise in illnesses such as depression, cancer, and diabetes. This mismatch between humans and our habitat shouldn't come as a surprise.

An accurate and timely assessment of wind speed and energy output allows an efficient planning and management of this resource on the power grid. Wind energy, especially at high resolution, calls for the development of nonlinear statistical models able to capture complex dependencies in space and time. This work introduces a Convolutional Echo State AutoencodeR (CESAR), a spatio-temporal, neural network-based model which first extracts the spatial features with a deep convolutional autoencoder, and then models their dynamics with an echo state network. We also propose a two-step approach to also allow for computationally affordable inference, while also performing uncertainty quantification. We focus on a high-resolution simulation in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), an area where wind farm planning is currently ongoing, and show how CESAR is able to provide improved forecasting of wind speed and power for proposed building sites by up to 17% against the best alternative methods.

Elon Musk just dragged ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence programs into the Trump crosshairs by repeating his warning that current AI models are too "woke" and "politically correct." "A lot of the AIs that are being trained in the San Francisco Bay Area, they take on the philosophy of people around them," Musk said at the Future Investment Initiative, a Saudi Arabia government–backed event held in Riyadh this week. "So you have a woke, nihilistic--in my opinion--philosophy that is being built into these AIs." Although Musk is himself a polarizing figure, he is right about AI systems harboring political biases. The issue, however, is far from one-sided, and Musk's framing may help further his own interests due to his ties to Trump.

On a Monday morning last month, tech executives, engineers and sales representatives from Amazon, Google, TikTok and other companies endured a three-hour traffic jam as their cars crawled toward a mammoth conference at an event space in the desert, 50 miles outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The lure: billions of dollars in Saudi money as the kingdom seeks to build a tech industry to complement its oil dominance. To bypass the congestion, frustrated eventgoers drove onto the highway shoulder, kicking up plumes of desert sand as they sped past those following traffic rules. A lucky few took advantage of a special freeway exit dedicated to "VVIPs" -- very, very important people.