It'll be close, but it looks like women will be allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia with some time to spare before the automobile industry converts entirely to self-driving cars. A royal decree announced Tuesday that women would finally be allowed behind the wheel, heralding a preposterously overdue end to the most high-profile and infamous of the repressive kingdom's restrictions on women. While there are a few other Middle Eastern and conservative Islamic countries where driving by women is culturally or religiously frowned upon, Saudi Arabia is the last country on the planet that officially prohibited it. The government says it will first form a panel to look into implementing the order, then create the infrastructure it claims is necessary to put the order into effect. However, the order seems likely to be carried out.

The orb's segmented pedestal, which looked as if it might have come from the bridge of a science-fiction starship, added to the mystery. And an illuminated floor, not directly visible in the most widely circulated images, intensified the dramatic underlighting. Critics of Mr. Trump, some of whom seem eager to see something nefarious in anything he does, appeared especially agitated. Some projected onto the images their dismay about Mr. Trump's playing down of human rights and about the authoritarian Egyptian and Saudi governments. Bill Kristol, a prominent conservative critic of Mr. Trump, likened the group to the conclave of witches in "Macbeth."

SoftBank Group Corp. Chairman Masayoshi Son promised Saudi King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz al-Saud Salman that the telecom conglomerate will help Saudi Arabia prosper through investment. Speaking to reporters after their meeting in Tokyo on Tuesday, Son quoted the king as telling him he was greatly looking forward to the investment move. With input from several backers, including a Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund, SoftBank Group is set to launch an investment fund that could reach up to ¥10 trillion ($87.1 billion). Son said he gave the 81-year-old king the company's humanoid robot Pepper. The talks came a day after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the king announced a plan to create special economic zones in Saudi Arabia to promote investment by Japanese companies.

CloudMinds, a Chinese startup developing cloud-intelligence-based services for robotics and other application areas, raised $100 million in a Series A funding round. Although no funder information was provided, seed financing was provided by SoftBank, Foxconn, Walden International and Keytone Ventures. Desktop Metal, a 3D metal printing startup based in Burlington, Mass., is gearing up to take its first product into production and raised $45 million from GV, BMW I Ventures and Lowe's Ventures. The company has now raised a total of $97 million. Other investors include NEA, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Lux Capital, GE Ventures, Saudi Aramco, and Stratasys.

With Congress opening the way for Sept. 11 families to sue Saudi Arabia, victims' families are focusing on an unproven theory that a Saudi consular official in Los Angeles and a Saudi intelligence operative in San Diego directly assisted two of the 19 hijackers. The alleged Southern California connection is the key to showing that Saudi Arabia financed Muslim extremists who played a direct role in supporting some of the hijackers, according to lawyers for the families of those killed in the 2001 terrorist attacks. The families contend that lower-level Saudi operatives in Southern California helped find housing for the two hijackers, both Saudi citizens, months before they muscled their way into the cockpit of an American Airlines passenger jet that smashed into the north side of the Pentagon. If a pending lawsuit is allowed to proceed, the families hope to find the evidence in thousands of classified FBI, CIA and Treasury Department documents that could be made public as part of discovery in federal court. Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied any direct or indirect support for Al Qaeda, the terrorist group that carried out the attacks, or any foreknowledge or involvement in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.