“We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.”
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The Headlines
President Donald Trump announced more than $243.5 billion in economic deals between the United States and Qatar on Wednesday, including a $96 billion agreement for Boeing to sell up to 210 jets to Qatar Airways.
Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg sits to the left of President Donal Trump and Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani (R) during a business deal signing ceremony at the Royal Palace in Doha, on May 14, 2025. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
President Donald Trump announced more than $243.5 billion in economic deals between the United States and Qatar on Wednesday, including a $96 billion agreement for Boeing to sell up to 210 jets to Qatar Airways.
The White House stated that the agreement with Qatar is projected to generate at least $1.2 trillion in economic exchange between both countries.
The president was joined by Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg and Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani for the signing ceremony in Doha.
Trump had signed agreements with Saudi Arabia the day prior.
Ortberg signed the deal with Qatar Airways CEO Badr Mohammed Al-Meer while standing next to Trump and Tamim. The president said Ortberg told him that it’s “the largest order of jets in the history of Boeing.”
Qatar Airways had signed a $96 billion agreement to acquire up to 210 U.S.-made 787 Dreamliner and 777X aircraft from Boeing with GE Aerospace engines inside, according to the White House.
“This historic agreement will support 154,000 U.S. jobs annually, totaling over 1 million jobs in the United States during the course of production and delivery of this deal,” the White House stated.
The president was also present to sign a defense agreement and an unspecified joint declaration with Tamim. (More)
More Politics:
The Supreme Court is expected to hear oral arguments today over President Donald Trump’s order restricting birthright citizenship and whether federal judges went too far in their decisions to block his directive nationwide.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee approved changes to Medicaid that will reduce federal spending by $712 billion over 10 years. The approval came in a party-line 30–24 vote after a marathon session lasting more than 26 hours, and marked the first step toward passage of a larger bill that is intended to fund President Donald Trump’s agenda.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended his recent statements about vaccines during a congressional hearing on Wednesday. “I’m going to tell the truth about everything we know and we don’t know about vaccines,” Kennedy told Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) “I am not going to just tell people that everything is safe and effective if I know there are issues. I need to respect people’s intelligence.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said that several Democrat lawmakers who forced their way into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in New Jersey on May 9 could face legal issues or other penalties, including expulsion from Congress.
Drug overdose deaths in the United States dropped sharply in 2024, falling to their lowest level since before the pandemic, according to provisional data released on Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The report estimates that 80,391 people died of a drug overdose in 2024—a 26.9 percent decline from 110,037 in 2023, marking the largest one-year drop since the agency began collecting comparable data more than four decades ago.
It’s the second consecutive annual decrease after overdose deaths surged during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Social isolation, disruptions to treatment, and other factors helped push fatalities to a peak of nearly 115,000 in 2023.
All but two states—Nevada and South Dakota—recorded declines last year, with especially steep drops in hard-hit areas such as West Virginia, which reported a 43.5 percent decrease. While the final figures may shift slightly as data are finalized, the CDC data indicate an unmistakable downward trend.
The decline was driven almost entirely by a reduction in fentanyl-related deaths. The synthetic opioid—at least 50 times more potent than heroin—was linked to more than 76,000 deaths in 2023, but that number dropped to just over 48,000 in 2024.
Experts have cited several possible reasons for the downturn, including expanded access to the overdose reversal drug naloxone—sold as Narcan—which became available over the counter in 2023. It is now carried by most first responders. Increased use of addiction treatment medications and changes in drug supply patterns may also be factors. (More)
More U.S. News
Federal authorities have charged alleged leaders of the Sinaloa cartel’s Beltran Leyva Organization with narco-terrorism, terrorism support, and international drug trafficking in what officials called a first-of-its-kind indictment targeting the cartel’s role in fueling the U.S. fentanyl crisis.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is backing away from a landmark progressive policy by proposing to end free health carefor most illegal immigrants, citing pressures from a projected revenue shortfall that has pushed the state’s budget deficit to $12 billion.
Maryland will soon begin using millions of dollars collected through a surcharge on insurance plans sold under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, to pay for abortion.
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The historic meeting took place after the president announced that he would lift sanctions on Syria and before Trump’s scheduled address to the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which comprises six countries in the region: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman.
“We are currently exploring normalizing relations with Syria’s new government,” Trump said during his remarks to the GCC leaders, noting that the process began with his meeting earlier with al-Sharaa.
Trump told reporters on Air Force One that the meeting with Ahmed al-Sharaa went “great.”
“He’s got a real shot at holding it together. I spoke with President Erdogan, who is very friendly with him. He feels he’s got a shot of doing a good job. It’s a torn-up country.”
He said he thought Syria would at some point join the Abraham Accords, an agreement that established diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab neighbors in late 2020.
“I think they have to get themselves straightened up,” Trump said. ”I told him, ‘I hope you’re going to join when it’s straightened out.’ He said, ‘Yes.’ But they have a lot of work to do.”
Asked whether there had been a conversation about a potential Trump Tower in Damascus, Trump said: “No, that I haven’t heard. We’ll have to wait a little while until things calm down, a little while with the country.”
“I think he’s got the potential to do—he’s a real leader. He led a charge and he’s pretty amazing,” Trump said.
Trump also asked the Syrian leader to “tell all foreign terrorists to leave Syria, deport Palestinian terrorists, help the U.S. prevent the resurgence of ISIS and assume responsibility for ISIS detention centers in Northeast Syria.” (More)
Russian President Vladimir Putinwill not attend the talks, despite Ukraine’s demands and Western pressure.
The European Union police force recently launched an operational task force to “tackle the rising trend of violence-as-a-service” and the recruitment of young people by organized crime syndicates.
Germany arrested three men over an alleged Russian plot in 2024 to send exploding parcels by air from Germany to Ukraine.
French President Emmanuel Macron has said he is “ready to open a discussion” about stationing the nation’s nuclear weapons on allies’ soil, in an effort to strengthen Europe’s defense.
Iranian and European officials will meet in Istanbul, Turkey, on Friday to discuss a lapsed nuclear deal that had sought to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
☀️ A Few Good Things
📷 Photo of the Day: U.S. Naval Academy freshman plebes are sprayed with water during the annual Herndon Monument climb at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., on May 14, 2025. In the annual tradition, the plebes attempt to scale the 21-foot greased monument to knock off a “dixie cup” hat and replace it with an upperclassman’s hat. The 2028 midshipmen’s class took 2 hours, 27 minutes and 31 seconds to scale the monument and replace the hat. Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
🎙️ Podcast: When it comes to tariffs, how should we understand communist-Chinese deal-making? Join Terri Wu on China Watch as she lays out Beijing’s “Art of the Deal.” (Listen)
🎵 Music: Mussorgsky – Pictures at an Exhibition (Listen)
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🍵 Culture
A taste of the fruits of their labor opens children’s eyes to the wonder of gardening. (Biba Kayewich for American Essence)
Chris Hall is a teacher and scholar, but he’s also a musician, a craftsman in arts such as leatherwork and woodworking, an auto mechanic, a longtime practitioner of the martial arts, a marksman, a hunter, a farmer, a brewer, and a baker.
These pursuits fall into the category of what Hall calls the common arts, which he defines as “the arts and skills that allow us to meet our basic, embodied needs in the world. … But you see from that definition just how broad that is—everything from agriculture to armament and a number of skills in between.”
To the ancient Greeks and Romans, these were “the vulgar arts, the servile arts,” Hall told American Essence. “They were arts that were done by the people with dirty hands.”
The restoration of doing for ourselves has become Hall’s passion and mission in life. Passing on that knowledge to students opens their eyes to the value of hands-on work and excellence in craftsmanship.
Though today these arts go by the name of the common arts, as Hall emphasized, “they’re also far from common, because if you practice these arts to such a degree that the person who uses the artifacts produced by them encounters goodness, truth, and beauty, then they’ve really ascended into something that’s a fine art.
“We all know the difference between a McDonald’s cheeseburger and one that’s very finely produced at a restaurant that knows cheeseburgers. That’s the difference in the skill of craft that makes some common arts uncommon.” (More)
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