Happy Wednesday and welcome to your morning wrap of the latest business and political headlines from around the world.
First up, the United States has secured a US$600 billion investment package from Saudi Arabia. It was one of several agreements US President Donald Trump signed in Riyahd as he began a tour of the Gulf states.
Reuters reports the deal includes an arms package worth nearly $142b in what a White House fact sheet called “the largest defence cooperation agreement” Washington has ever done. The agreement covers deals with more than a dozen US defence companies, including air and missile defence, air force and space advancement, maritime security and communications.
"I really believe we like each other a lot," Trump said during a meeting with the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler.
Alongside the investment package and arms deal, Trump agreed to lift all US sanctions on Syria following the fall of the Assad regime, which he said would “give them a chance at greatness”. The Assad regime fell during the Biden administration in December, and the new administration led by Ahmad al-Sharaa had hoped existing sanctions could be lifted.
Mohammed bin Salman.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he will travel to Turkey to meet the country’s president and will be available for direct peace talks with his Russian counterpart, according to the BBC.
"We will do everything to ensure that this meeting takes place," he told reporters in a hastily-arranged briefing in Kyiv. Russia has not yet said who will fly to Istanbul.
Vladimir Putin had initially called for direct talks in Ankhara before Zelensky announced he would go in person and expected the Russian president would go as well.
“If Putin does not arrive and plays games, it is the final point that he does not want to end the war,” Zelensky was quoted by The Guardian as saying.
The two leaders have not met in person since December 2019.
To Gaza, where one in five people in the Palestinian enclave are facing starvation as the entire territory edges closer to famine, according to a new United Nations-backed report.
CNN reports the new research comes as the UN, several NGOs, as well as civilians in Gaza, say the situation has deteriorated since Israel renewed its assault in March and imposed a humanitarian blockade. Israel has said the blockade, along with the military’s expansion of its bombardment of the enclave, is intended to pressure the militant group Hamas to release hostages held in Gaza.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report said the enclave’s entire population was experiencing “high levels of acute food security” and the territory was at “high risk” of famine.
In business news, the Financial Times reports that US stocks have wiped out their losses so far this year, as lower-than-expected inflation added more fuel to a rally sparked by Donald Trump’s deal with China to cut tariffs.
The S&P 500 was up by close to 0.8% in late trading, putting the benchmark index 0.2% higher for the year. Markets had started to cool before Trump’s sweeping “liberation day” tariff announcement in early April, causing the S&P 500 to fall by as much as 15%.
But a lot of those losses were walked back just days later when Trump paused his “reciprocal” tariffs on most countries for 90 days. Equities have continued to rally since then and jumped between 2.5% and 3.3% yesterday after the US trade deal with China was announced.
However, some analysts have warned that tariffs on China are still much higher than levels before Trump took office.
“Relief from policy-inflicted stress may be bullish at the margin, but it does not strengthen the economy or reverse the global slowdown that was already underway,” BCA Research strategist Felix-Antoine Vezina-Poirier told the FT.
Finally this morning, a British man who has served almost 38 years in prison for the murder of a woman has had his conviction quashed by the Court of Appeal after new DNA evidence emerged, the BBC reports.
Peter Sullivan was jailed over the 1986 killing of 21-year-old barmaid Diane Sindall, who was also subjected to a frenzied sexual attack in Merseyside. The Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Sullivan’s case back to the appeal court last year after fresh testing found a DNA profile pointing to an unknown attacker’s semen in samples preserved from the crime scene.
Now aged 68, Sullivan is believed to be the victim of the longest miscarriage of justice involving a living prisoner in British legal history.
