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Donald Trump held a friendly meeting with the new Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa – a former al-Qaeda commander who once had a $10m US bounty on his head – in Riyadh this morning, after announcing he would lift all sanctions on the country to give it “a chance for greatness”. The US president yesterday signed a $600bn “strategic economic partnership” with Saudi Arabia, including a $142bn arms deal, which he said would make the relationship between the two countries “more powerful than ever”. China has criticised the recent US-UK trade deal, saying the strict security requirements for Britain’s steel and pharmaceuticals industries could squeeze Chinese products out of British supply chains. Beijing said it was a “basic principle” that agreements between countries should not target other nations. Wild chimpanzees have been filmed administering first aid. Oxford scientists in Uganda’s Budongo Forest recorded the caring creatures dabbing medicinal plants on open wounds and other injuries, not only for themselves, but also tending to the wounds of others.

There’s no such thing as a free plane

What do you give the man who has everything, asks David Graham in The Atlantic. For the Qataris, hoping to charm Donald Trump, the answer is simple: a $400m luxury jumbo jet. Incredibly, the plane is not for the US government but Trump himself, flouting the US constitution’s specific ban on “foreign emoluments”. There’s a simple term for this: “bribery”. It’s not totally clear what Qatar expects in return, but it’s hard to ignore the billions of dollars in deals the Trump family have struck in the region ahead of this week’s state visit, including plans to build an 18-hole golf course flanked by Trump-branded villas. Whatever the reason, as Trump must know, there’s “no such thing as a free plane”.

The real Trump grift is in crypto, says Scott Galloway on the Pivot podcast. The night before the inauguration, Melania Trump unveiled a new crypto token. In the two and a half minutes before she announced it on social media, two dozen traders bought $2.6m worth of the newly created $MELANIA coin – then quickly offloaded it as the price soared, trousering $100m. (Since then, $MELANIA has lost 96% of its value.) Trump-affiliated entities have also netted more than $350m in fees from people trading the $TRUMP coin, juiced in part by the president’s promise to host an “exclusive dinner” for top buyers. Most brazen is the Trump-linked crypto firm World Liberty Financial, which appears to be a way to buy a “de facto presidential pardon”. When the crypto billionaire Justin Sun was under investigation for securities fraud, he “invested” $75m in World Liberty Financial and the case was dropped. This level of “kleptocracy” is enough to “make Putin blush”.

🛩️🕵️ The Qatari plane would surely be a “stunning security violation”, says Fred Kaplan in Slate. A Boeing 747 contains 171 miles of wiring, which is absolutely certain to be stuffed with bugs. Remember what happened in the 1970s when the US built a new embassy in Moscow. As a “friendly gesture”, the US hired Russian workers to construct it. But American security experts subsequently found such a vast network of hidden listening devices that the whole project had to be “scrapped before it was opened”.