World this week

Gianni Infantino announcing Saudi Arabia as the 2034 hosts. Fifa has been told that ‘in accordance with its own policy’ it must act on human rights. Photograph: Fifa
A group of leading lawyers has submitted an official complaint to Fifa, alleging the governing body has failed to follow its own human rights rules in relation to the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia. The 30-page complaint has been filed via Fifa's official grievance mechanism and calls for immediate action in five areas. The complaint has been authored by Fifa's former anti-corruption adviser Mark Pieth, the Swiss lawyer Stefan Wehrenberg and the British barrister Rodney Dixon, who submitted a report to Fifa a year ago warning of the risks of awarding the tournament to the Gulf state.
The five areas outlined relate to freedom of expression and association; arbitrary arrests, mistreatment and the death penalty; judicial independence; migrants' rights and women's rights. The complaint argues that the bidding process "failed to ensure that human rights standards were met".
The United States and Saudi Arabia signed a $142bn arms deal touted by the White House as the "largest defence sales agreement in history" in the first stop of Donald Trump's four-day diplomatic tour to the Gulf states aimed at securing big deals and spotlighting the benefits of Trump's transactional foreign policy. During the trip, Trump also met with Syria's new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former rebel commander whose forces helped overthrow Bashar al-Assad in 2024. The informal meeting was the first face-to-face meeting between a US president and a Syrian leader since 2000, when Bill Clinton met with the late leader Hafez al-Assad in Geneva.
Trump said that he planned to lift sanctions on Syria after holding talks with Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The visit was heavily focused on business interests and securing quick wins - often with characteristic Trumpian embellishment. The US president was accompanied by a strong business delegation, including Elon Musk, prominent figures in AI such as Sam Altman, as well the chief executives of IBM, BlackRock, Citigroup, Palantir and Nvidia, among others.
US President Donald Trump said that the United States and Iran have "sort of" agreed to terms on a nuclear deal, offering a measure of confidence that an accord is coming into sharper focus. Trump, in an exchange with reporters at a business roundtable in Doha, Qatar, described the talks between American envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi as "very serious negotiations" for "long-term peace" and were continuing to progress.
Still, throughout his visit with Arab Gulf leaders this week, the president has underscored that military action against Iran's nuclear facilities remains a possibility if the talks derail. "Iran has sort of agreed to the terms: They're not going to make, I call it, in a friendly way, nuclear dust," Trump said at the business event. "We're not going to be making any nuclear dust in Iran."
The US and China agreed a truce to lower import taxes on goods being traded between the two countries. The agreement marks a major de-escalation of the trade war between the world's two biggest economies, which has sent shockwaves impacting countless other countries. Both the US and China have confirmed a reduction in the tariffs they imposed on each other following the initial escalation by President Donald Trump earlier this year.
The deal involves both nations cancelling some tariffs altogether and suspending others for 90 days, by May 14. The result is that additional US tariffs on Chinese imports - that's the extra tariffs imposed in this recent stand-off - will fall to from 145% to 30%, while recently-hiked Chinese tariffs on some US imports will fall from 125% to 10%. China has also halted and scrapped other non-tariff countermeasures, such as the export of critical minerals to the US, which it put in place in response to the initial escalation.
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