First Thing: Trump agrees deal for UAE to build largest AI campus outside US

Concerns China could access the technology. Plus, James Comey investigated over photo of seashells

Good morning.

Donald Trump has signed a deal for the United Arab Emirates to build the largest artificial intelligence campus outside the US.

The agreement, signed during the president’s visit to the Middle East, would give the UAE broad access to advanced AI chips. Sources told Reuters it could be allowed to import 500,000 of Nvidia’s newest chips a year from this year.

The deal is a big win for the Gulf state, whose ambitions to become a major AI player have been thwarted by limited access to US chips.

• Why had the US previously limited the UAE’s access to chips? It was concerned about losing its hold as an AI frontrunner – and that the tech could be used by China, the UAE’s largest trading partner.

James Comey investigated over seashell photo ‘threat’ against Trump

The former FBI director James Comey is being investigated by the US secret service after he posted a picture of seashells on Instagram that the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, claimed constituted a “threat” to Donald Trump.

On Thursday, Comey posted a photo of seashells spelling out the numbers “8647”, captioning it: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”

Trump’s supporters have read it as endorsing violence against the 47th president. Some consider 86 to refer to a slang term often used in restaurants to mean getting rid of something, and which, according to Merriam-Webster, has been used more recently, and less often, to mean “to kill”.

• What has Comey said since? He has removed the post, saying that while he assumed the shells “were a political message” he was not aware that some people “associate those numbers with violence”.

DNC vice-chair says Democrats must ‘dramatically change’

The Democratic party needs to “dramatically change” and fight against Donald Trump, the Democratic National Committee vice-chair, David Hogg, has said.

In an interview with the Guardian, Hogg, 25, said competitive primaries should reshape the party and inject it with much-needed new energy. Recent polling by Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos found that nearly 70% of Americans viewed the Democratic party as out of touch “with the concerns of most people”. This is a higher proportion than those who said the same about Trump or his party.

Hogg, who became a gun-control activist after surviving the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, was elected in February as one of five officials to serve as vice-chair of the DNC.

• How does Hogg hope to change the party? He plans to spend millions of dollars to unseat what he calls “asleep at the wheel” Democrats in safely blue districts through a separate political group he runs.

In other news …

• Israeli strikes have killed 50 people in Gaza since midnight, Gaza’s civil defence agency has reported, as Trump said “a lot of people are starving” in the territory, contradicting statements by Israel and his own administration officials.

• The supreme court appeared wary on Thursday of Trump’s bid to restrict US birthright citizenship, in a dispute in that the administration is seeking to lessen judicial checks on executive power.

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy has sent his delegation to meet Russia’s in Istanbul for peace talks on Friday, but has said Russia was “not serious enough”. Kyiv will demand an immediate 30-day ceasefire, the Ukrainian president said.

• Police raided an Oregon safari park after reports of starving lions and a dead tiger left in a freezer for months.

Stat of the day: Almost 300 million people at risk of death through starvation – report

Almost 300 million people are at risk of dying of starvation, according to an analysis published as acute food insecurity continues to soar. It is the sixth consecutive year that the number of people facing “high levels of acute food insecurity” has grown, reaching 295.3 million according to the latest Global Report on Food Crises. More than 95% of them lived in the Gaza Strip or Sudan.

Don’t miss this: The man who fought off a polar bear with a saucepan

Penn Hadow, an explorer and campaigner for the Arctic, was 28 when he had a close call with a polar bear. “When a bear is hungry, it essentially becomes a meat-seeking missile – it can smell you from many miles away. If you’re unwashed in a dark tent out on the floating sea ice, you can look (and smell) not unlike an oversized walrus,” he recalls in a chilling Guardian Experience piece. Here is what happened after he heard the “dreaded crunch of bear paws in the snow” one morning in Svalbard, Norway.

Climate check: Texas hotter than Death Valley in record-breaking heatwave

Texas is experiencing an scorching, early heatwave, with temperatures across the central and southern region of the state ranging from 100F to 111F – record-breaking for this time of year. These parts of the state have recently been hotter than Death Valley, California, the hottest place on Earth.

Last Thing: Welcome to the British Universal Studios theme park

After Universal picked Bedford, England, as the location of its first theme park in Europe, the cartoonist Stephen Collins imagines a series of rides with a quintessentially British tone.

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