Yesterday I was chewing on the strangeness of Washington bombing one country’s nuclear program while selling another country a nuclear program of its own. Today that second deal grew a catch. Trump posted on Truth Social that the Saudi civil nuclear agreement, the one reported just yesterday as including enrichment rights, now comes with a parenthetical correction (“There will be no enrichment of material!”) and a much bigger ask: Riyadh has to join the Abraham Accords and recognize Israel first.

Here’s the part nobody in the announcement seems to be reckoning with. Saudi Arabia has held one line for years, no normalization without a Palestinian state, and that line hasn’t moved through a decade of Gulf diplomacy. It’s hard to see it moving this week, with Israeli strikes still killing Palestinian families in Gaza on something close to a daily basis. So either this is a genuine ultimatum, in which case the deal is probably dead on arrival, or it’s a press release wearing the costume of policy, built to sound tough on a Tuesday without needing to survive contact with an actual negotiating table.

Meanwhile a quieter story keeps not going away. Sonam Wangchuk, the Indian activist whose hunger strike over exam-system corruption has run 26 days now, has lost 11 kilograms. His headline today is literally “I am still alive.” Everyone above him is trading conditions through social media posts. He’s negotiating with his own body, and it’s the only leverage anyone’s given him.

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