Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org. I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with Trump's triumphalism in claiming the hooties have cried uncle and don't want

to fight anymore and assess the likelihood of a broader agreement than a ceasefire with the hooties

emerging next week when Trump visits Saudi Arabia and may announce some kind of nuclear deal with Iran.

Joining us is Dr. Anel Shiline, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible

Statecraft, a fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy, and an expert on

religious and political authority in the Middle East and North Africa.

She has worked as a journalist in Egypt and Yemen and served for a year as a foreign affairs

officer in the Office of Near Eastern Affairs in the Department of State's Bureau of Democracy,

Human Rights and Labor, until recently resigning over U.S. policy on the war in Gaza.

We'll discuss her article at Responsible

Stacraft. Trump deal with the hoodies, declare victory and go home. Then we'll assess

whether the tit-for-tat military strikes by India, then Pakistan in response to a terrorist

attack in Kashmir, are perform, as opposed to escalatory given the

danger of two nuclear states attacking each other.

Joining us is Dr. Sumit Ganguly, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford

Universities, whose books include fearful symmetry, India and Pakistan under the shadow of nuclear weapons,

India since 1980, India, Pakistan and the bomb, debating nuclear stability in South Asia,

and his latest book is the Oxford Handbook of Indian Politics.

Then finally we'll examine the alarming report in today's Washington Post that Musk's Doge operation plans to build

a single centralized database for the vast amounts of confidential and even classified personal

information on millions of U.S. citizens and residents they have scooped up from many government

...