Trump plans to greet Xi on arrival in Washington area, officials say

WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump plans to greet Chinese President Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews, at the airport of the military base just outside Washington, DC, on his arrival next week for a White House visit, a senior US official told reporters on Sept 18.

It is rare for the US president to greet visiting foreign leaders at the airport.

Senior US officials who briefed reporters about the visit said it will include an arrival ceremony inside the White House, a Rose Garden military review and a state dinner in the evening.

They said among the guests for the dinner will be a number of tech CEOs, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Tim Cook of Apple, Elon Musk of Tesla, Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Michael Dell of Dell Technologies.

Issues such as trade, flow of rare earths to the global economy and artificial intelligence are expected to be among the topics that will be discussed during the visit, officials said. REUTERS