Dozens of animals disqualified after owners manipulate their looks with hormones, fillers and facelifts
Saudi authorities have carried out their biggest crackdown on camel beauty contestants, disqualifying more than 40 “enhanced” camels from the annual pageant, according to the state-run Saudi Press Agency.
The camels disqualified in the competition, at the King Abdulaziz camel festival, were judged to have received Botox injections and other artificial touch-ups.
Continue reading...Khalid Aedh al-Otaibi reportedly arrested as he was about to board flight to Riyadh
French police have reportedly arrested a former member of the Saudi royal guard suspected of involvement in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Khalid Aedh al-Otaibi was said to have been taken into custody at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport as he was about to take a plane to the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
Continue reading...Human rights groups criticise French president’s planned meeting with crown prince in Saudi Arabia
Human rights groups have criticised Emmanuel Macron’s planned meeting with Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia on Saturday, which will mark the first one-on-one public meeting of a major western leader with the crown prince since the state-sponsored assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
For three years since the 2018 murder, western heads of state have avoided direct one-on-one meetings with the crown prince in the kingdom. The US president, Joe Biden, has even avoided speaking to the future king in what has widely been seen as an attempt to avoid conferring legitimacy on the de facto ruler.
But Macron’s move suggests at least one major western leader is ready to formally re-establish ties to the crown prince directly, less than a year after US intelligence agencies released a report stating they believed that Prince Mohammed had approved the murder of Khashoggi.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Political officials and diplomatic and activist sources describe stealth campaign
Saudi Arabia used “incentives and threats” as part of a lobbying campaign to shut down a UN investigation of human right violations committed by all sides in the Yemen conflict, according to sources with close knowledge of the matter.
The Saudi effort ultimately succeeded when the UN human rights council (HRC) voted in October against extending the independent war crimes investigation. The vote marked the first defeat of a resolution in the Geneva body’s 15-year history.
Continue reading...Survey also finds adults aged 18-24 and women more concerned about personal finances than other groups
Young people and women have taken the hardest psychological and financial hit from the pandemic, a YouGov survey has found – but few people anywhere are considering changing their lives as a result of it.
The annual YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project found that in many of the 27 countries surveyed, young people were consistently more likely than their elders to feel the Covid crisis had made their financial and mental health concerns worse.
Continue reading...‘Do not sing for the murderers of my beloved Jamal,’ Hatice Cengiz urged Bieber in an open letter
The fiancee of murdered Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi has called on Justin Bieber to cancel his performance in the kingdom’s second-largest city Jeddah scheduled for 5 December.
Khashoggi was killed and dismembered in 2018 after walking into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul the day before his wedding. His fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, was waiting outside.
Continue reading...6,000 people said to be displaced after withdrawal of government forces from the long contested and strategic port
The UN has called for talks about the implications of the Houthis’ complete takeover of the long-contested strategic port of Hodeidah in Yemen, amid reports that the withdrawal of the government forces had led to as many as 6,000 people being displaced.
The Houthi takeover of the port, the scene of on and off fighting for more than 5 years, marks a significant breakthrough in a conflict that has seen territorial stalemate through much of this year, but hundreds killed in fierce fighting.
Continue reading...Can the Middle East wean itself off oil? Plus: the return of Abba
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Few regions on Earth are more central to hopes of reining in global temperature increases than the Middle East. Financed by the west’s insatiable demand for fossil fuels, cities filled with air-conditioned skyscrapers and shopping malls have risen from the desert, and it’s not surprising that Gulf monarchies made rich and powerful by oil have paid little heed to thoughts of an economic transition to renewables, even though the region is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world. But, asks our diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour, could the long-term view be about to change?
The Cop26 climate conference got under way in Glasgow this week, amid a flurry of announcements and expectation. Follow the Guardian’s extensive coverage here.
Continue reading...Expulsion ordered a day after similar move by Saudi Arabia in response to criticism of the Riyadh-led intervention
Kuwait has given Lebanon’s envoy to the emirate 48 hours to leave, a day after Saudi Arabia made a similar move over a minister’s criticism of the Riyadh-led military intervention in Yemen.
The diplomatic row, in which Saudi Arabia has also suspended imports from Lebanon and Bahrain has expelled Beirut’s envoy to Manama, is another blow for a country already in the grip of crippling political and economic crises.
Continue reading...With the region warming twice as fast as the rest of the world but oil spoils keeping regimes in power, leaders are in a bind
Northern Oman has just been battered by Cyclone Shaheen, the first tropical cyclone to make it that far west into the Gulf. Around Basra in southern Iraq this summer, pressure on the grid owing to 50C heat led to constant blackouts, with residents driving around in their cars to stay cool.
Kuwait broke the record for the hottest day ever in 2016 at 53.6, and its 10-day rolling average this summer was equally sweltering. Flash floods occurred in Jeddah, and more recently Mecca, while across Saudi Arabia average temperatures have increased by 2%, and the maximum temperatures by 2.5%, all just since the 1980s. In Qatar, the country with the highest per capita carbon emissions in the world and the biggest producer of liquid gas, the outdoors is already being air conditioned.
Continue reading...The president has snubbed Mohammed bin Salman, but the ruler recently labelled a ‘psychopath’ is a problem that won’t go away
When Joe Biden was recently asked whether gas prices would come down soon, the US president offered a cryptic explanation of how his strained relations with Saudi Arabia were at least partly to blame for the price at the pump.
Gas prices were high because oil-rich nations in the Middle East were not increasing the supply of oil. That was happening, Biden suggested, in retaliation for his personal decision to not speak with – nor acknowledge – Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as his counterpart.
Continue reading...Saad Aljabri says Mohammed bin Salman boasted he could kill former ruler King Abdullah
A former senior Saudi intelligence officer has claimed that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is a “psychopath with no empathy” who once boasted that he could kill the kingdom’s ruler at the time, King Abdullah, and replace him with his own father.
In an interview on US television, Saad Aljabri, who fled Saudi Arabia in May 2017 and is living in exile in Canada, also said he had been warned by an associate in 2018, after the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, that a Saudi hit team was heading to Canada to kill him.
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Russia to Yemen
Key figures in Saudi Arabia and UAE accused of crimes against humanity include investors in Britain
A group of human rights lawyers will on Wednesday file a legal complaint in the UK accusing key figures in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates of being involved in war crimes relating to the war in Yemen.
They plan to submit a dossier to British police and prosecutors alleging that about 20 members of the political and military elite of the two Gulf nations are guilty of crimes against humanity, and call for their immediate arrest should they enter the UK.
Continue reading...The regime in Tehran says discussions will resume ‘soon’, but Israel has already ‘greatly accelerated’ plans for military action
Coordinated warnings last week from the US, Israel and the EU that “time is short” to revive an agreement curbing Iran’s nuclear activities raise a disturbing question: what will opposing governments do if, as seems likely, Tehran’s hardline regime continues to drag its feet while accumulating the wherewithal to build a nuclear weapon?
Israel’s leaders, as usual, are not mincing words. “Every day that passes, every delay in the negotiations, brings Iran closer to a nuclear bomb. If a terror regime is going to acquire a nuclear weapon, we must act. We must make clear that the civilised world won’t allow it,” said foreign minister Yair Lapid.
Continue reading...Court documents shed new light on Yasir al-Rumayyan’s relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
Yasir al-Rumayyan, the new non-executive chairman of Newcastle United, was involved in a controversial “anti-corruption” campaign in Saudi Arabia that included the transfer of assets on behalf of the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
Details of Rumayyan’s role – including the transfer of a charter jet company to the Public Investment Fund (PIF), where he serves as governor – are contained in court documents that shed light on his relationship with Prince Mohammed.
Continue reading...India, Egypt and Cuba among first states to develop and make their own vaccines as Covax falls behind
Developing countries are increasingly turning to homegrown Covid vaccinations as the UN-backed Covax programme falls behind.
While western countries roll out booster jabs to their own populations, Covax, which was set up by UN agencies, governments and donors to ensure fair access to Covid-19 vaccines for low- and middle-income countries, has said it will miss its target to distribute 2bn doses globally by the end of this year.
Continue reading...Saud al-Qahtani, aide to Mohammed bin Salman, hailed as patriot on pro-government social media
Three years after the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi royal court adviser accused of directing the murder is being quietly reintroduced by pro-government influencers as a patriotic figure who has served his country well.
Social media accounts that back the Saudi leadership have in recent months been posting tributes to Saud al-Qahtani, a chief aide to crown prince and Saudi Arabia’s effective leader, Mohammed bin Salman, in a move that is seen as marking his gradual return to the seat of Saudi power. Qahtani vanished from public view in the aftermath of the gruesome killing in Istanbul that shocked the world and almost derailed his boss’s path to the throne.
Continue reading...We shouldn’t single out football fans: the country has long since made its peace with the power of capital, whatever its origins
Football, no longer merely the national game, is England’s political theatre. The way in which the spasm of fan protest stopped the European Super League in its tracks in April, and which the prime minister erroneously claimed as his own victory, spoke to both a residual – if often dormant – public sense of justice and communitarianism, and the shamelessness of our snake-skinned political conversation. The open conflict between the England men’s team, the Conservative government and a section of the England fanbase over taking the knee at Euro 2020 was a battle over who gets to define the terms of our debate over structural racism. Now, the long anticipated sale of Newcastle United to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund points to England’s practically and morally diminished place in the world, and the roads that have taken us there.
The crown prince of Saudi Arabia is not the first politician to take an interest in Newcastle United. In the early 1990s, Tony Blair, then leader of the opposition, was busy burnishing his local credentials by declaring his fidelity to the team, decrying Andy Cole’s transfer to Manchester United in the Sun, and playing keepy-uppy with Kevin Keegan. Like Blair, Newcastle United were the coming thing. After four decades without a trophy, but now under the new ownership of Sir John Hall, both a Thatcherite property developer and an advocate for regional government and regeneration in the north-east, Keegan’s Newcastle were challenging for the Premiership title and playing fabulous football to raging full houses. In 1996 Alan Shearer arrived, on a then recored transfer fee, and declared to a delirious crowd that he was still “the son of a sheet-metal worker”. One could have been forgiven for thinking that, after the hammer blows of 17 years of Thatcherism, there was hope for an English working class and regional revival.
David Goldblatt is the author of The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football and The Game of Our Lives
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