To explore Saudi Arabia's role in Yemen's civil war, Mary Louise Kelly talks to Gen. Ahmad Asiri Asiri, a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition that is backing Yemen's president.

http://www.npr.org/2016/05/16/478188314/saudi-arabia-regrets-civilian-casualties-during-operations-in-yemen-

Source: Independent UK

Human-rights activists have projected the Isis flag and the phrase "Daesh bank" onto the side of the Saudi embassy in Berlin.

The "guerrilla light project" was organised by artist Oliver Bienkowski, who wanted to highlight the country's relationship with the extreme Islamist movement and its much-criticised human rights record.

Saudi Arabia has been accused of indirectly creating Isis through the propagation of its fundamentalist Wahhabist interpretation of Islam.

Saudi Arabia has also been accused of financially supporting extremist rebel groups in Syria.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/daesh-bank-isis-is-islamic-state-human-rights-activists-saudi-arabia-berlin-raif-badawi-a7030296.html

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A Saudi Arabian family therapist has released a video giving his advice on wife beating.

In the tutorial, Khaled Al-Saqaby says he is "aware that this issue is a thorny one, which contains many hazards".

He adds: "But Allah willing, we will cross this bridge safely."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-family-therapist-gives-advice-on-how-to-beat-your-wife-a7024091.html

Video at the link.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said on Friday that the Houthis are Saudi Arabia’s neighbors.

His comments on Twitter came just hours after positive developments at the UN-brokered peace conference in Kuwait.

UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed had said this week that the Yemeni government and the Houthis were discussing proposals to exchange prisoners before the month of Ramadan in June.

“Whether we disagree or agree with the Houthis, they remain a part of Yemen’s society,” Al-Jubeir tweeted. “Daesh and al-Qaeda, however, are terrorist organizations that should not be allowed to remain either in Yemen or in any other place in the world.”

http://aa.com.tr/en/politics/saudi-fm-houthis-are-part-of-yemeni-society-/571776

Looking for an exit to their disastrous military adventure. It's got to be embarrassing to have spent billions on the best military equipment and get humiliated by khat chewing, flip-flop wearing soldiers armed with AK's and RPG's.

for the curious. I got an error page from a link and it printed out the following sql

SELECT m.*, u.id as u_id, u.g_id, u.pa, u.pb, u.pc, u.pk, u.ua, u.ub, u.uc, u.ug, u.uj, u.username as author, u.num_posts, u.num_votes, u.points, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(m.last_date) as last_date, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(m.mesg_date) as mesg_date, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(m.edit_date) as edit_date, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(u.reg_date) as reg_date FROM 102_mesg_archive as m LEFT JOIN dcuser as u ON m.author_id = u.id WHERE m.id = 1525789

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1525789

Source: Guardian UK.

Investigators for the 9/11 commission would later describe the scene in Saudi Arabia as chilling.

They took seats in front of a former Saudi diplomat who, many on the commission’s staff believed, had been a ringleader of a Saudi government spy network inside the US that gave support to at least two of the 9/11 hijackers in California in the year before the 2001 attacks.

At first, the witness, 32-year-old Fahad al-Thumairy, dressed in traditional white robes and headdress, answered the questions calmly, his hands folded in front of him. But when the interrogation became confrontational, he began to squirm, literally, pushing himself back and forth in the chair, folding and unfolding his arms, as he was pressed about his ties to two Saudi hijackers who had lived in southern California before 9/11.

Even as he continued to deny any link to terrorists, Thumairy became angry and began to sputter when confronted with evidence of his 21 phone calls with another Saudi in the hijackers’ support network – a man Thumairy had once claimed to be a stranger. “It was so clear Thumairy was lying,” a commission staffer said later. “It was also so clear he was dangerous.”

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/september-11-saudi-arabia-congressional-report-terrorism

Source: SF GATE

A 72-year old woman in India became a first time mom thanks to a controversial fertility clinic that helps women well-past menopause age become pregnant through in vitro fertilization.

Whether or not new mom Daljinder Kaur is the oldest woman ever to give birth remains to be seen, as she's not really sure how old she is. Kaur says she is seven years younger than her husband, who is 79. The two have been married for 49 years, and have remained childless - until now.

"We will raise him and give him a proper education," Kaur told the Telegraph. "I had faith in Almighty that I will have my own baby, and Waheguru answered my prayers."Waheguru is the Sikh term for God.)

After spotting an advertisement from the The National Fertility and Test Tube Baby Centre in Hisar, India, Kaur and her husband began to visit the clinic. With the help of their team at the clinic, the couple has been trying to conceive since 2013, and endured two failed IVF attempts before becoming pregnant last July. The fertility clinic has come under fire for encouraging older women to have babies.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/72-year-old-becomes-first-time-mom-thanks-to-IVF-7444457.php

On May 5, the Pew Research Center released a big poll of 2,000 Americans that asked their opinions on a range of foreign policy topics. The research didn't get a lot of attention — there was Donald Trump to cover, after all. But buried in the report was a striking finding about the way Americans see the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Most Americans, Pew found, sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians — a standard finding in these polls. But for the first time in 15 years, the poll found that liberal Democrats sympathize more with the Palestinians than with Israel (40 percent versus 33 percent):



When Pew broke apart the data by presidential candidate preference, it found something similar: While a majority of Hillary Clinton supporters took Israel's side, Bernie Sanders supporters backed the Palestinians by a 39-33 margin.

Now, it's possible that this is just a blip — the polls showed a similar decline in sympathy for Israel in the early 2000s, in the middle of the second intifada. But although there are some pretty clear immediate causes for this recent surge in support for Palestinians, there are good reasons, rooted in American partisan politics, to believe this may actually be part of a longer-term trend.

http://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11607990/liberal-democrats-israel-pew

Source: DW

The 54-year-old General Yair Golan said that "If there is something that frightens me about the remembrance of the Holocaust it's the recognition of processes that occurred in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, back then - 70, 80 and 90 years ago - and finding signs of them here among us, today, in 2016."

Golan - himself a descendant of Holocaust survivors from Germany - was harshly criticized for his statements by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as other politicians, mainly from the right side of the political spectrum.

"The deputy chief was wrong, and he should immediately repair [his statements] before Holocaust deniers turn these words into their flag; before our soldiers are compared to Nazis with validation from above," Naftali Bennett, head of the right wing religious Jewish Home party, tweeted.


Read more: http://www.dw.com/en/idf-general-triggers-outrage-comparing-israel-to-nazi-germany/a-19244831