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Saudi Arabia on Saturday urged its citizens not to distribute "documents that might be faked" in an apparent response to WikiLeaks' publication on Friday of more than 60,000 documents it says are secret Saudi diplomatic communications. The statement, made by the Foreign Ministry on its Twitter account, did not directly deny the documents' authenticity. The released documents, which WikiLeaks said were embassy communications, emails between diplomats and reports from other state bodies, include discussions of Saudi Arabia's position regarding regional issues and efforts to influence media. Saturday's statement is the only official government response since the release, which WikiLeaks says...

WikiLeaks is in the process of publishing more than 500,000 Saudi diplomatic documents to the Internet, the transparency website said Friday, a move that echoes its famous release of U.S. State Department cables in 2010. WikiLeaks said in a statement that it has already posted roughly 60,000 files. Most of them appear to be in Arabic. There was no immediate way to verify the authenticity of the documents, although WikiLeaks has a long track record of hosting large-scale leaks of government material. Many of the documents carried green letterhead marked "Kingdom of Saudi Arabia" or "Ministry of Foreign Affairs." Some...

GENEVA/SANAA: A fistfight erupted on the sidelines of peace talks in Geneva Thursday between supporters of different warring factions in Yemen, underlining the divisions that have thwarted United Nations efforts broker a truce in the near three-month conflict. Yemeni opponents of the Houthi forces that drove the government into exile interrupted a news conference by Houthi officials, throwing shoes and insulting them as “criminals” and “dogs” who were “killing the children of south Yemen.” A Saudi-led coalition has been launching airstrikes against the Iran-allied Houthis since late March in a campaign to restore the exiled government and back its armed...

A Knesset Channel poll published Thursday indicates that almost one half of the Israeli public agrees with MK Michael Oren (Kulanu), the former Israeli ambassador in the US, who said this week that US President Barack Obama has “deliberately” caused a deterioration in US-Israel ties. […] “From the moment he entered office, Mr. Obama promoted an agenda of championing the Palestinian cause and achieving a nuclear accord with Iran,” wrote Oren. Obama abandoned the two core principles of Israel’s alliance with America, he accused. …

John Holdren, President Barack Obama’s top science and technology advisor, said at a White House summit on clean energy on Tuesday that a “global low-carbon economy” by the year 2050 means that “cars, trucks and planes” will be powered by “electricity, biofuels or hydrogen.” “As we all know, a global low-carbon economy in 2050 is going to have to meet the energy needs of 9 or 10 billion people using technologies that will have to be more advanced than the technologies that are in place today,” he said. “Buildings, agriculture, machines must be dramatically more energy-efficient.” “Cars, trucks and planes...

Saudi Arabia Monday beheaded a Syrian drug trafficker and a national convicted of murder, taking to 100 the number of executions in the kingdom this year. The number of executions has surged in 2015 compared with the 87 recorded by AFP for all of last year. But it is still far below the record 192 which rights group Amnesty International said took place in 1995. Syrian Ismael al-Tawm smuggled "a large amount of banned amphetamine pills into the kingdom", said an interior ministry statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency. He was beheaded in the northern region of Jawf.

A group of activists, organized by CODEPINK and the Gulf Institute, protested outside of the Saudi Arabian embassy on Thursday. Led by CODEPINK Co-founder Medea Benjamin, they attempted to deliver a petition demanding the release of liberal blogger Raif Badawi. Benjamin demands the immediate release of Badawi. “[the government] must respect free speech," Benjamin told News2Share. "I think if there was one phone call from President Obama that said, 'free Raif Badawi,' Raif would be free." Upon entering the embassy, the protesters were forcefully removed. The protesters continued to picket outside the embassy chanting, “no flogging for blogging” and “journalism...

Iran has told the UN Security Council that Saudi-led air strikes have twice hit close to its embassy in Yemen and warned of "serious consequences" if more such bombings occur. Iran's ambassador to the United Nations Gholamali Khoshroo said in a letter released today that the embassy in Sanaa suffered severe damage during air strikes on May 25 and that this followed a similar attack on April 20. "I would like to warn that a repetition of similar air strikes close to my country's diplomatic representation in the future can have serious consequences, including for the safety and security of...

Top Muslim authorities in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan spoke out over the weekend against extremism, the latest examples of religious figures doing what Western governments encourage as part of a broad campaign to reject and delegitimize any link between terrorism and Islam. In both cases, however, the authorities concerned have controversial records themselves, having drawn criticism in the past for justifying terror in the Pakistani instance and for inciting hatred of non-Muslims in the Saudi one. Addressing students at a Saudi-affiliated Islamic school in London at the weekend, the government-appointed imam of Mecca’s Grand Mosque, Sheikh Abdul Rahman al-Sudais, urged...

Although data_opacity makes objective_analysis difficult, market observers reported in April that China has surpassed the United States as the world’s largest oil_importer. This statistical inflection point needs context to understand global consumption trends. While oil bulls are anxious about China’s reduced crude growth appetite, fundamental shifts in Chinese currency and domestic consumption strategies point to long-term growth in Chinese hydrocarbon consumption generally. Keith Johnson wrote in Foreign Policy on May 11, 2015, “… China’s continued and, indeed, deepening reliance on volatile regions for the world for energy supplies, especially the Middle East, points to continued security vulnerabilities for Beijing for...

Te Saudi Arabian government delegation appreciate and fully support the decision of the Indonesian government to become an OPEC member again, because Indonesia is one of the founders of OPEC," Indonesian Energy Minister Sudirman Said said in the statement. Saudi Arabia is Indonesia's top crude supplier. Naimi will also push for Saudi state oil firm Saudi Aramco to invest in Indonesia's downstream sector, Said said.

JERUSALEM, Israel -- Against the backdrop of a pending deal over Iran's nuclear program, an unprecedented meeting took place in Washington, D.C., last week. The meeting between Israel and Saudi Arabia sent one more signal of an historic geopolitical change taking place in the Middle East. At the Council on Foreign Relations, Israel's incoming director general of the Foreign Ministry, Dore Gold, met with Anwar Majed Eshki, his Saudi counterpart. These historic enemies shared an identical message: Iran is trying to take over the Middle East and it must be stopped. The meeting took place in public, but Israel and...

n the first such attack of the 10-week-old conflict in Yemen, Shiite Muslim rebels early Saturday launched three Scud missiles toward a large Saudi air base, the insurgents reported. The Saudis acknowledged the firing of one missile, which they said was shot down. The episode came as the United Nations is struggling to bring the two sides together for talks that are envisioned to begin June 14. Both sides appear to be seeking to shore up their gains in advance of any negotiations. The Houthis’ Masirah television reported the missile firings, which Saudi Arabian reports said were aimed at the...

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Saudi Arabia said it shot down a Scud missile fired by Yemen's Shiite rebels and their allies early Saturday at a Saudi city that is home to a major air base, marking what could be a major escalation in the monthslong war. Two missiles launched from a Patriot missile battery shot down the Scud around 2:45 a.m. Saturday (2345 GMT, 7:45 p.m. EDT Friday) around the southwestern city of Khamis Mushait, the official Saudi Press Agency reported. The agency did not report any casualties in the attack. Khamis Mushait is home to the King Khalid...

Amid criticism over Saudi Arabia’s hosting of an international conference on combating intolerance and discrimination based on religion or belief, two U.S. lawmakers have introduced a resolution calling for the global repeal of blasphemy laws, citing the kingdom as an especially egregious offender. The bill, introduced by Reps. Joseph Pitts (R-Pa.) and Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) states that “Saudi Arabia has used criminal charges of blasphemy to suppress discussion and debate and silence dissidents.” […] Less than a mile-and-a-half away from the scene of the flogging (of Raif Badawi), the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on Wednesday and Thursday this...

"We have very little food and ammunition, and we can't withstand the suicide bombers, snipers and rockets....All of us are thinking of committing suicide - Iraqi Federal Police Officer. Against this cataclysmic backdrop of bombs falling in Sana’a and with ISIS literally at the gates of the major Iraqi city of Ramadi, many US energy and security experts were shocked to hear President Barack Obama ignore the danger in a recent keynote speech in which he pinpointed global warming as an equally big risk for Americans. “Climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our...

Editor's note: This column was co-authored by Bob Morrison. Many of us applauded when President Bill Clinton signed the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998. That law—passed with broad bi-partisan support—established a U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) that was required to issue annual reports. The law called for the appointment of an Ambassador-at-Large in the State Department who would make religious freedom a key concern. These initiatives gave great hope to advocates of religious freedom around the world. In the nearly twenty years since that good law was passed and signed, however, the picture for religious freedom worldwide...

In a February 22, 2015 article in the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh, Sheikh 'Adel Al-Kalbani, the former imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, attacked the extremism of the Islamic State (ISIS) and groups like it. He said that it takes more than mere words, condemnation, and even fatwas to halt the spread of ISIS's ideas and prevent young people from joining its ranks – it requires reform in Islam that will restore its original tolerant character. Stating that Islam is fundamentally tolerant and that the Prophet and his Companions were lenient with those who disagreed with them, Al-Kalbani added that...

It is hardly surprising that many Americans see ISIS as a vastly more brutal, more threatening version of Al Qaeda -- especially given the many Republican presidential candidates climbing over each other with plans to obliterate the group. But the perception is mistaken. While Al Qaeda’s strategy focuses on catastrophic attacks against the United States, ISIS seeks to capture and hold territory for its caliphate and to stoke a sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shia. The group has no known experience carrying out long-distance covert operations, and no senior federal official has yet pointed to any ISIS plotting against the...

Not that this has anything to do with Islam. “Islamic State’s Saudi branch calls for clearing Arabian Peninsula of Shi’ites,” Reuters, May 30, 2015: DUBAI, May 30 (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia’s branch of militant group Islamic State has said it wants to clear the Arabian Peninsula of Shi’ite Muslims and urged young men in the kingdom to join its cause, the U.S.-based SITE monitoring centre has reported. Islamic State claimed two suicide bombings carried out on May 22 and May 29 on Shi’ite mosques in eastern Saudi Arabia, where the bulk of the Saudi Arabia’s Shi’ite minority lives. The attacks...