Thanks to WikiLeaks, Reporters Without Borders is able to expose how Saudi Arabia’s government, which has suppressed all media freedom domestically, tries to co-opt foreign media outlets in order to project a positive image of the kingdom internationally.

Its methods are revealed in leaked cables between Saudi embassies and the Saudi foreign ministry which WikiLeaks has been publishing as the “Saudi Cables.” Not all of them are dated but the bulk of the documents cover the period from 2010 to 2015.

While it is not always clear from the cables what was actually done, they expose the extraordinary initiatives that were at least considered by the Saudi government in an attempt to improve its image abroad.

It is beyond doubt that the Saudi government abducted, or killed, the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But what did the Trump administration knew about the threat to Khashoggi? Did U.S. intelligence services warn him as their regulations require? Was such a warning blocked by the White House? And what will Trump do about the case?

The Turkish government published pictures of 15 men who had come from Saudi Arabia and were in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul shortly before Khashoggi visited it to get his divorce papers. They moved Khashoggi to the residence of the consul and later that day flew back on the same two private Saudi jets that had brought them to Istanbul.

Al-Jazeera distances itself from Khashoggi death claims, blames Reuters
Qatari broadcaster Al-Jazeera has distanced itself from a news item speculating that Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered while visiting the Saudi consulate in Turkey.

Al-Jazeera Arabic, which had repeated the Reuters story extensively, has acknowledged the claims to be unverified and instead blamed newswire Reuters for the information.

The Reuters story cited only Turkish sources without naming them or providing any substantial evidence to support Khashoggi’s death claims.

A Washington Post columnist who went missing after visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul was spirited out of Turkey in a private jet and held captive in the kingdom where he may still be alive, a source close to its royal family has claimed to DailyMail.com.

Jamal Khashoggi, a long-standing critic of Saudi Arabia and for the last year a columnist for the Post, has been at the center of international concern that he has been murdered after walking into the consulate in Turkey’s largest city and vanishing.

Turkish police were allowed into the building on Tuesday, a week after Khashoggi vanished, and said that CCTV footage from inside has gone missing and Turkish staff were abruptly told to take a holiday on the day in question, The Guardian reports.

The rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia has for decades roiled the Middle East with sectarian conflict, instability and war. Thinking about how the region would look if these two powerhouses normalized relations is intriguing.

But, sadly, such an outcome is unrealistic.

When President Trump recently spoke contemptuously of the Saudi rulers, saying“they wouldn’t last two weeks without US military protection”, it was a candid moment of truth.

However, US neocolonialism as it currently exists, will endeavor to always prop up the Saudi rulers no matter how despotic.

American power and Saudi rulers are a symbiotic scourge on the region, which, shamefully, will never permit restoration of relations with Iran.

If the latest outrage from Mohammed bin Salman changes anything, it should at the very least put an end to the absurd description of the crown prince and his allies as “reformers” once and for all. Reformer is a label that Western pundits and politicians use to describe foreign leaders when they want to express approval and support. It is often not intended to be an accurate statement about the leader’s record, but rather serves to distract from the worst parts of that record in order to sell the leader to Western audiences. Foreign leaders know that they can win a lot of supporters in the West just by saying the right things about a handful of issues, and as long as they keep up appearances their Western boosters will overlook or even defend the worst excesses.

THE DISAPPEARANCE of Jamal Khashoggi remained a mystery on Monday, but unlike many mysteries, it is one that could easily be solved. The Saudi journalist and Post Global Opinions columnist walked into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul at about 1:30 p.m. last Tuesday, Oct. 2, and has not been seen or heard from since. Turkish government sources are saying he was murdered inside the consulate; Saudi officials are calling that allegation “baseless and ridiculous.” They contend that Mr. Khashoggi left the consulate shortly after he arrived.

If either account is correct, there should be tangible evidence — videos, travel logs and other documents — to back it up. Such evidence should be immediately released. Any delay only magnifies the suffering of Mr. Khashoggi’s family, including the fiancee who waited for him in vain outside the consulate. It compounds the crime of those responsible for his disappearance, who will not succeed in deflecting questions through stonewalling.

Last year, Khashoggi fled Saudi Arabia over harsh crackdowns on regime critics. Friction between him and its despotic ruling family surfaced after saying the kingdom should be “nervous about a Trump presidency.”

He opposed Saudi aggression in Yemen, its unacceptable policies toward Qatar, and harshness against critics.

Banned from writing and speaking out publicly, he self-exiled himself to America, saying

“I have left my home, my family and my job, and I am raising my voice,” adding:

“To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison. I can speak when so many cannot.”

Earlier this year, he said Saudi intellectuals and journalists risk imprisonment for criticizing ruling family policies.

The State Department was largely silent on Khashoggi’s disappearance, a statement saying it’s aware of reports and seeks more information.

It has been nearly a week since renowned Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 and never walked back out. In the ensuing days, the Western media has become incensed by reports that the Saudis sent a 15-man "hit squad" to the consulate to carry out the "preplanned" torture and murder of Khashoggi. Afterwards, they reportedly dismembered his body and smuggled his remains out of the building, all while Khashoggi's Turkish fiance waited outside in her car. After sending a "security team" to the consulate to look for the missing dissident, Turkish investigators launched an investigation into Khashoogi's disappearance on Friday - an investigation for which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has pledged his "personal involvement".

Saudi prince Khalid bin Farhan al-Saud, who has fled to Germany after the empowerment of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, called on people to overthrow the current rulers in Riyadh after the recent murder of prominent journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Al-e Saud.
"If the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi is proved, I invite all walks of life in Saudi Arabia to cooperate in a legal measure and change the political system through civil disobedience," Farhan al-Saud wrote on his twitter page on Monday.

He proposed the Saudi people pave the ground for transferring power to Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, the Saudi King Salman’s younger brother who is in exile in Britain, and form a new government based on the constitution.

Turkish officials said they had concrete evidence missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered, with a friend of the prominent writer saying they think he might have been dismembered.

The Mustache of Understanding, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, is pissed that the Saudi clown prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered the kidnapping of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Every ten minutes a child in Yemen starves because of the famine caused by the Saudi, UAE, U.S. and UK war on the country. The renewed attack on the harbor of Hodeidah and hyperinflation over the recent months have doubled the prices of food and gas Most people in Yemen no longer have the income to pay for the needed food. Tens of thousands were already silently starved, millions will likely follow. By what humanitarian 'principle' would the potential death of one bootlicking columnist be worse than that?

Turkey said Tuesday it will search the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul as part of an investigation into the disappearance a week ago of a Saudi contributor to the Washington Post.

The announcement came as a surveillance image surfaced of Jamal Khashoggi walking into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul just before he disappeared.

Khashoggi, 59, went missing while on a visit to the consulate for paperwork to marry his Turkish fiancée. He had been living since last year in the United States, in a self-imposed exile, in part due to the rise of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the son of King Salman.

Turkish officials have said they fear the columnist was killed on the premises of the consulate.

The revelation that Russia worked privately with the Saudis “on Trump’s order” to aid the U.S. effort to halt Iranian oil exports without causing a supply shock seems to contradict Russia’s public promise to defend Iran’s economy against aggressive U.S. sanctions.

As we suggested on Saturday, the suspected extrajudicial torture, murder and dismemberment of a Washington Post columnist inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul is already straining tensions between Riyadh and Ankara. To wit, on Saturday, Turkish prosecutors officially launched an investigation into the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, according to Turkey's official Anadolou news agency, after a "Turkish security team" was allowed inside the consulate by Saudis (presumably under the assumption that they would produce a clean bill of health). Meanwhile, a handful of anonymous Turkish officials reportedly tipped off the Washington Post and Reuters about the murder.

The Yemeni military announced on Sunday the deployment of additional army troops, consisting of Sudanese servicemen and supporting the Saudi-led coalition, in the vicinity of the embattled Yemeni port city of Hodeidah, controlled by the Houthi militants, also known as Ansar Allah movement.

"The aim of the arrived Sudanese servicemen will be to reinforce troops already deployed there in order to fully liberate the territories which remain under the Houthis' control," the military said in a statement.

Desperate for funding to fend off a financial crisis fuelled in part by mounting debt to China, Pakistan is playing a complicated game of poker that could hand Saudi Arabia a strategic victory in its bitter feud with Iran at the People’s Republic’s expense.

Turkish government sources have said that a former trusted aide of the Saudi royal family, who was shunned by Riyadh after criticizing Saudi policies, was murdered inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. Jamal Khashoggi, 59, is an American-educated former adviser to Saudi royals. He worked for years as an advisor to Prince Turki al-Faisal, one of Saudi Arabia’s most recognizable public figures who represented the Kingdom as ambassador to the United States and the United Kingdom. But in 2015, when Mohammad bin Salman, favorite son of Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, began to rise through the ranks of the royal family, Khashoggi became sharply critical of changes in the Kingdom’s style of governance. He moved to the United States, from where he began to criticize Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the civil war in Yemen, its support for the repression of political freedoms in Egypt, and other issues.

This much, at least, can be said for Mohammed bin Salman, the putatively reformist crown prince of Saudi Arabia: He has made all the right enemies. Among those who would celebrate his end are the leaders of ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas, as well as Yemen’s Houthi rebels, and the entire clerical and military leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran. As a bonus, there are members of his own family, the sprawling, sclerotic, self-dealing House of Saud, who would like to see him gone—or at the very least, warehoused at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, where the 32-year-old prince recently imprisoned many of his enemies and cousins during an anti-corruption sweep of the kingdom.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the 33-year-old de facto leader of Saudi Arabia widely praised as a “reformist” by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and others, turns out to be a suspected murderer.

Here’s what happened: 5 days ago, Jamal Khashoggi, a one-time Saudi insider who became a prominent critic and self-exiled in Washington, entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, to get a document he needed to re-marry. His fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, said he never emerged.

The Washington Post reports that Turkish investigators now believe that a 15-member murder team sent in from Saudi Arabia killed Khashoggi inside the consulate. There have been further reports that his body was dismembered before being removed.

Reports are growing that Muhammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s hyperactive crown prince, is losing his grip. His economic reform program has stalled since his father, King Salman, nixed plans to privatize 5 percent of Saudi Aramco. The Saudi war in Yemen, which the prince launched in March 2015, is more of a quagmire than ever while the kingdom’s sword rattling with Iran is making the region increasingly jumpy.

Heavy gunfire in Riyadh last April sparked rumors that MBS, as he’s known, had been killed in a palace coup. In May, an exiled Saudi prince urged top members of the royal family to oust him and put an end to his “irrational, erratic, and stupid” rule. Recently, Bruce Riedel, an ex-CIA analyst who heads up the Brookings Institution’s Intelligence Project, reported that the prince is so afraid for his life that he’s taken to spending nights on his yacht in the Red Sea port of Jeddah.

Several months into the invasion of the Yemeni aid port of Hodeidah, the forces loyal to the United Arab Emirates have been escalating dramatically, looking to gain ground faster in an effort to seize the nation’s largest aid port.

Hodeidah is estimated to import food aid for about 70% of Yemen, and fighting has at this point effectively cut off traffic to an from the city. Promises by the Saudis for a humanitarian corridor haven’t been followed through on so far, and that means no one is getting food.

This has happened before in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, with Saudi naval blockades regularly cutting the nation off from food imports for weeks at a time. Fighting could drag on much longer, however, and that could mean mass starvation, particularly in northern Yemen.

It was May 2017. The Saudis were growing increasingly nervous. For more than two years they had been relying heavily on U.S. military support and bombs to defeat Houthi rebels in Yemen. Now, the Senate was considering a bipartisan resolution to cut off military aid and halt a big sale of American-made bombs to Saudi Arabia. Fortunately for them, despite mounting evidence that the U.S.-backed, supplied, and fueled air campaign in Yemen was targeting civilians, the Saudi government turned out to have just the weapon needed to keep those bombs and other kinds of aid coming their way: an army of lobbyists.

Yemenis have intensified their counterattacks against the Saudi-led coalition which has already escalated its offensive on the port city of Hudaydah over the past weeks. Our correspondent Mohamed Al-Atab has made a tour of Hudaydah and filed this report on the growing national resilience of the city’s people against the Saudi-led war and blockade.

Long-standing separatist ambitions in South Yemen could be coming to a head soon, with troops loyal to the Saudi-backed government massing in the city of Aden. They are preparing to resist calls by separatists to launch a full-scale uprising.

The Southern Transitional Council (STC), which envisions itself becoming an interim government after this uprising, is said also to be mobilizing, with its own forces preparing to seize government buildings across the south.

The STC is blaming Saudi Arabia for mounting corruption across the south, and has long envisioned ending the Saudi invasion by just splitting the country along the pre-unification borders. Pro-Saudi officials say that the STC must abandon all plans, saying they would benefit Iran.

Yemen was unified militarily in 1990, when North Yemen’s former President Ali Abdullah Saleh conquered the South. Since then, separatists have remained an active movement in the south, envisioning reclaiming the lost country.

This is how they roll in the Saudi Kingdom.

Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor has charged Essam al-Zamil, identified by activists as a prominent economist who once criticized plans to float shares of Saudi Aramco, with joining a terrorist organization and meeting with foreign diplomats, reports Reuters.

Local media, including Arabic-language newspaper Okaz, reported on Monday that the accusations include membership in the banned Muslim Brotherhood as well as communicating with neighboring Qatar and inciting protests inside Saudi Arabia.

Zamil has been detained since Sept. 2017 along with dozens of intellectuals and clerics in a crackdown on potential opponents of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose ambitious economic reform program centered on selling up to five percent of the state-owned Aramco oil company, notes Reuters.

Trump, speaking at a rally in Mississippi on Tuesday night, went out of his way to humiliate Saudi King Salman, his close ally in his attempt to corral Iran.

“We protect Saudi Arabia. Would you say they’re rich? And I love the King, King Salman. But I said,

‘King – we’re protecting you – you might not be there for two weeks without us – you have to pay for your military.'”

By “your military” Trump apparently meant the US army, navy and air force, which has often protected Saudi Arabia, as during the Gulf War when the US military spearheaded pushing Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, which he had invaded, and from which he could have menaced Riyadh as well. Some 80% of the cost of the Gulf War was shouldered by US allies, especially Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf states. Saudi Arabia alone pitched in $16.8 billion.

The “28 pages” from a 2002 Congressional Joint Inquiry report on the attacks was declassified on July 15, 2016, but large portions of the release remained redacted. This move pushes to finally remove the redactions on these and other documents related to 9/11.

The documents seem to point the finger at the highest level of the government of Saudi Arabia as being responsible for the financial backing for the attackers on 9/11.

S.Res. 610 Resolution Reads as follows:

Urging the release of information regarding the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks upon the United States.

Whereas tens of thousands of pages of documents relating to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks upon the United States remain classified by the Federal Government;

Whereas the Federal Government may properly classify and control access to information in order to protect sources and methods of collecting critical information in defense of the country and the people of the United States;

The latest attack comes just hours after Saudi Arabia admitted that its forces have committed what it called “certain mistakes” in Yemen, after increasing pressure from international bodies and human-rights groups that accuse the kingdom of carrying out war crimes in the country.

About one million people in northern Yemen are living in makeshift camps on the verge of famine.

They're in a Houthi-controlled area that the Saudi-Emirati coalition has been attacking and that's making it difficult for aid to reach camps. Without a ceasefire and end to the attacks, aid organisations cannot bring in the amount of food necessary for the displaced Yemenis to survive the conflict.

A Saudi dissident living in Canada was likely spied on by Israeli phone-hacking technology, according to a Monday report.

The Herzliya-based NSO Group uses its controversial Pegasus spyware program to turn smartphones into listening devices. It has been accused of selling the technology to countries, including Saudi Arabia, who use it to spy on dissidents, journalists, and others.

The Citizen Lab, a group of academics from Toronto University, said it has “high confidence” that the Israeli technology was used to spy on 27-year-old Omar Abdulaziz, an outspoken Saudi dissident who sought asylum in Canada.

The advanced defence and surveillance systems which Russia intends to send to Syria will be able to monitor flight movements in Israel, Saudi Arabia and Europe, media reports said.

“We will know not only that someone has entered the airspace in this region, but also that somewhere a plane is only operating on the runway, be it in Israel or Saudi Arabia or even in Europe,” Vladimir Mikheyev, first deputy director of government-owned Concern Radio-Electronic Technologies, told Russia’s Tass news agency

“Systems capable of combating precision weapons-guided bombs and missiles … will be added to the conventional radar protection systems,” he added.

Mikheyev pointed out that Moscow is planning to strengthen its own defence systems which could include the instalment of aerosol smokescreens which make airplanes invisible to missiles.

Saudi-backed forces are reporting heavy fighting in and around the vital aid port of Hodeidah, in northwestern Yemen. Reports suggest that over 60 were killed in the course of the day’s clashes, with 54 of them Shi’ite Houthis.

Fighting initially focused on some of the rare farms around the province, and some military positions leading into the port city itself. The port is the source of food aid for about 70% of Yemen, and the lone port under the control of the Houthi movement.

Yemen imports the vast, vast majority of its food, so a protracted battle for the last Houthi port could cut off millions in Houthi territory from any food aid at all, leading to mass starvation. The Saudi-backed forces have promised to eventually open “humanitarian routes” out of the city.

Addressing the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on Monday with respect to the massive civilian death toll in the Saudi invasion of Yemen, Saudi officials made rare admissions of fault, saying that they had made “mistakes” in targeting and were working hard to rectify the problem.

Saudi officials were clearly trying to use this to get a pass on the ten thousand-plus killed civilians, insisting that the internal investigations note the “mistakes,” and that perpetrators will be “held to account,” despite little evidence that this ever happened.

The UN committee didn’t appear to be sold on this idea either, with members noting the war has been going on since 2015 with no sign of prosecutions for civilian deaths. Panel chairwoman Renate Winter noted that an awfully large number of these “mistakes” had hit the same civilian targets, with several schools and hospitals hit myriad times. She asked how many times the Saudis could possibly keep making that same mistake.

Those rare moments that WikiLeaks gets invoked at the United Nations are always fun, especially when part of a tense feud between Middle East rivals and involving Hillary Clinton.

Iranian Ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo gave a fiery speech during the final days of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York wherein he responded to specific charges of Saudi Arabia that Iran sponsors terrorism and is waging proxy wars on Riyadh throughout the Middle East, saying that global terrorism actually originates with the Saudis.

The Iranian ambassador supported his case by appealing to a specific WikiLeaks email: “Everybody knows that Saudi Arabia supports terrorism in a very blatant and widespread manner,” he said. In a shock statement before his UN audience, he added, “in the framework of WikiLeaks in 2009, Hillary Clinton is said to have stated that Saudi Arabia is the greatest donor to terrorist groups around the world.”

US President Donald Trump called on Riyadh to increase its military spending, with an eye on more weapons sale to the "rich" kingdom.
Speaking at a campaign rally in West Virginia on Saturday, the US president stressed that he had complained that Washington was not getting what it should from Saudi Arabia during a phone conversation with King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Middle East News.

Trump said he had told King Salman that Riyadh has "trillions of dollars" and could pay its military bills.

"I love Saudi Arabia. They are great, King Salman, I spoke with him this morning. I said, king, you have got trillions of dollars. Without us, who knows what’s going to happen. .... With us they are totally safe. But we don’t get what we should be getting," he stated.

Trump further threatened to end what he claimed to be subsidies for the Saudi military.

New data from the US Air Force shows that the refueling operation for the Saudi-led war in Yemen is continuing apace with no sign of slowing. The US has refueled Saudi warplanes attacking Yemen since April of 2015.

Central Command revealed that the US has conducted 2,919 sorties, offloading 92.3 million pounds of fuel since the war began. The statement confirmed this was “in support of US missions and Saudi and Emirate operations against threats throughout the horn of Africa.”

US involvement in the Yemen War has been extremely controversial, with Congress once again working on a bill aiming to compel the administration to stop participating. The war was never authorized by the US Congress.

Refueling is the primary US operation in Yemen, which is a particularly controversial part of the war, since Saudi airstrikes have been killing massive numbers of Yemeni civilians in the course of the war.

At Nasr Hospital's emergency room in the Yemeni city of Daleh, a little boy struggles to breathe. He is too tired, or too hungry, to cry.

Born with a degenerative neurological disease, his muscles have atrophied to nothing, his tiny joints visible through his pale skin, his stomach distended.

The child's body cannot retain even water, so nurses have resorted to putting him in diapers.

And doctors say there is nothing they can do.

The boy is one of an estimated five million Yemeni children who may not see their next birthday in a war the UN children's fund has described as a "living hell" for minors.

The UN has warned that international aid agencies are losing the fight against famine in Yemen, where 3.5 million people may soon be added to the eight million Yemenis already facing starvation -- more than half of them children.

In a 21-8 vote, the UN Human Rights Council has agreed to extend the inquiry into human rights violations committed during the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Saudi Arabia and its allies in the United Arab Emirates both condemned the news.

Such votes happen every year around the UN General Assembly meeting, with the Saudis trying to limit such votes and insisting that any investigations are only going to “deepen divisions” in Yemen.

The council spent several days debating the matter, with those in favor of more investigations, led by the Netherlands and Canada, winning out handily, while many other nations chose to abstain.

Saudi Arabia's foreign minister asked Canada to apologise for demanding the release of Saudi women's rights activists and stop treating the kingdom as "a banana republic" if it wanted to resolve a diplomatic dispute between the two countries.

In August, Saudi Arabia froze new trade with Canada, blocked grain imports, expelled Canada's ambassador and ordered all Saudi students home after Ottawa called for the release of activists detained for urging more rights for women.

IN CONGRESS, FRUSTRATION with the U.S. role in Yemen is nearing a breaking point. Sen. Bob Menendez — the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — is holding up a $2 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates over concerns that the two countries routinely bomb civilian targets. Meanwhile, in the House, U.S. assistance to the Saudi- and UAE-led coalition is about to face another major hurdle.

On Wednesday, California Democrat Ro Khanna introduced a resolution invoking the 1973 War Powers Act, declaring that Congress never authorized U.S. support for the coalition in Yemen and directing President Donald Trump to withdraw U.S. troops from “hostilities” against the Houthis, the Iranian-backed rebel group at war with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The resolution would not affect U.S. forces who are on the ground in Yemen fighting Al Qaeda.

By now, the images are infamous: stunned, bloodied Yemeni children arriving at the hospital after their summer camp bus was bombed by Saudi aircraft. The United States is deeply implicated in that August 9 attack, which killed 54 people – most of them children

Fragments from the bomb bear the labels of U.S. weapons manufacturers. The indefensible nature of the bombing – there were no combatants anywhere in sight – has garnered headlines and even attention on Capitol Hill, opening a new conversation about US involvement in the years-long siege of Yemen by a coalition headed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Less than a month after Iran’s consulate in Basra was attacked, a group of terrorists claiming to be members of the Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz attacked a military parade in the capital of Iran’s Khuzestan province, killing 25 people and wounding many more. When the Basra consulate incident took place , some commentators in Iran speculated that the attackers also wanted to target Khorramshahr and Abadan. Now it seems that they were not too wrong.

Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, the Saudi-backed “president” of Yemen, spoke at the UN General Assembly today, dismissing the idea of any further attempts at peace talks with the Houthi movement as “doomed to fail.”

Hadi was installed as the Yemeni President in a US and UN-backed move after the Arab Spring. He was nominally “elected” in a vote in which he was the only allowed candidate. He was given a two-year term, starting in 2012. That has long since expired, though he maintains he is the legitimate president, and the Saudis maintain reinstalling him is the purpose of their war in Yemen.

Hadi’s attempts to cling to power, and to violently crush the Shi’ite Houthis led to his initial expulsion from the country, and the Saudi-led war intends to put him back. Hadi insists that there is no point in talks with the “gangster-like” Houthis, and continues to refer back to UN Security Council resolutions from years ago calling for the Houthis to surrender all territory to Hadi.

Escalations of the Saudi-led war in Yemen, including the attack on the Yemeni port city of al-Hodeidah, has seen the already huge civilian death toll of the war skyrocket, up 164% just since June.

According to the International Rescue Committee, the month of August was by far the worst of the year, with a single nine-day period leaving nearly 500 civilians killed. They noted that on- third of Saudi airstrikes have hit non-military targets.

It is unsurprising that August would be such a particularly deadly month, with a Saudi airstrike early in the month hitting a school bus full of children, killing 51 of them. Saudi officials long maintained that the attack was “legitimate,” but there was never any question the victims were civilians.

Iran's president has criticized the US ambassador to the United Nations’ response to the deadly attack in Ahvaz. He tweeted “a US official has held the Iranian government responsible for the attack,” adding, “What would Americans think if we were to say such a thing about the 9/11 terrorist attacks?”

Earlier, Iran's Revolutionary Guards promised a “crushing and devastating” response to the assault.

Radio Sputnik discussed the attack in Ahvaz with Alexander Azadgan, professor of international political economy, a senior geopolitical analyst and editor-at-large with Imperia News.

Less than a month after Iran’s consulate in Basra was attacked, a group of terrorists claiming to be members of the Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz attacked a military parade in the capital of Iran’s Khuzestan province, killing 25 people and wounding many more. When the Basra consulate incident took place , some commentators in Iran speculated that the attackers also wanted to target Khorramshahr and Abadan. Now it seems that they were not too wrong.

Invoking the War Powers Resolution, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) joined a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers today in introducing a privileged resolution to stop US military support for Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen. US support of this war continues to fuel the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, killing thousands of civilians, with millions suffering from mass starvation, famine and cholera.

On Monday, a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition attacking Yemen announced that they will open a humanitarian corridor out of the vital aid port of Hodeidah. The corridor is intended to allow aid deliveries to the capital city of Sanaa.

The decision is being done in coordination with the UN. Officials did not say when this corridor would be opened, but it would only allow travel parts of the day through certain routes. Hodeidah is the lone source of food aid for all of northern Yemen, and is estimated to feed about 70% of the entire country.

With Saudi-led forces attacking Hodeidah, and cutting off all supply routes, materially no aid is coming out of the city right now. This had led aid groups to warn that Yemen will run out of food in the next two months, leading to mass starvation.

Terrorists in Iran launched an attack on a parade on Saturday killing 25 — including a four-year-old girl. Unsurprisingly, the group claiming responsibility for the massacre has links to foreign entities in Saudi Arabia and their allies.

Also on Saturday, Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, spoke at an “Iran Uprising Summit” in New York City’s Time Square supporting efforts to overthrow Iran’s revolutionary government. The summit included supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and other groups that share Washington’s goal of overthrowing Tehran.

“The people of Iran obviously have now had enough,” Giuliani said on Saturday. “The sanctions are working. The currency is going to nothing … these are the kinds of conditions that lead to successful revolution.”

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is working to “westernise” the Kingdom and change people’s mindsets when it comes to Israel, Twitter user Mujtahidd has reported.

The account, which is believed to be reporting from inside the ruling family in Saudi Arabia, wrote: “Arrangement among the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain is wider than our expectations. Israel and American bodies linked to Trump are involved.”

“The plan is complete. It is based on unifying the bases of security, media, culture and education, including religion, in Egypt and all the Gulf States except Oman.”

The plan, according to Mujtahid, was drawn in Egypt which is the “supplier of cadres who will deal with the issues of media, security, Islamic movements, education syllabuses and religious institutions.”

The coalition’s strategy seems to be to seal the Houthis into Hodeida and squeeze.

On rare occasion a story is unearthed in the mainstream media which demonstrates in stunning clarity how major foreign policy decisions are really made in Washington, especially when it comes to waging perpetual war in the Middle East often under the official rhetorical guise of “protecting civilians”.

A bombshell Wall Street Journal report details a leaked classified memo which shows Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decided to continue US military involvement in the Saudi war on Yemen in order to preserve a massive $2 billion weapons deal with Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Russia has revealed his hope that the US will not impose sanctions on his country for its plans to buy the S-400 missile defence system from Moscow, AlKhaleejonline.com reported on Friday.

Raed Ben Khalid Qarmali made his comment when asked if Saudi Arabia is going ahead with its plan to purchase the system, just one day after America imposed sanctions on China for a similar deal with the Russians.

“I hope that no one imposes sanctions on us,” said Qarmali. He noted that 14 memorandums were signed during the visit of Saudi King Salman to Moscow, including four military deals. “The implementation of three has just started,” the ambassador added.

The Trump administration imposed sanctions on China after Beijing bought aircraft and other military equipment from Russia. The Chinese government described the American move as a “flagrant violation of the rules of international relations.”

At least 25 people are dead and 53 wounded after an army parade in the southwestern Iranian city of Ahvaz came under attack by militants on Saturday, according to state media.

Nearly half of the dead are members of the Revolutionary Guards, according to state news agencies, making this one of the worst attacks ever on the elite force.

While the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack, there are conflicting reports over who is behind it. A spokesman for Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Ramezan Sharif, said the attackers were funded by Sunni arch rival Saudi Arabia.

"Those who opened fire on civilians and the armed forces have links to the Ahvazi movement," Guards spokesman Ramezan Sharif told ISNA.

"They are funded by Saudi Arabia and attempted to cast a shadow over the Iranian armed forces."

Zarif vowed Iran would "respond swiftly and decisively in defence of Iranian lives". -France24

According to the Iranian terror group’s former head of security, Saudi intelligence helped fund the group by smuggling valuables like gold and Rolex watches into Iraq and Jordan for sale on the black market.

More than five million children are at risk of famine in Yemen as the ongoing war causes food and fuel prices to soar across the country, charity Save the Children warned Wednesday.

Disruption to supplies coming through the embattled Red Sea port of Hodeida could "cause starvation on an unprecedented scale," the British based NGO said in a new report.

Save the Children said an extra one million children now risk falling into famine as prices of food and transportation rise, bringing the total to 5.2 million.

A Saudi-led alliance intervened in 2015 in a bid to bolster the president, accusing Iran of backing the Huthis, but nearly 10,000 people have since been killed.

Deadly clashes resumed around the Huthi-held port city of Hodeida following the collapse of talks in Geneva earlier this month.

"Millions of children don't know when or if their next meal will come," said Helle Thorning-Schmidt, CEO of Save the Children International.

With Saudi Arabia forever escalating their war in Yemen, the growing calls by human rights groups to stop selling them arms with which to commit war crimes are struggling to compete with the vast sums of money the Saudis are offering for those arms.

Germany is the latest to renege on promises to ban weapons sales for use in the Yemen War, announcing Wednesday that the Economy Minister has greenlit a new round of artillery systems for sale to the Saudis.

The systems are designed for precise counterattack, and are clearly being bought explicitly to use in Yemen. Yet the Merkel government, as part of its coalition deal, announced a full export ban to “any sides fighting in Yemen,” including the Saudis.

Last month, a CNN investigation found remnants of a US-made bomb at the scene of an airstrike that left dozens of schoolboys dead. Now, an independent Yemen-based human rights group called Mwatana has given CNN exclusive access to a trove of documents that show fragments of US-manufactured bombs at the scene of a string of other incidents since 2015, when the civil war began. In each of those cases, civilians were either killed or put at risk.

Mwatana, which documents violations by all parties in Yemen’s conflict, used its network of trained field researchers to photograph evidence at the scene of strikes. The group consulted weapons experts to identify the weapons used from serial numbers found on the fragments. Mwatana was recognized last month with an award by US body Human Rights First.

Israel has ineluctably allied itself with Saudi Arabia and Sunni Islam. So too, the US has taken Israel’s and Saudi’s partisan position against Iran. Both have their shoulders behind the Saudi king’s back – pushing him into leading a hybrid war against his powerful neighbor.

Saudi Arabia is reported to have purchased the Iron Dome missile defence system from Israel signaling a rapprochement between the two countries, according to several diplomatic sources quoted in Al-Khaleej Online.

Saudi Arabia not only wants political convergence with Israel, said the sources, but also seeks to reach a level where it publically purchases heavy and developed weapons from Tel Aviv like the UAE does.

Saudi Arabia issued new directives banning up to 300,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon from performing pilgrimage, Alarab.qa reported yesterday.

Reporting the Palestinian Institution for Human Rights (Shahed), the Qatari news website said that Saudi Arabia stopped issuing visas for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who do not hold a Palestinian Authority (PA) passport.

Shahed reported travel agents were informed by the Saudi embassy in Lebanon not to accept applications from Palestinians who do not have PA passports.

The rights group said it was worried about the “sudden” Saudi decision, calling on Kingdom to identify its reasons which have “dangerous consequences” on the Palestinian refugees and their future.

Saudi Arabia has intensified its invasion of Yemen as the United Nations special envoy for the violence-scarred country visits the capital Sana’a in an attempt to cobble together a conflict resolution mechanism.

On Sunday, Saudi warplanes killed seven civilians, including women and children, in Bayda, attacking the central Yemeni province’s town of Radman. Eight others were also wounded in the attack.

Earlier in the day, two people lost their lives in a missile attack on the northern province of Sa’ada, and four more died in airstrikes on the southwestern province of al-Hudaydah.

Saudi authorities are reportedly keeping more than 2,500 anti-regime activists behind bars as part of a widening crackdown led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman against Muslim preachers, members of the press and intellectuals in the oil-rich kingdom.

The rights group Prisoners of Conscience, which is an independent non-governmental organization advocating human rights in Saudi Arabia, announced in a post on its official Twitter page that at least 2,613 people, among them prominent lawyers, judges, academicians and scholars, are currently languishing in jails and detention centers across the country.

In the months leading up to the 25th anniversary of the Oslo Accords, the U.S. has colluded with Israel in a string of policies and decisions that completely undermine the legitimacy of the agreement, not to mention Palestinian claims to justice, freedom and ultimately peace. As these policies unfold, one cannot help recalling the words of the great Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, who said that talking with the Israelis is “a conversation between the sword and the neck.”

In a remote pocket of northern Yemen, many families with starving children have nothing to eat but the leaves of a local vine, boiled into a sour, acidic green paste. International aid agencies have been caught off guard by the extent of the suffering there as parents and children waste away.

The main health center in Aslam district was flooded with dozens of emaciated children during a recent visit by the Associated Press.

Excruciatingly thin toddlers, eyes bulging, sat in a plastic washtub used in a make-shift scale as nurses weighed them one by one. Their papery skin was stretched tight over pencil-like limbs and knobby knees. Nurses measured their forearms, just a few centimeters in diameter, marking the worst stages of malnutrition.

At least 20 children are known to have died of starvation already this year, more than three years into the country’s ruinous civil war, in the province that includes the district.

Yemeni army forces, supported by allied fighters from Popular Committees, have fired a domestically-designed and -developed ballistic missile at a strategic economic target in Saudi Arabia’s southwestern border region of Jizan in retaliation for the Riyadh regime’s devastating military aggression against their impoverished country.

A Yemeni military source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Arabic-language al-Masirah television network that the short-range Badr-1 missile struck an oil refinery of the Saudi Arabian national petroleum and natural gas company, Aramco, in the region, located 967 kilometers southwest of the capital Riyadh, with great precision, on Friday evening.

The Saudi-led coalition has promised to compensate the victims of strikes in Yemen that left dozens of civilians dead, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said during a press briefing on Thursday.

"They have also pledged to compensate the victims of those strikes that tragically did kill civilians," Nauert told reporters.

A SHOCKING new documentary will reveal the horrors of daily life inside Saudi Arabia.

Titled Saudi Arabia Uncovered, the ITV film aims to expose the brutal punishments dished out to those deemed to have broken the country’s strict Islamic laws.

At one point a woman accused of killing her stepdaughter is heard screaming “I didn’t do it” before she is beheaded in the street. Another clip shows five corpses strung up from a crane, The Sun reported.

As well as showing the barbaric reality of life inside Saudi Arabia, the film also questions Britain’s close relationship with the hard line Islamic state.

It comes as capital punishment in the country hit a new high, with public executions taking place at a shocking average rate of one person per day.

Saudi-backed Yemeni forces have advanced closer to the northern port city of Hodeidah, the main aid port for the northern half of the country. The port is controlled by the Shi’ite Houthi movement, and the Saudi-led forces intend to seize it.

For now, the advancing forces have seized a pair of main roads leading into the city, effectively cutting off the Houthis’ supply line into the city. This also limits the ability of transporting humanitarian aid out of the city.

As the fight over the city drags on, this is increasingly concerning. Hodeidah is the sole source of food for millions in northern Yemen, and the offensive means very little aid is getting out. If the city falls entirely, the aid is likely to stop.

This is why the UN has been pushing for a deal to stop the fighting over Hodeidah. The UN offered to take control of the city just to keep aid flowing, though the pro-Saudi side has rejected the proposal, saying they want the Houthis to unconditionally surrender.

The advisory also warns military activities linked to the bloody conflict in Syria have been ramped across Iran's airspace.

Tensions between Tehran and Washington are running high following Donald Trump’s controversial decision to pull out of the landmark Iran nuclear deal re-introduce economic sanctions last month.

Flight Service Bureau, which provides safety information on airspace to airlines, said "without seeming alarmist", the deteriorating relationship between the US and Iran must be taken into account when planning flights in Iran's airspace.

Just as the U.S. in typical fashion continues lecturing countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran over severe human rights violations, including allegations of everything from launching barrel bomb strikes on civilian areas in Idlib to chemical weapons attacks to sensational spy poisoning ops in the U.K., the Saudi-US coalition in Yemen has attacked another bus full of children and civilians in Yemen.

On Wednesday multiple Yemeni journalists reporting from on the ground confirmed a new airstrike resulting in mass civilian casualties, this time a Saudi-US coalition strike scored a direct hit on a bus station in besieged Hodeidah City.

The strike occurred the same day Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced they've certified the legality of US assistance to the coalition in Yemen before Congress.

Iron Dome is a sophisticated vehicle-mounted system capable of detecting threats and eliminating incoming missiles and rockets using a shotgun-like blast.

Israeli security officials have vehemently rejected reports that Saudi Arabia had allegedly purchased Iron Dome missile defense systems from the Jewish state, according to Haaretz.

Their remarks came after the Emirati news website Al-Khaleej Online cited diplomatic sources as saying that the deal, which is estimated at tens of millions of dollars, is due to enter force in December, when Iron Dome batteries will be deployed on Saudi Arabia's southern border with Yemen.

On the 17th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Towers and damaged the Pentagon, Radio Sputnik spoke with the authors of a new book that hit shelves last month about the failures of the US intelligence community and heretofore unknown connection the hijackers had with the Saudi monarchy.

On Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear Tuesday, hosts Brian Becker and John Kiriakou spoke with Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy, about their new book: "The Watchdogs Didn't Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror," and some of the shocking facts it brings to light about how competition between intelligence agencies for information overlapped with the creation of "a little crucible" in California for two key 9/11 hijackers by figures with high-up connections in the Saudi state in the year before the attacks, and that those same people were allowed to keep their jobs and advance in the CIA.

A former US army officer and freelance writer disclosed that the US administrations have always attempted to conceal links between Saudi Arabia with the hijackers who caused the 9/11 tragedy, regretting that many American citizens are not aware of Riyadh's role in spreading extremism, support for terrorism and crimes in Syria and Yemen.

"Since 9/11, there has been a sustained effort, across both Republican and Democratic administrations, to conceal from the public any indication of Saudi government links to the attacks," Brian McGlinchey told FNA on Saturday.

McGlinchey launched 28Pages.org in July 2014 as an information and activism hub for the nonpartisan movement to declassify 28 pages on Saudi links to 9/11.

For a few months now, OPEC has been boosting production to ease concerns about high oil prices amid expected supply losses from Venezuela and Iran.

The cartel’s largest producer and exporter, Saudi Arabia, has been specifically targeting an increase in crude oil exports to the most transparent market, the United States, which reports crude oil imports and inventory levels every week.

On the one hand, the Saudis are looking to regain their foothold in the American market after having cut shipments to the United States to a 30-year-low at the end of last year, when OPEC’s efforts to erase the global oil glut were in full swing.

Riyadh’s prosecution of its 2015 war in neighboring Yemen has seen some 10,000 killed and an estimated 5 million uprooted as Saudi Arabian citizens, military officials and now even members of the royal family increasingly decry the ongoing bloodshed.

In a rare show of discord from the ranks of the Saudi royal family, Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz — one of the last sons of King Abdulaziz, the founder of the Middle Eastern kingdom — was heard to blame the monarchy's unpopular war in Yemen on current Saudi Arabian King Salman and his crown prince.

Spain’s defense ministry has canceled the delivery of laser-guided bombs to the Saudi-Arabian government, noting that Riyadh’s war in Yemen has seen some 10,000 killed and an estimated 5 million uprooted.

Yemen is engulfed in a war between the government headed by exiled President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and the Houthi political opposition movement.

Clashes and air strikes have left 84 people dead around Yemen's Red Sea port city of Hodeidah since the collapse of United Nations-brokered peace talks, hospital sources have said.

The sources in Hodeidah province, which is controlled by Houthi rebels, said on Sunday that 11 soldiers and 73 rebels had been killed since the talks were abandoned on Saturday.

Dozens of rebels and at least 17 soldiers had also been wounded.

Attempted peace talks between Yemen's Saudi-backed government and the Houthis, who are linked to Iran, collapsed on Sunday, sparking fears of an escalation in the country's conflict.

The rebels refused to leave Yemen for the talks in Geneva, saying the UN had not met their demands - including a plane to transport their wounded to nearby Oman and a guarantee their delegation would be allowed to return to the capital Sanaa.

The brother of King Salman is pondering whether he should return to Saudi Arabia after criticising the King and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the war in Yemen, the Middle East Eye reports.

Earlier this week Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, one of the few remaining sons of the kingdom's founder, told Yemeni and Bahraini protesters outside his London home that the entire Al Saud family should not be blamed for the war in Yemen.

"There are certain individuals who are responsible. Don’t involve anyone else," the prince said.

A delegation from Yemen’s former government has left UN-brokered talks in Geneva after representatives of the Houthi movement were prevented by Saudi Arabia from attending the negotiations.

"The government delegation is leaving today," said an official from the Saudi-backed team on Saturday, referring to the former Yemeni administration. "There are no expectations the Houthis are coming," he added.

UN envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths told a news conference that the Houthis were “keen” to get to Geneva.

"They would have liked to get here. We didn't make conditions sufficiently correct to get them here," he said.

Ansarullah accused the Saudis of planning to strand the delegation in Djibouti, where their plane was to make a stop en route to Geneva.

Signs of a potential rift within the ruling dynasty of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were apparent this week following comments by a Saudi prince that the horrific violence wrought on the people of Yemen should be blamed on the “king and his heir apparent,” a reference to Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, often referred to by the initials MBS.

In videotaped footage posted online, the high-ranking Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz al-Saud – one of the last of the sons of founding monarch, Ibn Saud – can be heard responding to protesters in London with rare critical comments that hint at a broader disunity in the ranks of Saudi royals.

In his comments, which were transcribed by Qatari-owned, U.K.-based news outlet Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, the 73-year-old prince said:

Tony Blair’s relationship with Saudi Arabia has come under scrutiny following the revelation that the non-government organisation set up under his name has received millions of pounds from Riyadh.

Accounts published yesterday by the Tony Blair Institute confirmed earlier reports that Blair had received donations of up to $12 million from the Kingdom.

The Saudi donation, according to the Financial Times, comes from an organisation called Media Investment Limited (MIL), which is a subsidiary of Saudi Research & Marketing Group, registered in Guernsey.

Yemen’s Houthi movement said on Wednesday that its delegation was prevented from flying to Geneva to attend United Nations-sponsored peace talks, according to a report by the group’s al-Masirah TV. It said the UN could not secure required authorizations from the Saudi-led coalition which controls Yemen’s airspace, Reuters said.

The Saudi government announced this week it is further criminalizing dissent, deeming satire that “disturbs the public order” a crime in what amounts to an escalation of already existing practices despite recent claims the Kingdom has entered an age of reformation.

London’s defence giant cut its workforce Tuesday and the union representing workers fears more job losses may be on the way.

General Dynamics Land Systems Canada laid off 28 of its 60 temporary workers, largely from its engineering area, and Unifor Local 27 is hearing rumblings about a downturn at the plant.

“It’s been in the wind. I think there may be more coming,” said Jim Reid, chairperson of Unifor Local 27, the union representing workers.

“We hear it’s up and down there. One day the Saudi order is going great guns, the next it’s at a standstill. I don’t know what the answer is.”

A state prosecutor in Saudi Arabia has reportedly sought the death penalty for Salman al-Odah, a prominent Sunni scholar facing accusations of terrorism stemming from tweets deemed dangerous to the Saudi state.

On August 17, Abdullah al-Odah, the cleric's US-based son, wrote on Twitter that his father was being moved suddenly from a prison in the coastal city of Jeddah to the capital city, Riyadh. Abdullah indicated that a source in the prison had informed him of his father's impending secret trial.