Saudi Arabia's Massive Futuristic Vanity Projects Falter Amid Gaza War
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The scaling back of Saudi Arabia’s proposed urban mega-project sends a clear warning
There is a long history of planned city building by both governments and the private sector from Brasilia to Islamabad. More recently, two trends have come together in a new wave of visionary urban planning. On the one hand, there are the neoliberal “special economic zone” policies that accelerated in the 1980s and which have become an almost unquestioned global economic article of faith. On the other, there is the “smart city” in which ubiquitous sensing and surveillance generate big data,...
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Obviously, Saudi Arabia’s enlightened despotism is not as depraved as Hamas’s genocidal totalitarianism
One of the dumber attempts to deflect away from the uniquely depraved fundamentalism of Hamas and Hezbollah came from New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci, who decided to conflate the terrorist organizations with Saudi Arabia. Tufekci is responding to Hezbollah’s leader reminding “Queers for Palestine” that under the Sharia law shared by both terrorist organizations, […]
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SIPRI: Saudi Arabia was Middle East’s biggest arms buyer in 2023
Shafaqna English-Saudi Arabia was biggest arms buyer in the Middle East in 2023, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The think tank’s latest report said that Riyadh spent $76 billion on arms in 2023, a four per cent increase compared to the previous year, making it the