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“In the end, Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about invading immigrant hordes, his macho posturing against a female opponent, and his promise to boost an inflation-battered U.S. economy simply resonated more than all the lectures about his many deficiencies as a person and a would-be President.”
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American Strongman Returns to Power As Divided Nation Ponders Future
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Cory Doctorow: “…to resist enshittification, you have to impose switching costs on yourself.”
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My story from last week’s Saudi investment conference: the PIF plans to further scale back the share of its international investment, drawing a line under a multibillion-dollar global spending spree as it refocuses on the domestic economy.
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Elon Musk is in early talks with Saudi Arabia and Qatar about backing xAI, could roughly double the company’s valuation to $45 billion.
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My latest story examines how Saudi reforms led to a surge in female labour force participation from 16.4% in 2015 to 35.8% this year.
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“If you are guaranteed to be competitive in every national election, even if you nominate a twice-impeached felon, why mend your ways? A major party in 21st-century America is never truly out of power.” —Janan Ganesh
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My latest: Saudi regulator to investigate media giant MBC over report calling Sinwar a “new face of terrorism” as Iraq moves to suspend the channel’s licence after protesters attacked its offices in Baghdad.
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Cory Doctorow: “You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS…”
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Obituary of pioneering Saudi female artist Safeya Binzagr.
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Our big read on the Saudi economy: After eight years of whirlwind construction activity and unprecedented spending, the kingdom’s new watchword is prudence.
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“With a web flooded with AI generated slop and the platforms themselves encouraging it, the role of curators is gonna become more and more important. Who knows, maybe with a digital world filled with low-quality garbage we’ll find refuge in old-school printed magazines.”
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KAUST president pledges to stop any AI collaboration with China that could jeopardise the Saudi university’s access to US-made chips.
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“There is no love lost between Hizbollah and Saudi, but Lebanon is a sovereign state and this is a very dangerous precedent that the Israelis are setting. They are making it complicated for everybody,” a Saudi official said.
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Dave Winer, one of the people who inspired me to blog, celebrates 30 years of blogging today: “Every time you post something you’re proud of on a social media site, how about taking a moment and posting it to your blog too.”
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My latest: Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal resumes work on the Jeddah Tower project, which is set to surpass Dubai’s Burj Khalifa as the world’s tallest building when completed in 2028
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Saudi ambassador to the UK: “As the government in Israel seems further away than ever from understanding this key fact, as demonstrated by its behaviour in Gaza and elsewhere, it’s clear that normalisation of the kingdom’s relationship with Israel is currently not possible.”
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OpenAI was a research lab — now it’s just another tech company.
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“A website is, among other things, a container. The shape of that container both constrains and makes possible what goes within it.”
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Saudi Arabia is ready to abandon its unofficial oil price target of $100 a barrel as it prepares to increase output to take back market share.
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My latest: The rise of MBS saw a relaxation of the Saudi dress code, but we are now seeing a pushback towards more formality as social change fault lines are becoming increasingly blurred.
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“Roads are barren, inhospitable landscapes whose only redeeming value is allowing us to reach somewhere much more pleasant than the road itself. When roads come to dominate the non-road area of a city, you have, by definition, built too much road.”
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Weekend in al-Baha, southwest Saudi Arabia.
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As Saudi Arabia reassesses its priorities and the PIF shifts focus to huge domestic commitments, the era of the kingdom being perceived as a source of easy money is coming to an end.
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Saudi Public Health Authority says no cases of mpox detected in the kingdom, urges citizens to avoid travel to countries where outbreaks have been reported.
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