One killed, several missing after rare floods hit Saudi capital

November 18, 2013  Get short URL<<

Cars drive through a flooded street in northern Riyadh, on November 17, 2013, after heavy rains fell overnight in the Saudi capital, caused floods and traffic jams which forced the Saudi Eduction Ministry to suspend studies in schools and universities for one day (AFP Photo / Fayez Nureldine)  >>> The search continues for other people who went missing as a result of the rainfall, which experts have already called the worst in 30 years. 

November 10, 2013 Saudi Arabia’s Driven Women Posted by Katherine Zoepf

On Monday evening, shortly after the call to Isha prayers had sounded from hundreds of mosques across Riyadh, a half dozen women gathered for a small dinner party—gender-segregated, like most Saudi social gatherings—in a residential compound in the eastern part of the city. Their black abayas and headscarves put away in a cupboard near the villa’s front door, most of the women wore trousers and silky evening tops. As a maid carried in a platter of roast lamb, one of the women, Fawzia al-Bakr, a writer and university professor, peered distractedly at her iPhone.

“This is not the way to address a king!” Bakr began tapping away at the screen, murmuring apologies to the table. Bakr is one of the forty-seven Saudi women who, on November 6, 1990, drove in a convoy down Riyadh’s busy Tahlia Street, demonstrating for the right to drive. (Tahlia is the Arabic word for desalination plant, an important landmark in any Saudi city.) The forty-seven women, still collectively known in the kingdom as “the drivers,” were detained, fired from their jobs, and widely pilloried. Today, Bakr is a supporter of the October 26th Campaign, a group of young Saudi women—and a few men—who in late September posted an online petition calling for Saudi women to be allowed to drive. The group has been collecting videos of Saudi women behind the wheel. In response to a request from Prince Khalid bin Bandar, the governor of Riyadh, the October 26th campaigners were drafting a new petition, Bakr explained. Prince Khalid had offered to take the petition to King Abdullah, so it was important that the language be just right, forceful but courteous.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/11/saudi-arabias-driven-women.html

[SIDBAR:  GLOBAL GOV doesn't want enlightenment or human beings are being slaughtered simply because?!]