AZspot

How much water are rural Arizona farmers using? We don't know.

Arizona doesn't keep track of how much groundwater is pumped in rural areas, leading to quesitons about how much is left.

www.12news.com

LA PAZ COUNTY, Ariz. — There's water underneath La Paz County. Only problem: No one's really sure how much.

And even worse, no one's sure how quickly it's being pumped out either.

La Paz County, which starts about 90 minutes west of Phoenix, is mostly brown desert studded with green fields of crops. There's a canal or two running through the farms, but the water mostly comes from wells pumping it up from underground.

"If you don't know what's underneath the ground, how can you even determine how much your supply and demand is going to be?" La Paz County Supervisor Holly Irwin said.

Water is everything in La Paz County. It's the center of the controversy over a Saudi Arabian alfalfa grower -- Fondomonte -- that's bought up thousands of acres. Alfalfa is one of the most water-intensive crops to grow, and Fondomonte ships it back to Saudi Arabia to feed dairy cows.

Local politicians have taken aim at taxing Fondomonte and other foreign companies, but it's not just foreign-owned farms sucking La Paz County dry.

Twitter accused of helping Saudi Arabia commit human rights abuses

Lawsuit says network discloses user data at request of Saudi authorities at much higher rate than for US, UK and Canada

www.theguardian.com

The social media company formerly known as Twitter has been accused in a revised civil US lawsuit of helping Saudi Arabia commit grave human rights abuses against its users, including by disclosing confidential user data at the request of Saudi authorities at a much higher rate than it has for the US, UK or Canada.

The lawsuit was brought last May against X, as Twitter is now known, by Areej al-Sadhan, the sister of a Saudi aid worker who was forcibly disappeared and then later sentenced to 20 years in jail. Ethiopian migrants walk on foot along a highway to Saadah province to cross into Saudi Arabia, on 23 August, 2023 on the outskirts of Sana'a, Yemen

It centers on the events surrounding the infiltration of the California company by three Saudi agents, two of whom were posing as Twitter employees in 2014 and 2015, which ultimately led to the arrest of al-Sadhan’s brother, Abdulrahman, and the exposure of the identity of thousands of anonymous Twitter users, some of whom were later reportedly detained and tortured as part of the government’s crackdown on dissent.

Lawyers for Al-Sadhan updated their claim last week to include new allegations about how Twitter, under the leadership of then chief executive Jack Dorsey, willfully ignored or had knowledge of the Saudi government’s campaign to ferret out critics but – because of financial considerations and efforts to keep close ties to the Saudi government, a top investor in the company – provided assistance to the kingdom.

Focus of 9/11 Families’ Lawsuit Against Saudi Arabia Turns to a Saudi Student Who May Have Been a Spy

Twenty years after the Sept. 11 attacks, declassified FBI documents have changed a big piece of the story about possible Saudi government help to the hijackers. Families of the victims want more information.

www.propublica.org|Tim Golden

“It’s clear from this evidence that Saudi intelligence was at the center of the network that aided the hijackers as they prepared for the attacks that killed my father,” said Peter Brady, the son of a finance executive, Michael G. Jacobs, who died in the World Trade Center. “We urge the courts to allow further inquiry. Our families — and the American public — deserve answers and accountability.”

Too hungry to weep. The tragedy of Yemen's starving children

On a recent trip to Yemen, actor and ambassador for the charity War Child, Thomas Sadoski, witnessed "the nightmarish effects" of terminal starvation on children, which include the inability even to produce tears when weeping.

www.cnn.com|Thomas Sadoski

Yemen, declared by the UN “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world,” is too flippantly sometimes described as a “proxy war.” Not so. Rather, what is occurring is an act of geopolitical sociopathy that trades the incomprehensible suffering of innocent souls for the martial annoyance of regional and global rivals. It does not have to be this way, but much needs to change and change immediately.

The Global Hunger Index currently ranks Yemen the worst in the world for level of hunger. Millions of Yemeni children, in some areas as many as 95% according to doctors in those areas that I spoke to, suffer from acute malnutrition.

The resulting stunted physical development had me convinced that I was in a kindergarten classroom when in fact I was meeting with eight and nine-year-olds. And those children were, as a colleague unnervingly put it, “the lucky ones.” Over 2 million Yemeni children are not in school, with far too many of them populating the vast child soldiery one must daily maneuver.

Everywhere is the ache of terminal starvation – the nightmarish effects of which include the inability to regulate body temperature, to produce tears when weeping and then a final decline into ghastly, emaciated, lethargic death. All of which I saw, and which Yemenis endure daily: children’s lives snuffed out by globally sanctioned neglect.

Saudi Prince Alwaleed Becomes Twitter’s Second Largest Shareholder

After flip-flopping on his support of Elon Musk’s bid for the social media company, the royal confirmed he followed through with his $1.9 billion equity commitment to the social media company’s new owner.

www.forbes.com|Matt Durot

When Elon Musk’s $44 billion Twitter acquisition was finalized last Thursday, a few key questions remained. Chief among them: whether a group of 19 investors would follow through on the $7.1 billion equity commitment they made to the Tesla chief in May–back before tech stocks plummeted. A piece of that puzzle was revealed Monday when Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia announced in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that he’d made good on his $1.9 billion commitment, making him the social media company’s second largest shareholder after Musk.

Architects Design 100-Mile-Long Mirrored Skyscraper That Runs Into the Red Sea

“The designs revealed today for the city's vertically layered communities will challenge the traditional flat, horizontal cities and create a model for nature preservation and enhanced human livability.”

mymodernmet.com|Jessica Stewart

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has revealed plans for The Line, a futuristic urban planning model intended to house 9 million residents. The innovative design, which looks ripped from a video game, sees two tall, narrow buildings run into the Red Sea. The mirror-clad building will be a highlight of Neom, a smart city being built in northwest Saudi Arabia.

Though the Saudi government had previously announced plans for The Line, Prince Mohammed's announcement is the first time the public is receiving specifics. The Line will run 105 miles across the desert, making it by far the longest building ever created. Standing 1,640 feet tall, it is only 656 feet wide, which means its overall footprint is small. This design allows Neom's environment to remain undisturbed in a way that wouldn't be possible using the traditional urban plan of creating a city horizontally.

By thinking vertically, the plan is to create neighborhoods where residents would have access to all their basic needs within a five-minute walk. At the same time, integrated transportation would make it possible to travel the entire length of The Line in just 20 minutes.

A double-edged sword: Mr. Biden's pilgrimage to Jeddah

James M. Dorsey Thank you to all who have demonstrated their appreciation for my column by becoming paid subscribers. This allows me to ensure that it continues to have maximum impact. Maintaining free distributions means that news website, blogs, and newsletters across the globe can republish it. I launched my column, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, 12 years ago. To borrow a phrase from an early proprietor of The Observer, it offers readers, listeners, and viewers ‘the scoop of inter

www.jamesmdorsey.net

More problematic from Mr. Biden's perspective is that Gulf states cooperate closely with China, which has acquired stakes in ports and terminals in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Oman, and Djibouti, where the People’s Republic has a military base.

The environment becomes more complex in light of stepped-up competition among US allies for regional influence and Iranian enhancement of the Islamic republic’s naval capabilities.

Regarding ports, Mr. Bin Salman plans to turn his kingdom into a transportation and logistics hub that connects continents and replaces the UAE and Qatar as the Middle East’s go-to addresses.

Saudi Arabia is a latecomer to the global port control game in which Dubai’s DP World and China are major players. DP World operates 82 marine and inland terminals in more than 40 countries, including Djibouti, Somaliland, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Cyprus, and crucially, Dubai’s central Jebel Ali port.

Saudi Arabia plans to spend $1 billion a year discovering treatments to slow aging

The oil kingdom fears that its population is aging at an accelerated rate and hopes to test drugs to reverse the problem. First up might be the diabetes drug metformin.

www.technologyreview.com

The Saudi royal family has started a not-for-profit organization called the Hevolution Foundation that plans to spend up to $1 billion a year of its oil wealth supporting basic research on the biology of aging and finding ways to extend the number of years people live in good health, a concept known as “health span.”

Normal Butcheries:  Saudi Arabia’s Latest Mass Execution

Great reformers are not normally found in theocratic monarchies. Despite assertions to the contrary, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia remains archaic in the way it deals with its opponents. In its penal system, executions remain standard fare. With liberal democratic countries fixated with the Ukraine conflict and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, it was prudent for Saudi authorities to capitalise.

www.counterpunch.org

Great reformers are not normally found in theocratic monarchies. Despite assertions to the contrary, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia remains archaic in the way it deals with its opponents. In its penal system, executions remain standard fare. With liberal democratic countries fixated with the Ukraine conflict and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, it was prudent for Saudi authorities to capitalise.

On March 12, the Saudi Ministry of the Interior announced the execution of 81 Saudi and non-Saudi nationals, bringing the total of those put to death by Riyadh in 2022 to 92. The last grand bout of killing was in 2019, when 37 people, including 33 Shi’a men, were put to death after being convicted by customarily dubious trials.

Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, claimed that this orgy of state killing was “all the more chilling in light of Saudi Arabia’s deeply flawed justice system, which metes out death sentences following trials that are grossly and blatantly unfair, including basing verdicts on ‘confessions’ extracted under torture or other ill-treatment.”

Another sordid feature of the system described by Maalouf is the tendency of authorities to underreport the number of trials that result in death sentences being meted out. Death row, in other words, is a burgeoning feature of the Kingdom’s repertoire.