Hints and tips:
...Days after this assault, King Salman ascended the throne in neighbouring Saudi Arabia and appointed his favourite son, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as defence minister....
...The Saudi intervention, which began in 2015 in an operation known as Decisive Storm, marked the rise of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, then a newly appointed defence minister, as an assertive actor on...
...$150m UAE royal Shaikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, pictured with manager Pep Guardiola, was estimated to have paid £150m to buy Manchester City in 2008....
...Iraqi leaders have hinted that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman could also visit the country soon, with some saying he would include Najaf on any itinerary....
...roula.khalaf@ft.com...
...The Saudis, backed by a United Arab Emirates expeditionary force on the ground, and with episodic US support, have failed to reinstate their client regime, led by Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi....
...Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who, as defence minister, orchestrated the kingdom’s military intervention in March 2015, described the missile attack on Riyadh as an “act of war”....
...Intrigue continues to grip Saudi Arabia following the sweep of princes, government officials and business executives on corruption charges ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman last weekend....
...Roula Khalaf Deputy editor of the FT My favourite read this year was a little gem of a book by Yasmina Khadra, pseudonym for an Algerian author who writes in French....
...Roula Khalaf is deputy editor of the FT Illustration by James Ferguson...
...Speculation about Ali al-Naimi’s retirement has been a favourite guessing game in the oil market for well over a decade....
...Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has said Saudi would face “divine vengeance” for the “unjustly spilled blood” of Nimr....
...The effect on business sentiment has sparked domestic criticism of the market share policy engineered by Ali al-Naimi, the oil minister, and agreed by both the late King Abdullah and the current King Salman...
...That was two weeks after a court sent Ali Salman, leader of the main Shia opposition party, to jail for four years....
...The government, led by ousted president Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, had claimed that Aden had been “liberated” from the Houthi fighters and military units loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who have...
...The conflict began after the Houthis, who over-ran the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, last September, took Aden in March, sending the government of president Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi into exile....
...Cheikh Ahmed, who was not informed of the initiative before arriving in the Saudi capital, had just 36 hours to convince the alliance of Shia Houthi fighters and military loyalists of former president Ali...
...The Camp David meeting, he added, would not be productive in any case, particularly as King Salman bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia had decided not to attend....
...Additional reporting by Roula Khalaf and Peter Salisbury...
...Crown Prince Salman, his brother, is also believed to be in fragile health....
...That is precisely what the 45-year-old Sheikh Ali Salman, who heads the main opposition party Wefaq, did on Friday....
...“There’s relative improvement in Sadr City – relative,” says Khalaf....
...Sheikh Ali Salman, head of al-Wefaq, the main Shia opposition party in Bahrain, says that the Arab spring has created an expectation of democracy across the region....
...Once a prominent opponent of the Saudi government, religious scholar Salman Alodah had appeared more docile over the past decade....
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