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When King Salman became Saudi Arabia’s ruler this year, few people expected much change. He was 79 and reputedly in ill health

But since taking the throne in January, Salman has shaken up Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy and the royal family’s succession plans.

He has launched a bombing campaign against Shiite rebels in Yemen and increased support for rebels in Syria, signaling a more assertive role for an oil-rich kingdom that traditionally relied on the United States for security. Salman’s goal, analysts say, is to guard Sunni Muslims against what he sees as the growing influence of Shiite Iran.

The Biden administration never considered sanctions as a viable option against the powerful Saudi crown prince named as responsible for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, even though the new President promised to punish senior Saudi leaders during the election.

Administration officials tell CNN there was little debate or tension inside the White House last week in the leadup to the release of a long-awaited intelligence report into the brutal 2018 murder of Khashoggi— and that the notion of sanctioning Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's de facto leader, was never really on the table.

The White House has been hammered over what many critics say was its weak response to the report's findings, especially given the administration's tough talk about recalibrating the relationship with Saudi Arabia, and Joe Biden's campaign promises of making the Saudis pay a price for their role in Khashoggi's murder.

He will for ever be remembered as part of the “Class of 83”, the inaugural Granta Best of Young British novelists list that also included Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro.

“He has had a baleful influence on a whole generation,” bemoaned AS Byatt of Amis in 1993, as one of the Granta judges tasked with finding successors a decade later. Not because he was a bad writer but because so many had been foolish enough to try to emulate him

At an event in 2020 with Salman Rushdie, Rushdie asked him if, back in those heady days, he felt part of a gang. “That’s the way ‘movements’ start,” Amis replied. “Ambitious young drunks, late at night, saying, ‘We’re not going to do that any more. We’re going to do this instead.’” And with this “gang” – which also included his great friend, the late journalist Christopher Hitchens, and Ian McEwan – the young drunks went on to became “the old devils”, to borrow a Kingsley Amis title, that pretty much comprised the literary establishment for years.

In the years prior to taking office, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and many of their administration's top officials harshly criticized President Donald Trump's lack of action against Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Biden is now facing criticism for not following through on campaign promises to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for the killing.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday announced visa restrictions that affected 76 Saudis believed to be involved in harassing activists and journalists, but he did not announce any measures against the crown prince.

In one of its final foreign policy acts before leaving office, the Trump administration is considering designating Yemen's Houthi movement as a foreign terrorist organization.

The move is part of President Donald Trump's and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's campaign to impose more sanctions on Iran and its allies in the Middle East—and to create new hurdles that would make it difficult for the incoming Joe Biden administration to resume negotiations with Tehran.

this designation could prolong Yemen's brutal civil war and drive millions of Yemenis into starvation

Saudi Arabian legal scholar Abdullah Alaoudh has become adept at spotting state-backed harassment.

“take advantage of what they called the chaos in the U.S. and kill me on the streets,” Alhaoudh tells TIME

Although the message ended with a predictable sign-off, “your end is very close, traitor,” Alaoudh was more struck by what he took to be a reference to protests and unrest in the months leading up to the U.S. elections.

Lulu Cheng Meservey from Substack says the company calls this a “pro deal”, with advances on a sliding scale depending on a writer’s profile. She says: “We do have several authors in our sights who are currently traditionally published, and are proactively approaching writers we think would do well at Substack. Over the next couple of years you will see some very recognisable names.”

On his blog, Tynion wrote: “DC had presented me with a three-year renewal of my exclusive contract, with the intent of me working on Batman for the bulk of that time … And then I received another contract. The best I’ve ever been given in a decade as a professional comic book writer. A grant from Substack to create a new slate of original comic book properties directly on their platform, that my co-creators and I would own completely, with Substack taking none of the intellectual property rights, or even the publishing rights.”

The subscription newsletter platform Substack announced on Wednesday it had signed an exclusive deal with Salman Rushdie – but he is just the latest in a growing number of authors making the leap to write serialised fiction delivered straight to the inboxes of subscribers who pay a monthly fee

America’s lapses do seem to be on Rushdie’s mind. Much later, after Bisnaga has come under corrupt, theocratic rule, the narrator observes that its people have “little regard for yesterdays.” They live wholly in the present. “This made Bisnaga a dynamic place, capable of immense forward-looking energy, but also a place that suffered from the problem of all amnesiacs,” Rushdie writes, “which was that to turn away from history was to make possible a cyclical repetition of its crimes.”

When a CNN reporter asked if Trump had a response to the heroic Navalny’s death, the Trump campaign pointed her to a Truth Social post that wasn’t about Navalny or Putin. It was about how awful America was.

Before Navalny’s death, Tucker Carlson — who scorned Ukraine’s desperate fight for its independence — cavorted in the Kremlin. His interview with Putin was so indulgent that even Putin complained of a “lack of sharp questions.”

At an Axios conference in Miami, Jared Kushner — who was festooned with $2 billion in Saudi investments after he left the White House — called Mohammed bin Salman a “visionary leader.” Asked about the crown prince’s complicity in Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, Kushner replied with exasperation, “Are we really still doing this?”

The head of the main Shia political society in Bahrain has told the BBC that the opposition leadership is being systematically targeted by the state.

Khalil Marzook, is on trial for inciting youth violence and trying to overthrow the Sunni-led government.

"Khalil and the Wefaq party have always advocated a peaceful path to democracy and condemn violence," he insisted.

Saudi Arabia announced Sunday it was severing diplomatic relations with Shiite powerhouse Iran amid escalating tensions over the Sunni kingdom's execution of a prominent Shiite cleric.

The move came hours after protesters stormed and set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and followed harsh criticism by Iran's top leader of the Saudis' execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said Iranian diplomatic personnel had 48 hours to leave his country and all Saudi diplomatic personnel in Iran had been called home.

Saudi Arabian women voted for the first time on Saturday in local council elections and also stood as candidates, a step hailed by some activists in the Islamic patriarchy as a historic change, but by others as merely symbolic.

"As a first step it is a great achievement. Now we feel we are part of society, that we contribute," said Sara Ahmed, 30, a physiotherapist entering a polling station in north Riyadh. "We talk a lot about it, it's a historic day for us."

This incremental expansion of voting rights has spurred some Saudis to hope the Al Saud ruling family, which appoints the national government, will eventually carry out further reforms to open up the political system.

The visit by crown prince Mohammed bin Salman has highlighted UK responsiblities in the devastating war

wo announcements marked the end of the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to the UK on Friday. First came a £100m aid deal, promptly branded a “national disgrace”. While DfID says it will pool expertise to boost infrastructure in poor countries, critics say that it is meant to whitewash the reputation of Saudi Arabia, which needs such PR thanks to its leading role in the war in Yemen.

The UN says that 8.5 million Yemenis are at risk of famine. Its humanitarian chief describes conditions as “catastrophic”. The shattered health system battles diphtheria and cholera. The country’s new special envoy, former British diplomat Martin Griffiths, must try to revive the moribund attempts to find a political exit. Whatever the hopes of the Saudi crown prince, there is not a military solution

There is a temptation, when a new presidential administration comes into office, for its members to assume everything the previous administration did was idiotic, and that a wiser course of action would have been to do the precise opposite.

here are four things I think the Trump administration got right in 2017.

cast aside a lot of conservative orthodoxy to bail out banks and spend what was necessary to stabilize the markets.

Bolton manipulated him by advocating for the most extreme options—such as imposing secondary sanctions on European countries to truly destroy the Iran nuclear deal, and pulling out of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty—when more modest ones would have sufficed.

Bolton’s priority has always been to advance his unilateralist theory of international law, and he seems unable to think strategically about America’s interests.

It was obvious in Osaka that his heart is with other authoritarian leaders. He embraced Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and joked with Putin about Russian election interference. He did not know what Putin meant by his comment that Western liberalism is obsolete, and didn’t care to find out.

A 24-hour sequence of political bombshells began on Saturday afternoon, when Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced his resignation from the Saudi capital of Riyadh, blindsiding his country's political establishment. Hours later, Saudi Arabia's official news agency reported that the country's military had intercepted a Yemen-borne ballistic missile over Riyadh.

Some of Saudi Arabia's most high-profile princes and businessmen were being sacked and detained in an anti-corruption drive led by bin Salman.

The events serve as an opening salvo for a new period in the region's crisis-ridden history, analysts say.

Saudi Arabia Charges Iran With ‘Act of War,’ Raising Threat of Military Clash

Saudi Arabia charged Monday that a missile fired at its capital from Yemen over the weekend was an “act of war” by Iran, in the sharpest escalation in nearly three decades of mounting hostility between the two regional rivals.

“We see this as an act of war,” the Saudi foreign minister, Adel Jubair, said in an interview on CNN. “Iran cannot lob missiles at Saudi cities and towns and expect us not to take steps.”