• It took a handshake between Prince Turki al-Faisal, former Saudi ambassador to the UK and US, and Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon to settle a seating spat at the Munich Security Conference. Depending on who you are, this may or may not be a big deal. Here’s the video:

  

• King Abdullah is popular in Egypt and Jordan. Yipee! Woohoo! The King is also very popular here. What I really hope for is that he would take advantage of this popularity to push for more radical reform in Saudi Arabia. People say he has to be cautious, but I disagree. If you are this popular then you can certainly afford to make some bold moves.
• Two TwitterCamps in Jeddah and Khobar today. Twitter users in the country are invited to discuss Twitter services, features, tips and tricks, as well as twitter clients.

Whenever someone asks me about the Shoura Council, I quickly respond: “Shoura is dead to me.” I have lost hope that anything good for the people would come out of this institution. Some think I’m being too harsh on them but I beg to differ. Now this is old news, because a couple of days ago Dr. Fahad al-Aboud, a member of the Shoura Council since 2001, offered yet another reason to take the council less seriously.

In his weekly column for al-Riyadh daily, Dr. al-Aboud wrote about a new iPod from Apple. That confused me a little bit because last time I checked Apple’s latest iPod was introduced in September 2009. So I figured maybe he meant the iPad, which was unveiled by Steve Jobs last month. The “revolutionary device,” he said, is a “tablet” computer. Okay, it’s the iPad then, I thought.

But in the next paragraph he adds, “the new device is 3-in-1: a mobile phone, an iPod, and an internet browser.”

Um, I’m confused again. The iPad indeed includes an iPod app and an internet browser, but can’t make phone calls. The iPod Touch is, well an iPod, can browse the internet, but also can’t make phone calls. The iPhone, on the other hand, can do all that, but it’s not exactly a tablet. So what’s up Doc?!

Dr. al-Aboud, who holds a PhD in information sciences from Florida State University, goes on and on about the new mysterious iPod that we have not yet seen, saying the new nonexistent device has given Apple “a psychological victory over its peers.” He then asks the all important question: “how far this amazing technological advancement will go?” It is safe to say, he concludes, that the human brain will have a hard time keeping up with or following this advancement.

Well, I can tell you that my brain is exploding from all this gibberish that I’m reading.

But on a more serious note, I believe this article, in addition to showcasing the incompetency of Shoura members, also says a lot about the state of media in the country. The minister of information and top editors here keep talking about how blogs and internet websites lack professionalism and credibility, presumably compared to their newspapers, and then they go and run utter rubbish.

Publishing an article like the aforementioned shows clearly that these newspapers do no fact-checking whatsoever. Do they even know what fact-checking is? Have they ever heard of such thing? They should. They are, after all, professional.

• We have no movie theaters, but that won’t stop young Saudis from making movies. BBC has a short reportage about these young men. I have met most of these guys who appear in this reportage, and got a chance to watch some of their work. They are talented, creative, and determined. Too bad that our government refuses to acknowledge their talent.

  

• And speaking of Saudi talents, here’s that latest single from ReD CoasT, a band from Jeddah:

  

• Surprise! Surprise! BAE Systems will plead guilty to offenses of false accounting to settle bribery allegations made over al-Yamamah arms deals. BAE will pay $400m but only in the US, and not in the UK where the SFO dropped their investigation into al-Yamamah due to a request by former prime minister Tony Blair.

• All is not well in KAUST, apparently. I don’t want to talk about their last-minute cancellation on Saudi Barcamp last month because I don’t know all the details, but here is a view from the inside by a student there. Noah J.D. DesRosiers called it a “black hole,” where people are too afraid to say anything:
  

  I worry about being asked to leave KAUST. I worry that I will be booted in exchange for a student who will not speak their mind – or worse, a student who will not care either way for the vision of KAUST. Speaking your mind seems offensive and standoffish here; behaving, being grateful, and accepting what has been given appears to be all that was anticipated of us students. We can’t tell; the lack of transparency leaves our questions unanswered.

• If you want to make something great then you need to be passionate about it. That’s true for almost everything in life. But there are things in life where passion is crucial, and one of these things is teaching. You must have some much passion just to be a decent teacher, let alone a great one. As we go through school, we are being taught by many different teachers, and usually very few of them truly stand out. Those who stand out will have a tremendous impact on our lives. Fatima is no exception, and that’s why she decided to become a teacher.
• Fellow blogger Ahmed Ba-Aboud introduces Alternative Saudi Voices. His vision is to make the blog one of the best available windows to life aspects, issues and dreams in Saudi Arabia, and it will be will be open to any Saudi who would like to contribute. I think the new blog offers a good opportunity for people who feel they have something to say but don’t want to start a blog of their own. At least it’s much better than pouring your ideas in the comments section of blog like mine where they will eventually be buried or get lost in the noise.
• A nice op-ed in the NYT by Tim Sebastian, host of Doha Debates. Talking about Egyptian bloggers, he quotes an influential editor in Cairo saying: “these young bloggers are the real bridge to a better, freer future in the Arab world. But, like the traffic, it may take a few years to arrive.” (via GB)

• The Buraida girl has shockingly decided to accept her marriage to the 80-year-old man. The girl’s divorced mother also dropped a bombshell by withdrawing the lawsuit she had filed to annul the marriage. Abdulrahman al-Lahem says the government should intervene based on its power and commitment to international accords on child rights that it has signed. UPDATE: HRC said they have assigned a new lawyer to the case, and added that just because the mother withdrew the lawsuit doesn’t mean the case is over.
• I have always said that the Kingdom of Segregation makes for some awkward moments, but this one is just hilarious: Al-Mass’ad lodged a complaint with the police calling on them to take Al-Rubai “under their wing” until he gives up his alleged “Satanic” views which reveal him as an “enemy of the religion.” Actually, this silly story offers a really good representation of the ideological crisis in our country.
• Caryle Murphy takes a look at how Saudi women use the internet to interact, connect, learn, and express themselves in many different ways. The story includes a couple of quotes by yours truly.
• Barack Obama has fundamentally altered the way a president deals with the news media, NYT says, as he has made a concerted effort to tap into alternative avenues, including blogs, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. In his first year in office he gave more than 160 interviews. Now compare this to how Saudi officials and leaders deal with the media. I mean, seriously, do officials here even care to speak to people every now and then? They don’t.

• Countries are built upon laws, not fatwa. After last year’s cabinet reshuffle, some people started to refer to King Abdullah’s reforms as the fourth Saudi state. Ahmed Adnan thinks King Abdullah can become the third founder of the third Saudi state, but first he has to replace the legitimacy of ideology with the legitimacy of citizens.
• There is a talk of establishing a media zone in KAEC. It sounds like a joke to me, and Sabria Johar agrees. She thinks Saudi media is still pretty immature, and that’s why such an effort will be like putting lipstick on a donkey and call it a thing of beauty.
• Abdulaziz Khoja, the minister of culture and information, says citizen journalism lacks credibility and fact-checking. Yeah, right. And local newspapers, that your excellency must approve of their editors, are full of credibility and fact-checking. Hey, how’s that new e-journalism law of yours is going btw?

The past few weeks were difficult, but I’m glad they are over and behind me now. As you can see, I return with a new design (if you follow the blog using a feeds reader you may want to visit the site to check it out). The redesign is based on Sandbox, and it’s a throwback to the minimalism that inspired the look of Saudi Jeans in its first two years.

Longtime readers probably remember when I used to post a bunch of links to all kinds of stuff everyday. I kept doing something like this through the “shared items” on the right sidebar, but it was not exactly the same. As an experiment, I’m reintroducing the daily links in the main column of the blog with occasional context and/or commentary. However, these linky posts will not be open to comments initially. Based on how the experiment goes, this may or may not continue to be the case.

I’m mostly satisfied with the new design but it’s still kind of rough around the edges, so if you run into anything funny please let me know.

After four years of suffering, the Supreme Court in Riyadh has finally put an end to the plight of Fatima al-Azzaz and Mansour al-Taimani, the couple who were forcibly divorced at the request of Fatima’s brothers for tribal reasons. According to the couple’s lawyer Ahmed al-Sudairi, the Supreme Court has reversed the ruling of Jouf Court that divorced Fatima and Mansour.

Abdulrahman al-Lahem, the couple’s former lawyer, wrote in his blog that he was pleased by the news. Al-Lahem hoped that the ruling would usher a serious beginning for an institutional reform of the judicial system in Saudi Arabia. He also praised the role of media and blogs in highlighting cases like this one.

Personally, I’m happy to see this issue come to a happy ending. Mansour, Fatima, and their children have literally gone through hell over the past four years, and it’s a relief to see the family finally come together again. This is a victory not just for them and their lawyers, but for all human rights activists in the country who supported their cause.

In the words of Fouzia al-Oyouni, it is “a victory for the nation over the tribe.”

PS. I’m not officially back, but I could not not blog about this.

It’s been almost a year since I took a break, so I think it’s about time to take some time off. This would be longer than usual, but I’m afraid it’s necessary and much needed. There will be no blogging for the rest of the month, but I shall be back in February with new content and probably a new design too.

From Qusai’s new album Experimental Edutainment.