NY Times: 4 diabetes drugs are seen raising hope… and profit.

Khalid Al Dakhil has a good analysis for King Abdullah’s recent speech in which he called people to renounce ideological classification. He says:

diversity has been seen as a threat to the unity of the society. Saudi culture failed to recognise that diversity could be a sign of pluralism; a source of intellectual and cultural richness rather than a threat, and as a sign of society’s political and cultural strength. Who, then, is responsible for promoting and establishing such a fear of diversity? It could not be the society as a whole, but those classes whose interests are perceived threatened by it.

Al Dakhil remarks reminds me with something a friend told me a few days ago: “our diversity only makes us stronger,” and I believe it really does. (via xa)

Business 2.0 released their “The 50 people who matter now” list. And King Abduallah ranked at 9, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, and Vladimir Putin. The magazine called them The New Oil Despots.

Some Indian blogger on Blogcritics.org describes Bahrain as The Whore of Arabia. Ouch!

Most of my friends know that I was not pleased at all with what have been going on in the Saudi blogosphere in the past few months. I made a decision not to write about that subject again, and I’m not changing my mind. What happened has left me in frustration, and I almost lost hope in the local blogosphere. However, I have recently come across three interesting Saudi blogs which made me convinced why I should keep some hope inside. These blogs are: Magic Kingdom, Icona, and Al-Mufakker. They are all written in Arabic, and they absolutely worth checking out if you can read that language. Every one of these guys deserves a separate post of praise and celebration, but I think it would be much better if you went there and discovered them yourselves. Enjoy.

I was browsing through the Guardian’s Comment is Free, which is a collective group blog, bringing together regular columnists with other writers and commentators representing a wide range of experience and interests, to find that they have recently added a Saudi columnist to their elite. The columnist is Iman Al Qahtani, who writes a weekly column for Al Watan. The Guardian says Al Qahtani is a journalist, writer, and activist. She graduated from the college of art in Riyadh in 2002 with a BA in English literature and science, and has worked at several newspapers in Riyadh. I am very proud of Al Qahtani, and have no doubt her participation on such interactive forum would be good for her, as well as the rest of Saudi women.

Mona Eltahawi, an Egyptian journalist who used to write for the op-ed page in Asharq Al-Awsat, writes for IHT about her banning from writing for the pan-Arab newspaper. Although I follow the website of the newspaper in Arabic and English, I have never considered comparing the translated content. “The newspaper in Arabic would abide by the red lines that govern criticism of Arab leaders while in English it ran roughshod over those very same lines,” she said. I have been wondering on what basis they select to translate some columns by writers while ignoring other columns. If this was intended “to show Western readers how liberal it was,” as Eltahawi says, then this damages their reputation and credibility, and they have to do something about it or they will lose their readers.