The world according to Chris

Nov. 25 (Bloomberg) — Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world that forbids women from driving, isn’t ready to alter that, said Ali Suwaiyel, a 28-year-old Saudi banker.

“What’s the hurry?” he asked as he sipped a coffee in a Starbucks in Riyadh, wearing a traditional white Arabic robe and sunglasses. “What are the benefits?”

King Abdullah, 86, sees the need for speed in changing his country. He is creating secular universities, including a coeducational graduate school, and pushing for more science and technology in education. The king needs a well-trained workforce to diversify the world’s largest oil exporter from energy and create jobs for Saudi Arabia’s youth, more than 25 percent of whom are unemployed.

Failing to raise the fortunes of the almost 40 percent of the population under 15 would make the Islamic state even more susceptible to extremism, said Simon Henderson, an expert on the Gulf monarchies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Stability of world oil supplies depends on Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally.

A backlash by clerics, led in public by Sheikh Saad Bin Naser al-Shatri, is slowing those efforts, though the king dismissed al-Shatri from the country’s top religious body last month.

“We’re missing a lot of opportunities because of religious opposition,” said Jamal Khashoggi, editor of al-Watan newspaper in Jeddah. It is owned by Prince Khaled al-Faisal, governor of that province. “The conservatives are fighting back.”

No Film Festival

Al-Shatri publicly criticized the country’s first co- educational university in September. This followed the last- minute cancellation in July of a Jeddah film festival that had run annually since 2006. The Arab News said a cancellation order was issued by local authorities, citing festival organizers. Clerics in Saudi Arabia, where movie theatres are banned, maintain that musical and film performances are against Sharia, or Islamic law.

Under a pact between the ruling al-Saud family and the Sunni Muslim hierarchy dating back to 1744, Saudi Arabia maintains an austere brand of Islam in return for clerics’ acceptance of the crown, according to official history. The Wahhabi religious establishment controls the courts and dominates the education system.

Opposition

Prince Turki al-Faisal, whose father, King Faisal, introduced female education in the early 1960s and deployed soldiers to protect girls attending school, said there is similar opposition now.

“Any reform agenda will face resistance but that has not disrupted King Abdullah,” said Turki, 64, a former ambassador to the U.S. and U.K. and intelligence chief from 1977 to 2001.

To lure foreign academics and international students to his King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, known as KAUST, the Saudi monarch relaxed the rules.

Women don’t have to wear the abaya, a black robe that covers all but the face, and are allowed to drive in the fenced- off campus 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Jeddah.

“This is something I never expected to see in my lifetime in Saudi Arabia,” Hommood al Rowais, 23, a student in a black baseball cap, blue shorts and a T-shirt who is the son of a Saudi diplomat in Washington, said in an Oct. 14 interview on the newly built campus.

Four New Cities

Abdullah also is building four industrial cities, including the King Abdullah Economic City near KAUST. The government says they will create 1 million new jobs by 2020 in a country whose population is now 28 million. The aim is to build energy-related industries such as plastics, petrochemicals, aluminum and steel. Saudi Arabia depends on oil exports for 90 percent of its revenue.

Saudi Basic Industries Corp., the world’s largest petrochemicals maker and a leading pillar of the drive to reduce reliance on oil, is listed as a research collaborator with KAUST in the field of catalysis on the university’s Web site. The technology allows more efficient use of raw materials in the chemicals and petroleum industries.

Saudi Arabia could increase manufacturing’s share of the economy from 11 percent to 16 percent within the next decade, according to John Sfakianakis, chief economist at Banque Saudi Fransi in Riyadh, the capital.

Religious Education

Elementary schools devote 31 percent of their time to religion and 20 percent to math and science, according to a report last year by Booz Allen Hamilton, a McLean, Virginia- based consulting firm.

The king faces difficulties too as he tries to modernize the religious-run judiciary to create a favorable environment for business and foreign investment. In 2007, Abdullah said Saudi Arabia would reform the legal system by establishing a supreme court and commercial and labor courts.

The future judges who can bring the system more in line with international norms are “now studying in school,” Bandar bin Mohammed al-Aiban, president of the government-run Saudi Human Rights Commission, said in an interview in Riyadh. “This will take a long time.”

Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz became first deputy prime minister, the third most powerful position in the country, in March. He is more wary of provoking clerical opposition than Abdullah, said Khashoggi.

Religious Police

The head of the religious police, Abdelaziz al-Humayyin, ordered stepped-up patrols in July. The police enforce separation of unmarried males and females and a ban on alcohol, and require Muslims to respect prayer times.

Just days after the Saudi monarch presided over a Sept. 23 inauguration ceremony for KAUST in which he called it a “beacon of tolerance,” al-Shatri said in a television interview that mixed-gender classes were “evil.”

Suwaiyel, the banker, said he thinks women will drive someday in Saudi Arabia, though not for 10 or 15 years. Granting them the right earlier “would cause a lot of friction,” he said.

“I believe Saudi Arabia is going to change but at its own pace,” he said. “The conservatives are resistant to change and they don’t want it right now.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Henry Meyer in Riyadh at hmeyer4@bloomberg.net. Glen Carey in Riyadh at gcarey8@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 25, 2009 04:02 EST

Rain in Thuwal (and lots of it!)

Right before dawn, I woke up to the sound of thunder and heavy rain on my windows. I love laying in bed listening to the rain at night - it gives me a peaceful feeling.

After listening for a few minutes though, I heard the sound of water dripping inside my house. With a sigh, I threw aside my covers, swung my feet over the side of the bed and…

SPLASH!

…onto the floor.

Rain in this part of Saudi Arabia is such a rare event that one cannot help but feel excited, but after ten minutes of sweeping water out of my bedroom and bailing it off of my balcony, I was praying for it to stop.

Heavy rain is something like a natural disaster because the infrastructure here is not designed to handle water.

Homes flooded, streets flooded, and the mobile phone network was knocked out for a while.

The rain was pretty incredible, we must have got three inches in just under an hour (about 7.5 cm). The weather network says that Jeddah only gets 54 mm of Rain every year - we've exceeded our limit for the next 1.5 years in one night!

As I was walking around taking pictures, I waved to my other neighbors who were also cleaning the water out of their houses.

Beautiful morning though.

Posted by Nathan at 9:42 PM

I Want to Have Twins Just to Get Them These Awesome T-Shirts [T-shirts]

So cute, those two and their t-shirts. Mine would say cmd + c and cmd + v, however. [The Daily What]

A biologist walks into a sushi bar and orders some tuna. What does he get? Escolar, a nasty fish with buttery flesh that can cause bizarre episodes of diarrhea, accompanied by a waxy intestinal discharge. It's not a joke. It happened five times to the same scientists during a brief research project. The results of that study were published Wednesday in PLOS One. "A piece of tuna sushi has the potential to be an endangered species, a fraud or a health hazard," wrote the authors. "All three of these cases were uncovered in this study." The team of researchers from Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History ordered tuna from 31 sushi restaurants and then used genetic tests to determine the species of fishes in those dishes. More than half of those eateries misrepresented, or couldn't clarify the type of fish they were mongering. Several were selling endangered southern bluefin tuna. Although their results were shocking, exposing sloppy sushi joints wasn't their main goal. The scientists were trying to improve on a new species-identification technique, called DNA barcoding. A coalition of labs has been collecting fish, reading their genes and uploading the information to a database called FISH-BOL. Their goal is to build a catalog of every fish species on earth so that anyone with a handheld DNA reader could definitively identify fish within minutes. Wildlife officials could use that technology to spot-check fish markets, and fine people who are selling protected species. Right now, the FISH-BOL database is roughly 20 percent complete, but zooligsts can't seem to agree upon the best way to condense the genetic information from each fish into a concise signature. That's where this study comes into play. By checking 14 carefully selected spots on a gene called cox1 and matching them up with the database, the scientists could accurately identify any kind of tuna. Citation: Lowenstein JH, Amato G, Kolokotronis S-O, "The Real maccoyii: Identifying Tuna Sushi with DNA Barcodes – Contrasting Characteristic Attributes and Genetic Distances." PLoS ONE 4, 11, 2009, e7866. Photo: Spicy tuna roll stuart_spivack/Flickr See Also:

• ID Error Leaves Fish at Edge of Extinction
• Tuna Ranch Hormone Cocktail Could Save Bluefin
• Genetic Testing for Tuna: Is It Really Yellowfin?
• Bird Cam Captures Albatross, Killer Whale Rendezvous
• Hacking Salmon's Mental Compass to Save Endangered Fish
• Saving Fish Is Possible, Unless They're Past the Tipping Point