May 24 – Canada and Saudi Arabia agree to restore full diplomatic relations after a breakdown in relations in 2018 over the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi.October 2 – The Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi is murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, triggering a diplomatic crisis for Saudi Arabia.clockwise around the Red Sea
- World Report 2024: Saudi Arabia (hrw.org)
Killings by Saudi Arabian forces of at least hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers at the Yemen-Saudi border may amount to crimes against humanity. Saudi Arabian authorities conducted arrests of peaceful dissidents, public intellectuals, and human rights activists and sentenced people to decades-long prison terms or death sentences for social media posts. Abusive practices in detention centers, including torture and ill-treatment, prolonged arbitrary detention, and asset confiscation without any clear legal process, remain pervasive. There has been no accountability for Saudi Arabia’s role in apparent war crimes in Yemen.
- Annus mirabilis papers (Wikipedia)
The annus mirabilis papers (from Latin annus mīrābilis, “miracle year”) are the four papers that Albert Einstein published in Annalen der Physik (Annals of Physics), a scientific journal, in 1905. These four papers were major contributions to the foundation of modern physics. They revolutionized science’s understanding of the fundamental concepts of space, time, mass, and energy. Because Einstein published these remarkable papers in a single year, 1905 is called his annus mirabilis (miracle year in English or Wunderjahr in German).
- Saudi Arabia (Wikipedia)
Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in West Asia. It covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula and has a land area of about 2150000 km2 (830000 sq mi), making it the fifth-largest country in Asia and the largest in the Middle East. It is bordered by the Red Sea to the west; Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait to the north; the Persian Gulf, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to the east; Oman to the southeast; and Yemen to the south. Bahrain is an island country off its east coast. The Gulf of Aqaba in the northwest separates Saudi Arabia from Egypt and Israel. Saudi Arabia is the only country with a coastline along both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and most of its terrain consists of arid desert, lowland, steppe, and mountains. Saudi Arabia’s capital and largest city is Riyadh; the kingdom is also the location of Islam’s two holiest cities of Mecca and Medina.