[Translate] Police are investigating a bomb hoax that triggered the evacuation of Kingdom Tower, the capital city’s landmark skyscraper, on Wednesday evening. “Nothing suspicious was found and the Kingdom Tower was reopened after a brief search,” said Mansour Al-Turki, Ministry of Interior spokesman. “We confirm that this was a hoax. The building and sites immediately close to [...]

[Translate] The Saudi Commission for Health Specialties has said that 15,000 foreigners working in the Kingdom’s health sector have been barred from practicing for incompetence in their work or holding forged qualifications. While substandard performance accounted for the vast majority of the dismissals, Hussein Al-Fureihi, the Secretary General of the Commission, said 1,093 had obtained employment with [...]

[Translate] Could the kingdom’s religious leaders be about to make a sharp U-turn? For decades Saudi Arabia’s religious police have enforced a rigid separation of the sexes in public places. Plain-clothes agents of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, as the religious police are known, patrol streets, parks and shopping centres, intervening [...]

[Translate] The Saudi Government has recently unveiled the Kingdom’s largest budget for the 2010 fiscal year. Using conservative demand and pricing estimates for oil, the government projects revenues to value $125.3 billion (SR470 billion), while expenditures will total approximately $144 billion (SR540 billion), resulting in a projected deficit of $18.7 billion (SR 70 billion). The upcoming [...]