Saudi Arabia and Russia announced on Wednesday the extension of their voluntary oil output and export cuts until the end of the year, as tightening supply and rising demand drive oil prices up.  

The two countries, which are the leaders of the OPEC+ group of major oil producers, made announcements in separate official statements hours before a ministerial monitoring panel of the group was due to convene online.  

Little is known about the high school student Manar Al Gafiri, an 18-year-old who, according to the exiled Saudi human rights group ALQST, was sentenced in August to 18 years in prison by the Saudi Specialized Criminal Court, in charge of trying terrorism crimes. Al Gafiri was still underage when she was arrested for tweeting in support of political prisoners in Saudi prisons and “human rights defenders, especially women who demand equal rights,” Carlos de las Heras, a specialist on Saudi Arabia at Amnesty International, confirms by telephone.

“You’ve got to leave the country, Jamal. You’ve got to get out before they arrest you too,” I told my friend, Jamal Khashoggi, just a few months before his fateful decision to leave his homeland in 2017.

While the timing of a potential deal normalising relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel remains unknown, talk of such a move is rapidly gaining momentum.

Asked last week how close a deal was, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman said: "Every day we get closer."

The Biden administration is currently considering going where no other president has gone before: offering a formal security guarantee to Saudi Arabia and helping the kingdom develop a civilian nuclear program in return for Riyadh normalizing relations with Israel.

President Biden and his team argue that the United States has a national security interest in brokering such a deal, even if that means massive and unprecedented concessions to Riyadh.

Breaking news on this Monday out of China where we have new data on the dumping of U.S. treasuries and what this means for the U.S. dollar dominance. Saudi Arabia also dumping U.S. treasuries at an increased rate over the past few weeks. What is going on?

The Maldives have restored diplomatic relations with Iran, which the Indian Ocean islands broke off seven years ago in support of Saudi Arabia, the Iranian foreign ministry said Saturday.

The move, which came in a meeting between the two countries’ foreign ministers on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, followed a Chinese-brokered rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a new map erasing Palestine during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly’s (UNGA) 78th session on Friday. 

The illustration showed a "new Middle East" wherein the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip appeared to be part of Israel.

An earlier erroneous map shown by Netanyahu also included the Palestinian territories as part of Israel in 1948.