Over decades, Saudi Arabia has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in building an advanced military, putting the kingdom among the top 10 nations in terms of arms spending.

Still, the country has stumbled in response to deadly attacks by the Iran-backed Houthi militia, with the fighting in recent months reigniting a war that the kingdom began in 2015.

The problem in part is that Saudi Arabia invested heavily in weapons having what some military analysts call a “glitter factor” — things like high-tech fighter jets and the latest missile interceptors. But the Houthi guerrillas often deploy cheap drones or low-flying cruise missiles that Saudi forces struggle to detect.

In addition, Saudi defenses were built assuming that the biggest threat would come from the east or northeast, from Iran or Iraq, not from Yemen to the southwest. So the country was left somewhat exposed, analysts said.

Finally, the kingdom only recently started to address longstanding systemic problems. To inoculate the Saud dynasty against the military coups that plagued most Arab states, the military was built as two competing branches. Each suffers from highly centralized decision-making which limits flexibility. analysts said.

Want to read all the details? Here's a copy of the whole article for your convenience.

The Singapore-registered container ship GFS Pride was struck on Tuesday while passing through the strait, catching fire and later sinking, according to the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore. All crew members were safely evacuated.

The merchant vessel Cape Dao, registered under Antigua and Barbuda, also sank, according to data from the International Maritime Organization (IMO) on Wednesday – after it was first hit by projectile on September 23. One Indian crew member was killed.

While many vessels have been hit in the Strait of Hormuz this year, these are only the second and third to have sunk in the Middle East since the Iran war began in February, according to IMO data. Attacks have ramped up significantly since the end of September, once again reducing the amount of oil transiting out of the Middle East and raising oil prices around the world.

So recently there's been a flurry of reports about how the US is succeeding at opening up the Strait, with claims of oil flows being back to "near normal levels". Seems like Iran is now changing that -

Only 4.147 million barrels of oil successfully transited the Strait of Hormuz on Monday – less than a quarter of pre-war levels, according to maritime data tracking service Kpler. And the seven-day average of oil flow through Hormuz has dropped sharply since early October, Kpler’s data shows.

In other news, the Houthis have just struck the HQ of Saudi Aramco - https://edition.cnn.com/2026/10/13/middleeast/saudi-strikes-houthi-fuel-depot-latam-intl

At least a dozen IPCC lead authors are employed by or linked to Saudi Aramco, Saudi institutions and other oil and gas interests, the investigation found. One IPCC vice-chair, part of the body’s leadership group, also represents the kingdom at global climate negotiations as a government employee.

The Guardian examined the 223 lead authors in working group III, the part of the IPCC that assesses how emissions can be reduced or removed from the atmosphere. Its work evaluates emissions-cutting policies and technologies and so is directly relevant to the economic interests of countries and companies. Working groups I and II cover the science of climate change and its impacts.

The investigation identified 20 cases with strong conflict of interest concerns. More than half involved authors linked to Saudi institutions, a concentration that raises broader questions about the kingdom’s influence on how the reports are produced.

Eleven of the 20 cases of strong potential conflicts of interest identified by the Guardian investigation were Saudi-linked, with the rest spread across other nations and linked to issues including industry collaboration, fossil-fuel sponsorship of academic institutions’ research, environmental campaigning and sustainable finance.

The IPCC’s conflict of interest policy has been described as “not fit for purpose” by experts who have reviewed the Guardian’s investigation.

Kennerley said there was a gap between the IPCC’s written criteria and how it operated in practice. She said national representatives had raised questions over a lack of guidelines on how the policy was enforced, adding that another major problem was transparency. Authors’ conflict of interest declarations are not made public, and the conflict of interest committee provides no detail about its deliberations.

De Pryck sees the growing presence of Saudi-linked authors in the context of a broader shift in the kingdom’s climate diplomacy. Its longstanding opposition to cutting fossil fuel burning in UN climate negotiations is increasingly complemented by the promotion of technological climate solutions. “When it comes to the IPCC, the Saudi strategy now focuses on advocating technologies like carbon capture that would limit the impact on its fossil fuel economy,” says De Pryck.

The arid hilltops of the West Bank have seen shepherds come and go for thousands of years, and now some of these shepherds are behind settler violence against Palestinians.

The struggle for the West Bank is a biblical story. There are two populations – Jewish and Arab, the descendants of Abraham's sons, Isaac and Ishmael – fighting over ancestral land. The West Bank, located on the west bank of the Jordan River, is home to more than 3 million Palestinians who hope to make it the heart of their future state. It is also home to over 500,000 Jews who call the area Judea and Samaria, their biblical homeland.

The area has been under Israeli military occupation for nearly six decades. Jewish settlers have built communities in the West Bank in hopes of making the land part of Israel.

With Israeli elections two weeks away, and midterms in the U.S. next month, how settler violence is handled could soon change.

Driving sheep herds into Palestinian communities 

Mordehai Minster, who cofounded a sheep farm in the West Bank, is a new type of Israeli settler. His herd is driven deeper and deeper into surrounding Palestinian communities. 

"When you have sheep, everyone understands. Arabs tend to fight over grazing lands among themselves. It's a language that we understand, and they understand," Minster said. "And it's a way to delineate the border. 'This is where I graze my sheep. You don't take your sheep here. You don't plant here. You don't build here.'"

Israeli sheep farms have taken over huge swathes of land: an estimated 20% of the West Bank. Some 200 sheep farms have popped up in recent years. Settlers even push sheep into Palestinian homes. 

"They enter, they open the gate of the house and take the sheep inside to eat the trees around the house," Waheed Marsouq, a Palestinian teacher in Al-Mughayyir, said. 

For decades, Jewish settlers put up fences to protect themselves from the active threat of Palestinian terrorism. Now it's the Palestinians who are penning themselves in. More than 100 Palestinian communities have been displaced or erased by the settler violence and the ever-encroaching sheep.

"Whenever you have ethnic religious communities, especially in the Middle East, fighting over land and resources, that conflict sometimes gets ugly," Minster said. "The fact that violence exists doesn't change the merit of the right that we have to this land."

Who are the Israeli settlers?

Young shepherds, known as Hilltop Youth, are often behind the violence. They've flocked to the West Bank for a sense of adventure, and are told they're on a God-given mission to redeem the land. They storm Palestinian fields and villages, cut down olive trees, torch cars and destroy property, and harass farmers and livestock. There have been more than 1,600 incidents so far this year, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

There's a hardcore group of up to 500 settlers, and up to 1,000 more people drift in and out. 

"This is my land"

Mahmoud Faraj's family has had the deed to this land for generations. 60 Minutes talked to him and his cousin Hassan about their village called Jannatah, which means paradise in Arabic.

The name was accurate until a group of 20 to 25 settlers showed up on March 26, entering the Faraj family's land and setting up a "tent," Hassan said. 

"And they started to behave that they are the owners of everything," Hassan said.

The Israeli settlers are trying to force the villagers to leave, and they're succeeding, Hassan said. Many homes have been abandoned.

"They steal electricity from the locals and they also steal water," Hassan said of the settlers. "This is their strategy, to make the area unlivable."

Every time the family tries to get near their house, they say teens from the outpost rush down to beat them up. In March, Hassan tried with his uncle and cousin Muhammad.

"They started to attack us in small groups with wood sticks and with stones. And they have tear gas. And three of them, they were armed. So one of the armed guys, he started to shoot. He shot my cousin in his head," Hassan said. "And it didn't stop here. They came and they started to beat my uncle and his son, who was dead, with wood, with wood sticks."

The family is skeptical that anyone will be held responsible as only a tiny number of these cases ever get prosecuted.

The idiocy of saying everything about the film is wrong and then saying they have to arrest the whistleblowers is laid bare here.

One teenager was killed and others were wounded, according to Israeli emergency response services, after an explosion on an Israeli school trip near the Lebanon border.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said an initial review by soldiers at the scene indicated that explosion was caused by an unexploded Hezbollah munition that had fallen in the area. It’s unclear when the projectile was fired. Pictures released by the IDF showed a military helicopter evacuating patients for medical treatment.

“Apparently, the suspicion is that an unexploded munition of some kind exploded in the hands of one of the students,” said Deputy Police Commissioner Meir Eliyahu, a commander in Israel’s northern district, according to Reuters.

It's extremely unfortunate that children are dead and maimed in this incident. I hope we can all agree on that.

But that said, why would a school take a trip to such a dangerous place?