Saudi lawmaker Saad Al-Otaibi has taken the helm of the Arab Parliament, Arab News reported on Sunday. The Arab Parliament is the Arab League’s legislative body, and a Saudi presidency gives Riyadh the gavel in a forum that has been vocal on Gaza and on regional security through this autumn.
Michigan’s Senate race drew its biggest national entrant. Former president Barack Obama endorsed Abdul El-Sayed and attacked what he called a spineless Congress, Bloomberg reported on Sunday, while Republican Mike Rogers doubled down on allegations linking El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, which El-Sayed’s campaign rejects. The exchange is the sharpest of the Michigan race so far and is carried here as campaign rhetoric from both sides, not as a finding about either candidate.
Russia has renewed its condemnation of the United States for excluding South Africa from this year’s G20 meetings and the December leaders summit in Miami. The substance of the objection is not new: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov argued at the UN General Assembly in September that a rotating host cannot bar a founding member, and South African reporting on Saturday carried the condemnation again as the summit approaches. Pretoria says it will attend only if invited and will not organise a boycott.
The United Nations marked 81 years of global cooperation on Saturday, UN News reported, in a week when its secretary general has also been the loudest international voice on the West Bank closures covered in this edition.
One week out from the Dakar Youth Olympic Games, France 24’s Africa journal previewed the first Olympic event to be held in Africa, a soft power milestone for Senegal that sits alongside the country’s harder infrastructure and energy stories in other beats.
In Japan, the Asahi Shimbun asked whether a senior official of the pro-Pyongyang Chongryon association who re-entered Japan after visiting North Korea falls under Japan’s own sanctions, reporting a possible gap between the government’s stated policy and its practice, in Japanese.