Latest news with #RoyalCourt
Ammon
8 hours ago
- Business
- Ammon
Economic Discussions at the Royal Court
Raad Mahmoud Al-Tal Three years ago, the Royal Hashemite Court launched the Economic Modernization Vision (EMV) to improve Jordan's economy and make it stronger and fairer. Jordan faces many problems such as high unemployment, slow economic growth, and limited government funds. The Royal Court's role is not just to oversee government work. It brings together the government, businesses, and society to discuss and find real solutions that meet people's needs. These talks focus on key issues like making it easier to do business and attract local and foreign investment. They also work on improving important areas like industry and farming and helping more people, especially young people and women, join the workforce. They want to reduce reliance on foreign workers who are not well regulated. Another important goal of these discussions is to create a more balanced and fair labor market. Many Jordanians, especially in rural areas, struggle to find decent jobs. By focusing on local economic development and encouraging small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the vision aims to spread growth more evenly across the country. Supporting entrepreneurship and innovation is also part of this effort, helping people turn ideas into jobs and businesses. The talks also stress the need for big changes in the economy's structure to keep growth steady. This means not just improving numbers but making the economy strong against shocks and able to attract investors. Education and job training are priorities to prepare people for future jobs and lower unemployment. These discussions give space for public and private sectors to share ideas and make sure policies fit the real market and work well. Improving investment means making rules simpler, cutting hidden costs, and fixing business laws. The talks produce advice for the government to create clear labor market rules, increase transparency, expand social safety nets, and offer training for Jordanian workers. They also explore ways to give tax breaks and other benefits to encourage hiring Jordanians. There are challenges like limited funds, a slow global economy, and regional problems. But working together with accurate data and openness helps Jordan grow steadily and create real jobs. These talks at the Royal Court are a good step toward modernizing Jordan's economy. If done well, this plan will boost economic stability, improve people's lives, and guide Jordan to a better future.
BBC News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'We haven't gone beyond her': How the plays of Sarah Kane sent shockwaves through the 1990s
Thirty years ago, the late British writer's debut play Blasted was castigated as a "feast of filth". Now though, revivals of her work are showing she was ahead of her time. Blasted, the 1995 debut play by the late British playwright Sarah Kane, begins with a couple, Ian and Cate, entering a Leeds hotel room. Ian, a tabloid journalist, is unimpressed, and in the following moments he brandishes a revolver, utters a stream of racist slurs, and commits acts of sexual violence against Cate. It is easy to fixate on these details which set the tone for a play that only gets more harrowing, building to a truly sickening final scene. Warning: This article contains content that some may find disturbing or upsetting With its staging at London's Royal Court Upstairs, Blasted became the biggest theatrical cause célèbre in the UK for decades – and reviewers were scathing. Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph called it a work "devoid of intellectual and artistic merit" and even suggested that Kane was mad. Jack Tinker from the Daily Mail's review was headed "This Disgusting Feast of Filth". Many of the press viewed Blasted as a grotesque waste of taxpayers' money, mindlessly squandered by a 23-year-old enfant terrible who was – shockingly – female. The critical tide later turned, with some of those reviewers apologising to Kane for misunderstanding Blasted. Thirty years on, Kane is part of the theatrical canon – a production of 4.48 Psychosis, the final play she wrote before taking her own life aged 28, is currently running at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, while a revival of her 1998 work Cleansed is being staged by director Rebecca Frecknall at North London's Almeida Theatre next year. While revivals of Kane's plays are not universally appreciated, they always invite new responses and revelations in relation to contemporary conflict and oppression. But at the core of each work is an abstracted meditation on love. "No one play is the same as the other," Graham Saunders, Professor of Drama Arts at the University of Birmingham, tells the BBC. "It would be difficult to believe that the writer of Blasted was the same person who wrote 4.48 Psychosis". Alongside playwrights including Mark Ravenhill and Patrick Marber, Kane was part of a movement in British theatre in the 1990s often described as "in-yer-face", a phrase defined in the New Oxford English Dictionary as "blatantly aggressive or provocative, impossible to ignore or avoid". Yet that is what many of the critics who saw Blasted attempted to do – to run away from the confrontational aspect of the play by burying it with outrage. Midway through, a third character enters the play: a soldier who details war crimes he has witnessed, confronting the repulsive Ian with the realities of conflict. Kane does not merely gesture towards the then-contemporary horrors of the Balkans War, but rips the stage open and has them erupt into the theatre itself. Blasted removes the temporal and spatial distance between ourselves and trauma, forcing us to face the very worst of humanity. Kane's route to notoriety The daughter of a journalist, Kane was born in 1971 in Brentwood, Essex, and rejected her Christian suburban upbringing from the age of 17. In Ravenhill's obituary of Kane upon her death in 1999, he quotes her saying: "There is an attitude that certain things could not happen here. Yet there's the same amount of abuse and corruption in Essex as anywhere else, and that's what I want to blow open". She drew influences from her musical loves (including Joy Division, Pixies, and Radiohead), modern playwrights, (especially Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter), and classical drama. The latter influence was brought to the fore in Kane's second play, Phaedra's Love, first performed at London's Gate theatre in 1996. Taking a story already given stage treatments by Seneca, Euripides, and Jean Racine, Kane's attention moves to Phaedra's stepson, Hippolytus, and dissects the taboos of incestuous desire. Phaedra's Love ends with an extreme act of mutilation. It is no wonder that Kane's plays are infrequently performed, not only for their challenging subjects, but because they pose enormous staging difficulties. Fellow writer and friend David Greig recalled that Kane said to him that the reason why she featured unstageable images in her plays was because "whatever they do they're going to have to do something interesting". In Cleansed, which premiered at the Royal Court Downstairs in 1998, Kane jokingly decided to "punish" the director, James Macdonald, for making her do a rewrite. After finding a dead rat in her cutlery drawer, Kane included the direction: "The rats carry Carl's feet away." Carl experiences some of Kane's most shocking violence, being subject to the most extreme of torture from a man called Tinker – the surname of the aforementioned Daily Mail journalist who whipped up the lambasting of Blasted in 1995. During the run of Katie Mitchell's staging of Cleansed at London's National Theatre in 2016, a press furore rose again as audience members fainted and walked out at the play's horror. But to focus on the violence is to miss the meaning of Kane's works. Cleansed is set in a university where Tinker leads an institution designed to rid society of its undesirables, while a group of inmates attempt to save themselves through love. Kane was inspired by A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes to compare extreme torture to the agony of being in love. Like Barthes, Kane finds the two experiences share the situation of panic, wherein there is no possibility of return. To fall in love is to be lost, forever. Cleansed is graphic, but it is heartachingly beautiful – the lovers Graham and Grace dance together, with her emulating him, until "she mirrors him perfectly as they dance exactly in time". A sunflower bursts through the floor. At another point a field of daffodils covers the entire stage. Light and beauty frequently shine through the most pitiless scenes. Ravenhill recalled that upon telling Kane that he thought Cleansed was brilliant, she smiled and replied, "Yeah, well, I'm in love". A couple of months later, when she directed Georg Büchner's Woyzeck at the Gate, Kane removed the possibility of redemption for any of the characters. "Yeah, well, I fell out of love," Kane explained. As explored in her final two plays, 1998's Crave, and 4.48 Psychosis, Kane had fallen out with the idea of love itself. She wrote Crave under the pseudonym Marie Kelvedon to detach herself from the associations of her name, allowing her to explore a free-flowing poetic narrative through the voices of four characters called C, M, B, and A. The characters mostly exchange single lines, until A bursts into a long monologue about all the little romantic things she wants to do with her lover. The stream of consciousness twists and turns between anger and love in the manner which defines Kane's worldview. Her death and legacy Later, A says, "Death is my lover and he wants to move in". This chimes with the emotions of her final work, 4.48 Psychosis, which explores a state of mind "at 4.48 / when desperation visits". The work comprises 24 sections, without directions or indication of setting, not even of how many actors should perform it. The revival currently running is directed, as it was first time around, by Macdonald, and features the three original actors: Daniel Evans, Jo McInnes, and Madeleine Potter. "It's a play about being a human being," Potter says. "The circumstances might have to do with depression and suicidal despair and psychosis. But the journey is a recognisable, human journey – the search for connection and the longing is universal." Evans reflects that, while Kane took the play form to a different place, "it's almost like we haven't gone beyond that yet – no one has discovered what the next stage is." McInnes adds: "Hopefully this production might have helped inspire new writers to come forward." More like this:• The Shakespeare play that makes audiences faint• Why Requiem for a Dream is still so divisive• Why Gen Z is nostalgia about 'indie sleaze' The Guardian critic Michael Billington dubbed it "a 75-minute suicide note" in his 2000 review. Kane struggled with severe depression and tried to kill herself once before she did so in 1999. But while 4.48 Psychosis might be its artist's cri de coeur, it is as reductive to call it a suicide note as it is to say the same of Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems. After her death, Kane's agent Mel Kenyon said: "I don't think she was depressed, I think it was deeper than that. I think she felt something more like existential despair which is what makes many artists tick." However, in a letter to the Guardian, playwright Anthony Neilson retorted that, "No one in despair 'ticks'", and that, "Truth didn't kill her, lies did: the lies of worthlessness and futility whispered by an afflicted brain." Far more important in terms of Kane's legacy is to focus on the ways in which she played with theatrical form. Reflecting on the power of Kane's work today, Graham Saunders observes that they "respond to #MeToo and issues of coercive control and sexual violence in ways that weren't even recognised or acknowledged when they were first written". Other themes which also come through strongly now include mental health, which is a subject now discussed more openly than when Kane was alive, and body and gender dysmorphia. Imagery recurs in Kane's poetic writing. The emergent flowers in Cleansed recall the end of the first scene of Blasted. Ian and Cate discuss why she came to the hotel with him, ending with him saying, "I love you", and her saying, "I don't love you". Ian picks up a bouquet of flowers and holds them out to Cate. At the start of the second scene the flowers are ripped apart and scattered around the room. Love and beauty have never been shown to be more fragile than in the fraught theatre of Sarah Kane. 4.48 Psychosis is at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 27 July; Cleansed is at London's Almeida Theatre from 21 July until 22 August 2026. * Details of organisations offering information and support for anyone affected by mental health issues and sexual abuse or violence are available at -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Mint
4 days ago
- Mint
Who was Al Waleed bin Khaled? Saudi Arabia's 'Sleeping Prince' passes away after 20 years in coma
Renowned as the "Sleeping Prince", Prince Al Waleed bin Khaled bin Talal Al Saud died after spending nearly two decades in a coma following a tragic car accident in London in 2005, confirmed the Royal Court on Saturday through the Saudi Press Agency. Prince Al Waleed bin Khaled bin Talal Al Saud was the eldest son of Prince Khaled bin Talal Al Saud, who is a prominent Saudi royal and nephew of billionaire Prince Al Waleed bin Talal. "With hearts believing in Allah will and decree, and with deep sorrow and sadness, we mourn our beloved son: Prince Al-Waleed bin Khaled bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, may Allah have mercy on him, who passed away today," the mourning dad wrote in Arabic on X. He added that the funeral service would be held on Sunday. Prince Al Waleed bin Khaled bin Talal Al Saud was born in April 1990 and was nicknamed Dede by his family. He was the eldest son of Prince Khaled bin Talal Al Saud. In 2005, he was injured in a car accident in 2005 while studying at a military college in London, reported the Mirror. At that time he was just 15-years-old. In the accident, Prince Al Waleed bin Khaled bin Talal Al Saud sustained several severe brain injuries and internal bleeding. He fell into a coma and later transported to King Abdulaziz Medical City in the Saudi city of Riyadh. He remained in a coma until his death. His father opted to keep him on life support and used to often share social media footage. These post went viral over the years and garnered millions of views as he prayed for his son. The prince also drew many in-person visitors over the years who visit his hospital room and pray alongside his father and brothers.
Leaders
4 days ago
- General
- Leaders
Sleeping Prince of Saudi Arabia Dead at 36 After 20-Year Coma
Prince Al-Waleed bin Khalid Al-Saud, a Saudi royal who spent two decades in a coma following a devastating car crash in London, has passed away at the age of 36. The prince was just 15 years old when the 2005 accident left him with a brain hemorrhage and severe internal injuries. He never fully regained consciousness and remained on life support in Riyadh's King Abdulaziz Medical City. Sleeping Prince Known affectionately as the 'Sleeping Prince,' Al-Waleed was the eldest son of Prince Khaled bin Talal Al Saud, who confirmed the tragic news in a heartfelt post on social media. 'With hearts full of faith in Allah's will and decree, and with deep sorrow, we mourn our beloved son: Prince Al-Waleed bin Khaled bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. May Allah have mercy on him,' his father wrote, quoting a verse from the Quran. At the time of the crash, Al-Waleed was a student at a military college in London. Despite the severity of his condition, his family never lost hope that he might recover. Prince Khaled remained by his son's side and refused all suggestions to withdraw life support. Moreover, the news of his passing has sparked an outpouring of grief online, with the hashtag 'Sleeping Prince' trending as thousands paid tribute. 'May Prince Al-Waleed bin Khaled rest in peace. My deepest condolences to his family,' one user wrote. 'His life was a quiet testament to love and hope,' said another. 'May his soul find eternal peace,' added a third. Funeral prayers are scheduled for today at the Imam Turki bin Abdullah Mosque in Riyadh. Related Topics: Saudi Royal Court Announces Demise of Princess Sultana bint Saud King Salman: Royal Order to Name a Riyadh Road after Prince Badr bin Abdulmohsen Royal Court: King Salman to Undergo Routine Checkup Short link :
Time of India
4 days ago
- General
- Time of India
Saudi Arabia's ‘Sleeping Prince' dies: Why was Prince Alwaleed bin Khaled called so
The 'Sleeping Prince' Prince Alwaleed bin Khaled with his father Prince Khaled bin Talal Al Saud In a moment that has left hearts heavy across Saudi Arabia and beyond, Prince Alwaleed bin Khaled bin Talal Al Saud, popularly known as the 'Sleeping Prince', passed away on July 19, 2025, the Royal Court confirmed through the Saudi Press Agency. Prince Alwaleed bin Khaled was 36 years old. His death brings a quiet end to a long, painful chapter of unwavering hope, patience, and fatherly devotion. Why is Prince Alwaleed bin Khaled called Saudi Arabia's 'Sleeping Prince' Prince Alwaleed bin Khaled's life changed forever in 2005 when, at the age of 15, a devastating car accident left him with severe brain injuries. He was studying at a military academy in London at that time. What was supposed to be the start of a bright, promising future became a two-decade-long battle between life and death for the Prince. Despite getting some of the best medical care in the world from American, Spanish, and Saudi specialists, and countless prayers, Prince Alwaleed remained in a coma. He only responded occasionally with minimal movements that kept his family's hope alive. During this difficult time, his father Prince Khaled bin Talal Al Saud became a symbol of unconditional love and undying faith. Over the years, he refused to give up on his son, rejecting calls to withdraw life support. Instead, he turned his palace into a sanctuary of prayers, often posting emotional messages and Quranic recitations on social media. Videos of the prince slightly moving to Quranic verses would often go viral, touching millions of hearts across the Arab world. For Prince Khaled, every small sign from the Sleeping Prince felt like a divine message of hope that one day his beloved son might open his eyes again. But, this never happened. The Sleeping Prince stayed in coma for 20 years, and passed away on July 19, 2025. Sharing the news of the passing away of his beloved son, Prince Khaled quoted the Quran and wrote in his emotional post on X (formerly Twitter), 'O reassured soul, return to your Lord, well-pleased and pleasing [to Him], and enter My Paradise…' With a heart full of faith in Allah's decree, the grieving father bid farewell to his son after 19 long years of standing by his side. Funeral prayers for Prince Alwaleed bin Khaled is scheduled for Sunday, July 20. For men, the prayer will be held after Asr at Imam Turki bin Abdullah Mosque in Riyadh, and for women, it followed Dhuhr at King Faisal Specialist Hospital. The palace opened its doors to mourners for three days, welcoming men in the Al-Fakhriyah district and women after Maghrib prayer. Prince Alwaleed's life became a rare and powerful story of hope, heartbreak, and a father's endless devotion. His memory will live on— not just as Saudi Arabia's 'Sleeping Prince,' but as a young soul who inspired millions to believe in love, prayer, and perseverance even in the face of impossible odds. Royal Showdown Caught on Camera: Harry & Charles' Teams Clash | Body Language Expert Breaks It Down
