Category: Middle East
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The USS George Washington is heading to the Middle East to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln, deployed more than 250 days with no port call in 200. What that does to a crew, and what the swap signals.
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Settlers besieged three Palestinian homes in Qusra for five nights, cutting water and electricity. The US ambassador to Israel — a longtime ally of the settler movement — called them terrorists.
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A slick from a stranded tanker in the Arabian Sea now covers an estimated 500 square miles and has reached the Omani mainland. Iran is demanding compensation. Basic facts about the spill remain unknown.
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Trump says the US has total control of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says no vessel passes without its permission. Fourteen ships crossed on Tuesday, against about 120 a day before the war.
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A pattern runs through several Gulf royal cases: confinement in a home rather than a prison, doctors employed by the household, and a psychiatric label attached to the woman who objects. An explainer on why that pattern is so difficult for courts, police and the UN to touch.
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Eighteen years before her sister’s escape by sea, Sheikha Shamsa ran from her family’s Surrey estate and spent weeks living quietly in England. She was found in Cambridge in August 2000. A British court later found she was abducted. She has not been seen in public since.
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Alanoud Al Fayez left Saudi Arabia in 2003 and has lived in London ever since. Her four daughters by the late King Abdullah say they were confined for years in a Jeddah compound. UN experts were told they were medicated without consent. Two of the sisters are now dead.
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Princess Haya bint Hussein of Jordan fled Dubai for London in 2019 with her two children. The custody battle that followed produced findings of intimidation, a phone-hacking ruling involving Pegasus spyware, and the largest financial award ever made by an English divorce court.
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Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum tried to flee Dubai by sea in 2018 and was seized off the coast of India. A London court later found her father ordered it. She has since been photographed abroad — but has never spoken publicly about any of it.
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Iran is reported to be nearing a deal with Oman over the Strait of Hormuz. Why Oman is one of the two owners of that water, and what “control” could and couldn’t legally mean.