RIYADH, 10 August 2003 — In a move to promote Saudi participation in the health sector, especially in terms of owning and operating health clinics in the Kingdom, the Ministry of Health (MOH) has imposed tighter restrictions on the issuance of licenses.
RIYADH– The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has stepped up efforts to facilitate employment and movement of their nationals among member states. There are also plans to ease travel restrictions for the hundreds of thousands of expatriates currently living in GCC countries.
RIYADH – The Kingdom together with the other five Gulf states will have only a 0.1 percent share of the $7 trillion global e- business in 2005. This is true despite many initiatives currently in place to redress the situation and to boost Gulf countries’ participation in global online business, according to Dr. Fawaz Alamy, Saudi Arabia’s deputy minister for technical affairs and chairman of E-Commerce National Taskforce.
RIYADH- Saudi security officers on Tuesday raided several illegal telephone operations here which were offering inter- national calls at cut-price rates. They were operated from small houses in the Batha and Al-Wazarat areas of the capital. “The raids on the illegal telephone cabins were carried out by the personnel of the Passports Department and led to the detention of 16 people’ * eyewitness Abdurahman Kutty told Arab News yesterday. Kutty said that a number of other expatriates involved in such operations were deported earlier. Over 120 illegal telephone cabins currently operate in Riyadh, employing some 1,000 expatriates.
RIYADH, 21 July 2003 — A group of 868 Iraqi refugees currently living in Rafha camp, northwest of Riyadh, will be repatriated in the next few as part of the resettlement program launched by the Riyadh-based chapter of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in cooperation with the Saudi government. The refugees have been living in Rafha camp since the 1991 Gulf War.
RIYADH, 5 July 2003 — The fight against terror and security cooperation to curb infiltration and weapons smuggling to Saudi Arabia will top the agenda of the Saudi-Yemeni Coordination Council held in the Yemeni capital Sanaa today. The meeting will be co-chaired by Prince Sultan, second deputy premier and minister of defense and aviation, who heads the Saudi delegation, the Royal Court announced yesterday.
RIYADH, 30 June 2003 — In a major move to curb illegal money transactions, Saudi Arabia has asked money exchange firms not to send remittances outside the Kingdom to unknown customers or dubious business entities. The money exchange firms, on the other hand, are also currently unifying their efforts to merge and form full-fledged licensed banking entities on a par with the Kingdom’s other commercial banks which offer the whole range of banking services.
RIYADH, 16 June 2003 — Frequent interruptions of the water supply have led to acute water shortages in different parts of the city during the seasonable hot weather. In some areas residents have left their homes because of undependable supplies of water.
RIYADH, 1 June 2003 — The Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Endowments, Call and Guidance has fired 353 imams and muezzins (prayer callers) while at the same time asking some 1,357 imams and muezzins to attend training courses to improve their performance.
RIYADH, 28 May 2003 — The Kingdom has stepped up efforts to ensure greater participation of Saudi women in the commercial sector and to promote female entrepreneurship. The move is a joint effort between public and private sector organizations.