Word: riyadh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...slowdown comes at a time when such monumental undertakings as the $3.4 billion Riyadh International Airport and the $18 billion industrial city of Jubail are largely complete. Yet those and other ambitious projects will now cost millions to maintain. Perhaps because of that, the suddenly penny- pinching Saudis have been making life miserable for foreign companies accustomed to more opulent treatment. "It's horrible now," says one American contractor in Riyadh. "They don't pay, there's little new business, and they nickel-and-dime you to death with inspections and rules...
Moreover, at MOMA one does not see any work of Mies' legion of followers, the modern architects who have remade and ravaged downtowns from Los Angeles to Riyadh. Mies was personally taciturn, but his vision was evangelical. He claimed that he had the answer, that his modern style was an architectural ultimate. "With Mies," wrote MOMA's Drexler in 1960, "architecture leaves childhood behind." In fact, it seems that Mies' example, brilliant in itself, provoked a prolonged architectural adolescence, a period when a stylistic conformism was enforced. To be modern, a building was obliged to wear what Critic Reyner Banham...
Halfway around the world from Cancun, a similar flurry of nervous consultation took place. In the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, Hussain Lwasani, the Iranian Foreign Ministry's director for African and Arab affairs, met with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal. Lwasani's mission, said a Saudi spokesman, was "related to the current oilmarket situation." A day later, Major Khoualdy Humaidi, a member of Libyan Strongman Muammar Gaddafi's governing Revolutionary Command Council, showed up for a session with Saudi King Fahd. Later, it was announced that the 13-member Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries would hold...
Energy-industry insiders saw the Saudi negotiations as an effort by Riyadh to pressure the rest of OPEC's 13 members into halting the now common practice of selling below official prices and exceeding their production quotas. Said a Japanese oil trader stationed in the gulf region: "First and foremost, this netback scheme is a warning to OPEC and non-OPEC oil producers that they must all take coordinated action or the Saudis will go further." As if in confirmation, Yamani warned that a ruinous price war could develop by next spring unless OPEC members stuck to official quota...
...main beneficiary of any Saudi price cuts will be the Riyadh treasury. While lower crude-oil rates will mean fewer dollars per bbl., they could trigger an increase in sales. That would pump badly needed cash into a nation that has seen its foreign currency reserves drop by some $20 billion in the past year, to less than $100 billion...