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Saudi Minister of Culture Inaugurates Riyadh International Book Fair on Behalf of King Salman

Preparations for the opening of the Riyadh International Book Fair (Photo: Bashir Saleh).
Preparations for the opening of the Riyadh International Book Fair (Photo: Bashir Saleh).
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Saudi Minister of Culture Inaugurates Riyadh International Book Fair on Behalf of King Salman

Preparations for the opening of the Riyadh International Book Fair (Photo: Bashir Saleh).
Preparations for the opening of the Riyadh International Book Fair (Photo: Bashir Saleh).

On behalf of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, Saudi Minister of Culture Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Farhan inaugurated on Thursday the Riyadh International Book Fair (RIBF), with the participation of more than one thousand local, regional and international publishing houses from 28 countries.

In its new edition, the RIBF is held under the slogan, “A New Destination, A New Chapter”, and extends from Oct. 1-10 in its new location in Riyadh.

The most prominent cultural event in Saudi Arabia in the field of books and the publishing sector is organized this year by the Saudi Ministry of Culture, with the presence of Iraq as “guest of honor.”

In remarks to Asharq Al-Awsat, Iraqi Minister of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities Dr. Hassan Nadhem said that his country’s participation as a guest of honor at the Riyadh International Book Fair this year comes in light of the “growing relations between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and tireless diplomatic work to build real partnerships with the Kingdom at various levels.”

The activities of the cultural program, which is held on the sidelines of the RIBF, will kick off on Friday, in the presence of prominent Saudi, Arab and international writers, thinkers and critics, who will meet in a set of seminars, lectures and workshops to discuss various fields of cultural creativity.

The exhibition celebrates the experiences of pioneers of literature and arts, including Muhammad Mahdi Al-Jawahiri, Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab, Ali Jawad Al-Taher, Wassini Al-Araj and Prince Khalid Al-Faisal.

Prominent participants include Dr. Abdullah Al-Ghadami, American author Jordan Belfort, and his compatriot Chris Gardner.

Poetry evenings will be held by poets from Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and musical and artistic gatherings will be attended by Egyptian musician Omar Khairat, Iraqi Naseer Shamma, and Iraqi singer Saadoun Jaber.

The cultural program also celebrates Iraq as guest of honor, through a series of seminars and poetry evenings, in the presence of the Iraqi minister of Culture.

The RIBF cultural program is divided into three main parts: the first is “Book Talk” evenings, in which nine Saudi, Arab and international authors will be hosted to talk about their experiences in writing. Those include: Prince Turki Al-Faisal, Sheikha Hend Al-Qasimi, the Saudi traveler and author Abdullah Al-Jumah, Kuwaiti novelist Meshaal Hamad, Jordanian novelist Ayman Otoom, American author Jordan Belfort, Kuwaiti novelist Saud Alsanousi, American chef and author Marco Pierre White, and American writer Chris Gardner, author of the famous book, “The Pursuit of Happyness.”

In the second part, “Cultural Encounters,” more than 100 intellectuals and critics of different nationalities will talk about urgent literary and cultural subjects through 36 seminars and lectures held over the ten days of the exhibition.

The third part will be devoted to evenings and prizes honoring authors and icons who served Arab culture, including Prince Khalid Al-Faisal, Advisor to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and Emir of Makkah Al-Mukarramah Region, who will be honored by the Arab World Institute in Paris in a grand ceremony hosted by the exhibition, in return for his immense contribution to Arab culture.

The exhibition will also host over the next Monday and Tuesday the activities of the Publishers Conference - the first of its kind in the Kingdom - in order to discuss the reality of the publishing industry in the Arab world and the ways to make it more competitive at the international level.

Furthermore, the exhibition will organize more than 60 workshops of various stripes and cultural trends, presented by more than 100 experts and specialists in a variety of fields, including workshops on writing and composition, filmmaking, theater, culinary arts, children’s arts and creativity, heritage fashion, science fiction writing, and many others.

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Varieties

Secret Cameras, Mics and AI Reveal Rare Cambodia Wildlife

Hidden microphones, cameras and artificial intelligence to reveal the secrets of species living deep in Cambodia's Cardamom Mountains. TANG CHHIN Sothy / AFP
Hidden microphones, cameras and artificial intelligence to reveal the secrets of species living deep in Cambodia's Cardamom Mountains. TANG CHHIN Sothy / AFP
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Secret Cameras, Mics and AI Reveal Rare Cambodia Wildlife

Hidden microphones, cameras and artificial intelligence to reveal the secrets of species living deep in Cambodia's Cardamom Mountains. TANG CHHIN Sothy / AFP
Hidden microphones, cameras and artificial intelligence to reveal the secrets of species living deep in Cambodia's Cardamom Mountains. TANG CHHIN Sothy / AFP

Above the patter of rain cascading through the jungle canopy comes the haunting call of a pileated gibbon singing to fend off intruders in Cambodia's Cardamom Mountains.

It is being recorded as part of work harnessing hidden microphones, cameras and artificial intelligence to reveal the secrets of species living deep in the rainforest and help protect them.

To conservationist Ratha Sor, the whoops and whistles are the sound of hope -- a sign that the country's largest remaining stretch of intact rainforest is healthy enough to support the endangered species, said AFP.

Gibbons are "indicators that our forest is still alive", he said.

By showing that everything from pangolins to elephants call the Cardamom Mountains home, conservationists hope to secure its future, in a country that has lost over a third of its forest cover in the last 25 years.

"This is the real evidence... we are conserving very unique species in our landscape," said Ratha Sor, biodiversity and science manager at Conservation International (CI), a US-headquartered non-profit.

The Cardamoms range, spread across more than a million hectares (2.47 million acres) in southwest Cambodia, is regarded as one of the most important remaining rainforests in the region.

For decades, it was eaten away by rampant deforestation and emptied by poaching.

Bolstered protections have helped slow both, though infrastructure projects, including dams, remain a serious threat.

In 2024, CI published the results of the first-ever systematic camera trap survey of the Central Cardamom region, revealing more than 100 resident species, nearly two dozen of them either vulnerable or endangered.

That effort, involving nearly 150 devices placed at regular intervals, will be repeated later this year.

It is supplemented by ongoing targeted camera trapping, focused on areas where animals are likely to be and offering deeper understanding of how populations are changing and behaving.

- Macaques, dholes, elephants -

AFP joined conservationists, rangers and locals this month as they retrieved and replaced cameras and microphones in the forest.

Under a chaotic canopy woven with vines and studded with fearsome spiked stems, the group crossed streams, waded through mud and picked off dozens of leeches.

Local community members like Pan Sok, a member of the Chong Indigenous minority, guide CI on where to place devices.

The 50-year-old lives outside the forest but calls himself a "jungle man" after years tapping resin from its trees.

He sat to review black-and-white footage from a camera he helped locate, describing "pride" at the sight of pig-tailed macaques, endangered wild dogs called dholes and his favorite, elephants.

"My efforts paid off," said Pan Sok.

Some of these species are seen fairly regularly elsewhere in Southeast Asia, but encounters can be vanishingly rare in the Cardamoms.

A ranger told AFP he had not seen an elephant once in 12 years patrolling.

While camera traps can capture many of the forest's inhabitants, gibbons are rarely seen because they live in treetops and move too quickly, so CI is turning to bioacoustic monitors and AI.

Its staff spent three months training a machine-learning program to identify calls recorded by dozens of monitors placed at 10 sites.

They are set at least three kilometers (1.9 miles) apart, as close as gibbon groups come to each other without fighting, meaning each device is picking up a different troop.

- 'This is gibbon, this is not' -

In just six weeks, the monitors recorded nearly 800 calls.

The team labelled up to half the data for the AI, teaching it "this is gibbon, this is not", said Ratha Sor.

AI then processed the rest, and in the future will be trained to distinguish male from female, and eventually individual calls.

Experts say poaching in the region has waned, though a ranger found part of an old snare during AFP's visit.

Patrolling has also reduced small-scale encroachments, but infrastructure projects including multiple dams are still driving deforestation.

In the last five years, the Central Cardamom protected region has lost nearly 7,000 hectares of tree cover, Global Forest Watch data shows.

Ratha Sor trod carefully when asked about government-backed infrastructure projects responsible for some of that deforestation.

"It's out of our control," he said.

But he hopes evidence of the region's rich wildlife will show the benefits of leaving the forest standing.

"It is an encouragement to protect... one of the very pristine evergreen forests in this Cardamom Mountains."

Varieties

‘Fingerprints’ of Black Hole’s Event Horizon Detected for First Time

An actual image of the black hole where scientists looked for a ring of light, which is matter and radiation circling at extreme speeds around a region of darkness representing the black hole. (Event Horizon Telescope collaboration)
An actual image of the black hole where scientists looked for a ring of light, which is matter and radiation circling at extreme speeds around a region of darkness representing the black hole. (Event Horizon Telescope collaboration)
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‘Fingerprints’ of Black Hole’s Event Horizon Detected for First Time

An actual image of the black hole where scientists looked for a ring of light, which is matter and radiation circling at extreme speeds around a region of darkness representing the black hole. (Event Horizon Telescope collaboration)
An actual image of the black hole where scientists looked for a ring of light, which is matter and radiation circling at extreme speeds around a region of darkness representing the black hole. (Event Horizon Telescope collaboration)

Scientists have detected the "fingerprints" of a black hole's event horizon -- the boundary from which nothing can escape -- for the first time, according to research published on Wednesday.

The discovery was made by studying ripples in space-time called gravitational waves that were created when two black holes violently smashed into each other.

A black hole's event horizon is known as the "point of no return" because not even light can avoid being swallowed into its darkness.

This has made them incredibly difficult to learn anything about.

However, there is one event of such cataclysmic violence that it could offer a chance to glimpse this extreme phenomenon -- when two black holes merge into one.

When this cosmic death spiral occurs, it shoots gravitational waves across the universe which scientists have been detecting for the last decade.

For the new research published in Nature, an international team of researchers analyzed data from the strongest gravitational wave ever recorded, known as GW250114, detected by the LIGO observatory in January 2025.

By isolating the last burst of waves -- known as "direct waves" -- from this black hole merger, the scientists said they were able to extract information from closer to an event horizon than ever before.

"This black hole horizon concept normally appears in science fiction," lead study author Sizheng Ma of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada told AFP.

"But now we are really able to touch the region around the horizon with gravitational data," he added.

"Sometimes I cannot believe this is really happening."

- Causing a stir -

The last stage of two black holes merging is like a spoon stirring a glass of water, Sizheng Ma explained.

The resulting swirl in space creates the ripple of gravitational waves that travel at the speed of light in all directions.

If the metaphorical spoon is stirring close enough to the black hole's event horizon, "this offers us a chance to decode the physics around that region", Sizheng Ma said.

By supporting the theory of general relativity, the results "proved that Einstein was correct again," he added.

The scientists emphasized that more research was needed to decipher what can be gleaned about event horizons using this method.

But they did detect information about how black holes twist space around themselves as they rotate -- a phenomenon known as "frame dragging".

"This is similar to pushing a glass into a table and twisting it, so that the tablecloth winds up around it," Maximiliano Isi, a gravitational wave astrophysicist at Columbia University, told AFP.

In the future, the team of scientists hope to find signs of tiny changes known as quantum fluctuation.

"In this way, we can really probe this near horizon region to look for a new physics," including searching for a deviation from general relativity, Sizheng Ma said.

- Reaction mixed -

Experts not involved in the study urged caution.

Francesco Sannino, an Italian theoretical physicist who studies black holes, told AFP it was "compelling analysis" but needed to be checked by other researchers.

Still, it was "striking" that the scientists were able to show that gravitational waves carried the event horizon's "fingerprints," he said.

The astrophysicist Isi described the work as "tantalizing".

"More generally, understanding the physics of black holes and their mergers is important as it might shed light on how space and time are woven together at a more fundamental level," he told AFP.

Sean McWilliams, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University, was skeptical that the gravitational wave frequency analyzed by the scientists was actually "dictated" by the event horizon.

For this reason, "the actual observed signal doesn't really tell us anything about the horizon or the other properties directly related to it", he told AFP.

Sizheng Ma said McWilliams's statement was "not correct," suggesting he had conflated two different aspects in the paper.

"There is often considerable resistance and criticism in the early stages of promoting a new concept," he said, adding he is working on another paper to "clarify these confusions and possible misinterpretations".

Varieties

Asteroid Zooming Past Earth on Saturday Visible to Stargazers

FILE PHOTO: A nighttime view of Earth, derived from satellite images taken daily over the past decade, capturing human activity on the planet through the emissions of artificial light, is seen in this image released on April 8, 2026. Michala Garrison/NASA Earth Observatory/Handout via REUTERS
FILE PHOTO: A nighttime view of Earth, derived from satellite images taken daily over the past decade, capturing human activity on the planet through the emissions of artificial light, is seen in this image released on April 8, 2026. Michala Garrison/NASA Earth Observatory/Handout via REUTERS
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Asteroid Zooming Past Earth on Saturday Visible to Stargazers

FILE PHOTO: A nighttime view of Earth, derived from satellite images taken daily over the past decade, capturing human activity on the planet through the emissions of artificial light, is seen in this image released on April 8, 2026. Michala Garrison/NASA Earth Observatory/Handout via REUTERS
FILE PHOTO: A nighttime view of Earth, derived from satellite images taken daily over the past decade, capturing human activity on the planet through the emissions of artificial light, is seen in this image released on April 8, 2026. Michala Garrison/NASA Earth Observatory/Handout via REUTERS

A large asteroid that will zoom harmlessly past Earth on Saturday will be visible to stargazers using a small telescope or large binoculars, the European Space Agency announced Wednesday.

The asteroid will come within 2,560,000 kilometers of Earth at 1114 GMT on Saturday, which is more than six times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Called (152637) 1997 NC1, the asteroid will be speeding along at nearly nine kilometers a second, posing no threat to Earth as any chance of an impact has been ruled out.

Discovered in 1997, the asteroid is estimated to be between 750 and 1,650 meters wide, according to calculations based on how much sunlight it reflects.

However other estimates suggest it could be smaller, AFP quoted the ESA as saying in a statement.

"A close approach to Earth by an object this size only occurs every few years, although this time the bright nearby Moon might impede its observability at closest approach," Juan Luis Cano of the ESA's Planetary Defense Office said in a statement.

For stargazers with telescopes or binoculars, the asteroid will be visible in parts of the Northern Hemisphere as it approaches, almost everywhere as it speeds past Earth, and only from the Southern Hemisphere as it departs.

But this depends if people are in areas of the world where the sky is dark enough as it passes.