Less than eleven seconds earlier, when the Argentinian player receives the pass from a teammate, the clock in Mexico marks thirteen hours, twelve minutes and twenty seconds. In the opening scene there are also two Brits and a slightly older man of Tunisian origin. Football isn't very popular in Tunisia. That's why the African seems to be the only one who is not in an athletic mental alertness The Tunisian is called Ali Bin Nasser and, while others run, he walks slowly. He is forty-two years old and ashamed: he knows that he will never be called again to referee an official match between nations. He also knows that if twelve years earlier, when he was injured in the Tunisian league, he had been told that he would be in a World Cup, he would not have believed it. Nor would he have believed it the afternoon he became a referee. After all, in Tunisia you only need to have the same number of legs as lungs to get the job. But when he officiated his first match, he discovered that he would be a proper referee. And it was more than that: he managed to become the first football referee to be recognised on the streets of his city. He was called up for the 1984 African qualifiers and his judgment proved to be so good that a year later he was called up to command in a World Cup. In Mexico he was asked for autographs, had pictures taken with him and slept in the most luxurious hotel. He had successfully refereed the Poland-Portugal match in the group stage, and watched the left half in a Denmark-Spain match where the Danes played the whole second half with a high-line; he didn't make a single mistake when he raised his flag. When the organisers informed him that he would be directing a quarterfinal - no Tunisian judge had ever come this far - Ali called home from the hotel, with reverse charge, told it to his father and both cried. That night he slept through hot flashes and had two dreams of ridicule. In the first dream he twisted his ankle and had to be replaced by the fourth referee; in the dream, the fourth referee was his mother. In the second dream a fan jumped onto the field, pulled down his pants and he was left with his genitals hanging out in front of the world's televisions. From each dream he woke up with his heart beating. But he never dreamed, during the eve, of validating a goal scored with a hand. He did not dream that, in Tunisian street slang, his name would become an humorous metaphor for blindness. That's why he's now refereeing the second half of that match with a desire to see it end soon. Now the Argentinian player touches the ball with his left foot and moves it half a metre out of the shadows. The heat is over 30 degrees and that spider-shaped shade is the only one in many meters around. Around the field, one hundred and fifteen thousand people follow the player's movements but only two, those closest to the scene, can prevent his advance. Their names are Peter: Raid one, Beardsley the other. Both were born in the north of England, one in the riverbed and the other at the mouth of the River Tyne; they both had, a few years earlier, a son whom they named Peter; they both divorced their first wife before travelling to Mexico; and they are both convinced, at the thirteen hours, twelve minutes and twenty-one seconds, that it will be easy to take the ball away from the Argentinian player because he received it with his weak foot and there are two of them: one at his front and the other at his back. They don't know that, a decade later, Peter Raid Jr. and Peter Beardsley Jr. will be friends, they will be fifteen and sixteen years old and they will be dancing at a London rave. A Scotsman named O'Connor - who will later become a screenwriter for comedian Sacha Baron Cohen - will recognize them and, in the middle of the dance, will dodge them with a feint and a dribble. He will do it once, twice, three times, imitating the dance move that now, ten years before, the Argentine player practices on his parents. Raid Jr. and Beardsley Jr. will not get the joke, so other rave participants will join O'Connor's mockery and a loop of dancers will form, in the form of a human train, dodging the boys in two stages. Peter Raid Jr. will be the first to understand the taunt, and will tell his friend, "It's because of our parents' video, the one from Mexico 86". Peter Beardsley Jr. will make a gesture of humiliation and the two friends will escape from the party, chased by dozens of boys who will shout, in chorus, the name of the player who ten years ago, right now, is running away from his parents with a move of his waist. Soon Raid Sr. and Beardsley Sr. will stop chasing the player: it will be the job of other teammates to try to stop him. They now remain frozen in the middle of a tape that time turns, in slow motion, from VHS to Youtube. Now their children are five and six years old and will not remember seeing the player's dribble directly, but in their early teens they will see it a thousand times on video and will no longer have any respect for their parents. Peter Raid and Peter Beardsley, still in midfield, don't know what exactly has happened in their lives to make it all fall apart. Quickly and with short steps, the Argentinian player moves the scene to the opposite side of the pitch. He has only touched the ball three times in his own field: once to receive it and outwit the first Peter, the second to step on it gently and outflank the second Peter, and a third to push the ball away towards the dividing line. When the ball crosses the chalk line, the player has covered ten of the fifty-two meters he will walk and has taken eleven of the forty-four steps he will have to take. At thirteen hours, twelve minutes and twenty-three seconds of midday shouts of astonishment come down from the stands and the asses of the radio announcers come off the seats in the transmission cabins: the free space that the player has just found on the right side, after the double dribble and his stride, makes everybody understand the danger. Everybody except Kenny Sansom, who appears behind the two Peter's and chases the player with a parsimony that seems to be from another sport. Sansom accompanies the Argentinian player without despair, as if he was taking a young son for his first bike ride. "You looked like if you were playing in training, for fucks sake," manager Bobby Robson tells him two hours later in the dressing room. "That wasn't you," his half-brother Allan will tell him a year later, both drunk, in a pub in Dublin. Kenny Sansom will rewind the video a thousand times in the future. He'll see his lazy step, almost a trot, as the player slips away. He will start, in November of that year, to have problems with gambling and alcohol. In the tabloids he will be nicknamed "White" Sansom because of his fondness for white wine. His only friend from the golden age will be Terry Butcher, perhaps because both will share the same traumatic experience. Butcher is the one who now, when the radio reporters and spectators in the stands are still standing, throws a failed tackle at the player advancing on his sideline. Butcher will chase the player madly and throw a second kick, this time with a murderous intent, in the apex of the small box. Terry Butcher will also never overcome the ghost of those ten seconds at the Mexican midday. "He only dribbled the rest of my teammates once, but he dribbled me twice, the little bastard," he will tell the press many years later, with his eyes glazed over. Kenny Sansom and Terry Butcher will never return to Mexico, not even to the tourist beaches far from Mexico City. In the future, without children or stable partners, they will have as a hobby (at almost sixty years old each) to get together to drink whisky on Thursday nights and invent new insults against the Argentinian player who now, unmarked, enters the big box with the ball stuck to his feet. Before the start of the play, a man gives a bad pass. With that mistake, the story begins. He could have played backwards or to his right, but he decides to send the ball to the player who is less free. That man is called Hector Enrique and he stays motionless after the pass, with his hands on his waist. After that game he will never be able to separate from the player, as if an invisible string from that vertical pass was transformed, over time, into a magnetic field. Enrique doesn't know it yet, but he will take part in a World Cup again, 24 years later and on African soil. He will be part of the coaching staff of a manager who, fatter and older, will have the same face as the young man who now runs in a zigzag. And he will end his career even further, in the United Arab Emirates, back on the right side of the player who, two seconds ago, was given a pass to the wrong foot. For many nights in the future, in a strange country where women have to sit in the back seat of cars, Enrique will wonder what would have happened if, instead of that bad delivery, he had given the ball to Jorge Burruchaga, his second choice. Burruchaga is the one who now runs parallel to the player through the midfield. It's the thirteen hours, twelve minutes and twenty-four seconds and he's convinced that the player will give him the pass before entering the box, that he's just taking the defenders away to leave him alone in front of the three posts. Burruchaga runs and looks at the player; with a body gesture he tells him "I'm free in the middle" and while he waits for the pass in vain he doesn't know that one day, some years later, he will accept a bribe in the French league and will be punished by the International Federation. Another misplaced delivery. But he, frozen in the present, still runs and waits for the pass that never comes. Days later he will score the decisive goal of the final, but the world will only have eyes and memory for another goal. Year after year, tribute after tribute, his will not be the one most admired. One night, Burruchaga will call to Saudi Arabia to talk with his friend Hector Enrique, and he will lament, a little jokingly, a little seriously, that goal scored by someone else that overshadowed the decisive goal of the final. Then Enrique will see a sandstorm out the window and, without intending to, will make him smile. "That goal wasn't so great," he'll say, "I gave him the pass, if he didn't scored it, it was to kill him". Inside the pitch the wind is blowing at 12 kilometers per hour. If it had been blowing at 60 kilometers per hour, as it did in Mexico City six days later, the play might have not ended well. The advance seems fast by an optical illusion, but the player regulates the rhythm, slows down and deceives. There is a secret geometry to the precision of that zigzag, a rigour that would have been broken by a change in the wind or the reflection of a wristwatch from the stands. Terry Fenwick thinks about the variables of randomness as he showers crestfallen after defeat. Especially in one, the least far-fetched. Before the game, Fenwick advised his manager Bobby Robson that it would be best to give the opposing player a man-to-man marking. Bobby responded that the marking would be zonal, as in previous games. What would have happened if Robson had listened to him? asks himself Terry Fenwick, naked in the solitude of the dressing room, with water hitting his temples. Right now, at thirteen hours, twelve minutes and twenty-six seconds of midday, he sees the player arrive with the ball dominated; he thinks he's going to pass it into the centre of the box. Fenwick thinks the same as Burruchaga, he leans his whole body on his right leg to avoid the pass and leaves the left flank unlocked. The player, with a small jump, enters then through the free space, steps on the box and finds the three posts. "Fuck", Terry Fenwick told the press in 1989, "he ruined my career in four seconds". Two years after the outburst, in 1991, Fenwick will spend four months in prison for drunk driving. He will say, by the middle of the next decade, that he would not shake hands with the Argentinian player if he saw him again. At the same period, one of his daughters will turn eighteen. During the party, Terry Fenwick will find her kissing an Argentinian on a beach in Trinidad. He will recognize the boy's identity because of a blue and white jersey with the number ten on the back. Fenwick does not know it yet, but in his old age he will be coaching an unknown team called "San Juan Jabloteh" in Trinidad and Tobago, a country that played only one World Cup, but has beaches. Fenwick will get drunk every day on the sand of those beaches. On the afternoon of his daughter's meeting with the Argentinian, he'll want to get close to the boy and beat him. The Argentinian will make a gesture to go out to the left and then escape to the right. Fenwick, again, will eat the feint. Eight steps, out of forty-four, will give the player inside the box, and they will be enough to understand that the scenario is not auspicious. There is one opponent breathing at his neck on his right, Terry Butcher; another on his left, Glenn Hoddle, prevents him from giving the ball to Burruchaga; Fenwick has recovered from the feint and now covers the possible pass backwards, and at the front, goalkeeper Peter Shilton closes into him from the near post. The north, south and east are closed to any manoeuvres. It is now thirteen hours, twelve minutes and twenty-seven seconds. Three more hours in Buenos Aires. Six more hours in London. In any city in the world, at any time of the day or night, trying to get a shot on goal in the middle of that mess of legs is impossible, and the one who knows it best is Jorge Valdano, who arrives alone, very alone, on the left. No one notices Valdano's existence, neither now in the box nor during primary school, in Santa Fe's town of Las Parejas. Jorge Valdano sat reading novels by Emilio Salgari while his classmates played football during breaks, swirling around behind the ball. Football seemed like a basic game to him at the age of nine, but something happened to him at eleven: he understood the rules and knew, without surprise, that the other kids didn't practice it with intelligence. He began to play with them and, while the rest chased the ball without strategy, he moved around the sidelines looking for the geometry of the sport. And he was good. He played for two clubs in the town and was soon called from Rosario to play for Newell's youth teams; he made his debut in the Argentinian first division before he was eighteen. At twenty he was a world-youth champion in Toulon. At twenty-two he had already played for the senior national team. But in those dizzying years he never loved the sport above all. If he was given a choice between a game among friends or a good novel, he always chose the book. Until that moment in his thirties, Valdano was not sure he had chosen his true vocation. That's why now, as he waits for the pass, he finally feels that this could be his destiny, that perhaps he has come into the world to touch that ball and place it in the net. He knows that the player's only option is to pass to the left. He has no other choice. As he steps into the box he thinks: "If he doesn't give it to me, I'll leave everything and become a writer." But the player enters the box without looking at him. Neither Butcher, Fenwick, Hoddle nor Shilton are aware of him. Not even the cameraman, who follows the play with zoom, can pick him out in time. In the video, Valdano is a ghost who only shows his full body when the ball is in the apex of the small box. Jorge Valdano does not know it yet, but at the end of that tournament he will start writing short stories. There is no greater enemy for an striker than the goalkeeper. The rest of the rivals can use the sneaky tackle or the knees for the thigh blow. It doesn't matter, they are legal weapons in a man's sport and the attacked can return the action on the next play. But the goalkeeper, the guardian, the goalie, the keeper (like Lucifer's, their names are endless) can touch the ball with his hands. The goalkeeper is an anomaly, an exception capable of undoing with his hands the best acrobatics that other men do with their feet. And until that day no outfield player had ever managed to repay that affront at a World Cup. So now, when the player steps into the box and looks into the eyes of goalkeeper Peter Shilton (grey shirt, white gloves) he understands the hate in the Englishman's eyes. Half an hour earlier, the Argentinian had avenged every attacker in the history of football: he had scored a goal with his hand. The strikers's palm had arrived before the goalkeeper's fist. In the rules of football this action is forbidden, but in the rules of another game, more inhumane than football, justice had been done. That is why, at this crucial moment in history, at thirteen hours, twelve minutes and twenty-nine seconds, Peter Shilton knows he can get revenge. He knows full well that it is in his hands to disrupt the greatest goal of all times. He needs to do it, moreover, to return to his country as a hero. Shilton was born in Leicester, 36 years before that Mexican midday. Already a living legend, he didn't need to make it to his first and last World Cup to prove it. He doesn't know it yet, but he'll be playing professionally until he's forty-eight. In the future, he will play the leading role in many unforgettable saves which, added to those of the past, will make him the greatest English goalkeeper. However (and he doesn't know this either) in the future there will be an encyclopedia, more famous than the Britannica, that will say about him: "Shilton, Peter: English goalkeeper who received, on the same day, the goals known as 'the hand of God' and 'of the century'. That will be his karma and it's better that he doesn't know it, because he's still looking into the eyes of the approaching Argentinian player and he's covering his left post like his teachers taught him. He believes Terry Butcher can make it in time with the final tackle. "Maybe this will end in a corner," he thinks. "Maybe I can reach the ball with my fingertips." Nor does he know that two years later a video game with his name will be released in Great Britain, entitled "Peter Shilton's Handball", or that his children will play it, in secret, during the 1992 holiday season. It is better that he does not know the future now, because he must decide, right now, what the next move of the player will be. And he decides: Shilton plays to the left, throws himself to the ground and waits for the left-footed shot across. The Argentinian, who does know the future, chooses to play to the right. Before touching the ball with his left foot for the last time, at the thirteen hours, twelve minutes and thirty seconds of the Mexican midday, the Argentinian player sees that he has left Peter Shilton behind; sees that Jorge Valdano is dragging Terry Fenwick; sees that Peter Raid, Peter Beardsley and Glenn Hoddle have been left on the road; sees Terry Butcher who throws himself at his feet with his boots spiked; sees Jorge Burruchaga who slows down his career with resignation; sees Hector Enrique, still stuck in the middle of the field, who makes a fist with his right hand; He sees his manager jumping off the bench as if he'd been sent off by a rocket and the other manager, the rival, looking down so as not to see the end of his advance; he sees a redheaded man with a smoking pipe on the first row of the stands; He sees the line of chalk on the opponent's goal and remembers the face of the worker who, during half-time, went over it with a roller; he clearly sees his brother the Turk who, aged seven, throws in his face a mistake he made at Wembley in a similar move; he sees his brother's lips full of caramel when he says: "Next time, don't shoot it across, you little fool, you'd better do feint to the goalie and go right." He sees his brother's face with the light of the kitchen where the scene took place, he sees the mischief with which he was looking at him; he sees, behind the goal, a sign that says Seiko in white letters on a blue background; he sees the green painted nails of his first girlfriend, the day he met her, and he sees that same girl, now a woman, breastfeeding a child; he sees a deflated ball and he sees himself, at the age of nine, trying to dominate it; he sees his mother and father dragging, with effort, a huge kerosene can along a dirt road where it has rained; he sees a box in a locker room in La Paternal, which bears his name and surname in bright letters, he sees his adolescent pride when he first reads his name and surname at his locker; he sees a stadium, its wooden boards, and he also sees that one day the whole stadium, and not just the locker, will bear his name. The Argentinian player has controlled the air in his lungs for nine seconds, and now he is about to release all the air in one breath. Unlike all the opponents and teammates he has left behind, he can breathe with his left leg, and can also sense the future as he moves forward with the ball at his feet. He sees, ahead of time, that Shilton will throw himself to the right; he sees Terry Butcher's murderous intention behind him, he sees himself, many years later, with a grandson in his arms, visiting the entrance of the Azteca Stadium where a bronze statue with no name stands: just a young player with a proud chest, a ball at his feet and a date engraved on the base: June 22, 1986; he sees a rave in London where two fifteen-year-old boys escape from a mocking crowd; he sees a shady apartment where there is only one table, two friends and a mirror on the table; he sees a girl on a tropical beach who lets herself be kissed by a boy wearing an Argentina shirt; He sees a swarm of journalists and photographers outside every airport, every terminal, every stadium and every shopping mall in the world; he sees a boy playing a video game in the city of Leicester while his brother watches through the window to make sure his father doesn't show up; he sees the body of an old man who died in Switzerland eight days before that midday, a man who also saw all the things in the world in a single moment. He sees Fiorito at day; he sees Napoli at afternoon; he sees Barcelona at night. He sees Boca's stadium about to burst and he's in the middle of the pitch but he doesn't have a ball on his feet but a microphone in his hand; he sees an old man at Carthage's airport, waiting for his son on the last flight from Mexico, to hug and comfort him; he sees a swollen ankle; he sees a Red Cross nurse, chubby and smiling; he sees all the goals he's scored and the ones he'll score; he sees all the goals he's shouted and the ones he'll shout; he sees himself, at fifty-three years old, watching from a balcony the world's final at the Maracaná; he sees the day when he will see his mother for the last time; he sees the night when he will see his father for the last time; he sees all his children's children grow up; he sees the pains of a woman who is about to give birth to a left-footed child in Rosario, one year and two days later than that Mexican midday; he sees a minimal, impossible, unreachable space between the right post and Terry Butcher's boot. He closes his eyes. He lets himself fall forward, with his body bowed, and the whole world becomes silent. The player knows that he has taken forty-four steps and twelve touches, all with his left foot. He knows the move will take ten seconds and six decimals. Then he thinks it is time to explain to everyone who he is, who he has been and who he will be until the end of time.
Favor for the GTA Reddit of the day. Kudos to - www.wizardslots.com and various Redditors for input. I have removed those fields that are just for 'Land Based' as they should allow online gambling alright. Some have very odd laws and will need tested.
Afghanistan
Algeria
American Samoa
Argentina
Azerbaijan
Bahamas
Bhutan
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Belarus
Brunei
Cambodia – gambling is illegal for natives, but land-based gambling is legal for foreign visitors
Cayman Islands – land-based gambling is illegal, and online local casinos are banned, whereas foreign slots are not
China
Costa Rica
Cuba
Cyprus – online sports betting ok with a license
Czech Republic – majority of online gambling is illegal (except online lottery and online sports betting)
Ecuador
Greece – some online gambling is illegal
Iceland – online casino gambling and online poker illegal – offline gambling is legal
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Israel
Jamaica
Jordan
Kuwait
Lebanon
Libya
Liechtenstein
Luxembourg – illegal online other than sports betting and online lottery
Maldives
Mali – only legal for foreign visitors
Mauritania
Malta - gambling services need a license from the government, this is up to R* to apply for
Malaysia - note: seems to work for some and not for others. No clear reasons why so far.
Montenegro
North Korea
Oman
Pakistan
Paraguay
Peru
Poland – everything but online sports betting is illegal
Portugal - gambling services need a license from the government, this is up to R* to apply for
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Somalia
South Africa - online gambling is illegal
South Korea
Sri Lanka
Sudan
Syria
Thailand - everything but Horse Racing and the Government Lotto
Tuvalu
United Arab Emirates
Vietnam
Venezuela
Notable edits - Originally the USA was added to this, it is illegal to gamble in Hawaii and Utah for example but the casino seems to function as normal there. There are a few countries as well that have gambling laws but again GTA's seems to duck underneath these. I'm not an enforcer of the law, nor am I a solicitor but common sense would lead me to say if GTA is allowing you to do it then you shouldn't have to worry about anything. If you cannot access the Casino games, VPN's are a known work around but this could net you in trouble. I won't be assisting players on where to find those (various comments have so far) but be warned it is to be used at your own discretion.
HBO’s ‘Welcome to Chechnya’ Is Latest Anti-Russian Cold War Propaganda - by Max Parry • 26 Aug 2020
Trailer - https://youtu.be/GlKkj_aHMXk In 2017, explosive allegations first emerged that the authorities of the Chechen Republic were reportedly interning gay men in concentration camps. After a three year period of dormancy, the accusations have resurfaced in a new feature length documentary by HBO Films entitled Welcome to Chechnya. Shot between mid-2017 and early last year, the film has received widespread acclaim among Western media and film critics. Shortly after its release last month, the Trump administration and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced an increase in economic sanctions and imposed travel restrictions against Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and his family, citing the putative human rights abuses in the southern Russian republic covered in the film. Most of the boilerplate reviews of Welcome to Chechnya have heaped particular praise upon the documentary’s novelty use of ‘deepfake’ technology to hide the identities of alleged victims in the cinematic investigation. Yet at the closing of the film, one subject who previously appears with his likeness concealed by AI reveals himself at a news conference without the disguise—rendering the prior use of synthetic media fruitless. Maxim Lapunov, who is not even ethnically Chechen but a Russian native of Siberia, is still the only individual to have gone public with the charges. Despite the obvious credibility and authenticity questions regarding the use of such controversial technology, it has not prevented critics from lauding it unquestioningly. Unfortunately, even some in alternative media have been regurgitating the film’s propaganda such as The Intercept, a slick online news publication owned by billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar whose financial ties to the national security state and U.S. soft power institutions conflict with the outlet’s purported mission. Notably, The Intercept’s glowing review of Welcome to Chechnya was written by Mehdi Hasan, a journalist who also works for Al-Jazeera, a news agency owned by the ruling emirs of Qatar, a theocratic dictatorship where homosexuality is actually illegal . The documentarians follow the work of a purported network of activists who evacuate individuals like Lapunov out of the Caucasian republic. This is the film’s primary source of drama, despite their encountering seemingly no difficulty from the local authorities in doing so. We are then subjected to random cell phone clips of apparent hate crimes and human rights abuses going on, but at no point does the film crew even visit the Argun prison where the anti-gay pogroms are alleged to have taken place. In 2017, the imperial hipsters at Vice news were given unrestricted access to the facility where nothing was found and the warden adamantly denied the allegations — but not without expressing his own disapproval of homosexuality which was assumed by his interrogators to be evidence of the detentions having occurred. In the HBO documentary, a similar hatchet job is done to Ramzan Kadyrov, whose uncomfortable denial of the existence of homosexuality in the deeply conservative and predominantly Muslim republic is implied to be proof that the purges must be happening. One may recall this same sort of smear tactic was previously done to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. However, Kadyrov and the warden’s predictable responses to the subject serve only as confirmation bias, not confirmation. The selective outrage in response to the alleged purges, like all things Russia-related, is highly politicized. Western viewers would have no idea that of the 74 countries worldwide where homosexuality is still criminalized, Russia isn’t among them. In more than a dozen of those nations, same-sex activity is punishable by death, a few of which happen to be close strategic allies of the United States, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. As recently as 2017, the U.S. was one of 13 countries to vote against a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution condemning countries with capital punishment for same-sex relations to avoid falling-out with those allies, most of which have legal systems established on their respective interpretations of Sharia law. While the local authorities of the Muslim-majority Chechen Republic have been allowed to introduce some elements of the fundamentalist religious code by the Russian government such as the banning of alcohol and gambling and requiring the wearing of hijab by women, as a federal subject it is still ultimately beholden to Russia’s secular constitution. In fact, it was Kadyrov’s predecessor, Alu Alkhanov, who hoped to govern Chechnya with Sharia law, not the current administration. Credulous audiences would have no clue that Kadyrov actually represents the more moderate wing of Chechen politics because there is absolutely no history or context provided, a deliberately misleading choice on the part of the filmmakers. The absence of any historical background deceptively suggests that theanti-gay sentiment in the mostly Muslim North Caucasus is somehow an extension of the homophobia in Russia itself, despite the autonomous differences in religion, culture, and society. In the last decade, the weaponization of identity politics has been central to Washington’s ongoing demonization of Russia and its President, Vladimir Putin, with the issue of LGBT rights particularly given significant attention. While homosexuality is decriminalized, there is admittedly no legal prohibition of discrimination against the LGBT community in Russia. In particular, human rights groups have condemned the notorious federal law passed in 2013 known as the ‘gay propaganda law’ that forbids the distribution of information promoting “non-traditional sexual relations” to minors, which entails the banning of gay pride parades and other LGBT rights demonstrations. However, the measure enjoys widespread support among the Russian people whose social conservatism has been resuscitated by the Orthodox Church since the breakup of the Soviet Union. It is rather ironic and hypocritical that the West has since taken issue with this turn, considering it facilitated that political transformation. In reality, the reason for the relentless vilification of Putin has absolutely nothing to to do with the exaggerated plight of gays in Russia and a lot more to do with the reversal of policies under his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. In the nineties, the mass privatization of the former state-owned enterprises during Russia’s conversion to capitalism resulted in the instant impoverishment of millions and the rapid rise of the notorious ‘oligarchs’ which the West characterized at the time as progression towards democracy. In the loans-for-shares scheme, a new ruling class of bankers and industrialists accumulated enormous wealth overnight and by the middle of the decade, owned or controlled much of the country’s media outlets. The oligarchs held enormous power and influence over the deeply unpopular Yeltsin, who would surely have lost reelection in 1996 without their backing and the assistance of Western meddling in the form of massive loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While economic disparity and corruption persists today, overall the Russian economy has been rebuilt after its energy assets were re-nationalized and brought back under state control by the Putin administration, resulting in improved living standards and income levels for the last two decades. By the same measure, the Russian people can hardly be blamed for associating homosexuality with the unbridled neoliberalism, vulture capitalism and draconian austerity imposed on their country by Western capital. It is also truly paradoxical that the notion of “Russian oligarchs” has become synonymous with Putin in the minds of Westerners when many of the most obscenely wealthy oligarchs of the Yeltsin era now live in exile as his most ardent political opponents after they faced prosecution for their financial crimes. Not coincidentally, the initial reports of the ‘gay gulags’ in Chechnya were published in Novaya Gazeta, an anti-Putin newspaper partly owned by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the very man who ushered in the economic liberalization which auctioned off the state assets to oligarchs like co-owner Alexander Lebedev. Gorbachev’s reforms, particularly that of perestroika (“restructuring”), also had destructive consequences for the national question and ethno-regional interests. V.I. Lenin had famously called the Russian Empire a “prison house of nations”, in reference to its heterogeneous range of nationalities and ethnic groups. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 especially re-agitated ethno-national conflicts in the Caucasus, a region that had enjoyed several decades of relative harmony and stability under socialism with rights and representation that did not exist in pre-revolutionary Russia. While Azerbaijan and Georgia were granted independence, Chechnya and many other municipalities remained under federal control of the Russian Federation, as sovereignty did not constitutionally apply because it had never been an independent state. Not to mention, its oil and gas reserves are essential to Russia’s very economic survival. The jihadism which plagued the Caucasus was an outgrowth of the U.S.-backed ‘holy war’ in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the brainchild of Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor in the Jimmy Carter administration. It was the Polish-born Brzezinski who not only authored the geostrategy of arming the mujahideen against the Soviets but the efforts to turn Russia’s own large Muslim minority community against them. This was mostly unsuccessful as the majority of its 20 million Muslims (10% of the population) are harmoniously integrated into Russian society, but the Atlanticists did fan the flames of a militant secessionist movement in Chechnya that erupted in a violent insurgency and became increasingly Islamist as the conflict dragged on. For Washington, the hope was that the West could gain access to Caspian oil by encouraging the al-Qaeda-linked separatists rebranded as “rebels” vulnerable to its domination in the energy-rich region. The collapse of the USSR already escalated hostilities between the intermingling ethnic communities of the region, but the antagonisms were intensified by CIA soft power cutouts like the Jamestown Foundation fomenting the secessionist insurrection. As the separatist movement grew increasingly Wahhabist thanks to U.S.-ally Saudi Arabia, its more moderate nationalist faction led by Akhmad Kadyrov eventually defected back to the Russian side. The elder Kadyrov would pay the price when he was assassinated in a 2004 stadium bombing in Grozny during an annual Victory Day celebration, with his son becoming one of his successors. The Kremlin’s support for the Kadyrovs should be understood as a compromise which prevented the more radical Islamists from taking power, which apparently Washington would be happier with running the North Caucasus. What a human rights utopia Chechnya would be as a breakaway Islamic state, under the salafists which during the Chechen wars committed unspeakable acts of terrorism including the taking of hospital patients, theater goers, and even hundreds of schoolchildren as hostages. One can be certain that if there aren’t anti-gay pogroms going on in Chechnya now, there definitely would be without the likes of Kadyrov in power. In the documentary, what the Chechen leader does implicitly acknowledge may be occurring are individual honor killings within families and clans, a social problem common in other Muslim countries such as Pakistan, and certainly not a human rights issue particular to Chechnya. Many instances of honor killings in the Muslim world have included homosexuality as a motive for the extrajudicial killings by relatives of victims believed to have betrayed the family honor. On the other hand, Kadyrov himself has overseen the establishment of unprecedented reconciliation commissions to address the issue of honor culture, blood feuds and vendetta codes of Caucasian tribes. Kadyrov’s promotion of reconciliation has made significant progress in reducing such killings which were rampant during the Chechen Wars as family members would often seek to avenge the deaths of loved ones. Now that the region is in a period of relative stability, peace and economic recovery, with the once devastated city of Grozny now known as the ‘Dubai of the North Caucasus’, the West is suddenly feigning concern over human rights. The swift end brought to the conflict by Putin was another reason for his becoming a target of Washington who had been counting on the balkanization of southern Russia. In a pinnacle of imperial projection, the explanation for Putin’s rise to power has since been revised by the Atlanticists to his having somehow secretly masterminded the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings while director of the Federal Security Service (FSB, the KGB’s successor), as if the neocons hope to deflect all of the longstanding rumors about the Bush administration and the 9/11 attacks onto the Kremlin. Except this Machiavellian conspiracy would be a lot more believable if the Chechen wars had not been going on since the early nineties, with much worse terrorist attacks already having been committed by the separatists, such as the taking of thousands of hospital patients as hostages in southern Russia. Since the end of the Chechen Wars, on the flip side the U.S. has also backed Russian opposition figure and Putin critic Alexei Navalny, a right-wing Islamophobe who has pledged to secede the North Caucasus while comparing its Muslim inhabitants to cockroaches. Despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric and minuscule 2% support among Russians, Navalny has been depicted as a “pro-democracy” and “anti-corruption” campaigner in Western media, who have been crying foul over his recent suspected poisoning in Russia and ensuing comatose airlift to Germany. If only the naive American liberals who read The New York Times and The Washington Post had any idea that Mr. Navalny has far more in common with the dreaded Mr. Trump than Putin does. Meanwhile, the U.S. has already experienced blowback for its nurturing of terrorism in the Caucasus in the form of the Boston Marathon bombings, which recently returned to the news when convicted Chechen-American perpetrator Dzokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence was vacated on appeal last month. In the aftermath of the April 2013 attacks, it was revealed that Tsarnaev’s deceased older brother and co-conspirator Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been radicalized attending seminars financed by the Jamestown Foundation while traveling abroad in Tblisi, Georgia, and the brothers’ uncle Ruslan Tsarni had previously been married to the daughter of high-ranking U.S. intelligence officer Graham Fuller, Brzezinski’s CIA station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, during the Afghan-Soviet war. It also came to light that ‘Uncle Ruslan’ had previously worked for the CIA-linked United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and established a company called the Congress for Chechen International Organizations which funded Islamic militants in the Caucasus. Despite the astounding ‘coincidences’ surrounding the Tsarnaev clan, Uncle Ruslan was never considered a person of interest by the FBI, who had ignored warnings by the Russian FSB of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s extremism prior to the attacks. Two years before Putin’s election, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the prime mover of the West‘s plan to dominate the globe by using Islam to bring down the USSR in delivering the Soviet equivalent of the Vietnam War, wrote in The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997): “…The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world’s paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power.” Those words were written before the return of both Russia and China on the world stage, developments that have thrown a monkey wrench into Washington’s plans which the Russophobic Warsaw-native did not anticipate in his blueprint for Western hegemony. When the U.S.-backed headchoppers in the Syrian war nearly had control of Damascus, just a thousand miles or so from Sochi, the threat of jihadism returning to the Caucasus became very real. Beginning at the Munich Conference in 2007, Putin had begun to criticize the monopolistic expansion of NATO on Russia’s borders — but after the subsequent overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi where Moscow witnessed Libya transformed into a hotbed of terrorism like post-Saddam Iraq, the prospect of the same happening in Syria was an existential threat that could not be tolerated. In mainstream media, reality has been inverted where Moscow’s self-defense has been portrayed as expansionism, even though the so-called “annexation” of Crimea was virtually nonviolent compared to the Nazi junta initiated by Washington in Ukraine and the Russian-speaking people of Donetsk and Luhansk who voted to join Russia did not wish to end up like those massacred in Odessa. Besides, is the U.S. not currently annexing northeast Syria? The Crimean parliament and Syrian government invited Moscow, while the same cannot be said for the US presence in violation of international law. Those with no respect for the sovereignty of nations in Washington would prefer Americans to see Russia as an adversary. During the Cold War, the threat was communism, but with capitalism restored in Eastern Europe, it became necessary to manipulate liberals into perceiving Russia as a ultra conservative regime. They must also keep Americans from knowing the true history of US-Russia relations — that Russia was the first nation to recognize American independence when Catherine the Great’s neutrality during the Revolutionary War indirectly aided the Thirteen Colonies in their victory against the Loyalists and Great Britain. During the War of Independence, the Russian Empress had maintained relations with the U.S. and rebuffed British requests for military assistance. The Russian Empire also later helped secure the Union victory during the Civil War, with an Imperial Navy fleet off the shores of the Pacific preventing the Confederates from landing troops on the west coast and deterring intervention by the British and the French. Then as Allies in WWII, while the U.S. was victorious in the Pacific, it was the Soviets who truly won the war in Europe, a feat the Anglo-Americans are still trying to take credit for to this day. Unfortunately, despite his promising rhetorical embrace of détente with Moscow that has made him the subject of political persecution, Donald Trump has proven to be every bit as hostile toward Russia as his forerunners. With the latest actions taken by his state department regarding Chechnya that are right out of the Brzezinski playbook, the idiom that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” certainly applies to Washington and US-Russia relations. *Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. Max may be reached at [email protected]
Online gambling legislation and regulation. Starting your own gambling product.
Mobile gambling If you plan to develop an app with the ability to deposit and withdraw real money, then such a product automatically falls into the category of gambling and you will need to license your business for successful operation. Mobile and Web Based Apps So let’s talk about the different kinds of online gambling apps available on web and mobile. We’ll be covering both free-play gaming apps and real money casino app games you can find for iOS, Android devices and web browsers. Mobile gambling is more common for poker, casino, bingo, and skill games. They have advantages in terms of a low barrier to enter the market, instant liquidity, product knowledge, and marketing expertise, minimal infrastructure costs, and the ability to bring a brand to the market quickly. Consequently, this form of gambling does not sit neatly with jurisdictional boundaries. Multiple gambling opportunities are available, including betting on various events and markets, in a relatively simple format. Gambling products can also be integrated into betting on television shows or virtual racing and sports games as well as offering lotteries, bingo, poker and casino games. Most Popular Gambling Apps Sports betting, casino, poker and lotteries are the most popular forms of online gambling. However, other forms are available too. These include the following: Bingo, slot machines, different card games, roulette and other game of chance. One of the best things about online gambling and betting apps is the number of choices you have.
Sports Betting
Betting means making or accepting a bet on the outcome of a race, competition, or other event or process, the likelihood of anything occurring or not occurring, or whether anything is or is not true. Today most sports betting is done via mobile-friendly sites and apps.
Today most sports betting is done via mobile-friendly sites and apps.
The introduction of live betting for sports like soccer and tennis means that bettors who are sitting inside stadiums watching games can now pick up their mobile devices and find real-time betting value with the best sports gambling apps. This has really unlocked a door to the future of sports gambling and the popularity of online gambling apps.
Poker
Many sites offer free poker, where no real money is wagered, although in some cases players can accumulate credits that can be exchanged for prizes. This is the case why people are going to play for real money. There is an ongoing debate over whether poker should be classified as a game of chance or skill. The parameters of legal poker playing are still unclear and differ between jurisdictions. Since you are not gambling with money, I’m pretty sure under the law it’s just a video game for now.
Blackjack
Blackjack is the game of choice to many high-rollers and do you know why? Because blackjack is a challenging, logic and skill-based game where your thinking, strategy, and calculations determine the outcome of the game.
Bingo
Bingo is one of the most popular and socially accepted games in the world. Bingo is a traditional form of gambling that has seen considerable innovation in recent years. It is also the only form of gambling recognized in the Gambling Act that does not have a specific statutory definition, the Act providing simply that “bingo” means “any version of that game, irrespective of by what name it is described”. Bingo must be played as an equal chance game. For game to be classed as “bingo” it must meet the Act’s definition of “equal chance gaming” (as opposed to casino gaming). Thus, it: must not involve playing or staking against a bank, and must be a game in which the chances are equally favorable to all participants in the sense that each ticket or chance has the same probability of success as any other. Licensed bingo is a well-regulated and socially responsible form of gambling that takes place in a safe environment. Many sites offer multiple forms of bingo with different features, types of games, and costs of play. These sites often cater specifically for women and some research suggests that they may appeal to markets who would not typically engage in traditional forms of gambling.
Slots
Slot machine is one of the most beloved game among the gambling community and it has been a part of the industry for a long time. They provide fun and entertainment and their simplicity allows gamers to start playing at once. This can play out in different ways depending on the machine you’re playing. For instance, there’s Pick a Fortune, a five-reel, 20 line game that puts players right in the studio of a television game show, including the potential to play a Deal or No Deal-style bonus round. A super trend over the past few years is mobile-friendly slot games. These apps and websites were developed to enable players to enjoy their favorite games on their smartphones at any time. Another dominant slot trend is licensed branded slots that are based on popular movies, television, and musicians. Virtual Money vs Real Money Let’s find out the difference between social gambling and real money gambling, as well as the differences between gambling through apps and gambling through a web browser. It can be quite confusing trawling through all the casinos, slots, and lotteries available, both through your mobile web browser as well as through mobile app stores, in the form of downloadable apps.
Virtual money
The main difference between virtual money and real money gambling is that the in-game virtual currency in social games and gambling-type games is used only like credits that are not paid out as winnings or anything given to player in cash, making these games exempt from gambling regulations.
Virtual money is loaded on user game accounts via in-app purchases in mobile applications or the game balance funding from a card via web based applications.
Real money gambling
Real money gambling via your mobile device is only allowed in countries where laws have been passed that allow for this type of gambling online, or there are no laws in place that prevent it. The payment systems are the legal way of services payment in the gambling app, performing as the intermediary between the gambling facility and the client. With their help, users replenish deposits and withdraw funds to personal accounts in financial institutions. If the application uses the payment system of a well-known brand, that gives players additional confidence in the resource. Nowadays, there is a wide range of payment systems, some of which operate all over the world, other systems are oriented towards the citizens of one or several countries. A number of services accept money of different world currencies, while others allow currency transactions of one state only. What is an Online Gambling Licensing The internet has a global audience, there’s no single piece of legislation that covers the legality of online gambling for the entire world. Mobile gambling doesn’t typically accept customers from every single country in the world. It often focuses on certain specific regions.
Instead, most countries have their own local laws that deal with the relevant legal and regulatory issues.
Ultimately, questions of legality all go back to the location of the casino or where the website operates out of. In closed regulatory systems, such as Italy, France, and the Netherlands, licenses, and advertising rights are limited to domestic providers, which must be located within their country’s geographical boundaries and these are only permitted to offer some types of products. Some jurisdictions, for example, Norway, Sweden, and Canada legalize and regulate online gambling, but this is limited to a single site that is owned by the government. Under such an approach, the government becomes the operator and regulator and all revenues are returned to the government. Remote gambling is generally permitted. That means that an operator that is licensed may provide gambling services to citizens in the country via all forms of remote communication (and using equipment that may be located in the country or abroad). Equally, a remote operator may be licensed to offer gambling services to citizens in any jurisdiction in the world using equipment located in the country. The law provides that, for each type of gambling (betting, gaming, and participating in a lottery), there will be two forms of license available: remote and non-remote forms (land-based). If you provide facilities for remote gambling, online or through other means, and advertise to consumers you will need a license from the licensing jurisdictions or local licensing authorities. Before an online gambling site signs up its first customer, before it accepts its first bet before the first card is dealt, it must be licensed by a recognized governmental entity.
Certain regions in the world have specific legislation in place that allows them to license and regulate companies that operate online gambling sites or provide industry services (such as the supply of gaming software). These regions are referred to as online gambling jurisdictions or licensing jurisdictions.
Depending on what type of entertainment you are going to implement in your internet establishment, you will have to apply for the corresponding permissions. Online gambling laws in Europe vary from one country to the next. The industry is well regulated in some countries and less so in others. There are several online gambling jurisdictions located in Europe. Some of these are members of the European Union (EU), and thus subject to the various rules and regulations of that body, while others are independent. Each of these jurisdictions has an authority that’s responsible for approving gambling sites for licenses that enable them to offer their services legally. They also regulate their licensees. Countries that Provide Gambling Licensing Today there are lots of licensing jurisdictions located all over the world and offering different terms for their customers. Depending on the country, licenses can be local, international (distributed in several countries), have a different set of documents for registration, costs of registration and further support, various operating conditions and other special details.
Which gambling license is both internationally recognized?
The government of Ireland offers casino operators, software, and service providers in the gambling industry, with a gambling license that allows gambling operators to conduct business related to casino, lotto, and other gaming-related activities. Ireland Gambling License is one of the most popular license for online casinos worldwide. Ireland has long been recognized as one of the preferred locations for Online Gambling operators to base their operations. This success has been due to a combination of factors, such as a progressive legislative system, political stability, first-rate telecommunications facilities, and a well established financial services industry. A wide range of gambling sites operates out of Ireland including sports betting, casino sites, poker, bingo, and more. In stark contrast, the UK is the largest regulated market for online gambling in the world, and corporations are already comfortable exploiting the intersections of gambling and gaming, betting in-play, social gaming, Bitcoin, financial trading and spread betting, betting exchanges, e-sports and, most profitably, mobile gambling. 40% and 60% of online gambling in the UK took place in Gibraltar.
International licensing
Europe is home to the following online gambling jurisdictions: Alderney, Gibraltar, Isle of Man, Malta. Malta is currently the country that is most accommodating to gambling companies, and the license offers whitelisted online gambling in sports and casino games in many European territories. But takes an extreme amount of time in paperwork and background checks. Also, you pay 5% of all your gross profit to the EU.
Among countries offering gambling licensing services, the attention should be paid to Curaçao jurisdiction, which is considered to be one of the most promising for the online gaming business.
Curaçao Internet Gaming Association (also known as Curaçao eGaming) is both a regulator and a licensor, and its licensing works worldwide except Curaçao itself, USA, France and Netherlands. Using Curacao as an example, let us examine in detail the process of obtaining a license, the necessary documents and expenses. How to get a License on Curaçao
Documents necessary for company registration:
criminal record;
passport scans;
bank account confirmation;
documents proving payments for utility services.
After the company is registered, an operator can apply for the license providing the following documents:
a document certifying the right of domain possession;
description of games planned to be used in the project;
a list indicating countries of potential operation;
illustration of server locations to be used in the project;
a copy of the agreement with a software provider.
Gambling license cost:
Bank account opening $1000
Company registration $3600
Company management per year $3600
Application processing fee $1000
License fee per year $4800
Equipment/software fee starting from $1500
Server maintenance per year $6000
Apart from that pay for technical support and maintenance every year. The entire license issuing process takes between 2-4 weeks. Curacao Internet Gaming Association (CIGA) also has the power to review a license and, if it finds that an operator has breached a license condition, has the power to impose a range of sanctions including revocation of the license. Apple and Google Gambling Rules You’ll be surprised at the limited number of real money gambling app options available on the AppStore and Google Play Store. Most real money casino gaming is done through gambler’s mobile web browsers and not through mobile gambling apps that you’ll find for iPhone and Android phones. Apple allows online gambling applications in a few forms, and not just in places where it is explicitly permitted. They do not allow any payments through the applications – those have to be done on the websites. Apple has far stricter developer guidelines for iOS apps than Google does for Android apps, so it’s fine to assume that whatever you choose to download from iTunes is usually safe, secure, and meets a certain standard.
Any real money casino in the iTunes app is required to have proper licensing and permissions before Apple will approve the app for use or downloads. While Google Play is technically regulated, it is much more loose in what can be hosted.
Apple Store
Gambling, gaming, and lotteries can be tricky to manage and tend to be one of the most-regulated offerings on the App Store. Apple has rules for apps that support real money wagering, including sports betting and poker. Those apps and lotteries must have necessary licensing and permissions in the locations where the App is used, must be geo-restricted to those locations, and must be free on the App Store, and Apple rate even simulated gambling apps as appropriate only for users 17-years-old and up.
Play Store
Google keeps the reigns tight. To be able to successfully upload apps to the Google Play store, developers need to have a valid license for the specific countries they are targeting and comply with their regulations. The app must be free to download and must prevent under-age users from gambling in the app. As a final precaution, all gambling apps are required to display prominent information regarding responsible gambling practices. This brings its policy in line with the Apple App Store. Countries where gambling is illegal It is also important to remember that while gambling is growing rapidly in many places, in others it is totally or partially prohibited. As well as in the majority of the US, sports betting is illegal in India, Pakistan, and China, three of the largest gambling markets in the world. Most countries have rules against gambling. Almost all Islamic countries prohibit gambling of every kind, but many turn a blind eye to online gambling or simply do not have regulations in place for this grey area. In the United Arab Emirates, however, any kind of gambling is prosecuted. National lotteries are the only legal forms of wagering on the Asian country’s mainland. Cambodia, North Korea strictly forbids online and offline gambling amongst its own citizens but allows tourists to participate in these activities. Qatar is the strictest country of all when it comes to gambling laws. All forms of gambling activities are considered illegal, and even sports betting is not permissible. Starting your own gambling product Numerous online casino platforms in the market offer fantastic casino games like bingo, poker, roulette, and many more.
If you have an idea, but don’t know where to start, we advise you begin with a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) to pilot your proof of concept for investors. MVP spotlights your core features and lets your investors know there are bigger and better things to come.
For MVP you do not need a large team, just a few people are enough to create a fully functioning prototype. In the case of successful numbers of your prototype, the further development of a full-fledged product will require more team, resources and time, however you will be sure that your development and your costs will pay off.
States are not homogenous entities. They are composed of dozens of different interest groups and cliques, each with their own vision for what the state ought to do and what society ought to look like. In functioning states, these groups agree on more things than they disagree on--or at least, the powerful groups are able to monopolize power enough to keep dissident voices drowned out. Carefully crafted power sharing arrangements, usually aided along by some sort of common enemy or common mission, keep states functioning well enough to work as coherent actors in the international arena. But these alliances are not set in stone. Like the sands of the Rub’ al Khali, they shift with the winds. One day, two factions may be the closest of allies. The next, one might overreach. One might think they have become too powerful to need to be held down by the commitments they’ve made to their erstwhile allies. And what happens when they’re wrong? Chaos. Power in Saudi Arabia On paper, the King of Saudi Arabia holds near-absolute power over the country. With no constitutional constraints, it would seem that the King (or more recently, the Crown Prince) enjoys unlimited power in Saudi society. There is no elected--nor even appointed--legislature to serve as a check on the King’s power. If the King wishes to permit women to drive, he need nearly decree it, and so shall it be. Viewing Saudi Arabia through this lens, however, flattens the existing power dynamics in the country. The King’s absolute power is in practice constrained by the varied interest groups that help to lend legitimacy to the institution of the monarchy, such as (to name a few) the military, the House of Saud, and the religious establishment (the ulema). The relationship between the ulema and the monarchy has been critical to the continued existence of the Saudi Arabian state. Starting with the 1744 alliance between Muhammad ibn Saud, the founder of the al-Saud dynasty, and Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, the two groups have formed something of a symbiotic relationship. The House of Saud provides the Wahhabist movement with protection and propagates its beliefs, and in exchange the Wahhabist movement lends legitimacy to the monarchy. The Grand Mosque Seizure; or, Why Saudi Arabia is the Way it Is In November 1979, hundreds of armed religious militants took control of the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca--the holiest site in Islam. Their leader, Juhayman al-Otaybi, declared his brother-in-law, Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani, to be the *Mahdi--a redeeming figure in Islami prophesied to arrive on Earth several years before Judgement Day. For a period of two weeks, al-Otaybi and his supporters managed to maintain control of the Mosque. The ensuing assault led to the deaths of hundreds of fighters and pilgrims. The Grand Mosque Seizure was, in part, a response to the growth of “western influence” within Saudi Arabia. Al-Otaybi condemned the West calling for the abolition of television and radio, the expulsion of non-Muslims, and the removal of women from the workplace. For al-Otaybi, the ruling al-Saud family’s refusal to resist this western influence had robbed them of their right to rule. While al-Otaybi was ultimately unsuccessful in overthrowing the House of Saud, his insurrection did led to an important revelation for the Saudi monarchy: religious extremism was perhaps the single greatest threat to their continued hold on power in Saudi Arabia. Rather than restricting the power of the ulema in an attempt to curtail this threat, King Khalid dramatically expanded the role of the ulema and the religious police, surrendering some of the House of Saud’s power in exchange for additional stability and security. This state of affairs, with some tinkering, would remain the status quo for the next three decades. Shifting Sands Since the September 11th, 2001 attacks and the beginning of the Global War on Terror, the monarchy has taken significant steps to attempt to curtail the influence of the ulema. The monarchy has become much less tolerant of clerics that speak out against the monarchy, often arresting them (though these arrests are usually temporary, they are enough to scare the dissident clerics into silence). The rise of Mohammad bin Salman in the mid-2010s accelerated this curtailment of the ulema’s power. Viewed as a youthful reformer, MbS has undone many of the laws that were put in place following the Grand Mosque Seizure: in 2018, he removed the ban on female drivers, while in 2021, he legalized gambling and the consumption of alcohol. While he was within his rights to do so--again, the monarchy has no formal restrictions on its authority--these actions flew in the face of the alliance struck between the House of Saud and the ulema. Had the Crown Prince stopped there, conservative opposition to his rule might have been vocal, but nevertheless manageable. Resistance in this period was largely restricted to existing Saudi exile groups like Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia and Hizb ut-Tahrir. A collection of senior clerics in Saudi Arabia rallied together to compose a new Memorandum of Exhortation--a call-back to the 1992 Memorandum written in the aftermath of Gulf War--condemning the Kingdom’s slide away from righteousness and towards western hedonism. The participating clerics were quickly stripped of their positions, arrested, or forced into exile, but their memorandum nevertheless made the rounds--especially in more rural, more conservative communities, where the monarchy had less power (relatively) than the ulema. Still, it spawned little but discontent whispers and prayers that someone would do something to set the Kingdom back on the righteous path. But he didn’t stop there. No more than four months later, Saudi Arabia invited the Bahraini Shi’a cleric Isa Qassim to Saudi Arabia. By itself, this would have created a diplomatic incident--Qassim was, in essence, the leader of the Shi’a opposition to the Saudi-aligned Sunni ruling dynasty of Bahrain, serving as a persistent thorn in the side of the Bahraini royal family. The fact that the House of Saud was inviting him to Saudi Arabia not just as a guest, but paying for the construction of a Hawza (a Shi’a seminary), was nothing short of sacreligious. The moment this news went public, conservative Saudi society flew into an outrage. How dare the monarchy collaborate with the radifa. Whatever control the monarchy had over the clergy melted away overnight, with most every Sunni cleric in the country denouncing the government’s support of the heretics in some form or another. Eight of the twenty-one members of the Council of Senior Scholars, the highest religious body in the country (and also one of the religious institutions most aligned with the House of Saud) resigned in protest. Among those resigning included several members of the al ash-Sheikh family, the foremost family of religious scholars and the direct descendents of al-Wahhab. Even Abdul-Rahman Al Sudais, the Imam of the Great Mosque of Mecca, issued a public denouncement of the government’s decision to fund the Hawza. Protests broke out throughout the country, especially in Mecca, Medina, and the Nejd, and while Saudi security forces were able to break their resolve after a week or two of protests, their discontent did not dissipate. The Saudi government’s 2022 decision to invite sixteen new American military bases only reignited tensions. Overnight, Saudi Arabia went from having no American bases to being the country with the sixth most American military bases. That anger stayed, bubbling beneath the surface. Waiting for an outlet. It finally found that outlet in 2022. At the opening ceremony of the new Hawza 'Ilmiya Dammam, a car bomb ripped through the crowd, destroying the largest building in the compound. When first responders arrived at the scene to treat the casualties, another suicide bomber--this one disguised as a first responder himself--detonated his vest, killing several dozen paramedics and security personnel. Several hours later, on the other side of the country in Jazan, a car bomber struck an under-construction American base, killing several Saudi construction workers (most of whom were migrant workers from South Asia or the Philippines), two American contractors leading the construction effort, and three American officers. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attacks the next day. In total, some eighty-four people, including three American servicemen, two American contractors, and forty Saudi nationals, died in the attacks, while another two- to three-hundred were wounded. Among those dead were several of the most important clerics of the new Hawza, including Qassim and the Pakistani marja’ Muhammad Hussain Najafi. The other Pakistani marja’ involved in the Hawza, Bashir al-Najafi, succumbed to his injuries a week later. The response from the predominantly Wahhabi Sunni clergy in the country ranged from silence (for those not willing to risk the ire of the monarchy) to celebratory (for those more dedicated to their faith than self-preservation). For the Saudi government, this was a concerning sign of what was to come. Older members draw comparisons between the current political moment and that of the 1990s, when outrage against the monarchy led to the formation of conversative opposition groups and an increase in terror attacks by groups like al Qaeda. And indeed, their fears may be legitimate. Anti-American protests are becoming increasingly common throughout the country, with the country’s American embassies, consulates, and base construction sites under near constant siege by conservative protesters. The Sahwa movement, a peaceful Islamist group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood opposed to American bases on the Arabian peninsula, has returned in full force after being all but crushed by government repression in the 1990s. Increasing numbers of Saudi clerics are issuing open criticisms and condemnations of the government and its recent activities, posing a serious challenge to the legitimacy of the rule of King Salman and the Crown Prince. In a different world, the monarchy might have been able to find some way to placate these dissidents. The warnings were there. But once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s impossible to put it back in. In April 2022, King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman launched an unprecedented purge of the religious establishment and the non-ruling branches of the House of Saud. Over the course of 48 hours, Saudi security forces rounded up and arrested numerous prominent figures on corruption charges. While this was in and of itself insignificant--MbS had already used corruption arrests to establish his power in the House of Saud in the past--the scale of them was substantially larger than any previous arrests. Moreover, those royals detained through this process found themselves stripped of the rights and comforts they had come to expect during detentions like these: rather than the Ritz Carlton, they instead found themselves thrown into dank, musty jail cells, as though they were any other criminal. This was a signal to the rest of the House of Saud: Mohammad bin Salman would no longer tolerate anything even remotely resembling opposition to his agenda. The Prince’s seizure of power did not end there. Later that week, King Salman announced that the Wahhabi religious clerics would no longer have any temporal power outside of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. Saudi Arabia, according to the King, was going to become a more tolerant, progressive nation. Non-Muslims would have the same rights as Muslims for the first time in the Kingdom’s history. As if this weren’t an insult enough to the religious establishment, the King then declared that the Kingdom would be holding an interfaith celebration in the city of Mecca. This celebration would mark the first time that non-Muslims were (legally) allowed entrance into the Grand Mosque in over a thousand years--flying in the face of a restriction that predated the House of Saud itself. While King Salman’s decree robbed the Wahhabi religious establishment of its temporal power, it could never hope to so suddenly deprive them of their ability to sway the hearts and minds of the masses. Almost every cleric in the country, Salafi or Sufi, Wahhabi or Shafi’i, Sunni or Shi’a, immediately and unequivocally condemned the King’s decision to reverse a thousand years of tradition and allow non-Muslims into the holiest site of Islam. The Imam of the Grand Mosque resigned in disgust, stating that he would rather die than preside over kafirs gaining entrance to Holy City. Most of the Mosque’s clerics resigned with him.
The Situation on the Ground
The country has exploded into massive protests, attended by millions of people across the country. There are near-constant masses of people in the streets of Saudi Arabia’s major cities, while construction work on the proposed Church in Riyadh has been unable to continue due to the hundreds, if not thousands, of protesters surrounding the site at all times. Every day, their grip on Saudi society seems to slip further. Saudi Arabia has long relied on the cooperation of the religious establishment to quash dissent and break up protests. With that alliance shattered by King Salman’s recent actions, Saudi Arabia has had a harder time containing these protests than ever before. There are frequent reports of Saudi security personnel collaborating with the protesters, often sneaking advance warning of police crackdowns to protesters or allowing protest leaders to slip away from arrest warrants. This environment has allowed numerous critics of the government a new lease on life, as dissent is simply too large and too widespread for the government to crack down on all dissidents at once. One major resurfaced critic of the Saudi government has been the Muslim Brotherhood. Once an ally of the Saudis, the Muslim Brotherhood was declared a terrorist organization in 2014, after its Egyptian leadership was deposed in the 2013 coup d’etat. Since then, the group’s Saudi Arabian leaders were forced to flee into hiding in Qatar, Iraq, and, to a lesser extent, Bahrain. While the Muslim Brotherhood itself is not Wahhabist, and has many doctrinal disputes with the leading branch of Islam in Saudi Arabia, it has nevertheless made significant inroads into Saudi society over the past several months. As clerics and Saudi conservatives have become convinced that monarchy is unable to deliver the Sharia-adherent society they so desire (and worse, that they have little ability to coerce the monarchy into doing so), many have turned towards the Muslim Brotherhood and its promises of democracy. If nothing else, at least the system promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood would allow them to vote out incompetent royals like Mohammad bin Salman! While many of these groups are not openly violent and are content to continue peaceful (if still terribly disruptive) means of protest against the government, other groups are not. Saudi intelligence is reporting a large surge in the membership numbers of extremist groups like Al Qaeda, Islamic State, and their affiliates. These groups are able to tap into the discontent that has manifested in Saudi society, using the more peaceful groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Sahwa Movement as a front for radicalizing and recruiting disenfranchised and disgruntled Saudi conservatives. Saudi intelligence suspects that the Kingdom’s sky-high youth unemployment rate--about 25 percent in 2019--has not helped matters, with many of the new recruits coming from the under-30 age group. Saudi intelligence suspects that the growth of these dissident and jihadi groups has also been assisted by covert funding from Qatar and the Qatari nobility (and in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood only, from Turkey as well), though as of yet, they have been unable to find concrete proof. Perhaps the most major opposition to Saudi rule, though, comes from the Wahhabi clerics that once lent so much legitimacy to the Saudi monarchy. Wahhabi clerics that had erstwhile been major supporters of the Saudi government took to every venue available to them--the pulpit, the streets, the internet, the radio--and loudly and repeatedly condemned the actions of the King and the Crown Prince, declaring that they had strayed from the path of the righteous and no longer had the moral authority to lead. Throughout the country, these Saudi intelligence and security forces have been overwhelmed trying to track down and arrest all of the clerics that have broken the law--either by insulting the King, calling for the death of unbelievers, or some other crime. Increasingly, they find that the public is providing a great deal of assistance in avoiding security personnel, providing housing, food, and other essentials that allow the clerics to go to ground and avoid arrest. Worse still, upper levels of the Saudi security apparatus have reported that their subordinates are, in some cases, simply refusing to carry out these arrest orders. Finally, elements of Saudi intelligence loyal to the Crown Prince himself are reporting rumors that should have Mohammad bin Salman very concerned. The recent instability in Saudi Arabia has led several members of the House of Saud to think that they could do a much better job running the country than this upstart reformer. While intelligence is unable to pinpoint exactly who is a threat to Mohammad bin Salman at this time, they have managed to suss out that there are ongoing talks between some members of the House of Saud and some members of the religious establishment that a palace coup might be the best way to ensure that their interests are protected. King Salman and MbS go away, the House of Saud can continue with its graft and corruption, and Sharia law and the power of the Wahhabis comes back. It’s a win for everyone. In short, Mohammad bin Salman faces a great number of issues that must be addressed--quickly--if he is to retain power.
Government Pockets Dry Up
(Written by Erhard) Saudi Arabia has been largely discounting oil export revenues to favor stronger relationships with its allies. This was destined to cause problems when $200 Bn, over 90% of total Saudi exports, come from revenues off of the oil they export. These oil revenues are so critical to the Saudi economy, that cutting off the revenue would send the economy into recession. The targets of these discounts were namely strong Saudi allies like the US, UK, Australia, India, Japan, and many more who are all known to be heavy oil consumers. Saudi Aramco, one of the largest companies on Earth by revenue, had shored up many of its accounts and had begun selling off assets to private investors and other companies just to keep itself afloat. The company, a state-owned enterprise, had to consult the government for this, but had really no other way to save itself. There were rumors in the company of bankruptcy, in one of the most profitable organizations, and layoffs had begun. Of the 76,000 employees, the company quickly shrunk down to 40,000 to recoup the losses. Oil prices across the world had never ever been lower. Fuel across the US was reporting record prices of $1.12 per gallon, which made consumers very happy while the Saudi economy was doing damage control, preparing for an implosion. It would seem the only way the company could recover would be to cut oil operations to slow the quantity to the market, and jack up the price to 20% over market value, effectively eliminating the discount and charging premiums to those who formerly had discounts. If implemented, the US consumer’s dream would be short-lived as they would approach prices of $4.15 per gallon, but would likely save the economy.
The Paper Tiger
A recent series of arrests has also brought to light an unanticipated vulnerability in the Saudi security establishment. Early in 2022, the Ministry of Defense announced plans to double the number of active-duty personnel in the Saudi Land Forces in a period of just two years. Assuming no retirements or fatalities (something that is hard to assume, given the ongoing Saudi intervention in Yemen), the Royal Land Forces will have to hire over three hundred people per day. Meeting this requirement in a country without conscription has required a massive increase in recruitment targets, coupled with a corresponding decrease in the standards used in hiring. In essence, anyone with a warm body that can hold a rifle and walk is being allowed into the military. Moreover, the massive increase in junior enlisted personnel has further taxed the brass’s ability to maintain discipline and unit cohesion: the army’s absenteeism rate has sky-rocketed, as there are simply too many recruits and too few skilled officers and NCOs in order to adequately enforce punishments. While the drop in Saudi Arabia’s combat capacity that this has caused is concerning on its own, far more concerning is the fact that not all of the recruits to the Saudi military have the country’s best interests at heart. A recent arrest of an Al Qaeda member in Riyadh revealed that numerous terrorist organizations, as well as other dissident organizations, have infiltrated substantial amounts of their members into the newly-expanded Saudi military. If left unchecked, these cells will pose a significant threat to the security of Saudi Arabia, and will be able to use their military training to greatly improve the efficiency of their parent organizations in the future. Moreover, it will give their parent organizations access to classified intelligence on Saudi (read: American) weapons systems, and likely lead to some of these systems ending up in the hands of militant groups in countries like Yemen. Similarly worrying is the monarchy’s deteriorating control of the Saudi Arabian National Guard. Separate from the traditional command structures of the Saudi military, the SANG has long served as the anti-coup, counter-insurgency, and counter-protest wing of the Saudi security establishment. It is comprised of a mixture of (largely conservative) tribal militias and personnel recruited from the Wahhabi religious establishment. Traditionally, these affiliations have helped protect the government from coups by the more liberal-minded military. In this instance, where the threat to the regime’s existence comes from conservative, religious parts of society, the loyalty of the National Guard has been called directly into question. Some worry that the ousted clerics and the more conservative elements of the House of Saud have compromised the integrity of the SANG, and may be able to use it in order to depose the current ruling family. Whatever the case, most agree that something needs to be done--and soon.
Issues Abroad
Naturally, when things go badly in a country as large as Saudi Arabia, they have a tendency to spill over into their neighbors. Below is a brief summary of some of the spillover effects in neighboring countries. The United Arab Emirates While the United Arab Emirates has long been the most “progressive” of the Gulf States, it is not without hardliners and conservatives. The country’s recent decision to decriminalize gay marriage has been met with considerable criticism from the country’s right-wing. Outrage against this decision--coupled with, Emirati intelligence suspects, but cannot prove, some assistance and funding from Qatar--has led to a revival of Al Islah, the UAE-branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The US presence in the UAE at Al Dhafra Air Base has also under scrutiny as the Sahwa Movement has spread across the border into the UAE, but so far, the movements are still content to resort to peaceful protest. Bahrain The death of Isa Qassim has sent shockwaves throughout Bahraini society, worsening already-existing tensions in the Shi’a-majority, Sunni-dominated nation. An important leader of the Shi’a community and political movement on the island, Qassim served as a constant voice for peace, frequently working to curtail the more militant wings of the Shi’a rights movement and channel them into peaceful activities like protest and, before the suspension of the legislature, voting. His martyrdom (and indeed, he is viewed as a martyr now in Bahrain) on Saudi territory has led to a great deal of suspicion in the Shi’a community of Bahrain, with many believing that Saudi security forces let the assassination occur in order to eliminate one of the peninsula’s largest Shi’a opposition leaders. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant: enough people believe it that the new leaders of the opposition who have risen to fill the void have become more convinced that the only way to have their demands met is through violence. In the future, Shi’a opposition groups on the island will be more likely to turn to violence in order to have their demands met. The royal family has become increasingly skeptical of Saudi Arabia’s commitment to their continued existence and independence following its actions in Qatar. While they are not brave enough to stand up to Saudi Arabia (yet) owing to their proximity to the country, the Royal Family is deeply uncomfortable with the Saudi coup in Qatar. In essence, it appears to the Royal Family that Saudi Arabia will abuse the Crown Prince’s marriage ties in order to replace other leaders of the GCC as punishment for working against Saudi interests. Given the marriage ties between the grand daughter of the King of Bahrain and the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, Bahrain considers itself to be at heavy risk of one of these new “succession coups.” As such, Bahrain has started to (quietly) search for new allies to help guarantee its security against an aggressive Saudi Arabia. Iraq The death of Grand Ayatollah Basheer al-Najafi on Saudi territory at the hands of Sunni jihadists has led to a dramatic flare-up in sectarian tensions in Iraq. As one of the Big Four clerics in the holy city of Najaf, al-Najafi was one of the preeminent leaders of the Shi’a faith. Candlelight vigils and other mourning ceremonies have been held throughout the country to mark the passing of one of Shi’a Islam’s greatest minds, while anti-Saudi sentiment has been further cemented in the country. tl;dr
Saudi Arabia has dramatically curtailed the powers of the religious establishment, and broken a thousand-year-old prohibition on non-Muslims entering the Holy City of Mecca
There are massive conservative protests in Saudi Arabia. The largely conservative security establishment is sympathetic to these protests, hampering the Saudi response.
The threat of terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia has increased dramatically
So far, two Al Qaeda attacks have led to the destruction of the Hawza in Dammam (and the death of three very important Shi'a marja') the death of 84 people (including forty Saudi nationals, three American servicemen, and two American contractors), and the injury of another two- to three-hundred
Saudi Arabia is facing a massive revenue crisis due to its heavy discounting of oil exports
There is large resistance to the rule of MbS and King Salman within conservative circles, with some suspecting that they will not be in power for much longer.
Smaller conservative protests are occurring in the UAE
Perhaps the most common question our team gets is if online gambling is legal in the UAE. The short answer to this question is that no, online gambling – like virtually all forms of gambling in the UAE – is prohibited by law. But a deeper dive into the country’s gaming policies shows that the situation isn’t entirely black and white. As the rest of the gambling types, online gambling operations in the United Arab Emirates is also fully illegal. No licenses are granted to any local providers. Accessing foreign gambling or betting websites is also absolutely illegal. Gambling in the United Arab Emirates. If you ever think of the United Arab Emirates as a powerful and rich country you are right. And any casino player out there knows that wealth and gambling go hand in hand. Therefore, the United Arab Emirates offers a lot of gambling opportunities for tourists. Known as one of the richest nations of the world, the United Arab Emirates is a paradise when it comes to vacation destinations and all sorts of fun activities, gambling included. The UAE is composed of seven emirates: Umm al-Quwain, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, and Ras al-Khaimah. Casino gambling is strictly forbidden as well as the advertising of any form of gaming and the penalties for breaking the law can be severe. Cruise liners are not permitted to run any gambling activities when docked in UAE. As mentioned earlier, gambling is not legally permitted in Dubai, as is the case with anywhere in UAE. The government and culture of the UAE strictly goes by the Islamic law, considering indulging in games of chance a huge sin. However, that doesn’t mean that Muslims don’t gamble ever. But betting with any real money is clearly disapproved of, and hence there’s a great deal of uniformity regarding such a ban in all the major Islamic nations. It is important to understand that Islam is the official religion of the country, pursuant to the Constitution of the UAE. Gambling is prohibited in Islam, and this forms the basis for the federal and local emirate laws that prohibit all forms of gambling, as well as the advertising of any form of gaming. Punishment for Gambling Article 414 of the United Arab Emirates Penal Code states that whoever gambles shall be punished by detention for a maximum period of two years or by a fine not exceeding 20,000 dirhams. United Arab Emirates; Almost all Islamic countries prohibit gambling of every kind, but many turn a blind eye to online gambling or simply do not have regulations in place for this grey area. In the United Arab Emirates, however, any kind of gambling is prosecuted and players can serve up to two years in jail under the Penal Code’s Article 414. The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority United Arab Emirates: Gambling Laws and Regulations 2021. ICLG - Gambling Laws and Regulations - covers common issues in gambling laws and regulations – including relevant authorities and legislation, application for a licence, licence restrictions, digital media, enforcement and liability – in 37 jurisdictions. Gambling Laws in the United Arab Emirates. There is no legal gambling in United Arab Emirates. According to article 414 of the UAE Penal Code, ‘whoever gambles shall be punished by detention for a maximum period of two years or by a fine not exceeding 20,000 AED. A penalty of detention or a fine shall be inflicted if the crime occurs in a public place, a place open to the public, or in a place or house prepared for gambling’. Consequently,
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