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Heat-related deaths during this year’s Hajj continue to dominate the conversation on Saudi in the foreign press with the 1.3k death toll getting ink from Bloomberg and the Financial Times, among many others. All of them pin extreme heat and the “underworld Hajj industry” of unregistered pilgrims as the main culprits for the tragic event.
In context: “With nearly 2 mn participating each year, it is not unusual for pilgrims to die from heat stress, illness or chronic disease. It is unclear if the number of deaths this year was higher than usual, because Saudi Arabia does not regularly report those statistics. Last year, 774 pilgrims died from Indonesia alone, and in 1985, more than 1.7k people died around the holy sites, most of them from heat stress, a study at the time found,” the New York Times reports.
Talks of a gigaproject scale down once again percolating in the western press, with the BBC writing that “some of the doubts on the feasibility of such projects are turning out to be true.” An unnamed advisor affiliated with the Saudi government told BBC that a decision on where gigaprojects stand will be made soon. “The decision will be based on multiple factors,” he says. “But there is no doubt that there will be a recalibration. Some projects will proceed as planned, but some might get delayed or scaled down.”
BACKGROUND- Officials have lately hammered the idea of preventing the economy from overheating on the back of its economic diversification push. Reports of a slower buildout of Neom drove officials at the project to assure contractors and bankers that the buildout of the city was proceeding on schedule. Neom also recently came off the road in China with officials looking to rally interest from Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai.
