Mike Pence urges Saudi Arabia to free blogger Raif Badawi

Saudi Arabia will begin receiving requests for umrah pilgrimage from abroad for vaccinated worshipers starting August 9. The move comes 18 months after a border closure due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The White House announced plans to hold a virtual summit for democracy in December. Leaders of the world's democracies are set to take part.

Once allies, Saudi Arabia and the Taliban have been divided by war, betrayal, and 9/11. As Afghanistan changes and Middle East relations shift, the two won't rekindle ties, but another nation is looking closely at Kabul.

Here are a few reasons to pick up a copy of The Guardian on Thursday. Find these stories and much more when you grab a copy of The Guardian on Thursday.⁣⁣⁣⁣ ⁣

The Lebanese ambassador has been asked to leave Saudi territory within 48 hours. The move comes after Lebanon's information minister criticized the Saudi-led war against Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.

Martin Luther King III, son of the iconic civil rights activist Dr Martin Luther King Jr, was arrested while protesting for voting rights in front of the White House on Wednesday as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act was blocked in the US Senate. He and scores of other protesters were detained before later being released. The reasons for the arrests remain unclear. The 13-year-old granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr, Yolanda King, gave a speech at the rally.

Saudi Arabia is offering residents and tourists a unique safari experience in the desert of its capital Riyadh, at a site now home to 700 animals native to Africa. Lions and tigers are just a few of the animals that were flown in from outside the kingdom to the 175,000 square metres stretch of land that is now a safari park, where visitors seated in a vehicle can see them, some for the very first time.

A Yemeni Houthi rebel attack on the Saudi Arabian town of Jizan resulted in two casualties and seven injured. Among the dead from the Houthi-fired projectile are a Saudi and a Yemeni national.

"King, the terrorist is the one who has exported ... Daeshi ideology to the world, and it is you," Nasrallah said in a speech, using an acronym for Islamic State, the hardline Islamist group that declared a caliphate straddling parts of Syria and Iraq in 2014. His comments were criticised by Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati who said the criticism of Saudi Arabia did not serve the national interest or represent the country's official stance. Saudi Arabia and a number of other Gulf Arab states withdrew ambassadors and expelled Lebanese envoys in October and November over what the kingdom later said was arch-foe Hezbollah's dominance of the Lebanese state.

A new women's football league is all set to launch on Monday (November 22) across Saudi Arabia. Sixteen teams will take part in the league.

The US Justice Department has charged four Chinese nationals over a global hacking campaign, which took aim at dozens of companies, universities and government agencies in the United States and elsewhere.

Saudi Arabia steps up its green ambitions by planting thousands of trees in the world's largest saxaul botanical garden, winning itself a Guinness record.