Iran, Middle East, Saudi Arabia

Water: The Gulf’s most precious resource under attack

WATER AND DESALINATION PLANTS

The Gulf states may have been built on wealth from oil, but it is another liquid – water – that keeps these desert countries running day-to-day.

Recent attacks on desalination plants in countries on both sides of the Iran war have targeted the Gulf’s most precious commodity, and threatened to weaponise a resource needed to prevent the region’s megacities from collapsing.

Just days ago, Bahrain accused Iran of damaging a desalination plant, hours after the Iranians claimed a US air strike had hit one of theirs.

Securing plentiful water in a region with almost no underground supplies or rain has been central to the vaulting ambitions of the fast-growing Gulf countries. The solution has been desalination plants, which turn seawater into drinking water for millions of people in one of the world’s driest regions.

In Kuwait, about 90 per cent of drinking water comes from desalination, along with roughly 86 per cent in Oman, and about 70 per cent in Saudi Arabia.

Everyone thinks of Saudi Arabia and their neighbours as petro-states. But, in reality, they are saltwater kingdoms. They’re human-made fossil-fuelled water superpowers. It’s both a monumental achievement of the 20th century and a certain kind of vulnerability.

Nearly half the world’s total desalination capacity is in the Gulf. The processing of water is needed not only to quench the thirst of fast-growing populations, but also for hotels, resorts, shopping centres, golf courses, and other facilities.

Yet, what has been a marvel of engineering and economic planning, has also been recognised as the dangerous vulnerability it is. Gulf governments and their allies have long warned of the risks these systems pose to regional stability.

In 2010, a CIA analysis said attacks on desalination facilities could quickly trigger national crises in several Gulf states. If critical equipment were destroyed, water processing could be halted for months.

A leaked 2008 US diplomatic cable warned that Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital, “would have to evacuate within a week” if either the Jubail desalination plant on the Gulf coast, or its pipelines or associated power infrastructure were seriously damaged. The cable added that “the current structure of the Saudi government could not exist” without the plant.

Gulf states are thought to have bolstered the resilience of their desalination networks since then, but the recent air strikes have again highlighted their vulnerability.

The Iran war is not the first conflict in the region in which water-processing plants have been targeted. After Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War, Iraqi forces sabotaged power stations and desalination facilities as they retreated.

At the same time, millions of barrels of crude oil were deliberately released into the Gulf, creating one of the largest oil spills in history. Workers deployed booms around the intake valves of desalination plants to prevent the vast slick from contaminating seawater-intake pipes.

The destruction left Kuwait largely without fresh water and dependent on emergency water imports. Full recovery took many years. More recently, Houthi rebels have targeted Saudi desalination facilities.

In the Gulf, desalination facilities are not merely infrastructure. They are essential lifelines that supply drinking water to millions. Striking them risks turning a military confrontation into a direct threat to civilian survival.

Iran, too, uses desalination and must deal with acute water shortages. Tehran claimed that a US air strike had damaged one of its water processing plants last weekend.

Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, said the strikes on Qeshm Island, in the Strait of Hormuz, had affected the water supply for 30 villages. He warned that in doing so, “the US set this precedent, not Iran”. The US military denied striking the facility.

The Institute for Strategic Studies said it was unlikely the Americans had targeted the desalination plant. However, Qeshm was essential to Iranian plans to block the strait to shipping, and was probably being targeted for other strategic reasons – such as to hit underground stocks of drones and missiles.

What seems certain, given the conflagration, is that the Americans would have been pounding Qeshm Island to take out these underground facilities where the drones and the missiles basically embodied the last strategic option, or one of the last strategic options, of Iran.

For Iran, that would’ve been a nice coincidence to create an information operation to say the Americans are targeting civilian assets. And it would justify the retaliatory attacks on desalination plants without looking like the villain.

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Artificial Intelligence, Arts, Intellectual Property, Publishing, Technology

Authors should be protected over big tech

COPYRIGHT LAWS AND AI

Intro: Creative artists and writers are voicing their anger at AI theft of their work with ‘Human Authored’ logos and an empty book. The government must listen

DURING last week’s London Book Fair, The Society of Authors stamped its books with “Human Authored” logos, in scenes that might have come from a dystopian novel. They described its labelling scheme as “an important sticking plaster to protect and promote human creativity in lieu of AI labelled content in the marketplace”.

Entrants to the fair were also given copies of Don’t Steal This Book, an anthology of some 10,000 writers including Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, Malorie Blackman, Jeanette Winterson, and Richard Osman. The pages of the book are completely blank, but the back cover states: “The UK government must not legalise book theft to benefit AI companies.” The message is clear and simple: writers have had enough.

The book fair arrived before the government is due to deliver its progress report on AI and copyright, after proposals for a relaxation of existing laws caused outrage last year. Philippa Gregory, the novelist, described the plans for an “opt-out” policy, which puts the onus on writers to refuse permission for their work to be trawled, as akin to putting a sign on your front door asking burglars to pass by.

– 10,000 authors publish an empty book to protest against the theft of books by tech companies to train AI models

According to a University of Cambridge study last autumn, almost 60% of published authors believe their work has been used to train large language models without consent or reimbursement. And nearly 40% said their income had already fallen as a result of generative AI or machine-made novels, a digital incarnation of Orwell’s Versificator in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Factual books are clearly most susceptible to ChatGPT and other AI generative tools. While sales in fiction are rising, sales of nonfiction were down 6% last year compared with 2024. But three nonfiction books, all by female authors, bucked the trend: Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir of abuse; A Hymn to Life, Gisèle Pel icot’s testimony and account of her ordeal at the hands of her ex-husband; and Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s exposé of working at Facebook. The success of these first-person narrations show the powerful reach of nonfiction beyond the world of publishing. These are painfully human stories; readers must be able to trust in the authenticity of their voices.

Last year, novelist Sarah Hall requested that her publisher Faber, print a “Human Written” stamp on her latest book, Helm. “AI might mimic the words more rapidly, but . . . it hasn’t bled on the page,” she said. “And it doesn’t have a family to support.”

Writers’ livelihoods must not be sacrificed to the promise of economic growth. The UK’s creative industries contributed £124bn to the UK economy in 2023, of which £11bn came from publishing. The Society of Authors is requesting consent and fair payment for use of work, and transparency as to how a book was “written”. These are hardly radical propositions. But in an era of fake news and AI slop, they are sadly necessary. Writers and creative artists need more than sticking plasters. They need robust legislation.

A House of Lords report recently published lays out two possible futures: one in which the UK “becomes a world-leading home for responsible, legalised artificial intelligence (AI) development” and another in which it continues “to drift towards tacit acceptance of large-scale, unlicensed use of creative content”. One scenario protects UK artists, the other benefits global tech companies. To avoid a world of empty content, the choice is clear.

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Arts, Broadcasting, Culture, Opera, Theatre

Fires of the Moon

MUSICAL-THEATRE

– Fires of the Moon is powerfully imagined and atmospherically shot Credit: Channel 4

This powerfully imagined and atmospheric new piece of music-theatre, with an outstanding cast of Welsh singers, is a rare creation that blends film, opera, and drama. A screening such as this rarely makes it to television.

Originally an opera commissioned by OPRA Cymru, first shown as a film at the Edinburgh Film Festival last summer, Fires of the Moon (Channel 4/S4C) is not an example of an opera setting a book, but rather a free imagining of some scenes from Un Nos Ola Leuad (1961) by Caradog Prichard – a modern classic that has become familiar in translation as One Moonlit Night. It was a novel initially criticised for its unrelenting view of Welsh life but became accepted as a realistic reflection of a changing world.

Haunting and elegiac, the visual style conjures up the bleak landscapes of Wales – slate quarries, gloomy pubs, shining lakes and distant hills, with the evocative steam engine of Blaenau Ffestiniog puffing through. In the 1950s, a son Hogyn returns by train to visit his mother who, a generation ago, was confined to an asylum. But why? The story unravels from a youthful romance between Hogyn and Jini, replayed in a cinema that he watches with Jini as the usherette, and the tale pulls no punches in its depiction of an unforgiving society.

Commencing with what sounds like a deliberate homage to the music of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius (and even a nod to his unfinished Third Symphony), the beautifully judged score by Gareth Glyn nourishes the narrative. Most will not know how well the Welsh text is reflected musically, except that its subtitled vocal lines sit perfectly within the framework that Glyn creates in his idiom, at once romantic and eclectic, that draws on everything from film music to Britten and Berg.

The orchestral playing by the Welsh National Opera Orchestra is vividly textured and strongly audible under conductor Iwan Teifion Davies (who is also the co-librettist with Patrick Young). The scenario by Marc Evans, though arguably lacking in contrast, allows for a choral number in the pub, a tense tea-time scene, and an intricate quartet in the car on the way to the gloom of the asylum.

Tenor Huw Ynyr is outstanding as the grown Hogyn, as is Dylan Jones as Hogyn the child, writing the story on the old typewriter as well as living it. Annes Elwy is Jini; the tormented figure of Mam is powerfully drawn by soprano Elin Pritchard. The attack by her brother and the scene of her awkward removal to the Denbigh Asylum are the most painful parts of the story.

Chris Forster directs; the black-and-white cinematography under Ben Chads is consistently excellent, and the synchronisation of the voices – always the trickiest aspect of opera with the voices shot separately for film – is pretty good.

This is an absorbing piece of music-theatre which demonstrates the distinctiveness and best of Welsh music and film-making. It also offers a way forward for transforming the medium of staged opera into compelling film.

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