Behind the facade of Wahabi conservatism in the streets, the underground nightlife for Jeddah's elite youth is thriving and throbbing. The full range of worldly temptations and vices are available — alcohol, drugs, sex — but strictly behind closed doors. This freedom to indulge carnal pursuits is possible merely because the religious police keep their distance when parties include the presence or patronage of a Saudi royal and his circle of loyal attendants (...)

Alcohol, though strictly prohibited by Saudi law and custom, was plentiful at the party's well-stocked bar, well-patronized by Halloween revellers.  The hired Filipino bartenders served a cocktail punch using "sadiqi," a locally-made "moonshine."  While top-shelf liquor bottles were on display throughout the bar area, the original contents were reportedly already consumed and replaced by sadiqi.  On the black market, a bottle of Smirnoff can cost 1,500 riyals when available, compared to 100 riyals for the locally-made vodka.  It was also learned through word-of-mouth that a number of the guests were in fact "working girls," not uncommon for such parties.

Additionally, though not witnessed directly at this event, cocaine and hashish use is common in these social circles and has been seen on other occasions. (...)

Four Saudi men have been beheaded by sword after being convicted of smuggling cannabis into the country, the interior ministry has said.

The government-owned SPA news agency identified the Saudi men on Monday as two sets of brothers - Hadi and Awad al-Motleq, and Mufarraj and Ali al-Yami.

They were beheaded in the southwestern city of Najran, found to have smuggled "a large quantity of hashish" into the country. The government did not say when the executions took place.

The beheadings raise to 32 the number of executions announced in Saudi Arabia so far this year, according to a tally by the AFP news agency.

Rights watchdog Amnesty International denounced what it called a "disturbing surge" in executions in Saudi Arabia.

"The Saudi Arabian authorities must halt all executions," the group said, adding that the executions of the two sets of brothers came "reportedly on the basis of forced confessions extracted through torture".

Amnesty's statement said the latest executions "bring the number of state killings in Saudi Arabia in the past two weeks to 17 - a rate of more than one execution per day".

"The recent increase in executions in Saudi Arabia is a deeply disturbing deterioration. The authorities must act immediately to halt this cruel practice," Amnesty's Said Boumedouha said. (...)

(...) Do the Saudis actually believe that the Security Council, chastened by Riyadh’s disapproval, will now force Israel to pull out of the West Bank, or unite to drive Bashar al-Assad out of power in Syria, or head off a possible rapprochement between the United States and Iran? Surely they know better. If they harbor such strong resentment against the Security Council, would they not have more influence over the group’s performance from the inside? And why seek the seat in the first place if they thought the elite group they were trying to join was impotent and feckless, as the statement from the Saudi Foreign Ministry announcing the decision said it was? It is hard to dispute the New York Times’s characterization of the decision as “a self-destructive temper tantrum.”

Saudi Arabia has traditionally pursued its international objectives through quiet diplomacy rather than open confrontation or grand gestures. It may well be that the Saudis would have been uncomfortable on the Security Council, where they might have been forced to take public positions on issues outside their relatively narrow range of interests — on territorial disputes in the Pacific, for example, or peacekeeping deployments in Africa. Did no one in Riyadh think that during the two years the kingdom campaigned for the election to one of the prized non-permanent seats? Apparently not, because the kingdom’s diplomats in Riyadh and New York were celebrating the election as a great success until they were sandbagged on Friday by the Foreign Ministry statement. (...)