Golfing News & Blog Articles
Saudis Preparing Mega-Purse Event, Execute 81 In Record Day Of Beheadings
After a flattering Atlantic profile of Mohammed bin Salman, that wasn’t enough to keep Golf Saudi’s sugar daddy and backer of the fluttering LIV Golf Investments to what he does best: screw with oil prices, complain about bad PR over Kashoggi and cut heads off.
It also seems he has yet to give up his sportwashing effort to lure pros away from the PGA Tour for a new golf league. Golfweek’s Eamon Lynch says the Crown Prince’s people have reconvened after the Phil Mickelson meltdown and demise of their league concept to try a new approach.
The latest conjecture has the Crown Prince’s coat holders planning to stage a tournament with an enormous purse that could dwarf the $20 million offered at the PGA Tour’s flagship stop in soggy Florida. The goal would be to engineer litigation by inviting Tour members to compete while hoping commissioner Jay Monahan denies the permission required to do so, thereby presenting an opportunity to challenge his control over where members play, or to at least jeopardize the Tour’s tax-exempt status as a 501c organization.
One tournament probably won’t do it. But then again, news of a record beheading day suggests MSM still has his touch.
The number of death penalty cases being carried out in Saudi Arabia dropped during the COVID-19 pandemic, though the kingdom continued to behead convicts under King Salman and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The state-run Saudi Press Agency announced Saturday’s executions, saying those killed had been “convicted of various crimes, including the murdering of innocent men, women and children.”
The kingdom said some of those executed were members of Al Qaeda or Islamic State or backers of Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
A Saudi-led coalition has been battling the Iran-backed Houthis since 2015 in neighboring Yemen in an effort to restore the internationally recognized government to power.
Those executed included 73 Saudis, seven Yemenis and one Syrian. The report did not say where the executions took place.
