Special moments as the curtain rises on first season of MBC’s Saudi Idol

The opening two episodes included some emotional moments as the would-be stars performed for the judges. (Shahid)
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Updated 23 December 2022
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Special moments as the curtain rises on first season of MBC’s Saudi Idol

  • The opening two episodes included some emotional scenes as would-be stars auditioned for the four judges in the hope of receiving the votes they needed to progress
  • The show is hosted by Saudi musician Rajeh Alharthi, and the celebrity judges are singers Aseel Abu Bakr, Ahlam Al-Shamsi, Assala Nasri and Majid Al-Mohandes

RIYADH: The first season of MBC’s “Saudi Idol” began this week with a look at the first batches of aspiring singers who auditioned for judges in the hope of being chosen to proceed to the next phase of the contest.

In common with other editions of the reality TV singing competition around the world, hopefuls across a range of musical genres began by auditioning for a panel of expert judges who decided which ones deserved the chance to progress and perform in front of a live audience.

The Kingdom’s version of the show is hosted by musician and TV presenter Rajeh Alharthi, and the celebrity judges are Yemeni singer and composer Aseel Abu Bakr, Emirati singer Ahlam Al-Shamsi, Syrian singer Assala Nasri, and Iraqi singer and composer Majid Al-Mohandes.

The opening two episodes, filmed in Riyadh and broadcast on Tuesday and Wednesday night on MBC1 and MBC Iraq, included some emotional moments as the would-be stars performed for the judges in the hope of receiving the minimum of three “yes” votes they needed to move on to the next phase.

The contestants in the first episode included Lamar Ali from Jizan, Khaled Gharibi from Taif, and Thikra Al-Hadi from Riyadh, all of whom impressed the entire panel of judges and received four yes votes. Issa bin Saleh, 19, progressed with three yeses; the no came from from Al-Shamsi, who said she aimed, through her rejection, to provide the young singer with an incentive to improve.

Saad Al-Kaltham looked to be out of luck when he received two rejections, from Nasri and Al-Shamsi, but was given a second chance to sing again and this time he was voted through to the next stage.

Each contestant had a story to tell about their lives and desire to sing, such as Ali Al-Nimri from Taif, who revealed that he has had health problems. That did not prevent him from impressing most of the judges as he claimed three yes votes, with only Al-Shamsi not convinced that he deserved to proceed.

Rinad Al-Mahdi from Jizan told how she discovered her talent for singing at an early age but her father had insisted that she prioritize her academic studies. She said hoped Saudi Idol would make her dreams come true; she got off to a good start by making it through the first test with four yeses.

The first episode concluded with Abdullah Al-Amiri from Jeddah, who said he comes from a family of artists and plays several musical instruments. He also impressed the whole panel and received four votes of approval.

The auditions continued in Wednesday night’s second episode. Saud Sharif and Monirah Al-Ali progressed with three yeses, while Mouna Khoury, Afnan Abdullah, Fahd Al-Jomhour, Saad Al-Naji, Ziad Lahtha and Ziad Abdul Kader each impressed all four of the judges.

The episode ended on a moving note as contestant Bushra Hammoud, a young woman with hemiplegia, which is paralysis of one side of the body, secured the three yeses she needed to proceed. Only Abu Bakr voted no. Other contestants who made it through included Rakan Al-Harbi, Jaber Othman and Hassan Asiri.

Saudi Idol airs on MBC 1 on Tuesday and Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. in Saudi Arabia and on MBC Iraq at at 11:00 p.m. Iraq time.
 


Photo group says it has ‘suspended attribution’ of historic Vietnam picture because of doubts

Updated 17 May 2025
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Photo group says it has ‘suspended attribution’ of historic Vietnam picture because of doubts

  • World Press Photo honored AP’s Nick Ut with its ” photo of the year ” in 1973
  • Picture of girl running from a napalm attack became an iconic symbol of the war’s tragedy

An organization that honored The Associated Press’ Nick Ut with its ” photo of the year ” in 1973 for a picture of a girl running from a napalm attack in the Vietnam War says it has “suspended its attribution” to Ut because of doubts over who actually took it.
World Press Photo’s report Friday adds to the muddle over an issue that has split the photographic community since a movie earlier this year, “The Stringer,” questioned Ut’s authorship. The photo of a naked and terrified Kim Phuc became an iconic symbol of the war’s tragedy.
After two investigations, The Associated Press said it found no definitive evidence to warrant stripping Ut’s photo credit. The AP said it was possible Ut took the picture, but the passage of time made it impossible to fully prove, and could find no evidence to prove anyone else did.
World Press Photo said its probe found that two other photographers — Nguyen Thanh Nghe, the man mentioned in “The Stringer,” and Huynh Cong Phuc — “may have been better positioned” to take the shot.
“We conclude that the level of doubt is too significant to maintain the existing attribution,” said Joumana El Zein Khoury, executive director of World Press Photo. “At the same time, lacking conclusive evidence pointing definitively to another photographer, we cannot reassign authorship, either.”
World Press Photo, an organization whose awards are considered influential in photography, won’t attempt to recover the cash award given to Ut, a spokeswoman said.
Ut’s lawyer, James Hornstein, said his client hadn’t spoken to World Press Photo after some initial contact before “The Stringer” was released. “It seems they had already made up their mind to punish Nick Ut from the start,” he said.
Gary Knight, a producer of “The Stringer,” is a four-time judge of the World Press Photo awards and a consultant to the World Press Photo Foundation.
The AP said Friday that its standards “require proof and certainty to remove a credit and we have found that it is impossible to prove exactly what happened that day on the road or in the (AP) bureau over 50 years ago.”
“We understand World Press Photo has taken different action based on the same available information, and that is their prerogative,” the statement said. “There is no question over AP’s ownership of the photo.”
Meanwhile, the Pulitzer Prize that Ut won for the photo appears safe. The Pulitzers depend on news agencies who enter the awards to determine authorship, and administrator Marjorie Miller — a former AP senior editor — pointed to the AP’s study showing insufficient proof to withdraw credit. “The board does not anticipate future action at this time,” she said Friday.
 


Elon Musk’s AI company says Grok chatbot focus on South Africa’s racial politics was ‘unauthorized’

Updated 17 May 2025
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Elon Musk’s AI company says Grok chatbot focus on South Africa’s racial politics was ‘unauthorized’

  • xAI blames employee at xAI made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic”
  • Grok kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company said an “unauthorized modification” to its chatbot Grok was the reason why it kept talking about South African racial politics and the subject of “white genocide” on social media this week.
An employee at xAI made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic,” which “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values,” the company said in an explanation posted late Thursday that promised reforms.
A day earlier, Grok kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa.
One exchange was about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name. Others were about video games or baseball but quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence against South Africa’s white farmers. It was echoing views shared by Musk, who was born in South Africa and frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.
Computer scientist Jen Golbeck was curious about Grok’s unusual behavior so she tried it herself before the fixes were made Wednesday, sharing a photo she had taken at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show and asking, “is this true?”
“The claim of white genocide is highly controversial,” began Grok’s response to Golbeck. “Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the ‘Kill the Boer’ song, which they see as incitement.”
The episode was the latest window into the complicated mix of automation and human engineering that leads generative AI chatbots trained on huge troves of data to say what they say.
“It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview Thursday. “It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to.”
Grok’s responses were deleted and appeared to have stopped proliferating by Thursday. Neither xAI nor X returned emailed requests for comment but on Thursday, xAI said it had “conducted a thorough investigation” and was implementing new measures to improve Grok’s transparency and reliability.
Musk has spent years criticizing the “woke AI” outputs he says come out of rival chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has pitched Grok as their “maximally truth-seeking” alternative.
Musk has also criticized his rivals’ lack of transparency about their AI systems, fueling criticism in the hours between the unauthorized change — at 3:15 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday — and the company’s explanation nearly two days later.
“Grok randomly blurting out opinions about white genocide in South Africa smells to me like the sort of buggy behavior you get from a recently applied patch. I sure hope it isn’t. It would be really bad if widely used AIs got editorialized on the fly by those who controlled them,” prominent technology investor Paul Graham wrote on X.
Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white and has repeated a claim that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”
Musk’s commentary — and Grok’s — escalated this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees, the start of a larger relocation effort for members of the minority Afrikaner group that came after Trump suspended refugee programs and halted arrivals from other parts of the world. Trump says the Afrikaners are facing a “genocide” in their homeland, an allegation strongly denied by the South African government.
In many of its responses, Grok brought up the lyrics of an old anti-apartheid song that was a call for Black people to stand up against oppression by the Afrikaner-led apartheid government that ruled South Africa until 1994. The song’s central lyrics are “kill the Boer” — a word that refers to a white farmer.
Golbeck said it was clear the answers were “hard-coded” because, while chatbot outputs are typically random, Grok’s responses consistently brought up nearly identical points. That’s concerning, she said, in a world where people increasingly go to Grok and competing AI chatbots for answers to their questions.
“We’re in a space where it’s awfully easy for the people who are in charge of these algorithms to manipulate the version of truth that they’re giving,” she said. “And that’s really problematic when people — I think incorrectly — believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what’s true and what isn’t.”
Musk’s company said it is now making a number of changes, starting with publishing Grok system prompts openly on the software development site GitHub so that “the public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI.”
Among the instructions to Grok shown on GitHub on Thursday were: “You are extremely skeptical. You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media.”
Noting that some had “circumvented” its existing code review process, xAI also said it will “put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can’t modify the prompt without review.” The company said it is also putting in place a “24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems,” for when other measures fail.


Trump says journalist Austin Tice has not been seen in many years

Updated 16 May 2025
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Trump says journalist Austin Tice has not been seen in many years

  • The US journalist was abducted in Syria in 2012 while reporting in Damascus on the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE: US President Donald Trump said on Friday that American journalist Austin Tice, captured in Syria more than 12 years ago, has not been seen in years.
Trump was asked if he brought up Tice when he met with Syria’s new President Ahmed Al-Sharaa during a visit to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.
“I always talk about Austin Tice. Now you know Austin Tice hasn’t been seen in many, many years,” Trump replied. “He’s got a great mother who’s just working so hard to find her boy. So I understand it, but Austin has not been seen in many, many years.”
Tice, a former US Marine and a freelance journalist, was 31 when he was abducted in August 2012 while reporting in Damascus on the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad, who was ousted by Syrian rebels who seized the capital Damascus in December. Syria had denied he was being held.
US officials pressed for Tice’s release after the government fell. Former President Joe Biden said at the time he believed Tice was alive.


Russia deliberately hit journalists’ hotels in Ukraine: NGOs

Updated 16 May 2025
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Russia deliberately hit journalists’ hotels in Ukraine: NGOs

  • The hotels hit were mostly located near the front lines, the organizations said
  • At least 15 of the strikes were carried out with high-precision Iskander 9K720 missiles

PARIS: Russia has deliberately targeted hotels used by journalists covering its war on Ukraine, the NGOs Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and Truth Hounds said on Friday, calling the strikes “war crimes.”
At least 31 Russian strikes hit 25 hotels from the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 to mid-March 2025, the two organizations said in a report.
One attack in August 2024 in the eastern city of Kramatorsk killed a safety adviser working with international news agency Reuters, Ryan Evans.
The hotels hit were mostly located near the front lines, the organizations said.
Just one was being used for military purposes.
“The others housed civilians, including journalists,” said RSF and Truth Hounds, a Ukrainian organization founded to document war crimes in the country.
“In total, 25 journalists and media professionals have found themselves under these hotel bombings, and at least seven have been injured,” they said.
At least 15 of the strikes were carried out with high-precision Iskander 9K720 missiles, they said, condemning “methodical and coordinated targeting.”
“The Russian strikes against hotels hosting journalists in Ukraine are neither accidental nor random,” Pauline Maufrais, RSF regional officer for Ukraine, said in a statement.
“These attacks are part of a larger strategy to sow terror and seek to reduce coverage of the war. By targeting civilian infrastructure, they violate international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes.”
RSF says 13 journalists have been killed covering Russia’s invasion, 12 of them on Ukrainian territory.
That includes AFP video journalist Arman Soldin, who was killed in a rocket attack near the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakmut on May 9, 2023. He was 32.


Omnicom Media Group consolidates influencer marketing services in Mideast

Updated 15 May 2025
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Omnicom Media Group consolidates influencer marketing services in Mideast

DUBAI: Omnicom Media Group has announced that it will consolidate its influencer marketing capabilities in the Middle East and North Africa region under influencer management agency Creo following a global directive last month.

The move “ensures our clients can harness the full potential of this communication channel” as digital consumption grows in the region and influencers play an “instrumental role in shaping brand perceptions,” said CEO Elda Choucair.

Creo will give the group’s clients “access to the same advanced tools, talent and technology we’ve developed globally, but adapted to our region’s unique landscape,” she added.

These include tools such as the Creo Influencer Agent, an AI-powered influencer selection tool; the Omni Creator Performance Predictor, which uses machine learning to predict the performance of content on Instagram; and the Creator Briefing Tool, which helps influencers create and get feedback on their content through Google’s AI chatbot Gemini.

The agency will also leverage exclusive partnerships with platforms such as Amazon, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat in the region.

Anthony Nghayoui, head of social and influencer at Omnicom Media Group, has been appointed to lead Creo.