Riyadh vs La Sofía

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Riyadh (Arabic: الرياض‎, romanized: ar-Riyāḍ, lit. 'The Gardens' [ar.riˈjaːdˤ] Najdi pronunciation: [er.rɪˈjɑːðˤ]) is the capital of Saudi Arabia and the largest city on the Arabian Peninsula. Located in the center of the an-Nafud desert, on the eastern part of the Najd plateau, the city sits at an average of 600 metres (2,000 ft) above sea level, and receives more than 16 million tourists each year, making it the 2nd most visited city in the Arab world. Riyadh had a population of 7.6 million people in 2019, making it the most populous city in Saudi Arabia, 2nd most populous in the Arab world (after Cairo), and 38th most populous in Asia.The first mentioning of the city by the name Riyadh was in 1590, by an early Arab chronicler. In 1737, Deham Ibn Dawwas, who was from the neighboring Manfuha, settled in and took control of the city. Deham built a wall around the city, and the best known source of the name Riyadh is from this period, thought to be referring to the earlier oasis towns that predated the wall built by Ibn Dawwas. In 1744, Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab formed an alliance with the Emir of Dir'iyah, Muhammad bin Saud, and in 1774, they took Riyadh from Deham. However their state, now known as the First Saudi State, came to a collapse in 1818. Turki ibn Abdullah founded the Second Saudi State in the early 19th century and made Riyadh his capital in 1825. However, his reign over the city was disrupted by a joint Ottoman–Rashidi alliance. Finally, in the early 20th century, 'Abdulaziz ibn Saud, known in the west simply as Ibn Saud, retrieved his ancestral kingdom of Najd in 1902 and consolidated his rule by 1926 with the final Saudi conquest of Hejaz. After this he named his kingdom Saudi Arabia in September 1932 with Riyadh as the capital.Riyadh is the political and administrative centre of Saudi Arabia.

The Consultative Assembly (also known as the Shura or Shura Council), the Council of Ministers of Saudi Arabia, the King and the Supreme Judicial Council of Saudi Arabia are all situated in the city. Alongside these four bodies that form the core of the legal system of Saudi Arabia, the headquarters of other major and minor governmental bodies are also located in Riyadh. The city hosts 112 foreign embassies, most of which are located in the as-Safarat district or Diplomatic Quarter (Arabic: حي السفارات‎, romanized: Hayy as-Safarat, lit. 'District of Embassies') in the western reaches of the city. RIyadh also holds great economic significance, as it hosts the headquarters of many banks and major companies, such as the National Commercial Bank (NCB), Alinma Bank and the Saudi Arabian British Bank (SABB). Highway 65, known locally as the King Fahd Road, runs through some of these important centers in the city, including the King Abdullah Financial District, one of the world's largest financial districts, the Faisaliyah Center and the Kingdom Center. Riyadh is one of the world's fastest-growing cities in population and is home to many expatriates. Riyadh has been designated a global city.The city is divided into 15 municipal districts, which are overseen by the Municipality of Riyadh (Arabic: أمانة الرياض‎, romanized: Amanat ar-Riyad, lit. 'Protectorate of Riyadh') headed by the mayor; and the Royal Commission for Riyadh which is chaired by the Governor of the Province, Faisal bin Bandar Al Saud. As of July 2020, The mayor is Faisal bin Abdulaziz bin Mohammed bin Ayyaf Al-Muqrin. Most of the population of the Riyadh Province is concentrated around Riyadh, as the rest of the province is mostly desert, with few, small cities connected by small two- to four-lane highways, such as Wadi ad-Dawasir.

Source: Wikipedia

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Women's suffrage is the right of women to vote in elections. At the beginning of the 18th century, some people sought to change voting laws to allow women to vote. Liberal political parties would go on to grant women the right to vote, increasing the number of those parties' potential constituencies. National and international organizations formed to coordinate efforts towards women voting, especially the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (founded in 1904 in Berlin, Germany). Several instances occurred in recent centuries where women were selectively given, then stripped of, the right to vote. In Sweden, conditional women's suffrage was in effect during the Age of Liberty (1718–1772), as well as in Revolutionary and early-independence New Jersey (1776–1807) in the US. The first territory to continuously allow women to vote to this present day is the Pitcairn Islands since 1838. The Kingdom of Hawai'i, which originally had universal suffrage in 1840, rescinded this in 1852 and was subsequently annexed by the United States in 1898. In the years after 1869, a number of provinces held by the British and Russian empires conferred women's suffrage, and some of these became sovereign nations at a later point, like New Zealand, Australia, and Finland. Several states and territories of the United States, such as Wyoming (1869) and Utah (1870), also granted women the right to vote. Women who owned property gained the right to vote in the Isle of Man in 1881, and in 1893, women in the then self-governing British colony of New Zealand were granted the right to vote. In Australia, the colony of South Australia conferred voter rights on all women from 1894, and the right to stand for Parliament from 1895, while the Australian Federal Parliament conferred the right to vote and stand for election in 1902 (although it allowed for the exclusion of "aboriginal natives"). Prior to independence, in the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland, women gained equal suffrage, with both the right to vote and to stand as candidates in 1906. Most major Western powers extended voting rights to women in the interwar period, including Canada (1917), Germany (1918), the United Kingdom (1918 for some women, 1928 for all women), Austria, the Netherlands (1919) and the United States (1920). Notable exceptions in Europe were France, where women could not vote until 1944, Greece (equal voting rights for women did not exist there until 1952, although, since 1930, literate women were able to vote in local elections), and Switzerland (where, since 1971, women could vote at the federal level, and between 1959 and 1990, women got the right to vote at the local canton level).

The last European jurisdictions to give women the right to vote were Liechtenstein in 1984 and the Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden at the local level in 1990, with the Vatican City being an absolute elective monarchy (the electorate of the Holy See, the conclave, is composed of male cardinals, rather than Vatican citizens). In some cases of direct democracy, such as Swiss cantons governed by Landsgemeinden, objections to expanding the suffrage claimed that logistical limitations, and the absence of secret ballot, made it impractical as well as unnecessary; others, such as Appenzell Ausserrhoden, instead abolished the system altogether for both women and men. Leslie Hume argues that the First World War changed the popular mood: The women's contribution to the war effort challenged the notion of women's physical and mental inferiority and made it more difficult to maintain that women were, both by constitution and temperament, unfit to vote. If women could work in munitions factories, it seemed both ungrateful and illogical to deny them a place in the voting booth. But the vote was much more than simply a reward for war work; the point was that women's participation in the war helped to dispel the fears that surrounded women's entry into the public arena. Pre-WWI opponents of women's suffrage such as the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League cited women's relative inexperience in military affairs. They claimed that since women were the majority of the population, women should vote in local elections, but due to a lack of experience in military affairs, they asserted that it would be dangerous to allow them to vote in national elections. Extended political campaigns by women and their supporters were necessary to gain legislation or constitutional amendments for women's suffrage. In many countries, limited suffrage for women was granted before universal suffrage for men; for instance, literate women or property owners were granted suffrage before all men received it. The United Nations encouraged women's suffrage in the years following World War II, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979) identifies it as a basic right with 189 countries currently being parties to this convention.

Source: Wikipedia