JEDDAH: The president of General Sports Authority (GSA), Turki Al-Sheikh, announced on Nov. 24 in Tokyo an agreement with Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) Chairman Toshi Shika Ishihara to build a replica of the famous “Takeshi Castle” in Riyadh.
Al-Sheikh tweeted: “I was pleased to sign — a few minutes ago — in Tokyo an agreement with TBS, to establish Takeshi’s Castle in the Kingdom. The beginning will be in the last quarter of 2018.”
This is the first entertainment project announced by the GSA, and reflects a will to attract public attention toward sports activities.
According to GSA’s Twitter account, Al-Sheikh said: “We seek not only to entertain, but also to inspire people to exercise and experience new physical activities.”
The building of the castle will show Arab architectural elements on an area of 300,000 square meters. As the original version, it will include 50 obstacles, some specially designed for this project.
The Japanese show had a large following in Saudi Arabia and neighboring Arab countries during the mid to late 1980s. It was locally called “Al-Hisin” (The Fort), and the commentary was provided in Arabic by Lebanese television personality Riad Sharara and Palestinian news broadcaster Jamal Rayyan.
The original show was dubbed in many languages around the world, and it has a special place in the memory of Saudis and Arabs.
Saudis welcomed the GSA initiative to diversify its activities. Khalid said on Twitter: “When I was 15 I wanted to participate with the Japanese players; now I’m 45 and I still have the will to prepare myself and participate.”
Badriah commented on Twitter saying: “What I like about this idea is that it contains both entertainment, and physical activity, as well as the use of heritage in an innovative way, that is creative.”
Tokyo Broadcasting System was launched in the early 50s, one of their most important projects was TBS Television, which has created countless hit drama, shows, and news programs that played an important role in promoting Japanese culture around the world.
Saudi version of Takeshi’s Castle coming to Riyadh in 10 months
Saudi version of Takeshi’s Castle coming to Riyadh in 10 months
Three-year heatwave bleached half the planet’s coral reefs: study
PARIS: A study published on Tuesday showed that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached between 2014-2017 — a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves.
The analysis concluded that 51 percent of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching while 15 percent experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the “Third Global Bleaching Event.”
It was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record,” said Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“And yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe Fourth Event, which started in early 2023,” Connolly said in a statement.
When the sea overheats, corals eject the microscopic algae that provides their distinct color and food source.
Unless ocean temperatures return to more tolerable levels, bleached corals are unable to recover and eventually die of starvation.
“Our findings demonstrate that the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems,” said the study in the journal Nature Communications.
An international team of scientists analyzed data from more than 15,000 in-water and aerial surveys of reefs around the world over the 2014-2017 period.
They combined the data with satellite-based heat stress measurements and used statistical models to estimate how much bleaching occurred around the world.
No time to recover
The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.
“2014-17 was the first record of a global coral bleaching event lasting much beyond a single year,” the study said.
“Ocean warming is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of tropical-coral bleaching and mortality.”
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, saw peak heat stress increase each year between 2014 and 2017.
“We are seeing that reefs don’t have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs,” said Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University in Australia.
A major scientific report last year warned that the world’s tropical coral reefs have likely reached a “tipping point” — a shift that could trigger massive and often permanent changes in the natural world.
The global scientific consensus is that most coral reefs would perish at warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels — the ambitious, long-term limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Global temperatures exceeded 1.5C on average between 2023-2025, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus, said last month.
“We are only just beginning to analyze bleaching and mortality observations from the current bleaching event,” Connolly told AFP.
“However the overall level of heat stress was extraordinarily high, especially in 2023-2024, comparable to or higher than what was observed in 2014-2017, at least in some regions,” he said.
He said the Pacific coastline of Panama experienced “dramatically worse heat stress than they had ever experienced before, and we observed considerable coral mortality.”
