Saudi Arabia Reinforces its Position as a Global Hub of Falconry Excellence and Wildlife Protection
17.12.2019 15:01:00 EET | Business Wire | Press release
The 2nd King Abdulaziz Falconry Festival set a new Guinness World Record with 2,350 falcons participating in the festival’s Al Mallouah race and Mazayin beauty competition. The previous record was 1,723 falcons. The record was the highlight of the last day of the festival which has also positioned the Kingdom as a preferred destination for cultural tourism.
The event, held from the 1st to the 16th of December in the town of Malham, north of Riyadh, attracted thousands of enthusiasts and elite falconers from across Saudi Arabia, the Gulf region and internationally. The participation of Asian falconers at this year’s festival added significant momentum to the international category which featured 124 falconers, including 107 in the International Owners Group and 85 in the International Professionals Group.
Emirati falconers took the top positions in the international open categories for the second consecutive year after making outstanding achievements in the 1st edition of the King Abdulaziz Falconry Festival held Feb 2019.
The annual festival reinforced Saudi Arabia’s position as a global hub for falconry excellence. The Kingdom is committed to upholding the highest standards of wildlife protection and conservation of the falcon species. Awareness campaigns to protect wildlife have been introduced along with new laws prohibiting uncontrolled hunting, the establishment of specialized falcon breeding farms and the leveraging of international expert knowledge and technologies. The Kingdom is also exploring innovative alternatives to the use of live game in falconry races. The overall approach is aligned with Saudi Arabia’s commitment to ensure the highest international standards of environmental conservation and protection are met.
With a total cash pot of US$5 million and a high level of technical and logistical readiness, the annual King Abdulaziz Falconry Festival is an eagerly anticipated event for professional international falconers. Saudi Falcons Club Executive Director and Chairman of the Higher Organizing Committee of the Falconry Festival, Hossam Al Hazimi, invited international falconers to take part in the 3rd edition of the festival to be held in 2020, including representatives from Russia, China, Japan, Germany, Spain and other countries, to compete alongside their Gulf region and American peers.
Click here to download VIDEOS & PHOTOS
*Source: AETOSWire
To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191217005427/en/
Contact information
Wael Abdul Samad
wael.samad@ws-mena.com
About Business Wire
For more than 50 years, Business Wire has been the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure.
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
Forrester’s 2027 Budget Planning Guides: After A Year Of Caution, Business And Tech Leaders Are Ready To Invest Again15.7.2026 12:00:00 EEST | Press release
According to Forrester’s (Nasdaq: FORR) 2027 Budget Planning Guides, business and technology leaders are approaching 2027 with renewed confidence as they increasingly accept volatility as a permanent feature of the business environment. After a year of more cautious spending, more than 80% of leaders expect their budgets to increase over the next 12 months, with as many as one-quarter anticipating growth of 10% or more. But planning in the age of AI demands more than bigger budgets: Increasing investment without modernizing operating models, strengthening data foundations, and improving AI readiness will only accelerate fragmented data, duplicated work, and technical debt. To realize AI’s full potential, leaders must rethink their strategies and prioritize investments in operational foundations, governance, and experimentation that drive tangible outcomes. This year, optimism is widespread across functions: 82% of technology decision-makers and 91% of marketers expect budget increases
Post-Quantum’s Algorithm - Classic McEliece - Achieves Global ISO Standardization to Protect the World From Quantum Cyber Attack15.7.2026 11:00:00 EEST | Press release
It’s proven that today’s encryption is vulnerable to attack by a sufficiently mature quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm - a catastrophic event commonly known as Q-Day. Even before such a cryptographically relevant quantum computer emerges it is known that adversaries are stealing encrypted data now, which can be decrypted later - also known as Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL). Google’s recent use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to optimise Shor’s algorithm reduces the number of physical qubits required to break today’s encryption, therefore shortening the timeline to Q-Day. This has led prominent experts to estimate today’s encryption may be broken as-soon-as the next three years. It’s against this backdrop that the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) has included the Classic McEliece algorithm as part of its standard for Asymmetric Ciphers (ISO/IEC 18033-2). Organisations from ISO’s 177 member states can now upgrade to Classic McEliece using an international s
Thredd Joins The Visa Agentic Ready Programme, Bringing Agent Network Readiness To Issuers Across Europe, Starting With Zilch15.7.2026 10:00:00 EEST | Press release
Thredd, the AI-first issuer processing platform, today announced it has joined the Visa Agentic Ready programme, enabling issuers across Europe to participate in agent-initiated payments without rebuilding their payments infrastructure. Consumer payments platform Zilch will be among the first issuers on the platform to enable agent-initiated payments for its cardholders. As a processor and enabler, Thredd sits at the trust layer of the payments ecosystem. By joining the programme, Thredd is ready to support Visa and its clients as the market moves into agentic commerce. Agentic commerce introduces a new type of payment initiator: An AI agent acting on a cardholder's behalf. The core payments principles do not change. Cardholder permission, issuer approval, authentication and fraud monitoring all still apply. What changes is how trust is established and enforced at the point an agent transacts. Taking a Zilch customer as an example, a cardholder might ask an AI agent to find a product w
Surgerii Robotics Announces First European Installation of the SHURUI ® Single-Port Surgical System at Vall d'Hebron University Hospital15.7.2026 10:00:00 EEST | Press release
Surgerii Robotics today announced the first European installation of its SHURUI Single-Port (SP) Surgical System at Vall d'Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, Spain, one of Europe's leading academic medical centers. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260713209503/en/ The first pediatric procedure performed with the SHURUI SP system was a nephroureterectomy on a twelve-year-old boy whose kidney and ureter had become infected and non-functional due to multiple stones. The SHURUI SP system is CE-marked for adult and pediatric use, making it the only CE-marked single-port robotic surgical system currently indicated for pediatric procedures in Europe. The installation marks an important milestone in the international expansion of Surgerii Robotics and the introduction of the technology into a major European reference center. As part of this collaboration, Vall d'Hebron University Hospital has become the first hos
SES, Airbus and Dutch Municipality of Noordwijk to Build Satellite Optical Ground Station for EAGLE-115.7.2026 09:50:00 EEST | Press release
SES, a space solutions company, jointly with Airbus Netherlands B.V. signed a ground lease agreement with the Dutch municipality of Noordwijk for a plot at the NL Space Campus, next to the European Space Agency’s (ESA) technical center ESTeC. The facility will host a dedicated optical ground station (OGS) to communicate with the EAGLE-1 satellite and receive quantum safe keys via laser technology. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260714786947/en/ Breaking the ground of the EAGLE-1 Optical Ground Station, Municipality of Noordwijk, the Netherlands. Pictured left to right: Pim van Strien, Alderman for the Municipality of Noordwijk; Rob Postma, President and Managing Director, Airbus Netherlands; Alan Kuresevic, Managing Director, SES Techcom, SES. The station, to be built by Airbus for SES, will consist of a control room, alongside a dome housing an ultra-precise telescope to track satellites, required for the la
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom