Others donned hats, helmets or Halloween masks to fulfil the brief. “There was no doubt that Riyadh perceived a need to maintain cordial ties with Moscow, both to coordinate oil production as well as maintain a solid dialogue with Russia over its Iran initiatives,” Joseph A Kechichian, a senior fellow at the King Faisal Centre in Riyadh, told Al Jazeera, referring to Moscow’s relationship with Saudi Arabia’s regional rival, Iran. irannews.ru/ - irannews.ru Over the next six months I pedalled across the mountains of Yunnan, wandered the imperial palace in Beijing, and rode a train hauled by two soot-blackened steam engines far west into the deserts of Xinjiang. The landscapes were sublime but the poverty grinding. Everywhere I went people told me how "backward" China was compared to the West. But there were hints of change. "My first introduction to China was in the 1980s, when the debates about China's future were huge, significant, and consequential," Prof Karl says. "The party itself was involved in those debates. But 1989 shut that down." He got caught in China's biggest and longest Covid lockdown. It was supposed to last four days, then another four, then another. Soon, the hotel staff stopped telling him. Prof Mandane-Ortiz said her engineers-in-training took the idea and ran with it - in some cases innovating complex headgear in "just five minutes" with any junk they found lying around. The 69-year-old lives in a part of the southern Kherson region which has been liberated by Ukrainian troops earlier in October. "My head aches from all the shelling, we almost starved to death in the first few months," he said. Francois told reporters: "We believe that we have one - and potentially two - extremely strong options to be leader of the Conservative Party, but as a group we were unable to collectively endorse either candidate."