Anyone assessing the attention, column inches and buzz dedicated to our latest international digital edition must find it difficult to believe that we have been around for only a week.

“I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams ... What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.”

In an editorial in these pages three years ago, Arab News welcomed the appointment of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a vote of confidence in Saudi Arabia’s younger generation, and we predicted that rapid and far-reaching reform would penetrate every corner of the Kingdom.