Saudi, Iranian diplomats formally meet in China

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

55% : The foreign ministers of Mideast Gulf rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran met in Beijing on 6 April, the first official meeting between the pair's top diplomats since 2016.
49% : For Iran, the focus is on economic opportunities after years of US sanctions that have squeezed its economy and contributed to a precipitous decline in the value of its currency.
41% : Riyadh's military intervention in Yemen, launched in 2015, turned the civil war there into a proxy Saudi-Iranian conflict, with Yemen's Houthi movement using missiles and drones supplied by Tehran to target energy and other civilian infrastructure in Saudi Arabia.
26% : Riyadh cut diplomatic ties with Tehran in January 2016 -- just days before the Iran nuclear deal went into effect -- after Iranians stormed two Saudi diplomatic missions in Tehran in protest against Riyadh's execution of a prominent Shiite cleric.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.