So this has been a major ongoing news story; I am a little surprised that no one else has made a thread.
Jamal Khashoggi was as Saudi journalist with close ties to the royal family, whose relations with that family became strained and who became a permanent resident of the United States. In this he reminds me of Fethullah Gülen, who was a close ally of Recep "Gollum" Erdoğan before Gollum decided that Turkey wasn't big enough for the two of them.
Khashoggi was engaged to a Turkish woman, and Saudi law requires government permission for its citizens to marry foreign nationals, so he went into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to get the documents. Routine stuff, except that he disappeared. A squad of fifteen men which included the deputy head of Saudi intelligence was seen going into the building just before his arrival, then leaving shortly after, visiting the head of the mission, and rushing to the airport, and the Turkish consulate staff was told to take the day off.
So it is pretty clear to everybody that Khashoggi was assassinated by Saudi intelligence. Gollum is pissed, which surprises me, since both Gollum and the Saudis are fans of Sunni Islamist theocracy and mostly supported the same sides in Syria. However I imagine that having an assassination on Turkish soil committed by the intelligence services of another county must hurt his pride, Gollum is a very prickly man.
Trump is Trumping on and so far refusing to do anything, saying that since it happened in Turkey and didn't involve a US citizen, it is not our problem. Rand Paul, who has been rightly critical over US support for the Saudi-induced humanitarian disaster in Yemen (another thing we should probably have a thread on), has issued a call for an end to US arms sales to Saudi Arabia that will almost certainly go nowhere. 22 Senators have called for an investigation under the Magnitsky Act.
Like Paul, I have been a critic of the US-Saudi relationship for a very long time. So this does not terribly surprise me, sadly. However a normal president would probably have done something at this point. I don't really have anything more to say at this time, but Turkey claims to have graphic evidence of the assassination, so this seems like it will be an ongoing saga.