Prime Minister Najib Miqati held separate talks on Sunday in Riyadh with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi, on the eve of the third Arab Economic and Social Development Summit.

The prime minister “has started a series of meetings in Riyadh ... on the eve of heading the Lebanese delegation to the Arab Economic and Social Development Summit,” Miqati's office announced.

A two-day economic summit that opens Monday in Saudi Arabia must break with tradition and tackle people's aspirations in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, the Saudi foreign minister said.

"Our meeting should not be mired in routine," Prince Saud al-Faisal said at a meeting Saturday to prepare for the third Arab Economic and Social Development Summit.

Saudi Arabia will send the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority $100 million to help alleviate its financial crisis, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.

In a report late Wednesday, the agency said that president Mahmud Abbas received a call from Saudi Finance Minister Ibrahim al-Assaf who "informed him of a decision by King Abdullah... to transfer $100 million (75 million euros) to the budget of the state of Palestine."

Saudi Arabia beheaded a Pakistani man in the eastern Khubar province on Wednesday after he was convicted of drug trafficking, the interior ministry announced.

Arshad Mohammed was arrested for smuggling heroin and hashish into the kingdom, the ministry was quoted as saying by the official SPA news agency.

A Saudi court on Tuesday sentenced an Egyptian rights lawyer whose arrest on drug trafficking charges in April sparked a diplomatic row with Cairo to five years in prison and 300 lashes.

Ahmed al-Gizawi, arrested in April, was accused of trying to smuggle 21,380 capsules of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax, which is banned in Saudi Arabia where drug trafficking carries the death sentence.

Saudi King Abdullah has appointed Prince Saud bin Nayef as the new governor of the kingdom's oil-rich Eastern Province, home to the Shiite minority that frequently complains of discrimination, the official SPA news agency reported Monday.

Prince Saud replaces Prince Mohammed bin Fahd who was in office since 1985 but was strongly criticized by Shiite activists for his aggressive policy towards them.

Saudi Arabia on Sunday criticized world reaction to its beheading a Sri Lankan maid convicted of killing her employer's baby, the official SPA news agency SPA reported.

Riyadh "deplores the statements made... over the execution of a Sri Lankan maid who had plotted and killed an infant by suffocating him to death, one week after she arrived in the kingdom," the government spokesman said.

The U.N.'s human rights body on Friday said it was 'deeply' dismayed by Saudi Arabi's beheading of a Sri Lankan maid convicted of murdering her employer's baby.

"We express our deep dismay at the execution," Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters in Geneva.

The U.N.'s human rights body on Friday said it was 'deeply' dismayed by Saudi Arabia's beheading of a Sri Lankan maid convicted of murdering her employer's baby.

"We express our deep dismay at the execution," Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters in Geneva.

Saudi King Abdullah appointed 30 women to the previously all-male consultative Shura Council in decrees published on Friday, marking a historic first as he pushes reforms in the ultra-conservative kingdom.

The decrees, published by the official SPA news agency, give women a 20 percent quota in the Shura Council, a body appointed by the king to advise him on policy and legislation.