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A young Saudi has established a company selling camel's milk in the United States, despite the animals reportedly being the source of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus. According to a report in a Los Angeles newspaper, Walid Abdulwahab, 23, set up the company as part of his class project at the University of Southern California. The lighthearted slogan of his company, Desert Farms, is "Make every day a humpday." Supplied by seven small camel farms, most of them owned by Amish, the Santa Monica-based company recently sold camel milk of $100,000, as it spreads its claims of nutritional...

A car carrying 11 people rammed into a camel in Saudi Arabia and overturned off the road, killing eight and injuring the remaining passengers. The car was moving on a motorway in the southern Asir province when the driver was caught off guard by a camel crossing over. The vehicle hit the camel and veered off the road before overturning, Sabq newspaper said, quoting a police spokesman. “Six passengers died on the spot while two died on the way to hospital…the other three suffered from medium to serious injuries,” the spokesman said without mentioning what happened to the camel.

These days you can order your coffee with anything from cow's milk to almond milk, but even in an experimental town like San Francisco, a camel's milk latte has yet to sound like anything but a joke. Southern California-based company Desert Farms is looking to change that. With its tongue-in-cheek slogan, "make every day a hump day," and its packaging emphasizing the health benefits of its product, the company is trying to turn camel's milk into the next big thing in dairy. Camel's milk isn't anything new to the Bedouins of the Middle East and Northern Africa, of course, who...

From the depths of the Dubai desert comes the four-hooved World Cup prediction machine that is Shaheen the Camel. Scroll down for a video. Discovered by a Gulf News videographer with a penchant for dune-based fun, Shaheen declared himself ready at the flutter of an oversized eyelash for the challenge of guessing the outcome of Brazil 2014 matches. Starting Thursday, one World Cup game per day will be the subject of Shaheen’s prediction genius. And yes, you guessed it, Gulf News accepts no responsibility for whether the hump-backed wonder is right or wrong. Matching Paul the Octopus’s near-perfect record may...

It seems like every other week someone gets ill from raw milk. The most recent incident occurred last month in West Michigan, when a 31-year-old woman and a six-year-old girl from different counties fell ill after drinking raw milk from a farm called Green Pastures. The Centers for Disease Control have released updated information on the link between raw milk and outbreaks of E. Coli infections, warning that a record number of such outbreaks were reported between 2010 and 2012. We have a fraught relationship with raw milk in the US, but elsewhere the routine consumption of raw milk is...

Children with autism relieved of symptoms following therapy that includes camel milkDubai: Can camel milk help children with autism? Two American mothers who sourced camel milk from the Middle East say it definitely can, citing circumstantial evidence of their children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) responding positively after therapy that included camel milk. Author Christina Adams shared her camel milk story with XPRESS following a meet-up organised by Autism UAE, Stepping Stones, Child EIMC and Emirates Industry for Camel Milk and Products (EICMP) at The Majlis Dubai, a new camel milk cafe next to Jumeirah Mosque. American-born Zeba Khan,...

Veterinary doctors at the public health and safety department of Dubai Municipality have saved life of a pregnant camel by performing an emergency surgery, said Hashim Al-Awadhi, head of veterinary services section at Dubai Municipality. He said the camel and new born are safe and in good health now. The camel was suffering acute pain due to delivery complications which might have led to death of the animal if emergency surgery was not done, he said. He urged the public to be careful of the health and safety of all kind of domestic animals by following approved methods of animal...

The State Department is planning to spend $400,000 to purchase a fiberglass statue of a white camel for a new U.S. embassy being built in Pakistan, BuzzFeed first reported Monday, citing contracting records. The sculpture, by artist John Baldessari, is of a life-size ablino camel staring upward at the eye of a huge needle. “A life-size dromedary with its neck extended inquisitively eyes a super-sized needle in a way which makes the viewer think it could actually pass through the needle’s eye,” described Hall Wines, which has a copy of the piece on display. “The colorless beast with striking blue...

'More beautiful than women, horses and all other animals': Welcome to the Arab beauty contest where million-dollar CAMELS with false eyelashes and lip filler compete for huge prizes • Visitors trek across desert for lavish event in Liwa, United Arab Emirates • Men happily declare they prefer camels to their wives - and all other women • Prize camels can change hands for as much as £1.8million at all-male event • Festival also features camel races and milking competitions Thousands of men leer on, playboys skid around outside in expensive cars, and top models command fees reaching into the millions...

Two researchers at Tel Aviv University (TAU) studied the bones of camels found in an area of ancient copper mines in the Aravah Valley, south of the Dead Sea. Using radiocarbon dating and other techniques, they determined that camels were first used in the mining operations near the end of the 10th century BC. They state that this is the first evidence of domesticated camels in ancient Israel. This would be almost 1,000 years later than the time of the patriarchs, when camels first appear in the Bible. Their study was quickly used to claim that the Bible was written...

PALMDALE, Calif. -- A camel escaped from an enclosure in a Southern California high desert community Friday, stomped a 72-year-old man who tried to capture it, and chased other people before it calmed down and was corralled. "My dad ... tried to catch it and it must have cornered him or something, and it took off after him, bit him on the head and knocked him down and stomped on him," Skylar Dossenbach told KCBS-TV. "He crawled under something and the camel tried to pull him out from under it."

Archaeologists from Israel’s top university have used radiocarbon dating to pinpoint the arrival of domestic camels in the Middle East -- and they say the science directly contradicts the Bible’s version of events. Camels are mentioned as pack animals in the biblical stories of Abraham, Joseph and Jacob, Old Testament stories that historians peg to between 2000 and 1500 BC. But Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures say camels weren’t domesticated in Israel until centuries later, more like 900 BC. “In addition to challenging the Bible's historicity, this anachronism is...

You can’t believe it’s not donkey? As Chinese eaters reel from Walmart’s fox-meat scandal, plenty of other beasts are still available—in cans!— for dinner. Chinese Walmart customers in search of a nice donkey for dinner got a shock Thursday, when the retailer announced it had found traces of fox DNA in the “Five Spice Donkey Meat” product. Wait—you didn’t realize fox and donkey meat were even considered proper meals? Nor did we. Here are a few other bizarre animal products you can buy, and these come in a can. A Whole Chicken Not content to just offer just bits and...

Dromedaries were strolling on train tracks in Negev unsupervised; no passengers injured in crash. Fourteen camels were killed near the Negev town of Segev Shalom after being struck by an oncoming train. No passengers were injured in the collision. The camels were apparently loitering unsupervised on the train tracks in a poorly-lit area. Following the crash Tuesday night, the train driver stopped at the nearest station for inspection and alerted the police. The train continued on to Beersheba shortly after. The police were working with local veterinarians to track down the camel owners. “Animals roaming on the train tracks are...

* Over one million feral camels live in arid and semi-arid regions of the Australian outback. * The camels demolish air conditioners, fences and toilet systems and foul critical watering holes. * A new program aims to track the camels by allowing people to report sightings using Google maps. The single-humped dromedary camels were brought mainly from India in the second half of the 19th century to work in the scrubby, red-earthed arid parts of the Australian outback, transporting people and as pack animals. Once trains, roads and machinery made them obsolete as workers, the camels were let loose, creating...

Australia's fledgling camel industry has received a government grant to capitalize on growing international demand for the animals' meat and milk. The animals were brought to the country by early settlers but their numbers have soared since they were released into the wild, and some Australians consider them pests. More than a million camels roam Australia's vast interior. These hardy animals are among the country's most destructive feral pests and marksmen have begun the task of culling hundreds of thousands of them. Meat companies, however, say a more productive way to reduce camel numbers is to export them as a...

Australian authorities plan to corral about 6,000 wild camels with helicopters and gun them down after they overran a small Outback town in search of water, trampling fences, smashing tanks and contaminating supplies. The Northern Territory government announced its plan Wednesday for Docker River, a town of 350 residents where thirsty camels have been arriving daily for weeks because of drought conditions in the region. "The community of Docker River is under siege by 6,000 marauding, wild camels," local government minister Rob Knight said in Alice Springs, 310 miles (500 kilometers) northeast of Docker. "This is a very critical situation...

An Oz Outback community is battling to regain control of its town from a 6,000-strong feral camel invasion, which has seen the thirsty dromedaries cause "chaos" in their search for water. According to the Times, the drought-hit beasts have descended on the Northern Territory's Docker River en masse, "trampling through homes, breaking water tanks and even damaging the emergency airstrip".

Australia has begun drawing up plans to cull hundreds of thousands of wild camels amid concerns that marauding herds are tearing up the environment and depleting valuable supplies of water. One-humped dromedaries were imported into Australia after 1840 to help colonial settlers conquer the arid continent’s inhospitable interior. A century later, the robust pack animals were no longer needed, superseded by trucks and trains. While some were slaughtered, many others were released into the desert where they have thrived. Apart from wild dogs, Australia’s camels have had little to fear until now. Deploying marksmen in helicopters is part of an...

SYDNEY -- Thousands of camels in Australia's remote Outback could be killed by marksmen in helicopters under a government proposal aimed at cutting down the population of the havoc-wreaking creatures. First introduced into Australia in the 1840s to help explorers travel through the Australian desert, there are now about 1 million camels roaming the country, with the population doubling every nine years. They compete with sheep and cattle for food, trample vegetation and invade remote settlements in search of water, scaring residents as they tear apart bathrooms and rip up water pipes. Last month, the federal government set aside 19...