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The Second GCC Camel Race Championship kicked off here yesterday evening under the sponsorship of His Highness Deputy Amir and Crown Prince Sheikh Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Saba. Addressing the inaugural ceremony, Jahra Governor Sheikh Mubarak Al-Humoud Al-Sabah, the representative of the championship sponsor, said a large number of camel owners from the six GCC member states are taking part in the race. He hoped that Gulf fans would be able to enjoy the camel-racing sports, which used to be practiced by Gulf forefathers. For his part, the head of the organizing committee and chairman of the Public Authority for Youth...

The Bashar al-Assad rule in Syria has come under heavy fire from people who believe that the regime must quit over its atrocities. But any attempt by the US-led West to impose a replacement will backfire soon India’s oil-rich western neighbourhood, extending from the Arabian Sea to the Bosporus, is engulfed in conflicts arising from sectarian and civilisational rivalries, aggravated by the meddling of external powers. With an arsenal of over 100 nuclear weapons, Pakistan is today witnessing a period of internal strife, largely arising from the pernicious role of its military establishment and tensions across its disputed borders with...

A member of the Parliamentary Committee for National Security Affairs and Iranian foreign policy Mohammad Karim Abedi that the Parliamentary Committee on National Security Affairs Iranian studied and listened to reports on the actions taken to protect the people of the house in Kuwait in case of any security imbalance there...

PROTESTS TODAY BROKE OUT IN SUDAN, KUWAIT AND MOROCCO! (STATE DEPT TWEETS AT LINK) Hundreds of Muslims protested on Wednesday outside the U.S. consulate in Morocco’s largest city Casablanca to decry a film deemed insulting to Islam. (Naharnet) And Morocco– Now Lebanon reported: Hundreds of Muslims protested on Wednesday outside the US consulate in Morocco’s largest city Casablanca to decry a film deemed insulting to Islam that already sparked deadly violence in Libya, an AFP photographer reported. The protesters, numbering between 300 and 400 mostly young activists, gathered around 200 meters from the consulate amid a heavy police presence. Some...

Travel - State Dept ‏@TravelGov #Sudan #EmergencyMessage #AmCits are advised to avoid visiting US Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, due to anti-U.S. protests outside the embassy.

AFP - Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari was expected in Moscow on Wednesday for talks with Russian leaders on his first major foreign visit since the killing of Osama bin Laden by US forces. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will host Zardari for talks on Thursday at the Kremlin where officials from the two countries were also expected to sign agreements on cooperation in agriculture, aviation and energy, a spokesman for the Pakistan Embassy in Moscow told AFP. "Economics will be the focus of the visit," said the spokesman, Raja Abdul Qayyum. The three-day visit to Russia will be Zardari's first...

If Israel jets show up in Iranian airspace, it will most likely happen while Obama is too busy accusing Mitt Romney of secretly storing all his money in a giant cave in the Rocky Mountains to do more than dispatch a flunky to chew out Netanyahu over the phone. The election is the perfect window for a strike on Iran's nuclear program, because Team Obama will be too tied down on the Romney Front to do much damage to Israel. Despite the signs being brandished at your local Anarchists for Peace rally, accusing the United States of being a puppet...

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE urged their citizens Wednesday to leave Lebanon immediately amid threats by members of a Lebanese clan who kidnapped earlier in the day over 30 Syrians, as well as one Saudi and one Turkish national. Saudi Ambassador Ali Awad al-Asiri, who is in Mecca, told the National News Agency he requested all Saudi nationals in Lebanon to leave the country after “the threats have become open.” … The Meqdad clan said Wednesday it abducted over 30 individuals it described as belonging to the Free Syrian Army, which it claims was behind the kidnapping Monday...

Syria will be suspended from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation on Wednesday for its violent suppression of a 17-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, a diplomat said on Monday ahead of an emergency OIC summit in Mecca. "The resolution regarding the suspension of the Syrian membership in the OIC is not facing obstacles ... It will be approved," said the diplomat, speaking on the sidelines of a preliminary foreign ministers meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He said the decision was likely to be formally announced at the end of the second day of the summit, which was called by Saudi...

The total revenue of the 11 members of the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) soared to $624.8 billion in 2011, according to the latest data. OAPEC data for the oil income generated in the year 2010 was announced as $450bn. In real terms, the combined Arab income stood at $479bn in 2011 taking into account the real dollar value and global inflation. While the nominal price of OPEC's basket of crudes stood at around $107 per barrel in 2011 its real value averaged about $88 in 1995 prices. The oil price in 2010 also averaged nearly $60 far...

In the 1980s, it was Afghanistan to which international Islamic fighters came, helping the mujahedeen successfully take on the Soviet army and its puppet regime in Kabul. Then came Bosnia in the 1990s and Iraq in the 2000s, in both of which veteran jihadists fought a sectarian war on behalf of outgunned Sunni minorities.In 2012, they’re flocking to Syria With funding from private organizations in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait, they are making their way across the frontiers from Iraq and Jordan, hooking up with opposition elements in Syria and taking the battle to Damascus and the heart of the...

Kuwait police called a man and asked him to come to the station to receive his teen age gay son who was arrested within a security drive in the capital. But they were shocked when the father told them to keep him with him. “Keep my son with you…I don’t want him and I will not come to get him,” the man told the police, according to Alanba newspaper. It said the 19-year-old boy wore women’s dress and had make up on his face, adding that police would keep him until relatives come and claim him.

The tectonic plates of Middle East politics are shifting fast. Egypt’s Arab spring may have run into the sand of anti-democratic Islamism, but the days when oil-rich Arab sheikhs colluded to hold Western economies to ransom will soon end. Massive shale oil and gas discoveries across the West, Israel’s rising status as a Middle East energy powerhouse and a deepening internal rift over strategic policy are all colluding to hasten OPEC’s demise. In June, Kuwaiti oil minister Hani Hussein’s commented, “Oil from the Middle East will always find a home. And we have to see more research to get a...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States is planning a significant military presence of 13,500 troops in Kuwait to give it the flexibility to respond to sudden conflicts in the region as Iraq adjusts to the withdrawal of American combat forces and the world nervously eyes Iran, according to a congressional report. The study by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee examined the U.S. relationship with the six nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman - against a fast-moving backdrop. In just the last two days, Saudi Arabia's ruler named Defense...

THE DEAD BABY MEDIA If the text on that one is too small for you, it's a CNN piece headlined, "Why the Syrian regime is killing babies." There's not much to add to that. The Syrian regime may be killing babies, but CNN killed journalism. With some help from the New York Times, the Washington Post and the BBC. Anyone who has spent time in the Middle East knows quite well that parading around dead bodies is part of the Muslim ceremony of rallying for the next attack. These aren't funerals, these are corpse parades and the corpses are often...

Bedoon Rights – Kuwait wants to sell 20,000 Bedoon to neighbors [Documenting the human rights situation of Kuwait's statelesss community] Apr 9, 2012 – After his tour in the Gulf, Al-Mustqabal newspaper reported that Saleh Al-Fidhala, head of Central Agency, plans to deport 20,000 Bedoon to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates while the rest will get the citizenship or have identification cards until their cases get examined again 10 years after issuing those cards. This plan comes as a humiliation for the Bedoon community and activists who expressed their refusal for such a derogatory policy practiced against...

KUWAIT CITY, KUWAIT (BNO NEWS) -- Kuwait's National Assembly on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly in favor of amendments to the country's penal code to apply the death penalty for those who insult Islam's Prophet Muhammad or his wives, a local newspaper reported on Thursday. Forty-six members of parliament, including all cabinet ministers, voted in favor of the controversial amendments during the first round of voting on Wednesday. Four Shiite members of parliament opposed the amendments, two MPs refused to vote, and one Sunni MP abstained from voting. According to the Kuwait Times, the amendments call for the death penalty for those...

Following are excerpts from an interview with Kuwaiti cleric Tareq Sweidan, manager of Al-Resala TV, which aired on Al-Quds TV on March 26, 2012. Tareq Sweidan : I studied at the Petroleum Department at the University of Oklahoma, and our dean, who was a Christian American, retired. The man they brought to replace him was completely incompetent. I went to the former dean, Dr. Guerrero, and asked him: "What made them choose Dr. Sylvester as the new dean, even though he is unworthy of this?" I was still a student back then. He laughed and said: "You noticed?" I said:...

Hillary Rodham Clinton, US Secretary of State, who met with the foreign ministers of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) here yesterday, proposed a strong missile shield to protect Gulf Arab states from Tehran and sought to work with them to help end the violence in Iran's ally Syria. Clinton said: "It is a US priority to help the GCC build a regional missile defense architecture" against what that country sees as a looming ballistic missile threat from Iran. Clinton said that she looked forward to discussing the wide range of common strategic concerns, including preventing Iran from acquiring a...

Kazakhstan's shooting team has been left stunned after a comedy national anthem from the film Borat was played at a medal ceremony at championships in Kuwait instead of the real one. The song was produced by UK comedian Sacha Baron Cohen for the film, which shows Kazakhs as backward and bigoted. Footage of Thursday's original ceremony posted on YouTube shows gold medallist Maria Dmitrienko listening to the anthem without emotion and finally smiling as it ends. The spoof song praises Kazakhstan for its superior potassium exports and for having the cleanest prostitutes in the region.