Saudi Arabian

Saudi production jumped to between 3.6 million and 3.8 million barrels a day last month, up from between 2.8 million and 3 million barrels a day in September. The increase was attributed to price reductions put into effect by the Saudis through "net-back" pricing agreements with Exxon, Mobil and Texaco. North Sea production rose 13.4% in September to 3.4 million barrels daily.

CAIRO - An Egyptian human rights lawyer was sentenced Tuesday to five years in prison and 300 lashes by a court in Saudi Arabia after being found guilty of smuggling drugs into the kingdom. Ahmed Gizawy was arrested with his wife on their way to a pilgrimage to Mecca in April, allegedly carrying 20,000 prescription anti-anxiety pills. The Egyptian consulate in the kingdom said it would appeal the ruling, according to Egypt's state news agency. The court also convicted an Egyptian who was traveling with Gizawy to six years and 400 lashes, the news agency reported.

A Saudi Arabian citizen was arrested in an FBI sting operation on suspicion of accepting bribes to issue American visas to Saudi nationals, authorities said Sunday. Abdulla Noman, who works for the U.S. Commerce Department issuing visas at the U.S. Consulate in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, was arrested Thursday in a Las Vegas Strip hotel room, authorities said. He is being held in federal custody. The FBI is not specifically probing ties between Noman and terrorists who carried out the Sept.

The Ikea catalog distributed in Saudi Arabia is the same as in other countries except for what it's missing - women. The Swedish publication Metro has posted a comparison of the Saudi Arabian mailer and the Swedish version, showing that women present in the latter were missing from the former. In one instance, a pajama-clad woman - shown standing at a bathroom sink along with a man, young boy and toddler nearby - was erased from the catalog distributed in the Arab nation, leaving just the three other people in the picture.

The one thing everybody knows about Saudi cuisine is the moment in "Lawrence of Arabia" where Peter O'Toole's Bedouin guide handed him some nondescript mush with the ominous words, "Bedu food." O'Toole's expression spoke volumes. Of course, what he was being given was merely a sort of trail mix. In the towns and villages, Saudis cook much like their neighbors in the Fertile Crescent countries, Egypt and the Persian Gulf.

Six people were killed and more than 100 injured when a bomb exploded at a village mosque Friday, the official Saudi Press Agency reported Saturday. About 500 worshipers were inside the mosque when the blast occurred during midday prayers on the Muslim Sabbath, the agency quoted an unidentified Interior Ministry official as saying. Security forces reportedly rushed to the scene and surrounded the mosque in the village of Al Qubah, in the southwestern region of Bishah.

TELLURIDE, Colo. - Wearing high-top tennis shoes and headphones, 11-year-old Wadjda doesn't look like much of a revolutionary. But in filmmaker Haifaa Mansour's new Saudi Arabian movie, the young girl is just that - as is Mansour herself. Having its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, "Wadjda" has become one of the event's most talked-about movies, as much as for what's on screen as for how the story was brought to the screen. The first Saudi feature directed by a woman, "Wadjda" was made entirely inside the repressive country.

A drug dealer was executed by beheading in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh on Wednesday, Riyadh radio reported.

A 100-year-old Saudi Arabian has remarried because he missed conversation after his wife died three years ago, the newspaper Al Yom reported. "Now I have someone to talk to," Abdullah Mouzaal told the Dammam-based daily after settling down with his 80-year-old bride.

A pink diamond was sold for $6,053,254, the fourth-highest sum ever paid for a gem at auction, it was announced Friday. The rare 21.06-carat diamond was bought Thursday by Robert Mouawad, a Saudi Arabian jeweler, according to Christie's spokeswoman Katharina Feller.

TELLURIDE, Colo. - Wearing high-top tennis shoes and headphones, 11-year-old Wadjda doesn't look like much of a revolutionary. But in filmmaker Haifaa Mansour's new Saudi Arabian movie, the young girl is just that - as is Mansour herself. Having its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, "Wadjda" has become one of the event's most talked-about movies, as much as for what's on screen as for how the story was brought to the screen. The first Saudi feature directed by a woman, "Wadjda" was made entirely inside the repressive country.

Though initially skeptical that top Iranian regime figures were behind a plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington, U.S. government officials became convinced by the operation's money trail and now consider it likely that Iran's supreme leader was aware of the plan. "This is the kind of operation -- the assassination of a diplomat on foreign soil -- that would have been vetted at the highest levels of the Iranian government," said a senior U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about sensitive analyses.

Director Greg MacGillivray knows a thing or two about shooting large-format films in tough locations: For 1998's "Everest," for example, he designed a lightweight, all-weather Imax camera to take up the highest mountain on Earth. But he says his new Imax movie, "Arabia 3D," opening Friday at the California Science Center, was his hardest endeavor. "At times we were in 120-degree heat" in the Saudi desert, recalled MacGillivray, 65. "When we would change rolls, which is every three minutes, we would actually put a tent over the camera.

Hundreds of troops from Saudi Arabia and police officers from the nearby United Arab Emirates have entered Bahrain at the request of the ruling family, a move that further polarized the tiny island nation and marks the first time Arab nations have intervened in another country's affairs amid sweeping unrest in the region. Bahrain television showed a line of armored vehicles Monday carrying Saudi soldiers crossing the 16-mile King Fahd Causeway that links the two countries. The surprise deployment came after several days of worsening violence that had paralyzed the country and threatened to bring down the monarchy.

Standing in an epic line to see the world's largest IMAX screen, you get the impression that the entire Chinese population of 1.3 billion has had the same idea. On a crowded day, lines have stretched more than two miles, with wait times of up to nine hours, for the Saudi Arabian pavilion, the most popular exhibit at Shanghai's Expo 2010. It usually takes at least six hours to see the Japanese pavilion, with a wildly popular exhibit of robots, including one that plays the violin.

The surgeon who ran the liver transplant program at St. Vincent Medical Center was indicted by a federal grand jury Wednesday for allegedly covering up the misallocation of a liver -- a significant breach of transplant rules that prompted the hospital to close the program four years ago. Dr. Richard R. Lopez Jr., 54, is accused of lying to national transplant officials and directing his staff to falsify records involving a September 2003 transplant....

An Indian supertanker that ran aground last month off the Saudi Arabian coast, spilling 3.9 million gallons of oil into the Red Sea, was refloated after running aground for a second time, shipping officials said Wednesday. The 276,744-ton Kanchenjunga was refloated Tuesday without damage or further oil spills off the Saudi Red Sea port of Gizan, gulf-based officials said. Maritime authorities in the Saudi Arabian port of Jidda said two tugs initially brought in to stabilize the vessel had to tow it about seven miles away from the spot where it ran aground for a second time.

A bomb threat delayed a Saudi Arabian airliner for four hours in Cairo, the Middle East News Agency reported Friday. The plane, carrying 411 passengers, was preparing to take off for Jidda, Saudi Arabia, late Thursday night when an anonymous telephone caller told airline officials it would explode within minutes. Police using specially trained dogs found nothing and allowed the airliner to leave. Egypt has sent thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabian warplanes attacked Shiite rebel strongholds inside northern Yemen today in a surge of fighting along the border following the death of a Saudi security official at the hands of insurgents, according to news reports. Saudi fighter jets targeted up to six rebel positions inside Yemen and along the mountainous border. Saudi troops were reportedly heading toward the region to secure villages and prevent further cross-border incursions from Houthi rebel forces that have been battling the Yemen government sporadically since 2004.

Zoe Ferraris' Ukrainian American grandmother thought her so spoiled that she would only marry a sheik. But Ferraris, then a San Francisco teen, didn't quite catch her meaning. "I thought it was some fairy-tale punishment, having to marry a sheet, having to do all the [house] work," Ferraris said. "When I did get married, she said, 'I told you so.'