Veil lifts

Kuwait, April 25 (Reuters): A Kuwait court has approved a request by a Kuwaiti man who had sex-change surgery to change his gender officially to female, setting a precedent in the conservative Muslim Gulf Arab state.

The Personal Status Court of First Instance ruled that the plaintiff had suffered physiologically and psychologically since childhood due to hormonal imbalances, defence lawyer Adel al-Yahya said today.

Yesterday’s ruling has to be referred to a higher court before the decision becomes final, Yahya said, adding the process might take up to a month.

Yahya said he presented the court with an edict issued by Egypt’s al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s top religious institution, that allowed people to change their gender if medical reports showed this was to their benefit.

“We have evidence, a fatwa from al-Azhar, because we have a case of illness, not a case of switching gender or as they call it in Kuwait a third-sex case,” Yahya said. “This is a very rare condition...and the court ruled according to that condition.”

The 25-year-old plaintiff, who wants a name change to Amal from Ahmad, had a sex-change operation in Bangkok in October 2002, the Arab Times daily reported.

Pop private

Los Angeles (Reuters): Pop star Michael Jackson, bristling at photographers ‘lurking behind bushes’ at his rented Florida mansion following his indictment, pleaded with the media to leave him alone. Jackson, in seclusion at the 12-bedroom central Florida estate of time-share magnate David Siegel while he awaits an arraignment, asked for privacy in a written statement posted on his website.

Passion play

Los Angeles (Reuters): Fox Broadcasting Co. appears to be the lone broadcast network considering licensing TV rights to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Representatives for Gibson’s Icon Prods. have been quietly shopping for a TV deal for Passion, which depicts the last hours in the life of Jesus Christ in graphic detail, for the past few weeks. It’s understood that ABC, CBS and NBC have passed on the movie. A Fox spokesman said that the network has been pitched the movie but has yet to “determine if it fits with our programming plans.”

Safe silence

Baghdad (Reuters) : Iraq’s US-led authorities are telling anyone who wants information about risks in the violence-torn country to seek it elsewhere. “For security reasons, there are no security reports,” says the weekly reports section of the Coalition Provisional Authority website http://www.cpa-iraq.org/weeklies.html.

The website includes reports on electricity production and reconstruction projects, but not on security, the top concern of foreign investors and local businesses.