Malaysian Film Censorship chairman said Darren Aronofsky's film Noah is not being screened in Malaysia -- whose population is 60 percent Muslim -- to protect the harmony and sensitivity of the country's multiracial community.

Arab leaders openly feuded over the region's most intractable problems at their annual summit on Tuesday, particularly the inability to resolve Syria's civil war and anger at Qatar for its support of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) had not fully recovered from last November's disagreement between Saudi Arabia and Oman when it was hit by a deeper rift involving Qatar. 

Three Arab countries have banned the Hollywood film "Noah" on religious grounds even before its worldwide premiere and several others are expected to follow suit, a representative of Paramount Pictures told Reuters on Saturday.

The United Arab Emirates has started to ban its citizens from working at Qatari media outlets following its recent decision to withdraw its ambassador from Doha. The UAE government has requested a number of prominent anchors to terminate their contracts with the Doha-based Bein Sports network (formerly Al-Jazeera Sports).

"The good times are over," a Doha-based diplomat told me glumly last week, as if foretelling the political earthquake about to hit Qatar. On March 5, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain announced in a joint statement that they were withdrawing their ambassadors from Doha -- a move that escalates their long-running feud with the tiny, gas-rich emirate to its most fraught point in recent memory.

A perceived lack of real progress in the improvement of conditions for foreign labor, aggravated by a Qatari reluctance to engage in public debate beyond platitudes, is undermining the soft-power goals underlying the Gulf state’s sports strategy

With the current cloud of anti-Semitic allegations hovering over football, Fifa must be praying that Israel do not qualify for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. For hard on the heels of the disturbing concerns over excessive heat, homophobia and mass deaths of migrant construction workers comes an incident at the recent Swimming World Cup in the capital Doha when the Qatari hosts refused to display the name “Israel” during TV broadcasts and removed Israeli flags from outside the venue.