In long-awaited move, Kuwait’s emir pardons dissidents

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Kuwait’s emir has issued a long-awaited amnesty decree, pardoning and reducing the sentences of nearly three dozen Kuwaiti dissidents in a move aimed at defusing a government standoff.  The royal decree, published late Saturday in Kuwait’s official gazette, said that Emir Sheikh Nawaf Al Ahmad Al Sabah had cut the sentences of 11 politicians who had landed in prison for storming the country’s parliament amid the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings and pardoned 24 others. Also pardoned were members arrested of a group dismantled in 2015 for links to Shiite Iran. The amnesty marks a breakthrough in a long-simmering standoff between the emir-appointed government and the parliament, the most empowered such body among Gulf Arab states.