Kuwait parliament failed Tuesday to hold its first session after it was reinstated by a court ruling as a majority of MPs boycotted the meeting amid a lingering political crisis.

Speaker Jassem al-Khorafi adjourned the session for next week after only six MPs of the 50-member house and several cabinet ministers turned up for the meeting boycotted by both pro-government and opposition lawmakers.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrived in Cairo on Tuesday for a lightning visit to the longtime Middle East ally to reaffirm U.S. support for Egypt's democratic transition, Agence France Presse reported.

The Pentagon chief is due to meet Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF, and newly elected Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.

Twin car bombs in Baghdad killed 12 people and wounded at least 27 others on Tuesday, while another attack west of the capital left two people dead, security and medical officials said.

An interior ministry official said the twin blasts in Baghdad's central Karrada area killed 12 people and wounded 27.

Gunmen shot dead a television presenter and wounded his mother, wife and baby in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, a media rights group said on Tuesday.

The Journalistic Freedoms Observatory said in a statement that Ghazwan Anis, from satellite channel Sama al-Mosul, was killed and that his four-month-old son was among family members who were wounded.

Iraqi Kurdish forces gave basic training to Syrian Kurds to fill any "security gap" should the Syrian regime fall, a top official in the party of the Kurdistan region's president said on Tuesday.

A "very small" number of young Syrian Kurds "were trained in basic training in camps in the region in order to fill any security gap after the fall of the Syrian regime," Hayman Hawrami, the head of the external relations department in the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), told Agence France Presse.

A firefight erupted Tuesday between Yemeni security forces and gunmen, dressed in police uniforms, who had been surrounding the headquarters of the interior ministry, witnesses said.

The gunmen, who were previously working unofficially in Yemen's police department, had been surrounding the ministry's headquarters in al-Hasaba district of Sanaa since Sunday, demanding that they be enrolled back into the impoverished country's police force.

The widow of Yasser Arafat on Tuesday formally asked for a French investigation into his death, bringing a complaint of assassination weeks after raising new suspicions that the former Palestinian leader was poisoned before his 2004 death in a French military hospital.

Earlier this month, Palestinian authorities gave final approval for Arafat's body to be exhumed. In recent tests of Arafat's belongings requested by his widow and the Arab satellite network Al-Jazeera, a Swiss lab detected elevated traces of polonium-210 — a rare and highly lethal substance — but said the findings were inconclusive and that Arafat's bones would have to be tested. And questions remain about the results of any additional tests after so long.

Yemeni security services have arrested a suspected al-Qaida leader, Abdulrahman al-Baihani, wanted for plotting "terrorist' attacks in the capital, state news agency Saba said Tuesday.

The suspect is "one of the most dangerous wanted al-Qaida elements and among the prominent leaders plotting to carry out acts of terrorism and sabotage in the capital," Saba quoted a high-ranking security official as saying.

Iran "will not allow the enemy to advance" in its key ally Syria, but does not yet see the need to directly intervene, the deputy chief of the Islamic republic's armed forces was quoted as saying in reports on Tuesday.

"There is still no need for Syria's circle of friends to fully enter the arena, and our assessment is that there will be no need to do so," Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri said, according to the Shargh daily.

Syrian troops and rebels poured into commercial capital Aleppo Tuesday as both sides battened down for the long haul after 40 police were killed on day four of a pivotal battle in the nearly 17-month conflict.

A Damascus security source said the offensive which the army launched on Saturday to recapture rebel-held areas of the city of some 2.7 million people now looked likely to drag on for "several weeks".