Led out by a beaming Adam Kadyrov, the son of the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, a group of muscular men sporting black beards strode on to the brightly illuminated stage in Dubai last week to receive gold medals and a $5,000 (£3,960) cheque. The men were members of the notorious Chechen Akhmat Kadyrov special police regiment, a group...
MPs raise concerns over Alex Aiken’s move to role advising Abu Dhabi’s foreign ministry on communications. The Government’s executive director of communications, who has been involved in sensitive discussions on national security, is to take a job at the United Arab Emirates’s foreign ministry. Alex Aiken, who in recent years has sat in on security...
“In the war of propaganda, it is very difficult to defeat the United States because the United States controls all the world’s media and many European media. The ultimate beneficiaries of the biggest European media are American financial institutions.” This is an excerpt from this week’s Tucker Carlson rather tepid interview with Vladimir Putin and...
Some Russian banks appear to have maneuvered around a ban on shipping dollars and euros to the country by trading gold in the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, according to research from a financial-intelligence company. The sanctions on export of banknotes were introduced after the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. The report compiled by Sayari found...
In the days after Hamas’s October 7 attack and the war that followed, Israeli entrepreneur Ron Daniel left Dubai, his home since 2021, fearing that he was “sitting on a volcano”. The chief executive of asset manager and financial technology company Liquidity Group flew back to the United Arab Emirates a month later after deciding...
Democracy Now! speaks with filmmaker Nawal Al-Maghafi about her BBC investigative report which reveals new details about how the United Arab Emirates hired American mercenaries to carry out over 100 assassinations in southern Yemen, targeting politicians, imams and members of civil society. Al-Maghafi interviewed several mercenaries for the first time on camera about how they conducted the targeted...
Sheikh Mohamed phones ‘dear friend’ Russian president to discuss war in Ukraine and conflict in the Middle East. Vladimir Putin and the president of the United Arab Emirates vowed to further develop their“friendly relations” after discussing the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas conflict in a phone call. Putin, who is subject to an international...
The mass trial underway of 84 Emiratis, including prominent human rights defenders, flagrantly violates the defendants’ fair trial rightsand disregards fundamental legal principle by re-trying some defendants for the same charges they were convicted of a decade ago, Amnesty International said ahead of a hearing in the case on 7 February. At least 65 of...
UAE-backed deal could be disastrous for UK government and freedom of press, opponents say. MPs have attacked the proposed UAE-backed takeover of the Telegraph newspapers, warning that it is impossible to “separate sheikh and state” and calling for further investigations to be launched before the deal “turns into a disaster for the government”. Julia Lopez,...
The United Arab Emirates has dispatched an ambassador to Damascus for the first time since the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, Syria’s state media reported today, in a new signal of Syria’s warming ties with the Arab region, Reuters reports. Incoming Emirati envoy Hassan Al-Shehi presented his credentials to Syria’s Foreign Affair Minister Faysal Al-Meqdad at...