Abu Dhabi and Dubai Blog

Two Britons accused of kissing in public in Dubai face up to a month in prison after a mother complained her child had seen them. The case is the third in under two years in which Britons have fallen foul of decency laws in Dubai. Dubai’s burgeoning foreign population, which now outnumbers that of Emirati nationals, has sparked concerns that the pace of change is threatening the conservative region’s social and religious identity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/14/kiss-dubai-britons-public

Washington Post laments the unfair treatment of Israel in the Dubai Hamas assasination:

Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim, the police chief of Dubai, certainly knows how to milk a good story for all it’s worth. It’s now been six weeks since Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was found dead in his room in an airport hotel, and most of the world long ago concluded that Israel’s Mossad spy agency was responsible. Yet day after day Tamim continues to make headlines, dribbling out more details of the clumsy and not-so-clandestine operation and issuing grandiose pronouncements.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/03/the_dubai_police_chiefs_outlan.html

The observation deck on the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world, has been closed for repairs only a month after it opened. Emaar Properties, the builder of the tower, said there had been an unexpectedly high number of visitors and problems with the power supply.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8504852.stm

The murder was straight out of a cheap spy thriller. At least 11 professional assassins, some wearing wigs and fake beards, tracked a senior Hamas official to his Dubai hotel in January and killed him with cold precision, fleeing the country afterward on European passports, the Dubai police say.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/world/middleeast/17dubai.html

Details continued to emerge yesterday on the assassination of senior Hamas member Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last week. Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan told local reporters yesterday at least seven people with European passports were involved. He did not name the specific countries of the passports, but said the Dubai police approached the nations for information on these individuals.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1146622.html

The financial crisis and now two criminal cases that have generated critical headlines in other countries have demonstrated that the emirates remain an absolute monarchy, where institutions are far less important than royalty and where the law is particularly capricious — applied differently based on social standing, religion and nationality, political experts and human rights advocates said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/world/middleeast/22uae.html

Even as the site was being excavated more than five years ago, during the halcyon days of the Dubai miracle, the Emirates construction business was disillusioning. Dogged by human and civil rights violations, the Pakistani, Bengali, Indian, and Chinese workers who poured the reinforced concrete, put in place the support beams, and manned the high cranes that still dominate the Dubai skyline were often subjected to unhygienic, overcrowded living quarters, unsafe working conditions, and withheld wages.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/81082807.html