UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

2011: A Year in Review

Liverpool skipper Steven Gerrard has recovered sufficiently from an ankle injury and is scheduled to take part in full training on Monday.

More than 20,000 children are putting their lives at risk by working in gold mines in Mali, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

A United Arab Emirates court, on Sunday, convicted and sentenced five political activists, after they were found guilty for "publicly insulting" the Gulf state's leaders by calling for protests. The five, arrested in April, have been on trial since June.

According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2011 published Tuesday, women hold less than 20 per cent of all national decision-making positions across the world.

The two sons of ousted President Hosni Mubarak have $340 million (£215 million) in Swiss bank accounts and are suspected of money laundering, says a senior Egyptian Justice Ministry official.

Saudi Arabia plans to spend over $100 billion to build 16 nuclear reactors in an effort to meet its growing domestic energy needs, the kingdom's former Saudi intelligence chief and former ambassador to Washington said in a recent speech.

All of the latest transfer rumours surrounding Chelsea for 25 August 2011. Chelsea are said to be ready to make a bid for Alvaro Pereira and will also pursue Luka Modric until the transfer window closes. Florent Malouda is linked with Chelsea and new signing Romelu Lukaku will be sent on loan to Stoke in January.

A United Arab Emirates player whose back heeled penalty in a friendly against Lebanon has become a viral internet success could be sanctioned, reports suggest.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday pressed all African states to demand the Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi step down and take tougher action against his regime.

fter months of hesitations, Germany has yesterday recognised Libya's rebels as "the legitimate representatives of the Libyan people", becoming the 13th country to do so after after Australia, Britain, France, Gambia, Italy, Jordan, Malta, Qatar, Senegal, Spain, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.

Relief could be felt and hope expressed after the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh announced that he was willing to sign a transition deal. However, on Wednesday and despite Washington's insistence on the necessity of a deal being signed so Yemen could "move forward immediately" with political reform, the agreement fell through. It seems that unhappy about certain details, the Yemeni president backed out of a deal that would have granted him immunity from prosecution and allowed him...

In comparison to other regions in the world, the Middle East attracts a relatively large part of US foreign policy time and has often presented it with its most enduring challenges. In the last decades, protecting the US interests within the region has become a complicated tasks as America has had to deal with the rise of Iran as a regional and influential power in the region and its illegal nuclear activities, the toppling of Saddam Hussein and his regime, invade Afghanistan, try to fight...

Military operations over Libya will be taken over by NATO in the next few days according to the British Foreign Secretary, William Hague.

Forget Britain's "Special Relationship" with America, largely a mirage of the Foreign Office and its existence unknown to most Americans. Even as World War II was ending, the cracks in the relationship between Britain and the United States were becoming ever more obvious to contemporaries and for more recent generations can be studied by reading books, both military and political, such as Armageddon and Nemesis by Max Hastings.

Shares in Mulberry were up on the FTSE AIM 100 after the luxury fashion retailer more than tripled its profits in the half year ended 30 September.

As Liverpool's bidding war enters its second week, Kirdi and Kuang are set to fight it out after the two emerged as frontrunners.

RIM, who have recently been embroiled in a privacy battle with United Arab Emirates are in the midst of a smartphone launch which could see it earn back some users after market share was lost to Apple and Google Android's OS recently.

The BlackBerry uses proprietary software that encrypts all wireless transmissions from Blackberry devices which the UAE can't break.

Shares in BP were up nearly five per cent on the FTSE 100 in afternoon trading after reports of Middle Eastern interest in a substantial stake in the company started doing the rounds.

Shares in RBS were up on the FTSE 100 after the part-nationalised bank confirmed that it would be disposing of its units in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates. It is also expected to sell off its assets in Kazakhstan.