PrairiePundit

 NY Times: To Avoid Sanctions, Luxury Imports to Russia Take a Detour Through Dubai The web of global trade has adjusted to Western sanctions, with a network of middlemen sending cars, electronics and more to Russia. This suggests that sanctions should be imposed on the middlemen who are facilitating the Russian imports.

NY Times: Holding Hands, and Other Ways to Go to Jail in Dubai Dubai says it welcomes foreigners, but some end up in prison for offenses that few Westerners would dream were even crimes. I spent some time in Dubai during a layover on a flight to Bangkok, Thailand.  The airport is modern and nice.  My wife was not with me so there was no danger of my holding anyone's hand.  The only really weird thing that happened was I bought a bottle of water at the airport and when I went to board the plane they acted as if it was a dangerous potential weapon.  I asked the guy if they were really selling dangerous bottles of water in their airport and he let me board. I am not sure why anyone would pick Dubai over going to a beach resort in the Caribbean.  The people on the islands are more friendly and they don't care if you hold hands or kiss.  Bangkok is also a much more interesting place.

Telegraph: British newspaper editor 'admits he accidentally killed wife by throwing a hammer at her in their Dubai home' I have done a good bit of hammering, but I never lost control of one or thrown one at anyone.  I have trouble visualizing how someone could accidentally throw a hammer at someone.

Daily Caller: EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Aide Cheryl Mills OK’d Oil Deal That Put $500K In Bill’s Pocket That was just one of the deals that enriched Clinton. Bill further earned $15 million in a hedge fund deal with business partner Sheikh Mohammed bin-Rashid al-Marktoum, the UAE’s authoritarian ruler. He collected an additional $5.6 million to serve as “honorary chairman” of a Dubai-based for-profit network of Islamic K-12 schools throughout the world. The curriculum featured in those schools includes instruction on Sharia Law, which is at the heart of Islamic terrorist ideologies behind groups like Islamic State. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Bill Clinton Got Millions From World’s Biggest Sharia Law Education Firm) Bill collected another $1 million for two speeches he delivered in Abu Dhabi that were paid for by the royal government while Hillary was secretary of state. Clinton spoke in the country while the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security were deliberating on op...

Reuters: The United States offered a reward of up to $5 million on Tuesday for a Chinese businessman accused of supplying missile parts to Iran, and targeted companies from China and Dubai for allegedly helping Iran evade weapons and oil sanctions. In a signal Washington will keep pressure on Iran over its nuclear program, the U.S. Treasury Department said it was sanctioning eight of Chinese businessman Li Fangwei's Chinese companies for allegedly procuring missile parts for Iran. The U.S. State Department said it was offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of Li, who is also known as Karl Lee. Li has been the target of U.S. sanctions in the past for his alleged role as a principle supplier to Iran's ballistic missile program. The State Department said the announcement of the bounty for Li was coordinated with Treasury and the Justice Department, which unsealed an indictment against him on charges including conspiracy to c...

BBC: A Norwegian woman has spoken out about the 16-month prison sentence she received in Dubai after reporting a rape incident to police. Interior designer Marte Deborah Dalelv was on a business trip in Dubai when she says she was raped. The 24-year-old reported the March attack to the police but found herself charged with having extramarital sex, drinking alcohol, and perjury. Convicted earlier this week, she says she is appealing against the verdict. The appeal hearing is scheduled for early September. Describing the sentence as "very harsh", she told the AFP news agency: "I am very nervous and tense. But I hope for the best and I take one day at a time. I just have to get through this." The case has angered rights groups and the authorities in Norway.'Wanted' Ms Dalelv says she had been on a night out with colleagues on 6 March when the rape took place. She reported it to the police, who proceeded to confiscate her passport and seize her money. She was ...

Daily Mail: US sailor thwarts Dubai bus driver rapist after putting him in strangehold with her thighs and then beating him into submission She also broke his knife.  The bus driver was later arrested, apparently drowning his misery with booze.

This is a very impressive performance done to Houston singing I Will Always Love You .

Image via Wikipedia Telegraph: The revelations came as Dubai laid out plans for a bond issue, in part designed to restore its finances in the wake of the crisis. The bond documents showed that the country's real estate watchdog cancelled the registered real estate projects over the past two years after the bursting of the property bubble. The Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) determined that the properties were unlikely to be completed after a review of 450 projects. The Gulf Arab emirate, known for extravagant projects such as the artificial islands Palm Jumeirah and Burj Khalifa , the world's tallest tower, is planning a benchmark sovereign dollar bond issue this week. ... The property sector has been hit hard by the downturn, with projects worth billions of dollars put on hold or cancelled, while property prices slumped as much as 60pc. Land sales fell by 14.9pc in the last year, according to data from Dubai's Department of Land and Properties. The...

Image via Wikipedia CNN: No evidence has surfaced of an explosion aboard a UPS cargo plane that crashed in Dubai last September, officials in the United Arab Emirates said Saturday. But UAE authorities are seriously looking into a claim by a militant group that it was responsible for bringing the plane down. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen -based arm of the al Qaeda terrorist network, claimed responsibility on Friday for the September 3 crash, which killed two pilots aboard, and last week's foiled plot to send parcel bombs to U.S. synagogues. "The investigators did not report any explosion, only a fire in the cabin," Dahi Khalfan Tamim , Dubai's police chief, told CNN on Saturday. "Dubai police investigations revealed that an explosive parcel would have blown up the plane into pieces." ... As noted elsewhere, I recently flew through Dubai on my way from Bangkok . It has one of the better airports in the world and its security was...

Image via Wikipedia NY Times: Germany, France and Britain all halted cargo shipments from Yemen as aviation and counterterrorism authorities weighed their response to the discovery late last week of two bombs in air cargo from Yemen. Germany halted all Yemeni passenger flights, as well. The British government also, at least temporarily, barred Somali cargo and said that air passengers would not be allowed to carry on ink cartridges the size of those used in the plot. The British home secretary, Theresa May , who has responsibility for domestic security, said the ban on the Yemen and Somali cargo and the restriction on ink cartridges would be in place initially for a month. ... Yemen is going to have to get a handle on al Qaeda if it expects to be able to use air cargo services in the future. Carry on ink jet cartridges will also be stopped until airport screeners can find a way to distinguish them from bombs. This will not have any effect on my flight through Dubai la...

Image via Wikipedia Sunday Telegraph: US intelligence officials say the detonator on one of the devices is almost exactly the same as one he is thought to have made for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab , the so-called Underpants Bomber. Originally born to a pious family in Saudi Arabia , Ibrahim is one of 85 people on the kingdom's list of wanted terrorists. After serving jail time in his home country, he fled to neighbouring Yemen two years ago with his brother Abdullah to become key members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula , which has bases in the lawless mountain areas beyond the writ of central government. The slightly-built 28-year-old, who is the son of a retired soldier, is believed to be the movement's resident bombmaking expert - skills he first put to chilling use in a suicide attack in which he recruited his own younger brother, Abdullah, 23, to act as the "martyr". ... We need to find this guy most ricky tick. I have a flight through Dubai coming u...

Image via Wikipedia NY Times: Two packages containing explosive devices originating in Yemen and bound for two places of Jewish worship in Chicago set off a global terror alert on Friday. One package was found at a FedEx facility in Dubai , and another was found early Friday morning at an airport in Britain, sparking a day of dramatic precautionary activity in the United States . Speaking at the White House Friday afternoon, President Obama called the packages a “credible terrorist threat against our country,” and confirmed that they “did apparently contain” explosives. Earlier reports had said that the device found in Britain did not. The wide-scale alert spread to the United States on Friday morning, when officials isolated two cargo planes at airports in Newark and Philadelphia and searched them for packages originating in Yemen, and New York police searched a delivery truck in Brooklyn. None of the shipments reaching the United States from Yemen were found to contain expl...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife I leave this afternoon so posting will be from web hotspots in airports for the next 30 or so hours.  The first leg of the trip is a 19 plus hour flight to Dubai where I have a four hour layover for the final leg to Bangkok which is a six plus hour flight.  I will try to post regularly during my trip. I hope I get a chance to see the world's tallest building while I am in Dubai.  I have been to the Windows on the World at the top of the World Trade Center before Islamic religious bigots destroyed it.

Independent: Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, could step down in three months after the country's Prime Minister refused to extend his term, a television channel has claimed. The unconfirmed reports will prompt speculation that Mr Dagan, 65, is being ousted over a botched operation in January to kill a Hamas operative in Dubai that led to a diplomatic backlash from some of Israel's closest allies. Israel's Channel Two television claimed that Mr Dagan, who has served eight years in the post, asked Benjamin Netanyahu to extend his term, but the request was turned down. Mr Netanyahu's office immediately refuted the reports, saying that Mr Dagan "did not turn to us and did not ask us to extend his term." ... The Hamas operative in Dubai deserved to die and he did. That part of the operation was not botched. The team that handled the operation could have done a better job of handling the video security in the hotel...

Observer /Guardian: The bosomy blonde in a tight, low-cut evening dress slid on to a barstool next to me and began the chat: Where are you from? How long are you here? Where are you staying? I asked her what she did for a living. "You know what I do," she replied. "I'm a whore." As I looked around the designer bar on the second floor of the glitzy five-star hotel, it was obvious that every woman in the place was a prostitute. And the men were all potential punters, or at least window-shoppers. While we talked, Jenny, from Minsk in Belarus, offered me "everything, what you like, all night" for the equivalent of about £500. It was better if I was staying in the luxurious hotel where we were drinking, she said, but if not she knew another one, cheaper but "friendly". I turned down the offer. This was not Amsterdam's red-light district or the Reeperbahn in Hamburg or a bar on Shanghai's Bund. This was in the city centre of Du...

Times: Would you be prepared to cross-dress? And kill a guest in an adjacent hotel room? If the answer to these questions is a resounding “yes”, and you can also act, enjoy luxury international travel with a twist and can carry off a convincing Irish or Australian accent, then the job could be yours. The Israeli spy agency Mossad may be the target of international reproach since it allegedly killed the Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel this month, but at home emerging details of the operation have generated Mossad mania. It has never been more popular in Israel, with stores selling out of Mossad memorabilia and its official website reporting a soaring number of visitors interested in applying to become agents. “Mossad has been restored to its glory days,” said Ilan Mizrahi, a former deputy director of the agency, which is located in the affluent beach town of Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv. ... Dubai has turned the Israeli intelligence agency into a group of ...

Eli Lake: The embarrassing trail left by a suspected Israeli hit team — a trail that began with doctored European passports, led to the assassination of a Palestinian terrorist in a Dubai hotel room, and ended on the front pages of world papers — has not worsened the country's intelligence cooperation with Western countries, a senior Israeli official insists. "There is a lot of hyperventilating about this in the public arena," said the senior official, who asked not to be named because he was speaking about sensitive intelligence matters. The official said he was speaking only about the effects on intelligence links and was not confirming Israel's involvement in the hit. "The countries that coordinate the war on terror with allies like Israel and the United States and Europe are not as exercised about this as some of the public statements," the official said. "There has been no effect on the operational side." But this assessment stands in stark ...

Leslie Susser , JTA: ... Dagan’s tenure at the Mossad is up for renewal at the end of the year. Defenders of Dagan point to the long list of Mossad achievements in the war on terrorism and the campaign against Iran's nuclear program, and argue that his tenure at the intelligency agency should be extended for an unprecedented fourth time. They insist that his knowledge of the Iranian theater is unmatched, and that as the clock reaches zero hour on the Iranian nuclear threat, his input will be invaluable -- and not only for Israel. Under Dagan, the Mossad has had just two priorities: delaying Iran's nuclear program and counter-terrorism. "The list must be short. If we continue pretending we can do everything, in the end we won't do anything," Dagan was quoted as saying when he was appointed by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon in 2002. Sharon reportedly told Dagan to run the agency "with a knife between its teeth." The main focus of his tenure has been...

From the Independent: Israel refuses to help Britain with inquiry into fake passports Why would Israel want to help the UK unravel a portion of what has been described in the UK papers as a Mossad operation to kill a Hamas arms dealer? Perhaps the UK needed to go through the motions of making the request to save its relations with Dubai.