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London | The co-pilot accused of attempting to hijack a passenger jet full of Israeli passengers watched terror videos and glorified attackers as part of his radicalisation while studying in Melbourne almost a decade ago, the United Arab Emirates top prosecutor said on Friday (Saturday AEDT). The Omani co-pilot planned to crash the plane into the passenger terminal at Tel Aviv airport to kill the most number of people in a September 11 style plot, UAE Attorney-General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi revealed. The co-pilot told investigators he had acted alone, the attorney-general said. Omani pilot Hamam al-Hammami is accused of...

Yemeni government forces claimed on Monday to have retaken control of key positions near the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a vital chokepoint for global trade, as they launch a renewed campaign to roll back recent gains made by the Iran-backed Houthi movement. Military spokesperson Majid Al-Nuzaili claimed on X that government forces “have succeeded in controlling Bab al-Mandeb,” adding that they have “cut off” and taken control of the road between Dhubab district, which overlooks Bab al-Mandeb, and the port town of Mocha, previously seized by the Houthis. CNN hasn’t independently verified the claim. Forces, which are backed by Saudi Arabia,...

Hamam al-Hammami, the copilot accused of trying to hijack and crash a flydubai aircraft bound for Israel, stated during interrogation that he had researched which airlines operate routes to Tel Aviv and consequently chose flydubai, an Israeli source told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday. "I tried to get hired by all the airlines. I planned the operation even before I was accepted by the company," the pilot said during interrogation. "The dream was to crash into Ben-Gurion Airport," Hammami added. In recent months, Hammami had been frequenting Ben-Gurion Airport in the course of his work as a pilot. One of...

UAE is in serious trouble. Israel is now suspecting the direct involvement of certain UAE officials in the attempted hijacking of FlyDubai Flight FZ1073. Without several deliberate security violations, the hijacking would have been impossible. To make matters even more suspicious, UAE and Saudi officials still refuse to release the name of the suicidal Omani pilot. The pilot went through 2 body scanners, a metal detector and an X-ray scanner with a knife. No alarm went off during the screening. Another suspicion is that an influential airport official may have already placed the weapon inside the cockpit. Things get even...

A series of open miracles on the flydubai flight that very nearly went down with a plane full of passengers. Miracle 1: A plane full of people survived an attempt by the copilot to crash their aircraft. Passengers and crew broke into the cockpit and subdued the attacker after he stabbed the captain. Miracle 2: Two off-duty flydubai pilots happened to be on board. They took control of the plunging aircraft and landed it safely. Miracle 3: The plane plummeted and spun out of control - spiraling some 17,000 feet. It ultimately touched down with a chunk of its rudder...

The Western model of multiculturalism has changed Western high-trust societies into low-trust societies with high levels of crime, violence and internal conflict. The Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom are examples of societies that have gone through this transformation. The United Arab Emirates is an example of a country that has implemented multiculturalism in a very different way. They have implemented a clear and legal distinction between the own population and foreigners from other cultures. What would it look like if this Arab model were to be implemented in Western societies? This video contains a thought experiment. CONTENT 0:00 Introduction...

A California man was charged Monday with operating a ring of illegal test-takers who helped dozens of Middle Eastern nationals obtain U.S. student visas by passing proficiency and college-placement exams for them. Eamonn Daniel Higgins, 46, of Laguna Niguel made an appearance in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana on one count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud as immigration agents arrested 16 of his suspected clients who remained in Southern California... The allegations revealed a potentially dangerous security breach in the country's student visa system and underscored the vulnerability of a tracking process that relies on schools to verify...

The new season of Fauda, released on September 8 on Netflix, is a hit around the world, as the series tends to be – but the big news is that, even as anti-Israel sentiment mounts around the world, it is the number one show in Lebanon, according to tracking sites such as FlixPatrol. Not only is it the top show in Lebanon, which has been in a state of war with Israel since 1948, but it is or has been in the top 10 in nine other Arab countries that have different relationships with Israel. At the time of writing,...

AR: ....The UAE refused to comment on the report but did not deny it and underscored that the Emirati and Israeli governments maintained open and direct communication since establishing relations more than 5 Years ago. For his part, Netanyahu wrote on social media that no such call took place between September and October 7th and called the story a malicious fabrication with a clear political timing. For more on this story and how the actions of Netanyahu before the October 7th attack are impacting the current election campaign in Israel, we turn to David Makovsky, distinguished fellow at the Washington...

Strategic patience for the win? Iran's regime leaders thought they could force the US to buckle by strangling the global economy at the Strait of Hormuz. The US, however, has an actual blue-water navy, and that tends to matter in blockades involving a country entirely reliant on sea trade for its only valuable export economy. As the Wall Street Journal concedes, Donald Trump's Hormuz blockade is a lot less "leaky" than the IRGC's. And as Trump himself pointed out yesterday, the Strait may not matter for very much longer anyway:By squeezing the Strait of Hormuz, both the U.S. and Iran...

The Underworld Bank scandal is oozing out all over. Conceived in Karachi, financed in Abu Dhabi, the conspiracy reached into the world's Western capitals and perhaps the U.N. under the protection of high-paid lobbyists and naive spooks. The B.C.C.I. scandal involves the laundering of drug money, the illicit financing of terrorism and of arms to Iraq, the easy purchase of respectability and the corruption of the world banking system. For more than a decade, the biggest banking swindle in history worked beautifully. Between $5 billion and $15 billion was bilked from governments and individual depositors to be put to the...

Confirmed Royal Jet flights from Abu Dhabi into Iran have intensified scrutiny of unverified claims that the United Arab Emirates released billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets, including gold, to reduce its exposure to future Iranian attacks. The allegations, attributed exclusively to anonymous senior sources in Tehran, describe financial transfers designed to preserve an apparent pause in Iranian missile and drone strikes against Emirati territory during the wider 2026 United States-Iran confrontation. Flight-tracking data confirms that a Royal Jet Boeing 737-7KK Business Jet, registered A6-RJA, conducted short return flights from Abu Dhabi to Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport and Karaj’s Payam...

A wide spread scale over the secret network used to move Iran's oil revenues around international sanctions has [received] criticism. Senior officials have discovered that [corrupt intermediaries] have misappropriated at least $1.6 billion, with some fleeing the country. The controversy has expose the unofficial network of so-called trusts: companies and intermediates entrusted with receiving and transferring oil revenues outside the international banking system. Speaking on state television on Sunday, the head of Iran's State Inspection Organization, Zabihollah Khodaeian, said one intermediart alone had failed to return $200 million in state funds before leaving the country. Khudaeian added that judicial authorities...

Oil producers in the Persian Gulf are making plans to bypass the Strait of Hormuz with new pipelines and a new port after Iran has repeatedly attacked ships and blocked traffic. The idea is to minimize Tehran’s leverage on the waterway that once saw 20% of the world’s oil pass through it as the war stretches into its fifth month. Iran has already insisted that it will impose tolls on the strait, which could cost tens of billions of dollars. And in some cases, it is extracting millions of dollars of protection money per oil tanker. Two such projects are...

The unexplained attacks have added a dangerous new layer of uncertainty to an already volatile conflict, raising concerns that additional countries may now be conducting military operations against Iran without publicly acknowledging their involvement.New Airstrikes Came After U.S. Said Its Campaign Had EndedThe U.S. military’s Central Command (CENTCOM) announced Thursday morning that it had completed a coordinated operation striking approximately 90 targets inside Iran.Yet only hours later, Iranian state media reported another wave of explosions and airstrikes across the southern provinces of Bushehr and Sistan and Baluchestan.Those attacks occurred after the United States had publicly stated its operation was complete.CENTCOM...

The Iran war exposed a long-simmering feud within the world’s most powerful oil cartel, boiling over this spring when it contended with the biggest oil supply shock in history. Now OPEC faces a fight for its existence. The Strait of Hormuz has started to reopen, and some OPEC nations are clamoring to ramp up oil production The ultimate decider will be Saudi Arabia Unlike Iraq and Kuwait, the Saudis don’t need production to ramp up . The country was able to keep its oil business afloat by bypassing the strait with pipelines that shipped oil to a port in Yanbu...

The US secretly approved a financial and maritime arrangement between Qatar and Iran, under which billions of dollars were paid to Tehran in exchange for free passage for Qatari tankers and ships through the Strait of Hormuz, three diplomatic officials now confirm. This was a deliberate and conscious course of action by the US administration, which allowed its navy to turn a blind eye to the arrangement, in complete contradiction of its declared policy. The move was intended to ease the crisis in global energy markets and curb rising oil prices. The current revelation proves that the White House had...

U.S. President Donald Trump will meet with Middle ‌Eastern leaders and attend a working ‌session with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during the ​G7 summit in France next week, senior U.S. administration officials said on Saturday. Officials said Trump would meet separately with the ‌leaders of Egypt, ⁠Qatar, United Arab Emirate, France and India. No bilateral meeting ⁠was planned with Zelenskiy but the two leaders could meet on the sidelines ​of the ​summit, they added. Trump ​planned to raise ‌issues of shared importance with leaders at the summit, including economic growth and development, supply chain resilience, illegal migration and AI, one...

The United Arab Emirates has agreed to unlock billions of dollars for Iran, four sources ​said, in a tactical shift after weeks of Iranian attacks on the wealthy Gulf Arab state during the U.S.-Israeli war with the Islamic Republic. (snip) Two regional sources told Reuters the UAE had agreed to release a total of $10 billion, more than $3 billion of which had already been delivered. Two other sources with knowledge of the arrangement put the total funds involved at $20 billion, adding that the move had been agreed in return for a ​halt to Iranian attacks on the UAE....

KAN Israel News, citing an Iranian-linked news network, reports that $3 billion was transferred from Abu Dhabi to Tehran aboard a private Boeing 737. According to the report, Iran agreed to halt direct attacks on Israel after receiving a U.S. message, delivered through Qatar, in from further strikes in Lebanon. The funds were reportedly flown to Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport aboard UAE Royal Jet aircraft A6-RJF, which was tracked traveling from Abu Dhabi to Iran. At this stage, the flight itself was genuine (it happened during Irans airspace closure) and the presence of a UAE delegation in Tehran has been reported...