Dubai / Emirates Business Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC), a Strategic Partner of Dubai Festivals and Retail Establishment (DFRE), is celebrating the region’s largest shopping and entertainment festival – the Dubai Shopping Festival (DSF) 2017 – for the 22nd consecutive year, by offering customers and visitors a chance to win a Nissan Car daily. ENOC has unveiled an impressive ...

  Abu Dhabi / Emirates Business A new regional conference devoted to exploring the growing role of the Middle East as the world’s largest producer of sulphur is to take place in the UAE capital in February 2017. Hosted by CRU Events – a subsidiary of the business intelligence company, CRU Group, that focuses on the global metals, mining and ...

  SHARJAH / Emirates Business An exhibition of calligraphy created by talented female artists from Southeast Asia opened on Thursday at Sharjah Calligraphy Museum. Entitled ‘Letters & Ornamentation from Southeast Asia’, the exhibition features Arabic scripts crafted by 12 master calligraphers from Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. Each of the women are former students of the world-renowned Moroccan artist and calligrapher ...

  Abu Dhabi / Emirates Business As part of the Asset Transfer Agreement signed with ENOC, ADNOC Distribution announced the opening of Seeh Al Mahab, Asraar and Al Ghafia re-branded service stations in Sharjah, taking the total number of service stations within its network in the emirate to 91. Saeed Mubarak Al Rashdi, Acting Chief Executive Officer of ADNOC Distribution, ...

  Aleppo / AFP More than 4,000 fighters left rebel-held areas of Aleppo, the Red Cross said on Thursday, in the “last stages” of an evacuation clearing the way for Syria’s army to retake the city. A week into the rebel withdrawal from the east of Syria’s second city, the evacuation of fighters and civilians from the one-time opposition stronghold ...

  United Nations / AFP The UN General Assembly agreed to set up a panel to gather evidence on war crimes in Syria, taking a first step towards prosecuting those responsible for atrocities in the nearly six-year war. A resolution on establishing the investigative mechanism was adopted in the 193-nation assembly by a vote of 105 to 15, with 52 ...

  Moscow/ AFP Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday called for the country to reinforce its military nuclear potential and praised the army’s performance in its Syria campaign. In a speech that recapped military activities in 2016, Putin said the army’s preparedness has “considerably increased” and called for continued improvement that would ensure it can “neutralise any military threat”. “We ...

  Moscow / AFP Russia’s defence minister on Thursday accused the British army of using Russian insignia to designate the enemy during training, a method he said was employed by Nazi Germany during World War II. Minister Sergei Shoigu said that British troops at the Salisbury Plain training facility “have started to use Russian-made tanks and uniforms of the Russian ...

  Lubumbashi / AFP Soldiers sealed part of DR Congo’s second city and carried out mass arrests of young men on Thursday, residents said, as talks to defuse the country’s explosive political crisis were set to continue. Protests and deadly clashes have erupted in the vast country over President Joseph Kabila’s refusal to step down at the end of his ...

  Istanbul/ AFP Turkey on Thursday vowed to press on with the fight against “terror”, a day after 14 Turkish soldiers were killed by extremists in an intensifying battle for a flashpoint Syrian town, Ankara’s biggest loss of its Syria campaign so far. The soldiers were killed in a succession of attacks by IS extremists around the town of Al-Bab ...