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A trove of emails, documents and legal filings reviewed by Bloomberg News, as well as interviews with former insiders, reveal the extent of the services Rowland and his private bank provided to one of its biggest customers, Mohammed bin Zayed, better known as MBZ, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. Some of the work went beyond financial advice. It included scouting for deals in Zimbabwe, setting up a company to buy the image rights of players on the Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City Football Club and helping place the bank’s chairman at the time on the board of Human Rights Watch after it published reports critical of the Persian Gulf country.

a 2017 plan devised by the bank for an assault on the financial markets of Qatar, a country that had just been blockaded by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain for allegedly sponsoring terrorism

a coordinated attack to deplete Qatar’s foreign-exchange reserves and pauperize its government

The white iPhone with chipped paint that Moroccan journalist Omar Radi used to stay in contact with his sources also allowed his government to spy on him.They could read every email, text and website visited; listen to every phone call and watch every video conference; download calendar entries, monitor GPS coordinates, and even turn on the camera and microphone to see and hear where the phone was at any moment.

Forensic evidence gathered by Amnesty International on Radi’s phone shows that it was infected by “network injection,” a fully automated method where an attacker intercepts a cellular signal when it makes a request to visit a website. In milliseconds, the web browser is diverted to a malicious site and spyware code is downloaded that allows remote access to everything on the phone. The browser then redirects to the intended website and the user is none the wiser.

While Amnesty could not definitively state that the Moroccan authorities were behind the attack, the group was able to use forensic evidence to conclude this was very likely the case.

After Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to police hijab law, the head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology would be used “to identify inappropriate and unusual movements,” including “failure to observe hijab laws.” Individuals could be identified by checking faces against a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said.

Shajarizadeh and others monitoring the ongoing outcry have noticed that some people involved in the protests are confronted by police days after an alleged incident—including women cited for not wearing a hijab. “Many people haven't been arrested in the streets,” she says. “They were arrested at their homes one or two days later.”

Iran’s government has monitored social media to identify opponents of the regime for years, Grothe says, but if government claims about the use of face recognition are true, it’s the first instance she knows of a government using the technology to enforce gender-related dress law.

The Tunisian General Union of Labour (UGTT) said it has issued a series of questions to be addressed to political parties and candidates for the upcoming legislative and presidential elections, aiming to identify their electoral programmes and assist voters in their choice.

10 major themes, serving to identify the programmes and ideas of political parties “in excruciating details in the political, security, economic and social fields,"

The answers will be collected by UGTT to be analysed and integrated into an electronic platform, through which voters can inspect the programmes of the parties and candidates and identify their convergences and divergences.

Today, Twitter has a different story, and it is not one of speaking truth to power. Twitter is no longer empowering its users. Its platform cannot be considered neutral. Twitter’s actions suggest it is systematically suppressing voices in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

What started out as an investigation into the mass suspension of accounts of Egyptian dissidents, uncovered a mass censorship algorithm that targeted users who use Arabic flagging their text as hateful conduct. This story is still unfolding. As you read this, mass and unjustified systemic locking and suspension of Twitter Arabic accounts continues. Users are angry and bewildered.

draconian yet lazy algorithms have systematically shut down voices of dissent – and pulled unsuspecting social media users down with them

Though the choreographed optics are intended to placate the community, pictures of Assad meeting with the distressed and offering shallow assurances are unlikely to offset the sight of cataclysmic flames devouring their homes. In a video shared on Twitter, an Alawite man films a fire surrounding his home. He sarcastically thanks the state for enabling its spread “because it’s irrelevant if we live or die.” In another video, a group of Alawites is seen criticizing government officials for their indifference, including a minister, whom they claim arrived for a photo op then subsequently drove off to avoid answering questions. The demographic’s small size and geographic concentration guarantees that word of such transgressions spreads quickly. The author’s Alawite sources on the coast echo these frustrations and claim they are widespread. They angrily questioned why neither the state nor its Iranian and Russian allies had assisted, especially given the proximity of the latter’s airbase at Khmeimim to the coastal mountains. 

On Oct. 9, state media’s Alikhbaria broadcast a video depicting a handful of Syrian soldiers struggling to put out small fires. Owing to severe water shortages, the troops were forced to use tree branches in lieu of hoses or buckets of water. The video was later shared on Twitter, where it elicited a mixture of mockery and condemnation from opponents of the regime. However, Alawite overrepresentation in the military means that these visuals denote a sense of loss and despair to the community.

The armed forces make up a key pillar of Alawite identity and have for nearly a century constituted their main institutional vehicle for attaining upward social mobility and prestige. The community’s loss of more than one third of their men of military age fighting for the regime against an overwhelmingly Sunni armed opposition has further entrenched this interdependence

“They want to depoliticize mosques and schools. What about unions?” he asked. “I don’t understand their refusal to depoliticize unions.”

He criticized Ennahdha’s hesitance to make mosques politically neutral, even though they have become “a nest for Salafis to promote extremist concepts such as Jihad.”

Other Arabic websites have said that MP Waleed Zoubi is from Dera’a. In the session of parliament, he stated that 20 days ago he alerted the presidency and government to the presence of armed militants who were taking control of specific locations, but that no responsive action was forthcoming. His words before the parliament were not framed as a protest but as an alert to Syrians, yet such honesty in the parliament is still uncommon. Zoubi presented his remarks as one concerned about seeing the muhafiza overrun by insurgents. Nevertheless, his open acknowledgment of loss of both territory and the morale of regime forces in Dera’a elicited objections from other MPs who tried to silence him, whereupon he demanded that they not interrupt him.     Photo from Sana What remains fascinating is the dance that must be performed around the reality of events on the ground. It’s permissible to say that foreign terrorists are causing havoc in Syria, but it’s not acceptable to acknowledge that the uprising includes Syrian participants, let alone that the uprising is primarily Syrian—that’s been the case from the beginning. But that other MPs would try to prevent Zoubi, even at this late hour, from merely discussing in parliament the practical problem of a very real loss of territory is a telling reminder of the persistence of the Ba’athist cult of unreality. How can the regime fight its war without acknowledging its battles? Is it loyalty to mention terrorism, but treason to admit losses? Is patriotism the acknowledgment of conflict with “unknown” assailants coupled with a simultaneous pretending that no failure is occurring? Zoubi mentioned the descent of Syria into a state of war and warned that “if terrorists prevail, chaos will prevail,” yet apparently, even if an area is falling out of the regime’s control, it is still taboo to acknowledge it directly. Subsequent Syrian news coverage of the parliamentary session made no mention of Zoubi.

Ali Abdullah Saleh's continuing sway over Yemen is worrying Gulf neighbours and Western nations who fear that the political transition could descend into chaos

"We share the concern over the role that the former president and those hardcore elements around him are playing right now," a senior Western diplomat in Sanaa said, adding they were undermining the government and hindering the transition. "We do have concerns about their resistance to following the legitimate orders of President Hadi."

Restoring stability in Yemen has become an international priority for fear that Islamist militants will further entrench themselves in a country neighbouring top oil exporter Saudi Arabia and lying on major world shipping lanes.

In February, OPEC called for an oil production “freeze” to raise crude prices in conjunction with Russia. But this effort collapsed at a meeting in Doha, Qatar, in April when Iran refused to join any freeze in order to regain the pre-2012 production levels of close to 4 mbpd it enjoyed before U.S. and European Union nuclear sanctions were imposed, following the removal of certain sanctions after the 2015 nuclear deal. A similar proposal failed at the OPEC meeting in June, again following Iran’s refusal, despite outreach by the Qataris.

OPEC again called for a form of output cut on Sept. 28 at an extraordinary meeting in Algiers. Markets bit on the news, with Brent prices rising sharply by about 15 percent in the following week, from $46 to $52 per barrel.

Can action by the cartel sustain higher crude prices over the long term? Probably not. Like a desert mirage, the image of an OPEC resurrection vanishes when approached.