DUBAI

Dubai plans to raise spending by 12 percent next year, balancing that out with identical growth in revenue, on a budget of 46.1 billion dirhams ($12.6 billion), the government said yesterday.

Nearly 1.7 million drug tablets known for their use by fighters in Syria have been seized in Turkey's southern province of Hatay.

Hatay Police Department Trafficking and Organized Crimes Unit officers seized 1.68 million tablets of fenethylline hydrochloride, a drug compound publicly known as "captagon," after searching a truck in Hatay's ?skenderun district on Dec. 22.

Turkmenistan on Dec. 13 started work on its part of a natural gas pipeline to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India (TAPI), a $10 billion project designed to reduce its dependence on gas sales to Russia and China.

A Dubai real estate firm has restored Donald Trump's name on a $6 billion golf complex it is building with the U.S. businessman and presidential hopeful, days after taking it down following his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

Babek Zanjani, an Iranian businessman currently imprisoned in Iran on corruption charges and connected to Turkey's massive 2013 graft case, has confessed that his company brought 1.5 tons of gold from Ghana to Istanbul by a plane and took it to Dubai, according to Iranian media reports. 

Speaking in a court session on Nov. 23, Zanjani also claimed that the smuggled gold was fake. 

Staff shortage at the airport of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, has caused passengers of two WizzAir flights had to wait for hours stranded on board.

Severe weather conditions in the capital Sofia, where the two flights, from Dubai and Valencia respectively, were to land, prompted traffic authorities to diver them to the airport of Bulgaria's second-largest city.

Thousands of Bulgarian households have been experiencing power outages since Saturday due to gale-force winds causing disruptions along the power grid, an electricity network operator has said.

Turkish police seized a huge shipment of amphetamine tablets near the border with Syria on the night of Nov. 19.

AA Photo

The operation seized a record amount of 1,800 kilograms of the drug Captagon in Hatay, Turkey's southernmost province that borders northwest Syria. The seized shipment of 11 million tablets is thought to have been bound for the Gulf.

Russia has finalized a contract for the delivery of advanced air-defense missile systems to Iran, the head of a Russian state-controlled industrial conglomerate said on Nov. 9.

The Dubai Airshow took off yesterday to a slow start amid expectations for a record low in sales as the Gulf's main airlines have already placed large orders with major manufacturers.

"Due to large previous orders, the total show order tally this year will be much less than years prior," said Ben Moores, senior analyst at IHS Aerospace, Defense & Security.