The Abu Dhabi Municipality continues to crack down on unauthorised renovations and partitions made in villas and flats as well as residential and commercial buildings.

The municipality aims to remove such illegal structures and constructions and take appropriate actions against offenders, a press release from the municipality has said.

Such partitions and extensions in Zaafraneh and Al Buttain area have been removed.

Residents of Ras Al Khaimah will pay more for their gas cylinder from today.

According to the new price list issued on Sunday by the RAK’s Department of Economic Development, a standard gas cylinder has gone up from Dh78 to Dh85.

A 44kg cylinder is now being sold at Dh170 instead of Dh156 and 11kg cylinder will now cost Dh 45, up from Dh39. The new prices will be effective up to the month of December.   

Burj Dubai, the world's tallest building, is set to open a public observation deck on level 124 this year, offering sweeping vistas of Dubai.

Billed as one of the world's highest observation decks, "At The Top" is also designed to be an evocative and interactive journey through the history and evolution of Dubai as well as Burj Dubai.

Burj Dubai general manager Thomas Dempsey promised that At The Top would be a never-before experience for visitors.

Much like the rivalry between Auckland and Wellington, there has always been a hint of competition between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, two of the biggest and most important of the seven emirates making up the United Arab Emirates.

They're a bit like Serena and Venus Williams. Everyone thinks they want to knife each other in the back - especially during Wimbledon - but we'll never know for sure. Who will win the trophy in the competition between Dubai and Abu Dhabi? Time will tell.

As the recession forces more Britons to return home from United Arab Emirates, many are donating unwanted items to groups taking from the rich and giving to the poor.

The charity Take My Junk UAE is the idea of Faisal Khan. The 34-year-old businessman said he was so moved by the plight of the Emirates' labourers he wanted to do something positive to help.

Now Mr Khan spends 15 hours a day driving around Dubai collecting donated household junk and distributing the goods in labour camps.

They locked their doors, pulled down the shutters and ignored callers, but it was not enough to stop municipal inspectors from making the first evictions of their drive to enforce the city’s one-villa-one-family regulation.

“Inspectors came this morning and reminded us that we have to move out. We were prepared for this and the family is now moving to International City,” said Abdul Kadir, a resident of Al Rashidiya, whose brother’s family had also been evicted. “We did not expect any trouble, but we were wrong.”

The municipality said that starting this month, it would intensify efforts to uphold the one family per villa rule. Officials say shared villas pose health and environmental risk

Dubai has a huge expat population. While a lot of foreigners have been packing bags and heading home in recent times, the city still plays host to people from all over the world. I caught up with a couple of expats calling Dubai home and here’s what they say about life in the city.

Amar Singh, a 32 year old Indian consultant weaves his way through the dancing crowd and tells me… “I love Dubai! Look at this place… where else can you have this kind of a lifestyle in the Middle East?” We are in Barasti, a favourite watering hole for Dubai’s expatriate crowd. This could have been any bar in South East Asia… the usual 80% - 20% ratio of white men to Asian girls, loud music and free flowing drinks. “That’s the problem with this place” says Hitaru, a Japanese friend who’s recently moved to the city as well and obviously not having as great a time as Amar. “This could be anywhere in the world, everything seems so artificial. This is supposed to be a desert but it could just as well be New York.”

According to the Household Income and Expenditure Survey that was conducted from April 1, 2007, to March 31, 2008, households of UAE citizens spend almost three times more than resident foreigners and individuals living in collective households. A collective household refers to dwellings with more than four occupants who have no blood relationship.

UAE citizen households consumed on average Dh305,500 worth of goods and services per year compared to an average of Dh106,400 spent by resident foreigner households and Dh47,500 by collective households.

The average annual per capita expenditure amounted to approximately Dh24,700, with UAE nationals spending Dh 29,900 per year, against Dh25,200 for non-nationals and Dh12,000 for members of collective households.

Sales of luxury goods in Dubai have dropped about 45 percent since the global economic crisis prompted local shoppers to tighten their purse strings and tourists to rethink spending sprees, a top retailer said.

Speaking to the Reuters Global Luxury Summit in Dubai, Tony Jashanmal, a director of the 90-year old Jashanmal Group of Companies, said the worst of the first real downturn in the region's retail sector in about 17 years had passed.

But the repercussions would linger as retailers scramble to sell excess stock and shoppers from recession-hit countries like Russia, who tended to frequent Dubai malls, stay home as they seek ways to weather the crisis.

"The sales of everything dropped a little bit, but more drastic was in the luxury field," said Jashanmal on Monday.

From now through July 2, the public will get a peek at some of the art that will fill the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the 260,000-square-foot museum designed by French architect Jean Nouvel and expected to open in the capital city of the United Arab Emirates by 2013.

At a ceremony last week to commemorate the beginning of construction, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, officially opened an exhibition at the Emirates Palace hotel that includes 19 works of art bought over the past 18 months for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, as well as loans from the French national museums.

Acquired for what is being billed as the first universal museum in the Middle East, the works range from a Greek ceramic figure from about 520 B.C. to two 1862 canvases by Edouard Manet.

The temperature shot up to 46 degree Celsius in Sharjah and Abu Dhabi on Wednesday.

The temperature could reach 48 degree Celsius in Jebel Ali and Minhad Air Base outside Dubai on Wednesday, said a duty forecaster at Dubai met office.

It is still very dry with humidity at less than 10 per cent, but things will get worse when the Monsoon rains reach Mumbai around June 10, according to the forecaster. "A lot of moisture will come in from the Arabia Sea during mid-June, pushing humidity levels into the uncomfortable zone," he said.  

Fish stocks of the UAE are 'stable' according to a ministerial fisheries official.

However a proposal to enforce a minimum size for marketing hamour at supermarket level is under review.

Fishermen will not be fined for catching undersized hamour, however shops and markets will - if found to be stocking hamour smaller than 45 to 50 centimetres explained Abdul Razzaq Anwahi, fisheries advisor at the Ministry of Environment and Water, after the closing deliberations of the Regional Commission of Fisheries (RECOFI) held in Dubai on Thursday.

The Ministry of Labour is set to introduce new rules for labour accommodation standards and a fresh mechanism to ensure payment of salaries, to protect workers' rights and improve their conditions.

Speaking to the press at the sidelines of the labour and human rights symposium, Saqr Gobash Saeed Gobash, Minister of Labour, emphasised that payment of workers' salaries and dignified living conditions are fundamental principles for the ministry of labour.

In order to safeguard those rights, the ministry will introduce a set of new measures such as the adoption for new criteria for labour accommodation and a requirement for companies to pay workers' salaries through banks.

Sex on the beach or drunken trysts may not raise eyebrows in many cities, but a recent case in Dubai has exposed a growing cultural divide between native Muslims and Western residents seeking fun in the sun.

The story of a British pair facing possible jail terms on charges of having drunken sex on the beach made headlines around the world, but in Dubai, reports are frequent of hapless foreigners falling foul of local laws that strictly control drinking and ban homosexuality or kissing in public.

Dubai's foreign population has expanded rapidly in recent years, dwarfing the native population, as the Gulf Arab trade and tourism hub tries to put itself on the international map with a promise of tax-free earnings and year-round sunshine.

The United Arab Emirates said on Tuesday it would move to bring down the cost of basic food items charged by retailers because they were no longer appropriate following a slump in world commodity prices.

The second-largest Arab economy last year signed a series of agreements with supermarket chains to fix the cost of basic food items such as sugar, cooking oil, rice and flour at 2007 levels in an effort to curb inflation at a 20-year peak.

But many of those prices now exceed the global average by 25 percent after oil prices collapsed almost $100 a barrel from a peak last July, said Hashim Saeed al-Neaimi, the manager of consumer protection at the UAE's Ministry of Economy.

Throughout the years that I have been working in the Emirates I have always lived in Abu Dhabi; I have come to call it home. My work has taken me all over the UAE – to deserts, islands and mountains, as well as to other cities. I’ve seen it all, changing, developing and growing, each emirate at its own particular pace.

However, I’ve never quite fallen in love with Dubai as many of my friends have done. Indeed, my daughter is happily settled there.

To some extent that’s because I’ve never become familiar with it in the way that I have done with Abu Dhabi. I’ve rushed in and out on short visits, or driven through it, or now, thanks to the Emirates Road and the outer bypass, I drive past to other destinations. I will go to great lengths to avoid a trip to its malls. And like many Abu Dhabi residents I’ve been mildly miffed over the years by the feeling that somehow Dubai (and Sharjah) residents looked upon us as country cousins – a bit behind the times. I remember a member of the Sharjah ruling family telling me in the mid-1980s that although he was in Dubai almost every day, he hadn’t been to Abu Dhabi for ten years, and didn’t feel motivated to drive down the road. I haven’t seen him here since.

Over the years I have often wondered whether the pace of Dubai’s development was sustainable and whether there would come a time that a slowdown would occur.