Human Rights Watch on Saturday urged authorities in the United Arab Emirates either to charge a group of Egyptians held over suspected links with Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood or release them.

"If the UAE government can show the Egyptian detainees have engaged in criminal behavior, why hasn't it charged them with a crime," asked Nadim Houry, HRW's deputy Middle East director.

Defense experts who say many lives could have been saved during Arab uprisings if states used proper crowd control measures sought to tap into a growing market at an Abu Dhabi arms fair.

Anti-riot vehicles with sophisticated acoustic repellents have boldly taken their place alongside the likes of Eurofighter's Typhoon warplane and the bristling firepower of rocket launchers at the arms industry's biennial quest for petrodollars in the Gulf emirate.

Prime Minister Najib Miqati reiterated on Thursday that Lebanon is keen on the best of relations with Arab countries and rejects meddling in their internal affairs.

During a meeting with a delegation of diplomats from Gulf Cooperation Council countries at the Grand Serail, Miqati stressed “the best of ties with the friendly Arab countries and mainly GCC states.”

The UAE armed forces signed on Tuesday new defence deals, mostly with local firms, worth $1.34 billion, on the third day of the IDEX defence show, the exhibition spokesman said.

"The total value of the deals signed today reached 4.9 billion dirhams ($1.34 billion)," Staff Major General Obeid al-Ketbi told reporters.

Egypt's justice ministry on Tuesday referred former presidential candidate Ahmed Shafiq to the Cairo criminal court on charges of corruption and squandering public funds, judicial sources told Agence France Presse.

Shafiq who has been living in the United Arab Emirates since his defeat in the election, faces arrest on his return to Egypt after he was put on an airport watch list.

The United Arab Emirates is mulling imposing a two-day weekend on the private sector as well as paying government supplements in a bid to lure Emiratis away from the attractive public sector, a newspaper reported Tuesday.

The National, quoting UAE Labor Minister Saqr Ghobash, said the government was considering ways to make the private sector, currently dominated by foreign workers, more attractive to Emiratis.

A top French defense industry official said Sunday that talks to sell Rafale jet fighters to the UAE were "progressing well", expressing confidence that a deal could be reached with the Gulf state.

"We are confident that by the end we will succeed in selling it" to the United Arab Emirates, Christian Mons-Catoni, chairman of the French defense industries council (CIDEF), told reporters on the sideline of the IDEX defense show.

Sharjah-based budget carrier Air Arabia said Saturday its 2012 net profit soared 55 percent on an annual basis to $115.8 million, as it expanded its network and passenger numbers rose.

Revenues for the Middle East's first and largest low-cost airline stood at 2.9 billion dirhams ($790 million), an increase of 21 percent compared with 2011, it said in a statement.

A top Syrian security official has recently sent Hizbullah a list of Lebanese political and military personalities targeted for assassination, the Kuwaiti al-Seyassah newspaper reported on Sunday.

The daily quoted a Gulf diplomat in Abu Dhabi as saying that the list, which includes 13 names, was sent by Maj. Gen. Ali Mamlouk, who has been charged by a Lebanese military court of involvement along with ex-Information Minister Michel Samaha in a terror plot to destabilize Lebanon.

Following the footsteps of the United Arab Emirates, Libya kicked off an "undeclared" campaign to expel Lebanese citizens under the pretext of having ties with Hizbullah, al-Akhbar daily said Thursday.

Under claims of “relations with Hizbullah,” Lebanese are being expelled from Gulf countries mainly the United Arab Emirates, from the U.S., African and European countries and now Libya.