LONDON: The UAE said on Thursday that it was helping to facilitate the evacuation of foreign nationals from Afghanistan.
“As part of its ongoing support on humanitarian grounds, the UAE has worked with its international partners to contribute to global relief efforts in Afghanistan,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation said in a statement issued by state news agency WAM.
Sultan Mohammed Al-Shamsi, assistant minister of foreign affairs and international cooperation for international development affairs, said that the UAE’s focus in recent days has been to support the efforts made by a number of countries and NGOs to safely evacuate their officials and employees, including some Afghan citizens.
He said: “The UAE is a committed and steadfast member of the international community and is exerting significant effort to safeguard those in need,” adding that the support provided by the Emirates is evidence of its commitment to strengthening international cooperation during crises.
“Guided by our principled support for peaceful, multilateral solutions, the UAE is also working with its international partners to advance efforts to achieve the aspirations of the Afghan people for peace, development, and stability,” he added.
Al-Shamsi also said that the UAE joins international calls “for a peaceful solution that meets the hopes and aspirations of the Afghan people.”
Former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country on Sunday as the Taliban closed in on the capital, Kabul, and subsequently took control of the presidential palace, following a lightening offensive that saw the group capture the country’s major cities in 10 days.
Ghani arrived in the UAE on Wednesday where he is being hosted on “humanitarian grounds,” according to UAE officials.
Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed received a phone call from Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, who thanked the UAE for helping to evacuate Australian nationals from Afghanistan, in addition to evacuating members of diplomatic missions from a number of other countries.
UAE working with international partners to provide relief efforts in Afghanistan
https://arab.news/24vt7
UAE working with international partners to provide relief efforts in Afghanistan
- The UAE is a committed and steadfast member of the international community and is exerting significant effort to safeguard those in need, the foreign ministry says
- Australia’s PM thanks UAE for helping to evacuate Australian nationals from Afghanistan
Can AI really discover anything?
- Nobel Laureates discuss true impact on science at World Laureate Summit in Dubai
DUBAI: Since its rise, artificial intelligence has brought with it a promise of human and scientific progression beyond most people’s imaginations.
However, the spread of AI slop, fakes and proliferation of seemingly nefarious and useless applications have caused many to wonder whether the technology can really live up to its promise.
Scientists and academics gathered in Dubai on Sunday for the opening of the World Laureates Summit argued that the technology does, in fact, help them work faster, spot patterns and test ideas that would otherwise take years or decades.
“Can AI help us in speeding up discovery? Yes. Can it simplify the tasks and eliminate a lot of the trial and error that we chemists use to crystallize things. Yes. Will it get better? Yes,” Palestinian-Saudi Prof. Omar M. Yaghi, 2025 winner of the Nobel prize in chemistry, told the conference.
“I think we are in the middle of a revolution, transforming chemistry by blending it with AI.”
Yaghi said AI was already reducing the time it took chemists to crystallize molecules — a process that lines up atoms or molecules in a neat, repeating pattern rather than a jumble — from several years down to just two weeks. This, in turn, speeds up the process of scientific discovery and application.
His views were echoed by Prof. Tony Fan-cheong Chan, president of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, who said AI had already contributed to Nobel Prize-winning discoveries.
However, he questioned the limits of AI saying that despite its ability to improve and accelerate science, humans still led the big, world-changing ideas.
“Here’s my thought experiment for all of you to consider: If someone besides Einstein had the best AI model pre-1905, would that person be able to discover the general theory of relativity?” Feng asked the crowd gathered in Dubai’s Madinat Jumeirah.
Robert Endre Tarjan, a prolific American computer scientist and mathematician, warned against AI — specifically for its inclination to “hallucinate.” He said he believed that regardless of how useful a tool it was, it could never replace human creativity and ingenuity in science.
“AI systems as we know them hallucinate; asking the right question is more important than finding the answer,” he said.
Russian mathematician Yurii Nesterov said AI was ultimately limited by the data made available to it. While he believes AI does have creative capacity, it depends how well it is programmed by humans.
“I believe that artificial intelligence has indeed a considerable creative power, it can discover new links, structures, and properties of the investigated objects,” he said.
“Artificial intelligence is already alive, and the main goal of the scientific community is to ensure the developments in the right directions.”
The World Laureates Summit, held in partnership with the World Governments Summit in Dubai, brings together some of the world’s most distinguished scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, Turing Award recipients, Fields Medalists and other award-winning researchers.
