I am back in Europe. Albeit by about a quarter of a mile. In the city of Istanbul. Turkey straddles Europe and Asia … and Istanbul, the former Constantinople (as well as the former capital), is where Turkey creeps over the Bosphorus and has a foot on European territory. Why are we here?

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No, this is not about the soccer club. When reviewing, a few weeks back, the interesting assumptions Isaac Asimov made in his “Foundation” series — set 30,000 years-plus in the future — I neglected to mention a fairly major assumption that he made. To wit: Humans are the only form of intelligent life in Asimov’s […]

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A hot topic here today, at least among the expat community: Photos of the wife of John Terry, the Chelsea defender and former English captain, frolicking in almost nothing on the beaches of Abu Dhabi! We are never surprised when WAGs (Wives And Girlfriends) go out and about with little or no clothes on. It’s […]

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The biggest up side to living halfway around the world is a bit of an idea about a batch of other countries. The sort you don’t get while sitting in Peoria. We live in the same country with 2 million Indians. The UAE has twice as many Indians, all of them expats, as it does […]

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The day after the end of a season is when, by the laws of print journalism, we are required to do a retrospective. The Pro League season ended Sunday, so for the Tuesday a.m. newspaper we printed our all-star team and a look back at the key factor in Al Jazira winning its first league […]

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It was strange, really. I’ve never seen a championship celebrated before and during a regular-season game. Nor have I seen one conducted in an outdoor stadium where the temperature was more than 100 and kickoff and about 113 in “feels like” degrees. Al Jazira of Abu Dhabi won the two most significant trophies in the […]

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Diego Maradona spent the day in Dubai, just up the road from us in Abu Dhabi, and how can we describe the reaction? How about “over the top”? El Diego, El Jefe Loco, had them eating out of his pudgy hand at a press conference, on Dubai’s Palm Jumeira  — one of the ritziest hotels […]

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We have noticed it here in the Arabian Peninsula, too. Rising food prices. It’s a dirham (27 cents) here and a dirham there. Insidious, in that you remember getting basically the same things at the market for 100 dirhams a few months ago, and now it’s 105. It’s difficult to spot, right off, where the […]

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I consider this one of the turning points on the UAE calendar. Like, in the U.S., where July 4 marks the start of serious summer and Labor Day the end. Here? It was still May when … I turned off the water heater for the shower. This is when you should be devising ways to […]

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I’ve known Andy Baggarly since he was a kid from Upland who was going to school at Northwestern. He was good right out of the box, like so many Northwestern J School people are. Maybe we gave him some room to grow, back in the L.A. market, but it wasn’t like we had to mold […]

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