Abu Dhabi is not crime free. It just seems like it. Violence is rare. Murder is particularly unusual. Someone attacking his three roommates with a chainsaw and a cleaver, and chopping them into tiny bits … just doesn’t happen here. Except when it does.

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I am more than a bit unsettled by the Dodgers’ spending spree since the new owners took over. The notion that if this acquisition (Carl Crawford) or that one (Adrian Gonzalez) is just an expensive mistake and, oh, well, we have more money where that came from … It creeps me out. Isn’t that the […]

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Seems as if monkeys are everywhere all of a sudden. Today’s story? The monkey that got loose at the Ikea store in suburban Toronto.

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We saw Argo, the Ben Affleck/Iran hostages movie, last night. (It came late to the UAE.) And if the film resonated back in the States, magnify that by two or three for those of us living about a 30-minute plane ride from Iran. Our concerns, here in the UAE, that we are at special risk […]

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As a kid, two dates associated with U.S. military history were fairly well known and certainly noted, annually: D-Day, June 6, 1944, when the Allies landed in France to open a second front against the Third Reich, and Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1941. And it was the latter that was the bigger event, come […]

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At my first professional journalism job, at the San Bernardino Sun, in 1976, one of the biggest and brightest influences on me was Paul Hagen, whom I considered a wise old sports writing veteran. He might have been 25. Paul covered the Dodgers for us, and he did it well and loved the beat. The […]

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A fascinating event was staged in Dubai this week, entitled the Emerging Host Cities Summit. The idea? A “how-to” for cities to bid for major sports events. Officials from recent and future World Cups and Olympics were in Dubai, giving talks about how to put together a bid and how to win it. That this […]

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Apparently, this is what the Brits did for a century or two. Go to a distant land, part of their empire (upon which the sun never set), looking for a better life or better weather or better opportunity or all of the above … And once a couple of hundred of them had assembled, in […]

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Just writing that headline invites disaster. Plumbing going bad a few floors above us, or a sudden breakdown of some of the appliances. But (so far) the new digs here in Abu Dhabi are so much better than the old that a certain person living here has suggested “It’s like I actually began living in […]

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December 2, National Day, in the UAE. On that date in 1971, six sheikhdoms (soon to be seven) on the tip of the Arabian peninsula decided to come together as a country. The Brits were pulling out of the Gulf, and it seemed like a good idea to team up. National Day. When the UAE […]

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