The final stages of the hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers began during working hours in the UAE. I can vouch for this because one of the overhead televisions at The National was audible from where I was sitting, and I got the endless loops of the limited available intelligence from one of the news […]

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I suddenly am impressed with this Lakers team, after having despaired of them, most of the season. (Pretty much from the 1-4 start forward.) Kobe Bryant out till sometime next season with the ruptured Achilles, Steve Nash hurt again, a playoffs berth clinched when Utah lost earlier in the evening … Not needing to win […]

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  On April 17, 2008, the first edition of The National rolled off the presses here in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Was it one of the last launches of a sizeable English-language newspaper? So far, it seems it might have been. I am unaware of another newspaper of this size and scope — more than 160 […]

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This time, an earthquake got my attention. Abu Dhabi rocked and rolled, a bit, at what was estimated as something between a 4- and a 5-magnitude shaking from another Iran-based earthquake — described as the biggest to strike Iran in 50 years — a 7.8 on the Richter scale. It was felt from Abu Dhabi […]

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The world absolutely is a smaller place — much smaller — than it was even five years ago. The internet. Facebook. Twitter. News travels fast, even if it is not always accurate. A call from the office a bit after 11 p.m. alerted us to the reports of explosions near the finish line of the […]

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This is one of those stories … you see the headline and you think, “urban myth”. When I was 12, maybe 13, kids my age heard, from our elders, that by smoking dried banana peels a silly person could get high — achieve a state of altered consciousness. The product was called mellow yellow, and […]

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A fairly amazing statistic reported in the lead story in Sunday’s editions of The National: The second-leading cause of death in the UAE in 2010 was “road injury”. Which trailed only heart disease for deaths — 2,326 to 1,838. Let’s see if we can figure out why that might be. Two distinct concepts are at […]

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I always thought the Walt Whitman poem eulogizing Abraham Lincoln was over the top. “Fallen cold and dead …” But my reaction to what appears to be Kobe Bryant’s torn Achilles tendon led me to think of the Whitman poem: O Captain! My Captain! (The one that, of a time, was required reading in American […]

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This brings a whole new meaning to the expression “police pursuit”. Dubai’s police have purchased a Lamborghini Aventador — cost, Dh1.5 million, or about $410,000 — to add to their fleet of patrol cars. No. Really. The UAE is a country that is in love with fast and exotic vehicles, but how did a workaday […]

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This is the sort of story that we in print journalism once called “a talker”. Not necessarily important. Not necessarily meaningful. But the sort of story you repeat to someone when making conversation. When this story was outlined at the news meeting, it was clear it was going to run at length (but not on […]

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