The UAE has soccer “derbies”, in the English sense — rivalries between neighbors. Al Wahda and Al Jazira, for instance, located only a couple of miles apart, here in Abu Dhabi. Sharjah’s two teams, Al Shaab and Sharjah, have a strong rivalry, too. But the country does not really have rivalries involving teams from different […]

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Hoped you liked the 2010 World Cup … Because the 2014 version is overwhelmingly the same teams you saw in 2010. Here is the complete list of teams who are going to Brazil who did not play at South Africa:

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I have been thinking about this for some time now. A sort of nightmare soccer scenario. The UAE national team over the past year has played as well as it has at any time in the country’s history. Which may count for nothing on the World Cup stage — a potentially crushing disappointment I wrote […]

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The Dubai Airshow began today, and the first day was an orgy of spending. Or at least an orgy of commitments to spend. It apparently was the biggest day in the history of the aviation business. Boeing and Airbus, the world leaders (and rivals) in building big passenger planes, were the major benefactors of the […]

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Apparently, I have been gone so long that the notion of USC defeating Stanford, in the Coliseum, is such a surprise that fans flood the field. For most of my life, and we’re talking more than a few decades now, USC beating Stanford was How Things Worked. Football players attended Stanford to have some fun […]

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Sticks and stones? It clearly is possible to hurt someone with words in the UAE, as a Canadian expat could tell you — as soon as he gets out of jail. Insults are taken very seriously in the UAE, as the case of the soccer coach Walter Zenga and a local reporter demonstrated. Zenga called […]

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It takes a typical westerner a long time to become accustomed to the work week here. Sunday is Monday. Tuesday is hump day. Saturday is Sunday. And for most people working in the Muslim world, the restaurant chain TGI Friday’s really ought to celebrate a day earlier in the week.

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I have been impressed, since arriving in the UAE — which is only a few air hours from the subcontinent — at what we Americans do not know about India. And vice versa. Take, for instance, Sachin Tendulkar.

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The UAE uses scads of energy. Oodles. Just lighting up the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, is like lighting up a small city, in much of the world. A story today in The National notes that the country’s demand for energy is rising at 9 percent per year, which is three times the global […]

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This is Veterans Day in the U.S., Remembrance Day in Britain and the Commonwealth. It originally was meant to give thought and tribute to those men killed in the First World War, the greatest disaster to befall Europe since, perhaps, the Black Death of the 15th century. The Second World War is better remembered and […]

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