The UAE is made up of seven Emirates, and you are forgiven if you do not know more than two — Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The three northernmost emirates have little or no oil, a fair number of Emiratis who are anything but wealthy, and a predilection for conservatism, both in matters of religion and […]

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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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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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The calls and emails began coming into the newsroom a bit before 4 p.m. “Did something just happen? Was that … an earthquake?” One person’s email read: “What should I do?” This is a country with a large number of people who know earthquakes only as events that happen elsewhere. Particularly Emiratis and Britons, whose […]

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The Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge falls dead-center in the “work with what you got” line of thought. And what does Abu Dhabi have a lot of? Sand. Miles and miles and miles of it. Mountains of it. In deserts that are not just waste areas, but actual dunes, moving and shifting and drifting almost like […]

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A lot of us in the first half of the Baby Boom generation are having some trouble with all this new-fangled technology stuff that is swamping the developed world. Certainly, it is playing hob with my brain. The inspiration for this was casting my eyes on a stick of what we once called Wite-Out — […]

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This is a sad story. But it also has elements of fairy tales. As well as lies. Some of them sad, pathetic lies … some more along the lines of a lack of “truth in advertising”. The National has done a story about the phenomenon of migrant workers here paying for fake/doctored photos — which […]

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Summer appears to have come early in the UAE, but April can be hot. We know it. We can’t really complain about it. The average high temperature in April in Abu Dhabi is 91.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Warmer than most humans prefer. The summer which, for practical purposes we have entered, also is the time of […]

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Abu Dhabi is not an easy place to get a salad. Not as Americans would recognize it. Which is a little odd, because not much will grow in the forbidding climate of the UAE, but lettuce is on the list. Lots of water, lots of heat. That, we have here, same as the Coachella Valley. […]

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