The UAE is mad about “Guinness World Records.” The National reports on one or two per week, it seems. Many of them silly. I remember when the “Guinness Book”, as it was known decades ago, was fun to read. “Tallest man.” “Fastest train.” “World’s Biggest Waterfall. Things like that. Fairly common things. Now, we’ve got […]

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A business story. Ugh. But the business of the UAE is business. Commodities and services and tourism and all the rest of it. The National has a 12-page business section, broadsheet, and the biz crew has no trouble filling it. Something is always going on. The big biz news story for months now has been […]

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Not long ago, Abu Dhabi was a very horizontal city. The typical downtown building was about six stories high. The typical building away from downtown and the beach was about three stories. The tallest building in the city, when it was completed in 2006, was the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority Tower, on the Corniche, at […]

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A fairly significat chunk of what sports journalists do is cover scheduled events. Games. Press conference. Interviews. Unscheduled news generally sets off some scrambling. A hiring, a firing, a change in policy, a violent opinion — we expect that sort of unexpected, but it requires extra effort. What we do not expect is scheduled events […]

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Running the sports section of The National is a bit of an out-of-body experience for an American. The Big Three of American sports are baseball, basketball and football. The Big Three of sports in this part of the world are cricket, rugby and football — football, as in soccer. We run cricket off-day stories here. […]

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The weather in the UAE is dependably pleasant from December through March — but particularly in January and February. What’s more, there are things to do. Outside. Interesting concepts. Sports. Concerts. Lazing at the beach. Enormous family groups barbecuing at the parks. We decided to join some of that today, a day when Everyone Seemed […]

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This may have been the highest-profile sports event in the history of the UAE. No, really. Perhaps the most famous soccer team in the world, Real Madrid, led by one of the two most famous players in the world, Cristiano Ronaldo, against an Italian club, AC Milan, that has won more European championshps (seven) than […]

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The UAE is a star-struck place. Are you a celebrity? A sorta celebrity? Drop on by, especially in Dubai, and we will make a fuss over you. Kim Kardashian could tell you about it. Thus, it was not difficult to imagine how big a stir the Real Madrid soccer team would make. Real Madrid is […]

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Now and then, all of us ought to allow a caricaturist to sketch us. It’s a good reality check. Reality isn’t always a fun thing, but it is a form of honesty, and we generally can stand some of that. We know how we look … or we think we do.

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A key part of the Volvo Ocean Race are the stops they make along the round-the-world, 39,000-nautical-miles-sailing part of it. When an ocean event gets a chance to sell itself to landlubbers. The organizers pack up and ship a race-themed village to each of the major stops around the world, and the six-boat fleet has […]

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