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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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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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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