I admire a well-run sports team as much as the next guy, and probably more so, since I have spent nearly the whole of my adult life covering sports teams. The Green Bay Packers, once upon a time. The New York Yankees from about 1920 to 1964. Yes, even the Boston Celtics, back when they […]

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Bringing in new people, expats, to work at The National is not a simple process. Which is understandable. The logistics are daunting. A security check. Negotiations over pay. Explanations of policies and benefits. The prospective employees needing time to make an important decision, doing their due diligence on the paper, the company, the country. Then […]

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What does a newspaper do when it has a big story on Day 1? It looks for ways to carry forward the narrative on Day 2. While your competitors are scrambling to catch up, or trying to knock down your story, you push it even further along. So, for this morning’s newspaper, we had David […]

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In journalism, some days just turn weird. You think you know how things will go. It seems slow. Routine. Boring. At the 4 p.m. news meeting I all but said “sorry, folks, sports is dull today …” And four hours later I was in a cab in the posh northwest corner of Abu Dhabi island, […]

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Abu Dhabi is not crime free. It just seems like it. Violence is rare. Murder is particularly unusual. Someone attacking his three roommates with a chainsaw and a cleaver, and chopping them into tiny bits … just doesn’t happen here. Except when it does.

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We saw Argo, the Ben Affleck/Iran hostages movie, last night. (It came late to the UAE.) And if the film resonated back in the States, magnify that by two or three for those of us living about a 30-minute plane ride from Iran. Our concerns, here in the UAE, that we are at special risk […]

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A fascinating event was staged in Dubai this week, entitled the Emerging Host Cities Summit. The idea? A “how-to” for cities to bid for major sports events. Officials from recent and future World Cups and Olympics were in Dubai, giving talks about how to put together a bid and how to win it. That this […]

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December 2, National Day, in the UAE. On that date in 1971, six sheikhdoms (soon to be seven) on the tip of the Arabian peninsula decided to come together as a country. The Brits were pulling out of the Gulf, and it seemed like a good idea to team up. National Day. When the UAE […]

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Some crazy weather here. The high temperature in Abu Dhabi today was 77 Fahrenheit, making it the lowest daily high since April. A real bundle-up day. But here is the shocker. Rain. Quite a bit of it. The most in a day since 2006, some people said.

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More than most of the populated parts of the planet, the UAE sports season is quite condensed. Some of the indigenous sports — well, soccer, anyway, sometimes at barely a walking pace — compete for most of the year. But the heat is too brutal about seven months out of 12 for most anything else, […]

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