I am fairly sensitive to this. I lived in The 909 for much of my life, and in southern California 909 was considered the worst possible telephone area-code prefix to have — because it encompassed a region with economic issues, significant crime rates and some of the worst air in the world. A few years […]

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An advantage to working at a morning newspaper on the west coast of the United States: Pretty much the whole sports day was over by the time we reached our deadline. We had complete news packages. Not much terra firma is behind California in the time-zone map, aside from Alaska and Hawaii. So the total […]

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A couple of days ago we broached the topic of big cats in the UAE, and all that it means … most of it bad. In this piece today a writer for The National addresses head-on the concept that it is legal for people here to own big cats of the lion-tiger-cheetah sort, and outlines […]

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No. Not an April Fool’s joke. Every six months or so, we at The National have a story like this: “Big cat found in city streets.” And we’re not talking about an overgrown tabby. These are the real deal. Lions and cheetahs, in particular, often brought into the country illegally, apparently for the amusement of […]

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The two biggest international sports events in the UAE neatly bracket the start and finish of the “winter” sports calendar here: The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in November and the Dubai World Cup in March. The former involves Formula One race cars and the latter horses. In each case, people are trying to get from […]

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When the Al Wasl club of Dubai and the UAE Pro League announced in June that they had hired Diego Maradona to be their coach … I wrote that “this will not be dull.” Got that one right. But that was shooting fish in a barrel. El Diego, FIFA’s co-player of the century (with Pele), […]

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A common misconception among people back in the U.S. is that we are not aware of what happens in the country’s major sports. We are not swimming in a sea of chatter about what is going on in the NBA and NFL, and we do lose track of some of what happens back home (college […]

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The UAE football team that won in Tashkent and clinched a place in the 2012 London Olympics … The president of the country, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, today awarded each player with 500,000 dirhams. Which converts to $136,000. Which is real money for winning a match you already really wanted to win.

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This is so UAE. You arrive at the office and a discussion ensues about whether it rained last night … or did not. And each side can make plausible arguments. “Rain” being a word we use here to describe any descent of water from the skies. Even the briefest and most inoffensive. And nearly unnoticeable. […]

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I now have an idea of how ridiculous I must have sounded. A couple of years ago, early in my time in the UAE and at The National, I asked a co-worker of Indian origin whether Major League Baseball ought to make a push to penetrate the India market. India is nuts about cricket, and […]

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