The Libyan civil war apparently ended today with the collapse of the last loyalist stronghold and the death of Muammar Qaddafi, all around weird guy and former president/leader/king of kings/dictator of Libya. It was a weird afternoon, in the offices of The National, in Abu Dhabi. Early in the day came reports that the last […]

[Read more →]

Yaaaawn. That’s the reaction to the World Series from over here. Well, that or just generic befuddlement. A significant number of people in this part of the world, Arabs and subcontinenters both, know basically nothing about baseball. I mean, they may not even know the game exists, let alone that Americans and some other random […]

[Read more →]

It was two years ago today, October 16, 2009, that we got off the plane at Abu Dhabi International Airport and picked up our duffel bags stuffed with clothes meant to last us … indefinitely. We have spent two years, then, working at The National and living in the UAE. A fair chunk of time. […]

[Read more →]

If I have left you with the impression that the UAE — Abu Dhabi, in particular — is all work and no play, millions of nose-to-the-grindstone people with old-fashioned values … well, that would be wrong. This is a country that loves celebrity and pop culture as much as any and perhaps more than most. […]

[Read more →]

It’s fascinating to consider the many changes that have occurred in journalism over the past three or four decades. Particularly on the topic of “how we file our stories from remote locations.” When I first entered the profession, we typically filed via a primitive form of early faxing — a machine that scanned typewritten pages […]

[Read more →]

Well, this is a bit awkward. The UAE women’s national team tonight won their second West Asian Football Federation championship, following up on the title they won at the last WAFF tournament, in early 2010. What we have here is something Americans could recognize: Compared to their rivals, the women’s national soccer team appears to […]

[Read more →]

This story is getting a lot of comment in the newsroom and, apparently, in the city and country, because it’s been one of our most-read stories, at The National, for several days. The “sheep suicide” via jumping off a five-story building here in Abu Dhabi. Here is the link. Have a look, and we will […]

[Read more →]

Al Davis has never been so popular. Within minutes of the news of his death today, obituaries were lauding him as a visionary (OK, he often was) a great football man (not lately) and a good and sensitive guy (not so much). And the litigation-happy man who had brought gangsta NFL fandom to Los Angeles […]

[Read more →]

Two days ago on this blog we noted the death of Theyab Awana, a UAE soccer player killed in a car crash here in Abu Dhabi. He was best known for scoring a backheel penalty shot in a game versus Lebanon. One of our news reporters tracked down the 21-year-old player’s father, and in this […]

[Read more →]

An awful story out of Dubai. A 5-year-old boy fell out of an eighth-story window, and his disconsolate mother then jumped out of the same window moments later. Both died, and a 14-year-old girl, the sister and daughter of the deceased, saw it all happen from the pavement. An awful story. What turned it into […]

[Read more →]