I know. I know. I could hardly put up a headline worse than that, in terms of enticing people to read. “Don’t read this” would do far, far better. But this won’t take long. And you some tiny fraction of you might find it interesting to see who went in the first round of one […]

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That is the name of the new “refreshment” store in the active neighborhood across the street from the offices of The National. I walked out late the other night, and was hit in the face by the brilliant lighting of the new place (next to the barber shop), and the remarkable name. “Vitamin Palace”. Don’t […]

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Bhutan is a small, rarely visited country on the eastern end of the Himalayas. North of India, south of Tibet, middle of nowhere. And it probably is neither unkind nor unfair to suggest that a couple of weeks ago, Bhutan was best known, globally, for being the country ranked 209th — and last — in […]

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That is the name of the honey store near the offices of The National. I don’t know how long it has been there. Maybe weeks. Maybe years. But I  noticed it on the drive to the newspaper offices. A small sign over a small shop, nearly obscured by construction all around it. “Emirates Flower Honey […]

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  Journalists who work inside the office need to get out once in a while. To see anew how the other half lives. To get reacquainted with the realities of reporting. The untidy and inexact process of going onsite, piecing together what has happened, interviewing people who may not want to talk, making sense of […]

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The UAE won the right to stage the 2019 Asian Cup on Monday … a tournament not well known in the rest of the world but a very big deal in Asia. Almost as big a deal to Asia as the African Cup of Nations is to Africa. Way bigger than North America’s generally limp […]

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Not much ties together these two stories, other than they appeared next to each other on the front page of The National today and seem to recurring themes, here in the UAE. A kid winning one million dirhams in a drawing in Dubai … and a lion being taken from a home in Sharjah.

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I got an email the other day from the L.A. Galaxy media department. “Postgame notes: L.A. Galaxy 2, Chicago Fire 0 – March 6, 2015” The Galaxy season opener, and a victory for the defending Major League Soccer champions. And it was then that I realized …

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I am fascinated by this topic. How do commercial airliners get from Point A to Point B when the shortest route takes them over politically unstable/openly hostile points C and D? They take evasive action. That’s how. For Etihad Airways, over the weekend, flying from Cyprus to Abu Dhabi apparently looked like this. And why […]

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Greek is a tough language. Different alphabet, not spoken by many people, with no living linguistic relatives, impossible to read for anyone who speaks a Western European language. So far, I can speak one word of Greek, and it is in the headline, above. “Yassas” … which is an informal “hello” but apparently can also […]

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