Talking Abu Dhabi the emirate, now. The big city has the same name as the emirate, but the emirate has one other major population center … and that is Al Ain. Al Ain is perhaps best known, in the region, as the home of the UAE’s most decorated soccer team. Eleven league championships, one Asian […]

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A business story. Ugh. But the business of the UAE is business. Commodities and services and tourism and all the rest of it. The National has a 12-page business section, broadsheet, and the biz crew has no trouble filling it. Something is always going on. The big biz news story for months now has been […]

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Not long ago, Abu Dhabi was a very horizontal city. The typical downtown building was about six stories high. The typical building away from downtown and the beach was about three stories. The tallest building in the city, when it was completed in 2006, was the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority Tower, on the Corniche, at […]

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A fairly significat chunk of what sports journalists do is cover scheduled events. Games. Press conference. Interviews. Unscheduled news generally sets off some scrambling. A hiring, a firing, a change in policy, a violent opinion — we expect that sort of unexpected, but it requires extra effort. What we do not expect is scheduled events […]

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The weather in the UAE is dependably pleasant from December through March — but particularly in January and February. What’s more, there are things to do. Outside. Interesting concepts. Sports. Concerts. Lazing at the beach. Enormous family groups barbecuing at the parks. We decided to join some of that today, a day when Everyone Seemed […]

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This may have been the highest-profile sports event in the history of the UAE. No, really. Perhaps the most famous soccer team in the world, Real Madrid, led by one of the two most famous players in the world, Cristiano Ronaldo, against an Italian club, AC Milan, that has won more European championshps (seven) than […]

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Now and then, all of us ought to allow a caricaturist to sketch us. It’s a good reality check. Reality isn’t always a fun thing, but it is a form of honesty, and we generally can stand some of that. We know how we look … or we think we do.

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A key part of the Volvo Ocean Race are the stops they make along the round-the-world, 39,000-nautical-miles-sailing part of it. When an ocean event gets a chance to sell itself to landlubbers. The organizers pack up and ship a race-themed village to each of the major stops around the world, and the six-boat fleet has […]

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That makes six consecutive Christmas Eve-into-Christmas-Day services we have spent at St. Andrew’s Church in Abu Dhabi. And the one before that was in Hong Kong. Cut this one a bit close. One of us walking over from the office, most of a mile away, after wrestling a section to the ground, the other arriving […]

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The Federal National Council is looking at the UAE national budget for 2015, and raising some questions. –Why does nearly every federal department spend more than 80 percent of its money on salaries? –Why are Abu Dhabi and Dubai the only contributers to the federal budget, from a country with seven emirates? Short answers?

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