Everton Ribeiro. I know the player Everton Ribeiro. Left-footed midfielder. During the 2014/15 season he played for the Dubai club Al Ahli. He arrived with a reputation for being one of Brazil’s best players; in recent years he twice had been designated the best player in Brazil’s domestic top flight. Turns out, he wasn’t the […]

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This has been one of the most closely followed stories of the past several months, certainly among expatriates and as measured by The National’s website: The murder of an American woman in the toilet of a mall on Reem Island, here in Abu Dhabi, on December 1. Today, the Emirati woman who carried out the […]

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Ahmed Rizvi is the tennis guy of The National staff, and in doing a meaty story on Serena Williams ahead of the start of Wimbledon tomorrow he illuminated some trends I had not noticed. She goes to the All England Club having won the past three major championships, the U.S. Open, the Australian Open and […]

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You know how, sometimes, you don’t make obvious connections? And then it hits you and you slap yourself on the forehead and say, “Well, of course!” I was sitting in a pew in the chapel at St. Andrew’s Church in Abu Dhabi, moments before a wedding, when the light bulb went on. “Hey, this is […]

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He is not forgotten, exactly. The older generation remembers Gary Player. Little guy from South Africa. Always wore black. For a time was considered part of a Big Three with Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. I imagine I covered a golf tournament he played in. The Bob Hope, maybe. I do remember a co-worker, Katie […]

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Interesting concept. American college kids, in 2015, don’t know how to laugh. Or perhaps they don’t allow themselves to laugh. That is the notion posited (at the link above) by a regular contributor to The National’s Arts & Life section, who was quoting “the great” Jerry Seinfeld. Wrote Rob Long: “University-aged young people – or, […]

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I am a big fan of the Volvo Ocean Race. Sailing around the world in eight legs, going through all the oceans, circling the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn … one of the last great romantic/daredevil adventures we can have on a planet in an era when we can get nearly anywhere by […]

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Turns out, the Queen Elizabeth 2 ocean liner has been docked in Dubai’s port since we arrived in the UAE, nearly six years ago. Turns out, I compiled more than a few news/travel briefs pertaining to the QE2 and its “final” voyage to Dubai while working at the International Herald Tribune’s Hong Kong bureau in […]

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This is a very UAE story. A 155-foot super yacht with 10 bedrooms and a cruising range of 4,200 miles — and a 90 million dirham (about $24.5 million) price tag. (Its arrival, in The National, comes with the requisite slide show.) Nice yacht … sold to a “superwealthy” Gulf resident, we are told. So […]

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In much of Eurasia, Italian soccer was the first external brand seen on local TV. This was in the 1990s, when Europe’s other big leagues were still pretty much off the air. Certainly overseas. Italy, then, filled a programming void, and soccer fans all over the Middle and Far East of Asia, for instance, regularly […]

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