This is a new one for the UAE. An ambitious Chinese soccer club has barged in, made an enormous offer — about $22 million — for the forward who has been the Arabian  dominant scorer for four seasons … and is carrying him off. China soccer apparently is ready to spend some serious money, if […]

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We have conceded on this site that accounts of long, draining travel are nearly always boring. Meaningless to all but those who survived them. And yet, we keep talking about them. Because they are so intense. Like our 31-hour door-to-door trip from Abu Dhabi to Los Angeles or, to be exact, to San Clemente, south […]

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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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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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Soccer in Asia tends to be predictable, when it comes to teams showing up at a World Cup. It will be Japan, South Korea and Australia, and the fourth will probably be Iran, though China someday may seize the last berth. Or maybe Uzbekistan. Or the UAE. But getting there, during qualifying, that’s where Asia […]

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Abu Dhabi, capital city of the UAE, now has two Catholic churches. St. Paul’s Church was inaugurated this weekend, and will serve the significant Christian population of Mussaffah, the suburb on the outskirts of the Abu Dhabi where many of the blue-collar expatriates live. The Catholics, many of them Filipinos or Indians, living around Mussaffah […]

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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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Granted, we are not at the epicenter of Western movie-making chatter, here in Abu Dhabi. But shouldn’t I have heard more about a very funny movie entitled Spy and starring Melissa McCarthy? This is how I came to see it tonight: “Want to see a movie?” “Could. Is that Pacino thing still in town?” “Long […]

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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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