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Iran builds pearl roundabout monument on disputed island
I can’t believe that I missed this when the story first broke. Evidently the Iranians have a super sense of high mirth and constructed a fake ‘pearl roundabout’ as a monument to the epicenter of the...
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Manchester City stadium renaming faux pas
Manchester City, the English Premiere League club, have renamed their stadium the Etihad Stadium, after signing the largest sponsorship deal in history worth some £400 million pounds with Abu Dhabi’s...
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14% of Emiratees to vote in elections
Around 129,000 or 14% of Emiratees will be eligible to vote in the elections on 24th September 2011 to elect half of the members of the Federal National Council. To put this another way, only 1.6% of...
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UAE backheel penalty: tut tut
The clip below shows an Emirati player backheeling a penalty against Lebanon. To those that perhaps don’t understand football culture, this is a shoddy thing to do. And it’s far worse and far more...
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Emirati women: modernity and modesty
Salon has a (vaguely) interesting slide show of pictures of Emirati women. To anyone who remotely knows the region, it will show you nothing remotely new. It is mostly, I think, for Americans who don’t...
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Gulf Disunion
The following article appeared in Foreign Policy magazine online on the 2nd May 2012. … The leaders of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab...
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On Prisoner X and the Dubai debacle
The Prisoner X case in Israel is interesting for a few reasons. Firstly, Bibi’s reaction to try to block Israeli papers from reporting on this incident smacks of the most pointless Mubarak-esque...
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Gulf Troika Troubles
The following article was published on 13 March 2014 by the New America Foundation. The original article can be found here. __ It had been coming, some might say, for years. The announcement of the...
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How personal politics drive conflict in the Gulf
The following article can be found on Steven Cook’s blog over at the Council on Foreign Relations. … “I love all the countries of the Gulf, and they all love me.” With this less than subtle statement,...
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Can Qatar, Saudi Arabia ease tensions at Gulf Cooperation Council?
It’s the gravest diplomatic crisis the Gulf Cooperation Council has ever faced — but as leaders from the six-member Arab alliance prepare to meet in Jeddah, are things about to get even worse? The root...
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