‘Dubai Idol,’ as the event is popularly known, gets a blurb in the local UAE papers around this time of year. The articles raise readers’ eyebrows, cause grins and evoke a warmth, perhaps out of self-righteous pity, toward Dubai’s most visible invisibles — the South Asian men who build, clean and guard Dubai’s buildings. The event’s official name is Camp Ka Champ (’Champ of the Camp’)…
Read the article here.

The stage and crowd in the Sonapur district of Dubai.

Since his retirement as a civil servant, Larry Beasley, who was the director of planning in Vancouver for thirty years, spends around seven to twelve days a month working as a special advisor of what appears to be his second homeland, Abu Dhabi. Last fall he spent one week in Rotterdam as a visiting urban [...]

photo: Joumana al Jabri

An article from today’s Emarat Al Youm. We’ve translated it here for our readers who don’t read Arabic:
by Rashid Mohammad Al-Fozan
translation by Sandra Bsat
photo credit: Mohammed Al Sharif (alsharif at flickr.com)

To celebrate the 10th birthday of Dubai’s quintessential icon, the Burj al Arab hotel, we present an interview with architect Carlos Ott from the archives of Al Manakh 1.

Every weekday between 7:30 and 7:45, the workers at the Marina Residences Towers on Palm Jumeirah congregate for morning exercises called rajio taiso, or radio exercises.
Al Manakh visited for one morning. Here’s some footage from a day got off to a good start.