Arabian Travel Market is more that an exhibition. The comprehensive event programme gives delegates the opportunity to network, learn and keep up-to-dates with industry news and company launches.

The show floor of Arabian Travel Market is four days of exciting “first chances to see.” Hotels announce new properties and concepts, airlines are launched, new routes confirmed, destinations promoted and headlines made. Inbound, outbound and intra-regional tour operators get a glimpse of the world and a snapshot of every new travel experience on offer as exhibitors compete for business. Circling the show floor are back to back seminars – where travel trends are announced and predictions made, opportunities of the future are presented and ideas are formed. Visitors leave at the end of each day discussing what they’ve seen, learnt and achieved at parties and awards dinners held in Dubai’s hotels and restaurants.

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Dates: 14 – 18 March 2006
Venue: Dubai International Marine Club, (Mina Seyahi)
Opening Times: 15.00 – 21.30

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The ambitious emirate, already a tourism giant, wants to run U.S. ports and be the Wall Street of the Persian Gulf. Isn’t that the American way?

Without much oil under its sands, Dubai is no petro powerhouse. But you can’t beat it for being the most colorful sheikdom in the Middle East–or the most ambitious. What other desert land can claim one of the world’s largest indoor ski slopes, featuring fresh powder year round? While flying in on the stylish, state-owned Emirates Airlines, you might notice the artificial islands in the shape of a palm tree or the 56-story Burj al-Arab hotel, as tall as the Eiffel Tower, built like a billowing sail. Westerners are welcome, along with their vices. Europeans in bikinis mingle on the beach with Muslim women in abayas; alcohol flows freely at Dubai’s nightclubs and resorts. With events like the Dubai World Cup, a horse race with a record $6 million purse, Dubai draws 7 million visitors a year, along with big-name acts from Luciano Pavarotti to Tiger Woods. Its economy has nearly tripled in size, to $34.5 billion, in just a decade. “We have built a success story in a short span of time,” says Mohammad al-Gergawi, executive chairman of Dubai Holding, the government-run conglomerate that oversees most of the emirate’s big domestic and foreign investments. “In 10 to 15 years, we put Dubai on the map.”

It took some members of the U.S. Congress about a day and a half to accomplish as much notoriety for the place, such was their outrage over the latest piece of Dubai’s economic development. A state-controlled company, Dubai Ports World, which aims to be a major player in the global-shipping industry, last November agreed to pay $6.8 billion to buy a British firm, Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. (P&O), which controls terminal operations under five U.S. port authorities, including those in New York City, Baltimore and Miami. Citing security issues and a lack of information from the Bush Administration, usually free-trade Republicans like Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, have all but vowed to show up at the docks to stop the deal. “A lot of Republicans feel they were hung out to dry,” says King. The tussle has even offered the prospect of former President Bill Clinton, a Dubai adviser, squaring off with his spouse, New York Senator Hillary Clinton, who opposes the buyout. Geopolitics makes strange bedfellows. The deal is on hold pending a 45-day national-security review that DP World asked for in the hope of winning support and easing fears about its antiterrorism credentials.

The P&O acquisition is emblematic of a Middle Eastern merchant state on the rise, one that aspires to be much more than an amusement park for jet-setters. Run since 1995 by a press-shy crown prince, Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who became emir this year (Sheik Mo, to finance types), Dubai has established a network of holding companies, funds and corporations with more than $15 billion in overseas investments and a domestic goal of turning Dubai into a hub for everything from financial services to biotechnology. Call it Dubai Inc., a conglomerate with Sheik Mo as CEO. “We are not that different [from] small states like Singapore,” says Mohammed Alabbar, head of Dubai’s Department of Economic Development and chairman of the real estate developer Emaar. “They realized their economy is too small, so they said, ‘Let’s go to a broader market.’ That’s what’s happening.”

By most metrics, the plan has worked brilliantly. Dubai’s economy is the healthiest in the Middle East, growing at a 16% annual clip and diversifying well beyond oil (which accounts for just about 6% of GDP). Dubai’s ports and free-trade zones bustle. The government has built high-tech centers, including Dubai Media City and Dubai Internet City, attracting companies from Microsoft to IBM. A research park called DuBiotech is luring drug companies. The Dubai International Financial Center, a “financial free zone,” aims to lead the region’s securities exchanges, although there will be plenty of competition for that honor.

Sheik Mo, known for his love of thoroughbred horses, has been on a shopping spree. In recent months his investment vehicles have acquired the Tussauds Group wax museums and a 2% stake in DaimlerChrysler. U.S. purchases include the landmark Essex House hotel and Helmsley Building in New York, and 69 apartment-rental properties in southern U.S. states. And he’s clearly not done. Says Alabbar: “For any businessman, you need to operate in the American economy and understand it. That’s where a lot of the stuff in the world starts. That’s why I am in California.” (And to visit his son, who attends college in San Diego.) Perhaps most impressively, the sheik has eschewed the opaque, connection-fueled style of business typical of the Middle East and insisted on Western standards of accounting and transparency.

Dubai’s embrace of Western business principles was no match for Western politicians with security fears, either real or politically opportunistic. The Bush Administration, stung by a rebellion in its own party, announced last week that it would review a deal by another Dubai firm to buy a British company, Doncasters, which makes precision parts for U.S. military aircraft and tanks at plants in Georgia and Connecticut.

Senators who want to block the ports deal, such as New York Democrat Charles Schumer, point out that the 9/11 attackers laundered money through Dubai and that the sheikdom participates in a boycott of Israel by the United Arab Emirates, of which it is one sheikdom among several. (Despite the boycott, DP World does business with Israeli firms.) Congressman King, for one, told TIME he wants assurances that al-Qaeda supporters “will not be able to work their way into the company.” That task might fall to the chief operating officer of DP World–a guy from New Jersey named Edward (Ted) Bilkey.

Dubai certainly isn’t short on big names coming to its aid. Power brokers Bill Clinton and Bob Dole (whose spouse is a North Carolina Senator), along with Madeleine Albright’s lobbying shop, have advised DP World. Clinton has described the U.A.E. as a model Middle East government and in 2002 gave two speeches in Dubai, pulling in $450,000. Nor is the Bush Administration unfamiliar with DP World. Critics grouse that Treasury Secretary John Snow’s former company, transportation giant CSX, sold its international port operations to DP World in 2004, for $1.15 billion. Dubai also works with the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm stocked with former government insiders.

The congressional uproar leaves Dubai’s bosses feeling burned by a double standard, one that promotes globalization only when it is within the U.S.’s comfort zone. “The media is saying ‘The world is flat’, but when it comes to Arabs there are a lot of barriers,” says a Dubai official. “People are thinking about the clash of civilizations. It’s important for the world to see us working together.” Sheika Lubna al-Qasimi, Dubai’s Minister of Economy and Planning, predicts that the bottom line will win out after the review. “At the end of the day, this is about business,” she told TIME. Whatever the outcome, she adds, it won’t halt military and intelligence cooperation between the U.S. and her country.

Yet if the U.S. is going to block deals for what Dubai sees as political reasons, there is less of an incentive to trade with American companies–and it could bolster Dubai’s effort to attract Arab capital to its nascent financial center. More concretely, Dubai is committed to $200 billion in projects, including expanding the city of Dubai’s airport, and tons more hotels and condos. Dubai recently unveiled a plan to create a “global aerospace manufacturing and services corporation” that will offer leasing and repair services, challenging firms like General Electric (start-up funds: $15 billion). Emaar is building an entire city in Saudi Arabia, a $23 billion project that will include an airport, seaport, schools and hospitals.

All this activity has fed speculation that Dubai Inc. is a bubble built on debt. Certainly, Dubai is a borrower. “The big secret is that Dubai doesn’t have much money,” says Harry Alverson, managing director of the Carlyle Group. “Most of what they do is very leveraged.” Yet borrowing to finance growth is what hot companies–and countries–do. That’s why Carlyle is a partner. And why Alabbar is confident the Dubai miracle is no mirage. “The whole region needs to be served,” he says, “and there is nobody there except Dubai.”

With reporting by Eric Roston/Washington, Coco Masters/New York, Reported by Scott MacLeod/Cairo

More: Dubai in the 60′s and 70′s – Pictures

For the first time in the history of Entertainment in the Middle East, M&M Entertainment is giving people a chance to WIN at a concert. The 1st Asian Buzz 2006 will feature:

Asia’s biggest rock band, Junoon
Bombay rockers
the don of remixing, DJ Aqeel

People will have numerous opportunities to win 2 cars, VIP & backstage passes to the concert, limousine pickup, new solo album of Salman Ahmad, dinner with Junoon, photo opportunity with Junoon and DJ Aqeel, be the live road show host with M&M’s team, and for people living outside the UAE, a fully paid trip to Dubai for the Asian Buzz 2006.

Tickets will be available at Daily Restaurant, all Al Mansoor Video stores and all Choithram outlets in the UAE. For more information on the 1st Asian Buzz 2006, call 04-3382766 or log onto www.mm-ent.net and www.dubaigigs.com.

Timings: 7pm gates open, 9pm show starts
Date: March 2nd, 2006
Venue: Dubai World Trade Center – Hall 1
Ticket: Blue – AED 100 (Promotional discount for limited time at AED – 50), Red – AED 200, VIP – AED 300
Organiser: M&M Entertainment
Address: POBox 38357 Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai, UAE
Tel: +971 4 3382766
Hotline: +971 50 4998779
Email: info@mm-ent.net

So who’s going then? If you have any VIP tickets to spare, let me know on dan.thisisanfield@gmail.com ;-)

The fastest-growing city on earth, Dubai is spending mind-boggling sums on construction and is about to swallow up P&O in its bid to be a global maritime power. Given the scale of its ambition, could it become the most important place on the planet?

Adam Nicolson of The Guardian reports from ‘Mushroom City’

It looks like a hot Grozny. On the vast invented islands offshore and in the even vaster building sites that stretch in a wide band the whole length of Dubai’s now famous riviera, acre on acre of grey-faced, concrete, hollow-eyed buildings, fenced in with scaffolding and overhung by tower cranes, stare at each other across the sands. Tower blocks look abandoned rather than half-made. It is said that a fifth of the world’s cranes are now at work here. An army of some 250,000 men, largely from India and Pakistan, are labouring to create the new glimmer fantasy, earning on average £150 a month, and living in camps, four to a room, 12ft by 12ft, hidden away in the industrial quarters of al Quoz. One night in one of the luxury hotels would cost six months’ wages of one of the men who built it. Below and around their work sites, the new streets are chaotic with rubble and piles of steel.

The traffic is already as bad as Los Angeles. The city authorities are now giving priority to new roads, hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on bridges across the Dubai Creek, five lanes in each direction, but still a taxi ride that might take 10 minutes at midday lasts an hour at either end of it. If you ask a driver to take you to some places, he laughs. “Do you want to have a very long talk?” he says.

Dubai is growing faster than any city on earth. “Mushroom City”, Ravi Piyush, a plumply content dealer in the Gold Souk, said to me. “Nothing today, everything tomorrow.” The World Bank reckons that the reconstruction of Iraq is going to cost $53bn. Here, along the strip of footballer-friendly sand that stretches 25 miles or so along the shores of the Persian Gulf, there is, at a rough estimate, about $100bn worth of projects either underway or planned for the near future. That is a numbing figure, ungraspable. It is the equivalent of every single dollar invested in the United States from abroad last year; almost twice the foreign investment in China.

There are the three famous offshore “palms”, man-made peninsulas laden with more hotels and more “signature villas” than the entire Premiership might ever dream of. The 7,000-man workforce on one of them is too large to get on to the palm each morning without creating its own traffic jam: they are shipped in by sea from further along the coast. There’s to be a Giorgio Armani Hotel and a Palazzo Versace. There’s the tallest building in the world under construction, Burj Dubai, costing $800m and expected to be 800m tall when complete, but the precise figure is being kept secret in case New York’s new Freedom Tower tries to top it. A billboard the size of Piccadilly Circus stands out in the desert showing the pencil-thin rocket of a tower alongside a simple rubric: “History Rising.” The biggest shopping mall in the world is already here. Another, bigger, the world’s largest retail development, is under construction.

There’s to be an underwater hotel ($500m). One indoor ski resort, with real snow and its own black run, exists already, a weird, looming presence on the city’s southern skyline. There is to be a second, with a revolving mountain. Plans are mooted for a Chess City, with 32 tower blocks of 64 floors, each in the form of a chess piece. There’s to be a 60-floor apartment block in the shape of Big Ben. One company selling flats is giving away a free Jag with each one. There will be a pyramid and a building called Atlantis that will cost $600m and include a “swim-with-the-dolphins encounter programme”. An Aviation City and a Cargo Village, an Aid City and a Humanitarian Free Zone, an Exhibition City and a Festival City, a Healthcare City and a Flower City, a $4bn extension to the airport and another entirely new airport along the coast towards Abu Dhabi, for which no figures are available but you can take a guess at a few billion: six runways, annual capacity 120 million passengers, 12 million tonnes of cargo.

Next to it, as the Dubai government’s Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing puts it, “There will be several smaller cities that will cater to the financial, industrial, service and tourism industries.” To fill these airports, Emirates, the national airline, has just placed the biggest order that Boeing has ever had: $9.7bn for 42 777s, each capable of carrying 300 passengers non-stop more than 9,000 miles across the world. They have also ordered a fleet of the biggest Airbuses on offer, each capable of carrying 555 people.

The Middle East’s answer to Disneyland, called Dubailand, which is far larger than Monaco, is costing $4.5bn. It will employ 300,000 people in the various joylands, servicing 15 million visitors. A new urban railway, with 37 stops, begins construction soon. Dubai is to have its own Silicon Oasis ($1.7bn) for computer companies. A mixed development called Dubai Waterfront/Arabian Canal covers an area larger than Barbados and will house, when completed ($6bn), more people than Paris.

There’s another side to Dubai. Drive south along the Gulf, away from the glamour zone of the great hotels, past the giant malls and the huge gas-fired power stations, almost to the western border of Dubai, and you come to the largest man-made harbour in the world. The unapproachably vast quays of the modern port at Jebel Ali were dredged out of the desert sands in 1979 at a place where the present emir’s father, Sheikh Rashid, used to come for evenings camping with his friends. Abdulla bin Damithan, one of the port managers, showed me around in his red Audi. (This was a replacement; the BMW was in for service.) The 1.5 mile-long quays are so enormous that to look the length of them is to stare into a desert haze. Halfway along, the metal bodies of the ships and cranes disappear like mirages.

But it is no dreamy place: every minute, every towering gantry crane lifts another container off the high-stacked decks of the bulbous ships alongside, lowers it to a waiting truck that delivers it to another part of the site, or transfers it from the unimaginably huge motherships, which travel the world oceans, to the slightly less huge feeder ships that service the Gulf, the Indian trade and the Mediterranean. Nothing interrupts the movements, day and night, 365 days a year, even in July at 90% humidity, an air temperature usually over 49C and when even the seawater in the docks approaches 38C. No one works outside. More than seven million containers are moved here in the course of the year, a figure that grew 23% last year, and is set to triple within the next six years, serving a market of two billion people. It’s like looking at the guts of the world, the usually hidden machinery by which things actually happen. Over on the other side of the harbour, two diminutive destroyers are tied up, the stars and stripes hanging off their sterns. This is where the American carrier battle groups patrolling the Gulf come for service – and shopping. It’s the port most visited by the US navy outside the United States.

Like almost everything of any significance in Dubai, the port system belongs to the state, or to the Maktoums, the ruling family. The two are indistinguishable, and in some ways, Dubai is like Poundbury writ large – and rich: a princely vision of how the world might be. The Maktoums came here as Bedouin chieftains in the 1820s, to a small, palm-fringed trading creek, where political control was in the hands of the British. Only in 1971 did Dubai gain independence as part of the United Arab Emirates. It was already known that Abu Dhabi, by far the biggest and richest of the Emirates, was sitting on a vast mineral reserve. At current rates of production, Abu Dhabi has more than 120 years’ supply of oil and gas still untapped. Dubai is nothing like so well endowed, and so from the 1960s onwards, the Maktoums have been consciously shaping Dubai as the trading and financial motor of the Emirates, and the Dubai ports system is central to their vision.

Dubai sits on the all-important strategic routeway of the modern world: China, India, Middle East, Europe and the US. That is where the money is going to be. China has just become the third biggest economy in the world and it is the fastest growing. India is set for its own acceleration. The Maktoum plan is to make Dubai the centre of a global strategic network of port facilities to rival Singapore and the huge Hong Kong-based conglomerate of Hutchison-Whampoa. They have been acquiring hard and fast and now control massive facilities in China, Hong Kong, Australia, South Korea, India, Yemen, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Romania, Germany and Latin America. In a profoundly symbolic move, Dubai Ports are now manoeuvring to make a bid for the great harbours in southern Iraq.

They want more, and that desire for global control is what lies behind their bidding war for P&O, the British ports and shipping combine, which has a powerful European presence (including the giant London Gateway, planned to be Britain’s biggest container port at Thurrock on the Thames), exactly what Dubai wants. Singapore wanted it too and the two commercial city states’ rival bids drove up the price, adding 80% to the value of P&O’s shares and valuing the company at a reported $6.8bn (just short of £4bn), an unprecedented 40 times P&O’s profits last year. At the weekend, Singapore pulled out and all the signs are that when P&O’s shareholders vote today, they will accept Dubai’s offer. This bid alone is a measure of the hunger, the money and the drive of what is happening in the emirate. And the Arab world has backed the bid. When Dubai Ports issued a bond for $2.8bn last month to help it buy P&O, it found itself drowning in $11.4bn of subscriptions.

Why is Dubai doing this? And why so fast? What can the hunger be traced to? I spent a morning on The World, one of the big prestige projects, consisting of 300 artificial islands made of sand dredged from the sea floor and either dumped or pumped into forms that vaguely mimic the shape of the world’s continents. Every week between five and 10m cubic metres of sand are delivered to the site. The islands will cost up to $30m each, and that is for the sand alone. Making the lumps habitable for the world’s island-hungry rich will cost half as much again.

I was somewhere in Greenland with Hamza Mustafa, the man who is running it for Nakheel, the state-owned developer. It was another invented moment: we were there for a photo. Vijay Singh, the Fijian golfer, was going to fire some shots from Greenland over a narrow channel to Iceland, still nothing but sand, on which one of Nakheel’s PR men had put a golf flag. There were helicopters, artificial grass, English marketing girls, Singh’s personal trainer in shorts, his agent in shades, two photographers, their assistants, cooks, waiters and barmen, boatmen, people from a Nakheel golf development and Singh’s personal course designer, who told me in detail how sewage makes courses greener. It’s a perfect symbiosis: houses need golf courses and golf courses need the sewage the houses produce. How happy is that? “As long as it’s got the nutrients, grass loves sand,” he said.

While Singh stood beneath the chopper firing his shots, I talked to Mustafa, in the sleek Arab-modernist villa he’s had built on Greenland. He has already sold 30% of the $3bn project, mostly to “local money, from the region”, the rest, he says, to British and Americans. Australasia has been sold to a developer from Kuwait. Why are they buying? “No tax, good weather, an easy life, a comfortable life, affordable. I don’t have to push the sales. I’ve got 10 islands left of the ones I want to sell at the moment. They are clamouring for them. And then I’ll stop for a while. We don’t want a glut.” He smiled, complicit, knowing as well as I did what sales talk amounts to. “By 2015, there will be 250,000 people living here. It’ll be like Venice.”

I asked him why Dubai was going through this world-busting surge. One might have expected the straightforward business answer, which goes something like this: Dubai, unlike other parts of the Gulf, has little of its own oil or gas. A great deal of Arab money, invested in the US, came back from there after 9/11 and needed an outlet. The fact that oil is now pushing $70 a barrel means that the Gulf is awash with liquidity. There is clearly a role for a strategic financial centre in the Middle East: Beirut played it once, Dubai could do so now. Money has been draining out of Iran for years and Dubai, just across the Gulf, has always been a traditional place for Iranians to put their money to work. Mohammed Noor Taleb, a 75-year-old textile trader I spoke to in the souk, who had lived with his mother as a child in a tent made of palm leaves and now owned a business in Indian cottons turning over $5.2m a year, told me an old Dubai joke. A young boy is asked by his father “What is two add two?” “Am I buying or am I selling?” the boy says. Commerce is in the blood.

But Mustafa’s reply came from another place entirely, evidence of the extraordinary hybridisation of cultures that is going on here: traditionalist, modernist, Arabist, internationalist, market-based, bowing to authority. For Mustafa, it all stems from the Emir of Dubai himself, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. Mohammed only became Emir on January 4, when his elder brother Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid al-Maktoum, died after a long illness. But Mohammed has had his hand on the tiller for years. “Sheikh Mohammed has had a vision,” Mustafa said, “which is that Dubai should become a fully developed city, with the best life of any city that has ever been created. The whole city is growing as a single organism. We have planned this, very carefully, he is a leader who has bestowed a great vision on us, so that in time Dubai is going to become the first ever Arab modern metropolis.” Was this really about an Arabist dream of perfection? “No, this is not Arab nationalism. But what Dubai is trying to do is set an example of how Arabs should be represented. After 9/11, Arabs suffered from a lot of bad publicity. Dubai is trying to come back with the right kind of publicity. It will be a fully modern state. It will be setting the standards. It will be a place that people will look up to.”

You might have to take that with a few bucketloads of salt. There is no hint of democracy in Dubai. There is a consultative council whose members are nominated by the ruling family. A group of five old Arab families control the entire emirate. The working and living conditions of the construction labourers and the domestic servants from south Asia are notoriously bad. Thirty-nine building workers died on sites last year, 22 of them simply by falling, as provision of slings and ropes is inadequate. The Dubai press is full of stories criticising companies for late payment, no payment, the confiscation of passports, imposition of penalties for minor infringements, the manoeuvrings of loan sharks and all the other expectable abuses of a poorly regulated employment system. The property laws are explicitly racist: no non-UAE national can own land outside the designated free zones. No foreign company can operate in the country without paying a UAE “sponsor” to be their local representative. No one except UAE nationals can get one of the plum jobs in a government department. Education and healthcare are free for all UAE nationals but no one else. The local press will never be seen to criticise the government and when, for example, I tried to interview the director of strategic planning in the offices of Dubai municipality, I was told I could only do so “if we have checked you out first and seen that what you will write will be favourable”. Not much hybridisation there.

And yet it is not Saudi Arabia. Brokeback Mountain is soon to open in Dubai cinemas, which it never could in Saudi Arabia. There is no problem with bikinis and sunbathing on the beaches. And on a more substantial level, there is a determined effort to de-monopolise the economy, to make market competition the driver for this new model world. Local customs must be respected: no loud music during Ramadan, no eating in front of Muslims on fast days, no possibility of making a political claim on the direction of the state. And in return for those limits, the state delivers a sense of wellbeing. That is the trade-off on which Dubai is relying. A booming market, with a consciously courteous social culture and a tight police system (panic buttons in the thousand gold shops in old Dubai bring the police in two minutes) deliver a better wage than would be available at home – all this in return for surrendering anything resembling a political right.

Eduardo Ferrari, an Argentinian cameraman who has lived in Dubai for the last eight years, says he couldn’t “give a damn for democracy. I live here in the most democratic country in the world. Why? Because the economy is taking you by the tip of your head and pulling you up. Every year I have more and more. In Argentina, every year I have less and less.” Vishal Khemani, a 26-year-old from Mumbai, who imports Indian and Japanese textiles for Dubai wholesalers, says he loves Dubai simply because it is “very disciplined, very neat, very clean. Everything is going to timetable. I have a good job, good food. It is a cheap country.” And extremely safe. There has been no hint, so far, of any terrorist attack, although you would have thought it was due for one. A western businessman, surveying the most luxurious of the Jumeirah beach hotels, said simply to me: “Everything about this place smells of western women, right? It looks like an al-Qaida target to me.” There are rumours in Dubai that a terror plot was foiled last year but the processes of government are so opaque that there is no confirming that. It may be that the levels of government control in Dubai are high enough to make any terrorist operations very difficult.

Bob Gogel, CEO of Liberata, an international company specialising in the outsourcing of financial services, probably speaks for the business community as a whole. “Dubai is an unpolished gem polishing itself very quickly. You could look at it as a CD compilation – the best of London, Sydney, Miami, Las Vegas – and you have to give them the benefit of the doubt. Where else in the Middle East is going to do it? Turkey? Saudi Arabia? Lebanon? Egypt? Kuwait? You can’t see it. Nowhere in the world do you get such good service. Certainly not in London. And business people like that. They’ve got a good plan, it’s tightly controlled, they’ve managed to pull in some good people, they’ve got the oil money, and that price is not going to drop very far. The property market in Dubai is probably overheated and the Dubai stock market is due for a correction. But you try poking holes and I have trouble poking that big a hole.”

This is the Dubai sandwich: at the bottom, cheap and exploited Asian labour; in the middle, white northern professional services, plus tourist hunger for glamour in the sun and, increasingly, a de-monopolised western market system; at the top, enormous quantities of invested oil money, combined with fearsome social and political control and a drive to establish another model of what modern Arabia might mean in the post-9/11 world. That is the intriguing question: can Dubai do what Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, or almost anywhere else in the Arab world you might like to mention, have failed to do? Is Dubai, in fact, the fulcrum of the future global trading and financial system? Is it, in embryo, what London was to the 19th century and Manhattan to the 20th? Not the modern centre of the Arab world but, more than that, the Arab centre of the modern world.

KUWAIT CITY (AP) – Sheik Jaber Al Ahmed Al Sabah, the emir of Kuwait who survived an assassination attempt in the 1980s and a decade later escaped Iraqi troops invading his oil-rich Persian Gulf state, died Sunday, state television announced. The sheik, who had been ailing since suffering a brain hemorrhage five years ago, was 79.

Inna Lillah’e wa’inna ilaihi raji’oon.

Kuwait’s Cabinet named the crown prince, Sheik Saad Al Abdullah Al Sabah, the new ruler in the tiny oil-rich country – a key U.S. ally in the Middle East. Al Sabah, a distant cousin chosen by the emir as his heir apparent in 1978, is in his mid-70s and has colon problems. His poor health had led to worries about succession in Kuwait, and it was not unclear what the ruling family would decide in the longer term.

The government announced a 40-day period of mourning and said government offices would be closed for three days beginning Sunday. Sheik Jaber was to be buried Sunday afternoon at the Sulaibikhat cemetery.

There had been speculation among Kuwaitis that the crown prince might give up his position because of poor health, but Prime Minister Sheik Sabah Al Ahmed Al Sabah announced in November that would not happen.

The post of the emir automatically goes to the crown prince, according to the country’s 1964 succession law, but it was not clear what the ruling family would decide in the longer term.

Sheik Jaber was a close friend of the United States even before U.S. forces led the fight to liberate his country in 1991. Kuwait served as the major launching point for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq 12 years later.

Kuwait has remained reliant on U.S. forces for defense, and the close alliance is likely to continue under Sheik Saad.

“I don’t believe there will be any change at all,” said Ayed al-Mannah, a columnist for Al-Watan daily and political science professor at the Arab Open University in Kuwait. “Kuwait needs the United States and the United States needs Kuwait, it is a strategic relationship.”

The Al Sabah family has ruled Kuwait, which has the world’s 10th largest oil reserves, for more than 250 years.

Abdul-Rhida Asiri, head of Political Science Department at Kuwait University, predicted a “smooth transition” to Sheik Saad, saying the family could make further leadership decisions after the mourning period. He said the prime minister will be chosen crown prince and would likely keep his present job.

After a Shiite Muslim extremist tried to assassinate Sheik Jaber in a suicide car bombing in May 1985, the emir abruptly changed his habits. He stopped driving his own car to bustling bazaars and cut down on public appearances. He did not like traveling abroad, though he went for medical treatment.

He suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2001 and was treated in London. On the rare occasions since then when he appeared in public, he had difficulty delivering speeches.

Sheik Jaber, born in 1926 before Kuwait became rich exporting oil and educated by private tutors in his father’s palace, was considered a father figure to many Kuwaitis who generally were fond and respectful of the emir.

Despite the wealth and well-consolidated family rule, Sheik Jaber was considered a quiet listener who avoided ostentation. His palace in Kuwait City’s Dasman neighborhood near the sea was described as a spacious but ordinary house, and bread and yogurt often satisfied him at mealtime.

While in exile in the Saudi resort hotel of Taif, the emir said little and prayed a lot, Ahmed al-Jarrallah, editor of the newspaper Al-Siyassah, wrote. He said the emir was always saying: “I just want a small tent in my country. I don’t want palaces or luxury.”

Designated crown prince and prime minister in 1965, Sheik Jaber succeeded his uncle, Sheik Sabah Al Salem Al Sabah, as emir on Dec. 31, 1977.

The year before taking over, he set up the Fund for Future Generations – a financial safety net for Kuwaitis when the oil eventually runs out. To this day, he has ensured 10 percent of oil revenues go into the fund, which has an estimated balance of more than $60 billion.

Before the 1990-91 crisis over the Iraqi invasion, Sheik Jaber and his family presided over an affluent but tightly controlled society. Sheik Jaber dissolved parliament in 1986 for severely criticizing the government. He did not restore it until 1992, a year after Iraqi troops were driven out.

The United States, trying to sell allies on joining the international coalition that ultimately forced Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait, pressed the ruling family to institute or return some democratic institutions to Kuwait.

The emir dissolved parliament again in 1999 saying lawmakers misused their constitutional rights. A new public vote was held just two months later.

Sheik Jaber won the praise and gratitude of human rights activists when he decreed in 1999 that women should have the vote and be eligible to run for office. However, conservatives and fundamentalist Muslims formed a parliamentary alliance that repeatedly kept his decree from being put into practice.

He could have disbanded parliament to press his view, but did not. Six years later, in May 2005, parliament finally approved the legislation supported by the emir.

During Saddam’s rule, the Iraqi dictator delivered harsh attacks on Sheik Jaber in an attempt to discredit the ruling family of Kuwait, which Iraq had claimed since the territory’s independence from Britain in 1961. He called the emir a “womanizer” who married 40 times.

Saddam described the emirate as a lazy nation languishing in comfort attended by foreign servants. Except when foreign workers fled during the invasion crisis, foreigners in modern Kuwait have outnumbered native. Today, there are about 960,000 Kuwaitis and 1.64 million foreign residents.

Sheik Jaber fled Kuwait when Saddam’s armored columns invaded on Aug. 2, 1990, with orders to capture or kill him. He drove to Saudi Arabia, accompanied by most of his estimated 70 children and dozens of senior members of the royal family.

He set up a government-in-exile in Taif and went on Saudi television to urge his people to resist.

Close aides say he denounced Saddam as a criminal and wondered out loud: “Why does this Saddam hate me so much?”

Like other Arab leaders in the Persian Gulf, Sheik Jaber had backed Iraq during its 1980-88 war with Iran.

By DIANA ELIAS / Associated Press Writer

The Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon 2006, postponed from its original date in early January, is back on track and will take place on Friday, February 17. Dubai Marathon: Official Site

Held under the patronage of HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, the Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon was scheduled to take place on January 6 but was immediately postponed following the demise of HH the late Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

Announcing the new date, Event Organiser Peter Connerton said there was never any doubt the event would be rescheduled.

‘Following the tragic news of the loss of HH Sheikh Maktoum, we immediately put plans for the Marathon on hold,’ he said. ‘The international runners and all the officials were in Dubai preparing for the race and completely understood the reasons for the postponement as I’m sure did all of our registered runners in the Marathon, the 10km and the 3km fun run.’

With the new date confirmed, Connerton added that all competitors who had registered for January 6 will be eligible to run on February 17. ‘Obviously, anyone who was too late for the first closing date for registration can now enter for the re-scheduled race,’ he said. ‘We will be taking new registrations on line as well as by post up until the deadline of February 10.’

Ray Ferguson, CEO, Standard Chartered UAE, added:’Standard Chartered backs this event because we believe, as do the organisers, that the Dubai Marathon can eventually take its rightful place alongside other key events such as the London and New York runs. We are fully behind the organisers’ attempts to make Dubai an inbound tourist destination for distance runners.

‘Mainline sponsorship of the marathon is in line with our commitment to support the community of the UAE.’

One of the landmark events on the Dubai sporting calendar, the Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon had already attracted a field of elite distance runners, including several top-class African runners from the portfolio of l international agent Dr Federico Rosa.

But while many of these athletes will be unable to make the new date, Rosa is in no doubt as to the quality of the field for February 17. ‘Many athletes see Dubai as a great venue to set a personal best and several of them were disappointed that their calendars could not allow them to run in January,’ he said. ‘Now those that couldn’t make it before will be available for the new date, while others who were carrying injuries will be fully fit come February 17. If anything, the new date will make the event even bigger and better.’

Those runners already registered and who collected their run numbers should keep them for the new date, while those athletes who registered and have not yet collected their numbers should collect them at the Dubai World Trade Centre on February 14 or 15 between 11.00am and 7.00pm or on February 16 between 11.00am and 4.00pm.

‘Anyone who didn’t manage to register for the original date can do so by registering online or by posting the original registration form or the form available on the website before the February 10 deadline,’ added Connerton.

In addition to title sponsors Standard Chartered, other sponsors of the Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon 2006 are JW Marriott, Isostar, Dubai Sports City, AMG, Mall of the Emirates, Dubai Bone & Joint Center, Toyota, Aquafina and the Dubai World Trade Centre.