Nuts

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I posted the other day about stumbling across a trove of old articles. Here's another one that amused me. It originally ran in Communicate Magazine under the pseudonym of misanthropic journalist Mike Gruff...

I thought that the idea of ad agency types brainstorming over Chablis and dry-roasted peanuts was a typical piece of apocrypha until I was invited to one. Interestingly, the product in question was dry roasted peanuts, so there were bowls of them on the frosted glass-topped table. The Chablis was in ice buckets, which shows a certain sense of style.

Why, oh why, they invited me I do not know. A friend of mine worked at the agency and had mumbled something about wanting a different opinion. He went on to say, darkly, that if anyone had different opinions it was Gruff. I took it as a compliment.

So I went along. I can’t say that I was particularly happy at the prospect of sitting around a table with a bunch of yahoos dressed in over-large shirts and sporting pony tails, but I was nevertheless intrigued to see the whole process of creative thinking, so celebrated by the agency world, at work.

My first mistake was deciding that I didn’t like anyone around the table. There were three girls and four men, not counting me. The girls were smart, dressed up to the nines and drawlingly, casually superior and the guys were so hip they kept their pockets sewn to avoid ruining the lines of their pinstripe trousers.

Nobody smoked.

The girls had already thrown me pitying glances: I was, as usual, dishevelled and wearing jeans and a scruffy purple shirt. The guys were being nice to me, which I hated. So I sulked.

My second mistake was saying ‘No thanks’ to the offer of a Perrier and getting stuck straight into the Chablis. Very nice, too.

The session started with a guy called Nick asking people for ideas on positioning peanuts. This made me snort into my Chablis and got me a withering glare from a girl in Red called Bryony.

“Well, actually, Nick, I think we’ve got a category killer here if we can position it right against the health food freaks, you know?” said Bryony. “Like, we’ve got artificial flavourings to deal with here, so let’s just make a virtue of that.”

And now I made my third and most fatal mistake of all. I reached across the table and picked up a handful of the nuts and ate them. The hit was instantaneous, my mouth freeze-dried, like I’d just filled it with that silica dessicant they put in television boxes. The chemical high came on like a steam-train as I munched and crunched, spicy flavours filling my brain and clamouring for attention. My shoulder muscles contracted and I felt my eyes trying to pop out of their sockets. I reached for the Chablis and knocked the glass over in my haste. Ignoring the pool of hooch slowly spreading across the table-top, I refilled the glass and drank deeply.

Suddenly the Chablis tasted soapy. I felt my mouth working, flicked my tongue around to dislodge the little pieces of nut caught in my teeth, realised that everyone had stopped talking and was looking at me as I sat, my mouth stretched into an insane, toothy grin as I tried to reach the nutty bits, my tongue caught between my teeth and my upper lip. I reached for more nuts.

“Right. Great.” Said Nick, in that way that people say right great to mean not. “So let’s move on here. We’re looking at maybe turning it all around, at making a virtue of the flavourings. Kind of, it’s bad for you but that’s what makes it good, yah?”

The second mouthful of nuts was better than the first. I gasped for breath as the powerful chemicals coursed through my veins, sucking the moisture out of my body and tearing at my tongue like highly spiced acid.

More Chablis.

“You OK there Mike?” said a girl called Naomi, looking concerned. I didn’t care. She was distorting, now, becoming Daliesque, her full torso melting and drooping over a forked stick. Voices started to moan in my head as I drank more of the cold white liquor. Everyone had stopped talking.

“No. No, I’m not alright.” I heard myself saying through a mountain of cotton wool. “Have you eaten these things? Have you actually tasted what you’re trying to sell to people? This isn’t legal. These things are dangerous.”

Nick was laughing, nervously now. “Sure, Mike. They’re great, aren’t they?”

 I was standing now, could feel myself weaving. “No they’re not. They’re fuller of chemicals than ICI. We’ve gone beyond this, surely! People are aware of what they’re eating these days, they don’t want to munch on man-made hyper-flavourings any more. This stuff drives kids mad. You can’t sell this!”

The rush was dying, so I took more nuts and Chablis. I tried to go on speaking, but the mixture was solidifying in my mouth like concrete, a kind of peanut butter lockjaw held me silent, standing up in front of them all, my eyes rolling and my jaw clenching spastically as I tried to manage the serious symptoms of toxic shock.

“Er, Mike, don’t you think you perhaps should…”

“Shut up!” I shouted, holding onto the table for stability, throwing my arm out and strewing nuts across the wet table top. The group sat, nervous and even scared, looking at me through wide eyes. “This is evil! Evil! You are twisted, monstrous.” Flecks of nut were escaping my mouth, but I didn’t care. “This isn’t FOOD!” I roared at them, grabbing more nuts. “This is the SLUT of all nuts!”

I stood glaring balefully at them all, as Bryony came out of her trance and sat forward and then stood, a shocked look on her face.

“Oh my God.” She said and then, turning to the others with a grin. “That’s brilliant!”

I collapsed, gibbering, into my chair.

My friend says that they won’t be asking me to any more brainstormings. Apparently they were very grateful for the idea, which they used. But they felt that perhaps it was best not to let people know that you didn’t have to work at an ad agency to come up with brilliant creative ideas. I met the girl Bryony at a party a few weeks later. She smiled nervously at me when I said hello and then left a few minutes afterwards. Apparently her tortoise was ill and she had to go home to look after it.

Book Post - A Brace Of Nukes

He remembered the cold gloom, the sound of dripping water and the looming shapes in the darkness beyond the finger of grey light the gap in the door let in. Days after, he had returned with a torch and his two closest friends for safety in numbers. They fought over who went first, almost dropping the torch in their fear. Emboldened by the silence, fearful of the echoes, they crept farther down the iron staircase and onto the wide concrete floor, huge doors to their left and right. One of the nearest doors was open, marginally, and they sidled in to prise open one of the stacks of crates. What they found scared them so much they ran out, removed the prop and let the door slam shut. They covered the whole thing up with undergrowth again. As they stood in the clearing, shivering with the cold and fear, they nicked their hands with Hoffmann’s knife and took a blood oath never again to mention the dark cavern to anyone except each other.
From Beirut - An Explosive Thriller

Gerhardt Hoffman sells two Oka nuclear warheads through arms dealer Peter Meier to future Lebanese President Michel Freij. Hoffman, a portly bankrupt, had discovered them as a child, playing in the woods on the East German/Czech border.

The Oka warheads in Beirut - An Explosive Thriller are, worryingly, pretty soundly researched. The OTR-23 Oka class missile (Designated by NATO as the SS-23 Spider) was developed in 1980 by the Soviets to carry both conventional and nuclear payloads and be launched from mobile launchers. It took over as a short/medium range mobile tactical missile system from the infamous SCUD B - the missile that Saddam had so much fun with.

The nuclear warhead, designated 9N63, was detachable and, as featured in Beirut, is about three metres long.  The Oka's successor, made by the same company, is the Iskander, currently in deployment by Russia and armed (we are told) with only conventional warheads.

A large number of Oka missiles were covertly deployed by the Soviets in the late 1980s to Warsaw pact countries to get around INF treaty (Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces) limitations. The INF treaty was intended to eliminate short-range nuclear missiles, but the Soviets tried to fly the Oka under the radar, claiming it wasn't covered by the treaty. This was followed by a round of Soviet obfuscation that made it hard to trace quite what was deployed and stored quite where.

Over 120 missiles were involved in the covert redeployment of Oka missiles – potentially including the 9N63 nuclear warheads. There is some evidence that loading equipment associated with handling the detachable nuclear warheads was part of that deployment, which would lead to the conclusion that the Soviet Union shipped nuclear warheads covertly to facilities in Warsaw pact nations.

Adding to the confusion, Czechoslovakia (which possessed 24 of the Oka missiles) subsequently split into two nations. The Slovaks claimed their missiles 'lacked key components' for the deployment of the 9N63 warhead.

Documented remaining stockpiles of the Oka were destroyed by both the Czech Republic and, finally in late 1999, Slovakia – it is now obsolete and all remaining Oka missiles and 9N63 warheads have been confirmed as destroyed.

Well, apart from two...

Old Gems - Why I Hate PR Bunnies

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I stumbled across an abandoned project from 2006/2007, back when we were starting to wake up to the changes being wrought in the digital world around us. Before I started this blog, I was playing with a Wiki called Orientations, which I used to dump various bits and pieces into, like the frustrated writer I was.

I had kept a number of articles and so on I had written for various magazines, which reminded me that I had written a column in Communicate under the pseudonym of Mike Gruff. Mike was another frustrated writer project, which involved me assuming the persona of a misanthropic old journalist ranting against the world around him and playing it for laughs.

The following piece remains one of my favourite Gruff moments but one, sadly that Communicate's editor, Chris Wright, got cold feet on. He seemed to think admitting to murder in an article might lead to some sort of consequences. So it never ran. Now, five years on, it can see the light of day!!!

I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

__________________________________________________________

I hate PR bunnies. In Europe, you can spot them because of the backpack. All PR bunnies wear those little backpacks. This is a sound piece of information, as it allows the discerning journo to avoid them like the plague before they come leaping up to you, filled with the certitude of youth and overflowing with corporate messaging that they feel the urgent need to deliver to the nearest sap with a pair of ears.

In the Middle East, they’re not so easy to spot, although the sight of studded leather handbags and big hairdos is beginning to make me nervous. The trouble isn’t really the women, though. The male PR bunny is much harder to pinpoint here. They tend to wear suits. This is cheating. In Europe they’re more likely to wear polo shirts with a company logo or ‘I’m Keith and I want to be your best friend’ badges. Suits can creep up on you more easily.

PR bunnies are like mad tape loops, a sort of messaging Teletubbie. Believe me, the last thing an ageing, bitter and hung-over hack needs in the morning is that megawatt Prozac smile and a dose of relentless positivity delivered in American corporatespeak. “Hey! Mike! Great! Cool! So, what do you think of this new paradigm in self-eclipsing product development? We think it’s a really profound move!”

I’ve killed one, you know. Somebody will get the smell from the liftshaft one day and they’ll find the body. It was all too much and a red mist descended. Nobody was looking and the press pack was heavy with useless verbiage and CDs full of dumb pictures. I swung and it was over in a second, hardly an ‘eek’ before I found myself dragging a body into the darkness. I was late into the press conference, but I just got the usual raised eyebrows from the suits and heard someone mutter, “Typical. They’re never on time.”

Like they own you.

Nobody ever missed the bunny. I doubt they ever will. Until, like I say, someone gets the smell.

You’d have thought someone would actually train them to have some kind of empathy with the people they’re supposed to be working with. Journalism’s not a difficult thing to understand. We want news and hard facts. So that means it has to be new or different and it has to be based on some kind of fact. No amount of rabid corporate messaging can disguise the complete absence of news and fact in a story and any half-decent journalist can see through the blurt instantly. That doesn’t stop bunnies evangelising the empty, which is why I suppose they can be so annoying. The other thing that’s irritating is that their need always seems to come before ours. We’re looking for a story, they’re looking for an interview or a bum on a seat at an event. So we get approached with “You must interview my client. He’s really interesting!”

There’s rarely any quality of thought to the approach. It’s programmatic…

10 Journalist response: “Why?”
20 Big Smile™ “Because he’s interesting!”
30 GOTO 10

The fact that a journalist wants news, information and insight is totally secondary to bunny culture PR. The bunny’s job is to impress the client and deliver willing, sheep-like press to do the client’s bidding. The fact that most journalists are not comfortable to play this role appears to escape bunnies, I truly believe this is because they use a special skin-thickening cream that they apply at night. I have also, incidentally, sometimes wondered if PR bunnies get their vitamin B12 in the same scatologically nocturnal way as real rabbits. I fervently hope that they do.

The other essence of bunny culture is the need to pretend to the client that they really, really get on with journalists. I once had the extreme pleasure of a bunny introducing me to a client like I was an old family friend and turning to the client with a “Sorry, but who on earth IS this person?” Yes, I know it was naughty. But let’s face it, not as bad as the lift shaft.

Don’t get me wrong. There are good and even great PRs out there. People that know a news story when they see one, sell good information that’s well packaged and thought through and that have taken the trouble to actually understand the proposition they’re pushing, the media they’re dealing with and that work hard to be professional, pleasant and helpful rather than pushy, insistent and relentlessly mindless. They’re a pleasure to deal with, at least in part because they’re so hard to spot in that sea of twitching, whiskery noses and floppy ears.

TrayGate - The Hidden Cost Of Little Foam Trays

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

They’re innocuous enough, the little foam trays that Spinneys likes to slip your food on before it’s weighed, but they can come at a sometimes remarkable price.

Take my purchase of a slice of ‘Cotto Paganini’, 100g requested and priced at Dhs 114 per kilo. Smashing, you think. Except it’s placed on a tray and then weighed. Dhs 10.95 for a single slice of meat weighing 0.96Kg was duly paid.

But the little foam tray thingy it came on weighed 12g. That’s over a Dirham (Dhs 1.38 to be precise) for a piece of foam I am simply going to throw away. If anyone can propose a secondary use for little black foam trays, I'm all ears.

So every time you buy a weighed food item, you pay for 12g of foam at the item's given 'per kilo' price. It's a pretty significant markup  on the cost of a foam tray. It must be the most profitable thing Spinneys sells.

A quick search of the internet reveals the Jiangyin Yikang Packing Products Co., Ltd. is willing to sell me food grade EPS foam trays for $0.02 - Or Dhs 0.073 per tray.

Which means Spinneys makes Dhs 1.307 on that tray - a markup of almost two thousand percent - and it'll make more on pricier food items.

 Not bad going, eh?

(And yes, I'm not getting out enough these days)

Sharjah Water Disruption - A Lesson In Communication?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Many, many years ago I was on a business trip to Austria when some loon or another decided to dump a dhow-load of dead cows into the Gulf off Sharjah. The resulting flotsam got caught up in the intake of Sharjah's main desalination plant, causing a shutdown and an Emirate-wide water shortage.

I arrived back clutching a couple of bottles of nice German sekt to find our water tanks draining fast. Soon enough, we'd run dry. Three increasingly dirty days later I decided enough was enough and popped to our local 'cold store' where I bought several cases of Masafi. These filled the bath quite nicely, thank you, and we popped a bottle of cold sekt and enjoyed a little taste of the life everyone at home believes for some reason we live every day - we bathed in spring water and drank champagne.

I'd better get the bubbly in, because it's all apparently set to happen again. Khaleej Times broke the story three days ago (Gulf News ran it as a NIB today) - from next week (November 28th to be precise), Sharjah's main desalination plant at Al Layyah will undergo maintenance with six days of 'disruption' to the water supply. Interestingly, the GN story refers to a message  circulated to residents by SEWA (The Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority), which is news to me. It also refers to the 'Al Liya desalination plant', which is one of those problems we face with place names here - the Al Layyah plant, Sharjah's central power station and desalination plant, is located in the Al Layyah area, near Sharjah port. It's also the main centre for bottling Sharjah's Zulal branded water (although there's a new plant in Dhaid which bottles groundwater, thereby confusing anyone who wonders if Zulal is desalinated water or spring water. It's actually both, it would seem!).

Al Layyah is one of (as far as I can find out) four desalination plants in Sharjah - there are also plants in Khor Fakkan, Kalba and Hamriya. The GN piece refers to disruption in "Al Khan, Al Majaz, the Corniche, Khalid Lagoon and other areas", which is typically - and infuriatingly, obtuse. What are those 'other areas'? If last time is anything to go by, pretty much all of Sharjah. Why didn't the papers think to question the announcement and get better quality information into our hands? This type of question is the route to madness, of course. The answer is 'because'.

Of course, the best thing to do is go to SEWA's website which will have all the information concerned consumers will need, won't it? No, of course it won't. It'll have a piece on how SEWA has, apparently, briefed Credit Suisse on its future expansion plans. While I am pleased for both Credit Suisse and SEWA, it's not the information I'm after. The delightfully 1990s retro feel website contains absolutely no reference to the 'planned disruption' at all, in fact.

So all we know is there is to be  'planned disruption', that supply will not be cut off but that we are being urged to stockpile water while we can. Oh, and that "after the completion of the work, water supply would be better than before."

We are all mushrooms.

Update - I didn't think of this at the time of this post, but Sarah did. Of all the times in the year to pick for this 'scheduled disruption', they've picked National Day weekend, a holiday weekend when load on the system is going to go through the roof. Nice...

Are We Back On Track?

Port of Dubai Emirate, located on Jebel Ali district. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You might have noticed the volume creeping up recently - apparently we're back in the game, the bad times they are behind us and the road ahead is green shoots all the way.

Emaar's apartment sales have tripled. Nakheel says confidence is back. Abu Dhabi's GDP is predicted to post solid growth while much of the rest of the world is struggling to baulk a tide of decline.

Which is, don't get me wrong, great. There has been little doubt that, even in the doldrums of the past four years, the UAE has been one of the best places in the world to be.

Lest we forget, in the years before that this was not a pleasant place for many of us. It filled with champagne-guzzling yahoos, realtors, financial advisors and other pond scum came flocking to the high life and easy money. The formula for boom was simple - the more stupid you were, the more money you made. The city was packed with dazzling promises and giddying dreams, advertising shrieking at us to Live The Life. The city's roads groaned under a layer of snarling traffic at a perma-standstill, the sewage farms were overflowing and they were digging holes in the desert to put the shit in while they worked out what to do with it. The guys in the orange trucks had a better idea - they just dumped their loads in the storm drains so Jumeirah's beaches were slowly invaded by a noxious brown tide.

You couldn't get to see a doctor. You couldn't get your kids into the schools. Landlords were turfing people out so they could drive the rent up yet again. The air was a haze of construction dust and pollution. The city became a nightmare symbol of excess and consumerism, the last great defining moment of the boom probably the Cristal-soaked firework freak-out of the Atlantis launch.

And then an awful silence. The hangover. Abandoned cars and fleeing investors. The British media queued up to point fingers and laugh at our disarray. The gold paving on the streets was just sand after all. For some of us, those who had lived here for more than two weeks, this was no surprise. It always was sand, it's just that you lot all came flying in here proclaiming it gold and so, for you, it was gold.

Dubai was founded on trade, not real estate booms. It was founded on entrepeneurialism and what 'the authorities' always liked to call a 'laissez faire' attitude to free market economics. It was opportunistic. And it will continue to succeed on trade, not selling implausible dreams. Its most successful and enduring assets, Jebel Ali, Emirates, Port Rashid and others, are built on trade.

Through the recession, Dubai has slowly but surely been investing in the infrastructure it was ramping up to try and meet the demands of the boom. It's in better shape now than ever it was to encompass expansion and growth with confidence and a new maturity.

The million dollar question is whether we, collectively, have learned our lesson. Whether we can build for the future without being pitched back into the nightmare of the boom.

@WeAreUAE

The Flag of the UAE (shown as artistically waving) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've sort of been too busy with book posts over the long weekend to tell you, but the lovely people behind the co-curated '@WeAreUAE' Twitter account had a massive brain fit and lapse in judgement and handed the account over to me on late Wednesday night, lock stock and barrel. They even bust out with an Instagram account! It's mine, all mine precioussss, until next Wednesday!

What is @WeAreUAE? The idea is that someone new tweets from the account each week, opening up a kaleidoscope of different viewpoints, experiences and voices from the people who inhabit a given country. One of the world's more famous co-curated national Twitter accounts was @Sweden, which popped into instant notoriety when curator Sonja Abrahamsson used the account to ask a number of questions about what a Jew was. The questions were, as the New Yorker pointed out in its piece on her tenure, not so much anti-Semitic as childlike and born out of genuine curiosity. Nevertheless, she caused a storm that saw @Sweden draw followers like a follower drawing thing. Rather wonderfully, the Swedish Institute, one of the bodies behind the account, pointed out that Sonja was merely exercising the right to free speech that characterised Sweden - and apparently many of the people who arrived, drawn to the controversy, found Sonja actually quite charming and endearingly kooky.

I'm already having great fun with it all - and just in case you're waiting for me to do a Sonja, I'm actually taking the opportunity to celebrate the many things I enjoy and treasure about the country I have called home for the past  19 years.

See you at @WeAreUAE!

Book Post - What Price Reviews?

So I've started Beirut - An Explosive Thriller's review programme. It's reasonably wearying, tracking down active book blogs and websites, flicking through them to see if they're interested in broadly the type of book I'm getting up to, finding out what their review submission guidelines are, then emailing them with pitches, vouchers or attached book files. But, as I've said before, if every review is 10 readers, 100 emails is a thousand pairs of eyes.

Of course, getting heavier hitting media is great, but the competition for those platforms is both fierce and, all too often, restricted for self-published authors.

Which is why the review of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller in the Huffington Post had me doing Little Dances Of Happiness when it dropped late last night.

Alexander McNabb outdid himself in his second novel, Beirut, An Explosive Thriller, another adventure-filled story loaded with intrigue, espionage, love, murder, international hoods and plenty of violence.

Okay, that's a good start. This next bit, for me, was the jaw-dropper. The writer is an important Lebanese media figure, former AFP and UPI staffer and was one of the Monday Morning team, so knows what she's on about:

The author has an uncanny understanding of the country's dynamics and power plays between the belligerent factions, post-civil war of 1975-1990.
McNabb seems to have amazing insight into Lebanon's convoluted, sectarian political system.
He masterfully merges people from the Maronite Christian community to confuse readers, with snippets of character descriptions that would fit any or all of the current leaders and former/remaining warlords.
His very expressive narrative has an eerie resemblance to the current status quo with all of Lebanon's dysfunctional problems.

Oh wow. I think she just gave me too much credit but I am most certainly not going to complain. The review goes for a showy finish, a little like a great chef putting a touch of 'English' on the plate as he presents it to the pass:

Beirut is a gripping, fast-paced exciting book that may well jar Lebanese and others familiar with the city and its heavy legacy. But it's a must read.

You can read the full review by Lebanese journalist Magda Abu-Fadil here.

I'm still grinning today. Now, let's face realities. Not all reviews will be like this. Some people out there will hate Beirut, or just go 'meh' (the worst reaction, actually. I'd rather vilification than indifference. At least the former cares about you!). But, as Oscar Wilde tells us, there's only one thing worse than being talked about - not being talked about.

My experience with Olives - A Violent Romance taught me some stuff about how people approach buying books, and it's been something of a surprise. Reviews are important, as is word of mouth recommendation. But it actually takes quite a lot to make someone buy a book. It's not a case of reading a good review and rushing to Amazon to click that all important click. People seem to need quite a few triggers pushed at once. I'd personally rather book buying were a more, well, male process. But it ain't.

So it's going to take more than a few reviews out there. It's going to take a lot and that means a certain degree of relentlessness in the whole business of promotion. Being creative and not just repetitive will help to ease the pain, but to all of you I'd like to say sorry in advance. I'll try not to be a PITA, but you know the best thing you can do to shut me up.

Yup. Buy the book. :)

Book Post - Beirut Launch Talent Unveiled!

How about if you took your book and gave extracts of it to four very different types of performer to interpret and deliver as readings - as they see fit? How about you were lucky enough to have friends and friends of friends who knew people who were acknowledged talents in their very diverse fields of performance, but all of whom used language, cadence and rhythm in what they do?

An actress, a rapper, an orator and a poet will deliver readings from Beirut - An Explosive Thriller at the launch event on the 1st December 2012. Dana Dajani, apart from having 'that name', is a recognised acting talent - I defy you to view that linked clip without a tingle making its way up your spine. Rapper Jibberish is another talent fast going places, while Kevin Simpson, educationalist and orator is a man who certainly lives up to his billing. Frank Dullaghan provided Lynch's Irish accent at last year's TwingeDXB when he kindly helped me launch Olives - A Violent Romance - here he is, unfeasibly, reading from his work at the White House.

Four very different voices, four very different styles and a set of performances of readings that combine a neat mixture of sex and violence. What more could you want? Come on down!

The UAE Cyber-Crime Law

English: Logo Information Technology (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The story dropped on national newswire WAM late Tuesday - past 6pm, when the papers would normally have pretty much been 'put to bed'. The UAE President His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan had issued Federal Legal Decree No. 5 for 2012 on "combating cyber crimes".

WAM story part one, part two and part three.

The new decree includes amendments to Federal Legal Decree No. 2 for 2006 on cyber crimes and is, as far as I am aware, the most comprehensive such law in the Middle East. The National team hit the phones like a wild thing and filed the story with comment. GN ran with WAM.

It's a pretty wide-ranging piece of legislation and includes many specific categories of online criminality, including human trafficking, trading in antiques, defamation, blasphemy, extortion and pornography. It repeatedly uses the phrase "using electronic sites or any information technology means to..."

The law includes some important clauses for those in the habit of posting comment and opinion online. Quoting the WAM file (extracting paras from the whole), the decree:

It also criminalizes acts by any one to insult others or to accuse others of acts which would lead to punishment or contempt by a third party, online or through any other information technology means.

It also stipulates punishments for any person creating or running an electronic site to publish, online or through any information technology means, any programmes or ideas which would promote disorder, hate, racism or sectarianism and damage national unity or social peace or damage public order and pubic decency.

It also stipulates punishments for any person for creating or running an electronic site to raise, online or through any information technology means, that may call for the raising of donations without authorization from the competent authorities.

It also stipulates penalties of imprisonment on any person who may create or run an electronic site or any information technology means, to deride or to damage the reputation or the stature of the state or any of its institutions, its President, the Vice President, any of the Rulers of the emirates, their Crown Princes, the Deputy Rulers, the national flag, the national anthem, the emblem of the state or any of its symbols.

It also stipulates penalties of imprisonment on any person publishing any information, news, caricatures or any other kind of pictures that would pose threats to the security of the state and to its highest interests or violate its public order.

It also stipulates penalties of imprisonment on any person creating or running an electronic site or any information technology means to engage in, or to call for, the overthrow of the system of government of the state or to seize it, or to seek to disrupt or obstruct the Constitution or the effective laws of the state, or to oppose the basic principles which constitute the foundations of the system of government of the state. The same punishment is imposed by the decree on anyone who calls for, promotes or provokes the aforementioned acts or abets or helps others to engage in them.

It also stipulates penalties of imprisonment on any person using electronic sites or any information technology means to call for disobeying the laws and regulations of the state that may be in effect.

It also stipulates penalties of imprisonment on any person using electronic sites or any information technology means to call for demonstrations, marches and similar activities without a license being obtained in advance from the competent authorities.

The new decree also imposes penalties of imprisonment to any person providing any organisations, bodies, institutions or entities, online or through any information technology means with misleading, inaccurate or incorrect information which would damage the interests of the state or damage its reputation and stature.

The new decree also imposes penalties of imprisonment and fines, or either of these, on any owner or administrator of an electronic website or any information technology means or devices for storing or intentionally providing illegal content ,despite his or her knowledge of the illegal nature of the content, or for not removing, or failing to prevent access to this illegal content within the period stated in a written warning sent to him by the competent authorities declaring the illegal status of the content available online or the electronic site.

There are no surprises in there - although you may take some comfort from the last para's explicit inclusion of a takedown order, which at least would avoid automatic recourse to the full might of the law. In the main, the clauses above merely reinforce the 'online' aspect of actions that were previously considered an offence 'offline'.

That last para would, however, be something of a worry to Google, for instance, which would now presumably face a takedown order with the threat of imprisonment for its local representative or a fine for the corporation for hosting 'illegal content' in the definition of the law, which does include content which is found to "display contempt for any holy symbols, characters, figures and rituals of Islam including the Divinity (Allah, God) and the Prophets; for any other faiths or religions or any of their symbols, characters, figures and rituals; or to display contempt for or to insult any of the Divine Religions and to call for the engagement in or the promotion of sins."

What's interesting is how this law will be interpreted and enforced by the courts. UAE law doesn't work on precedent, so a great deal of the interpretation and application of the law in any given case depends on the judiciary. Here, as pretty most elsewhere in the world, that judiciary is going to require a great deal of specialised training and assistance if it is to grasp the ever-changing and fast moving online environment and the technologies it both depends on and spawns.