Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state oil company, has been ordered to pay SR1m ($266,000) for causing the death of a prized beauty camel. The rare black camel fell into a hole in the desert that Aramco had dug and filled with oil,

Try the world’s first gold bar vending machine in  Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace  The Gold To Go machine, is covered in 24-carat gold, and dispenses one, five and 10 gram bars and for theose who can afford to stay at Emirate’s Palace,  one ounce bars of gold.

• The start of the school year will be deferred from September 5 to 12, after Eid celebrations.
• Exams of the end of first semester will start on December 12 and the holiday will begin on December 19 for two weeks.
• The second semester will start on January 2 2011.
• Students will sit for exams on March 20 with the second semester break starting on March 27 2011. 
• The third semester will begin on April 3 and exams will start on June 19.
• Final results will be announced on June 28, with summer holidays beginning on July 14.
• The new timetable applies to all government and those  private schools following the UAE Ministry of Education curriculum,
• The school year will remain at 180 days.

Five-day outage of SMS parking system left motorists unable to pay using mobile phones. ( note Etisalat board took $10.2m in bonuses  and the number of cars in the UAE is expected to grow> 7% this year)

The UAE’s Telecoms Regulatory Authority (TRA) has instructed operators du and Etisalat to allow customers to block unwanted text message ‘spam’. From June this year, mobile customers will be able to unsubscribe themselves from lists used by firms to send out advertising or promotional messages, TRA director general Mohamed Nasser Al Ghanim told UAE daily Emarat Al Youm. Al Ghanim said that the changes would not affect messages from banks, but that otherwise customers would enjoy a streamlined process when it came to opting out of receiving unwanted messages.

Our sympathies to the families of the all Indian passengers in this terrible tragedy.