Dubai

He was patting his two little children dry after an outing at the pool when the five men and a woman came to the door. They said they had a court order to search his apartment. They already seemed to know a lot about Syed Ali, a U.S. citizen of Indian descent. That his wife and kids had just arrived from New York. That he was a researcher chatting with expatriate workers in the Persian Gulf state, asking them a lot of questions. They grabbed his computer, his files, even his iPod.

An arrest was made overnight in New York in connection with the attempted car bombing in Times Square, police said early Tuesday, after a government official said investigators were focusing on a man of Pakistani descent who has been living in the United States. "Law enforcement can confirm an arrest has been made," a spokesman for the New York Police Department said shortly after midnight. U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. spoke at an early morning news conference in Washington and identified the man as Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent.

Britain expelled a high-ranking Israeli diplomat Tuesday in retaliation for alleged misuse of British passports by Israeli agents suspected in the assassination of a senior Hamas commander two months ago in Dubai. Foreign Secretary David Miliband said the decision was made after consultations with his Israeli counterpart. The expelled official was not named, but BBC and the Times of London reported that he was the head of the Mossad intelligence agency in the Israeli Embassy. The expulsion follows an investigation by Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency, or SOCA, into the Jan. 19 slaying of Mahmoud Mabhouh at a luxury hotel in Dubai.

With a little stretch, Jelena Jankovic's victory Sunday in the women's singles final of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells could be turned into a California angle. Headline: Local Woman Makes Good. Jankovic, of course, is about as local as Antarctica. She has spent the bulk of her 25 years as far away from California as you can get. Not by choice, by coincidence of birth. She is Serbian and proud of it, although she lists her residence as Dubai, which is one of those tax havens to which rich tennis players gravitate.

The sky is performing its usual routine — an ever-changing mix of clouds and sunshine — as I catch up with a couple of friends at a pub a few miles south of Dublin. The sun pouring through the leaded-glass windows warms our souls nearly as well as the whisky. Then, a breeze brings brooding clouds, and we're thankful to be indoors as rain washes over Greystones, County Wicklow. As quickly as they arrive, the clouds blow out to sea. The warming solar rays return, and one of Ireland's timeless rituals continues.

The gig: Don't call Mark Fuller, 58, a fountain maker. He prefers "feature creator." But he does make fountains -- spectacular ones. The company he founded, Wet, based in Sun Valley, has taken on some of the largest water fountain projects in the world. Projects: One of his latest creations is a 32-acre artificial lake at the foot of the world's tallest building -- the Burj Khalifa in Dubai -- with 1,500 water jets that can blast streams 500 feet in the air, plus 1,000 fog jets, all tightly choreographed to put on a computerized show to music.

Lacking witnesses but blessed with hundreds of hours of video, the cops and spooks worked the case of the slain weapons smuggler like a movie in reverse. Dubai's cameras never blink. The security system allows law enforcement to track anyone, from the moment they get off an airplane, to the immigration counter where their passport is scanned, through the baggage claim area to the taxi stand where cameras record who gets into what cars, which log their locations through the city's automated highway toll system, all the way to their hotels, which also have cameras.

When you're shopping for a pair of Seven jeans or ankle boots, you don't expect to be met by a flood of saltwater and the imminent prospect of sharks. But shoppers at the Dubai Mall faced just that Thursday when the center's massive aquarium sprang a leak. Amateur video of the incident shows worried shoppers slogging about as water gushes from the tank. News reports in the Persian Gulf city-state referred to it as a minor leak and said it was quickly brought under control by maintenance workers with no harm done to the aquarium's inhabitants.

Adam Korman loves to travel. According to police in Dubai, an Australian passport holder by that name visited the United Arab Emirates city-state three times in 10 months. The last time the muscular young man visited, police said Wednesday, he allegedly joined 25 other European and Australian passport holders and a pair of Palestinians who allegedly made up the hit team that killed suspected Hamas weapons procurer Mahmoud Mabhouh. But Adam Korman, an Israeli Australian dual national -- and acknowledged travel buff -- insists that he has never been to Dubai.

The United Arab Emirates Foreign Ministry issued a statement Sunday saying it was "deeply concerned" that passports from countries whose "nationals currently enjoy preferential visa waivers" were used in the recent assassination of a senior Hamas figure. The statement was the most high-level comment by Dubai or UAE authorities on the January slaying of senior Hamas figure Mahmoud Mabhouh, which some allege was carried out by the Israeli spy agency Mossad. It suggested that the increasingly powerful Persian Gulf confederation was trying to put heavy pressure on European officials -- whose nationals are able to travel freely through the UAE commercial powerhouses of Dubai and Abu Dhabi -- to help it hunt down the perpetrators of the killing.