Dubai Mornings

Dubai Mornings is a free daily newsletter for the 9 million people who live in Dubai. Every morning: fuel, schools, flights, and what actually changed overnight. Five minutes. No noise. dubaimornings.com

🇦🇪 CEASEFIRE DAY 1: 17 MISSILES HIT AFTER THE DEAL Iran confirmed the 14-day pause yesterday. President Pezeshkian called it a victory. Then 17 ballistic missiles and 35 drones hit the UAE on April 8, hours after the announcement. This is not a broken deal. It is a physics problem. Iran's military runs on semi-autonomous cells built to operate without central command. They do not need orders to fire. They need orders to stop. Getting that stop signal to every launcher across the region takes days. The doctrine was designed for resilience against decapitation strikes. Now it is working against its own ceasefire. 537 ballistic missiles. 26 cruise missiles. 2,256 drones. 41 days. Three injuries yesterday, all minor. No fatalities since the announcement. Saturday in Islamabad is the first real negotiation. Lebanon is not included, and Israel has made that clear. If Lebanon escalates, this pause could end before the launchers even get the memo to stop. The ceasefire is real. The quiet has not arrived yet. Subscribers got this and more at 7am.

Oh, here we go...

I feel this everyday in conversations with my co-workers on the situation. There is a major gap of knowledge between people that are on X and people that aren't to the point that I can guess who's on X and who isn't. We would not be able to write our newsletter without X.

@Tesla_AI When can we expect FSD in Dubai @elonmusk @rta_dubai ?

New release of FSD Supervised now starting to roll out This update brings 20% faster reaction time to further increase safety, among many other improvements Full release notes below Full Self-Driving (Supervised) v14.3 includes - Upgraded the Reinforcement Learning (RL) stage of training the FSD neural network, resulting in improvements in a wide variety of driving scenarios. - Upgraded the neural network vision encoder, improving understanding in rare and low-visibility scenarios, strengthening 3D geometry understanding, and expanding traffic sign understanding. - Rewrote the AI compiler and runtime from the ground up with MLIR, resulting in 20% faster reaction time and improving model iteration speed. - Mitigated unnecessary lane biasing and minor tailgating behaviors. - Increased decisiveness of parking spot selection and maneuvering. - Improved parking location pin prediction, now shown on a map with a (P) icon. - Enhanced response to emergency vehicles, school buses, right-of-way violators, and other rare vehicles. - Improved handling of small animals by focusing RL training on harder examples and adding rewards for better proactive safety. - Improved traffic light handling at complex intersections with compound lights, curved roads, and yellow light stopping – driven by training on hard RL examples sourced from the Tesla fleet. - Improved handling for rare and unusual objects extending, hanging, or leaning into the vehicle path by sourcing infrequent events from the fleet. - Improved handling of temporary system degradations by maintaining control and automatically recovering without driver intervention, reducing unnecessary disengagements. Upcoming Improvements - Expand reasoning to all behaviors beyond destination handling. - Add pothole avoidance. - Improve driver monitoring system sensitivity with better eye gaze tracking, eye wear handling, and higher accuracy in variable lighting conditions.

Dubai Mornings is a free daily newsletter for the 9 million people who live in Dubai. Every morning: fuel, flights, schools, and what actually changed overnight. dubaimornings.com (dubaimornings.com)

A ceasefire was announced. Missiles launched anyway. The US and Iran agreed to a two-week truce just before Trump's deadline hit. Strait of Hormuz — quote — "complete, immediate, and safe reopening." Gulf markets surged. UAE stocks up sharply within the hour. Then the air defenses started firing. Missiles and drones launched from Iran reached UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar within hours of the deal being announced. UAE air defenses intercepted. Tehran's statement included a caveat that safe passage through the Strait would happen "with due consideration of technical limitations" — language that gives Iran room to define compliance on its own terms. The ceasefire is real. The missiles were also real. Both things happened on the same morning. Two-week negotiating window now open. US and Iranian delegations expected in Islamabad on Friday. Whether what happens in the next 14 days looks like diplomacy or delay is the question everyone in Dubai is watching. Full brief went to subscribers this morning. Link in bio.

@gnuseibeh Absolutely true.

The Gulf countries and particularly the UAE have conducted themselves exceptionally well. Despite efforts to drag them into the war, they remained defensive and protected their countries & populations exceptionally well. The UAE has come out much stronger. No country in the world is immune to wars imposed by others, but the way the UAE protected its people is unprecedented, which is why Dubai’s and AD’s reputation as safe havens will only be enhanced further

Dubai Mornings is a free daily newsletter for Dubai's 9 million expats. Every morning we cover what's moving in fuel, schools, flights, and daily life in the UAE. Five minutes. No noise. dubaimornings.com

🚨🇦🇪 IRAN REJECTED THE CEASEFIRE. TRUMP SET 4AM WEDNESDAY. 45-day deal drafted by Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey. Iran said no. Demanded 10 conditions including sanctions lifted and war ended permanently. Trump's response: 8pm EDT Tuesday. That's 4am Wednesday, Gulf time. "Every bridge in Iran will be decimated. Every power plant out of business, burning, exploding." He said it could be done in four hours. Meanwhile Jubail is already on fire. Iranian missiles hit the world's largest petrochemical complex overnight. SABIC facilities, 7% of Saudi GDP. Al Hosn in Abu Dhabi is on the same IRGC target list. I've been tracking this from Dubai for 39 days. Tomorrow morning feels different. The diplomatic off-ramp just got narrower than at any point since February. Covering this daily. Link in bio.

@elonmusk When can we expect FSD in the UAE @elonmusk ?

Did you know Tesla FSD was this good?

Dubai Mornings is a free daily newsletter for Dubai's 9 million expats. Not just the crisis, we cover what's moving in property, exams, business, and daily life in the UAE every morning. Five minutes. No noise. dubaimornings.com, link in bio.

🇦🇪⛽️ FIRST MONDAY AT DH3.39 A LITRE The fuel price isn't a headline anymore. It's a line item. Super 98 hit Dh3.39, diesel jumped to Dh4.69, and I watched the queue at my ADNOC this morning move slower than I've ever seen it. Khaleej Times found four people in one Sharjah building who cracked it over the weekend. Same tower, offices in Business Bay and JLT, one car, split the route. Dh5 each per day. The solo driver on the same commute pays Dh21. Here's the part that's going to creep up on everyone: diesel at Dh4.69 is a 72% jump from March. That's not just your commute. That's delivery trucks, school buses, the cold chain keeping your groceries cold. I haven't seen anyone pricing that downstream impact yet, and I think we'll start feeling it before the week is out. RTA hasn't released Monday metro numbers yet. That'll be tomorrow's story. But if you're reading this on the E11 right now, you already know. Full breakdown went to subscribers this morning. Link in bio.

Dubai Mornings is a free daily newsletter for Dubai's 9 million expats. Not just the crisis, every morning we cover what's happening in property, schools, money, and daily life across the UAE. Five minutes. No noise. dubaimornings.com

🇦🇪 ALL UK EXAMS CANCELLED FOR UAE STUDENTS Every IGCSE, A Level, and IB exam in the UAE is done. Cambridge, Pearson Edexcel, OxfordAQA, all three boards pulled May/June sittings this week. The IB had already cancelled diploma exams earlier. Your kid's grades now depend entirely on a "portfolio of evidence," which is coursework, teacher assessments, and moderated predictions. No exam safety net. No chance to outperform a prediction on the day. I know parents in JLT and Arabian Ranches who found out through WhatsApp forwards before their schools had even sent an official email. That's how this week has been going. What I can't figure out is what happens in September. UK and international universities need to calibrate for an entire country's worth of students assessed on portfolios, not exams. UCAS dealt with something like this during COVID. It wasn't clean then and the UAE cohort is smaller, less familiar to admissions teams. That's the part that worries me more than the cancelled exams themselves. Schools are still remote until April 17. Seven weeks now. I write about this stuff every morning for Dubai residents. Link in bio if you want the full picture.

Dubai Mornings is a free daily newsletter for Dubai's 9 million expats. Not just the crisis — every morning we cover what's moving in property, flights, money, and daily life in the UAE. Five minutes. No noise. dubaimornings.com — link in bio.

🇦🇪 YOUR FLIGHT HOME COSTS 30% MORE THAN JANUARY 130% month-on-month jump in regional jet fuel, per IATA. That's not a typo. Fuel is about 30% of what airlines spend to fly you anywhere, and they're not absorbing it. Cathay Pacific roughly doubled its fuel surcharges this week. Thai Airways is passing through 10-15%. IndiGo revised surcharges April 2. Even AirAsia and Qantas added temporary ones. I looked at summer routes out of DXB this morning and the numbers don't look like they did in February. The kicker: airspace restrictions mean longer routing, which burns more fuel per flight. So airlines are paying more per litre AND burning more litres. Emirates is at about 75% capacity, 215-224 flights a day, but 20 routes are still suspended. Houston, LA, Osaka, gone for now. What I can't figure out is when this reverses. The Hormuz surcharge is structural, the airspace detours are structural. Even if crossings keep increasing (17 ships this weekend, busiest since March 1), jet fuel supply stays tight. Budget 15-30% more than January for anything you book in the next three months. Full breakdown went to subscribers this morning. Link in bio.

Dubai Mornings is a free daily newsletter for Dubai's 9 million expats. Not just the crisis — this week we've been covering airline cancellations, shipping costs, and what the Hormuz toll actually means for your grocery bill. Five minutes. No noise. dubaimornings.com — link in bio.

🇦🇪 IRAN NOW CHARGES $2M PER SHIP THROUGH HORMUZ Sixty-two ships have paid Iran's Larak Island toll since March 13. $2 million each. IRGC staff inspect every cargo manifest and ownership record before a vessel gets through. No ship has used the traditional Hormuz route in three weeks. I've been watching my grocery bill for any changes. The toll adds $4-6 per barrel on all oil moving through the strait, and that cost doesn't stop at fuel. It filters into everything that arrives here by sea. In the UAE, that's nearly everything. What I didn't expect is how fast countries adapted. India, Pakistan, Iraq, Malaysia, China are all cutting bilateral deals with Tehran for passage. Not through the UN, not through any international framework. Just one-on-one negotiations on Iran's terms. The world isn't waiting for this to end. It's building around it. Five weeks ago this was a blockade. Now it's infrastructure. I'm not sure that distinction has fully landed for most people here yet. Full breakdown went to subscribers this morning. Link in bio.

But with diesel increasing over 70%, the remittance budget may soon be affected…