Some stories from today’s newspapers across the Gulf.

The National: DNA database set to start in a year. The UAE’s look to be well on its way to becoming the first country in the world to collect DNA from every single person living in the country.

Gulf News: Etisalat mobile services restored after disruptions. After three days of disruptions Etisalat customers have a service again. The firm says this was not connected to previous disruptions that affected only its BlackBerry users. Well, what are left of them after the spyware scandal a few months back.

The Khaleej Times: Camels to Strut at Beauty Show. Maybe it was a slow news day…

Saudi Gazette: ‘Nosy parker’ gets month behind bars. Man gets a month in jail and a SR5,00 fine for reporting to police a man he thought was involved in the disappearance of two Qatari children in Mecca.

The Peninsula: Museum of Islamic Art bags architecture award. The museum has won the Overall Project of the Year award at the second Middle East Architecture Awards. See photos of this year’s award winners HERE

The Kuwait Times: Shops of ‘plus size’clothes increase. This rather unscientific report claims that the number of obese Kuwaitis has risen… based on the increasing number of plus size clothes shops.

Gulf News leads today with a report about the flash floods in the Philippines saying that the number of people dead or missing has risen to at least 284.Officials fear worse weather is set to come.

“A second cyclone is threatening the eastern Philippines but it’s difficult to predict damage it might cause,” Met official Geoffrey Love told the paper. “This storm could reach the east of the archipelago in the next two or three days and its intensity could increase during that time.”

Khaleej Times also focuses on world disasters with its report on the tsunami which struck the south Pacific islands of Samoa.

The National’s main story is about the UAE establishing the world’s first ever DNA database for all residents. Basically, everyone - Emiratis and expats alike – would have to give a sample of their DNA to be stored in a central database. Is this not a step too far? Residents have already given their fingerprints and iris scans for ID cards, don’t the authorities have enough of our personal data already?

While Emirates Business reports on an increase in requests for developers to convert offices in Dubai into homes – strange when there are estimated to be 30,000 surplus properties in the emirate…

PS. We’re pleased to see Saudi Gazette is back up and running today after a two week break. Although, it we might have been the only ones to see a homepage frozen in time after a reader Muscat said the site was working fine for them.

What has happened to the Saudi Gazette? We’re getting a tad worried because their website hasn’t updated since September 16.

We don’t want to read the ‘Warning at the barbers’ story anymore about the dangers of unhygienic razors at barber shops in Jeddah, nor the mysterious ‘147,197’ – an article about the number of Saudi jobseekers with qualification in 2008.

Last week we thought it might have been because of an extended Eid holiday, but with no sign of new news appearing today we’re wondering if they’ve called it a day.

Arabian Business hopes not because we love reading the news from our neighbours.

In the meantime, we’re getting our Saudi news fix from their rival, Arab News, but we want you back SG…

If anyone knows what’s happened to Saudi Gazette, please let us know.

The trouble with being a global statesman, world-renowned horseman and UAE Prime Minister these days is that it is so hard to keep up-to-date with the restaurant and nightlife scene in your home town.

Thankfully, Time Out Dubai (sister publication to Arabian Business) has come to the rescue of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai.

His Highness maintains a popular page on Twitter, with a healthy 4411 other tweeters following his every move and thought.

In turn, his Twitter page follows a mere 13 sources of news and information, among them venerable news sources such as Reuters.

But when it comes to the important stuff about Dubai: eating out, shopping, sport, music and film, His Highness trusts none other than Time Out Dubai, the city’s preeminent “Intelligent Guide to Life”.

Follow His Highness at http://twitter.com/HHShkMohd, and follow his lead through to TOD’s twitter page at http://twitter.com/timeoutdubai.

My wife does the shopping for our kids’ birthdays. I am only vaguely aware of what they want, and whether they’ll be delighted or disappointed on the morning of the Big Day.

My son is approaching his 16^th birthday, and I have learnt a great deal about the way people will consume news, information and entertainment in the future from his behaviour over the past few years.

My mind has been boggled by the technology he and his friends have mastered, and which they use to communicate with each other, entertain themselves and even (occasionally) use to improve their school work.

The Xbox 360, the netbook, the on demand television, the iTouch and the mobile phone are all standard issue to my son and his friends. They no longer congregate on street corners to ‘hang out’ (is that an eighties term?), but now meet in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Halo, chat on MSN, and open windows to each other’s lives on Facebook.

I have already become the dinosaur whose poor grasp of current technology is laughed at, just as I laughed at my parents’ inability to master a video recorder.

None of this will be news to a parent of teenagers. They’re all at it.

But one thing has shocked me in the past few days. I was helping my wife wrap birthday presents and discovered we have bought him a portable hard drive, on which will store all his downloaded music, videos and games.

The drive cost $150 - quite a sum for storage in this day and age. But the capacity is a whopping, gargantuan, elephantine…

…One Terabyte!

The only time I ever wrote about Terabytes was in articles about Cray Supercomputers - the type of stuff that could work out the spread of radioactive material from a nuclear explosion, or the destructive force of a hurricane.

Now, my son is about to have that much storage in his backpack.

He will be carrying his own television station filled with all his favourite shows. He will have more music than Virgin Megastore can cram into it hugely expensive mall outlets. He will have computer games that will occupy him for 50 percent of his leisure time.

He will have more media crammed into a box the size of a hardback book than the BBC had in every film can in its archives from World War II until the advent of digital video.

The mass storage he will have at his fingertips is a massively disruptive technological leap forward. He is no longer a consumer of the information and entertainment that traditional broadcasters and publishers want him to consume. His choices are entirely his own, with every desire catered for somewhere on the Internet.

A 16^th birthday is a landmark in any young man’s life, but this particular birthday may have as profound an effect on me as it has on him.