Three cheers for quick visa, Emirates ID renewal

Good news for many across the UAE. Those days of trudging down to a typing centre during your lunch break or day off will soon be a thing of the past.

In a 21st century approach to tackling laborious administrative chores, a senior official from the General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs confirmed that it will be cutting out the middle man when it comes to expats renewing Emirates IDs and residence visas. All people have to do now is use the GDRFA app.

As expected, the news has been welcomed with open arms and will no doubt save us all a lot of time and money.

Applications received via the app will be renewed

within one to three days, compared to the two-week waiting time earlier.

This was our top read story on Tuesday and secured more than 42,700 pages views on the

Khaleej Times website. The news spread like wildfire too, with the article being opened via a social media share 20,300 times.

A word to the wise though: make sure you submit all documents correctly. Dodgy scan copies won’t work.

Any Star Wars fans out there? If yes, you’ll be pleased to hear that Han Solo aka Harrison Ford made an appearance in Dubai this week, only this time with no lightsaber in tow.

Ford got serious about climate change during the World Government Summit, calling it the

“moral crisis” of our time. Speaking passionately about the need for human action in creating some sort of damage control re the decline of Mother Nature, he made an indirect dig at US President Donald Trump.

“You would think that the world would feel compelled to take action by what the consensus of science tells us about the threat of climate change. But around the world elements of leadership, including in my home country (the US) deny or denigrate science, merely to preserve their stake in the status quo.”

With his celebrity status drawing a packed audience, he ended with a compelling sentiment. “Nature doesn’t need people. People need nature.”