This is old news, given that the NUS press release is dated 2 Jan 2008 but the Financial Times only reported it online, as well as page 15 of the London print edition, on 11 Feb under the headline 'NUS selected to teach future Arab leaders'.

What I found particularly fascinating was how NUS was the focus of the FT article, given that the massively endowed Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (MBR) Foundation is sending fellows to scores of other partner institutions. NUS Corporate Development & Communications has certainly managed to get some good press there.

I was slightly surprised that, as Prof Kulwant Singh's rather carefully qualified claim put it: "Outside of North America and Europe we're the only Asian university to be selected", no Chinese or Indian institutions were selected. Certainly a few have done respectably in the FT's 2008 MBA rankings, such as Ceibs (11), Hong Kong UST Business School (17) and Shanghai Jiatong (41) as well as the Indian Business School (20). I suspect they might come on stream later. In any case, it seems that the education hub strategy rumbles on, UNSW Asia and Warwick regardless.

With respect to Singapore-Dubai relations, official contacts have been sparse but growing with the TDB setting up an office in 1997 as well as visits by Vivian Balakrishnan (2002), Yaacob Ibrahim (2006) and SM Goh (2008). I'm not entirely sure how much the ASEAN Scholarship has contributed to Singapore's government-to-government relations or people-to-people relations in ASEAN but, in the MBR case, the gahmen isn't the one forking out and this is a postgraduate program - will be interesting to compare the effects (or lack thereof) in the years to come.