Pink
The Truth About Love
RCA
***
Pink, aka the Pennsylvania-born singer Alecia Beth Moore, has long comported herself with a certain amount of attitude. It's there in the impish exclamation mark that sometimes supplants the letter "i" in the stylised version of her name and it was there in her in-your-face 2001 single Get the Party Started, a song packing more zig-a-zig-ah than a whole rack of Spice Girls.
If her brattishness, lyrical chutzpah and seeming resistance to stylistic airbrushing made for an alternative yet mainstream pop star, songs such as Lonely Girl and Please Don't Leave Me were a reminder that even tomboys get the blues. Like her heroine Janis Joplin, Pink clearly knew that, when the wind drops, kites can plummet.
Album number six also occasionally reveals Pink's sensitive side. But for the most part, The Truth About Love packs garish, fiendishly catchy pop tunes that cement her image as the gal most likely to rattle cages. Age 33 and a mum to one-year-old daughter Willow Pink may be, but Here Comes the Weekend - a police siren-infused gem that's lit-up by guest Eminem's rap fireworks - picks up where the aforementioned Get the Party Started left off.
Depending on your age-group, the awkwardly titled opener Are We All We Are will likely thrill or annoy. Its crowd-noise intro, pitch-drop vocal effects and resistance-is-futile hooks crank up the tension, but this is immediately released by Beam Me Up, a country-folk ballad with a deftly wrought orchestration. The latter song highlights that, unlike her pop contemporaries Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson, Pink has real versatility and can really sing.
Lily Allen's brief vocal contribution to the frothy True Love is idiosyncratic but somewhat superfluous-sounding. The Swedish hit-maker Max Martin has a hand in the powerful glam-rock update How Come You're Not Here. But to these ears, the album's best song is Just Give Me a Reason. A duet with Nate Ruess of the US indie-rock band Fun, it has something of that Michael Jackson vibe about it and when it drops to drums and vocals, the chorus is big enough to carry that weight.
Though the fine, positivity-infused Try and the slinky title track go some way towards delivering on the advice-column promise of the album's title, elsewhere Pink and / or her cowriters are guilty of some clunky lyrical constructions ("Sometimes I want to slap you on your whole face"; "Gonna keep you alive someday".) Ultimately, though, such peccadillos are forgivable and Pink's infectious if untidy pop still has legs.
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Engine: 51.5kW electric motor
Range: 400km
Power: 134bhp
Torque: 175Nm
Price: From Dh98,800
Available: Now
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Starring: Yasmine Al Massri, Clara Khoury, Kamel El Basha, Ashraf Barhoum
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Power: 333hp, 449hp, 680hp
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On sale: Later in 2025 or early 2026, depending on region
Price: Exact regional pricing TBA
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Some 400,000 shrubs and 13,000 trees in the on-site nursery
An additional 450,000 shrubs and 4,000 trees to be delivered in the months leading up to the expo
Ghaf, date palm, acacia arabica, acacia tortilis, vitex or sage, techoma and the salvadora are just some heat tolerant native plants in the nursery
Approximately 340 species of shrubs and trees selected for diverse landscape
The nursery team works exclusively with organic fertilisers and pesticides
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Most sourced from farms, nurseries across the country
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All times UAE ( 4 GMT)
Saturday
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Sunday
Sampdoria v AC Milan (2.30pm)
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A comparison of sending Dh20,000 from the UAE using two different routes at the same time - the first direct from a UAE bank to a bank in Germany, and the second from the same UAE bank via an online platform to Germany - found key differences in cost and speed. The transfers were both initiated on January 30.
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The smuggler
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Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
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He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
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A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
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- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
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