From the desk of Frank Kane: Tourists, swans and continental museums

Focus: Frank Kane notes the tranquil spirituality of the Sheikh Zayed Mosque and Rupert Murdoch's swan problem.

The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque can hold more than 40,000 worshippers. Ryan Carter / The National

I've had Muslim guests from Azerbaijan in town for the past few days, and one of their priorities was to visit the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi.

The mosque always looks spectacular from the road on the drive from Dubai to the capital, and I've often thought about visiting. Something has always cropped up to prevent me doing so.

But last Saturday, we all headed off down the E11 to finally make the visit, and what splendour was in store. The mosqueis jaw-droppingly spectacular, with an all-pervasive atmosphere of tranquil spirituality.

On a quiet Saturday afternoon, when most of the visitors seemed to be respectful tourists, it was hard to imagine the ornate marble walls surrounding 40,000 worshippers, but the young Emirati lady who was guide for my group assured us that the mosque would hold that number.

"In fact, last Eid, 42,000 people were counted here," she said.

All in all, it was an edifying experience, and my Azeri visitors were very impressed.

But I think it would be good if non-Muslim visitors were given just a little bit of instruction before entry to the site. One tourist, bedecked with cameras and tripods, had spent most of his time setting up photographic equipment in the main prayer hall and obviously hadn't bothered following the guide's excellent talk.

When the time came for questions at the end, he asked: "So you mean people actually come to worship here?" The young Emirati lady raised her eyes briefly to the magnificent chandelier hanging over our heads and replied with a slow, patiently indulgent nod.

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But apart from that trip, I've hardly left Burj Kane in the past week, so gripping has the British phone hacking scandal become.

Dramas usually "unfold", in the old cliche, but this one has broken in waves and crashes, with revelations coming several times a day. News that some executive has been arrested in the morning is rapidly overtaken by the resignation of a senior policeman by afternoon, and then again by a late-breaking story in the evening.

Then America takes up the baton, with the further revelations - FBI investigations, plunging share prices - coming into the small hours. I haven't gone to bed before 2am for the past week, and I wake bleary eyed in the morning but eager for the next round of shocks.

Three news organisations have surpassed themselves in coverage. British Sky Broadcasting, ironically 39 per cent owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, has been a paradigm of editorial rigour and independence. The Financial Times has been indispensable for the business repercussions of the scandal (although BBC Newsnight snatched a scoop, a live interview with the News Corp shareholder Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud).

But The Guardian newspaper wins the gold medal. It has kept the story alive through five years when others ignored it or hoped it would go away, and is subjecting the Murdoch empire to "death by a thousand cuts".

With "black swans" appearing virtually daily, it is impossible to say how or when it will end. But life will never be the same again for the Murdochs, or for the British media.

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Prof Kishore Mahbubani is a cultured man. He is the dean of the Lee Kuan YewSchool of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and author of several books on Asia's irresistible rise to world economic domination, most recentlyThe New Asian Hemisphere.

The basic argument is that China, India and the rest of east Asia will inevitably overtake the West; that the past few centuries of Western domination were an historical aberration that will end when Asians escape the narrow "mental maps" forced on them by Westerners.

He has some trenchant views, as I found out in a recent conversation: "If you want to understand the past, go to Europe; if you want to understand the present, go to the USA; but if you want to understand the future, go to Asia."

On Europe in particular, he is especially scathing: "Europe now is just one big museum."