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There's some surprising good news to come out of the BlackBerry's maligned worldwide outage: fewer car accidents in the United Arab Emirates. Officials in the country are reporting that traffic accidents plummeted 40 percent in Abu Dhabi and 20 percent in Dubai between last Tuesday and Thursday, when the BlackBerry blackout rolled through the Middle East, reports The National, the UAE's state-owned English daily. "People are slowly starting to realise the dangers of using their phone while driving," comments one Abu Dhabi police official. "The roads became much safer when BlackBerry stopped working." Those statistics might serve as a healthy wake-up call to Emiratis: as The Atlantic's Max Fisher notes today, the UAE's devil-may-care car culture makes its roads among the world's most dangerous.

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