Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Ablikim Yusuf, who had been living in Pakistan, faces detention and torture if he is sent to China, say supporters
Human rights activists are scrambling to prevent the imminent deportation of a Uighur man to China, where they say he faces torture.
Ablikim Yusuf, 53, who has been living in Pakistan, posted a desperate video on Facebook asking for help from the overseas Uighur community. He says in the video, translated and circulated by activists on Saturday: “I am currently being held in Doha airport, about to be deported to Beijing, China. I need the world’s help. I am originally from Hotan.”
During the 2022 World Cup, all eyes will be on the coastal metropolis located 16km from Doha
Text and photography by Stéphanie Buret
From the sands of the Qatari coast rise the towering glass, steel and concrete forms of Lusail, a city being built almost entirely from scratch. Pharaonic in its scale and ambition, the under-construction metropolis is the vision of the country’s former emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, born in part from the desire to diversify the Qatari economy and distance it from oil dependence.
Financed by the government via the Qatari Diar real estate company, the city was initially conceived in 2005 but development truly took off when Qatar was announced as the host of the 2022 World Cup.
Minister appears to accept that row between the two is fuelling other disputes in Middle East
Saudi Arabia is a force for disruption across the Middle East and Africa and often uses blackmail and economic pressure to enforce its brand of authoritarian rule, Qatar’s foreign minister has alleged.
In recent weeks the Saudis and Emiratis have been accused of interfering to stifle popular movements in Sudan, Libya and Somalia.
Gulf Cooperation Council will meet to discuss Iran’s alleged role in Gulf drone attacks
A possible US-backed thaw in Qatari-Saudi relations has been signalled by Qatari diplomats travelling to Saudi Arabia to lay the ground for their country’s attendance at a major summit in Mecca on alleged Iranian aggression in the region.
Qatar’s attendance will be seen as the biggest rapprochement between the two countries since the Saudis launched a sweeping economic and political blockade against the gas-rich country two years ago, accusing Doha of trying to undermine Saudi Arabia, fund terrorism and promote the Muslim Brotherhood across the Middle East.
Gulf state reveals funding plan after ceasefire ends latest Israeli-Palestinian hostilities
Qatar has said it is sending $480m (£370m) to Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after a ceasefire deal ended the deadliest fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants since 2014.
Qatar’s foreign ministry said $300m would go towards supporting health and education programmes of the Palestinian Authority, while $180m would go toward urgent humanitarian relief, UN programmes and providing electricity.
It took 18 years to build, with nearly a mile of galleries, and is inspired by a desert rose. But is Jean Nouvel’s eye-popping creation for the world’s wealthiest nation too extravagant to fill?
Hundreds of huge white plates lie scattered along the roadside in the centre of Doha, Qatar, as if someone has had a spectacular accident with a gigantic crockery cupboard. The creamy discs tilt this way and that, colliding with each other in a random muddle along the edge of the highway, forming an otherworldly landscape of canopies, terraces and enigmatic slit windows.
This pile-up of flying saucers is the new National Museum of Qatar, an astonishing creation by French architect Jean Nouvel, and the latest supercharged volley in the Gulf states’ cultural arms race. Two years ago, Nouvel unveiled the glistening upturned colander of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Now he’s back with another gargantuan palace for the Emirates’ arch rival. In its sprawling nearly mile-long loop of galleries, the museum tells the story of how this tiny nation of nomadic bedouins and pearl divers became, with the discovery of natural gas, the most wealthy country per capita on Earth in just 50 years.
Tory strategist’s pitch detailed how CTF Partners would spread negative stories and press Fifa to ‘restart bidding process’
Sir Lynton Crosby offered to work on a campaign to cancel the 2022 Qatar World Cup and get it awarded to another country in return for £5.5m, according to a leaked plan that gives a rare insight into the activities of one of the world’s best-known political operatives.
The detailed pitch document – “a proposal for a campaign to expose the truth of the Qatar regime and bring about the termination of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar” – was written in April last year and personally signed by Crosby.
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American diplomats held face-to-face talks with Taliban representatives in Qatar a week ago without Afghan government officials present, in a reversal of a longstanding United States policy, two senior Taliban officials said on Saturday. The United States State Department has not denied that its diplomats had taken part in such talks - a significant shift in American strategy toward the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Is America's longest war heading to a quiet end? NBC News reported earlier today that Taliban sources claim to have engaged in "indirect negotiations" with the US, primarily through former commanders forced out of the conflict. The talks are fraught with risks, particularly from some surprising sources: U.S. officials are meeting with former Taliban members amid intensifying efforts to wind down America's longest war, three of the militant group's commanders told NBC News.
The Arabic press is reacting to remarks of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the Wal Street Journal warning of war with Iran unless more severe economic and military sanctions are applied to that country. He is licking his wounds after having been outmaneuvered by Iran in Syria ; Iraq, where Iranian forces were key to defeating ISIL while the Saudis offered almost no help; Qatar, where the illegal Saudi blockade gave Iran the opportunity to strengthen ties with Doha; and Lebanon, where Bin Salman's brazen kidnapping of the sitting prime minister late last year failed to dislodge him or to weaken the political clout of Iran-Allied Hizbullah.
A blockade against Qatar by its Gulf neighbours is now in its fifth month. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates severed socio-economic ties with Qatar as punishment for its alleged support of terrorism and interference in their affairs.
In this Aug. 21, 2017 photo released by the U.S. Defense Department, Qatari special operations personnel conduct a military free-fall Friendship Jump over Qatar. The U.S. military has halted some exercises with its Gulf Arab allies over the ongoing diplomatic crisis targeting Qatar, trying to use its influence to end the monthslong dispute, authorities told The Associated Press on Friday, Oct. 6, 2017.
Qatar's emir is persona non grata to four U.S.-allied Arab states that accuse his wealthy Gulf nation of sponsoring extremists, but he recently received a warm welcome at the sprawling military base his troops share with thousands of American soldiers. Qatar's al-Udeid Air Base, a crucial staging ground for U.S. operations in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, is one of several American military outposts across the Gulf that are intended to serve as a bulwark against Iran, but now put Washington in a delicate balancing act.
As the Persian Gulf crisis drags into a second month, a four-country boycott of Qatar is raising questions about whether American businesses that follow suit could unwittingly run afoul of U.S. anti-boycott laws. Under obscure tax and export provisions designed decades ago to protect Israel, U.S. companies can be punished if they accept a foreign country's demand to comply with a boycott not supported by the United States.
An influential Republican senator said Monday that he'll withhold approval of U.S. weapons sales to several Middle Eastern allies until there is a clear path for settling a diplomatic crisis with Qatar. Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that "recent disputes" among members of the Gulf Cooperation Council undermine efforts to combat the Islamic State and counter Iran.
A deal between the United States and Qatar for F-15 fighter jets and a visit to Doha by two American warships on Thursday showed the vital military links Washington maintains with a country now in a dispute with several other Arab nations. Qatar remains the home of some 10,000 American troops at a major U.S. military base in the Mideast.
The blockade against Qatar by Gulf states was a "very complex situation" and an area where common ground had to be found, Mattis spoke on Monday ahead of talks between the US and Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir in Washington, DC, as the Gulf crisis entered its second week. The former general told the House Armed Services Committee that Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani had inherited a difficult situation and was moving in the right direction.
The inventory gains added to market worries about crude supplies, despite the recent agreement among OPEC and other oil producing nations extend output cuts of 1.8 million barrels a day into next year. Since OPEC announced the extension of production cuts, the market has continued to react bearishly with respect to the oil price.