The ex-England star’s deal for his ambassador role is in marked contrast to the wages of the host nation’s migrant workers
I doubt Nirmala Pakrin knows who David Beckham is, but she knows about Qatar.
Her husband, Rupchandra Rumba, a 24-year-old from Nepal, died in 2019, gasping for breath in a squalid camp for labourers on the outskirts of Doha, while working for a contractor on one of the new World Cup stadiums.
Continue reading...Focus of talks in Qatar will be allowing foreigners and at-risk Afghans to leave Afghanistan, says US official
US officials will meet senior Taliban figures this weekend for talks aimed at easing the evacuation of foreign citizens and at-risk Afghans from Afghanistan, a US official has said.
The focus of talks on Saturday and Sunday in Doha, Qatar, would be holding Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders to commitments that they would allow Americans and other foreign nationals to leave, along with Afghans who once worked for the US military or government and other Afghan allies, the official said.
Continue reading...Antony Blinken thanks Qatar and Taliban for facilitating flight that he says shows US commitment to help citizens and others who assisted US
A flight carrying more than 100 international passengers out of Kabul has landed in Doha, the first such civilian flight since the chaotic evacuation of 124,000 foreigners and at-risk Afghans sparked by the Taliban’s swift takeover of the country.
About 113 people were aboard the flight to Doha operated by state-owned Qatar Airways, officials said. The passengers included US, British, Canadian, Ukrainian, Dutch and German citizens.
Continue reading...Taliban fighters pictured outside governor’s compound, but Ahmad Massoud’s rebels deny province has fallen
The Taliban have fought their way to the capital of Panjshir, the last Afghan province holding out against their rule, and seem on the brink of total victory.
The group posted pictures on social media showing Taliban fighters standing in front of the gate of the governor’s compound. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid issued a statement, saying Panjshir was under the control of Taliban fighters.
Continue reading...Foreign secretary says UK must engage with Taliban in Afghanistan after meeting with Qatari officials
Evacuations may be able to resume from Kabul airport “in the near future”, the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, has said as he expressed a need for direct engagement with the Taliban.
Speaking after talks in Qatar on Thursday, Raab raised hopes that the Britons and Afghans left behind may be able to leave on flights from Afghanistan’s capital.
Continue reading...Those on board the cramped military plane weren’t granted a last glimpse of their homeland before the difficult journey ahead, while all knew thousands still waited desperately below
The American marine shouted “push!”. And hundreds of people did, shoving inside the Boeing C-17 military aircraft; tumbling over, then pulling their bodies into tight huddles on the floor to let as many others in as possible.
As the rear door closed and the deafening engines started, lifting the heavy plane off the runway at Kabul’s international airport, people broke down wailing; crying. Now refugees.
Continue reading...Western G7 powers are meeting Turkey, Qatar and Nato in Doha to discuss how Kabul airport could be reopened
Talks are due in Doha and New York to try to reach an international consensus on the conditions for recognising the Taliban government in Afghanistan. There are signs of tensions between superpowers after Russia called on the US to release Afghan central bank reserves that Washington blocked after the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul earlier this month.
“If our western colleagues are actually worried about the fate of the Afghan people, then we must not create additional problems for them by freezing gold and foreign exchange reserves,” said the Kremlin’s envoy to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov.
Continue reading...World Cup host has not properly investigated fatalities, rights group says, citing concerns over heat stress and safety
World Cup host Qatar has failed to investigate the deaths of thousands of migrant workers in the past decade, according to a new report by Amnesty International.
The human rights organisation said the majority of migrant worker deaths in Qatar are attributed to “natural causes”, cardiac or respiratory failure; classifications which are “meaningless” without the underlying cause of death explained, according to one expert cited.
Continue reading...The chaos that followed the president’s exit has created its own suffering – and may leave a much longer legacy of pain
By the middle of last week, Kabul’s capitulation to the Taliban was perhaps inevitable – but the horror and chaos of the last few days were not.
As the militants swept across Afghanistan, seizing towns then major cities, their negotiators in Qatar offered a deal that would have ushered in a pause in fighting, with a two-week transition period to a new government, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Continue reading...As scorching temperatures spread, the search for ways to protect against heat stress is becoming ever more urgent
William Martínez, who as a child worked on a sugarcane plantation in rural Nicaragua, learned the hard way what many in the US and Canada are now realising: that rising temperatures are costing lives and livelihoods.
Martínez, along with fellow villagers in La Isla, found himself getting sicker as he worked long, gruelling days in the fields under the beating Nicaraguan sun two decades ago. Workers at the nearby mill, which supplies molasses to alcohol companies, began to suffer kidney failure, and would be forced out of the workforce and into expensive and time-consuming dialysis. His father and uncles, addled with the same affliction, had died when Martínez was a boy, forcing him to join the workforce.
Continue reading...Promises of better working conditions ring hollow for tens of thousands of security guards, who say they still work long hours for low pay
Every day at 5pm, Samuel boards the company bus that takes him to his night shift as a guard at a luxury high-rise tower near Qatar’s capital, Doha. When his shift ends 12 hours later, he says he will have earned £9, just 75p an hour.
Samuel, who is from Uganda, says he almost never has a day off. “You have to tell lies, like ‘you are sick, you’re not feeling good’, so that you get a day off,” he says.
Continue reading...Malcolm Bidali, a Kenyan who blogged about migrant workers’ plight, detained by Qatari security services
A Kenyan security guard in Qatar who has written about the plight of migrant workers has been “forcibly disappeared”, human rights group say.
Malcolm Bidali was detained by the Qatari security services over a week ago and is being held in an undisclosed location, according to a coalition of rights groups, which include Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Continue reading...Lack of US sanctions on crown prince led to harsher sentences for critics of regime, Grant Liberty reports
The Biden administration’s failure to impose sanctions on Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has led to a increase in severe sentences for political prisoners in the kingdom, the Guardian can reveal.
The UK-based human rights organisation Grant Liberty found that twice as many harsh sentences had been meted out to Saudi prisoners of conscience in April than in the first three months of this year combined. It followed the Biden administration’s decision on 26 February to publish an intelligence report that showed the crown prince, “approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey, to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi”.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Lukman Thalib says he struggles to recall what he said during ‘calculated’ torture
An Australian public health professor alleges he told Australian consulate staff he was being tortured and held without charge they visited him in a Qatari prison, but says they did nothing to help.
Biostatistician Prof Lukman Thalib, 58, was arrested at his Doha home and detained for five months without charge in Qatar, where he had been working as acting head of Qatar University’s public health department.
Continue reading...Gulf state’s male guardian rules deny women right to wed, travel, work or to make decisions about their children, report says
Women in Qatar are living under a system of “deep discrimination” – dependent on men for permission to marry, travel, pursue higher education or make decisions about their own children, according to a new report.
Opaque rules on male guardianship leave women without basic freedoms, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which has analysed for the first time the way the system works in practice.
Continue reading...Read the list of super-rich claimants, from Saudi princes to Dubai monarchs, tax exiles to the UK’s richest
Glympton Park is a sprawling, 2,000-acre estate featuring an 18th-century stately home, nestled in the verdant Oxfordshire countryside near Woodstock.
It was bought for £8m in 1992, by Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, the senior Saudi royal whose past roles include ambassador to the US. He is said to have spent £42m on renovations, including a pheasant shoot and bullet-proof glass on the driveway to thwart would-be assassins.
Continue reading...Qatari owners of Harrods and the Ritz claimed £3m alongside payouts to Saudi royals and British National party from Covid job support scheme
Billionaire tax exiles, the British National party, Saudi royals and oil-rich Gulf states have claimed millions of pounds in taxpayer-funded furlough money, the Guardian can disclose.
The revelations, based on analysis of government information, have sparked dismay among MPs at the use of a scheme designed to support struggling businesses and prevent mass unemployment, with one complaining of public money being scattered “like confetti”.
Continue reading...Rightly, a digital platform for conservatives, goes down awkwardly in Qatari-funded news organisation
Al Jazeera’s surprise decision to launch a digital platform for conservatives in the US has left many within the Qatar-based news organisation dumbfounded and confused, staff have told the Guardian.
The network has announced the launch of Rightly, a platform that will host programmes and produce online content aimed at “audiences currently underrepresented in today’s media environment”, in this case right-of-centre Americans.
Continue reading...Guardian analysis indicates shocking figure likely to be an underestimate, as preparations for 2022 tournament continue
More than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have died in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup 10 years ago, the Guardian can reveal.
The findings, compiled from government sources, mean an average of 12 migrant workers from these five south Asian nations have died each week since the night in December 2010 when the streets of Doha were filled with ecstatic crowds celebrating Qatar’s victory.
Continue reading...