Qatar World Cup 2022: FIFA ignoring migrant workers abuses, says Amnesty
Updated 0903 GMT (1603 HKT) March 31, 2016
He's the migrant worker busting a gut to build Qatar's shiny soccer stadiums that will host FIFA's World Cup in 2022 -- at a price.
For Prem -- a metal worker and father of three from Nepal who carried out work on the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha between February and May 2015 -- that price was the loss of his family's home after he experienced a three-month delay in being paid, according to Amnesty international.
Prem is just one example of ongoing exploitation of migrant workers in Qatar at a venue for the 2022 World Cup that soccer's world governing body FIFA can no longer turn "a blind eye" to, says the human rights organization's new report published Thursday.
From Brighton to the battlefield: how four young Britons were drawn to jihad
They started out writing plays, making music, playing football and dreaming of bright futures. Then everything fell apart. Now three have been killed in Syria – and the fourth is still fightingby Mark Townsend
Thursday 31 March 2016 06.00 BST
The play was called Don’t Judge Me, a satire that poked fun at tabloid stereotypes of British Muslims. It was written, directed and produced by a 15-year-old from Brighton named Amer Deghayes, who had taken inspiration from some of the less considered headlines of the Daily Mail and the Sun. “They were so ludicrous they made me laugh,” he told one of the adults who helped with the production. “The way they called young people feral, wow!” The play, which was set to a rap soundtrack performed by Amer’s own group, Blak n’ Deka, toured theatres on the south coast in 2010, winning awards and plenty of plaudits.
Amer, who had his sights set on becoming a serious journalist, was the eldest son in his family. Two of his brothers were twins, Abdulrahman and Abdullah, a year younger and both keen footballers.
Argentina approves historic agreement to pay US creditors
Ending years of financial isolation and court battles, Buenos Aires has acceded to repaying its creditors. If the senate rejected the payment deal, the debt would have likely gone "viral," an opposition lawmaker said.
The Argentine Senate on Thursday approved a deal to pay back US creditors, effectively ending a 14-year court battle after defaulting on $100 billion (88.35 billion euros) in debt in 2001.
Following over 13 hours of debate, the deal - which passed Argentina's lower house two weeks ago - passed the Senate vote with 54 in favor and 16 against.
Under the deal, Argentina is expected to pay out over $4 billion (3.53 billion euros) in claims related to court cases.
It also allows Argentina to take on $12.5 billion in debt to settle the holdout creditors' disputes.
In 2005 and 2010, several US creditors agreed to swap their holdings for bonds worth far less than their original stakes.
Athens' airport to nowhere: Migrants stranded in Greek limbo
For decades, Ellinikon International Airport has connected Athens to wealthier EU capitals. Now the abandoned structure has been taken over by thousands of migrants desperate to make their way further north into Europe.
It's been 15 years since the last plane took off from the Greek capital's former international airport, which stretches along the Aegean Sea and lies a short drive south of the city centre. If things had gone according to plan, Ellinikon (also known as Hellinikon) might have become Athens' equivalent of Tempelhof Airport in Berlin: a sprawling and much-loved communal area where families, cyclists, skaters and kite-flyers whiz along the disused runways and revel in unkempt meadows that stretch out to the horizon.
How bribe factory Unaoil tried to stop us telling their secrets
March 31, 2016 - 5:56PMMichael Bachelard
Until the moment Fairfax Media and The Huffington Post hit the publish button at 10pm on Wednesday, AEDT, revealing how the oil industry really works, our investigative team was on tenterhooks.
This was more than simple pre-publication nerves, the questions we invariably ask ourselves about whether we have got it right, and what we had missed in the hundreds of thousands of documents we'd read over the previous months.
No, our concern was more specific: that an Australian court, an unsympathetic judge, might stop us publishing this global story. It would have left The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald newspapers with seven blank pages each, and thousands of words of crucial information unable to be published online.
It may have meant a story that Fairfax Media's reporters had worked on solidly for months would be broken overseas by our collaborator, The Huffington Post, not by the reporters who sourced, corroborated, combed and read hundreds of thousands of emails.
In Mississippi, a glimpse of ISIS run by women
UNDERSTANDING ISIS
In the Middle East, female ISIS recruits play specific, gender-defined roles. But a Mississippi case shows how, in the West, women can be jihadi leaders.
On the surface, the arrest of a young Mississippi couple at an airport last year, as they were on their way to join the Islamic State in Syria, looks no different than numerous other cases of Western men and women caught trying to join the terrorist group in recent years.
But the couple’s farewell letters revealed an unusual role reversal. Jaelyn Young acknowledged that she was "the planner of the expedition and that [her fiancé] was going as her companion of his own free will," according to court documents.
Ms. Young and her fiancé, Muhammad Dakhlalla, were arrested Aug. 8 trying to board a plane from Columbus, Miss., to Istanbul. This week, both pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to support a terrorist organization.
Pentagon plans more prisoner transfers from Guantanamo
The development marks the latest push in Obama's bid to shut down the facility before he leaves the White House.
| United States, Guantanamo Bay , Barack Obama
The Pentagon plans to transfer about a dozen inmates of the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba to at least two countries, a US official has said.
The first of the transfers were expected in the next few days and the others in the coming weeks, said the official on Wednesday who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The transfers are part of President Barack Obama's latest push to close down the facility, which opened the US to accusations of torture.
Tariq Ba Odah, a Yemeni man who has been on a long-term hunger strike and has lost about half of his body weight, will be among the prisoners being transferred.
No comments:
Post a Comment