What’s behind attacks on Qatar as it hosts FIFA World Cup 2022?

Tracing the political, economic and cultural factors at the heart of misinformation campaigns against Qatar.

As Qatar hosts the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the Middle Eastern country has been the target of misinformation campaigns in several European countries.

In this episode of Story to Follow, we trace the roots of the political, economic and cultural factors inciting these campaigns against Qatar, especially in the United Kingdom, Denmark and France.

Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar.  This programme  is nothing more than an attempt to white wash all of the wrong doing and abuse in the run up to the World Cup

German football federation to take legal action over Fifa’s OneLove armband ban

Move comes after supermarket chain cuts commercial ties with DFB in protest over row at World Cup

Germany’s football federation has said it plans legal steps against Fifa over its banning of OneLove rainbow armbands at the World Cup as it faced the humiliating decision by one of the country’s largest supermarket chains to cut its commercial ties over the row.

World Cup 2022: American journalist 'detained' over rainbow shirt ahead of U.S.-Wales match

Two American journalists have been told to remove rainbow-patterned articles of clothing by authorities at World Cup venues in Qatar in recent days.

On Saturday, Los Angeles Times reporter Kevin Baxter was told by a police officer at the U.S. men’s national team’s Qatari training site that a rainbow-colored mask was not allowed.

Two days later, at the Ahmad bin Ali Stadium, where the USMNT plays Wales on Monday night, longtime soccer journalist Grant Wahl said that he was told by security to change out of a shirt with a rainbow pattern around a soccer ball. FIFA told Yahoo Sports that the incident was a "mistake," and said it has been "sorted."

Migrants hired to work at the opening match waited all day without food and water.

Instead of a day of work, the workers endured no water, no food and no toilets under the hot desert sun.

A group of more than 200 migrant laborers hired to work concession stalls at the Qatar World Cup’s opening game said they had been left without food, water and toilet facilities for seven hours while they waited for their assignments.

Standing in front of the Bedouin-tent-shaped Al Bayt stadium in Al Khor, the group were desperately trying to contact their employer without success. Several said they had been asked to report to a facility close to the arena before 10 a.m., nine hours before the game was scheduled to start.

 

Covid: Stop anti-vaccination fake news online with new law says Labour

 

Emergency laws to "stamp out dangerous" anti-vaccine content online should be introduced, Labour has said. The party is calling for financial and criminal penalties for social media firms that do not remove false scare stories about vaccines.

Labour accuses Boris Johnson of pitting “region against region” over pandemic funding - BBC News

 

After days of wrangling with local leaders, the Prime Minister has said a £60m support package for Greater Manchester will be distributed to local councils in the region, effectively bypassing the mayor, Andy Burnham.

Labour demands new lockdown as scientists warn of “catastrophic” epidemic

 

The Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has said the government’s measures to tackle coronavirus are not working. He’s called for a short lockdown throughout England - or “circuit breaker” - as death rates rise sharply to the highest number since June.

Bitter chocolate | DW Documentary

 In Ivory Coast, the dark side of cocoa and chocolate production is hard to miss. Many people – including children – are driven here from neighboring Burkina Faso by drought and famine to find work. They often come alone, without their families, to find jobs on one of the many cocoa plantations. The conditions are spartan. They work with sharp machetes, carry heavy loads, are exposed to toxic herbicides, and lack protective clothing.

Coronavirus: PM must explain 10,000 deaths in care homes says Labour leader

The prime minister must account for official figures, showing 10,000 “unexplained” deaths last month, in care homes in England and Wales. The challenge was made by the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who said the UK government had been “too slow to protect people in care homes”.

Maid in Singapore

Agents in Myanmar are recruiting girls as young as 15 to work as domestic helpers in Singapore.

There are more than 200,000 foreign domestic workers in Singapore.

Under the law, they have to be at least 23 years old.

But one NGO says it is seeing more and more minors at its shelter for abused maids.

Most of these girls come from Myanmar, where investigations reveal a web of deceit and corruption in the recruitment process, and immigration officials are regularly bribed to doctor birthdates on travel documents.

Because of their youth, the girls are often easy targets for abusive employers and sexual predators.

The End of China Inc?

12 Arrests In Connection With London Bridge Terror Attack After Raids In East Of UK Capital, Police Say 

• Attackers drove van into pedestrians on London Bridge before stabbing people in Borough Market
• Prime minister says too much ‘tolerance of extremism’ in UK
• 48 injured people taken to hospitals
• General election campaigning suspended
• London attacks: what we know so far
• Full report: Police shoot dead three suspect after London attack
• Have you been affected by the attacks?

Maid in Singapore

Agents in Myanmar are recruiting girls as young as 15 to work as domestic helpers in Singapore.

There are more than 200,000 foreign domestic workers in Singapore.

Under the law, they have to be at least 23 years old.

But one NGO says it is seeing more and more minors at its shelter for abused maids.

Most of these girls come from Myanmar, where investigations reveal a web of deceit and corruption in the recruitment process, and immigration officials are regularly bribed to doctor birthdates on travel documents.

Because of their youth, the girls are often easy targets for abusive employers and sexual predators.

Seafood Slaves

We travel to Indonesia, Myanmar and Thailand to investigate slavery in the multi-billion dollar seafood industry.



In 2015, evidence of slavery on a massive scale surfaced in the remote islands of eastern Indonesia.

Illegal fishing in Indonesian territorial waters had risen to an extreme level, but many of the Thai fishing boats responsible harboured a much worse secret aboard.

In the last year, over 2,000 men have come forward who were enslaved on Thai fishing boats in Indonesian waters, working for as long as a decade without pay.

Thousands of migrants from Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos in search of higher-paying jobs were lured onto Thai fishing boats with empty promises about jobs "on the other side" and into, in some cases, years of ongoing seaborne labour.

America's War Workers

From India to Dubai and Afghanistan, we probe the system that brings foreign labourers to US military bases abroad.


Today there are nearly 40,000 foreign contract workers on bases in the US military’s Central Command.

Hailing primarily from India and Nepal, these labourers serve American troops in facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere - doing jobs including cooking, housekeeping and driving.

The US military subcontracts these manual jobs to private companies, which in turn subcontract hiring to Gulf-based contractors and local recruiters.

The promise of high salaries makes these so-called 'third country nationals' believe heading to a war zone is worth the risk.

To get the jobs, many dip into their savings and take out loans to pay thousands of dollars in local agents fees. But in Afghanistan, they find wages far lower than anticipated. Locked into an indentured workforce, they nevertheless remain to earn enough funds to repay their loans.

Disrupting the media with disruptive politics

The media versus the rise of anti-establishment politics; Plus, Syria's TV dramas soldier on.



Jeremy Corbyn's landslide victory as the Labour Party’s new leader on September 12 left the UK's media baffled.

Considered an eccentric, leftist outsider by some just a few months ago, Corbyn's appointment and sudden success defied the mainstream media's hostile stand, which initially deemed him unelectable.

The new leader's media strategy, which on the one hand appears free of spin, and on other, antagonist, forced news outlets, including even liberal news outlets, to re-evaluate the way they report on Westminster.

And the story in the UK seems to reflect a larger trend. On the other side of the Atlantic, Bernie Sanders, a fringe presidential candidate on the left, has similarly burst onto the media scene.

While his media strategy appears more sophisticated, he has more than just a hostile media to face - competing for airtime with the press-circus of his Republican rival, Donald Trump.

America's War Workers

From India to Dubai and Afghanistan, we probe the system that brings foreign labourers to US military bases abroad.


Today there are nearly 40,000 foreign contract workers on bases in the US military’s Central Command.

Hailing primarily from India and Nepal, these labourers serve American troops in facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere - doing jobs including cooking, housekeeping and driving.

The US military subcontracts these manual jobs to private companies, which in turn subcontract hiring to Gulf-based contractors and local recruiters.

The promise of high salaries makes these so-called 'third country nationals' believe heading to a war zone is worth the risk.

To get the jobs, many dip into their savings and take out loans to pay thousands of dollars in local agents fees. But in Afghanistan, they find wages far lower than anticipated. Locked into an indentured workforce, they nevertheless remain to earn enough funds to repay their loans.

So, has the US military come to rely on an indentured workforce?

Dark side of Japan revealed in film about Internet cafe living

Before Junichiro Koizumi was elected Prime Minister employment in Japan was stable, with a majority of those seeking full time work finding and those holding part time or temporary positions were either high school or university students the culture of temporary work and contracts didn't exist and then Japan's labor laws were amended in 2004 and the a large portion of the work force became temporary workers.  While the situation wasn't great, people were able to survive.

That changed with the 2008 financial crisis. Suddenly all those temporary workers became redundant and with it came an unstable and  untenable employment climate.  Which led to the birth of the internet culture which exists in Japan today.  Low wages and poor working conditions will do that.

The bleak and unforgiving existence of Japan's salarymen and part-time workers, who often live in Internet cafes to save on rent, is difficult to describe, but one filmmaker has done a great job of giving us a brief peek.
Net Cafe Refugees is a short 10-minute documentary that plunges the viewer into the world of 24-hour Internet-connected cubicles that serve as makeshift living spaces for many Japanese living on the edge of society.

If you've ever wondered if some of those film depictions of futuristic, dystopian cities will ever come to fruition, you need look no further than the dark, broadband-connected caves shown in director Shiho Fukada's film.

One part-time construction site worker is shown spending his time between monotonous work shifts and Internet cafe existence by chain smoking and staring listlessly at a computer screen surrounded by black walls draped with wires. Another man admits that he has lived in an Internet cafe for four months, after quitting his job as a computer systems manager at a credit card company. 

 

 

 

 

 

Trans Pacfic Partnership: A Free Trade Agreement That Isn't Free

In the 1990's the United States came to agreement with Mexico to institute one of the first free trade agreements NAFTA.  President Bill Clinton promised that not only would American jobs be saved but that manufacturing jobs would see an increase.  It was just another lie in a long list of them to fool American workers that losing their jobs was good for them while making them poorer. Then came the WTO formally known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that would morph into the World Trade Organization (WTO) which would not only perpetrate  globalization but would set back by several generations worker rights and create the American Rust Belt as those supposed safe manufacturing jobs were shipped over seas.

 In February of 2006 it was announced that America and South Korea had inter negotiations for a free trade agreement between the two allies.  At first glance it seemed to be an equitable agreement until details of the agreement were leaked showing that thousands of South Korean agriculture and fishery workers would lose their jobs.  No, matter the opposition to the agreement was eventually overcome   and signed into law by both countries.    Free Trade Agreements have never benefited the worker as they are seen as tools for multinational corporations whose rights supersede those of every nations citizens.    

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) will supersede all those agreements making them look like agreements between children at play.  If compromise can be reached corporations will achieve powers not seen since the gilded age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Corporations will be given the power to override the laws of sovereign states rendering any all regulations place upon null and void.

 

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Thu Oct 16, 2014 at 11:09 PM PDT

New Draft of TPP Leaked - And It's Not Good

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Another draft text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)’s intellectual property chapter has been leaked, and it has even more alarming provisions than the last draft we know about.
The TPP is a free trade agreement being negotiated in secret among the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Peru, Chile, and Brunei. This latest text draft is from May 2014.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation says: "The TPP still contains text on DRM, ISP liability, copyright term lengths, and criminal enforcement measures, and introduces new provisions on trade secrets that have us worried."

Anti-Circumvention Despite an over-abundance of evidence that laws punishing circumvention of DRM do far more harm than good, the USTR continues to press other countries to embrace the U.S.’s failed anti-circumvention policy.... What is worse, it would likely impede countries from adopting laws...that provide a blanket exemption for DRM circumvention for lawful purposes.

Copyright Term Whereas in the previous leak a coalition of countries had proposed that the TPP should allow them to retain full flexibility in determining the optimal length of their copyright term, that proposal has now been excised from the agreement—the only option now on the table is a provision that specifies a minimum term of years. How many years that should be, ranging from life plus 50 to life plus 100 years, remains undecided.

Criminal Treatment of Trade Secrets A new, more detailed provision on trade secrets introduces text that would criminalize the unauthorized, willful access of a trade secret held in a computer system, or the misappropriation or disclosure of a trade secret using a computer system. This text goes far beyond existing trade secrets law, which in the United States and other common law countries is usually a matter for the civil not the criminal courts. No public interest exception, such as for journalism, is provided. In practice, this could obligate countries into enacting a draconian anti-hacking law much like the Criminal Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) that was used to prosecute Aaron Swartz.

Liability and Enforcement On ISP liability the text remains quite contested.... This article provides ISPs with a safe harbor against liability for copyright infringements by users....conditioned on ISPs participating in a DMCA-like notice and take-down regime, where allegedly infringing content is removed from the Internet without a court order....
Also still contested are the criminal enforcement provisions. The issue is whether users can be held criminally liable for copyright infringements conducted on a commercial scale, for commercial advantage or financial gain. In the November 2013 text, the text was more highly contested by all 12 TPP countries, but now most of the disagreement lies between the US and Canada. The US seeks a broader definition of a criminal copyright infringement, to even cover acts that are noncommercial, whereas Canada only wants to apply criminal remedies to cases where someone has infringed for commercial purposes. If the US gets its way, then criminal penalties will apply even against users who were not seeking financial gain from sharing or making available copyrighted works, such as fans and archivists.

Public Domain For the first time, the parties have reached agreement to include an article recording their recognition of “the importance of a rich and accessible public domain” and acknowledging “the importance of informational materials, such as publicly accessible databases of registered intellectual property rights that assist in the identification of subject matter that has fallen into the public domain.”

 

The woman who nearly died making your iPad

Tian Yu worked more than 12 hours a day, six days a week. She had to skip meals to do overtime. Then she threw herself from a fourth-floor window

At around 8am on 17 March 2010, Tian Yu threw herself from the fourth floor of her factory dormitory in Shenzhen, southern China. For the past month, the teenager had worked on an assembly line churning out parts for Apple iPhones and iPads. At Foxconn's Longhua facility, that is what the 400,000 employees do: produce the smartphones and tablets that are sold by Samsung or Sony or Dell and end up in British and American homes.
But most famously of all, China's biggest factory makes gadgets for Apple. Without its No 1 supplier, the Cupertino giant's current riches would be unimaginable: in 2010, Longhua employees made 137,000 iPhones a day, or around 90 a minute.

What's most important here is that the western consumer have the latest in iPhone technology while caring little about those who manufactured it or their working conditions.

Yu was interviewed over three years by Jenny Chan and Sacom, a Hong Kong-based group of rights campaigners. From her hospital recuperation in Shenzhen to her return to her family's village, Chan and her colleagues kept in touch throughout and have published the interviews in the latest issue of an academic journal called New Technology, Work and Employment. The result is a rare and revealing insight into how big electronics companies now rely on what is effectively a human battery-farming system: employing young, poor migrants from the Chinese countryside, cramming them into vast workhouses and crowded dorms, then spitting out the ones who struggle to keep up.

It's like being a sharecropper:  working to provide a better life for yourself and your family but somehow remaining in debt and service to the company.

In her first month, Yu had to work two seven-day weeks back to back. Foreign reporters who visit Longhua campus are shown its Olympic-sized swimming pools and shops, but she was too exhausted to do anything but sleep. She was swapped between day and night shifts and kept in an eight-person dormitory where she barely knew the names of her fellow sleepers.
Stranded in a city far from her family, unable to make friends or even get a decent night's sleep, Yu finally broke when bosses didn't pay her for the month's labour because of some administrative foul-up. In desperation, she hurled herself out of a window. She was owed £140 in basic pay and overtime, or around a quarter of a new iPhone 5.

 Poor Tim Cook the CEO of Apple made a meager $4 million  last year one wonders if that was enough to house and feed his family.

After her suicide attempt, Yu received a one-off "humanitarian payment" of ¥180,000 (£18,000) to help her go home. According to her father: "It was as if they were buying and selling a thing." 

Workers demand back pay `Gangnam Style`

Chinese labourers' wage protest goes viral.

Chinese labourershave found success with a protest tactic for the social media age: going viral on the microblogging site Sina Weibo. A group of construction workers performed the dance from the South Korean megahit "Gangnam Style" outside one of their building sites. They filmed a video in the hope that it would draw attention to their overdue wages. The clip quickly went viral on Chinese social media sites. After a week of media attention, officials in Wuhan province agreed to pay the labourers a total of $33,000 (206,000 yuan). Here's a Chinese news clip about the labourers' protest. They say, "Pay me my wages so I can go home and celebrate the Spring Festival!"