Saudi Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman has rolled the dice with a US$ 374 million bid to acquire
storied British soccer club Newcastle United.
If approved
by Britain’s Premier League that nominally maintains a high bar for the qualification
of aspiring club owners, Prince Mohammed would have demonstrated that he has
put behind him an image tarnished by Saudi conduct of a five-year long war in
Yemen, the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, systematic abuse of
human rights and, more recently, the kingdom’s badly-timed oil price war with
Russia.
The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer: Saudi Arabia rolls the dice with bid for New... - 0 views
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the kind of financial muscle that allows it to acquire trophies that enable it to project itself in a different light and garner soft power rather than financial gain at a time of a pandemic and global economic collapse.
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Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, was reported to be talking to banks about a US$10 billion loan to help finance its acquisition of a 70% stake in Saudi Basic Industries Corp (SABIC). The deal would pour money into the Public Investment Fund (PIF), the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund.
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Qatar's Soccer Stars Are Guinea Pigs in an Experiment to Erode Citizenship Rights - 0 views
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Qatar has not simply spent money to import and train a soccer team: It has also redefined the very idea of citizenship. Like most states in the Persian Gulf, Qatar is a majority-foreigner country. There are only about 300,000 actual Qatari passport holders out of a population of nearly 3 million. Pathways to citizenship are notoriously exclusive, and only 50 new citizenships can be granted per year to those personally approved by the emir of Qatar himself. Yet 10 of the 26 players on Qatar’s national soccer team are naturalized citizens. To comply with FIFA regulations, the entire team consists of Qatari citizens. But these naturalized soccer players are not quite immigrant-origin national heroes, in the vein of Zinedine Zidane or Zlatan Ibrahimovic. These immigrant players all carry “mission passports”—documents that confer citizenship for the purposes of sports competition
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this type of citizenship comes with a built-in expiration date, making these immigrant players’ citizenships temporary as well as second class.
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that Qatar has redefined the very nature of citizenship—without fanfare, controversy, and with the sole goal of appeasing FIFA nationality regulations—takes this story of temporary citizen soccer players beyond the realm of Gulf labor exploitation
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Stolen Vehicle Intercepts are on the Rise at US Ports - 0 views
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While most attention that port security gains is focused on the importation of illegal goods, contraband, and narcotics, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) also conducts outbound cargo examinations at the nation’s ports. One of the items that they are seeking are stolen vehicles being shipped overseas. CBP reports that among the methods criminal organizations are using is car theft looking to sell them in overseas markets. To do this they need to quickly export the stolen vehicle to get it away from US law enforcement.
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The number of stolen car interceptions is on the increase, according to CBP. For example, the Baltimore field office cited a significant rise in the past three years. They recovered 100 stolen cars in 2018, a record 246 in 2019, and 157 this last year. That compares with just 41 stolen cars recovered in 2015, 14 in 2016, and 43 in 2017.
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“Transnational criminal organizations use stolen vehicles as a form of currency to fund their illicit enterprise and it is incumbent upon us to disrupt their trade in stolen vehicles through rigorous outbound cargo examinations,”
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Inside the Pro-Israel Information War - 0 views
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a rare public glimpse of how Israel and its American allies harness Israel’s influential tech sector and tech diaspora to run cover for the Jewish state as it endures scrutiny over the humanitarian impact of its invasion of Gaza.
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reveal the degree to which, in the tech-oriented hasbara world, the lines between government, the private sector, and the nonprofit world are blurry at best. And the tactics that these wealthy individuals, advocates, and groups use -- hounding Israel critics on social media; firing pro-Palestine employees and canceling speaking engagements; smearing Palestinian journalists; and attempting to ship military-grade equipment to the IDF -- are often heavy-handed and controversial.
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"President Biden seems incapable of using the one policy tool that may actually produce a change in Israel's actions that might limit civilian deaths, which would be to condition military aid that the United States provides to Israel,” Clifton added. He partially attributed the inability of the U.S. government to rein in Israel’s war actions to the “lobbying and advocacy efforts underway.”
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