World Cup fans from around the globe are bringing a festival feel to the Qatari capital Doha — with tens of thousands more set to arrive in the coming days.
From Colombia and Mexico to Wales and Spain, supporters have flown thousands of kilometres and spent thousands of dollars to witness teams play in the Middle East's first World Cup.
On Sunday night, there were teething problems at one of the largest fan zones, Bidda Park in central Doha, which can accommodate about 40,000 people.
There were long queues tightly packed into a narrow entrance outside Bidda Park before it opened at 4pm, while no water stalls or fountains were available outside the fan zone.
A group of fans surged in front of the barriers at one stage as tempers flared, although security showed restraint and appeared to quickly clock what was happening.
“The fan zone is huge, it was a bit chaotic getting in and there was a lot of pushing and shoving,” said fan Jadran Vulinovic, an Australian of Croatian descent.
“It wasn’t clear what was going on; we queued at one place for 20 minutes but it was going nowhere. So, it was a bit unnerving but we eventually got in OK after another half hour or so.”
Ecuador rolled over host Qatar 2-0 in the opening match later in the evening, after a dazzling opening ceremony that featured a unifying call for humanity from Morgan Freeman, dance troupes, Arabic singers and spectacular light show.
Qatar’s loss may have dampened local spirits but not the anticipation among the thousands of other fans eagerly awaiting the arrival of their own teams.
Mr Vulinovic, who works in information technology, has six match tickets to watch both sides play in Doha, and is confident that the coming couple of weeks will be exciting.
“We are staying in Al Khor for a few days, then heading to one of the fan villages,” he said.
“Transport around Doha has been pretty good, but it has been a bit of a culture shock for us.
“Because we are staying up north, the landscape is so alien. We are used to the greenery of Melbourne but this is just so different.
“We are here for 12 nights, and have been planning to come for a while after missing so many holidays during Covid.”
Australia face a tough group alongside France, Tunisia and Denmark, while Croatia will play Morocco, Belgium and Canada, which is competing in its first World Cup since 1986.
Mr Vulinovic’s son Ben was getting his first taste of a World Cup.
“It is a tough call to choose between supporting Croatia or Australia, but if both get to the final it would have to be the Aussies,” he said.
“But I don’t give us much hope of getting past the quarter-finals, so I will be following Croatia too.
“I wasn’t prepared for the heat. We were walking around most of the day and I wasn’t prepared, it was tough.”
'I can't say how much I spent to be here — I don't want my wife to find out!'
Earlier, supporters across the city arrived at some hotels, where the finishing touches were still being applied as they checked in and unloaded their bags.
Others found tent fan villages on the outskirts of Doha fell well below expectations, with insufficient air conditioning or a shortage of fresh drinking water.
Two Welsh fans from Wrexham, Adrian and Nick — both 47 — have tickets for their country's games against Iran and the US.
“It was tough getting a week away from home, but a World Cup doesn’t happen very often,” said Adrian, an engineer.
“I have spent about £2,000 for flights, tickets and accommodation on a cruise ship — it all seems well organised so far.”
Nick, also an engineer, said there were “a lot of Welsh on the cruise ship we are on, so it is good fun”.
“It is a mix of diehard Welsh fans who have followed the team for years and others who want to experience a World Cup for the first time,” he said.
“I can’t say how much it has cost as I don’t want my wife to find out but it has been expensive. It has take a long time to qualify so we can’t wait for it all to start — I think Wales can go all the way.”
Iran's dirty tricks to dodge sanctions
There’s increased scrutiny on the tricks being used to keep commodities flowing to and from blacklisted countries. Here’s a description of how some work.
1 Going Dark
A common method to transport Iranian oil with stealth is to turn off the Automatic Identification System, an electronic device that pinpoints a ship’s location. Known as going dark, a vessel flicks the switch before berthing and typically reappears days later, masking the location of its load or discharge port.
2. Ship-to-Ship Transfers
A first vessel will take its clandestine cargo away from the country in question before transferring it to a waiting ship, all of this happening out of sight. The vessels will then sail in different directions. For about a third of Iranian exports, more than one tanker typically handles a load before it’s delivered to its final destination, analysts say.
3. Fake Destinations
Signaling the wrong destination to load or unload is another technique. Ships that intend to take cargo from Iran may indicate their loading ports in sanction-free places like Iraq. Ships can keep changing their destinations and end up not berthing at any of them.
4. Rebranded Barrels
Iranian barrels can also be rebranded as oil from a nation free from sanctions such as Iraq. The countries share fields along their border and the crude has similar characteristics. Oil from these deposits can be trucked out to another port and documents forged to hide Iran as the origin.
* Bloomberg
PAKISTAN SQUAD
Abid Ali, Fakhar Zaman, Imam-ul-Haq, Shan Masood, Azhar Ali (test captain), Babar Azam (T20 captain), Asad Shafiq, Fawad Alam, Haider Ali, Iftikhar Ahmad, Khushdil Shah, Mohammad Hafeez, Shoaib Malik, Mohammad Rizwan (wicketkeeper), Sarfaraz Ahmed (wicketkeeper), Faheem Ashraf, Haris Rauf, Imran Khan, Mohammad Abbas, Mohammad Hasnain, Naseem Shah, Shaheen Afridi, Sohail Khan, Usman Shinwari, Wahab Riaz, Imad Wasim, Kashif Bhatti, Shadab Khan and Yasir Shah.
Points about the fast fashion industry Celine Hajjar wants everyone to know
- Fast fashion is responsible for up to 10 per cent of global carbon emissions
- Fast fashion is responsible for 24 per cent of the world's insecticides
- Synthetic fibres that make up the average garment can take hundreds of years to biodegrade
- Fast fashion labour workers make 80 per cent less than the required salary to live
- 27 million fast fashion workers worldwide suffer from work-related illnesses and diseases
- Hundreds of thousands of fast fashion labourers work without rights or protection and 80 per cent of them are women
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Brief scoreline:
Burnley 3
Barnes 63', 70', Berg Gudmundsson 75'
Southampton 3
Man of the match
Ashley Barnes (Burnley)
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Children who witnessed blood bath want to help others
Aged just 11, Khulood Al Najjar’s daughter, Nora, bravely attempted to fight off Philip Spence. Her finger was injured when she put her hand in between the claw hammer and her mother’s head.
As a vital witness, she was forced to relive the ordeal by police who needed to identify the attacker and ensure he was found guilty.
Now aged 16, Nora has decided she wants to dedicate her career to helping other victims of crime.
“It was very horrible for her. She saw her mum, dying, just next to her eyes. But now she just wants to go forward,” said Khulood, speaking about how her eldest daughter was dealing with the trauma of the incident five years ago. “She is saying, 'mama, I want to be a lawyer, I want to help people achieve justice'.”
Khulood’s youngest daughter, Fatima, was seven at the time of the attack and attempted to help paramedics responding to the incident.
“Now she wants to be a maxillofacial doctor,” Khulood said. “She said to me ‘it is because a maxillofacial doctor returned your face, mama’. Now she wants to help people see themselves in the mirror again.”
Khulood’s son, Saeed, was nine in 2014 and slept through the attack. While he did not witness the trauma, this made it more difficult for him to understand what had happened. He has ambitions to become an engineer.
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THE TWIN BIO
Their favourite city: Dubai
Their favourite food: Khaleeji
Their favourite past-time : walking on the beach
Their favorite quote: ‘we rise by lifting others’ by Robert Ingersoll
Test
Director: S Sashikanth
Cast: Nayanthara, Siddharth, Meera Jasmine, R Madhavan
Star rating: 2/5
Ads on social media can 'normalise' drugs
A UK report on youth social media habits commissioned by advocacy group Volteface found a quarter of young people were exposed to illegal drug dealers on social media.
The poll of 2,006 people aged 16-24 assessed their exposure to drug dealers online in a nationally representative survey.
Of those admitting to seeing drugs for sale online, 56 per cent saw them advertised on Snapchat, 55 per cent on Instagram and 47 per cent on Facebook.
Cannabis was the drug most pushed by online dealers, with 63 per cent of survey respondents claiming to have seen adverts on social media for the drug, followed by cocaine (26 per cent) and MDMA/ecstasy, with 24 per cent of people.
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Earth under attack: Cosmic impacts throughout history
- 4.5 billion years ago: Mars-sized object smashes into the newly-formed Earth, creating debris that coalesces to form the Moon
- 66 million years ago: 10km-wide asteroid crashes into the Gulf of Mexico, wiping out over 70 per cent of living species – including the dinosaurs.
- 50,000 years ago: 50m-wide iron meteor crashes in Arizona with the violence of 10 megatonne hydrogen bomb, creating the famous 1.2km-wide Barringer Crater
- 1490: Meteor storm over Shansi Province, north-east China when large stones “fell like rain”, reportedly leading to thousands of deaths.
- 1908: 100-metre meteor from the Taurid Complex explodes near the Tunguska river in Siberia with the force of 1,000 Hiroshima-type bombs, devastating 2,000 square kilometres of forest.
- 1998: Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 breaks apart and crashes into Jupiter in series of impacts that would have annihilated life on Earth.
-2013: 10,000-tonne meteor burns up over the southern Urals region of Russia, releasing a pressure blast and flash that left over 1600 people injured.
