Posted By David Goldblatt Friday, December 3, 2010 - 6:52 PM
View a slide show of Qataris celebrating getting the World Cup
For much of the last three years, Qatar
has been an outsider in the contest to host the 2022 World Cup. In the closing
stages of the race, British bookmakers slashed their odds and made it the favorite.
Someone somewhere knew something, and they were right. Qatar, a small Persian Gulf country of just 1.7 million
people, will be hosting football's top tournament 12 years hence. This is an intriguing and important
moment, for 2022 will be the first global sporting mega-event to be held in an
Arabic-speaking or predominately Muslim country. In an era of globalization, this is no sideshow, but the most watched event on the planet. Cumulative viewing figures for
each of the last few World Cups exceeded 25 billion. Moreover, football -- or soccer, for you Yanks -- is
incredibly popular in the region, played and watched more than any other sport.
Posted By Marcus Bleasdale Wednesday, July 7, 2010 - 11:48 AM
Marcus Bleasdale, a distinguished war photographer, has documented the
scars of conflict in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
Kashmir, and Nepal -- places where years or decades of war have left
local populations taking shelter in bombed-out buildings or makeshift
dwellings, with little food or safe water. What he found when he
visited Djibouti, a small, little-known country on the Horn of Africa,
felt eerily familiar. Only this time, the deprivation was not the
result of war, but of poverty; as Bleasdale says: "The conditions make
it almost feel like a conflict zone."
Posted By James Montague Friday, June 11, 2010 - 9:37 AM
Hosni Mubarak isn't a man usually accustomed to defeat. TheEgyptian president, after all, has been in charge for more than 30 years, outflanking regional and global rivals with consummate ease. Even Egypt's electoral process offers him scant chance of coming second: He romped home during the 2005 elections with almost 90 percent of the vote.
Yet as Mubarak sat in his residence watching last November's World Cup play-off between Egypt and Algeria--which was being played in neutral Sudan--that unusual sinking feeling would have come across him as Antar Yahia's thunderbolt sent the Desert Foxes to their first finals since 1986 and the Pharaohs, the African champions no less, home empty-handed.
As pictures beamed back of wild Algerian celebrations, Egyptian TV was flooded with calls from Egyptian fans claiming to have been attacked by knife-wielding Algerians. "Damn the so-called Arab unity, we should no longer talk about it," an angry Ibrahim Hegazi said on his NileSport show. "We should review our situations. We can no longer bear such incidents."
Posted By Paulo Sotero Tuesday, May 11, 2010 - 7:05 PM
Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva heads to Tehran
this week, a sort of victory lap for what he hopes will be a monumental piece
of foreign policy: bringing Iran's leadership to the nuclear negotiating table.
Last week, Tehran agreed
"in principle" to Brazil and Turkey's offer to facilitate talks on an agreement
proposed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last October. Should that
initiative succeed, it will surely be remembered as Lula's crowning
achievement.
But many are beginning to wonder if Lula can truly be the
darling of the West while also wooing the East.
Lula's administration has
pitched the talks to Iran not as a way to come clean but as a way to
prove that it is hiding nothing with its peaceful nuclear program --
and the United
States and Europe are understandably skeptical. Back home, questions
have
arisen about the Brazilian leader's motivation for injecting himself
and his
country in such a daring initiative in the first place. It's certainly
not
about domestic politics; if anything, cozying up to Iran is losing Lula
points at
home.
Posted By Ashraf Zeitoon Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 10:20 AM
FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
(This is the first article of a series on
change in the Arab world)
There
seems to be a consensus among foreign policy commentators and experts following
the region that the Middle East is no place for optimists. However, a recent
survey of Arab youth finds that the region's largest demographic segment (where
200 million Arabs are under 25 years of age) are in fact optimistic about the future.
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