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President Trump deserves an orange card for his red card corruption of FIFA and the game of soccer. When I played and coached a number of sports, one of the fundamental values was the umpires
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The American Library Association annual conference in Chicago this year was for the first time addressed by a non-American, and this fell to Sharjah Book Authority (SBA) CEO Ahmed Bin Rakkad Al Ameri.The privilege was
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When years ago, I was in Baghdad attending a conference on Palestine, I met a short and rather square Russian woman, wearing four rows of medals on her ample chest. She asked me where I
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With the UK now facing its third major heatwave of the year just weeks into summer, the sweltering temperatures of people’s homes and buckling public transport, have laid bare just how badly adapted the country
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The month of June 2026 has become lethal and harsh for European countries, as reports stated that France, the Netherlands, and Belgium recorded 3,700 excess deaths during the June heatwave that sent temperatures soaring across
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There is a particular cruelty reserved for the very greatest. The higher a star climbs, the more relentlessly the world seems determined to watch it fall — and few have understood this arithmetic more intimately than Cristiano Ronaldo. On the eve of what will be his final World Cup last-16 tie, a 41-year-old at the twilight of an extraordinary career chose not to plead for kindness but to hold up a mirror to those who have spent a generation waiting for him to stumble. “You have been trying to kill me for the past 23 years,” he told reporters in Texas, “but you must have seen that is not worth it, it’s a waste of time, but you try and try and try and try and try.” It is a remarkable sentence, and not only for its defiance. It is an indictment of an age in which scrutiny has curdled into something closer to bloodsport, where the appetite for pulling down what was once lauded has become a spectacle in its own right. Ronaldo did not pretend to be what he no longer is. “I am not the player I used to be,” he conceded — an admission that costs a proud man a great deal, and one that many of his critics would never grant themselves. Yet honesty about decline is treated, in the modern coliseum, not as grace but as an opening. The wounded lion draws the crowd. That he could add, in the same breath, “I am not doing too bad” — three goals into the tournament — speaks to a resilience that the daily churn of judgement rarely pauses to acknowledge. What is striking is how early the hunt began. “It’s been like this since I was 18,” he observed, “it is not going to change.” Here is the quiet tragedy beneath the glamour: the celebrated are never permitted an ordinary reckoning with time. Every ageing athlete, every fading performer, must conduct their decline in public, narrated by voices that profit from the drama of the descent. The question of when he will stop — asked again and again — he answered with weary precision: “(I will stop) when I choose, not when you choose.” There is wisdom in his refusal to be diminished by any single result. “I am not going to be more Cristiano Ronaldo or less because I win the World Cup,” he said, and in that line lies a rebuke to a media culture that measures a life’s worth by its final headline. “Age gives you maturity and experience to see how relative things can be.” One suspects his younger self could not have said it. Most disarming of all was his gratitude. “I even say thanks for the attacks I feel after I turned 40,” he offered. “The criticism is how you grow, so thank you for doing this.” It would be easy to read this as sarcasm; it is more generous, and more damning, to take it at face value. He has metabolised a lifetime of hostility into fuel, and in doing so exposes the futility of the enterprise ranged against him. The lesson is not that scrutiny should cease — accountability is the price of the platform. It is that we might learn to distinguish scrutiny from cruelty, and to remember that behind the caricature stands a person. Whatever unfolds against Spain, Ronaldo said he will leave “with a clear conscience.” His pursuers should ask whether they can say the same.
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When the history of this year’s Gulf war is written, a podcast recorded in Doha may prove one of its more revealing primary sources. In a rare interview on the CIRS Long View, the podcast of Georgetown University in Qatar’s Center for International and Regional Studies, conducted by the university’s Maryam Daud recently, Pakistan’s ambassador to Qatar, Muhammad Aamer, offered the fullest account yet from a serving Pakistani diplomat of how Islamabad manoeuvred two implacable adversaries — the United States and Iran — into the same room for the first time since 1979. The conversation catches Pakistani diplomacy at the moment of its vindication, and the ambassador in a mood both expansive and studiedly prudent. The first puzzle put to him is the one that has exercised chancelleries everywhere: how did a country that exchanged missile strikes with Iran in 2024 become, two years later, the venue of which Tehran’s envoy could say, “We will negotiate nowhere else but Islamabad”? Ambassador Aamer’s answer was a deliberate widening of the lens. Pakistan’s position, he insisted, “is not a one-off thing which just propped up because of the circumstances”. He invoked geography, a 900-kilometre shared border, cultural affinity and — pointedly — “the power structure of Pakistan, being a nuclear state”. As for the 2024 turbulence: “We sat down, we ironed out the differences, and we moved forward from that. We came out of that difficult situation very amicably and with a lot of trust developed at the end.” The connoisseur will notice what is being done here. The 2024 clash is recast not as a liability but as a credential — proof that Pakistan and Iran possess a functioning machinery for de-escalation. In the grammar of mediation, having survived a crisis with one of the parties is worth more than never having quarrelled at all. Equally instructive was the ambassador’s treatment of the vacuum question. When pressed on whether Pakistan rose because the conventional mediators were caught in the crossfire or sidelined, he was gracious but unambiguous. Qatar, he said, is “a powerhouse of mediation and negotiations”, yet “the situation became such that Pakistan had to come in. Pakistan had to fill the vacuum.” Reading between the lines, the admission is significant: when Iranian strikes reached Gulf infrastructure, the region’s brokers became stakeholders in the war itself. Mediation migrated to the nearest credible actor standing just outside the blast radius — a nuclear-armed neighbour with equities on every side but wounds on none. The Pakistani envoy recalled the early 1970s, when “it was Pakistan which brought both the countries together” and an American president (Richard Nixon) “flew from Pakistan to China”. The analogy is not idle. Then as now, Pakistan’s utility lay precisely in the richness of its portfolio — a defence pact with Saudi Arabia, “people-to-people contact” and “cultural affinities” with Iran, security ties with Washington dating to the 1950s. “Diplomacy,” he observed, “is the game of maintaining balance and walking on the tightrope successfully.” On the mechanics of the talks themselves — three rounds, 21 hours, delegations facing each other across a table in April — the ambassador declined the invitation to storytell, and in declining delivered the interview’s most quotable arithmetic. “You mentioned about 21 hours, but you don’t know how many hours went in before that particular event,” he said, estimating “2,100 hours — maybe before that, and many more hours after that — which did not let the process die down.” What the visible hours produced, in his telling, was almost physical in its symbolism: the two sides “entered the same room, sat at the same table, looked eye to eye with each other, and even shook hands after decades.” His defence of the process against the charge of failure was equally deft. “I think negotiations never failed. I think the expectations of the people — and especially the detractors — they failed.” A conflict “rooted in history” and “layered” with technicalities was never going to be resolved “in one sitting... in a theoretical exercise, in a classroom”. Here he deployed Churchill: “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” The line is doing real work. It reframes the metric of success from outcomes to contact — and by that metric, April 2026 was already historic before a word of the Accord was drafted. Perhaps, the most analytically interesting stretch concerned what one might call the political economy of the memorandum. A contrast was drawn with the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and the US, UK, France, Russia, China, plus Germany, along with the EU) — a Western-led instrument backed by sanctions and the implicit threat of punishment. The Islamabad Memorandum, by comparison, is the product of a mediator with no coercive leverage whatsoever — and Ambassador Aamer embraced the distinction as a philosophy. “Why not mediate with sincerity? Why not mediate with frankness?... And why not mediate without getting any benefit out of this?” Diplomacy of equals, in other words, offered as a structural alternative to diplomacy of compulsion. Whether goodwill can substitute for enforcement over the long haul is the memorandum’s great untested proposition; but as an origin story, it is a genuine departure from the region’s recent treaty-making. The ambassador was careful, too, not to let the rise of the so-called Middle East Quadrilateral — Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye — whose foreign ministers have met in Riyadh, Islamabad and Antalya in a relatively short span of time — be read as an obituary for multilateralism. Regional powers stepped in, he argued, because “the regional stakes were important” and they acted “in proximity” and “indigenously”, but “it doesn’t mean that multilateralism has finished”. He reached for the famous consolation offered by Swedish diplomat and economist Dag Hammarskjöld, who served as the second Secretary-General of the world body: the United Nations “is not created to take mankind to heaven; it has been created to save us from hell”. It was a shrewd hedge — claiming the middle-power moment while keeping Pakistan’s UN credentials, including its own resolution on mediation, firmly in view. Nor did the ambassador flinch from the question of self-interest. With millions of Pakistanis in the Gulf and heavy energy dependence on the region, Pakistan’s stake in de-escalation is existential as much as ethical. He converted the point into a closing flourish: “If you say our skin is into it — well, not only our skin; our mind and heart are also into it. And that’s why we are successful.” His parting counsel to Washington and Tehran was that of a professional wearied by performative statecraft: open direct channels “rather than depending on somebody else, rather than using social media only for communication”, because diplomacy “needs a lot of thought before uttering even a single word”. The Islamabad Accord will be judged by whether it holds. But this interview already establishes something durable: a doctrine of mediation — patient, unglamorous, uncoerced — articulated from Doha by the ambassador of the country that made the handshake possible. Scan the QR code to watch/listen to the episode:https://youtu.be/4-zTjl9A7Hc?si=KoLH9DPhAgmP3OOL The writer is Deputy Managing Editor, Gulf Times
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Qatar has long been defined by what rises above the waterline — the towers of Doha, the sweep of the Corniche, the ambition written into stadiums, museums and a national carrier that carries the country’s name to every continent. Yet the discovery of a new dive site some three kilometres south of GMC Reef is a quiet reminder that this country’s most compelling story may lie not only in the heights it has built, but in the depths it has scarcely begun to explore. There is something fitting in that. A nation that has spent a generation projecting itself confidently onto the world stage now finds fresh promise by looking downward — into the calm waters of the Arabian Gulf, where shipwrecks, coral reefs and some of the sea’s most magnificent creatures have been waiting, largely unseen, all along. The case made by diving ambassador Khaled Zaki in our story published Sunday is persuasive precisely because it is unhurried. Diving, he reminds us, is far more than a recreational sport. It is an adventure, an education and a gateway to understanding the marine environment — and ourselves a little better. Qatar’s underwater portfolio is already richer than many residents realise: GMC Reef, the newly developed Club Reef, the Barj Wreck at some 20 metres, the Inland Sea site, the QAFCO Reef Balls. And then the great visitors — the seasonal aggregations of whale sharks, among the largest anywhere on earth, alongside dugongs, turtles and dolphins. These are living evidence of an ecological inheritance Qatar has every reason to cherish and every obligation to protect. There is a practical hurdle. Too few sites are reachable from the shore; most require a boat, and with that come cost and inconvenience that keep many would-be divers on dry land. Expanding shore-accessible sites would open the sport to schools, families and curious first-timers. The treasures beneath these waters, as Zaki puts it, are waiting to be explored. Qatar has the ingredients, the resolve and the responsibility to explore them well.
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US Vice President JD Vance. (Reuters) Empires do not fall in a single hour. They erode in polling booths, in parliamentary chambers, and on the killing grounds where the wrong lesson was drawn too late. The State of Israel, whose founders promised their people a “villa in the jungle is now confronting what that metaphor always concealed: the jungle never agreed to its terms. A new Quinnipiac University poll conducted June 18–22, 2026, among 1,165 registered voters, finds that 48% of Americans now consider their government “too supportive” of Israel. This is the highest figure since the pollster first posed that question in 2017. Among Democrats, the number swells to 66%. Even more corrosive to Tel Aviv’s political calculus: only 20% of respondents hold a favourable view of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, compared with 48% who hold an unfavourable view. The Quinnipiac analyst Tim Malloy rendered his assessment with clinical precision: “Netanyahu gets poor marks from American voters as their appetite for supporting Israel wanes.” “After months of diplomatic fits and starts, global economic repercussions and a broad loss of life in the region, a majority of voters make their feelings clear: the Iran war was a bad idea.” — Tim Malloy, Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst The MOU signed on June 17 between Washington and Tehran has been the proximate trigger of Israel’s political panic, but the deeper wound is structural. Sixty percent of American voters now judge that military action against Iran was “not worth it.” The arithmetic is merciless and an eye-opener. Israel prosecuted a war it could not win without American blood and treasure, and the American public has rendered its verdict. On the battlefield, the verdict is no less damning. In southern Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces are being bled, not by ballistic missiles or armor, but by a $300 drone. These drones are assembled in a workshop from Chinese components and 3D-printed parts, guided by a fiber-optic cable no thicker than dental floss. Hezbollah’s FPV drone campaign, which began in earnest after its second war with Israel erupted in March 2026, has exposed the most consequential gap in Israeli military doctrine since the anti-tank missiles of 1973. The Alma Research and Education Center acknowledged in a classified-grade public assessment that the operational deficit is “not limited to technology but to doctrine, procurement, and the Israeli defence establishment’s risk perception.” The fiber-optic tether makes these drones immune to Israel’s dual counter-drone defenses of electronic warfare and spectral jamming, exposing a critical gap in their architecture that Hezbollah is now exploiting. Hezbollah operators, some stationed within the occupied villages themselves, release footage with serene regularity: Merkava tanks, Namer armoured personnel carriers, logistics routes — all struck, all publicised, all corrosive to the mythology of IDF invincibility. A single asymmetric calculus haunts every Israeli commander in the south: a $300–$400 drone kills a soldier, grounds a battalion’s manoeuvre space, and wins a news cycle. “The operational gap between Hezbollah and the IDF in the small drone arena is the most significant gap that has opened in the current campaign.” — Alma Research and Education Center Those who comfort themselves with the notion that Netanyahu’s removal will alter the fundamental trajectory mistake the figurehead for the system. The core pathology is not one man’s political survival; it is what the political theorist Norman Finkelstein once called the “iron wall” logic — the conviction, inherited from Ze’ev Jabotinsky and codified through Moshe Dayan’s dictum that security demands “permanent superiority of force,” which any successor will be bound to maintain. Naftali Bennett has publicly faulted Netanyahu for insufficient aggression against Iran. Benny Gantz commanded the 2014 assault on Gaza. Gavi Ashkenazi authored the Dahiya Doctrine of deliberate disproportionality. The ideology does not change when the face does. Inside the Republican Party, the MOU has ignited ideological combustion of a kind not seen since the neoconservative ascendancy of the early 2000s. Vice President JD Vance, mobilising a conservative anti-war coalition, is actively selling the deal as a matter of strategic sanity. Vance’s message to Israeli officials was blunt: “If I were in the Cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.” It is the kind of public rebuke that, once delivered, cannot be undelivered. The alliance is being renegotiated in real time, and Israel is not at the table. The foundational promise of Zionism — articulated by Theodor Herzl as a “rampart of civilisation against barbarism” and operationalised by successive governments as an impregnable sanctuary has not been delivered. The Iron Dome has prevented Iranian ballistic missiles from striking Israeli cities. Security, it turns out, is not a product of military supremacy alone. It requires political legitimacy, strategic restraint, and an enemy that has reason to stop fighting. Israel has cultivated none of these conditions. What remains is the arithmetic of exhaustion. A state that has mobilised its entire society for permanent war, that has burned its relationships with the European centre-left, that now generates majority disapproval inside its principal patron’s electorate, is not winning. It is spending. And the account, as every serious strategist from Clausewitz to Kissinger understood, must eventually be rendered. The fortress, as presently conceived, has failed. What replaces it is the only question that matters — and Israel’s current political class has not begun to ask it. The writer is a prominent news anchor, programme presenter and media instructor.
