Qatar gift of $400m jet highlights list of business links to Donald Trump and his cronies

Concerns and criticisms rise as president's sons negotiate deals with Middle Eastern country that will directly enrich the family fortunes
The furore over Qatar possibly giving the US a $400m (€357m) Boeing jet for Donald Trump to use as a replacement for Air Force One has highlighted administration figures' thicket of concerning business connections to the country, as Trump prepares to visit the US ally during his Middle East tour this week.
Last month, the Trump Organization, run by Trump's sons Eric and Donald Jr, announced a deal with developers Dar Global and Qatari Diar to build a Trump International Golf Club featuring 18 holes and a series of Trump-branded luxury villas within a larger government development.

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The Irish Sun

5 hours ago

• The Irish Sun

Israel will keep bombing Iran's nuke sites even without Trump – we will finish the job, says Netanyahu's ex-adviser

ISRAEL will continue blitzing Iran's nuclear sites with or without the US joining strikes, Benjamin Netanyahu's ex-adviser says. It comes as Donald Trump has revealed he has opened a two-week window for talks as he mulls whether America will intervene in the conflict. Advertisement 9 Israel has already struck a number of nuclear targets in Iran Credit: AFP 9 Damage inflicted on Tel Aviv after a missile Credit: Getty 9 Netanyahu will push on with his bombing campaign with or without US help Credit: EPA 9 Iran and Israel have been trading missiles for over a week Credit: Getty Karoline Leavitt , said there is "a substantial chance of Iran in the near future ". Trump had previously tried to curb He gave Iran's regime 60 days to deadline that passed two days before Israel unleashed unprecedented strikes on Iran's nuke sites last Friday. Trump has this week been weighing whether to give the green light for the US to step in and deploy a 15-ton mega bunker buster bomb. Advertisement More on Israel America's intervention has repeatedly been touted by Trump, who warned Iran would suffer the "full strength and might" of his military. But Netanyahu's ex-adviser Nadav Shtrauchler - who told The Sun the Israeli PM was preparing to strike Iran alone days before he did - said the embattled nation is prepared to carry on without the US. He said: "Of course Israel can carry on. "I think it is going swifter here than people thought when they planned it. Advertisement Most read in The Sun Breaking Exclusive Breaking "So Israel can proceed and have many targets to go through." Strategic adviser Shtrauchler said he believes the conflict will end with an agreement being thrashed out - and said America's involvement could change the course of the conflict. How Trump COULD destroy Iran's prize nuclear bunker US participation would most likely involve strikes against Iran's underground Fordo uranium enrichment facility, considered to be out of reach to all but America's bunker-buster bombs. Shtrauchler added: "It's a different story with the US, both with the military and the geopolitical side. It's a big deal and will change things. Advertisement "It's going to end with an agreement if the regime does not fall, but it is too soon to know that. "So if the US decides against intervening you wil see more from the Israel side and at some point it will end with an agreement. "It will make an effect and will change the end result. "But for now we can see that Israel is working very well itself and we can proceed like this - not without the US support but without the US intervening." Advertisement It comes as Israel and Iran continue to trade heavy blows - with no sign of de-escalation in the weeklong battle. Israel's 'Churchill moment' by Katie Davis, Chief Foreign Reporter (Digital) BRITAIN will never be safe until Iran's nuclear scheme is wiped out, Israel's ambassador told The Sun. Tzipi Hotovely said Israel is facing its "Churchill moment" and doing the UK a "huge service" by She also rebuked The PM - who chaired an emergency Cobra meeting this week - has insisted that the UK wants to de-escalate the situation and resolve it through diplomacy. But Amb. Hotovely said Iran had its chance for diplomacy during Donald Trump's 60-day deadline to t And she warned the UK would never be safe until Iran loses any The diplomat said Israel is facing its "Churchill moment" as Netanyahu finds himself in a similar position as the British wartime leader did in 1940 - drawing the US into a war with its enemy. Speaking to The Sun at its headquarters in London, she said: "When they're calling for de-escalation, you need to understand that the only way to de-escalate the situation is by removing the threat. "As long as Iran will race faster to have its ballistic missile programme that can destroy cities in Israel, if we will let them continue with that, cities in the UK won't be safe." European and Iranian officials met yesterday in Geneva, and Trump has said he will allow two weeks for negotiations before deciding whether to strike the rogue nation. Iran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi made a condition for renewed talks a ceasefire, saying: "There is no room for negotiations with the U.S. until Israeli aggression stops." Talks later on Friday between Araghchi and officials from the EU ended without a breakthrough after four hours. Advertisement No date was set for the next round of talks, aimed at getting Iran back to the negotiating table with the US. Missiles continued to rain down in Iran and Israel as the talks were held on Friday in a scramble to de-escalate the conflict. Netanyahu has insisted Israel's military operation in Iran would continue for as long as it takes to eliminate the "existential threat" of Iran's nuclear program and arsenal of ballistic missiles. 9 Advertisement 9 Trump will decide within two weeks whether to join Israel's campaign Credit: Getty 9 Smoke pours from Iran's state broadcaster building following an Israeli attack Credit: Reuters 9 Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is refusing to back down Credit: AFP Israel's top general echoed the warning, saying the Israeli military was ready for a prolonged campaign. Advertisement Iran previously agreed to limit its uranium enrichment and allow international inspectors access to its nuclear sites under a 2015 deal. But after Trump pulled the US unilaterally out of the deal during his first term, Iran began enriching uranium up to 60 per cent a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90 per cent. Access was also restricted access to its nuclear facilities. Netanyahu signed off a plot to bomb Iran's nuke facilities last week - killing several of its top generals and nuclear scientists, and striking several nuclear facilities. Advertisement Iran has retaliated by firing 450 missiles and 1,000 drones at Israel, according to Israeli army estimates. Most have been shot down by Israel's multitiered air defenses, but at least 24 people in Israel have been killed and hundreds wounded. 9

Irish Examiner

5 hours ago

• Irish Examiner

America is showing us football in its final dictator form – we can't afford to look away

Should we give it a miss? Is it best to stay away from next summer's Trump-Infantino US World Cup? Depending on your politics the answer may be a resounding no or a bemused shrug. Some will see pure drive-by entertainment. Why would anyone want to boycott a month-long end-of-days Grand Soccer Parade staged by two of the world's most cinematic egomaniacs? But it is a question that has been asked, and will be asked a lot more in the next year. Those who intend to travel will need to answer it by action or omission. Would it be better for dissenting media and discomfited football fans to simply no-platform this event? The picture is at least clearer now. After a week of the new steroid-fed Club World Cup we know what this thing will feel like and who it will benefit. There is no mystery with these events now, no sense of politics lurking coyly out of sight. Under Gianni Infantino Fifa has become a kind of mobile propaganda agency for indulgent regimes, right out in front twirling its pompoms, hitching its leotard, twerking along at the front of the parade like an unholy Uncle Sam. So we had the grisly sight this week of Donald Trump not just borrowing football's light, but wrestling it on to his lap and ruffling its hair, burbling like a random hot-button word generator about women and trans people, while Juventus players gawped in the background. We have the spectacle of both club and international football hijacked as a personal vanity platform for Infantino, the dictator's fluffer, the man who sold the world not once but twice. Infantino's status as a wildly over-promoted administrator has always had an operatic quality. But there is something far more sinister in his political over-reach, out there nodding along at the latest Oval Office freak-off, helping to legitimise each divisive statement, each casual erasure of process. STAR POWER: Inter Miami's Lionel Messi reacts after scoring during the Club World Cup group A soccer match between Inter Miami and FC Porto in Atlanta, Thursday, June 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart) Nobody gave Fifa a mandate to behave like this. Its mission is to promote and regulate. And yet here it is acting as a commercial disruptor in its own sport and as a lickspittle to the powerful, disregarding the human rights fluff and political neutrality enshrined in its 'statutes', offering zero transparency or accountability. To date Infantino's only public interface in the US is a 'fireside chat', AKA approved PR interview, at the Dick's Sporting Goods stage in New York. There he is, up there on the Stage of Dick's, mouthing platitudes to pre-programmed questions, high on his own power supply, the newly acquired Gianni glow-up eyebrows arched in a patina of inauthenticity. They say celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. Take a look at what football can do to you. And so far this tournament has presented the full grotesquery in store. What is the Club World Cup like on the ground? Pretty much the same as it is on the screen given this event is invisible in physical form beyond the stadiums. The key takeaway is confirmation of the weirdly jackboot, cult-like nature of the Infantino-shaped universe. Even the optics are trying to tell you something, all black holes, hard surfaces, gold, power-flash. Why does Fifa have its own vast lighted branding on the pitch like a global super-corporation or a military dictatorship? What is the Club World Cup logo supposed to represent, with its weird angular lines, the void at its heart? An obscure Stalinist plug socket? Darth Vader's space fighter? Not to mention the bizarre obsession with that shapeless and indefinable trophy, present on the big screen in every ground in weird scrolling closeup, one minute a Sauron's eye, the next some kind of finger-snapping torture instrument, with its secret draws full of ectoplasm, a dead crow, the personal effects of Pol Pot. Mainly there is the very openly manipulative nature of the spectacle, football in its final dictator form, with a sense of utter disdain for its captive consumer-subjects. Yes, they will literally put up with anything if we pipe it into their smartphones. So here is beauty, love, colour, connection, the things you're hard-wired to respond to, cattle-prodded into your nervous system for the benefit of assorted interests. Here is football reimagined as a kind of mass online pornography. Fifa even calls its media website Fifahub. With all this in mind some have suggested a World Cup and US boycott is the correct and logical response, not least in two recent articles published in these pages. The organisation Human Rights Watch has carried a warning about the implications of staging the tournament under the Trump regime. Guardian readers and social media voices have asked the same question from all sides of discourse. The hostile versions of this: if you don't like it then just don't come, we don't want you anyway [expletives deleted]. If you were worried about us in Qatar, western imperialist, why are you going to the US? And from the liberal left a concern that to report on sport is also to condone a regime that sends deportation officers to games, imposes travel bans on Fifa members and is edging towards another remote war. THE COMPANY YOU KEEP: President Donald Trump signs a FIFA soccer ball as Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and FIFA President Gianni Infantino looks on at the Lusail Palace, Wednesday, May 14, 2025, in Doha, Qatar, as they marked the passing of World Cup hosting duties from Qatar, which held it in 2022, to the United States, which is hosting in 2026. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) And all the while marches football around in a headlock, snapping its underwear elastic, saying thanks, Gianni, for the distracting firework show. This is not a normal situation. So why normalise it? Why give it legitimising light and heat? And yet, one week into the World Cup's rehearsal dinner, the only logical response is: you just have to go. Not only would a boycott serve no practical purpose; it would be counterproductive, an act of compliance for a regime that will happily operate without an opposing voice on the stage. There are two structural reasons for this. And a third that relates to the United States itself, or at least to the idea of the United States, to its possibilities, which are not defined by Trump, by the latest military action, or by Infantino. Most obviously, if you leave the stage you abandon the argument to the other person. Dissent remains a useful commodity. However pointless, ineffective and landlocked the process of pointing out the flaws and contradictions may have become, it is necessary to keep doing so. Qatar 2022 was a dictator show that simply sailed above the criticisms. But someone, however minor, has to make them, to offer at least some kind of counter-view. No-platforming an autocrat's show makes no sense on a basic level. These people would prefer you weren't there in any case. Whereas in reality the people platforming and enabling Trump and Infantino are not journalists trying to give another version of events, but the people who keep voting them into power, friendly dictators, subservient football associations and client media who will be present whatever happens. Fifa and its Saudi-backed broadcast partner Dazn are glossing up an army of in-house influencers and content-wanglers to generate a wall of approving noise. Is it healthy if these are the only voices at the show? Shouting into a void may have little effect. But you still have to shout. Second, football does still have a value that steps outside the normal rules of show and spectacle. This is why it is coveted, courted and used like a weapon. Last week these pages carnied a logical, entirely legitimate wider view, written by two academics from City University New York, which concluded that a boycott was not just an option but 'necessary'. At the same time, the article defined the football World Cup as something that basically has no value, 'spectacles of recreation designed to distract people from their day-to-day lives, cultural and political branding opportunities for their hosts. For authoritarians, they have long been used as a tool to distract from or launder stains of human rights violations and corruption.' Which is definitely true. But it also reads like a vision of sport defined by the most joyless version of AI invented. Under this version of events no World Cup or Olympics would have taken place, because they are essentially worthless, home only to malevolent actors, lacking any notion of colour, human spirt, joy, art, beauty or connection. Who knows, maybe this is accurate now. It is undeniably true that the idea of football as a collective people's game is fairly absurd. Fans of football clubs struggle with this state of cognitive dissonance on a daily basis, the contrast of legacy identity and hard commercial reality. Liverpool are a community club owned by a US hedge fund. Manchester City see themselves as outsiders and underdogs, and are also owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family. Football is the enemy these days. But both sides of this are important, because without that emotional connection, without the act of faith that enables the warm, human part, everything becomes diminished, all our institutions toxic shells. To give up is to abandon sport for ever to the dictators and the sales people, to say, yeah, this just belongs to you now. No-platforming something that still means connection and culture and history. Are we ready for that yet? There will be another version of the present at some point. The final point is about the US, a deeply divided and unhappy place right now, and a much-derided host nation, not least by members of its own populace. What has it been like here? The evidence is that an actual World Cup is going to be very hard to negotiate, spread over vast spaces, with baffling travel times, unreliable infrastructure, and a 24-hour attention industry that is already busy gorging on every other spectacle available to the human race. The US has a reputation for peerless razzmatazz around public events. And while this is undeniably true with cultural spectacles it invented – rock'n'roll, presidential races, galactic shopping malls, enormous food, rural tornadoes, its own continental-scale sports – the US's version of other people's specialities, from cheese to professional football, can seem a little mannered. But the fact remains the actual games have been quite good. There has been a European-flavoured focus on tickets and empty seats. But 25,000 people on a weekday to watch Chelsea in an ill-defined game is decent evidence of willingness to stage this thing and develop the market. The dismay at 3,500 turning up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando overlooks the upside, the fact that 3,500 people actually turned up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando. Sundowns get 9,000-odd even at home. How many of their South African fans can afford to travel for this? Fifa, which uses its faux-benevolence cleverly, will point out an African team received $2m (£1.7m) for winning that game. Do we want to develop something or not? BUYING IN: Flamengo's Wallace Yan celebrates after scoring during the Club World Cup Group D soccer match between Flamengo and Chelsea in Philadelphia, Friday, June 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Derik Hamilton) A wider point is that football here is a game beloved of immigrant populations. There is a different kind of warmth, often among people without a platform or the means to make it to the matches so far. The waiter who adores Cristiano Ronaldo. The taxi driver who wants to talk for 40 minutes about Chelsea's wastefulness with academy players. The cop who loves the Colombian national team and is desperate for his son to see them in the flesh. As for the US itself, it still feels like false equivalence to state that this is now an actual dictatorship, a lost land, a place that doesn't deserve this show because of its flaws and structural violence. This has always been a pretty brutal nation, human life as a constant pressure wave, mainlining heat and light into your veins, but also always taking a bite. The opening week in Miami captured this feeling, football's most hungrily transactional event staged on a sunken green peninsula, a place where the sea seems to be punching holes in the land, but which is still constantly throbbing with life and warmth and beautiful things. There is a nostalgic attachment to the idea of the US for people of a certain age, 20th-century holdovers, brought up on its flaws and imperialism, but also its culture and brilliance. But for the visitor America does seem in a worse state than it did 20 years ago. There is an unhappiness, a more obvious underclass, a sense of neglected parts and surfaces. All the things that were supposed to be good – cars, plenitude, markets, voting, empowerment, civil rights, cultural unity, all the Cokes being good and all the Cokes being the same – seem to have gone bad. But this is also a democracy with an elected leader, albeit one with a lust for executive power and some sinister tendencies. Mainly the US seems to have a massive self-loathing problem. Perhaps you can say it is correct in this, that Trump is enacting actual harms. But Trump is also a symptom of that alienation and perceived decline. He's an algorithm-driven apparition. Say his name enough times and this cartoon will appear. America remains a great, messy, dangerous, flawed idea of a place. What else is the world currently offering? This is in any case where football will now live for the next year, an unquestioning supplicant in the form of its own autocratic leader. The game is not an indestructible product. It can be stretched thin and ruined by greed, is already at war with itself in many key places. It will at some point be necessary to pay the ferryman, even as the US is packed away a year from now and the sails set at Fifa House for all corners of the globe and then Saudi Arabia. However stormy the prospects, it is not quite the moment to abandon this ship for good. The Guardian

Irish Times

6 hours ago

• Irish Times

Pakistan says it will nominate Donald Trump for Nobel Peace Prize

The Pakistani government has said it will nominate US president Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize , a move that may have as much to do with annoying rival India as it does with building stronger ties to Washington. The recommendation is being made for Trump's 'decisive intervention and pivotal leadership during the recent India-Pakistan crisis', according to a social media post on Saturday by Pakistan's government. Trump's 'robust diplomatic engagement with both Islamabad and New Delhi' served to de-escalate 'a rapidly deteriorating situation, ultimately securing a ceasefire and averting a broader conflict', according to a separate statement from Pakistan's embassy in the US. The move is likely to irritate Indian officials, who were caught off guard when Trump announced the ceasefire in a conflict that erupted in April following a terrorist attack in Kashmir. India blamed the attack on Pakistan, which rejected the accusation, and the two sides' militaries skirmished in the aftermath. READ MORE Pakistan officials celebrated Trump's announcement, while officials in Indian prime minister Narendra Modi 's government seethed. India has rejected Trump's claims that US mediation or the prospects of a trade deal helped defuse tensions with Pakistan. Modi rebutted many of those claims directly in a call with Trump this week. But in saying it would nominate Trump – who met Pakistan's army chief Asim Munir this week – Islamabad has suggested it understands how to assuage the American president. Government of Pakistan Recommends President Donald J. Trump for 2026 Nobel Peace Prize The Government of Pakistan has decided to formally recommend President Donald J. Trump for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, in recognition of his decisive diplomatic intervention and pivotal… — Government of Pakistan (@GovtofPakistan) Trump has long grumbled about the fact that his first-term predecessor, Barack Obama , won the Nobel Prize in 2009 – a controversial decision that came before Obama surged US troops in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, Trump has repeatedly said over the years that it's an accolade he, too, deserves. During a speech last year, Trump said: 'If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel Prize given to me in 10 seconds'. The American leader was back at it late Friday, issuing a lengthy post saying he merited the award – which recipients typically don't lobby for – for easing tensions between Serbia and Kosovo, keeping the peace between Egypt and Ethiopia and getting some Middle East countries to establish relations with Israel. Then he said it didn't necessarily matter if he won the prize because 'the people know and that's all that matters to me!'. – Bloomberg