Plans for a super-rich world club tournament in Qatar
A computer image of the 'Al Wakra' stadium to be built in Doha, Qatar, for the 2022 World Cup. Credit: ABACA
The Qatari royal family is to offer hundreds of millions of euros to Europe's top football clubs to persuade them to join a biennial 24-team tournament in the Gulf, The Times reports.
The report says plans for the 'Dream Football League' (DFL) will be released in April in an attempt to rival UEFA's Champions League and FIFA's Club World Cup.
Elite clubs would be offered around £175m to participate - in contrast, Chelsea were awarded £47.3m for winning the Champions League last season.
The Times said UEFA and the Premier League declined to comment on the proposals and the European Club Association did not respond to enquiries.
Delegates agree to extend Kyoto at Doha climate summit
Delegates from almost 200 nations have agreed to extend the Kyoto Protocol at UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar.
The first commitment period under the protocol, which commits industrialised countries to reducing their carbon emissions, expires this year.
The extension will cover the interim period between the first commitment period expiring and a new international emissions treaty due to come into force in 2020.
SFO launch Barclays probe into bank's dealings with Qatar
Barclays has revealed that the Serious Fraud Office has launched an investigation into payments made between the bank and Qatar at the height of the financial crisis.
Barclays has revealed the SFO has launched an investigation into the bank. Credit: Press Association
The bank said last month that the matter was being investigated by the Financial Services Authority but revealed today that the SFO has launched its own probe.
The organisation is understood to be looking at whether disclosure of payments to advisers was sufficient when it raised more than £5 billion of emergency capital from Middle Eastern investors in 2008.
Qatar's first female track athlete drops out of Olympics
One of the first women ever to compete for Qatar in the Olymic Games, Noor Hussain Al-Malki, has dropped out of the 100m sprint with a hamstring injury.
Mother grieves triplets who were 'her whole world'
The triplets' parents, Jane and Martin Weekes, had been in Qatar for the past five years. They returned to Wellington to give birth to the triplets after they were conceived using IVF.
According to TVNZ, Jane won a 'Best Mum in Doha' competition for her effort raising the triplets. She had commented: "A mother's love is not divided amongst her children, but multiplied by each child."
On her profile page on the parenting website BabyCenter.com, Jane said she was at her happiest when her children sat around "laughing like loons at each other".
Children killed in Doha mall blaze were trapped in the nursery
Qatar's Interior Ministry has reported that the 13 children killed in a fire at a shopping mall in the capital city of Doha, were trapped inside of a nursery in the complex. In a press conference this evening the Ministry said:
At 11.34 am, the concerned agency in the Ministry received another call about trapping of about 20 children in a nursery inside the mall, where the fire was broken out and immediately the civil defense team started evacuation process, focusing on the rescue of the children as much as possible [...]
Due to the dense smoke and high temperature inside the mall, the firefighters faced difficulty in accessing to the nursery.
Fire fighters accessed the place of children through the ceiling of the mall and rescue personnel spent great and painstaking efforts in order to save the children and staffers trapped in the nursery, as a result, two men from the Civil Defense were martyred while they were carrying out their noble mission.
2 firefighters die in Doha mall fire, says Qatar's Interior Ministry
Qatar's Interior Ministry have reported on their Twitter account that two firefighters have died in their effort to rescue children trapped in a fire today at a Doha shopping complex.
The Ministry said that they were only alerted later that children were trapped inside and firefighter then had to go in through the ceiling.
