 Hello and welcome to daily debrief brought to you by People's Dispatch, I am Pragya. Today we bring an update from Qatar where the FIFA Cup begins on Sunday amid a new controversy, this time over beer. We discussed the latest at Twitter where things are even more topsy-turvy than last week and finally the epic meeting of economic leaders has concluded. We discussed the key takeaways, especially what countries said about existing tensions. Stay with us All eyes are on Qatar, which prepared for a decade to host the games on the eve of the region's first FIFA World Cup. Qatar plays Ecuador on Sunday evening and after an opening ceremony that is expected to be quite grand. Defending champions France have also arrived in Qatar at what is also the most expensive World Cup amid many other firsts. We have news click Siddhantaane in Qatar at the games venue and here's his update. Siddhanta thanks for joining us from Ground Zero. What's the scenario like? Looks like beer is knocking out human rights for a moment here. Yeah it took actually this last minute U-turn by the Supreme Committee that is deciding on things for the Qadari government, however you look at it, where they said earlier that beer would be available, alcoholic beer would be available in stadiums for fans to consume in the 90 minutes of football that they are coming to watch and they made a last minute sort of U-turn on that which sparked off obviously concerns of some kind of commercial or contract based backlash from their partners who are supplying the beer but apart from that finally the western world has a different headline to go with which is that oh beer will not be available in stadiums. So I suppose that's another in that sense not meaning to sort of trivialize the situation but it's a different kind of human rights violation that these football fans are essentially talking about. It's not that beer is not available in the country, it's available outside stadiums at fans venues at bars etc etc but I think the the logic is that for those 90 minutes that you're in the venue you will not be able to consume alcohol and somehow that's the biggest story that is coming out of the World Cup at least for today. As of tomorrow of course things will kick off in terms of the actual football so the focus will probably slightly shift away from the narrative that has been building so far and I think we'll of course touch on that a little bit but mostly yeah the focus is shifting to the football. I think fans are coming in the airport here in Doha was super busy last night when I got in I think most of the world's media has descended already and is starting to sort of get into the flow of covering the event and finding obviously whatever storylines they might be able to. The host country's performance has actually the best hope for any Asian team at this tournament in some ways because of the preparation that they put into it going back to 2010 when they were awarded the World Cup, setting up of the Aspire Academy and you know sort of taking this whole generation of athletes to the culmination point which is this World Cup. We get to see that in Asia versus South America kind of opening match tomorrow evening so yeah essentially everyone's now looking forward to that and you know sort of starting to get into the football side of things more than all the other conversations that have been happening so far. Yeah talk about those conversations as well Siddhant like just to bring our viewers up to speed with what has been capturing the headlines so far. Right I mean as we've touched on a couple of times before on daily TV fan of course elsewhere on People's Dispatch as well as Newsclick. There has been from 2015 onwards when the investigations were launched by the United States based an FBI investigation was essentially launched into corruption in the FIFA structure. Much of it was focused on why Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022 were awarded the World Cup. What was the process that went on and of course all of the bribery corruption etc etc that has that is very much part of the heritage of FIFA I think as as an organization. So in my mind it has less to do with Qatar as a host nation and more to do with the organization that is FIFA and what that represents and how from maybe 1978 onwards when Jav Havelans took over as president of FIFA and sort of made crucial capitalist mega cooperation the shift started back then and with that money coming into the system before that FIFA was essentially like the BCCI was before the IPL started you know which is a board that controls the sport but has their little money in the bank unnecessarily right so once the money started coming in all of the people who run the sport thought that they could make the same kind of wealth that perhaps athletes get and you know people in that position get so essentially that's where the story of the corruption sort of began and it comes into of course today because of other reasons somehow that core element has been forgotten the questioning of FIFA and its structure how the politics of FIFA happens and how these tournaments are not only awarded but also then how they are executed on the ground that questioning has reduced to a great extent and it's become about particularly from western media point of view it's become about picking on you know countries that are not like us and and tacking on those issues not that the issues don't exist of course the fact of the matter is that over six and a half thousand officially recognized six and a half thousand workers have died in construction projects in the country from the time that the world cup was awarded to Qatar that is undeniable and compensation and those processes need to happen but to make that the sole sort of focal point of the entire story like oh are we really doing this you know is Qatar 2022 really happening that unfortunately has kind of dominated and taken away from actually I think what some of the core issues are thanks for joining us and we I'm sure we'd be catching up with you pretty regularly now that you're there yeah hopefully uh yeah justify also my trip on not all the way but yeah Twitter hasn't belonged to space billionaire Elon Musk for a month but there have been plenty of meltdowns in that much time the company has unveiled a new policy for hate speech on the platform and it has sacked around half its employees over the last three weeks meanwhile Twitter employees are said to be quitting by the hundreds as Musk also apparently wants them to work hardcore which means longer hours Prasanth from people's dispatch is here to talk about what all of this means right Prasanth so Prasanth a complete meltdown at Twitter one meltdown after the other can you tell us what's going on right so I mean to answer this question you would have to draw a time barrier so the question really is what is happening this week as opposed to what happened last week which is an entire story on its own so again a lot happening on one hand we do know that uh Elon Musk who's bought Twitter less than a month ago uh and already fired more than half its staff sent out a mail saying that you know he wanted people to be hardcore you know people had to commit to huge long working hours and otherwise they could take a severance pay etc whatever which means a lot more employees quit again so now there's no real estimate of how many employees actually still remain in the company and of course it's not uncommon for a large number of people to leave a company but in less than one month when over 50% and definitely now more of your workforce quits real questions arise about whether you know this entity is even sustainable it's true for any company it's all the more true for such a public facing company like Twitter where you know there are obviously constant attempts people might be constantly attempting to attack the site etc etc whatever so obviously there's a lot of speculation about whether Twitter will be even able to survive because whether it's core core functionalities there are enough people to run those core functionalities etc etc we don't really have an answer to those questions we have to wait and see on the other hand uh Elon Musk has brought back some of the accounts that were suspended now he's launched a poll to decide if Donald Trump should come back to Twitter which is you know quite a controversial move since Trump had used Twitter to hate Monger for many many years it played a huge role in fact in his coming to power in 2016 as well so what we're seeing is it's a bit like the wild west right now out there on twitter in terms of you know people being people worrying about whether the platform will survive at all people you know recommending moving on to new platforms just mastered in uh downloading your data and you know etc and moving on many people quitting the platform saying that they do not want to be in this new in this new era 2.0 twitter 2.0 etc etc lot of media commentary that's what we're doing as well but it's been in some sense is very interesting to see uh you know the this kind of a meltdown live i don't think we've rarely seen a company of this size a company of uh a platform which has uh this relevance across the world i mean of course millions of people don't billions of people don't use twitter it's not even one of the biggest social media platforms but it has an outsized influence as compared to its user base because the fact that the influential people are on twitter policy makers are on twitter celebrities are on twitter academics and twitter journalists so it has a you know uh huge uh it has a uh it has a relevance that sometimes uh you know goes beyond the sheer number of users on twitter which is only about uh 400 million or so as opposed to some of the bigger social media giants whose membership is in billions right so which is why i think people are watching with a huge amount of interest as to what happens now uh it's still uh right now it's still very very early to say because it does look like there is complete chaos uh going around a lot of employees who have left to talk about the fact that key teams have been gutted like i said right that through through resignations or through dismissals which means that many questions are being asked about the platform again many questions are being asked about what are the new kinds of policies that are going to come into place moderation policies content policies all of that very very uncertain right now so uh you know at uh depending on where you're standing in the political spectrum depending on where you're standing in the spectrum analysis for better or for worse uh you know the the one extreme case scenario is that you know twitter might go go to the very verge of collapse right and uh this is two meanings i mean technically it may still stand i mean i'm not saying that the site is going to go down completely or whatever but it might suffer such a huge credibility blow that a large number of its advertisers might permanently decide might permanently rethink whether they want to sort of continue uh advertising on twitter which will hit its revenue we know that 90 percent of twitter's revenue comes via ads so the key question for Elon Musk really is that can he pull the company back from the brink in terms of actually uh in a company like twitter continuity and steadiness are often what matter more than what really matter because that is what gives advertisers the confidence to keep advertising if your platform is completely chaotic if your platform is increasingly gaining the impression of an unsafe place of a completely anarchic and chaotic place advertisers will be more reluctant to actually spend on a platform like that so very uh interesting developments okay prashant thanks a lot for joining us for that the apex meeting of economic leaders concluded on saturday in bangkok thailand countries focused on the need for peace and ending war and tensions between world powers especially conflicts beyond the pacific region before the action wound down apic managed to raise some contentious issues but without raising hackles china was at the center of attention again like at the g20 that also ended this week climate change featured prominently among economic cooperation talks but how seriously do the countries take the concerns that they raised we spoke to anish from people's dispatch anish so an important summit concludes there seem to be a lot of these kind of summits which are held between various parties uh can you the g20 just concluded as well can you sort of compare and contrast what this one meant well uh to begin with in many ways it is uh sort of a continuation of what happened with g20 and also recent summits which which may not include the same kind of people but obviously the same countries where the talking points on every news media uh in the current case we saw china being the focus again uh but in a different uh in a different context uh but it wasn't as uh there was no rabble rousing there was no confrontation there was no uh you know attempt to one-up man there was no one-upmanship in either of the parties that were involved there were obviously uh what good very very good thing that happened was bilateral talks continued uh between different countries especially ones that have already strained relations especially when we consider the fact that china and the more pro-us allies in the summer among the summit partners have quite a strained relationship of the past few years over various issues uh has uh are now uh coming together talking you know coming back to the table negotiating talking about issues that they think are important and trying to find out ways for cooperation obviously shijin pings uh message uh speech at the summit is also noteworthy emphasized uh peace in the region in the asia pacific region as crucial for uh for stability and growth and prosperity of the region obviously that makes a whole lot of sense when we consider the fact that this is one of the least uh conflict prone region in for the past several decades now uh this is a vietnam war there hasn't been a major conflict involving multiple parties for a very long time obviously tensions are are high we are already talking about missile launches among between certain countries and that also figured within the summit with some of them actually making unilateral statements at the time but in the end of the matter the the the focus was often to bring in talks back at the table rather than just making statements against uh your competitors or another country and that is obviously crucial at a time like this right and each now many of these summits do actually boil down to what happens at the bilaterals can you go into some details of the important ones yeah so obviously two uh significant ones this time and the the side that happened in the sidelines of the summit was the talks between new Zealand and china and the talks between china and philippines obviously again these two countries are having confrontations on various fronts uh in the case of philippines there are more immediate confrontations obviously there are territorial disputes there are territorial water disputes there is an entire dispute that involves a multilateral uh you know conflict in the region which is the south china sea and so uh the meetings are crucial the heads of governments are talking uh coming together and talking about uh crucial matters is important uh there is uh unlike what we saw in g20 where at least one country had a sort of a spat with china uh in this case there wasn't any such thing uh china did again re-emphasize the no cold new no new cold war uh talking about which is important uh considering the fact that we're talking about uh major global powers facing off each other on the trade uh front which often at the time when we are looking at spiraling cost living crisis and you know supply shortages these aspects do become important thai one was something that obviously came in in some of the talks uh but it wasn't as uh it did not attract the sort of hostility that we saw in previous summits and uh that is a good news as well uh considering the fact that uh one of the flare ups uh of tensions in the regions was thai one and the question about uh the sovereign rights over thai one uh with the uh considering china and uh and obviously uh there was a short chat that we saw between uh us and china with kamala harris vice president kamala harris uh meeting shijun pink um but uh it wasn't as substantial as obviously the joe biden meeting that happened last week uh where obviously significant progress was made uh there was also an in mold on the multilateral front obviously bilaterals are definitely the most important but in the multilateral front uh climate change is becoming in as an issue the talk about uh maintaining peace and prosperity in the region was something that was echoed by other uh partners of the summit which was not just china but also thailand and philippines and other nations in the region who are more concerned about uh being uh you know being made to pick a side in uh any kind of tensions and uh losing a whole host of the advantage that they gained over the past several decades through trade and commerce uh and obviously that is something that concerns a whole lot of smaller nations that do not have the same kind of club that the us of china has and obviously who had to face a lot more uh in the trade wars and all the diplomatic tensions so obviously again the at the end of the at the end results we're still uh we need to look at the long-term plans and how uh you know outcomes of these talks materialized but it is definitely a step ahead and and something that can that we can be if not hopeful but uh something that we can keep an eye out for maybe some good news in coming months right anish thanks for joining us with that update and that's all we have for today thank you for watching daily debrief to come back to us next week you can find more such 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