Who actually gets to go to the World Cup? With US President Donald Trump’s strict immigration policies, some fans may never make it past the American border. Because while teams qualify on merit, passports don’t. Al Jazeera’s Samantha Johnson explains.
Published On 3 May 20263 May 2026
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China currently boasts one of the lowest rates of homicide, violent crime, and gun and explosive incidents globally. The Chinese-style sense of security is a comprehensive system integrating advanced technology, community engagement, and continuous improvement in living standards. This has positioned China as one of the safest countries in the world, according to the 2025 Global Security Report, with 98.2% of Chinese citizens feeling safe by 2025, further solidifying its status as a globally stable destination. The pillars of this Chinese-style sense of security are built upon advanced digital technologies, relying on smart networks and modern surveillance systems such as facial recognition and artificial intelligence to enhance the security network within China.
The phrase “Chinese-style security” refers to China’s model for achieving social stability and reducing crime rates. This model is based primarily on three pillars: proactive prevention systems, where, rather than simply addressing crime after it occurs, China focuses on prevention and control through extensive security networks and a constant police presence in key areas; the continuation of the community mobilization system (the Fengqiao model), a historical concept (currently revived) that involves citizens and local committees in resolving community disputes before they escalate into crimes or legal cases, thus promoting the idea of self-regulation and public cooperation with Chinese authorities; and the use of digitalization and artificial intelligence technologies, where China has heavily invested in smart city technologies and the Skynet system. Skynet utilizes millions of cameras equipped with facial recognition and big data analytics to predict suspicious activities and track wanted individuals with high precision. This combination aims to create a secure environment that supports economic growth within China, despite the occasional international debates it sparks regarding the balance between public security and individual privacy.
Data and reports confirm exceptional social stability in China, with citizens’ sense of security exceeding 98% for six consecutive years. This security is attributed to effective governance, advanced digital technologies, and a high standard of living, making China a safe destination for investment and a source of stability. Key features of Chinese governance and the sense of security include increased levels of trust and optimism, with the Chinese people ranking among the world’s highest in trust in the government and optimism about the future, according to trust index reports. A robust safety net exists, built on Chinese-style security through crime prevention systems, community mobilization, and enhanced digitalization. These systemic features, along with numerous other advantages, reflect the stability within China and the state’s ability to fulfill its commitments and provide a safe and stable social environment, earning international praise, particularly in light of global geopolitical conflicts. With the continuation of Chinese-style modernization, ongoing modernization has contributed to raising living standards, thus strengthening the sense of security within China.
Accordingly, the Chinese government and the authorities of the ruling Communist Party of China support several pillars and points that support this approach to enhance the sense of security within the country. Based on current developments, focusing on security as the foundation for development in China, the stability of the situation in China is seen as a key element in boosting investor confidence and building a safe and stable living environment for citizens, which contributes to economic growth. With the intensification of the Chinese-style modernization model, modernization in China is not limited to economic growth but also focuses on improving the quality of life, providing employment opportunities, and upgrading social services, which significantly raises living standards. With the stable sense of security, China, through well-considered social policies, has succeeded in maintaining a high level of social security, which enhances public trust in the government and contributes to long-term stability. This has resulted in continued international praise (amidst crises). At a time when several regions around the world are experiencing geopolitical conflicts, China’s stability stands out as a model attracting the attention and scrutiny of international observers, particularly due to the Chinese state’s ability to effectively manage its internal affairs compared to many systems worldwide, including American and Western ones. This strengthens China’s capacity to lead the developing Global South and strongly promote its model of Chinese governance.
Based on the preceding understanding and analysis, we can see how the development for security strategy can form a fundamental pillar within the Chinese governance system. Improving living standards contributes to consolidating social stability and public security within China. This analysis highlights a delicate equation in the contemporary Chinese landscape, where continuous development (Chinese-style modernization) is linked to social stability, creating a secure environment in a turbulent world.
WASHINGTON — A man carrying a gun and a cellphone entered a federal credit union in a small town in central Virginia in May 2019 and demanded cash.
He left with $195,000 in a bag and no clue to his identity. But his smartphone was keeping track of him.
What happened next could yield a landmark ruling from the Supreme Court on the 4th Amendment and its restrictions against “unreasonable searches.”
Typically, police use tips or leads to find suspects, then seek a search warrant from a judge to enter a house or other private area to seize the evidence that can prove a crime.
Civil libertarians say the new “digital dragnets” work in reverse.
“It’s grab the data and search first. Suspicion later. That’s opposite of how our system has worked, and it’s really dangerous,” said Jake Laperruque, an attorney for the Center for Democracy & Technology.
But these new data scans can be effective in finding criminals.
Lacking leads in the Virginia bank robbery, a police detective turned to what one judge in the case called a “groundbreaking investigative tool … enabling the relentless collection of eerily precise location data.”
Cellphones can be tracked through towers, and Google stored this location history data for hundreds of millions of users. The detective sent Google a demand for information known as a “geofence warrant,” referring to a virtual fence around a particular geographic area at a specific time.
The officer sought phones that were within 150 yards of the bank during the hour of the robbery. He used that data to locate Okello Chatrie, then obtained a search warrant of his home where the cash and the holdup notes were found.
Chatrie entered a conditional guilty plea, but the Supreme Court will hear his appeal on April 27.
The justices agreed to decide whether geofence warrants violate the 4th Amendment.
The outcome may go beyond location tracking. At issue more broadly is the legal status of the vast amount of privately stored data that can be easily scanned.
This may include words or phrases found in Google searches or in emails. For example, investigators may want to know who searched for a particular address in the weeks before an arson or a murder took place there or who searched for information on making a particular type of bomb.
Judges are deeply divided on how this fits with the 4th Amendment.
Two years ago, the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans ruled “geofence warrants are general warrants categorically prohibited by the 4th Amendment.”
Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s liberals in a 4th Amendment privacy case in 2018.
(Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Historians of the 4th Amendment say the constitutional ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” arose from the anger in the American colonies over British officers using general warrants to search homes and stores even when they had no reason to suspect any particular person of wrongdoing.
The National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers relies on that contention in opposing geofence warrants.
Its lawyers argued the government obtained Chatrie’s “private location information … with an unconstitutional general warrant that compelled Google to conduct a fishing expedition through millions of Google accounts, without any basis for believing that any one of them would contain incriminating evidence.”
Meanwhile, the more liberal 4th Circuit in Virginia divided 7-7 to reject Chatrie’s appeal. Several judges explained the law was not clear, and the police officer had done nothing wrong.
“There was no search here,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in a concurring opinion that defended the use of this tracking data.
He pointed to Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s declaring that check records held by a bank or dialing records held by a phone company were not private and could be searched by investigators without a warrant.
Chatrie had agreed to having his location records held by Google. If financial records for several months are not private, the judge wrote, “surely this request for a two-hour snapshot of one’s public movements” is not private either.
Google changed its policy in 2023 and no longer stores location history data for all of its users. But cellphone carriers continue to receive warrants that seek tracking data.
Wilkinson, a prominent conservative from the Reagan era, also argued it would be a mistake for the courts to “frustrate law enforcement’s ability to keep pace with tech-savvy criminals” or cause “more cold cases to go unsolved. Think of a murder where the culprit leaves behind his encrypted phone and nothing else. No fingerprints, no witnesses, no murder weapon. But because the killer allowed Google to track his location, a geofence warrant can crack the case,” he wrote.
Judges in Los Angeles upheld the use of a geofence warrant to find and convict two men for a robbery and murder in a bank parking lot in Paramount.
The victim, Adbadalla Thabet, collected cash from gas stations in Downey, Bellflower, Compton and Lynwood early in the morning before driving to the bank.
After he was robbed and shot, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective found video surveillance that showed he had been followed by two cars whose license plates could not be seen.
The detective then sought a geofence warrant from a Superior Court judge that asked Google for location data for six designated spots on the morning of the murder.
That led to the identification of Daniel Meza and Walter Meneses, who pleaded guilty to the crimes. A California Court of Appeal rejected their 4th Amendment claim in 2023, even though the judges said they had legal doubts about the “novelty of the particular surveillance technique at issue.”
The Supreme Court has also been split on how to apply the 4th Amendment to new types of surveillance.
By a 5-4 vote, the court in 2018 ruled the FBI should have obtained a search warrant before it required a cellphone company to turn over 127 days of records for Timothy Carpenter, a suspect in a series of store robberies in Michigan.
The data confirmed Carpenter was nearby when four of the stores were robbed.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, joined by four liberal justices, said this lengthy surveillance violated privacy rights protected by the 4th Amendment.
The “seismic shifts in technology” could permit total surveillance of the public, Roberts wrote, and “we decline to grant the state unrestricted access” to these databases.
But he described the Carpenter decision as “narrow” because it turned on the many weeks of surveillance data.
In dissent, four conservatives questioned how tracking someone’s driving violates their privacy. Surveillance cameras and license plate readers are commonly used by investigators and have rarely been challenged.
Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer relies on that argument in his defense of Chatrie’s conviction. “An individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements that anyone could see,” he wrote.
The justices will issue a decision by the end of June.
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The UAE has carefully crafted a position for itself as a hub for digital assets. Can the good times last?
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) positions itself as a center for digital assets, a market that may be worth up to $500 billion over the next few years by some estimates. Dubai and Abu Dhabi are already acknowledged as global hubs, based not only on quality of regulatory oversight but their early strategic bet on tokenization as the basis of a new financial infrastructure.
But the UAE’s pioneering moment may soon end. The US-Israeli war against Iran, launched in February, has sown doubts as to whether the Persian Gulf monarchies are the haven of stability they claim to be. And for all the regional talk of tokenization and fintech, longestablished financial centers elsewhere are taking the lead in drawing up a unified set of rules to govern crypto regulation. If a clear regulatory framework emerges, it could reshape crypto market dynamics at the UAE’s expense.
In January, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the world’s largest financial market, said it was launching a platform for 24×7 trading and on-chain settlement of tokenized securities, a development some analysts predict will spark a revolution in capital markets. The move by NYSE could leave some other financial centers behind as liquidity and institutional investors shift to more efficient, always-on markets.
Financial centers, including London, Singapore, and Hong Kong, are also evaluating tokenization.
And other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states, notably Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain, are increasingly embracing tokenization, backed by financial war chests of various sizes.
Management consultancy Kearney earlier this year estimated that by 2030, close to $500 billion of assets across the GCC could be placed on-chain, the most fertile ground being in private markets, public equities, funds of tokenized sovereign wealth fund (SWF) assets, commodities, real estate, and bank deposits. Tokenizing these assets would unlock some of the GCC’s most prized but difficult-to-access holdings, such as SWF assets and family offices. Tokenizing listed securities, for example, could simplify cross-border transactions and open markets to fractional ownership, a move likely to attract global investors looking to participate at smaller ticket sizes.
UAE real estate is already on the road to wider tokenization. Last year, Dubai launched a real estate tokenization sandbox pilot, the first regulatory body in the region to adopt blockchain-based tokenization for fractional ownership. The initiative coordinates with the emirate’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA), which monitors issuance, trading, and custody, together with the Central Bank of the UAE, which ensures compliance with national financial regulations.
For some analysts, the holy grail would be the tokenization of the GCC’s oil output. In January, Bahrain and UAE-based Gulf Energy Exchange announced plans for the first oil-backed stablecoin, aptly named OIL1, subject to regulatory approval by the Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB). OIL1 is to be collateralized by verified reserves of Persian Gulf crude oil and pegged to the US dollar, creating a link between the energy sector and digital assets.
To stay competitive, however, the UAE will need to continue innovating, given that adoption of tokenization and digital assets is moving at breakneck speeds. Tokenization’s market growth “looks like an express ride to the top of the Burj Khalifa,” Kearney noted, a reference to the world’s tallest building, located in Dubai.
Dubai and Abu Dhabi operate offshore free-zone financial centers—the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC) and Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM)—both of which have taken leading roles in ensur ing the UAE remains at the forefront of digital-asset innovation, says Jason Barsema, president and co-founder of Chicago-based Halo Investing. “The UAE’s ascendancy as the destination for digital assets is rooted in a unique policy-to-production approach that separates it from purely speculative markets,” he notes.
The UAE’s Securities and Commodities Authority offers a comprehensive regulatory regime straddling the central bank while Dubai’s onshore VARA, Abu Dhabi’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA), and the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA), which are offshore entities, operate at the local emirate level.
This regulatory landscape gives international investors a degree of comfort that governance standards are aligned with global legal standards. Its core advantage is a sophisticated yet “pragmatic regulatory architecture that offers something most emerging markets still lack: clarity,” says Shivkumar Rohira, CEO of EMEA at financial services firm Klay Group.
“Dubai’s VARA, alongside the DFSA in the DIFC, has built a tiered, activity-based framework that sets out clear permissions for exchanges, custodians, and token issuers, while tightening standards around AML, investor protection, and market integrity,” he adds.
Abu Dhabi’s ADGM has gone further in positioning itself as an institutional-grade venue with a regime that accommodates tokenized securities, funds, derivatives, and increasingly, staking, among other yield-generating activities.
“This integration keeps Dubai and Abu Dhabi the default GCC base for global digital-asset players even as regional rivals race to catch up,” says Rohira.
Even within the UAE, however, there are fundamental differences of approach between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, notes Martin Leinweber, director of Digital Asset Research and Strategy at MarketVector. The result is a layered system that gives firms the flexibility to structure licensing around their business model, not the other way around.
“What strikes me most from an institutional perspective,” Leinweber says, “is how deliberately the UAE constructed its regulatory architecture at a time when most major financial centers were still debating whether crypto deserved a framework at all.”
In creating VARA, Dubai established a purpose-built regulator with its own mandate, rulebooks, and enforcement capacity rather than grafting virtual asset oversight onto an existing regulator. In comparison, Abu Dhabi took a complementary path through ADGM’s FSRA, he notes.
While the UAE may be in the lead, other GCC states are finding a place for tokenization in their financial markets as well.
Bahrain’s regulatory framework is closest to the UAE’s, but with the CBB as sole authority for virtual assets. That includes a regulatory sandbox where firms can test and modify digital asset models; Rain was the first crypto-asset firm to be accepted into the program, in 2017.
Bahrain FinTech Bay, the island kingdom’s fintech center, acts as an incubator, bringing together startups, regulators, and financial institutions.
Qatar is taking a more gradual approach; the Qatar Financial Center (QFC) is over seen by the QFC Regulatory Authority, which has recognized tokenized assets, custody, and transfer within a virtual assets framework under the QFC’s jurisdiction.
The GCC’s largest economy, Saudi Arabia, remains underdeveloped when it comes to digital asset readiness, Kearney found, but the authorities have signaled openness to some use cases, including tokenized deposits and stablecoins. Further announcements are expected this year as tokenization becomes embedded in regional capital markets. The Kingdom is home to the buy-now-pay-later juggernaut Tabby, which was valued at $4.5 billion following a recent secondary share sale.
Oman, which recently announced it was establishing a financial center, is moving toward a digital assets framework under the auspices of the Central Bank of Oman, in compliance with existing AML standards. Conversely, Kuwait has adopted the GCC’s most restrictive digital assets policy. Several crypto activities increasingly accepted in other markets, including payments, trading, mining, and tokenization, are banned. The government cites market stability and risk as the primary reasons; the Kuwaiti stock market has a history of instability and volatility.
Although the NYSE threatens to jump ahead of the competition, it has done so against a backdrop of regulatory uncertainty; there is yet to be a definitive set of laws as to how tokenized assets are classified, issued, held, and traded in the US. Dubai and Abu Dhabi may be ahead of that curve, but even they have work to do to allay wider concerns, as does the rest of the GCC.
Those concerns, underscored by the conflict with Iran, center around the question of whether the GCC is a long-term stable environment for global investors. And with the US on the cusp of approving the CLARITY Act, creating a comprehensive regulatory framework for digital assets, and Europe moving toward unified regulation, investors may prove more inclined to opt for the safety of more established financial markets. If so, the UAE’s outsized position in the digital assets market may not be as secure as it would like.
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EU lawmakers have overcome a key political hurdle in the negotiations of digital euro, making the project closer to approval, according to a draft text seen by Euronews.
The Parliamentary rapporteurs involved in the legislation have found an agreement on the design of the digital euro, which will be able to function both online and offline.
The digital euro would be an electronic form of cash issued by the European Central Bank, designed to sit alongside banknotes and the payments services offered by commercial banks.
It has taken on new political weight as economic tensions between the EU and the US sharpen the debate over Europe’s reliance on American payment giants, such as Visa and Mastercard.
Under the European Commission’s proposal, digital euro users would have a wallet for both online and offline payments, with transactions designed so they are not trackable.
The situation in Parliament changed on Wednesday evening, when the centre-right politician Fernando Navarrete, who is the leading rapporteur on the file, announced the withdrawal of his position to reduce the scope of the digital euro to offline use only.
His position blocked the advancement of negotiations for months, jeopardising the whole legislative process, according to three sources familiar with the negotiations.
The political deadlock has pushed EU leaders to accelerate progress on the digital euro. At the European Council meeting on 19 March, they set a goal to have the digital euro legislation approved by the end of 2026.
With the Council, representing EU countries, having already adopted its position, the European Parliament is now the only institution left to advance the law.
“Thanks to our amendments and firm stance, we have finally broken the political deadlock on the digital euro. The distinction between online and offline has been removed, and it is now established as a single payment system,” Pasquale Tridico, the rapporteur for The Left, told Euronews.
However, lawmakers still need to agree on two key aspects: the “hold limits” and the “compensation.”
The hold limits determine the maximum amount a user can store in a digital euro wallet, while compensation sets out a model for reimbursing commercial banks that provide digital euro services.
Although negotiations are not yet complete, the text is expected to be voted on in the Parliament’s economy committee before the summer, according to a source familiar with the matter.
While in Australia, members of Iran’s women’s football team found themselves at the centre of an international political storm. As several players choose to return home, difficult questions are being raised about athlete safety, agency and Western intervention. Samantha Johnson looks at how Iran’s women footballers became caught in the middle of something they had nothing to do with, and asks whether they were being used as political pawns.
Published On 19 Mar 202619 Mar 2026
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