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A world football boss has broken rank to claim FIFA is awarding World Cups – including to Saudi Arabia – without a transparent process.

Lise Klaveness is the first football federation chief to go public with concerns about the rapid, short-circuit process that effectively decided the 2030 and 2034 hosts in secret meetings led by FIFA President Gianni Infantino.

“It has not been a transparent process,” Ms Klaveness, the Norwegian football federation president, told Sky News.

“We have to expect good governance,” she added. “We had big, big, huge reforms in FIFA several years ago, which were good on paper, but it needs to be implemented and I cannot see how that has happened.”

Ms Klaveness also said she was “very concerned” that FIFA is not taking women’s football seriously enough, given a World Cup host for 2027 is yet to be confirmed.

Lise Klaveness and Rob Harris
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Ms Klaveness is the Norwegian football federation president

The overall process appears at odds with the transformation of world football’s decision-making promised by Mr Infantino after replacing the discredited Sepp Blatter in 2016.

The 211 football nations should have had the final say on World Cup hosts – but last month, the closed FIFA Council suddenly produced an unprecedented plan to combine rival bids for a 2030 tournament in six countries on three continents.

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And they formed a curtailed, favourable process that blocked most of the world from bidding – paving the way for the Saudi Arabia to be unchallenged for 2034.

“When decisions are made in closed rooms, it’s the opposite of what the reforms were promising us,” Ms Klaveness said.

The decision came after Mr Infantino prioritised trips to Saudi Arabia over most other nations in the last three years – regularly meeting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and even appearing in a government promotional video advertising the virtues of the oil-rich nation.

Ms Klaveness said: “When we give away power … and money and influence to nations and hosts without knowing that FIFA has had enough objectivity and arm’s length distance and no conflict of interest in it, then we have a problem. So then the question needs to be asked.”

She hopes for transparency on Mr Infantino’s dealings with the Saudis while being focused on the process rather than the country itself.

She asked: “How have you [Mr Infantino] worked to keep an objectivity to business and knowing the fact that this is a lot of power? How has the power been separated between different bodies and persons so that you don’t get conflicts of interest?”

FIFA President Gianni Infantino arrives for a ceremony unveiling the official brand of the 2026 FIFA World Cup at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles Wednesday, May 17, 2023. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
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FIFA President Gianni Infantino at a 2026 FIFA World Cup ceremony. Pic: AP

FIFA has not explained why it only allowed countries in Asia and Oceania to bid for 2034 when North and Central American nations should have been permitted under the rotation system in the statutes.

Only weeks were given to form a bid that was too challenging for a democratic nation like Australia, which needs government agreements.

FIFA has sought to portray the selection of the 2030 and 2034 World Cup hosts as still being in play, with assessments of the countries to be conducted.

But Mr Infantino’s own comments on Instagram last week were taken as confirmation when he said the 2030 and 2034 tournaments were “set to be hosted” by the announced nations without any caveats mentioning an ongoing process.

A key part of that process should be human rights assessments, which FIFA has not fully committed to being published when pressed by Sky News.

Under FIFA regulations, a plan to mitigate risks should be presented to address anti-LGBTQ+ laws and the lack of equal rights for women.

But with the hosts already lined up, the importance of the bidding evaluations – a key reform from the start of the Infantino presidency – has been reduced.

Ms Klaveness said: “We don’t know if that’s a breach of a code of conduct or if there are good reasons to do so.”

Read more:
FIFA has ‘not changed’ and decisions still lack transparency

Soccer Football - FIFA Virtual Council Meeting - Zurich, Switzerland - October 4, 2023 FIFA President Gianni Infantino during the meeting FIFA/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES
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Mr Infantino has travelled to Saudi Arabia numerous times over the past few years

What about the Women’s World Cup?

FIFA has not explained why the 2027 Women’s World Cup host will not be selected until next year – with four rivals.

“Everyone should be very concerned with those symbolic signals you’re sending because we are in desperate need to have a balance that the women’s side is lifted at least at the same acknowledgement level as the men’s side,” Ms Klaveness said.

“And when you have those awards for three [men’s] World Cups and the next is not awarded for women, it might be a danger that people will view this as not taken as seriously.”

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‘FIFA is a pioneer for women’s football’

In response to the interview, FIFA insisted it is now a “respected, trusted and modern governing body.”

FIFA told Sky News that because the FIFA Congress still has the final ratification of World Cup hosts that “the suggestion that the Congress has been cut out is clearly misinformed.”

But FIFA acknowledged that “consultations with the confederations” – which were not publicly declared – had led to the decision to award two World Cups at the same time.

FIFA said in a statement: “Securing future FIFA World Cup hosts across multiple editions and cycles provides certainty and stability for FIFA’s flagship men’s football competition from a commercial, financial and operational perspective, which in turn helps position FIFA to best fulfil its key statutory objectives.”

But while highlighting the benefits of changes to the men’s World Cup process, FIFA responded to criticism of the deadline for the Women’s World Cup selection by saying it was “not substantially different to previous bidding processes.”

In 2018, Mr Infantino did oversee an unprecedented open vote for the 2026 World Cup with the combined United States-Canada-Mexico plan beating Morocco and the votes of the FIFA Congress made public.

But it was the ruling council of 37 members that decided to combine the interest from Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay to create a vast 2030 World Cup – without putting the plan to the congress of every football nation.

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IDF says it mistakenly identified Gaza aid workers as threat – after video of deadly attack emerges

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IDF says it mistakenly identified Gaza aid workers as threat - after video of deadly attack emerges

The IDF says it mistakenly identified a convoy of aid workers as a threat – following the emergence of a video which proved their ambulances were clearly marked when Israeli troops opened fire on them.

The bodies of 15 aid workers – including eight medics working for the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) – were found in a “mass grave” after the incident, according to the head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Jonathan Whittall.

The Israeli military originally claimed an investigation found the vehicles did not have any headlights or emergency signals and were therefore targeted as they looked “suspicious”.

But video footage obtained by the PRCS, and verified by Sky News, showed the ambulances and a fire vehicle clearly marked with flashing red lights.

In a briefing from the IDF, it said the ambulances arrived in the Tel Sultan neighbourhood in Rafah shortly after a Hamas police vehicle drove through.

Palestinians mourn medics, who came under Israeli fire while on a rescue mission, after their bodies were recovered, according to the Red Crescent, at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip March 31, 2025. REUTERS/Hatem Khaled/File Photo
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Palestinians mourning the medics after their bodies were recovered. Pic: Reuters

An IDF surveillance aircraft was watching the movement of the ambulances and notified troops on the ground. The IDF said it will not be releasing that footage.

When the ambulances arrived, the soldiers opened fire, thinking the medics were a threat, according to the IDF.

The soldiers were surprised by the convoy stopping on the road and several people getting out quickly and running, the IDF claimed, adding the soldiers were unaware the suspects were in fact unarmed medics.

An Israeli military official would not say how far away troops were when they fired on the vehicles.

The IDF acknowledged that its statement claiming that the ambulances had their lights off was incorrect, and was based on the testimony from the soldiers in the incident.

The newly emerged video footage showed that the ambulances were clearly identifiable and had their lights on, the IDF said.

The IDF added that there will be a re-investigation to look into this discrepancy.

Analysis: Video undermines Israel’s account of aid worker deaths

The clip is filmed through a vehicle windscreen - with three red light vehicles visible in front
Image:
The clip is filmed through a vehicle windscreen – with three red light vehicles visible in front

Addressing the fact the aid workers’ bodies were buried in a mass grave, the IDF said in its briefing this is an approved and regular practice to prevent wild dogs and other animals from eating the corpses.

The IDF could not explain why the ambulances were also buried.

The IDF said six of the 15 people killed were linked to Hamas, but revealed no detail to support the claim.

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Bodies of aid workers found in Gaza

The newly emerged footage of the incident was discovered on a phone belonging to one of the workers who was killed, PRCS president Dr Younis Al Khatib said.

“His phone was found with his body and he recorded the whole event,” he said. “His last words before being shot, ‘Forgive me, mom. I just wanted to help people. I wanted to save lives’.”

Sky News used an aftermath video and satellite imagery to verify the location and timing of the newly emerged footage of the incident.

More from Sky News:
Israeli troops expand Gaza ‘security zone’
What happened to the ceasefire?

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Aid worker attacks increasing

It was filmed on 23 March north of Rafah and shows a convoy of marked ambulances and a fire-fighting vehicle travelling south along a road towards the city centre. All the vehicles visible in the convoy have their flashing lights on.

The footage was filmed early in the morning, with a satellite image seen by Sky News taken at 9.48am local time on the same day showing a group of vehicles bunched together off the road.

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France needs to sort its political mess – or populist winds blowing from the US will strengthen

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France needs to sort its political mess - or populist winds blowing from the US will strengthen

Contemplating the turmoil sown by the return of President Trump, nobody could deny that the results of leadership elections in major nations matter to the rest of the world.

Take just the members of the G7 – so-called rich, industrialised democracies. Italy elected Giorgia Meloni in 2022, confirming the rise of the far-right. She was not only Italy’s first female leader, she was also the first from a neo-fascist party since Mussolini.

The arrival of Donald Trump and Sir Keir Starmer changed the complexion of politics in the US and the UK last year. Germany elected a more hawkish chancellor in waiting this spring.

Barring accidents, the next potentially transformative election in what used to be called the “Western alliance” will not be for two years.

France is due to elect a new president to succeed Emmanuel Macron in the summer of 2027. The contest is already plagued by undercurrents of disruption, conflict between politicians and the law, and populism – similar to the fires burning elsewhere in the US and Europe.

This week French judges banned the frontrunner to win the presidency from running for office for the next five years. It looked as though they have knocked Marine Le Pen out of the race.

Nobody, least of all her, the leader of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), knows what is going to happen next in French politics.

More on France

In opinion polls just over half of the French population, between 54% and 57%, agreed that justice had run its course. “The law is the same for everyone,” President Macron declared.

After lengthy consideration by a tribunal of three judges, Le Pen and nine other former RN MEPs were found guilty of illegally siphoning off some €4.4m (£3.7m) of funds from the European Parliament for political operations in France, not for personal gain.

Le Pen was sentenced to a five-year ban and four years in prison, not to begin before the appeals process had been concluded. Even then that sentence in France would normally amount to two years’ house arrest wearing an ankle alarm.

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Marine Le Pen hits out at ban

French presidents, such as Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, have been convicted before. Controversy is flaring because Le Pen was given an extra punishment: the immediate ban on running for political office, starting this week.

Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, her second in command at RN, likened the ban to a “nuclear bomb” and a “political death penalty”. Speaking in L’Assemblee Nationale, of which she is still a member, Le Pen identified herself with Alexei Navalny, the dissident leader murdered in Russia, and Ekrem Imamoglu, the recently imprisoned Turkish opposition leader and mayor of Istanbul.

The ban was imposed at the discretion of the chief judge Benedicte de Perthuis, a former business consultant, Francois Bayrou, France’s Macronist prime minister admitted he was “troubled” by the verdict. Not surprisingly perhaps from him, since the prosecution is appealing against verdicts in a similar case of political embezzlement, in which Bayrou’s party was found guilty but he was acquitted, escaping any possibility of a ban.

Bayrou is expected to be a candidate for the presidency. Meanwhile, RN has the power to bring down his government since it is the largest party in the Assembly, with 37%, but was kept out of power by a coalition.

FILE - Leader of the French far-right National Rally Marine Le Pen, left, and lead candidate of the party for the upcoming European election Jordan Bardella during a political meeting on June 2, 2024 in Paris. Jordan Bardella, Le Pen's 28-year-old prot..g.. who she'd been hoping to install as prime minister, grumbled that "the alliance of dishonor" between the National Rally's rivals kept it from power. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla, File)
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Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. File pic: AP

Populist forces on both sides of the Atlantic rushed to support Marine Le Pen. Matteo Salvini in Italy, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Vladimir Putin‘s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov all denounced what they saw as a “violation of democratic norms”. Hungary’s Viktor Orban said on X “Je suis Marine Le Pen”. Orban’s post came on the same platform Donald Trump Jr posted that “JD Vance was right about everything”, a reference to the US vice president’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he claimed Europe was silencing populist opposition.

President Trump weighed in: “The Witch Hunt against Marine Le Pen is another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech… it is the same ‘playbook’ that was used against me.”

Le Pen has called for bans and tough sentences for corrupt politicians from other parties. In France, mainstream commentators are accusing her of hypocrisy and “Trumpisme” for attacking the courts now.

They also allege, or rather hope, that RN’s anger is endangering Marine Le Pen’s drive to make her party respectable with her so-called “wear a neck-tie strategy”, designed to dispel the loutish, racist image of her father’s Front National.

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Le Pen leaves court after guilty verdict

For all the protests, justice and politics are now inextricably mixed in France. A ban from political campaigning would be pointless for most convicts, who have no political ambitions.

Any suggestion that Le Pen was just being treated like any other citizen was dispelled when it was announced that her appeal would be speeded up to take place next summer. The president of the court de cassation conceded: “Justice knows how to adjust to circumstances… an election deadline in this case.”

The ban could be lifted in time to give Le Pen a year to stand for the presidency. At this stage, a full acquittal seems unlikely, given the weight of evidence against RN. That is awkward for her and her party because, presumably, she would be campaigning while under house arrest.

The best course of action for 29-year-old Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s apparent successor, or “Dauphin”, would be to stick with her now. He would gain little if he split RN by insisting she is fatally wounded.

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If she loses her appeal in a year’s time, his loyalty and indignation would be likely to boost his candidacy. Conventional wisdom is that without a lift he may be slick, but is too callow and too square to stand a chance of becoming president in 2027.

The far right in France is no different from the far right elsewhere – prone to internal rivalries and in-fighting.

The craggy intellectual Eric Zemmour came fourth in the first round in the last presidential contest in 2022. Back then he had the support of Marion Marechal-Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s flighty niece. The two have since fallen out and may separately bid to carry the far-right torch.

Macron is riding high as an international statesman but he is unpopular at home. Even if he wanted to, he cannot stand again because of term limits.

His attempts to spawn an heir apparent have failed. The 34-year-old prime minister Gabriel Attal led Ensemble to crushing defeat in last year’s parliamentary elections.

Current prime minister Bayrou, and former prime minister Edouard Philippe, will probably make a bid for the centre-right vote. Bruno Retailleau, the trenchantly hardline interior minister, looks a stronger candidate for the Gaullist Les Republicains.

Read more:
Le Pen’s political career is in tatters
European far-right welcomes Trump 2.0

In the last presidential contest, Jean-Luc Melenchon of the hard-left La France Insoumise came third. He may fancy his chances of getting into the final two in 2027 against a right-wing candidate, unless the Socialists get it together. Or perhaps he may let through two finalists from the right and the extreme right.

It is a mess.

France and Europe need effective leadership from a French president. The unnecessary judicial suspension of Marine Le Pen’s candidacy has simply generated uncertainty. Her supporters are outraged and her foes no longer know who they are fighting against.

The French establishment thinks it will all blow over. Just as likely the controversy in France will strengthen the populist winds blowing across the continent and the US.

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IDF admits mistakenly identifying Gaza aid workers as threat – after video of attack showed ambulances were marked

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IDF says it mistakenly identified Gaza aid workers as threat - after video of deadly attack emerges

The IDF has admitted to mistakenly identifying a convoy of aid workers as a threat – following the emergence of a video which proved their ambulances were clearly marked when Israeli troops opened fire on them.

The bodies of 15 aid workers – including eight medics working for the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) – were found in a “mass grave” after the incident, according to the head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Jonathan Whittall.

The Israeli military originally claimed an investigation found the vehicles did not have any headlights or emergency signals and were therefore targeted as they looked “suspicious”.

But video footage obtained by the PRCS, and verified by Sky News, showed the ambulances and a fire vehicle clearly marked with flashing red lights.

In a briefing from the IDF, they said the ambulances arrived in the Tel Sultan neighbourhood in Rafah shortly after a Hamas police vehicle drove through.

Palestinians mourn medics, who came under Israeli fire while on a rescue mission, after their bodies were recovered, according to the Red Crescent, at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip March 31, 2025. REUTERS/Hatem Khaled/File Photo
Image:
Palestinians mourning the medics after their bodies were recovered. Pic: Reuters

An IDF surveillance aircraft was watching the movement of the ambulances and notified troops on the ground. The IDF said it will not be releasing that footage.

When the ambulances arrived, the soldiers opened fire, thinking the medics were a threat, according to the IDF.

The soldiers were surprised by the convoy stopping on the road and several people getting out quickly and running, the IDF claimed, adding the soldiers were unaware the suspects were in fact unarmed medics.

An Israeli military official would not say how far away troops were when they fired on the vehicles.

The IDF acknowledged that its statement claiming that the ambulances had their lights off was incorrect, and was based on the testimony from the soldiers in the incident.

The newly emerged video footage showed that the ambulances were clearly identifiable and had their lights on, the IDF said.

The IDF added that there will be a re-investigation to look into this discrepancy.

The clip is filmed through a vehicle windscreen - with three red light vehicles visible in front
Image:
The clip is filmed through a vehicle windscreen – with three red light vehicles visible in front

Addressing the fact the aid workers’ bodies were buried in a mass grave, the IDF said in its briefing this is an approved and regular practice to prevent wild dogs and other animals from eating the corpses.

The IDF could not explain why the ambulances were also buried.

The IDF said six of the 15 people killed were linked to Hamas, but revealed no detail to support the claim.

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Bodies of aid workers found in Gaza

The newly emerged footage of the incident was discovered on a phone belonging to one of the workers who was killed, PRCS president Dr Younis Al Khatib said.

“His phone was found with his body and he recorded the whole event,” he said. “His last words before being shot, ‘Forgive me, mom. I just wanted to help people. I wanted to save lives’.”

Sky News used an aftermath video and satellite imagery to verify the location and timing of the newly emerged footage of the incident.

More from Sky News:
Israeli troops expand Gaza ‘security zone’
What happened to the ceasefire?

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Aid worker attacks increasing

It was filmed on 23 March north of Rafah and shows a convoy of marked ambulances and a fire-fighting vehicle travelling south along a road towards the city centre. All the vehicles visible in the convoy have their flashing lights on.

The footage was filmed early in the morning, with a satellite image seen by Sky News taken at 9.48am local time on the same day showing a group of vehicles bunched together off the road.

Continue Reading

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