In a spartan office at the Justice Department, a team of experienced prosecutors is conducting a rapidly expanding probe into the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia — and into whether President Donald Trump himself may be guilty of obstruction of justice.

Led by special counsel Robert Mueller, a former FBI director, the team includes 16 lawyers and heavy hitters like Michael Dreeben, an expert on criminal law who has argued more than 100 cases in front of the Supreme Court, and Andrew Weissmann, a seasoned prosecutor who’s spent his career going after organized crime.

Adding to the firepower are James Quarles, a former assistant special prosecutor for the Watergate investigation; Jeannie Rhee, a former senior adviser to former Attorney General Eric Holder and a white-collar crime specialist; and Zebley, a cybersecurity expert who spent decades in the FBI before joining a private practice; and Greg Andres, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer who spent time in the criminal division of the Justice Department.

The appointments come amid growing signs that Trump himself is in Mueller’s crosshairs: On June 13, the Washington Post reported that the special counsel was directly investigating whether the president’s decision to fire former FBI Director James Comey was an effort to obstruct justice.

And the probe has a lot to look into. For example, the Washington Post reported on July 31 that the president dictated his son’s misleading explanation as to why he met with a Kremlin-linked lawyer during the 2016 presidential election.

The fact that Mueller’s team can conduct such a broad probe — one apparently looking into every possible angle of the Trump-Russia scandal, from possible financial crimes to outright collusion with the Kremlin — is a reflection of just how much legal firepower he has assembled.

Trump’s team, by contrast, is led by John Dowd, a veteran Washington defense lawyer who only joined the team in June. He’s joined by former team leader Marc Kasowitz, Ty Cobb, Michael Bowe and Jay Sekulow. The last two are known more for their time on TV than their time in the courtroom, and don’t have anywhere near the background Mueller’s team boasts to take on this challenge.

And while Dowd’s team is gaining some strength, it doesn’t look like it will improve anytime soon. Prominent lawyers with investigative experience at four major law firms declined to represent the president when Kasowtiz led the team, citing concerns about his role and influence over Trump. These lawyers include Brendan Sullivan of Williams & Connolly, a white-collar specialist who is consistently named as one of the top 100 trial lawyers in the country, and Ted Olson of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, who was the solicitor general under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2004.

At least so far, Mueller’s team has a clear advantage. This edge will be important when Mueller squares off with Dowd over the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Moscow, undisclosed meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, financial ties to Russia, and the firing of former FBI Director James Comey.

That is, of course, assuming Trump doesn’t fire Mueller, something that the president has considered but is at least so far refraining from actually doing. It’s not clear if Trump will change his mind now that he knows Mueller is investigating him personally. In the meantime, the Mueller investigation is kicking into high gear. And that means Trump — and those around him — has real reason to worry.

Team Trump just doesn’t have the right experience

Dowd is a well-respected lawyer who has a long history dealing with the Justice Department. He represented many high-profile government officials, including Sen. John McCain during a 1990 investigation known as the Keating Five scandal, in which McCain was accused of improperly meeting with federal bank regulators on behalf of a campaign contributor. McCain was later cleared of any wrongdoing.

Dowd is also known for leading a Major League Baseball investigation into former Cincinnati Reds player and manager Pete Rose on gambling charges. Because of Dowd’s report, Rose was banned from the MLB for life.

But Kasowitz is the most-known lawyer on Trump’s team after he published a typo-ridden response to James Comey’s Senate testimony. He brags of being the toughest lawyer on Wall Street and has a longstanding relationship with the president. He defended Trump in various high-profile cases, including the 2016 class-action lawsuits against Trump University for fraud and the 2006 defamation suit against biographer Timothy O’Brien for allegedly misrepresenting the real estate mogul’s net worth. The suit was later thrown out by a judge in New Jersey in 2009.

But even though Kasowitz has experience working with Trump, he doesn’t have an extensive background dealing with politically charged investigations like this one or navigating official Washington.

Neither do two key team Trump players besides Kasowitz: Michael Bowe, a partner from Kasowitz’s law firm, and Jay Sekulow, a chief counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a conservative, Christian-based social organization.

Like Kasowitz, Bowe’s experience is in commercial and corporate litigation. The two lawyers have spent their careers building reputations on Wall Street, but it’s not clear how their prowess there will hold up during the Russia and obstruction case.

Sekulow, the ACLJ’s chief counsel, has slightly more relevant experience. He argued 12 cases in front of the Supreme Court, including hearings on abortion rights and religious freedom. It’s an impressive tally, but doesn’t compare with Dreeben, who has argued more than 100 cases in front of the country’s highest court.

Regardless, it’s probably not their legal aptitudes that got Bowe and Sekulow spots on Kasowitz’s team. It’s their showmanship.

Both of these lawyers have high public profiles and regularly appear on television, which likely appeals to Trump given his obsession with cable news. Bowe tends to be on CNBC, Fox Business News, and Bloomberg, while Sekulow is a recurring guest on the Christian Broadcasting Network and Fox News.

Sekulow may also have earned extra points with Trump after writing a series of articles criticizing Comey and his testimony last week. “Comey’s case against President Trump collapsed like a house of cards,” he wrote in his most recent post. “Comey craves the spotlight. Comey likes to be the center of attention.”

On June 14, he went on Fox News to allege that the Washington Post’s sources committed a crime by talking to the paper. So far, though, neither he nor Kasowitz is disputing the accuracy of the piece.

Then there’s Ty Cobb, who does have experience in this field. He’s a former federal prosecutor and partner at the multinational law firm Hogan Lovells where he specialized in bribery and corruption law and congressional investigations. His addition to the team sends a clear signal of how seriously Trump is taking mounting allegations.

“He brings to the White House a lot of experience the president has not had,” Dowd, who recommended Cobb for the job, told USA Today.

Kasowitz, who did not respond to inquiries for this piece, and the others must figure out how to work with the lawyers other White House staffers are hiring to protect themselves.

As Politico reported, more than 12 lawyers are already working to represent Trump and a small group of his aides, including Trump’s son-in-law and right-hand man Jared Kushner, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, former campaign chair Paul Manafort, Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen, and former campaign advisers Carter Page, Roger Stone, Boris Epshteyn, and Michael Caputo.

But these folks, who will feature in Mueller’s investigation, are not Kasowitz’s concern. “His duty is to Trump — not White House staff,” Jane Sherburne, a former Clinton White House attorney, told Politico. “So first and foremost, White House staff should understand that he is not looking out for their interests.”

Kasowitz, like Trump, prides himself on not abiding by customary rules. He reportedly bypasses White House counsel when he speaks with the president. His actions, which seem to ignore normal codes of conduct in these kinds of investigations, were partially the reason why at least two experienced Washington lawyers chose not to join the White House team, reported the New York Times.

Kasowitz feels his own experience and that of those around him is more than enough to take on Mueller’s squad — and that may very well be. But on paper, it isn’t looking too good for the president.

Mueller’s strategy: picking experts he trusts

The Russia probe is a criminal investigation historic in its implications and scale. Members of the special counsel’s team need to know how to best make use of the vast resources of the FBI and Justice Department to make their case. And they need to know how to do that quickly given the political importance and public interest.

That’s why, as Mueller set out to put a team together, he reached out to seasoned hands.

“Experience at the FBI, experience at the DOJ, experience working with members of the Congress — these are all critical to working quickly,” said Michael German, a fellow at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice and a former FBI special agent. “You don’t want anyone having to learn how those communication channels work while they’re on the job.”

This shouldn’t be too hard for members of team Mueller, all of whom have spent years embedded in these organizations, familiarizing themselves with how they work and whom to call when more information is needed.

His latest hire was Greg Andres, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer from Davis Polk & Wardwell, a New York law firm. Before that, he spent some time at the Justice Department from 2010 to 2012 where was deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division. There, he led the fraud unit and the program that targeted illegal foreign bribery, Reuters reports. His wife, a federal judge, recused herself from a few cases on Trump’s dealings with foreign governments after her husband took the job.

Mueller wanted a team he could trust, which is why four out of five of his hires have worked with him before. Hiring from his personal network not only let him recruit more quickly, it let the team hit the ground running.

“The [counsel members] understand each other’s shorthands. They know each other’s strengths and weaknesses so they can communicate more easily,” German explained. “Remember: The goal here is to get this investigation done as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.”

There’s another thing that unites some of the team members: three of them donated to Democrats. That fact hasn’t been lost on GOP members and elders, including Newt Gingrich, who believe the lawyers’s political leanings mean the investigation won’t be fair.

So why did these lawyers join the team in the first place, dealing with all the partisan bickering? After all, most of them left high-paying jobs and put important federal duties on hold within weeks of Mueller’s appointment. Three former WilmerHale partners — Rhee, Quarles, and Zebley — as well as Mueller himself, likely took a large pay cut to join the team. A simple look at Glassdoor shows that a WilmerHale associate earns a base salary of around $175,179. A partner would have made … quite a bit more.

To get a sense of the scale of the pay cut, a 2016 survey of more than 2,000 law firm partners showed that their average compensation was $877,000. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who technically sits above the special counsel, is paid at the government’s executive level 1 rate, which for 2017 was about $207,800 — less than a quarter of what law firm partners are said to earn.

The upshot is that Mueller’s team is full of people so committed to him, and the mission he’s been given, that they’re willing to put their careers on hold and take massive pay cuts to help lead the Trump investigation. And that has the real potential to be very, very bad news for both the White House and the president himself.

For deeper dives into six members of Mueller’s team, see below.

Michael Dreeben: the criminal law expert

With decades of experience representing the federal government before the Supreme Court, former Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben has been touted by CNN as Mueller’s most important hire.

Paul Rosenzweig, a former deputy in the Department of Homeland Security, wrote in Lawfare that the worst thing to happen to Trump last week wasn’t Comey’s testimony, but the announcement that Dreeben — “quite possibly the best criminal appellate lawyer in America” — had been recruited into the special counsel’s office.

Dreeben’s appointment has drawn praise from lawyers of both parties, including Preet Bharara, a former US attorney who alleges he had some uncomfortable phone calls with Trump before being fired in March.

Bharara’s praise is a reflection of Dreeben’s long career in the solicitor’s general office, where he has argued more than 100 cases before the Supreme Court. Many of them delved into the exact issues the special counsel will investigate.

“There have been cases in the past 20 years that have determined what obstruction of justice means, and he was involved in many of them,” Rosenzweig said in an interview. “He will have worked on issues of executive privilege. He will have worked on issues of grand jury investigations.”

Andrew Weissmann: the expert prosecutor

One of Mueller’s first appointments, Andrew Weissmann, is another heavy hitter. He has taken a leave of absence from working as the head of the Justice Department’s criminal fraud unit to join the special counsel, and has been described by Politico as Mueller’s most significant hire.

That reflects the fact that Weissmann has a reputation as someone who has made a career out of taking on organized crime.

In the 1990s, Weissmann worked at the US attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York, where he eventually rose to become the chief of the criminal division. He supervised more than 25 cases, going after the infamous Colombo and Gambino Mafia families in New York City and digging into organized crime on Wall Street.

From 2002 to 2005, he led the Enron task force that prosecuted more than 30 individuals and corporations involved in white-collar crime, after which he received several honors, including the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service in 2006.

Weissmann’s investigative skills will be a key resource for the Russia probe, said James Jacobs, a criminal law expert who worked with Weissmann while he was an adjunct professor at New York University.

“He’s very familiar in following the money and very familiar with technology,” Jacobs said in an interview.

James Quarles: the former Watergate prosecutor

A renowned litigator, James Quarles also happens to be a former assistant prosecutor in the Watergate investigation, where he specialized in campaign finance research, according to Wired.

The FBI has already requested financial documents from both Flynn and former campaign chair Paul Manafort. It makes sense that someone with experience in these matters was selected to join the team.

“There is nothing comparable to the kind of pressure and obligation that this kind of job puts on your shoulders,” Richard Ben-Veniste, one of the leading special prosecutors for Watergate, told CNN. “Having been there before gives [Quarles] the confidence to know how to do it and how to do it right.”

Aaron Zebley: the cybersecurity expert

Aaron Zebley has spent most of his career working in national security, but has more recently focused on cybersecurity.

When he was hired at WilmerHale in 2014, the firm’s co-managing partner, Robert Novick, said in a statement that the longtime FBI staffer would boost WilmerHale’s cybersecurity expertise.

Zebley worked as a special agent in the FBI’s counterterrorism division for seven years. He went on to become the FBI’s chief of staff and, later, a senior counselor in the National Security Division of the Justice Department.

Jeannie Rhee: the DOJ expert

Rhee, another career litigator, brings an insider’s view of the Justice Department.

From 2009 to 2011, she was the deputy assistant attorney general, charged with providing counsel to then-Attorney General Eric Holder and to the White House on issues surrounding criminal law, executive privilege, and national security, according to WilmerHale.

After joining the private law firm, she focused on advising clients involved in government-related litigation, which again, suggests that she has a strong sense of how the Justice Department works. This is important given that the special counsel will technically be part of the department — albeit with more independence — and will need to know how to navigate its many different departments and resources.

Greg Andres: the white-collar criminal expert

Andres spent most of time working on white-collar criminal defense where he represented clients in both civil and criminal cases. He’s focused on regulatory and criminal investigations involving anti-corruption, healthcare fraud, market manipulation, insider trading, securities fraud, procurement and tax fraud, money laundering and antitrust issues.

But he also has government experience. From 2010 to 2012, he was the deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division, There, he led the fraud unit and the program that targeted illegal foreign bribery.

North Korea may soon be literally off limits to all American citizens.

Last month, the shadowy and tragic death of American student Otto Warmbier after imprisonment in North Korea led many Americans to wonder why US citizens like him had been traveling to the country in the first place. Each year, an estimated 800 US citizens make the trip to the world’s most reclusive country.

But that may be about to change.

According to a BBC report Friday morning, two companies that organize tours to North Korea have been notified of an upcoming US government travel ban on all US citizens traveling to the country. The China-based travel companies Koryo Tours and Young Pioneer Tours were told that the ban will be announced July 27, which coincides with Victory Day celebrations in North Korea that commemorate the end of the Korean War in 1953, reported the BBC.

After a 30-day grace period from that date, all US passports will be made invalid for travel to North Korea. The State Department has not made an official announcement on the ban, though spokesperson Heather Nauert confirmed in an email statement to Vox that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has decided to impose “geographical travel restriction” for North Korea.

“Once in effect, U.S. passports will be invalid for travel to, through and in North Korea, and individuals will be required to obtain a passport with a special validation in order to travel to or within North Korea,” she said.

Koryo Tours and Young Pioneer Tours said they were notified of the ban by the Swedish Embassy in North Korea, which conducts all consular services for the US in the country. Per the BBC, the embassy is currently working to verify the number of US tourists left in North Korea and encouraging all of them to leave the country immediately.

The travel ban sends a clear sign to North Korea — but will it work?

Talk of a potential ban comes just after North Korea’s National Tourism Administration revamped its website and launched a new tourism campaign without, it seems, even the slightest hint of irony.

“Today the tourist industry in the DPRK is developing afresh under the wise leadership of supreme leader Kim Jong Un,” wrote the country’s official tourism site, seemingly oblivious to the global controversy surrounding Warmbier’s death. They advertised beaches where “the water is not so deep, yet clear, the sand is as white as snow,” as well as golf courses that boast “an adequate number of service personnel.”

North Korea has been trying to grow its tourism industry for several years now. In 2015, it said it wanted to increase its number of visitors per year to 2 million by 2020, though in 2015 it had just 100,000. Banning all US citizens from traveling to the country is a clear rebuke of this goal, but it remains to be seen how, or even if, North Korea will respond.

Warmbier had been detained in North Korea for 17 months after allegedly trying to steal a propaganda poster from a hotel during a guided tour of the country. He was released last month in a comatose state, unable to speak or respond to those around him. Pyongyang said his condition was brought about by severe food poisoning, but doctors tending to him at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center flatly dismissed those claims.

On June 19, just days after returning home to his family, Warmbier died.

Tensions between Pyongyang and Washington have been steadily escalating ever since. North Korea tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile earlier this month, prompting strong backlash from the US and its allies. This travel ban comes as the Trump administration struggles to find new and effective ways to rein in North Korea, and the date for its announcement (July 27 — the same day as important Victory Day celebrations in North Korea) suggests that the US government wants to use it to send a signal to the country that its actions have diplomatic consequences.

The question is: Will the leaders of the Hermit Kingdom listen?

The travel ban may assuage the fears of US citizens worried that their children or loved ones might end up like Warmbier, but it’s not clear how effective it will be in pressuring North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to reveal more information about what happened to Warmbier, or about the fate of the other three US citizens still being held in captivity by Pyongyang.

The cholera epidemic in Yemen has now become “the largest ever recorded in any country in a single year,” British charity Oxfam reported on Friday.

There are more than 360,000 suspected cases and 5,000 more being added per day. 1,800 victims have already died, a quarter of them children. Hard as this may be to believe, these numbers will only continue to worsen in the coming months as Yemen struggles with its rainy season spanning July to September.

“In just two months, cholera has spread to almost every [part] of this war-torn country,” the United Nations said in statement last month. “We are now facing the worst cholera outbreak in the world.”

Yemen’s civil war erupted in 2014 when Iran-backed Houthi rebels ousted the country’s Saudi Arabia–backed central government. It has since evolved into a violent proxy war between the two regional powers that has killed more than 10,000 and pushed close to 3 million Yemenis out of their homes. Saudi Arabia has increased its involvement with US help, increasing ground troops and airstrikes: on June 24, the last day of the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, Saudi Arabia ordered over 50 airstrikes in just 24 hours. This came just days after a Saudi airstrike on a market in northern Yemen killed 25 Yemenis.

This brutal military campaign has destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, causing the spread of easily preventable diseases like cholera. According to the UN, 14.5 million people — which is more than half the country — has already lost access to clean water and sanitation as a direct result of the war.

The fighting needs to stop for the outbreak to end

Cholera is caused by a bacterial infection of the intestine that leads to severe diarrhea and vomiting. In theory, it’s an easy disease to treat.

“The prompt administration of oral rehydration salts to replace lost fluids nearly always results in a cure,” writes the World Health Organization.

The problem is that in Yemen right now, even clean water is a luxury. Water and sanitation systems have been severely damaged in recent months as a direct result of the fighting, UNICEF spokesperson Najwa Mekki said in an interview.

In January of last year, a water desalination plant in the city of Mokha was destroyed by reported airstrikes from the Saudi-led coalition group. This cut off more than a million people in the nearby city of Taiz from their only source of clean water.

More recently, in April, the sewer system in the capital city of Sana’a stopped working, though it’s not clear if this was the direct result of military strikes. Ten days later, a cholera epidemic hit the city, according to the BBC.

In the absence of working water and sanitation systems, cholera is not just hard to treat — it’s deadly. The disease spreads through water, so once a central water source is contaminated, everyone who relies on it is likely to get the disease. It’s made worse during emergencies such as the Yemeni civil war where people are huddled in overcrowded refugee camps, sharing whatever scarce supply of water there is.

Once they contract the disease, many Yemenis die without the right medical care, some within hours. The health system in Yemen has nearly collapsed, said Mekki. Half of the country’s health care facilities, which include clinics and hospitals, are not functioning. Close to 15 million people have no access to health care.

Yemen’s youngest and most defenseless are suffering the worst. Children under the age of 5 have the highest incidence of cholera, and account for close to half of the fatalities. Hundreds of Yemeni children have already died from the disease, and this number is likely to climb with the 5,000 new cases of cholera being reported daily.

The conflict in Yemen has inflicted a particularly heavy toll on children, Mekki said. Apart from the cholera outbreak, more than 400,000 of the country’s children face malnutrition, and nearly 2 million have been taken out of school, an increasing number of whom are being recruited as child soldiers, reported Amnesty International.

Yemeni children have been living a nightmare for more than two years. Amazingly, and horrifyingly, it’s still getting worse.

In early June, Saudi Arabia and an array of other Arab countries abruptly cut all ties with the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Qatar, triggering one of the region’s biggest diplomatic standoffs in decades. Flights were grounded. Borders were sealed. Threats were made.

And, alone in her room in the Qatari capital of Doha, migrant workers like Karen David worried about whether they’d pay the price.

Qatar, which has just 250,000 citizens, employs an astounding 2.2 million foreign workers who build bridges, clean houses, and look after children — all for a literal pittance. The average wage among the tens of thousands of migrant workers working in construction, for instance, can be as low as $1,920 a year, or less than $6 a day.

David, who has been in Qatar for four years, earns $800 a month. It’s not a lot of money by Qatari standards, but it’s a huge amount of money by Filipino ones. She dutifully sends 80 percent of her paycheck back to the Philippines every month to support her two children: a 22-year-old son and an 18-year-old daughter.

Now, for reasons entirely beyond her control, David, and millions of other migrants, is being pushed dangerously close to homelessness and poverty.

Their plight illustrates the human cost of the growing dispute between some of Washington’s closest Middle Eastern allies. The ongoing crisis has posed a particular challenge for the Trump administration, which has struggled to balance its increasingly close relationship to Saudi Arabia with its longtime relationship to Qatar — which houses a massive American military base and is a vital intermediary to Islamist groups in the region. 

Qataris are so wealthy — citizens can average up to $690,000 GDP per person — that they’re likely to weather the crisis just fine. The Qatari government is already paying for fresh food and cows to be airlifted into the country.

That’s not the case for migrant workers like David, who are the most vulnerable members of the oil-rich country. It’s almost certain they’ll end up bearing the brunt of this diplomatic rift. 

The universe of people who lack the financial resources to ride out the battle includes the millions of Filipinos, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Nepalis who build the country’s train tracks and look after the children of wealthy Qataris and white-collar expats. These migrants risk losing their jobs, their homes, and their access to basic amenities the moment the Qatari economy faces even the slightest pressure.

“We don’t know what will happen,” David told me in a phone interview. “What will happen if there are wars? I will have to go home without anything. I need this job.”

The problem is that she — and huge numbers of other migrant workers — may not have those jobs much longer.

The most to lose and the first to go

Migrant workers in Qatar are employed through the Kafala labor system, which gives their employers a staggering degree of control over their lives.

The advocacy group Migrant-Rights.org gives a good explanation of the system here, but in essence, every migrant worker is tethered to a sponsor (also their employer) through a series of contracts. Without first getting their employer’s approval, workers can’t change jobs, quit jobs, or leave the country. 

These rules are enforced by the Qatari government, so if a worker quits his job without permission, the employer has the legal ability to cancel his visa, making him an illegal resident overnight; if he tries to leave the country without first getting an exit permit, he’ll be stopped at the borders and possibly imprisoned.

In other words, migrant workers have close to no power over their own income, mobility, or well-being. This is distressing in itself, but when you add the instability introduced by the recent blockade, it becomes nightmarish.

Qatar’s economy is heavily integrated with the countries that just cut them off. Even though the government claims they have more than enough funds to stabilize their economy, no one really knows how long this standoff is going to last or how long the Qatari government can continue paying for food to be brought into the country.

Even if Qatar’s economy is able to weather this crisis as a whole, there are bound to be companies that will be forced to delay projects, scale down operations, or potentially shut down entirely.

The country’s business-owning citizens may not feel the pinch from these adjustments, but the ripple effects on migrant workers will be extensive.

Workers depend on their employers to provide the permit for them to stay in Qatar as well as to provide their physical accommodation. If these employers fold without accounting for their migrant workers, they’ll be left quite literally homeless. And if the companies fold without providing exit permits or transferring employment permits to another firm, these migrant workers will be left stranded in Qatar without the ability find another job.

All this is made worse by the fact that a majority of migrant workers in Qatar are already living in poverty.

“Migrant workers are at the bottom of the pay chain, and they pay the highest price when there are cash flow problems,” says Fabien Goa, a researcher with the Refugee and Migrants’ Rights team at Amnesty International.

Take David, who is the sole breadwinner for her family. She sends 80 percent of her paycheck back to the Philippines every month to support her two children: a son who just graduated from college, and a daughter waiting to enroll in university next year to study engineering. “She’s very bright,” David told me, her voice cracking.

David is far from alone: Most migrant workers send the bulk of their money home to support family members, so the moment their salaries are delayed, things come to a standstill for their entire family. 

Migrant workers also tend to accrue debts in order to travel to Qatar and rely on a steady salary along with their substantial end-of-service benefits to pay those debts off.

According to Goa, migrants have such precarious financial situations that even the slightest disruption can send things spiraling out of control.

The “weaponization” of the migrant workers issue

Since the blockade, news agencies from the Saudi-led coalition have taken a sudden interest in the fate of Qatar’s migrant workers.

“There are publications in Saudi Arabia that have weaponized this issue,” says Adam Sobel, the director of The Workers Cup, a documentary on migrant workers in Qatar building the facilities for the 2022 World Cup. “There’s an intent to create animosity towards Qatar by releasing stories about how workers are being treated in the country.”

In the past month, the Saudi news agency Al Arabiya has published at least five different articles highlighting Qatar’s purported abuse of migrant workers helping the country prepare for the 2022 World Cup. There were virtually no articles of this kind written on Al Arabiya from January to May this year.

The Emirates News Agency, which is the official news outlet for the UAE, has also run articles this past month condemning “the tragic situation of expatriate workers, especially Asians, who are subjected to serious human rights violations in [Qatar].”

To be clear, most of these accusations leveled against Qatar are true. What’s interesting is who is saying them — and why.

“This sudden attention on Qatar’s record of migrant labor abuse is incredibly hypocritical considering the fact that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain all have their own forms of the Kafala or sponsorship system,” says Goa, the researcher from Amnesty International. “Migrant workers have become a political pawn.”

Apart from Qatar, Saudi Arabia is the only GCC country to retain the exit permit system, which Goa describes as “a driver of exploitation.” In 2014, a dip in oil prices caused some of Saudi Arabia’s largest construction agencies to terminate contracts and delay payments, leaving thousands of migrant workers — up to 150,000 by some estimates — stranded in the country.

The UAE has an equally harsh way of treating migrant workers. In 2015, Human Rights Watch published a report on the human rights abuses migrant workers were subjected to while building Saadiyat Island — an island off the coast of Abu Dhabi that the UAE government is developing into a hub for tourism. It’s slated to host branches of the Louvre and the Guggenheim Museum, as well as a satellite campus for New York University.

The truth is neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE showed interest in Qatar’s migrant workers prior to this diplomatic rift. In recent weeks, their state-backed news agencies have picked up reports criticizing Qatar’s management of migrants, but ignored similar reports that identify those same flaws within their own labor systems.

In other words, as Goa noted, these governments seem to be using the experiences of migrant workers as little more than political pawns.

Qatar doesn’t want to talk about how it treats its migrants

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Qatar’s own media outlets have largely ignored the risks faced by the country’s migrant workers.

Qatar-based news agency Al Jazeera has run numerous articles on the impact of the blockade on mixed-nationality families and Qatari students studying in neighboring countries, but very few on the potential impacts on the country’s migrant workers.

“Migrant workers are out of sight, out of mind in society,” Sobel says. “And that’s by design.”

Most of Qatar’s migrant workers live in labor camps outside major cities. They’re not represented in the government or in the media, and they’re not often seen in public spaces because of their long workdays.

The tens of thousands of men employed in the construction sector, for example, can have up to 18-hour workdays, boarding a bus to their work site as early as 5 am and getting shuttled back to their labor camps just before midnight.

That means most migrant workers simply don’t have the bandwidth to worry about the standoff, even though it’s these 2.2 million people who are on the edge of becoming — quite literally — the invisible victims of the Gulf crisis.

Millions of Muslim women who wear the traditional headscarf are finally getting an emoji that represents them — and it’s all thanks to a teenage girl from Saudi Arabia.

In honor of World Emoji Day this Monday, Apple released a preview of 12 new emoji coming to users later this year. In between the icons of dinosaurs and sleepy-eyed zombies was an important new addition that marked a year’s worth of work for 16-year-old Rayouf Alhumedhi: the first-ever emoji of a woman wearing a hijab.

Alhumedhi’s emoji campaign started last year when realized she was the only one among her friends without an emoji that accurately resembled who she was. The student, who was born in Saudi Arabia but now lives in Vienna, Austria, set out to change that, spending two days in her bedroom drafting a proposal for a hijab-wearing emoji for the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit corporation that manages the addition of new emoji.

“The fact that there wasn’t an emoji to represent me and the millions of other hijabi women across the world was baffling to me,” she told CNN. “I wanted to be represented, as simple as that. I just wanted an emoji of me.”

Other people agreed. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian co-authored Alhumedhi’s proposal to Unicode, and helped Alhumedhi host an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit where she fielded questions on the emoji and on representation for Muslims in general. Unicode also connected Alhumedhi with the award-winning graphic artist who worked with her to create the final design that will appear on millions of keypads this fall.

An issue of representation — and a topic of controversy

In recent years, the hijab and other Islamic veils have emerged as a topic of controversy, sparking heated discussions over the implications of the veil on religious freedom, women’s equality, and, more recently, national security.

In 2011, France became the first country in Europe to ban the full-face Islamic veil (called the niqab) in public places. This came after former French President Nicolas Sarkozy said in 2009 that the veil violates “women’s dignity,” and is “a sign of subservience and debasement.”

Various Muslim women have firmly rebuked Sarkozy’s comments and others like them, stating instead that wearing the veil makes them feel empowered and connected to their faith. Nonetheless, the issue has remained a testy subject as both Europe and the United States see a continual rise in anti-Muslim sentiment.

Alhumedhi’s headscarf-wearing emoji has not been spared from this debate.

“The hijab is a symbol of oppression,” wrote one user to Apple CEO Tim Cook. “By including it as an emoji you are showing your support for the oppression of women.” Others conflated the headscarf with terrorist activity:

Backlash to the emoji continues even though Alhumedhi has made it clear that it’s about representation, not politics. “Millions of women wear the headscarf and not just Muslim women,” she said to AJ+, a news site under the Qatar-based media group Al Jazeera. “Orthodox Jews, orthodox Christians, they pride themselves on wearing it.”

She added in an interview with CNN that it was important to her that they make the emoji available in various skin tones in order to ensure that the icon is accessible to all headscarf-wearing users. According to the emoji reference website Emojipedia, the “woman with headscarf” emoji will be available in four different skin tones when it’s launched this fall.

Alhumedhi also acknowledged that even though an emoji may seem like a small achievement, it has the potential to normalize a community of people who are often, and increasingly, misunderstood. If headscarf-wearing women start appearing in the phones of Apple users everywhere, she said, people might start to recognize “that we are normal people carrying out daily routines just like you.”

Grown men and women tackling each other to the ground, flipping chairs, blaring air horns, and throwing water balloons — welcome to the Taiwanese parliament.

Members of Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan, or parliament, are notorious for breaking out spontaneously in brawls over contentious pieces of legislation, but a recent infrastructure spending bill from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party has proven to be particularly controversial, prompting some pretty ugly fistfights.

The first fight broke out last Thursday when opposition members, led by the conservative Kuomintang Party, criticized the new infrastructure bill for unfairly favoring cities and counties that traditionally support the ruling DPP. They allege that the ruling party under President Tsai Ing-wen is using the massive $29 billion stimulus plan to court voters ahead of local elections in 2018.

And boy, are they mad about it. In this video from the BBC, politicians are shown grabbing each other’s throats, launching water bombs at their rivals, and blaring air horns to drown each other out.

The fighting continued on Tuesday during a legislative meeting, which saw opposition members tackle DPP members to the ground in headlocks and unplug the cables of speakers to prevent the infrastructure bill from moving forward.

And you thought the US Congress was rowdy.

A show of power

This recent spate of fights in Taiwan’s parliament is more severe than usual, but isn’t really raising eyebrows domestically. The country’s top legislative body has seen numerous and — let’s go with colorful — scuffles over the years, from politicians pelting each other with hardboiled eggs in 2004 to a DPP deputy snatching a written proposal of a bill and shoving it into her mouth in 2006.

But political tensions have risen to new heights in recent years.

During the 2016 election, the ruling DPP was voted into power with 69 seats in parliament, leaving opposition parties with just 44 seats. As a minority in parliament, opposition parties often see physical fights as the only way to block legislation that they disagree with, and, more importantly, as a way to show voters (albeit in the most outrageous ways possible) that they’re trying.

“The legislators are partly acting — trying to show their constituents they’re working hard to fight for their cause,” Danny, a Taiwanese journalist who wished to be identified only by his first name, told the BBC.

This has become particularly important not just in the lead-up to the 2018 local elections, but also in light of President Tsai’s plummeting popularity in the country.

Tsai, the country’s first woman leader, had a challenging to-do list when she took office in 2016. She had to make a decision on the growing debate around LGBTQ rights in Taiwan (eventually passing Asia’s first same-sex marriage law) and try to keep the peace with China without ceding the sense of independence that a majority of Taiwanese feel.

Voters, it seems, haven’t been impressed with what she’s done: Approval ratings for Tsai have dropped from over 70 percent when she was elected in May last year to under 40 percent just a year later.

Opposition leaders see this moment of weakness for Tsai as a chance to swoop in and gain support. They’re not about to give up this valuable opportunity, even if that means they have to push up their shirtsleeves and get their hands dirty.

President Trump has an extensive list of things he doesn’t like, from travel to exercise. On Friday, he added one more thing to that important list: the French music duo Daft Punk.

Trump is in Paris to join French President Emmanuel Macron for Bastille Day, which commemorates the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, a turning point in the French Revolution. As part of celebrations on Friday, he was made to watch a French marching band perform a medley of songs by Daft Punk, including “Get Lucky,” the 2013 Grammy-winning hit. Let’s just say he wasn’t a fan.

In the video, the band marched along the Champs-Élysées in Paris, getting into various formations to “Get Lucky.” At 0:56, the camera flashes to an image that is just waiting to be memed: Trump with his signature pout, entirely still except for a fringe of hair that seems, strangely enough, to be bopping to the beat of the song.

The camera then pans to Macron, who is all smiles and seems to be thoroughly enjoying himself. At 1:06, he shoots Trump a sideways glance and seems almost concerned at just how still the American president is.

It’s a hilarious scene caught on camera, but maybe not all that surprising given that Trump isn’t known to have many interests apart from watching TV and playing golf.

Trump and Macron have butted heads on a variety of issues in the past few months, with Macron criticizing Trump for his withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and openly inviting American scientists to move to France with the play on Trump’s campaign slogan “Make the Planet Great Again.” Trump’s visit to Paris this week is widely seen as a way to move past this rivalry and create an “extravagant show of friendship” between the two leaders.

In other words, Trump may finally be trying to mend the bridges with longtime US allies whom he has alienated in the past few months. His expression in this video however, suggests he’s not really enjoying it.