Marise Payne is demanding answers after female travellers on an Australia-bound Qatar Airways flight were subjected to invasive physical examinations at Doha Airport.

The nation is trying to engineer its way out of global warming.

Temperatures in Qatar – one of the hottest places on Earth – have risen so much that authorities have installed air conditioning in the open air including in streets and outdoor markets. The country, where summer temperatures now reach up to 46C, has already started air-conditioning its football stadiums in preparation for November’s World Cup – itself delayed because of the extreme heat.

Migrant labourers are being worked to death in searing temperatures in Qatar, with hundreds estimated to be dying from heat stress every year, a Guardian investigation can reveal. This summer, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers toiled in temperatures of up to 45C for up to 10 hours a day as Qatar’s construction boom hit its peak ahead of the Fifa World Cup 2022.

It has been impossible to walk anywhere outdoors in Qatar this week without the body breaking into a fevered sweat in the 100F heat with 80% humidity. But at the new Al Janoub Stadium, the world’s first purpose-built air conditioned football ground, it was a pleasant 70F in the stands and on the pitch, even at the hottest point of the day.

The BBC has copies of texts and voicemails revealing Qatar’s tortuous negotiations to free kidnapped royals.

Saudi Arabia expects to spend about $750 million to build a 37-mile-long canal cutting itself off geographically from its former ally Qatar. The kingdom is accepting a bid for the project—which would transform its Gulf rival from a peninsula into an island—until June 25. Until now, five international companies have submitted bids for the project, which will create a canal about 656 feet wide and 50 to 65 feet deep, Gulf News reported.

In January, Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and onetime presidential candidate, took a trip to Qatar. Upon his return, Huckabee, whose daughter is White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, praised the small Persian Gulf state in a tweet.

It’s widely known both that Pope Francis is an avid soccer fan, and that when it comes to social concerns, the fight against human trafficking is one of the priorities of his pontificate. Hence it’s no surprise that, with his green light, a papal foundation is getting involved in the fight against the use of modern-day slavery for building stadiums for soccer’s World Cup Qatar 2022, after NGOs found that hundreds of trafficking victims have already died building facilities that will host the tournament.

Fresh back from Damascus, I was taking my coffee on the Beirut Corniche this week when a neat little Greek warship hove into sight... By Robert Fisk.

Sanctions imposed on Qatar this month are looking increasingly likely to become permanent as the deadline to meet a set of demands laid out by its Gulf neighbors fast approaches, according to the BBC. The small peninsular nation has been told it must stop funding terrorism — which it denies — downgrade ties with Iran, and shutdown its news organization Al Jazeera, or face permanent isolation.

Saudi Arabia dwarfs Qatar on almost any measure, yet there are plenty of ways the tussle between the Gulf neighbors could end up hurting the world’s biggest oil exporter – even if it wins. By Glen Carey, Marc Champion. [Autoplay]