Inside The Times

How did a country with almost no football infrastructure or tradition, a high terrorism risk and searing summer temperatures become the host for the 2022 World Cup? When the Sunday Times Insight team received a cache of documents from a whistleblower, the Qatari success soon developed into one of the greatest sporting scandals of our time.

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Billie Eilish is the home-schooled teenage superstar described by many as the future of pop. In an astonishingly honest conversation with our chief interviewer, Billie, who already has 25 million Instagram followers, opens up about therapy, her boyfriend and how success has changed her life — for better and for worse.

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What is it like to be one of the first journalists to bear witness to an unfolding crisis? Four years after the Saudi-led coalition entered the conflict in Yemen, 14 million people were facing a famine that, if left unchecked, would be the worst in a century. Our diplomatic correspondent travelled to the heart of the regions worst affected and recorded the devastating impact of the war on ordinary people’s lives.

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We kicked off 2019 with Theresa May’s Brexit deal getting the thumbs down in parliament and ended it with Boris Johnson as Britain’s prime minister following the result of a momentous general election (and with Brexit firmly back on the agenda). From scoops to verifying sources, Tim Shipman of The Sunday Times talks us through his year in Westminster.

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Sometimes scandals happen under our noses. Over several months our head of investigations set about exposing the government’s complicity in facilitating forced marriages. Here he explains how he discovered that government officials were charging teenage British girls fees to be rescued from abusers.

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It took an extraordinary military blitz to rout Isis from its de facto capital, Raqqa. The trauma and terror of those final days were witnessed first hand by Richard Spencer. Here he describes what it was like to enter the devastated Syrian city and pick over the remnants of the once mighty caliphate.

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This episode starts in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where workers as young as nine risk their lives to feed the world’s growing hunger for cobalt – the metal used in iPhones and electric cars. Our chief foreign correspondent tells the harrowing stories of those caught on the front line of this race for green technology.

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Four years ago Shamima Begum, then aged 15, ran away from her home in Bethnal Green, London, to marry an Isis fighter. Nothing more was heard from her until our renowned war correspondent tracked her down in a camp in Syria. His discovery stunned the world, setting in motion a chain of events that would change her life for ever. Here’s how he did it.

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