In brief

20,848.00-22.00-0.11%

10,110.84+119.17+1.19%

47.88+0.05

+0.10%

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GULF TIMES

published in

QATAR

since 1978SUNDAY Vol. XXXVIII No. 10453

May 14, 2017Sha’baan 18, 1438 AH www. gulf-times.com 2 Riyals

SPORT | Page 1

Qatar, Sweden to discuss solar, winddesalination plant

BUSINESS | Page 1

QATAR

REGION

ARAB WORLD

INTERNATIONAL

COMMENT

BUSINESS

CLASSIFIED

SPORTS

26, 27

1-4, 16-20

5-15

1 – 8

2-13, 28

13

13, 14

15-25

INDEX

Barshim wins in Shanghai

Mutaz Barshim of Qatar competes in the high jump event during the Shanghai Diamond League athletics meeting in Shanghai yesterday. The Rio Olympics silver medallist leapt 2.33m to win the event ahead of China’s Yu Wang and Ukraine’s Andriy Protsenko who managed 2.3 and 2.27m respectively. Barshim had delighted home fans in Qatar a week ago by winning the high jump at the Doha Diamond League meet.

Relief for Wakrah, Wukair commuters

The Public Works Author-ity (Ashghal) has announced the opening of Phase I of the

Barwa-Al Mashaf Road development project, giving commuters travelling to and from Al Wakrah, Al Wukair and neighbouring areas something to cheer about.

The road connects the Al Wakrah, Al Wukair and Al Mashaf areas and ex-tends from the Barwa Village Rounda-bout up to F-Ring Road and Doha.

Further relief is in store for motor-ists living and working in these areas as the authority has said work on the second phase of the project will be

completed by May-end. As part of Phase 1, Barwa-Al Mashaf

Road has been opened from Al Wakrah and Al Mashaf towards F-Ring Road. It also includes the opening of a newly built road with two lanes heading from the intersection north of the Al Wak-rah Hospital Roundabout to just before the intersection of Barwa-Al Mashaf Road with Ras Bu Fontas Street, Ash-ghal explained in a press statement.

Also, the lane turning right onto F-Ring Road has been widened to cater to growing traffi c in the area.

Further, the stretch in the other direction of Barwa-Al Mashaf Road -

heading from the west of Barwa Village to Al Wakrah, Al Wukair and Al Mashaf - has also been opened.

The phase has been completed in a “record time of three months only”, Ashghal has said.

The second phase of the project will include building a roundabout at the entrance of Barwa Village to facilitate entry and exit to and from Al Wakrah. The road, linking the Al Wakrah Club Roundabout with the beginning of the newly built road that connects to Barwa-Al Mashaf Road, will also be widened to two lanes.To Page 8

QATAR | Offi cial

Emir to patronise Doha Forum openingHH the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani will patronise this morning the opening of the 17th edition of the Doha Forum, which will be held under the theme “Development, Stability and Refugee Crisis” at the Sheraton Doha Hotel.

QATAR | Reaction

Shooting attack inQatif condemnedQatar has strongly condemned the shooting attack in Al-Masoura district in Qatif, which killed two people and injured several others. In a statement, the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs aff irmed Qatar’s solidarity with the sisterly Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and support for all measures it takes to maintain its security and stability. It reiterated Qatar’s firm stance against violence and terrorism regardless of motives and reasons. The Organisation of Islamic Co-operation (OIC) also condemned the terrorist attack.

AMERICA | Politics

Trump to move quicklyto name new FBI bossPresident Donald Trump said yesterday he will move quickly to nominate a new FBI director, after he sparked a political firestorm by firing the man investigating possible collusion between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign. Page 16

Tabata the star as Rayyan power into Emir Cupfi nal

Hack attackswreak havocacross worldAFPLondon

Cyber security experts scrambled yesterday to contain the impact of an unprecedented global cy-

berattack that hit Russia’s banks, Brit-ish hospitals, FedEx and European car factories.

The hunt was on for the culprits be-hind the assault, which was being de-scribed as the biggest-ever cyber ran-som attack.

State agencies and major companies around the world were left reeling by the attacks which blocked access to fi les and demanded ransom money, forcing shutdowns of computer sys-tems.

“The recent attack is at an unprece-dented level and will require a complex international investigation to identify the culprits,” said Europol, Europe’s policing agency.

The attacks used ransomware, which locks users’ fi les unless they pay the at-tackers a designated sum in the virtual Bitcoin currency.

Images appeared on victims’ screens demanding payment of $300 (275 eu-ros) in Bitcoin, saying: “Ooops, your fi les have been encrypted!”

Payment is demanded within three days or the price is doubled, and if none is received within seven days the fi les will be deleted, according to the screen message.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research

officer at the Helsinki-based cyber security company F-Secure, told AFP that the attack was “the big-gest ransomware outbreak in his-tory”, saying that 130,000 systems in more than 100 countries had been affected.

He said Russia and India were hit particularly hard, largely because tech giant Microsoft’s older Windows XP operating software was still widely used there.

US software fi rm Symantec said the majority of organisations aff ected were in Europe, and the attack was believed to be indiscriminate.

The ransomware spreads through corporate networks, “without user in-teraction, by exploiting a known vul-nerability in Microsoft Windows,” it said.

The attacks apparently exploited a fl aw exposed in documents leaked from the US National Security Agency (NSA).

In the United States, package deliv-ery group FedEx acknowledged it had been hit by malware and said it was “implementing remediation steps as quickly as possible.”

French carmaker Renault was forced to stop production at sites in France, Slovenia and Romania, saying the measure was aimed at stopping the vi-rus from spreading.

Japanese carmaker Nissan’s plant in Sunderland, northeast England, was attacked but production shuts on Sat-urdays in any case. Page 17

QATAR

Gulf Times Sunday, May 14, 20172

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir arrived in Doha yesterday evening to attend the 2017 Doha Forum, which begins today. The Sudanese president and his accompanying delegation were welcomed at Hamad International Airport by HE the Minister of Municipality and Environment Mohamed bin Abdullah al-Rumaihi, Qatar’s ambassador to Sudan, Rashid bin Abdulrahman al-Nuaimi, and Sudan’s ambassador to Qatar, Fath al-Rahman Ali. Meanwhile, Prime Minister of Somalia, Hassan Ali Khayre, and Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri also arrived in Doha yesterday to attend the 2017 Doha Forum. The Somali prime minister and the Lebanese prime minister were welcomed at Hamad International Airport by Minister of State for Foreign Aff airs HE Sultan bin Saad al-Muraikhi.

Sudan president arrives

RAF to inaugurate largest city to house Syrian orphans in Turkey

Sheikh Thani Bin Ab-dullah Foundation for Humanitarian Serv-

ices (RAF) and the IHH Hu-manitarian Relief Founda-tion, its partner in Turkey, will open on Thursday the RAF City for Human Devel-opment in the Turkish City of Rihaniyah to serve as the largest project to provide care for Syrian orphans in

the Arab and Islamic re-gion.

The RAF City has a total built-up area of more than 68,000 square metres. It has been constructed at a total cost of QR71mn do-nated by philanthropists in Qatar.

RAF said in a press release yesterday that about 6,000 orphans from the Syrian refugees in Turkey will ben-efi t from the City’s facilities, while 990 orphans will re-side in the City on perma-

nent basis and receive edu-cation and all the services they need.

More than 5,000 orphans will benefi t of education, health, sports and social services provided by the City, it said, noting that it would be a unique model of care, rehabilitation and ca-pacity-building of orphans to be leaders in the future.

The project is designed as an integrated city with 55 residential villas in addi-tion to schools, closed and

open gymnasiums, mosque, social halls, an integrated health centre, green spaces along with service rooms and markets.

The RAF Foundation has laid the cornerstone of the project in the city of Rihaniyah in southeastern Turkey’s Hatay Province on July 2, 2015, correspond-ing with World Orphan Day, and within the framework of a protocol signed with the Ministry of Family and So-cial Policies in Turkey.

QNADoha

QATAR

Gulf Times Sunday, May 14, 20174

HE the Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani yesterday met the United Nations Special Co-ordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nikolay Mladenov, who is currently visiting the country to participate in the 17th Doha Forum.The meeting dealt with developments of the Middle-East peace process and the two sides exchanged views on a number of regional and international issues of joint interest. The Foreign Minister said that peace and stability in the Middle-East depends on the Palestinian issue.

HE the Chief of Staff , Major General Ghanim bin Shaheen al-Ghanim, has met US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, General Joseph Dunford, at the Pentagon in Washington, DC.

Talks during the meeting dealt with the military relations between Qatar and the United States and means of enhancing and promoting them.

Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan will arrive in Doha today on an off icial visit to the country. HH the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad

al-Thani will meet the Armenian president at the Emiri Diwan tomorrow to discuss bilateral relations and the means to enhance them.

FM meets UN co-ordinator for Mideast peace

Qatar-US military ties discussed

Armenian president arrives in Doha today

Training workshopson heat exhaustion

The Ministry of Pub-lic Health (MoPH) will conduct, from

tomorrow, a number of training workshops on heat exhaustion for health and safety supervisors in diff er-ent companies.

The workshops will be held in co-operation with the Ministry of Administra-tive Development, Labour and Social Aff airs, Hamad Medical Corporation and Qatar Petroleum.

The initiative is aimed at spreading awareness of relevant issues among the entities concerned to intro-duce them to the symptoms of heat exhaustion and how to avoid them.

It is also part of the MoPH’s keenness to care for the health of workers in dif-ferent sectors, according to a press statement.

QATAR

Gulf Times Sunday, May 14, 20176

Mohamed Albinali speaking at the event.

WISH promotes mental health among SomalisThe World Innovation Summit for

Health (WISH) recently spon-sored Shida, the fourth Annual

Forum of the Somali Community in Qatar, organised by Weyak, a Doha-based voluntary organisation work-ing to foster understanding of mental health issues with outreach activities.

Weyak partnered with Hersare Foundation, a Somali NGO support-ing vulnerable and neglected people in Somalia and the Horn of Africa, to host Shida.

Shida is the result of an agreement between WISH and Weyak, estab-lishing a co-operative framework to raise awareness of mental health in Qatar. The collaboration allows the two organisations to exchange ideas and information on mental health is-sues across various media platforms, including websites and social media, through community events.

Shida aims to raise awareness among Qatar’s Somali community about the causes of direct and indirect mental illnesses among Somalis living around the world and highlight how to avoid these issues.

Sultana Afdhal, partnerships and out-reach manager of WISH, said: “We con-tinue to support events like Shida that work to address social isolation and oth-er signifi cant challenges faced by people with mental health issues. The Somali demographic includes one of the highest refugee populations in the world.

“When considered in the context of the trauma of war, issues such as dis-placement, substance abuse, and men-tal illnesses combine to create some uniquely challenging problems that the people of Somalia have to endure on a day-to-day basis.”

The event was attended by a large number of Qatar’s Somali residents

and their families, as well as represent-atives of other nationalities.

Attending dignitaries included Has-san bin Abdullah al-Ghanim, Qatar’s former minister of justice and deputy chairperson of Weyak; Hussein Os-man, deputy health minister of Soma-lia; and Galma Mukhe Boru, ambassa-dor of Kenya.

Mohamed Albinali, executive direc-tor of Weyak, said: “Our association’s mission is to spread awareness about mental health.We are happy and proud to organise Shida for the Somali com-munity in Qatar with our partners WISH and Hersare Foundation.”

Several speakers with unique edu-cation and career backgrounds gave thought provoking talks that addressed topics like ‘khat’ addiction in Somalia and the challenges faced by people with physical disabilities and those ex-periencing mental illness.

QATAR

Gulf Times Sunday, May 14, 20178

HE the Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani yesterday met the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Malaysia Anifah Aman, who was making an official visit to Qatar. The meeting dealt with bilateral relations and the means to enhance them, as well as discussing the latest developments in the region, particularly in Syria.

FM meets Malaysian counterpartMinor traffi c changes to facilitate new fl yover on Industrial Area RoadThe Public Works Au-

thority (Ashghal) has announced it will

implement minor traffi c changes in the Umm Al Se-neem area to open a 150m fl yover on Industrial Area Road from tomorrow.

The fl yover, which is be-ing delivered as part of Ashghal’s Rawdat Al Khail Street extension project, is located at the intersection of East Industrial Street and Industrial Area Road and will provide motorists with a free-fl owing road connec-tion from Al Kassarat Street to Naslat Al Maa Street, the authority has said in a press statement.

The fl yover forms a key component of the new East Street 33 Interchange,

a grade-separated inter-change that will replace the former Al Watan Rounda-bout and enable free-fl ow-ing movement between Salwa Road, the Industrial Area, Industrial Area Road and East Industrial Street. The entire interchange is expected to be complete in June, Ashghal has said.

To enable fi nishing works on the East Street 33 Inter-change, Ashghal will make slight modifi cations to the surrounding roads for the next month.

As shown on the attached map, the existing U-turns on East Industrial Street (towards Salwa Road) and Industrial Area Road (be-tween Al Kassarat Street and Al Watan Roundabout)

WISE Prize for Education Committee meets in Doha

The World Innovation Summit for Educa-tion (WISE)’s Com-

mittee for WISE Prize for Education met in Doha re-cently to prepare a shortlist of candidates to be present-ed to the WISE Prize Jury, which would make their fi nal selection of the 2017 Laureate.

The Laureate will be an-nounced at the WISE 2017 Summit in Doha this No-vember.

The WISE Prize for Edu-cation recognises an indi-vidual or team for an out-standing contribution to education at any level. It aims to raise the status of education and is fi rmly es-tablished as a source of en-couragement and inspira-tion for all who devote their lives to empowering others through education.

The WISE Prize Commit-tee, composed of six promi-nent international educa-tion experts, led a rigorous evaluation of the nomina-tions.

The members of the com-mittee are Sheikha Noof al-Thani, executive direc-

tor, Education Development Institute, Qatar; Dr Stefanos Gialamas, president, Amer-ican Community Schools of Athens; Dr Allan Good-man, president and CEO, Institute of International Education, the US; Dr Mary Joy Pigozzi, executive direc-tor, Educate A Child, a pro-gramme under Education Above All, Qatar; Asif Saleh, senior director of strategy, communications and em-powerment of BRAC and BRAC International, Bang-ladesh; and Claudio Sas-saki, co-founder and CEO, Geekie, Brazil.

The committee reached a consensus and produced a shortlist of names, which will now go forward to the WISE Prize for Education Jury for the selection of the 2017 Laureate.

Stavros N Yiannouka, CEO, WISE, said: “The WISE Prize for Education Laure-ates are an inspiration for all who dedicate themselves to education as the best invest-ment a society can make in its people. It’s my honour to welcome the members of the 2017 WISE Prize for Educa-

tion Committee to Doha. “Together they bring a

deep understanding of edu-cation issues to the task of creating a shortlist of can-didates for the WISE Prize. In accomplishing this, they have built a collegial con-sensus that refl ects the best values of the prize and for education leadership.”

The WISE Summit, an in-itiative of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, will take place in Doha from November 14 to 16 under the theme “Co-exist, Co-create: Learning to Live and Work Together”.

In related events, two of the WISE Prize Committee members led separate ses-sions in Doha. In collabora-tion with Qatar Business In-cubation Centre, Sassaki led a master class and discus-sion on fi nancial sustain-ability with entrepreneurs.

Dr Gialamas hosted a master class for local prin-cipals and school leaders from private and independ-ent schools in Qatar, titled “Academic Leadership for the 21st Century”.

Relief for commutersFrom Page 1

In addition, the road linking the Al Wakra Hospital Roundabout

with the same point at the beginning of the newly built road will be widened to in-clude two lanes, as shown on the attached map.

Work on this phase of the project will be completed the end of this month, Ash-ghal has said.

Head of Roads and In-frastructure for Areas in Doha South, Mohamed Ar-qoub al-Khaldi, said: “The project aims to ease traffi c fl ow in both directions be-tween Al Wakrah, Al Wu-kair, Al Mashaf and Doha. Barwa-Al Mashaf Road, along with other parts of surrounding roads that have

opened or are about to open to traffi c, will form an alter-native for Al Wakrah Main Road – which will reduce traffi c congestion in the area and provide another en-trance and exit to and from the Al Wakrah, Al Wukair and Al Mashaf areas.

Al-Khaldi said that in the next two months, it is ex-

pected that sections of Al Wakrah Bypass Expressway and Al Wukair Bypass will be opened.

The opening of the two bypass roads will signifi -cantly contribute to en-hancing traffi c fl ow for residents of Al Wakrah and surrounding areas and pro-vide several options to go in and out of these areas.

It could be recalled that commuters had complained of severe traffi c congestion last month in and around Al Wakrah, particularly at the entry and exit point, lead-ing to long delays. While the situation has improved since then, some problems still persist due to large-scale infrastructure works, say commuters.

Mohamed Arqoub al-Khaldi.

and the roundabout on East Industrial Street (near Bu Samra Street) have been closed.

Road users who previous-ly used the U-turn on East Industrial Street (towards Salwa Road) have been ad-vised to continue straight

towards Salwa Road for a short distance before per-forming a U-turn under-neath the bridge at Street 23 and returning to the existing road layout at East Street 33 Interchange and continuing towards their destination.

Road users who previ-

ously used the U-turn on Industrial Area Road (be-tween Al Kassarat Street and Al Watan Roundabout) will need to continue straight for a short distance and turn around at the roundabout on Al Kassarat Street.

Road users who previ-ously used the roundabout on East Industrial Street (near Bu Samra Street) will need to continue straight for a short distance to the next roundabout and perform a U-turn to head back to their required destination.

Ashghal has said there will be no reduction in the number of lanes on Indus-trial Area Road and East In-dustrial Street and request-ed all road users to abide by the speed limit, which is 50km/h, and follow newly implemented traffi c road signs to ensure their safety.

QATAR9Gulf Times

Sunday, May 14, 2017

ABP holds 16th graduation ceremonyThe Academic Bridge Pro-

gramme (ABP) held its 16th Graduation Ceremony in

the presence of HE Sheikha Hind bint Hamad al-Thani, vice-chair-person and CEO of Qatar Founda-tion (QF), ABP faculty, staff and parents.

Some 142 students graduated during the event, which was held at the Qatar National Convention Centre.

The ABP is a centre of QF that operates under its Pre-University Education section.

The Class of 2017 brings the total number of ABP graduates to more than 2,700. More than 80% of the graduating Class of 2017 are Qataris and the remaining 20% come from 17 nationalities. Girls account for 75% of students at the ABP this year.

Around 66% of this year’s graduating class have been ac-cepted to one or more of Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s partner universities. Some graduates will also enrol at Qatar University or one of the other colleges or uni-versities in Qatar. Around 30% of the class will be admitted to a university in the UK, Canada, or the US. Several others will enrol

in universities in the Gulf. “Overall, more than 80% of

the 2017 graduates will eventu-ally gain admission to a university; this has been the pattern for the past several years,” according to a press statement from the ABP.

Dr Bryan Lewallen, director of the ABP, welcomed the gather-ing and gave his comments on the Class of 2017. This was followed by a welcome speech on behalf of the Class of 2017 by Sara al-Hemaidi.

Khemara Chhorn, an ABP stu-dent with outstanding academic performance who came to study at the ABP from a village in Cam-bodia, spoke about her “Refl ec-tions on the 2016-2017 School Year”.

After a year at the ABP, Chhorn succeeded in getting accepted to Georgetown University – School of Foreign Service in Qatar. She concluded by thanking HE Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani for encourag-

HE Sheikha Hind bint Hamad al-Thani along with other dignitaries at the ceremony.

Some of the graduates of ABP Class of 2017.

Dr Bryan Lewallen speaking at the ceremony.

ing and providing her with a full sponsorship to study in Qatar, as well as her father, ABP faculty and staff , her high school principal and teacher in Cambodia and her fi rst Qatari friend, Al Anoud, for helping her on this journey.

Mohamed al-Otbey, who graduated from the ABP in 2008 and now works in Oc-cidental Qatar, gave the key-note speech.

Dr Mark Newmark, as-sistant director of academic aff airs, and Moza al-Boain-in, assistant director of stu-dent services, recognised students on their special achievements.

This year’s valedictorian was Qatari student Maryam al-Badr, who was fi rst in the class academically.

QATAR11Gulf Times

Sunday, May 14, 2017

International Nurses Day marked at HMCHamad Medical Corporation (HMC) has celebrated

International Nurses Day to recognise the vital role nurses play in healthcare.

International Nurses Day is observed around the world on May 12 in celebration of the anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birth.

Widely considered as the founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale spent her life promoting the estab-lishment and development of the profession.

“As the largest component of the healthcare workforce, nurses have constant interaction with our patients and their families, and have a tremendous impact on the pa-tient experience. Nurses are key members of the multi-disciplinary care teams that serve our patients and their families,” said Dr Badriya al-Lenjawi, executive director of nursing, Corporate Nursing and Midwifery Department.

“Today’s nurses are highly-skilled leaders, with ad-vanced degrees, who are playing an integral role in the transformation of healthcare in Qatar. It is important that we encourage Qatar’s younger generation, in particular, to seek a career in nursing. The nursing profession represents a great opportunity for Qataris to exhibit noble values and to become respected leaders,” added Dr al-Lenjawi.

Pauline Cadampog, a staff nurse at Rumailah Hospital’s Long Term Care Unit, said: “Being a nurse means making a diff erence to someone’s life. For me, it means being the hands of a patient who can’t grasp or walking for someone who is wheelchair bound. At the end of the day, I want to know that I have done a good deed.”

In acknowledgement of the day, a number of events were held across HMC’s network of hospitals, including events organised by the Home Healthcare Services, Heart Hospi-tal and the National Center for Cancer Care and Research.

An event at Hamad General Hospital saw more than a hundred nurses from that hospital recognised for long-term service, with each having served more than 25 years at HMC.

With more than 8,500 men and women working as nurs-es in its hospitals and clinics, nurses form the largest group of staff at HMC.

Dr Badriya al-Lenjawi

Diabetics cautioned to seek medical advice before undertaking fast during Ramadan

Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) is cautioning in-dividuals with diabetes to seek medical advice before fasting.

According to Prof Abdul-Badi Abou-Samra, chairman of Internal Medicine at HMC, fasting among patients with Type 1 diabetes, and among those with Type 2 diabetes who have inadequately managed blood glucose levels, can have many risks, including dangerously low or high blood glucose levels, diabetic ketoacidosis and blood clots.

“If you are planning to fast and you have diabetes, it is important to speak to your diabetes healthcare team before Ramadan begins. For some people with diabetes, fasting can be dangerous. Your diabetes care team will advise you on whether it is safe for you to fast. If you are able to fast, they will advise you on how to manage your condition, including providing advice on necessary modifi cations to your diet, ex-ercise and medication routines as well as guidance on when it might be necessary to break your fast,” said Prof Abou-Samra.

The fall of blood sugar (below 70mg/dl) may lead to severe hypoglycaemia and loss of consciousness. High blood glu-cose (above 200 mg/dl) may lead to severe hyperglycemia, dehydration and diabetic ketoacidosis, particularly in Type 1 diabetics.

“When the body’s cells don’t get enough glucose, the body burns fat for energy and this causes waste products called ke-tones. Ketones can make the blood acidic and this can be fa-tal. Diabetic ketoacidosis signs and symptoms often develop quickly, sometimes within 24 hours. For some individuals, diabetic ketoacidosis can be their fi rst symptom of diabetes. Common symptoms of diabetic ketoacidosis include exces-sive thirst, frequent urination, nausea and vomiting, abdom-inal pain, weakness or fatigue and fruity-scented breath,” added Prof Abou-Samra.

Individuals with Type 1 diabetes who choose to fast are at a higher risk of developing ketoacidosis, especially if they have

been experiencing hyperglycemia in the weeks leading up to Ramadan.

While fasting is not recommended for all diabetics, many individuals with diabetes are able to safely fast.

However, Prof Abou-Samra stresses that it is important to get medical advice prior to making any changes to diet or medication routines. “If you are diabetic and fasting during Ramadan, we recommend checking your blood sugar levels frequently. It should be checked at least four times daily dur-ing fasting, for example at 11am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm. If any of these tests show signs of hypoglycemia, it is necessary to break the fast. Your physician or diabetes educator can pro-vide more details about controlling blood sugar levels and can help you understand when it would be necessary to break your fast,” said Prof Abou-Samra.

Prof Abdul-Badi Abou-Samra

QATAR

Gulf Times Sunday, May 14, 201712

Tamuq names STEM Educator of the YearShanaaz Howell, a Year 6

teacher at Al Maha Acad-emy for Girls, was named

the 2017 Engineering Leaders STEM Educator of the Year by Texas A&M University at Qa-tar (Tamuq) and Maersk Oil Qatar during a ceremony that recognised some of Qatar’s top science teachers.

Howell received a cash prize of QR20,000.

Second place went to Noha Mohsen Mohamed Helmi Farid from Alkawthar Independ-ent Secondary School, while the runners-up were Ban Na-jimaldeen Abdullah from Al Bayan Educational Complex for Girls, Mallika Raja from Al-Arqam Academy for Girls and Hessa Ismail Faraj from Roda Bint Mohammed Independent Secondary School for Girls.

“I am extremely excited about winning such a prize and more importantly being part of it. I really appreciate being recog-nised today for all the hard work I do in off ering the young stu-dents these new techniques and knowledge in learning their sub-jects because they are the future leaders,” Howell said.

The STEM Educator of the Year award recognises teaching excellence in math and science, and encourages educators to in-struct and inspire students in these subjects in innovative ways.

Winners of the STEM Educator Award with Tamuq and Maersk Oil Qatar off icials.

In being nominated for the award, Howell was described as charismatic, creative, confi dent and knowledgeable. Her col-leagues, students and students’ parents praised her use of tech-nology in the classroom and her willingness to take on new chal-lenges in imparting instructions to students and creating an ex-cellent classroom environment.

In her submission essay, How-ell said the learning process in her classroom is inquiry-based, with students as active partici-

pants who work in teams and use their skills to research, discuss and share their fi ndings. Howell said she is able to gauge how well her students understand their lessons and track their perform-ance more eff ectively, which in turn allows her to develop tasks that cater to her students’ needs and personalised targets.

Since introducing this alter-native way of learning, she said her students have shown almost immediate change in terms of engagement, assignment com-

pletions and student confi dence, which have had a positive impact on their results.

The award is part of the Dhia: Engineering Leaders partnership between Tamuq and Maersk Oil Qatar. Dhia: Engineering Leaders supports the development of Qa-tar’s knowledge-based economy through outreach programmes to inspire young people in Qatar to take up science, technology, en-gineering and math in school and university.

Tamuq dean César O Malavé

said, “Texas A&M University at Qatar is cultivating the future engineering leaders Qatar will need to drive its development to meet the goals of Qatar National Vision 2030. It is critical to have outstanding educators in Qa-tar’s schools to guide students to STEM majors and prepare them for success in higher education.

“The teachers we recognise here today are shaping Qatar’s future by helping to build ca-pacity and skills in science and engineering.”

Commercial Bank begins summercampaignCommercial Bank has

launched a summer campaign with special

rates and discounts on travel and vehicle accessories.

The campaign was designed to cater to customer needs during the summer period, in-cluding helping customers pay for special family vacations, buying a new car or to meet other fi nancial commitments.

For a limited period only, Commercial Bank custom-ers can enjoy attractive per-sonal loans rates starting from 5.25% per annum with the added benefi t of a special discount on a holiday package from Qatar Airways Holidays.

Commercial Bank custom-ers can also enjoy competi-tive vehicle loans rates start-ing from 2.70% fl at and same day approvals combined with a gift voucher worth QR1,000 from Titanium and a spe-cial one-year comprehensive motor insurance rate from Massoun Insurance Services.

Amit Sah, EGM, consumer banking, said: “Commercial Bank is pleased to announce its exciting new summer cam-paign to support customers in fi nancing any additional ex-

penditure through the sum-mer months, which combines competitive rates for personal and vehicle with market lead-ing turnaround times on all fi nancing.

“As well as competitive pricing on personal and vehi-cle loans, Commercial Bank delivers the best customer experience with market lead-ing turnaround times on all fi nancing, dedicated bank-ing support 24 hours a day, and a package of additional benefi ts.”

Commercial Bank’s West Bay headquarters.

Emirates to introduce third daily service to Brisbane from Dec 1

Emirates will introduce a third daily service to Brisbane, Australia from

December 1, complement-ing the Dubai-based airline’s existing two daily services.

The direct service, to be operated on a B777-200LR aircraft with eight seats in fi rst class, 42 in business and 216 in economy will increase capacity on the route by 3,724 seats a week, inbound and outbound between Brisbane and Dubai.

This will give passen-gers in the United Kingdom, France and North America “greater access” to Australia with just one stop in Dubai as part of Emirates’ global route network, which in-cludes over 150 destinations in more than 80 countries and territories.

Flights EK434 and EK435 operate nonstop between Du-bai and Brisbane and onwards to Auckland, New Zealand, while fl ights EK432 and EK433 operate between Dubai and Brisbane via Singapore.

Additionally, with code-share partner Qantas, Emir-ates off ers services to Sin-gapore twice daily from Brisbane.

The news comes as Emir-ates announced it would be upgauging its third daily serv-

ice to Melbourne from a B777-300ER to an A380 operation from March 25, 2018, allowing passengers to travel aboard Emirates’ A380 on all three daily fl ights between Mel-bourne and Dubai.

Australia is a popular desti-nation for international trav-ellers with its diverse cities and coastal lifestyle.

Brisbane is renowned for its thriving culture and is the major international gateway to the Gold Coast, a tourist hot spot and host of the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games.

From a cargo perspec-tive, the 777-200LR off ers 14 tonnes of cargo capacity in the bellyhold. Popular goods expected to be transported on these services include fresh meat and vegetables, as well as pharmaceuticals.

Emirates off ers “generous” baggage allowances, with up to 35kg in economy, 40kg in business and 50kg in fi rst class.

Emirates currently operates 77 fl ights a week to Australia from Dubai, with fl ights to Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and Sydney. The ad-dition of this service will bring this number, including Qantas operated fl ights, to 98 fl ights a week to Australia from Dubai.

More Al Meera branches added to Nojoom programmeOoredoo has announced that its Nojoom loyalty programme added 14 more Al Meera branches to its partner network where members will be able to redeem and earn Nojoom points. Al Meera became a Nojoom partner in 2014 and has since enabled 20 of its popular branches to be eligible for Nojoom members. With this latest announcement, Nojoom members will be able to enjoy shopping at 34 Al Meera branches across Qatar and continue to be rewarded. The 14 new branches include Abu Nakhla, Rawdat Al Khail, Shamal, Dahl Al Hamam, Onaiza2, Al Gharrafa, Shahaniya, Barwa Mesaimeer, Barwa Sailiya, Bu Sidra, Mamoura, Sailiya North (Al Miarad), Umm Salal Ali, and Wakrah (East).Ooredoo and Al Meera are also off ering all members double Nojoom points for their purchases at these branches until May 20. Every Ooredoo customer with a Qatar ID can enrol into Nojoom, which enables members to earn Nojoom points each time they spend on an Ooredoo service or shop at selected earn partners. With Al Meera, members have the choice to earn Nojoom points on their purchases or to redeem vouchers starting at QR50 up to QR2,000 to complete all of their shopping needs.Redemptions can be made following Nojoom’s redemption channels by logging into their account at www.ooredoo.qa/nojoom or by downloading the Ooredoo app.

HBKU Press, Nature Masterclasses host workshop for researchers

Hamad Bin Khalifa Uni-versity Press (HBKU Press) and Nature Mas-

terclasses, a service of Nature Research, hosted a joint work-shop titled ‘Elements of Ex-ceptional Published Research Papers’ recently at Hamad Bin Khalifa University.

The event was yet another initiative targeting researchers in Qatar in an eff ort to further support their contribution to the global exchange of infor-mation and the dissemination of their work in the commu-nity and beyond, according to a statement.

HBKU Press regularly hosts such initiatives as a part of its commitment to help develop the academic and literary land-scape of the local and regional community.

“With this workshop, HBKU Press aims to support local re-searchers by providing them with the knowledge they need to get their work published by a world-class publishing house founded on international best practices, excellence and inno-vation,” explained Dr Alwaleed Alkhaja, senior editor at HBKU Press.

The full-day workshop ca-tered to researchers who are beginning to publish their work in scientifi c journals. It focused on the writing process and what to include in each section of the paper whereby partici-

The workshop in progress.

pants developed strategies to structure and edit manuscripts, improve fi gure presentation and how to put this into practice. Using examples submitted by the participants, the editors also performed a ‘live edit’ where they dissected and examined an abstract to the group.

Dr Pep Pàmies, chief editor at Nature Biomedical Engineering, and Dr Alison Stoddart, chief editor at Nature Reviews Mate-

rials, who have a combined 20+ years of experience in editorial experience, led the workshop of around 30 participants.

Dr Stoddart highlighted the positive reception of the par-ticipants throughout the work-shop, saying: “The participants were keen to get the most out of the day and kept (Dr Pep Pà-mies) and I ‘on our toes’ by ask-ing some insightful questions and making useful comments.”

Dr Noora al-Kaabi, assist-ant programme director of the Community Medicine Residen-cy Programme at the Primary Healthcare Centre and the sen-ior medical manager and hos-pital research offi cer at Hamad General Hospital, came to the workshop in the hope to further her skills in writing research papers and to gain the knowl-edge and skills to apply to her responsibilities at work.

QATAR/REGION/ARAB WORLD13Gulf Times

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Workers’ hospitals in Industrial Area, Shamal and Mesaieed

A hospital will be opened shortly in the Industrial Area to cater to the grow-

ing health requirements of the country’s migrant workers, Dr Sheikh Mohamed bin Hamad al-Thani, director of Public Health at the Ministry of Public Health, has said.

Speaking at the International Labour Day celebrations organ-ised by the Indian embassy and Indian Community Benevolent Forum (ICBF) at Asian Town on Friday, the top health of-fi cial hoped the new hospital would enhance medical access to foreign workers in the com-ing years.

Dr Sheikh Mohamed also informed that similar medi-cal facilities would be estab-lished both in the northern and southern areas of the country, in Madinat Al Shamal and Me-saieed, respectively. This is be-ing done as a large number of workers are currently staying in these places.

At the meeting, representa-tives of various departments of the Ministry of Interior (MoI) and Ministry of Administrative Development, Labour and So-cial Aff airs (MADLSA) were also present.

A MADLSA offi cial said work-ers who completed two years with their sponsor would have no problem returning to work for

another sponsor in the country.Similarly, an MoI offi cial in-

formed the gathering about the provisions in the country’s law that prohibits employers from keeping the passports of their employees. The penalty for the illegal retention of passport is now up to QR25,000.

Many Indian and other South Asian expatriates turned up in

large numbers to attend the In-ternational Labour Day celebra-tions.

One of the highlights of the meeting was the participation of many senior Qatari offi cials, representing various ministries. Indian ambassador P Kumaran was the chief guest and chaired the meeting.

The guests included Dr Sheikh

Mohamed, head of Occupa-tional Health Dr Mohamed Ali al-Hajjaj, assistant director at the MADLSA Jaber al-Marri, Lt Fahad Mohamed al-Sulaiti from the Directorate of Traffi c, Lt Fa-dhik al-Saudi from Community Policing, Lt Khamis al-Murakhi from the Human Rights Depart-ment, deputy chief of the Indian mission R K Singh and QNB’s Abdulla Arbabi .

While terming the Indians as a “very friendly group”, Dr Sheikh Mohamed recalled his long as-sociation with the expatriate community and recalled their contribution for the develop-ment of Qatar over the last sev-eral decades.

The offi cial also said Indians were “very hardworking and disciplined people,” who have all along respected the laws of the land and loved Qatar as their own country.

A colourful cultural fi esta, featuring a host of musical shows and folk dances followed

the public meeting. A number of individuals and forums enter-tained the audience.

ICBF president Davis Edaka-

lathur thanked QNB for the lib-eral fi nancial assistance. He also praised Doha Bank and others for their sponsorship.

Dignitaries and officials during the event at Asian Town on Friday. PICTURES: Shaji Kayamkulam

A garba dance at the event.

A view of the large gathering at the programme.

Govt in deal with rebels to evacuateAFPDamascus

Syria’s government has reached a deal with rebels in the Qabun

neighbourhood of Damas-cus for the evacuation of opposition fi ghters, Syrian state media and a monitor said yesterday.

The deal comes after similar evacuations from neighbouring rebel-held Da-mascus districts and a gov-ernment advance in Qabun.

“Military operations halted in Qabun district this afternoon after the or-ganisations announced their acceptance of a deal and the departure of their remaining members from the neigh-bourhood,” state news agen-cy SANA reported yesterday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor also reported that rebels in the district had agreed a deal to evacuate, but said it was not yet clear where the fi ghters would go.

Earlier talks on a deal to allow the regime to retake the neighbourhood in ex-change for safe passage of opposition fi ghters faltered over the rebels’ destination.

Some had wanted to go to Eastern Ghouta, an opposi-tion stronghold outside Da-mascus city, instead of Idlib province, a rebel-held area in northwest Syria.

Earlier yesterday, govern-ment forces had advanced inside Qabun, expanding their control to 80% of the district, the Britain-based Observatory said.

The Qabun agreement comes after similar deals to evacuate neighbouring Barzeh and Tishrin districts.

On Friday, upwards of 1,200 people, more than half of them rebels, left Barzeh and Tishrin for Idlib.

The evacuation of Barzeh began on Monday and con-tinued Friday, when depar-tures from Tishrin began after an agreement was reached.

The evacuations are the latest in a string of simi-lar deals between the gov-ernment and rebels under which opposition fi ghters are granted safe passage in exchange for surrendering.

The government touts the deals as the best way to end the six-year war, but rebels say they are forced into the agreements by re-gime fi re and siege.

Minority leader backs Rouhani AFPTehran

A leading fi gure of Iran’s minority Sun-nis endorsed moder-

ate President Hassan Rou-hani yesterday ahead of this week’s election, despite the government’s “shortcom-ings”.

Religious leader Molavi Abdol Hamid said “the at-mosphere for Sunnis has been a little more relaxed” since Rouhani took power in 2013, and that most would support him in Friday’s election.

Abdol Hamid repeated calls for greater Sunni rep-resentation in local and na-tional government.

“The Sunni community believes that this govern-

ment, despite its problems and weaknesses, has had more strong points, and we hope if the current govern-ment takes offi ce again, it will do more to resolve those problems and shortcom-ings,” he said in comments carried by his website.

Iranian President and presidential candidate Hassan Rouhani, along with current vice-president and presidential candidate Eshaq Jahangiri (right), attend a campaign rally in Tehran.

The United States is close to completing a series of arms deals for Saudi Arabia totalling more than $100bn, a senior White House off icial said, a week ahead of President Donald Trump’s planned visit to Riyadh. The off icial, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said the arms package could end up surpassing more than $300bn over a decade to help Saudi Arabia boost its defensive capabilities. “We are in the final stages of a series of deals,” the off icial said. The package is be-ing developed to coincide with Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia.Trump leaves for the kingdom on May 19, the first stop on his maiden international trip.

US nears $100bn arms deal for SaudiDEFENCE

ARAB WORLD

Gulf TimesSunday, May 14, 201714

17 mummies discovered in central EgyptAFPTouna el-Gabal

Egyptian archaeologists have discovered 17 mum-mies in desert catacombs

in Minya province, an “unprec-edented” fi nd for the area south of Cairo, the antiquities ministry announced yesterday.

Archaeologists found the non-royal mummies in a series of corridors after following the trail of burial shafts in the Tou-na-Gabal district of the central Egyptian province, the ministry said in a statement.

Along with the mummies, they found a golden sheet and two papyri in Demotic — an an-cient Egyptian script — as well as a number of sarcophogi made of limestone and clay.

There were also animal and bird coffi ns, the ministry said.

But the mummies have not yet been dated.

The ministry said they be-longed to the Late Period, which spanned almost 300 years up to Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt in 332 BC.

But a spokeswoman said they could also date from the Ptole-maic Dynasty, founded by Al-exander the Great’s general

Ptolemy. The discovery of the non-royal mummies is consid-ered unprecedented because it is the fi rst such fi nd in the area, offi cials said at the site.

Egyptologist Salah al-Kholi told a news conference held near the desert site that the discovery was “the fi rst human necropolis

found in central Egypt with so many mummies”.

It could herald even more dis-coveries in the area, he said.

The discovery was “impor-tant, unprecedented,” Mohamed Hamza, director of excavations for Cairo University said.

The site is close to an ancient

Mummies lying in catacombs following their discovery in the Touna el-Gabal district of the Minya province, in central Egypt.

Journalists gather outside catacombs in the Touna el-Gabal district of the Minya province, in central Egypt, where archaeologists discovered non-royal mummies.

animal cemetery. “The discovery is still at its beginning,” Antiqui-ties Minister Khaled al-Enany told reporters.

It was the second discovery of mummies announced with much fanfare by the government in less than a month.

In April, the ministry invited

reporters to the southern city of Luxor to unveil eight mummies discovered in a 3,500-year-old tomb belonging to a nobleman.

For the cash-strapped Egyp-tian government, the discover-ies are a boon from the country’s glorious past as it struggles to attract tourists scared off by a

series of militant attacks. “An-tiquities are the soft power that distinguishes Egypt,” Enany said. “News of antiquities are the things that attract the world to Egypt.”

Millions of tourists visited Egypt every year to see its Giza Pyramids — the only surviving

monument of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World — and its ancient pharaonic temples and relics.

But a popular uprising in 2011 that overthrew veteran strong-man Hosni Mubarak ushered in years of unrest that battered the economy and drove away tourists.

Red carpet for Gaza fi lm festival minus the starsAFP Gaza City

Gaza doesn’t have much space for cultural events — there is no proper cin-

ema in the entire enclave — but this weekend the city’s port has been transformed into a venue for outdoor screenings.

The Red Carpet Festival show-cases fi lms focusing on human rights issues and aims to provide Palestinians, many of them un-employed, with a rare opportu-nity to explore their dreams, or at least practise a little escapism.

True to its name, the festi-val’s organisers have laid out a 100-metre long red carpet.

But there are no celebrities, it’s for the thousands of ordinary Gazans turning out to watch the fi lms.

“The children and poor peo-ple are walking on the carpet,” organiser Saad al-Saworki said proudly at Friday’s opening night. “They are far more impor-tant than the carpet.”

The festival, which is in its third year, coincides with the Cannes Film Festival and aims to

show that there is an alternative to the catwalks and glamour of its French counterpart, Saworki said.

The maiden event was or-ganised by Palestinian director Khalil al-Muzain in 2015 in the rubble of homes destroyed by the Israeli army in the most re-cent of the three wars that have

devastated Gaza since 2008.This year for the fi rst time, all

of the festival’s entries are be-ing screened simultaneously in Ramallah in the West Bank and in the Israeli city of Haifa.

Around 40 fi lms by Palestin-ian and foreign directors are be-ing screened over fi ve days.

The opening fi lm was Pales-

tinian director Raed Andoni’s Ghost Hunting, winner of best documentary at the Berlin In-ternational Film Festival earlier this year.

It focuses on Israeli prison in-terrogation techniques and its screening came with hundreds of Palestinians in Israeli jails on hunger strike for nearly a month in protest over their conditions.

This year also marks the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Dec-laration, the letter in which the British government committed itself to the establishment of a Jewish national home in Pales-tine. Festival spokesman Saad Abu Ramadan said that the red carpet was 100 metres long to commemorate the anniversary and that parts of the text had been inscribed on it.

Palestinians despise the doc-ument, saying it gave away their independence. “People walked on the carpet and trampled on (British foreign minister Arthur) Balfour’s promise,” Abu Ram-adan said.

Tamara Matar, a 21-year-old law student, said the festival gave her a chance to “feel free” in the tiny enclave which has

been under Israeli blockade for a decade.“There is no cinema in Gaza,” she said. “I watch fi lms at the festival because of the block-ade and the closed borders, the unemployment and the electric-ity crisis we have to endure.”

Youth activist Asad al-Safta-wi, 25, said the festival helped change Gaza’s image in the out-

side world. Instead of the “stere-otype” of violence and destruc-tion, it showed that “in Gaza young people have creativity and love of life.”

“Our message to the Pales-tinian leadership in Gaza and the West Bank — we want free-dom, we want a cinema in Gaza,” Saftawi said. Rif Kassem, a Syr-

ian refugee who has been living in Gaza for four years, attended a screening with his wife.

“We, as Syrian refugees, share the pain of the Palestinian refu-gees,” he said.

Mohamed, 27, walked down the red carpet with his sick fa-ther in a wheelchair. “I want to feel like I am at Cannes,” he said.

Palestinians vote in West Bank pollsAFPRamallah

Palestinians in the occu-pied West Bank voted in municipal elections yes-

terday.The West Bank and Gaza have

not participated in an election together since 2006, when Ha-mas swept Palestinian parlia-mentary polls.

Voting for around 300 mu-nicipal councils opened at 7:00am (0400 GMT) at doz-ens of schools across the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel for half a century.

Hanna Nasser, chairman of the Palestinian election com-mission, said many of the con-tenders were from Fatah, while in some villages “clans and families” had decided on the candidate lists.

Hamas did not present any candidate lists of its own, say-ing the vote would only add to divisions.

Polls were due to close at 7:00pm and fi nal results are ex-pected today.

Fatah and unaffi liated candi-dates close to Abbas were ex-pected to win the most seats, as

they did in 2012 polls boycotted by Hamas.

“It’s important that everyone

has a say” but also that those elected “assume the responsi-bility given to them”, said Rami Nazal, a UN employee who vot-ed in Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority.

Samir Beshari, a mechanic leaning on a walking stick as he exited a polling station in cen-tral Ramallah, said his choice “wasn’t just political”, as above all he believed “the winners should look after the city and all its inhabitants”.

More than a million Pal-estinians were registered to choose from among 4,400 candidates in a vote that was seen as yet another sign that reconciliation may be a long way off.

Even so, “municipal elec-tions are better than noth-ing” in a country where “the situation is unlike anywhere else in the world”, said Zina Masri, who voted before going to work.

Amjad Mustafa, the man-ager of a software shop in his thirties, said the vote was “an event not to be missed” after “a long time since we last took

part in a democratic event”.The Palestinian high court

ruled in October that the mu-nicipal elections should be held only in the West Bank because the judiciary in Gaza did not have the necessary “guarantees” in place — a de-cision denounced by Hamas as “political”. Subsequent efforts to hold the polls in both ter-ritories simultaneously were unsuccessful as the two par-ties failed to bridge their dif-ferences.

Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah accused Ha-mas yesterday of sole respon-sibility for blocking the elec-tion in Gaza where he said it maintains a rival government that supports “separation”.

Abbas, whose term was meant to end in 2009 but who has remained in office, re-mains their leader in the eyes of the world.

He met US President Don-ald Trump in Washington on May 4 and is expected to do so again when Trump travels to the Middle East later this month.

Jordanian shot dead after stabbing offi cerAFPJerusalem

A Jordanian man stabbed and wounded an Israeli offi cer in annexed east Je-

rusalem yesterday before being shot dead, police said.

The officer was taken to hospital with “moderate” in-juries after the attack in the walled Old City, police spokes-woman Luba Samri said in a statement.

Police identifi ed the assailant as Mohamed Skaji, a 57-year-old Jordanian who the statement said had “entered Israel a few days ago”.

They said he brandished a knife and stabbed the policeman in one of the alleys of the Old City before the wounded offi cer, who had just come off duty, shot him dead.

Two Israeli passers-by tried to help the policeman, police added. The Jordanian govern-ment denounced the “crime” of the death of its citizen, giving his

full name as Mohamed Abdullah Salim al-Kassaji.

“The Israeli government, which is the occupying force, bears responsibility for the shooting of a Jordanian citizen in occupied east Jerusalem which led to his martyrdom,” govern-ment spokesman Mohamed Momani said in a statement.

“The government denounces this heinous crime... and has asked Israel to provide full de-tails about it,” he added.

A wave of unrest that broke out in October 2015 has claimed the lives of 263 Palestinians, 41 Israelis, two Americans, two Jordanians, an Eritrean, a Sudanese and a Briton, accord-ing to an AFP count.

Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, the Israeli authorities say.

Others were shot dead during protests or clashes, while some were killed in Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip.

The violence has subsided in recent months.

A Palestinian woman casts her ballot during the municipal elections in the West Bank city of Ramallah yesterday.

A Palestinian leads a donkey-kart on the red carpet during a film festival showcasing films focusing on human rights, in Gaza City. Palestinians walk on the red carpet during a film festival showcasing films focusing on human rights, in Gaza City.

AFRICA15Gulf Times

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Mutinous soldiers cut off BouakeReutersAbidjan

Mutinous soldiers in Ivory Coast yester-day shot two people

and cut off access to the second largest city, Bouake, as a na-tionwide revolt over demands for bonus payments extended into a second day despite gov-ernment warnings of harsh punishment.

The revolt began in Bouake on Friday before spreading quickly, following a similar pattern to a mutiny by the same group in January that paralysed parts of Ivory Coast and marred its im-age as a post-war success story.

Mutineers seized control of the national military headquar-ters and defence ministry in the centre of the commercial capi-tal Abidjan on Friday.

They stepped up the pressure yesterday, blocking roads out of Bouake, the epicentre of Janu-ary’s uprising, and protesting in several other locations, includ-ing the northern city of Korhogo, where two men on a motorcycle were shot as they tried to force their way through a roadblock manned by the mutineers.

“They shot at them. They were wounded and transported to the hospital,” said witness Amadou Yeo, adding that the two men had been shot in the legs.

Also in Korhogo, soldiers

fi red into air to disperse a group of residents that had gathered to protest against the uprising, sending people fl eeing home.

Shops were shuttered and the streets were largely empty.

“We do not want to negoti-ate with anyone,” said Sergeant Seydou Kone, one of the lead-ers of the uprising, speaking by phone from Bouake. “We’re also ready to fi ght if we are attacked. We have nothing to lose.”

In a statement on state tel-evision late on Friday, Chief of Staff General Sekou Toure threatened the soldiers with severe disciplinary sanctions if they did not end the revolt.

Ivory Coast’s defence minis-ter and government spokesman were not reachable for com-ment yesterday.

The soldiers were promised bonus payments by the govern-ment after the January mutiny but it has struggled to disburse the money following a budget crunch caused by the collapse in the price of cocoa, Ivory Coast’s main export.

Ivory Coast has emerged as one of the world’s fastest grow-ing economies following a dec-ade-long political crisis ended by a 2011 civil war.

But deep divisions persist, particularly in a military as-sembled from former rebel and loyalist combatants.

The government has already paid 8,400 soldiers — most of

them former rebels who helped bring President Alassane Ouat-tara to power — bonuses of 5mn CFA francs ($8,371) each as part of a deal to end the January mu-tiny.

On Thursday, following a meeting with authorities in Abidjan, a spokesman for the group said they would forego demands for remaining bonus-es of 7mn francs.

But that decision was reject-ed by some of the soldiers.

“We want our 7mn and that’s it,” said Kone.

Bouake residents said shops remained closed as soldiers fi red weapons in the air and pa-trolled the streets in cars.

Mutineers also took control of the northern city of Odienne and there was sporadic gunfi re in Daloa, the main cocoa grow-ing hub in southwestern Ivory Coast, which is the world’s top producer of the chocolate in-gredient.

Kone said the mutineers were also active in Man near the western border with Liberia, and Bondoukou in the east.

“Perhaps the government is tired of this, but they must sit down and talk,” said retired gendarme Valentin Sokoure, speaking near the military headquarters in Abidjan where the barricades had been re-moved yesterday morning. “I just want the government to negotiate with the mutineers.”

A rhino and its calf walk through the grass of Nairobi National Park in Kenya.

Born free!

Angola feels pressure of DR Congo refugeesBy Daniel Garelo Pensador, AFPDundo, Angola

Hundreds of people from Democratic Republic of Congo’s central Kasai

region have been pouring into neighbouring Angola every day for more than a month to escape violence plaguing their homes.

Some 20,000 people who have fl ed are now in or around three holding camps in Dundo in An-gola’s far north, living in increas-ingly dire conditions, according to the UN.

And the fl ow of refugees shows

no sign of abating. Patrice Ilunga managed to reach Mussungue with his children after four days of walking — exhausted, but alive.

“We fl ed under very tough conditions,” he said.

“The situation was so terri-ble that there were mothers who were sending their children alone in boats in the hope that the An-golans would save them.”

Since last August, the prov-inces at the heart of Congo have been engulfed by clashes follow-ing an uprising by those loyal to Kamwina Nsapu, a local chief who was killed by security forces.

The violence has already claimed hundreds of lives.

And according to the UN, the unrest has forced more than a million people out of their homes.

Last weekend, Angolan se-curity forces evacuated 1,400 Congolese from the border zone — including several injured refu-gees — who were taken to An-golan camps, the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) said.

To escape the atrocities, Michael Manguvu said he had no choice but to fl ee with his entire family in the hope of reaching Congo’s oil-rich southern neigh-bour.

“It was not easy to leave. It was the country where we had our family, but we had to leave every-

thing behind, in the hands of the rebels,” he said.

And he’s now worried about what the future might hold, on top of the hardship he has already suff ered. “Angola is the closest safe place but we are here with nothing,” he said.

Refugees have been arriving in Mussungue exhausted by days of walking, hungry and often with injuries.

The fi rst refugees to cross the border found shelter in di-lapidated buildings, while others stay under plastic sheeting — and some sleep in the open air.

Children make up more than one third of the migrants in the

camps and are particularly vul-nerable to diarrhoea, fever and malaria.

“We only have two doctors here for more than 4,000 refu-gees,” said Francois Kamabo of the UN children’s fund, Unicef.

“Children die because of a lack of medication or food, the hy-giene conditions are very bad,” he said, adding that as many as 12 people are often forced to share a single kilo of rice.

UNHCR, MSF (Doctors With-out Borders) and others have scrambled teams from the Angolan capital Luanda to the area of the camps to help the new arrivals.

But with a distance of some

1,000km between Luanda and the aff ected region, the mission has proved to be a logistical chal-lenge.

“Here we only have two doc-tors from MSF Spain who were in Luanda for the yellow fever epi-demic,” said an MSF representa-tive.

“We came here to help but we don’t have our kit. We’ve re-quested help but it’s slow com-ing,” he said.

Earlier this month, two planes chartered by UNHCR delivered emergency items including blan-kets, mosquito nets and humani-tarian rations to Luanda.

It seems unlikely that Angola

will be able to successfully stem the fl ow — and even less capable of improving the situation on the ground.

“We have welcomed them to save their lives, but that’s all that we are able to do. We need the support of the international community,” said a local offi cial, speaking on condition of ano-nymity.

“We don’t have any medicine, no food, no clothing, nothing at all,” said Claude Mavuya, 34, one of the refugees in the Mussungue camp.

“If the Angolan government can’t welcome us, then foreign aid must be mobilised.”

AU chief: Addressing climate change could be key to peace

Tackling climate change in Africa could help re-solve multiple problems

ravaging the continent, from drought to refugees and vio-lence, the head of the African Union has said.

The mix of global warming with economic woes and political confl icts keeps peace from taking hold, said Moussa Faki Mahamat, the Union’s new chairman, at Chatham House, an internation-al think tank in London.

“There is a link between cli-mate change and prosperity, as well as peace, on the continent,” Mahamat said in French with an interpreter.

“Africa is among the least polluting continents, and yet

it is the continent that suff ers most,” he said.

Mahamat, the former foreign minister of Chad, was chosen to chair the 55-member, Addis Ababa-based organisation in January.

In Africa’s arid Sahel region, south of the Sahara, he said, drought and desertifi caiton, along with a very young popu-lation prone to immigrate allow problems such as terrorism and traffi cking to “thrive.”

Yet Africa’s huge youth pop-ulation could provide a “demo-graphic dividend” benefi ting the region, so long as young people could be encouraged not to leave, he said.

About 12mn people in Ethio-

pia, Kenya and Somalia are at risk of hunger due to recurring droughts, the UN Food and Agri-culture Organization (FAO) says.

Eastern and southern Af-rica were particularly hard hit in 2016 by the El Nino weather pattern that brought cata-strophic heavy rainfall, fl ash fl ooding and landslides.

“We want to solve the dilem-ma, the irony of the situation in the sense that we have a conti-nent that is potentially rich and yet people are very poor,” Ma-hamat said.

“Africa has not been able to create and realise the prosper-ity that it was looking for, and above all Africa is marginalised on the international fi eld.”

Entrepreneur and farmer Kofoworola Durosimi-Etti (right) works in her greenhouse farm in Ikorodu on the outskirt of Nigeria’s commercial capital Lagos.

Green thumb!

Boko Haram ‘commander’ threatens to bomb AbujaDPALagos

A man presenting himself as a Boko Haram commander has threatened to bomb

the Nigerian capital Abuja on a video seen by DPA.

The video was posted on YouTube yesterday by the news outlet Sahara Reporters, which said it had been obtained by jour-nalist Ahmad Salkida.

The video, the authenticity of which could not be verifi ed, shows fi ve men dressed in mili-tary fatigue sitting in a clearing in a forest. They clutch assault rifl es while one holds a pole carrying a black fl ag.

One of the men, whom Salkida on Twitter identifi ed as com-mander Shuaibu Moni, says they

are sitting in Sambisa Forest, a Boko Haram stronghold from where the army has claimed to have ejected the radical Islamist group.

“In the coming days you will receive bombs in Abuja, by the grace of God,” the man says.

He also says the government released more than fi ve Boko Haram commanders in exchange for 82 girls who were freed a week ago after more than three years in captivity. They were among about 270 kidnapped from a school in the town of Chibok in April 2014.

On another video obtained by Salkida and posted on the Sahara Reporters website, a male voice presents four girls as some of the Chibok girls who refused to re-turn to their parents. The girls are covered with full-length black veils and carry assault rifl es.

One of the girls says they were not forced to marry Boko Haram fi ghters, and calls on her par-ents to join her so they can go to heaven.

“Whether you like it or not, the religion of God will grow. If you refuse, you can die with your sorrows,” she says.

The army dismissed the two videos as propaganda and asked that the threats be disregarded.

“The terrorists have lost touch with current realities. It was aimed at seeking relevance and attention,” army spokesman Sani Usman said.

“We will not relent in our de-termined eff orts of clearing the remnants of the Boko Haram ter-rorists,” the statement said.

Three suicide bombers mean-while attempted to gain entry into the University of Maiduguri

in north-eastern Borno state, the National Emergency Manage-ment Agency said.

Two of them, who were be-lieved to be male, were intercept-ed by security guards.

They then detonated their ex-plosives, killing themselves and one of the guards.

The third, female bomber de-stroyed the wall of a church on the university premises in an ex-plosion which killed her.

Boko Haram, which has been active in north-eastern Nigeria since 2009, wants to create a fun-damentalist state in the country, as well as in bordering regions of Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

The group has kidnapped thousands of other women and children in recent years, forcing them into sexual slavery or into marriages with its fi ghters.

Congo fi nds 2 Ebola casesReutersKinshasa

Health experts have identifi ed two more suspected cases of Ebola in Democratic Republic of Congo,

a day after the government declared an outbreak of the disease that has killed one man, the UN health agency said yesterday.

Government and World Health Organi-zation (WHO) offi cials reached a remote area of Bas-Uele province in northeastern Congo near the border with Central Afri-can Republic on Saturday for a fi eld inves-tigation, WHO said.

Experts say to prevent the spread of the virus they must quickly track down, test, isolate and treat suspected cases.

They also need to protect health work-ers and educate the population about hy-giene measures.

“The fi rst case and possibly the index case, a 39-year-old male, presented onset of symptoms on April 22 and died on ar-rival at the health facility,” a WHO state-ment said.

“Two contacts of this case are being in-vestigated: a person who took care of him during transport to the health care facility, he has since developed similar symptoms,

and a moto-taxi driver who transported the patient to the health care facility,” it said, adding that the taxi driver had died.

In addition, two more people in the area have been identifi ed as suspected cases in the last 24 hours, bringing the to-tal number of cases to 11, WHO’s Congo spokesman Eugene Kabambi told Reuters.

Three of them have died of fever.The worst outbreak of Ebola killed more

than 11,300 people in the West African countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Li-beria and infected more than 28,000.

It peaked in late 2014 causing global alarm but active virus transmission ended last year.

The latest Ebola outbreak is Congo’s eighth, the most of any country.

The deadly hemorrhagic fever was fi rst detected in its dense tropical forests in 1976 and named after the nearby river Ebola.

That experience helped Congolese au-thorities respond eff ectively to an out-break in 2014 that killed dozens of people.

The GAVI global vaccine alliance said on Friday some 300,000 emergency doses of an Ebola vaccine developed by Merck could be available in case of a large-scale outbreak and that it stood ready to support the Congo government on the matter.

19 die in Kenya road accidentAFPNairobi

At least 19 people were killed in a crash be-tween a bus and two trucks early yesterday in Kenya, police said. The accident comes

just weeks after another collision killed dozens in Kenya, which has notoriously dangerous roads.

“We had a bad accident this morning where we lost 18 people on the spot,” police com-mander Hassan Barua told journalists at the scene. Another passenger died in hospital.

Police said the bus hit two trucks while try-ing to overtake in the village of Gilgil, around 120km northwest of Nairobi.

Several other people are still in hospital, in-cluding the drivers of the trucks involved in the accident, police said.

Kenyan police estimate around 3,000 peo-ple die each year on the country’s roads while the World Health Organisation puts the fi gure at four times that amount, at around 12,000 deaths.

At least 26 people were killed in April in head-on collision between a bus and a truck on a highway between Nairobi and the country’s second-largest city Mombasa.

AMERICA

Gulf Times Sunday, May 14, 201716

First lady Melania Trump applauds the United States Army Chorus during a “celebration of military mothers” event at the White House in Washington.

First lady at military event

Fast decision on new FBI director: TrumpAFPWashington

President Donald Trump said yester-day he would act quickly to appoint a new FBI director following his

controversial dismissal earlier this week of James Comey — a move that was still re-verberating around Washington.

Trump’s administration — embroiled in a deepening crisis over the sacking and its shifting explanation of events — is inter-viewing the fi rst candidates for the post, US media reported.

“We can make a fast decision,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One before fl ying to southern Virginia, where he de-livered his fi rst commencement address as president at Liberty University, an evan-gelical Christian school.

The White House has provided no set timeline for the process of replacing Comey.

Asked if the decision or an announce-ment could take place before he leaves for Saudi Arabia, Trump said: “Even that is possible. I think the process is going to go quickly.”

“They’ve been vetted over their lifetime, essentially,” he said of the candidates, de-scribing them as “very well-known, highly respected, really talented people,” before adding: “And that’s what we want for the FBI.”

Yesterday, Attorney General Jeff Ses-sions and his deputy Rod Rosenstein were interviewing acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, Texas Senator John Cornyn, former federal prosecutor Michael Garcia and former assistant attorney general Al-ice Fisher, The New York Times reported, citing a source familiar with the meetings.

They may also speak to at least one more candidate: Adam Lee, who heads the FBI’s offi ce in Richmond, Virginia, according to Fox News.

They are among a dozen candidates be-ing considered for the job.

The choice of a new FBI director seen as independent from the White House will be

closely scrutinised as Trump faces an ava-lanche of criticism for fi ring Comey, the man in charge of a criminal probe into his campaign’s possible ties to Russia.

The 49-year-old McCabe, a career FBI agent, has taken part in a number of high-profi le investigations, including probes into the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 and the attacks against US installations in Benghazi, Libya in 2012.

McCabe contradicted Trump this week, telling lawmakers that Comey enjoyed widespread support among the FBI’s rank and fi le, and that the probe into alleged Russian meddling in the election was a “highly signifi cant investigation”.

Cornyn, the number two Republican in the Senate, served as Texas attorney gen-eral before his election to the Senate in 2002. Garcia served as assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforce-ment and US attorney under former presi-dent George W Bush.

Fisher headed the Justice Department’s criminal division, also under Bush. Other candidates include former New York po-lice commissioner Raymond Kelly, former Republican senator Kelly Ayotte, and South Carolina Congressman Trey Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor who headed the Benghazi investigation in the House.

Trump’s nominee must be confi rmed in the Senate, where Democrats and some Republicans have fi ercely criticised Comey’s fi ring, which came on Tuesday. FBI directors are appointed for a 10-year term.

The president is reported to have asked Comey whether he could be loyal to him during a dinner meeting in February shortly after his inauguration.

Comey promised only that he could be honest, The New York Times reported. Trump denied that account in a Fox News interview on Friday.

Addressing the graduating students at Liberty University yesterday, Trump ap-peared to defend his leadership, saying that doing “what is right” requires a will-ingness to “face criticism from those who lack the same courage”.

“Nothing is easier or more pathetic than being a critic,” he said, “because they are people that can’t get the job done”.

California police motorcycles with rifle mounts are seen outside the White House.

The engineer in a deadly 2015 Amtrak train crash in Philadelphia has been charged with involuntary manslaughter, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said in a statement on Friday, even though local prosecutors had cleared the engineer of criminal wrongdoing earlier in the week. In addition to eight counts of involuntary manslaughter, former Amtrak engineer Brandon Bostian was charged with one count of causing or risking a catastrophe and numerous counts of reckless endangerment, according to Shapiro’s statement.

A police chief in a Ohio town, on the job for just three weeks, was among four people fatally shot on Friday morning at a nursing home, off icials said. Steven Eric Disario, 36, was killed after responding to a shooting in Kirkersville, Ohio. Disario was shot after seeing the shooter who was holding two people hostage behind the nursing home. The hostages ran when the shooter fired and they were not harmed. Local media, citing law enforcement off icials, reported that two female nursing home employees and the shooter were later found dead inside the facility by other off icers.

Microsoft has re-released security updates for older versions of its Windows platforms to counter cyber attacks. In a blog post, the US tech giant recalled that it had published an update in March to address the weakness exploited in Friday’s attacks. “Those who have Windows Update enabled are protected against attacks on this vulnerability,” the company said. “For those organisations who have not we suggest you immediately deploy Microsoft Security Bulletin MS17-010.” The so-called “Wannacry” virus notably attacks Windows XP, which in principle has not been supported by Microsoft since 2014.

Engineer in Amtrak crash charged with manslaughter

Four shot dead at Ohio nursing home

Microsoft re-releases security update

LEGAL CRIMEUMBRELLA SQUARE EMPLOYMENT AFTER DARK

People walk in the rain at Times Square, New York yesterday.

A Lights Out concert at The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn New York. Lights Out wants to be a sensory experience by cutting out the visual sense to bring all the focus back to the sound.

ReutersSeattle

The collapse of a tunnel used to store radioac-tive waste at one of the most contaminated US nuclear sites has raised concerns among

watchdog groups and others who study the coun-try’s nuclear facilities because many are ageing and fraught with problems.

“They’re fi ghting a losing battle to keep these plants from falling apart,” said Robert Alvarez, a former policy adviser at the US Department of En-ergy who was charged with making an inventory of nuclear sites under President Clinton. “The longer

you wait to deal with this problem, the more dan-gerous it becomes,” said Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he focuses on nuclear energy and disarmament.

No radiation was released during Tuesday’s incident at a plutonium-handling facility in the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, but thousands of workers were ordered to take cov-er and some were evacuated as a precaution.

The state of facilities in the US nuclear network has been detailed by the Department of Energy, Government Accountability Offi ce and Defence Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. They have noted eroding walls, leaking roofs, and risks of electrical fi res and groundwater contamination.

In 2016, Frank Klotz, head of the National Nu-clear Security Administration, an Energy Depart-ment agency overseeing maintenance of nuclear warheads, warned Congress about risks posed by ageing facilities. Decontaminating and demolish-ing the Energy Department’s shuttered facilities will cost $32bn, it said in a 2016 report. It also noted a $6bn maintenance backlog. In the 1940s the US government built Hanford and other complexes to produce plutonium and uranium for atomic bombs.

“That was an era when the defence mission took priority over everything else,” said Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scien-tists. “We’re dealing with the legacy of that.”

A 2009 Energy Department survey found nearly

300 shuttered, contaminated and deteriorating sites. Six years later it found that fewer than 60 had been cleaned up.

A 2015 Energy Department audit said delays in cleaning contaminated facilities “expose the De-partment, its employees and the public to ever-increasing levels of risk.”

Risks identifi ed at the sites included leaking roofs carrying radioactivity into groundwater, roof collapses and electrical fi res that could release ra-dioactive particles.

A 2014 Energy Department audit noted a high risk of fi re and groundwater contamination at the shuttered Heavy Element Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is sur-

rounded by homes and businesses near California’s Bay Area.

Problems have also been identifi ed at active fa-cilities including the Savannah River Site, a nuclear reservation in South Carolina.

A 2015 report by the Defence Nuclear Facilities Safety Board found “severe” erosion in concrete walls of an exhaust tunnel used to prevent release of radioactive air.

A 2016 Energy Department audit of one of the United States’ main uranium handling facilities, the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, warned that “intense precipitation or snow” could collapse parts its roof, possibly caus-ing an accident involving radioactivity.

Accident at plutonium-handling facility puts focus on ageing nuclear facilities

ReutersDenver

A Mexican mother of four who moved into a Denver church three

months ago to dodge depor-tation left her sanctuary on Friday because immigration offi cials promised she could remain in the United States for two years.

Jeanette Vizguerra, who came to the United States 20 years ago without authori-sation and worked as janitor before owning a moving com-pany, was named by Time mag-azine as one of the 100 most infl uential people of 2017 last month after she sought refuge at a church.

She also has been an advo-cate for immigrants.

“It’s a special day for me be-cause I will be able to celebrate Mother’s Day (on Sunday) with my children and my grandchil-dren,” Vizguerra, 45, said in Spanish at a news conference after leaving the First Baptist Church.

Three of Vizguerra’s chil-dren were born in the United States.

Her oldest daughter, a Mexi-can national, is an adult who lives in the United States with a work permit under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a federal programme for illegal immigrants who en-tered the country as children.

Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado introduced legisla-tion in March seeking to shield Vizguerra from deportation.

It was a so-called “private bill” applying only to her and

not to immigrants in general.The acting director of Immi-

gration and Customs Enforce-ment (ICE), Thomas Homan, notifi ed Congress last week his agency would stop grant-ing stays of deportation in re-sponse to lawmakers’ private bills.

Instead, the agency would only honour such requests from certain key congressional committee leaders.

Thirty immigrants named in private bills before ICE’s re-vised policy went into eff ect on May 5 were “grandfathered” in, including Vizguerra, who received a stay of deportation until March 15, 2019, ICE said in a statement.

Vizguerra received fi ve pre-vious stays because she was the victim of an unspecifi ed violent crime and has a pend-ing visa application, according to the law fi rm representing her. She was convicted of two misdemeanours — using falsi-fi ed documents and illegally re-entering the United States after her mother’s funeral in Mexico.

Immigration offi cials re-jected Vizguerra’s request for a stay of deportation on Febru-ary 15 and that day she moved into First Unitarian Society church.

When it underwent renova-tion, supporters shuttled her to First Baptist.

Representative Jared Polis in a statement said he was grate-ful Vizguerra will be “aff orded more time in the US” but he criticised ICE for scaling back its compliance with private bills on behalf of individual immigrants.

Immigrant leaves church with stayof deportation

ReutersDetroit

The US National Labor Relations Board has fi led an unfair labour practic-

es complaint against Volkswa-gen AG for hiking health insur-ance premiums and changing working hours of a group of skilled workers who voted for union representation in 2015.

The complaint is part of a lengthy battle over the NLRB’s recognition of the vote by roughly 160 skilled workers at VW’s Chattanooga plant in Tennessee to be represented by the United Auto Workers union.

The German automaker has argued against allowing a small group within the plant to have union representation, main-taining that all 1,500 hourly workers should be treated as one unit.

The union sought to rep-

resent only a portion of the plant’s workers after it nar-rowly lost a February 2014 election to represent all hourly workers at the plant.

The NLRB complaint states that issues like working hours and conditions of employment are “mandatory subjects for the purposes of collective bar-gaining”.

In an e-mailed statement, VW spokesman Scott Wilson said: “We fundamentally disa-gree with the decision to sepa-rate” the skilled workers from the rest and “will continue our eff ort to allow everyone to vote as one group on the matter of union representation”.

In an affi davit provide by the UAW, a worker at the plant said that the company has “refused to bargain with the Union over” the changes.

The UAW has never been able to win an organising vote at a foreign-owned auto as-sembly plant in the US south.

Plaint against VW over practices at plant

President Trump appears set to make a rapid selection for a new chief

ASIA/AUSTRALASIA17Gulf Times

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Asia assesses ransomware cyber assaultReutersSingapore

Some hospitals, schools and universities in Asia were hit by a global cyber

attack which infected tens of thousands of computers in Eu-rope and the United States, but offi cials and researchers said the extent of any damage may not yet be known.

China’s offi cial news agency Xinhua said secondary schools and universities were hit, but did not say how many or iden-tify them.

Sun Yat-sen University said it received a large number of virus complaints on Friday, the Chinese fi nancial magazine Caixin reported yesterday, cit-ing a notice circulated by the university’s IT department.

William Saito, cyber security adviser to the Japanese cabinet and trade ministry, said some of the country’s institutions were aff ected but declined to elabo-rate.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said one of Seoul’s uni-versity hospitals had been af-fected.

An offi cial said it wasn’t yet clear whether the hospital, which he declined to name, had been hit by the ransomware or some other malware.

Two hospitals in Jakarta were hit, according to Semuel Pan-gerapan, a director general at Indonesia’s Communication and Information Ministry.

He said offi cials were at-tempting to localise the infect-ed server to prevent the mal-ware from spreading.

One of Vietnam’s leading an-tivirus software companies said dozens of people had reported infections.

“This number may increase as people return to work next week. A large number of com-puters will be turned back on and may be targets,” said Vu Ngoc Son, vice president of Bkav Anti Malware.

He declined to identify who had been infected. None were customers of the company.

Cyber extortionists tricked victims into opening mali-cious malware attachments to spam e-mails that appeared to contain invoices, job off ers, se-curity warnings and other le-gitimate fi les. The ransomware

encrypted data on the comput-ers, demanding payments of $300 to $600 to restore access.

Security researchers said they observed some victims paying via the digital currency bitcoin, though they did not know what percentage had given in to the extortionists.

Offi cials in the Philippines and Singapore said there were no reports of breaches of criti-cal infrastructure.

New Zealand and Australia reported no impact on any or-ganisations.

Two factors may account for the limited reports of damage in Asia.

The worm began to spread in Europe on Friday, by which time it was already early evening in many Asian countries.

The worm spreads most effi -ciently through organisational networks, not home com-puters, said Vikram Thakur, principal research manager at Symantec.

That means offi cials will need to wait until tomorrow, when business resumes, to gauge the impact on Japan, said Saito.

“In Japan, things could likely emerge on Monday,” he said.

Surfers hold their sufboards during sunset at Kuta beach near Denpasar, on Indonesia’s resort island of Bali.

Surf’s up!

New Zealanders crave for seasonal feijoas fruitGuardian News and MediaWellington

To most New Zealanders, imagining life without fei-joas is almost unthinkable.

Yes, this is marketing copy, but as with all the best marketing copy, it is also true.

At this time of year, these small, smooth green fruits are plentiful in New Zealand, traded by the bucket for next to noth-ing and infusing everything from chocolate to crumbles, ice-cream to vodka with their distinctive, soapy-citrus fl avour.

Physically they are unassum-ing, a little like oval limes of a darker green, but their taste de-

fi es description, which is “rather challenging” for Pole to Pole, the company “on a mission to promote NZ Feijoas around the world”.

They give it a go anyway, in a guide for growers to “marketing your fruit”.

“Many liken them to guavas or quince, but their complex fl avour also brings to mind strawberries and pineapple, with a pear-like gritty texture, and a hint of mint.”

The best indication of their taste is their powerful and dis-tinctive fragrance, which Wiki-pedia says “strongly” resembles that of the chemical methyl ben-zoate.

As this might suggest, a little feijoa goes a long way in fl avour,

and it is surprisingly versatile, appropriate in baking, confec-tionery, chutney, smoothies, sal-ads and even alcohol.

In New Zealand, where they have been embraced with a zeal that obliterates their South American origins, they crop up in everything.

Mostly, though, they are eaten like kiwifruit, another foreign fruit inextricably linked to New Zealand: sliced open and scooped out with a spoon.

Feijoas are technically “avail-able” in Australia, but invariably in small quantities at exorbitant prices at boutique grocers.

Like dragonfruit or any other “exotic fruit” that no one knows what to do with, they have low

name recognition — hence the marketing copy.

Pole to Pole, based in New Zea-land’s Bay of Plenty region, ex-port Zeijoa-brand feijoas around the world.

Its target market is clear: New Zealand has one of the larg-est diasporas of any country in the world, with an estimated 600,000 citizens in Australia alone.

Forget about not being able to vote, or the university fees hike: New Zealanders never feel less at home in Australia than for the three months of the year friends and family back home are experi-encing peak feijoa fatigue.

As a result of this scarcity, intelligence-sharing within the

New Zealand community in Aus-tralia as to where the green gold can be found is very good, and made more urgent by time pres-sure: once ripe, they don’t last long.

“There are feijoas on the ground on my ride to work in Syd-ney, yet to spy the tree,” tweeted a friend, new to Australia, with a picture of some small sad fruits on the verge of the road.

It was his fi rst feijoa season out of New Zealand — always the hardest.

“Where is the source? Think they’re rolling down the hill.”

A recent photo posted by Zei-joa to Facebook of crates of the things being shipped to Coles supermarkets in Australia drew

nearly 300 likes, 400 comments and more than 500 shares.

Todd Abrahams, the managing director of Pole to Pole and direc-tor of the grower-owned Zeijoa brand formed in 2014, says Aus-tralia is a great market, despite its “stringent” requirements on imported fruits.

“There’s a lot of expat Kiwis there that can tell their friends,” he says.

For many, feijoas are the stuff of childhood memories, Abra-hams says.

“A lot of people joke they don’t like paying for them because you’d fob them from your neigh-bours. Literally, at this time of year, in the upper North Island, they’re falling on to the streets.”

But the real measure of feijoas’ — sorry, Zeijoas’ — success will be whether they are embraced by people who did not grow up with them.

Abrahams says there has been a good response in Australia, Sin-gapore and Malaysia and small shipments have been trialled in the US and Japan. Pole to Pole is also working on the Middle East, particularly Dubai.

The lack of recognition is a barrier, he says, but not an insur-mountable one.

“To get consumers to walk in and pick it off the shelf, that’s a challenge, because they don’t know what they’re buying. But these things take time. Other fruits have done it.”

China provinces gear up for infrastructure investment as Xi pushes development

Chinese provinces are gear-ing up for more invest-ment in railways and ports

at home to expand international trade in response to President Xi Jinping’s ambitious Belt and Road initiative, government of-fi cials said yesterday.

Leaders from 29 countries will attend the Belt and Road forum in Beijing today and tomorrow, an event orchestrated to promote Xi’s vision of expanding links between Asia, Africa and Europe under-pinned by billions of dollars in in-

frastructure investment abroad.While China’s outbound in-

vestment appears to be a key focus of the new Silk Road ini-tiative, some Chinese provinces seen as strategic to the plans said they are also ramping up infra-structure investment.

Offi cials from the Chinese province of Zhejiang, an affl u-ent coastal province in eastern China, said it is planning new Belt and Road-related projects worth 123bn yuan ($17.8bn), and about half of that would be spent

within the province, mainly on infrastructure.

That includes a new $870mn railway to connect China’s man-ufacturing powerhouse Yiwu and port city Ningbo, connecting the province’s sea ports with conti-nental ports, said Li Xuezhong, director of the provincial offi ce of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

“Once completed, that would be very benefi cial for improv-ing the global logistic system,” Li said in a briefi ng.

Another senior offi cial from the southern province of Guangxi, bordering Vietnam, said yesterday upgrading existing infrastructure to improve transportation speed “in all directions” within China is a key focus for the province.

“We can only play a bigger role in the Belt and Road initiative if we do a good job in building trans-portation infrastructure to help (China’s) western region develop,” Zhang Xiaoqin, vice governor of Guangxi said at a separate briefi ng to the media.

N Korea says dialogue with US under ‘right conditions’Reuters Seoul

A senior North Korean diplo-mat who handles relations with the United States said

yesterday that Pyongyang would have dialogue with the US admin-istration if conditions were right, South Korea’s Yonhap news agen-cy reported.

Choe Son Hui, North Korea’s foreign ministry director general for US aff airs, made the comment to reporters in Beijing as she was travelling home from Norway, Yonhap said.

“We’ll have dialogue if the conditions are there,” she told re-porters when asked if the North was preparing to hold talks with the Trump administration, ac-cording to Yonhap.

When asked if North Korea was also getting ready to talk with the new government in South Korea, of liberal President Moon Jae-in, Choe said: “We’ll see.”

The comments by Choe, who is a veteran member of the North’s team of nuclear negotia-tors, came amid stepped up in-ternational eff orts to press North Korea and ease tension over its pursuit of nuclear arms.

US President Donald Trump

warned in an interview with Re-uters in late April that a “major, major confl ict” with the North was possible, but he would prefer a diplomatic outcome to the dis-pute over its nuclear and missile programmes.

Trump later said he would be “honoured” to meet the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, under the right conditions.

A US State Department spokesman said the United States remains open to talks with North

Korea but it would have to “cease all its illegal activities and ag-gressive behaviour in the region.”

“We have been clear over the past twenty years that we seek nothing but a stable and eco-nomically prosperous Korean peninsula,” the spokesman said in an email.

Choe was in Norway for so-called Track Two talks with former US government offi cials, according to Japanese media, the latest in a series of such meet-ings.

A source with knowledge of the latest meeting said at least one former US government offi -cial took part but the US admin-istration was not involved.

South Korea’s Moon, elected this week on a platform of a mod-erate approach to North Korea, has said he would be willing to go to Pyongyang under the right circumstances and said dialogue must be used in parallel with sanctions to resolve the problem over North Korea’s weapons.

North Korea has conducted fi ve nuclear tests in defi ance of UN and US sanctions and is also developing long-range missiles to deliver atomic weapons.

It says it needs such weapons to defend itself against US ag-gression.

Japan favours Aegis Ashore over THAAD

Japan is leaning towards choos-

ing the Aegis Ashore missile-

defence system over another

advanced system called Terminal

High Altitude Area Defence

(THAAD), government and ruling

party sources have said.

Faced with North Korea’s rapid

missile and nuclear development,

and its threats, Japan has been

looking into introducing a new

missile-defence layer — either

the THAAD or the Aegis Ashore,

a land-based version of the Aegis

system developed for war ships.

Lockheed Martin Corp makes

both systems.

The government now favours

the Aegis Ashore system as it

comes with a wider coverage area,

which would mean fewer units

needed to protect Japan, and it is

also cheaper, three government

and two ruling party sources said.

The sources, who spoke this

week, declined to be identified

because they are not authorised

to speak to media on the topic.

An Aegis Ashore unit costs

about 70bn to 80bn yen ($618mn

to $706mn), while a THAAD unit

costs more than 100bn yen, the

sources said.

Also, the introduction of

Aegis Ashore would help reduce

the burden of round-the-clock

vigilance shouldered by Japanese

warships equipped with the Aegis

system, they said.

The government will make a

final decision on the new system

in coming months, after sending,

possibly this month, an inspection

team to Hawaii, where US forces

operate Aegis Ashore test facili-

ties, they said.

Japan’s ruling Liberal Demo-

cratic Party in March urged Prime

Minister Shinzo Abe’s government

to consider acquiring the capabil-

ity to hit enemy bases and to beef

up missile defence.

More human bones recovered from sunken South Korean ferryAFPSeoul

More suspected human bones have been re-covered from South

Korea’s sunken Sewol ferry, of-fi cials said yesterday, part of a search that began when the ship was salvaged in March.

The 6,800-ton vessel sank off the country’s southwestern coast three years ago, claim-ing more than 300 lives, mostly high school students on an ex-cursion.

“Bones were recovered today from the fourth deck near the stern,” the maritime ministry said in a statement.

Forensic experts have sent the bones for DNA tests, the statement added. The results will be known in a month.

One of the country’s worst-ever maritime disasters, the sinking of the Sewol dealt a crushing blow to now-ousted president Park Geun-Hye.

Nine of the victims’ bodies have yet to be recovered.

Raising it in one piece was a key demand of their families.

Sifting through silt and de-bris piled up inside the hull, workers have been retrieving bones every day since Wednes-day when suspected human bones were found inside the wreck for the fi rst time.

Last week, a diver combing the sea bed where the ferry had been lying found a bone fragment be-lieved to be from a human shin.

Investigations concluded the disaster was the result of numerous human factors, in-cluding an illegal redesign, an overloaded cargo bay and inex-perienced crew.

Children use an Ofo’s shared bike at a residential area for migrant workers in a village on the outskirts of Beijing.

Shared wheels

BRITAIN

Gulf Times Sunday, May 14, 201718

Britain’s Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, and Britain’s Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, wave as they host with Britain’s Prince Harry a Special Garden Party at Buckingham Palace in central London. They are hosting a special party in the grounds of Buckingham Palace to honour children of those who have died serving in the Armed Forces.

Garden party

Tories on course for ‘massive majority’Guardian News and MediaLondon

Tom Watson has urged voters to back their local Labour MP in order to avoid a “Margaret Thatcher-style”

landslide that would make it diffi cult to hold the Conservatives to account.

Labour’s deputy leader said the party had a “mountain to climb” over the four weeks until the general election and was lagging behind in the polls with all income groups, including working-class voters.

“I’ve run a lot of byelections and elec-tions in my time for the Labour party and I know what it is like.

It is going be very, very diffi cult to turn the poll numbers around, but we are de-termined to do it,” Watson said in an inter-view with the Guardian.

The shadow cabinet minister said there were some “terrifi cally exciting” ideas in the manifesto drawn up by Jeremy Cor-byn’s inner team, which was leaked to newspapers this week.

Watson said he hoped to become the culture, media and sport secretary on 9 June, adding that he would try to put Rupert Murdoch’s bid for Sky on hold while the second part of the Leveson in-quiry into journalistic ethics took place.

But, speaking during a tour of marginal seats in Wales, he also warned of what could be looming if Labour failed to dra-matically shift the political picture in just under four weeks.

“If we get to 8 June and [Theresa May] still commands the lead in the polls that she had at the start of the election, she will command a Margaret Thatcher-style majority,” said Watson, referring to the

former prime minister’s 140- and 100-seat landslide victories in 1983 and 1987.

“A Conservative government with a 100 majority … It will be very hard for them to be held to account in the House of Commons. It means there won’t be usual checks and balances of democracy... all those things go out the window.

“You end up with governance by There-sa May without much accountability — and I don’t think anybody wants that.”

The comments came as May turned up the dial in personal attacks on Corbyn, us-ing a speech in the Labour stronghold of North Shields to attack what she described as “economically disastrous socialist” policies.

Meanwhile, Corbyn tried to defl ect Tory attacks over the question of national se-curity by insisting he was “not a pacifi st” during a speech at the Chatham House thinktank in London.

The Labour leader said he accepted military action was sometimes necessary, but insisted it must be “a genuine last re-

sort”. In Wales, Watson — who travelled to eight constituencies on Labour’s red bat-tle bus emblazoned with the slogan “For the many, not the few” — admitted voters had raised questions about leadership, but insisted that was not new. “He does come up on the doorstep, Jeremy, but so did Ed Miliband, so did Gordon Brown, so did Tony Blair,” he said.

He acknowledged Labour’s eye-wa-tering electoral challenge and urged vot-ers to consider that “a lot of local MPs are running on a good track record”. He also claimed that the idea of the Tories as the party of the working classes was “the big-gest myth perpetuated by London-based marketeers”.

“We’ve got to show it is a myth,” he said. “Labour are low in the polls in all catego-ries — we’ve got a lot to do, we’ve got to convince people we are serious about gov-ernment … We’ve got to try.”

Watson hit back at the suggestion that Corbyn’s leaked election blueprint had triggered anger among MPs, saying the

document had some “incredibly strong” ideas that were popular among voters.

The deputy leader also dismissed re-ports of a fractious atmosphere at La-bour’s “clause V meeting”, where the shadow cabinet and national executive committee nailed down a fi nal version of the manifesto.

“I read our media brief and it said that Emily Thornberry [the shadow foreign secretary] was reported to have stormed out of the clause V meeting and that my team were furious.

It bears very little resemblance to the meeting I was at, which was incredibly good-natured,” he said.

Watson said the shadow chancel-lor, John McDonnell, had explained how the policies were fully costed and that he would bring forward specifi c tax proposals during the election campaign.

Asked about the claim by Labour MP Ben Bradshaw that the manifesto was ir-relevant because Labour had no chance of victory, Watson praised the MP for his long record in standing up for his Exeter constituency but said Bradshaw was “of-ten outspoken”.

“He often swims against the tide and that is why he is his own man,” he added.

Watson said the manifesto was all about taking back power — and control. Asked if Labour was adopting the slogan of the Brexit campaign, he said: “The Vote Leave people used ‘take back control’ for a reason, because there are millions of people in the country who feel powerless, who feel that government is not listening to them.”

Having campaigned against phone hacking, Watson made clear that if he be-came culture secretary he would want to start the second part of the Leveson in-quiry into the relationship between jour-nalists and the police.

The leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, with campaign supporters on the promenade in Lowestoft.

The Evening StandardLondon

The home secretary is to chair a meeting of the emergency Cobra committee amid warnings that cha-

os wreaked by a global ransomware attack was “unprecedented”. A global cyber at-tack, using hacking tools believed to have been developed by the US National Secu-rity Agency has infected tens of thousands of computers in nearly 100 countries, dis-rupting the NHS and FedEx among other organisations.

Cyber extortionists tricked victims into opening malicious malware attachments to spam emails that appeared to contain invoices, job off ers, security warnings and other legitimate fi les. The ransomware en-crypted data on the computers, demand-ing bitcoin payments to restore access.

On Saturday, the European Union’s law enforcement agency Europol said the havoc unleashed by the attack was “at an unprecedented level”.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the virus had not been targeted at the NHS, saying the attack “feels random in terms of where it’s

gone to and where it’s been opened”. It has aff ected 45 NHS organisations, Rudd said, including London hospitals run by Barts Health NHS Trust.

She added: “Windows XP is not a good platform for keeping your data as secure as the modern ones, because you can’t download the eff ective patches and anti-virus software for defending against vi-ruses.

“CQC (Care Quality Commission) does do cyber checks on the NHS trusts, on hos-pitals when they do their visits, and they will be advising NHS trusts to move to modernise their platforms and I think that after this experience, I would expect them all to move forward with modernising.”

Rudd said the UK was a world leader in

cyber security, adding: “So far, all we have seen is patients inconvenienced, some hospitals, some doctors making changes to their daily life.

“But the fact is no data has yet been ac-cessed and the NHS are brilliantly manag-ing to weave through this disruption.”

Rudd is due to chair a meeting of the Government’s emergency Cobra meeting in Whitehall at 2.30pm.

The Home Secretary told BBC Breakfast she could not confi rm that all NHS fi les are backed up.

She said: “I hope the answer is yes, that is the instructions that everybody has re-ceived in the past.

That is good cyber defence, but I expect, and we will fi nd out over the next few days if there are any holes in that.”

Rudd added: “There may be lessons to learn from this but the most important thing now is to disrupt the attack, let’s come back to afterwards whether there are lessons to be learned.”

She later told Sky News: “It is disap-pointing that they have been running Windows XP — I know that the secretary of state for health has instructed them not to and most have moved off it.”

Rudd added: “Where the patient data

has been properly backed up, which has been in most cases, work can continue as normal because the patient data can be downloaded and people can continue with their work.”

Four London hospitals hit by hackers in cyber attack on NHS Four London hos-pitals aff ected by the attack continued to face problems yesterday morning.

There will be no outpatient appoint-ments at The Royal London, St Bartholow-mew’s, Whipps Cross or Newham, as Barts Health NHS Trust continued to deal with the major incident.

In statement, the Trust said: “We are continuing to deal with a major IT disrup-tion and we are sorry for any delays expe-rienced at our hospitals. We have activated our major incident plan to make sure we can maintain the safety and welfare of pa-tients.

“Ambulances are being diverted to nearby hospitals and we are sorry that we have had to cancel some routine appoint-ments.

“There will be no outpatient appoint-ments at our hospitals on Saturday May 13. All patients who have their appointment cancelled will be contacted as soon as pos-sible to reschedule.”

Cobra meet called amid cyber chaos

The Royal London Hospital.

The Evening StandardLondon

People will be able to have their embarrassing teen-age social media posts

deleted under a “right to in-nocence” plan announced by Theresa May ahead of the elec-tion.

Under widespread reforms to curb the dangers of the cy-berworld, the prime minster said sites like Facebook would be forced to wipe the records of users before they turned 18 on request.

Web giants will also be warned they face penalties if they fail to do more to stop children access-ing harmful content.

May said the internet had brought “signifi cant new risks” as well as a wealth of opportu-nities.

She said: “We want social me-dia companies to do more to help redress the balance and will take action to make sure they do.

“These measures will help

make Britain the best place in the world to start and run a digital business, and the safest place in the world for people to be online.” Under the plans, so-cial media fi rms will also have to take action to stop search terms directing users to inap-propriate sites.

It is hoped the move will stop children accidentally stum-bling on porn, with some adult channels featuring x-rated videos that have titles which play on the names of well-known fi lms and characters.

The measure would also in-clude hate speech and other sites that could be harmful to youngsters.

Age restrictions on apps to stop young children accessing damaging content will also be expanded.

Firms will be told to intro-duce a “comply or explain” system that means they take down content that has been complained about or explain the reason behind why they have not.

May promises right to delete teenage social media posts

Parents told off after tweeting SAT answersThe Evening StandardLondon

Parents have been rep-rimanded online by the Department for Educa-

tion for tweeting answers from their children’s SATs exams.

Millions of primary school pupils are in the process of tak-ing national curriculum tests, known as SATs, prompting of-fi cials to fl ood social media in a bid to clamp down on cheating.

The DfE’s offi cial Twitter ac-count warned against publish-ing answers as some key stage two students are still due to sit assessments.

It wrote: “Some children will be taking the KS2 tests next week using timetable varia-tions. Please help us to keep the test content secure. Thank you.”

The plea followed a series of interventions against dis-gruntled parents who had aired concerns about questions in their children’s’ tests.

Journalist Matt Thrower used Twitter to query whether a part of his daughter’s maths paper was relevant, only to re-ceive an offi cial rebuttal.

Matt Thrower @mattthr My 11 yr old missed a

#SATS2017 question today she didn’t know M in Roman numerals = 1000. How is that

useful info? How is it even maths?

DfE @educationgovuk@mattthr Hi, can you please

remove the tweet referring to SATs? We’re trying to maintain the confi dentiality & integrity of ongoing tests.

The DfE told him: “Hi, can you please remove the tweet referring to SATs? We’re trying to maintain the confi dentiality & integrity of ongoing tests.”

But the father hit back: “Happy to, once you remove such absurd and pointless questions from your tests.”

Another user complained that a word which had many spellings was too ambiguous to have formed part of his daugh-ter’s spelling test.

Grab68 @Grab68#SATs spelling test yes-

terday for my daughter. Spell ‘coarse’.Teacher (very broad Irish accent) didn’t specify what coarse/course.

DfE @educationgovuk@Grab68 Hi, can you please

remove the tweet referring to SATs? Trying to maintain the confi dentiality & integrity of the tests.

When asked by the offi cial account to remove details of the question, he responded with a fi rm “no”. He said: “I think SATs are cruel and un-necessary and cause stress for children.”

Guardian News and MediaLondon

The University of Man-chester has been ac-cused of planning a

“clearout” of experienced aca-demics in order to replace them with cheaper, junior teaching staff , after it announced plans to cut 171 jobs.

Britain’s largest university said the prospect of Brexit had created uncertainty in the high-er education sector and the cuts were designed to “secure future fi nancial sustainability”.

But the University and Col-lege Union (UCU), which rep-resents lecturers and research-ers, argued that Manchester’s fi nances were in good health and suggested the move had come in response to the new teaching excellence framework (TEF), which will allow univer-sities with the best teaching to raise fees.

In an e-mail sent to staff , the university said that despite the job cuts, it would continue to make “strategic investments”, including the creation of more than 100 new, early-career ac-ademic appointments.

The faculties of arts, lan-guages, biology, medicine and business most vulnerable to

the planned redundancies.Martyn Moss, UCU regional

offi cial for the north-west, said early assessments of the plans suggested the university want-ed to get rid of more expensive, senior academics.”I think they want to shake it up and have a clearout,” he said.

“The whole question of them bringing in a signifi cant number of early years academ-ics at a similar time raises real questions about the genuine-ness of the redundancies and whether they would be fair dismissals.”

A spokesman for the univer-sity confi rmed it was planning to recruit more than 100 junior academics, but did not com-ment on the allegation that the appointments would fi ll gaps left by redundancies.

Manchester is the latest higher education institution to announce mass job cuts, with many citing the uncertainty caused by Brexit as a contribu-tory factor.

This week alone it was re-ported that 150 jobs were at risk at Aberystwyth Univer-sity, while Bangor University warned unions that cuts were to come and the University of Sunderland said compulsory redundancies were probable as part of its cost-cutting drive.

Varsity accused of clearout of academics

The Tories under Premier May look likely to sweep the elections

EUROPE19Gulf Times

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Italy and Portugal were the frontrunners going into last night’s fi nal of the Eurovi-

sion Song Contest, an annual song and dance fest – held in Kiev this year – whose global audience topped 200mn people last year.

Italian Francesco Gabbani is leading the pack with a number, viewed nearly 114mn times on YouTube, that mixes Buddhist imagery with a dancing ape, and he explains as poking fun at the West’s superfi cial embrace of eastern culture.

Vying for fi rst place is Portu-gal’s Salvador Sobral, perform-ing a jazz-style ballad written by sister Luisa.

According to the bookmak-ers, third favourite is Bulgaria’s Kristian Kostov, the youngest entrant at 17.

Ukraine is hosting the com-petition while the country is fi ghting a war, hundreds of kilo-

metres away in the east, against Russian-backed separatists, after its Crimean Tatar entry Jamala won the competition last year.

On Kiev’s Independence Square, a billboard went up listing nine Ukrainian soldiers killed this month, with the slo-gan: “This is the price we paid for every single day we lived in peace.”

“This was put up for Eurovi-sion, to remind guests that not all is well in Ukraine,” said a spokeswoman for Ukraine crisis media centre.

The elephant in the room at Saturday’s contest is Russia, which is boycotting the event after Ukraine barred Moscow’s contestant Yuliya Samoilova from entering the country – a symptom of the countries’ toxic relations after Russia’s annexa-tion of Crimea in 2014.

Both countries ignored pleas from organisers, the European Broadcasting Union, and Russia has refused to air the contest, forcing fans to watch online.

Russia has vowed that Sam-oilova will compete in 2018, putting Ukraine in a tricky di-lemma over whether to partici-pate alongside her.

After the Kiev event opened, it emerged that the Bulgarian con-testant, Kostov, had also per-formed in annexed Crimea.

The singer, who has appeared on a Russian television talent show, was allowed to stay be-cause he was only 14 at the time.

He will appear in the fi nal.Gabbani faced questions at a

news conference on Friday about the pressures of being favourite.

“Without any off ence, but it has been the biggest pressure for me that I have been asked this question (about being favourite) zillions of times,” he said, speak-ing through an offi cial transla-tor. “But beside that, I want to be very honest about this – you embrace this experience of Eu-rovision with the aim of living a great adventure and not neces-sarily thinking of the fi rst or sec-ond place.”

This is the 62nd edition of

Eurovision, recognised by Guin-ness World Records as the long-est-running annual TV music competition.

It began in 1956 with just sev-en countries. Ireland have won the most times – seven in all – following by Sweden.

Other hopefuls this year in-clude Jacques Houdek, known as “Mr Voice” in Croatia, who blends pop and operatic singing

styles in the song My Friend.Romania is fi elding a duo that

combines rap and yodelling.Ukraine has won the compe-

tition twice, including last year with a song about the mass de-portation of Tatars from Crimea by Josef Stalin.

More than 10,000 have been killed in the war between Ukraine and pro-Russian fi ght-ers that erupted in 2014.

“And yes, there is a war going on, but it’s further, further out,” said Stephanie Novak, a visit-ing fan from Australia. “And I think isn’t it the whole point of Eurovision to help bring Europe together? What could be better than bringing Europe to a coun-try that is being so aff ected by war at the moment and to show them what a beautiful country it is.”

Italy leads the pack at EurovisionReuters/AFPKiev

Left: Kostov of Bulgaria performing the song Beautiful Mess during the second semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2017.

Gabbani performs during the first semi-final rehearsal for the Eurovision Song Contest in Kiev.

French President-elect Em-manuel Macron met party supporters yesterday on

the eve of his inauguration and told candidates contesting key parliamentary elections next month that they had an “im-mense responsibility”.

The 39-year-old, who beat far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in a second round vote last week, was received “trium-phantly” according to tweets by those attending the meeting.

“You are the new faces of French politics,” they quoted him as saying. “You have an im-

mense responsibility.”Macron has promised to re-

fresh France’s parliament and his party – La Republique En Marche (REM, Republic on the Move) – unveiled 428 out of its 577 candidates this week.

Half of them have never held elected offi ce, including a retired female bullfi ghter and a star mathematician, and half of them are women.

The pro-Europe centrist had pledged to bring about a “revo-lution” in French politics that will inject fresh faces into the stale political landscape and end the pattern of power alternating between traditional parties.

A former economy minister to outgoing President Francois

Hollande, Macron is due to take oath this morning in a ceremony that starts at 10am (0800 GMT).

Around 1,500 police offi cers will be deployed near the presi-dential palace located in the heart of Paris and the nearby Champs Elysees and other roads will be blocked off .

Macron won after one of the most unpredictable elections in modern history marked by scandal, repeated surprises and a last-minute hacking attack.

Hundreds of thousands of e-mails and documents stolen from his campaign were dumped online, leading Macron to call it an attempt at “democratic destabilisation”.

The election saw voters eject

establishment fi gures, including one-time conservative favourite Francois Fillon.

Unpopular Hollande was the fi rst to bow to the rebellious mood in December as he became the fi rst sitting president not to seek re-election in the French fi fth republic, founded in 1958.

On Thursday, a row broke out with centrist ally Francois Bay-rou whose MoDem party, which backed Macron in the presiden-tial election, protested that they were underrepresented in the election candidates list.

Bayrou said late on Friday however that a “solid and bal-anced” agreement had been reached after day-long talks be-tween offi cials of both parties in

which Macron was involved.Among the names were also

24 defecting MPs from the out-going Socialists and on Friday the party reached out to moder-ate conservatives.

“There is a group among The Republicans (France’s conserva-tives) ... saying ‘we want to be useful to the country, but we do not want to ‘Macronise’ our-selves,” Macron’s head of candi-date selection Arnaud Leroy said on BFM TV, naming a number of leading fi gures among The Re-publicans.

“We, being responsible peo-ple, are open to discussions. I am not closing any doors,” he said.

In a sign of how sensitive the reconstructing of the French po-

litical landscape is, Alain Juppe, a moderate conservative ex-prime minister, angrily denied on Twitter reports that he had struck a government deal with Macron.

“There is obviously no Juppe/Macron deal!!!!” Juppe said on his Twitter account.

RTL radio had minutes earlier reported that there was such a deal and that conservative Ed-ouard Philippe, a lawmaker and mayor of Le Havre, would be-come prime minister.

Philippe and Richard Ferrand, secretary general of Macron’s REM party, have been touted over the past few days by French media as possible prime minis-ters.

Macron meets supporters ahead of his inaugurationAFPParis

At least 23 people died and 11 more were seriously injured yesterday when a

bus carrying women and chil-dren plunged off a cliff near the southwestern Turkish sea resort of Marmaris.

“Sadly, we have had 20 fatali-ties and 11 other seriously in-jured,” said Amir Cicek, the gov-ernor of Mugla province, calling it a “horrible accident”.

His deputy Kamil Koten said that the bus plunged through a crash barrier and fell about 15m (50’) on to a lower road, smash-ing a car with its three occu-pants.

“If we count these three deaths, the number of the dead rises to 23,” the state-run Ana-dolu news agency quoted him as saying.

The accident occurred near the Sakar Pass on a steep wind-ing road fi lled with hairpin bends.

Cicek told NTV television

that an investigation was under way.

“The bus’s brakes may have malfunctioned,” he said.

Television images showed the yellow bus lying on its side and bodies wrapped up in cloth lined up next to it.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, currently on a visit to China, said that he was “extremely pained” by the tragedy and instructed local authorities to take measures to ensure that “such tragedies” do not recur.

The Hurriyet newspaper quoted Marmaris mayor Ali Acar as indicating an “error by the driver”, without giving fur-ther details.

Other media outlets reported that the bus left from the west-ern city of Izmir carrying only women and children who were on a trip for Mothers’ Day, cel-ebrated in Turkey today.

Marmaris is one of the coun-try’s main resorts on the Medi-terranean, and a popular week-end destination for many Turks as temperatures climb.

At least 23 killed in Turkey bus crashAFPIstanbul

Medics and rescue workers are seen at the scene of the bus crash near the southwestern holiday town of Marmaris.

Pope Francis gave the Catholic Church two of its youngest saints yes-

terday, canonising shepherd siblings believed to have seen the Madonna 100 years ago in a Portuguese town that is now a major pilgrimage site.

Hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom slept outdoors to hold their places, broke into applause as the leader of the world’s 1.2bn Catholics proclaimed the sib-lings – Francisco and Jacinta Marto – the newest of the church’s saints.

The two died at the ages of 10 and nine years, within three years of the 1917 apparitions, making them the youngest saints of the church who were not martyrs.

The Virgin of Fatima is ven-erated by Catholics around the world, a following underscored by the many national fl ags fl uttering in the huge crowd, estimated at more than half a million.

Marie Chantal, 57, a life-long devotee, travelled more than 9,000km (6,000 miles) from the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean to attend the ceremony.

“I am very emotional be-cause this Pope is truly merci-ful and close to the people and I think he will bring us many good things,” she said.

In the homily of a huge out-door Mass, Francis prayed that the Madonna would protect the most vulnerable members of society, “especially the sick and the disabled, prisoners and the unemployed, the poor and the abandoned”.

Two huge tapestries made from century-old photographs

of the children dressed in the traditional peasant garb of the times hung from the church that is now the focal point of the sanctuary visited by about 7mn people each year.

The story of Fatima’s shep-herd children has captivated Catholics since their fi rst re-ported vision on May 13, 1917.

The church believes the Madonna gave three children – Francisco and Jacinta Marto and their older cousin Lucia Dos Santos – three messages, the so-called secrets of Fatima.

Dos Santos became a nun and died in 2005 at the age of 97, and eff orts are underway to make her a saint as well.

The fi rst two secrets were revealed soon and concerned a vision of hell, seen by believers as a prediction of the outbreak of World War II, a warning that Russia would “spread her er-rors” in the world, and a need for general conversion to God and prayer.

The “third secret” intrigued the world for more than three-quarters of a century, inspir-ing books and cults convinced that it predicted the end of the world.

In 2000, the Vatican said it was a prediction of the 1981 assassination attempt on pope John Paul on May 13, the same day of the fi rst reported appa-rition in 1917.

Gracinda, 57, slept outside during the chill night in Fatima to hold her place near the front of the crowd.

“It was not a great sacrifi ce ... it is very important for me and for the church,” said Viei-ra, who had travelled from her home 250km north of Fatima in central Portugal.

“This Pope is diff erent in everything, I like him a lot. He is closer to us, the people,” she said.

Catholic Church gets its youngest saintsReutersFatima, Portugal

Critical Azerimedia websites blockedAFPBaku

A court in Azerbaijan on Friday approved the gov-ernment’s request to

block websites of a US-funded broadcaster and several news outlets critical of the country’s strongman President Ilham Ali-yev.

The Baku district court backed the claim of the ministry of transport and communications that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Azerbaijani branch, Radio Azadlyg, poses a “threat to the legitimate interests of the state and society”.

The court, held in normal open session, also blocked Inter-net-based Azerbaijan Saati TV, Turan TV, and Meidan TV.

The outlets’ lawyers con-demned the ruling as unlawful and unfounded.

“The verdict violates inter-national legal norms,” lawyer Samed Ragimov told AFP. “No publication referred to in the Azerbaijani authorities’ lawsuit contained a breach of laws and public interests.”

Earlier in April, Ganimat Za-hid, the director of Turan TV denounced legal action against online media as “a move against freedom of speech”.

Oil-rich Azerbaijan has faced strong international criticism for stepping up pressure on dis-sent and opposition media since Aliyev’s election for a third term in 2013.

Aliyev, 55, fi ercely denies any rights abuses.

The tightly-controlled ex-Soviet republic ranked 162 in the 2017 World Press Freedom Index released in April by media advo-cacy group Reporters Without Borders.

The advocacy group said that independent journalists and bloggers “are thrown in prison if they do not fi rst yield to har-assment, beatings, blackmail, or bribes”.

Aliyev took over in 2003 after the death of his father Heydar Aliyev, a former KGB offi cer and communist-era leader who had ruled Azerbaijan with an iron fi st since 1993.

Journalist turned politician attackedA prominent Kosovo journalist who this week joined a political party she had long criticised was beaten up yesterday in a car park close to her apartment, police said.Arbana Xharra was the editor-in-chief of daily newspaper Zeri before joining the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), the country’s largest party.Sources close to the party have said she plans to stand in parliamentary elections next month.Xharra was known for articles that accused off icials in the PDK and other parties of corruption and nepotism.When she joined the party, saying she wanted to serve citizens and remain a critical voice within the PDK, she was condemned by some colleagues and opposition supporters.“The victim was transported to the hospital and her condition is stable,” police said in a statement, without giving more details.No one has been arrested yet.

Migrants held with false passports

Greek police have detained several migrants for trying to cross into Europe on fake passports.A woman from Cameroon and two men from Syria were arrested after presenting the false documents at an airport on the island of Corfu, police said yesterday.Migrants carrying false passports have previously been caught in airports in the cities of Heraklion and Chania on Crete, and other islands in the Aegean Sea.False passports are provided by human traff ickers in many cases, and cost between €1,500 and €3,000 ($1,640-$3,280), police said.

20 Gulf TimesSunday, May 14, 2017

INDIA

BJP seeks

AFSPA in

Kannur after

murder of

RSS activist

IANSKannur, Kerala

The Bharatiya Janata Party yesterday demanded the imposition of the Armed

Forces (Special Powers) Act (AF-SPA) in Kannur, a day after a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh activist was hacked to death.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vi-jayan brushed aside the killing, terming it a one-off incident.

On Friday evening, Biju, 30, was hacked to death at Payyanur in Kannur, the hot spot of politi-cal murders.

The state BJP leadership has accused activists of the rul-ing Communist Party of India (Marxist) of the murder, which the party has denied. A dawn-to-dusk shutdown was observed in Kannur district yesterday.

BJP’s lone legislator O Rajag-opal and a team of party lead-ers yesterday met Governor P Sathasivam and asked for the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act to be imposed in Kannur.

Rajagopal said: “Today the Kerala police have become an outfi t of the CPM and miserably failed to protect the lives and property of citizens.

“The police are always linked to the leaders of the CPM, who direct them. The only way peace can return to Kannur is with im-plementation of the AFSPA,” he told reporters in Thiruvanan-thapuram.

The police have registered a case against seven people over the crime. They said the murder of Biju was carried out by a gang of four suspects, who came in a car.

Biju along with his friend was driving a two-wheeler, when the car knocked them down and he was hacked to death.

The victim, who was out on bail, was an accused in the July 2016 murder of CPM worker Dhanaraj.

Vijayan who arrived in Kan-nur yesterday told reporters that things appeared to be calm fol-lowing an all-party meeting that discussed political rivalries.

Uncle held over mysterydeath of Tripura studentIANSAgartala

After a month-long stu-dents’ protest, Tripura police on Friday night

arrested a trader in connection with the mysterious death of his niece and polytechnic student Anwara Chowdhury, offi cials said yesterday.

“After receiving the postmor-tem examination and forensic reports of Anwara Chowdhury, we immediately arrested Noor Mohamed on suspicion of his involvement in the death of the student,” West Tripura district police chief Abhijit Saptarshi said.

Mohamed, a contractor and trader, was presented in the Chief Judicial Magistrate’s court, which remanded him in two-day police custody.

Saptarshi said the state gov-ernment yesterday handed over the case to the Criminal Investi-gation Department.

The police chief said that ac-cording to the postmortem ex-

amination and forensic reports, poison was found in the 16-year-old girl’s body.

Since April 10, when the Women’s Polytechnic student died mysteriously at Govind Ballabh Pant Government Med-ical College and Hospital, stu-dent wings of the ruling Com-munist Party of India (Marxist), the Trinamool Congress, the Congress and the Bharatiya Ja-nata Party had been agitating to press for the arrest of the cul-prits.

The unrelenting students’ protest forced the authorities to exhume the girl’s body from a burial ground and conduct autopsy and forensic examina-tion.

Student leaders have de-manded stern action against the doctors of the medical college.

They have also demanded that Mohamed’s wife and his daugh-ter be arrested over Anwara’s death.

Trinamool Congress Chatra Parishad leader Viki Prashad has demanded that the case be tried in a fast-track court.

W Bengal civic polls a crucialtest for all political partiesIANSKolkata

The ruling Trinamool Con-gress’ capability to con-tinue its electoral suc-

cesses and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s bid to become the main opposition force would be tested amid a revival of the Gorkha-land demand in the hills as seven West Bengal civic bodies hold elections today.

The elections to the munici-palities spread across fi ve dis-tricts in northern, central and the southern tip of the state would provide a peek into the minds of voters in the small towns and pose a challenge for the Left Front and the Congress to revive their fortunes in the backdrop of recent electoral re-sults where they lost ground to the BJP.

The polls would be held for four municipalities in the north-ern Bengal hills - Darjeeling, Kurseong and Mirik Notifi ed Area Authority in Darjeeling dis-

trict and Kalimpong in Kalim-pong district. Besides, Raiganj municipality in North Dinajpur district, Domkal in Murshidabad and Pujali in South 24 Parganas are also up for grabs.

The Trinamool is a principal force in all the areas, and is hop-ing to break the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha’s stranglehold in the hills by tying up with the Gorkha National Liberation Front.

State Tourism Minister and Trinamool Congress leader from north Bengal, Gautam Deb, was confi dent of an impressive show in the hills.

“We will win in Kurseong. We will also perform fairly well in Darjeeling and Kalimpong. Peo-ple want to know why the GJM could not carry out necessary development in the hills despite being in power for so long.

“There was a fear psychosis among the people. Most of the local body elections were un-contested for many years. People could not come out to vote in-dependently. The situation has changed under the leadership

of Mamata Banerjee,” Deb said, alluding to the chief minister’s repeated trips to the hills and the development projects and sops she has announced for the region.

The hills have not witnessed a local election in the past fi ve years.

GJM chief Bimal Gurung, however, accused the state gov-ernment of not providing the necessary funds for develop-ment.

“The state government is talking about development here. I ask where is the development and where is the money sanc-tioned for the hills,” he asked.

To strike an emotive cord among the people, the GJM has revived the call for a separate Gorkhaland and tried to turn the polls into a Gorkhaland vs Bengal issue.

In Domkal, the Trinamool is up against an undeclared seat adjustment between the Con-gress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) which leads the opposition Left Front.

Kejriwal hasno moral right to continue in power: BJPManoj Tiwari makes fresh corruption allegations against AAP government

IANSNew Delhi

The Bharatiya Janata Party yesterday fl agged a new issue against Delhi Chief

Minister Arvind Kejriwal, al-leging corruption in the Public Works Department (PWD) and demanded that he resign on grounds of morality.

BJP Delhi president Manoj Tiwari showed a letter from an “assistant engineer” to Delhi police in which the offi cial al-leged he has been getting life threats.

“In his letter to the Assist-ant Commissioner of Police, Nangloi, regarding a complaint on April 1, 2016, the engineer alleged that while on inspec-tion in Peeragarhi area of Delhi he saw three persons breaking a concrete drain built by the PWD,” Tiwari said at a press conference.

“In his complaint, the en-gineer said he asked the three men not to break the drain but he received a call from a person called Vinay Kumar of Renu Construction who told him not to disturb the three men,” Tiwari said, adding that the company belonged to Kejri-wal’s brother-in-law, Surender Kumar Bansal, who died last week.

“The engineer said the man on the phone gave him life threats,” he said.

“Was the brother-in-law of Kejriwal from the mafi a? Were

they getting the work because Kejriwal was sitting here as the chief minister?” Tiwari asked.

“Kejriwal must answer all these questions,” the BJP leader said.

“It is for all these answers that Kapil Mishra is sitting on a dharna. Please go beyond the dharna politics,” Tiwari said re-ferring to a hunger strike by the sacked Delhi minister who was also suspended from the ruling Aam Aadmi Party after he made corruption allegation against Kejriwal.

“Kejriwal now must come out of his home and answer as he is the chief minister and all this corruption is being done on his instructions and life threats are being given to offi cials,” Tiwari alleged.

“Why is Kejriwal or any of his ministers not answering, where is the morality now?”

The BJP leader said the AAP government in Delhi was “loot-ing” the money of the city’s tax-payers.

Tiwari said the AAP govern-ment has no morality left to stay

in power, and it must resign so that the people’s faith is restored in the government and democ-racy.

On May 9, Delhi’s Anti-Cor-ruption Branch (ACB) registered three cases against Kejriwal’s deceased brother-in-law, and senior PWD offi cers in connec-tion with alleged corruption of Rs100mn.

Meanwhile Sharma, on the fourth day of his hunger strike, warned that the AAP will resort to “new drama” to distract at-tention from the “foreign trips controversy”.

“Fourth day of satyagraha - What new drama will be done to distract attention from the question of foreign trips,” Mishra asked in a tweet.

Also yesterday, police de-tained AAP legislator Sanjeev Jha for trying to “break public peace” after he tried to hold a counter hunger strike outside the house of Mishra.

“We have detained Sanjeev Jha, as he attempted to break the public peace,” a senior police of-fi cial said.

In related developments, Ke-jriwal expressed shock and urged federal Home Minister Rajnath Singh to act a day after AAP leader Ashish Khetan allegedly received a death threat.

“Extremely shocking. Ashish Khetan receives death threat. Hope Rajnath Singh ji will take action,” Kejriwal tweeted.

In a tweet, Khetan posted a letter in which he claimed he was threatened by right-wing forces.

He said he received the letter on Friday night and it warned his “killing is imminent”.

BJP youth wing activists conduct a signature campaign against Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in New Delhi yesterday.

In a warm philanthropic gesture, Bollywood actor Vivek Oberoi has decided to donate 25 flats to the families of troopers killed in last month’s Maoist attacks in Sukma. While four flats have already been allotted, another 21 are being reserved in a housing complex constructed by his company, Karrm Infrastructures Pvt Ltd, at their Thane project. The Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), whose troopers died in the attack, expressed “gratitude” to the actor for his gesture. Oberoi made the off er in a letter to the CRPF last week, but details of the allotted flats were not immediately available. However, the location is likely to be Shahapur area in Thane where KIPL is launching a mega-aff ordable housing project.

Federal minister Ram Vilas Paswan yesterday questioned the silence of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Rashtriya Janata dal chief Lalu Prasad Yadav’s alleged land deals worth Rs10bn and dared him to take action against his ally. Paswan, who is chief of the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), an ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led central government, said in Patna that Nitish Kumar should break his silence and prove his credibility by taking action against Yadav and his family members. “Why is Nitish Kumar silent and not taking action against Lalu despite knowing everything?” Paswan said. This is the first time that after the BJP, its ally LJP has directly attacked Yadav and targeted Nitish Kumar for ignoring serious charges against the former Bihar chief minister and his family.

In a bid to take the load off students, the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Uttar Pradesh has decided that Saturdays will be a “no bag day” in all government-run primary and secondary schools, an off icial said. Students will engage in “joyful activities” and there will be eff orts to enhance a positive relationship between the students and teachers on this day, the off icial said yesterday. The approval was given by Deputy Chief Minister Dinesh Sharma, who is also the education minister. Co-education will also be encouraged in these institutions. Education Department off icials met on Friday and decided that the power of settling disputes in management committees will no longer rest with the manager of the school but with the registrar of such societies.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will arrive in New Delhi today on a four-day state visit, it is reliably learnt. This will be his third state visit. It comes after President Pranab Mukherjee visited Palestine in October 2015 and External Aff airs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s visit in January 2016. According to sources, Abbas will be accompanied by Deputy Prime Minister Ziad Abu Amr, Foreign Minister Riad Malki, Diplomatic Adviser Majdi Khaldi, presidency spokesperson Nabil Aburdeineh and Palestine’s chief judge Mahmoud Habbash. Abbas will call on Mukherjee and hold bilateral talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday, the sources said. Vice President Hamid Ansari and Swaraj are also expected to call on the visiting dignitary.

Goa yesterday launched a unique hop-on-hop-off bus service for tourists, with a fleet of open-roof double-decker and single-decker buses plying through popular hotspots in Panaji and adjoining coastal areas. Goa Tourism Development Corporation chairman Nilesh Cabral said the service would off er tourists a unique experience of enjoying the natural architectural hotspots of Goa from open-roof buses. “Right now, we have four buses in our fleet, which will cover Panaji and the adjoining areas. Soon the fleet will be extended by 15 more buses and more circuits will be created all over Goa,” Cabral said. “The hop-on-hop-off circuit currently includes places of tourist interest in Panaji, like Raj Bhavan, Dona Paula cliff , the Miramar beach and other areas,” he said.

Actor gifts 25 flats to families of Sukma martyrs

Paswan questions Bihar CM’s silence on Lalu

No bags on Saturdays in UP govt schools

Abbas coming on four-day India visit

Hop-on-hop-off bus service launched

GESTURE POLITICSEDUCATION DIPLOMACY TOURISM

Election off icials leave for their respective polling booths with EVMs from Darjeeling ahead of municipal elections, yesterday.

“Kejriwal now must come out of his home and answer as he is the chief minister and all this corruption is being done on his instructions and life threats are being given to offi cials”

INDIA21Gulf Times

Sunday, May 14, 2017

India rules out participation inChina summit

Two civilians killed inKashmir border shelling

IANSNew Delhi

India yesterday ruled out participation in China’s mega One Belt One Road

summit, citing its objections to the $46bn China-Pakistan Economic Corridor that passes through Pakistan-adminis-tered Kashmir.

In a statement a day ahead of the launch of the two-day summit in Beijing, India said that “guided by our principled position in the matter, we have been urging China to engage in a meaningful dialogue on its connectivity initiative, ‘One Belt, One Road’ which was later renamed as ‘Belt and Road Ini-tiative’. We are awaiting a posi-tive response from the Chinese side.

“Regarding the so-called ‘China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’, which is being pro-jected as the fl agship project of the BRI/OBOR, the inter-national community is well aware of India’s position. No country can accept a project that ignores its core concerns on sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Last week, Defence and Fi-nance Minister Arun Jaitley had said that India had “serious reservations” about China’s massive connectivity project that aims to build a trade and infrastructure network linking Asia with Europe and Africa.

“I have no hesitation in say-ing that we have serious res-ervations about it because of sovereignty issues,” he had said.

On Friday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said Indian scholars were coming for the event.

India’s non-participation comes as the top leadership of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Myanmar are attending, while Bangladesh and Nepal are sending high-level del-egations. Bhutan is not at-tending.

On Friday, Nepal offi cially inked a deal with China on OBOR for development of cross-border connectivity.

China’s Foreign Minis-try has said that 29 heads of state, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, will attend the meeting. They will be among the 1,500 or so Chi-nese and foreign delegates at the event.

Among India’s neighbours, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has arrived along with four chief ministers, while Sri Lankan Premier Ranil Wick-remesinghe is also attending.

Countries like the US, Japan, South Korea and France have decided to send offi cial repre-sentations for the meeting.

The OBOR project is inspired by the Silk Road, the trading route of the 16th-18th centu-ries between Europe and Asia. It is proposed to be a vast net-work of sea and land routes - comprising railway lines, roads, ports and other infrastructure - across several countries. Ac-cording to reports, China is said to be spending $1tn on it. The project was introduced by President Xi Jinping in 2013 and is seen as his signature for-eign policy eff ort.

AgenciesSrinagar

Heavy shelling killed two people, including a teenager, in Jammu and

Kashmir yesterday, an offi cial said, in the latest deadly skirmish along the heavily militarised de-facto border with Pakistan.

The victims, a 13-year-old girl and a 51-year-old man, were killed when mortar bombs hit parts of Rajouri district on the Line of Control (LoC).

“Two people have been killed by mortar shells,” Shahid Iqbal Choudhary, deputy commis-sioner of Rajouri, said, adding three others were injured.

Defence spokesman Manish

Mehta blamed Pakistan’s army for initiating “indiscriminate fi ring” from 07.15am yesterday.

“The Indian army posts are retaliating strongly and eff ec-tively. The fi ring is presently on,” Mehta said in a statement.

Scores of families have report-edly migrated to safer places from fi ve villages near the LoC, while authorities have called for an indefi nite shutdown of all schools in three Rajouri towns.

Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti regretted the loss of lives in the shelling and said that war will not resolve anything.

Talking to reporters, she said: “Confl icts and war will not resolve anything. We always maintain that India and Pakistan should work together for peace and not for confrontation.”

The latest incident comes only days after two people were killed in cross-border fi ring in Kash-mir, one on each side of India and Pakistan.

The killings come amid an up-surge in violence in the stated, where rebels opposed to Indian rule have repeatedly attacked government forces and banks in recent weeks.

On Wednesday suspected rebels abducted and killed a mil-itary offi cer who was home on leave for a wedding in Shopian district.

Lieutenant Ummer Fayaz’s bullet-riddled body was found on May 10 at Harmen.

The offi cer, from Rajputana Rifl es, joined the army in De-cember last year.

Police have since issued post-

ers of three local militants re-sponsible for the offi cer’s kid-napping and murder.

The army yesterday said a school had been renamed after Fayaz and his family handed over a cheque for Rs7.5mn.

The cheque was from the Army Group Insurance Fund, apart from another cheque for Rs100,000 from his regiment.

“Major General B S Raju, the General Officer Command-ing of the Victor Force, visited the bereaved family members in Kulgam district and assured them that the army stands by them and will always be ready to help,” Defence Ministry spokesman Colonel Rajesh Ka-lia said.

“The GOC assured the fam-ily that those responsible for

Lt Ummer’s dastardly murder will be brought to justice. The GOC announced renaming of an army school in the area as ‘Lt

Ummer Fayaz Goodwill School’,” he added.

Meanwhile, a Lashkar-e-Taiba module in the Chenab Val-ley area of Jammu region, set up with the aim of reviving militan-cy in the area, has been busted, police said.

Five people have been arrested and arms seized, police sources said.

The development came fol-lowing an attack in Doda district last week, during which two spe-cial police offi cers (SPOs) were injured with one subsequently succumbing to his injuries, the sources said.

Two arrested over brutalgang-rape and murder

Kochi metro makes history by hiring transgender workers

IANSChandigarh

In a savage gang-rape remi-niscent of the 2012 Nirbhaya incident, a young woman

from Haryana’s Sonepat district was abducted and brutally raped and murdered, with her head and face smashed with a blunt object and crushed under the wheels of a vehicle.

Two men, including her neighbour who was stalking her, have been arrested.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi has expressed “deep shock” over the rape.

The incident comes days after the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of four accused in the December 16, 2012 Nirb-haya gang-rape.

The Haryana woman, aged around 22 years, went missing on May 9, according to a complaint fi led by her family.

Her body was found on the outskirts of Rohtak town, 70km from New Delhi, early on Friday.

Police offi cials said forensic experts have disclosed that the victim was sexually assaulted and her body was badly muti-lated. Stray dogs had bitten off parts of the body.

S K Dhattarwal, head of the Department of Forensic Medi-cine at the Post Graduate In-stitute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) in Rohtak, said that the postmortem examination of the body indicated sexual assault, mutilation and murder.

Police were told that the vic-tim’s head and face were smashed with a hard object and crushed under the wheels of a vehicle. This, according to the police, was done to hide her identity.

The Haryana police have launched an investigation into the brutal gang-rape and murder. The arrested men were being interro-gated, a police offi cer said.

The two men arrested have been identifi ed as Sumit and Vikas.

Police said Sumit was a neigh-bour of the victim in Sonepat and had been stalking her. He was pressuring her to marry him but she had refused.

Police offi cials alleged that Sumit planned the gang-rape and murder to teach her a lesson.

Expressing deep shock and outrage, Gandhi hoped that the Haryana government would take action against the perpetrators.

“This savage and bone chilling incident has shocked the con-science of the nation, reminding each one of us about the crying need of revisiting the important issue of women’s safety and se-curity,” she said.

A mentally unstable Nepalese woman was brutally gang-raped and murdered by seven men in Rohtak district in February 2015. The accused were awarded the death penalty by a local court in December 2015.

By Vidhi Doshi Mumbai

They used to beg on India’s train network, but this month, for the fi rst time,

transgender women will have proper jobs, serving passengers and selling tickets in Kerala’s Kochi city.

In an eff ort to integrate trans people into Indian society, Ko-chi’s metro has hired 23 mem-

bers of the hijra community, who will start working behind ticket counters and on housekeep-ing teams before the end of this month.

The new jobs are an unprece-dented initiative in India, where the trans and third gender com-munity is mocked and isolated. Though trans women have been given jobs in the past, the major-ity have to resort to begging to survive.

Rashmi C R, spokeswoman

for Kochi Metro Rail, said the new appointments were part of a wider initiative to make the trains more inclusive. “We want the metro to be not just a means of transport, but also a livelihood improvement project,” she said.

“People don’t interact with trans people. They live separate-ly from society, they are not giv-en jobs, their rights are not re-spected. We want to bring them into the mainstream by ensuring that people interact with them

every day - on their way to work, for example.”

The new recruits have already had training in customer care and taken classes in confi dence improvement.

“Kochi metro is the first company in India to accept us. It is a huge achievement for us,” said Vincy, one of those newly employed by Kochi metro. “I feel very comfort-able there. The other workers know how to respect me be-

cause Kochi metro is recog-nising us.”

Vincy will start work on a ticket counter in a couple of weeks, and is thrilled: “Trans people don’t get work, not even in big multina-tional companies, IT fi rms, not in government jobs, nothing. Even when we do get jobs, we are often made fun of. If I work in an offi ce, the other workers for example will make fun of how I walk like a woman. I will be the laughing stock,” she said.

“I hope it will be in all the newspapers and on TV channels and other companies will take notice of it and start hiring trans people.”

The lack of employment op-portunities for trans people, Rashmi said, happens for rea-sons other than prejudice.

“A lot of them have criminal records because they have no choice but to do sex work. Plus many of them have never had the opportunity to go to school, so

they don’t have any qualifi cations. You need to have some level of ed-ucation to get a front-end job but many of these people have been denied that opportunity.”

The palm-lined, tourist hotspot of Kerala is much more liberal and has a higher standard of education than many Indian states, said Rashmi. She added that she hoped the company would soon bring more trans re-cruits on to the staff . -Guardian News and Media

Gas stations put off protest, to attend talksIANSMumbai

Petrol stations in eight states across the country which had announced a

weekly ‘holiday’ from May 14 and work on a single shift from tomorrow, called off their pro-posed agitation yesterday, an of-fi cial statement said.

Federation of All Maharash-tra Petrol Dealers Association (FAMPEDA) president Uday Lodh said in view of a review meeting called on May 17 by oil marketing companies it has been decided to postpone the agita-tion.

The Consortium of Indian Petroleum Dealers (CIPD) along with FAMPEDA was planning to launch the ‘Cost Cutting Mod-ule’ in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Haryana, citing low margins.

The move would have aff ected 4,500 gas stations in Maharash-

tra alone, with 225 in Mumbai, said Lodh.

The FAMPEDA move was in support of CIPD’s call on various demands with the oil companies, including a hike in dealer margins which have not been revised since 2011, and other long-pending is-sues, he added. The CIPD claims to have 25,000 members.

“Next Wednesday, we have been called to discuss our agree-ment with the OMCs of Novem-ber last year and related issue. So till then, we have decided to post-pone our agitation,” Lodh said.

He reiterated that the petrol pumps are currently operating on extremely low margins, sell-ing high-tech unleaded petrol/diesel products in which the evaporation rate is very high leading to huge losses and other outstanding issues.

Besides there are concerns like paying a certain amount of minimum salary to the staff ers at each petrol pump, which has be-come unaff ordable owing to the low operating margins, he said.

Activists take part in a rally at India Gate yesterday held to remember army off icer Ummer Faiyaz who was abducted and killed in Kashmir while on leave for a wedding.

Vehicles pass through the 434km-long Srinagar-Leh highway which had remained closed for more than four months, after it was reopened on May 12.

Highway reopens

Senior cleric removes red beaconTwo days after openly defying the central government’s order and stating that he would keep using the red beacon on his vehicle, Maulana Noor-ur Rehman Barkati, the Shahi Imam of Kolkata’s Tipu Sultan Masjid, yesterday claimed he has removed the beacon from his car. “I have removed the beacon,” a visibly annoyed Barkati told reporters. Earlier in the day, the state Mass Education

Extension & Library Services Minister Siddiqullah Chowdhury termed Barkati as an RSS agent for “providing ammunition to the RSS” by constantly making controversial statements. Barkati had openly claimed two days ago that he would not follow the Centre’s order of removing the red beacon and indicated that he has the consent of state Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in the matter.

LATIN AMERICA

Gulf Times Sunday, May 14, 201722

Top aides to former Brazil-ian presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma

Rousseff say they ferried mil-lions of dollars in cash to fi nance presidential election campaigns in Venezuela, El Salvador and Panama, according to testimony made public on Friday.

Joao Santana, a former treas-urer for the former presidents’ Workers Party, was known as the “maker of presidents” for his success as a campaign strat-egist.

He was jailed this year on corruption charges in Brazil’s largest ever corruption probe, known as Operation Car Wash.

He and his wife Monica Moura are serving eight-year sentences for their part in the scandal, in which billions of dollars from the state oil company Petrobras

were funnelled to businessmen and politicians.

In videotaped testimony re-leased on Friday by Brazil’s Su-preme Court, Moura said that in 2012 Nicolas Maduro, then vice-president and now presi-dent of Venezuela, personally handed her suitcases stuff ed with a total of $10mn in cash to help the re-election campaign of his mentor Hugo Chavez, who won the election but died short-ly thereafter of cancer.

“Maduro paid me almost weekly in his own offi ce and delivered the money himself, sometimes in the Mirafl ores palace” of the president, said Moura in her statement.

She said that on one day alone, Maduro handed her $800,000 and provided her with an ar-moured car for her own security which looked like it belonged to “an American rock star”.

Moura said the money for Chavez’s campaign was laun-

dered through a slush fund known as “Box 2” and that Bra-zilian construction giants Ode-brecht and Andrade Gutierrez – both at the heart of the Car Wash scandal – had contributed $7mn and $2mn respectively to help the re-election of the late Socialist leader.

Moura said it was Lula, a left-wing icon who ruled from 2003 to 2010 but who is currently on trial on numerous counts of cor-ruption, who pushed the couple to help regional allies, including El Salvador’s leftist Mauricio Funes in 2009.

She said that the $3mn they were given to help in El Salva-dor – “a country at the end of the world with war, earthquakes and no money” was provided by Odebrecht, whose former director has himself been jailed for corruption in the Car Wash case.

The couple also worked for former Panamanian presi-

dent Ricardo Martinelli, who is wanted on corruption charges in his own country and now lives in Miami.

Moura said Martinelli, who was president from 2009 to 2014, gave her half a million dol-lars in “operating costs” while she was working in Panama on behalf of the man he wanted to succeed him in power.

Santana and Moura were both sentenced last February to eight years for money laundering in connection with the Car Wash scandal, and are now collabo-rating with prosecutors to re-duce their sentences.

In their videotaped testi-mony, they said both Lula and his successor Rousseff – who was herself impeached for ac-counting irregularities last year – were fully aware of the ille-gal campaign fi nancing of their Workers Party.

Lawyers for Lula dismissed the accusations as “lies”.

Jailed Lula aides say they funnelled cash to foreign election campaignsAFPRio de Janeiro

The 15-nation Caribbean Community (CARICOM) is angry at the United

States for labelling virtually all members of the regional trade bloc as money laundering juris-dictions and plans to mount a stiff lobbying eff ort in Washing-ton, its leader said on Friday.

CARICOM secretary general Irwin La Rocque said the United States’s listing 14 member states in its 2016 International Narcot-ics Control Strategy (INCS) Re-port could have devastating ef-fects on the region.

Most of the countries have economies heavily dependent on tourism and fi nancial services such as off shore banking and economic citizenships.

“I think these unilateral blacklistings are not helping anything,” he said, adding that “there ought to be some discus-sion and transparency on how these lists are arrived at”.

La Rocque spoke to AFP af-ter the issue was discussed by CARICOM trade ministers at a two-day meeting in Guyana, on the northeast coast of South America.

He said that when CARICOM foreign ministers meet in Barba-dos next month, they would pre-pare the groundwork to intensify regional lobbying eff orts that individual member states have already begun in Washington.

The only CARICOM member state not blacklisted by Wash-ington was Montserrat, a British overseas territory.

La Rocque insisted that CARI-COM members comply with in-ternational norms for fi ghting money laundering.

“And all of a sudden we see these unilateral blacklistings. This is not the way to do it,” he said.

In recent years, a number of US commercial banks have cut relationships with some banks across the Caribbean in an ef-fort to reduce the risk of being exposed to movement of dirty money across borders, as part of the global fi ght against money laundering and terror fi nancing.

Listed as “major money laun-dering countries” in the INCS report are Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, St Kitts and Ne-vis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.

Other Caribbean territories and countries also labelled as money launderers in the US re-port are Aruba, the British Vir-gin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Cuba, Curacao, the Dominican Republic, and Saint Maarten.

Also listed are Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

Caribbean nations miff ed overnegative US labelAFPGeorgetownA group of Colombian Farc

rebels have become the fi rst to formally complete

a disarmament process under a peace accord designed to end a half-century-old confl ict, Unit-ed Nations monitors have said.

“A fi rst group of 12 members of the Farc received today from the UN mission a certifi cate of completion of individual disar-mament, which allows them to formally begin their reintegra-tion into civilian life,” the UN

said in a statement. “With this event, a continuous process be-gins to certify the Farc members who are making the transition to civilian life after laying down their arms.”

The Farc is disarming under UN supervision as part of last year’s accord, which the govern-ment says will eff ectively end a 53-year civil confl ict.

The accord calls for the Farc to be allowed to transform into a political party.

Under the agreement, all the Farc’s weapons are supposed to be taken away by the United Na-tions by the end of this month to

be destroyed.The arms were all supposed to

have been handed over by May 1, but the UN said there were de-lays because some Farc members were late arriving at the agreed demobilisation zones.

Some 7,000 Farc fi ghters are assembling at 26 such points in Colombia.

Under the accord, the UN is supposed to use the metal from the destroyed Farc weapons to build monuments to peace.

The government and the Farc, formally known as the Revo-lutionary Armed Forces of Co-lombia and the country’s biggest

rebel group, reached a deal after four years of negotiations in the Cuban capital.

Voters rejected it by a narrow margin in a referendum last Oc-tober.

Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos and Farc leaders then drafted a new version of the accord and the government pushed it through Congress de-spite resistance from critics.

Opponents said the deal was too lenient on Farc members since it off ered some of them re-duced penalties for crimes com-mitted during the confl ict.

Santos won a Nobel Peace

Prize for his peace eff orts despite the referendum setback.

Under the deal Herminsul Arellan Barajas, one of the men convicted for a Farc bombing that killed 36 people in Bogota in 2003, was released from prison on parole on Friday, a source in the penitentiary service told AFP.

The government in February opened negotiations with the last active rebel force, the Na-tional Liberation Army (ELN), in the hope of sealing a “complete peace”.

The government’s negotia-tions with the ELN are at a much

earlier stage. The group is ac-cused of continuing kidnappings despite the negotiations.

The ELN has an estimated 1,500 fi ghters, compared with the Farc’s 7,000.

The Colombian confl ict erupted in 1964 when the Farc and ELN took up arms for rural land rights.

It drew in various rebel and paramilitary forces and drug gangs as well as state forces.

The confl ict has left at least 260,000 people dead and dis-placed more than 7mn, accord-ing to the authorities.

First Colombian rebels complete disarmamentAFPBogota

Elderly protesters braved pepper spray in scuffl es with riot police on Fri-

day as they marched in the lat-est anti-government protests in Venezuela.

With wheelchairs and walk-ing sticks or on their feet shout-ing and waving their fi sts, some 2,000 demonstrators challenged police who blocked their way in central Caracas and fi red pepper spray to deter them.

“We do not want a dictator-ship, we want to grow old with dignity, medicine, food and freedom,” said Lourdes Parra, 77, wrapped in a red, yellow and blue Venezuelan fl ag.

Defying calls for early elec-tions, President Nicolas Maduro also rallied elderly supporters, who yelled slogans in support of him and his late predecessor Hugo Chavez.

“With Chavez and Maduro, the grandparents are safe,” they yelled in a crowd in front of the presidential palace.

The demo drew attention to the suff ering of Venezuelans, particularly the elderly, in an economic crisis that has caused shortages of food and medicine in the oil-rich country.

Carlos Rivas, 67, stood in the front line of the demo with emp-ty medicine boxes.

“I have no medication and my pension doesn’t buy me any-thing,” he told AFP.

On Wednesday the health ministry released data showing deaths of infants under the age of one soared by 30% in 2016 and deaths of women linked to childbirth by 65%.

Cases of malaria also rose by 76% to 240,000, even though the disease was said to have been eradicated in the country.

The next day the government fi red minister Antonieta Capo-rale, the offi cial journal said.

Wednesday’s data referred to 2016, but Caporale took over as health minister only in January this year.

Hospitals and protesters are complaining of severe short-ages of medical supplies from an economic crisis that has fuelled opposition demands for early elections.

Elected in 2013, Maduro is re-sisting pressure for an early vote, calling the crisis a US-backed conspiracy.

His opponents have branded him a dictator.

A collapse in prices for Ven-ezuela’s crucial oil exports has left the country short of cash to import medicine and basic goods.

The Venezuelan Medical Fed-eration says hospitals have only

3% of the medicines and sup-plies they need to operate nor-mally.

Deadly unrest broke out on April 1.

Security forces have fi red tear gas and water cannons at pro-testers who have hurled stones, petrol bombs and excrement in response.

The government and opposi-

tion have accused each other of sending armed groups to stir up violence in the protests.

The death toll from the unrest hit 38 on Wednesday, when a 27-year-old male was shot dead in a protest in Caracas, the gov-ernment said.

Maduro has accused the op-position of mounting an “armed insurgency” and a “coup”.

“Nothing and no one will hold us back. We will succeed in neu-tralising this ambush,” he vowed late on Thursday, referring to the protests. “Venezuela demands that the rioting and the coup d’etat stop.”

The opposition called for protesters across the country to come out in processions of vehi-cles this weekend.

Protesting pensioners clash with police in VenezuelaAFPCaracas

An opposition supporter in a wheelchair carries a sign with a Venezuela’s constitution glued to it, reading ‘Do not change it, obey it!’ while rallying on Friday against President Maduro in Caracas.

Right: An opposition activist wears a ‘gas mask’ made out of a bottle of drinking water during the protest against the government in Caracas.

Below: Elderly opposition supporters cover their faces after being pepper sprayed while confronting riot security forces during a rally in Caracas.

Coastguards from the Car-ibbean island of Curacao rescued 26 Venezuelans

stranded on nearby Little Cura-cao on Friday, in the latest case of migrants fl eeing an economic and social crisis at home.

As millions of Venezuelans suff er food shortages, medicine scarcity, political turmoil and soaring crime, some are leaving to nearby islands and bordering countries.

Traffi ckers brought the 18 men, seven women and one teenager to mainland Curacao, coastguard spokesman Roderick Gouverneur said in an interview.

Little Curacao is a tiny tourist

island about 30km southeast of Curacao.

They were hungry and dehy-drated, with some showing cuts on their hands and feet, he add-ed. “Many times they say that the situation is alarming in Vene-zuela, that they do not have food, that they come for a better life.”

Since January, Curacao has de-tained at least 100 Venezuelans

trying to enter by sea.Most are normally deported.Migrants pay fi shermen to

transport them to Curacao, as well as neighbouring Aruba, be-cause of their proximity to Ven-ezuela.

To avoid detection, passengers often disembark a few metres from land to swim the last leg, witnesses have said.

Curacao offi cers rescuemigrantsReutersWillemstad

Venezuelans wait in boats after being rescued by coastguards in Willemstad, Curacao.

PAKISTAN/AFGHANISTAN23Gulf Times

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Pakistan, China sign major agreementsPakistan signed new deals

with China yesterday worth nearly $500mn

ahead of Beijing’s international forum on its “Silk Road” trade and infrastructure initiative for Asia, Africa and Europe, the Pa-kistani government said.

The memorandums of under-standing add to $57bn already pledged for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a network of rail, road and energy infrastructure that is part of the wider Chinese project also known as One Belt-One Road.

The deals came as Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif met Chinese President Xi Jin-ping ahead of the Beijing summit expected to be attended by lead-ers from at least 29 countries to promote Xi’s vision of expanding trade links.

Delegates in Beijing will hold a series of sessions today to dis-cuss the plan in more detail, in-cluding trade and fi nance.

Proposed in 2013 by Xi, the project is broad on ambition but still short on specifi cs.

Pakistan has been a fl agship country and one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the One Belt-One Road initiative, in part because many projects are for power plants to alleviate the country’s decade-long energy-shortage crisis that sees frequent blackouts.

“China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is a core component of your visionary initiative of the “One Belt-One Road,” Sharif told Xi when they met at the Great Hall of China on Satur-day, according to the Associated Press of Pakistan.

Xi called for a swift comple-tion of projects involving Gwa-dar Port and special economic and industrial parks along the corridor, state Xinhua news service reported.

The signing ceremony was witnessed by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Chinese Pre-mier Li Keqiang.

Among the 3.4bn RMB ($493mn) in deals Sharif’s offi ce said were signed yesterday were:

Two co-operation agree-ments worth 2.3bn RMB ($333mn) for an airport in the southwestern town of Gwadar, site of a deep-water port that is to provide an outlet to the Ara-bian Sea from the far western Chinese province of Xinjiang.

Establishment of the Have-lian Dry Port in Pakistan.

Agreement on economic and technical co-operation (1.1bn RMB) ($160mn) for the East Bay Expressway linking Gwadar to Pakistan’s existing

highway system.China says that between 2014

and 2016, its businesses signed projects worth $304.9bn in Belt and Road countries.

Some of the projects could be in development for years.

Some countries are wary of the debt burden that the Chinese fi nancing could create.

Pakistan, however, has ex-pressed an optimistic view, with the government’s chief econo-mist telling Reuters this week that the repayments will peak at around $5bn in 2022, but will be more than off set by transit fees charged on the new transport corridor.

An MoU was also signed on upgradation of the main railway line track ML-I and establish-

ment of Havelian Dry Port.Three agreements related

to economic and technical co-operation worth 3.4bn yuan for Gwadar port and East Bay ex-pressway.

Federal ministers, adviser on foreign aff airs and chief minis-ters of all four provinces were also present on the occasion.

Sharif also reaffi rmed Paki-stan’s commitment for comple-tion of early harvest projects un-der CPEC.

Sharif also held meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and assured that Islamabad will fully support Beijing’s OBOR initia-tive, Associated Press of Paki-stan (APP) reported.

The meeting focused on intra-regional trade and connectivity

as a crucial factor for sustain-able development of Asia and beyond, it added.

The Pakistan side conveyed that China’s strategic policies in the region were for peace and prosperity.

Sharif voiced gratitude for China’s support for the launch of the $46bn China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and said: “The CPEC presents a great opportunity for strengthening regional economy.”

The two sides discussed progress on CPEC — an impor-tant part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s One Belt, One Road vision.

Sharif in his statement also congratulated Premier Li Keqiang on hosting the

OBOR forum.Chief ministers of Punjab,

Khyber Paktunkhwa, Balo-chistan and Sindh were also present in the meetings.

The composition of his dele-gation to China, particularly the presence of four Chief Ministers, is testimony to the broad-based Pakistan-China friendship, Sharif was quoted as saying.

“Sharif told the Chinese pres-ident that presence of all chief minister in the meetings refl ects national harmony that pre-vails in Pakistan with regard to the country’s relationship with China,” the news agency quoted sources as saying.

Sharif said China was Paki-stan’s “strategic partner” which has always stood by the country.

ReutersIslamabad

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif talks with China’s President Xi Jinping (R), ahead of the Belt and Road Forum, in Beijing yesterday.

China’s Premier Li Keqiang and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif attend a signing ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing yesterday.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif shakes hands with China’s President Xi Jinping, ahead of the Belt and Road Forum, in Beijing yesterday.

Ten killed near

China ‘Belt and

Road’ project

in Baluchistan

Ten labourers were gunned down in south-western Pakistan yes-

terday while working on link roads to connect outlying towns to the country’s $57bn Chinese “Belt and Road” ini-tiative, security offi cials con-fi rmed.

The attack on the Pakistani labourers took place some 20km from the emerging port city of Gwadar in Baluchistan province that forms the south-ern hub of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

“All the labourers were shot at close range,” said senior lev-ies offi cial Mohamed Zareef, adding that the shooters were travelling on a motorcycle.

The levies are a paramilitary force that oversees security in Baluchistan where police ju-risdiction is limited to major urban centres.

Gwadar’s deep-water port is the exit point for a planned route from China’s far-west-ern Xinjiang region to the Ara-bian Sea.

Nadeem Javaid, who advises Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government and works closely on the CPEC programme, said earlier in the week that the Gwadar-Xinjiang corridor should be operational from June next year.

He said Pakistan expects up to 4% of global trade to pass through it by 2020.

Baluchistan, however, has long faced security concerns.

Separatist militants in the province have waged a

campaign against the cen-tral government for decades, demanding a greater share of the gas-rich region’s re-sources.

Security offi cials have said previously that militants try-ing to disrupt construction on the “economic corridor” have killed 44 workers since 2014, all of whom were Pakistani.

Pakistan’s military created an army division in 2015, be-lieved to number more than 10,000 troops, specifi cally to protect CPEC projects and Chinese workers.

The men killed and wound-ed yesterday had been working for the provincial government at two separate construction sites on three kilometres apart along the same road.

Two labourers wounded in the shootings were taken to hospital where one of them died from his injuries, Zareef said.

The roads the labourers were working on are not specifi c CPEC-funded projects, but they are part of a network of connecting roads that are part of the corridor.

No group has admitted re-sponsibility for the shootings but past attacks in the region have been carried out by sepa-ratists who view construction projects as a means to take over their land.

The shootings come a day after a suicide bomber target-ting a Pakistani senator killed 26 people and injured 40, Bal-uchistan Home Minister Sar-fraz Bugti said.

Friday’s attack was claimed by Islamic State via its Amaq news agency.

ReutersQuetta, Pakistan

Bank of China to operate in Pakistan

Pakistan’s central bank has granted government-run Bank of China a licence to operate in the country to ease the financial requirements of Chinese-led “Belt and Road” projects, the central bank said yesterday.China has pledged to invest some $57bn in Pakistan’s rail, road and energy infrastructure through its vast modern-day “Silk Road” network of trade routes linking Asia with Europe and Africa.“The Bank of China aims to provide diff erential and specialised banking services to eff ectively serve the financing needs of China

Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) related projects by leveraging on its experience and global technology platform,” the central bank said in a statement.The statement outlined the Bank of China’s ambitions to become one of Pakistan’s leading financial institutions by opening branches in major cities across the country.It said the Bank of China will first bring in $50mn to meet minimum capital requirements.Off icials expect a huge uptick in trade between the two countries once Pakistan’s Arabian Sea port of Gwadar is functional.

Jadhav case to be pursued forcefully: Pakistan’s AG

A set of recommendations has been sent to the Prime Minister’s Offi ce and the

Foreign Offi ce, strategising how to plead Pakistan’s point of view tomorrow before the Interna-tional Court of Justice (ICJ) on the conviction of alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav.

Jadhav was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on espionage charges and earlier this week, the ICJ at the Hague in the Netherlands suspended the death sentence.

“We have sent our recom-mendations to the Prime Min-ister’s Offi ce and the Foreign Offi ce,” Attorney General Ashtar Ausaf told Dawn on Friday.

Ausaf said a robust reply would be advanced by Pakistan in a forceful manner, refuting all allegations levelled against it and also pointing out atrocities India was committing in Kash-

mir, the Dawn report said.He said it was necessary to keep

all measures and options con-fi dential so that the “other side might not know the strategy being devised”. Ausaf is expected to lead the Pakistan side before the ICJ.

But he did not rule out the possibility of engaging some-one from abroad, saying the endeavour would be to hire the best minds on internation-al law to advance Pakistan’s standpoint.

However, he acknowledged that time was short since the hearing would begin tomorrow.

Islamabad said the Indian move (to approach ICJ in Jadhav case) was an attempt to divert attention from “state-spon-sored terrorism in Pakistan” and that it was analysing the ICJ’s authority in the matter.

AgenciesIslamabad

“We have sent our recommendations to the Prime Minister’s Offi ce and the Foreign Offi ce”

Pak team to investigate ex-army offi cer’s disappearance

Two Taliban leaders killed in Afghanistan airstrike

A Pakistani team will soon be visiting Nepal to probe the disap-

pearance of a former Pakistan army officer who was last seen in Lumbini in April, and whose family alleges he has been abducted by Indian in-telligence agencies, a media report said.

Col (Retd) Habib Zahir was allegedly kidnapped by Indian intelligence agencies from an area bordering Nepal and In-dia after he was invited to the

country in connection with a job opportunity, The Nation reported.

According to sources, a team comprising government offi -cials from the Ministry of Inte-rior will proceed to Nepal to ex-amine the facts fi rst-hand, take the statement of Javed Ansari, the host and airline offi cials/hotel management to assess as to who arranged his bookings and the like.

The Ministry of Foreign Af-fairs has asked the Interior Min-istry to nominate a team in this regard, offi cial sources told The Nation.

“The composition of the spe-

cial team — so as to forward the same to the concerned authori-ties of Nepal — is under consid-eration,” they added.

Mohamed Habib Zahir disap-peared from Lumbini near Ne-pal’s border with India.

The government of Pakistan had approached the Nepalese government for mutual legal assistance and arrangement for the visit of the team from Paki-stan to Nepal.

The team will seek any other information from fellow pas-sengers or any other person concerned and also take state-ments of the police offi cer in-charge of the city/town from

where the Pakistani went miss-ing.

The team will also ascertain the frequency of movements across the border with India.

It is likely that a team from National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) would be constituted to visit Nepal, the daily said.

Zahir had arrived in Nepal to reportedly for an interview for a United Nations job.

According to reports, Za-hir arrived in Nepal via an Air Arabia fl ight (Call Sign WY 344), with the passport no. AJ5122964, for a UN job inter-view in Nepal.

According to the reports, Zahir had retired as Colonel in 2014 and one Mark Thomson had called him to Lumbini based on his personal details posted by him on a website.

There had been a corre-spondence between the two.

Thomson had called him to Nepal for and interview and had h imself sent an air ticket for him.

India is believed to have en-trapped and kidnapped Zahir from Kathmandu to make it a case of having apprehended an “ISI spy” and equate it with the case of Indian “spy” Kulbhush-an Jadhav, The Nation said.

Two local Taliban lead-ers were killed when the Afghan air force struck

a militants’ hideout in restive southern Helmand province, the Defence Ministry said yes-terday.

“The strike was conducted on

specifi c intelligence inputs in Musa Qala district, killing Us-tad Toor Jan and Fidda Moham-ed and three militants’ vehicles were also destroyed following the raid,” the ministry said in a statement posted on its offi cial Facebook page.

In addition, the army per-sonnel conducted a cordon and search operation in neighbour-ing Marja district, capturing 10

Taliban militants and destroy-ing three vehicles, it said.

Furthermore, three militants were killed and eight injured in a separate operation in surround-ing areas of Tirin Kot, capital of neighbouring Uruzgan prov-ince, Xinhua news agency re-ported.

The army bomb disposal teams also found and defused 28 roadside bombs and landmines

in Uruzgan within the past 24 hours, the statement added.

Meanwhile, according to an administration offi cial, US President Donald Trump has not yet made a decision on whether to send additional American troops to Afghani-stan.

“The president wants to hear from our allies as well,” said National Security Adviser HR

McMaster at a White House on Friday briefi ng on Trump’s up-coming trip to the Middle East and Europe.

He added that Trump will discuss the issue with allies at the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) summit in Brussels and Group 7 (G7) meeting in Sicily, Italy, later this month, Xinhua news agency re-ported.

AgenciesIslamabad

AgenciesKabul

PHILIPPINES

Gulf TimesSunday, May 14, 201724

Manila, Beijing to open sea talks next week: envoyAFPManila

The Philippines and China will open bilateral talks on their dispute over the

South China Sea next week, Manila’s ambassador to Beijing said yesterday.

Philippine President Ro-drigo Duterte has sought to deepen relations with China despite its extensive island-building in disputed parts of the South China Sea, in the hopes of securing billions of dollars’ worth of investments from Beijing.

“We will inaugurate the bilat-eral consultative mechanism on issues of particular concern to each side. This is where the sen-sitive issues will be discussed,” ambassador Jose “Chito” Santa Romana said in Beijing in com-ments aired by ABS-CBN tel-evision.

Santa Romana made the comments ahead of Duterte’s arrival in Beijing to attend the One Belt, One Road summit today and tomorrow — a pet project of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“The fi rst session will be next week but this will be a session that will continue on a twice-yearly basis, a chance to exchange views on the South China Sea issue,” he said.

China claims nearly all of the strategically vital waterway, despite partial counter-claims

from several regional states in-cluding the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam.

During a stopover in Hong Kong on the way to Beijing yesterday, Duterte himself em-

phasised the importance of economic ties with China in a meeting with members of the Filipino community.

“China in all good faith wants to help us. And they are not ask-

ing for anything, no conditions. They just want to help. They have so much money,” he told the gathering of around 1,000 people at a city hotel.

“I am on friendly terms with

China. I am friends with Xi Jinping,” he said, adding that China would import fruit from the Philippines and invest in building bridges across Manila’s main river.

Santa Romana said the Duterte administration was putting the South China Sea dispute on a separate track while pursuing economic and diplomatic relations with Chi-na, adding that previously bi-lateral ties had been “frozen” because the territorial row had taken centre stage.

“To put it on a separate track is not to abandon or give up but rather to compartmentalise it,” he said.

Duterte has sought closer ties with China and Russia while distancing the Philippines from its traditional ally, the United States.

Last month, he alarmed ob-servers when he issued a chair-man’s statement, after hosting the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) sum-mit, which took a soft stance towards Chinese actions in the South China Sea.

The statement merely took note of “concerns expressed by some leaders over recent devel-opments in the area”.

It also ignored an interna-tional tribunal ruling last year which said China’s claims to most of the sea were unlawful.

Leaders from nearly 30 na-tions are attending next week’s forum in Beijing, which will showcase Xi’s grand plan to revive ancient Silk Road trade routes by bankrolling rail, maritime and road projects across Asia, Europe and Af-rica.

In this picture made available by the South China Morning Post, Kristine Gonzaga Demeterio (centre-left) sings a song to President Rodrigo Duterte during his visit to Hong Kong yesterday.

A man blows cigarette smoke on his fighting cock at the backyard of his house in Paranaque city, Metro Manila, yesterday.

Smoked chicken!

Govt eyes gains from China’s plan for infrastructure build-upBy Catherine S ValenteManila Times

For the second time, Presi-dent Rodrigo Duterte will visit China, this time to

attend the Beijing-led “One Belt, One Road” summit, which he said would boost co-opera-tion and connectivity between Beijing and Manila.

In an interview with China’s offi cial news agency Xinhua, Duterte has said developing countries like the Philippines need connectivity with other nations in the region “to de-velop a healthy economy and inclusive growth.”

“I understand the Belt and Road Initiative is primarily an economic undertaking that will build these connections among the countries, and result in mutual benefi t that includes increased trade and market ac-cess,” the president was quoted as saying.

“Healthy and robust eco-nomic exchanges are key to achieving the goal. It is our hope that many initiatives, including OBOR (One Belt One Road), can be part of these wider exchang-es,” he added.

Leaders from 28 countries, including Duterte and Presi-dent Vladimir Putin of Russia, are set to join the forum. The most prominent attendee from the West will be Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni of Italy.

Other Western nations, in-cluding the United States, will be represented by offi cials of lower standing. Washington is sending a delegation led by Eric Branstad, senior White House adviser. Britain, Germany and France are to be represented by fi nance offi cials.

“One Belt, One Road” is Chinese President Xi Jinping’s landmark programme to in-vest billions of dollars in in-frastructure projects includ-ing railways, ports and power

grids across Asia, Africa and Europe.

Spanning 65 countries and accounting for two-thirds of the world’s population and a third of GDP, the Chinese ini-tiative is intended to increase trade fl ows and boost long-term regional economic growth.

For Duterte, the Belt and Road Initiative, which calls for infrastructure connectiv-ity, complements the Philippine government’s development plan for 2017 to 2022.

The Philippine government recently unveiled “Duterten-omics,” an economic strategy to transform the Philippines into an upper middle-income economy by 2022 and close to a high-income one by 2040.

“It (China’s Belt and Road Initiative) is in line with my administration’s golden age of infrastructure of increased in-vestments on infrastructure projects,” Duterte said.

The president said he was

hoping that world leaders at-tending the forum “will have productive dialogues that will enlighten us on the gaps that need to be addressed.”

“I would like to listen to the views of many countries around the table…We also would want to learn from the development experiences of other participant countries, particularly with the opportu-nities off ered by the OBOR to enhance economic growth and address global economic chal-lenges,” he said.

Duterte, chairman of this year’s Association of South-east Asian Nations, thanked China for its continued support for the Asean community, in-cluding pushing for Asean-led initiatives to promote connec-tivity. “We are optimistic that OBOR will further contribute to the enhancement of Asean-China co-operation, as it paves the way for more mutually ben-efi cial economic activities be-

tween our two sides,” Duterte said. Ties between Manila and Beijing were strained under the administration of Duterte’s predecessor, Benigno Aquino, after the Philippines asserted its maritime claims on the disput-ed West Philippine Sea (South China Sea).

But Duterte has overhauled the Philippines’ diplomatic re-lations since taking offi ce by courting China to fund his am-bitious infrastructure projects while distancing himself from Washington, Manila’s tradi-tional ally and Beijing’s strate-gic rival.

The Philippine President also maintained that he would not raise just yet before China the arbitration award won by the Philippines from a UN-backed tribunal in July 2016.

Duterte admitted that there are still some challenges in the relations between Beijing and Manila, which includes the South China Sea.

Duterte’s net worth up 14%By Ma. Reina Leanne TolentinoManila Times

President Rodrigo Duterte has reported a modest 14% hike in net worth since as-

suming offi ce last year.Duterte’s latest statement of

assets, liabilities and net worth (SALN) showed that his net worth grew to P27.43mn at the end of 2016, from P24.08mn as of June 30, 2016.

The growth in the president’s net worth came from cash on hand and in banks, which in-creased by P3,148,768.40.

Duterte reported assets total-ling P28,428,862.44, including a Volkswagen sedan acquired in 1978 for P40,000; a Toyota Rav4 acquired in 1996 for P800,000; cash of P18,453,862.44; house-hold appliances and furniture worth P350,000; jewellery worth P300,000; investments worth P3mn; and “other per-sonal properties” worth P1mn.

The president also listed seven residential lots and two houses in Davao City, and properties under the name of daughter Ve-ronica including a residential lot, two houses, and two agricultural lots, also in Davao City.

Duterte disclosed P1mn in li-abilities—a loan from campaign donor Samuel Uy.

Under Section 8 of Republic Act 6713 (Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Of-fi cials and Employees), public offi cials or employees must ac-complish a statement under oath showing their assets, liabilities and net worth and fi nancial and business interests as of year-end.

Soldier seeks acquittal in transgender murder case

By Jomar CanlasManila Times

Joseph Scott Pemberton has asked the Court of Appeals to acquit him on the killing of

26-year-old Filipino transgen-der Jeff rey “Jennifer” Laude.

In his motion for reconsidera-tion before the appeals court, the American lance corporal reiter-ated that he merely acted in

self-defence.The US soldier argued that the

appeals court “committed grave error in exempting the prosecu-tion from proving that the crime of homicide was committed beyond reasonable doubt and shifting the burden on Pember-ton to prove his innocence.”

The appeals court had ruled that the Olongapo City Regional Trial Court committed no error of judgment in sending Pember-ton to jail for up to 10 years for homicide.

“We thus fi nd Pemberton’s defence of an impending grave danger more imaginary than real… Indeed, a plea of self-

defence cannot be justifi ably appreciated where it is not only uncorroborated by independent and competent evidence, but also extremely doubtful by it-self. Self-defence, like alibi, is a defence which can easily be con-cocted as it is in this case,” the appeals court had said.

It said the only reason Laude was attacked by Pemberton was the latter’s discovery that Laude was not biologically female.

However, Pemberton’s motion claimed that the appeals court relied on “cherry-picked evi-dence to sustain the conviction and completely ignored all con-trary evidence.”

“This honourable court found credence in the testimonies (of three prosecution witnesses) only insofar as they are unfa-vourable to Pemberton. The court disregarded such portions of their testimonies that are consistent with Pemberton’s in-nocence,” it said.

It also said the court failed to recognise his surrender as a “mitigating circumstance at the earliest possible opportunity.”

Call to halt additionalcoal-fi red plantsBy Ernie B EscondeBalanga City/Manila Times

Bataan Bishop Ruperto Santos yesterday called for a stop to the construction

of additional power plants in the province that use fossil fuels like coal and petroleum products, citing the severe impact on the environment.

The call was made through a pastoral letter which is to be read in the parishes in Bataan that Santos calls the stand, constitu-tion and road map of the Diocese of Balanga concerning the envi-ronment.

On Friday, anti-coal activ-ists belonging to the Coal Free Bataan Movement, Limay Con-cerned Citizens, and the Kilu-sang Pambansang Demokratiko held a protest rally in Barangay Lamao, Limay town denouncing the continued operation of the coal-fi red plants.

Santos pointed out that the province has already two power plants (San Miguel Global Power

and GN Power Plant) which uses coal; Refi nery Solid Fuel Fired Power Plant (Rsff pp) that uses coal and petcoke, a fuel oil waste product; and Panasia Power Plant that runs on diesel and fuel oil. He said the Bataan Oil Refi nery, that has been operating in the province for more than 50 years, supports the fuel needs of Pana-sia and in part that of Rsff pp.

GN Power Plant is in Marive-les town while the others, in-cluding the Bataan Oil Refi nery are in Limay, mostly adjacent to barangay Lamao. The parishes in Limay and nearby villages in Mariveles – Sisiman and Alas-Asin – have conducted studies on the eff ects of the coal-fi red plants to health and the environ-ment from October to December 2016.

“The parishioners called our attention as they were experi-encing diffi culty in breathing. More children were affl icted with asthma, fi sh were found dead while more plants and trees have withered and died,” the bishop said.

Anti-crime advocates have asked President Rodrigo Duterte to declare the United Nations special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings, Agnes Callamard, persona non grata for being unfair to and biased against the administration, Manila Times reported. In a letter to the president, the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption (VACC) claimed the unannounced visit of Callamard to the Philippines last week disqualifies her as an impartial rapporteur or investigator. Dante Jimenez, chairman of the VACC, said the organisation of crime vic-tims had observed closely the state-ments and actions of the former Amnesty International off icial regarding the anti-drug campaign of the government.He claimed the UN rapporteur had arrived at conclusions based on hearsay and polluted sources.“A chance for a talk with VACC victims of heinous crime committed by criminals high on drugs would have cleared her biases against the drive of the law enforcement agen-cies of the Philippine government,” Jimenez added.However, he said, the UN special rapporteur instead displayed her “blatant biases and unfairness.”

Plea to declare UN off icial ‘persona non grata’

REQUEST

SRI LANKA/BANGLADESH/NEPAL25

Gulf Times Sunday, May 14, 2017

Nepal votes in local polls to strengthen democracyNepal holds its fi rst local

elections in two decades today hoping to cement

a fraught transition to democ-racy and fi ll an institutional void that has seen corruption fl ourish.

The last local representatives were elected in 1997 and their mandates lapsed after their fi ve-year terms expired at the height of the brutal Maoist in-surgency.

After a 2006 peace deal end-ed a confl ict in which 16,000 people died, the impoverished Himalayan nation began a rocky transition from a Hindu monarchy to a secular fed-eral republic, which has seen the country go through nine governments.

In the vacuum left at the local level, graft has become a way of life. Nepal is ranked one of the most corrupt countries in South Asia.

Bureaucrats appointed on the basis of allegiance to polit-ical parties fi lled local govern-ment positions, and spawned a shadow industry of brokers who earned fees for every-thing from getting citizenship documents to registering a marriage.

When Mahananda Timilsina decided to extend his house, getting permission took months of work and involved hefty bribes.

“If there were elected repre-sentatives at the local level, the civil servants wouldn’t dare to ask for bribes from us,” said the 35-year-old.

Many of the nearly 50,000 people vying for 13,556 seats in today’s polls are shunning the main political parties to run as independents or as candidates for new reformist parties.

“It couldn’t get any worse. The gap between society and government couldn’t get any wider,” George Varughese, Ne-pal representative for the Asia Foundation think-tank, said.

Varughese said the elections could “undermine the current political dominance of the main three parties.”

In Kathmandu, 21-year-old Ranju Darshana, whose party name, Bibeksheel Nepali, trans-lates as the “party for rational Nepalis” is running for mayor.

Also hoping to snatch the votes of people fed up with the graft-ridden system, is a party recently set up by a former chief editor of the BBC’s Nepali serv-ice, Rabindra Mishra, who left journalism pledging to clean up the political quagmire.

Both are expected grab votes from the main parties, but neither is likely to win.

Under a new 2015 constitu-tion, local elections followed by provincial and national elec-tions have to be held by Janu-ary 2018 – the fi nal step in the drawn-out peace process.

The charter gives local gov-ernments to be elected today a large degree of autonomy in how they spend allocated funds.

Observers say the measure will help undermine the deeply ingrained rent-seeking culture.

“The allocation of funds will be tailored to suit the local needs, rather than tailored to the centre. And tailored by peo-ple who are accountable at the

By Annabel Symington, AFPKathmandu

Residents gather to receive their voter identity cards in Kathmandu yesterday ahead of forthcoming local elections in the Himalayan nation.

local level,” said Varughese.But not everyone is

optimistic.Anti-corruption activist

Sharada Bhusal said the polls would only cement the current corrupt system, particularly in rural communities.

“It is the same so-called lead-ers who will contest in the elec-tion as well. It will strengthen the foundation of the political

parties – from bottom to top. It will legitimise them in the system,” she said.

Bhusal added that low wages for local level offi cials was part of the problem – the best paid get less than $250 a month.

“They are almost in a situa-tion where they are forced to be corrupt to feed themselves,” she said.

Nepal ranks 131 out of 176

countries in Transparency In-ternational’s global corruption perception index.

The watchdog’s survey found that in Nepal political parties and public offi cials were con-sidered the most graft-ridden institutions – viewed as corrupt by 90% and 85% of people.

Bhusal says the system leaves ordinary Nepalese without ba-sic services, while the politically

well-connected get richer.Polls open at 7am (0115 GMT)

today in three provinces, with 283 local municipalities vot-ing for candidates for seven positions.

The vote has been split into two phases because of the threat of unrest in the southern plains bordering India. The remain-ing four provinces will vote on June 14.

Lankan airline to add new Indian cities to its network

SriLankan Airlines, the na-tional carrier of the is-land nation, will add three

southern India cities – Hydera-bad, Coimbatore and Visakhap-atnam – to its network from July, a statement said yesterday.

According to the statement, the fl ights will commence from July 8.

“The introduction of these new routes, along with the scheduled frequency increases in its Delhi and Mumbai serv-ices, will see SriLankan operat-ing over 120 fl ights a week to 14 cities, thus becoming the carrier that serves the highest number of points in India,” the airline said.

Currently, the airline serves key Indian cities such as New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Ben-galuru, Tiruchirappalli, Trivan-drum, Kochi, Madurai, Varanasi and Bodh Gaya, and will intro-duce four additional frequencies to its daily services from Delhi and Mumbai in July.

The statement said the new routes will be serviced by Airbus 320/321 aircraft.

“These new routes are intro-duced with the aim of provid-ing passengers with added con-venience, seamless travel and easy onward connectivity from Colombo,” it said.

SriLankan Airlines is a mem-ber of the Oneworld airline alli-ance, being the fi rst airline from the Indian sub-continent to join any global airline alliance.

IANSNew Delhi/Colombo

Bangladeshi IS fi ghter killed in Iraq

The Islamic State group has released the photo of a Bangladeshi youth

who was killed fi ghting for the terror outfi t in Iraq, a media report said.

The photo was of Taz Rah-man, who was from Moham-madpur in Dhaka, Dhaka Tribune reported.

The photo, published early on Thursday in Arabic Nashir channel on Telegram and later in At-Tamkin Bangla website, identifi es him as Abu Ismail al-Bengali.

The photo statement does not contain the time of his death, but Swedish-Bangla-deshi journalist Tasneem Kha-lil told the Dhaka Tribune that he had possibly been killed in Iraq earlier this month.

A close family source con-fi rmed his identity to the Dhaka Tribune.

“Taz Rahman was active in the Finnish jihadi/Islamist scene until 2013/2014 before migrating to Syria,” Tasneem added.

He was last seen in Finland in January 2015, while another

Bangladeshi IS fi ghter, Gazi Kamrus Salam Sohan, met him in Raqqa, Syria between April and May 2015.

Sohan, a former Desco en-gineer, returned home in mid-May 2015. Upon his arrest in Dhaka, Sohan told investiga-tors that Taz had been work-ing as a physiotherapist at a hospital in Raqqa.

Taz was the son-in-law of Abdul Mannan, who leads the Islamic Society of Northern Finland, and also the second in command of the local Social Democratic Party.

According to a close friend of Taz, who requested ano-nymity, he met Taz in Cyprus in 2000 and left for Finland with his Latvian wife in 2011. They were separated the following year.

Taz got married to the daughter of Mannan of Olu-lu city. Later he got close to some Jamaat-e-Islami men including Abdus Salam.

“Taz’s wife may have trav-elled to Syria with him. They had a small child,” a source close to Taz told the Dhaka Tribune, but could not con-fi rm the information. Taz also co-owned a halal shop in Finland.

IANSDhaka

Six Indian climbers reach Everest

Six Indian climbers reached the top of Mount Everest yesterday, the fi rst group to

summit the world’s highest peak this season.

The team reached the peak from the northern Tibet side of the mountain yesterday morn-ing, with the fi rst climber sum-miting at 8:20am (0020 GMT) and the rest of the group follow-ing shortly after.

“Six members from our team reached the summit this morn-ing, the fi rst of the season,” con-fi rmed Satish Kumar from Tran-scend Adventures, the operator organising the climb.

Some members of the team are from low income backgrounds and had been sponsored by the state government of Andhra Pradesh, in southeastern India.

The fi rst member of the group to reach the peak was Nagaraju Sundarana whose parents are day labourers, followed by son of a fi sherman, Satya Rao, accord-

ing to Transcend Adventures’ facebook page.

“We have 23 in our team and 19 are sponsored by the govern-ment. They are between 19-29 years old from low income fami-lies. They have been training for one and a half years,” team leader Shekhar Babu said.

The busy spring climbing season on Everest runs from late April to May when a narrow window of good weather opens allowing climbers to reach the top of the world.

But so far high winds, fresh

snowfall and unusually cold temperatures have forced most teams to delay their summit attempts.

Nearly 750 climbers are waiting to ascend the 8,850m (29,035ft) peak from the Nepal side, and an-other 300 on the Tibet side.

On the busier south side, a team of highly skilled rope fi xers are still waiting for a period of good weather to lay the ropes to the summit.

A group of Sherpa climbers fi xed ropes to the peak on the north side on Thursday, paving

the way for the fi rst summit of the season.

The season has already been hit by two deaths – experienced Swiss climber Ueli Steck who died late April while on an acclimatisation climb and 85-year-old Min Bahadur Sherchan who died while attempt-ing to reclaim his title as the world’s oldest person to summit Everest.

Last year fi ve people lost their lives on the world’s highest peak, while 443 successfully summit-ed from the Nepal side and an-other 197 made it to the top from the north side in Tibet.

AFPKathmandu

Glitch groundsone of Modi’s choppers

A helicopter, which was part of Indi-an Prime Minister

Narendra Modi’s entourage on his two-day Sri Lanka visit, remains grounded in Kandy after it developed a technical problem, a media report said quoting offi cials yesterday.

The Mi-17 helicopter is grounded at the As-giriya grounds after it failed to take off on Friday when Modi departed in his special fl ight.

Sri Lankan Air Force has helped identify the fault with the helicopter which awaits spare parts from India, offi -cials said.

A fl eet of helicopters were used for Modi’s travel from Colombo to Dikoya, Kandy and from there back to Colombo International airport to return home on Friday.

Several houses in the cen-

tral town of Hatton lost their roofs when the helicopters landed at two grounds in the area and at least one woman was injured, local media reported.

Modi wrapped up his Sri Lanka visit on Friday during which he took part in the In-ternational Vesak Day celebra-tions and addressed Indian-origin Tamils.

He addressed the Tamils of Indian origin in Dickoya town in the tea growing Cen-tral Province of Sri Lanka and inaugurated a Rs1.5bn super-speciality hospital built with India’s assistance.

Modi was the chief guest at the inauguration of the UN-recognised 14th Inter-national Vesak Day meant to mark the birth, enlighten-ment and passing away of Lord Buddha.

Modi arrived in Sri Lanka at the invitation of President Sirisena. This was his sec-ond visit to the Indian Ocean island nation as prime minister after his visit in March 2015.

AgenciesColombo

Danish ambassador to Bangladesh Mikael Hemniti Winther (extreme right) leads a motorbike rally to promote road safety awareness in Dhaka yesterday. Behind him is his wife Ratanawadee Winther riding a bike. Winther is the chairperson of AIP Foundation Thailand, an international non-government organisation which works for promotion of road safety. The rally was arranged by BRAC to observe UN Global Road Safety Week.

Envoy joins road safety drive

Nepal still to work out how to profi t from S Asia satellite

Nepal is yet to work out how to reap benefi ts from the South Asia Sat-

ellite that India launched as a ‘gift to its neighbours’ on May 5, a media report said.

Nepal and India had signed a MoU in March 2016, stating no objection to the launching of

the satellite and that Nepal was eager to benefi t from it.

The Nepali side, however, has yet to fi gure out what exactly it wants from the satellite and how to get it.

The Himalayan Times quoted Bhrigu Dhunga, who heads the South Asia division of Nepal’s ministry of foreign aff airs, as saying, “We are yet to decide which services we’ll use and what will be its modality.”

According to India’s ministry

of external aff airs, the commu-nication satellite aims to provide participating countries television services and communications technology for bank ATMs and e-governance, and may even serve as a backup for cellular networks, especially in places where the ter-restrial connectivity is weak.

Soon after the launch of SAS, leaders of the six benefi ting na-tions in a video conference with Prime Minister Narendra Modi

hailed the gesture as a new face of co-operation in space for com-mon good of the neighbourhood.

On the occasion, Nepal’s Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal stressed on taking the best possible benefi ts from the satellite services, as it would help provide communi-cation services in the mountainous and hilly regions of Nepal.

The Indian side has off ered to pro-vide at least one transponder with a bandwidth of 24,000 to 36,000MHz.

A senior diplomat at the In-dian embassy in Kathmandu noted that Nepal would get two transponders on this satellite, and India would provide neces-sary training and orientation, the Himalayan Times said.

India has already proposed to impart training to Nepali engi-neers at ISRO headquarters in Bengaluru, but the Nepali side is yet to respond to the proposal, the daily said.

IANSKathmandu

The cyberattacks that swept the world and crippled thousands of computers on Friday highlight the risk to data security within the global system and reinforces the need for cyber security to be at the heart of government planning.

The attacks came in the form of ransomware, a technique used by hackers that locks users’ fi les unless they pay the attackers a designated sum in the virtual currency Bitcoin.

The scope of the attacks was not immediately clear, but some analysts have reported that dozens of countries had been aff ected, with the malware linked to attacks on hospitals in Britain as well as the Spanish telecom giant Telefonica and the US delivery fi rm FedEx.

The US Department of Homeland Security’s computer emergency response team said it was aware of ransomware infections “in several countries around the world.

The British government already confi rmed that it was an international attack and that a number of countries and organisations have been aff ected.

The problem appeared to have begun on Friday morning when hospitals in the UK were crippled by a large-scale cyberattack, which forced operations to be cancelled and ambulances to be diverted.

Security experts are still trying to get their arms around this global problem.

According to Alan Woodward, a professor of computing at the University of Surrey, this particular malware emerged in February, and it has one purpose: “to extort money in return for releasing the data it has encrypted.”

And that’s not even the worst of it. Woodward warned there are two problems. “First, there is no guarantee the criminals will release your data,” he said, “and second, even if you do have your data released, there is no guarantee the criminals won’t repeat the exercise.”

Woodward said the malware “acts as a ‘worm.’”“Once inside a network it seeks out and aff ects any

susceptible computer it can fi nd on the network,” he said. “The only sensible way to tackle it is to ‘pull the plug’ so that it can’t spread any more until you can isolate the aff ected machines and work out a remediation plan.”

Cyber experts have warned that all countries are the targets of phishing, a fraudulent practice of sending e-mails pretending to be from reputable companies to induce individuals to reveal personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers.

The phishing attack is also on the increase over the smartphones as mobile phones are a key target of the cyber hackers, of late.

Hence, it is the interest of everyone that they keep their Internet-connected devices well protected against all such attacks.

Regardless of the origin of the attacks, the situation confi rms how important it is to maintain resilience of the national critical infrastructure, including in telecom, aviation, and banking and public health sectors.

The authorities need to be clear about what has happened worldwide on Friday and what measures they ought to take either to eliminate or reduce threats to the global computer system.

Certainly, digital revolution has transformed the way we live and work but we have to be ready for the vulnerabilities it brings too.

P.O.Box 2888Doha, Qatar

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Gulf Times Sunday, May 14, 2017

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Security experts are still trying to get their arms around this global problem

Taking the fi ght to cancer,other diseases essential

Tackling Qatar’s urban development challengesQatar needs closer public and private sector engagement to achieve sustainable urban development

By Engineer Hamoda Yousef,Head of Communications at QGBC

Qatar’s urban development is a relatively young

experience with the fi rst substantial urban settlement appearing in the 1940s. Ninety-nine per cent of Qatar’s population currently live in cities. The country has taken signifi cant steps towards creating a more sustainable and improved urban infrastructure. We have seen this happen as major neighbourhoods, such as Msheireb Downtown Doha, Education City, Katara and Lusail City, have come to life. These major projects, may seem few in number, but are leading developments which have started to reshape Qatar’s urban landscape.

Doha’s urban life, despite the recent progress, faces major challenges. The increase of waste production, the lack of regular recycling schemes, as well as an increased consumption of water and electricity, urban sprawling,

limited walkability, poor air quality and ineffi cient public transportation network, are some of the main challenges the government expect to tackle as part of its long-term urban development strategy. Successfully tackling these challenges through an eff ective public and private sector stakeholder engagement will have a unique opportunity to drive Qatar to become a regional role model.

Qatar has committed itself to achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) as part of its ongoing development within the framework of the Qatar National Vision 2030. An important testament to this commitment is the appointment of HH Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, Chairperson of Qatar Foundation, as one of the global advocates for UN SDGs.

From an international perspective, there has been several eff orts to tackle the rapid increase of urban population and exponential negative impact the urban development is imposing on the environment. In light of the UN SDGs and UN-Habitat’s “New Urban Agenda”, tackling Qatar’s urban development challenges requires a cohesive cross-sectoral engagement strategy. We should work on establishing comprehensive stakeholder co-ordination, eff ective public awareness and closer community engagement. Closer co-ordination among the key urban development parties, such as

municipalities, private sector partners and public sector institutions. This is what is required to ensure these challenges are identifi ed and tackled in a sustainable manner.

Qatar’s public sector needs to identify practical solutions to engage the private sector from the outset of urban planning policy development. Government agencies’ work can be speeded up if these stakeholders are more closely involved. Policies devised in isolation, and which the private sector will struggle to implement will not achieve their targets.

Most importantly, it is vital for the stakeholders to ensure members of the wider community are consulted on a regular basis. Personal benefi t is an aspect that needs to be strongly conveyed to all members of the community, and how an individual can benefi t from these eff orts for sustainability. A huge behaviour change and support from the community is required for meaningful urban development to take place, and the gap between government, the private sector and individual members of the community must be bridged.

Qatar Green Building Council’s (QGBC) various initiatives including technical events, training and education programs, public events, and outreach campaigns, provide eff ective ways for members of the public to learn about sustainability, get involved, have their voices heard, and make the necessary behaviour changes for a sustainable future.

QGBC, for instance, was recently awarded the right to host Urban Thinkers Campus (UTC) in Doha as part of its mission to raise awareness about sustainable living in Qatar. UTC is part of the World Urban Campaign (WUC), an initiative of UN-Habitat, which aims to raise awareness of the UN’s ‘New Urban Agenda’ across emerging cities. The Campus will bring together leading Urban thinkers, government decision-makers, members of the private sectors, members of academia, students, designers and consultants to gauge Doha’s current urban development potential and the way forward for a sustainable and intelligent Doha city.

Professional events, such as the Urban Thinkers Campus and QGBC’s in-house trainings are complementary to the more public outreach campaigns such as the No Paper Day campaign and the Green Life loyalty programme. These activities allow members of the community in Qatar to learn, benefi t and contribute to the sustainability agenda. Policy, academia and the personal application of sustainability are complementary to each other. The bones of the policy and government are essential to the accomplishment of a sustainable city, but these are pointless if they do not see an application in the daily lives of people. Bridging this gap is of fundamental importance, and this is a vital part of QGBC’s role in Qatar.

By Princess Dina MiredAmman/Jordan

I still remember the moment that the

doctor told us that our son had “cancer.” That six-letter word packed an emotional punch and we were hit by a combination of shock, sadness, helplessness, confusion and mostly fear. Fear that we could lose our most precious. My husband and I kept asking ourselves, why did this happen to our family? What did we do wrong? How did we miss the symptoms?

After the initial shock subsided, we switched to action to help save our little boy. In Jordan at the time (1997) there was no quality cancer treatment, so we were lucky to be able to aff ord the life-saving opportunity for treatment in the UK and later in the US.

With God’s grace and quality treatment, our son beat ALL leukaemia and survived. I know we were lucky to have the opportunity to save him and we are thankful every day for the gift of his cancer-free status. However, millions of parents who love their children as much as we do are not able to perform a parents’ sacred duty of being able to protect and save their children.

As a mother of a cancer survivor, I plan to work tirelessly to help reduce the global burden of childhood cancer and ensure that a child in the

developing world has the same chance to be cured as a child with cancer in a developed country.

As we speak, a child in Africa with ALL Leukemia has 10% chance for a cure, whilst his/her counterpart in the developed world has 90% cure rate. This is totally unacceptable. The chance for a cure should not be an accident of geography.

As a former Director-General of the King Hussein Cancer Foundation for 15 years, I have worked in Jordan and campaigned around the world for better prevention and treatment to cancer. As president-elect for the Union of International Cancer Control (UICC), I am dedicated to reducing the global cancer burden, promoting greater equity, and integrating cancer control into the world health and development agenda. Comprised of over 1,000 organisations from 162 countries, we’re the largest cancer-fighting organisation in the world.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), three quarters of all NCD deaths (28mn), and the majority of premature deaths (82%), occur in low- and middle-income countries. This is already a global pandemic and we have much work to do to make sure that everyone has the access to a cure.

A critical component will be how WHO steps up to tackle cancer and other non-communicable diseases. On smoking in particular, the evidence is clear that increased taxation is one of the most eff ective ways to reduce smoking and related disease. It is important for the WHO to ensure

lessons of taxation are appropriately shared, as well as lessons on plain packaging so member states can make informed judgment calls.

It’s not only tobacco control; with the proportion of people that are overweight and obese going up across the world, the WHO has a key role to play in bringing stakeholders together and spreading lessons across the world. For example, the soda tax in Mexico has reduced consumption of sugary drinks and Jamaica has launched a public exercise programme to raise physical activity.

Next month, WHO member states will elect a new WHO Director-General who has the opportunity to drive action on NCDs around the world: to take on the tobacco and food industries and hold countries to account in their delivery of the global NCD targets. They must also ensure that the next Director-General understands, identifi es with and prioritises the situations of women and mothers around the world - particularly those in the less wealthy regions of the world, where care is equally as crucial but far more diffi cult to access.

All three candidates are outstanding individuals with impeccable track records working in global health. One candidate stands out, and that is Dr Sania Nishtar whom I have known professionally and personally for some time. She has been a formidable leader combating NCDs for the last 20 years - from being the fi rst female cardiologist in Pakistan and working with patients on prevention and treatment to chairing the WHO

Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity.

It is this breadth and depth of Nishtar’s international experience at tackling the global epidemic of heart disease, diabetes and cancer - amongst many other attributes - qualifi es her for the critically important position of Director-General World Health Organisation.

Nishtar is the only candidate that has looked at health challenges through virtually every lens and has the all-round experience as an internationally respected medical doctor, civil society leader, former cabinet minister, thought leader, and technical expert, making her uniquely positioned to lead in the “SDG era” and tackle the multi-faceted health problems that the world now faces.

Nishtar has garnered unprecedented support from women around the world through her women’s declaration and she would be the fi rst leader from the WHO EMRO region and a country that falls within the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation.

As someone who has been touched by cancer, and who has witnessed fi rst-hand the inequity of cancer care and other NCDs, especially in developing world, I am determined to do all I can to combat this diseases. I urge all governments to step up and vote for the right leader to fi ght the leading global disease killers.

Princess Dina Mired from Jordan is a global advocate for cancer and other NCDs. She writes this comment in her individual capacity and not on behalf of any organisation.

Hack attack callsfor greater datasecurity globally

Chairman: Abdullah bin Khalifa al-Attiyah

Deputy Managing Editor: K T Chacko

King Hussein Cancer Foundation

COMMENT

Letters

Energy drinks ‘dangerous for heart patients’QNACanberra

Drinking just two energy drinks can cause cardiac arrest in patients who have an undiagnosed heart

condition, an Australian study warns.The long QT syndrome (LQTS)

condition aff ects 1 in 2,000 people and can cause a rapid, irregular heartbeat that can sometimes be fatal.

“The potential cardiovascular risk of energy drinks continues to emerge as an important public health issue,” said lead investigator Christopher Semsarian, a professor at the University of Sydney in Australia.

Previous research has shown that energy drinks can cause serious heart problems in people without genetic heart disease, but the researchers said this is the fi rst study to examine the potential threat to people with LQTS.

The study included 24 people with hereditary LQTS, aged 16 to 50, who were assessed for 90 minutes after

consuming an energy drink or a non-energy drink.

After consuming an energy drink, three of the patients (12.5%) had dangerous QT prolongation — when heart muscle takes longer than normal to recharge between beats.

Two of the three participants had sharp increases in blood.

These patients all had a family history of sudden cardiac death.

Two of them had previously experienced severe symptoms and received an implantable cardioverter-

defi brillator for recurrent fainting.“Some individual patients may be

at a higher risk. We therefore suggest caution in allowing the consumption of energy drinks in young patients with LQTS,” Semsarian said in a journal news release.

Education ‘victim’of private tuitionDear Sir,

There are many illogical and diffi cult traditions that have become deep-rooted weeds in our society. I fear private tuition is one such practice that is widely found in the Indian community. As an expert put it, it may be because “in our system, unfortunately, marks speak’’.

There are several reasons to bring an end to this system which is supposed to complement school education. Apart from the confusion resulting from being taught diff erent methods and loss of time for personal study, several students are forced to go to tuition centres by their parents. Though tuitions do help many students, it conveys the message that private lessons are better than what is taught in classrooms.

Tuitions also cause indiscipline among students who think they can learn at the tuition centre whatever has been missed in the classrooms. There are also instances of teachers sharing tips and bits of useful information at tuition centres so as to attract students. However, teachers feel insecure about their infl uence

over students due to the overlapping infl uence of private tuitions.

But the biggest victim in this whole episode is education itself. Education is not business and should never be. Knowledge is to be shared and not hoarded up like money.

Education is a selfl ess pursuit where a teacher aims at the holistic development of a student. On the contrary, tuitions have reinforced the concept of marketing education to make money. It has taken the gleam off teaching as a noble profession. I hope that parents will listen to their children and take better decisions. Let us all realise that education is not about marks and grades alone but equipping people with the skills for a better social life.

Reegana Doulath(e-mail address provided)

Traff ic bottleneck onWakrah-Doha roadDear Sir,

This letter is to bring to the notice of authorities the problems faced by motorists who travel from Wakrah to Doha during the morning hours.

The traffi c moves at a snail’s pace as one approaches the Barwa Village. The jam builds up because the road narrows down from three to two lanes near the old Barwa Village signal and the Hamad Airport interchange, where it joins the G-Ring Road. This problem has started after the opening of G-Ring Road and the subsequent closure of the Barwa Village traffi c signal.

We know that the authorities are tirelessly working to improve the traffi c situation but I humbly request them to look into this bottleneck and fi nd a solution to the morning traffi c woes of commuters.

Irfan QuadriWakrah

Plea to buildWukair road

Dear Sir,

Though the initial steps to build Street No 364 in Zone 91, Al Wukair were taken about a couple of years ago, nothing has been done until now. This is causing problems for the residents of the area. As they are forced to drive their vehicles on the rough and rocky

dirt road they often end up having fl at tyres.

Last year, a construction company did the road markings but still there is no further progress.

I request the authorities to build this road on a priority basis.

(Name and address supplied)

Gulf Times Sunday, May 14, 2017 27

By Bill EmmottLondon

If all else fails, try the previously unthinkable. It is not a bad principle for economic policy in the best of times. Today, it may

be just what is needed: many Western countries – certainly the United States, Japan, and Germany, probably the United Kingdom, and soon much of the rest of the eurozone – should pursue direct government intervention in wage bargaining, especially for the lowest earners.

Japan has spent the last 15 years struggling with slow growth, anaemic household demand (especially among poorer families), and rising inequality and poverty. Similar conditions now prevail in the US as well; indeed, they helped Donald Trump to be elected president, by creating a suffi ciently large group of what he quite reasonably called “forgotten Americans.” And before Trump’s victory, such conditions spurred the UK’s so-called “left behind” to vote for Brexit.

Without a sharp increase in wages – mainly statutory minimum wages – populism will continue to thrive, and most Western economies will remain saddled with slow growth. Inequality not just of income and wealth, but also of perceived political voice and infl uence, will continue to grow. And the temptation to pursue shortsighted solutions – such as closing borders and implementing protectionism – will become irresistible.

Yet the suggestion that governments should act directly to raise the price of lower-skilled labour is likely to be met with sharp intakes of breath and sotto voce comments that I must be mad. Don’t I know that higher minimum wages risk causing unemployment? Haven’t I heard of the

“rise of the robots” and the growing power of automation, more generally, to destroy jobs? Don’t I believe in market solutions?

The answer to all three questions is “yes.” But policies need to be tailored to conditions, and they need to refl ect choices between the competing interests of diff erent groups. (Indeed, that is the whole point of politics.) And current conditions, together with the interests of the “left behind,” indicate that the once-unthinkable has become essential, if not inevitable.

The main reason why governments are leery of intervening in wage setting is the memory of the failed wage and price controls during the period of high infl ation in the 1970s – controls that gave rise to large and troublesome distortions. But a second, more current reason relates to lobbying from businesses, which argue that corporate competitiveness depends on cheap labour. Governments also have their own self-interest to consider: the public sector often employs a lot of minimum-wage earners.

But it is time to take courage. Fiscal policy – cutting taxes or raising public spending – is too constrained by high government debt to be much use in stimulating demand, and attempts to use it to redistribute resources from rich to poor have created their own problems. Monetary policy – in particular, the vast money-printing “quantitative easing” programmes pursued by central banks in recent years – has run out of space, too, with price infl ation ticking up and central-bank balance sheets a record size.

Wage intervention is virtually the only option left.

Moreover, the risks of raising the minimum wage are probably not as great as they have been made out to be – at least not now. To be sure, there are times when such wage increases can risk killing employment. But today is not one of those times: countries like the US, Japan, Germany, and the UK are at virtually full employment.

The risk in these countries is not the risk of rising unemployment, but stagnating wages, which has

caused household demand to remain depressed or grow only sluggishly, thereby deterring businesses from investing. In the US, low wages at the bottom end of the labour market have discouraged millions of working-age individuals from even seeking employment. That certainly can help to reduce the offi cial unemployment rate, but it does little for the economy.

The US federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is one-third lower in real (infl ation-adjusted) terms than it was at its peak in 1968. Japan’s average statutory minimum wage of ¥823 ($7.40) per hour is barely higher. Even where the authorities have taken steps to raise minimum wages – the UK since last year, as well as US states like California and New York, which are targeting a $15 hourly minimum wage by 2020 – they are not moving fast or far enough. Japan is raising its minimum wage only slightly faster than infl ation.

Inequality remains the scourge of our era, with the bargaining power of the lowest-skilled workers severely undermined by automation and developing-country competition. If “forgotten” groups are not to be permanently left behind and alienated, governments must take bolder action.

In the 1960s, Japan’s “income doubling” plan helped it to develop a consumer economy. Perhaps the time has come to introduce a “minimum-wage doubling” plan, implemented over a few years, thus giving business the chance to adjust. For leaders who have received the fi nancial support of the very rich and the electoral support of those left behind, such a plan would seem to be a political winner. Any interest, President Trump? – Project Syndicate

Bill Emmott, a former editor-in-chief of The Economist, is Chairman of the Wake Up Foundation.

The wages of wage fear

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QATAR

Gulf Times Sunday, May 14, 201728

Qatar Airways and Hamad International Airport (HIA) have successfully

concluded this year’s emergency exercise on Thursday, which was dubbed “Delta Oryx 2017”.

The full-scale emergency ex-ercise, which is conducted by the Hamad International Airport every two years to test the ac-tivation and functionality of its emergency facilities, was held in co-ordination with 28 govern-ment agencies, stakeholders and partners including Qatar Coast-guard, Internal Security Forces, Qatar Navy, and the Qatar Emiri Air Force.

According to Qatar Airways, the emergency simulation con-sisted of a crash site in the sea adjacent to the airport.

“The planned emergency simulation is an annual proce-dure at Qatar Airways, initiated as a means of testing emergency facilities, in addition to ensuring that our staff are well-prepared to handle and deal with the situ-ation in the most eff ective man-ner,” Qatar Airways said.

“Delta Oryx 2017” incorpo-rated the use of a 30-seater mock aircraft, two Qatar Airways air-craft chutes, 170 volunteer pas-sengers, 60 volunteer family members and friends, 39 dum-mies to display casualties, 40 ambulance response vehicles,

three military helicopters, fi ve airport safety and security vehi-cles, and 10 Mowasalat buses.

Qatar Airways Group chief ex-ecutive Akbar al-Baker said: “We are very proud of the success of ‘Delta Oryx 2017’. This year’s

emergency simulation aimed to challenge our employees, who responded with the upmost pro-fessionalism and sense of duty, refl ecting our high standards of safety and security at Qatar Air-ways.”

“On behalf of Qatar Airways, I would like to thank all the gov-ernment agencies, stakeholders, partners, specialised forces, vol-unteers and lastly our employees for co-ordinating and delivering this year’s complex, yet tremen-

dously successful, simulated emergency exercise,” he added.

The exercise also tested spe-cialised forces’ arrangements for rescue at sea and Hamad Medical Corporation’s emergency activa-tion of all public hospitals and selected primary healthcare fa-cilities.

On the HIA’s successful com-pletion of the emergency exer-cise, HIA chief operating offi cer

Badr Mohamed al-Meer said: “We at HIA strive for excellence in everything we do, includ-ing our preparedness in a crisis, which is why this exercise, being HIA’s third full-scale exercise, simulated an aircraft incident at sea, not within the confi nes of the airport.”

In accordance with the re-quirements established by the International Civil Aviation Or-

ganisation (ICAO), airports are required to hold an emergency exercise every two years to fulfi l their licensing requirements.

As an airport directly located beside the sea, HIA is also re-quired by ICAO international regulations to ensure adequate emergency procedures are in place in the event that occupants are to be rescued from an aircraft that has crashed into the sea.

Qatar Airways, HIA successfully conduct ‘Delta Oryx’ exercise

Below: Al-Meer with the HIA team and others who took part in ‘Delta Oryx 2017’.

Right: A military helicopter participating in ‘Delta Oryx 2017’.

Al-Baker with member of the Qatar Airways Group Emergency Management Team.