New road eases access to Doha's southern areas - Gulf Times

MONDAY Vol. XXXVII No. 10125

June 20, 2016Ramadan 15, 1437 AH www. gulf-times.com 2 Riyals GULF TIMES

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INDEX

SPORT | Page 8QATAR | Page 3

Minister spells out steps to improve education system

Murray makes history with fi ft h Queen’s crown

In brief

BRITAIN | Vote

Cameron pushes tolerant valuesBritish voters should opt for a “tolerant, liberal Britain” and reject a British EU exit, or Brexit, in this week’s referendum, extolled Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday, as the campaign to decide Britain’s role in the EU enters its last days. “If you don’t know, don’t go,” Cameron told undecided voters, in his first major intervention in the campaigning since the murder of Labour politician Jo Cox. Pages 16, 26

RAMADAN THOUGHT

Prayer times

Fasting times

The Qur’an guides you to the recognition of your illness and to its remedy, your illness is your sins, and your medicine is seeking the forgiveness of Allah. [Qataadah]

Iftar today ............................6.30pmSuhoor tomorrow ..............3.14am

Fajr....3.14 Zuhr....11.35 Asr....2.58 Maghrib.....6.30 Isha.....8.00

The new road will help Doha residents reach Barwa Village faster among other locations of the south

By Ramesh MathewStaff Reporter

The connectivity between the central areas of Doha and its southern region, including

Wakrah, is set to remarkably improve with the opening of a new road, which includes a 117m-long bridge, on the 2.4km extended stretch of the Najma Street.

The new road will help Doha residents reach Barwa Village faster among other locations of the south.

While announcing the opening yesterday, the Public Works Author-ity (Ashghal) termed the ambitious project a “significant milestone” that would ensure smooth vehicu-lar movement between Doha and the southern areas.

The bridge, a vital component of the new development, is situated at a height of 10m and at the inter-section between the East West Cor-ridor and Najma Street Extension. The speed limit along the stretch is 80km.

One of the most prominent

projects of the Ashghal, the Najma Street Bridge is a vital connecting link of the East Corridor Project, which is the eastern part of the East West Corridor.

The major corridor comprises 22km of a new dual carriageway, in-cluding five lanes in each direction stretching from the west of Barwa City to Al Matar Street, south of the Air Force signal.

The whole project includes eight grade-separated interchanges built to provide new access to key roads and residential areas such as Al Ma-tar Street, Najma Street Extension , Barwa Access road and Al Wakrah bypass.

The new development, according to Ashghal, demonstrates its “com-mitment to develop effective and vi-

able solutions to the ever-growing road needs and requirements of the country’s residents, notably those in the southern areas”.

The Najma Street extension con-nects the partially-opened F-Ring Road to Al Wakrah main road, im-proving connectivity between Al Thumama and Mathar Qadheem.

With the development of the 2.4km stretch, one of the biggest ad-vantages of the road users is that they do not have to travel through the busy Airport Road or Ras Abu Aboud road anymore to commute between the southern and central areas.

Besides ensuring major infra-structural improvement, the project includes the upgrade and relocation of utilities, installation of 2,842m of drainage lines and more than 140,000m of irrigation lines across the project area.

Ashghal also has plans to build pedestrian pathways and cycle paths along the route.

The authorities hope that the project will eventually help provid-ing strategic link from Hamad In-ternational Airport to the upcom-ing residential areas in and around Barwa Village, the Industrial Area, besides the under-construction New Orbital Highway and Truck Route.

New road eases access to Doha’s southern areas

HH the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani yesterday attended an Iftar banquet hosted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul. The banquet was attended by members of the off icial delegation accompanying HH the Emir and a number of ministers, senior off icials and sports and media personalities in Turkey. The Emir arrived in Istanbul yesterday evening for a short off icial visit. He was welcomed upon arrival at Ataturk International Airport by Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Berat Albayrak, Istanbul Governor Vasip Sahin and Qatar’s ambassador to Turkey, Salem bin Mubarak al-Shafi. Page 3

Emir attends Iftar banquet

The new extended stretch of Najma Street.

Pogba shines as France top Euro 2016 groupAFPLille, France

Paul Pogba shone through the mediocrity as hosts France se-cured top spot in Euro 2016

Group A following a subdued 0-0 draw with Switzerland in Lille yester-day.

A game that featured a substand-ard pitch, ripped Switzerland shirts and a burst ball concluded in a mu-tually convenient result that allowed the Swiss to join Didier Deschamps’s France in the last 16.

But Pogba, dogged by controversy over an alleged contentious gesture prior to the game, did his best to il-luminate proceedings, hitting the bar twice, as did French substitute Dimitri Payet late in the game.

As group winners, France will face the third-place team in either Group C, D or E in Lyon on June 26, while Switzerland will come up against ei-ther Germany, Poland or Northern Ireland a day earlier.

It was mission accomplished, there-fore, for France, but following narrow wins over Romania and Albania, their failure to record a seventh consecutive victory means they advance with little momentum.

A dry, patchy pitch at Stade Pierre-

Mauroy made it diffi cult for both teams to get the ball down and play football, but aside from a few slips, Pogba did not seemed perturbed by the conditions underfoot.

One of fi ve players brought into the France team by Deschamps, in changes that saw in-form playmaker Payet left on the bench, the Juventus star seemed determined to erase the memory of his alleged ‘bras d’honneur’ following Payet’s second goal in Wednesday’s 2-0 win over Albania.

Deployed in his preferred posi-tion on the left of a midfi eld three, he threatened three times in fi ve minutes, forcing Swiss goalkeeper Yann Som-mer to produce a wonder save in be-tween two eff orts that clipped the bar from outside the box.

He also provided the fi rst half’s only real moment of danger in the French

penalty area when he unintention-ally scuff ed Xherdan Shaqiri’s eighth-minute corner towards his own goal.

The ball struck Swiss centre-back Johan Djourou, sprawled on the French goal-line, and Pogba hacked clear.

Pogba aside, Switzerland’s biggest concern in the fi rst period was the fl imsiness of their shirts as Admir Me-hmedi, Granit Xhaka and Breel Embolo all had big holes torn in theirs.

Switzerland began to fi nd joy behind French full-backs Bacary Sagna and Patrice Evra in the second half, but the chances continued to fall to France.

Switzerland have now gone seven games without beating France, since a 2-1 win masterminded by current England coach Roy Hodgson in May 1992, but they will now contest a Euro knockout phase for the fi rst time. Sport Pages 1, 2, 3

Albania down Romania and stay alive

Albania’s Euro 2016 could continue into the

knock-out phase after the debutants ended

their scoring drought to eliminate Romania

with a 1-0 victory in Lyon yesterday. Ar-

mando Sadiku’s 43rd minute header took

Albania to three points in Group A, above

bottom Romania on one, and leaves them

with an anxious wait to see if they will be

one of the four best third-place teams who

progress. It was Albania’s first-ever goal at a

major tournament finals.

Romania started brightly before losing

their rhythm during the first half and

Sadiku’s goal was deserved when it arrived.

After the interval, Ledian Memushaj twice

went close to doubling Albania’s lead

before substitute Florin Andone hit the

woodwork late on for Romania.

Qatar welcomes Sudan’s decision on ceasefireQatar has welcomed Sudan’s decision on ceasefire in the regions of Blue Nile and South Kordofan.In a statement yesterday, the Ministry of Foreign aff airs confirmed Qatar’s support to all eff orts aimed at achieving a comprehensive peace in Sudan.It considered Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s recent decision to a four-month ceasefire in the regions

of Blue Nile and South Kordofan as “a positive step towards enhancing security and stability in the country”.The statement stressed Qatar’s support for the Republic of Sudan “in its eff orts to push forward the peace process in order to reach a political settlement through a comprehensive national dialogue that responds to the aspirations of the brotherly Sudanese people”.

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QATAR3Gulf Times

Monday, June 20, 2016

The Ministry of Economy and Commerce (MEC) has conducted an intensive inspection campaign on more than 27 foodstuff storehouses at Industrial Area. The inspectors spotted five violations that included storing expired products and not posting the proper information of the items in store. Violators were issued a report each, which could entail them a fine ranging from QR3,000 and up to QR1mn, besides, the administrative closure of the outlet concerned for various periods.

Foodstuff storehouses inspected

HH the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani attended an Iftar banquet hosted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul yesterday. The banquet was also attended by the members of the off icial delegation accompanying the Emir, several ministers, senior off icials, a group of intellectuals and sports and media personalities in Turkey.

Emir attends Iftar banquet hosted by Turkish president

Rawdat Al Khail Health Centre fully operationalThe Rawdat Al Khail

Health Centre lo-cated near Jaidha

Flyover is fully operational, the Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC) an-nounced yesterday. The new health centre has re-placed Al Muntazah Health Centre.

According to PHCC, Rawdat Al Khail Health Centre is part of the fi fth stage of the projects for new health centres and the second of its kind in terms of the nature and quality of

services off ered. The centre is classifi ed

as an A category one which provides the wellness serv-ices in addition to the usual medical services.The addi-tional services include gym, swimming pool, massage centre, sauna and steam. It also off ers preventive and curative services such as vaccinations and men-tal health services, cancer screening services, physio-therapy, dermatology, fam-ily medicine, vaccination, non-communicable diseas-

es, antenatal care, healthy child clinic; ear, nose and throat clinic, dental clinic, ophthalmology and derma-tology.

In addition, the centre also provides laboratory services, pharmacy, radiol-ogy, medical commission, pre-marital consultation, home care services and physiotherapy among other services.

PHCC also said that the new centre is operating on the electronic fi les sys-tem from the fi rst day of its

opening and off ers its serv-ices through appointment system. The centre has a medical team of 39 doctors, 85 nurses and 38 adminis-trative staff . It has the ca-pacity of accommodating 150,000 visitors and serves the residents of Farij Abdul Aziz, Farij bin Mahmoud, Al Najma, Al Mansoura and Al Muntazah areas. The cen-tre will continue to provide its services to the patients of Al Muntazah old health centre and works from 7am to 11pm, seven days a week.

Minister spells out steps to improve education system

HE the Minister of Education and Higher Education

Dr Mohamed Abdul Wahed Ali al-Hammadi yesterday said his Ministry is imple-menting a package of meas-ures aimed at improving the education system, especial-ly in the area of public and higher education.

Addressing the Annual Ramadan Ghabga hosted for the staff of the Ministry of Education and Higher Education in Al Sharq Ho-tel on Saturday night, dur-ing which independent school principals who have completed 30 years or more in the field of education were honoured, the Min-ister expressed his thanks, appreciation and gratitude to all those in charge of ed-ucation, including the staff of the Ministry, schools, parents and students for their hard work and dedi-cation, emphasising the shared responsibility of all of them.

He also stressed that enhancing the level of academic performance of students and the quality and efficiency of the edu-cation system is one of the most important strategic objectives that the Minis-try aims to achieve through

the implementation of the ongoing policies, proce-dures and scientific pro-grammes.

Dr al-Hammadi said that in the fi rst phase the Minis-try has completed the proc-ess of the development of education infrastructure, solving problems, construc-tion of foundations and reg-ulations that promote the quality of education.

In the next phase it will focus on the quality and the development of necessary indicators to measure and set up systems to assess and improve performance in all aspects of the educational process.

The initiatives include the development of a system for analysing and measuring the performance of students

in national and internal tests conducted by schools and plans to enhance perform-ance, Dr Hammadi added.

This system will be in place before the beginning of the next academic year so that school authorities can assess the level of weakness and as-pects that need to be devel-oped to raise the academic performance of students, Dr al-Hammadi said, pointing out that the measures also target enhancing teachers’ capacities and all aspects of the education system relating to the performance of stu-dents or curriculum.

The Minister reviewed the eff orts being exerted to improve the education system’s performance, in-cluding organising train-ing workshops to raise the

quality of internal tests and establishing a Questions-Bank system, which is now in the testing phase.

The Minister also re-vealed a package of ini-tiatives and policies with regard to early childhood education, the adoption of a strategy for strengthen-ing the reading, writing and arithmetic skills of the students of all primary schools along with the im-plementation of various initiatives aimed at meet-ing the needs of students with special needs and those who require addi-tional support.

In this context, the Min-ister reviewed the develop-ment of skills enhancement programmes and academic guidance for secondary school students so as to fa-cilitate their enrolment in universities and involve-ment in the labour market.

The Ministry has imple-mented several initiatives including the establishment of a committee charged with developing curriculum with help from experts to create an education plan that fi ts the capabilities of students in accordance with the re-cently established curricu-lum national framework in order to achieve Qatar’s goals and ambitions in the provision of quality educa-tion in line with the national strategy.

QNA Doha

HE the Minister of Education and Higher Education Dr Mohamed Abdul Wahed Ali al-Hammadi honouring an independent school principal.

Zakat Fund distributesQR17.8mn aid in May

The Zakat Fund under the Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Aff airs continues

to provide monthly urgent aid to thousands of eligible families in Qatar.

In its monthly report, the Zakat Fund pointed out that the total amount of the aid dis-tributed among various social groups during the month of May amounted to QR17,772,042.

Zakat Fund stressed its com-mitment to conducting fi eld re-search to evaluate the real need for the needy.

QNADoha

QATAR

Gulf Times Monday, June 20, 20164

Indian embassy moving to new location from 27thThe Indian embassy

will start functioning from its new premises

in Onaiza from June 27, it was announced yesterday.

The address of the new premises is Villa No.86 & 90, Street No. 941, Al Eithra Street, Zone 63, Onaiza, Doha.

Since the shifting process is being held from Wednes-day to Sunday, the embassy will not be able to render consular and other services during this period.

However, the embassy will attend to any cases of genuine emergency even during the period of its re-location. The embassy’s Help Lines for this purpose during the period of relo-cation are as follows: Con-sular Section: 33872462, 66952621 or 33555029. La-bour & Community Welfare Section: 5 5 8 0 8 2 5 4 , 33451607, 66275337 and 33208766.

During the period of shifting, embassy offi cials would also be checking re-spective e-mails which are publicised through its web-site: www.indianembas-syqatar.gov.in.

In a statement, the mis-sion explained that “the Government of India has approved the embassy’s re-location to a better Chan-cery premises with a view

to further enhance the ef-fi ciency of services to the Indian community and the public at large in the State of Qatar.”

According to the embassy, “as an Internet search and visit to the new premises and its surroundings would demonstrate, the total parking available near the new premises is more as compared to the existing premises.

“The same is the case with the overall availability of public transport, the details of which may be perused at

www.mowasalat.com. The nearest bus stations

for the new location are City Center Doha and Qa-tar Sports Club. When Doha Metro starts operating, Al Qassar will be the nearest metro station.

“In anticipation of its re-

location, the embassy had requested the authorities concerned in Government of Qatar to kindly increase the number of buses to the close vicinity of the new premises. The embassy’s re-quest is under positive con-sideration”.

The Indian embassy at its new premsises in Onaiza.

Outsourcing collection of applications

In view of the increasing volume of consular services, the

Indian embassy’s proposal for outsourcing of the collection of

consular applications and delivery of documents after render-

ing services is under Government of India’s consideration.

HE the Minister of State for Defence Aff airs Dr Khalid bin Mohamed al-Attiyah meeting the Qatari troops in Najran.

Defence Minister visits Qatari troops deployed in Najran

HE the Minister of State for Defence Aff airs Dr Khalid

bin Mohamed al-Attiyah has visited the Qatari Armed Forces’ detach-ment deployed in Najran, Saudi Arabia, as part of the Arab Coalition Forces par-ticipating the Operation Restoring Hope in Yemen.

The Minister was wel-comed by Saudi Army’s Chief of General Staff and commander of the joint forces Colonel General Abdulrahman bin Saleh al-Banyan.

During the visit, HE Dr al-Attiyah met all the of-fi cers and soldiers in the

Qatari detachment and conveyed to them the greetings of HH the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad

al-Thani, the Supreme Commander of the Qatari Armed Forces.

Praising their superior

performance, the Minis-ter thanked the members of Qatari detachment for their eff orts.

QNA Najran/ Saudi Arabia

HE Dr Khalid bin Mohamed al-Attiyah with Qatari troops in Najran.

Vodafone off ers

double data while

roaming in Saudi

Vodafone has announced that it is off ering double data at a total of 4GB while roaming in Saudi Arabia on the Vodafone Passport Pack until July 16.

The fi rst 2GB can be used on any network in Saudi Arabia and the extra 2GB is only available on STC Saudi Arabia’s network, the company has said in a statement.

Mohamed al-Sadah, COO at Vodafone Qatar, said: “With many of our customers travelling to Saudi Arabia during the holy month to perform the pilgrimage to Makkah, Umrah and following that to spend Eid al-Fitr in the Kingdom, it was important that we off er our customers a better way to stay in touch with their loved ones.”

In addition to the 4GB data, the Vodafone Passport Pack allows customers to enjoy un-limited incoming and unlim-ited outgoing calls to Vodafone Qatar numbers at QR100 per week, the statement notes.

Customers can activate Vodafone Passport Pack by dialling *110*110#

“Moreover, customers will enjoy 4G coverage while roam-ing in Saudi Arabia. This comes at no extra cost to the current Vodafone roaming rates; all customers have to do is enable 4G and data roaming on their smartphone,” the statement added.

Vodafone also recently an-nounced that its Vodafone Passport Pack had expanded from 45 to 76 countries, ena-bling customers to roam for as low as local rates in time for the summer holiday season.

Qatar has been chosen as a member of the implementation team of the Arab Strategic Plan for the Alliance of Civilizations.Representatives to the Arab contact points of the Alliance of Civilizations at the Arab League chose Qatar in recognition of the eff orts made by the State, represented by Qatar Committee for Alliance of Civilizations, in the development of the Arab Strategic Plan for the Alliance of Civilizations.The team will determine the programmes and activities that will be implemented during the period 2016- 2019.

Qatar to be on Arab Strategic Plan team

QATAR5Gulf Times


Envoy sees hope for inaugural meet of joint panelThe Philippine embassy in

Doha is hoping that the inaugural convening of

the Joint Ministerial Commis-sion for Bilateral Co-operation (JMCBC) will “fi nally happen” under the new administration of incoming president, Rodrigo Duterte, ambassador Wilfredo Santos has said.

The JMCBC provides a regu-lar mechanism for the Philip-pines and Qatar to review the status of its bilateral relations, explore possible areas of co-op-eration, and exchange updates and viewpoints on regional and international issues aff ecting both countries, said Santos.

A memorandum of under-standing (MoU) establishing the JMCBC was signed in Doha on March 10, 1997 by then Philip-pine foreign aff airs secretary Do-mingo L Siazon and his then Qa-tari counterpart, HE the Minister of State for Foreign Aff airs Ah-mad bin Abdullah al-Mahmoud.

Santos noted that the JMCBC “has yet to convene despite the MoU,” which was signed 19 years ago.

“We have consistently brought this up during my calls on Ministry of Foreign Aff airs (Mofa) offi cials, as well as with my colleagues at the Depart-ment of Foreign Aff airs (DFA) in the Philippines.

“As we are about to start the incoming Duterte administra-tion, which will fi nd the DFA under the new stewardship of incoming foreign aff airs secre-tary Perfecto Yasay Jr, we hope that this long overdue inaugural convening of the Joint Ministe-rial Commission on Bilateral Co-operation will fi nally hap-pen,” Santos said.

Earlier, the ambassador also said the JMCBC meeting “will hopefully pave the way for the signing of several pending bilat-eral agreements between Qatar and the Philippines in various fi elds, including health, culture, investments, and visa waiver for

diplomatic passport holders and government offi cials.”

During a recent courtesy call on HE the Assistant Foreign Minister for Foreign Aff airs Sultan bin Saad al-Muraikhi by the Asean Committee in Doha (ACD), Santos reiterated his call for the inaugural convening of the JMCBC and invited al-Mu-raikhi to visit the Philippines.

Asked when al-Muraikhi would visit the Philippines, San-tos said: “This will have to be dis-cussed fi rst with the DFA before a date can be proposed to the Qa-tari side. Such a visit could per-haps coincide with the inaugural convening of the Joint Ministe-

rial Commission on Bilateral Co-operation, with assistant foreign minister al-Muraikhi possibly leading the Qatari delegation.”

Santos said al-Muraikhi ac-knowledged “the important role that the Filipino commu-nity plays in Qatar, and looked forward to more avenues of co-operation with the Philippines, whether bilaterally or through the ACD.”

“The Joint Ministerial Commission for Bilateral Co-operation is one avenue of co-operation from a bilateral perspective. But then again, this does not stop us from ex-ploring other bilateral means through regular exchanges be-tween Philippine and Qatari government agencies.”

Santos added: “As for the ACD track, the Philippines, as one of the founding members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean), actively promotes Asean awareness in Qatar and furthering relations between the two.

“Just recently, I was des-ignated as chairperson of the ACD from August 2016 to Au-gust 2017. My chairmanship coincides with the Philippines’ chairmanship of the Asean Summit in 2017, as well as the 50th anniversary of the Asean. This symbolic timing provides me an opportunity to maxim-ise my term as chairperson in achieving concrete gains from ACD’s mandate.”

By Peter AlagosBusiness Reporter

Philippine ambassador Wilfredo Santos. PICTURE: Ram Chand

Students from Ali Bin Jassim Bin Mohammed Al-Thani Secondary Independent School for Boys visit the QF Nursery.

School students learn about plants at Botanic Garden

The Qur’anic Botanic Gar-den (QBG) received a del-egation of school boys

as part of its ‘Young Botanist’ educational programme to teach high school students about plant physiology and scientifi c study.

The students, from Ali Bin Jassim Bin Mohammed Al-Thani Secondary Independent School for Boys, visited the QBG Her-barium and explored the QF Nursery where researchers ex-plained the biological processes that take place inside green-houses and how QBG conserves their plants. While in the Her-barium, students performed a laboratory study on the saffl ower plant and inspected diff erent seeds using microscopes.

Through its ‘Young Botanist’ programme, QBG, a member of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and the Community De-velopment aims to teach high school students about diff erent

plant life found in the desert. In addition, the initiative aims to raise awareness of plant conser-

vation and enhance the scientifi c and practical research skills of students.

Ali Bin Jassim Bin Mohammed Al-Thani Secondary Independent School students use a microscope to inspect plant seeds.

6 Gulf TimesMonday, June 20, 2016

QATAR

ibq launches new personal loans promotion with 15% cashback

Hyundai Tucson 2010 models recalled

International Bank of Qatar (ibq) has launched a new per-

sonal loan promotion for Ramadan, which off ers a 15% cashback of the total fi rst year interest payment.

The promotion also gives customers an op-tional grace period of three months and is available to both existing and new ibq customers.

The promotion is valid for customers taking loans with a minimum term of 36

months and a minimum amount of QR200,000, the bank said in a statement.

In addi-tion to the

cashback, customers will also receive “thanq” points for the loans taken.“thanq” is ibq’s awards winning programme that off ers its customers the chance to redeem their points at

over 800 airlines, 160,000 hotels, car rental services worldwide, and for No-joom points from Ooredoo.

Hassan al-Mulla (pic-tured), head of Retail Banking at ibq, said: “Starting today, custom-ers can choose to cele-brate the Ramadan season by enjoying some of the most rewarding cashback promotions of the year. With ibq personal loans, customers benefit from both a generous cashback

amount and thanq re-wards points.

“Ramadan is a season of giving and sharing. We are excited to commence this Ramadan season with a series of new off ers in the coming weeks. We hope customers will make the most of the promotions,” he added.

Terms and conditions apply.

Customers can apply by visiting any ibq branch or www.ibq.com.qa

The Ministry of Economy and Commerce, in collaboration with the National Car Company, has announced the recall of Hyundai Tucson models of 2010 over a leak in the automatic transaxle oil cooler hose.The MEC said the recall campaign comes within the framework of its

ongoing eff orts to protect consumers and ensure that car dealers follow up on vehicles’ defects and repair them.The MEC will co-ordinate with the dealer to follow up on the maintenance and repair works and communicate with customers to ensure that the necessary repairs are carried out.

The MEC has urged all customers to report any violations to its Consumer Protection and Anti-Commercial Fraud Department through the following channels: Hotline: 16001, e-mail: [email protected], Twitter: @MEC_Qatar, Instagram: MEC_Qatar, MEC mobile app for Android and IOS: MEC_Qatar

WISH presents research at global health policy forumThe World Innovation

Summit for Health (WISH), an initia-

tive of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, presented its evidence-based research to nearly 200 health policy experts at a global forum hosted by Health Aff airs in Washing-ton DC recently.

Health Aff airs is one of the world’s leading peer-reviewed journals in the fi eld of health policy re-search and serves as a high-level, non-partisan plat-form to encourage analysis and discussion to improve health and healthcare, and to address issues including cost, quality and access.

The forum, entitled ‘Glo-

bal Health: Patient Safety, Cancer Care, Universal Health Coverage and In-novation,’ explored major issues facing the global health community and co-incided with the journal’s publication and distribu-tion of a compendium of articles that originated from the WISH Summit in 2015.

The papers, which have also been published in Health Aff airs over the past year, addressed four ma-jor issues confronting the global health community: ‘How To Reduce The Bur-den Of Non-Communi-cable Diseases,’ ‘How To Improve Access To Vac-cines In Low And Middle-Income Countries,’ ‘How To

Achieve Universal Health Coverage’ and ‘How To Ac-celerate The Diff usion Of Healthcare Innovation.’

“We’re excited that the work we’re presenting here is supported through a multi-year relationship with Qatar Foundation and its World Innovation Sum-mit for Health,” Health Af-fairs editor-in-chief Alan Weil said at the event.

“We also have support from Hamad Medical Cor-poration, Sidra Medical and Research Centre and Impe-rial College London. This relationship has been very productive in terms of con-tent and the ability to dis-seminate important infor-mation to a US and global audience.”

Prof the Lord Darzi of Denham, executive chair of WISH, said: “The main aspiration of WISH is the dissemination of research output and the drive is to translate some of these ideas into practical appli-cations on the front line. It’s always wonderful to see WISH’s outputs reach a truly global audience through publication in one of the best and highest im-pact journals in policy.”

Egbert Schillings, CEO of WISH, who moderated a panel discussion on cancer care, said: “Our mission is to infl uence health policy at the highest levels, using the best available evidence. When we are invited to do just that in Washington DC

by the premier academic journal in this space, then we know we are truly liv-ing our purpose as a pro-gramme. The partners who joined us at the National Press Club represent some of the greatest leaders and thinkers in the world of health policy. All of them are as committed as we are to creating a healthier world through global col-laboration, and we look forward to writing the next chapter in Doha this No-vember.”

WISH leadership and WISH research forum chairs also played key roles in the briefi ng, moderating discussions and speaking about their respective areas of healthcare expertise.

Alan Weil, Editor-in-Chief of Health Affairs, and Professor the Lord Ara Darzi of Denham, Executive Chair of WISH, at a briefing on Global Health in Washington, DC.

Cargo fi rms’ service poor, customers complainBy Ramesh MathewStaff Reporter

Many customers have complained of long delays

in delivery of parcels and poor service by some local cargo companies.

These firms, particu-larly the small opera-tors, are known to make tall promises while woo-ing customers. They also come up with special offers and refer to well-known people and organi-sations whom they claim to have served in the re-cent past.

However, the custom-ers say these cargo firms fail to fulfil the promises they make.

Many of the customers have urged the authori-ties to make cargo the companies comply with consumer protection laws and penalise those who fail to do so.

More than two months ago, a former Doha resi-dent who cancelled his residence permit sent 11 parcels to his hometown in Kerala through a cargo firm located on Matar Qa-

deem Street. That was the last time he heard about his parcels.

“Every time I contact the firm, they give excuses that are lame and far from convincing. They also give new dates for deliv-ery whenever I call the of-fice. However, until now, the bags have not reached their destination,” said his friend who is following up on the case on behalf of the former Doha resident.

He said the company staff have no clue about when the consignment would reach the custom-er’s address. Also, when the company took posses-sion of the parcels from the customer, it had giv-en an assurance that the consignment would reach his home in less than 25 days.

Another resident nar-rated a similar experi-

ence. “Fortunately, I lost only one (piece of) cargo,” said the expatriate, who had sent a consignment through the same agency.

Efforts were made to contact the cargo com-pany, but there was no re-sponse.

More than a year ago, another cargo firm in Doha was made to pay a hefty compensation to a customer after some of the parcels he had sent to his home in Coimbatore failed to reach. The goods lost included electronic gadgets and expensive crockery, among others.

Customers feel the en-forcement of stringent consumer protection laws would make cargo firms more accountable and provide better services. At present, many customers feel they are helpless and can do little to deal with problems such as delayed or non-delivery of par-cels.

A cargo firm said they were aware of the com-plaints. “However, most of these issues are due to factors beyond our con-trol,” an official of the company said.

“Every time I contact the fi rm, they give excuses that are lame and far from convincing. They also give new dates for delivery whenever I call the offi ce”

QATAR7Gulf Times


With oodles of space, Chevrolet Tahoe is luxurious to the hilt too

When you are look-ing for a complete travel solution for

your family, the Chevrolet Tahoe certainly fi ts the bill. It can eff ortlessly accommodate your family, your pets, all the luggage and still have space to set up a tent with a refrigera-tor in the boot if you want to. Not only does it off er oodles of space but it is luxurious to the hilt too. So a luxurious, spa-cious city dweller then, you conclude. And that would be incorrect. And that is where the confusion sets in.

You see the Tahoe comes in the luxurious LTZ variant and the brute, off -roading specialist Z71 trim. So which one should you pick? We spend some qual-ity time with both the trims and put them through the test.

Both the trims are quite similar in looks. The huge grille with the Chevy bowtie nestled between the two stylish head-lamps give the Tahoe a strong presence on the roads. The Z71 comes with two tow hooks next to the fog lamps and a skid plate that reveals its penchant for ad-venture.

On the inside, the LTZ with its brown leather fi nish exudes luxury while the Z71 comes with a beige-black combination. Both come kitted with conven-ience features like remote en-gine starter, a 10-speaker audio system that is controlled by an 8-inch touch-screen infotain-ment system. Interestingly this touch-screen panel slides up at the touch of a button to reveal

a secret compartment that can be used to stash your valuables. Both trims have a whopping 13 charging locations including six USB ports and a 230V three-prong outlet. Your phones, tablets, laptops and even that refrigerator in the tent can be charged comfortably. It’s like a house on wheels. Add to that a fl ip down blu-ray screen for the rear passengers and you could have trouble getting people out of the Tahoe.

Under the hood both the trims feature the same 5.3-litre V8 that produc-es 355hp@5600rpm and 518Nm@4100rpm. They come mated to a six-speed auto-matic transmission. Features like Variable Valve Timing and Active Fuel Management help increase the fuel effi ciency, which is important for an SUV this big. The LTZ has a heavy throttle and is a bit slower to get off the line as compared to Z71.

The off -roader has a much lighter throttle and that helps when you are tackling dunes at Sealine. This is where the Z71 comes into its own. The lighter throttle means that you have all that torque early at your dis-posal and the dunes do indeed get bashed. The high-strength skid plate and the 24-degree approach angle meant that there was no dune where we had to be worried about the Tahoe nose getting into trou-ble. The Z71 also comes with a digital Center of Gravity meter that simply shows how much of a soup you are in. But we didn’t get a chance to tackle such monstrous dunes and put that feature to use. All we did were to

By Joe KoraithStaff Reporter

The interiors of the Tahoe LTZ with its brown leather finish have a more luxurious feel to it as compared to that in the Z71.

defl ate the tyres (guided by the onboard tyre pressure monitor gauge), point the Z71 in the right direction, use a bit of throttle control and we were sailing over anything and everything.

The light steering of the Tahoe is a big help when cruis-ing on the roads of Qatar. This Chevy off ers excellent ride quality and factors like the acoustic-laminated windshield and triple-sealed inlaid doors ensure that most of the road noise is fi ltered out.

So which Tahoe should you pick? The LTZ is for those who want that dash of luxury, spe-cifi cally on the inside. As for those keen to explore the end-less Qatar dunes, the Z71 won’t disappoint you. Head over to the swanky Chevrolet show-room and get yourself a good Ramadan deal.

The Chevrolet Tahoe Z71 is similar to the LTZ trim except for those tow hooks up front and the skid plate.

Windy conditions to prevail in many areasWindy conditions are likely to aff ect most parts of the country until tomorrow, particularly during the day, the Qatar Met department has said.The weather off ice has also issued a warning for strong winds and high seas in off shore areas during this period.In view of the expected conditions, the Met department has urged people to remain cautious and avoid venturing into the sea during the period of strong winds.In a report yesterday, the department said “fresh to strong northwesterly winds were expected to continue aff ecting most areas until tomorrow, especially during midday, due to the extension of the Indian monsoon seasonal low over the region”. The strong winds will result in blowing dust and a drop in visibility in some areas. The sea level is also expected to rise during this period.Windy and dusty conditions, along with reduced visibility, were reported from diff erent parts of the country yesterday as well.The detailed forecast for inshore areas today says strong winds are expected in most places along with poor visibility due to blowing dust. It will also be hot during the day. The wind speed may go up to 40 knots at times before decreasing by night.Off shore areas, too, are likely to see strong winds and high seas today, along with dusty conditions. The wind speed there is expected to reach a high of around 28 knots in some places at times, with the sea level rising to 9ft.Visibility, meanwhile, may drop to 2km or less in some areas at times.The mercury level yesterday reached a high of 45C in Batna and Turayna and 44C in the Qatar University area, Abu Hamour, Al Khor and other places.Today, the maximum temperature is expected to be 45C in Messaied and Wakrah and 44C in Doha and Al Khor.The Met department has advised people to follow latest updates through its diff erent social media accounts.

QATAR/RAMADAN


In celebration of the festival, Doha Bank has distributed 3,000 branded bags containing sweets, nuts and other goodies to kids and local organisations.

Doha Bank linesup activities tomark Garangao

Doha Bank, on the occa-sion of the holy month of Ramadan, organised a

week-long lineup of activities to celebrate the traditional festival of Garangao.

Garangao is celebrated on the 14th night of Ramadan, and sees children get dressed up in colour-ful and traditional Qatari clothes while carrying a bag around town to collect candies from houses in the neighbourhood.

In celebration of the festival this year, Doha Bank has distrib-uted 3,000 branded bags con-taining sweets, nuts and other goodies to children and local or-ganisations.

“Doha Bank is delighted to take part in the colourful and joyous festival of Garangao every Ram-adan season. The festival repre-sents a tradition that is unique to Qatar and the Gulf region, and we are proud to be celebrating this centuries-old custom with the splendour it deserves,” said Dr R Seetharaman, Group CEO of Doha Bank.

He added: “Doha Bank is com-mitted to supporting events and activities that help preserve the authentic Qatari culture and traditions, and we also actively participate in charitable causes, especially during the holy month of Ramadan.”

QPMC hosts Suhoor for company stakeholders

Qatar Primary Materials Company (QPMC) has hosted a Suhoor for all

its stakeholders to celebrate the holy month of Ramadan.

The shared Suhoor experi-ence provided an opportu-nity for the organisation to strengthen relationships with company stakeholders, ac-cording to a statement from QPMC.

The Suhoor was attended by QPMC’s valued clients, distin-guished partners and senior management team.

“The holy month of Ram-adan is a time for unity and refl ection, and provides a wonderful opportunity for us to share an evening with the QPMC community,” said Ei-ssa al-Hammadi, QPMC CEO. “We look forward to a prosper-ous year ahead and thank every one of our stakeholders for their valuable contribution.”

As part of its tradition, QPMC hosts the annual Ram-adan Suhoor to emphasise Qa-tari heritage, hospitality and tradition.

Preservation of timeAbu Hurairah, may Al-

lah be pleased with him, reported that the

Messenger of Allah, sallal-laahu ‘alaihi wa sallam, said: “Hasten to do good deeds before you are overtaken by one of the seven affl ictions.” Then (to warn of them) he, sallallaahu ‘alaihi wa sal-lam, said: “Are you waiting for such poverty that would make you unmindful of de-votion, or wealth that would make you corrupt, or sick-ness that would disable you, or such senility that would make you mentally unstable, or sudden death, or Ad-Da-jjaal (the Anti-Christ) who is the worst expected absent person, or the Hour? And the Hour will be most grievous and most bitter.” [At-Tir-mithi]

Abu Barzah, may Allah be pleased with him, reported that the Messenger of Allah, sallallaahu ‘alaihi wa sallam, said: “Man’s feet will not move on the Day of Resur-rection before he is asked about his life, how he had spent it …” [At-Tirmithi]

‘Umar ibn ‘Abdul-‘Azeez, may Allah have mercy upon him, was told one day about something he wanted to do: “Delay this until tomorrow” He, may Allah have mercy upon him, replied: “Woe to you! One day’s task is enough to busy my entire day. What

would I do if I had to fi nish the tasks of two days?”

Daawood At-Taa’i, may Allah have mercy upon him, said: “The days and the nights are but stages that people go through one at a time, until they eventu-ally come to the end of their journey. Therefore, set forth provision in each of these stages because the journey will soon cease, and remem-ber that the matter is far too rapid to be delayed.”

A righteous man once said to his students: “When you leave the mosque, sit indi-vidually and read the Qur’an and glorify and praise Allah because if you were to sit in groups, you would talk to each other and waste your time.”

Moosa ibn Ismaa’eel, may Allah have mercy upon him, said: “Hammaad ibn Salamah, may Allah have mercy upon him, occupied all his time. You would see him teaching others the sci-ence of Hadith, or reading, or praying, or praising Allah. His day was divided between these acts.”

The scholars of biogra-phy said about Al-Junayd ibn Muhammad, may Allah have mercy upon him: “Dur-ing his death sickness, when his situation worsened, he started reciting the Qur’an, and he refrained from talk-

ing to people. His family and friends would be talking to him, but he would only recite the Qur’an. One day his son said to him: ‘O father! Is this a time to recite the Qur’an (while in this critical situa-tion)?’ He replied: ‘I am in more need to perform right-eous deeds now than ever,’ and he continued to recite until he died.”

Ma’roof al-Karkhi, may Allah have mercy upon him, was at the barber shop after having performed ‘Umrah. He was mentioning Allah all the while, and after the bar-ber had shaved his head, he instructed him to trim his mustache, while continuing to mention Allah. The barber said to him: “Stop mumbling or I may cut your lip.” Those who knew him said that he had never been seen silent, as he was always busy men-tioning Allah - even at the time of sleep, to the extent that his family would not be able to go to sleep.

Imaam Ibn ‘Aqeel, may Allah have mercy upon him, said: “I do not believe it is lawful for me to waste even an hour of my life purpose-lessly. If my tongue can no longer move to teach oth-ers, then my eyes will read, and when my eyes go blind, I will use my mind to pon-der and think about diff er-ent jurisprudential matters.

I fi nd more energy in myself - at the age of eighty - to seek knowledge and learn than I had when I was in my twen-ties.”

Ibn ‘Asaakir, may Allah have mercy upon him, said: “Imaam Saleem ibn Ayyoob, may Allah have mercy upon him, never let time pass without benefi ting from it. He either taught or read, and whenever he wanted to sharpen his pencil, he would start mentioning Allah until he fi nished. I myself try to preserve and better utilise my time, to the extent that I crush dry cakes and bread and drink it with water as this is easier and faster to eat and not much chewing is required this way compared to eating it whole. The best thing a person can invest in is his time. Obligations are too numerous, while time is too short and snaps out of our hands suddenly.”

Ibn Al-Qayyim, may Al-lah have mercy upon him, said: “Wasting time is more serious than death, because wasting time disconnects you from the Hereafter, whereas death only discon-nects you from this worldly life.”Article source: http://www.islamweb.net/emainpage/

A mosque in Furousya Roundabout. PICTURE: Naushad Thekkayil

Off icials at the QPMC Suhoor.

REGION/ARAB WORLD9Gulf Times


UN marksrefugee dayin SyriaAFPDamascus

United Nations agencies marked World Refugee Day yesterday in Syria, a

country from which millions have fl ed a fi ve-year civil war.

Some refugees from other countries have decided to stay in Syria despite the devastating con-fl ict.

“Syria has been a host to refu-gees for many, many decades,” said Sajjad Malik, the UN refugee agency’s chief in Damascus.

“If you look at Syria’s history it has always been open borders where refugees come and stay in-side Syria,” he said.

“It’s unfortunate that the civil war, the confl ict here, has resulted in Syrians who have left and become refugees in a

number of countries around the world.”

The UN is organising activities in the country involving Syrians and refugees to “raise awareness” and emphasise the message that refugees are normal people who have been forced to fl ee.

One of the activities was a foot-ball match yesterday afternoon between refugees living locally and UN staff living in Syria, most of them working for the refugee agency, UNHCR.

The match ended as a 5-5 draw, and the UN team declared the ref-ugees the winners.

Hudhaifa, a 23-year-old from Sudan’s Darfur region who stud-ies economics at the University of Damascus and has lived with his family in Syria since 1998, said “my family decided to seek refuge in Syria because of how easy the asylum process was.”

“I can’t go back to my country, which has been at war for years, and despite the war in Syria my situation here is better than it would be there.”

Hamzah Sheikh Mohamed, 22, who is Somali but grew up in Syria, doesn’t see a future outside the country.

“Syria has become my country and I can’t possibly leave it.

“Everyone has their own cir-cumstances that push them to leave, but my presence here is a guarantee of my future,” he said.

Syria faces the worst humani-tarian crisis in the world since World War II, forcing 5.6mn to fl ee to other areas within the country and a further 4.8mn to seek asylum outside.

The war-ravaged country still hosts 31,400 refugees from other countries, mostly Iraq, according to UNHCR fi gures.

Civilians, who fled the violence in Manbij city, arrive to the southeastern rural area of Manbij, in Aleppo Governorate, Syria, yesterday.

Turkey denies killing eight Syrians trying to cross borderTurkey yesterday denied reports from a monitoring group that its guards had killed eight Syrian civilians, including two women and four children, while they were trying to cross the Turkish border from their war-torn country.Such reports were false, a statement from the Turkish foreign ministry said, adding that actions on the border were aimed at halting suspected traff ickers and terrorists.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights had said earlier that

the civilians had been killed on Saturday night near the town of Jisr al-Shughur in Idlib province of north-western Syria near the Turkish border. Eight people were injured in the incident, some seriously.Syrian opposition news site Orient News reported 11 deaths.The Syrian Observatory added that the latest deaths raised to 60 the number of civilians who have been killed by Turkish guards while trying to enter Turkey this year. They included eight children.There was no off icial Turkish

comment. The Turkish-backed Syrian opposition leadership body, the National Coalition, said it had requested a clarification and steps to ensure there was no repetition of the incident.Turkey claims it has an open-border policy for Syrians, while Human Rights Watch (HRW) says Ankara closed the border in August 2015.The process of getting into Turkey is highly selective, and tens of thousands of people are stranded on the Syrian side.

Dozens in Damacus protestagainst rising fuel pricesAFPDamascus

Dozens of protesters gath-ered in Damascus yester-day for a rare demonstra-

tion in front of Syria’s parliament against a 40% hike in fuel prices announced last week.

As lawmakers met inside the parliament building, protest-ers carried signs reading “No to corruption!” and “Parliament - stand with the people, say no to raising prices!”

“No to rising prices, people are starving to death,” another read.

The demonstration appeared to

be tolerated by Syria’s authorities, with about a dozen riot police sta-tioned near parliament allowing the protest to go ahead.

In a letter to parliament, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, the demonstrators called on law-makers to “cancel their decision to raise the prices of petroleum products.”

“The strike will continue on a daily basis until we get a response and the protest’s goal is achieved,” the letter said.

On Thursday Syria’s govern-ment ordered the price of a litre of petrol increased from 160 to 225 Syrian pounds (about 90 US cents), state news agency SANA

said, with similar increases for cooking gas and diesel.

“We called for this strike to protest the rising prices of petro-leum products which will in turn negatively aff ect all other prices,” said Firas Nadim, a member of a consumer protection group that organised the demonstration.

“The government had been trying to improve the quality of life for the average citizen, but now they are trying to starve him,” Nadim said.

Lawmakers were meeting for their second session since being elected in April.

SANA quoted parliamentarians as stressing “the need to postpone

the offi cial decision on amending the prices of oil products and to study the extent of its eff ect on the quality of life.”

Oil production has slumped in Syria since the beginning of the country’s fi ve-year civil war, which has killed more than 280,000 people, displaced mil-lions and devastated the economy.

While residents of Damascus have remained relatively insu-lated from the violence, they have suff ered from infl ation and severe unemployment.

Damascus witnessed some anti-government demonstrations in 2011, when Syria’s confl ict fi rst erupted.

An Iraqi security forces vehicle is seen on a street in the centre of Fallujah.

Fallujah flashpoint

Yemeni rebels free 276 loyalistsAFPAden

Shia Houthi rebels in Yemen an-nounced yesterday the release of 276 government loyalists who had

been held captive for months, in a ges-ture of good will.

The rebels’ sabanews.net website said 200 detainees were set free in Rada, a town in the central province of Baida, and another 76 were let go in nearby Dhamar province.

The move was a sign of “good will” on the occasion of the fasting month of Ra-madan, said the website, citing offi cials.

The detainees in Rada had been cap-

tured for allegedly “co-operating with the Arab military coalition and being loyal to the government” of UN-backed President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, an offi cial there said.

Those freed in Dhamar had been taken in on accusations they had been preparing to join government forces, the offi cial added.

The releases come a day after the exchange of 194 prisoners in Taiz, in southwestern Yemen, following tribal mediation unconnected to UN-bro-kered peace talks in Kuwait.

Those negotiations, now in their ninth week, have made no break-throughs, even on the issue of prisoners.

Earlier this month, the rebels freed

187 captives while Saudi Arabia released 52 children it was holding.

More than 6,400 people have been killed since March 2015, the majority of them civilians, the UN says.

The fi ghting has also driven 2.8mn people from their homes and left more than 80 % of the population in urgent need of humanitarian aid.

Meanwhile, relief agency Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned yester-day that the number of scabies cases has been “steadily” increasing in northern Yemen, mainly among displaced popu-lation.

MSF said its teams treated 1,927 pa-tients in May in the city of Khamer, compared with 123 patients in January.

Jordan jails Norwegian-Iraqi for ‘terrorism’AFPAmman

A Jordanian court sentenced a Norwegian man of Iraqi descent to 15 years in prison yesterday

for planning “terrorist acts” in the kingdom.

Khaled al-Rebai, 49, was also found guilty by Amman’s state security court of “possessing explosive material,” ac-cording to the verdict delivered in front of Norwegian diplomats in the Jorda-nian capital.

Rebai was found not guilty of be-longing to Iran’s Quds Force, the for-eign army of the Iranian Revolutionary

Guards, an AFP correspondent said.His lawyers said they would appeal

the guilty verdicts.Rebai was arrested in July in posses-

sion of 45kg of explosives in the north-ern town of Jarash.

Jordan said at the time it had foiled a “terrorist” attack due to be carried out by an Iraqi Quds Force member.


ARAB WORLD

Investigators examine damaged EgyptAir black boxesReutersCairo

Investigators have begun ana-lysing the two severely dam-aged black boxes from Egyp-

tAir fl ight MS804 as they seek to explain why the plane plunged into the sea, killing all 66 people on board.

It would require “lots of time

and eff ort” to fi x the two badly damaged black box recorders, sources on Egypt’s Aircraft Ac-cident Investigation Committee said yesterday.

The committee said it started the analysis of the devices, with representatives from France and the United States, which are cru-cial to explaining why the Airbus A320 crashed on May 19 en route from Paris to Cairo.

The memory units from both the Cockpit Voice Recorder and the Flight Data Recorder were extracted from the devices and dried in a military facility for eight hours, the committee said in a statement.

Investigators are now con-ducting electrical tests on the memory units, the fi nal step be-fore trying to extract data.

If intact, the cockpit recorder

should reveal pilot conversations and any cockpit alarms, as well as other clues such as engine noise.

But crash experts say it may provide only limited insight into the reason for the crash.

With the data recorder, inves-tigators have a greater chance of discovering the cause, provided its chip is still intact.

Investigators need to further

analyse the memory units before deciding if they can be fi xed lo-cally or if they need to be sent abroad for repairs.

Search teams retrieved the Cockpit Voice Recorder on Thursday which they said was damaged but had the memory unit intact.

They found the Flight Data Recorder on Friday.

While no explanation for the

disaster has been ruled out, cur-rent and former aviation offi cials increasingly believe the root of the crash lies in the aircraft’s technical systems, rather than deliberate sabotage.

There has been a series of air-plane accidents at high altitude blamed on a cocktail of technical and pilot fl aws.

The crash is the third blow since October to Egypt’s travel

industry, which is still suff er-ing from the 2011 uprising that ended Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule.

A Russian plane crashed in the Sinai Peninsula in October, kill-ing all 224 people on board in an attack claimed by Islamic State.

In March, an EgyptAir plane was hijacked by a man wearing a fake suicide belt.

No one was hurt.

Palestinians scuff le with an Israeli border policeman as Israeli troops demolish sheds belonging to Palestinians near the West Bank village of Yatta, south of Hebron yesterday.

Israel invests millions inWest Bank settlementsAFPJerusalem

Israel’s government yester-day approved some $18mn in additional fi nancing for

West Bank settlements, calling it a response to security con-cerns, though the money is to be used in a variety of ways.

The decision by Prime Min-ister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing cabinet will see some 70mn shekels ($18mn) al-located to settlement-related spending.

According to Haaretz news-paper, the amount is in addition to an already allocated $88mn.

Israeli settlements in the oc-cupied West Bank are consid-ered illegal under international law and major stumbling blocks to peace as they are built on

land Palestinians view as part of their future state.

The United States, the Euro-pean Union and many others in the international community have called for a halt to settle-ment building.

Netanyahu’s government is

however considered the most right-wing in Israel’s history, with key members of his cabi-net strong supporters of settle-ment building and opponents of a Palestinian state.

The premier faces steady po-litical pressure to support set-

tlements and settlement build-ing, which receive a range of government assistance.

The government argued the increase was needed due to se-curity concerns.

A wave of Palestinian knife, gun and car-ramming attacks began in October, with much of the violence occurring in the West Bank.

Speaking at the start of the cabinet meeting, Netanyahu called it “an assistance plan to strengthen communities” in the West Bank, saying it would “strengthen security, assist small businesses and encourage tourism.”

Beyond security, it will in-clude spending on tourism infrastructure, sport facilities and cultural events, ministers said.

Palestine Liberation Organi-

sation secretary general Saeb Erekat called the move a “slap in the face of the international community.”

“Israel is doing everything possible to sabotage every ef-fort to achieve a just and lasting peace,” he said in a statement.

Opposition lawmaker Amir Peretz of the Zionist Union accused the government of “wasting money on political settlements” instead of helping families within Israel.

Besides the settlement mon-ey, the government was also ex-pected to approve the allocation of 80mn shekels ($20.7mn) to ultra-Orthodox Jewish semi-naries.

The ultra-Orthodox estab-lishment also wields signifi cant political power in Israel and its politicians have often played a kingmaker role.

Palestinian wounded in clash with Israelis dies

A Palestinian shot by Israeli soldiers during clashes last month died of his wounds yesterday at a hospital in the West Bank, the hospital said.Arif Jaradat, 22, was wounded during clashes with the Israeli armed forces on May 4 in his home village of Sair, in the south of the occupied West Bank.He was transferred to the hospital in Hebron where he

succumbed to his wounds.Violence since October has killed at least 208 Palestinians, 32 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean and a Sudanese.Most of the Palestinians were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, Israeli authorities say.Others were killed in clashes with security forces or by Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip.

Arab League welcomes Bashir’s decree

The Arab League has welcomed the decree issued by Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on ceasefire as reflecting a profound political wisdom and an honest desire to achieve political solutions for the national issues through a comprehensive national dialogue which is open for all the political forces without exclusion to any party or issue.

Speaking the Sudanese news agency (SUNA), the Arab League’s envoy for Sudan, Ambassador Salah Halima regarded the four-month ceasefire as positive and constructive step and golden opportunity for the opposition forces, the non-signatory movements and dialogue-rejecting parties to join the national dialogue process.

Sudan summonsUN mission chiefin Darfur overmandate extensionAFPKhartoum

Sudan summoned yesterday the head of the interna-tional peacekeeping force

in Darfur after the UN recom-mended a one-year extension of UNAMID’s mission despite Khartoum’s reluctance.

About 20,000 troops and policemen from more than 30 countries are currently in Su-dan’s western region of Darfur as part of the African Union-United Nations mission, UNA-MID.

A report by UN chief Ban Ki-moon and the Chairperson of the African Union Commis-sion, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, recommends that UNAMID’s mandate be extended by another year.

The report which was submit-ted to the Security Council cites the “limited progress” made to reach a viable solution to end the confl ict in Darfur that has killed tens of thousands of civilians since 2003.

“With tens of thousands of people newly displaced in 2016 and approximately 2.6mn re-maining displaced in Darfur, ci-vilians across the region contin-ue to bear the consequences of the volatile security situation,” the report said.

It recommended extending UNAMID’s mandate - which expires at the end of the month - “for 12 months, until 30 June 2017.”

The UN Security Council is expected to meet before the end of June to endorse or reject the recommendation.

Khartoum insists that unrest in Darfur has ended and has stepped up pressure for a com-plete exit of the international peacekeepers from the war-torn region, where they have been deployed since 2007.

Yesterday, Sudan’s foreign ministry summoned UNAMID chief Martin Uhomoibh to dis-cuss the report, the ministry said in a statement.

“The report by the African Union and the United Nations consists incorrect information about the humanitarian and security situation in Darfur,” it said.

Last month Sudan’s Minis-ter of State for Foreign Aff airs, Kamal Ismail, said: “It’s time to say goodbye to the UNAMID mission.”

“This mission came to pro-tect civilians, but now there is no danger to civilians, there is no confl ict in Darfur,” he added.

Khartoum says that an April referendum - boycotted by the opposition and criticised inter-nationally - in Darfur “turned a page” on the Darfur confl ict.

Offi cials said almost 98 % of voters opted to maintain the re-gion as fi ve separate states.

The UN report insists that the confl ict is far from over.

“Intercommunal fi ghting and incidents of violence against the civilian population by criminal groups and militias have con-tinued to spread, despite the government eff orts to contain them,” it said.

In May, Arab tribesmen shot dead eight ethnic minor-ity villagers as they prayed in a mosque, in a revenge killing in West Darfur.

Algeria blocks accessto social networks toprevent exam fraudAFPAlgiers

Algeria temporar-ily blocked access to social networks yes-

terday to prevent cheating after leaked papers forced hundred of thousands of students to resit high school fi nal exams.

Facebook and Twitter have been blocked since late Saturday and are to remain inaccessible to millions of Algerians until after the last test on Thursday, a telecom source said.

The decision “is directly linked to the baccalaureate” and aimed at “protecting students from falling prey to fake questions” posted online, the source said.

More than 500,000 stu-dents out of the 800,000 who had sat the exams known as the “baccalaure-ate” this month were be-ing re-tested yesterday, the education ministry said.

It said most of the leaks cover science subjects and mathematics.

“The authorities have chosen the simplest solu-tion,” said information tech-nology expert Younes Grar.

He said the risk of fraud could have been prevented if the authorities had cho-sen to encrypt the exam questions and printed them at exam centres instead of transporting hard copies across the country.

“The decision to block social networks penalises millions of Internet users,”

he said. According to offi -cial estimates, 18mn Alge-rians out of a population of 40mn are active on the In-ternet and social networks.

Yesterday some users said they faced diffi culties ac-cessing websites, including Google, although authorities had said only social networks would be blocked.

Dozens of people, includ-ing the heads of national exam centres and teachers, were arrested this month on suspicions of leaking the fi -nal exam papers.

The leaks have sparked outrage in the oil-rich country.

Education Minister Nou-ria Benghebrit broke down in tears in public this month when she was told of the leak.

AFRICA11


Former Congolese leader faces landmark war crimes sentenceJudges at the world’s only

permanent war crimes court will tomorrow pass sentence

on former Congolese leader Jean-Pierre Bemba, with pros-ecutors calling for a minimum 25-year sentence.

If the judges agree with the prosecution, it will be the high-est jail term ever imposed by the International Criminal Court in a case that was the fi rst there to focus on rape as a weapon of war.

Prosecutors blamed the former vice president of the Democratic Republic of Congo for turning a blind eye to a reign of terror by his troops in the Central African Republic from October 2002 to May 2003.

He was found guilty in March of fi ve charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, after sending some 1,500 troops from his private army into CAR

to help quash a coup against the then president.

Bemba’s Congolese Libera-tion Movement (MLC) carried out a series of rapes and mur-ders as they sought to prop up then president Ange-Felix Pa-tasse.

Experts testifi ed that the bru-tality of the events would have long-term traumatic eff ects on the victims and their communi-ties.

In their verdict handed down at the end of a trial which be-gan in November 2010, the

ICC judges found that despite knowing what was happening, Bemba “failed to take all neces-sary and reasonable measures to prevent” a litany of crimes, which included the gang-rapes of men, women and children, sometimes as their relatives were forced to watch.

Bemba, 53, will become the highest level person sentenced at the tribunal based in The Hague.

The prosecution’s request for a 25-year sentence “does refl ect the gravity of these crimes,” hu-man rights activist Carrie Com-er said.

The ICC has previously sen-tenced two others convicted there to 14 and 12 years in pris-on.

As well as the issue of rape as a weapon of war, the Bemba case was also the fi rst at the ICC to focus on a military command-er’s responsibility for abuses by his troops, even if he did not or-der them.

Defence lawyers have argued

that Bemba, who has already spent eight years in detention since his 2008 arrest in Brus-sels, should be released.

Bemba “did not participate in the crimes. He was not stand-ing there and encouraging his troops... Bemba was not even in the same country,” defence law-yer Peter Haynes said at an ICC hearing last month.

His “culpability arises from his failure to control a small fraction of his troops who were thousands of miles away”.

Activists warn however that a light sentence would fail to send a warning to other military commanders.

“It’s really important that the court recognise the command responsibility … and there’s an opportunity here to provide a deterrent,” said Comer, the per-manent representative to the ICC for the International Feder-ation for Human Rights (FIDH).

“If you knew, or you should have known, that these things were going on and you execute

eff ective control over your troops then, yes, you’re abso-lutely responsible for ... not preventing or punishing these crimes.”

The FIDH, which represents some 178 rights organisations from the around the world, is also hoping “the trial chamber will come back with a strong sentence on this in recognition of the particular devastating harm that sexual and gender-based crimes have on victims, their families and their commu-nities at large.”

The landmark Bemba verdict was hailed at the time, even though many were shocked at how long it had taken for sexual violence to be focused on in an international trial.

American actress Angelina Jolie urged the international community “to build on the im-portant legal precedent” set by the Bemba case so that “we can collectively shatter impunity for the use of rape as a weapon of war and terrorism”.

AFPThe Hague

Jean-Pierre Bemba

Aid worker killed by gunmen in C African RepublicA local driver for Medecins sans Frontieres in the Central African Republic has been killed during an ambush on a convoy by unidentified gunmen, the medical aid group said yesterday.The attack, which occurred on the road between Sibut and Grimari in the centre of the country, comes one month after an MSF staff member was shot dead in a similar ambush in the north that led MSF to suspend its operation in the area. Thierry Dumont, the charity’s chief in Central Africa, told French broadcaster Radio France Internationale that the reason of the attack was unclear.But “trucks or humanitarian vehicles are economic targets”, he added. “We are carrying goods, people have a little bit of money with them”.Central African Republic descended into chaos in early 2013 when mainly Muslim Seleka fighters seized power, triggering reprisal attacks by Christian anti-balaka militias.More than 400,000 people have been displaced internally and some half-a-million have fled to neighbouring countries, according to the United Nations.MSF, known in English as Doctors Without Borders, said more than two-thirds of the country’s health facilities have been damaged or destroyed by fighting since 2013.

Algerian troops kill nine rebels

Algerian soldiers killed nine armed Islamist militants in an opera-

tion south of the capital yes-terday, the defence ministry said giving a new toll.

It said the nine “terrorists” were killed in an ambush in a mountainous area of the Me-dea region, about 80km (50 miles) south of Algiers.

Weapons, ammunition and an explosives vest were seized, it said.

The ambush was part of an ongoing operation against militants that began on June 9

and had so far led to the kill-ings of 13 “terrorists” and the arrests of four others.

The authorities in the North African country use the term “terrorists” to refer to Islamist militants.

A brutal civil war in the 1990s between the govern-ment and Islamists claimed about 200,000 lives.

Despite adopting a peace and reconciliation charter in 2005 aimed at turning the page on the confl ict, armed groups remain active in some areas.

At least 96 armed Islamists have been killed by security forces this year, according to an AFP count compiled from offi cial bulletins.

AFPAlgiers

Shebaab confi rms death of commander

Somalia’s Al Shebaab ji-hadists have confi rmed the death of a com-

mander suspected of organis-ing the 2015 attack on Kenya’s Garissa University that left 148 people dead.

The killing of Mohamed Mohamud aka Dulyadin was announced by Somali offi -cials on June 1 and Al Shebaab confi rmed his death with the release of an obituary on Sat-urday.

“We console ourselves and our nation for the martyrdom of the Muslim knight com-mander Sheik Mohamed Mo-

hamud Ali (Dulyadin). May Allah accept him and lift him to paradise,” it said.

Shebaab said the com-mander, also known by the aliases ‘Kuno’ and ‘Gamadhere’, was killed by “US crusaders”.

Somali offi cials had said he died in a Somali spe-cial forces raid close to the southern port town of Kis-mayo. Somalia’s special forces are trained by and receive logistical support from the US.

Mohamud, a Kenyan na-tional and an ethnic Somali, was killed alongside three other commanders and his body later put on display by local authorities.

AFPMogadishu

Buhari returns after medical treatment

Nigerian President Mu-hammadu Buhari arrived back in the capital Abuja

yesterday after a nearly two-week stay in Britain where he had treatment for an ear infec-tion and a holiday.

Buhari exited his plane wav-ing to ministers and army chiefs who came to greet him.

“I am ok. I am better. You can see me inspecting the guards of honour. Now you can do the as-sessment yourself,” Buhari told reporters at the airport.

Buhari returns a day before the naira currency is set to be devalued under a new market-driven trading system, ending the central bank’s 16 month fi xed exchange rate policy.

Buhari has for months said that he does not want the naira to be devalued, but backed a more fl exible exchange rate pol-icy when the central bank out-lined its plans in May, without elaborating.

The 73-year-old fl ew to Lon-don on June 6 to see an ear, nose and throat specialist after two doctors in Nigeria recommend-ed further evaluation “as a pre-caution”, his team said.

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo said last week that Buhari was in perfect health and would resume work on Monday.

The People’s Democratic Par-ty, Nigeria’s main opposition, said on its Twitter feed on Sun-day that Buhari was “critically ill” and he had returned to Abuja to continue treatment, without giving a source for the informa-tion.

Buhari left Nigeria days after cancelling a high-profi le trip to the restive Niger Delta region at the last minute and two weeks after pulling out of what would have been his fi rst offi cial trip to the commercial capital, Lagos.

ReutersAbuja

President Muhammadu Buhari addressing delegates at the start of a conference to tackle corruption at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London.

Ivory Coast farmers face eviction, extortion in drive to save forests

Ivorian conservation agents are using the threat of eviction and prosecution

to extort money from cocoa growers farming illegally in pro-tected forest reserves, victims and rights groups say.

Around 80% of Ivory Coast’s primary forest, once the larg-est in West Africa, has been chopped down in the fi ve dec-ades since independence, amid an agricultural expansion that helped make it the world’s top cocoa producer and most im-portant economy in Francoph-one West Africa.

With new illegal plantations coming into production every season, offi cials privately ac-knowledge that around a third of cocoa output, which reached a record 1.8mn tonnes last season, now originates from protected land.

President Alassane Ouattara, who took offi ce in 2011, wants to re-verse the loss. A 2014 forestry code seeks to restore forests to a fi fth of its territory, up from 6% today.

But the conservation drive has been used as a pretext for abuse by some agents from forest management agency SODEFOR, claim victims, who say their il-legal status in the protected for-ests means they have little hope of redress.

“Where am I going to fi le a complaint? Against whom? I’m afraid, because I’m in the forest illegally,” cocoa farmer Bien-venu Bago said, his voice barely a whisper, his face bruised and shoulder bandaged.

Bago, who has for three years farmed illegally in western Ivory Coast’s Cavally forest reserve, said forestry agents poured pet-rol on him and said they were going to set him alight.

He said he was then beaten, stripped and left naked on the road, the money he’d recently earned from his crop in their pockets. They struck a match, but only set fi re to his clothes.

A technical adviser from SO-DEFOR, Aboa Dogui, rejected such abuse allegations, saying there was no evidence of mal-practice by its agents but that reported abuses are investigated.

“We have nearly 1,000 agents

at SODEFOR. We can’t certify that every one is behaving well,” Dogui told Reuters. “For the mo-ment, we do not have informa-tion indicating bad behaviour.”

Yet abuses like the attack on Bago are not isolated.

Human Rights Watch and Ivo-rian rights group RAIDH accuse SODEFOR agents of burning down the homes of illegal farm-ers, destroying their belongings, beating them and squeezing them for money in the Cavally, Goin-Débé and Scio forests.

“Until the Ivorian government conducts a full investigation into SODEFOR’s management... abuses in protected forests will continue,” HRW Africa re-searcher Jim Wormington said.

The rights groups are not the fi rst to accuse Ivorian offi cials of misconduct in their manage-ment of public land.

In March, a UN experts panel said such racketeering is wide-spread. Soldiers and park serv-ice agents earned some 1bn CFA francs ($1.74mn) each year from illegal taxes collected from cocoa farmers in the Mont Peko Na-tional Park alone, it said.

Herve Keita, like thousands

of farmers now occupying land in Ivory Coast’s 231 protected forests, moved into the Cavally reserve amid the chaos that fol-lowed a brief 2011 civil war.

Keita had already paid SO-DEFOR agents once last year so they would leave him in peace on the plantation he’d carved out of the virgin forest. But he was still waiting for a buyer to pick up his main harvest when they returned in December.

Since he had no money to give them, the agents instead packed up the cocoa he had drying in the sun.

“They even cut the ripe pods off the trees,” he told Reuters. “They loaded it all into the sacks and then they cut down the trees and set it all on fi re.”

SODEFOR agents are not meant to clear illegal plantations that are already in production but rather allow their output to decline naturally as reforesta-tion is carried out.

Keita’s plot smouldered for more than a week, the charred remains of birds and monkeys littering the forest fl oor. Six months on, the site remains a 20-hectare desolate scar in the

middle of the jungle.Still, Keita considers himself

relatively lucky.When Guetayoaba Ouedraogo

was last seen alive in 2014, he had been stopped along with two other cocoa growers by forestry agents. After his decomposing body was later found in the for-est, his family fi led a complaint with local authorities, but they say the case has gone nowhere.

A second body was found weeks later. The third man in the group was never seen again.

SODEFOR’s Dogui denied the forest agency had anything to do with the deaths, blaming them instead on infi ghting between rival groups present in the for-est. He added that the agency opened an internal investigation as soon as it was made aware that its agents were accused of involvement. The inquest is on-going, he said.

Bago remains undeterred by the beatings. He said he will re-turn to the forest as soon as he can walk again.

“When I am better, I will go back to my plantation. I can’t do anything else. I have to eat,” he said.

By Joe Bavier, ReutersCavally Forest

17 wounded in Guinea clashesSeventeen people have been injured, including five with bullet wounds, during clashes in northern Guinea between security forces and people demonstrating over the beating of a truck driver by soldiers, police and hospital sources and witnesses have said.“At least 17 people were injured” during the violence in the northern city of Mali, a police off icer said.Of those injured, five were shot, including two hit in the “shoulders, two others in the thigh and a fifth in the buttocks”, a hospital source said.The violence erupted when the motorcade of Lieutenant Colonel Issa Camara, commander of the Labe military region which includes Mali, was “blocked by a truck”, one resident said. To “avenge the insult”, the soldiers beat the driver “before

leaving him in agony”, added the witness.Bystanders took the driver to hospital “in a terrible state” before city residents who learned of the incident took to the streets chanting “Death to the torturers, justice for the driver”, said another witness.Clashes erupted when angry demonstrators headed towards the prefecture, which was “protected by an impressive security cordon”, said the police off icer. “The police were overwhelmed by the crowd,” witness Ramata Souare said, adding that tear gas grenades were also thrown at the demonstrators.Calm had returned to the city in the early evening, according to one resident.More than half the population of the west African country lives in poverty despite its rich supplies of gold, diamonds and oil.

South Africa’s Eskom gets new hydro plant linked to grid

Eskom hailed a milestone in its eff orts to overcome South Africa’s chronic

electricity shortages yesterday, saying it had linked up the last of four units at its new Ingula

hydro-electric power plant to the grid.

“We look forward to Ingula rapidly nearing commercial com-pletion and meeting the 2017 deadline, thereby enhancing the security of Eskom’s electricity supply to power South Africa into the future,” Eskom’s Chief Exec-utive Brian Molefe said.

Eskom, which has in the past

been forced to impose power cuts to prevent demand surg-ing past capacity, is scrambling to repair its ageing power plants and grid.

The utility, which provides power for Africa’s most devel-oped economy, is also adding new plants.

Unit one of the hydro-pow-ered Ingula plant, which is in

the northeast Kwazulu Natal province, added an additional 333 megawatts (MW) to the grid, Eskom said in a statement.

Construction of the 25bn rand ($1.7bn) plant began in 2006 and all four units are expected to be fully operational in 2017, with capacity to produce 1,332 MW.

Eskom said on June 13 that it had linked up unit four,

adding 333 MW to the grid.The remaining units are on

track for commercial operation in 2017, Eskom said.

Other Eskom projects include the Medupi and Kusile coal-fi red plants in the northern Limpopo and eastern Mpumalanga prov-inces respectively, which will have a combined capacity of about 9,500 megawatts.

ReutersJohannesburg

AMERICAS


Transcripts of killer’s calls to be released

The casket of Christopher Leinonen, who was killed at the Pulse nightclub, is seen during a funeral service at Cathedral Church of St Luke in Orlando, Florida.

ReutersWashington

US offi cials will today release partial transcripts of three phone con-versations the man who killed 49

people in a Florida gay nightclub last week had with police as the massacre unfolded, attorney general Loretta Lynch said yes-terday.

Lynch, speaking on CNN’s State of the Union talk show, said the Orlando shoot-ing incident was “an act of terror and an act of hate”, but she declined to say what charges may be fi led nor who may be charged in the case.

The transcripts of the conversations between deceased gunman Omar Mateen and law enforcement negotiators will “talk about what he told law enforcement on the ground as the events were unfolding”, Lynch said.

“As we have said earlier, he talked about his pledges of allegiance to a terrorist group. He talked about his motivations for why he was claiming at that time he was committing his horrifi c act,” the attorney general said.

Lynch said, however, that the tran-scripts would be edited to “avoid revic-timising those who went through this hor-ror, but it will contain the substance of his conversations”.

She told ABC’s This Week programme the transcripts would not include his pledge of allegiance to Islamic State.

Lynch also said she would travel to Orlan-do on Tuesday to confer with investigators and meet survivors of the worst domestic

shooting incident in American history.She declined to say whether a federal

grand jury was likely to charge Mateen’s second wife, Noor Salman. US offi cials have said Salman knew of her husband’s plans to carry out the attack.

“Because this investigation is open and ongoing, we’re not commenting on any-one else’s role in it right now, except to say that we are talking to everyone who knew him, and that of course includes his family, to determine what they knew, what they saw in the days and weeks leading up to this,” Lynch said.

Funerals for two of the 49 victims killed in the shooting at a nightclub in Florida were marked by tense scenes on Saturday, as an impatient driver was accused of in-juring two law enforcement offi cers and one burial took place under the watch of anti-gay protesters.

Two Osceola County Sheriff ’s deputies on motorcycles were injured at the fu-neral procession for Jean Carlos Mendez in Kissimmee, Florida, some 32km south of Orlando, when a driver cut through the cortege and struck them with her car, ac-cording to a statement on the sheriff ’s Fa-cebook page.

The deputies were taken to the hospital, where both were in stable condition, said the sheriff ’s spokeswoman, Twis Lizas-uain.

At the funeral of another victim, Chris-topher Leinonen, at a church close to the center of Orlando, a handful of protesters from the Kansas-based anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church stood silently for about 45 minutes.

They were blocked from view of those attending the funeral by about 200 coun-ter-protesters, who cheered when the Westboro members left.

Members of the Orlando Shakespeare Theater used large “angel wings”, meas-uring 8 feet wide and reaching 3 feet over shoulder height, to block out the protest-ers.

The wings, made of white cloth and plastic piping by volunteers from the theater’s costume and set shops, fi rst surfaced at the 1998 funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay man murdered in Wyo-ming.

The shooting in Orlando continued to reverberate around the world.

More than a thousand people attended a candle-light vigil in Berlin to show soli-darity with the victims of the attack and their families.

The Brandenburg Gate, long a symbol of division in the city, was lit up in rainbow colors, according to pictures posted on Twitter under the hashtag #berlinforor-lando.

Authorities are still investigating what motivated Omar Mateen to kill 49 people at the popular gay nightclub Pulse in the early hours of last Sunday, perpetrating the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. Mateen was later killed in a shoot-out with police.

The shooting has sparked a new push for gun control legislation and Congress is expected to vote on proposals start-ing next week, including one on stopping people on terrorism watch lists from buy-ing guns.

Democrats, including president Barack Obama, are framing gun restrictions as a national security issue after Mateen pro-fessed loyalty to Islamist militants.

But authorities believe he was “self-radicalised” and acted without any direc-tion from outside networks.

US Federal Bureau of Investigation

agents on Friday questioned a member of the Florida mosque attended by Mateen, as new information surfaced revealing the killer had exhibited chronic behavioural problems during his youth.

Academic records obtained by Reuters showing Mateen was frequently suspend-ed as a student added to a disturbing por-trait of the long-troubled gunman.

Mateen, a 29-year-old private security guard, has been described by his fi rst wife as an abusive, mentally disturbed man with a violent temper.

Others who knew him recalled Mateen, a US citizen and Florida resident born in New York to Afghan immigrants, as a qui-et, socially awkward individual who kept largely to himself.

The FBI has acknowledged interviewing Mateen in 2013 and 2014 for suspected ties to Islamist militant groups but concluded he posed no threat.

Still, evidence in the Orlando case points to a crime at least inspired by ex-tremist ideology.

Authorities have said Mateen paused a number of times during his three-hour siege at the Pulse nightclub to place cell phone calls to emergency 911 dispatchers and to post internet messages profess-ing support for various Islamist militant groups.

US offi cials have said his second wife, Noor Salman, had known of his plans to carry out the attack and a federal grand jury was convened to decide whether to charge Salman.

Obama, who met with survivors of the shooting and families of the dead in Orlan-do on Thursday, urged Congress to make it more diffi cult to legally acquire high-pow-ered weapons like the semi-automatic rifl e used in the attack.

ReutersChicago

While mass shooting at-tacks are on the rise, smaller US businesses

remain reluctant to invest in more physical security measures such as metal detectors or extra guards even though events like the Orlando massacre prompt a surge in interest, industry execu-tives said.

Major attacks like the one at a gay nightclub in Orlando, which left 49 people dead, often prompt a fl urry of inquiries from potential customers to security companies.

But the calls fail to translate into meaningful sales as owners tally the cost of the equipment and the extra personnel needed.

“With past mass shooting events people want to know how much additional security costs.

Then they go, ‘Gulp’,” said Bruce McIndoe, chief executive of risk advisory fi rm iJet Interna-tional Inc. Those include upfront expenses like equipment and training as well as ongoing costs such as wages for guards.

For nightclubs, minor sports venues, shopping malls and smaller college campuses, the fi -nancial burden can be too great.

The trend stands in contrast to Europe, where companies say sales can spike after a major in-cident, such as the coordinated attacks on restaurants, a concert hall and soccer stadium in Paris in November that killed 130 peo-ple.

The very next day, privately held First Texas Products sold 18 walk-through metal detectors that can cost up to $5,000 each to another stadium in France, said Tom Walsh, the company’s chief executive.

However, Walsh and other in-dustry executives say the scope of the Orlando attack may lead more US businesses, especially big ones, to invest in physical se-curity measures already in place at sports stadiums, government buildings and airports.

This week, a large US retailer contacted First Texas Products to launch a test of its hand-held security wands, which start at around $100 each, in 50 stores.

“They specifi cally mentioned the Orlando shootings,” Walsh said in an email.

He declined to name the cli-ent.

Michael Gips of ASIS Interna-tional, an association that repre-sents more than 35,000 security professionals worldwide, said many businesses “roll the dice” over physical security.

US movie theaters have gen-erally not installed metal detec-tors following the 2012 slaying of 12 people at a theater in Aurora, Colorado, because “it could drive customers away”, he said.

But he expects consumer con-cerns will change that calculus.

“Over time, I think people will expect a better degree of secu-rity if we continue to see shoot-ings like this and that’s what will drive change,” Gips said.

ASIS International estimates US private sector spending on security goods and serv-ices jumped 18% to $377bn in 2015 from 2013 and is “pushing $400bn” this year, Gips said.

Much of that growth has been driven by spending on surveil-lance equipment and on cyber protections following high-pro-fi le data breaches, such as the one that hit retailer Target Corp in 2013.

Metal detectors debuted at US airports in the early 1970s after a series of airplane hijackings. Government buildings and large public venues began installing them following the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Metal detectors are now man-datory at all major league US football, baseball, basketball, hockey and football games.

But their use has been slow to spread elsewhere, even though many security consultants see metal detectors as an eff ective fi rst-line deterrent.

“The harder a target you make yourself appear, the more likely potential attackers will go else-where,” said Jason Porter, re-gional managing director for risk management fi rm Pinkerton.

Smaller venues need to weigh their options carefully, said Luca Cacioli, director of US opera-tions for Italian fi rm CEIA, one of the world’s largest metal detector manufacturers.

Fresh focus on security at smaller businesses

The Orlando attack may lead more US businesses, especially big ones, to invest in physical security measures already in place at sports stadiums, government buildings and airports

Court may take action on assault weapon bansReutersWashington

The US Supreme Court may weigh in this week on gun control, an issue smoldering again following

the June 12 Orlando massacre, with the justices due to decide whether to hear a challenge by gun rights advocates to as-sault weapon bans in two states.

The Connecticut and New York laws

prohibit semiautomatic weapons like the one used by the gunman who fatally shot 49 people at a gay night club in Orlando in the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history.

The supreme court will announce likely by today whether it will hear the challenge brought by gun rights groups and individual fi rearms owners assert-ing that the laws violate the US consti-tution’s second amendment guarantee of the right to bear arms.

The court has not decided a major gun case since 2010.

If they take up the matter, the justic-es would hear arguments in their next term, which begins in October.

A decision not to hear the challenge would leave in place lower-court rul-ings upholding the laws.

The court’s action in another recent appeal indicated it may be disinclined to take up the matter.

The justices in December opted not

to hear a challenge to a Highland Park, Illinois ordinance banning assault weapons and large-capacity maga-zines. A national assault weapons ban expired in 2004.

Congressional Republicans, backed by the infl uential National Rifl e Asso-ciation gun rights lobby, beat back ef-forts to restore it.

Some states and municipalities have enacted their own bans.

In their petition asking the supreme

court to hear the case, those challeng-ing the Connecticut law said the type of weapons banned by the state are used in self-defense, hunting and recreational shooting.

Connecticut said its law targets fi re-arms disproportionately used in gun crime, “particularly the most heinous forms of gun violence”. It said people in Connecticut still can legally own more than 1,000 types of handguns, rifl es and shotguns. In the 2008 District of

Columbia v Heller case, the supreme court held for the fi rst time that the second amendment guaranteed an in-dividual’s right to bear arms, but the ruling applied only to fi rearms kept in the home for self-defence.

That ruling did not involve a state law, applying only to federal regula-tions. Two years later, in the case Mc-Donald v City of Chicago, the court held that the Heller ruling covered in-dividual gun rights in states.

Man charged with assault was former police officer

Police have laid sexual assault charges against a former police officer who was working as a massage therapist at several clinics in northwest Calgary.Vladimir Siloci, 36, allegedly assaulted a female co-worker during a therapeutic massage in March, police say. He was arrested and charged on Friday, according to detective Shelley Dunn.“I can confirm that he was a Calgary Police Service officer from April 2012 until February 2016. He left of his own accord,” Dunn said on Thursday.Siloci — a registered massage therapist — worked at several clinics in the northwest and operated his own massage business called VS Wellness.According to his now-defunct website, he immigrated from Moldova in 2008 after training as a nurse and starting a massage therapy practice in 2001. He will appear in court on July 11.Last year, police charged another Calgary massage therapist, Brad McLellan, with sexual assault. Since then, eight patients have come forward claiming to have been assaulted.McLellan — who denies the charges — says he’s looking for employment outside the province because he can’t find work following the publicity surrounding the allegations.

Some parts of the calls are to be edited before release

AMERICAS13Gulf Times


Trump says he’s open to racial profi ling

Donald Trump poses for a photo with supporter Diana Brest during a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona.

AFPWashington

Donald Trump said yesterday he is open to racial profi ling, touching another raw nerve on the issue of

race in America.African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims

and other minorities in the United States have complained bitterly for decades about the practice in which police use a person’s race, religion, national origin or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting them of committing a crime.

Trump, the free-talking presumptive Republican presidential nominee, came close to endorsing racial profi ling out-right in an interview aired yesterday on CBS.

His comments came in a discussion on the Orlando nightclub massacre by shoot-er Omar Mateen, who is Muslim, and past comments by Trump to the eff ect that if elected president in November he “re-spectfully” would place mosques under surveillance.

Trump was asked point-blank if he was talking about increasing profi ling of Mus-lims in America.

“Well, I think profi ling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” Trump told the pro-gramme Face the Nation.

He added: “So we really have to look at profi ling. We have to look at it seriously. And other countries do it, and it’s not the worst thing to do.

I hate the concept of profi ling, but we

have to use common sense. We’re not us-ing common sense.”

Trump asserted that Israel practices ra-cial profi ling, and that France also places mosques under surveillance.

“They’re doing it in France. In fact, in some instances, they’re closing down mosques. People don’t want to talk about it. People aren’t talking about it.

But look at what they’re doing in France. They’re actually closing down mosques,” Trump asserted.

Trump has already infuriated many in America by calling for a ban on Muslims entering the country and by saying Mexico sends rapists and drug dealers across the border into the United States.

Meanwhile there are fears that if the US supreme court rules in the coming days on a high-profi le immigration case in favour of the Obama administration, it could have an unexpected benefi ciary: Donald Trump.

The Obama administration is asking the high court to revive its 2014 proposal to protect up to 4mn people from depor-tation, a plan that was blocked by lower courts.

The court could rule that a president has broad authority to interpret and enforce federal immigration law.

Such a ruling would allow Obama to im-plement his signature executive action on immigration, aimed at the parents of US citizens’ children, before he leaves offi ce.

It could also help Trump, who has put forth his own sweeping and controversial plans on immigration ahead of the No-vember 8 election.

“To the extent the court has language about the president’s wide authority in immigration law generally, that would certainly strengthen Trump’s hand.” said

Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law expert at Cornell Law School.

The Supreme Court’s ruling will come at a key phase in the presidential elec-tion cycle, with candidates Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton trading jabs over immigration policy following the mass shooting in a Orlando nightclub in which a gunman killed 49 people.

Trump has proposed curbing immigra-tion from countries with a history of ter-rorism, blocking the entry of Muslims and deporting the estimated 11mn people in the United States who entered the country illegally.

If he wins the race for the White House, Trump might need to invoke his own ex-ecutive authority — as happened with Obama — if the US Congress does not ap-prove his proposals, which have sparked outrage at home and abroad.

The current case is unlikely to provide any support for Trump’s proposal to bar Muslims, which legal experts say would face other legal hurdles because it targets people on the basis of religion.

But legal experts say it could help Trump if he seeks to block entry from certain countries under a provision of immigra-tion law that gives the president the power to suspend entry of noncitizens whose en-try “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

That provision has previously only been used block entry of small groups of people, such as offi cials linked with foreign gov-ernments hostile to the United States.

Applying it to entire countries could prompt a similar lawsuit to the one fi led against Obama.

Clinton could also seize on an Obama victory in the case, but her own immigra-tion proposals are more modest.

She has said that absent action by Con-gress to reform the system entirely, she would keep Obama’s program in place and seek to expand on it.

Under the US Constitution, Congress passes laws and the executive branch en-forces them.

In the immigration context, Congress has traditionally given the president con-siderable leeway to interpret how to im-plement the laws.

The high court, evenly split 4-4 be-tween liberals and conservatives following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in Feb-ruary, could decide the case on narrower grounds than the broad question of execu-tive power.

It could avoid touching on immigration law at all by fi nding that the states chal-lenging Obama’s proposal did not have le-gal standing to sue.

The court could also split 4-4, which would leave in place the lower court deci-sion blocking the plan but without setting any legal precedent.

US presidents generally have discretion to enforce immigration law, but the plan’s challengers said Obama exceeded the lim-its of his authority by setting up a pro-gramme that would allow millions to gain temporary legal status and work permits.

Critics say his plan was unlawful in part because it eff ectively granted relief from deportation to a much bigger class of peo-ple than had ever benefi ted from any simi-lar programmes in the past.

Texas and 25 other states who fi led suit said it was an unconstitutional abuse of power.

Obama’s lawyers told the Supreme Court that Obama was acting within the government’s exercise of prosecutorial discretion to decide who to deport.

Blue Origin booster test a successAFPWashington

US space fi rm Blue Origin conducted a successful fourth test yesterday of

its reusable New Shepard rocket, which dropped back to Earth for a fl awless upright landing seen on a live webcast.

Blue Origin, the space travel company founded by Internet entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, is try-ing to cut the costs of space travel by developing reusable rockets to boost manned capsules into sub-orbital space.

“Careful engineering plus of course... the lucky boots, suc-cessful mission,” Bezos quipped in a Tweet with a photo of his cowboy boots propped up on a desk.

The rocket landed at the Texas launch site at 9.44am local time (1444 GMT), followed one sec-ond later by the capsule, which lofted back to Earth under para-chutes.

“Amazing,” said the announcer at Blue Origin’s mission control. “Another picture perfect land-ing for the New Shepard rocket booster.”

The rocket rose to 331,500

feet, clearing the boundary be-tween the Earth’s atmosphere and space and releasing the cap-sule before dropping back for the controlled landing.

It reignited its engines at

5,000 feet, braking its descent to a speed of fi ve miles per hour and then deploying its landing gear.

It was the fourth time the rocket has successfully landed

upright after soaring into space.The feat was fi rst accom-

plished in November, and repeat-ed in test launches in January and February.

One of the main objectives of this launch was to see whether the capsule could still land safely if one of its three strings of para-chutes failed.

After the two parachutes de-ployed, the capsule could be seen rocking like a bell as it came down.

A larger chute was released seconds before the capsule land-ed, stabilising it.

A second before touchdown, rocket thrusters on the capsule were activated to cushion the landing.

Blue Origin’s long-term goal is to send people into space, using reusable rockets.

Its breakthroughs and paral-lel eff orts by rival Internet mo-gul Elon Musk’s SpaceX open up the potential for cutting costs for space travel and making rockets as reusable as airplanes.

A photo taken on April 2 showing the rocket ramping for a successful landing near Van Horn, Texas.

Guardian NewsFort Smith

A Canadian woman has told of how she made use of a nearby bear to

deter a wolf that had stalked her and her dog for 12 exhaust-ing hours in forests in the re-mote north of the country.

Joanne Barnaby and her friend Tammy Caudron were picking morel mushrooms near Fort Smith in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

Then, Barnaby said, she and her dog Joey encountered the wolf.

“There was a long, tall, very, very skinny wolf,” she told CBC.”A black wolf.

And his legs were spread and his hair was standing, and he was growling, and baring his teeth.”

Separated from Caudron, Barnaby and Joey were pushed deeper into the forest, the wolf cutting off the route back to Barnaby’s vehicle and standing its ground when Joey charged it.

“It took me a while to real-ise that he knew what he was doing,” Barnaby said.”He was trying to wear me down.

He was trying to separate Joey and I. He was dogged.He was just determined. I was in trouble.”

The Royal Canadian Mount-ed police confi rmed that Barn-aby was reported lost in the Wood Buff alo national park and that it was involved in a search mission for her.

While they looked, Barnaby said, she endured a harrowing 12 hours in which she and her dog were forced farther into the wildfi re-burned forest.

Barnaby, who became dehy-drated, said she was fatigued and bothered by “zillions” of mosquitoes that blanketed her face and arms.

Salvation came in the un-likely form of a mother bear,

whose growls were heard as the sun began to rise.

Realising the bear had be-come separated from its cub, Barnaby said, she settled on an unorthodox plan — to get between the mother and her off spring, despite the very real danger she could herself be at-tacked by the bear.

“I realised that there was a chance that the mother bear would tackle the wolf if she felt that the wolf was a threat,” she said. “So I made the choice of walking towards the cub.

“I heard this big crashing behind me and realised that the mama bear had attacked the wolf, or maybe the other way around, I don’t know,

but they were fi ghting and I could hear the wolf yelping and I could hear the mama bear growling and I could hear all this crashing and I just took off .”

Barnaby attempted to head back to civilisation, fi lling a beer can with water from a lake and then a stream.

She encountered another ob-stacle of thick vegetation that almost prevented her from fi nd-ing her way out of the forest.

“I didn’t think I was going to make it,” she told the Wash-ington Post. “I started talking to both my sons, one of whom died when he was a baby, and my other son, who is a young man now. I was talking to all kinds of people that I love, and I was crying the whole time.”

On Saturday morning she fi nally managed to get to the highway, where she saw several Mounties involved in a search eff ort.

Barnaby chose to drive her-self and Joey home — and “nearly passed out from ex-haustion” while doing so.

Woman pits wolf against bear in tale of survival

ReutersBerlin

The US could see the cost of new Boeing Co F/A-18E/F Super Hornets

rise unless the government ap-proves foreign sales of the jets soon, US Navy secretary Ray Mabus said yesterday.

Mabus, in Germany for a Nato exercise in the Baltic Sea, told Reuters he was frustrated by delays in approving the sale of the Boeing jets to a close US ally, warning that this could aff ect the cost of jets the US Navy still wants to buy.

US Navy and other defence offi cials have said they support the sale of 28 Boeing F/A-18E/F jets to Kuwait for an estimated cost of $3bn, but this has stalled for nearly a year pending fi nal White House approval.

Mabus said the delays could have an impact on the Navy’s budget plans, since the foreign order was needed to augment US Navy purchases and keep the production line running effi ciently.

The US Congress is expected to approve funding for as many as 16 Boeing F/A-18 jets as part of the Navy’s budget request for fi scal 2017, which begins October 1, but that would give Boeing less than the two jets a month it says needs for eco-nomical production. The Ku-waiti order would have fi lled this gap.

“I’m frustrated. A lot of people are frustrated,” Mabus said. “The process is too long, too onerous in terms of get-ting weapons systems to our friends and to our allies.”

Mabus said Boeing could likely continue F/A-18 produc-tion for some time without the foreign sales, but dropping be-

low optimal production rates could aff ect future pricing.

The Navy had requested funding for two F/A-18 jets in its fi scal 2017 budget request and 14 more as part of its “un-funded priorities list”. It also said it expected to buy a larger number of Super Hornets in fi scal 2018 to bridge a gap in its fl eet until the newer and more advanced Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fi ghter jet enters service in coming years.

Mabus welcomed possible moves by Congress to add jets to the fi scal 2017 budget, but said those orders alone would not keep production at the Boeing facility running at op-timal rates.

“The line wouldn’t be oper-ating as well as it should, and the price probably would go up for us because there aren’t as many planes coming through,” he said. Boeing welcomed the secretary’s remarks.

“Boeing appreciates the continuing engagement of secretary Mabus, and agrees that a Kuwaiti order is an im-portant element in continuing a production rate of two per month to keep prices optimal,” Boeing spokeswoman Caroline Hutcheson said.

The company needs to maintain production to remain competitive in bidding for other F/A-18 orders from other countries as it is now spending “hundreds of millions of dol-lars” to buy long-lead materi-als such as titanium to prepare for new orders from the navy and Kuwait.

US Navy chief warns of costlier Boeing jets

Mabus said the foreign order was needed to augment navy purchases and keep the production line running effi ciently

“He was dogged.He was just determined. I was in trouble”

Trump has stayed true to his calling by courting controversy at every opportunity

Nearly 35 dead after fl oods, landslides in IndonesiaAFP Banjarnegara, Indonesia

Flash fl oods and landslides in central Indonesia have killed at least 35 people

and destroyed dozens of homes, an offi cial said yesterday, as searchers scoured devastated villages for survivors.

Dozens were also missing or injured following torrential rain and widespread fl ooding on the main island of Java, where thousands of homes have been swamped.

Areas prone to landslides across densely-populated Cen-tral Java province have been worst hit, with drivers swept off roads and dozens of homes completely destroyed by

fast-moving walls of mud, rock and water.

TV footage showed villagers sitting on rooftops to escape the rising water, their cars and homes submerged in brown wa-ter.

“The number of casualties from fl oods and landslides in Central Java is 35 people dead, 25

people missing and 14 injured,” said disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho.

The worst-hit area was Pur-worejo district on Java’s south coast, where 19 people were killed, he said.

In one incident in the district, nine people died as they tried to clear rubble from a blocked road.

“Suddenly a huge landslide struck the cars and people on the street. Nine bodies were re-trieved,” Sutopo said.

In Banjarnegara, where six people were killed in an ava-lanche of mud, residents were bracing for the prospect of fur-ther fl oods.

Emergency crews were trying to clear roads of felled trees and rocks dumped by huge land-slides, an AFP journalist at the scene said.

Heavy lifting equipment was being used in the hunt for sur-vivors in Purworejo but access to sites elsewhere was diffi cult, said Sutopo.

Hundreds of rescuers were being forced to shift debris with their bare hands in some areas.

Evacuation centres, equipped with temporary shelters and kitchens, have been erected near the disaster zones.

Sutopo said late yesterday

that much of the fl ooding had subsided but he warned people to stay on alert as heavy rains could continue into the next day.

Landslides are not uncom-mon in Indonesia, a vast tropi-cal archipelago prone to natural disasters and torrential down-pours.

Last month, 15 students holi-daying at a popular tourist spot in western Indonesia were killed when a landslide swept through their camp ground.

Malaysia among three nations to hold meeting on MH370 search

DPAKuala Lumpur

Malaysia will host a two-day special meeting to discuss the next course

of action in the search for the missing fl ight MH370 that dis-appeared more than two years ago, state media reported.

The meeting of senior offi cials from Malaysia, China and Aus-tralia, is scheduled for today at the federal government centre in Putrajaya, the Bernama news agency said.

The three countries are con-ducting the search for the miss-ing aircraft that disappeared on March 8, 2014, nearly an hour after it took off from Kuala

Lumpur International Airport.“Top in the agenda of the

meeting is on the future direc-tion of the search operation for MH370,” deputy transport min-ister Abdul Aziz Kaprawi was quoted by Bernama as saying.

The Beijing-bound aircraft with 239 people aboard was believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.

Searchers have yet to fi nd the main wreckage, although several pieces of debris believed to be part of the plane have been re-covered during the past year.

The search has so far covered 105,000 square kilometres of the 120,000-square-kilometre sea-fl oor search zone.

The current search is expected to be concluded next month.

Doctors reduce water on the brain build-up for Thai king

AFPBangkok

Doctors treating Thai-land’s ailing King Bhu-mibol Adulyadej have

performed a procedure to reduce a new build-up of water on the brain, the palace said yesterday, the latest in a series of proce-dures for the 88-year-old.

Bhumibol is the object of an intense personality cult and his frail health is a matter of signifi -cant public concern.

The king is confi ned to a wheelchair and rarely seen in public.

He has spent most of the past two years hospitalised in Bang-kok for a series of ailments, in-cluding bacterial infections, breathing diffi culties, heart problems and hydrocephalus (water on the brain). The latest health update released by the palace yesterday said doctors had to install a new catheter to drain excess fl uid in his brain.

“An x-ray examination on June 14, 2016 found his majesty had more fl uid on his brain,” the Royal Household Bureau said.

The statement added that the procedure, which was done without anesthetic, was suc-cessful. Hydrocephalus is a po-tentially fatal condition where there is an excess of cerebrospi-nal fl uid, a liquid which cushions the brain and brings it vital nu-trients. Previous health updates from the palace, including one last month, have mentioned the king being treated for hydro-cephalus.

Earlier this month Bhumibol also underwent an operation to widen arteries in his heart. Yesterday’s statement said tests showed his heart condition had improved since then.

Bhumibol is the world’s long-est-reigning monarch and most Thais have never known life un-der another king.He is largely seen as a unifying force in a na-tion bitterly divided along po-litical lines.

Anxiety over what will hap-pen after his reign ends is con-sidered an aggravating factor in the country’s past decade of tu-multuous politics, as competing elites jostle for power and infl u-ence before the transition.

Information on the monarchy is tightly controlled by the palace. Throughout much of the last two years of Bhumibol’s hospitalisa-tion, updates have been rare.But in recent weeks the palace has is-sued a string of health bulletins.

Bhumibol has not been seen by the public since September when the palace released a video of him being taken in his wheelchair to visit a shop inside Bangkok’s Siriraj hospital. Shoppers and attendants knelt and bowed as he passed by.

An offi cial photograph of him attending a ceremony was re-leased by the palace in Decem-ber, while offi cials also released a statement in January saying he briefl y left his hospital for a brief trip by car to visit a palace.

People stand in front of a flooded area in Kampung Sewu residential area in Solo, Central Java province yesterday.

At least eight killed in head-on bus collision

DPAHanoi

At least eight people were killed after two buses collided in Viet-

nam’s central highlands yes-terday, offi cials said.

The accident took place in Lam Dong province when a bus lost control and hit a construc-tion worker on the road before colliding into another bus from the opposite direction, said Truong Huu Hiep, director of the local transport department.

The worker and six pas-sengers, including a child, were killed immediately, while another person later died in the hospital, Tuoi Tre newspaper reported.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault (second left), accompanied by Thant Myint-U (centre), chairman of the Yangon Heritage Trust, visits the historic Secretariat Building in Yangon yesterday. Ayrault is on a three-day visit to Myanmar.

French minister tours Myanmar’s Secretariat Building

Indonesian villagers and search and rescue team members carry out the body of a landslide victim at Gumelem Kulon village in Banjarnegara yesterday.


ASEAN

AUSTRALASIA/EAST ASIA15Gulf Times


Okinawans demand ejection of US troopsAFP Naha, Japan

Tens of thousands rallied yesterday on the Japanese island of Okinawa to protest against the heavy US military presence and

violent crimes by American personnel that have angered residents for decades.

Demonstrators, claimed by organisers to total 65,000, gathered in the prefectural capital Naha, infuriated with the United States after a former Marine employed as a civilian base worker alleg-edly raped and murdered a young local woman in April.

The case has intensifi ed longstanding oppo-sition to the bases — a key part of the US-Japan security alliance — on the sub-tropical southern outpost, a popular holiday destination for Japa-nese and increasingly for China and other Asian countries.

Okinawa hosts about 26,000 US troops, more than half the total Washington keeps in all of Ja-pan.

The demonstration was held at an athletics park under scorching heat.

Police did not have an immediate crowd esti-mate.

It began with a moment of silence for 20-year-old Rina Shimabukuro, the murder victim, and a message from her father.

“Why my daughter, why was she killed?” said the message, read on his behalf.”My thoughts are the same as those of all the bereaved families that have met with suff ering up to now.”

One protester carried a banner reading, “Mur-derer Marines.

Out of Okinawa”.Others read, “Our anger is past its limit” and “Pull out the Marines.”

Chihiro Uchimura, 71, said she was fi lled with sadness at Shimabukuro’s death.

“As long as there are US military bases this kind of incident will continue to happen,” she said.

Rally organisers in Okinawa said similar pro-tests were held throughout the country.

In Tokyo some 3,000 people gathered outside parliament for a rally with some signs reading “No base, no rape in Okinawa” and “Marines, go home”.

Hatsuko Aoki, one of the demonstrators, shouted through a microphone: “It’s not just a problem for Okinawa. It is a problem for all of Ja-pan.”

Protesters also want Washington and Tokyo to scrap plans to move a major US Marine base

in the centre of the island to pristine waters off Okinawa’s north coast.

Okinawa’s governor Takeshi Onaga, who at-tended the rally, is among those opposing the re-location.

Instead he and others want Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, which sits in the middle of a crowded city, moved off the island altogether.

But the anger of Onaga — who, like many on the main stage, wore black to signify mourning — was aimed more furiously at his own government than the US.

“The government...must understand that Okinawa residents should not suff er any more from the burden of the bases,” Onaga said.

He has revoked approval for work on the facil-ity, though Washington and Tokyo vow to push forward.

The idea of moving the base was sparked by the 1995 rape by three American personnel of a 12-year-old girl.

The project was set to have been completed years ago but is still held up by local opposition and legal manoeuvring.

“Japan is still a military colony of the United States,” said teacher Noboru Kitano, 59, standing at an observation point overlooking the Futenma base, whose location is widely seen as a danger to nearby residents.

“This base symbolises that.” At the end of World War II Okinawa was the site

of a major battle between Japan and the US.A 27-year American occupation of the island

followed.High-profi le crimes have sparked large-scale

protest rallies before on Okinawa.In 1995 tens of thousands rallied following the

rape of the girl, prompting Washington to pledge to reduce its footprint on the island.

Nearly 100,000 people joined a protest in 2010 against the construction of the new base.

US offi cials have grown increasingly concerned that the behaviour of its troops on the island could jeopardise support among Japanese for the security relationship.

They have imposed restrictions including on off -base alcohol consumption after an intoxi-cated sailor injured two locals while driving this month.

President Barack Obama received the equiva-lent of a diplomatic tongue-lashing over the death of the 20-year-old rape victim from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during a visit to Japan last month. Obama called it a tragedy and expressed “deepest regrets”.

HK singer goes ahead with concert pulled by LancomeAFPHong Kong

A pro-democracy Hong Kong singer yesterday staged a free concert af-

ter sponsor Lancome pulled out — allegedly due to pressure from mainland China — and urged her audience to fi ght repression.

Playing her guitar on an open-air stage, Denise Ho sang to hun-dreds of waving fans packed onto the streets of the Sheung Wan district in a 90-minute show.

The gig was originally organ-ised by the French cosmetics gi-

ant but was axed by Lancome earlier this month citing “possi-ble safety reasons”. That decision prompted protests at the brand’s beauty counters in the city and calls to boycott its products.

Many in the semi-autonomous southern Chinese city believe the move was a reaction to comments in Chinese state-run media.

These criticised Lancome for cooperating with the singer.

The cancellation came amid growing fears that Beijing is tightening its grip on the city.

Ho went ahead with the con-cert despite the lack of sponsor-ship and made it free of charge.

“In Hong Kong, suppression is going on...we need to resist,” she told reporters.

“Even when we don’t speak up the suppression will not go away, more will happen,” she said.

She said other brands which had been interested in partner-ships with her pulled out after the controversy over the concert.

Concertgoer Venus Lau said she supported Ho for reminding Hong Kong people they are free.

“We have our freedom to speak whatever we want,” Lau said.

Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997 under a “one country, two systems” agree-

ment and enjoys much greater liberties than mainland China.

But there are growing fears its freedoms and semi-autonomous status are under threat in areas ranging from politics to educa-tion and media.

On Saturday more than 1,000 people took to the streets to pro-test at the detention in China of a Hong Kong bookseller known for titles critical of Beijing.

Lam Wing-kee made explosive revelations last week of his gruel-ling ordeal at the hands of the Chi-nese authorities, including being blindfolded and interrogated dur-ing an eight-month detention.

Cantopop singer Denise Ho performs during a free concert in Hong Kong yesterday.

Bookseller likens detention to ‘Cultural Revolution’

By Laura Mannering, AFPHong Kong

The Hong Kong bookseller who broke silence ear-lier this week about being

blindfolded and interrogated in detention in China likened his ordeal to Cultural Revolution re-pression in an interview yester-day with AFP.

Lam Wing-kee is one of fi ve

booksellers who went missing last year — all worked for a Hong Kong publishing house known for salacious titles about leading Chinese politicians.

His story sent chills through Hong Kong where the booksell-ers’ case has heightened fears Beijing is tightening its grip on the semi-autonomous city.

He told Thursday how he was detained for months after being picked up in the southern main-

land city of Shenzhen in October on a visit to see his girlfriend.

Lam, who was placed on suicide watch during his detention, broke bail Thursday and is refusing to go back over the border, where he is under investigation for bringing banned books into the mainland.

Dressed in a neat blue shirt and cap the 61-year-old told AFP how he felt terrifi ed during his detention, where he was threat-ened with 30 years in jail and was

harangued by two men who said they had come from Beijing.

“They made me feel it was a Cul-tural Revolution denunciation,” he said, referring to the decade of tor-ture, executions and public vilifi ca-tions carried out under communist leader Mao Zedong across main-land China from 1966.

“I was just sitting there watch-ing them. When I said one thing they would say 30 things...bang-ing the table.”

22 killed in China rainstormsDPABeijing

China yesterday issued a national yellow alert for heavy rain after at least 22

people died and more than a doz-en went missing in rainstorms this month.

China uses a four-tier, col-our-coded system for inclement weather, with red being the most severe, followed by orange, yel-low and blue.

Rainstorms are expected to hit most parts of the country, with precipitation expected to reach 200mm in some areas, the Na-tional Meteorological Centre said on its website.

The centre urged people to take precautions against pos-sible fl oods and landslides, and suggested staying indoors if pos-sible.

In the latest reported incident, nine villagers in the Chinese au-tonomous region of Tibet were buried in a landslide late Friday when they took shelter from rain in a cave.

One injured villager has been pulled out so far, and rescue op-erations were continuing.

At least 14 people died and 16 were missing after heavy rain and hailstorms earlier this month triggered fl ash fl oods and land-slides across China.

Heavy rain battered Jinping County in south-west Guizhou

last week, with the province re-porting nine fatalities and nine missing, and about 65,600 peo-ple were evacuated, Xinhua news agency reported.

Hunan province in central China confi rmed last week that four people had died and six were missing, with about 157,000 people evacuated, while north-ern Shanxi province reported one death and one missing, according to Xinhua.

Heavy rain and hail in the capital, Beijing, on Friday also triggered fl ash fl oods, but no fa-talities or serious injuries were reported.

China is bracing for heavy fl ooding this year, according to Xinhua.

A man wades through a flooded street with a vehicle during heavy rain in Huangshan, Anhui Province.

Australia’s Labor party vows fi erce ballot battleAFPSydney

Three years after being ousted from power following a tumultuous period of infi ghting in which two prime min-

isters were deposed, Australia’s opposition Labor said yesterday it is ready to return to Canberra ahead of national elections.

The July 2 poll is tipped to be a tight race, and could see the ruling Liberal-National coalition become the fi rst government in more than eight decades to be turfed out of offi ce after one term.

Such a result would see Labor leader Bill Shorten become Australia’s fi fth prime min-ister in six years — a further illustration of the “revolving door” leadership that has marked the nation’s politics in recent times.

“Today my team and I off er ourselves as a new government dedicated to Austral-ia’s oldest aspiration — a fair go all round,” 49-year-old Shorten told 500 cheering supporters at his party’s offi cial campaign launch in the Western Sydney suburb of Penrith.

“There is always someone willing to write Labor off — and they are always wrong.”

While Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull came to power in September last year with high personal ratings after defeating his predecessor Tony Abbott in a Liberal coup, internal party divisions and poorly handled debates about reforms have dented support for the 61-year-old.

The decline in public support follows poor polling under Abbott and opens the door for Labor and minor parties to win marginal seats across Australia, where vot-ing is compulsory for adults.

Both the major parties are pledging to

boost the economy, with subdued wages growth and high costs of living placing pres-sure on some communities as the nation shifts away from mining-driven expansion.

Shorten yesterday announced tax cuts for small businesses, while emphasising sup-port for the party’s traditional policy areas of improving health and education.

He also sought to highlight his party’s support for same-sex marriage and action on climate change, as smaller parties on the left such as the Greens threaten to lure away Labor voters.

“Only Labor will lead an Australia with

prosperity for everyone who works and pros-perity that works for everyone,” the former union chief added in front of a red banner with the slogan “We’ll put people fi rst”.

He stressed that Turnbull, a multi-mil-lionaire former banker, would only be taking care of the big end of town.

Turnbull has campaigned on the Liberal Party’s long-time platform of sound eco-nomic management, announcing billions in tax cuts for individuals and businesses.

His party is set to offi cially launch its campaign next Sunday, also in Sydney which is home to numerous marginal seats.

Australia’s Labor Party leader Bill Shorten speaks to supporters at the launch of the party’s election campaign in Sydney yesterday.

DPALondon

Voters should opt for a “tol-erant, liberal Britain” and reject a British EU exit, or

Brexit, in this week’s referendum, extolled Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday, as the cam-paign to decide Britain’s role in the EU enters its last days.

“If you don’t know, don’t go,” Cameron told undecided voters yesterday, in his fi rst major inter-vention in the campaigning since the murder of Labour politician Jo Cox, who, like Cameron, had urged the public to vote Remain.

“Jo embodied Britain at her best — a country that is decent and compassionate; one that reaches out to make the world a better place,” Cameron wrote in The Sunday Telegraph.

“I’m so proud of Britain — this open, tolerant, big-hearted coun-try of ours,” he said. “But I believe this referendum has now become a watershed moment for our country.”

“And we are going to have to make a defi ning decision on Thursday: are we going to choose Nigel Farage’s vision — one which

takes Britain backwards; divides rather than unites; and questions the motives of anyone who takes a diff erent view,” Cameron asked, referring to the leader of the anti-EU UK Independence Party.

“Or will we, instead, choose the tolerant, liberal Britain; a country that doesn’t blame its problems on other groups of people; one that doesn’t pine for the past, but looks to the future with hope, op-timism and confi dence?”

An unemployed man who sym-pathised with racist and right-wing extremist groups, and had a history of mental illness, has been charged with murdering Cox.

Cameron and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who also backs Remain, appeared together on Friday at a vigil for Cox.

Speaking to broadcaster ITV yesterday, Farage said Cox’s mur-der had halted the momentum the Leave campaign had built.

“We did have momentum until this terrible tragedy,” Farage said. It has had an impact on the whole campaign for everybody.” But Farage said he was confi dent that people who had already decided to vote for a Brexit would turn out in Thursday’s referendum, “because they want to get control

over their country back.”Opinion polls published during

the weekend put Remain margin-ally ahead, after several polls early last week had suggested a swing towards Leave.

In another boost for Cameron, the Mail of Sunday, said it was backing Remain “for a safer, freer, more prosperous and even Great-er Britain.” But The Sunday Times backed Leave, even after Satur-day’s front page of The Times had supported Remain.

The pro-Leave Sun, Britain’s best-selling print newspaper, ran an interview with Vote Leave co-leader Boris Johnson yesterday, quoting him as saying Britain could break “several of the worst EU ties” within days of a vote for Brexit.

“This is our moment when the British people take centre stage in history,” said Johnson, a fel-low Conservative and long-term friend of Cameron.

“The eyes of Europe will be on us and hundreds of millions of people will be praying that we do the right thing and vote for change,” said Johnson, who is seen as a potential successor to Cameron as Conservative and na-tional leader if Britain votes for a Brexit.

Cameron urges voters toopt for ‘tolerant Britain’

Guardian News and MediaLondon

A man has been charged by police over an abusive phone call made to the of-

fi ce of the Labour MP for Exeter, Ben Bradshaw.

It is unclear when the message was left but it was heard the day before MP Jo Cox was shot and stabbed in Birstall, West York-shire.

Devon and Cornwall police said: “An abusive phone call to MP Ben Bradshaw was recorded on his parliamentary offi ce an-swering machine. The offi ce informed parliamentary police and Devon and Cornwall police. A 37-year-old male from Ex-eter has been charged under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and bailed to appear before Exeter magistrates.”

The man, who has not been named, is due to appear before magistrates on July 5.

Bradshaw said there had been abusive calls to his offi ce making homophobic and racist remarks. He said: “My constituency staff have borne the brunt of it. This led to the direct death threat made to me on Wednesday and I would like to congratulate the

police for moving so swiftly.”Bradshaw said he, like all his

parliamentary colleagues, was stepping up his security. He add-ed: “The security of MPs is con-stantly reviewed and of course it has as a result of Jo’s murder. We have all been advised to hold appointment only surgeries – which I think is a sensible cau-tion.

“We have also been advised to let local police know about our movements. But we live in a free democracy and we value and cherish our elected representa-tives being out and about in pub-lic in their constituency.

“I attend hundreds a year that are pre-advertised – none of us want to change that. Politicians driving in armoured convoy and being protected by high walls is not the British way. But it is about getting the balance right and not allowing crimes like this to change our way of life.

“I just feel really numb with grief over what happened to Jo and desperately upset for Brendan and her family and loved ones. We all must live with a con-stant sense of vulnerability.

“I do think we should use this as a moment to refl ect as a na-tion on the political culture we create.”

Man charged overabusive call to MP

FaragedefendsmigrationposterAgenciesLondon

Nigel Farage has defended his controversial EU mi-gration poster after it was

criticised by Remain and Leave campaigners.

The UK Independent Party (Ukip) leader said the poster, showing a stream of non-white migrants walking through the countryside under the slogan “Breaking Point,” “refl ects the truth” about migration and the European Union.

Scotland’s First Minister Nico-la Sturgeon called for the poster to be withdrawn, describing it on Sky New’s Murnaghan pro-gramme as “vile and racist,” while Chancellor George Osborne said it had “echoes of literature used in the 1930s”.

Campaigners on the Leave side have been equally scathing, with Justice Secretary Michael Gove saying he “shuddered” when he saw the poster and Chris Grayling calling it “wrong”.

Farage told Sky’s Dermot Mur-naghan that the poster - which has been reported to police for alleged racism - would not be ap-pearing again as it was the fi rst in a series of fi ve planned for the ref-erendum campaign’s fi nal days.

He said the campaign would not have attracted so much attention had it not been for the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox hours after the poster was launched last Thursday.

He said: “That poster refl ects the truth of what’s going on, there’s a new poster coming out tomorrow morning.

“I wish an innocent member of Parliament had not been gunned down in the street and frankly, had that not happened, I don’t think we’d have had the kind of row we have had.

He added: “If you see what Chancellor Merkel did last sum-mer by saying ‘just come in un-limited numbers’ - we do not want to be part of a union that is failing in every regard.”

Brexit camptrails in polls as campaign forvote resumesReutersLondon

Campaigning for Britain’s vote on EU membership resumed yesterday after

a three-day hiatus prompted by the killing of a pro-EU lawmaker, but pledges of a more respect-ful tone were quickly tested by a fresh row over immigration.

Three opinion polls ahead of Thursday’s vote showed the ‘Remain’ camp recovering some momentum although the overall picture remained one of an even-ly split electorate.

The murder of Jo Cox, a 41-year-old mother-of-two young children, shocked Britain, raised questions about the tone of campaigning and could yet prove a defi ning moment in what is Britain biggest political deci-sion for decades.

Both sides sought to adopt a more measured style yesterday, paying their respects to Cox but sticking closely to the immigra-tion versus economy debate that has defi ned the campaign.

“I hope, because of the tragic death of Jo, we can have a less divisive political debate in our country,” Finance Minister George Osborne, a leading con-servative ‘Remain’ campaigner, told ITV’s Peston on Sunday show.

“Particularly in the last few days of this referendum we’re going to have less baseless asser-tion and infl ammatory rhetoric and more reasoned argument and facts,” he said.

Cox, a Labour Party law-maker and ardent supporter of EU membership, was shot and stabbed in the street in her elec-toral district in northern England on Thursday.

A 52-year-old man appeared in a London magistrate’s court on Saturday, charged with her murder.

Both ‘Remain’ and ‘Leave’ halted their campaigns until yes-terday morning.

But the heated nature of the debate, which has so far seen ‘In’ campaigners accused of scare-mongering on the economy and the ‘Out’ campaign’s immigra-tion focus criticised as divisive, soon resurfaced after the tempo-rary truce.

Osborne criticised as “dis-gusting and vile” a poster un-veiled by ‘Leave’ campaigners last week showing a line of ref-ugees under the slogan ‘Break-ing Point’, saying it was remi-niscent of literature used in the 1930s.

UK Independence Party (Ukip) leader Nigel Farage, who was pic-tured in front of the poster, said the EU had failed to control im-migration properly and had com-promised safety in Europe by al-lowing in extremists who wanted to attack Western states.

“Something that is true can’t be a scare, can it?,” Farage told BBC radio when asked about the poster. “It was a comment about us being part of a European Un-ion that is failing.”

The offi cial ‘Vote Leave’ cam-paign sought to distance itself from the poster but defended its

focus on immigration — an issue that has resonated with many voters.

“The debate in this referen-dum is about our lack of control over economic migration from parts of Europe whose econo-mies are being destroyed by the euro,” said Vote Leave chairwom-an Gisela Stuart. “This is now af-fecting families in Britain.”

Farage also appeared to indi-cate he thought Cox’s killing had had an adverse eff ect on the ‘Out’ campaign.

“It has an impact on the cam-paign for everybody,” he told Peston on Sunday when asked whether it would aff ect the ref-erendum outcome. “We did have momentum until this terrible tragedy.”

The only poll fully carried out since the killing showed support for “In” at 45 % ahead of “Out” on 42 % — a reversal of the three-point lead that the pollster, Sur-vation, showed for ‘Out’ in a poll conducted on Wednesday.

Two other polls published on Saturday showed the ‘Re-main’ campaign had regained its lead over ‘Leave’, while another showed the two camps running neck-and-neck.

However, pollsters said most of these surveys were carried out before Thursday’s attack and thus did not refl ect the full im-pact of the event.

“We are now in the fi nal week of the referendum campaign and the swing back towards the status quo appears to be in full force,” Anthony Wells, a director with polling fi rm YouGov, said.

Jo Cox’s last message warned against immigration ‘spin’Guardian News and MediaLondon

The Labour MP Jo Cox, who was murdered in her West Yorkshire constituency on

Thursday, made an impassioned defence of immigration and called for voters to back remain-ing in the European Union in an article published just days before her death.

In the article fi rst published on PoliticsHome.com, the MP for Batley and Spen called for vot-ers not to “fall for the spin” that a Leave vote is the only way to deal

with concerns about immigration.Three days later, she was

killed in her constituency. Tho-mas Mair, the 52-year-old man charged with her murder, ap-peared at Westminster magis-trates court in London on Satur-day and gave his name as “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain”.

A memorial service was held for the late MP yesterday morn-ing at St Peter’s church in Birstall.

In the article, she wrote: “Most voters recognise that our country has reaped many benefi ts from immigration, from the brilliant doctors in our NHS to the skilled workers helping our economy to

grow. Yet across the country peo-ple face everyday worries about job security, school places and GP appointments.

“We cannot allow voters to fall for the spin that a vote to leave is the only way to deal with con-cerns about immigration. We can do far more to address both the level and impact of immigration while remaining in the EU. I very rarely agree with the prime min-ister but on this he’s right: we are stronger, safer and better off in.”

On Saturday Cox’s sister Kim Leadbeater, her parents Gordon and Jean Leadbeater, and other family members viewed the hun-

dreds of fl oral tributes and mes-sages left to the Batley and Spen MP since her death.

They embraced as they looked at the fl owers in Birstall market-place, metres away from where she was shot and stabbed in the street outside her constituency surgery.

Leadbeater said her sister was positive in the face of abuse on social media and urged people to continue to speak out as they had since her death.

She said: “Over the last 48 hours, people have not been si-lent. They have been vocal and passionate and have spoken from

the heart. Genuine emotion with no hidden agenda. Jo would have loved it.

“We have to continue this strength and solidarity for the days, months and years to come as part of Jo’s legacy. To focus on that which unites us and not which divides us.”

Leadbeater described her sis-ter as “perfect” and said she would never be forgotten. She said: “For now our family is bro-ken, but it will mend in time and we will never let Jo leave our lives.

“She will live on through all the good people in the world, through her husband Brendan, through us

and through her truly wonderful children, who will always know what an utterly amazing woman their mother was.”

Thousands of people have paid tribute to Cox, with more than £500,000 raised for charities she supported.

The charities chosen by Cox’s friends and family represent her campaigns as an MP to help civil-ians caught up in the Syrian war, to fi ght racism and extremism in Britain, and to help residents in her constituency.

A petition set up calling for Bernard Kenny, a pensioner who was also injured in the attack on

Cox, to be given the bravery hon-our the George Medal garnered close to 300 supporters in less than a day.

Prayers were said for Cox at church services across the coun-try yesterday.

Mair, from Birstall, is charged with the murder of Cox, grievous bodily harm against a pensioner who tried to help her, posses-sion of a fi rearm with intent to commit an indictable off ence and possession of a knife.

He was remanded in custody until his next appearance, a bail application at the Old Bailey to-day. Page 26

Former London mayor Boris Johnson speaks at a Vote Leave rally in London yesterday.

Stanley Johnson, the father of former London mayor and ‘Vote Leave’ campaigner Boris Johnson, speaks at a rally for ‘Britain Stronger in Europe’, the off icial ‘Remain’ campaign group seeking to avoid Brexit, in Hyde Park in London yesterday


BRITAIN16

BRITAIN17Gulf Times


Schools urge cautionafter kidnap attemptsGuardian News and MediaLondon

Parents in south-west Lon-don have been warned to keep vigilant after police

received reports of multiple at-tempted child abductions in the past week.

Offi cers told parents in the Mer-ton area to “be aware on school runs” after three incidents took place in Wimbledon and Raynes Park since June 7.

The Evening Standard reported that in one incident a man in a white van pulled up to a young boy at the junction of Church Road and Burghley Road and asked if he wanted a lift to King’s College school. After the boy repeatedly refused and walked away, the driv-er reportedly said: “I’ll give you credit for soldiering on like that.”

Parents in Sutton were also in-formed that students have been approached by unknown adults twice in the space of a week, ac-cording to the paper.

In a letter, revealed on Face-book, staff at Overton Grange school said a man, described as in

his 40s or 50s, white, fat and bald, approached a Year 8 girl and asked her to get into his black van in Devonshire Road. The letter added that extra staff had been deployed on roads near the school at the end of the day in response to the inci-dent.

A spokesman for the Metropoli-tan police told the Guardian: “Po-lice in Merton are aware of three reports of incidents of either at-tempted abductions or suspicious behaviour on the borough since June 7. There have been no people harmed during any of the reported incidents.

“To date, the descriptions of the vehicles and drivers given by the children are diff erent and involve both male and female drivers. Pa-trols have been increased in the area. Police are working with local authority partners to ensure ap-propriate personal safety advice is available. Inquiries continue.”

Four patientslost lives after errors by staff ,admits hospitalGuardian News and MediaLondon

The hospital whose A&E unit has been threatened with closure on safety grounds

has admitted that four patients died after errors by staff in the emergency department and other areas. The deaths are revealed in one of a number of internal NHS documents seen by the Guard-ian that detail a series of patient safety failings at North Middlesex hospital going back to 2014. Na-tional NHS bodies and regulators are alarmed about the quality and safety of care at the hospital.

The north London hospital has admitted that mistakes and poor care contributed to the deaths of four unnamed patients, which oc-curred in 2014 and 2015, and apol-ogised. While its A&E unit was in-volved in two of the four cases, two others involved other units at the troubled hospital.

The hospital admitted its blun-ders but said the deaths were not statistically signifi cant. “Whilst we deeply regret all these inci-dents and acknowledge that the care of these patients could have been better, this is a relatively low number of incidents for a hospital of this size,” it said in a statement.

One of the deaths occurred on November 12, 2014, when staff did not spot that a patient was suff er-ing from a cardiac arrest and so did not call the hospital’s cardiac ar-rest crash team. North Middlesex has admitted its “failure to iden-tify the deterioration of a patient who suff ered a cardiac arrest. This does not relate to the emergency department (ED),” it said.

In another case on April 15, 2015, staff did not give a patient suff er-ing from pneumonia fl uids and antibiotics for fi ve hours after their arrival, even though NHS-wide protocol dictates that should hap-pen within an hour. “A patient in the ED died following a diagnosis of community-acquired pneumo-nia. Blood tests were conducted on

arrival which confi rmed diagno-sis but fl uids and antibiotics were started after four hours outside the recommended one-hour win-dow,” the hospital said.

Another death, on December 12, 2014, involved what the trust said was “delay in recognising and appropriately managing a patient with sepsis in ED”. Sepsis is a seri-ous and often deadly infection that can be hard to treat and kills an es-timated 35,000 patients a year.

In the other case, staff failed to detect that a seriously ill patient was deteriorating “following poor handover between clinical depart-ments, from ED to another de-partment”, the hospital said.

The department of health said the deaths showed that the hos-pital, which is seriously under-staff ed, had to urgently improve its quality of care. “Patients have been seriously let down by the standards of care at North Mid-dlesex. This situation must change and NHS Improvement is sup-porting the trust so patient care is quickly improved,” a spokesman said.

Pressure is building on Julie Lowe, the hospital’s chief execu-tive, after the Guardian revealed on Wednesday that the General Medical Council, the medical reg-ulator, and Health Education Eng-land, the NHS’s staffi ng agency, have threatened to shut its A&E on safety grounds – the fi rst time any emergency department has received such a warning in NHS history.

MPs whose constituents use the hospital are increasingly wor-ried about the situation. Labour MPs Kate Osamor (Edmonton) and Joan Ryan (Enfi eld North) are meeting Lowe tomorrow to con-vey their concerns and ask why they have not been kept informed about the growing alarm among national NHS bodies, such as NHS England and NHS Improvement, about the quality and safety of care at the hospital and poor training given to junior doctors in its A&E threatening patient safety.

‘Angry’ Assange startsfi fth year in embassyAFPLondon

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange started his fi fth year camped out in the

Ecuadoran embassy in London yesterday, an occasion his sup-porters met with events celebrat-ing whistleblowers.

Supporters staged songs, speeches and readings in several cities worldwide. The 44-year-old is wanted for questioning over a 2010 rape allegation in Sweden but has been inside Ecuador’s UK mission for four full years in a bid to avoid extradition.

The anti-secrecy campaigner, who denies the allegation, walked into the embassy of his own free will on June 18, 2012, with Brit-ain on the brink of sending him to Stockholm, and has not left since.

His lawyers say he is angry that Swedish prosecutors are still maintaining the European arrest warrant against him.

The Australian former compu-

ter hacker fears that from Swe-den he could be extradited to the US over WikiLeaks’ release of 500,000 secret military fi les, and could face a long prison sentence there.

Veteran leftist fi lm-maker Ken Loach said: “He should be able to leave his place of safety without fear of deportation or being hand-ed over to those who intend him harm.” In a video message, French composer Jean Michel Jarre said: “We have to question the power in place, to improve it. This is why Julian Assange has to be freed right away.”

A hero to supporters and a dan-gerous egocentric to detractors, Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 and has been portrayed in two movies in recent years.

Assange has compared living inside the embassy — which has no garden but is in London’s plush Knightsbridge district, near Har-rods department store — to life on a space station.

His 15 feet by 13 feet (4.6 by 4 metre) room is divided into an

offi ce and a living area. He has a treadmill, shower, microwave and sun lamp and spends most of his day at his computer.

He got a cat in May to give him some company.

Last month a Stockholm district court maintained a European ar-rest warrant against Assange, re-jecting his lawyers’ request to have it lifted. “The court considers that Julian Assange is still suspected of rape... and that there is still a risk that he will abscond or evade jus-tice,” it said in a statement.

Assange will appeal the ruling, one of his Swedish lawyers, Per Samuelsson, said. “He is not sur-prised but very critical and angry,” he said.

Assange’s lawyers requested the lifting of the warrant after the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a non-binding legal opinion on February 5 saying his confi nement in the Ecuadoran embassy amounted to arbitrary detention by Sweden and Britain. London and Stockholm have an-grily disputed the group’s fi ndings.

Like any good parent, this swan keeps a close eye on her family as they cross the road. The pen and her six cygnets were spotted waddling along the street towards a pond in Barnes, south-west London.

Under a watchful eye

Designer Vivienne Westwood wears a tee-shirt reading “I am Julian Assange” as she walks the runway at the end of her show during the Men’s Spring - Summer 2017 fashion shows, in Milan yesterday.

Government ‘needsa nuclear plan B’Guardian News and MediaLondon

Ministers need to talk to the Chinese about fast-tracking the

planned reactor at Bradwell in Essex because the future of the £18bn Hinkley Point project is so uncertain, according to a leading pro-nuclear campaign-er.

Tim Yeo, a former chair of the energy and climate change committee, said the govern-ment should also consider whether the Russian state op-erator, Rosatom, or the British state could build new atomic plants.

The Hinkley project in Som-erset has been hit by a series of

delays, with its developer, EDF, recently postponing a fi nal in-vestment decision until Sep-tember.

Yeo said continuing opposi-tion from EDF unions to spend-ing huge sums of money in Brit-ain and political uncertainty ahead of the French elections next spring could hold up the project further.

“There is a risk of further delays at Hinkley and, because of that, Decc (the department of energy and climate change) should have a plan B.

“If another two to three years had passed before progress had been made (at Hinkley), it would have an impact on our ability to meet carbon targets and on our energy security,” said Yeo, who is the chairman

of pressure group New Nuclear Watch Europe.

Yeo, who was deselected as an MP at the 2015 general election, said the government needed to see whether it was possible to speed up other nuclear projects in the pipeline, such as China’s Bradwell scheme and the Hori-zon consortium project at Wylfa on Anglesey.

The former Conservative MP suggested that talks could take place with the Korean industry, which is building in the United Arab Emirates, and Rosatom, which is constructing a new plant in Finland and has new, proven reactor technology up and running in Russia.

Yeo acknowledged that un-ions and others have expressed concern about the plan by China

General Nuclear Power Corpora-tion (CGN) to use its own reactor technology at Bradwell.

CGN’s involvement with EDF at Hinkley has been less contro-versial because the scheme is to use a European pressurised water reactor (EPR).

Yeo said the Russian political situation made it harder for the government, but Russian nuclear sources have previously said Ro-satom would like to talk. In 2014, a senior Decc offi cial confi rmed that there had been serious con-tact between the two sides.

Yeo said the use of Russian or Chinese reactor technology, if agreed following a generic design assessment by British nuclear safety authorities, might be more acceptable to the public if it were built by a UK-based consortium.

“The public is cautious and the unions sceptical of China, but if there was a UK/EU-based group involving say, Rolls-Royce, it might reduce concern about where the technology came from,” he said.

The pro-nuclear campaigner said the total cost of any new re-actor to energy billpayers could be reduced if the government be-came directly involved, as some City analysts have claimed.

“Nuclear projects involve huge upfront costs. If you can shave off 1% from the cost of capital, that will go straight through to the cost of energy,” Yeo said. “The government has one of the best credit ratings in the world. There is an opportunity there, despite the Treasury’s almost Jesuitical opposition to borrowing.”

Charity slams councils’ £30mn in ‘sweeteners’ to landlordsLondon Evening StandardLondon

An anti-poverty char-ity attacked the millions of pounds in sweeteners

paid by cash-strapped London boroughs to private landlords to persuade them to rent to council tenants.

Despite boroughs suff ering fi -nancial black holes from govern-

ment cuts, it was revealed that offi cials had paid nearly £30mn to landlords since 2012. The “one-off fi nancial incentives” were re-vealed in Freedom of Information responses from 33 London local authorities to the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust. The charity said it showed boroughs were deploying “ever more desperate means to entice private landlords” as authorities compete with each other to secure accommodation.

Landlords want the extra mon-ey over fears that some council tenants were more likely to default on their rent. There are more than 50,000 families in temporary ac-commodation in London — the highest number in eight years — and a record low number of aff ordable homes is being built. Between 2010 and 2014, there was a 77% in the number of families classing themselves as homeless, reversing a decline since 2005.

This has been fuelled by gov-ernment welfare cuts and not enough council housing being built.

Joanna Kennedy, chief execu-tive of the charity, said: “London boroughs are being forced to use ever more desperate means to entice private landlords to pro-vide temporary accommodation for homeless households. Some boroughs appear to be spending a sum equivalent to more than half

the grant funding they receive for homelessness prevention on these ‘sweeteners’ to private landlords.

“The near £30mn that has gone straight in the pocket of private landlords could have been more productively spent on house building or other measures. This underlines the hidden cost of wel-fare reform and homelessness.”

Brent, with nearly 3,000 fami-lies in temporary accommoda-tion, paid out the most, with near-

ly £2.7mn given to landlords in the past four years. A council spokes-woman said: “Whilst households may prefer that their housing need is met through the provision of social housing, investing these funds into such developments would not enable us to meet our demand.”

Lambeth gave out nearly £2.6mn, but said its £850-a-time payments “help prevent strug-gling families in Lambeth becom-

ing homeless”. Camden handed more than £2mn to private land-lords, despite just 426 families be-ing in temporary accommodation, while Barnet, with 2,904 tem-porarily homeless families, gave more than £2.5mn.

A Barnet council spokeswom-an said the payments saved “the council £4mn per year compared with the cost of placing house-holds in temporary accommoda-tion”.

“To date, the descriptions of the vehicles and drivers given by the children are diff erent and involve both male and female drivers”

EUROPE


Brussels central station is evacuatedReutersBrussels

Brussels central train station was evacuated yesterday for about an hour because of a suspicious

suitcase amid heightened security fears in the Belgian capital after a huge anti-terror operation led to three men being charged with terrorism off ences.

The suitcase later turned out to be a false alarm but shows Belgium’s high state of alert as the Euro 2016 soccer tournament is under way in neigh-bouring France, three months after Islamist bombers killed 32 people in Brussels.

Investigators say the attackers had links to militants who carried out at-tacks in Paris in November.

Belgian police searched 40 houses and 152 garage lockups between Fri-day night and Saturday, arresting 12 people following reports of possible attacks targeting soccer fans watching the matches in Brussels. They later re-leased nine after questioning.

The three Belgian men charged with “having attempted to commit a ter-rorist murder and for participation in the activities of a terrorist group” were identifi ed by prosecutors only as 27-year-old Samir C, 40-year-old Moustapha B, and 29-year-old Jawad B.

Belgian media reported they had links to the men prosecutors believe carried out the Brussels twin bombings in March, brothers Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui and Najim Laachraoui.

Without citing sources, RTBF said police listened to phone conversations between the three men in which they said they planned attacks in Brussels over the weekend.

Neither prosecutors nor Prime Min-ister Charles Michel confi rmed reports of the arrested suspects planning to attack soccer fans.

The Belgian federal prosecutor’s of-fi ce said only that the investigation re-quired immediate action.

Michel appealed to the country to stay calm after chairing a meeting of the government’s security council on Saturday.

Investigators have found links be-tween the Brussels attackers and Is-lamist militants who killed 130 people in a spate of shootings and suicide bombings in Paris in November.

On Friday police arrested and detained a 30-year-old man named as Youssef E A, a Belgian national, on suspicion of taking part in terrorist activities in con-nection with the Brussels attacks.

The man worked at Brussels airport and had access to planes on the tar-mac, said broadcaster RTBF and news-paper Le Soir, citing judiciary sources.

A participant holds a placard reading “Muslims (of) Mantes United” as people take part in a silent march in Mantes-la-Jolie in memory of the French police off icer and his partner stabbed to death on June 13 by an extremist who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.

Silent protest

Worrying ‘climate of xenophobia’ in Europe, says UN refugee chiefAFPTehran

The UN’s refugee chief says a wor-rying “climate of xenophobia” has taken hold in Europe as the

continent struggles with the biggest infl ux of migrants since World War II.

Speaking to AFP in Tehran at the start of a regional tour, UN High Com-missioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said European leaders needed to do more to co-ordinate migration policies and to combat negative stereotypes about refugees.

“Refugees...don’t bring danger to us, they fl ee from dangerous places,” said Grandi, who took offi ce in January.

National leaders need to better ex-plain that immigration “in fact con-tributes to the development of socie-ties,” he said.

“Those who do the opposite, who stir up public opinion against refugees and migrants, have a responsibility in creating a climate of xenophobia that

is very worrying in today’s Europe,” he said. “It provides a negative example to countries further away.”

Protracted confl icts — in particu-lar Syria’s fi ve-year civil war — have prompted an unprecedented wave of migration to the continent, with a record 1.25mn Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan and other migrants entering Europe since January 2015.

The infl ux has sparked a backlash in

some countries, including in Austria where the anti-immigration Freedom Party nearly won the presidency last month and in Hungary where authorities have sealed the border with Serbia with razor wire and made illegal border cross-ing a criminal off ence punishable by jail.

Grandi said it was unfortunate that decisions taken last year by the Euro-pean Union to better handle the infl ux “were not implemented”.

It was, he said, “a missed oppor-tunity” because “each country made decisions separately ... with borders closed.”

He called for “a more collective collegial system of managing refugee fl ows based on solidarity and burden-sharing between the states, as opposed to trying to do it by themselves with the result that only some countries receive a large number of refugees and others close the borders.”

Grandi also called for greater eff orts to help those displaced by confl ict within their own countries. “Two-thirds of the world’s displaced are dis-placed internally,” he said.

“We have millions of them in Af-ghanistan, in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen...they are the most diffi cult to reach be-cause they are usually in the midst of wars therefore it’s dangerous to bring assistance.”

Grandi, an Italian diplomat long ac-tive in UN humanitarian work, is due in Afghanistan today to mark World Refugee Day.

Greek people smuggler jailed for 103 years

A Greek people smuggler was

sentenced to 103 years in prison for

ferrying groups of migrants across

the Aegean Sea to Europe, local media

reported yesterday.

The 63-year-old smuggler was ar-

rested in June 2015 aboard a yacht car-

rying 47 people, including 14 children,

after a chase with the Greek coastguard

off the island of Tilos, near Turkey.

The man, who had previously disem-

barked another group of migrants on

the island, only brought the vessel to a

halt after the coastguard fired warning

shots, the reports said.

He had previously been prosecuted

for people traff icking and was also impli-

cated in a case involving the deliberate

sinking of a boat, the reports added.

Over 800,000 migrants fleeing war,

persecution and hardship in the Middle

East and Asia have landed on the Greek

islands from Turkey in 2015. Most con-

tinued on to northern Europe.

14 dead, mostly kids, in Russia boating accident

Fourteen people, mostly children, have

died after boats capsized in stormy

weather during an outing on a lake in

the Republic of Karelia in north-west

Russia, the local Emergencies Ministry

said in a statement yesterday.

It said it had completed search and

rescue operations.

There were 51 people, including four

adults, on the outing.

A police off icer told Reuters by

phone that two of the three boats

capsized in Syamozero lake because of

bad weather.

The mayor of Moscow, Sergei

Sobyanin, wrote on his Twitter account

that 10 children from Moscow had died,

according to preliminary information.

Calais migrants turn to fl imsy boats to cross English ChannelAFPLille, France

Thwarted at every turn in their eff orts to reach Britain, migrants in

northern France have once again changed tack, turning to fl imsy dinghies to carry them across the Channel.

Migrants in Calais have sneaked into trucks or trains, and even tried to walk through the undersea tunnel in in-creasingly risky — and some-times deadly — attempts to reach Britain.

However tighter security has stymied these eff orts and authorities have reported about a dozen operations to rescue migrants drifting in in-fl atable dinghies in the Chan-nel since the start of the year.

In 2015, there were none.The most recent rescue took

place on June 11, when three Iranian migrants were saved from their sinking vessel.

Four days early, three other migrants were rescued in sim-ilar circumstances.

Pierre-Joachim Antona, spokesman for the local French maritime authority, said eff orts to cross the Chan-nel by boat were “no longer extraordinary or isolated”.

There have been rare cases in recent years of migrants drowning while trying to swim across the narrow sea, and an Afghan once built a raft with a bedsheet in a failed ef-fort to drift to England.

But the phenomenon is now a “real and lasting trend”, said Antona.

Hundreds of thousands of economic migrants and refu-gees have crossed from Turkey to Greece in overloaded boats, hundreds of them perishing in the process.

While France’s migrant cri-sis is tiny compared to that faced by Greece or Germany, the slum-like Calais camp of about 4,000 migrants desper-ate to reach Britain is a politi-cal hot potato on both sides of the Channel.

Many of the migrants have relatives in Britain, or believe they will have a better chance of fi nding employment there.

The migrants’ main tactic has been sneaking onto the back of trucks, initially when drivers stopped to rest and later by blocking roads and forcing their way onto the ve-hicles.

The crisis reached a peak in July and August last year when hundreds tried to storm the Eurotunnel site on several consecutive nights to try cross the Channel.

Security was stepped up in response to the disturbanc-es, however recent eff orts to block traffi c fl ared again last month.

At least 26 people have been killed attempting to reach Britain since June 2015.

Antona said it had become “nearly impossible” for mi-grants to make it through the tunnel, forcing them to adapt their tactics.

He said that while coast-guards had intercepted sev-eral boats, there was evidence that some were succeeding in crossing the treacherous stretch of water.

“We are realistic, we know there have been other at-tempts, successful or not,” said Antona, citing “clues on English and French beaches, like small boats or life vests.”

“When the weather is good you can see England from the French coast and, quite na-ively, one could imagine the crossing will be quick and

easy but it is an absolute il-lusion,” he added. “It is one of the most dangerous seas in the world.”

High levels of traffi c, strong currents and cold water mean chances of surviving a cross-ing are fl imsy.

“The risk of a boat not be-ing seen by a large cargo ship and being run over are enor-mous,” said Antona.

Both France and Britain have stepped up patrols and eff orts on land to curb the trend.

Patricio Martin, director of the border police in north-ern France, said a surveillance system had been set up along the coastline to “intercept smuggling networks even be-fore the migrants take to the sea”.A police source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that smugglers were de-manding “up to 10,000 euros ($11,300)” for the crossing.

Antona said that the smug-gler would provide a small boat, sometimes with life jackets and a telephone to call for help if needed.

“These are very fragile ves-sels, completely unsuited for this kind of crossing. Some don’t even have engines and the migrants have to row,” said Bernard Barron, head of sea rescue charity SNSM in Cal-ais.

However there were also professional smugglers using larger, sturdier vessels that can carry up to 20 people, he said.

In May, 18 Albanian mi-grants were rescued from a rigid-hulled infl atable boat when the boat started to take on water.

Two British smugglers who were also on board were charged over the attempted crossing.

Terror fears to mute French summer solstice music bashAFPParis

France’s annual summer sol-stice music extravaganza — a party it has exported across

the globe — will be slightly muted this year amid terror fears and the Euro 2016 football tournament.

The Fete de la Musique (Make Music Day) sees citizens throng the streets to enjoy thousands of pop-up concerts — whether a marching band in a garden, a rock group on a corner or a Paris-ian playing DJ from his apartment window to a crowd below.

This year the theme for the fes-tival’s 35th edition tomorrow is “Music is stronger than...”.

Culture Minister Audrey Azou-lay said in a statement that after two terror attacks in Paris killed 147 in 2015, this year’s event was about “overcoming our fears, fi ghting division, because music is stronger than those who want to shut it off .”

Nevertheless the party is likely to be dampened by terror fears as well as the threat of football hooli-ganism which has dogged the Eu-ropean championships.

On top of that, French people hoping for a break from the weeks

of grey skies and rain in one of the most miserable springs in recent years, are likely to see the music festival hit by downpours.

The various security threats have stretched thin an already ex-hausted police force.

The Fete de la Musique “comes at a time when police are particu-larly busy”, said a spokesperson at the culture ministry.

“After discussions with the in-terior ministry we decided to can-cel or postpone certain events to prioritise the security of the pub-lic.”

And after violent clashes in the southern city of Marseille be-

fore the Russia-England football match last week, the city decided to postpone its music party to Thursday due to a high-risk match between Ukraine and England on Tuesday.

Last year 17,000 concerts were held across France, bringing some 10mn music lovers, amateur and professional musicians out into the streets to enjoy everything from choral music, to rap and world tunes.

The festival was fi rst created by former French culture minister Jack Lang in 1982 and last year was celebrated in 120 countries across the world.

Russians participate in the Colour Run 2016 at the Luzhniki Olympic Complex in Moscow yesterday. The Colour Run is a 5km race without winners nor prizes, with runners being showered with colored powder at stations along the run.

Colour fun

EUROPE19Gulf Times


Italy goes to polls in test for RenziReutersRome

Italians voted yesterday for may-ors of their largest cities in ballots which were testing Prime Min-

ister Matteo Renzi’s popularity and could hand control of Rome to the anti-establishment 5-Star Move-ment (M5S) whose candidate would become the city’s fi rst woman mayor.

Virginia Raggi, a 37 year-old lawyer from the M5S, was in pole position after the fi rst round of vot-ing on June 5 to seize the scandal-plagued capital from Renzi’s Dem-ocratic Party (PD). The PD took a bruising in the fi rst round.

Italy’s four biggest cities are among 126 places holding run-off s between fi rst and second-placed candidates after none won more than 50% backing.

Attention is focused on Rome, fi nancial hub Milan and the tra-ditional PD stronghold Turin as

8.6mn people — just under a fi fth of the total electorate — cast their vote.

Voting began at 7am (0500 GMT) and closes at 11pm and no exit polls will be published before then.

Raggi won 35.2% in the fi rst round, pushing Renzi’s candidate Roberto Giachetti into second place, with a campaign promising to fi ght graft and privilege.

“Today we need two things: hon-esty and courage,” Raggi tweeted, quoting 20th century socialist poli-tician and former president Sandro Pertini.

Casting her vote at a school, Raggi joked with reporters but de-clined to make any statements.

Conquering Rome would be a big victory for M5S, which has capital-ised on widespread frustration with traditional parties as the left and right have been tainted by corrup-tion scandals.

Local but emotive issues such as public transport and the poor state of the roads have been at the cen-

tre of debate in Rome, where many complain basic public services have been left to decay, and the former mayor was forced out by scandal.

“We Romans are all fed up, the previous mayor brought few results and great disappointment,” Rome resident Paolo, who declined to give his last name, said outside a poll-ing station. “Faced with that kind of discontent it’s inevitable that someone new is likely to do better.”

Persistent weakness in the euro zone’s third-largest economy has also fuelled frustration.

M5S has promised universal in-come support for the poor and a referendum on membership of the euro.

Renzi has said the vote will not hurt his left-right coalition gov-ernment, but a bad showing will put him under pressure in his al-ready divided party ahead of a ref-erendum in October on which he has staked his political future.

Another highly signifi cant con-

test for Renzi is in Milan, where he backed Giuseppe Sala, head of the 2015 Expo World Fair.

Sala emerged from the fi rst round barely a percentage point ahead of centre-right rival Stefano Parisi.

In Turin, prominent PD incum-bent Piero Fassino came out ahead in the fi rst round but faces an un-expectedly tough challenge from M5S.

In Bologna, another leftist bas-tion, the PD is expected to hold off the anti-immigrant Northern League.

Naples is a lost cause for the PD, whose candidate was knocked out in the fi rst round.

Italy’s third-biggest city looks set to give a second term to former prosecutor Luigi de Magistris, who has declared it a “Renzi-free zone”.

Exit polls from the main cities will be issued after polls close.

Initial projections based on the count are due about an hour later, and then at regular intervals.

Virginia Raggi, 5-Star Movement candidate for Rome’s mayor, casts her vote at the polling station in Rome.

Historic Orthodox meet marred by Russian no showAFPAthens

Orthodox church leaders from around the world met yesterday in Greece for the fi rst such gathering in a millen-

nium, but the absence of several branches of the communion threatened to mar the event.

The clerics celebrated Orthodox Pente-cost in the town of Heraklion on the island of Crete, where a “divine liturgy” was per-formed as part of the assembly that will last until June 27.

Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch Bar-tholomew called the the so-called Holy and Great Council on issues including wedlock, fasting, and united representation in dioceses in countries such as the United States and Australia.

Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos took part in the mass that was aired live on state broadcaster ERT.

But the absence of Russian Orthodox leader Kyrill, who represents some 130mn faith-ful — half the world’s Orthodox population — threatened to undermine the image of unity that the gathered leaders had sought to project.

Aside from Russia, the Orthodox churches of Bulgaria and Georgia were also absent. Both are considered close to Moscow.

The Patriarchate of Antioch is also staying away because of a spat with Jerusalem.

“This great and holy council will carry the message of unity... it will help to escape the deadlocks of the present,” Patriarch Bar-tholomew told local media.

The last such meeting was in 1054 when Christianity split between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, in the so-called “great schism” — and working out the details of the new council has taken over 50 years.

“The unity of Orthodoxy is good for us all. It is those who are absent who will miss out,” said Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias.

The Orthodox communion has about 250mn followers worldwide and consists of 14 autonomous churches.

Shaken by the upheaval in the former So-viet bloc and the Middle East it is frequently plagued by national and political strife.

Pope Francis, in his traditional Sunday prayer on Saint Peter’s Square in Rome, called for reconciliation within the Orthodox Church.

“Let us unite with our Orthodox brothers, invoking the Holy Spirit to help with his gifts the Patriarchs, the archbishops and the bish-ops gathered together in Council,” the head of the Roman Catholic Church said, before reciting a Hail Mary with the crowd in Italian.

Turk nationalist party rebels move closer to ousting leaderReutersAnkara

Dissidents in Turkey’s nationalist MHP op-position party yes-

terday took a step closer to ousting their veteran leader, a move which could poten-tially derail President Tayyip Erdogan’s drive for greater powers under a new consti-tution.

The dissidents are trying to oust Devlet Bahceli, a dour 68-year-old who has led his party since 1997 but has seen support among voters ebb despite growing nationalist sentiment in Turkey.

At an extraordinary con-gress yesterday attended by

657 delegates, the dissidents managed to amend a party bylaw that will allow them to challenge Bahceli’s lead-ership at a meeting set for July 10.

They hope to replace Bah-celi with Meral Aksener, a 59-year-old woman seen by pollsters as having the met-tle needed to revitalise the MHP and increase its sup-port.

That could make Er-dogan’s ambitions harder to push through parliament.

If Bahceli survives the challenge — and many ex-pect him to challenge the bylaw amendment in the courts — pollsters and po-litical analysts say he could lead his party to a crushing

defeat at the next election, exiting parliament and free-ing Erdogan’s hand to re-write Turkey’s constitution.

Erdogan and his support-ers say Turkey needs a strong executive presidency to help steer the country through its big security and economic challenges.

Under the current consti-tution, Turkey’s president is a largely ceremonial post.

Critics say Erdogan is be-having in an increasingly authoritarian way, under-mining Turkey’s constitu-tional checks and balances and clamping down on me-dia freedoms in the Europe-an Union candidate nation.

Erdogan rejects the accu-sations.

Germans march against racismReutersBerlin

Thousands of Germans yesterday formed human chains against racism in several large cities after a surge in hate

crimes against foreigners following a record infl ux of more than 1mn migrants last year.

Organisers said over 20,000 people joined protests in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Leip-zig and Bochum while police counted more than 10,000 demonstrators.

The human chains were jointly organised by church groups, trade unions and human rights organisations under the motto “Hand in hand against racism — for human rights and diversity”.

Reiner Hoff mann, head of the DGB trade union confederation, said the turnout showed that many Germans still supported the “Willkommenskultur” (welcoming cul-ture) that greeted arriving migrants last year.

He urged the government to not only step up

eff orts to integrate migrants, but also imple-ment reforms to support low-wage earners.

“We must not play them off against each other,” Hoff mann warned.

Germany is on the front line of eff orts to integrate migrants into Europe after more than a mn arrived in the country last year alone, most of them Muslims fl eeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere.

The infl ux has increased tensions in Ger-many, where police registered a record surge in crimes by right-wing radicals last year. Attacks on refugee centres rose more than fi ve-fold.

The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has become a political force over the past year by branding Islam as incompatible with Germany’s democratic constitution and calling for a ban on mina-rets and women’s face veils.

Human rights groups say Germany is fail-ing to deal with the surge in hate crimes and signs of what they call “institutional rac-ism” among law enforcement agencies.

Rains shut Christo ‘walk on water’

AFPRome

Fans of renowned artist Christo faced disappointment yesterday for a sec-ond day after his latest work in north-

ern Italy was partly closed by rain.His ambitious 3km walkway of 200,000

fl oating cubes covered in orange fabric fl oating atop Lake Iseo was evacuated Sat-urday evening after wind and rain made it unstable.

“Given the infl ux of people and poten-tially bad weather, it is advisable to rethink your trip,” said a manager at the installation in a statement.

Local authorities have also cancelled train services to the lake to limit the numbers able to reach the project.

After being closed throughout Saturday night, the project only partly reopened yes-terday morning with one of the two walk-ways still closed to the public.

Crowds of visitors hoping to visit Chris-to’s “The Floating Piers” have been gather-ing around the lake since it opened on Sat-urday, with organisers hoping that 500,000 people will experience it by July 3 when the pontoons close to the public.

But the walkways can only hold 11,000 people at any one time — and only if weather conditions allow.

More than 55,000 visitors attempted to cross the walkways on Saturday, forcing or-ganisers who had anticipated just 40,000 to ask that they return another day.

And by the early evening the bridges had been forced to close by heavy winds and driving rain.

Christo fi rst conceived the project in 1970 for the River Plate delta in Argentina but was thwarted after failing to secure the neces-sary permits.

Despite the long delay in realising his vision Christo said on Thursday that the project, his fi rst since 2005, “stayed in our hearts”.

Spain’s left-wing bloc could clinch majority: pollsReutersMadrid

Spain’s two main left-wing parties could come close to clinching a combined parlia-

mentary majority, several opinion polls showed on yesterday, a week before the country votes in its sec-ond election in six months.

The June 26 election is expected to produce a similar outcome to December’s stalemate, when the entry of new political forces ended four decades of a two-party system and no single party gained enough support to govern alone Policy and leadership divisions split potential allies in ensuing negotiations, yet a better showing for left-wing con-tenders would increase their chanc-es of forming a government.

Spain’s political vacuum has yet to substantially derail an economy which is on course to grow faster than most euro zone peers this year, by 2.7%.

Unemployment still hovers at 21 %, the second-highest rate in Eu-rope, though jobs are returning, propelled in part by a tourism boom.

But Spanish politicians worry a prolonged limbo will further al-ienate voters, already unimpressed with their failed eff orts to form a government, while the economy could start to suff er if much-need-ed reforms to further fi x the labour market slip.

Three separate polls published yesterday found that a leftist alli-ance led by anti-austerity upstart Podemos would make big gains and come a strong second in the ballot behind the centre-right People’s Party (PP), leapfrogging the Social-ists.

Podemos, which came third in December, has since teamed up with a former communist group to form Unidos Podemos (“Together We Can”) in a bid to get more lawmak-ers elected to Spain’s 350-seat lower house of parliament.

Thanks to strong backing among

Spain’s crisis-hit poor, Unidos Po-demos and the Socialists would to-gether come a lot closer than they did last time to reaching the abso-lute majority of 176 seats, the polls showed.

The two would still likely need the backing of smaller parties, however, one of several potential obstacles to a deal as the Socialists have shunned backing from pro-independence forces in the Catalonia region.

Unidos Podemos would garner between 24.6% and 26% of the vote

and between 84 and 95 parliamen-tary seats, according to Metrosco-pia, Sigma Dos and GAD3, whose surveys were published in newspa-pers El Pais, El Mundo and ABC re-spectively.

In December, Unidos Podemos won 71 seats and its gains would likely come at the expense of the Socialists, who are seen falling into third place with between 20% and 21.4% of the vote and between 78 and 85 seats, down from 90 last time.

The PP of acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, meanwhile, is ex-pected to once again win the most support, with between 20% and 30.5% of the vote and 113 to 129 seats.

But the centre-right party may still struggle to fi nd potent enough allies to allow it to retain power, un-less the Socialists change tack and help support a PP-led minority government.

Liberal Ciudadanos (“Citizens”) could at best win one extra seat, giving it 41, the polls showed.

Ciudadanos party leader Albert Rivera gestures during a campaign rally in Madrid yesterday.


INDIA20

Tamil NaduRoundupBy Umaima Shafiq

EducationistJeppiaar dies aged 85

Jeppiaar, the founder of Jeppiaar Educational Trust that runs prominent engineering colleges in Chennai, died in Chennai on June 18. He was 85. Born as J Pangu Raj at Muttom in Kanyakumari, he started his career as a police constable but soon entered politics and became close to late film actor and Tamil Nadu chief minister M G Ramachandran. He worked in the Chennai Corporation and as director of Tamil Nadu Fisheries Development Corporation. In 1988, Jeppiaar set up the Satyabhama Engineering College that was the first to get deemed university status in Tamil Nadu. He single-handedly established nine colleges besides acquiring a law degree and a doctorate from Anna University in 2000. He also set up a private harbour in Kanyakumari a decade ago and even acted in some Tamil films. Jeppiaar was among the first to question the hiring of engineers into the IT industry and always encouraged them not to waver from their stream.

SRM lodgescase againstmissing director

The SRM Group has launched a search to locate film director S Madhan, who is also the managing partner of Vendhar Movies missing from Chennai since May 28 leaving a note saying he was going to the holy city of Kashi to get ‘salvation.’ SRM chairman T R Pachamuthu’s legal team told Chennai police that Madhan had misused the group’s name to sell medical and engineering seats for millions of rupees. The complaint said Madhan had been expelled from SRM’s political party Indiya Jananayaka Katchi (IJK) and had no say in their administration since this January. SRM conglomerate owns a university with seven campuses in diff erent cities besides businesses in hospitals, hotels, film production, politics and transportation. Vendhar Movies is their subsidiary company.

Veteran filmdirector dead

Veteran film director A C Tirulogachandhar, who has directed more than 60 movies in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi died in Chennai on June 15. He was 86 and is survived by a son and daughter. His younger son died of cancer in the US earlier this month. Arunachala Chengalvaraya Tirulogachandar was born in a middle class family in Chennai and graduated in Arts. He began by writing short stories for Tamil magazines, plays for All India Radio and doing part-time jobs at film studios. His career began as an assistant director for the 1950 Tamil film Kumari starring late superstar M G Ramachandran. In the next four decades, he directed several hits with leading actors M G Ramachandran, Sivaji Ganesan, Kamalhaasan and others. His films include Anbey Vaa (1966), Ramu (1966), Athey Kangal (1967), Naanum Oru Pen (1963), Baratha Vilas (1973) and Enga Mama (1970). His last film was Anbulla Appa in 1986. A skilled director, Tirulogachandar shot the last scenes of his 1976 film Bhadrakali with a lookalike, because his heroine Rani Chandra died in an air crash during the shoot. He won several national and state awards. His funeral on June 16 was attended by fans and colleagues.

Racehorses killedin trailer crash

Six racehorses were killed when a trailer they were being transported in crashed on the Chennai-Tiruchi highway at Ulundurpet in Villupuram district last week. The animals were being taken back to Chennai from the hill resort of Kodaikanal. Five men manning the vehicle were also injured. The accident took place when the driver swerved to avoid colliding with a lorry and a van and hit a road median.

Crackdownon hoardersof pulses asprices soarGovernment to import pulses from Myanmar, Mozambique and other countries

IANSNew Delhi

About 130,000 tonnes of pulses have been seized from hoarders in Haryana,

Uttar Pradesh, New Delhi and other parts of northern India in the last few months, offi cial sources said here yesterday.

The crackdown is part of the government’s eff orts to rein in the spiralling prices of pulses, which have hit Rs200 per kg.

“Hoarding is a hard fact and this is reported from parts of north India including Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. So far, ad-equate actions have been taken in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu,” an offi cial source said.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told a TV channel in an interview on Saturday that action against hoarders last year helped the gov-ernment bring the prices of pulses down by about Rs50 per kg in the retail market.

This year the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, Income Tax department and local police have been conducting raids on people suspected to have been hoard-ing pulses to take advantage of the high prices, according to the source.

The high prices of pulses, how-ever, arise from the long-term issue of supply falling short of demand by “about 5mn tonnes,” Jaitley said in his TV interview, terming the shortfall a “serious challenge” for the government to tackle.

The demand-supply gap could

be even wider than 5mn tonnes.A source in the food ministry

said: “As against the average sup-ply of 17mn tonnes of pulses, the national demand is about 24mn tonnes. India is the largest pro-ducer of pulses but also the larg-est consumer and a very large im-porter.”

The ministry confi rms that about 5.5mn tonnes of pulses were imported in the last fi nancial year.

This year too the government is looking to import pulses from Myanmar, Mozambique and other countries, the source said.

He said pulses are generally im-ported by private traders as well as public-sector agencies.

“But to avoid black market-ing, government-to-government contracts have been planned with countries like Myanmar to im-port the stuff for enhanced buff er stocks,” the source said.

The government decided on June 16 to enhance pulses’ buff er stock from 150,000 tonnes to 800,000 tonnes.

At the same time, the govern-ment is looking for ways to boost domestic production, especially

by better incentivising farmers to shift to cultivation of pulses.

“Farmers often give up culti-vating pulses for want of incen-tives and shift to paddy. Besides, to cultivate pulses, you need la-bour and this is also an uncertain crop,” said an offi cial in the agri-culture ministry.

The government has decided to procure more pulses this year and also announced higher minimum support price (MSP) for the Kharif (summer) crop.

“Higher MSP for pulses will give a positive signal to the farm-ers to increase acreage and invest in increase in productivity per acre,” the source said.

The central government has urged states to take pulses from the buff er stock at a subsidised rate of Rs66 per kg and sell in re-tail markets at Rs120 per kg.

Over 10,000 tonnes have been released to the states, including Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu, for retail distribu-tion.

Not many states, however, have come forward to buy from the buff er stock.

Girls’ escape from spinning mill highlights labour abusesReutersChennai

Tamil Nadu has launched a crackdown on factories violating labour laws after

two teenage girls scaled a wall to escape from a spinning mill where they were forced to work 12-hour shifts and subjected to abuse, offi cials said.

A women-led trade union, which represents female garment workers in the state, said the girls were found unconscious last

week on a highway near the mill where they scaled a 14ft wall be-fore falling on to thorny bushes.

“But because of excessive bleeding they became uncon-scious and were found two hours later by residents from nearby villagers,” the Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Labour Union said in a report.

It said the girls were forced to work overtime, banned from contacting family or study-ing. They were also pushed and shoved as they worked, the re-port said.

A senior local offi cial said an investigation had been ordered into the incident with the state labour department initiating a drive to check working condi-tions in mills across western Tamil Nadu, a hub for India’s $42bn-a-year textile and cloth-ing export industry.

“The district administration will inspect all mills to ensure that the girls are being paid di-rectly and there is no exploita-tion,” the offi cial from the state labour department, said request-ing anonymity.

Offi cials at the spinning mill did not respond to repeated re-quests for comment.

Activists said the incident highlights the poor working con-ditions of textile workers, par-ticularly those trapped in bonded labour - forced to work for little or no money to pay off loans, ad-vances on their salary or recruit-ment fees.

Mills mainly hire young girls, off ering Rs30,000 rupees to Rs60,000 ($450 to $900) to their families for three years’ work under so-called “Sumangali”

schemes with the money paid at the end of the fi xed term.

But former workers say they often do not receive the full amount because of deductions for their food and lodging.

A 2014 study into Tamil Nadu’s textile industry found workers were also often subjected to low wages, excessive and sometimes forced overtime requirements, lack of freedom of movement as well as verbal and sexual abuse.

“Diff erent studies and numer-ous documented case studies reveal repeated stories of exploi-

tation of the adolescents in vari-ous forms in textile sector,” said R Paritha, president of the textile union, said in a statement.

S James Victor, adviser with the textile union, criticised a lack of progress over working condi-tions for textile workers.

“Nothing is changing,” Vic-tor told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Last week, six chil-dren were rescued from a mill in Coimbatore and produced before the child welfare committee.

“These cases are making it to the public domain, many more are not.”

Dalit woman in ‘trespass’ case ‘attempts suicide’

By Ashraf PadannaGulf Times CorrespondentThiruvananthapuram

One of the two Dalit sis-ters arrested for allegedly “trespassing” into an of-

fi ce of the ruling party in Kerala has been hospitalised in a criti-cal condition after overdosing on pills.

“She was rushed here after she collapsed in her house late Saturday night,” said a doctor at the Indira Gandhi Co-operative Hospital in Thalassery, in the northern Kannur district.

“Anjana is out of danger now but is under observation in the intensive care unit.”

Anjana, 25, and Akhila, 30, daughters of N Rajan, a Dalit leader of the principal opposi-tion Congress Party, were re-leased on Saturday evening by a court with strict conditions that they should surrender their passports and report to the po-lice station every week.

They later appeared on a TV channel explaining their version of the incident during which CPM leaders questioned their character.

“My sister was upset at being portrayed as an evil character. She is unwed, and she thought that would aff ect her marriage prospects,” said Akhila, who went to jail with her 18-month-old baby.

“We are not into politics and were not supposed to be sub-jected to such abuses. She talked to us about this at night and was depressed. She went to sleep and later we found her unconscious.”

Several Congress leaders vis-ited her in the hospital and at-tacked the government for “per-secuting” family members of party workers.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vi-jayan, who was attending a two-day meeting of his party in New Delhi, told reporters: “You ask the police. I have nothing to say about it.”

His predecessor Oommen

Chandy reacted sharply say-ing the chief minister, who also holds the home portfolio, must know what’s happening in his state.

“The CPM thinks they can do anything and get away with it while in power. They should stop the habit of character assassina-tion. They should be account-able to the people of Kerala,” Chandy said.

Police say the sisters were arrested after they allegedly barged into the CPM party offi ce and attacked M Shijin, a party activist, some days ago.

The arrest triggered protests, and the national commission for the protection of Dalits and abo-rigines had sought a report from the state police chief.

Prime Minister Narendra Mo-di’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) dubbed it as the latest instance of the CPM’s politics of intoler-ance in its stronghold that had witnessed scores of revenge kill-ings of political activists over the years.

People walk past Bourne and Shepherd, one of the world’s oldest photo studios that closed down after 176 years, in Kolkata yesterday. Established in central Kolkata’s Esplanade area in 1840 by famous British photographers William Howard, Samuel Bourne and Charles Shepherd, the studio succumbed to the advent of digital technology. The four-storeyed Gothic structure was once a hotbed of activities with visitors like Oscar winning film director Satyajit Ray and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

Oldest studio shuts down

Social activists stage a protest against the sharp rise in prices of pulses and other food items in Varanasi.

Congress workers cut a cake to celebrate party vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s 46th birthday in Bikaner in Rajasthan yesterday.

Celebrating Rahul’s birthday

21Gulf TimesMonday, June 20, 2016

INDIA

Yoga Day brings people closer: PM

IANSNew Delhi

Ahead of the International Yoga Day tomorrow, Prime Minister Narendra Modi

yesterday said it is a unique occa-sion that brings people closer.

“The International Yoga Day is a unique occasion that brings us closer. The invaluable gift of In-dia’s ancient tradition,” the prime minister said in a video message posted on his Twitter handle.

He said when he outlined a vision for an International Yoga Day in September 2014 at the UN General Assembly, even he had not anticipated the “enor-mous enthusiasm for the occa-sion from all parts of the world.”

“Your support and participa-tion last year, and once again now, redeems our commitment to nurture and promote this an-cient discipline and reaffi rms yoga as an exemplary manifes-tation of Vasudhiava Kutum-bakam, or the world as one fam-ily,” Modi said.

Govt to get Vijay Mallyaand Lalit Modi extraditedIANSNew Delhi

External Aff airs Minister Sushma Swaraj yesterday said her ministry would

seek the extradition of former Indian Premier League chair-man Lalit Modi and industrial-ist Vijay Mallya, both in Britain, once it receives revised requests from the Enforcement Directo-rate (ED).

“As soon as the extradition request is received about these two, we will forward it,” Swaraj said at a press conference here.

The minister was respond-ing to a question why India was not getting support from Britain on the extradition of Modi and Mallya.

Mallya fl ed India earlier this year with more than Rs90bn of outstanding dues to 18 Indian banks. A non-bailable arrest warrant has been issued by a Mumbai court against the busi-ness tycoon.

The ED is probing Modi and other executives associated with the IPL since 2012 for alleged violation of anti-money laun-dering laws.

Swaraj said the government was keen on “extradition,” or the formal process by which a crimi-nal suspect held by one govern-ment is handed over to another for trial or to serve his sentence, and reiterated that the previous Congress government in con-trast used to talk only about “de-portation,” or mere expulsion of a person from a country.

She explained that her min-istry had earlier received ED’s “extradition request” for Mallya but returned it, seeking some changes.

“The ED had sent us the ex-tradition request for Vijay Mallya. Our team suggested a few changes which have been sent to the ED. Once we receive the revised application from ED, we will forward the request,” she said.

The ministry is also waiting

for ED’s revised version for the extradition process.

A special court in Mumbai in March this year issued an order allowing the ED to begin the ex-tradition proceedings against Modi in connection with the money laundering probe.

In August last year, the agen-cy moved the Interpol to get a red corner notice issued against Modi but the international police organisation has not obliged yet.

Interpol authorities have sought additional information from ED investigators on their money laundering case against Modi as part of the process to is-sue such a world-wide warrant against him.

Swaraj also said India’s High Commissioner to Britain, Navtej Sarna, was not at fault for the presence of Mallya at a book launch function in London.

“The moment the High Com-missioner saw Mallya, he staged a walkout. So, I don’t understand what the controversy is about?” she said.

Sushma: we can convince China on NSGmembershipAgenciesNew Delhi

China is not opposed to In-dia’s bid for membership of the Nuclear Suppliers

Group (NSG) that controls inter-national trade in fi ssile materials and technology, External Aff airs Minister Sushma Swaraj said yesterday.

India is keen to clinch mem-bership of the 48-member NSG by year-end, Swaraj said at a press briefi ng in New Delhi. “We are hopeful. We will be able to convince China as well. We are in touch with 23 nations on this issue. One or two of them had raised concerns, but I think a general consensus is there,” Swaraj said.

China’s objections concerned criteria and procedure, she said.

“Beijing insists that a pre-requisite of New Delhi’s entry is that it must be a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, while India is not,” said a recent opin-ion piece in the Global Times, which is known to refl ect the view of the Chinese government.

The NSG was formed after In-dia conducted a nuclear test in 1974 with the aim of controlling trade in nuclear materials to en-sure non-proliferation of tech-nology and weapons.

After much lobbying by the United States, the group had in September 2008 granted a waiver to individual members to trade with India in nuclear ma-terials but these involve elabo-rate bilateral treaties.

India has refused to sign the NPT saying it is discriminatory.

Signing it now to become a member of the NSG would mean it has to give up any nuclear weapons in its arsenal.

The same does not apply to the fi ve nuclear weapons states including the US, Russia and China who were original mem-bers of the NSG.

Swaraj said India would not oppose the entry of Pakistan or any other country into the NSG but asserted that the decision on all applications should be decid-ed on merits.

Swaraj’s remarks came close on the heels of Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar’s visit to Beijing to discuss India’s NSG bid with Chinese government.

To a question on Pakistan also trying to get NSG membership, the minister said: “Look, India is not a member in the group. But we will not oppose entry of any other country. What we want is all the applications are decided on their own merits.”

However, Swaraj countered Beijing’s stand over “criteria,” saying: “Instead of talking about criteria in our case, there should be talk about relations.”

On India-Pakistan relations, she said while bilateral ties are “jatil” (complicated), New Delhi was fi rm that talks and terrorism cannot go together.

She said there was “sehejta” (simplicity) in the chemistry in-volving Prime Ministers Naren-dra Modi and his Pakistani coun-terpart Nawaz Sharif.

“This warmth and simplicity in relations between two prime ministers were never there in the past,” she said.”To resolve prob-lems, you also need good rela-tionship.”

Swaraj said unlike in the past, there had been a signifi cant change in Pakistan’s policy to-wards terror strikes in India.

“Earlier whenever there used to be any terrorist activity, Pa-kistan used to go in denial mood. But after Pathankot attack, Na-waz Sharif himself called our prime minister and he said you give me proof, I will defi nitely take appropriate action.”

The minister, however, said it will be erroneous to suggest that “in order to maintain a harmo-nious relation, we will be either careless or neglect security.”

Karnataka Governor Vajubhai Vala administers oath to newly appointed ministers in Bengaluru yesterday.

13 new ministers join Karnataka cabinetCongress hopes the reshuff le will restore the party’s image, tainted by drought crisis, farmers’ suicides and a spate of controversies

IANSBengaluru

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah yesterday inducted 13 new minis-

ters in his three-year-old gov-ernment, while dropping an equal number.

Governor Vajubhai R Vala administered the oath of offi ce and secrecy to nine new cabinet ministers and four ministers of state at a simple ceremony on the lawns of Raj Bhavan here.

The nine cabinet ministers are K Thimmappa, K R Ramesh Kumar, Basavaraja Rayareddi, Meti Hullappa Yamanappa, Tanveer Sait, S S Mallikarjuna, M R Seetharam, Santosh S Lad and Ramesh Laxmanrao Jarki-holi.

The four ministers of state are Priyank M Kharge, Eshwara Kandre, Pramod Madhwaraj and Rudrappa Manappa La-mani.

Their names were cleared by Congress president Sonia Gan-dhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi over two days of con-sultations with Siddaramaiah and state party president G Par-ameshwara.

The cabinet ministers took the oath in Kannada in two batches of fi ve and four, fol-

lowed by the four ministers of state as Chief Secretary Arvind Jadav called them to the dais.

Though 14 lawmakers were short-listed, M Krishnappa, who represents a Bengaluru as-sembly segment, was left out from the fi nal list without any reason being specifi ed.

Thimmappa is currently the assembly speaker while Ramesh Kumar held the same post dur-ing the previous Congress rule over a decade ago.

Priyank is the son of Con-gress leader in the Lok Sabha, Mallikarjun Kharge, while Lad returns to the cabinet nearly three years after he resigned in November 2013 as minister of state for information and in-frastructure development over the mining scam that rocked the

state during the then Bharatiya Janata Party rule.

Among the 13 dropped from the 34-member ministry are Srinivas Prasad, Kimmane Rat-nakar, Baburao Chinchansur, Qamarul Islam, M H Am-barish, Dinesh Gundu Rao, Sathish Jarkiholi, Shamanur Shivashankarappa, P T Para-meshwar Naik, Vinay Kumar Sorake and S R Patil.

The major reshuffl e comes a week after the Congress won three of the four Rajya Sabha seats and four of the seven leg-islative council seats in the bi-ennial elections.

“The revamp will ensure pro-portionate representation to all the people across the state, spanning castes and regions,” a party offi cial said.

Mallikarjun replaced his fa-ther Shivashankarappa from Davangere, while Ramesh re-placed his elder brother Sathish from Belagavi district.

Karnataka is the only major state where the Congress is in power after the party lost in As-sam and Kerala in the recent as-sembly elections.

Siddaramaiah and state unit chief Parameshwara are hoping the revamp will restore the par-ty’s image, tainted by drought crisis, farmers’ suicides and a spate of controversies.

“Siddaramaiah wants to in-ject new and young blood in the cabinet and move some of the ministers for party work in the run-up to the next assembly election, due in early 2018,” a source said.

An African-American visitor poses for a selfie photograph with the statue of Mahatma Gandhi at the Mahatma Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad yesterday.

Selfie with Gandhiji

Culling plan a blot on India’s image, say animal loversIANSNew Delhi

The government’s call for culling “vermin” animals has caused a blot on its

image abroad, with over 1.5mn people asking ‘what’s wrong with the Indian government.’

“It is distressing to learn that protected animals are being killed and treated as vermin. When laws are disrespected it does damage

to the image of any country as one is committed to the rule of law and to protection of species,” Kathy Hessler, clinical professor of Law and Animal Law Clinic Director at Lewis and Clark Law School, said. The institute is one of the only centres in the world that teaches animal law.

About 100 NGOs under the Federation of Indian Animal Pro-tection Organisation have urged Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar to stop unscientifi c

and indiscriminate culling of wild species declared as ‘vermin.’

The Indian government has admitted to culling Nilgai, an antelope species, wild boar and monkeys (rhesus macaque) on the specifi c request of state govern-ments after terming them “ver-min.” The debate has now reached the Supreme Court, which will hear an appeal challenging three government notifi cations that de-clared these species as vermin.

Prime Minister Narendra

Modi, addressing the Third Asian Ministerial Conference on Tiger Conservation in April this year, had said “conservation of nature should not be a drag on develop-ment and can happen in a mutu-ally complementary manner.”

Though India’s own Wildlife Protection Act-1972 is consid-ered one of the best and inspir-ing laws in the world, the reports of culling of 250 Nilgai in Bihar, and plans to kill other species, and the environment minis-

ter supporting the move, has shocked international institutes.

Hessler says the Indian gov-ernment should seriously ex-plore alternatives.

“We also recognise that hu-man-animal confl icts cause real damage, but it needs to be pre-vented and managed better with the interests of all in mind,” she added.

Javadekar has said there are laws that support culling. But experts disagree.

“Under section 62 of the Wildlife Protection Act, certain animals could be declared ver-min. But it never says that killing is to be the fi rst solution. In the case of Nilgai, it seems that the government is not interested in exploring other options, which are easy and require no killing,” Nikunj Sharma of PETA said.

He adds that ever since the debate on culling began, India’s image abroad as a society that has always respected conserva-

tion and valued the environment has taken a beating.

“We have been receiving reac-tions from across the globe. There have been some 15 lakh reactions on our webpage alone. People are asking what is wrong with the In-dian government,” he said.

According to Hessler, India needs to educate its public about the value of animals and the need for peaceful mutual coex-istence for better functioning of the ecosystem.


LATIN AMERICA

Uber off ers choppersto beat Brazil gridlockReutersSao Paulo

For commuters who im-agine soaring above Sao Paulo’s notorious traffi c

jams, ride-hailing app Uber is off ering to make that day-dream a reality, starting at around $20.

Brazil’s biggest city has be-come the fi rst in the world where Uber Technologies is off ering on-demand chopper rides between airports, hotels and convention centres.

With more than 400 aircraft and nearly as many helipads, Sao Paulo has a helicopter fl eet that rivals those of New York and Tokyo, but commuting by air remains an option mostly for millionaires.

Uber aims to change that with a month-long pilot pro-gramme.

Promotional prices start at 66 reais ($19) per seat for a lift from Helicentro Mo-rumbi, in one of Sao Paulo’s richest neighbourhoods, to the Blue Tree hotel across the river. The distance is nearly

6km, as the chopper flies.A ride from the Blue Tree

Faria Lima onward to Guarul-hos International Airport costs 271 reais during the pro-motion. A car can take one to three hours to make that trip, depending on traffi c.

Uber media representa-tives declined to say how much prices would rise after the pro-motion ends or how many hel-icopters would be made avail-able by the three companies operating the fl ights.

Uber aims to get as much as fi ve times the fl ight time out of each helicopter compared to standard use, according to a spokeswoman.

The Sao Paulo pilot pro-gramme, connecting four air-ports and fi ve other helipads, is Uber’s biggest step yet in a partnership with Airbus Group, announced in January.

Uber experimented in re-cent years with helicopter rides to the Coachella and Bonnaroo music festivals from nearby US airports that cost as much as $3,000 to book a full helicopter and door-to-door SUV rides.

Land titles for farmers willcut Brazil forest loss: expertThomson Reuters Foundation Rio de Janeiro

Brazil should speed up its programme to grant small farmers formal land own-

ership to slow down the rate of logging and deforestation, a leading scientist said.

Farmers on small holdings are responsible for about 30% of the logging and destruction of Bra-zil’s vast forests, up from about 23% 10 years ago, said Daniel Nepstad, executive director of the California-based Earth In-novation Institute.

“A lack of clear land title pushes small farmers to opt for cattle (rearing) instead of more intensive (food) production” said Nepstad, a specialist with 30 years of experience tracking Amazon deforestation told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Cattle ranching leads small farmers to cut larger areas of for-est than other kinds of food pro-duction.”

Nepstad, who advises Brazil-ian lawmakers on deforestation, said small producers would be

more inclined to adopt envi-ronmentally friendly farming methods if they were given for-mal tenure or ownership of their land.

This would help them gain ac-cess to credit markets, encour-aging long term investment in their assets and improving live-lihood security.

A reduction in the rate of de-forestation in Brazil in the dec-ade since 2003 has been hailed as a victory for the environmen-tal movement.

The deforestation rate dropped nearly 80% between 2003 and 2013, according to a study published last year in the journal “Global Change Biol-ogy”.

However, the rate of loss in-creased last year. Home to the world’s largest rainforest, Bra-zil’s rate of deforestation edged up 16% in 2015, according to government data, with an area of forests larger than the US state of Delaware destroyed.

Nepstad said Brazil’s govern-ment had eff ectively adopted the “the stick” method in its eff orts to reduce the deforestation rate,

levying fi nes against farmers who fell trees, jailing loggers and cutting fi nance and credit access to states with high deforestation rates.

For positive progress to con-tinue, he said, the Brazilian gov-ernment must also consider us-ing a “carrot” approach, fi nding incentives to entice farmers to change their behaviour and en-courage them to preserve forest lands.

These “carrots” might include reduction in red tape for family farmers, improved services for rural produces and better, more secure land titling and land ten-ure, he said.

“If we can move beyond farm-ers’ fear as the basis of the Am-azon strategy, I think we will sustain and deepen the decline (in deforestation),” the scientist said. “Keep the sticks, but we need more carrots.”

While the proportion of de-forestation from small farm-ers has risen, large and medium sized farms and other businesses are still responsible for more than two thirds of the chopping, Nepstad said.

Venezuela willtest Latam faithin democracy:ex-presidentsTribune News ServiceWashington

A group of former Latin American presidents warned the hemisphere’s

head of state that the region’s commitment to democracy will be tested this week when the Organisation of American States debates whether to intervene in Venezuela’s economic and po-litical crisis.

The 30 former presidents, among them Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe and Brazil’s Fernando Henrique Cardoso, pledged their support for OAS secre-tary-general Luis Almagro’s call for Venezuela’s govern-ment to set a date for a recall referendum and to release po-litical prisoners.

Three of the former presi-dents, Jorge Quiroga of Bolivia, Alejandro Toledo of Peru and Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica, met with Almagro. It was Al-magro’s invocation of the OAS’ Democratic Charter that sparked the debate, now scheduled for Thursday.

Under the charter, members of the OAS agree to be governed democratically. If the OAS de-termines that Venezuela has violated the charter, it could be suspended from the 34-nation group.

“It’s sad that for a long time this beautiful building had mar-ble but not much democracy, because the Democratic Charter was basically useless paper,” said Quiroga, who served as Bolivia’s president from August 7, 2001, to August 6, 2002. “Now we have a secretary-general who has ac-tivated it. ... It’s time to stand up and be counted, if you believe in democracy.”

At issue is Venezuelan Presi-dent Nicolas Maduro’s refusal to schedule a recall referendum this year that could result in his removal from offi ce. Venezuela’s opposition succeeded in collect-

ing hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions seeking the recall.

In a scathing 132-page report on the Venezuela political cri-sis, Almagro called last month for “immediate change” in Ven-ezuela and said the government should schedule the referendum for this year. The report trig-gered the coming debate.

Venezuela’s economic situa-tion is dire. The country is short of food. The government has cut its workweek to two days be-cause of a shortage of electric-ity, and hospitals reports that patients have died because of a lack of medicine and the en-ergy needed to operate medical equipment.

Venezuela sits on the world’s largest oil reserves, yet the economy has plunged into cha-os because of plummeting oil prices and financial misman-agement.

Offi cials at the Venezuelan Embassy could not immediately be reached for comment. Ven-ezuela’s top diplomat in the US, ambassador Bernardo Alvarez, has criticised Almagro, charg-ing that the secretary-general is working unilaterally without the support of member states and is taking a political position against Venezuela.

The US has stood behind Al-magro, a former Uruguayan for-eign minister. Last Tuesday, Sec-retary of State John Kerry urged Venezuela to release prisoners and recognise the authority of its opposition-led Congress.

“I emphasise the humani-tarian dimensions,” Kerry told a meeting of the OAS General Assembly in the Dominican Re-public. “Just this morning, we learned of people who are dying in a food line or waiting to get medical help that they need.”

But Almagro hasn’t gotten much support from the OAS’ other members, many of which are averse to taking disciplinary actions against a fellow state.

Police and army personnel patrol the streets of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, yesterday in a bid to improve security.

Enhancing security

Gates’ chicken gift planruffl es feathers in BoliviaAgenciesLa Paz

Bolivia’s government turned up its nose at US billionaire Bill Gates’s ini-

tiative to donate 100,000 chick-ens to people living in poverty worldwide, including Bolivians.

“I fi nd it rude, because un-fortunately some people, es-pecially in the empire (the US), still see us as beggars. We don’t depend on chickens. We’ve ad-vanced,” said Rural Develop-ment Minister Cesar Cocarico.

“Our people have dignity and they know how to work,” he told journalists.

Gates, the man ranked by

Forbes magazine as the richest person in the world, announced plans last week to donate chick-ens to poor nations in an eff ort to fi ght extreme poverty.

The Microsoft co-founder says chickens are better than computers or the Internet for reducing poverty, because they are inexpensive, reproduce and supply food and revenue sources with both their eggs and meat.

The plan is a joint initiative between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the char-ity Heifer International.

The chickens were supposed to go to two dozen developing countries, but Bolivia snubbed the off er.

Such programmes “always see us as miserable Third World countries, and that point of view deserves a general protest by the people,” said Cocarico.

“Gates does not know Bo-livia’s reality to think we are liv-ing 500 years ago, in the middle of the jungle not knowing how to produce,” Cocarico added. “Respectfully, he should stop talking about Bolivia, and once he knows more, apologise to us.”

What may have ruffl ed the feathers of local offi cials is that since Evo Morales took offi ce a decade ago, Bolivia’s economy has tripled in size, and more than 2.6mn people have joined the middle class. Gross domes-tic product per capita jumped

from $1,200 in 2006 to $3,119 in 2015, according to the social and economic policy analysis unit.

“He should inform himself that us Bolivians have a lot of production and do not need any gifted chicks in order to live, we have dignity,” Cocarico said.

According to the poultry as-sociation of Cochabamba, Bo-livia’s chicken production went from 146.6m in 2009 to 193.6m in 2014. That year, Bolivians ate 35.5kg of chicken meat per per-son.

Despite Morales’ anti-impe-rialist rhetoric, he has steered an even course for Bolivia, though on Tuesday after US secretary of state John Kerry

made comments regarding Venezuela’s crisis, Morales took to Twitter saying: “John Kerry still believes Latin America is his backyard, and its peoples his peons.”

The Andean country is an ex-porter of natural gas and miner-als. Yet, unlike its ally, the oil-dependent socialist Venezuela, Bolivia has proved resilient to the slump in commodity prices. The International Monetary Fund forecasts Bolivia’s econ-omy will grow 3.8% this year, making it South America’s top performer.

But the landlocked coun-try remains one of the world’s poorest, with nearly 40 % of the population living in poverty.

Argentinian Ibar Perez Corradi (right), wanted for drug traff icking and murder in his country, arrives at the Paraguayan city of Luque after being apprehended at the border shared by Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay yesterday.

Drug trafficker held

Saving sharks is one issue where US and Cuba agreeTribune News ServiceCojimar, Cuba

At the fi shing port once used by Ernest Heming-way, fi sherman Luis Abad

and fi ve other men lugged a 12-foot tiger shark onto the dock so that Havana University scien-tists could measure and weigh the nocturnal hunter.

Then, after the weigh-in, the

fi shermen stripped the predator of its parts - fi ns, skin and meat - until all that was left in the af-ternoon sun was the shark’s liver.

That Abad, 57, cut up into hundreds of pungent, inch-sized chunks and tossed into a bucket. He let the hot Cuban sun melt the cubes into oil, which he’d give to his asthmatic aunt. She had been pressing him for more of the folk remedy.

“It helps her breathe,” Abad

said, lifting his gaze from his work with the knife. “I take it every day. I never get sick.”

Cuba is home to about one-fi fth of the world’s 500 shark species. Many sharks and other fi sh found off the shores of Flor-ida have travelled north from Cuba, following their prey.

Cuba - or at least Cuban fi sh-ermen - fi gure as one of the greatest threats to some of those same species, many of which

fi nd themselves in danger be-cause of the animal’s popularity as both a staple food and a source of folk remedies like the liver oil Abad sun-brews in buckets.

That has made protecting sharks odd common ground for the US and Cuba as the two coun-tries warily circle one another in the search for ways to end more than a half-century of enmity.

In a rocky relationship that’s still fi nding its way among political

crackdowns and blocked business growth, protecting sharks and other marine life is a spot where the two sides have come together. Of the eight agreements reached by the US and Cuba since relations were restored in December 2014, three involve the environment.

“The environment was the lowest hanging fruit in these bilateral discussions,” says Dan Whittle, the Cuba programme director at the New York-based

Environmental Defense Fund, an environmental advocacy group.

In October, Cuba announced an action plan developed with the help of the Environmental Defence Fund aimed at identify-ing and documenting the largely undocumented shark popula-tions. It calls for eventually im-posing fi shing restrictions to protect shark nurseries.

A month after the action plan, Cuba and the US signed their

fi rst accord, which called for the protection of fi sh and coral reefs around the Florida Keys and Cuba’s Guanahacabibes marine preserve, home to more than 200 species of fi sh, 40 species of corals and 1,000 species of mollusks. The second, signed a week later, was a joint statement on how the two countries would work together to fi ght climate change and protect against hur-ricanes and oil spills.

PAKISTAN/AFGHANISTAN23Gulf Times


Fatima Jinnah’s cars are fi nally being restored

Things remain in a state of uniform motion unless an external force is applied to

them. That’s Newton’s fi rst law of motion.

Ms Fatima Jinnah’s golden 1955 Cadillac Series 62 Convert-ible and her white 1965 Mercedes Benz 200 have not been road-worthy for years and would have been rusted away completely but for the eff orts of a few people.

Over the years, there have been discussions and debates, newspapers have printed letters about them but to no avail. A struggle of 19 years of two steps forward and one back have now shown results, as both of Ms Jin-nah’s cars are fi nally going to be restored.

Mohsin Ikram, founder and president of the Vintage and Classic Car Club of Pakistan and Motorheads Pakistan, fi rst came across the cars at the Mohatta Palace back in 1992/93. He says that back then they were parked in the palace garage and weren’t in too bad condition, with even the stickers on the engines in-tact. And they remained so until

1997 when the Sindh govern-ment decided to renovate the Mohatta Palace.

That’s when the labourers do-ing work on the building pulled out the cars from their garage and left them outside. Not re-alising their worth, they would sit on their bonnets from time to time and eat their lunch and din-ner on them.

It was during this time that Ikram heard a collector of classic cars boasting about how he had broken the dashboard of one of the cars to yank out its clock and other accessories. That’s when he hurried there to see for him-self what was going on. He was shocked to fi nd the cars miss-ing their wheels and rims. Many other parts had also been stolen and the vehicles stood in a pa-thetic condition on bricks.

It prompted him to write to the then governor of Sindh to kindly look into the matter. It had some eff ect, as the cars were soon re-moved from the Mohatta Palace and taken to the Sindh Archives department.

“They literally dragged them to the Sindh Archives build-ing causing further damage. I thought then that people should know about what was happening

to this national asset so I wrote a letter for daily Dawn’s ‘Let-ters to the Editor’ section, which prompted several more letters from other people as shocked as myself over the treatment meted out to the cars. Of course, all

were in favour of restoring them, especially those in authority, who seem excited at the prospect of these heritage vehicles getting restored,” says Ikram.

A long debate ensued. Some-one also had to be brought in to

do the job. Being a classic cars enthusiast and having restored over a hundred of them himself, Ikram felt confi dent enough to volunteer for the job.

“I am so passionate about classic cars that initially I even

off ered to do it for free,” he says. But with several people com-

ing and going in the Sindh Ar-chives department, nothing materialised until another well-meaning citizen of Karachi fi led a petition in the Sindh High Court for the handover of the cars so that they can be restored.

Soon others, too, caught wind of the matter. Around 2006, there were plans to take the cars to Islamabad to be restored and displayed at an army museum or at a park named after Miss Fati-ma Jinnah in F-9. “But my argu-ment is this that these cars are a part of Karachi’s heritage.

They should stay in this city. I told them that I would only help in restoring the cars if they stay in Karachi and are displayed at the Mohatta Palace where they actually belong,” Ikram stresses. Another long lull followed. In between people in the Sindh Ar-chives department kept calling up Ikram about the restoration of the cars. He was also getting sick and tired of them not doing much other than just calling him to know if he was still interested in restoring the cars.

“I tell them I was and still am willing but they should also move beyond just calling me.

They told me when they are posted to the offi ce, they open old fi les and only my name comes up as all the letters and proposals in those fi les are from me,” he laughs.

“I am happy that after years it is fi nally going to happen,” says Ikram, who has now been brought in as a consultant on the project.

About the actual work, Ikram says that it could take around one-and-a-half to two years. He says that people want to know if the cars will look as good as new.

“Of course they will, but see, there are two schools of thought. One is the easy way out where you get another donor car that is stripped off its parts which are put into the car being restored. It doesn’t even take so much time. But no, it would not be Miss Jin-nah’s car then, now would it? What I believe in is keeping as much of the original as possible. If the wipers can be restored, I will do it instead of replacing them. The same goes for the steering wheel and other such things in there. Perhaps it may take extra work but they will be original, not some replicas from China, Taiwan, Korea or India,” he concludes.

Internews Islamabad

Fatima Jinnah’s golden 1955 Cadillac Series 62 Convertible and her white 1965 Mercedes Benz 200 have not been roadworthy for years.

Afghan minister to visit Pakistan today for talksAfghanistan’s Deputy For-

eign Minister Hekmat Khalil Karzai, will visit

Islamabad today for talks to re-move diff erences over the border management issues, the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad said on Saturday.

Clashes had erupted along the Torkham, the busiest border crossing, between the troops of the two countries on June 12 that caused casualties on both sides, Xinhua news agency reported.

Both sides have now declared ceasefi re and the border was opened on Saturday after its six days’ closure. However, both countries have deployed troops and tanks along the border.

Pakistan Foreign Aff airs Ad-viser Sartaj Aziz had invited Af-ghan National Security Adviser Hanif Atmar, and Foreign Min-ister Syed Salahuddin Rabbani to visit Pakistan to discuss the border issues and to remove any gaps in communication or un-derstanding.

Afghanistan has accepted the talks off er but decided to send an Afghan delegation led by Deputy Foreign Minister Hekmat Khalil Karzai to Islamabad.

The foreign ministry said the Afghan delegation will visit Islamabad today for “discus-sions on the issues relating to Torkham border crossing as well as other matters pertaining to border management”.

“Pakistan welcomes the visit and looks forward to meaning-ful deliberations through a con-structive engagement between the two sides with a view to pro-mote bilateral relations as well as peace and stability of our two countries and the region,” a for-eign ministry statement said.

Pakistan and Afghanistan have

nearly 2,600km border, mostly porous, and the militants take ad-vantage of the loose control.

The clash, which erupted along the Torkham border a week ago, left at least three Af-ghan policemen and a Pakistani military offi cer dead, with doz-ens wounded.

Mohamed Ayub Hussain Khil, border police chief in eastern Af-ghanistan, said: “Everyday huge crowds of Afghans used to cross the border for medical purposes, but now they are only allow-

ing people with visas and pass-ports,” he said.

Pakistan’s foreign ministry spokesman posted a message on Twitter saying: “Only passport holders allowed from Afghan side.”

The new requirement will af-fect thousands of people who formerly crossed the busy border post without travel documents.

The border clash prompted bitter recriminations on both sides, with Islamabad and Kabul summoning each other’s dip-

lomats to lodge strong formal complaints.

The Pakistani military justi-fi ed the construction of the gate at Torkham, saying “terrorists” were using the crossing point.

Afghan offi cials have always accused Pakistan of supporting the Taliban and continuing to nurture sanctuaries on its soil in the hope of maintaining infl u-ence in Afghanistan.

Pakistan also accuses some elements in the Afghan govern-ment of supporting a senior Pa-

kistani Taliban leader Fazlullah who is said to be orchestrating attacks on Pakistani soil from Afghanistan.

Torkham is one of the major crossings between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where hundreds of trucks and thousands of people cross the border daily through the Khyber Pass.

The border was closed over similar clashes last month, but was reopened after an under-standing was reached between the two countries.

AgenciesIslamabad

People arrive at the border crossing in northwest Pakistan’s Torkham on June 18. Pakistan on Saturday opened its busiest border crossing with Afghanistan after one week, allowing thousands of people and trucks to cross both sides of the border, off icials said.

Major chunk

of Pakistani

budget ‘lost’ to

debt servicing

The National Assem-bly (the lower house) of Pakistan yesterday

approved the budgets of sev-eral sectors as well as charged expenditures that include Rs10.33tn for debt servicing, which is the country’s main annual expenditure.

The assembly gave its as-sent to Rs3.13tn in the form of 75 demands for grants, out of a total of 147.

The remaining grants will ostensibly include those on which cut motions will be moved by the opposition from today.

The largest allocation, as always, is for defence services, which has been earmarked a grant of Rs860bn. The lion’s share of this - Rs409bn goes to the army, Rs182.79bn to the air force and Rs93bn to the navy.

The budget of diff erent defence-related services, in-cluding the accounts depart-ments, amounts to Rs9.97bn. Besides, an unspecifi ed head titled ‘Others’ has been allo-cated Rs174.84bn.

In addition to the main al-location, the defence ministry has been allocated Rs1.5bn and Rs5.09bn has been earmarked for the federal government-run educational institutions in cantonments and garrisons. In terms of development ex-penditure, the defence minis-try has been allocated a grant of Rs2.52bn.

The total charged expendi-ture of the country during the coming fi nancial year 2016-17 amounts to Rs10.44tn, which includes the budget for insti-tutions such as the Supreme Court (SC), the Islamabad High Court (IHC) and the Election Commission of Paki-stan (ECP).

Charged expenditure re-fers to budgetary heads that are fi nalised by the relevant departments/institutions themselves, and their details are presented in the National Assembly as a mere formality. The legislature cannot alter the budgetary allocations for these departments/institu-tions. The main head among charged expenditures is for-eign and local debt servicing.

For the year 2016-17, the government has earmarked Rs8.38tn for repayment of domestic debt, Rs1.24tn for servicing of domestic debt which mostly includes inter-est payments Rs443.80bn for repayment of foreign loans, Rs113bn for servicing of for-eign debt and Rs141.37bn for repayment of short-term for-eign credits.

The other key charged ex-penditures include Rs3.97bn for the auditor general of Pa-kistan, followed by Rs2.25bn for the ECP.

The budget for the presi-dent’s staff , household and allowances amounts to Rs863.48mn. The SC has ear-marked Rs1.74bn for itself for the upcoming fi scal year. The IHC has decided that its budg-et for the coming year will be Rs469.63mn.

The charged budgets of the federal ombudsman and the federal tax ombuds-man amount to Rs586m and Rs117.72mn, respectively. Af-ter defence services, the larg-est approved amount is for the Pakistan Railways, which has received Rs113bn, of which Rs41bn has been allocated to help maintain its capital out-lay.

The Ministry of Planning, Development and Reforms has been allocated over Rs41bn, including development ex-penditure, while the Ministry of National Health Services will receive Rs32bn.

InternewsIslamabad

13 IS fi ghters killed in east of Afghanistan

At least 13 loyalists of Islamic State group were killed in an airstrike in eastern Nangarhar province of Afghanistan.Security off icials said yesterday that the militants were killed in an airstrike conducted in Achin district which is home to scores of IS loyalists, according to the Afghan Khaama Press.The off icials added another IS militant was wounded during the airstrike but it is yet not clear if the raid was

conducted by the Afghan Air Force or the US forces in Afghanistan.This comes as at least 21 IS militants were killed in a similar raid in Achin district last week, while at least 15 more were killed during a separate operation conducted in Achin earlier.The Afghan forces as well as the US forces are regularly targeting the loyalists of the group in this province in a bid to curb their activities.

Pregnant woman, husband gunned down in Pakistan

A pregnant woman and her husband have been ab-ducted and shot dead by

relatives who disapproved of their marriage, police said yes-terday, the latest in a surge of reported “honour killings” in Pakistan.

The couple were murdered near the village of Thikriwala in Punjab province last Wednesday, senior local police offi cial Malik

Waris said. The bodies were dis-covered after they washed up in a canal. Waris said Aqsa Bibi, aged 22, and Shakeel Ahmed, 26, both worked at a local pharmacy and had got married in a court cer-emony four years earlier.

Aqsa was expecting a child, though it was not immediately clear how many months’ preg-nant she was.

Their match enraged Aqsa’s family, who lived in a nearby vil-lage.

Matters came to a head when one of her brothers, named as

Mohamed Moavia, who had re-cently returned from abroad as-sembled a group of relatives to kidnap the couple.

They then shot them both in the head and dumped their bod-ies in the canal.

The accused remain at large, said Waris, adding that raids are underway. Mohamed Azhar, an-other police offi cial, confi rmed the incident.

It was the latest in a string of “honour” killings, which are thought to claim around 1,000 lives every year in Pakistan.

AFPIslamabad

Second spell of showers to start next week

Having received the fi rst spell of pre-monsoon rains this week, Islama-

bad and adjoining areas will have showers next week, too.

According to Pakistan Mete-orological Department forecast-ing offi cer Muhammad Junaid, there is a likelihood of more pre-monsoon showers falling in dif-ferent parts of the country, es-pecially Islamabad, Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, during

the next week beginning today. He said upper Punjab and

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa would re-ceive rains coupled with strong winds from July 21 to July 24.

The weatherman said main-ly hot and dry weather would prevail in most parts of the country over the weekend but there were chances of rainfall in parts of Punjab and Khyber Pa-khtunkhwa, Azad Jammu and Kashmir and surrounding areas.

He said seasonal low lay over north Balochistan and adjoining areas with its trough extending south-eastward.

InternewsIslamabad

US aircraft carriers start drills off PhilippinesAFP Manila

Two US aircraft carriers have started exercises in the Philippine Sea, de-

fence offi cials said yesterday, as Washington’s close ally Manila faces growing pressure from Bei-jing in the South China Sea.

The US Pacifi c Command said the USS John C Stennis and USS Ronald Reagan, among the world’s largest warships, began conducting air defence drills, sea surveillance and long range strikes on Saturday.

The command said the opera-

tions marked America’s contin-ued presence in the Asia-Pacifi c as China expands its maritime strength and engages in massive island building activities in dis-puted waters.

“No other Navy can concen-trate this much combat power on one sea...It was truly im-pressive,” said US Rear Admiral Marcus Hitchcock, carrier strike group commander.

US Defence Secretary Ash-ton Carter visited the Stennis in April as it sailed off the Phil-ippines near the disputed area where China has expanded islets and reefs into islands capable of supporting airfi elds and other

installations. The Philippines has been improving its defence ties with the US, its longtime treaty ally and former colonial ruler, to help boost the ability of one of Asia’s weakest armed forces.

The US exercises synchro-nised the activities of over 12,000 sailors, 140 aircraft, six combatants and the two carriers, said Hitchcock.

The command said the drills were meant to promote free-dom of navigation and over-flight in the region’s airspace and waters.

“(This) has been a great op-portunity for us to train on how

we would operate multiple car-rier strike groups in a contested environment,” said US Rear Admiral John Alexander, an-other carrier strike group com-mander.

The US Navy said it has been conducting dual carrier strike group operations for several years in the Philippine Sea, the South China Sea and the East China Sea, where China has a separate dispute with Japan over small islands.

Philippine defence depart-ment spokesman Peter Galvez said the exercises showed that the US was “resolute” in fulfill-ing its often repeated “ironclad

commitment” to defend the Philippines.

“We welcome the strong co-operation and partnership we have with our friends and al-lies...in light of (the dispute) where our legitimate rights have been overstepped,” he said. The Philippines is await-ing a ruling from an inter-national arbitration tribunal against China’s claims to most of the South China Sea.

Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also have overlap-ping claims to the strategic waterway, through which pass some of the world’s most active shipping lanes.

Malaysian sailors ‘released after paying $2.9mn ransom’By Joel M Sy Egco Manila Times

Families and friends of four Malaysian sailors ab-ducted in April this year

by the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) have paid a ransom of P130mn (RM12mn), but only P100mn has reached the bandit group, highly placed sources said.

The missing amount raised suspicions the rebels may be in cahoots with government offi -cials from Malaysia and the Phil-ippines who may have shared the money among themselves.

According to two highly placed senior Philippine govern-ment offi cials, the payment of ransom was confi rmed by Ma-laysian Deputy Prime Minister

Ahmad Zahid Hamidi. Hamidi publicly admitted that RM12mn (roughly $2.9mn) was paid for the freedom of brothers, Wong Teck Kang, 31, and Teck Chii, 29; their cousin Johnny, 21; and co-worker Wong Hung Sing, 34.

The four, crew of a tugboat, were abducted off Sabah on April 1 by a group of armed men on a speedboat.

They were released in Jolo, Sulu, on June 7 after long-drawn negotiations with the Abu Sayyaf militants led by sub-commander Apo Mike.

“It’s now a burning issue in Malaysia.

The ransom payment is al-ready one of their headlines but, surprisingly, it has yet to reach the Philippine media’s attention.

We got information that the

ASG was incensed after learn-ing from news reports that the money was actually RM12mn, equivalent to P130mn but that only P100mn reached them,” one of the senior offi cials, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal, told Manila Times.

“The question is, where did the missing money go?” the source asked.

Rumours flew thick that the money was coursed through a special branch of the Malaysian police and given to local of-ficials in Sulu before ending in the hands of the ASG.

“From what we gathered, a local government official in Sulu was involved in the nego-tiations.

It is common knowledge in Malaysia that usually P30mn is

paid as ransom for any number of Malaysian victims in the past. The P130mn by far is the highest,” said the other source.

Malaysian media had re-ported that the Malaysian police vehemently denied claims that ransom was paid, claiming that the ASG was pressured to release the hos-tages because of a barter trade ban imposed by Malaysia on southern Philippines.

But late last week, the dep-uty Prime Minister said the RM12mn was not paid to the kidnappers but to “legally and religiously sanctioned” organisations and agencies in the Philippines.

The Malaysian official, however, did not identify which religious organisations

got the money.“I can confirm that the RM12mn that was handed over to the Special Branch was given as a form of contribution to certain organ-isations in the Philippines,” he told the media on Thursday.

According to a Manila Times source, there is cre-dence to allegations by Jolo Mayor Hussin Amin that some local officials, probably in-cluding the military, may have colluded with the ASG, which recently beheaded Canadian Robert Hall.

Another Canadian, John Ridsdel, was executed by the group in April when the group’s ransom demand was ignored.

“Why are they so passive? Obviously, there is complic-

ity here.Much of the answers could be provided by the governor of Sulu (Abdusakur Tan),” the source said.

The families of the four sail-ors had said they had raised RM12mn through donations and had handed the money to the Special Branch of the Ma-laysian police in Sandakan on May 24.

It was reported that RM9mn was donated by individuals, RM1mn came from the mort-gage made on pieces of prop-erty and the remaining RM2mn came from the shipping com-pany where the four kidnap victims worked.

Last Friday, Sabah Police Deputy Commissioner Awang Sahari EM Nadzeer was quoted by the Malaysian media as say-

ing that the police had recorded statements from the victims right after they arrived in Kota Kinabalu from Sandakan last Wednesday.

The Abu Sayyaf also kid-napped a number of Indonesian sailors early this year.

On March 26, the terror group snatched the 10 Indone-sian sailors off Borneo island.

The kidnap victims were re-leased on May 1 but it was not known if ransom was paid.

On April 15, the bandit group abducted four Indonesian sail-ors. The victims were released on May 11.

The Abu Sayyaf is still hold-ing several foreign and local hostages, including Hall’s girl-friend Maritess Flor and Nor-wegian Kjartan Sekkingstad.

Comelec faces criticism over engineer’s ‘escape’By Jaime R Pilapil Manila Times

The camp of Senator Fer-dinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr yesterday

blamed the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and the Bureau of Immigration for the “escape” of a Smartmatic en-gineer facing criminal charges in connection with the May 9 elections.

The Marcos camp had asked the Comelec to ask the Immi-gration bureau to issue a hold departure order (HDO) against all personnel of Smartmatic accused of violating the Cy-bercrime Law but the request was not granted.

Smartmatic is the technol-ogy provider to last month’s local and national polls.

The respondents were charged for their alleged in-volvement in unauthorised alteration of the script of the transparency server at the height of the transmission of votes just hours after voting closed.

At the preliminary inves-tigation of the case on Fri-day at the Manila Prosecu-tor’s Office, it was revealed that Smartmatic employee Mauricio Herrera had left the country and is now in his home country of Panama. Comelec Commissioner Ro-wena Guanzon had pushed for the issuance of an HDO against the respondents but Smartmatic said such action is unnecessary.

“That is what we do not un-derstand, and it is what they must explain,” said Abakada party list Rep.

Jonathan de la Cruz, Marcos political adviser and one of the complainants.

De la Cruz said until now, neither the Comelec nor the Bureau of Immigration had acted on their request for a

hold departure order or for the respondents to be included in the watch list of the bureau.

The other respondents in the case–Smartmatic per-sonnel Marlon Garcia, a Ven-ezuelan national and head of the technical support team; Elie Moreno, an Israeli na-tional and project director; and Neil Banigued, mem-ber of the technical support team; and Comelec IT ex-perts led by Rouie Penalba, Nelson Herrera and Frances Mae Gonzalez–were present at the proceedings and sub-mitted their respective coun-ter-affidavits.

The respondents were charged for violation of Sec-tion 4(a) of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 or Re-public Act 10175, which pro-hibits “intentionally altering computer data, without right and altering and interfering with the functioning of a com-puter and computer network by inputting, deleting and altering computer data and programme, without right or authority.”

De la Cruz pointed out that shortly after the unauthorised alteration of the script of the transparency server, the lead of Marcos over his closest rival started to taper at a uniform rate, which experts had said was statistically almost close to impossible.

Marcos is set to fi le an elec-tion protest before the end of the month.

De la Cruz expressed confi -dence that they have a strong case against the respondents.

“What is in question here is whether they had the au-thority to alter the system, the script.

Otherwise, the Cybercrime Law has been violated,” he said, noting that Garcia had already admitted altering the script without permission from the Comelec en banc.

This photo released yesterday by the US Navy shows a flight formation of Boeing F/A-18E and F Super Hornets from Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 5 and 9 above the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS John C Stennis (CVN-74) in the Philippine Sea.

Outgoing official wants death for illegal recruiters

Manila Times Manila

Outgoing Labour Sec-retary Rosalinda Baldoz urged Presi-

dent-elect Rodrigo Duterte to consider imposing death penalty on illegal recruiters victimising aspiring overseas Filipino workers (OFWs). She noted that such activi-ties should be regarded as an organised or heinous crime.

“Right now, the law al-ready provides the highest penalty of life imprisonment since it is considered as eco-nomic sabotage.

So considering illegal re-cruitment for death penalty could be considered,” Bal-doz said. Rule IV, Section 5 of Republic Act 10022 pro-

vides that the penalty of life imprisonment shall be im-posed if illegal recruitment constitutes economic sabo-tage, wherein a syndicate or a group of three persons or more conspired to commit the activity.

Duterte had said the death penalty should be consid-ered for criminals involved in illegal drugs, gun-for-hire syndicates, and for those who committed heinous crimes like rape and robbery with murder.

Under the law, illegal re-cruitment is defi ned as any act of canvassing, enlisting, contracting, transporting, utilising, hiring or procur-ing workers for employment abroad when undertaken by non-licensee or non-holder of authority.

Religious group to hold special prayer for new govtBy William B DepasupilManila Times

Manila Archbishop Cardinal Luis Anto-nio Tagle has issued

a special prayer for President-elect Rodrigo Duterte and his incoming government, to have the wisdom and courage to lead the country to prosperity under a culture of peace, justice and respect for human life.

Tagle came out with the “Oratio Imperata” for govern-ment offi cials over the weekend, which will be recited for nine consecutive days before the as-sumption into offi ce of Duterte and other offi cials on June 30.

The ‘Oratio Imperata’ or ob-ligatory prayer is an old Catholic tradition for a special intention, aside from those prescribed by rituals, that the Pope or bishop or a diocese may require to be said during Mass in all parishes.

Part of the prayer states: “Bless our leaders with true reverence for human life and unyielding opposition to the culture of death.”

It added: “Loving God, look with favour on those who rule with their authority over us. Through your loving hands, may prosperity and progress be achieved, may peace and har-mony be assured, may freedom and justice be preserved and may this nation be healed and

protected from harm through Christ. Amen.” Tagle issued a circular calling on all clergy, su-periors of religious communities and heads of secular institutes in the archdiocese of Manila to pray the Oratio Imperata during Masses from June 21-29.

Fr Reginald Malicdem, chan-cellor of the Manila archdiocese, said the call to prayer is also in accordance with a proposal of the Catholic Bishops’ Confer-ence of the Philippines (CBCP).

The CBCP and Duterte had clashed on a number of issues, particularly on the incoming leader’s plan to reimpose the death penalty and on extra-ju-dicial killings.

Duterte earlier lashed out at

the Catholic Church, branding it as the “most hypocritical” institution.A week before the presidential elections on May 9, CBCP president and Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Socrates Villegas called on Filipino voters to be discerning, warning them against candidates who are mor-ally and politically unstable.

Villegas did not name individ-uals but was obviously referring to Duterte, who made fun of Pope Francis during the campaign pe-riod. But after the elections, the CBCP assured Duterte and other elected offi cials of its full sup-port even as it vowed to continue with its mission to pass moral judgment if needed, including on matters related to politics.

Malacanang yesterday com-mended the intensified eff orts of law enforcers to combat illegal drugs, Manila Times reported. This developed after the Philippine Na-tional Police (PNP) reported that 68 drug suspects were killed this year, including 39 from January 1 to May 9. The PNP also said 29 drug suspects were killed from May 9 to June 15. “My understanding is that they reported on the statistics of their anti-drug operation for the whole year and it seems that what they were pointing out is that there was an almost equal number of those seized and killed in this period after the May elections compared to the first five months of 2016,” Presidential Communications Op-erations Off ice Secretary Herminio Coloma Jr said in an interview over state-run Radyo ng Bayan. “And ac-cording to the statement I saw, they themselves said this, it was part of their intensified campaign,” Coloma added.

Palace lauds intensified efforts against drugs

PRAISE


PHILIPPINES

SRI LANKA/BANGLADESH/NEPAL25


Militant behind Bangladesh killings shot dead in gunfi ghtPolice in Bangladesh yes-

terday shot dead an Is-lamist militant wanted

for the killings of several liberal bloggers and gay rights activ-ists, a senior offi cial said.

The militant, identifi ed as Sharif, one of the leaders of the banned group Ansar Ul-lah Bangla Team, took part in the killing of blogger Avijit Roy, US citizen of Bangla-deshi origin, in Dhaka last

year, police offi cial Abdul Baten said.

Sharif was also behind the killing of two gay rights ac-tivists in April, as well as four other bloggers and a publisher, the police offi cer told a news conference.

Bangladesh, a deeply reli-gious but moderate Muslim-majority country of 160mn people, is struggling to control attacks by Islamist groups on bloggers critical of extremism, atheists and religious minori-ties.

This month the government,

facing growing pressure from an international community alarmed by the spate of attacks, launched a crackdown across the country under which more than 11,000 people have been arrested.

A 19-year-old suspected Is-lamist militant was killed in a shootout on Saturday, days af-ter he critically wounded a Hin-du college teacher, police said.

Police offi cer Baten said Sharif was killed in a gunbattle that erupted following a raid on a militant hideout on the out-skirts of Dhaka.

“During the pre-dawn raid, our personnel had to open fi re after three suspected militants on a motorbike started fi ring at them,” he said, adding that Sharif died in the gunfi ght while two others fl ed.

Rights groups and opposi-tion parties say hundreds of in-nocent people have been taken into police custody as part of the crackdown.

Arms cache recovered: Bang-ladeshi police recovered a huge cache of arms and ammunition from a canal yesterday in capital Dhaka.

At least 108 pistols, 1,000 bullets, 189 magazines and 10 bayonets from the canal in Ut-tara of northern part of Dhaka were recovered, Xinhua news agency quoted Dhaka Metro-politan Police offi cial as saying.

The recovery came a day after Bangladesh’s week-long anti-militants drive ended.

Since the beginning of the drive on June 10, at least 194 suspected militants and 14,376 other alleged criminals have been arrested.

Among the total 194 mili-tants, 151 are members of

banned militant outfi t Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh or JMB.

JMB, campaigning for es-tablishment of Islamic rule in Bangladesh, carried out a series of bombings in 63 out of the country’s 64 districts, including capital Dhaka on August 17, 2005, leaving two people dead and 150 others injured.

Hundreds of JMB leaders and activists were rounded up while six top leaders of the group, in-cluding Shaikh Abdur Rahman, were hanged in 2007.

Reuters/IANSDhaka Iftar for

BNP chiefcancelled

An Iftar (fast-breaking) party, where BNP chair-person Khaleda Zia was

invited as the chief guest, at the capital’s Sonargaon Hotel yes-terday was cancelled following a court injunction.

A faction of National People’s Party (NPP), a component of the BNP-led 20-party alliance, was scheduled to arrange Iftar.

NPP chairman Fariduzzaman Farhad said the hotel authori-ties cancelled the booking for the Iftar at its ballroom, forcing them to call the programme off .

He said the hotel authorities revoked the booking on the or-ders of Ramna police station.

Ramna police station sub-inspector Ali Hossain, however, said they only executed a lower court injunction in this regard.

He said NPP is registered with the election commission in the name of Sheikh Shawkat Hossain Nilu.

As its rival group led by Farhad booked the hotel recently for the programme under the ban-ner of NPP, the Nilu-led fraction moved a Dhaka court which is-sued the injunction on the pro-gramme.

On July 21, 2014, the Farahd-led group expelled its chairman Nilu for attending an iftar hosted by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

Farhad, who was NPP secre-tary general, declared himself as its new chairman.

However, Nilu claimed that he earlier expelled Farhad from the party.

Later, the Nilu-led fraction quit the 20-party alliance.

By Mizan RahmanDhaka

Jamaat leader fi les plea against death sentence

Condemned war criminal Jamaat-e-Islami leader Mir Quasem Ali yester-

day fi led a review petition with the Supreme Court against its verdict upholding his death penalty for his crimes against humanity during the Libera-tion War in 1971.

Mir Ahmed bin Quasem, son of Ali, who submitted the review petition with the Supreme Court, said there were 14 grounds for seeking release of the convict in the war crimes case.

On June 6, the International Crimes Tribunal issued a death warrant for the Jamaat-e-Isla-mi leader hours after the Su-preme Court released the full text of its verdict upholding his death penalty.

On March 8, the Supreme Court upheld the death pen-alty for Ali for his crimes against humanity during the Liberation War.

The International Crimes Tribunal-2 in a verdict had sentenced Ali in the port city of Chittagong in 1971, to death on November 2, 2014.

On November 30, 2014, Ali fi led an appeal before the Su-preme Court challenging the death penalty.

Among the total 14 charges brought against Ali for war crimes, the tribunal convicted him on 10 counts of charges and acquitted him from four.

The 64-year-old top Jamaat-e-Islami fi nancier was president of the Chittagong city unit of the Islami Chhatra Sangha, the student wing of the party, till November 6, 1971.


Garment workers taking part in a rally demanding their unpaid wages in Dhaka yesterday.

Rally for unpaid wages

Khaleda Zia

Nepalese mothers of newborns battle for survival in hunt for Himalayan fungus

The green highland of Pu-pal valley located in the Nepalese district of Rukum

has turned into a snow-capped cordillera with only few colorful tents visible from base camp.

Continuous snowfall has been creating trouble for the daily activities of those who have gathered at an altitude of 4,500m in search of the valuable yarsagumba.

Among nearly 5,000 pickers who have arrived at Pupal this season, many are young moth-ers with new-born babies. De-spite the freezing conditions, the new mothers can be seen carrying their babies on their backs and trying their luck in the chase of the unique hybrid.

In detail, yarsagumba is a

small, somewhat fragile, mum-mifi ed body of what is known as the Himalayan bat moth cater-pillar, which has been taken over by a parasitic fungus. The spe-cies is known throughout Hima-layas as a powerful medicine and in some instances is worth more than its weigh in gold.

Goreni Pun, 21, is among the thousands who reached the highland a week ago with her husband and three-month-old baby boy.

“I am here to search for yar-sagumba with my three-month old son. I am worried if the snowfall continues, he will catch a cold and I will need to return. I don’t want to go back empty-handed. I want to make some money,” Pun told Xinhua.

She was in the valley last sea-son as well when she had earned only Rs30,000 ($300) in a pe-riod of a month. This year, Pun

wants to pick more pieces to make more money as one piece is being traded at above Rs1,000 ($10) but she knows that it’s hardly possible due to the health concerns of her new-born baby.

“Bringing my toddler to this isolated valley is not a choice but a necessity. I am worried about the health of my baby but at the same time, I need to support my husband in making money that will sustain our lives until the next season,” she said.

One week has already passed since the formal opening of the yarsagumba harvesting sea-son in Pupal, the highland re-nowned its caterpillar fungus-es in the world. Many young mothers with new-born are still on their way to the Hima-layan region, whereas many have already started harvest-ing; ignoring the bitterly cold temperature and their own

health conditions. Prem Maya Pun, 30, was car-

rying her four-month-old baby on her back with the support of a woolen scarf and searching for the yarsagumba in a high grassy meadow.

One hand holding a black umbrella to protect herself and baby from the snow, her other hand was digging the soil to confi rm if she had found the pe-culiar hybrid, which would have been her fi rst piece of the day.

“I reached here in four days from my village while carrying my infant in a “doko” (bamboo-made basket) and leading two other children. The journey was too diffi cult due to the steep trail and my poor health condition. But we didn’t have any other option,” an exhausted Pun said.

It takes a few days uphill trek to reach the Pupal valley of upper Rukum, with many base camps

on the way. The pickers have to face harsh weather, unpredict-able rainfall, altitude sickness and a myriad of other hardships throughout the journey.

The local medical camp at the Pupal base camp said that within two days of the opening of harvesting season, nearly a dozen pickers were forced back home due to altitude sickness.

Pun, who was married at the age of 16, is accompanying her husband Tejendra Pun in yar-sagumba harvesting with two children below 10 years old. Most of the people in the region have a minimum of three chil-dren, as many believe that fam-ily planning is not necessary.

Pun’s two sons are also as-sisting in searching for the yarsagumba as their schools have remained formally closed for two months due to the yar-sagumba season. She expects

that this time they will do a booming trade.

“This time, we are four pick-ers from the same family. I am hopeful that the amount earned from collecting and selling yar-sagumba will be suffi cient to clear all our debts,” she said.

One commonality among all the highlanders is that they take out loans to cover their house-hold expenses for a year and clear the debts once the yar-sagumba season is over.

For the next few weeks, families have set up temporary shelters at the base camps with tents, fi rewood and cooking materials and utensils, trans-ported by mules and horses.

They solely concentrate on the harvest of this most expensive biological resource to sustain their livelihoods in the isolated area, which has no electricity, mobile networks or internet service.

IANSRukum

Lankan refugee threatens suicideA Sri Lankan national lodged in the special refugee camp in Tiruchi district of India’s Tamil Nadu state has threatened to commit suicide along with his family, giving tense moments to State authorities. K Dhayabararaj has been demanding his release from the camp claiming that he is innocent and has no criminal case pending against him in Sri Lanka, The Hindu reported. Even as security agencies assured his family that the release of Dhayabararaj was pending with the government, the refugee fell ill and was rushed to the Government Hospital late evening. His condition was said to be stable. In March, Dhayabararaj alleged that his wife Udayakala and children were illegally detained for several months in a special quarantine camp at Rameswaram in Ramanathapuram district of the south Indian state. After the media report, the government ordered their release and allotted a house in the open camp in Mandapam.

Customs off icers accounting and testing the confiscated drugs in Colombo. Sri Lankan Customs seized cocaine worth over $12mn, which was declared as sugar from Brazil by a local importer who had worked on import over 40 years. The involved businesspersons have been arrested by police.

Drug worth over $12mn seized 22,335 Bangladeshis freed from UAE and Saudi jails in last fi ve years

A total of 22,335 Bangla-deshis were freed from jails in Saudi Arabia and

the United Arab Emirates in the last fi ve years, the parliament was told yesterday.

Of the Bangladeshi prison-ers in two member-states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 17,335 prisoners were released from Saudi jails while 5,000 from the United Arab Emirates prisons, Foreign Min-ister A H Mahmood Ali said

while replying to lawmakers’ queries.

He said around 50,000 Bang-ladeshis were freed from diff er-ent foreign jails over the last fi ve years.

As per the statistics placed in the parliament, the minister said a total of 49,503 Bangla-deshis were released from pris-ons in 20 countries in between 2012 and 2016.

The highest – 18,721 – Bang-ladeshis were released from Malaysian jails during the same period.

In an answer, the for-eign minister said that 2,025

Bangladeshi prisoners were released from Singapore, 1,982 were freed from Mexi-co, 875 from India, 728 from Turkey, 720 from Jordan, 650 from Lebanon, 440 from Iraq, 377 from Myanmar, 250 from Hong Kong and 241 from Pakistan.

Apart from this, 48 Bangladeshis were released from Nepal, 45 from Bru-nei, 35 from Belgium, 17 from Iran, nine from Korea, three from Libya and two from Morocco.

In the reply, the minister said Bangladesh missions help re-

lease Bangladeshis from foreign jails through negotiations with the governments of respective countries in some cases.

In reply to a query, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal told the parlia-ment that Bangladesh has extradition treaties with two countries – India and the UAE.

Bangladesh signed the agree-ment on the transfer of sen-tenced persons with the UAE in October 2014, he said. In 2010, Bangladesh signed such an agreement with India, added the home minister.


The latest report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the cancer agency of the World Health Organisation, that drinking very hot beverages is “probably carcinogenic to humans”, is interesting as well as alarming.

The review by a panel of global experts stated that drinking beverages at temperatures above 65 degrees Celsius – 149 degrees Fahrenheit – could cause people to develop cancer of their oesophagus, the eighth most common form of cancer worldwide.

Drinking tea, coff ee or other hot beverages at this temperature can cause signifi cant scald burns in the oesophagus when they are consumed and has previously been linked to an increased cancer risk in this part of the body.

Warm beverages are commonly served at, or above, this temperature in regions such as South America, the Middle East and East Africa – particularly when drinking teas.

The 65 degree Celsius temperature noted by the cancer research agency is enough to burn one’s tongue.

The fi ndings come after a group of 23 international scientists analysed all available data on the carcinogenicity of coff ee, and a range of other hot beverages, including tea. They decided that drinks consumed at very hot temperatures were linked to cancer of the oesophagus in humans.

The new classifi cation puts consuming very hot drinks in the same risk group as exposure to

substances such as lead, gasoline and exhaust fumes, which are also classifi ed as “possibly carcinogenic” by the agency.

Evidence for the fi ndings was limited, but studies in China, Iran, Turkey and South America found positive associations between the risk of this form of cancer and temperatures

at which drinks were consumed. Forms of tea, are typically drunk at extremely high temperatures, above 70 degrees Celsius in these regions, according to the agency.

“These results suggest that drinking very hot beverages is one probable cause of oesophageal cancer and that it is the temperature, rather than the drinks themselves, that appears to be responsible,” said Dr Christopher Wild, director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

Oesophageal cancer was responsible for approximately 400,000 recorded deaths worldwide in 2012, about 5% of all cancer deaths. Though smoking and drinking alcohol are major causes of oesophageal cancer, particularly in high-income countries, the majority of cases globally for this form of cancer occur in parts of Asia, South America and East Africa.

The Tea Advisory Panel in the UK has responded to the classifi cation by highlighting that tea is drunk at lower temperatures in the UK and that most people add milk. A study by UK burns doctors found that a cup of tea with 10 millilitres of milk cooled to less than 65 degrees Celsius within fi ve minutes.

In October, the WHO announced results from a report that linked people eating processed meat, such as sausages and ham, to cancer. Based on evidence from hundreds of studies, processed meat was classifi ed as carcinogenic to humans. Unprocessed red meat was classifi ed as probably carcinogenic.

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The 65 degree Celsius temperature noted by the cancer research agency is enough to burn one’s tongue

There is no substitute for pro-active diplomacy that physically takes the top diplomat places as opposed to ad hocism

By Kamran Rehmat Doha

Islamabad remains one of the world’s pre-eminent capitals for its geo-strategic gravitas. As one of a handful of declared

nuclear powers alone means it ultimately, retains business interest for the world, but there is a question mark over how much Islamabad itself is doing to advance those strategic interests.

The long absence of a full-time foreign minister is not helping Islamabad’s cause at all and a belated move – reported by Reuters last week – to hire lobbyists in Washington after an eight-year hiatus to fi ll up the diplomacy gaps and infl uence movers-and-shakers on the DC circuit is an acknowledgment of how far have US-Pak ties slipped, of late.

The pinch was also felt more recently when Pakistan’s largely security driven foreign policy goals were gingerly pursued even as its rivals moved at a frenetic pace to convince any leftover skeptics around the world for a place in the coveted 48-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group.

Sartaj Aziz, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s adviser on foreign aff airs, did make a few calls to key world capitals, but it was never going to be enough, and remains unlikely to deliver the results that would be a decent bet, if say, Islamabad had a fulltime foreign minister manning the beat.

To be sure, there’s just no substitute for pro-active diplomacy that physically takes the top diplomat places, or have these foreign capitals reach out to — as opposed to making do with poor ad hoc cousins.

Trepidation is apparent in Sharif’s decision to not appoint a full time foreign minister in his third stint as prime minister.

There is an interesting background to this of course, but whether it is also justifi able is a moot point.

It stems from his uneasy relationship with the powerful security establishment during his previous two aborted terms.

But it is the relatively more recent episode pertaining to how Shah Mehmood Qureshi served as foreign minister at a crucial juncture in the last government of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and his exit that so alarmed Sharif that he chose to keep the portfolio with himself upon assuming offi ce in June 2013.

Qureshi refused to oblige his own party (PPP) – insiders suggest, after a nod from the security establishment – in the infamous Raymond Davis case.

Davis, a covert CIA contractor, was arrested by the authorities in Lahore after he killed two Pakistanis on mere suspicion they were chasing him.

The PPP government wanted the American released citing (unfounded) diplomatic immunity (after the Obama administration pressured Islamabad). The Qureshi dissent so annoyed Asif Zardari, the-then president and also PPP co-chairman, that he resorted to a cabinet reshuffl e soon after a

negotiated settlement - reportedly, between the Americans and the Pakistan military – led to Davis’ eventual release.

In the reshuffl e, Qureshi was off ered the agriculture ministry, which he reckoned to be beneath his “stature”, and therefore, declined.

Weeks later, Qureshi, who was a major contender for the PM’s slot when the Zardari-led PPP returned to power in 2008, quit the party and joined the emerging opposition Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf of fi rebrand cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan. He is now its vice-chairman.

This episode, more than anything else, insiders say, made Sharif wary and as a consequence, he decided beforehand that he would not be appointing a foreign minister.

Initially, Sharif also held the defence portfolio before reluctantly, handing over charge to his confi dante Khawaja Asif in the winter of 2013.

Interestingly, Asif has found it diffi cult to endear himself to the security establishment because of his damning remarks against its role during General Parvez Musharraf’s reign.

The PM, however, does not seem to have the same level of trust when it comes to the foreign aff airs portfolio.

What bewilders the pundits is that Sartaj Aziz has been a foreign minister – and before that the fi nance minister – in Sharif’s earlier two terms.

But this time, the veteran with a known ambitionless mien, was not even given a ticket to the Senate – upper house of Pakistan’s bilateral legislature – which would have constitutionally, enabled him to take the full minister’s charge.

In what appeared to be a further dilution of whatever powers Aziz would have enjoyed, if at all, Tariq Fatemi, another aide, was also appointed special assistant to the PM on foreign aff airs, which predictably, sowed confusion and some heartburn to boot.

Riaz Khokhar, a much respected former foreign secretary, admitted

in a subsequent piece on the subject that this move created confusion at the Foreign Offi ce and even foreign delegates appeared clueless in whom to approach for what.

Even though Aziz did gain the upper hand in a match of wits with Fatemi, it still does not hold water since foreigners – in world capitals and delegates visiting Islamabad – remain sceptical of the pointman’s essential reach.

They cannot, of course, talk to the PM directly because of protocol even though they routinely make courtesy calls with the only leverage left with perhaps, a visiting US secretary of state.

With the PM also away for treatment and recuperation in Britain for weeks now – and rapid developments pregnant with far reaching repercussions at home, in the region and elsewhere on the globe – Islamabad was never more in need of a full time foreign minister as it is now.

The declining state of relations with the US, worrying border tensions with Afghanistan and the need for a viable diplomatic strategy to deal with the Nuclear Suppliers Group zeitgeist makes it incumbent upon Sharif to fi nd a quick solution.

Reluctant half measures are no longer an option.

Any apprehensions surrounding a “Qureshi” encore are, in eff ect, meaningless and counterproductive because nothing can be achieved by creating a vacuum.

In fact, the “vacancy” makes it diffi cult for Sharif to direct and exercise steady control over foreign policy.

While hiring lobbyists in DC may help plug some of the gaps that have allowed disenchantment to grow manifold in Washington in the last few months – to speak of just one of the most critical bilaterals in the international arena; it does not, on its own, fi ll the void at the Foreign Offi ce in Islamabad.

The writer is Community Editor.

Needed: a full-time foreign minister for Pakistan

Cox’s death raises hard questions for BritonsBy Gordon Brown Guardian News and Media

Jo Cox was more than an MP doing her duty for her constituents. Her

whole life was inspired by an idealism that is itself under attack.

I think I understood Jo Cox – and what she was all about – the minute I met and fi rst talked to her. She was a young woman proud of her Yorkshire working-class upbringing, who had overcome class and gender barriers to get into Cambridge University.

But she then found that Cambridge created barriers of its own – making her, as she said, all too conscious of how she spoke, which school she had gone to, and who her friends were.

It took her a large part of her 20s, she said, to recover from Cambridge, but that experience tested her, and then strengthened her, and made her the amazing person we came to know.

She was never to be afraid again, and her ambition was not to join the establishment but to change it – and to change it for people far less fortunate than herself.

Putting something back in was the key to her activism. Her regular constituency surgeries and local visits made her, in just a year, one of the country’s best-loved MPs.

And there were her journeys to the most dangerous war zones and the most famine-ridden corners of the Earth.

The pathbreaking work she, my wife Sarah and a host of dedicated women undertook together signifi cantly reduced the number of mothers dying in childbirth.

I knew Jo as the loving mother who would do anything for Cuillin (named after the Scottish mountains she loved) and Lejla (named after a Bosnian nurse who inspired her and her husband Brendan). Now the two girls must grow up with no mother there beside them: to take them through their teens, or to talk to when they fi nd partners.

But I do know they’ll grow up not only surrounded by love and proud of everything she achieved.

And the Jo who cut across the often suff ocating conventions of Westminster should be remembered as much more than the brilliant, eff ervescent and seemingly irrepressible MP who sought to help those in need.

Indeed she would not want to be remembered for that alone.

Her life was devoted to building a diff erent kind of world – one in which we owe more than a general responsibility to one another.

She wanted us to shout from the rooftops, as she said in her maiden speech, that there is much more that brings us together than drives us apart.

She believed our society’s diversity was our greatest strength.

She wanted us to do more than adhere to “a golden rule” – that we should love our neighbour – and actively seek equality, particularly for those who are dispossessed.

And as Brendan told us, she would not want us to confront hate with hate, but to conquer hate wherever it is found.

Jo’s death – and how it happened, and how we should honour her memory – raises diffi cult questions for all of us. We need to start answering them in what remains of this referendum campaign.

We, the British people, pride ourselves on being diff erent – that here in the UK we both reject the extremes of prejudice and are a nation built on tolerance. But as Jo would have been the fi rst to tell us, we have been witnessing a downward spiral in our political culture.

The business of politics has become more about the exploitation of fears

than the advancement of hope.Temperate language has given way

to the intemperate.And where there is latent prejudice,

we have seen it exploited to breed intolerance – and then too often intolerance has descended into hate.

The referendum was always about more than Europe; it was always about what kind of Britain we are and what we aspire to be.

But some have attempted to hijack a decision on the future of Britain in Europe and turn it into a vote on immigration, and then on immigrants and those who support immigrants.

Unless we strive for a culture of respect to replace a culture that does too little to challenge prejudice, we will be learning nothing from what happened to Jo.

We have to be honest that calling for tolerance, while welcome, is not enough. We cannot just revert back to a status quo still fi lled with prejudice and discrimination without recognising the hurt that has been done and the need to address these injustices head on.

Only by tackling the prejudice and hate that killed her can we do justice to the meaning of Jo Cox’s life.

Gordon Brown, former prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer of the United Kingdom, is UN special envoy for global education.

Why should you letyour cuppa cool down before you drink

The inspiring MP devoted her life to bringing people together

Underwhelming: Sartaz Aziz, who has been a foreign and finance minister in Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s two earlier terms, is now only adviser on foreign aff airs.

Tributes for Labour Party MP Jo Cox, who was shot dead in the street in northern England, are displayed on Parliament Square in London.

COMMENT

LettersImportance of adult education Dear Sir,

A good education, they say, is the greatest gift you can give yourself or anyone else. And education is more than learning to write and read; it also means to prepare yourself for the future. Education helps us to face the challenges of life. It is with the education alone that people can progress in all directions.

Hence the need for devising an adult education programme.

The consequences of illiteracy are many and harmful. As well as aff ecting illiterate individuals themselves in their daily lives and often jeopardising their future, this scourge has a signifi cant eff ect on society, both socially and economically.

It’s diffi cult for illiterate people to fi nd jobs and often poverty and stress lead them to take their own lives.

In Third World countries, many adults are not educated because when they were children their parents didn’t know the importance of schooling.

Good schooling is essential for every society and individual. A number of governments have launched schemes for adult education.

There are night schools for people who work during the day.

Regular camps and campaigns are

being run to spread the message of adult education in many countries.

The role by Qatar’s Reach Out To Asia (Rota) deserves appreciation in this context.

The Rota Adult English Literacy Programme, fi rst developed in 2009, aims to teach English to low-skilled migrant workers in Qatar.

The programme trains volunteers, mainly students, to become literacy trainers, who go on to deliver English literacy course to low-skilled migrant workers using Rota’s custom-designed English literacy curriculum.

The course is designed to help workers improve their English language skills as a means of enhancing their ability to achieve personal goals and improve life opportunities.

Zainab Khatooon PO Box 60094 Doha

Put a stop to honour killings

Dear Sir,

Hundreds of Pakistanis, most of them women and girls, are murdered every year by their own family members for damaging the so-called family’s honour. Most of the times their only fault would be choosing

their life partners against the consent of others in their families.

Although a group of Pakistani clerics has issued a religious ruling against honour killings, these incidents seem to be on the rise. Last month, a teenager, named Ambreen, was drugged and burnt alive for helping her friend to marry against the wishes of her parents.

A few days after that, a girl called Zeenat Bibi,16, was burnt alive by her mother for marrying a man of her own choice. This was followed by the murder of a couple in Lahore for marrying without their family’s consent. Mohamed Ashraf killed his daughter Saba and her husband Karamat Ali a day after the couple returned to Lahore’s Kahna area to smooth over rocky relations with the family, who disapproved of the marriage, according to police.

And the other day, a pregnant woman became the latest victim of the honour-killing.

Muqaddas Tawfeeq was eight months pregnant with her second child and just 22 years old when she was allegedly dragged away from a maternity checkup by her mother. According to Khalid Tawfeeq, the woman’s husband, she was taken from the clinic to her maternal home.

It was there that the pregnant woman became the victim of an honour killing, beaten and her throat ultimately slit by her brother, according to reports.

I appeal to the Pakistani government to stand fi rm and protect its people from these crimes against humanity. Stringent measures have to be taken by authorities. Exemplary punishments must be awarded to the culprits.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has vowed Pakistan will eradicate this “evil” practice after watching a fi lm based on the story of a rare survivor of an attempted honour killing. But it is sad to note that no fresh measures have been taken and legislations tabled so far.

M Khalid Kamal(Address supplied)

Please send usyour lettersBy e-mail [email protected] 44350474Or Post Letters to the EditorGulf TimesP O Box 2888Doha, Qatar

All letters, which are subject to editing, should have the name of the writer, address and phone number. The writer’s name and address may be withheld by request.

Gulf Times Monday, June 20, 2016 27

Live issues

Give something to get co-operation from othersBy Judi Light Hopson, Emma H Hopson and Ted Hagen Tribune News Service

Do you need to change your life for the better? Are you fed up with your routine, fi nances or employment?

To change something major, you will defi nitely need certain co-operation from people in your life. None of us can accomplish giant leaps all by ourselves.

Before you can return to school, take a new job, sell your home or move across the country, you will need support from those in your inner circle of family or friends. It helps to fi gure out how to enhance their life goals as well.

For example, a retired teacher we’ll call Jan, recently opened an antiques store. Jan’s biggest problem wasn’t getting her new enterprise underway.

The fi rst month, she exceeded her business expectations three times over. Her biggest problem was getting

her husband’s blessing to hire some cleaning help at home. We’ll call her husband John.

Jan knew everything would fl ow better in her life if she had just a few hours of household help each week. But, John kept lecturing Jan about why they couldn’t aff ord it.

John is recovering from an automobile accident that occurred six months ago, so his mobility is limited in doing housework.

“I explained to John that I could earn plenty of money in the antiques store, if I didn’t have to worry too much about the house. I promised him we would take a cruise every year with some of the store profi ts.”

Jan says that money has been super-tight since she and John both retired four years ago. “We still owe fi ve years on our mortgage, so John is right about not spending money frivolously,” says Jan.

“But, when he could see the connection between hiring household help and my having more energy to earn money in the coming years, he

gave his blessing to hire a cleaning lady.”

Tracey, a young nurse who recently divorced, needed babysitting from her retired parents.

“I have a 4-year-old with ongoing health challenges,” says Tracey. “Mom and Dad were not thrilled with the idea,” says Tracey. “My life fell apart just as my parents were financially ready for their early retirement in their mid-fifties. When they got news of my struggles, I could see their faces fall.”

Tracey, however, came up with a plan that her parents like.

She worked out an arrangement with her employer to work in focused time segments for the next two years.

“I am working for two straight weeks at a private clinic, followed by two weeks off ,” says Tracey.

“I talked Mom and Dad into babysitting for me while I work, but I take care of their house and horses while they go to their cabin for two weeks in the mountains. They’ll alternate having two weeks at home

with two weeks at the cabin for the next two years.”

Tracey lives rent-free in her parents’ guest cottage on the back of their property, so her limited salary covers her other expenses.

Her employer agreed to cover her family healthcare premiums, although she is not a full-time worker.

“As jumbled up as this sounds,” Tracey emphasises, “it’s working great so far. I don’t think my parents could enjoy their cabin as much if I wasn’t looking after their home,” says Tracey.

“My divorce challenge became a new game changer for all of us. But, if you look at the needs of those you desperately need help from, you can devise a plan that will please everyone involved in very unique ways.”

Judi Light Hopson is the executive director of the stress management website USA Wellness Cafe at www.usawellnesscafe.com Emma Hopson is an author and a nurse educator. Ted Hagen is a family psychologist.

In Ramadan, working hours are reduced by two hours each day with 36 hours being the most that can be worked in any given week

By Emma Higham and Yasser Shabbir Doha

The holy month of Ramadan began on June 6 this year and marks the beginning of the most signifi cant month

in the Islamic lunar calendar. For all Muslims, Ramadan presents a valuable opportunity for increased spiritual refl ection, self-improvement and heightened devotion. Ramadan is expected to continue for a period of either 29 or 30 days until the sighting of the new crescent moon which signals the announcement of Eid al-Fitr.

During this month, it is important to understand the changes in working practices which take place and the requirement for both employers and employees to adapt their respective employment obligations to accommodate the same.

Reduced working hours

The employment of the vast majority of workers in Qatar is governed by the provisions of Law No14 of 2004 (“Labour Law”). The Labour Law ordinarily provides for a working week of 48 hours per week over a six day week with eight working hours allotted to each day. In Ramadan, working hours are reduced by two hours each day with 36 hours being the most that can be worked in any given week.

It is important to note that the Labour Law does not draw a distinction between fasting

and non-fasting employees, the reduced working hours apply to all employees.

Working overtime

Employees are still able to work two hours per day overtime as necessary and the usual overtime rates apply during Ramadan.

Employees who would not normally get paid overtime because they are in a position of responsibility or otherwise will not be paid overtime during Ramadan.

Employers and employees which operate and work respectively a five-day week will be required to reduce their working hours accordingly.

Compliance

Compliance with Qatar laws and regulations during Ramadan in relation to reduced working hours is promoted and observed in the same way as it is for fasting.

The Labour Department of the Ministry of Administrative Development, Labour and Social Aff airs is the relevant government agency with ultimate regulation and enforcement responsibility; and, is the place for employers to refer their questions in relation to the correct Ramadan working policies and procedures in order to confi rm that such policies and procedures are compliant.

In particular, the hours for employees working shifts should be discussed and agreed in advance where possible.

Qatar Financial Centre

The Qatar Financial Centre (QFC) Employment Regulations No.10 of 2006 (“QFC Employment Regulations”) which governs the employment of all individuals

employed by the Qatar Financial Centre Authority (QFCA), the Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority (QFCRA) and the entities licensed and regulated by those authorities provide for reduced working hours for fasting employees only.

All other employees are required to work normal hours, whatever those hours are and have been agreed to be between the employer and the employee.

Where employees fast and work

normal hours, they will be permitted the usual rest breaks.

Government/public sector

Ramadan working hours for government or public sector employees are set by the Minister or his authorised representative in the respective Qatar ministries, quasi-government entities and other government agencies. The working hours of these organisations are

usually announced in advance of Ramadan.

Eid holidays

Eid al-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan and is celebrated as an offi cial public holiday in Qatar.

The Labour Law provides for a three day public holiday for Eid al-Fitr; however, the start date and duration of Eid holidays will often diff er depending on whether the employee

is employed in accordance with the provisions of the Labour Law, the QFC Employment Regulations or the Human Resources Law which governs the employment of public sector employees.

There are other laws which govern the start date and duration of Eid holidays which have not been considered for the purposes of this article.

The Human Resources Law provides that public holidays amongst other things will be determined by a Council of Ministers’ resolution.

Generally, employees whose employment is subject to the Human Resources Law enjoy longer holidays than other employees in Qatar.

Eid holidays in Qatar are offi cially announced on or shortly before they are due to begin.

This year public sector holidays for Eid al-Fitr are expected to start on or around July 6, 2016.

Finally, it is also important to note that if the Eid holidays fall on a Friday, Saturday or indeed any other public holiday, it is likely that a day either before or after will be allocated as a holiday day to make up for the loss.

In addition, if the circumstances of the work require the employee to work during Eid, the employee is required to be compensated for the rest day in accordance with the Labour Law.

If you have any questions in connection with this article or the legal issues it covers, please contact either Emma Higham [email protected] or Yasser Shabbir [email protected]

Note: Qatari Laws (save for those issued by the Qatar Financial Centre to regulate its own internal business) are issued in Arabic and there are no offi cial translations. For the purposes of drafting this advice, we have used our own translations and interpreted the same in the context of Qatari laws, regulations and current market practice.

Working practices during Ramadan and Eid

Three-day forecast

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Low : 34 C

High: 39 C

Low: 32 C

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Fishermen’s forecast

OFFSHORE DOHAWind: NW- 17-22/28 KTWaves: 4-7/9 Feet

INSHORE DOHAWind: NW-N 17-27/40 KTWaves: 1-3/4 Feet

High: 42 C

Low: 31 C

TUESDAY

Strong wind and high seas

Cloudy

Sunny

Max/min42/2744/2938/2947/3138/3138/3143/2836/23

Weather tomorrowSunnySunnySunnyCloudyCloudySunnySunnySunny

Max/min43/2944/2839/3146/2937/3138/3142/27

Max/min37/2531/2433/2623/1540/2317/0829/2632/2732/2732/2232/2433/2721/1432/2531/1934/2833/2022/1716/1232/2332/2617/1130/22

Weather tomorrowSunnySunnyS T StormsShowersSunnyM SunnyT StormsT StormsP CloudyCloudyS T StormsM SunnyP CloudyT StormsS T StormsP CloudyI T StormsShowersShowersP CloudyS T StormsP CloudyCloudy

34/22

Thousands have taken part in celebrations marking Garangao, the traditional festival that falls in the middle of the holy month of Ramadan, across the country. While children were seen going around diff erent neighbourhoods of Doha collecting candies and other Garangao goodies yesterday, a number of organisations have also held special festivities over the past few days to mark the occasion. Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, Aspire Zone Foundation, Souq Waqif and Katara —the Cultural Village have hosted Garangao celebrations in addition to several other organisations and corporate entities. A number of special activities and events were organised to mark the festival. During Garangao, children dress up in special clothes, carry a bag around their neck and go around singing songs and knocking at the doors of neighbours, while receiving nuts and candies from them. PICTURES: Jayan Orma, Noushad Thekkayil, Ram Chand

Thousands take part in Garangao celebrations


QATAR

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