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Rosberg tops Hamilton for pole in Singapore

BUSINESS | 18 SPORT | 23

Sanofi to reinforce its presence

in Qatar

SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016 • 16 DHUL HIJJA 1437 • Volume 21 • Number 6923 thepeninsulaqatar @peninsulaqatar @peninsula_qatar 2 Riyals

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs H E Ahmad bin Abdullah Al Mahmoud is received by Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro to the 17th Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit in Porlamar, Venezuela, yesterday.

Deputy PM attends NAM Summit

Demonstrators take part in a march calling for the British parliament to welcome refugees, in central London, yesterday. Around 20,000 marched on the streets demanding the government to do more to help refugees fleeing conflict and persecution. → See also page 13

March for refugees

Emir arrives in New YorkNEW YORK: Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani arrived in New York City, United States, last evening to take part in the 71st Ses-sion of the UN General Assembly. The Emir is accompanied by an offi-cial delegation.

By Sidi Mohamed

The Peninsula

DOHA: As heavy traffic is expected across the city today, with opening of schools and offices after the Eid Al Adha holidays, the authorities have intensified patrolling in the traffic hotspots.

Schools are also gearing up for the rush, as nearly 300,000 students will resume classes today, after the long summer break, marking the begin-ning of the new academic year.

Major Jabor Mohammed Rashid Odaiba, Assistant Director, Media and Traffic Awareness Department at the General Directorate of Traf-fic said that patrolling teams will be deployed in all key areas, especially places that have seen road renova-tions recently.

“We are expecting more rush on

the first day ( today), because many people are not familiar with the new intersections and diversions. Patrolling will focus on areas such as the newly opened Civil Defence intersection and Al Atti-yah intersection, to prevent traffic congestion and accidents,” Odaiba told The Peninsula yesterday.

Some parents who may have shifted their children to new schools and those who have just come back from vacation might not be aware of the new changes in traffic.

He identified Abu Hamour, Al Rayyan, and Bani Hajir as some of the areas which could see heavy traffic and will get special atten-tion by the patrolling team.

The General Directorate of Traffic will also conduct aware-ness programmes for drivers and supervisors of private school buses to ensure safety of children.

“ We will start the classes from tomorrow in their free hours in the morning. Experts will give guide-lines to avoid any untoward incidents during pick-up and drop- out. There are some drivers who drop children away from their houses, forcing them to walk or cross the road. This will not be allowed,” said Odaiba.

Sources from some private schools located in Abu Hamour area said that they have also made prep-arations to meet the traffic rush. The area houses more than a dozen pri-vate and international schools.

→ Continued on page 4

By Sachin Kumar

The Peninsula

DOHA: Those planning to pre-order iPhone 7 online, may have missed the bus. All the models of iPhone 7 plus are out of stock for online pre-order while just a few models of iPhone 7 are up for grab now in Qatar.

Although latest iPhones are not available for online booking, cus-tomers can still pre-order them on electronic showrooms and shops.

The craze for Apple’s new mod-els can be gauged from the fact that online booking was started couple of days ago. Ooredoo and Vodafone

had started taking pre-orders of iPhone 7 and 7 plus from customers from Friday.

“Vodafone’s customers were very quick to place their pre-orders for the latest iPhone 7 that is now out of stock,” Vodafone Qatar told The Peninsula. Ooredoo said it will arrange additional stock of iPhones in the coming days to meet custom-ers’ demand.

“Customers have been able to order their iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus from Ooredoo since Friday, 16 September and we have seen a strong early response. People are very excited about the opportu-nity to use this powerful phone on our powerful Ooredoo Supernet,”

An Ooredoo spokesperson told The Peninsula. “For customers who are encountering an ‘Out of Stock’ message, Ooredoo will be receiv-ing additional stock in the coming days, so we encourage them to check back later in the week,” added the spokesperson.

Many customers, who were una-ble to pre-book iPhones online, took to social media to express their frus-tration. “I was late 3 min, it took only 3 min to get out of stock ! restock please @OoredooQatar” tweeted Fadi Soufi on his twitter handle @Fadi_Soufi

However, there were many who are able to pre-order latest iPhones and they rushed to social media to

announce this feat. “Just ordered the #iPhone7Plus from @OoredooQatar!” tweeted Shiva Singh.

Those who want to pre-order iPhones can do it by visiting show-rooms or shops. “Now pre-order your iPhone 7 at iSpace Lagoona Mall and Al Maha center and have it on Sep-tember 23rd by midnight,” wrote iSpace on its facebook page.

The price of iPhone 7 starts with QR2,799 and goes up to QR3,999 for 7 plus 256GB version. The devices will officially go on sale in Qatar starting from September 24. The Cal-ifornia headquartered tech giant had released the next generation of the iPhone — the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus — on September 7.

By Sanaullah Ataullah

The Peninsula

DOHA: Gold and jewellery shops across the country are struggling to meet the deadline given by the Min-istry of Economy and Commerce to upgrade their sales invoices in a bid to protect the rights of customers.

The deadline is supposed to end today, which means the customers have the right to ask the invoices in the new format from shopkeep-ers starting from tomorrow. The new invoices will help buyers to accurately know the quantity and value of gemstones in gold orna-ments, along with other necessary information.

Many disputes occur between traders and customers over gem-stones while reselling ornaments as shopkeepers would be reluctant to count it as gold. The new invoice has a special column on trademark to identify the manufactures, whether local or international, which many traders used to hide from customers because the latter preferred some specific international brands, rather than local.

The revised invoice will have many more details in Arabic and English like making charges, unit price excluding making charges,

quantity of pure gold and the price of gold per gram on the date of trad-ing. Personal details of buyers with ID or passport number will also be included in the invoice.

A toll free number-16001- of the consumer protection depart-ment is also given at the bottom of the invoice with a note asking cus-tomers to call the department if they come cross any violation of the rules by the shops.

“ A sample of the new invoice has been circulated to the shops. We are required to take a printed copy to the ministry and get it approved”, a shopkeeper at Doha gold Souq told The Peninsula yesterday.

Some shopkeepers, however, hinted that implementation of the new invoices could be delayed slightly because many shops have not yet received the required approval. The ministry issued a decision to regulate sale of gold and jewellery, other precious met-als, stones and similar items in June and granted three months grace period starting from June 19.

Following the decision, the Con-sumer Protection and Combating Commercial Fraud at the Consumer Protection Department (CPD) met with representatives of gold shops and circulated among them a draft copy of the new invoice and explained the new regulations.

City gears up for heavy school rush

DOHA: Qatar has donated $10m for the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuber-culosis and Malaria during the fifth conference for the Fund held recently at Montreal city, Canada, in the pres-ence of several national leaders.

Minister of Public Health H E Dr Hanan Mohamed Al Kuwari said in her speech at the conference that “Qatar supports of eliminating the three diseases which are: AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by the year 2030”.

→ Continued on page 4

iPhone out of stock for online pre-booking

AP

JERUSALEM: The Israeli mili-tary sent troop reinforcements to a flashpoint West Bank area yesterday

following a weekend surge in Pales-tinian attacks that shattered weeks of relative calm. The military said a Palestinian pulled out a knife dur-ing a security check in the West Bank city of Hebron earlier yesterday and stabbed a soldier, prompting forces

to open fire and kill the attacker.The incident came a day after

what Israeli authorities said were several Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians, police and a soldier.

→ See also page 5

AFP

MOSCOW: More than 60 Syrian government soldiers were killed and dozens of others injured yes-terday in US-led coalition air strikes on an air base in the east of the war-torn country, the Russian army said.

“Warplanes from the inter-national anti-jihadist coalition carried out four air strikes today against Syrian forces surrounded by the Islamic State group in the Deir Ezzor air base,” the army said in a statement.

“Sixty-two Syrian soldiers were killed and a hundred oth-ers were injured in these strikes.”

The Russian military said two F-16 and two A-10 jets flew into Syrian air space from neighbour-ing Iraq to carry out the strikes.

“Straight after the coalition’s strikes, IS militants launched an offensive,” said the statement, adding that “fierce fighting against the terrorists” ensued nearby.

“If these strikes were due to an error in the target coor-dinates, that would be a direct consequence of the US’ refusal to coordinate with Russia its fight against the terrorist groups in Syria,” it said.

→ See also page 5

New sales invoice for gold likely from tomorrow

Qatar donates $10m to fight Aids

Israel boosts troops in West Bank

62 Syrian soldiers dead in US-led strikes: Russia

As nearly 300,000 students will resume classes today after the long summer break, the authorities have intensified patrolling in the traffic hotspots.

HOME 02 SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

The Peninsula

DOHA: The Hamad Medical Corpo-ration (HMC) yesterday launched an awareness campaign on heart health as heart attacks are one of the biggest causes of death in Qatar every year.

In 2015, more than 20,000 patients were admitted to the Heart Hospital due to heart attacks and other heart-related conditions.

The new campaign aims at reducing the number of heart-related illnesses in the country.

It will educate the public on how to recognise signs and symptoms of a heart attack and will also provide advice on what to do if a heart attack

is suspected. It will also educate the public on how to improve their heart heath by providing information about heart conditions and the importance of maintaining a healthy heart.

Dr Hanan Mohamed Al Kuwari,

the Minister of Public Health, said, “Cardiovascular disease adversely affects the lives of many people in our society. As well as being one of the leading causes of death, there are also significant numbers of people living with the complications caused by chronic heart conditions. Qatar’s public health sector has made great progress in recent years to improve care for people with heart conditions – but our aim is to do even more.”

Mohammad Al Naama, Executive Director and Deputy CEO of Heart Hospital, said, “A healthy heart is a critical factor in living a healthy life. HMC’s Heart Health campaign aims to reduce the incidence of heart-related illnesses in Qatar by encouraging people to live a healthier

lifestyle and recognise the conditions that can make them more suscepti-ble to heart problems.”

The campaign also aims to provide the public with advice on minimising their risk of experienc-ing heart-related problems.

Dr Nidal Asaad, Chairman of Cardiology at Heart Hospital, “Symp-toms such as acute chest pain with a sensation of pressure, tightness or squeezing in the chest, pain or discomfort in the arms, jaw and sometimes upper back, nau-sea, breathlessness and dizziness could all be symptoms of a heart attack. If you suspect a heart attack, you should call 999 for an ambu-lance immediately and the first aid advice given over the phone

should be followed until the ambu-lance arrives. Once the patient is on board, ambulance staff will monitor their heart rhythm all the way to the Heart Hospital, transmitting this to the awaiting physicians so they have an up-to-date picture of the patient’s condition upon arrival and can be treated immediately.”

The campaign will also educate people on eating a balanced diet and taking regular exercise. Advice peo-ple to recognize if they fall into the high risk category for heart prob-lems by having regular health checks. Diabetes, smoking, high blood pres-sure, obesity and inactivity are all risk factors and adults with diabe-tes are between two to four times more likely than others.

Dr. Al Kuwariarrives in RomeQNA

ROME: Cultural Adviser at the Emiri Diwan and the State of Qatar’s candidate for the post of the Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organi-zation (Unesco), H E Dr. Hamad bin Abdulaziz Al Kuwari, arrived in Rome yesterday.

During his visit, Dr Al Kuwari will meet with a number of Italian officials within the framework of the election campaign ‘Towards a New Start for Unesco.

Dr Al Kuwari will also receive a Honorary Doctorate in Cultural Heritage from the University of Rome Tor Vergata, where he will deliver a lecture on the role of culture in international relations tomorrow.

Qatar condemns blast at mosque in PakistanQNA

DOHA: The State of Qatar has condemned the suicide blast that targeted a mosque in Pakistan and left dozens dead and injured .

The Qatari Ministry of For-eign Affairs said in a statement that the State of Qatar condemns such criminal acts, which is con-trary to all humanitarian values, ethics, principles and religions.

The statement also affirmed Qatar’s solidarity with the Islamic republic of Pakistan.

The statement reiterated the State of Qatar’s stance rejecting violence and terrorism in all its forms and manifestations and called for concerted international efforts to eradicate this danger-ous scourge and to eliminate all its causes.

It then expressed its con-dolences to the victims and the people of Pakistan, wishing the injured a speedy recovery.

HMC launches campaign for a healthy heart

Families across Qatar take part in exciting treasure hunt at MIAThe Peninsula

DOHA: During this Eid-Al-Adha, children across Qatar took part in a fun and exciting treasure hunt at the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA).

This fun-filled family adventure, which was held on September 14, formed part of Qatar Museums’ and MIA’s continued efforts to provide dynamic activities that appeal to diverse communities, fostering an indigenous culture of creativity and innovation, a press release said.

Ninety children and families from across Qatar attended the treasure hunt. During the hunt, children were taken on a unique adventure through the museum, where they explored one of the world’s greatest collections

of Islamic Art. Prizes selected from the MIA gift shop were awarded to three lucky winners with the highest scores.

Khalid Yousef Al Ibrahim, Chief Strategic Planning Officer at Qatar Museums, said:

“At Qatar Museums, we strive to provide fun and educational activities for families and children to enjoy together, to broaden horizons and stimulate the creativity within the community.”

“Our programmes create lasting memories and lead to the development of imaginative, compassionate and engaged individuals. This event was a great success, and it was a pleasure to see this event resonate so well with the local community.”

Qatar Museums offers a

wide selection of educational programmes across the country all year around. In particular, MIA offers learning opportunities for people of all ages and backgrounds

to enjoy and take part in, including regular exhibition tours, art classes, calligraphy classes, and object handling workshops.

All activities and workshops aim

to strengthen family bonds, develop creativity, build confidence and improve communication skills. For more information, visit: http://www.qm.org.qa/en/education

In 2015, more than 20,000 patients were admitted to the Heart Hospital due to heart attacks and other heart-related conditions.

Children and families taking part in the treasure hunt at the Museum of Islamic Art.

Eid Al-Adha celebrations are still under way in various parts of Doha as a number of colourful activities were organised to entertain residents at Katara and Souq Waqif. Concerts and performances by artistes wowed the spectators at Al Mirqab Hotel (Souq Waqif) while Al Dossari Zoo remained the favourite destination of families and children.

HOME 03 SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

Beneficiaries receiving meat of sacrificial animals provided by the Sheikh Thani bin Abdullah Foundation for Humanitarian Services (RAF) on the third day of Eid Al-Adha in Doha. At least 600 families, mostly widows and orphans, benefited from the gesture.

RAF distributes meat

By Irfan Bukhari

The Peninsula

DOHA: Every sailor is a stranger on the shore, and for hundreds of expatriates working in boats lined up along the Corniche, Doha’s water-front promenade, life is a mixture of both excitement and gruelling rou-tine. And their life is different from the tourists they entertain every day.

“The decision to work on foreign shores was hard to take and that too at a tender age, but the employment I found here ultimately vindicated my decision,” said Das from Madras (now renamed as Chennai). But he still nos-talgically calls his city ‘Madras’.

He works on a wooden-boat called dhow. There are around 500 dhows parked along the Corniche in Doha. Every sunset brings tourists,

some new and many regular visitors, who love the mesmerising effects of seaside tranquility and charm. But for Das, life is nothing but ‘an insipid routine’ which he is spending for the last many years for the welfare of his two sons back in India.

He said goodbye to Chennai when

a wooden-boat manufacturer in Ker-ala told him about a job opportunity in Qatar. The job, the manufacturer said, was on a boat which he was set to sell to a Qatari national. The buyer had asked the manufacturer to help him find the manpower too from his country.

Most of the dhows parked at the Corniche were built in Kerala. Some of them were made from the wood brought from Myanmar (Burma) to India. Its cost varies from QR1m to QR4m depending upon size and amenities attached. Dhows may come in different sizes from 20 feet to 130

feet (lengthwise) but every customer has the liberty to order any sizes.

“Most of the dhows here are not the commercial ones. They are owned by Qatari nationals. They come off and on for dhow cruise with family or friends and during the rest of the time these boats are parked here with the staff waiting for own-ers’ arrival any time,” says Das.

Hundreds of people from India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh work in various capacities on dhows from captain to cleaner. When their hopes to find some job got punctured in their homelands, they migrated to Qatar. “Life is not very easy. At the same time, it is not very tough either. At least our families are liv-ing a dignified life back at home with our hard-earned money,” says Das, adding sometimes they have noth-ing to do except sit around for hours or days.

It is pertinent to mention here that such leisure is enjoyed only by the workers who are not employed by tourist-boat runners rather they are employees of individuals or compa-nies who use their personal dhows off and on.

The commercial wooden boats or tourist dhows which charge QR20 to QR50 for a brief cruise have a magnetic attraction for visitors. Sometimes, on special occasions, tourists reserve the entire dhow for the extended family or friends

or office colleagues for a long tour to some island, paying QR1,500 to QR2,500. It depends on the size of the dhow as well as the time a tour-ist wants to spend at sea.

The cost increases with other services as well.

Though these workers feel hesi-tant to open their hearts, a palpable sense of homesickness is always written on their otherwise smiling faces. “We get a two-month vaca-tion after two years,” says Hidayatul Islam, another dhow-man hailing from Bangladesh.

“We live in these boats day and night, cook our food here. Life is good but still we cannot declare it a home away from home. Home is home you know. At times, particularly in scorching summer days, intense heat wipes us out. Air conditioners are turned on whenever the owner comes,” Hidayatul Islam added.

The boatman from Bangladesh celebrated Eid Al Adha in Doha around 2500 miles away from his family. “The workers are paid accord-ing to their job specifications and experience,” says Hidayatul Islam. All the workers live like a family, sharing one another’s moments of joy and grief.

The deck of dhow, puffs of cool air of a spring night and cheerful company of friends are the max-imum luxury they need to live a happy life.

Life a gruelling routine for dhow workers

Dhow workers waiting for customers on the Corniche.

Every sunset brings tourists, some new and many regular visitors, who love the mesmerising effects of seaside tranquility and charm.

Qatar to host WAGGGS Arab ConferenceQNA

DOHA: The Ministry of Culture and Sports will host on Monday the 21st World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) Arab Regional Conference.

The Commissioner of Qatar Scouts and Guides Association Abdullah Mahmoud Abdullah said in a press statement yesterday that 16 Arab countries will par-ticipate in the conference along with representatives of the WAG-GGS. The conference, which aims at improving the Arab Girl Guides movement, will discuss the Girl Guides and Girl Scouts move-ment growth strategies and the achievement of the Arab Region of Girl Guides objectives, he said.

The three-day event will also approve the plans for assisting national organizations and dis-seminating the culture of Girl Guides movement in the Arab region, he added.

At the Conference, the mem-ber organizations will also elect the 2016-2019 Arab Regional Committee, and they are all encouraged to identify qual-ity candidates, including young women, to form a diverse selec-tion of competent nominees with the skills and experience required to set the strategic direction of the region.

QLC invites applications for leadership programmeTHe Peninsula

DOHA: Qatar Leadership Cen-tre (QLC) has started receiving applications for its 2017-2018 national leadership programs to qualified Qatari profession-als employed across all sectors.

Applications are open until October 31 for qualified Qataris via QLC’s website, www.qlc.org.qa.

The Centre’s three rigor-ous and rewarding educational programs empower partici-pants to serve their country in innovative and effective ways by developing their leadership abilities.

Qatar Leadership Centre offers three leadership programs such as the Executive Leaders Programme, the Rising Leaders Programme, and the Govern-ment Leaders Programme.

These programmes deliver a unique blend of train-ing modules, engagements with influential leaders and Learning Journeys to interna-tional centers of economy and politics.

QLC programs also provide participants the opportunity to

build networks with their con-temporaries across all industries as they grow their leadership capabilities.

“This is a critical time in Qatar’s journey as we near the achievement of the ultimate goals of Qatar National Vision 2030,” said Dr Abdulla bin Ali AlThani Board Member and Managing Director of QLC.

“Human capital is the indispensable resource that supports our society and econ-omy; enhancing the country’s talent is crucial to reach-ing sustainable development. Therefore we call on qualified Qatari professionals to apply to one of QLC’s programs in order to strengthen their leadership skills for the good of the coun-try,” he added.

In every QLC programme, participants receive the highest quality instruction from interna-tionally-recognized institutions, like Harvard Business School, HEC Paris and Cambridge Judge Business School.

Participants benefit from policy seminars with influen-tial national and international guest speakers, both in the pub-lic and private sectors.

QLC offers its participants

a chance to embark upon an international Learning Jour-ney to experience – first-hand – the impact of outstanding leadership.

They learn how innova-tion grows businesses from experts around the world. Past Learning Journeys have taken participants to the United States, the UK, Singa-pore, China, and South Korea.

QLC’S courses are of 12 months, in parallel with participants’ professional responsibilities.

Applicants are selected based on an extensive, merit-based evaluation process.

All applications that meet the minimum criteria are assessed holistically based on each applicant’s educational qualifications, professional experience, leadership poten-tial, and other criteria.

QLC was established to provide high quality leader-ship training to accomplished Qatari professionals across all sectors and foster sustainable development of human capi-tal in line with Qatar National Vision 2030. To date, QLC has 263 alumni and 115 current participants.

The Peninsula

DOHA: Sheikh Thani bin Abdullah Foundation for Humanitarian Serv-ices (RAF) has helped many Qatari citizens facing default on loan repay-ments to the tune of about QR6m.

The initiative came under the campaign “Khairana Le Ahl-ina” (our goodness for our people) launched by RAF to release loan defaulters from jail. The debt totaled QR5,964,879.

RAF officials approached the lenders, including banks, companies and individuals, and convinced them to reduce a portion of the amount with an assurance of the repayment of the remaining amount. As a result, about QR2m was waived.

The committee concerned at the RAF paid QR3,976,036, of which

some 50 percent, more than QR1.9m, was contributed by philanthropists as donations.

“Six types of people benefit-ted from the largesse of RAF, said Husain Aman Al Ali, Supervisor of the campaign.

“The committee for rescuing the loan defaulters conducted a study on the cases coming before the commit-tee seeking help. Priority was given to the people serving jail sentence for defaulting on repaying loan, followed by those issued verdict against them for jail in same cases. Defendants in loan default cases and those being threatened to cases for not repaying their loans were also helped”, said Al Ali.

“I have been working for sev-eral years in this field, so I can say that people did not fail to repay loans because of only low income. Lack of proper knowledge about the

management of projects was found to be the reason behind the most cases of load defaulting,” said Al Ali. In some cases, the loan defaulters were cheated because of a lack of aware-ness. Some of them did not conduct feasibility studies before making investments, so they faced huge losses.

The committee has taken into consideration some more points in approving the requests seeking repay-ments and preferred those having families to single loan defaulters. The women applicants were also given priority.

The committee worked hard in negotiating with lenders to drop some amounts, especially in the cases of big loans. Most of the lenders cooperated with negotiators and reduced a por-tion of the loan, said a release.

The committee still has dozens of requests waiting for financial help from the donors.

RAF helps citizens facingdefault on loan repayments

HOME/MIDEAST04 SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

extends its heartfelt condolencesto the bereaved family of

Mr Mobin Pandit (Former head of Local Section, The Peninsula)

who died in Mumbai, India, yesterday at 3am.

CONDOLENCE

We express our deep sorrow over the sad demise of our long-serving employee.

Minister of Municipality and Environment H E Mohammed bin Abdullah Al Rumaihi participated in the conference ‘Our Ocean, Our Future’ held recently at the US Foreign Ministry headquarters in Washington DC.

Minister attends conference

By Fazeena Saleem

The Peninsula

DOHA: Airfares are expected to drop by up to 50 percent to various Asian and European destinations beginning today, with the summer peak season coming to its close, say industry sources.

The unusually long peak season in Qatar started around June 25 and will be over by next week — from the day school vacation started till the end of September. Within this peak season, the first week of July saw the highest demand for air tickets.

Fares for outbound flights begin to drop from today and those for inbound flights will reduce by next week, according to travel industry sources. “It was a long season this year starting from Ramadan to the end of September. By now not many people are traveling out of Doha, but some are still returning from holi-days,” said a travel agent.

“Although schools are starting on Sunday (today), some families have decided to come back after few days, because the fares will be rela-tively low. So the inbound fares are

still slightly high,” he added. Asian expatriates preferred to

spend the Eid holidays and school summer breaks in their native coun-tries while some travel to Europe and the Far East. Most Qataris travel to European designations such as Lon-don, Berlin and Paris during holidays and this year many had chosen places like the Georgian capital Tbilisi and Bosnia as well.

“Many Qatari families travelled to European destinations. This year Tbilisi was a very popular destina-tion. By this week, all of them will be returning to Doha and fares for round trips will see a major fall by next week,” said a travel consultant.

According to industry sources, flights to destinations like the Sri Lankan capital Colombo, and South Indian cities, including Chennai and cities in Kerala, European destina-tions like London, Paris and Tbilisi would cost 50 percent less than the peak season fares.

A round trip to Colombo would cost an average QR 1500 from next week, QR1,700 to Kozhikode, QR 1,100 to Mumbai, 3,500 to London, QR700 to Dubai, and QR2,000 to Tblisi. During peak season a return trip to London in economy class cost a minimum QR5000, Dubai QR 1,580, Colombo QR2,500, Kozhikode QR2,950 and Mumbai QR2,600.

Although it was not a peak sea-son to Katmandu and Manila, the airfares saw a slight increase than usual days. Nepal peak season is starting from first week of Octo-ber and Manila’s peak season is in December and January.

Steep drop in airfares as peakseason ends

Qatar ‘will continuesupportingthe fund’→ Continued from

page 1

This donation is the first contribu-tion through Qatar Development Fund for the Global Fund, and Qatar will con-tinue in the next coming years sup-porting the Fund, she added.

“This is a part of Qatar’s duties, which represents more of supporting human and development programs and it has provided support to more than 100 coun-tries, and recently Qatar has renewed its commitment by providing $10m the next ten years to serve the human-itarian goals and development”, she said. The conference sought to collect $13bn to finance activities related to such diseases and treatment during the period from 2017 to 2019.

→ Continued from page 1“ We had sent all our drivers to their respective

routes to identify the possible traffic problems, like new diversions and road works so that they can avoid such spots as much as possible. We have already informed the parents of students using school buses about their pick-up time tomorrow to avoid any delays. The classes

New Karwa school buses ready for the new academic year.

‘Opening of major roads expected to ease traffic’

Within this peak season, the first week of July saw the highest demand for air tickets.

will start at 7am as usual,” A K Srivasthava, principlal of Birla Public School told this daily.

He said the school has received a circular from the Private Schools Office at the Ministry of Education and Higher Education with guidelines to ensure safety of children in school buses along with other general instructions.

Nargis Raza Ortho, principal of the Pakistan Educa-tion Center (PEC) said that the opening of some major roads in Abu Hamour after renovation is expected to ease the traffic in the area to a great extent.

“ We are trying our best from our side to ensure smooth flow of traffic in and around the campus, by deploying more security personnel and supervisors. The authorities are opening several new exit and entry points in the area and are creating more parking space to reduce traffic congestions,” said Raza.

She said the Private Schools Office had asked private schools to provide updated information about their stu-dents and teachers. The school currently has over 3,500 students on its rolls and has recruited new teachers for the new academic year.

AP

TEHRAN: Iran’s atomic agency is denying that the European Union has demanded full details of its manufacture of centrifuge parts.

A report on the Iranian state TV website quotes agency spokes-man Behrouz Kamalvandi as saying, “We have not received such a demand through official sources.”

The AP reported on Friday that the EU is demanding that Iran share with the U.N. full details of its manufacture of parts for machines that could be used to make the core of nuclear weap-ons. The draft statement seen by the AP will be delivered next week at a board meeting of the Inter-national Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran denies EU

demanded

centrifuge details

MIDDLE EAST 05SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

AFP

MOSCOW: The Russian military said yesterday the situation in Syria was getting worse, blaming rebels for stepping up attacks and saying the United States would be responsible for a breakdown of the ceasefire.

“The situation in Syria is worsen-ing,” said Russian General Vladimir Savchenko in a briefing shown on television. “In the past 24 hours, the number of attacks have risen sharply,” with 55 attacks on govern-ment positions and civilians, he said.

Twelve civilians died in the attacks, including two children and a Syrian Red Crescent volunteer.

He said Syrian rebels were using the ceasefire to regroup and “are planning to go on the offensive” and that “acts of terror are possi-ble in crucial districts of Aleppo,

Damascus, Tartus and Latakia.”“There are constant attacks,

failure by the illegal armed groups to uphold the ceasefire regime, and lack of a checkpoint in the eastern part of the Castello road controlled by insurgents does not permit us to ensure safe delivery of humanitarian aid to Aleppo,” said General Viktor Poznikhir.

Military officials lashed out at the United States in the strongest lan-guage yet over the ceasefire struck last week in Geneva, a last-ditch effort to stop the bloodshed in Syria which has so far lasted five days.

“Russia is exerting all possible effort to restrain government troops from response fire,” said Poznikhir.

“If the American side does not take the necessary measures to carry out its obligations... a breakdown of the ceasefire will be on the United States.”

Moscow accuses Washington of failing to separate the armed oppo-sition to President Bashar al-Assad from jihadist groups in Syria, and Savchenko, who heads the Russian ceasefire monitoring centre in Syria, said the US “evaded” planned tele-phone talks on Friday.

“Russia initiated extension of the ceasefire by 48 hours, yesterday it was again extended by 72 hours,” said Poznikhir. “The US and the so-called moderate groups they control have not met a single obligation they assumed in the framework of the Geneva agreement.”

AFP

CAIRO: An Egyptian court froze assets of five prominent human rights defenders and three non-gov-ernmental organisations yesterday, provoking fears of an intensified crackdown on civil society.

They had been under renewed investigation for allegedly receiving foreign funds in a case that stretches back to 2011 and had caused a dip-lomatic crisis between Washington and Cairo.

R ights groups quick ly denounced the decision, with Amnesty International calling it “a shameless ploy to silence human rights activism”.

The rights activists are Hos-sam Bahgat, who founded the leading Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights NGO, Gamal Eid, Bahey Al Din Hassan, Mostafa Al Hassan and Abdel Hafez Al Tayel.

The NGOs are Bahey el-Din Hassan’s Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, Mostafa Al Hassan’s Hisham Mubarak Law Centre and the Egyptian Centre for the Right to Education.

The court’s decision is a “rep-rehensible blow to Egypt’s human rights movement”, the London-based Amnesty said in a statement.

“These individuals may subse-quently face prosecution and prison terms of up to life, equivalent to 25 years in Egypt.”

In 2011, Egypt provoked inter-national condemnation when it raided Egyptian and Western NGOs in Cairo on suspicion of illegal financing, including the US National Democratic Institute and the Inter-national Republican Institute.

Police also sought to arrest NGO staff members at the time, forcing 13 foreigners including six Americans to take refuge at the US embassy in Cairo until the Egyptian authori-ties relented and allowed them to leave Egypt.

Yesterday’s decision came ahead of a visit by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a former army chief whose government is accused by rights groups of violations, to New York for United Nations General Assem-bly on September 20.

The initial probe into foreign funding had been launched amid a crackdown against civil society groups following the 18-day upris-ing that ousted president Hosni Mubarak in early 2011 and left the military in charge.

Officials and security services aired suspicions that the civil soci-ety groups were plotting against the country, at a time of heightened suspicion in Egypt against Western countries.

Russia warns US; says Syria crisis worsening

Anatolia

ANBAR, IRAQ: Iraqi refugees have started to return to the western city of Fallujah, which was recaptured from the Daesh group in May.

“Around 500 refugee families were moved to the center of Fallujah,” Anbar provicial chief Sabah Kahrout said.

He said the returning families will be settled in the city’s eastern and central neigh-borhoods after clearing mines from these areas.

Kahrout said the returning families were the first batch of Iraqi refugees, who would go back to their areas.

“More families will return to their areas in the near future,” he said.

Iraq has suffered a devastating security vacuum since mid-2014, when Daesh captured Mosul — the country’s second largest city — and overran large swathes of territory in the northern and western parts of the country.

According to the UN, more than 3.4 million people — more than half of them children — are now internally displaced in Iraq.

Egypt freezes assets of rights defenders & NGOs

AFP

ADEN: Yemeni pro-government forces battled Shia Houthi rebels on two fronts yesterday, includ-ing east of Taez where they are struggling to break a siege of the southwestern city.

“Five rebels and one of our soldiers were killed in the fighting” near Taez, a local pro-government commander, Fadl Hassan,said. He said loyal-ist forces drove rebels and their allies from five hills in the Shar-ija region on the borders of Taez and Lahj provinces. “We are try-ing to break the siege (imposed by rebels) of Taez,” Hassan said, add-ing that pro-government forces launched the operation from the eastern side of the city.

Forces loyal to the embat-tled government of President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi have struggled since the end of August to break the siege of Taez which the rebels have surrounded for more than a year.

Pro-government forces also clashed with rebels east of the Yemeni capital, with fighting con-centrated in the strategic Sarwah region leading to Sana’a, mili-tary sources said. The Houthis, who seized Sana’a two years ago, were putting up fierce resist-ance despite also coming under attack from Saudi-led coalition air strikes, the sources added.

Witnesses also reported air strikes targeting rebel positions in Nahm northeast of Sanaa, and in the coastal city of Hodeida to the west. The coalition intervened in Yemen in March 2015 to help shore up Hadi’s government.

Yemen loyalists battle rebels on two fronts

500 refugee families return to Fallujah

AFP

WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama will meet his Iraqi counterpart at the United Nations next week, US officials said on Friday, amid mounting preparations to seize control of Mosul from the Islamic State group.

Top Obama aide Ben Rhodes said Obama would meet Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi on the margins of the UN Gen-eral Assembly tomorrow.

“The two leaders will have a chance to check in on the coun-ter-ISIL campaign,” said Rhodes, using another acronym for the Islamic State group. “Also the

campaign to liberate Mosul.”The United States deployed

an additional 400 troops to Iraq earlier this month as local forces prepare for an assault on Iraq’s second city.

Allied forces have been car-rying out “shaping operations” around the northern city, work-ing on an airfield near the town of Qayyarah that will provide a staging area and striking sus-pected IS chemical weapons facilities nearby.

Jihadists seized the city in 2014 and it is now their last major stronghold in Iraq. The meeting between Obama and Abadi is also likely to offer support for the Iraqi leader, who faces growing internal

challenges. Cleric Muqtada Al Sadr has been flexing his con-siderable political muscle, mustering thousands-strong demonstrations to demand gov-ernment reforms.

During the UN meeting Obama is also expected to hold bilateral meetings with Nigerian President Muham-madu Buhari and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.

Rhodes said there were no plans to hold a rescheduled meeting with the Philippines’s leader Rodrigo Duterte. Obama cancelled a planned meeting with him in Laos earlier this month after the firebrand lead-er’s barbed remarks insulting the US president.

Obama to meet Abadi as Mosul offensive looms

AFP

AMMAN/HEBRON: Jordan condemned the killing of one of its nationals by an Israeli policewoman he alleg-edly attacked in east Jerusalem, calling it a barbaric act.

Israeli police said that the officer shot dead 28-year-old Saeed Amro on Friday after he tried to stab her at the Damascus Gate, the main entrance used by Pales-tinians to enter Jerusalem’s Old City.

A Palestinian stabbed an Israeli soldier yesterday in the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron before being shot dead, the army said, in the such fourth attack in under 24 hours.

A military statement said the attacker drew a knife during a routine security check in Hebron’s Tel Rume-ida neighbourhood, wounding the soldier.

“In response to the immediate threat, forces at the scene shot the assailant, resulting in his death,” the state-ment said. The Palestinian health ministry named the man killed as Hatem Al Shaloudi, 25.

He was a resident of Tel Rumeida, as was 16-year-old Mohammed Rajabi, who was shot dead during an attack on Friday.

Rajabi was one of three alleged assailants killed while carrying out attacks on Israelis, two in and around occu-pied Hebron and one in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem.

Another man was killed on Thursday, also in Hebron, after allegedly trying to evade arrest by the Israeli military.

Amman condemns Israel killing of Jordanian

AFP

DOUMA, SYRIA: Syrian children love playgrounds like kids all over the world but in rebel-held towns near Damascus swing sets are made of spent rockets and jungle gyms are tucked underground.

Eastern Ghouta, a besieged opposition stronghold east of Damascus, has been battered by regime air strikes and shelling since Syria’s conflict erupted more than five years ago.

Since then, children have grown accustomed to warnings not to play

outside — but the grown-ups are finding creative ways to make sure kids can still have fun.

In Douma, Eastern Ghouta’s largest town, children sprint towards red-and-black swings made of rockets which government MiG fighters jets once rained on their hometown.

The sets were made by Abu Ali Al Bitar, a 40-year-old house painter who collected dozens of rocket debris, welded them into swings and then gave them a fresh coat of paint.

“At first, my neighbours thought I was crazy. They didn’t realise I was going to make children’s toys out of this,” he tells while sitting next to

one of his creations. “It was a huge surprise for everyone when I came outside my shop one day carrying a swing.”

Fellow townspeople urged him to build more sets, and farmers brought him rocket and shell debris that had crashed on their lands on the outskirts of Douma.

“This is how we made the impossible, possible — that some-thing used to kill can be turned into a toy that makes children happy,” said Abu Ali. A dozen children clam-ber onto swing sets nearby, taking advantage of clear skies after a frag-ile truce brought a lull in air strikes and shelling on the town.

Besieged Syrian kids play with swings made of rockets

A Syrian boy plays in an underground play area built to protect children from shelling in the rebel-held town of Arbin, on the outskirts of capital Damascus, yesterday.

In the past 24 hours, the number of attacks have risen sharply, with 55 attacks on government positions and civilians, says Russian General.

Reuters

JUBA: South Sudan’s government said it was deeply concerned by the release of a report by US group Sentry alleging corruption among top officials, saying such allegations would damage peace efforts in a nation which has been riven by war. Sentry, a group co-founded by actor George Clooney and activist John Prendergast, said South Sudan’s leaders on both sides of the civil war and their families had profited from the conflict.

“This sort of allegation can only jeopardise the pursuit of peace and stability in my country where mutual distrust and lack of authority are key factors of violence,” a government spokesman said in a statement, expressing “deep concern.”

“We will make sure that each of those allegations are challenged with a counter forensic and legal analysis of the shortcomings of this report,” Ateny Wek Ateny, spokesman for the president’s office, said. Sentry said the report followed a two-year undercover investigation to look into the financing of African conflicts. It was released as the United Nations is threatening to impose an arms embargo against South Sudan’s government.

US group’s corruption allegations damage peace efforts: South Sudan

Islamic Jihad Movement supporters stage a march to support Palestinians in Israeli jails in Jenin, West Bank, yesterday.

ASIA / AFRICA06 SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

NIAMEY: Soldiers from Niger and Chad have killed 38 Boko Haram fighters during operations that followed attacks by the Nigerian Islam-ist group on two border towns in southeastern Niger earlier this week, Niger’s army said on Saturday.

Two soldiers from the bilateral force were lightly wounded in the operation, launched after clashes in the village of Toumour, near Lake Chad and the Nigerian border, on Monday.

The Nigerien and Chadian forces also seized large quantities of weapons and ammu-nition, according to the army statement.

38 Boko Haram

fighters die

in clashes

Green protest

Buhari ‘plagiarised’ line from Obama’s speechReuters

ABUJA: Nigeria’s President Muham-madu Buhari plagiarised quotes from US President Barack Obama in a speech promising change in the West African country, his office said on Friday.

Last week, Buhari gave a speech to launch a campaign titled ‘Change begins with me,’ part of his credo to end graft in Africa’s biggest economy which is gripped by mismanagement and poverty despite sitting on vast energy reserves.

But one paragraph in the speech

urging Nigerians not to fall back ‘on the same partisanship, pettiness and immaturity that have poisoned our country so long’ was copied from Obama’s victory speech after his election in November 2008.

“It was observed that the

similarities between a paragraph in President Obama’s 2008 vic-tory speech and what President Buhari read in paragraph nine of the 16-paragraph address... are too close to be passed as coincidence,” Buhari’s office said in a statement.

“President Buhari urges Nige-rians to look beyond this incident and focus on the message of change which the country needs in order to restore our cherished value systems,” the office said after a Twitter user joked about the incident.

“Those responsible” would be punished, the office said, adding that a deputy director in the presidency had admitted the mistake.

AFP

HARARE: Riot police were expected to be out in force in Zimbabwe yes-terday after protesters planned fresh demonstrations calling for electoral reform and the resignation of Presi-dent Robert Mugabe.

Police this week issued an order barring protests in the capital Harare, but campaigners on Friday vowed to challenge the ban through the courts, which overturned a

similar order earlier this month.A coalition of opposition par-

ties under the banner of the National Electoral Reform Agenda (NERA) is demanding reform ahead of the 2018 election, when Mugabe, now aged 92, plans to stand again.

Mugabe has vowed a crack-down on dissent and blasted judges for “reckless” rulings allowing pre-vious demonstrations.

Promise Mkwananzi, spokesman for the protest group Tajamuka, said they would march on Saturday (yes-terday), despite the police order.

“The constitution and the high court allow for peaceful demonstra-tions,” he said.

“The police are promoting law-lessness in the country by banning peaceful demonstrations.”

Two weeks ago, police detained scores of people including activists and bystanders following violent protests in the capital.

“Mugabe has vowed to end the wave of recent protests, last week-end warning marchers that they were “playing a dangerous game”.

Harare police on alert for protests

AFP

COLOMBO: Brawling elephants triggered a stampede at a temple in southern Sri Lanka which left one woman dead and a dozen wounded, police said yesterday.

A mahout tried to separate the two animals by poking one with a sharp-edged hook, causing the ele-phant to run away in pain late Friday, a police official said.

“The elephant did not harm any-one, it was trying to get away from the mahout, but people panicked and started running,” a local police

official in the area said recently.The Hindu temple in Ratnapura,

100km south of Colombo, was packed with devotees ahead of an annual pageant.

A 60-year-old woman died of a heart attack following the incident, while about a dozen others were hos-pitalised for minor injuries suffered

in the stampede, the police official said. “The situation was quickly brought under control.”

Elephants are considered sacred in Sri Lanka and domesticated ani-mals are frequently paraded at temples during Buddhist and Hindu festivals.

The country›s wild elephant

population had dropped to 6,000, from some 7,379 five years ago, largely due to farmers encroaching on their natural habitat.

The number of domesticated elephants has also dropped consid-erably as the authorities no longer grant permits for the capture of ani-mals from the wild.

Riots erupt in

DR Congo’s

oppn stronghold

DAKAR: Protesters calling for DR Congo Pres-ident Joseph Kabila to resign and hold elections burned tyres on Fri-day in the streets of the opposition stronghold of Lubumbashi, and police fired tear gas to disperse them, UN-backed Radio Okapi reported.

The radio station reported that police had tried to break up the evening demonstration by local members of the UDPS, the Central African country’s main opposi-tion party, led by newly returned exile Etienne Tshisekedi.

Kabila’s opponents accuse him of stalling the vote to cling to power, though his supporters deny the charge.

Tutu readmitted to hospitalAFP

JOHANNESBURG: South Afri-can retired archbishop and anti-apartheid icon Desmond Tutu was readmitted to hospi-tal yesterday in Cape Town just days after being discharged fol-lowing surgery, his family said.

Tutu, 84, underwent a “minor surgical procedure” last week to determine the cause of a “recurring infection”.

He wa s d ischa rged on Wednesday, but was

hospitalised again three days later.

“The Archbishop was read-mitted yesterday as a precaution after his surgical wound had shown signs of infection,” said a statement by his family.

His wife Leah Tutu said she was “very grateful for the ongo-ing prayers and support”.

The Nobel Peace laureate was last year hospitalised over a persistent infection which was a result of the prostate cancer treatment he has been receiv-ing for nearly 20 years.

DR Congo adviser on ‘pleading mission’ to US not to impose sanctionsReuters

WASHINGTON: A senior adviser to Democratic Republic of Congo Pres-ident Joseph Kabila said on Friday he was on a “pleading mission” to Washington to press US officials to support talks between the govern-ment and opposition on setting up new elections and not to impose sanctions that could hurt the proc-ess.

In an interview, Barnabe Kikaya said he had updated US officials and lawmakers on talks under way to form an interim government in Congo and insisted that Kabila was not seeking to extend his term.

“I’m in a pleading mission because there are two resolutions that were pending in the House to impose sanctions on Congolese offi-cials,” Kikaya said.

“My mission is to plead with American officials and to prove to them that sanctions are not a solution to help us resolve our problems.”

Washington has threatened sanctions against political figures over delays in the vote that had been set for November.

The mining-rich country has never had a peaceful transition of power and the delay has led to pro-tests and arrests.

Most major opposition parties are boycotting the talks, saying they are part of a plan by Kabila to jus-tify staying in power beyond the end of his mandate in December, when he is due to step down under the constitution.

The opposition has insisted that presidential elections should be held first, but the government has

argued for local elections to take place before.

Under a compromise worked out between the sides, presidential and legislative elections would occur simultaneously provided there was funding for it, Kikaya said.

A senior State Department offi-cial said the United States supported talks that included the opposition and civil society, but there was still a lack of clarity over precisely what the agreement would include.

“We want to see what it would say,” the official said recently, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“We want to make sure that the Congolese government includes political opposition, civil society in these discussions.”

The United States insisted again on Friday it was ready to consider additional targeted sanctions against individuals who sought to undermine DR Congo’s demo-cratic institutions and the election process.

“We’re ready to consider tar-geted sanctions under those circumstances,” the official said, adding: “It is something we’re exploring and looking at.”

Kikaya denied that Kabila was seeking to stay in power and pushed back at accusations that the delay in the election was “purposefully engineered.”

The constitution “means a lot to him and he will not violate it,” said Kikaya, “And he has said it time and again.”

Asked why Kabila had not pub-licly stated he was not seeking to extend his term, Kikaya said: “He has made it clear at every opportu-nity. It is written in the constitution that he can’t and the constitution hasn’t changed.”

One dead after Sri Lanka temple elephants spark stampede

The president urges Nigerians to look beyond the incident and focus on the message of change.

Protesters hold placards as Zimbabwe opposition supporters under the National Electoral Reform coalition march through the streets of Zimbabwe’s second largest city Bulawayo to demand electoral reforms, yesterday.

AFP

LIBREVILLE: An Internet cur-few and social media blackout has sparked outrage and wreaked havoc on businesses in oil-rich Gabon, as citizens keenly await a pivotal rul-ing challenging President Ali Bongo’s contested re-election.

“We are losing a lot of money,” fumed Steeve Ndong, who oversees the website of a mobile telephone company.

“The figures of the page I look after are in the red. We are now down

to 600 hits a day against between 6,000 and 10,000 normally,” he said.

“It has lasted for 15 days,” added Raoul, a doctor in the seaside capital Libreville, adding “(and) we speak of democracy.”

Internet connections were par-tially restored on Thursday between six in the morning until 8 at night and then cut off later.

Social media such as Twitter, Facebook and What’sApp remain blocked.

Gabon, which has been ruled by the Bongo family for nearly 50 years, has been wracked by violent pro-tests after the sitting president was

declared the winner of the August 27 polls.

Bongo’s rival Jean Ping, a veteran diplomat, took his challenge of the result -- which gave Bongo a win-ning margin of a mere 6,000 votes -- to the country’s top court.

Riots broke out following the August 31 announcement of the results, the National Assembly was torched and there were attacks on Ping’s headquarters. Bongo meanwhile claimed that Ping had instigated the violence.

Ping has asked for a recount in the ruling family’s stronghold of Haut-Ogooue province, where Bongo

won more than 95% of votes on a reported turnout of more than 99%.

Ping says more than 50 people were killed in post-electoral vio-lence, but the interior ministry says the toll was three dead.

Meanwhile, anxious Gabonese awaiting news of the Constitutional Court’s decision on Ping’s appeal now only have recourse to the country’s tightly-controlled state media and television.

“To know what’s really happen-ing we have to wait for the evening news on international TV channels,” said a student who identified herself as only Marie.

Members of the Maasai community and conservationists demonstrate on Langata road, along the eastern boundary of the Nairobi National Park, over the planned construction of the Standard Gauge Railway.

Gabon imposes nationwide Internet blackout

ASIA / PHILIPPINES 07SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

HANOI: Vietnam has issued an arrest warrant for a scandal-hit sen-ior official accused of mismanaging a unit of government-run oil giant, the latest executive tar-geted in Hanoi’s attempt to clean up the corrupt state sector.

Trinh Xuan Thanh, one of the highest ranking officials to be sought by police in the communist nation in recent years, has not been seen in public since he left the country last month, according to state-run media.

His arrest warrant came just one day after four of his former col-leagues were arrested.

Vietnam hunts

former state-oil

executive

Religious festival

Abu Sayyaf frees Norwegian hostage

AFP

MANILA: A Norwegian held hostage by a notorious kidnapping-for-ran-som gang in the strife-torn southern Philippines was released yesterday after a year in captivity and will soon be handed over to authori-ties, officials said.

Kjartan Sekkingstad was abducted by Abu Sayyaf from a high-end tourist resort in Sep-tember 2015, alongside a Filipina woman, who has already been freed, and two Canadian men who were later beheaded by the Islamic

militant group.Sekkingstad was released by

Abu Sayyaf yesterday and handed to another Muslim rebel group in Sulu, a remote archipelago known as a militant hideout, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s peace advisor said.

“He is now released by captors and (is) staying overnight with Nur Misuari’s camp... due to heavy rain,” Jesus Dureza said, referring to the founder of the Muslim rebel group Moro National Liberation Front.

The MNLF are currently in peace talks with the govern-ment and have been working with authorities to secure Sekkingstad’s release.

“He is well,” Dureza said yester-day, adding that Sekkingstad would be handed over to authorities today and then flown to the southern city of Davao.

The president’s spokesman Martin Andanar said Duterte

was heading to Davao to receive Sekkingstad.

Norway said the release was a “positive development”, adding that it was closely monitoring the situ-ation and working with Philippine authorities to bring Sekkingstad to safety. “According to Philippine authorities, Sekkingstad is now in a relatively safe place,” Norway’s For-eign minister Borge Brende said in a written comment.

“We refrain from celebrat-ing until Sekkingstad has been safely handed over to Philippine authorities.”

Resort manager Sekkingstad was among a group seized by Abu Sayyaf from aboard yachts at an exclusive tourist resort on Samal island. Two of the other captives, Canadians John Ridsdel and Rob-ert Hall, were beheaded in April and June respectively after demands for ransoms of some $6.5m each were not met.

Militants ‘hungry’ for caliphate: DuterteMANILA: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said yesterday Abu Sayyaf militants were hun-gry to establish a caliphate, as he toughens his stance on the kid-nap-for-ransom group accused of a deadly bombing in his home city this month.

The fiery leader, who has threatened to eat the militants alive in a bloodthirsty vow of revenge for the attack in Davao that killed 15 people, said the group was no longer just after money from crim-inal activities.

Several units of the Abu Sayyaf in the strife-torn southern Philip-pines have pledged allegiance to

the Islamic State group but analysts have said they are more interested in funding than ideology.

“They are hungry for a fight to establish a caliphate in Southeast Asia. Caliphate is a kingdom for the Muslims,” Duterte said in a speech to soldiers.

“The problem is that they do not talk on the basis of what school you can give them,” he said refer-ring to previous local services the militants have asked for.

“It’s either the caliphate or nothing.”

The Abu Sayyaf is blamed for the nation’s worst terror attacks and has beheaded foreigners.

China issues alert

for second storm

in a week

SHANGHAI: China is brac-ing for its second typhoon in a week after govern-ment raised their alert to “orange” for Typhoon Malakas yesterday, just as southeastern provinces continue to clean up after an earlier, stronger storm, state news agency Xinhua reported.

Malakas will be the 16th storm of this year’s typhoon season, coming after the strong Typhoon Meranti made land-fall in Fujian province on Thursday.

That storm has killed at least 28 people in China and Taiwan and cut power to more than a mil-lion homes.

AP

BANGKOK: Authorities in Thai-land seeking to curb the growing number of Zika cases say they will criminally charge homeowners who fail to remove mosquito breeding grounds on their property.

The Public Health Ministry announced on Friday it will revive a 1992 law allowing officials to order the removal of decorative ponds or any areas with still water found to foster mosquitoes, which can trans-mit the Zika virus.

Anyone failing to clean up or remove the mosquito breeding grounds can face a jail term of one month and a fine of $57-143.

The ministry said there have been 279 Zika cases in Thailand since the start of the year, including

22 in Bangkok. Thirty-three were pregnant women.

Zika generally causes a mild flu-like illness, but a major outbreak in Brazil last year revealed that it can lead to severe birth defects when pregnant women are infected.

In February, the World Health Organization declared the spread of Zika a global emergency.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs on Friday updated its advice to travelers, saying they should exercise a “high degree of caution” because of the ongoing transmission of the Zika virus in Thailand.

It said measures suggested by the Australian Department of Health included deferring non-essential travel if pregnant.

Mosquitoes are a constant con-cern in Thailand because they also can transmit malaria, dengue fever and chikungunya.

Anatolia

KUALA LUMPUR: A team inves-tigating missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will begin probing whether the commercial aircraft was deliberately ditched or experienced an uncontrolled fall while carrying 239 people, according to Malaysia’s transport minister.

Liow Tiong Lai said on Friday that both the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) and the MH370 Safety Investigation Team will look into details of debris confirmed to belong to the aircraft to determine the falling mode of MH370 in March 2014.

“The teams will examine into other details now and study how the accident happened -- whether it was a controlled or uncontrolled

ditch into the sea,” he said recently. The minister had earlier dis-

missed a report claiming that evidence had shown that MH370 was deliberately crashed into the Indian Ocean by its pilot, and underlined that the ATSB had reported the incident was an “uncontrolled ditch”.

His comments on Friday come a day after he confirmed that a piece of debris -- an inboard flap of a Boe-ing 777 -- found in Tanzania last June originated from MH370.

In a statement late Thursday, Liow said the debris was determined to be from the missing aircraft after several numbers as well as its physi-cal appearance and dimensions were found to match those of the ill-fated flight.

“A date stamp indicated that it was manufactured on Jan 23, 2002, and consistent with the May

31, 2002, delivery date for MH370,” Liow said.

“Besides the Boeing part number, all identification stamps have a sec-ond OL number which are unique identifiers relating to the part,” the minister highlighted.

He added that an Italian parts manufacturer had confirmed that all numbers located on the recovered debris relate to the same outboard flap shipped to Boeing and delivered to Malaysia Airlines.

Flight MH370, carrying 239 pas-sengers and crew, disappeared from radar shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur enroute to Beijing on March 8, 2014.

The jetliner has yet to be found despite massive search operations in the southern Indian Ocean where the aircraft was believed to have ended its flight after diverting from its orig-inal route.

Duterte warned about ‘bad communication’

Anatolia

ZAMBOANGA CITY: Filipino experts have stressed the need for President Rodrigo Duterte to adopt “consistent and coher-ent” communications after his responses to statements from the US and the United Nations caused a stir in international media.

Over the past month, Duterte has declared that his admin-istration would pursue an “independent foreign policy”, threatened to withdraw the coun-try from the UN, and called from US Special Forces to leave the troubled southern Philippines island of Mindanao.

The comments came after the US and UN expressed con-cern about reported extrajudicial killings taking place in the Phil-ippines under a campaign against illegal drugs that has seen the kill-ing of more than 3,000 suspects in less than three months.

Jean Franco, professor of political science at the Univer-sity of the Philippines, warned that “recent faux pas” had already affected Duterte’s political capital, which she described as being cru-cial for his government to garner the support of Filipinos.

“I guess, it has affected his political capital already in a sense that some people who may have trusted him in the first place may have second doubts,” she said.

Meanwhile, a veteran pub-lic relations specialist serving as the chairman of Grupo Agatep, Inc., warned that communication errors could be “very costly” and result in “international embar-rassment” and “international disrespect” for Filipinos.

Anatolia

BANGKOK: A suspected separatist was killed yesterday in a shootout by a joint team of military and police in Thailand’s insurgency-plagued Muslim south.

The Bangkok Post reported that security forces acting on intelligence surrounded a house in Raman dis-trict of Yala province and were shot at by a man hiding inside early in the morning.

After a ten-minute exchange of gunfire, they found the body of the suspect inside with several bullets wounds to the head.

The victim was identified as 32-year-old suspected separatist

operative named Sorbri Buenae, whom police accused of involvement in bombings at eight banks in three southern provinces affected by the decades-old insurgency -- Yala, Pat-tani and Narathiwat in 2006.

The level of violence in Thai-land’s far south has markedly risen since 13 bombs hit tourists areas August 11-12 in the upper south -- in what an analyst for IHS Jane’s defense group, Antony Davis, has described as a “strategic shift”.

Recent violent incidents include the detonation of a bomb placed on railway tracks and a bomb hidden in a motorcycle that destroyed a hotel lobby in Pattani, as well as an explo-sion in front of a school that killed a four-year-old school girl and her father in Narathiwat.

Hong Kong lights candles to support ‘rebel’ Chinese villageAFP

HONG KONG: More than 100 people attended a candlelight vigil in Hong Kong yesterday to protest a violent crackdown on protesters during tense clashes this week in the rebel Chinese village of Wukan.

The 13,000-strong fishing village in southern Guangdong province became a symbol of resistance against corruption in 2011 after a mass uprising over land grabs pro-pelled it onto global front pages and led to landmark elections.

Wukan was back in the head-lines after Lin Zulian, who played a key role in the 2011 protests, was detained in June and sentenced to three years in prison last week, trig-gering protests.

Chinese authorities on Tuesday said they had detained 13 residents for ‘disturbing public order’, which set off a fresh round of protests.

Bloodied villagers threw bricks and stones at riot police, who responded with tear gas and rub-ber bullets, according to local media reports.

Law enforcement officers were ‘hitting the villagers, even the old’, wrote one resident, Zou Shaobing, on a micro-blog.

It is important for Hong Kong to show solidarity for Wukan, organ-isers said of the virgil, which was staged just outside China’s repre-sentative office in the city.

“Today we have Wukan, tomor-row this sort of violence may occur in Hong Kong,” lawmaker Kwok Ka-ki told the 100-strong crowd recently, who chanted ‘release Lin

Zulian and all Wukan villagers’.Veteran pro-democracy pro-

tester Lee Cheuk-yan said the violence deployed in Wukan was not so different from the crackdown in Beijing›s Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Hundreds -- by some estimates more than a thousand -- died after the Communist Party sent tanks to crush demonstrations in the square in the heart of the nation’s capital, where student-led protesters had staged a peaceful seven-week sit-in to demand democratic reforms.

“This Wukan incident serves as a reminder to our youth that China’s nature has not changed,” Lee told the crowd, as people tied black ribbons to the metal fences surrounding the Chinese liaison office.

“We are coming out because we are worried,” office clerk Jade Lee said.

Protesters attend a candlelight vigil for the southern Chinese village of Wukan outside the Chinese Liason Office in Hong Kong, yesterday.

Downing mode of MH370 under probe

It was not clear whether Sekkingstad was ransomed off.

Balinese women carry offerings during prayers to celebrate Kuningan holiday at a temple in Denpasar on Indonesia’s resort island of Bali, yesterday.

Thailand to crack down

on Zika breeding spots

Suspected separatist killed in Thai south

VIEWS08 SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

The Syrian ceasefire, negotiated by the US and Russia, appears to be holding for the sixth day since its implementation. But that’s no guarantee for how long it will hold because the signals are positive and negative -- positive because it can continue to remain

intact if both sides refrain from actions that will torpedo the deal; negative because of accusations of violations on both sides to wreck the deal. For example, the Russian military said yesterday that the ‘situation was worsening’ and rebels were stepping up attacks. A Russian military spokesperson said that in the past 24 hours, the number of attacks has risen sharply with 55 attacks on government positions and civilians, adding that the US will be responsible for any breakdown in the ceasefire.

While the ceasefire deal itself has been a success, as it is the most significant peacemaking effort in Syria for months, bringing a respite in fighting, its biggest drawback has been the

lack of a mutually agreed mechanism to enforce the deal. In the current situation, any side can unilaterally walk out from the deal if they want and blame it on the other side. Moscow has already said US will be responsible for any breakdown of the truce if Washington doesn’t take “necessary measures to fulfill its obligations”.

Though a ceasefire can be a prelude to a long-term solution to the crisis, the situation on the ground makes any such optimism unwarranted. The biggest advantage of the current ceasefire, like all ceasefires during fighting, is the delivery of badly needed

aid to areas which have been inaccessible due to fighting. Even a small break in fighting can make a huge difference to civilians whose lives have been torn apart and have suffered from years of fighting.

But the supply of aid hasn’t been hassle-free. Top United Nations officials have accused the Syrian regime of hindering access to the besieged areas. The Syrian regime has denied the charge and said it has done all it was required, but the there is no need to distrust the UN which is an independent organization and has been carrying out humanitarian work for the benefit of all civilians.

It’s time for US, Russia and the rest of the international community to think about a permanent solution to the Syrian crisis. n its sixth year now, the war has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, displaced millions of people which, according to reports, amount to half of Syria’s pre-war population, caused a refugee crisis in Europe with huge repercussions and inspired a wave of jihadist attacks across the world.

Fragile peace

Accusations of violations by both sides are endangering the Syrian ceasefire.

Quote of the day

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Matteo Renzi Italian Prime Minister

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Last weekend, a 35-year-old woman was standing outside a Valentino store in Manhattan when, as

she later told police, she felt heat on her left side. Her blouse was on fire, and a man stood nearby with a lighter in his hand. The woman, whose name has not been released by the New York Police Department, escaped with a hole in her blouse and no inju-ries. The NYPD is investigating the incident as a possible hate crime — the woman is Muslim, and she was wearing a hijab.

Almost every woman has an unsettling story about the dif-ficulties of being a woman in public — whether it’s a stranger walking behind us too closely, verbal abuse, unwanted sexual advances or physical attacks. But for Muslim women, these iso-lated incidents of misogyny or violence have taken on an addi-tional, ugly edge.

Amid a surge of anti-Muslim policy proposals (including pres-idential nominee Donald Trump’s idea to ban Muslims from entering the country), 2015 had the high-est number of anti-Muslim hate crimes — five times the pre-9/11 rate. And although the venom of anti-Muslim sentiment is directed against both men and women, it is a particularly gendered crisis. Women bear the brunt of Islam-ophobic prejudice.

Comprehensive data on the effect of discrimination and hate crimes targeting Muslim women are hard to find. (The FBI does not track hate crimes by gen-der.) But studies suggest that women, particularly those who wear hijab or niqab, shoulder a unique burden. Because women who wear hijab and niqab are visible representations of our religion, they face a significant risk of exposure to discrimina-tion, harassment and attacks.

According to one researcher, 69 percent of Muslim women who wore hijab reported at least one incident of discrimination; for

those who did not wear hijab, it was 29 percent.

Non-governmental organ-isations that track anti-Muslim incidents in various parts of the world report record numbers of hate crimes and violent inci-dents targeting Muslim women. In the Netherlands, 90 percent of victims reporting incidents of violence to Meld Islamofobie (Report Islamophobia) in 2015 were Muslim women; in France, the Collective Against Islamo-phobia reported that 81 percent of violent incidents involved Muslim women, as did more than half of incidents reported to Tell MAMA, an NGO in Britain. In each study, women who wore visible symbols of Islam such as a hijab or niqab were more likely to be targeted.

To Muslim women, these numbers aren’t abstract. They are real life. Just last weekend, days after my friend who wears hijab told me about being accosted in an airport bathroom and told to “go home where they wear those things” in front of her 7-year-old son, we reflected on two women who were attacked in New York City while pushing their babies in strollers. Their attacker expressed a similar sentiment — “Get the [expletive] out of America” — as she threw one stroller to the ground and tried to rip off the women’s hijabs.

Much of the focus as of late has been on France, even though Muslim women in the United States have endured prohibitions on hijab and niqab at work, in public spaces such as swimming pools or at school for decades. Muslim women have been fired or not hired, like Samantha Elauf, who took her case to the US Supreme Court and won when Abercrombie and Fitch didn’t hire her because of her hijab.

They’ve been arrested, like Itemid Al Matar, who, while try-ing to catch a train, was tackled,

detained and later subjected to a strip search by Chicago police. And they have been pushed out of the judicial process altogether, like in Michigan, which passed a court rule allowing judges to decide whether women in niqab can appear as witnesses.

Although Muslim men and women may both suffer from a presumption of guilt, women experience the additional pre-sumption of victimhood. We’re seen simultaneously as recognis-able representatives of a religion to be “feared” and passive targets of male dominance.

In turn, our absurd status as both villains and victims drives not only discrimination, har-assment and hate crimes, but promotes cynical policy proposals designed to help us, which actu-ally are rooted in stereotypes and anti-Muslim bias.

Officials and news pundits have long used this tactic and the guise of “women’s rights” to pro-mote anti-Muslim ideology. This thinly concealed bias is central to the arguments of the 30 French coastal towns that banned the burkini. In a truly head-scratch-ing moment, Laurence Rossignol, the French government’s minister for women’s rights, defended the bans by stating: “The burkini is not some new line of swimwear; it is the beach version of the burqa and it has the same logic: hide women’s bodies in order to bet-ter control them.”

Lost in this statement is the irony that these laws reinforce exactly what the minister pur-ports to loathe.

Similarly, in the United States, when Ibtihaj Muham-mad became the first American Olympian to compete and medal while wearing hijab earlier this month, Rush Limbaugh tried to diminish the historic moment by stating: “But why celebrate a woman wearing something that’s been forced on her by a religion,

a religion run by men? . . . She may actively agree to do it, don’t misunderstand, but it’s a religion run by men that subjugates and subordinates women.”

Under heightened scrutiny and calls for vigilance, Mus-lim women have flocked to self-defense classes, some have contemplated removing their hijab to protect their families and others are wearing hijab to feel closer to faith during these uncer-tain times.

I have experienced my own scare, when I was cornered by a man at a community dog park. After exchanging pleasantries, he snarled without warning or provocation: “Do you know what’s wrong with Muslims?”

He punctuated his rant with a finger in my face and a grab at my shoulder when I tried to glance or back away. Through clenched teeth, he ranted that Muslim men are rapists and terrorists, and that Muslim women are victims of their own oppression.

I listened, silent calculations running through my head — I was alone in a dog park the size of one city block, and he was unpredict-able and belligerent. Anything could have happened.

We have a long road ahead to realise full and equal rights, but it’s not Islam that holds us back. It’s pervasive prejudice and discrimination in all facets of our lives.

Just as it’s intellectually dishonest to believe that four police officers forcing a Muslim woman to remove her burkini on a crowded beach is a sign of progress for women, it’s immoral to continue to allow anti-Muslim bias to close the doors of oppor-tunity to us.

Discrimination in the name of women’s rights or religious tolerance is still discrimination — ask any Muslim woman, if only to finally include us in the conver-sation about us.

Muslim women bear the brunt of Islamophobia

By Rana Elmir

The Washington Post

A Muslim woman pushes a baby stroller following the Eid Al Adha prayer, in the Queens borough of New York.

OPINION 09SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

All thoughts and views expressed in these columns are those of the writers, not of the newspaper.All correspondence regarding Views and Opinion pages should be mailed to the Editor-in-Chief.

Mourning the Syria that might have been

By Christian Caryl

Foreign Policy

Earlier this week, when the latest ceasefire in Syria’s long-running civil war took effect, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad seized the opportunity

to embark on a triumphant tour of a place that has long defied him. He paid a visit to the city of Daraya, a Damascus sub-urb where rebels managed to resist his forces for four long years until they finally agreed to give up control in the last week of August.

For those four years the government threw everything it had at Daraya. The troops surrounding it tried to starve it out, refusing to let aid convoys bring food to residents. Syrian helicopters pounded the city with barrel bombs, weapons of indiscriminate terror that have little or no military utility. In August, the Syrian air force used rockets and napalm to obliter-ate the city’s last surviving hospital. Some observers believe this was part of a calcu-lated effort to make the place completely uninhabitable.

We’ve seen the same brutality in far too many places in this war. But there was something different about Daraya — something that helps to explain why Assad was so keen to celebrate its fall.

If you only follow the headlines, you can be forgiven for seeing this war pri-marily as a fight between two equally nasty alternatives: the totalitarian Baath Party regime of Assad or the totalitar-ian theocracy of the Islamic State and other jihadist groups. But this is a dras-tic simplification — one that both Assad and the terrorists want their own sup-porters, and the world, to believe. But it is certainly truer today than it was back at the beginning of the conflict.

By their very nature, civil wars have

a tendency to foster extremes. The ruth-less are rewarded, while the moderates and the evolutionary reformers tend to get culled out.

That’s exactly what has happened in Syria. Today, five years later, it’s easy to forget that Syria’s revolution started off amid the optimism of the Arab Spring. The first protests against Assad’s dicta-torship were peaceful: Demonstrators were demanding democracy, not rule by Al Qaeda.

And Daraya was one of the birthplaces of this movement. In the revo-lution’s early stages it was the home of the activist Ghiyath Matar, known as “Little Gandhi” for his quixotic embrace of non-violence. When Assad’s soldiers arrived to crush local protests, he greeted them with flowers and water. They responded by torturing him to death. His corpse was later returned to his family with its throat torn out. The country’s downward spi-ral began.

In The Morning They Came for Us, her bloodcurdling account of the early stages of the war, journalist Janine di Giovanni explains what happened next. When she visited Daraya in 2012, locals gave her detailed accounts of a massa-cre conducted by government troops who had briefly managed to wrest the town away from the rebels. “It was punished,” she told me, “because it was a symbol of peaceful resistance.”

Yet even amid the descending dark-ness, the people of the city tried to hold on to their ideals. When Assad’s gener-als realised they couldn’t take the place back, they placed it under siege. Hunger became the government’s most potent weapon. “’What did you eat today?’ I’d ask them,” di Giovanni recalls. “’Grape leaves, some salt.’ They took leaves from the trees and made soup out of them.” Much of the population left, but several thousand locals, many of them activ-ists, remained. In October 2012 they set up a council to govern themselves, and in the years that followed, even as life became nearly impossible, they persisted in holding regular elections — “every six months, inside every single office and department of the local government,” says Hussam Ayash, a spokesperson for the local council.

Most importantly of all, he told me, the local government persisted in maintaining its independence from the city’s militia, a non-jihadist unit of the rebel Free Syrian Army. In many other rebel-controlled parts of Syria, Ayash explained, local governments have fre-quently fallen under the sway of fighters, many of them Islamist extremists.

By contrast, Al Qaeda and its ilk never managed to get a foothold in Daraya. “We had no services,” says Ayash. “We had no communications. We had no water. But also nobody could get in or get out. The only fighters in Daraya were the local people. So we had no jihadists.”

Ayash spoke to me on Skype from northern Syria, where he is now living after being “evacuated” from Daraya by government forces in the days following the city’s surrender on August 25. When

the Syrian army managed to capture a key position on the outskirts of the city, Daraya’s leaders saw the writing on the wall, and accepted a government offer of safe passage to the north in return for their surrender of control over the community.

This uncharacteristically lenient ges-ture by Assad was a shrewd move, one that enabled him to finally seize control of a key rebel stronghold at relatively low cost to his own troops. It was also calcu-lated to undermine the resolve of rebel holdouts in other hard-pressed areas, who may now see a deal with the gov-ernment as a more palatable option than continued resistance.

It’s hard to overestimate the psy-chological impact of the city’s fall. Fadi Mohammed, another Daraya activist, told me that the city embodied the hopes of the many Syrians who reject extremists of all stripes. He cites one occasion, early on, when protesters formed a human chain around the local government building to protect it from attack by pro-government forces, and recalls the city’s devotion to the principle of civilian control. “If the experience in Daraya had been pro-tected and supported by the international community, it could have been a model,” he says. “Many people around Syria regarded Daraya as something special.” That’s a big “if,” of course. But it’s hard to dismiss the thought out of hand.

“The loss of Darayya is a watershed

in Syria’s war,” wrote analyst Sam Hel-ler of The Century Foundation in a recent blogpost. “For many in Syria’s opposi-tion, Darayya represented the best of the Syrian revolution — a bastion of civil activism and nationalist, ‘Free Syrian Army’ rebels that held together and per-severed for years against overwhelming odds, even as rebel-held areas elsewhere slid sideways into jihadism and factional infighting.”

To be sure, Daraya is also a place of considerable military significance. As Faysal Itani, an analyst at Washington’s Atlantic Council, points out, the city is just a few miles south of Damascus proper, and close to a key government airfield. “My own perception has always been that this is the most important geography of the war,” he told me. The surrender of Daraya and other areas near Damascus to government forces are, he says, “the most significant military victories of the war” — victories that owe a great deal, he says, to Russia’s forceful intervention on Assad’s behalf.

Now the government has succeeded in completely emptying the city of the people who lived there, and there are rumors that Assad intends to replace its rebellious Sunnis with members of other sectarian groups who are loyal to his regime. “What happened in Daraya is ethnic cleansing,” says di Giovanni, who notes that the practice of expelling civil-ians and replacing them with others is a

direct violation of international law. “This will set a terrible precedent.” The situ-ation is so dire that even the otherwise mealy-mouthed United Nations has seen fit to utter a few critical words about the expulsion of the city’s last inhabitants.

Daraya’s supporters often speak of it as an “experiment” in self-government and democratic practice. The question now is whether that experiment should be regarded as a failure, or whether its survivors can keep it alive at a time when their spirit of moderation and pragmatism looks like a throwback to a distant era.

Its example remains tantalising. Here is a case where Syrians stubbornly stuck to the principles of civilised government even under the most forbidding circum-stances. And that, clearly, amounts to a particularly potent challenge to Assad’s ruling Baath Party. “This idea of the choice, that you only have Assad or ISIS, it’s not right,” as Ayash put it. “Actually you have another choice, and this choice is us. We are looking for a future, and we think that we’ll have a decent future if we are free, with dignity.”

The sad reality, though, is that Daraya’s fall is a huge blow to this dream, and democratically minded Syrians everywhere are mourning. And this is precisely why the Syrian pres-ident decided to take his victory lap there. “It’s a real coup for Assad,” says di Giovanni. “He hated Daraya. It was everything he loathed.”

For many in Syria’s opposition, Daraya represented the best of the Syrian revolution — a bastion of civil activism and nationalist, ‘Free Syrian Army’ rebels that held together and persevered for years against overwhelming odds, even as rebel-held areas elsewhere slid sideways into jihadism and factional infighting.

This file photo taken on May 25, 2016 shows armed men in uniform identified by Syrian Democratic forces as US special operations forces riding in the back of a pick-up truck in the village of Fatisah in the northern Syrian province of Raqa.

Latin America has a different migration problem

By Mac Margolis

Bloomberg

A recent survey by Datincorp, a Caracas-based pollster, found that some 57 percent of Vene-

zuelans wanted to leave the country. That number, up from 49 percent just four months ago, is just one facet of the rolling collapse in South Amer-ica’s most benighted nation, which has gone from oil powerhouse to glo-bal exporter of people in a little over a decade.

But Venezuela’s tragedy could also be its neighbors’ gain. The race for advantage in the world economy

requires many virtues: a competitive market to attract opportunity-seek-ers, first-rate universities, the rule of law to protect intellectual property. But the knowledge and experience that outsiders bring to a new land can also be vital to long-term devel-opment and productivity. That’s why many economists agree that global migration is a highway for talent and can even be a shortcut to entrepreneurship.

Look at Venezuela. Half a cen-tury ago, this stable, prospering Latin democracy was a magnet for migrants from Germany, Italy, Portu-gal and Spain, who helped modernize the country. But ever since Hugo Chavez turned the Andean economy inside out in the name of Bolivarian socialism, the flows have reversed. From 1990 to 2015, the number of Venezuelans living abroad tripled, according to the United Nations.

Now the Bolivarian brain drain is doing for the world what the world did for Venezuela last century: Its skilled migrants are ramping up the heavy oil industry in Colombia, starting businesses in Panama, and opening health clinics

in Miami and Toronto.The question is whether the rest

of Latin America is ready to take advantage of this demographic wind-fall — from Venezuela or anywhere else. Although 244 million people live in countries other than their own, Latin America remains one of the least friendly regions to outsid-ers. In 2015, migrants accounted for just 1.5 percent of total population in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Compare that with Europe, where foreigners are 10.3 percent of the population, or North America, where migrants make up 15.2 per-cent of the total.

“Latin America is united in its rejection of Donald Trump’s immi-grant-bashing rhetoric but has been quietly practicing his poli-cies at home,” Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann told me. And since many studies have shown that foreigners often bring innova-tion, hawkish immigration policies are not just uncaring but ultimately self-defeating.

Venezuela’s 20th-century immi-grants represented nearly 7 percent of the population in 1960 but proved

much more likely to become entre-preneurs than Venezuelans with similar education.

And while today’s immigrants may not always come honed with business skills, they often keep in contact with their kin and leverage experiences and technology from their homeland. One recent success is that of Koreans migrants who helped to revitalise the textile industries in Argentina and Chile.

“Migrants are risk-takers,” Oliver Stuenkel, a specialist in international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foun-dation in Sao Paulo, told me. “They rarely count on institutional channels or jobs in the public sector, where risk is not rewarded, and so are forced to innovate.”

Of course, importing ringers is no fast-pass to the First World, espe-cially for deadbeat economies. “More than half of worldwide migrant pop-ulation ended up in the United States, drawn by world-class universities and laws that stimulate enterprise,” Carsten Fink, chief economist for the World Intellectual Property Organi-sation, told me.

Asia, for instance, has only

slightly more migrants (1.7 percent of its total population) than Latin America, but also cutting edge indus-tries that encourage enterprise and demand innovation.

The result: Asia kicked in 60 per-cent of world patents and over half of new trademarks registered in 2014. By contrast, Latin America accounted for 2.4 percent of world patents and 8.4 percent of trademarks. A century ago, Latin America took in the Old World’s human jetsam and flour-ished. Civita, Kuczynski, Slim, and Temer: Imported surnames are ubiq-uitous in the palaces and corporate towers of the Americas.

Times have changed. Brazil, the continent’s signature economy, has been in prolonged recession, jobs are scarce and the cascade of resumes from would-be immigrants chas-ing last decade’s boom has dried up. But with the economy bottoming out, it’s time for Brazil and its neighbors to think ahead. “If national leaders want to take advantage of the next economic boom, the time to put good policies in place is now,” Stuenkel said.

That’s a challenge that border walls can’t meet.

Latin America is united in its rejection of Donald Trump’s immigrant-bashing rhetoric but has been quietly practising his policies at home.

PAKISTAN10 SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

Rickshaw cart

Court orders confiscation of Musharraf’s propertyAFP

ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani court trying former military ruler Per-vez Musharraf (pictured) over a deadly raid on Islamabad’s radical Red Mosque passed an order yes-terday confiscating his property, a lawyer said.

Former president Musharraf, who left Pakistan for Dubai in March for what was described as urgent med-ical treatment, is facing a string of

court cases connected to his 1999 to 2008 rule.

Lower court judge Pervaiz Qadir

Memon passed the order yesterday in a case over the death of radical cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi, one of more than 100 people killed when Pakistani troops stormed the Red Mosque in 2007.

“The court...today passed an order that his property be confis-cated,” a lawyer for the Red Mosque, Tariq Asad said.

“Our next move will be to put pressure on the interior ministry to bring Musharraf back home so he can face all cases against him,” he added recently.

A special court in July which is trying Musharraf for treason, issued a similar order in July but little has resulted from that verdict.

“Today’s court order will help mount pressure on the government,” to take action, Asad said.

Musharraf ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a bloodless coup in 1999. He resigned in 2008 to avoid possible impeachment and went into exile overseas.

He returned in 2013 in an attempt to contest elections but was barred from taking part in the polls and from

leaving the country while facing a barrage of legal cases.

The travel ban was lifted in March.

In January this year Musharraf was acquitted over the 2006 kill-ing of a Baloch rebel leader, Nawab Akbar Bugti.

But four cases against him remain -- one accusing him of trea-son for imposing emergency rule, as well as those alleging the unlawful dismissal of judges, the assassina-tion of opposition leader Bhutto and the deadly raid on the Red Mosque.

Suicide attack toll rises to 30

PESHAWAR: The death toll from a Taliban suicide bomb attack on a mosque in northwest tribal Pakistan rose to 30 yesterday, officials said.

The Friday attack targeted a mosque in the Mohmand tribal dis-trict bordering Afghanistan where the army has been fighting against Tal-iban militants.

“Two more injured people died of their wounds early today raising the death toll to 30,” deputy chief of the Mohmand tribal district administra-tion Naveed Akbar said.

The bomber came in as Friday prayers were in progress and blew himself up in the main hall. A curfew has been imposed in the area since the bombing. Taliban faction Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA) claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was carried out to avenge the deaths of 13 of its members and arrests of others by a local vigilante force in 2009.

AP

JHELUM: A Pakistani court yes-terday adjourned the case of a British-Pakistani woman’s murder until September 23 to give police more time to finalise charges against her father and ex-husband, who are accused of slaying her in the name of honor, police and lawyers said.

Police brought both men before the court in Jhelum as they cov-ered their faces. They avoided most questions from journalists. However, when pressed, the woman’s father, Mohammad Shahid said that the accusations are “all lies.”

“The police arrested me, police charged me, you go to police sta-tion and check my report, check my statement,” Shahid said.

The death of 28-year-old Samia Shahid has shocked the nation as the latest alleged case of so-called “honor killings” in Pakistan. The Bradford native’s death while vis-iting Pakistan in July was originally declared to be from natural causes.

But Shahid’s second husband, Mukhtar Kazim, publicly accused her family of killing her. The case was reopened and a police probe quickly concluded that Shahid’s death was a “premeditated, cold-blooded murder,” according to a police statement.

Police allege that Moham-med Shahid stood guard while his daughter’s ex-husband, Moham-med Shakeel, raped her. The men then both strangled her, according to police.

Defence lawyer Mohammed Arif dismissed the police allegations as a

baseless, saying his clients have been wrongly accused. He said he will appeal another court’s recent rejec-tion of bail for Mohammed Shahid.

Samia Shahid married her first husband in February 2012 but stayed only briefly in Pakistan before returning to England where she obtained a divorce two years later.

She later married Kazim and moved with him to Dubai.

Najful Hussain Shah, the lawyer for Kazim said that he will seek the death penalty.

He said Shahid’s mother and sister tricked her into visiting Paki-stan in July by saying her father was gravely ill and that the women fled to Britain after her murder.

He said the Pakistani govern-ment is trying to bring them back for questioning.

British woman’s murder case put off until September 23

Mosques become a target of choice for terrorists Internews and AFP

PESHAWAR: In their decade-long bloody cam-paign, Taliban terrorists have frequently targeted mosques and Imambargahs in an attempt to inflict mass casualties. Yesterday’s suicide bombing was the 12th targeted at Muslim worshippers. Most of these attacks have taken place in different parts of the tribal belt.

The first suicide attack on a mosque occurred in a village in Akhorwal, Darra Adam Khel, in 2006, a year before the birth of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the group responsible for most militant violence in the country.

Around 60 worshippers, including a promi-nent tribal elder Haji Ghairat Khan Afridi, were killed in the attack.

After a four-year gap, terrorists targeted two mosques in Khyber Agency. More than 60 wor-shippers were killed when a bomber blew himself up in Ali Masjid, and around 40 people died in an attack on a mosque in Ghundai, Jamrud.

Both attacks were carried out when wor-shippers had gathered for Saturday prayers. Interestingly, some elders believe the Ali Masjid blast was in fact a missile strike by a remotely-piloted US aircraft.

In 2011, a suicide bomber struck at a mosque during Saturday prayers in Salarzai tehsil of Bajaur

Agency, killing some 45 worshippers. Similar attacks were also carried out in other places in the tribal belt.

Around 25 people were also killed in a 2012 suicide attack on a mosque in Nowshera district’s Akbar Pura town. Sixty people died in a suicide blast targeting worshippers at an Imambargah in Parachinar in December 2014.

Another 21 people were killed in a 2015 suicide attack at an imambargah in Hayatabad. Suicide attacks have targeted Imambargahs in Hangu, Mansehra and Dera Ismail Khan as well.

Compared to other terrorist tactics such as attacks using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) suicide attacks inside mosques and other structures are especially destructive in terms of casualties.

Internews

PE SH AWA R: T he K hyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial govern-ment has failed to implement its decision made a year ago to ban non-biodegradable plastic bags in the province.

After the ban decision, the gov-ernment and manufactures had agreed on October 12, 2015, that non-biodegradable shopping bags would be replaced with biodegradable ones within three months.

The meeting chaired by Chief Minister Pervez Khattak had also decided on the introduction of strict and effective laws to cover all aspects of use and manufacturing of non-biodegradable plastic bags, food containers, bottles and such other hazardous products.

Besides, the government and manufacturers had also agreed on a plan to convert the machinery of making biodegradable shopping bags in three months.

However, even a year after that, non-biodegradable black shop-ping bags are still in use across the province.

The shopkeepers, vendors, and grocery shop owners continue to use non-biodegradable shopping bags without fear.

“No one has asked us to stop using black shopping bags,” said a vendor selling fruit on Ring Road. He said the black shopping bags were available on the wholesale market.

A staff member of the Water and Sanitation Services Peshawar said that non-biodegradable shopping bags chocked drains during rain and thus, causing rainwater to inundate roads.

In 2016, the KP Environmental Protection Agency had proposed rules to ban the use of non-degra-dable plastic products that it insists are the main cause of environmen-tal pollution.

The proposed rules are called the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Prohi-bition of Non-Degradable Plastic Products (Manufacturing, Sale and Usage) Rules 2016.

The environment department forwarded the rules to the law department for vetting six months ago but the law department has yet to do the job.

Once the rules are approved, ban on the manufacturing of non-biode-gradable black shopping bags will be imposed with immediate effect.

The rules will be applied to all disposable plastic products made of wholly or substantially of polyethyl-ene, polypropylene or polystyrene.

90 percent policemen found under-educatedInternews

ISLAMABAD: It is estimated that almost 90% personnel in the police force are under-educated and with-out power or authority, a report compiled by a committee consti-tuted by the Federal Ombudsman Secretariat revealed.

The report titled ‘Address-ing Maladministration in Police Stations’ stated that at present, personnel working as assistant sub inspectors or in lower posi-tions, constituting 12% of the force, hardly have any authority. While the remaining 88% wither do not work.

The committee, formed in compliance with the apex court’s orders, after a thorough investi-gation concluded that it was not possible to reform police stations without bringing about changes

in its culture in a holistic manner. The report paints a gloomy picture of police stations across the coun-try that are severely understaffed and under resourced.

It reveals that policemen are unable to fulfil their duties due to lack of training, influence of bigwigs, unaccountability, poor planning and failing to upgrade their technology to investigate crime scenes among others.

The committee in its findings pointed out that SHOs fear that reg-istering every complaint might show a higher crime rate in their jurisdic-tions which could be used against them to prove their incompetence.

After registering the FIR, the relevant police officer, without ascer-taining whether sufficient evidence is available, directly proceeds to arrest-ing the nominated accused which is tantamount to abuse of authority and misconduct,” the report pointed out.

Decision on non-biodegradable plastic

bags ban ‘awaiting’ implementation

The Red Mosque lawyer said that their next move will be to put pressure on the interior ministry to bring Musharraf back home so he can face all cases against him.

A rickshaw is towed to a workshop for repair on a donkey cart outside Peshawar, yesterday.

Mourners gather for the funeral prayers of victims of a sucide bombing in Bajaur Agency near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, yesterday.

LAHORE: Former chief justice Iftikhar Muham-mad Chaudhry’s political party Justice and Dem-ocratic Party has moved the Lahore High Court for disqualification of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif for not being a righteous and sagacious person under the Constitution.

Sardar Umar Farooq of JDP has filed 468 pages writ petition through advocate Mudas-sar Chaudhry pleading that Nawaz Sharif had not declared his London property in his returns and he is no more a saga-cious and righteous person under Art 62 and 63 of the Constitution.

The petitioner has also annexed documents about alleged corruption.

Former CJ

seeks PM’s

disqualification

Karachi’s keen

stargazers watch

lunar eclipseKARACHI: People Karachi and several other parts of the country witnessed a penumbral lunar eclipse when the moon started passing through the outer edge of the earth’s shadow on Friday.

A complete eclipse was witnessed at 11:55pm and it culminated at 1:54am in Pakistan, Mete-orological Department officials said.

A penumbral lunar eclipse occurs when the sun, the earth and the moon align in an almost straight line. The earth blocks the sun’s light from reaching the moon’s sur-face, and covers a part of the moon with the outer part of its shadow.

INDIA 11SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

Thousands of people cheered the PM as the slogans for him reached a crescendo, but a pin-drop silence descended as Chief Minister Vijay Rupani and state chief Jitibhai Vaghani tried to raise slogans.

Srinagar: Kashmir Val-ley remained shut for the 71st consecutive day on Saturday amid sporadic clashes at half a dozen places across the valley, police said.

A 14-year-old-boy identified as Momin Iqbal Ginai who was injured in clashes between security forces and protesters in Harwan area of Srinagar district died, taking the toll to 89.

Giani was buried amid protests yesterday. Clashes broke out after Ginai’s burial following which around one dozen protesters and policemen were injured.

AI flights land

midway to attend

emergencies

New Delhi: National pas-senger carrier Air India yesterday said it landed two of its outbound flights midway to address medical emergencies of its passengers, ensur-ing their safety and well being.

According to the air carrier, a Chicago-bound flight AI 127 on September 16 and AI 174 SFO-Delhi flight on September 17 landed midway at Norway and Helsinki respectively to address medi-cal emergencies of the passengers.

Doordarshan ADG

goes missing

New Delhi: Police have launched a massive search for an Additional Director General (ADG) of Doord-arshan who has been missing since Friday after-noon after reporting for duty, police said yesterday.

According to police, the DD official, identi-fied as Jayant M. Kharche, went missing from his office in Mandi House.

He was staying in south Delhi’s Andrews Ganj area with his family.

Kashmir shut for

71st consecutive

day; toll at 89

A performer painted as a tiger takes part in the ‘Pulikali’, or Tiger Dance, in Thrissur yesterday. The folk-art event is held every year in the town during ‘Onam’ festival.

Tiger dance

IANS

LIMKHEDA (GUJARAT): Prime Min-ister Narendra Modi yesterday shed all security and proceeded in an open vehicle from the helipad, waving at the cheering crowds at his rally in this Gujarat tribal town and sought to invoke Gujarati pride by noting a local lad had come to meet them on his birthday. However, the event also saw a continuous trickle of people leaving the venue.

A 67-feet cutout symbolising

Modi entering his 67th year stood large in the backdrop as he reached the sprawling Arts College Ground at Mota Hathidhara in Limkheda town in Dahod district of central Gujarat which was all decked up to receive him. Unlike in the south, huge cutouts of politicians are new to the state.

Thousands of people cheered the Prime Minister as slogans for him reached a crescendo, but a pin-drop silence descended as Gujarat BJP stal-warts, including Chief Minister Vijay Rupani and state chief Jitibhai Vaghani tried to raise slogans - and had to vir-tually cajole the crowds to join them.

Again, in a rarity in Gujarat, scores of tribals began leaving the venue in between Modi’s speech where he spoke of his government›s focus on overall development, even as others sought to raise enthusiasm with high decibel slogans of ‘Modi, Modi’.

Schoolchildren and local artistes performed to customised songs like Son of Hiraba, ruler of Delhi, Hail Modi, Hail Modi (in Gujarati) while crowds cheered at Duniya mein danka bajaay diyo re, Rahul ko paani pilaay diyo re (he has made a name in the world, pipped Rahul to the post). Traditional folk theatre (bhavai) was staged showcasing the central and state welfare schemes.

Attired in a tribal costume offered

to him on the dais, Modi watched as a tribal boy delivered a speech in English to highlight schemes he had benefited from during the Modi regime in the state.

“You won›t have heard a tribal boy speak in English in presence of senior leaders. And this too, at a function to mark the 67th birthday of our beloved Prime Minister,” said Vaghani but there was no applause and no response from the crowd.

The prime minister was in Lim-kheda to lay foundation stone for seven irrigation and drinking water schemes for the region. To come up at a cost of over Rs 48bn, these projects are expected to cover over 25,000 acres and provide drinking water to villages in five tribal districts in the region.

“Water has been the biggest chal-lenge. What a farmer wants is water in his fields. Our focus is on issue that had been ignored for long,” Modi told the gathering. “Everyone generally speaks only of three basic needs of food, cloth-ing and shelter, but I include education and health. This is our priority.”

Invoking Gujarati pride, Modi spoke about himself touching an emotional chord with the audience on how son of the soil became the ‘Pradhan Sevak’ of the country.

“We have focused on issues that have been ignored. We had banks but

the poor were excluded. We had hos-pitals but the poor could not avail of those facilities. We want to change this and put things in place so that it generates employment and is self-sustaining,” Modi said.

In the same vein, he said he did not believe in celebrating his birth-day except seeking blessings of his mother, which he had done early in the morning near Gandhinagar.

Meanwhile, police cracked down

on Congress leaders wanting to stage demonstrations before Modi’s rally.

Three slogan-shouting Congress MLAs from the region and former Dahod MP Prabhaben Taviad were rounded up along with 70 supporters

IANS

KALABURGI (KARNATAKA): With no reply to his letter or an appoint-ment to meet, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah yesterday chided Prime Minister Narendra Modi for being indifferent to the state over the raging Cauvery river water shar-ing issue with Tamil Nadu.

“Though it’s over a week since I wrote to him (Modi) seeking his intervention to resolve the Cau-very issue by convening a meeting of the chief ministers and sought an appointment to meet him personally in Delhi, no reply yet to the letter or response for time to meet him,” lamented Siddaramaiah, who was here on a day’s official trip.

Noting that the Cauvery River Water Dispute Tribunal has made a provision for the riparian states to find a solution to any problem through understanding and con-sensus, he said in a federal set-up, it was the duty of the Central gov-ernment and the Prime Minister to convene a meeting of chief minis-ters to resolve inter-state issues, as some PMs did in the past.

In a letter to Modi on Septem-ber 9, on a day when Karnataka was shut down in protest against releas-ing the river water to Tamil Nadu on a directive by the Supreme Court, the Chief Minister urged Modi to convene a meeting of the chief min-isters at a short notice for resolving the Cauvery river water impasse with Tamil Nadu.

Citing a precedent over 20 years ago, when under similar circum-stances of deficit flows, the Supreme Court had requested then Prime

Minister P V Narasimha Rao to resolve the issue, the Chief Minister had said the ‘unrest’, if continued, would have a serious impact on the state›s economy as also the IT economy, which brought enormous revenue and foreign exchange to the country.

Siddaramaiah yesterdaysaid: “I also spoke to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) seeking time to meet the Prime Minister on this issue but there is response yet to my oral request.”

Asked if the Prime Minister was uncooperative and not interested to intervene in the matter, he said: “You can draw your own inference.”

Accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of changing its stance on the water dispute, he regretted that the opposition party in the state was trying to politicise the issue by advising the state government against releasing water in defiance of the apex court directive.

The Chief Minister, however, hoped the state government’s deci-sion to release water would work in its favour when the main case comes up for the final hearing on October 18 in the top court.

“We do not have enough water in the reservoirs to release to Tamil Nadu after October 20, as it would result in denying drinking water to Bengaluru and other cities and vil-lages dependent on Cauvery till the onset of monsoon in June next,” he said.

The state requires at least 27 tmcft (thousand million cubic feet) of water to meet the drinking water needs after October 20 and the four reservoirs in the state would have 28 tmcft, while Tamil Nadu will have 42 tmcft in its reservoirs.

AFP

NEW DELHI: A massive leak of secret technical data on Scorpene-class submarines did not originate in India but in France, Delhi’s naval chief said yesterday, pointing to ini-tial probe findings.

Some 22,400 pages of classi-fied documents detailing the combat capabilities of subs made by French defence contractor DCNS for Indian navy were leaked to an Australian newspaper last month.

DCNS has implied that the leak

may have come from India but the initial findings of a high-level probe set up by Delhi indicate otherwise.

The “preliminary probe has found that leak did not take place in India but at DCNS office in France,” India’s naval chief Sunil Lanba said yesterday, according to the Press Trust of India.

“In France, DCNS and French gov-ernment have launched an inquiry. Based on this inquiry, we will see what needs to be done,” he added.

The leaked documents included thousands of pages on the subma-rine sensors and thousands more on its communication and navigation

systems as well as nearly 500 pages on the torpedo launch system alone.

The Australian newspaper said in its earlier report that the sensi-tive data was thought to have been removed from France in 2011 by a former French naval officer who at the time was a subcontractor for DCNS.

It said the data was believed to have passed through firms in South-east Asia before eventually being mailed to a company in Australia.

Variants of the submarine are used by Malaysia and Chile, with Brazil due to deploy the vessels from 2018.

IANS

LUCKNOW: Conflicting signals continued to emerge from Uttar Pradesh’s ruling Samajwadi Party (SP) yesterday amid efforts by party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav to douse the raging fire of dissent between Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and state party president Shiv-pal Yadav.

In the morning, as supporters of both leaders came face to face and protested on the streets in favour of their respective leaders, party chief Mulayam Singh swung into action and stuck to his ground on his deci-sion to appoint his brother Shivpal Yadav as state unit chief.

Mulayam Singh, however, accom-modated son and Chief Minister

Akhilesh Yadav in the candidate selection process of the state par-liamentary board.

Akhilesh Yadav, who reallocated the portfolios he stripped Shivpal Yadav of, additionally gave him med-ical education and minor irrigation. He however left an irritant — as he retained the most important portfo-lio of PWD with himself and did not return it to his uncle.

Angry at the supporters of Akhilesh Yadav for almost laying siege to his house, Mulayam Singh is reported to have rung up the chief minister and asked him to tell his supporters to retreat immediately.

Supporters of Akhilesh Yadav also tried to stop the car of Shivpal Yadav who was headed to the resi-dence of Mulayam Singh, giving his security men a tough time in clear-ing the road for the cavalcade.

Later addressing party workers at the party headquarters in Vikrama-ditya Marg, Mulayam Singh chided the youth workers and asked them to remain within limits.

He asked them what they were doing in Lucknow when all the deci-sions had been made for elections for the state assembly.

“While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders are working overtime to strengthen booths for elections you are engaged in tam-asha (drama) here,” he said angrily.

He once again reiterated his support for younger brother Shiv-pal Yadav and said he too had done immense work for the party, and mused that he would not allow all this to happen in the party to which he has given his sweat and blood.

Mulayam Singh also said that during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections,

he had given everything that was asked of him by the Chief Minis-ter and his team but the disastrous results were for all to see.

The Samajwadi Party won just five of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state while the BJP won 73 with its alliance partner Apna Dal, the Con-gress won two seats and Bahujan Samaj Party drew a blank.

Akhilesh Yadav later appealed through the media that banners, hoardings and posters along with sloganeering should be stopped with immediate effect.

He also informed that he had lunch with uncle at his home and wished him on his becoming the state unit chief.

“We have done a lot of work with regards to infrastructure, develop-ment, roads, dairy, electricity, and in the social sector, and we will go to

the people with our good work, seek-ing a second term,” he told reporters.

The situation continued to be fluid however as tensions contin-ued in both camps.

While Shivpal Yadav supporters are angry that he has not been given the PWD portfolio, they also fear a parallel centre of power — chairman of the state parliamentary board —has been created which, they say, will create problems in the future dur-ing the distribution of tickets for the forthcoming state assembly elections.

Akhilesh Yadav supporters are sullen that the decisions of their leader had been reversed and the re-induction of ministers like Gayatri Prajapati in the cabinet would taint his clean image. Sensing that some knots still continued, Mulayam Singh has called a meeting between Shiv-pal Yadav and Akhilesh Yadav again.

Crowds cheer Modi in tribal Gujarat at birthday rally

A sand sculpture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Juhu Beach in Mumbai to mark his 67th birthday.

Conflicting signals in UP even as Akhilesh & Shivpal say all sorted out

Siddaramaiah flays PM on Cauvery row

Submarine issue: Naval chief blames France

EUROPE12 SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

Reuters

LONDON: Ensuring every child gets a good education is the “civil rights struggle of our generation”, United Nations education envoy Gor-don Brown said on Friday ahead of launching a plan for the largest edu-cational expansion in history.

Education not only provides chil-dren with a route out of poverty but also guards against the spread of extremism, the former British prime minister said as he called for a mas-sive increase in investment.

“We will be betraying half our future if we do not take action,” he

told a media briefing at the United Nations. Under new global develop-ment goals agreed upon last year, all children should be receiving primary and secondary education by 2030.

But Brown said under current trends half the world’s children would still be either out of school or getting a poor education which would not begin to equip them with the skills needed for the labour markets of the future.

Young people denied school are more likely to end up victims of child marriage, child labour or fall into the hands of traffickers, he said. Brown also warned of a “ticking time-bomb of discontent” among young people deprived of education and opportu-nities which would leave them “prey

to extremist factions determined to exploit their discontent”.

Today, Brown will present a report to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon which will call for the first global education budget and pro-pose a new international funding mechanism to boost investment in schooling in poorer countries.

Brown said low income countries were spending only 3 percent of their national income on education and must invest more. The two countries with the highest number of children out of school - Nigeria and Pakistan - spend around 2 percent.

Brown also said that interna-tional educational aid, which has fallen from 13 percent of all aid to

10 percent since 2002, was “com-pletely inadequate”. “Education aid is worth just $12 per child per year - barely enough to finance a text book for that child,” he added.

He said countries which show a commitment to reforming and investing in education must receive international support. The Education Commission report will also call for a massive effort to get the world’s 30 million refugee and displaced chil-dren into school.

Brown said the main reason so many Syrian refugee families were risking their lives to reach Europe was because they could not see any hope of their children getting an education if they remained in the region.

AFP

ROME: Italy is not ready to pretend everything is alright when Europe is not functioning properly, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said yesterday, the day after a key EU gathering.

“I don’t think it would be right for Italy to pretend not to notice when things are not getting any better,” he told a conference in Flor-ence several hours after expressing his dissatisfaction that so little had been achieved at this week’s sum-mit in Bratislava.

EU leaders had gathered in the Slovak capital on Friday to discuss the EU’s future in the wake of Brit-ain’s vote to leave the bloc, wrapping up the summit by issuing a road-map for tackling problems such as migration, security and the falter-ing economy.

But Renzi said little had been achieved. “We said more or less the same things” as in previous summits, complained the Italian leader who had been hoping for concrete action on both immigration and economic growth.

As a mark of protest, he had refused to participate in a clos-ing press conference with French

President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, saying he did not agree with them on key issues such as migration and the economy.

“I am not satisfied” with the conclusions of the summit, he later said, explaining his absence. “I can-not take part in a press conference with the German chancellor or the French president when I don’t share their conclusions.” And yesterday, he insisted that Italy would not “serve as a fig leaf” for others, in an appar-ent allusion to France and Germany.

For Renzi, Italy — which has been on the frontline of the migrant cri-sis — has been largely left to its own

devices in coping with the influx, and the solutions it has proposed have not been taken into account.

Italy has been pushing for inter-national agreements with African states to help close migrant routes to Europe and take back some of those arriving via Libya, in exchange for increased aid and investment.

But Renzi said the issue was not even raised at the Bratislava sum-mit where the documents presented “didn’t even mention Africa,” he com-plained. On economic growth, Renzi reiterated his critique of Europe’s adoption of austerity policies over Washington’s choice of investment.

Although Italy is respecting the

EU’s budgetary discipline rules, it retains the right to say that such rules are “not working”, Renzi said, stressing that Italy is not prepared “to pretend not to notice”.

Speculation in the Italian press suggested that the reason for Renzi’s bad mood was Italy’s upcoming con-stitutional reform referendum which is scheduled for November.

Renzi has staked his political future on the outcome of the refer-endum on his proposed reforms of parliament and the electoral system.

The vote is shaping up as a ref-erendum on Renzi’s two-and-a-half years in office and polls suggest it will be a close-run thing.

Reuters

BRATISLAVA: Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are ready to veto any Brexit deal that would limit their citizens’ rights to work in Britain, Slovak Prime Minis-ter Robert Fico said yesterday.

EU leaders met in Slovakia’s cap-ital Bratislava on Friday at their first summit for decades without Britain after a shock British vote in June to leave the bloc, a subject which Fico said had only been touched on at the meeting.

They are still trying to find com-mon ground on the best way to cope with a higher number of migrants and how to shake off the lingering effects of years of economic crisis.

Fico said in an interview the EU had also shifted from a debate over

mandatory quotas to a new princi-ple of “flexible solidarity” over the migrant crisis.

The Visegrad group (V4) of Central European countries have together opposed EU efforts to intro-duce mandatory quotas for migrants and now, Fico said, also have a com-mon interest in protecting citizens’ rights to work in Britain.

“V4 countries will be uncompro-mising. Unless we feel a guarantee that these people (living and working in Britain) are equal, we will veto any agreement between the EU and Brit-ain,” he said. “I think Britain knows this is an issue for us where there’s no room for compromise.”

EU officials on Friday also under-lined that there could be no granting Britain access to the EU’s single market unless London accepts the freedom of movement of workers that lies at the heart of European Union accords.

Fico reiterated that he was opposed to any “cherry-picking” in negotiations, saying EU freedoms must remain. Britain has said it would not initiate the formal pro-ceedings this year but it could do so next year, starting a two-year count-down to its exit.

The Brexit vote has triggered what European Commission Pres-ident Jean-Claude Juncker has described as an “existential crisis” for the EU and Friday’s informal meeting of the bloc’s 27 members was meant to display unity but instead showed divisions remain over migrant policy.

The EU’s eastern members have

been at odds with older members, mainly Germany, over taking in a share of more than one million migrants who last year fled war and poverty in Middle Eastern and Afri-can countries to come to Europe.

On Friday, Hungary criticised Germany for refusing to agree to a ceiling on the number of migrants entering Europe, saying it would con-tinue to draw masses to Europe.

Fico said he wanted more steps on migration issues in the bloc’s new road map but that he was happy that border security was getting more attention and that a debate began on “flexible solidarity” allowing coun-tries to offer what they can to tackle the migrant crisis.

“I could have banged on the table yesterday ... but that would get us nowhere. What the EU is about today, is lets talk about things that unite us. There is no time for things that divide us,” he said.

Slovakia has been one of the harshest critics of quotas and has sued the bloc over a plan agreed last year to re-distribute migrants, but was outvoted. Hungary has also taken legal action.

Fico said V4 would keep putting forward its common positions, which he said were sometimes more pragmatic given its history of trans-formation after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

“But the V4 would never go against the EU. We will have our orig-inal positions, but we will not push it at the price of damaging the EU,” Fico said.

Reuters

PARIS: Parts of central Paris were cordoned off yesterday after a false alarm triggered a major security operation. French government security alert app - SAIP - warned cit-izens that a police operation was under way in Saint-Leu church in Chatelet and advised people to stay away.

Interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, issued a statement confirming the false alarm. More than 100 police officers carried out the operation and the area was reopened to traf-fic after it became evident that there was no danger. Security forces had responded to a call that claimed hostages had been taken in Saint-Leu church, interior ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said. “As the operation took place, the church’s priest came out and the BRI (emergency intervention and search service) made sure there was nobody, that there was no assaillant,” he said.

Italian premier fumes over key EU summit

No compromise on workers’ freedom of movement: FicoHungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are ready to veto any Brexit deal that would limit their citizens’ rights to work in Britain, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico said.

Slovakia Prime Minister Robert Fico (left) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel leave the boat after a lunch cruise on the Danube River during the informal EU Summit in Bratislava on Friday.

Reuters

SARAJEVO: Bosnia’s top court upheld a ban on a “discrimi-natory” national holiday in the country’s autonomous Serb Republic, setting the regional gov-ernment on a collision course with the deeply divided country’s cen-tral authorities in Sarajevo.

The Constitutional Court ruled that January 9, the date on which Statehood Day is held, discrimi-nated against the region’s Muslims Bosniaks and Catholic Croats since it coincides with a Serbian Orthodox Christian holiday.

January 9 is the date when Bosnian Serbs declared independ-ence from Bosnia, precipitating a three-year war that claimed 100,000 lives when rival forces carved ethnically pure statelets out of multi-ethnic Bosnia with the backing of their kin in neigh-bouring Serbia and Croatia.

The court also ordered a halt to next Sunday’s regional referen-dum on holding the holiday. Many see the vote as a dress-rehearsal for a threatened 2018 plebiscite on full secession for the region. The court said the vote harmed the constitutional order.

The Serb Republic said it would push on with the poll in defiance of the court, which could strengthen separatist sentiment in the country, whose intricate federal structure was designed by the West to hold it together after the 1992-95 war.

“They cannot halt our decision,” said Milorad Dodik, President of the Serb Republic. “We will vote in the referendum. We will show that the citizens of the Serb Republic stand by its holiday.”

Bosnian Serbs commemo-rate Statehood Day by hanging out flags and holding religious ceremonies. But non-Serbs say celebrating it on a religious hol-iday violates their country’s constitutional principle of secu-larism and pluralism.

Western countries have urged Serbs to drop plans for the vote, fearing it could derail the long-term plan of nudging Bosnia and the entire region further down a path of European integration after years of economic and political stagnation. Russia, a traditional ally of Serbs both in Serbia and in Bosnia, has backed it.

Bosnia’s top

court blocks

Serb Republic

national holiday

Reuters

FREJUS: Far-right National Front party leader Marine Le Pen yes-terday said that she was eager for France’s presidential election cam-paign to start, portraying herself as the “candidate of the people” and mocking her opponents’ primaries as cockfights.

Opinion polls consistently show the anti-immigration, anti-EU Le Pen making it to the second round of the 2017 election. Her ratings have been boosted by worries over Europe’s refugee crisis and concerns over Islamist attacks.

But the same polls also show Le Pen losing the second-round runoff — to be held in early May — prompting her to make further efforts to polish her image and that of her camp, including with a campaign poster sporting the slogan “France Brought to Peace”, and not bearing the par-ty’s name or logo. “I’m very relaxed, impatient to start this presidential campaign,” Le Pen told reporters. “I am eager for the match to start, to debate issues that are essential to the survival of our country as it is now.

She was speaking at her party’s annual rally, this year in the Medi-terranean town of Frejus, where the mayor, David Rachline, is a rising party star and Le Pen’s campaign manager. Le Pen, who was alone amid France’s major party lead-ers to back Britain’s exit from the European Union and is also alone

in supporting US Republican can-didate Donald Trump, hopes to benefit from rising anti-establish-ment sentiment amid voters on both sides of the Atlantic.

“I am, and will be, in this pres-idential election the candidate of the people, who have been forgot-ten, scorned, over the 20 past years,” she said at the start of the rally in the southern France town of Frejus.

Le Pen mocked the bitterly fought primaries of France’s con-servatives and centre-right, which will pit ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy against former Prime Minister Alain Juppe and other candidates in November, and that of the Left, scheduled for January. She said they were battles of egos and cockfights.

Rachline and her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen both told Reuters that the party’s campaign would only fully start once those two pri-maries are over. “As long as we don’t know who our opponents are, it is very complicated to launch a cam-paign,” Marechal-Le Pen said, while insisting the National Front, or FN, believed it could win the presiden-tial election, despite the opinion polls.

“I don’t say it will be easy,” she said. “But a lot of the pieces of the puzzles are falling into place.” She said pointed to security concerns among voters after various deadly attacks in France, and at Brit-ain’s Brexit vote. Rachline said Le Pen would focus on asking voters “whether France must or no regain its independence” and “whether it will, or not, let radical Islam grow”.

Education is civil rights struggle of our age: UN envoy

False alarm leads to major police

operation in central Paris

French police secure the area next to the Saint-Leu church during a security operation in a shopping district of Paris yesterday.

France’s Le Pen says she is ‘candidate of the people’

EUROPE 13SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

People dressed as gorillas take part in the Great Gorilla Run 2016 in London yesterday to raise money for gorilla conservation and awareness of endangered species.

Great Gorilla Run

AP

SID, SERBIA: For Mohammad Ansar Al Mansouri, reaching the European Union has proved to be an impossi-ble task. In the past two months, the 28-year-old from Pakistan has tried countless times to cross from Serbia into EU members states Hungary or Croatia, but was always chased back

by police guarding their borders.Now, countries across eastern and

central Europe — spurred by Hunga-ry’s tough stance against refugees and migrants trying to cross into the coun-try — are teaming up to make it even harder for people like Al Mansouri to come anywhere near the EU.

When the nations along the former Balkan migrant route — leading from Turkey through Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia — closed their borders one after another in March, it reduced the influx of peo-ple from thousands to hundreds a day.

But despite this, and an EU-Tur-key deal aimed at keeping migrants away from Europe, they have con-tinued pouring in using clandestine routes. Now governments are look-ing for ways to fortify their borders further, fearing the number of people from the Middle East, Asia or Africa trying to cross the Balkans could swell again as worsening weather discourages them from using the Mediterranean Sea crossing from Libya to Italy.

In past weeks, Hungary’s right-wing, anti-migrant prime minister has offered to send police to help

Serbia guard its borders and has announced plans to build yet another barbed-wire fence on Hungary’s southern border. Serbia too is mulling border barriers toward Macedonia and Bulgaria, where it has already beefed up army and police patrols. Further west, Croatia and Slovenia are also gearing up for a possible migrant wave. In Brussels, the EU has urged reinforcements on Bul-garia’s border to Turkey to manage the influx.

Migration is on the the agenda of the EU summit in Bratislava, with nations divided over how to deal with the crisis after more than one mil-lion people entered Europe last year.

“I am against walls and fences,” Serbia’s populist Prime Minister Ale-ksandar Vucic said. “We just want a solution. Serbia cannot be the first and last defense of Europe. Europe must solve this on the borders of Greece and Bulgaria.”

Experts have warned that further tightening of anti-migrant measures only adds to the refugees’ hardship and risks pushing even more of them into the hands of people smugglers. Thousands more could get stranded

in Balkan countries such as Serbia, where frustration is already mount-ing and reports of migrant-related incidents have been on the rise.

“It is a vicious circle that will not result in a solution,” said Rados Djurovic, from the Asylum Protection Center. “If you bring army and police to the border, those people may not pass today, but they will pass tomor-row or the day after.”

The European Union’s border agency, Frontex, has reported that the number of migrants arriving in the Greek islands from Turkey has increased significantly over the last month, with 3,430 migrants “detected” in August, up from 2,030 in July. Frontex has described the rise as the “first noticeable monthly increase” since the EU-Turkey migrant deal came into effect and Macedonia tightened border con-trols with Greece.

Serbian officials have said that already some 5,000 migrants are currently staying in the country, which has capacities for only one thousand more. With more new migrants arriving than leaving Ser-bia there are fears thousands more

could soon pile up. Officials have also complained that most of the migrants are young, single men from Afghanistan, Pakistan or north Africa and so-called economic migrants, whose asylum requests are routinely rejected in EU countries and whom nobody wants to take in.

Al Mansouri has been on the road for the past six months and has been stuck in Serbia for the last two. He has moved between three asylum cent-ers in Serbia, and made numerous attempts — legal and illegal — to enter the EU, all in vain. A policeman back in Pakistan, Al Mansouri says he fled because he faced threats to his life.

“I am running from country to country ... seeking a safe life,” Al Man-souri said in English. “They won’t give us papers to work or to live, they just want us to leave the country; it is same from Turkey to Greece, Macedonia and Serbia. It is the same everywhere.”

Al Mansouri is currently staying in a Serbian asylum center in Sid — a town of some 15,000 people on the border with Croatia — where he is sharing a stuffy tent with dozens of other migrants like him. Stranded, the men already have spent much

of their money and now spend their days lingering in the camps, with no prospects ahead.

“We went through hell and we are stuck here!” Al Mansouri said. “We can’t go back, we can’t go forward, so we ask the EU where do we go now?” In Sid, local authorities have stepped up police presence and banned young migrant men without families from going out at night, following incidents with locals and a spike in burglaries and thefts blamed on migrants.

Al Mansouri said most of the men in the camp in Sid have tried several times to leave Serbia, but didn’t get far. Some of the men pulled up their shirts to show bruising that they claimed were bites from police dogs on the Hungarian border, their frus-tration and anger almost palpable in the humid and hot tent.

“We did try to cross to Hun-gary, they bashed us, they had dogs on us and threw pepper spray and said many bad words to us,” Al Man-souri said. “Then we tried to cross to the Croatian side and police caught us and they bashed us. Why they are doing that?” he asked. “We are humans, we are not criminals.”

AFP

MOSCOW: Russia votes today in national parliamentary and regional elections with the Kremlin firmly in control and parties loyal to President Vladimir Putin expected to remain dominant.

The polls come after years of tumult that have seen the country annex Crimea from Ukraine, lurch into its worst stand-off with the West since the Cold War, plunge into economic crisis and launch a military campaign in Syria. Here are some key facts to know and things to look out for:

What’s at stake?Some 110 million voters are reg-

istered to cast their ballots across Russia’s 11 time zones in a poll to choose the 450 members of the coun-try’s national parliament—or State Duma—for its next five year term.

Over 6,500 candidates from 14 parties are competing, with half of the deputies elected on a constit-uency basis for the first time after changes to the voting system.

The last Duma—which ended its term with only one opposition

member—was widely seen as a rub-ber-stamp body that has slavishly followed the Kremlin’s line.

Voters will also be picking regional bosses and local parlia-ments in some parts of the country.

There are several interesting subplots. This is the first time Cri-mea elects MPs to Russia’s parliament since Moscow seized it from Ukraine in 2014. It will also be the first time

that the strongman leader of Chech-nya Ramzan Kadyrov faces a popular vote, with rights groups saying any criticism of him has been crushed in the run-up. The first exit polls are expected Sunday evening.

Crisis, what crisis?Russia is currently mired in the

longest recession of Putin’s 16-year rule on the back of low oil prices and Western sanctions over Ukraine. The

crisis has pushed poverty levels to a nine-year high and hit the spending power of average people.

Meanwhile Moscow’s ties with the West are the worst they have been since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the country is conducting its first military operation beyond the ex-Soviet region in decades in Syria.

Putin’s approval rating is still around 80 percent and the author-ities’ vice-like grip on most of the media and political discourse means that, even if the ruling United Russia’s popularity has slipped, pro-Krem-lin parties look set to maintain their dominance.

Freer but not fair?Looming over these elections for

the authorities is the memory of mass protests that shook Putin’s rule after the last legislative polls five years ago when evidence of vote-rigging emerged. Since then the authorities have cracked down on the right to demonstrate, fired on by the ouster of Ukraine’s Russian-backed leader Viktor Yanukovych in protests.

The Kremlin has simultane-ously also moved to clean up the vote, replacing the former scandal-tainted election chief with a human

rights advocate in a bid to give more legitimacy to the polls.

As in previous elections parties loyal to the Putin—including the Communists and ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party—provide a facade of greater choice.

But this time round the number of genuine opposition candidates allowed to take part—including some 20 funded by exiled arch-Kremlin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky—has also increased dramatically and they have access to TV advertising and debates.

Putin 2018?For many the vote is seen as a dry

run for the next presidential election scheduled for March 2018.

Putin, 63, is widely expected to run again for a fourth term that could see him become the longest-ruling leader since Stalin, even if he has not formally committed himself yet.

The authorities therefore are looking for a trouble-free vote to help smooth Putin’s path to victory.

Any lurch away from the ruling party to the left or the right could see the Kremlin put much-needed reforms to restructure the economy or speed up a shake-up of key offi-cials around Putin.

More migrants stuck in Balkans as nations fortify bordersHungary’s right-wing, anti-migrant prime minister has offered to send police to help Serbia guard its borders. Serbia too is mulling border barriers toward Macedonia and Bulgaria.

Reuters

BRUSSELS: A 17-year-old has committed doctor-assisted sui-cide in Belgium, the first minor to do so under rules adopted in 2014 allowing euthanasia for people of all ages, the head of the national committee for euthanasia said yesterday.

Wim Distelmans, who chairs Belgium’s Federal Control and Eval-uation Committee on Euthanasia, told Reuters that the minor was 17 and that a local doctor had reported the case to his committee last week, but he gave no other details.

Belgium legalised euthanasia in 2002, and two years ago amended the rules to permit doctor-assisted death for minors in a hopeless med-ical situation and with their explicit consent. It is the only country in the world that allows euthanasia for minors of all ages. In the neigh-bouring Netherlands the practice is legal for children aged 12 or over.

Distelmans said in an emailed statement that the Belgian law defines euthanasia very strictly. Minors must be conscious and able to make rational decisions when they request assisted death. Psychologists or psychiatrists must be consulted and the par-ents must give their permission.

To undergo euthanasia, the minor must also be in a “terminal medical situation with constant and unbearable physical pain which cannot be assuaged and that will cause death in the short term”, the law says.

In the ten years to 2013, the number of euthanasia cases in Belgium rose from about 1,000 to 8,752, according to official records. Euthanasia laws vary by country. Laws in Belgium, the Netherlands, Colombia and Luxemburg allow mercy deaths for adults, which usually means a doctor adminis-tering lethal doses of barbiturates. In Switzerland, Germany, Japan and Canada, doctor-assisted sui-cide, where people take the final action themselves, is legal.

AP

BERLIN: Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives face possible ejec-tion from Berlin’s state government in an election this weekend, while a nationalist party hopes for more gains at the expense of Germany’s traditional political forces.

Today’s vote comes two weeks after Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union was beaten into third place by the nationalist Alternative for Ger-many, or AfD, in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where Merkel has her parliamen-tary constituency. The CDU has long been weak in Berlin but another fee-ble result, though not immediately dangerous to Merkel, would keep up political pressure on the chancellor.

Merkel’s opening of Germany’s borders to migrants last year fea-tured prominently in Mecklenburg, although the influx has dimin-ished drastically. The result there prompted her allies in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union, to step up a drive for tougher refugee policies — an internal dispute that isn’t helping the conservatives’ poll ratings.

Merkel has defended her approach and, at a rally Wednesday, criticized opponents “who think that if you provoke, if you have snappy slogans ... problems will solve them-selves.” “It is not enough ... to know who is to blame, it is not enough just

to know what you’re against,” she said. “We need good solutions that hold our society together.”

Local issues are more prominent in Berlin, a city of 3.5 million. That isn’t good news for the governing parties: disillusionment is high over the capital’s notoriously inefficient bureaucracy and issues such as years of delays in opening its new airport.

Mayor Michael Mueller’s center-left Social Democrats lead the local government, with Merkel’s CDU as junior partner, a bad-tempered alli-ance of Germany’s biggest parties similar to Merkel’s national govern-ing coalition. Mueller says he wants to dump the conservatives for one or more left-leaning partners.

“It looks as though both big parties ... will probably do even worse than last time,” said Manfred Guellner, the head of the Forsa polling agency, referring to Berlin’s 2011 state election when both were already weak. Vot-ers consider CDU mayoral contender Frank Henkel, like his counterpart in Mecklenburg, an “extremely weak” candidate, he said.

He argued that it suits local leaders to blame the chancellor for the result in Mecklenburg, but only AfD support-ers were motivated by the desire to punish Merkel. “They now hate Merkel; for them, national politics are more important than local politics, and the refugee question more important than for all other voters.”

As for the effect on national poli-tics, he said “there are always dents”

in support immediately after poor results, but they can be ironed out.

Polls suggest that the governing parties may not win a combined majority in Berlin’s state legisla-ture, which elects the mayor. That already happened earlier this year in the eastern region of Saxony-Anhalt. It’s a novel situation in Germany, caused in part by a long-term ero-sion of voter loyalty but in particular by AfD’s rise.

In Berlin, the conservatives have stressed law-and-order issues, with Henkel, the current state interior minister, also leading calls for a ban on face-covering veils. The govern-ing parties have accused each other of not taking sufficient responsibility for the refugee situation after Berlin’s initially chaotic handling of it last year.

The low-key Mueller succeeded long-serving predecessor Klaus Wow-ereit in 2014 after he stepped down in mid-term. Even under the charismatic Wowereit, the Social Democrats won a lackluster 28.3 percent of votes five years ago, followed by Merkel’s party with 23.3 percent.

Polls suggest their support will sink to at most 24 percent and 19 percent respectively. The opposi-tion Greens and Left Party, potential new partners for Mueller, are a few points further behind. Polls show its support at up to 15 percent in Berlin. The capital is somewhat less promis-ing territory than rural Mecklenburg, where it won 20.8 percent to finish second.

Merkel’s party faces litmus test in crucial Berlin vote today

17-year-old is first

minor to be granted

euthanasia in Belgium

20,000 refugee

supporters march

through London

LONDON: Around 20,000 pro-refugee demonstrators took to the streets on London yesterday, according to police, to call on Prime Minister Theresa May to do more to tackle the migrant crisis.

Protesters marched down the affluent Park Lane and the central thoroughfare Piccadilly carrying an array of colourful placards and shouting slogans including “say it loud, say it clear: Refugees are welcome here!” Some carried signs reading “no-one is illegal”, “stop the drowning”, while oth-ers chanted “refugees - let them stay...Let’s deport Theresa May!”

What to look out for at Russian parliament polls today

Members of a local electoral commission prepare a polling station ahead of Russia’s parliamentary elections, in Moscow, yesterday.

AMERICAS14 SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

Trump has long suggested his Democratic opponent wants to overturn the Second Amendment and take away Americans’ right to own guns.

Members of civil associations from Mexico and the United States take part in search for people missing along the Navajo stream in the Juarez Valley desert, near Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua State, Mexico.

For the missing ones

AP

MIAMI: Donald Trump made his usual sarcastic call early yesterday for Hillary Clinton’s Secret Service agents to be stripped of their fire-arms — and then added, “let’s see what happens to her.”

Trump has long incorrectly suggested his Democratic oppo-nent wants to overturn the Second Amendment and take away Amer-icans’ right to own guns. At a rally in Miami, he again riffed about con-fiscating the agents’ guns and then went further.

“I think that her bodyguards should drop all weapons. They should disarm, right?” Trump asked the crowd. “Take their guns away,

she doesn’t want guns. Take their — and let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away. OK, it would be very dangerous.”

Trump’s meaning was not immediately clear and a campaign spokeswoman did not respond to a request for an elaboration.

But the Clinton campaign had a quick reaction. Spokesman Robby Mook released a statement saying Trump “has a pattern of inciting people to violence. Whether this is done to provoke protesters at a rally or casually or even as a joke, it is an unacceptable quality in any-one seeking the job of Commander in Chief.

“This kind of talk should be out of bounds for a presidential candi-date,” Mook wrote.

The seemingly ominous com-ment evoked a remark Trump made last month that many Democrats condemned as a call for Clinton’s assassination. Speaking at a rally in North Carolina, the Republican nominee erroneously said his oppo-nent wants to “abolish, essentially, the Second Amendment.”

He continued: “By the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

However, within minutes, the Clinton campaign condemned the remark. Mook said then, “A person

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump appears at a campaign rally in Miami, Florida.

Trump flayed for

switch on

‘birther’ statement

AP

NEW YORK: Donald Trump’s renouncement of birtherism came with some media gamesmanship that compelled television news networks to air 20 minutes of endorsements by retired military men before the can-didate briefly got to the point.

“We all got Rick-rolled,” said CNN’s Jake Tapper, a reference to the Internet prank of replacing an expected link with a video of singer Rick Astley’s 1987 hit, “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

The bad blood continued after the event when the Trump campaign barred text reporters and a television producer from joining him on a tour of the new Trump International Hotel in Washington. In response, cable and broadcast networks refused to use any video of the tour.

With criticism of his birther movement starting anew, Trump’s campaign signaled that the candidate would address the issue at a Wash-ington event. When Trump stepped to the podium, he was carried live on CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC.

Following a short statement that didn’t address the birther issue, Trump stepped aside for a succes-sion of Medal of Honour recipients to approach the microphone and endorse him.

The networks stuck with the event, essentially a Trump com-mercial, until Fox News Channel pulled away at 11:25 a.m. for a stu-dio discussion and the other two networks shortly followed suit. By 11:30, Trump stepped back to the podium and all the networks went back to him live.

seeking to be the president of the United States of America should not suggest violence in any way.”

Trump later disputed that criti-cism, saying everyone in his audience knew he was referring to the power of voters and “there can be no other interpretation.”

Trump, who has the endorsement of National Rifle Association, eventu-ally took to Twitter to say the Secret Service had not contacted him about the remarks.

The comments in Miami came hours after Trump finally reversed his long-held position that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Appearing in Washington, he said Obama was born in the United States

but then incorrectly suggested that the Clinton campaign had started the conspiracy theory.

Trump ignored questions from reporters about his switch and has yet to explain why he abandoned the “birther” stance that fueled his political fame and was viewed by critics as an attempt to delegitimize the nation’s first African-American president.

While campaigning in South Florida, which has a large Cuban-American population, Trump also said that if he’s elected president, he will reverse Obama’s efforts to normalise relations with Cuba — unless the country abides by certain “demands.” Among those, he said, would be religious and political

freedom for the Cuban people and the freeing of all political prisoners.

Trump says he’ll “stand with the Cuban people in their fight against communist oppression.”

The comment marks yet another reversal for the GOP candidate, who previously said he supported the idea of normalised relations, but wished the US had negotiated a better deal.

Trump also said the US has a broader obligation to stand with oppressed people — a comment that seems at odds with his “America first” mantra. “The next president of the United States must stand in solidarity with all people oppressed in our hemisphere, and we will stand with oppressed people, and there are many,” he said.

AP

FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA: Stepping deeper into the political fray, Michelle Obama warned young voters against being “tired or turned off” in the 2016 election. She urged them to rally behind Hillary Clinton, “particularly given the alternative.”

She is emerging as one of Clin-ton’s most effective advocates, especially with voters who backed President Barack Obama but are less enthusiastic about his potential Dem-ocratic successor. The Clinton team’s

biggest challenge regarding Mrs Obama is getting the reluctant cam-paigner to commit to more events.

The rally in Virginia was Mrs Obama’s first solo campaign event for Clinton and comes nearly two months after her star turn at the Democratic convention. Speaking to mostly stu-dents at George Mason University, she repeatedly jabbed Trump without mentioning him by name, declaring that being president “isn’t anything like reality TV.”

The first lady pointedly called out those who continue to question the president’s citizenship “up to this very day.” Drawing on a frequently

quoted line from her convention speech, Mrs Obama said her husband had responded to those questions by “”going high when they go low.”

Beyond her ability to take on Trump with a smile, Mrs Obama’s real value to Clinton is her wild popularity with Democratic voters, particularly young people and blacks. She vouched repeatedly for Clinton’s resume and character, urging voters motivated by her husband’s history-making campaigns to feel the same way about the first woman nominated for president by a major US party.

“When I hear folks saying that they don’t feel inspired in this

election, well let me tell you, I dis-agree— I am inspired,” Mrs Obama said.

Clinton aides want Mrs Obama in battleground states as much as pos-sible between now and Election Day. Her rally in northern Virginia, less than an hour drive from the White House, is the only event she’s pub-licly committed to, though the Clinton campaign expects her to make addi-tional appearances.

Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s com-munications director and a former Obama adviser, called the first lady “an advocate without peer.”

“There is no other surrogate with

the reach, credibility and respect she has,” Palmieri said.

Clinton herself has started refer-encing Mrs Obama in her campaign remarks, using her convention address as a guidepost for what she promises will be a more aspirational finish to her campaign.

“As Michelle Obama said in her fabulous speech at the Democratic Convention, when we go to the polls this November, the real choice isn’t between Democrat or Republican. It’s about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four years of their lives,” Clinton said on Thursday during a campaign stop in

Greensboro, North Carolina.That convention address ran just

about 10 minutes, yet it was perhaps the most powerful of the four-day gathering. In the midst of a heated campaign, with two candidates who are viewed negatively by so many Americans, the first lady provided a striking contrast by speaking as a mother hopeful about her daugh-ters’ future.

“Part of what makes her so appealing and effective as a surrogate is that she’s relentlessly positive, even when things on the campaign trail get negative,” said Olivia Alair Dalton, Mrs. Obama’s former spokeswoman.

AFP

NEW YORK: Powerful city police chief William Bratton ended his sec-ond stint as New York commissioner early yesterday, leaving to his suc-cessor the task of repairing fraught police-community relations.

Bratton—who announced his resignation in August—walked out of police headquarters to the sound of bagpipes and applause from a receiving line of officers and well-wishers, including the city’s mayor.

The 68-year-old served twice as New York police commissioner, and has also led agencies in Los Ange-les and Boston.

One of the most recognised faces in American policing, he

was a key proponent of “zero tol-erance” policing in the 1990s that slashed crime to historic lows, and expanded use of the stop and frisk as police chief of Los Angeles from 2002 to 2009.

He was reappointed New York police chief in 2013 by Mayor Bill de Blasio and steps down as the United States is roiled by controversy over deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police and high-pro-file killings of officers.

Crime in New York has steadily declined in recent years, a transfor-mation since the drug wars of 1990s.

Despite his ceremonious depar-ture Bratton is not without critics, who say he remained overly commit-ted to a policing approach focused on small crime that many hold unfairly targets people of colour.

Brazil soap opera

star drowns in

off-set accident

AFP

SAO PAULO: Soap opera star Domingos Montagner, who drowned in a river where his series had been filming and where his character narrowly escaped death in a recent episode.

Montagner, 54 was on a break from filming the hit series Velho Chico (Old Chico) in northeast Brazil when he went for a swim in the Sao Francisco River with co-star Camila Pitanga, according to the Globo media group, which broadcasts the show.

The pair was swept up in a strong current. Pitanga managed to grab onto a rock, but she was unable to keep hold of Montagner.

She cried out for help, but some locals apparently did not pay attention because they sup-posed filming was under way.

Montagner’s body was found several hours later 30 metres underwater trapped among the riverbed rocks, the Globo group’s flagship newspaper reported.

Velho Chico, one of Brazil’s most-watched “novelas”—or primetime soaps—tells the story of the power struggles between two families of landholders in the turbulent 1970s.

Tragically, Montagner played the role of Santo, who disappeared in the same river in a recent epi-sode. In the series, he was rescued by an indigenous tribe.

AP

KITTERY, MAINE: A long-shuttered, century-old rescue station on the border of Maine and New Hampshire is being restored with plans to turn it into a maritime history museum.

The building is located on Wood Island near the entrance of the

Piscataqua River, on the Maine side of the state divide. It was once an out-post of the long-gone United States Life-Saving Service before being decommissioned in 1948 and then falling into neglect for decades.

The first phase of a restoration overseen by a local group called the Wood Island Life Saving Station Asso-ciation will be completed next month.

The association, which is

managing the project for the town of Kittery, anticipates the project will be completed by 2019 at a cost of $2.5m; it is being funded by state and federal grants and private donors, said Pres-ident Sam Reid. Work began in May.

The United States Life-Saving Service, for which the station was originally built, was created to save lives of shipwrecked mariners. It merged with Revenue Cutter Service

in 1915 when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Act to Create the Coast Guard. The Wood Island Sta-tion was designed to launch boats to save imperiled mariners. In World War II, it was used to keep an eye out for German submarines.

It is the only station in the coun-try that still has a marine railway — a launch that was used to send rescue boats into the water, Reid said.

The restoration plan represents a chance to save a unique piece of maritime history, and allow it to be opened to the public, Reid said.

“The issue is can you create enough value to fully restore it and open it to the public, Reid said.”

Gary Beers, chairman of Town Council in Kittery, said it is a chance to save a historic site and celebrate the areas centuries-old maritime history.

Trump calls forHillary’s guards to lose their guns

Michelle Obama warns young voters against being ‘turned off’

Bratton ends tenure as NY police chief

Historic ‘Life Saving Station’ saved, to become museum

AMERICAS 17SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016 15

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (right) speaks to the media with Mali’s Prime Minister Modibo Keita prior to a bilateral meeting at the Fifth Replenishment Conference of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Together for a cause

A view of the hydroelectric dam on the Reventazon River in Siquirres, in Costa Rica’s Limon province, inagurated early yesterday. The Reventazon River hydropower dam is the largest public infrastructure project in Central America after the Panama Canal, and the largest hydroelectric dam in Central America.

Dedicated to public

Reuters

YARI PLAINS, COLOMBIA: Colom-bia’s Marxist FARC rebels will continue their fight for social justice under a peace deal with the government, its top commander said yesterday at the opening of the group’s final congress as an armed group.

Representatives from the Revo-lutionary Armed Forces of Colombia

(FARC) are expected to ratify the recently agreed accord at its tenth congress this week, the first ever open to the media.

Standing before hundreds of fighters in southern Colombia, rebel commander Rodrigo Londono, who uses the nom de guerre Timochenko, said the FARC wants to spread its message as an unarmed political party and transform the Andean nation after five decades of war.

“Our greatest aspiration is to reach many more with our message until the torrent for transformation is overwhelming,” Timochenko told a crowd of fighters gathered on the rural Yari Plains, about five hours from the nearest town.

“In this war, there are neither victors nor vanquished,” he said, wearing a T-shirt bearing the image of FARC founder Manuel Marulanda. “The greatest satisfaction will always be to have won peace.”

The congress, which in the past was secret and used to decide battle strategy, may offer insight into the

FARC’s political agenda. The sched-ule for the event mirrors the peace talks agenda, including land reform and environmental issues.

After almost four years of talks, the FARC and government last month reached a final peace accord that will be signed by Timochenko and Presi-dent Juan Manuel Santos on September 26. Colombians will have the last word during a plebiscite on October 2.

“We’re going to vote for peace,” said Jhon Guerrero, a 24-year-old delegate from a rebel unit in Choco. “What’s been agreed in the deal is a solution to Colombia’s problems.”

“We are all ready to contribute,” he said, as he stood unarmed but in full uniform among other fighters.

While FARC may find an electoral foothold among poverty-stricken farmers and committed leftists, many Colombians are wary ex-fighters will join crime gangs or smaller rebel group the National Liberation Army.

Santos, who has staked his legacy on peace, has launched a campaign to convince Colombians to back the

accords but he faces fierce opposition from powerful sectors of the coun-try who believe the only solution is

to finish the FARC militarily.Many are angered that the FARC

leadership will not serve jail time,

and are worried they will seek to convert the traditionally conserv-ative nation with its Marxist ideals.

Obama to meet

with leaders of

Nigeria and

Colombia

AP

WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama will review mil-itary strategy against the Islamic State (IS) group, press nations to admit more refugees and review progress around the world, despite new challenges, when he makes his final appearance at the UN Gen-eral Assembly session in New York next week, the White House said.

On the sidelines of the session, Obama has scheduled meetings with the leaders of Iraq, Nigeria and Colombia and plans to pro-mote trade between the US and Africa.

Obama heads to New York today for the General Assembly session that opens tomorrow, his eighth and final as president.

He plans to sit down tomorrow with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to discuss progress the country has made countering the IS, a coming Iraqi military opera-tion to take back the city of Mosul from IS militants, and a brewing humanitarian crisis inside Iraq, said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser.

Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this week while visiting Baghdad that Iraqi forces aided by the US-led coa-lition against IS had retaken half the territory that militants once held in the country. He also announced more than $181m in aid to address a humanitarian cri-sis that has festered in Iraq as a result of the insurgency.

Despite a series of major defeats in recent months, IS has maintained its grip on Mosul. Iraq hopes to launch an operation this year to retake Mosul.

AP

CHICAGO: A Chicago police officer who was videotaped firing shots that injured two black teenagers inside a car was indicted on fed-eral civil rights charges.

US Attorney Zachary Fardon said the 41-year-old Marco Proano was indicted on two counts of dep-rivation of rights after he allegedly used unreasonable force while on duty on December 22, 2013. Each count of the indictment is punisha-ble by up to 10 years in prison.

The release doesn’t detail the allegations, but police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said that the indictment stems from an incident captured on dashboard camera video that was released last year by a retired judge who had handled a criminal trial involving one of the teenagers.

The video shows the officer firing his handgun multiple times — more than a dozen, according to an attorney for the families that filed a lawsuit — into a car occupied by the two teenagers, who posed no appar-ent theat. The car had been pulled over for speeding.

Police said at the time that the officer opened fire out of fear that the “occupants who had been in the vehicle were in a position to sustain great bodily harm.” Police also said that a weapon was recovered at the scene. But a family attorney said a pellet gun was recovered and it was never visible or brandished at the officers.

The shooting prompted a lawsuit filed by mothers of three teens in the car, and the city agreed to settle the case for $360,000. One of the three teens wasn’t shot but was taken to the ground by an officer and his right eye was injured, according to the lawsuit.

AP

MIAMI BEACH, FLORIDA: In the only US city to have mosquitoes carrying Zika virus, some residents say they’d rather be bitten than be exposed to droplets of chemicals sprayed from planes to kill the bugs.

No assurances from health officials would calm some 200 people packing a Miami Beach City Commission meet-ing Wednesday. They cursed elected officials and the US Centers for Dis-ease Control and Prevention for mixed messages about aerial spraying over South Beach and refusing to detail all locations where adult mosquitoes

have been isolated with the virus.“At first they said they couldn’t

do aerial spraying, but then they said yes,” said Sadie Kaplan, a fit-ness trainer who fled her home twice to avoid the spraying. Some argued the mild flu-like illness that Zika causes in most people doesn’t war-rant aggressive pesticide use.

“I don’t want to be sprayed with pesticides for what I believe is a hoax,” said Kiro Ace, a graphic designer who was shirtless but wore a gas mask as he joined protesters chanting, “If you’re going to spray, we want a say!”

At issue is the use of naled, an insecticide sprayed since the 1950s for mosquito control in the US. It’s

currently being used in Miami Beach at levels deemed safe by the CDC and the US Environmental Protection Agency. It’s banned from personal use in homes, but the EPA says there’s no evidence it causes cancer.

An EPA fact sheet on naled says people exposed to high concen-trations can experience nausea, dizziness and confusion. At extremely high concentrations it can be fatal. Ten naled-related calls have been reported to the Florida Poison Con-trol Information Network since August 1, but there’s no confirma-tion of any pesticide exposure or illness, Florida Department of Health spokeswoman Mara Gambineri said.

EPA said a review of its records

found only a “handful” of cases over the past 15 years where naled harmed people. EPA said the major-ity of incidents included minor burns, skin irritation or headaches with no deaths. Agency spokeswoman Nancy Grantham said the numbers are low, considering Florida sprayed about 338,000 pounds of naled on about 6 million acres in 2014.

Not everyone in the commu-nity agreed that naled should be ruled out, and officials confirmed a fifth mosquito sample was found with Zika in the same area of Miami Beach.

Dr. Christine Curry, a University of Miami OB-GYN who is treating Zika-infected women in the affected

area, reminded the sceptical audi-ence that there’s real health risk.

“There are four women I have spoken to in the last several weeks who have not left Florida and who are suspected to have gotten their infec-tion in our community,” she said to boos and jeers. “I frankly don’t care which compound we decide to use or not use for mosquito control. I care that we choose an option that this community agrees on.”

However, naled use can harm the environment. About 2 million honeybees died last month in South Carolina after some beekeepers weren’t notified about aerial spray-ing, the South Carolina Department of Pesticide Regulation confirmed.

Rebel commander Rodrigo Londono said the FARC wants to spread its message as an unarmed political party.

AP

TULSA, OKLAHOMA: A Tulsa police officer shot and killed a black man who ignored repeated requests to put up his hands before reaching into an SUV that was stalled in the middle of a street, the police department said.

Terrence Crutcher, 40, died at the hospital where he was taken after he was shot by the officer, police said in a news release.

Police spokeswoman Jeanne MacKenzie earlier told reporters that two officers were walking toward the stalled SUV when Crutcher approached them from the side of the road.

“He refused to follow com-mands given by the officers,” MacKenzie said. “They continued to talk to him, he continued not to listen and follow any commands.

As they got closer to the vehicle, he reached inside the vehicle and at that time there was a Taser deploy-ment and a short time later there was one shot fired.”

MacKenzie said thatpolice hadn’t searched the SUV and didn’t know if there was a weapon inside.

MacKenzie did not immediately respond to phone messages left yes-terday seeking further information.

The officers’ names and races weren’t released. The one who shot Crutcher will be placed on leave, which is routine in cases of police-involved shootings. The county district attorney’s office will deter-mine if the shooting was justified, MacKenzie said.

Online court records show Ter-rence Crutcher of Tulsa with the same date of birth as the man who was shot pleaded no contest in 1996 to carrying a concealed weapon and resisting an officer and was given a six-month suspended sentence.

His only other court records were for traffic violations, the most recent occurring in 2005.

Tulsa police officers don’t cur-rently have body-worn cameras, although they were selected to receive a nearly $600,000 cash-match grant for them in 2015.

MacKenzie said she believes the officers’ dash cameras might have captured video of the shooting.

In April, a white reserve Tulsa County sheriff’s deputy was con-victed of manslaughter in the fatal shooting last year of an unarmed black suspect who was on the ground being restrained by offic-ers. The deputy said he mistook his handgun for a stun gun.

The shooting led to an investiga-tion that resulted in misdemeanor charges against the county sher-iff, who resigned and later pleaded no contest a charge of refusal to perform official duty and guilty to willful violation of the law.

FARC will fight on as political party: Leader

Members of FARC attend opening ceremony of the 10th National Guerrilla Conference at the camp in Llanos del Yari, Caqueta department, yesterday.

Chicago cop indicted on civil rights charges

Aerial pesticide spray adds to fears in Zika-stricken Miami

Tulsa police shoot dead black man

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Reuters

ASHGABAT: Turkmenistan opened a $2.3bn air terminal at Ashgabat Inter-national Airport yesterday as part of its bid to become an international transport hub and offset a plunge in traditional revenues from gas exports.

The Central Asian desert nation of five million has a strict visa policy and

only attracts about 100,000 tourists a year, although it expects higher num-bers to visit during the Asian Indoor Games in 2017.

Speaking at the white, falcon-shaped building President Kurbanguly Berdy-mukhamedov said: “We have all the opportunities to become a transport bridge facilitating economic coopera-tion between Europe, the Asia-Pacific region and South Asia.” The former Soviet republic has traditionally relied

on exports of natural gas as its main source of foreign currency and revenue.

But a decision by Russia, once the biggest buyer of Turkmen gas, to halt imports and the plunge in global energy prices have led to foreign cur-rency shortages, according to local businessmen, and pushed the govern-ment’s budget into deficit.

As part of its diversification drive, the Ashgabat government has taken part in a railroad project connecting

Central Asia to Iran. It is also building a $2bn port on the Caspian Sea and a railway through Afghanistan.

While infrastructure megaprojects are a relatively new trend, the con-struction of lavish and extravagant buildings such as the new terminal has long been a Turkmen trademark.

Ashgabat holds a Guinness World Record for the highest density of white marble-clad buildings as well as the largest indoor Ferris wheel.

The Peninsula

DOHA: “Fafa Saves the Forest” is a title of drama performed during Eid at the theatre of the Qatar National Conven-tion Centre (QNCC).

The play, the first of its kind in Arab countries, was produced by Baraeem Children satellite TV Channel and performed by the famous figures of Baraeem TV channel Fafa, Teea and Toola and other actors and programme announcers Iman and Rania and pre-sented between September 11 and 17.

This is the first time to direct a stage show in Arab country and it is exciting experience that enabled me to know many talented actors, said Michael Hunt the Director of the drama. He is renowned director of many thea-tre plays, opera shows and concerts in the UK, Russia and Italy.

The play starts with appearance of Fafa enjoying his lives with ani-mals in the forest with big trees and beautiful scenes of the forest. This is followed with appearance of a group of people who begins to destroy the for-est. The issue becomes big challenge for Fata who attempts to save the for-est and bring back the animals forced to leave the forest and try to convince others to reforest it again with help of other actress including Teela and Toola. Fafa crosses long distance to save the forest and then starts to reforest the

land where animals came back to live. “We chose to address the issue of

environment as major challenge not only to this region but the entire world,” Hunt said recently in an interview.

“We would like to convey a message to children and the old to protect their environment, keep land and sea free of plastic, bags and bottles, the impor-tance of recycling, reserve greeneries, animals, birds and natural resources in general,” Hunt pointed out.

Speaking about the ability of the actors presented the show, Hunt said: “It is exciting that Baraeem TV chan-nel produced the stage show which is first of its kind in the Arab region, and the actors knew very well that working in studio is different from performing drama in the stage direct to audience”.

The play accessories included more than 40 pieces of decoration, a number of balloons and items repre-senting forest, desert and North Pole. All these were presented in professional way, he said.

This is one of the major shows pre-sented in QNCC so far, and it is not less important than the stage show of “Lion King” presented in Walt Disney and enjoyed by the children and it is the same like Disney shows but in Arabic language.

From technical point of view Hunt said performing the drama required import of some sophisticated equip-ments for flying from UK and Ireland. The play required 14 tonnes of decora-tion materials, and light units between 1,200 to 1,500, experts and technicians of mobile lights. The scene of the drama changes nine times to reflect different places with touching views.

It is world class work for chil-dren and their parents to admire, said Patrick Connellenin, designer of cloth-ing. He added: “I designed the clothes in a way reflecting cultures, environ-ments and variability of the animals”. Connellenin is the winner of the Lin-bury Prize which is most prestigious award for Stage Design.

People stand in front of a building of a new five-storey international airport in Ashgabat yesterday.

Turkmenistan opens $2.3bn falcon-shaped airport terminal

An Arabic play with a green theme

Michael Hunt (left) and Patrick Connellenin

Pokemon GO new distraction

for drivers and ups crash risk

WASHINGTON: Catching Pokemon while driving is not safe at all as a study reported incidents of crashes and more than 110,000 instances in just 10 days where drivers or pedestrians were distracted by Poke-mon GO. Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among 16 to 24-year-olds, whom the game targets, the investigators, led by John Ayers from San Diego State University, wrote in the study.

The augmented reality game, which allows players to catch and collect Pokemons in real-world locations through the mobile phone camera, has taken the youngsters by storm since its release in July. As players move, their avatar moves within the game, and players are then rewarded for collecting Pokemons placed in real-world locations.

By rewarding movement, the game incentivises physical activity. However, if players use their cars to search for Pokemon they negate any health benefit and incur serious risk, the study said. To evaluate the risk of traffic-related incidents, Twitter postings containing the terms “Pokémon” and “driving,” “drives,” “drive,” or “car” were obtained for July 10-19, 2016. A random sample of 4,000 tweets was generated, and esti-mates from this sample were used to create population-level estimates. Google News reports published during the study period that included “Pokémon” and “driving” were obtained, yielding 321 story clusters.

Reports of crashes caused by Pokemon GO were identified and duplicate coverage was eliminated. There were 14 unique crashes - one player drove his car into a tree - attributed to Pokémon GO in news reports during the same period, the study published online in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine reported.

IANS

NEW YORK: Talking to a trained nurse might help smokers to quit smoking, a study has found.

The research shows that self-reported quit rates increased when nurses and other staff members were trained to coach patients on how to stop smoking.

“Hospitalisation is the perfect time to help people quit. They are more motivated and nurses can explain how smoking harms their health, including slowing healing,” said Sonia Duffy, Professor at The Ohio State University in the study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The study looked at the quit rates of 1,528 patients, who were discharged from the hospital after six months. Those who had been treated met with a nurse who had undergone a one-hour training on how to help people quit smoking.

Six months after release, 16.5 per cent of the smokers from the intervention hospitals said they did quit, compared to 5.7 per cent from other hospitals. The research-ers also looked at lab-confirmed quit rates based on urine tests and found a two-fold difference among patients from intervention hospitals, but that data was not con-sidered statistically significant.

According to the study, many smokers, even those who plan to quit, start smoking the minute they leave the hospital. Getting them started with a quitting plan while they are admitted to hospi-tals boosts their chances of success.

“I hope hospital administra-tors will look beyond telephone quit lines to help people. Nurses have the greatest access to patients, they have relation-ships with patients and they can relate the benefits of quitting to the patient’s medical condition,” Duffy added.

IANS

NEW YORK: Using Nasa’s Hubble space telescope, astronomers have captured the sharpest, most detailed observations of a comet breaking apart 108 million kilome-tres from Earth.

In a series of images taken over three days in January 2016, Hubble showed 25 fragments consisting of a mixture of ice and dust that are drifting away from the comet at a pace equivalent to the walking speed of an adult, said lead researcher David Jewitt from University of California, Los Angeles.

The images suggest that the roughly 4.5bn-year-old comet, named 332P/Ikeya-Murakami, or comet 332P, may be spinning so fast that material is ejected from its surface. The resulting debris is now scattered along a 4,828-km-long trail, said the study published online in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

These observations provide insight into the volatile behaviour of comets as they approach the sun and begin to vaporise, unleashing powerful forces. “We know that comets sometimes disintegrate, but we don’t know much about why or how,” Jewitt said.

“The trouble is that it happens quickly and without warning, so we don’t have much chance to get useful data. With Hubble’s

fantastic resolution, not only do we see really tiny, faint bits of the comet, but we can watch them change from day to day. That has allowed us to make the best meas-urements ever obtained on such an object,” Jewitt noted.

The three-day observations show that the comet shards brighten and dim as icy patches on their surfaces rotate into and out of sunlight. Their shapes change, too, as they break apart. The icy relics comprise about four percent of the parent comet and range in size from roughly 65 feet wide to 200 feet wide. They are separating at only a few kil-ometres per hour as they orbit the sun at more than 80,467km per hour.

Talking to a nurse

may persuade

smokers to quit

smoking: Study

Hubble captures best view of a comet breaking apart

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StanChart CEO mulls spinning out PE

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China’s policymakers walking on tightrope: QNBThe Peninsula

DOHA: Chinese policymakers are walking on a tightrope between ‘stimulating’ and ‘transforming’ their economy. Policy stimulus has resulted in higher infrastructure spending, faster credit growth and stronger activity in China’s real estate sector. But these are the same variables that China is trying to put a lid on as part of its transformation plan. The idea of rebalancing the Chinese economy away from investment and towards consumption was motivated by fears that large capital spending and ram-pant credit growth have resulted in sizable spare capacity, particularly in

real estate and infrastructure.According to QNB’s latest ‘economic

commentary’, the two most recent market turbulences were caused by concerns about the Chinese economy.

While the January 2016 market vol-atility was triggered by fears about a potential Chinese currency crisis, the turmoil of August 2015 was caused by worries about a possible disor-derly slowdown in China. However, market attention seems to have been diverted away from China as the focus has shifted to other global issues such as Brexit, the US Federal Reserve and the Japanese economy. This raises the question whether things have genu-inely improved in China or whether markets are being complacent. QNB believes that on both the currency and the growth fronts, risks in China have subsided.

On the currency situation, QNB analysts noted the market turbulence in early 2016 was triggered by large

capital outflows from China, represent-ing Chinese borrowers repaying some of their external debt. The move was motivated by the cuts in Chinese inter-est rates, expectations about higher US rates and potential devaluation of the Chinese currency. These factors would have resulted in higher debt service burden for Chinese residents borrowing in foreign currency. The resulting large capital flight put downward pressure on the yuan, which forced the author-ities to use their reserves to defend the currency. The large drawdown of reserves, which declined by nearly 20 percent between mid-2014 and January 2016, spooked investors who worried about an out-of-control weakening of the yuan.

Continued on page 18

Idea of rebalancing the Chinese economy is motivated by fears that large capital spending and rampant credit growth have resulted in sizable spare capacity.

BUSINESS18 SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

Continued from page 17

However, the situation seems to have stabilised recently. Inter-national reserves have been maintained at around $3.2tn since February 2016. Going for-ward, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects pressure on the currency to ease as outflows related to external debt repayment decelerate. External debt has been reduced from nearly 17 percent of GDP in 2014 to around 12 per-cent currently, according to the IMF, which also believes that the current stock of debt is less sen-sitive to interest rate movements or expectations about future cur-rency direction as it is mainly related to trade financing.

Regarding growth, ‘hard’ data (such as real GDP growth, retail sales and industrial produc-tion) suggest that the economy has slowed down in an orderly manner, reducing fears about a potential hard landing. But survey data, which tend to be more for-ward looking, suggest that activity has turned a corner since it bot-tomed out in September 2015. Furthermore, survey data point to a broad-based pickup in activity, covering both the manufacturing and the service sectors.

The uptick in the Chinese activity was caused mainly because of policy stimulus from the authorities on both the mon-etary and fiscal sides. On the monetary side, interest rates were cut five times in 2015. As a result, three-month deposit rates fell from 2.35 percent in early 2015 to 1.10 percent by October 2015. On the fiscal side, the policy stance has become expansionary in 2015 having been contractionary the year before. However, while these policy initiatives have managed to boost growth in the short term, they risk causing problems in the medium term.

Policymakers in

China walking on

tightrope: QNB

Sanofi to reinforce its presence in Qatar

By Satish Kanady

The Peninsula

DOHA: The global life science company Sanofi is all set to rein-force its presence in Qatar. The French pharma major will work to strengthen Qatar’s healthcare infrastructure in the management of communicable and non-commu-nicable diseases.

Talking to The Peninsula, Jean-Paul Scheuer (pictured), Country Chair and General Manager for

Sanofi Gulf said Sanofi’s partnership with Qatar will help bring innova-tion in Qatar’s health sector and improve patients’ access to qual-ity treatment. “With the changing demographic patterns and growing life-style ailments across the region, Qatar is committed to provide quality facilities in the healthcare sector. We see huge opportunities in this coun-try,” he said.

“We at Sanofi, are proud to explore partnership opportunities with Qatar Ministry of Public Health and the French Republic’s Embassy in Qatar, with the ultimate objec-tive of improving access to quality healthcare and supporting the people that we serve through continuum of care. As global leaders in therapeu-tic solutions for diabetes care, human vaccines, consumer healthcare and rare diseases, we are committed to supporting Qatar, and the region as a whole in enabling the delivery of better patient outcomes”.

Education and information prgramme for patients are impor-tant part of modern treatment. Hence, education is one of the key components of our new partnership with Qatar. This is just one project,

our intention is just to start with this broaden partnership again to non communication disease and like dia-betes and cardiovascular diseases.

Jean-Paul said the innovations Sanofi has developed along the way has had a profound effect, particu-larly in the developing world. It has developed the first vaccine for the dengue virus, which infects 390 mil-lion people each year, and whose range is expanding due to climate change. Since the beginning of the year, first vaccinations campaigns have started in the Philippines. “Thanks to systematic vaccination campaigns, we are close to eradicat-ing polio; while over the last decade, sleeping sickness treatments have saved more than 180,000 lives. In addition, we provide innovative treatments for diabetes and cardi-ovascular diseases,” he said.

In 2015, Sanofi launched three pioneer treatments: Toujeo (insu-lin glargine 300 U/ml) in diabetes, Praluent (alirocumb) against hyper-cholesterolemia and dengvaxia, the first-ever vaccine against dengue fever. Some of these products are expected to hit the Qatari market by the end of this year. “We expect

to have three more major launches by 2020 in the field of asthma and atopic dermatitis (duilumab), rheu-matoid arthiritis (sarilumab), and diabetes (Lixilan)”, he said.

Jean-Paul joined Sanofi in 2008 as General Manager for Ukraine. Under his leadership, Sanofi Ukraine consolidated, solidified and further expanded the business in a highly challenging business landscape, while ensuring organisational con-tinuity and growth.

Jean-Paul is a member of the board of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine (ACC). Since 2014 he has been serving as a treas-urer for the ACC Executive Board of the Chamber.In 2011-2012, he was elected as Chairman for the board of the Association of Pharmaceutical Research and Development (APRaD) in Ukraine.

J&J to buy Abbott’s eye surgery unit for $4.33bnBloomberg

NEW YORK: Johnson & Johnson agreed to buy Abbott Laboratories’ eye-surgery equipment unit for $4.33bn, moving the health-care giant toward its goal of boosting its three core businesses.

The deal is expected to close in the

first quarter of 2017, the companies said Friday in separate statements. The unit, called Abbott Medical Optics, makes equipment used in surgeries to repair cataracts and in Lasik pro-cedures to improve vision, as well as eye drops and solutions. It generated $1.13bn in sales for Abbott in 2015.

J&J, the world’s biggest maker of health-care products, has been chasing deals for all three of its main

businesses to boost growth and offset potential competition for prescrip-tion medicines, the largest unit at the New Brunswick, New Jersey-based company. For Abbott, the divestiture is another step in Chief Executive Officer Miles White’s effort to refo-cus the company since spinning off AbbVie Inc. in 2013 and agreeing this year to acquire Alere Inc., a medical testing company, and St. Jude Medical

Inc, another device maker.Abbott’s optics unit is “a self-con-

tained business and had very little synergy with anything else in their device portfolio,” Debbie Wang, an analyst at Morningstar, said in a tele-phone interview. The company wants to take its medical device division “down the path of these more sophis-ticated products that St. Jude offers,” she said.

Partnership with Qatar will help bring innovation in Qatar’s health sector and improve patients’ access to quality treatment.

StanChart CEO mulls spinning out PE unit to managers Bloomberg

LONDON: Standard Chartered Plc is considering spinning out its private-equity business to its managers, as Chief Executive Officer Bill Win-ters (pictured) continues efforts to simplify the bank and reduce the amount of risk it takes, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The London-based lender may exit Standard Chartered Private Equity, or SCPE, as it faces tougher capital rules and losses from the unit. The unit’s managers, led by Joseph Stevens, would take control of a business that oversees about $5bn of assets, including stakes in a Nigerian bank and a Singaporean chain renowned for spicy noodles, said the people.

Winters, who took charge of Standard Chartered last year, is seeking to help the bank recover from losses on soured loans by exit-ing and restructuring $100 billion of risky assets. The Principal Finance unit that houses SCPE posted $167m losses in the first half of 2016, after losing $105m in the second half of 2015. “It’s been a more difficult business to carry from a regulatory perspective, and we’re looking at ways that we can effectively repo-sition the funding of that business,” Winters said of Principal Finance on a conference call last month. “It’s not surprising that it’s part of the cycle where we’re experienc-ing some pain.”

Regulators in Europe and the US have made it harder for banks to invest shareholders’ cash in illiq-uid funds since the financial crisis, leading to a series of so-called spin-outs where employees become owners of newly independent firms.

“I’d view any potential disposal as an attempt to both de-risk the

business and make the attainment of management’s return targets more credible,” said Ian Gordon, an analyst at Investec Plc in Lon-don with a sell rating on Standard Chartered’s shares. “This potentially makes sense, dependent on pricing, but the key challenge for the bank remains revenues.”

The SCPE business manages more than $2bn of Standard Char-tered’s cash and another $3bn for third-party investors, the peo-ple said. The bank has reduced its investment over the past three years, one of the people said.

The company “is looking at non-core businesses, or those that do not sit within our tightened risk toler-ance,” Simon Kutner, a spokesman for Standard Chartered, said in an e-mailed statement.

SCPE has been involved in deals worth at least $1.5bn since the start of 2015, according to data. Acquisi-tions include stakes in Singaporean companies Phoon Huat & Co., a ven-dor of baking ingredients such as pie fillings and confectioners’ sugar, and Crystal Jade Culinary Concepts Holding Pte, a restaurant chain known for its steamed dumplings and spicy noodles.

Intel raises forecast, sending shares to highest since 2014Bloomberg

NEW YORK: Intel Corp raised its forecast for third-quarter sales, bol-stered by growing optimism for the personal computer market. Shares climbed to their highest closing price since 2014.

The world’s largest maker of semiconductors has been suffering from a global slide in demand for PCs because people increasingly prefer their tablets or mobile phones. Now, Intel is seeing signs of “replenishment of PC supply chain inventory,” indi-cating that PC makers are stocking up on key components for comput-ers after years of sliding sales that left hardware gathering dust on shelves.

It’s also “seeing some signs of improving PC demand,” the com-pany said in a statement.

Chief Executive Officer Brian Krzanich is looking for new ways to

fuel growth in areas such as drones, robots and everyday items like connected air conditioners, while still depending on its traditional

businesses, including products that power PCs and mobile phones. In addition to the PC gains, the com-pany’s forecast indicates Intel may

be benefiting from chips that are now being placed in some of Apple Inc.’s iPhones, according to Timothy Arcuri, an analyst with Cowen & Co.

“They also had this iPhone stuff in their back pocket, which is now coming through,” Arcuri said. “I do think PCs are better — there’s enough data points to suggest that — but it’s not just PCs.”

The shares rose 3 percent to $37.67 at the close in New York, the biggest single-day jump in about nine months and the highest value since December 2014. The stock has gained 9.3 percent this year.

Intel’s new forecast is for revenue of $15.6bn, plus or minus $300m. The previous projection from the Santa Clara, California-based company was $14.9bn, plus or minus $500m. Analysts on average had estimates in line with the company’s original outlook. Intel also boosted its fore-cast for adjusted gross margin by 1 point, now expecting the midpoint

at 63 percent, plus or minus a cou-ple of percentage points.

Shipments of PCs, a market that provides Intel with more than half of its sales, fell to their lowest level in a decade in the first three months of 2016. The depth and duration of the slump means Intel can no longer fall back on booming demand for server chips or market-share gains against weaker rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. By the second quarter, the rate of decline in PC shipments had slowed, as demand in North America helped blunt weakness across the rest of the industry.

Some analysts were hesitant to call this a turnaround yet.

“PCs are doing better, no doubt about it,” said CJ Muse, an analyst at Evercore ISI. “I wouldn’t call it rapid change. I think when you look at depleted inventory in the channel plus the pessimistic attitude coming in, we were set up for things to come in a little better than expectations.”

Employees walk past the research and development (R&D) centre of American multinational technology company Intel in Toulouse.

GM seeks one-year delay

in recalling Takata airbags

Bloomberg

MICHIGAN: General Motors Co is asking US safety regulators to delay by a year the mandatory recall of almost 1 million vehicles with air-bags made by Takata Corp, saying the designated models have not been shown to carry the same risk as oth-ers linked to deaths and injuries.

The automaker said in a filing with the National Highway Traf-fic Safety Administration that it has conducted tests on the inflators and concluded they are “not currently at risk of rupture.”

Of 44,000 deployments of Takata airbags in the group, none ruptured, according to the company.

It cited “unique design features” that makes the covered airbags safer. The automaker said it has hired an expert to conduct a long-term aging study of the inflators that will take about a year to conclude.

“GM shares with NHTSA a strong commitment to customer safety,” the Detroit-based automaker said in an e-mailed statement. “GM is taking a systematic, engineering-based approach to better understanding the performance of Takata inflators installed in GM vehicles, and GM con-tinues to share this information with NHTSA on a regular basis.”

The agency has ordered that all vehicles with air-bag inflators that use ammonium nitrate-based propellant without a desiccant be recalled. GM wants to push back

the recall of the 980,000 full-size pickups and sport utility vehicles, scheduled for the end of this year, to the end of 2017.

The consent order Takata signed

with NHTSA includes a provision in which an automaker can seek to alter the schedule of recalls, which was established to get the riskiest infla-tors off the road first.

Two cars of the public rail are seen covered with an advertisement for Chevy Silverado pickup truck as they move past General Motors headquarters in Detroit, Michigan.

Foreign holdings of US Treasury debt dip in July

AP

WASHINGTON: Foreign holdings of US Treasury securities fell in July as China, the biggest foreign owner of Treasury debt, trimmed its holdings.

The Treasury Department says total foreign holdings dropped 0.6 percent in July to $6.25 trillion following a 1.1 percent increase in June. China reduced its hold-ings 1.8 percent to $1.22 trillion, the second straight monthly reduction.

Japan, the second-biggest for-eign owner of Treasury securities, increased its holdings 0.7 percent to $1.15 trillion.

BUSINESS 19SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

Free trade deals face wide protests in Europe

Reuters

BERLIN: Tens of thousands of people protested in European cities yes-terday against planned free trade deals with the United States and Canada they say would undermine democracy and lower food safety, environmental and labor standards.

Organisers — an alliance of envi-ronmental groups, labour unions and opposition parties — said 320,000 people took part in rallies in seven German cities, including Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Frankfurt.

Police put the figure at around 180,000. Smaller protests were also planned in other European cities, including Vienna and Salzburg in Austria and Gothenburg and Stock-holm in Sweden.

In Berlin, demonstrators waved banners reading “STOPP CETA —STOPP TTIP”, another placard said “People over profits”.

The demonstrations are against the Transatlantic Trade and Invest-ment Partnership (TTIP) with the United States and the Comprehen-sive Economic Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada, currently being negotiated by the European Union’s executive with the respective gov-ernments across the Atlantic.

Opposition in Europe to the trade deals has risen over the past year, with critics saying the pacts would hand too much power to big multina-tionals at the expense of consumers and workers by establishing arbitra-tion courts to settle disputes between companies and governments.

EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom defended the planned trade deals and accused the oppo-nents of deliberately heating up the debate with “horror stories and lies”. “The idea that the Transatlan-tic Trade and Investment Partnership will lower environmental standards

is simply not true,” Malmstrom told German daily Bild. “Also the assertion that we’ll be flooded with genetically modified food is simply wrong. Our

democracy of course won’t be under-mined as some seem to believe.”

Malmstrom said German export-ers would benefit highly from the

deals because they would reduce non-tariff barriers to trade. “This helps Germany and creates jobs,” she added.

German Economy Minister Sig-mar Gabriel, who faces crunch CETA vote on Monday by his Social Dem-ocrats (SPD), said that the trade agreements were Europe’s best chance to shape globalisation so that it served people and not only the interests of a few businesses.

“If CETA fails, then we’ll not have another chance to shape globalisa-tion in this way for decades,” Gabriel told Bild am Sonntag in an interview published yesterday.

Gabriel’s SPD, junior coalition partner of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative, will vote tomor-row whether to back the trade deal between the EU and Canada.

Gabriel, who is also vice chancel-lor and SPD leader, has championed CETA as part of his remit as econ-omy minister, and to demonstrate the center-left party’s business credentials.

But critics on the SPD’s left wing are sceptical about the benefits of the deal and believe it would give multi-nationals greater access to European markets without creating jobs.

A failure to secure a majority of delegates at SPD convention in favour of the accord could scupper Gabri-el’s chances of standing as the party’s candidate for chancellor in national elections next year.

Demonstrations are against the TTIP with the United States and the CETA with Canada, currently being negotiated by the EU’s executive with the respective governments across the Atlantic.

Consumer rights activists take part in a march to protest against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) in Berlin yesterday.

India loses WTO appeal

in US solar dispute

Reuters

GENEVA: India lost its appeal at the World Trade Organisation in a dispute over solar power, failing to overturn a US complaint that New Delhi had discriminated against importers in the Indian solar power sector.

The WTO’s appeals judges upheld an earlier ruling that found India had broken WTO rules by requiring solar power developers to use Indian-made cells and mod-ules. The appeal ruling is final and India will be expected to bring its laws into compliance with the WTO rules. “This report is a clear victory for American solar manufacturers and workers, and another step for-ward in the fight against climate change,” US Trade Representative Michael Froman said in a statement.

Indian officials made no imme-diate comment on the appeal outcome. US solar exports to India have fallen by more than 90 percent since India brought in the rules, the statement said.

As in the earlier ruling, which was issued in February this year, the judges said India could not claim exemptions on the basis of that its national solar power sec-tor was included in government

procurement, nor on the basis that solar goods were in short supply.

There was also no justification on the grounds of ensuring eco-logically sustainable growth or combating climate change.

The dispute, which the United States first launched in Febru-ary 2013, involved an increasingly common target of trade disputes —solar power, with an increasingly common complaint — local content requirements.

The appeal ruling came just days after India launched a WTO complaint against subsidies for the solar industry in eight US states.

Under WTO rules, countries are not allowed to discriminate against imports and favor local producers, but in the past five years countries keen to support their own manu-facturers have frequently resorted to local content requirements, while keeping a sharp eye out for their use by others. “We strongly support the rapid deployment of solar energy worldwide, including in India,” Fro-man said.

“But local content requirements are not only contrary to WTO rules, but actually undermine our efforts to promote clean energy by requir-ing the use of more expensive and less efficient equipment, making it more difficult for clean energy sources to be cost-competitive.”

Tesla breakup with Mobileye turns ugly Bloomberg

SAN FRANCISCO: The public breakup between Tesla Motors Inc and Mobileye NV took a turn for the worse as the supplier company said it “expressed safety concerns regard-ing the use of Autopilot hands-free” to Elon Musk (pictured), the auto-maker’s chief executive officer.

Mobileye cut its ties with Tesla after failing to agree on “necessary changes in the relationship,” accord-ing to a statement on Friday by the provider of image-sensing tech-nology. That came a day after Tesla accused the supplier of trying to block its in-house efforts to develop vision capability for cars.

Tesla’s driver-assistance features, which the company calls Autopilot, have been under intense scrutiny in the wake of a fatal crash in Florida on May 7. Probes of the accident by the National Highway Safety Traf-fic Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are con-tinuing. After two other non-fatal accidents, Consumer Reports called

on Tesla to require drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel and to change the feature’s name to avoid confusion.

“Tesla’s response to the May 7 crash, wherein the company shifted blame to the camera, and later cor-rected and shifted blame to the radar, indicated to Mobileye that Mobil-eye’s relationship with Tesla could not continue,” the supplier said. “As for Tesla’s claim that Mobileye was threatened by Tesla’s internal

computer vision efforts, the com-pany has little knowledge of these efforts other than an awareness that Tesla had put together a small team.”

All Tesla vehicles built since October 2014 — a fleet of more than 90,000 cars worldwide — have Auto-pilot, which drivers have to actively engage. The features themselves were announced with great fanfare last fall.

Tesla said that Mobileye tried to force it to abandon efforts to develop its own image-sensing capabilities and demanded that the maker of electric cars pay more for a continuing supply of some hard-ware. When Tesla refused, Mobileye halted hardware support for future platforms and released public state-ments implying the discontinuance was motivated by safety concerns, according to the Palo Alto, Califor-nia-based automaker.

The breakup was first announced in July, when Mobileye said its coop-eration with Tesla wouldn’t extend beyond the EyeQ3 product.

Scrutiny around Autopilot is heightened in part because the US government is drafting guidelines,

expected to be released this month, for automakers racing to bring fully self-driving cars to market. While Ford Motor Co and Alphabet Inc’s Google espouse an all-or-nothing approach, Tesla has introduced Auto-pilot in “beta” form for continuous improvement and frequent over-the-air software updates. Version 8.0 of the Autopilot software is rolling out to customers next week.

During an announcement about the improved software, Musk said its emphasis on radar over cameras might have saved the life of Joshua Brown, who died in the Florida crash. Germany’s Robert Bosch GmbH sup-plies Tesla’s radar system.

“Mobileye has commented fully on its relationship with Tesla and will not provide further comment,” said the company in the statement. “Mobileye’s deeply held view is that the long-term potential for vehicle automation to reduce traffic inju-ries and fatalities significantly is too important to risk consumer and regulatory confusion or to create an environment of mistrust that puts in jeopardy technological advances that can save lives.”

Central banks

form task force on

payments fraud

Reuters

BUDAPEST: A committee of the world’s major central banks said it has launched a task force to examine cyber security in cross-border banking and to ensure interbank payments are pro-tected, confirming an earlier Reuters report.

“Recent incidents of cyber fraud are of significant concern for the central banking com-munity, and we are working to make sure there are adequate checks and balances in place at each stage of the payments proc-ess,” Benoit Coeure, chairman of the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures, part of the Bank for International Set-tlements, said in a statement. Coeure, also a European Central Bank executive board member, added it was too soon to predict the result of the work that had just begun. The Basel, Switzer-land-based committee will decide how to proceed based on a review of current practices, he said.

Hacking incident exposed vulnerabilities in the glo-bal wholesale payments infrastructure.

Viacom may abandon plan to sell stake in Paramount Pictures

AFP

BUENOS AIRES: An Interna-tional Monetary Fund mission will go to Argentina to assess the state of the country’s economy, the government said.

The economists, who will arrive tomorrow, aim to “gather information and exchange opin-ions with government officials, members of the private sector, members of Congress and civil organisations,” according to a statement from the Ministry of Finance. Monday will mark the Fund’s resumption of its Article IV missions — in which it assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the economies of each member country every year — to Argen-tina after a 10-year hiatus.

The regular fiscal checkups were interrupted in 2006 when then president Nestor Kirchner halted them. “Article IV repre-sents a new step for Argentina in its international reintegra-tion,” said the ministry.

The move marks a repairing of relations that soured in the wake of the country’s default on $100bn in debt in 2001.

Ties between the two hit rock-bottom when the IMF cen-sured Buenos Aires in 2013 for not meeting an IMF requirement that members must provide reliable, basic economic statistics.

The shift comes after the sweeping economic policy changes of President Mauri-cio Macri, who took office in December after a long period of IMF-hostile Argentine governments.

Argentina & IMF to start

financial checkups soon

Bloomberg

NEW YORK: Viacom Inc is no longer actively pursuing the sale of a stake in Paramount Pictures, according to people familiar with the matter, after the owners decided the movie studio is one of the company’s key assets.

The New York-based media giant said in February it hired PJT Part-ners to help with a possible sale of the stake, after being approached by investors who wanted to buy part of Paramount. PJT is no longer doing work on the process, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the matter isn’t public. The deal could still be revived at a later date, they said. A representative for Viacom declined to comment.

While selling a stake in Para-mount would have helped Viacom pay off some of its $12bn in debt, it was seen as a pet project of former Chairman Philippe Dau-man, who exited this month as part of a legal settlement. Sumner Red-stone’s National Amusements Inc — Viacom’s controlling shareholder — opposed the idea of a deal, saying it would undermine shareholders’ interests. Sumner’s daughter, Shari Redstone, has taken on a prominent

role in the boardroom since her fam-ily replaced Dauman and installed five new board members.

The board met on Wednesday and Thursday at its New York head-quarters to discuss budgets for the coming year and Viacom’s capital structure, people familiar with the matter said.

No announcement has yet been made on whether the company will

cut its dividend or take other meas-ures to address liquidity.

Dauman, 62, had said a sale could generate as much as $4bn in after-tax proceeds for Viacom. Tencent Holdings Ltd. was among companies that looked at buying the Paramount stake, Bloomberg reported in May. Dalian Wanda Group Co has also been named as a potential suitor.

A woman exits the Viacom Inc. headquarters in New York.

BUSINESS VIEWS20 SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

East Europe on alert to old foe as wages jolt central banksBy Marton Eder and Marek Strzelecki

Bloomberg

Like central banks elsewhere, policy mak-ers in eastern Europe haven’t been too adept at fighting deflation. A burst of

wage growth suggests they may not have to worry about that much longer.

A bonanza for workers among the former communist members of the European Union has sent paychecks soaring at a pace unseen for years, with Romanian salaries growing faster than 10 percent for nine months. Aver-age gross wages in Poland, the EU’s biggest eastern economy, jumped 4.7 percent from a year earlier in August, near a four-year high of 5.3 percent in June, data from the Warsaw-based statistics office showed. For Morgan Stanley, that signals inflation risks in the region are “skewed to the upside” for the first time since 2013.

The gathering threat is setting the stage for policy whiplash in nations just emerging from the slumber of deflation and price growth still below zero in three of the four largest econo-mies in the EU’s east. With Poland in the grip

of its longest stretch of falling prices in six decades, Governor Adam Glapinski said this month the central bank is “moving closer” to its first interest-rate increase since 2012 after having held its benchmark at a record low for a 17th month. “This is a growing con-cern in all of the region,” said Roxana Hulea, an emerging-market strategist at Societe Gen-erale in London. In Poland, “wage growth is an element that is being considered very care-fully, given the ongoing tightening of the labor market.”

Higher salaries are buoying consumer demand that’s kept eastern European econ-omies growing at the fastest clip in the EU. While that’s helping the bloc’s poorest coun-tries catch up with richer neighbours in the west, productivity gains haven’t kept up, meaning there’s a greater risk that compa-nies will have to raise prices to cover higher labor costs.

The salary spike is the latest challenge for central banks in Poland, Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic. While policy makers have credited deflation for propping up house-hold spending without clouding the economic outlook, their credibility is on the line because inflation has for years undershot their targets,

which are between 2 percent and 3 percent.Czech wage growth accelerated in the first

quarter even as labour productivity slowed significantly, the central bank said in its lat-est inflation report. In Hungary, the exodus of skilled workers to more affluent European states has tightened the labor market and helped push net salaries 8.3 percent higher in the first seven months from a year earlier, heading for the fastest annual growth since at least 2008.

That pressure will gradually translate into faster consumer-price growth through next year, according to the National Bank of Hungary, which ended a three-month rate-cut cycle in May with a pledge to keep borrowing costs on hold for an “extended period.” Czech policy makers, meanwhile, are counting on wage growth to help them meet their 2 per-cent inflation target next year, a condition for removing a cap on the koruna they imposed in November 2013 to weaken the currency.

“Labour markets have tightened sharply across emerging-market Europe, and wage growth has picked up,” Morgan Stanley ana-lysts Pasquale Diana and Georgi Deyanov said in a report earlier this month. “While this does not mean inflation getting out of control, it

would nevertheless be a significant break from the recent past.”

Forward-rate agreements used to wager on Polish rates in 12 months have priced out 22 basis points, or 0.22 percentage point, in cuts in the past three weeks and now show bets for six basis points in decreases for the next year. Koruna forwards for 12 months indicate increased anticipation the Czech National Bank will abandon its limit on cur-rency appreciation.

While Hungary’s three-year bond yields fell to a record-low on Friday, the rate on 10-year notes traded near the highest in more than two months, lifting the yield curve to the steepest in almost a year. That’s a sign inves-tors are betting on an uptick in inflation and accelerating growth.

Polish Monetary Policy Council mem-ber Eugeniusz Gatnar has cited rising wages among the key reasons that the end for defla-tion is near, signaling the next rate move will be an increase. ING estimates a labor-market overhaul, including the introduction of mini-mum hourly wages, will raise the inflation rate by 0.2 percentage points and contribute to a rebound in consumer-price growth, accord-ing to a report by economist Jakub Rybacki.

By Ludwig Burger

Reuters

Bayer’s $66bn purchase of Monsanto amounts to a long-term bet that farmers will grow to

trust combinations of seeds and pesticides rather than continue to pick from ranges of separate products. In the short term, the German drugs and chemicals firm hopes to benefit from a marketing and sales force that can promote combinations of the two groups’ existing products.

But Bayer has said the main reason for buying the world’s big-gest seeds company is to develop entirely new product combina-tions, such as weed killers and crops that resist them.

Some farmers, though, are wary about a merger between two of the largest players in the agricultural supplies market, con-cerned they will have less choice and that product bundles will be expensive. “They sell you the seed and their special herbicide. I was offered one deal of that (by Monsanto) and I turned it down because it locked me into one sup-plier,” said North Dakota corn, soy and grain grower Justin Sherlock.

“You can’t find it from a different company.”

The idea of integrating dif-ferent farm products has been around for a while, but has a patchy record.

Switzerland’s Syngenta has pursued it since 2011, with some success in emerging markets in Asia and South America, but less in the all-important North Amer-ican market. That depressed its share price to a point where it became a bid target — first for Monsanto and then, after that failed, ChemChina, which agreed a takeover deal last year.

Bayer, the world’s No.2 crop chemicals firm behind Syngenta, argues better research tools such as gene editing mean compelling product combinations could only be a few years away.

Chief Executive Werner Bau-mann, a collector of 1980s cars, explains his vision with a repair-and-paint shop analogy: “You can go and buy your own diluents (thinning agent), the first cover, the clear coat and so on and you’re not sure how the different compo-nents interact with each other and you don’t have the guarantee of an optimal surface. What you have with an integrated offering is the promise of an optimal outcome.”

It’s a big bet.Bayer’s bid for Monsanto is

the largest ever all-cash takeover

offer. Analysts at Deutsche Bank and Jefferies have warned the financial burden could drain funding from Bayer’s pharmaceu-tical business, which is struggling to sustain the rate of past block-buster drug launches.

The German company is pay-ing a hefty premium now for the promise of a business model that some say could be up to a decade away. That’s in contrast to Dow Chemical and DuPont, whose shareholders will share future spoils and risks of a combined agribusiness in a merger of equals.

What’s more, Germany’s BASF, the world’s No.3 pesticides maker, thinks product bundles are a non-starter. “Farmers don’t want to lock into any particular combina-tion of seeds and crop chemical at an early stage,” said Markus Heldt, the head of BASF’s crop protec-tion business.

“You can sell the two in the bundle, but only if you happen to have the best product in each category. Not even the biggest companies could secure such a dominant position.”

Combining products has long been a goal for Bayer, and its determination to agree a deal with Monsanto — which saw it raise its bid three times — was driven partly by concerns it could get left behind by a rival tie-up, sources close to the matter say.

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During Monsanto’s pursuit of Syngenta last year, the head of Bayer’s crop protection divi-sion Liam Condon branded the proposed combination in inter-nal discussions as a “behemoth” in the making, according to peo-ple who spoke to him at the time.

Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant agrees product bundles are the future, and said on Wednesday there was no longer any point developing new products with seeds and chemicals as separate businesses.

“Consolidation in the industry is a prerequisite to further invest-ment in R&D,” he added.

But according to one indus-try expert who has advised all the major global suppliers, it could take 7-10 years for newly developed product combinations to have an impact. He spoke on condition of anonymity.

Complicating their quest for a new business model, Bayer and Monsanto have said dig-ital services — a combination of data gathering, predictive soft-ware and precision farming gear

— will have to serve as a “hub” in any product suite of farm supplies.

Bayer in bet that farmers will back linked-up supplies

Wells Fargo issue raises sales tactics concerns

By Jonnelle Marte and Renae Merle

The Washington Post

For Oscar Garza, career success was measured one account at a time. The Chase personal banker said he had a month to persuade customers to open 40 checking or

savings accounts and 15 credit cards. Meet-ing that goal would mean an extra $800, but failure could lead to his termination.

“You either do this or you’re out,” Garza said. The stakes were so high, Garza says,

that his managers encouraged him to enter false income information or to accept ques-tionable identification documents in order to speed approval for new accounts. Other times, he said, he would run a customer’s credit history without their permission to determine if they qualified for a credit card.

Such corner-cutting sales tactics — and worse — have become a new flash point in the debate over whether, eight years after the financial crisis, US regulators are doing enough to hold Wall Street accountable for bad behaviour.

Wells Fargo, the largest retail bank in the US and an institution once thought above the fray of financial crisis era scandals, has been under fire after acknowl-edging it had fired 5,300 employees over the past five years for opening

up to 2 million sham accounts customers didn’t ask for. The San Francisco-based bank, which did not admit wrongdoing, agreed to pay a $185m fine and now finds itself in the crosshairs of a possible crim-inal investigation by two different federal prosecutors.

The bank’s longtime Chief Executive John Stumpf is set to appear before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday to explain how such a massive scheme was able to fester for years, and Wells Fargo’s troubles are now fodder for the presiden-tial campaign trail.

Wells Fargo is hardly alone in aggres-sively pushing accounts, industry veterans say. Consumers have filed more than 31,000 complaints since 2011 about the opening, closing and management of their accounts and issues dealing with unauthorised credit cards, according to an analysis of com-plaints filed with the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The complaints name many of the nation’s largest institutions. The banks say many of the complaints are unfounded, or the result of identify theft. Few, they said, are related to outright fraud; some are com-plaints about unauthorized credit checks. Several institutions echoed Wells Fargo in saying they are regularly reviewing and improving their training and compliance programs to deter wrongdoing. But crit-ics say consumers often are being steered into accounts and services they don’t need, fueled by a business culture that places unreasonable demands on employees to plug products in order to drive revenue at a time when banking margins are thin.

“Extremely unreasonable sales goals and collection quotas” are the biggest issues facing bank employees, said Erin Mahoney, a coordinator for the Commit-tee for Better Banks, a labor coalition made up of bank employees, community groups and unions that formed in 2013. “We have

stories from every bank. It goes well beyond Wells Fargo.”

Efforts to combat the problem have been episodic, and few top executives have been held accountable. Regulators fined Santander Bank $10m in July for working with a vendor that allegedly enrolled cus-tomers in overdraft protection services they never authorized. Last year, Citibank and its subsidiaries were ordered to pay $700m to consumers for allegations they misrepre-sented the cost and benefits of credit card add-ons. And PayPal was ordered to pay $25m in fines and customer refunds for claims consumers were unknowingly given credit accounts. All three settlements con-tained no admission of wrongdoing.

Taken together, such incidents expose a potential vulnerability in the banking sys-tem that has generated far less attention from authorities than, say, periodic warn-ings about the threat of cybercrime and identity theft. It’s not just outsiders who represent a threat, but front-line workers who have access to personal records.

Garza, the former JPMorgan Chase & Co. banker, has recounted his experiences with lax oversight in various media accounts and in a June presentation before members of Congress. At the time he worked for the banking giant in Dallas, he said in an inter-view he made just $11 an hour. The bonus he could claim for reaching his monthly goals for new accounts helped keep him off pub-lic assistance. “You make a determination, a hard one, and say do I take this ID and meet my monthly quotas and put food on the table?,” said Garza.

After two years at the bank, Garza said he quit in 2013. He now works for a phone company. Chase said it has no record of problems with Garza and that its policy is to move swiftly to terminate employees who encourage illegal behaviour. It said it uses sales targets to award bonuses, not to punish.

Corner-cutting sales tactics — and worse — have become a new flash point in the debate over whether, eight years after the financial crisis, US regulators are doing enough to hold Wall Street accountable for bad behaviour.

A bonanza for workers among the former communist members of the European Union has sent paychecks soaring at a pace unseen for years, with Romanian salaries growing faster than 10 percent for nine months.

A woman walking into a Wells Fargo bank in Washington, DC.

21SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

False clues make it tough to find the Wada hackers AP

LONDON: Medical data from some of the world’s leading athletes has been posted to the web and the World Anti-Doping Agency says Russians are to blame.

Even the hackers seem to agree, adopt-ing the name “Fancy Bears” — a moniker long associated with the Kremlin’s electronic espionage operations. But as cybersecurity experts pore over the hackers’ digital trail, they’re up against a familiar problem. The evidence has been packed with possible red herrings — including registry data pointing to France, Korean characters in the hackers’ code and a server based in California.

“Anybody can say they are anyone and it’s hard to disprove,” said Jeffrey Carr, the chief executive of consulting firm Taia Global and something of a professional skeptic when it comes to claims of state-backed hacking.

Many others in the cybersecurity indus-try see the Wada hack as a straightforward act of Russian revenge, but solid evidence is hard to find.

IOC President Thomas Bach said on

Friday he will ask Russian authorities for help to stop the hackers. Bach said the IOC will help Wada “including communicating with the Russian authorities, to underline the seriousness of the issue and request all pos-sible assistance to stop the hackers.”

“This is an unacceptable and outra-geous breach of medical confidentiality that attempts to smear innocent athletes who have not committed any doping offense,” said Bach. Later on Friday Wada announced Fancy Bears had posted another selection of hacked data to the web. This time, they tar-geted 11 athletes — three from Australia, one from Denmark, two from Germany, one from Spain and four from the United Kingdom - from the sports of boxing, cycling, rowing, shooting, swimming and tennis.

What’s known is that it was only days after scores of Russian athletes were banned from the Olympic Games that suspicious looking emails began circulating.

Purporting to come from Wada itself, the booby trapped messages were aimed at har-vesting passwords to a sensitive database of drug information about athletes worldwide. Among other things, the Anti-Doping Admin-istration and Management System carries

information about which top athletes use otherwise-banned substances for medical reasons — prize information for a spurned Olympic competitor seeking to embarrass its rivals. On September 1 someone regis-tered a website titled “Fancy Bears’ Hack Team.” A few days later, a Twitter account materialised carrying a similar name. Just after midnight Moscow time on September 13, the Fancy Bears Twitter account came alive, broadcasting the drugs being taken by gold medal-winning gymnast Simone Biles, seven-time Grand Slam champion Venus Wil-liams and other US Olympians. It followed up Thursday with similar information about the medication used by British cyclists Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome, among many oth-ers. There is no suggestion any of the athletes broke any rules, but Russians seized on the leak as evidence that US and British players were using forbidden drugs with the bless-ing of anti-doping officials.

“Hypocrisy” Russia’s embassy to Lon-don tweeted in reaction to the news. Kremlin channel RT broadcast a cartoon showing a Wada official picking up a bulky American player’s steroid bottle with a smile. “All good! You’re cleared to compete!” he says.

Citing law enforcement sources, Wada said the attacks “are originating out of Russia.” Russian officials dismissed the alle-gation; in an email, Wada said it wouldn’t be commenting further.

With little to go on, independent inves-tigators have still made some intriguing connections. Virginia-based intelligence firm ThreatConnect said that whoever compro-mised Wada did so using websites registered through an obscure domain name company that also set up the fake sites used in a vari-ety of other hacks blamed on the Kremlin, including the one that hit the Democratic National Committee.

In a telephone interview, the company’s chief intelligence officer, Rich Barger said he had been cautious at first about tying the WADA breach to Russian hackers but that “confidence is certainly growing as more and more people weigh in and lend their voice.”

Even the meaning of the name “Fancy Bears” is unclear. California-based threat intelligence firm CrowdStrike has long applied that nickname to an allegedly Russian state-backed group, but the hackers’ adoption isn’t necessarily a brazen acknowledgement of CrowdStrike’s research.

It might be an attempt to hold it up to rid-icule. Which interpretation the group favours hasn’t been made clear. Repeated messages to email addresses associated with Fancy Bears have gone unreturned. Fancy Bears’ website doesn’t necessarily provide any more insight. Some its artistry appears to have been lifted from a Russian clip art page. But tech pod-caster Vince Tocce also found Korean script in the site’s code — characters which vanished shortly after he made his discovery public .

In a telephone interview, he said that showed how difficult it was to take any-thing for granted. Some pieces of Fancy Bears’ infrastructure were almost certainly struc-tured to sow confusion.

The site, for example, appears to be hosted in California but was registered at an address in the town of Pomponne, east of Paris, under the name “Jean Guillalime.”

A man residing at that address, Jean-Francois Guillaume, said the registry information was bogus and that he was mys-tified as to why the hackers had picked on him. “I have absolutely nothing to do with this,” he said, adding that he ran a consult-ing shop and a flower business and wasn’t particularly interested in sports.

Japan return to Davis Cup elite

AFP

TOKYO: Kei Nishikori teamed up with Yuichi Sugita in a dominant doubles victory as Japan completed a 3-0 defeat of Ukraine to return to the Davis Cup’s top tableyesterday.

The world number five looked sharp as the Japanese pair ran out easy 6-3, 6-0, 6-3 winners over Artem Smirnov and Sergiy Sta-khovsky in Osaka to give the home side an unassailable lead in the World Group play-off with only two rub-bers remaining.

Nishikori sat out in Friday’s open-ing singles following his exertions over the summer as Taro Daniel and Yoshihito Nishioka put Japan in firm control of the tie.

But his presence was felt in the doubles as the Japanese ran riot, giv-ing Sugita the perfect present ahead of his 28th birthday on Sunday, when the final two matches will now be abbreviated dead rubbers.

“The return was key for us today,”

said Nishikori, who won bronze at the Rio Olympics before reaching the US Open semi-finals earlier this month.

“We had never played together before and we had to change some things during the match,” he added.

“Neither of us are the best net players but our groundstrokes did the job. The second set we were on fire -- we made a lot of returns and they were struggling with their service.”

Meanwhile, John Peers and Sam Groth clinched the Davis Cup World Group play-off tie for Australia with a doubles win over Slovakia in Syd-ney yesterday.

Peers and Groth were taken to four sets by the Slovak pair of Andrej Martin and Igor Zelenay after holding a match point in the third set.

The duo went on to secure Aus-tralia’s World Group status 3-0 in the 2017 Davis Cup competition with a 6-4, 6-2, 6-7 (3/7), 7-6 (7/2) victory in two hours and 21 minutes.

“So much depends on the draw but we’re not there just to make up the numbers,” captain Lleyton Hewitt said at the prospect of playing again in next year’s World Group.

“We expect that we can go deep. This group wants to try and get our hands on the Davis Cup.

“It’s been quite a while now since we’ve had an opportunity to play in a final and I know from experience I’d love these boys to have that experi-ence of going out there and playing for Australia.”

Teaming up for the first time in the competition, Peers and Groth were impregnable on serve, dropping only 18 points in 21 service games and did not face a break point.

They broke the Slovaks three

times and looked to be steaming to a straight sets win until they had a match point at 5-6.

Slovakia then went on to take the third-set tiebreaker before a back hand put-away by Peers sealed the play-off tie for Australia in a fourth-set tiebreaker. It was Peers’s first win for Australia after losing his only other rubber - a doubles match alongside current captain Hewitt

against the United States in March. The ‘dead’ reverse singles will be played today.

Australia only needed one more win after Nick Kyrgios and Bernard Tomic won their opening day singles in straight sets on Friday.

The 15th-ranked Kyrgios shrugged off recent hip problems to whip through Martin 6-3, 6-2, 6-4 while the 21st-ranked Tomic

completed a 7-6 (7/5), 6-4, 6-4 win over Jozef Kovalik. Australia, who lost to the United States in this year’s first round, will now extend their stay in the World Group to four years.

Slovakia, who came to Australia without their two leading stars -- 31-ranked Martin Klizan and 102-ranked Lukas Lacko -- have not been in the premier group for 10 years.

Nishikori teams up with Sugita in doubles win over Ukraine to guide his side back to the top table as Aussies down Slovakia to stay in World Group

FROM RIGHT: Japanese team members Taro Daniel, Kei Nishikori, Yuichi Sugita, and Yoshihito Nishioka, celebrate their win after a Davis Cup World Group play-off against Ukraine in Osaka, yesterday.

Argentina’s Juan Martin del Potro in action against Great Britain’s Andy Murray during their Davis Cup match at Emirates Arena in Glasgow, Scotland on Saturday.

Del Potro sinks Murray as Argentina claim 2-0 lead Reuters

GLASGOW: Juan Martin del Potro delivered a huge blow to Britain’s hopes of retaining the Davis Cup when he beat Andy Murray 6-4, 5-7, 6-7(5), 6-3, 6-4 in a five-hour thriller as Argentina grabbed a 2-0 lead in their world group semi-final on Friday.

World number two and Wim-bledon champion Murray looked poised to chalk up his 30th victory in 32 Davis Cup matches when he led by two sets to one against the man he beat in last month’s Rio Olympics singles final.

But Del Potro, ranked 64th in the world after being plagued by

numerous injuries, refused to sur-render and condemned Murray to only his third singles defeat in the men’s team competition after fin-ishing off the marathon encounter with an ace.

Britain’s day went from bad to worse in Glasgow as Guido Pella then beat Kyle Edmund 6-7(5) 6-4 6-3 6-2 in the second singles. Fri-day’s defeats mean the hosts have to win the three remaining rubbers if they are to reach the final for the second year running.

The big serving Del Potro cap-italised on Murray’s mistakes to take the first set, which included one rally of 41 strokes.

Towards the end of the second, both players, while appreciating the backing of their respective

supporters in a noisy crowd, were upset by excitable calls of “out” from spectators.

That happened on the final point of the set to Del Potro’s fury, the umpire declining to replay it.

He recovered his composure in the third set, taking two of the three successive breaks of serve while running up a 5-3 lead.

But Murray saved a set point with a superb lob and drew level at 5-5 before taking it on the tiebreak.

Del Potro, who won the US Open in 2009, then showed what he was capable of producing as he pummelled winners from the base-line to bag the next two sets and leave Argentina two wins away from reaching their first final since 2011. Tim Southee

New Zealand

pacer Southee

ruled out of

India seriesReuters

WELLINGTON: New Zealand fast bowler Tim Southee has been ruled out of the three-match Test series in India with an ankle injury and will be replaced by paceman Matt Henry.

Southee felt pain in his front foot while bowling in training and a scan had shown a ligament strain in his left ankle, New Zea-land’s cricket board said.

The 27-year-old, New Zea-land’s most experienced Test bowler with 52 matches and 177 wickets, will return home for rest and rehab but was expected to be available for the one-day inter-nationals starting mid-October.

“Tim has been working hard in preparation for this tour, so he’s understandably very disappointed to be ruled out of all three Tests,” New Zealand coach Mike Hes-son said.

“The focus now is for Tim to give his ankle seven to 10 days rest, before slowly building his bowling loads back up ahead of the ODI series.

“We’ve got a replacement who is ready to go in Matt Henry and he’ll join the team before the start of the first Test.”

The 24-year-old Henry has played just three more Tests since his debut against England at Lord’s last year, his last match against Australia in Christchurch in February.

The series opener starts in Kanpur on September 22 before further matches will be played in Kolkata and Indore.

New Zealand are bidding to win their first Test series in India.

India, led by Virat Kohli have retained Shikhar Dhawan and Rohit Sharma for the series.

India are currently on number two in the Test rankings behind Pakistan who claimed top spot after England series.

AFP

RABAT: Morocco football club Wydad Casablanca have sacked Welsh manager John Toshack after losing to Egypt’s Zamalek 4-0 in the first leg of the African Champions League semi-final.

Wydad Casablanca took the decision after Friday’s dis-astrous game in Alexandria, Egypt, saying the former Real Madrid and Wales manager’s contract had been “termi-nated with immediate effect”.

“We of fered John Toshack’s staff all the neces-sary support needed” the club said in a statement. It said that Friday’s failure showed “a real management problem:

Wydad Casablanca also sacked goalkeeping coach Younes Koutaya and trainer Driss Ouajou.

Toshack, 67, a former Liv-erpool striker, took charge in January 2014 and deliv-ered two top-notch finishes, ensuring a Champions League presence the following year.

SPORT22 SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

Henderson’s humdinger sinks Conte’s ChelseaAFP

LONDON: Captain Jordan Hender-son scored a stunning winning goal as Liverpool ended Antonio Conte’s unbeaten record as Chelsea man-ager with an impressive 2-1 victory at Stamford Bridge on Friday night.

In a dominant first-half display, Liverpool took the lead through Dejan Lovren before England mid-fielder Henderson curled home a superb effort from distance in the 36th minute.

Diego Costa reduced the arrears in the second half with his fifth goal of the campaign, but Jurgen Klopp’s men held out to register another eye-catching Premier League win.

Liverpool have also beaten Arse-nal and champions Leicester City this season, the only blot on their league record being a surprise 2-0 defeat at promoted Burnley.

They moved level on points with Chelsea and Merseyside rivals Ever-ton in the early-season standings, two points below leaders Manches-ter City.

It had been with a 3-1 victory on this ground that Klopp recorded his first win as Liverpool manager 11 months ago. On yesterday’s evi-dence, his team are title contenders.

Chelsea would have gone top with victory, but instead Conte tasted defeat for the first time in his

fledgling tenure as his side dropped points again following last weekend’s 2-2 draw at Swansea City.

It was Conte’s first home league defeat since a 2-1 loss to Sampdoria with Juventus in January 2013. David Luiz, meanwhile, lost to Liverpool on his second Chelsea debut, follow-ing his return to the club from Paris Saint-Germain -- just as he had in his first appearance in February 2011.

Liverpool were without Roberto Firmino due to injury, but any fears they might miss the hard-working Brazilian forward were banished immediately.

The away side registered two shots on target inside the first two minutes, Thibaut Courtois saving from Georginio Wijnaldum and Dan-iel Sturridge, and they took the lead in the 17th minute.

Chelsea were punished for twice switching off at a free-kick on the Liverpool left. First they allowed Philippe Coutinho to take the set-piece quickly, giving the Brazilian time to measure an in-swinging cross towards the back post.

Slack marking left Sadio Mane and Lovren unmarked and it was the Croatian who seized the chance, beating Courtois with an adroit side-foot volley.Befor the end of the first falf the hosts were 2-0 down as Henderson gathered a hurried clearance from Gary Cahill, stead-ied himself and arced a sublime 25-yard shot right into Courtois’s

top-left corner. Chelsea’s players were being bypassed by the match, but they managed to plug some of the holes in their defence in the sec-ond half and in the 61st minute, Costa gave them a lifeline.

Joel Matip’s unnecessary deci-sion to go to ground enabled Nemanja

Matic to reach the byline on the left and the Chelsea midfielder cut the ball back for Costa to volley home at the near post.

The Brazil-born Spain inter-national scored a late equaliser at Swansea and he threatened to do the same here, brilliantly gathering

Oscar’s headed knock-down and lashing a shot at Mignolet.

But despite Conte sending on Cesc Fabregas, Victor Moses and Pedro, it was Liverpool who came closest to scoring again, substitute Divock Ori-gi’s header drawing a fine goal-line stop from Courtois.

Chelsea's goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois jumps but fails to save a long-range shot from Liverpool's Jordan Henderson to score his team's second goal during their English Premier League match in London on Friday.

Ronaldo and Bale to miss Madrid trip to Espanyol

AFP

MADRID: Real Madrid will have to cope without Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale in the quest for a club-record 16th straight La Liga win after coach Zinedine Zidane said both will miss today’s trip to Espanyol.

Bale was forced off early by a hip knock as Real Madrid came from behind in dramatic fash-ion to beat Sporting Lisbon 2-1 on Wednesday in the Champions League. Ronaldo started Real’s fightback against his old club, but misses out this weekend due to illness.

“Cristiano won’t travel. He has a problem with his throat and is not ready to play,” Zidane said on Saturday. “We are not going to risk anything and much less so with Ronaldo.”

Zidane also stressed Madrid’s busy schedule with five games in the next two weeks was also behind his decision to leave out Bale.

“He suffered a heavy blow (on Wednesday) so we won’t risk any-thing. All the players want to play, but we have a lot of games,” added Zidane.

“If Gareth gets another knock on the same area he could be out for 10 days or more. I prefer that he is 100 percent for Wednesday (against Villarreal).”

Zidane hinted that James Rod-riguez may finally get his chance to start for the first time this sea-son in the absence of Ronaldo and Bale after impressing as a substi-tute against Sporting.

La Liga: Messi’s double guides Barca past debutants Leganes

AFP

MADRID: Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and Neymar ‘MSN’ were all on tar-get as Barcelona got back to winning ways in La Liga with a 5-1 thrashing at newly promoted Leganes yester-day.

Barca suffered a shock 2-1 home defeat to Alaves last weekend, but despite a bright start from the hosts there was to be no repeat of that upset once Suarez teed up Messi to open the scoring after 15 minutes.

Suarez and Neymar tapped home to give Barca a healthy half-time lead before a Messi penalty and wonder strike from Rafinha made it

5-0. Gabriel Appelt Pires’s fine free-kick pulled a goal back for Leganes 10 minutes from time.

Barca move level with Real Madrid at the top of the table, but Madrid play their game in hand away to Espanyol without the injured Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale tomorrow.

Messi, Suarez and Neymar were starting together for only the sec-ond time this season and, just as in a 7-0 thrashing of Celtic on Tues-day, showed no mercy as Leganes’s high defensive line was torn apart in the first-half.

The hosts were given a warn-ing when Diego Rico blocked Messi’s goalbound effort from Barca’s first counter-attack.

However, Leganes were pun-ished moments later when Suarez showed great strength to burst down the right and his low cross was eas-ily turned home by Messi.

The roles were reversed for Bar-ca’s second when Messi was gifted possession inside the Leganes half and waltzed past two defenders before teeing up Suarez for a tap-in.

Leganes did pose a threat going forward as Venezuelan winger Darwin Marchis caused Javier Mascherano, playing in an unfa-miliar role on the right of Barca’s defence, no end of problems.

Marchis was desperately unlucky not to halve Barca’s advantage when he was denied by a goal-line block from Samuel Umtiti having beaten Mascherano and Marc-Andre ter Stegen.

Suarez bagged his second assist of the half just before the break

when he was released clear on goal and selflessly squared for Neymar this time to roll into an empty net.

All of Barca’s front three were involved for the fourth 10 minutes after the break as Neymar latched onto Suarez’s ball over the top and was dragged down by Unai Bustinza.

Messi showed no signs of the penalty yips he suffered last season and at the Copa America in June as he fired into the top corner for his eighth goal in as many games this season.

However, the two best goals of the afternoon were still to come as

Rafinha cut inside onto his weaker left foot to unleash a rocket into the top corner for Barca’s fifth.

Leganes got the reward their display merited 10 minutes from time when Gabriel curled a sensa-tional free-kick past the helpless Ter Stegen.

Troubled Mourinho expects United revival at WatfordAFP

WATFORD:Jose Mourinho (pictured) insists Manchester United will get back on track at Watford in the Pre-mier League today after successive defeats ruined a promising start to his reign.

United won the Community Shield and reeled off three consec-utive Premier League wins to raise hopes Mourinho’s influence had

quickly revitalised the team. But the size of the rebuilding job facing Mourinho has been laid bare over the last week as his arch rival Pep Guardiola led Manchester City to a 2-1 win over United at Old Trafford before Feyenoord clinched a shock 1-0 victory in the Europa League on Thursday.

United were well below their best against Feyenoord and another loss at Vicarage Road today would leave Mourinho with some awkward ques-tions to answer for the first time since

he took charge. The United manager conceded the mood in the squad was no longer quite so buoyant, but he is confident his players will put their recent struggles behind them this weekend.

“I think tomorrow’s game will be an independent game. It is a new event,” Mourinho said. “It starts minute zero at 0-0 so I think it has nothing to do with the previous two matches.

With the critics sharpening their knives, Mourinho insists losing to a

strong City side and suffering a nar-row loss with a much-changed team against Feyenoord is no reason for panic among the United faithful.

Mourinho could do with an influ-ential performance from France midfielder Paul Pogba after the world record signing’s latest underwhelm-ing performance in midweek.

“I don’t like to individualise too much. I think he was like the team. ” Mourinho said.

After locking horns with Guar-diola, Mourinho comes up against

another manager he has antago-nised in the past in Watford’s Walter Mazzarri.

Mazzarri coached Sampdoria and Napoli during Mourinho’s reign at Inter Milan and the Italian got hot under the collar when the Portu-guese provocateur said of him that “a donkey can work hard but will never become a thoroughbred”. At the time, Mazzarri dismissed him for talking “rubbish”, but now he says he doesn’t hold a grudge and plans to offer Mourinho a post-match drink.

Barcelona’s ‘MSN’ continues their ruthless reign by thrashing the newcomers to move level with Real Madrid on top in points table

Wydad

Casablanca

sacks manager

Toshack

Leganes 1 (Gabriel 80) Barcelona 5 (Messi 15,

55-pen, Suarez 31, Neymar 44, Rafinha 64)

Atletico Madrid 5 (Griezmann 2, 31, Gameiro 5,

Torres 72, 90-pen) Sporting Gijon 0

LA LIGA RESULTS

Barcelona’s Argentinian forward Lionel Messi (Centre) eyes the ball after kicking during the Spanish League football match against Leganes CF at the Butarque municipal stadium in Leganes, Spain yesterday.

SPORT 23SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016

Doha Worlds: Qatar coach eyes home advantage

The Peninsula

DOHA: Qatar’s national cycling coach Tareq Esmaili is hoping that his team will make good use of the home advantage when the UCI Road World Championships Doha 2016 flags off on October 9.

It will be a proud moment for Qatar, the tournament’s first-ever Middle Eastern host, but for national team coach, October 12 is an even more significant date, as it will mark the completion of a dream that has been several years in the making.

The experienced former Qatar international, who is currently pre-paring the team at a camp in Italy, spoke about the dream.

“On October 12, Ahmed Elbourdainy will step forward to compete in the Elite men’s individ-ual Time Trial race. I’ve wanted to coach the national team for as long as I can remember. So it will be a reali-sation of that dream for me. It’s even more satisfying that I get to do it in front of home fans,” he said.

“We’ll field three cyclists at the 2016 Road Worlds. In addition to Elbourdainy, Farhan Farzi and Jassim Al Jabri will participate in the Jun-ior Individual Time Trial. Their focus will be on improving their personal best times and putting up a good show among Asian competitors.”

Esmaili felt Elbourdainy could put up a decent show in Doha. “He competed in the last two UCI Road World Championships (Ponferrada, Spain, 2014 and Richmond, USA, 2015) and the experience will stand him in good stead in Doha. He’s rela-tively young and has improved much in recent years. I’m confident he’ll be able to manage the pressure of com-peting at home.”

Cycling enjoys great popularity around the world, and, in Qatar, it started sprouting wings in the early

2000s. Esmaili, one of Qatar’s first-ever international cyclists, fondly recalled the early days.

“The Qatar Cycling Federation was established in 2001 and they for-mally launched a team in late 2002. I won the inaugural Qatar Armed Forces Cycling Championship that year. Qatar’s first coach, Czech Svato Buchta, approached me and said he wanted me in the national team. I readily agreed.

“I remember our team’s first training camp. It was in Bern, Swit-zerland, in June 2003. It was a totally new experience for us. I watched and learned from my fellow European riders. They helped instill in me a deep love for the sport,” he said.

And now, more than a decade later, his transformation from cyclist to coach is almost complete. So which role does he find more challenging? The response was immediate.

“Being a coach is infinitely more difficult. When I was riding, I just had to train, remain healthy and be ready for race days. After taking over the coaching reins, I’m now responsible for my riders’ lifestyle, nutrition, and training analysis. It’s a tough job, but

one which I’m immensely enjoying,” said Esmaili.

The Qatar team has been train-ing hard for the UCI Road World Championships Doha 2016, attend-ing summer training camps in three European countries - Slovenia, Croatia and Italy - and will return home on October 1 to finalise prep-arations on home soil.

“We’ll come back and start a period of acclimatisation. I’m hop-ing we’ll make good use of the home advantage and adapt to the situation faster. After the World Champion-ships, we’ll also take part in several Gulf, Arab and Asian competitions,” said the coach.

Esmaili said the UCI Road World Championships Doha 2016 would help popularise the sport not only in the country, but the entire Mid-dle East.

“One always sees a surge in interest when a major tournament comes to your region. The Road Worlds in Doha will highlight the sport better than ever before. Hope-fully, a second generation of Qatari cyclists will rise up to the challenge,” he signed off.

Tournament’s first ever Middle Eastern host, Qatar to field three cyclists

Josoor Institute launches

new training and

development programmesThe Peninsula

DOHA: Josoor Institute, a centre of excellence for the sports and events industries, inspired and developed by the Supreme Com-mittee for Delivery and Legacy (SC), will launch a new set of train-ing and development programmes.

The new programmes which will be delivered in partnership with Leaders, a global event, pub-lishing and consultancy business in sport, will focus on strate-gic management and advanced leadership.

The new offerings will enable delegates to combine best prac-tice from the global world of sport with business insight and aca-demic rigor.

The training and develop-ment programmes include five sets of offerings that will run from September to December. These programmes include the ‘Advance Leadership Programme’, targeted at senior executives, the ‘Profes-sional Development Workshops’ and the ‘Masterclass’ that are open to professionals in the sports and events industries. The new pro-grammes also include ‘Executive Networking’ sessions targeted at senior leaders in the sports and events industries, in addition to ‘Outreach’ sessions dedicated to university students.

The programmes will focus on leadership, sports and events mar-keting, commercial best practice and venue and stadium manage-ment among others. Delegates can register for more than one type of programme of the same theme to gain deeper knowledge and understanding of the pre-sented topics.

The newly introduced pro-grammes offer flexible learning and development opportunities and will be delivered by renowned industry experts including Simon Bazalgette, Group Chief Execu-tive Officer of The Jockey Club, the largest commercial group in British horseracing and the UK’s second highest spectator sport; Jonathan Ford, Chief Executive, Football Association of Wales a founding member of both FIFA, UEFA and key member of the International Football Associa-tion Board that decides upon the rules of the game globally, and Simon Crouch, Chief Operat-ing Officer of TEAM Marketing, UEFA’s record marketing company. Also speaking at the workshops are Benjamin Morel, Manag-ing Director SVP EMEA of NBA and Damien Comolli, Sporting Director with extensive scouting experience across Europe, most recently oversaw the signings of Suarez and Jordan Henderson at Liverpool FC.

Speaking about Josoor Insti-tute’s new offerings, Mushtaq Al

Waeli, Executive Director (act-ing) of Josoor Institute said: “The launch of the new training and development programmes come in line with our efforts of grow-ing and developing the industry’s human capital that will enable the MENA region to become a top choice destination for sports and mega events.

The new set of programmes delivered in partnership with Leaders have been designed to fit the needs and knowledge gaps of the region’s sports and events industries. I am confident that delegates will find tangible value that will help them advance their careers. Our partnership with Leaders enables us to deliver cut-ting-edge knowledge with their experience in delivering confer-ences that are widely recognised and receptive in sports and events industries across the globe.”

The first batch of the pro-grammes is set to take place from September 26 to 29.

The first workshop of the Advanced Leadership Pro-gramme focuses on developing leadership and management capabilities for sports business leaders in the MENA region. This explores personal purpose and leadership philosophy, neuro-science of leadership, managing talent, coaching others, building high performance teams, creat-ing a high performance culture and leading organisational change.

The September Professional Development Workshop, titled ‘Strategic Management for Sport Organisations’ will equip delegates with the means of leading project teams and analysing markets to develop strategy and implemen-tation plans.

The workshop will run from September 26 to 28.

The first session of the Mas-terclass will examine a different aspect of ‘Strategic Management’. The session is due to take place on the September 27 and will focus on how to develop an organisational purpose, and how to effectively implement a strategy.

The Executive Networking session on ‘Leading Sports and Events Organisations’ will help delegates to improve their team management skills, and give them an opportunity to meet senior level peers from the sports and events industry. The Executive Network-ing session is due to take place on September 26.

The Outreach session titled ‘Leadership Lessons from Sport’ taking place on 28 September focuses on establishing a personal leadership philosophy and devel-oping coaching skills. Delegates will explore in-depth the latest leadership theory and practices.

More details are available at Josoor Institute’s website www.josoorinstitute.qa and through delegate@josoorinstitute.qa .

Rosberg tops Hamilton for pole in SingaporeAFP

SINGAPORE: Nico Rosberg seized his first ever Singapore Grand Prix pole position with a blistering lap yesterday as he piled pressure on his championship-leading Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton.

Rosberg scorched round the Marina Bay circuit in 1min 42.584sec, more than half-a-second quicker than Red Bull’s Daniel Ric-ciardo’s 1:43.115, with Hamilton only managing 1:43.288 for third place.

Red Bull’s Max Verstappen was fourth, but last year’s winner Sebastian Vettel had a disaster in his Ferrari, as a broken anti-roll bar relegated him to the back row of the grid when he failed to get out of Q1.

Rosberg has never been on the podium in Singapore but he will now be hopeful of celebrating his 200th grand prix by overhauling Hamil-ton’s narrow, two-point lead in the standings today.

“Definitely happy with that one for my 200th grand prix,” beamed Rosberg, who finished fourth in Singapore a year ago but is in the ascendancy after winning the last two races in Belgium and Italy. “One of my top three laps ever.”

Hamilton was left to lament another difficult evening which leaves him with work to do in Sun-day’s race, when he will start from the second row of the grid.

“It wasn’t really a frustrating session it just hasn’t really been my weekend so far,” said Hamilton, whose Friday practice was restricted by a hydraulic failure.

“Nico did a great job in releasing the full potential of the car.”

History is on the German’s side as he starts from pole for the 29th

time in his career. Out of eight grands prix so far in Singapore, the race has been won by the pole-sit-ter six times. “I like that statistic,” Rosberg said.

Kimi Raikkonen was fifth fast-est in his Ferrari and will be joined on the third row of the grid by Toro Rosso’s Carlos Sainz Jr.

Red Bull, who lived up to the pre-qualifying predictions by proving to be Mercedes’ nearest

challengers, will employ a differ-ent tyre strategy in the race which could make for a fascinating battle.

Ricciardo and Verstappen will start on the longer-lasting super-soft tyres that they used in Q2, while Mercedes will utilise the sticky ultrasofts.

The ultrasofts are quicker but have a question mark over their race endurance as they are being used in Singapore for the first time this year.

Ricciardo said it was “always the plan” for Red Bull to go through Q2 on the supersoft tyres when the weekend began, and he was sur-prised that others hadn’t employed the same tactic.

“I am pleased enough. The aim was to be in on the front row, we knew it would be tough to get in front of the Mercedes, but it was nice to be in front of at least one of them,” said Ricciardo.

Pit crew members attend to Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team’s German driver Nico Rosberg’s car during the qualifying session for the Formula One Singapore Grand Prix in Singapore yesterday.

All Blacks crush SpringboksAFP

CHRISTCHURCH: Ardie Savea lived up to his star billing with a colossal try as New Zealand thrashed South Africa 41-13 to take a firm grip on the Rugby Champi-onship in Christchurch yesterday.

The runaway competition lead-ers again banked a bonus point, their fourth in four matches, to be in an almost unbeatable position in the championship with two rounds still to play.

But in the replay of last year’s World Cup semi-final at Twick-enham, which the All Blacks won 20-18, they again struggled to get on top in another gripping encoun-ter between two of rugby’s fiercest rivals.

They were only 15-10 ahead at half-time and did not begin to pull away until eight minutes into the second spell when Ardie Savea showed his devastating skill with the ball, handling twice in the move

that set up Ben Smith’s try. Savea, starting a Test for the first time, then carried two Springboks on his back as he charged over for a try of his own and after 56 minutes, with the All Blacks ahead 29-13, the out-come was obvious.

The All Blacks touched down six times, with Ardie Savea and Smith joined by Julian Savea, Israel Dagg, Sam Whitelock and TJ Perenare, while Beauden Bar-rett kicked four conversions and a penalty. For South Africa, Bryan Habana scored an early try with Elton Jantjies landing a conversion and two penalties.

The Springboks had been widely written off before the game but stepped up against the All Blacks, producing a sterner defence than that presented by either Aus-tralia or Argentina before them.

The win extended the All Blacks unbeaten streak to 15 as they close in on the record of 17 consecutive wins for a tier one nation which they currently share with South Africa.

Qatari cyclists pose for a photograph with coach Tareq Esmaili (Right). RIGHT: Qatari cyclists train during their summer training camps in Europe, ahead of the UCI Road World Championships Doha 2016.

PAGE | 21 PAGE | 22

SUNDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2016 • 16 DHUL HIJJA 1437

www.thepeninsulaqatar.com

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Al Rayyan trounce Al Shahaniya 3-0

The Peninsula

DOHA: A hat-trick by striker Rodrigo Tabata helped defending champions Al Rayyan trounce Al Shahaniya 3-0 in the round one Qatar Stars League (QSL) match here yesterday.

Tabata scored in the 31st minute , a spot kick conversion and added two more goals in the 58th minute and the last one came in injury time.

On Friday, Al Sadd got their new QSL season off to a winning start with a commanding 4-0 win over Al Kharaitiyat at Jassim Bin Hamad Stadium.

Al Sadd controlled the game from kick off, largely thanks to their tal-isman and captain Xavi Hernandez who took a leading role in midfield from the first whistle. Al Sadd broke the deadlock after 25 minutes when Xavi delivered a pin-point pass to find Algerian under-23 international Bag-dad Bounedjah, who controlled the ball on his chest before driving it into the back of the net.

Al Kharaitiyat went into half-time trailing 1-0 but came out strong in the opening minutes of the second half, having a goal disallowed after just two minutes when striker Jeremy Bokila was deemed offside after pok-ing home from six yards out.

Al Sadd continued to control the game and on the 62nd minute, new summer signing Jugurtha Hamroun delivered a through ball to Qatar’s national team captain, Hasan Al Haydoos, who calmly took it around Al Kharaitiyat’s goalkeeper

to make it 2-0. Just a minute later, Al Sadd nearly made it three after Al Kharaitiyat’s goalkeeper was forced to make a fingertip save after another pin-point delivery from Xavi which found the head of Ibrahim Majed.

Al Sadd made sure of all three points after a fine solo goal from Ali Asad which saw him drive an 18 yard shot into the roof of the net on the 77th minute mark. Al Kharaitiyat had a late final push, with Domingos forc-ing a fine save from Al Sadd’s Sadd Abdullah. They also had another goal disallowed on the 84th minute, again for being caught offside.

Al Sadd rounded off a compelling performance after debutant Hossam Kamal set-up Bounedjah in the 92nd minute for his second goal to round

off a fine opening day win for Al Sadd.In the first match, goals either

side of half time and some last minute heroics from goalkeeper Baba Mal-ick helped Umm Salal beat Al Khor 2-1 at Qatar Sports Club as the Fal-cons got their QSL season off to the best possible start.

The match started with an early penalty appeal from Umm Salal after Helal Mohammad looked to be tripped in the box by Khor defender

Wellington Souza. The referee, how-ever, was quick to wave for a goal kick which drew early protests from The Falcons’ bench and Head Coach, Bülent Uygun. Possession was neatly balanced for the majority of the first half but neither side looked able to produce the quality required to pene-trate the opposing defence. That was until Umm Salal midfielder Ismael Mahmoud made a darting run down the left wing and drilled an excellent cross which caused Al Khor’s captain, Mostafa Jalal Jafri, to raise an arm and gift Umm Salal a penalty with 28 minutes gone.

Yannick Sagbo was quick to step up and send the keeper the wrong way to take a 1-0 lead. Al Khor could have been 2-0 down not long after

Sagbo scored from the spot after new summer signing, Alef, on loan from Braga, missed a open goal from five yards out after his header went over the crossbar. Al Khor nearly went into half time level but had a goal disal-lowed on the 42nd minute after a clear infringement on Umm Salal’s goalkeeper, Baba Malick, the first half ended 1-0 to Umm Salal.

Al Khor came out strong in the second half, pressing well and keep-ing possession. The Knights soon got a well-deserved equaliser after Mouhcine Iajour poked home a flick from a corner after Umm Salal’s Baba Malick failed to deal with the set piece.

Hopes of a point for each team didn’t last long however as The Falcons scored an excellent coun-ter-attacking goal which saw Helal Mohammad control a long 25 yard ball from midfield before whipping in a lightening cross to Ismail Mah-moud who found himself unmarked on the back post.

Al Khor continued to press for an equalisier and two late chances fell to Al Khor attacker Mason, who put one chance wide in front of an open goal from six yards out and also drew a last gasp save from Umm Salal’s Babba Malick with the final kick of the game, giving all three points for Umm Salal.

Action from the Qatar Stars league match between Al Rayyan and Al Shahaniya in Doha yesterday. Al Rayyan won 3-0. RIGHT: Rodrigo Tabata of Al Rayyan celebrates his goal.

EPL: Manchester City pull clear, Slimani lifts LeicesterThe Peninsula

LONDON: Kevin De Bruyne, Raheem Sterling and Kelechi Iheanacho shone as Manchester City crushed Bourne-mouth 4-0 yesterday to provisionally go five points clear in the Premier League.

League debutant Ilkay Gundogan also found the net for Pep Guardiola’s City, who have made their best ever start to a season with eight consec-utive wins in all competitions.

Full debutant Islam Slimani scored twice as champions Leices-ter City won 3-0 at home to Burnley and there were also wins for Arsenal and West Bromwich Albion.

At the Etihad Stadium, Guardiola made four changes to the team that had outclassed Borussia Moencheng-ladbach in the Champions League, with Bacary Sagna, Gael Clichy, Nolito and Iheanacho coming in.

Jack Wilshere, on loan from Arsenal, made his first Bourne-mouth start, but it was to prove an afternoon to forget for the England international.

He gave away the free-kick that led to City’s 15th-minute opener, De Bruyne cleverly stroking the set-piece beneath the jumping wall and

into the bottom corner.The Belgian was involved in the

hosts’ second goal 10 minutes later, moving Nolito’s pass on to Sterling, who unselfishly teed up Iheanacho -- deputising for the suspended Ser-gio Aguero -- to score.

Sterling added a third early in the second half, squeezing a shot over the line after Iheanacho had returned the favour, before De Bruyne set up Gundogan for City’s fourth.

The only disappointment for Guardiola was the late dismissal of Nolito for leaning his head towards Adam Smith.

Everton can trim City’s lead back to two points if they win at home to Middlesbrough in Saturday’s late game.

Liverpool and Chelsea also trail City by five points following the Mer-seyside club’s impressive 2-1 win at Stamford Bridge on Friday.

Arsenal are also on 10 points after winning 4-1 at Hull City to reg-ister a third consecutive league win for the first time since last December.

Alexis Sanchez claimed his first goal of the afternoon when Alex Iwo-bi’s shot flicked off him and into the net in the 17th minute.

After Theo Walcott had chipped in to make it 2-0, Robert Snodgrass reduced the arrears with a 79th-minute penalty following a foul on Hull debutant Dieumerci Mbokani by visiting goalkeeper Petr Cech.

But Sanchez made the game safe six minutes later by lashing home after Hull goalkeeper Eldin Jakupovic

had saved from Walcott and substi-tute Granit Xhaka added a stunning late goal from long range.

Leicester are three points back in ninth place after Slimani put paid to Burnley at the King Power Stadium.

Algerian international Slimani was making his league debut after his £28m ($36.4m) transfer from Sporting Lisbon.

He scored a pair of headers either side of half-time, nodding in a Christian Fuchs free-kick in first-half stoppage time and then heading home from strike partner Jamie Var-dy’s flick.

Ben Mee’s own goal from Riyad Mahrez’s cross completed the scor-ing in the 78th minute.

In the day’s remaining game, West Brom withstood a late West Ham United fightback to claim an entertaining 4-2 win at The Haw-thorns. Nacer Chadli scored twice and helped create goals for Salomon Rondon and James McClean as the hosts raced into a 4-0 lead by the 56th minute.

West Ham replied through a header from Michail Antonio -- his fifth goal in four games -- and a Manuel Lanzini penalty, but West Brom saw out the rest of the game in relative serenity.

Leicester City’s Islam Slimani celebrates after scoring their first goal against Burnley in the English Premier League at King Power Stadium yesterday.

Striker Rodrigo Tabata scores the first hat-trick as defending champions pick full points against Oryxes

Qatar Stars League Result and Schedule

Al Rayyan 3 Al Shahaniya 0

Today’s match

El Jaish vs Al Wakrah at Lekhwiya Sta-

dium, 6.00pm

English Premier League Results

London: English Premier League

results on Saturday:

Hull 1 (Snodgrass 79-pen) Arsenal 4

(Sanchez 17, 83, Walcott 55, Xhaka

90+2)

Leicester 3 (Slimani 45+1, 48, Mee

78-og) Burnley 0

Manchester City 4 (De Bruyne 15,

Iheanacho 25, Sterling 48, Gundogan

66) Bournemouth 0

West Brom 4 (Chadli 8-pen, 56, Ron-

don 37, McClean 44) West Ham 2

(Antonio 61, Lanzini 65-pen)

Played on Friday

Chelsea 1 (Costa 61) Liverpool 2

(Lovren 17, Henderson 36)

Playing today (1315 GMT unless

stated):

Crystal Palace vs Stoke, South-

ampton vs Swansea, Tottenham vs

Sunderland (1630 GMT), Watford vs

Manchester United (1100 GMT)

Del Potro sinks Murray as Argentina

claim 2-0 lead

Messi’s double guides Barca past debutants Leganes