SATURDAY 6 FEBRUARY 2021 www.thepeninsula.qa24 JUMADA II- 1442 VOLUME 25 NUMBER 8525

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Sport | 16

Nigeria candidate

closes in on WTO

top job

Qatar's Al Duhail look to finish Club World Cup campaign on a high

Business | 12

2 RIYALS

Fog engulfs West Bay areaBased on the decisions of

the Council of Ministers

issued on Wednesday,

regarding the plan to

reimpose restrictions due

to the COVID-19 pandemic

in the State of Qatar to

prevent its spread and in

the interest of community

safety, it was decided that

all sports activities this

year will be individual

only, such as running,

swimming, and cycling, the

committee said.

FIFA Club World Cup semi-finals to air at drive-in cinema in LusailTHE PENINSULA — DOHA

Qatar National Tourism Council (QNTC), in cooperation with the Doha Film Institute (DFI), has announced that the two FIFA Club World Cup 2021 semi-final games will be broadcast on February 7 and 8 at DFI’s drive-in cinema in Lusail.

The initiative provides fans with the opportunity to support their teams, and enjoy the excitement and enthusiasm of football without violating social distancing or other precau-tionary measures. Highlighting Qatar’s cultural diversity, this initiative is also reflective of the country’s passion for sports in general and football in particular.

The drive-in cinema will broadcast the first semi-final between Brazilian Libertadores

Cup champion Palmeiras and the Tigres UANL Concacaf’s Champions on February 7 at 9pm. Europe’s champion Bayern Munich will play its first game against Africa’s Cham-pions Al Ahly SC, on February 8 at 9pm. The drive-in cinema can accommodate 159 cars, and ticket prices range from QR120 to QR150.

Berthold Trenkel, Chief Operating Officer of QNTC, said: “We continue our suc-cessful partnership with the Doha Film Institute to develop entertainment experiences for

citizens and residents that con-tribute to domestic tourism while focusing on adhering to safety measures due to current circumstances. Qatar continues to strengthen its position as a hub for major international events such as the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022. Successfully hosting tournaments such as the FIFA Club World Cup shows the world Qatar’s read-iness and capabilities in organ-ising events in exceptional cir-cumstances, further enhancing our position as a safe desti-nation.” �P3

A view from the Corniche shows thick fog blanketing the West Bay area and some parts of the country, yesterday afternoon. PIC: SALIM MATRAMKOT /THE PENINSULA

Qatar welcomes election of interim executive authority in LibyaQNA — DOHA

The State of Qatar welcomed the election of representatives of the interim executive authority in Libya and considered this step a mile-stone in the path of struggle and sacrifices of the brotherly Libyan people for stability and prosperity.

In a statement yesterday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stressed the need for all Libyan parties to adhere to the scheduled election date and work to achieve compre-hensive reconciliation.

The Ministry commended the efforts of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya, and expressed the wishes of Qatar that the election of the interim exec-utive authority would pave the way towards a comprehensive political solution that pre-serves the unity of the Libyan territories, respects the rights of the brotherly Libyan people, and establishes a state of law and civil institutions. �P5

Al Emadi inspects work progress at Hamad Hospital in GazaQNA — GAZA

Chairman of Qatar’s Gaza Reconstruction Committee H E Ambassador Mohammed Al Emadi made an inspection tour of H H the Father Amir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani Hospital for Rehabilitation and Prosthetics, and Hamad bin Jassim Center for Integrated Rehabilitation Care.

Ambassador Al Emadi inspected the progress of work at H H the Father Amir Hospital in all its departments, praising the quality of services provided by the hospital. He appreciated the efforts of the administrative and medical staff working in it to provide service and treatment to patients.

He was also briefed on the

most important services pro-vided in the medical rehabili-tation departments such as the rehabilitation accommodation service, physical and occupa-tional therapy, treatment of speech and swallowing dis-orders, and the work of the prosthetic department in the hospital.

Ambassador Al Emadi

inspected Hamad bin Jassim Center for Integrated Rehabil-itation Care, lauding the impor-tance of the service provided by the center for people with special needs with cerebral palsy.

He stressed that what dis-tinguishes the primary care center from other centers is the integrated services provided to

this category, starting from accommodation, education and treatment to occupational training and other services.

Al Emadi stressed the State of Qatar’s keenness to contin-uously develop the level of per-formance and services provided by Qatari projects in the Gaza Strip, in accordance with inter-national standards.

Over 250 referred

to prosecution

for violating

COVID-19 curbs

THE PENINSULA — DOHA

The Ministry of Interior (MoI) official has intensified its efforts to take action against individuals v io lat ing COVID-19 precautionary measures in the country.

The officials recorded 263 individuals and referred them to the Public Prosecution for violating of COVID-19 precau-tionary measures. As many as 224 were booked for not wearing masks in public while 39 were found vio-lating the limit allowed in a vehicle, which is specified as four persons, including the driver, except for members of the same family. All the violators were referred to the Public Prosecution for further action.

“The competent author-ities referred 224 people to the Public Prosecution, as they did not comply with wearing masks in places where it is mandatory,” the Ministry said in a statement. �P2

Only individualactivities allowedfor Sport DayQNA — DOHA

The National Sport Day Committee announced the amendment of the conditions and guidelines for the activities and sporting events of the 2021 National Sport Day on Tuesday, after coordination with the Ministry of Public Health.

Based on the decisions of the Council of Ministers issued on Wednesday, regarding the plan to reimpose restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the State of Qatar to prevent its spread and in the interest of community safety, it was decided that all sports activities this year will be individual only, such as running, swimming, and cycling, the committee said in a statement yesterday.

It added that sports that require physical contact, such as ball matches, are not allowed, and sports in which several teams compete in a limited space are not permitted, in addition to not allowing public attendance in places of sports activities during Sports Day. All sports activities must take place in outdoor places, while indoor sports are prohibited, in addition to not allowing the holding of sporting events in schools and clubs, the statement added.

The National Sport Day Committee called on all members of society who practice sports to commit to taking several preventive measures, such as wearing masks, except for the time of practicing sports activity, stressing that a thermal exam-ination must be conducted for practitioners of sports activity upon entering any area to practice and to prevent the

participation of those whose temperature reaches more than 37.8 C, in addition to making sure that participants have a green color EHTERAZ application.

The committee urged the non-immune groups, including people over the age of 60 years and people with chronic dis-eases, to be discouraged from attending places of sports activities for the sake of their safety, indicating that pro-viding meals in all public places is under the guidelines of the Ministry of Public Health and restrictions imposed on restaurants. �P3

Katara International Arabian Horse Festival concludes todayTHE PENINSULA — DOHA

The Katara International Arabian Horse Festival will conclude its activities and qual-ifiers today with the awarding of winners.

Minister of Justice and Acting Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs, H E Dr. Issa bin Saad Al Jafali Al Nuaimi; Min-ister of Finance H E Ali Shareef Al Emadi and a number of ambassadors visited the festival yesterday.

Chairman of the Organising Committee and General Manager of the Cultural Village Foundation — Katara Dr. Khalid bin Ibrahim Al Sulaiti honoured the festival’s sponsors, namely

Nasser Bin Khaled Group (Diamond Sponsor), Ali Bin Ali Group (Diamond Sponsor), Ahli Bank (Exclusive Sponsor), Vodafone (Communications Partner), and Qatar Airways among others.

The festival is being held at the waterfront and attracts art and equestrian lovers. The associated activities of Katara International Arabian Horse Festival include a number of distinctive art exhibitions that highlight the status of Arabian horses from various creative angles.

Among these activities are a manuscript exhibition on the horses of the East and their breeds. Also Al Aseel exhibition,

an exhibition of horse paintings, and the activity of drawing on the saddle of the horse, in addition to the activity of horse photography. The exhibition also includes rare collections of postage stamps that doc-ument many events, activities and international champion-ships in equestrian races.

The exhibition by photog-rapher Omar Al Hammadi, which is held on the waterfront of Katara, contains a set of the most beautiful pictures that embody the Arabian horses and their names. Al Hammadi is considered the first profes-sional Qatari artist in the field o f A r a b i a n h o r s e photography.An action from the Katara International Arabian Horse Festival, yesterday.

The drive-in cinema will broadcast the semi-finals at 9pm tomorrow and Monday. The drive-in cinema can accommodate 159 cars, and ticket prices range from QR120 to QR150.

02 SATURDAY 6 FEBRUARY 2021HOME

Ministers visit Katara International Arabian Horse FestivalMinister of Justice and Acting Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs, H E Dr. Issa bin Saad Al Jafali Al Nuaimi (left), and Minister of Finance H E Ali Shareef Al Emadi with Chairman of the Organizing Committee and General Manager of the Cultural Village Foundation - Katara, Dr. Khalid bin Ibrahim Al Sulaiti, during their visit to Katara International Arabian Horse Festival, yesterday.

MoTC suspends rental services for boatsTHE PENINSULA — DOHA

The Ministry of Transport and Communications (MoTC) has announced to suspend the services for renting boat, tourist yachts and leisure boats.

“Based on the Ministry’s keenness to introduce the plan to re-impose restrictions due

to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been decided to suspend rental services of boats, tourist yachts and leisure boats,” the Ministry has tweeted. The Ministry said the owners of personal boats and yachts are obligated to adhere to no more than 15 people on board while using it.

MoPH: 153 more recover; 398 new COVID-19 casesTHE PENINSULA — DOHA

The Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) yesterday announced the registration of 398 new confirmed cases of COVID-19. Among them, 27 are travellers returning from abroad.

Also, 153 people have recovered from the virus, bringing the total number of cases recovered in Qatar to 146,627.

In addition, the Ministry also announced one new death,

an 11-year-old child, who was suffering from chronic condi-tions and, who was receiving the necessary medical care.

All new cases have been introduced to isolation and are receiving necessary healthcare according to their health status.

The statement added that due to the measures put in place by Qatar’s government and the support of the public in following preventive steps, Qatar succeeded in suppressing the spread of the virus since its

peak in July. “However, over the past

month in Qatar we have seen

a gradual and consistent increase in the number of new daily infections. Additionally, and of great concern is the recent increase in both the number of people admitted to hospital with COVID-19 and the number of people admitted to ICU with the virus.

“The data over the next few days and week will tell us more, but these increases appear to be the early signs of a potential second wave in Qatar,” it added.

For this reason, the Min-istry said, it is more important than ever that people adhere to preventive measures to cut off second wave before it gains momentum.

“If numbers of positive cases and hospital admissions continue to increase over the coming week or two, addi-tional restrictions may need to be implemented across the country and we will return to some of the early restriction phases. “

Thailand PM meets Qatar’s AmbassadorPrime Minister of the Kingdom of Thailand, H E Prayut Chan-o-cha, meets with Ambassador of the State of Qatar to Thailand, H E Ahmed bin Ali Al Tamimi. During the meeting, they reviewed bilateral cooperation and issues of common concern.

QRCS secures clean drinking water for displaced Syrians in Deir HassanTHE PENINSULA — DOHA

Qatar Red Crescent Society (QRCS) has concluded a project to enhance pure water accessi-bility for the population of Deir Hassan and nearby camps in Idlib Governorate, northern Syria.

It is an effective and sus-tainable intervention with $697,643 funding from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Over 12 consecutive months, QRCS’s representation office in Turkey has been executing this project, which focused on repairing the water and sewage

infrastructure in Deir Hassan and the camps of internally displaced people (IDPs).

The purpose of the project was to improve access to safe and potable water for both the resi-dents and IDPs, thus reducing dependence on trucks to move water and boosting the local community’s resilience amid a prolonged humanitarian crisis.

This intervention matches the strategic goals of both the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Cluster and Camp Coordination and Camp Management (CCCM) Cluster. It is a significant WASH activity by OCHA in Syria, as it addresses the issue of

non-dependence on drinking water transported by tanker trucks.

Faisal Mohamed Al Emadi, Executive Director of Relief and International Development at QRCS, said, “The project meets the needs of IDPs in Deir Hassan and the camps of Abtin, Zamzam, Al-Rahma, Al-Ghab, Naseem Al-Rahma 1, Naseem Al Rahma 2, and Ataa’, all located in the northern rural parts of Idlib.”

“Thanks to this vital project, 46,041 persons now have access to better-quality and adequate water,” said Al Emadi.

The water supply system was

repaired and rehabilitated, and water tanks were installed at camps. Moreover, sewage services are made available for 8,489 persons, after sewage systems and wastewater treatment plants were renovated to protect the environment.

Under the project, water, sanitation, and capacity-building training was provided for repre-sentatives of 10 active organiza-tions and national humanitarian authorities.

The project solved many problems, mainly inadequacy and impurity of water, damage in sewage systems, lack of a cost recovery method to ensure water

sustainability, and dependence on water tankers for years at the neighboring camps.

Among the activities done under the project were the reha-bilitation of a water well in Deir Hassan, construction of a 150-m3 elevated water storage tank, operation of the village’s pumping station, provision of two power generators, linkage to wells, provision of all equipment, maintenance of water supply pipelines, and construction of camp water supply systems.

As a result, half of the town’s population and the camps’ 37,541 IDPs have access to drinking water.

MES students

win accolades in

inter-school

competitions

THE PENINSULA — DOHA

The Junior Section students of MES Indian School excelled in their performance by securing first position in quiz and poster making competitions and third position in the speech contest in the Virtual Vista 2020, an inter-school competition organised on virtual platform by Birla Public School on November 7, 2020.

Various competitions such as quiz, show & tell, music and poster making contest were conducted online in different categories. Sohan Sandeep of Class I-K and Danish Reji Bhazeer of Class I-M repre-sented MES in quiz category-1.

Aambal Synesh of Class II-B represented MES in poster making category-1 and Aaesha Fathima Basheer of Class IV-B represented the school in speech competition under category-2.

The students were trained by the literary in charge teachers of the school. Students were congratulated for their enthusiasm, effort and achievement in the live competition.

CNA-Q concludes workplace health and safety training for Coasts and Borders Security

THE PENINSULA — DOHA

College of the North Atlantic – Qatar (CNA-Q) held a certificate distribution ceremony for Coasts and Borders Security, following a 3-week training on Workplace Health and Safety.

Present at the ceremony were CNA–Q President Dr. Salem Al-Naemi, Representing Assistant Director-General of Coasts and Borders Security, Brigadier General AbdelHakim Yehya Hzam Al Awa, Director of the Police Training Institute, Colonel Ali Saud Al-Hanzab, School of Engineering Tech-nology and Industrial Trades’ Dean Dr. Awni Al Otoom, CNA-Q’s Continuing and Pro-fessional Education Depart-ment’s Manager Dr.Suhaim Khalaf Al Josaiman.

The Continuing and Profes-sional Education (CPE)

department, along with the School of Engineering Tech-nology and Industrial Trades, tailored the plan, courses, and curriculum based on the Police Training Institute’s request to meet the Coasts and Borders Security’s needs.

The programme provided coast guards with theoretical knowledge and applied skills required to identify hazards and professionally respond to emergencies.

Participants gained prac-tical experience determining appropriate safety precautions that eliminate or minimize the risk of personal injury, equipment damage and pro-moting safe work practices.

In his speech Brig. Al Awa said: “We are pleased to attend the graduation ceremony of our coast guards. Workplace health and safety are essential

components of our daily work routines.

“We extend our thanks to the Police Training Institute and College of the North Atlantic – Qatar, and the School of Engi-neering Technology and Indus-trial Trades and Continuing and Professional Education Department for putting in place this programme, which is con-sidered a top applied training for our national workforce.

“We wish the graduates all the best, and we are looking forward to seeing them apply what they learned in the workplace”.

Dr. Al Naemi said, “It was a pleasure to collaborate with the Ministry of Interior and Coasts and boarders Security on this particular initiative. We appre-ciate the trust that was put in our College to deliver this training.”

The Ministry said it is

more important than

ever that people adhere

to preventive measures

to cut off second wave

before it gains

momentum.

Over 250 referred

to prosecutionFROM PAGE 1

The Ministry of Interior (MoI) further stated that 39 people were found violating the maximum limit allowed in a vehicle which is set at four persons, including the driver, with the exemption of families.

“The competent author-ities call on the public to adhere to the precautionary and preventive decisions in force to protect them and others from the spread of the coronavirus in society,” the statement added. MoI and health authorities have been continuously warning the public to follow precautionary measures like wearing masks, following social distancing, and restricting the number of people in vehicles to fight the COVID-19 pandemic from spreading.

Education Forum 2021 tobe organised in AprilQNA — DOHA

Under the theme of ‘Visions and Aspirations...Beyond Challenges,’ the Ministry of Education and Higher Education will organise the ‘Education Forum 2021’ in April.

The event, which will be held virtually, seeks to bring together educational experts and profes-sionals to discuss and share views on the issues of education and explore the future of edu-cation in the post-COVID-19 period.

The Forum will shed light on the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) of ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all, as set out in the UN’s Sus-tainable Development Plan 2030. This contributes to the Qatar National Vision 2030 (QNV2030), which aims to transform Qatar into an advanced country capable of sustaining its own development and ensuring high living standards for its people for gen-erations to come.

Through various seminars and workshops, the Forum will address a range of issues and practices presented by university professors and professionals from different participating

entities, with a special focus on the role of technology and devel-opments in the post-COVID-19 education.

The following themes will be featured in the event: Integrating education sustainable devel-opment into school curricula. Aligning education outputs with labour market and sustainable development needs. Introducing new visions for the early childhood education. Exploring the role of educational super-vision and educational lead-ership in promoting teachers sustainable professional devel-opment. Fostering community partnerships to realise sus-tainable development.

The Ministry invites all parties interested in education from inside and outside Qatar to register for training workshops using the links below: The reg-istration link in Arabic: https://surve ys .e ducat ion .qa/ s /EDUFORUM2021/

The registration link in English: https://surveys.edu-c a t i o n . q a / s /EDUFORUM2021Eng/

Requirements for regis-tration are also available on the ministry’s website for your perusal. The deadline for regis-tration is Monday, February 15, 2021.

W ALRUWAIS : 17o → 29o W ALKHOR : 18o → 23o W DUKHAN : 14o → 22o W WAKRAH : 18o → 24o W MESAIEED : 18o → 24o W ABUSAMRA : 11o → 25o

Misty to foggy at places at first becomes moderate temperature daytime with some clouds and slight dust at times.

Minimum Maximum15oC 28oC

WEATHER TODAY

LOW TIDE 06:15 – 18:14

HIGH TIDE 00:54 – 09:55

PRAYER TIMINGSPPPPRAYRRRAAAYARA MMMMIINNNNNNNNNGGGGGGMMMMMMMMMIIINNNNNNGGGGNNNNGGGIINNNNGNNNNNNNNN

PRAYERTIMINGS

FAJRSUNRISE

04.55 am 06.14 am

DHUHR 11.48 am

ISHA 06.54 pmMAGHRIBASR 02.59 pm

05.24 pm

03SATURDAY 6 FEBRUARY 2021 HOME

Sri Lanka Embassy celebrates 73rd Independence Day

THE PENINSULA — DOHA

Embassy of Sri Lanka in Doha marked the 73rd Inde-pendence Day of Sri Lanka on Thursday symbolically at the Chancery premises.

The National Day events commenced with the hoisting of national flag and the singing

of national anthem of Sri Lanka followed by the observance of two minutes silence in remembrance and honour of all patriots who sac-rificed their lives to preserve

and protect the freedom, unity, sovereignty and terri-torial integrity of the motherland.

Thereafter, multi-religious observances were conducted

by the respected religious dig-nitaries representing the Bud-dhist, Hindu, Islam and Catholic faiths to bestow the blessings to the people of the country.

Independence Day mes-sages of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and Foreign Minister Dinesh Gune-wardena were read out in Sinhala and Tamil by the staff members of the mission.

Speaking at the occasion Ambassador-designate M. Mafaz Mohideen highlighted the sentiments expressed by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa at the National Independence Day ceremony on the National Policy Framework of the Gov-ernment “Vistas of Prosperity and Splendour”.

Speaking further the A m b a s s a d o r - d e s i g n a t e emphasized the friendly rela-tionship between Sri Lanka and the State of Qatar and expressed the hope that these ties would be strengthened in the year ahead particularly in the political, trade and in various fields.

The ceremony concluded with the serving of traditional Sri Lankan delicacies and refreshments.

Sri Lanka's Ambassador-designate M. Mafaz Mohideen hoisting the national flag.

FIFA Club World Cup fever continues; eyes on semi-finals stageTHE PENINSULA — DOHA

Qatar is currently hosting the FIFA Club World Cup for the second time in a row — and locally-based fans of SE Palmeiras and FC Bayern Munich have been sharing their excitement for the competition with www.qatar2022.qa.

The CONMEBOL and UEFA representatives will both enter the tournament at the semi-finals stage.

Palmeiras will get their campaign underway at Edu-cation City Stadium on Feb-ruary 7, when they face Mexican side Tigres UANL (kick-off 21:00), while Bayern Munich take on Egyptian giants Al Ahly SC on February 8 at Ahmad Bin Ali Stadium (kick-off 21:00).

A limited number of fans will be able to attend the matches in line with Qatar’s COVID-19 protocols. Click here for ticket details, qatar2022.qa said on their website

Among the crowds will be two fans who are fanatical about their respective clubs. Here we meet Palmeiras fan Karolina Stuksa and Bayern

Munich supporter Michaela Spranger.

Karolina Stuksa, SE Palmeiras

When did you move to

Qatar, and what do you do there?

I moved to Doha in early 2018 to work as a flight attendant for Qatar Airways.

When did you first start supporting Palmeiras?

For as long as I remember, I’ve supported this club based in São Paulo, where I was born. Palmeiras is one of the most popular clubs in Brazil, with millions of supporters. Many of them, like myself, are Bra-zilians of Italian ancestry. But unfortunately, even though my family are Italian immigrants, they don’t support the same team that I do!

Who is your favourite Pal-meiras player?

My favourite player will always be Marcos. He played as a goalkeeper until his retirement in 2012 and became one of the club’s greatest idols. If I were to choose a player from the current team, it would

have to be Gabriel Veron, who plays as a forward. He’s a young talent with a lot of potential.

What will it mean to you to see Palmeiras play in the FIFA Club World Cup Qatar 2020?

I’m so proud and excited for the chance to see my Pal-meiras playing here in Qatar, which has been my home for the past three years. It’s nothing short of a dream come true.

With under two years to go until the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, what should fans

expect when they come over to enjoy the tournament?

If you are thinking of coming to Qatar, prepare yourself to be immersed in so much history and diversity. You will enjoy the cultures and foods of different peoples from around the world, all immersed in a fun, warm and friendly culture of hospitality. The great thing is that you won’t have to worry about your safety either, as the country is one of the safest in the world. Experi-encing cutting-edge technology at tournament stadiums against a background of rich heritage

will definitely be a treat for the senses.

Michaela Spranger, FC Bayern Munich

When did you move to Qatar, and what do you do there?

In 2014, I moved to Qatar to pursue a career in the coun-try’s growing tourism sector. During my time here, I also founded the official Bayern Munich fan club, known as the ‘Red Falcons’.

When did you first start supporting Bayern Munich?

I grew up supporting them; in fact, my entire family supports them. Watching their many suc-cesses domestically and on the continental level over the years has been a tremendous reward for a lifetime of support.

Who is your favourite Bayern Munich player?

It would have to be Thomas Müller. He has been an incredibly consistent and important player for Bayern and Germany in recent years. He can play anywhere across the forward line and often chips in with important goals.

He is one of the greatest

players in Bayern’s history.What will it mean to you to

see Bayern Munich play in the FIFA Club World Cup Qatar 2020?

I can tell you that having met the team during previous visits to Qatar, that it has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. Although we won’t be able to get too close this time because of the COVID-19 safety measures, I really look forward to seeing them in action. And as always, I really look forward to the opportunity to meet other fans. That sense of community is one of the things that makes football so special.

With under two years to go until the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, what should fans expect when they come over to enjoy the tournament?

They will get a sense of the multiculturalism that makes Qatar what it is. So many dif-ferent nationalities live here in peace, and that’s something really beautiful. I’m sure that when people get to witness what Qatar has to offer in a safe yet exciting setting, they will con-tinue to visit this country long after the World Cup.

Michaela SprangerKarolina Stuksa

Periodontitis can increase COVID-19 complications: QU research

THE PENINSULA — DOHA

A Qatar University team has carried out research to determine the link between COVID-19 and oral health.

The research team spear-headed by Dr. Nadia Maarouf, an Associate consultant from Hamad Dental Center, and led by Dr. Faleh Tamimi, Professor at Qatar University, speculated that this strong association between COVID-19 and oral health could be caused by periodontitis.

Periodontitis causes a chronic inflammation that makes patients more suscep-tible to the severe and dan-gerous inflammation caused by COVID-19.

The researchers investi-gated the records of 568 patients who suffered from COVID-19. They found that a significant portion of the patients who suffered severe COVID-19 complications and even death had advanced per-iodontitis, chronic inflam-mation of the gums.

After adjusting for several factors such as patient’s age, gender, and chronic diseases, the link between periodontitis and COVID-19 complications was statistically significant, and it revealed that patients with periodontitis were at least three times more likely to experience COVID-19 complications regardless of age, gender, and other patients’ conditions.

Periodontitis is mostly caused by poor oral hygiene and lack of maintenance of the dental condition.

Speaking further the

Ambassador-designate

emphasized the friendly

relationship between Sri

Lanka and the State of

Qatar and expressed the

hope that these ties

would be strengthened

in the year ahead

particularly in the

political, trade and in

various fields.

A view of thick fog blanketing the West Bay area, in Doha yesterday. Fog was also witnessed in some other parts of the country. PICS: ABDUL BASIT/ THE PENINSULA

Fog blankets city

FIFA Club World Cup semi-finals to air at drive-in cinema in Lusail

FROM PAGE 1

Fatma Hassan Alremaihi, Chief Executive Officer of DFI, said: “Bringing audiences together at safe social distances, the open-air experience of drive-in cinemas are a perfect way to bring the excitement of the game to the community at a time when it’s challenging for many to go to a game now. A retro favourite, the drive-in during the pan-demic is being reimagined across the world, giving us new ways to experience films, music, sports, and live performances. We are proud to be collaborating with Qatar National Tourism Council to celebrate our great love of football and share our enthusiasm with

the public as we prepare to host the world’s biggest sporting extravaganza next year.”

To ensure a smooth entertainment expe-rience at the drive-in cinema, every passenger above 18 years old must show their Ehteraz. Each ticket is valid for one car with a maximum capacity of four individuals, all of whom must be above 12 years of age. Each car is allowed two chairs within the desig-nated parking area, The drive-in cinema

opens one hour before the games start to ensure smooth and organised entry.

Tickets to watch the two semi-finals on the drive-in screen in Lusail can be purchased at the following link: https://www.dohafilm-institute.com/nowplaying. QNTC continues to work with partners from the public and private sectors to promote sports tourism - a key focus area. The sports tourism sector is complemented by Qatar’s advanced sports facilities and capabilities along with its rep-utation as a host for major international tour-naments such as the 2022 World Cup, the World Aquatics Championships 2023, the 2023 World Judo Championships, and the 2030 Asian Games.

Only individual

activities allowed

for Sport Day

FROM PAGE 1

The National Sports Day aims to highlight the impor-tance of sport with its moral and human values and health benefits, in addition, to educate citizens and res-idents of the importance of sport in daily life and encourage them to practice it throughout the year.

The protocol file can be downloaded and viewed by visiting the Ministry of Culture and Sports website www.mcs.gov.qa.

The drive-in cinema opens one hour before the games start to ensure smooth entry.

04 SATURDAY 6 FEBRUARY 2021MIDDLE EAST

“We will deal

positively with the

attitude of the new US

administration, which

wants to end the

conflict,” Yemen’s

Foreign Minister

Ahmed Awad Bin

Mubarak told The

Associated Press.

Yemen govt says willing to work with Biden to end warAP — SANA’A

Yemen’s foreign minister said his government will work with US President Joe Biden’s adminis-tration to end the war in the Arab world’s poorest country.

Still, Ahmed Awad Bin Mubarak (pictured) insisted the Houthi rebels and their Iranian backers remain the main obstacle to peace— an apparent defense of Saudi military involvement in Yemen.

On Thursday, Biden announced the US was ending support for the grinding war in Yemen. The five-year conflict has killed some 130,000 people, including over 13,000 civilians, and resulted in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

“We will deal positively with the attitude of the new US administration, which wants to end the conflict in Yemen,” Bin Mubarak told The Associated Press.

“This has always been our goal since the war started, and we dealt positively with all UN initiatives in the past, but we are always faced with the intransigence of Houthi militias

and Iran’s agenda in the region,” he said.

Houthi spokesman Mohamed Abdel Salam tweeted late on Thursday that peace would not be achieved until “the aggression was brought to a halt and the siege was lifted.”

Yemen’s war began in Sep-tember 2014, when the Houthis seized Sana’a and began a march south to seize the entire country. Saudi Arabia, along with the United Arab Emirates and other countries, entered the war alongside Yemen’s inter-

nationally recognised gov-ernment in March 2015.

Biden also called for a ceasefire, an opening of humanitarian channels to allow more delivery of aid, and a return to long-stalled peace talks.

The Yemeni government also welcomed Biden’s decision to appoint Timothy Lenderking as special envoy to Yemen, hailing it as another “important step” attesting to the US commitment to end the war, according to a statement from Yemen’s state-run Saba news agency.

Erdogan rebuffs criticism, vows ‘no mercy’ to protestersAP — ANKARA

Turkey’s president yesterday rebuffed US and European criticism of his govern-ment’s handling of weeks-long demon-strations at a top Istanbul university, saying they should focus on violent protests in their own countries instead.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan also vowed to show “no mercy” to protesters who use violence, and reiterated his deter-minat ion not to a l low

the demonstrations spiral into mass anti-government protests like those that rocked the country in 2013.

Students and faculty members at Bogazici University have been dem-onstrating in protest of appointment of a rector of an academic with links to ruling party. They have been calling on rector Melih Bulu to step down and for the university to be allowed to select its own president.

Some of the protests have led to

clashes with police, resulting in hun-dreds of arrests — although most of the detainees were later released. Protests have been staged in the capital, Ankara, as well as Izmir and other cities in support of the Bogazici students.

Speaking to reporters as he left a mosque following Friday prayers, Erdogan rejected criticism from the US and from EU officials.

“I will say this to America: aren’t you ashamed of the incidents in the

United States before the elections?” Erdogan said, in refence to the violence on Capitol Hill. “Racism went over the roof,” he continued, alluding to anti-racism protests that swept the US last year.

He also called on France to “sort out” protests by the yellow vest movement which has been calling for economic justice.

Later, in a video address to female members of his ruling party, Erdogan

again accused the US and European nations of double standards, for “crushing” protests in their countries but portraying as “innocent those who terrorize the streets” in Turkey.

“We will not show mercy towards those who have become the toy of organisations involved in terror and who regard the use of violence as a means of seeking justice,” he said. “We will grab hold of their collars and bring them to justice.”

Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, the European Union’s representative to the West Bank and Gaza, Sven Kuehn von Burgsdorff, and other foreign diplomats visit the village of Khirbet Humsah which was razed by Israeli forces, in Jordan Valley in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, yesterday.

Unarmed Palestinian shot dead in West Bank settlementAP — OCCUPIED JERUSALEM

The Israeli military said yesterday that an unarmed Palestinian man was shot and killed in a West Bank settlement after he tried to break into a home and fought with a guard.

The military referred to the incident as a “terror attack,” but a spokesman was unable to explain how it came to that conclusion, given that no weapons were found on the suspect or in his car. The mil-itary said the suspect fought with a guard, who was also unarmed, before being shot and killed by another guard and a third individual.

The incident took place in what the military referred to as “Sde Efraim farm,” one of several small outposts set up by

Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank.

Radi Abu Fkheideh, the head of the local council in the nearby Palestinian village of Ras Karkar, identified the deceased as Khaled Nofal, 34, the married father of a four-year-old boy. He said the army stormed Nofal’s home in the village early yesterday and detained his father. Ras Karkar is located near Ramallah, the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority.

He had no information about the circumstances of Nofal’s death, but said the family owned land near the settler outpost. The Palestinian Authority condemned the killing. Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh called it a “heinous crime” and

denounced the “terrorism of the occupation and the settlers.”

There have been a series of stabbings, shootings and car-ramming attacks against Israelis in recent years, mostly carried out by lone Palestinians with no apparent ties to armed groups. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war, and the Palestinians want it to form the main part of their future state. Nearly 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank, mainly in large, developed set-tlements. Hard-line settlers have established a number of smaller outposts without official authorization.

The Palestinians view all the settlements as illegal and a major obstacle to peace, a position with wide international support.

Iraqi security forces arrest six IS militantsQNA — BAGHDAD

Iraqi security forces arrested yesterday six Islamic State (IS)members in the north of the country.

Iraqi Interior Ministry’s intelligence agency said, in a statement, that six militants were arrested in different areas of Kirkuk governorate, adding that they are wanted by the security and judicial authorities for their involvement in ter-rorist acts.

The statement added that six IS dens were also found in the Hawija and Daquq districts, with a number of IEDs, weapons and ammunition.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi security forces thwarted an IED attack in front of the house of Iraqi army aviation com-mander Samir Al Maliki in Baghdad.

A security source said that the bomb disposal experts were able to dismantle the explosive device without causing any human or material losses.

At least one person was injured in clashes today between security forces and demonstrators in southern Iraq.

A security source stated that clashes took place between the security forces and the demonstrators in Al Haboubi Square in Nasiriyah, adding that one of the demonstrators was injured by security forces bullets.

The source added that the demonstrators closed the ‘Bridge of Civilizations’, pointing out that the clashes between the security forces and the demonstrators are still going on.A policeman patrolling a checkpoint in Fallujah, Iraq, yesterday.

Jordan recovers bodies of three swept away in floods

AP — AMMAN

Authorities in Jordan have recovered the bodies of three people who went missing after their vehicle was swept away in a flash flood early yesterday.

The Public Security Directorate said the brother of one of those missing died during the search near the town of Ruwaished, some 300km (190 miles) east of the capital, Amman.

Jordan often experiences flash flooding this time of year as heavy seasonal rains send torrents of water through its desert valleys.

Family of slain Lebanese activist wants to know if he was torturedAP — BEIRUT

The family of a prominent Lebanese publisher and harsh critic of the Shia Hezbollah group who was shot dead said yesterday they want a forensic doctor they hired to determine whether he was tortured before he was killed.

The development came amid much speculation that the 58-year-old Lokman Slim was alive for several hours before he was shot several times at close range. He was found in his car in southern Lebanon on Thursday with

multiple gunshot wounds.The brazen killing sparked

fears of a return to political vio-lence in this country gripped by social and economic upheaval.

The longtime Shia political activist and researcher went missing on Wednesday night after a trip south to visit friends. The Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV and some local Lebanese TV stations have reported that Slim may have been tortured while local officials speculated that bruises on his face indicate he was punched before he was killed. Lebanese security forces found Slim’s car on a rural road

near the southern village of Addoussieh, in Sidon province. He was heading back to Beirut in the evening after his visit.

Yesterday, his body was brought from the southern city of Sidon to the American Uni-versity Medical Center in Beirut.

Slim’s family has dismissed a handwritten report by the coroner who was at the scene Thursday when the body was found. The coroner said there were six bullets in the body - three to the head, one in the chest and one in the back. It was not known if the report had any mention of bruising.

“We have asked a private doctor” to examine Slim’s body, his sister, Rasha al-Ameer, told the local LBC TV station. The family, she said, wants to “find out how much they tortured him before killing him.”

Al Ameer on Thursday offered a veiled accusation against Hezbollah, without naming the group, and repeated it yesterday, saying that “it is known who con-trols” the area where her brother was found dead. “We want to know what happened to him during the three hours before he was killed,” she added.

Hezbollah has condemned

Slim’s killing and called for a swift investigation. It also urged security agencies to combat crimes it said have spread around Lebanon and which have been “exploited politically and by the media at the expense of security and domestic sta-bility” - a jab at their critics.

Perpetrators of political vio-lence or corruption are almost never identified or prosecuted in Lebanon. With rising tension amid deepening political dispute and economic crisis, officials have warned of a return of violence and assassinations.

AGENCIES — RIYADH

Saudi Arabia announced four deaths from COVID-19 and 327 new infections yesterday.

Of the new cases, 134 were recorded in Riyadh, 67 in the Eastern Province, 38 in Makkah, 11 in Madinah, 10 in Asir, eight in Najran and six in Jazan.

The total number of recov-eries in the country increased to 360,954 after 257 more patients recovered from the virus. A total of 6,393 people have succumbed to the virus in the Kingdom so far.

Kuwait Ministry of Health yesterday reported 940 new coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in the last 24 hours, bringing the total cases in the country to 169,190.

The ministry recorded two death cases, taking the death toll to 964.

In a statement, the minis-try’s official spokesperson Dr. Abdullah Al Sanad said that the number of people who are receiving treatment at intensive care units amounted to 68, taking the total number of cases that still receiving the necessary medical care to 7,672 cases.

Earlier yesterday, the Kuwaiti Ministry of Health announced the recovery of 456 people in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of cases of COVID-19 to 160,554. (QNA)

Meanwhile, Israel’s cabinet voted overnight to extend the country’s lockdown to tomorrow morning, and agreed to begin gradually reo-pening parts of the economy next week.

Starting from February 7, restrictions on movement will be lifted while certain busi-nesses will be able to reopen. Ministers will meet Sunday to further discuss the country’s exit plan from its third lockdown.

The government extended restrictions on entering and exiting the country by two weeks through February 20.

Saudi reports 4 more COVID-19 deaths; Israel to ease some curbs from tomorrow

Jordan eases virus lockdown

05SATURDAY 6 FEBRUARY 2021 MIDDLE EAST / AFRICA

A delegate casting his vote for the election of a new interim government for Libya during the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum in Chavannes-de-Bogis near Geneva, Switzerland, yesterday.

People exercise at a reopened gym, as authorities eased lockdown restrictions that were imposed to slow the spread of the coronavirus disease, in Amman, Jordan, yesterday.

Libyan rival factions agreeon new interim governmentREUTERS — GENEVA/TRIPOLI

UN sponsored talks produced a new interim government for Libya yesterday aimed at resolving a decade of chaos, division and violence by holding national elections later this year.

Mohammed Al Menfi, a former diplomat from Benghazi, will head a three-man presi-dency council, while Abdul-hamid Dbeibeh, from the western city of Misrata, will head the government as prime minister.

Libya has been engulfed in chaos since a Nato-backed intervention ended Muammar Gaddafi’s four-decade rule in 2011 and has been split since 2014 between warring admin-istrations in the west and east, backed by foreign powers.

However, with many fac-tions in the country afraid to surrender influence they already hold, and with foreign powers invested in local allies, the new government may rapidly come under pressure.

The appointment of a new government may also do little to change the balance of

military power on the ground, where armed groups rule the streets and factions remain split between east and west along a fortified front line.

“This is the last chance for the Libyan people and political leaders to end the conflict and division in the country. We hope to reach the stage of elections, just as they have promised, to achieve the people’s demands,” said Gamal Al Fallah, a political activist in Benghazi.

Analysts describe the new government team as surprise winners of a leadership contest

against three other groups of candidates presented to the 75 Libyan participants picked by the United Nations to take part in political talks.

A slate that included the eastern-based parliament head Aguila Saleh and western-based interior minister Fathi Bashagha was widely seen as the most likely to succeed but lost in a run-off by 39 votes to 34.

“This is certainly a shake-up, and as a result it will get support from groups that were preparing to fight Aguila or Fathi,” said Tarek Megerisi of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

The winning leadership group also includes Musa Al Koni, from the south, and Abdullah Al Lafi, from the west, in the presidency council. Bashagha tweeted his support for the process and for the new government after the vote.

All candidates for the new government promised to honour the plans to hold pres-idential and parliamentary elec-tions on December 24 and not to run for office in them. The UN publicly displayed their signed pledges.

The latest UN process emerged from a Berlin con-ference last year and gathered pace in the autumn after com-mander Khalifa Haftar’s eastern-based forces were repelled from a 14-month assault on Tripoli.

It has also involved a mil-itary ceasefire but not all its terms of that ceasefire have been met - a sign of continued mistrust on both sides and

internal fractures within both camps. The new government may make it harder to bridge the east-west divide, said analyst Jalel Harchaoui of the Clingendael Institute.

Though born in the east, Menfi is seen as close politically to the current Tripoli gov-ernment leadership and without strong ties to Haftar or other eastern leaders, he added.

Some Libyans have been

critical of a process which they view as being managed from abroad and which they fear will allow existing powermongers to cling to their influence.

“It’s just a painkiller to portray Libya as stable for a while. But war and tension will certainly come back sooner or later so long as militias have power,” said Abdulatif al-Zorgani, a 45-year old state employee in Tripoli.

Tunisian union calls for four ministers to quit as way to end crisisREUTERS — TUNIS

Tunisia’s powerful UGTT labour union yesterday called for four proposed new cabinet ministers to stand aside as a step towards resolving a political crisis.

Parliament last week approved a cabinet reshuffle put forward by Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi with 11 new ministers.

But President Kais Saied rejected the reshuffle, saying four of the appointments were believed to have conflicts of interest.

The dispute is causing a political logjam as the gov-ernment struggles to combat the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout. Protests have been going on for nearly three weeks over the political and social crisis.

“A concession must take place..I kindly ask the pro-posed ministers in dispute to give up their posts for the s tate interest , ” sa id

Noureddine Taboubi, the head of the UGTT.

The proposed ministers rejected by the president are the health, energy, employment and sports ministers.

Saied, who appointed Mechichi last year but has taken issue with some of his moves, on Monday condemned the absence of women among the new ministers and said he would not swear in any min-is ters suspected of corruption.

Protests flared earlier this month on the 10th anniversary of Tunisia’s 2011 revolution that inspired that Arab Spring and introduced democracy in the North African country.

Political paralysis and eco-nomic decline have soured many Tunisians on the fruits of the uprising.

The deadlock since elec-tions in 2019 has stymied efforts to address the festering economic problems, with both foreign lenders and UGTT demanding reforms.

UN: Situation in Tigray now ‘extremely alarming’AP — NAIROBI

Life for civilians in Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region has become “extremely alarming” as hunger grows and fighting remains an obstacle to reaching millions of people with aid, the United Nations says in a new report.

The conflict that has shaken one of Africa’s most powerful and populous countries - a key US security ally in the Horn of Africa - has killed thousands of people and is now in its fourth month.

But little is known about the situation for most of Tigray’s 6 million people, as journalists are blocked from entering, communications are patchy and many aid workers struggle to obtain permission to enter.

One challenge is that Ethiopia may no longer control up to 40% of the Tigray region, the UN Security Council was told in a closed-door session this week. Ethiopia and allied fighters have been pursuing the now-fugitive Tigray regional government that once domi-nated Ethiopia’s government for nearly three decades.

Now soldiers from Eritrea are deeply involved on the side

of Ethiopia, even as Addis Ababa denies their presence. Eritrea on Friday rejected “false and presumptive allegations” after the US Embassy there posted a statement online about the need for Eritrean forces to leave.

On Thursday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was the latest to pressure Ethi-opian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed directly, urging the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner in a phone call to allow “immediate, full and unhindered” aid access to Tigray before more people die.

Abiy’s brief statement on the call didn’t mention Tigray. Neither did his statements on calls this week with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel as European countries also express concern over one of the world’s newest crisis zones. Neighbouring Sudan and Somalia could be sucked in, experts have warned.

The new UN humanitarian report released late on Thursday includes a map showing most of the Tigray region marked as “inaccessible” for humanitarian workers. It says the security situation

remains “volatile and unpre-dictable” more than two months after Abiy’s government declared victory.

The aid response remains “drastically inadequate” with little access to the vast rural population off the main roads, the report says, even as Ethio-pia’s government has said well over 1 million people in Tigray have been reached with assistance. Some aid workers have reported having to nego-tiate access with a range of armed actors, even Eritrean ones.

Civilians have suffered. “Reports from aid workers on the ground indicate a rising in acute malnutrition across the region,” the new report says. “Only 1 percent of the nearly 920 nutrition treatment facil-ities in Tigray are reachable.”

Starvation has become a major concern. “Many house-holds are expected to have already depleted their food stocks, or are expected to deplete their food stocks in the next two months,” according to a new report posted Thursday by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, which is funded and managed by the U.S.

The report said more parts

of central and eastern Tigray likely will enter Emergency Phase 4, a step below famine, in the coming weeks.

Health care in the region is “alarmingly limited,” with just three of Tigray’s 11 hospitals functioning and nearly 80% of health centers not functional or accessible, the U.N. report says. Aid workers have said many health centers have been looted, hit by artillery fire or destroyed.

Large parts of two camps that once hosted thousands of refugees from nearby Eritrea have been systematically destroyed, according to analysis of satellite images by the UK-based DX Open Network non-profit. Now some 5,000 of the refugees who have made their way to the community of Shire “are living in dire conditions, many sleeping in an open field on the outskirts of the town, with no water and no food,” the UN report says.

Visiting U.N. refugee chief Filippo Grandi this week urged Ethiopia to allow access for independent investigators to probe alleged widespread human rights abuses, calling the overall situation in Tigray “extremely grave.”

Congo senate leader quits as Kabila’s influence wanesREUTERS — GOMA, DR CONGO

The head of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s senate resigned yesterday, handing President Felix Tshisekedi another victory in his bid to sideline allies of his prede-cessor Joseph Kabila.

The resignation of Alexis Thambwe-Mwamba, a close associate of Kabila, comes a week after the fall of the prime minister and two months after the removal of the lower house speaker.

On Wednesday the public prosecutor said Thambwe needed to explain the “unjus-tified” use of more than $52m of senate funds from January 2019 to December 2020.

Thambwe denies any impro-priety. “I see no grievance that can be held against me,” Thambwe said in a response to motion of no confidence lodged by a majority of senators on Tuesday. Thambwe said the motion violated the consti-tution and the internal regula-tions of the senate.

“(Because) trust no longer exists between a group of sen-ators and myself... I am resigning,” Thambwe said.

The senate confirmed his resignation in a Tweet.

A longtime opponent of Kabila, who governed from 2001-2019, Tshisekedi was forced into an alliance with him in the aftermath of a widely dis-puted election two years ago.

Nigeria lifts

short-lived

Emirates flight

suspension

REUTERS — LAGOS

Nigeria has lifted its suspension of Emirates airlines flights imposed after the carrier sought additional COVID-19 tests for passengers from Nigeria, a spokesman for the country’s aviation regu-lator said.

“The suspension has just been lifted, because they have complied with what we want,” said the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) spokesman in a phone call. He said further details would soon be made public in a statement. An Emirates spokesperson said the company “can confirm that we will continue to operate services to Abuja and Lagos.”

An aviation ministry spokesman on Monday told a news conference that the United Arab Emirates (UAE), in addition to requiring a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test before flying from Nigeria, was adding an extra requirement of having a rapid test four hours before departure.

He said airlines that insisted on the additional test would be suspended until an appropriate structure was put in place to conduct the second test within four hours of departure.

ICC clears way for war crimes probe of Israeli actionsAP — OCCUPIED JERUSALEM

The International Criminal Court said yesterday that its jurisdiction extends to terri-tories occupied by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war, clearing the way for its chief prosecutor to open a war crimes probe into Israeli military actions.

The decision was welcomed by the Palestinians and decried by Israel’s prime minister, who accused the court of “legal persecution.”

The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, said in 2019 that there was a “reasonable basis” to open a war crimes probe into Israeli military actions in the Gaza Strip as well as Israeli set-tlement activity in the occupied West Bank. But she asked the court to determine whether she has territorial jurisdiction before proceeding.

The Palestinians, who joined the court in 2015, have pushed for an investigation. Israel, which is not a member

of the ICC, has said the court has no jurisdiction because the Pal-estinians do not have statehood and because the borders of any future state are to be decided in peace talks.

The Palestinians have asked the court to look into Israeli actions during its 2014 war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, as well as Israel’s con-struction of settlements in the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem.

T h e i n t e r n a t i o n a l

community widely considers the settlements to be illegal under international law but has done little to pressure Israel to freeze or reverse their growth.

The international tribunal is meant to serve as a court of last resort when countries’ own judicial systems are unable or unwilling to investigate and prosecute war crimes.

Israel’s military has mech-anisms to investigate alleged wrongdoing by its troops, and despite criticism that the system

is insufficient, experts say it has a good chance of fending off ICC investigation into its wartime practices.

When it comes to settle-ments, however, experts say Israel could have a difficult time defending its actions. Interna-tional law forbids the transfer of a civilian population into occupied territory. Israel cap-tured the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem in the 1967 war, territories the Palestinians want for their future state.

Mohammed Al Menfi, a former diplomat from Benghazi, will head a three-man presidency council, while Abdulhamid Dbeibeh, from the western city of Misrata, will head the government as prime minister.

06 SATURDAY 6 FEBRUARY 2021ASIA

Protests against Myanmarjunta spread despite arrestsREUTERS — YANGON

Teachers and students in Myanmar rallied yesterday to a growing civil disobedience campaign as the anti-coup protest movement won the support of ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party.

Stepping up measures to quell discontent, police arrested one of Suu Kyi’s veteran aides and dozens of people who had joined noisy demonstrations against Monday’s coup.

International pressure on the junta increased with the UN Security Council urging the release of detainees and Wash-ington considering sanctions on the ruling generals.

Teachers became the latest group to join a civil disobe-dience campaign with some lec-turers refusing to work or coop-erate with authorities over the coup that halted a long and unsteady transition to democracy.

“We want the military coup to fail,” said lecturer Nwe Thazin Hlaing at the Yangon University of Education.

The disobedience campaign, which began with doctors, has also spread to some gov-ernment offices and yesterday won the formal backing of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party.

In a statement, the party denounced the coup and Suu

Kyi’s detention as “unac-ceptable” and said it would help people who are arrested or sacked for opposing the takeover.

Army chief Min Aung Hlaing took power citing alleged irreg-ularities in a November election that the party won in a land-slide. The electoral commission has said the vote was fair.

There has been no out-pouring of people onto the streets in a country with a bloody history of crackdowns on protests, but there were signs of coup opponents growing

bolder — with dozens of youths parading in the southeastern city of Dawei.

In the biggest city, Yangon, supporters hung red clothing, ribbons and balloons outside their homes to show support.

“We put red balloons down the whole street,” said Myint Myint Aye, 49. “This is a non-violent campaign. We want to show the dictators that all of us are with Mother Suu.” But authorities also began to step up action against coup opponents.

In Myanmar’s second city of Mandalay, 30 people were arrested over pot-banging pro-tests which have taken place for the last three nights.

Eleven Media quoted Maung Maung Aye, deputy head of the regional police force, as saying they were accused of breaking a law against “causing noise in public streets”.

The latest high-profile detainee was 79-year-old Win Htein, a stalwart of Suu Kyi who was repeatedly imprisoned during their decades of strug-gling against previous juntas.

“I have never been scared of them because I have done nothing wrong my entire life,” he spoke on the phone as he was taken away.

Reuters was unable to reach police for comment on his arrest or what charges could be brought against him.

The 15-member UN Security Council released a statement on Thursday calling for the release of all detainees and for respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law.

But before it won consensus among members that include China and Russia, which have close ties to Myanmar’s army, the language of the draft was changed to remove any mention of a coup.

Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi, 75, has not been seen since her arrest in morning raids on Monday. Police have filed charges against her for illegally importing and using six walkie-talkie radios found at her home.

President Joe Biden said the United States was working with allies and partners to address the generals’ takeover.

“There can be no doubt in a democracy force should never seek to overrule the will of the people or attempt to erase the outcome of a credible election,” he said.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said targeted sanctions on individuals and on entities controlled by the mil-i t a r y w e r e u n d e r consideration.

He spoke by phone with ambassadors from the Associ-ation of South East Asian Nations (Asean) regional bloc.

Indonesia and Malaysia later said regional foreign ministers would be asked to hold a special meeting on the situation.

Myanmar’s generals have few overseas interests that could be targeted by sanctions, but the military has extensive business interests that could suffer if foreign partners leave.

Japanese company Kirin Holdings said yesterday it was terminating its alliance with a top Myanmar conglomerate whose owners, according to the United Nations, include members of the military. Kirin said the coup had “shaken the very foundation of the partnership”.

Teachers from Yangon University of Education wear red ribbons and pose with a three-finger salute as they take part in a demonstration against the military coup, in Yangon yesterday.

Nepal PM seeks public support for early electionREUTERS — KATHMANDU

Nepal’s Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli insisted yesterday he had the legal right to dissolve parliament and said he was justified in calling an early election in the face of widespread opposition from within his own ruling Communist party.

Oli was addressing thousands of supporters in Kathmandu, a day after leaders of a rival party faction called a national strike to oppose what they said was his

“unconstitutional” move to seek a fresh poll amid a pandemic-induced economic crisis.

“The prime minister has the prerogative to dissolve the par-liament,” Oli told a crowd gathered on a main road in the capital.

The 68-year-old prime min-ister, who is facing almost daily protests by political opponents and rights groups, said he had been compelled to take a tough decision because many col-leagues were refusing to coop-

erate with him. Nepal was plunged into

crisis on December 20 when Oli, who has two years of his term left to run, declared he could no longer work with rivals in his Nepal Communist Party (NCP), dissolved parliament and called for a fresh election.

The Supreme court is now hearing more than a dozen peti-tions challenging the legality of that action, with a verdict expected this month.

If Oli wins the legal battle,

the Himalayan nation of 30 million people, wedged between India and China, will go to the polls, in two phases, on April 30 and May 10.

Oli’s critics — including many in his own party formed in 2018 in a merger of the United Marxist-Leninist party and the main Maoist party — say Nepal’s 2015 constitution, intended to preserve political stability, does not give the prime minister the prerogative to dissolve parliament.

Pfizer drops India vaccine application after regulator seeks local trialREUTERS — NEW DELHI

Pfizer Inc said yesterday it had withdrawn an application for emergency-use authorisation of its COVID-19 vaccine in India, after failing to meet the drug regulator’s demand for a local safety and immuno-genicity study.

The decision means the vaccine will not be available for sale in the world’s two most populous countries, India and China, in the near future. Both countries are running their immunisation campaigns using other products.

Unlike other companies conducting small studies in India for foreign-developed vaccines, Pfizer had sought an exception citing approvals it had received elsewhere based on trials done in countries such as the United States and Germany.

Indian health officials say they generally ask for so-called bridging trials to determine if a vaccine is safe and generates an immune response in its cit-izens. There are, however, pro-visions under India’s rules to waive such trials in certain conditions.

The US company, which was the first drugmaker to seek emergency approval in India for its vaccine developed with Germany’s BioNTech, made the withdrawal decision after a meeting with India’s Central Drugs Standard Control

Organisation (CDSCO) on Wednesday.

The drug regulator said on its website its experts did not recommend the vaccine because of side effects reported abroad were still being inves-tigated. It also said Pfizer had not proposed any plan to gen-erate safety and immuno-genicity data in India.

“Based on the deliberations at the meeting and our under-standing of additional infor-mation that the regulator may need, the company has decided to withdraw its application at this time,” Pfizer said in a statement.

“Pfizer will continue to engage with the authority and re-submit its approval request with additional information as it becomes available in the near future.”

Pfizer had sought authori-sation for its vaccine in India late last year, but the gov-ernment in January approved two much cheaper shots — one from Oxford University/Astra-Zeneca and another developed in India by Bharat Biotech with the Indian Council of Medical Research.

Both companies had applied for approval of their vaccines after Pfizer, and their trials are ongoing in India. Local company Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd is running trials for Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, which is expected to be approved this month or next.

India: Protests against agriculture reforms attract new supportersREUTERS — BHAINSWAL

Thousands of farmers in a politi-cally important Indian state yesterday rallied in opposition to new agricultural laws, signalling growing support for a months-long campaign to have the government reforms scrapped.

Angry at what they see as leg-islation that benefits private buyers at the expense of growers, tens of thousands of farmers have been camped on the outskirts of the capital, New Delhi, for more than two months, calling for the withdrawal of laws introduced in September.

Much of the initial support for the protests has come from rice and wheat growers from northern India, particularly opposition-ruled Punjab state.

But in a sign of a growing challenge to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, more than 10,000 farmers from across the political and religious spectrum rallied yesterday in

Uttar Pradesh state to show their support for the protests.

Ramkumar Choudhary, a local leader from Bagpat district, told the crowd of Hindu and Muslim farmers in Bhainswal village thousands more would head to Delhi unless the gov-ernment rolled back the laws.

“Only 1% of people have come out of the villages so far. The day we send 50% of our people, there will be no place to move in Delhi,” he said.

Devender Singh, a sugarcane farmer who attended the rally, said the agitation was drawing widespread support.

“100% farmers from all com-munities are joining the protest,” he said, “Farmers are unable to make ends meet.” Hundreds of police, many armed and wearing riot gear, stood by but there was no trouble.

Uttar Pradesh is India’s largest state and a critical battleground state in elections. While Modi’s party commands a comfortable

majority in parliament, the support for the protests from Uttar Pradesh’s politically influential sugarcane farmers will be a worry. The farmers say the laws mean the end of long-standing support prices for their crops and will leave them vulnerable to the whims of big buyers. They are demanding that the laws be annulled.

The government says reform of the inefficient agriculture sector will open up new opportunities for farmers and while it has offered some concessions, it has ruled out withdrawing the laws. The protests have been largely peaceful but flared into turmoil on January 26 as some farmers clashed with police in New Delhi and one person was killed and hundreds were injured. The pro-tests have drawn increasing inter-national scrutiny, with celebrities including pop star Rihanna and environment campaigner Greta Thunberg announcing their support for the farmers.

People attend a grand village council meeting as part of a farmers’ protest against farm laws at Bhainswal in Shamli district in Uttar Pradesh, India, yesterday.

US warship sails

near disputed

South China

Sea islands

REUTERS — TAIPEI

A US warship sailed near the Chinese-controlled Paracel Islands in the disputed South China Sea yesterday in a freedom of navigation oper-ation, the US Navy said, the first such mission under President Joe Biden’s new administration.

China’s military condemned the move, saying it had dis-patched naval and air units to follow and warn away the ship.

The busy waterway is one of a number of flashpoints in the US-China relationship, which include a trade war, US sanc-tions, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The US Navy’s 7th Fleet said the destroyer USS John S McCain “asserted navigational rights and freedoms in the vicinity of the Paracel Islands, consistent with international law”.

The freedom of navigation operation upheld the rights, freedoms and lawful uses of the sea recognised in international law by challenging the “unlawful restrictions on innocent passage imposed by China, Taiwan, and Vietnam”, it said.

The Southern Theatre Command of China’s People’s Liberation Army said the ship had entered into what it termed the territorial waters of the Paracels without permission, “seriously infringing upon China’s sovereignty and security”.

The United States was “deliberately disrupting the good atmosphere of the South China Sea of peace, friendship, and cooperation”, it added.

China took full control of the Paracels in 1974 after a short battle with South Vietnamese forces. Vietnam, as well as Taiwan, continue to claim the islands.

Taiwan says trade office with Guyana now offAP — TAIPEI

Taiwan yesterday blamed Chinese interference for preventing the establishment of a trade office with Guyana in what had been seen as a diplo-matic victory just 24 hours earlier.

The Foreign Ministry said China had exerted pressure on the South American country’s government and the agreement could not be salvaged despite considerable efforts.

“Our government expresses deep regret toward this,” the ministry statement said. “China’s bullying and efforts to isolate Taiwan and shrink its interna-tional space... only emphasize more clearly its evil nature and drive the people of the two sides

further apart.” China’s Foreign Ministry had responded swiftly to Thursday’s announcement, demanding those concerned avoid setting up any official insti-tutions with each other and to correct mistakes.

Beijing’s hard-line position appeared to have an immediate effect and Chinese Foreign Min-istry spokesperson Wang Wenbin credited Guyana with having “corrected its mistake in a timely manner, which is ben-eficial to the overall situation of bilateral relations.”

Any attempt by Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party to carve out more space for the island in the international community will end in its gov-ernment making a “laughing stock of itself,” Wang said.

Stepping up measures to

quell discontent, police

arrested one of Suu Kyi’s

veteran aides and

dozens of people who

had joined noisy

demonstrations against

Monday’s coup

International pressure

on the junta increased

with the UN Security

Council urging the

release of detainees and

Washington considering

sanctions on the ruling

generals.

07SATURDAY 6 FEBRUARY 2021 ASIA

Hong Kong orders schools to teach pro-China curriculumBLOOMBERG — HONG KONG

Hong Kong ordered schools to adopt a more patriotic curriculum and advised teachers to report any breaches of the city’s national security law, the government’s biggest move yet to overhaul the education system following the protests of 2019.

The measures, announced late Thursday, seek to inculcate patriotism to kindergarten-age children through “story-telling, role-playing, drawing, singing, dancing and other activities.”

Students as young as six will be taught to memorise offenses criminalised by the national security law, which was imposed on the city by China last year, including subversion, secession, terrorism and col-lusion with foreign powers. The curriculum will cover all sub-jects from geography to biology.

“The fundamentals of national security education are to develop in students a sense of belonging to the country, an affection for the Chinese people,

a sense of national identity, as well as an awareness of and a sense of responsibility for safe-guarding national security,” Hong Kong’s Education Bureau said in a statement.

The new curriculum may also impact Hong Kong’s approximately 52 international schools, which largely cater to the city’s expatriate population. The government statement said that international schools have the “responsibility” to help their students “acquire a correct and objective understanding” of the law, without elaborating.

No international school Bloomberg reached out to was available for immediate comment.

Cutting Off ‘Black Hands’ Beijing has blamed Hong Kong’s education system for fostering dissent and fueling the months-long protests opposing the Chinese government ’s increasing power over the former British colony. Hong Kong authorities have previ-ously vowed to “cut off” the “black hands” — including

teachers — deemed insuffi-ciently patriotic.

The Hong Kong government attempted to introduce a patriotic education curriculum in 2012, but shelved the decision following massive protests. The latest attempt to do so will bring the financial hub further in line

with the education system in mainland China, where students are, for example, required to study the teachings of President Xi Jinping.

University and high school students comprised a majority of the frontline protesters in the 2019 unrest, and people under 18 represented almost a fifth of the roughly 10,000 arrests made as of last December, according to data complied by Bloomberg. Students also organized protest activities including forming human chains and class boycotts, actions forbidden under the new rules.

Ip Kin-yuen, a former law-maker and a vice-president of the Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union, said that the new guidelines are “not con-ducive for learning or fostering the development of young minds,” and that in an envi-ronment where people are trying to avoid getting into trouble “the natural response will be self-censorship.” Owl Video As part of its promotion

materials, the government pro-duced a 7-minute animation featuring an owl explaining the concept of national security, saying it covers all aspects of Hong Kong society including culture, cybersecurity, and ecology. The video also says that it’s the “right and duty of the Central Authorities to enact the National Security Law,” and that other countries have similar laws.

Garrie Chow, a father with three children in Hong Kong schools, said the new cur-riculum means that students are “not allowed to have inde-pendent thinking.” In Sep-tember, the English Schools Foundation, which operates 22 international schools in the city, released and distributed a 15-page set of guidelines directing teachers to tell stu-dents that the classroom isn’t a “safe space” for discussion or debate of the national security law, the South China Morning Post reported. ESF did not immediately respond to Bloomberg’s request for

comment.Migration Wave The impo-

sition of the new curriculum could add to the already surging number of people emigrating to places like the U.K. and Taiwan. Some parents and teachers have cited Beijing’s growing control over Hong Kong schools as a major reason for leaving.

Jojo, a 37-year old Chinese and special education teacher who would only give her first name due to security fears, said she is seeking to relocate to the UK later this year, joining thou-sands of others who have already done so via a pathway made available to Hong Kong holders of the British National (Overseas) passport. She is part of a WhatsApp group with 120 other local teachers that helps educators obtain the skills and certifications needed to secure employment in the U.K.

“The students will have to follow along (with the rules), but it will severely impact their per-sonal relationship with us,” Jojo said. “They won’t trust us.”

HK democracy activists appear in court over banned Tiananmen vigilREUTERS — HONG KONG

Twenty-four activists appeared in a Hong Kong court yesterday on charges related to a June 4 vigil last year marking the anni-versary of China’s military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Hong Kong traditionally holds the largest vigil in the world every year, although it was banned in 2020, with authorities giving the risk of spreading the coronavirus as the reason. The vigils have always been banned in mainland China.

But thousands of Hong Kong people defied the ban and took to the streets to stage can-dlelight rallies in the former British colony which was promised wide-ranging freedoms when it returned to Chinese rule in 1997, including

rights of expression and assembly.

Released from jail to attend the court hearing were media tycoon and staunch Beijing critic Jimmy Lai, 73, and prom-inent democracy activist Joshua Wong, 24.

Lai is being held pending a bail hearing after he became the city’s most high-profile person to be charged under a controversial national security law. Wong is serving more than 13 months related to an unlawful anti-government rally in 2019.

Five of the group, including Wong, indicated they planned to plead guilty to charges related to illegal assembly and their case was adjourned to April 30. The rest were expected to plead not guilty and their case was adjourned to June 11.

Outside the court, more than a dozen supporters shouted slogans and held up

placards that read, “Against political suppression” and “Innocent to mourn June 4.” Last year’s June 4 anniversary came nearly four weeks before Beijing imposed a national security law on Hong Kong that Western governments and rights groups have widely con-demned as a tool to crush freedoms in the global financial hub.

Hong Kong and Chinese authorities reject that and say the legislation was necessary to restore stability after a year of sometimes violent anti-China a n d a n t i - g o v e r n m e n t demonstrations.

China has never provided a full account of the 1989 violence.

The death toll given by offi-cials days later was about 300, most of them soldiers, but rights groups and witnesses say thou-sands of people may have perished.

Pro-democracy activists hold placards outside West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts before facing charges related to an illegal vigil assembly commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, in Hong Kong, yesterday.

Indonesia, Malaysiapledge to counteranti-palm oil campaignAP — JAKARTA

Malaysia and Indonesia yesterday agreed to coordinate and strengthen their campaign against they say is international discrimination against palm oil, the countries’ main commodity.

Indonesia and Malaysia are the world’s largest exporters of palm oil, which plays an important role in their eco-nomic recovery. Together they account for 85% of global palm oil production. But they are hampered by the European Union, which they allege favors producers of other vegetable oils.

After meeting with Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, Indonesian President Joko Widodo told a joint news conference that Indonesia is fighting against palm oil discrimination. “Our struggle will be optimal if we fight together, and Indonesia expects the same commitment from Malaysia,” he said.

Muhyiddin said that his country will continue to strengthen cooperation with Indonesia in addressing neg-ative campaign against palm oil and advancing it for sus-tainable development.

“We are concerned over the current anti-palm oil cam-paign, especially in Europe, Australia and Oceanea,” Muhy-iddin said.

“This campaign is baseless and does not reflect the sus-tainability of the world palm oil industry and it’s against the EU and WTO commitments regarding free trade practices.” He said that continuity of the palm oil sector is critical to both economies. There are over 2.7 million palm oil smallholders in Indonesia and 600,000 in Malaysia.

In December, the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, to which Malaysia and Indonesia belong, upgraded its relations with the EU after years of res-ervations from Indonesia and Malaysia.

They object to the EU policy on palm oil that categorizes it as unsustainable and lays out plans to phase out its use in biofuels by 2030.

The dispute began in 2017, when the European Parliament issued a resolution effectively refusing to recognise palm oil as a renewable biofuel feed-stock because of the deforest-ation, social conflicts and labour rights issues associated with its production.

The measure was approved by the European Commission in 2019, which puts the bloc on track to phase out palm oil as a biofuel.

The EU also decided to impose an import tariff on biodiesel from Indonesia, set at between 8% and 18% over the next five years. It cited both environmental concerns and the need to balance out what it called the unfair advantage to Indonesian producers as a result of the country’s biodiesel subsidy.

Both decisions have been criticized by Indonesia and Malaysia, prompting the Indo-nesian government to initiate a lawsuit at the World Trade Organization in December 2019. Malaysia followed suit on Jan. 15, Muhyiddin said.

“We should to ensure that we can protect our palm oil industry to save millions of people, including smallholder farmers, whose lives depend entirely on this industry in Indonesia and Malaysia,” Muhyiddin said.

Germany ducks Taiwan appeal for COVID-19 vaccine supply

REUTERS — BERLIN

Germany yesterday ducked an appeal by Taiwan for its help to supply COVID-19 vaccines, as the Asian tech power-house’s request for assistance following Berlin’s plea to ease a semiconductor supply crunch in the auto industry risked provoking China’s ire.

In an exchange between the economy ministers of Germany and Taiwan last month, Berlin first asked Taipei to persuade its chip foundries to increase supply to German car makers that have had to rein in production due to chip shortages.

While promising help on chips, Taiwan Economy Min-ister Wang Mei-hua appealed to Germany’s de facto ambas-sador in Taipei for assistance in obtaining vaccines, none of which has arrived on the island yet.

The exchange risks angering Beijing, which con-siders self-ruled Taiwan a wayward province.

Though German industry relies on chips made by the likes of Taiwan Semicon-ductor Manufacturing Corp, China is its largest trading partner and a big export market for its cars.

Asked at a regular news conference whether the Germany would entertain the idea of some kind of chips-for-vaccines deal, spokesmen for both the economy and foreign ministries declined comment.

A person familiar with dis-cussions between the two governments said the diplo-matic implications of any such agreement were tricky, as were the optics of exporting vaccines that remain in short supply at home.

Construction workers wearing protective masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease cross a main road in Jakarta, Indonesia, yesterday.

Taking precautions

China takes aim again at BBC as dispute with Britain intensifiesREUTERS — BEIJING

The BBC came under renewed fire from Chinese officials yesterday in a diplomatic dispute a day after Britain’s media regulator revoked the TV licence of Chinese state media outlet CGTN.

Britain and China have exchanged barbs for months over China’s crackdown on dissent in the former British colony of Hong Kong, concern over the security of Huawei technology, and the treatment of ethnic Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region.

On Thursday, Britain’s Ofcom revoked the licence of CGTN, the English-language sister channel of state broad-caster CCTV, after concluding that China’s ruling Communist Party had ultimate editorial

responsibility for the channel.Minutes later, China’s

foreign ministry accused the British Broadcasting Corp of pushing “fake news” in its C O V I D - 1 9 r e p o r t i n g , demanding an apology and saying that the broadcaster had politicized the pandemic and “rehashed theories about cov-ering up by China”.

The BBC said its reporting is fair and unbiased.

Yeserday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin criticised the Ofcom ruling as “politicising the issue on a technical point” and warned that China reserves the right to make a “necessary response”.

Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper separately reported on Thursday that Britain had in the past year expelled three

Chinese spies who were there on journalism visas.

China’s state media has ramped up attacks on the British public broadcaster in recent weeks.

“I highly suspect that the BBC has been closely instigated by the intelligence agencies of the US and the UK. It has become a bastion of the Western public opinion war against China,” Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Communist Party-backed tabloid the Global Times, said on Twitter.

The foreign ministry’s crit-icism of the BBC was among the top trends on China’s Weibo social media platform yesterday.

“BBC shall not become Bad-mouthing Broadcasting Corpo-ration,” ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Twitter.

Students as young as six

will be taught to

memorise offenses

criminalised by the

national security law,

which was imposed on

the city by China last

year, including

subversion, secession,

terrorism and collusion

with foreign powers.

The curriculum will cover

all subjects from

geography to biology.

It is not good enough to acknowledge that Israel is an “apartheid regime” but also praise it for its “successful vaccination drive” or “diplomatic achievements”. Until the international community ends its hypocrisy and starts holding Israel to account for its countless, ongoing crimes, we, the Palestinians, will remain stuck in limbo.

08 SATURDAY 6 FEBRUARY 2021VIEWS

CHAIRMANDR. KHALID BIN THANI AL THANI

EDITOR-IN-CHIEFDR. KHALID BIN MUBARAK AL-SHAFI

editorinchief@pen.com.qa

ACTING MANAGING EDITORMOHAMMED SALIM MOHAMED

m.salim@pen.com.qa

DEPUTY MANAGING EDITORMOHAMMED OSMAN ALI osman@pen.com.qa

EDITORIAL

IN a bid to realise Qatar National Vision 2030, the Min-istry of Transport and Communications (MoTC) like other state entities has launched a number of crucial initia-tives recently.

These initiatives also support the National Devel-opment Strategy and aim at building smart databases. Last month, the MoTC announced collecting data and conducting relevant surveys and questionnaires for Qatar Freight Master Plan which is set to be finalised by end of next year.

Now the Ministry of Transport and Communications (MoTC) is working on another project to conduct a field technical survey on road network assets covering 20,000km of road lanes, bridges and tunnels. The survey aims at recording integrated road assets to ensure the provision of a safe and high quality road network.

Both the projects are crucial to realise targets set under Qatar National Vision 2030. The field technical survey on road network assets will help build a smart database to evaluate its performance, raise the level of safety, and reduce traffic accidents.

The Ministry has adopted most advanced techniques and devices to assess the performances of road assets. MX9 survey device is being used to track and record condition of road assets. A multifunctional ROMDAS device has also been mobilised to make 3D photog-raphy of road surface.

To be noted, in August last year, the Ministry of Transport and Communications had signed an MoU with the Public Works Authority (Ashghal) on planning, studying, designing, maintaining and managing the road projects. The MoU is meant to upgrade the level of col-laboration, joint efforts and constructive cooperation between the two sides with the aim of providing a safe, integrated transportation system in line with best uni-versal practices and standards within the tasks and competencies of the two parties.

Regarding finalisation of Qatar Freight Master Plan (QFMP), the Ministry’s efforts include collecting a wide-range of freight-related information on origins, routes and destinations of freight movements, the flow rate of trucks at major junctions, as well as other qualitative and quantitative data on the performance of freight industry across Qatar in general.

The QFMP aims to establish a modern infrastructure for freight industry across the country as part of an inte-grated transportation system in such a way that upgrades the culture and service of freight in Qatar to the best global standards and practices in terms of traffic safety and least possible environmental imprint. It will also con-tribute to economic and urban growth and improved road freight for people and visitors of Qatar, thus meeting the Qatar National Vision 2030 objectives for sustaina-bility, growing economic productivity, social equity etc.

Supporting development strategy

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Quote of the day

The policies of killing, destruction and theft of land

through illegal settlement on Palestinian land, and

the ongoing raids, confiscations and attacks on

Islamic and Christian holy sites will never bring

peace, security and stability to anyone.

Abu Rudeideh, Spokesman for Palestinian Presidency

A demonstrator holding a banner and a Palestinian flag during a protest against Israeli settlements, in Beit Dajan, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Ten years ago, we, the Pales-tinians, were cautiously opti-mistic – we saw the possi-bility of change on the horizon. We thought the world was finally, albeit slowly, starting to pay attention to our plight. We believed, perhaps naively, that justice and freedom were within our reach.

A lot has changed since then. Today, we simply cannot shake off the feeling that we are stuck in limbo. Israel’s political and diplo-matic standing in the world is noticeably on the rise, and its illegal occupation is rapidly being normalised. While more and more people are acknowledging the fact that Israel has built an illegal system of apartheid on our homeland, the international community appears to be more reluctant than ever to hold it to account. The unjust, illegal and deadly status quo in Palestine is slowly becoming permanent before our eyes.

Earlier this month, leading Israeli rights group, B’tselem, published an explosive report describing Israel and its control of the Palestinian ter-ritories as a single “apartheid” government and stating that

the lands between the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea are being governed by “a regime of Jewish supremacy”. This was a much welcome recognition of our reality on the ground, but it did little to change the increasingly pos-itive perception of Israel in the international arena.

The normalisation deals it signed with a number of Arab states, and its impressive drive to vaccinate its citizens against COVID-19, provided Israel with a lot of good press. Despite its ongoing crimes against the Palestinians and persistent violations of inter-national law, it is not being shunned as a pariah state or sanctioned by the interna-tional community. Instead, it is strengthening its political, diplomatic and economic ties with the world. Most recently, it started exporting produce from its illegal settlements to the United Arab Emirates. These exports labelled “Made in Israel”, help normalise Israel’s settlement enterprise and claim of sovereignty over the occupied territories.

Meanwhile, the situation at home is only getting worse. Settlement expansion is con-tinuing at an unprecedented pace, with more and more Palestinians being kicked out of their homes. According to the most recent report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Territories, 2020 witnessed “the highest number of demolitions and people dis-placed by Israeli authorities in recent years”.

Israel is also completing crucial infrastructure projects to ensure its illegal settle-ments are here to stay. It is expanding the separation wall, building bypass bridges for settlers, and approving

Palestinian-only separation roads across the West Bank to transform its so-called “tem-porary occupation” into a permanent, hellish reality. It is also routinely sending its security forces into Pales-tinian population centres such as Ramallah to make it clear to the Palestinians they are living at the mercy of Israel at all times.

And all this is happening amid a deadly pandemic.

Israel is being praised the world over for leading the COVID-19 vaccination race. To date, Israel administered more than 4.6 million vaccine doses and it is expected to be the first country in the world to vaccinate the majority of its population.

But there is a dark side to this success story not many people are talking about – Israel is not vaccinating the millions of Palestinians living under its occupation.

The Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council, the Palestinian NGOs Network and the Palestinian National Institute for NGOs recently issued a detailed joint statement accusing Israel of implementing a “discrimi-natory, unlawful and racist” vaccine policy and disre-garding its obligation under international law to provide adequate healthcare to the Pal-estinian population. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, has similarly issued a statement, accusing Israel of “violating the right to health of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem” by not providing them with adequate access to COVID-19 vaccines.

These accusations, however, are falling on deaf ears.

Israel has no plans to immunise Palestinians against COVID-19 in the near future

because it is not really facing much pressure to do so. Beyond the aforementioned NGOs, which Israel is well accustomed to ignoring, no one is really talking about Israel’s moral and legal responsibility to provide healthcare to Palestinians living under its occupation. The international community is paying attention only to the number of vaccine doses being administered and praising Israel’s successful vaccination campaign without giving a second thought to the Palestinians.

The Israeli public, which overwhelmingly views Pales-tinians as a hostile neighbour rather than an occupied people, is not exerting any pressure on the government to take action either. Most Israelis are preoccupied with the vola-tility of the domestic political scene and the effect the pan-demic had on their own lives and livelihoods, so they are paying little attention to the plight of the Palestinians.

Today, we, the Pales-tinians, are sidelined, silenced and forgotten. We are stuck in limbo, with no hope for a better future. Yes, more and more people are calling out Israel’s apartheid for what it is. However, more and more people also seem ready to accept this unjust and illegal state of affairs as unchangeable and move on.

It is not good enough to acknowledge that Israel is an “apartheid regime” but also praise it for its “successful vaccination drive” or “diplo-matic achievements”. Until the international community ends its hypocrisy and starts holding Israel to account for its countless, ongoing crimes, we, the Palestinians, will remain stuck in limbo.

THE WASHINGTON POST

Thanks to Social Security, the United States has gone a long way toward eliminating poverty among the elderly; the poverty rate for over-65s fell from 28.5 percent in 1966 to 8.9 percent in 2019, according to Census Bureau data, well below the overall national rate. For children, it’s a different story. For the past half-century, the child poverty rate has remained elevated above the national rate, rising from 18 percent in 1966 to a high of 22 percent in 1993, before declining to 14.4 percent in 2019. The latter figure, encouragingly, repre-sented a 47-year low - until the pandemic threw all such progress into doubt. Federal aid to households actually decreased the poverty rate between March and June of 2020, but as certain benefits

expired over the summer, millions fell back into poverty, including 2.3 million children under 17, according to a team of economists from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Chicago.

The United States must not let the covid-19 crisis create a permanent reversal in the fight against child poverty, which had been trending in the right direction since 2012, under President Barack Obama and con-tinuing under President Donald Trump. The first imperative is to restore a robust labor market; full employment and poverty reduction go hand in hand. Yet the success of programs such as the child tax credit and earned-income tax credit (EITC) shows the need for government support as well.

Fortunately, both Demo-crats and some Republicans

seem to understand that. President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief plan includes a one-year expansion of the existing child tax credit for low-income households, raising it to $3,000 per child and $3,600 for children under 6 years old, at a cost of $120 billion. Now Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, has coun-tered with a monthly payment of $350 per child up to age 5 and $250 for children ages 6 to 17, up to $1,250 per family; this program would last through 2025, subject to reauthorisation.

The Niskanen Center think tank estimates Rom-ney’s plan would cut child poverty by a third. And unlike a one-year boost, it is struc-tural change, which would replace not only the existing child credit and most of the EITC but also Temporary Assistance for Needy

Families, the government’s welfare-for-work program. The savings, plus an end to the deduction for state and local taxes, would pay for the new benefit, so the plan is also paid for, unlike Biden’s.

Romney’s idea has two potential advantages: It gets cash to the needy without a lot of bureaucratic hassle; and it creates a long-term, pos-sibly permanent shift in income flows around which individuals and society can plan. There are two possible drawbacks, however: It would benefit families earning up to $400,000, consistent with eligibility for the existing child tax credit, but far in excess of what fighting poverty could justify; and by ending the EITC (except a maximum $2,000 annual payment for some working families), it imperils the work incentives that program creates.

We, the Palestinians, are stuck in limbo

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+974 6698 6188

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It’s encouraging that reducing child poverty is now a bipartisan aspiration

Established in 1996

JALAL ABUKHATER AL JAZEERA

The expulsions, which affected diplomats from Germany, Poland and Sweden, appear to have wrecked an EU attempt to re-engage with Moscow being spearheaded by Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, who was in Russia for talks yesterday.

09SATURDAY 6 FEBRUARY 2021 EUROPE

Russia expels EU diplomats, ignores call to free NavalnyREUTERS — MOSCOW

Russia yesterday expelled dip-lomats from three EU member states it accused of attending illegal protests in support of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, and pointedly ignored a public call by the EU’s top dip-lomat to free the opposition politician.

The expulsions, which affected diplomats from Germany, Poland and Sweden, appear to have wrecked an EU attempt to re-engage with Moscow being spearheaded by Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, who was in Russia for talks yesterday.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the move unjus-tified and a further step away from the rule of law in Russia, while Poland summoned the Russian ambassador over the decision.

Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critic, was jailed this week for almost three years for parole violations he calls trumped up, a move the West condemned.

Russia announced the

expulsions after Borrell used a joint news conference with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to call for Russia to free Navalny immediately.

Lavrov did not respond directly to the appeal but com-plained about what he described as human rights abuses in the EU and called the 27-nation bloc an unreliable partner.

Borrell had earlier said that the Navalny case was a low point for ties between Russia

and the EU. He said there was not yet a formal proposal for new EU sanctions on Russia but that the 27-member bloc would have a discussion next month about relations with Moscow.

“I have conveyed to Minister Lavrov our deep concern and our appeal for his (Navalny’s) release and for the launch of an investigation over his poi-soning,” Borrell told the news conference. “Over the last years our relationship has been marked by fundamental differ-ences and a lack of trust.”

Navalny was arrested on January 17 on his return from treatment in Germany, where he was flown in August after falling ill from what German officials concluded was poi-soning with a military-grade nerve agent. The Kremlin has questioned whether Navalny was poisoned and denied blame for his illness.

Lavrov said it was up to Brussels if it wanted to impose sanctions on Russia, but that the EU was behaving more and more like Washington in its use of unilateral sanctions.

“We share the view that a

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (right), and European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell attend a news conference following their talks in Moscow, Russia, yesterday.

further deterioration of ties is fraught with negative and highly unpredictable conse-quences,” Lavrov said.

A few hours after the talks, Russia announced the expulsion of the diplomats, saying they had taken part in illegal protests last month against Navalny’s jailing. The foreign ministry said Moscow considered their actions unacceptable.

Despite close trade ties and

energy interdependence, Rus-sia’s political relations with the European Union soured after Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

Navalny was back in court yesterday for another trial, accused of slandering a World War Two veteran who took part in a promotional video backing changes last year that let Putin run for up to two more terms. Navalny at the time described

those in the video as traitors and lackeys. He denies the slander charge.

In comments by video link at the trial, the veteran called on Navalny to apologise publicly. “This case in general was intended as a kind of PR process because the Kremlin needs the headlines: Navalny slandered a veteran,” Navalny told the court.

The next hearing in the case is on February 12.

Hotel quarantine policy in Britain to start on February 15REUTERS — LONDON

Britain will place travellers arriving from COVID-19 hot spots in quarantine in hotels from February 15, the gov-ernment said, after criticism that it was not moving fast enough to bring in the measure.

The mandatory 10-day stay in government-provided accom-modation, first announced last month, is designed to tighten borders against mutant strains of the coronavirus which could endanger Britain’s vaccination programme.

The quarantine will apply to states on a “red list” where COVID-19 variants are prev-alent, including South Africa and countries in South America.

“This is adding to existing measures and we want to make sure that this works, that we give the hotel industry notice,” junior foreign minister James Cleverly told Sky News yesterday.

In an announcement late on Thursday, the government said it had been consulting the travel and hotel industries, and would now finalise plans, including contracting hotels near ports and airports. A Health Department spokeswoman said

Britain already had one of the toughest border regimes in the world for travellers, such as requiring proof of a negative COVID-19 test.

“We are now working at pace to secure the facilities we need to roll out managed

quarantine for British nationals returning home from the most high risk countries,” she said.

Opposition lawmakers have criticised Boris Johnson’s administration for not imple-menting the plan more quickly.

“We are in a race against

time to protect our borders against new Covid strains. Yet hotel quarantine will come in to force more than 50 days after the South African strain was discovered,” Labour’s home affairs spokesman Nick Thomas-Symonds said.

Health minister Matt Hancock had discussed the policy with his counterpart in Australia, where quarantine was introduced in March 2020, the Health Department said. Officials would also seek advice from New Zealand.

Meanwhile, Britain said it had agreed on a deal with German biotech firm CureVac to work to develop vaccines against coro-navirus variants, placing an initial order for 50 million doses in case they are needed.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has cited the possibility of new variants of the corona-virus as one of the biggest risks to the vaccine rollout and hopes that the economy can start to be reopened from lockdown in the spring. The government said both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccines being currently rolled out appear to work well against variants cur-rently dominant in Britain.

“But we must be prepared for all eventualities and bolster onshore UK manufacturing capacity to develop vaccines to combat new variants of the disease, taking advantage of our world-leading genomics expertise,” Hancock said.

Health workers administer a COVID-19 vaccine at a drive-thru vaccination centre at Batchwood Hall in St Albans, Britain, yesterday.

Italy: Draghi to meet trade unions after talks with partiesREUTERS — ROME

Italy’s Prime Minister Designate Mario Draghi will hold talks with trade unions before wrapping up his consultations and deciding whether he has enough backing to form a new government, a source close to the matter said yesterday.

Draghi, a former European Central Bank chief, will end his round of consultations with political parties today.

It is still unclear when he will meet with the trade unions. President Sergio Mattarella anointed Draghi on Wednesday after the implosion of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s coa-lition, asking him to form a new government.

After his appointment, Draghi said Italy must seize the moment. “We have the oppor-tunity to do a lot for our country, with a careful look at the future of the younger gen-erations and to strengthen social cohesion,” he said.

So far the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) and the small centrist Italia Viva party, led by former premier Matteo Renzi, have pledged their support to a government headed by Draghi.

The conservative party of four-time prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has made clear it would like to back Draghi, but

in doing so it would strain its alliance with its rightist partners, the League and Brothers of Italy.

It is still unclear whether Draghi could win the support of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, the largest party in parliament, whose members have trouble with the idea of backing a government led by a former ECB president.

5-Star are scheduled to meet Draghi today at the end of a first round of consultations with the political parties.

Before reverting to the head of state, however, Draghi wants to meet trade unions and the industrialist association Con-findustria, a source close to the matter said, adding that the timetable still had to be defined.

Mattarella said a new gov-ernment must take office imme-diately to avoid Italy missing out on more than €200bn ($243bn) from a European Union fund designed to help overcome the economic slump.

Asked whether Draghi was the best option to lead Italy out of its political crisis, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said the Commission never commented on internal politics. But she said Draghi had “played an extraordinary role at the ECB and everyone is aware of this”, according to an interview with daily La Stampa.

COVID-19 nightmare far from over in PortugalREUTERS — LISBON

Portugal’s devastating surge in coronavirus infections has finally slowed, to the relief of its overwhelmed health service — but for nurse Marcio Vidal the fight is far from over.

“The problem goes beyond the virus. It is people’s behaviour. In the first wave there was fear but now that’s gone,” said Vidal, 26, who works at a hospital in the southern Algarve and has been on the frontline since March last year. Portugal, with 13,482 COVID-19 deaths and 748,858 cases, has had the world’s highest seven-day rolling average of new

cases and deaths per million people for the past fortnight, according to tracker www.our-worldindata.org.

But on Thursday, just 7,914 new cases were detected, less than half of the record 16,432 a week ago. Deaths and hospital-isations also fell for the fourth day in a row. “Things are a little better, but that doesn’t make me feel better. If we unlock like we did before, it’ll go back to the same,” said Graca Fonseca, 60, on a morning walk in Lisbon.

“We should be doing this bit-by-bit.” The number of people in intensive care units (ICUs) remains worryingly high.

Over 20 military doctors and nurses arrived from Germany on Wednesday to staff a unit fully equipped but with noone to run it. Austria has offered to take in five ICU patients and five with severe illnesses.

The help is sorely needed. Vidal’s hospital in the Algarve is under-staffed and under-resourced, with ICUs too full for some patients, he said. “Their health could improve but because we are at maximum capacity people despair... waiting for a vacant bed or waiting to die,” he said.

“Going to work is agonising. We work 12 hours shifts but it’s

never 12 hours. It’s always more... Up until mid-last year, things were under control, it was going well, but then it com-pletely collapsed.”

Nearly 380,000 of Portu-gal’s 10 million people have received one vaccine dose so far, 100,000 of them both, Prime Minister Antonio Costa told reporters yesterday outside a private hospital in Lisbon.

“I’m asthmatic, and I don’t know when I’ll get vaccinated,” said Antonio Santiago, 54. “It’s a mess. People are getting it who don’t have conditions and shouldn’t be a priority. But as soon as I’m called, I’m getting it.”

UK’s May local elections to go ahead, but bring your own pen

REUTERS — LONDON

England will go ahead with local elections on May 6 despite the COVID-19 pan-demic, the government said yesterday, citing the success of its vaccine rollout and announcing a range of addi-tional safeguards to make voting flexible and secure.

The elections, which decide thousands of positions in local governments and other roles, had been under review due to the coronavirus, with England currently in a state of lockdown that is expected to last at least another month.

But yesterday the gov-ernment said it had decided to go ahead, albeit with a series of special measures including more flexible rules on proxy voting and telling voters they should bring their own pens to mark ballot papers.

“Democracy should not be cancelled because of COVID,” said Constitution Minister Chloe Smith. The government announced that all nine groups on its initial COVID-19 vacci-nation priority list would have been offered their first shot by May, setting a new deadline in the programme.

Local elections usually give some signal as to the public’s happiness with the current central government, although specific local issues are often also influential meaning the results are not a direct proxy of national sentiment.

Thousands of seats in local government across England will be decided as well as regional mayors — including the high profile London mayor — and police commissioners in both England and Wales. Some of the polls were delayed from May 2020.

Elections to the devolved Scottish and Welsh parlia-ments are due to take place on the same day, but they are administered separately.

Precautionary measuresPassengers wear face masks as they wait for an S-Bahn commuter train on the platform at Friedrichstrasse station amid the coronavirus disease pandemic, in Berlin, Germany, yesterday.

Surveys suggest that Scottish voters, who rejected secession in 2014 but are now frustrated by being taken out of the European Union against their will, would this time vote for independence. Johnson may therefore need the UK Supreme Court to uphold his veto on such a vote taking place.

10 SATURDAY 6 FEBRUARY 2021EUROPE / AMERICAS

High-tech lie detector used at Europe borders face scrutinyREUTERS — TBILISI

A lie detector driven by artificial intelligence and trialled at European Union borders is the focus of a lawsuit that hopes to bring more transparency over the bloc’s funding of “ethically questionable” technology, its proponent said.

Patrick Breyer, a European lawmaker, is requesting the release of EU Research Agency (REA) documents evaluating the €4.5m ($5.4m) trial of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) lie detectors to ramp up EU border security. “I want to create a precedent to make sure that the public... can access information on EU-funded research,” said Breyer, of Germany’s Pirate

Party, who has described the technology as a “pseudo-scien-tific security hocus pocus”.

The European Union’s top court started hearing the case yesterday. The iBorderCtrl trial, which ended in 2019, is one of several projects seeking to automate the EU’s increasingly busy borders and counter irregular migration and terrorism.

The project, launched in 2016, was tested in Greece, Latvia and Hungary, drawing criticism from human rights groups that question the technology’s ability to accurately assess people’s intentions and its potential for discrimination.

The European Commission, which manages the REA, said the project aimed to test new

ideas and technologies.“iBorderCtrl was not

expected to deliver ready-made technologies or products. Not all research projects lead to the development of technologies with real-world applications,” a Commission spokesman said in emailed comments.

Under iBorderCtrl, people planning to travel were asked to answer questions from a com-puter-animated border guard, via webcam. Their micro-gestures were analysed to see if they were lying, according to the European Commission website.

Then at the border, low-risk travellers went through, while higher-risk passengers were sent for further checks, it said. Ella Jakubowska of digital rights

group EDRi expressed concern over the effectiveness of AI in making such decisions.

“Human expressions are varied, diverse (especially for people with certain disabilities) and often culturally-contingent,” she said. “(IBorderCtrl) is by no means the only dystopian tech-nological experiment being funded by the EU,” she added.

IBorderCtrl acknowledged the ethical concerns on its website, adding the project helped initiate a public debate over the technology’s use. “Novel technologies can have a significant impact on improving the efficacy, accuracy, speed, while reducing the cost of border control,” it said.

“However, they may imply risks for fundamental human

rights, which need to be further researched and mitigated before a concept goes live.” When Breyer asked the REA for the project’s results, ethics report and legal assessment in 2019, the REA said disclosure would undermine commercial interests of the iBorderCtrl con-sortium - a decision that Breyer is now challenging in court.

Breyer said he hopes the case will lead to greater trans-parency over the EU’s funding of “ethically questionable” tech-nology. While the technology was unlikely to be used at EU borders again, there was a risk it could make its way into the private sector, for example to screen insurance claims or job applicants, he said.

Scottish voters now back independence: Surveys REUTERS — LONDON

Scotland’s top civil court dealt nationalists a blow yesterday by declining to rule that the Scottish parliament had the right to call an independence referendum without London’s permission.

In the first skirmish of what is likely to become a major legal battle, the Court of Session in Edinburgh said it was pre-mature and hypothetical to challenge Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s power to block a new secession vote.

But, with the Scottish National Party (SNP) set for a big win in May’s election to the Edinburgh parliament on the promise of a referendum, the fate of the 300-year-old union of Scotland with the rest of the United Kingdom is by no means assured.

Surveys suggest that Scottish voters, who rejected secession in 2014 but are now frustrated by being taken out of the European Union against their will, would this time vote for independence. Johnson may therefore need the UK Supreme Court to uphold his veto on such a vote taking place.

“I don’t see how you can avoid going to the court,” said David Hope, former deputy president of the Supreme Court.

A poll last month indicated the ruling SNP would capture 71 of 129 seats in Scotland’s par-liament, the biggest majority since the assembly was formed. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, has vowed to hold a referendum

early in the new parliament.But the 1998 Scotland Act,

which devolved some powers to Edinburgh and created the Scottish assembly, says matters relating to the union of the two countries can be decided only by the UK parliament in Westminster.

To stray from that, the UK parliament must agree to grant Scotland’s government powers using a “Section 30 order” — as it did when approving the 2014 referendum, in which Scots rejected independence by 55 percent-45 percent.

Johnson says that was a “once in a generation” vote and has ruled out granting per-mission for another.

“The political pressure may well prevail in the sense that in the end Boris Johnson has to simply give way for political

reasons,” Hope told Reuters. “But without a Section 30 order, I don’t see how a measure which directly attacks the union can get away with it.” The SNP says it will go ahead regardless, and force Johnson to test the issue in court.

Hope doubted whether it could succeed. “They are trapped within a statute which is very carefully drafted,” he said. “There is an argument, I suppose, about the democratic will of the people, but I don’t think that arrives in the pro-vision of the Scotland Act, because it (the Act) is looking at both sides.”

However, Professor Aileen McHarg, a UK constitutional law expert from Durham Uni-versity, said there were “respectable arguments” for concluding that the Scottish Parliament did have the right to pass a referendum bill without London’s approval.

Facing such legal hurdles, some nationalists believe the SNP should either push ahead with a referendum, with or without a legal basis, or try to make May’s election a proxy vote on whether Scotland should be independent.

Hope and McHarg both said a vote held without legal authority, similar to one in Catalonia in 2017, had little prospect of success. For one thing, without international legit-imacy, Scotland would have little prospect of rejoining the European Union, as the SNP wants. “I think we are talking about a lawful ref-erendum or no referendum at all,” McHarg said.

UN chief names Michael Bloomberg climate envoy to rally actionREUTERS — NEW YORK

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reappointed former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as his special envoy on climate ambition and solu-tions yesterday “to mobilize stronger and more ambitious climate action” ahead of a global summit in November.

Bloomberg was previously the UN special envoy for climate action between March 2018 and November 2019. He stepped down shortly before announcing his bid for the Democratic US presidential nomination. He dropped out of the race in March 2020.

The media mogul will

support Guterres in “growing and strengthening” a coalition of governments, companies, cities and businesses com-mitting to net-zero emissions by 2050 in line with the goals of the 2015 global climate deal struck in Paris, the United Nations said.

In 2015, nearly 200 coun-tries committed to halt rising temperatures quickly enough to avoid disastrous climate change. The United Nations in November will stage a crucial follow-up climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.

By then, countries are expected to commit to make deeper emissions cuts to deliver the goal of the Paris agreement.

The reappointment of Bloomberg aims to “mobilize stronger and more ambitious climate action” in the run-up to the Glasgow summit, the United Nations said in a statement.

New US President Joe Biden has moved to bring the United States, the world’s second-largest greenhouse emitter, back into the Paris deal.

Bloomberg “will engage government officials and members of the private sector and civil society to finalize and implement plans, particularly in high-emitting countries, industries and sectors, to vastly accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy,” the United Nations said.

Brazil to buy 20 million more doses of CoronaVacREUTERS — SAO PAULO

Brazil is in talks to buy an addi-tional 20 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech, the governor of Sao Paulo said, in a show of confidence in the Chinese shot.

The order, which has not been previously reported, will come on top of the 100 million doses of the vaccine, known as CoronaVac, already secured by Sao Paulo’s Butantan bio-medical institute, Governor Joao Doria said.

The state-run institute led mass clinical testing of the vaccine in Brazil and is now filling and finishing doses for a national immunization program, with plans for 100 percent domestic production in early 2022. The only other COVID-19 shot approved for emergency use is the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Doria, governor of the coun-try’s wealthiest and most pop-ulous state, has been the driving force behind CoronaVac’s testing and rollout in Brazil, bolstering his presidential ambitions and feeding a rivalry with President Jair Bolsonaro.

But with efficacy of just over 50% in the Brazilian trial, well below other choices on the market, some have questioned whether Brazil should pursue other vaccines as it confronts the deadliest outbreak outside the United States.

Bolsonaro, a China critic

and COVID-19 sceptic, ini-tially dismissed the Sinovac vaccine but has changed tack in the absence of alternatives, after his Health Ministry dallied in securing contracts with vaccine developers.

The pandemic has killed nearly 230,000 people in Brazil, and a new variant that emerged in the city of Manaus has proven devastating in a second wave now hammering the jungle city.

While the federally funded Fiocruz biomedical center is still awaiting supplies to begin bottling doses of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, the Butantan institute has begun finishing and selling doses of CoronaVac to the Health Ministry.

Doria said he expects Butantan to receive shipments of active ingredients from China on a rolling weekly or 10-day basis, overcoming initial hitches that threatened to slow production.

A new Butantan facility under construction is slated to produce the vaccine’s active ingredients beginning in January 2022, later than a prior target of the second half of this year. Butantan is nego-tiating supplies for the extra 20 million doses to keep its fin-ishing line active until the new plant starts up.

So far, Brazil’s Health Min-istry has only signed a contract with Butantan to acquire 46 million doses of CoronaVac for nationwide distribution.

Impeachment: Trump rejects call to testify at his trialREUTERS — WASHINGTON

Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers on Thursday rejected a request from Dem-ocrats to testify at his impeachment trial in the US Senate next week, dismissing their invitation as a “public relations stunt.”

Democrats in the House of Representatives accuse Trump of inciting insurrection when he urged supporters to “fight” his election defeat before they stormed the Capitol on January 6, fought with police and sent lawmakers scrambling for safety. Five people died, including a Capitol Police officer.

“The president will not testify in an unconstitutional proceeding,” Trump adviser Jason Miller told Reuters. In an open letter, Trump’s attorneys, Bruce Castor and David Schoen, called the request a “public relations stunt.”

The attorneys this week rejected the impeachment charge and asserted that Trump’s claims his November 3 election defeat was the result of widespread fraud - which were baseless - were protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

Democratic lawmaker Jamie Raskin, the lead House impeachment manager, wrote in a letter to the Republican Trump and his attorney inviting the former president, who left office on January 20, to provide testimony under oath.

“If you decline this invi-tation, we reserve any and all rights, including the right to establish at trial that your refusal to testify supports a strong adverse inference regarding your actions (and inaction) on January 6, 2021,” Raskin wrote.

Castor told Reuters that Trump was within his rights in rejecting the request. “The burden is on the House to prove their case,” Castor said. “I’m not going to help them meet their burden.” Several senators said it would have been a bad idea for Trump to testify. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a vocal Trump ally, told reporters: “I don’t think that would be in anybody’s interest.”

J&J files vaccine application with FDAREUTERS — NEW YORK

Johnson & Johnson said it has asked US health regulators to authorise its single-dose COVID-19 vaccine for emer-gency use, and it will apply to European authorities in coming weeks.

The drugmaker’s appli-cation to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) follows its Jan. 29 report in which it said the vaccine had a 66% rate of preventing infections in its large global trial.

The FDA said on Thursday

evening that it has scheduled a meeting of its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee on Feb-ruary 26, to discuss the com-pany’s request for emergency use authorization.

Vaccines from Pfizer Inc/BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc were authorised a day after such a meeting.

J&J’s single-shot vaccine could help boost supply and simplify the US immunization campaign, amid concerns of fresh surges due to the more contagious UK coronavirus

variant and the potential of lower vaccine efficacy against a variant that first emerged in South Africa. Unlike the two currently authorized vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech SE and Moderna, J&J’s does not require a second shot or need to be shipped frozen.

After the company’s appli-cation, regulators will need time to analyze the data and an advisory committee must meet. The company’s chief scientific officer, Paul Stoffels, said last month J&J was on track to roll out the vaccine in March.

DiplomacyGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron wave at the end of a press conference after German-French Security Council video talks, in Berlin, Germany, yesterday.

Ecuador poll campaignEcuador presidential candidate Yaku Perez gestures during his closing campaign rally ahead of the February 7 presidential vote, in Cuenca, Ecuador, on Thursday.

“American alliances are our greatest asset. And leading with diplomacy means standing shoulder to shoulder with our allies and key partners once again. We are a country that does big things. American diplomacy makes it happen and our administration is ready to take up the mantle and lead once again,” US President Joe Biden said.

11SATURDAY 6 FEBRUARY 2021 AMERICAS

‘America is back’: Biden vows to rebuild global alliancesREUTERS — WASHINGTON

US President Joe Biden on Thursday promised a new era after the scattershot foreign policy of his predecessor, Donald Trump, declaring “America is back” on the global stage in his first diplomatic address as President.

In his speech, Biden sig-nalled aggressive approaches to China and Russia, urged Myanmar’s military leaders to halt their coup, and declared an end to US support for a Saudi Arabia-led military campaign in Yemen.

“American leadership must meet this new moment of advancing authoritarianism, including the growing ambi-tions of China to rival the United States and the determination of Russia to damage and disrupt our democracy. We must meet the new moment... accelerating global challenges from the pan-demic to the climate crisis to nuclear proliferation,” said Biden.

Trump angered European and Asian leaders with tariffs, fracturing of global alliances, and threats to withdraw US troops. He did little to push back against a wave of authoritari-anism in some countries.

After a Trump-inspired mob attacked the US Capitol on

January 6, protesting Biden’s election win, foreign allies and rivals alike expressed doubts about the health of American democracy.

Biden’s speech on Thursday was a full-throated attempt to vanquish those doubts, and convince Americans of the value of a forceful international approach.

“Investing in our diplomacy isn’t something we do just because it’s the right thing to do for the world,” he said. “We do it in order to live in peace, security and prosperity. We do it because it’s in our own self-interest.”

Biden’s choice of the State Department as venue for his first big diplomatic address was an important symbol of the value he places in career dip-lomats, who Trump largely saw as opponents.

“American alliances are our greatest asset. And leading with

diplomacy means standing shoulder to shoulder with our allies and key partners once again,” Biden said.

Biden in his early days has attempted to repair what he has called the damage to America’s standing around the world, rolling back Trump policies. He is working to revive the Iran deal, and renewed US mem-bership in the Paris accord and t h e W o r l d H e a l t h Organization.

He challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I made it clear to President Putin, in a manner very different from my predecessor, that the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions, interfering with our elections, cyberattacks, poi-soning its citizens, are over,” he said.

Trump had initially sought a warm relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping but

US President Joe Biden delivers a foreign policy address as Vice-President Kamala Harris listens during a visit to the State Department in Washington, DC, on Thursday.

differences over trade, Hong Kong and what the US military calls Beijing’s destabilizing and aggressive behaviour in the South China Sea prompted a rift.

China, which is expanding its military and working to grow its influence around the world, is perhaps Biden’s biggest inter-national challenge as he begins his presidency.

He called Beijing “our most

serious competitor”. “We’ll con-front China’s economic abuses, counter its aggressive, coercive action to push back on China’s attack on human rights, intel-lectual property and global gov-ernance. But we’re ready to work with Beijing when it’s in America’s interest to do so,” he said.

Not all US allies may be happy at the sharp turn in US

foreign policy, including Poland, where Trump once pledged to deploy US troops, or a host of nations that have criticized heavy-handed intervention by Washington in the past.

“We are a country that does big things. American diplomacy makes it happen and our administration is ready to take up the mantle and lead once again,” said Biden.

Biden to raise annual refugee admissions to 125,000REUTERS — WASHINGTON

US President Joe Biden said on Thursday that he plans to raise annual refugee admissions to 125,000 in the coming fiscal year, a more than eight-fold increase after former President Donald Trump slashed levels to historic lows.

Biden also called for dozens of changes to US refugee processing and vetting in a detailed executive order that advocates lauded on Thursday.

During a speech at the US State Department, the Demo-cratic President said the order would build up the country’s capacity to accept refugees in the face of “unprecedented global need”.

Biden has pledged to restore the United States’ historic role as

a country that welcomes refugees from around the world after four years of cuts to admissions under Trump. The UN High Commis-sioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates there are 1.4 million refugees worldwide in urgent need of resettlement.

During his presidency, Trump portrayed refugees as a security threat and a drain on US communities as he took a series of measures to restrict legal immigration. Biden is con-fronting a refugee program hobbled by Trump’s policies, which led to the closure of reset-tlement offices and the reas-signment of program staffers.

Trump’s actions also dis-rupted the pipeline of refugees to the United States, a situation exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Biden said the goal

of 125,000 refugee admissions — up from 15,000 this year under Trump — would be for the coming fiscal year, which begins on October 1, 2021.

“It’s going to take time to rebuild what has been so badly damaged,” Biden said. “But that’s precisely what we’re going to do.” Biden also intends to propose increasing the refugee ceiling for this year fol-lowing a consultation with Con-gress, according to a White House fact sheet released on Thursday.

Refugee backers praised Biden’s executive order, which they said would speed up refugee processing and remove barriers that blocked some applicants. “This is a laundry list of everything advocates have said was wrong with the

program,” said Jennifer Quigley, director of refugee advocacy with the New York City-based Human Rights First. “We’ve identified problems and this is providing the solutions.”

The executive order called for a review of the Special Immigrant Visa program for refugees who aided US interests in Iraq and Afghanistan to determine whether there have been “undue delays” for applicants.

The Trump administration carved out 4,000 spots for Iraqi refugees in its 2020 cap for admissions but only 537 were resettled in the fiscal year, which ended in September.

More than 9,800 Iraqis came to the United States in the 2016 fiscal year before Trump took office. Some veterans groups had pressed the

government to do more to help resettle military interpreters and other personnel who faced danger for helping US troops abroad.

Biden’s order highlighted the role of climate change in the dis-placement of people around the world, calling on heads of several U.S. agencies to produce a report on the matter with 180 days.

Biden also rescinded several restrictive Trump policies, including a 2019 order that required US states and localities to consent to receive refugees.

The rollback of that Trump order will be partly symbolic since a Maryland-based federal judge blocked it nationwide more than a year ago, a decision that was upheld in January by the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals.

US Senate passes budget blueprint to speed aid planREUTERS — WASHINGTON

President Joe Biden’s drive to enact a $1.9 trillion coronavirus aid bill gained momentum yes-terday as the US Senate nar-rowly approved a budget blue-print allowing Democrats to push the legislation through Congress in coming weeks with or without Republican support.

At the end of about 15 hours of debate and votes on dozens of amendments, the Senate found itself in a 50-50 partisan deadlock over passage of the budget plan. That deadlock was broken by Vice-President Kamala Harris, whose “yes” vote provided the win for Democrats.

This was a “giant first step” toward passing the kind of com-prehensive coronavirus aid bill that Biden has put at the top of his legislative agenda, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said. Shortly before the final vote, Democrats flexed their muscles by offering an amendment reversing three earlier votes that Republicans had won.

Those had used the coro-navirus aid battle to voice support for the Canada-to-United States Keystone XL pipeline that Biden has blocked and support for hydraulic fracking to extract under-ground oil and natural gas. Also overturned was a Republican amendment barring corona-virus aid to immigrants living in the United States illegally.

With Democrat Harris pre-siding, she broke a 50-50 tie to overturn those Republican vic-tories. It marked the first time

Harris, in her role as president of the Senate, cast a tie-breaking vote after being sworn in as Biden’s vice-president on January 20.

Before finishing its work, the Senate approved a series of amendments to the budget outline, which had already passed the House of Represent-atives on Wednesday. As a result, the House must now vote again to accept the Senate’s changes. The Senate added a measure calling for increased funding for rural hospitals whose resources are strained by the pandemic. Senate Dem-ocrats and the Biden adminis-tration have said they want comprehensive legislation to move quickly to address a pan-demic that has killed more than 450,000 Americans and left millions jobless.

They want to spend the $1.9 trillion to speed COVID-19 vac-cines throughout the nation. Other funds would extend special unemployment benefits that will expire at the end of March and make direct pay-ments to people to help them pay bills and stimulate the economy.

They also want to send money to state and local gov-ernments dealing the worst health crisis in decades.

But as the hours wore on and dozens of amendments were offered, exhausted sen-ators mainly spent the night disposing of Republican ideas, such as ending all US foreign aid and prohibiting Congress from expanding the US Supreme Court beyond its current nine justices.

Virginia lawmakers vote to abolish death penaltyREUTERS — NEW YORK

Virginia, which over the cen-turies has executed more pris-oners than any other US state, took a big step yesterday toward abolishing the death penalty, a sign of waning public support for capital punishment across the country.

The state’s Democratic-led House of Delegates voted 57-41 in favour of the measure to end the practice. The Senate passed it earlier this week, and Gov-ernor Ralph Northam, a Dem-ocrat, said he would sign the repeal into law.

Virginia, which last carried out an out an execution in 2017, has conducted 1,390 since 1608, when it was a British colony. Texas, which became a US state in 1846, is in second place with

68 fewer executions than Vir-ginia. Two men remain on Vir-ginia’s death row, including Thomas Porter, who was con-victed of killing a police officer in 2005.

During deliberations on Thursday and yesterday, several Republican lawmakers said the death penalty should retained for the most serious crimes. “It’s not about revenge, it’s not about retribution. Ulti-mately, it’s about justice,” Republican Delegate Jason Miyares said yesterday.

Some Democratic law-makers said they support abol-ishing the punishment because it is disproportionately used against Black people.

The risk of executing of a person wrongly convicted also warrants the death penalty’s

abolition, they said. Democratic lawmaker Kathleen Murphy said her brother was murdered years ago and one of his killers is still on death row, but she would vote to repeal.

“People are put to death, more often, because of the color of their skin than because they are the real criminal who was involved in the crime,” she said on Thursday. “And there are no do-overs.”

Public support for capital punishment has declined in the United States. According to Gallup, support has dropped from 80 percent in the 1990 to 55 percent in 2020.

Abolition is also under con-sideration at the national level. Former President Donald Trump, a Republican, resumed the execution of prisoners on

federal death row last summer after a 17-year hiatus, killing 13 people convicted of murder. In the previous six decades, the federal government carried out only three executions.

Last year was the first time the US government executed more people than all 50 state governments combined.

Democrat Joe Biden took office last month as the first US President to commit to seeking to abolish the federal death penalty. Congressional law-makers are asking him to support bills that would repeal the death penalty.

Most countries have abol-ished capital punishment, and the United Nations has long called for a moratorium on exe-cutions and urged its abolition worldwide.

Pentagon to deploy 1,100 troops to help vaccination efforts

REUTERS — WASHINGTON

President Joe Biden’s admin-istration yesterday announced that the Pentagon had approved the deployment of 1,100 active-duty troops to assist with COVID-19 vacci-nation efforts in the United States, a number likely to rise in the coming weeks and months.

The pandemic has killed more than 447,000 Amer-icans and thrown millions out of work. Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the White House’s COVID-19 response team, said in a briefing that part of the group would start to arrive in California within the next 10 days.

The Pentagon said the 1,110 troops would be broken down into five teams, each with vac-cinators, nurses and clinical staff. The deployment is likely just the first tranche of US mil-itary personnel assisting in administering vaccinations around the country.

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain last week said the Federal Emergency Man-agement Agency was working with the Pentagon to use 10,000 troops and open 100 centers across the country to increase the availability of vaccines.

Using the military to fight the coronavirus is not new. At its peak under former Pres-ident Donald Trump, more than 47,000 National Guard troops were supporting COVID-19 operations and about 20,000 continue to help.

The Army Corps of Engi-neers has also built thousands of rooms across the country to assist hospitals with the strain caused by the spread of the coronavirus.

Vaccination driveA person uses a mobile phone while lining up outside Yankee stadium for vaccination amid the coronavirus disease pandemic in the Bronx borough of New York City, New York, US, yesterday.