Volume 22 | Number 7296 | 2 RiyalsTuesday 26 September 2017 | 6 Muharram 1439 www.thepeninsulaqatar.com”

”The people have withstood the conditions of siege,and rejected the dictations with resolve and pride. #Tamim_almajd

Centurion Ali ‘presses the button’ in six-fest

QDB & QC announce ‘Made at Home’ expo launch

BUSINESS | 21 SPORT | 32-33

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QATAR

114UNDER SIEGE

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Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani received a written message from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May, pertaining to bilateral relations and topics of common concern. The written message was delivered by the Ambassador of the United Kingdom to the State of Qatar, Ajay Sharma, when the Prime Minister met him yesterday.

Prime Minister receives message from UK Premier Emir greets German ChancellorEMIR H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani sent yester-day a cable of congratulations to German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, on the occasion of the victory of her party in the parliamentary elections in the Federal Republic of Germany. Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani and Prime Minis-ter and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani also sent similar cables to Merkel. → See also page 17

Qatar signs 15-year LNG deal with BangladeshRASGAS has closed a major 15-year liquefied natural gas (LNG) Sales and Purchase Agreement (SPA) with Bang-ladesh Oil, Gas and Mineral Corporation (Petrobangla). The agreement was signed in Doha in the presence of H E Dr Mohammed bin Saleh Al Sada, Minister of Energy and Industry; Saad Sherida Al Kaabi, Qatar Petroleum Presi-dent and CEO; and Bangladesh State Minister Nasrul Hamid. As per the agreement, the Qatari energy giant will sup-ply 2.5 million tonnes of LNG per annum to Petrobangla for 15 years.

→ Full story on page 21

Siege helps real estate sector grow strongerSachin Kumar The Peninsula

Real estate market has stood firm despite the blockade imposed by the siege

countries on the Qatar. In the first six months of the year, June recorded the highest number of real estate transactions.

As per the Ministry of Development Planning and

Statistics, the total value of properties sold stood at QR3.6bn in June, surpassing the figures of January which came second in the terms of proper-ties sold. The total value of properties sold in January was QR3.4bn. In the remaining four months of the year, the value of properties sold, ranged between QR1.6bn to QR3bn.

→ Continued on page 8

Trump steps up efforts to end Gulf crisis: FMThe Peninsula

Foreign Minister H E Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani has said that US President Donald

Trump was stepping up efforts for a diplomatic solution to the crisis in the Gulf.

The Foreign Minister told media in Paris that he had seen a “greater desire” from Trump to fix the stand-off through dis-cussion, Reuters reported. “He has stated very clearly that he doesn’t want to see conflict among friends. So there is a determination by the US to solve this by dialogue.”

The Foreign Minister said that the blockading countries want to impose their policies and guardianship over Qatar by imposing siege.

“The aim of siege countries is to impose policies and dic-tates on Qatar due to its independent foreign policy and successes. Some neighbours’ attempts to undermine the sta-bility of Qatar by imposing siege is irresponsible,” the Foreign Minister said during a seminar in Paris at the French Institute

for International Relations on “Gulf Crisis: The View from Doha”.

He said that what is hap-pening is not boycott but a siege. He said that Qatar sup-ports Kuwaiti mediation to settle crisis in the Gulf. “This siege is being used to interfere in the internal affairs of Qatar. It violates the rights of peoples and the principles of interna-tional law,” he added.

The Minister further said the siege countries want to impose guardianship on the political decision of the State of Qatar. “The aim of fabri-cated Gulf crisis and siege imposed on Qatar is to dictate Qatar and damage its econ-omy,” he said.

→ Continued on page 2

The Foreign Minister said in Paris that he had seen a “greater desire” from Trump to fix the stand-off through discussion.

The State of Qatar reiterated its stance towards the Palestinian cause and its full support for the right to self-determination.→PAGE 2

INSIDE

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The Compensation Claims Committee received 22 complaints more in the last two days.

02 TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017HOME

Sanaullah AtaullahThe Peninsula

Aiming to increase the local production of meat and milk, Qatar General Elec-tricity and Water

(Kahramaa) has announced that it will provide electricity and water connection to all animal breeding farms across the country.

The move is a concrete step towards bringing the country closer to food self-sufficiency under the framework of the Qatar National Food Security Programme (QNFSP) that has assumed importance after the blockade to meet the growing demand for milk, meat and other food products, said the experts.

“Kahramaa will provide electricity and water connec-tion to all animal breeding farms,” said Kahramaa Presi-dent Issa bin Hilal Al Kuwari.

Speaking in a TV talk show, Al Kuwari said that many ani-mal farms were already connected with electricity and water supply.

“It is very important to pro-vide necessary support to animal breeding farms and the owners of livestock,” said Al Kuwari.

“The water and electricity connections will encourage the animal breeding farms to bring more animals like cows for dairy,” an expert told The Peninsula.

The expert said that the demand for fresh milk has increased significantly after the blockade.

“Those farms that were not much active in production will now consider to grab the opportunity by increasing the

number of animals such as cows, as many active farms were breeding only sheep and camels,” said the expert.

The electricity and water connection will help in a major way as there will be no need to bring water in tankers and will help them to get rid of genera-tors, said Anwar Ali, in-charge of a farm operating in Umm Salal.

“My farm is already con-nected with utility so there is no problem in setting up cool-ing system for employees and animals. We are enjoying the same facility that the workers are having in Doha downtown or Industrial Area,” said Ali.

He said that there are some farms in remote areas like Al Khor and Al Shamal suburbs that are without utility. They depend on generators for elec-tricity and tankers for water, he added.

The new move will help them to get rid of the problem that they have due to lack of utility, he added.

“We have about 2,500 sheep and 50 camels in our farm with the potential to breed cows and other animals for milk purpose,” said Anwar.

Livestock farms to get utilityconnections

Self-sufficiency

The move is a concrete step towards bringing the country closer to food self-sufficiency.

Many animal farms are already connected with electricity and water supply.

QGBC offering ‘Green Key’ certification program for hotels

QNA

The State of Qatar reiterated its firms stances towards the Palestinian cause and its full

support for the Palestinian peo-ple’s right to self-determination and ending the occupation, stress-ing its backing for achieving a Palestinian national reconciliation and unity among the Palestinian people so as to liberate it and establish an independent sover-eign state with East Jerusalem as its capital based on 1967 borders.

Ambassador H E Ali Khalfan Al Mansouri, the State of Qatar’s

permanent representative to the United Nations Office in Geneva, made the remarks during a gen-eral discussion on the human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories as part of the 36th session of the Human Rights Council.

Qatar’s permanent repre-sentative to the United Nations Office in Geneva reaffirmed the importance of the seventh arti-cle in the agenda of the Human Rights Council due to its signif-icance in documenting and tackling the crimes and grave violations that Israel, as an occu-pation force, commits against

Palestine and other Arab territories.

Ambassador Al Mansouri expressed the State of Qatar’s condemnation of Israel’s viola-tions and racist policies and its arrogant treatment of interna-tional legitimacy resolutions, which indicates its unwillingness to be a true partner for peace, its insistence on challenging the international community, and its continued pursuit of under-mining the two-state solution.

HE the ambassador stressed that Israel must understand that the Palestinian cause will not be marginalised despite the

ongoing crises in the region because it is a central issue at the Arab, Muslim and global levels and will always be alive as long as the rights of the Palestinian people are stolen and violated.

Ending his address, the per-manent representative urged the international community to shoulder its legal and ethical responsibilities towards the Pal-estinian people, end the Israeli occupation, stop all settlement activities and attempts to Judaize Jerusalem, end the unjust siege on Gaza Strip, and hold Israeli officials accountable for their crimes.

Irfan BukhariThe Peninsula

The unjust siege imposed on Qatar has failed to shatter the unswerving

trust of investors in the coun-try and they plan to start new v e n t u r e s w i t h o u t apprehensions.

“Believe in Qatar, invest in Qatar” is the slogan with which a Turkish businessman, Omer Seyfi Aktulun (pictured), is attracting more investors from Turkey to launch ambitious business ventures in Qatar with confidence.

Aktulun, in partnership with Al Hayat family, opened Sazeli at Mall of Qatar with a whopping QR22m investment a year ago and today he terms his venture a ‘great success’.

Sazeli is a well-established brand of signature Turkish cui-sine with two fine-dining restaurants in Istanbul. “Since the very beginning when I used to visit Qatar to discover invest-ment opportunities, before the opening of Sazeli, I found Qatar a loveable, welcoming place,” said Aktulun.

He said that being an inves-tor and businessman, his trust in Qatar was not affected by ongoing blockade. “Rather, I am set to launch two new projects in next three months. I am bringing Turkish hand-made chocolate “Maia” to Qatar and the other project is also related to food.”

Sazeli Chairman says that he did not meet any bureaucratic

or other procedural hurdle when he decided to open chain of his restaurant in Qatar. “I have become an example for those Turkish investors who want to do business in Qatar,” he said, adding that over 100 Turkish investors had visited Qatar using his help to explore investment opportunities in Qatar.

“My success has become a source of inspiration for fence-sitting investors who were previously caught in little confusion.”

Omer Aktulun, who has been serving as head of live-stock section of Istanbul Chamber of Commerce for long, thinks that now many Turkish businessmen are poised to invest in Qatar. “They can invest in food sector, construction sec-tor or infrastructure development or even in agri-culture,” he noted.

To a question about the impact of siege on Qatar’s econ-omy and growth, Aktulun said that Qatar would grow stronger due to blockade. “In next 10 years, Qatar will achieve self

sufficiency in food and other sectors,” he observed.

Coming back to Sazeli which he launched a year ago, he said that as many as 170 peo-ple were employed at the restaurant. “Around 100 employees are from Turkish origin therefore we are offer-ing authentic cuisine in peculiar Turkish ambience,” he said, adding that Sazeli was set to hire 50 more Turkish employ-ees for the restaurant.

Aktulun feels very proud when he says that the Emir His Highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Sazeli on its opening.

Most of the raw material from meat to spices used at Sazeli is imported from Turkey. “We are importing stuff from both ships and air cargo.” Aktu-lun said that opening of new Turkey-Iran-Qatar land-sea route would also help his busi-ness and the supply of goods would become more smooth and cost-effective.

He said that the blockade has strengthened Turkey-Qatar relations. “Bilateral trade has grown manifold, new shipping lines have been started and this process will continue for the greater interest of both nations.”

Aktulun, who also serves as Vice President of Hunting Fed-eration of Turkey, said that he felt proud that many Turkish companies, particularly con-struction firms, were doing mega projects in Qatar.

He said that like Turkish investors showing interest in Qatar, Qatari investments in Tur-key were also on the rise. “Many Qatari companies and individu-als have invested in Turkey considering it as their second home like we consider Qatar as our second home,” Aktulun said, adding: “These relations are not based just on business interests, they are deep-rooted emotional connections.”

When asked whether siege had impacted his business, he said that the impact was momen-tary as “State of Qatar had overcome crisis” swiftly present-ing quick solutions. “Now trade and commerce in Qatar will be more aggressive and proactive as compared to the situation existing before siege,” he observed.

He said that the honourable response to crisis from Qatar had attracted people all over the world. “Now there exist more respect, more interest for Qatar and its people in the world community.”

Believe in Qatar, Invest in Qatar: Turkish businessman

The Peninsula

Qatar Green Building Coun-cil (QGBC) will be offering ‘Green Key’ certification

program for all hotels in Qatar to boost sustainability in Qatar’s Hospitality Sector.

The Green Key award is a leading standard of excellence in the field of environmental responsibility and sustainable operation within the tourism industry.The Green Key eco-label for tourism facilities has been in existence for more than 19 years.

The Green Key has certified more than 2,500 hotels and hos-pitality establishments in 55 countries to date, based on cri-teria that includes staff and environmental management, energy efficiency, water conser-vation, green activities, indoor environment, green areas, and corporate social responsibility.

As a new member of the Foundation for Environmental Education, QGBC will announce the launch of the certification program as part of World Tour-ism Day in Qatar, which is celebrated on September 27.

QGBC will subsequently manage and issue Green Key cer-tification across Qatar’s hospitality sector. All hotels and tourism establishments in Qatar are eligible to apply to become

Green Key certified upon meet-ing all of the necessary criteria.

Eng Meshal Al Shamari, Director at QGBC, said: “QGBC is honoured to take on the national responsibility of overseeing the prestigious Green Key program. The comprehensive guidelines to obtain the certification pro-vides a clear path for the sector to follow and achieve their sus-tainability goals in addition to meeting the requirements of the Qatar Tourism Authority’s new classification system. Further-more, having a unified grading system in place will serve to improve sustainability standards across the industry and further drive Qatar’s overall sustainabil-ity ambitions.”

“QGBC strongly encourages hospitality establishments to apply for the certification, and contribute to securing a green future for Qatar,” he added.

Eng Al Shamari’s sentiments, Finn Bolding Thomsen, Director at International Green Key, said: “I am delighted that Green Key is now offered to any hotel and tourism establishment in Qatar through QGBC. As Qatar is gear-ing up to host the 2022 World Cup, Green Key will offer a unique opportunity to showcase its sustainable development objectives and promote best practices among its hotels and tourism facilities.”

Trump steps up efforts to end Gulf crisis: FMContinued from page 1

However, Qatar has man-aged the siege by diversifying its economy and building largest port in the Middle East to coun-ter the move of blockading countries,” he added.

He said that siege countries by blockading air, sea and land routes of Qatar want to impose policies on Qatar that violate its principles and values.

The Foreign Minister reiter-ated that the accusations of the blockading countries against Qatar are baseless and that Qatar has asked these countries to pro-vide evidence of their allegations, but they did not pro-vide one proof.

He said that 13-demands of the siege countries were made to be rejected.

He praised the Qatari peo-ple’s ethics in dealing with the crisis, saying that the siege imposed on Qatar gave Qatari citizens an opportunity to show their values of tolerance and justice.

The Foreign Minister warned of the serious political and eco-nomic repercussions of the Gulf crisis on the region and the world.

He said that siege countries have betrayed Qatar and carried out unilateral actions against Qatar in violation of

international laws in an attempt to isolate Qatar.

“The countries of

the blockade are carrying out propaganda campaigns against the State of Qatar. They are also

pressurizing imams and religious clerics to campaign against Qatar.”

Regarding relations with Iran, the Minister said: “They said Qatar was now closer to Iran. By their measures they are pushing Qatar to Iran. They are giving Iran, or any regional force, Qatar like a gift,” he said.

“Is that their objective, to push one country, a GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) member state towards Iran? This is not a wise objective,” he added.

Syria policy The foreign minister said

Qatar’s position over Syria had not changed.

Both Qatar and Saudi Ara-bia have backed Syrian rebels, despite their differences. “After eight months, after the militari-sation of the (Syrian) revolution, this is when Qatar decided to take a side. We decided to stand with the people,” he added.

“Our position - will it be changed because blockading nations have a dispute with us? That would mean our principles that we are fighting for our worthless. Our position and the values which we have stuck to from the beginning have remained the same. War crimi-nals need to be held accountable,” he added.

Foreign Minister H E Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani with Marielle de Sarnez, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the French National Assembly, in Paris yesterday.

Qatar reiterates support for Palestinian reconciliation

03TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017 HOME

Sidi Mohamed The Peninsula

The Compensation Claims Committee received in the last two days 22 complaints from people affected

by the unjust blockade and the total number of complaints has crossed 6,400, said an official at the committee.

“We received a total of 22 complaints in the last two days, and so far we have received about 6,400 complaints from residents who are affected by the ongoing blockade. We are still receiving complaints at the com-mittee headquarters at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Center,” he said.

From the National Human Rights Committee (NHRC), the

committee has received more than 3,340 complaints.

In the first weeks when the committee started receiving peo-ple affected by the siege, most cases were people who lost their animals and their investments in the siege countries.

Qatar Chamber has received about 800 complaints from com-panies and transferred 200 complaints to the Compensation Claims Committee and is work-ing to transfer other cases.

Most of these 200 cases are filed by companies from Arab countries working in Qatar.

The committee transferred most of the complaints which it received to international law firms.

The siege was imposed by three GCC countries on Qatar on June 5. The siege has separated

families and violated the rights of people to travel, their right to edu-

cation, work, and residency. Residents affected by the

siege are not allowed to visit these countries to check their

properties, either land, apart-ments, and investment projects and even to visit their relatives.

One of those who came to register complaints had started agricultural projects in Saudi Arabia.

The seeds cost him hun-dreds thousands of riyals and now he lost all of them includ-ing agricultural equipment which include machines and vehicles.

Hundreds of shipments for individuals and local companies were seized in the UAE.

Statistics issued earlier said that there were more than 22,000 camels and other live-stock seized in Saudi Arabia.

The aim of establishing the committee is to protect the peo-ple’s rights.

Compensation claims panel receives 22 more complaints

An official receiving a complaint from a citizen.

Corniche cleaned in record timeThe Peninsula

The Public Cleaning Department at the Min-istry of Municipality and

Environment cleaned the Cor-niche area in three hours after the massive turnout to receive Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani after his world tour which included Turkey, the US and a number of Euro-pean countries.

Safar Mubarak Al Shafi, Department’s Director, said that they prepared a special pro-gramme to clean the Corniche and were expecting a big number of people to receive H H the Emir.

The Department formed a special team of workers to

monitor the areas and deployed them in an organized way and

cleaned the areas during a short period.

Minister of Economy and Commerce H E Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani yesterday met Qatari-Russian Business Council Chairman Ahmed Blankuiv. The meeting discussed views about issues of mutual interest and bilateral cooperation. Bilateral trade volume reached about QR66m in the first half of 2017. The number of Russian firms operating in Qatar stood at 41, of which 40 are with Qatari-Russian joint capital of QR20.1m, in addition to a single company with 100 percent Russian capital.

Ministry highlights importance of Education Excellence Award QNA

The Ministry of Education and Higher Education affirmed that the Educa-

tion Excellence Award (EED) is one of the pillars of the edu-cational system in the State of Qatar. The EED aims to enhance the creativity and innovation among students and educational institutions, it added.

At an introductory event held by the Award organizing committee, EED Executive Director Dr Hamda Hassan Al Sulaiti stressed that the Award

is supported by the wise leadership.

She highlighted that the amendments made to the cri-teria of the Award for the categories of students and sci-entific research and teacher necessitate that those inter-ested in running for the Award attend awareness meetings and workshops held by the organizing committee. For his part, head of the EED Execu-tive Committee Hassan Abdullah Al Mohammadi intro-duced participants to nomination procedures, which included how to apply for each

award and the authorities responsible for it.

He said that the applications will be received from October 29 until November 26, while the Excellence Day ceremony will take place on March 7.

The categories of Education Excellence Award includes the Excellence Award for Second-ary School Certificate Students, the Excellence award for Uni-versity Graduates, the Excellence award for PhD Hold-ers, the award for Excellent Teacher, the award for Excel-lent School, and the award for Scientific Research.

Workers cleaning the Corniche.

Minister of Public Health H E Dr Hanan Mohamed Al Kuwari with Ambassador of the Republic of Turkey, Fikret Ozer, yesterday. The Minister also met Ambassador of the Sultanate of Oman, Najeeb bin Yahya Al Balushi. The meetings reviewed cooperation in the health sector.

Commerce Minister meets Russian official Health Minister meets Turkish Ambassador

04 TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017

Mohammed Bin HamadBin Abdulla Al-Mana

Khalid Bin Mohammed Hamad Al-Mana

Hamad Bin Mohammed Hamad Al-Mana

Abdul Aziz Bin Mohammed Hamad Al-Mana

Express their heartfelt condolences to

and the family members of Al-Mana on the sad demise of their

Father

May Allah rest the departed soul in peaceand give grace and fortitude to the

bereaved family.

05TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017 HOME

The Peninsula

Qatar Post (Q-Post) has launched a new set of stamps to celebrate the launch of its new brand identity,

cementing the official start of the next chapter of postal services in Qatar.

Qatar Post just launched a significant transformation proc-ess, that will set the company on par with the digital world, mod-ern economy and the needs of new customers. Qatar Post’s modernisation process is under

way at full speed and is impact-ing all levels of the postal services.

The new stamps are a sym-bol of modern life delivered by Qatar Post. The 50 Dirham stamps, which feature Qatar Post’s new logo and new branded cars, can be found at Qatar Post General Post Office (GPO), as well as in branches spread across Qatar and phila-telic e-shop.

Leading the launch of the brand new stamps, Khalid Rus-tom, Qatar Post Head of Philatelic, stated: “Qatar Post is

always keen to mark key mile-stones in our country’s history

and of our company. It was important for us to launch a stamp set that celebrates and honours this new chapter of the postal services in Qatar. We hope that our exclusive stamps will be popular among stamp lovers and collectors across Qatar as well as among our customers.”

Qatar Post is expected to continue building on the success of its new brand reveal with plans to launch a variety of new products and services as well as the expansion of its footprints through new partnerships and new kiosks across the country.

New stamps of Q-Post symbolise modern life The 50 Dirham stamps, which feature Qatar Post’s new logo and new branded cars, can be found at Qatar Post General Post Office (GPO) as well as in branches spread across Qatar and philatelic e-shop.

Raynald C RiveraThe Peninsula

The Philippines is inviting foreign investors including Qatari companies to invest

in nearly six million hectares of lands available as agro-indus-trial zones and halal hubs and production zones, said Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) Director General Charito Plaza.

Plaza was speaking to local media on the sidelines of the Qatar-Philippines Food Security Summit (QPFSS) held yesterday at City Center Rotana Doha Hotel.

“The purpose of this summit is to gather Qatari investors to take a look at our agro-indus-trial economic zones and our Halal hubs and production zones. We want to help Qatar in food security and offer the almost six million hectares of agricultural lands to the Qatari government

and investors to utilize as agro-industrial economic zones and halal hubs and production zones,” she said.

PEZA has been very aggres-sive in marketing Philippine Economic Zones (PEZs) offering the best incentives to foreign investors such as 100 percent ownership, six to eight years income tax holiday, lease of lands of up to 75 years, special visa for the foreign investors their family members and for-eign national workers and tax-free importation of materi-als and equipment, Plaza stressed.

“If Qatari investors will develop our agro-industrial eco-nomic zones, all the products can be brought to Qatar,” she said.

“The Philippines has been known as the source of world class workers, but it also has very beautiful and productive and fer-tile soil that can be source of food

security for countries like Qatar,” she stressed.

This was the third time Plaza visited Doha. The last time was during the state visit of President Rodrigo Duterte, during which $206m worth of deals were signed between Qatari business-men and PEZA.

Plaza expressed high hopes that more Qatari companies will invest in the agro-industrial eco-nomic zones and Halal hubs and production zones as well as other PEZs such as agro-forestry eco-nomic zone, tourism economic zone and aquamarine economic zone, in addition to defence industrial complex and renew-able energy industrial park.

“I hope this will just be the start to inform the Qatari inves-tors of the potential economic zones and industries in the Phil-ippines. I would like to say to the Qatar government we welcome you very much in the Philippine

economic zones,” she said.Plaza delivered the keynote

at yesterday’s summit, organized by Management Solutions Con-sultancy under the patronage of Al Read Fresh Foods, which gath-ered six food processing and exporting companies from the

Philippines and 11 fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) import-ers and retailers in Qatar.

She was scheduled to hold meetings with Qatari companies that are now in the process of site surveying, Philippine company formation and PEZA registration

stages after signing investment pledges to the Philippines dur-ing the recent state visit of President Duterte. These com-panies are mostly into retirement village ecozone development, tourism, construction, IT and ecozone services sectors.

Philippines woos Qatari firms to invest in agro-industrial zones

Adel Saadeh (left), MSI Managing Director and Special Advisor to PEZA Director General for the Middle East; Bgen Charito B Plaza, Director General of PEZA; and Ahmed Khamis Al Abdullah, Chairman of Management Solutions Consultancy, during Qatar-Philippines Food Security Summit at Rotana City Center yesterday. Pic: Baher Amin / The Peninsula

06 TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017HOME

The Peninsula

The Office of Gradu-ate Studies at Qatar University (QU) recently held the 2017 Graduate Stu-

dent Orientation Day for new students aimed to familiarise them on the academic poli-cies and procedures as well as the office’s services.

Around 250 new gradu-ate students attended the event. They got insight into the major policies that are crucial for new students such as class attendance, academic load, withdrawal, and probation or dismissal. They also had the opportunity to meet and inter-act with the staff members of the Office of Graduate Studies.

Attending the event were QU Vice-President for Research and Graduate Stud-ies, Prof Mariam Al Maadeed;

QU Dean of Graduate Studies, Dr. Ahmed El-Zatahry; QU Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies for Student Affairs, Ghada Al Kuwari; QU Office of Graduate Studies Senior Program Development and Coordination Specialist, Dr. Mary El-Mereedi; and QU Research and Graduate

Studies Office Senior Student Affairs Specialist (Registra-tion), Amna Al Suliti; as well as associate deans of Gradu-ate Studies at QU colleges.

Dr. Ahmed El-Zatahry said: “Your interest in QU research programs will help in generating new concepts, innovations, collaborations

and developments. It is an opportunity for you to become instrumental in identifying solu-tions for several national challenges, thus contributing to the Qatar National Vision 2030.”

G h a d a A l Kuwari, said, “Our graduate policies and procedures have been devel-oped to ensure our

programs’ consistency as well as to simplify student life on campus by providing a clear means for addressing poten-tial problems. All university policies are vitally important to student success and the Graduate Student Affairs has worked extensively to provide

access to these policies in both Arabic and English.”

Elaborating on graduate academic support, Dr. Mary El-Mereedi said: “The Gradu-ate Academic Support Unit (GASU) under the Office of Graduate Studies provides a variety of academic support services to graduate students, particularly relating to thesis and dissertation writing. These services include TAD writing groups, graduate writing workshops, and one-on-one tutoring sessions by appoint-ment.” She also noted that GASU organises a number of professional development ses-sions for graduate students and facilitates graduate fac-ulty mentoring workshops designed to enhance the grad-uate student-mentor relationship.

QU outlines academic policies to new students

QU Dean of Graduate Studies, Dr. Ahmed El-Zatahry (left), and QU Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies for Student Affairs, Ghada Al Kuwari.

The Peninsula

Malabar Gold & Dia-monds, one among the BIG 5 jewellery

retailers globally, has revealed offers to celebrate the upcoming festive season.

This time around, they have announced an oppor-tunity to win 100kg of gold.

“This is the first time a jewellery retailer has announced an offer of this magnitude. It is no surprise that the biggest offer this time is from Malabar Gold & Diamonds, who are leaders in jewellery retailing. This cam-paign will run at all Malabar Gold & Diamonds outlets glo-bally from September 27 to October 28. A true shopper’s delight, Malabar Gold & Dia-monds has also unveiled a huge collection of jewellery in gold, diamonds and precious gems

from different parts of the world to enthrall the jewellery lovers,” said in a statement.

With every purchase of gold & diamond jewellery worth QR500, customers get a chance to enter raffle draws to win 1/4 (Quarter) kg of gold each in 8 raffle draws. Adding to the

above, customers also get two gram gold coin on diamond jewellery pur-chase of QR5,000 and a one gram gold coin on purchase of diamond j e w e l l e r y w o r t h QR3,000.

Not only that, cus-tomers can protect the gold rate at Malabar Gold & Diamonds by paying 10% of the entire amount on the selected gold jew-ellery until October 17. The customers also get a fabulous chance to buy 8gm gold coins with absolutely no making

charges from any of Malabar Gold & Diamonds outlets in Qatar during this period. Fur-thermore, customers can avail the zero deduction offer on 22K (GCC) gold jewellery exchange as well. All these offers will be valid at their outlets in Qatar until October 29.

Malabar Gold & Diamonds offers chance to win 100kg of gold

The Peninsula

Qatari paint manufacturer Hempel participated in the 3rd edition of Buy

Local Product Exhibition organ-ised by Qatar Development Bank (QDB) and Qatar General Electricity & Water Corporation (Kahramaa) held at Doha Exhi-bition and National Conference Centre from September 17 to 18.

The exhibition aimed at expressing commitment by QDB and Kahramaa to lend special support to local companies in Qatar and also providing a plat-form to bring all Qatar manufacturers to expand their local supply to identify local procurement opportunities.

With a manufacturing facil-ity established in 1981, Hempel has been producing high qual-ity coatings and servicing market sectors such as marine, protective, decorative and yacht coatings. Hempel’s state-of-art production facility in Doha

Industrial area has an ample capacity to meet the ever grow-ing demands of this proud nation. Hempel’s close proxim-ity to its customers means innovative products can be sold locally, with as much local con-tent as possible. Quick availability, complete customer support and the versatility to either supply directly from stock or to manufacture any product in its range in a timely manner. Hempel has showcased wide range of the products such as the

advanced floor coating solution, Strata, Texotile system, which is the popular requirement for Kahramaa substation etc. in the exhibition and has attracted many potential clients to its booth. Christopher Sharkey, Decorative Sales Manager at Hempel Paints, said that Hempel works closely with each cus-tomer to develop the best solutions for each and every project and their customers have access to the highest lev-els of technical support staff .

Hempel participates in 3rd Buy Local Product Exhibition

A visitor looks at a display at the 3rd edition of Buy Local Product Exhibition.

The Peninsula

Ministry of Economy and Com-merce announced the recall of Mitsubishi ASX models of 2011-

2013 over probable defect of front windshield wiper motor

The Ministry, in collaboration with Qatar Automobiles Company, dealer of Mitsubishi vehicles in Qatar, has announced the recall of Mitsubishi ASX models of 2011-2013 over probable defect of front windshield wiper motor.

The ministry said the recall campaign comes within the framework of its ongo-ing efforts to protect consumers and ensure that car dealers follow up on vehi-cles’ defects and repair them.

The Ministry said that it will coordi-nate with the dealer to follow up on the maintenance and repair works and will communicate with customers to ensure that the necessary repairs are carried out. The Ministry urges all customers to report any violations to its Consumer Protec-tion and Anti-Commercial Fraud Department through the following chan-nels: Call Center: 16001, Email: info@mec.gov.qa, Social media accounts:

Twitter: @MEC_QatarInstagram: MEC_Qatar. Ministry of

Economy and Commerce mobile app for Android and IOS: MEC_Qatar.

MEC recalls Mitsubishi ASX models of 2011-13 Around 250 new graduate students

attended the 2017 Graduate Student Orientation Day. They got insight into the major policies that are crucial for new students such as class attendance, academic load, withdrawal, and probation or dismissal.

07TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017 HOME

The Peninsula

Three Qatar based journal-ists trained to write about mental health problems,

have started to contribute their work in creating awareness about dealing with mental health issues.

Individuals living with men-tal health issues continue to be misunderstood, discriminated against, and stigmatised by soci-ety. In the Middle East, a perceived lack of societal support and understanding for mentally ill people means that those deal-ing with mental health issues often suffer in silence or refuse treatment.

Established in 1996 by Ros-alynn Carter, the former First Lady of the United States, and administered by the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia, the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism programme provides expert training and sup-port for journalists writing about mental health from around the world.

The four inaugural fellows have now completed their year-long fellowships, during which they created a significant body of

work in both English and Arabic across a range of media. Their stories have now been added to the more than 1,500 authored by fellows since the program began.

Over the past 12 months, jour-nalists Aney Mathew, Tarek Bazley (of Al Jazeera English), Buthaina al Janahi (of Al Arab newspaper), and Kathy Hearn have written about a range of mental health-related topics, including dementia from a care-giving perspective, an integrated approach to autism, the progress Qatar has made in addressing mental health issues, and Qatar’s vision for mental health.

Those suffering from mental illness are frequently supported by family and friends who have to deal with the toll that caregiv-ing can take on their own lives. This issue was tackled by Aney Mathew through the work she undertook during her fellowship year.

Meanwhile, Tarek Bazley, Al Jazeera English’s Science and Technology Editor, used his time during the fellowship to develop the media organisation’s interna-tional best practices for reporting mental health stories.

QNA

The Ministry of Culture and Sports is taking part in the 69th edi-tion of Frankfurt Book Fair from October 11 to

15 with representatives of the ministry as well as a number of authors and writers, heritage researchers and a number of craftsmen, a painter and an Ara-bic calligrapher.

In a statement issued yester-day, the ministry said that the Qatari participation this year will be wider in order to celebrate the Qatar-Germany cultural year, with a number of Qatari entities, including Katara Prize for Arabic Novel and the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, taking part in the fair that is considered one of the world’s biggest in the field.

The Qatari pavilion will

present the Qatari intellectual production as well as a number of releases of Qatari institutions such as Qatar Museums, Al Jazeera Center for Studies, Muhammad bin Hamad Al Thani Center for Muslim Contribution to Civilization, and Hassan bin Mohamed Center for Historical Studies. In addition, there will be a dedicated place for herit-age events featuring a number of traditional crafts as well as a

calligrapher to highlight the beauty of Arabic calligraphy and a painter.

As part of the accompany-ing events, the Ministry of Culture and Sports, in coopera-tion with the State of Qatar’s embassy in Germany will organ-ise a seminar on October 15 on the integration and interaction between eastern and western cultures based on WestEastern Diwan by German poet Johann

Wolfgang von Goethe. The min-istry will also launch a book featuring short novels by Qatari writers translated into German.

Qatar has been participating in Frankfurt Book Fair since 2003 with the aim of enhancing intellectual communication between Qatar and Germany, building and developing new relationships with the publish-ing industry, boosting the

opportunities of knowledge and information exchange with major international publishers, and promoting communication between international publish-ing houses and Doha International Book Fair.

Frankfurt Book Fair is the largest cultural book event in which thousands of intellectu-als, authors, researchers and publishers participate from all over the world.

Qatar to participate in Frankfurt Book Fair

QNA

A training workshop on fighting terrorism financ-ing began yesterday,

organised by Qatar’s National Anti-Money Laundering and Ter-rorism Financing Committee (NAMLC) in cooperation with the National Anti-Terrorism Com-mittee (NATC).

A number of lecturers from the US Federal Bureau of Inves-tigation (FBI) will lead the five-day workshop, attended by representatives from different entities of law enforcement and financial and banking sectors.

The workshop addresses dif-ferent topics on terrorism financing and ways to prove it for prosecution. It also discusses investigation tools and its pro-cedures, in addition to gathering evidence and using advanced sources and techniques on the topic. The workshop will also touch on money flows, methods of gathering information, move-ment of funds, emerging financial technology and other related topics.

NAMLC Secretary-General,

Essa Mohammed Al Hardan, said the workshop is held in cooper-ation with the FBI with relevant entities invited to it, in hope that the workshop will contribute to strengthening the involved bod-ies and help develop mutual coordination and cooperation, which in turn will reflect at the national level.

In his opening speech, Al Hardan said the committee always hosts important work-shops and training sessions after the inauguration of the training center and providing all the required facilities.

In pursuit of strengthening the anti-money laundering and terrorist financing system, a training plan was developed to include all national entities to enhance efforts and implement regional and international enti-tlements, Al Hardan added.

NATC Rapporteur Lieuten-ant Khaled Ali Al Kaabi said the workshop is a continuation to the efforts the State of Qatar makes as part of the global sys-tem of fighting terrorism financing, to contain it and reduce its effects.

Al Kaabi said the workshop comes as continuation to the established cooperation and coordination between the State and the friendly United States in this field, which goes back to several years and include work-shops, agreements, letters of intent, memoranda of under-standing and most recently the memorandum of understanding

on fighting terrorism financing that was signed in July.

Al Kaabi expressed his con-fidence that the workshop will provide a good opportunity to the participants to share expe-riences related to strengthening global cooperation on the subject.

Meanwhile, FBI attache at the US embassy in Doha said the

workshop is a result of construc-tive cooperation between the State of Qatar and the US.

He said the workshop will also discuss the challenges and efforts exerted in the field of combating terrorism financing, expressing his gratitude to the entities that organized the work-shop, its lecturers and attendees.

FBI experts to speak at workshop on terror financing

Participants during the training workshop on fighting terrorism financing.

The Peninsula

Ooredoo announced yesterday that the company is once again

offering an amazing bundle deal for all customers want-ing to buy a Samsung Galaxy S8 or Samsung Galaxy S8+ device from Ooredoo.

The promotion, which was first launched in July, saw an amazing response from customers, and was designed to ensure that everyone who bought the new Samsung S8 device from Ooredoo had a full bundle of accessories ready to enjoy their device and the Supernet.

With the new promotion, anyone who purchases a Samsung Galaxy S8/S8+ from Ooredoo will receive QR 300 discount, a phone cover, wireless charger, Level U (Bluetooth headset), 15 GB Data Card (worth QR200) and screen insurance valid for one year. The super bundle is available in Ooredoo Shops until October 3, 2017 only and stocks are limited. Device prices start at just QR2,499 for the Samsung Galaxy S8 bun-dle, and QR2,849 for the Samsung Galaxy S8+ bundle.

Ooredoo offersbundle deal on Galaxy S8

The Peninsula

Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has strongly rejected the decision of

the Canadian Government that intends to impose illegal sanctions on Venezuelan sen-ior State officials.

A communique issued by the Ministry of Popular Power for Foreign Relations of the Bolivarian Republic of Vene-zuela and released by the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in Qatar terms the step as fla-grant violation of the objectives and principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, the OAS Charter, the international law and the rules that govern the friendly and cooperative rela-tions among the States.

Venezuela denounces these unfriendly and hostile measures before the interna-tional community, which violate, among others, the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of the States, and intends to under-mine the peace and social stability achieved in our coun-try after the installation of the National Constituent Assem-bly and the continued efforts made by the National Govern-ment in favour of dialogue and political understanding among the different sectors of our country. These sanc-tions aim at to undermine the efforts of the Venezuelan Government and opposition to engage on a dialogue sup-ported and accompanied by some members of the inter-national community.

Venezuela rejects ‘illegal sanctions’

Journalists create mental health awareness

The WISH team and 2016 Qatar-based fellows, with Rosalynn Carter, former US First Lady Rosalynn Carter, at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

08 TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017HOME

The Peninsula

Qatar Foundation (QF) recently held a guided art tour at Vir-g i n i a C o m m o n w e a l t h University School of the Arts in Qatar (VCUarts Qatar), kicking

off a new season of ‘Art Trail’, an ongoing programme that enables the public to view and learn more about the artworks located within Education City.

The tour offered the public a glimpse of the inspiring achievements of 20 VCUarts Qatar alumni whose multidisci-plinary creations were showcased in an exhibition titled ‘20/20/20’.

Art Trail caters to different age groups and interests and serves as a platform to inspire the community. It further aims to increase artistic appreciation and pro-mote local culture and artists.

Machaille Al Naimi, President of Com-munity, QF, said, “We are delighted to launch this new season of our popular ‘Art Trail’ guided tours. Qatar Foundation serves as a local hub for arts and culture and these tours invite the wider commu-nity into Education City as an open and welcoming public space, catering to peo-ple from all walks of life, united by a love for the arts.

“Our monthly tours showcase out-standing artworks by local artists who have drawn inspiration from their rich heritage. Visitors on the tours are able to gain greater insight into regional identity, while experiencing the unique

connection between art and their envi-ronment,” Al Naimi added.

Several of the 150 artworks owned by QF were acquired through the world-renowned ‘Percent-for-Art’ scheme, which ensures that one-percent of the cost

of large-scale development projects be allocated to fund and install public art.

Qatari artists with work located in Education City include Ali Hassan, Chair-man of the Youth Creative Art Center and the Girl’s Creativity Art Center; Yousef Ahmad, a pioneer of Qatar’s modern art movement; Salman Al Malik, who is widely acknowledged for his work in the field of ‘plastic arts’; and Moza Al Kuwari, an award-winning Qatari artist.

Education City, QF’s flagship devel-opment, is home to many arts and cultural centers, including Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, and Qatar National Library’s Heritage Collection, as well as the art galleries at VCUarts Qatar and the Education City Student Center. QF’s art collection is a valuable add-on to the country’s cultural efforts, and promotes Qatar as a leading player in the contem-porary art market.

The next guided Art Trail will wel-come the public to the ‘City Limits, and the Famous QF Headquarters’ exhibition at VCUarts Qatar. Those wishing to join the Art Trail should contact qftrail@qf.org.qa for a registration form. Once registered, interested participants will receive a confirmation email, including tour logistics.

QF launches new season of ‘Art Trail’ guided tours

Community members enjoy a guided Art Trail tour in Education City.

The Peninsula

Experts in the field of sus-tainability presented riveting talks this month at

Qatar Foundation’s homegrown academic institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU).

On September 13, the Uni-versity hosted David Hone, Chief Climate Change Advisor at Shell, who spoke on environmental sustainability and the road to low-emission energy systems. In the field of organisational and corporate sustainability.

HBKU also welcomed speak-ers from the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences on September 20, who talked about governance best practices in the airline and automotive industries.

Held in Education City, both

events showcased HBKU’s ongo-ing commitment to being an important voice in the sustaina-ble growth of the country, and its role in facilitating open dis-cussions and knowledge-sharing in the field.

Hone, who is an international expert in the field of energy, pre-sented a talk titled ‘A Better Life with a Healthy Planet: Pathways to Net-Zero Emissions’ to a packed auditorium at the HBKU Student Center. Master’s and doctoral students in attendance from HBKU’s sustainable energy and sustainable environment programs got the opportunity to engage with Hone at a question-and-answer session after his talk, and at a networking event that followed the seminar.

On September 20, HBKU

hosted experts from Germany’s Anhalt University of Applied Sci-ences, who presented two talks at a seminar titled ‘Corporate Governance in the Airline and Automotive Industries’. Anhalt University’s Dr. Cornelia Scott spoke on the role of the super-visory board in German corporate governance and Dr. Frank Himpel presented on stra-tegic coopetition in international contexts.

Using Volkswagen AG as a case study, Dr. Scott presented on company governance issues in the automotive industry and organisations’ roles in corporate social responsibility and sustain-ability. Dr. Himpel gave the attendees a deeper understand-ing of inter-organisational governance perspectives within

the airline sector. With an ever-increasing need for transparency and a commitment to sustaina-ble growth, the talks showcased an insightful and nuanced per-spective to corporate governance.

The events build on other academic initiatives and research conducted at HBKU. Students and faculty members pursuing the fields of sustaina-ble energy, environmental sciences and public policy issues, were given the opportu-nity to engage and share perspectives at these two events.

HBKU’s Maryam Al Mannai, who is the Vice-President of stu-dent affairs, said, “We are proud to be a facilitator of these discus-sions, and will continue to take on the responsibility of being a

thought leader in the field of sus-tainability. Now more than ever, we strive to embody and advo-cate sustainable practices, both

environmentally and organisa-tionally, as we continue to play an important role in achieving Qatar’s 2030 vision.”

HBKU hosts experts to share views on sustainability

Continued from page 1

A big difference between the two months were the size of deals, as June saw big ticket deals compared to January. Number of properties sold during January were 414 while in June 135 prop-erties were sold.

Among the municipalities, Doha and Al Rayyan were the most happening places in terms of deals as they witnessed 40 and

41 deals respectively in June. Some big ticket deals were signed in Bu Sidra area in Al Rayyan municipality. In the first week of June, a major deal of QR827m was done while in the third week of the month, a deal worth QR475m was transacted in Bu Sidra. In January Doha saw 135 deals while Al Rayyan had 87 deals in its share.

“The fundamentals of Qatar’s economy remain strong and the

firm real estate market confirms the strength of country’s econ-omy. The big ticket deals show that investors have full confi-dence in Qatar’s real estate sector,” said a senior official of a real estate consulting firm based in Doha told The Peninsula. “Qatar’s real estate is not dependent on foreigners as majority of investment is done by local residents. During the past few months, some major real

estate players announced the launch of new projects which shows that the market is unaf-fected by outside factors,” he added.

Recently there were some mega projects were also announced by the real estate players. Ezdan Holding Group announced, in July, opening of the first phase of Ezdan Oasis project for lease. The project is the larg-est real estate project in the

history of Ezdan Holding Group. United Development Company (UDC) had recently announced the signing of an agreement with Mohammed Al Hamad Al Mana Group for the sale of land plot located on the island at La Plage South district. The land will be used for the construction of a commercial mall, to be known as ‘04 Mall’, which is scheduled to open its doors to the public in the third quarter of 2018.

The Peninsula

Vodafone Qatar has launched two new 4G smartphones in its

award winning Vodafone Devices range, the Smart V8 and Smart E8. Both smart-phones use the latest Android Nougat operating system.

Vodafone Devices pro-vide great value enabling more Vodafone customers to access the latest mobile tech-nology and 4G mobile networks. Vodafone Devices are designed by the operator’s award-winning in-house team and incorporate some of the industry’s highest qual-ity standards. Vodafone Devices have increased speed and reliability by being tuned to work optimally with Voda-fone’s mobile networks.

The Smart V8 promises to be one of the best smart-phones released this year for people who want a great smartphone for using lots of data, but have a constrained budget.

The Smart V8 has already won a 2017 World iF Design Award for the premium look and feel, underpinned by its elegant and durable full-metal casing. Its powerful processor can stream media at speeds of up to 300 meg-abits per second (Mbps) over Vodafone’s 4G+ networks.

The Smart V8 also has top of the range features like a fingerprint sensor, 5.5” Full HD screen with reinforced 2.5D Dragontrail glass, high spec 16 megapixel (MP) rear and 8MP front camera with dual flash and 3000 milliamp hour battery.

The Smart E8 is a reliable device that provides a worry free experience offering around two days’ moderate usage before the battery needs charging and 3.44GB of available storage for pho-tos and videos that can be expanded by up to 128 GB using a microSD card. In addition, the Google photos app automatically uploads all photos and videos to the cloud, saving valuable memory.

The Smart V8 and Smart E8 is available in all Vodafone Qatar’s retail stores and Online store priced at QR799 and QR349 respectively. Moreover, to celebrate the launch of the devices, Voda-fone will be offering a free accessory with every device purchase. Diego Camberos, Commercial Director, Voda-fone Qatar said: “Vodafone Devices combine high qual-ity design and build quality, while making the latest mobile and Vodafone net-work technology available at a fair price for our customer base.”

Fazeena Saleem The Peninsula

Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar (VCUarts

Qatar) with an aim to meet the needs of the community, will introduce new study programs as the campus enters into the 20th year of academic excel-lence in the country.

The new programs are likely to include filmmaking and pho-tography, as well as a unique course on health and well-being, says Dr. Akel I. Kahera, VCUarts Qatar Dean.

“We are looking at respond-ing to the needs of the community. One of the things we are looking at is the possibility of extending one of our degree programs to include filmmaking and photography. Part of the

vision is that we are trying to capture the enthusiasm of Qataris, who may want to peruse a degree in filmmaking and pho-tography,” said Dr. Kahera.

“We are also thinking of expanding our fashion programs to fashion merchandising. But we have a deep interest in making sure the existing programs be strong, while we expand them,” he said speaking to media on the sidelines of the 20/20/20 exhi-bition being held to celebrate the success of the campus.

Additionally, in a new attempt, VCUarts Qatar is work-ing together with Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar and Texas A&M University at Qatar to develop the course ‘Designing for a Healthy Society’ for this spring.

“It’s interesting to work on a health and well-being program

as we are an arts school. But health effects all of us: how we eat, how our psychology, behav-ior and environment evolves into it, and how we convince people to eat a certain way matters here. There is a visual component to it. You see it, and you convince. Then the narrative, there is sort of technical information which translates how it helps your body, so we are working with WCM-Q and Texas A &M Qatar,” said Dr. Kahera.

Being the first US campus to open in Education City, at present VCUarts Qatar has 361 students and they represent a diverse range of nationalities with students coming from more than 40 different countries. Among them, 95 percent are female, 61 percent Qatari, 40 stu-dents have cross-registered at different campuses within

Education City. It has a student faculty ratio of 1:6.

The campus offers programs in Art History BA, Fashion Design BFA, Graphic Design BFA, Inte-rior Design BFA, Painting + Printmaking BFA and Design MFA.

VCUarts Qatar is the only campus within Education City to

have two female Qatari faculty, and them being VCU graduates makes it unique.

VCUarts Qatar is the Qatar campus of the Virginia Common-wealth University School of the Arts in Richmond, Virginia. It was established in 1998 through a partnership with Qatar Foundation.

Real estate market stronger despite siege

VCUarts Qatar plans degree programs on filmmaking and photography

Dr. Akel I. Kahera, Dean of VCUarts Qatar, in discussion about the work ‘All ways giving Bowl’ by Aisha Al Sowaidi at the 20/20/20 exhibition held to celebrate the success of the campus. Pic: Kammutty VP / The Peninsula

Vodafone Qatar launches Smart 8 devices

An expert speaks on sustainability at HBKU.

09TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017 HOME / MIDDLE EAST

Jordanian King Abdullah II shaking hands with military officers during an inauguration ceremony for the second and third phases of the Princess Salma military housing project in Zarqa, Jordan.

Jordan King visits housing project opening

Syrian forces to push IS out of Raqqa soonRaqqa

Reuters

US-backed militias expect to push all Islamic State fighters out of their

former Syrian headquarters of Raqqa in less than a month, a Kurdish commander said yesterday.

Under the banner of the Syr-ian Democratic Forces (SDF), the militias have hemmed the mili-tants into a few districts in the north of the city.

The Kurdish and Arab mili-tias pushed into the city in June after fighting for months to encircle it with the help of US-led jets and special forces.

“As the noose tightens, the reaction of Daesh gets fiercer,” said Jihan Sheikh Ahmed, spokeswoman for the Raqqa offensive, using the Arabic acro-nym for Islamic State. “In the coming days, the battles will be at their most intense...

“We expect, under our plan, that we will be able to liberate Raqqa in less than a month.”

Islamic State has lost much of its territory in Syria this year under separate offensives by the SDF and the Russia-backed Syr-ian military.

Its fighters have fallen back to its last major footholds, the cities and towns in the fertile strip along the Euphrates river downstream of Raqqa.

The SDF said last week that, after seizing 80 percent of Raqqa, the battle for the city had entered its final stages.

With the Kurdish YPG mili-tia at its forefront, the SDF has closed in from three directions. Islamic State militants put up tough resistance, planting scores of mines around their districts, Ahmed said.

SDF forces sought to “meet up from several axes” to squeeze the Islamic State enclave, said a field commander in the

northeast of Raqqa. Shefkar Hemo said his fighters had faced fewer mortar shells and car bombs recently, with the mili-tants relying more heavily on snipers.

“The breach of enemy lines is clear on the ground...Daesh are hiding behind civilians,” he said.

Another field commander in the city said the latest phase of the battle had proved difficult. SDF officials estimate that 700-1,000 Islamic State fighters are holed up in a pocket in the city. Ahmed said she did not expect them to sur-render and the SDF would never allow them passage out.

Palestinian PM to visit Gaza for reconciliationJerusalem

AFP

Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah will travel to Gaza on October

2 as part of a fresh push to end a decade-long split between Fatah and Hamas, which runs the enclave, his government said yesterday.

The visit follows conces-sions by Hamas after discussions with Egypt, which has urged it to take steps towards reconciliation with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah, based in the occupied West Bank.

Fatah and Hamas have been divided for a decade, with separate administrations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“Prime Minister Rami Ham-dallah has decided after consulting with President Mah-moud Abbas that the government will hold its weekly meeting in Gaza next week,” government spokesman Yusuf Al Mahmoud said in a statement published by official Palestin-ian news agency WAFA.

“Hamdallah and members of the government will arrive in Gaza next Monday to start taking over government responsibilities after Hamas announced its agreement to dissolve the administrative committee and enable the gov-ernment to assume its full responsibilities.”

Hamdallah, who is not believed to have travelled to the Gaza Strip since 2015, also wrote about the visit on his Facebook page.

“I am heading to the beloved Gaza Strip next Mon-day with the government and all bodies, authorities and secu-

rity services,” he wrote.“We hope all parties and all

Palestinians will focus on the national interest to enable the government to continue carry-ing out all of its functions in a way which serves the Palestin-ian citizens first.”

Hamas said a week ago that it had agreed to steps towards resolving the split with Fatah, announcing it would dissolve a body seen as a rival govern-ment — known as the administrative committee — and was ready to hold elections.

The statement came after Hamas leaders held talks with Egyptian officials and with the Gaza Strip facing a mounting humanitarian crisis.

It remains unclear whether the steps will result in further concrete action towards end-ing the deep division with Fatah.

Hamas for now continues to run a de facto separate administration in the Gaza Strip and is in charge of security forces there.

Previous attempts to resolve the split have repeat-edly failed. The last attempt at a unity government fell apart in 2015, with the two sides exchanging blame.

Hamas has run Gaza since 2007, having seized it in a near civil war from Fatah following a dispute over parliamentary elections won by the Islamist movement the previous year.

It formed the administra-tive committee in March, and since then Abbas has sought to put further pressure on the Islamist movement, reducing electricity payments for the Gaza Strip and cutting salaries for public employees.

The Peninsula

Omani Products Exhibition (OPEX) will begin today at Doha Exhibition and

Convention Center (DECC) under the sponsorship of Qatar Cham-ber, Oman’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Oman Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Oman’s Public Estab-lishment for Industrial Estates (PEIE) and Oman’s Public Authority for Investment

Promotion and Export Develop-ment (Ithraa).

The Qatari-Omani joint busi-ness council will convene, on the sidelines of the exhibition, dis-cussions on means of promoting trade cooperation between the two fraternal countries and dis-cussing more available opportunities as well as the pos-sibility of establishing joint ventures between the two sides.

Qatar Chamber Vice Chair-man Mohamed bin Ahmed bin

Tawar Al Kuwari said the joint business council will focus on developing cooperation between Qatari and Omani businessmen and following up on the out-comes of the Qatari-Omani forum that was held in Muscat in June and saw the two sides agree on boosting trade and investment cooperation between businessmen from both sides.

Qatar Chamber vice chair-man stressed the Chamber’s support for mutual cooperation

and enhancing commercial and economic ties with the Omani side, adding that it looks forward to more cooperation at the lev-els of investment and business, calling on Qatari and Omani business owners and investors to look into available investment opportunities in both countries and work on creating more projects that serve both economies.

He added that the Qatari commercial delegation’s visit to

Muscat in June led several Omani firms to come to Doha for invest-ment in Qatar, noting that the agreement that was signed in Muscat between the two cham-bers of commerce at that time paved the way for enhancing partnerships between the two sides. OPEX is one of the largest Omani exhibitions in the last seven years and aims to intro-duce the major Omani industries and displaying products in many fields.

Omani Products Exhibition begins today at DECC

Record 90,000 visit MIA’s Imperial Threads exhibition The Peninsula

The Museum of Islamic Arts’ (MIA) blockbuster exhibition, Imperial Threads: Motifs and Artisans from Turkey,

Iran and India, was viewed by record more than 90,000 visi-tors since its opening.

Due to popular demand, the exhibition has been extended to run until January 27. This is the last chance for visitors to dis-cover the exchange of artistic and material cultures between three neighbouring empires, pri-marily from the 15th to the 19th centuries.

Held under the patronage of Qatar Museums’ (QM) Chairper-son H E Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the exhibition shows a new element of MIA’s extraordinary perma-nent collection by highlighting the connection between three

major dynasties that marked the start of the early modern period in Islamic art — the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires.

The Imperial Threads exhi-bition also illustrates the cultural and artistic background of this time by featuring artefacts including carpets, manuscripts, metalwork and ceramics.

Demonstrating the vast cul-tural contributions of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires, another significant

exhibition on show at MIA is, Powder and Damask: Islamic Arms and Armour from the Col-lection of Fadel Al Mansoori.

Fadel Al Mansoori is the first Qatari collector to exhibit his pri-vate collection at MIA. The exhibition, which is running until May 12, presents edged weapons and firearms crafted primarily in Turkey, Iran and India from the 17th to the mid-19th century. It captures Al Mansoori’s passion for arms and amour, which

began seven years ago, and has since grown into one of the best examples of popular crafts-manship styles across the three empires.

Powder and Damask explores the art of craftsmanship, which reached unprecedented levels in these regions under the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires, where weapons were

valued not only for their intended purpose but as works of art as well. The objects featured as part of the collection are great exam-ples of the diverse styles and materials, such as ivory, horn, gold inlay and calligraphy, used to decorate weapons during this

time period.A range of educational pro-

grammes, workshops, activities and events continue to be organ-ised alongside both exhibitions, which will inspire engagement and provide enriching opportu-nities for the people of Qatar.

Due to popular demand, Imperial Threads: Motifs and Artisans from Turkey, Iran and India has been extended to run until January 27.

Some of the items on display at the exhibition.

Israel plans to build 2,000 settlement units in West BankJerusalem QNA

Israel’s High Planning Com-mittee of the so-called “Civil Administration” is

expected to approve next week a plan to build 2,000 new housing units in the West Bank settlements, according to the Haaretz newspaper.

The newspaper quoted an Israeli official as saying that the majority of what will be approved by the Committee is the projects which are still within the planning proce-dures, along with several tenders for immediate construction.

As part of the understand-ings with the US administration on curbing construction in the settle-ments, the High Planning Committee, which approves construction in the settle-ments, meets once every three months, according to the Israeli daily. The Israeli offi-cial pointed out that during the meeting of the Ministerial Council (Security Political), held yesterday, the ministers were informed that the post-ponement of the meeting several times was at the request of the White House, so as not to clash with politi-cal events during the meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations.

A fighter from Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) sits on a curb as he holds his weapon in Raqqa, yesterday.

Was it a pyrrhic victory for Angel Merkel in Germany? The euphoria over Merkel winning a fourth term in office has been tempered or to some extent nullified by the remarkable

performance of the racist, anti-Islamic and far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Sunday’s election. In a sense, the election showed a collective weakening of the secular, liberal parties and the stunning march of the far-right. The German chancellor’s centre-right Christian Democrat-led alliance took 33 percent of the vote, which was its worst performance since 1949 though enough to remain the largest party in parliament; the centre-left Social Democrats – Merkel’s partners since 2013 – also suffered a huge setback, taking just 21 percent, while the AfD walked away with 13 percent, making a grand entry into the Bundestag for the first time in almost six decades. Merkel now faces the tough task of finding one or more coalition partners to form a governing majority, or pursue a minority government. Social Democrats have ruled out another “grand coalition” with the CDU within hours of the first exit polls.

However, it will be premature to read too much into the performance of the far-right in the current election. AfD’s rise is more of a protest of Germans against Merkel’s liberal immigration policies rather than a permanent shift towards the right. Merkel had taken the

revolutionary step of opening her country’s borders to welcome more than a million migrants, mainly from Syria, while other European countries baulked and looked at her magnanimity with awe. Her decision created a backlash at home, with AfD using it to whip up anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic sentiments, which resulted in the election gains.

In several European countries, the racist, anti-immigrant parties have staged spectacular performances during the campaign but later lost their momentum. The heavy defeats of Wilders’ Freedom party and Le Pen’s Front National conclusively proved

that Europeans were not keen on pursuing populist and racist parties which talked hate rather than development. At the same time, there is no reason to think that they will go away and will continue to exploit the broader fears and disappointment of discontented voters across the EU.

The election is a message for Merkel to tread cautiously. She will be forced to forego some of her pro-immigrant policies, and even satisfy the far-right by veering a little to the right, which she has done during the campaign. A further tilt to the right will damage the values which Germany is known for. It’s one thing to garner 13 percent of the vote, but another to upend the policies of the state which it has followed for decades.

10 TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017VIEWS

E S T A B L I S H E D I N 1 9 9 6

CHAIRMANSHEIKH THANI BIN ABDULLAH AL THANI

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

editorinchief@pen.com.qa

ACTING MANAGING EDITORMOHAMMED SALIM MOHAMED

msalim@pen.com.qa

A lacklustre victory

QUOTE OF THE DAY

The UK will honour commitments we have made during the period of our membership, but it is obvious that reaching a conclusion on this issue can only be done in the context of and in accordance with a new deep and special partnership with the European Union.

Michel BarnierEU’s Chief Negotiator

A further tilt to the right will damage the values which Germany is known for. It’s one thing to garner 13 percent of the vote, but another to upend the policies of the state which it has followed for decades.

In the past few days, Qatar’s Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani made a surprise visit to Turkey. The Emir made his first overseas visit to Turkey after the Gulf Crisis and had a closed-door meet-

ing with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for 2.5 hours in Beştepe.

In the meeting, which was mainly about the latest situation in the current crisis, the regional and international developments and subsequent steps to be taken were discussed. The focus was on the necessity of finding solutions through diplomatic channels. The bilateral relations between Turkey and Qatar and possible improvements for cooperation in commercial, industrial and military fields were discussed. It is also stated that the latest situation in Syria and Arakan was assessed in the meeting.

In the following days, the visit began to bear fruit for both countries. A 3-year LNG (liquefied natural gas) trade agreement was signed between Turkey’s pipeline oil trans-portation company Botaş and Qatargas of Qatar. According to the agreement, Qatargas will transfer 1.5 million tons of LNG from Qatar to Turkey every year for 3 years. Qatar-gas Chief Executive Officer Khalid Bin Khalifa Al-Thani also stated that they desire the aforementioned commercial cooperation to last for many years.

As a matter of fact, the commercial rela-tions between Turkey and Qatar are steadily gaining momentum especially since the early 2000s. Qatar has made many big investments and secured important partnerships in Turkey in recent years.

Since 2015, the shares of many major and critical Turkish companies have been pur-chased by Qatari businessmen. With worldwide investment volume of 335 billion dollars, Qatar invested approximately 18 bil-lion dollars in Turkey. In 2016, Turkey exported 421 million dollars to Qatar while imports from Qatar amounted to 271 million dollars. The goal is to double this 700 million dollar trade volume. According to the Interna-tional Investors Association’s (YASED) 2016 report, Qatar ranks 7th among the countries with the highest investments in Turkey.

Likewise, Turkey is mainly active in the construction sector in Qatar. Stating that Qatar has a significant market potential for Turkish construction firms, Contractors’ Union Chairman Mithat Yenigün continued to note that in first quarter of 2017, Turkish companies undertook 128 projects totaling 14.2 billion dollars in Qatar.

Many major infrastructure, transport and structure constructions, including the Doha subway, are among these projects. In addition to this, it is expected that Turkish companies will undertake important projects within the scope of 170 billion dollar worth of invest-ments for infra/superstructure construction jobs for the 2022 World Cup which Qatar will host.

However, there is more to the Turkey-Qatar relations than the mutual and positive developments of the recent period. Qatar-Turkey relations is actually far from being just commercial and economic but

Qatar-Turkey friendship has strong historical foundationsHarun Yahya

goes a long way back and is based on a long-established friendship.

As it is known, Qatar was the last country to leave the Ottoman Empire in 1914. However, Qatar was always targeted by

the threats and attacks of surrounding states and tribes. In the face of such an attack, the great-grandfather of the cur-rent Qatar Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani requested help from the Ottoman Empire upon which the Otto-mans sent four Turkish flags to Qatar.

After these four flags were planted at four different points in Qatar, the pres-sure and attacks came to an end during that period. (“The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudia Arabia, and Qatar”, Frederick F. Anscombe, Colum-bia University Press, October 1, 1997)

Hence, today’s Turkish-Qatari rela-tions are based on such historical friendship, brotherhood and solidarity. As a matter of fact, it is not possible to forget the support and cooperation pro-vided by Qatar as a demonstration of this spirit of brotherhood after the coup attempt on July 15 in Turkey. Qatar’s Emir has shown to the whole world that Qatar is a true friend of the Turkish peo-ple by announcing their support for Turkish government immediately after this treacherous coup attempt.

Moreover, according to a report by Middle East Monitor, after the coup attempt, Qatar sent 150 members of their Special Forces to Turkey for the protection of President Erdogan. The Turkish Embassy in Qatar explained that

“this cooperation has strengthened the relations between the two countries”.

As expected, Turkey also took imme-diate action following the Gulf states’ embargo and sanctions on Qatar. Since the beginning of the crisis, Turkey mobi-lised aid for food, textile and any other urgent needs of the country. Currently, Turkey is doing its best to ensure that Qatar’s stocks of food and other con-sumption supplies are not lacking. Turkey coming to Qatar’s aid in less than 24 hours was extensively covered by the foreign media.

Citizens on the other hand shared the photos of Turkish products in market shelves with the message “Greetings Ottomans” in social media: An account named Khalid_AlSuliti shared photos of Turkish products in supermarkets, say-ing “Within 24 hours of our neighbours’ blockade, Turkish products arrived at our market shelves”. Sarah AlMuhanadi shared the message; “I always knew that Turkey was a friend of Qatar. But I did not expect so much love and solidarity from the Turkish people. Thank you Tur-key.” Television host Usame Caviş tweeted; “Things seem to have sim-mered down with the inclusion of Turkey. May God protect the people of Qatar“.

Turkey continues to make calls for dialog and reconciliation, as it has been from the very beginning, to end this meaningless crisis in the Gulf. It offers full support to Qatar by utilising all kinds of diplomatic contacts.

As you can see, the events that at first seemed malignant led to two old friends reconnecting and uniting their forces while strengthening their ties of friend-ship and brotherhood. From now on, these two important countries will con-tinue to cooperate and work under the roof of friendship and brotherhood for the peace and comfort of the region. It is our greatest wish that this beautiful spirit of love, unity and brotherhood set an example for all Muslims and envelop the entire Islamic world as soon as possible.

The writer has authored some 300 books in 73

languages on political, faith-related and scien-

tific issues which have been read by millions of

people, exerting considerable influence on both

Muslims and non-Muslims all over the world.

The Turkish-Qatari relations are based on such historical friendship, brotherhood and solidarity. As a matter of fact, it is not possible to forget the support and cooperation provided by Qatar as a demonstration of this spirit of brotherhood after the coup attempt on July 15 in Turkey.

ED ITOR IAL

A file photo of a ship from Turkey carrying approximately 4,000 tonnes of food arriving at Hamad Port in Doha.

11TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017 OPINION

island nations are terribly exposed on the front line.

Many people turn to religion, “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions …the opium of the people”. That might help give comfort but isn’t going to fix the problem. Climate change needs us to rethink, globally and locally. We need a new direction for public and private investment.

One immediate task is to spend more on get-ting people prepared. That means developing expert local humanitarian capacity, leading to bet-ter contingency planning, risk mitigation, education and awareness. This must involve vul-nerable communities. We already have policies and often even laws. But there’s a big gap in acting upon them - and a stunning absence of political will. Everywhere.

The Inter-American Development Bank’s new

The lies of the Catalan regional leader

After learning about the searches and arrests made on Wednesday morning by the Civil Guard at various Catalan government agencies, regional leader Carles Puigdemont called a news con-

ference to convey his position to the public opinion and the media. The gravity, but above all the false-ness of the accusations that he made, now force us to debunk them one by one, for the sake of rigor and freedom of information. We believe it to be a basic tenet of democracy that public authorities cannot lie to citizens with impunity.

• “The government of the Generalitat has today been the target of a coordinated aggression by the Interior Ministry’s police forces.” False: the searches and arrests conducted on Wednesday inside various government agencies were carried out by the Civil Guard, not on the orders of the Interior Ministry or of the Prosecutor’s Office – rather, it was on the order of the judge at Barcelona’s 13th investigative court, as a result of legal proceedings that began a long time ago. As such, the Civil Guard acted in its role of “judicial police.”

• The goal of the operation was to “suspend the activities of the (Catalan) government,” a govern-ment that holds “democratic legitimacy.” False. The Catalan government’s activities in all areas where it has devolved powers by virtue of the regional charter, the Estatut (education, health and so on), have not been suspended.

The Catalan government has no power to organise a secessionist referendum and it knows this; the Constitutional Court has informed it of this fact. So there has been no suspension of the Catalan government’s activities. On the other hand, while it is true that the Catalan government was appointed by a majority of the deputies who were elected at the regional election of

September 27, 2015, this kind of legitimacy (which does not even represent a majority of the people who voted that day) does not give them a man-date to repeal the Estatut or to organise activities that violate the law, as the Constitutional Court has also reminded the Govern. What defines a democracy is not the existence of majorities – all political regimes have them – but rather the fact that democracies cannot disobey the law with impunity.

• “This aggression lacks legal backing,” it “vio-lates the rule of law” and the European Charter of Rights, and is “a de facto suspension of self-gov-ernment and a de facto application of a state of exception.” It is all false.

The police intervention not only took place under the aegis of the judiciary, it was in fact ordered by the latter and has the backing of the Constitutional Court. It therefore falls within the boundaries of the rule of law, of which the independence of the judiciary is a basic pillar (in contrast with the aim of the breakaway laws that were dictated by the secessionist bloc and later suspended by the courts).

Nor can one say that Catalan home rule has been suspended, since nobody has invoked Sec-tion 155 of the Constitution, which would allow central authorities to temporarily intervene in Catalonia’s affairs. What’s not been applied either is the National Security Law, which would allow the government to take over all law enforcement agencies. There is no state of exception, because not a single civil right has been suspended, as shown by the freely exercised freedom of demon-stration on the streets of Barcelona to protest acts ordered by the judiciary.

• Various acts including “indiscriminate raids, even inside private homes” and other measures such as “the closure and blocking of websites” rep-resent “an assault on democracy.” False: the searches on Wednesday were not indiscriminate, they were individualised as part of the judicial police’s operation. And it was the prosecutor’s

office, following the Constitutional Court’s resolu-tions, that ordered the closure of a website that aimed to apply a law (passed on September 6 to facilitate the referendum) that had already been suspended by the Constitutional Court; the website provided details about the illegal ballot and instructions on how to carry it out.

• “We condemn and reject the totalitarian and antidemocratic attitude of the Spanish State” and after its actions “we consider that the (central) government has crossed the red line separating it from authoritarian and repressive regimes” and that “it doesn’t respect the chief elements of democracy.” This accusation is not new. Carles Puigdemont has previously argued that, politically speaking, Spain is like Turkey. But the reverse is the case: Puigdemont is, like Erdogan, the one who is shielding himself behind the majority, ignoring the separation of powers and breaking the law, violating the Constitution and the Estatut and using the institutions to push forward an illegal referen-dum without guarantees. Spain, a member of the European Union, is recognized as a democracy by all the relevant international organisations.

• “We citizens have been called to the polls on October 1 to defend democracy in the face of a repressive and intimidating regime.” False: the announcement of the ballot is not about defending democracy, but rather about the culmination of a project to repeal constitutional democracy, to repeal the charter of self-government; and to cause the fragmentation of the Spanish rule of law, as embodied in the suspended breakaway laws paving the way for a referendum and for the tran-sition to an independent republic, which were approved in the regional Catalan parliament on September 6 and September 8, 2017 inside a chamber that was half empty as most opposition deputies walked out in protest against the fact that their parliamentary rights were being denied. Intimidation has been carried out by secessionist groups, among them the radical left-wing CUP party, which has put up posters with photos of Cat-alan mayors and councilors who are in favor of

The hurricane season here in Haiti runs from June to Novem-ber. There are still two months to go. We keep checking the lat-est data from the US National

Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as it predicts more hurricanes. We’ve already had Harvey, Irma, Jose, Katia and Lee, now Maria. The World Meteorologi-cal Association has a list of names ready for those that could come next: Nate, Ophelia, Philippe, Rina, Sean, Tammy, Vince, Whitney. And so we prepare.

Scientists say this season is unusual for having two Category 4 and two maxi-mum Category 5 hurricanes in a single month.

In October last year, Category 5 Mat-thew hit more than a million people in south-east Haiti. This year, another Cate-gory 5 — Irma — threatened northern Haiti after having all but destroyed some of the smaller Caribbean islands. But Irma skirted Haiti and, as if reminding itself of its destructive sense of purpose, hit Cuba instead, devastating housing, infrastruc-ture and agriculture, and rebounding into Florida.

In Haiti’s northern municipalities, Oxfam, Unicef and the local health minis-try run a “fire-fighter” cholera elimination programme. Cholera is like wildfire. Oxfam teams work to isolate the case, set up a sanitary cordon, and then seek the source and treat the water. “The programme is finally achieving success,” says Laurence Desvignes, who coordi-nates the programme. “Zero cases here since July, and now just ten cases a week in the north, down from hundreds each week at the peak of the epidemic.”

There was a lot of cholera in the United States back in the 1800s. People become stricken with diarrhoea and dehydration. It’s a killer. Modern water and sewage treatments can stop it. The solution is not a mystery but it is incredi-bly difficult in Haiti because it has such poor water and sanitation. “If the hurri-cane had hit us hard it could have ignited another epidemic very easily,” says Desvignes.

Climate change is changing the game for us. Warmer Atlantic waters are super-charging these storms, making them more frequent and intense. Caribbean

The Hurricanes: Act now, save later

Risk Management Index measures countries’ capacity to reduce risk, recover from disaster and provide financial protection. Every country measured in this region has failed to reach even a satisfactory level.

The international community currently spends only 1 percent of aid on disaster preparedness. Since 2000, more than a million people have died in disasters. Recovering from them is costing us between $250bn and $300bn a year. The UNDP says that each dollar invested in disaster preparedness saves seven dollars in recovery. We know what to do. We just need to do more.

But what really causes the “disaster” is not wind or rain … its economic inequality. Haiti is less than 500 miles from Florida but may as well be on another planet. Haiti’s once prosperous rice production, its principal economic activity, has long-since collapsed after tariffs were stripped from 50 percent to 3 percent and subsi-dised US rice was able to be dumped onto its market. There are few jobs in Haiti, no social protection, safety nets or insurances. Haiti’s social and economic situation is one of the hemisphere’s biggest collective failures. This is why we end up fire-fighting cholera after a hurricane in Haiti.

This week — even as Hurricane Irma spared it - violence erupted on the streets of Port au Prince. Police sprayed tear gas at people. The spark was a new budget, approved by parliament on the eve of Irma, that voted in a 74 percent increase in salaries and benefits to members of parliament alongside new taxes on consumption that will hit the pock-ets of the poorest. That is a preparatory measure to guarantee a disaster.

Simon Ticehurst is the Oxfam Regional Director for Latin America

and Caribbean.

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compliance with democratic law.• “We are defending the right

of Catalans to freely decide their future” The assumption that Cat-alans currently cannot decide their future in free elections is false: they have participated in 35 fully democratic elections since 1977 (at the local, regional, national and European levels) and in three referendums (the ratification of the Spanish Consti-tution and, on two occasions, of the Catalan Estatut); they enjoy self-government; and the region’s parties are fully present inside the Spanish Congress and Senate (and in the European Par-liament, as Spaniards), as well as in many other public institutions.

• “What is happening in Cata-lonia isn’t happening anywhere else in the European Union” This is the only assertion by Puigdemont that is actually accurate. Unfortu-nately, in the European Union we have nationalist leaders in both Hungary and Poland who want to put an end to the separation of powers and revoke the systems of laws and liberties currently in force. Luckily, as is also the case with Catalonia, this type of behav-ior has no place in the EU.

This article is published in response

to the story carried on September

23 in the Opinion section of The

Peninsula: Catalonia is voting

whether you like it or not.

http://thepeninsulaqatar.com/

opinion/23/09/2017/

Catalonia-is-voting-whether-you-

like-it-or-not.

El Pais

Simon TicehurstAl Jazeera

A girl stands in a flooded area after Hurricane Irma hit Fort Liberte, Haiti.

One immediate task is to spend more on getting people prepared. That means developing expert local humanitarian capacity, leading to better contingency planning, risk mitigation, education and awareness.

12 TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017MIDDLE EAST / AFRICA

Turnout high as Kurds vote despite hurdlesErbil/Sulaimaniya

Reuters

Kurds voted in large numbers in an independence refer-endum in northern Iraq yesterday, ignor-

ing pressure from Baghdad, threats from Turkey and Iran, and international warnings that the vote may ignite yet more regional conflict.

The vote organised by Kurd-ish authorities is expected to deliver a comfortable “yes” for independence, but is not binding. However, it is designed to give Masoud Barzani, who heads the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), a mandate to negotiate the secession of the oil-producing region. Turnout was 76 percent an hour before voting closed, the Kurdish Rudaw TV station said, later adding that vote counting had started. Final results are expected within 72 hours.

About 5.2 million voters were asked to say yes or no to the ques-tion: “Do you want the Kurdistan Region and Kurdistani areas out-side the Region to become an independent country?”

For Iraqi Kurds — part of the largest ethnic group left stateless when the Ottoman empire col-lapsed a century ago — the referendum offers a historic opportunity despite intense inter-national pressure to call it off. “We have seen worse, we have

seen injustice, killings and block-ades,” said Talat, waiting to vote in the regional capital of Erbil, as a group of smiling women, in col-ourful Kurdish dress, emerged from the school showing their fin-gers stained with ink, a sign that they voted. At Sheikh Amir vil-lage, near the Peshmerga front lines west of Erbil, long lines of fighters waited to vote at a former school. Most emerged smiling, holding up ink-marked fingers.

In the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, Kurds sang and danced as they flocked to polling stations. Opposition to the vote has been simmering among the Arabs and Turkmen who live alongside the Kurds in the northern Iraqi city and there had been rumours that the vote would not take place in mixed areas. Officials later ordered an overnight curfew.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi ordered security serv-ices “to protect citizens being threatened and coerced” in the Kurdish region, after uncon-firmed reports that Arabs in a

small town in eastern Iraq were compelled to vote yes. Kurdish officials say no such coercion happened.

The Kurds also say the vote acknowledges their contribution in confronting Islamic State after it overwhelmed the Iraqi army in 2014 and seized control of a third of Iraq. But with 30 million eth-nic Kurds scattered across the region — mainly in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria — Tehran and Ankara fear the spread of sepa-ratism to their own Kurdish populations.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey could cut off the pipeline that carries oil from northern Iraq to the outside world, piling more pressure on the Kurds.

“After this, let’s see through which channels the northern Iraqi regional government will send its oil, or where it will sell it,” Erdogan said in Istanbul. “We have the tap. The moment we close the tap, then it’s done.”

The Iraqi army started “major manoeuvres” with the Turkish army at the border, the Iraqi defence ministry said, outlining coordinated measures by the two countries against the Kurds in retaliation for the referendum. Turkey later took the Rudaw tel-evision channel off its satellite service TurkSat, a Turkish broad-casting official said.

The US State Department warned the Kurds last week that “holding the referendum in dis-puted areas is particularly provocative and destabilising.”

Pentagon spokesman Colo-nel Robert Manning told reporters yesterday: “We hope that it does not become a distraction and take away the focus on destroying IS(Islamic State) and beyond that obviously this an issue for Iraq, you know, they are going to have to sort that out.”

The referendum is taking place not only in the Kurdish autonomous region of Iraq, but also in areas in the north of the country where Kurdish forces have advanced against Islamic State. These areas also have large

non-Kurdish populations.Iran announced a ban on

direct flights to and from Kurdis-tan on Sunday, while Baghdad asked foreign countries to stop direct oil trading with the Kurd-ish region and demanded that the KRG hands over control of its international airports and border posts with Iran, Turkey and Syria.

Opposition to the vote has emerged among non-Kurdish

populations in areas disputed by the KRG and Baghdad, mainly the oil-rich region of Kirkuk.

In Sulaimaniya, a centre for political groups opposed to Bar-zani, queues at polling stations were shorter than in Erbil. There were fewer billboards celebrat-ing the referendum, reflecting resentment that a yes vote could be seen as a plebiscite for the Kurdish leader.

TOP: A groom and a bride cast their votes at a polling station during Kurds independence referendum in Duhok, yesterday. MIDDLE: Iraqi Kurds arrive to cast their votes at a polling station in Erbil. BOTTOM: Women use their cellphones as they hold on to their IDs while arriving to cast their votes in Erbil.

Turnout was 76 percent an hour before voting closed. The vote counting had started and final results are expected within 72 hours.

Officials count votes after the close of polls during the referendum at a polling station in Erbil yesterday.

Dozens in court after pro-Biafra clashesAba

AFP

Sixty suspected members of a pro-Biafran group were remanded in cus-

tody yesterday when they appeared in court after clashes with the security services in southeast Nigeria.

The defendants, all said to be members of the Indig-enous People of Biafra (IPOB) movement, are charged with a string of offences, including attempted murder and terror-ism. Abia state police spokesman Geoffrey Ogbonna said the case before magistrates in the state cap-ital Umuahia was adjourned until October 25. No plea was entered.

The case is the second involving suspected IPOB members following the clashes earlier this month that were sparked by a build-up of troops in the southeast. Seven people were remanded in custody last week in the commercial hub, Aba.

IPOB wants an independ-ent state for the Igbo people who dominate the southeast region, reviving secessionist sentiment that led to a brutal civil war 50 years ago.

Sudan vows to normalise ties with US as travel ban liftedKhartoum

AFP

Sudan vowed yesterday to step up efforts to normalise relations with the United

States after Washington dropped the country from a list of coun-tries facing a US travel ban.

US President Donald Trump decided to remove Sudan from the list just days ahead of an October 12 decision when he is

to decide whether to perma-nently lift decades-old US sanctions on Khartoum.

The decision was “a positive development in the two coun-tries’ bilateral relations”, the foreign ministry said in a state-ment. It was a result of a “clear and long dialogue” and growing cooperation between the two countries in regional and inter-national issues, the ministry said. “The government of Sudan will

carry out more efforts to remove all obstacles to a full normalisa-tion of relations with the American administration,” it said.

Sudan was one of six Mus-lim-majority countries on the original list, and Trump on Sun-day ordered it to be dropped as he issued a new list under which eight nations now have complete or partial blocks on travel to the United States.

Full travel bans were placed on nationals from North Korea and Chad, while restrictions for Venezuela were limited to offi-cials from a long list of government agencies and their families.

Other countries included in the ban were Iran, Libya, Soma-lia, Syria and Yemen.

Sudan said it will monitor travellers heading to the United States from its airports.

“Sudanese authorities are professional and qualified enough to monitor who is trav-elling through Sudanese airports,” the ministry said.

The US has recently praised Sudan’s efforts in fighting terror-ism, and Trump is due to decide next month whether to perma-nently lift sanctions imposed on Khartoum in 1997 for its alleged support of Islamist militant groups.

Erdogan & Putin to meet in Turkey this weekAnkara

AFP

Russian President Vladimir Putin will this week visit Ankara for talks with

Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan set to touch on Iraq and Syria, both sides announced yesterday.

Putin will make a one-day working trip to Ankara on Thursday, the Kremlin and the Turkish presidency said, follow-ing a telephone call between the two men.

Ankara and Moscow have been on opposing sides of the over six year civil war in Syria, with Russia the key backer of President Bashar al-Assad and Turkey backing rebels seeking his ouster.

But while Turkey’s policy is officially unchanged, it has been working closely with Russia since the end of 2016 to bring peace to Syria and has cooled its attacks on the Damascus regime.

The Kremlin said that Erdogan and Putin emphasised that the implementation of a plan for four “deescalation zones in Syria” would open the way to an end to the civil war and the creation of a political settlement.

Turkish presidential sources said that Erdogan and Putin also discussed Monday’s non-bind-ing independence referendum in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region.

They both stressed the importance of preserving the

territorial integrity of both Iraq and Syria, the sources said.

Turkey is a leading oppo-nent of the poll in northern Iraq, fearing the vote could stoke sep-aratist aspirations among its own sizeable Kurdish minority.

But Russia has so far not come out explicitly against the referendum, emphasising the importance of preserving Iraq’s territorial integrity.

Ankara and Moscow went through their worst crisis in ties since the end of the Cold War when the Turkish air force shot down a Russian war plane over Syria in November 2015.

But relations warmed rap-idly following a reconciliation deal in 2016, and Erdogan and Putin have repeatedly met since.

Nigeria’s top Muslim cleric dies at 79LAGOS: Nigeria’s top Muslim cleric Sheikh Garba Akinola-Ibrahim died at a government hospital in the commercial city of Lagos, according to a local Islamic official.

Akinola-Ibrahim died at age 79 after a protracted ill-ness. He was until his death the chief imam of Lagos’ Mus-lim community, an office he took on July 30, 2000 after decades in the civil service.

Akinola-Ibrahim was a major Muslim preacher and a senior member of the Nigerian Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs, the country’s apex body for the estimated 100 million Muslim population.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks yesterday during a meeting in Istanbul.

Zimbabwe pastor on trial faces 20-year jail termHarare

Reuters

An activist pastor went on trial in Zimbabwe yesterday on charges

of attempting to subvert the government, following pro-tests last year against President Robert Mugabe’s handling of the economy.

Evan Mawarire faces a sentence of up to 20 years in prison if convicted, and even if acquitted could soon be on trial again.

The trial that began yes-terday stems from stay-at-home demonstrations he led last year through his #ThisFlag movement.

The social-media cam-paign urged citizens to speak out against economic prob-lems and government failure to pay workers.

On Sunday, Mawarire was arrested again for subversion as he stepped down from his pulpit.

Police accused him of cir-culating social-media posts that accused the government of wrecking the economy.

13TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017 ASIA

Modi announces 40 million free power connectionsNew Delhi

IANS

With an eye on the 2019 Lok Sabha elec-tions, Prime M i n i s t e r

Narendra Modi yesterday announced 40 million free power connections to the rural poor even as he declared that his battle against corruption was “uncompromising” and those indulging in graft cannot escape.

The announcement was made at a function after taking the BJP National Executive into confidence as over 2,000 dele-gates endorsed the government’s fight against terror and black money, GST, its pro-poor pro-grammes and lauded the handling of the Doklam military standoff with China.

The day-long meeting of the BJP’s National Executive, attended by Chief Ministers, MPs, MLAs and state unit chiefs, adopted a political resolution in which the vision of a “New India” was unveiled that included free-ing India of poverty, terrorism and separatism, casteism,

appeasement politics and cor-ruption while focusing on cleanliness.

Significantly, at the meeting held at a time of economic slow-down and concern over the lack of jobs, the political resolution nor any leader made any men-tion of these issues. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said that the macro economic indicators

during the last three and a half years have been fine but acknowledged that there has been a dip in growth in the last quarter and measures to address it are being taken.

From the Executive, Modi drove to the venue of a function where he announced a Rs 16,000 crore scheme under which free connections will be provided to rural households by March 2019. The connections will be provided at their door steps for which they need not to go after government officials.

In his valedictory address at the National Executive, Modi said the battle against terrorism would continue and disclosed that 90 hardcore wanted terror-ists have been deported to India from other countries.

“My battle against corruption will be uncompromising. Any-body caught in this cannot escape. I have no relatives,” Modi said. At the meet, the Prime Min-ister was hailed for bringing international focus on the role of Pakistan in sponsoring terror-ism against India and for the resolution of the Doklam mili-tary standoff with China.

The resolving of the Doklam crisis reflected the political and diplomatic maturity of Modi who had talked to Chinese President Xi Jinping and hailed his policy of neighbourhood first, accord-ing to the party’s political resolution.

“It was an extraordinary

success of the government,” Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari said, briefing the media on the political resolution.

The resolution hailed several decisions the government took in the last three and half years on economy, agriculture, terror-ism and international relations.

The one nation, one tax GST regime was hailed as the biggest economic reform since inde-pendence. Modi took on the opposition for criticism of his government saying “harsh lan-guage cannot be a substitute for any substantive charge against the government”.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (right) at the launching ceremony of Saubhagya scheme to supply electricity to poor households, in New Delhi, yesterday.

US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis is met by officials after arriving in New Delhi, yesterday.

Eye on 2019 polls

Significantly, at the meeting held at a time of economic slowdown and concern over the lack of jobs, the political resolution nor any leader made any mention of these issues.

“My battle against corruption will be uncompromising. Anybody caught in this cannot escape. I have no relatives,” Modi said.

Woman burned to death after leaving boyfriend

Mukul Roy to quit Trinamool

Retired judge to probe Jayalalithaa’s death

US defence chief in India to boost military ties

New Delhi

AFP

A father and son have been arrested in India for allegedly burning a

woman alive over a soured relationship, authorities said yesterday. The 18-year-old was beaten by her former boyfriend and his father before being doused in kero-sene and set alight in a district of Rajasthan state in western India, police said.

“She was attacked by the father-son duo and later burnt alive,” local police officer Manish Charan said. He said the woman was returning home when the pair accosted her late Saturday in a local market.

The ex-lover poured ker-osene on the victim, but she was unsure who set her ablaze, the officer said quot-ing her dying statement.

She died from severe burns in hospital on Sunday.

The woman’s family has accused the man of stalking her after the couple broke up some time ago. Reported crimes against women have risen dramatically in India in recent years and particularly following the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in New Delhi in 2012.

In a neighbouring Rajas-than district on Sunday, a 70-year-old woman was beaten to death by a villager who accused her of witchcraft.

Kolkata

IANS

Senior Trinamool Congress leader Mukul Roy, once the right hand man of West

Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, yesterday announced his decision to quit the party, which hit back by suspending him for six years.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) meanwhile denied that Roy was set to join its fold.

Addressing a hurriedly con-vened media meet here, Roy said he would resign as the pri-mary party member and also from his Rajya Sabha seat after the Durga Puja which concludes on September 30.

“With a heavy heart and pain, I am informing you that I have taken a principled deci-sion. I am not an office-bearer

in the party now... I will mail my resignation from the party working committee today itself.

“I’ll quit as Rajya Sabha member after the Durga Puja break. I will also quit my primary membership of the Trinamool after a few days,” he added. Refusing to divulge more details, Roy said he would explain the reasons for his decision later.

“Today is panchami. People of Bengal and in the rest of India are in a festive mood. People will not accept it if I say these things now,” said the former Railway Minister.

Roy, one of the founding members of the Trinamool, also recalled that he was the first sig-natory for the party on December 17, 1997, during the its formation process. Trina-mool officially came into being on January 1, 1998.

Hours after Roy’s announce-ment, the Trinamool slapped a six-year suspension on him for “indulging in anti-party activi-ties”. “For the past few years, he has been indulging in anti-party activities and trying to weaken the party from within.. to serve his own interest .

“Trinamool Congress disci-plinary committee has recommended punishment against Mukul Roy to the par-ty’s leader and chairperson Mamata Banerjee. Accordingly, Roy has been suspended for six years from the party,” said Tri-namool Secretary General Partha Chatterjee. Accusing Roy of “succumbing to the pressure of the central agencies” - a ref-erence to the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforce-ment Directorate probing the Saradha chit fund scam.

Chennai

IANS

The Tamil Nadu government yesterday said it has set up an inquiry commission

headed by retired High Court Justice A. Arumugaswamy to go into the death of late Chief Min-ister J. Jayalalithaa.

Chief Minister K. Palan-iswami had announced the government’s decision to set up an inquiry commission to be headed by a retired High Court judge to go into the death of the AIADMK supremo.

Ever since Jayalalithaa’s death, there have been hints of

foul play in her death, with crit-ics pointing fingers at her aide, the now jailed V.K. Sasikala.

The AIADMK camp of Dep-uty Chief Minister O. Panneerselvam had laid down a probe into the death as one of its demands before merging the faction with that led by Palaniswami.

Meanwhile, sidelined AIADMK leader and Sasikala’s nephew T.T.V. Dinakaran told reporters that his aunt has taken a video of Jayalalithaa as she was watching television in her hos-pital room.

Dinakaran said it was only Jayalalithaa who had asked

Sasikala to take the video.According to him, the video

could not be released to the media as Jayalalithaa was wear-ing a nightie after she was shifted from intensive care unit to a room.

The government’s decision to set up an inquiry commission comes couple of days after For-ests Minister C. Sreenivasan had sought people’s apology for “lying” about the health condi-tion of Jayalalithaa when she was admitted in Apollo Hospital. At a public meeting in Madurai, around 500km from here, on Fri-day night, Sreenivasan said: “We would have told lies that

she (Jayalalithaa) had idlis and people met her. The truth is that nobody saw her.”

PMK leader Anbumani Ram-adoss in a statement said only a probe by Central Bureau of Investigation could bring out the truth in Jayalalithaa’s death and urged the state government to issue orders for that.

According to him, the inquiry commission or the video taken by Sasikala side will not bring out the truth in Jayalalithaa’s death.

Ramadoss said there was no visible indication about Jayala-lithaa losing weight in Apollo Hospital.

New Delhi

AFP

Stronger military ties between India and the United States should not

affect relations with neighbours such as Pakistan, US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said ahead of a visit to New Delhi.

The Pentagon chief arrived yesterday for a 48-hour trip -- the first to India by any member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet.

“This is a historic opportu-nity for our two democracies at a time of strategic

convergence,” Mattis told reporters on his flight. He is to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his new defence min-ister in New Delhi.

The trip comes weeks after Trump unveiled a new Afghan-istan strategy and urged India to increase assistance to the war-torn nation’s economy.

The US president also chided Delhi’s arch-rival Pakistan for offering safe haven to “agents of chaos”.

When asked how he would balance the India-Pakistan dynamic, Mattis stressed that the relationship the United States is

pursuing with India is “not to the exclusion of other countries”.

“Any nation that is living by the traditional rules of non-inter-ference in other states in today’s age of anti-terrorism, they will not find this relationship in any way adversarial,” he said.

India has long vied with Pakistan for influence in Afghan-istan, building dams, roads and a new parliament in the troubled country. Last year it offered some $1 billion in aid.

Trump’s new Afghan strat-egy includes the deployment of more than 3,000 additional US troops.

NEWS BYTES

AHMEDABAD: Karnataka High Court’s most senior judge Jayant Patel, who had ordered a CBI investigation in the contro-versial fake Ishrat Jahan encounter case in Gujarat, yesterday resigned reportedly for not being elevated as Chief Justice. Patel, the senior-most puisne judge of the Karnataka High Court after the chief justice, sent his resignation letter to Chief Justice SK Mukherjee. It is believed Justice Patel, who was Acting Chief Justice of the Gujarat High Court before being posted to Bengaluru, resigned in a huff over his transfer to the Allahabad High Court, where he would be the third most senior judge. In fact, the Gujarat High Court Bar Association had even raised the non-appointment of Justice Patel with the Collegium and called it shocking.

Judge who ordered CBI probe in Ishrat Jahan case quits

Veteran scribe Arun Sadhu dead

Student drowns while taking selfie

MUMBAI: Veteran journalist and a left-of-centre liberal Mar-athi writer Arun Sadhu passed away here yesterday after prolonged illness. He was 76 and is survived by his wife Aruna, a renowned social worker, and daughters Shefali and Suvarna, a relative told IANS. Suffering from heart disease since long, he was rushed to the Sion Hospital on Sunday afternoon in a critical condition and admitted to the ICU there. Sadhu, who was put on ventilator, was ailing with a muscular heart con-dition, cardiomyopathy, and breathed his last around 4.45 a.m. yesterday. As per his last wish, there were no funeral services and his body was taken in a procession and donated to the Nair Hospital this evening. “Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed grief on the demise of noted writer and jour-nalist Arun Sadhu.

RANCHI: A Class 12 student drowned in a waterfall in Jharkhand yesterday after he slipped while taking a selfie, police said. Harshit Pandey, a resident of Daltanganj, had gone to the Sug-gabandh waterfall in Latehar district along with six friends, according to police. Harshit and three more boys went in the fall to take a bath. Harshit was taking selfie on a elevated por-tion of the waterfall when he lost balance and fell in the water and drowned. His friends somehow managed to fish out his body, police said. Two months ago, two youths had drowned in Ranchi while taking selfie in a waterfall.

14 TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017ASIA

North Korea says US declared war Beijing

Reuters

North Korea’s foreign minister said yester-day that President Donald Trump had declared war on

North Korea and that Pyongyang reserves the right to take coun-termeasures, including shooting down US bombers even if they are not in its air space.

“The whole world should clearly remember it was the US who first declared war on our country,” Foreign Minister Ri- Yong-Ho told reporters in New York.

“Since the United States declared war on our country, we will have every right to make countermeasures, including the right to shoot down United States strategic bombers even when they are not inside the air-space border of our country,” Ri said.

“The question of who won’t be around much longer will be answered then,” Ri said in a direct reference to a Twitter post by Trump on Saturday.

The increasingly heated rhet-oric between Trump and North Korean leader Kim-Jong-Un is raising fears of a risk of a mis-calculation by one side or the other that could have massive repercussions.

China called yesterday for all sides in the North Korea missile crisis to show restraint and not “add oil to the flames.”

Ri told the UN General Assembly on Saturday that tar-geting the US mainland with its

rockets was inevitable after “Mr Evil President” Trump called Kim a “rocket man” on a suicide mission.

“Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at UN. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!” Trump said on Twitter on Saturday.

North Korea, which has pursued its missile and nuclear programmes in defiance of international condemnation and economic sanctions, said it “bitterly condemned the reckless remarks” of Trump. They were an “intolerable insult to the Korean people” and a declaration of war, the North’s official news agency said yesterday.

Pyongyang accuses the United States, which has 28,500 troops in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean war, of planning to invade and regularly threatens to destroy it and its Asian allies. The United States and South Korea are technically still at war with North Korea because the 1950s conflict ended with a truce, not a peace treaty.

US Treasury yields fell to ses-sion lows after Ri’s comments

yesterday.In an unprecedented direct

statement on Friday, Kim described Trump as a “mentally deranged US dotard” whom he would tame with fire.

Kim said North Korea would consider the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure in his-tory” against the United States and that Trump’s comments had confirmed his nuclear pro-gramme was “the correct path”.

Trump threatened in his maiden UN address last Tuesday to “totally destroy” the country of 26 million people if North

Korea threatened the United States or its allies.

Asked how concerned China was with the war of words between Trump and North Korea could get out of control, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang described the situation as highly complex and sensitive.

It was vitally important eve-ryone strictly, fully and correctly implemented all North Korea related UN resolutions, Lu said, resolutions which call for both tighter sanctions and efforts to resume dialogue.

All sides should “not further

irritate each other and add oil to the flames of the tense situation on the peninsula at present”, Lu told a daily news briefing.

“We hope all sides do not continue doing things to irritate each other and should instead exercise restraint.”

Speaking to British Prime Minister Theresa May by tele-phone, Chinese President Xi Jinping repeated Beijing’s posi-tion that the North Korean issue should be resolved peacefully via talks, state media said.

China hopes Britain can play a constructive role in easing the

situation and pushing for a resumption in talks, Xi said. May, like some other US allies, has pushed for China to do more on North Korea.

Downing Street said the two leaders agreed there was a par-ticular responsibility for China and Britain, as permanent Secu-rity Council members, to help find a diplomatic solution.

North Korea conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear bomb test on September 3. Pyongyang said on Friday it might test a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean.

While China has been angered by North Korea’s repeated nuclear and missile tests, it has also called for the United States and its allies to help lessen tension by dialling back their military drills.

U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer bombers escorted by fighters flew in international airspace over waters east of North Korea on Saturday in a show of force the Pentagon said indicated the range of military options avail-able to Trump. In response to a question about the exercises, Chinese spokesman Lu said: “A continued rise in tensions on the peninsula, I believe, is not in the interests of any side.”

Wang Jingdong, president of the world’s largest lender Indus-trial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), told reporters dur-ing a briefing the bank will “strictly implement U.N. Secu-rity Council decisions related to North Korea and carefully fulfil r e l e v a n t i n t e r n a t i o n a l responsibility”.

North Korean Foreign Minister Ri-Yong-ho leaves his hotel in New York yesterday.

China called yesterday for all sides in the North Korea missile crisis to show restraint and not “add oil to the flames.”

Manila

AP

The Philippines said yes-terday it respects Malaysia’s decision to

dissociate itself from a state-ment on Myanmar’s Rakhine state issued by Foreign Sec-retary Alan Peter Cayetano as chairman of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean).

Malaysia’s Foreign Min-ister Anifah Aman said Sunday that Malaysia was dissociating itself from the statement because it misrep-resents the reality of the situation, omits reference to Rohingya Muslims as one of the affected communities and was not based on consensus — a rare public spat in Asean, which prides itself in its unity and decisions by consensus.

Manila’s Department of Foreign Affairs said the Phil-ippines, as Asean chair, issued the statement taking into account sentiments of others in the 10-member regional bloc and after extensive con-sultation with Malaysia.

“Asean is deeply con-c e r n e d a b o u t t h e humanitarian situation in the northern Rakhine State and since Malaysia has different views on some issues, out of respect for its position, we decided that instead of a For-eign Ministers Statement, we would issue a Chairman’s Statement that would reflect the general sentiments of the other foreign ministers,” the DFA said in a statement.

As this year’s Asean Chair, the Philippines is allowed a certain level of flexibility in formulating the Asean chair-man’s statement on various issues, it added.

Manila accepts Malaysia’s rejection of Asean remark

17 bodies of Hindus found in another Myanmar mass graveYangon

AFP

Searchers yesterday found 17 more bodies in mass graves in Myanmar’s

Rakhine state, the government said, a day after the bodies of 28 Hindu villagers were exhumed in what the army says is evi-dence of a massacre by Muslim Rohingya militants.

Northern Rakhine has been ravaged by communal violence since Rohingya insurgents staged deadly raids on police posts on August 25, unleashing an army crackdown that has displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians.

The vast majority — more than 430,000 — are Rohingya Muslims who have fled across

the border to Bangladesh from a military campaign which the UN says likely amounts to eth-nic cleansing.

But tens of thousands of eth-nic Rakhine Buddhists, and the region’s small population of Hin-dus, have also bolted from their homes, saying they were attacked by Rohingya militants.

On Sunday, the army said it had discovered two mud pits filled with 28 Hindu corpses — mostly women and children — outside the village of Ye Baw Kyaw in northern Rakhine.

The military blamed the kill-ings on Rohingya “extremist terrorists”.

Seventeen more bodies were found yesterday, said govern-ment spokesman Zaw Htay.

Ni Maul, a Hindu leader who joined the search alongside sol-diers and police, said the new corpses were of Hindu men aged between 30-50 and buried in two pits near the other grave sites.

“We are still searching together with soldiers and police as we believe more than 100 people were killed at that time,” he said.

Displaced Hindus from that area, known as Kha Maung Seik, have told AFP that Rohingya fighters stormed into their com-munities on August 25, killing many and taking others into the forest. They showed a list of 102 people from two villages — Ye Baw Kyaw and Taung Ywar — who are feared dead by distraught relatives now

sheltering in camps. Several Hindu women were also abducted by the militants,

according to the displaced Hin-dus, who wept as they recounted the bloodshed.

Beijing

AFP

An official who was mayor of a northern Chinese city when a

massive chemical explosion killed at least 165 people was yesterday sentenced to 12 years in prison for graft, state media said.

Huang Xingguo, 62, headed the response commit-tee after the explosion rocked Tianjin in August 2015 and devastated a huge swathe of the port city.

He was also acting party chief of the municipality at the time. Huang was sen-tenced for taking bribes of over 40 million yuan ($6m) and fined three million yuan, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The report did not men-tion the Tianjin disaster.

Refugees should not be moved: UN Dhaka

AFP

Bangladesh must not force Rohingya Muslims who have fled Myanmar to

move to camps on a desolate island, the UN refugee chief said yesterday.

Authorities have stepped up moves to house the Rohingya on the island in the Bay of Bengal since a new surge which now totals 436,000 refugees started arriving on August 25.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had mentioned the relocation plan when they met in July. There were already 300,000 Rohingya in camps near the bor-der at Cox’s Bazar before the latest influx started.

But he insisted that any move from the camps to Bhashan Char island — also known as Thengar Char — “has to be voluntary on the part of the refugees”.

“We cannot force people to go to the place. So the option for the medium term, let’s say — I don’t want to talk about long-term — has to be also something that is acceptable to the people that go there,” he said.

“Otherwise it won’t work.

Otherwise people won’t go.”The United Nations has

praised Bangladesh for taking in the Rohingya, who fled a mili-tary crackdown in Myanmar. It has appealed for international help for the authorities.

“It is good to think ahead.

These people (Rohingya) may not be able to go back very quickly and especially now the population has now doubled,” Grandi told a Dhaka press briefing.

The UNHCR chief said his agency was ready to help the island plan with a “technical study of the options.

“That’s all that we are ready to give. We are not giving it yet because I have not seen any con-crete options on any paper.”

The small island in the estu-ary of the Meghna river is a one-hour boat ride from Sand-wip, the nearest inhabited island, and two hours from Hatiya, one of Bangladesh’s largest islands.

The government has tasked the navy with making it ready for the Rohingya. Two helipads and a small road have been built.

The authorities first pro-posed settling the Rohingya there in 2015, as the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar became overstretched.

A Rohingya woman poses for a photo along with a little girl and two babies at a makeshift camp in Teknaff, Bangladesh, yesterday.

Bangladeshi soldiers distribute rice to young Rohingya refugees at the refugee camp of Balukhali near Gumdhum, yesterday.

Former Tianjin mayor gets jail term for graft

15TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017 ASIA

Spectators cheer during the dragon boat race in Thailand’s southern province of Narathiwat. The annual three-day rowing festival includes teams from Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Cheering the rowers

An Afghan health worker administers the polio vaccine to a child during a vaccination campaign in Herat yesterday.

Polio campaignJapan PM to dissolve House for early pollsTokyo

Bloomberg

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (pictured) said he’ll dissolve the lower house of parliament on Sep-tember 28 for a general

election as he announced an $18bn economic package.

At a press conference yes-terday, Abe unveiled a slew of economic measures including more education spending. He said he’d pay for them with funds from a consumption tax increase originally intended to rein in the nation’s swollen debt. He also spoke about the need to keep up pressure on North Korea after Kim Jong Un’s regime fired two missiles over Japan in recent weeks.

“To increase investment in future generations, I decided today to change the way we had promised to use the sales tax,” Abe said. “I am changing a pledge that was made to the public, and one that affects peo-ple’s livelihoods, so I must swiftly seek the will of the people.”

Election DateVoting will be set for Octo-

ber 22, according to three people with knowledge of his ruling coalition’s plans. Heightened tensions with North Korea have boosted Abe’s approval rating after a series of scandals, and may help him retain his coali-tion’s two-thirds majority in the lower house of parliament.

“An election in these cir-cumstances will also be a test of confidence in me,” Abe said, adding that he’d resign if his rul-ing coalition failed to get a simple majority.

The yen pared a drop as Abe unveiled the stimulus package and called the election.

Ahead of Abe’s remarks, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike announced that she would form a new national party to chal-lenge him. Koike, a former member of Abe’s Liberal Dem-ocratic Party, said yesterday that her “Party of Hope” would run

candidates across the nation.Abe announced yesterday

he had ordered a 2 trillion yen ($18bn) economic package, including spending on preschool and higher education, as well as improving conditions for peo-ple working in elderly care. The premier said he would make use of revenues from a planned increase in the nation’s con-sumption tax in October 2019 to 10 percent from 8 percent now.

He reiterated his strong line on North Korea, saying the cur-rent situation on the Korean Peninsula was among his rea-sons for calling the election.

“Elections, which are the foundation of democracy, must not be affected by North Korea’s threats,” he said. “By holding an election at this time, I want to ask the people’s view on how we are dealing with North Korea.” Following the announcement, public broad-caster NHK said LDP Vice President Masahiko Komura wouldn’t stand in the election, without providing a reason.

Opinion PollsA poll published in the

Nikkei newspaper yesterday said Abe’s LDP received 44 per-cent of support, compared to 8 percent for both Koike’s group and the main opposition Dem-ocratic Party. Another survey by Kyodo News published on Sun-day showed the LDP with a more than three-to-one margin against its closest rival, with 42 percent still undecided.

UN taps superheroine Burka Avenger to fight terrorismKuala Lumpur Reuters

She has already captured hearts across Asia by taking on corrupt politicians and

fighting bad guys who tried to shut girls’ schools – and now even the United Nations has been wowed by a superheroine whose only weapons are pens and books.

Move over Superman and Batman. Here comes Pakistan’s superheroine Burka Avenger who might soon be spreading her message of peace and tolerance on behalf of the UN.

The Emmy-nominated ani-mated TV series has won global accolades since its 2013 launch, with its female protagonist — a teacher called Jiya — putting on the Islamic veil at night and transforming into an all-action heroine to tackle social ills.

Now the UN is seeking to tap

her popularity as it ramps up a campaign that emphasises wom-en’s role in peacebuilding to combat extremism.

“We have a lot of shared goals,” the series’ creator, Paki-stani pop star Haroon Rashid, told the Thomson Reuters Foun-dation by phone from Islamabad. “The whole concept (of Burka Avenger) came about because I was reading about girls’ schools being shut down and bombed by extremists, and women and girls are threatened with violence. That’s why the superheroine was created,” he said. Rashid will be speaking at a UN Women con-ference in the Thai capital Bangkok this week which will look at using creative approaches to promote women’s role in peacebuilding.

Although there is no official partnership yet, the UN agency and Rashid both said they were keen to explore collaboration,

including by making Burka Avenger an ambassador.

“Burka Avenger can be a great messenger not only for women’s issues but because it’s animation, you can highlight very sensitive issues, it makes them (appear) softer,” Rashid said. Burka Avenger was launched first in Pakistan, then Afghanistan, India and this year in Indonesia. It has been pro-duced in different languages including Urdu, Tamil, Hindi, Pashto and Indonesian.

The series has won numer-ous accolades, including the Peabody Award, International Gender Equity Prize and the Asian Media Award, while the protagonist Jiya was named one of the most influential fictional characters of 2013 by Time magazine.

Orphaned as a child, Jiya was adopted by a master of a mystic martial art called Takht Kabaddi,

which uses pens and books as weapons to take on enemies.

There has also been debate over Jiya’s choice of disguise, the burqa. The all-encompassing veil has typically been viewed as symbol of female repression in the West but the cartoon presents it in a different light, as a symbol of female empower-ment. UN Women Asia-Pacific

head Miwa Kato said cartoons can help prevent extremism from a young age.

“We often look to law enforcement to prevent extrem-ism but it starts very early from a child’s age, through TV and entertainment,” Kato told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“A girl and superhero using pens and books as weapons can make us start having a conver-sation, at home or in schools.”

Burka Avenger is set for more launches in Asia — includ-ing Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Brunei, Singapore and Bangladesh — but after four seasons and 52 episodes, Rashid said he has no plans to work on new episodes immediately although he is planning a full-length feature film.

“We believe that will help spread the message on a larger scale, to a larger audience,” the pop star said.

Philippines assures Vietnam of fair probe into deaths of two fishermen Manila

Reuters

The Philippines has assured Vietnam of a fair and thor-ough investigation into

the deaths of two of its fisher-men during a sea chase incident at the weekend, during which warning shots were fired by a navy ship.

Two crew died and five were arrested on Saturday about 48km off Pangasinan, northwest of Manila, after the navy cor-vette encountered Vietnamese vessels deep in the Philippines’ 200 nautical mile exclusive

economic zone, according to its foreign ministry.

Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano made the assurance to his Vietnamese counterpart in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

“We would like to offer our sympathies over the unfortunate loss of life and give you our assurance that we will conduct a fair and thorough investiga-tion into this matter,” Philippine Foreign Ministry spokesman Robespierre Bolivar told report-ers yesterday, quoting Cayetano.

The Philippines and Vietnam

have been close diplomatic allies when it comes to the South China Sea, most of which is claimed by China. Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also have claims.

Yesterday, Vietnam’s foreign ministry said it had received information from the Philip-pines and was investigating.

Vietnam protested violence against fishermen of any kind, it added, asking the Philippines to notify it soon of the official results and to take serious meas-ures if there were violations by Philippine authorities, the state-ment said.

Kuala Lumpur Reuters

The Philippines has banned companies from forcing female employees to wear

high heels at work, in a move lauded by a labour union yester-day which said it was one of the first countries in the world to do so to protect women’s rights.

Citing health and safety issues, the Philippines’ labour department said companies can no longer compel women to wear high heels, after four women lodged a complaint to a labour union which took the matter to the authorities.

The department issued the order earlier this month and the union said it would officially

take effect on September 29.“This is good,” Alan Tan-

jusay from the Associated Labor Unions-Trade Union Congress of the Philippines, which spear-headed the policy change, told the Thomson Reuters Founda-tion by phone from Manila.

“This frees women from a sexist policy and the bondage of unsafe and dangerous work-ing conditions.” The union spokesman said he believed the Philippines is the first country to impose a nationwide ban after the Canadian province of British Columbia issued a sim-ilar order in April this year.

The union spokesman said the practice of ordering women to wear high heels is wide-spread across the Philippines.

High heels not must in Philippine offices

Ahead of Abe’s remarks, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike announced that she would form a new national party to challenge him.

Burka Avenger is set for more launches in Asia — including Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Brunei, Singapore and Bangladesh — but after four seasons and 52 episodes, Rashid said he has no plans to work on new episodes immediately.

Indonesian militant jailed for life over church attackJakarta

AFP

An Indonesian extrem-ist who carried out a deadly attack on a

church with a group of mili-tants loyal to the Islamic State (IS) group was jailed for life yesterday.

Juhanda, who like many Indonesians goes only by one name, was found guilty of an act of terrorism that killed a toddler and hurt three other small children on Borneo island last November.

“The defendant has been proven guilty of committing a terrorism act,” Judge Surung Simanjuntak, from the East Jakarta Court, said.

Prosecutors said Juhanda travelled to the Protestant church in the city of Sama-rinda by motorbike, intending to carry out the attack.

But instead he fell from the bike and detonated a Mol-otov cocktail in front of the church where the youngsters, aged between two and four, had been playing.

Two-year-old Intan Olivia Marbun was killed in the blast.

Juhanda was arrested along with four others, with all five accused of belonging to the Jamaah Ansharut Daulah group (JAD), a local militant outfit that supports IS. One of his co-conspirators, Joko Sugito, was jailed yes-terday for seven years for his part in the attack.

The three other defend-ants involved in the case have received prison sentences ranging from six years to six years and eight months in prison.

16 TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017EUROPE

Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May welcomes her Irish counterpart Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to Downing Street in London, yesterday.

Theresa May receives Irish counterpart

People enjoy the view from a pedestrian bridge in the newly-opened Zaryadye Park, with the Kremlin’s towers and the main building of the Russian Foreign Ministry seen in the background, as the sun sets in downtown Moscow, yesterday.

Sunset view of Kremlin

Madrid

AFP

Spain’s chief public prosecutor refused yesterday to rule out the arrest of Catalan president Carles Puig-

demont for pushing ahead with an independence referendum deemed illegal by Madrid.

“Legally the conditions may be met” for Puigdemont’s arrest, Jose Manuel Maza said during an interview with radio Onda Cero.

“It’s a decision that is pos-sible but we have not considered that we should take it,” he added.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy as repeatedly said that the referendum slated for Octo-ber 1 — which his conservative party insists is illegal and unconstitutional — will not take place, and the legislation underpinning the vote has already been suspended by Spain’s Constitutional Court.

Spanish prosecutors have warned that officials engaged in any preparations for the plebiscite could be charged with civil disobedience, abuse of office and misuse of public funds. Maza said Puigdemont could be arrested for misuse of public funds, as this crime car-ries a jail sentence.

Prosecutors have also told police to investigate any efforts to promote the referendum and ordered a criminal investiga-tion of over 700 Catalan mayors who have pledged to cooper-ate with the vote.

Police on Monday sum-moned 17 people for allegedly developing web platforms ded-icated to the banned referendum. Puigdemont, a

former journalist and provin-cial mayor, regularly tweets links to the websites, which tell Catalans where they can vote in the referendum.

He has said he is ready to go to prison rather than give up his push for independence.

Key members of the team organising the vote have been put under official investigation for disobedience, malfeasance and embezzlement of public funds. Organisers of protests last week have been threatened with charges of sedition.

And police have seized close to ten million ballot papers, as well as other items destined for the vote. But Cata-lonia ’s pro-separat is t government has vowed to go ahead with the referendum.

If the “yes” side wins it has said it would declare independ-ence within days for the wealthy northeastern region of Spain, home to about 7.5 mil-lion people.

Polls show Catalans are split on the issue of independ-ence, but a large majority want to vote in a legitimate referen-dum to settle the matter.

London

AP

A lawyer representing a suspect accused of kid-napping a British

model says the entire case may have been fabricated as a publicity stunt.

The case involves British model Chloe Ayling, who said in August she had been lured to Milan for a phony photo shoot, then drugged, stuffed into a suitcase and held by criminals who offered to auc-tion her online unless her agent payed a ¤300,000 ($355,000) ransom. The scheme was said to have been carried out by a little-known group called “Black Death.”

One suspect, 30-year-old Lukasz Herba, is in custody in Italy, having been arrested after delivering Ayling to the British Embassy on July 17, six days after she was reportedly kidnapped. He denies wrongdoing.

His brother, Michal Herba, was in Westminster Magis-trates Court yesterday fighting extradition to Italy. His law-yer, George Hepburne Scott, said there were numerous problems with the case that suggest the model’s claims were fabricated.

Scott said “there is a real risk that the entire case is a sham” that fooled Italian detectives.

Brussels

AFP

Poland’s president yester-day unveiled plans to give himself more power over

the judiciary, as the EU warned that Warsaw still risked unprec-edented sanctions over what it calls a threat to the rule of law.

Andrzej Duda presented his own version of laws in place of government reform proposals he vetoed in July, to the surprise and dismay of the ruling Law and

Justice (PiS) party. “I have a pro-posal: I’ve prepared a bill to amend the constitution,” Duda told reporters.

But the EU says all the Polish reforms pose a “systemic threat” to the rule of law, with Brussels having warned it could go for a so-called “nuclear option” of freezing Poland’s voting rights within the bloc.

The proposals have led to mass street protests in Poland and prompted Polish freedom icon Lech Walesa to express

concern about his country’s fate in Europe. After a meeting with European affairs ministers from the 28-nation bloc to discuss the problem, European Commission Vice President Frans Timmer-mans said they were united in their concern.

“We will study very carefully the amended proposals announced by president Duda this morning, we will make our comments on that once we have analysed it,” Timmermans said.

“But apart from those two

drafts there are other worries we have... there’s still a lot we need to do before we can say that the problem has been solved,” he said. Timmermans added that the concerns over Poland went right to the heart of what the EU does as an organisation, “because if the rule of law doesn’t function well, the inter-nal market can’t function well.”

Timmermans, the right-hand man to European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker, has been leading efforts for months

to get Poland to comply with EU democracy standards.

If Warsaw fails to halt the measures, the commission -- the EU’s powerful executive arm -- has also warned it could trigger Article Seven of the EU’s treaties, which could eventually suspend Poland’s right to vote in the bloc.

Hungary has vowed to veto any such step against its Polish ally, deepening fears of a split between the European Union’s west and an increasingly right-wing and authoritarian east.

Spain may arrest Catalan president

British model kidnapping case a sham: Lawyer

Polish president seeks more powers as EU voices concerns

London

Reuters

A man who refused to provide passwords to his electronic devices when stopped by

British police was found guilty under terrorism laws at a court in London yesterday, in a case that campaigners say threatens per-sonal privacy.

Muhammad Rabbani, 36, the international director of campaign group CAGE was found guilty of wilfully obstructing or seeking to frustrate an examination or search, and given a conditional 12-month discharge, and was ordered to pay £620 ($830) fine.

CAGE is an advocacy group which campaigns against the impact of counter-terrorism pol-icies, and came to international

attention over its links to Jihadi John, a British Islamic militant, before he went to Syria.

Rabbani said he was returning from a wedding in Qatar when he was stopped at Heathrow last November. Police seized his phone and computer, and demanded the passwords for the devices. Rabbani said that he had not provided the passwords as he wanted to protect the privacy of a client who he was working with on an anti-torture case. However, judge Emma Arbuthnot found that Rabbani was lawfully required to provide the passwords. Rabbani said he would appeal the decision.

He was held under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which was used to detain David Miranda, the partner of the journalist who brought leaks from former U.S. spy

agency contractor Edward Snow-den to world attention in 2013.

Rabbani said that the law poses a threat to personal privacy, and told reporters and supporters outside the court that the decision “highlights the absurdity of the Schedule 7 law.” “They accept that at no point was I under suspicion, and that ultimately this was a matter of having been pro-filed,” he said, referring to the judge and prosecution. “There are impor-tant implications for our collective privacy, as Schedule 7 acts as a digital strip-search.” But the police wel-comed the verdict. “Today’s verdict is an important one. It’s crucial that police are able to use the legisla-tion that exists to help keep the public safe,” said Commander Dean Haydon, head of the Met Police Counter Terrorism Com-mand, in a statement.

Man found guilty under UK terrorism laws after refusing to reveal passwords

Russian murder suspect ‘took selfies with body parts’MOSCOW: Russian investi-gators said yesterday they have detained a couple on suspicion of murdering a woman and eating her flesh after finding selfies with the victim’s body parts.

The Investigative Com-mittee in the southern Krasnodar region arrested the 35-year-old man and his wife after a lost phone con-taining the photographs was handed in to police.

They believe the man killed the woman in a drunken fight in wasteland on Septem-ber 8 and then cut up her body while his wife was present.“After carrying out the crime, the man took photo-graphs of himself with some fragments of the dead wom-an’s body with his cell phone camera,” investigators said. The phone was traced to the cou-ple living in a hostel at a nearby military facility, where a raid uncovered body parts in a salt solution. A source in the law enforcement authorities told RIA Novosti news agency these included “a jar contain-ing a preserved hand”.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy as repeatedly said that the referendum slated for October 1 — which his conservative party insists is illegal and unconstitutional — will not take place, and the legislation underpinning the vote has already been suspended by Spain’s Constitutional Court.

London

Reuters

Britain could stay in a cus-toms union with the European Union after

leaving the bloc if Labour win power, the main opposition party said yesterday, putting pressure on Prime Minister Theresa May’s divided govern-ment over Brexit.

Labour’s Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer said the party was ready to be “the grown-ups in the room” and take charge of negotiations to leave the EU, cautioning against taking any-thing off the table when looking at Britain’s future ties with the EU. After months of sticking to a position little different from the Conservative Party’s pursuit of a clean break with the EU, Labour changed tack last month by suggesting that, if in power,

it would press for remaining in the EU’s single market for a transition period to smooth Brit-ain’s departure in March 2019.

Starmer’s words took that position further. “If we were in government...we would negoti-ate a final deal...that retained the benefits of the customs union and the single market,” Starmer told hundreds of Labour mem-bers in the southern English seaside town of Brighton. “Sub-ject, of course to negotiations, remaining in a form of customs union with the EU is a possible end destination for Labour.”

He later told an event that rather than taking an off-the-shelf arrangement for future trade with the EU in a final deal, he wanted to pursue the “harder challenge” of trying to win “a changed relationship with the single market” that keeps free trade but not membership, pos-

sibly by signing a new treaty.But while challenging May’s

vision for Brexit, the move also could deepen divisions in Labour, putting those who want the close economic ties of a cus-toms union at odds with others who say the referendum vote means complete withdrawal.

Steve Baker, a Conservative minister working on Brexit, crit-icised Labour for having “no plan for Brexit, no interest in controlling our borders and no desire to make the most of the opportunities it will bring”.

After Britain voted to leave the European Union last year, divisions over what Brexit will look like have split both parties and the country, revealing deep differences between the south and more industrial north of England, between young and old and between urban voters and those in rural areas.

Labour Party shifts on Brexit; proposes staying in customs union

17TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017 EUROPE

Berlin

AFP

Chancellor Angela Merkel said yesterday she would talk with all mainstream parties about trying to form a “good, sta-ble” government after

Germany’s watershed election, and vowed to try to win back voters who supported an upstart nationalist force.

Sunday’s election saw the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party poach one million votes from Mer-kel’s conservatives, leaving her without an obvious coalition to lead Europe’s largest economy.

“We had hoped for a better result,” she admitted, referring to her CDU/CSU bloc’s 33 percent score, its worst out-come since 1949. Merkel, 63, said she would now seek exploratory talks on an alliance with two smaller parties, the pro-business Free Democrats and the ecologist Greens.

And she said she would extend an olive branch to the Social Democrats, her junior partners for eight of her 12 years in power, who suffered a crush-ing 20.5 percent share of the vote and pledged to go into opposition.

The poll marked a breakthrough for the anti-Islam AfD, which with 12.6 per-cent became the third strongest party and vowed to “go after” Merkel over her migrant and refugee policy.

She admitted that she had been a “polarising figure” to many people who ultimately gave their vote to the AfD.

Merkel acknowledged that the AfD’s

strongholds in depressed corners of the ex-communist east felt “left behind”.

She said she believed that not all were diehard supporters of the AfD and that at least some could be won back “with good policies that solve problems”.

News weekly Der Spiegel said Mer-kel had no one but herself to blame for her election bruising.

“Angela Merkel deserved this defeat,” the magazine’s Dirk Kurbjuweit wrote, accusing her of running an “unin-spired” campaign and “largely ignoring the challenges posed by the right”.

The entry of around 90 hard-right MPs to the glass-domed Bundestag chamber breaks a taboo in post-World War II Germany.

While joyful supporters of the AfD — a party with links to the far-right French National Front and Britain’s UKIP — sang the German national anthem at a Berlin club as the results came in late Sunday, hundreds of protesters outside shouted “Nazis out!”

The AfD’s top candidate in the elec-tion, Alexander Gauland, told reporters Monday that the party was the one true

defender of a Germany for the Germans.

“I don’t want to lose Germany to an invasion of foreigners from foreign cul-tures,” he said.

He refused to back away from recent comments urging Germans to be proud of their war veterans, and calling for a government official who is of Turkish origin to be “dumped in Anatolia”.

But just hours after its triumph, the party’s long-simmering infighting between radical and more moderate forces spilled out into the open at a dra-matic news conference.

AfD co-leader Frauke Petry stunned her colleagues by saying she would not join the party’s parliamentary group and would serve as an independent MP. She then abruptly left the room in a move

Gauland criticised as “excessively feisty”.Political scientist Suzanne Schuet-

temeyer of Halle University in eastern Germany said despite it remaining an opposition party with marked internal divisions, the AfD’s presence in parlia-ment would harm the country’s image abroad.

“It’s Germany and it will change the way we are perceived, because AfD will speak a language that we thought... was outside of our political consensus,” she said. All other political parties have ruled out working with the AfD, whose lead-ers call Merkel a “traitor” for allowing in more than one million asylum seek-ers since 2015.

Merkel said Monday that while she was not seeking a repeat of the influx, she stood by her decision made on “humanitarian” grounds.

But the leader of her Bavarian CSU allies, Horst Seehofer, a vocal critic of Merkel’s asylum policy, called the poll outcome a “bitter disappointment” and vowed to close the “open flank” on the right before state elections next year.

The Social Democrats’ leader Mar-tin Schulz, putting a brave face on his defeat, vowed Monday that the 150-year-old traditional workers’ party would be “a strong opposition force in this country, to defend democracy in this country against those who question it and attack it”. This will likely force Mer-kel to team up with two smaller, and very different, parties to form a lineup dubbed the “Jamaica coalition” because the three parties’ colours match those of the Caribbean country’s flag.

Merkel vows to form stable government

Frankfurt

AFP

Germany’s general election brought the pro-business Free Democratic Party a

triumphant return to parliament, looking all but certain to became a thorn in the side of both Chan-cellor Angela Merkel and Europe.

As the Social Democrats (SPD) head for the opposition benches, an unlikely match-up between the FDP, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU/CSU alliance and the Greens appears to be the only option for government.

The prospect of a “Jamaica” alliance, named after the par-ties’ colours of black (CDU), yellow (FDP) and green has thrown the gulfs between the parties’ political convictions into stark relief. Bringing the three together on climate, economic and fiscal policy would be diffi-cult enough, but the FDP’s biggest spanner in the works could come on Europe.

Its youthful party leader Christian Lindner has rejected any reform of the euro single currency area — pushed by French President Emmanuel Macron and cautiously wel-comed by Merkel -- that would create a centralised budget to smooth out national economic crises, managed by a eurozone finance minister.

And the FDP would prefer to use Germany’s bumper budget surpluses to offer voters and businesses 30 billion euros ($35.7 billion) in tax cuts, rather than investing the cash at home and shrinking the country’s trade surplus as its foreign part-ners have demanded.

“Of course we’re ready to take on responsibility,” Lindner told journalists in Berlin Mon-day, while warning “there would be nothing worse than contin-uing the policies of the past four years with new colours”.

“We think it’s necessary for the law to encourage individual responsibility” in European countries’ finances, Lindner declared.

The FDP would be prepared to back some increased invest-ments using exist ing

mechanisms like the European Investment Bank, he said.

But “we couldn’t agree to a eurozone budget which would automatically lead to fiscal transfers in the EU, that wouldn’t solve problems but make them worse,” Lindner added.

The press conference saw the 39-year-old swipe at both prospective coalition partners, claiming that CDU, the SPD and the Greens were indistinguish-able in the previous parliament.

Turkey ready to normalise ties with GermanyISTANBUL: Turkey, whose relations with Germany have soured in recent months, will take two steps to normalise bilateral relations if Germany takes one step, Foreign Min-ister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in a television interview yesterday.

He was speaking after Germany’s Angela Merkel secured a fourth term as chancellor in an election which saw her support slide and the far right making sig-nificant gains.

“Germany should learn from its mistakes,” Cavusoglu told broadcaster A Haber when asked about ties between the two countries, which have been hit by disa-greements on a range of political and security issues.

Paris

AFP

Fr e n c h P r e s i d e n t Emmanuel Macron’s grand Europe plan could

be stymied by Angela Merkel’s disappointing election score, with the liberal party tipped to join her coalition rejecting his proposals for radical eurozone reform.

Today, Macron will deliver a speech setting out his vision for Europe’s future to an audi-ence of French and foreign students at the Sorbonne uni-versity in Paris.

The europhile French cen-trist had been waiting for the German election to put forward his proposals on how to re-energise the EU after last year’s seismic Brexit vote.

Since Sunday, he has spo-ken twice with Merkel, as well as with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. He also plans to consult the Ital-ian and Spanish prime ministers before his speech, his office said. Presidential advisors say he will argue for a multi-speed EU, where ad hoc coalitions of willing states could move ahead together on key issues “with-out being held back by those who are opposed”.

He will also set out plans for EU-wide “democratic conven-tions” to give citizens more of a say in the functioning of a union widely seen as out of touch. But some of his propos-als, particularly on eurozone integration, could prove a tough sell in post-election Germany.

Merkel’s Christian Union

CDU/CSU bloc scored its worst result in decades, losing over a million votes to the anti-immi-grant Alternative for Germany (AfD), now the country’s third-strongest party.

The humbled chancellor now faces potentially lengthy coalition talks, during which Macron’s EU wish list -- includ-ing a common budget, finance minister and parliament for the 19-member currency zone -- could be significantly whittled down. The pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) -- one of two parties seen as possible coali-tion partners for Merkel, along with the left-leaning Greens -- have already rejected Macron’s proposals for a common budget for investments across the eurozone.

“Providing money for French state spending or to compensate for Silvio Berlus-coni’s mistake is inconceivable for us and will be a red line,” FDP leader Christian Lindner, who has been sharply critical of eurozone bailouts, said on Sunday. A French government spokesman warned of the rise of a “very violent, very hard, very radical far right” in Ger-many. But the presidency attempted to play down the threat to his wider reform plans.

“We have four years of sta-ble government in France and Germany ahead of us,” a pres-idential advisor said.

He noted that both the FDP and Greens with whom Merkel is tipped to form a three-way pact are pro-Europe, despite the liberals’ reticence on bailouts.

Lyon

AFP

Interpol said yesterday that it seized a record total of 25 million illicit and counterfeit

medicines worth more than $51m (¤42m) in a weeklong worldwide operation.

Dietary supplements, pain killers, fake contact lenses, epi-lepsy medication and 1.2 tonnes of erectile dysfunction pills were

among the drugs seized, the agency, based in Lyon, France, said in a statement.

Operation Pangea X was car-ried out by police, customs and health authorities across a record 123 countries and led to more than 400 arrests from Septem-ber 12 to 19.

The illegal sale of medicine online was also targeted, with 3,584 websites shut down and more than 3,000 online

advertisements suspended. It was the first time many African countries participated in the operation, said Immanuel Sam, the head of Interpol’s Namibia office.

“The sale of fake or counter-feit pharmaceuticals is a growing concern across Africa, as it cre-ates a dangerous situation for the health of unsuspecting consum-ers,” Sam said.

As opioid abuse has reached

epidemic proportions in sev-eral countries, the operation also targeted the trade of pain-killers, particularly the drug Fentanyl.

Numerous websites selling only the drug were closed down, including one called “Where to buy Fentanyl without a prescription”.

Operation Pangea was launched in 2008 and has since tracked the rise of unauthorised

websites selling pharmaceutical products. “Criminals are exploit-ing this trend to make a profit, putting lives at risk,” said Tim Morris, Interpol’s executive director of police services.

“The fact that we still see such strong outcomes after 10 years of Pangea operations dem-onstrates how the online sale of illicit medicines is an ongoing, and ever increasing, challenge,” he said.

Free Democrats complicate task

Interpol seizes $51m in fake drugs in weeklong operation

Macron’s EU reforms could be tough sell

Merkel, 63, said she would now seek exploratory talks on an alliance with two smaller parties, the pro-business Free Democrats and the ecologist Greens.

Martin Schulz, leader and top candidate of Germany’s social democratic SPD party, leaves the stage after giving a press conference following the party leadership meeting in Berlin, yesterday.

European envoys to US back Iran nuclear pactWASHINGTON: The ambas-sadors to Washington from Britain, France, Germany and the European Union all strongly backed the interna-tional nuclear agreement with Iran yesterday, as long as Tehran continues to com-ply with the pact.

US President Donald Trump is weighing whether the 2015 deal serves U.S. security interests as he faces a mid-October deadline for certifying that Iran is comply-ing with the pact, a decision that could sink an agreement strongly supported by the other world powers that negotiated it. “We agree that the demise of this agreement would be a major loss,” David O’Sullivan, the European Union’s envoy in Washing-ton, said at an Atlantic Council panel discussion.

German Ambassador Peter Wittig said anyone advocating walking away should consider “larger issues,” including an increased danger Iran would resume enrichment, danger of a nuclear arms race in an unstable region and impact on global nonproliferation efforts.

German Chancellor and the Leader of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) Angela Merkel at a press conference after a meeting with her party’s board members following the federal elections, in Berlin, yesterday.

18 TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017AMERICAS

A group of activists, including two university presidents, making a 20km march to Lago Escondido (Hidden Lake) in Rio Negro province, southern Argentina, as part of the movement to demand free public access to the lake, which is on lands purchased by British businessman Joseph Lewis.

Call for public access

New US travel ban adds N Korea, Venezuela & ChadWashington

AP

President Donald Trump has signed a proclama-tion imposing strict new restrictions on travellers from a handful of coun-

tries, including five that were covered by his expiring travel ban. Administration officials say the new measures are required to keep the nation safe.

The indefinite restrictions apply to citizens of Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and North Korea. As part of the presi-dential proclamation signed yesterday, the US will also bar the entry of certain Venezuelan gov-ernment officials and their immediate families. The changes will take effect from October 18.

The announcement came the same day that Trump’s temporary ban on visitors from six Muslim-majority countries was set to expire, 90 days after it went into effect. That ban had barred citi-zens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen who lacked a “credible claim of a bona fide rela-tionship with a person or entity in the United States” from entering the US Only one of those countries, Sudan, will no longer be subject to travel restrictions. “Making Amer-ica Safe is my number one priority. We will not admit those into our country we cannot safely vet,” Trump tweeted late Sunday after the new policy was announced.

Unlike the first iteration of Trump’s travel ban, which sparked chaos at airports across

the country and a flurry of legal challenges after being hastily writ-ten with little input outside the White House, officials stressed they had been working for months on the new rules, in collaboration with various agencies and in conversa-tion with foreign governments.

To limit confusion, valid visas would not be revoked as a result of the proclamation. The order also permits, but does not guarantee, case-by-case waivers for citizens of the affected countries. The restric-tions are targeted at countries that the Department of Homeland Secu-rity says fail to share sufficient information with the US or haven’t taken necessary security precau-tions. DHS has spent recent months working to develop a new security baseline, which includes factors such as whether countries issue electronic passports with biomet-ric information, report lost or

stolen passports to INTERPOL, an international law enforcement body, and share information about trave-lers’ terror-related and criminal histories. Citizens of countries that don’t meet the standard will face restrictions until they make changes to bring them into compliance.

The new rules include the sus-pension of all immigrant visas for nationals of Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Yemen and Somalia, and the suspension of non-immigrant visas, such as for business and tourism, to nationals of Chad, Libya, North Korea, Syria and Yemen. Citizens of Iran will not be eligible for tourism and business visas, but remain eligible for student and cultural exchange visas if they undergo additional scrutiny. Such additional scrutiny will also be required for Somali cit-izens applying for all non-immigrant visas.

Critics have accused Trump of overstepping his legal authority and violating the U.S. Constitution’s protections against religious bias each time he has ordered new travel restrictions.

And the inclusion of Venezuela and North Korea appeared to be an attempt to block challenges from advocacy groups and others who have called the restrictions a ban on Muslims. Trump during his campaign called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the US.” The US had already imposed wide-ranging sanctions on certain high-ranking Venezuelan government officials to protest the government’s attempts to consolidate power.

Ex-Congressman sentenced to 21 months in prisonNew York Reuters

Former US Congressman Anthony Weiner was sentenced to 21 months

in prison yesterday for send-ing sexually explicit messages to a 15-year-old girl, setting off a scandal that played a role in the 2016 US presiden-tial election.

Weiner, 53, started to cry as soon as the sentence was announced by US District Judge Denise Cote in Manhat-tan. He pleaded guilty in May to transferring obscene mes-sages to a minor, and agreed he would not appeal any sen-tence of 27 months or less.

Weiner’s lawyers had asked that he be sentenced to probation rather than prison, saying he acted out of the “depths of an uncontrolled sickness” and was now being treated. The investigation into Weiner’s exchanges with a North Carolina high school student roiled the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign in its final days, when authorities found emails on Weiner’s lap-top from his wife Huma Abedin, an aide to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Abedin has filed for divorce. Weiner wore his wedding band at the sentencing.

The discovery of the emails prompted James Comey, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investiga-tion, to announce in late October that the agency was reopening its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was US sec-retary of state. Clinton has said the announcement contributed to her upset loss to Republican Donald Trump, who had accused her of endangering national security by using the private server.

Caracas

AFP

Venezuela accused the United States yes-terday of “psychological terrorism” designed to bring down the government

after it was included in a list of eight countries targeted by a travel ban.

“These types of lists....are incompatible with international law and constitute in themselves a form of psychological and political terrorism,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

Venezuela was added yesterday to a new list of countries targeted by the US ban, due to what it called poor security and a lack of coop-eration with American authorities.

The restrictions on Venezuela were limited to officials from a list of government agencies and their families, while full travel bans were placed on nationals from the other seven coun-tries, including North Korea and Chad.

The Socialist government of President

Nicolas Maduro said Washington was using the fight against terrorism for its own political ends.

The foreign ministry statement said the ban was seeking to “stigmatize” Venezuela “under the pretext of combating terrorism, by includ-ing it in a unilaterally drawn-up list and accusing other states of being alleged promoters of this terrible scourge.”

It rejected “the irrational decision of the United States government to once again catalog the noble Venezuelan people as a threat to their national security.” Venezuela has been rocked by months of economic chaos and deadly protests as Maduro tries to consolidate control, including through a new Constituent Assembly that has wrested power from the opposition-dominated legislature.

Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza last week accused US President Donald Trump of being “racist and supremacist” after Trump told the UN General Assembly that the US was ready to act to restore Venezuela’s democracy.

Psychological terrorism: CaracasUS President Donald Trump speaks with reporters while boarding Air Force One at Morristown Airport in Morristown, New Jersey, yesterday.

The indefinite restrictions apply to citizens of Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and North Korea. As part of the presidential proclamation signed yesterday, the US will also bar the entry of certain Venezuelan government officials and their immediate families.

Washington

AFP

US rights groups yesterday blasted the new, open-ended version of President Donald Trump’s travel

restrictions as a masked Muslim ban and pledged to keep fighting it in courts.

Despite the removal of Sudan from the expiring 90-day ban on six mainly-Muslim countries, and the addition of Chad, Venezuela and North Korea for tight restrictions or bans, activists and legal experts said Trump’s intent remained the same, to sharply cut off the flow of Mus-lim visitors and immigrants into the United States. “This ban is not any better than the previous one,” said Zahra Billoo of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“The fact that Trump has added North Korea —with few visitors to the US — and a few government officials from Vene-zuela doesn’t obfuscate the real fact that

the administration’s order is still a Mus-lim ban,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “President Trump’s original sin of targeting Muslims cannot be cured by throwing other countries onto his ene-mies list.”

Late Sunday the White House issued a new executive order to replace the expiring 90-day temporary ban on trave-lers from Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Somalia and Libya.

The ban, which Trump has been fight-ing to put in place since days after he

became president in January, has been repeatedly delayed and watered down in a series of court challenges and appeals.

At the end of June, the Supreme Court allowed it finally to be implemented, with restrictions, together with a 120-day ban on refugees. The new, which has no expi-ration date, targeted eight countries but was less uniform.

North Korea, Chad, Syria, Yemen, and Libya face full bans, until they can improve their information collection on their own citizens and boost cooperation with US security authorities, who say the

main target is to prevent potential terror-ists from entering the country. For Iran, an exception was left for students and exchange visitors. For Somalia, new immi-grants are blocked but business, official and personal temporary visitors will be allowed, though subject to tougher vetting.

With Venezuela, only officials from certain key ministries and government agencies, and their families, are banned.

In Caracas, the foreign ministry called the US action “psychological terrorism” aimed at bringing down Venezuela’s left-ist government.

The original ban is due to be heard at the Supreme Court on October 10, focus-ing in part on whether Muslims were targeted from the beginning.

The new order could shape the way the issue is addressed, possibly even mooting the case. “Religion, or the reli-gious origin of individuals or nations, was not a factor,” a senior government offi-cial told reporters on Sunday.

New restrictions are still Muslim ban: Rights groupsUS Supreme Court calls for new briefingWASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court yesterday asked parties involved in the challenge to the Trump administration’s travel ban to file new briefs on whether the case should be dismissed. The court also said that oral arguments in the case will no longer be held on October 10 as scheduled. The move came after the adminis-tration on Sunday unveiled a new wave of travel restrictions on eight countries.

New York Washington Post

Violent crime increased in the United States for a second consecutive year

in 2016, remaining near histor-ically low levels but pushed upward in part by an uptick in killings in some major cities, according to FBI statistics made public yesterday.

The FBI’s release of the fig-ures comes as the Trump administration has warned omi-nously of a dangerous crime wave. In his inaugural address, President Donald Trump described “American carnage” in US cities, while Attorney Gen-eral Jeff Sessions said earlier this year he worried the crime uptick was “the beginning of a trend.”

Some experts and analysts have disputed that suggestion,

noting that crime levels were much higher a quarter-century ago. In some major cities, vio-lence has surged, while in others it has declined. Chicago, a much-cited example, saw a spike in murders last year; kill-ings have continued to drop in New York.

The FBI statistics for 2016 show that the estimated number of violent crimes nationwide increased 4.1 percent over the previous year.

The violent crime rate was 386.3 offenses per 100,000 inhabitants, up from 373.7 a year earlier, and the highest figure since 2012. The murder rate increased to 5.3 per 100,000 people, the highest that figure has been since 2008.

In both cases, these numbers are well below figures seen dur-ing previous decades. Going

back to the mid-1980s, the vio-lent crime and murder rates were both consistently higher, particularly in the early 1990s. In 1991, for instance, the vio-lent crime rate was 758.2 per 100,000 people and the murder rate was 9.8 per 100,000 people, after which both numbers began to fall, albeit with some year-over-year increases.

The FBI considers four crimes - murder and non-neg-ligent manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault - to be violent crimes involving force or the threat of force.

Looking more recently, the statistics released Monday show that the violent crime rate in 2016 was down 18 percent from 2007, while the murder rate was down 6 percent over the same period.

Violent crimes surge for second consecutive year in 2016: FBI

19TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017 AMERICAS

NEWS BYTES

NEW YORK: A Florida man stopped for urinating near the White House on Sunday was arrested after authorities said they found at least nine firearms, including assault style weap-ons, in the trunk of his car, according to a DC police report. The man had been driving a silver 2009 Nissan with Tennes-see license plates, the report said. The plates had a Fraternal Order of Police insignia on them; it could not immediately be determined if the suspect has a connection to law enforce-ment. D C police identified the man as Timothy Joseph Bates, 37, of Jacksonville, Fla. Police said he faces charges that include illegal possession of firearms, illegal transportation of fire-arms and other gun offenses. Police said the incident occurred about 7:15 a.m. at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, near the Renwick Gallery, on the west side of the White House. The police report said a uniformed Secret Service officer stopped a man he saw urinating. When approached, Bates told the officer that he “came to the White House in order to speak with Adm. Mike Rogers and Gen. Jim Mattis for advice on missing paychecks and how to get the dog chip out of my head,” the police report said.

RICHMOND: Rachel Myrick and her family were looking for a bite to eat at a steakhouse in Virginia. But she, instead, was on the receiving end of a bite - from a copperhead snake that managed to get inside a LongHorn Steakhouse and attack her on her toes and foot. Myrick told her story to the Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg. She said she and her family had gone to the restaurant on September 12 when as she was walking into the entrance, she felt a sharp pain in her foot and shrugged it off. She thought it was maybe a bee sting. But then she couldn’t walk. When she stopped and looked down at her sandal, she realized it was a snake - a roughly 8-inch-long copperhead. “I freaked out,” Myrick, who is a real estate agent in Fredericksburg, told the Free Lance-Star. She said she yelled, “I got bit! I got bit!” Copperhead snakes are among the most common venomous snakes in Virginia. And they are known to bite. Myrick’s boyfriend, Michael Clem, told the Free Lance-Star that he saw the snake and stomped on it to kill it. Myrick posted photos of her severely swollen foot and toes on social media. Myrick was taken to a hospital and treated. In photos on Facebook, Myrick showed her swollen foot and toes. On her body were markings by medical teams to track the swelling. She is expected to recover. How the snake got into the restaurant remains unknown. Officials at the restaurant chain said they think the snake may have lived at a nearby retention pond.

Man arrested near White House had at least nine firearms in vehicle

Woman bitten by copperhead snake at restaurant in Virginia

San Juan

Reuters

Most people living near a crumbling dam in storm-battered Puerto Rico have been moved to safety, Governor Ricardo

Rossello said yesterday, as he urged the US Congress to fund an aid pack-age to avert a humanitarian crisis after Hurricane Maria.

Most of the Caribbean island, a US territory with a population of 3.4 mil-lion, is still without electricity five days after Maria swept ashore with ferocious winds and torrential rains, the most powerful hurricane to hit Puerto Rico for nearly a century.

There have been growing concerns for some 70,000 people who live in the river valley below the Guajataca Dam in the island’s northwest, where cracks were seen appearing on Friday in the 88-year-old earthen structure.

Rossello said he was working on the assumption that the dam would collapse. “I’d rather be wrong on that front than doing nothing and having that fail and costing people lives,” he said in an inter-view with CNN.

“Some of the dam has fallen apart and now we’re making sure that we can assess if the other part is going to fall down as well. ... Most of the people in the near vicinity have evacuated.”

It was unclear if the governor was saying that most of the 70,000 valley inhabitants had left the area, or only the several hundred people living in the small towns closest to the dam. About 320 people from those towns have moved to safety, according to local media.

The fear of a potentially catastrophic dam break added to the difficulties fac-ing disaster relief authorities after Maria, which was the second major hurricane to strike Caribbean this month and which killed at least 29 people in the region.

At least 10 of those who died were in Puerto Rico, including

several people who drowned or were hit by flying debris, and three elderly sisters who died in a mudslide.

Many structures on the island, including hospitals, remain badly dam-aged and flooded. Clean drinking water is hard to find in some areas. Very few planes have been able to land or take off from damaged airports.

After Maria caused widespread flooding, the National Weather Service warned of further flash floods in some western parts of the island on Monday as thunderstorms moved in.

The hurricane hit at a time when Puerto Rico was already battling eco-nomic crisis.

Rossello said on Monday that before the storms struck he had been embark-ing on an aggressive fiscal agenda that included more than $1.5bn in cuts.

“This is a game changer,” the

governor told CNN. “This is a completely different set of circumstances. This needs to be taken into consideration otherwise there will be a humanitarian crisis.”

In Washington, US House of

Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan said Congress was working with President Donald Trump’s administration to make sure the necessary assistance reaches Puerto Rico.

“Our fellow citizens in Puerto Rico

remain in our prayers as we make sure they have what they need,” Ryan said in a statement.

Maria continued to weaken and would likely be downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm by Tues-day night, the National Hurricane Center said. As of 11am ET (1500 GMT) yesterday, it was about 505km south-southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, heading slowly north, the center said.

The storm was unlikely to hit the continental United States directly, but a tropical storm warning was in effect for much of the North Carolina coast. Offi-cials issued a mandatory evacuation order for visitors to Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks, beginning at 5am ET (0900 GMT) yesterday.

Hundreds leave home near Puerto Rico dam

WASHINGTON: Residents of the East-ern coast of an island on North Carolina’s Outer Banks started evacu-ation as hurricane Maria approaches North looming toward the state’s coast.

The evacuation process started on Ocracoke Island, which still suffers

from the previous hurricane that hit the Island in September, ABC reported.

It’s not immediately clear how many residents and visitors are heed-ing the order to leave.

The National Hurricane Center issued a tropical storm warning from

Cape Lookout to Duck on the Outer Banks. A tropical storm watch was in effect from Surf City to Cape Lookout and from Duck to the North Carolina-Virginia state line.

Hurricane Maria has killed more than 33 people across the Caribbean

Mexico City

AFP

Allegations of negligent construction and over-sight began to fly

yesterday after deadly building collapses during Mexico’s earth-quake, as hope faded of finding more survivors of a disaster that killed more than 300 people.

The most-watched collapse site — a school where 19 chil-dren were killed last week — was built illegally on a site reserved for housing, according to local media reports.

Mexico City’s mayor, the education minister, and the top official for the district all traded blame after reports that the Enrique Rebsamen primary school operated using false

documents. “If confirmed, it would be very serious,” Educa-tion Minister Aurelio Nuno told TV network Televisa, saying he had ordered an investigation.

The government has also come in for criticism from anguished families of people still missing after Tuesday’s earthquake.

“All they tell us are lies: that they’re about to get (the missing people) out, that they’re work-ing on it, but nothing comes of it,” said Anel Jimenez, 42, whose cousin Martin Estrada, a 30-year-old accountant, was inside a seven-story office build-ing when it collapsed.

“No one from the govern-ment has come to show their face. They just send low-profile officials who always have clean

helmets and shiny shoes. They just come to see what they can get out of other people’s pain.”

Rescue workers have now wrapped up their efforts at all but five sites in Mexico City, and the chances of pulling any more survivors from the rubble are dim.

But President Enrique Pena Nieto has been careful to insist that authorities will not send in the bulldozers to start clean-up until rescuers are absolutely cer-tain there are no more people in the rubble.

The building where Estra-da’s cousin was, at 286 Alvaro Obregon Avenue in the trendy Roma neighborhood, is now the main search site. It crumpled into a tangled heap of concrete and steel with 132 people inside.

Hurricane Maria: Northern Carolina begins evacuation

Most of the Caribbean island, a US territory with a population of 3.4 million, is still without electricity five days after Maria swept ashore with ferocious winds and torrential rains, the most powerful hurricane to hit Puerto Rico for nearly a century.

Blame starts to fly over Mexico building collapses

A damaged road in Toa Alta, west of San Juan, Puerto Rico, following the passage of Hurricane Maria, yesterday.

Rescuers work in a building toppled by a magnitude 7.1 quake that struck central Mexico almost a week ago, in Mexico City, yesterday. Hopes of finding more survivors after Mexico City’s devastating earthquake have dwindled to virtually nothing, nearly a week after the seismic jolt shook the mega-city, killing more than 300 people.

Washington

Agencies

The White House yester-day rejected claims that the United States has

declared war on North Korea as “absurd” in the latest exchange of barbs and insults between the two nuclear powers. “We have not declared war on North Korea and frankly the suggestion of that is absurd’” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

North Korea’s foreign minister on Monday accused US President Donald Trump of declaring war against his country and said Pyongyang was ready to defend itself by shooting down US bombers.

The latest threats stoked a week-long war of words that began when the Ameri-can leader threatened in his address to the United Nations General Assembly to “totally destroy” North Korea if it launches an attack.

Reacting to remarks by North Korea’s foreign minis-ter, China’s UN Ambassador Liu Jieyi said the escalating rhetoric between North Korea and the United States was getting too dangerous and the only solution was negotiations.

North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho told reporters that President Don-ald Trump had declared war on North Korea and Pyongyang reserves the right to take countermeasures, including shooting down U.S. bombers even if not in its air space.

White House: Absurd to claim war declared on North Korea

20 TUESDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2017MORNING BREAK

Qatar national sets free-diving recordsIrfan Bukhari The Peninsula

Earning honour for the country, Amro Al Hamad, a Qatari national, has set two free-diving GCC

records in Variable Weight and No-Limit categories in Kalamat, Greece.

Two records were set on September 18 and September 19. He has set two free-diving GCC records in two different categories including -83 metres in Variable Weight and -94 metres in No-Limit.

“The records are interna-tionally recognised through the judging of 2 AIDA Judges (Stavros Kastrinakis and David Tranfield). The Variable Weight record was set on Sep-tember 18 while on the next day (September 19), I set the -94 metres No Limit record,” Amro told The Peninsula add-ing that No Limit free-diving was scheduled for September 20 but “we chose to do it on the 19th to coincide with the Emir’s speech at UNGA session.”

In July this year, Amro had also organised an underwa-ter photo shoot wearing diving costumes carrying “Tamim Al Majd” image on his chest and Qatari flag in his hands at Canary Islands.

“I set my previous records in both categories (Variable Weight -70 meters and No Limit -80 metres) in Septem-ber 2015. A couple of months later Ahmed Abbas from Kuwait managed to break my Variable Weight GCC record by just 2 meters (-72 meters),” Amro said. Hamad said now he had stretched the gap as much as he could to make the task for him (Abbas) harder

but “I don’t mind if he gives me another chance to break his record.”

He said that his No-Limit record set in 2015 as a GCC record was broken by himself on September 19. “It also stands as the deepest man in the GCC on one breath of air record.”

When asked about his deep blue sea experience, he said: “I am not sure if words would be able to describe it. Every time we free dive the state of peace and tranquility is indescribable.”

“The freedom experienced under water without any breathing devices is a feeling that no other sport could give you. The mind thinks of noth-ing at all, there is no other,” he

said further quoting Umberto Pelizzari who once said “Scuba diver dives to look around. Free divers dive to look inside’’.

On his future ambitions, Amro said he wanted to con-tinue free-diving and go deeper as much as he could. “Maybe, one day I will get close to Walid Boudhiaf’s records.”

Walid is a free-diver from Tunisia based in Colombia. “He competes in a different discipline than mine called Free Immersion and has reached successfully to 116 meters deep. I would like to be an inspiration for Qatari free divers to competitively compete and not only concen-trate on spearfishing when it

comes to free-diving.”He said that he also

wanted to be the first GCC cit-izen to pass 100 metres of depth.

To a question about the appreciation he had received from Qatar, Hamad said that he had not set the records to expect any recognition. “I did it to raise the name of my country and for my self-satisfaction.”

When asked how difficult it was to set the record, Amro said: “I wouldn’t say it was an easy journey. It took more than half a year of planning and overseas training camps the latest was in Tenerife, Spain in July before we went for the final training camp in Greece and spent three weeks

on a strict training programme that involved slowly adapting to depth and embracing it.”

Amro Al Hamad, also a racing driver, has been Mid-dle East Radical Champion for 2013, 2014. When asked why he switched his passion from motor racing to free-diving, he said: “I didn’t do it volun-tarily. I was still doing both until recently. The expenses got super-high when my rac-ing advanced and I started it in Europe. In the shadow of no adequate sponsorship I had to back up a bit on my participation.”

“Free-diving doesn’t come for free as the name implies but the expenses are for sure way affordable than motor-sports,” he concluded.

Amro Al Hamad with other divers in Kalamat, Greece. RIGHT: Al Hamad in a free-dive.

Pandas rebounding but their habitat isn’t: ResearchersParis

AFP

China’s fiercely protected giant panda had a smaller habitat in 2013 than when it was declared endangered more than 20 years ear-

lier, researchers said yesterday.What living space they had was much more frag-

mented, and often in areas under threat from earthquakes, road construction, tourism or global warming, they wrote in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Last year, the International Union for the Con-servation of Nature (IUCN) moved the giant panda from the “endangered” to the less-threatened “vul-nerable” category on its species Red List.

But the iconic black-and-white bear is not out of the woods yet, according to the new study.

“We are not arguing with the IUCN assessment that the panda is less threatened now than in the past,” study co-author Stuart Pimm of Duke Uni-versity in Durham, North Carolina, said.

“There is much good news about the panda — its numbers are up, much more of its habitat is protected, deforestation has stopped,” he said by email. But “while there is some good news, there is also bad news: the panda habitat is much more frag-mented than in the past and small fragments may not hold viable populations of pandas.”

The panda’s conservation status is a barometer of global conservation efforts, according to the study’s authors.

The IUCN’s assessment, they added, was based “solely” on population numbers, “while ignoring emerging threats”.

“Our results show a more complicated picture that warns against complacency” in conservation efforts, the team wrote.

The researchers used satellite data collected over four decades to evaluate the giant panda habitat from 1976 to 2013.

Suitable panda living space decreased by nearly five percent until 2001, but increased by 0.4 per-cent from then to 2013, they found.

Initial losses have not been offsetCompared with 1988, when the IUCN listed the

panda as “rare” — equivalent to “endangered” in a later update of the Red List categories — its hab-itat in 2013 was 1.7 percent smaller, the authors said.

Commercial logging was the most harmful activ-ity to panda habitat, the team said, but the creation of nature reserves “significantly” slowed the loss of living space.

The first reserves were created in the 1960s, and 67 were established by 2013.

Yet there are many remaining risks, including that giant pandas live in one of the most tectoni-cally active regions of China.

“In the past, pandas had a much larger range across China, so while earthquakes are natural events, their impacts may now be disproportion-ately severe,” the authors wrote.

Road construction is another driver of habitat loss and fragmentation, while tourism has increased throughout the panda’s range.

File photo of a panda sleeping on the tree at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in China’s Sichuan province.

Fin bans might not help sharks: ScientistsPortland

AP

As lawmakers propose banning the sale of shark fins in the US, a pair of scientists is pushing back, saying the effort might actu-

ally harm attempts to conserve the marine predators.

Democratic Sen Cory Booker of New Jersey introduced a bill this year designed to prevent people from possessing or selling shark fins in America, much to the delight of conservation groups such as Oceana. But marine scientists David Shiffman and Robert Hueter said this approach could be wrongheaded.

Shiffman and Hueter authored a study that appears in the November issue of the journal Marine Policy, saying that the US has long been a leader in shark fisheries management and that shutting down the US fin trade entirely would remove a model for sustainability for the rest of the world.

The US also is a minor contributor to the worldwide shark fin trade, and countries with less regulated fisheries would likely step in to fill the void if America left the business altogether, Shiff-man said.

“Removing that from the marketplace removes a template of a well-managed fishery,” said Shiff-man, a shark researcher with Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. “It’s much easier for us to say, here’s a way you can do this.”

Shark fins are most often used in a soup consid-ered a delicacy in Asia. Shark fins that American fishermen harvest are often shipped to Asia for processing.

Environmentalists and animal advocates have long blamed shark fin soup for the decline of cer-tain shark species.

Their criticism of shark fin soup often includes arguments against “finning,” which is a practice that’s illegal in the United States and involves removing the fins from recently caught, often live sharks and discarding the animals.

Nearly a quarter of US states have bans in place on the sale of fins, and sharks were afforded new protections with the Shark Conservation Act of 2010.

FAJRSHOROOK

04:08 AM

05.24 am

ZUHRASR

11.25 am

02.51 pm

MAGHRIBISHA

05.29pm

06.59 pm

PRAYER TIMINGS

HIGH TIDE 09:00 – 19:45 LOW TIDE 01:45 – 15:15

Hazy to misty at places at first

becomes hot daytime with

chance of local rainy clouds at

places by afternoon and rela-

tively humid by night.

WEATHER TODAY

Minimum Maximum 30oC 39oC

Courtesy: Qatar Meteorology Department