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Volume 23 | Number 7626 | 2 RiyalsWednesday 22 August 2018 | 11 Dhul-Hijja I 1439 www.thepeninsula.qa

Top up your Hala number with QR 100 and celebrate Eid with free data on the Ooredoo AppTerms and conditions apply

HMC to expand postnatal home care program

DOHA: The pilot postnatal midwifery home care program for new mothers and their babies provided by Women’s Wellness and Research Center (WWRC) will be expanded to all maternity facil-ities across the Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) in near future.

The service will be expanded to Al Wakra Hospital, Al Khor Hospital and the Cuban Hospital providing home care to new mothers who experience a normal pregnancy or caesarian delivery, Haila Johar, Executive Director of Nursing at the WWRC told The Peninsula.

“The pilot program started on May 15 to women deliver at the WWRC and live in Doha and

Rayyan area. This will continue for six to eight months. Then we will evaluate the service and ulti-mately it will cover the whole of Qatar,” she said.

“With time all HMC hospitals which has birthing facilities such as the Al Wakrah, Al Khor and Cuban hospital will have a group of people to provide postnatal midwifery home care services,” she added.

The postnatal midwifery home care program provide new mothers and their newborns with health checks, wound care to women who deliver by caesarian, as well as help to overcome dif-ficulties in breast-feeding. It also prevents re-admission and reduces unnecessary visits to the WWRC’s Emergency Department by women who have given birth recently.

“Since the program was launched, we have seen approx-imately 140 patients. Earlier we had a good number of re-admis-sions due to either infected wounds or breast engorgement. So until the temperature becomes normal and the mother is ready to breast-feed the baby, they stay in the hospital. It can take five days to a week. With the new midwifery home care

service, mothers and their babies are examined at home. In case if the mother has any complica-tions, the mobile doctors pre-scribe antibiotics or other med-icines,” said Johar.

“Therefore, after the program was introduced, we are having nearly zero re-admis-sions,” she added.

→CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

FAZEENA SALEEM THE PENINSULA

Residents enjoy fun-filled Eid activitiesTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Eid Al Adha was celebrated across the country yesterday with tradi-tional fervour in which thousands of Muslims performed prayers, sacrificed animals to mark the sacred Islamic festival.

The day began with offering of Eid Al Adha prayers in hundreds of mosques and prayer grounds across the country. The largest congregation of Eid Al Adha prayers was held at Imam Muhammad ibn Abd Al Wahhab Mosque.

The Ministry of Endowments and

Islamic Affairs (Awqaf) had prepared 368 mosques and prayer grounds in various areas of the country for the blessed Eid Al Adha prayer, including 70 mosques and prayer grounds with places reserved for women.

Citizens and residents visited homes of relatives and friends to exchange Eid greetings and distribute meat of sacri-ficial animals. Special feasts and get-togethers were arranged to celebrate the festival with family and friends.

In the evening, people visited various destinations of their choice to celebrate the festival with fun and recreation.

Various malls had lined up enter-tainment activities for Eid Al Adha par-ticularly the ones taking part in the ongoing Qatar Summer Festival (QSF).

The residents enjoyed a number of shows hosted by different malls as well as activities for children, such as Spongebob Square Pants Live Show, Ben 10, “Ya’ Alaydo” and many more. Along with the live shows, there were many traditional dances like the Syrian Arda and Jordanian and Palestinian dabkeh dance.

→CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

Amir performs Eid prayer, greets well-wishers

THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Amir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani performed Eid Al Adha prayer along with a group of loyal citizens at Al Wajba praying area yesterday morning.

The Personal Representative of H H the Amir, H H Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani; H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalifa Al Thani, H H Sheikh Mohammed bin Khalifa Al Thani and H E Sheikh Jassim bin Khalifa Al Thani took part in the prayer.

It was also attended by a number of Their Excellencies Sheikhs, Ministers and members of diplomatic corps

in addition to citizens, QNA reported. H H the Amir received scores of well-wishers on the advent of Eid Al Adha at Al Wajba Palace in the morning.

H H the Amir received Prime Minister and Interior Minister

H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani, and Their Excellencies Sheikhs, Min-i s t e r s , , M i n i s t r i e s ’

Under-secretaries, Advisory Council members, and citizens.

H H the Amir also received heads of diplomatic missions accredited to the country as well as army and police officers, and heads of national institutions and departments.

The well-wishers expressed their greetings and congratula-tions to H H the Amir on such a

blessed occasion, praying for its return with good and blessings for the Qatari people and the Arab and Muslim nations.

H H the Personal Represent-ative of H H the Amir attended the receptions along with H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalifa Al Thani, H H Sheikh Mohammed bin Khalifa Al Thani and H E Sheikh Jassim bin Khalifa Al Thani.

Sheikh Dr Thaqeel Sayer Al Shammari, Court of Cassation judge and Supreme Judiciary Council member, who led the morning prayer, delivered the Eid sermon in which he urged worshippers to ponder the deep meanings of Eid Al Adha, because

it is a ritual of Islam. He also called for the exploi-

tation of this occasion by increasing the acts of worship, good deeds and devotion, and by worshiping Allah Almighty and following the Sunnah of our Prophet Muhammad (Peace and Blessing Be Upon Him).

In the sermon, Dr Al Shammari highlighted the importance of the day of sac-rifice. He also said that the religion of Islam is the religion of love and peace. This urges us to meet the sense of belonging

to the nation and that the nation’s sons strive to meet its interests and protect it from all evils through cooperation between all on the basis of good governance that is based on justice and love for all, as well as on the basis of promoting unity and love and staying away from intolerance.

Scores of worshippers per-formed the Eid prayer in mosques and praying areas across the country.

→SEE ALSO PAGES 2, 3

Amir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani performing Eid Al Adha prayer at Al Wajba prayer area yesterday. RIGHT: H H the Amir greeting a well-wisher.

Amir exchanges Eid greetings with ErdoganQNA

DOHA: Amir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani has exchanged greetings, on the occasion of the blessed Eid Al Adha with President of the Republic of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a telephone conversation, the Amir held yesterday evening.

A fireworks display at Katara Cultural Village yesterday. PIC:BAHER AMIN/THE

PENINSULA

Gr

02 WEDNESDAY 22 AUGUST 2018HOME

Amir performs Eid Al Adha prayer

Amir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani performed Eid Al Adha prayer along with a group of loyal citizens at Al Wajba praying area yesterday morning. The Personal Representative of H H the Amir, H H Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani; H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalifa Al Thani, H H Sheikh Mohammed bin Khalifa Al Thani and H E Sheikh Jassim bin Khalifa Al Thani took part. It was also attended by a number of Their Excellencies Sheikhs, Ministers and members of diplomatic corps in addition to citizens. H H the Amir also received well-wishers at Al Wajba Palace yesterday. H H the Amir received Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani, and Their Excellencies Sheikhs, Ministers, Under-secretaries, Advisory Council Members and citizens.

03WEDNESDAY 22 AUGUST 2018 HOME

Kalyan Jewellers staff contribute over QR522,000 for KeralaTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Employees of Kalyan Jewellers will contribute over QR522,000 to the Kerala Chief Minis-ter’s Distress Relief Fund (CMDRF). Over 8,000 employees working across Kalyan Jewellers showrooms and My Kalyan outlets in India and the Middle East raised this amount by contributing one day’s salary towards flood relief and rehabili-tation. The cheque will be handed over to Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan by employee representatives of Kalyan Jewellers in Thiruvanan-thapuram.

Commenting on the contribution, T S Kalyanaraman, Chairman & Man-aging Director, Kalyan Jewellers said, “Kerala is going though one of the most testing phase in its history, with floods and landslides claiming lives and homes. Our employees have vol-unteered to contribute one day’s salary towards the CMDRF. I express my gratitude to my team and join them in prayers and sincerely hope that the normalcy returns to the state, quickly”.

Earlier this month, Kalyan Jew-ellers management had also con-tributed a sum of over Dh522,000 towards flood relief initiatives. Apart from monitory support, Kalyan’s team was also actively involved in ground level relief activities across the state. Kalyan’s showrooms in other parts of the country are also functioning as collection points for ‘Home Re-Entry’ kits which are being distributed in Kerala.

Eid celebrations at Katara mesmerise visitorsTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: With more joy and entertainment, the Cultural Village Foundation – Katara celebrated the first day of Eid Al Adha with a wide range of festivities and celebra-tions and thousands of visitors in the first day of Eid Al Adha yesterday. Spectacular fireworks, musical shows and other activ-ities mesmerised scores of visitors, who

were there with their family members. Starting from the Katara beach side

and along the marine walkway, the cel-ebrations started with a fantastic musical show performed by the Police Musical Band which drew the attention of eve-rybody attending the festival.

Following that, colourful bags con-taining Eid gifts were distributed from two platforms on children who were at the

festival with competitions and fun activ-ities on amphitheatre stages dedicated for that purpose. Several eateries and cafes despite the permanent ones also joined in to add more flavor and variety of food and beverages available for the visitors of Katara Eid festival. As it always happens in Katara during special occa-sions, complementary water and refresh-ments were distributed on visitors

attending the festival site to help cool down and bear with the summer hot weather. The festival was concluded with a magnificent fireworks show which turned the sky into a colourful piece of art that amused the visitors who recorded this memorable moment with their cameras. Katara has line up of more activ-ities in the coming days to make Eid Al Adha holidays special for visitors.

LEFT: People waiting in queues with their sheep for Eid Al Adha at Abu Hamour Livestock Market yesterday. RIGHT: People watch Eid celebrations on the first day of Eid Al Adha at Mirqab Mall. PICS: BAHER AMIN & ABDUL BASIT /THE PENINSULA

Amir receives well-wishers on Eid Al Adha

Amir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani received yesterday at Al Wajba Palace more groups of well-wishers on the occasion of Eid Al Adha including Their Excellences, Sheikhs and citizens. The well-wishers expressed their sincere congratulations to His Highness on this happy occasion praying the Almighty Allah for many happy returns to the Qatari people and the Arab and Muslim nations. Personal Representative of H H the Amir, H H Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, attended the reception.

HMC to expand postnatal home care program

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

The postnatal midwifery home care program has been introduced in line with the National Health Strategy 2018-2022, which empha-sises on enhancing midwifery services. “We started this service to provide complete midwifery services according to the National Health Strategy. We introduced things at dif-ferent intervals. Now we have started midwives deliver babies. She will be in charge of the delivery and dis-charge of the patient,” said Johar.

“First home visit will be scheduled within 48 to 72 hours of their delivery. During the visit midwife will examine the mother and baby including if the baby is breast-fed properly. They will check general health of the mother and child. Even if everything is fine we will have a second visit and discharge the patient from home care,” she added.

At present WWRC has a team of six community midwifes who make home care for new mothers and their babies.

Residents enjoy fun-filled Eid activities

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

The Cultural Village Foun-dation – Katara hosted a festive Eid Al Adha celebration with a range of colourful activ-ities. One of the highlights of the celebration was a mar-velous show by the Police Musical Band, who played patriotic music. Eid gifts were also distributed among children by Katara staff.

Summer Entertainment City remained another hot spot

to mark the festival especially for kids offering over 75 rides and games, such as the largest bouncy castle, virtual reality area with more than 15 games or the Football Fan zone.

United Development Company offered ‘Spend & Splash’ campaign at The Pearl-Qatar.

The event featuring a variety of interactive water sports including a waterslide, inflatable water park, hydro

bike, beach swing, bubble soccer, kids outdoor cinema, etc. on Qanat Quartier Beach, while Porto Arabia’s Marina was home to parasailing and wakeboarding activities.

A large number of people thronged various beaches and parks in the evening to cele-brate the Eid festival.

Al Khor Park, Al Bida Park and other parks received thou-sands of visitors on first day of Eid. Al Khor Park has a mini

zoo, with animals and birds shifted from the Doha Zoo which is undergoing renovation.

Souq Al Wakrah’s unique charm proved another magnet to citizens and residents alike this Eid Al Adha as hundreds of visitors thronged the souq which is now fast becoming a favourite family destination.

The Souq’s beach also saw hundreds of people who chose to spend the Eid holiday there.

04 WEDNESDAY 22 AUGUST 2018MIDDLE EAST / AFRICA

Celebrated Syrian novelist dies aged 94DAMASCUS: Award-winning Syrian novelist Hanna Mineh, known in his war-torn country as the father of the modern novel, died yesterday aged 94.

The prolific author died “after a long battle with illness”, state news agency SANA said. Mineh wrote around 40 novels, many inspired by the sea and his coastal hometown of Latakia, where he was born in 1924.

His most famous novel, entitled “The Road and the Storm” in Arabic, was set in French mandate Syria during the Second World War. It was adapted to film in 2012.

He was one of the founders of the Syrian Writers’ Association and the Arab Writers’ Union in Damascus in the 1950s.

Among other awards, Mineh in 2006 received the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for Arabic Literature, named after the late Egyptian nov-elist and Nobel laureate.

In Syria, the culture min-istry each year awards the Hanna Mineh Prize for Liter-ature. The ministry hailed Mineh as “one of the greatest Arab novelists”, SANA said.

Iran unveils first domestic fighter jetAFP

TEHRAN: Iran unveiled its first domestic fighter jet yesterday, with President Hassan Rowhani insisting that Tehran’s military strength was only designed to deter enemies and create “lasting peace”.

Images on state television showed Rowhani sitting in the cockpit of the new “Kowsar” fourth-generation fighter at the National Defence Industry exhi-bition in Tehran. State media said it had “advanced avionics” and multi-purpose radar, and that it was “100-percent indig-enously made” for the first time.

“When I speak of our read-iness to defend, it means we seek lasting peace. If we lack read-iness, we welcome war,” Rowhani said in a televised speech shortly after.

“Some think when we increase our military power, this means we seek war. (But) this is peace-seeking because we don’t want war to happen,” he added.

“If we don’t have a deterrent... it gives a green light

for others to enter this country.” The plane was first publicly announced on Saturday by

Defence Minister Amir Hatami, who had said it would be unveiled on Wednesday.

He gave few details of the project, focusing instead on Iran’s efforts to upgrade its

missile defences. Hatami said the defence programme was moti-vated by memories of the missile attacks Iran suffered during its eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, and by repeated threats from Israel and the United States that “all options are on the table” in dealing with the Islamic republic. “We have learned in the (Iran-Iraq) war that we cannot rely on anyone but ourselves,” he said in a televised interview.

Rowhani said Iran must show restraint as well as deter-rence, in an apparent swipe at his hardline opponents who seek to provoke the US with aggressive slogans.

“With a couple of sentences one can start a fight. With a couple of military moves one can enter confrontation. But then it will be costly,” he said. “The skill is to protect the country with minimum cost,” he said.

That mirrored a line from the defence minister, who said on Saturday: “Our resources are limited and we are committed to establishing security at a minimum cost.”

Iranian President Hassan Rowhani is seen in a newly unveiled fighter jet in Tehran, yesterday.

Pilgrims stone a facade of Jamarat pillars that symbolise the devil as a part of the annual Haj pilgrimage during the first day of Eid Al Adha in Makkah, yesterday.

Muslims worldwide celebrate Eid Al AdhaAGENCIES

MINA: Muslims across the globe — in Europe, Asia and Oceania — thronged mosques on the first of the four-day Eid Al Adha holiday yesterday to pray. More than two million Muslims took part in the symbolic stoning of the devil, the last major ritual of the Haj pilgrimage that heralds the start of the Eid Al Adha feast, in Mina valley. “Thank God it hasn’t been too crowded this year. There hasn’t been a big rush,” said Mohammed Osman, 27, who regularly attends Haj.

In Germany, Muslims in the capital Berlin and in Cologne headed to mosques for Eid prayers.

Meanwhile, Muslims in the Russian capital of

Moscow, as well as around the country also flocked to mosques to pray. President Vladimir Putin issued an Eid message to Muslims living in Russia.

Muslims in Sweden also swarmed into mosques for the Eid prayer. In the Kazakh capital of Astana, nine mosques were open for prayers. President Nursultan Nazarbayev extended Eid wishes in a statement

At least 200,000 Muslims in the Greek capital Athens prayed in basements as the city does not have a mosque.

In Australia, thousands of Muslims prayed in 27 mosques. The country’s Bureau of Statistics indicates that over 600,000 Muslims live in Australia.

UN urged to stop Israel’s grave breaches at Al AqsaQNA

CAIRO: The Arab League has called on the international community, particularly the United Nations, to resolutely move to stop Israel’s “grave” breaches of Al Aqsa Mosque.

Arab League Assistant Sec-retary-General of for Palestine Affairs and Occupied Arab Ter-ritories Ambassador, Said Abu Ali, made the remarks to remember the 49th anniversary of the arson attack on Al Aqsa Mosque.

He sounded the alarm about attempts to rescind the existing historical status of the mosque, which is one of the third holiest site in Islam, con-demning the 1969 mosque fire as a “heinous crime”.

“The crime was committed by a member of ultra-Zionist gangs in 1969 under the very nose of the Israeli occupying authorities in a serious dese-cration of the mosque,” he recalled.

Al Aqsa Mosque stands as a great historical landmark for the Muslim world and the entire humanity, he said. On August 21, 1969, Denis Michael Rohan, a Christian Australian citizen, set fire to the pulpit of Al Aqsa

Mosque, in Jerusalem.Ambassador Said Abu Ali

explained that the settlement government, in clear American partnership and absolute support, is implementing its biggest plans to control the capital Jerusalem in the midst of accelerated measures.

He also condemned all Israeli violations of Christian and Islamic holy sites and places of worship, including the Al Aqsa Mosque, as well as the forced displacement of Jerusalemites, the continued construction of several settlement projects in the Holy City, demolition of their homes and confiscation of their property and land.

Arab League

Assistant Secretary-

General of for

Palestine Affairs

and Occupied

Arab Territories

Ambassador, Said

Abu Ali, made the

remarks to remember

the 49th anniversary

of the arson attack on

Al Aqsa Mosque.

Russia to give S-400 missiles to TurkeyQNA

MOSCOW: Russia will start delivery of its S-400 missile systems next year, Russia’s state arms exporter Rosobor-onexport said.

Russia and Turkey signed in December 2017 in Ankara, a loan agreement for the supply of S-400 air defence systems. In September, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Turkey signed a contract with Russia to buy the S-400 missile defense system in the largest contract between the two countries, adding that a down payment has been made.

According to a statement issued by the Turkish defence industry secretariat, Ankara will buy two batteries from this air system, which will be serviced by Turkish officials. The two sides also reached an agreement on technological cooperation in this field to develop the production of missile defence systems in Turkey. Earlier, the US expressed concern that the intention of Turkey to deploy the S-400 missiles ‘may pose a threat’ to a number of US-made weapons used in Turkey, including F-35.

Moscow signs military agreement with CARAFP

MOSCOW: Russia and the Central African Republic signed a military cooperation agreement, less than a month after three Russian journalists were killed in the strife-torn CAR while probing alleged Russian mercenaries.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and his CAR counterpart Marie-Noelle Koyara signed the document on the sidelines of defense expo Army-2018 outside Moscow, Russian agencies reported.

The deal “will help strengthen ties in the defence sphere,” Shoigu was quoted as saying after the ceremony.

Russian deputy defense minister Alexander Fomin later told Interfax news agency that the pact was a “framework

agreement” about general avenues of cooperation.

“Exchange of delegations, education in Russian military institutes, mutual visits and so forth,” he was quoted as saying.

The agreement is set to deepen Moscow’s involvement in the impoverished CAR, where the government is des-perate to boost its armed forces in the fight against militias which control most of the country. A UN arms embargo imposed in 2013 was last year lifted exclusively for Moscow.

It has since then sent instructors and some equipment and now provides security for President Faustin-Archange Touadera.

The investigation was funded by ex-oil tycoon Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Tanker missing off Gabon with 17 sailors onboardAFP

LIBREVILLE: A tanker is missing off the coast of Gabon with 17 Georgian sailors onboard, officials said.

The ship “disappeared” from tracking screens on August 14, the source said, while regional military officials said the potential search area was between the Gabonese coast and the Sao Tome and Principe archipelago.

Specialist websites list the 121-metre ship, the Pantelena, as a 7,000-tonne, 12-year-old dual-purpose oil or chemical tanker. The vessel is Panamanian-flagged and owned by a Greek company, Lotus Shipping Co. Ltd.

The Georgian foreign min-istry in Tbilissi, in a statement issued last Friday, said there

were concerns for 17 Georgian sailors onboard and a search operation was being conducted with the help of the British mar-itime authorities.

Gabon lies on the southern part of the Gulf of Guinea — the great bend in the coastline of West African — where pirates are a notorious problem for shipping. The Pantelena “turned off its locator beacon,” a device that tracks a vessel’s position by sat-ellite, a regional military official said.

“The first thing that pirates do when they board a ship is to cut off this beacon.” A crew member aboard a ship sailing between Libreville and Port-Gentil, Gabon’s economic hub, told AFP: “We received a distress message over the radio and we alerted the Gabonese navy.” A

Gabonese navy official con-firmed, “We received an alert... about the Pantelena, but we didn’t have enough information to intervene.” In Sao Tome and Principe, which is located about 260km from Gabon, the com-mander of the local coastguard, Joao Idalecio, said it had dis-patched a patrol vessel with a crew of 30 to search for the tanker. In February, a Panama-registered tanker, the MT Marine Express with 13,500 tonnes of gasoline was seized with its crew as it was anchored off Benin. The ship and crew were freed several days later.

Last month, the Interna-tional Maritime Bureau (IMB) said that its specialist piracy reporting centre had recorded 107 incidents worldwide in the first six months of 2018.

Kurd region denies human trafficking claims

ERBIL: The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) denied recent assertions by the US regarding the alleged preva-lence of human trafficking in northern Iraq’s Kurdish region. In late June, the US State Department released a report on the prevalence of human trafficking worldwide.

The phenomenon has become widespread in the Kurdish region due to the lack of appropriate legislation.

“The KRG is working dil-igently to confront all forms of violence against women and children — including traf-ficking — and severely pun-ishes violators,” KRG official Dindar Zebari said. He said the Erbil-based KRG had already drawn up several committees to deal with the scourge of human trafficking.

05WEDNESDAY 22 AUGUST 2018 ASIA

Central govt releases Rs6bn for Kerala flood relief effortsIANS

NEW DELHI: The Centre yesterday released Rs6bn to the Kerala government for relief work in the flood-ravaged state and decided to waive Customs Duty and Goods and Services Tax (GST) on relief materials being imported.

The money released included Rs5bn announced by Prime Min-ister Narendra Modi and Rs1bn by Home Minister Rajnath Singh during their visits to the state, said a Union Home Ministry statement.

The money was released after the sixth consecutive meeting of the National Crisis

Management Committee (NCMC) chaired by Cabinet Secretary P K Sinha here.

The NCMC has been meeting

since August 16 to review the rescue and relief operations in Kerala which faced the worst floods in nearly 100 years, leaving around 370 persons dead and lakhs homeless.

The meeting was attended by Kerala Chief Secretary Tom Jose via video conferencing in which he said that “the situation (in Kerala) is now improving by and large though there are some iso-lated pockets: still under water. But the “water levels are receding fast”.

The Finance Ministry informed the NCMC that it had decided to “waive the Customs Duty and GST on the relief mate-rials being imported to aid the people in the flood-affected areas in Kerala”.

The Department of Food and Public Distribution said it had made additional allocation of 89,540 tonnes of rice as per the state government’s request while the Consumer Affairs Department said it was sending additional quantities of green gram and Tur dal, in addition to 100 tonnes of pulses supplied earlier.

Public Sector Oil Marketing Companies have contributed Rs250m to the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund in Kerala, the NCMC said.

The Union Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas has

opened special points in the flood affected areas for Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) distribution and permission had been granted, in coordination with the state government, for non-certified vehicles to carry LPG cylinders.

The Ministry said it had also made available 3.2 lakh LPG cyl-inders and 2.2 lakh regulators.

Indian Railways said it had so far supplied 24 lakh litres of drinking water in addition to 2.7 lakh water bottles. Another 14 lakh litres water was available at Ernakulam district.

The Railway Ministry said it had also made arrangements for supply of bed sheets and blankets

and that trains on all sections had resumed.

“Railways is also trans-porting relief materials from various states to Kerala free of cost,” the NCMC was told.

The NCMC was apprised that an action plan had been prepared for restoration of power supply in all the affected areas. “About 94 percent of telecom towers have been made functional. Power supply to telephone exchanges is being restored on priority.” The Health Ministry said it would supply three crore chlorine tablets in addition to one crore tablets supplied earlier and that 30 tonnes of bleaching

powder and 1.76 lakh sanitary pads had also been sent.

“Additional quantities will be sent in the next few days.” The Ministry declared that no major outbreak of disease had been reported so far.

The Ministry of Food Processing Industries said essential spices, salt, tea and coffee were being supplied as per the state government’s requirement.

“As the rescue operations wind down, the state adminis-tration has started de-requisi-tioning the teams of Defence Forces and NDRF,” the NCMC told.

A woman cleans the mud from the entrance of her house following floods in Paravur in the southern Indian state of Kerala, yesterday.

Cochin airport to open on August 26IANS

KOCHI: With the flood waters receding rapidly, the Cochin International Airport, one of the three in Kerala and the busiest, will open on August 26, after 12 days of closure.

Airport authorities have been engaged in a massive cleaning operation of the operational area that was submerged by flood waters.

One side the compound wall of the airport came down after

water from the swollen Periyar river and its tributaries, which received an unprecedented amount of water released by major dams, entered the complex, turning it into a virtual sea.

The airport was first closed on August 9, for a few hours, and then on August 15. Consequent to the flooding, a Rs600m solar power plant, billed as one of the biggest in an airport, was submerged.

The Cochin airport handled 10 million passengers in fiscal 2017-18.

India directs WhatsApp CEO to comply with law of the landIANS

NEW DELHI: Sending a stern message to WhatsApp over unabated mob lynchings linked to the spread of misin-formation on its platform, Union IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad yesterday instructed visiting CEO Chris Daniels to comply with the law of the land and take “suitable” steps to prevent misuse of the instant messaging platform.

Prasad, in a brief inter-action with the media after meeting Daniels here, said he also directed the WhatsApp boss to appoint a grievance officer and establish a sep-arate corporate entity in the country.

“WhatsApp has biggest footprint in India and has done a great job, be it in the field of education or helping people in Kerala floods. But I’m more concerned about the platform being misused for mob lynching and revenge porn. It has to find a technical way to deal with these issues,” the minister said.

“I have told WhatsApp to comply with the Indian laws, open a corporate entity and appoint a grievance officer here who can be reached to address such issues,” Prasad added.

Daniels, according to Prasad, assured him that the Facebook-owned platform will soon take steps on all these counts.

The minister also asked the WhatsApp CEO to work closely with law enforcement agencies and create public awareness to prevent misuse of the platform.

WhatsApp, however, did not issue any statement on the outcome of the meeting.

The meeting came against the backdrop of over 30 inci-dents of mob lynching in the recent past that were linked to the circulation of fake mes-sages and misinformation on WhatsApp.

Congress asks Modi to make letter to Imran publicIANS

NEW DELHI: Terming Punjab minister Navjot Singh Sidhu’s visit to Pakistan a non-issue since he went there in his personal capacity, the party yesterday turned to Prime Minister Narendra Modi asking him as to what happened to the red lines of ‘no-talks’ till terror from Pakistan stops.

It said the PM’s letter to his newly elected counterpart Imran Khan was to “obfuscate this gov-ernment’s lack of policy.” Modi

has written to Khan saying India d e s i r e s “ c o n s t r u c t i v e engagement” with Islamabad. The Congress has demanded that the Prime Minister should make the letter public to clear the air about multiple narratives about ‘resumption of dialogue’ with Pakistan.

The party said India and Pakistan relations are extremely complicated. “Navjot Singh Sidhu is not the issue,” it emphasized.

“The real issue is the rela-tionship between India and Pakistan, the impact of the

India-Pakistan stand-off on South Asia and the complete absence of the NDA-BJP govern-ment’s policy towards Pakistan,” said Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari.

“There seems to be a sug-gestion of resumption of a dia-logue despite all the red lines,” he said. “These lines mean that there will be no talks till terror from Pakistan stops, till the trial of the 26/11 perpetrators is not resumed, till Lakhvi is not put back in the prison, till Hafiz Saeed, who heads the Jamat-ud-Dawa, is not

incarcerated,” he said. “So there has been a concerted attempt by the government to try and obfuscate this. That is the real issue,” he added.

On government contra-dicting Pakistan’s foreign min-ister’s claim on PM’s offer on India’s overtures for talks with Pakistan, Tewari said: “The dif-ficulty with this government is, it only speaks through sources on uncomfortable questions.” “You have a second narrative on ‘sources in India’ which says that no such offer has been made. So

why does not the Prime minister make the letter public, which he has written to Prime Minister Imran Khan?” he asked.

“I think, it would be appro-priate that the letter be put it in the public space so that the whole thing can be clarified. And may I also add, I don’t see the government doing so,” he added.

Tewai said it was not the responsibility of the Congress to suggest a policy. “We conceptu-alized policy and implemented it for 10 years while we were in government,” he said.

Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi (right) answers question from audience while Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean listens during the 43rd Singapore Lecture in Singapore yesterday.

Japan offers to boost Sri Lanka security as China makes inroadsAFP

COLOMBO: Japan has pledged to help strengthen Sri Lanka’s maritime security, authorities said yesterday, in a new sign of efforts to counter China’s stra-tegic grip on the Indian Ocean island.

President Maithripala Sirisena thanked Japan’s Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera for donating two coast guard patrol

craft costing over $11m in total, his office said in a statement after talks in Colombo.

“Attention has been drawn to further strengthening mar-itime security cooperation between Japan and Sri Lanka,” the statement said.

The visit came a week after the US State Department gave $39m to strengthen the island’s naval capabilities.

Sirisena said he was happy that

Onodera, the first Japanese defence minister to visit, was travelling to two strategic ports on the island.

Onodera will visit Ham-bantota, which Colombo in December 2017 leased to a Chinese state-owned company for 99 years.

The government said it was forced to lease the port for $1.1 billion because it could not service loans from Beijing to build the white-elephant facility

agreed by former president Mahinda Rajapakse.

Hambantota, 230km from Colombo, straddles the world’s busiest east-west shipping route and gives China a foothold in a region long dominated by India.

The Japanese minister will also visit Trincomalee, a natural harbour that was the target of Japanese bombing during the Second World War.

China has edged out Japan

as a key funder of ports and other projects in the island in recent years. Sri Lanka has become a key link in its ambi-tious “Belt and Road” interna-tional infrastructure initiative.

China has also vowed to keep providing financial help to Sri Lanka. The International Monetary Fund, which bailed out Sri Lanka in 2016 with a $1.5bn loan, has warned Colombo over its debt.

Suu Kyi defends policies toward RohingyaAP

SINGAPORE: Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi yesterday defended her government’s actions in Rakhine state, where about 700,000 Rohingya Muslims fled from a brutal counterinsur-gency campaign to neighboring Bangladesh. She said terrorism, not social discrimination or inequality, triggered the crisis.

Suu Kyi made the com-ments in a lecture in Singapore in which she reviewed her two years in power.

“We who are living through the transition in Myanmar view it differently than those who observe it from the outside and who will remain untouched by its outcome,” she said, in an apparent response to criticism of how her

government has handled the plight of the Rohingya.

Critics accuse Myanmar’s army of carrying out ethnic cleaning, or even genocide, against the Muslim minority.

Suu Kyi’s government says it carried out justifiable coun-terinsurgency operations in response to attacks by militants on security forces.

In a measure of the national sensitivity of the subject, Suu Kyi appeared not to refer to the Rohingya by name in her speech. The term is rejected by many Buddhists in Myanmar who do not consider the group a native minority and charge it entered illegally from Bang-ladesh, although many families have lived for generations in Myanmar.

The Finance Ministry

waived Customs

Duty and GST on

the relief materials

being imported to

aid the people in the

flood-affected areas

in Kerala, while an

additional allocation

of 89,540 tonnes of

rice was made.

Car bombings,

roadside

explosives and

gunfire have

targeted and

killed more than

200 fighters, but

have also cost the

lives of dozens

of civilians,

the Syrian

Observatory for

Human Rights

says.

THE WASHINGTON POST

06 WEDNESDAY 22 AUGUST 2018VIEWS

Instability and abductionsfeed frustration in Idlib

Targeted killings and kidnap-pings for ransom have for months rattled Syria’s Idlib province, with angry residents

blaming dominant rebel forces for the chaos.

Even as the regime says it aims to retake the northwestern province on Turkey’s border, its inhabitants are falling victim to infighting between the rival groups controlling most of it.

Car bombings, roadside explosives and gunfire have targeted and killed more than 200 fighters, but have also cost the lives of dozens of civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says. These mostly unclaimed killings, as well as increasingly frequent abductions, have left inhabitants in constant fear of being caught up in the violence.

“Every time I want to take my car somewhere, I inspect it thoroughly... to make sure there’s no explosive device planted in it,” a media activist in southern Idlib said.

“Whenever I drive by a dustbin, I accelerate, afraid it’s going to blow up,” he said, asking to remain anon-ymous for fear of reprisals.

At the mosque on Fridays, he sits at the front of the congregation, as far away as possible from the entrance, in

case a car or motorbike blows up outside.

Since April, 270 people — including 55 civilians — have been killed in assassinations of rebels and commanders from all sides in Idlib, and adjacent parts of Hama and Aleppo prov-inces, the Britain-based Observatory says.

Activists and analysts blame most of the vio-lence on two rival umbrella groups, also attributing some to the Islamic State (IS) group and alleged regime collaborators.

The Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)

alliance, which is led by jihadists from Al Qaeda’s former Syrian affiliate, con-trols more than 60 percent of Idlib.

Part of the rest is held by the National Liberation Front, a rival umbrella group backed by neigbours, while IS also has sleeper cells in the area.

The regime holds the southeastern tip of the province that is home to some 2.5 million people -- more than half displaced by Syria’s seven-year war or bussed into Idlib under sur-render deals.

As the rampant insecurity in opposition areas reaches all walks of life, residents have grown increas-ingly angry. The media activist from southern Idlib said he mostly blamed the dominant force of HTS for the chaos. “As the most powerful force on the ground, it is responsible for guaranteeing security,” the activist said.

Medical staff in the HTS-held pro-vincial capital have also had enough.

In June, doctors and pharmacists in Idlib city announced a three-day strike to protest against “chaos and a lack of security”, including the kid-napping of doctors for ransom.

In one of the latest incidents, on August 7, masked men abducted Khalil Agha, a hospital director in the southwest of the province, district spokesman Mahmud al-Sheikh said. He was only released a week later after payment of a $100,000 ransom, Sheikh said.

A second activist said that, in the street, residents changed their route if

they saw men with scarves wrapped around their faces, fearing an attack.

In recent weeks, HTS as well as other rebels have arrested not only alleged IS members, but also dozens of people accused of collusion with the regime. Rebels fear loyalists could help broker a surrender deal, but HTS official Khaled al-Ali also accused government forces of helping to foment instability.

“The regime has cells working to destabilise Idlib to have a pretext for a military operation,” he said.

President Bashar al-Assad on July 26 said regaining control of Idlib was a priority. But analysts say any offensive is likely to be limited to Idlib’s periph-eries, to allow Turkey and regime ally Russia to eke out a deal for the rest of the province.

A report for the Turkey-based Omran Centre for Strategic Studies said the chaos was due to “compe-tition between a flurry of local forces”, as well as IS and regime sleeper cells.

The instability was affecting the popularity of all rebels, the report’s author Nawar Oliver said, especially HTS.

“Many areas in Idlib hate HTS and are ready to revolt against them at any time,” said the analyst.

Popular anger “could help the regime if it tried to take back the province”, Oliver said.

But discontent over the violence could also “make civilians more favourable to an alternative” put forward by Ankara and Moscow, he said.

ROUBA EL HUSSEINI AFP

QUOTE OF THE DAY

The negotiations are now entering

the final stage. We have agreed that

the EU and the UK will negotiate

continuously from now on.

Michel Barnier

EU Chief Negotiator

Venezuela’s situation is moving from awful to even worse

Venezuelans, once the richest people in Latin America, are living through an extraor-dinary humanitarian catas-

trophe. Deprived of adequate food, medicine, power and water, sub-jected to a terrifying epidemic of violent crime, ruled by a repressive, corrupt and monumentally incom-petent government, they are fleeing their country at the rate of an esti-mated 5,000 per day. Not only have they received scant aid, but Latin American nations and the regime of Nicolás Maduro are taking steps that will make their suffering even worse.

On Friday, Maduro, an economic illiterate who has overseen a drop of nearly 50 percent in Venezuela’s economic output, announced a drastic but incoherent package of measures intended to stop the free fall. It included some conventional steps the government has resisted for years, such as a huge devaluation and a promise to raise some gasoline prices to international levels.

But they were accompanied by other measures, such as a 30-fold increase in the minimum wage, that are likely to accelerate an infla-tionary storm that is already measured in the tens of thousand

percent. Some experts believe that what remains of economic activity may seize up altogether. Opposition leaders have called a general strike, but the regime has proved adept at putting down popular uprisings by force.

For a growing number of Vene-zuelans, the only alternative is to follow the more than 2 million of their fellow citizens - out of a popu-lation of 32 million - who have already sought refuge in other coun-tries, including the United States.

The movement of refugees is described by UN officials as one of the largest in Latin American history. More than 1 million are believed to be in Colombia, 600,000 have crossed into Ecuador this year, and 400,000 are in Peru. More than 70,000 have sought US asylum, making Venezuela by far the largest source of asylum seekers. Its Latin American neighbors, along with Car-ibbean nations such as Trinidad and Tobago, lack the resources to manage the Venezuelans, many of whom are destitute and desperate.

Many have been victimized by human traffickers and other crim-inals. Yet the international response has been anemic: The UN refugee agency had raised only half of the $46 million it was seeking for Vene-

zuela operations as of early August.Now several governments are

taking steps to block Venezuelans seeking refuge. Ecuador and Peru announced last week that they would admit only those carrying passports, which are nearly impos-sible to obtain in Venezuela. Chile already imposed such a restriction. The Brazilian government mean-while announced it would send troops to the border state of Roraima, where Venezuelan migrants were attacked by a mob on Saturday.

The US response has also been disappointing, despite frequent con-demnations of the Maduro gov-ernment by President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and other officials. The administration has pro-vided $12 million to UN refugee efforts and about $55 million overall; Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said last week that a Navy hospital ship would be stationed off Colombia to provide medical aid to Venezuelans.

That’s not adequate. While the United States cannot easily force a political change in Caracas, it can at least do much more to help refugee Venezuelans and the nations hosting them. Otherwise, it risks allowing the disaster in one nation to become a regional crisis.

Qatar’s tourism

infrastructure

is expected to

receive a major

boost when the

much-anticipated

National Museum

of Qatar opens

its doors to the

public.

CHAIRMANSHEIKH THANI BIN ABDULLAH AL THANI

EDITOR-IN-CHIEFDR. KHALID BIN MUBARAK AL-SHAFIeditorinchief@pen.com.qa

ACTING MANAGING EDITORMOHAMMED SALIM MOHAMEDm.salim@pen.com.qa

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

ESTABLISHED IN 1996

EDITORIAL

Qatar’s booming tourism

Qatar is fast becoming a favourite destination for tourists. And Qatar Tourism Authority is steadfast in its mission to firmly establish the country on the

global map where people of the world come together to experience Qatar’s unique culture and diversity.

Qatar has taken several measures to boost tourism. In September last year, the country witnessed the launch of the Next Chapter of its National Tourism Sector Strategy 2030, which charts the next five years of the tourism sec-tor’s growth in Qatar. The Next Chapter aims to attract 5.6 million visitors to Qatar annually by 2023, double the number which the country welcomed in 2016. It also aims to achieve a 72 percent occupancy rate across all hotel establishments, through a combination of increasing demand and diversifying the country’s tourist accommo-dation offerings. Since the strategy’s launching in 2014, Qatar has welcomed over 10 million visitors.

Recently, the Mall of Qatar said it was looking to attract foreign visitors coming through cruise ships, in a bid to increase footfalls. The Mall is in talks with QTA to tap into growing number of cruise tourists coming to the country.

A total of 65,675 visitors arrived on Qatar’s shores during 2017/18 season, marking a 39 percent increase compared to the previous season, according to QTA. The visitors were on board 22 cruise ships, 14 of which were mega-ships. The cruise season, which ran from October 2017 until April 2018, witnessed five maiden voyages to Doha, made by MSC Splendida, Mein Schiff 5, Crystal Symphone, Europa 2 and Crystal Serenity. Data gathered by QTA shows that most visitors aboard cruise ships the last season were European, with the largest portion being German.

Italian and British visitors formed the second and third largest groups respectively.

Also, Qatar Tourism Authority and DER Touristik Deut-schland joined hands to further boost awareness of Qatar as a tourism destination. The deal comes following a 22 percent rise in German visitors to Qatar in 2017 compared to the previous year.

In the last quarter of 2016, QTA, the Ministry of Interior and Qatar Airways introduced a free 96-hour transit visa . The scheme attracted a huge increase in stopover pas-sengers at Hamad International Airport. In August last year, Qatar eased its visa policies allowing citizens of 80 countries visa-free entry. After the announcement, Qatar became the first country in the region in terms of number of nationalities eligible to enter visa-free, making it the most open country in the region.

Qatar’s tourism infrastructure is expected to receive a major boost in 2019 when the first phase of Doha’s new metro system comes online and the much-anticipated National Museum of Qatar opens its doors to the public. Qatar offers every traveller an unforgettable experience. Hospitality is the essence of Qatari culture. With more malls and tourist attractions coming up in the run-up to 2022 FIFA World Cup, Qatar is going to witness a boom in tourism in times to come.

Strict interpretations

of UN sanctions

curtailing banking and

shipping transactions

with Pyongyang,

as well as a travel

ban for US citizens,

have effectively

shut down the North

Korea operations of

most relief groups,

according to a

dozen officials at UN

agencies and civilian

organisations.

07WEDNESDAY 22 AUGUST 2018 OPINION

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Australia’s oppn sitting pretty as PM’s leadership appears doomed

As food crisis threatens, aid for North Korea grinds to a halt

JOHN MAIR & ERIN COOPER REUTERS

HYONHEE SHIN REUTERS

Australia’s opposition Labor Party looks to be in the envious position of having to do little to ensure victory

in the next election after Prime Min-ister Malcolm Turnbull survived a damaging leadership challenge yes-terday. Polling and growing dissatis-faction with Turnbull’s fractured

centre-right government, led by his Liberal Party, suggest all Labor has to do before the next election, which could be as soon as next month or as late as May, is avoid shooting them-selves in the foot.

“I would think the Liberal Party have a very limited chance of winning the next election,” said Ian McAllister, professor of Political Science at Aus-tralian National University in Canberra.

“Labor’s strategy would just be to do very little, just sit on the sidelines. They’ll just be bystanders until the election is called.” However, recent experience would suggest that Labor can not take for granted a smooth path to election victory.

For one thing, Labor leader Bill Shorten’s central involvement in deposing two prime ministers when

his party was last in office has left a bad taste with voters. Despite his party’s lead in opinion polls, Shorten has consistently trailed Turnbull as preferred prime minister.

But with the Turnbull’s gov-ernment at war with itself as a con-servative faction has leveraged a slim parliamentary majority to challenge policy it disagrees with, voters may set aside questions over Shorten’s leadership.

Turnbull, trying to regain the initi-ative as speculation swirled over his future, began a meeting of Liberal parliamentarians yesterday by declaring the leadership of the party, and therefore the government, open to be contested.

He headed off a leadership chal-lenge from Minster of Home Affairs Peter Dutton by a margin of 48 votes to 35 in the surprise vote. But that was hardly the resounding vote of confi-dence Turnbull sought.

Had just seven votes gone the other way, he would have lost office, and so the talk in Canberra has been when, not if, a second challenge would come. Parliament adjourns on Thursday until September 10.

If the policy paralysis and poor opinion polls continue, Turnbull could call an election before the new parlia-mentary session, or he looks bound to face another challenge.

“There’s no doubt that when one major party is tearing itself apart over leadership and that major party happens to be the party of gov-ernment, the other major party in opposition benefits,” said Nick Economou, senior lecturer in politics at Monash University in Melbourne.

Labor appears to be in a position of strength. It has rated higher than the Liberal-National coalition in the past 38 Newspoll opinion polls, a widely watched gauge of voter sen-timent released every two weeks.

Turnbull used a shorter run of Newspoll losses as part of his justifi-cation to depose Tony Abbott as prime minister in his own party coup in Sep-tember 2015.

The ruling coalition’s battle plan, which it repeated as it tried to close ranks after the leadership vote, is to focus on stopping Shorten from becoming prime minister.

The government has been keen to highlight questions over Shorten’s leadership, reminding the public of his role in removing both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard as Labour prime ministers in 2010 and 2013, and also portraying him as a high-taxing former union leader.

“He’s less popular than Malcolm Turnbull, and the least popular leader Australia has seen over the past 30 years. The saving grace for Labor is voters don’t like Malcolm Turnbull much better,” said the ANU’s McAllister.

“Having two relatively unpopular leaders doesn’t give an advantage to either party because they cancel each other out.” One thing voters seem to share is frustration with the incessant infighting within both major parties.

“Definitely had enough of this, I think that it’s bad for the stability of the nation,” said law student Renata Labio.

“We just need to have a stable leadership and we need to stop these challenges. It’s utterly ridiculous.”

Humanitarian aid for North Korea has nearly ground to a halt this year as the United States steps up the

enforcement of sanctions, despite warnings of a potential food crisis and improving relations with Pyongyang, aid groups say.

International sanctions imposed over North Korea’s nuclear weapons programmes technically do not cover humanitarian activities, and the United Nations recently adopted a US proposal designed to streamline approval for aid shipments.

But strict interpretations of UN sanctions curtailing banking and shipping transactions with Pyongyang, as well as a travel ban for US citizens, have effectively shut down the North Korea operations of most relief groups, according to a dozen officials at UN agencies and civilian organisations.

A ban on the shipment of any metal objects, from health diagnostic instru-ments to spoons to nail clippers, makes it nearly impossible to deliver even basic healthcare to North Korea, the officials say. Farm machines, green-houses and ambulances, meanwhile, are sitting idle without spare parts.

“The sanctions regime is having unintended consequences on human-itarian operations and relief and assistance activities, notably the col-lapse of the banking channel and delays in moving supplies into the country,” Mazen Gharzeddine, who oversees North Korea operations at the United Nations Development Pro-gramme, told Reuters.

Total funding for UN and NGO

activities in North Korea has dropped from $117.8 million in 2012 to $17.1 million so far this year, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ Financial Tracking Service.

The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Philadelphia-based NGO that has run farming projects in North Korea for 20 years, said it had halted its programmes this year for the first time because of the inability to ship supplies or travel to the country.

London-headquartered Save the Children, which provided food, healthcare and disaster relief, pulled out in November citing operational obstacles.

Geneva-based Global Fund, which had funnelled more than $105 million since 2010 to fight tuberculosis and malaria, closed its North Korea opera-tions in June. It blamed risks in deploying resources and the lack of access and oversight for the withdrawal.

While exemptions are allowed for humanitarian aid, officials say they have faced delays of more than a year for even basic aid deliveries, as well as months waiting for US government permission to travel to North Korea.

That is hurting efforts to help ordinary citizens in a country where some 40 percent of the population - or more than 10 million people - need humanitarian assistance and about 20 percent of children suffer from mal-nutrition, according to UN estimates.

\This month, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said North Korea faces a “full-blown food security crisis” after state media warned of an “unprecedented natural

disaster” due to the heat wave.Another US relief group, which

requested anonymity due to the sen-sitivity of the issue, said it worried the heatwave could lead to crop damage and loss of life.

However, UN agencies and AFSC said it was too early to forecast any impact of the heatwave until the autumn harvest season, and satellite images show crops appear healthy compared to last year.

North Korea experienced a crip-pling famine in the 1990s when a combination of bad weather, eco-nomic mismanagement and the removal of fuel subsidies paralysed its state-run rationing system, killing up to three million people.

North Korea’s economy con-tracted by 3.5 percent in 2017, the sharpest rate since the 1990s famine, as international sanctions and drought hit growth hard, South Korea’s central bank said last month.

When asked about sanctions’ impact on aid, a State Department spokesperson told Reuters sanctions will continue “until nukes are no longer a factor,” without elaborating.

US President Donald Trump held an unprecedented summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June in Singapore and quickly declared the country no longer posed a nuclear threat. Despite positive words since from Trump, the two countries have struggled to agree on how to end the North’s weapons programmes.

“We are dismayed that, just as there is a thaw in US-DPRK relations, the US government is doubling down on sanctions, effectively shutting down the work of US NGOs working on the ground,” said Linda Lewis, who runs AFSC’s agricultural projects there. The DPRK stands for the Demo-cratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official name.

Lewis said when she applied for a special passport to travel to North Korea in October, it took her 10 days, but when she made a second request in May, she had to wait for 56 days.

Lack of transparency and restricted access have long been a hurdle for relief workers in North Korea, even before international funding dried up under Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear and missile development.

Nearly 20 international civic relief groups were active as of 2010, but that number has more than halved, according to aid workers operating in North Korea.

Only a handful of mostly American NGOs now remain, comple-menting the work of the WHO, the UN Development Programme, UN World Food Program and Unicef.

“Labor’s strategy

would just be to do

very little, just sit on

the sidelines. They’ll

just be bystanders

until the election is

called.” However,

recent experience

would suggest

that Labor can not

take for granted

a smooth path to

election victory.

The UN had to stop nutrition support for kindergartens in North Korea in November due to the lack of funding. Its $111 million “2018 Needs and Priorities Plan” is nearly 90 percent under-funded.

After visiting North Korea last month, UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock said sanctions are exacerbating humanitarian problems. There was “very clear evidence” of aid needs, but funding was falling short, he added.

Seoul has not yet delivered on its pledge made last September to give $8 million to the WFP and Unicef to support North Korean children and pregnant women.

South Korea will make a donation “at an appropriate time considering overall circumstances”, Unification Ministry spokeswoman Lee Eugene said.

Early this month, a UN panel that monitors sanctions against North Korea adopted US-backed guidelines designed to facilitate humanitarian assistance to North Korea.

But aid officials say the rules still leave plenty of ambiguity.

For example, one US NGO pointed to a provision that “strongly recommends” shipments be consolidated into one every six months, which it said was unfea-sible for many groups.

“If the true intention is not to harm humanitarian efforts, then there should be more will and com-mitment on the part of every gov-ernment ... to make sure that humanitarian efforts go forth unimpeded,” an official at the agency said, requesting anonymity due to sensitivity of the matter.

“Truly, for humanitarian organ-isations, it is death by a thousand cuts.”

08 WEDNESDAY 22 AUGUST 2018ASIA

Hours-long battle ends in Kabul after militants dieAFP

KABUL: An hours-long battle in the Afghan capital involving insurgent rocket attacks and military airs trikes ended yesterday with the death of two militants, authorities said.

The assault came as Pres-ident Ashraf Ghani was making a speech marking the first day of the Islamic Eid Al Adha holiday, days after he offered the Taliban a conditional three-month ceasefire, which the Taliban has rejected.

It was not clear who carried out the attack.

“Two attackers were involved. The enemy was firing mortars,” General Murad Ali Murad, commander of Kabul’s garrison, told a press conference.

They were killed and at least six civilians or security force members were injured, he said.

Police said the attackers used rockets, several of which landed in at least two areas of Kabul around 9am.

During the battle an Afghan army helicopter swooped in low near the Eidgah Mosque in a central district and fired a rocket at a militant position, sending a plume of dust into the sky.

Shoppers who moments earlier had been buying live-stock for the Eid feast sprinted for shelter as cars swerved in the road to flee the fighting.

Blasts and gunfire could be heard as security forces cor-doned off the area.

The mosque is near the presidential palace where Ghani was making his speech, which was being aired live on Facebook when the attack began.

The president can be seen pausing as multiple blasts are heard in the background, some sounding nearby, before stating: “This nation is not going to bow to these rocket attacks.” The

attackers appeared to be in a building behind the mosque, which was partially destroyed in another attack several years earlier and is not believed to have been in use for Eid.

Footage aired during the attack on Tolo News showed black smoke emanating from the area near the mosque while fire trucks and security vehicles rushed to the scene.

Interior ministry spokesman Najib Danish confirmed that militants had taken over a building near the mosque and fired several rockets.

Danish later told Tolo the militants were using rocket-pro-pelled grenades and mortars to target parts of the city.

“Choppers are flying over the site and the security forces are busy defusing two explosive-packed vehicles,” wrote interior ministry strategic communica-tions chief Bahar Mehr on Facebook.

Ghani unveiled the govern-ment’s latest ceasefire offer during an Independence Day address late on Sunday, saying security forces would observe the truce beginning this week -- but only if the militants reciprocated.

The offer was welcomed by the United States and Nato after nearly 17 years of war, though it was not clear if their forces in Afghanistan

would also participate.The Taliban have not yet

officially responded to Ghani’s proposal.

The move followed an extraordinarily violent week in Afghanistan that saw that Taliban storm the provincial capital of Ghazni — just a two-hour drive from Kabul — and press the fight against security forces across the country, with estimates suggesting hundreds of people may have been killed.

Analyst Nazar Sarmachar said the proximity of the rockets to the presidential palace as Ghani was speaking highlighted glaring security shortcomings in the capital.

“Had a rocket landed in the backyard of the palace... it could have killed or wounded the president,” he said.

The truce proposal came after an initial ceasefire in June, the first since the US-led invasion in 2001 that toppled the Taliban regime.

For three days thousands of insurgents poured into cities across Afghanistan, eating ice cream and posing for selfies with security forces to celebrate.

The brief respite spurred hopes that a new path was opening for possible peace talks in the country.

The Taliban have long insisted on direct talks with Washington and refused to negotiate with the Afghan gov-ernment, which they see as illegitimate.

In June Washington indi-cated a change in its long-standing policy, with US officials meeting Taliban representatives in Doha in July.

However, State Department official Alice Wells said on Monday that any future peace talks must include the Kabul government, and would not take place directly between the Taliban and Washington.

Soldiers keep vigil as Afghans listen to Eid Al Adha sermon in Khost Province, yesterday.

Peaceful Eid Al Adha prayers in Afghanistan

Imran Khan calls for austerity; wants bullet-proof cars soldREUTERS

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s new Prime Minister Imran Khan called on Sunday for the rich to start paying taxes and said the country will begin an austerity drive to reduce debt, a campaign he will kick-start by selling his office’s fleet of bullet-proof cars.

In his first address to the nation as premier, Khan set out his vision for a “New Pakistan” and spoke at length about the need to reshape the country by introducing an Islamic welfare system, reducing poverty and slashing high debt levels.

“We have formed a bad habit of living on loans and aid from other countries,” said Khan, speaking under a portrait of his hero and Pakistan founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah. “No country can prosper like this. A country must stand on its own

feet.” A firebrand populist, Khan’s

appeal has soared in recent years on the back of his anti-corruption drive, which has res-onated with young voters and the expanding middle class in the mainly-Muslim nation of 208 million people.

But Khan has inherited a host of problems at home and abroad, including a brewing currency crisis and fraying rela-tions with Pakistan’s historic ally, the United States.

Khan did not shed any light on policy plans to deal with the cur-rency woes that analysts expect will force Pakistan to seek another International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout. Instead, Khan focused on debt and said former central bank governor Ishrat Husain would lead a task-force to drive austerity.

Criticizing what he called the colonial-era mindset and lavish

lifestyles of Pakistan’s ruling elite, Khan announced he would live in a small three-bedroom house instead of the palatial prime minister’s residence.

Khan plans to have only two servants instead of 524 reserved for a sitting premier. He also announced plans to sell a fleet of bullet-proof vehicles to help Treasury shortfalls.

“I want to tell my people, I will live a simple life, I will save your money,” he said.

Khan appealed to overseas Pakistanis to invest in the country and urged the wealthy to start paying taxes, a perennial problem in a nation famous for tax dodging and where less than 1 percent of the population files income tax. “It is your respon-sibility to pay taxes,” said Khan. “Think of this as a struggle, that you need to pay tax for the bet-terment of your country.”

Malaysia’s national day parade to affect nearly 500 flightsREUTERS

KUALA LUMPUR: Nearly 500 flights will be affected when Malaysia closes the airspace near its major inter-national airport every morning for five days next week to prepare for inde-pendence day celebrations, the transport ministry said.

Malaysia’s annual National Day parade, which features an aerobatic per-formance by the air force, is normally held on August 31 in Kuala Lumpur, some 60km away from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) and its budget carrier ter-minal, KLIA2.

But this year, the parade will be held in the adminis-trative capital of Putrajaya, close to the two airports, the ministry said in a statement.

A total of 498 flights in and out of the airports are expected to be affected as a result of the closures, which will run from 9.30am to 10.30am during August 27 to August 31.

“The closures... are important to ensure the success of the National Day 2018 flypast and the priority is to ensure the safety of the airspace and movement of aircraft at KLIA/KLIA2,” the ministry said. It said the clo-sures may involve additional arrangements that could lead to flight delays.

The public is advised to contact airlines and airport authorities to get the latest information and schedules, it said.

No indication N Korea nuclear activities stopped: IAEAAFP

VIENNA: The UN’s nuclear watchdog said it had not seen any indication that nuclear activities in North Korea have stopped despite its pledges to denuclearise.

“The continuation and further development of the DPRK’s nuclear programme and related statements by the DPRK are a cause for grave concern,” said a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), referring to North Korea’s official name.

The report, published late on Monday, by director general Yukiya Amano is to be submitted

to an IAEA board meeting in Sep-tember. In 2009 Pyongyang expelled IAEA inspectors from its Yongbyon nuclear site and has since refused to allow IAEA inspections on its territory.

The watchdog has stepped up monitoring through open source information and satellite imagery, it said.

“As the Agency remains unable to carry out verification activities in the DPRK, its knowledge of the DPRK’s nuclear programme is limited and, as further nuclear activities take place in the country, this knowledge is declining,” it said.

Between late-April and early-May, there were indications of the operation of the steam plant that serves the radiochemical labo-ratory at the Yongbyon site, according to the report.

However, the steam plant was not operative long enough to have supported the reproc-essing of a complete core from the experimental nuclear power plant reactor, it added.

The report added steam charges and the outflow of cooling water at the Yongbyon experimental nuclear power plant had also been observed “consistent with the reactor’s

operation”.“Since December 2015, when

the current operational cycle started, there have been indica-tions consistent with several short periods of reactor shutdown. However, none of these periods were of sufficient duration for the complete reactor core to have been discharged. The Agency’s observations indicate that the current opera-tional cycle is longer than the previous one,” it said.

It also found “indications consistent with the use of the reported centrifuge enrichment facility located within the plant,

including the operation of the cooling units as well as regular movements of vehicles.” North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump held a groundbreaking summit in Sin-gapore in June.

At the meeting the pair struck a vague agreement to denuclearise the Korean peninsula, but there has been little movement since.

Before this, Kim met South Korean President Moon Jae-in in April for their first summit. They agreed to push for a dec-laration of an end to the Korean War this year.

South Korean Park Gap-il (second left), 79, and his North Korean relatives pose for a photo on the second day of a separated family reunion event at the Mount Kumgang resort on the North’s southeastern coast, yesterday.

A glimpse of the Korean family reunion

Australian Prime Minister survives Dutton’s challengeREUTERS

SYDNEY: Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull survived a leadership challenge by Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton yesterday, government officials said, but the narrow margin of his win did little to dampen speculation about his future.

Turnbull defeated Dutton 48-35 in the party-room vote for the leadership of the Liberal Party, the senior party in the centre-right government coa-lition, officials said. The vote came after a sharp fall in opinion poll ratings and talk of a challenge that have raised the possibility of an early election.

Seeking to safeguard his leadership, Turnbull called on

his party to back him or risk losing the next election to the opposition Labor party.

“We know that instability undermines the ability of any government to get anything done. Unity is absolutely critical,” Turnbull said in Canberra.

Labor wasted no time in moving a no-confidence motion against Turnbull in parliament. The motion failed when all gov-ernment lawmakers in the lower house of parliament backed their embattled leader despite a pro-longed Labor attack.

“If the prime minister’s own party does not want him, and nearly half of his party voted against him remaining prime minister, why should the par-liament put up with him?” Labor leader Bill Shorten said.

Militants fired rockets

as President Ashraf

Ghani was making

a speech marking

the first day of the

Islamic Eid Al Adha

holiday, days after he

offered the Taliban

a conditional three-

month ceasefire,

which the militants

rejected.

09WEDNESDAY 22 AUGUST 2018 EUROPE

UK urges EU to weigh tougher Russian sanctions

Toll in Italy gorge flood hits 11REUTERS

ROME: At least 11 people were killed in southern Italy when they were washed away over rocks by a raging white-water creek in a deep mountain gorge that swelled suddenly after heavy rain upstream, officials said.

The civil protection department said yesterday that 23 people were rescued and about a dozen others were hospitalised after surviving the flash rush of water in the narrow gorge in the Calabria region. The eleventh victim died in hospital.

At least five people were missing but the total could be more because not all had entered the gorge with official

guides and registered. Rescue squads worked through the night with spotlights, and heli-copters took off a first light to survey the area.

The nationalities of the dead and injured were not immedi-ately known. Six of the victims were women and five were men. Most tourists and trekkers who visit the area, in the country’s deep south, are Italian.

In some places the Raganello creek, part of the Pollino National Park, is at the bottom of a narrow, 1km deep gorge in the mountain. Rescue teams used ropes to descend the sides of the mountain to reach the site.

“This gorge filled up with water in a really short space of time and these people were

catapulted out like bullets. They ended up some 3km down the valley,” said Carlo Tansi, head of the civil protection department in Calabria.

Tansi said the gorge was only about four metres wide in some places, increasing the speed of the water and making the rescue more difficult.

“It is really difficult terrain, filled with obstacles because of the (geological) formation of the area,” said Eugenio Facciolla, the chief prosecutor of the pro-vincial capital, Cosenza.

He said rescuers working under spotlights were trying to locate areas where some people may have survived by ending up on small patches of shore or tiny islands in the creek.

Rescuers are seen at the Raganello Gorge, a popular hiking spot in Civita, a village in the Italian Calabria southern region, yesterday.

Nazi-era camp guard deported by US to GermanyAFP

BERLIN: Germany, citing its “moral duty”, yesterday took in a 95-year-old former guard at a Nazi labour camp where more than 6,000 people were killed, after he was stripped of his US citizenship.

The German foreign min-istry said it had agreed to accept the former Ukraine national Jakiw Palij after his expulsion from the United States late Monday, saying Berlin felt obliged to take him in light of the Nazis’ crimes.

“The United States had repeatedly pressed for Germany to take in Palij,” the ministry said. Berlin, however, had long resisted because he was not a German citizen.

“The US administration, senators, members of Con-gress and representatives of the Jewish community in the US stress that people who served the rogue Nazi regime should not be able to live out their twilight years in peace in their country of choice, the United States,” it added.

Palij illegally concealed his Nazi past from immi-gration agents when he moved to the US in 1949, the Justice Department said. He became American in 1957.

Britain ‘sorry’ over deportation rowAP

LONDON: The British government apologised yesterday to 18 long-term UK residents from the Caribbean who were deported or detained because they could not produce documents to prove their right to live in the country.

Home Secretary Sajid Javid said their treatment was “com-pletely unacceptable,” and issued a personal apology. He said those affected would get “the support and compensation they deserve.”

The government reviewed almost 12,000 immigration cases after it was reported that some people from the Caribbean who had lived in Britain for decades had been denied housing, jobs or medical treatment because they could not prove their status.

The treatment of members of the so-called “Windrush gen-eration” caused widespread outrage in Britain.

The Home Office said yes-terday that the most serious cases include 11 people who were wrongly removed from the country, and another seven who were detained but not deported.

Javid said these 18 people are the “most likely to have suf-fered detriment.” The gov-ernment found 146 other cases of Caribbean immigrants who were detained or deported, but “the degree of detriment suf-fered varied considerably.”

Those affected are known as the “Windrush generation” after the ship Empire Windrush, which in 1948 brought hundreds of Caribbean immigrants to a Britain seeking nurses, railway workers and others to help it

rebuild after the devastation of World War II.

They and other Common-wealth immigrants who came to Britain before 1973 had an automatic right to settle in the UK But some have fallen foul of rules requiring employers and doctors to verify people’s immi-gration status.

The Conservative gov-ernment introduced the checks as part of its goal of making the UK a “hostile environment” for illegal immigration.

Javid, whose parents came to Britain from Pakistan, has dropped the “hostile envi-ronment” label and is reviewing immigration procedures.

“We must do everything we can to ensure that nothing like this happens again, which is why I have asked an independent adviser to look at what lessons we can learn from Windrush.”

Swedish fighter jet crashes after collision with birdsAP

COPENHAGEN: A Swedish Air Force jet fighter crashed yesterday near an air base in southern Sweden after striking several birds as it was about to land, Sweden’s Armed Forces said.

“The pilot of the Swedish-built JAS 39 Gripen fighter aborted the landing he was attempting and ejected,” said Col Lars Bergstrom, head of the Blekinge Air Force Wing near Ronneby in southern Sweden.

“The pilot is in good spirits and is doing fine,” Bergstrom told a news conference, adding he was taken to a nearby hos-pital for checks. “We could see the whole thing from the control tower.”

The collision occurred at about 9.45am north of Ronneby, near Karlskrona — 160km east of Malmo, Sweden’s third largest city.

Sweden’s Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist said that “the pilot did exactly what one has to do in this kind of situation.”

Italy refuses to let migrants disembarkAFP

ROME: Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Salvini remained defiant yesterday in refusing to allow about 170 migrants to disembark from an Italian coastguard boat after it docked in Sicily for technical reasons.

The Diciotti vessel, which rescued the migrants five days ago, arrived at the port of Catania overnight “for a tech-nical stopover”.

Salvini was forced to allow the boat to dock but refused to let migrants onto land until the European Union committed to taking care of some of them.

“Either Europe begins to seriously defend its borders and shares the relocation of immi-grants, or we will start taking them back to the port that they left,” Salvini tweete.

“Italy has already done its duty, and when it’s too much, it’s too much,” said Salvini, who is also deputy prime minister and leader of the far-right League.

He has threatened to return the migrants to Libya if other European countries did not par-ticipate in a solution.

The boat had been stuck off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa since Thursday while Italy’s populist gov-ernment, in power since June, battled with Malta over who should take them in.

The Maltese government said the migrants refused the help of a Maltese boat because they wanted to reach Lampedusa.

The spat between Italy and Malta is the second in just over a month. It follows a fight over 450 rescued people who were eventually allowed to dis-embark in Italy after five European countries agreed to take 50 each.

Last week, Malta allowed 141 migrants aboard the French NGO rescue vessel Aquarius to dock after an agreement to dis-tribute them to a number of European countries.

Russia denies hunger-striker critically illAP

KIEV: The family of an imprisoned Ukrainian film-maker who has been on a hunger strike for 100 days said he is in critical condition, a claim that a Russian official quickly denied.

Oleg Sentsov, a native of the Russia-annexed Crimea Peninsula, was sentenced to 20

years in prison in 2015 for con-spiracy to commit terrorism. His supporters call the prosecution of Sentsov politically motivated.

Sentsov’s sister, Natalya Kaplan, said that Sentsov is in intensive care in critical con-dition. She said, however, that the family doesn’t have full information about his health.

Russia’s prison system has been contradicting claims about

the filmmaker’s worsening con-dition, saying that he’s been given nutritional supplements.

Kremlin ombudswoman promptly contradicted Kaplan’s statement, telling the RIA Novosti news agency that the prison sent in a group of doctors to examine Sentsov on Monday and they reportedly concluded that his condition was satisfactory.

Demonstrators holding placards reading “Free Sentsov” with an appeal to free Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov during a rally in front of Russia embassy, in Kiev, yesterday.

REUTERS

LONDON: Britain pressed the European Union yesterday to increase sanctions against Russia, saying it should stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the United States, which hit Moscow with new economic restrictions this month.

Britain’s Foreign Minister, Jeremy Hunt, said that Russian President Vladimir Putin has made the world “a more dan-gerous place”, and that after a chemical weapons attack in the English city of Salisbury, the EU should apply more pressure to ensure Russia sticks to interna-tional rules.

“Today the United Kingdom asks its allies to go further by calling on the European Union

to ensure its sanctions against Russia are comprehensive, and that we truly stand shoulder to shoulder with the US,” Hunt said in his first major speech since his appointment in July.

“That means calling out and responding to transgressions

with one voice wherever and whenever they occur, from the streets of Salisbury to the heart of Crimea.”

Asked about Hunt’s speech, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Britain had too high an opinion of itself and was trying to impose its Russian policy on the EU and the United States, the RIA news agency reported.

EU officials said Britain had not yet proposed any new sanc-tions on Russia to the other 27 EU member states.

Britain, the EU, and the United States blame Russia for a nerve agent attack against a Russian double agent in Salisbury earlier this year. The Kremlin denies involvement.

Citing the Salisbury incident,

Washington has imposed sanc-tions against Moscow covering national-security related goods. It has promised more hard-hitting measures unless Russia gives “reliable assurances” it will no longer use chemical weapons.

The sanctions sparked a sell-off across Russian markets, and pushed up the country’s cost of borrowing - with both likely to worsen if a second wave of measures is enacted.

Britain is preparing to leave the EU next March, but currently follows EU-level sanctions policy on Russia, agreed by all member states. The EU recently agreed to renew sanctions against Russia relating to its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and other activity in the region.

But the EU has not imposed

further economic sanctions spe-cifically linked to Salisbury, although it strongly condemned Moscow and joined international action to expel Russian officials after the attack. Its measures against Russia include finance restrictions and arms exports.

Any new EU sanctions would require unanimity among all 28 states. The current economic sanctions against Russia are in place until the end of January, 2019, as well as curbs on doing business with Crimea.

But while some countries such as Poland and the Baltic states back Britain’s hawkish stance towards Russia, some other member states including Italy, Austria and Greece advocate more engagement with Moscow.

In yesterday’s speech, Hunt also criticised China — like Russia a permanent member of the UN Security Council — over what he sees as its inaction over Crimea and chemical weapons.

On Brexit, where negotia-tions have become bogged down as the deadline for reaching an exit deal with the EU approaches, Hunt repeated his call for the bloc to show flexibility.

“Now is the time for the European Commission to engage with an open mind with the fair and constructive proposals made by the Prime Minister (Theresa May),” he said.

Hunt, who took over from Boris Johnson as Britain’s foreign minister in July, will meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other US officials today.

Russian Foreign

Minister Sergei Lavrov

said Britain had too

high an opinion of

itself and was trying

to impose its Russian

policy on the EU and

the United States

A year 1957 photo of Jakiw Palij.

10 WEDNESDAY 22 AUGUST 2018AMERICAS

Microsoft ‘halts Russian political hack’AP

WASHINGTON: Microsoft has uncovered new hacking attempts by Russia targeting US political groups ahead of the midterm elections.

The company said yesterday that a group tied to the Russian government created fake web-sites that appeared to spoof two American conservative organi-zations: the Hudson Institute and the International Republican Institute. Three other fake sites were designed to look as if they belonged to the US Senate.

Microsoft didn’t offer any further description of the fake sites, and the Russian officials dismissed its claims as unfounded.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov cited the lack of detail on the hack, and said it wasn’t clear “who the hackers in question are” and how they could distort the US electoral system.

The revelation if new hacks arrives just weeks after a similar Microsoft discovery led Sen Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who is running for re-election, to reveal that Russian hackers tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate her Senate computer network.

The hacking attempts mirror similar Russian attacks ahead of the 2016 election, which US intelligence officials have said were focused on helping to elect Republican Donald Trump to the presidency by hurting his Dem-ocratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

This time, more than helping one political party over another, “this activity is most fundamen-tally focused on disrupting democracy,” Brad Smith, Micro-soft’s president and chief legal officer, said in an interview this week.

Smith said there is no sign the hackers were successful in persuading anyone to click on the fake websites, which could have exposed a target victim to computer infiltration, hidden surveillance and data theft. Both conservative think tanks said they have tried to be vigilant about “spear-phishing” email attacks because their global pro-democracy work has frequently

drawn the ire of authoritarian governments.

“We’re glad that our work is attracting the attention of bad actors,” said Hudson Institute spokesman David Tell. “It means we’re having an effect, presumably.”

The International Republican Institute is led by a board that includes six Republican senators, and one prominent Russia critic and Senate hopeful, Mitt Romney, who is running for a Utah seat this fall.

Microsoft calls the hacking group Strontium; others call it Fancy Bear or APT28. An indictment from US special counsel Robert Mueller has tied it to Russian’s main intelligence agency, known as the GRU, and to the 2016 email hacking of both the Democratic National Com-mittee and Clinton campaign.

“We have no doubt in our minds” who is responsible, Smith said.

Microsoft has waged a legal battle with Strontium since suing it in a Virginia federal court in summer 2016.

The company obtained court approval last year allowing it to seize certain fake domains created by the group.

It has so far used the courts to shut down 84 fake websites created by the group, including the most recent six announced.

Microsoft has argued in court that by setting up fake but real-istic-looking domains, the hackers were misusing Microsoft trademarks and services to hack into targeted computer net-works, install malware and steal sensitive emails and other data.

Smith also announced that the company is offering free cybersecurity protection to all US political candidates, cam-paigns and other political organ-isations, at least so long as they’re already using Microsoft’s Office 365 productivity software.

Two held for ‘spying’for Iran in USREUTERS

WASHINGTON: Two Iranian men were indicted yesterday for allegedly spying for Tehran in the United States, including conducting surveillance at a Jewish facility and gathering information on backers of the militant Iranian opposition Mujahideen-e Khalq, the Justice Department said.

Ahmadreza Mohammadi-Doostdar, 38, a dual US-Iranian citizen, and Majid Ghorbani, 59, an Iranian citizen and resident of California, were charged in the indictment with acting on behalf of Iran by conducting the surveillance, the Justice Department said in a statement. Both were arrested on August 9.

The indictment alleges Doostdar traveled from Iran to the US in July 2017 to collect intelligence about entities con-sidered to be enemies of the

Iranian government, including Israeli and Jewish interests as well as people associated with MEK, it said.

The Justice Department said Doostdar conducted surveil-lance in July 2017 of an ultraor-thodox Jewish facility in Chicago, the Rohr Chabad House, including photo-graphing the security features.

Ghorbani attended an MEK rally in New York on September 20, 2017, to protest the current Iranian government, taking photographs of the participants, which he later passed on to Doostdar and was paid about $2,000.

The photos, many with handwritten notes about the participants, were found in Ghorbani’s luggage at a US airport as he was returning to Iran in December 2017, the Justice Department said.

The company said

that a group tied

to the Russian

government created

fake websites that

appeared to spoof two

American conservative

organizations. Three

other fake sites were

designed to look as if

they belonged to the

US Senate.

Sleeping Chicago police officers face disciplinary actionAP

CHICAGO: Chicago police said disciplinary action is being taken against two officers after photographs of them sleeping inside a police vehicle spread on social media.

The department denied claims by a mayoral can-didate that the officers were exhausted from working overtime shifts ordered by city leaders following recent bursts of gun violence.

Mayoral candidate Ja’Mal Green shared the photo-graphs on Facebook and argued it was a sign of forced overtime leaving officers fatigued.

The department says neither sleeping officer was working overtime and had minimal overtime since July 1.

Former Trump lawyer, prosecutors reach plea deal Shootouts leave 13 dead in RioAP

RIO DE JANEIRO: At least 11 suspects and two soldiers died during shootouts with military personnel and police in greater Rio de Janeiro as violence erupted in several areas of the city that hosted the Summer Olympics two years ago.

The direct confrontations between soldiers and armed traffickers also marked a deepening of the military’s role in Rio’s security. Since the military was put in charge of the state’s security earlier this year, soldiers have mostly played supporting roles to police during operations, such as securing perimeters or setting up checkpoints.

“Our goal is only to make arrests. If there are deaths, the criminals are to blame,” Carlos Cinelli, a military spokesman, said while adding that military per-sonnel came under fire during operations that began at 4:30 am. “The soldiers have a right to defend themselves.”

Cinelli said that five sus-pects were killed and another 10 were arrested when sol-diers stormed the neighbor-hoods of Mare, Complexo do Alemao and Penha. In a press statement in the evening, the military command said two soldiers had died.

Cinelli said the operations, which included more than 4,000 military personnel, were aimed at finding wanted traffickers in the areas.

Melania Trump announces Africa tripAFP

WASHINGTON: The US First Lady Melania Trump will travel to Africa later this year, her office announced yesterday, with further details expected in the coming weeks.

“This will be my first time traveling to Africa and I am excited to educate myself on the issues facing children throughout the continent,” Trump said in a statement, “while also learning about its rich culture and history.”

It is not yet clear where the US first lady will travel on the vast continent or when, but according to her commu-nications director Stephanie Grisham, the White House “will release details in the coming weeks.”

Trump previously traveled solo to Canada and has made several trips with her husband. This trip is expected to focus on good-deed projects.

Venezuelans flood into Ecuador, defying rulesREUTERS

IPIALES: More than 200 Vene-zuelans crossed the border ille-gally into Ecuador yesterday, fleeing a deepening economic and political crisis at home in a desperate race to get to Peru before new entry restrictions kick in on Saturday.

This year, 423,000 Vene-zuelans have entered Ecuador through the Rumichaca border near the southwestern Colombian town of Ipiales. Alarmed, Ecua-dor last Saturday put in place rules requiring Venezuelans to show passports, rather than just national identity cards. Peru will do the same this Saturday.

Hundreds of migrants who had begun traveling days ago by bus and on foot through Colombia from Venezuela before the policy change crossed the Rumichaca

checkpoint yesterday. More than a dozen Ecuadorean police watched them, but did nothing to stop them.

“We only want Ecuador to support us to keep moving for-ward to Peru where we can work,” said Yorian Alcides Gamez, as fel-low migrants sang the national anthem.

They plan to walk and hitch-hike 840km in freezing conditions to the crossing at Huaquilla in Peru.

“We’re walking to Peru, we’re on our way. You wouldn’t believe the number of people,” 23-year-old tourism student Antony Vinales said.

Like Gamez and Vinales, hun-dreds of migrants had planned to cross legally with their Ven-ezuelan national ID card to find work in Ecuador, Peru or Chile.

Sleeping in tents and on streets, tension is mounting as conditions worsen, migrants

complain of the cold and the little money they have for food is running out. Arguments have started to break out as they vent anger at Ecuador.

Ecuador’s foreign and interior

ministries did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Venezuela’s economy has been in steep decline and there are periodic waves of protests against the leftist government of

President Nicolas Maduro. Maduro argues that he is the victim of a Washington-led “economic war” designed to sabotage his admin-istration through sanctions and price-gouging.

Venezuelan migrants heading to Peru carrying bags as they walk along the Panamerican highway in Tulcan, Ecuador, after crossing from Colombia, yesterday.

REUTERS

NEW YORK: US President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen (pictured), has reached a plea bargain with federal prosecutors in New York on campaign finance violations, bank fraud and tax evasion, news media outlets reported, citing unnamed sources.

Cohen, 51, was to appear in

federal court in Manhattan today, a court official said.

News that Cohen had entered into a plea agreement followed a report earlier in the day by NBC News, then others, that he was discussing a deal with prosecutors.

A plea bargain could increase legal risks for the president, as it raises the possibility that Cohen will provide information to US

Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible coordination with the Trump campaign.

Cohen was part of Trump’s inner circle for more than a dec-ade, working as his personal attorney at the Trump Organi-zation and continuing to advise the president after the election. But their relationship has frayed

in recent months.Lanny Davis, a lawyer for

Cohen, declined to comment. Cohen and another of his lawyers, Guy Petrillo, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the earlier reports.

The probe is being led by the office of US Attorney Geoffrey Berman in Manhattan. A spokes-man did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mexican President meets new CabinetMexican President Enrique Pena Nieto (left), accompanied by his cabinet, during a press conference offered along with President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (out of frame) during a ceremony in which the latter presented his own Cabinet, at the National Palace, in Mexico City, yesterday.

16 WEDNESDAY 22 AUGUST 2018MORNING BREAK

HIGH TIDE 00:15 – 15:15 LOW TIDE 07:15 – 22:45

Misty at places at first, becomes hot day-

time and humid by night.

WEATHER TODAY

Courtesy: Qatar Meteorology Department

Minimum Maximum 32oC 41oC

FAJR

SHOROOK

03. 50 AM

05. 10 AM

11. 37 AM

03. 06 PM

06. 05 PM

07. 35 PM

ZUHR

ASR

MAGHRIB

ISHA

PRAYER TIMINGSCalifornia declares surfing its official sportAP

LOS ANGELES: “Let’s go surfing now, everybody’s learning how,” the Beach Boys have been telling us in song since 1962.

And if you haven’t started listening by now — and you live in California —perhaps it’s time you did.

On Monday, surfing became the official sport of California.

So grab a board, catch a wave and again as the Beach Boys like to say, find yourself, “sittin’ on top of the world.”

“I am stoked that surfing is now California’s official sport,” declared Al Muratsuchi, state assemblyman and a dedicated surfer dude himself, after Gov Jerry Brown put his signature to the new law Muratsuchi wrote and shepherded through the Legislature.

“No other sport represents the Cal-ifornia Dream better than surfing —riding the waves of opportunity and living in harmony with nature,” added Muratsuchi, a surfer since high school who represents the city of Torrance, a place not far from the heralded Cali-fornia surf break called Haggerty’s. (Yes, the one mentioned in the Beach Boys’ song “Surfin’ USA.”)

While the law acknowledges that surfing, like so much other California stuff, actually came from somewhere else — in this case Hawaii — it also makes the case that California revolu-tionised the art of shooting the curl and hanging 10.

The Golden State is the heart of the surfboard building industry and the place where the wetsuit was invented, state officials said, and with 1,770km

of coastline, it provides a surfer’s par-adise that Muratsuchi estimates gen-erates more than $6bn in annual retail sales.

Michael Scott Moore, author of the acclaimed 2010 surfing history “Sweetness and Blood,” agrees that although Hawaii is the cradle of surfing, California did play a key role in revo-lutionising the sport.

“Modern surfing was born in Hunt-ington Beach, Malibu, the South Bay, Manhattan, Redondo,” Moore said, ref-erencing many of the beachfront cities the Beach Boys call out in “Surfin USA.”

“That’s where new technologies in surf design got developed,” continued

Moore, an avid surfer himself. “We had a lot of aerospace technicians who were into surfing, and they developed new shapes for surfboards that turned the sport into something of a pop cul-tural phenomenon.”

Basically, California builders began making boards safer, lighter, easier to stand on and easier to maneuver through the water than the ones the Hawaiians had used for centuries, Moore said. They also added a key feature, the skeg or bottom-of-the-board rudder and, yes, they invented the wetsuit.

Meanwhile, popular “Beach Party” movies of the 1960s that starred teen

heartthrobs Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon made it look to the rest of the country like one big surf party was going on nonstop in California. The Beach Boys, Dick Dale, Jan and Dean and other popular musicians of the time provided the soundtrack.

“It’s part of the California mythology,” University of Southern California pop culture historian Leo Braudy said. “The idea of someone becoming Californianised, and if you become Californianised then surfing is part of the deal.”

Indeed, Huntington Beach now calls itself Surf City and is home to the Surfers’ Hall of Fame and the Interna-tional Surfing Museum. Oceanside has the California Surf Museum. In Redondo Beach, there is a bust of George Freeth, hailed as California’s first surfer after he began dazzling local crowds with his wave-riding skills in 1907.

(Freeth actually learned to surf in his native Hawaii, where it’s been the official sport since 1998.)

But no matter. Which state lays claims to surfing as its sport doesn’t bother surfers all that much, said Moore, who has surfed all over the world.

“As long as the waves are good, we don’t care,” he said laughing.

He may be right.A woman who answered the phone

at legendary big-wave rider Titus Kin-imaka’s surf school in Hanalei, Hawaii, said she’d be happy to put a surfer on the phone to discuss the issue.

“But they’re all in the water,” she added.

A surfer is shown in motion riding a wave after sunset at Cardiff State Park, in Encinitas, California.

Jennifer Garner gets star on Walk of FameAFP

LOS ANGELES: Jennifer Garner received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Monday to honour a glittering career that has included roles in acclaimed movies from “Juno” to “Dallas Buyers Club.”

The Texas-born actress has appeared in more than 30 films over two decades but is just as famous for a television career that has seen her gar-landed with some of the industry’s top awards.

“Today for me is a moment to mark 24 years really joyfully lived, in a job that I love so much. And to get to share with my family and friends is pretty amazing and special,” the star said.

Music world pays tributes to ArethaAFP

NEW YORK: “Queen of Pop” Madonna led an impassioned tribute to “Queen of Soul” Aretha Franklin yesterday as the music world paid its R-E-S-P-E-C-Ts to the superstar at the MTV Video Music Awards.

The show came four days after 76-year-old Franklin died of pancreatic cancer and the industry used the telecast to send Franklin off in style.

“She led me to where I am today, and I know she influenced so many people in this house tonight, in this room tonight,” said Madonna, who turned 60 last Thursday — the day Franklin died.

Franklin has influenced gen-erations of singers with iconic hits including “Natural Woman” and “I Say a Little Prayer.”

But “Respect” (1967) was her signature tune and the broadcast ended with a recording of Aretha belting out the Otis Redding cover as the audience danced wildly.

“I want to thank you, Aretha, for empowering all of us. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Long live the Queen,”

Madonna added. Fast-rising rapper Cardi B

— who recently became a mother — was expected to launch the show at New York’s Radio City Music Hall with a song but instead turned heads by sim-ulating breastfeeding onstage.

She left performing duties to Canadian singer and songwriter Shawn Mendes, who treated fans to his acclaimed single “In My Blood,” which chronicles his struggle with anxiety disorder.

Cardi B started the show as frontrunner, narrowly taking more nominations than Jay-Z and Beyonce, who ended the evening with just one award —best cinematography — for their Louvre-shot video “Apeshit.”

But artist and video of the year — for “Havana” — went to former Fifth Harmony singer Camila Cabello, who earlier had to endure comedian Tiffany Haddish struggling to pronounce her name before joking awk-wardly: “I only speak English.”

Unlike the industry-led Grammys, the VMAs prides itself on outrageous made-for-tele-vision moments with less focus on who wins the awards.

As ever, the industry’s most controversial stars strutted the red carpet in outrageous awards garb featuring whips, masks and, in model Amber Rose’s case, conical breasts.

All big awards shows these days are political and accord-ingly MTV debuted a new cam-paign, “+1 the vote” to encourage young people to go to the polls for November’s midterm elections.

Childish Gambino’s “This Is

America,” which racked up more than 100 million views in its first week on YouTube with its pow-erful take on gun violence and racism, won best video with a message, choreography and direction.

Gold was an unofficial motif for the night and former child star Ariana Grande, 25, was dressed accordingly in gilded sequins.

Rapper Logic and Ryan Tedder offered one of the night’s first big emotional moments

when they performed their col-laboration “One Day.”

Tedder was onstage as Logic entered the venue with dozens of immigrant children following him, wearing T-shirts that said, “We are all human beings” and holding candles.

There was a hometown takeover from Jennifer Lopez, who sung a medley of some of her biggest hits, including “Ain’t Your Mama,” “Love Don’t Cost a Thing” and “Get Right.”

Madonna (centre) during a tribute to the late singer Aretha Franklin.

Right ways to wear floral patternsIANS

NEW DELHI: Floral fashion is never out of trend, but it helps to know how to get it right and not go overboard.

Ashish Gurnani, Co-Founder of Postfold and Shreyasi Pathak, Stylist at Vajor, have shared tips that can help you style your floral outfits for different occa-sions to add spark to your look:

* Florals for workwear: Floral print mostly in dresses is on the top of this sea-son’s trend alert. One can easily incor-porate some florals in the workwear wardrobe. Go for minimal silhouettes and elegant prints.

You can style a nice muted floral sheath dress with a leather belt, a lon-gline blazer and a nice pair of block heels. A floral shirt with a solid skirt would also be a great hit at your workplace.

* Florals for evening looks: People often connect florals with a breezy morning brunch or a sunny afternoon stroll but it could be a nice evening wear

option too. All you have to do is to go for a floral print over a rich fabric like silk, satin or organza.

You can also go for a quite elaborate silhouette and can finish the look with a statement pair of earrings and nice con-trasting pumps.

* Florals for fall: Fall season rings the bells for winters but it doesn’t mean that you can’t wear floral dresses in fall. For fall, one should opt for some earthy florals over chirpy ones. You can incor-porate colours like slightly rustic shade of orange; go for floral printed mustards or a shade of lavender.

You can style your floral skirts with tinted full sleeve blouses and you can wear your floral dresses as a layer over a basic t-shirt or shirt and can complete the look with a nice pair of boots and some chunky accessorising would do magic to the whole ensemble.

* Florals for casual getaways: A floral print short dress can be a very sophisti-cated and playful choice. A go-to option

for casual getaways the colours of the dress can be anything from vibrant to bright or neutral. A solid black dress or anything in a darker hue is usually better suited for the cold weather.

Boots and scarves can be matched to give a complete winter vibe to your outfit. Long floral shrugs are also great add-ons for a chic and breezy look in the fall season.

* Florals for a picnic: The year is not complete without at least one meal eaten alfresco in the park or by the beach. Also, because the ambience and scenery around are just begging to be Insta-grammed, you’re going to want to wear the right picnic outfit.

Find something that keeps you com-fortable like a nice floral blouse paired with comfortable linen pants. A floral dress paired with a solid scarf also makes for a great outfit choice!

You can also choose long floral shrugs instead and as they add a rich look to any dress.

In 90 days, users spent 85 billion hours on WhatsAppIANS

SAN FRANCISCO: Among all the social media platforms, people globally spent a whopping 85 billion hours on the Facebook-owned WhatsApp in the last three months.

According to a Forbes report, the data released by the US-based app analytics company Apptopia showed that over the past three months, users spent 85 billion hours on WhatsApp that has 1.5 billion users in the world, — or “11.425 hours for every human being on the planet”.

“It’s clear that WhatsApp is the global messaging app of choice,” Apptopia’s spokes-person Adam Blacker was quoted as saying.

“Apps having to do with communication take up most of our time spent on our mobile apps,” Blacker added.

The top 10 apps overall — in terms of time spent globally — are WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook, Messenger, P a n d o r a , Y o u T u b e , Instagram, Twitter, Google Maps and Spotify.