oil producers to continue discussions on freeze deal

MONDAY Vol. XXXVII No. 10062

April 18, 2016Rajab 11, 1437 AH www. gulf-times.com 2 Riyals GULF TIMES

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QATAR

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In brief

QATAR

REGION

ARAB WORLD

INTERNATIONAL

COMMENT

BUSINESS

CLASSIFIED

SPORTS

26, 27

1 – 6, 12 – 16

7 – 11

1 – 12

2 – 7, 28

8

9, 10

11 – 25

INDEX

SPORT | BUSINESS | Page 1

Qatargas, UASC, Shell sign deal to explore use of LNG as marine fuel

SYRIA | Conflict

Opposition threatens to quit peace talks Fighting in Aleppo killed at least 22 civilians as the opposition delegation yesterday threatened to quit Syria peace talks in Geneva if there is no progress on a political transition. The opposition High Negotiations Committee (HNC) said the indirect negotiations could collapse if Syria’s regime refuses to compromise on political and humanitarian issues. “We might suspend (our participation in) the talks if things carry on this way, and then there will be no prospect for any political solution,” HNC member Abdulhakim Bashar told AFP. Page 10

LIBYA | Vote

UN urges backing for unity govtThe United Nations’ Libya envoy urged lawmakers to back a unity government as he landed in Tripoli yesterday on the eve of a crucial confidence vote. Libya’s parliament is set to vote today on the UN-backed government of national accord, in a bid to end years of chaos in the North African nation. “It is always with open arms that I arrive in #Tripoli. Thank you to all Libyans: you make me feel at home,” Martin Kobler said on Twitter after landing in a UN aircraft. Page 9

LATIN AMERICA | Disaster

Earthquake kills scores in Ecuador The death toll from Ecuador’s biggest earthquake in decades soared to at least 235 yesterday as rescuers using tractors and bare hands hunted desperately for survivors in shattered coastal towns. The 7.8 magnitude quake struck off the Pacific coast on Saturday and was felt around the Andean nation of 16mn people, causing panic as far away as the highland capital Quito and collapsing buildings and roads in a swath of western towns. Page 22

EUROPE | Referendum

Italians vote on oil and gas Italians yesterday voted in a referendum on oil and gas drilling concessions after a debate fuelled by anger over a government corruption scandal and freighted with risk for Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. Page 18

Al-Attiyah, Price lead top draw as Sealine Rally starts today

Qatar seeks EU help on release of hostages in Iraq

Plane hits suspected drone on landing

QNABrussels

The head of Qatar’s Mission to the European Union, Sheikh Ali bin Jassim al-Thani, has called on

the European Union (EU) to help secure the release of the two Qatari nationals kidnapped in Iraq.

The Qatari nationals entered the Iraqi territory with a permit from Iraq’s inte-rior ministry in co-ordination with the Iraqi embassy in Doha, Sheikh Ali said.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the GCC-EU committee of political dialogue experts, which was held in Brussels, Sheikh Ali called on the Euro-pean Community to urge the Iraqi gov-ernment to take measures to ensure the safety of Qatari detainees and secure their release as soon as possible.

He affi rmed that Qatar rejected such terrorist acts which constituted a breach of the international law and a violation of human rights, calling on the European Union to co-operate with the Qatari authorities on this due to the close relations between the two sides.

He also renewed Qatar’s keenness to fi nd a political solution to the Syrian crisis in accordance with the Geneva Conference I.

He noted that Qatar had never hesi-tated a moment to provide all neces-sary assistance to Syrian refugees to ease their suff ering and had allotted for this purpose more than $1.2bn since the crisis broke out in 2011.

He referred to Qatar’s initiative, en-titled Educate A Child, which allowed more than 600,000 Syrian children to return to schools, pointing out that by the end of 2016 the number would in-crease to 1mn children.

In addition, Qatar had provided 100 scholarships for Syrian refugees to en-roll in Sorbonne University in France, allocated $2,300,000 for education in refugee areas in partnership with the Unicef and allocated two schools for Syrian children.

Sheikh Ali reaffi rmed Qatar’s rejec-tion of all forms of violence and ex-tremism as well as its explicit condem-nation of terrorist acts, wherever they are, and the state’s commitment at all levels to combat such criminal acts within the international mechanisms, especially since terrorism had become a serious global phenomenon which required all eff orts to curb it.

AFPLondon

A British Airways (BA) plane yes-terday struck an object believed to be a drone as it was coming

in for landing at Heathrow, Europe’s busiest airport, police said.

An investigation had been launched into the incident which follows a string of near misses involving drones.

The plane, an Airbus A320 with 132 passengers and fi ve crew on board, was on its fi nal descent into Heathrow’s Terminal Five when it was struck.

“A pilot on an inbound fl ight into Heathrow Airport from Geneva report-ed to police that he believed a drone had struck the aircraft,” a spokeswoman for London’s Metropolitan Police said.

“The fl ight landed at Heathrow Ter-minal Five safely. It transpired that an object, believed to be a drone, had struck the front of the aircraft”.

A BA spokesman said the plane had been examined after landing and was cleared to operate its next fl ight.

The UK Airprox Board, an air safety agency, said last month there were 23 near-misses between drones and air-craft in the six months between April and October last year.

HH the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani yesterday received ministers participating in the second oil producing countries meeting in Doha. The meeting at the Emiri Diwan was attended by HE the Prime Minister and Minister of Interior Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa al-Thani.

Emir receives participants of Doha meeting

Smart clinic aims to combat diabetes in Qatar By Joseph VargheseStaff Reporter

A smart clinic for diabetes, implemented for Qataris in collaboration with the help

of healthcare providers in the state through the recommendation of the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH), has been success-ful with over 9,800 registrations for testing.

The clinic, opened in January as a pilot programme at Al Wakra Health Centre of the Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC) with the sup-port of the Al Wakra Hospital, off ers integrated care through a specialised team that includes a physician, nurse, health educator and dietitian.

“By the end of March, more than 3,000 people had been invited for screening and nearly 1,000 screened for diabetes. Of those, 123 were iden-tifi ed as pre-diabetic, and 20 were diagnosed with diabetes,” said Dr Mariam Ali Abdulmalik, managing director, PHCC.

“The smart clinic for diabetes, is run with the participation of HMC and provides integrated healthcare facilities. It employs accountable care practices to improve the health and well being of Qataris through the delivery of high-quality, effi cient care for those suff ering from or are at risk of developing diabetes. Using a combination of data analytics and a risk-based screening, the programme identifi es those with known diabetes risk factors and invites them to the

smart clinic for voluntary diabetes screening.

“The programme aims for ear-

ly detection of diabetes as well as other risk factors associated with diabetes. Patients who are regis-

tered at Wakra Hospital are invited for diabetic screening at the clinic.They will be seen by doctors, nurses, health educators and nutritionists and provided health education.”

Dr Abdulmalik noted that the pa-tients would be attended by both the primary and secondary healthcare providers through the multidiscipli-nary teams.

“This will give them a comprehen-sive idea about their physical health as well as how they can care about them-selves. The overall aim of the project has been successfully achieved and its results will be reviewed regularly over the coming months.”

“Once the pilot phase of the pro-gramme is completed, it will be taken to other health centres too, maybe next year,” she added.

The staff at the smart clinic for diabetes.

Eighteen Opec member countries and major producers from outside the group met in Doha yesterday to discuss a possible freeze in oil production at January’s levels

DPADoha

Top oil producers yester-day delayed an agreement to freeze the crude output levels

to shore up low prices, saying they needed “more time for further con-sultations”.

The decision followed marathon talks in Doha from which Opec member Iran stayed away.

HE the Minister of Energy and Industry Dr Mohamed bin Saleh al-Sada said at a press conference that participants in the meeting had agreed on the need for more time for discussion.

“The general conclusion was that we need more time to consult among ourselves in Opec and non-Opec producers,” he said

The minister added that Opec members would meet in Vienna in June to consider a possible freeze.

“The freeze could be more eff ec-tive defi nitely if major producers, be it from Opec members like Iran and oth-ers, as well as non-Opec members, are included in the freeze,” he said.

Eighteen Opec member countries and major producers from outside

the group met in Doha yesterday to discuss a possible freeze in oil pro-duction at January’s levels.

But the meeting started several hours behind schedule due to what the Qatari news television Al Jazeera called “divergence in views”.

Sources said that Saudi Arabia de-manded that any cap deal must be binding to all producers.

Tehran has said it had no plans to sign the plan on freezing oil output.

Iran, which according to Opec data currently produces between 2.8mn and 3.5mn barrels a day, is hoping

a boost in production will help it recover from the impact of inter-national sanctions lifted after last year’s deal on its nuclear programme.

Failure to clinch the freeze deal can weaken prospects for recovery of oil prices that have fallen by up to 70% since their peak in mid-2014, some observers say.

However, al-Sada said that the oil market was improving.

Yesterday’s meeting in Doha fol-lows a February agreement by Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela to push for the freeze in a bid to shore

up the prices of crude oil, which ear-lier this year fell to their lowest levels since 2004.

Qatar, which holds the rotating presidency of Opec, had invited oil producers both inside and outside the Opec group to take part, saying that the time had come “to restore balance to the market and health to the global economy”.

Although the low oil price has been a boon for many importing nations, it is causing economic and budgetary problems for exporting countries.

From above $100 in mid-2014, oil prices dropped to 13-year lows of around $27 in February due to a sup-ply glut, though they have since re-bounded to about $40.

Iran had initially said its Opec rep-resentative would participate in the Doha talks but yesterday Oil Minis-ter Bijan Zanganeh announced Te-hran would send no delegation at all.

Russia’s oil minister Alexander Novak yesterday said the country was not closing the door on a global deal to freeze output levels although he was disappointed that no decision had been taken.

Novak said he had travelled to Doha, expecting all sides to sign the deal instead of debating it. When asked whether Russia would freeze output levels, he said the govern-ment was not meant to regulate the output of private producers.

Opec said its members pumped 32.25mn bpd in March, up from an average of 31.85mn bpd in 2015.

Oil producers to continue discussions on freeze deal

HE the Minister of Energy and Industry Dr Mohamed bin Saleh al-Sada addressing a news conference in Doha yesterday.

QATAR

Gulf Times Monday, April 18, 20162

HH the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani and HH the Deputy Emir Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad al-Thani have sent cables of condolences to Emperor Akihito of Japan condoling the victims of the earthquake which struck the country, wishing the injured quick recovery. HH the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, HH the Deputy Emir Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad al-Thani, and HE the Prime Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa al-Thani also sent cables of condolences to Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe.

The Souq Waqif special events celebrations that opened two weeks ago will conclude here today. The organisers conducted a variety of recreational events, music, games and contests during the fortnight-long celebrations. Games for children included swings, airplane, crazy fire, crazy frog, dragon and family train. The event organisers handed over 10,000 gifts to children comprising a bag with interesting games that had the logo of the festival. The Souq Waqif Art Centre organised a number of art events which brought together 30 Qatari and resident artists who showcased their paintings, carvings and ceramic works of scenery from Qatar’s local environment.

HH the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, HH the Deputy Emir Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad al-Thani and HE the Prime Minister and Minister of Interior Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa al-Thani have sent cables to President of Ecuador Rafael Correa condoling the victims of the earthquake that hit the country and left many people dead and injured, wishing quick recovery for the injured.

HE the Minister of Justice Dr Hassan Lahdan Saqr al-Mohannadi will chair Qatar’s delegation in the extraordinary meeting of GCC justice ministers, set to take place today in Riyadh. The meeting will discuss draft resolutions and follow up on the implementation of the ones made during the 27th meeting of GCC justice ministers, which was hosted by Doha. The ministers will also discuss the mechanism of establishing an Economic Judicial Authority, in the context of the vision of King Salman bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, Custodian of the Two Holly Mosques.

Qatar leaderscondole Japanquake victims

Souq Waqif celebrations conclude today

Qatar sends condolences to Ecuador president

Justice Ministerto attend GCC meeting in Riyadh

In brief

HH the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani has received a written message from President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro, pertaining to bilateral relations and ways of enhancing them. The message was handed over by the Vice-President for Political Aff airs and Foreign Minister of Venezuela Dr Delsey Rodriguez.

HH the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani met the Commander of the US Central Command General Joseph Leonard Votel and his accompanying delegation at the Emiri Diwan yesterday. Talks dealt with ties between Qatar and the US and means of boosting them. They also exchanged views on regional and international issues of common concern.

Message from Venezuelan president Emir meets US Centcom chief

QRCS holds course for relief workers in Syria

Qatar Red Crescent Soci-ety (QRCS) has organised the 2nd course to build

the capacity of relief workers in-volved in Syria in the fi eld of hu-man rights in the International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and Islamic Shariah.

The course was attended by 18 trainees, with some further 180 benefi ciaries who will receive the information of the course through the participants them-selves.

The four-day course was held at the headquarters of Afaq Academy, a subsidiary of the Swiss Geneva Call.

Conducted by four specialist lecturers, the course gave useful information on IHL, the Inter-national Human Rights Law, and their link with the teachings of Islamic Law.

It also involved documenta-ries and presentations to en-hance learning. Certifi cates of

participation and course mate-rial were shared with the par-ticipants.

In view of the signifi cant is-sues discussed in the course, the participants came up with a set

of recommendations, including (1) the call for a military code of ethics to outline the major prin-ciples, norms, and provisions of IHL from an Islamic perspective, (2) the importance of continuing

to hold such courses on IHL and Islamic tenets related to armed confl ict.

From the feedback of the par-ticipants, it was obvious that there is a need for similar course

to be held via videoconferencing to inform the military in Syria about the values and rules of armed confl ict, as well as issu-ing publications that urge bel-ligerents to observe the ethics of

warriors in Islam. This is the second course co-

held by QRCS and Afaq Acad-emy to promote IHL and Islamic Law knowledge among the relief workers in Syria.

The two-day course was at-tended by 20 trainees from QRCS and Syrian NGOs working in Gaziantep, Turkey.

These courses are part of QRCS’s eff orts to support the Syrian people in their protract-ed calamity, whether in terms of relief (food/nonfood aid, medicines, blankets, tarpaulins, ambulances, rehabilitation of camps hit by fi re or snow), de-velopment (building clay hous-es, establishing and operating health centres, providing fuel for civil defense vehicles, open-ing humanitarian corridors, se-curing water trucks in residen-tial neighbourhoods, installing water networks and heaters at camps), or humanitarian diplo-macy and advocacy (organising and participating in conferences and events to raise awareness among the international com-munity about the serious hu-manitarian conditions of Syr-ians inside their own country and in neighbouring countries like Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Iraqi Kurdistan.

QNADoha

Course participants with QRCS off icials.

Al-Kuwari in Tunisia to attend internationalsymposium on peace

HE the Adviser at the Emiri Diwan and the State of Qatar’s candidate to the

Post of the Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientifi c and Cultural Organi-sation (Unesco) Dr Hamad bin Abdulaziz al-Kuwari arrived yesterday in the Tunisian city of Sousse to take part in an interna-tional symposium on promoting peace and dialogue values, due to kick off today.

The two-day symposium is organised by the Tunisian Edu-cation Ministry in co-operation with the Islamic Educational, Scientifi c and Cultural Organi-sation (ISESCO), and the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientifi c Organization (ALECSO).

Dr al-Kuwari will deliver a speech on the symposium topic during the fi rst session which will be chaired by President of Malta Marie Louise Coleiro Pre-ca. He will also chair a session on the symposium’s second day dealing with challenges to peace

in the region: violence, terror-ism, migration, illegal drug traf-fi cking and arms smuggling.

The symposium is part of contribution to the global eff ort to cultivate peace and dialogue and security in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region, the Sahel and sub-Saharan Af-rica, and to further enhance the Tunisian experience in peaceful dialogue and democratic reform.

Items on the agenda will feature Maghreb and Euro-pean countries and the geos-trategic changes in the Sahel region: various approaches; peace challenges in the region: violence, terrorism, migration, drug and arms traffi cking; re-gional co-operation in all its dimensions to establish peace in the Euro-Mediterranean area, the Sahel and Sub-Sa-haran Africa; democratisation and political dialogue: a stra-tegic choice for peace; eff orts of international and regional organisations towards pro-moting values of peace and dialogue across the world; and the Tunisian experience in promoting peace and dialogue values.

QNATunis

Al Markhiya Gallery to host art exhibition

Al Markhiya Gallery is or-ganising tomorrow an art exhibition that brings to-

gether the works of Qatari artists Masoud al-Bloushi, Mubarak al-Malik and Lulwa at Katara Art Centre.

The participating artists will showcase a large collection of artworks that address the ideas of identity, homeland, women, traditions and modern arts. Each artist will exhibit seven works of various contemporary art schools. The gallery said that or-ganising such exhibitions aims at highlighting the aesthetics of arts and creativity by Qatari artists.

QNADoha

Rotana opens its4th hotel in Doha Rotana is opening today

Centro Capital Doha, its fourth hotel in the city.

The new property, 20 minutes away from the Hamad Interna-tional Airport, off ers 229 rooms and studios, ‘in contemporary and stylish setting.’

“The hotel is characterised by distinct accommodation in a modern environment, designed primarily for business travel-lers who seek chic accommoda-tion at aff ordable prices,” Rotana president and CEO Omer Kad-douri said.

The opening of the new hotel has increased Rotana’s inven-tory in Doha to more than 1,229 rooms. Rotana also plans to open two additional brands in 2017 and 2018: the Plaza Rayhaan Doha and Downtown Arjaan

Doha, further increasing its keys in the city to nearly 2,000.

The opening of Centro Capital Doha is the second collaboration between Al Malki group and Ro-tana following Sedra Residences at the Pearl-Qatar, according to Al Malki group chairman Ali Ib-rahim Abdullah al-Malki.

“By introducing this new life-style hotel brand, it proved its distinctiveness in the UAE and it is time to introduce this unique-ness in Qatar,” he said.

Al-Malki added that the de-mand for hotel rooms, particu-larly in the four-star hotels cat-egory, has increased in the past fi ve years.

Rotana has been working hard to be a major player in the global tourism sector, espe-cially with several hotels being

launched in the past year. “With the current launch, the

total number of hotels managed by Rotana has gone up to 101, where 56 of them are fully oper-ating and 45 are under construc-tion,” Rotana Hotel Management Corporation chairman Nasser al-Nowais said.

He added that Rotana cur-rently employs around 14,000 employees and this number will reach 29,000 once works on all under construction hotels are completed.

The new hotel in Doha will fea-ture amenities customised to the business traveller’s needs, includ-ing two meeting rooms, a gymna-sium and a swimming pool.

In addition, several din-ing options are available to suit the needs of all guests includ-

ing, ‘c.taste’, an all-day dining restaurant off ering buff ets for breakfast, lunch and dinner; ‘c.mondo,’ a bar designed to provide a number of informal zones for business gatherings and entertainment; and ‘c.deli’, an innovative 24-hour take-away dining concept that al-lows guests to enjoy great food and drinks in addition to the purchase of any items they may need during their stay for their convenience.

Some of the special features include the design, as well as functionality of each piece of furniture, innovatively styled bathrooms, and strategic place-ment of room lighting and controls including the latest technology and in-room enter-tainment options.

Rotana and Al Malki group senior off icials announce the opening of Centro Capital Doha yesterday.

QATAR3Gulf Times

Monday, April 18, 2016

The Ministry of Economy and Commerce (MEC) has launched the sign language translation service of the consumer protection law for the services of the people with hearing disability.MEC has put the law in sign language on a CD that has been distributed to the public and the entities concerned. In addition, it was published on the various social media channels of MEC to reach out to the maximum number in the targeted category. The video is available on MEC YouTube at MEC_Qatar.

The Ministry of Economy and Commerce, in collaboration with Jaidah Automotive, has announced the recall of Chevrolet Aveo 2015 models to check the parking brake bracket underbody.The MEC said the recall campaign comes within the framework of its ongoing eff orts to protect consumers and ensure that car dealers follow up on vehicles’ defects and repair them.The MEC will co-ordinate with the dealer to follow up on the maintenance and repair works and communicate with customers to ensure that the necessary repairs are carried out. The MEC has urged all customers to report any violations to its Consumer Protection and Anti-Commercial Fraud Department through the following channels: Hotline: 16001, e-mail: [email protected], Twitter: @MEC_Qatar, Instagram: MEC_Qatar, MEC mobile app for Android and IOS: MEC_Qatar

A woman has been fined a sum of QR5,000 by a Doha Criminal Court for beating two school children, who were quarrelling with her son.Local Arabic daily Arrayah reported yesterday that one day when the woman went to collect her son from the school, she saw

two other children attacking him. Though the duo fled towards the playground, the woman caught and beat them up. The mothers of the attacked children filed a complaint against the woman, accompanied by a medical report of the injuries sustained by the boys in the attack.

MEC service forhearing impaired

Chevrolet Aveo models recalled

Woman fined for beating schoolkids

HE the Minister of State for Defence Aff airs Dr Khalid bin Mohamed al-Attiyah met the Commander of United States Central Command General Joseph Leonard Votel in Doha yesterday. Talks dealt with bilateral relations and ways of enhancing them in addition to the military co-operation and other regional security issues.

HE the Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani has received an invitation to attend the International Conference on the late Prince Saud al-Faisal, which is organised by King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies from 24-26 April in Riyadh. The invitation was handed by Prince Saud bin Turki al-Faisal during his meeting with the Foreign Minister yesterday.

Qatar-US defence ties discussed FM invited to Saud al-Faisal conference Doha to host UN forum

Doha will host the First UN Asia Regional Forum on Business and Human

Rights on 19-20 April. During the Forum, companies,

governments, NGOs, workers and community representatives will discuss key business and human rights issues in Asia.

The Asia Regional Forum on Business and Human Rights is being convened by the United Nations Working Group on Busi-ness and Human Rights with the support of the Offi ce of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Director of Human Rights De-partment at the Foreign Minis-try, HE Sheikh Khalid bin Jassim al-Thani said in a press state-ment yesterday that the UN Asia Regional Forum is an opportu-nity to accelerate and expand the awareness and implement the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in Asia.

Over two days, participants will discuss the outstanding is-sues and prioritise the required action at the local level by states and businesses in order to pro-tect human rights in the busi-ness sector, he said.

Various workshops on a sub-regional level will be held to fo-cus on specifi c rights.

QNADoha

Customs foils bid to smuggle 11 kilos of marijuana

The General Authority of Customs (GAC) has foiled an attempt to smuggle

11kg of the illicit drug marijuana through Hamad International Airport (HIA).

The GAC inspector in charge doubted the luggage of an Asian traveller coming to Doha, so he ordered a full search of his bags. The search uncovered the mari-juana hidden within bulky pack-ages of dried red chillies. The bags were seized and the neces-sary procedures taken to refer the traveller and the seized illicit drugs to the security authorities concerned.

GAC president Ahmed bin Ali al-Muhannadi thanked the GAC inspector who managed to spot the smuggler and honoured him for his alertness on duty. He also pointed out that GAC has an ef-fective training programme to raise the effi ciency of its inspec-tors and enhance their work ex-perience and performance.

GAC president Ahmed bin Ali al-Muhannadi with the GAC inspector who made the marijuana seizure and another off icial.

Marijuana was concealed in packets of dried red chillies.

15-year jail term for possessing illegal drug

A Doha Criminal Court has sentenced a man to 15 years in jail and a fi ne of

QR400,000 for illicit drug pos-session for trade and personal consumption.

Local Arabic daily Arrayah re-ported yesterday that the Drug Prevention Department of the Ministry of Interior had received information from a secret source that the defendant was trading

in hashish in collaboration with others.

Accordingly, legal procedures were taken to search his house and vehicles.

Police dogs were able to spot a total of 24kg of hashish hidden in various parts of the defendant’s house. A blood test of the defend-ant proved he was a drug abuser. He also admitted to possessing the illicit drug.

Ooredoo launches Video Clips mobile portal service

Ooredoo has announced the launch of its new-est service, the Oore-

doo Video Clips mobile portal, as it expands its entertainment off erings for Qatar’s growing online population.

Ooredoo Video Clips, which has been designed to enable Qatar’s smartphone users to watch videos online and on the go, off ers subscribers the ability to access unlimited video clips on a daily basis, the company said in a statement yesterday.

Once subscribed, customers will be able to watch as many videos as they like on their mo-biles, with the portal off ering more than 1.7mn videos across genres such as sports, action, Bollywood, Pinoy, shows and more.

Subscriptions cost QR2 per day on a recurring daily sub-scription to the catalogue of over 25 languages.

To subscribe, customers can send the keyword ‘SUB1’ to 92202. To unsubscribe, they can send the keyword ‘UNSUB’ to 92202.

Fatima Sultan al-Kuwari, director of community and

public relations at Ooredoo, said: “Ooredoo Video Clips is our latest entertainment serv-ice, and one we believe will be extremely popular with smart-phone users across the country. Using our Supernet network, people can enjoy unlimited ac-cess to over 3.6mn minutes of content.”

Video Clips is brought to Ooredoo customers via a part-nership between Ooredoo and Vuclip, a leading premium video-on-demand service for emerging markets.

Other entertainment con-tent from Ooredoo includes Ooredoo tv, Qatar’s new next-generation entertainment service and a one-stop-shop for apps, gaming, movies, streaming and more.

“Delivered in truly stunning 4K defi nition, and powered by Android and Huawei, Ooredoo off ers the most technological-ly advanced TV subscription service in the region to keep you entertained,” the state-ment added.

For more information, cus-tomers can visit an Ooredoo shop or log onto Ooredoo.qa

CAS outlines plans at advisory board meeting Qatar University College

of Arts & Sciences (QU-CAS) needs to decide on

possible interdisciplinary de-grees options such as, Food Se-curity, Criminology & Forensic Sciences, and Sustainable De-velopment, dean Dr Eiman Mus-tafawi has said.

Addressing the QU-CAS ad-visory board meeting for the academic year 2015-2016, she welcomed the new members in addition to the continuing ones from last year.

Those who attended the meeting included Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, president of Qatar Bas-ketball Federation; Dr Hassan al-Mohannadi, director of the Diplomatic Institute, Qatar Ministry of Foreign Aff airs, Said al-Muhannadi, senior ad-visor to the president and CEO, Qatar Petroleum; Youssif A Saleh, general manager, Qatar Shell Research & Technology Centre; Professor Gilles Bous-quet, senior special advisor for International Strategies for the president of the University of Wisconsin System; Professor Adnan Shihab-Eldin, director general, Kuwait Foundation for

the Advancement of Sciences; Professor Anoush Ehtesha-mi, director of the Al-Sabah Programme and joint direc-tor of the ESRC Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World in the School of Govern-ment and international aff airs special adviser to the Islamic Criminal Justice Project in the Centre for Criminal Law & Jus-tice; Dr Richard Leete, adviser to the Minister of Develop-ment, Planning and Statistics; and Dr Mohamed al-Sulaiti, research director, ExxonMobil Research Qatar.

Sheikh Saoud al-Thani said that CAS should study the mar-ket and the Qatar National Vi-sion to off er new majors that will be mutually benefi cial to stu-dents, society, the university.

Saleh encouraged the college to open majors in areas of need such as geology. He stressed the importance of having local grad-uates in such fi elds so employers don’t have to look for candidates abroad.

On CAS’ potential plan for future expansion with possible interdisciplinary degrees op-tions including, Food Security, Criminology & Forensic Sci-

ences, and Sustainable Devel-opment, Dr Leete noted that the UN Global Goals that have been recently passed have over 70 tar-gets under the umbrella of sus-tainable development, owing to its importance.

Dr Bousquet encouraged in-creased collaboration with the private and public sectors as this provide the college with important information that will infl uence CAS degree off erings and curriculum in order to meet the needs of these sectors by providing the graduates of to-morrow.

Regarding CAS future plan to establish a food security or fo-rensic science degree, Dr Leete suggested combining these into a degree in Security and Human Development as its broader scope could encompass food security, cyber security, and public security.

Professor Ehteshami suggest-ed a degree with a harder (cyber, forensics) and softer (food, hu-man) track.

Dr al-Sulaiti stressed the im-portance of off ering degrees that are attractive to students and also do not limit their employ-ability.

Dr al-Mohannadi noted that the fi eld of food security is broad enough to allow for many spe-cialisations. Hence, its gradu-ates could work in a multitude of sectors.

The dean confi rmed that dif-ferent public and private sectors have welcomed the proposal of the establishment of the BSc in Food Security and they promised to provide students with schol-arship opportunities.

Regarding CAS future re-search strategy, Dr Mustafawi proposed the theme “Energy, Environmental Science/Climate Change, and Sustainability”.

Dr Eiman Mustafawi

Environment Intersection on Al Khafj i Street opens for traffi c

Environment Intersection on Al Khafj i Street was opened for traffi c yester-

day after being converted from a roundabout to a signal-control-led intersection.

The remaining sidewalk pave-ment works are expected to be completed next month. The opening of the Environment In-tersection comes as part of the works on Al Khafj i Street De-velopment Project. This is the third phase of the project which includes converting Environ-ment Roundabout to a signal-controlled intersection and the expansion of Al Khafj i Street

from three to four lanes.The fi rst and second phases of

the project were completed, and they included converting Al Hazm and Al Jelaiha roundabouts to sig-nal-controlled intersections.

Al Khafj i Street Development project is part of a series of vital projects implemented by Ash-ghal to improve and enhance the network of local roads and expressways, and enhance the traffi c safety across the country.

The works include converting roundabouts to signal-controlled intersections, installing Intelligent Transportation Systems, street lighting, and pedestrians’ paths. Al Khafji Street which was opened for traff ic yesterday after the installation of the new traff ic signals.

QATAR


WISH presentsresearch and fi ndings previewThe World Innovation

Summit for Health (WISH), a global ini-

tiative of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF), yesterday presented a preview of its research and fi ndings, including a smart clinic to fi ght diabetes in Qatar, as part of its midterm summit.

Prof the Lord Ara Darzi, executive chair, WISH; Dr Mariam Ali Abdulmalik, managing director, Primary Health Care Corporation; Fahad Saad al-Qahtani, president, community de-velopment, QF; Dr Mark McClellan, director, Robert J Margolis Centre for Health Policy; and Dr Victor Dsau,

president, Institute of Med-icine of the National Acad-emy of Sciences, discussed the activities at the event.

Prof the Lord Ara Darzi described the midterm summit as an opportunity to convene the global com-munity around healthcare issues that really matter.

“This year we are focus-ing on topics that resonate around the world and here in Qatar as we continue to create evidence-based re-search that off ers policy-makers practical solutions to create change.”

Al-Qahtani said that WISH is not only deliver-ing tangible benefi ts to the people of Qatar, but, in-ternationally, it is raising the nation’s profi le in in-fl uential health policy cir-cles through its research, ongoing programmes,

and global partnerships.Egbert Schillings, CEO,

WISH, said WISH continu-ally works towards building a community of health lead-ers for whom their subject matter is a calling rather than an industry.

“By supporting the local healthcare leadership com-munity, as we did with the Al Wakrah clinic, among other projects over the last two years – the WISH pro-gramme is directly contrib-uting to the success of Qa-tar’s exceptional healthcare sector.”

According to Dsau, the Qatar Genome Project is one of the boldest in the world. “Working with Qatar Biobank, we are sequencing the genomes. Many samples have been sequenced and we are in for some excit-ing results. Last month, we

created a new project which allows people to come in with new ideas to utilise all that information developed through Qatar Genome project.”

The chairs of WISH Fo-rums took part in group workshops and open dis-cussions as part of the fi nal phase of their year-long research initiatives. Their fi nal reports will be made public at the 2016 sum-mit, that will take place on November 29 and 30.

The evidence-based re-search will highlight and put forth policy recom-mendations on seven key topics: Accountable Care, Autism, Behavioural In-sights, Cardiovascular Dis-ease, Economic Benefi ts of Investing in Health, Healthy Populations, and Precision Medicine.

By Joseph VargheseStaff Reporter

Prof the Lord Ara Darzi, centre, speaking at a midterm summit of WISH as other off icials look on. PICTURE: Jayan Orma

QATAR5Gulf Times


Students display skills in obstacle course contest Some 28 Qatari students

from schools across the country navigated their

drones through an obstacle course to show off the aspects of engineering and science they learned last week at the Engi-neering Heroes Drone Camp in Education City.

HE the Minister of Energy and Industry Dr Mohamed bin Saleh al-Sada attended the fi nal day of Engineering Heroes to watch the students navigate through the obstacle course competition.

Engineering Heroes is an aca-demic outreach initiative that teaches the principles of avia-tion, programming and power electronics as students are im-mersed in drone technology and its diverse applications.

Maersk Oil Qatar is the exclu-sive sponsor and industry partner for Engineering Heroes, which was organised by Texas A&M University at Qatar (Tamuq).

Throughout the week, fac-ulty, staff and researchers from Tamuq and Hamad Bin Khalifa University led students through exercises and design challenges to prepare them for the fi nal challenge, the drone obstacle course competition, in which the students applied what they learned to simulated real-world problems that drones can solve.

An added challenge for the students was learning to pro-gramme and navigate in three dimensions - not just forward and backward, and right and left, but also up and down - using cameras mounted on the drones.

The seven teams, each con-taining four or fi ve students, were coached by offi cers from the Reconnaissance and Surveil-lance Centre of the Qatar Armed Forces.

NU-Q study looks at digital health tools for Qatari youth Whether young peo-

ple care about their health and pay atten-

tion to public health campaigns is at the heart of a study being carried out by Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) in collaboration with other re-searchers in Qatar and the US.

The health communication study, “Qatari adolescents: How do they use digital tech-nologies for health informa-tion and health monitoring?”, which received a $300,000 grant from the Qatar National Research Fund in March, ex-amines how Qatari youth aged 13 to 18 years acquire and eval-uate information about health issues of all kinds.

The study probes into what is known about young people’s specifi c health concerns and conditions, as well as how they use technology to acquire and share such information.

Aimed at discovering how future public information cam-paigns can better reach youth beyond typical media sources and school settings, the study is being carried out by Dr Klaus Schoenbach, NU-Q’s associate dean for research, an interna-tionally known media research-er; and Dr Ellen Wartella, an expert on children’s media and health, who is a Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani professor of communication, psychology and education at NU’s Evan-ston, Illinois campus in the US.

They are joined by Dr Salma Mawfek Khaled, a survey re-

searcher at Qatar University’s Social and Economic Survey Research Institute where she is an assistant professor, and Dr Paul Amuna, who heads the research section of Qatar’s Pri-mary Health Care Corporation and will serve as consultant.

“We are evaluating the chan-nels adolescents use to fi nd an-swers for their health concerns in order to fi nd what works best. We hope that information will improve the options available to them,” said Dr Schoenbach, who will lead the research team.

Qatar’s youth are subject to some of the highest rates of obesity risk in the world. In addition, they are exposed to shisha smoking and environ-mental restrictions such as extreme weather conditions.

“The threshold for physical activity is much higher in this part of the world than in most countries, so we’re trying to communicate the best ways to educate and train using digital sources,” Dr Schoenbach said.

The research project will be completed in 2017.

Dr Klaus Schoenbach , associate dean for research, NU-Q.

HE Dr Mohamed bin Saleh al-Sada with students and off icials.

The student teams were re-quired to fl y their drones through an obstacle course that included a model of the Zubarah Fort and a Maersk Oil Qatar platform in the Arabian Gulf — and to land their drones safely after particular tasks were completed.

The winning teams were cho-sen according to their perform-ance in the obstacle course and their application of program-ming skills developed over the course of the week.

Dr Hassan S Bazzi, assist-ant dean for research and ex-ecutive director of develop-ment, engagement and outreach at Tamuq, said the programme demonstrated the diverse ap-plications for engineering and science in Qatar’s pursuit of a knowledge-based economy.

Engineering Heroes is one of the many STEM (science, tech-nology, engineering and math) programmes put together by Tamuq and Maersk Oil Qatar through their Dhia: Engineer-

ing Leaders partnership, which delivers strategic educational outreach programmes to mo-tivate young Qataris to choose educational pathways for ca-reers in fi elds related to STEM, according to a statement.

Lewis Affl eck, managing di-rector of Maersk Oil Qatar, said: “It’s been a privilege to host some of Qatar’s brightest eighth and ninth grade students at the Engineering Heroes Drones competition.

“Initiatives like this play a big role in inspiring the younger gen-eration of students to explore STEM disciplines and develop the necessary skills to become Qatar’s future technical workforce.”

As part of the Engineering Heroes Drone Camp, students also had the opportunity to pre-view drone technology recently adopted by Qatar’s military forc-es during an exclusive presenta-tion earlier in the week by offi c-ers from the Reconnaissance and Surveillance Centre.

General Khalid Ahmad al-Ku-wari encouraged the students to study hard to attain the knowl-edge needed to support technol-ogy for Qatar’s national defence, saying that engineering is a calling for Qatar.

Jowaher al-Marri, outreach

and development manager at Tamuq, said encouraging Qa-tar’s best and brightest young minds to study STEM disciplines was critical to building the hu-man capacity required to drive the country towards the goals of Qatar National Vision 2030.

Students from schools across Qatar navigated their drones through an obstacle course at the event.

6 Gulf TimesMonday, April 18, 2016

QATAR

The first Qatari winner of ‘Safari Win 6kg Gold Promotion’ receiving his prize from Safari Group director/general manager Zainul Abideen as another off icial looks on.

Golden moment

QC to hold workshop

Strong windslikely today

Qatar Chamber is conducting today a workshop on the

development of business effi ciency and human rights. The exercise is in co-operation with the International Organisa-tion of Employers and the Global Business Initiative on Human Rights. QNB is a main sponsor.

Several company rep-resentatives, those con-cerned with human rights, business and cor-porate social responsi-bility are set to take part. The workshop is aimed at spreading the culture of respecting human rights at workplaces, besides promoting proper health and safety practices.

Strong winds and high seas are ex-pected in off shore

areas today, the Qatar Met department has said.

The wind speed in these places may go up to 25 knots and slightly dusty conditions are also likely, according to the weather report.

The sea level, mean-while, may rise to 9ft.

The forecast for in-shore areas says it will be relatively hot during the day and slight dust is also expected in some places at times. The wind speed in these areas may reach 18 knots by the af-ternoon.

The minimum and maximum temperatures in the country today are expected to be 21C and 34C, respectively, with the forecast for Doha be-ing 24C and 34C.

Al Khaliji enhances Internet banking

Al Khalij Commer-cial Bank (Al Khaliji) has announced the

release of a new Internet banking experience.

This comes as part of its mission to off er a full range of banking products and services for its clients, the bank said in a statement.

“In its newest release, Al Khaliji’s Internet bank-ing service puts over 60 enhancements, tweaks and new functions at the fi n-gertips of clients who pre-fer the speed, ease of use and security of our Internet banking,” the bank said.

The Internet banking interface now features “an all-new home page with net position summary and quick previews, a face-

lifted design that is sleeker and user-friendly, as well as a range of handy new fea-tures, including widgets, to see currency rates, SMS and e-mail reminders, and QSE prices, among others,” the statement said.

The bank further noted that payments have been made “smarter and easier, including support for fu-ture-dated payments, while navigation now gives users more freedom and fl ex-ibility with a range of new options and quick links, in addition to the ability to set up SMS account alerts for balances, open deposits, as well as an OTP-by-email feature for clients who don’t have access to their registered phones.”

QU students in Indonesia on volunteer mission Reach Out to Asia (Rota) has

co-ordinated an interna-tional volunteer trip, spon-

sored by HSBC, for 20 Qatar Uni-versity (QU) students to Indonesia as part of its ongoing eff orts to provide underprivileged youth in Asia with access to quality educa-tion.

The Rota-QU volunteers facili-tated workshops for 200 students from grade 1 – 6 at a school in the village of Bayat, in Yogyakarta province. Workshop topics fo-cused on sport for education, computer literacy, cultural ex-change, Arabic language, and en-vironmental awareness.

The programme aimed to ex-pand the knowledge and skills of local students, while giving vol-unteers the opportunity to devel-op their own life skills, witnessing fi rst-hand the conditions faced by youth in rural Indonesia.

Mohamed Abdulla al-Saleh, Rota national programmes direc-tor, said: “Education is key to al-leviating poverty and empowering youth in disadvantaged communi-ties. Our ongoing initiatives across Asia allow for eff ective knowledge transfer, making a positive impact in the lives of youth and their wid-er communities.”

Abdullah Alyafei, associate vice president for Student Life and Services at Qatar University, said: “Volunteering and community service abroad is an eye-opening experience for students. It gives them the chance to contribute to the lives of others in less fortunate areas. Additionally, it is a great way to promote understanding and cultural exchange between the two countries.”

Mohammed al-Shoraim, a QU volunteer, said: “In this trip, we have learned a lot from the stu-dents who are intensely eager and

enthusiastic to pursue education despite their limited resources and humble tools. We have to be extremely thankful for what we have. Those who want to succeed have to rely on themselves and not on the available means and resources. We came to learn and have learned a lot.”

“We believe that education is key to prosperity as it off ers peo-ple the chance to develop their skills, realise their potential and make a meaningful contribution to society. This partnership with Rota was the perfect opportunity for HSBC to positively impact the lives of the children of Bayat,” said Abdul Hakeem Mostafawi, CEO of HSBC Qatar.

QU students at one of the teaching sessions in a school in Indonesia.

The volunteers try their hand in rice cultivation.

QATAR7Gulf Times


A number of streets at the Doha Industrial Area, particularly those on the

eastern side, remain fl ooded following the rains on Thursday evening and the early hours of Friday.

The rains, accompanied by severe winds, caused damage to many buildings across Qatar, especially on the southwestern side of Doha.

As a result of the fl ooding in Industrial Area, vehicular movement through the streets has become extremely diffi cult and risky.

The already-dilapidated, pot-holed roads, where there has been little in the way of repair or maintenance in recent years, now sport craters.

A large number of warehouses of foodstuff s suppliers are locat-ed on the streets on the eastern side.

Most of the streets also house a large number of workers ac-commodations.

Residents of many of those residential camps are fi nding it increasingly diffi cult to ven-ture out onto the streets due to fl ooding in the area.

Some of the operators of the warehouses told Gulf Times yesterday that they have been unable to move their vehicles through the area because of the fl ooding.

“It is very risky to operate ve-hicles, especially goods-laden trailers, through the area now.

Only a few streets in the Doha Industrial Area have good roads even though there has been a re-markable rise in the number of trailers coming to the area,” said a warehouse manager, who says it is time proper maintenance work is carried out on most of the streets fl anked by warehous-es of foodstuff s companies.

Signifi cantly, it is understood that a number of large trucks coming to the area are from abroad.

Perhaps the only segment

which is apparently happy with the present conditions of the roads here are the garage op-erators who are getting a large number of repairing works on account of the break down of the vehicles in the area.

Earlier, there were only pot-holes on the roads.

However, the absence of re-pairs has turned them into cra-ters over the years.

There has also been alarming growth of weeds and bushes in the middle of some of the roads.

Industrial Area roads in dire need of repair By Ramesh MathewStaff Reporter

One of the flooded roads on the eastern side of the Doha Industrial Area.

Movement through this street has become a nightmare after Thursday’s rains.

Barwa Bank has announced the winners of the seventh round of draw for Thara’a,

its Shariah-compliant savings account, at the bank’s headquar-ters.

Salem Saeed M A Almarri and Fakhria Esmaeil Mahmoudi each won a cash prize of QR50,000.

Also, a cash prize worth QR25,000 was awarded to Nashwa Osman Ali Omer, Abdu-lasees Chevidikkunnan Koyamu, Ali Hassan Y H al-Ansari, and Alawi Abdulkadir Aljuneid.

The draw’s seventh round was conducted under the supervision of a representative of the quali-tative licence and market control department at the Ministry of Economy and Commerce.

Thara’a off ers account holders the chance to benefi t from cash rewards of up to QR1,000,000.

Based on several criteria, Thara’a account holders are eli-

gible for a number of periodic draws for cash prizes.

Totalling QR3,000,000, Thara’a cash rewards are distrib-uted on both a monthly and bian-nual basis to customers holding a minimum balance of QR10,000.

On a monthly basis, there are seven winners per draw for the cash prize of QR5,000, as well as four winners per draw for the cash prize of QR10,000.

Additionally, twice a year, there are four winners per draw for the QR25,000 cash prize, two winners per draw for QR50,000, and one winner per draw for the grand prize of QR1,000,000.

A total of 102 winners are to be rewarded with cash prizes total-ling up to QR3,000,000.

Customers can learn about the Thara’a savings account by visit-ing Barwa Bank’s website, www.barwabank.com, or by calling the contact centre at 800 8555.

Barwa Bank names winners of seventh Thara’a prize draw

Two of the four QR25,000 cash prize winners in the seventh draw for Barwa Bank’s Thara’a savings account.

REGION


Warring sides‘optimistic’over Yemenpeace talks Yemen’s warring parties are

sending conciliatory sig-nals ahead of UN-backed

talks starting today, in a rare sign of mutual willingness to end a year-old confl ict that has caused one of the world’s worst humani-tarian crises.

A deal may help defuse ten-sions between Iran and Saudi Arabia, who are allied to oppos-ing sides in Yemen.

Air strikes and heavy com-bat persist in many parts of the country, while armed forces who could yet play a spoiling role loom throughout Yemen’s tan-gled political scene.

Police said they foiled two car bomb attacks in the southern port of Aden yesterday. In one case a policeman died when a car exploded after police opened fi re on it rushing at a checkpoint at high speed.

But the recent rhetoric of the main combatants has been unu-sually mild.

“We are ready for a political transition which excludes no one ... The world now looks to the Kuwait consultations as a land-mark of peace for Yemenis, and

we will give everything we can to alleviate the suff ering of the people,” Foreign Minister Ab-del Malek al-Mekhlafi , from the Saudi-backed government now based in Aden, told state news agency Saba.

Mohamed Abdul-Salam, spokesman for the Houthi move-ment which controls the capital Sanaa and which Gulf Arab states say is allied to Iran, appeared conciliatory in an interview with Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai on Saturday.

“There should be a consensus authority during a defi nite tran-sitional phase to decide every political dispute,” he was quoted as saying. “Iran does not have any role in our sovereign decisions and we are not tools in anyone’s hands.”

In a further sign of goodwill, he said on his Facebook page that his group had received 30 prisoners from the government side.

Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab allies joined the war on March 26 of last year to back Yemen’s gov-ernment after it was pushed into exile by the Houthis.

UN talks in June and Decem-ber failed to end the war that has killed about 6,200 people, about half of them civilians. The war has allowed Al Qaeda fi ghters to

seize territory and opened a path for Islamic State militants to gain a foothold.

A partial naval blockade im-posed by the Arab coalition has caused food shortages and prices for necessities to skyrocket in the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country.

The Houthis agreed with Saudi Arabia to reduce attacks on the kingdom in exchange for a halt to Saudi-led air strikes on Sanaa, and the two sides carried out a prisoner exchange.

“This represents the best op-portunity to end the war since it started - real progress has been made,” said Adam Baron, a visit-ing fellow at the European Coun-cil on Foreign Relations.

The fate of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s president of 33 years who was ousted by “Arab Spring” pro-tests in 2012 and who has formed an alliance with the Houthis, re-mains unclear and could compli-cate transition plans.

While Saleh’s party will take part in the talks, the former lead-er has refused to depart Yemen’s political scene.

“There are a slew of potential spoilers. The past year has seen a proliferation of warlords whose power is tied to the confl ict con-tinuing,” added Baron.

ReutersKuwait

Pro-government forces sit on a heavily armoured vehicle in Sanaa yesterday. Yemen’s nearly week-long ceasefire has been violated numerous times with fighting that has been unabated in Nahm, northeast of rebel-held Sanaa.

US sends nine Yemeni menfrom Guantanamo to Saudi

The US on Saturday trans-ferred nine Yemeni men to Saudi Arabia from the

US military prison at Guan-tanamo, including an inmate who had been on a hunger strike since 2007, under a long-sought diplomatic deal between Washington and Riyadh, US of-fi cials said.

The transfer, which took place just days before President Barack Obama’s visit to Saudi Arabia for a summit of Gulf

Arab allies, marked the latest step in his fi nal push to close the controversial detention centre at the US naval base in Cuba before he leaves offi ce in Janu-ary 2017.

The Saudis agreed, after lengthy negotiations that at one point involved Obama and Saudi King Salman, to take the nine Yemenis for resettle-ment and put them through a government-run rehabilitation programme that seeks to reinte-grate militants into society, the offi cials said.

The group announced by the Pentagon was the largest

shipped out of the Guantan-amo Bay prison since Obama rolled out his plan in February aimed at shutting the facility. But he faces stiff opposition from many Republican law-makers as well as some fellow Democrats.

There are now 80 prisoners at Guantanamo, most held with-out charge or trial for more than a decade, drawing international condemnation.

The most prominent of the transfers was Tariq Ba Odah, a 37-year-old Yemeni whom the military had been force-feeding daily since he went on a hunger

strike in 2007. His legal team said he was down to 74lb, losing about half of his body weight.

Ba Odah’s lawyer, Omar Fa-rah, said the US government had “played Russian roulette” with his client’s life and that his transfer “ends one of the most appalling chapters in Guantan-amo’s sordid history.”

His case was a source of legal wrangling between the US De-partment of Justice and his law-yers, who had unsuccessfully sought his release on humani-tarian and medical grounds, and also created divisions within the Obama administration.

ReutersWashington

Iran shows off S-300 defence system

Iran showed off parts of its new Russian S-300 missile defence system

during National Army Day yesterday.

Every year, Iran’s armed forces hold parades across the country to mark Army Day. In a ceremony in Te-hran, broadcast live on state television, trucks carrying the missiles drove past a po-dium where President Has-san Rouhani and military commanders were stand-ing. Soldiers also marched passed the podium and fi ghter jets and bombers

took part in an air display. “The power of our armed

forces is not aimed at any of our neighbours ... Its pur-pose is to defend Islamic Iran and act as an active deterrent,” Rouhani was quoted as saying by the state news agency IRNA, in a speech at the Army Day ceremony.

Russia delivered the fi rst part of the S-300 missile defence system to Iran last week, one of the most ad-vanced systems of its kind that can engage multiple aircraft and ballistic mis-siles around 150km (90 miles) away.

Russia has said it can-celled a contract to deliver

S-300s to Iran in 2010 un-der pressure from the West. President Vladimir Putin lifted the ban in April 2015, after an interim agreement that paved the way for July’s full nuclear deal with Iran that ended international sanctions.

Since then, Iran has upset the US by carrying out four ballistic missile tests, which the US and its European al-lies said were in defi ance of the UN resolution adopted in July.

Rouhani said that dur-ing the nuclear talks Ira-nian negotiators also aimed to maintain and boost the country’s military capabili-ties.

Iran has two armies, a reg-ular one which operates as a national defensive force, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that was cre-ated after the revolution to protect the Islamic Republic against both internal and ex-ternal adversaries.

The army has the big-gest ground force in Iran and IRGC is in control of growing arsenal of ballistic missiles.

In its fi rst overseas op-eration since the revolution, the regular army said ear-lier this month that it had deployed some of its spe-cial forces and commandos to Syria to help President Bashar al-Assad in the civil war there.

Reuters Dubai

First Air Francefl ight in 8 yearslands in Tehran

An Air France pas-senger jet landed in Tehran for the fi rst

time in eight years yester-day, in a sign of Iran’s in-creasing reintegration into the global economy after last year’s landmark nu-clear deal.

The Airbus A330’s fi ve-hour journey from Paris was the fi rst of Air France’s three new weekly services between the two capitals.

Iranian and French fl ags

waved from the cockpit as the plane taxied down the runway at Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport.

Air France had oper-ated the Paris-Tehran route since 1946 but suspended it 2008 after Iran was tar-geted with international sanctions due to its nuclear programme.

Relations between Iran and the West have thawed since Tehran agreed to curb its nuclear activities in return for the removal of sanctions that have crip-pled its economy.

DPATehran

GCC Islamic aff airs ministers meetThe third meeting of the GCC ministers of Awqaf and Islamic aff airs was held yesterday in Riyadh. It was chaired by Saudi Minister of Islamic Aff airs, Endowments Call and Guidance Saleh bin Abdul Aziz Aal Ash-Shaikh. In their statements to the meeting, the ministers called for exerting further

eff orts to bolster the GCC joint action, and co-operation in Awqaf and Islamic aff airs. They also stressed the role of ministries of Awqaf and Islamic aff airs in the GCC for defending Islam against media campaigns that distort the religion, its values and teachings.

ARAB WORLD9Gulf Times


New Libyan unity govt asserts itself ahead of vote AFPTripoli

The UN said its staff had returned to Tripoli and Libya’s unity government

vowed further steps to assert its authority yesterday, on the eve of a crucial confi dence vote.

UN envoy Martin Kobler said his staff were back after leaving amid violence in mid-2014, three years after Libya descended into chaos following the Nato-backed uprising that killed dictator Muammar Gaddafi .

Their arrival comes a day be-fore the recognised parliament votes on the UN-backed Govern-ment of National Accord (GNA), supported by the international community in a bid to end years of chaos in the North African na-tion.

“The UN staff will be in Tripoli fi ve days a week... I am not visit-ing Tripoli any more, I am work-ing out of Tripoli,” Kobler said at a joint news conference with Ahmed Maiteeq, deputy head of a UN-backed unity government.

Maiteeq, meanwhile, said the GNA would take control of three

ministries from today, in the lat-est step to assert its authority over the confl ict-torn country.

“More than six ministries are ready, of which three will be handed over administratively to-morrow,” he said.

The deputy premier said the GNA would begin running the ministries of social aff airs, youth and sports, and housing and public works from today, regard-less of the results of the vote of confi dence.

“The legislative authorities must quickly give the GNA its legitimacy through the House

of Representatives in order for it to serve the Libyan people,” Maiteeq said.

This, he said, would “endorse the GNA in order to save the Libyan people from all the prob-lems”.

The legislature’s endorsement would be a key step for the unity government of prime minister-designate Fayez al-Sarraj, which has been working to assert its authority in the war-torn nation.

Libya has had two rival admin-istrations since mid-2014 when a militia alliance took over Tripoli, setting up its own authority and

forcing the recognised parlia-ment to fl ee to the remote east, where it is based in Tobruk.

Sarraj’s government was formed under a UN-backed pow-er-sharing deal agreed in De-cember and supported by some lawmakers from both sides.

The unity cabinet has been steadily winning support from local offi cials and state institu-tions, though the head of the Tripoli-based administration, Khalifa Ghweil, has refused to recognise its authority.

Kobler visited Tripoli shortly after Sarraj’s government arrived

in the capital under naval escort on March 30.

The UN envoy will be in To-bruk today to encourage the rec-ognised government and parlia-ment to back the latest moves.

There has been a fl urry of dip-lomatic trips to back the unity government, including a visit on Saturday by French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

World powers see the GNA as a crucial partner in tackling mili-tants behind a string of deadly attacks in Libya, as well as human

traffi ckers exploiting the coun-try’s turmoil.

The fi rst clashes since Sarraj’s arrival broke out several hours after the ministers’ visit, but had subsided by early yesterday.

Gunfi re and small explosions were heard overnight as two armed groups clashed in the Hay el-An-dalous district north of the capital, an upmarket area housing embas-sies and home to many politicians, an AFP correspondent said.

No information was imme-diately available on the cause or extent of the clashes or whether there had been any casualties.

Hollande inkseconomicdeals duringEgypt visit AFPCairo

French President Francois Hollande sealed several economic deals with his

Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo yester-day during a visit dogged by al-legations of rights abuses in the North African country.

Hollande had touched down in Cairo to a lavish welcome, pull-ing up at the historic Al-Qubbah palace fl anked by a cavalry guard and to a 21-gun salute.

He and Sisi later oversaw the signing of several memorandums of understanding, including a 1.2bn euro deal to expand the metro line in Cairo.

Later at a news conference, both leaders veered into the question of rights abuses un-der Sisi, who activists accuse of crushing dissent.

Turning to Hollande, Sisi said the French president had brought up the issue during their meet-ing.

“The region we live in, Presi-dent Hollande, is very turbulent,” said Sisi.

He added that “European cri-

teria” of human rights should not be applied to struggling coun-tries such as Egypt, and should include rights to “better educa-tion and better housing”.

Hollande said respecting hu-man rights was not an obstacle to fi ghting militants, who have con-ducted large scale attacks in both France and Egypt.

“Human rights are not a con-straint but also a way to fi ght against terrorism,” he said.

When a reporter brought up the case of Italian student Giulio Regeni, whose body was found bearing torture marks in Cairo in February, Sisi said there was a plot by an “evil force”.

“Let me say we are being con-fronted by an evil force that is trying to shake Egypt, and give a false impression of what is hap-pening in Egypt,” he said.

Italian offi cials have voiced suspicion that the PhD student was killed by security services, and Rome has recalled its ambas-sador from Cairo to protest the pace of Egypt’s investigation into his death.

Egypt denies he was killed by the police.

“I want to say what is hap-pening in Egypt is an attempt to

destroy state institutions. Today accusations are made against the police to bring down the po-lice, then against judges to bring down the judiciary,” Sisi said.

Meanwhile, militants have staged an insurgency based in the Sinai Peninsula that has killed hundreds of soldiers and police-men.

The Islamic State group’s Egypt affi liate has also claimed responsibility for bombing a plane carrying Russian holiday-makers over Sinai last October, killing all 224 people on board.

Sisi, who won a presidential election in 2014, has manoeu-vred his country into being a cor-nerstone in the fi ght against IS, which a US-led coalition is bat-tling in Iraq and Syria.

IS has taken over the city of Sirte in neighbouring Libya, more than fi ve years after French-led air strikes helped rebels there de-feat dictator Muammar Gaddafi ’s regime.

For France, Egypt has also be-come a key market, especially for military hardware.

Egypt was the fi rst country to buy French Rafale warplanes, and also purchased two Mistral heli-copter carrier ships.

AFPBeirut

French President Francois Hollande met with Syrian refugee children in eastern

Lebanon yesterday before head-ing to Egypt as part of a four-day regional tour.

The French leader travelled to an informal settlement in Leba-non’s Bekaa valley that is home to some 600 Syrian refugees, most-ly women and children.

“I just visited a camp the likes of which are all over Lebanon,”

Hollande told reporters after spending nearly an hour in the Al-Dalhamiyah camp.

“They (Syrian children) don’t want violence. They want to learn and go home, join their families, their country,” he said.

About 15 Syrian schoolchildren greeted the French president as he entered the large commu-nal tent used as their makeshift school.

They recited a poem in Arabic and gave Hollande pictures they had drawn.

“You will be the messengers of peace... France’s children are

thinking of you a lot,” Hollande told them.

He met with the UN refugee agency’s Lebanon representative Mireille Girard, who said diffi cult living conditions were forcing young Syrian children into child labour.

Lebanon, home to 4mn peo-ple, hosts more than 1mn Syrian refugees. France hosts more than 10,000.

Hollande landed in Beirut on Saturday for meetings with Leb-anese offi cials and announced 100mn euros ($113mn) in assist-ance to the small Mediterranean

country over the next three years. He will travel to Jordan tomor-

row. In Cairo, Hollande is expected

to discuss with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi both the political crisis in Egypt’s western neigh-bour Libya and the Israeli-Pales-tinian confl ict.

His visit to Jordan will take him to the Prince Hassan air base, 100km (60 miles) northeast of Amman.

French aircraft taking part in the US-led coalition battling the Is-lamic State militant group in Iraq and Syria are stationed at the base.

French president visits Syrianrefugee children in Lebanon

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi welcomes French President Francois Hollande upon his arrival in Cairo yesterday.

Israel will neverleave Golan,says Netanyahu DPATel Aviv

Israel will never return the Golan Heights to Syria, Prime Minister Benjamin

Netanyahu said yesterday, as the Israeli cabinet held its fi rst-ever meeting in the strategic border region.

“I chose to hold this fes-tive cabinet meeting on the Golan Heights in order to deliver a clear message: The Golan Heights will forever remain in Israel’s hands,” Netanyahu said.

“The time has come for the international com-munity to fi nally recognise that the Golan Heights will remain under Israel’s sov-ereignty permanently,” the prime minister said.

In 1967, Israel captured from Syria part of the rocky plateau that also borders Lebanon and Jor-dan. It annexed the terri-tory in 1981, in a move that was not internationally recognised.

The fi ve-year-old war in Syria has frequently spilled over into the disputed area.

The Israeli military says it has launched several op-erations into the Syrian-controlled side to prevent the transfer of weapons from Syria to Lebanon by fi ght-ers with the Shia Hezbollah movement.

At the symbolic meet-ing, Netanyahu said Israel’s nearly fi ve-decade presence has enhanced “peace” for the 50,000 people who live in the Golan.

Libyans arrest 200 migrants Libyan authorities said yesterday they had arrested 203 African migrants in Tripoli who were preparing to make a perilous sea crossing to Europe. An alleged people smuggler was also detained. An early morning raid by forces battling clandestine migration targeted a house

in eastern Tripoli’s Al-Hashan district and netted several dozen people, an AFP journalist said. Armed and masked members of the authorities in bullet-proof vests rounded up the migrants and put them on vehicles to be driven to a detention centre.

‘No compromise’ on Assad ouster AFPGeneva

Fighting in Aleppo killed at least 22 civilians as the op-position delegation threat-

ened yesterday to quit Syria peace talks in Geneva if there is no progress on a political transi-tion.

The opposition High Negotia-tions Committee said the indi-rect negotiations could collapse if Syria’s regime refuses to com-promise on political and human-itarian issues.

“We might suspend (our par-ticipation in) the talks if things carry on this way, and then there will be no prospect for any politi-cal solution,” HNC member Ab-dulhakim Bashar said.

The opposition’s chief ne-gotiator also said there could be “no compromise” on Bashar al-Assad’s ouster, and called for renewed attacks on regime forces

despite a fragile ceasefi re. The Syrian Observatory for

Human Rights said the number of civilians killed in fl ashpoint Aleppo city was one of the high-est single tolls since the truce be-gan on February 27.

The truce has seen violence drop across parts of Syria, in-cluding the northern city, but renewed clashes there in the past 24 hours have seriously strained the truce, the Observatory said.

At least six civilians were killed and eight wounded in regime air strikes on rebel-held eastern parts of the city on Saturday.

And a barrage of rockets and sniper fi re by opposition groups onto government-controlled western districts killed 16 civil-ians, including 10 children and two women.

Rebel groups fi red more rock-ets at western areas of Aleppo city late Sunday, but there was no immediate information on new casualties.

“There’s a clear escalation. This was the bloodiest incident in Aleppo and its province” since the ceasefi re began, Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.

“This escalation directly threatens the truce.”

The HNC has questioned the regime’s commitment to a po-litical solution to Syria’s five-year war, particularly in the wake of the renewed violence in Aleppo.

“The humanitarian situation is continually deteriorating, the is-sue of the detainees has not seen any progress, the ceasefi re has almost collapsed, and now there is an attack on Aleppo from three sides,” Bashar said in Switzer-land.

“Given these factors, we are reviewing everything, and we will continue our meetings today (Sunday) so that tomorrow we can decide what to do.”

A second member of the HNC delegation, speaking anony-

mously, said the talks were nearly at “an impasse”.

“The negotiations have nearly reached an impasse with the in-transigent regime’s refusal to negotiate the fate of Assad in the Geneva talks,” the member said.

This has remained the main sticking point in peace talks, with Syria’s opposition clinging onto its call for Assad’s ouster since the confl ict began in 2011.

But the regime has ruled out his departure, calling his fate “a red line”.

“There can be no compromise on the issue of Bashar al-Assad... For us, it’s a closed book - you cannot trade an entire people for one man,” opposition chief nego-tiator Mohamed Alloush said in Geneva.

Earlier, Alloush called for re-newed attacks on regime forces, despite the shaky truce.

“Don’t trust the regime and don’t wait for their pity,” tweeted Alloush, a leading political fi gure

in the Jaish al-Islam (Army of Is-lam) rebel group.

“Strike them at their necks (kill them). Strike them every-where.”

A fellow opposition fi gure said Alloush’s hawkish statement did not represent the HNC’s posi-tion.

Alloush himself later said that he had been calling on rebel groups to defend themselves against regime truce violations.

The peace plan outlined by UN envoy Staff an de Mistura and backed by world powers envi-sions a political transition, a new constitution, and presidential and parliamentary elections by September 2017.

But Syria’s government hosted its own regularly-scheduled par-liamentary elections last week only in government-held areas, which Assad’s ruling Baath party easily won.

The opposition denounced the election as a “farce”.

Jordan’s King Abdullah welcomes Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at the Royal Palace in Amman yesterday.

Hundreds rally in support of Sadr

Jordan king meets Singapore’s PM

ReutersBaghdad

Hundreds rallied in central Baghdad in support of pow-

erful Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr who has threat-ened to call mass protests if the prime minister fails to name a new cabinet to fi ght corruption by tomorrow.

People in Tahrir Square yesterday said many more would join them if Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi did not select a govern-ment mainly made up of technical experts to tackle what they see as wide-spread graft and misman-agement.

“Yes, yes to Iraq; no, no to corruption,” they chant-ed, carrying Iraqi fl ags.

“We are demonstrat-ing on our own initiative in support of Sayyid Mo-qtada,” said a man sitting in one of a number of tents set up to shield protesters from the blazing sun.

Delays in naming a new government, and political and sectarian wrangling over who should be in it, have paralysed politics in Iraq.

Abadi has said the tur-moil could threaten the campaign against Islamic State militants who still control swathes of terri-tory in the north and west, including the city of Mosul.

Iraq, a major Opec ex-porter which sits on one of the world’s largest oil reserves, ranks 161th out of 168 countries on Trans-parency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

Corruption became a major issue after oil prices collapsed in 2014, shrink-ing the state budget at a time when it needed ad-ditional income to pay for war on the militant group.

Abadi’s initial cabi-net line-up, presented on March 31, was made up of independent professionals who he hoped could free their ministries from the grip of dominant politi-cal groups that have built their infl uence and wealth on a system of patronage put in place since the over-throw of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Parliament has already postponed the vote on Abadi’s government over-haul three times.

QNA Amman

Jordanian King Abdul-lah II met in Amman yesterday with Sin-

gaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsein Loong who is on a visit to Jordan.

During the meeting, King Abdullah expressed Jordan’s aspiration for strengthening and ex-panding relations with Singapore, especially in the economic and invest-ment areas.

The Jordanian mon-

arch reaffirmed the im-portance of continued efforts being made by both governments to ex-plore further opportu-nities for economic co-operation.

Meanwhile, Singapore’s prime minister affi rmed his country’s keenness to strengthen ties with Jordan and to take co-operation into advanced levels to serve their joint interests”, particularly in economic and investment domains, according to the offi cial Jordanian Petra news agency.

Civil defence members look for survivors after an airstrike on the rebel-held Old Aleppo, Syria on Saturday.


ARAB WORLD

AFRICA11Gulf Times


At least 11 people were killed and 59 more injured when a bus transporting African National Congress (ANC) supporters from an election rally in Port Elizabeth overturned yesterday, South African emergency services said. The bus rolled off the N1 highway between Ventersburg and Winsburg in the Free State, trapping passengers underneath the vehicle, ER24 paramedics said in a statement. The cause of the accident is not yet known. “The ANC has learnt with sadness of a fatal accident in the Free State where a bus carrying comrades returning from the ANC manifesto rally in Port Elizabeth overturned,” the party said in a statement.

The African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia (AMISOM) apologised yesterday for accidentally killing four civilians on Saturday after soldiers mistook them for Shebaab fighters when they failed to stop at a roadblock. The incident happened in the area of Buulo Mareer in the Lower Shebelle region, 80km south of Mogadishu. “A speeding vehicle approached the roadblock and failed to adhere to repeated warnings to stop. Assuming the car to be a vehicle borne improvised explosive device, the troops opened fire resulting in the death of four occupants of the vehicle,” said a statement issued by AMISOM. “AMISOM profoundly regrets the loss of civilian lives.”

The UN yesterday condemned a government crackdown in Gambia that it said had led to the death of three opposition party members who were arrested during protests on Thursday. In a statement echoed by the US state department, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed “dismay” at reports that a leading member of the United Democratic Party (UDP), Solo Sandeng, and two other party members had died while in custody. Ban Ki-moon called for a “prompt, thorough and independent investigation into the circumstances that led to their death while under state custody”.

Hundreds of mourners gathered in the Malian capital over the weekend to pay their final respects to the late photographer Malick Sidibe, who won international acclaim with his vibrant black-and-white images which captured daily life in his native country. The send-off for Sidibe, whose coff in was draped in the national flag, took place on a football pitch in Bamako, with soldiers giving the iconic artist full honours. Young Malian photographers in attendance expressed their sadness at the loss of a mentor. After the 80-year-old’s death was announced Friday, France’s Culture Minister Audrey Azoulay hailed him as “the father of African photography”.

Men carry the body of late photographer Malick Sidibe during the funeral ceremony in Bamako on Saturday.

ANC supporters killed after bus overturns on return trip

4 mistaken for Shebaab, shot dead by AU troops

UN and US condemn Gambia crackdown

Malians pay tribute to celebrated photographer

ACCIDENT ROADBLOCK INCIDENTCUSTODY DEATHS MOURNED

Boko Haram splinter group leader nabbed AFPMaiduguri

Nigeria’s security services have hailed the arrest of the leader of the Boko Haram splinter

group Ansaru, Khalid al-Barnawi, say-ing it will lead to them to other senior Islamist commanders.

“The arrest of Barnawi is a huge suc-cess and will have a profound eff ect on counter-terrorism operations in Ni-geria and beyond,” one security source told AFP.

“He is a known transnational terror-ist and the backbone of all Al Qaeda af-fi liate groups in West Africa.”

Barnawi, designated a global terror-ist by the US since 2012, was detained on April 1 with three others in the Kogi state capital, Lokoja, and found with four Thuraya satellite phones.

The phones “provided several leads” to “high-profi le Boko Haram and An-saru elements” in the capital, Abuja, Lokoja and the central city of Jos, said another source.

“This has been our biggest break-through against terrorism in Nigeria ever,” said a third.

“We still have other high-ranking terrorists on our radar based on the in-formation gathered from the phones of Barnawi and his three comrades. We will rope them in at the right time,” he added.

Barnawi is certainly a major prize for Nigerian intelligence, the Department of State Services (DSS), which called him “a trained terrorist commander” who also recruited for Al Qaeda affi liates.

He is accused of masterminding a string of kidnappings of Westerners between 2011 and 2013.

“This arrest is a major milestone in the counter-terrorism fi ght,” the DSS said in a statement on April 9, with an accompanying mugshot of Barnawi.

But while security analysts agree he is the most high-profi le capture since the start of the Islamist insurgency in 2009, it remains unclear what eff ect it

will have on operations on the ground. Boko Haram has been pegged back

by an aggressive fi ghtback from the Nigerian military since January last year, losing territory and its capacity to mount conventional attacks.

President Muhammadu Buhari has gone so far as to say the militants were “technically” defeated, even if suicide and bomb attacks have continued in northeast Nigeria, Cameroon and Niger.

Yan St-Pierre, from the Modern Security Consulting group, however, said Barnawi, who trained in Sudan, Afghanistan and with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in Algeria, was “infl uential”.

But he was “only one” part of a dis-parate organisation.

His arrest “should not change much in terms of Ansaru’s terrorist activities”, St-Pierre said, as the group has not car-ried out many operations since 2013.

“Where things could change howev-er is in the recent openings some Boko

Haram-affi liated groups have made to AQIM in the last few months, and Kha-lid al-Barnawi was a huge part of that,” he said.

“His arrest will aff ect the dynamic of the discussions between AQIM and those he represented” at a time when the Nigerian militants were reaching out to jihadists further afi eld.

Ansaru, which is more ideologically aligned to Al Qaeda, is believed to have been formed as a result of disapproval at Boko Haram’s indiscriminate target-ing of civilians.

Andrew Walker, author of ‘Eat the Heart of the Infi del’: The Harrowing of Nigeria and the Rise of Boko Haram, said shifting dynamics between the groups made the arrest’s impact un-certain.

“However, I think that any removal of key powerful charismatic fi gures from this situation will have the po-tential to scatter the remaining fi ghters and supporters,” he said.

4 Burundi villagers shot dead by raiders ReutersNairobi

Unknown gunmen killed four people on Saturday night in two villages southeast of

Burundi’s capital Bujumbura. The killings were the latest in a

series of violent incidents which have rattled the small central Af-rican nation since a political dis-pute erupted a year ago.

Tit-for-tat attacks between President Pierre Nkurunziza’s security forces and his oppo-nents have been escalating since he announced a disputed bid for a third term in April 2015.

More than 400 people have been killed in the ensuing vio-lence, according to estimates by the UN and rights groups.

Nkurunziza’s opponents said a third term violated Burundi’s constitution and a peace pact that ended the country’s 1993-2005 civil war.

A constitutional court ruling, however, said Nkurunziza could extend his rule.

Citing that ruling, the gov-ernment organised an election which the president won in July.

Etienne Nijimbere, a local gov-ernment offi cial, told Reuters yes-

terday the gunmen had attacked two villages in Mugamba district, 60 kilometres southeast of Bu-jumbura, and killed four people.

Another source told Reuters that “some of the attackers were wearing military uniforms with hoods on (their) heads”.

Nijimbere said all four people killed were likely targeted be-cause they were members of the ruling CNDD-FDD party.

Late on Saturday a grenade was also thrown at a fuel reserve facility in Burundi’s second larg-est town, Gitenga, although the blast caused no damage, accord-ing to a regional government of-fi cial, Anicet Manirambona.

Three armed groups, including one led by offi cers that attempted a coup in May 2015, have launched armed rebellions against the gov-ernment, offi cials say.

None have claimed responsi-bility for Saturday’s attacks.

Burundi has accused neigh-bouring Rwanda of supporting the anti-Nkurunziza rebels and there are concerns the violence could convulse the entire Great Lakes region, still haunted by Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.

Rwanda and Burundi both have ethnic Hutu majorities and Tutsi minorities.

Mali makes third arrest in Ivory Coast beach attack

Authorities in Mali have arrested a third man be-

lieved to be linked to last month’s deadly Al Qaeda attack on a beach resort in neighbouring Ivory Coast, military offi cials said yesterday.

Gunmen shot swim-mers and sunbathers be-fore storming hotels in the town of Grand Bas-sam, killing 19 people 40km from the commer-cial capital, Abidjan, on March 13.

One source said Alou Doumbia was arrested late on Saturday in the Malian capital of Bamako and suspected of driving the gunmen from Mali to Ivory Coast.

A second police source confi rmed the arrest but was unable to provide further detail.

Saturday’s arrest was the third reported in Mali linked to the Grand Bas-sam attacks, that were claimed by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the Islamist group’s North African branch..

Eleven Ivorians, in-cluding three special forces’ soldiers, died in the attack. Four French citizens were killed and other foreign victims in-cluded citizens of Germa-ny, Lebanon, Macedonia and Nigeria.

With power in Nigeria dependent on individ-uals and patronage networks, including among the insurgents, the rebels could “break down to desperate bandits fi ghting each other”, he sug-gested.

But equally the opposite could happen and remaining fi ghters could rally around another charismatic rebel leader, he added.

There was confusion last month when Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau indicated in a video that his time in charge of the Islamic State group affi liate was running out.

Yet the following week, another video which did not feature Shekau maintained he was still in charge, and dismissed any suggestion of sur-render.

The DSS said Barnawi would soon be in court “to face his charges after investigation is com-pleted”. Due process is seen as vital, given that Boko Haram became a more deadly force after the death in custody of its original leader Mo-hamed Yusuf in 2009.

“The last thing they (the authorities) want to do is to make him (Barnawi) a ‘martyr’ that could play into Boko Haram’s hands, which is something they exploit very well,” said St-Pierre.

A December 24, 2012, file photo of a video released by the radical Islamist group Ansaru.

AMERICAS


Immigrants and community leaders rally in front of the US supreme court to mark the one-year anniversary of President Barack Obama’s executive orders on immigration.

Licence issue could hitUS immigration case ReutersAustin, Texas

One of the pivotal issues in the closely watched battle over presi-dent Barack Obama’s executive

action on immigration to be argued before the US supreme court today is the rather banal subject of the money Texas pays for driver’s licences.

To bring the case and have legal stand-ing, the state of Texas, the lead plaintiff in the case, must show that it has been hurt in some way. In its fi ling, Texas argues that it would take a hefty fi nancial hit for processing driver’s licences for immigrants in the country illegally whose deportation would be deferred under Obama’s execu-tive action.

The Texas attorney general’s offi ce said Obama’s action “would cause a spike in driver’s license applications, thus making those licenses much more costly to issue”.

But the numbers cited by Texas in its claim far exceed what the state currently pays annually for all its driver’s licence services.

“It is kind of dry, legal stuff , but it is of great consequence,” said Bill Beardall, ex-ecutive director of the Equal Justice Cent-er in Texas, which provides legal help for low-income families and immigrants.

Beardall, also a University of Texas Law School professor, said the claims Texas makes of harm are tenuous.

“It has been regarded by almost all legal scholars as a very thin basis for claiming the kind of irreparable harm that would support a temporary injunction, or the kind of serious harm that would support standing,” Beardall said.

If the supreme court fi nds that Texas lacked a suffi cient “injury” to sue, the case ends there and Obama wins.

In a fi ling with the supreme court, Texas contends that processing driver’s licences for immigrants shielded from deportation under Obama’s action would cost the state more than $103mn in additional funds to process as many as 520,000 people seek-ing licences.

The $103mn fi gure is nearly triple what the state of 27mn people currently budgets annually for all driver’s licence services in-cluding tasks such as administering about 4.9mn driver’s examinations and mailing approximately 6.3mn driver’s licences and identifi cation cards.

In its explanation of costs contained in a 400-page appendix to the high court, Texas said the additional immigrants it ex-pects to seek driver’s licences would force it to hire new staff , expand offi ce space and bolster technology.

“The added customer base that may be created by the president’s executive ac-tion, assuming an applicant will be able to demonstrate they are authorised to be in

the United States, will substantially bur-den driver licence resources without addi-tional funding and support,” Texas stated in the document.

The state said that for each additional 1,750 people seeking driver’s licences, it would have to hire roughly two full-time employees to process them.

That number does not match the fi gure in this fi scal year’s state budget, which said the average number of driver’s licences and records produced by a single full-time employee is 2,638 annually, a fi gure triple the effi ciency of the state’s claim to the Supreme Court.

Texas said in its supreme court fi ling that to process applications from the im-migrants who fall under the terms of the executive action, it has to make additional checks. It also said the average costs of those checks is about 75 cents an appli-cant.

When the court takes up the challenge, the eight justices face a series of legal questions beginning with whether Texas and the other state challengers even have grounds to bring the case.

Texas subsidises the cost of processing driver’s licences and contends Obama’s actions would cost it millions of dol-lars. The Obama administration rejects that basis for standing to fi le suit, assert-ing that any such costs are “incidental” and could be avoided by the state. Obama administration lawyers say Texas could eliminate the subsidies for these driver’s

licences and eliminate the harm claimed by the state.

If the justices agree that Texas has standing to bring the case, they then would consider whether deferred-deportation policies that were part of Obama’s actions violated rule-making requirements in a federal law called the Administrative Pro-cedure Act. Under that law, federal agen-cies typically must issue a general notice of a proposed rule and give interested parties a chance to comment. Obama administra-tion lawyers say the deferred deportation practices are not binding rules subject to the Act. Rather, they characterise these policies as an outgrowth of the US depart-ment of homeland security’s discretion in determining deportation priorities. The administration contends that the home-land security secretary should be able to focus his department’s limited resources on deporting serious criminals and secur-ing the border.

A fi nal possible question for the justices is whether the deferred deportation vio-lates a dictate of the US constitution that presidents must “take care” to “faithfully execute” the nation’s laws. Texas and the other states that brought the lawsuit say Obama, in taking executive action that by-passed Congress, crossed that line because Congress is in charge of deciding who is a lawful or unlawful immigrant. The Obama administration says it was faithfully ex-ecuting the authority to determine priori-ties under immigration law.

Top varsity cop ‘urged aggressive traffi c stops’ReutersCincinnati

The former chief of the University of Cincinnati police force encouraged

aggressive use of traffi c stops to look for guns and drugs, ac-cording to a report by a consult-ant reviewing the department after a white offi cer shot and killed an unarmed black man during a traffi c stop last year.

Former University of Cincin-nati police chief Jason Goodrich, who resigned in February amid an internal review, pushed the department’s offi cers to make more traffi c stops, according to the report by consulting fi rm Exiger released this week.

Goodrich and the depart-ment’s No 2 offi cial, major Tim Thornton, who also resigned, said they were unaware of the reason for the surge in traffi c stops, the review said.

Goodrich and Thornton could not immediately be reached for comment.

The offi cers’ resignations came during the review of an off -campus traffi c stop last July 19 during which former offi cer Raymond Tensing shot and killed Samuel DuBose.

Tensing claimed he was be-ing dragged by DuBose’s car during an attempted escape but Tensing’s body camera footage as well as an investigation con-cluded the car was barely mov-ing, if at all, when Tensing fi red.

A grand jury later indicted Tensing for murder. He pleaded not guilty and is free on $1mn bond. His trial is scheduled to begin October 24.

Police use of lethal force, especially by white offi cers against unarmed African-Americans and other minori-ties, has been the focus of pro-tests and the killing of DuBose also fuelled demonstrations.

An independent report on DuBose’s shooting released last September called it “en-tirely preventable”. Robin En-gel, the university’s vice presi-dent for safety and reform, said on Friday that traffi c stops can be an eff ective policing tool but only when used with proper oversight and data review.

Exiger said Goodrich and Thornton were untruthful with both Exiger and the uni-versity administration, “mis-representing their knowledge as to signifi cant increased use of off -campus traffi c stops

by UCPD offi cers during the chief’s tenure.

“It was clear that Chief Goodrich embraced the ag-gressive use of such stops as part of his policing philoso-phy,” Exiger added.

Exiger found traffi c stops and traffi c citations increased by al-most 400% after Goodrich took over as chief in November 2014.

It said traffi c stops prior to Goodrich’s arrival averaged about 86 a month but then hit about 271 a month. In the two months before DuBose’s death, stops and citations were at all-time average highs of 412 and 392, respectively.

“The public has a right to know when offi cers abuse the public trust as well as the ram-ifi cations of that abuse,” Cook County sheriff Thomas Dart said in a statement. “Transpar-ency is critical to ensuring law enforcement accountability.”

The video release comes as the third-biggest US city’s po-lice department faces a federal investigation and racism accu-sations over the death of black teenager Laquan McDonald. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel fi red his police commissioner in 2015 after protests following the release of a video showing a Chicago police offi cer shooting McDonald 16 times.

The McDonald video was released more than a year af-ter the October 2014 shooting, sparking a round of protests late last year.

The Cook County jail videos document six cases on which the Sheriff ’s Merit Board made rulings. The board is a civil-ian body that makes the fi nal judgment whenever the sher-iff ’s offi ce recommends fi rings or long-term suspensions for offi cers. Earlier this year, Dart posted rulings from the merit board on the sheriff ’s website.

The videos were posted at http://www.cookcountysheriff .org/meritboard_decisions.html.

Cook County recently paid more than $10mn to install more than 2,400 cameras throughout its jail complex.

Former University of Cincinnati police off icer Ray Tensing enters court in 2014.

Two Canadians dead in Ecuador quake AgenciesOttawa

Federal offi cials say two Canadians are among at least 233 people killed by

an earthquake in Ecuador.Global Aff airs Canada says

consular offi cials are in contact with the families of the two Canadians, who have not been named.

The 7.8-magnitude earth-quake is the strongest to hit Ecuador since 1979, levelling buildings and buckling high-

ways along the Pacifi c Coast of the South American country.

The quake was centred about 170km northwest of the capital, Quito.

President Rafael Correa has declared a national emergency and some 10,000 armed forc-es have been deployed to the earthquake region in addition to 4,600 national police.

Global Aff airs Canada has asked friends and relatives of those known to be travelling in Ecuador to contact their emer-gency response centre.-Cour-tesy yahoo.com

Seattle remains likely that of murdered woman ReutersSeattle

Human remains discovered in Seattle likely belong to a woman who was murdered and dismem-

bered after going on a date last week with a man she met online, police said.

John Charlton, 37, has been charged in the fi rst degree murder of Ingrid Lyne, a 40-year-old nurse and mother of three girls. Lyne’s head, arm, and leg were discovered on April 9 wrapped in plastic and tossed in the recycling container of a Seattle home.

More remains were discovered by sanitation workers on Friday and are

likely connected to Lyne’s murder, po-lice said in an online media release.

Friends told police Lyne and Charlton had met online and had been seeing each other about a month when she disap-peared on April 8 after the pair attended a Seattle Mariners baseball game.

She was reported missing the next morning after her ex-husband tried to

drop off their three girls at her suburban Renton home and couldn’t locate her, police said.In-vestigators, who searched Lyne’s house, found swabs of blood and a 15-inch pruning saw in the bathroom.

In an interview with detectives, Charlton ac-knowledged he went to the baseball game with Lyne and the two returned to her home, accord-ing to the documents.

He said he was too drunk to remember much of what happened next and that Lyne eventu-ally drove him to Seattle, according to the docu-ments.

Detectives noted cuts on Charlton’s forehead, according to the document, though he denied having any injuries.

His attorney has said no forensic evidence links him to the crime.

Charlton is being held on $2mn bail and is due to be arraigned on April 27.

Firefi ghter survives deadly shootingReutersMaryland

A Maryland volunteer fi refi ghter critically wounded by gun-fi re that killed a colleague was

struck four times, but is expected to survive, Prince George’s County au-thorities said on Saturday.

Kevin Swain, 19, a volunteer fi re-fi ghter in Morningside, Maryland, remains hospitalised in serious but stable condition after surgery. Two

other volunteers with the department sustained less serious injuries while seeking cover in the shootings. They were released from the hospital on Saturday.

John Ulmschneider, a 37-year-old fi refi ghter and medic, died as a result of his injuries at a hospital late on Fri-day, the local fi re department said in a statement.

The fi refi ghters were responding to a call on Friday to check on the well-be-ing of a man whose relatives had been unable to reach him, Prince George’s

County police said on Facebook.When no one answered the door,

the fi refi ghters began forcing their way into the house, Prince George’s Coun-ty fi re and emergency medical services department said.

Several shots were fi red from inside the home, striking both fi refi ghters. A family member of the occupant was also struck, but sustained non-life-threatening injuries.

The shooter surrendered and was taken into police custody, authorities said.

Experts feel Texas’ case is extremely weak

AMERICAS13Gulf Times


Bernie Sanders greets people as he walks through Brooklyn Bridge Park in the Brooklyn borough of New York yesterday.

Sanders’ criticismof Israel splits JewsAFPWashington

When Bernie Sanders called Is-rael’s response in the 2014 Gaza war disproportionate and urged

America to be more balanced on the Is-raeli-Palestinian confl ict, he smashed a presidential campaign taboo.

His remarks at the April 14 Democratic debate ahead of New York’s decisive pri-mary on Tuesday amounted to unprec-edented criticism of Israel and promotion of Palestinian rights from a canvassing US presidential candidate.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netan-yahu “is not right all of the time”, said the Vermont senator. “We cannot continue to be one-sided.”

He criticised Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton for not saying that she would do more to promote Palestinian rights when she addressed the powerful right-wing American Israel Public Aff airs Committee (AIPAC) lobby in Washington in March.

“If we are ever going to bring peace to that region, which has seen so much ha-tred and so much war, we are going to have

to treat the Palestinian people with re-spect and dignity,” Sanders said.

Sanders, who is the only Jewish presi-dential hopeful this year, has lived in Is-rael.

In other countries the remarks would have been considered run of the mill, said Daniel Sieradski, national organiser of the group “Jews for Bernie” which has 8,000 supporters on Facebook.

“But because the discourse in American Jewish politics has been pulled so far to the right in the last couple of decades, Bernie is being made to sound like some anti-Is-rael extremist.”

During the last contested Democratic New York primary in 1992, it might have been political suicide, The New York Times wrote.

Sieradski disagreed. “I don’t think it’s political suicide,” he told AFP. “But it defi -nitely didn’t help him among people who have hard-line views on Israel.”

He said Jewish Americans make up 20% of the New York electorate. The majority of them are Democrats, meaning that air-tight support for Israel has long been con-sidered a campaign must.

But Sanders’ words refl ect changing at-titudes among Jewish voters, particularly Millennials who grew up seeing Israel as a strong state and for whom the horrors of the Holocaust are more removed.

Democrat Sharon Goldtzvik, 29, told AFP she was “really excited” to see a presi-dential candidate bring up the issue of Pal-estinian dignity.

She founded and runs Uprise, a com-munications fi rm which works with non-profi t groups and focuses on human rights and the Middle East. Goldtzvik has lived in Israel, is married to an Israeli, and de-scribes Sanders as “a breath of fresh air”.

“I’m under 30. People in my cohort were not willing to accept (that) there is only one way to support Israel, so I do think that he represents the views of many, many Jews and a growing number of Jews.”

According to a Pew Research Center poll, 35% of Democrats thought Israel had gone too far in its response during the 2014 Gaza.

Sanders has “at least opened up the dis-course so the conversation can shift in the Democratic Party, and that’s a big deal”, said Sieradski.

Polls show that Sanders trails Clinton 40-60% among Jewish Democrats in New York City, and 13 points behind his oppo-nent on a state-wide average.

Documentary fi lmmaker Gaylen Ross is voting for Clinton and believes she is the candidate best able to negotiate a two-state solution.

“Frankly if that’s the kind of language that he comes to a negotiating table with

he is already 10 steps behind,” she told AFP.

“You don’t play your hand before you get to the table and you don’t play your hand before you get to a national election.”

Sanders’ suspension of his Jewish out-reach director for referring to Netanyahu in vulgar terms also signals a lack of expe-rience or suggests he is not informed, Ross said.

Sanders was the only the candidate who declined to speak at the AIPAC event in Washington on March 21. He also told the New York Daily News -- mistakenly -- that he thought more than 10,000 civil-ians were killed in Gaza in 2014.

Howard Graubard, a New York lawyer active in Democratic politics in the state, does not expect Sanders to suff er much at the ballot box “because he was going to lose anyway”.

It won’t alienate his progressive Jewish supporters, but his criticism of Israel gives Orthodox and right-wing Zionist Demo-crats, who feel little enthusiasm for Clin-ton, a reason to get out and vote.

“They’re nominal Democrats and need a motivator,” Graubard said.

“People are being emailed, fl iers will be going up this weekend, there will be phone banks, and the message about Bernie and Israel is going out to pull those people out to vote.”

Attempts at suicide rise in Canada community ReutersToronto

Five children tried to take their own lives Friday evening in a Canadian

aboriginal community, its chief said, following other at-tempted suicides after he had declared a state of emergency over repeated such incidents.

Chief Bruce Shisheesh of the Attawapiskat First Nation in the province of Ontario con-fi rmed the news in a telephone conversation on Saturday.

He said “a few” people tried taking their own lives in the community of 2,000 in the days before Friday, though he declined to go into specifi c numbers.

Those incidents are in ad-dition to the dozen or so teen-agers who attempted suicide yesterday.

The attempts came after Attawapiskat declared a state of emergency last Saturday, in response to 11 of its mem-bers attempting suicide in one weekend and 28 trying to do so in March.

Shisheesh declined to go into the details of the cases, citing privacy.

Canada’s 1.4mn aboriginals have higher levels of poverty and a lower life expectancy than other Canadians. Health minister Jane Philpott has said the suicide rates among abo-riginal youth were at least 10 times higher than for the gen-eral population of young peo-ple.

Regional and federal govern-

ments sent healthcare workers to the community in response to the state of emergency.

Canadian legislators held a special parliamentary session Tuesday night to address the suicide attempts.

Charlie Angus, a member of parliament whose electoral district includes Attawapiskat, said the attempts on Friday are the result of growing despair in the area due to neglect by the federal government.

“We have to get away from our government attitude that they can sit and wait and wait,” he said in an interview.

Attawapiskat has declared fi ve states of emergency since 2006. It previously sounded the alarm over fl ooding and sewage issues, poor drinking water and a housing crisis.

The problems plaguing abo-riginals gained prominence in January when a gunman killed four people in La Loche, Saskatchewan. An aboriginal teenager was charged in the shootings.

Shisheesh said federal and provincial governments need to immediately address the community’s infrastructure issues and increase mental health support.

Local police and Health Canada, the lead federal agen-cy in tackling the suicide at-tempts, could not be reached immediately for comment.

Angus and Canada’s Indig-enous and Northern Aff airs Minister Carolyn Bennett said in a joint statement on Friday they would visit the commu-nity.

Woman ‘jumped’ fences at tiger exhibit Toronto Zoo off icials are investigating after a video surfaced that shows a woman jumping over the first of two fences that separate zoo-goers from Sumatran tigers. It appears the woman hopped the barrier to retrieve a hat. The video, which was posted to YouTube on Saturday, shows a tiger pacing back and forth — clearly agitated, a zoo representative said — on the other side of the interior fence.Zoo representative Jennifer Tracey said that because of the interior barrier, the woman wasn’t in any danger from the tiger, but that she could have otherwise injured herself. “At no time would she have come into contact with the tiger,” Tracey said. “She easily could have broken an ankle from jumping over.” In the video, someone can be heard saying, “She jumped in front of it like a moron!”“You’re a bad example for everyone else’s kids,” someone else told the woman. This isn’t the first time the zoo’s Sumatran tigers have made the news: in 2011, one of the rare tigers was mauled to death by her mate According to the zoo’s website, there are only about 350 Sumatran tigers left in the wild.

Sanders broke with tradition by rebuff ing AIPAC

Helicopter crashes on tracks , delays Amtrak train servicesReutersBaltimore

A helicopter that was inspecting power lines crashed on rail tracks near Baltimore/Washington Inter-national Airport on Saturday, sparking a brush fi re

and delaying Amtrak train service along a major passenger route, offi cials said.

The crash, which injured three on board, resulted in de-lays to Amtrak service between Baltimore and Washington, DC, according to the railroad’s statements and social media posts.

An Amtrak spokeswoman said that by mid-afternoon all service had resumed between the two cities. Airline op-erations were not aff ected, airport spokeswoman Whitney Kidd said.

The helicopter was fl ying at low altitude around a power line when it crashed a mile north of the Maryland airport, near Amtrak’s BWI Station, the Federal Aviation Adminis-tration and Anne Arundel County police said.

The helicopter was destroyed in the crash and the three people hurt were transported to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries, said Ariel Jackson, a lieutenant at the Anne Arundel County Fire Department.

No one else was hurt, the FAA and police said.The crew of the helicopter, which was operated by a

private contractor, was inspecting transmission lines for Baltimore Gas and Electric, a division of Exelon Company [EXCGC.UL], said BGE spokesman Justin Mulcahy.

The crash, which was reported just before 1pm on the ma-jor passenger train corridor linking Washington and other northeastern cities, sparked a fi re in the wooded area where the helicopter came down, but fi refi ghters extinguished the blaze, Maryland State Police said in a statement.

Police said the cause of the crash was under investiga-tion by federal transportation authorities.

83 political prisoners get pardon in MyanmarAFPYangon

Myanmar President Htin Kyaw pardoned 83 po-litical prisoners on the

country’s traditional New Year yesterday, a spokesman from his offi ce said, as the fl edgling civil-ian-led administration seeks to cast off the shackles of nearly half a century of military rule.

The new government, steered by veteran democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, has spent its fi rst weeks in power free-ing scores of political activists prosecuted under the country’s former military leaders.

“All of the 83 prisoners that the president gave amnesty to today are political prisoners and prisoners concerned with political cases,” Zaw Htay, the deputy director of the presi-dent’s offi ce, told AFP.

A presidential pardon pub-lished yesterday morning said the amnesty was granted to “make people feel happy and peaceful, and (promote) na-tional reconciliation during the New Year”.

The former junta’s routine jailing of dissidents was one of many repressive policies that garnered support for the de-mocracy struggle led by Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD), which swept historic polls in November.

The party is stacked with ex-political prisoners who were jailed for their activism under the former military regime.

Suu Kyi, who spent some 15 years under house arrest dur-

ing the dark junta days, oversaw her government’s fi rst amnesty push earlier this month, when authorities dropped charges against nearly 200 political ac-tivists ahead of the New Year holiday.

The former quasi-civilian government that replaced junta rule in 2011 also freed hundreds

of political detainees, but over-saw the detention of scores more.

Local media aired joyful reun-ion scenes as released prisoners left jails across the country, car-rying small bags of belongings and joining loved ones in song outside the prison gates.

Among those pardoned yes-

terday were fi ve journalists handed 10-year sentences in 2014 over a report accusing the military of producing chemical weapons - which the govern-ment denied.

The journalists’ sentence, which was later reduced to sev-en years, was slammed by rights groups as “outrageously harsh”.

“We have been looking for-ward to hearing good news from this new government,” Yarzar Oo, one of the reporters from Unity Weekly News, said by phone after his release from Pa-kokku Prison in Magway region.

The group was greeted with fl owers by their relatives, who gathered at the prison the night

before after learning of their re-lease, he said.

Others seen released in lo-cal media reports included Htin Lin Oo, a writer and former NLD information offi cer, and Htin Kyaw, a well-known democracy activist who shares the presi-dent’s name and spent more than a decade in and out of the country’s notorious prisons.

“The release is welcome, but the NLD needs to release more political prisoners as soon as possible” said Bo Kyi from the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a watchdog group that tracks in-formation about the country’s prisoners of conscience.

There are still dozens of po-litical prisoners and hundreds of others facing trial, he said.

In a New Year speech yester-day, President Htin Kyaw - an ally and close friend of Suu Kyi - stressed his administration’s determination to free all politi-cal activists facing prosecution.

Suu Kyi is banned from the presidency by a junta-era char-ter but is guiding her party’s government through her seats in the cabinet and a newly-fashioned role as state counsel-lor.

The novice administration is carrying the hopes of millions of voters hungry for greater freedoms and economic rejuve-nation after decades of military strangulation.

But many challenges lie ahead, including a deeply fl awed legal system, the military’s con-tinuing clout, high poverty rates and civil wars in several ethnic minority states.

Homemade bombs found in MalaysiaDPAKuala Lumpur

Police yesterday found fi ve home-made bombs in a condominium unit in the outskirts of the Ma-

laysian capital, forcing the evacuation of about 200 residents, an offi cial said.

Bomb-making equipment, includ-ing a coal powder and several pipes and wires, were also seized during a raid on the 17th fl oor of the block in Damansara Perdana in Petaling Jaya, according to police chief Mohamed Zani Che Din.

Two suspects escaped, Mohamed Zani said, adding the bombs were

safely detonated at a nearby quarry.Aside from the bombs, police offi c-

ers also seized illegal drugs in the unit, he added.

Police have remained on heightened alert throughout Malaysia following January bombings in the Indonesian capital Jakarta that killed several peo-ple.

Activists hold banners as they stand on reclaimed land during a protest againtst land reclamation in Jakarta Bay, Indonesia yesterday. The banners read, “Sealed by Fisherman” and “Jakarta Reject Reclamation”.

Protest against land reclamation

Ex-cop nabbed over illegal weapons trade

AgenciesTak

A former police offi cer on the run for illegal posses-sion of war weapons was

arrested in Wang Chao district yesterday morning after return-ing home from Songkran cel-ebrations.

Pol Snr Sgt Maj Seksan Konkaew, 43, was caught while resting in a house in Wang Chao. A combined team of police and soldiers burst into the house at 6.30am, Bangkok Post reported.

The former Tak police offi cer was wanted on a warrant issued by the 310th military circle on March 6 this year for illegal pos-session of war weapons and car-rying them in public areas with-out permission.

A motorcycle he used to es-cape arrest was seized. The sus-pect was handed over to Mae Sot police station for legal action.

Maj Gen Padung Yingpaibun-suk, commander of the 310th military circle, said the military had closely worked with police to track down the suspect as the case aff ected national security.

Earlier, a combined team of police and soldiers gave chase to a white pickup truck with a Tak licence plate which sped past a se-curity checkpoint.

The offi cers later found the pickup truck, which was parked in front of a house in Mae Sot dis-trict. However, the driver fl ed.A search uncovered 10 M16 rifl es, more than 3,000 rounds of M16 ammunition, 11 rounds of M79 ammunition, one AK rifl e and other munitions on the pickup.

Freed political prisoner Htin Kyaw (right) -— no relation to Myanmar’s president with the same name — and who was sentenced to 10 years in prison at Insein Prison is reunited with his wife Than Than Maw (left) and son Aung Kyaw Htin at a guest house in Yangon yesterday, following his release.

Singapore must ‘focus on own role’ over forest fi res

AgenciesJakarta

Indonesia has taken substantial steps to prevent a repeat of the forest and land fi res that caused last year’s haze crisis, and Singapore should just focus on its own role in

the transboundary issue instead of concerning itself with what its neighbour is doing.

That is the view of Indonesian Environment and For-estry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar as reported by an envi-ronmental news website over the weekend, Straits Times reported.

“We have been consistent in sticking to our part of the bargain, especially by attempting to prevent the recurrence of land and forest fi res and by consistently enforcing the law. So, my question is – what has the Singaporean government done? I feel that they should focus on their own role,” Siti

told Foresthints.news in a report posted online last Saturday. According to the report, details of which The Straits

Times could not reach the Environment and Forestry Min-istry in Jakarta to verify, Siti was referring to comments made by her Singaporean counterpart at a forum in Singa-pore last Friday.

Minister for the Environment and Water Resources Ma-sagos Zulkifl i had said in his speech at the third Singapore Dialogue on Sustainable World Resources that his govern-ment applauded Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s latest move to push through a moratorium on new concessions for oil palm plantations and land for mining activities, in a bid to protect the environment.

Masagos also said he welcomed the president’s appoint-ment of Nazir Foead, a former director of WWF-Indonesia, to helm the new Peatland Restoration Agency. A key aim of the agency, set up by President Joko, is to restore about 2mn ha of peatlands in seven provinces by 2020.


ASEAN

ONE SMOKER.TWO PATIENTS.

TOBACCO KILLS

Issued in Public Interest by GULF TIMES

AUSTRALASIA/EAST ASIA15Gulf Times


Donned in eye-patches and a spaghetti bridal headdress, two New Zealanders have celebrated the first legally recognised ‘Pastafarian’ marriage on board a pirate ship, in a milestone of recognition for the bizarre global ‘religion’. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose stated beliefs are in a god made of spaghetti, have amassed followers around the world. “We decided to do a pirate wedding mainly because it shows respect to the Pastafarian faith. Pastafariansm believes that all humans are descendants of pirates,” groom Toby Ricketts said alongside bride Marianna Fenn. Followers who revere pirates insist that they are not a spoof church and that their beliefs are genuine.

A Chinese national arrested in Hong Kong for allegedly murdering his two teenage nephews in the US has been extradited back to the US, city police said yesterday. Shi Deyun, 44, was detained at Hong Kong’s international airport in January after arriving on a flight from Los Angeles. He is accused of murdering his nephews, aged 15 and 16. “Wanted for two cases of murder...(he) was extradited to the US of America from Hong Kong on April 15,” a police spokesman told AFP in an emailed statement. Media reports said Shi was heading to mainland China when he was arrested on January 24, but he has denied fleeing.

A surge in activity at North Korea’s atomic test site suggests preparations for a fifth nuclear test are in their final stages, possibly before a key political event in early May, South Korean media reported yesterday. The frequency of vehicle, workforce and equipment movements at the Punggye-ri site have “increased two to threefold,” since last month, Yonhap news agency said, citing multiple government sources. Off icials believe the trucks seen moving in and out of the complex are likely carrying nuclear technicians. “If they are signs of nuclear test preparations, it seems the preparations are in the final stages,” Yonhap quoted one government source as saying.

Hollywood superstar Johnny Depp and his actress wife Amber Heard have landed on the Australian Gold Coast ahead of a trial to determine whether Heard illegally brought two pet dogs into the country, local media reported yesterday. The couple were believed to have been aboard a private jet that touched down at Coolangatta Airport yesterday morning, broadcaster ABC and The Courier Mail newspaper reported. The early flight meant there were no media photos and “it is not known where they are staying,” ABC reported. The four-day trial is set to begin tomorrow in Southport in the north-eastern state of Queensland. Depp may be called as a witness.

China’s South China Sea fleets have conducted training drills with upgraded methods that resemble actual combat conditions to increase the fleets’ combat effectiveness, according to an article published by the PLA Daily yesterday. Begun on April 7, the drills include new methods such as training within an electromagnetic environment. Previously, the fleets have also conducted all-weather drills, beyond visibility range training and low-altitude, high-speed exercises to hammer their pilots into shape, the article said. The article did not specifically say where in the South China Sea the drills took place.

‘Pastafarians’ tie knot in first recognised wedding

Hong Kong extradites double murder suspect

North Korea preparing for fresh nuclear test : reports

Depp, Heard Down Under to face terrier tangle

China upgrades drills for South China Sea fleets

LEGAL NOW WANTED‘FINAL STAGES’ DOG DAYS ‘ACTUAL’ CONDITIONS

Japan rescuers search rubble ReutersTokyo

Japanese rescue teams yester-day scoured the splintered re-mains of buildings destroyed

by a series of deadly earthquakes in southern Japan as time ran out for fi nding survivors and as ma-jor Japanese manufacturers face production losses from supply chain disruptions.

A 7.3 magnitude tremor struck early on Saturday, killing at least 32 people, injuring about a thousand and causing widespread damage to houses, roads and bridges, with at least one mountain highway sev-ered in two, concrete tumbling into the valley below.

In the village of Minamiaso, 11 people were “out of contact”, said public broadcaster NHK.

Rescuers pulled 10 students out of a collapsed university apartment in the same settle-ment on Saturday.

“In Minamiaso, where the damage is concentrated, there may still be people trapped un-der collapsed buildings, so we are focusing our attention and rescue and search eff orts in this area,” chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters.

It was the second major quake to hit Kumamoto province on the island of Kyushu in just over 24 hours.

The fi rst, late on Thursday, killed nine people.

Of more than 470 quakes hit-ting Kyushu since Thursday, 78 have been at least a four on Japan’s intensity scale, strong enough to shake buildings.

Quakes are common in Ja-pan, part of the seismically ac-tive “Ring of Fire” which sweeps from the South Pacifi c islands, up through Indonesia, Japan, across to Alaska and down the west coast of the US and Central and South America.

At the other end of the ring this weekend, Ecuador’s biggest earthquake in decades killed at least 77 people, caused devasta-tion in coastal towns and left an unknown number trapped in ru-ins.

A 6.1 magnitude quake also struck southeast of the Pacifi c island nation of Tonga, with no immediate reports of damage.

Three nuclear plants in the southern Japanese region were unaff ected by the second quake, but the Nuclear Regulation Au-thority said it will hold an ex-traordinary meeting today to dis-cuss the disaster.

A massive 9 magnitude quake and tsunami in northern Japan in March 2011 caused the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986, shutting down the nuclear industry for safety checks and sending radiation spewing across the countryside. The fi rst reactor to restart was Kyushu Electric’s Sendai No. 1, which is at one of the plants in the region hit on Saturday.

Nearly 20,000 people were killed in the 2011 tsunami.

The Kumamoto region is an important manufacturing hub.

Toyota Motor Corp said it would suspend production at plants across Japan after the quakes disrupted its supply chain.

Electronics giant Sony Corp said its Kumamoto image sensors plant would remain suspended. One of the company’s major cus-tomers for the sensors is Apple. Meanwhile, Honda said produc-tion at its motorcycle plant in southern Japan would remain suspended through Friday.

Suga said the government may seek a supplementary budget to cover the cost of the quakes.

“We will do all that we can,” Kyodo News quoted Suga as tell-ing a press briefi ng.

All commercial fl ights to the damaged Kumamoto airport were cancelled and Japan’s bullet train to the region suspended.

Expressways are closed in wide areas because of landslides and cracks in road surfaces, hinder-ing eff orts to get supplies of wa-ter and food to survivors.

Overnight, rescuers digging with their bare hands dragged some elderly survivors, still in their pyjamas, out of the rubble and onto makeshift stretchers made of tatami mats.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he would boost the number of troops helping to 25,000 and had accepted a U.S off er of help with air transportation.

Heavy rains fuelled worries of more landslides and with hun-dreds of aftershocks and fears of more quakes, thousands spent the night in evacuation centres.

“It’s full in there. There’s not a inch to sleep or even walk about in there. It’s impossible in there,” a resident of Mashiki town said outside an evacuation centre.

Firefi ghters handed out tar-paulins to residents so they could

cover damaged roofs, but many homes were simply deserted.

Around 62,700 households were without electricity, water supplies had been disrupted to more than 300,000 homes and some areas had lost their gas supply, said NHK.

More than 110,000 people have been evacuated from the Ku-mamoto area, said Kyodo.

Troops set up tents for evacu-ees and water trucks were being sent to the area while television footage showed people stranded after the fall of a bridge being res-cued by helicopters.

Police said 32 people had been confi rmed dead in Saturday’s quake. The government said about 190 of the injured were in a serious condition.

The epicentre of Saturday’s quake was near the city of Ku-mamoto and measured at a shal-low depth of 10 km (six miles), the US Geological Survey (USGS) said. The shallower a quake, the more likely it is to cause damage.

The city’s 400-year-old Ku-mamoto Castle was badly dam-aged, with its walls breached after having withstood bom-

bardment and fi re in its four cen-turies of existence.

The USGS, a science organisa-tion that provides information on ecosystems and the environ-ment, estimated there was a 72% likelihood of economic damage exceeding $10bn, adding that it was too early to be specifi c. Ma-jor insurers are yet to release es-timates.

Policemen search for missing people in a damaged neighbourhood of Mashiki town in Kumamoto prefecture.

Australians killed in Vietnam War to be brought home AFPCanberra

Australian soldiers killed in the Vietnam War and bur-ied in Malaysia and Singapore will be brought home in June with a full military ceremony, it was announced

yesterday. Thirty-fi ve soldiers who died in the confl ict lie in Malay-

sia’s Terendak Cemetery, which sits inside a large, operational military base, and one other in Kranji War Cemetery in Sin-gapore.

In May last year, then Australian prime minister Tony Ab-bott off ered repatriation to the families and more than 30 of them have accepted the off er.

“The homecoming of their family member will be a very moving and emotional time, and their right to privacy, grief and refl ection has been central in the government’s plan-ning,” said Australia’s Veterans’ Aff airs Minister Dan Tehan in a statement.

For families who decided not to take up the off er, their rela-tives’ graves will be maintained in perpetuity as is the stand-ard for all Australian war dead in cemeteries around the world, the government said.

Royal Australian Air Force planes will fl y the remains back to a military base outside Sydney on June 2 where they will be received in a formal ceremony, followed by a private memorial service for their families.

Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia president Ken Foster said the families and the veterans community had been asking for the bodies to be reinterred for some time.

“It was the family members who started putting pressure and raising all sorts of questions about, ‘Is there some way we can have these veterans brought home?’,” he told the Austral-ian Broadcasting Corporation.

Foster added that the move would enable not just family but those who fought alongside the fallen to pay their respects.

“A lot of the veterans would not be in the situation where they could go to Malaysia and visit the graves,” he said.

“Now the families will have the choice of where they’re reinterred and the local veteran community within Australia will be able to visit those graves whenever they want.”

Australian soldiers killed in World Wars I and II and the Korean War were buried near to where they fell but around the time of the Vietnam engagement this policy changed and bodies were usually brought home.

Almost 60,000 Australian military personnel fought along-side the US in Vietnam, with 521 losing their lives. Of these, all but the 36 in Malaysia and Singapore were returned home.

Australia became one of the fi rst Western countries to es-tablish diplomatic ties with Hanoi in 1973, and has become a substantial aid donor and business partner of the communist nation.

Protesters accuse Hong Kong leader of breaching safety rules

Members of the Hong Kong Cabin Crew Federation protest at the Hong Kong International Airport.

AFPHong Kong

More than 1,000 people staged a protest yester-day at Hong Kong airport

over an alleged breach of aviation safety rules involving the baggage of the city leader’s daughter.

It was the latest controversy to hit Beijing-backed Chief Execu-tive Leung Chun-ying since he took offi ce in 2012 in the semi-au-tonomous Chinese city. His pop-ularity ratings are currently low.

Protesters - including cabin crew, pilots and activists - staged a sit-in at Chek Lap Kok airport’s arrival hall, alleging special treat-ment for Leung’s family.

They said they were annoyed by an apparent special arrangement which helped 23-year-old Leung Chung-yan after she acciden-tally left her hand baggage at the check-in counter last month.

Airport staff brought it to her in the restricted zone.

Local media have reported that the chief executive made a phone call to relevant offi cers before the

bag was delivered to the 23-year-old. C Y Leung has admitted making a call but denied pressuring staff .

Protesters alleged that Leung mis-used his power and said the incident could jeopardise aviation safety.

“We are strongly against privi-leges. We are stressed and an-noyed. We cannot stay silent,” Carol Ng, of the Hong Kong Cabin Crew Federation, one of the pro-test organisers, told AFP.

Slogan-shouting protesters held banners reading “No com-promise on professionalism” and “The sky with 100% safety”.

They ended the three-hour demonstration by marching around the busy airport terminal as curious travellers recorded the scene with smartphones.

Hong Kong was handed over by Britain to China in 1997 under a “One country, two systems” ar-rangement which guarantees its freedoms for 50 years. But there are fears such freedoms are being erod-ed due to the increasing behind-the-scenes infl uence of Beijing.

A government spokesman said the bag of Leung’s daughter had undergone a thorough security

check and aviation safety was not aff ected by the incident.

As with previous leaders since 1997 Leung was picked by an electoral committee dominated by pro-Beijing elites. Since then, he has faced several controversies.

In 2012 he was embroiled in a row stemming from illegal struc-tures at his luxury home.

In 2014 the former surveyor was accused of taking a $7mn payment from an Australian com-pany arising from his business before he became the city’s leader.

He has denied any wrongdoing.

BRITAIN


GP appointment waitingtimes crisis revealed About 14.2mn patients had to wait a week or did not get an appointment at all the last time they tried to see their doctor in 2015

Guardian News and MediaLondon

The number of people hav-ing to wait at least a week to see their GP rose by

500,000 last year, offi cial fi gures show.

About 14.2mn patients had to wait a week or did not get an appointment at all the last time they tried to see their doctor in 2015, compared with 13.8mn the year before, research from the House of Commons library found.

Many of the 9,770 GP surger-ies are struggling to cope with a growing and ageing population and as pressures have risen, the number of GPs has not kept pace, with an increasing number opt-ing for early retirement. That has coincided with a failure to attract enough graduate medics

into choosing general practice as a career.

Labour, which conducted the research, said constituents have desperately sought their help to get a GP appointment. The reve-lation in December that patients were having to queue in the dark from 6.30am outside their sur-gery in Surrey helped to highlight the problem.

The party blamed the new fi g-ures on a £250mn real-terms cut in GP funding since David Cameron became prime minister. It says spending fell from £176 a head in 2009-10 to £165 in 2014-15.

The shadow health secretary, Heidi Alexander, said: “Millions more are struggling to see their doctor and cuts to funding mean this is likely to get worse. Cam-eron talks about a seven-day NHS, but he is failing to deliver fi ve-day services and patient care is suff ering.”

Labour released the fi gures at the start of a week of campaign-ing on the NHS ahead of the local elections.

A Tory health spokesman said: “We are putting an extra £220mn into the new GP contract, and we will be saying more about im-proving GP services very soon.”

The NHS is looking to recruit doctors from India in an attempt to tackle the shortage of GPs.

Health Education England, the NHS’s training and recruitment agency, has signed a memoran-dum of understanding with the Apollo Hospitals chain in India about lending clinical staff be-tween them.

GPs’ leaders said the India initiative amounted to ministers’ admission of failure to develop enough homegrown staff , and that it cast doubt on their pledge to increase the number of GPs by 5,000 by 2020.

The Royal College of GPs has said that doctors from outside the EU could not be parachuted into the NHS without fi rst un-dergoing proper training and an assessment.

Man charged withcricketer’s murder Guardian News and MediaLondon

One of the two men ar-rested over the kill-ing of a young British

cricketer in Trinidad has been charged with his murder.

Adrian St John, 22, was shot in an apparent robbery in San Juan, Trinidad, last Sunday night. He was picking up a male relative of two female passengers when all three were robbed of their cash and mobile phones.

St John was allegedly told to drive away, but as he was doing so one of the men fi red a single shot that hit him in the head, the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian reported. He was taken to hospi-tal but died while being treated. Maldon Pascall, 24, was charged on Friday night with St John’s murder and is due to appear in court today. The suspect was picked out at an identifi cation parade on Thursday, according to the report.

Trinidad police said Pascall was held after he went to a po-lice station to give a statement and his description matched one

of the men who robbed and shot St John. A fi ngerprint analysis is expected to determine whether the second suspect’s prints matched those recovered from the car St John was driving when he was robbed.

St John grew up in Kenning-ton, south London – close to the Oval cricket ground – and de-veloped a passion for the sport. He captained the Chris Gayle cricket academy, which opened in 2013 to “improve access to good quality education, train-ing and employment for at-risk young people in Jamaica and the UK”.

Following St John’s death, Gayle, the West Indies cricketer, tweeted: “Such sad news to hear. My condolences to his family & friends. Adrian St John was the captain of the academy.”

St John joined the Oxted and Limpsfi eld cricket club in Sur-rey for the 2015 season and played 18 games for the fi rst team. The club chairman, Phil Trayner, said: “He was fun lov-ing, friendly, cricket-mad and always had a kind word for his fellow club members. His com-mitment was clear for all to see.”

TV presenter Sue Barker poses with her Off icer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) medal, after it was presented to her during an Investiture ceremony at Windsor Castle in Windsor.

Barker honoured

The police have bailed one of five people arrested last week on suspicion of preparing acts of terrorism, West Midlands Police in central England said yesterday. The police arrested five people last week as part of an investigation which a security source said was linked to the attacks in Paris and Brussels. Four were arrested in Birmingham and one at London’s Gatwick Airport. West Midlands Police said in a statement that four people, three women and one man, were still being questioned after securing warrants of further detention, while a 59-year-old man had been bailed “with strict conditions”.

Councils are to be given new powers to strip away “eyesore” road signs in a bid to save cash and make Britain’s streets more pleasing on the eye, the government has announced. Signs warning of permit-parking zones and cycle lanes could be among those removed under measures to be introduced on Friday by Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin. Repeater speed limit signs could also be axed under changes McLoughlin said could save local authorities £30mn over the next four years and stop drivers being “distracted”. The department for transport says the number of road signs in England has almost doubled from 2.45mn in 1993 to an estimated 4.57mn in 2013.

Embarrassing claims about the private life of John Whittingdale have been branded “tittle-tattle” by people close to the Cabinet minister. Former topless model Stephanie Hudson claimed the culture secretary had breached security protocols while they were a relationship. Whittingdale showed her confidential papers at his constituency home and also photographed Cabinet Ministers at a private meeting in Chequers before secretly texting the image to her, she claimed in the Mail on Sunday. But sources insisted that Hudson “never had access” to government documents and said the Tory MP was entitled to a private life.

A man has been charged with the murder of a woman found stabbed to death less than six minutes after police received an emergency call from a woman in distress. Off icers were dispatched to the property on Gosford Way, Felixstowe, Suff olk, at 10.30pm on Wednesday after receiving the 999 call. On arrival just over five minutes later they found a woman in her 60s who had suff ered serious injuries. Paramedics were called to the scene, although the woman, who has not been named, was pronounced dead. A Home Off ice post-mortem found the woman had died of a single stab wound. Shaun Ryan, 61, also of Gosford Way, has been charged with murder.

Broadband speed advertising is misleading and must be reformed, a cross party group of MPs has said. Customers should be able to leave contracts and be given compensation if they have been misled by service providers, according to the British Infrastructure Group. It also criticised the way Advertising Standards Authority guidelines mean only one in 10 broadband users need to be able to obtain the fastest advertised speed. Grant Shapps, who set up the group, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It seems to us that’s extraordinary.” The former Conservative party chairman said tougher laws would be needed if Internet service providers and the ASA failed to act.

Police bail one of fivelinked to terror attacks

‘Eyesore’ road signs to beaxed to save money: govt

New claims about ministerdismissed as ‘tittle-tattle’

Man charged with killingas woman found stabbed

Broadband speed advertsmisleading, say MPs

LAW AND ORDER DECISIONCONTROVERSY CRIME COMMENT

Roman villadiscoveredby chance in Wiltshire AgenciesLondon

An “elaborate and extraor-dinarily well-preserved” Roman villa has been

discovered by chance by a home owner laying electric cables in his garden.

The villa was found after rug designer Luke Irwin unearthed a high-quality Roman mosaic at his Wiltshire farmhouse while laying cables so that his children could play table tennis in an old barn.

He called in archaeological experts and an eight-day dig by Historic England and Salisbury Museum revealed the home of a wealthy family living in luxury in what could be one of the largest such villas in the country.

Finds include oysters which were artifi cially cultivated and then carried live from the coast in barrels of salt water, indicating how rich the family were.

The dig also turned up coins, brooches, bones of wild animals which had been hunted and a Ro-man well, while the experts iden-tifi ed a Roman child’s coffi n which had been holding geraniums by Irwin’s kitchen.

The villa - which is being compared to the Roman home at Chedworth, Gloucestershire, in size and wealth - was built some-time between 175AD and 220AD and was repeatedly re-modelled up to the mid 4th century AD.

The dig also revealed occupa-tion of the site dating back to a pre-Roman roundhouse.

And archaeologists found evi-dence of fi fth-century pottery and timber structures within the partly ruined villa, suggesting the presence of a Romano-British family who did not have the re-sources to live in the house but remained at the site.

Of his discovery, Irwin said: “I was overwhelmed by the realisa-tion that someone’s lived on this site for 2,000 years.

“You look out at an empty fi eld from your front door, and yet 1,500 years ago there was the biggest house, possibly, in all of Britain.” Dr David Roberts, His-toric England archaeologist, said the fi nd was very signifi cant for a number of reasons.

New Scotlandindependencevote sought incase of Brexit AgenciesLondon

Scotland should have the right to hold a new refer-endum on independence

if the country is taken out of the European Union “against our will”, the leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) said yesterday.

Facing a British referendum on whether to stay in the Euro-pean Union on June 23, Nicola Sturgeon used her party’s manifesto before the election for the Scottish parliament next month to make clear that she wanted another independ-ence vote in Scotland.

There should be such a ref-erendum, she said, “if there is clear and sustained evidence that independence has become the preferred option of a ma-jority of the Scottish people”.

“Or if there is a significant and material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland be-ing taken out of the EU against our will,” Sturgeon, who leads Scotland’s devolved govern-ment, said in a statement.

Scots voted 55%-45% against independence in a referendum in 2014, but Sturgeon’s party then won a sweeping victory in a British election in May, taking all but three of Scotland’s 59 seats in the Westminster parliament.

The party is expected to be returned to power in the May election in Scotland.

Scottish nationalists have told Prime Minister David Cameron that he cannot rule

out giving Scotland another independence vote and that a situation in which Scots voted to stay in the EU but a major-ity of all Britons voted to leave could be a trigger.

According to polls, Scots are more likely to vote to stay in the European Union than other Britons, and with voters almost evenly split on the EU mem-bership referendum, it is un-clear which campaign will win.

Meanwhile Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers has insisted border arrangements between Ireland and the UK would not change if the public votes to leave the EU.

She dismissed claims that Brexit would prove negative for trade between the countries - and even harm the peace proc-ess - as “scaremongering”.

Villiers told Sky News’ Mur-naghan show that leaving the EU would not alter the free flow of “goods and people” over the only land border with the UK.

She offered reassure after Ireland’s former prime min-ister, Bertie Ahern, voiced strong concerns over the con-sequences of an Out vote.

He said it would be “regres-sive” and “negative in every way”.

Ahern said: “We’d be the only place that has a land bor-der with Britain - of course others would exploit and ex-pose it. They’d have to check people.”

Ahern went on: “From a trade point of view it would be a customs border - it’s regres-sive, negative.”

But Villiers, a Brexit cam-

paigner, told Sky News that no changes to border arrange-ments would be needed. I be-lieve that the land border with Ireland can remain as free-flowing after a Brexit vote as it is today,” she said.

“There is no reason why we have to change the border ar-rangements in the event of a Brexit because they have been broadly consistent in the 100 years since the creation of Ire-land as a separate state.

“It’s in the interest of both countries to keep an open bor-der and there’s no reason for that to change if the people of this country were to exercise their freedom to vote to leave the EU.”

The border concerns came as Work and Pensions Secre-tary Stephen Crabb warned that families would face “dis-astrous” consequences if the UK left the EU.

Crabb, who replaced Out campaigner Iain Duncan Smith in the Cabinet in March, pre-dicts there would be factory closures, an exodus of busi-nesses and job losses.

He said Brexit would cause “economic rupture”.

Writing in The Sunday Tel-egraph, Crabb warned: “Lost jobs and livelihoods take an enormous, indelible toll on families and communities. No one should be complacent about the potential conse-quences for working people and their families if Britain votes to exit the EU. This is not a theoretical debate.”

It is the first official week-end of campaigning ahead of the referendum on June 23.

The NHS is looking to recruit doctors from India in an attempt to tackle the shortage of GPs

A campaigner with the “Britain Stronger In Europe” hands out leaflets in Brixton, south London, yesterday calling for a remain vote in the upcoming EU referendum.

BRITAIN/IRELAND17Gulf Times


Man dies of gunshotwounds in Belfast

A new father has died from gunshot wounds in north Belfast, the Police Serv-

ice of Northern Ireland has con-fi rmed.

Michael McGibbon, 33, who was married with a young family, died in hospital after being found wounded in the republican Ardoy-ne district of the city. He was shot three times in the leg in an alley-way at Butler Place near Elmfi eld Street at about 10.05pm on Friday, police said.

Offi cers revealed the victim had refused to leave his home on Thursday evening after two armed and masked men arrived at the house and ordered him to come outside.

The armed men then told Mc-Gibbon they would be back, ac-cording to police offi cer John McVea. The senior PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) of-fi cer said the killing “had all the hallmarks of paramilitary murder”.

PSNI commander inspector James Murphy said: “We are keen to hear from witnesses or anyone

with information regarding this heinous crime.”

Sinn Fein’s Gerry Kelly blamed an “armed gang” for the murder – a common euphemism for one of the dissident republican terror groups.

“This killing has shocked the local community in north Belfast. This is the second such killing car-ried out in this area in the last six months by an armed gang which is clearly at war with the local com-munity.,” he said.

The centrist Alliance party con-demned those behind the killing.

Nuala McAllister, a council-lor, said: “There can never be any excuse for carrying out such a heinous act and I utterly con-demn the thugs behind it. Thanks to them, there is now a man lying dead and a family plunged into mourning.

“Violent attacks and murder have no place in our society. This was a brutal crime and those be-hind it need taken off our streets. Our entire community must unite against those who seek to drag us back to the bloody days of the past.

“I would urge anyone with any information at all to contact police immediately.”

Residents angryover TV show’sDorset beach hut competition

They are a traditional em-blem of the British seaside but plans to build innova-

tive beach huts designed by view-ers of George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces on an unspoilt stretch of Dorset coastline have infuriated local people.

Twelve winners of a competi-tion run by the Channel 4 pro-gramme will be given £8,000 each by the local council to build their huts at Highcliff e, despite the fragile cliff s being designated a site of special scientifi c interest (SSSI).

Residents accused Christchurch borough council of being “star-struck” and have launched a peti-tion against “a ruinous use of a rare natural beach”.

“Just to get some publicity for a TV programme that is here to-day, gone tomorrow, we’re getting our cliff -top ruined,” said High-cliff e resident Josephine Pollen. “The council have been absolutely blinded by the fact that we are go-ing to be on telly.”

The competition is open to anyone, and the huts will be built this summer and rented out by the council to holidaymakers.

“They are supposed to be beach huts but they will be halfway up the cliff . We could end up with Barbie-pink or Darth Vader huts,” said Pollen. “I feel very sad that the wild coastline is going to be destroyed – there is not a lot left and people like this particular area because it’s so natural.”

The huts will not require plan-ning permission under “permitted development” rules which allow garden sheds but the council does require the permission of watch-dog Natural England for construc-tion on an SSSI.

Development would not nor-mally be permitted if the cliff s were protected for fl ora or ground-nesting birds, but Highcliff e is an SSSI for its geological value and

beach huts would not impact upon these features.

A spokesperson for Natural England said: “Whilst we’re com-fortable with the idea of the devel-opment going ahead, we’re still in quite early stages of discussions with the council.”

Matt Reeks, community and open spaces manager for the council, said the “phenomenal” beach huts were “the beginning of a journey”.

“This is a really exciting new way of improving our assets,” he said. “It’s an opportunity to do something a little bit out of the ordinary.”

The huts will be available for overnight stays – raising further local concerns about sanitation. Reeks said the huts would be situ-ated close to public toilets.

“We’re being creative, we’re be-ing innovative and we’re getting 12 bespoke beach huts for £100,000. It doesn’t get any better than that,” he said. “It’s a win-win situation.”

The council will have the fi nal say in approving the designs, and Reeks said the winning huts would be scrutinised by structural en-gineers to ensure they won’t “fall over”.

Claims that councillors were starstruck were “ridiculous”, said Reeks. “If George Clarke and Channel 4 weren’t involved we’d be paying £50,000 for a hut, not £8,000. Two million viewers of George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces are going to hear about Highcliff e. Where else can we get marketing like that?”

Will Daws, managing director of Plum Pictures, which makes the programme, promised “abso-lutely no Darth Vaders and no pink Wendy house huts at all”.

“When the huts are up there proudly on the cliff it should bring joy to people in the area,” he said. “We’re not looking to impose very modern designs on an unwelcom-ing public. It’s a beautiful part of the country and hopefully our in-volvement will lead to a lot of posi-tive publicity for the area.”

‘Air force’ to fi ne drivers

who leave engines idling

A new “air force” is to be deployed in London to stop hundreds of drivers

leaving their engines idling and spewing out toxic fumes.

Two traffi c wardens will be tasked mainly with reducing engine idling and raising aware-ness about air quality.

They will be able to issue £20 on-the-spot fi nes if drivers refuse to turn off their engines when parked. If the pilot project in Westminster is successful, four more traffi c wardens will join the pollution-busting team using electric mopeds and bikes to get around.

“For a greener healthier city, we need to work with drivers and encourage them to turn their engines off when station-ary,” said Heather Acton, West-minster city council’s cabinet member for parking and sus-tainability.

“That is why we’ve created

our new air force, who will lead the charge in spreading the positive message on air quality across the borough.”

The council is seeking to cre-ate a low emission neighbour-hood in Marylebone where four of the traffi c wardens would operate. Scientists have put the death toll in London from nitro-gen dioxide and tiny particulate pollution at more than 9,000 a year.

Westminster introduced the £20 fi xed penalty notices for engine idling last May. Traffi c wardens have approached more than 1,500 drivers on this issue since then but have not yet is-sued a fi ne as most people turn off their engine.

The traffi c wardens are em-ployed through parking en-forcement fi rm NSL. Mark

Hoskin, its director for local government, said: “Turning off your engine when stationary may sound like common sense but you would be surprised at just how many drivers leave their vehicles running while parked.

“In partnership with West-minster city council, we are working hard to reduce engine idling which will signifi cantly improve air quality, help the environment and reduce noise pollution. This makes fi nancial sense for drivers too. The re-sponse so far has been great.”

Westminster is bidding to be one of two boroughs to receive £1mn funding from the Greater London Authority and Trans-port for London to set up the low emission neighbourhood in Marylebone.

One of the proposed meas-ures is to trial a number of resi-dential parking bays only for electric cars. Under the plan, a small number of residents would contract to share an elec-tric charging parking bay.

Competitors take part in the Mud Madness off -road challenge event at Foymore Lodge, Portadown in Northern Ireland yesterday. Competitors take on two laps of a muddy 4.5km course strewn with obstacles.

Mud Madness challenge

London Evening StandardLondon



Two women enjoy a picnic under a tree in blossom on a sunny day in Regent’s Park in London yesterday.

Sunny day

14-year-olds chargedwith Spalding murders Two 14-year-olds have

been charged with mur-der after a woman and her

daughter were found dead at a house in Lincolnshire.

The bodies were found at an address in Dawson Avenue, Spalding on Friday.

Police believe they are school meals assistant Elizabeth Ed-wards, 49 and her 13-year-old daughter Katie although formal identifi cation has yet to take place.

Both youths are due before

Lincoln Magistrates’ Court to-day.

Detective chief inspector Martin Holvey, of the East Mid-lands Special Operations Unit, said post-mortem examina-tions had not yet taken place to determine the cause of their deaths.

He added: “I still need to speak to anyone with any infor-mation that might be relevant from Dawson Avenue from around noon on April 13 to noon on April 15.

“If you saw or heard anything that you thought was suspicious or unusual I’d encourage you to get in touch as soon as possible.”

One resident living close to Edwards, a dinner lady, said she last saw her on Tuesday. The neighbour, who declined to be named, said: “She was a lovely lady, very friendly and I knew her quite well. She was quite well-known because she worked at a primary school and what has happened is just unbelievable. Katie was lovely too, but very quiet.”

Relatives of the victims paid tribute on social media sites - with a teenage friend of Katie describing her as being “like a sister” and Edwards as a second mother.

Edwards’s partner, Graham

Green, wrote on his Facebook page: “My babe has gone but you will always in my heart forever and ever and ever.

“The lady meant the world to me she was my rock. Katie so young lots of good times in front of us been taken away r.i.p.”

Friends and family have placed fl owers and a teddy bear on the lawn in front of the house, as forensic experts continued to examine the property.

Edwards’ eldest daugh-ter Mary said: “I love you both so. Still in shock, can’t believe they’re gone. I love them so much. I need my mum.”

Her ex-partner, Peter Ed-

wards, who is the father of Katie and her two sisters, said: “The loved ones around us will keep us strong every step of the way.”

Superintendent Paul Tim-mins said the deaths had gener-ated a great deal of local concern and upset.

“I would like to make clear that this type of crime is ex-tremely rare. Indeed, we believe this is a completely isolated inci-dent,” he said.

“There is still a lot of police activity in the area and extra of-fi cers in the neighbourhood and I would encourage anyone who has any concerns to please talk to our offi cers.”

AgenciesLondon

Siblings taking up too many school places: Netmums chief

School “sibling rules” should be relaxed because so few other children are able to

get into oversubscribed reception classes, the head of a parenting website said.

Anne-Marie O’Leary, editor-in-chief of Netmums, said some

classes are almost entirely made up of the brothers and sisters of children already at the school.

In some cases children with no siblings are only able to get a place if they live within feet of the school gate.

Her comments come ahead of primary school off er day today when children across the country will fi nd out which school they will go to in September.

Thousands of London chil-dren are expected to miss out on their preferred schools because competition is so fi erce in the capital.

O’Leary said the number of free schools opening is nowhere near enough to address the de-mand for school places in Lon-don.

She said: “One little free school here and there is not going

to make much of a diff erence. It’s a big issue that needs a big plan.”

In most areas children with siblings at a school get priority for a place even if their family has subsequently moved out of the area.

It means in some cases chil-dren who live next door to a pri-mary school but do not have sib-lings there cannot get in.

O’Leary suggested relaxing the

rules so that siblings still get pri-ority for a place but only if their families still live somewhere in the catchment area.

O’Leary lives in Balham and her four-year-old son Atticus starts school in September. She also has a two-year-old daughter Florence.

She wants her son to go to the school that is 300 metres away from the fl at she and her husband

have lived in since before they had children.

She said: “We decided to stay living there because we had al-ways fallen safely within the catchment area. We could have moved to a bigger home but we extended our fl at and committed to the area. But this year we found out that 30 of the 60 places are likely to be taken by siblings.

“That will shrink the catch-

ment area. I have spent many evenings trying to work out how many metres we are from the school. Your child’s education is the most precious thing and it is out of your control if you are the parents of an eldest child.

“It seems horrible to pit chil-dren against each other. I don’t like the idea of any child being deemed as more important than another.”

London Evening StandardLondon

Traffi c will be able to issue £20 on-the-spot fi nes if drivers refuse to turn off their engines when parked

EUROPE


Italy went to the polls yes-terday in a referendum on off shore oil and gas drilling

rights, a vote which Prime Min-ister Matteo Renzi has said he

hopes people will not take part in.

For the ballot to be valid, more than 50% of the Italian elector-ate must vote but Renzi has urged people to stay away, saying that the referendum is unnecessary and might end up hurting the economy.

It would be a blow to Renzi if substantial numbers did turn out, suggesting that voters were ready to snub him just weeks be-fore major local elections.

But opinion polls have indi-cated that a quorum will not be reached.

The referendum focuses on whether Italy should stop re-newing off shore drilling licences within 12 miles (20km) of the coast.

New drilling concessions are no longer being handed out, but the government says that old agreements should be kept in play.

Voting runs from 7am (0500 GMT) to 11pm (2100 GMT).

At 10 GMT, midday in Italy, the turnout was 8.36%, according to the ministry for internal aff airs.

The ballot was proposed by a number of regional assemblies, most of them run by Renzi’s own centre-left Democratic Party, which object to drilling platforms because of worries about the en-

vironment, as well as the impact on their tourist industries.

Italy imports around 90% of its energy needs and succes-sive governments have looked to boost domestic production to re-duce dependence on foreign sup-pliers such as Russia’s Gazprom.

There are 69 exploration con-cessions in Italian waters, most of them gas, the industry minis-try says.

Of these, 44 fall within the 12-mile range, most of them run by Italy’s Eni.

If the referendum succeeds, these 44 fi elds will be shut when their concessions expire, even if they are still workable.

“This not a political refer-endum, but concerns 11,000 workers, their future and Italy’s energy supply chain,” Renzi told reporters on Friday.

Environmental watchdog Legambiente and other green groups say that domestic oil and gas production is minimal and that a continued focus on fos-

sil fuels takes Italy further away from its renewable energy and carbon targets.

Gas production from off shore fi elds inside the 12-mile area cur-rently accounts for around 3% of Italian consumption while oil output in the area makes up just 1%.

While the short-term impact of a “Yes” vote would be minimal it would have long-term impli-cations, as by 2027 the off shore fi elds could account for more than 20% of Italy’s oil and gas production, Alessandro Pozzi, an analyst at Mediobanca, said.

The referendum comes at an awkward time for Renzi.

An infl uence-peddling case centred on the country’s main landlocked oil producing area triggered the resignation of the industry minister two weeks ago.

Opponents are seeking to use the scandal to bring voters out to test the government’s mettle ahead of June local elections, in which Renzi’s party risks losing control of several cities.

While the prime minister has played down the drilling refer-endum, he has said he will resign if he loses another referendum slated for October on constitu-tional reform.

Italians head to vote Renzi has spoken againstReutersRome

Assessors wait for citizens yesterday in a polling station in Rome.

This file photo taken on April 6 shows a worker at Italy’s Eni Gas platform PCW-C in the Adriatic sea.

Renzi: This not a political referendum, but concerns 11,000 workers, their future and Italy’s energy supply chain.

Syrian refugees taken in by Pope Francis following his visit to the Greek island

of Lesbos hailed the Pontiff as a “saviour” for off ering them a new life.

In a hugely symbolic move seen as a lesson in solidarity for Europe, Francis, who is himself the son of Italian migrants in Argentina, on Saturday took 12 Syrians from three families – all Muslims – home with him from Lesbos to the Vatican.

“All refugees are children of God,” the 79-year-old Pope said on the fl ight back to Rome refer-ring to their religion, adding that though his gesture was “a drop in the ocean” he hoped “the ocean will never be the same again”.

In an interview published yes-terday with the Italian daily La Stampa, the families, who spent their fi rst night in Rome at a Catholic charity, expressed their gratitude.

“We saw friends and relatives die in the rubble, we fl ed Syria because we no longer had any hope,” said Hasan, an engineer from Damascus, who arrived with his wife Nour and two-year-old son.

After fl eeing to Turkey, Hasan and his family joined the migrant

trail to Europe, piling into a rub-ber dinghy that set out from the Turkish coast for Greece.

“But it was overloaded,” said Hasan, recalling the pitch black of the sea at night and the waves rocking the vessel.

“In Lesbos, we understood that we were stuck in a place that we could not leave, (we were) in a

trap, a prison,” he explained.Hasan described the Pope as

“our saviour” for whisking them off the island, where thousands of migrants risk being sent back to Turkey under a new EU-Tur-key deportation deal.

Wafa, who was also on the pa-pal fl ight from Lesbos with her husband Osama, eight-year-old

daughter Masa and six-year-old son Omar, described the “con-stant bombardments” in recent months around their home.

“Since then (my son) has bare-ly spoken ... he is locked in an impenetrable silence,” she said. “Even today, he wakes up every night crying and we cannot get him to play with his sister.”

Wafa said she and her husband, who are from the Damascus sub-urb of Zamalka, had opted to cut ties with the past.

“But we know we took the right decision,” she said.

After their stay on Lesbos, which seemed interminable, “Francis gave us a new life”, she said.

Ramy, a 51-year-old teacher from the eastern Islamic State-occupied city of Deir Ezzor, fl ed Syria with his wife Suhila and three children – sons Rashid, 18 and Abdelmajid, 16, and seven-year-old daughter Al Quds – af-ter their home was destroyed in the war.

“We discuss a lot and fi nd it hard to imagine what life will be like in the future: we don’t know whether we will start over in Eu-rope or whether, one day, we will be able to return to a Syria free of war and violence,” he told La Stampa. “We are grateful to the Pope, we will prove ourselves worthy of this opportunity and the gift he gave us.”

The three families, who had initially set their sights on reach-ing Germany or another Euro-pean country, are now expected to seek asylum in Italy.

More than 1.1mn people have crossed clandestinely from Tur-key to Greece since the start of 2015, with hundreds drowning en route.

Many of them are Syrians, fl eeing the horrors of war.

Arrivals in Greece have drasti-cally fallen over the past weeks after Turkey agreed to take back all people who have been denied asylum in return for billions in EU cash and other concessions.

Human rights groups have as-sailed the arrangement.

In an emotional address to worshippers who gathered for his weekly Angelus prayers in Saint Peter’s Square, Pope Francis re-counted his visit to the migrant centre in Lesbos, accompanied by Ecumenical Patriarch Bar-tholomew and Archbishop Ier-onymos of Athens.

“I saw such suff ering,” he said, visibly moved.

The Roman Catholic leader then went on to tell of one partic-ular case, “that of a young man, who was not even 40”.

“I met him yesterday with his two sons. He was Muslim and told me he had married a Chris-tian, (and that) they loved and respected each other.”

But the woman fell victim to Islamist radicals, he said.

“She had her throat slit by ter-rorists because she would not re-nounce Christ and abandon her faith,” said Francis, calling her a “martyr”.

As for her grieving spouse, he said sorrowfully, “this man was crying so much”.

Pope Francis ‘gave us a new life’: refugeesBy Laure Brumont, AFPRome

This picture taken on Saturday shows Pope Francis greeting people gathered to welcome him at the port of Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos. He later left for the Vatican with 12 Syrian refugees.

Europe’s refugee crisis has created a “huge business opportunity” for human

traffi ckers, and governments should widen the legal routes of entry to protect refugee chil-dren, the UN children’s agency (Unicef) said this week.

The number of children on the move in Europe has been rising and children now account for more than one-third of all refu-gees and migrants – compared with just one in 10 in June 2015 – and many are travelling alone, according to Unicef fi gures.

“We know that (child protec-tion and monitoring systems) are well over-stretched and overwhelmed and they need to be strengthened,” Sarah Crowe, Unicef’s global spokeswoman on the European refugee and mi-grant crisis, told a media briefi ng in London.

“They need to make sure that they’ve got a proper system in

place with guardianship, with child protection offi cers who are able to determine where (chil-dren’s) best interests are and how to reunify them with family ... otherwise they will abscond and be preyed upon.”

More than one million peo-ple fl eeing confl ict poured into Europe, mainly through Greece, last year.

The European Union is imple-menting an accord under which all new arrivals in Greece will be sent back to Turkey if they do not meet asylum criteria.

In 2015, 95,000 children who sought asylum in Europe were not accompanied by an adult, Crowe said, adding that this vastly un-derestimated the number who arrived as many children avoided registering with the authorities from fear of being detained.

Unregistered children were not covered by any child protec-tion services and so were most vulnerable to violence, abuse and exploitation, according to Unicef.

“We know that thousands

and thousands of children are simply unaccounted for and the most horrifying thing of all is we just have no idea where they are or what’s happening to them,” Unicef deputy executive direc-tor Lily Caprani told the briefi ng. “It’s that complete absence of information that should terrify us the most.”

Crowe said that although not all children who were unac-counted for were necessarily be-ing exploited by human traffi ck-ers, Europe should strengthen child protection systems and widen legal routes such as family reunifi cation.

She said that as the migrant route to Europe through the Bal-kan countries seemed to be shut, people would fi nd alternative and more dangerous routes.

“That’s why we are saying there has to be a safe and legal alternative,” Crowe said, adding: “We’re ... calling for alterna-tives such as humanitarian visas, scholarship grants that can be seen as ways in ... especially for young people.”

UN: Child refugees in Europe need better protection from traffi ckersBy Magdalena Mis, ReutersLondon

A man holds a child aloft at the makeshift migrant and refugee camp near the Greek village of Idomeni on the border with Macedonia.

AfD party vows to pursue bans on Muslim ‘symbols’ReutersBerlin

The anti-immigration Al-ternative for Germany (AfD) said yesterday that

Islam is not compatible with the German constitution and vowed to press for bans on minarets and burqas at its party congress in two weeks’ time.

The AfD punished Chancel-lor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats in three regional elections last month, profi ting from popular angst about how Germany can cope with an infl ux of migrants, more than a million of whom arrived last year.

“Islam is in itself a political ideology that is not compat-ible with the constitution,” AfD deputy leader Beatrix von Storch told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

“We are in favour of a ban on minarets, on muezzins and a ban on full veils,” added Storch, who is a member of the European Parliament.

Merkel’s conservatives have also called for an eff ective ban on the burqa, saying the full body covering worn by some Muslim women should not be worn in public.

But they have not said Islam is incompatible with Germany’s constitution.

The AfD’s rise, which has co-incided with strong gains by other European anti-immigrant parties including the National Front in France, has punctured the centrist consensus around which the mainstream parties have formed alliances in Ger-many.

Last month, the party grabbed 24% of the vote in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, surpassing even the Social Democrats (SPD), Merkel’s coalition partner in Berlin.

The AfD, founded in 2013, also performed strongly in two other states.

The party’s rise has been con-troversial.

Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, a Social Democrat, has said that Germany’s far-right, led by the AfD party, is using language similar to that of Hit-ler’s Nazis.

EUROPE19Gulf Times


Two-thirds of Germans op-pose Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to al-

low prosecutors to pursue a case against a German comedian who mocked Turkey’s President Re-cep Tayyip Erdogan, a poll pub-

lished yesterday showed.Merkel announced her deci-

sion on Friday after Erdogan demanded that Germany press charges against Jan Boehmer-mann after he recited a sexually crude satirical poem about the Turkish leader on German public broadcaster ZDF on March 31.

A section of the German crimi-nal code prohibits insults against

foreign leaders but leaves it to the government to decide whether to authorise prosecutors to pursue such cases.

This put Merkel in an awkward position as she has been the driv-ing force behind a European Un-ion deal with Turkey to stem the fl ow of refugees into Europe.

Yesterday’s survey by pollster Emnid for the Bild am Sonntag

newspaper found that 66% of those questioned opposed Mer-kel’s decision to allow prosecu-tors to pursue the case.

Only 22% said she was right, with 12% undecided.

Emnid polled 500 people on Friday afternoon.

Merkel’s decision had already divided her ruling coalition and prompted accusations that she

failed to protect free speech.Her centre-left Social Demo-

crat (SPD) coalition partners, who had wanted the Turkish re-quest to be rejected, urged her to champion freedom of opinion and of the media on the trip to Turkey this week.

“Without these basic liberties, democracy is not conceivable – the Turkish government must

recognise that too,” SPD Secre-tary General Katarina Barley told the Bild am Sonntag.

Under the EU’s deal with Tur-key, Ankara will help manage the refugee crisis and be rewarded with fi nancial aid, visa-free trav-el and progress in its EU mem-bership negotiations.

ZDF has said it will help Boeh-mermann fi ght any case brought

by prosecutors for mocking Er-dogan.

The comedian said before re-citing the poem that he was in-tentionally going beyond what German law allowed.

The broadcaster said the cult comedian is taking a break from producing his programme until May 12. He is reportedly under police protection.

Most Germans oppose Merkel on prosecution of comedian: surveyReutersBerlin

Around 7,000 people in Brussels marched yester-day against Islamic mili-

tant violence, nearly a month after suicide blasts on Europe’s institutional capital left 32 dead and several hundred injured, po-lice said.

A group of around 6,000 peo-ple left the Gare du Nord railway station in Paris and teamed up in central Brussels with around 1,000 marchers who started off from Molenbeek, the rundown Brussels district that has gained an unwelcome reputation as a Islamic militant haven.

The rally – “A march against terror and hatred” – was organ-ised by civil groups, who had hoped for a turnout of 15,000.

“When our fellow citizens, defenceless civilians, are cut down in a cowardly attack, all citizens should stand up to ex-press their disgust and soli-darity,” said Hassan Bousetta, a local councillor in the city of Liege, who helped organise the march, told AFP. “It is a mo-ment of refl ection, a message of compassion for the victims and a moment when citizens come together.”

Bearing a banner marked, in French and Flemish, “#allto-gether against hatred and ter-

ror”, the main group of marchers was led by families of the vic-tims, followed by representa-tives from the various religious communities.

A dozen members of an asso-ciation for inter-religious dia-logue carried a banner marked “Together in peace”, adorned with drawings of doves.

A Muslim group carried a placard reading, “Love is my re-ligion and my faith”.

A fi re truck, its beacons fl ash-ing, symbolised the role of emergency services after the attack, fi re service spokesman Pierre Meyes said.

In the group that left Molen-beek, a group of children chant-

ed, “Daesh, off you go, Brussels isn’t for you!” referring to the Islamic State (IS) group, which is also known by the acronyms of ISIL or ISIS.

Thirty-two people were killed in the three March 22 bomb at-tacks, which targeted Zaventem airport and a subway train near the European Union (EU) insti-tutions in central Brussels.

The violence tore at Belgium’s social fabric, already weakened along linguistic lines between francophones and Dutch-speaking Flemings, and stirred anguished debate about the emergence of militants among the country’s Muslim under-class.

On Saturday, Interior Minis-ter Jan Jambon – who has been criticised for his handling of se-curity – said that a “signifi cant section of the Muslim popula-tion danced” when the attacks took place.

Jambon also accused Mus-lim residents of Molenbeek of attacking police during an op-

eration last month to arrest a suspect in connection with the deadly attacks in Paris last No-vember.

“They threw stones and bot-tles at police and press during the arrest of Salah Abdeslam. This is the real problem. Terror-ists we can pick up, remove from society. But they are just a boil.

Underneath is a cancer that is much more diffi cult to treat. We can do it, but it won’t be over-night,” he said.

The march, an initiative gathering more than 100 as-sociations, was initially to have taken place on March 27, but was scrapped at the authorities’ be-hest for security reasons.

Thousands in Brussels rally against terrorism AFPBrussels

A girl lays a flower on a street memorial during a rally in Brussels called ‘The march against the fear, Tous Ensemble, Samen Een, All Together’ in memory for the victims of bomb attacks in Brussels metro and Brussels international airport of Zaventem.

Representatives of diff erent religious and cultural communities take part in the peaceful march in Brussels.

Thousands of people marched in Bilbao in northern Spain yes-

terday calling for the return of prisoners from the armed Basque separatist group ETA being held outside the region.

Former ETA prisoners for the fi rst time led the march in the Basque region’s most populous city.

Past marches have been led by family members of the con-victs, who are dispersed across dozens of prisons in Spain and neighbouring France.

The demonstrators, many of them waving red, white and green Basque fl ags, chanted “prisoners to their home” as they made their way through the streets under an overcast sky to city hall where letters from three ETA prisoners were read out.

Among those who took part in the march was veteran sepa-ratist leader Arnaldo Otegi, 57, who was released from jail in March after serving a six-and-a-half year sentence for

trying to resurrect the out-lawed Basque separatist party Batasuna.

Otegi, who is credited with helping end violence in the northern Spanish region, has said that he aims to become the next leader of Spain’s Basque Country which will hold re-gional elections at the end of the year.

He declined to speak to re-porters at the march.

The protest was called by a group of former ETA prisoners.

ETA is blamed for more than 800 killings in its campaign of bombings and shootings to create an independent Basque homeland in northern Spain and southwestern France.

The group’s last deadly at-tack in Spain was in August 2009.

In October 2011, it declared a “defi nitive end to armed activ-ity” but it has yet to formally disband or disarm as the Span-ish and French governments demand.

The group wants negotia-tions on several issues, includ-ing the fate of around 400 ETA prisoners, before it fully de-commissions its armed wing.

Thousands march in Spain for return of ETA prisonersAFPBilbao

People march in Bilbao behind a banner reading ‘Amnesty. Prisoners and Exiles Home’ in support of ETA prisoners and exiles.

The Belgian government has appointed a new transport minister in a re-

shuffl e sparked by allegations of lax security at Brussels airport, one of two targets hit by suicide bombers last month.

The new minister is Francois Bellot, 62, who replaces Jacque-line Galant, whose resignation on Friday made her the fi rst po-litical casualty of the attacks.

Bellot will meet King Philippe today to take his oath of offi ce, the Belgian royal palace said in a statement.

Galant quit in a blaze of an-ger, blaming “well-orchestrated theatrics” and a “media cru-sade” by political enemies for forcing her out.

The media had reported that the European Union (EU) repeat-edly warned of security fl aws at Zaventem airport.

A top ministerial offi cial also quit, accusing her of incompe-tence and “Gestapo-like” be-haviour.

Bellot, like Galant, is a franco-phone liberal – one of the many streams in Belgian politics, whose landscape is fractured along linguistic as well as politi-cal lines.

The country has had a string of ministers over the past half dozen years.

The present coalition govern-ment took offi ce in October 2014 after nearly fi ve months of hag-gling following elections.

A low-profi le lawmaker in the national parliament and mayor of the town of Rochefort, in the French-speaking region of Wal-lonia, Bellot is a civil engineer by training and specialist in railway transport, according to his Re-form Movement party.

In a fi rst response to his ap-pointment, Bellot promised to restore “serenity, calm and trust,” with the top priority of bringing operations at Zaventem back to normal.

Belgium names new transport ministerAFPBrussels

Bellot: to be sworn in today.

Police in the western Ger-man city of Essen were yesterday searching for a

masked man after an explosion at a Sikh temple left three peo-ple injured.

About 200 guests were at the temple for a wedding on Satur-day when an explosive device went off in the prayer room.

The suspect, a masked man about 1.8m tall, was seen fl ee-

ing the scene and is wanted by police.

A police spokesman said it was fortunate that only a few people were in the room at the time of the blast, and investiga-tors said there was no evidence of terrorism.

The motive for the attack re-mained unclear.

More than 20 offi cers were part of the investigation, the spokesman said yesterday.

Three men in a black SUV were detained shortly after the blast, police said, as they had

been seen in the vicinity of the temple.

They were subsequently re-leased.

The building was badly dam-aged and windows were shat-tered.

Two people suff ered minor injuries, while the 60-year-old priest who married the couple was in hospital.

The Sikh temple and the home of a community leader were placed under police pro-tection.

There are 200 members of

the Sikh community in Essen, which is the largest in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

An estimated 15,000 Sikhs live in Germany.

Essen Mayor Thomas Kufen, who met with Indian Consul General Raveesh Kumar yes-terday morning, said: “Our free society guarantees freedom of religion. Any form of violence is totally unacceptable.”

The monotheistic Sikh reli-gion was founded in India in the 15th century as a reaction to the rigid strictures of Hinduism.

Hunt for masked man after Sikh temple blastDPAEssen, Germany

Spanish police have seized 210kg (460 pounds) of co-caine paste hidden in fur-

niture that was imported from Peru, arresting 13 people during the operation, they said yester-day.

The paste, which is used as the basis for making cocaine, was found inside furniture that was shipped to the port of Barcelona and transferred to several nearby

warehouses, offi cers said in a statement.

They gave no estimate for the street value of the drug, say-ing only that it would be enough paste to make about one tonne of cocaine.

The drugs ring is suspected of recruiting impoverished individ-uals who were sent to Peru where they lived for several months at the group’s expense while pre-tending to work before returning to Spain.

“When the organisation planned the return of these peo-

ple to Spain they would hide the drugs inside the furniture that was supposedly part of their home during their stay in Peru,” the police statement said.

“The person would return to Spain by plane and the furniture was shipped by sea in contain-ers that were sent to diff erent storage facilities in Barcelona from where they would be picked up by members of the criminal group,” it added.

Spain seized over 22 tonnes of cocaine in 2015, a 43% increase on the previous year.

Cocaine paste hidden in furniture AFPMadrid


INDIA20

Tamil NaduRoundupBy Umaima Shafiq

Lawyer sayscompensationfor school firevictims ‘paltry’

The Madras High Court last week ordered the Tamil Nadu government to pay Rs500,000 each as compensation to the families of 94 children who died in the July 16, 2004 school fire tragedy in Kumbakonam.The victims’ lawyer Tamilarasan protested that the amount was paltry because the court had spent nearly Rs20mn for legal proceedings. He said the Rs600,000 recommended for three children who suff ered third degree burns was insuff icient considering their mental and physical agony. He vowed to re-appeal the case to get Rs2mn for each family.The fire began in the kitchen of Sri Krishna School and soon spread to the three floors of the congested building during school hours. Many children were crushed to death or charred in the following stampede. The tragedy sparked global concern and forced the Indian government to revise infrastructure norms for private schools.

Two AIADMKactivists diein heat wave

Two activists of the All India AnnaDravida Munnetra Kazhagam fainted and died due to sunstroke while attending a rally of Chief Minister Jayalalithaa at Virudhachalam in coastal Cuddalore district on April 11. Tamil Nadu is facing an extreme heat wave with temperatures ranging from 38-41 degree Celsius in many districts.Eyewitnesses said that about 100,000 people waited for an hour in the scorching heat and the venue lacked medical facilities, shades, drinking water, fans and coolants and other necessities. The incident sparked outrage from AIADMK’s rivals and forced the Election Commission to step up campaigning norms and crowd control rules.Meanwhile the AIADMK has launched android apps for election campaign. When users fill in their address, they can access district, constituency, ward number, booth number and their personal data, besides the AIADMK’s welfare work in their district.

Church plansanniversaryprogrammes

St John’s Church in the cantonment area of Tiruchi celebrated 200 years on April 14 (Tamil New Year day) by launching a year-long schedule of congregational programmes.The church was built by the British East India Company in1816 chiefly for the benefit of British contingents posted in the cantonment. Several soldiers, martyrs and Bishop Heber, the third bishop of Calcutta, are buried there.The church is today governed by the Tiruchi-Thanjavur diocese of the Church of South India (CSI) and has been consecrated thrice. The church features imported stained glass panels, louvered wooden doors, and gothic architecture and teakwood pews.The culmination service is planned for Easter Sunday in 2017.

105-year-old herbarium being digitised

The 105-year-old Fischer Herbarium at the Institute of Forest Genetics and Tree Breeding in Coimbatore is being digitised in phases for easier online use.Fischer Herbarium located at R S Puram was established in 1911 by British off icer Cecil Ernest Claude Fischer who brought in plant specimens from several forest divisions in South India. Today it has about 6,000 specimens that can be accessed at www.frcherbarium.org whose digitisation is being done by K H Hussain of the Kerala Forest and Research institute.“The herbarium is visited by taxonomists and botanists. So, when they discover a unique species they have to physically visit to cross verify, which can now be done with the image and data available online,” Hussain said.

3rd phase ofWest Bengal polls sees over80% turnout Trinamool leader courts fresh controversy by entering a voting booth sporting the party symbol on his shirt

IANSKolkata

Amid allegations of spo-radic violence and voter intimidation, over 80%

of about 10.2mn voters exercised their right to franchise across 56 constituencies in the third phase of elections to the West Bengal assembly yesterday.

“At 3pm, the overall poll-ing percentage was 70.82%,” an Election Commission offi cial said.

Long queues of voters were seen outside most polling booths despite the sweltering heat and humidity.

There are about 10.2mn reg-istered voters, 383 candidates, including 33 women, and 13,645 polling stations.

Five of the constituencies are in Alipurduar district, seven in Jalpaiguri, nine in North Dina-jpur, six each in Darjeeling and South Dinajpur and 12 in Malda districts.

The only south Bengal district going to the polls in the third phase is Birbhum. Of its 11 con-stituencies, seven - Dubrajpur, Suri, Nalhati, Rampurhat, Sain-thia, Hansan and Murarai - have been classifi ed as aff ected by leftwing extremism and polling in these areas ended two hours earlier than elsewhere at 4pm.

“Polling percentage at 3pm in Alipurduar was 73.65, Jalpaiguri recorded 67.93, Darjeeling 66.73, North Dinajpur 70.37, South Di-najpur 74.78, Malda 68.67 and

Birbhum 73.59,” said the EC of-fi cial.

There were allegations of false voting in the presence of the presiding offi cer in a booth in Malda’s English Bazar. Following a complaint lodged by the Com-munist Party of India (Marxist), the offi cer was removed.

At Dumrut in Birbhum’s Bolpur constituency, three peo-ple were arrested following a clash between the Trinamool Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party workers.

In the district’s Rampurhat, a section of residents reportedly boycotted the polls citing failure of the state government to pro-vide basic electricity services.

In Nanoor, Trinamool activ-ists allegedly assaulted a polling agent of the CPM.

The BJP’s star candidate Locket Chatterjee, contesting from May-ureshwar, said the civic police were seen with central forces in-side a booth in the constituency.

A clash reportedly broke out between Trinamool and CPM workers outside a booth in Malda, in which two people were injured.

Meanwhile, despite the Elec-tion Commission’s constant surveillance, the Trinamool’s Birbhum chief and strongman Anubrata Mondal courted fresh controversy as he cast his vote by entering a booth sporting the party symbol on his shirt.

While the EC has sought a re-port about the incident, Mondal claimed it was an “inadvertent” act, but refused to apologise.

Mondal, who has been served a notice by the EC for his contro-versial remarks against opposi-tion leaders, is under constant surveillance till the end of the poll process with his movements

being videographed in the pres-ence of central security forces and a local magistrate.

The EC move came after op-position parties and civil society members demanded his arrest to create an atmosphere conducive to holding of free and fair polls.

As many as 2,909 polling sta-tions were earmarked as vulner-able and special arrangements made for them by the poll panel, which also identifi ed 3,827 peo-ple as trouble-mongers and over 16,000 as vulnerable voters in the 56 constituencies.

In the 2011 assembly polls in these constituencies, then allies Trinamool and the Congress won 18 seats each, the Left Front 15, Gorkha Janmukti Morcha 3 and independents won 2 seats.

This time, the Trinamool is contesting 55 seats, the BJP 53, the Congress 23, Left Front 34, and the GJM 3.

In Darjeeling district’s Sil-iguri, former Indian football captain and Trinamool nominee Baichung Bhutia is pitted against former state minister and CPM heavyweight Asok Bhattacharya.

Also grabbing attention is Su-japur in Malda district where Abu Naser Khan Choudhury, Trinamool candidate and brother of late Congress stalwart A B A Ghani Khan Choudhury, is con-testing against his nephew Isha Khan Choudhury, representing the Congress.

So far, voters in 49 of the total 294 constituencies have exer-cised their right to franchise on two dates - April 4 and 11.

West Bengal is having a stag-gered election over seven phases. Polling for the remaining phases will be held on April 21, 25, 30 and May 5.

Goa to develop rivers to boost tourism IANSPanaji

Goa, famous for its beach-es, is now seeking to tap rivers for their ability to

attract tourists as well as share and shoulder the burden of transportation and commuting within the state.

With the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition government looking to start water parks tourism and river-based trans-port systems, the onus, accord-

ing to Chief Minister Laxmi-kant Parsekar, is not to bank too much on funding from the state or central governments, but in-stead scout for the right inves-tors who can bring in the money and the technical knowhow to execute such projects.

“The government will give priority to waterways and we can develop waterfronts like the Chapora river. From Chapora to Colvale, we can develop some points (of tourist interest),” Parsekar said.

Known for its beaches, the

tiny state of Goa also has fl owing water-bodies. Apart from the main rivers, the Mandovi, Zuari, Chapora, Sal and the Kushwati, several smaller rivers criss-cross the state, especially in the hin-terland areas, which do not pos-sess a healthy tourism profi le.

Government records sug-gest that the state has water-ways which are around 650km in length. According to Parsekar, an additional 250km can be also uti-lised, through adequate dredging and deepening of the navigation channels of the rivers.

“The rest can be extended by dredging. Waterways and tour-ist attractions are two important points to remember. A tourist who lands at Dabolim (interna-tional airport) should be able to head for Panaji or Calangute by a boat instead of by road alone. This will be an added attraction for a tourist coming to Goa,” Parsekar said.

The chief minister returned earlier this week from a three-day Maritime Summit organised by the federal shipping ministry in Mumbai that was aimed at

increasing the connect between shipping industry stakeholders in the private sector and govern-ment representatives.

“We should use our rivers as waterways and further reduce the pressure on our roads. And Goa being a touristic destina-tion it could be a major attrac-tion. We could also build river jetties in coastal villages and the hinterland so that the pressure created by tourism can be spread across Goa and not just along the beaches,” Parsekar said.

The chief minister also said

that instead of moaning about whether the state or the central government would foot the bill for development of water fronts and waterways, eff orts should be taken to fi nd the right investors for the project.

“We want investors to invest and once we have the invest-ment, we could have job creation and diversify tourism in the hin-terland from the coast,” Parsekar said.

Goa attracts nearly 4mn tour-ists every year, about half a mil-lion of whom are foreigners.

Kerala vote to be a defi ning moment for top leaders IANSThiruvananthapuram

The upcoming assembly elections in Kerala will be of crucial signifi cance for

10 top political leaders, though not all running for offi ce, and are likely to be the swansong of a few.

The 10 include three each from the Congress, Commu-nist Party of India (Marxist) and the Bharatiya Janata Party, each of which leads a larger political front.

From the Congress, there are Chief Minister Oommen Chan-dy, state party president V M Sudheeran and Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala - for whom the May 16 vote would be a defi n-ing moment.

From the CPM, there are former chief minister V S Achuthanandan, politburo member Pinarayi Vijayan and state party secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan.

From the BJP, which hopes this time to open its account in the Kerala assembly, there are state party president Kum-

manem Rajasekheran, former central minister O Rajagopal and former state party president and convener of the elections V Mu-raleedharan.

The joker in the pack is Vela-pally Natesan, the popular Hindu Ezhava leader and supremo of the recently formed Bharath Dharma Jana Sena (BDJS) which is part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

While seven of the 10 leaders are contesting the election, Sud-heeran, Balakrishnan and Nate-san are not.

Achuthanandan, who at 92 is at the very fag end of his career, continues to be a crowd puller and a much sought after cam-paigner for the opposition Left Democratic Front (LDF).

Should the LDF come to pow-er, which is likely given Kerala’s electoral history, this battle-hardened veteran might seek at least a year in offi ce.

If the LDF fails to make it to offi ce, it’s anyone’s guess as to what Achuthanandan’s place in Kerala’s politics is going to be.

On the other hand, Chandy is almost certain to be in the

chief ministerial seat again if the Congress-led United Democratic Front upsets Kerala’s electoral history and regains power.

And if that does not happen, it could be the last hurrah for this 72 year old; he could well sign off in style by completing his golden jubilee as a legislator, as no one seems to believe he won’t get elected to the 14th Kerala as-sembly.

Equally challenging is what’s in store for Vijayan, who last year stepped down as the CPM state secretary after close to two dec-ades of running the party.

This could well be his last chance of getting power.

For Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) strongman Rajas-ekheran, it was a surprise selec-tion to the top post in the party. If the ‘lotus’ blooms in Kerala, he is in line for more glory and if it does not happen, his post itself could be in for a change.

For Natesan, who until the 2014 Lok Sabha polls maintained equidistance from all political formations, it could be rise to be a signifi cant force in the state’s politics.

Alternatively, the count-ing of votes would determine if Natesan’s presence helped either of the traditional UDF/LDF fronts.

Chennithala has age on his side. So the outcome of this elec-tion will have the least impact on

his career, among the 10 leaders.But if the Congress is in for a

long-term hibernation in Kerala, so is he.

For Sudheeran, a loss could well be curtains for him.

Balakrishnan, on the other hand, is also on safe ground as

he has got two more years for his tenure to end.

Last but not the least, all eyes would be on Rajagopal. If he wins, good for him.

If not, will the BJP give him the post of governor that has been eluding him for quite a while now?

Former football captain and Trinamool Congress candidate Baichung Bhutia comes out of a polling booth after casting his vote during the third phase of assembly election, in Siliguri yesterday.

Former cricketer S Sreesanth, the BJP’s candidate in Thiruvananthapuram, and his wife Bhuvaneshwari Kumari, are seen with members of the Travancore royalty at Kowdiar palace during an election campaign.

21Gulf TimesMonday, April 18, 2016

INDIA

Army chief assesses Kashmir situation IANSJammu

Army chief General Dal-bir Singh yesterday visited Jammu and

Kashmir where he met senior commanders amid fresh bouts of violence in the state that have left fi ve people dead.

Army spokesman Colonel S D Goswami said Singh met commanders of 14, 15 and 16 Corps at Northern Command headquarters at Udhampur near here “to take stock of the situation” in the state follow-ing deaths of civilians in al-leged fi ring by soldiers in north Kashmir’s Kupwara district.

The general arrived on a day-long visit to the state.

The Kashmir Valley has been on the boil since Tuesday after the death of at least fi ve civil-ians in clashes with security forces.

The trouble began after ru-

mours that a soldier molested a college girl in Handwara of the border district.

Meanwhile there were no restrictions in Srinagar city as the situation limped back to normal.

However, as a precaution-ary measure, restrictions continued in Handwara and Kupwara towns, the authori-ties said.

Despite restrictions in parts of Srinagar city on Satur-day, there was a perceptible improvement in the situa-tion over the last three days as skeletal transport serv-ices operated and some shops opened.

District magistrate of Kup-wara, Kumar Rajiv Rajan said restrictions would remain in force in Kupwara and Hand-wara towns because of tension in the district.

Separatist leaders also did not call for any shutdown or protests yesterday.

Temple festival goes aheaddespite security concerns By Ashraf PadannaGulf Times CorrespondentThiruvananthapuram

The famed Kerala tem-ple festival of Thrissur Pooram, the biggest of

its kind with a mass percussion ensemble, fi reworks and parade of elephants, began yesterday, exactly a week after the state’s worst temple tragedy that killed 114 people and maimed many.

The 36-hour festival started with the arrival of deities from eight small temples in proces-sion in front of Vadakkumnath-an temple for the annual ritual amid tight security under strict guidelines from the Kerala High Court.

The festival was held amid calls for moderation as many of the injured in last week’s blaze and explosion during the Puttin-gal Devi Temple festival in Kol-

lam are still battling for life in hospitals and the state is yet to recover from the shock.

However, like in previ-ous years, thousands of peo-ple, including foreign tourists, thronged Thrissur, known as Kerala’s cultural capital, to enjoy the colourful festival, which will culminate early today morning with a massive display of fi re-works.

Chief Minister Oommen Chandy held an extraordinary meeting with the festival offi -cials, following protests against restrictions, and assured them of all safety and security steps to organise Pooram “without los-ing the essence of its tradition, beauty and culture.”

Earlier, the high court allowed a low-decibel fi reworks show at night during the Pooram festi-val, exempting it from the ban imposed in the wake of Kollam temple tragedy.

Some 3,000 security person-nel, including federal forces, were deployed at the venue to control the crowd.

Unlike in the past, they did not allow people to come near some 30 caparisoned elephants lined up for the Kudamattam or ex-change of parasols between the two leading sides, a key feature of the event which also is under attack from animal rights activ-ists.

In all, 90 elephants are pa-raded at the festival despite ob-jections from the forest depart-ment.

Animal rights activists said the authorities did not allow an inspection team authorised by the Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI) despite a high court HC order against pa-rading unfit elephants, which posed a huge threat as the pachyderms often run amok during the parade.

‘Citizenship for Hindus from Pakistan to be made easier’ IANSNew Delhi

The government yesterday announced that it propos-es to simplify procedures

for grant of Indian citizenship to minority Hindus from Pakistan.

The proposal also envisages al-lowing “minority communities of Pakistan staying in India on a Long Term Visa” to buy prop-erty, open bank accounts and ob-tain permanent account number (PAN) and Aadhaar number, a home ministry offi cial said here.

According to the proposal, the collectors or district magistrates of 18 districts will be empowered for two years to grant citizenship to such people at heavily reduced fees.

The districts are Raipur (Chhattisgarh), Ahmedabad, Gandhinagar, Rajkot, Kutch and Patan (Gujarat), Bhopal and In-dore (Madhya Pradesh), Nag-pur, Mumbai, Pune and Thane (Maharashtra), West Delhi and South Delhi (National Capital Territory), Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and Jaipur (Rajasthan) and Luc-know (Uttar Pradesh).

Having reviewed “the hard-ships being faced by the minority communities in Pakistan staying in India on Long Term Visa”, the government also plans to allow such people to open bank ac-counts and obtain PAN and Aad-haar number, the offi cial said.

“These are only at a proposal stage,” the offi cial said and sought public comments and sugges-tions on the measures proposed.

The feedback can be sent to the foreigners’ cell of the federal home ministry.

It is further proposed that the fees for registration as citi-zen of India for nationals of Pakistan belonging to minority communities be reduced from Rs5,000 (under registration) and Rs15,000 (under naturalisation) to a uniform fee of Rs100 each at the time of application and at the time of grant of certifi cate of registration or naturalisation.

“There are reports that a number of Bangladeshi and Pa-kistani nationals belonging to minority communities in those countries, such as Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Parsis and Buddhists, have been com-pelled to seek shelter in India due to religious persecution or fear of religious persecution,” the of-fi cial said.

Many of these people enter India either without any valid travel document or with one whose validity has expired.

The government decided in September 2015 “on humanitar-ian considerations” to exempt Bangladeshi and Pakistani na-tionals belonging to minority communities, who entered India on or before December 31, 2014, to stay in the country even after the expiry of their travel docu-ments.

The exact number of minority refugees from Pakistan, Bang-ladesh and Afghanistan living in India is not known. Rough offi -cial estimates suggest there could be about 200,000 such people, mostly Hindus and Sikhs.

Supporters of Patel Patidar clash with police at Mehsana, some 70km from Ahmedabad yesterday.

Protests by Patels turnviolent, hundreds held Security forces deployed in Gujarat’s Mehsana town, Internet suspended

IANSAhmedabad

A curfew was imposed and the Border Security Force (BSF) deployed in

Mehsana town in Gujarat yes-terday after protests by mem-bers of the pro-reservation Patidars (Patels) community turned violent, leading to arson and clashes with police.

Authorities suspended Inter-net services and mobile phone applications till today morn-ing in Mehsana and other north Gujarat towns after the violence to prevent the spread of incen-diary information.

Similar action is likely to be taken in Ahmedabad and cer-

tain cities of Saurashtra region, sources said.

Police and paramilitary forces were deployed in all north Gu-jarat towns, besides Ahmeda-bad and Surat, which are known strongholds of the pro-quota Patels.

More than 1,000 protesters from the Patel community in Mehsana and over 500 in Surat were taken into preventive cus-tody as large crowds gathered near the district jails in both places in defi ance of prohibitory orders.

Surat Police Commissioner Ashish Bhatia told local TV channels that most of those detained were from the Patel-dominated Varachha area.

Asserting that trouble-mak-ers would not be spared, Bhatia said: “This city belongs to all and those creating mischief will be dealt with strictly.”

Chief Minister Anandiben Pa-tel said in south Gujarat’s Valsad town: “Our government is for the people and not for agitators.”

Speaking to Gujarati TV channels, the state’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party presi-dent Vijay Rupani asked the people as well as the police to exercise restraint.

The protesters attacked the camp offi ce of Minister of State for Home Rajnikant Patel. A warehouse of the Food Corpo-ration of India and a state gov-ernment building were set on fi re in Mehsana.

The Patel mobs also torched a Sub Divisional Magistrate’s ve-hicle and a state transport bus.

Two buses of Ahmedabad Municipal Transport Service (AMTS) were attacked with stones in Patidar-dominated Ghatlodia area of Ahmedabad. A group of Patels blocked the

Bhavnagar-Talaja highway in Saurashtra region.

About 200 state transport buses were diverted from sensi-tive routes as a precaution and drivers were instructed to take the buses to the nearest police stations.

In Ahmedabad city also, some buses run by AMTS were diverted from Patel-dominated pockets while civic authorities were holding a meeting to de-cide on discontinuing several routes in the city.

Police burst over two dozen tear gas shells and used water cannons as well as rubber bul-lets to disperse the crowds.

Sardar Patel Group (SPG) convener Lalji Patel sustained head injuries as his supporters pelted policemen with stones.

Gujarat TV channels reported police as saying that Patel was hurt in the stone-throwing and

not lathicharge. Patel along with his supporters was also taken into preventive custody.

The SPG has given a call for a shutdown in Gujarat today in protest against the police ac-tion.

The SPG is a pro-quota group like the Patidar Anamat An-dolan Samiti of Hardik Patel, which has been protesting for over eight months for reserva-tion for the Patels in govern-ment jobs and educational institutions under the Other Backward Class category.

Sunday’s ‘jail bharo’ (fi ll jail) programme was in support of the demand for the release of the jailed Patel leaders and withdrawal of cases against them.

The SPG earlier announced its second round of agitation if its demands were not met by April 17.

Supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wave their party’s flags as they wait for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to address an election campaign rally in Kolkata yesterday.

Election rally

20mn-year old fossilised tree saved in Himachal Pradesh IANSKumarhatti, Himachal Pradesh

A 20mn-year old fossilised tree, discovered on the outskirts of Himachal

Pradesh’s Kumarhatti town, was saved from destruction, a geolo-gist said yesterday.

The tree fossil discovered in 2013 was about to be destroyed last week during the construc-

tion of a four-lane Parwanoo-Shimla highway at Raboon village, some 50km from Chan-digarh, geologist-entrepreneur Ritesh Arya said.

He said numerous fl ora and fauna fossils have been dis-covered in Kasauli, Barog, Kumarhatti, Dharampur and Subathu areas, located in the Shivaliks, in Solan district. The entire area, Arya said, should be preserved by declaring it as geo-

fossil forest for in-site conserva-tion, meaning the conservation of an archaeological asset in its original location.

Arya claimed that the dis-covered fossils dated back to paleofl ooding that was related to global warming and glacial melt, resulting in fl oods.

The fl ooding uprooted trees and buried them under sand along the river channels, lead-ing to petrifi cation - a process of

fossilisation in which dissolved minerals replace organic matter.

The saved fossil tree is 12ft tall and 1m wide.

“It’s believed that the fossil might be more than 100ft tall,” Arya, who holds a Guinness Book of World Record for discovering groundwater at an altitude of 11,000ft in Ladakh, added.

He said this was the second fossilised tree in the region that was saved from destruction.

Earlier, a 25mn year-old fos-sil of a 5ft-tall and 3ft-wide tree was discovered a few years ago at Jagjitnagar near Kasauli. The fos-sil, which was standing on a rock, was conserved as it was located on a private land and the owner took the initiative to preserve it.

Arya said the Kasauli hills are geologically about 16 to 23mn years old and have been associated with Irish geologist Henry Ben-edict Medlicott, who discovered

the fi rst fossilised preserved leaves in 1864. Kasauli was once inhab-ited by a large number of apes, tigers, elephants, hippos, giraff es, crocodiles and land tortoises.

According to Arya, the dis-covery of fossils in the Kasauli region indicated that the area supported fl ora and fauna that was native to coastal regions of Malaysia, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Indonesia.

“This clearly indicated that

Himalayan region was under the ocean,” the geologist said.

Arya said the presence of fos-sils of Garcinia and Gluta and other species show that the Himalayas had not evolved dur-ing those times and were young-er than 20mn years.

He said declaring Kasauli and its nearby hills as geo-heritage site would boost tourism and help improve the knowledge of the evolution of the Himalayas.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra yesterday served a legal notice to leading daily Times of India demanding an “unqualified apology” for its report on her off icial accommodation. “My client calls upon your esteemed publication to tender an unqualified apology and publish the contents of this letter in its entirety with the same prominence and display as you

have done to the patently false and malicious captioned news article,” the notice said. Vadra on Saturday said the rent for her government accommodation was the “same as others in her category” and she was asked to occupy the premises “on security grounds”. The newspaper report said she wrote to the government in May 2002 that Rs53,421 was “too high” an amount and “beyond her paying capacity.”

Priyanka demands apology from TOI


LATIN AMERICA

No water for millionsdespite Chile rains AFPSantiago

Four million people in San-tiago were without tap wa-ter yesterday after unusually

heavy rain pounding central Chile triggered landslides that fouled the city’s water supply and forced the closure of the world’s biggest copper mine, offi cials said.

The heavy rain fl ooded parts of the massive El Teniente mine, leading the state-owned copper company Codelco to halt opera-tions there for at least three days.

The mine, located in the foot-hills of the Andes 150kms south of Santiago, is being closed to let engineers and crews clean up landslides and divert streams that have “caused damage” to machinery, Codelco said.

Temporarily closing El Teniente, which has more than 3,000kms of galleries, will result in the loss of production of some 5,000 tonnes of copper, the com-pany said. Chile is the world’s top copper producer, producing about one-third of global output.

In the capital Santiago, the national emergency response

agency declared a red alert for the city of more than 7mn people due to dirty water. Heavy rains in the Andean foothills since Fri-day triggered landslides into the Maipo and Mapocho rivers.

Santiago mayor Claudio Or-rego said late Saturday that the cuts aff ect 4mn people, 1mn more than announced hours earlier.

Tap water production was down to 35% of normal levels, said Eugenio Rodriguez, corpo-rate manager of the Aguas Andi-nas water company.

Municipal authorities acti-vated an emergency plan that in-cludes accessing 45 backup wa-ter sources and mobilising more than 60 water trucks.

Thousands on Saturday fl ocked to stores to stock up on bottled water, and supermarket shelves were quickly left bare.

In the O’Higgins region 90kms south of Santiago, the swollen Tinguiririca River left one person missing and about 100 homes damaged.

Rain was expected to continue throughout the weekend, lead-ing Aguas Andinas to say that “it is not possible yet to estimate the time that service will be restored.”

Castro proposes agelimit for Cuba leaders ReutersHavana

Future top leaders of Cuba’s Communist party should retire at 70 to make way for

younger blood, President Raul Castro said, suggesting older members hoping for promotion to the top table could play with their grandchildren instead.

Cuba’s current leaders in-clude several septuagenarian or octogenarian veterans of Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution. There is a growing urgency for them to make succession plans to keep the party alive once they are gone.

Raul Castro himself is 84 and after his planned retirement from government in two years the country is likely to be led by somebody with a diff erent surname for the fi rst time since his brother overthrew a pro-US government nearly 60 years ago.

His comments during a two hour speech at the Communist Party’s twice-per-decade con-gress were met with silence,

perhaps because some members were disappointed with the idea.

“So serious! What silence is caused by this subject. Don’t think that just because you can’t be in the leadership of the country you can’t do anything,” Castro said, suggesting the elderly continue as party activists and spend more time with their grandchildren.

Before the congress, the cur-rent party leadership faced some discontent among younger members critical of the slow de-livery on promised economic re-forms in the past fi ve years and a lack of transparency.

Fidel Castro, who turns 90 in August, retired in 2008 after a seri-ous illness and his younger brother took over, introducing a limit of two fi ve-year terms for leaders. That limit has yet to be tested.

The proposed new rules would aff ect new entrants into the leadership, but Castro added that there would be no sudden change. The limits would be in-troduced in time for the next party congress in 2021.

He said there should then be a

constitutional amendment and a referendum to codify this and other reforms.

Castro proposed that 60 years be fi xed as the age limit for en-tering the party’s central com-mittee and up to 70 years as the maximum age to perform duties in the party leadership, say-ing the new rules would have a knock-on eff ect of bringing younger leaders up through the ranks more quickly.

“Somebody who is 65 or 70 is useful for important activities, but not the activities of an im-portant leader,” he said.

The party is today due to vote for a new leadership, and is ex-pected to re-elect Castro and the party number two Jose Ramon Machado Ventura, 85. Presum-ably the new rules would not apply to them because they are already within the leadership.

Castro said the same age rules should be applied to other state bodies and the government. He reiterated that he would step down as president of the nation in 2018.

Twice punished,town copes with death, disaster AFPAbdon Calderon

First came the fl ood and then the “long, long” earthquake, a shaking so

hard the two-storey, covered market came down in a heap in this small town in western Ec-uador.

Dazed residents had begun the week in fl ood waters up to their chests, and ended it Satur-day evening with a devastating 7.8-magnitude quake.

“It’s only been a week and na-ture has punished us so badly,” said Nelly, a 73-year-old who declined to give her last name.

At least 233 people were killed across Ecuador, the government said.

In Abdon Calderon, 180kms south of the epicentre, at least two people were killed in the col-lapse of the town market.

“On Monday, water fl ooded the town. There wasn’t a house that wasn’t submerged. The wa-ter was up to our chests in the main avenue,” Nelly said.

Then on Saturday, she said, the market came down “like a house of cards.”

Too fearful to stay indoors, she had spent the night in the streets. Now she found herself standing outside the fl attened market, hugging herself to keep warm as she tearfully recounted the town’s double misfortune.

A short distance away a fi re-

fi ghter picked through the mar-ket ruin, looking for a way to re-trieve the body of a man pinned under the mound of rubble and twisted steel.

“They’ve already taken the body of one poor little man out of there,” she said.

When the earthquake struck, Nelly said she rushed into the streets and saw that the market had collapsed.

“How can I not cry,” she sobbed. “There was a person trapped who screamed for help, but then the screaming stopped. Oh, it was terrible.”

Firefi ghters said when they arrived, the building had already been fl attened. “Two shakes and everything came down, all at once. We’ve found two victims so far,” said Alberto Santana, one of the fi refi ghters on the scene.

One of the victims was 51-year-old Francisco Mendoza, known by his nickname Pan-cho, who had a stand outside the market on weekends. His father, 73-year-old Colon Mendoza, said his son had just gone inside the market to use the bathroom when the quake struck. “This earthquake was unlike any I’ve felt before. It was stronger, the house shook so much it scared me, it was a tremendous rattle.”

“The earthquake was long, long,” he said.

Choking back tears, he looked to the ground and said, “Now what’s going to happen to Pan-cho’s widow and two orphans?”

Ecuador quake kills 233,devastates coastal zone ReutersManta, Ecuador

The death toll from Ecua-dor’s biggest earthquake in decades soared to at

least 233 yesterday as rescuers using tractors and bare hands hunted desperately for survivors in shattered coastal towns.

The 7.8 magnitude quake struck off the Pacifi c coast on Saturday and was felt around the Andean nation of 16mn people, causing panic as far away as the highland capital Quito and col-lapsing buildings and roads in a swathe of western towns.

President Rafael Correa, rush-ing home from a trip to Italy, said the number of fatalities jumped yesterday to 233.

“The immediate priority is to rescue people from the rubble,” he said via Twitter. “Everything

can be rebuilt, but lives cannot be recovered, and that’s what hurts the most.”

More than 1,500 people were injured, authorities said.

Coastal areas nearest the quake were worst aff ected, especially Pedernales, a rustic tourist spot with beaches and palm trees, which appeared largely fl attened.

“There are people trapped in various places, and we are start-ing rescue operations,” Vice President Jorge Glas said yester-day morning before boarding a plane to the area.

A state of emergency was de-clared in six provinces.

Authorities said there had been 163 aftershocks, mainly in the Pedernales area.

A photo on social media pur-porting to be the entrance to Ped-ernales showed a torn-up road with a crushed car in the middle and people standing behind.

Local TV station Televicen-tro broadcast images from Ped-ernales showing locals using a small tractor to remove rubble and also searching with their hands for people buried under-neath.

Women cried after a corpse was pulled out. Locals said chil-dren were trapped.

One man begged for help: “Pedernales is destroyed.”

Many people spent the night on the streets.

In Guayaquil, Ecuador’s larg-est city, rubble lay in the streets and a bridge fell on top of a car. “It was horrible, it was as if it was going to collapse like card-board,” said Galo Valle, 56, who was guarding a building in the city where windows fell out and parts of walls broke.

About 13,500 security force personnel were mobilised to keep order around Ecuador, and

$600mn in credit from multi-lateral lenders was immediately activated for the emergency, the government said.

Ramon Solorzano, 46, a car parts merchant in the coastal city of Manta, headed away from built-up areas with his fam-ily. Photos from Manta showed Red Cross workers arriving, po-lice hunting through debris, a smashed sculpture and badly damaged buildings.

“Most people are out in the streets with backpacks on, heading for higher ground,” Solorzano said, speaking in a trembling voice on a WhatsApp phone call. “The streets are cracked. The power is out and phones are down.”

Parts of Quito were without power or phone service for sev-eral hours, but the city govern-ment said those services had been restored and there were no

reports of casualties in the city. The government called it the

worst quake in the country since 1979. In that disaster, 600 peo-ple were killed and 20,000 in-jured, according to the US Geo-logical Survey.

In international aid, Venezue-la, Chile and Mexico were send-ing personnel and supplies, the Correa government said.

A tsunami warning was lifted on Saturday night, but coastal residents were urged to seek higher ground in case tides rise.

“At fi rst it (the quake) was light, but it lasted a long time and got stronger,” said Maria Jar-amillo, 36, a resident of Guayaq-uil, describing windows break-ing and pieces falling off roofs.

“I was on the seventh fl oor and the light went off in the whole sector, and we evacuated. People were very anxious in the street. ... We left barefoot.”

A street is flooded due to the overflowing Mapocho river during heavy rains in Santiago yesterday. Four million people in Santiago were without tap water yesterday after unusually heavy rain pounding central Chile triggered landslides that fouled the city’s water supply and forced the closure of the world’s biggest copper mine, off icials said.

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro greets supporters outside an health centre during an event to commemorate the 13th anniversary of the “Barrio Adentro” health programme, next to his wife and deputy of Venezuela’s United Socialist Party (PSUV) Cilia Flores, in Caracas.

Five young people died and five others were in critical condition after apparently taking drugs at an international electronic music festival in the Argentine capital, emergency responders said. Autopsies will be needed to determine the substance involved, said Alberto Crescenti, head of the emergency healthcare system, which was summoned to the Time Warp music festival in Buenos Aires. The partygoers were mostly between the ages of 21 and 25, Crescenti said. “The youths lost consciousness and rapidly went into a coma,” he said. Those in hospitals were in critical condition and had high temperatures, indicating severe poisoning, Crescenti said.

Venezuela has paid $30mn of over $100mn in debt it owes Uruguayan dairy farmers, the Uruguay government said. In July, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro sealed a multi-million-dollar food import deal with his Uruguayan counterpart to combat shortages ahead of Venezuela’s legislative elections. But instead of paying the $267mn as agreed, Maduro’s government deposited in November under a fifth of that amount. “An important payment from Venezuela has arrived, of around $30mn, which will pay what is owed to small dairy producers” and also go towards paying what is owed to dairy-products exporter Conaprole, said Uruguayan government off icial Enzo Benech.

Mexico’s defence minister has apologised for the torture of a 22-year-old woman by members of the military after a recording of the torture was broadcast on Mexican television. “It is necessary that we show publicly our indignation for this regrettable act,” General Salvador Cienfuegos said, according to a statement issued by the military. Speaking before about 30,000 Mexican soldiers, he asked Mexicans for forgiveness, which is a very unusual gesture in the country. The statement was broadcast live for all military personnel. The video of the woman being tortured was broadcast two days ago by the television station Teleformula.

Experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) were forced to end their investigation into the abduction and presumed murder of 43 students in Mexico, its head said. The Mexican government did not extend the group’s mandate, IACHR chief James Cavallaro explained. The 43 students from a teacher-training college in the town of Ayotzinapa in the state of Guerrero went missing in the city of Iguala on September 26, 2014. The remains of only one of the students have been identified by DNA tests so far. The victims’ relatives have demanded that the IACHR investigators’ mandate be extended, as they no longer trust the state authorities.

Five dead ‘from drugs’ at Argentina music festival

Venezuela clears part duesowed to Uruguay farmers

Mexico minister sorry fortorture caught on video

Inquiry on missingstudents cancelled

PEOPLE TRAGEDYPAYMENT CONTROVERSY DECISION

A building in Portoviejo lies destroyed after the 7.8-magnitude quake.

People rest in a park after an earthquake in the city of Guayaquil.

PAKISTAN/AFGHANISTAN23Gulf Times


Pakistan’s Punjab Marriage Func-tions Bill, placing restrictions on indoor ceremonies, passed by the provincial assembly last year has been challenged in Lahore High Court. Petitioner Advocate Syed Ali Gilani said on Friday that restrictions cannot be imposed on indoor marriage functions as every citizen has a right to organ-ise events inside his house, The Nation reported. The petitioner urged the court to stop the law from being implemented. The bill, moved by Law Minister Rana Sanaullah, prohibits ostentatious wedding celebrations. Accord-ing to the bill, any street, road or a place other than the building where the event is being held, shall not be decorated while or-ganising a marriage. The bill states that a marriage ceremony should be concluded before 10pm. A person organising the marriage shall not serve or allow anyone to serve meals except for one dish. Anyone breaching the law will face imprisonment for a one month and fine above Rs.50,000 or more than Rs2mn.

President of Mauritius Bibi Ameenah Firdaus Gurib-Fakim arrived in Pakistan yesterday on a four-day visit for talks on bilateral issues. According to Pakistan’s foreign ministry, the two sides will explore the possibilities of strengthening existing bilateral ties in various fields of common interest, with particular focus on economic and trade.

Pakistan’s Ministry of National Health Services (NHS) has final-ised all arrangements to launch the Prime Minister’s National Health Programme (PMNHP) in Quetta. Under the programme 76,000 families will get free of cost medical treatment. The scheme will be launched by the end of the month or in the first week of May and Prime Min-ister Nawaz Sharif will himself inaugurate the programme. The programme was launched by the prime minister on December 31 last year for Islamabad, describ-ing it as the first step in turning Pakistan into a welfare state. The scheme will be expanded to all parts of Punjab, Balochistan, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata). People of Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa will not benefit from the initiative because their govern-ments have declined to become part of the federal government’s programme. A family gets Rs50,000 for the treatment which begins as soon as a patient is hospitalised under the programme. It includes all kinds of diseases.

Punjab marriage functions bill challenged

Mauritius president arrives in Pakistan

All set for new health scheme for Quetta

POLITICS

HEALTHCARE

Money being sent home by non-resident Pakistan slowing down

The World Bank says that the growth of remittances – money being sent home

by non-resident Pakistanis – slowed down by 3.9% in 2015.

The growth of remittances in 2015 slowed from 16.7% to 12.8% for Pakistan followed by 8% in 2014 to 2.5% for Bangladesh and from 9.6% to -0.5% for Sri Lanka,

says the latest edition of ‘Migra-tion and Development - Trends and Outlook’ published last week.

The report says in the fourth quarter of 2015, year-on-year growth remittances to Pakistan from Saudi Arabia and the UAE were 11.7% and 11.6%, respective-ly, a signifi cant deceleration from 17.5% and 42.0% in the fi rst quarter.

Also, depreciation of major sending country currencies like euro, Canadian dollar and the Australian dollar vis-à-vis US

dollar may be playing a role, the report says.

According to the report, the growth rate of remittances to developing countries continues to slow down largely due to eco-nomic weaknesses in the major remittance-sending countries particularly weak oil prices and currencies in many remittance-source countries.

However, the report expects that the remittances to develop-ing countries are expected to rise

to around 4% a year in 2016-17.

A major downside risk to this forecast is the potential for a decline in outward remittances from Gulf Co-operation Coun-

cil countries due to continuing weakness in the price of oil.

Also, the continued widening of black market premia and im-position of capital controls could limit formal remittance infl ows in some countries.

Remittances to India, the re-gion’s largest economy and the world’s largest remittance recip-ient, decreased by 2.1% in 2015, whereas remittances to Nepal rose dramatically in response to the earthquake, by 20.9% in 2015

versus 3.2% in 2014. The average cost of sending

$200 to regional countries in the fourth quarter of 2015 was 5.4%, down from 5.9% recorded in the fourth quarter of 2014 and the low-est rate among developing regions.

Remittance service opera-tors in the UAE waived fees for remittances to Nepal for a pe-riod following the earthquake, leading to the corridor having the lowest average cost (0.2%) in the fourth quarter of 2015.

Aside from this one-off event, average remittance costs are less than 3pc in the fi ve next lowest-cost corridors, but around 10% or more in the fi ve highest-cost corridors.

Higher costs in the latter group may be due partly to low volumes, lack of competition in the remit-tance markets in some sending or receiving countries, high regula-tory burdens and policy rigidities that limit competition in some market segments.

InternewsIslamabad

A major downside risk to this forecast is the potential for a decline in outward remittances from Gulf Co-operation Council countries due to continuing weakness in the price of oil”

Heavy fi ghting continues in Kunduz city

Afghan forces fought back a renewed series of attacks on Kunduz, killing dozens

of Taliban fi ghters, offi cials said yesterday as insurgent forces stepped up their bid to retake the northern city that they captured briefl y last year.

The attack on Kunduz, in-volving hundreds of insurgent fi ghters, has intensifi ed just days after the Taliban announced the start of their annual spring of-fensive, aimed at driving out the Western-backed government in Kabul.

The Taliban’s brief capture of Kunduz last year underlined both their growing strength and the lack of readiness of Afghan security forces fi ghting largely on their own since the Nato-led international coalition ended its combat operation in 2014.

Attacks overnight appeared

aimed at cutting off Chardara district on the southwest out-skirts of the city, which insur-gents used as a base in last year’s attack, with several checkpoints targeted, Kunduz police chief Qasim Jangalbagh said.

“They wanted to cut the road which connects the district to Kunduz city to stop us sending reinforcements,” he said.

In addition, he said a major attack was driven back at Charkh Ab, to the east of Kunduz, as Tal-iban forces sought to stretch the city’s defences.

Casualty estimates provided by Afghan offi cials varied slight-ly, with Kunduz police saying 49 Taliban fi ghters had been killed and another 61 wounded, while the defence ministry said 38 were killed and 13 wounded over the past 24 hours.

A police spokesman said four members of the security forces were killed and 11 wounded.

Kunduz public health director Saad Mukhtar said six dead and 107 wounded had been brought

to city hospitals over the past three days, which have been put under heavy strain by the de-struction of the hospital run by aid group Medecins Sans Fron-tieres in a US air strike last year.

The heavy fi ghting around Afghanistan’s fi fth-biggest city underlines the concern high-lighted in the United Nations’ latest report on civilian casual-ties, which pointed to a sharp rise in the number of children killed or injured as a consequence of combat in built-up areas.

The fall of Kunduz last year followed months of attacks that began in the spring. The attacks weakened security forces before Taliban fi ghters seized the city centre at the end of September, holding it for two weeks before pulling out.

However, offi cials have made a major eff ort this year to reassure residents that there would be no repeat of last year’s demoralizing collapse, which prompted thou-sands to fl ee to city.

Although heavy fi ghting con-tinued over the winter months in Afghanistan, notably in the southern province of Helmand, the approach of warmer weather is likely to bring an increase in operations in the north of the country as snow clears.

ReutersKunduz, Afghanistan

Off icials say dozens of Taliban killed, attacks driven back ; Insurgents try to cut road from district to city centre ; Battles underline UN concern over fighting in urban areas

“They wanted to cut the road which connects the district to Kunduz city to stop us sending reinforcements”

A Pakistani Kashmiri resident sits on cracks following landslides in Danna village, some 48km from Muzaff arabad, the capital of Pakistani part of Kashmir on Saturday. Hundreds of people have been shifting to safer places as their houses have been destroyed as large areas started moving downward due to massive landslides. Pakistan last week ended the search for 23 people buried by a landslide in the north, after heavy rains that authorities said killed 117 people.

Devastation

Pakistani children play on a tree in Islamabad yesterday.

Family tree

Afghan child casualties soar as urban warfare escalates: UN

Child casualties have soared in Afghanistan this year as the Taliban

stepped up attacks in urban areas, the United Nations said yesterday, branding the fi gures “appalling”.

Between January and March, 161 children were killed and 449 others injured — a 29 per-cent increase from a year earlier — the UN’s mission in Afghani-stan said in a report.

Danielle Bell, the mission’s human rights director, said women and children have suf-fered the most as the insurgents have launched more bomb at-tacks in populated areas.

“In the fi rst quarter of 2016, almost one third of civilian cas-

ualties were children,” said Bell in the report.

“If the fi ghting persists near schools, playgrounds, homes and clinics, and parties con-tinue to use explosive weapons in those areas... these appalling numbers of children killed and maimed will continue.

“Increased fi ghting in popu-lated areas continues to kill and injure women and children at higher rates than the general population.”

The fi gures come days after the Taliban launched its spring off ensive by trying to retake

control of Kunduz, the north-eastern provincial capital they briefl y captured last year.

The militants have intensi-fi ed their insurgency since the end of Nato’s combat mission in 2014, launching brazen at-tacks on urban areas that saw last year become the bloodiest for civilians on record.

In the fi rst three months of 2016, 600 civilians were killed and 1,343 were injured, the report said. The number of deaths fell 13% from a year ago, while the number of injuries rose by 11%.

The Taliban were responsible for six out of every 10 casual-ties, according to the UN’s re-port.

Last year, there were 11,002 civilian casualties, including 3,545 deaths, according to UN fi gures released in February.

AFPKabul

“Increased fi ghting in populated areas continues to kill and injure women and children at higher rates that the general population”

Don’t target Hindus, says Pakistani daily

A Pakistani commentator has hit out at a private TV channel for using

“extemely off ensive and de-rogatory remarks” targeting the Hindu minority.

A commentary published in The Nation pointed out that the audience roared with laughter when the performer, while apparently trying to be funny, used the word “dog” to describe Hindus.

“I am surprised how this was allowed to go on air keeping in mind there are millions of Hindus living in Pakistan,” the commentator said.

“Unfortunately, from text books to talk shows to common people, this culture of consid-ering Hindus ‘impure’ or ‘in-

ferior’ continues, thanks to the likes of such people who in dis-guise of their ‘funny content’ keep this hatred alive.”

The commentator pointed out that all hell breaks loose when Donald Trump passes his hateful remarks towards Muslims.

“Before whining about a racist sitting miles away in the US, have some self-refl ection: What we have been doing to the very people of our own country, the people who have been living in this land for thousands of years, long before Muslims arrived.

“Many might not know this but a part of our land, which today is part of ‘Islamic Re-public of Pakistan’, is the birth-place of Hinduism.

“Publicly insulting follow-ers of that religion in the same country is extremely disre-spectful to say the least.”

IANSIslamabad

US judge says terrorism convict can’t be deported to Pakistan

A Maryland man believed to be the youngest person ever convicted of US terrorism charges may not be deported to Pakistan because he would likely face torture there by government off icials, an American judge has ruled. Mohamed H. Khalid, who legally moved from Pakistan with his family to suburban Baltimore as a young teenager, was arrested in 2011 at age 17 as part of the failed “Jihad Jane” conspiracy to murder a Swedish artist who had blasphemed the Prophet Muhammad.

Khalid pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and cooperated with the FBI more than 20 times, teaching US agents how to combat online jihadists, records show. But when his five-year sentence concluded late last year, US off icials sought to deport him to Pakistan, a move his lawyers said would likely subject him to torture. “This is a huge victory - immigration judges do this in 1% of the cases when someone argues they will be tortured if sent home,” said Khalid’s lawyer, Wayne Sachs of Philadelphia.

PHILIPPINES

Gulf TimesMonday, April 18, 201624

Duterte attacked over rape remarks

AFPManila

Leading Philippine presi-dential candidate Rodrigo Duterte, whose campaign

promises a ruthless war on crime, was condemned yester-day after a video surfaced of him apparently joking about a mur-dered Australian rape victim.

Duterte, who promises mass killings of suspected criminals if elected next month, appears in a video uploaded on YouTube making the remarks about the female Australian missionary.

The woman, who was minis-tering in a prison in Davao in the southern Philippines, was raped and killed during a riot by in-mates in 1989.

Duterte was the city’s mayor at the time. Duterte made con-troversial remarks watched by a crowd of laughing supporters at the campaign rally.

Duterte, who boasts of the ex-tra-judicial killings of suspects by vigilantes during his time in Davao, is leading in the run-up to the May 9 election, accord-ing to the latest opinion survey on April 3. His rivals, women’s groups and commentators on social media quickly denounced his remarks but Duterte denied any levity.

President Benigno Aquino’s spokesman Herminio Coloma said the comments show “lack of fi tness for the presidency” and his “utter lack of respect for women”. Aquino, who under the

constitution cannot seek a sec-ond term, is supporting another candidate, his former interior secretary Mar Roxas who trails Duterte in opinion surveys.

Rival presidential candidate Vice President Jejomar Binay called Duterte’s remarks “simply revolting”.

“You are a crazy maniac who doesn’t respect women and doesn’t deserve to be president,” Binay told Duterte in a state-ment.

Another candidate Senator Grace Poe, who is just behind Duterte in the surveys, said his comment was “distasteful and unacceptable, and refl ects his disrespect for women”.

In a response also uploaded on YouTube, Duterte insisted he had just been recounting the events of 1989 and was not mak-ing a joke about them.

“It was not a joke. I said it in a narrative,” he said.

“I was very angry when I spoke.” Duterte refused to apologise for his remarks, in-sisting: “This is how men talk.”

One Filipino remarked on Twitter: “I broke down after watching Duterte on Aussie rape. I can’t fathom how his followers can laugh at it.”

Women’s group Gabriela also attacked the remarks, saying rape or any other form of sexual abuse was not “something to be trivialised in a joke”, especially by some-one seeking the presidency.

Many Filipinos have em-braced Duterte for his vulgar-ity-laced speeches, his boasts of sexual conquests and his promised war on crime.

Even when he used an ex-pletive against Pope Francis, in a speech last November, his followers in the devoutly Catholic nation quickly for-gave him.

The leading Philippine presidential candidate, who promises mass killings of suspected criminals if elected next month, appears in a video uploaded on YouTube making the remarks about a female Australian missionary

Rodrigo Duterte: courting controversy

Robredo seeks passage of Bangsamoro bill to check terror groupsBy Jeff erson Antiporda & Llanesca T PantiManila Times

Terrorist groups will continue to thrive if the proposed Bangsamoro

Basic Law is not passed, Lib-eral Party (LP) vice presiden-tial candidate Leni Robredo said yesterday.

Robredo made the state-ment during the Harapan Bise, a debate organised by ABS-CBN, when asked what advice she will give to the sit-ting president.

“This is something we have long feared. Until a law that addresses our Muslim broth-

ers and sisters’ grievances and reflects their aspirations is passed, it would mean to them that we are not listening to them, and so they will be drawn to extremists like the ISIS,” Robredo said, referring to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The proposed law will create a Bangsamoro Region, which will replace the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao. Congress, however, failed to pass the measure because of the killing of 44 police com-mandos by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in Mamasapano, Maguindanao, in January 2015.

“In the event that ISIS

reaches our shores, our gov-ernment should act swiftly. But we should not wait for that to happen and move to pass a law that would address the concerns not only of the Muslims, but also of Chris-tians and indigenous people, in Mindanao,” Robredo said.

“It would be tougher to fight extremism if we will just react and not take a preventive action,” she added.

Meanwhile, Sen. Francis Escudero vowed that he and Sen. Grace Poe will work to eradicate poverty, which he called “public enemy number 1.”

“We will slay hunger not the hungry, kill poverty, not the poor, because by doing that we will be able to lead the country toward genuine progress,” Escudero said.

Escudero dodged an at-tack by Senator Alan Peter Cayetano on his supposed failure to participate in anti-corruption hearings of the Senate.

Cayetano was asked by one of the panelists about his weakness, but instead of answering directly, the sena-tor praised himself as the only candidate who is will-ing to engage in a fight when it comes to corruption un-like Escudero who he alleged has done nothing against the corrupt. Escudero dismissed Cayetano’s allegation.

He said he authored two laws that seek to prevent a repeat of atrocities of mar-tial law: Republic Act 9745 or the Anti-Torture Act, passed in 2009, and RA 10353 or the Anti-Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance Act, passed in 2012.

“I was the primary author and sponsor of the law that required the compensation of human rights victims,” Escudero added. Leni Robredo: call for preventive action

Illegal drugs worth 200,000 pesos seized

Manila TimesCagayan De Oro City

A government employee was arrested Fri-day after a buy bust operation by op-eratives of the Philippine Drug Enforce-

ment Agency (PDEA) in Bukidnon. Wilkins Villanueva, PDEA regional director

in Northern Mindanao, identifi ed the suspect as Romeo Flores, of Poblacion Malaybalay City, Bukidnon.

During the initial investigation, the sus-

pect claimed to be currently employed as an Administrative Assistant II with the Depart-ment of Education (DepEd) in Malaybalay City, Bukidnon.

Villanueva said that the suspect yielded about 40 grams of ‘shabu’ with an estimated street value of P200,000. He said that the il-legal drug was contained in seven sachets of heat sealed plastic. Aside from the illegal drug, the PDEA operatives also seized from the sus-pect a green Kawasaki KLX 150L with no plate number, the buy-bust money and assorted drug paraphernalia.

Plan to promote Cagayan as cruise ship destination Manila TimesSanta Ana, Cagayan

Among the many regions in the Phil-ippines, Cagayan Valley is getting noticed as a major tourist destina-

tion.Palaui Island, the Callao Cave system

and Batanes province are becoming popular destinations for travellers, but the Cagayan Economic Zone Authority (CEZA) is ram-ping up its marketing activities to attract more foreign tourists to the region.

Foe one, a CEZA delegation recently at-tended the Cruise Shipping Asia Confer-ence in Hong Kong.

“We have also joined three airline in-dustry conferences, the Routes Asia 2015 conference in Kunming, China, the World Routes 2015 Conference in Durban, South Africa, and a couple of weeks ago, the Routes Asia 2016 at the SMX Convention Centre in Manila, where we put up our own booth to showcase Cagayan’s tourism sites,” said CEZA Chief Executive Offi cer and Ad-ministrator Jose Mari Ponce.

He added that Port Irene here will soon become a cruise ship destination and that Royal Caribbean has already visited Santa Ana. Ponce said CEZA is waiting for feed-back from the cruise ship company on the setting up of an explorer type cruise.

Talks for more fl ights going to Cagayan are also being pushed.

In 2015, the Cagayan Freeport attracted 150,000 tourists, both local and international

or 63% more than the 91,984 recorded in 2014. Chinese and American tourists made up the majority of foreign tourists visiting the re-gion followed by travellers from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, United Kingdom, Canada, India and Germany who also fl ocked to the fi ne beaches in Santa Ana town and the Cal-lao Caves in Penablanca town, both located in Cagayan province.

In March, the CEZA, in partnership with the Department of Tourism (DOT) in Region 2 and Cagayan Provincial Tourism Offi ce, conducted the First Cagayan Culture and Tourism Summit in Tuguegarao City with some 150 participants from various groups, such as tourism stakeholders – hotel and restaurant owners, tour operators, boat and service providers, as well as other local gov-ernment units and agencies of Cagayan.

Ponce said the occasion became a venue

to discuss signifi cant agenda on culture and tourism that included defi ning and pre-serving Cagayan heritage and culture, pro-moting sustainable tourism development in Region 2 and fostering partnerships in de-velopment, among others.

Tourism offi cials said arrivals in the Ca-gayan Economic Zone and Freeport have also been steadily rising and benefi ting the local community through its tourism pro-grammes boosted by infrastructure devel-opments inside the zone as well as tourism developments outside the zone, on a na-tional and international scale.

Ponce said because Cagayan Valley is get-ting more tourists, there is a need for tour operators to develop new tour packages to suit all sorts of tourists, from the day trip-pers, to scuba divers, to war tourism buff s and many other tourists.

The Cagayan Economic Zone Authority (CEZA) is eyeing cruise ships to visit Port Irene soon.

Philippines haven of cyber

criminals ‘due to social media’ By Kristyn Nika M LazoManila Times

The Philippines is a favour-ite of cyber criminals be-cause of its high exposure

to social media and weak cyber security.

A report released by the global cybersecurity giant Symantec Corp showed that the Philip-pines ranked 20th worldwide and third in the Asia-Pacifi c re-gion for social media scams and seventh in the Asia-Pacifi c for ransomware attacks, with an av-erage of 17 attacks per day.

Peter Sparks, Symantec sen-ior director for Cyber Security Services in the Asia-Pacifi c and Japan, said the Philippines is more exposed to cyber attacks because it is one of the fastest nations to adopt technology and the Internet.

Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR) Volume 21, which covers attacks in 2015, revealed that cyber criminals adopted “best practices” and established professional busi-nesses in order to increase the effi ciency of their attacks against enterprises and consumers.

The report said these “pro-fessional cyber criminals” rule the entire ecosystem of attack-ers, extending the reach of en-

terprise and consumer threats and fueling the growth of online crime.

“Advanced criminal attack groups now echo the skill sets of nation-state attackers. They have extensive resources and highly-skilled technical staff that operate with such effi cien-cy that they maintain normal business hours and even take the weekends and holidays off ,” Sparks said.

“We are even seeing low-level criminal attackers create call centre operations to increase the impact of their scams,” he added.

According to the Symantec report, professional cyber at-tackers usually target “zero-day vulnerabilities,” or the holes in software unknown to the seller, and use them to their own ad-vantage.

Last year, the zero-day vul-nerabilities discovered have more than doubled, to a record of 54, which is 125% higher than a year before.

Malwares, on the other hand, increased to 430mn new vari-ants in 2015, which proves that cyber criminals look for new avenues to overwhelm defences and enter corporate networks.

The data also showed that 191mn records were stolen in a single incident last year, com-promising 429mn in personal

information and identities.Of the stolen information, a

number of companies chose not to report the number of records lost.

“The increasing number of companies choosing to hold back critical details after a breach is a disturbing trend. Transparency is critical to security. By hiding the full impact of an attack, it becomes more diffi cult to assess the risk and improve your secu-rity posture to prevent future at-tacks,” Sparks said.

Symantec also reported that there is an emergence of ran-somware in 2015, with a 35% growth in a more damaging vari-ant of crypto-ransomware at-tacks.

Ransomware are softwares in-tended to break into a computer system, restrict all kinds of ac-cess and demand a ransom from the user to remove the system restrictions.

The Philippines ranks 40th globally for ransomware attacks, with an average of 17 attacks per day.

Symantec advised businesses to partner with organisations or companies with advance threat and adversary intelligence solu-tions to fool-proof systems, as well as conduct continuous edu-cation and training to combat cyber threats.

SRI LANKA/BANGLADESH/NEPAL25Gulf Times


Court rejects Khaleda’s plea, defers hearing A Dhaka court yesterday

rejected two petitions of former Bangladesh prime

minister BNP chairperson Kha-leda Zia who appeared before it in a graft case which accuses her of embezzling over $400,000 from a trust, saying there is “no ground” to re-examine the investigating offi cer.

The Third Special Judge’s Court deferred 70-year-old op-position leader Zia’s hearing and fi xed April 25 to hear her state-ment over graft charges brought against her in the Zia Charita-ble Trust case which accuses her of embezzling 31.5mn taka ($400,000).

The court was scheduled to record her deposition yesterday, but the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) chief Zia’s lawyers petitioned for a fresh testimo-ny of the investigating offi cer, which the court turned down.

The BNP chairperson’s coun-sel then appealed for a fresh cross-examination of the inves-tigating offi cer, which was also dismissed. The court rejected the petition on re-examining the in-vestigating offi cer as it found “no ground”, The Daily Star reported.

There was a heated argument between the prosecution and the defence when Judge Abu Ahmed Jamadar deferred recording Zia’s statement and fi xed April 25 to hear it.

In 2010, the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) had fi led the case against Zia and four others. In 2012, charges were pressed against four, including the two-

AgenciesDhaka

Khaleda Zia, centre, walking as she left after a court appearance in Dhaka yesterday.

time former prime minister Zia. In 2013, the trial began after the court indicted the four.

On March 31, the court had then fi xed April 7 to hear Zia’s statement, but it was deferred as the BNP chief pleaded for more time. Two others accused in the case - Ziaul Islam Munna and Monirul Islam Khan - have

pleaded not guilty while Haris Chowhdury is absconding.

In February, Zia was ordered to appear before a court to face trial in a separate $1.85mn graft case over contracting out cargo handling work to a company in exchange of kickbacks.

The case fi led in 2007 during the military-installed caretaker

regime accused her of contract-ing out an “unqualifi ed” com-pany called GATCO the task of handling containers at the country’s main southeastern seaport of Chittagong and In-land Container Depot in Dhaka allegedly in exchange of kick-backs during the 2001-2006 tenure of her BNP- led four

party coalition government.Zia and the co-accused were

indicted in the case in Septem-ber 2007 under a massive anti-graft campaign which was being spearheaded by the then interim government, installed with cru-cial military support on Jan 11, 2007 proclamation of the state of emergency.

Thousands hospitalised as heat wave sweeps Bangladesh

Thousands of people with heat wave syn-dromes have been ad-

mitted in the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research (ICDDR) and oth-er major health facilities in Dhaka.

Doctors said yesterday that despite their preparedness to treat people with diarrhoeal syndromes, dehydration or fever due to hot weather in March and April, the hos-pital is seeing large turn-up due to protracted hot weather conditions.

“Since the start of March, we (ICDDRB) alone so far admitted more than 19,000 people, most of them being children,” hospital director Dr Azharul Islam Khan told newsmen.

The state-run facility for children Shishu Hospital in Dhaka also reported high rate of admission in the past sev-eral weeks because of the heat wave exposing minor chil-dren to severe health risks in particular.

“Parents are taking their small children with problems like high fever, cough and di-arrhoea as the hot weather made them sick,” hospital di-rector Dr Manzoor Hussain said.

In villages, quick change of temperature is making children sick.

“The parents and adults

should be careful about this situation,” assistant surgeon of Kadamtola Union health complex in Pirojpur district Dr Sakil Sarwar said.

Eminent pediatric Dr M R Khan said children are very sensitive to this hot and hu-mid weather as “they get de-hydrated quickly and germs multiply in their bodies easily during heat waves”.

“Babies and children have relatively low body weight, as compared to adults that make them more vulnerable to the fl uid loss or dehydration that occurs when more fl uid is lost from the body compared to the volume they consume … this causes an imbalance of minerals in their bodies,” Khan said.

He said excessive weather like heat wave also generally exposes people of diff erent ages to viral infections caus-ing a lot of irritation, running nose, fever, breathing prob-lems with cough fi lling the breathing passage.

They called upon people and particularly children to drink plenty of water, lemonade, green coconut water for keep-ing fl uid balance in the body as meteorological department warned that the current heat wave might continue for next several days despite slight fall of mercury.

According to a Met Offi ce bulletin, northwestern and western regions were exposed to more heat wave as they re-corded the highest 38.3 degree in Rajshahi.

By Mizan RahmanDhaka

Lankan Tamils look for federal solution

Sri Lanka’s main Tamil par-ty TNA is seeking a fed-eral solution to resolve the

long-pending issue of political independence for the country’s minority community.

This was conveyed by the main opposition leader and Tamil Na-tional Alliance leader (TNA) R Sampanthan in Jaff na yesterday to TNA representatives.

Commenting on the talks, the TNA northern provincial councilor M K Shvajilingam said Sampanthan had briefed them on the party’s approach to the constitutional reform coming up at national level.

The government headed by President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wick-remesinghe has already launched a process to formulate a new constitution for the country replacing the 1978 statute.

Shivajilingam said Sampan-than said the current govern-ment could be more responsive to a federal arrangement and therefore, the TNA local politi-cians must not act indiff erently at this stage.

“He said they are looking for a federal solution within an un-divided Sri Lanka based on the merger of the north and eastern provinces,” Shivajilingam said.

He said if the government did not acceded to a federal solution, inter-national pressure must be brought to bear upon it by the Tamils.

The Tamil demand for a feder-al solution dates back to the days when Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, came to be granted independenceby the British in 1948.

Later, the campaign was ex-tended to a separate state de-mand when the LTTE fought a decades old war with the gov-ernment to carve out a separate Tamil homeland.

With the defeat of the LTTE in 2009, the Tamil leadership has adopted a softer approach to give up on the separatist demand.

AgenciesJaff na

Nepalese female climbers blaze trails for their gender

When a deadly ava-lanche hit Mount Everest a year ago,

Pasang Lhamu Sherpa Akita, one of the few Nepali women with expertise in climbing the world’s highest peaks, headed straight there to help.

A gifted mountaineer who had summited Everest by the age of 22, she is part of a new generation of Sherpa women who are climbing peaks that have traditionally only been scaled by their men.

“People think mountaineering is a man’s job, but I think we need more women in the mountains,” the 31-year-old said.

Generations of men from Ne-pal’s famed Sherpa community have climbed the Himalayas, while their wives and daugh-ters have traditionally kept the home fi res burning.

But in a sign of changing times, a string of Sherpa wom-en are now breaking records themselves, not only on 8,848m (29,029ft) high Everest but other dangerous peaks.

Some are now planning new summits during Nepal’s spring climbing season, which started this month.

“Sherpa men train their sons to climb, not their daugh-ters, they are expected to stay home,” mountaineering expert Elizabeth Hawley said.

“These female climbers are certainly breaking tradition, which takes some courage.”

In the year since Nepal’s mas-sive earthquake, which trig-gered avalanches and landslides that killed almost 9,000 people, they have also led rescue and relief eff orts.

“Everyone told me to stay behind, they said Everest base camp is gone, but I had to go,” said Sherpa Akita, who was in a nearby village when the disaster hit.

Raised in the Himalayan town of Lukla, known as the gateway to Everest, she had long wanted to climb the mountain, inspired by the late Pasang Lhamu Sher-pa — the fi rst Nepali woman to summit the peak in 1993.

After her parents died, leav-ing her orphaned at 15, she worked on trekking expedi-tions to earn money. In 2004,

she signed up for a local moun-taineering course, where she was one of only two women in a class of dozens of men.

Sherpa Akita soon won a scholarship to train in the French Alps before returning to climb Everest. She also joined two Sherpa women and togeth-er they became the fi rst female team to summit K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, in 2014.

But her toughest test came when the 7.8-magnitude quake ripped through her country on April 25.

Sherpa Akita lost a friend in the subsequent Everest ava-lanche, her Kathmandu home suff ered damage, and the sight of thousands of Nepalis hud-dling under tarps for shelter broke her heart.

She spent the next few months raising funds and trav-elling to remote villages to de-liver emergency supplies and help run medical camps.

National Geographic maga-zine named her 2016’s “Adven-turer of the Year” for her eff orts, the fi rst Nepali woman to win the accolade.

Although Sherpa women

AFPKathmandu

Mountaineer Pema Diki Sherpa looking at boots in a mountaineering equipment shop in Kathmandu.

have faced a long wait for their turn in the mountaineering spotlight, they are making up for it by snatching world records.

In 2012, Chhurim Sherpa be-came the fi rst woman to scale Everest twice in one week, while 42-year-old Lhakpa Sherpa holds a record for the most Ev-erest summits by a woman, with six.

The daughter of a yak herder, Lhakpa Sherpa worked as a por-ter and kitchen hand on trek-king and mountaineering ex-peditions when she was young, before climbing solo.

“I felt free up there, I found or-dinary life much more diffi cult,” she said, referring to a years-long violent relationship that saw her eventually retire from climbing.

The mother-of-three is now preparing a comeback - 16 years after she fi rst scaled Ev-erest - determined to summit the mountain twice in a single season.

Eventually, she wants to beat the record held by male climber Apa Sherpa of 21 total summits.

Despite such feats, wom-en say they continue to face an uphill battle in a male-dominated industry, includ-ing securing funding for their expeditions.

They have made 33 attempts to scale Everest, compared to 2,923 bids by Sherpa men, ac-cording to the authoritative Himalayan Database.

More than a year after Pema Diki Sherpa and her team be-

came the fi rst all-female expe-dition to summit the highest mountains on all seven conti-nents, they still need to pay back a 10mn rupee ($95,000) loan.

Like others, the 28-year-old has temporarily set aside her climbing ambitions and fi nan-cial concerns and thrown her-self into relief work in Nepal, monitoring aid distribution in devastated Dolakha district.

“People had no food, nowhere to live, no access to roads be-cause of landslides. It was very sad,” she said.

But they plan to return to the peaks, if not this climbing season, then the next. “Once you begin climbing, you can’t stop. The mountains are an addiction,” Sherpa Akita said.

Youth train to become eco-guides for Sundarbans

Bangladesh has at long last started training youths of the Sundarbans region

as eco-guides for ensuring re-sponsible tourism in the world’s largest mangrove forest.

“We would like to pick many educated and enthusiastic youth from areas adjacent to the Sundarbans to make them eco-guides so that they can conserve unique nature and wildlife of the mangrove forest through ensuring responsible tourism,”

Civil Aviation and Tourism Minister Rashed Khan Menon said yesterday.

The state-run Bangladesh Tourism Board (BTB) in co-op-eration with Bengal Tours, one of the largest tour operators in the Sundarbans, imparted a 10-day infi eld eco-guide training to 20 local youths including four females last week.

The minister said, “Practice of eco-tourism is a must in the Sundarbans. The number of both local and foreign tour-ists is increasing in the Sun-darbans day by day but we have scarcity of eco tourist

guides and professional tour operators there. “

He said on one hand, the eco-guides will ensure bio-diversity conservation in the forest, they will create em-ployment opportunities for the local educated youths on the other.

The minister has already urged the forest depart-ment to refer eco-guides to the tour operators when they give entry permission to any tourist group.

“If the tour operators hire an eco-guide along with for-est guards whenever they bring

tourist groups in the Sunda-rbans, the visitors will be en-couraged to practise responsi-ble tourism during their stay in deep forest,” he said.

Noting the importance of the Sundarbans as Unesco world heritage site, Me-non said the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) put special em-phasis on this world largest mangrove forest.

“We received a proposal from the UNWTO to present the world’s largest mangrove forest Sundarbans, a Unesco heritage, to international holidaymak-

ers in proper tourism-friendly way,” he said.

The minister said he will hold meetings with Forest and Envi-ronment Ministry soon to up-grade the existing Sundarbans Tourism Policy for support-ing the tour operators to con-duct responsible tourism in the region.

During the 10-day training, academic lessons were im-parted in three days, aware-ness campaign in two days and in field training for five days.

Akhtaruz Zaman Khan Ka-bir, chief executive offi cer, BTB,

said currently the BTB is work-ing to upgrade the modules of the training curriculum to make the eco-guide building process more eff ective.

“We will seek applications from interested educated local youths to become eco-guides through publishing advertise-ment in the newspapers soon,” he said.

The BTB chief said they will provide eco-guide training to the interested candidates phase by phase to adequate number of eco-guides from four districts - Khulna, Satkhira, Bagherhat and Barguna.

By Mizan RahmanDhaka

A good night’s sleep is one of the vital factors to maintain good health. A good night’s sleep may even keep colds and other infections at bay, according to a new study.

The odds that someone who sleeps fi ve or fewer hours a night had caught a cold in the past month were 28% higher than for folks who regularly get more shuteye, the study found, as reported by www.upi.com

And for other infections -including fl u, ear infections and pneumonia - short sleepers had more than 80% higher odds of having an infection in the past month compared to those sleeping seven or eight hours.

“People who sleep fi ve or fewer hours on average are at substantially increased risk for both colds whether head or chest or other infections, compared to people who sleep seven to eight hours on average,” said study researcher Aric Prather, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco.

The fi ndings were published as a letter April 11 in JAMA Internal Medicine, a peer-reviewed medical journal published twice a month by the American Medical Association.

The researchers found that people who have sleep disorders or those who have ever told their physician

that they have sleep troubles had about 30% higher odds of having had a cold in the previous month. The odds of infection in the past month for people with sleep disorders were more than doubled.

Experts cannot say for sure why lack of sleep helps increase

susceptibility to infections. However, Prather said, it is known that T-cells, a type of white blood cells that fi ght off infection, do not work as well when one is sleep-deprived.

The new study builds on Prather’s previous work, in which he exposed people to a cold virus and found there was a link between sleep duration and the risk of catching a cold.

The latest research echoes some fi ndings of previous studies, according to Sheldon Cohen, professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. Cohen has previously studied sleep habits and susceptibility to colds. “We found that seven hours is about the breaking point,” he said. “People who got less than seven hours were at greater risk, basically.”

When many studies are examined, “the consistency across studies really does suggest that sleep is playing a role (in susceptibility to colds),” Cohen said, while adding that “the data suggest that sleep may be altering the immune function in some way,” with suffi cient sleep helping it.

People can become better sleepers, Prather said. Getting up at the same time every day is a start, he said. “Make sure your bedroom is cool, quiet and dark,” he advised. “Have a wind-down period (before going to sleep).”

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“The data suggest that sleep may be altering the immune function in some way”

If all the material and resources of the Middle East wasted on wars had been used for the welfare of Muslims and the development of their countries, a profi t of $12tn would have been made

By Harun YahyaIstanbul

Since the second half of the 20th

century, the Middle East has been trapped in a vicious cycle of war, the likes of which it had never seen at any point in history.

Arab-Israeli conflicts, the Iran-Iraq war, the civil wars of Jordan, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, the Egyptian revolutions, Shia-Sunni conflicts and the minority genocides have all engulfed and inflamed the oldest regions known on the earth.

More than 10mn Muslims perished in these seemingly endless wars while millions of others were left permanently disabled and millennia-old cities were destroyed. Mosques,

schools, hospitals and factories were razed to the ground.

The most technologically advanced armies of the world employed their most powerful war machines upon these lands. American F-22 and F-15’s, Russian MIG-29 and SU-24 war planes, American Nimitz class and Russian TAVKR class aircraft carriers, Tomahawk and Cruise missiles, Russian S-400 missile systems, state-of-the-art tanks, light infantry weapons, heavy machine guns, bomber aircraft, mustard gases, chemical weapons all had a helping hand in carrying out the most horrible massacres these lands had ever seen.

These multi-billion dollar killing machines escalated the economic cost of the wars to astronomical amounts. Specifi cally, the fi rst period of the 21st century will go down in history as a dark period during which trillions of dollars were wasted on war.

In a state of panic caused by the September 11th terrorist attacks, the US administration fi rst invaded Afghanistan, which was followed by the invasion of Iraq, under the guise of “war on rerror”. To convince the public of the necessity of Iraq, the US vice president at the time, Dick Chaney, claimed that the cost of the operation would not exceed $100bn. Today, many studies estimate the cost of the operations of Afghanistan and Iraq for the American public to be $6tn. When the indirect expenses such as the interest of the war debts and the

post-war care of soldiers are added to the direct costs of war, the fi gures reach incredible heights.

A report published by the World Bank in 2016 revealed that 87mn Muslims were directly aff ected by the civil wars in four diff erent countries. As a consequence of these civil wars, 80% of the population of Yemen now lives below the poverty line, 21.5mn people in Syria are in need of humanitarian aid. And 12mn people living in Iraq and Libya are counting on foreign aid for their survival.

These wars also hold the futures of the Muslims in the region hostage. The Lebanese economy was only able to mend the devastation wrought by the civil war that lasted 20 years. It is impossible to even give an estimated time for Syria and Iraq.

An India-based think tank named Strategic Foresight Group pointed out an important matter while estimating the cost of the confl icts in the Middle East. The wars that had taken

place in the region had a shocking “Opportunity Cost”. In other words, if all the material and resources of the Middle East wasted on wars had been used for the welfare of Muslims and the development of their countries, a profi t of $12tn would have been made. This is the true cost of the confl icts that have been going on for 25 year since the fi rst Gulf War.

Actually calculating the costs of wars fi nancially is a great shame in itself. Every bomb that hits a city means children and women are about to be martyred. Every bullet that fi nds its target means leaving little souls fatherless, motherless and hungry out in the streets.

Every massacre, every invasion stands for the millions of lives that will be wasted in pursuit of revenge. The people who lost their lives and are confi ned to clutches, who had to leave their homes behind and immigrated towards the unknown and who wait for their death in the refugee camps and, constitute the greatest cost of the war in the Middle East.

It is impossible to justify and pay back the cost of such bloodshed, sorrow and diffi culty. These ceaseless wars in the Middle East have to come to an end. Otherwise, with every passing day, the world will become an even more dangerous place.

Harun Yahya may be followed at @Harun_Yahya and www.harunyahya.com

Middle East’s incessant wars must come to an end

UN’s global justice referee, the ICJ, turns 70 By Jan HennopAFP/The Hague

From ruling on nuclear testing to bitter border disputes or whether whales can be hunted in Antarctica, the UN’s highest

tribunal the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is celebrating 70 years of far-reaching global decision-making.

But after seven decades the respected court remains hamstrung in any bid to intervene in the 21st century’s most pressing confl icts so far, analysts say.

The ICJ can only rule in disputes when both the countries involved have accepted its jurisdiction, thereby placing confl icts such as the fi ght by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine beyond its reach.

A special sitting of the court will be held on Wednesday in the presence of UN chief Ban Ki-moon to mark the 70th anniversary of its opening in the imposing Peace Palace in The Hague.

Set up in 1946 after World War II, the ICJ’s 15-judge bench, elected for a term of nine years, is seen as the fi nal word in rows between states and an impartial arbiter when quarrels erupt between neighbours.

“The ICJ has helped settle international disputes involving territorial issues, diplomatic relations, hostage-taking and economic rights,” said Aaron Matta, senior researcher at

the Hague Institute for Global Justice think-tank.

It has “also served, albeit to a limited extent, as an instrument to protect human rights, but also jurisprudence to meet challenges such as threats to the environment”, Matta told AFP.

Because of jurisdictional issues however “in some ways, the court is arguably best suited to low-level or moderate confl icts - these are the ones that more frequently come before it”, said Cecily Rose, assistant law professor at Leiden University.

Also, unlike its younger relative the International Criminal Court, the ICJ does not rule on criminal cases arising out of confl icts.

Back in 1947 when judges steeped themselves in the fi rst case to be brought to the ICJ, the horrors and devastation of World War II were still uppermost in many people’s minds.

Britain sued Albania after two destroyers hit sea mines laid during the war in the Corfu channel near the eponymous Mediterranean island, killing 45 sailors.

In its fi rst judgement, the ICJ held Albania responsible for the explosions, but also ruled that Britain violated Tirana’s sovereignty when it subsequently embarked on a mine-clearing operation.

Albania was ordered to pay London £843,947 in compensation - some £29mn ($40mn) in today’s money.

Many of some 200 decisions handed down by the ICJ since then were born out of bilateral tensions which the tribunal has helped resolve.

One of the ICJ’s biggest achievements “is the number of confl icts that have been avoided thanks to the court”, the court’s deputy president, Somalian judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf said recently.

“I think this is something this court can be proud of,” added ICJ president, French judge Ronny Abraham during a rare meeting with reporters.

They cited the example of a long-standing spat between Cambodia and Thailand over access to the ancient temple of Preah Vihear.

In 2013, the court ruled that most of the area around the fl ashpoint site on the Thai border belonged to Cambodia, ordering Thai security forces to leave.

Cambodia welcomed the ruling,

while Thailand said it accepted and withdrew its troops.

The ICJ has also played a major role in hearing cases on global nuclear testing.

Recently the tiny Marshall Islands - scene of US-led atomic tests - sued the world’s major nuclear powers aiming to shine a new spotlight on the nuclear threat. The case is ongoing.

In what was seen as a major symbolic victory for environmentalists, the ICJ ruled in 2014 that Japan’s annual whale hunt in the Antarctic was a commercial activity disguised as science, after Australia brought a case against Tokyo.

Last month, however, activists accused Japan of an “empty response” after Tokyo resumed its Antarctic chase, killing 333 whales.

“There certainly would be more festering, long-term disputes between states,” had it not been for the ICJ, said Leiden University’s Rose.

“It would of course be great to see more disputes about critical ongoing confl icts submitted to... third parties like the ICJ. But the states have to consent to this in some way,” she said.

Olivier Ribbelink, senior researcher at the respected Hague-based Asser Institute, said: “States respect the court’s rulings because they have confi dence in the ICJ’s impartiality and its carefully-considered judgements.”

Study underlines link between sleep and good health

A World Bank report reveals that 87mn Muslims have been directly aff ected by the civil wars in four diff erent countries

“The ICJ has helped settle international disputes involving territorial issues, diplomatic relations, hostage-taking and economic rights”

Residents looking for survivors amidst the rubble after an airstrike on the opposition-held Old Aleppo.

COMMENT

More than 300 events — exhibitions, plays, readings, conferences — are taking place in Spain over the year to mark his death

By Marianne BarriauxAFP/Madrid

He is best known for Don Quixote, but the eventful life of Spain’s revered author Miguel de

Cervantes was just as intriguing as any adventures of the delusional wanna-be knight of his famous novel.

Cervantes - whose death on April 22, 1616 will be commemorated in Spain this week just as Britain marks the passing of Shakespeare 400 years ago - survived a sea battle, capture by pirates, fi ve years of captivity in Algiers and stints in prison.

“What gives such power to Cervantes’ literature is that he lived his life so intensely,” says photographer Jose Manuel Navia, who, for a Madrid exhibition, travelled to sites where the author once set foot.

Many questions surround the life of the soldier-turned-captive-turned-tax-collector, whose writings largely took a back bench until he achieved overnight success with Don Quixote in his late fi fties.

Using offi cial archives, scant witness accounts and autobiographical prefaces to his books, academics have for decades tried to decipher the myth of the man known as the father of the modern novel.

Born in 1547 in Alcala de Henares near Madrid, his family struggled fi nancially.

They settled in Madrid when the future superstar author was close to 20, and he wrote his fi rst known poetry there.

But a few years later in 1569, Cervantes moved to Rome for reasons that remain unclear, and may have had to do with his involvement in a duel that forced him to escape.

In Italy, he enlisted as a soldier and fought in the 1571 Battle of Lepanto that saw more than 200 galleys of an alliance of Christian powers confront an Ottoman Empire fl eet in the seas off Greece.

“Trembling with fever, he lies in a rickety old bed infested with lice

between decks in an area that serves as a sick bay... affl icted by sea sickness and malaria,” writes biographer Jean Canavaggio of the day of the battle.

But Cervantes still went on deck to fi ght, ending up shot in the chest and in the left hand, which he would never again be able to use.

After recovering from his wounds, Cervantes continued to participate in military campaigns until deciding to return to Spain in 1575.

But his ship was captured by pirates

and Cervantes was taken to Algiers - a bustling city administered by the Ottoman Turks.

He remained there for fi ve years despite several attempts to escape, waiting to be freed in exchange for a ransom.

One of these attempts saw him and others hole up in a cavern east of Algiers for fi ve months, waiting for a ship dispatched by his brother that never arrived.

Eventually, his family and a religious

order raised money for the ransom and he returned to Spain, where he tried unsuccessfully to get offi cial postings in return for his services as a soldier.

Then in 1584, Cervantes had a daughter - his only off spring - with one woman before marrying another who was nearly 20 years his junior.

He settled with her in a tiny village in the central region of Castilla-la-Mancha, where Don Quixote would later be based.

During that time he wrote his fi rst novel La Galatea, without much success.

Finally in 1587, he got an offi cial posting that saw him on the move again, criss-crossing southern Spain for the next decade requisitioning wheat and oil for authorities and then collecting taxes.

During that time, he went to prison for what may have been debt-related reasons, and some believe he could have started dreaming up Don Quixote then.

When the novel was fi nally published in 1605, it was an overnight success.

The years after saw Cervantes move to Madrid and devote his time to writing - including the second part of Don Quixote - before dying of illness in 1616, a relatively poor man who probably never expected to leave such a lasting literary legacy.

Don Quixote has become one of the world’s most translated works, perhaps only surpassed by some religious texts.

Its tale of a man who fancies himself as a knight and set outs to rid the world of its ills has been universally praised.

Cervantes’ portrayal of a hero as vulnerable and imperfect as any other human being was revolutionary, and inspired authors from Jane Austen and Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Gustave Flaubert and Mark Twain.

More than 300 events - exhibitions, plays, readings, conferences - are taking place in Spain over the year to mark his death.

On Saturday, Spain’s royals and Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy will go to Alcala de Henares to attend the prize-giving ceremony for the annual Miguel de Cervantes award, which honours the lifetime achievement of a writer.

And for Javier Rodriguez Palacios, mayor of Alcala de Henares, the author is still hugely relevant today.

“You describe his life to a 16-year-old guy... and he will start to realise that what is happening now in some places - unemployment, youth having to go abroad, occasional confl ict between those of Spanish origin and those who aren’t - Cervantes experienced this too,” he says.

Cervantes: The man behind the myth

Live issues

The fi ne art of doing nothing will help reverse burnout

Letters

By Judi Light Hopson, Emma H Hopson and Ted HagenTribune News Service

Do you feel guilty and highly uncomfortable when you do absolutely nothing? Maybe you fi dget and squirm,

looking for your smartphone to scan for incoming text messages. Or, do you itch to check your e-mail?

Learning to relax is not that simple. Most of us stay so busy, pushing our stressful emotions to the background, that working on our relaxation techniques will create anxiety at first!

“When I started taking 30 minutes a day to sit in my recliner, I actually felt worse in the beginning!” says a banking executive we’ll call Ralph. “All of my fears, problems and personal issues started jumping into my brain.”

Those of us who feel heavy and bogged down are suff ering from emotional burnout, most likely. We’ve worked, planned, fretted, stayed up late, and gotten up early so long, our mental health is crying out for some relief.

Being in a burnout stage means it

takes more and more energy to keep up our lifestyles. We never feel energised.

These tips can help you back away from overall burnout:

Practice doing absolutely nothing in small increments. Take actual breaks from work throughout the day. Or, sit on your patio at home for 20

minutes just taking in the view.Start giving something back to

yourself. Would you enjoy reading a magazine centred on one of your hobbies? Or, would you enjoy taking a drive in the country?

Try to obtain “closure” on past problems. Maybe one of your businesses failed, or perhaps you’ve come out of a bad relationship or marriage. Staying busy is a way to avoid dealing with these issues. Get with someone you trust and talk out this kind of pain. This way, you can relax more readily.

“I literally drain myself with compulsive busyness and making to-do lists,” says a pharmacist we’ll call Alex. “I only work 40 hours a week, but I’ve killed three marriages! I cannot relax and just enjoy being alive.”

Alex says he was raised to keep busy and work hard. When he gets home from work, he has real trouble kicking back to relax. He does admit, however, that he “drags through life” and feels overwhelmed.

“When I was a young newly-wed at 28, I could get up at six, go to work, clean and cook, and fi nd time to watch a movie three nights a week,” says a

nurse we’ll call Evelyn. “But now, at 56, I can’t fi nd the energy to do my laundry or clean my house at all. I worry about my six grandkids, the upcoming presidential election, you-name-it. I am so tense, others can feel it. I went for a massage at the spa, and I was so tense, I think I crippled the massage therapist’s hands!”

Think of your brain as a computer that needs to defrag. A busy mind is scattered. It burns energy to keep worrying about 20 things on 20 diff erent tracks.

“I knew I was cooling my burnout when I caught up my messy house by noon one Saturday,” says a friend of ours we’ll call Janice. “I had rested a lot the prior week, and I got up at 7am on this particular Saturday and sailed through my chores. Once I took a shower, I felt like taking a long walk. I was really surprised when I didn’t feel tired when I went to bed that night. I slept like a baby.”

Judi Light Hopson is the executive director of the stress management website USA Wellness Cafe at www.usawellnesscafe.com. Emma Hopson is an author and a nurse educator. Ted Hagen is a family psychologist.

Allegation wasbased on factsDear Sir,

I respect the sentiment of the writer of the letter “Baseless allegation” (Gulf Times, April 10) and completely agree with his statement that India has always stood by Nepal. At the same time, I would like to take this opportunity to clear some of the apparent misunderstandings of the writer.

1) In my earlier letter, “Regretful comments” (Gulf Times, April 7), in which I had written about India’s “undeclared blockade” on Nepal during the fourth quarter of the last year, the allegation I made was based on facts. It did not spring from reports that I had read in newspapers or views expressed in some books. I reached the conclusion from what I had witnessed as well as experienced while I was in Nepal, my home country, during October-November 2015.

2) After the promulgation of the new Constitution, it is true that there had been a lot of tension in Nepal. It is also true that some members of a disappointed community had started

blocking India-Nepal trade points to highlight their dissent. However, during the entire period of their agitation, Nepal’s eastern trade point Kakarbhitta-Panitanki (connecting to India’s Naxalbari area in West Bengal) had remained completely peaceful. Despite this, except for a few trucks carrying vegetables and fruits, no essential goods were allowed to enter Nepal from India through this border point. Please note that this is one of the major trade points of Nepal and India through which a wide range of essential goods and fuel enters Nepal every day under normal circumstances.

Hundreds of containers and trucks carrying essential supplies, including medicines and earthquake relief materials, had got stranded on the Indian side of the border (Panitanki/Naxalbari) for weeks after the agitation over the new Constitution broke out.

Now it is for the writer of the letter, “Baseless allegation” to conclude whether it was an unoffi cial blockade or one that had the backing of Indian authorities.

Being a citizen of Nepal and hailing from the eastern side of the country, I have witnessed many incidents to support my argument that there was

some sort of blockade unoffi cially sanctioned by New Delhi. The blockade had severely aff ected my country, especially since it came in wake of the devastating earthquake in April 2015. For this state of aff airs, I blame not only India’s government but also my country’s government and some of its political leaders who work for their own personal benefi ts or of their parties rather than for the nation and its citizens.

Before I conclude, I would like to stress once again that my criticisms were not against any individual or country but against the bad politics which is being exploited by many of our corrupt leaders in the name of innocent people.

Ramesh [email protected]

Welcome showers

Dear Sir,

I noticed that Thursday night’s rains left parked cars that were exposed

to the elements surprisingly clean, a refreshing change from the dust-laden aftermath that car owners have to contend with. I wonder if this particular downpour has left the local car-wash industry hanging dry.

AK(Full name and e-mail address supplied)

Please send usyour lettersBy e-mail [email protected] 44350474Or Post Letters to the EditorGulf TimesP O Box 2888Doha, Qatar

All letters, which are subject to editing, should have the name of the writer, address and phone number. The writer’s name and address may be withheld by request.

Gulf Times Monday, April 18, 2016 27

Many questions surround the life of Miguel de Cervantes whose writings largely took a back bench until he achieved overnight success with Don Quixote in his late fifties.

In Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’ portrayal of a hero as vulnerable and imperfect as any other human being was revolutionary.

Three-day forecast

TODAY

WEDNESDAY

High: 34 C

Low : 24 C

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Low: 24 C

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Max/min29/1824/1836/2913/0733/1629/1833/2634/2826/2025/1633/2632/2414/0636/2617/0439/2426/1414/0433/2017/0534/2721/1423/14

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OFFSHORE DOHAWind: W-NW 07-17 KTWaves: 6-9 Feet

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18/09

Exhibition explores connect between art and medicine Students of Virginia Common-

wealth University in Qatar (VCUQatar) and Weill Cornell

Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q) present-ed their original artworks at a new exhibition exploring the intersection between art and medicine, which opened at the Hamad Bin Khalifa University Student Centre recently

The month-long exhibition show-cases a collection of works created by six students from each college, utilis-ing a range of materials, methods and media, from laser-cut works based on medical scans, to photographs that examine the landscape as a meta-phor for neurological conditions, and kinetic sculptures that question our perception of what is mental and what is physical.

The artworks and the exhibition are the result of a semester-long col-laboration between VCUQatar and WCM-Q that sought to explore the many direct and abstract links that

exist between art and medicine, as part of a research project conducted by Dr Alan Weber, associate pro-fessor of English at WCM-Q; Rhys Himsworth, director of Painting and Printmaking at VCUQatar; Amy An-dres, interim director of Libraries and assistant professor at VCUQa-tar; and Dr Stephen Scott, associate dean for Student Aff airs at WCM-Q. Himsworth curated the exhibition and an exhibition catalogue and a documentary fi lm about the project will be published shortly.

Through an ‘Art and Medicine’ Learning Laboratory set up by the researchers, the project aimed to de-velop innovative, interdisciplinary pedagogies that will provide art stu-dents with new understandings, ma-terials and tools to further develop their artistic practice.

The Learning Laboratory consisted of a series of workshops, seminars and lectures that investigated how

each discipline solves problems, de-velops expertise and utilises creativ-ity, analysis, synthesis and evaluation to create new knowledge.

Dr Weber said: “Clearly, art and medicine are very diff erent disci-plines involving very diff erent modes of learning, so the students have to move outside of their comfort zones and think creatively to develop ways to communicate and work produc-tively with one another.”

The researchers have documented the interactions between the students through photography, videography and ethnographic-based research methodologies.

The research project is the product of collaboration and support from WCM-Q, VCUQatar, Hamad Medi-cal Corporation, Qatar Science and Technology Park, HBKU Student Centre, Qatar Robotics Institute of Development and the Qatar Robotic Surgery Centre.

LuLu Exchange branch relocates to Al Khor Mall LuLu Exchange Company

has relocated their Al Khor branch to a more

conveniently accessible loca-tion at Al Khor Mall.

The new branch was inaugu-rated by Adeeb Ahamed, direc-tor, LuLu Exchange Company, in the presence of other digni-taries and offi cials of LuLu Ex-change Company.

The Al Khor branch reloca-tion comes with the company’s strategy to reinforce its growing presence in local markets while reaching out to its wide range of customers and providing easy and convenient access to its wide range of services.

“We have a signifi cant number of customers who are based around the area and our branch now is situated in a location that is easily reachable,” Ahamed said.

LuLu Exchange Company has

strategic banking arrangements with leading banks around the world and has also tied up with the best fi nancial institutions backed with technological pro-

fi ciency with an aim to provide smoother, faster, and more reli-able services to its customers.

“Services like instant credit to designated bank accounts in se-

lect countries, is a testimony of the organisation’s commitment towards promoting innovation that delights customers,” the offi cial added.

Ooredoo, Fortinet in joint security services showcase

Ooredoo and Fortinet recently hosted a spe-cial event for compa-

nies from some of Qatar’s key industries to showcase their portfolio of security services and products.

Fortinet is a global leader in high-performance cyber-se-curity solutions.

The event included a series of presentations on the range of cyber threats facing companies today, and the solutions and services that can protect data and prevent breaches.

Solutions included Fortinet’s Advanced Threat Protection,

which is designed to combat advanced attacks from the net-work’s core to the end user’s device. In addition, experts demonstrated the FortiGate platform, which combines the most advanced threat intelli-gence from FortiGuard Labs and the FortiOS operating system to provide consistently top-rated security, deeper visibility and superior performance.

Ooredoo also used the event as an opportunity to demonstrate its Cloud E-mail Security Serv-ice, a comprehensive and cost-eff ective way to protect Qatar’s businesses against all threats

associated with business e-mail, according to a statement.

Ooredoo currently off ers some of the most advanced security solutions in the region and is investing in growing its security portfolio as part of its vision to become the leading integrated ICT provider in Qatar, the state-ment added.

The company currently of-fers a host of next-generation security services designed to protect Qatar’s businesses, in-cluding Out of Country Disas-ter Recovery, Cloud Security, Cloud E-mail Security Solutions among others.

Participants at the event.

The Ministry of Public Health (MPH) has conducted a training workshop for nurses and other health practitioners working at local independent schools on how to check the eyesight of students. The workshop was held in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Higher Education and the Primary Health Care Corporation. More than 70 male and female nurses attended.

Health Ministry holds workshop on eye tests for students

Ahamed cutting a ribbon to inaugurate the new branch of LuLu Exchange Company at Al Khor Mall.

A laser cut artwork, based on medical scans of a human face at the exhibition. Another artwork.

Some of the art collections.


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