Al Attiyah displays top form, clinches silver at Qatar Open

QIB gets nod to raise AT1 Capital

Sukuk limit

www.thepeninsulaqatar.com

Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani met with the United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Kate Gilmore, Secretary-General of the Arab Maghreb Union Dr Taieb Baccouche, and President of Saudi Arabia's Human Rights Commission Dr Bandar bin Mohammed Al Aiban, on the occasion of their participation in the International Conference on Human Rights Approach to Conflict Situations in the Arab Region, in Doha yesterday. → See also page 2

PM meets human rights officials

BUSINESS | 21 SPORT | 28

Volume 21 | Number 7080 | 2 RiyalsWednesday 22 February 2017 | 25 Jumada I 1438

MEDINA CENTRALEMEDIINANA C CENENTRTRALESpecial Lease Offer

4409 5155

PORTO ARABIAPORTRTOO ARARABABIASpecial Lease Offer

4409 5155

Pages 10 -11Hublot dazzles with

advertising campaign with Ragheb Alama

Emir chairs Supreme

Committee for

Delivery and Legacy

Board meetingEMIR H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani chaired the first meeting of the Board of Directors of the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy for the year 2017, held at the Emiri Diwan yesterday, QNA reported. The Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani attended the meeting.

The Personal Representative of the Emir and Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors H H Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, Prime Minister and Interior Minister and Board Mem-ber H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani, and other mem-bers of the Board of Directors were also present. Discussions covered the latest developments and the progress that has been achieved in the projects for Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup over the past months. The meeting also touched on investment opportunities concerning Ras Abu Aboud stadium.

Included with today’s edition is an 8-page supplement

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTWEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017

ACTING MANAGING EDITORMohammed Salim Mohamed

ADVERTISING MANAGERAli Wahba

CHAIRMANSheikh Thani bin Abdullah Al Thani

EDITOR-IN-CHIEFDr. Khalid Al-Shafi

ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Muhammad Shammas

DESIGNAbraham Augusthy

SUPPLEMENT EDITORPramod Prabhakaran

PRODUCTIONViswanath Sarma

Brad StoneBloomberg

In 2010, an advanced aircraft engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center named Mark Moore published a white paper outlining the feasibility of elec-tric aircrafts that could take off and land like helicopters but

were smaller and quieter. The vehicles would be capable of providing a speedy alternative to the dreary morning commute.

Moore’s research (PDF) into so-called VTOL—short for vertical takeoff and landing, or more colloquially, fly-ing cars—inspired at least one billionaire technologist. After reading the white paper, Google co-founder Larry Page secretly started and financed two Sili-con Valley startups, Zee Aero and Kitty Hawk, to develop the technology, Bloomberg Businessweek reported last summer.

Now Moore is leaving the confines of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, where he has spent the last 30 years, to join one of

Google’s rivals: Uber Technologies Inc. Moore is taking on a new role as direc-tor of engineering for aviation at the ride-hailing company, working on a fly-ing car initiative known as Uber Elevate. “I can’t think of another company in a stronger position to be the leader for this new ecosystem and make the urban electric VTOL market real,” he says.

Uber isn’t constructing a flying car yet. In its own white paper published last October, the company laid out a rad-ical vision for airborne commutes and identified technical challenges it said it wanted to help the nascent industry solve, like noise pollution, vehicle effi-ciency and limited battery life. Moore consulted on the paper and was impressed by the company’s vision and potential impact.

Moore acknowledged that many obstacles stand in the way, and they’re not only technical. He says each flying car company would need to independ-ently negotiate with suppliers to get prices down, and lobby regulators to certify aircrafts and relax air-traffic restrictions. But he says Uber, with its 55 million active riders, can uniquely

demonstrate that there could be a mas-sive, profitable and safe market. “If you don’t have a business case that makes economic sense, than all of this is just a wild tech game and not really a wise investment,” Moore says.

Uber’s vision is a seductive one, particularly for sci-fi fans. The com-pany envisions people taking conventional Ubers from their homes

to nearby “vertiports” that dot residen-tial neighborhoods. Then they would zoom up into the air and across town to the vertiport closest to their offices. (“We don’t need stinking bridges!” says Moore.) These air taxis will only need ranges of between 50 to 100 miles, and Moore thinks that they can be at least partially recharged while passengers are boarding or exiting the aircraft. He

also predicts we’ll see several well-engineered flying cars in the next one to three years and that there will be human pilots, at least managing the onboard computers, for the foreseea-ble future.

His move to Uber is a risky one. Moore says he’s leaving NASA one year before he’s eligible for retirement and walking away from a significant per-centage of his pension and free health care for life “to be in the right place at the right time to make this market real.” (Though it’s probably safe to say that Uber, with some $11 billion on its bal-ance sheet, is making it worth his while.) Moore seems to be disillusioned with NASA, saying the agency is leaving promising new aviation markets to the private industry. “It’s the federal gov-ernment who is best positioned to overcome extremely high levels of risks,” he says.

While NASA is larded with layers of bureaucracy and management, Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick has been closely involved in hatching his company’s flying car plans, Moore says.

Uber wants to develop flying cars

Irfan Bukhari The Peninsula

To accommodate the growing number of boats and ships in the country, around 1,000 new berths will

be developed at Al Ruwais, Al Wakrah, Al Khor and Al Dhak-ira harbours.

The project for providing more berthing spaces at the four harbours will be jointly executed by the Ministry of Transport and Communica-tions, Ministry of Municipality and Environment and Qatar Ports Management Company (Mwani Qatar).

Work on the project would start in the next few months and is expected to be completed in a year-and-a-half.

This was announced at a joint press conference addressed by Nasser Qadar, Director of Maritime Transport Licensing and Planning Depart-ment of the Ministry of Transport and Communica-tions, Mohamed Saeed Al Mohannadi, Director of Fisher-ies Department of the Ministry of Municipality and Environ-ment and Eng. Nabil Alkhaldi, Engineering Director of the Qatar Ports Management Com-pany (Mwani Qatar).

Eng. Nabil Alkhaldi said that following directives of Minister of Transport and Communica-tions H E Jassim Saif Ahmed Al Sulaiti, Mwani Qatar had been commissioned to prepare the necessary studies to initiate a project for ship and boat berthing at four of Qatar’s key fishing harbors.

He said that Mwani Qatar had done comprehensive plan-ning and technical studies under the supervision of the Ministry of Transport and Com-munications and engineering

designs and drawings of around 1,000 berths at four harbors had been approved.

Saeed Al Mohannadi said that four harbours had been selected on the basis of care-ful, detailed studies. “The new berthing spaces will be allocated to ship and boat owners. These spaces will be separate but adjacent to those berthing spaces which are used by fishermen,” said Al Mohannadi.

He said that the Ministry of Municipality and Environment in collaboration with the Min-istry of Transport and Communications and Mwani Qatar was all set to execute the project which would contrib-ute to providing solutions for ship and boat owners.

Nasser Qadir from the Min-istry of Transport and Communications said that efforts were accelerated to pro-vide solutions for ship and boat owners by allocating berthing locations for them seeing the growing number of registered private ships and boats.

→ Continued on page 6

1,000 berths to be set up for ships & boats

Fazeena Saleem The Peninsula

Some 200 new cases of kid-ney diseases are reported each year at Hamad Med-

ical Corporation (HMC) and the numbers have almost doubled during the past three years, says a senior official.

And nearly 1,000 patients with kidney diseases are on dialysis and another 140 are on waiting list for transplant. Separately around 10 children are in need of dialysis or a transplant.

“The number of people with kidney diseases are increasing. We have data from 2013 to 2016 and the number of new patients is increasing. Three years ago it was 100 who were in the initial stage of kidney diseases and now it is 200 a year. Also the number of patients need dialysis is increasing,” said Dr Hassan Al Malki, Adult Nephrology Con-sultant, Head of Nephrology Division, HMC while

announcing the activities for World Kidney Day (WKD) on March 9, to raise awareness among the public. Around eight to ten percent of the world’s population is affected by kidney diseases and the prevalence in Qatar is similar.

“We have about 800 patients on hemodialysis and there are 170 patients on peri-toneal dialysis. And 140 patients are on the waiting list for kidney transplant,” said Dr Mohamad Mahmood Alkadi, Consultant at HMC.

Hemodialysis is a dialysis machine and a special filter called an artificial kidney, or a dialyser, used to clean blood and peritoneal dialysis is a treatment for kidney failure that uses the lining of abdo-men, to filter blood inside the body. Between 4,500 and 5,000 appointments are seen at HMC’s 14 paediatric neph-rology clinics per year. Kidney diseases among children are due to congenital abnormal-ities — conditions that are present at birth.

→ Continued on page 7

Satish Kanady The Peninsula

QATAR Islamic Bank (QIB), the coun-try’s largest Shariah-compliant lender by assets, has selected Sheikh Abdulla bin Khaled bin Thani Al Thani as the new member of the bank’s board of directors. Sheikh Abdulla will repre-sent Al Naera Building Materials Company in the QIB board during the period 2017-2019.

The first meeting of the new board members selected Sheikh Jas-sim bin Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani as Chairman and Abdullatif bin Abdullah Al Mahmoud as the Vice-Chairman of the Bank. The board members: Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, Abdul Rahman Abdulla Abdul Ghani Al Abdul Ghani, Abdullatif bin Abdul-lah Al Mahmoud, Sheikh Abdulla bin Khaled bin Thani Al Thani, Abdulla Saeed Mohamad Al Eida, Sheikh Ali bin Ghanem bin Ali Al Thani, Moham-med bin Issa Al Mohannadi, Mansour Mohammed Al Musleh, Nasser Rashid Al Kaabi.

→ See also page 21

The Peninsula

Qatar witnessed a 16.8% increase in visitors in the period coinciding with

the month-long Shop Qatar fes-tival compared to the same period last year, Qatar Tourism Author i ty (QTA) sa id yesterday.

Similarly, the hospitality sector enjoyed a 70.5% occu-pancy rate as guests availed of the festival’s special rates and offers.

Growth in the number of vis-itors who are GCC nationals was evident in particular as 188,513 GCC nationals visited Qatar between January 7 and Febru-ary, 7 an increase of 23% in

comparison to the same dates last year.

Much of this growth came from the Saudi market, which brought a total of 133,849 visi-tors to Qatar over the entire month-long period of Shop Qatar.

Arrivals to Qatar peaked during the January school holi-day in Saudi Arabia, increasing by 43% in comparison to the Jan-uary school holiday period in 2016.

Hotel occupancy over this holiday period, both weekends included, averaged at 82.3%, with a peak mid-way through the holiday with occupancy rates above 90%.

Over the festival period, the direct impact of inbound tour-ism on the GDP was estimated

at QR1.06b—a tremendous increase from similar estimates

during previous festivals.→ Continued on page 4

200 new cases of kidney diseases every year

Surge in tourists from Saudi during Shop Qatar Festival

Sheikh Abdulla bin Khaled bin Thani Al Thani is QIB Director Board member

The project for providing more berthing spaces at the four harbours will be jointly executed by the Ministry of Transport and Communications, Ministry of Municipality and Environment and Qatar Ports Management Company (Mwani Qatar).

Representatives of government agencies, private partners, media, mall participants, local entrepreneurs and volunteers together with QTA officials at the closing ceremony at the City Centre Rotana.

1,000Nearly 1,000 patients withkidney diseases are on dialysis.

140are on waiting list for transplant.

10children are in need of dialysis or a transplant.

02 WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017HOME

Call to empower most vulnerable groups in societyMohammed Osman The Peninsula

The two-day “International Con-ference on Human Rights Approach to Conflict Situations in the Arab Region” concluded yesterday with a call for empow-

ering the most vulnerable groups to demand their rights and encouraging them for active participation in public life.

Member governments were asked to support efforts being made to prevent vio-lations of human rights and regional organisations to establish early warning centres. All actors should support activities and strategies aiming to disseminate the culture of human rights, review curriculum and education systems in order to enhance human rights culture, mutual respect, and tolerance, a recommendation suggested.

The second-day sessions of the con-ference, which hosted representatives of 18 Arab countries and around 320 repre-sentatives of governments and

organisations, witnessed discussions on a variety of topics related to human rights in conflict-hit areas in four working groups. The groups highlighted education and protection of children, protection of women, children and minorities in con-flict situation in three papers.

Working group two highlighted “Edu-cation under attack: How to protect the right to education in armed conflicts". While the third workshop addressed issues related to human rights approach to transitional jus-tice, and the last group focused on humanitarian aid in conflict affected areas in the Arab region bringing to the floor examples of successes and lessons, perspec-tives and challenges facing aids in internally displaced peoples in Syria and Yemen.

The final session included speeches and announcement of the final recom-mendations of the conference which called all parties involved in armed con-flicts to respect the international humanitarian law, human rights law and humanitarian principles.

All member counties were asked to use their maximum influence to make the parties in conflict areas to respect human rights and respond to the humanitarian needs of victims.

International community, human rights and civil society and national human rights organisations have also been urged to bear their responsibilities to protect and end violence and violations to the rights of vulnerable segments of societies including children and women, elders, people with special needs and minority groups. As well to provide with necessary financial, medical support and consolation to the victims of violations.

As one of the challenges the participants focused on during the last-day-sessions was the targeting of humanitarian organisation, sharing a statistic that 40% of aid workers were subjected to violence.

They called for documenting those attacks and for holding accountable the perpetrators as a deterrent to potential violators. In regard to this point the rec-ommendations prompted actors to ease access to reliefs without hindering relief trucks or targeting aid and medical employees working on the ground.

Participants also called, during the discussions, for respecting international humanitarian law, which they said would help alleviate the suffering and limit the killing and displacement of people. It

would also allow for the providing of humanitarian aid.

Member countries and concerned national and international human rights organisations were also urged to support and protect the right of education for deprived segments of the societies and work to achieve the goals of sustainable developments, protect schools and edu-cational institutions and ratify and implement the declaration of secured schools. The working group on education discussed topic entitled "Education Under Attack: How to Protect the Right to Edu-cation in Armed Conflict" and participants highlighted four broad topics which are accountability for education-related vio-lations in international law. The second topic was avoiding the use of school in mil-itary purposes. The third was engaging with non-state armed groups to encourage them to abide by the international law related to education, while the fourth was the role of civil society in promoting the right to education in areas of conflict.

Regarding transitional justices, the conference urged all actors to support inclusion of accountability and protection of human rights in any peace agreements and protect the rights of the victims.

The total number of refugees world-wide is now 65 million, 1% of the world’s population. Some 39% of those refugees are in the Middle East.

DOHA: Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani held via telephone a conver-sation with H R H Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khal-ifa, Crown Prince, Deputy Supreme Commander and First Deputy Premier of the Kingdom of Bahrain.

The call reviewed frater-nal ties between the two countries and means of boosting and enhancing them in addition to discussing a set of regional and international issues of mutual interest.

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs, H E Ahmed bin Abdullah bin Zaid Al Mahmoud, with UN Secretary-General's Envoy for Humanitarian Affairs, Dr Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Muraikhi, yesterday.

FROM LEFT: Kate Gilmorem, United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights; Dr Ali bin Sumaikh Al Marri, Chairman of the National Human Rights Committee, and Randa Siniora, Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Councelling’s General Director, at the conference yesterday.

Doha to host meet on impact of technology on nursing careDOHA: Qatar will host a GCC conference about the impact of technology on nursing care next Sunday at the Doha Sheraton Hotel.

The two-day conference, themed "The Evolution of Technology and its Impact on Humane Nursing Care", will bring together internationally renowned speakers who will provide advances in best practices and address the everyday challenges of using nursing technology to improve patient outcomes.

Dr Nabila Al Meer, the Deputy Chief Continuing Care Group and the Ministry of Public Health Nursing Affairs and Chairperson of the Con-f e r e n c e O r g a n i s i n g Committee, said the meet will include Qatar's 12th seminar about nursing care.

Emir holds talks with Bahrain Crown Prince

03WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017 HOME

04 WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017HOME

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs H E Ahmed bin Abdullah bin Zaid Al Mahmoud with Ambassador of the Republic of Turkey to Qatar, Ahmet Demirok, on the occasion of ending his tour of duty in the country. Talks covered bilateral relations and ways of enhancing them. The Deputy Premier wished the ambassador success in his future assignments and the relations between the two countries further development and growth. The meeting was attended by a number of officials at the Cabinet General Secretariat.

Deputy Prime Minister meets Turkish ambassadorOver 450 youth to take part in Empower 2017Raynald C Rivera The Peninsula

The annual youth-led Empower 2017 con-ference organised by Reach Out To Asia (ROTA) will bring

together more than 450 youth from various countries to the three-day event under the theme ‘Sustainable Tourism for Development: A Youth Perspec-tive,’ ROTA announced yesterday.

The conference, to be held from March 2 to 4 at the Hamad bin Khalifa University Student Center, will see the participa-tion of 350 youth from Qatar selected from more than 1,000 applicants from 55 countries, Mohamed Abdulla Saleh, National Program Director at ROTA said at a press conference yesterday.

The theme of the conference coincides with the United Nations (UN) declaration of 2017 as the ‘International Year of Sus-tainable Tourism for Development’ in order to high-light the role of the tourism sector in advancing economic, social and environmental sus-tainability. “ROTA firmly believes in investing in the lead-ers of tomorrow, and Empower underscores the importance of youth empowerment and lead-ership. Sustainable tourism was selected as the theme for this year’s conference as it aligns with ROTA’s mission to address skills development, education, and investment in youth to motivate them to utilise their capabilities to achieve success and independence,” said Saleh.

Essa AI Mannai, Executive Director of ROTA, and Dr Kha-lid AI Sulaiti, General Manager

of the Cultural Village Founda-tion-Katara, will give the opening speech.

During the gathering, youth will explore ways to become engaged in sustainable tourism to promote cultural heritage, and contribute to economic growth and environmental pres-ervation with the aim of achieving Qatar’s sustainability objectives and the United Nations Sustainable Develop-ment Goals (SDGs).

“The conference will high-light the key role of youth in promoting sustainable tourism, and will serve as an impactful tool to engage youth as leaders

and empower them to take action towards a successful and sustainable future,” Saleh added.

For Empower 2017, ROTA has partnered with Injaz Qatar; Qatar Tourism Authority; Aspire Logistics; Ministry of Municipal-ity and Environment, Doha Film Institute; Qatar Museums; Katara; Bedaya; Qatar Develop-ment Bank; VCUQatar; Qatar L e a d e r s h i p A c a d e m y ; ILLAFTrain Center; Silatech; Qatar Foundation; Ministry of Culture and Sports; and Msheireb Properties.

The workshops will cover numerous topics including Tourism and Social Media; The Marketing and Branding of Nations; Arts for Sustainable Tourism; Intercultural Learning in Sustainable Tourism; Lead-ership from a Different Perspective; and Effective Team Work. Among the speakers at the conference are accom-plished columnist and author Tahani Al Hajri and Khalifa Saleh Al Haroon, founder and CEO of ILoveQatar.net and I Love Qatar Network.

GCC Traffic Week to kick off on March 12Sidi Mohamed The Peninsula

The GCC Traffic Week will kick off on March 12 under the theme “Your

Life is a Trust”, which has been designed by Qatar General Directorate of Traffic.

The theme is for 2017-18. The logo of the traffic safety campaign features a heart which symbolises life. In the heart there lies a collage of var-ious things like mobile, speed, social media, Lieutenant Colo-nel Mohammed Radi Al Hajri, Director of Media and Aware-ness told The Peninsula.

The GCC Traffic Week pro-vides an opportunity for GCC traffic officials to discuss and exchange their views and expe-riences about traffic safety.

“Since we started the cam-paign, the violation of parking at mosques has decreased more than 65 percent. We received very good response from Imams and mosques,” Al Hajri said.

He said that there were some people who still violate and park in the mosque premises, "but we have caught those violators and we hope in

this year this phenomenon will disappear.”

He further said that many entities such as the Ministry of Education and Higher Educa-tion and universities were cooperating with the traffic department to spread road safety message. “The decrease in traffic accidents last year happened due to collective efforts," he noted.

And about the change in traffic laws which will make wearing seatbelts on backseat obligatory, he said that some articles could be amended in the traffic law depending on sit-uation as the aim of the department was to curb violations.

“Our aim is to maintain people's safety and that is why we are taking care of seatbelt and urging people to use it in all situations."

He said the department was also focusing on annual vehi-cles technical check-ups because it was also related to people's safety.

“We urge youth to use seat-belt. They are wearing seatbelts while in desert on hunting spree but usually do not use them in the city,” he concluded.

FROM LEFT: Ahmed Allenjawi, Advisory Board Member, Mohammed Abdulla Saleh, National Programs Director at ROTA, Dalal Mohammad, Empower Youth Planning Committee Member, and Rehab Al Naemi, Advisory Board Member, at the press conference yesterday. Pic: Kammutty V P / The Peninsula

Shopping main attraction of tourism→ Continued from page 1

The direct impact from inbound tourism for August 2016, during which the Qatar Summer Festival was held, was estimated to be QR639m. This growth and strong sec-tor performance was supported by Shop Qatar fes-tival activities, offerings and regional promotions, in addi-tion to overlapping festivals around Qatar such as Souq Waqif Spring Festival and Souq Al Wakrah Festival.

“Festivals and events are a key component of Qatar’s urban and family entertain-ment portfolio, which the country has taken great strides in developing in line with the Qatar National Tour-ism Sector Strategy and the needs of our visitors. Through exciting new additions to our calendar of events, as well as new retail, entertainment and cultural products, we are building all the ingredients needed for a touristic expe-rience reflective of Qatar and its people,” said Hassan Al Ibrahim, Chief Tourism Development Officer at QTA.

QTA introduced the annual shopping festival fol-lowing a notable growth in Qatar’s retail sector, matched by a strong contribution to tourism. According to Qatar’s draft Tourism Satellite Account, shopping repre-sented a larger portion of inbound and domestic tour-ism spending in 2014 than tourist accommodation or F&B, contributing QR6b to the economy.

Rashed AlQurese, QTA’s Chief Marketing and Promo-tion Officer, added, “The collaborative spirit shown from the various private and public sector partners for the first edition of Shop Qatar has yielded remarkable results across several sectors. This give me confidence that together we can continue to expand this festival in the years to come and reinforce Qatar’s position as a destina-tion of choice for shoppers and families.”

Forty-two small busi-nesses were also present at the festival, showcased at the thirty pop-up shops spread across five of the participat-ing malls. Throughout the early weeks, 23,000 people enjoyed the daily shows of the African Circus in the outdoor area surrounding Hyatt Plaza.

A total of 30,740 tickets were sold for live concert and shows.

The conference, to be held from March 2 to 4, will see the participation of 350 youth from Qatar selected from more than 1,000 applicants from 55 countries.

05WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017 HOME

Public Wi-Fi launched at The Pearl-QatarThe Peninsula

Ooredoo and UDC yesterday launched public Wi-Fi solu-tion on The Pearl-Qatar for vis-

itors and shoppers. The Cisco-based Ooredoo

Supernet solution, which can be accessed by anybody with a compatible device, delivers incredible Internet speeds and a smooth browsing experience. Full coverage is already live across the island’s three retail hubs, namely Porto Arabia, Medina Centrale and Qanat Quartier.

By facilitating the deploy-ment of Internet access points across the island, Ooredoo has brought the award-winning power and performance of the Ooredoo Supernet to The Pearl-Qatar so that people can enjoy the Internet wherever they are.

Waleed Mohamed Ebrahim Al Sayed, Chief Executive Officer, Ooredoo Qatar, said: “Ooredoo is focused on deliver-ing the best data experience for our customers across Qatar by providing the most-advanced networks and the most conven-ient access wherever they are. This far-reaching agreement with UDC shows that compa-nies in Qatar are increasingly deploying advanced technology to improve people’s lives, and we’re very proud to be working with UDC on this landmark pub-

lic Wi-Fi project.” Ibrahim Jassim Al Othman,

UDC President and Chief Exec-utive Officer, said: “Our vision for The Pearl-Qatar is to pro-v i d e a n i n c r e d i b l e family-friendly atmosphere for visitors across the island, and superfast, reliable, affordable Internet plays a role in that. When people shop, eat out or arrange to meet friends on The Pearl-Qatar, they can now access the Ooredoo Supernet to choose where they want to go and find out about new events taking place in this exciting community.”

The state-of-the-art Wi-Fi solution has been designed to provide a superior customer experience for The Pearl-Qatar’s guests, and is the latest in a series of innovations designed to ensure that the urban devel-opment remains one of the most desirable destinations in Qatar.

Officials at the launch of the public Wi-Fi solution at The Pearl-Qatar yesterday.

Minister of Transport and Communications H E Jassim bin Saif Al Sulaiti participated yesterday in the ministerial meeting of United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)’s Inland Transport Committee which was held in Geneva under the title of “Past and Future of UNECE Inland Committee”. The meeting was organised to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Inland Transport Committee, take stock of its past and decide on its future mission until 2030. The meeting coincided with the 79th annual meeting of Inland Transport Committee. Ambassador Ali Khalfan Al Mansouri, the Permanent Representative of Qatar to the United Nations Office in Geneva, also attended the meeting.

Al Sulaiti attends UNECE meet

Annual Arab Future Cities Summit in AprilThe Peninsula

Under the theme ‘Advanced Technologies Transform-ing Qatar’s Future’, the

6th Annual Arab Future Cities Summit Qatar 2017 will cover topics that focus on sustainable city infrastructure development leading to economic growth, improved connectivity and over-all a better quality of life. The two-day summit will be held on April 10 and 11.

With 1 million visitors expected to throng to Qatar for the World Cup 2022, there has been a surge in infrastructure

spending across key segments such as transport, broadly encompassing rail, roads, airport and ports; utilities covering tel-ecommunications, power generation and water; hospitals, real estate and stadiums.

With an estimated budget of $35bn-45bn, the Qatar Rail Development Programme is one of the most expensive infrastruc-ture projects underway in the state. Few years back, Qatar Tour-ism Authority (QTA) had announced that by the year 2022, the country would be investing $20bn-25bn in new tourism projects. Recently the Ministry of

Finance in Qatar announced that the government is currently spending $500m a week on cap-ital projects in preparation for World Cup games with more than $200bn to be spent on stadiums and major projects such as roads, a new airport and hospitals.

Governments across nations are adopting solutions and undertaking measures to pro-mote smart city development and it has been estimated that over the next 20 years, cities across the world will invest approximately $41 trillion on technologies to offer improved services.

Ooredoo has brought the award-winning power and performance of the Ooredoo Supernet to The Pearl-Qatar.

06 WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017HOME

Help to travellers

The clinic provides travellers with counselling, vaccinations and other preventive measures.

Spanish Foreign Ministry Protocol Director Juan Sunye Mendia received a copy of credentials of Mohammed Jaham Al Kuwari as Qatar’s ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to Spain. The head of protocol wished the ambassador success in his mission, and further progress and development for bilateral relations between the two countries.

Qatar’s Spain envoy presents credentials

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met Minister of Education and Higher Education H E Dr Mohammed bin Abdul Wahed Al Hammadi, and the delegation accompanying him on a visit to Azerbaijan. The minister also learned about primary and higher education systems in Azerbaijan and visited a number of schools and institutes as well as Baku State University and met its Arab Studies students.

Education Minister visits Azerbaijan

The Peninsula

A number of leading bio-medical experts will address topics relating

to precision medicine during second edition of Qatar Biobank Congress, under the theme ‘The Impact of Biobanking on Precision Medicine Initiatives.’

The conference will bring together top medical practi-tioners and researchers in biobanking, genomics and per-sonalised medicine to discuss biomedical science and grow-ing use of precision medicine to improve clinical outcomes.

The event will be held from March 14 to 15 at Qatar National Convention Centre (QNCC).

During the conference, Dr Asmaa Al Thani, Chair of Qatar Genome Programme Commit-tee and Board Vice Chairperson of Qatar Biobank, will explain how Qatar Population Biobank Project aims to establish a research enterprise platform to achieve improvement in diagnostic and prognostic intelligence.

Topic of ‘Population Biobanks: Goals and Perspec-tives’, Professor Elio Riboli, Professor of Cancer Epidemi-ology and Prevention at Imperial College London, will highlight how population cohorts have contributed to scientific understanding of causes of chronic diseases.

The Peninsula

People travelling to countries where vac-cinations and other preventive measures are required can now

visit Travel Clinic at Hamad Medical Corporation’s (HMC) Communicable Diseases Center (CDC).

The clinic opened on Mon-day and provides travellers with counselling, vaccinations and other preventive measures. It also provides assessment and medical care for travellers returning with travel-related infections.

The clinic will operate on an appointment basis where patients will be able to call and book the time. Those accessing clinic’s services will be able to attain a certificate of vaccina-tion (required for travel to some countries) as well as disease prevention advice for the coun-tries they will visit.

These include vaccines for measles-mumps-rubel la (MMR), diphtheria-tetanus-per-tussis, polio, hepatitis A and B and yearly flu shot. Some addi-tional vaccines for yellow fever, rabies, and diptheria may also be required, depending on the

country being visited. Vaccina-tions will be free for all, unless medication required is special-ised (for example Japanese Encephalitis).

Travellers can take appoint-ments at clinic by calling 40254003 between 7 am and 7 pm. The clinic will operate only Mondays initially, with a view to expand as demand grows.

The clinic, the first of its kind in Qatar, will provide highly specialised advice and treatment for those returning from overseas trips who sus-pect they may have a travel-related illness such as persistent diarrhea, rash, and fever.

“Our aim is to protect the health of travelers by provid-ing exemplary clinical care along with specific advice and information for each traveler,” said Dr Muna Al Maslamani, Medical Director of the CDC.

The Peninsula

Qatar University College of Medicine (QU-CMED) Professor of Biochemistry

Prof Bared Safieh-Garabedian (pictured) was invited as a spe-cial speaker at the Joint Molecular Biosciences and Bio-medicine Seminar Series, which was recently organised and hosted by Cardiff University School of Biosciences.

Prof Bared delivered lecture entitled “Targeting unresolved neuroinflammation: Can

Thymulin related peptide (PAT) come to the rescue?”.

Dr Bared noted that inflam-mation, as part of innate immune response, plays an important role in homoeostatic processes such as tissue repair. He also noted that chronic inflammation is tightly linked to neurological diseases, cardio-vascular diseases, metabolic diseases, chronic inflammatory diseases, and cancer.

Continued from page 1Nasser Qadir from the

Ministry of Transport and Communications said a committee, established by Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdul-lah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani, formed a work group that conducted studies and drafted plans for the estab-lishment of the berthing spaces. “Headed by the Min-istry of Transport and Communications, the com-mittee has representation from all governmental bod-ies concerned,” he added.

He said berthing loca-tions had been marked at four harbors of Al Ruwais, Al Khor, Al Zakhira and Al Wakra. “These harbors are state owned, operated by Ministry of Municipality and Environment and are increasingly frequented by many ships,” he observed.

Qadar said the project and its budget had been approved, and implemen-tation was commissioned by Ministry of Transport and Communications to Mwani Qatar.

Alkhaldi, Engineering Director of Mwani Qatar said the project would be executed on public-private partnership basis and would begin in few months. “Work is underway for public ten-der, followed by the award of the project, which should be completed in less than a year and half,” he said.

Alkhaldi said Mwani Qatar, supervised by Minis-try of Transport and Communications, would be complying with the use of the best materials and mak-ing sure those materials meet the highest safety and quality standards in order to ensure they are effective, s u s t a i n a b l e a n d eco-friendly.

The Peninsula

Ford Motor Company handed over an amount of $15,000 as grant towards

green mangroves project in Qatar as part of the 2016 Ford Motor Company Conservation and Envi-ronmental Grants initiative.

The recipient from Qatar, Lina Al Tarawneh for her project “Green Mangroves,” was handed over a cheque by Ford’s Regional Sales Manager Ramzy Hadi and Ian Partridge; General Manager, Almana Motors with Dr Aurora M de Castilla, initiative’s juror in Qatar and Principal Investigator, Acting Research Director, Envi-ronmental & Chemical Sciences Group for Qatar Environment & Energy Research Institute.

“Green Mangroves” will use the grant for learning through free kayak trips to Purple Island, where expeditions will help raise awareness, and save

the mangroves in Al Khor region.

Recipients of Ford’s Conser-vation and Environmental Grants

were applicants from Kuwait, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia with a total of $120,000 made available.

QU-CMED professor attends biomedicine seminar

Biomedical experts to adress precision medicine

HMC opens Travel Clinic for vaccination

Ford Motor Company gives $15,000 as grant for mangroves project

FROM LEFT: Ramzy Hadi, Ford Middle East’s Regional Sales Manager; Lina Al Tarawneh, Dr Aurora M. de Castilla, and Ian Partridge, General Manager, Almana Motors.

Committee drafts plan for setting up berthing spaces

07WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017 HOME

Multipurpose utility

The cloth used on outer side of jacket is “water proof. The jacket is specially designed to keep warm in winter and can be worn in rainy season as well.

The Peninsula

The Embassy of Bangladesh in Qatar yesterday observed National Martyrs’ Day and

International Mother Language Day. The programme started with hoisting of Bangladesh National Flag at half mast by Ambassador Ashud Ahmed at the Embassy premises in presence of embassy officials and a good number of expatriate Bangladeshi nationals.

They stood in solemn silence for one minute as a mark of pro-found respect to memories of the 1952 Language Movement

martyrs of Bangladesh. Prayeres were s also offered for salvation of the departed souls. Messages from president, prime minister, foreign minister, state minister for foreign affairs of Bangladesh were read out on the occasion.

A meeting on significance of the National Martyrs’ Day and International Mother Language Day was organised . The speakers highlighted contribution of lan-guage martyrs towards the birth of an independent Bangladesh.

In his speech the Ambassador recalled supreme sacrifice of the language martyrs of Bangladesh

and mentioned that the 1952 Lan-guage Movement is considered as the most decisive episode and a turning point in the history of Bangladesh as its spirit led to the independence of Bangladesh. He also recalled the immense contri-bution of the Father of the Nation of Bangladesh Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman during 1952 language movement. He thanked expatriate of Bangladesh in Qatar for their hard labour and contribution to the nation build-ing. An audio visual presentation on International Mother Language Day was screened during the event.

Continued from page 1“We have four patients on

hemodialysis and six on Perito-neal dialysis. They need continues dialysis or transplant. We encour-age families to donate for their children. At present we have 15 children who have undergone kidney transplant and among them three were done in Doha. Since three years they are doing well. But those who went out-side in some countries they receive non related kidney transplant, some of them are coming with lots of complica-tions and one child of 12 years died. After being undergone dialysis for 12 years he went for a transplant outside the coun-try and died and until now we don’t have a report for the cause of death,” said Dr Bajes Y.

Hamad, Senior Consultant – Paediatrics at HMC.

“Major cause for paediatric kidney diseases are congenital abnormalities and we have very good antenatal program and diagnose cases at a very early stage as from the second trimes-ter of pregnancy and so we avoid late diagnosis,” he added.

However among adults chronic diseases such as diabe-tes and hypertension are a major cause for developing kidney disorders.

“Prevalence of kidney dis-eases in Qatar is similar to other countries. Diabetes, hypertension and obesity are the most common reasons for kidney diseases. Also some conditions like infections are related to the immune level of the body,” said Dr Awais Nau-

man, Consultant at HMC. HMC will hold several aware-

ness activities to mark this year’s WKD, being observed worldwide under the theme ‘Kidney diseases and obesity: Healthy lifestyle for healthy kidneys.’ The events will be held at hospitals, schools and primary health centers. A walk-athon will be held at Katara on March 10 encouraging people to adopt a healthy lifestyle.

Dr Adel Aziz, consultant at HMC said, “Healthy food and exercise are way to avoid obes-ity, hypertension and diabetes. If they have a kidney disease, they need to get a review with the doc-tor. Follow his advice to get medicine properly and avoid talking pain killers. Drinking proper amount of water is also essential.”

Amna Pervaiz Rao The Peninsula

The demand for new winter ‘Farwa jackets’ and ‘Reverse umbrel-las’ has started picking up in stores, hyper-

markets and Souqs as Qatar residents have started feeling the chill and also want to enjoy the rains.

“Winter Farwa Jacket” is similar to a full length Arabic coat. It is made of wool and internally padded with fur. Its relatively heavier (weight approximately 3kg) due to its internal fur and is perfect to keep one warm in the coldest of winters.

Muhammad, salesman at Hussain Textile and Tailor Store at Souq Waqif said: “Farwa jack-ets are imported from Syria. The cloth used on the outer side of jacket is “water proof”, this jacket is specially designed to keep warm in winter and can be worn in rainy season as well. For young boys the jacket costs

QR120, for men full-length jacket is for QR250 and for children the jacket costs QR100.”

“Most of the Qatari men visit my shop to buy special ‘Woolen Ghutra Scarf’, which is for QR65 and Qatari women buy special cape shawls made up of wool and leather to wear over Abaya, each cape shawl is for QR65,” he added.

Sales of umbrellas are also on the rise, with people looking to make the most of the pleasant weather. Mostly, children look for umbrellas of their own choice to carry them to schools. Lulu Hypermarket is providing spe-cial customised umbrellas and a special type of umbrella called

‘Reverse Umbrella’.“Reverse umbrella”, leaves

wet side of the canopy contained on the inside when closed. It

doesn’t drip on the floor or soak anything it touches. It opens on the upper side thus avoiding risk of poking passers-by in the eye

and head. It is double coated, it is strong. A click of the button and the umbrella restores back to its open shape.

“We have a wide range of umbrellas starting from QR24 to QR80. Customised umbrellas are available for QR26 and normal sized umbrellas are for QR37. The special ‘Reverse Umbrella’ cost QR 80,” said a salesgirl at Lulu Hypermarket.

Muhammad Uzair, salesman at Tanoob Store at Souq Waqif said: “Umbrellas from China are available at our store in all sizes. They are priced between QR10 and QR25. Umbrellas for children are for QR10, Normal sized umbrella are for QR15 and good for two umbrella is for QR25.”

Jamshed Abrahim, salesman at Al- Zainy Trading at in Souq Waqif told The Peninsula: “The most selling item at my shop is ‘Pashmina Shawl’. One Pashmina Shawl costs QR15. Tourists buy these colourful, light weighted and warm shawls the most. Peo-ple come and buy these shawls in bulk as well. Per dozen of these shawls is available for QR160. Good quality woolen caps are for QR10 and other caps are for QR8 each.”

Demand for farwa jackets & reverse umbrella rises

Reverse umbrella and (right) Farwa jacket displayed at one of the stores in Doha.

Bangladesh Embassy marks National Martyrs' Day

Congenital abnormalities major cause of paediatric kidney diseases

The Ambassador of Bangladesh to Qatar Ashud Ahmed hoisting the national flag of Bangladesh at half mast on the occasion of the National Martyrs’ Day and the International Mother Language Day 2017 at the Embassy premises.

From left: Dr. Abdel Ashour Abdelaziz, Consultant Medicine, Dr. Awais Nauman, Consultant Medicine, Dr Hassan Ali M H Al Malki, Senior Consultant Nephrologist, Dr. Mohamad Mahmood T A Al Kadi, Consultant Medical Education, and Dr Bajes Y. Hamad, Senior Consultant Paediatrics, at a press conference of World Kidney Day at Hamad bin Khalifa Medical City yesterday.Pic Kammutty VP / The Peninsula

An Israeli court’s verdict yesterday sentencing an Israeli soldier to eighteen months in jail for killing a Palestinian shows the extreme partiality and callousness of the Israeli judicial system

towards Palestinians. The case attracted global attention due to the sheer brutality and cold-bloodedness of the murder because the Israeli soldier, a Defence Force medic, had shot the Palestinian in the head when he was immobilised on the ground, last year. The killing was captured on video and widely shared by Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, triggering global condemnations and outrage. A case was registered against the soldier Elor Azaria.

The verdict is not surprising because Israel has been carrying out its repression of Palestinians with the aid of the judiciary, which has two different systems for Israelis and Palestinians. A manslaughter can carry a prison sentence of up to 20 years under Israeli law, but the prosecution in this case had sought a sentence of only between three-five years, while the court went for much less at eighteen months. In the verdict, the judge said that the soldier had been “aware” that his actions in shooting the wounded Palestinian assailant would result in loss of life, and the attacker posed no threat”, but still he gave the culprit a punishment

which was a mockery of the law.

The verdict comes as an incitement and encouragement to Israeli soldiers who have been accused of committing atrocities and human rights violations against Palestinians. The injustice of the judicial system was summed up by the father of the Palestinian who was killed when he said: “If

[a Palestinian] kills an animal... he would have gotten more time. They are laughing at us.” The verdict is also in keeping with the changed attitude of the Israeli public, which has shifted to the right in the recent years. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu too has been abetting violence against Palestinians. After the Israeli soldier’s arrest for manslaughter, the right-wing leader took the unusual step of calling the soldier’s

family to express his sympathy. Fortunately, some human rights activists exist in Israel who are sympathetic to the cause of Palestinians. “Sending Elor Azaria to prison for his crime sends an important message about reigning in excessive use of force,” said Sari Bashi, Human Rights Watch’s Israel and Palestine Advocacy.

Options are narrowing for Palestinians to seek justice and resist against Israel. The election of Donald Trump has dealt another blow.

The current scenario calls for drafting a new strategy to adapt the resistance movement to the new realities.

08 WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017VIEWS

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

CHAIRMANSHEIKH THANI BIN ABDULLAH AL THANI

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

editorinchief@pen.com.qa

ACTING MANAGING EDITORMOHAMMED SALIM MOHAMED

msalim@pen.com.qa

Abetting crime

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Seven million Yemenis do not know where their next meal will come from and are ever closer to starvation in a country of 27 million people.

Jamie McGoldrickUN Humanitarian Coordinator in Yemen

An Israeli court’s verdict sentencing a soldier to eighteen months in jail for killing a Palestinian makes a mockery of justice.

For the last several years it has been increasingly common to hear Israe-lis and Palestinians alike say that the two-state solution to their struggles is dead and that the time has come

to discuss a one-state solution. US President Donald Trump acknowledged that trend dur-ing a news conference Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by say-ing that he is “looking at two states and at one state” while remaining open to whichever suits the parties.

There’s just one problem: “One-state solu-tion” means something almost completely different on each of the two sides. Years of negotiation and debate have created the gen-eral contours of a two-state solution, but when people speak of one-state options, they lack that common ground.

On Thursday, US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said the US sup-ports a two-state solution, but “we are thinking out of the box as well.” What might that mean for the Palestinians, for starters? (I’ll restrict this discussion to vaguely realistic visions that could be reached by compromise, not force — so I won’t consider the disappear-ance of either the Jewish state or the Palestinian national cause.)

For most Palestinian one-staters, the ideal is a democratic state offering equal citizen-ship rights to everyone living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, both Jews and Arabs. The state could be federated into two parts, so that each side would enjoy a majority in its own areas. Jerusalem might be treated as its own federal unit or divided between the two federations with shared responsibility for the Temple Mount.

In this picture, all citizens would be allowed to travel freely through the state and across federation lines. Probably all would be allowed to live wherever they chose.

This version of Israel-Palestine wouldn’t necessarily have a Jewish majority. Palestini-ans know that Israelis are afraid a single state would eventually be taken over by a Palestin-ian majority, which would make them into a minority.

The solution would be a constitution that guaranteed the federation’s continued exist-ence even as demographics change. The Israeli part would keep its Jewish character no matter what.

Complicated problems present them-selves at once, of course. For example, what if population movement rendered a Pales-tinian majority even within the Israeli side of the confederation? That could perhaps be overcome by making the federation vir-tual rather than purely geographical — or even by restricting how many people could live in any part.

Reasonable Palestinians understand that even to consider such a deal, Israelis would have to be able to keep important symbols of the Jewish state, such as the Law of Return, which allows every Jew the right to

Mideast can’t agree what one-state solution meansNoah FeldmanBloomberg

immigrate. But that would have to be matched by some provision for refugee Palestinians in Jordan and Lebanon to return home. The numbers could possi-bly be managed or spread out over time.

When it comes to defense, things get messy fast. No Palestinians I know are willing to contemplate asingle state in which Israelis keep permanent control of the army and the police. Some might be willing to allow the outside borders to be controlled by Israel for the time being. But the long-term goal for Pales-tinians is a truly shared sovereignty, which would require something like an integrated military command.

Most Israeli one-staters see the world very, very differently. Right-wing Israelis typically imagine that there would be no single Palestinian entity, just local government in Palestinian areas. Left-wing Israeli one-staters can imagine a federated country, but with Israel continuing to control the army and the national police force (not to

mention the nuclear arsenal) for the fore-seeable future.

Most Israeli one-staters are also unwilling to imagine

Israel as anything other than a Jewish state. After all, the point of Zionism was to create a Jewish-majority homeland. For them, Jewish sover-eignty must always ultimately trump Palestinian sovereignty, both symbol-ically and practically.

Israelis understand that someday there may be more Palestinians than Israelis. The liberal democratic Israeli one-staters would like to use the one-state solution to ensure that Israel remains democratic and Jewish even if and when that happens.

In short, both of these perspectives on one state depend on the dream that the other side will give up on some-thing it has long considered basic in exchange for peaceful coexistence: Palestinians hope Israelis will give up or modify the need for total Jewish sovereignty. Israelis hope Palestinians will give up or modify the goal of unfettered self-determination.

The point isn’t that these dreams are impossible, or even mutually exclusive. Nor are they necessarily unappealing. It’s that both dreams are further from present reality than what the boring old two-state solution imagines.

If reconceiving the solution helps solve the problem, no one person could be against trying. But before getting carried away, the Trump administration should realise just how far apart the one-state visions are from each other. And it should remember that in the Middle East, more than almost anywhere else, the situation can always get worse.

The writer is a Bloomberg view columnist.

He is a professor of constitutional and

international law at Harvard University and

was a clerk to US Supreme Court Justice

David Souter.

One-state solution means something almost completely different on each of the two sides. Years of negotiation and debate have created the general contours of a two-state solution, but when people speak of one-state options, they lack that common ground.

ED ITOR IAL

A Palestinian woman and a child walking in the Bani Naaim village with the Israeli settlement of Bani Hever, southwest of the Israeli occupied West Bank city of Hebron, seen in the background.

09WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017 OPINION

in assets. “Snapchat is going to have to continue to be really innovative and distinctive. It’s going to be very tough to trump Facebook.”

Snap declined to comment for this story.Snap first signaled its new focus with the Sep-

tember reveal of Spectacles, funky sunglasses with an embedded video camera for posting to the Snap-chat app. The company spent $184 million on research and development last year, nearly half its revenue. Augmented reality, which refers to compu-ter-generated images overlaid on real surroundings and viewed through a smartphone or special glasses, is a big part of the plan. Snap’s “lenses” image-over-lay feature has been a hit, and gives Snap an advertising format that’s unique, at least for now.

“If you’re going to make the bet longer-term on Snap, you are betting they are going to come up with innovative products that Facebook can’t copy,” said Nabil Elsheshai, senior equity analyst at Thriv-ent Financial, who is considering whether to recommend that his firm buy Snap’s IPO.

Facebook-owned Instagram last year rolled out a feature called Stories, modeled after Snapchat’s feature by the same name. Snapchat had about 100 million fewer downloads than Instagram in 2016, according to market research firm App Annie.

Snap had 158 million daily active users in the fourth quarter, up just 3 percent from the previous quarter, compared to 14 percent growth during the same period in 2015, according to Snap’s IPO filing. New gadgets that offer more ways to interact with Snapchat could help attract new users and get exist-ing users to spend more time on the app.

“Ultimately, that’s what advertisers are going to be looking at,” said Douglas Melsheimer, managing director at investment bank and consulting firm Bulger Partners. Snap, along with Facebook and host of online rivals ranging from Google to Buzz-Feed, is capitalizing on the shift of video advertising dollars from traditional television to the internet.

Snap’s IPO filing reads “as if all the hard things in front of them that they have to do are already done,” said Rett Wallace, cofounder and chief exec-utive at Triton Research. But, he said, that’s not the case. “How will they hold up against all the guys you don’t want to be fighting against in the world - Facebook, Google and Apple?”

The Brazilian hangover: When the party ends

In a world inevitably multilateral such as ours, regional powers are supposed to have their share of responsibilities in order to build more plural paths towards a fairer and more peaceful international political environment.

Therefore, Brazil is expected to have a significant role in international politics. However, the crisis that the country is currently going through structurally prevents it from fulfilling this expectation.

Brazil is melting down, to put it softly. A euphe-mistic image is that the country is waking up after a huge party, with a terrible hangover, and now has to face a very hard reality.

In fact, looking at Rio de Janeiro, the former host of the Olympic Games, the metaphor is indeed real-ity. Unsurprisingly, Rio is the epitome of the Brazilian tragedy. Until recently, both Brazil and Rio were in the spotlight of the international stage, receiving a lot of attention and investments.

However, turning this promising situation into a sustainable reality was simply crushed when the real party that the country was enjoying ended. Brazil was enjoying a boom in its exports of com-modities thanks to the high demand in China. As soon as the Chinese demand decreased, the impact was rapidly felt.’

The situation in Rio is tragic. Since the state’s economy is highly dependent on oil sales, the decrease of oil prices internationally, and alleged cases of corruption, have led to a precarious financial situation. This resulted in a negative outlook in sev-eral areas — ranging from the state’s struggle to pay the wages and pensions of its public employees, to its crumbling health and security sectors.

It is not a coincidence that Rio’s acting Governor Francisco Dornelles declared a state of calamity in June 2016. In the political sphere, the picture is not any bet-ter. Last November, for example, Rio observed two of its major politicians, Sergio Cabral and Anthony Garotinho, both former governors, being arrested. This is definitely a microcosm of the crisis in Brazil. The country is in a dire economic situation. During the commodities boom,

Brazil missed the opportunity to make structural modi-fications in its economy and become less dependent on commodities’ price fluctuation.

Inversely, the country experienced, for instance, the deterioration of its manufacturing sector. Now, it struggles to produce a sustainable economic growth and generate enough jobs, which consequently stresses its public deficit.

In this situation, following Rio de Janeiro, two other states of the federation also declared a state of financial public calamity — Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul.

Therefore, three of the four largest state econo-mies of Brazil are unequivocally broke. Even Espirito Santo, a state often praised as a financial example, is under a significant security crisis, owing to a strike of police officers demanding better salaries. The conse-quences of the strike claimed at least 144 lives.

Notwithstanding, a pivotal dimension of the Bra-zilian crisis is the political sphere, which is in severe turmoil. In recent months, for instance, the country witnessed the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and the arrest of the former Lower House Speaker in Congress, Eduardo Cunha.

Moreover, Brazil’s biggest-ever corruption inves-tigation, known as Operation Carwash, is touching every major political party and profoundly shaking up the entire political establishment.

On the top of all this, once more Brazil is under a neoliberal restructuring in order to overcome the cri-sis, which is the equivalent of stepping forward when reaching the edge of a cliff.

Consequently, with its core pillars collapsed, it is

illusory to expect Brazil to have a major influence on the international stage.

In fact, for quite some time already, one can observe precisely the opposite — the retreat of Bra-zil’s global ambitions.

This is clearly noticeable by simply observing the financial structure of its diplomacy-making. For instance, the country has been decreasing its budget allocated to its Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Hence, Brazil is not only recruiting fewer diplo-mats, but also discussing the closure of several embassies and consulates around the world, mainly in Africa and in the Caribbean.

The recent constitutional amendment, blocking federal state budget increases for two decades, undoubtedly ensures that this trend is not ephemeral.

Most importantly, it should be noted that a fun-damental drive of Brazil’s diplomacy is its president. Therefore, any turbulence in the president’s office — or merely having someone that simply has no inclination to pursue proactive international policy-making, such as former President Rousseff — directly affects Brazil’s positioning in the world.

Therefore, it is not difficult to understand that a president who takes office through an impeachment process — like President Michel Temer did — is far from being in a solid position to perform presidential diplomacy with a global perspective.

On the contrary, the constant necessity of simply managing his political position domestically - as a consequence of a very disputed and polarising impeachment process — apprehends much more of

Snap Inc takes to the road in Lon-don on Monday to promote its initial public offering with a dar-ing proposition: That it can build hot-selling hardware gadgets and

ad-friendly software features fast enough to stay one step ahead of Facebook.

No longer just a purveyor of a smart-phone app for disappearing messages, Snap has hired hundreds of hardware engineers, built a secretive product devel-opment lab and scoured the landscape for acquisitions as it pursues its newly stated ambition to be “a camera company.”

These efforts, which are aimed at developing hardware and so-called aug-mented reality technologies, are central to the strategy of a company that is seeking a valuation of up to $22 billion in its early March IPO despite heavy losses and the specter of stiff competition for advertising dollars with a far-larger Facebook.

It is a big gamble and the odds against Snap are long.

There is little precedent for a company with its roots in software and social network-ing succeeding in the notoriously difficult consumer hardware business. Few US firms aside from Apple have made big profits on hardware, and camera and wearable gadget makers have much lower valuations than Snap is seeking. Once-hot camera start-up GoPro is a cautionary tale: its stock sits 61 percent below its 2014 IPO price.

More broadly, creating new products and features that have mass-market appeal and cannot be readily mimicked is a huge challenge, analysts say.

“It’s worrisome,” said Paul Meeks, chief investment officer at Sloy, Dahl & Holst, which manages more than $1 billion

Snap bets on hardware as Facebook threat looms

A view of the Olympic Aquatics Stadium, which was used for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Hardware is part of the answer. Snap has recruited hard-ware experts from Apple, Alphabet Inc’s Google, Nest and Motorola, according to an analysis of LinkedIn profiles. One former employee described ample resources and support from management for the hand-picked hardware teams.

Last spring, Snap set out to hire up to 300 hardware, aug-mented reality and virtual reality specialists in a single month, according to another former employee. It also set up Snap Labs, a group dedicated to working on secretive projects. Its members have reviewed acquisition targets in areas including wearable cameras, facial recognition and 3D scanning technol-ogy, according to people close to the discussions. Spectacles itself came from Snap’s acquisition of startup Vergence Labs in 2014. The sunglasses surprised even Snap’s earliest investors, who say hardware was not in Snap’s initial pitch to them.

“It was a disappearing messaging product, and that’s it,” said Jeremy Liew, a partner with Lightspeed Venture Part-ners, who made the initial venture investment into Snap. Like most Snap backers he lauded the Spectacles rollout. Snap has acquired at least 10 startups since 2014 according to firms tracking such deals, and M&A deal makers say Snap is one of the most active shoppers they have heard from.

Snap’s R&D investment as a percentage of revenue is far higher than what Facebook or Twitter were spending before they went public. One result of that investment has been a wave of patent filings — about 46 total, according to research firm CB Insights. They include eyewear patents for Specta-cles, as well as patents for photo and video-capture devices, and object and facial recognition, which is key to developing augmented reality technology.

One former employee said Snap is working to figure out ways to turn the warehouse of data it collects from Memo-ries, a feature for users to save photos on Snap’s server, into augmented reality or facial recognition applications.

Spectacles “opens the doors for augmented reality,” Elsheshai said. “That’s a different direction for the company than just adding more social media capabilities.”

The quirky popularity of Spectacles further endears users to Snapchat, he said, but doubted that such niche products can propel the user growth Snap needs in the long term.

The greatest impediment to Snap’s innovation efforts, however, may be its hefty losses: the company lost $515 mil-lion last year on $404 million in sales. Revenue from Spectacles. was “not material,” according to Snap’s IPO filing.

Snap, like Amazon.com, is expecting public investors to allow the company to lose money for years on the promise that more investment in innovation will pay off later.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OFFICETEL: 4455 7741 / 767FAX: +974 4455 7758

MANAGING EDITORTEL: 4462 7505

DEPUTY MANAGING EDITORTEL: 4455 7769

LOCAL NEWS SECTION TEL: 4455 7743

BUSINESS NEWS SECTION TEL: 4462 7535

SPORT NEWS SECTION TEL: 4455 7745

ONLINE SECTION TEL: 4462 7501info@pen.com.qa

PUBLIC RELATIONSTEL: 4455 7613pr@pen.com.qa

ADVERTISING DEPARTMENTTEL: 4455 7837 / 780FAX: 4455 7870 adv@pen.com.qa

CLASSIFIED DEPARTMENTTEL: 4455 7857adv@pen.com.qa

SUBSCRIPTION & DISTRIBUTIONTEL: 4455 7809 / 839FAX: 44557819info@tawseelqatar.com

D-RING ROADPOST BOX: 3488DOHA - QATAReditor@pen.com.qa

All thoughts and views expressed in these columns are those of the writers, not of the newspaper.

All correspondence regarding Views and Opinion pages should be mailed to the editorinchief@pen.com.qa

his attention and concerns than any international aspiration.

This situation structurally sup-presses Brazil’s ability to pursue a more relevant political objective in its international relations.

Consequently, a country that was once able to pursue a very proactive foreign policy - for instance, brokering, alongside Tur-key, a nuclear deal with Iran, or fostering a polycentric world with BRICS countries, engaged in the conception of an alternative inter-national financial architecture with the creation of the New Develop-ment Bank — is now unable to deal effectively with pressing crises in its neighbourhood, such as the one in Venezuela or in Haiti.

It is hardly believable that Bra-zil is going to recreate the necessary circumstances to pursue a prominent role in the interna-tional arena before having a new president in 2019.

Only someone assuming the presidential office directly through the popular vote can possibly ease political tensions in Brasilia, bring some predictability to the economy and, by its turn, set the conditions to project Brazil’s international influence.

Until then, unfortunately for the whole world, Brazil will simply remain adrift in the turbulent waters that are in the horizon of international politics.

The writer is a researcher and profes-

sor of international relations at the

Federal University of Latin-American

Integration (Brazil).

Heather SomervilleReuters

Ramon Blanco Al Jazeera

A country that was once able to pursue a very proactive foreign policy is now unable to deal effectively with pressing crises in its neighbourhood, such as the one in Venezuela or in Haiti.

WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017

DOHA JEWELLERY &WATCHES EXHIBITION20-25 February 2017, Doha Exhibition and Conference Center

Hublot dazzles with advertising campaign with Ragheb Alama

Luxury Swiss watch brand Hublot has undertaken yet another great project, its second Middle East and Africa advertis-ing campaign, featuring Friend of the Brand Ragheb Alama. Following its usual "first, different and unique" motto, Hublot connected East to West by shooting in Budapest-

Hungary, the campaign which was fully conceptualized and developed by a Middle East team.

Arab superstar and singing-sensation Ragheb Alama took the spotlight in the new campaign, embodying the elegant and refined Hublot man with a young spirit. In an elaborate production embod-ying the brand's Art of Fusion concept, the campaign brings past to future with the world acclaimed artist who has been in the Arabic pop music scene for more than 3 decades, always connecting gen-erations through his style, music and vibrant personality. Ragheb personifies the Hublot man who travels the world enjoying a par-ticular lifestyle, but who also shines in every day situations be it a casual walk out by the water or a busy day at work.

“Working with Ragheb Alama was a great experience as he has high standards and is a professional at everything he does. Having shot many video clips, he brought along an artistic sense and crea-tive insights to the shoot,” asserts Marco Tedeschi, Hublot Regional Director Middle East & Africa.

Well before his collaboration with Hublot, Ragheb was a big fan of the watchmaker and owned several Hublot watches. To him, this association is built on a family bond as well as mutual love and respect.

A well-seasoned musician having been in various clips, Friend

of the Brand Ragheb Alama admits: “Every photo shoot involves fatigue, focus and skill; but when backed by a passion for success, coupled with conveying the right image to the audience, no task is too daunting.”

The campaign boasts two looks based on different facets of a man’s life, and was shot in different ambiances and distinctive light-ing, creating a special mood for each look. Casually admiring a breathtaking twilight sinking behind a warmly-lit bridge by a vast lake; and elegantly descending the majestic steps of a lavish opera house.

“The shot by the bridge at sundown was quite amazing because natural light was exceptional that day and allowed an emotional feel to radiate through all the elements in the image,” says Marco Tedeschi.

With a big smile, Ragheb Alama confirms: “The looks fit my own style perfectly, as I feel at ease both in a tuxedo and in a casual chic outfit.” Adding: “We should cherish every moment in life and live it with love, dedication, hard work, peace and happiness.”

There is nothing the Hublot man cannot do on time with total style and elegance. For that is what the Art of Fusion is all about.

Elegant, modern, sporty, relaxed, chic, understated, sublime, magnetic, irresistible. These are just some of the adjectives and states of mind that the multifaceted and creative style of the new Big Bang “One-Click” 39mm evokes.

The now iconic Big Bang 39mm – designed for women with a stone-set bezel and no chronograph – is celebrating its eighth anni-versary with a new design.

These majestic masterpieces are available in Qatar with Al Majed Jewellery.

The case now boasts a diameter of 39mm. It elegantly adopts the design codes of its male alter ego, the Big Bang Unico launched in 2013. The screws, crown, indices and numerals have all been restyled. Tauter lines, giving a more resolute character. As a testa-ment to its versatility, it is paired with the "One-Click" strap - the patented attachment system which allows the strap to be changed

quickly and easily. The Big Bang “One-Click” 39mm has now added interchangeability to its bounty.

Eight different faces for an infinite choice of styles. Its 39mm case is available in Hublot gold – King Gold – or steel. To match the stone-set bezel, the pavé version of the case is also set with dia-monds. Its black or white dial is adorned with appliqués and

numerals which are illuminated by their Super Luminova® coat-ing. Another new feature is the addition of the HUB1710 automatic manufacture movement with the date at 3 o'clock. At its heart, the movement beats at 28,800 vibrations per hour, with a power reserve of 50 consecutive hours. For this initial release, the Big Bang “One-Click” 39mm sports a lined and structured natural rubber strap, in a colour to match its dial.

For 10 years, the Big Bang collection has proved that it suits every style. Pop art, Tutti Frutti, Denim, Embroidery. From the dress-iest outfits to the most understated, from the highly glamorous to sports chic, the Big Bang provides the perfect accessory. Your sta-tus as a fashion icon is now confirmed with the “One-Click” straps on the Big Bang 39mm. Materials, styles and shades, the "it Big Bang" will match every mood and every outfit. Feminine, classy, rock chick, glam, boho or chic. Day or night, in any scenario, it is transformed into a fashion must-have.

Which Big Bang are you? The art of style

with versatility

DOHA JEWELLERY & WATCHES EXHIBITION20-25 February 2017, Doha Exhibition and Conference Center

WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017

12 WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017MIDDLE EAST / AFRICA

Iraqi families who fled the front line gather in the village of Al Buseif, south of Mosul, during an offensive by Iraqi forces to retake the western side of the city from Islamic State (IS) group fighters, yesterday.

Internally-displaced

Geneva

AFP

Upcoming Syria peace talks remain focused on negoti-ating a "political transition" in the

war-ravaged country, the UN mediator's office said yester-day, following concern the UN was backing away from that aim.

United Nations envoy Staffan de Mistura had appeared reluctant in recent days to use the term "political transition" — a term the oppo-sition has linked to Syrian President Bashar Al Assad's removal from office.

De Mistura's chief of staff, Michael Contet, told reporters that Security Council Resolu-tion 2254, which calls for "negotiations on the political transition process", was still the basis for the talks set to begin in Geneva tomorrow.

Political transition and the opposition's insistence that Assad quit power have been a main sticking point in previous rounds of negotiations.The Damascus government has cat-egorically insisted that the president's fate is not up for dis-cussion. Since April 2016, when rival delegations were last in the Swiss city, the opposition has seen its position weakened substantially, as government

forces have recaptured terri-tory including the former rebel bastion of eastern Aleppo.

The opposition has also seen its biggest supporters —the United States and Turkey — show signs of shifting their positions, prompting concern in rebel ranks that their demands for Assad's departure may go unheard.

US President Donald Trump's administration has said it is "re-looking at every-thing" about its involvement in Syria, and Turkey last month said last month it was no longer "realistic" to insist on a solution to the Syria conflict that excluded Assad.

But Ahmad Ramadan, a spokesman for the opposition National Coalition, insisted that "the main issue in this round will be the political transition."

Cairo

AP

At least 74 bodies of Afri-can migrants have washed ashore in west-

ern Libya, the Libyan Red Crescent said yesterday, the latest tragedy at sea along a perilous but increasingly pop-ular trafficking route to Europe.

The bodies were found near the western Libyan city of Zaw-iya on Monday, Red Crescent spokesman Mohammed al-Mis-rati told The Associated Press, adding that he feared more might surface. He said a torn rubber boat, the kind that

usually carry up to 120 people, was found nearby.

The Red Crescent's branch in Zawiya said there are bodies still floating out at sea but it has no means to retrieve them.

The International Organiza-tion of Migration said the traffickers took the engine and left the boat to drift. Another 12 migrants remain missing and are "presumed drowned," and a sole survivor was transferred to a hospital in a coma, the UN migration agency said on Twitter.

The Red Crescent posted photographs of dozens of bod-ies in white and black bags, lined up along the shore. Al-Misrati

said the bodies would be taken to a cemetery for unidentified people in the capital, Tripoli. The Red Crescent appealed for help on Facebook, saying there are no vehicles to transport the bodies.

Al Misrati had initially said the bodies were found overnight Tuesday, but later clarified that they were recovered Monday afternoon and evening.

Libyan coast guard spokes-man Ayoub Gassim said over 500 migrants were rescued at sea on Friday and Saturday off the coast of Sebratha, a city to the west of Zawiya. The migrants' boats were about 8-11km from the coast.

Kurdish party co-leader given 5-month jailANKARA: A Turkish court yesterday ordered the co-leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) Selahattin Demirtas to serve five months in jail, in the latest legal blow to the politi-cian. Demirtas has been held in jail since November on charges of links to the out-lawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and making ter-ror propaganda on their behalf. If found guilty in that case, he risks up to 142 years in jail. In a separate case, a court in the eastern city of Dogubayazit convicted Demir-tas of denigrating the Turkish state and its institutions and sentenced him to five months in jail, state media said. Demir-tas is currently being held at a prison in Edirne, in northwest Turkey.

Kiir offers access to starving civiliansJUBA: South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir yesterday promised aid agencies safe access to hunger-stricken civilians, a day after his government declared a famine in parts of the war-ravaged country. South Sudan has been mired in civil war since 2013 and the United Nations said on Mon-day it was unable to reach some of the worst hit areas because of the insecurity. “The government will ensure that all the humanitarian and developmental organizations have unimpeded access to the needy population across the country,” Kiir said in a speech to parliament.

Uganda seizes a tonne of ivoryKAMPALA: Ugandan author-ities have seized more than a tonne of ivory, chopped into small pieces and treated with a chemical intended to pre-vent it being detected, the national wildlife protection service said. The haul was made in a suburb, before it could be loaded at Entebbe international airport and flown off to an unknown des-tination, the authorities said.

Harare

AFP

Zimbabwean President Rob-ert Mugabe, the world's oldest national ruler,

turned 93 yesterday, using a long and occasionally rambling inter-view to vow to remain in power despite growing signs of frailty.

He celebrated the day at a private event in Harare with a cake and presents from staff as supporters and ruling ZANU-PF party officials filled state media with gushing messages of good-will and congratulations.

During an hour-long, pre-recorded television interview broadcast late on Monday,

Mugabe appeared to grow increasingly tired, pausing at length between sentences and speaking with his eyes barely open.

"The call to step down must come from my party... In such circumstances I will step down," he said.

"They want me to stand for

elections... If I feel that I can't do it any more, I will say so to my party so that they relieve me. But for now, I think I can't say so.

"The majority of the people feel that there is no replacement — a successor who to them is acceptable."

Mugabe, who has ridiculed regular reports that he is close

to death, spoke about creating jobs in Zimbabwe's wrecked economy, the country's extreme cash shortage and his much-crit-icised wife.

Sitting in State House, his official residence in Harare, he appeared lucid at some points while at other times he drawled and lost track of his thoughts.

Tehran

AP & AFP

Iran's supreme leader yesterday used the podium of a pro-Pal-estinian gathering in Tehran to lash out at Israel, calling the Jewish state a "fake" nation in a "dirty chapter" of history.The remarks by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were some of his most

vitriolic against Israel, Iran's archenemy. Every four years since the early 1990s, Tehran has hosted a similar conference in sup-port of the Palestinian cause, assembling foreign guests and those who oppose Israel. Speaking to the gathering, Khamenei said Israel was created by bringing Jews from other parts of the world to the Mideast region to settle in the land of the Palestinians to replace its "true entity."

The creation of Israel is "one of the dirty chapters of history that will be closed, with the grace of God," he added. Khamenei's speech lasted 33 minutes. The supreme leader, who has final say on all state matters in Iran, also urged all Muslims to support the Palestinians and "resistance" movements — a reference to anti-Israeli militant groups such as Palestinian Hamas and Lebanon's Shia Hezbollah militants. Iran has always been their staunch ally.

The "resistance movements should have all necessary instru-ments," Khamenei added and praised those who are part of it in allegedly succeeding in "preventing the domination of the Zion-ist regime in the entire region." But he did not appear to endorse an all-out war on Israel, saying instead that it's a "cancerous tumor" that requires a "step by step" treatment. In 2015, Khamenei pre-dicted that Israel would not exist after 25 years.

Palestinian scribe freed after 10 monthsJERUSALEM: A senior Palestinian journalist has been released after 10 months in an Israeli jail without charge, he said. Omar Nazzal, 55, was released on Monday after nearly a year in prison and following 13 hearings in an Israeli military court, he said.

Despite that, he added, he never received specific allegations, only a "general accusation" that he was threatening "regional security". "When my lawyer asked for details, he got only rejec-tions from judges and military prosecutors," Nazzal, a member of the general secretariat of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, said. He was arrested on April 23.

Tel Aviv

AFP

A YOUNG ISRAELI soldier who killed a wounded and incapacitated Palestin-ian assailant was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment yesterday, in a show of leniency that drew Palestinian outrage after one of the most divisive trials in Israel’s history.

Eleven months ago, Sergeant Elor Azaria was serving as an army medic in the town of Hebron in the occupied West Bank when two Palestinians stabbed and wounded another soldier. One of the assailants was shot dead by troops. The other was shot and wounded. Eleven minutes later, as the wounded man, Abd Elfatah Ashareef, 21, lay on the ground unable to move, Azaria, then 19, took aim with his rifle and put a bullet in his head.

With the 50th anniversary of Isra-el’s wartime capture of the West Bank approaching, the trial generated debate about whether the military, in accus-ing Azaria of violating open-fire rules and its ethical code, was out of touch with a public that has shifted to the right in its attitudes towards the Palestinians.

In one poll, nearly half of Israeli Jews said any Palestinian attacker should be killed on the spot. A three-judge military court convicted Azaria of manslaughter last month, a crime that carries a maximum 20-year term.

Abuja

AFP

Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari needs "further rest" so

will extend his month-long medical stay in London, but there is "no cause" for worry over his health, his office said yesterday.

"During his normal annual checkup, tests showed he needed a longer period of rest, necessitating the president staying longer than originally planned," presidential spokesman Femi Adesina said in a state-ment. "President Buhari wishes to reassure Nigerians that there is no cause for

worry," he said. Speaking to reporters, Adesina added: "It makes sense to say that maybe from the results of the tests, further rest had been recommended."

The statement did not say how long the rest would last, and Adesina did not dis-close the nature of Buhari's ailment.

UN: Focus on Syria political transition

Bodies of 74 migrants heading to Europe wash up in Libya

Buhari to extend stay in London

Mugabe marks 93rd birthday with faltering TV interview

Israeli soldier gets 18 months jail for manslaughter

Geneva talks

De Mistura's chief of staff, Michael Contet, told reporters that Security Council Resolution 2254, which calls for "negotiations on the political transition process", was still the basis for the talks set to begin in Geneva tomorrow.

Iran leader calls Israel a 'fake' nation'

UN envoy to Libya, Martin Kobler, talks to illegal migrants during a visit at a detention centre in the Libyan capital Tripoli, yesterday.

13WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017 ASIA

Kim's cause of death still unknown: MalaysiaKuala Lumpur

Anatolia

Malaysian health authorities have yet to determine the cause of death of the estranged

half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, according to officials.

Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, health department Director-General, said yesterday that a post-mortem conducted on the body of Kim Jong-nam did not provide any concrete clue on the cause of death.

He added that the identifi-cation process was also ongoing.

"Until now, Jong-nam's next-of-kin have not come forward to perform deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) test, for us to verify that the dead body is indeed Jong-nam," he said.

Abdullah also assured that the examination was being con-ducted by qualified and experienced consultant forensic pathologists, a forensic radiolo-gist and a forensic odontologist.

The comments come after Malaysia's Foreign Ministry sum-moned the North Korean ambassador, Kang Chol, over his accusation that the government had something to conceal with regard to Kim’s death at Kuala Lumpur International Airport last week.

Kang had also demanded the release of the body without delay and alleged that Malaysia was trying to conceal something and collude with South Korea -- regarded as an enemy force by Pyongyang.

Abdullah underlined

yesterday that immediately after the post-mortem examination, “medicolegal specimens were handed over to the Investigating Police Officer… to be sent to

accredited laboratories for analysis”.

"These analyses are meant to confirm the identity of the deceased person and also the

cause of death; both of which are still pending at the moment".

“There has been no second autopsy performed on this deceased person."

Tokyo

AFP

A Japanese kindergarten known for its nationalist curriculum has apolo-

gised after coming under fire for hostile comments about Korean and Chinese parents.

The operator of Tsukamoto Kindergarten in the western city of Osaka was questioned by local education authorities last month after complaints from parents in December.

Kyodo news agency reported

last week that the school had handed parents copies of a state-ment which described the parents of Chinese and Korean children as having "evil thoughts."

The private pre-school had also posted a statement on its home page referring to "delin-quent" South Korean and Chinese parents.

But it has now deleted that from its website and replaced it with another expressing remorse.

"We apologise for our

expression about foreigners that led to misunderstanding," it said.

The kindergarten previously had said the insults were pro-voked by criticism it had received from Chinese and South Korean parents.

The kindergarten has drawn attention for introducing a cur-riculum that includes the memorisation of an 1890 impe-rial edict which was widely used to promote militaristic educa-tion during World War II.

A number of incidents of hate speech against specific

ethnic groups on the streets or online have been reported in Japan in recent years.

They are most commonly directed at Koreans who came to Japan when the Korean peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule between 1910-1945, and at their descendants who stayed in the country.

China's rising economic and military profile, as well as a sim-mering territorial dispute with Japan over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea, have also raised tensions.

North Korea envoy wasdiplomatically rude: PM NajibKuala Lumpur Reuters

MALAYSIA'S Prime Minister Najib Razak said yesterday that comments by the North Korean ambassador casting doubt over a Malaysian investigation into the killing of the estranged half-brother of North Korea's leader were "diplomatically rude".

"The statement by the ambassador was totally uncalled for. It was diplomat-ically rude. But Malaysia will stand firm," Najib said.

North Korean ambassador Kang Chol said his country "cannot trust" Malaysia's han-dling of the probe into the killing.

South Korea and US believe he was assassinated by North Korean agents.

Osaka kindergarten apologises after hate speech

Bangkok

AFP

Rights groups yesterday urged the Thai army to drop defamation charges

against three activists over a report on torture in the conflict-hit south, decrying the prosecution as an effort to silence critics.

A state prosecutor was handed the case file yesterday and will now decide whether to press on with the controver-sial charges against Pornpen Khongkachonkiet -- the chair of Amnesty International Thai-land -- Anchana Heemmina and Somchai Homlaor.

The trio could face up to seven years in jail for defama-tion and a separate charge filed for publishing the report online.

The case is being closely watched in junta-run Thailand

where authorities routinely use defamation laws to shut down reporting of allegations of abuse or corruption.

The 2016 report, based on interviews with 54 former detainees, catalogued a host of torture tactics allegedly used by soldiers and police across the kingdom's southernmost provinces.

More than 6,700 people -- mostly civilians -- have been killed in a near-13 year insur-gency by Malay Muslim locals against the Thai state, which rules the region with emer-gency laws.

Beatings, threats at gun-point, sensory deprivation and partial suffocation were all rou-tine during detention of suspects, the report alleged.

The Thai army denied the allegations and launched pro-ceedings against the writers.

Autopsy report

Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said that a post-mortem conducted on the body of Kim Jong-nam did not provide any concrete clue on the cause of death.

Malaysia confirmed that Kim Jong-nam's body still not claimed.

Pornpen Khongkachonkiet (centre), the chair of Amnesty International Thailand; Anchana Heemmina (right) and Somchai Homlaor show a document filed at the State Prosecutors office in Pattani, yesterday.

Thai army urged to drop charges against activists

Director General of Health Malaysia, Noor Hisham Abdullah, speaks during a news conference at Kuala Lumpur General Hospital, yesterday.

One dead as floods hit Jakarta

Bali murder accused given eight year jail term

Bali

AP

INDONESIAN prosecutors sought eight-year prison sentences yesterday for a British man and an Austral-ian woman accused of killing a police officer on the tourist island of Bali.

David James Taylor and his Australian girlfriend Sara Connor were arrested last August in the death of traffic police officer Wayan Sudarsa, whose bloodied body was found on the beach outside the Pullman Hotel in the pop-ular tourist area of Kuta.

They were charged with committing violence leading to death, which carries a maximum 12-year prison term under Indonesia's crim-inal code.

Taylor admitted getting into a fight with Sudarsa, who was on duty, after Connor realised she had lost her handbag and accused Sudarsa of being a fake police officer and stealing it.

Taylor admitted to hitting the Indonesian repeatedly with a cellphone, binoculars and a broken bottle, leaving him face down and unconscious.

But he said he didn't real-ise Sudarsa would die.

Connor, a mother of two, seemed upset and angry after the yesterday's hearing.

Her lawyer, Erwin Sire-gar, said she could not accept the sentencing demand, which she regarded as too heavy.

Japan zoo culls 57 snow monkeys carrying 'invasive' genes

Jakarta

AFP

Widespread flooding hit the Indonesian capi-tal yesterday after

hours of torrential rain, with thousands of homes inundated, cars stranded and at least one person killed.

Water up to 1.5 metres deep swamped parts of the Indone-sian capital and nearby commuter towns after a thun-derstorm overnight.

People were forced from their houses in some places, with authorities setting up evac-uation centres.

The disaster agency said it had received more than 400 reports of floods across Jakarta.

"In Bekasi, a city within the

Jakarta metropolitan area, one person drowned while about 280 others were forced to evac-uate," the agency said.

Images of the flooding showed major roads inundated in parts of the megacity of 10 million, people wading through deluged streets and cars in water up to their headlights.

"Drains were unable to cope

with the torrents of water unleashed by the storm and riv-ers burst their banks," said disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho.

Jakarta is hit by flooding to some degree every year during tropical Indonesia's months-long rainy season, with the city's numerous riverside communi-ties worst affected.

A child dives as cars wade through floodwaters in a flood-hit area at the Mangga Dua, in Jakarta, yesterday.

Tokyo

AFP

A Japanese zoo has culled 57 native snow monkeys by lethal injection after

finding that they carried genes of an "invasive alien species", officials said yesterday.

The Takagoyama Nature Zoo in the city of Futtsu in Chiba pre-fecture east of Tokyo, housed 164 simians which it believed were all pure Japanese macaques.

But the operator and local officials discovered about one-third were crossbred with the rhesus macaque, which in Japan

is designated an "invasive alien species".

A city official said yesterday that Japanese law bans the pos-session and transport of invasive species, including the cross-breeds, and that culling of them is allowed under the law.

He said the monkeys were put to death by lethal injection over about one month ending early February.

"The zoo operator held a memorial service for the mon-keys at a nearby Buddhist temple to appease their souls," he added.

Snow monkey-rhesus macaque crossbreeds were

designated for culling when Japan's environment law was revised in 2013.

"They have to be killed to protect the indigenous environ-ment," an official with the Chiba prefectural government said.

But Japan's Environment Ministry said exceptions can be made, such as cases in which zoos apply for permission to keep them.

"There are many zoos in the country, which rear animals that became classified as invasive species after the law was cre-ated," a ministry official said.

Though the killing of the

monkeys may appear cruel, environmentalists said it is cru-cial not to allow any contacts between foreign and native spe-cies lest the natural balance be upset.

Junkichi Mima, spokesman for conservation group WWF Japan, said invasive species cause problems "because they get mixed in with indigenous animals and threaten the natu-ral environment and ecosystem".

The snow monkey, known in Japan as Nihonzaru (Japanese macaque), is brown in colour with a red face, and the

mountainous area near the zoo is designated as a wild habitat for them.

The zoo started feeding wild snow monkeys in 1957 and held dozens in a rough fence, the city official said.

But in the 1990s, the rhesus macaque, which originates in China and Southeast Asia, started to increase in the area. Chiba prefecture said that since 2005 it has culled wild ones in a bid to stamp them out.

The Takagoyama zoo con-ducted DNA testing on its snow monkeys and discovered the mixture.

14 WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017ASIA

South China Sea: Code of conduct framework soonBoracay

AP

The Philippines' top dip-lomat said yesterday it remains to be seen whether China will cooperate fully in

ongoing efforts to craft a legally binding pact designed to prevent aggressive behaviour in the dis-puted South China Sea.

Despite the likelihood of tough negotiations ahead, For-eign Secretary Perfecto Yasay Jr expressed confidence that the 10-nation Association of South-east Asian Nations and China could at least complete a frame-work for such a pact, called a code of conduct, as early as June.

Efforts to forge such a regional non-aggression pact have dragged on for years with-out any concrete sign of when it might be completed.

Asian and Western govern-ments led by the US have called for the rapid conclusion of such an accord as territorial disputes in the South China Sea escalated in recent years.

"China, however, has opposed a legally binding agree-ment that could block its actions to assert its claim to virtually the entire South China Sea," a sen-ior Southeast Asian diplomat involved in the negotiations for the nonaggression pact said.

Yasay said he was confident a framework for the agreement could be finalised by mid-year

"on the basis of the fact that eve-ryone, including all of the Asean member states and China are pushing hard for this."

"Whether, in fact, China will be able to cooperate along the way is something that we can-not say for now," Yasay said, without elaborating, after host-ing a closed-door meeting of Asean foreign ministers on the central Philippine resort island of Boracay.

"China will not agree to any-thing that will tie its hands," said Jay Batongbacal, who heads the Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea at the state-run University of the Philippines.

"China's cooperation is cru-cial," Yasay said.

While Southeast Asian gov-ernments generally want a strong pact, Yasay suggested the regional group would not want to craft a framework that is unacceptable to Beijing and would simply be "a piece of paper that will just further pro-long discussions on the matter without getting any tangible results."

When China seized Philip-pine-claimed Mischief Reef in 1995, the Manila government strongly protested and took steps that led to the start of negotia-tions for a regional accord with China to discourage actions that m i g h t s p a r k a r m e d confrontations.

Bejing's opposition to a legally binding pact then, how-ever, led to the signing in the year 2002 of a nonbinding declara-tion to encourage China, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines,

Taiwan and Vietnam to avoid aggressive actions in one of Asia's potential flashpoints.

China and rival claimant countries, however, have traded accusations of violating the 2002 pact, which urged them to "exer-cise self-restraint in the conduct of activities" and refrain "from action of inhabiting on the pres-ently uninhabited islands, reefs, shoals, and other features."

In the last three years, China has turned seven mostly sub-merged reefs, including Mischief

Reef, into man-made islands, including at least three with runways.

It also reportedly installed defence missile systems on the new islands, sparking alarm and protests from rival claimants.

The Philippines used to be the most vocal Southeast Asian critic of China's actions in the disputed waters, successfully questioning the legal basis of Bei-jing's claims in an arbitration case Manila won in July last year.

Seven dead as Taliban attack Pakistan courtTangi

AFP

AT LEAST seven people were killed when multiple Taliban suicide bombers attacked a court complex in northern Pakistan yesterday, the lat-est in a series of assaults which have raised fears militants are regrouping.

One bomber was briefly on the loose inside the busy complex in the Tangi area of Charsadda district but was killed by police some 20 min-utes after the attack began, officials said.

A second bomber was shot dead by security forces and a third died when he det-onated his vest outside the main gates of the facility in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa prov-ince, according to police.

The attack was claimed by the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA) faction of the Pakistani Tali-ban, which carried out a series of apparently coordi-nated assaults last week including a powerful bomb blast in Lahore which killed 14 people.

Earlier this month the group vowed a fresh offen-sive on targets in Pakistan including the judiciary.

"So far seven people have been killed and 15 wounded," Suhail Khalid, district police chief, said.

Azerbaijan President appoints wife as deputyBaku

AFP

Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev yesterday appointed his glamorous

wife as first vice-president, the latest move seen as tightening the family's iron grip on the oil-rich Caspian nation.

The elevation of Mehriban Aliyeva -- a prominent socialite and lawmaker -- sees her now become the country's second most senior official after her husband.

"She is professional, edu-cated, experienced, principled, and magnanimous," Aliyev told

a National Security Council meeting.

Known for her lavish life-style, Aliyeva, 52, has been an MP for the ruling Yeni Azerbai-jan party since 2005 and head of the influential Heydar Aliyev Foundation -- named after her father-in-law and former president.

"I believe that I will justify this confidence," she said at the security council meeting.

"The interests of the country and people will always come above all else for me."

Born into the powerful Pashayev family, Aliyeva has sometimes been seen

as a possible successor to her husband, who took over in 2003 after the death of his father Hey-dar, a former KGB officer and Communist-era boss.

The appointment follows constitutional changes made after a tightly-managed refer-endum last year that introduced the powerful position of first vice president.

Such steps were denounced by regime opponents as a ploy to cement the Aliyev family's dynastic rule.

Azerbaijan's embattled oppo-sition angrily criticised Aliyeva's elevation as undemocratic.

"The move throws

Azerbaijan back to medieval, feudal times," opposition leader Isa Gambar of Musavat party said.

"Family rule has no place in the 21st century," he added.

Known for her love of lux-ury, Aliyeva featured prominently in US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks, one of which dubbed her "a first lady, too, in fashion".

"First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva appears to have had substantial cosmetic surgery, presumably overseas, and wears dresses that would be considered provoca-tive even in the Western world," the leaked 2010 cable said.

Pakistan moves artillery to Afghan border 5 dead as aircraft crashes into mall in MelbourneSydney

Reuters

A pilot and four American passengers were killed yesterday when a small

plane crashed in to the roof of a shopping mall after taking off from an airfield outside Mel-b o u r n e , A u s t r a l i a ' s second-largest city, police said.

The twin-turboprop Beech-craft King Air plane suffered an engine failure and crashed into the mall near the end of the runway at Essendon Airport, Victoria state police assistant commissioner Stephen Leane said.

Witnesses said the plane exploded on impact.

"There were five people on the aeroplane and it looks like nobody's survived the crash," Leane said.

The crash happened at around 9am, about an hour before the mall was due to open and there were no fatalities other than those aboard the air-craft, he added.

"All five occupants were male - the pilot was Australian and the four passengers were from the United States of Amer-ica," Victoria police said in later statement.

Sky News showed burning wreckage strewn across the mall's carpark and a thick col-umn of black smoke rising from the crash site.

Senator urges Cabinet save country from DuterteManila

Reuters

A staunch critic of Philip-pine leader Rodrigo Duterte yesterday urged

the Cabinet to declare the pres-ident unfit to rule, describing him as a "sociopathic serial killer" because of his war on drugs and allegations he once ran a hit squad.

Senator Leila de Lima, one of the few high-profile critics of Duterte's crackdown, said Fili-pinos should rise up and Cabinet ministers had the duty to save the country from a president "of criminal thinking".

De Lima is facing arrest on charges of involvement in the drugs trade, which she says are a vendetta for her leading a Sen-ate investigation of allegations that Duterte had ordered unlaw-ful killings of criminals while mayor of Davao City.

Duterte denied unlawful killings and the Senate investi-gation found no evidence to prove that.

She said new allegations made on Monday by a retired policeman, Arturo Lascanas, that Duterte had operated a "Davao death squad" should clear up any uncertainty.

Duterte's lawyer and his

spokesmen have rejected Las-canas' claims.

"With the coming out of Las-canas, there's no more doubt that our president is a murderer and a sociopathic serial killer," De Lima said.

"I will not retreat from this fight now that I know I am not alone. We are plenty already, so they should be scared. I call on all our countrymen that have yet to act, to hold responsible the mur-derer president of the country."

Asked at a regular news briefing about De Lima's remarks, Duterte's spokesman, Ernesto Abella, said: "That's col-ourful language".

Islamabad

Internews

Pakistan Army has moved heavy artillery towards the Pak-Afghan border in

Chaman and Torkham districts, security officials said yesterday.

The move came just two days after the military deci-mated camps of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan’s (TTP) Jamaatul Ahrar (JA) fac-tion on the Torkham border opposite Mohmand and Khyber tribal regions.

The group, which claims to be behind the recent wave of terrorist attacks, has found safe haven in Afghanistan,

according to the Pakistani secu-rity establishment.

Security sources said their forces have resolved to restrict illegal border movement and any attempt to breach border security will be responded to with full force.

Security forces have stepped up patrolling in the areas along the Afghan border, while secu-rity has been put on high alert in North and South Waziristan agencies.

The stringent border checks were implemented after a week of deadly attacks by terrorists left dozens of people dead and injured in different cities of Pakistan, prompting a pledge of ‘revenge immediate revenge’

from Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa.

Security forces have also indefinitely closed the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Separately, at least two ter-rorists were killed during a search operation in Dera Bugti.

Sources said that FC, peace force and law enforcers are con-tinuing operation against the criminals in Dera Bugti and its adjacent areas following the recent wave of terrorism in the country.

During the search operation, terrorists opened fire on secu-rity forces. In retaliatory firing two terrorists were killed while some others managed to escape.

Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) Foreign Ministers link arms during the retreat in Boracay, central Philippines, yesterday.

Non-aggression pact

Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay Jr expressed confidence that the 10-nation Asean and China could at least complete a framework for a code of conduct, as early as June.

Whether, in fact, China will be able to cooperate along the way is something that we cannot say for now: Yasay.

Philippine Senator Leila De Lima during a press conference at the Senate, in Manila, yesterday.

Smoke and flames seen after a twin-engined Beechcraft plane crashed into a shopping centre just after take-off from Essendon Fields Airport near Melbourne, yesterday.

15WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017 ASIA

Chief Minister of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav (second right) and Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi (centre) pass under foliage as they take part in a joint roadshow in support of their state assembly election party candidates in Allahabad yesterday. Voting in state assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh continues in phases on February 23/27 and March 4/8 with results on March 11.

Election roadshow in Indian state

Chennai

Reuters

Police in eastern India have shut down an orphanage and arrested its owner for illegally selling

babies to childless couples, and were investigating whether the adoption racket was part of a wider human trafficking oper-ation, officials said yesterday.

The orphanage in the city of Jalpaiguri in West Bengal, run by a non profit organisation, sold at least two dozen children for adoption, police said.

"What is shocking is that the head of the (orphanage) was also running a shelter for des-titute women and selling their babies," Rashmi Sen of the West Bengal state women and child development ministry said.

"Ongoing investigations will also probe if the women were trafficked to the home to keep the adoption racket going."

The weekend raids come three months after 13 babies were rescued and skeletons of two other infants found near the port city of Kolkata.

Eighteen people, including doctors, midwives and the owners of charities and clinics, were arrested, suspected of tak-ing babies from women immediately after they had given birth and telling them their children were stillborn.

"There are at least 17 chil-dren who were housed in this

home (in Jalpaiguri) who are untraceable," Subodh Bhatta-charjee of the Jalpaiguri child welfare committee said.

"They were giving children for adoption without our knowl-edge, violating guidelines." Police said the West Bengal orphanage was using forged documents, fake stamps and certificates to sell the babies and had been warned many times by the gov-ernment in the past.

The orphanage was regis-tered with the Central Adoption Resource Authority and is the only one in Jalpaiguri district permitted to put up children for adoption. The babies were being sold for Rs100,000-200,000 ($1,500-3,000).

"Our own enquiry last year revealed that the children had not been entered into the gov-ernment system, which mandates recording of every abandoned child," Sen said.

New DelhiReuters

Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged the United States yesterday to keep an

open mind on admitting skilled Indian workers, in comments that pushed back against Repub-lican President Donald Trump's "America First" rhetoric on jobs.

Modi's comments reflected concern that India's $150bn IT services industry would suffer if the United States curbs the visas, known as H-1B, it relies on to send its software experts to the United States on project work.

"The prime minister referred to the role of skilled Indian tal-ent in enriching the American economy and society," Modi's office said in a statement after he met a bipartisan delegation of 26 members of the US Congress.

"He urged developing a reflective, balanced and far-sighted perspective on movement of ski l led professionals."

Indian nationals are by far the largest group of recipients of the 65,000 H-1B visas issued each year to new applicants under a cap mandated by Con-gress. Exemptions on the H-1B

cap are available to up to 20,000 further applicants who have obtained a US master's degree.

The actual number of Indian nationals working in the US under the H-1B programme is significantly higher, however, because many visas are rolled over.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was born in India, also met Modi yesterday. He told the Eco-nomic Times earlier that his own career had been made possible by "an enlightened immigration policy".

Initial confidence that Asia's third-largest economy would benefit from Trump's election

victory has given way to concern that his isolationist rhetoric and hostility to free trade would hurt India's hi-tech and outsourcing industry.

The sector, led by Tata Con-sultancy Services, Infosys Ltd and Wipro Ltd, employs 3.5 mil-lion people and is lobbying against proposed US visa curbs - including increases on salaries that H-1B visa holders must earn.

Part of the delegation led by Congressman Bob Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia who chairs the House Judiciary Com-mittee, met Ravi Shankar Prasad, India's minister in charge of electronics and IT.

Paris

AFP

Two nuclear reactors being built in the southern Chi-nese city of Taishan will

come onstream months later than planned, said China Gen-eral Nuclear Power (CGN), which runs the project together with France's EDF.

"Taishan Nuclear recently organised a comprehensive evaluation on subsequent engi-neering construction plan and relevant risks, and after due consideration, it is decided to adjust the construction plan of Taishan project," CGN said in a statement filed late Monday to the Hong Kong stock exchange.

The reactors are of the so-called third-generation European Pressurized Reactor

(EPR) type which has yet to go onstream anywhere in the world, and their start had been delayed once before, in 2016.

Britain in September gave the green light, with conditions, to EDF and CGN to build such a reactor an Hinkley Point, after a heated debate which included worries about China's involvement.

Following EPR delays in Finland and in France, the two Chinese reactors are set to become the first of their type to go into service anywhere.

"The expected commercial operation of Taishan Unit 1 and Taishan Unit 2 are adjusted from the original first half of 2017 and the second half of 2017 to the second half of 2017 and the first half of 2018, respectively," it said.

Pyongyang

AFP

A North Korean state eco-nomic official sought yesterday to play down

the impact of China's shock announcement that it was sus-pending coal imports from the country for the rest of the year.

The move came shortly after another missile launch by

Pyongyang and the assassina-tion of its leader's half-brother in Kuala Lumpur, allegedly in a Northern plot. It would go much further than the latest UN sanc-tions imposed on the country over its nuclear and missile programmes.

China is the North's sole major ally and by far its largest trading partner, with coal the biggest c o m p o n e n t o f i t s

purchases -- according to figures from Chinese Customs, Beijing last year imported more than 22 mil-lion tonnes worth nearly $1.2bn.

It is a crucial foreign cur-rency-earner for isolated Pyongyang. "Of course if we can no longer export things that we used to export, it can have some impact on the companies that are directly involved in exports," Ri Sun-Chol, chief of the

economic research institute of the North's Academy of Social Sciences, said.

But he added: "Direct exports of natural resources have been under great restrictions. So I can't say that it would have sub-stantial impact on the economy." Beijing, which announced the move at the weekend, said it was in line with UN Security Coun-cil sanctions on the North.

Myanmar govtinvestigates cover-up of custody deathsYangon

Reuters

Myanmar's army-control-led home ministry is investigating a cover-up

by the country's border force of the deaths in custody of two Rohingya Muslims in troubled Rakhine State, according to a police report reviewed by Reu-ters and interviews with two senior security officials.

The internal document is the first official admission of serious wrongdoing by security forces in their crackdown against insur-gents in northwestern Myanmar that has sent more than 70,000 people fleeing across the border to Bangladesh.

When contacted by Reuters, the Home Affairs Ministry denied an investigation was under way, but the commander of the Border Guard Police (BGP) in the area where the incident took place and a sen-ior home ministry security official confirmed the authen-ticity of the document and said it was not the only such case that was being looked into.

The home ministry over-sees the national police force,

which includes the BGP. The ministry is headed by an army general.

Myanmar is under growing international pressure to take action against those who are alleged to have committed atrocities in Rakhine. The United Nations has documented mass killings and rapes it says may amount to crimes against humanity. About 1.1 million

Rohingya Muslims live in apart-heid-like conditions in northwestern Myanmar, where they are denied citizenship. Many in Buddhist-majority Myanmar regard them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

The civilian government led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has repeatedly denied almost all allegations against the coun-try's still-powerful armed forces

during what it has said was a law-ful counterinsurgency campaign that began in October.

The undated document reviewed by Reuters, titled "A cover-up of two deaths by Bor-der Guard Police", was compiled by a BGP unit in northern Rakhine and focuses on two men who were arrested on Oct. 18 and questioned on suspicion of aiding insurgents.

The ruins of a market which was set on fire at a Rohingya village outside Maugndaw in Rakhine state, Myanmar.

No major impact from China coal ban: North Korea

China delays nuclear reactor start again

Corruption: China jails official for 15 yearsBeijing

Reuters

China jailed the former head of its safety watchdog for 15 years for graft, the state

broadcaster said, wrapping up an inquiry launched after deadly blasts in 2015 killed nearly 170 people in the city of Tianjin, where he worked.

Regular mishaps, from fac-tory fires to mine cave-ins, have boosted public concern about China's relatively lax safety standards, which the govern-ment has pledged to improve.

Yang Dongliang, former head of the State Administration of Work Safety, who spent much of

his career in the port city, was suspected of violating law and party discipline and sacked days after the blasts in a warehouse storing hazardous chemicals.

A court in Beijing found Yang guilty of abusing his position, including when he was former vice mayor of northeastern Tian-jin, by accepting bribes to grant contracts to companies, China Central Television (CCTV) said.

In 1999, a property devel-oper gave Yang an apartment in a new development complex that he failed register with the authorities. The court reduced his sentence because Yang con-fessed and took steps to return bribe money and assets.

Orphanage shut down for selling babies in India

Owner arrested

Owner of the orphanage in West Bengal arrested for illegally selling babies to childless couples.

Police say at least two dozen children sold for adoption for ($1,500-3,000).

Modi urges Trump to keep 'open mind' on visas

7 Maoist rebels shot deadNew DelhiAFP

At least seven suspected Maoist rebels were killed yesterday in a

gunfight with police in the remote forests of central India, an officer said, the lat-est deadly encounter in the country's long-running insur-gency. Police ambushed a group of heavily armed rebels passing through the dense forests of a Maoist stronghold in Chhattisgarh state, trigger-ing an hours-long gun battle before the suspected guerril-las fled.

"So far we have recovered seven dead bodies along with some arms and ammunition. We may find more bodies as the combing operation is on," D M Awasthi, head of the Chhattisgarh anti-Maoist unit, said.

16 WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017EUROPE

A man holds a candle as he commemorates the third anniversary of Ukrainian mass protests in 2014 that sparked a revolution, in central Kiev, yesterday.

Remembering a revolutionGermany & France seek looser EU rights rulesBrussels

Reuters

Germany and France want the European Union to weaken its human rights safe-guards to allow for

deportation of asylum seekers before their case is considered, according to their joint proposal on curbing immigration, seen by Reuters yesterday.

This option would only kick in at times of a “mass influx” of people to the bloc and comes as the EU is persistently making it harder for migrants and refu-gees alike to get in and be allowed to stay.

However, France denied involvement in drafting any sug-gestions for easing EU human rights safeguards to make it eas-ier to deport asylum seekers, a spokesman for the French mis-sion to the European Union said.

While the EU says it has the right to send away all economic migrants if it chooses so, its existing laws on human rights and asylum say a third country must meet certain conditions if the bloc were to send there someone who claims asylum in Europe, and have the person wait for a decision there.

Returning asylum seekers was a key element of a year-old EU-Turkey agreement, which Paris and Berlin hailed in their joint document as a “game

changer” as it cut drastically the number of people — mostly Syr-ian refugees — making it to Europe.

But few other EU neighbours could be seen as meeting the cri-teria, which include safety from persecution, humane reception conditions, and at least partial access to medical care, educa-tion and labour market.

So Germany and France have proposed to dilute them, saying in the paper that the EU’s asylum system “must be designed in a flexible way, and it must be capable of coping with any eventuality.”

“This is not about building a ‘fortress Europe’. It is about combating illegal immigration,

which has already cost the lives of thousands, and about replac-ing it by a regulated system of legal admissions, combined with humane living conditions, assured by the EU in third countries.”

The two said the Turkish deal — which has been criticised by rights groups as cutting cor-ners on human rights and for bumpy implementation that put people’s lives at risk — should serve as a blueprint for the future. They said extending the options for deportation would discourage people smuggling to Europe, while the bloc offer legal ways for confirmed refu-gees and pay to improve conditions for refugees and migrants in those third countries that receive such people. Spe-cifically, the proposal also includes an option to recognise certain regions - rather than whole states as is the case now - as fit for such returns, even of asylum seekers.

Germany and France said such new rules would still meet the basic criteria of the Geneva Convention on the rights of refu-gees, as well as the European Convention on Human Rights, but would rescind secondary EU laws offering more safeguards. Mass expulsions would still be prohib-ited and receiving third countries would still have to guarantee decent living conditions for deported asylum seekers.

Austria approves job rules that prefer hiring of locals Vienna

Reuters

Austria’s coalition govern-ment approved new employment rules yester-

day to ensure workers already in the country are given prior-ity for new jobs over potential immigrants from other EU states in an attempt to halt an increase in unemployment.

However, the plans could

undermine the European Union’s principle of free move-ment of people and prompt opposition from Brussels. A European Commission spokes-man said the EU executive would not comment on legisla-tion it has not yet examined.

Immigration into Austria’s labour market, especially from its poorer eastern European neighbours, has been rising for years due to its significantly

higher wages and social bene-fits. Unemployment in Austria is still relatively low at 5.7 per-cent, under a harmonised EU measure, but is steadily rising and the government is also fac-ing slower economic growth.

Under the plans, EU nation-als already resident in Austria would also enjoy priority along with Austrian citizens over new-comers from outside the country.

Hollande ticks off Britain over child refugeesParis

AFP

French President Francois Hollande called yesterday on Britain to "accept its

responsibility" to take in stranded under-age migrants stuck in France who wish to join up with family in the UK.

The issue has been a con-stant irritant between the two countries, made worse by Brit-ain's decision this month to end an arrangement to take in up to 3,000 unaccompanied

minors from Europe.The scrapping of the so-

called "Dubs agreement" by Britain's conservative govern-ment has sparked criticism from opposition MPs in London and led to anger in France.

"France is playing its part in the European effort. We expect that our partners do the same, particularly when we are talk-ing about minors on their own," Hollande told a conference on children in conflict zones.

"I call on the United Kingdom to accept its responsibility for

adolescents in France at the moment who have family on the other side of the Channel," he added.

Last October, French authorities cleared a squalid camp near the Calais port on the Channel sea separating the countries which was filled with thousands of migrants hoping to reach Britain. The camp dwellers, many fleeing war in Sudan, Iraq or Afghanistan, were dispersed around France. Children with family in Britain were assured that authorities

would help them travel to reach them.

A first wave who arrived in Britain shortly afterwards sparked outrage in the right-wing press, with opponents questioning the age of some of the children who appeared to be teenagers or older.

One conservative MP sug-gested the new arrivals should undergo dental tests to prove their age.

On February 8, the govern-ment announced it would limit to 350, instead of 3,000, the

number of unaccompanied young migrants who would be admitted from Europe.

Interior minister Amber Rudd argued that the scheme was encouraging children to travel to Europe and that Britain had accepted thousands of oth-ers from camps bordering war-torn Syria.

Prime Minister Theresa May has made reducing immigration one of her priorities since taking office in July following her coun-try's decision to leave the European Union.

Curbing migration

The option of less stringent rules on human rights would only kick in at times of a “mass influx” of people to the bloc.

Germany and France said such new rules would still meet the basic criteria of the Geneva Convention on the rights of refugees, as well as the European Convention on Human Rights.

Blow to Left as Socialist minister may back Macron Paris

Reuters

A senior Socialist minister said yesterday he might back centrist Emmanuel

Macron in France’s presidential election, a blow to his party’s official candidate and a poten-tial boost for Macron, who is battling to stay favourite in opin-ion polls.

A daily survey by Opinion-way pollsters showed the tight, multi-faceted race was still wide open with less than nine weeks to go.

Macron was neck-and-neck with conservative rival Francois Fillon as favourite for the pres-idency, but far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen was holding on to recent gains that have rattled investors.

Socialist Benoit Hamon, elected as candidate in a Party primary in January, remained in a distant fourth place, still strug-gling to make an impact on the two-stage election set for April 23 and May 7, but with a distant possibility that a deal with a rival could yet give him a chance.

Hamon is pushing a hard-left programme that divides his party and competes for votes with another leftist, Communist-backed Jean-Luc Melenchon.

Melenchon is in fifth place,

but a combined Hamon-Melen-chon vote would theoretically put them into first or second and therefore into a second round instead of Fillon or Macron and against Le Pen.

But in a blow to Hamon, Socialist agriculture minister and government spokesman

Stephane Le Foll yesterday became the second minister to suggest he might defect to Macron.

“I support the man who has been chosen (by the Socialists), but the moment comes for polit-ical responsibility with regard to what is at play, with regard to

Marine Le Pen and with regard also to the programme of Fran-cois Fillon,” Le Foll said on BFM TV. Asked whether this meant his backing would depend on who was best placed to prevent a Le Pen versus Fillon runoff, he said: “Exactly!”

Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, No 2 in the cabinet rank-ings, has also said he might back Macron.

Political analysts are also eying an imminent decision from veteran centrist Francois Bay-rou on whether to stand or not.

If he stands, that could hurt Macron, but backing from Bay-rou could be a further boost for the 39 year-old’s battle with Fil-lon, whose campaign is trying to recover from a fake work scan-dal surrounding his wife.

LE PEN HOLDS GAINSOpinionway’s polls yester-

day put Le Pen on 26 percent in the first round with Macron and Fillon both on 21, Hamon on 15 and Melenchon on 11, little changed from recent days.

But it is in the second round where the Le Pen vote has been advancing. Opinionway showed her losing there with 42 percent of the vote, holding onto the gains she has made, particularly in a Macron contest, in recent days.

Macron was to be campaign-ing in London, home to a large expatriate French community, yesterday.

LEFT TALKS FOUNDERThe Left still looked split

despite news last week that Melenchon and Hamon were in discussions.

The talks between Melen-chon, a veteran campaigner, and Hamon, an ex-educatiom min-ister, were tentative from the start and both have acknowl-edged wide policy differences.

Hamon yesterday gave the latest indication they were unlikely to be joining forces.

“There is a desire on Melen-chon’s part to go on right to the end,” Hamon said on Europe 1 radio. “I respect that...In any case, I will work on right to the end.”

News of the talks raised investor worries about a hard-Left, hard-right choice in the second round last week. These have since subsided, but Le Pen’s showing the polls has kept inves-tors nervous. The premium investors demand to hold French bonds instead of German debt fell slightly yesterday from Mon-day’s near four-year high. The spread was last at 78 basis points, after widening out to as much as 85 bps on Monday.

French presidential candidate for the En Marche! movement, Emmanuel Macron, arrives at 10 Downing Street in central London yesterday to meet British Prime Minister Theresa May.

Italy taxi strike over regulating Uber enters sixth dayRome

AFP

Hundreds of taxi driv-ers protested in Rome yesterday as a strike

over delays to Italian legisla-tion regulating Uber and car-hire services entered its sixth day.

Commuters have been stranded in several cities across the country, with taxis from Rome to Milan, Turin and Naples taking only emer-gency fares for disabled people or those needing to get to hospitals.

The row is over the gov-ernment's decision to suspend until the end of 2017 the introduction of norms to con-trol car-hire and car-share services.

Drivers say the current rules benefit ride-hailing service Uber or NCCs — cars rented with a driver — because unlike taxis they can purchase licences in smaller towns, where they cost less, but use them to work in cities.

Taxi driver representa-tives were due to meet with Italy's Minister of Transport Graziano Delrio later yester-day. "A taxi licence in Rome is worth ¤150,000, but the NCC pays ten times less else-where," said Gabriele, 52, who has been a taxi driver since 2011 and did not want to give his surname.

His colleague, Antonio Moratti, 58, gave as an exam-ple a village in Calabria in southern Italy which he said had sold some 200 licenses to drivers who went to work in cities -- though the town was only authorised to issue two licences. Taxi drivers are also furious that they have to work under fixed tariffs while Uber and the NCCs can charge as much as they like.

17WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017 EUROPE

Armoured vehicles of the type "Marder" on a train at the troop exercise area in Grafenwoehr, southern Germany, yesterday. The German armed forces are sending military vehicles to Lithuania as a part of the Nato programme "Enhanced Forward Presence".

Train-ed for battle

Marine Le Pen refuses headscarf for meeting Lebanon cleric Beirut

Reuters

French far-right National Front presidential candidate Marine Le Pen cancelled a meeting yesterday

with Lebanon’s grand mufti, its top cleric for Sunni Muslims, after refusing to wear a headscarf for the encounter.

Le Pen, among the frontrunners for the presidency, is using a two-day visit to Lebanon to bolster her foreign pol-icy credentials nine weeks from the April 23 first round, and may be partly tar-geting potential Franco-Lebanese votes.

Many Lebanese fled to France, Leb-anon’s former colonial power, during their country’s 1975-1990 civil war and became French citizens.

After meeting Christian President Michel Aoun — her first public hand-shake with a head of state — and Sunni Prime Minister Saad Al Hariri on Mon-day, she had been scheduled to meet the Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Latif

Derian. He heads the Dar Al Fatwa, the top religious authority for Sunni Mus-lims in the multireligious country.

“I met the grand mufti of Al-Azhar,” she told reporters, referring to a visit in 2015 to Cairo’s 1,000-year-old centre

of Islamic learning. “The highest Sunni authority didn’t have this requirement, but it doesn’t matter. You can pass on my respects to the grand mufti, but I will not cover myself up,” she said.

The cleric’s press office said Le Pen’s aides had been informed beforehand that a headscarf was required for the meeting and had been “surprised by her refusal”.

But it was no surprise in the French political context.

French law bans headscarves in the public service and for high school pupils, in the name of church-state separation and equal rights for women. Le Pen wants to extend this ban to all public places, a measure that would affect Mus-lims most of all.

HARIRI’S VEILED MESSAGEBuoyed by the election of President

Donald Trump in the United States and by Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, Le Pen’s anti-immigration,

anti-EU National Front (FN) hopes for similar populist momentum in France.

Like Trump, she has said radical Islamism must be faced head on, although she has toned down her par-ty’s rhetoric to attract more mainstream support and possibly even woo some Muslim voters disillusioned with France’s traditional parties.

After meeting Hariri on Monday, Le Pen went against current French policy in Syria by describing President Bashar Al Assad as the “only viable solution” for preventing Islamic State from taking power in Syria.

Lebanon has some 1.5 million Syr-ian refugees.

Hariri, whose family has close links to conservative former French Presi-dent Jacques Chirac and still has a home in France, issued a strongly-worded statement after their meeting.

“The most serious error would be to link Islam and Muslims on the one hand and terrorism on the other,” Hariri said.

Scotland to leave

EU whether free

or not: UK minister

Edinburgh

Reuters

Britain’s Secretary of State for Scotland will tell the Scottish parliament today that Scotland is leaving the EU whether or not it becomes independent.

The comments by David Mundell are bound to raise hackles with the pro-inde-pendence devolved Scottish government as talk of a new referendum on splitting from the United Kingdom swirls.

A majority of Scots voted to stay in the European Union in last June’s Brexit referendum but Britain as a whole will nevertheless quit the EU due to the weight of the pro-leave vote in more populous England.

The Scottish government says that means Scotland should have a choice on a future without the United Kingdom.

Although the independence move-ment lost a referendum in September 2014, the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) says that a second independence referendum is warranted as Brexit means circumstances have significantly changed.

But Mundell will say: “The Scottish government are in exactly the

same position they were in before the 2014 referendum - arguing for an inde-pendent Scotland that would face an uncertain process applying to join the EU as a new member state.”

“There is no set of circumstances in which Scotland could remain a member of the EU after the rest of the UK has left,” he will say, according to an advance copy of his speech.

Mundell is the only member of the British parliament from the ruling Con-servative Party to hold a seat in Scotland. In response to his comments, a Scottish government spokesperson said: “Scot-land faces being dragged out of Europe against its will by a Tory (Conservative) government with just one MP out of 59 in Scotland, but that MP – David Mun-dell –seems totally oblivious to the irony of him seeking to lay down the law on what should happen next.”

The devolved government in Edin-burgh has proposed that Scotland be able to retain at least membership of the EU’s single market once Britain leaves.

But it accepts that the EU will not negotiate with it directly. And the British government has given no sign it is ready to seek special deals from Brussels for Scotland.

FAR-FETCHEDThe notion that Scotland could some-

how secede and negotiate its own independent membership of the EU to start by the time the rest of the United Kingdom leaves the bloc in early 2019 is dismissed as far-fetched by British and EU officials. European Union leaders refuse to be drawn on hypothetical ques-tions of whether a future independent Scotland would be let in and how long that would take. Fears of encouraging the break-up of other members, such as Spain or Belgium, meant the EU main-tained a chilly distance from the Scots’ 2014 secession bid.

Vienna

Reuters

An Austrian court approved yes-terday the extradition of Ukrainian businessman

Dmytro Firtash (pictured) to the United States in a bribery case, over-turning an earlier ruling that had said the US request was politically motivated.

Firtash, who denies the US brib-ery allegations, is a former supporter of Ukraine’s ousted pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich. Firtash made a fortune selling Russian gas to the Kiev government.

Minutes after Judge Leo Levnaic-Iwanski announced his exradition verdict to a packed courtroom, a spokeswoman for Austrian prosecu-tors said Firtash had been detained on a European arrest warrant based on a separate Spanish request.

The spokeswoman said it was too early to say if implementing the

European warrant might impact the extradition proceedings. She could give no details on the Spanish request, though Spanish media said it related to suspected money laundering.

In the extradition case, Judge Levnaic-Iwanski said the United States had provided further docu-ments to strengthen its case against Firtash since the previous Austrian

court ruling. “This does not mean that somebody is being pre-judged as guilty, but rather that it will be decided in another country whether they are guilty or innocent,” he said.

A US grand jury indicted Firtash in 2013, along with a member of India’s parliament and four others, on suspicion of bribing Indian gov-ernment officials to gain access to minerals used to make titanium-based products.

Levnaic-Iwanski said the US charges against Firtash were entirely of a criminal nature and not related to politics. He added that the busi-nessman, who was in the courtroom, would get a fair trial in the United States.

Speaking before yesterday’s ver-dict, Firtash’s lawyer Dieter Boehmdorfer reiterated the accusa-tion that the United States was motivated in the case by political interests.

Ukrainian tycoon to be extradited to US

Contentious issue

Comments by David Mundell are bound to raise hackles with the devolved Scottish government as talk of a new referendum on splitting from the UK swirls.

The govt in Edinburgh has proposed that Scotland be able to retain at least membership of the EU’s single market once Britain leaves.

Spanish cops shoot to halt speeding truck Barcelona

AFP

Spanish police opened fire yesterday on a truck loaded with gas cylinders that was

speeding the wrong way down a Barcelona road, managing to halt it and detain the Swedish driver.

Fears that the 32-year-old was attempting an attack simi-lar to those that took place last year in the French city of Nice or Berlin were soon put to rest when Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido tweeted "it was not a terrorist act".

"The detained driver of the

stolen butane truck in Barcelona has a history of psychiatric prob-lems," he said.

The man was unarmed and was taken to a hospital for a check-up, regional police chief Joan Carles Molinero told a news conference.

He was identified by a source close to the investigation, who refused to be named, as Joakim Robin Berggren.

Court documents in Sweden revealed he had served prison time before 2012, though why he was jailed is not known as these details are erased from criminal records after five years.

He then ended up back in

court twice for driving under the influence of drugs, taking drugs and for carrying a banned weapon — in this case brass knuckles — and was fined for each offence.

Police said the small truck rammed several cars near Bar-celona's harbour before police fired seven shots to stop it.

The trace of two gunshots were visible on the windscreen.

During the chase, which lasted several kilometres, sev-eral gas cylinders fell off the truck as the man drove at high speed.

Three people were lightly

injured during the chase, includ-ing a Brazilian woman whose leg was struck by one of the bottles that fell from the truck, Molin-ero said.

Mireia Ruiz, a woman who saw the incident from her home nearby, said the driver ignored people screaming at him to stop as he sped down the wrong side of a ring road.

"When people shouted at him, he would laugh and make offensive gestures with his hand," she told AFP.

The truck was stopped when it crashed against the wall of a motorway, and the driver was then detained.

Romania Lower House nod to scrapping graft decreeBucharest

Reuters

Romania’s Lower House of parliament yesterday o v e r w h e l m i n g l y

endorsed a government order to scrap a graft decree that trig-gered mass street protests, international condemnation and a consequent U-turn by the month-old cabinet.

The cabinet of Prime Min-ister Sorin Grindeanu enraged people when it quietly approved on January 31 a d e c r e e t h a t w o u l d

have decriminalised several corruption offences, prompt-ing the largest display of anger since the 1989 fall of communism.

The Lower House, as expected, backed the order comprehensively by 291 votes to none against with three abstentions.

The Upper House of parlia-ment, the senate, approved the withdrawal of the decree last Tuesday after all ruling party leaders agreed to scrap the decree as quickly as possible.

Marine Le Pen leaves a hotel after a news conference in Beirut, Lebanon, yesterday.

18 WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017AMERICAS

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos (left) shaking hands with a FARC-EP leftist guerrilla during his visit to a Transitional Standardization Zone in La Carmelita, Puerto Asis municipality, yesterday.

Conciliatory gesture

White House 'gave anti-EU message'Berlin

Reuters

In the week before US Vice-President Mike Pence visited Brussels and pledged America’s “stead-fast and enduring”

commitment to the European Union, White House chief strat-egist Steve Bannon met with a German diplomat and delivered a different message, according to people familiar with the talks.

Bannon, these people said, signalled to Germany’s ambas-sador to Washington that he viewed the EU as a flawed con-struct and favoured conducting relations with Europe on a bilateral basis.

Three people who were briefed on the meeting spoke to Reuters on condition of ano-nymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. The German gov-ernment and the ambassador, Peter Wittig, declined to com-ment, citing the confidentiality of the talks.

A White House official who checked with Bannon in response to a Reuters query confirmed the meeting had taken place but said the account provided to Reuters was inac-curate. “They only spoke for about three minutes and it was just a quick hello,” the official said.

The sources described a longer meeting in which Ban-non took the time to spell out his world view. They said his message was similar to the one he delivered to a Vatican con-ference back in 2014 when he was running the right-wing website Breitbart News.

In those remarks, delivered via Skype, Bannon spoke favourably about European populist movements and described a yearning for nationalism by people who “don’t believe in this kind of pan-European Union.”

Western Europe, he said at the time, was built

on a foundation of “strong nationalist movements”, add-ing: “I think it’s what can see us forward”.

The encounter unsettled people in the German govern-ment, in part because some officials had been holding out hope that Bannon might tem-per his views once in government and offer a more nuanced message on Europe in private. One source briefed on the meeting said it had con-firmed the view that Germany and its European partners must prepare for a policy of “hostil-ity towards the EU”.

A second source expressed concern, based on his contacts with the administration, that there was no appreciation for the EU’s role in ensuring peace and prosperity in post-war Europe. “There appears to be no understanding in the White House that an unravelling of the EU would have grave conse-quences,” the source said.

The White House said there was no transcript of the con-versation. The sources who had been briefed on it described it as polite and stressed there was no evidence Trump was pre-pared to go beyond his rhetorical attacks on the EU.

New York AP

The city medical examiner was expected to perform an autopsy yesterday on

Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, who died a day earlier after falling ill at his office at Russia's UN mission.

Spokeswoman Julie Bolcer said the case was referred to the office by the hospital. The med-ical examiner is responsible for investigating deaths that occur by criminal violence, accident, suicide, suddenly or when the person seemed healthy, or if someone died in any unusual or suspicious manner. Most of the deaths investigated by the office are not suspicious.

Vitaly Churkin, who died a day before his 65th birthday, had been Russia's envoy at the United Nations since 2006. He was the longest-serving ambas-sador on the Security Council, the UN's most powerful body.

The Security Council held a moment of silence yesterday in memory of Churkin, whom UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called "not only an out-standing diplomat but an extraordinary human being."

Russian President Vladimir Putin esteemed Churkin's "pro-fessionalism and diplomatic talents," spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to the

state news agency TASS. Mos-cow has not yet given a date for the funeral.

Diplomatic colleagues from around the world mourned Churkin as a master in their field, saying he had both a deep knowledge of diplomacy and a l a r g e a n d c o l o u r f u l personality.

US Ambassador Nikki Haley said that while she and Churkin did not always agree, "he unquestionably advocated his country's positions with great skill."

Her predecessor, Samantha Power, described him

on Twitter as a "diplomatic maestro and deeply caring man" who had done all he could to bridge differences between the US and Russia. Those differ-ences were evident when Power and Churkin spoke at the Secu-rity Council last month, and Power lashed out at Russia for annexing Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and for carrying out "a merciless military assault" in Syria. Churkin countered that Democratic former President Barack Obama's administration, which Power served in, was "desperately" searching for scapegoats for its failures in

Iraq, Syria and Libya.Churkin died weeks into

some major adjustments for Russia, the UN and the interna-tional community, with a new secretary-general at the world body and a new administration in Washington. Meanwhile, the Security Council is due this week to discuss Ukraine and Syria.

From Moscow's vantage point, "Churkin was like a rock against which were broken the attempts by our enemies to undermine what constitutes the glory of Russia," TASS quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying.

Churkin's UN counterparts "experienced and respected the pride that he took in serving his country and the passion and, at times, very stern resolution that he brought to his job," said Gen-eral Assembly President Peter Thomson, of Fiji. But colleagues also respected Churkin's intel-lect, diplomatic skills, good humour and consideration for others, said Thomson, who called for a moment of silence at the start of an unrelated meet-ing Monday.

Churkin emerged as the face of a new approach to foreign affairs by the Soviet Union in 1986, when he testified before the US Congress about the Cher-nobyl nuclear plant disaster. It was rare for any Soviet official to appear before Congress.

Autopsy set for Russian envoy to UN

Moreno ahead in Ecuador election as counting delayedQuito

AP

Vote counting in Ecuador's presidential election dragged into a third day

yesterday with ruling party can-didate Lenin Moreno still just short of a definitive first-round victory and supporters and opponents of outgoing President Rafael Correa trading heated accusations.

With the last ballots trickling in from Sunday's election, Moreno had a little over 39 per-cent of the votes and an almost 11-point lead over conservative Guillermo Lasso, a former banker who finished second in a field of nine candidates. But Moreno remained just under a point below the 40 percent threshold needed to avoid an April runoff.

It was the first time in recent memory that Ecuadorean authorities had not declared a winner on election night, lead-ing Lasso and many of his supporters to charge that an attempt at fraud was underway as Correa's leftist movement sought to hold onto power at a time the rest of South America has shifted to the right. But Las-so's side did not present any evidence of irregularities.

In a series of Tweets

yesterday morning, Correa accused the "losers" of taking advantage of the vote-by-vote count to generate violence and talk of fraud.

"No one doubts who over-whelmingly won the first round," Correa wrote. "There is doubt over whether there will be a sec-ond round or not."

Late Monday, hundreds of Lasso supporters hunkered down in a heavy rain outside the National Electoral Council for a second night to demand that a runoff be confirmed. By early yesterday their numbers in Quito had thinned considerably.

"Ecuadorean people: You have won. We're going to defend this victory," Lasso told supporters in a video message in which he urged protesters to stay mobilised. He said he had called several regional presidents and the head of the Organization of American States to express his concern.

"It's very strange that here in the 21st century the results aren't known the same day as the elec-tion," Lasso later told the NTN24 network, saying that he did not trust Ecuadorean electoral authorities.

Moreno, who served as Cor-rea's vice president from 2006 to 2013, was emphatic that he won outright.

With more than 93 percent

of polling stations reporting yes-terday, he remained ahead with slightly more than 39 percent of the vote compared to 28 percent for Lasso.

"It's striking to me that there is a loser politician out there call-ing for violence," Moreno said at a news conference Monday night. "This can't be tolerated. We're a nation of peace and we want to continue that way." He said he would respect the final count, whatever the outcome.

Rumours swirled on social media about the vote count. A group of people broke down a door at a building in Quito where

ballots were supposedly being burned. Outside an electoral office in Guayaquil, police erected barricades to keep sup-porters and opponents of Correa apart. The Defense Ministry issued a statement denying reports that some sort of mili-tary uprising was underway.

Electoral authorities appealed for calm, saying it could take until today to know if a runoff would be necessary. They said the delay was due to slow arrival of ballots cast in remote rural regions and consu-lates abroad as well as inconsistencies on tally sheets

that needed to be sorted through.Observers from the Wash-

ington-based Organization of American States told electoral authorities that it was important to count the ballots as quickly and as transparently as possible, and urged them to continue informing the public of their progress to shore up credibility in the process.

The outcome of the race is being watched closely in Latin America, where conservative leaders in Argentina, Brazil and Peru have assumed power in the past 18 months after the end of a commodities boom that boosted leftists like Correa.

A self-declared "21st century socialist," Correa was elected president in 2007 and he won praise for ushering in stability for Ecuador after a severe economic crisis that saw three presidents toppled by street protests and the adoption of the US dollar to con-trol rampant inflation.

But Correa also drew criti-cism for his iron-fisted approach against much of the press, oppo-sition and judiciary.

The sheen on his adminis-tration also has been tarnished as once-flush government budg-ets were cut and thousands of employees at state-run compa-nies laid off amid a decline in oil revenues for the OPEC nation.

Policy anomaly

Bannon, sources said, signalled to Germany’s ambassador to Washington that he viewed the EU as a flawed construct and favoured conducting relations with Europe on a bilateral basis.

A White House official confirmed the meeting had taken place but said the account provided to Reuters was inaccurate.

Flowers are laid in front of a portrait of Russia's Ambassador to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin at the Foreign Ministry guest house in Moscow yesterday.

Members of the National Electoral Council count votes in Quito yesterday.

Quebec mosque hires own lawyers for shooting trialQuebec City Reuters

A Quebec City mosque attacked in January by a gunman who killed

six worshippers, is hiring its own lawyers to observe the trial of the accused shooter, a member of the congrega-tion said yesterday.

The lawyers will attend the trial of accused mosque shooter Alexandre Bisson-nette to ensure the “rights of the victims” are respected, mosque vice president Mohamed Labidi told report-ers at a Quebec courthouse, while stressing his confidence in the Canadian justice system.

The lawyers will take on an oversight role on behalf of the mosque’s congregation and are separate from the prosecutor.

Earlier in the day, Bisson-nette, 27, who is accused of six counts of premeditated murder and five charges of attempted murder, appeared briefly in court wearing a red T-shirt that said, “Physiother-apy integration” in French on the front and “Volunteer” on the back.

Quebec Court Judge Jean-Louis Lemay agreed to the defence’s request to a publi-cation ban which would make the evidence against Bisson-nette not immediately publishable.

Evidence at the trial would be public.

The January shooting at the Quebec mosque, con-demned by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a terrorist attack, is considered by police to be a lone wolf attack. Incidents of Islamo-phobia in Quebec have made headlines in recent years, with multiple mosques being vandalised, including one in Montreal that had its glass door broken early yesterday morning, police said.

Mass shootings are rare in Canada, where gun control laws are stricter than in the US.

19WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017 AMERICAS

Trump security adviser pick surprises manyWashington

Reuters

US President Donald Trump has named Lieutenant General Herbert Raymond McMaster as his

new national security adviser, choosing a military officer known for speaking his mind and challenging his superiors.

McMaster is a highly regarded military tactician and strategic thinker, but his selec-tion surprised some observers who wondered how the officer, whose Army career stalled at times for his questioning of authority, would deal with a White House that has not wel-comed criticism.

“He is highly respected by everybody in the military and we’re very honoured to have him,” Trump told reporters in West Palm Beach where he spent the weekend. “He’s a man of tremendous talent and tre-mendous experience.”

One subject on which Trump and McMaster could soon differ is Russia. McMaster shares the consensus view among the US national security establishment that Russia is a threat and an antagonist to the United States, while the man whom McMaster is replacing, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, appeared to view it more as a potential geopolitical partner.

Trump in the past has expressed a willingness to

engage with Russia more than his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Flynn was fired as national security adviser on February 13 after reports emerged that he had misled Vice-President Mike Pence about speaking to Rus-sia’s ambassador to the United States about US sanctions before Trump’s inauguration.

The ouster, coming so early in Trump’s administration, was another upset for a White House that has been hit by miscues, including the controversial roll-out of a travel ban on people from seven Muslim-majority countries, since the Republican president took office on Janu-ary 20.

The national security

adviser is an independent aide to the president and does not require confirmation by the US Senate. He has broad influence over foreign policy and attends National Security Council meet-ings along with the heads of the State Department, the Depart-ment of Defense and key security agencies.

NOT AFRAID TO QUESTION THE BOSS

Republican Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a frequent Trump critic, praised McMaster as an “outstanding” choice. “I give President Trump great credit for this decision,” McCain said in a statement.

A former US ambassador to Russia under Obama, Michael McFaul, a Democrat, praised McMaster on Twitter as “terrific” and said McMaster “will not be afraid to question his boss.”

McMaster, who flew back to the Washington area from Florida with Trump on Air Force One, will remain on active military duty, the White House said.

Trump also said Keith Kel-logg, a retired US Army general who has been serving as the act-ing national security adviser, as chief of staff to the National Security Council. John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, would be asked to serve the administration in another capacity, Trump said.

“He has a good number of

US President Donald Trump and his newly named National Security Adviser Army Lt Gen Herbert Raymond McMaster (left) in Palm Beach, Florida.

ideas that I must tell you I agree very much with,” Trump said of Bolton, who served in Republi-can President George W Bush’s administration.

Kellogg and Bolton were among those in contention as Trump spent the long Presidents Day weekend considering his options for replacing Flynn. His first choice, retired Vice Admiral Robert Harward, turned down the job last week.

McMaster, 54, is a West Point graduate known as “HR,” with a PhD in US history from the Uni-versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was listed as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2014, partly because of his willingness to buck the system.

A combat veteran, he gained renown in the first Gulf War — and was awarded a Silver Star

— after he commanded a small troop of the US 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment that destroyed a much larger Iraqi Republican Guard force in 1991 in a place called 73 Easting, for its map coordinates, in what many con-sider the biggest tank battle since World War Two.

As one fellow officer put it, referring to Trump’s inner circle of aides and speaking on condi-tion of anonymity, the Trump White House “has its own Repub-lican Guard, which may be harder for him to deal with than the Ira-qis were.” The Iraqi Republican Guard was the elite military force of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.

Trump relies on a tight, insu-lar group of advisers, who at times appear to have competing political agendas. Senior adviser Steve Bannon has asserted his

influence by taking a seat on the National Security Council.

McMaster’s fame grew after his 1997 book “Dereliction of Duty” criticised the country’s mil-itary and political leadership for poor leadership during the Viet-nam War.

"CRITICISM AND FEEDBACK”In a July 14, 2014, interview

with the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer in Columbus, Georgia, where Fort Benning is located, McMaster, then the base com-mander, said: “Some people have a misunderstanding about the Army.

“Some people think, hey, you’re in the military and every-thing is super-hierarchical and you’re in an environment that is intolerable of criticism and peo-ple don’t want frank assessments."

Conservative US judges sceptical in border shooting caseWashington

Reuters

Conservative US Supreme Court justices yesterday expressed scepticism

about reviving a lawsuit filed by the family of a Mexican teenager against a US Border Patrol agent who fatally shot the 15-year-old from across the border in Texas in 2010.

In a closely watched case that could affect US immigration actions under President Donald Trump’s administration, the court’s liberal justices expressed sympathy toward allowing the case to move forward, indicat-ing the justices could be headed toward a 4-4 split. Such a ruling would leave in place a lower court’s decision to throw out the civil rights claims against the agent, Jesus Mesa, filed by the family of Sergio Hernandez.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, a conservative who sometimes sides with the liberal justices in close cases and whose vote could be pivotal in this one, voiced doubt about the family’s argu-ments during the court’s hour-long argument.

Kennedy indicated the ques-tion of how to compensate victims of cross-border shoot-ings is one that the US and Mexican governments should resolve, noting that the border is “one of the most sensitive areas in foreign affairs.”

The Supreme Court poten-tially could delay action on the case to see if Trump’s nominee to fill a vacancy on the court, conservative appeals court judge Neil Gorsuch, is confirmed by the US Senate. Gorsuch could then potentially cast the deciding vote. A ruling is due by the end of June.

The justices heard the case at a time that the security of the lengthy US-Mexico border is a hot topic, with President Donald Trump moving forward with plans for a border wall he said is needed to combat illegal immigration.

The case is one of three the justices currently are consider-ing that concern the extent to which the US Constitution pro-vides rights to non-US citizens.

That issue has become more pressing in light of Trump’s Jan-uary order, put on hold by the courts, to block entry into the United States by people from seven Muslim-majority countries and refugees. Trump is prepar-ing a rewritten version of the ban.

The case raises several legal questions, including whether or not the US Constitution’s ban on unjustified deadly force applied

to Hernandez because he was a Mexican citizen on Mexican soil when the shooting occurred in June 2010.

The court could resolve the case by simply deciding not to apply a 1971 Supreme Court rul-ing in a case involving federal drug enforcement agents that allowed such lawsuits in limited circumstances. The court has been reluctant in subsequent cases to extend that ruling to other types of conduct.

Kennedy seemed unwilling to take that step, saying the Her-nandez shooting would be an “extraordinary case” in which to allow a lawsuit against a federal official.

Liberal justices appeared more willing to examine whether some US rights extend to border areas where the US government exercises a certain amount of authority even beyond

the border line, as it does in the culvert where Hernandez was killed.

Justice Elena Kagan said it could be described as a no-man’s land that is “neither one thing or another thing.”

The incident took place at a border crossing between El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

The US Border Patrol said at the time that Hernandez was pelting US agents with rocks from the Mexican side of the Rio Grande before the shooting. US authorities have asserted that Mesa shot Hernandez in self-defense. Lawyers for Hernandez’s family disputed that account, saying he was playing a game with other teenagers in which they would run across a culvert from the Mexican side and touch the US border fence before dashing back.

Outspoken officer

McMaster's selection surprised some observers who wondered how the officer, whose Army career stalled at times for his questioning of authority, would deal with a White House that has not welcomed criticism.

McMaster gained renown in the first Gulf War — and was awarded a Silver Star.

New EPA chief says will 'listen, learn and lead'Washington

Reuters

The new head of the US Environmental Protec-tion Agency, Scott

Pruitt, told agency staff yes-terday that America should not have to choose between the economy and the environment.

As the White House pre-pares executive orders to roll back Obama-era green reg-ulations, Pruitt struck a conciliatory tone in an address to agency staff, say-ing he would “listen, learn and lead.”

“I believe that we as a nation can be both pro-energy and jobs, and pro-environment. We don’t have to choose between the two,” he said in his first speech to EPA workers since he was confirmed as admin-istrator by the US Senate last week.

“I think our nation has done better than any nation in the world at making sure that we do the job of protect-ing our natural resources, and protecting our environment, while also respecting eco-nomic growth,” he told the room of about 70 staff at EPA h e a d q u a r t e r s i n Washington.

Many Republican law-makers view Pruitt, who sued the agency he now leads more than a dozen times as the attorney general of Okla-homa, as a refreshing change at the top of an agency they accuse of federal overreach and killing jobs.

But Democrats and many others worry his appointment signals a reversal in Ameri-ca’s progress cleaning up air and water and fighting global climate change.

US United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley speaks at the Security Council meeting at UN Headquarters in New York, yesterday.

Ready for better Russia ties: US envoy to UN United Nations AFP

US Ambassador Nikki Haley yes-terday said the United States is ready to improve ties with Rus-

sia but will not compromise on its support for Nato and the European Union.

Haley told a Security Council debate on conflicts in Europe that "Russia's attempts to destabilise Ukraine" were among the most serious challenges fac-ing the continent.

"The United States thinks it's possi-ble to have a better relationship with Russia — after all, we confront many of the same threats," Haley said.

"But greater cooperation with Rus-sia cannot come at the expense of the security of our European friends and allies."

The remarks came as European gov-ernments are seeking reassurance after

US President Donald Trump applauded Britain's decision to leave the European Union, criticised Nato members over bur-den-sharing and praised Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Haley said the United States was committed to "the institutions that keep Europe safe" and that it "will not waver" in its support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The United States wants to deepen cooperation within Nato while "keeping the door open to new allies," she said.

Enlarging Nato has been a major bone of contention with Russia, which sees any expansion of the military alli-ance in eastern Europe as a policy of containment directed against Moscow.

Haley described US ties with the European Union as "deep and enduring" and said differences with European gov-ernments should not be seen as a shift in US support.

20 WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2017HOME

Courtesy: Qatar Meteorology Department

Singapore Ambassador to Qatar Jai Sohan visited The Peninsula office yesterday. Dr. Khalid Al Shafi, Editor-in-Chief, welcomed the ambassador along with other embassy officials and was briefed about the evolution of the newspaper over the 20 years since its establishment and its mission and vision. They talked about the close bilateral relations between Qatar and Singapore in various fields, as well as further cooperation between the Singapore Embassy and the newspaper. Pic: Qassim Rahmatullah / The Peninsula

Singapore Ambassador visits The Peninsula office

FAJRSHOROOK

04.47 am

06.04 am

ZUHRASR

11.47 am

03.05 pm

MAGHRIBISHA

05.34 pm

07.04pm

PRAYER TIMINGS

Raynald C Rivera The Peninsula

More than 120 works by Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti-two of the most important artists of the 20th cen-

tury-are on display at the Fire Station’s Garage Gallery in a first-of-its-kind exhibition in the Middle East which opened yesterday.

The ‘Picasso-Giacometti’ exhibi-tion, which runs until May 21, is a collaboration between Qatar Muse-ums (QM) and Musée national Picasso-Paris and the Fondation Giacometti. It covers paintings, sculp-tures, sketches, photographs and interviews with the artists drawn from the collections of Musée national Picasso-Paris and the Fondation Giacometti in Paris.

“We are hugely honoured to present a tribute to legacies of Picasso and Giacometti, a first for the Middle East, at Fire Station, which is home to our Art-ist in Residence Programme. The Fire Station is a place where our artists in res-idence encounter one another, just as Picasso and Giacometti encountered each other and shared a dialogue and many similarities, despite their age dif-ference,” said Khalifa Al Obaidly, Director of Qatar Museums’Fire Station Artist in Residence Programme.

The exhibition tells captivating story of Picasso and Giacometti unknown relationship between the two artists,

who, despite 20 years age gap, shared many key moments during their distin-guished careers.

“The very close relationship between Picasso and Giacometti has never been shown before this exhibition, and we are particularly pleased to share this discov-ery with the Qatar audience. Thanks to an exceptional gathering of master-pieces, the audience will benefit from a large presentation of unique artworks from these two giants of Modern Art, and will be introduced to specific context of emulation and artistic exchanges which characterised this particularly fertile time for arts,” said Catherine Grenier, Director, Fondation Giacometti, and curator of the exhibition.

Divided into six sections, the

exhibition evokes different aspects of each artist’s production, including development of their work as young artists through to their modernist cre-ations, and shows correspondences between their works, the influence of the surrealist movement, and the return to realism during the post-war period.

Among key works on display are Self Portrait (1901), Woman Throwing a Stone (1931) and The She Goat (1950) by Picasso, and Flower in Danger (1932),Tall Woman (1960) and Walking Man (1960) by Giacometti, presented alongside some newly discovered drawings and photo-graphic archives.

A public roundtable event will be held at 6pm tonight at the Fire Station

auditorium during which Catherine Grenier and the Musée national Picasso-Paris director Laurent Le Bon will discuss the exhibition, its concept, development and curation.

The exhibition will be accompanied by interactive educational activities for school children, teachers and families as well as a self-guided handbook for visitors. Activities will include training for teachers to enable them to conduct self-guided tours of the exhibition for students, run workshops and equip them with materials to have post-visit discus-sions with students. All schools will be invited to the exhibition and workshops will take place at Fire Station Education Studio, where students can create their own art based on the artworks on show.

Huda N V The Peninsula

World’s most valuable jewellery box valued at $3.5m, was unveiled for the first time in the Middle East at

the Doha Jewellery and Watches Exhibition 2017, yesterday. The masterpiece the Moua-wad Flower of Eternity Jewellery Coffer was revealed by renowned 127-year-old dia-mond house, Mouawad.

Certified by the Guinness World Records, the coffer stole limelight at this year’s exhibi-tion, next to stunning Mouawad jewellery and Swiss-made timepieces.

Inspired by Mouawad’s signature Flower of Eternity motif, which consists of three heart-shaped petals symbolising the past, present, and future in an emblem of eternal

love, the Flower of Eternity Jewellery Coffer was crafted using 18-karat gold and 925 sil-ver, and features a profusion of 542.39 carat of white and yellow diamonds, 293.24 carat of white and pink sapphires, 20.06 carat of rubies, and 1,799.75 carat of lapis lazuli.

“The coffer is a labour intensive piece, though machine designed, the stones are hand set for precision. More than a dozen workers took some 8 months to build the masterpiece, which is a resounding testa-ment to the profound creativity and virtuosity of our craftsmen,” Pascal Moua-wad, Co-Guardian of the Mouawad Retail Division, told The Peninsula.

The jeweller, is showing their presence at the Doha Jewellery and Watches Exhibition(DJWE), for the ninth year.

“We see good customer response in

Qatar, which brings us back for the exhibition. The show is best in the world as we really do have customers here. There are real buyers in Qatar and hence all the big brands are here bringing-in their best master pieces.”

“We have chosen the show as

the location for debut of our award-winning jewellery creation in the Middle East. The unveiling of our Flower of Eternity Jewellery Coffer is Mouawad’s special gift for what we believe is top event for luxury market in the region in its 14th edition,” he said.

World's most valuable jewellery box valued at $3.5m unveiled

Picasso-Giacometti expo opens; over 120 works on display

Catherine Grenier, Director of Fondation Giacometti taking the media on a tour during Picasso & Giacometti exhibition at Fire Station's Garage Gallery, Doha, yesterday. Pic: Baher Amin / The Peninsula

The Peninsula

THE Ministry of Economy and Commerce has issued statis-tics of licensed eateries in the country in a bid to guide busi-nessmen about new emerging opportunities in this sector.

A total of 3,716 commer-cial licences for eateries were issued. Doha has 2,004 licence holders, followed by 1038 in Al Rayyan. Al Wakra ranked with 291 licences and Umm Salal with 130. Al Khor-Al Zakhira, Al Daain, Al Shihaniya and Al Shamal have 111, 72 and 23 licences respectively.

Highest active licences are about 1,889 for restaurants, 1271 for cafeteria and 270 for juice stalls. Fast food outlets are 201 and traditional local kitch-ens serving foods are 121. The least number of commercial outlets are 12 for serving bar-becue and nine for seafood. Seven outlets provide mixed services like restaurant, juice stall , cafeteria and kitchen. Outlets severing healthy food are only six.

Ministry issues statistics of licensed eateries

Pascal Mouawad, Co-Guardian of Mouawad Retail Division with The Flower of Eternity Jewellery Coffer. Pic Salim Matramkot / The Peninsula

HIGH TIDE 02:45 - 12:45 LOW TIDE 10:15 - 19:30

Hazy to misty at places at first be-

comes mild daytime with scattered

clouds and weak chance of light rain.

WEATHER TODAY

Minimum Maximum14oC 21oC