celebs 8 @newsofbahrain op-ed dreamer, rhodes scholar, human · annual new visa applicants also saw...

Baghdad bikers aim to unite IraqBaghdad

Roaring along Baghdad’s highways, the “Iraq Bik-ers” are doing more than

showing off their love of out-sized motorcycles and black leather: they want their shared enthusiasm to help heal Iraq’s deep sectarian rifts.

Weaving in and out of traffic,

only the lucky few ride Harley Davidsons — a rare and expen-sive brand in Iraq — while oth-ers make do with bikes pimped-up to look something like the “Easy Rider” dream machines.

“Our goal is to build a broth-erhood,” said Bilal Al Bayati, 42, a government employee who founded the club in 2012 with

the aim of improving the image of biker gangs and to promote unity after years of sectarian conflict.

That is why the first rule of his bikers club is: you do not talk about politics.

The Iraq Bikers — who now number 380 — are men of all ages, social classes and various

faiths. One of their most recent events was taking party in Army Day celebrations.

Some are in the military, the police and even the Popular Mo-bilisation Forces, a grouping of mostly Shiite militias which have taken part in the fight to oust Islamic State from Iraq in the last three years.

02Alarm over declining number of expatriates ‘baseless’

03Huge turnout at Shop Bahrain’s Festival City

04Construction progress at jet fuel farm complex reviewed

8

Wall for ‘Dreamers’7WORLD

OP-EDC E L E B S

I played it a little safe in the past: Nicole Kidman on her film choices

Hollywood star Nicole Kidman says she ‘’played

it safe’’ with her career in the past but now always looks for roles that will challenge her.P14

MONDAYJANUARY 2019

200 FILS ISSUE NO. 7998

Dreamer, Rhodes scholar, human

Brad Pitt is dating Charlize Theron 14 CELEBS

21WHATSAPP38444680

TWITTER@newsofbahrain

[email protected]

WEBSITEnewsofbahrain.com

FACEBOOK/nobmedia

LINKEDINnewsofbahrain

INSTAGRAM/nobmedia

B E Y O N D P O L I T I C S

DON’T MISS IT

90pc consensus on GAP 2019-2022 reachedManama

Second Deputy Speaker Ali Ahmed Al Zayed said that a consensus of more than

90 per cent on the Government Action Programme’s (2019-2022) objectives, policies and initiatives have been reached between the parliamentary committee tasked with study-ing the GAP 2019-2022 and the government delegation chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Shaikh Khalid bin Abdullah Al Khalifa.

MP Al Zayed, on the sidelines of yesterday’s meeting between the two sides, said the meet-

ing addressed the proposed amendments and that the gov-

ernment delegation answered all queries raised by the par-

liamentary committee, includ-ing the exceptional financial

situation seen by Bahrain and the region.

He added the consensus would lead to total one that reflects the parliamentary committee’s keenness to make the GAP as a starting point for the parliamentary and govern-mental action for the preserva-tion of the national gains and providing the citizens with decent living, in addition to achieving sustainable devel-opment services, chiefly in health, housing and education areas.

He noted that the two sides would meet today to discuss the remaining amendments.

All proposed amendments were discussed at the meeting.

Joint Arab action call Bahrain expresses support for co-operation to achieve the economic and developmental interests of Arab countries

• The minister noted the importance of alliances and co-operation to guarantee food security and providing strategic stock to avoid any potential crises in the future.

Beirut

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed

Al Khalifa, conveyed the greet-ings of His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa to the Presi-dent of the Lebanese Republic,

Michel Aoun and his wishes of success for the Arab Economic and Social Development Summit.

He also conveyed the greetings and wishes of His Royal High-ness the Prime Minister, Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa,

and His Royal Highness the Crown Prince, Deputy Supreme Commander and First Deputy Prime Minister, Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa to the Leb-anese President and people.

This came during the Min-

ister’s participation on behalf of His Majesty the King in the fourth Arab Economic and Social Development Summit held in Beirut yesterday.

The minister of Foreign Affairs lauded the efforts of the Custo-dian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and the Kingdom of Saudi

Arabia in hosting the third Arab Development Summit.

The minister affirmed the keenness of the Kingdom of Bah-rain in supporting joint economic and development Arab action to achieve the interests of Arab countries.

He noted the importance of al-liances and cooperation to guar-antee food security and provid-ing strategic stock to avoid any potential crises in the future.

He also underscored the im-portance of activating joint Arab actions in all vital sectors in order to combat economic and social challenges facing Arab countries and people, including extremism, wars and attempts to categorise people based on their religions and sects.

Shaikh Khalid addresses the summit in Beirut.

Bahrain has provided aid and established health, education

and social centres for refugees in a number

of brotherly countries. SHAIKH KHALID

380men of all ages, social

classes and various faiths form the Iraq

Bikers Club.

Many dead in Syria blastDamascus

A “huge explosion” near a military intelligence of-

fice in Damascus yesterday left a number of dead and wounded, a war monitor said, after state TV reported early indications suggested a “terrorist act”.

The Syrian Observatory later confirmed that at least three civilians had been killed in the blast.

“The explosion took place near a security branch in the south of the city. There are some people killed and injured but we could not verify the toll immediate-ly,” the Britain-based Syri-an Observatory for Human Rights said. See Page 5

Sudan protest intensifies Khartoum

Sudanese police fired tear gas on Sunday at pro-

testers ahead of a planned march on Parliament in Omdurman, the twin city of Khartoum, witnesses said.

Security forces were earli-er deployed in large numbers in anticipation of fresh pro-tests calling on longtime ruler Omar Bashir to step down, according to activists and video clips circulating online.

02MONDAY, JANUARY 21, 2019

Alarm over declining number of expatriates ‘baseless’ Expatriate population has been increasing in the Kingdom over the past few years The implementation of VAT and subsidy cuts will not arrest the flow of expats to the Kingdom

TDT | Manama Abdul Jaleel Abdulla

An online video posted by a newspaper claiming ex-odus of expatriates has

stirred up a debate about the fu-ture of those who consider the Kingdom as a home away from home.

While the video paints a gloomy picture, the statistics of-fers a totally different narrative.

The report says that Asian ex-patriates continue to pack their baggage and send families home owing to declining economic conditions, increasing power and water bills and introduction of Value-Added Tax (VAT). But it fails to substantiate citing ade-quate statistics and data.

Exodus Dismissing the report pub-

lished by the newspaper, Interior Ministry Undersecretary for Na-tionality, Passport and Residence Affairs (NPRA) Shaikh Rashid bin Khalifa Al Khalifa said in a state-ment that the expatriate popula-tion has been rising in the years from 2014 to 2018 and in the last

two years it registered a three per cent growth.

Jobs The Labour and Market Regu-

latory Authority (LMRA) statistics reveal that the number of for-eign workers rose from (approx-imately) 458,709 during the first quarter of 2010 to 600,857 in the second quarter of 2018.

And this serves a testimony to the fact that economic slow-down, political issues and labour reforms including Bahrainisation of the workforce have not halted the flow of expatriates into the Kingdom.

The number of expatriates has grown by 142,148 in the past eight years, which is a growth of 24 per cent.

Annual new visa applicants also saw a marked rise from 2010 to 2018; while 101,064 obtained new visas in 2010, 158,264 new visas were approved for expatri-ates in the year 2018.

Power One of the major reasons cited

by the report for the exodus was the increase in power and wa-ter tariffs. Going by history, no country or population has had long term benefits out of subsi-dies offered by the government. The Kingdom, in its efforts, to become a welfare state has been offering huge subsides on power and water to citizens and expatri-ates. But declining oil revenues, which constitute almost over 70

per cent of the Kingdom’s budget, would make things really difficult for the government to continue with subsidies.

The subsidies are being phased out in three phases to achieve the target of charging 29 fils per unit. By the second quarter of the current year the slab system will be replaced with uniform charge for using power for domestic pur-poses.

However, despite the rise in power and water bills, it is really low when compared to the major countries of expat origin - India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and The Philippines.

It is true that the power tariff rise has adversely affected expa-triate families. The only way to tackle this issue is to reduce the consumption of power and water. The per capita use of electricity

in the Kingdom is really high at 1,632 units when compared to the global average, which stands at 265 units. In India, the per capita use of electricity is 95 units, far lower than Bahrain.

VAT woes The increasing worries

about the implementation of VAT among the expatriates is unfounded because the major household budgetary alloca-tions that include rent, food, healthcare and school fees are not subjected to VAT. The im-plementation of VAT will, at best, increase household expenses by 5pc, which shouldn’t be a matter of big worry.

142,148is the growth in the

number of expatriates during the past eight years.

Admission assistance for top Universities of the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New

Zealand and Europe.Diploma, Degree, Certificate, PhD programs

with more than 500+ courses.

STUDY ABROAD

• The auction will throw light on the historical eras of the Kingdom of Iraq to African territories that were under the British, Italian, or French rule.

TDT | Manama

Treasures of the Past for Antiques in co-operation with the Strategic Partner

Tamkeen will be organising its Annual Banknotes Fair and Auc-tion at Seef Mall on Thursday.

This year’s Arados banknotes auction will have 100 riyals of Qatar and Dubai (graded 64) – considered one of the two high-est graded banknotes, according to the PMG banknote grading report.

In a statement issued, Nas-reen Khunji, Marketing Man-ager of the Treasures of the Past for Antiques, said: “The event will be held 24-26 Jan 2019; it will be open for public who are

invited to experience the his-torical and cultural banknotes, coins and related collectables.”

The auction will throw light on the historical eras of the Kingdom of Iraq to African territories that were under the British, Italian, or French rule.

Moreover Arados auction not only focuses on bringing what is unique to the people we also provide them with very reasonable prices to add fun to the competition and biddings, added Ms Khunji.

Every collector has a differ-ent taste from solid serial num-

bers, banknote errors, Specimen issues; proof (drafts). Arados assures the collectors that all these different tastes will be ful-filled in the upcoming auction, she said.

The auction owner Mohamed Al Aradi, said: “This fair is big-ger than the ones held the pre-vious years as we are having 28 booth with dealers buying and selling banknotes, coins and collectables from different countries.

“The banknote collectors of the GCC region will have an op-portunity to value and grade their banknotes with the world grading service company (PCGS) as it will be available to offer its grading services throughout the event.

“I like to emphasis that the Kingdom is rich in its culture, and history as events like this just reflects how rich is out Bah-raini culture, hoping that the Kingdom of Bahrain become a regional host for Banknotes Exhibition and auctions like worldwide auctions similar to Spinks and Son, UK,” he added.

Rare coins and banknotes auction at Seef Mall

The fair and auction will showcase cultural banknotes, coins and related collectables.

The auction will throw light on the historical eras of the Kingdom of Iraq to African territories that were under the British, Italian, or French rule. MS KHUNJI

Antic coins on display at the fair.


Alarm over declining number of expatriates ‘baseless’ Expatriate population has been increasing in the Kingdom over the past few years The implementation of VAT and subsidy cuts will not arrest the flow of expats to the Kingdom

Vacant flats The report highlights vacant apartments in

Gudaibiya and Hoora, but doesn’t talk about new apartments being occupied by expatriates in in-creasing numbers in many areas including Tub-li and Hidd. Many expatriates are comfortably moving to these new enclaves to escape from the

hustles and bustles of densely-populated areas and parking woes.

Businesses closing down It is true that many shops and businesses have

closed down in the past few years. But a thorough probe would reveal that the reason behind this was not the economic crisis but the inability of

these businesses to adapt to latest technologies and consumer demands. A good number of cold stores still don’t have the facility to accept e-payments and many shops including the ones at souqs haven’t started their online divisions.

The report is a mere attempt to spread panic among the expatriates. There could be tempo-rary challenges, but there is no way they are going to block the flow of expatriates into the Kingdom.

CPIThe rise in the cost of living in the Kingdom

during the past eight years stands at 15pc, which is low when compared to those of the countries of origin of major expatriate communities (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and The Philip-pines).

Huge turnout at Shop Bahrain’s Festival City

• The Festival City is considered the main event of the fifth edition of Shop Bahrain, the largest event for family entertainment in the Kingdom.

• The Festival City will run for two weeks until the 2nd of February and includes a number of fun-filled family entertainment, a wide range of exciting activities, live performances, carnival games, outdoor market and outdoor cinema.

TDT | Manama

The ‘Festival City ’ launched by the Bahrain Tourism and Exhibitions Authority (BTEA)

is a big hit with thousands visiting in the first few days.

The Festival City is considered the main event of the fifth edition of Shop Bahrain, the largest event for family entertainment in the Kingdom.

Commenting on this occasion, Shai-kh Khaled bin Humood Al Khalifa, the Chief Executive Officer of BTEA said: “We are delighted to launch the Festival City, the main event in Shop Bahrain which aims to revitalise the tourism sector, further positioning Bahrain as the leading tourist desti-nation regionally and internationally, as well as increase its growth in the non-oil sector that contributes to the Kingdom’s National economy and the economic vision 2030.

“We were pleased with the large number of visitors and local business owners who were interested to take part in this unique national event and we hope to offer more space for local

businesses in the upcoming editions. “We also expect the Festival City

to attract even more visitors this year than the previous editions.” he added

The Festival City will run for two weeks until the 2nd of February and includes a number of fun-filled fam-ily entertainment, a wide range of exciting activities, live performances, carnival games, outdoor market and outdoor cinema. It will also feature a daily line-up of live local bands for visitors to enjoy.

Festival City which is held for the third consecutive year, has attracted over 70,000 visitors last year and coincides with the school vacations in Bahrain, KSA and Kuwait. The event will include many activities catering to the entire family and is expected to attract even more visi-tors this year.

The event has been attracting thousands of visitors.

Many fun-filled activities are in store for the children at the event.

70,000is the number of visitors attracted by the festival

last year.


Corrigendum In the advertisement

published on Page 79 in Tribune’s National Day Supplement, Bahrain was wrongly spelled. The error is regretted.

Her Royal Highness Princess Sabeeka bint Ibrahim Al Khalifa, Wife of His Majesty the King and President of the Supreme Council for Women (SCW), yesterday received at SCW headquarters, in Riffa, President of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) Gabriela Cuevas Barron and her accompanying delegation. She welcomed her, underlining keenness of the Supreme Council for Women to boost co-operation, with IPU in order to shed light on the achievements of Bahraini women. She lauded the participation of IPU in the conference held by SCW last November to cast light on the role of political participation of women in achieving developmental justice.

AlMabarrah AlKhalifia Foundation signed an agreement with Tamkeen to support a number of programmes designated for enhancing the skills of the Bahraini youth and preparing them to embark on their careers. The agreement is entered into by the two entities for the third consecutive year, stressing the Foundation’s vital role in supporting its students through “Rayaat” Scholarships Program, as well as training youth within the “Ithra’a Youth Enrichment Program, which is being supported by Tamkeen for the first time. Shaikha Zain bint Khalid AlKhalifa, Chairperson of AlMabarrah AlKhalifia Foundation, and Dr Ebrahim Mohammed Janahi, Chief Executive of Labour Fund Tamkeen signed the agreement.

Agreement inked

Construction progress at jet fuel farm complex reviewed

Oil, Transportation and Telecommunication ministers briefed on latest project milestones TDT | Manama

The Minister of Oil, Shaikh Mohammed bin Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Khalifa,

and the Minister of Transpor-tation and Telecommunica-tions, Kamal Ahmed hailed the on-schedule progress of con-struction work at Bahrain In-ternational Airport’s (BIA) new fuel farm complex during an inspection visit to the site.

The ministers were briefed on the latest milestones of the project, which was launched in mid-2017, in the presence of BAC Jet Fuel Company (BJFCO) board members, and representa-tives from Bahrain Airport Com-pany (BAC), engineering con-sultants Mott Macdonald, and main contractor Amana Pipeline Construction.

The strategic project, an im-portant component of the Air-port Modernisation Programme, will reinforce Bahrain’s posi-tion as a centre of aviation fuel services in the GCC region and contribute to national economic growth in line with the King-dom’s Vision 2030.

The BJFCO, established as a

joint venture company between BAC and the National Oil and Gas Authority (NOGA) in April 2016, is currently developing the complex in the north east area of the airport in line with directives from Bahrain’s lead-ership to relocate the airport’s fuel tanks from Arad.

Following a tour of the site, BJFCO Chairman, Abdul Majeed Al Qassab briefed the Ministers and their accompanying delega-tion on the project’s completed and upcoming stages. BJFCO, a joint venture company between BAC and the National Oil and Gas Authority, will be responsi-ble for the facility’s management and operation, as per directives from Bahrain’s leadership.

The ministers stressed the importance of finishing the complex by Q3 this year, while maintaining the highest levels of quality to achieve the project’s objectives. They also noted the milestone achievement of one

million man hours without lost time accidents.

The Minister of Oil said praised NOGA’s vision to support pioneering projects aimed at achieving a number of tangible and qualitative goals, including improving efficiency and the expansion of aviation fuel oper-ations and services.

He also stressed the impor-tance of completing the con-struction of the complex of aircraft fuel depots in a time-ly manner in accordance with the highest specifications and standards, and utilising the highest level of skill, knowledge and competency.

Mr Ahmed said: “The fuel farm complex is an important

component of plans to restruc-ture the aviation sector in the Kingdom and will play a key role in streamlining the aviation fuel supply, operation, and mainte-nance process at the airport.

“It is one of the largest in-frastructure projects in the Kingdom and is aimed at stim-ulating sustainable economic growth and diversifying revenue streams in line with Bahrain’s Economic Vision 2030. There are currently 38 airlines oper-ating out of BIA and we expect this number to grow.

“The fuel farm, which is being built according to the highest international standards, will en-able us to support the increased activity.”

Youngest writer to launch book on SDG’sTDT | ManamaHarpreet Kaur

A 12-year-old author will launch his book on Sus-

tainable Development Goals on January 24, which marks the United Nations Interna-tional Day of Education.

The event, which will be held at the International Peace Institute MENA, will be inaugurated by IPI MENA director Nejib Friji in the presence of GPIC President Dr Abdulrahman Jawahery and other dignitaries.

Speaking to Tribune, Mr Friji said the ‘young author’ Adam Kadia has well ac-knowledged and analysed the SDGs in the book. “He wrote his first book at the age of nine and is a great promise for tomorrow.”

India Quiz 2019 set TDT | Manama

To commemorate the 70th Republic Day of

India, Bahrain India Edu-cational and Cultural Forum in Association with Veritas Public Relations and The Bahrain Keraleeya Sama-jam, is organising the INDIA

QUIZ 2019. It will be

at the Bah-rain Ker-aleeya Sa-majam Di-mond Ju-bilee Hall , Bahrain on Friday February 1, 2019.

The Quiz master is A P M Mohammed Haneesh, a senior Indian Administra-tive Service Officer.

Mr Mohammed Haneesh IAS, ( Managing Director of Kochi Metro) is a very familiar face to the Quiz Buffs of Bahrain as he was the Quiz master for the pre-vious two editions of the India Quiz.

Mr Ahmed with Shaikh Mohammed and other ministry officials at the project site.

The fuel farm complex is an important

component of plans to restructure the aviation

sector in the Kingdom and will play a key role

in streamlining the aviation fuel supply.

MR AHMED

Mr Haneesh

MPs offer support to housing projects

Manama

Housing Minister Bas-sem Al Hamer re-ceived Members of

Parliament (MPs) Abdulla Al Thawadi, Bassem Al Maliki, Jassim Bu Hamoud and Yousef Zainal.

They discussed various top-ics including latest progress in the housing plan and means of boosting the bilateral coopera-tion between the ministry and the Council of Representatives.

The lawmakers affirmed supporting the ministry’s plans to meet the applications on the waiting lists, accelerating the momentum of the residential projects within the ministry’s plans.

They also reviewed the pro-gress in housing projects be-ing implemented in the King-dom’s new towns, as part of the ministry’s plans to meet the housing demand in the various governorates, particularly the Northern governorate.

The lawmakers expressed their appreciation of the minis-try’s efforts to resolve the hous-ing dossier and the steps taken by the ministry in this respect.

They reiterated their sup-port to the housing develop-ment dossier in harmony with the directives of His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, within the Government Action Plan led by His Royal Highness Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa the Prime Minister.

05

world

MONDAY, JANUARY 21, 2019

I heard them saying, ‘Build that wall, build that wall.’

We’re not supposed to have walls here,

we never did.

PHILLIPS

NATIVE AMERICAN MAN

World’s oldest man’ dies in Japan at 113

Tokyo, Japan

“World’s oldest man” Masazo Nonaka, who was born just two years after the Wright brothers launched humanity’s first

powered flight, died on Sunday aged 113, Japanese media said.Nonaka was born in July 1905, according to Guinness World

Records -- just months before Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity.

Guinness officially recognised Nonaka as the oldest living man after the death of Spaniard Francisco Nunez Olivera last year.

“We feel shocked at the loss of this big figure. He was as usual yesterday and passed away without causing our family any fuss at all,” his granddaughter Yuko told Kyodo News.

Nonaka had six brothers and one sister, marrying in 1931 and fathering five children.

He ran a hot spring inn in his hometown and in retirement enjoyed watching sumo wrestling on TV and eating sweets, according to local media.

Japan has one of the world’s highest life expectancies and was home to several people recognised as among the oldest humans to have ever lived.

They include Jiroemon Kimura, the longest-living man on record, who died soon after his 116th birthday in June 2013.

The oldest verified person ever -- Jeanne Louise Calment of France -- died in 1997 at the age of 122, according to Guinness.

Masazo Nonaka eats a cake after receiving the certificate from Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest living man at then age 112 years and 259 days during a ceremony in Ashoro on Japan’s northern main island of Hokkaido. (Associated Press)

US diocese sorry after students mock elderly Native American

Washington, United States

A US diocese has apologized and vowed to take action

after videos emerged showing boys from a Catholic private school mocking an elderly Na-tive American man at a rally in the capital Washington, trigger-

ing widespread criticism. The incident occurred on the

steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Friday when the annual an-ti-abortion March for Life coin-cided with a rally by indigenous communities calling for their rights to be respected.

In footage captured on mul-

tiple phone camera videos that swept social media on Satur-day, a student from Covington Catholic High School in Ken-tucky wearing a Make America Great Again hat is seen smirking as he stands extremely close to Nathan Phillips, a Native Amer-ican Vietnam war veteran, who

beats a traditional drum while chanting.

Other teens, many also wear-ing clothing bearing President Donald Trump’s political slogan jeered, jumped and appeared to mock the man.

The Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School issued a statement rebuking the students after their displays drew widespread derision.

“We condemn the actions of the Covington Catholic High School students towards Na-than Phillips specifically, and Native Americans in general, Jan. 18, after the March for Life, in Washington, D.C,” the statement said.

“We extend our deepest apol-ogies to Mr. Phillips. This behav-ior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person. The matter is being investigat-ed and we will take appropri-ate action, up to and including expulsion.”

Kaya Taitano, a witness to the

incident, was quoted by CNN as saying Phillips had decided to in-tervene with a “healing prayer” when the school teens got into a verbal altercation with a group of African American youths who had been preaching about the Bible nearby.

An emotional Phillips gave his reaction in a separate video. “I heard them saying, ‘Build that wall, build that wall.’ We’re not supposed to have walls here, we never did.

“I wish I could see that energy of that young mass of young men. . . into mak-ing this country really, really, great. Helping those that are hungry.”

Deb Haaland, one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress in Novem-ber, linked the students’ be-havior to rising levels of racial intolerance under the Trump administration.

“This Veteran put his life on the line for our country,” she wrote on Twitter.

A screen grab taken from a video circulating showing boys from a Catholic private school mocking an elderly Native American man

Blast rocks Damascus

AFP | Damascus, Syri

A bomb blast hit the capi-tal of war-torn Syria on Sunday and a “terrorist”

was arrested, state media said, in a rare attack in the city that has been largely insulated from violence.

A Britain-based war monitor said a “huge explosion” near a military intelligence office in southern Damascus had left a number of people dead and wounded.

State news agency SANA said that a “bomb blast” had caused an explosion “without leaving any victims”.

“There is confirmation of re-ports that a terrorist has been arrested,” it said.

The Syrian Observatory for

Human Rights monitor told AFP that “the explosion took place near a security branch in the south of the city”.

“There are some people killed and injured but we could not verify the toll immediately,” it said. It was unclear if the blast was caused by a bomb that was planted or a suicide attack, ac-cording to the monitor, which relies on a network of sources inside the country.

It said that shooting followed the explosion.

Syria is locked in a civil war that has killed more than 360,000 people and displaced millions since a brutal crack-down on anti-government pro-tests in 2011 spiralled into full conflict. Damascus has been largely spared the worst of the

violence during the country’s brutal nearly eight-year war, but several bomb attacks have shaken the city.

Another bombing Sunday killed three people and wound-ed nine others in the northern Syrian city of Afrin on the first anniversary of a Turkish offen-sive on the Kurdish-majority region, the Observatory said

Repeated attacksWith key military backing

from Russia, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have retaken large parts of Syria from rebels and jihadists, and now control almost two-thirds of the coun-try.

The Syrian regime in May re-claimed a final scrap of territory held by the Islamic State group in southern Damascus, cement-

ing total control over the capital for the first time in six years.

Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said that Sunday’s blast appeared to be the first attack in Damascus since a car bomb over a year ago that caused no casualties.

The city has been hit re-peatedly by bloody bombings throughout Syria’s devastating conflict. Since regime forces reclaimed control of the Damas-cus and surrounding regions security forces have removed many of the security check-points that dotted the city.

Government troops have largely pushed remaining re-bel and jihadist forces into the northwestern province of Idlib, while IS holds a few dwindling pockets of territory.

A woman mourns the death of an Arab fighter from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who was killed while fighting against the Islamic State (IS), during his funeral in northeastern Syrian Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli


For years we were stereotyped as

people who have pools of petrol in their backyards.We are changing

that narrative. This (project) is about

national pride

AN OFFICIAL FROM THE ROYAL AL-ULA COMMISSION

Reviving ancient past Saudi music festival spotlights pre-Islamic heritage

AFP | Al-Ula, Saudi Arabia

Bathed in light, musicians belt out melodies among pre-Islamic desert ruins

in northwestern Saudi Arabia, a heritage trove at the centre of efforts to put the reclusive king-dom on the tourism map.

Hosted by the Al-Ula gov-ernorate -- where Nabatean tombs and art are chiseled into caramel-hued rock -- “Winter at Tantora” is the latest music carnival in the kingdom, where such events were unheard of just two years ago.

Spread over eight weekends until February 9, the main events are hosted in an auditorium made of mirrored glass that has drawn international artists, from Lebanese singer Majida El Roumi to French classical violin-ist Renaud Capucon.

And it shines a spotlight on a long-isolated area seen widely as an open-air museum.

“Saudi Arabia is turning a new page,” said Zainab al-Kadadi, a Riyadh-based banker.

The 29-year-old attended a musical weekend that also in-cluded sand dune bashing -- an adventure sport that involves driving across challenging de-sert landscapes -- and a tour of an Ottoman-era train station.

The festival is seen as a soft

opening of Al-Ula, an area roughly the size of Belgium that is being touted as the centre-piece of Saudi attractions, as the conservative petro-state pre-pares to open up to international tourists.

Building a tourism industry

from scratch is at the heart of a government plan to prepare the Arab world’s biggest economy for a post-oil era, an ambition fraught with challenges.

Kingdom of ‘fun’A liberalisation drive by

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, has brought new cinemas, concerts and sporting extravaganzas.

While i t is yet to offer tourist visas, the country fast-tracked electronic per-mits for visitors to attend the festival.

The kingdom organised a sim-ilar process in December for a motor sports event in Riyadh, where performances by artists like Enrique Iglesias and Da-vid Guetta -- and thumping af-ter-parties -- were on offer.

‘Changing the narrative’ Saudi Arabia is seeking to pre-

serve heritage sites that predate Prophet Mohammed’s life in the seventh century.

The sites have long been ne-glected or vandalised, because glorifying them is considered blasphemous by religious con-servatives.

With French support in Al-Ula, archaeological teams are

undertaking a massive survey of key sites, which includes scanning via helicopters, sat-ellites, drones and a remote sensing technology called Lidar.

Five-star resorts are being planned to accommodate thou-sands of tourists. Local residents are being trained as guides, of-fering them some respite from rampant joblessness.

Al-Ula is expected to fully open up to foreign tourists with-in three to five years, an official from the Royal Al-Ula Commis-sion said.

He added that the project aims to revive the glory of Saudi Ara-bia’s ancient past, a topic that has scant coverage in local his-tory textbooks.

“For years we were stereo-typed as people who have pools of petrol in their backyards,” the official said.

“We are changing that nar-rative. This (project) is about national pride.”

French solo violinist Renaud Capucon performs with pianists during the first “Winter at Tantora” music carnival

A view of the facade of the new purpose-built Maraya (Arabic for “Mirror”) concert hall hosting the first “Winter at Tantora” music carnival in the ruins of Al-Ula, a UNESCO World Heritage site in northwestern Saudi Arabia

eSwatini chief bans alcohol after spear stabbings on elderly victimsMbabane, eSwatini

A regional chief in the Afri-can kingdom of eSwatini

has banned alcohol, his repre-sentative said Saturday, after drunken youths repeatedly attacked elderly people and in one incident sons killed their father.

Chief Gasa waNgwane Dlamini i ssued the ban in Qomntaba, one of the largest of 385 chiefdoms in eSwatini , which was until recently known as Swaziland.

According to the chief’s rep-resentative, Fanalakhe Ndzini-sa, young men stabbed elderly people with spears in a spate of attacks.

“The violent behaviour of drunk youths who spear and assault elderly people is the

reason why the chief decid-ed to ban alcohol,” Ndzinisa said.

“In this area we have a prob-lem of a high rate of drinking among youths caused by high unemployment.

“This causes them to spend a lot of time drinking traditional concoctions and smoking dag-ga (marajuana).”

He said a man had been killed by his sons in one attack.

The land-locked southern African country is ruled by King Mswati III -- one of the world’s last absolute mon-archs.

Last year the king marked 50 years since his country’s independence from British colonial rule by changing its name to eSwatini (“land of the Swazis”).

UN condemns ‘vile’ killing of eight UN peacekeepers in MaliBamako, Mali

The UN’s spokesman in Mali condemned the

killing of at least eight UN peacekeepers in a “vile and criminal attack” on their base in the northeast early yesterday.

“Peacekeepers of the MI-NUSMA force at Aguelhok fought off a sophisticated attack by assailants who ar-rived on several armed ve-hicles,” said Mahamat Saleh Annadif, the UN’s special representative for Mali.

Eight peacekeepers have so far been confirmed dead and several others were wounded, he added in a statement.

Russians protest Kuril islands handoverMoscow, Russia

Hundreds of Russians pro-tested against a feared

giveaway of strategic islands to Japan yesterday, two days be-fore a key summit between the countries’ leaders in Moscow.

Between 300 and 500 peo-ple gathered on Suvorovskaya Square, just outside Moscow city centre, for an authorised rally called by several nation-alist politicians, opposed to any move to cede any of the four islands claimed by Tokyo.

The Soviet army claimed four islands, the so-called south Kurils, in the closing days of World War II.

The dispute over their sov-ereignty prevented the two countries from signing a peace treaty, a situation President Vladimir Putin and Prime Min-

ister Shinzo Abe sought to rec-tify last year.

Abe is set to hold talks on the issue with Putin on Tuesday.

Moscow has said the islands’ sovereignty is not a bargain-ing chip and the Kurils will remain Russian territory, but many people distrust official rhetoric and suspect a different line of negotiations behind the scenes.

Some protesters carried signs saying “The Kurils are Russian land” and “Giving away the Kurils is state treason”, an AFP correspondent observed.

The Kremlin has ridden a wave of nationalism follow-ing Moscow’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and any attempt to structure an agreement with Japan around a territorial compromise would likely be poorly received.

Protestors hold a protest in Moscow demanding to stop talks on assignation Kuril islands to Japan.


For years we were stereotyped as

people who have pools of petrol in their backyards.We are changing

that narrative. This (project) is about

national pride

AN OFFICIAL FROM THE ROYAL AL-ULA COMMISSION

Reviving ancient past Saudi music festival spotlights pre-Islamic heritage

AFP | Al-Ula, Saudi Arabia

Bathed in light, musicians belt out melodies among pre-Islamic desert ruins

in northwestern Saudi Arabia, a heritage trove at the centre of efforts to put the reclusive king-dom on the tourism map.

Hosted by the Al-Ula gov-ernorate -- where Nabatean tombs and art are chiseled into caramel-hued rock -- “Winter at Tantora” is the latest music carnival in the kingdom, where such events were unheard of just two years ago.

Spread over eight weekends until February 9, the main events are hosted in an auditorium made of mirrored glass that has drawn international artists, from Lebanese singer Majida El Roumi to French classical violin-ist Renaud Capucon.

And it shines a spotlight on a long-isolated area seen widely as an open-air museum.

“Saudi Arabia is turning a new page,” said Zainab al-Kadadi, a Riyadh-based banker.

The 29-year-old attended a musical weekend that also in-cluded sand dune bashing -- an adventure sport that involves driving across challenging de-sert landscapes -- and a tour of an Ottoman-era train station.

The festival is seen as a soft

opening of Al-Ula, an area roughly the size of Belgium that is being touted as the centre-piece of Saudi attractions, as the conservative petro-state pre-pares to open up to international tourists.

Building a tourism industry

from scratch is at the heart of a government plan to prepare the Arab world’s biggest economy for a post-oil era, an ambition fraught with challenges.

Kingdom of ‘fun’A liberalisation drive by

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, has brought new cinemas, concerts and sporting extravaganzas.

While i t is yet to offer tourist visas, the country fast-tracked electronic per-mits for visitors to attend the festival.

The kingdom organised a sim-ilar process in December for a motor sports event in Riyadh, where performances by artists like Enrique Iglesias and Da-vid Guetta -- and thumping af-ter-parties -- were on offer.

‘Changing the narrative’ Saudi Arabia is seeking to pre-

serve heritage sites that predate Prophet Mohammed’s life in the seventh century.

The sites have long been ne-glected or vandalised, because glorifying them is considered blasphemous by religious con-servatives.

With French support in Al-Ula, archaeological teams are

undertaking a massive survey of key sites, which includes scanning via helicopters, sat-ellites, drones and a remote sensing technology called Lidar.

Five-star resorts are being planned to accommodate thou-sands of tourists. Local residents are being trained as guides, of-fering them some respite from rampant joblessness.

Al-Ula is expected to fully open up to foreign tourists with-in three to five years, an official from the Royal Al-Ula Commis-sion said.

He added that the project aims to revive the glory of Saudi Ara-bia’s ancient past, a topic that has scant coverage in local his-tory textbooks.

“For years we were stereo-typed as people who have pools of petrol in their backyards,” the official said.

“We are changing that nar-rative. This (project) is about national pride.”

French solo violinist Renaud Capucon performs with pianists during the first “Winter at Tantora” music carnival

A view of the facade of the new purpose-built Maraya (Arabic for “Mirror”) concert hall hosting the first “Winter at Tantora” music carnival in the ruins of Al-Ula, a UNESCO World Heritage site in northwestern Saudi Arabia

eSwatini chief bans alcohol after spear stabbings on elderly victimsMbabane, eSwatini

A regional chief in the Afri-can kingdom of eSwatini

has banned alcohol, his repre-sentative said Saturday, after drunken youths repeatedly attacked elderly people and in one incident sons killed their father.

Chief Gasa waNgwane Dlamini i ssued the ban in Qomntaba, one of the largest of 385 chiefdoms in eSwatini , which was until recently known as Swaziland.

According to the chief’s rep-resentative, Fanalakhe Ndzini-sa, young men stabbed elderly people with spears in a spate of attacks.

“The violent behaviour of drunk youths who spear and assault elderly people is the

reason why the chief decid-ed to ban alcohol,” Ndzinisa said.

“In this area we have a prob-lem of a high rate of drinking among youths caused by high unemployment.

“This causes them to spend a lot of time drinking traditional concoctions and smoking dag-ga (marajuana).”

He said a man had been killed by his sons in one attack.

The land-locked southern African country is ruled by King Mswati III -- one of the world’s last absolute mon-archs.

Last year the king marked 50 years since his country’s independence from British colonial rule by changing its name to eSwatini (“land of the Swazis”).

UN condemns ‘vile’ killing of eight UN peacekeepers in MaliBamako, Mali

The UN’s spokesman in Mali condemned the

killing of at least eight UN peacekeepers in a “vile and criminal attack” on their base in the northeast early yesterday.

“Peacekeepers of the MI-NUSMA force at Aguelhok fought off a sophisticated attack by assailants who ar-rived on several armed ve-hicles,” said Mahamat Saleh Annadif, the UN’s special representative for Mali.

Eight peacekeepers have so far been confirmed dead and several others were wounded, he added in a statement.

Russians protest Kuril islands handoverMoscow, Russia

Hundreds of Russians pro-tested against a feared

giveaway of strategic islands to Japan yesterday, two days be-fore a key summit between the countries’ leaders in Moscow.

Between 300 and 500 peo-ple gathered on Suvorovskaya Square, just outside Moscow city centre, for an authorised rally called by several nation-alist politicians, opposed to any move to cede any of the four islands claimed by Tokyo.

The Soviet army claimed four islands, the so-called south Kurils, in the closing days of World War II.

The dispute over their sov-ereignty prevented the two countries from signing a peace treaty, a situation President Vladimir Putin and Prime Min-

ister Shinzo Abe sought to rec-tify last year.

Abe is set to hold talks on the issue with Putin on Tuesday.

Moscow has said the islands’ sovereignty is not a bargain-ing chip and the Kurils will remain Russian territory, but many people distrust official rhetoric and suspect a different line of negotiations behind the scenes.

Some protesters carried signs saying “The Kurils are Russian land” and “Giving away the Kurils is state treason”, an AFP correspondent observed.

The Kremlin has ridden a wave of nationalism follow-ing Moscow’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and any attempt to structure an agreement with Japan around a territorial compromise would likely be poorly received.

Protestors hold a protest in Moscow demanding to stop talks on assignation Kuril islands to Japan.


F I N A L F A R E W E L L

KNOW WHAT

Abul Bajandar has had 25 surgeries

since 2016 to remove the growths from his

hands and feet at Dhaka Medical Col-

lege Hospital.

US President Donald Trump (L) and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (2L) attend the dignified transfer of the remains of Scott A. Wirtz, a Defense Intelligence Agency civilian and former Navy Seal, and three other US personnel killed in northern Syria, at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

Bangladesh ‘Tree Man’ returns to hospital as condition worsensDhaka, Bangladesh

A Bangladeshi father dubbed “Tree Man” for the bark-

like growths on his body re-turned to hospital yesterday after his condition worsened, he said.

Abul Bajandar has had 25 sur-geries since 2016 to remove the growths from his hands and feet at Dhaka Medical College Hospital.

Doctors were on the verge of declaring their treatment a success before a sudden relapse prompted Bajandar to flee the clinic in May without notify-ing staff. But on Sunday he was readmitted to the hospital after his condition deteriorated, with the growths now covering al-most the entirety of his hands and feet, the 28-year-old said.

“I made a mistake by leaving the hospital. I sought alterna-tive treatment but could not find any. I now I understand I should have stayed and contin-ued the treatment here,” Bajan-dar said.

Samanta Lal Sen, a plastic surgeon at the hospital, said doctors would resume treat-ment “very soon”, adding the growths had spread to other parts of his body.

“I requested Bajandar to re-turn as soon as possible. Now we have to start from the very beginning. We’ll have to con-

duct more surgeries,” Sen said.Prime Minister Sheikh Hasi-

na had promised free treatment for Bajandar after his plight captured the sympathies of the

country. He lived in the hos-pital’s expensive private cabin with his wife and daughter for nearly two years during his first round of treatment.

The father of one suffers from epidermodysplasia ver-ruciformis, an extremely rare genetic condition also known as “tree-man syndrome”.

Sen said that fewer than half a dozen people worldwide have the disease.

His hospital also treated a young Bangladeshi girl suffer-ing from the condition in 2017.

Doctors declared her sur-gery a success, but her father later said the growths had re-turned in even greater num-bers, prompting the family to halt treatment and return to their village.

Abul Bajandar’s hands are again covered in the growths that characterise his rare condition. (AFP)

UK’s Prince Philip, 97, back driving - without seatbeltLondon, United Kingdom

Britain’s Prince Philip has been spoken to by the po-

lice for driving without a seat-belt -- just two days after the 97-year-old was involved in a car crash.

Images published in yesteer-day’s newspapers appeared to show him behind the wheel of a replacement Land Rover Freelander on his wife Queen Elizabeth II’s private Sandring-ham estate on Saturday.

A Norfolk Constabulary spokeswoman said the force was aware of the photographs and that “suitable words of advice have been given to the driver”.

The advice was “in line with our standard response when being made aware of such imag-es showing this type of offence.”

Meanwhile, a woman who broke her wrist in Thursday’s crash near the royal country residence in Norfolk, eastern England, has reportedly com-plained about not receiving an apology from the Prince.

“I’m lucky to be alive and he hasn’t even said sorry. It has been such a traumatic

and painful time and I would have expected more of the Royal Family,” Emma Fair-weather, a passenger in the Kia which collided with the Prince’s Land Rover, told the Sunday Mirror.

A police family liaison officer however did call to pass on a message to Emma, who was in the vehicle with a friend and her nine-month-old baby, she said.

“The message he passed on didn’t even make sense. He said, ‘The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh would like to be remembered to you.’ That’s not an apology or even a well-

wish,” she added.The crash, which left the

Prince’s Land Rover on its side, happened as the royal patriarch pulled out of a side road onto a busy main road.

The prince walked away from Thursday’s crash shaken but uninjured, according to a pas-ser-by who helped him out of the vehicle.

The driver of the Kia sus-tained cuts to the knee.

In a statement on Friday, Norfolk Constabulary said: “As is standard procedure with in-jury collisions, the incident will be investigated and any appro-priate action taken.”

Philip driving the replacement Land Rover Freelander (Courtesy of BBC)

Fuel pipeline blaze in Mexico kills 73

Tlahuelilpan, Mexico

An explosion and fire in central Mexico killed at

least 73 people after hundreds swarmed to the site of an illegal

fuel-line tap to gather gasoline amid a government crackdown on fuel theft, officials said. Hidalgo state governor Omar Fayad announced that the toll had increased to 73 after the discovery of five additional

bodies.The blast -- which Fayad

said injured 74 people -- oc-curred near Tlahuelilpan, a town of 20,000 people about an hour’s drive north of Mexico City.

Aerial view of the scene where a massive blaze trigerred by a leaky pipeline took place the night before in Tlahuelilpan, Hidalgo state, Mexico

Wall for ‘Dreamers’ Trump offers concessions on immigrants in return for fundsWashington, United States

US President Donald Trump bitterly attacked top Democrat Nancy Pe-

losi yesterday after she rejected a deal on immigration and the Mexico border wall that would end a 30-day-old government shutdown.

Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, on Saturday called Trump’s offer of tem-porary protections for about a million immigrants in return for $5.7 billion to fund the wall a “non-starter.”

“Nancy Pelosi has behaved so irrationally & has gone so far to the left that she has now offi-cially become a Radical Dem-ocrat,” Trump tweeted. “She is so petrified of the ‘lefties’ in her party that she has lost control.”

“...And by the way, clean up the streets in San Francisco, they are disgusting!” he added, in a seemingly gratuitous aside. Pelosi is from San Francisco.

The offer also was assailed by prominent anti-immigrant voices, which denounced it as tantamount to amnesty.

“No, Amnesty is not a part of my offer. It is a 3 year extension of DACA,” Trump said in anoth-er tweet, referring to former president Barack Obama’s pro-gram to shield undocumented immigrants who entered the country as children.

Besides the 700,000 immi-grants already enrolled in the so-called DACA or “Dreamers” program, Trump’s proposal would also extend to another 300,000 people who had been protected from deportation un-der another programme.

He said that while there would be “no big push” to re-move the 11 million people in the country illegally, he warned: ‘but be careful, Nancy!”

Vice President Mike Pence, who has been leading the ad-ministration’s contacts with

members of Congress, said a bill with the president’s propos-al would be introduced in the Republican-controlled Senate as early as Tuesday.

Trump attempted to seize the initiative in ending the 29-day partial shutdown, a funding freeze that has left many impor-tant government departments relying on unpaid or highly re-duced staff.

His bargain, announced in a televised White House ad-dress, held out the carrot of protection from deporta-tion for two categories of immigrants.

These include 700,000 so-called “Dreamers,” children of people who settled illegally in the United States, and who have become a favorite cause of the Democrats, as well as 300,000 other immigrants whose pro-tected status is expiring, Trump said. The president said these concessions would “build the trust and goodwill necessary to begin real immigration reform.”

US President Donald Trump makes a statement about immigration and the border wall from the diplomatic reception room of the White House

Trump on Saturday offered to temporar-

ily shield a million immigrants from

deportation if Congress authorizes funding for

his Mexican border wall -- an idea Democrats

rejected


Hon. Chairman Najeb Yacob Alhamer | Editor-in-Chief Mahmood AI Mahmood | Deputy Editor-in-Chief Ahdeya Ahmed | Chairman & Managing Editor P Unnikrishnan | Advertisement: Update Media W.L.L | Tel: 38444692, Email: [email protected] | Newsroom: Tel: 38444680, Email: [email protected] & circulation: Tel: 38444698/17579877 | Email:[email protected] | Website: www.newsofbahrain.com | Printed and published by Al Ayam Publishing

JIN PARK

In November, I became the first Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals benefi-

ciary to win the Rhodes scholar-ship. The news was bittersweet.

In 2017 the Trump adminis-tration rescinded the option for overseas travel for those with DACA status, the “Dreamers” who were brought to this country il-legally as children. This means that when I leave the country in October to study at Oxford with my fellow Rhodes scholars, I may not be able to come back.

This is a perpetual reality of be-ing undocumented: I never know if I have a place in America — my home — even after receiving one of the most esteemed scholar-ships in the world.

My family left South Korea during the Asian financial cri-sis in 1997. I remember being whisked away in the middle of the night when I was 7 and boarding a flight for what my par-ents said was “a magical place” called America. At the time, I was unaware of the economic

forces that had compelled my parents to make the journey to a new country.

We settled in a Korean enclave in Flushing, Queens. The lan-guage, people, smells and fla-vours reminded us of home, and that helped ease our transition into our new life. My mother found work in a beauty salon, providing manicures and facials. My father was hired as a line cook in a Korean restaurant, working 12-hour shifts six days a week.

I started going to a school in a nearby Korean church. I slowly began adapting to my new life. I found comfort in learning how to speak English. Despite their demanding workload, my par-ents were resolute and nurtur-ing. When my father learned that playing baseball was an American rite of passage, we’d go out to the sidewalk in front of our apart-ment complex to play. He didn’t know how to pitch, but he tried to teach me anyway. In 2012, I received DACA status, which al-lowed me to apply to Harvard. I graduated in December with a degree in biology and govern-ment.

These days the conversation around immigration is centered on conspiracy theories and ra-cially charged statements. I’m re-

MANAGEMENT IS EFFICIENCY IN CLIMBING THE LADDER OF SUC-CESS; LEADERSHIP DETERMINES WHETHER THE LADDER IS LEANING AGAINST THE RIGHT WALL. STEPHEN COVEY

QUOTE OF THE DAY

VIET THANH NGUYEN

Is it true that Asian-Americans cannot say “I love you?” The striking title of the writer

Lac Su’s memoir is “I Love Yous Are for White People,” which explores the emotional devasta-tion wreaked on one Vietnamese family by its refugee experiences. I share some of Lac Su’s back-ground, and it has been a lifelong effort to learn how to say, without awkwardness, “I love you.” I can do this for my son, and it is heart-felt, but it comes with an effort born of the self-consciousness I still feel when I say it to my father or brother.

Thus, when the actress San-dra Oh won a Golden Globe for best actress in a television drama, “Killing Eve,” perhaps the most powerful part of her acceptance speech for many of us who are Asian-Americans is when she thanked her parents. Gazing at them in the audience, she said, in Korean, “I love you.” She was emotional, her parents were proud, and I could not help but project onto them one of the central dramas of Asian immi-grant and refugee life: the silent sacrifice of the parents, the dif-ficult gratitude of the children, revolving around the inarticulate expression of love.

So many of our Asian parents have struggled, suffered and en-dured in ways that are completely beyond the imaginations of their children born or raised in North American comfort. This strug-

gle and sacrifice is how Asian parents say “I love you” without having to say it. And so many of us children are not expected to say it either, but instead are ex-pected to express love through gratitude, which means obeying our parents and following their wishes for our lives.

Our parents, for the most part, told us to get a good education, get a good job and not speak up, things they had to do to survive. They have encouraged, or forced, many of us to become doctors, lawyers and engineers, and to feel ashamed if we do not. What these parents did not do was tell us we could become artists, ac-tors or storytellers, people en-gaged in seemingly trivial, unsafe and unstable professions. This is why it has been so rare for me, as I give talks in different places around the country, to encounter Asian parents who embrace their children who do not become the “model minority.”

I have met so few who have proudly told me that their chil-dren are English majors or have become writers or artists. Per-haps Oh’s parents were like this. I sometimes wish my parents would have been like this. But I became a writer despite, and perhaps because of, their resist-ance to the idea, my inarticulate desires pushing against their in-articulate sacrifice, all of it taking place before a backdrop of refu-gee life and racial reality.

I grew up in the relatively di-verse city of San Jose, Calif, in the 1980s. My neighbours were older white working-class peo-ple, Mexican immigrants and Vi-etnamese refugees. Then I went to a mostly white high school,

with only a handful of students of Asian descent. We knew we were different, but we found our difference a little difficult to put into words. We called ourselves “the Asian invasion.”

We laughed about that term, but looking back, it was clear that we had absorbed and internal-ized the racism of American soci-ety. In my case, I was lucky that I had never been called a racist slur

to my face, although one of my white elementary school class-mates, knowing that I came from Vietnam, asked me if had carried an AK-47 and fought in the war. My classmate had been irradiated by the images he — and I, and all my eventual Asian-American classmates in high school — saw. We knew that somehow we were seen by other Americans as in-vaders of their country, even if it

happened to be our country, too.The irony was that we had not

invaded America. America had invaded us, or at the very least had occupied or fought in our countries of origin or heritage. We were here because America was there.

Looking back, what I only be-latedly realised was that I needed — we all needed — more stories featuring us. More voices belong-


A person shouldn’t have to be a “genius” or “economically

productive” to have access to equal opportunity

Why we struggle to say ‘I love you’

For many Asian-

Americans, the phrase

belongs to the wonderful

world of white people we see in the

movies and on television



JIN PARK

In November, I became the first Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals benefi-

ciary to win the Rhodes scholar-ship. The news was bittersweet.

In 2017 the Trump adminis-tration rescinded the option for overseas travel for those with DACA status, the “Dreamers” who were brought to this country il-legally as children. This means that when I leave the country in October to study at Oxford with my fellow Rhodes scholars, I may not be able to come back.

This is a perpetual reality of be-ing undocumented: I never know if I have a place in America — my home — even after receiving one of the most esteemed scholar-ships in the world.

My family left South Korea during the Asian financial cri-sis in 1997. I remember being whisked away in the middle of the night when I was 7 and boarding a flight for what my par-ents said was “a magical place” called America. At the time, I was unaware of the economic

forces that had compelled my parents to make the journey to a new country.

We settled in a Korean enclave in Flushing, Queens. The lan-guage, people, smells and fla-vours reminded us of home, and that helped ease our transition into our new life. My mother found work in a beauty salon, providing manicures and facials. My father was hired as a line cook in a Korean restaurant, working 12-hour shifts six days a week.

I started going to a school in a nearby Korean church. I slowly began adapting to my new life. I found comfort in learning how to speak English. Despite their demanding workload, my par-ents were resolute and nurtur-ing. When my father learned that playing baseball was an American rite of passage, we’d go out to the sidewalk in front of our apart-ment complex to play. He didn’t know how to pitch, but he tried to teach me anyway. In 2012, I received DACA status, which al-lowed me to apply to Harvard. I graduated in December with a degree in biology and govern-ment.

These days the conversation around immigration is centered on conspiracy theories and ra-cially charged statements. I’m re-

MANAGEMENT IS EFFICIENCY IN CLIMBING THE LADDER OF SUC-CESS; LEADERSHIP DETERMINES WHETHER THE LADDER IS LEANING AGAINST THE RIGHT WALL. STEPHEN COVEY

QUOTE OF THE DAY

VIET THANH NGUYEN

Is it true that Asian-Americans cannot say “I love you?” The striking title of the writer

Lac Su’s memoir is “I Love Yous Are for White People,” which explores the emotional devasta-tion wreaked on one Vietnamese family by its refugee experiences. I share some of Lac Su’s back-ground, and it has been a lifelong effort to learn how to say, without awkwardness, “I love you.” I can do this for my son, and it is heart-felt, but it comes with an effort born of the self-consciousness I still feel when I say it to my father or brother.

Thus, when the actress San-dra Oh won a Golden Globe for best actress in a television drama, “Killing Eve,” perhaps the most powerful part of her acceptance speech for many of us who are Asian-Americans is when she thanked her parents. Gazing at them in the audience, she said, in Korean, “I love you.” She was emotional, her parents were proud, and I could not help but project onto them one of the central dramas of Asian immi-grant and refugee life: the silent sacrifice of the parents, the dif-ficult gratitude of the children, revolving around the inarticulate expression of love.

So many of our Asian parents have struggled, suffered and en-dured in ways that are completely beyond the imaginations of their children born or raised in North American comfort. This strug-

gle and sacrifice is how Asian parents say “I love you” without having to say it. And so many of us children are not expected to say it either, but instead are ex-pected to express love through gratitude, which means obeying our parents and following their wishes for our lives.

Our parents, for the most part, told us to get a good education, get a good job and not speak up, things they had to do to survive. They have encouraged, or forced, many of us to become doctors, lawyers and engineers, and to feel ashamed if we do not. What these parents did not do was tell us we could become artists, ac-tors or storytellers, people en-gaged in seemingly trivial, unsafe and unstable professions. This is why it has been so rare for me, as I give talks in different places around the country, to encounter Asian parents who embrace their children who do not become the “model minority.”

I have met so few who have proudly told me that their chil-dren are English majors or have become writers or artists. Per-haps Oh’s parents were like this. I sometimes wish my parents would have been like this. But I became a writer despite, and perhaps because of, their resist-ance to the idea, my inarticulate desires pushing against their in-articulate sacrifice, all of it taking place before a backdrop of refu-gee life and racial reality.

I grew up in the relatively di-verse city of San Jose, Calif, in the 1980s. My neighbours were older white working-class peo-ple, Mexican immigrants and Vi-etnamese refugees. Then I went to a mostly white high school,

with only a handful of students of Asian descent. We knew we were different, but we found our difference a little difficult to put into words. We called ourselves “the Asian invasion.”

We laughed about that term, but looking back, it was clear that we had absorbed and internal-ized the racism of American soci-ety. In my case, I was lucky that I had never been called a racist slur

to my face, although one of my white elementary school class-mates, knowing that I came from Vietnam, asked me if had carried an AK-47 and fought in the war. My classmate had been irradiated by the images he — and I, and all my eventual Asian-American classmates in high school — saw. We knew that somehow we were seen by other Americans as in-vaders of their country, even if it

happened to be our country, too.The irony was that we had not

invaded America. America had invaded us, or at the very least had occupied or fought in our countries of origin or heritage. We were here because America was there.

Looking back, what I only be-latedly realised was that I needed — we all needed — more stories featuring us. More voices belong-


A person shouldn’t have to be a “genius” or “economically

productive” to have access to equal opportunity

Why we struggle to say ‘I love you’

For many Asian-

Americans, the phrase

belongs to the wonderful

world of white people we see in the

movies and on television

C I V I L I A N ’ S T R I B U N E


TOP

4TWEETS

04

02

03

01

When I see govern-ment employees

sitting on their desks while their phones con-tinue ringing unanswered it further confirms to me my opinion that many government employees don’t work as hard as private sector employees. Very unprofessional and lazy attitude.

@ATEEKSTER

Nancy Pelosi has be-haved so irrationally

& has gone so far to the left that she has now officially become a Radical Demo-crat. She is so petrified of the “lefties” in her party that she has lost control...And by the way, clean up the streets in San Fran-cisco, they are disgusting!

@realDonaldTrump

.@realDonaldTrump, 800,000 Americans are

going without pay. Re-open the government, let workers get their pay-checks and then we can discuss how we can come together to protect the bor-der. #EndTheShutdown

@SpeakerPelosi

I am as deeply troubled by this as anything: the

degree to which so many Congr. Republicans, starting w McConnell & Ryan, but incl Graham, Cornyn, Thune, Grass-ley + dozens more, have sold out every American interest to our greatest adversary in return for tax cuts and judges.

@NormOrnstein

Disclaimer: (Views expressed by columnists are personal and need not necessarily reflect our

editorial stances)

minded daily that I don’t belong here, and find myself having to justify why I should be allowed to remain.

I can argue that I am smart, driven and able to contribute to this country, just like my fellow undocumented immigrants. We pay taxes to help keep systems such as Medicare and Social Se-curity solvent — systems that we may never directly benefit from.

According to a 2017 study, 91per cent of “Dreamers” are employed and will contribute $460.3 billion to the gross domes-tic product over the next decade. Over 65pc of us are pursuing a degree in higher education.

And yet I resist citing my “intelligence” or “abilities” to defend my presence here, be-cause a human being need not be a Rhodes scholar to be treated with basic fairness and decency. A human being shouldn’t have to be a “genius” or “economical-ly productive” to have access to equal opportunity.

We are your co-workers, your friends, your classmates and your fellow Americans — we work, learn and laugh alongside you.

As I attempt to make sense of what it means to be an un-documented immigrant, I often retreat into the Pusey Archives at Harvard to pore through the

personal library of John Rawls. Rawls, considered the most im-portant philosopher in the 20th century, concentrated on one crucial question: How can a so-ciety establish just institutions when there are seemingly irrec-oncilable differences among its members? He argues that we must recognise first and foremost those who stand among us, who are members of the union, and who therefore must be treated fairly.

I plan to use my time at Ox-ford to think about how undoc-umented immigrants can urge this country to recognise that we are American — we stand among you and we are embed-

ded in this country, its practic-es and its institutions. I hope to start a dialogue about how we as Americans can collectively forge a common identity that respects human rights.

When I step on that plane in Oc-tober and leave the United States for the first time since I arrived 16 years ago, I will think of the bustling flea market on 41st Street and Union Avenue in Flushing, and of the smell of freshly made spicy tteokbokki rice cakes in Korean eateries along Northern Boulevard that I pass on my way to the 7 train. These are my roots. These are the sights and sounds that nurtured me as I became the person I am today.

Walking through those streets has taken on a new meaning as I grapple with the knowledge that soon it may very well be the last time I do so.

There’s a Korean adage that warns that, “What becomes far from the eyes becomes far from the heart.” Yet I have no doubt that these sights and sounds will carry me and remain with me wherever I go, because that’s the nature of home: It stays with you even if the country you call home won’t accept you.

(Jin Park is a 2018 graduate of Harvard.)

1997The U.S. House of Representatives votes 395–28 to reprimand Newt Gingrich for ethics violations, making him the first Speaker of the House to be so disciplined.

1999War on Drugs: In one of the largest drug busts in American history, the United States Coast Guard intercepts a ship with over 4,300 kilograms (9,500 lb) of cocaine on board.

2000Ecuador: After the Ecuadorian Congress is seized by indigenous organizations, Col. Lu-cio Gutiérrez, Carlos Solorzano and Antonio Vargas depose President Jamil Mahuad.

2003A 7.6 magnitude earthquake strikes the Mexican state of Coli-ma, killing 29 and leaving approx-imately 10,000 people homeless.

TODAY DAY IN

HISTORY

ing to us. More advocates tell-ing our stories in our way with our faces, our inflections, our concerns, our intuitions. We just needed to be at the centre of a story, which would include all the complexities of human sub-jectivity, not just the good but the bad, the three-dimensional fullness that white people took for granted with the privilege of being individuals.

When it came to mass media’s representations of us — film and television, morning radio disc jockey jokes, journalistic pun-ditry — we got only the bad. We were collectively the villains, the servants, the enemies, the mistresses, the houseboys, the invaders.

As a result, so many of us who watched these distorted imag-es and heard the stupid jokes learned to be ashamed of our-selves. We learned to be ashamed of our parents. And the shame compounded the inability to say “I love you,” a phrase that be-longed to the wonderful world of white people we saw in the movies and television.

We had to learn better, but the truth is that Asian parents have to learn better, too. You cannot be proud of your artist and storytell-er children only when they win Golden Globes. We honour your sacrifice for us, but you have to encourage your children to speak up as well, to claim their voices, to risk mediocrity and failure, to tell their stories and your sto-

ries. At the very least, you cannot stand in their way.

A high school classmate who lived in the elite, mostly white city of Saratoga, Calif, in the 1980s told me that when Asians started moving in — the “good,” professional Asians — white people started moving out. No amount of Asian-American suc-cess will change this dynamic of white people fearing that we are the Asian invasion — taking their jobs, breaking the curve, stealing their seats in the Ivy League — until we challenge racism of both the explicit and implicit kinds.

We are still the Asian invasion in the eyes of many, and if we are not as terrifying today as we were in the past, it’s at least partly be-cause many Americans are more afraid of invasions by Mexicans and Central Americans. Many Americans who might not wish to be our neighbours would at least prefer us to African-Amer-icans.

We cannot accept this as our price of entry into American so-ciety. If we must assert ourselves and speak out against racism when it is directed against us, we must also do so when it benefits us. And we do that by challeng-ing and changing the American story. We do it by taking the stage and by telling our own stories, which is really, in the end, our way of saying “I love you” to our parents, our families, our com-munities and our country.

(Viet Thanh Nguyen, a contributing opinion writer, is the author, most

recently, of “The Refugees” and the editor of “The Displaced: Refugee

Writers on Refugee Lives”. )

I started going to a school in a nearby Korean church.

I slowly began adapting to my new life. I found

comfort in learning how to speak English.

Why we struggle to say ‘I love you’If we must assert ourselves

and speak out against racism when it is directed

against us, we must also do so when it benefits us.

In the modern world, branding has become a reckoning factor that determines what you buy. A brand name is something that people connect with. They feel the brand

will help them stand out in the crowd. The reasons for this could be many. The society also feels these highly branded people are to be followed. On the flip side, this tendency paves the way for the creation of duplicated versions of some well-known branded products.

I hear people often tell others, “The coffee at Starbucks is of a great taste” or “My Mercedes is a very nice car”. People often talk about the hotels they stay while on travel like Ritz’ or Carltons or Four Seasons to name a few. They also speak a lot about non-vegetarian food which they relish. There are some of my friends who know my meal preferences and yet offer dishes that I normally do not have. They do not look at the more common affordable brands.

Some people often brag about going to exotic vacation desti-nations that are beyond the reach of the common man. There was this friend of mine who always used to fly only business class wherever he goes. He used to wear only branded clothes. He knew only of Ray Ban glasses and other “POSH” wearable accessories.

If we take the examples of expats here, when we go for our annual vacations, most of us go on a shopping spree that is pre-dictable – buying things that we may or may not require – like for instance, chocolates, dresses etc – we keep buying the same things again and again year after year., whether we actually need them or not.

On the other hand, there are also marginalised people who do not go for those “HIGH CLASS” lifestyles and prefer to live life simpler and use lesser known alternative consumer products. We need to respect their choices and appreciate them as well.

When you go for the next purchase, please look at the mirror in the shop and ask yourself these questions. Are we the brands that we buy? Or are we the actual persons that we are within ourselves? Are we the people who go with the flow for the brands or are we unique? Is it widening the gap between two social classes or is it bridging the gap between them? I leave it for the reader to decide.

Sreejith S Raja

Mirror, mirror in the shop

10

business


CrediMax launches ‘We Give the Max’TDT | Manama

CrediMax yesterday an-nounced the launch of its

2019 campaign ‘Win The Max with CrediMax’ giving card-holders an opportunity to win four BMW X2 model 2019 and a total of $60,000 cash.

The campaign which began on 1 January 2019 will run un-til 31 December 2019. Card-holders will have the oppor-tunity to win monthly $5,000 and quarterly a BMW X2 model 2019.

To be eligible to enter the raffle draw and get a chance to win, cardholders must use a monthly accumulated amount of BD100 and can double their chances when using an accu-mulated amount of BD100 out-side Bahrain.

“Our goal is to ensure that customers experience & re-ceive rewards and see the val-ue of using our products and services in their everyday pur-chases,” said Chief Executive of CrediMax, Yousif Ali Mirza.

Yousif Ali Mirza

Al Salam Bank-Bahrain receives two top awards TDT | Manama

Al Salam Bank-Bahrain has emerged as the win-ner of two prestigious

awards: “Best Islamic Retail Bank – Bahrain” and “Most Innovative Shari’a Compliant Products – Bahrain” for the year 2018 from Global Business Outlook, a business publication based in the United Kingdom.

The awards aim to recog-nise and rewards business excellence all over the globe, both in the public and private sector for achieving outstand-ing results across the global market.

Rafik Nayed, Chief Executive Officer of Al Salam Bank-Bah-rain said, “We are honoured and proud to be awarded the “Best Islamic Retail Bank and “Most

Innovative Shari’a Compliant Products – Bahrain” for 2018 by Global Business Outlook. The awards are a strong testament to the Bank’s performance and continued excellence.”

Nayed further added, “Dur-

ing the year 2018, the Bank has launched unique banking prod-ucts and services that included: iBank service, Apply@Home (an online product application service), Bahrain’s first Visa Contactless Platinum and Sig-

nature credit cards, the only Visa Prepaid multi-currency student card, new & upgrad-ed mobile banking service, and “myShare” card (the first divi-dend distribution solution in as-sociation with Bahrain Clear).”

Rafik Nayed, Chief Executive Officer of Al Salam Bank-Bahrain

Mustafa Fouad Ali Reda joins Arcapita boardTDT | Manama

Arcapita - a global leader in Shari’ah-compliant al-

ternative investments - has appointed Mustafa Fouad Ali Reda as a Member of the Board of Directors.

Reda is the owner and Gen-eral Manager of Reda Invest-ment & Development Group and has considerable expertise in the real estate, financial in-vestment, hospitality and tour-ism sectors. In addition, Reda brings experience from senior roles at several other leading entities, including Member of the Board of Directors, Saudi Al Bilad Establishment; and previously Member of the Board of Directors, Mecca Chamber of Commerce & In-dustry; and the Saudi-Turkish Business Council.

Commenting on the ap-pointment, Abdulaziz Ham-ad Aljomaih, Chairman of the Board of Directors at Arcapita, said: “Mr Reda will provide strategic support, helping to enrich and strengthen Arcap-ita’s operations in the Western province of Saudi Arabia.

Mustafa Fouad Ali Reda

Gulf Air partners with ‘Shop Bahrain’TDT | Manama

Gulf Air announced its stra-tegic partnership of the

Fifth edition of ‘Shop Bahrain’. The Festival offers a unique

shopping experience with fun-filled family entertainment and

valuable prizes from the 1st of January until the 2nd of Feb-ruary 2019.

Commenting on the partner-ship, CEO of Bahrain Tourism and Exhibitions Authority, Sheikh Khalid bin Humood Al Khalifa: “This will increase

the Kingdom’s exposure on a regional and global level and encourage travellers to join the festival in the Kingdom.”

Gulf Air’s Deputy Chief Exec-utive Officer Captain Waleed Al Alawi said: “This partnership comes in line with our efforts to support events and initiatives that revitalize the Kingdom’s economy, such as Formula 1, the Bahrain International Airshow, Ironman and more.”

Through its strategic part-nership, Gulf Air is offering 5000 discounted airline tick-ets for Business and Economy Class Return tickets, among the 73,000 instant prizes given to the Festival’s winners. It will also promote Shop Bahrain through its media channels.

Alba closes US$136m, EUR90m Export Credit Financing TDT | Manama

Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) announced it has success-

fully closed a c.US$136 million and c. EUR90 million from Export Credit Agency (ECA) supported-facilities, the final instalment of the 2nd tranche of the financing of Alba’s Line 6 Expansion Project, by the end of 2018.

The proceeds are used to fi-nance the provision of equip-ment in relation to Alba’s Line 6 Expansion Project.

The facilities are made-up of: c. US$136 million Export Devel-opment Canada (EDC) support-ed-facility with a 10-year tenor wherein the principal amount is to be repaid over a 10-year pe-riod. It also includes a c. EUR90 million Japan Bank for Inter-national Cooperation (JBIC)/Nippon Export and Investment

Insurance (NEXI) supported-fa-cilities comprising two contract loans. The first has a tenor of 10-year and a principal repay-ment period of 9.5 years, and the second contract loan a tenor of 6 years with the principal

amount to be repaid over a 5.5-year period.

Commenting on this mile-stone, Alba’s Chairman of Board of Directors, Shaikh Daij Bin Salman Bin Daij Al Khalifa said: “This is another concrete high-light for us and a step closer towards transforming our vi-sion into reality with the safe start-up of Line 6.”

Shaikh Daij Bin Salman Bin Daij Al Khalifa, Alba’s Chairman

The proceeds from the from the ECA di-rect and guaranteed

loans are used to finance the provision of equipment in rela-tion to Alba’s Line 6 Expansion project

UK PM’s office says MP Brexit moves ‘extremely concerning’London, United Kingdom

British Prime Minister The-resa May’s Downing Street

office said yesterday that re-ported plots for parliament to seize control from the gov-ernment over Brexit were “ex-tremely concerning”.

Downing Street blasted re-ported moves by lawmakers seeking to rewrite the rules of the House of Commons in an attempt to take control of the business of the lower cham-ber in order to frustrate May’s Brexit plans.

Groups of MPs are planning to table such amendments this week, newspapers reported. “The British public voted to leave the European Union and it is vital that elected politicians deliver upon that verdict,” a Downing Street spokeswoman said.

“Any attempt to remove the government’s power to meet

the legal conditions of an or-derly exit at this moment of historic significance is ex-tremely concerning.

“This news should serve as a reminder to those MPs who want to deliver Brexit that they need to vote for it -- otherwise there is a danger that parlia-ment could stop Brexit.”

May is due to spell out to lawmakers what her plans are now for Brexit following MPs’ overwhelming rejection of the divorce deal agreed between London and Brussels.

Theresa May

Government sacks PNB executives for lapses in $2 billion fraud in first firingsReuters | New Delhi

The government has sacked two executives

of the state-run Punjab National Bank (PNB) for al-legedly failing to prevent a $2 billion fraud, two sourc-es said on Sunday, nearly a year after the country’s biggest bank scam came to light and also dragged the government into the con-troversy.

The firing of the two ex-ecutive directors, whom the CBI have accused of breach-ing the Reserve Bank of In-dia (RBI) guidelines, is the first instance of sacking of the bank’s employees since it said that billionaire dia-mond jeweller Nirav Modi and his uncle had for years fraudulently raised billions of dollars in foreign credit by conspiring with staff at the bank.

Modi and his uncle Me-hul Choksi, who left India before the fraud was dis-covered, have denied the accusations.

In a stock exchange filing late on Friday, the country’s second-biggest state bank said the government had removed K. Veera Brahma-ji Rao and Sanjiv Sharan “from the office of executive director” with immediate effect. The filing did not give a reason.

The government then fired them because “they failed to use global pay-ments network SWIFT to detect the fraud”, a bank source said. The sources who had direct knowledge of the matter and declined to be identified because the reasons for the sacking have not been made public.

10

business


CrediMax launches ‘We Give the Max’TDT | Manama

CrediMax yesterday an-nounced the launch of its

2019 campaign ‘Win The Max with CrediMax’ giving card-holders an opportunity to win four BMW X2 model 2019 and a total of $60,000 cash.

The campaign which began on 1 January 2019 will run un-til 31 December 2019. Card-holders will have the oppor-tunity to win monthly $5,000 and quarterly a BMW X2 model 2019.

To be eligible to enter the raffle draw and get a chance to win, cardholders must use a monthly accumulated amount of BD100 and can double their chances when using an accu-mulated amount of BD100 out-side Bahrain.

“Our goal is to ensure that customers experience & re-ceive rewards and see the val-ue of using our products and services in their everyday pur-chases,” said Chief Executive of CrediMax, Yousif Ali Mirza.

Yousif Ali Mirza

Al Salam Bank-Bahrain receives two top awards TDT | Manama

Al Salam Bank-Bahrain has emerged as the win-ner of two prestigious

awards: “Best Islamic Retail Bank – Bahrain” and “Most Innovative Shari’a Compliant Products – Bahrain” for the year 2018 from Global Business Outlook, a business publication based in the United Kingdom.

The awards aim to recog-nise and rewards business excellence all over the globe, both in the public and private sector for achieving outstand-ing results across the global market.

Rafik Nayed, Chief Executive Officer of Al Salam Bank-Bah-rain said, “We are honoured and proud to be awarded the “Best Islamic Retail Bank and “Most

Innovative Shari’a Compliant Products – Bahrain” for 2018 by Global Business Outlook. The awards are a strong testament to the Bank’s performance and continued excellence.”

Nayed further added, “Dur-

ing the year 2018, the Bank has launched unique banking prod-ucts and services that included: iBank service, Apply@Home (an online product application service), Bahrain’s first Visa Contactless Platinum and Sig-

nature credit cards, the only Visa Prepaid multi-currency student card, new & upgrad-ed mobile banking service, and “myShare” card (the first divi-dend distribution solution in as-sociation with Bahrain Clear).”

Rafik Nayed, Chief Executive Officer of Al Salam Bank-Bahrain

Mustafa Fouad Ali Reda joins Arcapita boardTDT | Manama

Arcapita - a global leader in Shari’ah-compliant al-

ternative investments - has appointed Mustafa Fouad Ali Reda as a Member of the Board of Directors.

Reda is the owner and Gen-eral Manager of Reda Invest-ment & Development Group and has considerable expertise in the real estate, financial in-vestment, hospitality and tour-ism sectors. In addition, Reda brings experience from senior roles at several other leading entities, including Member of the Board of Directors, Saudi Al Bilad Establishment; and previously Member of the Board of Directors, Mecca Chamber of Commerce & In-dustry; and the Saudi-Turkish Business Council.

Commenting on the ap-pointment, Abdulaziz Ham-ad Aljomaih, Chairman of the Board of Directors at Arcapita, said: “Mr Reda will provide strategic support, helping to enrich and strengthen Arcap-ita’s operations in the Western province of Saudi Arabia.

Mustafa Fouad Ali Reda

Gulf Air partners with ‘Shop Bahrain’TDT | Manama

Gulf Air announced its stra-tegic partnership of the

Fifth edition of ‘Shop Bahrain’. The Festival offers a unique

shopping experience with fun-filled family entertainment and

valuable prizes from the 1st of January until the 2nd of Feb-ruary 2019.

Commenting on the partner-ship, CEO of Bahrain Tourism and Exhibitions Authority, Sheikh Khalid bin Humood Al Khalifa: “This will increase

the Kingdom’s exposure on a regional and global level and encourage travellers to join the festival in the Kingdom.”

Gulf Air’s Deputy Chief Exec-utive Officer Captain Waleed Al Alawi said: “This partnership comes in line with our efforts to support events and initiatives that revitalize the Kingdom’s economy, such as Formula 1, the Bahrain International Airshow, Ironman and more.”

Through its strategic part-nership, Gulf Air is offering 5000 discounted airline tick-ets for Business and Economy Class Return tickets, among the 73,000 instant prizes given to the Festival’s winners. It will also promote Shop Bahrain through its media channels.

Alba closes US$136m, EUR90m Export Credit Financing TDT | Manama

Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) announced it has success-

fully closed a c.US$136 million and c. EUR90 million from Export Credit Agency (ECA) supported-facilities, the final instalment of the 2nd tranche of the financing of Alba’s Line 6 Expansion Project, by the end of 2018.

The proceeds are used to fi-nance the provision of equip-ment in relation to Alba’s Line 6 Expansion Project.

The facilities are made-up of: c. US$136 million Export Devel-opment Canada (EDC) support-ed-facility with a 10-year tenor wherein the principal amount is to be repaid over a 10-year pe-riod. It also includes a c. EUR90 million Japan Bank for Inter-national Cooperation (JBIC)/Nippon Export and Investment

Insurance (NEXI) supported-fa-cilities comprising two contract loans. The first has a tenor of 10-year and a principal repay-ment period of 9.5 years, and the second contract loan a tenor of 6 years with the principal

amount to be repaid over a 5.5-year period.

Commenting on this mile-stone, Alba’s Chairman of Board of Directors, Shaikh Daij Bin Salman Bin Daij Al Khalifa said: “This is another concrete high-light for us and a step closer towards transforming our vi-sion into reality with the safe start-up of Line 6.”

Shaikh Daij Bin Salman Bin Daij Al Khalifa, Alba’s Chairman

The proceeds from the from the ECA di-rect and guaranteed

loans are used to finance the provision of equipment in rela-tion to Alba’s Line 6 Expansion project

UK PM’s office says MP Brexit moves ‘extremely concerning’London, United Kingdom

British Prime Minister The-resa May’s Downing Street

office said yesterday that re-ported plots for parliament to seize control from the gov-ernment over Brexit were “ex-tremely concerning”.

Downing Street blasted re-ported moves by lawmakers seeking to rewrite the rules of the House of Commons in an attempt to take control of the business of the lower cham-ber in order to frustrate May’s Brexit plans.

Groups of MPs are planning to table such amendments this week, newspapers reported. “The British public voted to leave the European Union and it is vital that elected politicians deliver upon that verdict,” a Downing Street spokeswoman said.

“Any attempt to remove the government’s power to meet

the legal conditions of an or-derly exit at this moment of historic significance is ex-tremely concerning.

“This news should serve as a reminder to those MPs who want to deliver Brexit that they need to vote for it -- otherwise there is a danger that parlia-ment could stop Brexit.”

May is due to spell out to lawmakers what her plans are now for Brexit following MPs’ overwhelming rejection of the divorce deal agreed between London and Brussels.

Theresa May

Government sacks PNB executives for lapses in $2 billion fraud in first firingsReuters | New Delhi

The government has sacked two executives

of the state-run Punjab National Bank (PNB) for al-legedly failing to prevent a $2 billion fraud, two sourc-es said on Sunday, nearly a year after the country’s biggest bank scam came to light and also dragged the government into the con-troversy.

The firing of the two ex-ecutive directors, whom the CBI have accused of breach-ing the Reserve Bank of In-dia (RBI) guidelines, is the first instance of sacking of the bank’s employees since it said that billionaire dia-mond jeweller Nirav Modi and his uncle had for years fraudulently raised billions of dollars in foreign credit by conspiring with staff at the bank.

Modi and his uncle Me-hul Choksi, who left India before the fraud was dis-covered, have denied the accusations.

In a stock exchange filing late on Friday, the country’s second-biggest state bank said the government had removed K. Veera Brahma-ji Rao and Sanjiv Sharan “from the office of executive director” with immediate effect. The filing did not give a reason.

The government then fired them because “they failed to use global pay-ments network SWIFT to detect the fraud”, a bank source said. The sources who had direct knowledge of the matter and declined to be identified because the reasons for the sacking have not been made public.


Abracadabra! German executives turn to magic to up their game

AFP | Pullach im Isartal, Germany

Harold Voit takes out his wallet, extracts a wad of 50-euro bills and gazes

at it calmly as the cash goes up in flames.

Slamming the billfold shut, Voit puts out the fire and opens it again to reveal the money intact and ready for spending. A room full of wide-eyed magic students erupts into applause.

Most of these apprentices of the dark arts are not budding cabaret or YouTube stars, how-ever, but business executives and other professionals hoping to put a few new tricks up their sleeves.

“Learning magic isn’t just about picking up a couple of gags -- it’s about developing your own personality, your own way of presenting, speaking and mov-ing,” said Voit, 70, founder of the Magic Academy in Pullach, a wealthy Munich suburb.

Voit, who has worked for more than half his life as a profession-al magician and instructor, said that was part of why so many busy career people sought out his courses.

“Most of my students don’t quit their day jobs. I’ve had everyone from young interns

to an 80-year-old priest from a monastery,” said Voit, who has a neatly trimmed beard and a conspiratorial twinkle in his eye.

“You’d be amazed how many situations there are in which magic can help,” he said, offering examples ranging from flirting to closing a business deal.

Harry Potter maniaGermany’s fascination with

sorcery goes back centuries but saw a strong revival in the post-war years, when a weary popu-lation sought entertainment and escapism in popular nightclub acts.

The current boom has two decades of Harry Potter mania to thank, as well as a growing recognition that a bit of wizardry can go a long way in real life.

The country’s biggest magic stars, the Ehrlich Brothers, fill football stadiums.

German illusionist Marc Wei-de, 27, won best parlour magic performer at July’s world cham-pionship in Busan, South Korea with a card trick -- beating a ri-val who could make 10 doves and four sheep vanish and reappear. Second place went to another German, Axel Hecklau.

Voit, who abandoned a career with the foreign intelligence ser-

vice to take up a magic wand, said his night school offered Germany’s first state-recognised certificates for illusionists.

But most pupils who commit to two years of weekly classes for a 750-euro ($860) fee came to him seeking something more elusive than a rabbit to pull out of a hat. The course motto is “Conjure yourself into the spot-light”.

One of the pupils present on a recent night in the classroom was entrepreneur Marco Hafen-richter, 46, who runs a success-ful construction business.

As he practised a classic trick involving the seamless coupling and uncoupling of ropes, he said that learning how to trigger a sense of wonder in an audience had attracted him to magic school.

“I was looking for some bal-ance in my life,” he said.

“At the moment my biggest fan is still my son but by the end of the course, I’d like to have six or seven routines down that I can always perform.”

IT industry manager Marianne Hofmann, 67, said magic had given her a touch of star pow-er and not just with her eight grandchildren.

“I head up a choir and

everything I learn about human psychology here I can use there, especially how you command the attention of an audience,” she said.

Hofmann said that in some-times staid German corporate culture there seemed to be a real hunger for fantasy.

“Maybe we’re just a bit too ra-tional otherwise and are longing to have a few dreams.”

Taking the stage ‘naked’Thomas Fraps, 51, holds a doc-

torate in physics but caught the magic bug during his studies.

Fraps, who has written ex-tensively on illusions and stage-craft, has performed monthly for nearly 25 years in what he calls Germany’s longest running magic act.

He noted that cherished writ-er Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -- who penned the poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” later popularised by Walt Disney -- gave each of his grandchildren a box of tricks in the 18th century.

Then, illusions were seen as a tool to advance Enlightenment thinking because magic, once understood, could serve as a mirror on perception and its fallibility -- the stuff that makes us human.

A century earlier, books de-tailing how illusions could be performed were credited with helping to stop witch burning, Fraps said.

“The irony is that as more people learned about magic, it helped demystify things that they saw and couldn’t under-stand,” he said.

“Now for company bosses or physicists, it’s great to plunge into another world. When you have a trick, you don’t have to take the stage ‘naked’, unlike a standup comedian who’s only got his jokes.”

Voit said online instructional videos, which count hundreds of thousands of fans, have only stoked interest in magic schools like his.

“There’s no replacement for learning it l ive,” said Voit.

Just as technological innova-tions like self-driving cars make the impossible commonplace, Voit said the best magic tricks were, like Harry Potter books, simply based on a great story.

“With a trick, you come up with the best fairy tale you can,” he said.

“Magic is the joy that comes from the special delight in being fooled.”

Harold Voit, owner of the Magic Academy in Pullach near Munich, southern Germany, performsStudents of the Magic Academy in Pullach near Munich, southern Germany, pose for a picture

Learning magic isn’t just about picking up a couple of gags -- it’s

about developing your own personality,

your own way of presenting, speaking

and movingHAROLD VOLT

THE, 70 YEAR OLF, FOUNDER OF THE MAGIC ACADEMY IN PULLACH, A

WEALTHY MUNICH SUBURB

France pushes Japan to accept Renault-Nissan merger: reportsParis, France

Japanese media reported yes-terday that France wants a

merger between Renault and Nissan following the arrest of former Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn, but according to France’s economy minister changing

the current s e t -

up is “not on the table”.Ghosn headed a powerful al-

liance between Nissan, Mitsubi-shi and Renault before his arrest in November on charges of financial misconduct.

A delegation including M a r -

tin Vial -- a Renault director designated by the French gov-ernment -- made the merger re-

quest at talks with Jap-anese officials in Tokyo, Kyodo News reported, citing sources close to

the matter.

The French government is the biggest shareholder in Renault with a stake of more than 15 per cent, while Renault owns 43.4pc of the Japanese carmaker Nissan with voting rights.

A merger between the two is favoured by French President Emmanuel Macron, Kyodo said.

Japanese business daily Nik-kei also re - ported the merger r e -

quest by the French delegation, saying Nissan had been opposed to giving Paris greater sway over the Japanese carmaker.

According to Nikkei, the dele-gation also said Renault wants to name Nissan’s next chairman -- a post that has remained vacant since Ghosn was ousted on his arrest in November.

But the reports appear to con-tradict comments French Econ-omy Minister Bruno Le Maire made to Le Journal du Diman-che (JDD) newspaper, published Sunday.

“A shareholder rebalancing, a change in cross-shareholdings between Renault and Nissan is not on the table,” he told the French weekly.

A ‘stable relationship’

Macron last month held talks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Argentina, at which they only agreed to en-sure a stable relationship within the three-way alliance, which also includes Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors. Abe reportedly stressed the importance of all three com-panies “maintaining their stable relationship”. But the Japanese premier reportedly also said the fate of the group should be decided by “private business-es” and “governments should not commit to how the alliance should operate going forward”, according to a senior govern-ment official quoted by Kyodo.This general view shows the Tokyo Detention House (C) where former Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn is being held in Tokyo


Closing BellSAUDI 0.8pc to 8,384 pts

DUBAI 0.2pc to 2,513 pts

QATAR 0.3pc to 10,760 pts

ABU DHABI 0.2pc at 4,975 pts

EGYPT 0.3pc to 13,444 pts

KUWAIT 0.3pc to 5,494 pts

OMAN 0.1pc to 4,203 pts

BAHRAIN 0.5pc to 1,348 pts

Most Gulf markets decline• Saudi’s Almarai slips after Q4 results

• Dubai’s DAMAC continues to slide after BofA downgrade

• Emirates NBD continues to gain after Q4 results

Reuters | Dubai

Bank shares led Saudi Ara-bia’s stock market lower on Sunday as most re-

gional bourses fell.In Saudi Arabia, the index lost

0.8 per cent with Al Rajhi Bank and Samba Financial Group fall-ing 1.1pc and 3.3pc respectively.

The Gulf’s largest dairy com-pany Almarai shed 6pc after reporting a 28pc drop in fourth quarter profit.

The United Arab Emirates two main indexes, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, each slipped 0.2pc.

Abu Dhabi was dragged down by telecom, banking, and real es-tate shares. Telcom Etisalat lost 0.6pc, while the UAE’s biggest lender First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) fell 1.4pc. Aldar Properties lost 0.7pc,

Dubai’s index, reversing earli-er gains, was weighed by prop-erty and aviation shares. Major developer DAMAC Properties

lost 4.0pc. Last week, BofA Mer-rill Lynch downgraded DAMAC

to ‘underperform’ from‘neutral’. BofA said in a re-

search note it was also lowering its 2018 to 2020 earnings per share forecast on DAMAC by an average of 47pc, citing expec-tations of weaker booked sales and gross margin.

Air Arabia shed 1.9pc. It said last week it had filed a criminal case against former board mem-ber and Abraaj founder

Arif Naqvi. The budget carrier has previously said it has an

exposure of $336 million to collapsed private equity firm

Abraaj. Dubai saw some sup-port from blue chip bank Emir-ates NBD which added 0.5pc. Last week it reported a 10pc rise in fourth-quarter net profit. Developer Emaar Properties also rose 0.5pc.

In Qatar, the index lost 0.3pc with telecom Vodafone Qatar shedding 1.8pc and Qatar Gas Transport fell 1.5pc.

Bahrain’s index and Kuwait’s index bucked the regional trend to close up 0.5pc and 0.3pc,re-spectively, both helped by bank-ing shares.

Traders on the floor of Saudi Stock exchange (file)

Kuwait announces initiative for $200m tech investment fundReuters | Beirut

Kuwait is launching an initiative to create a

$200 million fund for invest-ments in technology, its for-eign minister said at an Arab economic summit in Beirut

yesterday.Sheikh Sabah al Khalid al

Sabah said Kuwait would give $50 million to the fund to al-low “investment in the fields of technology and digital econ-omy” which the private sector will take part in.

Small electric cars may be unaffordable: VW

Reuters | Berlin

The move to electric vehi-cles will make cars sig-

nificantly more expensive, meaning they may become unaffordable for people on low incomes in the future, the chairman of Volkswagen said in an interview published yes-terday.

The German carmaker is still reeling from a 2015 scan-dal over cheating on emissions tests and needs to ramp up

production of electric vehicles to meet toughened European emmissions-cutting targets.

“We have the clear goal of making electromobility acces-sible to a broad section of the population, that is to make it affordable,” Hans-Dieter Po-etsch told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

“The current price level cannot stay the same if these cars are equipped with electric motors,” said Poetsch. “There-fore, it will inevitably lead to significant price increases in the small car segment.”

Poetsch referred to the tougher-than-expected tar-gets to cut greenhouse emis-sions from cars by 37.5 per cent by 2030, which the European Union agreed in December.

VW plans to spend almost 44 billion euros on developing electric cars, autonomous driv-ing and new mobility services by 2023.

Hans Dieter Poetsch

Does mounting corp debt pose an avalanche risk?Paris, France

During the years of ultra cheap money, companies

loaded up on debt but now the concern is whether they will be able to handle the mountain of debt as interest rates rise.

Until last year, companies basked in the sun of low inter-est rates while economies were expanding at a steady clip. They had no real reason not to borrow.

But in 2018 the clouds set in: political uncertainty, market volatility, deteriorating growth prospects, in particular in China, and most importantly a tighten-ing of monetary policy as central banks ended the stimulus meas-ures taken to tame the 2007-08 financial crisis.

At the end of last year the US Federal Reserve estimated that private US companies held near-ly $15 trillion (13 trillion euros) in debt. In Europe, non-finan-cial companies hold some 12 trillion euros ($13.8 trillion), according to Pierre Verle, head of credit at asset manager Car-

mignac.“In absolute terms, the debt

of non-financial companies ac-counts for around 70 per cent of gross domestic product in the United States and in the eu-rozone it is above 100pc: these are elevated levels, but not ex-plosive,” said Isabelle Mateos y Lago, managing director and chief multi-asset strategist at BlackRock Investment Institute.

She said such levels “don’t say much about the capacity of firms to repay their debts.”

Instead Mateos y Lago pointed to anoth-er indicator: the ratio of net revenue to debt p a y m e n t s . I n the United States, net revenues

are nine times higher than debt payments, while in Europe the ratio is 12, she said.

‘Fallen angels’In recent months,

concern

in the United States has focused around so-called leveraged loans, which former US Federal Reserve head Janet Yellen re-cently called a systemic risk.

These loans, estimated by experts to be worth some $1.3 trillion, are made to companies with high debt loads or with poor credit histories, or both.

These loans are riskier as there is a greater risk the bor-rower will default, but as they carry higher interest rates, they can be attractive to investors seeking returns.

A portion of these loans have been resold to investors, much as the high-risk “sub-prime”

mortgages that caused the 2008 financial

crisis.“ I n E u -

r o p e t h e

problem is less acute as investors accept less readily debt levels that are too high and the trau-ma from the 2008 crisis is more present,” said Vincent Marioni, who heads up credit investments in Europe for Allianz Global In-vestors.

There are less than 300 bil-lion euros in repackaged lev-eraged loans, according to Verle.

Another subject of attention has been the rise in the num-ber of companies that are just holding onto their investment grade credit rating. A downgrade into what ratings agencies call a speculative debt rating -- and in-vestors call junk bonds -- means companies will have to pay more interest to borrow. These com-panies which tumble into junk territory are called “fallen an-gels,” and if there are too many then it could spook investors and cause them to dump the bonds.

‘Dark Cloud’This risk “hovers like a dark

cloud over investors”, said Clau-dio Borio, head of the mone-tary and economic department at the Bank of International Settlements, when presenting its latest quarterly report in December.

Others are less concerned.Meanwhile Felix Orsini, who

is global co-head for corporate debt markets at French bank Societe Generale, said that he believed the number of fallen angels would be limited.

“In gaining a bit of perspec-tive, the return of volatility in 2018 was a return to normal after years during which the markets were on central bank life sup-port,” he said.

Frederic Gabizon, head of Debt Capital Markets at HSBC France, said that “the crisis had pushed borrowers to thoroughly clean up their finances”, which gives them some margin of maneuver.

A countervailing factor is that investors still have funds they need to place.

Representative picture

Gulf Air unveils its 2019 business plans to staffTDT | Manama

Gulf Air has revealed its business plans for 2019 and

rolled out the recently launched boutique business model con-cept to its staff in an event held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Manama, Bahrain.

The event was part of a town hall meeting to present its latest developments to all employees.

With the new business mod-el concept, Gulf Air aims to grow strategically in size and

plan to expand into more bou-tique destinations in 2019 as well as continue moving for-ward in modernizing its fleet with an additional delivery of 2 Boeing 787-9 Dreamlin-er’s and 4 Airbus A320neos this year.

Gulf Air’s Chairman of Board of Directors Zayed R. Alzayani spoke to the airline’s employ-ees and shared the compa-ny’s direction in 2019 and be-yond along with members of the Gulf Air’s executive man-

agement that presented top-ic-specific plans and interact-ed with the employees during the event.

In line with its 5-year strategy to become the regional airline of choice, Gulf Air aims to differen-tiate itself as a boutique airline comparing to the bigger airlines that are more volume driven, a reflection of a popular concept currently within the hospitality industry.

This approach, according to Gulf Air, gives the airline

a competitive advantage that will translate in its new fleet, Falcon Gold class offering, ex-

clusive products, destinations in 2019 along with its pres-ence in the new terminal at

Bahrain International Airport due to open towards the end of the year.

Gulf Air officials and employees during the town hall meeting held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel


Closing BellSAUDI 0.8pc to 8,384 pts

DUBAI 0.2pc to 2,513 pts

QATAR 0.3pc to 10,760 pts

ABU DHABI 0.2pc at 4,975 pts

EGYPT 0.3pc to 13,444 pts

KUWAIT 0.3pc to 5,494 pts

OMAN 0.1pc to 4,203 pts

BAHRAIN 0.5pc to 1,348 pts

Most Gulf markets decline• Saudi’s Almarai slips after Q4 results

• Dubai’s DAMAC continues to slide after BofA downgrade

• Emirates NBD continues to gain after Q4 results

Reuters | Dubai

Bank shares led Saudi Ara-bia’s stock market lower on Sunday as most re-

gional bourses fell.In Saudi Arabia, the index lost

0.8 per cent with Al Rajhi Bank and Samba Financial Group fall-ing 1.1pc and 3.3pc respectively.

The Gulf’s largest dairy com-pany Almarai shed 6pc after reporting a 28pc drop in fourth quarter profit.

The United Arab Emirates two main indexes, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, each slipped 0.2pc.

Abu Dhabi was dragged down by telecom, banking, and real es-tate shares. Telcom Etisalat lost 0.6pc, while the UAE’s biggest lender First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) fell 1.4pc. Aldar Properties lost 0.7pc,

Dubai’s index, reversing earli-er gains, was weighed by prop-erty and aviation shares. Major developer DAMAC Properties

lost 4.0pc. Last week, BofA Mer-rill Lynch downgraded DAMAC

to ‘underperform’ from‘neutral’. BofA said in a re-

search note it was also lowering its 2018 to 2020 earnings per share forecast on DAMAC by an average of 47pc, citing expec-tations of weaker booked sales and gross margin.

Air Arabia shed 1.9pc. It said last week it had filed a criminal case against former board mem-ber and Abraaj founder

Arif Naqvi. The budget carrier has previously said it has an

exposure of $336 million to collapsed private equity firm

Abraaj. Dubai saw some sup-port from blue chip bank Emir-ates NBD which added 0.5pc. Last week it reported a 10pc rise in fourth-quarter net profit. Developer Emaar Properties also rose 0.5pc.

In Qatar, the index lost 0.3pc with telecom Vodafone Qatar shedding 1.8pc and Qatar Gas Transport fell 1.5pc.

Bahrain’s index and Kuwait’s index bucked the regional trend to close up 0.5pc and 0.3pc,re-spectively, both helped by bank-ing shares.

Traders on the floor of Saudi Stock exchange (file)

Kuwait announces initiative for $200m tech investment fundReuters | Beirut

Kuwait is launching an initiative to create a

$200 million fund for invest-ments in technology, its for-eign minister said at an Arab economic summit in Beirut

yesterday.Sheikh Sabah al Khalid al

Sabah said Kuwait would give $50 million to the fund to al-low “investment in the fields of technology and digital econ-omy” which the private sector will take part in.

Small electric cars may be unaffordable: VW

Reuters | Berlin

The move to electric vehi-cles will make cars sig-

nificantly more expensive, meaning they may become unaffordable for people on low incomes in the future, the chairman of Volkswagen said in an interview published yes-terday.

The German carmaker is still reeling from a 2015 scan-dal over cheating on emissions tests and needs to ramp up

production of electric vehicles to meet toughened European emmissions-cutting targets.

“We have the clear goal of making electromobility acces-sible to a broad section of the population, that is to make it affordable,” Hans-Dieter Po-etsch told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

“The current price level cannot stay the same if these cars are equipped with electric motors,” said Poetsch. “There-fore, it will inevitably lead to significant price increases in the small car segment.”

Poetsch referred to the tougher-than-expected tar-gets to cut greenhouse emis-sions from cars by 37.5 per cent by 2030, which the European Union agreed in December.

VW plans to spend almost 44 billion euros on developing electric cars, autonomous driv-ing and new mobility services by 2023.

Hans Dieter Poetsch

Does mounting corp debt pose an avalanche risk?Paris, France

During the years of ultra cheap money, companies

loaded up on debt but now the concern is whether they will be able to handle the mountain of debt as interest rates rise.

Until last year, companies basked in the sun of low inter-est rates while economies were expanding at a steady clip. They had no real reason not to borrow.

But in 2018 the clouds set in: political uncertainty, market volatility, deteriorating growth prospects, in particular in China, and most importantly a tighten-ing of monetary policy as central banks ended the stimulus meas-ures taken to tame the 2007-08 financial crisis.

At the end of last year the US Federal Reserve estimated that private US companies held near-ly $15 trillion (13 trillion euros) in debt. In Europe, non-finan-cial companies hold some 12 trillion euros ($13.8 trillion), according to Pierre Verle, head of credit at asset manager Car-

mignac.“In absolute terms, the debt

of non-financial companies ac-counts for around 70 per cent of gross domestic product in the United States and in the eu-rozone it is above 100pc: these are elevated levels, but not ex-plosive,” said Isabelle Mateos y Lago, managing director and chief multi-asset strategist at BlackRock Investment Institute.

She said such levels “don’t say much about the capacity of firms to repay their debts.”

Instead Mateos y Lago pointed to anoth-er indicator: the ratio of net revenue to debt p a y m e n t s . I n the United States, net revenues

are nine times higher than debt payments, while in Europe the ratio is 12, she said.

‘Fallen angels’In recent months,

concern

in the United States has focused around so-called leveraged loans, which former US Federal Reserve head Janet Yellen re-cently called a systemic risk.

These loans, estimated by experts to be worth some $1.3 trillion, are made to companies with high debt loads or with poor credit histories, or both.

These loans are riskier as there is a greater risk the bor-rower will default, but as they carry higher interest rates, they can be attractive to investors seeking returns.

A portion of these loans have been resold to investors, much as the high-risk “sub-prime”

mortgages that caused the 2008 financial

crisis.“ I n E u -

r o p e t h e

problem is less acute as investors accept less readily debt levels that are too high and the trau-ma from the 2008 crisis is more present,” said Vincent Marioni, who heads up credit investments in Europe for Allianz Global In-vestors.

There are less than 300 bil-lion euros in repackaged lev-eraged loans, according to Verle.

Another subject of attention has been the rise in the num-ber of companies that are just holding onto their investment grade credit rating. A downgrade into what ratings agencies call a speculative debt rating -- and in-vestors call junk bonds -- means companies will have to pay more interest to borrow. These com-panies which tumble into junk territory are called “fallen an-gels,” and if there are too many then it could spook investors and cause them to dump the bonds.

‘Dark Cloud’This risk “hovers like a dark

cloud over investors”, said Clau-dio Borio, head of the mone-tary and economic department at the Bank of International Settlements, when presenting its latest quarterly report in December.

Others are less concerned.Meanwhile Felix Orsini, who

is global co-head for corporate debt markets at French bank Societe Generale, said that he believed the number of fallen angels would be limited.

“In gaining a bit of perspec-tive, the return of volatility in 2018 was a return to normal after years during which the markets were on central bank life sup-port,” he said.

Frederic Gabizon, head of Debt Capital Markets at HSBC France, said that “the crisis had pushed borrowers to thoroughly clean up their finances”, which gives them some margin of maneuver.

A countervailing factor is that investors still have funds they need to place.

Representative picture

Gulf Air unveils its 2019 business plans to staffTDT | Manama

Gulf Air has revealed its business plans for 2019 and

rolled out the recently launched boutique business model con-cept to its staff in an event held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Manama, Bahrain.

The event was part of a town hall meeting to present its latest developments to all employees.

With the new business mod-el concept, Gulf Air aims to grow strategically in size and

plan to expand into more bou-tique destinations in 2019 as well as continue moving for-ward in modernizing its fleet with an additional delivery of 2 Boeing 787-9 Dreamlin-er’s and 4 Airbus A320neos this year.

Gulf Air’s Chairman of Board of Directors Zayed R. Alzayani spoke to the airline’s employ-ees and shared the compa-ny’s direction in 2019 and be-yond along with members of the Gulf Air’s executive man-

agement that presented top-ic-specific plans and interact-ed with the employees during the event.

In line with its 5-year strategy to become the regional airline of choice, Gulf Air aims to differen-tiate itself as a boutique airline comparing to the bigger airlines that are more volume driven, a reflection of a popular concept currently within the hospitality industry.

This approach, according to Gulf Air, gives the airline

a competitive advantage that will translate in its new fleet, Falcon Gold class offering, ex-

clusive products, destinations in 2019 along with its pres-ence in the new terminal at

Bahrain International Airport due to open towards the end of the year.

Gulf Air officials and employees during the town hall meeting held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel

M o v i e R e v i e w

Woman Walks Ahead proves good intentions don’t make a good movieWoman Walks Ahead is a 2017

American biographical drama film directed by Susanna White and written by Steven Knight.

The film is the story of Catherine Weldon (Jessica Chastain), a por-trait painter who travels from New York to Dakota to paint a portrait of Sitting Bull (Michael Greyeyes) in 1890.

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival September 10, 2017.

It was released through DirecTV Cinema on May 31, 2018, before being released in a limited release on June 29, 2018, by A24.

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an

approval rating of 53% based on 36 reviews, and an average rating of

5.9/10. On Metacritic, which assigns a rating

to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 51 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating “mixed or average reviews”.

Despite mixed reviews, Michael Greyeyes received critical acclaim for his portrayal of Sitting Bull.

The New York Times critic Jeannette Catsoulis called his performance “a miracle of intelligence and dignity”. RogerEbert.com contributor Susan Wloszczyna raved about his perfor-mance, calling it “the most subtle, soul-ful, and believable”.

Los Angeles Times and Village Voice

described his presence as captivating as “wry wit and quiet gravity” while the latter described his performance as “stirring”.

13 MONDAY, JANUARY 21, 2019

A scene from Woman Walks Ahead

A reputed international fast food company is hiring individuals for the position bike drivers, interested candidates can contact 17683222 or email CV to [email protected]

OASIS JUFFAIR1-GLASS (PG-15) (THRILLER) NEW

JAMES MCAVOY, BRUCE WILLIS, SAMUEL L. JACKSON

DAILY AT: 12.15 + 3.00 + 5.45 + 8.30 + 11.15 PM DAILY AT (VIP): 2.30 + 7.45 PM

2-THE UPSIDE (PG-15) (COMEDY/DRAMA) NEW KEVIN HART, BRYAN CRANSTON, NICOLE KIDMAN

DAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 1.30 + 4.00 + 6.30 + 9.00 + 11.30 PM DAILY AT (VIP): 12.00 + 5.15 + 10.30 PM

3-MIKHAEL () (MALAYALAM) NEW NIVIN PAULY, UNNI MUKAUDAN, MANJIMA MOHAN

FROM FRIDAY 18TH: 11.00 AM + 2.00 + 5.00 + 8.00 + 11.00 PM

4-HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD (PG) (ANIMATION/ACTION/ADVENTURE) NEW

CATE BLANCHETT, JONAH HILL, GERARD BUTLER

DAILY AT (KIDS CINEMA): 11.30 AM + 4.00 + 8.30 PM

5-SIMMBA (PG-15) (HINDI/ACTION/COMEDY/DRAMA/RO-MANTIC)

RANVEER SINGH, AJAY DEVGN, SARA ALI KHAN

DAILY AT: 11.15 AM + 2.15 + 5.15 + 8.15 + 11.15 PM

6-SPIDER MAN INTO THE SPIDER VERSE (PG) (ANIMATION/ACTION/ADVENTURE)

HAILEE STEINFELD, NICOLAS CAGE, MAHERSHALA ALI

DAILY AT (KIDS CINEMA): 1.45 + 6.15 + 10.45 PM

7-URI: THE SURGICAL STRIKE (15+) (HINDI/ACTION/DRAMA) VICKY KAUSHAL, KIRTI KULHARI, PARESH RAWAL

DAILY AT: 10.30 AM + 3.30 + 8.30 PM

8-THE ACCIDENTAL PRIME MINISTER (PG) (HINDI/DRAMA/BIOGRAPHY)

ANUPAM KHER, AAHANA KUMRA, ABDUL QUADIR AMIN

DAILY AT: 1.15 + 6.15 + 11.15 PM

9-PETTA (PG-15) (TAMIL/ACTION/THRILLER) RAJINIKANTH, VIJAY SETHUPATHI, SIMRAN, TRISHA

DAILY AT: 12.30 + 3.45 + 7.00 + 10.15 PM

10-VISWASAM (PG-15) (TAMIL) AJITH KUMAR, NAYANTHARA

DAILY AT: 11.15 AM + 2.15 + 5.15 + 8.15 + 11.15 PM

11-VINAYA VIDHEYA RAMA (PG-15) (TELGU) KIARA ADVANI, RAM CHARAN AND VIVEK OBEROI

DAILY AT: 11.30 + 5.15 + 11.00 PM

12-JOSEPH (PG-15) (MALAYALAM) JOJU GEORGE, MALAVIKA MENON, JAMES ELIYA

DAILY AT: 2.30 + 8.15 PM

CITYCENTRE1-GLASS (PG-15) (THRILLER) NEW


DAILY AT: 10.30 AM + 1.00 + 3.45 + 6.30 + 9.15 PM + 12.00 MN + (1.00 AM THURS/FRI)DAILY AT (IMAX 2D): 6.00 + 8.45 + 11.30 PM DAILY AT (VIP II): 12.00 + 2.45 + 5.30 + 8.15 + 11.00 PM


DAILY AT: 11.30 AM + 2.00 + 4.30 + 7.00 + 9.30 PM + 12.00 MN + (1.00 AM THURS/FRI)DAILY AT (VIP I): 10.30 AM + 1.00 + 3.30 + 6.00 + 8.30 + 11.00 PM

3-ALL THE DEVIL’S MEN (15+) (ACTION/THRILLER) NEW WILLIAM FICHTNER, SYLVIA HOEKS, ELLIOT COWAN

DAILY AT: 12.30 + 2.45 + 5.00 + 7.15 + 9.30 + 11.45 PM

4-SA’AT REDA (PG-15) (ARABIC/COMEDY) NEW HALA FAKHER, AHMED FATHY, DINA FOUAD

DAILY AT: 11.45 AM + 1.45 + 3.45 + 5.45 + 7.45 + 9.45 + 11.45 PM

5-MAHARAJA (PG-13) (ARABIC/COMEDY) NEW

ZIAD BOURJI, DALIDA KHALIL, JULIA KASSAR

DAILY AT: 10.45 AM + 4.00 + 9.15 PM

6-AQUAMAN (PG-15) (ACTION/ADVENTURE) JASON MOMOA, AMBER HEARD, NICOLE KIDMAN

DAILY AT (ATMOS): 12.00 + 3.00 + 6.00 + 9.00 PM + 12.00 MN

7-HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD (PG) (ANIMATION/ACTION/ADVENTURE)


DAILY AT: 12.00 + 2.15 + 4.30 + 6.45 + 9.00 + 11.15 PMDAILY AT (IMAX 3D): 11.15 AM + 1.30 + 3.45 PM

8-THE MULE (PG-15) (CRIME/DRAMA/THRILLER) CLINT EASTWOOD, BRADLEY COOPER, TAISSA FARMIGA

DAILY AT: 11.15 AM + 1.45 + 4.15 + 6.45 + 9.15 + 11.45 PM

9-BACKTRACE (PG-15) (CRIME/ACTION/THRILLER) SYLVESTER STALLONE, RYAN GUZMAN, MATTHEW MODINE

DAILY AT: 11.30 AM + 1.30 + 3.30 + 5.30 + 7.30 + 9.30 + 11.30 PM

10-JOHNNY ENGLISH STRIKES AGAIN (PG) (COMEDY/ACTION/ADVENTURE)

ROWAN ATKINSON, OLGA KURYLENKO, EMMA THOMPSON

DAILY AT: 12.00 + 2.00 + 4.00 + 6.00 + 8.00 + 10.00 PM + 12.00 MN

11-MARY POPPINS RETURNS (G) (ADVENTURE/MUSICAL/FAMILY)

EMILY BLUNT, LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA, BEN WHISHAW

DAILY AT: 1.15 + 6.30 + 11.45 PM

12-RALPH BREAKS THE INTERNET (PG) (ANIMATION/ADVEN-TURE/COMEDY)

JOHN C. REILLY, SARAH SILVARMAN, GAL GADOT

DAILY AT: 11.30 AM + 1.45 + 4.00 + 6.15 + 8.30 + 10.45 PM

13-SPIDER MAN INTO THE SPIDER VERSE (PG) (ANIMATION/ACTION/ADVENTURE)

HAILEE STEINFELD, NICOLAS CAGE, MAHERSHALA ALI

DAILY AT: 11.30 AM + 1.45 + 4.00 + 6.15 + 8.30 + 10.45 PM

14-BUMBLEBEE (PG-13) (ACTION /ADVENTURE/SCI-FICTION) HAILEE STEINFELD, JOHN CENA, JORGE LENDEBORG JR.

DAILY AT: 12.00 + 2.15 + 4.30 + 6.45 + 9.00 + 11.15 PM

15- EL BADLAH (PG-13) (ARABIC/COMEDY) TAMER HOSNY, AKRAM HOSNI, MAJED EL MASRY, AMINA KHALIL

DAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 1.00 + 3.00 + 5.00 + 7.00 + 9.00 + 11.00 PM

16-HUNTER KILLER (PG-15) (ACTION/THRILLER) GERARD BUTLER, GARY OLDMAN, COMMON

DAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 1.30 + 4.00 + 6.30 + 9.00 + 11.30 PM

17-CREED II (PG-13) (DRAMA/ACTION/SPORT) TESSA THOMPSON, MICHAEL B. JORDAN, SYLVESTER STALLONE

DAILY AT: 10.45 AM + 1.15 + 3.45 + 6.15 + 8.45 + 11.15 PM

18-ROBIN HOOD (PG-15) (ACTION/ADVENTURE) TARON EGERTON, EVE HEWSON, JAMIE FOXX

DAILY AT: 12.15 + 2.30 + 4.45 + 7.00 + 9.15 + 11.30 PM

SEEF (II)1-GLASS (PG-15) (THRILLER) NEW


DAILY AT: 10.30 AM + 1.00 + 3.45 + 6.30 + 9.15 PM + 12.00 MN + (1.00 AM THURS/FRI)


DAILY AT: (12.45 MN THURS/FRI)


DAILY AT: 12.15 + 2.30 + 4.45 + 7.00 + 9.15 + 11.30 PM

4-SA’AT REDA (PG-15) (ARABIC/COMEDY) NEW HALA FAKHER, AHMED FATHY, DINA FOUAD

DAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 1.00 + 3.00 + 5.00 + 7.00 + 9.00 + 11.00 PM + (1.00 AM THURS/FRI)

5-THE AMITYVILLE MURDER’S (15+) (HORROR) NEW JOHN ROBINSON (IX), CHELSEA RICKETTS, DIANE FRANKLIN

DAILY AT: 10.45 AM + 12.45 + 2.45 + 4.45 + 6.45 + 8.45 + 10.45 PM

6-RIDE (PG-15) (THRILLER) NEW BELLA THORNE, JESSIE T. USHER, WILL BRILL

DAILY AT: 11.15 AM + 3.15 + 7.15 + 11.15 PM

7-WOMAN WALKS AHEAD (15+) (DRAMA/BIOGRAPHY) NEW JESSICA CHASTAIN, MICHAEL GREYEYS, CHASKE SPENCER

DAILY AT: 1.45 + 6.30 + 11.15 PM

8-PRAANA (PG-15) (MALAYALAM) NEW NITHYA MENON

FROM FRIDAY 18TH: 10.45 AM + 4.00 + 9.15 PM

9-F2: FUN & FRSTRATION (PG-15) (TELGU) NEW TAMANNAH BHATIA, PRAKASH RAJ, VENKATESH DAGGUBATI,

VARUN TEJ

DAILY AT: 1.00 + 6.15 + 11.30 PM


DAILY AT: 12.45 + 3.30 + 6.15 + 9.00 + 11.45 PM



DAILY AT: 11.30 AM + 1.45 + 4.00 + 6.15 + 8.30 + 10.45 PM


DAILY AT: 11.15 AM + 4.00 + 8.45 PM

13-BACKTRACE (PG-15) (CRIME/ACTION/THRILLER) SYLVESTER STALLONE, RYAN GUZMAN, MATTHEW MODINE

DAILY AT: 1.15 + 5.15 + 9.15 PM

14-VISWASAM (PG-15) (TAMIL) AJITH KUMAR, NAYANTHARA

DAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 2.00 + 5.00 + 8.00 + 11.00 PM

SEEF (I)


DAILY AT: 11.15 AM + 1.45 + 4.15 + 6.45 + 9.15 + 11.45 PM

2-CHEAT INDIA (PG-15) (HINDI/DRAMA/CRIME) NEW EMRAAN HASHMI, AMMAR TAALWALA, SHREYA DHAWANTHARY

DAILY AT: 10.45 AM + 1.15 + 3.45 + 6.15 + 8.45 + 11.15 PM

3-FRAUD SAIYAAN (15+) (HINDI/COMEDY) NEW ARSHAD WARSI, FLORA SAINI, MIHIKA VERMA

DAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 1.30 + 4.00 + 6.30 + 9.00 + 11.30 PM

4-MARY, MARRY ME (PG-15) (FILIPINO/COMEDY/ROMAN-TIC/DRAMA) NEW

TONI GONZAGA, ALEX GONAZAGA, SAM MILBY

DAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 1.00 + 3.00 + 5.00 + 7.00 + 9.00 + 11.00 PM

5-MIKHAEL () (MALAYALAM) NEW NIVIN PAULY, UNNI MUKAUDAN, MANJIMA MOHAN

FROM FRIDAY 18TH: 11.30 AM + 2.30 + 5.30 + 8.30 + 11.30 PM

6-PETTA (PG-15) (TAMIL/ACTION/THRILLER) RAJINIKANTH,VIJAY SETHUPATHI,SIMRAN,TRISHA

DAILY AT: 10.45 AM + 2.00 + 5.15 + 8.30 + 11.45 PM

SAAR1-GLASS (PG-15) (THRILLER) NEW


DAILY AT: 12.15 + 3.00 + 5.45 + 8.30 + (11.15 PM THURS/FRI)


DAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 1.30 + 4.00 + 6.30 + 9.00 + (11.30 PM THURS/FRI)


DAILY AT: 9.15 + (11.30 PM THURS/FRI)


DAILY AT: 3.00 + 8.15 PM



DAILY AT: 12.15 + 2.30 + 4.45 + 7.00 PM


DAILY AT: 12.30 + 5.45 + (11.00 PM THURS/FRI)

AL HAMRA1-MIKHAEL () (MALAYALAM) NEW

NIVIN PAULY, UNNI MUKAUDAN, MANJIMA MOHAN

FROM FRIDAY 18TH: 11.30 AM + 5.45 + (12.00 MN FRI)

2-PETTA (PG-15) (TAMIL/ACTION/THRILLER) RAJINIKANTH, VIJAY SETHUPATHI, SIMRAN, TRISHA

DAILY AT: 2.30 + 8.45 PM

WADI AL SAIL1-GLASS (PG-15) (THRILLER) NEW


DAILY AT: 12.45 + 3.30 + 6.15 + 9.00 + 11.45 PM


DAILY AT: 11.30 AM + 2.00 + 4.30 + 7.00 + 9.30 PM + 12.00 MN


DAILY AT: 12.30 + 3.15 + 6.00 + 8.45 + 11.30 PM



DAILY AT: 11.45 AM + 2.00 + 4.15 + 6.30 + 8.45 + 11.00 PM


DAILY AT: 1.15 + 6.30 + 11.45 PM

6-SIMMBA (PG-15) (HINDI/ACTION/COMEDY/DRAMA/RO-MANTIC)

RANVEER SINGH, AJAY DEVGN, SARA ALI KHAN

DAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 2.00 + 5.00 + 8.00 + 11.00 PM

7-MARY POPPINS RETURNS (G) (ADVENTURE/MUSICAL/FAMILY)

EMILY BLUNT, LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA, BEN WHISHAW

DAILY AT: 10.30 AM + 3.45 + 9.00 PM

URGENTLY REQUIRED

14 MONDAY, JANUARY 21, 2019

at Seef District too

Um al Hassan +973 17728699 Seef District +973 17364999

Justin Timberlake surprises cancer patientsLos Angeles

Singer-actor Justin Tim-berlake visited the HCA

Healthcare’s Methodist Chil-dren’s Hospital here to meet cancer patients.

Earlier this week, Tim-berlake fans at the hospi-tal posted a video dancing to his song “Can’t stop the feeling” urging the star to come and see them ahead of his “Man of the W o o d s ” c o n -cert.

S o, T i m -berlake on Fri-

day took a break from his tour and surprised a group of children who are battling cancer, re-

ports dailymail.co.uk.After his visit, several

photographs were shared online in which he was seen posing with the children.

The 37-year-old recent-ly resumed his tour after cancelling several dates because of bruised vocal chords.

R. Kelly’s accuser claims to have DNA evidence against himLos Angeles

Je r h o n d a Pa c e h a s claimed that she has DNA

evidence of sexual abuse at the hands of rapper R.Kelly.

On the show “Dateline NBC”, Pace spoke about her allegations against Kelly and disclosed that she has DNA evidence including spit on a blue T-shirt, which she kept, reports usatoday.com.

She said: “It went from just being slapped in your face to being choked. And he starved me. He would, like, not -- he would not feed me.

“I was locked in a room for three days with no food. If I didn’t agree to having in-tercourse with him, I would be locked in the room.”

The victim said Kelly forced her to write incrim-inating letters that could be used against her. Kelly’s lawyer Steve Greenberg de-nied Pace’s claims saying they are “false”.

US SC Judge to be in ‘The LEGO Movie 2’Los Angeles

US Supreme Court Jus-tice Ruth Bader Gins-

burg has been roped in to be a part of “The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part”.

Ginsburg will play a cam-eo in the movie, reports us-atoday.com.

Director of the movie Mike Mitchell said that Jus-tice Ginsburg’s brief role is part of the creative younger sister’s universe.

“These movies are so full of surprises. And we were thinking, ‘Who’s the last person you would think to see in a Lego film as a minifigure?’ And we are all huge fans. It made us laugh to think of having her enter this world,” Mitch-ell said.

Ginsburg will not be voicing the character, but she has already giv-en her approval to have her likeness appear in the movie.

According to the direc-tor, Ginsburg will become an official “Lego Movie 2” figurine.

Mitchell added: “So there will be a real Ruth Bader Ginsburg toy that boys and girls can play with. It will even come with a gavel.”

Bon Jovi’s restaurant to serve free meals to unpaid US government workers

Los Angeles

American rock star Jon Bon Jovi’s restau-

rant has announced that will be serving free meals on Monday to fed-eral employees who have been furloughed or working without pay, during the ongoing partial

government shutdown.“In line with our

mission, federal workers are encour-aged to join us for a

delicious meal and to learn about addition-

al support and resources available in our community,” JBJ Soul Kitchen posted on Facebook on Saturday.

I played it a little safe in the past: Nicole Kidman on her film choicesLos Angeles

Hollywood star Nicole Kid-man says she ‘’played it

safe’’ with her career in the past but now always looks for roles that will challenge her.

The actor said she is hap-py to make ‘’spontaneous and random’’ decisions now, reported Contactmu-sic.

‘’I think maybe I played it a little safe in the past, and went for the work I thought I was meant to do, which spoke to the idea of what and who an actress is supposed to be. But, for the most part, I’ve followed my spirit, which motivates me to go against the grain.‘’I’m completely spon-

taneous and random in my decisions. Never let it be said that I don’t have diverse taste. I love jumping into the deep end. Why not? That’s my favourite saying, I think it has such poten-tial and choice, why not?’’ Kidman told Psycholo-gies magazine.

The actor said life ex-periences have made her a better performer and she is happy to find her footing as

a character actor.

Los Angeles

The new lovebirds were all over each over at a showbiz function last week.

Their relationship, which began over Christmas, is Brad’s first serious romance since he split from Angelina Jolie in 2016.

Oscar winner Charlize, who called off her marriage to Penn in 2015, is understood to have visited Brad at his home in Loz Feliz, LA. She has not met his six children with Jolie.

Both Brad, 55, and Charlize, 43, are known for their romances with other high-profile stars.

A source said: “They have been casually seeing each other for near-ly a month now. They’ve been friends for some time — ironically through Sean — but things have developed.”

Last weekend the pair were spotted together after separate Saturday-night movie screenings.

Brad, 55, went to watch If Beale Street Could Talk — which he is exec producer of — at a private house in the Hollywood Hills. Charlize, 43, was special guest at a showing of Roma in LA’s Chateau Marmont.

The source said: “Brad came over to Cha-teau afterwards, changed his outfit and joined Charlize in a corner of the bar.

Los Angeles

Victoria Beckham has once again ruled out going on the upcoming Spice Girls reunion tour.

The singer-turned-fashion designer, who last February dismissed the possibility of touring with her former bandmates, said she is engaged in a full-time job now.

Asked if it was a difficult decision to make, Beckham said, “Not at all. What I do now is my passion and a full-time job. “I’m excited to see it, though. And I’m sure when I’m there and they are on stage, there will be a part of me that feels a bit left out.”

The former singer, also known as Posh Spice, said that “a part of me will al-

ways be a Spice Girl”. O t h e r mem-b e r s

E m m a Bunton, Geri

Horner, Mel Brown and Melanie Chisholm are set to hit the road for a 2019

UK tour, more than two decades after the band first burst onto the music scene.

Nicole Kidman

Victoria Beckham

Brad PittCharlize Theron

Brad Pitt is dating Charlize

Theron

Sharapova refuses to let Open exit dent Slam dreams

AFP | Melbourne

Former world number one Maria Sharapova shrugged

off her failure to reach the Australian Open quarter-fi-nals yesterday, saying she still believes she can increase her tally of five Grand Slam titles.

The 31-year-old Russian was competitive during periods of her fourth-round clash with local hope Ashleigh Barty but ultimately lost in three sets after her serve fell mid-match.

Sharapova insisted she was

still a Grand Slam contend-er, despite struggling with a shoulder injury and facing a new generation of players ea-ger for success at the majors.

“I think it would be tough for me to be doing all the work and putting in all the effort if I didn’t really believe that,” she said. “I think I’d be kidding myself.”

Sharapova was seeded 30 this year as she seeks to rejoin the game’s elite after coming back from a 15-month doping ban in 2017.

City ease past Huddersfield Sterling and Sane ensure Manchester City cruise to victory to cut Liverpool’s lead

AFP | Huddersfield, United Kingdom

Manchester City reduced Liverpool’s lead at the top

of the English Premier League table to four points as they even-tually found top gear to win 3-0 away to basement club Hud-dersfield Town yesterday.

This was by no means City’s most outstanding display of the season but, ultimately, goals from Danilo, Raheem Sterling and Leroy Sane ensured they did not trip up in the latest leg of their quest to keep the Premier League title-race alive.

Liverpool’s captivating 4-3 victory over Crystal Palace on Saturday ensured this was a crunch fixture for Pep Guardi-ola’s side, yet any hopes Hud-dersfield could pull off a shock win never materialised.

The embarrassment of riches available to City manager Guar-diola meant Gabriel Jesus, who had scored seven goals in three matches, dropped to the bench alongside David Silva while Kevin De Bruyne and Sergio Aguero returned to his starting line-up.

That depth of quality would be difficult for any side to coun-ter, especially a team struggling as much as Huddersfield are at present.

They parted company with manager David Wagner today,

a mutual decision but a sad one for Terriers’ fans who will al-ways remember him as the man who not only secured promo-tion to the Premier League for the Yorkshire club but also kept them in the top-flight last term.

A repeat of that looks high-ly unlikely this season and this match pitted the Premier League’s highest scorers against the lowest, with Huddersfield having netted just 13 times go-ing into this encounter and hav-ing lost eight of their last nine league games.

Huddersfield made six chang-es for the game but did manage to match reigning English cham-pions City early on.

After 12 minutes, Sterling felt he was denied a penalty after Terence Kongolo’s heavy chal-lenge in the box.

But City’s wait to break the deadlock lasted just six more minutes as Danilo’s fierce shot was deflected past Jonas Lossl by Christopher Schindler.

The goal was City’s 100th of the season in all competitions, a statistic underlining their potent attack, but they were surprising-ly lacklustre in the remainder of the first half

One clumsy Kyle Walker foul on Chris Lowe might have been worthy of a red card but the England international escaped with a booking.

Emotional message An emotional message from

Wagner was broadcast on the big screen at the John Smith’s Stadium during the half-time interval and that comfortably eclipsed most of the entertain-ment offered in the opening period.

Yet after the break, City finally upped the tempo and were soon out of sight.

After 52 minutes, De Bruyne’s pass found Sane on the left and his pinpoint cross was met by Sterling who finished off a div-ing header with some aplomb.

City’s afternoon soon got even better when Sane then scored a wonderful team goal that demonstrated how City had fi-nally woken up.

Danilo pumped a ball forward and Aguero steered a fantastic cushioned header into the path of Sane who slipped the ball past Lossl.

Immediately, it felt as if Hud-dersfield would need to enter damage-limitation mode to stop

City from running riot as they did in the 6-1 reverse fixture victory at the Etihad Stadium in August.

But to the credit of Hudders-field caretaker coach Mark Hud-son, he implored his team to keep on trying to attack despite being three goals down.

However, Huddersfield never really looked like conjuring up a miracle comeback as Stevie Mounie resorted to attempting to score from 30 yards but with little effect.

A close-range header from Mounie was also well saved by Ederson towards the end.

But that incident was the City goalkeeper’s first real piece of action, which said everything about the lopsided nature of this contest.


KNOW

BETTER

City’s first goal, a deflected strike for Danilo in the 18th minute, brought

up their 100th goal of the season in all

competitions

English Premier LeagueHuddersfield Town 0 - 3 Manchester City

Fulham 0 - 0 Tottenham Hotspur

Asian CupJordan 1 - 1 Vietnam

(Vietnam win 4-2 on penalties)

Thailand 1 - 2 China

Iran 0 - 0 Oman

Italian Serie AFrosinone 0 - 5 Atalanta

Fiorentina 3 - 3 Sampdoria

SPAL 1 - 1 Bologna

German Bundesliga1. FC Nürnberg 1 - 3 Hertha BSC

Spanish La Liga1Real Betis 3 - 2 Girona

Villarreal 0 - 1 Athletic Club

French Ligue 1Rennes 0 - 0 Montpellier

Angers 0 - 0 Nantes

Caen 0 - 0 Marseille

Manchester City’s English midfielder Raheem Sterling (2nd L) heads home their second goal

Bryan doctor urges Murray to consider ‘miraculous’ surgery

AFP | London

Andy Murray’s tennis ca-reer could yet be pro-

longed by hip resurfacing surgery, according to the doctor who performed the procedure on US doubles specialist Bob Bryan.

Former world number one Murray bowed out of the Australian Open on Monday for potentially the last time after saying his longstanding hip pain was too much to bear.

Earlier Murray, 31, had declared he would like to end his career at Wimble-don, where he has won two of his three Grand Slam sin-gles titles, if possible.

Dr Edwin Su operated on Bryan, who then took part at the Australian Open in under six months since his surgery.

Bryan has recommended Su to Murray, although the greater physical demands of singles compared to doubles, mean there is no guarantee the same oper-ation could help the Brit-ish tennis great to regain a place among the world’s top players.

Su, though, told Britain’s Mail yesterday newspaper: “I think it would absolutely be able to help him. Ideally, it is with no pain. Most of the time, right away from the time they wake up from the surgery, patients say that the pain is gone.

Russia’s Maria Sharapova(L) shakes hands with Australia’s Ashleigh Barty

Spider-cam smashes into umpire’s sun shield

AFP | Melbourne

An umpire was lucky to es-cape injury at the Australi-

an Open yesterday when a spi-der-cam smashed into the sun shield above her chair, ripping it off, as Maria Sharapova and Ashleigh Barty stood nearby.

The drama unfolded after Australian 15th seed Barty up-set the Russian five-time Grand Slam champion 4-6, 6-1, 6-4 on Rod Laver Arena.

In the immediate aftermath the spider-cam, which hovers above the court on a cable, mov-ing vertically and horizontally to offer an overhead perspec-tive, attempted to swoop down closer to the action.

Instead the camera crashed into the sun shield of shocked umpire Alison Hughes, remov-ing it completely and narrowly missing her head.

“Camera driver got his license on a weet-bix packet?,” said one Twitter user in re-posting video

of the near-miss, while another tweeted: “Dear oh dear, out of control spider cam - yikes!”

Another social media user Richard Ings said people should not underplay how serious the incident was.

“The workplace should be safe. The camera at that speed could have killed the umpire,” he said on Twitter. “Where was the risk management plan to ensure the risk of injury from this spider cam was mitigated?”

Russia’s Maria Sharapova (L) leaves the court as officials remove part of the umpire’s canopy shade, broken down by the spidercam, at the end of her women’s singles match against Australia’s Ashleigh Barty

Britain’s Andy Murray reacts after his match against Spain’s Roberto Bautista Agut on day one of the Australian Open

PSG target Weigl set to stay at Dortmund

AFP | Berlin, Germany

Julian Weigl is set to stay at Borussia Dortmund, the

Bundesliga leaders have in-sisted, with the Germany in-ternational reportedly a tar-get of Paris Saint-Germain in current transfer window.

“He’ll remain in Dort-mund,” director of sport Mi-chael Zorc told broadcaster ZDF after Saturday’s win at RB Leipzig restored Dort-mund’s lead over Bayern Munich in the league table.

Weigl, usually a defen-sive midfielder, slotted into defence at centre-back in Leipzig as cover for the Swiss Manuel Akanji, who is sidelined long-term, and was magnificent as Axel Witsel’s first-half strike gave Dortmund three points.

Zorc described Wei-gl’s performance against Leipzig as “flawless”, even though he was playing out of position, as more than 95 percent of his passes hit their target.

Federer ousted from OpenRafael Nadal earns an easy straight-set win over Tomas Berdych at Australian Open

• Barty downs Sharapova to fire Australia’s Open dreams

• Collins slays Kerber on dream Open debut

• Marathon man Bautista Agut advance after ending Cilic challenge

AFP | Melbourne

Defending champion Rog-er Federer was stunned by fiery Greek Stefanos

Tsitsipas who ended his bid for a record seventh Australian Open yesterday on a day of upsets that also saw second seed Angelique Kerber crash out.

The Swiss master caved in un-der the energy and pressure of a man 17 years his junior to tumble out 6-7 (11/13), 7-6 (7/3), 7-5, 7-6 (7/5) in the last 16 on Rod Laver Arena.

World number two Kerber was also sensationally bundled out by a woman playing the event for the first time, with American Danielle Collins humiliating the Wimbledon champion 6-0, 6-2 in under an hour.

The man Federer beat in last year’s final, sixth seed Marin Cilic, was also sent packing by Spain’s Roberto Bautista Agut, who now plays Tsitsipas in the

quarter-finals.Five-time Grand Slam winner

Maria Shaparova and fifth seed Sloane Stephens were others to fall, but there was no such drama for a rampant Rafael Nadal who powered into the last eight with a straight sets win over Tomas Berdych.

Federer was gunning for a 21st Grand Slam title but had a battle on his hands from off against the

20-year-old, touted among the new generation of young stars as a future champion.

“I’m the happiest man on Earth right now, I cannot de-scribe it,” said the 14th seed, who is the first Greek in history to reach quarter-finals of a Slam.

“I’ve been idolising him (Federer) since the age of six. It was a dream come true for me just being on Rod Laver facing

him. Winning at the end, I can’t describe it.”

The Swiss great denied the defeat signalled a changing of the guard.

Wimbledon winner and 2016 champion Kerber, the bookies’ favourite along with Serena Wil-liams after defending champion Caroline Wozniacki was ousted early, was no match for Collins, ranked 35 in the world.

Collins is little known after playing much of her tennis in the US college system and was making her debut in the main draw at Melbourne Park. She had never won a Grand Slam match before this year.

Her next assignment is against unseeded Russian Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, who beat Ste-phens 6-7 (3/7), 6-3, 6-3 in a late night epic.

Chipping away Men’s second seed Nadal, re-

turning from foot surgery, bar-relled past former world number four Tomas Berdych 6-0, 6-1, 7-6 (7/4) as he stays on track for an 18th Grand Slam title.

“I always say the same when I am back for injury,” said the Spaniard. “I don’t expect nega-tive or positive things. I just try to do my work every day and just be with (the) right attitude every single day.”

He will play world number 39 Frances Tiafoe for a place in the semi-finals after the young American celebrated his 21st birthday by grinding down Grig-or Dimitrov 7-5, 7-6 (8/6), 6-7 (1/7), 7-5.

Hometown hero Ashleigh Bar-ty also made the last eight after muscling past Sharapova and will next meet Petra Kvitova.

Sharapova claimed her biggest

scalp since completing a drugs ban in 2017 when she rolled Wozniacki in round three and looked on track to carry the mo-mentum forward.

The 30th seed won the first set but then fell to pieces, eventually succumbing 4-6, 6-1, 6-4.

“I knew I had to keep chip-ping away -- in a sense, trust the work we’ve done. I know that I can match it with the best,” said Barty, seeded 15.

Next up for the diminutive 22-year-old is Kvitova, who beat Barty in the final of the warm-up Sydney International this month.

The two-time Wimbledon champion beat 17-year-old Amanda Anisimova 6-2, 6-1 to match her best performance at a major since being slashed in a terrifying attack at her home in late 2016 that left her with last-ing nerve damage in her fingers.


Federer bats away ‘changing of guard’ talk, to play French OpenAFP | Melbourne

Swiss great Roger Federer denied yesterday his defeat

to Greek young gun Stefanos Tsitsipas signalled a changing of the guard as he announced he will play the French Open this year for the first time since 2015.

But Federer, the defending champion, played down sug-gestions it was the beginning of the end for a man who has dominated the sport for so long.

“I’ve heard that story the last 10 years. From that standpoint, nothing new there,” he said.

And in a signal that he is hun-gry for more, the 37-year-old said he planned to play on clay again this year for the first time since 2015.

“It’s a bit of a desire. I’m in a phase where I want to have fun and I’ve missed not doing it,” he told reporters of French Open.

He missed Roland Garros in 2016 with an injury and skipped the clay season last two years.

“I don’t feel it is necessary to have a big break again,” he

added.The long-haired Tsitsipas,

seeded 14, has been touted as a future Grand Slam champion and Federer had nothing but praise, saying he saw similari-ties to himself.

“He has a one-handed back-hand and I used to have long hair, too,” said the world num-ber three.

“Yeah, so maybe a little bit, sure. He has more of a conti-nental grip than players nowa-days. That’s a bit more my way than, let’s say, Rafa’s way.

“I see him definitely being high up in the game for a long time. That was a good night for him tonight.”

Federer conceded he had “massive regrets” about losing and said he didn’t win because he struggled to convert his 12 break points, making none of them count.

“I have massive regrets, you know, tonight. I might not look the part, but I am. I felt like I have to win the second set,” he said.

“I don’t care how I do it, but I have to do it. Cost me the game tonight.

KNOW WHAT

Australian sporting history is littered

with legendary tennis players who own

multiple Grand Slams, including Margaret Court with a record

24, Roy Emerson with 12 and Laver with 11

Germany’s Angelique Kerber leaves the court after her defeat against Danielle Collins of the US

Spain’s Rafael Nadal hits a return against Czech Republic’s Tomas Berdych

Shoot-out sees Vietnam beat Jordan, reach Asian Cup quartersAFP | Dubai

Vietnam emerged victorious from a penalty shoot out

with Jordan to become the first team to reach the Asian Cup quarter-finals yesterday -- after being the last side to scrape into the round of 16.

After extra-time finished at 1-1, BT Dung rolled in the decisive spot-kick for a 4-2 penalties win and saluted the crowd after Baha Faisal and Ahmed Samir had missed for Jordan.

The dramatic win upset the odds after Jordan were the first to qualify for the knockouts, and Vietnam only went through be-

cause of their disciplinary re-cord after they finished with an identical points and goals record to Lebanon.

However, the Southeast Asian champions came back from a goal down to force extra time, and they were on balance the stronger and more positive team over the 120 minutes.

Vital Borkelmans’ Jordan came into the game as the form side and they spurned a num-ber of chances before opening the scoring six minutes from half-time.

Baha Abdel-Rahman, taking a free kick from the right edge of the penalty area, hit it just right

as the ball bent around the wall and flew into the top corner.

However, the goal stung Viet-nam into action and they near-ly hit back when Hung Dung’s dipping shot was tipped over by Jordan goalkeeper Amer Shafi.

Vietnam, who won Southeast Asia’s Suzuki Cup in Decem-ber, levelled six minutes after the break, when Cong Phuong showed great technique to steer home a volley from close range.

On the hour-mark, Van Duc nearly snatched it for the Viet-namese but his dink over Shafi was hacked off the line by Anas Bani-Yaseen.

Bui Tien Dung converts the winning penalty for Vietnam

Switzerland’s Roger Federer gestures to the crowd after losing to Greece’s Stefanos Tsitsipas

celebs 8 @newsofbahrain op-ed dreamer, rhodes scholar, human · annual new visa applicants also saw...

Documents