CAS rejects Russian appeal on Rio Olympic ban

BUSINESS | 17 SPORT | 24

Brazil’s exports to Qatar touch

QR447.14m in H1

www.thepeninsulaqatar.com

Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani yesterday received a written message from Sudan’s President Field Marshal Omar Hassan Al Bashir, inviting him to attend the celebration of the completion of the enforcement of Doha Document for Peace in Darfur articles. The Emir met Sudanese President Office Director Lt. Gen. Taha Osman Al Hussein who presented the message at Al Bahr Palace.

Emir gets message from Sudanese President

FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016 • 17 SHAWWAL 1437 • Volume 21 • Number 6865 thepeninsulaqatar @peninsulaqatar @peninsula_qatar 2 Riyals

Emir greets King of BelgiumDOHA: Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani yesterday sent a cable of congratulations to King Philip of Belgium on his country’s National Day, reports QNA.

Emir gets phone call from UK PMDOHA: Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani yesterday received a telephone call from UK Prime Minister Theresa May.

The Emir congratulated May on her election as Prime Minister, wishing her every success in the performance of her duties.

They also reviewed relations between the two friendly coun-tries, ways of enhancing them and regional and international devel-opments, reports QNA.

By Sanaullah Ataullah

The Peninsula

DOHA: As green ACs arrive, gov-ernment has taken steps to ensure traders do not pass off conventional air conditioners as green ones, mar-ket sources said.

New brands of green ACs have begun arriving in bulk consign-ments, market sources told The Peninsula, hinting at a healthy com-petition and price drop.

Customers don’t need to break their heads over buying new energy- efficient ACs because authorities have issued starred rating stick-ers for each product based on its efficiency with regard to power consumption.

To help users, authorities are

ensuring that conventional ACs don’t reach the market and users buy green ACs of their choice based on the stickers.

An agent said: “Huge consign-ments of green ACs have began arriving. We cleared 12 contain-ers of energy-rational split units of a popular brand last week. This week we cleared 17 containers of the same brand. An order is in hand to clear 18 more containers of green spilt units next week.”

Traders said with increasing supplies of green ACs, the prices of split and widow units that witnessed marginal increase, could drop. More supplies of green ACs will create a healthy competition and help reduce retail prices, said a trader.

“We have some old stocks of green ACs but expect the first ship-ment of new brands early next

month,” said a representative of an agency of a popular brand.

Traders also justified the mar-ginal increase in the prices of green ACs as their spare parts are a bit expensive compared to conven-tional ones.

To increase energy efficiency rate (EER), ACs are being equipped with acqua-friendly and stronger spare parts. For example, an efficient AC needs new type of gas like 4.1 required for a starred rating. To run this type of gas, the coils and other spare parts should be able to take the pressure, explained the trader.

“The minimum EER required in Qatar is 8.5 and above. One of our products with 10.9 EER has been cer-tificated by authorities as eight-star,” said the trader.

→ Continued on page 2

Govt steps in to curb fraud sale as green ACs arrive

The Peninsula

DOHA: The Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy (SC) has launched new, state-of-the-art training facil-ities for Al Rayyan Sports Club alongside Al Rayyan Stadium.

The new, 40,000-seat stadium, a proposed venue for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, will host games up to quarter-finals. The pitches will be used for the upcoming season of Qatar Stars League (QSL). They were completed as part of an early works package for the club to con-tinue with its operations until the stadium is ready in 2019.

The inauguration ceremony on Wednesday night was attended by players, coaching staff, club man-agement and senior officials from the SC.

“It’s a great achievement to get Al Rayyan Sports Club back on home soil for training ahead of such an important season as they look to defend their QSL title,” said Ghanim Al Kuwari, Executive Direc-tor, Competition Venues, Technical

Delivery Office, SC. At the opening ceremony, he said: “As is the case with all of our venues, we stress the importance of receiving feed-back from the local community and stakeholders which, in this case, was the club.

“We heard exactly what they wanted from the precinct and the stadium. The opening of these pitches marks a pivotal moment in the development of the site and the club and gives a glimpse of what the finished Al Rayyan precinct will look like in 2019,” he added.

Last month, the SC announced that Qatari contractor Al Balagh Trading & Contracting and India’s biggest construction firm, Larsen & Toubro Limited (L&T), had been appointed as main contractors to build Al Rayyan Stadium.

“We are honoured to be part of joint efforts in delivering this mile-stone. The new facilities combined with the emotional boost of return-ing to Al Rayyan site gives the club a lift and hope heading into such an important season,” said Ali Salem Afifa, Football Operations Manager, Al Rayyan Club.

“In just over six years, the first ball will be kicked at 2022 World Cup and we are proud that Al Rayyan and the new stadium will play such a big role in the world’s biggest football tournament,” he added.

Al Rayyan football star Sebas-tian Soria said: “The team is thrilled to be back and all are looking for-ward to our pre-season training on the new pitches. It’s not unusual for training grounds and sporting stadi-ums to be world-class in Qatar, and the new training sites for Al Rayyan are no different. This motivates us more ahead of the new season and everyone at the club is excited at the prospect of moving into our new permanent home in 2019.”

Training pitches laid out at AlRayyan Stadium

Reuters

ANKARA: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said yesterday there were significant failures in intelligence ahead of last Friday’s attempted military coup and the armed forces would quickly be restructured.

He said a new coup attempt was possible but would not be easy, say-ing “we are more vigilant. It is clear that there were significant gaps and deficiencies in our intelligence, there is no point trying to hide it or deny it. I told it to the head of national intel-ligence,” Erdogan said.

He said there was no obstacle to extending the state of emergency beyond the initial three months if necessary.

Erdogan said the movement of US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, who he blames for masterminding the attempt to seize power, would be treated as “another separatist terrorist organisation”, drawing a parallel to the state’s fight against Kurdish militants over the past three decades.

He said the death toll had risen to 246, excluding the coup plotters and 2,185 people were wounded.

Turkey sought to assure its citizens and the world that there would be no return to the deep repression of the past, even as Erdogan imposed the first nationwide state of emergency since the 1980s.

Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek calmed financial markets. “The state of emergency won’t include restrictions on movement,

gatherings and free press, etc. It isn’t martial law of 1990s,” he wrote on Twitter.

Another Deputy Prime Minis-ter, Numan Kurtulmus, said Turkey would invoke its right to suspend its obligations temporarily under Euro-pean Convention on Human Rights.

→ See also page 4

AFP

KUWAIT CITY: Kuwait, which is hosting troubled Yemen peace talks, has issued an ultimatum to the warring parties to strike a deal within 15 days or leave the state. Three months of UN-brokered talks in Kuwait have failed to make headway with the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the government, supported by a Saudi-led coalition, holding firm to their positions.

“We have given 15 days for Yemeni sides taking part in the talks to resolve all issues,” Kuwait’s Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Al Jarallah told Dubai-based Al Arabiya news channel late on Wednesday.

“If matters are not resolved within 15 days, we have hosted them enough and consequently our brothers have to excuse us if we cannot continue hosting” the talks, Al Jarallah said in Brussels.

Talks resumed in Kuwait on

Saturday after a 15-day break.UN special envoy Ismail Ould

Cheikh Ahmed earlier said nego-tiations would last two weeks and warned that they may be Yemen’s last chance for peace.

They would also deal with “forming the military com-mittees that will supervise the withdrawal and hando-ver of weapons... and opening safe passages for humanitarian aid,” he said. But the deadline by the United Nations angered the Houthis who reiterated their demand for a national unity government ahead of any other solution.

The government is calling for implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 2216 which requires the rebels and their allies to withdraw from areas they have occupied since 2014, includ-ing capital Sana’a, and hand over heavy weapons. The government wants to re-establish its authority across the entire country, much of which is controlled by the rebels.

The pitches will be used for the upcoming season of Qatar Stars League and were completed as part of an early works package for the club to continue with its operations until the stadium is ready in 2019.

The Peninsula

DOHA: The Ministry of Interior yesterday announced that Umm Salal and Al Wakra service cen-tres will remain closed on every Saturday.

Messaimer and Al Rayyan service centres will continue providing services as usual on Saturdays from 8am to noon.

→ Continued on page 2

2 service centres

shut on Saturdays

DOHA: Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani has directed that salaries of Gaza Strip employ-ees totalling QR113m for the month of Shawwal be paid as he is keen to alleviate the suffering of brethren in the Strip and the severe finan-cial distress they are facing due to the unjust siege imposed by the Israeli occupation on them.

AFP

UNITED NATIONS: Portugal’s former prime minister Antonio Guterres took the lead in the first straw poll vote yesterday to pick the next UN secretary-general, diplomats said.

Slovenia’s former president Danilo Turk came second in the secret vote by the Security Coun-cil to choose a successor to Ban Ki-moon.

Council ambassadors met behind closed doors for the poll, the first of several rounds to be organised over the next two months.

There are 12 candidates, six of them women.

Eight of the contenders are from eastern Europe, includ-ing Argentina’s Foreign Minister Susana Malcorra, New Zealand’s ex-prime minister Helen Clark.

Guterres also headed the UN refugee agency.

→ See also page 12

Portugal ex-PM

takes lead in first

vote for UN chief

Emir orders Gaza salaries be paid

Kuwait gives 15 days to strike Yemen deal

Erdogan: Military to be restructured

A tourist bus, decorated with Turkish flags and a banner with the picture of President Erdogan, seen at Taksim square in central Istanbul.

Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani yesterday met at Al Bahr Palace outgoing Cuban Ambassador Ernesto Daniel Plasencia Escalante. The Emir conferred upon him the Sash of Merit in recognition of his role in enhancing ties between Qatar and his country and wished him every success in future assignments and bilateral relations further progress. The ambassador thanked and praised the Emir and officials for cooperation he received which contributed to the success of his mission. The Emir also met separately outgoing Panama Ambassador Luis Enrique Martinez. The Emir wished the ambassador every success in his future assignments and bilateral relations further progress and prosperity. The ambassador thanked and praised the Emir and officials for cooperation he received which contributed to the success of his mission.

Emir meets outgoing Cuban and Panama ambassadors

HOME / MIDDLE EAST02 FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

Deputy Emir & PM

greet King of Belgium

DOHA: Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani yesterday sent a cable of congrat-ulations to King Philip of Belgium on his country’s National Day.

Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani sent a similar cable to King Philip.

Minister meets envoysDOHA: Minister of State for For-eign Affairs H E Sultan bin Saad Al Muraikhi yesterday met ambassa-dors Park Heung-Kyeong (South Korea) and Shingo Tsuda (Japan) and US Charge d’Affaires Ryan Gliha. Talks dealt with relations and issues of common concern.

By Raynald C Rivera

The Peninsula

DOHA: Strengthening cultural coop-eration between Qatar and Peru is a priority considering the immense distance between the two countries, says Peru’s Ambassador to Qatar Julio Florian.

“I would like to work a lot on cul-tural events because for me they act as bridges between two countries.

“They bring countries closer, like in the case of Qatar and Peru which are thousands of kilometres away from each other which is at least 20 hours by plane,” Florian to the Penin-sula in an interview at the opening of Qhapaq Ñan exhibition at Katara on

Tuesday. The exhibition showcases photos of Peruvian landscape taken along the Qhapaq Ñan road network which was inscribed in the Unesco World Heritage Site List during the committee’s 38th meeting in Doha two years ago.

The ambassador said there are plans to organise more cultural events in the future.

“We have an agreement on cul-tural cooperation going on. It’s a matter of sitting down and negoti-ating what we can do between the two countries,” he said, stressing cul-tural cooperation as his main priority at the moment.

“I will start with cultural coop-eration then go on with political, diplomatic and economic one,” he said, adding relations between the two countries have been cordial following the establishment of the Peruvian Embassy in Doha four years ago.

“Relations between Qatar and Peru are growing steadily. We have to take into account the embassy was established in 2011 which is just four years ago. “If you go to supermarkets you will see more and more Peruvian

products coming to Doha. There is also a very good investment in min-ing in Peru. There are lots of things we can do in the future and we are looking forward to the challenge,” he added.

He cited the official visit to Peru of Father Emir H H Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani in 2013 and Peru’s President Ollanta Huma-la’s visit to Qatar the following year as expression of mutual interest of both countries to further strengthen relations.

The exhibition features the vast road network built by the Incas more than 500 years ago and which still functions till today. Built between 5,000 and 6,000 metres above sea level, the 30,000km road systems runs through six South American

countries — Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile.

Organised by Katara and the Peruvian Embassy, the expo runs until July 30 at Katara Building 19 Gallery 2.

Strong Qatar-Peru cultural ties top priority: EnvoyPeruvian ambassador Julio Florian says there are plans to organise more cultural events.

The Peninsula

DOHA: Cricket fans in Doha had a wonderful opportunity to witness an international T20 cricket match between Pakistan Stars and Qatar Starts last Friday at Asian Town Cricket Stadium. In the rousing match, Qatar stars beat Pakistan Stars by nine runs.

Led by Iqbal Chaudhry, Qatar Stars won the toss and Kamran Khan gave them an extra ordinary start in batting. In the first six overs he took 55 runs and hit five sixes. Qatar Stars had given a target of 151 runs in 20 overs to Paki-stan Stars to win the match. Saeed Ajmal was the Man of the Match.

Both teams had renowned international players like Salman Butt, Abdul Razzaq, Saeed Ajmal and Mohammad Sami.

“We are very happy to see this scale of crowd coming to watch cricket matches and each match in this stadium shows the devel-opment of the game in Qatar.

“We want to hold better tournaments fre-quently as we are getting a lot of appreciation from people and fans in Qatar,” said Sajjad Chaudhry, Organiser and Managing Director, Pro Events.

The tournament was organised by Ibn Ajayan Projects, the managers of Asian Town, in association with Pro Events, an international sports event management company in Qatar.

This is the third year Pro Events organised the tournament. “We are trying to develop a cricket culture in Qatar and our aim is to raise

Qatar to the level of World Cup,” Chaudhry added.

Qatar Stars win T20 international

cricket match at Asian Town Stadium

Organisers of the cricket tournament with the Qatar Stars team.

Scores of Pokémon Go players turned up to catch Pokémon at the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) park last night. Organised by FilipiKnows-a vlog (video blog) channel, the event was the first Pokémon Go hunt in Qatar after the game was launched two weeks ago. Pic: Abdul B / The Peninsula

Continued from page 1 The ministry said on its

Facebook account that all other centres will continue providing their regular services throughout the week in two shifts (morning and evening), the ministry added. The ministry has eight service centres across Qatar.

The ministry said the number of subscribers to Metrash2 has exceeded 250,000 and urged res-idents to subscribe to the online service, which provides about 250 services, including those offered by the centres.

Metrash2 is one of the minis-try’s channels to deliver services provided by services centres in simplified way.

It provides services for com-panies and individuals on the website in Arabic and English and enables users to apply for and obtain services that save their time, effort and money, while enjoying the convenience of using their smartphones, according to the ministry.

Continued from page 1

“EER measures electricity conservation of ACs, more EER means the ACs are more efficient,” he added.

“High prices of green ACs compared to conventional ones will not be a burden on custom-ers, who will benefit in terms of a reduced electricity bill,” said another trader.

The General Authority for Standardisation and Specification (GASS) at the Ministry of Munici-pality and Environment has asked importers and suppliers of ACs to register their products and take prior approval before import-ing from manufacturers, said a source.

Once a consignment arrives at port, a certificate is issued by the authority concerned that the supply meets Qatar’s specifica-tions for EER.

Other service centres to work entire week

The Peninsula

DOHA: A patrolling team from the Environment, Wildlife and Natural Reserve Protection Department at the Ministry of Municipality and Environment has caught an Arab national for selling a chita (spectac-ular leopard). The culprit has been booked under the provisions of the Law No. 5 of 2006 for regulating trade of wildlife, animals of rare species threatened with extinction and their products.

The man was handed over to police of Al Shamal Security Department for taking legal procedures to

produce him before the public prosecution related to the environment.

The chita was sent to zoo. It will be kept there until the issuance of a decision by public prosecution.

The ministry has called on citizens and expatri-ates to abide by the law of the land, especially those related to the trade of wildlife, Qatar News Agency reports. People should avoid importing or bringing such animals without prior permission from author-ities concerned at the ministry.

They were also asked to inform the environment control room at the Ministry through its hotline 998 if they come cross any violation.

Man caught for selling chita

QNA

MANAMA: As part of the Bahrain Interior Ministry’s counterterrorism pro-gramme, police seized bomb making materials and weapons after arresting five individuals on terrorist charges. The investigation revealed that they had planned bombings in more than one location in Bahrain.

The men were found to have turned their homes into additional storage areas for bomb-making materials. They also confessed to receiving inten-sive military training at Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Iraqi Hezbollah camps. The investigation is ongoing to have more details.

Reuters

SIRTE: Forces aligned with Libya’s UN-backed government fought fierce exchanges with Islamic State militants in Sirte yester-day in which 13 of their fighters were killed and more than 110 wounded, officials said.

The government-backed forces have pinned militants back to a small area in the centre of the coastal city after advancing on the Islamic State stronghold in May.

But they have faced stiff resistance from the several hun-dred militants thought to be still holed up in Sirte, suffering casu-alties from snipers and explosive devices.

Yesterday, the government-backed forces said that they were advancing on two fronts after bombarding Islamic State positions from the air and the ground at dawn. They said there was heavy fighting in the Dollar neighbourhood and around the port. The forces are mainly made up of fighters from the city of Mis-rata, though other western Libyan towns and cities have also con-tributed men.

Five ‘terrorists’ held in Bahrain

Green ACs will

help reduce

users’ bills

Libya launches

new assault to

oust IS from Sirte

Pokemon Go hunt

ISLAM 03 FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

To Muslims, Jerusalem houses one of the holiest mosques — the Masjid Al Aqsa — and represents a place of great-

est religious significance. Muslims call to rule over Jeru-

salem is not driven by colonist, nationalist or material motives.

The love for every grain in the Holy City is sacred to Muslims. Mus-lims respect all the Prophets revered by Judaism and Christianity and their venerated places are also central to the ethos of Islam.

To quote a few Quranic verses and sayings of Prophet Muhammad (Peace be Upon Him) with regard to Jerusalem will indicate the impor-tance Masjid Al Aqsa and, therefore, Jerusalem has assumed upon the Muslims hearts.

1. The miraculous journey of the holy Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) from Makkah to Masjid Al Aqsa (Al Isra) and his ascension through the heavens (Al Ma’araj) has linked Jerusalem to the Muslims’ hearts and minds.

The Holy Quran states:Glory to Allah who did take His

Servant for a journey by night from the Sacred Mosque (in Makkah) to Al Aqsa (in Jerusalem) whose precincts We did bless (Al Isra 17: 1)

The Lord Almighty had it in His power to have taken Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) from Makkah straight up to the heavens. However, to impress the importance of Jerusalem upon Mus-lims, Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) was first taken to Masjid Al Aqsa in Jerusalem.

When the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) reached Al Aqsa (Haram Shareef), he led prayers in congregation that was attended by all the previous Prophets (Alayhis salaam). Hence, Masjid Al Aqsa is unique in that this is the only place on earth where all the Prophets (Alay-his salaam) performed Salaah in congregation.

2. The Prophet Ibrahim (Abra-ham) (Alayhis salaam) who is central to all the three faiths, migrated to the land of Canaanite around 1805 BC.

The Quran states:We said, O Fire! Be thou cool and

safety for Ibrahim. Then they planned against him, but We made them the greater losers. But We delivered him and (his nephew) Lot (and directed

them) to the land which We have blessed for the nations (Al Anbiyaa 1: 69-71).

3. The sacredness of Jerusalem is emphasised in numerous places in the Holy Quran. The Apostles of Allah, Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) and also Prophet Musa (Mosses) (Alayhis salaam) alluded to it. The Holy Quran reports Prophet Musa (Alayhis salaam) telling his people:

O my people! Enter the holy land… (Al Maida 5: 21)

Further, the Holy Quran states:It was Our power that made the

violent (unruly) Wind flow (tamely) for Suleiman. To his order, to the land Which We had blessed… (Al Anbiyaa 21: 81)

4. Masjid Al Aqsa and, therefore, Jerusalem’s importance was fur-ther emphasised by the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him):

(a) According to Islamic teach-ings, there are only three places to which it is desirable to undertake a journey for the purpose of Salaah. Abu Huraira (ra) is quoted as say-ing that Allah’s Messenger (Peace Be Upon Him) said:

‘Set out deliberately on a journey only to three mosques: This mosque of mine (in Madinah), the Sacred Mosque (in Makkah) and the Mas-jid Al Aqsa (in Jerusalem)’ (Bukhari & Muslim)

(b) The virtues of praying in Mas-jid Al Aqsa are exalted:

Abu Darda (ra) is quoted as saying that the Prophet of Allah Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) said:

A prayer in the Sacred Mosque (in Makkah) is worth 100,000 prayers, a prayer in my mosque (in Madinah) is worth 1,000 and a prayer in Jerusa-lem is worth 500 prayers more than in an any other mosque. (Bukhari)

(c) Masjid Al Aqsa is the second house of prayer established on earth: Abu Dhar (ra) is quoted as saying:

I asked the beloved Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) which was the first mosque on earth?

‘The Sacred Mosque (in Makkah),’ he said. And then which, I asked? ‘Masjid Al Aqsa,’ he said. I further asked, what was the time span between the two? ‘Forty years,’ the Prophet (Alayhis salaam) replied. (Muslim)

5. Masjid-Al-Aqsa was the First Qibla (the direction to which Mus-lims faced when praying Salaah): The centrality, historical and cul-tural significance of Masjid Al Aqsa is further emphasised by the fact that Muslims used to turn towards Jeru-salem when they prayed. This was practiced until 16 to 17 months after

hijra, when Allah commanded in His wisdom for the Muslims to face Makkah. The importance of Masjid Al Aqsa remained and all the wor-ship performed facing Masjid Al Aqsa was good and valid.

6. The resting place of Prophets (Alayhis salaam) and the Prophet’s

companions (ra): The land of Pal-estine has in it some of the noblest souls the earth has seen. The graves of many Prophets are in Palestine, including Ibrahim (Alayhis salaam), Yakub (Alayhis salaam), Ishaq (Peace Be Upon Them) and according to some commentators there are over 100 Prophets buried in Palestine.

Palestine also has the bodies of some of the closest companions of the Prophet and thus the first gen-eration of Muslims. Included in these are the graves of Ubada ibn Al Samit, Shaddad ibn Aws ibn Thabit Al Ansari and Tamim Al Dari [ra].

7. Merits of Performing Haj or Umrah from Masjid Al Aqsa:

Umm Salamah (ra) narrates that she heard the Prophet (Alayhis salaam) saying: “Whosoever starts his Umrah or Haj from Masjid Al Aqsa his wrong actions will be forgiven, both past and future.”

In another version, he is reported to have said that Paradise would be his reward. (Targheeb)

8. Freedom of the Holy City.

After the battle of Yarmuk, the Muslim forces under the command of Abu Ubaydahr lay siege to Jeru-salem. The inhabitants consented to surrender on condition that the Kha-lifa, Umar ibn Al Khattab (ra) came in person.

Umar (ra) travelled to Palestine and formally received the keys to the city in 637 AD. On his arrival, he con-cluded the famous peace treaty with the people of Holy City.

This opened the doors to the Jews, who were denied access for thousands of years and for the first time Jerusalem under Muslim rule became truly an open city to all the three faiths.

Throughout Muslim rule of over 1,200 years of Jerusalem, members of Jewish, Christianity and Islam pros-pered in Jerusalem.

Muslim rule enabled the city to live up to its rightful title of ‘The Holy City’ as it encompassed all believers in One God to go about their business without any hindrance.

(Published by: Friends of Al Aqsa — Islamic Invitation Centre)

Good manners, respecting others and ensuring their rights result in friendly bonds between people and removes dislike and grudges from their hearts.

In this way the hearts become pure, sym-pathetic and kind; so feelings of love and brotherhood prevail. The Messenger of Allah said: “He is not from my nation, he who does not respect our elderly, have mercy upon our young, and honour our scholars.” (Musnad Ahmad)

Good moral conduct is the path to benefi-cial knowledge

Allah The Exalted Says (what means): Allah will raise those who have believed among you and those who were given knowledge, by degrees. And Allah is acquainted with what you do. (Quran 58:11) We are so much in need today for benefi-cial knowledge that leads us towards progress, glory, and dignity we have lacked for a long time. At the same time, this would achieve for us the satisfaction of our Lord and knowledge that is not a result of (following) the inseparable two: Whims and ignorance. Good manners save us from such things.

A student of knowledge — any type of knowl-edge — cannot obtain it without acquiring good manners first. Should a person obtain some knowledge without obtaining good manners, it shall have negative consequences on him in this life and in the Hereafter, because he risks being a bad scholar. Our predecessors frequently cau-tioned about taking knowledge from someone who lacks good manners.

One of the righteous predecessors said, “One who seeks religious knowledge and does not have good manners is likely to tell a lie about Allah (The Exalted_ and His Messenger.”

Another person said, “Through good man-ners, knowledge can be understood, and through knowledge, deeds are soundly performed.”

Good manners are a necessityGood manners are necessary for every

Muslim with Allah The Exalted, the Prophet

Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) and with all creation. Allah The Exalted Says (what means): And speak to people good (words) — Quran 2:83

When there is interaction between a Mus-lim and another person, each one should fulfil the criterion of rights and obligations; and it is necessary to understand the principles needed for interacting with others. This is what is meant (here) by good manners.

This can only be gained through acquiring knowledge. Some would say good manners are a kind of etiquette; but in reality they are a Shariah and religion and a way by which to draw nearer to Allah The Exalted; and they are subject to the five basic Shariah rulings. Good manners are an obligation upon every Muslim to seek and abide by (in everyday life).

Good manners constitute the following five basic Shariah rulings: that which is obligatory, forbidden; recommended, and that which is per-missible, and that which is disliked.

Obligations are known through good manners

Through good manners a Muslim knows what his obligations are in worship, daily practices, his interaction with others and his conduct. The Messenger of Allah said, “May Allah have mercy upon a man who is forgiving if he sells, (who is forgiving) if he buys, and (who is forgiving) if he collects money due to him that he had lent out.” — Al Bukhari]

Good manners are the nation’s imageWe require good manners so that a youth

respects his elders, a student respects his teacher, a teacher respects his students, offspring respect their parents; a wife respects her husband. The Messenger of Allah said, “He is not from my nation he who does not respect our elders, have mercy upon our young, and honour our schol-ars.” — Musnad Ahmad

Good manners are the result of the Da‘wah of the Prophets

Good manners are the means to every virtue and one of the purposes for sending messen-gers and the result of their Da‘wah (call to Islam).

The Messenger of Allah said: • “I was sent to perfect righteous manners.”

— Ahmad• “A believer reaches with his good man-

ners the rank of one who is fasting and praying throughout the night.” — Ahmad

• “There is nothing heavier in the scales (of the Hereafter) than good manners.” — Abu Dawood

• “I guarantee a house on the outskirts of Par-adise for he who leaves arguing even if he is right; and a house in the centre of Paradise for he who does not lie even when he jokes; and a house in Upper Paradise for the one who has good man-ners.” — Abu Dawood

When you realise the value of good manners in Islam and how Islam gives much importance to it then know that acquiring good manners is comprised of two stages: The manners that par-ents teach their children and the manners that a person acquires as he grows up.

Parents should teach their children basic manners, so that they become an essential part of their lives and can easily acquire them as they grow up. Should teaching a young child good manners be ignored, it is very difficult to achieve that after he has grown up.

Allah The Exalted Says (what means): O you who have believed, protect yourselves and your families from a fire whose fuel is people and stones… — Quran 66:6

Ibn ‘Abbas, may Allah be pleased with him, said (that protecting them in the verse means): “Educate them and teach them good manners.”

The manners required for a person when he is grown is to supplement what was missed, and this is what is required, because it is necessary for the reformation of the soul. With a righteous soul the body becomes sound; rather, a person’s whole life and affairs become sound. Allah The Exalted Says (what means): He has succeeded who purifies it (the soul), And he has failed who instils it (with corruption). — Quran 91: 9-10

Question: The Imam of our local mosque said in this year khutba that people must not congratulate each other in the mosque as it is haram. We all must go out of the mosque and congratulate and meet each other. Sec-ondly, he said asking for dua after Eid khutba is also haram. Dua must be asked before khutba. Please guide me in the light of Islamic teaching to which extent this person is right as he is not quoting any ruling in his defence. He just say that he knows the best.

Answer: All perfect praise be to Allah, The Lord of the Worlds. I testify that there is none worthy of worship except Allah, and that Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) is His slave and Messenger.

First, we are not aware of any evidence that proves that it is forbidden for Muslims to congratulate each other on Eid in the mosque and no jurist has ever issued a fatwa to this effect.

Rather, there is evidence in the Sunnah that it is permissible for Muslims to generally congratulate each other in the mosque as in the story of Ka’b Ibn Maalik when Allah accepted his repentance when he stayed behind from the battle of Tabook. Ka’b said: “…until I entered the mosque and people were sit-ting around the Prophet then Talhah Ibn ‘Ubaydillaah stood up and hurriedly came to me and shook hands with me and congratulated me...” — Al Bukhari and others.

This is a congratulation in the mosque in the presence of the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) and his Companions; it is for this reason that Ibn Hajar when mentioning the benefits of this Hadith in ‘Fat’h Al Baari’, said: “…and congrat-ulating someone who is blessed with a bounty….”

On the other hand, it is not clear to us what is exactly meant by supplicating after the Eid khutba, so if by this you mean asking the Imaam to supplicate at the end of the khutba in the same manner he supplicates in the Friday khutba, then this is permissible and the jurists stated that the ‘Eid khutba is like the Fri-day khutba – in general – concerning its rulings.

Ibn Qudaamah said about the two ‘Eid khutba: “The features of the two khutbas (of ‘Eid) are like the features of the two Friday khutbas.”

As regards the Friday khutba and what is permissible in it, he said: “…it is desirable for the Imaam to supplicate for the believing men and women, for himself and for the people present in the congregation…”

Therefore, it is permissible to supplicate in the ‘Eid khutba in the same man-ner this is permissible in the Friday khutba.

However, if what you mean is that a Muslim asks another Muslim to suppli-cate for him, then this is not absolutely unlawful even though some scholars are of the view that it is (generally) less appropriate to do so, but it makes no dif-ference, with respect to the ruling, if this happens before the khutba or after it.

Finally, it is acceptable to ask the Imaam to mention the evidence for what he said about the prohibition of the Muslims from congratulating each other on Eid in the mosque or the forbiddance of someone asking another to suppli-cate for him after the Eid Khutba. Indeed, it is not impolite to ask for evidence, and this Imaam should answer your request if he is a knowledgeable person; he should not just say that he knows better than you. Allah Knows Best.

Significance of Al Aqsa Mosque

The way to reform society Supplicating after Eid khutba

A prayer in the Sacred Mosque (in Makkah) is worth 100,000 prayers, a prayer in my mosque (in Madinah) is worth 1,000 and a prayer in Jerusalem is worth 500 prayers more than in an any other mosque — Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him).

MIDDLE EAST04 FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

IS gets 48-hour deadline to quit Syria’s Manbij

AFP

BEIRUT: US-backed fighters yester-day gave the Islamic State group 48 hours to leave the battleground Syr-ian town of Manbij, after US-led air strikes nearby killed scores reported to be civilians.

Elsewhere, dozens of civilians were reported dead in bombard-ment of several rebel-held areas in Syria, a monitor said.

The 48-hour ultimatum was issued by the Arab-Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is fighting IS with coalition air support.

The force has been waging a major campaign since June to oust IS from Manbij, in Aleppo province, with US-led air support.

The deadline follows a major backlash after reports that at least 56 civilians, including children, were killed in air strikes by the coa-lition near Manbij on Tuesday.

“In order to protect civilian lives and property and to protect the town from destruction we announce that we accept the initiative under which besieged IS members would leave with their individual light weapons,” said the Manbij Military Council, part of the SDF.

“This initiative is the last

remaining chance for besieged members of Daesh (IS) to leave the town.”

A SDF commander said that the initiative was first floated last week by tribal leaders in Manbij, which is a key IS bastion.

“But we took this decision now after IS used residents as human shields, after the media pressure on us, and to protect whatever civilians are left in the town,” he said on con-dition of anonymity.

The statement also urged civilians to try to leave Manbij or distance themselves from areas where clashes are taking place.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, said the 56 civilians killed Tuesday were villagers fleeing fight-ing in Al Tukhar, 14 kilometres from Manbij.

The anti-IS coalition has said it is investigating the allegations, and US Defence Secretary Ash-ton Carter on Wednesday pledged a “transparent” investigation. Yes-terday afternoon, the Observatory reported quiet in Manbij, though it was unclear if the calm was tem-porary or in response to the SDF’s ultimatum.

Earlier in the day, the mon-itor had reported additional US-led air strikes and it said the SDF had advanced inside the town overnight.

Elsewhere in the country, the Observatory said 43 civilians had been killed in bombardment of rebel-held areas.

The US Treasury announced fresh sanctions yesterday targeting the arms and financial networks of the government of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.

AFP

WASHINGTON: Top diplomatic and military officials from the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State group met yesterday to prepare the assault on its Iraqi bastion Mosul.

Defence and foreign ministers from more than 40 countries gath-ered in Washington for a second day, even as their local militia allies made advances in Syria.

But, while news from the front was dominated by the Syrian Dem-ocratic Forces’ siege of Manbij, the leaders in Washington were focused on a far bigger prize.

“Mosul will be the ultimate test,” Brett McGurk, the US special

presidential envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, told the assembled delegates.

Backed by coalition air strikes and military advisers, Iraqi and Kurdish force have made inroads in recent months into territory once controlled by IS fighters.

But the daunting target of Mosul, Iraq’s second city home to two mil-lion people, will be the centre of gravity on the campaign in the weeks and months to come.

On the first day of the talks, the defence ministers met separately to talk battlefield tactics, while the foreign ministers pledged $2bn in reconstruction funds.

Yesterday’s meeting brought them together to discuss how to

ensure that any victory in Mosul is quickly followed by a politi-cal settlement and the return of refugees.

“Let us remember, Mosul is where Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi declared his phony caliphate in June of 2014,” McGurk said, referring to the IS group’s elusive leader.

“And if we get this campaign right on the ground, in all its aspects, it is where we can begin to seal his fate.”

The battle for Mosul and for the Islamic State group’s Syrian base Raqa will be tough if the jihadists decide to hold out in their symbolic strongholds.

But the Iraqi city also poses a political challenge.

Saudi Arabia

denies issuing

new fatwa against

Pokemon Go

Reuters

DUBAI: Saudi Arabia denied yesterday that the country’s top clerical body had renewed a 15-year-old edict declaring that the Pokemon game was un-Islamic.

Saudi media reports said on Wednesday the General Secre-tariat of the Council of Senior Religious Scholars had revived a 2001 decree against a Pokemon card game in response to queries from Muslims, although it made no mention of the new Pokemon GO mobile game.

Users of the game walk around their real-life neigh-bourhoods in search of scores of “pocket monsters”, which emerge superimposed on the phone screen via its camera.

The 2001 fatwa said the card game contained elements pro-hibited by Islamic law such as gambling.

However, Saudi authorities said the social media reports were unfounded.

“The Council of Senior Reli-gious Scholars denied that it issued a new fatwa about the Pokemon game, and the media reports of that are not accu-rate,” said Abdulmohsen Alyas, undersecretary for international communication and media at the Ministry of Culture and Information.

“We ask international media to call the ministry to verify infor-mation for their reports.”

On its Twitter account, the Council said no fatwa had been issued for the new Pokemon game.

In Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s two holiest sites, cinemas are banned and women’s sports are discouraged. Middle Eastern states are often wary of social media use by their growing youth populations.

43 civilians had been killed in bombardment of rebel-held areas.

People mourn over the coffins of members of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria’s northeastern city of Qamishli, yesterday, during the funeral of 16 fighters killed battling the Islamic State (IS) group in Manbij.

Anti-IS coalition meets with eye on retaking Mosul

Turkish military officers who fled to Greece get two-month suspended jail sentenceAFP

ALEXANDROUPOLI: A Greek court yester-day sentenced eight Turkish military officers who fled last week’s failed coup to suspended two-month prison terms, an AFP reporter said.

The officers, sought by Turkey to face a military trial at home, have requested asylum in Greece and will remain in police custody

until their cases on that issue are heard early in August.

The prison sentence for illegal entry was suspended for a three-year period, the court in the northern city of Alexandroupoli said, taking into account that the men felt threatened.

In his defence, one of the Turkish officers told the court through a translator that he did not want to return home owing to “indiscrim-inate” arrests by Ankara authorities.

“We saw indiscriminate arrests of military personnel and we were afraid,” the suspect said. Another said: “I’m proud to be an army man. I would not have left Turkey had my life not been in danger.”

The case threatens to strain ties between the two Nato allies, with Ankara labelling the eight “terrorists”.

Turkey’s ambassador has warned that failure to return the officers “will not help” ties. “I hope we will manage to swiftly go

through the phases of due process and man-age to return these terrorist elements so that they will face justice,” Kerim Uras told report-ers in Athens on Tuesday.

“We thought of going to Bulgaria, Roma-nia or Greece — finally we chose Greece,” said the officer who opened yesterday’s trial, held under tight security.

The officers flew to Alexandroupoli by military helicopter on Saturday and were allowed to land after sending a distress signal

to authorities. A Turkish detachment arrived after them and returned the Black Hawk hel-icopter to Turkey.

Greek military units have been placed on “heightened vigilance” amid reports that additional Turkish military personnel could be trying to flee to the Greek islands, a navy spokesman told AFP.

The eight men, who declined to give their ranks and units in court, arrived in handcuffs with their faces hidden.

Libya unity govt slams France for lack of coordinationReuters

TRIPOLI: Libya’s UN-backed unity government has said that France did not coordinate with it over the presence of French troops in Libya and that it would not compromise on its sover-eignty after France announced the deaths of three of its soldiers there.

Special forces teams from countries including France, Brit-ain and the United States are on the ground in western and eastern Libya to fight Islamist militants.

The French have been working alongside forces loyal to eastern Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar who have been battling Islamist militants and other opponents

in Benghazi and elsewhere in the east. But Haftar has rejected the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli, which is backed by major West-ern powers — including France.

The GNA’s Presidential Coun-cil said in a statement released late on Wednesday that it had asked France for an explanation after President Francois Hollande announced the soldiers’ deaths during “dangerous intelligence operations”.

“The Presidential Council expresses its deep discontent at the French presence in eastern Libya without coordination with the Council, which was declared by the government of France,” said the statement from the unity government.

A fighter of Libyan forces allied with the UN-backed government prays in front of his sniper rifle during a battle with IS fighters in Sirte, Libya, yesterday.

S Sudan president asks VP to come back to JubaReuters

JUBA: South Sudan’s president wants his vice-president to return to the capital to try to salvage a peace agreement that was jeop-ardised by fighting earlier this month between forces loyal to the two long-time rivals.

President Salva Kiir asked Vice-Presi-dent Riek Machar yesterday to make contact with him in the next 48 hours, to re-establish a peace agreement signed in August.

Forces loyal to the two men fought street battles in the capital over a five-day period ear-lier this month, until a ceasefire was reached on July 11. The fighting killed at least 272 peo-ple. Machar then left the capital with his troops, although he said he was not preparing for a resumption of the fighting that convulsed South Sudan from December 2013 and ended ear-lier this year. His spokesman said he had called for an outside force to be deployed as a buffer between his and Kiir’s forces.

Kiir said late last week he opposed the

presence of any more outside forces, saying the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) troops were sufficient.

“I am appealing for your return while reiterating my 100 percent commitment to ensuring your protection and overall secu-rity ... “ Kiir said in a statement read by his spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny. “I will be expect-ing a response from your good self within 48 hours ...”

The statement said Kiir wanted to re-estab-lish a peace agreement signed in August.

Wispy clouds

ASIA / AFRICA / PAKISTAN 05FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

Mali declares emergency after deadly attackAFP

BAMAKO: The Malian government yesterday declared a state of emer-gency, a day after an attack in the centre of the country left 17 soldiers dead and 35 wounded.

The government said yesterday that the state of emergency would last “for a duration of 10 days” fol-lowing the attack at an army base in Nampala.

Its also said a period of national mourning would begin yesterday

“in homage to the victims of terror-ist attack”.

In the hours after Tuesday’s

assaults two groups -- one jihadist, the other ethnic -- both claimed to have carried out the raid on the mil-itary camp.

Several security sources in the region said they doubted the verac-ity of the claim of responsibility from the National Alliance for the Protec-tion of Peul Identity and Restoration of Justice (ANSIPRJ).

The ethnic group was only founded last month following inter-communal clashes in the area and lacked the means to mount an attack.

Malian jihadist organisation

Ansar Dine also took credit for the attack, which the Malian government described as a “coordinated terror-ist attack”.

The government that the military was in control in Nampala and that the attackers would be hunted down and punished.

The attack was the latest in a series of assaults on security forces in Mali, and was condemned by the United Nations and European Union.

A previous state of emergency in place since April had only been lifted the week before.

Northern Mali has seen repeated violence since it fell under the control of Tuareg-led rebels who allied with jihadist groups linked to Al-Qaeda in 2012.

But attacks are now becoming more frequent in the country’s cen-tre, close to its borders with Burkina Faso and Niger, both from criminal and jihadist elements.

Although Islamists were largely ousted by an ongoing French-led mil-itary operation launched in January 2013, sporadic attacks from desert hideouts are common.

Divided groups in

KP’s civil service

set to lock horns

Internews

PESHAWAR: The internal wran-gling between civil servants of Pakistani province of KP’s bureaucracy is headed down a volatile road as sparring officials from both sides are about to lock horns. While there are reports of protests from one side, the other is thinking of ways to use Central Prison Peshawar’s tandoors to turn up the heat for any demonstrators.

Planning ahead, the admin-istration department has been deploying heavy contingents of police, armed with batons and tear gas, at Civil Secretariat for three consecutive days. A pris-oner van has also been brought to the secretariat premises.

Officials privy to the devel-opment said the administration department decided to arrest PCS officers if they hold a rally or sit-in at the secretariat.

“The police have been told to lock them in rooms close to the tandoor at the jail if they try to hold a rally,” said a senior official.

Yesterday, the administration department escorted Muntazir Khan, a senior PCS officer active in the struggle, out of the secre-tariat when he tried to gain entry.

Muntazir said he was physi-cally manhandled by the police.

“We were supposed to see the establishment secretary who asked us for a meeting so we can give practical shape to demands approved by the ministers’ com-mittee report,” he said.

However, the officer was not allowed to access the secretariat and was later barred from enter-ing through the home department.

AFP

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s law min-ister yesterday announced that bills aimed at tackling “honour killings” and boosting rape con-victions would soon be voted on by parliament, days after the murder of a social media star by her brother.

Rights groups and politicians have for years called for tougher laws to tackle perpetrators of vio-lence against women in Pakistan and the move follows a slew of high-profile killings in the country.

The perpetrators of so-called honour killings -- in which the vic-tim, normally a woman, is killed by a relative -- often walk free because they can seek forgiveness for the crime from another family member.

Rape conviction rates mean-while are close to zero percent, largely due to the law’s reliance on circumstantial evidence and a lack of forensic testing.

A committee comprised of law-makers from both lower and upper houses of parliament unanimously approved the two bills yesterday afternoon, meaning they could be voted on within weeks.

Law minister Zahid Hamid, who chaired the committee, said: “We have plugged all loopholes in the anti-honour killing legislation, which will be put up for approval at a joint sitting of parliament soon.”

Prime Minister Nawaz Shar-if’s ruling PML-N party has a large majority of seats in the lower house and the bills are believed to have enough backing from opposition parties to pass in the senate too.

A 2005 amendment to the law pertaining to honour killings prevented men who kill female rel-atives pardoning themselves as an “heir” of the victim.

But punishment was left to a judge’s discretion when other rela-tives of the victim forgive the killer -- a loophole which critics say is exploited.

According to Hamid, under the new law relatives of the victim would only be able to pardon the killer of capital punishment, but they would still face a mandatory life sentence of twelve-and-a-half years.

In the anti-rape bill, “a provi-sion to conduct DNA tests on both the alleged victim and perpetrator has been added for the first time,” he said.

Rape of minors, as well as the mentally and physically ill, would become punishable by death.

Commenting on the move, Sughra Imam, a former senator from the opposition Pakistan Peo-ple’s Party who first tabled both bills said: “No law will eradicate a crime entirely but the law should be a deterrent. Laws are supposed to guide better behaviour, not allow destructive behaviour to continue with impunity.”

Yesterday’s development came just six days after Social media star-let Qandeel Baloch was strangled to death by her brother once again casting a spotlight on honour killing murders which claim around a thou-sand lives in Pakistan every year.

An honour killing is the hom-icide of a member of a family by other members.

Internews

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is unlikely to meet the targets of sustainable development goals set for 2030 to provide education for all with the current allocation of pending 2% of its GDP on education, annual report of Unicef says.

The annual report of United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (Unicef) launched last month says, Pakistan has more than 5.6 million out-of-school children of primary school age.

The government of Pakistan reports spending about 2 percent of

GDP on education. These investment levels are below the estimated 5.5 percent of GDP that will be required to provide education for all by 2030.

“There are also large wealth-related gaps in school attendance and retention children in the richest 20% of the population get nearly nine more years of schooling, on average, than children in the poorest 20%.

This wealth gap is magnified by gender disadvantages among the poorest girls and by regional dis-parities. While Pakistan is making national progress in primary school completion, some groups - nota-bly poor rural girls - have been left behind,” the report says.

Similarly the report says Paki-stan and Nigeria are the only two countries where the under-five mor-tality rate (U5Mr) in the wealthiest and the poorest household is above the sustainable development goals (SDG) target, and marked dispari-ties persist between regions.

The report says while the rich-est 20% will have to cut mortality by more than half to achieve the tar-get by 2030, the poorest 20% must achieve a reduction of three quarters.

While analysing another indi-cator, the report highlighted glaring disparities in antenatal care and skilled birth attendance at the regional level.

The gap between the richest and poorest households are respec-tively four and six times more likely to receive antenatal care than those from the poorest in Bangladesh and Pakistan.

“Five countries will account for more than half of the global bur-den of under-five deaths: India (17%), Nigeria (15%), Pakistan (8%), the democratic republic of the Congo (7%) and Angola (5%),” the report says.

While appreciating the initia-tive of cash transfers programmes the report says, this programme has helped improve rates of transition to higher levels of education.

Pakistani MPs to debate ‘honour killings’ law

MH370 wreckage may be ‘outside search zone’Reuters

SYDNEY: Top searchers at the Dutch company leading the underwater hunt for Malaysia Airlines jet MH370 say they believe the plane may have glided down rather than dived in the final moments, meaning they have been scouring the wrong patch of ocean for two years.

Flight MH370 disappeared in March 2014 with 239 passengers and crew onboard en route to Bei-jing from Kuala Lumpur. Searchers led by engineering group Fugro have been combing an area roughly the size of Greece for two years.

That search, over 120,000sq km of the southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia, is expected to end in three months and could be called off after that following a meet-ing of key countries Malaysia, China and Australia today.

The three countries agreed in April 2015 that should the aircraft not be located within the search area, and in the absence of any new cred-ible evidence, the search area would not be extended. So far, nothing has been found.

“If it’s not there, it means it’s somewhere else,” Fugro project director Paul Kennedy said.

Kennedy does not exclude extreme possibilities that could have made the plane impossible to spot in the search zone, and still

hopes to find the craft. But he and his team argue another option is the plane glided down - meaning it was manned at the end - and made it beyond the area marked out by cal-culations from satellite images.

“If it was manned it could glide for a long way,” Kennedy said.

“You could glide it for further than our search area is, so I believe the logical conclusion will be well maybe that is the other scenario.”

Fugro’s controlled glide hypoth-esis is also the first time the officials have leant some support to contested theories that someone was in con-trol during the Malaysian flight’s final moments.

Australian and Malaysian officials examine aircraft debris at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau headquarters in Canberra, Australia, yesterday, after it was found on Pemba Island, near Tanzania, in late June and transported to Australia for examination.

AFP

SEOUL: Several thousand South Koreans staged an angry pro-test yesterday against the planned deployment of a US anti-missile system near their hometown, but President Park Geun-Hye insisted the move was a national security imperative.

South Korea’s defence ministry announced last week the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence sys-tem, or THAAD, will be installed in Seongju -- a rural county about 200km southeast of Seoul -- by the end of next year.

The decision was predicated on the growing threat posed by North Korea’s advancing nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programme.

But Seongju residents say the THAAD deployment makes their county a strategic target and com-plain that it carries health and environmental hazards.

“Let’s block the deployment of THAAD, a threat to peace on the Korean peninsula!” chanted some 2,000 protestors, waving flags and banners that read ‘No THAAD’ as they sat outside Seoul station yesterday.

The protestors were sur-rounded by hundreds of police,

amid concerns of a repetition of a violent standoff last Friday, which saw Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-Ahn pelted with eggs and water bottles.

Hwang had been in Seongju to try and appease the residents, but ended up being trapped in his min-ivan for hours.

Yesterday’s protest began just hours after Park urged public sup-port for THAAD.

“The government’s decision ... was based on the judgement that it was the best way to protect our country and people from North Korean threats,” Park said during a National Security Council meet-ing yesterday.

“If there is a better way...please let me know,” Park added.

Tensions on the divided Korean peninsula have been running high since Pyongyang carried out its fourth nuclear test in January, fol-lowed by a series of ballistic missile tests.

On Tuesday, the North fired three ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan in an exercise aimed at simulating pre-emptive attacks on South Korean ports and airfields hosting US military “hardware”

Park is the first woman to be elected as President in South Korea, and is serving the 18th presidential term.

Park defends US missile

shield plan amid protest

Pakistan unlikely to meet education goals: UN

A woman walks with her dog on a promenade along Victoria Harbour as the sun sets in Hong Kong, yesterday.

Mali begins the period of national mourning “in homage to the victims of terrorist attack.”

JAKARTA: A rowdy brawl among a group of drunken Australians forced a plane to make an unscheduled landing in Indonesia, an official said yesterday.

The Jetstar flight from Australia to Thailand was forced to reroute to the Indonesian resort island of Bali on Wednesday evening after several pas-sengers began fighting.

The pilot requested permission to land at Bali’s Ngurah Rai international airport and asked that extra security be present to assist in hauling the offenders off the flight.

Plane diverted

after drunk

Aussies brawl

ASIA / PHILIPPINES06 FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

Philippine ex-president freed from detention

AFP

MANILA: Former Philippine pres-ident Gloria Arroyo was released from detention yesterday follow-ing nearly five years in a military hospital after the Supreme Court dismissed her corruption charges, her lawyer said.

The 69-year-old who suffers from a spinal illness was accused of stealing $8.8 million in state lottery funds meant for charity programmes while she was in office between 2001 and 2010.

The Supreme Court threw out the case on Tuesday, citing insuffi-cient evidence, but her release was

delayed for procedural reasons. “It’s a happy day today because

she has just been freed,” said Lau-rence Arroyo, who is also a distance relative through marriage.

A convoy of vehicles carrying Arroyo, her supporters and law-yers was seen leaving the suburban hospital compound near Manila but she could not be seen from her car’s tinted windows.

Her lawyers said that after being freed Arroyo would go to a private hospital for a check-up.

In a statement issued by her law-yers, Arroyo thanked the Supreme Court and newly-installed President Rodrigo Duterte for not standing in the way of her release.

Government Ombudsman Con-chita Carpio-Morales defended the decision to charge Arroyo for plun-der, and said on Wednesday she was preparing another corruption charge against her.

The former leader was jailed in 2011 under the administration of arch critic, then-president Benigno Aquino.

Aquino questioned the ruling to free Arroyo yesterday, saying she should be held accountable for the

mismanagement of funds that were supposed “to alleviate the suffering of many of our countrymen”.

Duterte succeeded Aquino in June, and said he was willing to par-don Arroyo.

Another of Arroyo’s lawyers, Estelito Mendoza, had suggested that the Supreme Court waited until Aquino stepped down before issuing its ruling as a “courtesy” to Aquino.

Arroyo was initially arrested on charges of electoral sabotage for allegedly conspiring with election officials to rig 2007 senatorial polls.

Because of her illness, the gov-ernment allowed her to be detained in a military hospital.

She was granted bail for the vote-rigging case in July 2012 after the court -- while not dismissing the charge -- ruled evidence against her was weak.

But the corruption case against Arroyo was lodged the same year, keeping her in detention.

Despite being detained, Arroyo has won a seat in the House of Representatives in the past three elections, serving as a congress-woman while being held in the hospital.

Dhaka arrests top Islamist extremist

China eyes eight cruise ships to serve S China Sea

AFP

AUCKLAND: The United States ended a three-decade stand-off with New Zealand yesterday when Vice President Joe Biden announced an American warship will visit Auck-land later this year.

No US naval ship has docked in New Zealand since a row over nuclear weapons erupted in the 1980s and Biden said the symbolic visit was “a major step to further friendship” between the two nations.

“It is with great pleasure and honour that the United States gladly accepts the invitation to send a ship to the Royal New Zealand Navy’s 75th (anniversary) celebration this November,” he told reporters.

“It will be yet another expression

of our close and cooperative relationship.”

New Zealand and the US were strong allies during World War II but ties soured when the South Pacific nation declared itself nuclear free in the 1980s.

It banned nuclear-powered war-ships and those carrying atomic weapons from its waters in 1986, creating a dilemma for Washing-ton, which has a policy of neither confirming nor denying its vessels’ nuclear capability.

The US responded by suspend-ing the three-way ANZUS defence treaty -- which also involved Aus-tralia -- and placing strict controls on military cooperation.

New Zealand Prime Minis-ter John Key said Wellington and Washington had found a way to work

around the issue, while still respect-ing each other’s position.

“It’s not a victory for one side or a defeat for another, it’s a sense that our relationship is more important (than this),” he told reporters.

“We’ve dealt with the matter. It’s somewhat historic now.”

Key said the United States had not been asked to drop its policy of refusing to declare its ships’ nuclear capability.

Instead, the New Zealand leader said he simply had to be satisfied, based on advice from his officials, that any visiting ship was nuclear free.

Activists have already pledged to disrupt the November visit, with a group called Auckland Peace Action saying it will send a “peace flotilla” to meet the US navy.

Myanmar frees

reporter from jail

after appeal

YANGON: A journalist from the BBC’s Myanmar-lan-guage service walked free from prison yesterday after a court accepted his appeal against a three-month sentence handed down in June for striking a policeman.

“I’m in good health and I’m very thankful to those who expressed concerns and worked for my release,” the journal-ist, Nay Myo Lin said.

Thein Than Oo, his lawyer, said the court in Mandalay, accepted Nay Myo Lin’s appeal.

Reuters

DHAKA: Bangladesh’s security force arrested four members of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (JMB) yes-terday, including a regional leader of the banned group blamed for the Islamist attack on a cafe in Dhaka in which 22 people were killed, mostly foreigners.

The Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) raided an apartment on the outskirts of the capital Dhaka and

arrested the group’s southern region leader and three other members, including a medical student, said RAB spokesman Mizanur Rahman Bhuiya.

“They will be interrogated intensively to understand if they had any connection with the cafe attack,” he said.

A huge quality of ammunition, weapons, bomb-making materials and jihadi books have been recov-ered from the house, which was used for training recruits, Bhuiya added.

Dhaka court convicts opposition leader’s son

Reuters

BEIJING: Up to eight Chinese ships will offer cruises to the South China Sea over the next five years, a state-run newspaper said yesterday, as Beijing continues to promote tour-ism to the disputed waters.

Sanya International Cruise Development Co Ltd, a joint venture by COSCO Shipping, China National Travel Service (HK) Group Corp and China Communications Construc-tion Co Ltd, will buy between five and eight ships, the official China Daily reported.

It will also build four cruise liner

docks in Sanya, a Chinese resort city on the southern island province of Hainan, the paper added.

Liu Junli, chairman of Sanya International Cruise, said the com-pany is already operating the “Dream of the South China Sea” cruise ship and plans to add another two cruise ships by next summer, the report said.

The ships will travel to the Cres-cent group of islands, part of the Paracels, and is also “considering a cruise around the South China Sea at the appropriate time”, it added.

Hotels, villas and shops will all be built on the Crescent group, the paper said.

It is not clear if foreigners will be allowed on these cruises or if they will be allowed to visit China’s hold-ings in the South China Sea.

China claims 90 percent of the potentially energy-rich South China Sea. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philip-pines, Vietnam and Taiwan lay claim to parts of the sea, through which passes about $5 trillion of trade a year.

Countries competing to cement their rival claims have encouraged a growing civilian presence on dis-puted islands in the South China Sea. The first cruises from China to the Paracel islands were launched by Hainan Strait Shipping Co in 2013.

Beijing has also said it wants to build Maldives-style resorts around the South China Sea.

China has refused to recognise a ruling by an arbitration court in The Hague that invalidated its vast terri-torial claims in the South China Sea and did not take part in the proceed-ings brought by the Philippines.

Transportation is not the only purpose of cruising, particularly on cruises that return passengers to their originating port, with the ports of call usually in a specified region of a continent. There are even “cruises to nowhere” or “nowhere voyages” where the ship makes 2–3 night round trips without any ports of call.

AFP

DHAKA: A Bangladesh court yes-terday convicted the exiled eldest son of the main opposition leader for money laundering and sentenced him to seven years in prison, a move that could end his political ambi-tions.

Two high court judges over-turned a 2013 acquittal by a lower court of 51-year-old Tarique Rah-man, who lives in exile in London and now faces a ban from politics.

Rahman, who was also fined $2.5 million, is the eldest son of opposition leader and two-time former prime minister Khaleda Zia and was considered her polit-ical heir apparent.

“The high court said Tarique Rahman influenced political power to help his close friend Giasuddin Mamun to get and then launder 200 million taka,” deputy attorney

general Moniruzzaman Kabir said.The move comes at a volatile

time in Bangladesh, which is reel-ing from a wave of deadly attacks by Islamist extremists.

Earlier this month five armed men stormed an upscale cafe in Dhaka’s diplomatic zone and killed at least 20 hostages including 18 for-eigners, in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group.

Police say local Islamist group, the Jamayetul Mujahideen Bangla-desh (JMB), was behind the siege. A week later, suspected Islamists from the same group attacked the nation’s largest Eid prayer con-gregation, killing three people, according to police.

The government says those attacks and a number of other kill-ings of secular writers, foreigners and religious minorities are part of a plot to destabilise the country. It has blamed Zia’s Bangladesh National-ist Party (BNP) and its Islamist ally.

US warship visit to heal rift with New Zealand

US Vice-President Joe Biden (right) and New Zealand Prime Minister John Key speak during a meeting at Government House in Auckland, yesterday.

Duterte offers militants peace

A member of the Philippine National Police walks past a banner of former Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo before her release from hospital arrest at the Veterans Memorial Medical Center (VMMC) in Quezon City, yesterday.

AFP

ISABELA: Philippine president Rod-rigo Duterte stepped up efforts to bring peace to the country’s insur-gency-hit south during a visit there yesterday, calling upon the Islamic militant group Abu Sayyaf to end its campaign of violence.

Speaking to local military and government leaders on the trou-bled island of Basilan, a base of the Abu Sayyaf group, Duterte said: “I am pleading for peace, even with the Abu Sayyaf. You have commit-ted crimes, killing people... You are not thinking of anything but hatred.”

But Duterte, the first president to hail from the south and who claims Muslim ancestry, added that “every Filipino life is precious” and “we have to stop this war”.

The Abu Sayyaf is a loose net-work of a few hundred Islamic militants formed in the 1990s with seed money from Osama bin Lad-en’s Al Qaeda network that has

earned millions of dollars from kidnappings-for-ransom.

It is a radical offshoot of a decades-long Muslim separatist insurgency in the south of the mainly Catholic Philippines that has claimed more than 100,000 lives.

The main Muslim rebel groups do not generally engage in kidnappings-for-ransom.

Duterte is known for his hardline stance against crime, even boasting of killing numerous criminals, but he he has called repeatedly for talks with all rebel groups.

Despite his message of peace, Duterte warned that if the group did not lay down its arms “soldiers will keep coming. That is the response of government”.

His visit came as troops were battling the Abu Sayyaf in the hin-terlands of Basilan.

The military said at least one sol-dier and over 30 Abu Sayyaf fighters were killed in weeks of fighting there.

Although its leaders have pledged allegiance to Islamic State,

analysts say they are mainly focused on lucrative kidnappings.

While Duterte addressed troops, his chief peace negotiator Jesus Dureza held meetings with the coun-try’s largest Muslim rebel group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), elsewhere in the south.

A ceasefire with the MILF, in place since 2003, has largely held but the Abu Sayyaf are not covered by the truce.

Arroyo thanked the top court and President Rodrigo Duterte for not standing in the way of her release.

President Rodrigo Duterte

‘No helmet, no

fuel’ rule in

Maharashtra

MUMBAI: Tightening the existing traffic laws, the Maharashtra government yesterday said bikers in the state will not be enti-tled to fuel if they don’t wear a helment.

Transport Minister Diwakar Raote made the announcement in the state legislature and jus-tified it on grounds of promoting safety on the roads. “Supplying fuel to riders not wearing helmets is seen as encour-aging riding two-wheelers without helmets,” he said in a statement.

The Mumbai police has recently announced the policy of ‘No Helmet, No Petrol’ in the city from August 1 and is optimis-tic of making it a success among bikers.

High-end car

thief arrested

in New DelhiNEW DELHI: A 27-year-old car thief, who specialised in stealing high-end cars, reportedly to impress his girlfriends and was inspired by Bollywood character “Bunty Chor”, was arrested here, police said yesterday. “Robin aka Rahul was arrested when he drove the stolen BMW vehicle in west Delhi’s Paschim Vihar area near a five star hotel to sell it,” Deputy Commissioner of Police (West) Pushep-endra Kumar sai. Police also recovered two high-end stolen cars -- one BMW and a Toy-ota Fortuner -- from his possession.

The accused was inspired from Bolly-wood movie “Oye Lucky Lucky Oye” character of “Bunty Chor” by imitating his modus operandi. He also had the photo of the actor in his pocket. Police also said he stole vehicles to impress his girl friends. He lived a lavish life and was often spotted at pubs and eatries in the national capital.

INDIA 07FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

Agencies

NEW DELHI: Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh yesterday squarely blamed Pakistan for the present unrest in Jammu and Kashmir and also said that the neighbouring coun-try is “sponsoring” terrorism in India.

“There can be no denying the fact that our neighbour (Pakistan) is sin-gularly responsible for the present deterioration of the situation in the state,” Singh said while replying to a short-duration discussion in the Lok Sabha that was taken up on Wednesday.

The terrorism that India is witnessing today is “Pakistan-spon-sored”, the Home Minister said, adding that though the country was “created in the name of religion”, Pakistan “has failed to keep itself united,” he said.

Rajnath Singh said Kashmir is the integral part of the country and Paki-stan was keeping an evil eye on it.

“Kashmir is India’s crown (Mukut). It is heaven and the neigh-bouring country is keeping an evil eye on it. I am hopeful that the pride of Kashmir will be restored,” he said.

Taking strong exception to the ‘Black Day’ Pakistan observed after

the killing of Hizb-ul operative Bur-han Wani, Rajnath Singh trained guns at the neighbouring country, saying: “The terrorist was involved in various heinous crimes and activ-ities, and Pakistan need not worry about Muslims in India.”

“Pakistan came into existence in the name of religion but failed to keep the Muslims together and underwent a division. Most of its parts are troubled. So, it will be bet-ter for them if they could keep them united,” he said and also invoked former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s poem to suggest that those who fuel fire in the homes of

Pakistan behind Kashmir unrest: RajnathThe terrorism that India is witnessing today is “Pakistan-sponsored”, the Home Minister said, adding that though the country was “created in the name of religion”, Pakistan “has failed to keep itself united,” he said.

Govt re-opens schoolsSRINAGAR: Indian authorities have ordered schools in four dis-tricts of Indian-held Kashmir (IHK) to re-open yesterday despite a strict curfew remaining in place while an ongoing protest shut-down imposed by Kashmir’s pro-independence leadership has also continued.

Given ongoing heightened tensions, which have seen more than 45 civilians killed over two weeks, many Kashmiris voiced concerns about sending their children to school, claiming they are being used as “human shields” against protestors. The order to open the schools was issued by the government on Wednesday and according to a teacher working in one of the government schools in the four districts, the teachers were also told to resume duties.

IANS

NEW DELHI: Amid protests in Uttar Pradesh after former BJP leader Daya Shankar Singh’s abu-sive remark against her, Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati (pic-tured) said yesterday that people from the weaker sections treat her as an “idol.”

“People from the weaker sec-tions of society, cutting across party lines, respect me a lot; they treat me as a goddess... and if you say bad things about their goddess, they will feel bad and are bound to protest,” Mayawati said.

The former state Chief Minister

said she did not ask party workers to protest against Singh’s abusive remark. “I haven’t asked anyone to protest. The language used by the (now expelled) BJP leader was so bad that the people from the weaker sec-tions, especially the Dalits, protested on their own. I can’t stop them. But I

want to assure them that I will con-tinue to fight for their rights”, the BSP chief said.

She said the punishment meted out by the Bharatiya Janata Party to Daya Shankar was “not enough” and that the party should have filed a police complaint against him. The BJP Uttar Pradesh unit Vice-Presi-dent was sacked from all party posts as also expelled from the party for six years.

“Even some BJP leaders did not like the abusive remarks against me made by their own party leader. The party took action against him, but that is not enough. It was a general punishment to control the damage,” the BSP leader said.

IANS

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court yesterday issued notice to the Attor-ney General and Maharashtra on a plea by an abuse victim seeking termination of her 24-week-old preg-nancy due to the abnormal growth of foetus.

A bench of Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar, Justice Kurian Joseph and

Justice Arun Mishra directed the hearing for today after going through the doctor’s report which said that stomach of the foetus was uncovered and as a result, the intestines were growing outside it.

Senior counsel Colin Gonsalves told the court that medical report says that the foetus’s skull too was not fully developed, and holds chances of the survival of the foe-tus were from zero to a few hours.

The petitioner has sought the

direction of the court for the termi-nation of her pregnancy as under Section 3(2) of the Medical Termi-nation of Pregnancy Act, 1971, the pregnancy beyond 20 weeks could not be terminated.

However, under Section 5 of the MTP Act, pregnancy beyond 20 weeks could be terminated only if there is a threat to the life of the mother. In the instant case there is no threat to the life of the mother but foetus is abnormal and the chances

of its survival are remote. The peti-tioner has contended that this ceiling of 20 weeks could have been justi-fied when this law was enacted in 1971 butit does not hold ground today given the advancement in technology that allows safe termination of preg-nancy even after 20 weeks right up to 26 weeks.

It has further contended that the artificially fixing of upper limit of 20 weeks MTP was arbitrary as women who get the reports of serious foetal

abnormality after the 20th week have to suffer excruciating pain and agony on account of the deliveries that they are forced to go through.

Senior counsel Gonsalves told the court that in conformity with inter-national laws, Albania, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Croatia, Denmark, Iceland, Israel, Luxem-bourg, Nepal, Netherlands, Slovakia, South Africa, Britain, and the US have not fixed any absolute time limits in their abortion laws.

A policeman stands guard during a curfew in Srinagar, yesterday.

others get caught in the same blaze. Referring to Vajpayee’s famous lines -- “Chingari ka khel bura hota hai” (To play with fire is often danger-ous), Rajnath Singh sought to caution Pakistan against its continued role in sponsoring terrorism.

He also sought support of all the

political parties and the members to make united efforts to restore peace in Kashmir.

“The situation in the Kashmir Valley is steadily returning to the normalcy. The essential commodi-ties are being supplied in the curfew clamped areas and the ban which has

been imposed on Internet has been lifted,” he said.

He denied that the security forces were harsh while controlling protest-ing mobs in the valley and hastened to add that personally he would always favour that minimum force is used to maintain control.

People from weaker sections

treat me as idol: Mayawati

People look at a bridge damaged by torrential rain in Toribari village on the outskirts of Siliguri, West Bengal,W yesterday.

Nature’s fury

IANS

NEW DELHI: The government yes-terday said that the recent incidents of violence against Africans in the country were not racial in nature and that it is taking steps to ensure the safety of African students in India.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, in response to a question in the Rajya Sabha, also said there should not be any racial discrimination in India.

Speaking on the killing of Con-golese national Masonda Ketada Olivier in Vasant Kunj of Delhi in May, the minister said: “The Con-golese national was not killed due to racism. CCTV footage is a proof

that he was being beaten by some anti-social elements and the peo-ple around were trying to save him.”

“Those who were beating him, also hit those who were trying to save Olivier,” she said.

Referring to the assault of 23-year-old Nigerian student Kazeem in Hyderabad in May, the minister said: “Second incident was with a Nigerian national in a park-ing lot. I want to assure the House the incidents with African nation-als in the last few days, none of them was a racial incident.”

Asked about retaliation in African countries against Indians, Sushma Swaraj said the incidents had only taken place in Congo’s capital Kinshasa where there was stone pelting on some Indian owned shops.

IANS

AHMEDABAD: The public outrage over the recent flogging of Dalit young-sters by self-appointed cow vigilantes in Saurashtra region refused to die down, a day after the Gujarat bandh call, with reports of protests and vio-lence from across the state kept on trickling in yesterday too.

Amid torching of buses and stone-throwing, police had to lob teargas shells at several place and impose prohibitory orders against assembly of four or more persons.

A group of unidentified persons burnt three state transport buses in Mehsana district, about an hour’s drive from state’s capital Gandhinagar as well as commercial hub Ahmedabad. Blocking of buses on national high-ways, especially at Katariya village near Limbdi, connecting Saurashtra to central and south Gujarat, forced authorities to suspend services between Rajkot and Ahmedabad.

Tempers wore thin in the Saurashtra region with people coming out in hordes to protest against the July 11 atrocities in Una.

There were reports of skirmishes in Talala town in Gir Somnath dis-trict, Kutiyana in Porbandar and in Amreli district of Saurashtra region. Police had to fire teargas shells in Keshod town of Junagadh district to quell the protesting mob.

The district collector of Surendranagar announced imposition of pro-hibitory orders, ahead of rally by Dalits community on Friday to protest the Una incident.

Outrage continues in Gujarat

SC to hear plea for termination of 24-week pregnancy

Incidents against Africans

not racial, says Sushma

VIEWS08 FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

Culture is a complex subject usually understood by experts but misunderstood by the laity. Man is a byproduct of the social institutions and associations that influence him from childhood and contribute to his development. The complexity of cultures and

habits that emanate from them often leads to conflicts and unrest.

When individuals within a society tend to deviate from norms, tensions are created and such strains can often prove fatal. This is what happened with Qandeel Baloch, the controversial social media star strangled to death by her brother in a honour killing that drew international media attention.

Dis-traught by her killing, Baloch’s parents have voiced resentment against their son who was responsible for murdering her in sleep. Her father wants his son to be ‘shot on sight’ while her mother cannot get over the grief of losing a daughter who

used to share all joys and sorrows with her.

In conservative Pakistani society, Baloch was considered a woman with loose morals. Her social media posts, which drew tens of thousands of views, came to exemplify the tug-of-war between conserva-tives and the secular, upwardly mobile Pakistani who saw in her a way of breaking out of the fetters of strict social mores.

Her provocative photographs and comments bordering on the

explicit drew deri-sion from a social order in which women are supposed to be inhibited and any sign of liberalism is frowned upon. In conservative societies, which are largely found in the eastern hemisphere, coyness is a prized virtue among women while men are expected to be bold and aggressive — a supposed sign of machismo.

Baloch’s actions, which were in rather poor taste and wouldn’t qualify for cultivated showmanship, are being seen as a sign of redemption for the uplift of women by feminists in the country.

Her murder by her brother has triggered a heated debate among conservatives and liberals. A Muslim cleric with whom Baloch had taken a selfie is also being probed by the police in connection with the crime. That her brother has no regrets about eliminating her comes as a shock and shows the intensity of conflict related to social norms.

The brother was not only driven towards the cold-blooded murder because he hated her actions. It seems the taunts he was subjected to forced him to commit the heinous act. In this regard, the law drafted by the government to plug a loophole in honour killing legislation is praiseworthy. It will lead to more convictions and deter people from repeating what Baloch’s brother did.

No honour in killing

Pakistan’s plan to plug a loophole in the law on honour killings is laudable.

Quote of the day

We are studying the instruments of the amnesty. We have to secure the environment, otherwise investment will not come.

Muhammadu BuhariNigerian President

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The energy in the convention room as Ted Cruz began to speak Wednesday night was weird, at least from

where I was sitting high among the alternate delegates. They seemed as if they had read that people get excited at conventions and were trying to mime the appropriate responses but weren’t quite able to pull it off.

They roared at lines about abortion, guns and building a wall on the Mexican border but otherwise seemed curiously subdued — clapping, but not as much as I’d expect at a speech that basically consisted of Cruz ripping off chunks of raw steak and tossing them to his conserv-ative audience.

It was only at the end of the speech that I understood what I was seeing. As Cruz talked about voting to uphold the conservative principles that he’d just spent the past minutes outlining, the crowd around me grew enthusiastic. “How odd,” I thought. “I’d have thought they’d be angrier about his refusal to endorse Trump.”

“Ah”, I said to myself, “they don’t realize it. Cruz has mas-terfully convinced them, with carefully phrased weasel words, that he is endorsing, even though he has not come even close to doing so.”

I was wrong. Both the earlier flatness and the later applause were explained by the same thing: They were waiting for a Cruz endorsement that never came.

I made the cardinal mistake that afflicts all writers from time to time: I forgot that other people don’t know everything I know. I walked into the room on the third night of the Republican National Convention certain that Ted Cruz was not going to endorse Don-ald Trump because that was the consensus of all the news cover-age. The delegates, on the other hand, were not refreshing their news feeds with the alacrity of a lab rat pushing one of those levers that dispense cocaine. They took Cruz’s presence as a sign that he was going to rally around and

endorse Donald Trump for the sake of party unity and of beat-ing Hillary Clinton in the fall.

When it finally became clear that no endorsement would be forthcoming, they turned on him in rage. The boos and demands for endorsement filled the arena with an angry roar. Heidi Cruz was reportedly escorted from the floor by security; her husband would later be accosted by a livid delegate who called him a trai-tor. Meanwhile, up in my section, outraged alternates said, over and over, that if he couldn’t endorse, he shouldn’t have come.

The mistake made by the alternates is understandable. The mistake made by Ted Cruz, and especially, Donald Trump, is not. Somehow these two former rivals faced off over the conven-tion floor, and both lost.

Cruz’s supporters may view this as a bold and principled stand that will position him well for 2020 as the conscience of the party. Bold and principled it may be, but after hours of reflection, I still can’t see how this does any-thing but hurt him. A whole lot of Republicans — including a whole lot of true-blue base conserva-tives who are Cruz’s natural home in the party — want the party to come together to defeat Clinton.

That clip of Cruz getting booed by his own party convention is now the highest-profile moment of his career. It will play over and over for the next four years, and possibly beyond. Watching it, I couldn’t help but think of a story I once heard about a politician who had been captured on film being chased by his own angry constitu-ents. Allegedly, the politician asked

a staffer when the media would stop playing the clip; allegedly, the staffer replied, “Sir, they’ll play it when you die.”

Of course, Cruz has built his career on such high-pro-file moments. But his photogenic stands on the Senate floor were stands against Democrats, and Democratic programs, not against the fellow who won his own par-ty’s primary.

I continue to think that the #NeverTrump Republicans are a sizeable group; I don’t think that they are, by themselves, sizea-ble enough to constitute anyone’s political base. For many other Republicans, this will finally make plausible what that Wash-ington establishment has been saying for months: that Cruz is an opportunist who is willing to badly hurt his own party for the sake of some imagined political advan-tage. When they make that charge again in 2020, it will have a much more receptive audience.

For somewhat similar reasons, I don’t see how this redounds to Trump’s benefit. It’s going to be difficult — I’m tempted to say “impossible” — for Trump to play this as yet another example of the hated establishment trying to stop the Trump Train. Cruz’s speech was pure red meat, and his base is the tea partiers, not Washington insiders. The debacle that unfolded in prime time will highlight, not how he’s overthrowing the estab-lishment, but how badly Trump has divided the party he claims to represent.

More importantly, this marks yet another convention news cycle when Trump should have been presenting himself to the

American people and reaping the poll bump that inevitably follows. Instead, the news is dominated by a negative story about Republi-cans sniping at one another.

Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov Mike Pence, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker both gave very effective speeches, which will be drowned out by the story of the Trump-Cruz feud. It’s hard to comprehend why Trump allowed Cruz to give a prime-time speech without securing a promise of at least a tepid endorsement.

Media reports are saying that Trump knew this was com-ing days in advance. Yet the campaign not only allowed the speech to go forward, but may even have actively whipped up the boos rather than encourag-ing followers to smile and pretend there was an endorsement some-where in Cruz’s tangled verbiage. If true, that means Trump’s staff either somehow thought that this debacle would rebound to his benefit, or, even worse, that they were more intent upon punishing Cruz over a personal slight than presenting a positive and unified face to American voters.

For reporters, this has been the most exciting convention to cover in decades. For the rest of America, it’s been a pretty sorry spectacle. Worse still, almost all of its errors have been unforced, the rookie mistakes of a campaign that is inexperienced and under-staffed. Conventions are supposed to be coronations. What Trump has instead shown the country is a power vacuum at the center of his party — one that threatens to consume his presidential hopes.

Cruz and Trump both lost in convention face-off

By Megan McArdle

Bloomberg

Delegates shout as Ted Cruz speaks during the Republican National Convention at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio

OPINION 09 FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

All thoughts and views expressed in these columns are those of the writers, not of the newspaper.All correspondence regarding Views and Opinion pages should be mailed to the Editor-in-Chief.

Turkey: Ethical void in Western press

By Adam McConnell

Anatolia

“Recep Tayyip Erdogan: Turkey’s Ruthless President” reads the headline of a BBC article published only

a day after last Friday’s failed military coup. “Ruthless in what manner?” was the question that immediately came to my mind. Ruthless in obtaining freely cast votes from Turkey’s citizens? Ruthless in opposing a military coup instigated by cultists ensconced in Turkish state insti-tutions? Ruthless in telling it like it is?

If such an article were taken out of context and considered in a vacuum, maybe it could be considered as just some sort of mistake, or the author’s ignorance. But the reality is that the Western press, as a whole, publishes such ridiculous items on Turkey, its political leadership, and especially Erdogan, on a nearly daily basis.

The failed coup attempt last Friday was no exception. From the initial min-utes after the country and the world realised what was happening around 22.00 Turkish local time (1900GMT), the Western press followed a carefully neu-tral, and in some cases, even pro-junta narrative.

The coup was carried out against a democratically elected government, yet newspapers and commentators in

democracies such the US openly cheered the coup attempt. The New York Times, for example, which had already mounted a two-year campaign specifically aimed at Erdogan, maintained a “we don’t know what’s happening” narrative for hours after the failure of the coup attempt was clear. In the following days and hours the paper published a stream of edi-torials (“The Countercoup in Turkey,” “Turkey’s Coup That Wasn’t,” “Mr. Erdog-an’s Reckless Revenge,” “Trump and the Sultan”) and articles (“Turkey Was an Unlikely Victim of an Equally Unlikely Coup,” “Many Turks Prefer Even Flawed Democracy to Coup) grossly distorting real events in the country, attacking the country’s president, and even providing space for conspiracy theories.

This despite the fact that Erdogan had escaped the junta’s clutches, and possi-bly death, by only minutes in the opening hours of the event. Blaming the victim has never been carried out on such an inter-national scale.

Around 2.00 am on July 16, it was clear that the junta had failed. At that point, the Western press narrative switched back to the “dictator Erdogan” theme developed over the past several

years, and added several convenient twists. Before the violence had entirely subsided in Istanbul, Business Insider already had a report up that, under the situation, was shocking (“Erdogan could use the latest coup attempt to fur-ther tighten his grip in Turkey”). They accused a democratically elected leader, who was only in the process of escap-ing unscathed from a military coup attempt aimed at either capturing or kill-ing him, with “authoritarianism.” This is mind-boggling.

In other places, blatantly false rumors were reported as facts. The Daily Beast and other Western media sources reported that Erdogan was seeking asy-lum in Germany. But at the exact time those reports were emerging everyone in Turkey knew that he was en route to Istanbul. All one had to do was turn on a Turkish TV channel and learn for themselves. Others, such as Fox News, openly cheered for the violent downfall of a democratically elected leader of a NATO ally.

Some immediately developed con-spiracy theories which were clearly a sop to assuage their disappointment over the junta’s failure. The Independent, already

known for publishing false and slander-ous articles about President Erdogan, wasted no time in reporting that a “very popular” idea was that Erdogan had “staged” the coup in order to consoli-date power (“Turkey coup: Conspiracy theorists claim power grab attempt was faked by Erdogan”).

In other words, a major British news-paper reported a conspiracy theory as worthy of consideration, despite the fact that the event in question involved the deaths of more than 200 citizens defending democracy against the junta, including people that Erdogan had close relationships with.

As someone who personally lived through the events in central Istanbul, and spent the night fearfully listening to military helicopters, gunfire, and war jets, I find the behavior of the Western press nauseating and unacceptable. The stances taken and information published constitute gross violations of journalis-tic ethics.

But this behavior is also a symptom of a larger problem. The West has, for at least 50 years, had a great deal of diffi-culty understanding the Muslim world, and its press has reflected this situation.

The prejudices in Western society are reflected through its press.

Attitudes and preconceptions are treated as factual bases for analysis, and concrete information is rarely considered. Those who write articles on Turkey for the Western press rarely have the expe-rience, language skills, or educational background that would qualify them for such a task. But this is not a new diagnosis — Edward Said described this phenome-non in detail in his book Covering Islam, written more than 30 years ago.

The truly disturbing aspect of today’s Western press coverage of Turkey is that people who consider themselves “liber-als” or even “progressives” fall victim to fear and a lack of real information about Turkish society, history, and politics.

When will someone — someone important, influential, and who can have an impact — in the mainstream Western press take a stand against this behavior? Most Turkish people now have little regard for the Western press because of the blind and uninformed negative attitude taken towards Turkey’s political leadership.

And the Western press’s abysmal performance last Friday dramatically worsened that situation.

The failed coup attempt last Friday was no exception. From the initial minutes after the country and the world realised what was happening, the Western press followed a carefully neutral, and in some cases, even pro-junta narrative. The coup was carried out against a democratically elected government, yet newspapers and commentators in democracies such the US openly cheered the coup attempt.

Pro-Erdogan supporters wave Turkish flags during a rally at Kizilay Square in Ankara, following the failed military coup attempt.

Tunisia’s celebrated labour union holding the country back

By Mischa Benoit-Lavelle

Foreign Policy

The economy of Tunisia is creep-ing, week by week, towards collapse. Growth is virtually

nil, unemployment remains high, and the currency continues to sink. The most recent ill omen was the announcement that Tunisia’s gov-ernment has asked for postponement of a debt payment it owes to Qatar. All this has experts talking about a potential default in 2017.

There’s more than enough to blame to go around. A corrupt and nepotistic elite, a still-sluggish Euro-zone on which the country’s export sector is nearly entirely dependent, and a series of terror attacks that have crippled its tourism industry, a vital source of foreign currency, are all lead weights on the prow of the economy.

But there’s an economic alba-tross that few outside the country wish to address: Tunisia’s econ-omy is also being pulled down by a bloated, lethargic civil service that has been faithfully defended by the Nobel-crowned labor union, the Gen-eral Tunisian Labour Union (better known by its French acronym, UGTT). The army of functionaries, includ-ing employees of public utilities and mining companies, teachers, and municipal employees, reached nearly 800,000 in 2014, and this in a coun-try with a total labor force of just over four million.

The UGTT’s role has long been larger than simply advocating for workers. It was an integral part of Tunisia’s anti-colonial independ-ence movement in the 1950s, and as the only authorised labor union in post-independence Tunisia, it has at different times been a key ally and a bitter rival of the country’s dictato-rial governments. In 2011, it helped organize protests during the uprising against President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s regime, and its star reached its apogee with the Nobel Peace Prize it received in 2015 for its part help-ing negotiate an end to a simmering political crisis within Tunisia’s frag-ile new democratic government. This outsized importance has given the UGTT a political and economic heft that it may not entirely know how to wield.

“[It’s] an organization that is very aware of its historical role. They think that they built Tunisia, so [the Nobel] gives them a sense of their role, but it’s a bit paralyzing, probably,” said Franck Bissette, who helped man-age a World Bank grant to the UGTT.

Since the revolution, the union has burdened the Tunisian economy with general strikes in key sectors like the phosphate industry and the health sector and bargained for across-the-board wage hikes for gov-ernment workers that have distended the public debt and fueled inflation. Public sector debt has gone from 40 percent before the revolution to 52 percent last year. This wouldn’t nec-essarily be a problem if the money were being invested in things like roads and equipment, but thanks to the union’s efforts, more and more (nearly half of the budget last year) is going to wages and less and less to capital expenditure. The government has been saved so far by the decline in oil prices, which has reduced the burden of fuel subsidies, but if those prices rise again — as they are pre-dicted to do next year — it could pose serious problems for Tunisia’s ability to service its debt.

On top of demands for more jobs and higher wages, the UGTT has also shown a willingness to use strikes as a political weapon. The union’s largest-scale recent strike, a gen-eral strike of the postal service, was

exemplary of the aggressive strategy it has been pursuing.

According to the union, the strike started in response to the jailing of a postal employee in the southern city of Tozeur after he refused to hand over documents to an agent of the local court who had failed to prop-erly identify himself.

There may well be a legitimate grievance concerning the sudden, summary manner of the postal worker’s arrest. But was it worth stopping the functioning of the coun-try’s entire postal service? Slowing down mail delivery for a few days is damaging enough for an econ-omy, but in Tunisia, the post also has other functions. Many of the country’s poorest keep their money in accounts at the post office rather than in banks. Because of the strike, these people were cut off from their retirement payments and remit-tances. This bellicose, politicized approach has struck some Tunisians as counterproductive.

“There are different means of protesting. You can wear a red badge to tell people you’re angry, you can stop working for half an hour, for example, and get back to work,” said Mouheb Garoui, the executive director and co-founder of iWatch, a non-profit government and private sector watchdog.

“We’re having a crisis and it’s a decay in people’s work ethic,

especially after the revolution. Before the revolution you hardly heard of a strike in public service. Maybe it happens twice a year, three times a year, that’s it. Now it’s every day,” he went on.

Absenteeism is at its worst in Tunisia in the dog days of summer, when public sector workers are granted special shortened hours — up until early afternoon, but no later. With Ramadan and its daylong fasts falling in summer this year, even those hours seem to be too much for some civil servants.

“We all know that administra-tions, they close earlier than they are supposed to, they open later than they are supposed to. You go to the administration and its open but there’s no one there,” said Garoui.

This summer, iWatch has launched a campaign to send volun-teers to see whether public service administrations actually stayed open until the reduced summer hours they advertised. The organization has not yet published its results, but the cam-paign has already raised the hackles of public servants. One professional organization, a union of graduates of the country’s most prestigious pub-lic service school, actually staged its own protest against the group. In a press release announcing the protest, it deplored civil society “interfer-ence” and called on its members to refuse to work with iWatch.

A corrupt and nepotistic elite, a still-sluggish Eurozone on which the country’s export sector is nearly entirely dependent, and a series of terror attacks that have crippled its tourism industry, a vital source of foreign currency, are all lead weights on the prow of the economy.

EUROPE10 FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

People hold pictures of slain Belarus-born journalist Pavel Sheremet during a memorial meeting on Independence Square in Kiev, yesterday. Sheremet was killed by a car bomb in Kiev on Wednesday.

Tributes to slain scribe

But the British Prime Minister won acceptance from French President of her position not to trigger the formal exit procedure this year.

Reuters

PARIS: French President Fran-cois Hollande urged Prime Minister Theresa May yesterday to quickly come up with a negotiating stance for Britain’s departure from the Euro-pean Union but agreed she needed time to trigger the formal divorce.

A day after German Chancellor Angela Merkel also endorsed May’s call for some breathing space to prepare for formal talks to end Britain’s mem-bership, May won acceptance from Hollande of her position not to trig-ger the formal exit procedure this year.

But the French leader was clear Britain could not put off invoking Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty for long. “The sooner the better,” Hol-lande told a news conference when asked when France wanted to see Britain start the at-least two-year formal procedure to quit the bloc.

“There can be no discussion or pre-negotiation ... but there may be some preparation for this negoti-ation. We do understand that your government, which has just been formed, needs this time, but again the sooner the better is in the common interest,” the Socialist president said.

May has urged France and Ger-many not to punish Britain and to maintain strong economic ties despite its decision to leave the EU - something she said could not be undone.

“I think it is sensible for us to ensure that the negotiations for Brit-ain leaving the European Union are done in as calm and orderly and con-structive a manner as possible and I think that does require some prepa-ration to be made,” she said.

“I hope we can all make the most of the next six months to prepare for these discussions in a constructive way so we maximise the opportu-nities for both the UK and the EU.”

Arriving at the Elysee to members

of the palace’s republican guard, the new British leader may have been ready for a cool welcome after Hol-lande, during a trip to Ireland, said May had to justify any foot-dragging over the triggering of Article 50.

But before a dinner, the two lead-ers said they were looking forward to working together, after Hollande said

May had impressed his government on her work as interior minister.

But Hollande suggested it would not be easy.

He, like Merkel, reiterated there could be no formal negotiations on the terms for a post-Brexit Britain before Article 50 and described some of the opt-outs from the EU Britain

had already won and the offer made to her predecessor, David Cameron, for a brake on immigration into Britain.

Both said the most testing part of any future negotiation would be Britain’s desire to remain part of the EU’s lucrative single market, while reducing immigration from the EU.

‘Solidarity is key,’

says Nato chief

after Trump

comments

AFP

BRUSSELS: Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg yesterday stressed the need for solidarity in the alli-ance after Donald Trump raised the issue of his own commitment to defending other countries in the group.

Trump, the Republican pres-idential candidate, suggested in a New York Times interview that under his leadership the US could review its relationship with a Nato ally before deciding whether to spring to its defence.

Nato is based on the princi-ple of collective defence, with all members agreeing to defend each other against external attacks.

“I will not interfere in the US election campaign, but what I can do is say what matters for Nato,” Stoltenberg said in a statement.

“Solidarity among allies is a key value for Nato. This is good for European security and good for US security. We defend one another.”

Trump said in the event of a Russian attack on the Baltics, Nato’s newest members, Wash-ington might assess whether those nations “have fulfilled their obli-gations to us” before deciding whether to come to their aid.

“If they fulfil their obligations to us, the answer is yes,” he said.

A cornerstone of the 28-mem-ber trans-Atlantic alliance is its Article 5 commitment that an attack on one member state is an attack on all. The pledge has only been invoked once in the group’s 56-year-history—in defence of the US after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

“We have seen this in Afghan-istan, where tens of thousands of European, Canadian, and partner nation troops have stood shoul-der-to-shoulder with US soldiers,” Stoltenberg said.

Trump also reiterated to New York Times that under his presi-dency, the US would force allies to shoulder defence costs that the US has borne for decades.

Stoltenberg acknowledged that the US was “stepping up its support” for European allies “and increasing its presence”.

AFP

MADRID: Spain said yesterday it has asked London for “urgent” explanations after a British nuclear submarine collided with a vessel off the coast of Gibraltar, forcing it to dock in the disputed territory.

The incident sparked environ-mental fears as well as concerns it could lead to yet another dip-lomatic row between London and Madrid, which wants Gibraltar back centuries after it was ceded to Britain in 1713.

“The ministry has asked the Brit-ish embassy in Madrid for urgent explanations over the extent of the breakdown and all relevant informa-tion regarding the circumstances of

this incident,” Spain’s foreign minis-try said in a statement.

Britain’s navy tried to allay fears on Wednesday, saying there were “no safety concerns” as the collision had not damaged HMS Ambush’s nuclear plant, adding that initial indications suggested the vessel had not been damaged.

But Antonio Munoz, a spokes-man for Spanish environmental group Ecologistas in Action, called for more information on the incident.

“We don’t have any form of report to see if there was a radioac-tive leak,” he said.

“We don’t know exactly where the collision happened, where the other vessel is, whether the vessel that collided with the submarine was a freighter, an oil tanker... We don’t know whether there was a

leak from the vessel,” he said.The incident revived memories

of another submarine incident at the turn of the century, when Britain’s HMS Tireless was forced to dock in Gibraltar for repairs for nearly a year after a crack was found in a cooling pipe near its nuclear reactor.

Its presence caused outrage in Gibraltar and southern Spain, which people staging regular protests, and strained ties between London and Madrid.

The tiny rocky outcrop of Gibral-tar has long been the subject of an acrimonious sovereignty row between both countries.

Spain’s conservative govern-ment, which has been in place since 2011, has been particularly vocal about its desire to see the territory come back into its fold.

AFP

GIBRALTAR: A British nuclear submarine docked in Gibraltar on Wednesday night after it collided with a merchant vessel off the coast of the territory located on Spain’s southern tip, Britain’s defence ministry said.

“The submarine suffered some external damage but there is abso-lutely no damage to her nuclear plant and no member of the ship’s company was injured in the inci-dent,” the ministry said.

“We are in contact with the mer-chant vessel and initial indications are that it has not sustained dam-age,” it added.

The HMS Ambush submarine was submerged and carrying out a training exercise when it col-lided with the merchant vessel on Wednesday night.

It arrived in Gibraltar later the

same day to undergo further checks, the ministry said.

The HMS Ambush has the capacity to carry a mix of up to 38 Spearfish heavyweight torpedoes and Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles, and can target enemy sub-marines, surface ships and land targets with pinpoint accuracy, according to the defence minis-try’s website.

The defence ministry said there “are no safety concerns” associ-ated with the presence of the HMS Ambush in Gibraltar, and that it has opened an “immediate investiga-tion” into the collision.

The captain of the HMS Tireless at the time, Mike Walliker, assumed the post of Commander of British Forces in Gibraltar last week.

Britain’s defence ministry did not provide details of the damage done to the HMS Ambush, saying only that “this is not a similar situ-ation to the HMS Tireless”.

Reuters

LONDON: - British police investi-gating the attempted abduction of a serviceman from a Royal Air Force base in eastern England, said yester-day they could not discount it being a terrorism incident.

The serviceman, aged in his late 20s, was jogging on Wednesday afternoon and not in uniform when he was approached by two men on a quiet, rural road near the married quarters of RAF Marham in Norfolk.

One of the men shouted at

him and tried to pull him towards a car, police said. He fought off the attacker, knocking him to the ground, and the second man, armed with a what was believed to be a mil-itary-type knife, went to help his accomplice.

The married serviceman, who was very shocked but not hurt, ran off and the two attackers, described by police as being aged between 20 and 30 and of Middle Eastern origin in appearance, fled in the car.

Police said they had liaised with counter-terrorism officers but the motive remained unclear.

“We’re unable at this time to

discount terrorism but I stress that other lines of inquiry are equally plausible and are being investigated,” Norfolk’s Assistant Chief Constable Nick Dean told a news conference.

RAF Marham is home to Britain’s Tornado GR4 Force which is involved in operations in the Middle East.

Britain is on its second-highest alert level of “severe,” meaning an attack is considered highly likely, with service personnel believed to have been the targets of a number of recent foiled plots.

In May, Junead Khan, 25, a supporter of the Islamic State (IS) militant group, was jailed for life

for plotting to kill US troops based in eastern England, while in April two Britons, inspired by IS, were impris-oned for planning to kill police and soldiers in drive-by shootings in London.

In 2013, British soldier Lee Rigby was hacked to death on a street in London in broad daylight near his barracks. Two British Muslims were later found guilty of his murder.

Dean said vigilance had been increased at Marham, which was hosting a families’ day event yes-terday, but the wider security threat to the public and military bases was unchanged.

Reuters

LONDON: British opposition Labour lawmaker Angela Eagle, who this week dropped out of the race to oust party leader Jeremy Corbyn, has been advised by police not to hold her regular advice session with constituents due to safety risks, her office said yesterday.

Last month, Labour lawmaker Jo Cox was murdered as she attended her “surgery,” one-to-one meetings when members of public have the opportunity to raise issues with their local lawmaker.

“We have received advice from Merseyside Police that the safety of Angela, her staff and constituents

cannot be guaranteed,” said a staff member at Eagle’s office, which was vandalised last week.

A spokesman for Eagle said Fri-day’s cancelled surgery had been due to be an open drop-in session. Future surgery sessions, due to resume in September after a scheduled August break, would now be appointment-based, he said.

Labour is locked in a bitter internal power struggle, with Cor-byn refusing to stand down despite most of his policy team resigning and Labour lawmakers overwhelmingly backing a vote of no confidence in his leadership.

Eagle, formerly the party’s top business spokeswoman, triggered a leadership contest earlier this month by challenging Corbyn. She

withdrew from the race this week after receiving less support from lawmakers than rival Owen Smith.

The staff member said the office in Wallasey near Liverpool in north-west England was still open to members of the public and could also be contacted by phone or email.

On Tuesday, police said a 44-year-old man, who had been arrested on suspicion of making threats to kill after an email was sent to Eagle, had been released on bail pending further enquiries.

Eagle has previously said Cor-byn, who has strong support among party grassroots members, “needs to get control of the people who are supporting him”. Last week Corbyn said he condemned any violence or threats.

Cops probe bid to abduct UK serviceman

Spain seeks answers from London over submarine collision

British submarine HMS

Ambush docks in Gibraltar

The submarine HMS Ambush docked in a port while it is repaired off the coast of the peninsula of Gibraltar.

Police warn UK opposition MP

Angela Eagle of safety risks

Hollande urges May to deliver Brexit soon

Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May (left) meets with French President Francois Hollande (right) at the Elysee Palace in Paris, yesterday.

Participants from all over the world gather for the 59th World Santa Convention in Copenhagen, Denmark.

A day for Santas

Belgium’s Queen Mathilde (right) receives flowers at the Sainte-Gudule cathedral as people exchange greetings on Belgian national day in Brussels, yesterday.

Saying it with flowers

French police secure a street as members of special forces carried out counter-terrorism swoop at different locations in Argenteuil, a suburb in northern Paris, France, yesterday.

Not letting down their guard

EUROPE 11FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

The third major attack in 18 months has left France’s Socialist government fending off accusations of failing to protect the nation.

AFP

PARIS: French President Francois Hollande yesterday promised “truth and transparency” from an inquiry into allegations of lax security the night of the Bastille Day attack in Nice that killed 84 people.

“When there is a tragedy, or in this case an attack with many dead... there will naturally be ques-tions,” Hollande said during a visit to Dublin, adding that the conclu-sions of the police probe would be announced next week.

The third major attack in France in 18 months has left France’s Socialist government fending off accusations of failing to protect the nation.

Liberation daily reported yester-day that only one municipal police

car was guarding the spot where Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel crashed a 19-tonne truck through barriers and into crowds on the promenade.

A week after the rampage, five suspects arrested over links to the Tunisian attacker are to appear before anti-terrorism judges who will decide whether to charge them.

The attack came just as France was preparing to lift the state of emergency in place since the November attacks in Paris, prompt-ing an immediate reversal of course.

Yesterday, the parliament final-ised adoption of a bill extending the emergency laws for a fourth time, after it was toughened up by the right-dominated Senate.

The final version bans gatherings where sufficient security cannot be provided and makes it easier to shut places of worship where preachers incite hate or violence.

Since November the authori-ties have had emergency powers to carry out searches by day or night and place people under house arrest.

While France continues to mourn the victims of the assault that took terror to the shores of the Rivi-era, the government continues to be plagued by questions over possible security failings.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls has accused members of the centre-right Republicans party of “lying to the French” after some suggested the

attack could have been thwarted.Just hours after he warned

the French had to learn to live with terror, the Islamic State (IS) group—which claimed the Nice attack—posted a video showing two French-speaking jihadists threaten-ing more attacks against the country. The video appeared to have been shot in Iraq.

IS last week claimed Bouhlel as one of its “soldiers”.

Investigators have said they have no proof yet that the driver, who was shot dead by police, had pledged allegiance to the group.

In Nice, investigators found a Kalashnikov rifle and a bag of ammunition in the basement of a 22-year-old man who is among five being held over links to Bouhlel.

The suspect received text mes-sages from Bouhlel on the night of the attack, in which Bouhlel praised him for providing the pistol he used during a shootout with police. About 100 investigators are poring over masses of data linked to the probe.

Pictures found on Bouhlel’s mobile phone indicate he was stud-ying several locations where crowds gathered as possible targets.

One photo concerns a fireworks display on August 15, another a race on January 10 along the Promenade des Anglais where the attack took place.

Reuters

SOFIA: Carcasses of dolphins are washing up on Bulgaria’s Black Sea beaches at a higher than normal rate, with a record 108 dead animals dis-covered this year, authorities said.

The cause of the deaths has yet to

be determined, said Enviroment Min-ister Ivelina Vasileva, adding 77 of the dead dolphins were found in south-ern part of country’s Black Sea coast.

Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borissov yesterday called for a spe-cial meeting with conservation organisations to try to find a solu-tion to the record number of deaths and said on his official Facebook

page that steps are being taken to ban fishing in areas populated by the protected species.

The number of dead dolphins in 2016 is significantly higher than the 56 found last year and the previous record of 74 in 2012.

Media reports of dead dolphins on Bulgarian beaches have been rife in recent years.

Crowds attack

French police

again over

death of man

Reuters

PARIS: Angry crowds hurled pet-rol bombs at police and set cars alight in an area north of Paris overnight following the death of a young man in police hands earlier this week, a French offi-cial told reporters.

Nine people were arrested in a second consecutive night of violence, which involved some 200 locals and 180 police offic-ers in the Val d’Oise region 40 km north of Paris, Jean-Simon Meran-dat, director of the local prefect’s office, said.

About 15 cars and dozens of public garbage bins were set on fire by crowds who also hurled petrol bombs at a nurs-ery school and a town hall, Merandat told public radio sta-tion France Info.

French authorities have made no link between tensions in the area and the deadly truck attack in the southern coast city of Nice last week for which the Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility.

Weeks of rioting erupted in Paris’s often grim suburbs in 2005 after the death of youths who were electrocuted when they hid from police in a power generation hub.

Merandat told France Info that nobody was injured on either side in the second night of confrontation and that calm had returned by the early hours of yesterday.

The protests in the Val d’Oise area began on Tuesday night when, according to deputy pros-ecutor François Capin-Dulhoste, a 24-year-old man died as he was being taken away by police after being arrested.

Five police were slightly injured on the first night, when they were shot at by people with firearms, he said.

Capin-Dulhoste told reporters that the dead man suffered a heart problem during transportation to a police station but that the cause of death was being investigated.

However, family members of the victim said that police hit the man as they detained him for trying to prevent the arrest of his brother on suspicion of violence and extortion.

Reuters

WARSAW: The World Jewish Con-gress has demanded an apology from Polish education minister over her refusal to recognise the com-plicity of Poles in a 1941 massacre of several hundred Jews at Jedwabne in the country’s northeast.

Speaking to private broadcaster TVN24, Education Minister Anna Zalewska refused to openly admit Poles’ complicity in the pogrom, say-ing it was a “historical fact, which has been misunderstood many times, with many very biased opinions”.

“The dramatic situation which took place in Jedwabne is controver-sial. Many historians, distinguished professors, paint a completely dif-ferent picture,” she said.

Before World War II, Poland was home to Europe’s largest Jew-ish community of some 3.2 million people. Most of them were killed by the Nazi occupiers, who built death camps including Auschwitz and Tre-blinka on Polish soil.

But a 2000-2004 inquiry of Poland’s state Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) found that

on July 10, 1941, Nazi occupiers and local inhabitants colluded in a massacre of at least 340 Jews at Jedwabne. Some victims were burned alive after being locked inside a barn.

The revelation disturbed the Poles’ belief that, with a few excep-tions, they conducted themselves honourably during a vicious war that killed a fifth of the population, and some still refuse to acknowl-edge the IPN’s findings.

The issue of Poles’ attitudes to their Jewish neighbours during World War II is also key for Poland’s ruling conservatives, who surged to power in October, partly on a prom-ise to make Poland feel proud of its achievements and win it more respect on the world stage.

Anti-semitism was rife in Poland in the run-up to World War II. After the war, a pogrom in the town of Kielce and a bout of anti-Semitism in 1968 sponsored by the communist authorities forced many survivors who had stayed in Poland to flee.

In a statement issued yesterday, the WJC’s President Ronald Lauder said Zalewska should “immediately issue clearly worded apologies and retract” the remarks.

AFP

SHAKHTARSK, UKRAINE: Pro-Russian insurgents in war-torn eastern Ukraine have staged sabre-rattling training exercises in preparation for the possible deploy-ment of an armed international police force in rebel-held areas.

The simulated street fight-ing in the rebel-controlled town of Shakhtarsk saw around 100 cam-ouflaged fighters armed with thick metal shields training cheering crowds how to form lines to push back against advancing troops.

One rebel held up a banner read-ing “No to a foreign armed mission” while several others tried to over-turn a car.

Kiev is pressing for an inter-national armed police presence in the region so that it can be brought under control and seal Ukraine’s porous eastern border with Russia—allegedly used by rebels to smuggle in weapons and supplies.

The Organisation of Security of Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) —the

group that would be responsible for policing the conflict zone—has 580 unarmed staff based in the region and recently had its mandate to monitor the shaky truce extended to the end of March 2017.

The idea of arming that mission does not sit well with the self-pro-claimed “people’s republics” in the industrial regions of of most Rus-sian-speaking Lugansk and Donetsk.

“We will repel the Ukrain-ian junta and the armed mission at the very border of the People’s Republic of Donetsk,” one camou-flaged fighter who refused to give his name shouted out while a mock street revolt unfurled behind him.

A separate exercise saw about 1,000 civilians get into a fight with the imitation OSCE force in order to disarm them. They pelted them with bottles of water and rocks and even-tually succeeded in taking control of an insurgent tank that was play-ing the role of an OSCE tank vehicle.

The OSCE press office tried to calm the waters by noting that no decision on arming their monitors was imminent and would need prior approval from the European security

body’s 57 members. One of those is Russia—that views Ukraine’s aspi-ration to one day join the European Union with a great degree of rancour.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said it would be possible for OSCE members to carry pistols for self-defence in some cases, but has never endorsed fully arming the mission.

The pro-EU government in Kiev accuses Russia of backing the mili-tias in a conflict that has plunged Moscow’s relations with the West to a post-Cold War low and compli-cated the resolution of other urgent matters such as the Syrian war.

Russia denies any direct involve-ment in a 27-month war that has claimed nearly 9,500 lives.

But it admits that volunteer and off-duty soldiers have fought along-side the rebels and defends the separatists’ position at global ven-ues such as the United Nations.

Ukraine’s call for an armed mis-sion has found little support among its Western allies or the OSCE itself—a monitoring body that has no experience in performing police missions.

France probes ‘security failings’ in Nice attack

Over 100 dolphin found dead in Bulgaria

Apology sought from Polish minister over pogrom remarks

Ukraine rebels train locals to fight ‘armed OSCE force’

Helium-filled Powerpuff Girls figures float over a fountain as they are installed for the start of Comic-Con International in San Diego, California.

Soaring high

AMERICAS12 FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

Cruz tried to link arms with Republicans but was booed by delegates when he ended his speech without offering Trump his endorsement.

AP

CLEVELAND: A night after being booed off the Republican National Convention stage, Texas Senator Ted Cruz remained defiant about Donald Trump yesterday, saying he is not a “servile puppy dog” and vowing not to support anyone who wages personal attacks against his family.

Speaking to an incensed Texas delegation, Cruz recalled an answer he gave at a Republican debate this year, when he enthusiastically said he would support the party’s offi-cial nominee.

“The day that was abdicated was the day this became personal,” Cruz said. “I’m not going to get into criticis-ing or attacking Donald Trump, but I’ll

give you this response: I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father.”

“And that pledge was not a blan-ket commitment that if you go and slander and attack Heidi, I’m going to nonetheless come like a servile puppy dog and say thank you very much for maligning my wife and my father,” he added.

Cruz tried to link arms with Republicans at the party’s con-vention but was booed lustily by delegates when he ended his speech without offering Trump his endorse-ment or even saying he would vote for the New York billionaire.

The blatant sign of disunity in prime time angered the Trump campaign, with top adviser Paul Manafort saying Cruz “used very bad judgment” and was “not respectful to the invitation by the convention to come and speak.”

Trump repeatedly mocked Cruz throughout the campaign as “Lyin’ Ted.” Trump also took jabs at appear-ance of Cruz’s wife, Goldman Sachs executive Heidi Cruz, and the Texas senator responded that Trump is a “sniveling coward.” Trump also made suggestions that Cruz’s father had indirect links to John F Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Manafort told NBC’s Today yes-terday that Cruz “understood what the responsibilities are, someone in his position.”

Eighteen protesters

arrested in

Cleveland after

scuffle with police

Reuters

CLEVELAND: Cleveland police arrested 18 protesters after scuf-fling with demonstrators who tried to set an American flag on fire near the crowded entrance to the arena where Republicans made Donald Trump their presidential nominee, officials said.

Two of those arrested were charged with felonious assault on an officer after officers tried to confiscate the flag, Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams told reporters. Some of the protesters’ pants caught fire during the incident.

“Whatever they tried to do with the flag, as we were trying to extin-guish it and they were trying to keep it away, their pants leg caught on fire,” said Williams, who was at the protest.

“The charge was assault on an officer because the officer tried to put it out when he saw it getting burned, and there were also counterdemon-strators who were trying to take it away,” the chief said.

Fifteen of the 16 other people arrested were charged with a misde-meanor offence of inciting violence near the Quicken Loans Arena.

None of the protesters were charged for burning the flag.

Two police officers were injured during the scuffle, sustaining what Williams described as “minor, bruises.” The incident saw the largest number of arrests during the four-day convention, and brought the total number arrested to 23, according to officials.

Previously, five people had been arrested in three different incidents.

AFP

UNITED NATIONS, UNITED STATES: The United States will back a candidate to be the next UN chief who has great leadership and management skills, Ambassador Samantha Power said yesterday as the Security Council kicked off vot-ing for the next secretary-general.

Council ambassadors met behind closed doors for a secret straw poll, the first of several rounds of voting to be held over the next two months to pick a successor to Ban Ki-moon.

“This could not be a more impor-tant job and it could not be a more important time to choose the best possible leader for this organisa-tion on which so much depends and so many depend,” Power told report-ers ahead of the vote.

“We are looking for somebody with great leadership skills, great management skills—someone who has a commitment to fairness and accountability, and who stays true to founding principles of the United Nations,” she added.

There are 12 candidates in the race, six of them women. The bulk of con-tenders—eight—from eastern Europe.

Among the top contenders are Argentina’s Foreign Minister Susana Malcorra, Slovenia’s ex-president Danilo Turk, New Zealand’s ex-prime minister Helen Clark and Antonio Guterres, who served as Portugal’s prime minister and headed the UN refugee agency.

The 15 ambassadors including those from the powerful perma-nent five—Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States—are to each rate the candidates with ballots marked “encourage”, “discourage” or “no opinion.”

The results of the first round of straw polls will not be announced,

but they will be communicated to the governments that have put forward candidates.

Power said the next UN leader will have “so much to do” from con-fronting terrorism to combating climate change, advancing the UN’s development goals and making sure UN peacekeepers “act on behalf of civilians.”

Council members are facing calls to pick the first woman secretary-general after eight men in the job, and to give preference to a candi-date from eastern Europe, the only region that has yet to be represented in the top post.

Reuters

BUENOS AIRES: A little over a year since Argentina’s spy agency was shackled in wake of mysterious death of a star prosecutor, Presi-dent Mauricio Macri is backing its quest for broader powers that critics fear will revive unfettered domes-tic spying.

Argentina’s spies are press-ing Macri to remove restrictions imposed by former president Cristina Fernandez after public investigator Alberto Nisman was found dead in his home in 2015, a source in the judiciary said.

Fernandez accused a rogue agent of playing a role in Nisman’s murder, which came days after he accused her of covering up Iran’s alleged role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires. Fern-andez overhauled the country’s spy agency in response, branding it the Federal Intelligence Service, or AFI.

But despite the new name, the agency is starting to look more like the former Intelligence Secretariat, with agents purged by Fernandez moving back into old posts since Macri took power in December, said an intelligence source.

In May, Macri issued a decree that lifted controls Fernandez had placed on the spy agency’s funding, allowing it once again to spend most of its budget without any oversight.

Macri’s centre-right govern-ment has since floated possibility of

giving back to AFI control of wire-taps that have been run by judiciary since last year - raising red flags with Argentines fearful of a return to its sinister role in country’s past.

The old spy agency helped the military dictatorship of 1976-1983 target Marxists, labor unions and students in the country’s “dirty war,” when thousands disap-peared. Successive democratically elected governments were widely believed to keep using it to snoop on opponents.

Macri, who has promised to uproot crime, declined to comment. But advocates of allowing the spy agency to conduct wiretaps again say it would help speed up criminal investigations amid a recent spate of kidnappings and extortion.

“I’m worried” about AFI regain-ing wiretapping powers, said Juan Rodriguez, the director of the court-controlled department DCC that now conducts all legal taps of some 3,000 phone lines in Argentina.

Wiretaps today are mostly used to track suspected drug traffickers, Rodriguez said, and must be author-ised by a judge and registered for possible scrutiny.

Standing before DCC’s 17 wire-tapping devices, Rodriguez said “this is transparent ... we want to end the dark period that this sys-tem once represented.”

A source close to Macri said it was a myth that the country’s spies are sinister and powerful, and that AFI is too weak in its current state to operate effectively.

AFP

WASHINGTON: A unarmed black man trying to help a patient with autism was shot and wounded by Florida police while lying on the ground with his arms raised in the air and pleading with officers to hold their fire.

Charles Kinsey was wounded in the leg in the incident in Miami, which came as he was trying to help a disoriented autistic man who had wandered away from a group home where Kinsey works as a therapist.

Police said they were respond-ing to an emergency call about a man with a gun walking around and threatening suicide.

Cell phone footage shows Kinsey

on the ground with his arms in the air, with the heavy-set young autis-tic man sitting on the ground nearby playing with a small white toy.

In the video, Kinsey can be heard shouting to police: “All he has is a toy truck. A toy truck. I am a behavioural therapist at a group home.”

He was shot anyway. The video ends before that. Kinsey was not seri-ously hurt.

The incident illustrates edgy mood of US police and the nation in general after the police ambush in Dallas.

Kinsey, 47, told Florida TV sta-tion WSVN-Channel 7 that as he lay on the ground he told police that he was unarmed.

“I am asking the officer, I said, ‘sir, please don’t shoot me. Please, do not shoot me.’”

Kinsey added: “It was like a mos-quito bite, and when it hit me, I’m like, ‘I still got my hands in the air, and I said, ‘No I just got shot! And I’m saying, ‘Sir, why did you shoot me?’ and his words to me, he said, ‘I don’t know.’”

The officer who opened fire has been placed on administrative leave for at least a week, the Miami Her-ald reported.

Brazil arrests

group planning

terrorism during

Olympics

AFP

BRASÍLIA: Brazilian police arrested 10 members of a group allegedly planning terrorist attacks during upcoming Olympic Games, Justice Minister Alexandre de Moraes said yesterday.

The group, made up of Brazil-ians, allegedly declared loyalty to the Islamic State (IS) organisation and discussed buying weapons.

“There was an order between them to start training in martial arts and to (obtain) ammunition, weapons with which they could carry out an act,” de Moraes told a hastily called press conference.

“This was in progress. One of them had got in contact with an underground weapons site in Paraguay, asking to buy an AK47” assault rifle, he said.

The group was monitored when it discussed plans in Internet com-munications, the minister said.

In a statement, the justice ministry said that it had launched “Operation Hashtag” to break up a group involved in the promo-tion of IS and the preparation for carrying out terrorist attacks and other criminal acts.”

About 130 officers took part in the operation in which 10 were arrested and two more temporar-ily detained, the statement said.

Earlier, as he appeared at the convention, Cruz basked in a minute-long standing ovation. Cruz finished second to Trump in the crowded Republican primary campaign and congratulated the GOP nominee on his victory.

But the closest as Cruz came to saying he wanted Trump to win the White House was when he said: “I want to see the principles that our party believes in prevail in November.”

Cruz didn’t tell the convention crowd that he plans to vote for Trump. Nor did he ask his supporters, hun-dreds of whom encouraged him to run for president in four years at an event on Wednesday afternoon, to vote for the newly minted Republi-can nominee.

Interrupted by chants of “Trump, Trump, Trump,” Cruz paused and said with a smile, “I appreciate the enthu-siasm of the New York delegation.”

But as Cruz ended his remarks, and as the crowd of more than 2,000 delegates at the Quicken Loans Arena waited for Cruz to say something — anything — kind about Trump, he demurred.

“And to those listening, please, don’t stay home in November,” Cruz said. “Stand and speak, and vote your conscience. Vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faith-ful to the Constitution.”

Democrat Hillary Clinton, in a tweet, quickly echoed Cruz, saying, “Vote your conscience.”

The delegates responded with

angry boos, and Cruz backer and former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli escorted Heidi Cruz off the convention floor as she was heckled by Trump delegates.

But Trump said later on Twitter that Cruz’s lack of an endorsement was “no big deal!” But he said Cruz “didn’t honour” the pledge that Republican pri-mary candidates had made to support the eventual GOP nominee.

“He’s a chicken,” said Eugene Delgaudio, a delegate from Sterling, Virginia, who clucked like a chicken when asked about Cruz’s decision. “He needed to toughen up like every other Republican loser of any nomination battle in the last 100 years since Abra-ham Lincoln and just suck it up, be a man and back the nominee that he was beaten by, fair and square.”

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (centre) gives two thumbs up as Donald Trump Jr. (left) and Ivanka Trump stand and cheer at the Republican National Convention, at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio.

Cruz refuses to endorse Trumpat convention

US seeking new UN leader with ‘great skills’ Argentina’s spy agency

regroups & wins back

power under Macri

Florida police shoot at black man lying on ground

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Hoy en la HistoriaJuly 22, 2013

1981: Mehmet Ali Agca was jailed for life for the assassination attempt in Rome on Pope John Paul II1987: The Soviet Union offered to dismantle all of its short and medium range missiles1992: Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar escaped from custody2011: Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian right-wing extremist, killed 77 people in central Oslo and on the island of Utoeya

Prince George of Cambridge, third in line to the British throne after his grandfather and father, was born. He celebrates his third birthday today

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BREAK TIME 17FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016 15

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22:00 True Story Of Puss’n Boots

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Alice Through The Looking Glass (Adventure) 3D 10:15am, 2:45, 7:15 & 11:45pm 2D 12:30, 5:00 & 9:30pmStar Trek Beyond (Action) 2D 11:30am, 4:30 & 9:30pm3D 2:00, 7:00pm & 12:00midnightCentral Intelligence (2D/Comedy) 10:30am, 12:40, 2:50, 5:00, 7:10, 9:20 & 11:30pmHell In India (2D/Comedy) 10:10am, 2:40, 7:10 & 11:35pmGhostbusters (2D/Action) 12:20, 4:50 & 9:15pmFinding Dory (2D/Animation) 11:00am, 1:00, 3:00, 5:00, 7:00, 9:00 & 11:00pm Kabali (2D/Tamil) 12:00noon, 3:00, 6:00, 9:00pm & 12:00midnightThe Conjuring 2 (2D/Horror) 11:30am, 2:00, 4:30, 7:00, 9:30pm & 12:00midnightStar Trek Beyond (3D IMAX/Action) 10:30am, 1:00, 3:30, 6:00, 8:30 & 11:00pm 7 star 11:00am, 4:15, 9:20pmThe Conjuring 2 (7 star/Horror) 1:30, 6:40 & 11:45pm

Alice Through The Looking Glass (2D/Adventure) 5:00 & 7:00pm

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Finding Dory (2D/Animation) 5:15pmMonkey King: Hero Is Back (2D/Animation) 3:30pmThe Conjuring 2 (2D/Horror) 7:00 & 11:30pm Silah El Talamiz (2D/Arabic) 9:30pm

Kabali (2D/Tamil) 1:00, 2:30 & 11:15pm

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Madaari (Hindi) 6:45pm

Kabali (2D/Tamil) 11:00am, 2:00, 5:00, 8:00 & 11:00pmThe Conjuring 2 (2D/Horror) 12:30, 3:15, 6:00, 8:45 & 11:30pmStar Trek Beyond (2D/Action) 11:15am, 1:45, 4:15, 6:45, 9:15 & 11:45pm

Monkey King: Hero Is Back (2D/Animation) 1:00 & 5:00pmStar Trek Beyond (2D/Action) 7:00pm

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Silah El Talamiz (2D/Arabic) 2:30pm

Finding Dory (2D/Animation) 3:00pmCentral Intelligence (2D/Action) 4:30pmAlice Through The Looking Glass (2D/Adventure) 4:00, 6:00 & 9:15pm

Abu Shanab(2D/Arabic) 6:30pmKabali (2D/Tamil) 8:00 & 11:00pm

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MORNING BREAK16 FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

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TWEET OF THE DAY

Emir meets Abu Dhabi Crown Prince

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Gonzalo Higuain: Why Arsenal should sacrifice Giroud for the Argentine

1

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FAJR

SHOROOK

ZUHR

ASR

MAGHRIB

ISHA

03.29 am04.56 am

11.40 am03.06 pm

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Hazy and misty at places at first becoming hot

to very hot during the day with some clouds and

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PRAYER TIMINGS WEATHER

IANS

LONDON: When it comes to rating one’s own abilities, you are strongly influenced by the performance of others, a study has found.

Interaction with high performers makes one feel more capable of being cooperative in team settings but less competent in competitive situations, sug-gested the study published in the journal Neuron. The research shows that com-parisons with other people can be used as an effective means for self-evaluation and conversely people make judgments about others based on their own traits.

“We found that although people esti-mated their abilities on the basis of their own performance in a rational manner, their estimates of themselves were partly merged with the performance of others,” University of Oxford researcher Marco Wittmann said.

Moreover, the degree of “self-other-mergence” is associated with an activity in a brain region previously implicated in theory of mind -- the ability to under-stand the mental state of oneself and others.

Relatively little is known about which brain regions are involved in estimating the abilities of oneself and others, sug-gested the study. However, the brain imaging data revealed that two distinct regions in the brains’s frontal cortex tracked the estimated abilities of one-self and others.

According to the study, the research-ers addressed this question by combining behavioural experiments with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Twenty-four subjects participated in two games that involved either assessing the colors of shapes or estimating elapsed time.

People estimate

own ability

based on others’

performance

Reuters

WASHINGTON: Fossils of a car-nivorous dinosaur unearthed in Argentina are shedding new light on an intriguing group of predators that apparently were just as happy to slash victims to death with sickle-shaped hand claws as to chomp them into an early grave.

Scientists said the creature, called Murusraptor barrosaen-sis, lived about 80 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period, measured about 21 feet (6.5 meters) long and was a pursuit hunter more lightly built than some other pred-atory dinosaurs.

Murusraptor was a member of a group of meat-eaters called

megaraptors, meaning “giant thieves,” that prowled Patagonia, although fossils of relatives have been discovered in Australia and Japan.

“Most of the different species known from this clade are based on rather fragmentary specimens. The Murusraptor specimen pre-served the complete posterior half of the skull, several vertebrae and pelvis bones, unveiling unknown areas of the skeleton of this group,” said paleontologist Rodolfo Coria of Argentina’s Universidad Nacional de Río Negro.

“The braincase is complete, and is the only known among megarap-tors,” Coria added. “It brings a unique opportunity to search for character-istics of neurological development in these dinosaurs.”

Megaraptors were medium-sized predators compared to some of Argentina’s giant Cretaceous meat-eaters, like the roughly 41-foot-long (12.5 metres) Giganotosaurus, and likely hunted in a different way. Giganotosaurus, which lived about 17 million years before Murusrap-tor, had a massively built skull and large teeth for killing prey, along with puny arms that would have done little good in hunting.

Other scientists last week announced the discovery of fossils of another Argentine carnivorous dinosaur, called Gualicho, a bit larger than Murusraptor that had feeble arms, akin in size to a human child’s.

Murusraptor means “thief from the wall,” because its fossils were collected from the wall of a creek in Argentina’s Neuquen Province.

Reuters

OSLO: The Antarctic Peninsula, among the fastest warming places on Earth last century, has since cooled due to natural swings in the local climate, scientists said yester-day, adding that the respite from the thaw is likely to be brief.

Rapid warming until the late 1990s on the peninsula, which snakes up towards South America, triggered the break-up of ancient ice shelves, which are vast expanses of ice floating on the sea at the end of glaciers, and declines in some pen-guin colonies.

But a shift to colder winds and more sea ice since then have brought a chill to the region despite the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the scientists wrote in the journal Nature.

“The increase of greenhouse gases ... is being overwhelmed in this part of the Antarctic” by natu-ral variations in the local climate, said lead author John Turner of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

“We’re certainly not saying that global warming has stopped. On the contrary,” he told a telephone news conference on the study. “We’re highlighting the complexity of cli-mate change.” Since about 1998, local air temperatures have fallen about 0.5 degree Celsius (0.9 Fahr-enheit) a decade, roughly the rate at which they had previously been warming since about 1950.

Stabilisation of the ozone hole over Antarctica, which shields the planet from ultra-violet rays and

has been damaged by man-made chemicals, may partly explain the shift in winds that led to the cool-ing, the study said.

But the build-up of greenhouse gases, mainly from the global burn-ing of fossil fuels, means the cooling may be just a blip in a corner of Ant-arctica. Temperatures were likely to start rising again and could gain by 3-4C (5.4-7.2F) by 2100, Turner said.

At a Paris summit in December, almost 200 governments agreed the strongest deal yet to rein in global warming, aiming to phase out fossil fuels by 2100. US Republican pres-idential nominee Donald Trump, who does not believe in man-made warming, says he would pull out if elected. On the Antarctic Penin-sula, about 10 ice shelves, from the Jones to the Wilkins, have retreated

sharply or disintegrated in recent decades.

The splintering of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002 inspired the open-ing scene of a Hollywood disaster movie about climate change, “The Day After Tomorrow”, where a vast crack destroys a US scientific camp.

In the real world, the worry is that far bigger ice shelves further south in Antarctica will also break up, allowing vast glaciers to slide more quickly into the sea and add to a rise in ocean levels. Wednesday’s study “begs a question as to the cli-mate variability in other regions of Antarctica - where there is far more ice with the potential to melt and cause sea-level rise - as well as in the Arctic and other locations,” Martin Siegert, an expert at Imperial Col-lege, London, wrote in a comment.

A family negotiate with a ferryman during high-tide at the Doha Corniche, yesterday. As the summer peaks ferrymen find their business dwindling. Pic by: Salim M / The Peninsula

Escape from heat

IANS

WASHINGTONL: The US space agency has established a new insti-tute charged with researching and developing innovative approaches to reduce risks to humans on long-duration exploration missions, including Nasa’s “Journey to Mars”.

The Nasa Translational Research Institute (NTRI) will implement a “bench-to-spaceflight” model, moving results or methods from lab-oratory experiments or clinical trials to point-of-care astronaut health and performance applications, the US space agency said in a statement.

The goal of the research is to produce promising new approaches,

treatments, countermeasures or technologies that have practical application to spaceflight.

“It’s fitting on the 47th anni-versary of humanity’s first moon landing that we’re announcing a new human spaceflight research insti-tute that will help reduce risks for our astronauts on the next giant leap - our Journey to Mars,” said Marshall Porterfield, Nasa’s Director of Space Life and Physical Sciences Research and Applications.

Set up under the Translational Research Institute Cooperative Agreement, overseen by Nasa’s Human Research Programme, the new institute is lated to begin func-tioning from October 1.

Nasa will join with Baylor Col-lege of Medicine in Houston to

operate the new institute, the state-ment added.

Translational research is an interdisciplinary model of research that focuses on translating fun-damental research concepts into practice, with appreciable health outcomes. Translational research has the potential to move solutions into practical application much faster than traditional research approaches. To that end, the Nasa Translational Research Institute would maintain research leadership in translational human performance, biomedical, environmental, and cog-nitive and behavioural science, and foster greater involvement of the science community in accomplish-ing the agency’s human exploration goals.

Nasa institute to protect astronauts

Part of Antarctica gets a chill after warming fast: Study

A seal swims by icebergs off the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera base.

An image of the carnivorous dinosaur unearthed in Argentina, which lived about 80 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period.

Argentine fossils shed light on vicious group of dinosaurs

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Brazil’s exports to Qatartouch QR447.14m in H1

By Mohammad Shoeb

The Peninsula

DOHA: The value of Brazil’s exports to Qatar for the first six months of this year (H1, 2016) touched QR447.14m ($122.15m), accounting for 2.33 per-cent of the country’s total exports of over QR19bn to Arab world, data pro-vided by Arab-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce (ABCC) show.

Meat, sugar, cereals, ores, slag, ash and other miscellaneous grain

seeds and fruits were some of the important items of Brazilian exports to the region.

According to the Chamber’s sta-tistics, Arab countries had imports worth $5.24bn (QR19.08bn) from Brazil in the first half. Saudi Arabia accounted for the most with 23.71 percent share at a value of $1.24bn, followed by the United Arab Emir-ates at 17.36 percent, Egypt at 16.65 percent, and Kuwait at 2.08 percent.

Among the exports, meat posted the most shares during the period at 34.88 percent, accounting for $1.82bn of exports to the Arab world. Sugar took second place at 26.62 percent with $1.39bn followed by cereals at 6.52 percent with $341.64m; ores, slag and ash at 4.63 percent with $242.73m, inorganic chemicals and rare earth metals at 6.61 percent with $189m, and miscellaneous grain

seeds and fruits at 3.03 percent with $158.94m.

Of all goods, cereals marked the most growth over 2015, at an increase of 113.94 percent followed, by sugars which registered a growth of 10.09 percent.

“We are very optimistic about the state of trade between Brazil and the Arab world. We believe these num-bers reflect the strong relations both economies have with each other and we hope it will serve as further encouragement for businesses to explore the infinite potentials that the business environment has to offer. We look forward to many more fruit-ful exchanges in the future that will benefit our respective economies and the community at large,” said Dr. Michel Alaby (pictured), Secretary General and CEO, Arab-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber did not provide the country wise breakups of the goods exported to Brazil from the Arab world. But according to reports, the Arab region witnessed an unprec-edented rise in fertiliser exports to the South American country for the first quarter of this year with a total of 1.14 million tonnes, and Qatar’s share alone accounted for over 305,000 tonnes, or more than one-fourth of the total, emerging as the second largest exporter of fertiliser

to Brazil from the Arab world.Among the Arab nations, Qatar

and Saudi Arabia led the market, with share growth soaring up to 26.8 per-cent and 55.9 percent, respectively. Overall, Brazil posted 21.82 percent import growth from 2015.

The exports of fertilisers from the Arab region registered a double-digit growth of 69 percent compared to 675,000 tonnes imported during the same quarter (January to April) in 2015.

Brazil’s total exports to the Arab countries top QR19bn.

Daimler drives on to record sales in Q2AFP

FRANKFURT: German top-of-the-range carmaker Daimler said that it sold a record number of vehicles worldwide in the second quarter, driven largely by strong demand for its flagship Mercedes-Benz brand.

Daimler said in a statement that it sold 761,3340 cars and commercial vehicles in the period from April to June, an increase of seven percent over the year-ear-lier period.

That strong performance pushed second-quarter revenues up by three percent to €38.6bn ($42.6bn) and bottom-line net profit also up by three percent to €2.45bn, the statement said.

Underlying or operating profit, as measured by earnings before interest and tax (EBIT), climbed by six percent to €3.97bn.

Daimler said sales of its Mer-cedes-Benz cars grew by nine percent to 546,517 units in the April-June period.

By contrast, sales of trucks were down 13 percent at 108,282 units owing to weakness prima-rily in the North American region.

Looking ahead, chief executive Dieter Zetsche was confident for the remainder of the year.

“We are starting the second half of the year with record unit sales and will systematically con-tinue along our path,” Zetsche said.

“We continue to grow profit-ably and are well on the way to achieving our forecasts for the full year,” said chief financial officer Bodo Uebber.

“We intend to make 2016 into another successful year for Daim-ler. However, the markets remain volatile,” he added.

ECB keeps door open to easing after holding rates steadyReuters

FRANKFURT: The European Cen-tral Bank (ECB) kept interest rates unchanged yesterday but left the door open to more policy stimulus, highlighting “great” uncertainty and abundant risks to the economic out-look.

Signalling a readiness to act, ECB President Mario Draghi argued that Britain’s decision to leave the European Union and weak emerg-ing market growth both dampen the eurozone’s own outlook, leav-ing the balance of risks tilted firmly to the downside and possibly requir-ing action.

But Draghi also noted that growth

and inflation were both moving along the path projected in June so more evidence, including fresh staff pro-jections in September, were needed before any decision.

“If warranted to achieve its objec-tive, the Governing Council will act by using all the instruments availa-ble within its mandate,” Draghi said. “So I would stress readiness, willing-ness, ability to do so.”

The balanced comments give the ECB time until its September meeting to weigh the economic costs of Brexit without fuelling excessive market expectations, potentially leading to disappointment, even if it does decide to act.

Indeed, the euro and German yields were broadly unchanged late on Thursday with little volatility

during Draghi’s news conference.“All in all, today’s meeting was

one that will quickly disappear from memories,” ING economist Carsten Brzeski said. “More action in Septem-ber is possible but not yet a given.”

Keeping its deposit rate at minus 0.4 percent and the main refinanc-ing rate at 0.00 percent, the bank reaffirmed its guidance to keep rates at current or lower levels for an extended period and beyond the scope of its asset purchase programme.

It also repeated that its €80bn per month asset-buying programme — which Draghi deemed “quite suc-cessful” — would run until March 2017, or beyond if necessary, until it sees an upward adjustment of infla-tion towards its target.

Exxon snaps up InterOil in LNG push as Oil Search bows outReuters

NEW YORK: ExxonMobil Corp said yesterday it would buy InterOil Corp for more than $2.5bn in stock, add-ing a gas field to expand exports from Papua New Guinea and better posi-tioning it to meet Asian demand for liquified natural gas.

Oil majors are targeting Papua New Guinea for growth as the qual-ity of its gas, low costs and proximity to Asia’s big LNG consumers make it one of the most attractive places to develop projects following a collapse

in oil and gas prices.“I think (the deal) shows that

Exxon views LNG as a very strong growth business. I believe that LNG demand over time will grow faster than oil,” said Brian Youngberg, oil analyst with Edward Jones in Saint Louis.

Exxon sealed the deal for Inter-Oil after Australia’s Oil Search Ltd said that it would not pay more than the $2.2bn it offered in May, a pro-posal that was backed by French giant Total SA.

InterOil owns a 36.5 percent stake in the Elk-Antelope gas field, which is operated by Total. The

acquisition will give Exxon interests in six licenses in Papua New Guinea covering about four million acres.

Oil Search said it and Total agreed that letting Exxon take over would help speed up development of the Elk-Antelope field.

Exxon said it would pay InterOil shareholders $45 per share in stock and that it would also make an addi-tional cash payment based on the size of the Elk-Antelope field. That payment is worth $7.07 per share for each trillion cubic feet equiva-lent (tcfe) of certified gross resource from the field above 6.2 tcfe and up to a maximum of 10 tcfe.

Exxon said it would evaluate processing of gas from the Elk-Ante-lope field by expanding its LNG export plant in Papua New Guinea. Oil Search also owns a stake in the LNG plant.

The plant is a 6.9 million tonne per annum integrated project oper-ated by Exxon. The gas is sourced from seven fields and Elk-Antelope gas could be used to feed an expan-sion. “It will be interesting to watch how Exxon pursues the development of InterOil’s gas resources. Will it be by expanding the existing LNG plant already operating in the country, or building a brand-new project?,” said

Pavel Molchanov, an energy analyst with Raymond James.

Credit Suisse (Australia) Ltd, Mor-gan Stanley and UBS are InterOil’s financial advisers, while Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and Goodmans provided legal advice.

Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP and Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP are Exxon’s legal advisers.

The Elk-Antelope fields are 340 km away from the proposed site of the LNG plant near the capital, Port Moresby, less than half the distance for the resources feeding the PNG LNG project, according to an Inter-Oil presentation in January.

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi (right) and the ECB’s Vice-President Vitor Constancio (second left) along with other officials arrive for a press conference following a meeting of the ECB’s Governing Council in Frankfurt am Main, western Germany, yesterday.

QE 10,534.40 -57.20 PTS

DOW 18,485.09 -109.94 PTS

FTSE100 6,699.89 -29.10 PTS

BRENT $45.02 -$0.73

BUSINESS18 FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

US Treasury chief backs Greece debt relief

AP

ATHENS: US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew stressed yesterday the importance of making Greece’s debt sustainable, praising the country’s progress in reforming its economy as part of its bailouts but urging it to keep implementing the necessary measures.

Speaking in Athens after talks with Greek Finance Minister

Euclid Tsakalotos, Lew said further progress on reforms was important so European creditors could begin discussions with the International Monetary Fund on “the timing and details of debt relief.”

“Putting Greece’s debt on a sus-tainable path is critical to Greece’s long-term economic health and I encourage all parties to be flexible to successfully conclude this fall’s negotiations,” Lew said.

Lew stopped in Greece amid political turmoil in neighboring Turkey triggered by a deadly failed coup attempt, and following the ref-erendum vote in Britain to leave the European Union.

“The sooner these issues (with Greek debt) are resolved the better ... My view of the geopolitical signifi-cance of Greece is not new,” Lew said.

Greek national debt is set to peak this year at 182.8 percent of gross domestic product, according to EU Commission forecasts. That is mainly made up of bailout loans from other eurozone countries and the IMF, which Greece has been dependent on since 2010.

To qualify for its bailout loans, successive governments have had to implement austerity measures and reforms, including in the labor market, pensions and social security, as well as raising taxes and selling state assets. The reforms have come at a high cost, with Greece’s econ-omy contracting by a quarter and leaving unemployment hovering at around 25 percent.

Making the country’s debt sus-tainable in the long term has been a key issue, with Greece insisting they need to be restructured.

“Our position has been clear for quite some time that it’s important for debt restructuring to be part of an overall plan for Greece” and for the country’s economic future, Lew said, adding that achieving debt sus-tainability and stability were key to ensuring a return to long-term eco-nomic growth.

The IMF, which has yet to com-mit to Greece’s third bailout program, has argued strongly in favor of debt relief for Greece and has suggested the forecasts underpinning the Greek bailout plan are too optimistic.

Although eurozone creditors have ruled out an outright cut in Greece’s debt, the repayment timetable for loans could be extended and inter-est rates could be reduced.

Lew stressed it was key for the country to continue implementing

the reforms it has committed to.“Completing the work, continu-

ing to implement privatization, doing the work that’s needed to address the non-performing loans will very much strengthen the position that Greece brings in to a negotiation in

the coming months.”Lew was also met with Greek

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and other government officials before heading to China for a meeting of G-20 finance ministers and central bank governors.

Lew said progress on reforms was important so European creditors could begin discussions with the IMF on the timing and details of debt relief.

US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew (left) speaks as Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos listens during a news conference at the Finance Ministry in Athens, yesterday.

UK retail sales

suffer biggest fall

in six months, no

EU effect reported

Reuters

LONDON: British retail sales suf-fered their sharpest monthly fall in six months in June, but stores said bad weather rather than Brexit was to blame, leaving open the question of how big a hit the vote to leave the European Union will deal to the economy.

Retail sales volumes in the five weeks to July 2 dropped by 0.9 percent, their largest fall this year, and clothing stores reported the sharpest annual drop in quar-terly sales in 25 years, according to official figures released yesterday.

Sterling fell against the dol-lar after the data, which came in below economists’ expectations, as analysts said a Brexit effect could not be ruled out and that worse may be to come.

But the Office for National Statistics said retailers did not attribute the fall to the result of the June 23 referendum. “Change-able weather” was the main thing dragging down clothes sales, while department stores got a boost from the Euro 2016 football con-test and the Queen’s 90th birthday celebrations, it said.

Measures of consumer senti-ment have shown a darker mood since the EU vote, but this has not translated into an immediate fall in households’ spending in data from the ONS, British Retail Con-sortium and the Bank of England.

“The volume of retail sales will only really start to be hit more markedly further down the line once firms cut back on hiring ... and the fall in ster-ling is passed through into retail prices,” UniCredit economist Dan-iel Vernazza said. A Mintel market research report showed that while 39 percent of British consumers thought leaving the EU would hurt the economy, 25 percent expected to see gains. Limited evidence on the impact of the Brexit vote may put the Bank in a quandary next month when it decides whether to cut interest rates, and what if any additional stimulus the econ-omy needs to deal with what it expects will be a material eco-nomic slowdown.

While sterling suffered it big-gest two-day fall on record and some corners of the financial markets have come under severe stress, policymakers say the situ-ation does not remind them of the 2008 financial crisis. Last week the BoE surprised markets by not cutting rates, but minutes of that decision showed most policymak-ers expected to approve a package of stimulus measures in August.

Capital flows out of China slowing despite weak yuanAFP

BEIJING: The flood of billions of dollars out of China slowed dramat-ically in the second quarter, official figures showed yesterday, despite the yuan’s persistent weakness making it less attractive to hold.

“Cross-border capital outflow pressures have gradually eased,” Wang Chunying, spokeswoman for the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), said at a briefing.

Foreign exchange settlement data showed Chinese banks sold $49bn more in foreign currency than they received between April and June. That “narrowed sharply” from $124.8bn in the January-March period, she said.

The monthly figures were even more dramatic, with $12.8bn leav-ing in June, down from $54.4bn in January, she added.

Money has been flowing out of China in recent years as its growth has slowed, adding to downward pressure on its currency and mak-ing yuan-denominated assets less attractive to hold, in a vicious cycle for the world’s second-largest economy. Authorities have tight-ened restrictions over cross-border money flows, including capping cash withdrawals overseas using domes-tic bank cards at 100,000 yuan ($15,000) per year from January and

requiring banks to pay a 20 percent deposit on forward sales of foreign exchange to stem speculation.

A forward sale is a commitment to sell at a predetermined price and date. Wang insisted that capital was leaving mainly because of “continued expanding overseas investment” by Chinese firms, rather than “foreign capital withdrawing from China”.

Chinese firms have embarked on a string of high-profile overseas acquisitions. But Beijing rattled global investors with a surprise devaluation last August, when it guided the normally stable yuan

down nearly five percent over a week, in a move largely perceived by analysts as an attempt to boost exports as economic growth slowed.

China’s gross domestic product expanded 6.9 percent last year, its slowest in a quarter of a century, and growth further weakened to 6.7 per-cent in the first half of this year.

China’s foreign exchange reserves, the world’s largest, declined for months before unex-pectedly increasing in June by $13bn to $3.21 trillion, although they are still down 20 percent from their $4 trillion peak in 2014.

A vendor holds yuan notes at a market in Beijing.

ABB hit by drop in big

orders, overhaul costsAFP

ZURICH: Swiss-Swedish engineer-ing giant ABB said yesterday that first-half net profits fell by around one fifth, weighed down by restruc-turing costs.

ABB said net profit dropped by 21 percent to $906m, on a six-per-cent fall in sales due to fewer big orders. The group, which produces items ranging from electrical trans-formers to ship propulsion parts, said that sales stood at $16.5bn for the first six months of this year.

For the April to end-June period alone, large contracts fell 41 percent, it said. Smaller orders — below $15m — were steady, but were down by 3 percent when converted into dollars.

“Base order demand was strong in Germany, Spain, Sweden and Denmark, and weak in the UK amid uncertainties around Brexit,” ABB said in a statement.

ABB said utilities remained “cautious but continued to make selective investments to integrate renewable energy and enhance energy security”.

The company however won orders of more than $300m in China for an ultra-high voltage power link.

“Automotive and consumer industries continued to drive demand,” ABB said.

Looking ahead, the group sees

a “mixed picture with continued uncertainty,” it said.

“Some macroeconomic signs in the US remain positive and growth in China is expected to continue, although at a slower pace than in 2015.

“The market remains impacted by modest growth and increased uncertainties relating to Brexit in Europe, and geopolitical tensions in various parts of the world,” it added.

The group has said it wants to focus on its most profitable sectors and has embarked on a vast restruc-turing programme, including of its energy division hit by postpone-ments of wind and solar projects.

It announced last year a one-bil-lion-dollar cost-cutting plan by the end of 2017 by increasing the pro-ductivity of its white-collar staff.

The logo of ABB is seen at a plant in Zurich, yesterday.

Swatch profits fall 52% as attacks hit key marketsAFP

ZURICH: Swatch Group, the world’s largest watchmaker, posted a 52-per-cent fall in first-half profits yesterday, with sales hurt by declining tourism after attacks in France and Belgium.

The Swiss-based company also said revenues were down in its cru-cial market of Hong Kong.

The entire luxury watch sector has seen trimmed sales in Hong Kong since Chinese authorities introduced new anti-corruption measures in 2013 that included curbs on extrav-agant gifts. A company statement put first-half profits at 263m Swiss francs ($267m), 52 percent lower than dur-ing the same period of 2015. Sales dropped by 11.4 percent to 3.7bn Swiss francs.

“The situation in France and Belgium will remain difficult,” with fewer tourists travelling to the key markets following deadly attacks in Paris, Nice and Brussels, Swatch said.

But the company claimed the

outlook for the second half of 2016 was promising, pointing to “clear signs of tourism revival,” in Spain and Italy.

Swatch’s Omega brand is also a flagship sponsor of the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, which start on August 5. The company said it was expecting a “boost” during the Games.

The first three weeks of July saw strong sales in mainland China, fur-ther fuelling hopes that the company could record “an annual result closer or equivalent to the previous year,” the statement added.

But Patrik Schwendimann, an analyst at Zuercher Kantonalbank in Zurich, told Bloomberg that “to achieve last year’s results for the full year would require a bigger miracle.”

Swatch’s slowdown in sales comes as exports of all Swiss watches fell by their fastest rate yet this year in June, plunging by 16 percent to 1.6 billion francs, according to data from the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry. Experts to Hong Kong fell by 29 percent.

In Europe, exports to Italy fell by

28 percent, to France by 21 percent and by 15 percent to Germany.

Exports of watches in the 200-500 Swiss franc segment fell by

nearly 20 percent in volume and value terms, while those above 3,000 Swiss francs dropped a simi-lar amount in value.

The logo of Swatch is seen at a shop at the central railway station in Zurich, yesterday.

GM recalls about

308,000 cars on

air bags issues

DETROIT: General Motors is recalling nearly 308,000 older Chevrolet Impala sedans in the US and Canada because the air bags might not inflate in a crash.

The recall covers Impalas from the 2009 and 2010 model years that were made before Feb. 10, 2010. GM says in government documents that the front passen-ger seat frame can rub against the wiring for a passenger detection sensor.

Damaged wiring could cut power to the sensor and knock out the air bags.

Air bag warning lights will illuminate if the wires are chafed. But some gauges may not work.

GM says it’s aware of two crashes and two injuries that may be related to the problem.

Dealers will add anti-abrasion tape to fix the problem. There’s no schedule yet for when repairs will be made.

AFP

LONDON: Airlines are facing one of their most challenging periods “for a long time”, with peak sum-mer bookings hit by terror attacks and Brexit uncertainty, the boss of EasyJet said yesterday.

Carolyn McCall’s (pictured) comments to reporters came

after the British no-frills airline published a third-quarter trad-ing update that failed to provide a full-year profits forecast.

EasyJet’s outlook, already affected by Britain’s vote in favour of exiting the European Union, has been further clouded by last week’s Nice massacre and the failed military coup in Turkey.

The airline’s share price was the biggest loser on London’s benchmark FTSE 100 index in morning deals, dropping 4.6 per-cent and dragging down rivals’ valuations.

McCall told a conference call that airlines were facing “one of the most difficult periods that we’ve seen in a very long time”.

She said that a drop in

consumer confidence was “not entirely due to Brexit”, noting that EasyJet’s performance had been hit also by a slump in the pound, strike action, severe weather fac-tors and the Brussels terror attack in March.

On the Brexit fallout, McCall said a 10-percent drop in the value of the pound against the dollar since the referendum outcome had cost EasyJet some £40m.

But she insisted that the air-line would “continue to grow in the UK” — in contrast to Hungar-ian budget airline Wizz Air which has cut back its British expansion plans on Brexit and the subse-quent slump in sterling.

Since the June 23 referen-dum, EasyJet has applied for

a European Union licence to keep flying throughout the bloc — becoming the first carrier to activate a contingency plan.

EasyJet “provided a third quarter update which, as we expected, confirmed that trad-ing has been difficult in recent months”, said Ian Forrest, invest-ment research analyst at The Share Centre.

“Overall revenue fell 2.6 per-cent to £1.2bn and revenue per seat dropped 8.3 percent at con-stant currency in the period.”

Nicholas Hyett, equity ana-lyst at stockbroker Hargreaves Lansdown, said the industry’s move to increase capacity “for some time... is starting to have an effect on pricing, squeezing revenue per seat”.

BUSINESS 19FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

QE Index 10,534.40 0.54 %

QE Total Return Index 17,043.96 0.54 %

QE Al Rayan Islamic Index 4,072.4 0.25 %

QE All Share Index 2,916.22 0.51 %

QE All Share Banks & Financial Services 2,819.31 0.56 %

QE All Share Industrials 3,218.75 0.30 %

QE All Share Transportation 2,556.97 0.04 %

QE All Share Real Estate 2,691.51 0.32 %

QE All Share Insurance 4,286.94 2.37 %

QE All Share Telecoms 1,168.53 0.18 %

QE All Share Consumer Goods & Services 6,612.58 0.18 %

QE INDICES SUMMARY QATAR STOCK EXCHANGE

QE MARKET SUMMARY COMPARISON

GOLD AND SILVER

WORLD STOCK INDICES

21-07-2016 Today 20-07-2016 Previous dayIndex 10,534.40 10,591.60

Change 57.20 56.98

% 0.54 0.54

YTD% 1.01 1.56

Volume 5,208,693 7,075,216

Value (QAR) 209,804,364.35 262,198,434.99

Trades 2,764 4,150

Up 07 | Down 30 | Unchanged 05

GOLD QR154.8351 per grammeSILVER QR2.2921 per gramme

Index Day’s Close Pt Chg % Chg Year High Year LowAll Ordinaries 5565.875 32.009 0.58 5548.2 4762.1

Cac 40 Index/D 4372.53 42.4 0.98 4607.69 3892.46

Dj Indu Average 18559.01 25.96 0.14 18562.5 15370.3

Hang Seng Inde/D 21882.48 209.28 0.97 21822 18278.8

Iseq Overall/D 5855.86 49.99 0.86 6791.68 5286.65

Karachi 100 In/D 39098.79 -110.09 -0.28 39415.25 29785

Nikkei 225 Index 16681.89 -41.42 -0.25 18951.12 14864.01

S&P 500 Index/D 0 0 0 2169.05 1810.1

EXCHANGE RATECurrency Buying Selling

US$ QR 3.6305 QR 3.6500

UK QR 4.7679 QR 4.8356

Euro QR 3.9860 QR 4.0425

CA$ QR 2.7644 QR 2.8188

Swiss Fr QR 3.6643 QR 3.7165

Yen QR 0.0339 QR 0.0346

Aus$ QR 2.7024 QR 2.7556

Ind Re QR 0.0537 QR 0.0548

Pak Re QR 0.0344 QR 0.0351

Peso QR 0.0766 QR 0.0781

SL Re QR 0.0246 QR 0.0252

Taka QR 0.0460 QR 0.0469

Nep Re QR 0.0336 QR 0.0343

SA Rand QR 0.2526 QR 0.2577

Reuters

DUBAI: Most Gulf stock markets fell yesterday amid soft oil prices and mixed corporate earnings, while Egypt was hit once again by concern about instability in the country’s currency.

Dubai’s index edged down 0.1 percent. Dubai Parks & Resorts surged 3.8 percent but real estate stocks were weak, with Deyaar Development dropping 1.1 percent after reporting a 17.8 percent fall in second-quarter net profit. Blue chip Emaar Properties, which had been rallying strongly for the past two weeks, lost steam. It edged down 0.3 percent to Dh7, failing to break major technical resistance on its October 2015 peak of Dh7.01.

A few small speculative stocks rose sharply includ-ing Al Salam Group Holding, which gained 10.6 percent. In Kuwait, where its shares surged 5.8 percent, the company issued a statement saying it knew of no mate-rial reason for the unusual trade in its shares.

Saudi Arabia’s index fell 0.5 percent as Yamama Cement tumbled 5.2 percent after reporting a 14 per-cent year-on-year drop in second-quarter profit to SR150.5m, and slashing its second-quarter dividend to SR0.25 per share from SR0.75.

Petrochemical shares were strong, however. Yanbu National Petrochemical Co (Yansab) rose 2.8 percent in its heaviest trade since January after its second-quar-ter net profit trebled to SR689.3m ($183.8m) because of higher production and sales — analysts had on average forecast 446.2 million riyals. Petrochemical heavy-weight Saudi Basic Industries gained 0.6 percent.

Abu Dhabi’s index fell 0.5 percent, dragged down by profit-taking in merger candidates First Gulf Bank, down 1.2 percent, and National Bank of Abu Dhabi, off 2.0 percent.

Qatar also dropped 0.5 percent because of wide-spread selling in banks. Commercial Bank of Qatar, which slumped 6.6 percent on Wednesday after it missed second-quarter earnings forecasts by a large margin, fell a further 2.0 percent.

The Egyptian index sank 0.9 percent as the gap between Egypt’s official and unofficial US dollar rates hit its widest ever because of speculation that the coun-try’s endemic foreign exchange shortage could force another devaluation.

Gulf markets fall on oil and corporate earnings

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Castrol India-/D 413.75 5.6 184528

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Cipla-A/D 517.8 12.1 230252

City Union Bk-/D 120.5 1.1 13275

Colgate-A/D 949.15 8.05 18441

Container Cor-/D 1456 21.2 11421

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Dhampur Sugar-/D 118.35 2 170862

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Eicher Motor-A/D 19810.1 114.1 1895

Electrosteel-B/D 20.8 1.15 250013

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Escorts Fin-B/D 4.6 0.14 3907

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F D C-B/D 189.9 1.7 5306

Federal Bank-A/D 62.75 2.55 858610

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Finolex-A/D 453 2.65 5622

Gail-A/D 394.85 9.55 79986

Galada Power-B/D 16.25 -0.85 94155

Gammon India-T/D 16.8 0.4 141487

Gangotri Tex-B/D 1.33 0.06 2100

Garden P -B/D 36.95 0.15 13801

Godfrey Phil-B/D 1195.8 33.7 68472

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Goodyear I -B/D 526.1 -3.05 3922

Hcl Infosys-B/D 40.3 -2.4 4348149

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Hind Unilever-/D 906.9 11.75 55119

Hind.Petrol-A/D 1121.15 13.7 167492

Hindalco-A/D 135.8 -2.05 1810583

Hous Dev Fin-A/D 1334.95 -3.45 61225

I F C I-A/D 28.65 0.05 369992

Idbi-A/D 73.55 0.15 305554

Ifb Agro-B/D 434 18.9 2367

Ifb Ind.Ltd.-B/D 382.1 9.1 9281

India Cement-A/D 115.65 4.05 439464

India Glycol-B/D 99.15 2.05 24843

Indian Hotel-A/D 134.55 2.15 161275

Indo-Tcount-T/D 903.9 30.7 13038

Indusind-A/D 1122.25 15.2 250415

J.B.Chemical-B/D 261.4 -0.85 7314

Jagson Phar-B/D 40.1 1.5 10235

Jamnaauto-B/D 174.05 3.2 68260

Jbf Indu-B/D 204.5 1.2 9175

Jct Ltd-B/D 6.24 -0.07 841598

Jenson&Nich.-B/D 8.96 -0.02 32254

Jik Indust-B/D 0.63 -0.01 29257

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Jmc Projects-T/D 250 11 2051

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Kajaria Cer-A/D 1223 8.65 40690

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Kalpat Power-B/D 262.35 1.2 2874

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Kanoria Chem-B/D 68.8 1.1 10505

Kg Denim-B/D 86.2 -0.8 124595

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Kinetic Eng-B/D 73.4 -0.5 11252

Kopran-B/D 52.75 1.8 80787

Laxmi Prcisn-B/D 36.6 0.05 3250

Lloyd Metal-B/D 29.7 0.7 3170

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Lumax Ind-B/D 714.2 -7.85 3285

Lupin-A/D 1713.6 23.2 83064

Lyka Labs-T/D 76.4 4.55 98226

Mafatlal Ind-B/D 318 0.95 1359

Mah.Seamless-B/D 221.7 0.1 1435

Maha Scooter-B/D 1442.3 39.55 1750

Mangalam Cem-B/D 300.45 1.9 12188

Maral Overs-B/D 31.4 0.25 5916

Mastek-B/D 134.45 1.4 15297

Max Financial-/D 559.9 51.05 611388

Mrpl-A/D 76.7 1.65 461345

Nahar Spg.-B/D 131.1 0.95 27047

Nation Alum -A/D 47.75 -1 160599

Navneet Edu-B/D 94 -0.9 15771

Nepc India-T/D 1.65 0.07 26850

Neuland Lab-B/D 972.55 7.2 3958

Nrb Bearings-B/D 113 0.5 1547

O N G C-A/D 223.8 2.65 1360510

Ocl India-B/D 640.05 16.75 1744

Oil Country-B/D 34.55 0.2 104667

Onward Tech-B/D 72.1 -1.5 2121

Orchid Pharm-B/D 41.75 2 220982

Orient Hotel-T/D 26.65 -0.05 3356

Orient.Carb.-T/D 624 0.65 2723

Orient.Carb.-T/D 624 0.65 2723

Oudh Sugar-B/D 142.95 6.8 124041

Patspin India-/D 11.16 0.85 38185

Punjab Chem.-B/D 193.6 0.6 6028

Radico Khait-B/D 90.45 0.95 20732

Rallis India-A/D 209.5 1.55 13701

Rallis India-A/D 209.5 1.55 13701

Reliance Indus/D 435.85 4.8 158700

Ruchi Soya-B/D 22.35 0.25 93136

S Bk Bikaner-B/D 690.1 2.2 17514

Salora Inter-B/D 42.8 -0.7 4848

Saur.Cem-B/D 69.9 2.9 91816

Thirumalai-B/D 349 10.3 39869

Timexgroup-T/D 40 1.35 196128

Tinplate-B/D 97.9 14.85 3195914

Ucal Fuel-B/D 114.95 0.6 5740

Ucal Fuel-B/D 114.95 0.6 5740

Ultramarine-B/D 147.9 4.75 18974

Unitech P -A/D 8.34 0.11 17391148

Univcable-B/D 81 0.1 5570

Uppergsugar-T/D 469.65 8.15 205675

3I Group/D 593.5 2.5 277660

Assoc.Br.Foods/D 2812 6 151972

Barclays/D 150.75 0.35 14792787

Bp/D 452 -0.8 5083880

Brit Am Tobacc/D 4816 27 612217

Bt Group/D 389.85 -2.7 4535968

Centrica/D 237.3438 0.8 3813865

Gkn/D 285.6 5.2 1453035

Hsbc Holdings/D 495.4 8.3 12099492

Kingfisher/D 331.5 -0.1 3056955

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Legal & Genera/D 196.2 4.8 8581195

Lloyds Bnk Grp/D 55.79 0.36 40867580

Marks & Sp./D 333.9 -1.1 2108830

Next/D 5020 -70 215122

Pearson/D 969 2.5 642599

Prudential/D 1327 17 2593365

Rank Group/D 235.7 3.9 28846

Rentokil Initi/D 209.7 0.7 725197

Rolls Royce Pl/D 738 -1.5 1199304

Rsa Insrance G/D 491.6 3 380482

Sainsbury(J)/D 228 0.5 1927061

Schroders/D 2593 25 117439

Severn Trent/D 2461 7 136164

Smith&Nephew/D 1299 7 677598

Smiths Group/D 1227 7 327219

Standrd Chart /D 611 9.2 3065682

Tate & Lyle/D 699.5 9.5 501821

Tesco/D 160.85 -2.9 5211254

Unilever/D 3574 4.5 547938

United Util Gr/D 1027 3 259130

Vodafone Group/D 226.25 1.55 11441329

Whitbread/D 3671.8124 -3 225049

COMPANY CLOSE NET VOLUME

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LONDON

Peak summer bookings hit by terror attacks and Brexit uncertainty.

EasyJet warns of tough journey ahead

BUSINESS VIEWS20 FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

Strong US home sales, low layoffs highlight economy’s strengthBy Lucia Mutikani

Reuters

US home resales hit their high-est level in nearly 9-1/2 years in June as low interest rates lured first-time buyers into the mar-

ket and the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits fell last week, under-scoring the economy’s strength.

Although another report showed factory activity in the mid-Atlantic region contracted this month, a surge in new orders and ship-ments suggested the setback was likely temporary. “The economy is doing well and is weathering the global turbulence. With housing and consumers powering ahead, some of the clouds are dissipating and sum-mer looks good from a data point of view,” said Thomas Costerg, a US economist at Standard Chartered Bank in New York.

The National Association of Realtors said existing home sales increased 1.1 per-cent to an annual rate of 5.57 million units last month, the highest level since Febru-ary 2007. It was the fourth straight month of

increases and left sales 3 percent higher than a year ago. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast sales slipping to a 5.48 million-unit pace in June. Sales were boosted by first-time buyers, whose share of transactions rose to 33 percent in June, the highest since July 2012. That compared to 30 percent in May and a year ago.

The increase in first-time buyers, whose participation is considered crucial for a strong housing market, came as US mort-gage rates hit their lowest levels since 2013 on bets the Federal Reserve would be cau-tious about raising interest rates.

Britain’s vote on June 23 to leave the European Union has also put downward pressure on borrowing costs for home buyers as investors pile into safe-haven US govern-ment debt.

The housing market is being supported by a strengthening labour market, but sales remain constrained by a persistent short-age of properties available for sale, which is keeping home prices elevated. There were 2.12 million previously owned homes on the market last month, down 0.9 percent from June. The median price for a previously owned house rose 4.8 percent from a year

ago to a record $247,700 in June. “We expect this buoyant performance to continue dur-ing the second half of this year, underpinned by strong employment growth, low mort-gage rates and continued confidence in the economic recovery,” said Millan Mulraine, deputy chief economist at TD Securities in New York.

The broader PHLX housing index .HGX, including builders, building products and mortgage companies, was down 0.14 percent, tracking a slightly weak US stocks market.

The dollar was little changed against a basket of currencies, after the European Central Bank gave no hint that it was set on easing policy further in September to support growth. Prices for US government bonds fell.

In a separate report, the Labor Department said initial claims for state unemployment benefits slipped 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 253,000 for the week ended July 16, the lowest reading since April. Claims are near the 43-year low of 248,000 touched in mid-April.

Economists had forecast initial claims ris-ing to 265,000 in the latest week. Claims have now been below 300,000, a threshold asso-ciated with a healthy labour market, for 72

straight weeks, the longest stretch since 1973. The four-week moving average of claims, considered a better measure of labour market trends as it irons out week-to-week volatil-ity, fell 1,250 to 257,750 last week.

The claims data covered the survey week for July’s nonfarm payrolls. The four-week average of claims fell 9,000 between the June and July periods, suggesting another month of strong job gains. The economy added a whop-ping 287,000 jobs in June, the largest this year.

“The claims data continue to signal very low layoffs and that the employment report for July will be solid,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics in New York. “These data point to a further tightening of the labour market in terms of readily employa-ble underutilised labour.”

Labour market strength is boosting con-sumer spending and the housing market, which in turn are providing a lift to eco-nomic growth.

According to a survey of economists, the government is expected to report next week that the economy grew at a 2.6 per-cent annualised rate in the second quarter, an acceleration from the 1.1 percent pace logged in the first three months of the year.

By Jack Clark

Bloomberg

There’s a high-stakes race under way in Silicon Valley to develop software that makes it easy to weave

artificial intelligence technol-ogy into almost everything, and Google has sprinted into the lead.

Google computer scientists including Jeff Dean and Greg Corrado built software called TensorFlow, which simplifies the programming of key systems that underpin artificial intelligence. That helps Google make its prod-ucts smarter and more responsive. It’s important for other compa-nies too because the software makes it dramatically easier to create computer programs that learn and improve automatically. What’s more, Google gives it away.

But for some competitors, there’s a big downside to adopting Google’s standard. Using Ten-sorFlow will help Google recruit more AI experts by training them on the same tool it uses internally, spotting their code, and hiring the best contributors. It could also let the search-engine provider exert outsize influence over the burgeoning AI ecosystem. If the internet giant dominates in this field, it could gain an advantage in the fast-growing cloud-com-puting business, turning the popularity of its software into real revenue.

“It’s the next big area, and peo-ple are worried Google’s going to own the show,” said Ed Lazowska, a computer science professor at the University of Washington who has served on the technical advi-sory board of Microsoft’s research lab. “There is a network effect, and it’s a really excellent system.”

Google initially used Ten-sorFlow internally for products like its Inbox and Photos apps. The company made it available for free in November. Technol-ogy companies like Microsoft, Amazon.com and Samsung Elec-tronics rushed to give away their own versions, hoping to get the most outside developers using their standards. The company that wins will benefit from the collective efforts of thousands of developers using, but also updating and improving, its sys-tem. That’s an advantage when it comes time to make money from the new asset. Whoever has the most popular software will have the best chance of creating com-mercial cloud services for AI because potential customers will already know how to use it.

Amazon and Samsung

declined to comment. Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.

Success in these types of open-source projects some-times yields big rewards. Google released Android for free in 2008, and it’s now the most widely used mobile operating system with over 400,000 developers and more than a billion users. Google generates billions of dol-lars a year from ads shown on Android devices and the cut it gets from revenue app develop-ers make through the operating system.

Since emerging, TensorFlow has become the most popular AI programming project on soft-ware code sharing service GitHub, leapfrogging well-regarded sys-tems created by universities and corporate rivals.

On launch day, TensorFlow had around 3,000 “stars” on GitHub, meaning that number of programmers had bookmarked the code, indicating interest. As of July 13, it had 27,873. Two other popular AI software projects, Theano and Torch, have less than a fifth of that following. In 2014, Torch was the leader. A Micro-soft tool called CNTK, released for free in January, and Ama-zon’s free DSSTNE, which rolled out in May, have so far failed to dent Google’s lead much.

Linux, an open-source oper-ating system launched in 1991, now helps run everything from supercomputers to phones to airplanes and helped turn Red Hat Inc into a $13bn enterprise software company. Linux has 33,967 stars on GitHub. “It’s kind of crazy,” said Dean, a top Google engineer and one of the main developers of TensorFlow. “We’re almost to Linux level.”

Google will soon begin gen-erating revenue from this lead. It plans to offer a version of Ten-sorFlow that runs on its Google Cloud Platform service, letting people and businesses pay to run their AI software in Google’s data centers.

Google made the software free so it could give the commu-nity a useful tool “and everyone could standardise on that,” said Corrado, a senior research scien-tist at Google. “In a giant green field, trying to build a fence around the next blade of grass is really absurdist. It’s really better to help everybody run into that field.” That openness, and con-tinual Google updates, have lured developers like computer-vision startup Matroid, which re-wrote its software to work with Tensor-Flow, after building on another free AI tool called Caffe.

Google sprints ahead in AI building blocks, leaving rivals wary

British clothing retailers face Brexit double whammy

By James Davey

Reuters

Already hamstrung by the battle to compete with online rivals, Britain’s major clothing retailers now risk a hit to sales and profits from the higher costs and plum-

meting consumer confidence that have followed the vote to leave the European Union. A month after that vote, clothing sellers are nursing big share price falls and contemplating the cost of the depreciation in the pound versus their most important currency, the US dollar.

At the same time, consumer confidence has recorded one of the biggest drops in over two decades. With consumer spend-ing accounting for three quarters of Britain’s gross domestic product any drop would have huge implications for the economy.

While a few retailers with big overseas earnings could benefit from the currency move, such as luxury brand Burberry, online fashion retailer ASOS and discount chain Primark, those that will struggle

are likely to be Brit-ish-focused and with already tight margins.

“It was already a tough market,” Andy Street , managing director of John Lewis, Britain’s biggest depart-ment store chain, said earlier this month, while Steve Rowe, CEO of Marks & Spencer, the nation’s biggest cloth-ing retailer, described confidence as “fragile”.

While steps by clothing retailers to protect themselves from volatility in for-eign exchange rates through hedging will

provide some breathing space on the cur-rency issue, the hit to confidence is the more immediate threat as Britons typically cur-tail clothes shopping in hard times.

Market researcher Nielsen polled shoppers after the Brexit vote and found 41 percent planned to change their spend-ing habits to save on household expenses, with clothing and expensive grocery brands in their sights. In common with all British retailers, clothing sellers were already grappling with intense competition from online-only players and the cost inflation implications of the government-mandated minimum pay rate, the national living wage, as well as increased business rates.

Official data yesterday showed UK clothing sales were falling even before the referendum. Sales volumes in the three months to June were 5 percent lower than a year earlier — the worst performance for any calendar quarter in 25 years, and in sharp contrast to a buoyant picture for most other categories of retail.

Now clothing retailers also have to deal with a sharply depreciated pound.

Sterling has taken the brunt of market concern since the Brexit vote on June 23, falling to a 31-year low and trading below $1.28 on July 6 against $1.50 the day before the referendum. With the bulk of British clothing retailers’ goods sourced from Asian suppliers and paid for in dollars, a weaker pound has a major impact on their buying costs. Britain’s biggest clothing retailers, including M&S, Next and John Lewis, are hedged up to 18 months ahead, meaning that if sterling stays depressed the main impact will not start to be felt until the second half of their 2017-18 financial year.

Sportswear retailer Sports Direct is the notable exception, being unhedged for sterling-dollar for its 2016-17 year. Its share price is down 32 percent since the vote.

Clothing companies would normally be expected to hedge for the second half of 2017-18 and beyond, now and over the next few months. But with foreign currency markets volatile, the treasury departments

of firms are reviewing their hedging policies. They face a dilemma, explained a senior banker with several major British retailers as clients, because as UK interest rates look set to be cut there is a risk sterling could fall further. “Now might not be the right time to do it, equally waiting might not be the right thing to do,” he said.

That unease was echoed by a person with knowledge of the situation at a FTSE 100 clothing retailer. “You don’t want to be making a decision in July to hedge for 18 months time because nobody knows what’s going to happen. You could put yourself in a worse position,” said the per-son, adding that only the brave would start hedging now.

Faced with higher sourcing costs one solution could be to pass those costs on to consumers through higher prices.

However, in an already weak market shoppers will have little appetite for infla-tion and in the case of M&S raising prices would run counter to Rowe’s stated strat-egy of bringing them down to cure the firm’s perceived uncompetitiveness.

The average price of clothing has fallen by 15 percent in the last 10 years, according to official UK data. The key for clothing retailers will be their ability to mitigate the cost increases they face. “There are a number of things that we can do in terms of the sourcing side of things,” said Helen Weir, M&S’ chief finance officer, noting the firm imports 1 billion to £1.5bn worth of goods each year in dollars.

Options include changing the mix of sourcing countries and further increasing the proportion of direct sourcing from factories, cutting out middlemen. Also there might be scope to re-negotiate better terms with suppliers as Asian currencies have depreciated against the dollar.

Bankers say more radical options would require a cultural shift at retailers. They could pursue “dual pricing” where they negotiate part payment for supplies in different currencies from the dollar, for example using the Chinese renminbi.

Clothing sellers are nursing big share price falls and contemplating the cost of the depreciation in the pound versus their most important currency, the US dollar.

Labour market strength is boosting consumer spending and the housing market, which in turn are providing a lift to economic growth.

Shoppers are reflected in a window as they walk along Oxford Street in London.

21FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

Bolt eyes third sprint sweep to close Olympic chapter

Reuters

SYDNEY: Usain Bolt is keenly aware of the narrative of his extraordinary career and, for the fastest man who ever lived, the only fitting way to close its Olympic chapter is with a third sprint sweep at next month’s Rio Games.

Bolt is already assured of a place not only in the pantheon of his own sport but alongside the likes of Muhammad Ali, Pele, Michael Jor-dan and Jack Nicklaus - men whose names alone conjure up the notion of sporting excellence.

It is company the confident

Jamaican covets and he is deter-mined to concrete his legacy by capping eight years of sprint domi-nance by defending his 100, 200 and 4x100 metres relay titles in what he has said will be his final Olympics.

Barring injury or mishap, Bolt will run in his ninth Olympic final in the relay at the Rio Olympic Sta-dium on August 20, the day before he turns 30.

He ran his first final in Beijing five days before his 22nd birthday, exploding into the consciousness of sports fans around the world by coasting to 100 metres victory in a world record time of 9.69 seconds with one shoelace undone.

Since that balmy August night Bolt has proved unbeatable in major championships, winning 11 world titles and sweeping the three sprint titles at the Beijing and Lon-don Olympics.

The one title he missed came at the 2011 worlds in Daegu when he was disqualified from the 100 final.

Then, some of the conjecture over his false start focused on pos-sible jitters caused by a lack of fitness

but he blew away those theories with victories in the 200 and the relay.

Bolt has since lived with, and confounded, the injury narrative ahead of two major championships - a sore hamstring hampered him before London and a back problem similarly limited his outings before the 2015 world championships.

This year, Bolt was forced to skip the Jamaican Olympic trials because of another hamstring injury but his rivals, chastened perhaps by expe-rience, have no doubt he will be at his best in Rio.

Former world champion Tyson Gay described the injury scares as a “tradition”, while Justin Gatlin said it was all part of the “crazy stuff” of an Olympic year.

“On the eve of the Olympics we’ll all be debating whether he can win. And then he will win,” American 400 metres great Michael Johnson said.

Gatlin, as he was before Bolt’s triple world championship triumph in Beijing last year, is shaping as the biggest threat to the Jamaican’s monopoly on the Olympic sprint titles.

The 34-year-old American’s two doping convictions have lent the air of a morality play to the battle for sprint supremacy between the pair.

Bolt’s pristine doping record and profile have see him cast as the saviour of his sport as it battles the turmoil unleashed by a string of dop-ing and corruption scandals.

However brilliant, Bolt knows he cannot “save” his sport, and is con-tent instead to ensure his own legacy before he heads into retirement after next year’s world championships in London.

His form indicates Bolt might not be in position to challenge the world records of 9.58 and 19.19 seconds he ran to win the 100 and 200 at the Berlin world championships in 2009.

But, as Gatlin said at the US.trials when discussing the Jamaican’s injury problems, Bolt has made a habit of making the extraordinary ordinary:

“The mystery of the Olympics is in the air. It is full of dreams and sometimes dreams don’t come true. But come on, man, he’s Usain,” he commented.

America’s Gatlin poses biggest threat to Jamaican sprint king in Rio

Rudisha struggling for form, gunning for greatnessReuters

NAIROBI: David Rudisha tore up the tactical script at the London Olympics to smash the world record in one of the greatest ever 800 metre runs and emerge as an athletics superstar to rival the sport’s biggest names.

For Kenya’s “King David” to cement his Olympic legacy by becoming the first man to success-fully defend his title since the 1964 Olympics, however, he will need shake off doubts about his form and mental fortitude after a medi-ocre season. Rudisha finished third in the Kenyan trials and his Dia-mond League form has been poor. His mentor and coach, Brother Colm O’Connell, last month questioned Rudisha’s mental toughness and said he had “done very very little training” with him in 2016.

Few expect Rudisha, who hails from Africa’s Maasai tribe, to dent the world record of 1:40.91 set in London, the zenith of his illustrious career.

Yet it would be foolish to write

him off after he snatched his second world title in Beijing last year after a similarly off-colour season.

“I feel that my body is coming back pretty nicely and I am in bet-ter form than last year. I am focused and determined to defend my title,” Rudisha said after the Kenyan trials.

A Rudisha victory would go a long way toward lifting Kenyan spir-its after the African nation’s pristine reputation was tarnished by a spate of doping scandals that at one point threatened the country’s participa-tion at Rio.

Rudisha’s beaming smile and the manner of his 2012 victory, which his childhood hero and now IAAF Presi-dent Seb Coe described as “the most extraordinary piece of running I have probably ever seen”, catapulted him to global stardom.

“Bolt was good, Rudisha was magnificent,” Coe said after the stun-ning 2012 race, in which all eight athletes beat the gold-winning time set at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

O’Connell, an Irish mission-ary who first spotted Rudisha as a 14-year-old, told Reuters back in

October that Rudisha had achieved riches and fame and was now moti-vated by the prospect of “greatness”.

By the time of the Kenyan Olym-pic trials last month, however, O’Connell hinted at discord within the camp. “Although I know he is a very experienced athlete, I am not sure if he is mentally fit. It would be misleading to say I knew his men-tal or physical strength. He has not been in touch for a long time,” said O’Connell.

Rudisha afterwards referred to O’Connell as his “coach” on Twitter, refuting claims the two had split.

But in Kenya’s running heartlands there have been doubts voiced about Rudisha’s ability to replicate the type of form that saw him shine in London.

Rudisha has always been clear: he prefer medals over records, which are inevitably improved with previ-ous holders forgotten.

“There is nothing more special than winning the Olympics. That is something that you will be remem-bered for entire life and for many generations to come,” Rudisha said last year.

Gold medalist David Rudisha of Kenya competes in the men’s 800 metres final of the Gyulai Istvan Memorial - Hungarian Athletics Grand Prix at the athletic center of Szekesfehervar, Hungary last Sunday.

Cancellara quits Tour de

France for Olympic bid

AFP

FINHAUT-EMOSSON: Switzer-land’s Fabian Cancellara (pictured) quit the Tour de France on Wednes-day at the end of the 17th stage to concentrate on his bid for an Olym-pic Games gold medal.

The 35-year-old, nicknamed ‘Spartacus’, is the second high-pro-file rider to pull out of the Tour in two days after British sprinter Mark Cavendish withdrew on Tuesday to focus on his bid for a first Olympic medal.

“This was not an easy deci-sion to take, but I feel it is the right one,” said Cancellara in a statement released by his Trek team.

“I don’t like withdrawing from a race, especially not when our GC leader (Bauke Mollema) is in sec-ond place at four days from Paris.

“With some really hard stages ahead of us my support would nat-urally be more limited so we took the decision together to withdraw. It was a hard Tour for me -- a lot of stress and I feel tired. If I want to be good at the Olympics I need rest.”

It was a sad end for Cancellara who was riding in his last Tour de France.

“The Tour has given me a lot in the last twelve years and I don’t say this lightly,” he added.

“I gave a lot of thought to this decision to withdraw from the race. Today was very emotional for me - more than I expected it to be.

“Right now knowing that these were my last kilometers in the Tour de France is hard.”

Meanwhile, Rio’s drug testing laboratory had its suspension lifted by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) on Wednesday, clearing it to operate at the Olympics that start on August 5. The doping control labora-tory was suspended on June 22 due to a non-conformity with the Inter-national Standard for Laboratories.

Shotput champion Adams sees Rio light at end of injury tunnel Reuters

WELLINGTON: Valerie Adams’ (pic-tured) winning throw at the recent Diamond League meet in Monaco was well short of her career best but breaking the 20 metres mark in competition for the first time in nearly two years showed she is on track to defend her Olympic shotput title in Rio.

“The distance was definitely more important than the win,” the 31-year-old New Zealander said of her 20.05m throw. “The win is just a bonus, it shows I still have the com-petitive fire in me.”

Adams will attempt to become the first woman to win three suc-cessive Olympic shotput titles at the Rio de Janeiro Games but her path to that bid for glory has been far from smooth.

After winning gold in Beijing, Adams’ hopes of retaining her title in London suffered a setback when she discovered she had not even been

entered due to an administrative error by NZOC officials. Her prepara-tions upset, Adams was beaten to the gold by Nadzeya Ostapchuk of Bela-rus. A week later, however, Adams received a telephone call informing her that Ostapchuk had tested posi-tive for a banned steroid and was to

be stripped of the title.Her reaction was mixed. Joy at

becoming champion. Anger at being robbed of her Olympic moment.

The NZOC organised a spe-cial ceremony a few weeks after the Games to award her the gold medal and while overwhelmed by

the support from her compatriots she later conceded the whole Lon-don experience was “bittersweet”.

Adams went on to win a fourth successive world championships title at Moscow in 2013 but the physical toll of her sport began to catch up with her.

Surgery was needed to fix her left ankle and right knee at the end of the season, and while she recovered to win a third world indoors title and third Commonwealth gold in 2014, nagging pain in her left shoulder and right elbow forced her to go back under the knife.

She made a slow return to com-petition, not appearing again until a Diamond League meeting in Paris in July 2015.

With new rivals such as Germa-ny’s Christina Schwanitz, China’s Gong Lijao and American Michelle Carter proving they had caught up with the New Zealander, Adams finished fifth with a best throw of 18.79m, ending an unbeaten streak of 56 competitive events that had stretched back to August 2010.

SPORT22 FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

Isner, Monfils cruise into third round

AFP

WASHINGTON: US top seed John Isner and French second seed Gael Monfils cruised into the third round of the ATP and WTA Washington Open on Wednesday but former world number one Caroline Woz-niacki dropped out due to injury while leading.

Isner, coming off heartbreaking Wimbledon and Davis Cup defeats, fired 14 aces and dropped only three points on his first serve in a 6-3, 6-4 romp over Australian qualifier James Duckworth.

“I’m happy I got through my first match. I can get tripped up in those,” Isner said. “I’m not looking past anyone.”

Flamboyant Monfils, who had lost three matches in a row after suf-fering a mystery illness, fired 10 aces and lost only two points on his first serves in a 6-3, 6-2 victory over Tai-wan’s Lu Yen-hsun.

“I played a very solid match,” Monfils said. “I was surprised I could play that good so soon and I want to keep it going for the next few matches.”

Wozniacki, a two-time US Open runner-up from Denmark, was lead-ing 7-5, 3-4, when a left arm injury forced her to retire from her second-round match against Aussie top seed Samantha Stosur, the 2011 US Open winner.

“It happened at 5-all in the first set,” Wozniacki said. “I hit a back-hand and I just felt the pain.”

Wozniacki, who has battled inju-ries all year, fought into the second set but could not stand the pain. At 58th, she is out of the world top 50 for the first time since 2008.

“I’ll take it and try to run with it as far as I can,” said Stosur, who faces US wildcard Jessica Pegula in the quarter-finals.

Next for Monfils is Croatian 16th seed Borna Coric, who downed

Japan’s Yuichi Sugita 6-4, 6-4. Isner will meet Cypriot 15th seed Marcos Baghdatis, who ousted Australian John Millman 6-2, 6-4, for a quar-ter-final berth.

Aussie third seed Bernard Tomic fired 12 aces in beating American Donald Young 7-6 (7/4), 6-3 to book a third-round date with Croatian

13th seed Ivo Karlovic, who blasted 19 aces in beating American Brian Baker 6-3, 7-6 (7/4).

Isner and Monfils, who had first-round byes, have split eight career meetings and could play a third time at Washington in Sunday’s final. Isner won a 2007 semi-final while Monfils won a 2011 semi-final rematch, both going to a third-set tie-breaker.

“I look forward to playing Johnny,” Monfils said. “Every time I come here I play him.”

Neither has won the Washington hardcourt crown. Monfils, ranked 17th, lost to Czech Radek Stepanek in the 2011 final. Isner, ranked 16th, lost the 2007, 2013 and 2015 finals.

“To win here would be very spe-cial,” Isner said. “I’ve been very close before.”

Isner lost a third-round Wimble-don match to France’s Jo-Wilfried Tsonga after taking the first two sets, dropping the fifth set 19-17. Tsonga’s next foe, compatriot Richard Gas-quet, retired after six games, adding to Isner’s woes on what might have been.

“It was a very excruciating match for me and even tougher when I landed and found out Gasquet only lasted (six) games,” Isner said. “It was a tough pill to swallow.”

Adding to his pain was a Davis Cup home loss to Croatia last week-end after the US team took a 2-0 lead.

“You have to try to forget about it,” Isner said. “It’s tough, though. I haven’t forgotten about it. It’s hard to forget about it. It’s in the back of my mind right now.”

Since losing to Rafael Nadal in April’s Monte Carlo final, Monfils had withdrawn from Munich with a groin strain, the French Open and Halle with a severe illness, but he blitzed Lu in 62 minutes.

“It has been a tough month for sure,” said Monfils. “I didn’t do any-thing but rest. I don’t know how I got this thing. They cannot put a name to it. But I feel much better. I feel my ability is back.”

German 19-year-old seventh seed Alexander Zverev beat US 18-year-old Taylor Fritz 6-4, 6-2. Zverev, ranked 27th, is the young-est to crack the world top 30 since Nadal in 2005.

“I’m happy with the way I’m playing,” Zverev said. “It’s a great start to the hardcourts.”

Former world number one Caroline Wozniacki drops out due to injury at Washington Open

Venus Williams of the United States competes against Magda Linette of Poland during day three of the Bank of the West Classic at the Stanford University Taube Family Tennis Stadium in Stanford, California, yesterday.

Venus Williams pulls out three-set win at StanfordAFP

SAN FRANCISCO: Top seed Venus Williams fended off a spirited chal-lenge in her opening match against world No. 87 Magda Linette at the WTA Tour’s Stanford tournament Wednesday as she needed three sets to advance.

Former two-time champion Wil-liams defeated Linette 6-3, 6-7 (6/8), 6-2 to reach the quarter-finals of the hardcourt tournament at Stanford University.

The 36-year-old Williams is hoping she doesn’t suffer a post-Wimbledon letdown and she now has an easy path to the semi-finals since her next opponent won’t be ranked in the top 200 in the world.

Williams will face either Cath-erine Bellis, who is ranked 203rd, or Sachia Vickery who is one spot back of Bellis in the world rankings.

“It would be very special to get No. 50 here but I am just going to try to keep advancing,” said Williams who has 49 career titles after win-ning in Kaohsiung, Taiwan earlier this year.

Williams blasted 11 aces and had four double faults against Linette in the two hour, 14 minute match on the main stadium.

Earlier this month Williams reached the semi-finals of Wim-bledon, her first semi at a major in five years.

Williams played her first pro-fessional tennis match at this event in 1994 and she has won here twice but not since beating Kim Clijsters 14

years ago. The former world number one has seen her game fall on hard times over the past several years.

And she got off to a rocky start to this season before recovering, losing in the first round of the Australian Open to the 47th ranked Johanna Konta. To add insult to injury, organ-izers fined her a record $5,000 for refusing to attend the post match news conference. She also suffered losses in opening second round matches at both Miami and Indian Wells.

Linette, who is ranked second in Poland behind Agnieszka Rad-wanska, had to be pleased to take the world number seven to three sets in her Stanford debut.

In 2015 she made her Grand Slam debuts at the French Open, US Open and Wimbledon.

Chinese group completes Wolves takeoverAFP

LONDON: Chinese group Fosun International completed their take-over of English Championship club Wolves for an estimated £45m yes-terday.

Fosun, one of the largest invest-ment groups in China, are the latest Asian consortium to snap up an Eng-lish club as they look to cash in on the huge financial rewards on offer to teams promoted to the Premier League.

Premier League champions Leicester are owned by Thai bil-lionaire Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha,

while Wolves’ local rivals Aston Villa were purchased by Chinse busi-nessman Tony Xia earlier in the close-season.

Fosun started in 1992 through five graduates from Fudan Univer-sity, including its current chairman Guo Guangchang, 49, who is China’s 17th richest man.

The group will have a football board of four people with Jeff Shi, who led the negotiations on behalf of Fosun, becoming the club’s representative.

Sky Sun will join him with local businessmen John Bowater and John Gough remaining as non-executive board members.

“We are delighted to have

completed the deal to become the new owners of such a famous and historic club as Wolves,” Shi said.

“Football is enjoying a huge growth in China and, of course, is England’s national sport. As part of our strategy, it makes perfect sense to buy a great football club.

“Our goal is crystal clear: we will do our very best to help take Wolves back to the Premier League as soon as possible and to stay there.

“We believe the club and the fans belong at the top of English football and getting there is our first and top priority.”

Fosun initially invested money in real estate and the health-care industry, but soon expanded

internationally and moved into fash-ion and tourism.

They have spent $30bn in 20 years, mostly in the United States and Europe, with interests in the likes of Cirque du Soleil and French resort brand Club Med.

Wolves finished last season 14th in the Championship and fans were unhappy with their failure to chal-lenge for a play-off place.

Fosun’s takeover will raise fresh doubts about the future of Wolves manager Kenny Jackett, who is cur-rently in Ireland with the squad.

The 54-year-old is understood to have told the team earlier this month that he had no assurances over his future.

Midfielder Wagner Ribeiro (right) with Al Arabi official during the signing ceremony in Doha on Wednesday.

El Jaish midfielder Wagner joins Al Arabi The Peninsula

DOHA: Qatar Stars League (QSL) side Al Arabi has continued to strengthen their squad ahead of the new QSL season, announcing the signing of El Jaish midfielder Wag-ner Ribeiro.

Wagner was greeted to the club on Wednesday evening by Al Arabi vice chairman Jassim Al Kuwari, and put pen to paper on a one year loan deal.

The signing of Wagner rep-resents a busy week for Al Arabi, who has also welcomed midfielder Luis Jiminez and new head coach

Gerardo Pelusso to the club. Al Arabi have been particularly busy in the local transfer market this sum-mer with the accusation of Wagner now the third high profile local signing by the Dream Team from El Jaish. The former Qatari inter-national now also joins defenders Rami Fayez and Mohammed Jumma at the club.

In other news, Iranian inter-national Ashkan Dejagah returned to club training on Wednesday evening.

Al Arabi is now set to train in Doha till July 30, before heading to their preseason training camp in Nuremberg, Germany till August 26.Borussia Dortmund players during training ahead of the International Champions Cup at Shanghai Stadium, in China, yesterday.

ATP-WTA Washington Open Results

Washington: Results on

Wednesday from the third day

of the ATP and WTA Washington

Open (x denotes seed):

Men2nd round

Steve Johnson (USA x5) bt Adrian

Mannarino (FRA) 6-3, 6-4

Gilles Muller (LUX x14) bt Yoshihito

Nishioka (JPN) 6-4, 6-1

Alexander Zverev (GER x7) bt Taylor

Fritz (USA) 6-4, 6-2

Ryan Harrison (USA) bt Viktor

Troicki (SRB x10) 7-6 (7/4), 6-4

Gael Monfils (FRA x2) bt Lu Yen-

hsun (TPE) 6-3, 6-2

Ivo Karlovic (CRO x13) bt Brian

Baker (USA) 6-3, 7-6 (7/4)

Malek Jaziri (TUN) bt Kevin

Anderson (RSA x9) 5-7, 6-4, 7-6

(7/3)

John Isner (USA x1) bt James

Duckworth (AUS) 6-3, 6-4

Marcos Baghdatis (CYP x15) bt John

Millman (AUS) 6-2, 6-4

Jack Sock (USA x6) bt Lukas Lacko

(SVK) 7-6 (7/1), 6-4

Borna Coric (CRO x16) bt Yuichi

Sugita (JPN) 6-4, 6-4

Bernard Tomic (AUS x3) bt Donald

Young (USA) 7-6 (7/4), 6-3

Women2nd round

Yanina Wickmayer (BEL x7) bt

Zhang Shuai (CHN) 6-3, 7-5

Jessica Pegula (USA) bt Christina

McHale (USA) 7-5, 6-2

Samantha Stosur (AUS x1) bt

Caroline Wozniacki (DEN) 5-7, 4-3,

retired, left arm

Yulia Putintseva (KAZ x6) bt Usue

Arconada (USA) 6-4, 4-6, 6-4

1st roundLauren Davis (USA) bt Shelby

Rogers (USA) 5-7, 7-5, 6-3

Kristina Mladenovic (FRA x4) bt

Samantha Crawford (USA) 6-2,

2-6, 6-3

Al Shaqab team’s riders pose for a group picture on the sidelines of their training. The Al Shaqab Endurance team is currently participating in several endurance competitions in Europe in order to prepare and qualify for the FEI World Endurance Championship to be held in Slovakia in September 2016 and the World Endurance Championship for Young Horses (7 years old) to be held in France in September 2016.

Al Shaqab team visits Europe

SPORT 23FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016

Froome moves closer to third Tour title

Reuters

MEGEVE: Britain’s Chris Froome put the hammer down in his bid to retain the Tour de France title when he won the 18th stage, a 17-km mountain time trial, to extend his overall lead to almost four minutes yesterday.

The Team Sky rider, aiming to become the first to retain the title since Miguel Indurain in 1995, clocked a best time of 30 minutes 43 seconds on a course featuring the punishing Cote de Domancy, a 2.5-km climb at an average gradient of 9.4 percent.

He beat time trial specialist Tom Dumoulin by 21 seconds and Italian Fabio Aru by 33 seconds.

“I really didn’t expect to beat Tom today, pacing was key. I started off steady and really controlled that

first part then gave it everything I had,” said Froome. Dutchman Bauke Mollema, who started the day 2:27 behind Froome in the general clas-sification, lost 1:25 and trails the defending champion by a massive 3:52 going into two final stages in the Alps before Sunday’s parade to the Champs Elysees.

Froome’s compatriot Adam Yates is third, 4:16 off the pace, as the race to the podium is set to heat up with at least five riders still in the mix for second place. Colombian Nairo Quintana, runner-up to Froome in 2013 and 2015, had another tough day in the saddle, losing 1:10. The Movistar rider is fourth overall, 4:37 behind Froome. On his heels is Frenchman Romain Bardet, 4:57

behind after finishing a surprise fifth on Thursday, while Australian Richie Porte, fourth on Thursday, is sixth three seconds further back.

“I’m happy it’s a good time trial, I’ve got good sensations, it was pleasing. There are still two big stages left. I hope I’ll find a good ter-rain to attack,” said Bardet.

Froome started cautiously but finished strong to claim his second stage win in this Tour, raising his fist in celebration after crossing the line.

“As always in the time trial the pacing strategy is critical, particu-larly in one like today where it was very easy, with that first steep ramp, to go out a little bit too hard and pay for it at the end,” said Team Sky manager Dave Brailsford.

“So you have to be brave on a course like that and hold a little bit back to start with so that you can get all your effort out over the course.”

Froome was one of few riders to use both a time trial bike and a rear disc wheel, which played a part.

“We went for a very lightweight TT bike, disc wheels, I think Chris was one of the only riders to do a disc but we spent a lot of time doing the maths and the calculations and it looked like it came out right thank-fully,” said Brailsford. Today’s 19th stage is a demanding 146-km moun-tain trek with an uphill finish at Saint-Gervais Mont Blanc.

Yellow jersey leader Team Sky rider Chris Froome of Britain arrives on the finish line during the individual time trial at Tour de France yesterday.

Briton extends overall lead to almost four minutes; wins 18th stage ahead of time trial specialist Dumoulin

Hamilton sweats

over record fifth

Hungary victory

AFP

BUDAPEST: Defending champion Lewis Hamilton faces a demand-ing and sweaty battle with his championship-leading Mer-cedes team-mate Nico Rosberg and a potentially-rampant Red Bull team as he seeks a decisive victory at this weekend’s Hungar-ian Grand Prix.

The 31-year-old Briton, who is also aiming to complete a hat-trick of successive wins after triumphs in Austria and his home British event, can overhaul Ros-berg’s one-point lead in the title race with his first win in Hungary since 2013.

But he knows that the tight, twisting and, often, swelteringly hot Hungaroring circuit has not been kind to him, or Mercedes, in recent years as he bids for a record fifth success.

He currently shares the record for most wins at the track with seven-time champion Michael Schumacher. Both have won four times.

“The past couple of years, I haven’t had the smoothest of weekends at Budapest,” said Hamilton whose last win in Hun-gary was in 2013. “But I know I’ve got the pace, so I’m gunning to turn that around this time.

“I have incredible support there so I can’t wait to get out the track. Ever since the low of Barce-lona this year, I have been able to cultivate this really strong men-tal attitude.

“I’m feeling fresh, powerful and confident. I’m feeling that fire inside me.”

By contrast, Rosberg, who endured a torrid weekend at the British Grand Prix, where he was penalised for a radio-commu-nications infringement and saw his once-comfortable lead cut to a single point, has lost momen-tum since the Spanish race in May.

In six races since the F1 circus arrived at the Circuit de Cat-alunya, Rosberg has won only once while Hamilton has collected four wins to release his team-mate’s grip on the championship.

Rosberg led by 43 points in May and goes into this race seek-ing his first win at a track that this weekend celebrates the 30th anniversary of the first Hungarian race and the first behind what was then known as ‘the Iron Curtain’.

Last year the German finished eighth, but he remained defiant ahead of the 11th race in this year’s 21-race calendar -- the turning point of the season and the year.

“The battle is on with Lewis and I’m feeling great in myself and great in the car,” said Rosberg. “So, bring it on.”

Both men, however, are mind-ful that their duel for the crown could be shoved into the shade by rivals Red Bull who are expected to be fast and highly-competitive on the dusty track set in rolling countryside about 20km north of the capital.

“We will need to be flawless to come out on top this week-end,” said Mercedes team chief Toto Wolff. “This track plays to the strength of our rivals.

The Hungaroring, where an estimated 200,00 crowd attended the inaugural race three decades ago, may also be good for Ferrari who triumphed last year when four-time champion Sebastian Vettel was in masterful form.

The Italian team, however, appears to be struggling for con-sistency and reliability -- notably with gearboxes -- and has report-edly approached former technical chief Briton Ross Brawn to return as a consultant.

Lewis Hamilton

Dhawan curbs aggression as India reach 72-1 at lunch against WI AFP

NORTH SOUND, Antigua and Bar-buda: Shikhar Dhawan curbed his natural aggression in compiling an unbeaten 46 as India reached the lunch interval on the opening day of the first Test against the West Indies at 72 for one at the Sir Vivian Rich-ards Stadium in Antigua yesterday.

Famed for his unrestrained attacking instincts in all forms of the game, the left-handed opening bats-man displayed admirable restraint against bowling that lacked any real pace and potency, with the notable exception of Shannon Gabriel.

With skipper Virat Kohli choos-ing to bat first on a surface devoid of any consistent pace and bounce to really threaten the batsmen, Gabriel still caused alarms for the Indian opening pair.

His raw pace removed Murali Vijay for just seven after half-an-hour’s play when the right-hander fended at a lifting delivery for Kraigg Brathwaite to take the catch

at the second attempt at second slip. Cheteshwar Pujara looked untrou-bled on joining Dhawan at the crease with the pair putting on 58 runs for the second wicket by the interval. Pujara resumes in the afternoon ses-sion on 14.

Having opted to go into the match without uncapped fast-medium bowler Miguel Cummins, the only other pace threat available

in the West Indies pre-match squad of 13, it was left to captain Jason Holder, fellow medium-pacer Car-los Brathwaite and debutant Roston Chase to do the bulk of the work in support of Gabriel.

Chase, the 24-year-old Barba-dian who earned selection on the basis of a consistent domestic season with the bat, delivered eight overs of uncomplicated off-spin.

Particularly surprising was him being used ahead of the lone front-line spinner in the side, Devendra Bishoo.

While the West Indies have packed their side with batting, India opted for a bowling attack compris-ing three pacers and two spinners, omitting Ravindra Jadeja in pref-erence for Amit Mishra to work in tandem with Ravichandran Ashwin as specialist slow bowlers.

West Indies have not defeated India in Test cricket for 14 years since the end of the 2002 series in the Caribbean and are the decided underdogs for the first meeting with these opponents on home soil for five years.

Misbah says ‘no disrespect’ in press-up routineAFP

MANCHESTER: Pakistan captain Misbah-ul-Haq was adamant his unusual press-up celebrations at Lord’s were in no way aimed at Eng-land.

Misbah marked his maiden Test appearance at ‘the home of cricket’ with a first-innings century.

The 42-year-old, who in the process became the oldest player to score a Test century for 82 years, marked his hundred by performing several press-ups.

It was a gesture repeated by the whole Pakistan team in front of the Lord’s Pavilion after they wrapped up a 75-run win, with more than a day to spare, to go 1-0 up in the four-match series.

The press-up routine has become the squad’s way of thanking army staff who put them through a pre-tour boot camp.

“No disrespect for opposition -- they (England) are a fine team and we know their strengths,” Misbah told

reporters at Old Trafford yesterday, a day out from the start of the sec-ond Test at the Manchester ground.

“The celebrations were nothing to do with England, only a gesture for those we worked with,” said the Pakistani captain.

Meanwhile the skipper confirmed key leg-spinner Yasir Shah would be fit to play in the second Test.

Shah, who in the series opener took a match-winning 10 for 141 -- the best figures by a Pakistan bowler in a Lord’s Test -- was hit on the shoulder batting in the nets on Wednesday.

But scans revealed no significant damage and Misbah said: “That was a wake-up call for him.

“It was a bit of a concern -- but after the scan I think he’s okay. So no worries.”

England off-spinner Moeen Ali took just two wickets at Lord’s.

He was milked by Misbah in the first innings, although the veteran batsman did hole out for a duck off Ali second time around.

“I back my ability to attack spin-ners, and use sweeps. That paid off in

the first innings. It’s a match between ball and bat, sometimes you win it, sometimes it’s the ball.”

Meanwhile, England captain Alastair Cook announced that the hosts had reduced their squad for the

second Test against Pakistan from 14 to 12 after dropping Steven Finn and Jake Ball.

The fast bowlers, who both played in England’s 75-run defeat by Pakistan in the first Test at Lord’s, were released ahead of the second Test, which starts at Old Trafford on Friday.

Now fit-again fast bowler James Anderson (shoulder) and all-rounder Ben Stokes (knee), who both didn’t play at Lord’s, are set to make their Test return in Manchester.

England’s decision means they could give a home debut to leg-spin-ner Adil Rashid, all of whose three Test appearances to date were away to Pakistan in the United Arab Emir-ates last year.

“We’re going to name a 12 -- Ste-ven Finn and Bally are missing out,” Cook told reporters at Old Trafford yesterday.

“That means, obviously, Ben Stokes and Jimmy Anderson are back in - and Adil’s going to be in the 12, just depending on what happens to that wicket by tomorrow (Friday),” he added.

Pakistan’s captain misbah-ul-haq (left) talks with Pakistan’s head coach Mickey Arthur during a practice session at Old Trafford Cricket Ground in Manchester, England yesterday.

India (I Innings)M Vijay c K Brathwaite b Gabriel 7

S Dhawan (batting) 46

C Pujara (batting) 14

Extras (B4, NB1) 5

Total (27 overs, 1 wkt) 72To bat: V Kohli, A Rahane, W Saha, R

Ashwin, A Mishra, I Sharma, M Shami, U

Yadav.

Fall of wicket: 1-14 (Vijay)

Bowling: S Gabriel 7-2-18-1 (1nb), J Holder

6-2-14-0, C Brathwaite 6-2-6-0, R Chase

8-0-30-0.

SCOREBOARD

STANDINGS (TOP 10)1 Chris Froome (GBR/Sky)

77h55:53.

2 Bauke Mollema (NED/TRE) at

3:52.

3 Adam Yates (GBR/ORI) 4:16.

4 Nairo Quintana (COL/MOV)

4:37.

5 Romain Bardet (FRA/ALM)

4:57.

6 Richie Porte (AUS/BMC) 5:00.

7 Fabio Aru (ITA/AST) 6:08.

8 Alejandro Valverde (ESP/MOV)

6:37.

9 Louis Meintjies (RSA/LAM) 7:15.

10 Daniel Martin (IRL/ETI) 7:18.

Venus pulls out three set win at Stanford

PAGE | 21 PAGE | 24

Bolt eyes third sprint sweep at

Olympics

FRIDAY 22 JULY 2016 • 17 SHAWWAL 1437

www.thepeninsulaqatar.com

@peninsulaqatar @peninsula_qatarthepeninsulaqatar

Russian Olympic ban upheld

AFP

LAUSANNE: The international sports tribunal yesterday rejected an appeal by 67 Russian athletes seeking to overturn an IAAF doping ban on them competing at the Rio Olympics.

The ruling by the Court of Arbi-tration for Sport (CAS) is seen as a key indicator as the International Olym-pic Committee (IOC) debates whether to order a blanket ban on Russia over accusations of state-run doping.

The IOC said it will study the CAS decision before a conference call on Sunday with its executive board.

A decision on banning Russia from the Rio Games which start on August 5 could come this weekend, an IOC spokesperson said.

CAS said it had “dismissed” an appeal by the Russian Olympic Committee and 67 athletes against the suspension ordered by the Inter-national Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).

The 67 included two time pole vault champion Yelena Isinbayeva.

The IAAF ban covers all inter-national competition, including Rio, and follows an investigation last year which found widespread “state-sponsored” doping.

Russia is an athletics powerhouse and its team’s absence from Rio will leave a gaping hole in major Summer Games competitions.

Isinbayeva called the CAS ruling a “funeral for athletics” and blasted the court based in Lausanne, Swit-zerland for issuing “a blatant political order.”

The Kremlin expressed “deep regret” over the court’s decision and it had “no legal basis.” Russia has denied any state involvement in the doping crisis.

Originally, 68 Russians had appealed against the IAAF ban but

the governing body has cleared US-based long jumper Darya Klishina to compete in Rio as a neutral.

The IOC and the CAS decision said that Klishina could compete under the Russian flag.

An IOC ethics commission is to rule on the case of Yuliya Stepanova, an 800m runner who gave evidence about the doping.

The IAAF welcomed the CAS tri-bunal ruling.

“Today’s judgement has created a level playing field for athletes,” said an IAAF statement.

“The CAS award upholds the rights of the IAAF to use its rules for the protection of the sport (and) to protect clean athletes.”

The CAS ruling has been the focus of Olympic attention, how-ever, since an independent WADA report this week said Russia ran a “state-dictated failsafe system” of drug cheating in 30 sports at the 2014 Sochi Games and other major events.

IOC president Thomas Bach called Russia’s actions a “shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sport and on the Olym-pic Games.”

According to the report by Cana-dian lawyer Richard McLaren, the doping included the switching of Russian samples by secret serv-ice operatives at the 2013 world championships in Moscow. It said the operation was directed by the sports ministry, with help from the FSB intelligence agency. WADA, backed by the United States and other nations, has called for Russia to be completely banned from the Rio Games. The IAAF suspended Russia in November because of an earlier doping investigation which also said there was “state-sponsored” action.

It refused to lift the suspension last month, meaning no Russian ath-letes could take part in Rio.

Russia was the second most suc-cessful athletics nation at the 2012 London Olympics, behind the United States, with seven gold medals, four silver and five bronze.

Originally, Russia had 17 med-als. But several are already at risk because of doping failures.

Olympic 3,000 metre champion Yulia Zarapova has tested positive for

anabolic steroids and will almost cer-tainly be stripped of her gold medal.

Woman’s discus thrower Darya Pishchalnikova, silver medallist in London, has been banned for 10 years because of drug failures.

The IOC has not yet reconfirmed the results of the London Olympics following the retesting of doping samples.IAAF president Sebastian Coe said the CAS ruling should not give cause for celebration.

“While we are thankful that our rules and our power to uphold our rules and the anti-doping code have been supported, this is not a day for triumphant statements.

“I didn’t come into this sport to stop athletes from competing. It is our federation’s instinctive desire to include, not exclude.”

He said that after the Rio Games an IAAF task force “will continue to work with Russia to establish a clean safe environment for its ath-letes so that its federation and team can return to international recogni-tion and competition.”

Meanwhile, Sprint king Usain Bolt believes the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruling on Russia’s drug cheats will scare athletes and send a strong message that doping won’t be tolerated.

“This will scare a lot of people, or send a strong message that the sport is serious about cleaning up,” Bolt told reporters in London.

Lopetegui picked

to breathe new

life into Spain

AFP

MADRID: Julen Lopetegui, who led Spain’s youth teams to inter-national success, was tasked yeserday with breathing new life into La Roja after they crashed out of the 2014 World Cup and Euro 2016.

The Spanish football federa-tion announced the 49-year-old former goalkeeper would take over from Vicente del Bosque as manager of the national team, weeks after the latter resigned following Spain’s defeat to Italy in the last 16 of Euro 2016.

Del Bosque had led Spain to the 2010 World Cup and Euro 2012 titles, after taking over from Euro 2008-winning coach Luis Aragones.

But the second half of his stint was disappointing, with the 2-0 defeat to Italy following a shock group-stage exit from the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, and he was criticised for not having given the newer gener-ation a chance.

Thanks to his success with Spain’s under-19s and under-21s, Lopetegui has long been a favour-ite of Spanish FA head Angel Maria Villar, who made the appointment before concentrating on his bid to replace Michel Platini as UEFA chief.

He is reported to have over-come stiff competition from veteran former Sevilla and Athletic Bilbao coach Joaquin Caparros for the post.

Del Bosque wished Lopetegui well yesterday.

“He’s a man with experience, well trained and with huge enthu-siasm and lots of energy,” he told Radio Marca.

“He will know how to man-age (the team) like he has done brilliantly in the younger age categories.”

Lopetegui has over his career achieved varying degrees of suc-cess on the pitch and as a coach.

His spells as a goalkeeper at Real Madrid and Barcelona saw him spend much of his time on the bench.

But he was highly successful at smaller club Logrones from 1991 to 1994 at a time when the team was in the country’s first division.

Retiring from professional football in 2002, he became coach of Madrid-based Rayo Vallecano -- a team in Spain’s second tier -- where he had last played before retiring.

He then moved on to Real Madrid where he coached the club’s Castilla reserve team, the same post that Zinedine Zidane held before moving on to manag-ing the first team.

But Lopetegui, who hails from the northern Basque coun-try, really made his name when he coached the national team’s under-19s, under-20s and under-21s from 2010 to 2014.

He led his teams to victory in the 2012 European Under-19 Championship and a year later in the Under-21 European Champi-onship which featured David de Gea, Thiago Alcantara and Alvaro Morata, all of whom were at Euro 2016.

Fresh from that success, he took over Porto in 2014 and led them to the quarter-finals of the 2014/15 Champions League.

Court of Arbitration for Sport rejects appeal by 67 Russian athletes seeking to overturn an IAAF order on banning them from competing at the Rio Olympics

English women’s rugby to get 48 pro contractsAgencies

LONDON: English women’s rugby will benefit from 48 professional contracts for players next season, the Rugby Football Union announced yesterday.

The contracts will include 16 full-time deals that will concentrate on the sport’s 15-a-side version.

England Women first awarded contracts in October 2014, when 20 were given to sevens players only.

The new arrangement will also feature 16 part-time, three-day-a-week contracts with a sevens focus, with an additional 16 short-term deals that will allow players to attend residential camps ahead of major tournaments such as the World Cup and Six Nations, England

Women announced. It is all part of a drive towards England’s World Cup defence next year.

“The RFU is committed to sup-porting the growth of women’s rugby,” RFU chief executive Ian Ritchie said.

“We are immensely proud of Eng-land Women’s achievements, and we want to provide the best support to continue this success.”

Full-time contract recipients will be announced in September, when the deals also come into effect, with the majority of players concentrat-ing on 15s being released to play club rugby throughout the season.

Meanwhile, Buoyed by their stun-ning victory in the Singapore sevens, Kenya’s men’s team will be vying for a top-three finish at next month’s Rio Olympics when the sevens game makes its debut.

The team, is set to leave for Rio de Janeiro on Sunday after undergoing a rigorous two-week high altitude training camp at Nandi Hills in West-ern Kenya, alongside their women counterparts.

Head coach Benjamin Ayimba has overseen a marked improve-ment with Kenya’s performances in the international circuit since his return to the helm last September, and he’s looking forward to greater success in Rio.

“I don’t know where they (play-ers) get their energy, but they are a bunch of very good people, I think that is very positive. And winning that Singapore tournament, has made us realise that we can actually win in the Olympics,” Ayimba said.

“I am very confident, bordering arrogance actually... the gold actu-ally, nothing less... for the boys the

gold is a target, and for the girls to get to the top eight of their tour-nament because that will give us a platform to prepare then for the next Olympics.”

Kenya, currently ranked ninth in the world, are drawn in a tough Pool C in Rio, alongside former world champions New Zealand, England and Japan.

Top player Biko Adema, who has returned to the team after a long injury-lay off, said Kenya was look-ing forward to playing in Rio.

“Rugby has not been in the Olympics so it’s awesome that it is now there. I don’t think that I would say that we are scared, we are just probably very excited,” Adema said.

“We need to have our focus, which is to play and play well.”

Kenya have made huge strides

in rugby sevens, which apart from athletics will be the only team sport representing the east African nation in Rio, famed for its middle and long distance running.

Apart from winning the Sin-gapore sevens --- their first-ever victory in the international circuit series --- Kenya reached the semi-final of the World Cup in Dubai in 2009.

Many young Kenyan players have been inspired to play in the sevens side, as compared to the tra-ditional 15-a-side game, which has long struggled to find a sure footing in the country.

The popularity of the sevens, known for its dynamism and crowd-appeal began to change in Kenya in the late 1960’s with the intro-duction of the seven-a-side league competition.

Secretary General of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) Matthieu Reeb gestures after delivering a statement at its headquarters in Lausanne, yesterday. The Court of Arbitration for Sport today dismissed a Russian appeal against a ban imposed by athletics governing body the IAAF over state-run doping, barring the country’s track and field team from the Rio Games.

A combination of pictures shows some of the top Russian athletes that may miss the upcoming 2016 summer Olympics in Rio. Yesterday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) dismissed an appeal against a ban on Russia’s track and field team for the Rio Olympic Games over state-run doping. TOP ROW, FROM LEFT: Sergey Shubenkov (men’s 110 metres hurdles), Yelena Isinbayeva (women’s pole vault), Vladimir Morozov (men’s 50-metre freestyle swim), and Yuliya Efimova (women’s 100m breaststroke swim). SECOND ROW, FROM LEFT: Sofya Velikaya (Women’s sabre), Aliya Mustafina (Artistic Gymnastics), Dmitriy Muserskiy (left) and Dmitriy Ilinykh (men’s volleyball), and Evgenia Kanaeva (Rhythmic Gymnastics).

ISINBAYEVA MOURNS ‘FUNERAL OF ATHLETICS’