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Volume 23 | Number 7466 | 2 RiyalsThursday 15 March 2018 | 27 Jumada II I 1439 www.thepeninsula.qa

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QNA

DOHA: Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani sent a cables of condolences to President of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, Bidhya Devi Bhandari, and to President of People’s Republic of Bangladesh, Muhammad Abdul Hamid on the victims of the Bangladeshi civil aircraft crash at the Trib-huvan International Airport in Nepal and wishing speedy recovery for the injured. Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani sent similar cables.

Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani sent similar cables to Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina Wajed and Prime Minister of Nepal, Khadga Prasad Oli.

Emir greets President of NepalDOHA: Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani sent a cable of congratula-tions to President of Nepal, Bidhya Devi Bhandari, on the occasion of her re-election for a new presidential term. Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani sent similar cable.

Emir congratulates German ChancellorDOHA: Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani sent a cable of congratula-tions to German Chancellor Dr Angela Merkel on the occasion of her re-election for a new term. Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani and Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani sent similar cables.

PM launches five-year NDS2 Emir condoles with Presidents of Nepal and Bangladesh

MOHAMMED OSMAN THE PENINSULA

DOHA: The blockade enforced on Qatar has proven the visionary foresight of the country’s wise leadership which had launched Qatar National Vision 2030 back in 2008, said the Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani in a speech during the launch of Qatar’s 2nd National Development Strategy (NDS2) 2018-2022.

The national strategies are steps towards the completion of Qatar National Vision 2030 and its four pillars represented in eco-nomic, social, human and envi-ronmental development.

H E the Prime Minister launched the 2nd strategy during a ceremony held yesterday at Sheraton Hotel in the presence of a number of their Excellencies Sheikhs, ministers, and officials in governmental and non-gov-ernmental sectors which are part of the strategy.

The goal of the QNV 2030 was building a society based on justice and equality with a con-stitution that protects freedoms and enhances traditions, morals, security and stability said H E the Prime Minister, noting that the vision was responding to the

ambitions of the people of Qatar in achieving balanced, sus-tainable development that uses the country’s resources optimally.

H E the Prime Minister listed some of those challenges including that development must be sustained, maintains the reli-gious and cultural identity, must be managed in a way that avoids the negative consequences of years of rapid growth.

Other challenges also include the size and type of labour needed to strike a balance between the country’s national identity and the safety of society on one side, and the require-ments of development on the other. The attention paid to the environment was also crucial given the country’s hydrocarbon resources and the fact that the region’s economy relies on the

same source, which compounds the threats to environment and the threats of pollution.

H E the Prime Minister said that the current phase requires meeting all the challenges that we must be overcome. He noted that all government entities, the private sector, and

non-governmental organisations participated in the preparation of the NDS2. The methodology focused on analysing the current status, comparing it regionally and internationally, and then determining the priorities for the strategy.

H E the Prime Minister called

for strengthening of human planning capacities and the capacity-building of the members of the specialised departments, and for enhancing the efficiency of their performance.

→CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani speaking at the launch of Second National Development Strategy at Sheraton Hotel yesterday.

DIMDEX 2018 attracts nearly 13,000 visitors DOHA: A record number of agreements have been signed at the Doha International Maritime Defence Exhibition and Conference (DIMDEX 2018), which concluded yesterday attracting close to 13,000 visitors.

The biggest deal was signed between Qatar Air Force at the Ministry of Defence and Italian aerospace and defence group Leonardo and under it, the consortium will supply 28 medium sized twin-engine NH90 military helicopters to Qatar.

The signing ceremony was attended by Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Defence Affairs H E Dr Khalid bin Mohamed Al Attiyah and Italian Minister

of Defence Roberta Pinotti.In a press statement, Staff Brigadier

(Sea) Abdulbaqi S. Al Ansari, Chairman of DIMDEX said that “more than 27 agree-ments and MoUs were signed during the last three days of DIMDEX. Next edition of DIMDEX will witness military exhibits made by Barzan Holdings, the first defence and security company responsible for empowering the military capabilities of the Qatar Armed Forces in the State of Qatar.” “Barzan Holdings has partnerships with manufacturers, and there will be some of the equipment made in Qatar through Barzan Holdings like light weapons, military vehicles and latter the complicated defence equipment,” he said.


Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Defence Affairs H E Dr Khalid bin Mohamed Al Attiyah (right, standing) and Italian Minister of Defence, Roberta Pinotti (left, standing) witnessing the signing of an agreement between Qatar Air Force and Italian aerospace and defence group Leonardo to supply 28 medium-sized twin-engine NH90 military helicopters to Qatar. The signing ceremony was held at the Ministry of Defence yesterday.

SIDI MOHAMED THE PENINSULA

New centre to market local agricultural products

DOHA: The Ministry of Munici-pality and Environment (MME), in cooperation with the Ministry of Economy and Commerce (MEC) launched yesterday a new initiative to make available local vegetables to the consumers without middlemen at major commercial outlets.

Plans are afoot to establish a new centre for marketing local agricultural products, said Sheikh Dr Faleh bin Nasser Al Thani, Assistant Undersecretary for Agriculture Affairs & Fisheries at the Ministry of Municipalities and

Environment. He said that the new centre will offer service for packaging the local agricultural products and storing the surplus stock.

He was speaking with media persons on the sideline of a cer-emony held at Lulu Hyper Markets - Gharafa to launch new initiative. The new initiative “Qatar Farms” was launched yesterday at Lulu Hyper Markets Gharafa branch and Family Food Centre (FFC) Al Khisa branch and will be launched today at Carrefour Villaggio Mall and Al Meera at Hyatt Plaza Mall.


SANAULLAH ATAULLAH THE PENINSULA

Qatar condemns assassination bid on Libyan High Council PresidentDOHA: The State of Qatar has strongly condemned the assassination attempt on President of the High Council of Libya Dr Abdulrahman Al Sweihli.

In a statement yesterday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the incident is a rejected criminal act aimed at undermining the interna-tional efforts for a political solution in Libya, and stressed the need to bring the perpe-trators to justice.

The statement affirmed Qatar’s support for the Libyan political agreement and its outputs, and the international efforts aiming at achieving security and stability in Libya and realising the legitimate aspirations of its brotherly people.

The national strategies are steps towards the completion of Qatar National Vision 2030 and its four pillars represented in economic, social, human and environmental development.

Italian Minister lauds Qatar’s efforts in fighting terrorismTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: The Minister of Defence of the Italian Republic, Roberta Pinotti, has appreciated the Qatari efforts regarding fighting terrorism.

“We have signed an agreement with Qatar related to fighting terrorism and extremism, and we know that defeating terrorism takes long time and requires more of cooperation”.

She also commended Qatar’s efforts in combating violence by spreading science and culture

and countering extremist ide-ology that does not belong to any religion”.

Regarding the question about the GCC crisis and if it effects the relationship between both countries, Pinotti told The Peninsula on the sideline of DIMDEX 2018 yesterday that “We feel serious concern about the crisis and hope all these countries to discuss the problems and find solutions”.

Pinotti noted that the rela-tionships between Qatar and Italy are excellent, adding that “I visited Qatar on October last

year and now I am visiting DIMDEX 2018 here and it con-tributes to enhancing relations in the field of security and defence between both coun-tries”. The joint military exercise between both countries repre-sents the joint confidence between both countries. About the two agreements which were signed between Qatar and Italian companies, Pinotti said: “The signing of the agreements between Qatar and Italian com-panies was very important.”


02 THURSDAY 15 MARCH 2018HOME

Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani met yesterday with Minister of Defence of the Italian Republic, Roberta Pinotti, and the delegation accompanying her, who are participating in the sixth Doha International Maritime Defence Exhibition (DIMDEX 2018). The two sides reviewed bilateral cooperation and the means to enhance them in all fields, particularly in security and defence areas.

PM reviews ties with Italian delegation Cabinet nod for draft law on national service QNA

DOHA: Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani chaired yesterday the Cabinet’s regular meeting.

Following the meeting, Min-ister of Justice and Acting Min-ister of State for Cabinet Affairs H E Hassan Lahdan Saqr Al Mohannadi said the following: At the outset of the meeting, the Prime Minister and Minister of Interior briefed the Cabinet on the outcomes of his visit to the Kingdom of Morocco on March 11 and 12, during which he chaired the Qatari side at the 7th meeting of the Qatari-Moroccan Joint Supreme Committee.

The Minister stressed that the meeting of the committee and the agreements, programs and Memorandums of Under-standing signed at the end of the meeting strongly boost the dis-tinguished relations between the two countries and their bilateral cooperation in various fields for a strategic partnership that meets the aspirations of the two brotherly peoples, in accordance with the directives of the Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and his brother King Mohammed VI of Morocco.

After that the Cabinet reviewed topics on its meeting’s

agenda as following: The Cabinet took the necessary measures to pass a draft law on national service after it reviewed the rec-ommendation of the Advisory Council on the draft law.

The Cabinet also took the nec-essary measures to issue a draft law amending some provisions of Law No. 5 of 2015 regarding similar com-mercial, industrial and public shops and street vendors after it reviewed the recommendation of the Advisory Council on the draft law.

Pursuant to the amendment, a decision by the Cabinet, based on the proposal of the Minister, shall determine the licence period according to the type of the shop. This period may be renewed for a period or other similar periods after completion of the pre-scribed fee. The competent department shall renew the licence accordingly at the request of the concerned party.

Moreover, the Cabinet approved the proposal of the Interior Ministry to amend some

provisions of the Cabinet’s decision No. 49 of 2013 on estab-lishing the Standing Committee for Reviewing Recruitment Appli-cations at the Ministry of Interior.

It also approved a draft decision of the Minister of Municipality and Environment on the terms and conditions of the replacement procedure of substituting and transferring the precondition of the government lands disposition by the state to the beneficiaries and the lands or housing owned by them.

The Cabinet, meanwhile, approved the accession of the State of Qatar to both the Inter-national Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Interna-tional Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

It also approved the hosting of the 14th edition of the World Islamic Economic Forum (WIEF) in 2018 in Doha and the partic-ipation in the China Interna-tional Import Expo (Shanghai - November 5-10, 2018).

THE PENINSULA

DOHA: A Canadian parliamentary dele-gation comprising Borys Wizesnewskyl, Faycal El Khoury, Michael Cooper, Colin Frayser, Kelly Mc Cauley and Ali Ehsassi has concluded their visit to Doha by field trips through which they discovered the aspects of cooperation between the State of Qatar and Canada and ways of bolstering and developing them.

The delegation was received by the Speaker of the Advisory Council H E Ahmed bin Abdullah bin Zaid Al Mahmoud and Council members. They discussed means of cooperation.

The Canadian delegation with the Speaker of the Advisory Council H E Ahmed bin Abdullah bin Zaid Al Mahmoud and Council members.

Qatar, Canada to boost cooperation

The Prime Minister and Minister of Interior briefed the Cabinet on the outcomes of his visit to the Kingdom of Morocco on March 11 and 12, during which he chaired the Qatari side at the 7th meeting of the Qatari-Moroccan Joint Supreme Committee.

Foreign Minister meets Nato Parliamentary Assembly delegationQNADOHA: Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs H E Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdul-rahman Al Thani met yeserday with the delegation of the Nato Parliamentary Assembly, which includes members of the security, defence and foreign affairs committees of the national parlia-ments.

They discussed the follow-up to the visit of

the Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to Brussels and the promotion of political dialogue between Qatar and Nato.

The Deputy Prime Minister briefed the visiting delegation on the developments of the Gulf crisis and the efforts of political cooperation between Qatar and Nato. He also briefed the delegation on the position of Qatar on international issues, espe-cially Syria, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

03THURSDAY 15 MARCH 2018 HOME

Prime Minister launches five-year NDS 2

Continued from page 1

The Prime Minister and Interior Minister emphasised on sustainability as a principle in national development initiatives that stimulated important policy innovations, such as the devel-opment of a road map to mod-ernise the budget and the devel-opment of comprehensive National Health policy, restruc-turing of the educational system, management of public investment, stimulation of the private sector and reform of the policy government support and guidance to target groups, ration-alisation of public expenditure

and conservation and devel-opment of natural resources.

Minister of Development Planning and Statistics H E Dr Saleh Mohamed Salem Al Nabit said that Qatar’s economy is expected to grow between two and three percent in 2018, while the non-oil sector is expected to achieve good growth rates this year, which are important growth rates under the current condi-tions in Qatar.

Addressing a press conference held on the sideline of the launch of Qatar’s (NDS2) 2018-2022. H E Al Nabit praised the role of the gov-ernmental and non-governmental bodies that participated in drawing

up NDS2, which was formed fol-lowing the efforts of a team of about 150 people.

Regarding the impact of the siege imposed on Qatar on the preparation of NDS2, the Minister noted that the strategy has flex-ibility to respond to all variables including the new situation, focusing on increasing self-suf-ficiency and international coop-eration. He pointed out that NDS2 dealt with the emerging devel-opment priorities and absorbed the goals of global sustainable development.

He stressed that the coming period until the end of NDS2 requires all government agencies

to prepare their strategic and executive plans that are con-sistent with NDS2, and that can achieve their results within the specified time frame.

H E Al Nabit pointed out that Qatar is going through a crucial period of its economic and social development and institutional maturity, whereas NDS2 has pushed towards achieving this transfor-mation in all sectors of the State and at all levels. He expressed hope for achieving greater economic diver-sification and private sector devel-opment in addition to creating the suitable investment environment to attract foreign investments over the next five years, especially in the field

of innovation and creativity, in addition to encouraging investment in sectors that accelerate the tran-sition towards the knowledge economy.

H E Al Nabit said the next five years will witness the completion of a high-level physical and infor-mational infrastructure and eco-nomic infrastructure related to major developmental projects, where with its completion, a com-prehensive system will be operated to manage and maintain the infra-structure and its facilities.

He said the next few years will also witness the completion of updating the public sector including the e-government

projects and services sector, an increase in the efficiency of f inancial management, enhancement of economic stability and rationalisation of expenditure.

The health sector will work on consolidating a comprehensive model to offer a high-level healthcare system and there will be a focus on promoting education quality and increasing enrolment numbers and levels of achievement, in addition to an increase in the number of Qatari graduates from academic pro-grams associated with knowledge-based economy, the Minister added.

Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani, Their Excellencies the Ministers, and other dignitaries during the launch of NDS 2 yesterday.

Italian Minister lauds Qatar’s efforts in fighting terrorism Continued from page 1

The Italian Minister added: “The agreements will enhance the relations between the two countries and it include also joint training”.

The first agreement was

signed with Beretta to supply rifles to Qatar for use by different military sectors in Qatar.

The second agreement was with Leonardo company to supply 28 medium sized twin-engine NH90 military heli-copters to Qatar.

The agreements were signed in the presence of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Defence Affairs H E Dr Khalid bin Mohamed Al Attiyah and Minister of Defence of Italy Roberta Pinotti, in the course of the 6th edition of DIMDEX 2018.

Nearly 13,000 visit DIMDEX 2018 Continued from page 1

Barzan Holdings (Strategic Partner), signed more than 20 MoUs and partnership agree-ments with multiple regional and international defence com-panies, aimed at empowering the military capabilities of Qatar Armed Forces, and enhancing the security and protection of the country’s natural resources.

About the Naval Commanders Conference at the DIMDEX 2018, Al Ansari said, “the conference was held under the theme ‘Building Capabilities in Chal-lenging Environments through Visionary International Military Cooperation and Defence Engagement’ and as we have seen the military operation is not like

before it must be done now through cooperation because of joint marine challenges.”

Topics discussed during the conference focused on granting maritime security and access to the global maritime community, building capabilities in chal-lenging environments, interna-tional military cooperation, and maritime defence planning and building capabilities, he added.

“Despite the siege, the edition of DIMDEX 2018 was the best compared to the number of companies partici-pating which is more than 180, and compared to the number of countries which is more than 60. Also, some of the pavilions already announced its partic-ipation in the next edition of

DIMDEX like Turkish and others.”

Commenting on the success of DIMDEX 2018, Al Ansari, Chairman of DIMDEX, said: “It was an honour welcoming and working with industry leaders and Qatar’s foremost businesses that have ensured the con-tinuous success of DIMDEX.”

This year’s edition marked a special occasion as it celebrated its 10th anniversary.

Over 180 global exhibitors and close to 90 VIP official delegations from 60 countries participated in this year’s edition across the defence, maritime and security sectors, and DIMDEX continues to earn its position as one of the most prestigious maritime defence shows in the region.

Kahramaa records lowest power cuts since its establishmentTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: The Qatar General Elec-tricity and Water Corporation (Kahramaa) registered during the last quarter of 2017 the lowest period of power cuts since the establishment of the Corporation, exceeding the global and regional indicators in this field.

According to a press release issued by Kahramaa yesterday, on the occasion of the quarterly performance review meeting during the fourth quarter of 2017, the water networks also achieved the required performance indi-cator with regard to the availa-bility of the country’s water reserves under the increasing demand and expanded the water network to cover new sectors.

The statement added that Kahramaa has succeeded in implementing all projects according to plans developed without affecting delivery dates of projects, especially those serving development projects in the country.

The indicators showed a rise in the performance in the fourth quarter and during 2017 in general, as Kahramaa has been

successful in maintaining the state’s electricity and water needs for all sectors in the country.

The meeting, which was chaired by President of Kah-ramaa Eng Issa bin Hilal Al Kuwari, was attended by directors of departments and aims to monitor and evaluate performance and review the progress of work in accordance with approved plans and to enhance the values committed by the institution.

The meeting reviewed per-formance reports of various administrations, their progress, the progress of projects they carry out, the difficulties encountered, and the mecha-nisms and strategies taken to solve them, in order to ensure the progress of work according to the approved plans especially in the current circumstances. It also tackled the vision of Kah-ramaa and its strategic plans as a major development partner in the country, and its keenness to ensure that its commitments towards providing electricity and water to the country are met with high efficiency.

Public Prosecution developing online portalQNA

DOHA: The Public Prose-cution launched yesterday the first phase of developing their online portal.

The Public Prosecution held yesterday a workshop for a number of law firms to update them on the upcoming changes and the work plan, to ensure the new portal will be used efficiently and easily. The new portal will have a host of features, the most prominent of which is that they will be linked with Hukoomi and Sak portals. This will ensure that data can be easily, accurately, and quickly verified by the new portal. Another feature will see users get electronic copies of the files they need without having to visit the head-quarters of the public prose-cution. The changes reflects the public prosecution’s com-mitment to improve its service levels and lift the pro-ductivity of its employees.

The public prosecution’s commitment also is part of its responsibilities in Qatar’s e-government project, which aims to improve the services.


CRA to mark World Consumer Rights DayTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: The Communications Regulatory Authority (CRA) is commemorating the World Consumer Rights Day (WCRD) with a public outreach event from today until March 18, at Katara Cultural Village. Through the event, CRA intends to empower consumers of communications services to understand their rights and responsibilities so they have a more satisfactory experience.

The event at Katara — in front of L’wzaar Restaurant, Gate 14 -15 from 4.30pm to 9pm — is an exciting opportunity for CRA to directly engage with consumers and raise awareness of issues relating to the use of communications services in Qatar. During the event there will be activities for kids and adults, and CRA’s team will provide tips to help visitors better under-stand their rights and responsibil-ities. CRA team will also educate consumers on other topics related to roaming, spam and scam calls. The highlight of the event is an opportunity for visitors to lodge complaints against licensed service providers of communications services onsite and learn more about CRA’s complaints resolution process.

“CRA ensures to balance the rights of consumers with the needs of service providers therefore it is important that consumers know their rights and responsibilities. This will help them make informed decisions. Consumer protection is not just an annual event for us, it is at the heart of everything that we do and every day is dedicated to the consumers,” said Amel Salem Al Hanawi (pictured), Consumer Affairs Department Manager, adding, “CRA is here to help and I would like to invite all con-sumers to join us at the event”.

CRA follows a clearly defined process for the resolving com-plaints. Consumers are free to approach the CRA if a complaint lodged directly to their service provider remains unresolved. Consumers can lodge a

complaint with CRA after 48 hours for mobile service discon-nections, after 72 hours for fixed line disconnections, or after 30 calendar days for complaints that aren’t related to a service disconnection. Consumers can also contact CRA any time if they are dissatisfied with the offered resolution of the closed com-plaint. Special needs consumers can lodge complaints with CRA for service disconnections or any other unresolved issues as long as a period of 48 hours has passed.

Complaints are assessed by CRA against a set of criteria to validate a complaint. CRA receives and investigates com-plaints by working with both the complainant and service pro-viders to find a fair and mutually acceptable resolution.

Consumers of communica-tions services can contact CRA in a variety of ways: by calling the 24/7 hotline number (103), by email CRA at [email protected], by tweeting directly to @CRAqatar, by vis-iting the CRA’s headquarters at Al Nasr Tower B, by submitting online complaints form on CRA’s website, or through “Arsel” mobile application.

Qatar Airways wins four awards at APEX

Ashghal completes packages 1 and 2 of Rawdat Abal Heeran projectTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: The Public Works Authority (Ashghal) has announced the completion of packages 1 and 2 of the Roads and Infrastructure Development Project in Rawdat Abal Heeran, and opening of all roads within the project area for traffic.

Eng Salem Al Shawi (pictured), Assistant Roads Projects Department Manager in Ashghal, said the first and

second packages of the Roads and Infrastructure project in Rawdat Abal Heeran serve almost 2,622 residential plots, and several schools, mosques, and public places, on a total area of 5,300,000 square metres.

“A wide range of road development and construction works were implemented. This is in addition to implementing infra-structure development works according to the highest standards.”

Eng Salem Al Shawi said that the two packages included the construction of 68km of modern roads along with associated service roads in order to reduce traffic congestion hence facilitating access to all the residential and commercial establish-ments in the area.

Other works to enhance traffic safety were implemented,

such as providing pedestrian and cyclist paths, pedestrian crossings, parking bays, and street lighting. This is in addition to installing interlock and landscaping works that aimed to improve the quality of life for the residents and business owners in the area.

Eng Salem added: “The two packages included works to develop the infra-structure in the area, including the con-struction of a new s e w e r d r a i n a g e network, which will

eliminate the use of sewage tanks and solve the problem of ground-water pollution and its environmental and health impact. A surface water drainage system was also constructed using micro-tunnelling technique, in addition to constructing a treated sewage effluent network to be used for irrigation purposes.”

Works related to services for more than 1,400 undeveloped plots have been constructed and completed such as roads, drainage, potable water and electrical connections.

The first package was implemented by “QBS International”, while the second was implemented by “Al Tayseer Contracting Company” and “Consol-idated Contractors Company” joint venture, at a total cost of approxi-mately QR989m.

8 restaurants to take part in Gout de/Good FranceDOHA: As many as eight well-known restaurants of Qatar will be taking part in Gout de/Good France being marked on March 21 to present a valuable oppor-tunity to enjoy French cuisines.

Every year on March 21, Goût de/Good France celebrates French gas-tronomy and its values in more than 150 countries across the five continents.

Addressing a press conference Eric Chevallier, Ambassador of France to Qatar, said that gastronomy is a pillar of France’s attractiveness for tourists and is an active component of its cultural outreach.

He said that organised by the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and the renowned Chef Alain Ducasse, Goût de France/Good France, highlights the art of living “à la française” (the French way of life), promotes French products, and more glo-bally, France as a tourism destination.

“The richness and singularity of our

cuisine, the diversity of our local pro-ducing regions, as well as the inclusion of the “gastronomic meal of the French” on the Unesco list of intangible cultural heritage, are all key advantages that help keep France at the top of the list of the world’s tourist destinations.”

In this 4th edition of Goût de France/Good France, over 3,000 restaurants and more than 150 French embassies, will offer the finest meals, from highest gastronomy (haute-cuisine) to high-quality Bistro con-cepts. As many as 1,300 restaurants par-ticipated in the first edition in 2015.

In Qatar, eight well-known restau-rants are participating including

Fauchon; Idam (MIA – Alain Ducasse); La Villa (Mercure); Market by Jean Georges (W Hotel); Olive Oil (Rotana City Centre); Porcini (Ritz Carlton); Prime Steakhouse (Intercontinental The City); and Walima (Mondrian)

The ambassador said that it was the wish of Alain Ducasse to make 2018 edition an opportunity to pay tribute to Paul Bocuse as participating chefs will have the option of including in their menus a dish from the repertoire of Paul Bocuse or one inspired by the spirit of his cuisine.

Eight chefs from participating res-taurants were also present at the event and spoke briefly on the preparations they were making to mark the day. Damien Leroux, chef from Idam told The Peninsula that the restaurant was all set to celebrate Good France with authentic French cuisine including lobster salad a la francaise; duck and foie gras pie; red mullet, crispy potato scales; refined comte cheese among others. He said Tart

Tatin, a dish inspired by the legacy of Paul Bocuse would also be part of the menue.

The Goût de/Good France menu includes an aperitif with finger food, a starter, one or two main course(s), a cheese platter and a dessert, accom-panied by French beverages.

From now on, the ambassador said that a spotlight will be thrown on a French region each year. “This 4th Goût de/Good France showcases the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region and the diversity of its

culinary expertise. As the leading agri-cultural region of France, Nouvelle-Aqui-taine is also the country’s leading region for gastronomy, a byword for good products, fine dining and good restaurants.”

This year, Good France is being sup-ported by the number one outdoor advertising company in the world, JCDecaux, which is a sponsor of Goût de France / Good France. This year, Qatar Culinary Professionals (QCP) is also sup-porting Good France.

Eric Chevallier, French Ambassador to Qatar, with French chefs during a press conference at his residence yesterday. PIC: ABDUL BASIT / THE PENINSULA

IRFAN BUKHARI THE PENINSULA

Every year on March 21, Goût de/Good France celebrates French gastronomy and its values in more than 150 countries across the five continents.

THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Qatar Airways has been awarded the APEX Passenger Choice award for ‘Best Overall Airline: Middle East’; ‘Best Food and Beverage: Middle East’; ‘Best Cabin Service: Middle East’; and ‘Best Seat Comfort: Middle East’ by the Airline Passenger Expe-rience Association (APEX).

The latest set of awards were presented to the airline during a ceremony at APEX Asia held yesterday in Shanghai, where the airline also received a 2018 Five-Star APEX Official Airline rating.

“As an airline, we con-stantly seek to improve the in-flight experience for all of our customers, no matter which class they are flying in. We want their experience with Qatar Airways to exceed all their expectations and to be truly better than anything they have experienced before,” said Akbar Al Baker, Group Chief Executive, Qatar Airways. “As such, we are particularly excited to receive these awards for food and beverage, cabin service and seat comfort, as they are based on customer feedback. We greatly value the

opinion of all of our passengers, and we will continue to push the boundaries of what flying can be and setting a new standard for the industry,” he said.

The APEX awards come in tandem with a series of recent innovations announced by the airline to continually improve the passenger experience,

including enhancements to the airline’s in-flight catering, with a new bespoke Pre-Select Dining service for its First and Business Class passengers, giving them even more choice and freedom to create a personalised à la carte dining experience every time they travel on long-haul flights from Doha. The airline also recently launched a premium

global chauffeur service for passengers, offering door-to-door seamless transfers.

Qatar Airways last year launched its groundbreaking new Business Class seat, Qsuite, featuring the industry’s first-ever double bed available in Business Class, with privacy panels that stow a w a y , a l l o w i n g passengers in adjoining seats to create their own private room. Adjustable panels and movable TV monitors on the centre four seats allow colleagues, friends or families travelling together to trans-form their space into a private suite, giving them the option to work, dine and socialise together. These new features provide the ultimate customisable travel experience that enables passengers to create an environment that suits their own unique needs.

Officials with the awards.


Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ now available at OoredooDOHA: Ooredoo announced yesterday that the new Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ device is available in Ooredoo’s Villaggio, Landmark and HQ2 Shop, as well as via the eShop.

Customers who pre-ordered their device should follow the instructions given via SMS to collect their new smart-phone. For anyone who did not pre-order a Samsung Galaxy S9 or S9+ device, all purchases will include a free 20 GB Data Card (worth QR200), screen insurance, and a 35 percent off discount voucher for Clear-Coat.

The new Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+

device has been designed to offer a next-generation Dual Aperture lens camera that can automatically switch between light conditions, offers a Super Slow-mo option for action shots, can change the users face into an Augmented Reality emoji and offers an edge-to-edge screen.

The new Galaxy also offers a host of wearables and accessories for every moment. Capture stunning 360 videos and live-stream with the Gear 360 camera, play games and discover VR experiences with the Gear VR headset and have a fitness coach on your wrist with the Gear Sport.

Qatar Airways is official airline sponsor of QIFFTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Qatar Airways announced yesterday that it is the official airline sponsor of the Ninth Qatar International Food Festival (QIFF), which is organised by Qatar Tourism Authority and begins today. This year the airline will fly in a lineup of regional celebrity chefs to Doha, who will bring their culinary talent to the festi-val’s Live Cooking Theatre, a highlight of the annual event.

Celebrated chefs taking part in this year’s festival include famed Michelin-starred chef Wolfgang Puck and Qatari chef and food programme presenter Aisha Al Tamimi; Lebanese celebrity chef Ramzi Choueiri; Filipino celebrity TV chef Nino Logarta; Food Network pastry chef Anna Olson; Turkish celebrity chef Murat Bozok; Kuwaiti celebrity TV chef Sulaiman Al Qassar; Indian chef Ajay Chopra; Kuwaiti chef Asmaa Al Bahar; US 2012 MasterChef winner Christine Ha, IDAM Exec-utive Chef Damien Leroux, and Kuwaiti chef Fawaz Al Omaim.

Qatar Airways Senior Vice President Marketing and Cor-porate Communications, Salam Al Shawa, said: “We are delighted to take part in this world-class event, bringing culinary masters from around the globe to Doha to showcase their talent. As the national carrier of the State of Qatar, we

help bring the world to Qatar, and offer visitors their first taste of Arabian hospitality when they arrive in Doha. Every year the Qatar International Food Festival is a celebration of Qatar’s extraordinary cultural and culinary diversity, and we could not be more proud to par-ticipate in this event”.

The 11-day festival, which runs until from March 25 at the Hotel Park beside the Sheraton hotel Doha, will feature nearly 180 food trucks and stalls, as well as a mini-zoo, a dedicated coffee zone, a Health Zone with free fitness classes, in addition to daily live cultural perform-ances and a fireworks display.

“We are delighted to partner once again with Qatar Airways in delivering unique culinary experiences through Qatar International Food Festival. As our national carrier and award-winning airline, Qatar Airways is a key component of our efforts to develop and promote unique end-to-end visitor expe-riences, that extend our message of welcome to the world, Rashed Al Qurese, Chief Marketing and Promotion Officer at QTA.

“We are confident that our guests arriving on board Qatar Airways will enjoy unique and authentic experiences, and become ambassadors to Qatar’s most popular celebration of food and culture,” he said.

More than 60 entities to join 34th Traffic Week celebrationsTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: More than 60 entities will join the celebration of the 34th traffic week that will be held on March 18-24, at Darb Al Saai, under the theme“Your life is a trust”. This was announced during a press conference held at the traffic headquarters in Madinat Khalifa yesterday.

Colonel Muhammad Radi Al Hajiri, Director of Traffic Awareness Department told that the activities will be open for the public from the morning 8 am till 9pm night in two shifts. He added that there will be activ-ities in different parts of the country other than Doha under the traffic departments in Shamal, South and Dukhan.

Major Jabir Muhammad Odhaiba, said that “The asso-ciated activities include events at Souq Waqif, Traffic Fort and special areas for productive fam-ilies. The main venue in Darb al Saai include activities for

children and some youth initia-tives through youth hostel centers and Qatar University” , Colonel Al Hajri said.

All concerned ministries, authorities and agencies will take part in awareness programs held as part of the traffic week cele-brations in addition to the cul-tural performances and the debate among high school stu-dents under the title “Driving without a license between rejection and acceptance”.

The seminar corner which will be organized throughout the week will address a number of traffic issues such as Qatar’s road safety strategy until 2022, the role of the family in traffic awareness, schools and their role in the dissemination of traffic awareness and traffic infor-mation between reality and hope.

There will be special counters for traffic licensing affairs department that will introduce licensing procedures, Metrash 2 services and

theoretic and practical tests of driving. All services of the traffic can be learned through the pavilions lined up in the exhibition such as Talaa camera for traffic violations, Fahes services, driving training by driving schools and services of insurance companies. There will be traffic related contests daily

sponsored by driving schools. The event also includes

activities and pavilions of Lakhwiya, a motorcycle circuit, Batabit Qatar, as well as the activities of Al Shaqab. It also includes a traffic village in cooperation with Shell, which includes a range of awareness activities suitable for all ages.

Traffic diversion on Al Thakhira RoadDOHA: Ashghal said that it will close one lane in both direc-tions of Al Thakhira Road in Al Khor, for a distance of 1km between Al Khor Community Round-about and Al Meera H y p e r m a r k e t junction. The closure starts on Friday (March 16) and lasts for three months, in coordination with the General Directorate of Traffic. Traffic will be diverted to the remaining lane on Al Thakhira Road, as shown in the map.

The traffic change is required to enable the works of laying Sewer rising mains as part of design, build, operate and maintain of Al Thakhira Sewage

Treatment Works, Transfer Pumping Station and Associated Pipelines. Ashghal will install road signs to advice motorists of the closure. The authority requests all road users to abide by the speed limits, and follow the road signs to ensure safety.

Qumra concludes with inspiring masterclass by Oscar-winning costume designer THE PENINSULA

DOHA: The fourth edition of Qumra, the annual industry event by the Doha Film Institute, concluded yesterday with an inspiring masterclass by three-time Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell, Order of the British Empire (OBE).

The masterclass, which offered a behind-the-scenes look at some of the captivating films she had worked on, brought to close six days of lively discus-sions, interactions, men-toring sessions and work-shops through which 34 Qumra Projects by first- and second-time film-makers from 25 nations, were nurtured by six Qumra Masters and over 150 industry experts.

Moderated by Richard Pena, the Sandy Powell masterclass was high-lighted by show-reels of some of her masterful works that bring out Pow-ell’s versatility and ingenuity as one of the world’s renowned costumed designers.

Powell said she discovered her passion for costume design while working on theatre and going on to “learn from mistakes”. Her advice for young talents is to understand the art of costume design with the funda-mental approach that “you are creating characters and making them believable”.

She discussed her debut work as film costume designer for Derek

Jarman’s Caravaggio, after having worked with him on music videos. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said, with the average age of the crew at 25, and each of the member learning by doing. “It was real learning.”

With an accomplished ouvre that includes several period films, fairytales and historic set-pieces such as Orlando, Shakespeare in Love, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, Hugo, and Cin-derella, Powell said that while it is important to work with the team, she also goes by her instinct and intuitive understanding of the character.

She said her priority in choosing a project is its script, and that is open to work in Bollywood, adding the industry “has a number of good designers already”. She does background

research on the cos-t u m e s f r o m paintings as well as from contemporary fashion, “as there is always something one can take inspi-ration from it”, creates mood-boards for the char-acters, and then decides on the colours, contrasts and fabrics.

Powell said she is not overly attracted to working in science fiction films because “I am not attracted to them. I am not inter-ested in creatures, aliens, and super-heroes,” and she has taken delight in

doing independent, low budget films because “they push you creatively” to work within the resources. Her advice, from her personal experience as costume designer, is to “work instinc-tively not intellectually”.

This year, Qumra hosted six modern legends in cinema, who men-tored young filmmakers through their Masterclasses and one-on-one sessions. They included Powell, Oscar® winning actor Tilda Swinton; Oscar® nominated director Bennett Miller; Venice Golden Lion winning Russian director and writer Andrey Zvyagintsev; Cannes Palme d’Or winning Thai filmmaker and visual artist Apichatpong Weera-sethakul; and the only documentary director to win the Berlinale Golden Bear, Italian director Gianfranco Rosi.

Three-time Oscar-winning British costume designer Sandy Powell (left) at Qumra Masterclass moderated by Richard Pena (right) yesterday at Museum of Islamic Art Auditorium.

QU hosts Animal Ethics Awareness DayTHE PENINSULA

DOHA:THE Office of Research Planning and Development at Qatar University Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies recently held the Animal Ethics Awareness Day in collaboration with the Ministry of Public Health.

The event aimed to raise community awareness on research ethics and to high-light the role of QU Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) following the latest ethical international standards within an Islamic framework.

Attendees included QU VP for Research and Graduate Studies Prof Mariam Al-Maadeed, QU Director of Research Planning and Development Dr Aiman Erbad, QU Laboratory Animal Research Center (LARC) Founding Director Dr Hamda Al-Naemi, QU Manager of Research Excellence Dr Abdelbary Elhissi, and Min-istry of Public Health Executive Manager Dr Iman Sadoun, as well as QU faculty, researchers and staff.

It drew the participation of experts and researchers from QU, the Anti-Doping Lab Qatar, Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), the Min-istry of Public Health, and Sidra Medical and Research Center.

The event’s program featured lectures

by Dr Hamda Al-Naemi, Associate Professor at QU College of Pharmacy (CPH) and IACUC Head Dr Husam Younes, CPH Associate Pro-fessor Dr Abdelali Agouni, Professor at QU College of Medicine Dr Ala-Eddin Al Moustafa, and Associate Professor at QU College of Health Sciences Dr Nasser Rizk. They discussed the implementation of ethical standards by QU.

Prof Mariam Al-Maadeed stressed the importance of ethical consideration when using animals. She pointed to the benefits of animals which are mentioned in the Holy Quran. She also noted that animals have many benefits for the society, especially in pharmacological experiments which con-tribute to the advancement of the society.

Dr Abdelbary Elhissi said: “The high level that QU reached with regard to paying attention to the ethics of dealing with exper-imental animals is a real indication of the level of civilization achieved by Qatar in recent years. The implementation of ethics in research is an integral part of research excellence.”

Prof Mariam Al-Maadeed

Colonel Muhammad Radi Al Hajiri (right) and Major Jabir Muhammad Odhaiba (left) at the press conference.


QM contributes to publication of QNDP THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Qatar Museums further cemented its leadership in the cultural and institutional devel-opment of Qatar through its contribution to the publication of the Qatar National Devel-opment Plan 2018 – 2022.

Led by the Ministry of Development Planning and Sta-tistics (MDPS), the publication of the plan represents the cul-mination of many months of intensive work by a number of leading public bodies and

institutions in the country, including Qatar Museums.

In helping move the country forward towards realising the ambitions of the Qatar National Vision 2030 (QNV 2030), the plan covers a variety of tangible programmes and projects designed to improve and support institutional devel-opment, service provision, financial management, sustain-ability of economic prosperity, strengthen human devel-opment, support social devel-opment and sustainable

development that preserves the environment, as well as underpin strategic performance management across the coun-try’s leading organisations and institutions.

A team from Qatar Museums has played a vitally important role since 2017 in the formu-lation of the plan through active involvement on the Central Advisory Committee which was charged with reviewing, eval-uating and strengthening numerous strategies and plans developed by various

sub-committees to feed into the overarching plan and which cover all spheres of public life.

The Advisory Committee has spent considerable time during these past few months carefully scrutinizing plans covering all aspects of the country’s devel-opment – ranging from culture, safety & security, finances, immigration, employment, edu-cation, healthcare and more. It is comprised of a variety of experts and leading figures that represent a wide cross-section of the public and private sector.

6th Middle East Forum on Quality & Safety from March 23 to 25 THE PENINSULA

DOHA: The largest conference dedicated to healthcare quality improvement and patient safety in the Arab world is about to open its doors to more than 2,500 local and international healthcare professionals.

Organisers have announced that the sixth Middle East Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare, being held from March 23 to 25 March at the Qatar National Convention Centre (QNCC), will feature an expanded ‘Knowledge Zone’ exhibition section with strategic healthcare partners showcasing their contribution to quality improvement and patient safety.

This year’s primary partners for the ‘Knowledge Zone’, the Forum’s unique exhibition space, include the Ministry of Public Health, Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC), Sidra Medicine, the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH), Qatar University, and Cerner. Qatar Armed Forces and the Ministry of Interior will also be in attendance and will feature special mobile healthcare services.

Additionally, Cerner, a global leader in healthcare tech-nology and the provider of the electronic health records platform used across Qatar, will participate in the launch of a joint project with PHCC and HMC that demonstrates patient-centered care.

Other stands confirmed for this year’s ‘Knowledge Zone’ will feature the latest advance-ments from some of HMC’s

specialized centers, including the ITQAN Clinical Simulation and Innovation Center, Qatar Organ Donation Center (HIBA), the Tobacco Control Center, and Hamad International Training Center. Additionally, the Ambu-lance Service will stage live demonstrations in a specially designed presentation area, which will also feature select poster presentations.

“We are delighted to have so many strategic partners from different sectors participating in the Forum this year. Every one of them makes an important contribution to patient safety, and they rep-resent how collectively each helps raise the standards of patient care in Qatar,” said Dr Abdulla Al Ansari (pictured), HMC’s Acting Chief Medical Officer and Middle East Forum Co-Chair.

HMC’s exhibition stand will showcase one of this year’s key Forum topics, ‘Joy at Work’ and will engage with stand visitors to demonstrate the importance of the concept, not only to the individual but also to the organ-ization and ultimately patients.

QCDC wraps up 5th edition of Career Advisor Training CourseTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Qatar Career Devel-opment Center (QCDC), a member of Qatar Foundation (QF), has wrapped up the fifth edition of its Career Advisor Training Course (CATC), which aims to provide participants with essential career guidance and planning skills to assist young people in their career development journeys.

This edition of the course, offered only in English, brought together 15 career advisors, aca-demic counsellors, and experts in career guidance and career development from leading Qatari organizations including QF, Awsaj Academy, Qatar Airways, and Qatar Petroleum.

Launched in 2015, the CATC is the first customized training program of its kind for career advisors in Qatar and the GCC region. The course is also cer-tified by Kuder Inc, a world leader in career planning services. Abdulla Al Mansoori, Director, QCDC, said, “We are

very pleased with the success of the fifth edition of our Career Advisor Training Course, which builds on the success of the pro-gram’s previous editions.”

Course instructors included Anita Abraham, Professional Development Specialist of Science, National Center for Educational Development, College of Education, Qatar Uni-versity, who has worked in the field of education for 25 years; and Susanna Mascarenhas, Pro-fessional Development Spe-cialist, National Center for Edu-cational Development, College of Education, Qatar University, who, with a career spanning 28 years in Doha, has seen first-hand the growth of education in Qatar. Ahmed Al-Baker, HR Training Specialist at Hamad International Airport, said the program was very useful,

Additionally, six months after the completion of the course, participants will have access to an online interface for the course, which will serve as a knowledge bank.

Ashghal to replace 3 roundabouts at Wadi Al Salmiya Street with signalsTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: The Public Works Authority, ‘Ashghal’, will recreate three rounda-bouts into two signal-controlled intersections on Wadi Al Salmiya Street which connects Al Khara-ityat Interchange with Al Rufaa Street in Al Kharaitiyat Area.

Ashghal has stated that there will be two signalized junctions replacing two round-abouts, one to link Zikreet Street with Wadi Al Salmiya Street and another to tie Gharrafat Al Rayyan Street with Wadi Al Salmiya Street. Meanwhile, the third roundabout on Wadi Al Salmiya connecting Wadi Al Mashreb Street and Barqa Al Hamil Street will be changed into a T-Junction.

The new reconstruction will provide some expansions, increasing the number of lanes at the new intersections from two into three. The fresh revamp will largely improve traffic leading to and from Al

Shamal Road, notably Al Kharaitiyat Interchange, Al Kharaitiyat Area and local approaches such as Zikreet Street and Gharrafat Al Rayyan towards Al Rufaa Street and Dukhan Road. Also, the upgrade will boost traffic to areas of Bani Hajer, Al Wajba and Al Rayyan besides the key close facilities, including Mall of Qatar and Cel-ebration Complex.

A diversion will be in place on Wadi Al Salmiya Street on dual carriageways as the vehicle movement will be shifted onto a 1500-metre long parallel route comprising three roundabouts and two lanes in each direction. The new layout will be in effect on March 16 and last till Sep-tember 30.

Cloud-based solutions back Qatar’s growthSACHIN KUMAR THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Cloud-based digital solu-tions not only reduce complexity, optimise costs and drive inno-vation for firms but it also supports Qatar’s self-sufficiency and diversified economic growth.

Speaking at the media round-table yesterday, officials of Ooredoo, Aspire Academy, Jaidah Group and SAP Qatar under-scored the crucial role of cloud-based digital transformation in driving innovation, job creation, and economic growth in Qatar.

SAP Qatar yesterday hosted technology conference SAP NOW at St Regis Hotel that brought together hundreds of Qatar’s top executives, who discussed the latest technology innovations.

Ooredoo, an SAP strategic partner for cloud services, pre-sented how Ooredoo’s network and Data Centre solutions support innovation and transform businesses every day.

“Cloud-based digital business

models will support Qatar’s self-sufficiency and diversified eco-nomic growth,” said Yousuf Abdulla Al Kubaisi, Chief Oper-ating Officer, Ooredoo. “At SAP NOW, we have showcased how our cloud partnership with SAP can transform industry verticals and citizen experiences, such as smart utilities and smart sta-diums. By combining global

expertise with our nation-leading infrastructure, we can deliver business breakthroughs across Qatar,” he said.

At SAP NOW, Jaidah Group and Aspire Academy won Middle East and North Africa Quality Awards for successful digital transformation and digital business models.

“In digitally transforming our

automotive and heavy equipment dealerships with SAP S/4HANA, Jaidah Group now has real-time views on our financial reporting,” said Saji Oommen, CIO, Jaidah Group speaking during the media roundtable held on the sideline of SAP NOW conference. “We now have the actionable insights leading to accelerated turna-round, enhanced levels of

customer service and retention, and improved inventory turnover -- supporting growth of Qatar’s key economic sectors,” he said .

Aspire Academy, with channel partner Clariba, won in the “Business Transformation” category, for deploying a wide range of analytics solutions. These solutions run on the in-memory SAP HANA platform to transform the performance for hundreds of top athletes and football players.

“With analytical dashboards and interactive reports that can be viewed on mobile devices, Aspire Academy’s coaches, sports scientists, athletes, and man-agement can track and benchmark athlete training, fitness, and matches to improve performance,” said Nasser Al Marri, Head of Educational & Sport IT Services, Aspire Academy. “Thanks to our digital transformation with SAP, we will be able to better develop the top young athletes in Qatar and enhance Qatar’s national teams’

competitiveness on the global stage,” he said.

Attendees to the SAP NOW Qatar event exchanged best prac-tices in digital transformation, and heard about the latest tech-nology trends, supporting Qatar National Vision 2030 goals.

“The leadership of Ooredoo, Jaidah Group, and Aspire Academy underscores the impor-tance of digital transformation to enable Qatar’s self-sufficiency and economic growth, in line with Qatar National Vision 2030,” said Fokion Angelopoulos, Country Manager, SAP Qatar.

“Qatar NOW’s success shows that Qatar’s CIOs are early adopters and disruptors. Organ-izations can find the biggest benefit from combining, on one digital platform, artificial intelli-gence, machine learning, block-chain, and the Internet of Things solutions, helping to catalyze Qatar’s Digital Economy growth, fueling job creation, and trans-forming daily lives,” added Fokion Angelopoulos.

FROM LEFT: Manar Khalifa Al Muraikhi, Director of Community and Public Relations Ooredoo Qatar; Rok Libnik, Assistant Director Manager and ICT service Ooredoo; Nasser Mohammed Al Marri, Head of Educational and Sport IT service Aspire; Saji Oommen, IT Director Jaidah Group; Fokion- Takis G Angelopoulos Managing Director SAP; and Sameer Narvekar, Quality Manager SAP; during the mediaroundtable at St Regis Hotel yesterday. PIC: ABDUL BASIT / THE PENINSULA

Jamie’s Italian debuts in Qatar THE PENINSULA DOHA: Apparel Group, one of GCC’s largest fashion and lifestyle retail conglomerate announced the opening of Jamie’s Italian restaurant in Qatar’s popular hub, Doha Festival City.

Jamie’s Italian has opened for the first time in Qatar, giving diners and foodies an opportunity to indulge in some authentic Italian salads, grills, pizzas, pasta and des-serts. The restaurant is spread over 2700 sq mts and was inaugurated by the UK Ambassador, Ajay Sharma on February 21.

Jamie’s Italian is a rustic Italian casual dining concept from British Chef Jamie Oliver. The menu is simple and classic; celebrating fresh, sustainable and impeccably sourced ingredients. The restaurant serves fresh

pasta made on site, every single day, hand-stretched pizzas, rustic main courses and indulgent desserts, that

the whole family can enjoy. Jamie’s Italian, open from 12pm to 11pm from Saturday - Friday.

British Ambassador to Qatar, Ajay Sharma, inaugurating Jamie’s Italian restaurant in Qatar’s popular hub, Doha Festival City.

Qatar, South Korea review defence ties Commander of the Joint Special Forces, Brigadier General Hamad bin Abdullah Al Fetais Al Marri, met yesterday with the South Korea’s Defence Attache to Qatar. During the meeting, they discussed bilateral relations in the defence and military fields as well as means of enhancing and developing them.


Emir honours three CMU-Q alumni for academic excellenceTHE PENINSULA DOHA: Three Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q) alumni received the Education Excellence Award from Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani at a recent ceremony. Omar Al Emadi received the platinum award, while Noor Al Mana and Alanood Al Muftah received the gold award.

The Dean of CMU-Q, Michael Trick, said, “It is a deep honour that three of our recent graduates were recognised with this award. At Carnegie Mellon, we strive to educate global cit-izens who will make a dif-ference in their own, unique ways. Omar, Noor and Alanood are very deserving of the award and I wish them every success in their careers.” All three alumni graduated from CMU-Q in 2017. Al Emadi, a business

administration grad, is now a strategy and investment analyst at beIN Media Group. Al Mana, also a business major, is a mar-keting finance analyst at Qatar Shell, and Al Muftah, an infor-mation systems graduate, is an information systems analyst at Qatar Central Bank.

The Education Excellence Award is presented by the Min-istry of Education and Higher Education, and given to students who have demonstrated achievement in the classroom and pass a rigorous interview process. Winners are also judged on their community involvement, extracurricular activities and leadership roles.

With ten graduating classes, nearly 700 young professionals have graduated from CMU-Q. Today they work in top organisations.

Place and time of birth can affect media preferences in later lifeTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: A new study by Klaus Schoenbach, an internationally renowned researcher, has found that when and where you are born could influence the type of media you consume.

Schoenbach, who served as NU-Q’s senior associate dean for four years, concluded that service in December and continues to serve as a distinguished adjunct professor.

The study, just published in

the scholarly journal Communi-cations, examines possible cor-relations between both the season and hemisphere in which one is born and media prefer-ences later in life.

The work builds on previous studies conducted in Europe and Japan suggesting that those born during winter months – when less light and colder temperatures cause people to stay indoors – tend to be less cheerful, lively and self-assured, and therefore more likely drawn to entertaining

content to manage their mood. The NU-Q study focuses on

the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa), where summers are almost unbearably hot, forcing people to stay inside or to cover them-selves up – that is, more like during northern winters.

“The more summer months people born in the

MENA region experience in the first half year of their life, the more we would expect them to use and prefer enter-

taining media content,” said Sch-oenbach, who is also a former

senior associate dean at NU-Q. “This relationship is stronger in countries with higher average summer temperatures. The duration of summer correlates with more media use later in life to compensate for a lack of cheerfulness and liveliness.”

Individuals with more – but also relatively hotter – summer months directly after birth more often prefer entertaining genres such as comedy and drama, both on TV and online. Younger respondents also tend to watch

films on DVD more frequently and do not call either religious and spiritual programs their favorites.

The study does note that the impact of climate during a per-son’s first six months in life should fade with age.

“This study provides new evi-dence of how temperaments come about that lead to specific me-dia behaviors, thus helping to expand and refine mood-man-agement theory,” said Schoenbach.

Klaus Schoenbach speaks about his latest research project.

Colorectal Cancer most common cancer in Qatar THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Colorectal cancer is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer in Qatar and a leading cause of cancer-related deaths in both men and women in the country, according to an official at Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC).

Statistics released by the Ministry of Public Health’s Qatar National Cancer Reg-istry indicate that among all male cancers in Qatar in 2015, colorectal cancer was the second most common with 94 new cases reported, followed by leukemia with 65 new cases reported.

Colorectal cancer is cancer that starts in the colon or rectum. Also known as bowel or colon cancer, most colorectal cancers begin as a growth called a polyp on the inner lining of the colon or rectum. Polyps are often non-cancerous, but some can develop into cancer.

Commenting on the inci-dence of colorectal cancer in Qatar, Dr Mohamed Abunada, Lead Colorectal Surgeon at HMC said, “Envi-ronmental conditions, family history, and diet are among the major factors that can lead to colorectal disease. The risk can, however, be lowered by avoiding a high-protein diet and fat-rich foods, quitting smoking, and most importantly maintaining an active lifestyle.” “Colorectal cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths in Qatar. To reduce the number of cases in Qatar we are doubling our educational and awareness efforts and highlighting preventive measures. We are also working hard to improve the treatment offered to people diagnosed with the disease by implementing the latest and best surgical techniques,” Dr Abunada said.

Bombay Silk Centre to celebrate 30th anniversarySALIM MATRAMKOT THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Bombay Silk Centre (BSC), established in 1988, is an exclusive showroom for silk products and is located in Shara Kaharbaa at the heart of Doha.

The pioneer at the helm of Bombay Silk Centre is Bekal Mohammed Salih, also known as the “Silkman of Doha”.

A first of its kind showroom in Qatar, when it was opened, is now gearing up to celebrate the 30th anniversary on March 22 under the leadership of Salih

“Bombay Silk Centre deals Natural Mulberry Silk, Dupion Silk, Pashmina Wool Shawl, Bhagalpuri Khadi Silk, Natural Linen by Linen Club, 160 micron Kashmer woolen by Reid & Taylor, Chairman Collection by Raymond, original hand-embroidered Zardosi Silk, Banarasi Uphada, Paithani, Bengal & Coimbtore Cotton, Rajkot Handlooms, Jamd-hanis, and Jaipuri Bandhej to name a few,” says Salih.

Recalling the launch in 1988, Salih says: “Many others followed suit with similar shops. But we remain number one in Qatar. Our customers are mainly Qataris but expatriates from the US, Europe, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka placed huge trust in us.

They know we never compro-mised in quality and pricing.”

When the first branch of BSC opened, it was a ‘three-shutter’ shop with five employees. “Four years later, we moved to a new premise with ‘eight- shutter’ shop in the same area,” he says. A few years later he opened a branch in Salwa Road. Now BSC occupies 11,000 square feet in floor area and now employs more than 100 workers.

“It’s not just my hard work. People like General Manager Vipresh Sheth, Paulose, Suna-daran and other staff brought all these business. They are with me since the beginning and I am very grateful to them,” says Salih. He also started Lexus Tailoring, devoted to stitching long Arabic robe (thobe) for men with Abdul Azeez Akkara in 1997-98. Lexus

Tailoring now has 22 branches in Qatar and some branches in neigh-bouring countries. More than 900 employees are working at Lexus Tailoring.

Achievements apart, Bekal Mohammed Salih is very active on the social and charity front. He is a member of ICC, ICBF, KMCC, Welfare League and several other bodies functioning in Qatar and in Kerala.

Recounting his life’s journey from his native village of Bekal, in Kasaragod district of Kerala, India, Salih says he landed in Qatar in December 1971 on a cargo dhow from Khor Fakkan.

In 1972, he started a small res-taurant in Azeeziya in partnership

with the late Kunjhammad, a friend from Bekal. Khalifa Sultan Al Suwaidi, a citizen, helped him legalise his stay in Doha. In 1974, Salih went back home. After four months, he returned to Doha. He took up odd jobs for livelihood. Later he landed a job at a British Bank and worked for two years. In 1977, he started ‘Metro Hotel’, an Indian restaurant, which gave him enough money to start a textile shop in Souq Faleh in partnership with MP Shafi Haji.

In 1980, he joined hands with three partners who were running

Century Textiles and Tailoring. “It was a small shop in Shara Kaharabaa. I took initiative to expand the business. Other partners, mainly Moideen and Thangal cooperated well. The business flourished,” he says.

While at Century Textiles, Dubai’s Al Humaidi group backed by Indian silk merchants Vijay Silk Limited suggested him to start a separate shop for silk products. Thus Bombay Sllk Centre took shape and from thereon there was no looking back.

Bekal Mohamed Salih (centre), Managing Director, Bombay Silk Centre and Chairman of BMS Exports (Mumbai), India, with Vipresh Seth (sixth right), General Manager, BSC, and some of the employees of BSC at the showroom. PICS: SALIM MATRAMKOT / THE PENINSULA

Dr Falah bin Naser Al Thani (second right), Under-Secretary of Assistant for Agriculture Affairs & Fisheries Resources at MME; Jabir Abdullah Al Ansari (third left), Director, Family Food Centre (FFC); Abdullah Khalifa Al Kuwari (fourth left), official from MEC; Faisal Hyder (second left), CEO; Jamal Hyder (right), General Manager; and Shafi Faisal (left), an FFC official, cutting a ceremonial cake to mark the launching of a programme for marketing premium quality Qatari vegetables at the Al Kheesa branch of FFC yesterday. PIC: SALIM MATRAMKOT / THE PENINSULA

AAB opens promotional galleries to reach out to Toyota & Lexus customersTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: AAB is taking new initi-atives to think outside the box and reach their Toyota & Lexus fan base locally by opening promotional galleries outside the parameters of the conventional showroom. The new strategy is not for customers to come to the showroom but for the showroom to come to them.

In the gallery Toyota & Lexus have on display their latest models ranging from small pas-senger vehicles, to sports coupes & SUVs.

AAB seeks to make it easier for visitors to discover all the exceptional features and advan-tages via the gallery located inside the Mall of Qatar where the latest models are on display.

The gallery is open to cus-tomers and all visitors in the mall from 10am-11pm on a weekly basis and from 10am-12am on weekends. During these hours, the sales staff are happy to welcome visitors to the gallery and present to them the latest technology and unique selling points of the displayed models including the legendary Toyota

Land Cruiser and its history in the region, the iconic all new 2018 Camry and the hybrid Prius the bestselling vehicle in its segment globally. Lexus will also have on display the state of the art LC500 coupe with its futur-istic design and sporty charac-teristics. The GS-F is also on display highlighting its powerful V8 engine and 471hp making it a true force to be reckoned with. Visitors can also feast their eyes on the new 7 seater RX350 with the retractable rear folding seats combing space and luxury ele-ments to any drive.

New centre to market local products CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Sheikh Dr Faleh bin Nasser Al Thani said: “The new initiative will allow customers to buy local vege-tables under retail trading system as it is being showcased in loose form unlike existing programme that offer premium products in packet under certain rules and regulation.”

Under new initiative, the partic-ipating commercial outlets will offer local premium quality vegetables at special prices that will be lower com-pared to those imported, he added.

He said under new initiative, the vegetables are being showcased in open basket allowing customers to choose and buy as per their wish in a bid to increase the sale. He pointed out that high quality local vegetables will be available with the retail sales system of items like tomato, cucumber, squash, pepper, eggplant, cabbage, broccoli, herbs and others in the participating commercial outlets, with and reasonable prices for consumers.

The products showcased under that ini-tiative will undergo the daily price

list of vegetables issued by the Ministry. The participating outlets will offer these products with the difference of QR1 per kg from the

daily declared price, said Abdullah Khalifa Al Kuwari, Director of Licensing and Market Monitoring Department at the Ministry.

Sheikh Dr Faleh bin Nasser Al Thani (centre), Assistant Undersecretary for Agriculture Affairs & Fisheries at the Ministry of Municipality and Environment; Yousef Al Khulaifi (left to him), Director of Agricultural Affairs Department; with other officials and local farmers at the launch of the initiative at Lulu Hypermarket-Gharrafa, yesterday.

FFC promotes local products

09THURSDAY 15 MARCH 2018 MIDDLE EAST

Two dozen sick civilians leave Syrian enclave amid siegeAP

BEIRUT: Two dozen civilians in need of medical care were evac-uated yesterday from Syria’s besieged rebel enclave near the capital, Damascus, the latest trickle of urgent cases to leave the area amid an ongoing military offensive as government forces advance. Local authorities in Harasta, one of the towns in eastern Ghouta, meanwhile, said they have been cut off from the rest of the rebel-held enclave, isolating 20,000 residents with no access to medical aid or supplies.

A spokesman for a medical charity said the isolation meant that Harasta and another cut-off pocket have not been able to send patients out in the evacu-ation. A list of least 1,034 patients, including 72 urgent cases, for evacuation from eastern Ghouta has been drawn up, said Mohamad Katoub, of the Syrian American Medical Society, which oversees a number of medical facilities there. The evacuation is part of a deal negotiated by the United Nations to allow urgent medical cases to leave the rebel-held enclave to government-held Damascus for treatment. About 150 patients and their families

left the enclave on Tuesday.Government forces have

recently split the enclave in two and cut off the towns of Douma and Harasta after their offensive intensified in February. Oppo-sition activists say more than 1,100 civilians have been killed since mid-February. Activists, yesterday, reported continued bombings of the enclave. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Syrian Civil Defence first responders, known as White Helmets, said Kfar Batna, a town in the southwestern corner of the enclave was particularly heavily bombed since Tuesday.

A video by the White Helmets shows rescuers rushing to a neighbourhood in the town, scrambling to find survivors and unable to pick up the dead amid continuing bombing. A couple of women emerge from a cloud of smoke, walking over a pile of debris to get to the rescuers.

Meanwhile, Syrian state-run TV broadcast footage of the patients exiting eastern Ghouta. In the footage, about a dozen residents, mostly women and children, many looking haggard and carrying a few belongings, are seen walking out of the enclave through the corridor manned by Syrian soldiers that links between the rebel-held

enclave and Damascus. At least two ambulances and a bus brought patients and their fam-ilies to the area. The broadcaster said 25 people were evacuated.

One resident told the state-run TV that he was happy to get out of eastern Ghouta safely. “I hope all people manage to get out. They all wish to get out. But they (rebel fighters) are not letting them out,” the unnamed resident said. “It is not up to us. It is up to them.”

There is an estimated 400,000 residents trapped in eastern Ghouta. Despite a UN ceasefire, the government’s mil-itary offensive continued against the region, only miles from the Syrian capital and in rebel hands since 2012. Russia ordered a daily humanitarian pause late last month, but almost no left during the breaks. Russia and the Syrian government said rebels have prevented the residents from leaving, while rebel fighters say the Russia-ordered human-itarian corridor contravenes U.N. standards for safe and voluntary evacuation.

The largest rebel group in eastern Ghouta, the Army of Islam, negotiated the medical evacuation but vowed to con-tinue fighting till the last man.

Families board Syrian Red Crescent buses evacuating humanitarian cases from Douma in the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta to the government-controlled Wafidin crossing on the eastern outskirts of the capital Damascus, yesterday.

Turkey ramps up assault on AfrinAFP

BEIRUT: Turkey turned up the heat on Syria’s Afrin yesterday, launching deadly strikes on Damascus loyalists deployed around the Kurdish enclave and closing in on its main city.

The development — which could redraw the map of northern Syria as the conflict enters its eighth year — came as Russian-backed regime forces pounded shrinking rebel pockets in Eastern Ghouta near Damascus, killing 25 civilians.

Afrin’s encirclement “will have been completed by the evening”, a Turkish presidency source said yesterday, toning down President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s earlier statement saying it would fall by evening.

Afrin city lies in the heart of a Kurdish-majority enclave against which neighbouring Turkey launched a deadly ground and air offensive on January 20. Before the retraction, Erdogan had told supporters in Ankara he hoped “Afrin will, God willing, have completely fallen by the evening.”

A top official in the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG),

which controls Afrin, laughed off the claim. Turkish and allied forces have almost encircled Afrin city, from which thousands started fleeing when it became apparent Ankara’s goal was nothing short of full capture.

Yesterday, Turkish bombing raids killed 10 fighters loyal to the regime, which last month deployed pro-government forces after the Kurds asked for help. “The air strikes targeted a check-point on the only road leading from afrin to regime-controlled territory to the southeast,” said the Britain-based Syrian Observ-atory for Human Rights.

Displaced families have swelled the city’s population to around 350,000, and officials feared a humanitarian crisis

should Turkish forces draw closer. Shells rained down on Afrin city, killing seven civilians including one child and wounding 25 others.

Earlier, dozens of desperate residents were seen lining up outside a bakery distributing free bread. “Regardless of who will win in the end, as soon as the battle for this small pocket begins, it will mean a massacre against civilians,” said YPG media adviser Rezan Hedo.

The Observatory said that Turkey-led forces controlled 70 percent of the wider Kurdish enclave, after seizing several vil-lages. On the outskirts of Damascus, hundreds of kilo-metres south of afrin, another humanitarian emergency was unfolding in Eastern Ghouta.

For nearly a month, Moscow-backed Syrian gov-ernment forces and allied militia have waged a devas-tating air and ground assault that has killed more than 1,220 civilians. The United Nations has called for urgent medical evacuations for more than 1,000 people who desperately need medical treatment outside the besieged area.

Civilians fleeing Afrin after Turkey said its army and allied rebels surrounded the Kurdish city in northern Syria, pass through the village of Anab northwest of the city, yesterday.

Nigeria’s Buhari says no rest until last kidnapped girl released LAGOS: Nigerian authorities will not rest until the last kidnapped girl from the northeastern towns of Chibok and Dapchi have been r e l e a s e d , P r e s i d e n t Muhammadu Buhari said yesterday in comments posted on his office’s official Twitter feed. He made the remarks during a visit to Yobe, the northeastern state in which Dapchi is located. Some 110 girls were kidnapped from their school in the town by suspected members of Boko Haram last month, the most high-profile mass abduction since the 2014 kidnap of over 270 Chibok schoolgirls.

Guinea teachers call off strikeC O N A K R Y : Guinea’s powerful teachers’ union called off a month-long strike yesterday after reaching an agreement with the government on pay condi-tions. The strikes have para-lysed the country’s education system and fractured rela-tions between teachers, parents and the state, while President Alpha Conde faced criticism for allowing the industrial action to drag on.

South African police accused of abuse

Kenyan president’s pick for top prosecutor draws criticismREUTERS

NAIROBI: President Uhuru Kenyatta’s pick of a national intelligence officer to serve as Kenya’s top prosecutor drew crit-icism from lawyers and rights groups yesterday.

The president nominated Noordin Mohamed Haji to be director of public prosecutions and forwarded his selection to parliament for approval on

Tuesday, along with his selection of Paul Kihara Kariuki as attorney general.

Critics said the choice of Haji, who is the deputy director of the national intelligence service and has no experience as a prose-cutor, endangered the inde-pendence of the judiciary because the nominee is viewed as a Kenyatta administration insider.

“The holder of this office

should not be someone of his background,” said activist Okiya Omtatah. “This is a red flag.”

“We are very concerned because he is not known within the legal profession,” said George Kegoro, executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Com-mission. “He is associated with the security establishment and he is a political insider.”

Kenyatta’s spokesman Manoah Esipisu told Reuters that

he picked had the candidate from the three names recommended to him by the selection panel.

Among those short-listed were senior prosecutors, said Peter Kiama, head of the Inde-pendent Medico-Legal Unit, a Nairobi-based rights group.

The spokesman did not comment on the make-up of the short-list, the finalists nor the identify of those on the selection panel.

“Kenya needs an explanation as to why very experienced and able deputy prosecutors were not chosen for the position,” Kiama said. Before joining Kenya’s intel-ligence service, Haji worked in the Attorney General’s office in the commercial law department, according to Isaac Okero, pres-ident of the Law Society of Kenya.

“His exposure to the practice of criminal law seems to have been very limited,” he said.

Strike by doctors cripples hospitals in ZimbabweAFP

HARARE: Zimbabwe’s main state hospitals turned away many patients and only attended to emergency cases on Wednesday as a strike by doctors escalated.

The strike, which seek to pressure the government for salary increases and address drugs shortages in hospitals, has spread since starting two weeks ago among junior doctors.

“We will only return to work when all issues raised have been fully resolved,” the Zimbabwe Hospital Doctors Association (ZHDA) said in a statement.

“We note with concern the closure of almost all

central hospitals, children’s units, provincial hospitals and cessation of emergency life-saving procedures throughout the country.”

Senior doctors, yesterday, joined the strike, stoking fears of loss of lives.

Labour unrest could pose a test for President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who came to power in November after the fall of Robert Mugabe.

Mnangagwa has vowed to revive the economy and boost investment, after public sector strikes were a regular feature of Mugabe’s rule due to delayed payment of salaries.

“My brother had an appointment for a review for his

broken arm, but the doctors are only attending to critical cases,” Sicelo Phahlane, said leaving Mpilo, the main state hospital in the second city of Bulawayo.

“This new government must address the doctors’ grievances urgently to save lives and show it has a different approach to issues from the previous one.”

A doctor at Mpilo, asking not to be named said: “We are not going back to work until the authorities address us.”

Zimbabwe’s economy has been on a downturn for nearly two decades and cash shortages have been experienced for more than a year with banks running out of bank notes.

AFP

JOHANNESBURG: South African police were yesterday probing one of their own officers who was accused of molesting young girls while investigating harassment of scores of primary school pupils.

The forensic investigator allegedly molested two girls aged seven and eight on Monday when he visited their school to prepare pupils for a court appearance.

The girls are among up to 87 girls allegedly abused by a security guard at a school in Johannesburg’s Soweto township last year.

The guard is facing rape

and sexual assault charges. Police provincial commis-sioner Deliwe de Lange said the allegations against the officer were “receiving the necessary attention as a matter of priority”.

Provincial education min-ister Panyaza Lesufi expressed dismay at the latest “shocking and disturbing” accusations. “A person entrusted with pro-tecting children has violated their trust, “ Lesufi said in a statement.

The opposition Democratic Alliance party called for better vetting, saying that 57 police officers with criminal records are employed in units special-ising in child protection.

Turkish and allied forces have almost encircled Afrin city, from which thousands started fleeing when it became apparent Ankara’s goal was nothing short of full capture.

It is commendable that the country aims at increasing the agricultural sector’s GDP input by more than 4 percent annually and Agriteq 2018 will be instrumental in promoting efforts to achieve these goals.

The new Strategy seeks to achieve its objectives driven by expectations that the real economy will grow during the period (2018-2022) by the activities of the non-oil and gas sector, especially in the sectors of merchandise and traded services, while the rationalisation of government spending in this period will balance the public financial balance of the country, and facilitates the creation of a wider space for private sector activities.

10 THURSDAY 15 MARCH 2018VIEWS

CHAIRMANSHEIKH THANI BIN ABDULLAH AL THANI

EDITOR-IN-CHIEFDR. KHALID BIN MUBARAK [email protected]

ACTING MANAGING EDITORMOHAMMED SALIM [email protected]

ESTABLISHED IN 1996

EDITORIAL

Attaining self-sufficiency

Qatar is always at the forefront in providing global and local experts a platform to exchange ideas, bring in new trends and developments and make use of business

opportunities.In this context, Qatar International Agricultural

Exhibition (AgriteQ 2018), which will be held at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Center from March 20 to 22, will help Qatar and the region attain sus-tainable food production programme.

The visionary programme is held under the patronage of Father Emir H H Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and is organised by the Ministry of Municipality and Environment.

The sixth AgriteQ 2018 is in line with Qatar’s move towards attaining self-sufficiency in every field as Qatar is keen to diversify its economy, broad-ening its targets towards achieving a sustainable and comprehensive development in line with the Qatar National Vision 2030.

Qatar’s efforts and hard work to achieve self-sufficiency increased manifold after the unjust siege imposed on this great nation by some countries. However, the unjust blockade of land, sea and air gave Qatar major opportu-nities to realise its hidden power in every field.

The AgriteQ 2018 certainly will give a major boost in meeting food security goals, a top priority for the country, especially in the region’s current circumstances. The participation of over 300 exhibitors from 37 countries itself shows that the world leaders in the field is keen to participate in the development of Qatar. And the efforts of organisers to make it a grand success should also be appreciated.

Qatar used to import more than 90 percent of its food

needs and is continuously launching several initi-atives and projects that are aimed at increasing local production and achieving self-efficiency in the basic produces.

“The exhibition reflects the strategic pursuit of self-sufficiency in agricultural production, which aims at increasing the country’s domestic production capacities and reduce its dependency on imported products”, said Sheikh Dr Faleh bin Nasser Al Thani, Assistant Undersecretary of the Ministry’s Agricul-tural Affairs, Livestock and Fisheries.

It is commendable that the country aims at increasing the agricultural sector’s GDP input by more than 4 percent annually and Agriteq 2018 will be instrumental in promoting efforts to achieve these goals.

It’s worth mentioning that the exhibition, which will showcase innovations in agricultural techniques, will also host a series of lectures and meetings to discuss current and future projects in the agricul-tural sector with farm owners, agricultural experts, government agencies, environmental specialists and technology providers.

Qatar’s Second National Development Strategy a constant progress towards sustainable economy

Qatar Second National Devel-opment Strategy (2018-2022), launched yesterday has outlined a national stra-

tegic roadmap for the next five years, after mobilising efforts to guide the activities and resources available to meet the national priorities set for this period, and thus making it clear that the economic prosperity of the State of Qatar will be sustained through the development of economic infra-structure, economic diversification, private sector development, natural resources management, human development, sustainable social development and sustainable envi-ronment development.

The new strategy was charac-terised by the addition of a new chapter dealing with global partner-ships for development, which aims to strengthen Qatar’s role at all regional and international levels, raise the level of international partnerships and contribute effectively to regional and international peace and security, the strategy included also a new chapter on strategic performance man-agement, which is also considered as a compass to monitor implementation paths, ensure smooth and efficient follow-up, and to know obstacles and work to overcome them in a timely manner, taking advantage of the lessons of the first strategy to focus on results and outputs through moni-toring the most important key per-formance indicators to determine the safety of their implementation.

According to the strategy book issued today, efficient implementation of the national development strategy

will continue to be subject to moderni-zation of the public sector and upgrading its performance, in order to complement the efforts exerted in this direction and the tran-sition of the imple-menting gov-ernment entities from the state of recognizing the impor-tance of planning as a tool to achieve the results, to the regular appli-cation of institutional practices in the prepa-ration of the executive plans,

medium-term strategy and annual output plans.

The new strategy book said that its preparation was influenced by the emerging conditions in terms of gov-ernment structure and economic developments, the number of sectors was reduced from 14 sectors in the first strategy to eight sectors in the second strategy, organized according to the four pillars of Qatar National Vision 2030.

The second national development strategy (2018-2022) addressed the most important challenges facing the first national development strategy (2011-2016).

Through a broad participatory process, the second national strategy, adopted the national priority devel-opment agenda for the coming years to the end of 2022, by emphasizing and re-evaluating national devel-opment goals, identifying change obstacles and re-evaluating priorities, lessons learned and what can be achieved on the ground.

According to the new strategy, the State of Qatar will focus during the next five years on reforms in the area of policy and motivation, and enhance productivity at all levels, and devote efforts of economic diversification, and participants in the second national development strategy are expected to focus on strengthening their institutional and organizational capacities, formulating incentive frameworks and policies to attract the private sector, enhancing their contri-bution to the local economy and enhancing productivity in all its dimensions.

The new Strategy seeks to achieve its objectives driven by expectations that the real economy will grow during the period (2018-2022) by the activities of the non-oil and gas sector, especially in the sectors of mer-chandise and traded services, while the rationalisation of government spending in this period will balance the public financial balance of the country, and facilitates the creation of a wider space for private sector activities.

The second National Devel-opment Strategy stressed that main-taining the economic performance of the State of Qatar to achieve the goals of its National Vision 2030 should be institutionally linked to sustainable development programs and plans. The Strategy noted that despite the great legislative and reg-ulatory efforts to consolidate these values, achieving sustainability requires continuous and integrated efforts based on outstanding interna-tional experiences, as well as vig-orous efforts to build national eco-nomic capacities, both institutional and human, and to preserve them as a national wealth and heritage for future generations.

According to the Strategy, the sus-tainability of the economic boom requires more investment in the eco-nomic infrastructure, which in turn would raise the efficiency of the

economy and expand its absorptive capacity, avoid bottlenecks and increase its competitiveness.

It cautioned that although many achievements have been made in the economic infrastructure sector such as transport, communications and information and the supply of elec-tricity, water, sanitation and con-struction networks, it is difficult to determine the extent to which they meet the economic and human needs and the efficiency of operation and maintenance.

In this context, the Strategy cited international indicators, including the infrastructure index, in which Qatar ranked 18th out of 138 countries in 2016, and the logistics performance index in which Qatar ranked 30th out of 160 countries in 2016. The Strategy, however, called for action to overcome future challenges facing the economic infrastructure sector by developing a supportive infra-structure for the national economy that is sustainable, high quality and able to keep up with the latest tech-nology systems.

This can be achieved through the provision of sustainable water, increasing the production of tradi-tional and renewable energy, recy-cling of project waste, more coordi-nation among relevant government agencies, particularly in the identifi-cation of project priorities, the exact size of their investments, the expected demand and the issuance of appro-priate legislation, as well as the pro-vision of data and technical capabil-ities of human cadres, and addressing issues related to electronic security, according to the Strategy.

QNA

QUOTE OF THE DAYI would like to be

very clear. We have promised €3bn for

the refugee program and another €3 bn to Turkey for the coming

years. This decision of the EU will be respected fully.

Jean-Claude Juncker European Commission

Chief

The new strategy was characterised by the addition of a new chapter dealing with global partnerships for development, which aims to strengthen Qatar’s role at all regional and international levels, raise the level of international partnerships and contribute effectively to regional and international peace and security, the strategy included also a new chapter on strategic performance management, which is also considered as a compass to monitor implementation paths, ensure smooth and efficient follow-up, and to know obstacles and work to overcome them in a timely manner.

H E Dr Saleh bin Mohammed Al Nabet (centre), Minister of Development Planning and Statistics; Dr Sameh El Saharty (left), World Bank Director of Human Development Programs in the Gulf State; Dr. Ibrahim Saleh Al Naimi (second left), President of the Community College of Qatar (CCQ); Ambassador Tariq bin Ali Faraj Al Ansari (right), Department of International Cooperation; and Ali bin Abdullatif Al Misnad (second right ), Qatar Chamber board member, during a press conference held on the sidelines of the launch ceremony of Qatar’s 2nd National Development Strategy 2018-2022 at Sheraton Hotel yesterday. PIC: KAMMUTTY VP / THE PENINSULA

Trump’s foreign policy has not been particularly good, but at least it has been far less radical than one might have expected based on his campaign rhetoric. As a candidate, Trump frequently gave the impression that he intended to tear up alliances, discard free trade in favor of wholesale protectionism and fundamentally upend the foreign policy tradition he inherited.

11THURSDAY 15 MARCH 2018 OPINION

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Japan political longevity likely elusive in a post-Abe world

Trump shows signs of breaking free of advisers’ constraints

LINDA SIEG REUTERS

HAL BRANDS BLOOMBERG

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made some lasting changes to bolster the power of the premier’s office, but his political longevity is

mainly due to strong allies, weak enemies and good luck — a hat trick suc-cessors may find hard to emulate.

Abe, 63, is in the midst of what may be the worst political crisis since his return to

office in December 2012, as doubts swirl over suspected cronyism in a land deal with a school operator linked to his wife, Akie.

He has denied he or his wife inter-vened in the sale. But the affair could dash Abe’s hopes of a third three-year term as governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) president from September, leading to a leadership change sooner than expected. Among the reforms Abe made was the launch in 2014 of a cabinet bureau giving him and his close aide, Chief Cabinet Sec-retary Yoshihide Suga, authority to appoint hundreds of senior officials, tight-ening their grip on the bureaucracy.

That was the latest in a series of moves over the past two decades to cen-tralise power in the “Kantei,” as the prime minister’s office is known.

“Abe is the culmination of changes that began earlier that made clear where the buck stops,” said Gerry Curtis, emeritus professor at New York’s Columbia Uni-versity. “After Abe, how the institutions work depends on the individual.” Abe and Suga have made skilful use of their increased clout. Even before the new system was adopted, for example, Abe named an ex-diplomat sympathetic to his drive to loosen the limits of the pacifist constitution on the military to a post in charge of interpreting that charter.

Abe has assembled a tight inner circle of aides, many of whom have learned from missteps of his first, troubled term in 2006-2007. That tenure ended when he quit abruptly in the face of scandals in his cabinet, a hung parliament and bad health. “It’s an insider group of trusted friends that run a very, very stable ship,” said Jesper Koll, head of equities fund WisdomTree Japan. “In a very un-Jap-anese fashion, he is not afraid to exercise power and use the institutional framework.”

Abe has also benefited from a frag-mented opposition and voters’ memories of the rocky reign of rival Democratic Party of Japan — which has since shat-tered into three smaller parties. He has led his ruling bloc to three huge wins in lower house elections, helped by a splin-tering of opposition votes and low turnout. His “Abenomics” recipe for growth, including hyper-easy monetary policy and fiscal spending, has given Japan its longest period of expansion since the 1980s, a fact not lost on voters, although consumption could lose steam and wage growth is weak.

Abe’s willingness to risk snap elec-tions — two in the past four years — has helped keep LDP lawmakers in line by

forcing them to focus on re-election rather than challenging him, while he has rewarded their constituents with public works spending. “Prime Minister Abe has been very good ... at both carrots and sticks,” said University of Tokyo professor Yu Uchiyama.

Some of his strategies, however, such as trying to dampen media criticism by limiting access to information as well as putting bureaucrats in their place, may already be backfiring. Rivals inside the LDP are also getting feisty feistier, with some speaking out about the suspected cronyism scandal.

“Abe declared war on the media and the media is now getting its revenge,” said Jeffrey Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University’s Japan campus. The conservative Abe’s perceived nemesis, the liberal Asahi newspaper, was first to report that the finance ministry had altered documents about the land deal. “Abe declared war on the autonomy of the bureaucrats, but I’m not betting against the bureaucracy,” Kingston added.

Likely successors, such as former foreign minister Fumio Kishida and former defence minister, Shigeru Ishiba may not have the right stuff to pull the levers of Kantei power with the same skill as Abe’s team, analysts said.

That has some experts worrying that Japan could again see the revolving door premiers of the past. Japan had five prime ministers in the five years before Abe returned for a second term, and nine between 1989 and 2001, before Junichiro Koizumi managed a five-year term.

“If Abe has to go now, I’d predict that the next prime minister would last less than two years,” said Koll of WisdomTree Japan. “Abe is an active prime minister. Whoever comes next will be a passive one.”

Almost from the moment Rex Tillerson was sworn in as secretary of state a little more than a year ago, it

seemed clear that his tenure would be short and undistinguished. And although Tillerson ultimately lasted just long enough to give the impression he might stick around after all, his firing basically confirms these judgments.

As a variety of commentators have already noted, Tillerson’s primary legacy from his 14 months of service is a demoralised, disem-powered State Department that is hemorrhaging talent and experience. But in one of the many ironies of the Trump era, Tillerson’s departure — and his replacement by CIA Director Mike Pompeo — may nonetheless be bad news regarding what it is to come in year two of the Trump presi-dency and beyond. It is conceivable that Tillerson’s firing will return the State Department — and the sec-retary of state — to a more prominent role in American policy. Yet it may also indicate that Trump is progres-sively casting off the constraints that have prevented him from doing even greater damage.

Trump’s foreign policy has not been particularly good, but at least it has been far less radical than one might have expected based on his campaign rhetoric. As a candidate, Trump frequently gave the impression that he intended to tear up alliances, discard free trade in favor of wholesale protectionism and fundamentally upend the foreign policy tradition he inherited. Yet during his first year in office, most of those promises went unfulfilled.

Yes, Trump withdrew the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and announced his intention to do likewise with the Paris climate change accords. Yes, he disrupted alliances and partnerships alike through incompetent and boorish behavior. Yes, he threatened to tear up trade agreements from Nafta to the US-Korea bilateral trade deal.

But the symbolic departures were normally greater than the sub-stantive ones. Trump did not, for instance, withdraw from Nafta despite his clear desire to do so; he did not reinstitute torture, despite having repeatedly touted the efficacy of that practice. He even (so far) has remained within an Iran deal that he had repeatedly castigated on the campaign trail. And on a number of policies — Afghanistan, the Islamic State and others — the policies he pursued were not far removed from what any Republican administration might have done.

There were many reasons for this, but top of the list is the fact that Trump was simply hemmed in by his most important advisers. Given how unorthodox Trump’s worldview was, it was virtually inevitable that he would have to surround himself with aides that did not subscribe fully, or even partially, to his America First brand of zero-sum nationalism. And on a variety of issues, Trump’s Cabinet succeeded in moderating his more impulses.

According to press reporting, for instance, the intervention of advisers like National Economic Council chairman Gary Cohn and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue dis-suaded Trump from ditching Nafta in

the spring of 2017. Similarly, during the summer of 2017 the unified opposition of Trump’s key national security aides reportedly prevented him from simply withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, and led him to seek its renegotiation instead. Con-trary to the fevered dreams of con-spiracy theorists, this was not some “deep state” at work. It was Trump’s own political appointees grabbing the wheel to stop the president from driving US foreign policy into a ditch.

The result of these and other instances was a widespread sense that Trump was being moderated. The president, however, appears to have other ideas.

I have argued that Trump’s foreign policy might be significantly more disruptive in year two of his presidency than it had been in year one. In part, this was because the administration had simply kicked hard issues like Iran and Nafta down the road, meaning that Trump was soon going to be confronted with a choice between escalating and retreating. And in part it was because the president would feel greater political pressure to deliver on some of his campaign promises as the 2018 midterms approached.

My fear was that all this — as well as his inevitable resentment at being “managed” by his advisers — would tempt Trump to break free of his constraints and impose greater changes in US policy. This is what now appears to be happening.

Case in point: the steel and alu-minum tariffs that were formally imposed last week. The president’s “establishment” advisers reportedly fought hard against those tariffs, but Trump ignored them, choosing to heed the protec-tionist urgings of economic nation-alists such as Peter Navarro and Robert Lighthizer.

In the wake of that decision, Cohn resigned, an ominous sign of how the internal balance of power may be shifting as the NAFTA rene-gotiations approach a critical stage. Tillerson’s departure may have similar implications for other foreign policy issues.

After all, Tillerson — for all his well-documented flaws — was one of the advisers seeking to persuade Trump to avoid the massive self-inflicted wound of pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. But the president seems to have grown tired of Tiller-son’s opposition on that issue — he cited it as one of the reasons for firing him — and thus replaced him with Pompeo, an Iran hawk who has been associated with efforts to weaken or even terminate the agreement.

Abe’s willingness to risk snap elections — two in the past four years — has helped keep LDP lawmakers in line by forcing them to focus on re-election rather than challenging him, while he has rewarded their constituents with public works spending.

Tillerson’s departure may thus indicate that the defenders of the Iran deal are becoming weaker as Trump’s self-imposed May deadline for renegotiating that agreement nears. More broadly, it indicates that Secretary of Defense James Mattis is losing a key ally — the two were often reportedly in lockstep in seeking to pull Trump back toward the mainstream.

To be clear, there are also more positive possibilities asso-ciated with Tillerson’s exit. If one believes that having a trusted, empowered secretary of state with the president’s ear is important to the success of American diplomacy, then “Rexit” may be a step in the right direction. If one believes that Tillerson’s effort to reorganize the State Department was ill-conceived and counter-productive, then his removal may be welcome, as well. Finally, having headed the CIA, Pompeo surely understands the threat posed by Russian electoral inter-vention in the US and other coun-tries — although whether he can get Trump to take meaningful action here is another question.

With Trump, the fundamental question is always whether the president or his more responsible advisers are winning the struggle over the direction of American statecraft.

The author is the Henry A Kiss-inger Distinguished Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assess-ments. His latest book is “American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump.”

12 THURSDAY 15 MARCH 2018ASIA

Samajwadi Party candidate Nagendra Pratap Singh Patel (centre) celebrates with supporters after winning by-election Phulpur (Allahabad) Lok Sabha seat in Allahabad yesterday.

Nepal Chief Justice sacked for faking date of birthAFP

KATHMANDU: Nepal’s Chief Justice Gopal Parajuli was sacked yesterday for faking his date of birth in order to remain in office longer.

The controversy over Parajuli’s date of birth has been brewing for months after he charged a prominent activist and Nepal’s largest newspaper with contempt of court for raising concerns about his multiple birthdays.

The decision came just moments before Parajuli administered the oath of office to Nepal’s President Bidya Bhandari, who was ree-lected for a second term on Tuesday. He administered the oath nonetheless. It is not clear if Bhandari will have to be sworn in again.

Rohingya return: Myanmar, UN agencies begin talksAP

NAYPYITAW: Senior officials in Myanmar announced yesterday that they have begun talks with UN agencies to see how they could assist with the repatriation of Rohingya refugees who fled to Bangladesh to escape violence against them.

Foreign Ministry Permanent Secretary Myint Thu said the offices of the UN High Commis-sioner for Refugees and the U.N. De v e l o p me n t Program responded last week with a

proposal and concept paper to the government’s invitation for UN involvement, which the gov-ernment is now studying.

“We considered that the time is now appropriate to invite UNHCR and UNDP to be involved in the repatriation and reset-tlement process, as well as in car-rying out activities supporting the livelihoods and development for all communities in Rakhine state,” Myint Thu said.

Human rights experts believe safety cannot yet be guaranteed for about 700,000 Rohingya

Muslims who fled the western state of Rakhine to Bangladesh after security forces carried out brutal crackdowns in response to attacks by Rohingya insurgents last August.

Antagonism between Rakhine’s Buddhist community and Rohingya Muslims led to communal violence in 2012, forcing at least 140,000 Rohingya from their homes into squalid camps for internally dis-placed people. Most Rohingya are treated as stateless persons with limited rights, and the insurgents

drew support from the discon-tented as prejudice against their community grew in over-whelming Buddhist Myanmar.

Stanislav Saling, a UN spokesman in Myanmar, con-firmed that in response to Myan-mar’s initiative, the U.N. agencies submitted a note proposing how they could help create conditions “for the safe, dignified and vol-untary return for refugees, in line with international principles.” Neither the UN nor the gov-ernment made public details of the proposal.

Sri Lanka to lift social media ban: MinisterREUTERS

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka is likely to lift a ban on social media networks this week, a government minister said, almost a week after blocking access to prevent the spread of communal violence.

At least two people were killed in clashes in early March when Sinhalese Buddhists, angered by a killing of a driver, attacked mosques and Muslim-owned properties in the central Kandy district, a popular tourist destination.

Some of the violence was instigated by postings on Facebook threatening more attacks on Muslims, according to the government, which on March 7 cut access to Facebook, Viber and WhatsApp. It initially said the ban would last for three days, but users say the services have remained blocked, indicating that in practice the ban has been extended. Harin Fernando, the Telecommuni-cation Minister, said senior Facebook company officials were expected to visit Sri Lanka tomorrow and the gov-ernment was likely to lift the ban on both Facebook and WhatsApp access.

Delegates line up to vote during the fourth plenary session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, yesterday.

China hopes Tillerson move won’t affect Sino-US tiesAFP

BEIJING: China voiced hope yesterday Donald Trump’s sudden firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will not impact bilateral relations or planned talks between the US president and North Korea’s leader.

Beijing is believed to have a positive assessment of Till-erson, who was seen as a light touch in contrast to Trump’s “good cop, bad cop” routine of slamming Beijing on Twitter while simultaneously flattering its leadership in person.

“We hope that this personnel change will at the least not have any effect on the development of Sino-US bilateral rela-tions or Sino-US cooperation in some important areas,” foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told reporters at a regular press briefing.

Shock defeat for BJP in UP and Bihar by-pollsIANS

PATNA: Opposition leaders yesterday advocated, with renewed vigour, for a grand alliance to defeat the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections after it was crushed in three Lok Sabha seats in the by-polls, especially in Uttar Pradesh where an alliance of arch rivals SP and BSP sealed the BJPs fate.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was defeated on the Gora-khpur, and Phulpur Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh by Sama-jwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party combine while the Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) defeated the Janata Dal United (JD-U) — an NDA ally — on Araria Lok Sabha seat in Bihar.

The RJD had the backing of the Congress in Bihar though in Uttar Pradesh the Congress fielded its candidates on both seats. Buoyed by the victory, a number of opposition leaders including RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav and veteran socialist leader Sharad Yadav called for a Grand Alliance at the national level to defeat the BJP. Congress Pres-ident Rahul Gandhi and

Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee were quick to congratulate the victorious can-didates of the opposition camp.

Although Samajwadi Party President and former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav avoided a direct reply to the chances of his party forging an alliance with BSP and others for the next year’s Lok Sabha polls, saying there was still time, but emphasised that the by-polls results did give a “message and a direction” to the national politics. Gandhi, while congrat-ulating the victorious candi-dates, said that the results showed the “electorate is very angry against the BJP and will vote for the non-BJP candidate

most likely to win”.Tejashwi Yadav said the

Samajwadi Party and the BSP should fight the 2019 Lok Sabha polls together and urged the Con-gress to join them. “A Grand Alliance is the demand of time, it is the demand of the people. Keep your ego away. There is a need to teach a lesson to those who have destroyed the country,” he said. Sharad Yadav said even “a partial unity” among opposition parties was enough to defeat the BJP. “The (BJP-led) government will go even if there is a partial unity among the opposition parties,” he said.

Asked if the opposition parties were chalking out unity plans ahead of the 2019 general election, he said the “process is on” and added that the opposition unity was a “big challenge” and would take “time and honest efforts” to materialise.

Banerjee congratulated Akhilesh Yadav, BSP chief Mayawati and Lalu Prasad as the opposition took big leads over the BJP in Lok Sabha by-elections.

“Great victory. Congratula-tions to Mayawatiji and Akhileshji... The beginning of the

end has started,” the Trinamool Congress leader tweeted.

“Congratulations to Lalu Prasadji for winning Araria and Jehanabad. This is a great victory,” she said.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Wednesday said the BJP under-estimated the SP-BSP alliance that led to its defeat in the by-elections to the prestigious Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha seats and

termed it as a lesson to the party which would do an introspection.

Reacting to the shocking defeat of the party in the seats held by him and his Deputy Keshav Prasad Maurya, he, however, expressed confidence that this would have no impact on the general elections in 2019 in which national issues will play a dominant role and it will be a vote on the performance of Prime

Minister Narendra Modi.He said local factors play a

role in by-elections but in the general elections, the good per-formance of the Modi gov-ernment and its welfare schemes will have an impact in BJP’s favour. In Bihar, BJP leader and Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi downplayed the RJD’s victory, saying it was the result of sympathy votes in Lalu Prasad’s favour.

BJP was defeated on the Gorakhpur, and Phulpur Lok Sabha seats in UP by SP-BSP combine while the Lalu Prasad’s RJD defeated the JD-U — an NDA ally — on Araria Lok Sabha seat in Bihar.

Newly-elected Nepali President Bidhya Bhandari (centre) looks on next to Nepal’s Chief of Justice Gopal Prasad Parajuli (left), Vice-President Nanda Kishor Pun (second left), Prime Minister KP Oli (second right) and Speaker of the House of Representatives Krishna Bahadur Mahara during the swearing-in ceremony at the Presidential Residence in Kathmandu, yesterday.

Bidhya Bhandari takes oath as Nepal’s President

SC: Ayodhya parties free to settle dispute IANS

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court yesterday said that the parties to the Ramjanmab-hoomi-Babri Masjid dispute were free to settle the conten-tious issue between themselves but it will not ask them take it as a way forward except for deciding the title issue.

A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice Ashok Bhushan and Justice S Abdul Nazeer said this as a number of applicants including the resident of Ayodhya and Faizabad urged to court to ask parties to the dispute — Sunni Wakf Board and Nirmohi Akhara — to arrive at a compromise.

“You say that they must com-promise, how can we issue notice on it,” said Justice Bhushan,

making it clear that it was for the parties to settle the issue but as far the court was concerned it would not get into it except for deciding the title suit.

The court also said this to former Union Minister Arif Mohammad Khan who told the court that two professors of MIT Pune have drawn a plan to convert the disputed site into a place of worship for all religions and teaching of their spiritual tenets.

“If anybody is a professor or academician, he can speak to both the parties and if he suc-ceeds, then he can approach us,” Chief Justice Misra said declining the plea for court exercising its extra-ordinary power. “Inherent power must not grow up to this. It has its own limitation,” he noted.

Maran brothers discharged in illegal telephone exchange caseIANS

CHENNAI: A special CBI court discharged DMK leader and former Telecom Minister Dayanidhi Maran, his brother and Sun TV group head Kala-nithi Maran and five others in the alleged illegal telephone exchange case.

The seven had filed a dis-charge petition which the court allowed on the grounds of lack of prima facie material against them. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had alleged a loss of Rs1.78cr to the government due to the installation of alleged an illegal telephone exchange at Dayanidhi Maran’s house which was used for Sun TV operations.

The others who were dis-charged were BSNL’s former Chief General Manager K Brahmanathan and former Deputy General Manager M Velusamy, the former minis-ter’s Personal Secretary V Gowthaman, and Sun TV network employees S Kannan and KS Ravi. This is the second major legal victory for a DMK leader.

Plenary session of CPPCC

13THURSDAY 15 MARCH 2018 ASIA

More troops sent to west Afghanistan after attacksAFP

FARAH: Afghanistan has deployed more troops to a restive western province where a multi-billion-dollar pipeline is planned after the Taliban launched multiple attacks against security forces, causing heavy casualties, officials said yesterday.

The latest assault in Farah, which borders Iran, happened in the early hours of yesterday when Taliban militants stormed a checkpoint manned by police and intelligence officers on the outskirts of the provincial capital of the same name, killing seven security forces.

It came as the Taliban face growing pressure to take up Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s offer of peace talks to end the 16-year insurgency, but so far the group has given only a muted response.

“When commando forces were deployed they (the mili-tants) retreated,” Jamila Amini, a member of the Farah pro-vincial council said.

Four members of the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s spy agency, and three police were killed, she added.

The incident and death toll were confirmed by fellow

provincial council member Gul Ahmad Faqiri.

“We have sent more troops and commando forces to Farah to contain the situation,” defence ministry spokesman Dawlat Waziri said, adding the army chief of staff had also visited the province.

“The situation will soon come under control,” he said.

Taliban fighters on Monday briefly took control of the administrative building of Farah’s Anar Dara district, killing eight police, before they were beaten back by security forces, officials said.

That came after an attack on soldiers in Bala Buluk district over the weekend that resulted in multiple casualties.

A February 24 raid on an army base in the same district killed at least 18 soldiers, offi-cials said, in one of the deadliest attacks on security forces in recent months.

Farah is a poppy-growing province in a hard to reach part of Afghanistan which a section of the multi-billion-dollar TAPI gas pipeline will traverse.

The conduit is named for the four countries involved: Turk-menistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Despite security concerns, the Taliban have pledged to cooperate with the project.

Farah has been the scene of intense fighting in recent years. In 2017 insurgents tried to overrun the capital three times, according to the Afghanistan Analysts Network.

“The security situation has been deteriorating day by day in Farah,” Faqiri confirmed, esti-mating around a dozen security forces are killed in the province every day.

Former Farah governor Mohammad Aref Shah Jahan resigned in January after days of protests in the provincial capital over rising insecurity.

The latest assault in Farah, which borders Iran, happened in the early hours of yesterday when Taliban militants stormed a checkpoint manned by police & intelligence officers on the outskirts of the provincial capital of the same name, killing seven security forces.

Selfie with Aussie troopsAustralian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull takes a selfie with a group of Australian Army soldiers after inspecting armoured vehicles at the Gallipoli Barracks in Brisbane, Australia, yesterday.

NEWS BYTESPeshawar High Court orders free healthcare for lawyersINTERNEWS

PESHAWAR: A Peshawar High Court bench yesterday directed the provincial government to provide free medical treatment to local lawyers and their family members like Punjab and Sindh.

Justice Waqar Ahmad Seth and Justice Mussarat Hilali pro-nounced a short order in this respect accepting two petitions filed by lawyers.

One petition was filed by advocate Shabbir Hussain Gigyani in 2015 and the other by the Peshawar District Bar Association.

Both the petitioners requested the court to issue directives for the provincial gov-ernment for the provision of free medical treatment to lawyers and their families across the province like the treatment permissible to government officers of BPS-17 and BPS-18.

Zahidullah Zahid, counsel for the petitioners, along with other lawyers said the Punjab gov-ernment had permitted free medical treatment to all lawyers in that province in 2005.

He pointed out that in 2015, the Sindh government, too, had introduced free health facilities for lawyers in the province.

The counsel said in light of a judgment of the Islamabad High Court, the federal government also recently ordered the

provision of free treatment to the lawyers in the capital city.

He said it was an injustice to the lawyers of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that they had not been provided the health facil-ities, which were given to lawyers in Punjab, Sindh and Islamabad.

Zahid said under the Consti-tution, it was the responsibility of the government to provide free health facilities to its citizens.

He contended that the KP government had so far not been fulfilling that constitutional obligation.

The lawyer said the province was hit hard by militancy for over a decade.

He said like rests of the cit-izens the lawyers was also badly affected by acts of terrorism and militancy. An additional advocate general said Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was a poor province and provision of free medical facilities to thousands of lawyers would put an extra burden on the provincial exchequer. The bench observed that the other two provinces had already been providing such facilities to lawyers like the federal government.

It asked when other prov-inces could provide that facility to lawyers, why the KP gov-ernment couldn’t do so.

The AAG said KP had limited resources compared to Punjab and Sindh.

Duterte to withdraw Philippines from ICC after ‘outrageous attacks’REUTERS

MANILA: The Philippines said yesterday it is withdrawing from the International Criminal Court (ICC) due to what President Rodrigo Duterte called ‘outrageous’ attacks by UN officials and viola-tions of due process by the ICC.

The decision marks an about-face by Duterte, who initially wel-comed a preliminary ICC exami-nation announced last month into a complaint, filed by a Philippine lawyer, that accuses him and top officials of crimes against humanity, committed during a war on drugs that has killed thousands of people.

A 15-page statement, dated

March 13 and not signed by Duterte, said the withdrawal from the ICC’s founding treaty, the Rome Statute, was ‘effective immediately’.

That was confirmed separately by Duterte’s spokesman and his legal counsel, who both said the ICC’s examination was part of a plot by the president’s enemies.

Duterte’s statement said the withdrawal was because of ‘baseless, unprecedented and out-rageous attacks’ by UN officials, and what he said was an attempt by the ICC prosecutor to seek juris-diction over him ‘in violation of due process and presumption of innocence’.

ICC spokesman Fadi el

Abdallah referred most questions to the court’s prosecutors, who could not immediately be reached for comment.

Duterte’s war on drugs has caused international alarm and fierce criticism from some UN rap-porteurs and officials, including UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, who on Friday said Duterte should submit himself for a psychiatric examination.

The maverick former mayor has sparred relentlessly with critics and refused to change his approach, or accept that police may have executed suspected dealers, as activists allege.

Police deny allegations of

murder and cover-ups and say they killed about 4,100 drug dealers in shootouts. Police say they have no ties to armed men responsible for the deaths of about 2,300 drug users and peddlers. Duterte, who is hugely popular among Filipinos, has no love for the ICC, calling it ‘useless’ and ‘hypocritical’.

He at first dared the ICC to indict him, saying he was willing to rot in jail for his people. He then said he would prefer a firing squad to prison.

He has recently changed his tune, telling security forces not to cooperate should there be any international investigation. He last week said the ICC would ‘not in a

million years’ have jurisdiction. The ICC’s preliminary examination into the complaint seeks to establish whether crimes have taken place. Such a process typically takes years.

Jude Sabio, the Philippine lawyer who filed the ICC complaint last year, said Duterte’s move was predictable, futile and designed to appeal to his base.

“Looks like they are really afraid. Why? They feel that this will proceed to an investigation,” Sabio said. “His statement is only good for politics, just so his supporters can hear that he is withdrawing from the ICC. But it will have no binding legal effect.” According to ICC rules, the withdrawal becomes

effective one year after receipt of the notification. Duterte and the Philippines are under the juris-diction of the ICC as a result of being a member, and pulling out would not change that jurisdiction retroactively. The ICC can only intervene in a member state when that state is unable or unwilling to carry out investigations and pros-ecute suspected perpetrators. The Philippines says its legal processes are functional and independent.

Senator Antonio Trillanes, who filed supplementary communica-tions to support Sabio’s complaint, said the withdrawal was flip-flopping by Duterte, who ‘knows that there is no way out for him in the ICC’.

Protesting for protection of ancestral landIndigenous people hold a protest in front of the Chinese Consular Office, shouting against the building of mega dams in their ancestral territories under the Philippine-China deals in Manila, yesterday.

NZ censures US-based diplomat for anti-Trump tweetsAP

WELLINGTON: New Zealand yesterday censured its second-ranking diplomat in Washington after she sent tweets saying US Democrats needed to get their act together for the next presidential election ‘or we will all die’. Deputy Head of Mission Caroline Beresford later deleted the anti-President Donald Trump tweets

and made her account private.New Zealand’s Ministry of

Foreign Affairs and Trade said the tweets didn’t meet its code of conduct for social media, which require diplomatic staff to maintain political neutrality and take care in expressing personal opinions.

Beresford sent at least three tweets late last week disagreeing with an opinion column on

political news website ‘The Hill’ that said a 2020 Democratic ticket with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren could ‘win big’. ‘No it couldn’t,’ Beresford responded. “Please get your (expletive) together or we will all die.” She also wrote that Demo-crats had ‘learned nothing’ and that ‘If this is what they have against Trump we should be planning for the eight years’.

Senior Pakistani politician predicts disagreement over interim set-upINTERNEWS

ISLAMABAD: Former MNA Javed Hashmi says the matter of the interim government will be placed before the Supreme Court due to disagreement between the government and the opposition.

He told reporters yesterday if the matter landed in the Supreme Court, general elections

would be postponed for a couple of months. ‘I am sure the oppo-sition and the government will not be able to reach any agreement on who should be the caretaker prime minister,‘ he pre-dicted. He said he would like to remind the chief justice that he was just a judge and not a ruler, so he should avoid creating the East Pakistan like situation.

Pakistani authority to fight hate speechKARACHI: In order to report

and fight hate speech in the

country, the National Counter

Terrorism Authority (Nacta) of

Pakistan has launched a smart-

phone app ‘Chaukas’ under its

Tat’heer programme, a cyber

counterterrorism drive that

includes mapping radical con-

tent available on the internet.

The main aim of the app,

according to Nacta, is to help

people identify hate content,

giving the user options to send

a photograph, video, banners

and activities or written mate-

rial which will then be passed

on to the relevant law enforce-

ment agencies.

Pakistani citizen released from Indian prisonLAHORE: A Pakistani cit-

izen was released from an

Indian prison yesterday, after

spending 25 years in the neigh-

bouring country.

The citizen named Siraj-

ud-din Mohammad reached

Pakistan today after obtaining

his freedom from the prison.

The Ansar Burney Trust played

a major role in bringing Siraj

to Pakistan.

Siraj erroneously made his

way into India at the age of 11.

After running from his home in

Mansehra, Siraj reached Lahore

and mistakenly took Samjhota

Express to India.

After spending a great deal

of time in India, Siraj married a

woman from a Muslim family

in 2005. In 2009, Siraj pre-

sented himself before police

and expressed the desire to

go to Pakistan with his family.

Following which the police

sent him to jail, from which he

gained freedom yesterday. An

Indian NGO fought for Siraj’s

right to Indian citizenship, how-

ever, he was sent to jail again.

14 THURSDAY 15 MARCH 2018ASIA

Tokyo regrets departure of TillersonREUTERS

TOKYO: Japan’s foreign minister said yesterday he personally regretted the departure of ‘frank, trustworthy’ US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson ahead of a proposed summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Trump fired Tillerson on Tuesday after a series of public rifts over policy on North Korea and other issues, replacing him with loyalist Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo.

“He (Tillerson) was a frank, trustworthy counterpart and I thought we would deal with the North Korea issue together, but personally, I feel that this situ-ation that has developed is unfortunate,” Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono told reporters in Tokyo.

“For sure, America holds the key, so I want to meet his suc-cessor as secretary of state soon and exchange views on North Korea and other matters,” Kono said. Critics expressed dismay at the decision to swap out top dip-lomats so soon before the unprecedented potential meeting between Kim and Trump, and worried that Pompeo would encourage Trump to be hawkish on North Korea.

South Korea’s Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha decided to go ahead with a planned trip to Wash-ington to discuss North Korea despite Tillerson’s departure, the ministry said in a text message. An official had earlier said she would cancel the visit.

Other South Korean officials, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that while Pompeo was known to have hardline views on North Korea, he was a seasoned politician and seemed to know how to compromise.

“We’re aware that Pompeo was one of the strongest voices in the talk of military action and fed Trump related assessments, but things have since changed a lot,” one senior official said, referring to upcoming inter-Korean talks and the prospect of a Kim-Trump summit. “So, we will see.” Chinese Foreign Min-istry spokesman Lu Kang said China hopes the change in per-sonnel will not impact the devel-opment of relations and important areas of cooperation.

“We of course hope that the positive momentum on the Korean peninsula, including the political will for talks of both the United States and North Korea, will be maintained,” Lu told a daily news briefing.

Shares in Japanese defence equipment makers rose sharply on speculation that geopolitical tensions may rise after the firing of Tillerson and Pompeo’s appointment. Ishikawa Sei-sakusho surged as much as 15 percent, while Howa Machinery jumped 11 percent.

Jia Qingguo, an expert on Chinese diplomacy at Peking University in Beijing, said China may see positive outcomes from the change when it comes to the US position on the Belt and Road initiative, Chinese President Xi

Jinping’s signature foreign policy initiative.

“Tillerson has at times been quite critical of China, including of Belt and Road,” Jia said. “Trump is not as hawkish on China as many assume. He has tried to communicate and to cut a deal.” Coming from the CIA, Pompeo is more likely to see China as a threat but his views will probably soften, Jia said.

“Once you are in the secretary of state position, you need to be more pragmatic and take into account the huge stakes involved, so the impact will not be as big as some people expect.” Most important for China was that Pompeo makes contact with his Chinese counterparts to ensure a smooth meeting between Kim and Trump as soon as possible, said Ruan Zongze, a former Chinese diplomat now with the China Institute of International Studies, a think tank affiliated with the Foreign Ministry.

“Time is short. There are a lot things to do. Every day is very important,” he said. Pompeo is also known for his hawkish views on trade. He takes over as the chief US diplomat as the United States is finalising the imposition of hefty tariffs on steel and alu-minium that have upset a number of Asian trading partners.

“He (Tillerson) was a frank, trustworthy counterpart and I thought we would deal with the North Korea issue together, but personally, I feel that this situation that has developed is unfortunate,” Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono said.

Former South Korean president questioned over corruptionAP

SEOUL: Prosecutors yesterday questioned South Korea’s conservative former President Lee Myung-bak over corruption allegations, making him the latest of the country’s leaders entangled in scandal.

The move came about two weeks after prosecutors demanded a 30-year prison term for Lee’s conservative suc-cessor, Park Geun-hye, over a separate bribery scandal that led to weeks of massive anti-government protests. Park is in jail as she awaits a court verdict set for early next month.

“I stand here today feeling wretched,” Lee said in televised remarks after arriving at a Seoul prosecutors’ office. “I am very sorry for causing worry for the people.” South Korean politi-cians accused of misdoing often apologize for causing trouble while still denying wrongdoing. Lee has previously called the investigation ‘political revenge’ orchestrated by the current liberal government of President Moon Jae-in, a statement that prompted fury from Moon.

Lee also referred to the 2009 suicide of ex-liberal Pres-ident Roh Moo-hyun, who leapt to his death amid a high-profile corruption investigation of his family when Lee was president. Moon, who was Roh’s chief of staff, previously called the Roh investigation by the Lee gov-ernment politically motivated.

Prosecutors accuse Lee of taking about 1.75bn won ($1.6m) from the National Intelligence

Service, the country’s main spy agency, for personal purposes through his aides.

Prosecutors allege that Lee took other illicit money from business groups including Samsung and a former law-maker. South Korean media said the illicitly obtained funds totaled 11bn won ($10m).

Lee is also accused of using an auto parts manufacturer called DAS as a channel to establish illicit slush funds amounting to 30bn won ($28m) and embezzling its official funds.

One of Lee’s brothers is DAS’s largest shareholder, but prosecutors suspect Lee is its de facto owner.

Nearly all former presidents in South Korea, their family members and key aides were embroiled in scandals either just before they ended their terms or after they left office.

South Korea’s first pres-ident, Syngman Rhee, resigned and fled to Hawaii in 1960 amid protests over allegations of vote-rigging. Park’s father, Park Chung-hee, who ruled South Korea for 18 years following a 1961 coup, was gunned down by his own spy chief during a 1979 drinking party.

Park’s successors Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, both former army generals, spent time in jail after leaving office for bribery, treason and other charges. Presidents Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung saw their terms tainted by cor-ruption scandals involving their sons.

South Korea’s former president Lee Myung-bak arrives at the prosecutors’ office in Seoul, South Korea, yesterday.

Vietnam PM in CanberraPrime Minister of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Nguyen Xuan Phuc, and his wife Madam Tran Nguyet Thu hold hands with children from a welcoming party after arriving for an official visit at Fairbairn airfield in Canberra, Australia, yesterday.

Abe denies involvement by him, wife in discount land-sale dealREUTERS

TOKYO: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe yesterday remained steadfast that he and his wife were not involved in a discount land-sale deal that has seen the opposition call for the resignation of his ally, Finance Minister Taro Aso.

Abe and Aso have come under fresh pressure over the ministry’s admission this week that it had altered documents related to the sale of state-owned land at a steep discount to a school operator with ties to Abe’s wife, Akie.

Suspicion of a cover-up could slash Abe’s ratings and dash his hopes for a third term as leader of his Liberal Dem-ocratic Party (LDP). Victory in the LDP September leadership vote would put him on track to become Japan’s longest-serving premier.

Copies of documents released by the finance ministry on Monday showed that references to Abe, his wife and Aso were removed from the ministry’s records of

the sale to school operator Moritomo Gakuen. “When you look at the docu-ments even before they were altered, it is clear that my wife and I were not involved,” Abe told an upper house budget committee, a statement echoed by chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga.

Abe has said he would resign if evi-dence were found that they had.

According to the ministry documents, a comment from Moritomo Gakuen citing Akie Abe as telling him, “This is good land so please proceed”, was removed. Yasunori Kagoike, the former head of Moritomo Gakuen, and his wife remain in custody after being arrested last July over the deal.

Asked about the reference yesterday, Abe said: “I checked with my wife and she says she said no such thing. My wife was neither the person in charge of estab-lishing the school nor Mr Kagoike’s boss, so naturally she would not have made such a remark.” Abe and Aso told par-liament they had never instructed

officials at the finance ministry to alter the documents.

The scandal has caused a stalemate in parliament, with opposition parties boycotting debate on the next fiscal year’s budget, potentially delaying reforms to boost long-term economic growth.

Yesterday, Tetsuro Fukuyama, sec-retary-general of the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party told reporters the ruling LDP-Komeito coa-lition had agreed to summon former National Tax Agency chief Nobuhisa Sagawa to testify in parliament.

Sagawa headed the ministry division that submitted the documents before he became tax agency chief in July, an appointment critics saw as a reward for his efforts to smooth over the issue with his statements to parliament last year.

Yesterday, Kiyomi Tsujimoto, a prom-inent Constitutional Democratic Party lawmaker, asked for Abe’s wife to appear for questioning, a senior LDP politician said earlier. She did not receive a reply.

Protesters shout slogans and hold placards during a rally denouncing Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Finance Minister Taro Aso over a suspected cover-up of a cronyism scandal in front of Abe’s official residence in Tokyo, yesterday.

Singaporean firms being investigated for selling luxury goods to N Korea

SINGAPORE: Singapore said yesterday it was investigating two local companies accused of supplying luxury goods to North Korea in violation of UN sanctions.

Citing a leaked draft of a UN report, British broad-caster BBC said earlier this week the two firms were OCN and T Specialist, sister companies that share the same director.

“The Singapore authorities are aware of these cases and we are in correspondence with the UN Panel on them,” Sin-gapore’s foreign affairs ministry said in a statement.

“In respect of the two companies mentioned in the BBC report - OCN and T-Specialist - our author-ities have commenced investigations into these companies.

However, we are unable to provide addi-tional details as investiga-tions are ongoing.” Under UN sanctions, it has been illegal to sell luxury items to North Korea since 2006.

REUTERS

Cambodia urged to pay heed to human rightsAP

PHNOM PENH: With political and press freedoms under pressure ahead of elections scheduled for July, the UN’s specially appointed researcher on human rights in Cambodia said yesterday it is a mistake for the government of long-serving Prime Minister Hun Sen to prior-itize stability and development over human rights.

Professor Rhona Smith, speaking at the end of her fifth visit to Cambodia as a UN rap-porteur, praised Cambodia for its gains in economic and social rights, but declared that ‘it is also necessary to respect civil and political rights’. Smith said freedom of expression was under serious threat, as was peo-ple’s right to take part in public affairs through freely chosen representatives.

Hun Sen has cracked down severely on his opponents ahead of the scheduled polls, shutting down critical media and using the courts to dissolve the only credible opposition party.

He has repeatedly cited the need for peace and stability as a reason for taking such measures, declaring that there will be trouble if he is not allowed to stay in office for another decade, as he has vowed to do.

Aceh mulls beheading as penalty for murderAP

BANDA ACEH: The conservative Indonesian province of Aceh known for publicly caning homo-sexuals, adulterers and gamblers is considering the introduction of beheading as a punishment for murder, a top Islamic law official said yesterday. Syukri M Yusuf, the head of Aceh’s Shariah Law

and Human Rights Office, said the provincial government has asked his office to research beheading as a method of execution under Islamic law and to consult public opinion.

Aceh is the only province in Indonesia to practice Shariah law, a concession made by the central government in 2005 to end a war for independence.

15THURSDAY 15 MARCH 2018 EUROPE

EU pledges aid to Syrian refugees in TurkeyREUTERS

BRUSSELS: The European Union yesterday said it would chip in another $3.7bn for Syrian refugees in Turkey, and restrict travel for countries refusing to take back their citizens who fail to obtain asylum in Europe.

The latest measures to curb immigration from the Middle East and Africa, which overwhelmed the bloc when it surged in 2015 to 2016, were announced by the EU’s top migration official, Dim-itris Avramopoulos (pictured).

Some 1.8 million refugees and migrants have reached Europe across the Mediterranean since 2014, according to UN figures, causing friction among member states at odds over how to handle them and lifting support for

nationalist and populist parties.The EU has since been tight-

ening its external borders and asylum laws, as well as offering money and other help to third countries in exchange for pre-venting people from trekking north.

A 2016 deal with Turkey, though criticised by rights groups for restricting the chance to claim asylum by those in need, has cut to a trickle arrivals through its soil to EU member Greece.

The EU yesterday announced a second tranche of $3.7bn for projects benefiting Syrian

refugees in Turkey, though the bloc’s executive European Com-mission and the member states must yet agree on the exact financing.

“Our cooperation with Turkey is key to address common challenges,” Avramopoulos told a news conference, referring to the many rifts between Ankara and the EU, which sees President Tayyip Erdogan as increasingly autocratic.“Unnecessary escala-tions can and should be avoided,” he said, hoping for a swift return of two Greek soldiers held in detention in Turkey.

Despite heavy criticism of Erdogan’s track record on human rights, the bloc’s top officials will host him for high-level talks next week, a reminder that many in the EU may dread Ankara but

cannot do without it.Though the number of people

who reached Europe on smug-glers’ boats since 2014 is small compared to the bloc’s popu-lation of 500 million, higher immigration caught the EU by surprise and caused political chaos.

It still reverberates, as last seen in the resounding defeat of Italy’s centre-left in elections this month.As EU states struggle to become more effective in deporting failed asylum seekers or people who overstay the time allowed, the bloc agreed last June to restrict visas for foreign coun-tries that refuse to take back their nationals.The Commission pro-posed on Wednesday to regularly monitor how third countries cooperate on returns and, if it

deemed it poor, could rec-ommend the bloc gets tougher on visas for that country in the hope of encouraging a change in policy.

Currently, citizens of 105 countries in the world - from Russia to Congo to Bolivia - need a visa to get into Europe’s Schengen zone of free travel and Avramopoulos said 15 million such entry permits had been issued in 2016.

With some African and Asian countries topping the EU’s list of problematic returns, the Com-mission said the bloc was still short of one billion euros for projects to improve life for people in Africa.

The bloc hopes such projects would weaken people’s resolve to try get to Europe.

The EU announced a second tranche of $3.7bn for projects benefiting Syrian refugees in Turkey, though the bloc’s executive European Commission and the member states must yet agree on the exact financing.

Lithuanian lawmaker quits after surviving impeachment voteAP

VILNIUS: A Lithuanian lawmaker resigned yesterday, a day after surviving an impeachment vote in the Baltic country’s parliament for his reported ties to Russia.

Mindaugas Bastys, a former Social Democrat-turned-inde-pendent, announced his decision after Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis had urged him to step down.

Lawmakers in the 141-seat Seimas were unsuccessful in revoking Bastys’ mandate for lying about his Russian connections after failing to reach the needed 85 votes for an impeachment.

Probes had concluded Bastys, who is suspected of liaising with shady Russian lobbyists, had acted against Lithuanian interests by working with Russians and breaching the constitution of Lithuania. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Lithuania’s secret service con-cluded Bastys had close personal relationships with people repre-senting Russian state nuclear monopoly Rosatom and Russian state television. The Lithuanian government has strongly objected to two nuclear power plants being built by Rosastom in Belarus, south of the Baltic country, and in the Russian exclave of

Kaliningrad, which shares a border with Lithuania, among others.

No criminal investigation against Bastys has been opened.

In recent years, Lithuania has deported several Russian nationals suspected of espi-onage. Lithuanians also have been convicted for spying for Belarus, which authorities say is sharing information with Russia.

In July, a court in Lithuania found a Russian national guilty of spying and sentenced him to 10 years in prison for attempting to recruit local officials to plant listening devices in the offices of the Baltic nation’s president.

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking dies at 76AFP

LONDON: British physicist Stephen Hawking, whose mental genius and physical disability made him a household name and inspiration across the globe, died yesterday aged 76.

Propelled to stardom by his 1988 book “A Brief History of Time”, which became an unlikely worldwide bestseller, Hawking dedicated his life to unlocking the secrets of the Universe.

His genius and wit won over fans from far beyond the rarified world of astrophysics, earning comparisons with Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton.

Hawking died peacefully at his home in the British University city of Cambridge yesterday morning. A university source said that his health deteriorated around holiday time.

“We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today,” Professor

Hawking’s children, Lucy, Robert, and Tim said in a statement.

“He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years.” Prime Minister Theresa May was among the first to pay tribute, writing on Twitter that Hawking was “a brilliant and extraordinary mind” whose legacy “will not be forgotten”.

Well-wishers lined up at the University of Cambridge to sign a book of condolences.

“He was a fun person to work with and had a great sense of humour. For his students, at the blackboard, sometimes a little scary... He was an inspiration,” Justin Hayward, who was Hawk-ing’s PhD student from 1991 to 1995, said.

Hawking defied predictions that he would only live for a few years after developing a form of motor neurone disease in his early 20s.

The illness gradually robbed

him of mobility, leaving him con-fined to a wheelchair, almost completely paralysed and unable to speak except through his trademark voice synthesiser.

“His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across the

world,” his family said. “He once said, ‘It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love’. We will miss him forever.”

Born on January 8, 1942 -- 300 years to the day after the death of the father of modern

science, Galileo Galilei -- Stephen William Hawking became one of the world’s most well-regarded scientists and entered the pan-theon of science titans.

His death was announced on the 139th anniversary of the birth of Albert Einstein.

People queue to sign a book of condolence inside the chapel at Gonville following the death of Professor Stephen Hawking, in Cambridge, Britain, yesterday.

Hungary jails migrant over border riotREUTERS

BUDAPEST: A Hungarian court sentenced a Syrian-Cypriot man to seven years in prison for illegally crossing the border and being an accomplice in a terrorist act during clashes with police in September 2015, state news agency MTI reported.

Ahmed Hamed was part of a group that crossed illegally into Hungary on September 16, 2015 and also spoke to the crowd using a loudspeaker before hundreds of migrants forced open the border gate and police fired water cannon and tear gas. A witness in the courtroom at the court in the southern town of Szeged said the man, who was guarded by masked police, received the sentence calmly.

Angela Merkel clings onto powerAP

BERLIN: Angela Merkel sworn in for her fourth term as German chancellor yesterday, putting an end to nearly six months of political drift in Europe’s biggest economy.

Lawmakers voted 364-315 to re-elect Merkel, Germany’s leader since 2005. The coalition of Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union, its Bavaria-only sister party, the Christian Social Union and the center-left Social Democrats has 399 of the 709 seats in parliament.

In what is widely expected to be her last term, Merkel will have to hold together what is potentially her most fragile coa-lition yet, while also addressing challenges such as a potential Europe-US trade war and

seeking agreement with France and others on the future of a fractious European Union.

“The expectations of our friends and partners are huge, particularly in Europe,” Pres-ident Frank-Walter Steinmeier told Merkel and her ministers as he formally appointed the new Cabinet. “Many hope we in Germany will show that liberal democracies are capable of acting and facing the future.”

Merkel will travel to Paris tomorrow for talks with French President Emmanuel Macron on the first trip abroad of her new term. The chancellor heads a much-changed Cabinet, with the governing parties - which are traditional rivals - keen to send signals of renewal after a Sep-tember election in which all lost significant ground.

The same parties have

governed for the past four years but putting together the new administration has been unprec-edentedly hard work.

Yesterday’s parliamentary vote came 171 days after the election, nearly double the pre-vious record. The Social Demo-crats initially planned to go into opposition after crashing to their worst result since World War II, but Steinmeier nudged them into a reluctant about-turn after Mer-kel’s talks with two smaller parties collapsed in November.

Merkel was able to take office only after two-thirds of the Social Democrats’ members approved in a ballot the coalition deal clinched last month.

At least 35 coalition law-makers didn’t support her, and Merkel won only nine votes more than the absolute majority she needed.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel (second right) and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier with the members of the new German Cabinet during the appointment ceremony at Bellevue Palace, in Berlin, yesterday.

Two Frenchmen on trial for online identity theftAP

PARIS: Two Frenchmen are going on trial for allegedly stealing Emmanuel Macron’s online identity last year when he was running for president.

The unusual case, to be heard in a Paris court, follows a complaint filed by Macron days before he was elected French president in May.

The main defendant, Jean-Paul Mongin, a 38-year-old book editor and conservative right-wing activist, is accused of using a Gmail address purporting to belong to Macron to send a long political email titled “10 good reasons not to vote for me” and signed “Emmanuel.”

Also on trial is an acquaintance of Mongin who allegedly helped him create the email address and send the text to a list of about 100 recipients just before the first round of the pres-idential election, according to the prosecutor’s summons.

The email was then forwarded to other people, including journalists and members of Macron’s campaign.

Mongin has admitted writing the email and using the Gmail address but denied any intent to really pose as Macron, according to his lawyer. He faces up to one year in prison and a $17,600 fine if convicted of passing himself off as someone else “in order to damage their honour or reputation.”

Slovenia’s teachers seek higher wages AP

LJUBLJANA: Slovenia’s teachers on strike for the second time in a month after failing to reach a deal with the government on higher wages. Many schools and kindergartens remained closed yesterday as teachers held street protests in several towns, blowing whistles and horns.

This is the latest in a string of strikes and protests by public sector workers in the small European Union country who are demanding higher salaries amid an eco-nomic recovery.

Teachers want their sal-aries - around $1,100 a month for junior teachers and $1,470 a month on average - to be in line with those of other public workers.

16 THURSDAY 15 MARCH 2018EUROPE

Britain to expel 23 Russian diplomatsAP

LONDON: Britain announced yesterday it will expel almost two dozen Russian diplomats, sever high-level bilateral contacts with Moscow and take both open and covert action against Kremlin meddling after the poisoning of a former spy, plunging UK-Russian relations into their deepest freeze since the Cold War.

Prime Minister Theresa May told lawmakers that 23 Russian diplomats who have been iden-tified as undeclared intelligence officers have a week to leave the country.

May spoke after Moscow ignored a midnight deadline to explain how a nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union was used against Sergei and Yulia Skripal. The father and daughter remain in critical condition in a hospital in Salisbury, south-western England, after being found unconscious on March 4.

May said Russia had provided no explanation, and “there is no alternative conclusion other than that the Russian state was cul-pable for the attempted murder of Mr. Skripal and his daughter.”

She announced a range of economic and diplomatic measures, including the sus-pension of high-level bilateral contacts with Russia. An

invitation for Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to visit Britain has been canceled, and May said British ministers and royals will not attend the soccer World Cup in Russia this summer.

May also said Britain would clamp down on murky Russian money and strengthen its powers to impose sanctions on abusers of human rights - though she gave few details.

“We will freeze Russian state assets wherever we have the evi-dence that they may be used to threaten the life or property of K nationals or residents,” May said, promising to use all possible legal powers against criminals and corrupt elites.

“There is no place for these people - or their money - in our country,” she said.

The Russian embassy in London said the expulsion of dip-lomats was “totally unacceptable,

unjustified and shortsighted.”“All the responsibility for the

deterioration of the Russia-UK relationship lies with the current political leadership of Britain,” it said in a statement.

Russian ambassador Alex-ander Yakovenko, said Britain’s actions were “a provocation.”

Critics of the British gov-ernment have long claimed that the U.K. is reluctant to act against Russia because London’s property market and financial sector are magnets for billions in Russian money.

Some Russia experts said the measures announced by May were unlikely to make Russian President Vladimir Putin’s gov-ernment change its behavior. She did not expel Russia’s ambas-sador or announce sanctions against any individuals.

“There does not seem to be any real appetite so far to inves-tigate the ill-gotten gains of the Russian elite that have been laun-dered through London,” said John Lough, an associate fellow in the Eurasia program at the Chatham House think-tank.

“It is not clear to me that Lon-don’s response will hit the Kremlin where it hurts.”

Moscow refused to comply with Britain’s demands that it explain how Novichok - a form of nerve agent developed by the

Soviet Union during the Cold War - came to be used in Britain. Russia said the UK must first provide samples of the poison collected by investigators.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said yesterday that Britain has offered “baseless accusations which are not backed up by any evidence.” He said Russia would cooperate with the investigation but does not see Britain’s will-ingness to reciprocate.

“We hope reason will prevail and other countries will think hard how serious the evidence against Russia is,” he said.

Russia has claimed that the nerve agent could have come

from another former Soviet country, pointing to Moscow’s foe, Ukraine.

Lawmaker Vladimir Gutenev, a member of the state com-mission for chemical disar-mament, said Russia had scrapped its stockpile of Novichok.

“It is hard to say what may be happening in neighboring coun-tries,” he was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

Britain has sought support from allies in the European Union and Nato, including the United States. May’s office said President Donald Trump told the prime minister the US was “with the UK

all the way.”On Wednesday it also called

for an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the investigation.

European Council President Donald Tusk said that the attack was “most likely” inspired by Moscow and announced he would put the issue on the agenda at an EU leaders’ summit next week.

May said Russia’s use of a chemical weapon was “an affront to the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons. And it is an affront to the rules-based system on which we and our interna-tional partners depend.”

Finland named world’s happiest countryREUTERS

VATICAN CITY: Finland is the world’s happiest country, according to an annual survey issued yesterday that put Burundi at the bottom of the happiness index and found Americans were getting less happy even as their country became richer.

The UN Sustainable Devel-opment Solutions Network’s (SDSN) 2018 World Happiness Report ranked 156 countries according to their scores for things such as GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, social freedom, generosity and absence of corruption.

Finland, rose from fifth place

last year to oust Norway from the top spot. The 2018 top-10, as ever dominated by the Nordics, is: Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Nether-lands, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and Australia.

The United States came in at 18th, down from 14th place last year. Britain was 19th and the United Arab Emirates 20th.

One chapter of the 170-page report is dedicated to emerging health problems such as obesity, depression and the opioid crisis, particularly in the United States where the prevalence of all three has grown faster than in most other countries.

While income per capita has increased markedly in the US

over the last half century, the happiness index has been hit by weakened social support net-works, a rise in perception of corruption in government and business and declining confi-dence in public institutions.

“We obviously have a social crisis in the United States: more inequality, less trust, less confi-dence in government,” the head of the SDSN, Professor Jeffrey Sachs of New York’s Columbia University, said as the report was launched at the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences. “It’s pretty stark right now. The signs are not good for the US. It is getting richer and richer but not getting happier.”

Asked how the current

political situation in the United States could affect future hap-piness reports, Sachs said:

“Time will tell, but I would say that in general that when confidence in government is low, when perceptions of cor-ruption are high, inequality is high and health conditions are worsening ... that is not con-ducive to good feelings.”

For the first time since it was started in 2012, the report, which uses a variety of polling organisations, official figures and research methods, ranked the happiness of foreign-born immigrants in 117 countries.

Finland took top honours in that category too, giving the country a statistical double-gold

status. The foreign-born were least happy in Syria, which has been mired in civil war for seven years.

“The most striking finding of the report is the remarkable consistency between the hap-piness of immigrants and the locally born,” said Professor John Helliwell of Canada’s Uni-versity of British Columbia.

“Although immigrants come from countries with very dif-ferent levels of happiness, their reported life evaluations con-verge towards those of other residents in their new coun-tries,” he said. “Those who move to happier countries gain, while those who move to less happy countries lose.”

‘Serbia ready to end row with Kosovo’AFP

BELGRADE: Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said yesterday his country is ready for a compromise over Kosovo since resolving a dispute with its former province is key to its bid to join the EU. Serbia has refused to recognise Kosovo’s independence, declared unilat-erally a decade ago.

Brussels insists normali-sation of ties between the former foes, who fought each other in a 1990s war, is a key condition they both must meet in order to join the EU

“For us, the most difficult hurdle on the European path is indeed the situation over Kosovo and that is why Serbia is .... ready to talk about possible

compromises,” Vucic said.He spoke after meeting with

Wess Mitchell, the US acting assistant secretary of state for European affairs.

Mitchell is on a tour of the region that has already taken him to Kosovo and Macedonia.

“We can accept only a com-promise ... but not a humiliation of our own people,” Vucic said.

Elected last year, Vucic, once an ultranationalist and close ally of the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, has become a staunch pro-European liberal who hopes to bring Serbia into the EU.

As he was sworn in May last year, Vucic urged an “internal dialogue” over the politically sensitive issue of Kosovo.

Bulgarian govt eyes Russia to overhaul fighter jets REUTERS

SOFIA: Bulgaria has chosen Russian Aircraft Corporation MiG (RSK MiG) to overhaul and maintain its 15 ageing, Soviet-made MiG-29 fighter jets until 2022, Defence Ministry documents show.

The Black Sea state is a member of the European Union and Nato but deemed RSK MiG the only supplier able to provide reliable support for its MiG 29s, which date to when Sofia was part of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact alliance in the 1980s.

Bulgaria therefore did not invite other bidders for the deal. Sofia has said it needs to keep its Soviet-era aircraft operational after plans to buy eight new fighter jets from a fellow Nato state hit a proce-dural snag. The process is expected to start almost from scratch later this year.

The Defence Ministry planned to sign a four-year, $51.45m deal with RSK MiG in December but put it off fol-lowing an appeal by Ukrainian arms exporter Ukrinmash.

Bulgaria’s anti-monopoly commission later rejected Ukraine’s appeal and a special Defence Ministry commission approved RSK MiG’s offer on March 6, according to the doc-uments posted on the minis-try’s website.

Some eastern European Nato allies that were once Soviet satellites still rely on Russian-made military jets - two-thirds of Poland’s mil-itary equipment dates from the pre-1991 Soviet era, for example.

British Prime Minister Theresa May also said Britain would clamp down on murky Russian money and strengthen its powers to impose sanctions on abusers of human rights.

Ireland Prime Minister calls for new power-sharing talks next monthREUTERS

DUBLIN: The British and Irish governments should redouble efforts next month to broker a deal that would restore a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland after a year of political

stalemate, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said.

The British region has been without a devolved executive - a central plank of its 1998 peace deal that ended three decades of vio-lence - since Irish nationalists Sinn Fein pulled out in January last year,

saying they were not being treated as equal partners by the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

Each side has blamed the other for repeated failures to reach a deal. Acknowledging that the impact of Brexit negotiations on the future of the border between

Northern Ireland and Ireland had complicated the political talks in Belfast, Varadkar called for a fresh round once EU leaders endorse a joint stance on their future rela-tionship with Britain on March 23.

“The next few weeks will rightly see a focus on Brexit. ...

We face enormous challenges from Brexit, which has undoubtedly changed the political climate in Northern Ireland,” Varadkar said in the text of a speech due to be delivered at an event in Wash-ington celebrating 20 years of

peach in Northern Ireland.“After that, I believe the

period after April 1 should see a redoubled effort on the part of both Governments and all of the parties in Northern Ireland to seek agreement on the resto-ration of the institutions.”

Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May addressing the House of Commons on her government’s reaction to the poisoning of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, in Salisbury, in London, yesterday.

Street artPeople walk past an eye mural drawn by British street artist My Dog Sighs, in Rome, yesterday.

17THURSDAY 15 MARCH 2018 AMERICAS

US students stage walkouts against gunsAFP

WASHINGTON: Students across the United States walked out of classes yesterday in the largest protest against gun violence seen in years, demanding action following last month’s shooting rampage at a Florida high school.

Hundreds of teenagers from Washington area schools gathered outside the White House chanting “Never again!” and “Enough is enough!”

They held up signs reading “Books Not Bullets” and “Protect People Not Guns.”

With the crowd swelling into the thousands, the students marched to the grounds of the US Capitol where they were joined by Democratic members of Con-gress and denounced the National Rifle Association (NRA), the pow-erful US gun lobby.

“You, the young people of this country, are leading the nation,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont shouted to the crowd through a megaphone.

“People are sick and tired of gun violence and the time is now for all of us, together, to stand up to the NRA.”

At 10:00am, students in numerous US cities held a moment of silence to honor the 14 students and three adult staff killed on Valentine’s Day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

At a high school in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, students marched to the football field and assembled in a heart formation to pay tribute to the victims.

At a Los Angeles high school, students spelled out the word “Enough” -- the gun control movement’s catchphrase -- by lying down on the ground on a football field.

In New York, students, many of whom wore orange -- the color of gun control -- walked out from more than 50 schools.

“We want change,” and “Am I next?” they chanted.

The “National School Walkout” was intended to last for 17 minutes, one for each victim.

But it quickly became apparent that tens of thousands of students around the country decided not to go to class at all and to protest instead.

Brenna Levitan, a 17-year-old who goes to high school in Silver Spring, Maryland, attended the White House demonstration with her mother.

“We want to show Congress and politicians we are not standing by, we are not silent anymore,” Levitan said. “Parkland is going to be the last school shooting.”

Farah Parmah, also 17, said “gun violence has taken way too

many lives this year.”Parmah, who goes to

Thomas Wootton High School in Rockville, Maryland, said President Donald Trump’s con-troversial proposal to arm and train teachers “is just a bad, bad idea.”

“There should be no guns in schools,” Parmah said.

The nationwide protest is being held one month to the day after Nikolas Cruz, a troubled 19-year-old former student at Stoneman Douglas, unleashed a hail of gunfire on his one-time classmates.

The United States has more than 30,000 gun-related deaths annually but following the Stoneman Douglas killings stu-dents launched one of the most concerted movements for gun

control seen in years.Students from the school

have taken the lead in a national campaign, meeting Trump and other politicians, and helping force through a new law on age limits for gun purchasers in Florida. The US public supports tougher gun laws, according to polls taken since the Parkland shooting, but there is little support for meaningful reforms in the Republican-controlled Congress.

Trump momentarily signaled support for curbing access to guns, notably by raising the age for purchases from 18 to 21, but now stands accused of bowing to the NRA.

The president backed away from supporting age limits on gun purchases -- sending the

proposal to a commission on school safety -- as well as from expanded background checks for gun purchases.

Such checks are currently only performed on people buying firearms from licensed gun dealers. Sales online and at gun shows are exempt.

Efforts to ban semi-automatic weapons have made no headway.

Cruz, the Parkland shooter, used a semi-automatic AR-15 military-style rifle, a type now being targeted by activists, who are also against high-capacity magazines.

Organisers of yesterday’s walkout were also behind the Women’s March, which saw mil-lions of demonstrators take to the streets across the country in January 2017 to protest President

Trump’s inauguration.According to the #Enough

campaign, students from more than 3,000 schools nationwide signed up to take part in yester-day’s demonstration.

Another nationwide student-inspired protest, the March For Our Lives, is to be held on March 24.

Some schools forbade their students from taking part in yes-terday’s walkout.

Florida prosecutors have announced plans to seek the death penalty against Cruz, who is due to appear in court today to be formally charged.

His lawyers have indicated he would accept to plead guilty in exchange for guarantees that he would not face capital punishment.

Students from the Washington area carry signs as they march to the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, yesterday. RIGHT: Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and Westglades Middle School marching to a nearby park as part of a National School Walkout to honour the 17 students and staff members killed at the school, in Parkland, Florida.

Pennsylvania Democrat claims victoryREUTERS

CANONSBURG: Republicans sounded alarm bells yesterday after Democrats claimed victory in a Pennsylvania congressional election seen as a referendum on President Donald Trump’s performance, although the final vote result remained officially too close to call.

In an ominous sign for Trump’s Republicans eight months before national midterm elections, moderate Democrat Conor Lamb led conservative Republican Rick Saccone by a fraction of a per-centage point in the race for the seat in the US House of Represent-atives. The final result may not be available until tomorrow.

The election should have been a shoo-in for Republicans. Trump actively campaigned for Saccone, who started the race well ahead of Lamb in a district Trump won by almost 20 points in the 2016 presidential election.

Republican Speaker Paul Ryan called the election a “wakeup call” in a meeting with Republican House members yes-terday and pushed them to raise more campaign funding. He also urged them to do more to high-light tax cuts approved by the Republican-dominated Congress and signed by Trump.

Lamb led Saccone by 516 votes yesterday after absentee ballots were counted. Counting of provisional ballots - those cast

by voters whose registration requires extra confirmation - was to begin tomorrow.

Republicans have not con-ceded the race and were not ruling out a recount or other legal action, a spokesman for the National Republican Congres-sional Committee said. Provi-sional ballots will not be counted until tomorrow.

House Republicans called the race unique, noting Lamb, 33, a US Marines veteran, had dis-tanced himself from his party’s leaders and staked out positions to the right of many Democrats.

“I don’t think you’ll see another candidate like Lamb,” said Republican Representative Chris Collins of New York.

Supporters of US Democratic congressional candidate Conor Lamb during election night rally in Pennsylvania’s 18th US Congressional district special election, in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.

Three injured as teacher fires gun in class AP

SEASIDE: A teacher in Northern California acciden-tally fired his gun inside a classroom, injuring three students, police said.

Dennis Alexander, who is also a reserve police officer, was pointing the gun at the ceiling to make sure it was not loaded when the weapon dis-charged inside his classroom at Seaside High School in the coastal community of Seaside, KSBW-TV reported.

The Seaside Police Department said no one suf-fered “serious injuries.” One 17-year-old boy sustained moderate injuries when bullet fragments lodged in his neck, the student’s father, Fermin Gonzales, told KSBW. “It’s the craziest thing. It could have been very bad.”

Alexander was teaching a gun safety lesson for his administration of justice and was about to show the stu-dents how to disarm someone, Gonzales said.

Gonzales said no officials contacted parents to let them know what happened and that he was shocked when his son returned home with blood on his shirt and bullet fragments in his neck. He rushed his son to a hospital for X-rays.

“Alexander was placed on administrative leave from his teaching job and he was also placed on administrative leave at the Sand City Police Department, police and schools officials said.

VP commits to governing Peru if President oustedREUTERS

LIMA: Peru’s Vice-President Martin Vizcarra would not resign to pave the way to early elections if President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski were removed from office by an impeachment vote, two sources said.

Opposition lawmakers are seeking to impeach centre-right Kuczynski over accusations he lied about his ties to Odebrecht , a Brazilian construction con-glomerate at the heart of a far-reaching graft probe.

After a first impeachment vote failed in December by just eight votes, a second was pre-sented by opposition lawmakers last week. Kuczynski, a 79-year-old former Wall Street banker who denies wrongdoing, warned it would create chaos and said there was no legitimate reason to oust him.

If Kuczynski were removed from office, Peru’s constitution dictates that Vizcarra replace him as a president. Early

elections would be held if both Vizcarra and Kuczynski’s second vice-president resign. In the past week, ruling party lawmakers have called for Vizcarra to pledge to resign out of loyalty.

But Vizcarra believes it would be his duty to govern Peru until the next scheduled elec-tions in 2021 instead of deep-ening the political turmoil by resigning, said a source close to Vizcarra, who asked not to be named.

A government source also said that Vizcarra, a 54-year-old former governor of a mining region, was opposed to stepping down. Vizcarra declined to comment. On the eve of the impeachment vote in December, Kuczynski signaled that if he lost, both his vice presidents would resign to protest what he called a legislative coup.

But Vizcarra disagreed with that stance and refused to sign a resignation letter prepared for him before the vote, the sources said.

A file photo of Peruvian vice-president Martin Vizcarra (left) and Mercedes Araoz, outside his house, in Lima, Peru.

Florida prosecutors have announced plans to seek the death penalty against Nikolas Cruz, a former student at Stoneman Douglas, unleashed a hail of gunfire on his one-time classmates.

Two victims of Texas package bomb were mother and sonREUTERS

AUSTIN: Two victims of a parcel bomb that exploded on Tuesday at a house in Austin, Texas, were identified as 17-year-old Draylen Mason and his mother, the city’s police chief said.

Mason, who was African-American, was killed and his

mother was injured in a blast at their east Austin home that police believe was one of a string of related attacks in the state capital that may be hate crimes.

“He was an outstanding young man who was going places,” Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said of Mason. The teen’s mother, who is in her 40s but whom he did not

identify, was in stable condition, he said.

Mason was a talented musician with the Austin Youth Orchestra where he played double bass, according to the Austin American-Statesman newspaper.

A 75-year-old Hispanic woman seriously hurt in a second package explosion in east Austin on Monday

remained in critical condition with life-threatening injuries, Manley said.

The attacks sparked heightened security at Austin’s South by Southwest Festival of music, technology and film, which draws hundreds of thou-sands of out-of-town visitors.

The explosions came 10 days after another package bomb

killed Anthony Stephan House, a 39-year-old black man, at his home in the Harris Ridge neigh-borhood about 19kmnortheast of downtown. The blast was pow-erful enough to blow out a wall at the home’s entryway.

Manley said Monday’s blasts were of a similar force, causing “traumatic penetrative injuries”

and a “concussive wave.”No motive has yet been found

for the blasts, which occurred when parcels left overnight in front of residences in three sep-arate neighborhoods were moved or opened. “We are not saying that we believe terrorism or hate are in play, but we absolutely have to consider that,” he said.

18 THURSDAY 15 MARCH 2018AMERICAS

US mayors back federal policy proposalREUTERS

TEPIC: Mayors from 21 US cities including New York and Los Angeles backed a proposal calling for the federal government to better channel infrastructure funding, boost affordable housing and strengthen businesses and communities to withstand shocks.

The Rockefeller Foundation-backed 100 Resilient Cities (110RC) initiative said its federal policy recommendations would help protect cities as they deal with problems like increasingly extreme weather events, social inequality and crime.

“Cities have always taken responsibility for driving their own transformational policy

changes to keep their residents safe and prosperous,” said Michael Berkowitz, 100RC pres-ident, in a statement.

“But the nature of the chal-lenges they will face in the 21st century - from catastrophic events like hurricanes, to long-term stressors like unem-ployment and violent crime - require an active and engaged federal government to help.”

Responsible for 80 percent of global economic output and

set to be home to two-thirds of the world’s people by 2050, many cities are grappling with how best to integrate and protect their booming populations.

In the United States, city leaders have vowed to lead the drive to slash carbon emissions driving climate change, after President Donald Trump said he would pull the country out of the Paris climate change deal.

The 100RC proposal urged the US government to set up a

national bank to fund investments aimed at making infrastructure more resilient, that would help cities pull in financing from the public and private sector.

It also called for federal funding to help small businesses to better prepare for disasters and to recover after they hit.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said efforts to tackle social inequality needed to run alongside moves to strengthen infrastructure in his flood-prone city. “Being resilient means more than having levees and wetlands to hold back water,” he said.

“It also includes combating the long-standing, generational challenges around crime, edu-cation, income inequality and

striking a balance between human needs and the envi-ronment that surrounds us.”

“Bolstering police forces, investing in crime prevention and ramping up schemes to reintroduce offenders to the community, would also benefit cities, along with improved support for violent crime victims.”

“Our cities and our nation are experiencing complex and unprec-edented challenges, such as the increasing impacts of climate change and acute shortages of affordable housing,” said Jesse Arreguin, mayor of Berkeley, Cal-ifornia. “Cities are leading the charge in addressing these and other urgent challenges.”

US warns of ‘bedlam’ without border wallAFP

SAN DIEGO: Donald Trump -- making his first trip to California as president -- warned there would be “bedlam” without the controversial wall he wants to build on the border with Mexico, as he inspected several prototype barriers. The trip to the “Golden State” -- the most populous in the country and a Democratic stronghold -- was largely upstaged by his own announcement that he had sacked Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

On the other side of the border, a small group of anti-Trump protesters vented their frustration, and announced plans to boycott US businesses over the

frontier.“For the people who say ‘no

wall’ -- if you didn’t have walls over here, you wouldn’t even have a country,” Trump said near the border in San Diego.

Trump repeated his insistence that law enforcement personnel should be able to see through the structure so that they could monitor criminal cartels

that might be “two foot away” on the Mexican side.

“Without a wall there would be bedlam, I imagine,” he added.

Trump inspected nine-metre models made of concrete and steel, erected side-by-side at Otay Mesa, an area in southern San Diego along the border with Tijuana, Mexico.

Each prototype cost more than $300,000 and, according to some estimates, the complete wall could carry a $20bn price tag.

Congress has yet to approve the funding amid skepticism and Democratic opposition, but an administration official said the wall would save far more money than it cost.

“Congress must fund the BORDER WALL,” Trump tweeted after leaving the border.

California has been at the forefront of resistance to the Republican leader’s anti-immi-gration agenda and at odds with his stance on a number of other issues, from gun control to mar-ijuana and the environment.

Trump skewered California’s Democratic Governor Jerry Brown, saying he’d done “a ter-rible job” of running a state where the taxes were “way out of whack” and criminals were allowed to roam free in sanctuary cities.

He said he had seen estimates that the “intolerably high” illegal immigration costs came to $100bn a year in terms of drugs, crime, education and social services.

The hulking prototypes can

be seen from across the border in Tijuana, where residents are not overly impressed with the real estate tycoon.

Ahead of the visit, a few dozen people gathered for a pro-Trump rally on the US side near the prototypes, while a similar number of the president’s detractors came to the San Ysidro border post.

“This is an environmental catastrophe, on top of a misallo-cation of government resources that could be used for health care or social services,” Cody Pet-terson, president of the San Diego County Democrats for Environ-mental Action, said of the wall.

Demonstrators draped them-selves in US flags and waved placards emblazoned with slogans such as “Humpty Trumpty will fall off his wall,” “Resist unstable idiot,” and “No hate in the Golden State.”

Among Trump’s supporters,

Kira Innis, 31, said she was backing Trump “because he doesn’t give a good gosh darn about somebody’s color, he cares about putting more green in their pocket.”

On the Mexican side, federal police had to persuade around 50 demonstrators not to burn a yellow-haired pinata in Trump’s likeness.

Pointing to one of the proto-types towering behind the cor-rugated metal border fence, Eladio Sanchez, 30, admitted that it might slow him down, but noted: “You can get over it anyway.”

The border with Mexico stretches nearly 3,200km and about a third of it already has some type of barrier or wall.

Trump’s insistence that Mexico pay for the wall has soured relations and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto recently canceled plans to visit

Washington amid continuing disagreement.

“I have a great relationship with the president of Mexico, a great guy,” Trump said, adding that “we’re trying to work things out.”

Before leaving San Diego, a military port, the president con-gratulated troops at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station on the coalition’s taking back “almost 100 percent” of the IS militant group’s captured territory in Syria and Iraq.

“They never got hit like this. We took off the gloves. In one year we did more damage to ISIS than other administrations, a certain other administration, did in many years,” he said.

He didn’t name which of his predecessors he was referring to, although the insurgency’s most significant advances were made after 2013, during Barack Obama’s second term.

The motorcade carrying US President Donald Trump drives past a US-Mexico border fence, in San Diego, California.

Honduran man pleads guilty in bomb plot case APMIAMI : A Honduran man has pleaded guilty to US charges in a plot to detonate a bomb in a Florida mall food court in support of the IS militants.

Vicente Adolfo Solano pleaded guilty yesterday in Miami federal court to a single count of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organisation, which carries a maximum 20-year prison sentence. Court records show Solano will be sentenced May 30.

The FBI said the 53-year-old Solano wanted to det-onate a bomb last October at the Dolphin Mall near Miami but was actually working with undercover FBI operatives who gave him a fake bomb before his arrest.

United Airlines admits dog died mid-flight AFPWASHINGTON: A dog has died during a United Airlines flight after a flight attendant insisted it be placed in an overhead bin. The black French bulldog was in a pet carrier during the flight from Houston to New York.

United said it took respon-sibility for the death, saying pets should not be placed in the overhead storage com-partments. “This was a tragic accident that should never have occurred,” the airline said in a statement, adding that it expressed its “deepest condolences to the family.”

Passenger Maggie Grem-minger, 30, who was seated behind the pet owner, said the owner was told to put her dog in the compartment after boarding with two kids including an infant, according to The New York Times.

Congress has yet to approve the funding amid skepticism and Democratic opposition, but an administration official said the wall would save far more money than it cost.

White House opposes migration deal with CongressAP

WASHINGTON: The White House said yesterday it does not favour an immigration agreement with Congress that would involve extending protections for young immigrants for three years in exchange for three years of border wall funding.

Deputy press secretary Raj Shah said the administration con-tinues to negotiate an immigration overhaul that would address the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program me that protects young immigrants from deportation, while also stopping illegal immigration and modernizing the legal immi-gration system.

Two Republican officials briefed on the talks said the so-called “three-for-three” proposal had been floated in staff-level discus-sions in recent days. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorised to speak publicly. The discus-sions were first reported by The Washington Post, which said the idea was being discussed as part of an upcoming spending bill.

Responsible for 80 percent of global economic output and set to be home to two-thirds of the world’s people by 2050, many cities are grappling with how best to integrate and protect their booming populations.

Labour protestPolice officers stand guard outside the Guatemalan constitutional court, as workers of the silver mining company, San Rafael, the Guatemalan branch of the Canadian Tahoe Resources, take part in a protest demanding the Court to order the company to resume operations in the country, in Guatemala City, yesterday.

White nationalist faces physical assault chargesAP

PAOLI: A white nationalist arrested for physically harassing a woman protesting at a 2016 Donald Trump rally is accused of attacking his wife and her stepfather in southern Indiana.

Matthew Heimbach, 26, was charged with battery and domestic battery committed in the presence of a child under age 16. He was released from jail after posting bond. Heimbach is chairman of the Traditionalist Worker Party, which has described itself on its website as “fighting to secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Court documents alleged Heimbach assaulted his wife’s stepfather, David Matthew Parrott, at the property where Heimbach lives with his family and other group members in Paoli, about 65km south of Bloomington.

The men had argued over Heimbach’s alleged affair with Parrott’s wife before Heimbach choked Parrott twice into uncon-sciousness, according to court

documents. After Parrott regained consciousness the second time, he fled the scene and called 911 early Tuesday.

An officer called to Heim-bach’s home arrested Heimbach after hearing him arguing and scuffling with his wife, who was inside with him and their two children. Brooke Heimbach, who was crying and had a reddened face, told the officer Heimbach had assaulted her, a police report states. A message seeking comment was sent to Heimbach’s cellphone.

Heimbach has for several years been a leading figure in the white nationalist movement. He was one of the scheduled speakers at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a car plowed into a crowd last August, killing a counter protester. During a March 2016 rally in Louisville, Kentucky, for then-presidential candidate Trump, Heimbach physically harassed an African-American woman who was pro-testing at that rally.


Cleft Hospital Pakistan conducting free cleft lip surgeries THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Dr Ijaz Bashir, a world renowned Pakistani surgeon and CEO of Cleft Hospital Pakistan, Gujrat disclosed that more than 9,000 children in Pakistan are born with cleft lips or palates every year and their proper reha-bilitation remains difficult in view of the non-availability of enough plastic surgeons and lack of team approach for multi-disciplinary management.

He was talking to the Paki-stani Community in Qatar recently during a video presen-tation on Cleft Hospital Pakistan - a ‘Charitable’ institution for such treatment in Pakistan. Apart from Pakistani doctors, surgeons from Britain, USA, Turkey and Ireland besides Orthodontists, Speech therapists, Audiologists and par-amedics have also pooled their services on regular basis by pro-viding ‘free of cost’ Cleft

Treatment and Training services in the Hospital. “Cleft lip and palate are correctable birth defects which if left untreated can cause facial deformity, speech and feeding disorders and major psychological trauma not only for the poor patient but also for the entire family”, Dr Ijaz informed.

Dr Ijaz briefed the partici-pants that cleft surgeries are nor-mally conducted by plastic sur-geons, but there has been dearth of plastic surgeons in the country and even a single operation can change the life of a child.

He underlined the impor-tance of timely medical inter-vention and said that delay in the treatment could cause irre-versible damage to speech. About the causes of this deformity, he said that genetic factors were thought to play an important role. Earlier, Dr Zahid Rafiq, a prom-inent Anesthetist who works for Sidra Medical & Research Centre,

revealed that the idea of this ded-icated hospital was conceived by Dr Ijaz Bashir during 1996 and since then a surgical teams from United Kingdom visit twice yearly to Gujrat for the purpose and carry out numerous surgeries on daily basis.

The Cleft Hospital is a unique institution of its own kind where complete care for cleft patients is provided ‘free of cost’ for poor patients. It has also achieved world class standards with the help of local and international surgeons from UK, USA, Turkey and Ireland, Orthodontists, Speech therapists, Audiologists and paramedics who have pooled their services to provide state of art Cleft Treatment Services and Trainings. Cleft Hospital Pakistan was awarded Global Leader Award in 2015 by Smile Train USA. So far more than 10000 children and adults have been treated by this organisation.

Mohammad Idrees Anwar, a prominent Pakistani Community Member, welcomed the distin-guished guest and revealed his first meeting with Dr Ijaz Bashir

in Gujrat while opening Pakistan Welfare Forum-Gujrat Chapter last year. He showered praise on Dr Ijaz and his dedicated team for their tremendous role for

overcoming patients’ misery as well as of their families purely on humanitarian basis thus bringing smiles and confidence on the faces of many parents.

ICAI felicitates women achievers THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Doha Chapter (‘The Chapter’) of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), celebrated the Interna-tional Women’s Day by conducting a full day seminar on March 9.

The morning session focused on ‘Women as value drivers’, while the post lunch session covered the ‘Indian Budget 2018 - A change agent for Reforming India’.

Over 150 finance profes-sions, in senior positions in busi-nesses and organisations across Qatar attended the event.

CA Rupalakshmi Setty, Chairperson, Doha Chapter of ICAI, in her opening remarks

said that every woman is inspiring in her own way and it is very essential to use the example of successful women to encourage and motivate other women who are facing their own challenges and struggles, to help them realise how unique, strong and beautiful they are.

CA R M Vishakha, MD and CEO of India First Life Insurance, connected with the audience, speaking from the heart on her own experiences and challenges in rising to the CEO level in her organisation.

The chapter felicitated the women achievers who attended the event including CA RM Vishakha (MD, CEO India First Life Insurance), CA Sripriya Kumar(Central Council Member

ICAI), CA Leena Dasani (Chair-person- Doha Chapter of ICAI 1999-2000), CA Aastha Rangan(Chairperson- Muscat Chapter of ICAI), CA Shanti Krishnakumar and Sangeetha Seetharaman for their contri-bution to society and CA fra-ternity on occasion of Interna-tional Womens Day.

CA Rukkaiya Pachisa, Vice Chairperson of Doha Chapter in her concluding remarks insisted that we the educated women, should use our voice for the voiceless, helpless and the most vulnerable women in the society.

CA Dr R Seetharaman, the CEO of Doha Bank was the Chief Guest for the Indian Budget 2018 session.

‘Little Chef’, a cooking without fire activity, was conducted for the students of DPS-MIS Nursery on March 4. The tiny tots were taught to make vegetable sandwiches. The teachers made special efforts for integrating the activity with table manners and teaching the students about the nutritious value of sandwiches, encouraging them to bring healthy tiffins every day

Little chefs of DPS-MIS Nursery

VILLAGGIO & CITY CENTERCROSSWORD NOVO Pearl Qatar

MALL

Note: Programme is subject to change without prior notice.

LANDMARK

ROXY

AL KHOR

ASIAN TOWN

Tomb Raider 10:00, 11:30am, 12:30, 2:00, 3:00, 4:30, 5:30, 7:00, 8:00,9:30, 10:30pm & 12:00midnight Death Wish (2D/Action) 10:00am, 12:15, 2:30, 4:45, 7:00, 9:15 & 11:30pm Gnome Alone (2D/Animation) 10:00am, 12:00noon, 2:00, 4:00 & 6:00pm The Lodgers (2D) 8:00, 10:00pm & 12:00midnight Boonie Bears: Mystical Winter (2D) 10:00am, 12:00noon, 2:00, 4:00 & 6:00pm Talq Sena3y (2D/Arabic) 8:00, 10:00pm & 12:00midnight In Syria (2D) 10:00am, 2:00, 6:00 & 10:00pm Ragdah Almotawahesha(2D) 12:00noon, 4:00, 8:00&12:00midnight Hangman (2D) 10:00am, 2:00, 6:00 & 10:00pm Okdat Al Kawja (2D/Arabic) 12:00noon, 4:00, 8:00pm & 12:00mid- night Black Panther (2D) 10:30am, 3:15 & 8:00pmGame Night 1:15, 6:00 & 10:45pm Tomb Raider (2D) 12:00noon, 2:45, 5:30, 8:15 & 11:10pm Tomb Raider (3D IMAX) 10:30am, 1:00, 3:30, 6:00, 8:30 & 11:00pm

Bonnie Bear: A Mystical Winter (2D/Animation) 2:30, 4:15 & 6:00pm Raid (2D/Hindi) 2:30 & 11:30pm Aami (2D/Malayalam) 2:30 & 11:15pm Tomb Raider (2D/Action) 5:00, 7:15, 9:30 & 11:30pm Ragdah Almotawahesha (Arabic) 5:30 & 7:30pm The Arabian Warrior (2D/Drama) 8:00pm In Syria (2D/Arabic) 9:15pm The Lodgers (Horror) 9:45pm

ROYAL PLAZA

Aami (2D/Malayalam) 2:30 & 11:15pm Tomb Raider (2D/Action) 2:30, 7:00, 9:15 & 11:30pm Bonnie Bear: A Mystical Winter (2D/Animation) 3:00, 5:00 & 7:15pm Raid (2D/Hindi) 4:45, 9:00 & 11:30pm Ragdah Almotawahesha (Arabic) 5:30, 7:15 & 9:15pm

Bonnie Bear: A Mystical Winter (2D/Animation) 2:30, 4:30 & 5:30pm Tomb Raider (2D/Action) 2:30, 6:30, 8:45 & 11:00pm Raid (2D/Hindi) 3:00, 9:15 & 11:30pm Ragdah Almotawahesha (Arabic) 5:00 & 7:00pm The Arabian Warrior (2D/Drama) 7:30pm In Syria (2D/Arabic) 8:45pm Aami (2D/Malayalam) 11:00pm

Raid (Hindi) 1:00, 3:30, 6:00, 8:30, 11:00, 11:15pm & 01:15am Kirrak Party (Telugu) 12:15pm Captain (Malayalam) 2:45pm Kaly (Malayalam) 12:30 & 8:15pm Maya Nadhi (Malayalam) 3:15pm Hate Story 4 (Hindi) 6:00pm Aami (Malayalam) 12:30, 3:30, 6:30,8:00, 9:30, 11:00, 12:30 & 02:00am

Tomb Raider (Action) 11:00am, 1:30, 4:00, 6:30, 9:00 & 11:30pmRaid (Hindi) 12:15, 3:00, 5:45, 8:30 & 11:15pm Kirrak Party (Telugu) 11:00am & 5:00pm Aami (Malayalam) 2:00, 8:00 & 11:00pm

Bonnie Bears: Mystical Winter 10:30am, 12:30, 2:30, 4:30 & 6:30pm Tomb Raider (Action) 10:30am, 1:00, 3:30, 5:00, 6:00, 8:30, 10:30, 11:00 & 12:30pm The Arabian Warrior (Action) 8:30 & 10:45pm Aami (Malayalam) 10:30am, 1:45 & 7:30pm Raid (Hindi) 10:30am, 1:103:50, 6:30, 9:10 & 11:50pm

Based on real events, Raid revolves around Amay Patnaik, a fearless Income Tax officer who carries out a non-stop raid at the mansion of Tauji, the most powerful man inLucknow.

RAID

FLIK MirqabAami 11:50am, 3:10, 6:30 & 9:50pm

Black Panther 11:50am, 12:45, 2:30, 5:10, 6:35, 7:50, 9:15, 10:30pm & 12:00midnight Boonie Bears: Mystical Winter 11:30am, 1:30 & 6:30pm Death Wish (Action) 2:00 & 4:15pm Early Man 2:40pm Ferdinand 10:30am Game Night 11:55am & 6:15pm Gnome Alone (Animation) 12:45, 3:35 & 5:35 & 6:00pm

In Syria 3:35 & 10:40pm Ragdah Almotawahesha 10:45am & 7:25, 9:25 & 11:25 pm The Lodgers 8:30, 10:40pm & 12:35am Tomb Raider 10:20, 11:40am, 12:40, 3:00, 5:20, 7:40, 8:20, 10:00pm & 12:20am 3D 2:00, 4:20, 6:40, 9:00 & 11:20PM

20 THURSDAY 15 MARCH 2018MORNING BREAK

FAJRSHOROOK

04. 28 AM05. 44 PM

11. 43 AM03. 08 PM

05. 45 AM07. 15 PM

ZUHRASR

MAGHRIBISHA

PRAYER TIMINGS

HIGH TIDE 04:00 – 16:00 LOW TIDE 11:00 – 21:30

Misty at places at first becomes relative-

ly hot daytime

WEATHER TODAY

Courtesy: Qatar Meteorology Department

Minimum Maximum 21oC 33oC

Warming could threaten half of species in key areas AFPPARIS: Global warming could place 25 to 50 percent of species in the Amazon, Madagascar and other biodiverse areas at risk of localised extinction within decades, a report said Wednesday.

The lower projection is based on a mercury rise of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-Industrial Revolution levels -- the warming ceiling the world’s nations agreed on in 2015. The highest is for out-of-control warming of 4.5 C.

“Global biodiversity will suffer terribly over the next century unless we do everything we can,” said con-servation group WWF, which com-missioned the analysis published in science journal Climatic Change.

“We must keep average global temperatures down to the absolute minimum.” The report focused on 33 so-called “Priority Places” which host some of the world’s richest and most unusual terrestrial species, including iconic, endangered, or endemic plants and animals.

They include southern Chile, the eastern Himalayas, South Africa’s unique Fynbos ecoregion, Borneo, Sumatra, the Namibian desert, West Africa, southwest Australia, coastal east Africa, and southern Africa’s Miombo Woodlands, home to

African wild dogs.The team looked at the impact

of climate change on nearly 80,000 terrestrial plant, mammal, bird, amphibian, and reptile species.

At warming of 4.5 C, based on a “business-as-usual” scenario of no emissions cuts, the Amazon could risk the local extinction of 69 percent of its plant species.

The Miombo Woodlands risks losing 90 percent of its amphibians, 86 percent of birds, and 80 percent of mammals, according to the report.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries made vol-untary pledges to curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal, oil and natural gas. - ‘New normal’ - But even if those pledges are met, scientists predict warming over 3 C, a recipe for disastrous climate change-trig-gered sea level rises, superstorms, floods, and droughts.

Warming of 3.2 C would place about 37 percent of species in Pri-ority Places at risk of local extinction, said a WWF statement.

“Even with the emissions cuts pledged under the Paris Agreement, temperatures that were extreme in the past are set to be the new normal in all Priority Places,” it added -- in some as early as 2030.

Rockefeller’s Picasso could raise $0.5bn REUTERSPARIS: A rare Picasso once owned by Gertrude Stein is part of an art trove belonging to the Rockefeller dynasty that could raise half a billion dollars this year, in what auctioneer Christie’s says could be the most valuable sale ever of a private collection.

Ten works on display at Christie’s in Paris, including the Picasso and a Monet, rep-resent a small fraction of the 1,600 lots once owned by bil-lionaire banker David Rock-efeller and his wife Peggy that will go under the hammer in May for charity.

David Rockefeller, a former CEO of Chase Man-hattan bank and grandson of the oil tycoon John D. Rock-efeller, died last year at the age of 101. “We’re talking probably north of 500 million dollars which will make it the most valuable collection sale of all time, and the most val-uable charity sale of all time,” Christie’s auctioneer Jonathan Rendell said.

IANS

WASHINGTON: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which has been shrinking for a century and a half, seems to be growing taller as it gets smaller, Nasa scientists have found.

The Great Red Spot is a persistent high-pressure region in the atmosphere of Jupiter, producing an anti-cyclonic storm 22 degree south of the planet’s equator.

The findings, published in the Astronomical Journal, indicate that the Great Red Spot recently started to drift westward faster than before.Historically, it’s been assumed that this drift is more or less constant. The study confirms that the storm has been decreasing in length overall since 1878 and is big enough to accommodate just over one Earth at this point. But the historical record indicates the area of the spot grew tempo-rarily in the 1920s.

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot grows

Ninth QIFF opens todayTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: The ninth Qatar Inter-national Food Festival (QIFF), the country’s longest-running food festival, opens today at Hotel Park.

Over the course of the coming 11 days, residents and visitors are invited to sample and enjoy a variety of gastro-nomic experiences, including a fresh farmers’ market, garden picnics and special festival menus at participating restaurants around Qatar. The Festival will run from 4 pm to 12 midnight from Saturday to Wednesday and will extend to 1am on Thursdays and Fridays.

QIFF 2018 is organised and delivered by QTA with the support of numerous partners representing the entertainment, hospitality and F&B sectors in Qatar. The Festival’s Strategic Partner is Katara Hospitality, the global hotel owner, developer and operator based in Qatar. The award-winning five-star national carrier, Qatar Airways is the Festival’s official airline. Other partners include Msheireb Museums, Doha Film Institute,beIN,Qatar

Culinary Professionals, Askar, Mini Zoo Events, AlRayyan Water, RAW ME, Zomato, Talabat, UBER, Qatar TV, Al Rayyan TV and Olive Radio

To mark the launch of QIFF 2018, an opening cer-emony will be held at 6pmwith one of Hollywood’s favourite chefs, Wolfgang Puck and Qatar’s very own Aisha Al-Tamimi sharing the QIFF Cooking Theater stage for an exchange of culinary insights that span from East to West. Their discussion will be followed by the Theater’s first demonstration by US Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto and the event will culminate in a fireworks display above the Doha Corniche.

The festival’s signature feature, the QIFF Cooking Theatre, returns this year to provide a space for connois-seurs and novices to learn all about how to handle, prepare, cook, present and even pho-tograph food. With a special theme for each day, it will run live competitions and dem-onstrations daily from 4pm to 10.30pm. The US’s Christine Ha, Kuwait’s Sulaiman Al Qassar, the Philippines’ Luis Rey ‘Niño’ Logarta ,India’s Ranveer Barar, Lebanon’s

Chef Ramzi, Turkey’s Murat Bozok and Qatar’s Aisha Al-Tamimi are among the 14 internationally-renowned chefs who will take to the stage to share their secret ingredients and techniques.

And in celebration of the aromatic coffee bean, there is a new coffee zone offering a truly unique experience. Other special features include a Mini Zoo in the zone dedi-cated to young children.

Adding to the festive atmosphere at Hotel Park, the main festival stage will host a variety of cultural shows from countries all across the globe. They include Ethiopia, India, South Africa, Turkey and Vietnam. And on the second weekend of the festival, Kuwaiti singer Abdulaziz Louis and Lebanese band, Wahdon will take to the QIFF entertainment stage for free live performances on the eve-nings of March 23 and 24 respectively.

Throughout the festival, there will be live perform-ances by Doha-based hip hop dance troupe, Beats and Bytes as well as Music Vending Machine, The Doha String Quartet & Friends, Doha Jazz and an American music band.

Al Bidda Park Spring Bazaar opens todayTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Al Bidda Park in collaboration with QSports will officially open the first “Al Bidda Park Spring Bazaar” today.

The Spring Bazaar will be the first public event to be held at the newly opened park where over 60 exhibition booths have been setup along with 15 food court kiosks and a variety of chil-dren’s games that include a 1,000 square meter outdoor trampoline park, bike rentals, trackless train and a 15-meter-high giant inflatable slide. The event will run for seven weeks until May 8, said a release.

The “Bazaar” offers a wide variety of products and services targeting citizens, residents and tourists, such as handi-crafts, Abayas, Jalabiyas, scarves, Arabic perfumes, accessories and other products. Residents can also enjoy special weekend stage performances and kids games with a chance to win prizes. QSports, the official event organiser, announced that the door is still open to entrepreneurs, retailers, restaurants wishing to participate in the “Spring Bazaar 2018”. Businessmen that are par-ticipating will benefit from the

importance of the event in promoting their products and services to a large number of people visiting the park daily.

Ghanim al Mohannadi, Deputy Chairman of QSports, stated that the organisation of the Spring Bazaar in its first edition is part of the overall direction of QSports to promote outdoor activities whilst taking advantage of near perfect weather in Qatar during this time of the

year. He further stated that there are

plenty of surprises with mini-weekend events being planned throughout the next seven weeks. One such event is sure to drive thousands of people to partic-ipate is the first ever 2K Inflatable Run where families can join their kids in con-quering the World’s largest inflatable obstacle course.

Various arrangements at “Al Bidda Park Spring Bazaar”.

Ai Weiwei’s expo opens at Fire StationRAYNALD C RIVERA THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Thousands of clothes and shoes once owned by refugees are displayed in Laundromat, the first ever exhibition in the Gulf by icono-clastic Chinese artist Ai Weiwei that puts the spotlight on the global refugee crisis, which opened yesterday at Garage Gallery at the Fire Station.

A total of 2,046 articles of clothing are neatly arranged and hanged on clothes racks which stand on the floor covered with Ai’s Newsfeed com-prising daily press coverage, personal observations and images on war, dis-placement, and the refugee and migrant journey among others.

The clothes were collected from a makeshift refugee camp in Idomeni – a small village in northern Greece and official border crossing to the former Yugoslav Republic of Mace-donia. The camp was shut down in May 2016 and the refugees that had been living there were evacuated, leaving their importat possessions behind including their clothes.

The walls of the exhibition space are dotted with 17, 062 photos taken by Ai on his iPhone during the filming of his documentary feature “Human Flow” in which he travelled to 40 refugee camps in 23 countries con-ducting over 600 interviews.

The exhibition also features the film “Idomeni” (2016) which captures the everyday conditions of the ref-ugees up to the moment when the camp was evacuated.

Alongside Laundromat, other projects by the artist exhibited include Stacked Porcelain Vases as a Pillar (2017), which represents six themes of the refugee condition — War, Ruins, Journey, Crossing the Sea, Refugee Camps, and Demonstrations, and Tyre (2016), a traditional symbol of safety turned on its head by being crafted from marble and representing the struggle faced by refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

This is the first time the renowned artist and political activist has exhibited in the Gulf region. It follows his visit to Doha last year when he visited museums and art projects, delivered a lecture and met with Qatar’s aspiring artists.

“My relationship with Qatar began when I first visited the country last year. I had the chance to tour the Fire Station and meet with the artists who had residencies there. It was a great experience to see the openness with which they practiced their craft and I am pleased to have the chance to bring Laundromat to this space and continue taking my message to people around the world,” he said.

Mansoor bin Ebrahim Al Mahmoud, CEO and Special Adviser

to the Chairperson of Qatar Museums, HE Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani officially opened the exhibition which is open to the public until June 1.

Khalifa Al Obaidly, Director of Qatar Museums’ Fire Station Artist in Residence Programme, said: “We are hugely honoured to present Laundro-matat the Fire Station — a place where our residents encounter new perspec-tives and find inspiration in the work of well-established artists. By bringing such internationally significant talent to Qatar, we hope to spark creativity

for a young generation of artists and build an exciting future for Qatar. An exhibition such as this, which brings attention to an issue that has preoc-cupied a generation, is sure to be of interest to the wider community as well. This is a show that should not be missed, and we urge all those who live in and visit Qatar to experience it.”

The travelling exhibition, which serves as a powerful commentary on the refugee crisis, highlights Qatar’s devel-opment as a creative and artistic hub that encourages dialogue through art.

Thousands of articles of clothing and photos are on display at Laundromat, the first-ever exhibition by renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in the Gulf, launched yesterday at the Fire Station. PICS: SALIM MATRAMKOT / THE PENINSULA

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