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Artistes preparing the shows for the Eid Al Adha celebrations at Katara yesterday. Pic: Kammutty V P /The Peninsula

Festive rehearsal

MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016 • 10 DHUL HIJJA 1437 • Volume 21 • Number 6917 thepeninsulaqatar @peninsulaqatar @peninsula_qatar 2 Riyals

Over 1.8m pilgrims converge in ArafahBy Raynald C Rivera The Peninsula

DOHA: Qatar wore a festive mood yesterday as hypermarkets saw huge crowds having last minute shop-ping in preparation for a grand Eid Al Adha celebration today. From malls to leisure and tourist destina-tions, the week-long activities and events to mark Eid Al Adha will kick off today under the “Eid Celebrations in Qatar” programme organised by Qatar Tourism Authority (QTA).

With the theme “Capture Joy,” the festival organised in partner-ship with the public and private sectors including sports organisa-tions, malls and cultural landmarks will see seven days of unique shows and entertainment and fun-filled

activities at 18 venues across the country. A ship-shaped stage has been erected at Katara Esplanade to present a spectacular show tracing the adventures of Sinbad through a combination of aerobat-ics , cutting edge sound and lighting system. Three shows will be staged each night starting at 7pm tonight for four days. Fireworks display will conclude each night’s shows.

Six participating malls will stage exclusive live entertainment shows throughout the week starting today including Tarzan (City Cen-tre), Beauty & The Beast (Dar Al Salam), Flying Superkids (Al Khor Mall), Alvin and the Chipmunks (Ezdan Mall), Pirates from the Car-ibbean (Lagoona Mall) and Sinbad the Sailor (in Arabic at Hyatt Plaza).

For five days starting tomorrow, malls are staging unique entertain-ment shows for the entire family including Aladdin (City Centre Doha), Bob the Builder (Dar Al Salam), Dora the Explorer (Ezdan Mall), Cinderella (Lagoona Mall), Play ‘Doh (Hyatt Plaza) and Kid’s Circus (Al Khor Mall). There will also be daily fam-ily entertainment shows that will rotate between 4pm and 10pm at the participating malls, such as African Drummers, Circus Bear and Clown, and Funny Ball performances in addition to indoor parades through-out the malls featuring Fritters, B-Boys and the young tots’ popular characters, the Shopkins.

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Emir exchanges Eid greetings with leaders of Arab countriesDOHA: Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in telephone calls yesterday, exchanged greetings, on the occasion of the blessed Eid Al Adha, with a number of Arab leaders, Qatar News Agency (QNA) reports.

Emir exchanged congratulations with the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, Emir of Kuwait H H Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Jaber Al Sabah, King H M Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain, Crown Prince of Kuwait Sheikh Nawaf Al Ahmad Al Jaber Al Sabah, and Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Dep-uty Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces Sheikh Moham-med bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Emir also exchanged congratulations with President of Sudan Omar Hassan Al Bashir, President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi of Egypt, President Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine, President Ismail Omar Guelleh of Djibouti.

Emir has received a cable of greetings on the occasion of Eid Al Adha from Speaker of the Advisory (Shura) Council H E Mohammed bin Mubarak Al Khulaifi. Al Khu-laifi prayed the Almighty Allah for the best of health and happiness to the Emir and further progress, wel-fare and prosperity to the people of Qatar under the wise leader-ship. In his reply the Emir said: “I have received with great appreci-ation your precious greetings on the occasion of the blessed Eid Al Adha, As I reciprocate you and brothers members of the Shura Council best wishes and congratu-lations, praying the Almighty Allah that this occasion brings all of you good health and happiness and to our dear country further progress and prosperity.

Agencies

MOUNT ARAFAH, SAUDI ARABIA: The Haj reached its high point yesterday when pilgrims from across the world converged in Arafah near the Holy city of Makkah.

More than 1.8 million pilgrims gathered from sun-rise to sunset at the hill and a vast surrounding plain known as Mount Arafat, about 15km from Makkah.

In stifling heat they chanted a traditional Haj incan-tation, “God, here I am,” spending the most important day of the annual Haj in prayer and reciting from the Holy Quran.

Sheikh Abdul Rahman Al Sudais, Imam of the Grand Mosque, led the multitude of pilgrims gathered in Ara-fah, in prayers after delivering the Haj sermon.

Delivering the wide-ranging sermon, Al Sudais called on Muslim leaders to work together to solve the many issues that are confronting the Ummah.

The imam said that “terrorism doesn’t belong to any religion or nation.” He also asked pilgrims to avoid

politics during the Haj. Al Sudais gave the sermon this year instead of the Grand Mufti Abdulaziz Al Ashiekh after he opted out due to health reasons. Al Ashiekh sat on a chair as he listened to Al Sudais encourage pilgrims to benefit from their time at Arafat and the rest of their Haj. He urged the unity of the Muslims and warned about deviant ideologies reminding parents, teachers and scholars the responsibilities they have in nurtur-ing the young away from deceptive messages.

After sunset, the pilgrims were on the move aboard buses heading for nearby Muzdalifah, in preparation for the first stoning ritual at the Jamarat. At Muzdali-fah, half way between Arafah and Mina, pilgrims gather 49 pebbles for a symbolic stoning of the devil which begins today, in the last major rite of Haj. It coincides with Eid Al Adha, the feast of sacrifice marked by Mus-lims worldwide.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia yesterday said it had launched a television channel to broadcast the Haj rituals in the Persian language, also known as Farsi, spoken in Iran.

Week-long Eid festivities begin today

Customers told to be vigilant against cheating at cattle marketBy Sanaullah Ataullah

The Peninsula

DOHA: The Ministry of Economy and Commerce (MEC) has cautioned customers against some fraudulent practices in the trade of sacrificial

animals at the cattle market during Eid Al Adha.

A majority of the stalls at the livestock market in Abu Hamour are owned by private companies or individuals.

“Demand for sacrificial animals has surged ahead of Eid Al Adha. There might be attempts of cheating

and fraud by the traders. So the cus-tomers should be vigilant and inform the Consumer Protection Depart-ment (CPD) in case they come cross such practices”, the ministry said on its Twitter account.

Different types of cheating have come to the light repeatedly on the occasion of Eid Al Adha every year,

said the ministry. One method is to add extra salt to the drinking water given to the cattle to fatten them artificially (by enlarging the belly and increasing weight) to cheat the customers.

“ Some traders might also wash the head and body of the sheep to befool you about the

quality of the animal,” it added.Another cruel trick employed by

some traders is to beat the animals continuously to prevent them from taking rest or from falling asleep in a bid to hide any possible symptoms of sickness.

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More than 100 dead in Syria ahead of truceBEIRUT: Air strikes on Syria’s battleground cities of Idlib and Aleppo killed more than 100 peo-ple in last 24 hours. The worst strikes were in Idlib city, the cap-ital of the province of the same name, where they hit a market, killing 55 civilians. six civilians yesterday just 24 hours before a truce brokered by Russia and the United States was due to begin.

The ceasefire, announced after marathon talks by the Rus-sian and US foreign ministers, has been billed as the best chance yet to end Syria’s five-year civil war estimated to have killed more than 290,000 people.

As the clock ticked towards sunset when the ceasefire is expected to start, rebels bat-tling the Syrian regime and the political opposition were still weighing whether to take part in the truce.

Key regime ally Iran wel-comed the plan on Sunday and called for “comprehensive mon-itoring” of the truce, particularly along Syria’s volatile borders.

But even as world powers threw their support behind the deal, regime air raids on rebel-held parts of northern city Aleppo killed six civilians and wounded 30, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

→ See also page 6

Pilgrims gather to perform noon and afternoon prayers at Namira Mosque in Arafah, about 15km from the Holy city of Makkah, yesterday.

QNA

RIO DE JA NEIRO: Qatar’s Abdulqadir Abdulrahman (pic-tured), won a silver medal in the Men’s Shotput F34 event at the Summer Paralympic Games, which is currently being held in Rio de Janeiro.

Abdulrahman threw 11.15 metres to win the prestigious sec-ond spot on the podium.

The gold went to Morocco’s Azeddine Nouiri who threw 11.28. In third place was Colombia’s Mau-ricio Valencia who managed 11.10 metres.

Abdulrahman is one of the three athletes representing Qatar at this edition of the Paralympic

Games. The other two are Moham-med Rashid Al Kubaisi (Men’s wheelchairs event 100m) and Sarah Hamady Masoud (women’s shot put).

Qatar’s Abdulqadir wins silver in Paralympics

A ship-shaped stage has been erected at Katara Esplanade to present a spectacular show tracing the adventures of Sinbad. Three shows will be staged each night starting at 7pm tonight for four days. Fireworks display will conclude each night’s shows.

The Peninsula wishes all readersThe Peninsula wishes all readers

EID MUBARAKEID MUBARAK

HOME 02 MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

The Peninsula

DOHA: Ooredoo will open a spe-cial booth in the departure area at the Hamad International Airport to mark Eid Al-Adha with thousands expected to travel during the hol-idays.

Ooredoo’s Eid booth, which will be open from September 10 till September 13, has been designed to provide a family-friendly treat for citizens and residents who are travelling over the break, as well as share the Eid spirit with visitors and transit passengers at the Hamad International Airport.

Talking about the booth, Fatima Sultan Al Kuwari, Director, Commu-nity and Public Relations, Ooredoo Qatar, said: “This is an ideal way to

share Qatar’s tradition of warm hos-pitality with the thousands of people who are travelling this week. Oore-doo hopes this activity will brighten up their journey and share some of the spirit of Eid Al-Adha. We thank Hamad International Airport for their cooperation and partnership, as we work together to serve the community.”

Activities in the booth, which is located by the children’s play area in departures, will include daily appearances from Ooredoo’s mascots the Alrabaa, as well as vol-unteers distributing free colouring gift packs for children.

Ooredoo will also provide a special ‘photo booth’ for visitors, enabling them to take photographs in traditional Qatari dress, and also sample Arabic coffee at selected times of the day, for free.

Deputy Emir exchanges Eid greetingsQNA

DOHA: The Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani has exchanged cables of congratulations on the occasion of Eid Al-Adha with deputies and leaders of Arab and Islamic coun-tries.

PM exchanges Eid greetingsQNA

DOHA: The Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani has exchanged cables of greetings on the occasion of Eid Al-Adha with heads of gov-ernment of the Arab and Islamic countries.

Indian embassy holiday for OnamDOHA: On the occasion of the Keralite festival of Onam, the Embassy of India, Doha, will remain closed on Wednesday, 14 September, 2016, the embassy announced in a press release yes-terday.

By Sidi Mohamed

The Peninsula

DOHA: To add more taste to Eid Al Adha happiness, some residents of Doha, including both Qataris and expatriates, are approaching various traditional kitchens for the prepa-ration of age-old Arabic dishes like makboos.

“We cannot handle more cus-tomers ... no more reservations for cookery services,” said an employee of a traditional kitchen located in Madinat Khalifa. He said that they started taking orders for special Ara-bic dishes, particularly those made of mutton and beef, a week ago.

Officials of some other cooking service providers told The Peninsula that they had started receiving book-ings almost ten days ago and most of the orders were for the first day of Eid Al Adha.

“Most of the customers want to place orders for the very first day. We

cannot deliver all the orders on the first day and so we have taken orders for the second and third days of Eid as well, but the real rush is for the first day,” he added.

Saleem, a booking employee of a ‘traditional kitchen’ in Madinat Khal-ifa, said that they had stopped taking orders two days ago as about 40 peo-ple had already booked. “Most of the orders are for dishes made of Syrian sheep while a few have demanded Australian sheep”.

He said people were placing orders for makboos and biriyani. “A majority of our customers are Qataris who prefer the Qatari makboos,” he added.

Price of Makboos/Biriyani with Syrian sheep (served in two huge plates) is QR1,800 while one with Australian sheep is being charged QR750.

“This is if we are providing eve-rything, including the meat, and if the customer provides the meat they just have to pay for cooking and other ingredients and the cost varies from QR350 to QR500,” he said.

Another employee, Mohamed, from a traditional eatery located in Duhail, said that they had stopped booking on Saturday as they could not take more. “We started bookings ten days ago and have received more than 60 orders but not all of them for

dishes with a whole sheep,” he said.Asked which is more preferred,

biriyani and makboos, Mohamed said, “there is no big difference between the two and people are asking for both and the prices remain unchanged compared to last year.”

“Our prices are QR1,750 for Mak-boos/biryani with Arabic sheep and QR750 for with Australian one.”

He said that old and loyal cus-tomers were placing orders via phone while new customers were visiting the outlet to see the environment and have a taste of the dishes before plac-ing orders. Some also come out with suggestions and advice to make the

dishes tastier.A Qatari customer who didn’t

want his name in print said that he had come to the outlet because he was planning to throw a party for some guests at his residence on the the first day of Eid.

“For such big parties we place orders outside since we cannot pre-pare food at home in such huge quantities. Especially during Eid, women will be busy celebrating,” he said.

He was seen giving tips to the person responsible for the outlet to give special attention to the dish to avoid criticism by customers, espe-cially women.

High demand for traditional dishes during EidMany residents are approaching traditional kitchens for the preparation of age-old Arabic dishes like makboos.

Al Harfi Kitchen for Traditional Food in Duhail area. RIGHT: Makboos, the Arabic traditional food. Pic: Baher Amin/The Peninsula

Continued from page 1

A number of famous children’s shows will also be staged at The Pearl Qatar for three days starting tonight. Barney, Aladdin and Bubble show will be staged at 6pm, 7.30pm and 9pm tonight respectively.

Other shows to look forward in the next two days are Dora, Finding Nemo, Frozen and Jungle Book.

Families enjoyed “Fafa Saves the Forest” live children’s show which opened yesterday at the Qatar National Convention Centre main theatre. Tickets to the show, which runs for seven days, starts from QR150 and are available at Virgin Megastore.

For Arabic music lovers, a series of concerts of prominent Arab sing-ers starts at 9pm tonight at Abdualziz bin Nasser Theatre in Souq Waqif featuring Saad Jumaa and Fouad Abdualwahed.

The concerts are organised by Sout Al Rayyan radio station and run for five nights.

Amusement rides are also availa-ble at Souq Waqif’s Al Ahmad Square for six days starting tonight. Entry to the amusement park, which is open from 4pm to 10.30pm , is QR10 inclu-sive of one ride and additional QR10 for each ride.

The Ministry of Culture and Sport is organising shows high-lighting traditional Qatari dances

and multicultural performances at Dahl Al Hammam Park from 6.30pm to 11pm starting tonight until Wednesday.

The Al Dosari Zoo and Game Reserve will be open to receive guests from 3pm to 7pm starting tomorrow until Friday while the Sheikh Faisal Museum will also offer tours from 9am to 6pm.

Families seeking an action-packed Eid can engage in sports events at Aspire Zone including ten-nis, football, volleyball and biking, among others.

Qatar Air Sports Committee is organising aerial paragliding tours at Sealine Beach from 3.30pm to 6.30pm for a week while Al Samriya

Equestrian Academy is offering horse riding for a fee.

Eid celebrations extend to var-ious expatriate communities as the Public Relations Department at the Ministry of Interior yester-day organises ‘Communities Eid Al Adha 2016 Celebrations’ today and tomorrow.

The Wakra Sports Club will host celebrations today while Asian Town in Industrial Area and Barwa Work-ers Sports Complex in Al Khor will stage two-day programmes from 5pm to 10pm showcasing talents from Indian, Sri Lankan, Indonesian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Nepalese communities.

Abattoirs ‘ready to receive’ Eid customersBy Mohammed Osman

The Peninsula

DOHA: Eight traditional and auto-mated abattoirs in different parts of the country are ready to offer their services on the first day of Eid Al Adha, said a senior official of Widam Food Company.

“We have prepared three air-conditioned tents in Al Mamoura and Al Mazroua areas to receive the cus-tomers - one for men, one for women and the third for elders and people with special needs,” said Abdurrah-man Mohammed Al Khayarin, CEO of Widam Company. These two areas were selected as they are populated areas and slaughterhouses there wit-ness huge crowds compared to other places, Al Khayarin explained.

The Ministry of Economy and Commerce has provided this year with 12,500 subsidized sheep from Jordan at a price of QR1,100 for cit-izens and the sale started on the fourth of this month.

The demand for Eid Al Adha sacrifice is increasing every year, and demand for Arab sheep ranged between 8,000 to 8,500 in 2014 and last year it increased by 10 to 12 percent.

“This year also we are expecting a further hike in demand,” Al Khay-yarin told Al Rayyan TV recently.

All imported animals are under strict monitoring of veterinary doc-tors at the entry gates, whether they came by air, sea or land, and no animal is allowed entry if not healthy. Veterinary doctors check them before and after slaughtering and also check the meat to ensure

safety and health of consumers, Al Khayarin said, pointing out that any animal is vulnerable to diseases after entering the county and follow-up check are needed. If any of them is found sick or if there are doubts about their health, whether before or after killing, they could immedi-ately be replaced with another one, said the CEO.

The health monitoring system is applicable to all sheep in the coun-try, including Australian and local.

Some consumers have appreci-ated the quality of the sheep, their availability in the market and their prices compared to the past year. Sheep are fat and are sold at afford-able prices compared to the past year, a citizen told the TV channel.

He added that the initiative of the MEC has helped stabilize the prices in the market through a crackdown on monopoly and both the price increase and prices this year are reasonable compared to last year, he said.

The Ministry of Municipal-ity and Environment has provided with 30 veterinary doctors and health inspectors to monitor the sales outlets and slaughterhouses. The number of health inspection teams has been increased due to demand from the people, in collaboration with the Ministry of Municipality, Al Khayarin emphasized.

The Widam CEO urged all cit-izens and residents to come to the abattoirs at a convenient time to

receive their sacrificial meat because abattoirs will be operating from 5am to 5 pm, and there is no need to rush immediately after the Eid prayers. The automated abattoir’s capacity is very high, more than 180 per hour, and only the Australian sheep will be received there.

Widam company is selling Aus-tralian sheep at a price of QR 350 plus QR10 for slaughtering. The com-pany has also reserves of 50,000 sheep besides Australian calves to meet the demand.

The number of sales outlets will be increased over the coming years and inspection will be intensified in collaboration with the Ministry of Municipality and Environment, the Widam CEO said.

Children’s shows to be staged at Pearl-Qatar

Ooredoo to host booth at HIA for Eid Al Adha

Aerial artistes rehearse for the Sinbad show yesterday at Katara Esplanade. One of the main attractions of this year’s Eid celebrations, Sinbad promises another world class show combining breathtaking stunts and stunning sounds and lighting. Pic: Kammutty VP/The Peninsula

Sheep for Eid Al Adha sacrifice at the livestock market.

Ooredoo’s Eid booth has been designed to provide a family-friendly treat for citizens and residents.

HOME / MIDDLE EAST 03 MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

Continued from page 1

The salesman would catch the sheep by head and pull it up while showing to the customers in a clever way that can create a false impres-sion about its physique and fitness.

Some traders at the livestock market The Peninsula spoke to confirmed the prevalence of such fraudulent practices.

“Some greedy traders have been found washing, brushing and polish-ing the hair of the animals at night

to mislead the customers about their real features,” said a salesman work-ing with a livestock company at the Central Market.

“Customers should not buy the animals in a hurry. They must be careful in their selection because this is the only way to avoid being cheated,” he added.

Some customers said they avoid buying animals from traders who are not familiar to them.

“I bought two locally bred-sheep at the rate of QR1,200 each

from an outlet at the livestock mar-ket. Every time I buy from the same outlet because the salesman know me very well. He is from Bangla-desh and is very trustworthy”, said the customer.

“I took a round of the market before buying. There were not much animals as they used to be in the pre-vious years. Perhaps many families who went on vacation will come only after the Eid holidays. Traders may be aware of it and they bring animals as per demand,” he added.

Customers urged not to buy in a hurry

Pilgrims are seen at Mount Arafat, also called Jabal al-Rahmah (Mount of Mercy), ahead of the climax of Haj. RIGHT: Pilgrims are sprayed with water on the plains of Arafah.

Camels are displayed for sale at a livestock market, ahead of the Eid Al Adha festival, in Amman, Jordan, yesterday.

Pilgrims in Arafah

Camels for sale

AFP

CAIRO: Egypt has released three youths arrested in May over an online video mocking the govern-ment, but a fourth member of the group is still in custody, their law-yer said yesterday.

The four young men from the group known as Street Children

had posted a video on the internet poking fun at the devaluation of the Egyptian pound and the return of two islands to Saudi Arabia.

“Three of them -- Mohammed Yehya, Mohammed al-Dessouki and Mohammed Gabr -- have been released” over the past few days, defence lawyer Hazem Salah said yesterday.

The fourth member of the group, Mohammed Adel, is still in deten-tion but waiting for the completion of the procedure allowing his release, he said.

Salah said Yehya, Dessouki and Gabr were freed on condition that they clock in twice a week at their local police station for the next 45 days.

He said “the case has not yet been referred to court”.

The group were arrested in May and remanded in custody, the latest case in a crackdown on voices crit-ical of the authorities.

They were accused of “promot-ing ideas calling for terrorist acts by

posting a video on social networks and YouTube,” a member of the defence team said after their arrest.

They are also suspected of “incitement to take part in demon-strations disturbing the public order” and “inciting mobs to commit hos-tile actions against state institutions”.

The case sparked public anger, and in June the New York-based Human Rights Watch group (HRW) urged Egypt to drop legal charges against the four.

“The investigation appears to be based purely on their satirical videos and violates the right to free speech,” the watchdog said.

Egypt under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is “losing its legen-dary sense of humour when it locks up young men for making satirical videos,” said Nadim Houry, deputy Middle East and North Africa head at HRW.

“This kind of blanket repression leaves young people with few outlets to express themselves or joke about their daily hardships.”

Egypt frees three youth held over mocking videoThey were accused of “promoting ideas calling for terrorist acts by posting a video on social networks and YouTube,” a member of the defence team said after their arrest.

Turkey has duty to defeat IS: ErdoganAFP

ISTANBUL: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday said Turkey had a duty to defeat the Islamic State extremist group, adding its oper-ation inside Syria was a first step towards this goal.

Turkey has sent dozens of tanks and hundreds of troops into Syria, in an unprecedented operation dubbed Euphrates Shield aimed at booting out both IS jihadists and Kurdish militia from the border area.

The operation, launched on August 24, came after a string of bloody suicide bombings and rocket

attacks inside Turkey blamed on IS.“It is the binding duty in front of

our nation to finish off the organ-isation called Daesh (IS) in Syria and ensure it is unable to carry out actions inside our country,” Erdogan said in a televised message for the upcoming Eid al-Adha Islamic holiday.

“The Euphrates Shield opera-tion is the first step towards this,” he added.

Erdogan said Turkey was now “much stronger, determined and more dynamic” than before the July 15 coup bid, which the authorities blame on the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen. He denies the charges.

Six Turkish soldiers have been killed so far in rocket attacks in Syria blamed on IS but Erdogan said that the Euphrates Shield would continue and “not one drop” of blood of Tur-key’s forces would be spilt in vain.

Turkey had previously been accused of not doing enough in the fight against IS and its West-ern partners have applauded the operation.

Turkey’s operation is also target-ing the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its People’s Pro-tection Units (YPG) militia, which Ankara regards as the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) which has waged a 32-year insurrection inside Turkey.

People carry the body of 16-year-old Palestinian Abdulrahman Al Dabag during his funeral ceremony in Gaza City, yesterday. The boy was wounded by Israeli security forces as he was attending a demonstration at Al Bureyc refugee camp and died in hospital.

Gaza unrest

MIDDLE EAST04 MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

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AP

CAIRO: An Egyptian court has released from detention a rights activist who had worked as a legal consultant to the family of Italian student Giulio Regeni who was tor-tured to death in Cairo this year, defence lawyers said yesterday.

Ahmed Abdullah, Head, Egyp-tian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, an NGO, was arrested in April, ostensibly as part of a gov-ernment crackdown on protesters campaigning against Egypt’s inten-tion to turn over two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia.

The court freed him on bail. Charges, including inciting violence and attempting to overthrow the government, have not been dropped.

His release came a day after top prosecutor Nabil Sadek publicly acknowledged for the first time that Regeni was investigated by police less than three weeks before he dis-appeared on January 25. His body, bearing marks of severe torture, was found on the side of a highway just west of Cairo on February 3.

It was not immediately clear whether Abdullah’s release was linked to two days of talks on Rege-ni’s case in Rome last week between Sadek and Italian officials. Regeni’s family said in April it was distraught over Abdullah’s arrest.

Sadek’s revelation was the first time an Egyptian official publicly acknowledged that the 28-year-old doctoral student was a subject of interest to police, who were accused of abuse and torture.

Officials, including President Abdel Fattah El Sissi, have consist-ently denied any police role in the murder.

However, the fact that it took Sadek nearly eight months to acknowledge that police had a prior interest in Regeni seems certain to fuel suspicions that Cairo has con-cealed facts of the case.

The issue has roiled relations with one of Cairo’s closest Western allies and its largest trade partner in the EU.

El Sissi promised in an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica in March that investigators will work “night and day” to identify and pros-ecute those responsible for Regeni’s torture and death.

The newspaper said during the two-hour interview, El Sissi never once directly responded to ques-tions about who might have been responsible.

Sadek, in a joint statement at the end of his talks in Rome, also cast doubt on the Egyptian Interior Ministry’s account implying that a criminal gang was responsible for Regeni’s death.

In March, police said five mem-bers of a gang had been killed and some of Regeni’s personal belongings were found at the home of the sister of the gang leader. Italian authori-ties and Regeni’s family cast doubt on that story.

The statement said the case would continue to be investigated but added there are “weak doubts with regard to the connection” between Regeni’s death and the alleged gang members.

It prompted calls by social media activists in Egypt to prosecute all those involved in the death of the alleged gang members, describing their death as cold-blooded murder committed to create a cover story.

Adviser to murdered Italy student’s family freedThe release follows prosecutor’s statement that Regeni was probed by police before his disappearance.

Anatolia

BETHLEHEM: A Palestinian girl was killed when a Jewish settler ran her over with his vehicle near Al Khader village near Bethlehem city in West Bank, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said.

Witnesses said the driver fled the scene.

The ministry identified the girl as Lama Musa, 6.

Later, Israeli police issued a statement, saying the man had surrendered and claimed he did not run the girl over on purpose.

AFP

JERUSALEM: Israel’s Supreme Court yesterday rejected an appeal by the Israel Medical Association and authorised the force-feeding of prisoners on hunger strike, a court

document showed. “This law is legal under Israeli law and international law,” the court ruled on a law passed in July last year allowing hunger-strikers to be force-fed if their lives are in danger.

“Saving a life must remain the priority and the state is responsi-ble for the lives of its prisoners,” the

judges said. The association appealed against the law after doctors com-plained of being embroiled in a political dispute.

“The state is responsible for the safety of prisoners but also of citizens whose safety may be endangered because of events such as a hunger strike by prisoners,” the judges said.

AFP

ISTANBUL: Jailed Kurdistan Work-ers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan yesterday received his first family visit in two years, meeting his brother on the Turkish prison island where he has been held for over one-and-a-half decades, his lawyers said.

Mehmet Ocalan travelled from the port of Gemlik, south of Istan-bul, to the high security prison on the island of Imrali in the Sea of Marmara returning in the early

evening, the state-run Anadolu news agency said.

Amid concerns over his health, Ocalan’s lawyers confirmed that he had met his brother. “Mr Oca-lan today received a family visit. A statement about the situation of our client will be made in the shortest time,” the Asrin lawyers office said on their Twitter account.

Media said that permission had been granted for the visit marking the Eid Al-Adha holiday. It was the first family visit Ocalan was allowed since October 6, 2014. He last met a delegation from pro-Kurdish Peo-ples’ Democratic Party in April 2015.

Ocalan meets first family member in two years

Palestinian girl

run over by

Jewish settler

Israel rejects appeal against hunger strikes law

MIDDLE EAST06 MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

People buy sweets on the eve of the Eid Al Adha festival in Sana’a, Yemen, yesterday.

Eid shopping

AFP

BEIRUT: Syria’s opposition was weighing whether to take part in a truce brokered by Russia and the United States due to start today, after air strikes killed dozens in rebel-held areas.

Brokered after marathon talks by the Russian and US foreign min-isters, the ceasefire has been billed as the best chance yet to end Syria’s five-year civil war.

Key regime ally Iran welcomed the plan and called for “compre-hensive monitoring” of the truce, particularly along Syria’s volatile borders.

But even as world powers threw their support behind the agreement, scores were reported dead from a

barrage of unidentified raids in two key northern cities in opposition-held territory.

At least 62 people, including 13 women and 13 children, were killed in Saturday’s bombardment on Idlib city, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said Sunday.

The strikes hit several areas in the rebel-held city, including a mar-ket full of shoppers preparing for the Muslim holiday of Eid Al Adha, which begins today.

Britain’s special representative for Syria, Gareth Bayley, called the attacks “barbaric”.

“Bring on the #SyriaCeasefire,” he tweeted on Sunday.

Fresh bombardment also hit the battleground city of Aleppo on Sun-day, the Observatory said, a day after 12 civilians were killed in unidenti-fied raids there. No information on casualties from Sunday’s bombard-ment was immediately available.

“We hope there will be a ceasefire so that civilians can get a break. The shelling goes on night and day, there are targeted killings, besieged cities,” said Abu Abdullah, who lives in Aleppo’s rebel-held east.

“Civilians have no hope any-more.” In a major blow to the opposition, pro-regime forces reim-posed a devastating siege on the city’s eastern districts last week.

State news agency Sana on Saturday reported that Syrian Pres-ident Bashar Al Assad’s government “approved the agreement”.

Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah, which has intervened militarily on behalf of Assad, said late Saturday it supported the deal.

Iranian foreign ministry spokes-man Bahram Ghasemi said Sunday that Tehran, a key Assad supporter, also backed the agreement.

But Ghasemi said its success relied on the creation of “a compre-hensive monitoring mechanism, in particular control of borders in order to stop the dispatch of fresh terror-ists” to Syria.

Hezbollah has announced its support for a US-Russia truce deal for Syria, where the Lebanese Shia movement has intervened mili-tarily on behalf of President Bashar Al Assad.

In a statement published late Saturday on its official media arm Al Manar, the group’s unnamed “field commander for Syria opera-tions” said Hezbollah “stands with the ceasefire.”

“Syria’s allies are completely committed to what the Syrian lead-ership, government, and security and political forces have decided in terms of the ceasefire,” the state-ment said.

But it pledged to pursue an “open, relentless war against the terror-ists” of the Islamic State group and Al Nusra Front, which changed its name to Fateh Al Sham Front after renouncing its ties to Al Qaeda.

Hezbollah has dispatched between 5,000 to 8,000 fighters to

bolster the beleaguered Syrian army.The group receives military and

financial support from Iran, which threw its weight behind the truce deal on Sunday.

“Iran welcomes any establish-ment of a ceasefire in Syria and facilitating of access of all people of this country to humanitarian aid,” said foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi.

The new ceasefire, agreed as part of a landmark deal brokered by Rus-sia and the US, is set to begin today at sundown.

If the truce holds for one week, the US and Russia could start joint operations against jihadists from the Islamic State group and Fateh Al Sham Front.

Syria oppn weighs truce deal after raids kill dozens

Agencies

ISTANBUL: Turkey’s military said yesterday its warplanes have killed 20 Islamic State (IS) group fighters in an attack on targets in northern Syria, while Turkey’s president renewed a pledge to destroy the group.

The Chief of General Staff’s office said in a statement that warplanes had struck three build-ings identified as belonging to the IS group.

A vehicle and motorcycle also were destroyed in the Saturday evening airstrike that came less than two days before a U.S.-Russia agreement on a ceasefire in Syria takes effect.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday reiterated his government’s com-mitment to eliminating IS in Syria and the threat the group poses to Turkey.

Erdogan said in a videotaped message marking the Muslim holi-day of Eid Al Adha that Turkey has a “primary duty” to its people to destroy IS and prevent it from staging attacks in Turkey.

Turkey last month sent tanks across the Syrian border to help rebels retake Jarablus, a key IS-held border town, and to contain the expansion of a Syrian Kurd-ish militia.

Turkish jets have carried out several strikes against IS targets in Syria since the operation began. But clashes have also reportedly broken out between Turkish and Kurdish forces in the area.

Eight dead in Baghdad attacksBAGHDAD: Eight people were killed and dozens injured in a spate of attacks in the Iraqi cap-ital Baghdad. An improvised device exploded in Al Husseiniya, northeast of Baghdad, killing two people and injuring nine others, police officer Yasser Al Mostafa said. A Sunni tribal fighter and three family members were killed when unidentified people hurled a grenade on his vehicle in south-ern Baghdad, he said. Two people were also killed and five others injured in two separate bomb blasts in the Iraqi capital.

Meanwhile, Iraqi forces shot dead a bomber, leaving seven people injured when his explo-sive belt exploded.No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, though Iraqi authori-ties often point the finger at the Daesh terrorist group, which seized vast swathes of territory in northern and western Iraq in 2014. On Friday, at least 16 people were killed in a double car bomb-ing claimed by Daesh at a shopping mall in Baghdad. Daesh has suf-fered defeats across Iraq and Syria in recent months, leading some observers to predict a rise in bombings on soft civilian targets as its military strength is eroded.

Reuters

DIYARBAKIR: Turkey appointed new administrators in 28 munic-ipalities yesterday after removing their elected mayors over suspected links to militants, triggering pockets of protest in its volatile southeast-ern region bordering Syria and Iraq.

Of those replaced, 24 are sus-pected of ties with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK, and four are thought to be linked to the Gulen movement allegedly responsible for the abortive coup which killed over 270 people.

Police fired water cannon and tear gas to disperse demonstrators outside local government buildings in Suruc on the Syrian border as new administrators took over, security sources said. There were smaller pro-tests elsewhere in the town.

There were also disturbances in the main regional city of Diyarbarkir

and in Hakkari province near the Iraqi border, where police entered the municipality building and unfurled a large red Turkish flag, taking down the white local government flags that had previously flown.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said this week the campaign against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) mili-tants, who have waged a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy, was now Turkey’s largest ever. The removal of civil servants linked to them was a key part of the fight.

The 24 municipalities had been run by the pro-Kurdish opposition Peo-ples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the third largest in parliament, which denies direct links to the militants. It decried the move as an “administrative coup”.

“No democratic state can or will allow mayors and MPs to use munic-ipality resources to finance terrorist organisations,” Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said on Twitter. “Being an elected official isn’t a licence to com-mit crimes.” Turkey’s battle against

the PKK resumed with a new inten-sity after a ceasefire collapsed last year and with attempts by Kurdish groups in Syria’s war to carve out an autonomous Kurdish enclave on Tur-key’s border.

In a message to mark the Mus-lim Eid al Adha holiday, Erdogan said the PKK had been trying to step up attacks since a failed military coup in July and that they aimed to disrupt Turkish military operations in Syria.

The US embassy said it was con-cerned by reports of clashes in the southeast and that while it supported Turkey’s right to combat terrorism, it was important to respect the right to peaceful protest.

“We hope that any appointment of trustees will be temporary and that local citizens will soon be permit-ted to choose new local officials in accordance with Turkish law,” it said.

The crackdown comes as Ankara also pushes ahead with a purge of tens of thousands of supporters of US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah

Gulen, accused by Turkey of orches-trating the attempted coup in July. Gulen denies any involvement.

The mayors of four other munic-ipalities, three from the ruling AK Party and one from the nation-alist MHP opposition, were also replaced over alleged links to what the authorities call the “Gulen Ter-ror Organisation”, or FETO.

The interior ministry said the 28 mayors, 12 of whom are formally under arrest, were under investiga-tion for providing “assistance and support” to the PKK and to Gulen’s organisation.

Turkey has sacked or suspended more than 100,000 people since the failed coup. At least 40,000 people have been detained on suspicion of links to Gulen’s network.

The crackdown has raised con-cern from rights groups and Western allies who fear Erdogan is using the failed coup as pretext to curtail all dissent, and intensify his actions against suspected Kurdish militant

sympathisers. Turkish officials say the moves are justified by the extent of the threat to the state.

The HDP, which says it promotes a negotiated end to the PKK insur-gency, said it did not recognise the legitimacy of the mayors’ removal.

“This illegal and arbitrary stance will result in the deepening of current problems in Kurdish cities, and the Kurdish issue becoming unresolva-ble,” it said in a statement.

Tensions in the southeast had already been heightened since Turkey launched a military incur-sion into Syria two and half weeks ago dubbed “Operation Euphrates Shield”.

The operation aims to push Islamic State fighters back from the border and prevent Kurdish mili-tia fighters seizing ground in their wake. Turkey views the Kurdish militia as an extension of the PKK and fears that Kurdish gains there will fuel separatist sentiment on its own soil.

Turkey ousts 28 mayors over PKK, Gulen links

AP

BENGHAZI, LIBYA: Libyan forces loyal to a powerful general yesterday recaptured two key oil terminals from militias in a surprise attack, according to officials familiar with the operation.

They said forces led by Gen. Khalifa Hifter, who heads the Libyan National Army, took over the Ras Lanuf and Al Sidra terminals on Libya’s Mediterranean coast and were bat-tling militias at a third terminal, Al Zueitina.

The majority of Libya’s oil exports went through the three terminals before a militia known as Petroleum Facilities Guards seized them about two years ago.

The return of the oil terminals could help Libya recover from the turmoil that has gripped the country since the 2011 uprising that toppled and killed Muammar Gadhafi. The resumption of oil exports would also help address Libya’s severe cash crunch.

The officials said there were no casual-ties among the attacking forces and that the militiamen at the three facilities did not offer

much resistance.The attack took place on the eve of a major

Muslim holiday, Eid Al Adha, which begins today.

“Many of them (militiamen) abandoned their weapons to escape or turned them-selves in,” said Brig. Gen Ahmed Al Mosmary, a spokesman for Hifter’s forces. “We will con-tinue to move till we secure the whole area.” Hifter’s forces also moved against two areas in Benghazi that remain under militia con-trol. Al Mosmary said there was also little confrontation from the militiamen there, but that land mines were slowing down the advancing troops.

Hifter enjoys the support of several Arab nations, including Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, as well as European nations like France. He is allied with the par-liament based in eastern Libya, which refuses to recognize a newly-formed, UN-backed government.

Libya has been split between rival par-liaments and governments, each backed by a loose array of militias and tribes. Western nations view the UN-brokered government as the best hope for uniting the country.

Libyan troops recapture key oil terminals from militia

Turkish warplanes kill 20 IS terrorists

Even as world powers threw their support behind the agreement, scores were reported dead from a barrage of unidentified raids in two key northern cities in opposition-held territory.

Search and rescue team members inspect the debris of buildings after Syrian army carried out air strikes in Salihiya district of Aleppo, yesterday.

US envoy outraged over South Sudan harassmentJUBA: The US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, says she is “outraged” that South Sudan’s government has harassed civil rights activists who met with a UN Security Council delegation during a visit to the young nation.

Power said in a statement issued Saturday that the dele-gation observed “chilling” living conditions for civilians trapped in the ongoing conflict between the government and rebel forces. She says the South Sudanese government should elevate, not suppress, the voices of activists “who organize peacefully and pro-vide constructive criticism.”

She says the Security Coun-cil is “engaging directly with the government of South Sudan to underscore that intimidation and threats toward civil society must cease immediately.”

Heads of organizations that met with the diplomats say they have been ordered to report to the government.

VIEWS08 MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

Americans yesterday commemorated the 15th anniversary of the September 11 attacks with a series of events. Prayers were held for the victims, the relatives spoke with tears about their loved ones, the media recounted the horror of the day and the

nation once again united against terror. Though 15 years have passed, the memories of September 11

are still fresh and poignant and would continue to be so. This was a terrorist attack that shook the world and upended the world’s confidence about fighting terror. As President Barack Obama rightly put it, “fifteen years may seem like a long time, but for the families who lost a piece of their heart that day, I imagine it can seem like just yesterday.”

On September 11, 2001, terrorists crashed four passenger jets into the Twin Towers in Manhattan, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people. More than 340 firefighters and 60 police were among the killed.

The attack changed the world for ever, leading directly to the US war in Afghanistan and indirectly to the invasion of Iraq. The world continues to battle terrorism which has been taking new forms in the age of social media. Afghanistan remains unstable, and huge swathes of Middle East are torn apart by conflict. Hundreds of thousands have lost their lives and millions have been displaced. Countries from Libya to Syria are on the verge of collapse.

In the twin towers’ place has risen the 104-storey 1 World Trade Center, which is called the Freedom Tower. It is the tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere at 541 meters. One highlight of this year’s anniversary was that the US government marked its

return to the WTC site on Friday, moving its New York City offices there.

It’s noteworthy that Obama has sent a message of peace and co-existence to Americans at a time when outrage and despair can lead people to evil thoughts and when the controversial Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is trying to conquer White House on an anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant campaign. “It is so important today that we reaffirm our character as a nation (...) Our diversity, our patchwork heritage, is not a weakness. It is still and always will be one of our greatest strengths. This is the America that was attacked that September morning. This is the America that we must remain true to” Obama said.

9/11 anniversary

Obama has sent a message of peace and co-existence to Americans at a time when outrage and despair at terrorist attacks are causing divisions.

Quote of the day

Our diversity, our patchwork heritage, is not a weakness. It is still and always will be one of our greatest strengths. It is so important today that we reaffirm our character as a nation

Barack ObamaUS President

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Saturday’s deal to renew a nationwide truce in Syria, open aid routes and establish a US-Rus-sian military partnership

may be the best hope yet to end the brutal five-year civil war. It is also full of potential pitfalls and leaves Moscow with far more power than Washington to determine if there can be lasting peace.

Careful to note the possibil-ity for failure, Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian For-eign Minister Sergey Lavrov were nevertheless upbeat as they announced the agreement after a marathon negotiating session in Geneva that culminated dozens of one-on-one conversations over the past several months. Spurred on by the violence that has enveloped the Syrian city of Aleppo — intense airstrikes were reported there Sat-urday — the two diplomats forged a pact they say departs from pre-vious unsuccessful attempts to halt the bloodshed. Yet the new blueprint appears to suffer from a fundamental imbalance com-mon to the earlier efforts.

If US-backed or other rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Al Assad break the cease-fire, Russia could threaten to respond militarily or allow his forces to retaliate. But if Assad breaks the cease-fire, the US has no clear enforcement stick.

Washington is unlikely to attack Syrian forces, given Presi-dent Barack Obama’s longstanding opposition to entering the war, even after Assad famously crossed Obama’s “red line” by using chem-ical weapons in 2013. Allowing the opposition to launch attacks would only risk reopening a fight that the rebels were losing to Assad’s Rus-sian-backed military.

As a result, the US strategy seems to rest almost entirely on Russia’s good faith. Moscow can punish Assad by withdrawing the military support that has shored up his position. But if Russia acquiesces to Syrian government violations or breaks the deal itself by hitting US-backed rebels, the only recourse the United States

may have is to abandon the cease-fire scheduled to start at sundown Monday and the military cooper-ation arrangement supposed to take effect seven days thereafter.

Suspicion that Moscow won’t live up to its word has fueled Pen-tagon skepticism of Kerry’s plan.Sustainability is another potential problem, given the Syrian opposi-tion’s rejection of any settlement that leaves Assad in power.

Kerry said the breakthrough could lead to an undefined political transition. He made no mention of Assad leaving power.

Instead, Kerry stressed the importance of Assad’s govern-ment living “up to its obligations and to work with us,” suggesting the Syrian leader could trans-form himself from international pariah to potential peace part-ner. After Lavrov said the Syrian government pledged to abide by the cease-fire, Kerry said Assad must be “prepared to live by these agreements, which is critical.”

For Washington, the fight-ing’s brutality and the Islamic State group’s rise now trump any larger gain it might have seen in Assad’s departure. “The suffering that we have witnessed in Syria over the course of more than five years now is really beyond inhu-mane,” Kerry told reporters early Saturday. “People have all seen the pictures — women, children tortured; barrel bombs, gas.”

To secure Russia’s coop-eration, the US hopes the new military partnership is enough of a carrot. For one, it gives Rus-sian President Vladimir Putin a potential “out” of the mili-tary intervention he launched in September 2015, without which Syrian government gains could evaporate. If calm emerges in a Syria that leaves Assad in power, Putin could legitimately claim victory, a pill the US would have to swallow for the sake of peace. But many mechanics of the cease-fire remain unexplained.

When the cease-fire begins Monday, Assad’s air force can still fly combat missions against IS and Syria’a Al Qaeda affiliate, the Nusra Front, for seven more days. That poses problems because various US-backed rebels inter-mingle with the Al Qaeda-linked militants, a symbiosis the US must break. A Syrian strike against Nusra can easily be perceived as one against the “moderate opposition,” confusion that has regularly undermined past truces.

After a week of compliance with the deal, Assad’s forces would then be restricted to fight-ing only IS. But even IS territory isn’t always clear. Its fighters, too, mix with other militants sharing the goal of defeating Assad.

Kerry said Assad’s air forces will be restricted to an “area that we have agreed on with very real specificity.” The map wasn’t shared publicly, even though Kerry said these restrictions are the “bedrock of this agreement.”

Enforcement in Aleppo, once Syria’s largest city, is especially dif-ficult. Both sides must withdraw from various arteries and commu-nities to allow aid to reach civilians and commercial activity to resume.

Yet much of Aleppo remains

under siege — Assad’s forces cap-tured several significant transit points in recent days — and intense airstrikes were reported on Satur-day just hours after the US-Russian agreement was reached. The Aleppo Media Center, an activist collective, said at least 45 people were killed while the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 30 people were killed in Aleppo province and another 39 were killed by airstrikes in neigh-boring Idlib province.

Alongside Russia, Assad has received critical military assistance from Iran and its Lebanon-based proxy group, Hezbollah. Although neither Kerry nor Lavrov mentioned them, their compliance will be needed, too. Iran and its allies often have proved a spoiler to Middle East peace efforts.

Underlying the entire proc-ess is US-Russian mistrust. Obama spoke of it a week ago after meet-ing Putin in China. Lavrov used the word Saturday. As an aside, Lavrov delivered a sharp indictment of what he labelled “arrogant” new US sanc-tions against Russia over the crisis in Ukraine. Nevertheless, he said, Russians “are not offended easily” and want to settle Syria’s conflict.

But some of Lavrov’s particu-lars didn’t quite match Kerry’s, a problem compounded by the lack of a publicly available, written doc-ument. While American officials highlighted the initial, weeklong phase of the truce, Lavrov said it starts with a two-day period and then requires a 48-hour extension.

He said the US-Russian arrange-ment that comes into force after a week still allows Syrian air forces to be “functional in other areas outside those that we have singled out for Russian-American military cooper-ation.” He didn’t outline those areas.

Syria deal offers hope but Russia is calling the shots

By Bradley Klapper and Matthew Lee

AP

US Secretary of State John Kerry (left) and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov shake hands at the conclusion of a joint press conference following their meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.

OPINION 09MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

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

As a Muslim in Congress, I believe US can beat Islamophobia

By Keith Ellison

The Washington Post

Fifteen years ago, the United States was attacked by terror-ists claiming to act in the name of Islam. America’s response? “United We Stand.” Yet now it

feels like Muslims face more hatred in 2016 than on September 11, 2001.

Back then, President George W Bush, no liberal, visited a mosque in Washing-ton, DC, just days later to show solidarity with Muslims, saying, “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.”

People came together in gratitude for those who risked everything rescu-ing others during the attacks, including Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a 23-year-old first responder who died saving lives in the World Trade Center. He was Mus-lim. So am I.

Before that day, America’s Muslim community wasn’t the focus of much political discussion. Now, Islam and Mus-lims are regular topics on talk shows and in headlines, often in a negative light.

The political landscape has changed dramatically for America’s Muslim com-munity — for better and worse. Increased Muslim visibility and engagement in the community are occurring at the same time as an increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes, and this is not a coincidence: A recent study by the Bridge Initiative found that anti-Muslim crimes have increased during this election season, with 2015 having the most anti-Muslim violence and vandalism of any year since 9/11.

Looking at the data, there is a clear uptick in anti-Muslim crime associated with the rise of Donald Trump. In fact, two Somali Muslim men were recently shot in my own city of Minneapolis because of their faith. For American Mus-lims, the period since 9/11 has represented both progress and peril — and many fear what may lie ahead.

On the good side, President Obama just nominated America’s first Mus-lim federal judge, Abid Qureshi. Ibtihaj Muhammad just won an Olympic bronze medal in fencing — hijab and all.

Seven Muslims addressed the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, including the electrifying presentation of Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan. Thirty-three-year-old Ilhan Omar, who lived in a Somali refugee camp from the ages of 8 to 12, is poised to be elected to the Minnesota state legislature on a decidedly pro-gressive platform. And today’s Muslim community is voting, running for office, opening businesses and starting health clinics like never before.

When I first came to Congress after 9/11, I certainly faced challenges: Glenn Beck asked me to prove I wasn’t work-ing with our nation’s enemies; Rep Virgil Goode, R-Va, warned his constit-uents that unless America supported his exclusive vision of immigration, there would be “many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Quran.” But I took these things in stride because I expected negative reactions from some people to the first Muslim congressman.

Now, I’m no longer sure those reac-tions are receding. Indeed, things are

still challenging for America’s Muslim community, as we face down lies and fear mongering about our faith — by the presidential nominee for the Republican Party, no less. Anti-Muslim hate speech used to be limited to the fringe. But over time, because of well-financed advo-cacy, these ugly views have crept into the mainstream.

People like Frank Gaffney and Pam Geller pushed anti-Muslim senti-ment during the incessant right-wing media coverage over the so-called “9/11 mosque” a proposed Islamic community center in lower Manhattan near the World Trade Center. It morphed into members of Congress advocating for McCarthy-like tactics for Muslims working in our government.

And it has culminated with a Repub-lican presidential nomination race that included Sen Ted Cruz appointing Gaff-ney to be one of his closest advisers, Ben Carson saying a Muslim should never become president, and the nomination of a man who said Muslims should not be allowed to enter our country. What used to be whispered through a dog whistle is now being screamed through a bullhorn.

Throughout all this, the Muslim com-munity has shown an incredible amount of poise and patriotism. So much so that

Daesh (known as the Islamic State by some) has put out a list of Muslim Amer-icans they want to kill because of their service to our country. I am one of them.

Daesh is right about one thing: American Muslims are serving their country. Muslims are working to make it better every day. After the killing of Michael Brown, I traveled to Fergu-son, Mo, to meet with members of the community.

During my visit, I went to the Salam Clinic, which is housed inside of a Chris-tian church. There, two Muslim doctors joined with the pastor to offer free health care to anyone who showed up that weekend.

While talking with the doctors, I was surprised to find out that Salam Clinic wasn’t just offering free care in response to the protests over Brown’s death. Salam Clinic has opened its doors every weekend since 2008 and still gives free care to hundreds of local residents. These doctors and pastor are true public servants.

Like millions of other Muslims in this country, I find peace and comfort in my faith. The Quran teaches us that “Allah enjoins justice, and the doing of good to others; and giving like kindred” (16:91). It inspires leaders such as Omar, the doctors at the Salam Clinic, and Olympic fencer

Muhammad, who ignore the hate and serve their communities.

It is also inspiring future gen-erations. During the Republican primary race, 12-year-old Yusuf Dayur responded to Carson saying that a Mus-lim should never be president. In his video, Yusuf said that he will become the first Muslim president. He also promised to reject all forms of hatred: “When I become president,” he said, “I will respect people of all faiths, all colors and all religions.” Go Yusuf!

The 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks should remind us of les-sons learned long ago: The best way to overcome darkness is with light. And despite so much negativity, peo-ple are responding. During Ramadan in June, many of my neighbors in the Twin Cities, most of whom were not Muslim, posted yard signs saying, “To our Muslim neighbors, blessed Ramadan.”

Let’s follow their example, and turn to each other, not on each other.

The writer represents Minnesota’s fifth congressional district and was the first Muslim elected to Congress. He is the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and serves on the Financial Serv-ices Committee.

The 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks should remind us of lessons learned long ago: The best way to overcome darkness is with light. And despite so much negativity, people are responding.

Muslims gather to pray on the east front of the Capitol in Washington, DC.

International community must calmly handle N KoreaThe Japan News

The threat of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and missiles has surely increased. The inter-

national community must unite to stave off reckless acts by the regime of Kim Jong Un.

North Korea conducted its fifth nuclear test on Friday, the anniver-sary of the nation’s founding. The country’s state media reported that Pyongyang “carried out a nuclear explosion test for the judgement of the power of a nuclear warhead.”

Only eight months have passed since January, when the country con-ducted its previous nuclear test. This is the first time it has conducted two nuclear tests in the same year. Kim’s regime has become more unpredict-able in its moves and waded further into dangerous waters.

The series of resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council clearly bans nuclear tests by North Korea. The latest test came just after the East Asia Summit issued a statement on Thursday expressing “grave concern”

over North Korea’s nuclear tests and ballistic missiles. Parties to the sum-mit include Japan, the United States, China, and members of the Associa-tion of Southeast Asian Nations.

Pyongyang’s act of forcing through a nuclear test is a blatant challenge to the international com-munity — which has urged it to abandon its nuclear programme — and totally unacceptable.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in a statement, “North Korea’s nuclear development constitutes a grave threat to Japan’s security and seri-ously undermines the peace and security of the region.” Such con-demnation is legitimate.

The latest nuclear test is esti-mated to be the North’s largest, based on the amount of energy released by the earthquake it caused.

A point that cannot go unnoticed is North Korea’s claim that it tested “the structure and specific features of movement of [a] nuclear warhead that has been standardised to be able to be mounted on strategic bal-listic rockets.” By making a specific reference to a “nuclear warhead,” Pyongyang apparently intended to

trumpet that its nuclear develop-ment has reached a higher level and is closer to being combat-ready.

Following a nuclear test in Janu-ary that it claimed was of a hydrogen bomb, North Korea has launched a total of 21 ballistic missiles in rapid succession. Defense Minister Tom-omi Inada said, “We can’t rule out the possibility that [North Korea] might have managed to miniaturise a nuclear warhead.” It would not be surprising if North Korea declared the deployment of a combat-ready nuclear missile and created a situa-tion that threatens Japan, the United States and South Korea.

At a congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea in May, Kim, the party’s chair-man, called North Korea a “responsible nuclear state.” By conducting nuclear tests and missile launches, his appar-ent aim is to make the international community recognise his country as a nuclear power and draw the United States into peace treaty negotiations.

There has recently been a series of defections by North Korean diplomats, including the deputy ambassador at its embassy in Brit-ain. It was also learned that a vice

premier was executed.Amid a continued sluggish econ-

omy, Kim Jong Un has maintained his regime by ruling the country through fear and repeated purges. Kim is likely using military “achieve-ments” to enhance national prestige and tighten his regime’s control.

The international community should not allow North Korea to make its self-centered possession of nuclear weapons a fait accompli. Japan, as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, should take concerted action with the United States to drastically toughen sanc-tions against Pyongyang.

In a telephone conference with Prime Minister Abe, US President Barack Obama emphasised the importance of trilateral cooperation, saying the United States will work closely with Japan and also cooper-ate with South Korea. Referring to the nuclear deterrence provided by the United States, Obama reportedly said the US commitment to safeguarding Japan’s security remains firm.

We hope Obama makes all-out efforts until the end of his term in January to strengthen sanctions

against Pyongyang and improve the deterrence.

Japan must urgently build a tight defense system by promoting joint cooperation between the Self-Defense Forces and US military, and expanding and improving the nation’s missile defense system.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye lambasted North Korea’s latest provocation, saying it con-firmed the erratic recklessness of the Kim regime’s adherence to the development of nuclear arms.

Park should decide to con-clude early the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) with Japan — a pending issue between the two countries — thereby advancing information-sharing with Japan and the United States. China also has an extremely important role to play.

The UN Security Council reso-lution adopted in March called for banning North Korea from export-ing coal and iron ore, except when those exports maintain people’s live-lihoods. The trade value between China and North Korea declined tem-porarily but turned upward in June.

Pyongyang’s act of forcing through a nuclear test is a blatant challenge to the international community — which has urged it to abandon its nuclear programme — and totally unacceptable.

ASIA / AFRICA / PHILIPPINES10 MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

N Korea calls sanctions push laughable

Reuters

TOKYO/SEOUL: North Korea said yesterday a push for further sanc-tions following its fifth and biggest nuclear test was “laughable”, and vowed to continue to strengthen its nuclear power.

The isolated state on Friday set off its most powerful nuclear explo-sion to date, saying it had mastered the ability to mount a warhead on a ballistic missile, ratcheting up a threat that its rivals and the United Nations have been powerless to contain.

A US special envoy met with Jap-anese officials yesterday and said later the United States may launch unilateral sanctions against North Korea, echoing comments by US President Barack Obama on Friday in the wake of the test.

“The group of Obama’s running around and talking about meaning-less sanctions until today is highly laughable, when their ‘strategic patience’ policy is completely worn out and they are close to packing up to move out,” state-run KCNA news agency cited a North Korean Foreign ministry spokesman as saying in a statement later yesterday.

“As we’ve made clear, measures to strengthen the national nuclear power in quality and quantity will continue to protect our dignity and right to live from augmented threats of nuclear war from the United States,” KCNA added.

Earlier, the South’s Yonhap news agency reported South Korea’s mil-itary had a plan to use its missiles to “decimate” areas of Pyongyang if there were signs the North was about to launch a nuclear attack, quoting a source in the military.

The South’s Defence Ministry could not immediately confirm the report, but the military has vowed to take strong actions to retaliate in the event of an attack by the North.

The North has yet to demonstrate that it had deployed nuclear-capable missiles, despite claims to have mas-tered the technology to miniaturise a nuclear warhead to mount it on bal-listic missiles.

The UN Security Council denounced North Korea’s decision to carry out the test and said it would begin work immediately on a reso-lution. The United States, Britain and France pushed for the 15-mem-ber body to impose new sanctions. Obama said after speaking by tele-phone with South Korean President Park Geun-hye and with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Friday that they had agreed to work with the Security Council and other powers to vigorously enforce existing measures and to take “additional significant steps, including new sanctions”.

“We will be working very closely in the Security Council and beyond

to come up with the strongest pos-sible measure against North Korea’s latest actions,” said US envoy Sung Kim yesterday.

“In addition to action in the Secu-rity Council, both the US and Japan, together with the Republic of Korea, will be looking at unilateral meas-ures, as well as bilateral measures, as well as possible trilateral coop-eration,” he said, referring to South Korea by its official name.

South Korea’s top nuclear envoy also spoke to his Chinese counter-part late on Saturday by telephone and emphasised the need for fresh countermeasures including a new UN security council resolution during

their call, the South Korean foreign ministry said in a statement.

South Korea said on Satur-day that the latest test showed North Korea’s nuclear capability was expanding fast and that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was unwilling to alter course.

Another KCNA report yesterday said North Koreans were “delighted” by the nuclear test.

“The enemies can no longer deny the strategic position of our coun-try as a nuclear weapons state,” Jong Won Sop, a teacher at the University of National Economy, was quoted as saying.

Demand for nuclear statusNorth Korea yesterday restated

its demand for recognition as a “legit-imate” nuclear-armed state.

The North also vowed to increase its nuclear strike force “in quality and in quantity”, two days after its fifth test in a decade sparked international condemnation and moves for tougher UN sanctions.

In Japan, a visiting senior US envoy said Washington and Tokyo were seeking “the strongest possi-ble” measures in response.

North Korea insists that its mis-sile and nuclear tests are necessary to counter what it says is a US nuclear threat to its independence.

A statement yesterday from a foreign ministry spokesman in Pyongyang mocked President Barack Obama’s “totally bankrupt” policy on the country.

“Obama is trying hard to deny the DPRK’s (North Korea’s) strategic posi-tion as a legitimate nuclear weapons state but it is as foolish an act as try-ing to eclipse the sun with a palm,” said the statement quoted by the offi-cial KCNA news agency.

Friday’s test came only eight months after the previous one and was almost twice as powerful.

A North Korean soldier mans a guard post near the North Korean town of Sinuiju, opposite the Chinese border city of Dandong, yesterday.

Pyongyang demands legitimate nuclear-armed state status.

Militant suspect

in Bangladesh

cafe attack killed

himself: Police

Reuters

DHAKA: A suspected militant believed by Bangladesh police to have been among the planners of a July cafe attack that killed 22 peo-ple killed himself during a police raid on a hideout in the capital, police said yesterday.

The July attack in Dhaka’s dip-lomatic quarter was claimed by the jihadist group Islamic State and was one of the most brazen in Bangladesh, hit by a spate of killings of liberals and members of religious minorities in the past year.

The government has pinned the blame on domestic militant groups, but security experts say the scale and sophistica-tion of the incident suggest links to a trans-national Islamist network.

National police chief Shahidul Hoque said the dead man, Sham-shed Hossain, was suspected to be one of the planners of the cafe attack, and to have rented a flat for the militants who carried it out.

“He killed himself inside the flat so that we can’t collect information from him through interrogation,” another official, Sanwar Hossain, told reporters yesterday.

An autopsy report confirmed that the militant committed sui-cide by slitting his throat, doctors said yesterday.

Police had earlier said they shot the man during Saturday’s raid on the hideout.

Three women who were wounded and arrested in the raid also tried to kill themselves, Hos-sain added.

Five officers from the police counter-terrorism unit were wounded when women militants attacked them with chilli powder, explosives and knives, police have said.

One of the women could have been the wife of a man killed last week in a shootout with police and believed to have trained the cafe attackers, police said.

Police have killed more than two dozen suspected militants in shootouts since the July attack.

The United States believes elements of Islamic State are “connected” to operatives in Bangladesh, US Secretary of State John Kerry said during a visit to Dhaka last month.

Robed women attack police station in MombasaReuters

MOMBASA, KENYA: Three robed women tricked their way into a Mombasa police sta-tion where they stabbed one officer and set fire to the building with a petrol bomb before being shot dead, an officer and a witness said yesterday.

The city of Mombasa, with a large Muslim population on the coast of Kenya, has been targeted by Islamist militants in recent years although the frequency of attacks has subsided.

Under the pretext of reporting a stolen

phone, the women walked into the police sta-tion on Saturday morning, a knife and petrol bomb concealed in their traditional Buibui robes. “While being questioned by officers, one drew a knife and the other threw a petrol bomb at the police officers,” Patterson Maelo, Mom-basa County Police Commander, told reporters at the scene.

“The station caught fire. Police shot the three and killed them. Two officers are in hospital with wounds. Presumably it is a ter-ror attack.”

Two bullet-proof jackets and an unused petrol bomb were recovered from the dead suspects, Coast regional commander Nelson

Marwa told reporters.“We already have crucial leads that will

help in investigation,” he said.Two separate police sources who asked not

to be named said a woman who had housed the suspects the night before the attack had been arrested. Salma Mohamed, a witness who was at the station to see a relative in custody, said one attacker had jumped onto a coun-ter and stabbed an officer in the thigh before being shot.

Police did not say which group the suspects were linked to but Mohamed said the women pledged allegiance to Al Shabaab.

“They shouted saying they were Al Shabaab

and recited the Arabic slogan ‘Allahu Akbar’ even as police fired at them. They did not run. They shouted until bullets fell them down,” she told reporters.

Somalia’s Al Qaeda-linked Al Shabaab has taken responsibility for attacks in Mombasa and other parts of Kenya, saying it was in retalia-tion for the East African country sending its troops to Somalia.

Al Shabaab was behind an attack on Nai-robi’s Westgate shopping mall that killed 67 people and a raid on Garissa university in the northeast that killed 148. The militants also launched several attacks in 2014 that left more than 100 dead in Lamu County region.

Philippines’ crime war a success: GovtAFP

MANILA: The bloody crime war that has claimed nearly 3,000 lives in the Philippines in just two months was dubbed a “success” yesterday by a spokesman for controversial President Rodrigo Duterte.

Martin Andanar insisted many of those slain have been killed in “gang wars” and not by shadowy vigilantes encouraged by the president, as critics have alleged.

Duterte, who took office in June after winning election on a promise to kill tens of thousands of criminals, has vowed to press his campaign, despite growing international criticism.

“The police operations are a success. But there have also been gang wars or internecine (conflicts) where they eliminate each other,” Andanar told reporters.

He said such killings were under investigation by the police.Andanar was reacting to police reports showing that more than

41 people were being killed each day under the Duterte adminis-tration’s anti-crime campaign.

By the end of last week, at least 1,466 people have been killed by police in anti-drug operations since Duterte took office, police spokesman Senior Superintendent Dionardo Carlos said.

Another 1,490 are classified as “deaths under investigation” referring to people murdered in suspicious circumstances, many of them shot by suspected vigilantes or found dead with crude signs labelling them drug-pushers or criminals.

The government has insisted that those killed by police died because they resisted arrest.

However human rights groups charge that Duterte has been actively encouraging extra-judicial killings, telling police that he will protect them from punishment while urging civilians to kill drug pushers in their community.

United Nations officials, human rights groups, local Catholic church leaders and some legislators have criticised Duterte’s harsh campaign, saying it is eroding rule of the law in the Philippines.

Duterte has fallen out of favour with many world leaders for his acerbic campaign, which has been criticised internationally for fail-ing to respect human rights. However, Duterte is undeterred and there is no let up in the campaign against drug traffickers.

Three Malaysians kidnapped from boat

China vessels sail near disputed islands

Tanzania quake toll increases to 14

AFP

KUALA LUMPUR: Three crew members on a Malaysian fishing trawler have been kidnapped in waters where militants from the Abu Sayyaf group have previously taken hostages, a security official said yesterday.

The incident is believed to have occurred late Saturday off Pom Pom

Island, a popular scuba diving loca-tion in the eastern state of Sabah.

“The boat is Malaysian reg-istered,” Wan Abdul Bari Abdul Khalid, head of Malaysia’s Eastern Sabah Security Command, told AFP, without providing further details.

Authorities did not directly link the kidnapping to the Abu Sayyaf but Deputy Prime Minister Zahid Hamidi said a “kidnap-for-ransom” group was responsible.

AFP

TOKYO: Four Chinese vessels sailed into territorial waters around dis-puted islands in the East China Sea, Japan said yesterday, as Tokyo attempts to engage with Beijing to press North Korea over its latest nuclear test.

The four coastguard vessels sailed into waters surrounding the

islands, administered as Senkaku by Japan and claimed as Diaoyu by China, at around 10:30am (0130 GMT) and left about 90 minutes later, the Japan Coast Guard said.

The two countries are locked in a long-running dispute over the uninhabited islets. China regards them as its own, rejecting the view it violates Japan’s territorial waters.

The latest incident comes at a tense time for the region.

AFP

DAR ES SALAAM: A 5.7-magnitude earthquake that struck northwest Tanzania, close to Lake Victoria and the borders of Uganda and Rwanda, has killed at least 14 people and injured 200, local authorities said yesterday.

As rescuers scrambled to find survivors from the Saturday quake in the worst-hit town Bukoba, pre-mier Kassim Majaliwa headed there to attend a mourning ceremony at its stadium. President John Magu-fuli, who is from the region, said he was “deeply saddened.” The previ-ous toll from local authorities was 13 dead and 203 injured.

Family members and friends follow hearses carrying the bodies of Melvin and Meriam Odicta during their funeral in Iloilo City in the central Philippines yesterday. Odicta, a businessman accused of being a drug trafficker known as ‘Dragon’, and his wife were shot dead on August 29, at Aklan port in the central Philippines after getting off a ferry.

A Pakistani bus conductor hauls a motorbike onto a bus as people travel home to celebrate Eid Al Adha in Lahore yesterday.

Motorbike rides a bus

A trader shows his camel’s teeth at a livestock market set up for Eid Al Adha in Hyderabad.

Dental display

ASIA / PAKISTAN 11MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

Food crisis hits those returning to tribal areas

Internews

PESHAWAR: The displaced peo-ple, who have returned to their once militant-infested native lands in Fata, are vulnerable to food inse-curity as majority of them own agricultural land with low produc-tivity, says a study jointly conducted by UN agencies and other relief organisations.

These organisations have raised concern about the state of livelihood and food security saying around 60 percent of households own agricul-tural land and 86 per cent of them have reported cultivating it.

“However, productivity is very low with annual produc-tion sufficient for only 3.5 months on average,” said the report titled ‘Returning home: Livelihoods and food security of Fata returnees.’

The survey was jointly con-ducted by the UN World Food Programme, Food and Agriculture Organisation, International Rescue Committee and Food Security Clus-ter with the coordination of the Civil Secretariat Fata.

“The returnee populations are vulnerable to food insecurity. Over-all, 28 percent of the households have acceptable food consumption,

18 percent have poor consumption, while 54 percent have borderline consumption and 44 percent of households suffer from a caloric consumption deficit, considering a minimum daily requirement of 2,100 Kcal per person,” said the report.

Despite the significant length of time that many surveyed fam-ilies had spent back in their areas of origin after returning, the study revealed a high level of concern for the general state of livelihood and food security among these households.

The field surveys included inter-views with 1,931 households, 39 key informants, 78 traders, and focus group discussions in 35 previously returned communities.

On average, surveyed families had lived in displacement for 1.7 years and had lived in homes where they were during this survey for an average of three years after their return from displacement.

The survey found that the worst food insecurity among the six agen-cies was found in Kurram and Khyber agencies with larger num-bers of recent returnees who had arrived on average 1.1 and 1.6 years ago, respectively.

The bodies recommended that returnees in Kurram and Khyber agencies required more immedi-ate assistance to improve their food security, followed by South Waziris-tan and Orakzai.

Long term development programmes would be more appro-priate for returnees in Bajaur and Mohmand.

Pakistan to set up 46 hospitals across countryInternews

ISLAMABAD: The government of Pakistan led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has decided to set up 46 hospitals across the country after facing criticism from political oppo-nents for giving priority to metro buses and motorways over health and education.

The federal government, on the directives of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, had written letters to chief secretaries of the four provinces, Islamabad Capital Territory Admin-istration, AJK and Gilgit-Baltistan administrations to allocate land for proposed hospitals.

All 46 hospitals would be fully funded by the federal government and designed by international con-sultants having state-of-the-art facilities with prime minister’s direc-tives to complete these before the end of the present government’s tenure.

The prime minster stated, “We are simultaneously targeting pov-erty and diseases in the country as poverty and diseases make deadly combination in any household.”

The proposed cities in Punjab for 500-bed hospitals are Rajan-pur, Jhang, Bhakkar, Sadiqabad and Rawalpindi, while 250-bed hospitals would be constructed in Burewala, Ahmedpur East, KotAddu, Taunsa, Sahiwal, Sargodha, Pasroor and

Layyah. In Sindh, 500-bed hos-pitals are planned in Jacobabad, Mirpurkhas and Badin and 250-bed hospitals in Islamkot, NaushahroF-eroze and Meher districts.

In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 500-bed hospitals would be constructed in Haripur and Charsadda and 250-bed hospitals in Batgram, Hangu and Chitral. A 250-bed hospital will also be set up in the Federally Adminis-tered Tribal Areas.

Besides, 100-bed hospitals would be constructed in GarhiHabibullah and Kaghan.

In Balochistan, 100-bed hospi-tals would be established in Hub, Nushki, Chaman and Punjgur, 250-bed in Khuzdar, Loralai and Sibi and

a 500-bed hospital in Quetta.Furthermore, 250-bed hospi-

tals would be established in Skardu and Gilgit; 100-bed in Karimabad (Hunza) and a 50-bed hospital in Ghanche, Gilgit-Baltistan.

In AJK, 250-bed hospitals would be constructed in Muzaffarabad, 100-bed in Rawlakot, Kotli and Athmuqam and a 50-bed hospital in Leepa. Three hospitals would be constructed in Islamabad.

These hospitals on completion would add to the already 13,400-bed hospital system across the country.

The hospitals would be run on best management model with min-imum control of the government and best service delivery.

43 criminals arrested through Hotel Eye Software in LahoreInternews

LAHORE: Lahore police have arrested 43 criminals from hotels of the city through recently installed ‘Hotel Eye Software’. This new sys-tem has been introduced to tighten the noose around the hardened criminals. It is stated to be the first information technology-oriented ini-tiative which has been introduced in hotels of Lahore to keep eye on the activities of the criminals, suspects and terrorists. Making the Hotel Eye

Software permanent feature of the security process, the police have linked nearly 500 hotels in the last two months with the crime data-base at its control room in the DIG Operations office. “We have pro-vided android phones to the hotels’ management and linked their compu-terised system to the police through the software in order to get details of all the visitors or guests,” Operations DIG Dr Haider Ashraf said.

He said the software was designed in collaboration with the Punjab Information Technol-ogy Board (PITB) in order to collect

details of every guest, including for-eigners, staying in hotels.

“During last two months, the police had arrested 43 criminals from hotels of the city by locating them through the software,” the DIG said.

He shared that through the project, entries of 194,000 guests were made in the hotels and guesthouses. Of them, 186,000 were the locals while others were foreigners. The sys-tem had traced 453 criminals at the hotels and guesthouses during the two months. He said the previous manual system of keeping record of the guests at the hotels was defective and faulty

and it was not humanly possible for police to collect particulars of every visitor since the volume of guests had been in thousands, he said.

Initially, Ashraf added, the police had linked nearly 500 hotels with the software programme. The hotel authorities had been made bound under the National Action Plan (NAP) to make entry of every visitor or guest in the newly-installed system.

Talking about the arrest of the criminals from hotels, Ashraf said as soon as the hotel management entered their particulars or details, the employees sitting in the control

room got alert about their notorious record and forwarded the cases to the section concerned.

After verification in a short time, police teams were dispatched to the hotels to arrest them. Through this innovative scheme in Lahore, he said, the city police busted two dacoits’ gangs. “The complaints have been surfacing that hardened criminals were using the hotels as shelter after committing crime,” Dr Ashraf said.

He added that many hotels were still not in the loop as their owners were not cooperating with the police but efforts were on to bring them to in the network.

Gunmen shoot

dead senior

polio official

Deadly virus concern over animal sacrifice Anatolia

KARACHI: The sacrifice of animals and sharing of their meat is a key ritual for Muslims in this week’s Eid Al Adha celebrations but for many in Pakistan this year, the threat of a deadly animal-borne virus has meant new arrangements.

At least eight people have been killed in the last two weeks by Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever (CCHF) and scores of oth-ers are being treated for it, making people wary about joining the rush at makeshift cattle farms that tra-ditionally spring up in Karachi — Pakistan’s most populous city.

“I am not going to buy the ani-mal. I don’t want to take risk,” said Ebad-ur-Rehman, one of the many Karachi residents who has sought other methods of making the sac-rifice instead of risking contact with the virus.

Most, including Ebad, have donated to charities to perform the sacrifice on their behalf while others, like Unas Aamir, simply decided they will not do the sacri-fice themselves.

“I would usually bring goats home a week before Eid, as my chil-dren enjoyed taking care of them.

This time, I will buy the animals on Eid day and take them directly to the butcher’s shop.” he said.

The government has issued warnings for citizens, and espe-cially butchers, to wear protective gloves before touching the sacri-ficial animals and for farms and slaughterhouses to be disinfected.

According to Dr Tariq Mahmood, a senior physician at Jinnah Medi-cal College Hospital Karachi, the virus is behind an infectious disease transferred by ticks to both domes-tic animals and humans. It is similar to other viral haemorrhagic fevers, including Dengue and Ebola, and can fatally cause uncontrolled bleeding.

“People are really scared this year because of the Congo virus threat,” said Ghulam Hussain, an animal seller at the country’s larg-est cattle market on the northern outskirts of Karachi.

“We used to have a huge rush of people here but this year, so far, we have 30 to 40 percent fewer visitors,” he said, accusing the gov-ernment of exaggerating the threat and causing unnecessary panic.

A financially-able Muslim sacri-fices a single sheep or goat or takes shares with others in sacrificing a larger animal, like a camel or cow, as an act of worship during the feast.

AFP

PESHAWAR: Gunmen on a motor-bike shot dead a senior member of the country’s polio eradication cam-paign in northwest Pakistan, police said yesterday, in the latest attack on immunisation teams by extremists.

Attempts to eradicate polio in Pakistan have been hit by militant attacks on inoculation teams that have claimed more than 100 lives since December 2012.

Doctor Zakaullah Khan, a seasoned member of Peshawar’s polio vaccination campaign near the country’s restive tribal belt, was killed late Saturday when gunmen on a motorbike opened fire near his house, a senior police official told AFP. Imtiaz Ahmad, a provincial spokesman for the immunisation campaign, also confirmed the killing.

A faction of the Pakistani Taliban, Jamaat ul Ahrar, on yes-terday claimed responsibility for the attack.

Islamist opposition to all forms of inoculation grew after the CIA organised a fake vacci-nation drive to help track down Al Qaeda’s former leader Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad.

UN study says Kurram agency most affected.

Clerics to be

inducted in

family planning

campaignInternews

ISLAMABAD: Population Wel-fare Department of Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province has decided to induct 250 clerics across the province for a mass awareness campaign on new-born and maternal health care and to sensitise the public about family planning. The summary of the induction of clerics has been sent to the chief minister for final approval, while the provincial finance department has released Rs10.76m for the purpose.

According to the summary sent to the Planning and Develop-ment Department, 250 ulemas will be inducted for all union councils across the province. The ulemas will run awareness campaign among the public about maternal, newborn and child health.

Population Welfare Depart-ment Secretary Fazal Nabi Khan said the scheme has been initiated to shatter the myths about the use of contraceptives and birth con-trol among the rural population.

As per the recent Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, the contraceptive prevalence rate in K-P is 38 per cent, which is sig-nificantly higher than the 31 per cent measured by the same sur-vey seven years ago.

But the rate is far behind the target of United Nations Millen-nium Development Goal of 55 per cent. Additionally, only one in five women is using modern methods such as sterilisation, birth control pills and injections, the survey suggests. The contraceptive preva-lence rate is higher in urban areas, and varies between districts. The unmet need for family planning has been estimated at 26 per cent down from 35 per cent in 2000.

Al Razi Teaching Hospital Peshawar Medical Officer Dr Far-yalMaqsood said there were myths associated with birth spacing by using various methods of contraceptives.

Four militants dead in clashes near Pakistan borderAP

TEHRAN: Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency says the Revolution-ary Guard has killed four Sunni militants along the eastern bor-der with Pakistan.

Yesterday’s report says the Guard clashed with a nine-mem-ber cell of the Jaish Al Adl militant group last week, killing four of them, including their leader. Last week, Guard forces wounded two militants in clashes near the border and con-fiscated weapons and ammunition.

Security forces often clash with drug traffickers in the area, which is along one of the main routes for bringing Afghan opium and her-oin to the Persian Gulf and Europe.

Shia-majority Iran has seen a rise in Sunni militancy in recent months, and in June authorities said they foiled one of the “big-gest terrorist plots” ever hatched on Iranian soil.

Residents watch as a Municipal Corporation of Delhi worker fumigates a locality to prevent mosquitos from breeding in New Delhi.

Fumigation drive

NEW DELHI: Prime Min-ister Narendra Modi yesterday paid tribute to the victims of the terror attacks on September 11, 2001 in the US.

“Two contrast-ing images come to the mind,” he tweeted, as on the same day in 1893 Swami Vivekanand deliv-ered his historic speech at the first Parliament of World’s Religions in Chicago.”

“The speech in Chi-cago demonstrated the strength of India’s rich culture and the power of universal brotherhood and harmony,” he said in another tweet.

People gave me

mandate: Nitish

PATNA: Bihar’s Chief Minister Nitish Kumar yesterday countered former Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) MP and crim-inal-turned-politician Shahabuddin’s swipe at him, saying peo-ple of Bihar have given the mandate to him and asked media “not to waste time and space by giving mileage to such people”.

Shahabuddin had said on Saturday, “My leader was Lalu Prasad and is Lalu Prasad and will be Lalu Prasad. Nitish Kumar changes his stance according to the situation. He is not my leader.”

No ‘controversial

deal’ with India

KATHMANDU: Nepal’s Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ yesterday said “no con-troversial agreement” will be signed during his four-day state visit this week.

“No agreement against national inter-est will be signed,” he said at the International Relations and Labour Committee of the Legis-lature. The visit is being undertaken by the Prime Minister of Nepal not Pushpa Kamal or Prach-anda. So, such things cannot be thought of even.” But he said he would be reviewing and implementing old agreements.

Black flags

shown to Rahul

AZAMGARH: Protest-ers demanding a judicial probe in the 2008 Batla House gunfight in Delhi showed black flags to Congress Vice-Presi-dent Rahul Gandhi as he passed through the district on his Kisan Mahayatra through Uttar Pradesh.

A group of men belonging to the Ulema Council waved black flags near Sindhari turn yes-terday when Gandhi’s entourage was passing.

In the gunfight on September 19, 2008 in Batla House area of Jamia Nagar in south Delhi, sus-pected Indian Mujahideen terrorists, Atif Amin and Mohamed Sajid, and Delhi Police Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma were killed and suspects Saif and Zeeshan arrested. The yatra is suspended for today and tomorrow owing to Eid Al-Adha.

Modi pays tribute

to 9/11 terror

attack victims

INDIA12 MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

IANS

JAMMU: Three militants and a policeman were killed in a day-long gunfight yesterday between security forces and guerrillas in Jammu and Kashmir’s Poonch district, while four were killed in Kupwara as the army foiled an infiltration bid, police said.

The militants in Poonch were killed when in the evening, army commandos stormed a under-con-struction mini-secretariat building in the town from where militants were firing.

A policeman was killed while a sub-inspector and a civilian were injured in firing exchanges in the morning.

“Army commandos launched the final assault against the holed up mil-itants in evening,” said a senior police official, adding militants started firing from the building near the headquarters of Brigade in Poonch after which all escape routes for the rebels were sealed.

In Kupwara, a gunfight broke out in Nowgam sector of the Line of

Control (LoC) as soldiers detected and challenged a group of infiltrat-ing militants. The engagement ended with four killed.

In Bandipora, another gunfight started in the morning near the LoC in Gurez sector. Militants attempted to infiltrate into the Indian side of the LoC from Pakistan, but timely action by the army forced them to withdraw.

Meanwhile, Eid Al-Adha is going to be a highly subdued event in Kash-mir this year.

The only visible sign of Kashmiris preparing for the festival that falls tomorrow is the buying of sacrificial animals at some places in Srinagar and other parts of the valley. There was no other indication yesterday that the festival is two days away.

The traditional animal bazaars bustling with sellers and buyers that generally mark the festival eve, or the long queues of locals waiting for bakery, mutton, poultry, hosiery, or children thronging markets for fire-crackers were nowhere to be seen.

Markets are closed, pedestrian malls deserted and there is an eerie silence that indicates the locals are in no mood to celebrate.

Except for police and paramil-itary forces dotting roads, markets and sensitive installations, Srinagar city was shut for the general public.

Authorities said no curfew or restrictions had been imposed in the valley but people decided to remain indoors fearing clashes between stone-pelting mobs and the secu-rity forces.

Some of the better known bak-ery outlets have not prepared the choice cookies, cakes and biscuits

that would lure buyers during Eid celebrations in the past.

Foreseeing few buyers, mutton sellers have not built up on stocks.

Separatists have appealed to locals to celebrate Eid with austerity as a mark of respect for the victims of unrest. They have also asked peo-ple to hold a protest march on Eid to the office of United Nations Mili-tary Observers Group in India and

Pakistan in Sonwar locality of Srina-gar city. “We have intelligence inputs that separatists are planning large-scale violence on Eid in Srinagar and elsewhere. Adequate arrangements have been made to scuttle the sepa-ratist designs,” a senior intelligence officer said.

Sources said authorities could suspend broadband Internet facil-ity on fixed landlines tomorrow to

check spread of rumours. All Inter-net facilities on mobile phones and other appliances and incoming call-ing facility on all prepaid mobile phones have remained suspended for 65 days.

Large prayer gatherings of peo-ple in Srinagar and other cities and towns at Eidgahs would also not be allowed to prevent post-prayer vio-lence on Eid, sources said.

IANS

NEW DELHI: In a major move to take up India’s campaign against ter-ror vis-a-vis IS activities and the role of neighbouring Pakistan in foment-ing trouble in Jammu and Kashmir, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh will visit Russia and the US this month.

As part of an exercise proposed by the government for reaching out overseas, Singh will also travel to Hungary.

Singh will be in the US for a week-long trip from September 26 to 27 for the Indo-US Homeland Security Dialogue with American counterpart Jeh Charles Johnson, official sources said yesterday.

His visit for Homeland Security Dialogue, a bilateral mechanism, is likely to see a push for greater col-laboration between New Delhi and Washington on security cooperation.

Last month Singh had said that “India and US were natural allies and could transform the world with trade and trust”.

To boost counter-terrorism

cooperation, India and the US on June 2 signed an agreement to facil-itate exchange of terrorist screening information.

Under the agreement, both sides have agreed to provide each other with access to terrorism screening information through designated con-tact points, subject to domestic laws and regulations.

India and the US face serious threats from terror outfits like the Islamic State, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and have been collaborating in the fight against glo-bal terror.

As part of a similar exercise, Singh will visit Russia for talks on issues related to Indo-Russia joint anti-terror cooperation.

He will visit Hungary at the end of the year as part of the Modi gov-ernment’s announcement that India will reach out to all nations across the globe to present New Delhi’s per-spective on issues likes terrorism, cyber security, economic growth and address issues concerning climate change and sustainable development.

Union Food Minister Ram Vilas Paswan is likely to visit Mauritius, sources said.

Seven militants and cop die in Kashmir clashes

IANS

NEW DELHI: The Spanish-made Talgo high-speed train completed its final Delhi-Mumbai trial run in less than 12 hours, the Railways Ministry said yesterday.

On the run, a senior railway official said: “The train left from New Delhi at 2.45pm and reached Mumbai in 11 hours 42 minutes — two minutes ahead of scheduled time.”

The trial was carried out at maximum speed of 150kmph, cov-ering 1,384km between the two metropolises.

Five trial runs had been car-ried out at 140kmph.

The Talgo coaches have the feature of natural tilting while travelling on curves which enable them to achieve about 20 percent higher speed compared to con-ventional coaches.

In a tweet, Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu congratulated the railways team and said: “A major achievement for our team. We are working on increasing speed, reducing travel time using inno-vative means.”

HUMSAFAR TRAINSThe ministry also announced

that Humsafar trains — a spe-cial-class service comprising AC three-tier coaches — will be launched next month. Their fares would be about 20 percent higher than those for normal mail and express trains.

Announcing some new trains in the rail budget for the current fiscal in February, Prabhu had introduced Humsafar.

“Humsafar would be fully air-conditioned third AC service with an optional service for meals,” he had said.

It is for inter-city overnight journey with many facilities not available in normal AC three-tier coaches, like close circuit TV, GPS-based passenger infor-mation systems, fire and smoke detection and suppression systems and mobile/laptop charging points with every berth.

Humsafar will also have improved aesthetics with new interior and exterior colour schemes presenting a futuristic look with the use of vinyl sheets similar to Maharaja Express coaches. Besides, it will also have integrated Braille displays.

Rajnath to visit US and Russia to highlight Pakistan’s role in terror

IANS

LUCKNOW: In a pioneering initia-tive, the Uttar Pradesh government has decided to constitute an infor-mation technology (IT) cadre of its own, officials said yesterday.

This is for the first time that any state government has initiated such a process, an official said.

A letter has been sent to princi-pal secretaries of all departments to “constitute cadres of IT experts for efficient and quick delivery of

government services through bet-ter implementation of e-governance schemes”.

Heads of the departments have also been asked to constitute a vir-tual IT cadre, nominate two IT expert officers of the rank of special sec-retary and joint secretary in all government departments.

Chief Secretary Deepak Singhal said. “Officials selected in the vir-tual IT cadre will be given incentive of 10 percent of their basic pay and grade pay”.

He said selected officials will also be supported by the Information

and Public Relations Department in publicity of government schemes on social media.

The Information Technology and Electronics Department has been nominated as nodal agency for constitution of virtual IT cadres and a committee headed by the Chief Secretary formed for monitoring the process.

An official said the idea was brainchild of Singhal who has also asked the heads of departments to ensure that special secretaries of this cadre, who will act as experts, will conceptualise and manage

e-governance initiatives in their departments, while the joint sec-retaries would be responsible for execution of e-governance schemes.

IT cadre officers will also have to ensure improvement in inter-nal proceedings, file movement, process re-engineering of service delivery and management of their departments.

The officers will also work for capacity development for success-ful implementation of e-governance initiatives along with monitoring of government policies, standards and orders.

Indian Kashmiri Muslims watch the body of Javed Ahmad Dar, 23, (not in the picture) being carried during his funeral procession in Wadwan area in Budgam district on the outskirts of Srinagar yesterday. Dar was hit by a bullet in his leg on August 5 during clashes with the security forces.

UP to create separate IT cadre in a first

IANS

BAGHAPURANA: Aiming to target a major vote bank in Punjab, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) yesterday prom-ised to make farmers debt-free by end of 2018 if the party was voted to power in assembly elections early next year.

AAP Convener and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, who released the Kisan (farmer) man-ifesto of his party in this town in Moga district, said the party will implement the Swaminathan Panel report on agriculture and ensure that no more farmers in the ‘Green Revolution’ state committed suicide.

Kejriwal was f lanked by AAP Punjab Convener, come-dian-turned-politician Gurpreet Ghuggi, and AAP MPs from Punjab,

Bhagwant Mann and Sadhu Singh.The Kisan manifesto promised

to pay a compensation of Rs20,000 per acre if their crop was dam-aged due to natural calamity. It also promised compensation for farm labourers and said property of farmers will not be confiscated or attached in default of payment of loans. In addition, the party prom-ised 12-hour free uninterrupted power supply to farmers.

Addressing a rally, Kejriwal said Punjab’s ruling Badal family and the Shiromani Akali Dal, which has been in power in the state in an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 2007, had ruined the farmers of the once progres-sive state.

He said Akali Dal leaders would be put behind bars and their prop-erties confiscated for indulging in large-scale corruption.

AAP vows to make Punjab farmers debt-free by 2018

Talgo completesDelhi-Mumbai trial run in less than 12 hours

Separatists call for protest march on Eid to the office of UN Military Observers Group in India and Pakistan, in Srinagar.

Cruise ship ‘Viking Freya’ is seen after a collision with a bridge at Main-Donau-Kanal in Erlangen, Germany, yesterday.

Close encounter

EUROPE 13MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

AFP

BARCELONA: Hundreds of thou-sands of Catalans took to the streets yesterday to demand their region break away from Spain, pressuring pro-independence leaders to unite and iron out differences over their secession plan.

Crowds waved red and yellow striped Catalan flags in Barcelona and four other cities under bright sunshine on the region’s national day, the “Diada”, which marks the con-quest of Barcelona by Spain’s King Philip V in 1714.

Police estimated that 800,000 people had taken part. Many wore white T-shirts with the slogan “Ready” in Catalan to stress how they believe the northwestern region of 7.5 million people is prepared to be its own country.

“This is the moment to stand united for the ‘yes’ to the Catalan Republic,” Jordi Sanchez, the head of the Catalan National Assembly, a pro-independence organisation which co-organised the protest, told the rally near the regional parliament.

“We are impatient,” he added. The run-up to the protest has coincided with a rift between separatist parties just as they target independence for the region in mid-2017.

In the coming months “criti-cal decisions” regarding Catalonia’s future will have to be taken, the head of the regional government of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, told a meeting with foreign journalists before the rallies.

Catalan separatists have tried in vain for years to win approval from Spain’s central government to hold an independence referendum like the one held in 2014 in Scotland in Britain which resulted in a “no” vote.

After winning a clear majority in Catalonia’s regional parliament for the first time ever last year, seces-sionist parties approved a plan to achieve independence in mid-2017.

But the plan ran into trouble in June when Puigdemont’s coalition government lost the support of the tiny anti-capitalist party CUP which

has the hardest line on independence. As a result it lost its clear majority in the assembly. The central government remains as fiercely opposed to Cata-lan independence as ever.

The pro-independence camp hopes Sunday’s mass protest will reu-nite and breathe new life into their campaign, which is moving along more slowly than many of its sup-porters would like.

“Politicians say we are close but we want to see it happen now,” said 60-year-old researcher Xavier Val-lve at the rally in Barcelona. Carmen Santos, a 58-year-old civil servant, said she hoped this “Diada would be the last before independence.” Rallies were also held in the southern city of Tarragona, Berga in the centre, Salt in the north and Lleida in the east.

Catalans have nurtured a sep-arate identity for centuries, but an independence movement surged recently as many became disil-lusioned with limitations on the autonomy they gained in the late 1970s after the Francisco Franco dictatorship, which had suppressed Catalan nationalism.

Since 2012, major demonstrations in favour of independence have been held in Catalonia every year on its national day on September 11.

Reuters

PARIS: French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said yesterday that there would be new attacks in France but proposals by former president Nicolas Sarkozy to boost security was not the right way to deal with threats.

The French capital was put on high alert last week when French officials said they dismantled a “ter-rorist cell” that planned to attack a Paris railway station under the direc-tion of Islamic State.

“This week at least two attacks were foiled,” Manuel Valls said in an interview with Europe 1 radio and Itele television on Sunday.

Valls said there were 15,000 people on the radar of police and

intelligent services who were in the process of being radicalised.

“There will be new attacks, there will be innocent victims...this is also my role to tell this truth to the French people,” Valls said. In an interview newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche (JDD), Sarkozy said France needed to get tough on militants by creating special courts and detention facili-ties to boost security.

“He is wrong about trying to wring the neck of the rule of law,” Valls said. Sarkozy proposed to sys-tematically place French citizens suspected of having militant links in special detention facilities.

“And don’t tell me it would be Guantanamo,” Sarkozy said in the interview. “In France, any admin-istrative confinement is subject to subsequent control by a judge.”

Meanwhile, anti-terror judges charged a woman over a failed jihad-ist attack near Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral, where a car full of gas canisters was found last weekend.

The mother of three, named as 29-year-old Ornella G, is one of several women detained in the past week on suspicion of planning new attacks in France, a country on high alert after a string of jihadist assaults in the past 18 months.

According to investigators, her fingerprints were found in the Peu-geot car that was abandoned last Sunday a few hundred metres from Notre Dame in an area thronging with tourists. The car contained five gas cylinders, three bottles of diesel and a lit cigarette.

Ornella G was remanded in custody after being charged with

association with a terrorist group and attempted murder by an organised group, prosecutors said.

Known to authorities for pre-viously planning to go to Syria, she was arrested in southern France on Tuesday with her boyfriend, who has since been released.

Three other women, named as 19-year-old Ines Madani, 23-year-old Sarah H. and Amel S., 39, were detained on Thursday before they could carry out an attack, investi-gators said.

The trio were looking at train stations in Paris and south of the capital as potential targets, as well as the police, according to sources close to the investigation. Madani, the daughter of the car’s owner, had allegedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.

People wave ‘Estaladas’ (pro-independence Catalan flags) as they gather at a pro-independence demonstration in Barcelona yesterday during the National Day of Catalonia ‘Diada’. The ‘Diada’ marks the date (September 11, 1714) when Barcelona fell to Spanish and French forces in the War of Succession, that redrew the map of Spain.

Thousands demand Catalan independence from Spain

15,000 people on police radar in France: PMReuters

LONDON: Britain’s interior minis-ter Amber Rudd said yesterday that she was looking at a work permits system to control migration from the European Union, responding to Brexit voters’ demand for tighter border controls.

Although formal negotiations on leaving the EU have yet to begin, Brit-ain is searching for a way to satisfy voters who backed leaving the EU because they wanted lower immigra-tion and an end to open borders with the bloc, whilst meeting the needs of an economy in which some sectors depend on foreign labour.

“Work permits certainly has value,” Rudd told the BBC, saying her department was examining immi-gration control systems and that no decisions had yet been made.

Britain currently has a visa sys-tem for non-EU nationals, but under EU rules citizens from within the 28-country bloc are free to live and work in Britain.

“What we’re going to look at is how we can get the best for the economy, driving the numbers down but protecting the people who really add value to the econ-omy,” Rudd said.

Earlier this month Prime Minister Theresa May rejected a “points-based” system to screen immigrants — something Brexit campaigners promised to imple-ment - stirring fears among some voters that her government was not taking a hard enough line on key issues like immigration.

But May has said the June 23 vote to leave the EU showed Brit-ons wanted to control the movement of people from the bloc. Rudd, a close ally of May, backed the gov-ernment’s long-standing target of bringing net annual migration into Britain, currently at 327,000, down below 100,000.

Migration controls are likely to form one of the most contentious negotiating points in talks with the EU on leaving the bloc, as Britain looks to tighten border controls without losing access the EU single market.

AFP

LONDON: British police arrested 55 people and seized blades at a Sikh temple yesterday, following a demonstration at the holy site believed to be protesting a mixed marriage.

Armed officers were deployed to the Gurdwara Temple in Leam-ington Spa, central England, at around 6:45am after a group of men entered the building. A total of 55 people were arrested for aggravated trespass in what police chief David Gardner described as “an escalation of a local dispute”.

“A significant number of bladed weapons were seized from the scene,” he added, stat-ing no-one was injured in the incident. A representative from the Gurdwara Temple was not immediately available to com-ment on the arrests.

Jatinder Singh Birdi, a former treasurer at the temple, told the BBC a marriage between a Sikh and a non-Sikh had been sched-uled to be performed. One eyewitness, Perry Phillips, con-firmed the dispute was over a “mixed marriage ceremony”.

“I could see at the entrance to the Gurdwara a lot of people were outside but it was peaceful, there was no shouting or anything.

“It seemed like a peaceful pro-test,” he told the Press Association, adding: “There’s a big Sikh com-munity in Leamington Spa and a lot of people were turning up.”

The Sikh 2 Inspire group said those arrested were carrying a kirpan, a ceremonial Sikh dag-ger, and criticised the response to the Gurdwara Temple incident.

AFP

ZAGREB: Croatia’s main conserva-tives and the centre-left opposition were in a tight race for seats in the parliament, an exit poll projected yesterday after voting ended in the country’s snap election.

A centre-left coalition led by the Social Democrats (SDP) of former prime minister Zoran Milanovic and the conservative HDZ party were forecast to win 58 and 57 seats respectively, according to the poll by Ipsos Puls for the Nova TV network.

This would give neither side an

absolute majority in the 151-seat parliament — meaning the polit-ical uncertainty could continue following the collapse of a con-servative government that lasted only five months.

The HDZ’s former junior gov-ernment partner, the Most party (meaning “Bridge” in Croatian), is likely to play kingmaker once again as it looks set to come third with 11 seats.

Some 3.8 million Croatians were eligible to cast ballots for the second time in a less than year, at a time of economic gloom in the EU’s newest member and strained ties between neighbours in the volatile Balkans.

AFP

MOSCOW: Russia is gearing up for parliamentary elections on Septem-ber 18, with parties loyal to President Vladimir Putin set to dominate despite the Kremlin making a show of cleaning up the vote after mass protests last time around.

The nationwide polls—which include the annexed Crimea penin-sula for the first time — come as Putin’s ratings still stand at more than 80 percent despite the country enduring the longest economic crisis

of his rule due to falling oil prices and sanctions over Ukraine.

While a new election chief has clamped down on corruption and more opposition candidates have been allowed to run, analysts say the authorities’ total grip looks certain to guarantee a smooth victory — likely setting the stage for Putin to cruise to a fourth term in power in 2018.

“Clearly, the Kremlin has little appetite for relaxing its wholesale control over Russia’s political sys-tem,” the Carnegie Moscow Centre think tank wrote. “At the same time, there is a desire to portray the elec-tions as largely fair to help the regime

to bolster its legitimacy among both elites and the broader body politic in the run-up to the 2018 presiden-tial election.”

The polls also include votes for some key regional leaders: most prominently in the North Cauca-sus republic of Chechnya where Kremlin-loyal strongman Ramzan Kadyrov is facing his first popular test to his decade-long rule. Rights groups in the region say there has been a harsh crackdown on dissent in the run up to the vote.

Looming large for the Kremlin in this round of parliamentary polls is the memory of mass protests that

followed the 2011 vote, which drew tens of thousands of Russians on to the streets after evidence of vote rig-ging emerged. The demonstrations represented the biggest challenge to Putin’s dominance since he took charge in 2000 and experts say the authorities are desperate not to give any pretext for a repeat.

Those fears were only height-ened by the 2014 ousting of Ukraine’s Kremlin-backed leader Viktor Yanu-kovych by huge protests in Kiev, sparking a crisis that has plunged Russia’s ties with the West to their lowest point since the Cold War.

“For authorities it is important to

preserve an air of decency,” Yekaterina Schulmann of the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Admin-istration told AFP, adding this would mean “the absence of high-profile scandals or scandalous news.”

In March, Putin replaced the scandal-tainted head of the elec-tion commission with former human rights ombudsman Ella Pamfilova in a clear bid to clean up its image.

At a recent commission meet-ing, Pamfilova insisted that in the five months she has been in charge officials have taken “a string of pre-ventive measures” against possible violations in the lead-up to the vote.

Police estimated that 800,000 people had taken part.

Britain eyeing work permits

to control EU immigration

Croatia rivals in tight poll race

Dozens arrested

and blades seized

at UK Sikh temple

Russia gears up for parliamentary elections on Sept 18

AMERICAS14 MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

Grief and memories on 15th anniversary of 9/11

AP

NEW YORK: The US marked the 15th anni-versary of 9/11 yesterday, with victims’ relatives reading their names and reflecting on a loss that still felt as immediate to them as it was indelible for the nation.

But despite a tradition of putting aside partisan politics for the day, the observance became part of the news of a combustible presidential campaign, when Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton left about 90 min-utes into the ground zero ceremony after feeling “overheated,” her campaign said.

The 15th anniversary arrives in a country caught up in the campaign, keenly focused on political, economic and social fissures and still fighting terrorism. But for those who lost relatives, the fraught passage of 15 years feels “like 15 seconds,” said Dorothy Esposito, who lost her son, Frankie.

Over 1,000 victims’ family members, sur-vivors and dignitaries were present at ground zero under an overcast sky.

“It doesn’t get easier. The grief never goes away. You don’t move forward — it always stays with you,” said Tom Acquaviva, who lost his son, Paul Acquaviva.

James Johnson was there for the first time since he last worked on the rescue and recov-ery efforts in early 2002, when he was a New York City police officer.

“I’ve got mixed emotions, but I’m still kind of

numb,” said Johnson, now a police chief in For-est City, Pennsylvania. “I think everyone needs closure, and this is my time to have closure.”

Nearly 3,000 people died when hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville on September 11, 2001. It was the deadliest ter-ror attack on American soil.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh John-son said yesterday news shows that the United States is safer now than it was in 2001 against another 9/11-style attack but continues to face the challenge of potential attacks by solo and

homegrown violent extremists.President Barack Obama, speaking at the

Pentagon memorial service, praised Ameri-ca’s diversity and urged Americans not to let their enemies divide them.

“Our patchwork heritage is not a weak-ness — it is still and always will be one of our greatest strengths,” Obama said. “This is the America that was attacked that September morning. This is the America that we must remain true to.”

Some victims’ relatives at ground zero pleaded for the nation to look past its

differences. “The things we think separate us really don’t. We’re all part of this one Earth in this vast universe,” said Granvilette Kesten-baum, who lost her astrophysicist husband, Howard Kestenbaum.

Others expressed hopes for peace or alluded to the presidential race: “Guide Amer-ica’s next commander in chief and help make America safe again,” said Nicholas Haros, who lost his mother, Frances Haros.

Neither Clinton nor Trump made public remarks at the ceremony, where politicians haven’t been invited to speak since 2011. The

two candidates also followed a custom of halting television ads for the day.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people gathered for a name-reading observance at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Penn-sylvania, where one of the hijacked planes crashed 15 years ago.

In New York, ceremony organisers included some additional music and read-ings yesterday to mark the milestone year. But they kept close to what are now tradi-tions: moments of silence and tolling bells, an apolitical atmosphere and the hourslong reading of the names of the dead.

Some speakers described how their loss had moved them to do something for others.

Ryan Van Riper said he planned to hon-our his slain grandmother, Barbara Shaw, by serving the country. Jerry D’Amadeo, who was 10 when he lost his father, Vincent Gerard D’Amadeo, said he worked this summer with children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where 26 children and adults were massacred in 2012.

“Sometimes the bad things in our lives put us on the path to where we should be going — to help others as many have helped me,” he said. Financial and other hurdles delayed the redevelopment of the Trade Center site early on, but now the 9/11 museum, three of four currently planned skyscrapers, an architec-turally adventuresome transportation hub and shopping concourse and other features stand at the site. A design for a long-stalled, $250m performing arts centre was unveiled Thursday.

The crowd has thinned somewhat at the anniversary ceremony in recent years. But some victims’ family members, like Cathy Cava, have attended all 15 years.

“I will keep coming as long as I am walk-ing and breathing,” Cava said, wearing a T-shirt with a photo of her slain sister, Grace Susca Galante.

Hillary: I’m feeling great; was overheated at 9/11 eventAP

NEW YORK: Hillary Clinton abruptly left a 9/11 anniversary ceremony yesterday after feel-ing “overheated,” according to her campaign. A video showed the Democratic presidential nominee slumping and being held up by three people as she was helped into a van.

Less than two months from Elec-tion Day, it was an unwanted visual for Clinton as she tries to project the strength and vigour needed for one of the world’s most demanding jobs. Republican rival Donald Trump has spent months questioning Clinton’s health, saying she doesn’t have the stamina to be president.

Clinton’s departure from the event was not witnessed by the reporters who travel with her campaign and aides provided no information about why she left or her whereabouts for nearly two hours. Spokesman Nick Merrill even-tually said Clinton had gone to her daughter’s nearby apartment, but refused to say whether the former

secretary of state had required med-ical attention.

Clinton exited the apartment on her own shortly before noon. She waved to reporters and said, “I’m feeling great. It’s a beautiful day in New York.”

The video of Clinton posted to social media shows her being held up by aides as a black van pulls up. She stumbles and appears to fall off the curb as she is helped to the vehicle.

After leaving her daughter’s, Clinton was driven to her home in Chappaqua, New York, and made no public appearances. She was scheduled to fly to California today morning for fundraising and it was unclear whether her schedule would change.

Trump, who attended the same event marking the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, was noticeably restrained. Asked by a reporter about Clinton’s health incident, Trump said, “I don’t know anything.”

The incident compounds an already difficult stretch for Clin-ton as the presidential race enters its final stretch. Despite Trump’s

numerous missteps, the race remains close and many Ameri-cans view Clinton as dishonest and untrustworthy.

On Friday, Clinton told donors that “half” of rival Donald Trump’s supporters are in a “bucket of deplorables” — a comment that drew sharp criticism from Republi-cans. Clinton later said she regretted applying that description to “half” of Trump’s backers, but stuck by her assertion that the GOP nominee has given a platform to “hateful views and voices.”

Now Clinton is sure to face new questions about whether she’s phys-ically fit for the presidency. Trump and his supporters have been hinting at potential health issues for months, questioning Clinton’s stamina when she takes routine days off the cam-paign trail and reviving questions about a concussion she sustained in December 2012 after fainting.

Her doctor attributed that episode to a stomach virus and dehydration.

Clinton’s doctor reported she is fully recovered from the concussion.

Democratic presidental nominee Hillary Clinton waves as she leaves the home of her daughter Chelsea Clinton yesterday in New York City.

Funds keep pouring in for Clinton AP

WASHINGTON: Hillary Clinton could spend $2.2m every day until the November 8 election without running out. And every month she widens her cash advantage over Donald Trump. As of September 1, it was a $55m gulf.

Yet the Democratic nominee is not letting up on gas when it comes to fundraising.

Clinton is scheduled to return to California today for still more finance events after a lucrative August swing through dot-com mansions in Silicon Valley and celeb-rity-packed dinners in Los Angeles. It wasn’t clear if she’d keep to that schedule after falling ill yesterday while attending the 9/11 memorial event in New York.

Her allies say the continued fundraising helps other Democrats because the party can keep build-ing up voter turnout operations. It also serves as protection in a rollick-ing race against a man who claims to be worth $10bn and once said he was willing to spend up to $1bn to get

elected. So far, he’s put about $60m of his own money in his campaign.

Even when Clinton is busy cam-paigning, wallets are still flying open for her.

As she wrapped up a speech in Kansas City on Thursday night, run-ning mate Tim Kaine was in New York entertaining five donors who’d given $500,000. A day later, Clinton was in the city telling donors, “I’m all that stands between you and the apocalypse” at a private concert headlined by Barbra Streisand.

The singer’s rendition of “Send in the Clowns” tore into Trump. “Is he that rich? Maybe he’s poor? ‘Til he reveals his returns, who can be sure?” Streisand sang. “Who needs this clown?”

Clinton scooped up more than $4m there, and that wasn’t her only fundraiser of the day. Hours earlier, she held a far more exclusive one at the home of private equity firm exec-utive Hamilton “Tony” James. The 30 people at his home together chipped in at least $1.5m.

Much of the money Clinton is raising goes into efforts to find and persuade voters to back her can-didacy, and get the ones who do to

show up at the polls or cast their bal-lots early where they can. It’s a costly endeavour.

Her campaign has a staff of about 700, with a monthly payroll of almost $5m. She is spending roughly $10m each week on television ads, according to Kantar Media’s political ad tracker. She also just began leas-ing a Boeing 737, dubbed “Hill Force One,” to travel to the most compet-itive states.

“If you think of an election as a conversation with voters, you have to keep having it all the way through, and that takes significant resources,” said Amy Dacey, a Democratic con-sultant and former chief executive officer of the Democratic National Committee. “It’s smart to continue to raise until the end.”

Four years ago, President Barack Obama raised more than $1bn for his re-election, a number that Clinton’s national finance chairman Dennis Cheng has cited as a goal.

She’s getting close. By the end of August, Clinton had raised about $600m for her campaign and allied Democratic groups, an Associated Press review of campaign finance records found.

Dancing a novel way of protest in ChileAP

SANTIAGO, CHILE: Violeta Zuniga gets around with a cane because of her knee problems, but nothing can keep the 83-year-old from perform-ing Chile’s national dance to protest her partner’s disappearance during the country’s military dictatorship.

The cueca dance is performed by couples during Chile’s national holidays, a source of celebration and pride for many in the South Ameri-can country. But Zuniga has danced alone for nearly 40 years to mourn and protest the forced disappear-ance of her partner, Pedro Silva Bustos, during Gen Augusto Pino-chet’s 1973-1990 rule.

Zuniga is among the women British pop singer Sting told of in his 1987 protest song, “They Dance Alone.”

“Why are there women here dancing on their own?” Sting asked in the song. “Why is there this sad-ness in their eyes?”

Sting invited Zuniga and other women from her group to dance on stage during an Amnesty Interna-tional concert in Argentina in 1988. They also performed with singers Peter Gabriel and Sinead O’Connor before more than 70,000 people in Chile’s National Stadium in 1990.

Zuniga was to dance alone to the cueca yesterday, the 43rd anni-versary of the September 11, 1973 bloody coup that brought Pinochet to power. She’ll wear a picture of her partner around her neck and wave a white handkerchief embroidered with one word: “Justice.”

“You never want to give up the search,” Zuniga said of Silva Bus-tos, a mason and Communist Party member who was disappeared in 1976.

In all, 40,018 people were killed, tortured or imprisoned for political reasons. The government estimates that 3,095 were killed during Pin-ochet’s dictatorship, including about 1,200 who were forcibly disappeared.

A young girl holds her mother during a commemoration ceremony for the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, yesterday in New York City. RIGHT: A New York City firefighter looks over the south memorial pool.

Diversity is not our weakness, says President Barack Obama.

Canada may

grant easier

residency for

foreign workersReuters

TORONTO: Canada may make it easier for temporary foreign workers to get permanent resi-dency and eventual citizenship, Immigration Minister John McCa-llum said yesterday.

Speaking on CTV television’s “Question Period,” a national pol-itics talk show, McCallum did not give details, saying he was wait-ing for a parliamentary report on the matter to be introduced in September.

Canada’s Liberal government has said it is revamping the pro-gramme, which brings in workers who are often in low-skilled posi-tions. Local unions have criticised it for depressing wages and affect-ing Canadian jobs, and workers and advocacy groups have com-plained of poor conditions and rights violations.

The workers already have paths to permanent residency that have been criticised as too difficult.

When asked whether Canada will consider loosening the rules, McCallum said the government “is certainly considering providing a pathway to permanent residence” to the workers.

“We think that those who come, in general, should have a pathway to permanent residence more so than is the case today,” he said. “If they’re on a pathway to permanent residence, they’re only temporary for a while, and then they become full Canadians.”

Canada in June watered down measures to limit the number of low-wage temporary foreign workers that firms can hire after complaints the restrictions would cause major labour shortages.

Tropical storm Orlene forms off Mexico

AP

MIAMI: Tropical storm Orlene has emerged in the Pacific Ocean hun-dreds of miles southwest of Mexico. The National Hurricane Center in Miami says Orlene emerged from a tropical depression early yester-day and is centered about 1,100km southwest of the southern tip of Baja California.

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Members of the British Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team, the Red Arrows, perform at the Great North Run half-marathon in South Shields, north-east England, yesterday.

Members of the public watch as enthusiasts provide a display of steam ploughing on the final day of the 63rd World Ploughing Contest at Crockley Hill, near York, northern England, yesterday. The World Ploughing Contest comprises of competitors from 29 countries, from as far afield as the USA, Kenya, Australia and New Zealand each vying for the title of World Champion in either the Conventional or Reversible class of plough.

Red Arrows in action

Steam ploughing

IANS

NEW YORK: Food, once dropped on the floor, is not safe to eat, however quickly you pick it up, warns a new study that debunks the widely accepted notion that it is all right to scoop up food and eat it within a “safe” five-second window.

Moisture, type of surface and contact-time all contribute to cross-contamination. In some instances, the transfer begins in less than one second, the study said.

“The popular notion of the ‘five-sec-ond rule’ is that food dropped on the floor, but picked up quickly, is safe to eat because bacteria need time to transfer,” said Donald Schaffner, Professor at the Rutgers Univer-sity at New Jersey, in the US. “We decided to look into this because the practice is so widespread. The topic might appear ‘light’ but we wanted our results backed by solid science,” Schaffner noted.

The researchers tested four surfaces — stainless steel, ceramic tile, wood and carpet — and four different foods — water-melon, bread, bread and butter, and gummy candy. They also looked at four different contact times — less than one second, five, 30 and 300 seconds. They used two media — tryptic soy broth or peptone buffer — to grow Enterobacter aerogenes, a nonpath-ogenic “cousin” of Salmonella naturally occurring in the human digestive system. Transfer scenarios were evaluated for each surface type, food type, contact time and bacterial prep; surfaces were inoculated with bacteria and allowed to completely dry before food samples were dropped and left to remain for specified periods.

All totalled 128 scenarios were replicated 20 times each, yielding 2,560 measurements. Post-transfer surface and food samples were analysed for contamination. Not surprisingly, watermelon had the most contamination, gummy candy the least, showed the findings published online in the American Society for Microbiology’s journal, Applied and Environ-mental Microbiology.

IANS

NEW YORK: If you are planning diet restriction, an “open concept kitchen” with greater visibility and convenience of food access may put a spanner in the works, suggests new research.

“The results of our study sug-gest that the openness of a floor plan, among many other factors, can affect how much we eat,” said Kim Rollings, Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, US.

“Eating in an ‘open concept

kitchen,’ with greater visibility and convenience of food access, can set off a chain reaction. We are more likely to get up and head toward the food more often, serve more food and eat more food,” Rollings said.

The study, published in the journal Environment and Behavior, involved 57 college students in the Food and Brand Lab at the Cornell University. The researchers made use of folding screens to manipulate the arrange-ment of kitchen and dining areas during the service of buffet-style meals, and two-way mirrors for the unobtrusive observation of variously sized groups of student diners.

Rollings noticed that each time college students in the study got up to get more food, they ended up eat-ing an average of 170 more calories in the “open” than in the “closed” floor-plan kitchen.

“Considering that decreas-ing calorie consumption by 50 to 100 calories per day can reduce or avoid the average annual weight gain of one to two pounds among US adults, these results have impor-tant implications for designers of and consumers in residential kitch-ens; college, workplace and school cafeterias and dining areas; and buf-fet-style restaurants,” she noted.

IANS

NEW YORK: Retrieving memo-ries, like sharing incidents with one another, helps in reinforcing remembrance of an event, says a study. People do, in fact, synchro-nise what they remember and what they forget after sharing memo-ries with one another, according to researchers from Princeton Univer-sity at New Jersey, in the US.

Known as mnemonic conver-gence, these collective memories are influenced both by a person recalling information and by those individuals sharing memories within a group.

“Keep practising that infor-mation. Send repeated messages into the community. If people care about the topic, they are going to talk to one another about it and by spreading the accurate information, psychological research shows, they will likely forget about the miscon-ception,” Assistant Professor at the Princeton University Alin Coman said in the study published in the Proceedings of the National Acad-emy of Sciences.

The researchers recruited 140 participants to conduct the study and were grouped into 10-member communities and used a program called Software Platform for Human Interaction Experiments (SoPHIE) to communicate.

“We designed this software plat-form to expedite the communication process. All phases of the study took about 30 to 40 minutes for each group to complete. It’s a very fast

way to have these people communi-cate, and computer chatting makes this much more standardised. We were able to control the network structure and properly study it,” Coman added.

In the first phase of the study, participants read four random pieces of information about differ-ent volunteers and afterward they were asked to remember the infor-mation they studied.

Next, participants chatted online with one another about the stories. Each participant chatted with three different people in two-and-a-half-minute conversations.

Following the conversa-tions, each participant was asked to remember the information originally presented about the vol-unteers. As in the second phase, they were given the name of each volun-teer as a cue.

Based on both recall phases, the researchers calculated how simi-lar the individual memories were within each 10-member community.

The results were in alignment with what the researchers had predicted: Conversationally shar-ing stories with others influences the degree to which individuals of a group end up remembering the story in similar ways.

“Our study shows that when we talk about memories of collectively experienced events with others, we start remembering these memories in similar ways. Importantly, as a group, we also tend to forget the same information following these conversations. We are, in essence, synchronising our memories at a community level,” Coman said.

IANS

WASHINGTON: Astronomers have found evidence of a magnetar — magnetised neutron star — that spins much slower than the slowest of its kind known until now, which spin around once every 10 seconds.

The magnetar 1E 1613 — at the centre of RCW 103, the remains of a supernova explosion located about 9,000 light years from Earth — rotates once every 24,000 seconds (6.67 hours), the researchers found.

“The source exhibits properties of a highly magnetised neutron star, or magnetar, yet its deduced spin period

is thousands of times longer than any pulsar ever observed,” Nasa said.

On June 22, 2016, an instrument aboard Nasa’s Swift telescope cap-tured the release of a short burst of X-rays from 1E 1613. The Swift detec-tion caught astronomers’ attention because the source exhibited intense, extremely rapid fluctuations on a time scale of milliseconds, similar to other known magnetars.

These exotic objects possess the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe -trillions of times that observed on the Sun - and can erupt with enormous amounts of energy.

Seeking to investigate further, a team of astronomers led by Nanda Rea of the University of Amsterdam

quickly asked two other orbiting telescopes — Nasa’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Nuclear Spectro-scopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR — to follow up with observations.

New data from this trio of high-energy telescopes, and archival data from Chandra, Swift and European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton con-firmed that 1E 1613 has the properties of a magnetar, making it only the 30th known, said a paper published online in the The Astrophysical Jour-nal Letters.

These properties include the rel-ative amounts of X-rays produced at different energies and the way the neutron star cooled after the 2016 burst and another burst seen in 1999.

The source is rotating once every 24,000 seconds (6.67 hours), much slower than the slowest magnetars known until now, which spin around once every 10 seconds. This would make it the slowest spinning neutron star ever detected, the researchers found.

Astronomers expect that a single neutron star will be spinning quickly after its birth in the supernova explo-sion and will then slow down over time as it loses energy.

However, the researchers esti-mate that the magnetar within RCW 103 is about 2,000 years old, which is not enough time for the pulsar to slow down to a period of 24,000 sec-onds by conventional means.

Eating food off the floor is not safe at all

Open floor plans may make you eat more

Sharing stories helps to retrieve memories

Nasa spots slowest known magnetar

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Aviation carbon agreement moves a step closer

The Peninsula

DOHA: The International Air Trans-port Association (IATA) expressed optimism for an agreement on a Car-bon Offset and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) when governments meet for the 39th Assembly of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) later

this month. The draft negotiating text for CORSIA, published on Septem-ber 2, 2016, broadly aligns with the aviation industry’s call for a manda-tory global carbon offset scheme as a tool to help manage the industry’s emissions as it pursues its goal of car-bon-neutral growth.

Instead of being mandatory from the start, however, the draft text defines a voluntary “pilot and imple-mentation” period (2021-2026) after which participation would be man-datory for all eligible States (2027 onwards).

“I am optimistic that we are on the brink of a historic agreement — a first for an industry sector at the glo-bal level. The aviation industry would have preferred a more ambitious timeline than is currently outlined

in the draft text. However, what is most important is that the substance of the negotiating text will allow for meaningful management of aviation’s carbon footprint. Airlines support it

and urge governments to agree when they meet at ICAO,” said Alexandre de Juniac (pictured), IATA’s Direc-tor General and CEO in an official statement.

IATA encourages governments to commit to their voluntary par-ticipation as soon as possible. “Last year’s much lauded Paris climate change agreement was a combina-tion of voluntary measures to which the vast majority of countries have already committed themselves. We expect no less of an outcome from the ICAO Assembly. The industry is ready. There is really no reason for govern-ments not to volunteer. Indeed, the United States, China, Canada, Indo-nesia, Mexico, the Marshall Islands, and 44 European countries have already indicated their willingness

to participate. Now is the time for other states to match their political leadership, by coming to the Assem-bly already committed to participate, even if the scheme is voluntary at the initial stage,” said de Juniac.

“Airlines are committed to environmental responsibility. But achieving it requires a partnership with governments. That is clear in the development of a global market-based measure such as CORSIA. And it is the same for day-to-day opera-tions. Airlines are investing heavily in new technology, the develop-ment of sustainable alternative fuels and operational efficiency. Our message to the states attend-ing the ICAO Assembly is that they must match our efforts. This is par-ticularly the case with investments to

modernize air navigation infrastruc-ture which will bring cost-efficiency benefits along with improved envi-ronmental performance. Similarly, government incentives to commer-cialize sustainable alternative fuels are critical to unlocking their envi-ronmental benefits with increased production capacity and lower costs,” said de Juniac.

ICAO is the United Nations body charged with managing aviation’s cli-mate change impact because of the complexity of emissions from any one flight which might occur over several countries and the high seas. As such, international aviation is not included in the agreement reached by the United Nations Framework Con-vention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in December 2015.

IATA urges States to sign up voluntary implementation.

Hanjin collapse is triggering short-term rate spike: MaerskBloomberg

COPENHAGEN: Maersk Line, the world’s largest container shipping company, is seeing a short-term rise in freight rates and an inflow of new clients after the collapse of Hanjin Shipping Co. “There’s no doubt that we’re seeing a reaction in the rate market,” Klaus Rud Sejling, the executive in charge of Maersk Line’s east-west network, said.

“The question is, what will hap-pen with the rates in the longer term. In the short term, the effect is posi-tive, but there are many factors that can influence rates in the medium and in the long term.”

Hanjin, South Korea’s biggest container company with 97 ships, recently filed for bankruptcy protec-tion in Seoul, leaving some vessels effectively marooned at sea as ports in the US, Asia and Europe turned them away.

A US court has since granted

the company a reprieve from hav-ing assets seized and allowing it to offload its goods at the Port of Long Beach in California. Hanjin also won relief on Saturday from its biggest shareholder, Korean Air Lines Co, which agreed to provide 60bn won ($54m) in funds to help pay for goods to be unloaded from its container ships. “What we’re hearing from the customers that are coming to us is that they are seeking a partner that’s stable,” Sejling said. “Customers are coming to us because we are finan-cially strong.”

Maersk Line is part of the Copen-hagen-based conglomerate A.P. Moeller-Maersk, which also owns ports, drilling rigs and oil fields.

The rise in freight rates could boost Maersk Line’s 2016 net profit by as much as $760m, Lars Heindorff, an analyst at SEB, said in a Septem-ber 8 note. However, rate increases are unlikely to stick, so it’s more likely that Maersk Line’s profit will be boosted by less than $200m, the

analyst said. Maersk Line said Sep-tember 7 it will open a new service from Asia to the US west coast to soak up Hanjin’s customers.

Sejling said that the new capac-ity would add 0.6 percentage points to Maersk Line’s market share on the route, which is currently at about 7.5 percent.

“We are constantly optimising our network and our port calls, but we don’t have any plans to add more services at this point,” Sejling said.

Global bank capital rules should not punish Europe: Schaeuble

Reuters

BEIJING: Volkswagen’s luxury car unit Audi has agreed to deepen collabo-ration with Chinese internet technology groups to offer more digital services in the world’s largest car market.

Aud i a nd FAW-Volkswagen, VW’s joint venture with FAW Car Co Ltd, have signed letters of intent with Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, Audi said yesterday. Financial terms were not disclosed.

VW’s CEO told a news-paper on Sunday that it has to remain in control of its relationship with car users, which is why it stopped talks with U.S. ride-hailing service Uber and technol-ogy giants Google and Apple. Under the agreement with online search com-pany Baidu, Audi aims to improve the use of smart-phone apps in its cars.

Its projects with social network and online gaming group Tencent include help-ing drivers to make better use of the WeChat commu-nication app.

The alliance with Ali-baba aims to develop more real-time traffic news serv-ices and 3D maps.

VW in May took a $300m stake in smaller ride-sharing company Gett.

Parent Volkswagen has been hobbled by a scandal over the rigging of emis-sions tests, distracting it in a race with global carmakers to develop computer-aided services for drivers.

Audi steps up

collaboration

with Chinese

tech groups

A crane lifts a container from the Hanjin Greece container ship as unloading begins at the Port of Long Beach in California yesterday after being stranded at sea for more than a week.

Bloomberg

BRATISLAVA: German Finance Min-ister Wolfgang Schaeuble (pictured) said global regulators mustn’t pun-ish Europe or any other region as they complete work on revamped bank capital requirements by the end of the year. “The rules mustn’t have particularly negative consequences for specific regions because banks’ balance sheets and the financial markets are structured quite differ-

ently around the world,” Schaeuble told reporters in Bratislava. “This is a crucial, common European concern. In Europe, companies are mostly financed via banks, whereas in the US this is mostly done in the capital markets.”

That message has found support outside Europe. Leaders of the Group of 20 nations said earlier this month that as work on the capital framework known as Basel III is wrapped up, the Basel Committee on Banking Super-vision should promote a “level playing field” while honoring its commitment

to avoid “further significantly increas-ing overall capital requirements across the banking sector.”

The Basel Committee promised in January not to boost “overall cap-ital requirements” significantly as it completes work on bank-lever-age limits and a revision of the way credit, market and operational risks are measured. That left open the pos-sibility that individual countries or banks could face a marked increase.

The Basel Committee is racing to wrap up the post-crisis capital frame-work. The regulator’s oversight body

is set to meet on Sunday, followed by a two-day meeting Sept. 14-15 of the committee, whose members include the US Federal Reserve, the Euro-pean Central Bank and the Bank of England.

Banks warn that proposed changes in how they assess risk would send capital requirements spiraling. Credit Agricole SA Chief Executive Officer Philippe Brassac said the Basel Committee should freeze plans to overhaul capital rules to avoid a “drastic” reduction in lending by European banks.

Stranded cargo ship finally unloads

LONG BEACH: A Hanjin container ship that was stranded off the California coast for more than a week began unloading after a judge protected the global shipping giant from having its assets seized in the US as it struggles to avoid bankruptcy. The 1,145-foot-long Hanjin Greece began unloading tonnes of imported clothing, elec-tronics, furniture and plastic goods, Port of Long Beach spokesman Lee Peterson said. “This is good news for cargo owners and Amer-ican consumers, just in time for the holiday shopping season,” Noel Hacegaba, the port’s chief commercial officer, said in a statement.

BUSINESS18 MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

UK faces free trade headache after Brexit vote

AFP

LONDON: Britain’s desire to become a free trade leader following its vote to leave the EU is seen as wishful thinking by experts, who say Lon-don’s hands are tied until a formal

exit from the bloc.Prime Minister Theresa May

(pictured) used this month’s G20 summit in China to explore poten-tial trade deals with Australia, India, Mexico, Singapore and South Korea. But international trade experts have been quick to highlight Britain’s lack of experience in such negotiations.

“Currently, legally speaking, the UK is part of the EU and therefore is not able to conclude free trade agree-ments,” said Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, director of trade policy think tank, the European Centre for International Political Economy. “For me, it is more an experience problem because the UK has actually not negotiated” on such matters since 1973 when the country joined the European Union, Lee-Makiyama added.

At stake is Britain’s position as a major world economy along with its future economic and employment

growth. International trade to and from the country each year totals hundreds of billions of pounds, around half of which is with the European Union. Brussels and Berlin have lost no time in reminding Brit-ain that while it remains within the EU, trade negotiations on behalf of all member states are the sole responsi-bility of the European Commission.

May has meanwhile come up against hurdles outside the EU, with US President Barack Obama insisting that Washington’s priority remains striking a free trade deal with Brussels, however unlikely, before tackling any separate agree-ment with London.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson on Friday insisted at a joint ministerial meeting that “Australia is keen to do a free trade deal” and the two countries would be able to “at least to sketch out a very productive

deal,” while Britain negotiates its exit from the EU.

Australian counterpart Julie Bishop said that Brexit opened “many opportunities to develop an even closer relationship,” but her trade minster warned earlier this week that formal negotiations on a deal must wait until Brexit is concluded, which could take years.

“We are now in a time where law-yers don’t matter,” Lee-Makiyama said. “It is about high politics.”

Tim Oliver of the London School of Economics stressed that “there are no friends or special relationships in international trade”. He said: “Some countries will know the UK is keen to do deals and vulnerable because it has little experience at negotiating them.” The Conservative govern-ment has yet to set out its vision for Brexit following the June 23 referen-dum, beyond saying it would not start

formal exit negotiations with Brus-sels until next year.

“The focus for the first deal is that with the EU,” said Oliver. “All others are secondary for the time being.”

Andrew Cahn, a former head of the government’s department for international trade, has suggested it is “highly unrealistic” that London will have several deals ready to sign once Britain’s exit is formalised.

Britain is meanwhile widely seen as having an insufficient number of specialist staff to successfully carry out such negotiations. “We will have to learn quickly,” said Oliver.

The boss of popular British pub chain JD Wetherspoon last week called on the government to scrap trade talks, as he mocked critics who had forecast economic disaster in the event of Brexit.

Tim Martin, founder and chair-man of JD Wetherspoon, was a vocal

Brexit supporter and “Leave” cam-paign donor in the run-up to the vote.

“Common sense... suggests that the worst approach for the UK is to insist on the necessity of a ‘deal’,” he said on Friday.

“We don’t need one and the fact that EU countries sell us twice as much as we sell them creates a hugely powerful negotiating position.”

Prime Minister Theresa May used this month’s G20 summit in China to explore potential trade deals with Australia, India, Mexico, Singapore and South Korea.

BAML Italy head gets

ECB nod for Monte

Paschi’s appointment

Reuters

SIENA: The European Central Bank has given a preliminary nod to the possible appointment of Marco Morelli (pictured), head of Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Italy, as chief executive of ailing lender Monte dei Paschi di Siena BMS, a source close to the matter said.

If confirmed, the ECB’s infor-mal green light, first reported by Ansa news wire, would help pave the way for a swift succession at the helm of Italy’s third biggest bank, whose chief executive Fabrizio Viola agreed to step down on Thursday.

The bank needs to move quickly to implement an emergency res-cue plan which includes a capital increase of up to €5bn ($5.6bn) and avert the risk of being wound down.

Monte dei Paschi and the ECB declined to comment.

In its role as banking supervi-sor for the eurozone, the ECB could potentially block the appointment of a manager who is not judged “proper and fit”.

Morelli, who was Monte dei Pas-chi’s chief financial officer before leaving the Tuscan bank in 2010, was not available for comment.

The source said head hunters Egon Zehnder, appointed by Monte dei Paschi for the CEO selection process, would give the results of its survey of potential candidates to the lender today, before Chairman Massimo Tononi travels to Frankfurt for meetings with the ECB.

The formal appointment is likely to take place towards the middle of week, a second source said.

Morelli, from the start indicated by sources as the frontrunner to take over from Viola, has not com-mented publicly on whether he would be available for the job.

Malaysian Air in talks to offload A380sBloomberg

LONDON: Malaysia Airlines Bhd. is in talks with carriers in China and other Association of Southeast Asian Nations countries about offloading its six Airbus Group SE A380 jets because the giant double-deckers are no longer needed in the fleet, according to Chief Executive Officer Peter Bellew.

The company is also negotiating with Airbus to add 90 more seats to each of the superjumbos in order to make them more marketable while retaining the ability to operate the aircraft in a two or three class con-figuration, Bellew, who took over on July 1, said in an interview.

If direct buyers aren’t found Malaysian is prepared to offer the planes for lease with access to its A380 simulator, or complete with pilots and cabin crew, the CEO said, adding that there are a number of airlines in the region “keen to dip their toe in the water.”

Malaysian Air no longer wants the A380s as it focuses more on Asian flights and prepares to take deliver of six smaller Airbus A350s, which will replace the superjumbos on routes such as Kuala Lumpur-London. Bellew said the carrier is looking at beefing up its fleet with three of four used Airbus A330s with engines from Pratt & Whitney, like the 18 already

in operation.Airbus’s A321 model, which

former CEO Christoph Mueller had said the carrier might buy, is now less likely to join the fleet, Bellew said. Malaysian placed an order for 25 737 Max 8 jets in July for delivery from 2019 and has options including the Max 9 model that could perform most longer flights.

Bellew said the airline is in talks about 15 new routes to China, Japan and South Korea as he carries for-ward Mueller’s Asia-focused strategy. Of those the most attractive three to six are likely to go ahead, with an announcement due as early as next month. Passenger confidence in Malaysian Air, now fully owned by sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional Bhd., collapsed two years ago after Flight MH370 bound for Beijing vanished on March 8, 2014 and another of its planes was shot down over Ukraine four months later.

Bellew said perceptions of the company have now greatly improved both in Malaysia and the crucial Chi-nese market, which is again one of the strongest for the airline. Demand levels from Australia and New Zea-land are less stable because of overcapacity, he said.

Malaysian Air said earlier that cost cuts initiated by Mueller should help deliver a loss this year that’s 15 to 20 percent lower than anticipated, and that it remains on track to post a profit in 2018.

Russian firms say rouble finding groove as float shock ebbs Bloomberg

MOSCOW: War, sanctions and a shift to a free float have sent the rouble on a wild ride over the past two years. Now, some of Russia’s biggest com-panies see better times ahead.

Bosses at Polyus PJSC, the coun-try’s biggest gold producer, top coal miner SUEK and the Renova Group conglomerate say they’re finally able to count on a stable rouble when planning their businesses as the economy shakes off the longest recession since President Vladimir Putin first came to power in 2000. Traders agree: a measure of antic-ipated volatility has fallen to the lowest since the Bank of Russia stopped managing the currency in November 2014.

The newfound calm suggests investors are finally putting the Ukraine crisis of two years ago behind them to focus on an improve-ment in business confidence and an

80 percent decline in capital out-flows. Russian assets are also in demand for the relatively high yields they offer in a world of below-zero interest rates, helping offset stagnant oil prices.

“The rouble has finally got its act together,” Viktor Vekselberg, Russia’s fourth-richest man and a collector of Czarist-era Faberge eggs, said in an interview in the Pacific port of Vladi-vostok. “Should there be no strong fluctuations in oil, the ruble will be at slightly more than 65” per dollar, or close to its level of about 64 in Mos-cow on Thursday.

Vekselberg, whose Renova Group owns assets ranging from stakes in metals producers to a Swiss equip-ment company, has a fortune that the Bloomberg Billionaires Index values at more than $14bn.

Stability in the ruble is already setting in, with the currency of the world’s largest energy exporter climbing steadily from 67 per dol-lar at the end of the first quarter. It gained faster earlier in the year,

and is up 14 percent in 2016, trailing behind only Brazil’s real in emerg-ing markets. That’s even as oil hovers around $50 a barrel, about $10 less than the middle of last year.

That’s quite a change from Jan-uary, when the rouble tumbled to a record 85.999 as crude prices

collapsed, and 2014-15, when the currency lost more than half its value. Confidence is improving after the shock of the free float became Russia’s biggest currency crisis since the debt default of 1998, and con-tributed to the failure of companies including the second-largest airline.

Bloomberg

SAN FRANCISCO: Snapchat Inc has taken out a line of credit, with Morgan Stanley as the lead banker on the deal, according to people familiar with the matter.

The credit facility will allow the company to fund its growth with-out diluting the ownership of its equity holders. The company has eventual plans for an initial public offering, though it hasn’t had seri-ous talks with banks about it yet, the people said. One of the people noted that Snapchat has yet to have a “bake-off,” where banks pitch for IPO roles. Snapchat was valued at about $18bn after its last round of funding in May, people familiar with the matter said at the time. In that round, the company raised about $1.8bn, according to a reg-ulatory filing.

Snapchat to take on credit

line using Morgan Stanley

A man talks on a mobile phone outside a currency exchange in Moscow.

Brazil annual inflation hits nearly twice the central bank target Bloomberg

RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazil’s annual inflation in August accelerated to nearly double the central bank target as policy makers pon-der when to cut the key interest rate for the first time since 2012.

The benchmark IPCA consumer price index accelerated to 8.97 percent in the year

through August, from 8.74 percent in July, the national statistics agency said.

While the monthly reading of 0.44 per-cent was in line with analyst expectations and less than the 0.52 percent gain the prior month, it was also the highest print since 2007 for August, historically a month for low inflation.

Brazil’s annual inflation remains far from the official 4.5 percent target and economists forecast it will fall short next year as well.

That has prevented the central bank’s board from cutting the benchmark interest rate from its 10-year high. The timing of key rate cuts also hinges on President Michel Temer’s efforts to pass fiscal austerity measures that could help slow consumer price increases, according to Carlos Kawall, chief economist at Banco Safra.

“The markets need to have clear proof that reforms will move forward, and I think this is more likely to happen by the November

meeting rather than the October meeting,” Kawall said by phone. The central bank’s board “is also tracking inflation itself, and we’re seeing today that inflation is still very persistent.”

Swap rates on the contract due in Janu-ary 2018, a gauge of expectations for Brazil’s interest rate moves, rose 0.10 percentage point to 12.56 percent at 10:58 a.m. local time. The real dropped 1.8 percent to 3.2733.

Food and beverage prices increased

0.3 percent in August, following a 1.32 per-cent surge the previous month. There were some one-time increases to inflation in the month, including an 111 percent spike in Rio de Janeiro hotel prices associated with its hosting of the Olympic games.

Still, Kawall pointed to inflation com-ponents such as new cars, which saw prices spike 0.95 percent in August after two con-secutive declines, as proof that waning food price pressure is being offset by other items.

BUSINESS 19MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

Rift between EU & IMF hurting Greece: Tsipras

THESSALONIKI: A rift between the International Monetary Fund and the European Union over how to make Greece’s debt sustainable is damaging the country’s attempts at economic recovery, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras (pictured) said yes-terday.

Describing the debt pile, equiv-alent to more than 170 percent of economic output, as not just a Greek but a “European problem”, he said investors would remain wary of the country for as long as the two sides were at odds on how to restructure it.

“I would say that what is creat-ing conditions of delay in regaining trust of markets and investors ... is the constant clash and disagreement

between the IMF and European institutions,” Tsipras told a news conference in the northern city of Thessaloniki.

Greece almost tumbled out of the eurozone last year, with inves-tors fleeing its assets as talks dragged on between Athens and international lenders over terms of a financial bail-out, the country’s third since 2010.

The IMF has yet to decide whether to participate in Greece’s newest international bailout, saying it is not yet convinced the country’s debt is sustainable or its fiscal tar-gets feasible.

Greece’s debt to GDP ratio is the highest in the eurozone.

Tsipras said differing views among lenders was preventing the

inclusion of Greek debt in the Euro-pean Central Bank’s quantitative easing (QE) asset purchase program. The ECB has said it cannot specify when it could start buying Greek bonds, but that Greece needs to pass a debt sustainability analysis before it happens.

Lenders have promised to look at how Greece’s debt mountain can be made sustainable, and whatever they decide will swing whether the IMF decides to sign up for the latest bailout deal.

Tsipras, a leftist who came to power in early 2015 promising to end years of austerity, is trailing opposi-tion New Democracy in opinion polls. A Kapa Research poll published by the To Vima newspaper on Saturday showed New Democracy ahead by 3.9 points.

Tsipras ruled out early elec-tions, saying: “The country doesn’t need elections. The country needs stability.”

On Friday, eurozone finance min-isters called on Greece to stay on track with reforms it must pursue under the bailout, which is worth up to €86bn, ahead of a second review of progress in meeting terms that is due to start in October.

It still needs to pursue energy market reforms, create a new body to oversee privatisations and establish a new independent revenue agency.

The Greek premier said the coun-try had already completed 70 percent of reforms required under the bail-out programme.

Tsipras, who eschews ties and

prefers open-collared shirts, reit-erated a pledge that a “significant event”, such as debt relief, would make him put one on.

“I never got married, so I couldn’t

wear one at my wedding,” he joked. “I don’t have any hang-ups about it, but I made a commitment that I would make that wardrobe change when we have an important event.”

The IMF has yet to decide whether to participate in Greece’s newest international bailout, saying it is not yet convinced the country’s debt is sustainable or its fiscal targets feasible.

Demonstrators protest against the government’s austerity measures and reforms outside the annual Thessaloniki International Fair (TIF) in Thessaloniki yesterday.

Bloomberg

NEW YORK: There’s a terminal on Louisiana’s coastline that seemingly everyone in the US natu-ral gas market is watching closely.

Cheniere Energy Inc’s Sabine Pass complex, which liquefies US shale gas for export, is scheduled to shut some time this month for four weeks of mainte-nance, threatening to trap supplies in a market that’s already been overwhelmed by a glut. Traders shorted the spot market, betting that the outage would send prices plunging. The only problem: The terminal has yet to show signs of shut-ting down.

Now those who bet the work would’ve started by now have been caught short, leading to a rally in prices at the US bench-mark Henry Hub as they scramble to cover, accord-ing to Kyle Cooper, director of research with IAF Advi-sors in Houston.

The exports from Cheniere’s terminal have served as one of the few bright spots for the US gas market. Prices at the hub have plunged 60 percent over the past eight years amid a flood of supply from shale formations.

“Why you are seeing rel-atively strong Henry Hub is because you had peo-ple short, so they had to go into the market and buy that back,” Cooper said by phone. “Once the mainte-nance actually starts you are going to see weakness in cash because those mol-ecules are going to have to find another home.”

The idea of an early September shutdown of the first liquefied natural gas export terminal for shale was supported by signs that gas deliveries to the site had dropped by about half in the last week of August. But instead of con-tinuing to fall, Cheniere’s gas demand bounced back to reach a record this week, forcing some traders to buy gas in the physical market.

Gas traders

caught short

by Cheniere

terminal work

Fed urges ban on Wall Street buying stakes in companies Bloomberg

NEW YORK: Goldman Sachs Group Inc and other banks that invest in companies are officially on notice: The Federal Reserve wants that abil-ity taken away.

Among several recommendations issued by US banking regulators, one from the Fed urged Congress to prohibit merchant banking, in which firms buy stakes in compa-nies rather than lend them money. In a report, the agency also pushed for limits on Wall Street’s ownership of physical commodities after law-makers accused Goldman Sachs and other banks of seizing unfair advan-tages in metal and energy markets in recent years.

The report — based on a multi-agency study of banks’ investment activities required by the Dodd-Frank Act — highlighted ways to fix potential risks that regulators didn’t think were handled by the law’s Volcker Rule ban on certain trading and investments. The need for Con-gress to pass legislation presents the greatest hurdle to the Fed’s recom-mendations on merchant-banking and the ability of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to operate mines, warehouse aluminum and ship oil.

“Congress has an obligation to give their recommendations seri-ous attention,” US Senator Sherrod

Brown, the most senior Democrat on the Banking Committee, said in a statement.

A 2014 Senate investigation into banks’ commodities busi-nesses revealed Goldman Sachs had almost $15bn in merchant banking investments. The firm’s most recent filings show it booked $1.2bn in rev-enue through the first six months of this year in its division that houses merchant banking, with equity investments contributing $626m of that. Another agency that partic-ipated in issuing the report, the Office

of the Comptroller of the Currency, said it plans to restrict lenders’ hold-ings of the hard-to-value securities. The OCC also proposed a rule that would curtail banks’ investments in certain industrial metals including copper and aluminium.

The Fed called for the repeal of exemptions for industrial loan com-panies, which are lenders generally owned by non-financial firms, that allow them to operate outside of rules that affect banks. The Fed’s section of the report said its aim was to level the playing field among financial firms

and “help ensure the separation of banking and commerce.”

Spokesmen for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co — another bank that could be affected by the recommendations — declined to comment on the reg-ulators’ report.

A coalition of financial indus-try associations called the recommendations “unfortunate and ill-considered” in a statement. The groups — including the Clear-ing House Association, American Bankers Association and Securi-ties Industry and Financial Markets Association — said merchant bank-ing has financed startups and fueled job growth. The groups also argued that it hasn’t been shown to pose a risk to the financial system.

The Fed and the US Treasury Department adopted a merchant-banking rule in 2001 after the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act gave banks the right to make such investments. But making statutory changes to merchant banking and other indus-try laws would require intervention from lawmakers — a tall order in a politically-divided Congress that has passed only a few significant bills affecting the financial system in recent years. That leaves any imme-diate impact of the report in doubt.

The Fed, OCC and the Fed-eral Deposit Insurance Corp were required by Dodd-Frank to dig into further risks from bank investments,

and they were supposed to issue the report almost five years ago.

The document was called for by a provision tucked more than 200 pages into Dodd-Frank under section 620. Lenders’ government watch-dogs had to review the industry’s investment activities to determine whether they “could have a negative effect on the safety and soundness” of the financial system. But the man-date was easy to lose track of next to the passage that preceded it: section 619, which is better known as the Vol-cker Rule.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan were the targets of criticism that led to the 2014 Sen-ate review of their commodities businesses. It found lenders used their ownership of metals and other physical commodities to dominate markets and gain unfair trading advantages. The physical commod-ities businesses at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were protected by grandfathering that allowed them wider abilities than most banks — an advantage the Fed is seeking to end.

Morgan Stanley sold off its oil business last year and backed away from industrial metals trading, while JPMorgan shed a big part of its phys-ical commodities business in 2014. While Goldman Sachs dumped a coal-mining operation in 2015, Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein has maintained that commodities trading is a “core” part of his firm’s business.

A view of the Wall Street sign with the New York Stock Exchange in the background in New York.

Hyundai sells more cars in

Germany than combined

sales of German brands

QNA

SEOUL: Hyundai Motor Co sold more cars in Germany in August than the combined sales of five German carmakers in South Korea, data showed yesterday.

Hyundai sold 9,240 cars in Germany last month, up 5.6 per-cent from a year earlier, according to the data compiled by the Korea Automobile Importers and Distrib-utors Association, Yonhap news agency reported.

In comparison, the combined sales of Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, Volkswagen and Porsche came to 8,735 in South Korea last month, according to the German Association of the Automotive Industry.

Hyundai also outperformed its German competitors in sales in

July. The South Korean carmaker sold 9,209 units in Germany, while the five German carmakers sold 9,059 units in South Korea.

Hyundai’s outperformance came as South Korea revoked the sales licenses of 80 vehicle models sold by Audi Volkswa-gen Korea, the local importer of the German cars, for fabricating their emissions and fuel efficiency test results.

In August, Audi sold 476 cars in South Korea, down 83 per-cent from 2,796 in August 2015. Volkswagen suffered a 97.6 per-cent on-year plunge with only 76 cars sold in South Korea last month, the data showed.

The sharp drop in sales of Audi and Volkswagen cars lowered the combined market share of German vehicles to 54.8 percent in August from 74.6 percent a year earlier, according to the data.

A worker cycles past cars made by Hyundai Motor and affiliate Kia Motors parked at the company’s shipping yard at a port in Pyeongtaek, about 70km south of Seoul.

BUSINESS VIEWS20 MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

Free housing fails to lure labourers in Eastern EuropeBy Zoltan Simon

Bloomberg

Better-known for low-paid jobs than generous incentive packages, McDonald’s Corp is facing a labour shortage so dire in Hungary that it’s

offering free rooms to out-of-town burger flippers. The accommodation — a rare ben-efit in the more than 100 countries where the fast-food giant sells Big Macs and Happy Meals — is just one perk employers in eastern Europe are dangling to fill open jobs. Oth-ers getting sweeteners include cashiers at Lidl Ltd in Prague and software develop-ers in Bucharest.

Once deemed a land of abundant cheap labour, the region has become a headache for employers. Ageing populations, an aver-sion to mass immigration and the exodus of millions to richer European states have left thousands of jobs unfilled and bumped sal-aries higher. That spells increased costs for companies, and the threat of reduced invest-ment for economies that have thrived since European Union membership.

“The labour shortage is what keeps exec-utives up at night across eastern Europe,” said Robert Bencze, director of Price-waterhouseCoopers’s human resources consultancy business in Budapest, citing an annual PwC survey. “The first question investors now ask themselves before coming here is ‘will I be able to find enough employ-ees to make my business work?”’

The labour drought is worsening at an alarming pace. The number of unfilled posi-tions climbed 166 percent in the past two years to about 110,000 in the Czech Repub-lic, where unemployment is among the EU’s lowest. In Latvia, that share has tripled over the past year while in Poland it’s doubled since December. In a bid to fill its own vacant jobs, McDonald’s ran ads this year in Hun-garian newspapers offering free lodging, with employees only required to pay utility bills. The Oak Brook, Illinois-based company declined repeated requests for comment beyond a press statement published in May.

The dearth of labour isn’t limited to the restaurant business. Lidl, which operates grocery stores, raised salaries by a quar-ter in the Czech Republic and by a fifth in Hungary. Romanian software engineers are

being plied with gym and spa vouchers.In Slovakia, a manufacturing power-

house that makes the most cars per capita globally, Peugeot Citroen employs Romani-ans, Bulgarians, Serbians and Hungarians, though most staff remain local, human-resource director Lubomir Kollar said last year. Companies must offer training and housing to lure more workers, Slovak Auto-motive Industry Association head Jan Pribula told the Hospodarske Noviny newspaper in August. Kia Motors is a case in point. While its plant in Zilina, northern Slovakia, is set for another record year, it’s starting to feel a “real shortage of labour,” according to local spokesman Jozef Bace. “Increasingly more applicants lack the skills needed in the car industry, and quite often they aren’t inter-ested in long-term employment,” he said by e-mail. “Recently, it’s hard to fill even less-qualified positions such as assembly-line and paint-shop operators.”

The result is surging pay checks and higher corporate expenses: Romanian gross wages grew 12.4 percent year-on-year in July following a 14.3 percent jump in June, the Statistics Office said. Wage hikes are in many cases outstripping efficiency improvements,

with Lithuania predicting salaries will rise 6.5 percent a year through 2019, double the pace of productivity growth.

Hungarian unit labour costs have risen the most in central Europe this year, accord-ing to Morgan Stanley. The increase wasn’t offset by a higher productivity, “which mat-ters a great deal” for economic growth, the bank said in an August report.

Shrinking pools of labour risk jeopard-ising inflows of foreign investment, which helped propel ex-communist nations such as Poland and Slovakia to average annual growth rates of about 4 percent since joining the EU in 2004, more than twice the pace of western peers. Hungary recently lost out on a car-industry project because of the dearth of labour, Economy Minister Mihaly Varga told the Figyelo magazine in August, with-out naming the company.

“It’s a question of quantity and quality of labour across eastern Europe,” said Dirk Wolfer, a spokesman at the German-Hun-garian Chamber of Industry and Commerce, which represents companies including Daimler and Commerzbank. “This needs to be solved in the next few years, otherwise investment may suffer.”

Bloomberg

China’s emergence as the world’s biggest alumin-ium maker has shaken up the industry, creating a

surplus that forced competitors to close plants as profit fell. Alcoa, an iconic US producer for more than a century, has shuttered all but one smelter and plans to split itself in two. While some companies begin to show signs of stanching the red ink, there’s probably more disrup-tion ahead.

After dominating the market for raw aluminium, China wants to expand its ability to make higher-value products with the commodity. The biggest step so far was the announcement that Chi-nese aluminium entrepreneur Liu Zhongtian will acquire Cleveland-based Aleris Corp for $2.3bn.

The deal gives the founder of China’s largest producer of extruded aluminium greater access to American and European technology, as well as buyers that include aerospace manufacturers like Boeing Co and automakers such as Audi. “This was a differ-ent kind of move by a Chinese company,” Yi Zhu, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said.

“Previously, China went after raw-material assets abroad, but this is about going to the down-stream, and it fits with the Chinese government’s goals to upgrade manufacturing and the economy.”

Liu’s move follows decades of sweeping changes in the indus-try. When he founded China Zhongwang Holdings in 1993, the country accounted for less than 10 percent of global production of primary aluminium, the basic product churned out by smelters. Now, it’s 55 percent. Surging out-put has eclipsed domestic needs, spawning a flood of cheap exports that aggravated a global surplus amid stagnant demand. Prices this year, on average, are the lowest since 2003 on the London Metal Exchange. While Liu is expand-ing a business already focused on processing metal rather than producing it, he’s not the only one getting into that market. Even as Chinese smelters continue to expand their capacity to make the raw commodity, the coun-try is also expanding the number and capabilities of rolling mills that shape the aluminium into higher-end products.

China’s exports of rolled sheet and plate last year were equal to about 7 percent of world demand and will grow further, accord-ing to London-based CRU Group,

a commodity researcher. The country produced more than 60 percent of the world’s alumin-ium foil in 2015, and last year it became a net exporter for the first time of the specialised aluminium sheets used to make beverage cans for soda and beer.

China’s move into the more lucrative, higher-margin markets for processed aluminium is still in its infancy and may take years to peak. The country has very little capacity to manufacture products that need to meet strict specifica-tions common in the automobile and aerospace industries. That means China can either build its own plants that employ the industry’s newest technologies, or acquire existing assets from some-one else. The Zhongwang group, which is also building a flat-roll-ing complex in Tianjin, northern China, is doing both.

The Aleris deal “could be the shape of things to come” as Chi-nese companies add downstream capacity and capabilities by acquiring overseas assets, Char-lie Durant, a principal analyst CRU Group in London, said. “Further market integration could ulti-mately encourage more exports out of China, particularly in higher-value-added rolled prod-ucts, where Chinese players have yet to have much of an impact,” Durant said. The push for more downstream business mirrors a long-term shift for China’s econ-omy, in which manufacturing has to become more sophisticated as the economy matures and domes-tic demand increases. Getting rid of surplus capacity and encourag-ing China’s industries to produce more value-added products is one plank of President Xi Jinping’s attempt to maintain growth that last year was the slowest since 1990.

“The Chinese government has set clear development goals for the aluminium industry that empha-size not only quantity increase, but more importantly quality improvement,” Zhang Shiping, the chairman of aluminum producer China Hongqiao Group Ltd, said.

China is a fast-growing con-sumer of the metal. Annual demand for aluminium will rise 6 million tonnes by 2018 as the country uses the metal in more cars, construction projects and aircraft, China Nonferrous Indus-try Association, a state-affiliated group, said in a WeChat post. That’s up about 18 percent from consumption of about 32.5 mil-lion tonnes last year, according to Beijing Antaike Information Development Co, a researcher affiliated with the CNIA.

China’s chase for cars and planes lifts aluminium

Cash in a box catches on as Swiss negative rates bite

By Jeffrey Vögeli and Jan-Henrik Förster

Bloomberg

It’s a sign the world is getting used to negative interest rates when what once seemed bizarre starts looking like the norm. Consider Switzerland, where more companies are taking

out insurance policies to protect their cash hoards from theft or damage.

“Because of the low interest rate level, we note increasing demand for insurance solutions for the storage of cash,” said Philipp Surholt at Zurich Insurance Group, among underwriters reporting a surge in such requests. “We’re seeing demand for coverage for sums ranging from 100m to 500m francs.”

The Swiss National Bank imposed sub-zero rates in early 2015, effectively charg-ing banks for excess deposits. Many lend-ers including UBS Group and Credit Suisse Group have passed on at least some of the burden — they don’t disclose how much —to cash-rich clients like asset managers and big companies. While the central bank is seeking to rein in the franc, negative interest rates have side effects that over time could outweigh the bene-fits. That risk may be on the minds of SNB officials when they meet next week for their scheduled quar-terly monetary policy review. Economists expect they will keep the rate steady at minus 0.75 percent, the lowest

among major central banks. “The SNB’s dilemma is that it can’t make everyone happy,” said Alexander Koch, an economist at Raiffeisen Schweiz. “In its attempt to get the best deal for the Swiss economy, it also has created losers and collateral damage.”

Helvetia Holding said it charges about 1,000 francs ($1,020) a year to insure 1m francs, a fraction of the 7,500 francs a com-pany would pay to park the same amount in a bank for a year — assuming the lender passes on the full charge. But that amount doesn’t include the cost of logistics such as transport or security features like rein-forced walls, guards and alarm systems.

Companies need to save a lot on bank fees for cash storage to be economical because, in addition to insurance, they have to assume the costs of managing the money, said Roberto Brunazzi, a spokesman for Baloise Holding. He said the company has long offered such coverage “but there has been a noticeable increase and now it’s becoming more commonplace.”

Switzerland’s continued use of high-denomination banknotes adds to the appeal of self-storage: About 1m francs worth of 1,000-franc bills can fit in a small box. The SNB’s rate applies to sight deposits — cash that commercial banks hold at the cen-tral bank — that exceed 20 times a bank’s required minimum, an amount set by the SNB and that varies from lender to lender.

Private banks, which have lower thresh-olds because they are less active in lending, exceeded their exemption limit almost from the start. For other bank categories, depos-its stayed either under or just above the threshold for much of last year.

This year, though, the levels have jumped, prompting some banks to warn that they may one day have to charge ordinary savers — not just big custom-ers — for liquidity. In June, UBS and Credit Suisse exceeded their combined minimum required deposits by about 26 times, putting them about 25.8bn francs over their exemp-tion. Swiss cantonal banks were about 24 times over the amount they are required to hold at the SNB, or about 12.5bn francs over their threshold, according to SNB data,

which doesn’t break down the figures by bank. “Negative rates are the dominant topic,” said Markus Gygax, chief execu-tive officer of the Swiss retail bank Valiant Holding. “As long as the interest rate on credit keeps falling, it’s a big problem for us.”

UBS Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti said in March that negative interest rates are encouraging risky lending prac-tices among some banks, potentially posing a threat to the wider financial system. He described deposits as a de facto “loss-mak-ing proposition.”

UBS will consider passing on negative rates to its wealthiest clients and increas-ing interest charged on loans if the situation drags on, he told shareholders in May.

“Consumers are shielded from the neg-ative interest rates so far,” Oliver Adler, an economist at Credit Suisse, told Bloomberg Television. “Large institutional investors have had to pay, but in the overall context it’s not dramatic.” Companies aren’t the only ones bypassing banks. Some lenders that are below the SNB’s threshold are taking on other banks’ cash for a fee. A “market for liquidity” has developed between the banks as a result of negative rates, the Swiss Banking Association said last week in its annual report on the industry.

“Cash hoarding is a problem for mon-etary policy,” Koch said. “It’s a question of efficiency: the more corporates hoard cash, the smaller the impact of negative rates.”

Negative rates kicked in just days after the SNB scrapped its minimum exchange rate, causing the franc to soar. The currency, a traditional haven for investors in times of economic uncertainty and market tur-moil, has depreciated 0.6 percent against the euro this year.

Swiss central bankers have said they could further cut rates, with economists seeing the lower bound at minus 1.25 per-cent. Policymakers have also said that changing the exemption threshold for neg-ative rates is among their options should more action be required.

For now, the SNB says it hasn’t seen evidence of widespread cash hoarding in Switzerland.

The Swiss National Bank imposed sub-zero rates in early 2015, effectively charging banks for excess deposits. Many lenders including UBS Group and Credit Suisse Group have passed on at least some of the burden to cash-rich clients like asset managers and big companies.

Once deemed a land of abundant cheap labour, the region has become a headache for employers. Ageing populations, an aversion to mass immigration and the exodus of millions to richer European states have left thousands of jobs unfilled and bumped salaries higher.

A tram drives past the building of Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse at the Paradeplatz in Zurich.

21MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

Johnson breaks clear for three-shot lead at BMW

Reuters

NEW YORK: US Open champion Dustin Johnson birdied four of the final five holes to open up a three-shot lead over Paul Casey after the third round at the BMW Champion-ship in Indiana on Saturday.

Johnson delighted fans with another display of long hitting but also displayed a deft touch on slow greens at Crooked Stick in Carmel.

He carded a 68 to post an 18-under-par 198 total, while Eng-lishman Casey also shot 68 to lurk in second place at 15-under, with American JB Holmes (68) another shot back. Johnson has plundered the par-fives, playing them in 11-under, and his length has become an even

more valuable weapon on a course softened all week by heavy rain.

“With all the rain we got last night I struggled with the speed (on the greens) early in the round, kept leaving everything a little bit short but got a handle on it the back nine and finished off really nicely,” the world number two told Golf Channel.

“I’m seeing the lines really well. The putter is working. It’s just going where I’m looking. I feel like I read the greens very well. I’m making some putts this week.” Johnson, using a putter he put in the bag this week, launched his finishing flourish with a 10-foot birdie at the 14th.

He had a tap-in birdie at the

par-five 15th and then made it a hat-trick at the 16th, before capping off his day with a 15-foot birdie at the last. Despite the cushion, Johnson can take nothing for granted.

He has converted only two of his previous six 54-hole leads on the PGA Tour into victory.

“I’m not going to change any-thing,” he said.

“I feel I’ve got a good game plan out here, be aggressive on flags when I feel like I’ve got a good club and a good number and other times there are a few holes you just want to make par on and keep going.” Casey is in contention for the second consecu-tive week. He led going into the final

round at the Deutsche Bank Classic, before finishing runner-up to Rory McIlroy.

“To keep a clean sheet, I was very happy with,” said Casey, who posted a bogey-free round in “ugly” conditions.

“The fact I stayed in touch is nice, but he’s going to be a tough man to beat tomorrow.

“He’s got maybe the best attitude in golf. When he gets on his game maybe he’s the best ball-striker in golf, maybe the longest, and he showed it today.”

The BMW Championship is the third of four FedEx Cup play-off events on tour.

Dustin Johnson hits a tee shot during Saturday’s third

round of the BMW Championship at

Crooked Stick GC in Carmel, USA;.

BMW SCORES198 Dustin Johnson 67-63-68

201 Paul Casey (ENG) 67-66-68

202 JB Holmes 69-65-68

204 Roberto Castro 65-65-74

205 Adam Scott (AUS) 69-69-67, Matt

Kuchar 68-69-68

206 Ryan Palmer 73-64-69

207 Chris Kirk 68-66-73

208 Billy Horschel 73-68-67, Jordan

Spieth 68-72-68, Hideki Mat-

suyama (JPN) 68-71-69

The US Open champion cards 68 in the third round to remain ahead of Casey and Holmes

This handout photo taken and released by OneAsia yesterday shows Lee Kyoung-Hoon of South Korea posing with the winner’s trophy following the final round of the Korea Open golf championship in Cheonan, Seoul.

Brilliant Lee fires 68 to

retain Korea Open title AFP

CHEONAN: Defending champion Lee Kyoung-Hoon fired a final-round 68 to win the Korea Open title for the second time yesterday.

He carded 16-under-par 268 for a three-stroke victory over country-man Choi Jin-Ho at Woo Jeong Hills Country Club in Cheonan.

Choi mounted a strong chal-lenge on the front nine before three straight bogeys from the 10th derailed his glory bid.

One shot behind was Kang Kyung-Nam, who was looking to re-ignite his career after complet-ing his mandatory military service last year.

Choi, two strokes behind after the third round, drew level with Lee after birdies at the first and the fourth, turning the contest into an engrossing duel.

Lee shot four straight birdies from the par-five fifth hole as Choi picked up three shots in the same

stretch. But Choi’s challenge crum-bled after the turn with three bogeys on the trot.

T h a i l a n d ’ s N a m c h o k Tantipokhakul shot a 69 to finish as the highest-placed overseas chal-lenger in equal 12th spot, 11 shots behind Lee.

SCORES268 Lee Kyoung-Hoon (65-67-68-68)

271 Choi Jin-Ho (65-69-68-69)

272 Kang Kyung-Nam (68-66-67-71)

274 Lee Chang-Woo (70-63-69-72)

275 Kim Do-Hoon (73-64-68-70), Kim

Yeong-Su (65-68-71-71)

276 Song Young-Han (71-66-

70-69),Hwang Jung-Gon

(65-68-71-72),

277 Lee Seung-Taek (72-70-66-69),

Park Sang-Hyun (69-69-69-70)

278 Kim Tae-Woo (69-70-71-68)

279 Namchok Tantipokhakul (THA)

(69-70-71-69), Hwang In-Choon

(67-72-70-70), Ryu Hyun-Woo

(70-68-71-70), Kim Gi-Hwan

(70-67-70-72)

Britain’s Mo Farah does his ‘mobot’ celebration after winning the men’s elite race in the Great North Run half-marathon in South Shields, northeast England, yesterday. The Great North Run is Britain’s largest running event with more than 50,000 participants set to cover the 13.1 miles from Newcastle to South Shields.

Farah wins Great North Run AFP

LONDON: Britain’s Mo Farah claimed an unprecedented third consecutive victory in the Great North Run half-marathon in north-east England yesterday.

The four-time Olympic cham-pion pulled clear of America’s Dathan Ritzenhein to complete the course between Newcastle and South Shields in a time of one hour and four seconds.

Kenya’s Vivian Cheruiyot won the women’s race in her first half-marathon, edging out compatriot Priscah Jeptoo.

“I knew it was going to be a hard race today,” Farah told BBC.

“To be honest, I’m knackered. I can hardly talk.

“It’s good to finish on a high here. What a year I’ve had. I just have to go home now and chill out and see the kids.”

Farah’s victory in the world’s biggest half-marathon came after he completed a second consecutive Olympic double in the 5,000 metres and 10,000 metres in Rio de Janeiro.

Farah, 33, endeared himself to the large crowds watching by mimicking the goal celebration of former Newcastle United striker Alan Shearer as he finished, raising his right hand in the air.

Shearer tweeted his approval, writing: “Love it @Mo_Farah!”

Farah’s triumph follows accusa-tions made by his wife, Tania, who

also ran in the race, that he was “humiliated” by an airline attend-ant in the United States.

She told the Sunday Telegraph a Delta Airlines official “yelled” at her husband and sent him to the back of a queue.

Other reports said the Farah family had arrived late for first-class boarding. The family were report-edly travelling home from Rio and were about to embark on the final leg of their journey from Atlanta to Portland, Oregon.

A Delta Airlines spokesperson, quoted by the BBC, said the company was investigating and “will be work-ing directly with the Farah family”.

Neither Delta Airlines nor Mo Farah’s management company could be reached.

Brutal Golovkin bludgeons Brook to secure middleweight titles Reuters

LONDON: Middleweight marauder Gennady Golovkin retained his WBC and IBF titles when challenger Kell Brook was pulled out by his corner five rounds into a compelling fight on Saturday.

Kazakh Golovkin had won his previous 22 fights by knockout but was rocked by unbeaten welter-weight world champion Brook in the early exchanges before his superior power told.

Brook, who suffered a suspected fractured eye socket, won the second round with a left uppercut that pro-duced huge roars from the huge O2 Arena crowd, who were mainly sup-porting the British underdog.

He was still standing his ground in the fourth but by the fifth it became clear the step up from wel-terweight to fight the man who has brutally dominated the middle-weight division for six years was a step too far.

There was little coming back as Golovkin landed some thumping blows and trainer Dominic Ingle threw in the towel which was ini-tially unseen by the referee.

Some of the crowd booed, but afterwards Brook said the eye injury had left him with restricted vision.

Unbeaten Golovkin took his record to 36 wins.

“Kell is a huge fighter, a very good fighter, but he’s not a middle-weight. I respect him, he is good, but not so strong,” 34-year-old Golovkin said at ringside.

“I respect Kell, he’s a warrior. And his corner, for his career, for his family, was correct. It was game over.”

Brook was wobbled by a huge body shot in the first round but

connected with a couple of sting-ing jabs.

Golovkin has rarely been hurt in his outstanding career but he was marked around the face by the end of the second as the skilful Brook landed a fearsome uppercut.

The 34-year-old Golovkin looked rattled in the third as he missed with some sledgehammer shots, although he landed enough to leave Brook’s right eye swollen.

The fourth round looked about even, with Golovkin relentlessly moving forward in search of the knockout and Brook countering with some precise jabs.

There was a menace about Golovkin in the fifth though and he began to unload in devastating

fashion, forcing the intervention of Brook’s corner as the gallant Shef-field fighter tasted defeat for the first time in his 37-fight pro career.

“He broke my eye socket in the second round. I was seeing three or four of him,” Brook said.

“Believe me, I hurt him. I saw his legs start to buckle. I was starting to settle in. I would fight him again.”

Golovkin, who remains the WBC, IBF and WBA champion, said his next target was a unification fight against another Briton, WBO titleholder Billy Joe Saunders.

The WBA had refused to sanction Saturday’s fight fearing Brook, who has spent his career fighting men 13 pounds (6 kg) lighter than Golovkin, was putting his health in danger.

Gennady Golovkin celebrates at the end of the fight at the O2 Arena in London on Saturday.

SPORT22 MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

Kerber downs Pliskova to reign supreme at US Open

Reuters

NEW YORK: Germany’s Angel-ique Kerber began her reign as world number one in imperious style battling past a determined Karolina Pliskova 6-3 4-6 6-4 to win the US Open final on Satur-day and claim her second Grand Slam title of the year.

Kerber, who officially takes over from Serena Williams as the world’s top ranked player on Monday, underlined her number one status displaying the heart of a champion as she fought off a fierce challenge from Czech 10th seed Pliskova on a steamy after-noon at Arthur Ashe Stadium.

The 28-year-old began the grand slam year beating Serena Williams to lift the Australian Open title and celebrated again on Saturday when she became the first German to win the US Open in 20 years.

Kerber recovered from a break down in the third set, pouncing on her wilting opponent with two breaks in the third set to end a compelling, high-quality battle of attrition that stretched for two hours and seven minutes.

“It’s just amazing,” a beam-ing Kerber, told an adoring crowd

after being handed the winner’s cheque of $3.5m. “I won my sec-ond grand slam in one year. That’s the best of my career.”

Pliskova, who arrived at Flushing Meadows with a reputa-tion of grand slam under-achiever having never before been beyond the third round of the major, shed that label by making it all the way to the final and taking on back-to-back world number ones.

After beating top ranked Ser-ena Williams in the semi-finals to end the American’s record-equal-ling 186 consecutive weeks stay at the top of the rankings, the

big-hitting Pliskova, who has led the WTA Tour in aces the last two season, attacked her suc-cessor in the final but could not break down the tireless German’s defence.

“You cannot compare those two (Serena Williams and Ker-ber),” explained Pliskova. “The game is totally different. The per-sons as well. Serena is going for every shot. With Angie, you can-not wait for mistakes. She doesn’t give you anything. I have to be the one who is aggressive. I beat very good players. It was always my goal to pass the third round and

I made it to the final.”Kerber admires compatriot

Steffi Graf, but is blazing her own trail. Comparisons, though, are inevitable after Kerber became the first German to win the US Open since Graf claimed the last of her five Flushing Meadows crowns in 1996.

“She was always my idol and I told her so many times,” said Ker-ber, adding that Graf had sent her a text wishing her luck. “For me it’s really important to go on my own way.”

The match opened with Ker-ber breaking a jittery Pliskova and

ended the same way, though for most part it was a very even con-test. Kerber’s loss of the second set was the first time the entire championship that she had dropped a set. But she fought back in the third set and wore down the towering Czech, who started to wilt in the punishing conditions, hunching over her racket at the end of almost every point.

Kerber, sensing an opening, stepped up the pressure and pace getting triple break point at 5-4 and closed out the contest on the first match point.

Djokovic, Wawrinka ready for final encounter Reuters

NEW YORK: World number one Novak Djokovic had enjoyed a whirlwind trip to yesterday’s US Open final, but the top-seeded Serb expected hard work ahead when he meet Stan Wawrinka at Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Defending champion Djokovic, who became the third man to hold all four Grand Slam singles titles at once after his triumph at Roland Garros in June, owned a 19-4 career head-to-head advantage over the Swiss third seed.

He led 4-2 in Grand Slam meet-ings against Wawrinka, with three of Djokovic’s victories going five sets, including a memorable 2013 Aus-tralian Open fourth-rounder decided 12-10 in the fifth set, before yester-day’s final.

“He’s a big match player. He loves

to play in the big stage against big players, because that’s when he ele-vates his level of performance,” said 12-times Slam winner Djokovic.

Gifted by a second-round walk-over and two retirements along the way, Djokovic had spent less than nine hours on court, completing 13 sets through six rounds at Flushing Meadows, reaching the final 6-3 6-2 3-6 6-2 over 10th seed Gael Monfils.

The hard-working Wawrinka had been on court twice as long, 17 hours, 54 minutes, playing 23 sets. He advanced 4-6 7-5 6-4 6-2 over sixth seed Kei Nishikori after surviving a match point in his five set, third-round match against unseeded Daniel Evans of Britain.

The ‘big match’ Warwinka, whose indefatigable determination brought him the nickname “Stanimal”, had won his last 10 finals.

The contrasting path to the final suits both players.

Wawrinka preferd to build momentum in order to bring his best at the finish.

“We’ve had many big memories together, especially in grand slams, so it’s going to be an exciting match,” said Wawrinka, who is playing his first U.S. final and beat Djokovic on the way to his slam titles at the 2014 Australian Open and 2015 French.

“Because the biggest matches, it’s the end of the tournament. Final, semi-final, and I had matches to get confidence to play well match after match.”

Djokovic came to Flushing Mead-ows showing signs of wear and tear after losing in the third round at Wimbledon and the first round at the Rio Olympics while dealing with a nagging wrist injury, and considers his relatively easy ride a “blessing”.

“Before this grand slam there were things that were happening with my health and physical state that were making me a little bit sceptical.”

GRAND SLAM TITLES (12): Aus-

tralian Open: 2008, 2011, 2012,

2013, 2015, 2016; French Open

2016; Wimbledon: 2011, 2014,

2015; U.S. Open: 2011, 2015

US OPENDjokovic’s nine sets and 84 games

completed are the fewest en route

to a semi-final at any major in the

Open Era that featured a 128 draw.

Appearing in his seventh US Open

final, twice a winner in 2011 and

2015.

With a win would become the first

man to clinch back-to-back US

Open titles since Roger Federer won

four straight from 2004.

THIS SEASON Became first tennis player to sur-

pass $100 million in prize money.

Won French Open to join Rod Laver

and Don Budge as the only men to

hold all four major titles at once.

Winner of seven titles this season

(Australian Open, French Open,

Doha, Indian Wells, Miami, Madrid,

Toronto)

Loss to American Donald Querrey in

Wimbledon third round ended cal-

endar grand slam bid and 30 match

win streak at majors.

In February became third active

player to reach 700 career wins

joining Roger Federer and Rafa

Nadal

MAKING HIS NAME

Born: Belgrade, May 22, 1987

Began playing tennis aged four.

PLAYING CAREER In 2006, he won his first ATP tour

title at Amersfoort.

In 2007, he won five titles (Ad-

elaide, Miami, Estoril, Montreal and

Vienna) and reached his first grand

slam final at the US Open, losing to

Federer.

Beat Frenchman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga

to win his maiden grand slam title

at the 2008 Australian Open - be-

coming the first Serbian man to win

one of the four majors.

Began 2011 by winning the Austral-

ian Open, beating Briton Andy Mur-

ray in the final, to end his three-year

wait for a second grand slam title.

Secured the number one spot on

July 4, 2011 by beating Tsonga in

the Wimbledon semi-finals, then

beat Nadal to clinch his first Wim-

bledon crown, his first title on grass.

Began 2013 by beating Murray to

become the first man in the profes-

sional era to win three successive

Australian Open titles.

Beats Murray again in the French

Open final in 2016 to win the clay-

court major at his 12th attempt and

complete his grand slam collection.

NOVAK DJOKOVIC

GRAND SLAM TITLES (2): Australian Open (2014);

French Open (2015)

US OPEN: Saved match point

against Britain’s Daniel Evans

in the third round

Has reached semi-finals three

times in last four years but

made finals only once (2016)

Owns a 9-6 record in US Open

five-setters, second most five-

setters in Open Era at Flushing

Meadows.

Competed in 47 straight

grand slams since made major

debut at the 2005 French

Open

THIS SEASON Won three titles this season

(Chennai, Dubai, Geneva)

On a 10 match winning streak

in finals after winning title in

Geneva in May

Looking to become the fifth

man in the Open Era to win

two or more grand slam single

titles after turning 30.

MAKING HIS NAME Born: Lausanne on March 28,

1985.

Began playing at age eight

Left school at 15 to play tennis

fulltime and won the junior

French Open title in 2003 and

two Challenger level titles in

San Bendetto and Geneva.

Was included in Switzerland’s

Davis Cup squad as an

18-year-old, beginning his

long association with Roger

Federer.

PLAYING CAREER Captured his first ATP tour

level title in 2006 at Umag,

Croatia, when Novak Djokovic

retired with breathing difficul-

ties in the final.

Broke into the world top 10

for first time in 2008 by

reaching two ATP Tour finals

and winning the gold medal in

doubles with Federer at the

Beijing Olympics.

Beat Federer for the first time,

a third round victory at Monte

Carlo in 2009.

After beating defending

champion Djokovic in quarter-

finals of 2014 Australian

Open, he defeats Rafael Nadal

in the final to win his maiden

major title.

Wins two rubbers as Switzer-

land win their first Davis Cup

title against France in 2014.

Overcomes overwhelming fa-

vorite Djokovic to win on the

clay of Roland Garros in 2015

to seal his second grand slam

title.

STANISLAS WAWRINKA

New world number one s urvives two-hour battle to become the first German winner since Graf in 1996

Angelique Kerber of Germany kisses the trophy after beating Karolina Pliskova of the Czech Republic in their Women’s Singles Final match of the 2016 US Open at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York City yesterday.

Algerian team faces possible expulsion from Paralympics AP

RIO DE JANEIRO: An Algerian women’s goalball team could be expelled from the Paralympics for failing to show up for two matches.

The International Paralympic Committee said the team did not appear for a Friday match against the United States, and would also miss a match on Satur-day against Israel.

IPC officials say the absence could be a form of political protest, which is banned in the Paralympics as it is in the Olympics.

IPC spokesman Craig Spence says Algerian offi-cials “claim they suffered multiple delays, cancelled flights and missed connections” attempting to board a flight Sept. 5 from Warsaw, Poland, to Rio de Janeiro.

Spence said the rest of the Algerian delegation was in Rio. Algerian officials told the IPC that the goalball team would arrive on Sunday.

Spence said sanctions could range from a “slap on the wrist” to the team being “removed from the competition.”

Fighting blind: Paralympians take on judo and disabilityAFP

RIO DE JANEIRO: Being in a fight with an invisible attacker may sound like a nightmare. Christella Gar-cia, a medal-winning, blind Paralympian judoka, says it’s “wonderful.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Garcia told right after defeating Brazil’s Deanne Almeida for bronze in the over 70kg category in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday.

Garcia, who has been almost completely blind from birth, said that out on the judo mat, where opponents try to outwit, unbalance and throw each other, her dis-ability no longer matters.

“You’re gripping and you feel your opponent’s body and the way they’re moving,” Garcia, 37, said. “It about who wants it the most.”

Judo in the Paralympics is reserved for the visu-ally impaired -- some with limited eyesight, others like Garcia with virtually none. There are surprisingly few changes to the way the regular sport is played.

Contestants unable to see the boundaries may unwittingly spill outside, so the referee has to guide them back. And unlike in regular judo, where the clock is visible, a loud buzzer goes off at the one minute warn-ing before the bout ends. Otherwise, the combatants in their white or blue kimonos fight as skillfully and fiercely as those with proper vision. It can be easy to forget they are blind at all -- until the incongruously gentle scene of a referee leading a black belt fighter around by the hand.

Another US bronze medal winner Saturday, Dartan-yon Crockett, only took up judo when he left high school. Learning a sport in which being propelled through the air or choked while lying on the mat are integral parts was not easy for a young man born blind.

“Part of doing judo for the visually impaired is putting yourself in a scary, uncomfortable situation,” said Crockett, now 25. “It’s about stepping out of your comfort zone.”

His coach, Eddie Liddie, said teaching is also a huge challenge in a sport involving scores of techniques, many of them only subtly different from each other.

Oleksandr Nazarenko (top) of Ukraine competes against Zviad Gogotchuri of Georgia during their Men’s 90 kg judo final of the 2016 Rio Paralympics at the Carioca Arena 3 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on Saturday.

SPORT 23MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016

Repsol Honda Team’s Spanish rider Dani Pedrosa celebrates after winning the San Marino MotoGP Grand Prix race at the Marco Simoncelli Circuit in Misano, yesterday. INSET: Pedrosa lifts his trophy.

Pedrosa shocks Rossi and Lorenzo at San Marino GP

AFP

MISANO ADRIATICO: Spain’s Dani Pedrosa, on a Honda, secured an impressive victory in the San Marino Moto GP yesterday after a superb overtaking move on Valentino Rossi ended the Italian’s hopes at his home track.

Pedrosa started eighth on the grid, several places behind compa-triot and defending world champion Jorge Lorenzo, with Rossi in second ahead of Maverick Vinales.

But the Honda rider, one of only two in the field to employ a soft front tyre, produced a tactically flawless race to steadily move up to the front after Rossi had taken the lead from

the second of the race’s 28 laps.Pedrosa overtook Rossi with

seven laps to go and was unassail-able as he powered his way to his first win of the season and 52nd of his career. A frustrated Rossi finished a close second with Lorenzo in third.

Spain’s Marc Marquez, who fin-ished fourth on a Honda, retains the lead in the world championship standings on 223 points.

Rossi is second on 180 with Lorenzo on 162 and Pedrosa 145.

“I’m very happy personally,” said Pedrosa, who collected two wins last year on his way to a fourth place fin-ish in the championship.

“Today I focused on my rhythm and tried to do my race. This vic-tory is for my fans, friends, family and team.” Thousands of the esti-mated attendance of 100,000 fans

at the track had shown their support for Rossi, the seven-time MotoGP world champion who is trying to win an eighth title in motorcycling’s top category but his first since 2009.

Although many of them spoiled Pedrosa’s podium celebrations by chanting for Rossi as he drank spu-mante from his boot -- the Italian mimicking the antics of Australia’s Jack Miller when he won his maiden Moto GP race at Assen earlier this year -- the Italian readily accepted defeat.

“I tried my hardest for Lorenzo and Marquez and when I saw that my pace would be good for the win, I was very happy,” said Rossi.

“But then I saw Pedrosa and I thought, ‘no way’. He was faster than me. I wanted to win here at Misano as it’s very special race.”

Rossi’s team-mate Lorenzo claimed his third world title from the category last year.

He admitted his disappointment at failing to challenge and is already looking ahead to the Aragon GP in three weeks’ time.

“They were faster than me, but I can’t be happy because I expected to fight for the win,” said Lorenzo.

“Now I have to wait for next time. I am very happy for Dani as he’s been through a very hard time.”

SAN MARINO GP RESULTSMotoGP

1. Dani Pedrosa (ESP/Honda) 43min 43.524sec, 2. Valentino Rossi (ITA/Yamaha) at 2.837s, 3. Jorge Lorenzo (ESP/Yamaha) 4.359, 4. Marc Mar-quez (ESP/Honda) 9.569, 5. Maverick Vinales (ESP/Suuki) 15.467, 6. Andrea Dovizioso (ITA/Ducati) 19.676, 7. Michele Pirro (ITA/Ducati) 22.936, 8. Pol Espargaro (ESP/Yamaha Tech3) 27.155, 9. Cal Crutchlow (GBR/Honda LCR) 27.202, 10. Alvaro Bautista (ESP/Aprilia) 33.968, 11. Danilo Petrucci (ITA/Ducati Pramac) 39.206, 12. Stefan Bradl (GER/Aprilia) 39.967.

Moto2 (all riding Kalex)1. Lorenzo Baldassarri (ITA) 42:45.885, 2. Alex Rins (ESP) 2.523, 3. Takaaki Nakagami (JPN) 6.199, 4. Johann Zarco (FRA) 8.942, 5. Franco Morbidelli (ITA) 10.016, 6. Thomas Luthi (SUI) 11.095, 7. Hafizh Syahrin (MAL) 13.048, 8. Jonas Folger (GER) 14.604, 9. Sandro Cortese (GER) 15.647, 10. Alex Mar-quez (ESP) 20.720.

Moto31. Brad Binder (RSA/KTM) 39:37.556, 2. Enea Bastianini (ITA/Honda) 0.262, 3. Joan Mir (ESP/KTM) 1.416, 4. Nicolo Bulega (ITA/KTM) 1.534, 5. Jakub Korn-feil (CZE/Honda) 4.278, 6. Andrea Locatelli (ITA/KTM) 4.387, 7. Aaron Canet (ESP/Honda) 4.811, 8. Philipp Oettl (GER/KTM) 5.582, 9. Hiroki Ono (JPN/Honda) 6.259, 10. Fabio Di Giannantonio (ITA/Honda) 10.896.

Starting from eighth on the grid, the Spaniard claims first win of the season, Rossi finishes runner-up as Lorenzo takes third spot

Rain lashes

Serie A games AFP

MILAN: Torrential rain forced Serie A officials to postpone the Genoa vs Fiorentina Serie A fix-ture at half-time on Sunday.

After an opening disrupted by the weather, poor visibility and poor playing conditions, Serie A officials announced the match had been postponed.

Meanwhile, the Roma vs Sampdoria fixture resumed with a delay of over 30 minutes after large sections of the pitch resem-bled a lake following a spectacular downpour.

Sampdoria held a 2-1 lead at the Stadio Olimpico after goals from Fabio Quagliarella and Luis Muriel cancelled out Mohamed Salah’s opener for the hosts.

But by then the pitch was sporting a thick layer of hailstones and at the start of the second half huge puddles were visible on the pitch.

Newly-promoted Alaves stun Barca AFP

MADRID: Newly-promoted Alaves stunned Spanish champions Barce-lona by winning 2-1 at the Camp Nou on Saturday as boss Luis Enrique paid a heavy price for starting Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez on the bench.

Barca now trail Real Madrid by three points at the top of the table after Cristiano Ronaldo took just five minutes to score on his return from a two-month injury layoff in a 5-2 rout of Osasuna at the Bernabeu.

Enrique made seven changes from their last outing – a 1-0 win at Athletic Bilbao two weeks ago – with Messi recovering from a groin prob-lem and Suarez rested following his exertions in World Cup qualifying with Uruguay.

“It wasn’t a good day from the start, we weren’t precise enough,” said Enrique.

“On the day we weren’t fluid in attack, we were fragile in defence.

They had three shots on goal and scored two goals.”

His wholesale changes backfired as Barca failed to unlock Alaves’s mass ranks of defence before the break and went behind when Dey-verson turned Kiko Femenia’s cross past Jasper Cillessen on his Barca debut.

Neymar was the only one of Bar-ca’s star “MSN” front three to start on his first appearance of the season after leading Brazil to Olympic gold and should have levelled moments later when he failed to hit the target with a free header inside the area.

The Brazilian provided the assist as Jeremy Mathieu headed home Bar-ca’s equaliser from a corner a minute after the break and the French defender somehow blasted wide with the goal gaping moments later.

Messi was summoned on the hour mark, but there was another shock to come for the hosts when Ibai Gomez took advantage of some awful Barca defending to put Alaves back in the front.

Andres Iniesta and Suarez were also called upon as the “MSN” were reunited for the first time in four months, but even they couldn’t break the Alaves resistance as the Basques held out for their first La Liga win in a decade.

“We couldn’t find the speed or precision we needed at the right moments,” lamented Iniesta.

Enrique admitted responsibilty of the shock loss.

“I am the one ultimately respon-sible for all the bad things that happen,” said the Barca boss after suffering just his fifth home league defeat in three seasons in charge at the Camp Nou.

“Many of the changes came from the circumstances surrounding us, but we have 22 players and we are going to use everyone this season,” he said.

“We lacked fluidity, precision and we were fragile in defence, which is one of the things that nor-mally makes us strong,” added the Barcelona boss.

Barcelona’s Argentinian forward Lionel Messi (right) vies for the ball possession with Alaves’ defender Victor Laguardia during their La Liga match at the Camp Nou Stadium in Barcelona on Saturday.

Cummings completes

victory in Tour of Britain

AFP

LONDON: Steve Cummings safely navigated the final stage of the Tour of Britain to secure overall victory in the race in London yesterday.

Dimension Data rider Cum-mings, 35, was runner-up in 2008 and 2011 and became only the sec-ond Briton to win the race since its 2004 rebrand after Bradley Wig-gins in 2013.

He finished in the peloton as Australia’s Caleb Ewan prevailed in a sprint finish at Piccadilly Cir-cus after a 16-lap, 100 kilometres course.

“I’m delighted. Finally I can smile and enjoy it,” Cummings said, in comments published on the BBC website.

“It’s been a tough week. It was so close that it wasn’t done until I crossed the line.

“I’d to thank all my team-mates for keeping me out of trouble and the British public for supporting every day like they have. It’s been a great week.”

Australia’s Rohan Dennis came second overall, 26 seconds off the pace, with Dutchman Tom Dumou-lin third.

Victory continues a fine year for Cummings, who claimed stage vic-tories in the Tirreno-Adriatico, the Tour of the Basque Country, the Cri-terium du Dauphine and the Tour de France.

He assumed the overall lead with an eight-place finish on stage six and preserved his advantage on the last stage despite having lost time the day before.

Dutch rider Jasper Bovenhuis won the sprint classification, Bel-gian Xandro Meurisse was the best climber and Dylan Groenewegen of the Netherlands won the points classification.

Moody escapes further punishment for tackle AFP

HAMILTON: All Blacks prop Joe Moody was yesterday issued an offi-cial warning for a head-high tackle on Argentina’s Guido Petti during their Rugby Championship Test.

The decision to take no further action comes at a time when rugby authorities face growing accusa-tions of leniency towards the world champion New Zealanders.

Moody was penalised for the tackle shortly before half-time in the Test, won by New Zealand 57-22, but South African referee Craig Joubert ruled no other action was required.

In a statement yesterday, the game citing commissioner said Moody had since received an offi-cial warning for a dangerous tackle.

A citing commissioner can issue a warning for “foul play incidents that are very close to, but in his

opinion do not meet the red card threshold for citings,” the state-ment said.

The All Blacks have been under fire since their Test against Aus-tralia two weeks ago when there were suggestions prop Owen Franks had gouged the eyes of Wallabies lock Kane Douglas.

Franks was not cited with offi-cials deciding there was no case to answer. Douglas said no contact had been made with his eyes.

But that did not stop howls of outrage led by former Irish interna-tional Brian O’Driscoll who tweeted: “It makes a mockery of citing. If nothing comes of this it’s a farce.”

British rugby writer Stephen Jones labelled the incident “unpun-ished All Black savagery” while former Wallaby Matt Burke said it ws “beyond belief” that Franks was not punished.

“I’m actually surprised Douglas wasn’t penalised for making contact with Franks’ fingers,” Burke said.

Britain’s Steve Cummings, riding

for Dimension Data, celebrates on the podium in his leader’s yellow jersey

after his overall victory in the Tour

of Britain cycle race in London,

yesterday.

Pedrosa shocks Rossi and Lorenzo at San Marino GP

PAGE | 21 PAGE | 23

Johnson breaks clear for three-shot

lead at BMW

MONDAY 12 SEPTEMBER 2016 • 10 DHUL HIJJA 1437

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EPL: Costa scores twice but Swansea hold ChelseaReuters

LONDON: Diego Costa scored twice but could not prevent Chelsea losing their 100 percent Premier League record in a controversial 2-2 draw at Swansea yesterday.

The result left Manchester City two points clear of them at the top of the table.

The fiery Spain striker scored in the 17th minute as Antonio Conte’s team took control of the game before conceding twice in quick succession.

In the 59th minute goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois gave away a pen-alty by fouling Gylfi Sigurdsson after a Swansea counter-attack and the Ice-land international got up to convert it. Then Gary Cahill was dispossessed by Leroy Fer and apparently fouled, but Fer was allowed to go on and score.

Nine minutes from the end Costa, who also received his third yellow card in four games, equalised with an overhead scissors kick that might have been penalised for dangerous play.

Chelsea should have been further ahead at the interval. ukasz Fabianski made saves from Willian, Eden Haz-ard and Cesar Azpilicueta, before Costa was guilty of an extraordinary miss. As John Terry flicked on a cor-ner the Spanish international was

unmarked two metres from goal but directed the ball wide.

Fortunately for the Londoners, Costa had been sharper earlier on, guiding the ball perfectly just inside a post as Oscar laid it square to him.

It was poor Swansea defending,

however, as Federico Fernandez twice failed to clear.

Manager Francesco Guidolin changed tactics from a misfiring 3-5-1-1 system before halftime, withdrawing the disgruntled Welsh international Neil Taylor for

Gambian winger Modou Barrow. He could hardly have envisaged such a dramatic turnaround, helped as it was by mistakes from Courtois and Cahill. Costa continued to be involved in controversy right to the finish.

Booked for a foul, he could have been sent off after an apparent dive, but had the last word with an acro-batic effort that may have made slight contact with defender Kyle Naughton’s head and went in off Federico Fernandez’s face

QSL season set for grand kick off

The Peninsula

DOHA: The new season of Qatar Stars League is set for a grand kick off with Al Ahli taking on Al Gharafa in the first game at Hamad bin Khalifa Stadium on Thursday.

Both sides will be looking to grab an early victory and to build solid foun-dations for the season ahead.

Al Ahli, Qatar’s oldest football club will head into the first game of the sea-son after enjoying a good preseason under new coach Luka Bonačić.

The Croatian coach was brought in at the end of the season, and is no stranger to the QSL, after enjoying a stint with Al Shahania. The 61 year old will be charged with improving the for-tunes of the brigadiers who finished strongly in sixth place last season.

The club has been relatively quiet in the transfer market electing for stability over change. Despite the sta-bility, Al Ahli is expected to announce the signing of a foreign professional in the coming days before the start of the season.

Al Ahli will be relying on the goals of Congolese striker Firmin Ndombe Mubele if they are to grab all three points. The young attacker is set to start his second season in the QSL, and will be looking to better his eight goal tally from last term.

As for Al Gharafa, they have enjoyed an extended preseason under head coach Pedro Caixinia in Portugal and Doha. The charismatic Portuguese

tactician was rewarded with a contract extension last year, and will be charged with pushing the Cheetahs back into the top four places.

In the transfer market, Gharafa have made a move for South Korean international Kooky Han who was signed from relegated Qatar Sports Club. In an exclusive interview earlier in the summer Caixina underlined the importance of the player for his team.

“Han is a real box to box midfielder he is constantly involved with the game and gives us plenty of pace moving forward and defending. We are much more balanced in the heart of the mid-field now and Han will help us inforce the patterns of play that we want here at Gharafa.”

Han will have to be at his dynamic best if the Cheetahs are to grab all three points away from home.

The much awaited season opener will kick off at 6.00pm at Al Ahli Stadium.

Al Gharafa to face Al Ahli in opening game on Thursday

Lekhwiya reveal new club logoThe Peninsula

DOHA: Lekhwiya revealed a new club badge ahead of the 2016/2017 season on Saturday.

The new crest will have a color scheme of red and silver, replacing the previous red and gold design, whilst the founding year of the club has also been added into the badge.

Speaking at the launch of the design Lekhwiya midfielder Ali Afif said; “I think the design represents the club well and I hope this new badge can bring the club further success in the new season.”

The Red Knights are set to kick-off their QSL season with a home match against Muaither on Sep-tember 17.

Al Ahli SC player Abdul Ghafoor Abdullah (top) heads the ball during a QSL clash against Al Wakrah at Al Ahli Stadium, in this January 2016 file photo.

Lekhwiya players and officials attend the launch of their club’s new logo design

QNA

DOHA: Qatar will host a brand new Ladies European Tour tour-nament from 2016 onwards. The Qatar Ladies Open will be much more than just a big golf tourna-ment, empowering Qatari women and leaving a lasting legacy on the golf scene in the region.

The full field event, which will take place from November 23-26 at Doha Golf Club, will be the third Ladies European Tour event in the Middle East, joining the Omega Dubai Ladies Masters and recently announced Fatima Bint Mubarak Ladies Open in Abu Dhabi.

QNA

RIO DE JANEIRO: The Secre-tary General of Qatar Olympic Committee (QOC) Dr. Thani bin Abdulrahman Al Kuwari vis-ited the Olympic Village that accommodates all the athletes participating in the Paralympic Games Rio 2016, to encourage the Qatari athletes before the Begin-ning of the competitions.

He met with the Qatari Par-alympic mission where he was briefed by the chief of the mis-sion Abdulqadir Al Mutawa on the ongoing preparations and arrangements for providing all the necessary facilities to the athletes.

He also praised the Qatari athletes and urged them to make every effort to benefit from this important opportunity.

AP

ZAGREB: International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach is quoted as saying his absence from the opening of the Paralym-pic Games in Rio de Janeiro has nothing to do with the charges brought by Brazilian prosecutors against another high-ranking IOC official.

Olympic Council of Ireland President Patrick Hickey is among ten people facing charges of ticket scalping, conspiracy and ambush marketing related to last month’s Olympics. Police investigators have said they wanted to speak with Bach about email exchanges he had with Hickey related to Ire-land’s ticket allocation.

Bach said he missed the cer-emony to attend the funeral in Germany for former West Ger-many president Walter Scheel.

In comments translated into Croatian and published on the Croatian Olympic Committee website, Bach also said he didn’t want to cancel a visit to the coun-try for the second time in just three months.

Golf: Qatar to host Ladies European Tour

Paralympics: Al Kuwari visits Qatari athletes in Rio

Bach defendsdecision to miss Paralympics opening ceremony

Chelsea’s Diego Costa scores their second goal against Swansea City during their English Premier League match played at Liberty Stadium yesterday.

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