Intensify efforts to with President protect information E ... cyber crimes which has spread and...

The Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani warned of the dangers related to information security, especially those related to cyber crimes which has spread and affected developed countries and major companies.

Volume 22 | Number 7337 | 2 RiyalsMonday 6 November 2017 | 17 Safar 1439 www.thepeninsulaqatar.com

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QATAR

155UNDER SIEGE

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The State of Qatar has condemned and denounced the target-

ing of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, by a ballistic missile. In a statement yesterday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reiterated Qatar’s rejection of any direct or indiscriminate attacks against civilians as a violation of international humanitarian law. It called on all parties to avoid escalation and engage in a comprehen-sive dialogue to end the war and restore stability to Yemen. The statement also reiterated Qatar’s firm and supportive stance of the Gulf initiative, the outcomes of the national dialogue, and UN resolutions aimed at restor-ing stability in Yemen.

Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani sent yesterday a cable

of condolences to President of People’s Republic of Bang-ladesh, Muhammad Abdul Hamid, on the death of former president Abdur Rah-man Biswas. Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani sent a simi-lar cable. Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Kha-lifa Al Thani also sent a cable of condolences to the Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina Wajed , on the death of former president Abdur Rahman Biswas.

Qatar has strongly con-demned the two attacks targeting a mosque in

central Kirkuk, Iraq that resulted in a number of deaths and injuries. In a statement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reit-erated Qatar’s firm stance rejecting violence and terror-ism regardless of motives and reasons. The statement stressed Qatar’s total rejec-tion of targeting places of worship and intimidating civilians. The statement expressed Qatar’s condolences to the families of the victims, the government and the peo-ple of Iraq, wishing the injured speedy recovery.

Emir condoles with President of Bangladesh

Qatar condemns targeting of Riyadh by ballistic missile

Qatar flays attacks on Kirkuk mosque

Intensify efforts to protect information security, says PMThe Peninsula

Prime Minister and Interior Min-ister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani has said that Qatar works in full coordination with all regional

and international institutions and organ-isations to unify policies and to promote and protect efforts for protecting infor-mation security.

“In this context several committees have been formed at the level of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to link and develop payment and settlement systems and to enhance information secu-rity and protection, in addition to coordination in the field of supervision and control,” he said while speaking at 4th Conference of Information Security in the Financial Institutions under the title “cyber-hacking and its impact on the econ-omy,” organised by Qatar Central Bank (QCB), at Sheraton Doha Hotel yesterday.

“Coordination is also being under-taken at the international level to enhance information security, particularly in the financial sector, and to benefit from inter-national expertise and experience in this field,” the Prime Minister said.

The event was attended by a number of Their Excellencies the Sheikhs and Min-isters, and a number of Their Excellencies the Ambassadors accredited to the State

QNA/Anatolia

The Qatar Emiri Air Force (QEAF) yesterday inaugurated the Heli-copter Simulation Flight Training

Center “Augusta AW139”, at Al Udeid Air Base. The Center was inaugurated by Minister of State for Defence Affairs H E Dr. Khalid bin Mohamed Al Attiyah, along with the National Defence Minis-ter of the sisterly Republic of Turkey, Nurettin Canikli.

The Augusta AW139 helicopter sim-ulation center is a training center for pilots and aircraft crew using 3D tech-nology at both the foundation, progressive and operational levels and in all climatic conditions. The simula-tor was manufactured by the Turkish Havelsan company which is considered the latest and best for its advanced tech-nology and efficiency .

The new Center provides more than 3,800 training hours per year, to upgrade

pilots efficiency and reduce the opera-tional cost of aircrafts. The center can also be linked to all aircraft simulators located at the Emiri Air Force.

Earlier in the day, Canikli was received by his Qatari counterpart at Al Udeid Air Base. During the ceremony, Canikli gave a presentation on the

facility built by the Turkish state-run air defence and military software com-pany Havelsan.

Canikli described Turkey and Qatar as two sister countries enjoying a strate-gic partnership. “Our ties in the field of defence will improve and the new train-ing facility is in accordance with our objectives, Canikli said.

The Turkish National Defence Minis-ter stressed that his country has made progress to manufacture its military needs, but “we have to improve ourselves even more, working together”, he added.

Following the inauguration, Al Atti-yah and Canikli inspected the facility together with other military delegations. The project was signed on May 10, 2013 with the aim of meeting the needs of AW 139 helicopter pilots and operators in Qatari Air Forces. By the end of 2016, the project moved to Qatar.

→ See also page 3

QEAF opens Augusta AW139 helicopter simulation center

Sachin Kumar The Peninsula

Public sector commercial bank deposits value reached QR302.6bn during September

2017, registering a surge of 68.4 per-cent compared to the value of banks deposits during the same month last year. The deposits have witnessed a monthly increase of 2.5 percent, said Qatar Monthly Statistics bulletin released yesterday by the Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics.

The total population of Qatar has

increased to more than 2.63 million at end of September this year from 2.55 million in September last year, showing an annual increase of 3.2 percent. Traffic cases declined dur-ing the month as 417 traffic cases were recorded during September compared to 450 cases in August 2017, showing a monthly fall of 7.3 percent.

The total number of registered marriages was 284 marriages during September 2017, whereas the total no of divorces reached 74 cases.

Social security value, in the month of September 2017, witnessed

a significant increase in number of social security beneficiaries as it reached 14,220 individuals, whereas the total value of social security has reached QR81.1bn during September 2017. A total number of 2,103 live births were registered during Septem-ber 2017, while 175 death cases were recorded during the same period.

According to the monthly bulle-tin, the total number of registered vehicles reached 4,140 new vehicles during September this year, record-ing at decline of 23.6 percent compared to previous month this

year as 5,420 new vehicles were reg-istered in August. The bulletin showed that the total electricity utilisation value during Septem-ber 2017 was 4,383.3 GWh attaining a monthly decrease of 5.6 percent compared to last month.

The bulletin also showed that the total value of water consumption reached 43,064.7 thousand cubic meters during the same month, attain-ing a monthly decrease of 5.2 percent as compared with last month.

→ Continued on page 2

Minister of State for Defence Affairs H E Dr. Khalid bin Mohamed Al Attiyah, along with the National Defence Minister of the sisterly Republic of Turkey, Nurettin Canikli, and other dignitaries during the inauguration ceremony.

Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani speaking at 4th Conference of Information Security in the Financial Institutions organised by Qatar Central Bank, at Sheraton Doha Hotel, yesterday.

of Qatar. The Prime Minister warned of the dangers related to information security, especially those related to cyber crimes which has spread and affected developed countries and major companies.

The Prime Minister referred to the ter-rible hack that targeted the Qatar News Agency (QNA) website last May through different, fabricated and false attributing statements for H H the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, in attempt to harm the State of Qatar and escalate the current crisis by the siege countries.

He said the concept of information security has massively changed with the role of information developing, where is

has become an important factor for all the countries’ components the govern-mental and non -governmental.

The Prime Minister stressed on the need to intensify the local, regional and

international efforts to find the best ways to protect information security and lessen the dangers surrounding it.

→ Continued on page 3

Public sector commercial bank deposits surge 68.4% in SeptQAF parachute jumps in Sealine from November 12 QNA

The Directorate of Moral Guidance announced that the Qatari Armed Forces will conduct parachute jumps by two

C-130 aircraft for the seventh session of par-achuting instructors in Sealine area from November 12 to 23.

The exercises will be carried out from 6am to 12 noon at an altitude of 1,500 feet and the radius of half mile.

The Directorate of Moral Guidance has called on those who frequently visit the area to take precautions for their own safety.

B

02 MONDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2017HOME

Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani with Republic of Turkey’s Minister of Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications Ahmet Arslan. During the meeting, they discussed cooperation relations between the two brotherly countries, and means to further develop them, especially in the fields of transport and communication. The two sides also discussed a host of topics of mutual interest.

Qatar remains stronger than ever: EnvoyQNA

Ambassador of the State of Qatar to the Italian Republic, H E Abdulaziz

bin Ahmed Al Malki, said that after several months of the siege, the state of Qatar remains stronger than ever before, and able to develop its international relations and stand on the world stage to protects its interests.

In an interview with the La Nueva Sardegna , he said “The State of Qatar since the begin-ning of the crisis has ready for dialogue with the siege coun-tries, on condition that its sovereignty is not to be compromised.”

In response to a question

about the repercussions of the siege on life in Qatar, the Ambassador pointed out that 20,000 families have been affected by this siege, only because one of its members is Qatari.

He noted that food security in the country has been ensured quickly, explaining that “we have imports from other coun-tries in the region, but, with the closure of borders, as well as the suspension of flights and the freezing of political contacts and business, many families have been affected.”

“We are working for this, too, so that the siege can be lifted and we can improve the status of the 20,000 families,

consisting of Qataris and citizens of other members of the Arab States who have been affected by these measures,” The ambas-sador added.

The ambassador said that the crisis was as a result of some fabricated statements attributed to Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and it was pub-lished on the website of QNA.

“We asked for assistance of the FBI to find out who did this hacking, and we are waiting for results of this investigation so that our police will pass it to the Attorney General,” the ambas-sador said, adding that it was a provocation to start a plot that had been set up with the aim of besieging Qatar.

Continued from page 1As for the buildings permit’s

information, the bulletin showed that total number of permits reached 472 permits during Sep-tember 2017, recording a monthly decrease of 34.4 percent in com-parison with the previous month August 2017.

Total broad money supply (M2) recorded about QR564.8bn during the month of September this year, showing an annual increase of 14.5 percent compared with September 2016 from last year. Cash equivalents (including deposits) were QR797.8bn dur-ing September 2017. The figure

has recorded an annual increase of 17.5 percent in comparison with September 2016 from last year. The monthly bulletin contains various social and economic sta-tistical indicators related to Qatar. Next issue of the bulletin is expected to be released by the end of this month.

Min i s te r o f Municipality and E n v i r o n m e n t H E Mohammed bin Abdullah Al Rumaihi (second left) with Hungarian Ambassador Fodor Barnabas (left), Undersecretary of the Ministry of Economy and Commerce Sultan bin Rashid Al Khater (centre) and other officials during the National Day of Hungary event. Pic: Kammutty

VP / The Peninsula

National Day of Hungary celebrated

Course on nuclear technologies to enrich agricultural research beginsQNA

The National Training Course on the use of nuclear tech-nologies to enrich

agricultural research to achieve sustainable food security in Qatar began here yesterday and will continue until the 16th of Novem-ber. The course is being organized by the Ministry of Municipality and Environment in cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The course aims at increas-ing the capacity of researchers and staff of the Agricultural Research Department on plant breeding, plant physiology, his-tological propagation of date palm blossoms, methods of detection of modified plants and study of variability between mother plants and newly devel-oped plants.

Undersecretary of the Min-istry of Municipality and Environment for Agriculture and Fisheries Affairs, H E Sheikh Dr Faleh bin Nasser Al Thani, said that under the wise leadership, the ministry is exerting all efforts to achieve food security, protect

the environment of Qatar, pre-serve its natural resources and keep abreast of regional and glo-bal changes and developments in the fields of agricultural research and environmental sustainability.

Sheikh Dr Faleh bin Nasser Al Thani, in his speech delivered on his behalf by Hamad Al Sham-mari, Deputy Director of the Agricultural Research Depart-ment at the Ministry, said that the accomplishments of the Minis-try are only an interpretations of the guidance of the wise leader-ship, which gives the environment great attention so

that the country’s food security has become closely linked to development.

For her part, Head of Genetic Resources Department, at the Agricultural Research Depart-ment Aisha Dasmal Al Kuwari stressed the importance of the Ministry’s efforts for the achieve-ment of a number of goals, most importantly food security, agri-cultural research, environmental protection and natural balance through comprehensive and sus-tainable development for the benefit of future generations according to Qatar National Vision.

Public sector commercial bank deposits surge

Officials and other participants at the National Training Course.

Turkish Minister visits Hamad PortThe Peninsula

Turkish Minister of Transport, Marine Affairs

and Communica-tions, Ahmet Arslan has paid a visit to Hamad Port accom-panied by Minister of Transport and Com-munications H E Jassim bin Saif Ahmed Al Sulaiti and listened to a detailed description about the project and its sched-uled expansion plans, which includes the construction of the second phase and port’s capacity enhancement.

During the visit, Arslan watched some of the port’s operations and commercial

vessels movement at container, general cargo and miscellane-ous cargo terminals. The Turkish official hailed the advanced equipment installed at the port,

which places it among world seaports, affirming that Hamad Port is going to help increase cooperation between Qatar and Turkey.

Minister of Transport and Communications H E Jassim bin Saif Ahmed Al Sulaiti and Turkish Minister of Transport, Marine Affairs and Communications, Ahmet Arslan, during the visit to Hamad Port.

Prime Minister meets Turkey’s Minister of Transport

03MONDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2017 HOME

Intensify efforts to protect information security: PM

Continued from page 1The Prime Minister said effective

protection will not be achieved unless joint cooperation between all parties is established locally, regionally and inter-nationally, in addition to setting strategies based on basic substrates of defence, deterrence and development.

The Prime Minister added that the large development witnessed by infor-mation technology in the past years, has had positive and vital changes in the glo-bal economy especially with diversifying it and turning it into knowledge econ-omy. “However, despite these great advantages of the rapid development of

information technology, it has come with a number of dangers such as cyber crimes which has spread and remains to be widely spread,” the Prime Minister said.

The Prime Minister said in 2015, cyber crimes around the world resulted in a yearly loss of almost $500bn, add-ing the media reports reveal daily of the continuity of cyber attacks and the vol-ume of threat and danger the world faces.

He said that it is enough to look at the attacks that took place in different countries around the world and resulted in the closure of many industrial facili-ties, where the experts expect the losses

of cyber crimes to reach more than $2 trillion globally by 2019.

The Prime Minister said that Qatar, in order to protect and achieve compre-hensive national security in accordance with the directives of Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, has attached great importance to this matter, by tak-ing all measures, procedures and plans to ensure the protection of the security of national information by protecting the infrastructure of classified information from hacking and theft.

The Prime Minister pointed out to the formation of a high committee to pre-pare policies and programs. The

membership of the committee includes representatives from all sectors in the country, and it has sub-committees for each sector. “Coordination is held at the highest level between all committees and the Supreme Committee in order to achieve the desired objectives to ensure the achievement of information secu-rity,” he added.

The Prime Minister said that the State of Qatar seeks to create an environment conducive to investments in all fields in order to diversify the economy and achieve economic development, which is one of the most important pillars of Qatar National Vision 2030.

Qatar Flag-coloured garments trend at Heya exhibitionAmna Pervaiz Rao The Peninsula

Garments made with ‘Qatari Flag’ colours, white and maroon, are trending at

12th edition of Heya Arabian Fashion Exhibition, helping women gear up for the National Day celebrations.

Several Qatari designers have showcased their collection with Qatar’s flag coloured designed garments. As the demand increases for clothes based on Flag colours, designers have started to take orders to prepare for Qatar National Day.

The 12th edition of Heya Ara-bian Fashion Exhibition has increased Qatari designers by 25% from the previous edition. Varieties of brand-new designs of ladies ready-made garments are available at the exhibition.

At Abaya-A-Porter pavilion, A Qatari designer told The Penin-sula: “As Qatar National Day is just round the corner, we focused on the demand of Qatar’s flag coloured dresses which were designed for casual and formal gatherings. Tourist coming from different countries also find these flag-based dresses one of its kind. Showcasing our flag col-our based garments depicts the enthusiasm for National Day

preparation. Many Qatari design-ers this year are displaying such clothes, we feel proud to see us together under one roof.”

“I have used these colours for abayas as well. The material we have used are suitable for win-ters and autumn both weathers. Special dresses for Hijabi ladies, we kept every nationality in mind while doing this team work.

Some of our national day dresses have glitters and crystals to make them party-wear as well,” she added.

Many new Qatari designers have participated in the exhibi-tion and a few of the designers showcases their work every year. The renown brand ‘Debaj’ came up with something special based on Qatar’s National Day as well.

Elisabete Reis, Brand Ambas-sador of Debaj said: “This year we are showcasing ‘Sultana’ col-lection, which is inspired by the beautiful ladies in Qatar. Sultana is highly associated with a women who have beauty, power and strength. We have a lot of maroon colour this year which is linked with Qatar National Day and the trend of winter and

autumn season. We have a lot of details of embroidery on velvet this year. This year’s collection consists of many colours which include, beige, pink, rose gold, green and metallic shades. The designs fits different personali-ties of different women.”

Visitors at Heya Exhibition can find more than 150 abaya and modest fashion brands from over 15 countries, including, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, India, Tur-key, Lebanon, Indonesia, Morocco, Spain, Germany, Italy, Sri Lanka, the UK, France, Mex-ico and Hong Kong for the first time. The show offers a unique flavour of Arabian heritage, with returning brands including Debaj, Al Motahajiba, Al Dukan, and Harlienz, as well as new popular brands Q-Label, Dary collection, Modish, and Ende-mage from Oman.

A regular local customer at the exhibition said, “Being a loyal customer at Heya Exhibition, I never walk out the expo with dis-appointment, it is amazing how the Qatari designers have dis-played ‘Tamim Al Majid’ famous portrait on their stalls. Heya every year brings innovation in designs and the setup. I am happy to see many countries participating this year. I am look-ing forward to buy new designs

for Qatar National Day. Witness-ing the variety of garments always leaves us confused to make a wise choice.”

Today visitors are invited to attend Heya to participate in a variety of engaging workshops designed to nurture local design-ers, including; ‘VCU: The Mood & Design Board’ (7pm) and ‘Makeup Consultation with Wojooh’ (7:30pm).

In addition, Qatar’s popular social media fashion influencers Fatma Al Ahmed, Creativity with Kay and Yezenia Navarro, will host a forum for guests on ‘Sketching Your Blogging Suc-cess: The Dos and Don’ts’ (6:35pm). The session aims at laying the right foundations and will encourage listeners to blog correctly, sharing their own experiences.

Held under the patronage of HE Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, vis-itors are encouraged to attend and browse a variety of more than 150 abaya and modest fash-ion brands from emerging and established designers. This includes unique collections, from high-street apparel, couture and luxury, to the latest modest fash-ion evening gowns, leather accessories, and for the first-time perfumery and make-up.

Qatari Flag coloured garments at 12th Heya Arabian Fashion Exhibition which is taking place at DECC. Pic: Baher Amin / The Peninsula

Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani at the 4th conference of Information Security in the Financial Institutions. The event was attended by a number of Their Excellencies Sheikhs and Ministers, and a number of Their Excellencies Ambassadors accredited to the State of Qatar.

Minister of State for Defence Affairs H E Dr Khalid bin Mohamed Al Attiyah, along with the National Defence Minister of the sisterly Republic of Turkey, Nurettin Canikli, and other dignitaries during the inauguration ceremony of the Helicopter Simulation Flight Training Center “Augusta AW139”, at Al Udeid Air Base.

The Prime Minister said that the State of Qatar seeks to create an environment conducive to investments in all fields in order to diversify the economy and achieve economic development, which is one of the most important pillars of Qatar National Vision 2030.

Qatar Emiri Air Force inaugurates Helicopter Simulation Flight Training Center


QGBC launches campaign to educate people about sustainable lifestyleThe Peninsula

Qatar Green Building Council (QGBC), a member of Qatar Foundation, launched the ‘Green Life’ national

sustainability campaign to educate peo-ple about sustainable lifestyle at the opening of Qatar Sustainability Week 2017.

Green Life is the world’s first sustain-ability loyalty program that aims to raise public awareness on what it means to be ‘green’.

The initiative uses the Green Life mobile application to personalise the con-cept in an effort to create community-driven sustainable lifestyles among Qatar’s residents. It is designed to demonstrate how sustainability can become part of everyday life, and how the public can get rewards by tracking their efforts.

The application allows users to track their everyday green practices such as attending Qatar Sustainability Week events, purchasing products, and partici-pating in initiatives. Users collect points which can then be redeemed for valuable rewards, said a release.

Eng Meshal Al Shamari, Director, QGBC, welcomed Green Life’s strategic partners: The National Programme for Conservation & Energy Efficiency ‘Tar-sheed’, Aspire Zone Foundation (AZF), and Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q) – a QF partner university – at an official

signing and launch of the national cam-paign at the Qatar National Convention Centre on October 29.

Al Shamari commented on the official launch, saying: “We’re very grateful to our strategic partners for helping to make it happen. This initiative aims to support Qatar’s commitment to sustainability prac-tices and environmental protection in the

nation’s transition to becoming a sustain-able and diverse economy as set out in Qatar National Vision 2030.

It is a demonstration of our commit-ment to creating a collaborative environment between members of the public and different industries to work together towards achieving the sustaina-bility goals of the State of Qatar.”

QTA to launch ‘Qatar Welcomes the World’ driveThe Peninsula

Qatar Tourism Authority (QTA) is set to launch Qatar’s latest destination promotion campaign, ‘Qatar Welcomes the

World’ at the 37th World Travel Mar-ket (WTM).

The campaign which capitalises on the country’s new visa facilita-tion measures aims to leverage WTM’s platform to extend its audi-ence reach. Qatar is now the region’s most open country with nationals of over 80 countries eligible for a free entry visa waiver. To further facilitate visitor access, the country introduced an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) system for vis-itors of all nationalities who hold valid residence permits or visas from the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Schengen coun-tries, or the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Rashed Al Qurese, Chief Market-ing & Promotion Officer at QTA said, “Qatar Welcomes the World is the country’s largest destination promo-tion campaign yet and comes as part of our efforts to diversify Qatar’s vis-itor source markets. We are particularly excited to be launching it at WTM, where our stand’s visi-tors from across the global tourism and travel industry have an oppor-tunity to learn more about the developments that make Qatar the most open country in our region.”

WTM, which kicks off today in London, is the global tourism indus-try’s most anticipated annual event. The three-day event held at the ExCel Centre, brings together over 50,000 senior travel industry pro-fessionals, tourism industry leaders, government officials and interna-tional press.

Qatar’s delegation to WTM this year includes 24 hotels and Desti-nation Management Companies (DMCs) representing the variety and range of Qatar’s leisure tourism options. QTA will be exhibiting alongside these private sector part-ners at WTM providing a comprehensive one-stop showcase of the destination’s extensive offerings.

At the QTA stand, visitors are invited to collect ‘Your Passport to Qatar’, a brochure clearly

explaining the various visitor visa types and the different systems for that have been put in place to make a visit to Qatar — whether for a stop-over, a short break or as a final destination — a smooth and enjoy-able process.

The campaign will also see a fleet of taxis branded ‘Qatar Wel-comes the World’ stationed around the ExCel Centre and in London dur-ing WTM and into 2018, encouraging those attending the show and those living in and visiting London to dis-cover more about Qatar and its attractions. In addition, a social media competition for the campaign encourages people in London to snap a photo of one of the branded taxis and upload to social media tag-ging @VisitQatar and using the hashtag #PassportToQatar. The most creative photo will win a three-night trip to Qatar for two, including accommodation at the luxurious Sharq Village & Spa and flights with Qatar Airways.

WTM delegates gather each year to network and negotiate with rep-resentatives from global tourism destinations, and to discover latest investment opportunities in tourism industry. This year, Qatar’s stand number at WTM is ME 100.

The delegation includes Alwadi Hotel Doha, Amari Doha, Century Hotel Doha, Discover Qatar, Doha Marriott Hotel, Fal Travelmart Travel & Tours, First Travel & Tourism, Grand Hyatt Doha, Gulf Adventures, Holiday Villa Hotel, InterContinental Doha, InterContinental Doha - The City, Labbaik Travel, Mandarin Ori-ental Doha, Mondrian Doha, Radisson Blu Hotel Doha, Regency Travel & Tours, Rehlaty for Travel & Tourism, Sharq Village & Spa, Sher-aton Grand Doha Resort & Convention Hotel, The Ritz-Carlton Doha, Travel Designer, Unique Choice and Qatar Airways.

QCS launches ‘our passion in our health’ program at Ooredoo Cancer Awareness CenterThe Peninsula

Qatar Cancer Society (QCS) has launched ‘our passion in our health’ program at Ooredoo Cancer Aware-

ness Center, which lasts for 3 months and targets all women in the Qatari community.

The program aims to raise awareness among women about the most common types of cancers among women in Qatar (Breast cancer, Cervical cancer, Thyroid cancer). It will educate them about the importance of adopting a healthy lifestyle and how to modify unhealthy to healthy lifestyle.

The program will also educate women on issues related to the most common can-cers among women, including information about the most important risk factors related to cancer, warning signs and symp-toms, and methods of prevention, and early detection .

The program includes two parts. The theoretical part includes common cancers (Breast cancer, Cervical cancer, Thyroid cancer), prevention and early detection, and unhealthy lifestyle behaviours and its modification. The practical part is about training on breast cancer signs and symp-toms using educational models such as

breast cancer educational models, edu-cate the attendees on how to detect it, and to reinforce the concept of healthy life-styles through healthy nutrition. It also

includes healthy cooking workshops, prac-tical demonstration of healthy dishes with chef and nutritionist b emphasizing their role in the prevention of cancer.

Minister of Culture and Sports H E Salah bin Ghanem Al Ali with Chairman of the Audit Bureau H E Sheikh Bandar bin Mohammad Al Thani. During the meeting, they discussed aspects of cooperation and coordination to unite efforts on how best to achieve efficiency, and good governance in the management of public funds. The two sides agreed on joint cooperation and coordination, particularly with regard to State support to sports clubs, youth and cultural bodies, in order to achieve best accounting practices and relevant international standards.

Participants take part in the ‘our passion in our health’ program.

MEC recalls CMC Veryca 2017 modelsThe Peninsula

The Ministry of Economy and Commerce, in col-laboration with Doha

Marketing Services Company (Domasco), dealer of CMC vehicles in Qatar, has announced the recall of CMC Veryca model of 2017 because the chassis frame might crack and break.

The Ministry said the recall campaign comes within the framework of its ongoing efforts to protect consumers and ensure that car dealers follow up on vehicle defects and repairs.

The Ministry said that it will coordinate with the dealer to follow up on the maintenance and repair works and will communicate with customers to ensure that the necessary repairs are car-ried out.

Eng Meshal Al Shamari, Director, QGBC, with strategic partners at the event.

The campaign which capitalises on the country’s new visa facilitation measures aims to leverage World Travel Market ’s platform to extend its audience reach.

Minister meets Audit Bureau Chairman


Secretary-General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, H E Dr Ahmed bin Hassan Al Hammadi, with Head of the Inspection Team of the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Germany, Ricarda Redeker. The meeting discussed bilateral relations and ways of boosting them, as well as issues of mutual interest.

The Peninsula

Hamad Medical Corpora-tion (HMC) will welcome a number of visiting con-

sultants from various medical specialities during the month.

The visiting consultants are Dr Marc Ferrante, Assistant Pro-fessor at KU Leuven and Gastroenterology Specialist at the University Hospitals Leuven, in Leuven, Belgium, will visit from November 10 to 13 and Dr Anto-nio Torres, Professor of Surgery at the Complutense University of Madrid and Chief of the Gen-eral, Digestive and Thoracic

Surgery Service at the Cl�nico San Carlos Hospital in Madrid, Spain, will visit from November 10 to 15.

While, Dr Duncan Whitwell, Consultant Orthopedic Surgeon at the Nuffield Orthopedic Cen-tre NHS Trust in Oxford, England, will visit from November 11 to 13 and Dr Jeremy Cobbold, Consult-ant Hepatologist and Gastroenterologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford and the Manor Hospital, Oxford, England, will visit from November 18 to 22. Also patients can consult Dr Patrik Velander, Consultant Plastic Sur-geon at Sk�ne University Hospital

in Lund, Sweden, from Novem-ber 18 to 24 and Dr Hossein Gharib, Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medi-cine and Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism Specialist in Rochester, Minnesota, USA, will visit from 30 November to December 7.

Members of the public wish-ing to book an appointment with one of the visiting consultants are advised to discuss this option with their physician. If the doc-tor agrees that an appointment with a visiting consultant is appropriate, they will provide a referral.

Activities of QNCECC and Unesco outlined at seminarQNA

The Ministry of Culture and Sports organised yesterday a seminar on the activities of the National Commission

for Education, Culture and Science (QNCECC) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cul-tural Organization (Unesco) on the occasion of the anniversary of its founding on November 4, 1945.

During the seminar which was held at the Ministry’s headquar-ters, Cultural Consultant at QNCECC, Salem Bu Sharbak pre-sented detailed information about the Commission since its estab-lishment on February 25, 1962. The committee joined a number of Arab, regional and international organizations, explaining that the QNCECC has joined a number of Arab, regional and international organizations, including Unesco in 1972, the Arab

League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO) in 1975, the Arab Bureau of Edu-cation for the Gulf States in 1975 and the Islamic Educational, Sci-entific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) in 1982.

He said the QNCECC plays an active role in achieving the objec-tives of Unesco, which are consistent with the objectives of education in Qatar on the one hand and with the objectives of the QNCECC on the other, through the implementation of many of its programmes, projects and activ-ities in various fields and the

coordination with national, regional and international part-ners to promote citizenship, human rights, justice and human dignity.

The QNCECC aims to make Qatar’s membership in interna-tional, regional and Arab organisations a successful invest-ment that benefits all aspects of the educational, scientific and cul-tural activities in the country and contributes to the national devel-opment process according to Qatar National Vision, he added.

He addressed the most impor-tant objectives of the Commission, represented in strengthening com-munication between regional and international organisations and various bodies in Qatar, including familiarising the citizens with var-ious activities of organisations calling for understanding and rap-prochement between the countries of the world in general, and Islamic and Arab countries in

particular as well as providing advice to the delegations of Qatar to the general conferences of the organisations, and to the official bodies in the State concerned with the programmes of cultural, edu-cational and scientific organisations, and providing assistance to the competent organs of the State with a view to ena-bling them to make maximum use of the activities of these organisations.

He pointed out that the QNCECC aims to meet the needs of the ministries and institutions concerned with the activities and programmes of the organisations related to education, culture and science, and to highlight the sta-tus of Qatar locally and internationally in the fields of edu-cation, culture, science and communication. The QNCECC also seeks to open channels of com-munication with the Qatari public in all its categories through differ-

ent media outlets.On the values and principles

on which the Commission builds its work, Bu Sharbak said that the QNCECC believes in belonging, loyalty, good citizenship, commit-ment, responsibility, truthfulness and honesty. He pointed out that the Commission’s references are represented in the Qatari Consti-tution, Qatar National Vision 2030 and the Cabinet’s Decision organ-ising the work of the Commission, as well as the regional and inter-national instruments and agreements related to the work of organisations. He added that the organisational structure of the Commission is headed by the Min-ister of Education and Higher Education H E Dr Mohammed bin Abdulwahid Al Hammadi.

Bu Sharbak said that the Doha Secondary School for Boys was only school to join the Unesco’s World Network of Associated Schools, until 2014. The number

of schools that have joined the net-work from the three educational levels so far is 39 schools for boys and girls, he added.

He spoke about Unesco as a UN organisation and its main objectives, pointing that it now consists of 193 member states. Unesco has two governing bod-ies, namely the General Conference and the Executive Council, each with its own func-tions and system according to Unesco’s Statute, in addition to the General Secretariat which is com-posed of international staff headed by the Director-General who is appointed by the General Confer-ence following the election of the Executive Board. The Unesco Gen-eral Conference is currently being held in Paris with the participa-tion of Qatar. France’s Audrey Azoulay will be appointed as Director-General on November 10 after her election last month by the Executive Council.

QA reaffirms declaration against illegal wildlife tradeThe Peninsula

Qatar Airways attended a meeting of the signatories to the United For Wildlife

Transport Taskforce Bucking-ham Palace Declaration hosted by the United Kingdom’s For-eign and Commonwealth Office and in the presence of HRH The Duke of Cambridge and the Rt Hon the Lord Hague of Rich-mond at Lancaster House in London on November 1.

Acknowledging the scale and complexity of the challenge of illegal wildlife transportation, Qatar Airways signed the Buck-ingham Palace Declaration in March 2016 as one of a small group of aviation industry lead-ers invited to attend the signing ceremony in London, to dem-onstrate their commitment to protecting wildlife from illegal trade and transportation.

Qatar Airways has a policy of zero tolerance towards the illegal transportation of endan-gered species through its network and is dedicated to delivering its commitment to the Declaration, including raising employee and passenger aware-ness of illegal wildlife transportation, improving detection of illegally transported wildlife and sharing intelligence and best practice within the industry.

“Qatar Airways remains faithful to our commitments to the Buckingham Palace Decla-ration. Since signing the Declaration, we have ramped up efforts on all fronts in the fight against illegal wildlife traffick-ing,” said Akbar Al Baker, Group Chief Executive, Qatar Airways.

“This month we launched an extensive passenger awareness campaign, and our customers

will start to notice our new wildlife p o s t e r s appearing at our Doha hub, Hamad International Airport, and at strategi-cally selected o u t p o s t s worldwide. Passengers will find more information o n - b o a r d with a new v i d e o

appearing on our in-flight enter-tainment system, Oryx One, and a feature length article included in the November issue of our in-flight magazine, Oryx,” he added.

Qatar Airways is also in the final stages of developing a spe-cially tailored e-learning package to improve the capac-ity of its workforce to identify and manage suspicious activity relating to illegal wildlife trans-portation. The training, which will be rolled out later this year, will be targeted at staff most likely to encounter illegal wild-life trafficking, including cargo and customer-facing roles.

Qatar Airways Cargo, the third largest air cargo carrier in the world, implements rigorous procedures in their require-ments of consignors, in an enhanced effort to prevent and detect misconsignment, one of the primary ways that this ille-gal trade is carried out.

Qatar Airways has devel-oped a global collaborative network including government authorities, international regu-lators and sector experts such as the USAID ROUTES Partner-ship (Reducing Opportunities for Unlawful Transport of Endan-gered Species). It also maintains highly cooperative relationships with other international carri-ers, freight forwarders and customs agents to ensure trans-parency and effective information exchange and to increase deterrence and detec-tion of this criminal activity.

QNCECC plays an active role in achieving the objectives of Unesco, which are consistent with the objectives of education in Qatar.

HMC announces names of visiting global consultants this month

Qatar Airways has a policy of zero tolerance towards the illegal transportation of endangered species through its network.

Al Hammadi meets German foreign ministry official


The Peninsula

The Centre for Law and Development at Qatar University College of

Law (QU-LAWC) recently hosted a seminar on law and technology, under the title of “Law and Technology: 20 Year Reflection”.

The seminar was delivered by Prof Michael Adams (pic-tured), an internationally recognised specialist on legal education, former “Australian University Teacher of the Year” for law and legal edu-cation and Professor of Corporate Law and Govern-ance at Western Sydney

University School of Law. The seminar was facilitated by Dr Andrew Mazen Dahdal, Assist-ant Professor of Law at LAWC.

It aimed to increase com-munity awareness on the role of technology in changing legal practice and education over the past two decades. Attend-ees included LAWC faculty

members and staff. Prof Michael Adams gave an over-view on the advent of Internet. He noted that legal informa-tion became more accessible through smart devices, and highlighted the adaptation of legal educators to technolog-ical changes. Dr Jon Mark Truby, Development Director

at the center of law said: “The Centre for Law and Develop-ment is delighted to host Professor Adams to learn from his experience during a time of rapid transition in legal education and research, which will help us plan for our use of technology in education in the future.”

QU-LAWC seminar raises awareness on role of technology in education

The Peninsula

More than 30 professional physiotherapists took part in Aspetar’s second

Kinesiology Taping Workshop Master Class 1, a three-day event that took place recently at the orthopaedic sports med-icine hospital in Qatar.

The Kinesiology Taping Technique is a therapeutic tap-ing method that allows for treatment of all types of clini-cal conditions, such as orthopedic, neurologic, and autonomic pathologies in var-ious age groups.

The Master Class 1 team experts, addressed topics related to Kinesiology Taping technique, emphasising its importance in accelerating the healing process among profes-sional athletes while providing support and stability to muscles and joints without restricting

the body’s range of motion. Therefore, the taping method can be used in conjunction with a multitude of other treatments and modalities.

The Kinesiology tape’s skin-like latex-free elasticity, which stretches to 140 percent of its original length, as well as its unique ability to provide extended soft tissue manipula-tion, improve microcirculation, activate lymphatic systems and influence the reflexes of inter-nal organs, make it especially useful for the treatment of trau-matised soft tissue.

The Master Class 1 also included comprehensive hands-on training to demonstrate the most efficient approach to the four basic muscle, ligament, fas-cia and correctional kinesiology taping techniques. When done properly, the taping method helps to normalise muscle tonicity, decrease pain and

swelling, and restore motion back to its pre-injury state more quickly.

The Master Class 1 was organised by the Aspetar’s National Sport Medicine Pro-gramme (NSMP), a pioneering national programme offering elite end-to-end sports medi-cine services for local athletes, in coordination with local sports organisations and social institutions.

Established in September 2009, the NSMP aims to facili-tate the development of quality in sports medicine for all sport-ing clubs and federations within Qatar. Since its establishment, the NSMP has evolved and expanded its services to intro-duce new venues, clinics, pharmacies, rehabilitation and physiotherapy areas, massage therapy spaces, and sports sci-ence knowledge to sports clubs and federations.

Role of Kinesiology Taping Technique highlighted at Aspetar workshop

The Peninsula

Qatar University College of Engineering (QU-CENG) yesterday signed a memoran-dum of understanding

(MoU) and two agreements with Qatar Rail to establish collabo-ration in the field of research, consultancy and exchange of information.

The MoU and agreements were signed by QU President Dr Hassan Al Derham and Qatar Rail Managing Director and CEO Eng Abdulla Abdulaziz T Al Subaie in the presence of officials from both institutions.

The MoU aims to establish collaboration between QU and Qatar Rail in the field of infor-mation exchange and consultancy. The terms of the MoU include collaboration between QU and Qatar Rail in areas of education, research and student training and support.

The first agreement aims to establish collaboration between both institutions on the develop-ment of a framework for research to tackle contemporary issues related to railway

engineering through academic work. In the terms of the agree-ment, both institutions will collaborate on providing aca-demic and industrial inputs to support undergraduate and post-graduate students to investigate, plan and assess the different designs of railway tracks for future rail projects. The work will also include the operation, main-tenance and investigation of the behaviour of slab and ballasted tracks and their impact on the environment.

The second agreement aims to provide sponsorship to the Engineering Week that will be held by CENG in April 2018.

In his remarks, Dr Hassan Al Derham said “The MoU and agreements help to cement rela-tions and to enhance the mutual

collaboration between QU and Qatar Rail. This partnership will facilitate knowledge and tech-nology transfer with Qatar Rail. It aligns with QU’s commitment to offer consultancy and research services to industry and to drive the sustainable socio-economic development in Qatar.”

“It also underlines QU’s ongoing efforts to find solutions to the current challenges in the field of transportation and to widen the scope of cooperation with local institutions in line with the national priorities towards a knowledge-based economy.”

Eng Abdulla Abdulaziz T Al Subaie said: “At Qatar Rail, we place great value on the contri-butions of our future generation of homegrown talent. As part of our commitment to education

and supporting young talent in Qatar, we look forward to build-ing on our partnership with Qatar University, supporting its research drive in general with a particular emphasis on the Col-lege of Engineering.”

Al Subaie added: “This part-nership will act as the driver by which we reap the unparalleled rewards of developing the Qatari youth, building their capabilities and encouraging the students and alumni to join the railways

transport sector. It is a new sec-tor in the country and we strive to shape highly qualified national competencies through partner-ing with leading academic institutions such as Qatar University.”

QU-CENG & Qatar Rail sign MoU for knowledge sharing

The Peninsula

Carnegie Mellon Univer-sity in Qatar (CMU-Q) formally welcomed its

new dean, Michael Trick, in an installation ceremony at its Education City campus. He is the third dean since CMU-Q opened in 2004.

Trick has been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University’s main US campus Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, since 1989, and holds a Ph.D. in industrial engineering. He is a researcher and educator in the field of operations research, with a specialization in com-putational methods in optimization. He also has con-sulted with professional sports leagues on scheduling.

“I am honored to be named dean of this remarkable insti-tution,” Trick said. “University is a transformative time for young people, and I look for-ward to building an educational experience at CMU-Q that is enriching, enlightening and inspiring.” Hessa Al Jaber, a member of CMU-Q’s Joint Advi-sory Board, welcomed Trick on behalf of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Com-munity Development (QF).

“Dean Trick is in a unique position to lead this institution through its second decade. He is an esteemed educator who will provide the guidance and leadership to fulfill the educa-tional mission of CMU-Q. He is an internationally recognized researcher, who will bring a new perspective to the research efforts of CMU-Q. He is a stra-tegic thinker, who will help us ensure that CMU-Q is contrib-uting to the community in ways

that matter,” Al Jaber said. Carnegie Mellon interim

president Farnam Jahanian spoke at the ceremony: “Carn-egie Mellon is proud to be a part of this community to deliver educational and research programs that will support and contribute to the long-term development of Qatar’s knowledge-based economy. The leader we have chosen to build on this success is Michael Trick.

“Under Dean Trick’s lead-ership, I am confident that CMU-Q will continue its devel-opment as an integral part of the Qatar landscape, represent-ing CMU’s dynamic global capacity,” he added.

Laurie Weingart, CMU’s interim provost and a close col-league of Trick’s for many years, spoke about his dedica-tion to supporting students.

Trick is the author of more than 50 professional publica-tions and the editor of six volumes of refereed articles. He has consulted extensively with the United States Postal Serv-ice on supply chain design, Major League Baseball and var-ious college basketball conferences on scheduling issues, and telecommunica-tions organizations such as Sony and Motorola on band-width allocation.

The installation ceremony was capped by the presenta-tion of a ceremonial Quaich, a Scottish vessel traditionally symbolizing friendship, trust and new ventures.

Carnegie Mellon in Qatar offers undergraduate programs in biological sciences, business administration, computational biology, computer science and information systems.

Michael Trick takes helm as CMU-Q’s third Dean

QU President Dr Hassan Al Derham (right) and Qatar Rail Managing Director and CEO Eng Abdulla Abdulaziz T Al Subaie during the signing ceremony.

The MoU aims to establish collaboration between QU and Qatar Rail in the field of information exchange and consultancy. The terms of the MoU include collaboration between QU and Qatar Rail in areas of education, research and student training and support.

Participants during the seminar organised by Aspetar.

The new Dean of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Michael Trick, is received at an installation ceremony at its Education City campus.


The Peninsula

Texas A&M University at Qatar recently hosted its first Global Showcase to

highlight students’ interna-tional experiences and the impact these experiences have had on their lives and educa-tional careers.

Texas A&M at Qatar’s mis-sion in educating exemplary engineers champions provid-ing students a holistic educational approach, and international experience is one factor in what sets Aggie engi-neers apart.

Dr. Troy Bickham, Assist-ant Dean for Academic Affairs, said, “Engineering is increas-ingly a global profession and nowhere is this more appar-ent than in Qatar. Through its unique position, Texas A&M at Qatar strives to provide as many international experi-ences as possible for our students.”

Students who participated in past programs outlined what they learned, how they grew as individuals and how the programs exposed them to engineering in a global context. I n t o t a l , 1 2 9

students participated in 217 international experience opportunities in the 2016-2017 academic year. Faculty, staff and students learned about the global programs on offer at Texas A&M at Qatar during the event.

The programmes are var-ied. Some students, such as mechanical engineering jun-ior Alaa Abdalla, spent a semester on the main campus in College Station. Others trav-elled all over the world, including Morocco and Costa Rica as part of service-learn-ing and volunteerism-based trips, and Greece as part of a faculty-led study abroad opportunity. Incoming fresh-men had the chance to bond together in Italy before begin-ning their college journeys.

Of her semester abroad at Texas A&M’s main campus, Abdalla said, “The four months of my stay passed by very quickly. I learned that I enjoy living on my own. The sense of independence is a great one. America is such a huge coun-try with so many cultures combined, but once you con-nect to the people you will realize how similar we are.

Maybe we speak in a different language, but on the human level we are very similar.”

Mechanical engineering senior Saad Moazam, who launched a startup at the Euro-pean Innovation Academy, said, “The European Innova-tion Academy program that I attended this summer in Italy was — and continues to be a truly inspirational experience. The amount of knowledge I gained and the number of val-uable connections I made in the space of three weeks

surpasses everything I have done for the past three years. I have always had a dream of starting up my own company, and the European Innovation Academy was the perfect step-ping stone I needed in order for me to progress to a serious level.” Students talking about their positive and even life-changing experiences to fellow classmates is the best recruit-ment, said Dr Ryan McLawhon, executive director Student Affairs and Academic Services.

Texas A&M at Qatar hosts Global Showcase

Texas A&M at Qatar students during the Global Showcase.

The Peninsula

A German female football team is in Qatar for a friendly match with a Qatari

female football team today to cel-ebrate the Qatar Germany 2017 Year of Culture.

The match is organised by the German Football Ambassador in partnership with the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Goethe-Institut Gulf Region.

On the occasion of Qatar Ger-many 2017 Year of Culture the German Football Ambassador ini-tiated a very special exchange by bringing female football players from Germany and Qatar together for a joint training and friendly

match that is open for the public to attend.

Twenty-five young female players and their team are in Doha

from November 3 to 7 to meet their Qatari counterparts at their home stadium.

German and Qatari female

football history was highlighted when Monika Staab trained the Qatari female national team in 2014. She was awarded as “Ger-man Football Ambassador” in 2014 for her efforts to introduce together with the Qatari Football Association effective structures for the training of female football players from their early years and support them throughout their careers. Monica Staab was nom-inated member of the board of trustees for Qatar Germany 2017 by the Foreign Office of the Fed-eral Republic of Germany due to her merits for the Qatari German friendship.

Roland Bischof of the German Football Ambassador says, “It is great to see how football connects

people worldwide and we are honored to contribute to the social-cultural exchange between the Qatari and German team. Based on the engagement of Monika Staab in Qatar we are looking forward to further the friendship of both countries.”

As the program is aimed at intensifying the relations of both teams the 4-day-long visit includes a tour of the Museum of Islamic Art as well as a joint desert trip. The guests from Germany will also visit the Aspire Academy to get a deeper insight into their counterparts training in Qatar.

Peter Ziegler, Deputy Head of the German Embassy in Doha says, “The friendly match between the German and the Qatari female

team is just one example for the excellent cooperation between German and Qatari sport institu-tions that is not only covering stars but as well young talents.”

Qatar Germany 2017 Year of Culture is a year-long program designed to deepen understand-ing between nations through the mutual exchange of arts, culture, heritage and sport, developed by Qatar Museums in partnership with the Goethe-Institut Gulf Region, the German Embassy in Doha and the Embassy of Qatar in Germany. The match between both teams will take place at Qatar Women’s Sport Committee main venue at Aspire Zone today at 6pm. It is open to the public. Admission is free.

Qatar-Germany female football match today at Aspire Zone

The German female football team in Doha.

The Peninsula

Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Al Thani (FBQ) Museum is set to inaugurate its amphithe-

atre with a Premiere Concert this Friday at 6pm.

A series of concerts will be held at the amphitheater, bring-ing the visitors an unforgettable experience of open air concerts in the middle of FBQ Museum Farm.

This Friday’s concert will fea-ture winners of the First Edition of the recently concluded Qatar National Music Competition, showcasing the best of Qatar’s musical talents. This concert is

organized in collaboration with Moving Young Artists, the Qatar-based non-profit foundation that has been nurturing and inspiring young local talent for more than three years, and sponsored by Fifty One East.

The concert program will be diverse and will include Arabic as well as Western music perform-ances featuring musicians from Qatar, the Middle East and from around the globe, aged between 10 and 18.

Visitors are welcome to spend the afternoon exploring FBQ Museum and finish the day lis-tening to the impressively t a l e n t e d y o u n g

musicians, starting at 6pm at the amphitheater, located in front of the museum exit. The concert is open to the public with free entrance on a first come first served basis.More concerts are being planned for the coming months with collaborations fea-turing the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra and Qatar Music Acad-emy. Besides concerts, new events such as storytelling and dance performances are expected to complement the events calen-dar soon. The museum is open on Sundays from 9am to 4pm, Mon-day to Thursday (9am to 4.30pm, Fridays (2pm to 7pm) and Satur-days (10am to 6pm).

FBQ Museum to inaugurate amphitheatre with concert

The Director-General of Public Security H E Major General Saad bin Jassim Al Khulaifi met in Doha yesterday with the Minister of Internal Security of the Republic of Somalia , Mohamed Abukar Islow Dualle , who is currently visiting the country. During the meeting, they discussed a number of issues that concern the two brotherly countries.

The Peninsula

IdeaCamp has begun activities with involvement of 95 ideas. IdeaCamp is a new pro-

gramme provided by Digital Incubation Center (DIC) under the Ministry of Transport & Commu-nications for entrepreneurs, developers and designers who have a great idea for a technol-ogy solution.

Through a six-week pro-gramme of workshops, training and mentorship, participants will create a business model, build a prototype and test their idea with customers. By the end of the pro-gramme participants will know whether their idea is likely to suc-ceed in the market in Qatar and will pitch to join DIC’s two-year startup programme to take the idea to the next level.

DIC received 129 applications to join IdeaCamp and 95 ideas were accepted, based on their level of technical innovation and feasibility. Almost half of the Ide-aCamp applications featured one of DIC’s technology focus areas: 3D Printing, Blockchain and IoT.

The IdeaCamp programme

was launched on October 21 with 85 entrepreneurs taking part in a full day workshop which intro-duced participants to the Business Model Canvas tool, with exam-ples from companies such as Airbnb, Flickr and Uber.

Participants then created their own Business Model Can-vas showing the value proposition, key activities, part-nerships and cost model related to their idea. The second work-shop on October 28 focussed on customer validation. Participants created a Value Proposition Can-vas, building a set of customer segments and looking at how their business could address cus-tomer needs. They were then set the task of researching their cus-tomers and refining their business model to meet customer needs. The program will continue for the next three weeks. DIC will incu-bate 25 ideas from IdeaCamp, these teams will be accepted onto the two-year Startup programme where they will receive support, training and mentorship allow-ing them to launch a business in Qatar, build a product and grow their market reach.

IdeaCamp begins with 95 ideas

The Peninsula

Indian Sports Centre, an apex body of Indian Embassy, organized a felicitation func-

tion to honour the Indian National U-19 Football team vis-ited Doha for participating in the friendly matches with Qatar and Ghraffa sports club U-19 foot-ball teams on 1-11-2017.

On behalf of the Indian com-munity, Indian Ambassador, P. Kumaran, was the chief guest of the function and handed over the Mementos to the team

Manager, Velu Dhayalamani, & Head Coach Lu�s Maria Cabral Norton de Matos, a former Por-tuguese footballer who played as a forward, and is a current Head coach, Hugo Alexandre Santos Martins, Asst. Coach, Paulo Fernandes, GK Coachand physio, Sumedh Shashikant Desai & Sampath Babu and team captain, Sahil Panwar.

Nilangshu Dey, President of Indian Sports Centre, welcomed the team and highlighted the role of Indian Sports Centre to promote sports and games

among the Indian community in Qatar, General Secretary Mohd Habibun Nabi was the MC and presented the vote of thanks.

Head Coach Mr. Hugo Alex-andre admire the facilities available in Qatar for football and appreciated the Hospitality of Qatar Government (QFA) and extend his best wishes for 2022 world cup, said a release.

Ambassador cheered the Indian team for their perform-ances in both the Matches played in Doha.

Indian Sports Centre honours football team

Indian National U-19 Football team with the officials of Indian Sports Centre during the ceremony.

Al Khulaifi meets Somalia Minister


The Peninsula

Sheikh Abdullah bin Zaid Al Mahmoud Islamic Cul-tural Center at the Ministry

of Endowments and Islamic Affairs (Awqaf) in collaboration with Primary Health Care Cor-poration organised a medical awareness programme for about 700 workers in last two weeks. The programme offers a free medical test to workers and its aim is to meet workers medical needs. The centre has also organised three awareness lectures in multiple languages which were attended by around 920 persons.

The lectures were on the healthy life which a person can have through commitment to worship, and financial trans-actions and risk of usury (riba).

Medical awareness programme for 700 workers organised

QNA

HEC Paris, a member of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and

Community Development (QF), is organising a short interactive executive education programme entitled “Meeting the challenges and opportunities of today in the fields of digitisation and radical transformation” yesterday at the University’s headquarters in Doha.

The programme aims to edu-cate senior executives in Qatar on the major challenges facing various sectors nowadays, par-ticularly digitization and the impact of radical shifts.

The program reviews the challenges facing regional and global companies in the age of digital transformation and radi-cal change, as well as discussing opportunities in this area.

It will also allow participants to get a closer look at the

concepts, methods and in-depth knowledge offered by the HEC Paris University in Qatar to all its associates and will be a valuable opportunity to learn about the core values and educational level of the University’s renowned executive MBA program.

Which will ensure that they have a comprehensive under-standing of the various topics they will be familiar with when enrolling in the executive MBA program.

The program will also high-light the impact of digital transformation in a range of sec-tors where participants will collaborate on identifying the fundamentals and how they can be applied in the companies they work in, as well as ways to ana-lyze and respond to the impact of radical shifts and disturbances and how to respond to it, as well as provide them with the neces-sary skills to ensure that their companies are transformed into

influential and effective entities.

Large and small companies around the world, especially in the Middle East, often identify areas of digitization and radical transformation as the biggest challenge to their operations, said Professor Roger Hallowell, the program supervisor.

He added that in parallel to the international race to keep pace with change, there are a lot of senior executives and decision makers who do not have a clear picture of the meaning of the areas of digitization and benefits to the companies they work for.

The new program will allow participants to study several examples of best practices of dig-itization, explore the possibility of applying them in the GCC countries, and provide partici-pants with a central foundation on how to integrate them into their executive roles in order to achieve the best results.

HEC Paris holds programme on digitisation & radical transformation

QNA

Qatar Scout and Girl Guides Association cel-ebrated the Arab and

Gulf Guide Day, and on this occasion honoured the first batch of Qatari Girl scouts.

The ceremony coincides with a new and strong start to the scouting movement in Qatar, where the country works to provide great sup-port to the association in its belief in its role in establish-ing the personality of the student and as an activity complementary to the edu-cational process in schools, Commissioner-General of the Association Jassim Al Hardan stated.

Fazeena Saleem The Peninsula

After a long summer lull, activities at Al Wakrah fishing port are slowly gaining momentum. The

arrival of cool weather helps fish-ermen and those who do fishing for leisure to get more catch.

The Al Wakrah fishing port harbours around 1,200 small and large fishing boats with each hav-ing an average of six people including fishermen working. The port is also busy with fishing launches and cruisers.

The fishing boats spend around two to three days in the sea and fishermen claim that the catch increases at least thrice during the cold season compared with hot months. Ahmed Al

Darwish (21 years) a Qatari owner of three fishing boats and two launches had just returned from the sea in an evening of a week-day. He agrees that a pleasant weather is always a good sign for fishing. “I enjoy fishing, I spend like three to ten hours in the sea during the winter. The fishermen

on my boats spend like two or three days in the sea. The amount of fish we get in four months between December and March is definitely more compared with other months,” he told The Peninsula.

Replying to a query if there was any impact on fishing activ-ities due to the unjust blockade imposed on Qatar by siege coun-tries, Ahmed said “There is no impact. All activities are happen-ing as usual and we get all fishing equipment without any disrup-tion from countries like Oman.”

At the same time, a group of fishermen were fixing ‘Karkur’, a round metal fishing net, at the Al Wakrah fishing port. Most of them are from countries like India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. “Four to five people work in a small boat and six to ten

people work in a big boat. There are others here who do work like boat reparing. All of us are busy during the cold months. We get more fish and we are sometimes get paid more,” said Rakesh, and Indian fishermen working at the

Al Wakrah fishing port for more than eight years.

The most common types of fish caught by these fishermen are Sheri and Hamour and mostly sold at the Al Wakrah fish mar-ket. While, Omar an Egyptian

fishing enthusiastic and his two friends were taking their inflat-able boat into the water.

“We go fishing for few hours almost every day after work. It’s more enjoyable when the weather is pleasant,” they said.

Rise in fish catch as weather turns milder

Fishermen with their catch at the Al Wakrah harbor. Pic: Salim Matramkot / The Peninsula

The fishing boats spend around two to three days in the sea and fishermen claim that the catch increases at least thrice during the cold season compared with hot months.

Qatar Scout and Girl Guides Association marks Gulf guide day

The Peninsula

The Ministry of Municipality and Envi-ronment’s agricultural quarantine offices have inspected 6,165 imported

consignments, weighing more than 96,242 tonnes, from various types of imported agri-cultural consignments, plant products and production inputs in August across the dif-ferent customs points.

The quarantine offices destroyed 90 consignments weighing more than 50 tonnes for violating the agricultural quar-

antine law and for certain damages. The agricultural quarantine is a first line

of defence for protection from agricultural infections. The preventive procedure aims to protect the country’s agricultural wealth from foreign-originated pests.

It also provides that all plants, agricul-tural products and any other materials shall be subject to phytosanitary regulations for its procedures and to ensure that other agricultural production inputs are in con-formity with the conditions and specifications.

Quarantine offices destroy 50 tonnes of farm products for norms violation

Sanaullah Ataullah The Peninsula

Doha Souq Mall has begun accepting tenants and is expected to be open by

the second quarter of next year. The mall, located at Al Nasr Street, Al Mirqab next to Turk-ish Central Restaurant, is expected to create approxi-mately about 500 jobs.

“The Mall with a gross leas-able area of 26,000 sqm is currently at the stage of comple-tion and has now opened its doors to tenants,” said Amjed Saleh (pictured), Malls Manager at Bandary Real Estate, the man-aging company of Doha Souq

Mall.Speaking in a press confer-

ence yesterday, Saleh said that the Doha Souq Mall has the capacity to accommodate 22 retail spaces, a supermarket, 20 food and beverage outlets, three

atrium lobby cafes, 26 offices/clinic spaces, a play area and two basement car parks. The mall has a land area of 15,000 sqm and total buildup area of 63,000 sqm.

He added said that the Mall will have many famous outlets like Family Food Center, Wooden Bakery from Lebanon, Jollibee Restaurant, Pilipino Style Foods , Technical Care Center among many others.

“We target to open the Mall by second half 2018 but full operation is expected by the end of next year. We focus on qual-ity, good services at reasonable prices,” he said.

Speaking on the promotion of local products, Saleh said “we

always support the local prod-ucts more. We have noticed that retailers and restaurants have launched a lot of new initiatives and they have succeeded in competing with the international brands”.

This location is very special for the mall as it is a very busy street, he said,” Plans are afoot to develop Al Nasr Street and make it to a one-way road to reduce traffic congestion.

The mall has six main entrances and exits and consists of four floors. The ground floor will have restaurants, retail shops; atrium style cafe that give outdoor feel, mezzanine floor will have restaurants and a huge

play area. First and second floor will have offices and a gym.

Shoppers and those want to dine will not have to worry about parking their cars, as the mall will have a parking spaces to accommodate 550 cars.

“There is no deadline for application but those who have applied before the end of this year will get opportunity to join the grand opening ceremony of the Mall,” he said.

It will have a play area for all age group of children with spe-cial focus on teenagers. “We are studying different concept some-thing new that is not available in Doha,” he added.

Doha Souq Mall opens doors for tenants

QNA

The Cultural Village Foun-dation (Katara) has signed a memorandum of under-

standing with Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), in the presence of the General Manager of the Katara Dr. Khalid bin Ibra-him Al Sulaiti and the Executive Director of External Affairs of PDO, Engineer Abdulamir Al-Ajmi.

Speaking at the conference, the General Manager of Katara, Dr. Khalid bin Ibrahim Al-Sulaiti, said, “It is my pleasure to be here today as we sign this memoran-dum of understanding between Katara and PDO to achieve the mutual goal; which is establish-ing a planetarium and the first observatory of its kind in the State of Qatar. This MoU is a significant step in the mutual cooperation, exchange of experiences, work-shops and training between the two parties in the astronomy field.” “The new Katara project; i.e. the planetarium and the observatory, reflects Katara’s interest in astronomy and recog-nition of the significance of this

branch of science which has been mastered by our ancestors. It is part of Katara’s role in raising astronomical awareness and spreading knowledge about the wonders of the space and uni-verse. Three years before, Katara chose this branch of science as a theme for its events and activi-ties as a part of its grand annual festival held during Ramadan”, Katara’s Chief added.

The Executive Director of External Affairs of PDO, Engineer Abdulamir Al Ajmi exuded his utmost appreciation and grati-tude to Katara for their keenness to enhance this fruitful relation-ship by establishing this valuable educational and entertainment tool; dome. He explained the benefits of establishing astro-nomical dome, as it would be a touristic attraction that will grab the attention of visitors to stop and examine this project which aims to raise understanding about the wonders of our uni-verse. This agreement will thrive to train 2-4 employees from Katara on relevant aspects regarding the astronomical dome at the Sultanate of Oman.

Katara signs MoU with PDO

The Peninsula

Vodafone Qatar, Gold Sponsors of the 4th annual Information

Security Conference for the Financial Sector organised by Qatar Central Bank (QCB), took part for the third year in the event that highlighted informa-tion security challenges and ways to improve the country’s infrastructure.

Cybercrime is a major threat to financial institutions not just in Qatar but globally. This has forced many companies to invest heavily in adoption of

cyber protection measures which is helping them in man-aging the growing customer concerns and think a step ahead from the culprits. In a keynote presentation entitled “Cyber-crimes, the good, the bad and the ugly”, Vodafone Qatar’s Head of Enterprise Marketing, Mohammed Serieh, gave an overview on cybercrime trends and the cost implications of such breaches. He also showcased the “legal hacking” trend being adopted by major companies to hire hackers to test their secu-rity mechanisms in order to prevent future potential attacks.

Vodafone participates in QCB meet

09MONDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2017 MIDDLE EAST

Palestinian fishermen check their nets at the beach in Gaza City, yesterday.

Ankara

Anatolia

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim will visit the US next Tuesday amid

the ongoing visa dispute between the two countries, according to Prime Ministry sources.

Yildirim is scheduled to meet US Vice President Mike Pence during his four-day visit, the sources said Sunday, requesting anonymity due to restrictions on speaking to the media.

The two leaders will discuss bilateral political, economic, and military ties, as well as regional issues such as Syria and Iraq. They are also to exchange views on critical issues including counter-ter-rorist efforts—against the Fetullah Terrorist Organization (FETO), Daesh, and the PKK/PYD—refugees, and the current visa row.

Turkey has long sought the extradition of Fetullah Gulen, the head of FETO, the terrorist group behind last year’s defeated coup, which martyred 250 people.

Ankara has complained of the US dragging its feet on the request.

Turkey has also protested the US supporting the PKK/PYD.

Ankara considers the PKK/PYD the Syrian offshoot of the PKK, a designated terrorist organization by Turkey and the US, while the US sees it as a separate group and “reliable ally” in its fight against Daesh in Syria.

For more than 30 years, the PKK has waged a terror cam-paign against Turkey leading to the deaths of more than 40,000 people—security forces and civilians alike—including more than 1,200 since July 2015 alone.

Yildirim’s talks will look to eliminate differences in opin-ion with the US as well as the continuation of joint efforts to advance cooperation.

The visa dispute was sparked on Oct. 8, when the US Embassy in Ankara announced the suspension of non-immi-grant visa services to Turkish nationals, following the arrest of a local employee working at the US Consulate in Istanbul. This prompted a tit-for-tat response from Ankara.

Yildirim is also scheduled to meet with opinion leaders, representatives of Turks abroad and the Muslim and Jewish communities, members of the press, investors, and business-men in Washington and New York.

Beirut

Agencies

Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Lebanon’s Shia Hez-bollah movement, said

the previous day’s resignation of the country’s premier Saad Al Hariri had been “imposed” by Saudi Arabia.

“It is clear that the resigna-tion was a Saudi decision that was imposed on Prime Minister Hariri. It was not his intention, not his wish and not his decision” to quit, Nasrallah said in a tele-vised address.

Hariri, a protege of Riyadh, on Saturday announced his sur-prise resignation in a broadcast from the Saudi capital. He cited the “grip” of Hezbollah ally Iran

on the country, and also said he feared for his life. “We did not seek this resignation,” said Nas-rallah, whose powerful movement has participated in Hariri’s government for almost a year.

The Hezbollah chief did not directly address the accusations levelled by what he called Har-iri’s “very hard” speech, saying only that these were “a matter for Saudi Arabia”.

Nasrallah questioned the timing of Hariri’s announce-ment at a time when “things are proceeding normally... in the heart of government” in Leba-non. The resignation sparked fears that Lebanon—split into rivals camps led by Hariri and Hezbollah — could once again

descend into violence.But Nasrallah yesterday

called for “calm, patience and waiting until the reasons become clear” for Hariri stepping aside. The Hezbollah leader also ques-tioned why Hariri gave his resignation speech from Saudi Arabia. “Is he at home? Will they let him return? These are legit-imate concerns,” he said, referring to a purge of princes, ministers and businessmen in Saudi Arabia in an anti-corrup-tion operation.

He said Hariri was expected in Lebanon on Thursday “if they let him return”. Nasrallah played down the risks of conflict between rival camps in Lebanon or with his movement’s arch-foe Israel. “Do not listen to alarmist

speeches ... do not worry, there is nothing to worry about,” he said. “We will react responsibly and calmly... we are concerned about the security” of Lebanon, Nasrallah added. It remains unclear who will succeed Hariri as prime minister in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Lebanon’s pres-ident will not accept the resignation of prime minister Saad Al Hariri until he returns to Lebanon, palace sources said on Sunday, delaying for now polit-ically difficult consultations on his successor. President Michel Aoun, a political ally of Hezbol-lah, will wait to accept or reject Hariri’s resignation until he returns to Lebanon to explain his reasons, sources at the pres-ident ial palace said .

Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat cited unnamed sources close to Hariri as spec-ulating that he would probably remain outside Lebanon because of the security threat against him.

Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh sought to calm fears the political turmoil unleashed by Hariri’s bid to resign would hit Lebanon’s already fragile econ-omy, issuing a statement to reaffirm the stability of its cur-rency, which is pegged against the US dollar. In Lebanon’s sec-tarian system the president must be a Maronite Catholic, the prime minister a Sunni and the speaker of parliament a Shia. Hariri is Lebanon’s most influential Sunni politician.

Jerusalem

AFP

Israel’s army said yesterday it was holding the bodies of five Palestinian militants

found after it blew up a tunnel last week stretching from the Gaza Strip into its territory.

Israeli media said they would most likely be retained as bargaining chips to retrieve the bodies of soldiers believed to held by the strip’s Hamas rul-ers. The military stressed that the Palestinian bodies were found in Israeli territory follow-ing the operation to blow up the tunnel that left at least 12 mili-tants dead. It did not say what conditions it would place on

their return. “We are indeed in possession of those bodies of five terrorists,” military spokes-man Jonathan Conricus said.

“All were killed or died inside Israeli territory, not in the Gaza Strip.”

Israel blew up the tunnel on October 30 after monitoring it for some time, saying it had no choice but to act after “the grave and unacceptable viola-tion of Israeli sovereignty”.

Hamas, the Islamist move-ment that runs the Gaza Strip, has used such tunnels to carry out attacks in the past.

Two of the 12 dead belonged to the military wing of Hamas, with the other 10 from Islamic Jihad.

Kirkuk

Reuters

Two suicide bombers struck in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk yes-

terday , killing at least five people and wounding more than 20 others, police and medical sources said.

The interior ministry said the attacks targeted a Shi’ite Muslim mosque on Atlas Street in central Kirkuk and gave an initial casualty toll of one killed and 16 wounded.

It is the first such attack since the central government in Baghdad seized the oil-rich city last month from Kurdish forces, who had been control-ling Kirkuk for three years.

The central government in Baghdad launched an offen-sive on Oct. 16 to recapture the city and other territories in northern Iraq claimed by both Baghdad and the Kurds, in retaliation for a referendum on Kurdish independence.

Iraqi security forces advanced on the city, forcing the Kurdish Peshmerga to withdraw. The retreat also allowed Baghdad to take con-trol of all oil fields operated by the state-owned North Oil Company in Kirkuk’s north-ern province.

No group has claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attacks but the suicide bomb-ings are a trademark of Islamic State militants. Police sources said the two attacks happened in quick succession and said the death toll might rise because some of the wounded were in critical con-dition. “It’s a crowded street and a place for street vendors. The terrorists wanted to kill large number of people,” said a Kirkuk police major.

Istanbul

AFP

Turkey yesterday said Russia had decided to postpone a planned

Syria peace conference this month that had met with a cool reception from Ankara and its Western allies.

There was no confirma-tion by Russia of the announcement by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin, who added that Turkey was not planning to attend the event.

Russia was planning to hold the “Congress of Syrian National Dialogue” on November 18 in the Black Sea resort of Sochi to bring together various players in the over six year conflict.

Several Western states had expressed scepticism over the planned conference, saying peace efforts were bet-ter off going through the United Nations.

Turkey had also been troubled by the possible involvement of Syrian Kurd-ish groups like the Democratic Union Party (PYD) which control much of northern Syria but are con-sidered by Ankara to be terror organisations. The plan had been announced by Russia after the latest peace talks on Syria, also backed by Turkey and Iran, in the Kazakh cap-ital Astana. “We immediately objected,” Kalin told NTV tel-evision. “The Kremlin then got in touch with us and said they were postponing the meeting.

Khartoum

AFP

A controversial Sudanese counter-insurgency unit said yesterday that it

had seized 19 tonnes of hash-ish in war-torn Darfur, in one of the largest hauls ever reported in Sudan.

Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), usually used to crush rebels in the country’s conflict areas, seized two vehi-cles loaded with hashish after a gunfight with smugglers in the state of South Darfur last week. Yesterday, the security forces showed tonnes of seized cannabis to reporters at an RSF camp in Khartoum. Dozens of blue plastic sacks full of hash-ish were on display, while some was spread out on a carpet in

the compound of the camp.“On Tuesday, October 31,

our troops clashed with a gang of smugglers when we ambushed them,” RSF spokes-man Abdulrahman al-Jaali said. “We captured their chief... and seized two vehicles loaded with 189 quintals (19 tonnes) of hashish.” The RSF unit ambushed the smugglers after intercepting their telephone communication with another gang in Khartoum, indicating that the seized drugs were bound for the capital, he said.

“This hashish is usually grown in South Sudan and also comes from Ethiopia, and these days it is also grown in Radoum (in South Darfur),” police Gen-eral Hashim Ali said at the press conference.

In recent years the

Sudanese media has regularly reported security forces seiz-ing hashish and other narcotics, but the latest seizure is clearly one of the biggest-ever hauls reported in the east African country.

Officials have acknowl-edged an overall rise in drug trafficking and consumption across the country in recent years, especially among young people. Global rights groups accuse RSF of human rights abuses in areas where it is fighting rebels like Darfur, Blue Nile and South Kordofan.

The three conflict zones have witnessed intense fight-ing between government forces and rebels for years that has left tens of thousands of peo-ple killed and millions displaced.

Sudan forces seize tonnes of hashish in Darfur ambush

Turkish PM to meet US’ Pence at White House

Members of Rapid Support Forces (RSF) show yesterday in Khartoum sacks of hashish that were captured in the state of South Darfur a week earlier.

Two suicide attacks claim 5 in Kirkuk

Turkey: Russia postpones Syria peace conference

Hezbollah says Saudi ‘imposed’ Lebanon PM’s resignation

Israel holds bodies of 5 Gaza militants after tunnel blast

Yildirim is scheduled to meet US Vice President Mike Pence during his four-day visit. The two leaders will discuss bilateral political, economic, and military ties, as well as regional issues such as Syria and Iraq.

Means of livelihood

A sporty Donald Trump yesterday played golf with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a game both players understood was not as complicated as the strained geopolitics of the region. As the US President embarked on

his Asia tour, the world’s eyes were fixated on how the four large economies — China, Japan, South Korea and America would come together to solve the North Korean crisis that threatens stability in the region.

Japan and South Korea are close US allies and North Korean leader Kim Jong un’s shenanigans to portray his flailing country as a nuclear power are under threat of being stonewalled by Tokyo and Seoul with help from Washington. Trump is visiting the region just weeks after Kim had threatened a missile strike on the US Pacific territory of Guam. It was then Trump’s bluster that was more in the spotlight than the threat.

Told to rein in his bellicose instincts and his wayward tweets, Trump sounded more restrained yesterday. He told a television channel that he was open to meeting North Korean leader if it helped solve the crisis.

North Korea’s ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun welcomed Trump to the region warning a “spiritually instable” president against making “reckless remarks.”

South Korea, one of the staunchest US allies, has thousands of troops stationed on its soil. The United

States Forces Korea (USFK) have an important role to play in buttressing the defence of the US ally.

The deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence anti-missile system in South Korea has been a sticking point between US and South Korea on one side and China and Russia on the other. China, which wrapped up the 19th Communist Party of China Congress recently,

has emerged as a more consolidated power in the region after the re-election of Xi as the President. Like legendary Leftist figure Mao Zedong, Xi’s name has been enshrined in the Party constitution and Socialism with Chinese characteristics is the buzzword in the second largest economy.

The North Korean nuclear crisis and the South China Sea standoff are the major issues in the region affecting ties among nations. Thaad, which has to do with protecting South Korea from Pyongyang’s missiles, worries Beijing that says the missile defence system’s radar penetrates its territory.

After landing in Japan, Trump was at his jovial best. He played golf with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and praised the golfing skills of Hideki Matsuyama, one of the world’s top golfers, who gave the leaders company.

A Summit with Abe and the Asean and Apec meets in Philippines and Vietnam wait for Trump. After a good start to the tour, Trump is expected to show his more serious side in the crucial summits that may define US agenda for Asia in the years to come.

10 MONDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2017VIEWS

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

CHAIRMANSHEIKH THANI BIN ABDULLAH AL THANI

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

[email protected]

ACTING MANAGING EDITORMOHAMMED SALIM MOHAMED

[email protected]

Geopolitical game

QUOTE OF THE DAY

No dictator, no regime, no nation should ever underestimate American resolve. We will never yield, never waver and never falter in defence of our freedom.

Donald TrumpUS President

Trump begins his Asia tour on a light note as critical issues await his intervention.

UN Secretary-General’s Humanitar-ian Envoy Dr Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Muraikhi (pictured) underscored the State of Qatar’s distinctive and effective role

through its assistance programmes and pledges and through its various innovative and pioneer-ing international initiatives as well as hosting and organising humanitarian conferences and forums to support those in need in the region and the world.

In an interview with Qatar News Agency (QNA), the UN Humanitarian Envoy praised the role of the Education Above All foundation, which includes the “Educate a Child” initiative, and its great impact on the spread of education in conflict zones in the world.

He also praised the Qatari initiative “QUEST’ to educate Syrian refugees, Silatech institution which aims to provide 2 million job opportunities by 2020, Reach Out To Asia (ROTA) program and others.

The State of Qatar, he said, is one of the major donor countries and one of the major countries that contribute to the reduction of conflict in the world, referring in this regard to the Darfur Peace Agreement in the Republic of Sudan.

Dr Al Muraikhi said that the meeting of the major donors group for Syria, held in Doha on October 18, was a platform to follow up the pledges made by countries on assisting Syrian displaced people and refugees and has adopted several important resolutions, includ-ing urging the Security Council to extend resolution 2165 to ensure access of aid to those affected, trapped and hard to reach within Syria and to find a political solution to end the crisis there.

Participants in the meeting also agreed to make a field visit to the Syrian refugees on next January 23 to know about the situation on the ground, he said, adding that there was also an agreement for the European Union to host the meeting of Syria’s major donors in Brussels next year, indicating that there is an intention to hold similar meetings for donors to Yemen, Somalia and Iraq.

The UN Secretary-General’s Humanitarian Envoy pointed out that in 2017, 37 countries have been affected and are in need for human-itarian assistance, mostly from Arab countries, underlying that 25 humanitarian response plans, four regional response plans for refu-gees and five urgent appeals have been put in place. He added that these cases need $23.5bn to provide life necessities, from which $6.2 bn have been raised and the remaining is $17.8 bn, indicating that only 26%, or 141.1 million, of people in need have been assisted.

Furthermore, Al Muraikhi said that some country’s failure or delay to provide their pledges according to emergency relief plans is one of the biggest challenges facing the United Nations in its humanitarian work, adding that another challenge is how to reach those in need in conflict and war zones and beyond as the United Nations and its humanitarian con-voys are often attacked by the disputants in these areas.

He continued to say that the agreement of some countries bilaterally with the receiving state and the lack of coordination with the United Nations often lead to the repetition of humanitarian work and create surplus in an area and a shortage in another.

Qatar is a major donor & has essential role in reducing conflicts: UN OfficialQNA

For this reason, he said, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) was established and that the United Nations is studying the situa-tion and needs on the ground and identify priorities whether in shelter, education, food, medicine, health or water and accordingly develop a feasible plan.

The humanitarian envoy stressed that the United Nations is concerned about the fatigue of the donor countries in light of the increasing conflicts and the spread of crises as well as the growing needs, pointing out that the United States has recently reduced its support and this is a serious indicator that other major donors should not follow.

UN Secretary-General’s Humanitar-ian Envoy Dr Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Muraikhi told QNA that the UN promotes financial partnership with civil society organisations, stressing that the loss of any actor, even a small proportion of financial resources, is a loss of humani-tarian work and that the partnership with such organisations supports transparency in the implementation of projects and contributes to raising capacities and exchange of experiences, as they are always aware of the internal situation more than the UN.

On the United Nations deal with humanitarian organisations classified by some countries as terrorist, the UN humanitarian envoy said that the UN is committed to the Security Council classi-fications. These classifications are

adopted immediately. Whereas the accusa-tions of countries are not considered espe-cially as the

humanitarian action is away from the political field and polit-ical interests. The first goal of officials in the field of humani-tarian work is how to reach the needy and provide assistance.

Dr Al Muraikhi said that the United Nations is working closely with regional organiza-tions, including the Arab League, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and are all work-ing together to create a humanitarian “unit” within these organisations to facilitate interaction and exchange of

information.He added that the UN started work

with the Gulf Cooperation Council last March to develop a “humanitarian unit” to support the humanitarian action and to promote a concentrated GCC efforts, thus enhancing the cooperation with the United Nations in this field. The same thing happened with the Arab League in April when Al Muraikhi met with the Arab League Secretary-General to activate the role of the “humanitarian unit”, organize and develop its departments and link them to the UN humanitarian system.

Al Muraikhi urged the donor coun-tries to fulfil their commitments and cooperate in the implementation of the UN plan, noting that this year’s plan has required $23.5bn, but only $6.2 bn had been raised, leaving a large gap in fund-ing and needs — only 26% of the financial requirements for the current year — despite the generous pledges and resource mobilisation efforts.

He noted that the United States is the largest donor to the United Nations in 2017, contributing 23.4% of global humanitarian needs, followed by the European Commission (11.3%), the United Kingdom (6.6%), Germany (5.2%), Japan (5.1%), Canada (4.7%), Sweden (3%), Nor-way (1.6%), Switzerland (1.2%), and Denmark (1%), while the rest of the world share the remaining 9.9%.

Dr Al Muraikhi spoke about the UN strategic humanitarian plan for the next three years which was set for the coming three years and was approved by the Sec-retary-General, noting that it relies on key themes, including mobilising resources to implement humanitarian aid plans through genuine partnership between the United Nations and the gov-ernment sector as well as non-governmental organisations, civil society organisations and the private sec-tor, while encouraging businessmen to contribute to the efforts of the United Nations through activities, events, initia-tives and the provision of doctors, engineers, nurses and trainers for certain periods.

He added that the plan also depends on raising awareness and communication with all actors and donors to highlight the work of the United Nations. The plan also includes a “policy development” by provid-ing the necessary flexibility to deal with each country separately and each region according to its own situation, explaining that it is not permissible to deal with Arab countries as European countries in writing reports on grants.

Al Muraikhi urged the donor countries to fulfil their commitments and cooperate in the implementation of the UN plan, noting that this year’s plan has required $23.5bn, but only $6.2bn had been raised, leaving a large gap in funding and needs — only 26% of the financial requirements for the current year — despite the generous pledges and resource mobilisation efforts.

ED ITOR IAL

11MONDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2017 OPINION

billion in the second quarter of this year as com-pared to $22.8 billion in the same period a year ago. As a result, the trade deficit has reduced from $9.07 billion in FY16 to $8.98 billion in FY17.

In fact, India’s exports have been falling since 2014 and have only seen a recent recovery. It may come as a surprise to many that India’s export per-formance had been deteriorating earlier because of dampened oil prices. Petroleum products con-stitute 25 per cent of the country’s export basket, making them a leading determinant of the export sector’s performance each year.

This raises a number of issues. A popularly accepted theory of trade dictates that a nation will specialise in goods that require resources that are plentiful in the economy. India is not an oil-rich nation by any means. It is a labour-rich country and even oil refining is a capital-intensive process. So, the dominance of refined petroleum products in its export list is inexplicable. This is clearly indicative of the fact that India is missing out on potentially lucrative export markets where it can be globally competitive.

Moreover, oil is also India’s leading import item. Even though the value of oil imports are almost three times that of the country’s oil exports, any change in global oil prices has to have an adverse impact on the external sector. Thus, even when oil prices dip, and India’s import bill does fall giving the government a fiscal bonanza, it nega-

tively impacts exports and dampens the gains.

Another reason for India’s poor show in exports over the last few

In an expected and welcome turn of events, the Indian economy received a Rs 9-trillion resolution to its bad loan and slow growth problem. The government unveiled its plan to

pump Rs 2.11 trillion into over-leveraged state-owned banks over the next two years and another Rs 7 trillion into an ambitious roads project over the next five years.

I’ve repeatedly argued for these in this column and a timely roll-out of the plan should suffice in reviving the dampened animal spirits within the economy. How-ever, now that issues on the domestic front have been tackled headfirst to the best of the government’s fiscal capabili-ties, the external sector should be explored for lucrative economic possibilities.

Fortunately for India, the global econ-omies are showing signs of recovery for the first time after the financial crisis of 2008, rendering the world markets ripe for the taking. The IMF resonated this in its latest World Economic Outlook by raising the global growth forecast for 2017 to 3.6 per cent. This came due to growth improvements in countries like China, Russia and emerging Europe while India was awarded a downward revision in its growth.

Most importantly, India’s major trad-ing partners like the US (2.2 per cent), China (6.8 per cent), Hong Kong (3.8 per cent) and Singapore (2.5 per cent) are showing better than expected growth rates. Under these circumstances, India could easily leverage the external upswing to boost its growth momentum.

Moreover, the external sector has already been showing some positive signs of late, with exports shooting up to $28.61

World markets ripe for the taking but where is India’s strategy?years was a sharp fall in discretionary spending among consumers as a result of subdued demand since the finan-cial crisis. Consequently, India’s other leading items of export like diamonds and jewellery witnessed a sharp downturn. Now, as the global economy recovers both demand for petroleum products and discretionary prod-ucts will see an uptick. But the fact of the matter remains that these should not be the products defining India’s export performance.

As mentioned, India is a labour-rich nation and is cur-rently in desperate search for avenues to find employment for its workforce, which is expanding at an annual rate of over 11 million. Nudging the export sector to compete in manufactured goods should be a beneficial strategy in this case.

As China gradually vacates its position of being the world leader in low-cost manufacturing and graduates into higher value-added products, India should not miss out on the opportunity to become the next manufacturing desti-nation. It has already lost considerable ground to Bangladesh in textiles and Vietnam in electronics.

Unfortunately, the government’s Foreign Trade Policy 2015-20 misses out on this issue. It calls for building ade-quate export infrastructure like better multi-modal transportation for improved road connectivity to ports, railheads, airports and inland waterways; faster through-put at ports; faster movement of rakes by railways; and quicker air cargo movement.

It also recommends the creation of a supportive infra-structure for exports, including more laboratories for testing and more tool rooms and plant quarantine facilities, among others.

However, these are merely supply-side issues which are important in themselves but do not have much impact in altering India’s export composition. To strengthen man-ufacturing competitiveness in India, there is a dire need of bold structural changes in the economy like labour reforms, for which I have argued at length in this column quite recently.

Another bold reform can be inspired from the early years of Chinese growth with the encouragement of entre-preneurship at the village-level.

There remain multiple avenues for India to adopt a trade-focused, pragmatic approach which can ensure long-term gains for the country’s trade competitiveness. If the government falters at this juncture, India could very well miss an inflexion point in the country’s export history.

The writer is chair, Institute for Competitiveness, India.

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For South Koreans, Donald Trump is a headache

Donald Trump is set to arrive in South Korea on November 7. The country is naturally abuzz with anticipation, in a show of how important the military alliance with the US is, especially at a

time of tense standoff with North Korea.The foreign minister and the South Korean

ambassador to Washington will reportedly be at the airport to greet Trump and his wife. South Korean President Moon Jae-in will then have a one-on-one with his US counterpart before an extravagant din-ner party with K-pop performances and traditional music. Trump will also address the National Assem-bly and visit US military base, Camp Humphreys.

All that brouhaha over Trump’s visit belies the difficult predicament the South Korean government is in. Since taking office, Trump has made clear that he cares only about US interests. To continue kow-towing to Washington would be dangerous, even if Seoul cannot quite quit the pretence of honouring its longtime ally, at least not yet.

The Trump presidency, less than a year old, has been a headache for President Moon, who won the elections in May promising greater engagement and an end to hostility between the two Koreas. He took power exactly as Trump engaged in a verbal escala-tion with Pyongyang, threatening “fire and fury” and unilateral military action against North Korea.

It has become apparent that the US president doesn’t particularly care about the safety and secu-rity of Korean people. According to Republican senator Lindsey Graham, Trump said, “If thousands die, they’re going to die over there.”

During the visit, Trump is also bound to bring up, at least privately, the free-trade agreement (FTA) between South Korea and the US, having

insisted that it is “horrible” and “job-killing” for Americans. At Washington’s demand, the two sides agreed early October to renegotiate

the deal. While Moon opposed the FTA when he was in opposition six years ago, he is hardly in a position to give it up now, considering that South Korean businesses benefit greatly from the arrangement.

Despite disagreements, Moon has tried to sound in sync with the US leadership. He has been ada-mant to show support for stronger measures against North Korea and has repeatedly invoked the word “pressure,” which he says is necessary to bring North Korea back to the negotiation table.

The government announced on Friday that it was about to release a list of its own sanctions against Pyongyang, at the request of the Americans. And Moon has tried to downplay the looming FTA renegotiation, saying in August that it is not “some immediate, major crisis”.

Like Moon, South Koreans are not really enam-oured with Trump, though they do value relations with the US. Most South Koreans — 78 percent, to be precise — have no confidence in Trump, accord-ing to a Pew Research Center survey released in June, but a similar number — 75 percent — express favourable opinions toward the US even at a time when the US’s likeability is declining around the world.

In a separate poll, conducted last November by Asan Institute, a domestic think tank, the percent-age of respondents who said that US-South Korean relations would worsen jumped more than four times from 2015 (14.1 percent) to 2016 (64 percent). From 2014 to 2016, the percentage of South

Koreans who thought US military presence in South Korea to be the most important issue for the two allies nearly doubled from 17.6 to 30.

In other words, more South Koreans than not view Trump’s intentions toward the Korean Penin-sula with scepticism, and there is growing attention to whether the US should continue to guarantee South Korea’s security.

An ostensibly liberal politician that rose to power as part of a movement to oust a corrupt con-servative government, Moon is trapped between an uncaring ally and an electorate that is psychologi-cally dependent on it, and he knows it. His discontent surfaces in the media only through more talkative members of his circle, like special advisor Moon Chung-in, who caused a firestorm late Sep-tember by saying that even if the US-South Korea alliance falls apart, war must be stopped.

It was actually a good point: Why should South Korea beg for American protection when the US doesn’t seem committed to peace in the Korean Peninsula?

Knowing that there are fundamental differences between Moon and Trump, South Korean conserva-tives have sought to exploit the visit as an occasion to fan the public’s anxiety and undermine the presi-dent’s popularity. Opposition lawmakers and conservative media are hounding the presidential office over why Trump is spending only one night in South Korea when he is spending two nights in Japan and China. They insist that the government is slighting the US president or hasn’t done enough to

South Korean supporters wave the US and South Korean national flags during a pro-US rally in Seoul.

win Washington’s favour.Competing rallies, for and

against Trump’s visit, took place this weekend, and it’s obvious that Washington has left Seoul with no choice but to lessen its depend-ence on the US.

That’s why the administration rightly — but carefully - has begun working to improve relations with China. On October 30, Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-hwa announced that there would be no additional deployment of THAAD, a US-made missile defence sys-tem which was set up to protect South Korea from North Korean missiles but which has angered Beijing to no end. She also said that South Korea is working on establishing its own defence system.

This has brought almost imme-diate relief for South Korean businesses that have been suffer-ing from a form of unofficial sanctions imposed by the Chinese government over the THAAD deployment last year.

On November 3, Moon gave an interview to Singapore’s Channel News Asia in which he defined his policy as “balanced diplomacy”. But, no doubt, Moon will need to explain to Trump during next week’s visit what this pivot means. And if Trump is smart, he will get the message: Show that you genu-inely care for the people of this country, or we can find another ally.

The writer is co-founder and pub-

lisher of Korea Expose, an online

magazine.

Se-Woong Koo Al Jazeera

The Trump presidency, less than a year old, has been a headache for President Moon, who won the elections in May promising greater engagement and an end to hostility between the two Koreas.

India is a labour-rich nation and is currently in desperate search for avenues to find employment for its workforce, which is expanding at an annual rate of over 11 million. Nudging the export sector to compete in manufactured goods should be a beneficial strategy in this case.

12 MONDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2017MIDDLE EAST / AFRICA

Tunisian actor Nejib Belkadhi gestures as he arrives to attend the 28th Carthage Film Festival at Cinema Le Colisee in Tunis, yesterday.

Beirut

AFP

A car bombing by the Islamic State group killed at least 75 dis-placed civilians who had fled fighting in

eastern Syria, a monitor said yes-terday, as the cornered extremists try to defend their last strongholds.

Syrian government troops meanwhile moved closer to the border town of Albu Kamal, the last urban zone still held by IS jihadist holdouts in Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The regime’s forces “progressed rapidly” and are 15km from the town, the Brit-ain-based monitor said.

Saturday’s attack in the east-ern province of Deir Ezzor killed “at least 75 displaced civilians including children” and wounded 140, said Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman.

The scale of the attack showed that despite losing vast swathes of territory it held in Iraq and Syria, the jihadist group is still capable of mounting deadly attacks. Abdel Rahman said “a new convoy of displaced people joined the gathering at the time of the attack”.

The displaced had fled bat-tles in the province, where Russian-backed Syrian regime forces and the US-backed Syr-ian Democratic Forces (SDF), are fighting the jihadist group in sep-arate offensives.

The Observatory, which relies on a network of sources

on the ground inside Syria for its information, reported Saturday that dozens had died in the bombing.

Fighting across Deir Ezzor province has sent thousands of civilians fleeing for their lives, some straight into the desert. Saturday’s attack came a day after Russian-backed govern-ment forces seized Deir Ezzor city from the jihadists.

IS, which in 2014 declared a “caliphate” spanning territory in Iraq and Syria roughly the size of Britain, has also lost most of the territory it once controlled in neighbouring Iraq, including second city Mosul.

On Friday, Iraqi forces retook the border town of Al-Qaim, also on the Euphrates river. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on Sunday toured Al-Qaim and raised the national flag in the town centre.

The jihadists who have lost most of the territory they once controlled are now confined to a small stretch of the Euphrates Valley border area, which was at the heart of IS’s so-called

caliphate.The US-led coalition has

estimated that around 1,500 jihadists are still in the area. Syr-ian regime forces have intensified their assault on IS in the area in a bid to seize Albu Kamal close to the Iraq border. According to the Observatory, Iraqi militiamen have fought alongside Iraqi regime forces in the area. Civilians caught in the fighting have tried to escape.

Aid group Save the Children estimates that some 350,000 people have fled the recent

fighting in the oil-rich province, half of them children.

Some of those displaced had sought refuge in a desert area controlled by the SDF, a Kurd-ish-Arab alliance, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates where Saturday’s bombing took place, the Observatory said. It was not the first attack attributed to IS and targeting civilians fleeing Deir Ezzor.

On October 12, a car bomb-ing in the northeastern province of Hasakeh killed at least 18 peo-ple, including displaced people

and Kurdish security forces, the Observatory said. The jihadists have been repeatedly accused of targeting those attempting to flee during fighting.

The United Nations on Thursday said the group had executed 741 civilians in the bat-tle for the Iraqi city of Mosul, accusing it of “indiscriminate targeting of civilians trying to flee the city”. Despite being driven out of large parts of Deir Ezzor, IS still controls 37 percent of the province and its fighters are deployed on the eastern side.

75 dead in IS attack in Deir EzzorSyrian government troops meanwhile moved closer to the border town of Albu Kamal, the last urban zone still held by IS jihadist holdouts in Syria.

Kinshasa

Reuters

Congo’s electoral com-mission president announced yesterday

that long-awaited presiden-tial elections to replace President Joseph Kabila would take place in Decem-ber 2018.

Speaking at a news con-ference in Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital Kinshasa, Corneille Nangaa said around 43 million voters had so far been registered for the vote.

Repeated delays to the poll, originally scheduled for late 2016, have triggered unrest and raised fears the central African nation could slip back into the conflicts that killed millions around the turn of the century, mostly from hunger and disease.

The electoral commission had originally said last month that the presidential vote could not take place until April 2019 at the earliest, and the opposition had warned that the population would “take matters into its own hands”. Dozens died in pro-tests against Kabila’s refusal to step down at the end of his constitutional mandate last December. But U.S. envoy Nikki Haley said during a visit to meet with Kabila last month that the vote must happen in 2018 or it will lose international support.

Goma

Reuters

C lashes between Congolese troops and supporters of a renegade colonel in Congo’s

eastern city of Bukavu killed seven people yesterday before he surrendered and turned himself in to UN peacekeepers, the army said.

Democratic Republic of Congo army spokesman for South Kivu province, Dieudonne Kasereka, said clashes had started after police came to disarm Colo-nel Abbas Kayonga, who was sacked on Thursday from his post overseeing anti-fraud efforts in local mines. Kayonga, a former rebel from a group that had been disarmed and integrated into the Congolese military, gave himself up at the local base for the U.N. mission to Congo.

“He has just surrendered with

17 people at the base of the mis-sion,” Kasereka said by telephone. Two army soldiers and three of Kanyonga’s bodyguards were killed in the fighting and two civil-ians were killed by stray bullets, he said.

Seventeen members of Kan-yonga’s force surrendered to U.N. troops and nine others were cap-tured by the army, Kasereka said, adding that soldiers found about a dozen heavy weapons at Kan-yonga’s house.

Security has been deteriorat-ing across Congo since the end of last year, when President Joseph Kabila refused to step down despite his mandate expiring.

Surging militia violence in the east, which has for decades been a tinderbox of ethnic rivalries fuelled by the region’s mineral wealth, and in the formerly peaceful central Kasai region, have raised fears the country

could slip back to the multi-fac-eted civil wars of the turn of the century. Those wars killed hun-dreds of thousands directly in violence while millions of others are thought to have died from of hunger and disease.

South Kivu has rich deposits of gold, tin and coltan, used in mobile phones, which have long helped finance rebel groups and army officers.

The national electoral com-mission was expected to announce a date for the election to replace Kabila later on Sunday. Last month, it said the election cannot take place until April 2019, raising fears of an escalation in militia violence and civil disturbances.

US envoy Nikki Haley said during a visit to meet with Kabila last month that the vote must happen in 2018 or it will lose international support.

Renegade colonel surrenders in eastern Congo after clashes

Juba

AFP

Troops remained deployed around the home of South Sudan’s

powerful former army chief Paul Malong yesterday in a dispute over the fate of his 30 bodyguards, an army spokes-man said.

The standoff began on Friday evening when more than 100 soldiers surrounded his residence in central Juba, South Sudan’s capital, in a move which prompted peo-ple to flee to their homes for fear the standoff would erupt into clashes.

Malong is a hardline eth-nic nationalist whose dismissal in May by President Salva Kiir had sparked fears of a major clash between sup-porters and troops loyal to the president, though that never materialised.

But by Sunday morning, after a tense but uneventful 36 hours, people could be seen venturing out for early-morning prayers even though troops remained in the streets around his home in the cen-t r a l H a i A m a r a t neighbourhood, an AFP cor-respondent said.

Army spokesman Briga-dier General Lul Ruai said the soldiers were in place because of a “small misun-derstanding” with Malong, who had failed to comply with an order given to him on Friday that he release most of his government-appointed bodyguards to return to their former duties.

“That notification did not go down well with him, he didn’t comply with the order, and as a result we establish a limited presence of security personnel around his resi-dence to ensure that elements do not take advantage of the misunderstanding,” he told AFP.

Aden

AFP

The Islamic State group claimed a major attack on Yemen’s government bas-

tion of Aden yesterday which killed at least 15 people, wounded 18 others and sparked a hostage crisis.

IS and its extremist rival Al Qaeda have taken advantage of the war between Yemen’s Saudi-backed government and the country’s Shia Houthi rebels, who are allied with Iran, to bol-ster their presence across much of the south.

While Al Qaeda in the Ara-bian Peninsula (AQAP) has for years been the stronger presence in southern Yemen, IS has recently come forward to claim attacks on both the army and the country’s Shia, whom it consid-ers heretics.

IS claimed yesterday’s attack on the criminal investigations unit in an online statement released by its “Aden and Abyan province”, which said clashes were “still ongoing”.

Security officials in the southern province of Aden, where the Yemeni government is based, said an explosives-rigged car blew up outside the investigations unit, killing six officers on the spot along with the driver.

Around 30 gunmen then stormed the unit and freed around 50 detainees from their holding cells, some of whom took up arms to fight alongside the militants, according to a high-ranking official.

The security officials said a total of four suicide bombers blew themselves up during the attack, one of them targeting the convoy of Yemen’s chief of

security. The gunmen also took an unknown number of people hostage inside the unit on Sun-d a y a f t e r n o o n . T w o policewomen were killed exe-cution-style by the attackers, the official said. By late afternoon, security officials said four police-men — among them a colonel — had been freed. Earlier in the day, Yemeni security sources had said they suspected Al-Qaeda militants were behind the well-coordinated attack.

The assault spells an abrupt end to a period of relative calm that has reigned in Aden, where the government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi has been based since it was driven out of the rebel-held capital Sanaa in 2014.

Yemen’s complex war, which pits the Saudi-backed Hadi gov-ernment against former president Ali Abdullah Saleh and

his Huthi rebel allies, has allowed AQAP and IS to flourish in the south of the country.

IS has not claimed a Yemen attack in almost a year. The group claimed responsibility for a December 18, 2016 attack in Aden that killed 48 and wounded 84 soldiers who had lined up to get their salaries.

While southern Yemen has long been the target of a drone war by the United States, which classifies AQAP as the radical network’s most dangerous branch, Washington appears to have recently turned its aim towards IS as well.

In October, a US drone strike targeted what local officials said was an IS group in the central Bayda province—the second known strike by Washington against the jihadists in Yemen.

The United States has ties to Yemeni special forces trained by

the United Arab Emirates, a key member of the Saudi-led coali-tion, who have closed in on AQAP southern strongholds in recent weeks.

The UAE has played a key role in the Saudi-led military campaign to prop up Hadi’s gov-ernment against both AQAP and the Huthis, who forced him into exile back in 2014.

More than 8,600 people have been killed in Yemen since Saudi Arabia and its allies joined the war in 2015 to support gov-ernment forces, according to the World Health Organization. Another 2,100 have died of chol-era this year. Long the poorest country in the Arab world, Yemen now stands steps away from an official declaration of famine, as war, displacement, and port and airport blockades leave its people struggling to secure food.

IS claims major attack on Yemen govt bastion

Long-awaited Congo election in Dec 2018

Juba standoff at ex-army chief’s home continues

A picture shows the damage in the eastern Syrian city of Deir Ezzor during a military operation by government forces against Islamic State (IS) group jihadists, yesterday.

Carthage Film Festival

13MONDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2017 ASIA

Charge d’Affaires at the US Embassy, MaryKay Loss Carlson, visiting the Golden Temple in Amritsar, yesterday.

US Charge d’Affaires visits Sikh shrine

India has registered a jump of 30 ranks in the World Bank’s Doing Business Report 2018. The country has ranked 100 among 190 countries in the current report over its rank of 130 in the Doing Business Report 2017.

The DB Report covers 10 indicators which span the lifecycle of a business. India has improved its rank in 6 out of 10 indicators and has moved closer to international best practices (Distance to Frontier score).

This is the outcome of the “Reform, Perform, Transform” mantra given by the Prime Minister, reflecting a strong political will to carry out comprehensive and complex reforms.

This is also the result of an extensive exercise of stakeholder consultations, identification of user needs, Government process re-engineering to match Government rules and procedures with user expectations and streamlining them to create a more conductive business environment.

Major aspects of the DB Report are encapsulated in tabular form presented below:

S. No.

Area Rank Improvement

Distance to Frontier (DTF)

Score Improvement

Major steps taken by Government of India

From To From To

1. Resolving Insolvency

136 103 32.75 40.75 Q Insolvency & Bankruptcy Code created for efficient handling of restructuring & insolvency proceedingsProfessional institutes set up for handling restructuring & insolvency proceedings

2. Paying Taxes

172 119 46.58 66.06 Q Enabled electronic registration, return & payment of ESI & EPF contributions

3. Getting Credit

44 29 65 75 Q Increased coverage of security interest registration under SARFAESI ActQ Secured creditors prioritized over Government dues for purposes of recovery

4. Enforcing Contracts

172 164 35.19 40.76 Q Dedicated commercial courts establishedNational Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) to monitor and manage court cases

5. Protecting Minority Investors

13 4 73.33 80 Q Greater transparency requirements for interested parties transactionsQ Greater shareholder protection through action against directors & claims for damages

6. Construction Permits

185 181 32.83 38.80

Information provided by Embassy of India in Qatar

India’s subsonic missile ready for fifth trial

BJP flays delay of bridge completion in Wazirabad

Sushma seeks report over boy shot dead in Kenya

New Delhi

IANS

India’s indigenous subsonic cruise missile, Nirbhay, which failed its last test in December 2015, is ready for its fifth trial, DRDO chief S

Christopher said yesterday.“We are planning to have

one probable trial (of the mis-sile) next week,” Christopher said on the sidelines of a three-day international conference Fipsphysiocon-2017, organised by the Defence Institute of Phys-iology and Allied Sciences.

The DRDO chief said the glitches that led to failure in its fourth trial in December last year, have been removed.

According to sources, the problem was related to the soft-ware of the missile, and has been resolved. This time, the missile will also have a turbojet engine instead of the turbofan engine used so far.

Nirbhay’s December 2016 trial was aborted half-way as the missile changed its targeted course. It had to be destroyed within minutes of taking off

amid a threat that the missile could hit land.

The 750-1,000km-long range missile’s first test on March 12, 2013 failed as it fell after 20 minutes of flight. The second on October 17, 2014 was, however, successful. The third test on October 16, 2015 saw the missile nose-dive after covering 128km in the Bay of Bengal.

The cruise missile is expected to supplement the

Indo-Russian joint venture supersonic cruise missile Brah-Mos, which can carry warheads up to 290km.

The two-stage missile has a length of six metres, a diameter of 0.52m, a wing span of 2.7m and a launch weight of about 1,500kg.

Nirbhay, which has capabil-ity to strike deep into enemy territory, has been designed and developed by the DRDO at its aeronautics R&D laboratory Aeronautical Development Establishment in Bengaluru.

The cruise missile is pow-ered by a solid rocket motor booster developed by the Advanced Systems Laboratory and is guided by a highly advanced inertial navigation system indigenously developed by Research Centre Imarat.

Nirbhay is able to pick out a target among multiple targets and attack it, and also can go around a target and re-engage it. It can fly at different altitudes ranging from 500 meters to 4 kilometers above ground and can fly at tree level to avoid detection by radar.

New Delhi

IANS

The BJP yesterday flayed the “delay” in the completion of the Signature Bridge over the Yamuna river in

Wazirabad and the resultant escalation in the project cost and demanded a White Paper by the AAP government in Delhi.

“The government led by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal should immediately bring out a White Paper to tell the rea-sons for the delay and increase in the project cost,” Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Manoj Tiwari told reporters during a protest against the delay.

The Signature Bridge project was approved in 1997 after a mishap on the narrow Wazirabad bridge, wherein a school bus fell into the Yamuna, killing 22 children.

He said if the AAP govern-ment did not act soon, BJP workers will force the Kejriwal government to complete the work and also issue a White Paper.

The completion of the bridge has been delayed by

several years due to inadequate funds. Even the project cost has increased from Rs1,100 crore to Rs1,575 crore, becoming a major cause of concern for the Public Works Department. The PWD has released Rs1,244 crore (excluding Rs100 crore) so far.

Hitting out at the previous Congress government, the BJP MP from northeast Delhi said: “In 1998, the Congress came to power in Delhi and sat over the project for five years. The con-struction started only in 2003.”

Tiwari said the project delay had caused huge loss to t h e e x c h e q u e r a n d corruption.

The BJP leader said that ever since the Kejriwal-led gov-ernment came to power in 2013 and again in 2015, it had done little to speed up the work, except repeatedly raising cost and deadlines.

“In 2014, after becoming an MP from the area, I repeatedly checked out with the company building the bridge. By late 2015, it was said that almost 90 per cent of the structural work was completed. Yet, two years down the line, the Kejriwal gov-ernment is still extending deadlines and increasing the project cost,” he added.

New Delhi

IANS

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has sought a report from the

Indian High Commission in Kenya following reports of an Indian boy being shot dead in Nairobi.

“Suchitra (Suchitra Durai, India’s High Commissioner to Kenya) - Please send me a report on this,” Sushma Swaraj tweeted late on Saturday night following a request by one Netra Parikh.

In her message on Twitter, Parikh said that the boy named Bunty Shah of Bombil Indus-tries was shot dead at his home and sought support for the fam-ily. Kenya is home to around

80,000 people of Indian origin.

In a separate tweet, Sushma Swaraj asked the Indian High Commissioner to South Africa Ruchira Kamboj to extend help after an Indian national died of natural causes while on a tour in that country.

She was responding to a request by Shweta Kapur, who tweeted: “Because it is the weekend and a foreign land, nobody knows who to turn to for help.

Can the MEA help? It is a nightmare for a member of the general public to experience a loss like this, and the helpless-ness thereafter.”

Sushma Swaraj also sug-gested Kapur to contact Kamboj.

Nirbhay

“We are planning to have one probable trial (of the missile) next week,” DRDO Chief S Christopher said.

The cruise missile is expected to supplement the Indo-Russian joint venture supersonic cruise missile BrahMos, which can carry warheads up to 290km.

Belgian King arrives on week-long visitNew Delhi

IANS

Belgium’s King Phillipe and Queen Mathilda, accompa-nied by a large business

and academic delegation, arrived here yesterday evening on a week-long state visit to India. President Ram Nath Kovind will meet the royal couple tomorrow

after bilateral talks between King Phillipe and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

King Philippe and Queen Mathilde are being accompanied by six ministers and a high-pow-ered business delegation comprising CEOs of nearly 90 Belgian companies and over a dozen chiefs of academic institutions.

India is Belgium’s second largest export destination and third largest trade partner out-side the European Union (EU). In 2016-17, bilateral trade, over-whelmingly dominated by diamonds, was at $13.28bn of which exports from India to Bel-gium acc1ounted for $5.65 billion while imports from Bel-gium accounted for $6.62bn.

Kamal Haasan confirms launch of political partyChennai

IANS

Confirming his political plunge, actor Kamal Haasan (pictured bot-

tom) yesterday said the first step will be the launch of a mobile software app tomor-row — his 63rd birthday — that will enable him to be in touch with the fans and as well as enable book-keeping.

At a function to mark the 39th anniversary of his fan/welfare club, he said his polit-ical plunge by starting a political party is confirmed.

Haasan said the political party launch will happen in a calm manner and the launch of mobile app is the first step tomorrow.

He said his fans would contribute funds for the polit-ical party and the mobile app will facilitate keeping proper accounts of funds collected.

According to him, there is no shame in stretching out one’s hands for the welfare of the people and if only the rich pay their taxes properly, the country would be on the right path. Kamal said November 7 is a day not to cut a cake and celebrate but a day to cut canals, obliquely referring to the flooding of several local-ities in the city due to recent rains.

The actor added natural disasters does not differenti-ate between rich and poor and all should be ready to take preventive measures then acting after the loss of dear ones.

Kolkata

IANS

In commemoration of the UK-India Year of Culture 2017, Britain will be the focus

country for the 23rd edition of the Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF), India’s second oldest film festival, which will also pay homage to icons of Indian cinema Tom Alter, Om Puri and Ramananda Sengupta. The festival beginning here on November 10 will screen an assemblage of 143 films span-ning 53 countries under 16 different categories till Novem-ber 17.

“As many as 13 films from Britain will be shown during the festival while six films of acclaimed English filmmaker Michael Winterbottom will be screened as part of retrospec-tive,” Yadab Mandal, KIFF

Director, said here yesterday.Stars Amitabh Bachchan and

Shah Rukh Khan will be present at the inaugural ceremony on November 10. Tamil film icon Kamal Haasan and filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt are also slated to attend the ceremony, to be pre-sided over by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

Iranian film maker Mostafa Taghizadeh’s “Yellow” (2017) will kick-off the gala event while pro-lific French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s “The Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company” will be screened in cinematic for-mat at the fest. The 1986 film, made for television was restored and released in October this year.

According to organisers, this would be the first screening of the film in India.

Three films will be show-cased in memory of cinematographer Sengupta

(“Headmaster”) and actors Tom Alter (“Shatranj Ke Khiladi”) and Om Puri (“Sadgati”).

As for the competitive sec-tion, the women’s director’s competition has been replaced by ‘Innovation in Moving Images’ with a prize money of Rs 51 lakh for the best film and Rs 21 lakh for the best director.

“The women directors’ exclusive section was done away with following feedback from the female filmmakers who felt a separate section would create distinctions and they felt it doesn’t matter who is male, who is female.. the fact that they make good films, mat-ters most,” said Mandal.

Indian languages competi-tion section has been introduced this year in which 10 films in nine languages will fight it out for the Hiralal Sen Memorial Award.

Kolkata Film Festival starts on November 10

India jumps 30 places in World Bank Report

14 MONDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2017ASIA

Women graduate from Kabul UniversityKabul

AFP

Afghanistan’s first gradu-ates in women’s studies donned caps and gowns

yesterday to collect their unu-sual qualifications in the patriarchal country.

Kabul University is the coun-try’s first higher education institute to offer a degree focused on gender and women’s issues, according to the United Nations Development Programme and university officials. Feminist the-ories, media, civil society and conflict resolution were among the largely women-focused top-ics covered in the two-year Master’s course, funded by South Korea and run by the UNDP.

Offering such a degree would have been unthinkable during the Taliban’s repressive 1996-2001 Islamist regime.

Afghan students attend the graduation ceremony of the first-ever class of Gender and Women’s studies master’s programme in Kabul yesterday.

BBC name change stirs anger in AfghanistanKabul

Reuters

The BBC is facing an angry reaction in Afghanistan after it changed the name

of one of its local language Face-book pages to BBC Dari, the official name of the Afghan ver-sion of Persian or Farsi but one rejected by many local Persian speakers.

The Facebook page and other social media sites were bombarded by criticisms of the change. Many Persian speakers say the name Dari has been imposed historically by the tra-ditionally dominant Pashto ethnic group as an implicit denial of Afghanistan’s place in the wider Persian-speaking world.

The reaction highlighted the sensitivity of linguistic issues in Afghanistan, a

country with a mix of over 35 languages spoken by ethnic groups including Pashtuns, Tajiks and Hazaras as well as Uzbeks and Turkmen.

It also echoed some of the tensions around the government led by President Ashraf Ghani, which was formed after the dis-puted 2014 election and which is seen by many Persian-speak-ing Tajiks and Hazaras as favouring his own Pashtun ethnicity.

While the Persian spoken in Afghanistan and neighbouring Iran have distinct accents and numerous variations in vocab-ulary and usage, other essentials are the same, with the gap between the two sometimes compared to the differences between the French spoken in France and Canada.

“My language is Farsi,” said

Mujib Rahman Rahimi, spokes-man for Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, whose Jamiat-e-Islami party draws its support mainly from Tajiks.

“The time of betrayal of our language and culture is past. We will not allow anyone else to choose a name for our lan-guage,” he wrote on his personal Facebook page.

However not all reaction was negative and some other users supported the move, saying it reinforced Afghanistan’s national identity: “I am from Afghanistan, not Persia or the Persian race,” wrote one.

There was also no sign the reaction would harm the BBC’s ability to report or have major political repercussions in Afghanistan. Combined BBC services are estimated to reach about 6.6 million Afghans out of

a total population of some 35 million, according to figures last year from the BBC Trust.

The head of the BBC’s Afghan service, Meena Baktash defended the use of the term Dari, noting that it was the offi-cial name of the language in Afghanistan.

She said the change was intended to link the Facebook page to the BBC Dari radio serv-ice, which was launched in 2003 and which, together with the BBC Pashto service, occupies an important place in the crowded local media landscape.

“There are absolutely no political and cultural reasons behind our decision,” she wrote in a statement on Facebook, which, as in other countries, has taken off in Afghanistan to become one of the main sources of news and comment.

27 dead as Typhoon Damrey hits VietnamDanang

AFP

At least 27 people have died and nearly two dozen are missing after Typhoon

Damrey barrelled into Vietnam, authorities said yesterday, dam-aging tens of thousands of homes and submerging high-ways days before the country welcomes world leaders to the APEC summit.

The storm, which made landfall on Saturday, is the worst in decades to strike the coun-try’s southern coastal region, an area normally spared the typhoons that typically hit fur-ther north.

More than 40,000 homes were damaged as heavy rains and 130 kph winds tore through the area, leaving 27 dead and 22 reported missing, according to the disaster management office.

Coastal Khanh Hoa province, home to the popular white sand Nha Trang beach, was hardest hit with 16 dead and 10 injured, the government said.

APEC woes More than 30,000 people

were evacuated ahead of the lat-est storm in central Vietnam, including foreign tourists.

Photos showed residents wading through knee-deep floodwater in several cities as toppled electricity poles and trees blocked roads.

Some 300 ships were wrecked, according to the gov-ernment, while local authorities said Phu Yen province’s Tuy Hoa city had never suffered such devastation before.

There were also reports of

lesser damage around 500 kil-ometres north in Danang, the coastal city which will host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooper-ation (APEC) summit next weekend. A local resident said

strong winds and rain had torn down signs promoting the APEC gathering, which will bring together leaders including US President Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping.

“Now city people are joining hands with authorities to clean up the mess to make the city look nicer for the APEC week,” said Tran Huy, as dark clouds loomed above.

Pakistan poll panel worried over delayIslamabad

Internews

The Election Commission of Pakistan has warned that introducing a consti-

tutional amendment with respect to delimitation by November 10 is necessary as even a delay by a single day would make it very difficult to hold general elections in time.

The statistics and law sec-retaries have been told that the Election Commission of Paki-stan (ECP) is fully prepared for the purpose, but no progress on adding new names to the vot-ers’ lists and delimitation is possible because the constitu-tional amendment has not been introduced.

On the other hand, Railways Minister Saad Rafique yester-day criticised the PPP for refusing to engage with the PML-N on election-related leg-islation and said Asif Ali Zardari was working on some unknown agenda, adding the dubious attitude of both PPP and PTI on delimitation was incomprehen-sible. The federal minister warned that the next general election could be delayed if the constitutional amendment on delimitation of constituencies was not made in time.

“Imran Khan appears to be in some kind of a hurry with all his public meetings. His agenda is well known to the PML-N and the people of Pakistan, but Zardari is working on some unknown agenda,” the minis-ter said after a meeting with PML-N president Nawaz Sharif at Jati Umra.

He remarked that his advice to ‘Einstein’ Zardari and the

person holding rallies (Imran) was that they should shun using abusive language and holding public meetings, which could be organised later, and sit together with the PML-N to bring constitutional amend-ment on delimitation ahead of the next years’ elections. “It is not just in PML-N’s interest, it is in the national interest,” he stressed.

Talking to media, Saad said they were not desperate or in a hurry to meet Zardari, as “only those people could eat the “Laddo” (sweets) he (Zardari) distributes who have digestion similar to that of his”.

He noted that there was no mechanism to hold those judges accountable who gave cover to martial law and dictators.

Responding to a question about Pervez Musharraf not appearing before the courts, Saad said the generals were sent home with guard of hon-our and there was no one to question them (for their actions).

The judges who violated their oath, took oath from dic-tators and endorsed martial law also never faced accountabil-ity, he said.

Kuala Lumpur AFP

Five people have been killed and over 3,000 evacuated after a storm

triggered serious flooding yes-terday in Malaysia’s Penang, with the state’s historic capital under murky brown water.

The army was deployed to provide help after a torrential

downpour lasting for 15 hours sparked the worst inundations in the northern state for years.

Hundreds of houses across the state were flooded, many trees were toppled and roads cut off, disaster officials said.

Many streets in the state capital George Town on Pen-ang Island, a Unesco World Heritage site which attracts hordes of foreign and

domestic tourists, were sub-merged in deep dirty water.

Officials said the floodwa-ters reached up to 12 feet and submerged houses, with pic-tures showing cars almost entirely under water and vic-tims being rescued in boats.

Britain’s Prince Charles and his wife Camilla are due to visit Penang tomorrow as part of a tour of Malaysia.

China may take the lead at climate talksBonn

Reuters

China has a chance to assert leadership of a global plan to com-bat global warming this week at the first

UN climate talks since US Pres-ident Donald Trump decided to quit the 195-nation Paris Agree-ment, delegates say.

Government experts are to work on a “rule book” for the 2015 climate pact at the annual meeting that starts today and ends on November 17 in Bonn, Germany.

The accord seeks to end the fossil fuel era this century with a shift to wind, solar and other clean energies.

Trump once dismissed cli-mate change as a Chinese hoax to harm the US economy and said in June that he would pull out of the agreement and instead promote US coal and oil. A formal US withdrawal will take until 2020.

No other nation has fol-lowed his lead. US influence is likely to wane compared to other big greenhouse emitters led by China, the European Union and India even though Washington will still have a place at the table in Bonn.

“The rest of the world, including all major emerging economies, has made it clear

that it is committed to the Paris Agreement,” Maldives Environ-ment Minister Thor Abraham, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (OASIS), said.

China, on track to beat its goal of a peak in carbon emis-sions in 2030, seems best placed to step up leadership of an agreement largely designed by Washington under former president Barack Obama, many delegates say.

The meeting “will be a great free advertisement for China,” one European environment minister said. And Beijing plans to launch a nationwide carbon market this year, albeit delayed from the first half.

“The results (in Bonn) will prove that this (Paris) process has certainly not stopped,” Chi-na’s top climate official, Xi Zhenhua, told a news confer-ence last week.

He expressed hopes that Washington will end up stay-ing in the Paris pact.

Adding urgency, 2017 is set to be the second warmest on record, behind 2016, according to NASA. And 2017 has had weather extremes of hurri-c a n e s , f l o o d s a n d drought-fuelled wildfires.

Fiji will preside at the Bonn talks, the first small island nation to do so in more than two decades of UN climate negotiations.

The federal minister warned that the next general election could be delayed if the constitutional amendment on delimitation of constituencies was not made in time.

Floods in Penang; thousands evacuated

Officials row a boat out of a submerged local government building in Hue city after typhoon Damrey hit Vietnam, yesterday.

15MONDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2017 ASIA

Sydney

Reuters

Australia turned down yesterday an offer to take 150 asylum seek-

ers being held in an Australian-run detention cen-tre in Papua New Guinea, where U.N. officials have warned a humanitarian emer-gency is unfolding.

About 600 men have bar-ricaded themselves inside the camp on an island in Papua New Guinea, defying efforts by Australia and PNG to shut it. Food was cut off by Aus-tralia five days ago. Australian authorities want the men moved to a transit centre else-where on the island at the start of a process the asylum seekers fear will result in them being resettled in PNG. or another developing nation.

Washington

AFP

US President Donald Trump would “cer-tainly be open” to meeting with North Korean

leader Kim Jong-Un, he said in an interview broadcast yester-day as he began an extended Asian tour.

Asked by journalist Sharyl Attkisson, host of the “Full Measure” TV show, whether he would “ever consider sitting down with the dictator,” Trump said he was holding meetings with numerous Asian leaders.

“I would sit down with any-body,” he said. “I don’t think it’s strength or weakness, I think sitting down with people is not a bad thing.

“So I would certainly be open to doing that but we’ll see where it goes, I think we’re far too early.” Trump’s concilia-tory-sounding comment came after months of fiery rhetorical exchanges between the two leaders, prompted by a series of internationally condemned nuclear and missile tests by the North.

The North has denounced Trump as a “mentally deranged US dotard,” or senile old man, and the country’s ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun referred to him yesterday as “instable.” Trump, for his part,

has mocked Kim as “Little Rocket Man” and has vowed to rain “fire and fury” down on the North if it threatens the US or its allies. Trump’s latest com-ment appeared to be something of a reversal from a Twitter message he sent just over a month ago, in which he said that US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was “wasting his time” trying to negotiate with the North Korean leader.

The war of words has been deeply unsettling for US allies in the region, which include Japan, where Trump met yes-terday with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and South Korea, where he is to meet tomorrow with President Moon Jae-In.

Trump then travels to China on Wednesday, Vietnam on Fri-day and the Philippines on Sunday. The interview was broadcast as a letter by the US Defense Department emerged that said the only way to locate and secure all North Korea’s nuclear weapons sites would be via a US ground invasion.

Trump says open to meeting Kim

LEFT: US President Donald Trump gestures to Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as Japanese professional golfer Hideki Matsuyama looks on, as they play golf at the Kasumigaseki Country Club in Kawagoe, north of Tokyo yesterday. RIGHT: Japan’s Foreign Minister Taro Kono (right) shakes hands with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson prior to their working dinner in Tokyo yesterday.

In bomber jacket, Trump warns dictatorTokyo

AFP

President Donald Trump yesterday issued a stern warning that “no dictator” should underestimate the United States as he

kicked off an Asian tour dominated by the North Korea nuclear crisis.

Speaking to cheering military personnel at Yokota Air Base just west of Tokyo min-utes after landing, Trump donned a bomber jacket and said “no one, no dictator, no regime and no nation should underestimate... Amer-ican resolve”.

“Every once in a while in the past, they underestimated us. It was not pleasant for them, was it?” roared Trump.

“We will never yield, never waver and never falter in defence of our people, our free-dom and our great American flag.”

Trump’s marathon trip comes with the North Korea crisis at fever pitch, as US bomb-ers fly sorties over the Korean peninsula and fears mount of another Pyongyang missile test. The president’s first stops are Japan and South Korea — frontline US allies in the effort to force Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear programme, and the two countries with most to fear should a full-scale conflict break out.

Trump touched down under clear blue Tokyo skies and stepped out with his wife Melania in bright sunshine to greet the crowds.

Speaking to reporters on the plane, he announced he would likely be meeting Rus-sian President Vladimir Putin during the tour, as the international community scrambles for a solution to the North Korean crisis.

“I think it’s expected we’ll meet with Putin, yeah. We want Putin’s help on North Korea, and we’ll be meeting with a lot of different leaders,” said Trump.

He added that North Korea was a “big problem for our country and for the world, and we want to get it solved” but had kind words for its people.

“I think they’re great people. They’re industrious. They’re warm, much warmer than the world really knows or understands.

They’re great people. And I hope it all works out for everybody,” he said.

The next stop was a golfing date with his “friend” Shinzo Abe, prime minister of Japan, with whom he enjoys a close personal relationship.

Trump joked with reporters on Air Force One that they should not believe him if he claims to outhit Hideki Matsuyama, one of the world’s best players who joined the

leaders on the course. Abe also appeared to have enjoyed his nine holes, tweeting: “A round of golf with a marvellous friend (Pres-ident Donald J Trump), full of spirited conversation.”

A senior administration official said they chatted about trade and North Korea on the course but was diplomatically coy over the key question of who won, saying only: “I am told the three of them did not keep score.”

The Japanese leader has emerged strengthened from a crushing victory in a snap election and has firmly supported Trump in his policy of exerting maximum pressure on Kim, backed up with the threat of military force.

“I want to further cement the bond of the Japan-US alliance, based on our relations of trust and friendship with President Trump,” Abe said as Trump arrived.

Trump for his part described Japan as a “treasured partner and crucial ally of the US”.

The pair later dined at a swanky restau-rant in upmarket Ginza, with Trump telling reporters: “I don’t think we’ve ever been closer to Japan than we are right now.”

“Our relationship is really extraordinary.”

Melania looks at pearls with pearl diver duoTokyo

AFP

While her husband hit the greens, First Lady Mel-ania Trump got a

glimpse yesterday of Japanese cultured pearls at Tokyo’s glitzy Ginza shopping district on the first day of their Asia tour.

Melania was welcomed by Akie Abe, the wife of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, at Mikimoto’s flagship pearl shop as part of her cultural programmes, while doz-ens of security guards kept close watch. The two greeted and kissed each other on the cheek instead of shaking hands or bowing.

Then they went upstairs to a “hidden floor” of the building, reserved for VIPs, to talk over tea and coffee. No details of their dis-cussions were released.

Mikimoto brought in two “ama” divers who traditionally

harvest pearls, clad in typical white costumes with big goggles and wooden buckets, to explain pearl farming to the US First Lady.

“Wonderful visit w/ Mrs. Abe today! Enjoyed conversation over tea & the cultural presentation on the history of pearls,” Melania tweeted after the meeting.

One of the divers, 57-year-old Miaki Okumura, told reporters after the two VIPs left the shop: “I was asked how deep the waters we dive are, and how long I can hold my breath.”

“I answered that the depth was about five-six metres and I can hold my breath for about 40-50 seconds,” she said, adding that Melania Trump seemed impressed at her endurance.

“She looked like a very kind person and was also very beau-tiful. Her hands were beautiful and warm when we shook hands.”

Dhaka

AFP

The US wants a diplomatic solution to the Rohingya crisis but is not ruling out

sanctions to pressure Myanmar if needed, a senior State Depart-ment official said yesteday in Bangladesh. Thomas Shannon, under secretary of state for political affairs, said solving the crisis through dialogue with Myanmar was a priority but the door remained open for tougher measures.

“We have a variety of

sanctions available to us should we decide to use them. This will be a part of larger efforts of pres-sure,” Shannon told reporters after meeting officials in Dhaka.

“But right now, as I noted earlier, our purpose is to solve the problem, not to punish.”

His comments come just days after US lawmakers pro-posed sanctions against Myanmar’s military in some of the strongest efforts yet by Washington to pressure Myan-mar to end abusive treatment of its Rohingya Muslim minority.

Seoul

AFP

Thousands of South Koreans protested yesterday against an

upcoming visit by Donald Trump and called for peace as the US President begins an Asian tour dominated by North Korea’s nuclear programme.

South Korea is a key US ally and hosts 28,500 US troops but many of Trump’s

critics in the South see him as a warmonger whose recent war of words with Kim has heightened ten-sions on the flashpoint peninsula. “We oppose war! Negotiate peace!” the pro-testers chanted in central Seoul, waving banners and balloons emblazoned “Peace, not war” and “We want peace”.

Many slammed both Trump and Kim for height-ening the risk of conflict.

Protests rage against visit

Trump’s latest comment appeared to be something of a reversal from a Twitter message he sent just over a month ago.

US President Donald Trump puts on a US Pacific Air Forces bomber jacket at Yokota Air Base, yesterday.

A demonstrator during a peace rally in Seoul yesterday.

US wants talks on Rohingya crisis

First Lady of the United States, Melania Trump, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s wife Akie Abe listening to explanations by Sales Manager of Mikimoto Jewellery Store, Hajime Fukuju, at Mikimoto Ginza Main Store in Ginza district of Tokyo, yesterday.

Australia refuses to take in refugees

16 MONDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2017EUROPE

Puigdemont turns himself in to policeBrussels

AFP

Catalonia’s sacked sep-aratist leader Carles Puigdemont and four of his former minis-t e r s t u r n e d

themselves in to Belgian police yesterday after Spain issued a warrant for their arrest.

The five, who face accusa-tions of rebellion and sedition in Spain, are due to appear yester-day before a judge who will

decide within 24 hours whether to detain or release them.

It is the latest dramatic development in the crisis unleashed by the Catalan sepa-ratists’ push for independence from Spain that sent shock waves across Europe.

Puigdemont and his allies fled to Belgium last Monday after Spain sacked the Catalan exec-utive and imposed direct rule on Madrid following the regional parliament’s declaration of inde-pendence last month.

“They were deprived of their liberty at 9.17am,” the Belgian prosecutor’s office said.

“We were in regular contact with the lawyers of the five peo-ple and they agreed to turn up at the police station,” prosecution spokesman Gilles Dejemeppe said.

“They honoured that commitment.”

Only the five, their lawyer and an interpreter will be present at yesterday’s hearing.

Spain issued a warrant for their arrest on Friday after they failed to appear before a judge on claims of sedition, rebellion and misuse of public funds over the move to declare Catalonia an independent republic.

The judge in Madrid had on Thursday put Puigdemont’s dep-uty and seven other deposed regional ministers behind bars because of a risk that they would flee.

Puigdemont, 54, who insists that Catalonia earned the right to declare independence follow-ing a disputed referendum last month, had said Friday that he was willing to cooperate with Belgian authorities.

But he said he was not con-vinced by guarantees of a fair trial back home, denouncing the “enormous pressure and politi-cal influence on judicial power in Spain”.

The ousted Catalan leader, who still describes himself as “president,” has also said he is willing to run as a candidate in Catalonia’s December 21 snap election, which was organised after Madrid fired the region’s government over the independ-ence declaration.

“We want president

Puigdemont to be the person who leads the big offensive we will carry out on the 21st at the polls,” said Marta Pascal, spokes-woman for his PDeCAT party.

She said the conservative, pro-independence party was looking to put together a “big united list,” a day after Puigde-mont himself called for separatists to unite in the election.

During the last regional elec-tion in September 2015, Puigdemont’s PDeCAT and the leftwing ERC party stood together in a “Together for Yes” coalition.

With the help of the separa-tist, far-left CUP party, they held an absolute majority in the Cat-alan parliament, which has since been dissolved after it declared

independence last month.But there have been grow-

ing tensions between the two allies over strategy and it is not clear if they will stand together again.

ERC leader Oriol Junqueras has been in custody since Thurs-day along with other members of Puigdemont’s dismissed gov-ernment who did not flee to Belgium over their role in the independence drive.

Opinion polls published in several newspapers Sunday indi-cated that the ERC would come first in the December election, but that the independence coa-lition as a whole could lose its absolute majority.

Puigdemont’s party, mean-while, would come fourth, the surveys suggest.

Pro-independence demonstrators show posters demanding freedom for imprisoned politicians and leaders of separatist movements during a demonstration, in Barcelona, yesterday.

Gilles Dejemeppe, spokesman of the Public Prosecutor's Office, during a press conference, in Brussels, yesterday.

They were deprived of their liberty at 9.17am. We were in regular contact with the lawyers of the five people and they agreed to turn up at the police station: Prosecution spokesman

Five in custody

Italy to probe shipwreck with all-female victimsRome

AFP

The bodies of 26 women who drowned attempt-ing the perilous crossing

from Libya to Europe were brought to Italy yesterday, where investigators launched a murder inquiry.

A seemingly endless line of black plastic body bags were lowered by crane from a Span-ish ship onto the portside in Salerno, southern Italy, where they were placed in coffins and loaded onto waiting hearses.

Twenty-three of the women died on Friday after the inflatable dinghy they were travelling on sank, and their bodies were recovered by the Spanish ship Cantabria, which was operating as part of the EU anti-trafficking force Sophia.

A Sophia spokesman said another three bodies had been discovered during other life-saving operations in the Mediterranean this week, and transferred to the Cantabria as it headed towards Italy with its grim cargo.

There was no immediate explanation as to why all the dead were women, though the crossing is riskier for them.

Far-right party loses out in Slovakia n electionsBratislava

AFP

Slovak’s neo-Nazi politician Marian Kotleba lost his job as regional governor while

the ruling leftwing Smer party also took a thrashing in Slovak regional election this weekend, final results showed yesterday.

Rightwing and centrist par-ties emerged as the winners in Saturday’s vote, the Slovak sta-tistics office said, and they will now govern in five out of seven Slovak regions.

Smer, led by Prime Minis-ter Robert Fico, will have regional governors in the remaining two regions, having lost four governor’s seats in the vote, in which turnout was just 30 percent.

Kotleba, head of the LSNS party, lost in his native central region of Banska Bystrica to independent candidate Jan Lunter, who was backed by coalition and opposition par-ties which joined forces against the far-right governor.

Only two of 336 LSNS

candidates have been elected into regional assemblies in Slo-vakia, a eurozone member with 5.4 million inhabitants.

“The fascist party was defeated and it is also impor-tant that the political map of Slovakia has changed,” Grigorij Meseznikov, head of the Brati-slava-based Institute for Public Affairs, a think-tank, said.

Hostile to both the Roma minority and the established elite, Kotleba has spoken warmly about former Slovak president Jozef Tiso.

He attributed his defeat to a media campaign which “vot-ers preferred to real achievements”, he said.

“We fought a coalition of seven parties backing Mr Lunter. The fight was unfair and even though media and candi-dates kept talking about democracy and a free society, it was all against one in the end,” Kotleba said.

“We’ve got rid of evil,” the Smer vice chairman Peter Pel-legrini said in a Facebook post.

But Smer, which leads a

three-party governing coalition with the Slovak Nationalist Party (SNS) and the Most-Hid Hungarian minority party, has suffered one of its greatest defeats in recent history.

“You have started a revolu-tion. The first domino fell,” Igor Matovic, head of the opposition centrist OLANO party, told vot-ers after the election, in which OLANO won two governor’s seats.

Yesterday’s vote has “redrawn the political map of Slovakia,” said an analyst.

Bomb threats force evacuations in MoscowMoscow

Reuters

Bomb threats forced thou-sands of people to evacuate Moscow’s

Bolshoi Theatre, Metropol hotel, GUM department store on the Red Square and other public places yesterday, local media reported.

A spate of anonymous phone calls have caused disrup-tion at shopping centres, train

stations and public buildings across Russia in the past two months. The calls have so far proved to be false alarms and there have been no claims of responsibility.

RIA news agency, citing a source in the police, reported that as many as 5,000 people were evacuated from GUM and Metropol hotel. TASS and RIA, also quoting police sources, said the Bolshoi theatre was also evacuated.

A witness said police had cordoned off premises of Bolshoi and GUM.

TASS said the evacuation was announced from Bolshoi before a performance was due to start at 1600 GMT.

Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB security service said last month the authorities knew the identities of those responsible, saying they four Rus-sian citizens based abroad with “accomplices” inside Russia.

Three Romania railway line workers die in rock fallBucharest

AP

Romanian emergency officials say three workers who were repairing a railway line have died after rocks and dirt gave way and trapped them.

A spokesman for the local Inspectorate for Emergency Situa-tions, Claudiu Achim, said the three men were working on a bridge near the western town of Petrosani on Saturday morning when they were hit by falling boulders and soil.

Some 20 emergency workers attempted to rescue the work-ers, but they died under the rubble.

Authorities have opened an inquiry into whether health and safety regulations were being followed.

A police officer and a security staff member stand guard in front of the Bolshoi Theatre, in Moscow, yesterday. 380 detained at anti-Putin protest

Moscow

AFP

Russian police detained at least 380 activists across the country yes-

terday for holding unauthorised protests against President Vladimir Putin, a monitoring group said.

The demonstrations took place after radical opposition politician Vyacheslav Maltsev appealed on his website for supporters to hold protests across the country, calling for

a “people’s revolution” to end “Putin’s tyranny”.

“We know of 380 detained. 13 were detained in Saint Petersburg and 346 in Mos-cow, who were taken to 19 police stations,” said OVD-Info, a rights group that monitors detentions at politi-cal protests.

It added that officers from the powerful Investigative Com-mittee, which probes serious crime, was questioning detain-ees at some police stations.

Moscow police said

previously they had detained 263 people “for breaches of public order”.

Many of those detained were carrying knives, knuck-ledusters and pistols that can fire rubber bullets, TASS state news agency reported.

A photographer said police, some in helmets and bullet-proof vests, picked up the protesters one by one in central Moscow close to the Kremlin. Police then detained activists on another central square, TASS reported.

17MONDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2017 EUROPE

Italy wiretaps bill to harm press freedom: CriticsRome

AFP

A contested wire-tap-ping bill in Italy risks landing journalists in jail for up to three years and could see

mafia-related crimes go unde-tected, critics said yesterday.

The bill, which was approved by the cabinet this week and is waiting for a green light from the prime minister’s office, is a bid by the government to stop poten-tially incriminating but private conversations being splashed in the media.

“It will be the last rites for criminal trials,” warned Giulia Bongiorno, one of Italy’s most renowned lawyers.

Under the proposed law,

police officers listening to wire-tapped conversations will only be allowed to transcribe and pass on to prosecutors “relevant” bits. Any transcripts not used in trial would be sealed as “secret”.

Successive governments have attempted to change the law to protect against what former prime minister Silvio Ber-lusconi in 2010 dubbed “porno politics”, where reputations are ruined and trials jeopardised before courts rule.

But each time their efforts have been stymied by police, prosecutors and the media, who say it would hobble investiga-tions and limit journalists’ ability to report on matters of public interest.

Justice Minister Andrea Orlando said on Thursday the bill would “in no way hamper the possibilities for prosecutors and police to use wiretaps as i n s t r u m e n t s i n t h e i r investigations”.

“Nor does it affect freedom

of the press or the right to inform,” he said.

But La Repubblica daily said yesterday that it would mean “six months to three years for the journalist who, doing his job, finds and publishes wiretaps that the prosecutor considers ‘irrelevant’ for trial, but are extremely relevant for their news value”.

“Publishing such transcripts will become extremely risky, with the real chance of ending up behind bars for revealing ‘secret’ wiretaps that the politi-cal sphere above all does not want to end up in the papers,” it added.

Leaving it up to policemen to decide what could be of interest to the legal process was pure folly, Bongiorno said.

“There will be an enormous amount of discretion in decid-ing, almost arbitrarily, what wiretaps are relevant. Over-worked Italian judges won’t be able to perform the necessary controls this law demands,” she said.

Bongiorno argued that Orlando had also ignored the “most obvious pitfall: the ambi-guity of language”.

“Perhaps he thinks that peo-ple always talk openly? Does he know how many times the word mozzarella is used instead of cocaine? Will mozzarellas be held to be relevant or not?” she said.

In one famous trial in 1983, judges convicted dozens of defendants for mafia crimes after examining transcripts of

conversations in which “horses” was used as a code word for her-oin and “green lemons” for US dollars.

Former anti-mafia magis-trate Antonio Di Pietro said the bill “has big holes in it” and called for it to be modified.

“The criticisms raised by magistrates, lawyers, jurists and journalists should convince the government to review the bill and persuade parliament to call for radical changes,” the Italian National Press Federation (FNSI) said.

Transforming it into law not only risked “serious conflicts with heavy consequences for freedom of the press” but would also deny citizens “the right to know about mafia, corruption and crime cases,” it said.

Thousands march to honour slain runnerGray

AFP

Shocked locals in eastern France joined the family and distraught friends of a

murdered jogger for a silent march yesterday that saw up to 10,000 people take to the streets of the town of Gray.

Alexia Daval, a 29-year-old bank worker, disappeared last weekend after heading out for a run from her home in the rural Haute-Saone area to the north-east of France’s Burgundy.

Her badly burned body was found in a nearby wood on Mon-day and an autopsy has determined she was strangled to death, but police have not yet made any arrests and the iden-tity of her attacker remains unknown.

The seemingly random nature of the murder in a quiet town of around 5,000 people has led to national attention, with hundreds of joggers pay-ing homage to her on Saturday by running in cities across France.

“With these sporting ges-tures, you are making Alexia into a strong symbol, one of the free-dom for all women to enjoy running and to live,” her mother Isabelle Fouillot said through tears as she addressed the rally yesterday.

Many of the 8,000 to 10,000 people who joined the march and listened to speeches from Daval’s devastated hus-band and family brought white roses which were placed in front of her parents’ shop in the town.

Frankfurt

Reuters

Germany’s environmental-ist Green party polled at its highest level this year

in a survey published yesterday, overtaking Chancellor Angela Merkel’s other would-be coali-tion partner as talks to form a new government continued.

An agreement would see Merkel extend her 12-year spell at the helm of Europe’s largest economy, during which she has helped avoid a collapse of the euro zone and established her

country as the bloc’s economic powerhouse.

Merkel must bring together the Greens, the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) and her own conservative bloc to secure a majority, with sticking points including immigration caps, whether to end coal production and increasing defence spending.

The poll published by Ger-man daily Bild put the Greens at 11 percent, up by one percent-age point from a week earlier, while the FDP fell by the same amount to 10 percent.

Merkel’s Christian Demo-crats (CDU) and their Bavarian CSU sister party were stable at 31 percent while the Social Democrats, who have said they would not renew their ruling coalition with the conservatives, slipped by one percentage point to 21 percent.

Party leaders are slated to meet today before the larger negotiating teams launch into more detailed talks.

The FDP leader, Christian Lindner, said in an interview that his party did not fear new elec-tions if the negotiations failed.

Germany’s Green party tops polls

Women urge Macron to push ‘emergency plan’ against abuseParis

AFP

A hundred female French personalities from the arts, media and film are calling on President Emmanuel Macron to implement an “emergency plan” against violence, after

a series of allegations of harassment and abuse in France.In a letter addressed to Macron and published yesterdya in

the Journal du Dimanche newspaper, French feminist Caro-line De Haas, journalist Giulia Fois, activists Marie Cervetti and Clara Gonzales said that “one in two women has been a victim of sexual violence”.

“Many are no longer here to sign onto this platform, dead after beatings,” they wrote.

“Do you have that in mind when you travel, meet with cit-izens, preside over a meeting or an official dinner? We are one in two”.

Haas and her co-writers are calling for five priority meas-ures, including mandatory corporate training against harassment at work and a doubling of state subsidies to asso-ciations helping female victims of abuse.

La Repubblica daily said, publishing such transcripts will become extremely risky, with the real chance of ending up behind bars for revealing ‘secret’ wiretaps that the political sphere above all does not want to end up in the papers.

Extremely risky

Parents of murdered French woman Alexia Daval, are joined by her husband Jonathan Daval (centre) and others as they take part in a silent march in her memory, in Gray, some 40km east of Dijon, yesterday.

Court to rule on Nazi-looted Pissarro paintingParis

AFP

A French court will rule tomorrow who really owns a painting of

women picking peas by Impressionist master Camille Pissarro, more than 70 years after it was seized from a Jew-ish art collector.

The dispute began earlier this year when the painting, “La Cueillette des Pois”, went on display in Paris during a retrospective of Pissarro’s work, alerting family mem-bers of the original owner, Simon Bauer.

Bauer, a wealthy busi-nessman with a sizeable art collection in 1943, was dis-possessed by the anti-Semitic wartime French government which collaborated with the Nazis.

After narrowly escaping death when a train drivers’ strike stopped him from being sent to an extermination camp, Bauer recovered some of his collection after the war and received compensation—but never La Cueillette.

In early 2017, his descendants spotted an opportunity when the paint-ing was lent to the Marmottan museum in Paris by Ameri-cans Bruce and Robbi Toll, who had bought it in 1995 for $800,000.

They launched legal action and in May a court granted their request to have it impounded pending a rul-ing on its on ownership.

The verdict mirrors other legal disputes around art and property looted from Jewish owners by the Nazis which has subsequently been sold on to—sometimes—unsus-pecting new owners.

Out of 650,000 stolen pieces, about 100,000 had not been returned by 2009, according to figures released at the Holocaust Era Assets Conference held in the Czech Republic that year.

Sicilians cast ballots in regional electionsCatania

AFP

Sicilians cast their ballots yesterday in a regional vote seen as a barometer for Ita-

ly’s general election next year, with the populist Five Star Move-ment (M5S) challenging a resurgent right as a divided left flounders.

“The vote is considered deci-sive not just by the party leaders pounding the streets of the main cities, and not just for the island’s future, but for the future of Italy and even Europe,” editorialist Marcello Sorgi wrote in La Stampa daily.

A victory in Sicily would give M5S its first region, a boost sup-porters say could propel it all the way to national leadership.

“The choice is simple: us or them, the future or the past, hope or failure, citizens or traditional political parties”, comedian Beppe Grillo, the movement’s outspoken founder, wrote on his blog.

M5S candidate Giancarlo Cancelleri, 42, is expected to have just one real challenger for the victory podium: Nello Musumeci, 62, who was leading the race in recent opinion polls and could snap up the region for the right.

A bitterly feuding left is expected to fail to get anyway near the top.

Analysts say the political dynamic on the Mediterranean island mirrors the situation nationally, and the vote is being closely watched in the euro-zone’s third-largest economy for indications of how the general election, due before May, will go.

Polls close at 10 pm (2100 GMT) and votes will be counted on Monday.

“The polling stations open under a dark cloud, amid con-troversy over the risk of vote-rigging,” La Repubblica daily said, referring to claims the decision to wait overnight before beginning the count increased the chances of fraud.

The interior ministry was tightening controls in response to the fears, it said.

All eyes were on turnout fig-ures, with low participation known to have rewarded M5S in the past. Only 47 percent of Sic-ily’s eligible voters turned out for the last regional election in 2012, a record low.

By midday, only 10.8 percent of voters had cast

their ballots—down nearly half a percentage point from the same time at the last election.

A victory for Musumeci could be a boost for billionaire former premier Silvio Berlusconi, who recently shrugged off scandals to return to the political fray, portraying himself as a pro-European moderate and the only real defence against populism.

His centre-right Forza Italia

(Go Italy) party joined forces with its traditional rightist allies the Northern League and the Broth-ers of Italy for the Sicily vote—a powerful combination which pollsters say could steal the show at the national elections.

The anti-immigrant North-ern League, meanwhile, sees Sicily as a testing ground for expanding its reach beyond Ita-ly’s northern regions.

Italian anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) leader, Beppe Grillo (centre) during a campaign meeting, in Sicily.

19MONDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2017 AMERICAS

Teenage candidates for Governor speak during a forum at Free State High School in Lawrence, Kansas. The state of Kansas has no age restrictions for gubernatorial candidates. The mid-term election will be held today.

Kansas mid-term polls

Santiago

AFP

A top Venezuelan opposi-tion lawmaker requested Chile’s protection after

Venezuela’s high court announced he would be

prosecuted on charges punish-able by a decade in prison.

Freddy Guevara, the opposi-tion-stacked National Assembly’s number two official, sought ref-uge at Chile’s embassy in Caracas after the pro-government domi-nated Supreme Court’s

announcement on Friday.Chile’s foreign ministry said

in a statement that Guevara, 31, was received at the residence of its ambassador “as a guest,” and that he “had requested the pro-tection of Chile” based on “what he considers to be imminent

threats to his security and per-sonal integrity.” The prominent opposition leader became the sixth Venezuelan to seek protec-tion at the embassy in under three months, including four judges who are already pro-tected in Chile.

Washington

AFP

The former Democratic Party chief seriously con-sidered replacing Hillary

Clinton with then US vice pres-ident Joe Biden as the party’s White House candidate after Clinton fell ill at a public event, according to excerpts from a new memoir published on Saturday.

Donna Brazile also wrote that Clinton’s campaign was badly mismanaged, “anemic” and had taken on “the odor of failure.” She likened the cam-paign’s New York headquarters

to a hospital ward where “some-one had died.”

The Washington Post pub-lished the searing details after obtaining an advance copy of Brazile’s book, which will be released Tuesday.

Brazile, 57, is a longtime Democratic strategist who served as the Democratic National Committee’s interim chairwoman during key months of last year’s presidential campaign.

Explosive revelations from Brazile earlier in the week, pub-lished by Politico, said Clinton’s team essentially took over day-to-day operations of the DNC, in

essence rigging the system against Senator Bernie Sanders, who was challenging Clinton for the party’s nomination.

Her allegations have con-vulsed the party as it struggles to rebuild, and whipped up accu-sations of cheating from President Donald Trump.

Brazile wrote that there were secret deliberations to use her power as party chief and begin the process of removing Clinton and runningmate Senator Tim Kaine from the ticket, and replacing them with vice presi-dent Joe Biden and Senator Cory Booker.

Brazile thought they held the

most appeal to working class voters and could defeat Trump.

This was in the aftermath of Clinton’s collapse at a Septem-ber 11 memorial event in New York that was captured on ama-teur video that quickly went viral.

But Brazile never carried out the plan. “I thought of Hillary, and all the women in the coun-try who were so proud of and excited about her. I could not do this to them,” she wrote.

As for Clinton’s campaign, it was poorly run and overconfident, taking minority votes for granted and putting out “stiff” and “stupid” messages, Brazile said.

She charged that the DNC was sidelined during the cam-paign, with Clinton’s team controlling party finances and strategy.

Brazile wrote of fights with Clinton’s top lieutenants, includ-ing one conference call where she complained of being treated like a “slave.”

“I’m not Patsey the slave,” Brazile, who is black, recalled saying. “Y’all keep whipping me and whipping me and you never give me any money or any way to do my damn job. I am not going to be your whipping girl!”

Clinton has not responded to Brazile’s accusations.

Washington

AFP

Former US president George H W Bush voted for Hillary Clinton in the

2016 election and called Don-ald Trump a “blowhard” who was driven by “a certain ego.”

His son George W. Bush left his ballot blank and said of Trump: “This guy doesn’t know what it means to be president.”

The revelations, contained in historian Mark Updegrove’s “The Last Republicans,” avail-able in bookstores later this month, represent the strongest criticism to date from the Bush clan on why their Republican successor is uniquely unfit to hold office.

“I don’t like him,” the elder Bush told Updegrove in May 2016 before the elections in November of that year, accord-ing to excerpts of the book.

“I don’t know much about him, but I know he’s a blow-hard. And I’m not too excited about him being (our) leader.”

While traveling to Tokyo on Air Force One, Trump walked back to the press cabin and responded to the Bushes’ criti-cism. “I don’t need headlines. I

don’t want to make their move successful,” he said. The younger Bush was skeptical about then-candidate Trump’s chances in a race in which his younger brother Jeb was an early favorite. “Interesting, won’t last,” was his initial reaction when Trump entered the race.

Once the bombastic billion-aire real estate magnate secured the Republican nomination, Bush expressed surprise and worried about Trump’s lack of humility, and thus his inability to recog-nize his own limitations and surround himself with more knowledgeable people.

“As you know from looking at my family,” Bush said, humil-ity “is a certain heritage, that’s what they expect, and we’re not seeing that” in Trump. After Trump said, “I’m my own advi-sor,” Bush quipped: “Wow, this guy really doesn’t understand the job of president.”

The comments are sure to escalate a long-running feud and come after George W Bush gave a speech last month that condemned bigotry, bullying and lies in US politics in what was widely seen as a broadside against Trump even though the president was not mentioned.

Trump approval rating lowerthan other presidents: PollWashington

AFP

A new poll, released a year after Donald Trump’s stunning electoral victory, shows the US presi-

dent suffering historically dismal approval ratings as the Russia investigation casts a continuing shadow.

The Washington Post, which conducted the survey with ABC News, said Trump’s approval rating was “demonstrably lower than any previous chief execu-tive at this point in his presidency over seven decades of polling.”

Just 37 percent of Americans approved of his handling of the job.

The president’s disapproval rating was 59 percent, with half of those saying they strongly dis-approved, both the worst marks of his presidency.

The next highest disapproval rating among presidents stretch-ing back to Dwight Eisenhower was 41 percent, for Bill Clinton, in 1993.

The poll comes as Trump faces a daunting array of polit-ical and legal challenges, led by the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into pos-sible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

Last week a federal grand jury had indicted three former

Trump campaign aides or advis-ers, and NBC News reported Sunday that more charges could be coming.

Trump has also faced set-backs in Congress, notably over his promise to repeal the Obamacare health program and to build a wall on the border with Mexico.

The poll showed voters sharply critical of Trump’s achievements, with 65 percent saying he had accomplished “not much” or “little or nothing,” while only 35 percent said he had achieved a great deal or a good amount.

The coming months offer Trump a chance, at least, to affect those views, as Congress works on a tax plan that the president has insisted would pri-marily benefit middle-class Americans.

Whatever happens in Con-gress, Trump seems certain to be shadowed by the Russia investigation for months to come.

A week after news that former Trump campaign chair-man Paul Manafort and two other men had been indicted, NBC reported that federal investigators have sufficient evidence to bring charges against Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and his son, who has worked with him.

NBC, citing three sources familiar with the investigation, said Mueller was stepping up pressure on Flynn, who served in the White House for only 24 days before being fired amid reports about his communica-tions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and claims he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about them.

Investigators are examining whether Flynn, in previous lob-bying work, had laundered money or lied to federal agents, NBC said.

Two officials told NBC that Mueller’s team was studying whether Flynn sought the removal from the United States of a rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- the cleric Fethullah Gulen, blamed by Erdogan for inspiring a failed coup -- in exchange for millions of dollars.

37pc rating

Just 37 percent of Americans approved of his handling of the job, says WashingtonPost survey with ABC News.

The poll comes as Trump faces a daunting array of political and legal challenges.

Runners wait for the race to commence at the start line in New York yesterday.

New York

AFP

Five days after the worst attack on New York since Septem-ber 11, 2001, the city staged a

show of defiance yesterday, with some 2.5 million people packing the streets to cheer on 50,000 mara-thon participants from around the world. In a befitting finish, Sha-lane Flanagan, 36, became the first American in 40 years to win the women’s title, overcoming a slow start to capture her first major world marathon crown in an unofficial time of 2 hours 26 minutes 53 seconds.

The men’s title was taken by

24-year-old Geoffrey Kamworor of Kenya in an unofficial time of 2 hours 10 minutes 53 seconds.

Many who had come to watch spoke of overcoming their fears as New Yorkers proved their resil-ience in the aftermath of a truck attack that killed eight people and wounded 12 others in Manhattan near the 9/11 Memorial.

Dense crowds lined the route as the elite women began the race at 1420 GMT and the elite men fol-lowed a half-hour later in cool and cloudy conditions.

The city heavily bolstered security for the race, parking mas-sive sand trucks to prevent vehicle attacks, stationing extra police on

rooftops and deploying more anti-sniper units. Hundreds of uniformed officers stood guard along the route, while plain-clothes officers blended in with the crowds of spectators.

President Donald Trump insisted in an interview that aired Sunday, as he began an extended Asia trip, that Americans need never accept terrorism as inevi-table. “We cannot just say, ‘Oh well, it’s going to happen, let’s get used to it.’ We cannot allow it to happen,” he said on the Full Meas-ure syndicated television show. “I can tell you, the Trump admin-istration is getting tougher and tougher and tougher.”

New York marathon shows city’s resilience

Former Democratic chair considered replacing Clinton with Biden Manafort pledges $12m to avoid house arrestWashington

Reuters

President Donald Trump’s former campaign man-ager Paul Manafort

offered to post more than $12m in real estate and life insurance assets and to limit his travel in a bid to avoid continued house arrest, according to court documents filed on Saturday.

Manafort, who ran Trump’s presidential cam-paign for several months last year, and associate Richard Gates earlier this week pleaded not guilty to a 12-count indictment by a fed-eral grand jury.

The charges include con-spiracy to launder money, conspiracy against the United States and failing to register as foreign agents of Ukraine’s former pro-Russian govern-ment. They are part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Rus-sian efforts to tilt the 2016 election in Trump’s favor and potential collusion by Trump associates.

In the Saturday court fil-ing, Manafort offered to limit his travel to New York, Wash-ington and Florida and pledged life insurance worth about $4.5m as well as about $8m in real estate assets, including a property on Fifth Avenue in New York that was identified by some media out-lets as an apartment in Trump Tower.

Bush Sr voted for Clinton in 2016 election race

Venezuelan oppn lawmaker seeks refuge at Chile embassy

20 MONDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2017MORNING BREAK

FAJRSHOROOK

04.26am

05.44 am

ZUHRASR

11.17 am

02.27 pm

MAGHRIBISHA

04.53 pm

06.22 pm

PRAYER TIMINGS

HIGH TIDE 06:30 – 17:45 LOW TIDE 13:00 – 23:45

Hazy to misty at places at first,

becomes mild daytime with weak

chance of local clouds.

WEATHER TODAY

Minimum Maximum

Courtesy: Qatar Meteorology Department

25oC 32oC

Montreal celebrates Leonard CohenMontreal

AFP

Montreal this week cele-brates Leonard Cohen, its native son

whose sage and spiritual songwriting impacted gen-erations. But the singer, who died one year ago, probably wouldn’t have wanted it.

“In all honesty, I think it’s better that he’s not here for this,” admitted his son Adam Cohen, who has spearheaded t h e a n n i v e r s a r y commemorations.

“One of his chief distin-guishing characteristics was his modesty. I think he would have shied away from this event and tried to discourage us from making this visible and big and bothering any-one by inviting them,” Cohen said.

The anniversary’s high-light will be a tribute concert Monday night at Montreal’s Bell Centre arena that fea-tures a wide range of artists who were impacted by Cohen.

Performers at the con-cert, dubbed “Tower of Song,” will include the English pop greats Sting and Elvis Cos-tello, grunge rocker Courtney Love, melancholic pop singer

Lana Del Rey and pre-emi-nent living composer Philip Glass.

The city’s modern art museum, the Musee d’art contemporain, will also inau-gurate an exhibition on Cohen’s life entitled “Crack in Everything,” a lyric from “Anthem,” his song of find-ing hope in bleakness.

Adam Cohen -- himself

a musician who produced his father’s final album last year, “You Want It Darker” -- said he felt a filial duty to put together the tribute, no matter how much the late artist would have resisted it.

“I really wanted to put on display the span of influence that he had and give people an opportunity -- and especially

in this town, Montreal -- an opportunity to come and praise him and celebrate his songs and lift them into the night in one joyous and senti-mental and touching occasion,” he said.

Cohen, 82, died in his adopted home of Los Ange-les on November 7 last year -- one day before Donald Trump’s stunning election upset.

He was buried in accord-ance with his wishes -- in a small, private ceremony with his body in an unadorned pine casket placed next to his parents in a Jewish cemetery of Montreal.

Cohen, the son of a tai-l o r i n t h e c i t y ’ s English-speaking commu-nity, frequently alluded to his native city in verse even as he traveled the world -- spending years in New York, on the Greek island of Hydra and finally in Los Angeles, where for a time he was a Buddhist monk.

Adam Cohen described his father and himself as a sort of “Montreal diaspora” -- who become even more attached to the city as they left. “Montreal is something mythical to us. It’s celebrated; we are ambassadors for Mon-treal everywhere we go,” he said.

Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen performing at the Auditorium Stravinski during the 47th Montreux Jazz Festival in Montreux, Switzerland, in this file photo.

Qatar participates in Istanbul book exhibition The Peninsula

Qatar’s Ministry of Culture and Sport is attending ‘Istanbul International Book Exhibition’ which is expected

to see participation of around 650,000 people.

Over 850 publishers from 18 coun-tries are attending the exhibition which began yesterday at Tuyab Center for Exhibition and Conferences, Istanbul. The exhibition will continue till Novem-ber 7.

Participation of Qatar comes within the framework of strengthening rela-tions with Turkey.

Ibrahim Abdulraheem Al Bohashim, Director for Public Library in the Min-istry of Culture and Sports, said: “The exhibition provides good chance to cel-ebrate for readers as reading is a part of

our daily lifestyle, and an important point for readers to meet each other”.

He added: “Our participation in this exhibition is aimed at strengthening the relation between Qatar and Turkey.”

He emphasised on importance of supporting culture and knowledge in the society which is a part of the vision to build knowledge based economy in line with Qatar National Vision 2030.

The Qatari stall at ‘Istanbul International Book Exhibition’ which is expected to see participation of around 650,000 people.

The Peninsula

The Government Communication Office Director, H E Sheikh Saif bin Ahmed Al Thani

said that blockade which is imposed on Qatar was based on fake press statements which includes hacking of QNA, a fabricated news and false statement attributed to Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.

“Those who fabricated these statements intended to publish it after the mid night 12:15am until there is no time to respond before morning and despite that Qatar’s Gov-ernment Communication Office thwarted their plan and replied at 1:00am and clari-fied that the QNA was hacked,” said Sheikh Saif bin Ahmed Al Thani in an inter-view with Spanish newspaper El País.

He also stressed that the aim from this blockade is very clear which is to suppress Qatar’s independent foreign policy and to shut down free media, adding that “about the siege countries demand to

close Al Jazeera is not the first time and will not be the last time. They have embarrassed themselves with such demands”.

Regarding the situation of workers in Qatar, he said that Qatar has developed a number of laws to protect expat work-ers in the last three years.

About the campaign of siege countries against hosting Fifa world cup 2022, he said that siege countries in their statements in last week called Doha to give up the world cup for lifting the blockade.

He pointed out that the crisis began from fabricated statements then siege coun-tries shifted to allegations of supporting terrorism and then to hosting the world cup.

Qatar has been working seriously for hosting FIFA World Cup since 1999. Qatar

hosted many small champi-onships and Asian Game 2006.

The World Cup 2022 belongs to entire region and not only to Qatar. It is first time that the World Cup will be held in Arab region.

He said that Qatar has moved fast the area of women empowerment compared to siege countries, adding that blockading countries only spread propaganda instead of focusing on real changes. Qatar has made real changes

to provide better life to citi-zens and expatriates. Women in Qatar are holding many key positions in public sector and have made remarkable achievements in private sec-tors including education and health.

Blockade based on ‘fake press statements’

Government Communication Office Director, H E Sheikh Saif bin Ahmed Al Thani, in an interview with Spanish newspaper El País.

Registration for 2018 Ooredoo Doha Marathon opensThe Peninsula

Ooredoo has officially opened registration for the 2018 Ooredoo

Doha Marathon, which will take place on January 12, 2018.

Now in its sixth year, the 2018 edition of the Ooredoo Doha Marathon is being organised to hold the biggest number of runners yet, as Ooredoo continues its push to inspire Qatar’s communi-ties to get fit.

Registration opened yes-terday and fees will range depending on the selected course and age of the participant.

Talking about the mara-thon, Manar Khalifa Al Muraikhi, Director of PR and Corporate Communications, Ooredoo Qatar, said: “The Ooredoo Doha Marathon is a great chance for us all to get fit and run as a community. Families can run together, and even people who have never competed before can start training and their year with something they are proud of. As always, we’re working to ensure the best possible expe-rience for our competitors, so stay tuned for more marathon announcements soon.”

Qatar has developed a number of laws to protect expat workers in the last three years.

Prankster tosses yellow dye into Lincoln fountainNew York AP

A prankster has thrown yellow dye into the fountain at New York’s

Lincoln Center for the Per-forming Arts.

Photos posted on social media Saturday show lemon-yellow water gushing from the fountain, which sits in front of the Metropolitan Opera and is a popular tourist attraction that has been featured in mov-ies including “Moonstruck” and “Ghostbusters.”

The Daily News reports the fountain was turned off after suddenly changing color Saturday afternoon. A Lincoln Center spokeswoman says security notified the police, who are looking for the prankster.

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