Gulf Times

BUSINESS | Page 1
INDEX
QATAR
3 – 8, 28
9
REGION
ARAB WORLD
10, 11
INTERNATIONAL 12 – 25
26, 27
COMMENT
BUSINESS
1 – 8, 14 – 16
CLASSIFIED
9 – 13
SPORTS
1 – 12
Qatar
has
amazing
facilities:
PSG coach
1mn migrants reach
Europe in 2015: UN
A Palestinian boy looks through the gate of Rafah border crossing during a rally calling on Egyptian authorities to open the
crossing in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip yesterday. Egypt has kept its Rafah crossing largely shut since 2013. Since then, it
opened the crossing partially and on a few occasions to allow thousands of Palestinians to travel in and out of the Gaza Strip,
border officials said.
Iraq forces advance into
centre of IS-held Ramadi
AFP
Baghdad
I
raqi security forces advanced yesterday into the centre of Ramadi
for a final push aimed at retaking
the city they lost to the Islamic State
group in May, officials said.
“We went into the centre of Ramadi from several fronts and we began
purging residential areas,” said Sabah
al-Noman, spokesman of the elite
Iraqi counter-terrorism service.
“The city will be cleared in the
coming 72 hours,” he said.
“We did not face strong resistance,
only snipers and suicide bombers and
this is a tactic we expected,” Noman
said.
The fresh push was launched on
Monday night and aims to result in the
full recapture of Ramadi, the capital of
Anbar province in western Iraq.
Footage on state TV channel Iraqiya
showed soldiers driving down the deserted streets of the bombed-out city,
entering homes with caution to detect
possible booby traps and retrieving
shells and rockets from abandoned IS
positions.
The fighting in Ramadi is led by the
elite counter-terrorism force, backed
by US-led coalition air strikes and
also supported by the police, army
and Sunni tribes opposed to the militants.
IS has lost several key towns in Iraq
since Baghdad and the autonomous
Kurdish region in the north started
fighting back following the jihadist group’s devastating offensive 18
months ago.
The Shia-dominated Hashed alShaabi paramilitary forces were heavily involved in battles that led to the
recapture of towns such as Tikrit and
Baiji, but they have remained on the
fringes in the battle for the Sunni city
of Ramadi.
Retaking the city, an insurgent bastion that saw some of the deadliest
fighting against US troops a decade
ago, would be the Iraqi federal forces’
most significant victory so far.
“We built temporary bridges on the
Euphrates and our forces were able to
cross the river to enter residential areas and gain access to the city centre,”
a brigadier general said, speaking on
condition of anonymity.
IS fighters have had plenty of time
to dig in since they took full control of
Ramadi on May 17 after blitzing government forces with wave after wave
of car and truck bomb attacks.
The militants built tunnels to move
without being exposed to the coalition’s daily raids, but their supply
lines have been gradually severed and
military officials estimated last week
there were no more than 300 fighters
left in the city.
The breakthrough came earlier this
month when counter-terrorism forces broke down IS defences and retook
the key southwestern neighbourhood
of Al-Tameem.
After beefing up their new positions, Iraqi military leaders had said
a final push was imminent and leaflets urging the population to flee were
dropped over the weekend.
“The distance between our forces
and the governmental compound,
which is located in the central district
of Hoz, is less than a kilometre” or
500 yards, said the brigadier general.
The provincial headquarters is believed to be one of the main IS bases in
the city, and was at the heart of deadly
fighting earlier this year.
According to another military official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to
talk to the press, 15 families had managed to escape from Hoz in the past 24
hours.
“They were able to flee the lockdown imposed by Daesh on civilians
and they found shelter with the army
on the southern side of the city,” he
said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.
The senior officer said the civilians
were mostly children, women and
elderly men who were screened and
then taken to a safe area on the edge
of Ramadi.
Defence Minister Khaled al-Obeidi
and other officials said in recent days
they believed there were still a few
civilians in Ramadi being used as human shields by IS.
The coalition said its aircraft had
been carrying out six strikes a day on
IS targets in the Ramadi area for the
past month.
GCC condemns abduction of Qataris
T
he Gulf Co-operation Council member states said they are
following with great concern
the abduction of a number of Qatari
citizens in southern Iraq, considering
it as a shameful act and a flagrant violation of international law and human
rights, and contrary to the provisions
of the sacred religion of Islam.
They added that the abduction is
unacceptable act that hurts the bonds
of fraternal relations between the Arab
brothers.
A statement released by the GCC
General Secretariat yesterday said,
while condemning the abduction of
innocent citizens who entered the
Iraqi territory legitimately and le-
+0.62
+1.73%
WEDNESDAY
gally, the GCC countries express full
solidarity with the Government of the
State of Qatar in all the actions taken
in this regard, and hoped that the
contacts taking place between Qatar
and Iraq will result in the release of
hostages and their safe return to their
home country.
The statement pointed out that
the GCC countries, which continue
to co-operate with the Iraqi Government in its quest to achieve security
and stability in Iraq, are demanding
the Iraqi Government to shoulder its
international legal responsibilities, to
take decisive and immediate measures
to guarantee the safety of the abductees and release them as soon as possible, especially since Qatari citizens
had entered Iraqi territory with official permission issued by the embassy
of Iraq in Doha and approved by the
Iraqi Interior Ministry, and since the
kidnapping incident took place in the
territory under the control and sovereignty of the Iraqi Government.
Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Sheikh
Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohamed alKhalifah expressed deep concern over
the kidnapping.
This came in a telephone conversation between Sheikh Khalid and his
Iraqi counterpart Dr Ibrahim al-Jaffari.
During the meeting, the minister
pointed that the Iraqi government
ought to assume its responsibility and
take the necessary crucial procedures
for the safe release of the abductees
and their return unharmed to Qatar.
Meanwhile, the Arab Parliament has
condemned the kidnapping of Qatari
nationals and urged the Iraqi government to take measures to ensure the
safety of the abductees, and release
Vol. XXXVI No. 9945
December 23, 2015
Rabia I 12, 1437 AH
www. gulf-times.com 2 Riyals
atar’s largest financial institution QNB is acquiring the
entire 99.81% stake of National Bank of Greece in Turkey’s
Finansbank for $2.94bn as part of its
“inorganic expansion” to become an
icon in the Middle East and Africa
(Mea) region.
In this regard, QNB has entered into
a “definitive” agreement with National
Bank of Greece for the transaction,
which is expected to be completed by
the first half of 2016, a Qatar Stock Exchange communiqué said.
“This transaction is a significant
milestone in QNB’s Vision to becoming
a Mea icon by 2017 and a leading global
bank by 2030,” QNB Group chief executive Ali Ahmed al-Kuwari said.
QNB, which is also the largest lender
in the Middle East and North Africa
(Mena), intends to fund the purchase
through its own funds and will remain
strongly capitalised after the acquisition in line with its group targets, its
spokesman said.
Finansbank – has a strong capital
base with a capital adequacy ratio of
15.9%, which is among the highest in
the Turkish banking sector – is the fifth
largest privately owned universal bank
by total assets, customer deposits and
loans in the Turkish market.
Highlighting that through controlled growth, the bank aspires to become
an icon in the Middle East and Africa
by 2017, to achieve this, QNB Group is
“pursuing inorganic growth in large,
high growth markets,” he said.
Turkey – with its significant market
size, population, growth track record,
strong economic and banking sector
prospects and strategic location as a
gateway between Europe and Asia –
represents such a market and is therefore of strategic importance for QNB
group.
“We look forward to contributing
towards Turkey’s future economic development and further enhancing its
overall connectivity with international
markets as an integral part of QNB
group’s global network,” according to
al-Kuwari.
QNB Capital and J P Morgan are acting as joint financial advisers, while
Clifford Chance is acting as lead legal
counsel and Yegin Çiftçi Attorney Partnership is acting as local legal counsel
for the deal, which has been approved
by the board of directors of both banks
and the General Council of the Hellenic
Financial Stability Fund.
Turkey’s ties with the rest of the region have increased in recent years, as
trade with the Mena region has risen
nearly ten-fold from $5.6bn in 2000 to
$52.2bn in 2014.
Finansbank has grown organically
into a full service financial institution
with an independent and experienced
management, nationwide distribution network of 647 branches and over
5.3mn customers.
As of June 30, 2015, Finansbank has
$29bn worth assets, $19.5bn in loans
and $14.6bn in deposits and total equity amounted to $3.6bn as per International Financial Reporting Standards.
QNB headquarters in Doha.
Flags of Turkey and Finansbank fly
outside of the bank’s headquarters in
Istanbul.
The transaction is a significant
milestone in QNB’s Vision to
becoming a Mea icon by 2017 and a
leading global bank by 2030
EUROPE | Refugees
QNA
Riyadh
36.43
+268.80
+2.71%
in
United Arab Emirates security
authorities have seized an Iranian
ship that was smuggling drugs and
people, the state WAM news agency
said yesterday. WAM said the ship’s
captain was trying to smuggle “big
amounts of drugs and two Iranian
nationals through the Khaled port in
the emirate of Sharjah”.
Planet Earth could be at higher risk
of a space rock impact than widely
thought, according to astronomers
who suggested yesterday keeping a
closer eye on distant giant comets.
Most studies of potential Earthsmashers focus on objects in the
asteroid belt roughly between Mars,
Earth’s outside neighbour, and
Jupiter on its other flank, said the
researchers. But they noted that the
discovery in the last two decades of
hundreds of giant comets dubbed
centaurs, albeit with much larger
orbits, requires expanding the list of
potential hazards. Page 19
10,174.80
+70.52
+0.41%
d
UAE seizes Iranian
ship smuggling drugs
Giant comets may
threaten Earth
17,322.14
he R
is
bl TA 978
A 1
Q since
REGION | Security
SCIENCE | Astronomy
NYMEX
QNB to buy
Turkey’s
Finansbank
for $2.94bn
In brief
More than 1mn migrants and
refugees reached Europe this year,
including over 970,000 who made
the dangerous journey across the
Mediterranean, the UN refugee
agency said yesterday. About half
were Syrians fleeing the country’s
brutal civil war, according to the
new figures released by the UNHCR
and the International Organisation
for Migration. A total of 3,692
migrants died or disappeared
crossing the Mediterranean sea this
year, IOM said. Page 19
QE
Latest Figures
GULF TIMES
Call to open Rafah crossing
DOW JONES
pu
Qatargas’ innovative
LNG cargo delivery
SPORT | Page 11
them as soon as possible.
The Speaker of the Arab Parliament Ahmed bin Mohamed al-Jarwan
in Cairo described the kidnapping as
“shameful” against any Arab citizen,
especially that the Qatari nationals who
entered Iraq legally, asserting rejection
of these terrorist acts which constitute a breach of international law, and a
violation human rights, and contrary to
the principles of brotherhood relations
among Arabs and Muslims.”
He expressed support for the Qatari
and Iraqi efforts to release the abductees, hoping that the ongoing contacts
between the two governments would
result in the release of the Qatari hostages soon and return home safely. He
called on the Iraqi government to exert more effort in this regard as its responsible for their safety as guests and
Arabs and Muslims brothers.
Q
Met dept warns over
weather fluctuations
T
he Qatar Met department has
advised people to remain cautious, avoid activities in the
sea and follow latest official weather
updates and warnings in view of the
weather fluctuations expected over the
next few days.
The country is likely to experience
unstable weather conditions, including rain, from tomorrow evening until
December 27 (Sunday).
This is due to the passage of a lowpressure system in the upper levels of
the atmosphere during this period, according to the weather office.
Easterly to southeasterly winds are
expected tomorrow, leading to an increase in humidity as the skies will become partly cloudy to cloudy gradually.
There is also a chance of isolated light
to moderate rain.
The rainfall is expected to reach its
peak from early on Friday until Saturday morning with a forecast for mod-
erate to heavy rain over most areas of
the country with a chance of thundershowers, the weather report states.
On Saturday evening, cloudy skies
are expected to continue with a chance
of isolated light to moderate rain. The
weather will gradually stabilise on
Sunday though there is a chance of isolated light rain.
Northwesterly moderate to fresh
winds, which may become strong at
times, are expected to affect the country from Friday evening until Sunday
morning, leading to high waves and
a noticeable drop in temperature, the
Met department has said.
The maximum temperature in Doha
is expected to range between 19C and
22C and the minimum between 14C
and 17C. Lower temperatures are likely
in open areas.
Latest official weather updates and
warnings can be accessed through different social media channels.
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
3
QATAR
Commercial Bank honoured
by Doha Municipality
C
ommercial Bank has
been honoured by
Doha Municipality
for its support of two contests encouraging Qatari
students to draw and sow
with the municipality.
The winning students received their awards, and Commercial Bank was honoured as
a supporting institution of
this initiative, at a special ceremony led by the director of
Doha Municipality at the Darb
Al Saai Qatar National Day
celebrations recently.
Commenting on the initiative, Commercial Bank
CEO Abdulla Saleh al-Raisi
said: “Commercial Bank
fully supports contests that
encourage creativity among
the younger generation as
part of our CSR programme,
which is focused on engaging more effectively with the
wider Qatari community.
“Doha Municipality’s initiative of encouraging drawing
and sowing among the Qatari
Abdulla Saleh al-Raisi receiving a memento on behalf of Commercial Bank.
youth has made a positive
impact within Doha’s community, in both human and
environmental terms, which
is firmly in line with Commercial Bank’s commitment
to Qatar’s all-round national
development in keeping with
Qatar National Vision 2030.”
He added, “Good corporate citizenship today is
about finding ways to work
together. I would like to thank
Doha Municipality for organising such engaging competitions and also congratulate
the winning students on their
achievements.”
Doha court reviewing fraud case
A
Doha Misdemeanour Court has been
reviewing a case of
fraud, where the defendants are accused of grabbing
the money of others on the
pretext of investing on their
behalf, local Arabic daily
Arrayah reported yesterday.
The main defendant, a
Syrian expatriate man, is
accused of deceiving others
with the help of five other
expatriate defendants; two
Filipinos, an Egyptian man,
a Lebanese man and another
Syrian man. All of them
used to work as salesmen at
major shopping outlets.
Earlier, Al Sadd police
station received a complaint
filed by 24 expatriates from
different nationalities accusing the Lebanese and
the Egyptian defendants
of tricking them and grabbing their money claiming
that they would invest it for
them and give a hefty return
on a monthly basis.
The petitioners also told
the police that more than
200 others had the same
complaints and they would
come and file it.
Accordingly, legal procedures were taken and the
two accused were called for
the interrogation, where
they denied the fraud charges.
They claimed that they
were collecting the money
and delivering to the main
Syrian defendant to invest
it, but knew nothing about
his fraudulent activities.
The security authorities
took hold of the main defendant and seized his laptop to check the information
related to such process. The
case is still being reviewed
by the court, the daily added.
4
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
QATAR
Qatar Foundation to set up
its own publishing house
Q
atar Foundation for
Education, Science and
Community
Development (QF) will launch its own
publishing house called Hamad
Bin Khalifa University Press
(HBKU Press) following a successful seven-year partnership
with Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
HBKU Press will publish children’s books, fiction, academic,
and education books in English
and Arabic.
Created in 2008, Bloomsbury
Qatar Foundation (BQF), included under its umbrella both a publishing house and an academic
research publisher, Bloomsbury
Qatar Foundation Publishing
(BQFP) and Bloomsbury Qatar
Foundation Journals (BQFJ), respectively.
The joint initiative was set up
to play a role in achieving QF’s
mission to unlock human potential and foster an engaged society that is interested in life-long
learning and research; while also
helping to establish a vibrant
literary culture in Qatar in a bid
to transform the nation from
a carbon-based economy to a
knowledge-based one.
Having achieved its purpose
by establishing a strong publishing framework in Qatar, both entities recently agreed to end their
successful partnership. This
progression of BQFP to HBKU
Press will continue to provide a
unique local and international
platform for Arabic and English language literature, literacy,
scholarship, research, discovery
and learning.
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
said: “As indicated in our interim
statement in October, the contracts for Bloomsbury to provide
Qatar Foundation with publishing services to enable knowledge
transfer to QF to have a selfsufficient publishing company
reach the end of their term this
month. We are now handing
over to the strong local team we
developed having completed
this mission, who will continue
to publish on the foundations
established. QF now has the
tools, knowledge and experience
to take the reins and fully run its
publishing house.”
“As indicated in our interim
statement in October, the
contracts for Bloomsbury to
provide Qatar Foundation
with publishing services
to enable knowledge
transfer to QF to have a
self-sufficient publishing
company reach the end of
their term this month”
HBKU Press will continue the
tradition of releasing books of
excellence and originality, promoting the love of reading and
writing and transferring publishing and related skills to Qatar
through regular internships and
secondments.
During its tenure, BQFP published more than 200 titles in
fiction, non-fiction, art, academics, and business for an au-
dience of adults and young children alike. The partnership also
introduced ‘Ready, Steady, Read’,
a pilot training programme with
hands-on activities for developing an active and stimulating
school library.
HBKU Press will also take on
the work of BQFJ, which was
responsible for launching the
Middle East’s first open access,
academic research platform,
QScience.com. BQFJ also used
its QScience platform to provide
a home to the proceedings of
many conferences held in Qatar,
making them citeable and archived for future generations.
HBKU Press will continue to
uphold international standards
of publishing and maintaining
the highest level of quality and
production. It will also provide
an enhanced offering for print,
e-books and digital open access
and will incorporate BQFJ and
its established work in peerreviewed, online academic publishing.
Officials with the owner of the 10,000th unit.
QAC celebrates milestone
Q
atar Automobiles Company (QAC), the authorised distributor of Mitsubishi Motors and Mitsubishi
Fuso vehicles in Qatar, has announced that it has achieved a
sales milestone of over 10,000
units in 2015.
On this occasion, QAC celebrated the 10,000th unit with
the lucky customer who won
a service package for her new
2016 Outlander.
At the ceremony, QAC general manager Ihab El Feky
said: “After the excellent sales
growth award from Mitsubishi
Motors and after-sales award
of excellence from Mitsubishi
Fuso, we are closing the year
with record-breaking sales.
This achievement reflects the
hard work and commitment put
in by the entire team throughout the year and the continued
trust of our customers in our
products and services.”
“This impressive sales figure
proves that Mitsubishi continues to satisfy its enthusiasts
and appeals to a large mass of
consumers in the Qatari market,” according to a statement.
Motorist fined
Mannai Air Travel joins Nojoom programme
O
oredoo has added Mannai Air Travel as the newest earning partner for its
Nojoom Rewards Programme.
Mannai Air Travel is an ISO
9001:2008-certified, IATA-recognised travel agency specialising in worldwide travel. It is an
affiliate of BCD Travel, one of
the world’s leading travel management companies, which provides a global reach for Mannai
Air Travel.
The company offers travel
management services for corporate business travel and leisure travellers, including air
ticketing, hotel booking, holiday and sightseeing packages,
rail bookings, cruise bookings, car rentals, certificate
attestation services, travel
insurance, international driving licences, visa assistance,
Qatar sightseeing packages,
dhow cruises, desert safaris
and camping.
With this partnership, Nojoom members can earn one Nojoom point for every QR8 spent
on travel at the following Mannai
Air Travel branches: Musheireb
Street, B-Ring Road, Mesaieed,
Al Khor, Doha Sheraton, Salwa
Cricket Stadium and D-Ring
Road.
To earn points, members must
inform staff that they are Nojoom members and show their
QID to the cashier at any Mannai
Air Travel branch.
Besides earning points when
travelling, members can also
use their points to redeem with
Mannai Air Travel. Members
must visit one of the above
Mannai Air Travel branches
and present the valid Nojoom
voucher to a member of staff.
Once validated, the member will
be able to use the amount against
their purchase.
To ensure that all members
are rewarded wherever they are
in the world, Nojoom aims to
continue to expand the range of
local and international partners,
including hotels, travel agencies,
airlines and restaurants in 2016,
according to a statement.
For more information on all
Nojoom partners and how to
enrol, customers can visit the
Nojoom page on the Ooredoo
website at www.ooredoo.qa/
nojoom, download the Ooredoo app or stop by any Ooredoo
shop.
Mercedes G-Class
models recalled
T
he Ministry of Economy and Commerce
(MEC) has announced a
recall of 2014 Mercedes-Benz
G-Class models to replace
the horn and bulb mount of
both tail lamps as well as to
perform coding in the SAM
control unit and driver seat
control unit.
The recall is being carried
out in collaboration with Nasser Bin Khaled Automobiles,
dealer of Mercedes-Benz vehicles in Qatar.
The campaign falls within
the framework of the Ministry of Economy and Commerce’s ongoing efforts to
protect consumers and ensure that automobile dealers
follow up on vehicle defects
and repairs.
The ministry has said it will
co-ordinate with the dealer to
follow up on maintenance and
repair works and communicate
with customers to ensure that
the necessary repairs are carried out.
A Doha Criminal Court has
fined a motorist QR3,000 for
reckless driving and ordered the
withdrawal of his licence for a
month, local Arabic daily Arrayah
reported yesterday.
The court also fined a friend of
the accused QR5,000 for giving
a false testimony. The case goes
back when the main accused
motorist drove the vehicle of his
friend recklessly and crashed into
two parked vehicles, damaging
them. Then, he called his friend,
the owner of the vehicle, to come
and help him. The vehicle owner
told the investigators that he was
the one driving the car at the
time of the accident to protect
his friend. But, subsequently he
admitted the truth. Accordingly,
the court convicted both.
6
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
QATAR
SCH: Conference on
emergency medicine
from January 14
By Joseph Varghese
Staff Reporter
T
he Supreme Council of
Health (SCH), in collaboration with Hamad
Medical Corporation (HMC), will
organise the International Conference on Emergency Medicine
and Public Health - Qatar (ICEPQ 2016) from January 14 to 18.
To be held at the Qatar National Convention Centre (QNCC),
it is the first such conference in
the GCC. Over 45 papers related
to emergency medicine will be
presented at the conference.
Speaking at a press conference
yesterday, Sheikh Dr Mohammed bin Hamad al-Thani, director, public health at SCH, said
that ICEP-Q 2016 will be a major
international event in emergency medicine and public health.
He said: “This conference will
discuss various areas of emergency medicine such as acci-
dents, food poison and communicable diseases. The conference
will explore ways to bring down
the large number of injuries and
mortality rates on account of
such diseases.
“There is a great lineup of
distinguished
international
speakers from a wide spectrum
of emergency care and public
health organisations across the
world. We expect more than
1,000 delegates from all around
the world to share and discuss
their experience in the fields of
emergency medicine and public
health. This will be the first of its
kind in the GCC and the second
in the world that will show the
unique interface of public health
department and the emergency
department.”
Sheikh Dr Hassan bin Ali alThani, head of trauma and vascular surgery section at HMC,
noted that emergency medicine
as a specialty, holds an integral
position in addressing several
SCH and HMC officials at the press conference yesterday. PICTURE: Shameer Rasheed
public health concerns such as
management of chronic conditions, injuries and health risks
and the delivery of clinical and
preventive services.
“Emergency
departments
serve as points of entry into the
healthcare system for a large percentage of the population; hence
the conference intends to highlight the importance of focusing
on the crucial interface between
two major domains of healthcare - Emergency Medicine and
Public Health. Additionally,
emergency departments serve as
sites of surveillance for the public health community,” he added.
The scientific programme of
ICEP-Q 2016 aims to cover infectious disease, trauma, paediatric emergency medicine,
medical toxicology, emergency
ultrasound, medical education,
emergency psychiatry, prehospital and disaster medicine,
emergency nursing and many
other relevant topics. The scientific programme will be further enriched by an exhibition
featuring the latest innovations
in healthcare, technology and
pharmaceuticals.
The ICEP-Q keynote speakers
include Sheikh Dr Mohammed
(of SCH), Sheikh Dr Hassan (of
HMC), Dr Lee Wallis (president
of the African Federation for
Emergency Medicine, University
of Cape Town), Dr Della Corte
Francesco (University of Eastern
Piedmont), Dr Barbara J Reynolds (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention) and Dr Peter
Cameron (HMC).
Two new members join Sidra board of governors
S
Dame Ruth Carnall
idra Medical and Research
Center (Sidra) announced the
appointment of Dame Ruth
Carnall and Sir Murray Brennan as
members of the board of governors
yesterday.
Dame Ruth Carnall has more
than 35 years’ experience in healthcare, including 20 years as a chief
executive in acute hospitals, mental health, community services and
health authorities. She is credited
for having established the National
Health Service London - the strategic health authority for London.
She was awarded Commander of the
Most Excellent Order of the British
Empire for services to the National
Health Service in London in 2004. In
2011, she received Dame Command-
er of the Most Excellent Order of the
British Empire for her achievements
in healthcare.
Sir Murray Brennan is an international cancer surgeon and leader in
cancer research. He is currently the
Benno C. Schmidt Chair in Clinical
Oncology, vice-president for International Programmes, and director
of The Bobst International Centre
at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer
Centre, New York. Sir Murray was
bestowed the title of Knight Grand
Companion of the New Zealand
Order of Merit for his services to
medicine in January 2015. The title
is the highest honour given to New
Zealand nationals by the Queen of
England.
Lord Darzi of Denham, the vice
chair of the board of governors and
the chair of the executive committee
at Sidra said, “We are honoured to
welcome Dame Ruth Carnall and Sir
Murray Brennan to the Sidra board.
They are respected leaders and mentors in the healthcare industry and
we look forward to benefiting from
their judgment and counsel. Their
combined expertise will add a valuable perspective in supporting Sidra’s
mission to address the growing need
for comprehensive patient-focused
medical services for the women and
children of Qatar. Together with
the world-class team here, we are
committed to establishing Sidra as
a beacon of learning, discovery and
exceptional care”.
In his capacity as vice chair of the
board of governors and the chair of
the executive committee, Lord Darzi
oversees and supports Sidra’s delivery of excellence in clinical care
underpinned by the latest research.
He was appointed to the role in
May 2015.
Lord Darzi has contributed to
many healthcare reform and innovation initiatives in Qatar. He is
a member of the Qatar Foundation
advisory board and executive chair
of the World Innovation Summit for
Health (WISH). He has previously
served as a member of the board of
the Supreme Council of Health. In
2014, Lord Darzi was awarded the
Qatari Sash of Independence, by
HH the Emir, in recognition of his
contribution to Qatar’s health sector.
Sir Murray Brennan
8
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
QATAR
QU unveils new academic probation regulations
Q
atar University Executive
Management Committee (EMC) has reviewed
the policies related to academic
dismissal, probation, reinstatement, and course repeat for undergraduate students.
In its recent meeting, the EMC,
presided over by QU president Dr
Hassan Rashid al-Derham, approved the new regulations on the
Academic Probation policy.
The committee established
standards for satisfactory academic progress and achievement, and defined procedures to
identify and notify undergraduate students who are not making
satisfactory progress, with the
aim to encourage them to take
action to improve their academic
performance.
The new regulations cancelled
the four intermittent academic
warnings that were provided to
students in the previous years.
Once the students improve their
cumulative GPA, this will also
cancel all their previous intermittent academic warnings.
If students fail three times in
a course, they will not be dismissed from the university. If
they repeat their courses, the
highest grade they receive will be
calculated.
QU vice president and chief
academic officer Dr Mazen Hasna noted that student academic
standing is evaluated by the Office of the Vice-President for
Student Affairs at the end of each
semester excluding the summer
term. “Student academic standing is to be updated by the Office
of the Vice-President for Student Affairs after final grades are
posted,” he said.
He also noted that undergraduate students are placed
under Academic Probation
based on their cumulative GPA,
and if they exceed 24 earned
credit hours and their cumula-
A view of a section of the Qatar University campus.
tive GPA is below 2.0. He further noted that undergraduate
students receive an academic
warning notification if the student cumulative GPA at the end
of a semester, except the summer term, falls below 2.0, and if
the student fails any particular
course two times.
First year students shall receive a warning and a hold is
placed on their record if their
GPA falls below 2.0, and once
undergraduate students receive
Mannai Auto in special year-end offers
M
annai Auto Group, official
agents for Cadillac in Qatar,
has announced three special
year-end offers for customers.
These include special 2-year leasing packages for the Cadillac ATS and
CTS sedans, as well as an enhanced
finance package for eligible customers seeking to own the SRX luxury
crossover.
The leasing offer starts at QR1,999
for a brand new 2015 ATS and
QR2,999 for the 2015 CTS. Both are
offered for 2-year lease periods. The
attractions include a range of available colours and options, as well as
available insurance, registration, and
enrollment in the Cadillac Premium
Care Programme which ensures extended provisions for service and
maintenance.
Customers interested in the brand
new 2016 SRX can avail a special finance package from leading banks
The 2015 Cadillac ATS
in Qatar, depending on personal eligibility and as per each bank’s terms
and conditions. The offer starts at
QR2,999 per month with competitive
finance rates and a 3-month grace period of waived payments at the time
of the purchase. Comprehensive insurance packages at special rates are
also available, along with down payment assistance.
The SRX luxury crossover offers
generous interior and cargo space,
with seating for five. It is offered in
Luxury and Premium collections. A
direct-injected 3.6 L V6, powers its
all-wheel drive powertrain and is
matched with a six-speed automatic
transmission.
The Cadillac ATS line-up is offered as well-equipped Standard
models, as well as Performance and
Premium Collections. A broad lineup of engines – including four-cylinders and a V-6 – delivers strong
power to the ATS and capitalises on
the car’s lightweight and rigid structure to complement its performance
with efficiency.
The centrepiece of Cadillac’s sedan
portfolio, the midsize Cadillac CTS Sedan delivers a package of performance,
elevated luxury and state-of-the-art
technology, which helped make it the
2014 Motor Trend Car of the Year.
Cadillac CUE, standard in all models, pairs entertainment and information data, as well as mobile connectivity.
two academic warnings for two
consecutive semesters, excluding the summer term, they are
placed under Final Academic
Probation.
Once placed under Final Academic Probation at the end of a
semester, undergraduate students who fail to satisfy the cumulative GPA requirement for
“Good Standing” (a minimum
of 2.0) at the end of the following semester, are academically
dismissed from the university in
compliance with the university
policy for academic dismissal
of undergraduate students. This
excludes the summer term and
withdrawal from the academic
semester.
Dr Hasna observed that Academic Probation decisions and/
or Academic Warning notifications are to be officially communicated by the Office of the VicePresident for Student Affairs
to all concerned students, their
adviser, and the head of their
department at the end of each
semester excluding the summer
term unless summer performance removes the academic probation for the student.
He added: “The summer term
is not considered for Academic Probation decisions unless
summer performance removes
the academic probation for the
student. Students placed under
Academic Probation or Final Academic Probation may apply for
transfer to another programme
subject to the university rules
and regulations as defined in the
transfer policy.”
Undergraduate students placed
under Academic Probation or
Final Academic Probation are allowed to register in a maximum
of 12 credit hours per regular semester and a maximum of six
credit hours in the summer term.
Students may however be allowed to register in more than the
maximum number of credit hours
subject to prior approval from
the Student Affairs Committee.
Undergraduate students will be
placed under academic warning
once they exceed six years excluding foundation programme.
Strong demand
for Filipino
domestic help
By Joey Aguilar
Staff Reporter
T
he demand for Filipino domestic helpers
continue to be strong
in Qatar, Philippine labour
attaché Leopoldo De Jesus
told Gulf Times.
After visa restrictions on
Filipino domestic helpers
were lifted in late 2013, he
said the number of deployment to Qatar has increased
significantly.
The Philippine Overseas
Labour Office (Polo) also
recorded a huge spike in the
number of individual employment contracts (IEC) it
processed from November
2013 to December this year.
From an average of 3,900
contracts per year, De Jesus noted that the figure
rose to around 2,000 per
month. Employers (mostly
families) had also complied
Philippine labour attaché
Leopoldo De Jesus.
with all the requirements
including the $400 monthly
minimum wage set by the
Philippine government for
domestic helpers, the Polo
official pointed out.
“There is no reason not
to approve valid and complete applications submitted by employers,” De Jesus
stated while observing that
they also benefitted from
the earlier decision of Indonesia and other South Asian
countries such as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka to stop
sending domestic helpers to
the Middle East.
Many recruitment and
manpower agencies, both in
Qatar and in the Philippines,
had also opened recently to
meet the growing demand
for Filipino domestic helpers, the official recalled.
An agency staff told Gulf
Times that they normally
charge a QR12,000 fee for
every recruitment and rich
employers usually ask for
more than one domestic
helper.
He said one agency gets
more than 100 Filipino domestic helpers from the
Philippines every month
compared to less than 50
in previous years. This accounts for 70% of its total
recruitment for Qatar.
With the growth in Qatar
population, Polo is expecting the huge demand for
Filipino domestic helpers to
continue in 2016 and subsequent years.
The number of skilled
Filipino workers and professionals being deployed to
Qatar have also significantly
increased. Qatar’s booming
construction and hospitality industry has given a lot of
job opportunities for many
Filipinos, De Jesus said.
He also expects more
nurses, doctors and other
medical practitioners to
come to Qatar in the coming
years due to the increasing
number of clinics and hospitals.
“We want to focus on
sending more skilled workers and professionals to the
Middle East,” he added. The
Philippine embassy in Doha
had announced early this
year that some 94,289 visas are reserved for Filipino
workers that Qatar hopes to
employ soon.
Safari Group promotion
The fourth draw for Safari Group’s “Win 18 Toyota Camry” mega promotion has been held at Safari Mall in the
presence of an official from the Ministry of Economy and Commerce and Safari management and staff. The winners of
three Camry vehicles in the draw are M A Kabeer (number 2625357), Mohamed Fathy Ameen (5148890) and Sad Abd
al-Gabar Mohamed Ahmed (2094274).
Zenith, Blue Salon host exhibition
Swiss watchmaker Zenith, which marks its 150th
anniversary this year, recently collaborated with
its luxury partner in Qatar, Blue Salon, to host an
exhibition at the Blue Salon
department store in Doha. Held between
December 13 and 19, the exhibition drew VIP
guests, visitors and enthusiasts who discovered
the legacy of the brand. Georges Bechara, general
manager of Zenith for the Middle East, said: “We
are thrilled to be celebrating the occasion with
our partners and connoisseurs and look forward
to many more.” Nabil Abu Issa, vice-chairman of
Blue Salon, said: “We are proud to be involved in
the 150th anniversary
celebrations of our esteemed partner, Zenith, and
wish them immense success on every endeavour
they undertake henceforth.” The exhibition
featured a combination of timepieces: eight
historical ones and eight contemporary ones.
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
9
REGION
US visa law hurts Iran trust: French Senate head
Agencies
Tehran
T
he president of the
French Senate has criticised new US visa regulations that penalise Europeans
who have visited Iran, saying
they send the “wrong signal”.
Gerard Larcher was speaking during a trip to Iran aimed
at strengthening relations with
France following a landmark
deal to curb Tehran’s nuclear
programme in return for a lifting of sanctions.
The US measures “can be seen
in Tehran as a sign of mistrust”
and do not contribute to building confidence with Iran, he told
reporters late Monday.
The US bill, passed by Congress on Friday, bars citizens
from 38 countries and who are
also dual nationals from Iran,
Iraq, Syria and Sudan from using a visa waiver programme.
It also requires people who
have travelled to those four
countries since 2011, or to a
country Washington has listed
as supporting terrorism, to apply for a standard visa, deeming
them a risk.
“I think it sends the wrong
signal... from a democratic
country, the great American
democracy,” Larcher said.
He said the move was at odds
with the International Atomic
Energy Agency’s recent closure
of its investigation into Iran’s
past efforts to develop nuclear
weapons.
The end of the probe into
“possible military dimensions”
to Tehran’s atomic programme
was a condition for the July deal
to go forward.
Larcher, on the first visit to
Iran by a French Senate president since the 1979 Islamic
revolution, on Sunday met
President Hassan Rouhani who
is expected to visit France in
late January.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohamed Javad Zarif said during a
meeting with the French delegation that the visa restrictions
were “primarily against the independence of Europe”.
“Europeans must show their
independence in the face of discriminatory measures,” he said,
quoted by the Irna official news
agency.
Iran says its inclusion on the
list is intended to undermine a
deal on the nuclear deal, known
as the JCPOA.
Foreign ministry spokesman
Hossein Jaberi Ansari said in a
televised news conference on
Monday that the measure had
been passed “under pressure
from the Zionist lobby and currents opposed to the JCPOA”.
Asked whether Iran’s inclusion in the visa law was a backdoor attempt to undermine the
nuclear deal, State Department
spokesman John Kirby told reporters in Washington that the
restrictions applied because
Tehran was on the department’s
list of state sponsors of terrorism.
There is no intention to use
the visa programme “to halt the
legitimate business interests of
Iran post-implementation” of
the nuclear deal, Kirby told reporters at a news briefing.
Iranian officials have said the
visa measure will adversely affect bilateral relations. Some
suggest the measure is effectively a new sanction against
the Islamic Republic that could
jeopardise the nuclear deal.
“Existing sanctions not yet
lifted, additional sanctions
imposed,” ran the front-page
headline of the hardline daily
Kayhan on Monday.
US Secretary of State John
Kerry wrote to Zarif on Saturday to assure him that Washington remained committed
to the JCPOA, noting that the
White House can waive the
new requirements in individual
cases.
Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s National Security Council, warned that
the measures would breed
mistrust between the two
countries. “It could have irreversible effects on the implementation of mutual commitments under the JCPOA,”
Shamkhani was quoted as
saying by Irna.
Saudi warns
of reprisals
after Yemen
missile fire
The rebels and their allies
still have “about 60 to 70
missiles, including Tochka
missiles”, Yemeni army
sources say
AFP
Riyadh
T
he Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen
threatened severe reprisals late Monday against
rebels in the neighbouring
country, after they fired a
fourth ballistic missile in as
many days towards Saudi territory.
Official media said Saudi Arabia intercepted a rocket fired
towards the border city of Jazan
late on Monday and then destroyed the missile launcher in
Yemen.
The kingdom has deployed
Patriot missile batteries designed to counter tactical ballistic missiles.
Air defences shot down another missile fired towards Jazan
on Monday morning.
On Friday, the coalition said a
ballistic missile had been intercepted and that a second missile
struck a desert area east of Najran city.
Those attacks came after a
local source reported that on
September 13 another missile
struck a desert area of the kingdom’s south, causing no damage.
Three civilians, two of them
from India, died on Saturday
when shellfire from Yemen
struck the border city of Najran.
All these attacks, as well
as fighting on the ground in
Yemen, came despite a sevenday ceasefire in conjunction
with peace talks in Switzerland.
The talks between Yemen’s
government and Iran-backed
Shia Houthi rebels concluded on
Sunday without a major breakthrough.
The head of the Yemeni government negotiating team,
Foreign Minister Abdel Malak
al-Mekhlafi, said the muchviolated ceasefire would be extended for seven days after its
expiry on Monday.
“The coalition command
made it clear that while it is
keen to deal positively with the
Yemeni government’s request
for an extension of the truce,
the continuation of the Houthi
militias in their absurdity will
push the command of the coalition to take harsh measures to
deter such acts,” the Saudi-led
bloc said.
The Houthis are allied with
elite troops loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
On Sunday a spokesman for
forces allied to the Houthis
vowed to intensify missile attacks on Saudi targets.
Brigadier General Sharaf Luqman said “300 Saudi military
and vital targets” had been chosen.
The rebels and their allies
still have “about 60 to 70 missiles, including Tochka missiles”, Yemeni army sources say,
despite coalition claims to have
neutralised their ballistic capabilities.
Saba news agency controlled
by the Houthis confirmed they
fired “a Qaher-1 ballistic missile” on Monday evening.
Coalition warplanes and
troops have been supporting
anti-rebel forces in support of
Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu
Mansour Hadi.
More than 80 people, most
of them soldiers and border
guards, have been killed in
shelling and cross-border skirmishes in the kingdom’s south
since coalition operations began in Yemen.
A fresh bout of deadly fighting
and air strikes hit Yemen yesterday, military sources said.
The United Nations says the
conflict has killed nearly 6,000
people since March.
In the latest bloodshed, at
least 13 rebel fighters were killed
in air strikes on the northern
province of Daleh overnight,
military sources said.
The rebels reportedly shelled
an area near the central city of
Taez, where loyalist forces have
been besieged for months.
Fighting also took place in
other parts of the country, including the northern provinces
of Hajja and Jawf, strongholds of
the rebels, as well as Shabwa in
central Yemen.
Saudi-led warplanes carried
out eight raids early yesterday
on Houthi fighters and their allies at Rahida and Shuraija, on
the border between Taez and
Lahj provinces, the military
sources said.
There were dead and wounded, the sources said, without
providing any figures.
A man looks at a model of a helicopter at the stand of the Russian company Rostec yesterday during the Russia National Industrial
Exhibition in Tehran.
Russia to begin building
nuclear reactors in Iran
AFP
Tehran
R
ussia will start constructing two nuclear
reactors in Iran next
week, as Tehran seeks to reduce its reliance on oil and
gas with 20 facilities over the
coming years, an official said
yesterday.
The start of construction
follows a historic deal between
Iran and world powers in July
that ends a decade-long standoff over Tehran’s nuclear programme.
And it comes a year after
Tehran signed a contract with
Moscow to construct two reactors at the existing Russianbuilt Bushehr power plant.
A series of agreements signed
between the two countries last
year foresees eventually increasing the total number of
Russian-built reactors in the
country to nine.
Work on the two facilities
“will commence next week,”
Store pulls Trump’s
books from shelves
Reuters
Dubai
S
The Kuwaiti flag is seen placed at the seat of MP Nabil al-Fadhl
in the national assembly yesterday.
Kuwaiti MP dies in parliament
A Kuwaiti lawmaker, Nabil
al-Fadhl, died in his seat
yesterday during a meeting of
parliament.
Speaker Marzouk al-Ghanem
said the independent
lawmaker, 66, passed away
while serving his country and
suspended sessions for the
rest of the day and today in
his honour.
Witnesses said Fadhl had been
taking part in regular discus-
sions with his colleagues and
made his last remarks on
parliamentary business just
minutes before he died.
A flag of Kuwait was seen
draped on his parliamentary
seat.
Known for his strong antiIslamist views, Fadhl suffered
from several illnesses and had
a kidney transplant last year,
but the cause of his death was
not immediately announced.
audi Arabia-based
retail chain Jarir
Bookstore
has
removed books written by US presidential candidate Donald
Trump from its shelves,
it said yesterday, part of
a backlash against his
proposal to stop Muslims from entering the
United States.
Jarir, part of one of
the kingdom’s biggest
retailers, Jarir Marketing
Co, announced the move
in a Twitter response to
another user’s call for a
boycott of the Republican frontrunner’s books.
“Jarir Bookstore sells
books by Donald Trump,
who is known for making comments offensive
to Muslims and Islam.
We ask them please to
remove them,” wrote
Saudi user Mogatah
on December 19, along
with a photo of the Arabic-language edition
of Trump’s 2009 book
Think Like a Champion.
“The copies have been
removed, we thank you
for your comment,” Jarir
replied, three days later.
The move continues
the backlash against
the Republican frontrunner’s business interests in the Middle
East, where his brand
has grown toxic as a result of his anti-Muslim
comments.
On December 9,
Dubai-based
retailer
Landmark halted sales
of Trump merchandise
at its Lifestyle stores,
which had been selling
Trump-branded lamps,
mirrors and jewellery
boxes throughout the
Gulf region.
state
television’s
website
quoted atomic energy agency
spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi as saying.
Iran plans to build 20 more
nuclear plants in the future, including four in Bushehr.
The accord does not limit
Iran’s development of civilian
nuclear sites.
The two reactors will be financed by Iran, Sergei Kiriyenko, head of Russia’s state nuclear company Rosatom, said
last year.
The two countries are allied
in supporting Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad against opposition and militant groups,
mainly Islamic State.
And they plan to boost trade
volume, as they signed several
joint development documents
last month during Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s first
visit to Iran in eight years.
On Monday, Iran’s Minister
of Industry, Mining and Trade,
Mohamed Reza Nematzade, and
his Russian counterpart, Denis
Manturov, opened an industrial
exhibition in Tehran.
The three-day fair by Russian
industrial holding Rostec State
Corp, along with hundreds of
business leaders, aims to introduce Russian industries to
Iran, state television’s website
reported.
Rostec owns 700 enterprises,
organised into 14 holding companies, and nine of which are
focused on the military.
Russia is “not afraid” of
Western economic delegations trying to dominate Iranian markets after the lifting of
sanctions, a Rostec official said
yesterday.
“Everyone is waiting for the
sanctions to be lifted and everyone wants to be the first” to
enter Iran, international co-operation department chief Victor
Kladov said.
“We are afraid of nothing; we
are certain of the quality of our
products,” he said.
“Iran and Russia have a long
history, and we are trusted
partners for each other,” he
added.
Fields of co-operation included transport, the auto industry, aviation, metallurgy,
petrochemicals, oil and ship
building.
Iranian engineers were examining the Sukhoi Superjet 100,
in which the Russians travelled,
Kladov said.
“As we are talking here Iranian technical specialists are
examining it at the airport and
they are flying over Tehran” to
test it, Kladov said.
“If we can technically satisfy” Iran, a possible number
“around 100 aircraft” would be
sold to Iran, he added.
Rostec Helicopters was also in
talks with Iran to sell new Russian medical helicopters. Rostec
will also repair and upgrade a
fleet of 50 Russian helicopters
now operating in Iran.
Iran is to become a central
maintenance centre in the region that services Russianmade aircraft from neighbouring countries like Iraq,
Afghanistan and Turkmenistan,
he added.
10
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
ARAB WORLD
Looming Israel strike threatens Christmas travel
Agencies
Jerusalem
C
hristians warned yesterday that a general
strike threatened by
Israel’s largest labour union
could disrupt travel for thousands of pilgrims travelling to
the Holy Land for Christmas.
Barring a last-minute wage
deal, the Histadrut labour federation says its members—including workers at Tel Aviv’s
Ben Gurion international airport,
government
offices,
hospitals, schools and public
transport—will stop work at
6am today.
“I contacted the office of the
Histadrut chairman this morning to ask that they make an
exception of the airport,” Wadie Abunassar, a spokesman for
local Christian groups, said in a
statement.
“That is in order not to hurt
the thousands of Christian
pilgrims who are due to arrive
here for Christmas and hundreds of Christians from Israel
who are to travel abroad for the
holiday,” he said.
Histadrut is demanding
across-the-board public sector pay rises, while the government argues that with negative
inflation in the economy this
year workers’ spending power
has increased.
Treasury officials are reportedly ready to consider increases for the lowest paid workers
only.
Negotiations were continuing yesterday evening but with
no sign of any imminent breakthrough.
If a strike goes ahead, Israel’s
main airport, seaports, trains,
the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange,
government offices, hospitals
and schools will probably be
closed. Flag carrier El Al moved
up 18 flights to New York and
Europe scheduled for yesterday morning by as much as four
hours.
Business leaders estimate di-
rect economic damage at about
300mn shekels ($77mn) a day
while the government sees total damage at 1bn to 3bn shekels
daily.
Israel’s economy grew slower
than expected in the first half
of 2015 before posting an annualised 2.5% growth rate in the
third quarter.
Histadrut is demanding an
11% pay raise for civil workers, saying many Israelis have
trouble making ends meet.
That would cost the state about
11bn shekels and likely require
budget cuts elsewhere.
Israel’s Manufacturers’ Association and Federation of
Israeli Chambers of Commerce
have asked the labour court to
prevent any strike.
The finance ministry has
asked the court to prevent
teachers from striking since
their union earlier signed a
contract that forbids them
from walking out until August
2017.
Uriel Lynn, president of the
chambers of commerce, noted that the public sector has
grown sharply in the last decade to 1.26mn workers from
722,000.
The last strike, which lasted
three days in early 2012, cost
the economy some 6bn shekels and ended with a new wage
package for low-earning contract workers. A strike was
averted last December when
Histadrut signed a deal with
private sector employers to
raise Israel’s minimum wage.
Palestinians’
home targeted
in West Bank
teargas attack
The incident coincides
with growing Israeli
ultranationalist anger over
interrogation methods used
against suspects in the fatal
arson attack on a house five
months ago
Agencies
Jerusalem
T
eargas grenades were
thrown into a Palestinian
home yesterday in what
Israeli police believe was an attack by Jewish militants angered
by the detention of comrades
suspected of killing a Palestinian toddler and his parents in
July.
No one was hurt in the incident overnight in the village of
Beitillu in the occupied West
Bank, a police spokeswoman
said.
It coincided with growing Israeli ultranationalist anger over
what one cabinet minister called
uncommon interrogation methods used against suspects in the
fatal arson attack on a house in
Duma village five months ago.
Suspected Jewish attackers
torched the Dawabsheh family’s
home in the West Bank on July
31, killing 18-month-old Ali. His
father Saad and mother Riham
died several weeks later from injuries they sustained.
Several suspected Jewish ultranationalists have been arrested in that case, with a court
gag order on their exact numbers
and identities in place.
The words “Revenge” and
“Hello from the detainees of
Zion” were daubed on the wall of
a home next to the one attacked
yesterday, witnesses said, an apparent reference to the suspects
in the Duma arson case.
“Inside the house, where settlers hurled the two gas bombs,
my brother, his wife and ninemonth-old baby were sleeping,”
Abed Hussein al-Najar, who
lives in Beitillu, said by telephone. “Thank God, my brother
woke up to the powerful smell of
gas and cried for help. Neighbours rushed in and helped them
get out.”
Court documents released on
Monday showed that a lawyer
for one of the suspects alleged
that violent interrogation methods were being used against his
client.
An official transcript of the
hearing noted that security officials had provided details of the
questioning, but further information was redacted.
Hundreds of right-wing protesters demonstrated in Jerusalem on Saturday in support of
the detainees.
A court official said security
had been stepped up outside the
home of a judge presiding over
the case, and postings on social
media accused him of failing to
stop the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, mistreating the suspects.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended the
agency, saying its actions were
lawful. “Regrettably, from time
to time there is terrorist activity
by Jews and the Shin Bet deals
with that,” Netanyahu told reporters in Jerusalem.
A lawyer for one of the suspects said his client was sexu-
ally harassed and prevented from
sleeping. “At one point they
hanged him from his feet with
his head down. They use chairs,
tables, something called a Sodom Bed where he is tied up and
stretched,” Itamar Ben Gvir said
by telephone.
Asked on Army Radio yesterday whether the detainees were
being tortured by the Shin Bet,
Security Cabinet member Naftali Bennett said “exceptional
actions” were being taken in
response to an exceptional situation, but under tight legal scrutiny.
Referring to yesterday’s teargas attack, Bennett, head of the
far-right Jewish Home party,
said: “Terrorism is terrorism.
They tried here to murder another family in its sleep.”
Palestinians have often highlighted the lack of progress in the
Duma case as among the causes
of a wave of knife, gun and carramming attacks targeting Israelis that began on October 1.
Defence Minister Moshe
Yaalon has said Israel was determined to bring those responsible
to trial, adding that he considered the arson “a Jewish terrorist
act”.
The attack drew renewed attention to Jewish extremism
and accusations Israel had not
done enough to prevent such
violence.
Young Jewish men from
wildcat settlement outposts in
the West Bank and known as
the “hilltop youth” have been
blamed for violence and vandalism targeting Palestinians,
Christian holy sites and even Israeli military property.
Greek parliament president Nikos Voutsis hands over the resolution on recognition of the state of Palestine by Greece to Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas during a parliamentary session in Athens yesterday.
Greek parliament calls for
recognising Palestine state
AFP
Athens
G
reece’s parliament approved a resolution yesterday calling on the government to recognise the state
of Palestine, but Prime Minister
Alexis Tspiras said Athens will
judge when the time is right to
make the formal move.
At a special session attended
by visiting Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas, all parliamentary parties voted in favour of
the move, speaker Nikos Voutsis
said.
It urges the Greek government
to “promote appropriate procedures for the recognition of a
Palestinian state and every diplomatic effort for the resumption
of discussions for peace” in the
region, Voutsis added.
Abbas said he was proud to be
in the Greek parliament, calling
it “the sanctuary of democracy”,
and thanked the deputies for a
vote he said would “contribute
A
n Egyptian military court
yesterday sentenced Muslim Brotherhood leader
Mohamed Badie to 10 years in
prison over deadly clashes following the 2013 ouster of Islamist
president Mohamed Mursi, judicial officials said.
Ninety other defendants who
were tried in absentia were sentenced to life terms, which in
Egypt mean 25 years.
Badie and dozens of others
were found guilty of participating in clashes that killed 31 people
in the canal city of Suez between
August 14 and 16, 2013.
The clashes erupted after police brutally broke up two proMursi protest camps in Cairo on
August 14 that year.
The charges in the military trial
included vandalism, inciting violence, murder, assaulting military personnel and setting fire to
armoured personnel carriers and
two Coptic churches in Suez.
Badie, the Brotherhood’s spir-
itual guide, was sentenced to 10
years along with fellow Brotherhood leader Mohamed Beltagy
and Safwat Hegazy, a pro-Brotherhood Islamist, army and judicial officials said.
Forty-one defendants were
sentenced to serve between three
and seven years, 90 others were
handed down life sentences and
59 others were acquitted.
Yesterday’s sentences can be
appealed.
Badie is facing several trials
and has been sentenced to death
in a separate case along with
Mursi for plotting jailbreaks and
attacks on police during the 2011
uprising that ousted president
Hosni Mubarak.
The Brotherhood chief has also
been handed life sentences in five
other cases.
Military tribunals in Egypt
have faced criticism for their
harsh and swift verdicts.
Egypt’s constitution allows
military trials of civilians accused
of violence against military targets—which include public infrastructure such as highways and
bridges as well as universities.
ognition were meaningless.
“The Palestinians and Abu
Mazen continue to choose the
unilateral path to obtain recognition which has no meaning in
practice,” said deputy foreign
minister Tzipi Hotovely, using
another name for Abbas.
“Instead of Abu Mazen ceasing to incite and fund terror he is
following a flawed path that will
lead him nowhere.”
Athens has forged closer ties
with Israel in recent years, especially in the field of energy, while
retaining its traditionally good
relations with the Palestinians.
Tsipras travelled to the region
last month when he met both
Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu.
He said Abbas’ visit to Greece
signals the “strengthening” of
traditionally historic ties between the two.
“Greece was committed to
the installation of a viable, independent and sovereign Palestinian state based on borders set
in 1967 and with East Jerusalem
as its capital, a country that will
coexist peacefully with Israel,”
Tsipras said.
However he added that Greece
would “judge the right time” for
recognising a state of Palestine,
taking into account its “brotherly
relations with the Arab people
and ties of co-operation with Israel”.
In Ramallah, the headquarters
of the Palestinian Authority, Saeb
Erakat, the number two of the
Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), welcomed the resolution.
“We truly hope that the Greek
government will follow through
with the parliament’s decision
and officially recognise a state of
Palestine with the 1967 borders
and East Jerusalem as its capital,”
he said.
Palestine’s flag was hoisted for
the first time at UN headquarters
in New York on September 30 in a
symbolic gesture.
Abbas then took to the podium
to call for universal recognition of
Palestine.
Egypt hires airport
security consultants
10-year jail term for
Brotherhood leader
AFP
Cairo
to the creation of a Palestinian
state”.
Deputy speaker Tassos Kourakis also called the resolution
“an important step” towards the
recognition of a Palestinian state.
Tsipras announced on Monday after talks with Abbas that
Greece would no longer refer on
official documents to the Palestinian Authority, but rather to
Palestine.
The Palestinian Authority
considers over 130 countries to
have recognised Palestine as a
state, although the number is
disputed and several recognitions
by what are now European Union
member states date back to the
Soviet era.
Nine EU members—the Czech
Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Malta,
Cyprus and Sweden—have so far
recognised Palestine.
But no EU heavyweight has yet
made the move.
Israel responded to the Greek
vote by saying the Palestinians’
“unilateral” efforts to secure rec-
AFP
Cairo
E
Egypt’s Civil Aviation Minister Hossam Kamal speaks during a
news conference in Cairo yesterday.
gypt said yesterday it has
appointed a global consultancy firm to review security
at its airports, nearly two months
after a Russian airliner crash in the
Sinai killed 224 people.
London-based Control Risks, a
specialist in protecting organisations in hostile environments, will
initially review security at Cairo
and Sharm El Sheikh airports, officials said.
The tourism minister denied
the move was linked to the October 31 crash.
It was from Sharm airport that
an A-321 operated by Russia’s
Metrojet left for St Petersburg before breaking apart in mid-air over
the Sinai, minutes after takeoff
from the Red Sea resort.
Everyone on board, mostly
Russian holidaymakers, was killed
in what Moscow says was a disaster caused by a “terrorist attack”.
Egypt’s branch of the Islamic
State militant group said it had
downed the plane with a bomb.
Based on information gathered by their intelligence services, Washington and London say
it was likely a bomb caused the
crash.
Wary of the impact on its lucrative tourism industry, a key foreign revenue earner, Cairo maintains there is no evidence a bomb
brought the plane down.
“The Egyptian government has
appointed Control Risks to commence work immediately to provide a comprehensive review of
airport security in Egypt,” Tourism Minister Hesham Zaazou said
at a press conference.
“This will commence with the
airports at Cairo and Sharm El
Sheikh immediately.”
The Metrojet disaster has dealt
a body blow to tourism in Egypt, a
cornerstone of its already faltering
economy.
“Given Egypt’s position as a
major tourist destination... we
have to address this global threat
to security that is highly hiked
up around the world,” Zaazou
said.
“This is why we are committed
to a world-class gold standard in
security at our airports.”
He denied that the hiring of
Control Risks had anything to do
with the Sinai crash.
Hiring Control Risks did not
mean Egyptian security teams
will not be present at airports,
Civil Aviation Minister Hossam
Kamal said.
The aim was to “ensure that the
highest standards of airport security are met”, he said.
Days after the October disaster,
Moscow halted all Russian flights
to and from Egypt. Britain has
suspended air links with Sharm El
Sheikh.
British ambassador to Cairo
John Casson welcomed the appointment of Control Risks, saying it would soon allow flights
from Britain to Sharm El Sheikh to
resume.
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
11
ARAB WORLD
IS shelling kills nine students at Syrian school
AFP
Damascus
I
slamic State militants killed
nine Syrian students when
they shelled a school in the
eastern city of Deir Ezzor yesterday, state news agency Sana
reported.
The
Syrian
Observatory
for Human Rights said nine
girls were killed and another
20 wounded, mostly students
from the regime-held district of
Hrabesh.
“The toll is likely to worsen as
some of the injured are in serious
condition,” the Observatory’s
Rami Abdel Rahman said.
The Islamic State group has
controlled nearly all of oil-rich
Deir Ezzor province since 2013,
but half of the regional capital
remains in the government’s
hands.
In recent weeks, the USled coalition and Russia’s
military have targeted IS
militants in the province
with air strikes.
In the west of the country,
at least 20 air strikes likely to
have been carried out by Russia caused injuries in Latakia
province, said the Observatory.
Elsewhere in Latakia, forces
loyal to President Bashar al-
Assad fought fierce battles with
Islamist rebels, leaving several
dead on both sides, it added.
The Syrian government has
been trying for months to recapture rebel-controlled areas of
the coastal province.
Last week, troops and allied
militia pushed rebel fighters
from a hilltop, Jabal Nuba, which
overlooks a strategic highway in
Assad’s heartland.
In the northern province of
Aleppo, meanwhile, five people
were killed and dozens wounded
over 24 hours in air raids on the
town of Al Bab, said the Observatory.
The Britain-based monitor, which relies on a network
of sources on the ground, also
said IS carried out nine execution-style killings in the same
province during the past few
days.
Aleppo province is almost en-
tirely in the hands of Al Nusra
Front, the Syrian offshoot of Al
Qaeda, and its Islamist allies, as
well as IS.
The conflict in Syria has
killed more than 250,000 people and forced millions to flee
their homes since it broke out in
March 2011.
The Observatory said yesterday that Russian air strikes
have killed 2,132 people in
Syria, a third of them civilians,
since they began on September
30.
Of those killed, 598 were IS
fighters and another 824 from
Al Nusra Front and other rebel
groups.
There were a further 710 civilians killed, of whom 161 were
children and 104 women.
The Observatory bases its tallies on Russian-caused casualties by the type of aircraft flown
and the munitions used.
UN eyes Syria
peace talks
towards end
of next month
The United Nations has said
the talks aim to establish
“credible, inclusive and
non-sectarian governance”
in Syria and to draft a new
constitution
Reuters
Geneva
T
he United Nations envoy
on Syria, Staffan de Mistura, plans to convene
peace talks in Geneva in about a
month’s time, a senior UN official said yesterday.
On Friday the UN Security
Council unanimously approved
a resolution endorsing an international road map for a Syria
peace process.
“The intention is that (de
Mistura) starts some time towards the end of January,”
Michael Moller, head of the
UN’s Geneva office, told a
news conference, adding that
he hoped there would be more
clarity in the first half of next
month.
“Mr De Mistura is, as you
know, basically living on a
plane these days. Every day,
evolutions in how things are
being planned and being perceived by the different parties
make it very hard to give you
some idea of how this is going
to evolve.”
The United Nations has said
the talks aim to establish “credible, inclusive and non-sectarian
governance” in Syria and to draft
a new constitution in the country now in its fifth year of civil
war.
Friday’s resolution gives a UN
blessing to a plan negotiated
earlier in Vienna that calls for a
ceasefire, talks between the Syrian government and opposition,
and a roughly two-year timeline
to create a unity government and
hold elections.
The United States, Russia,
Saudi Arabia, Iran and other
countries meeting in Vienna
asked De Mistura to set up the
Syria talks in Geneva, while
promising they would try to engineer a nationwide ceasefire
into force as soon as the talks
begin.
But the obstacles to ending
the war remain daunting, with
no side in the conflict able to
secure a clear military victory.
Despite their agreement at
the United Nations, the major
powers are bitterly divided on
who may represent the opposition as well as on the future
of Syrian President Bashar alAssad.
Russia and Iran have been Assad’s main allies in the conflict,
while Saudi Arabia, other Gulf
Arab states and Western powers
have supported rebels fighting to
overthrow him.
The Security Council also
called on UN Secretary General
Ban Ki-moon to draw up options
within a month for monitoring a
ceasefire in Syria. It is the second
time since Syria’s conflict broke
out with mass street protests
in March 2011 that the council
backed a plan for peace talks and
a truce.
Diplomatic sources said the
UN is mulling “light touch”
options for monitoring a
ceasefire that would keep its
risks to a minimum by relying
largely on Syrians already on
the ground.
UN planning for truce monitoring will seek to avoid repeating the “disaster” of a mission
sent to Syria in 2012, diplomats
said. That operation failed
because the warring parties
showed no interest in halting
the fighting, they said.
Under the light-touch mechanism under consideration, the
UN would rely on Syrian actors
- “proxies” - on the ground to
report violations. This could possibly involve a small group of nonuniformed UN officials in Syria to
carry out investigations of ceasefire violations, diplomats said.
“There’s the idea of proxyism, where they were going to
look at who would be credible
on the ground to get information
and to create a reporting mecha-
nism from them to the UN,” a
diplomatic source said.
To make the proxy approach
work, major powers would need
to agree on who is considered a
credible Syrian actor.
“Who is it who’s responsible for the credibility of the
information?” one diplomatic
source asked. “The Syrians on
the ground or the UN, which receives the information?”
The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations will likely
present an option to put UN
peacekeepers on the ground. But
that approach likely will be ruled
out immediately.
Diplomats say they want to
avoid a heavy UN footprint in
Syria. A large number of UN officials on the ground would require a large security detail to
protect them.
“If we have a big security contingent, all of a sudden it looks
like a full-scale mission,” one
diplomatic source said. “And
any UN presence will be targeted
in Syria.”
Another tool for aiding verification work, another diplomatic
source said, could be the use of
unmanned surveillance drones,
a technology the UN has begun
using in peacekeeping missions
in Africa.
The UN had to suspend operations once before in Syria.
After deploying some 300 unarmed “blue beret” monitors
in April 2012, it was forced by
August of that year to end the
mission after the moderators
became the target of angry
crowds and gunfire.
The Security Council had sent
in monitors after it endorsed
then-UN-Arab League mediator Kofi Annan’s six-point peace
plan for Syria calling for talks
and a truce.
Another UN peacekeeping
force called UNDOF, which still
monitors the Israeli-Syrian
border in the Golan Heights,
has repeatedly seen its blue
helmets under fire and even
kidnapped by militants fighting Assad’s forces.
Tunisia state
of emergency
is extended
Tunisia extended for another
two months yesterday a state
of emergency imposed after a
deadly November bus bombing
claimed by the Islamic State
group, the presidency said.
President Beji Caid Essebsi has
“decided on an extension of the
state of emergency over all the
territory” of the country “until
February 21, 2016”, a statement
said.
It had been due to expire today.
It was imposed on November 24
following a suicide attack in the
capital that killed 12 presidential
guards.
The measure gives authorities
the power to prohibit strikes by
workers and meetings that might
stoke unrest, as well as to close
entertainment venues and bars
and to censor the press.
In addition to the state of
emergency, the authorities also
imposed a curfew on Tunis and
closed the border with Libya.
Malala Yousefzai greets 17-year-old Syrian refugee Muzoon Almellehan at the City Library in Newcastle Upon Tyne yesterday.
Malala, Syrian girl vow to
push for refugee education
Reuters
Newcastle Upon Tyne, England
N
early two years after they
met in a refugee camp in
Jordan, Nobel laureate
Malala Yousafzai yesterday welcomed the Syrian schoolgirl activist Muzoon Almellehan to her
new home in northern England.
Malala, who moved to Britain
in 2012 after being shot in the
head in Pakistan by the Taliban for refusing to quit school,
won acclaim for her advocacy of
women’s right to education. She
became the youngest winner of
the Nobel Peace Prize.
Meeting with families in tow
at a gleaming public library in
the northeast English city of
Newcastle, 18-year-old Malala and Muzoon, 17, pledged to
campaign together for access
to education for Syrian refugee
children.
“I hope world leaders promise
the future generation that they
will not deprive them of their
basic human right, which is education,” Malala told Reuters in an
interview.
The setting for their reunion
was a far cry from the sprawling
lines of tents comprising the Zaatari camp for Syrian refugees in
the Jordanian desert, where the
pair first met in early 2014.
Malala now lives in England’s
second city, Birmingham, where
she was treated after being shot,
and Muzoon is among the first
Syrians from refugee camps in
the Middle East to have come to
Britain.
Since the two first met, the
number of registered Syrian
refugees has doubled to almost
4.4mn, according to the United
Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR).
More than 250,000 people
have been killed since the Syrian
civil war began in 2011.
“I hope 2016 becomes a year
when this war ends and world
leaders must try,” Malala said.
Appeals for funding from the
world’s governments have fallen
far short of targets. With only
days before the end of the year,
the UNHCR’s $4.3bn appeal
for Syria in 2015 has raised just
$2.2bn.
UN children’s agency Unicef
estimates 2.6mn Syrian children
are no longer in school. Muzoon, often dubbed the “Malala
of Syria”, made her name encouraging girls to stay in school,
rather than being married off at a
young age.
“We need to speak about education and how to help children,
especially in Syria, because there
are more children in Syria without education,” Muzoon said.
Malala and Muzoon met again
in July this year to open a school
for Syrian refugees in Lebanon,
and have kept in touch through
Skype and e-mail.
“(World leaders) need to listen
to Muzoon - she has a dream,
she wants to become a journalist, she has been away from her
home for three or four years,
and she wants to go back to her
country one day,” Malala said.
The pair will be keeping a close
eye on an international summit
due to be held in Britain in early
February, focused on Syria’s humanitarian crisis.
“This coming generation of
Syrians are going to be deprived
of their right and it means that
country is going to face more
problems if its children are uneducated,” Malala said.
Britain said in September it
would resettle up to 20,000 Syrian refugees through to 2020.
Malala expressed hope that
Newcastle would welcome Muzoon in the same way Birmingham did for her.
“I call myself a Brummie now,”
Malala said, referring to the nickname for residents of Birmingham.
“It’s a lovely society where
you can interact with people and
feel like you’re just part of it. I
hope Muzoon can have a similar
feeling.”
Cabinet gives nod for
Lebanon waste export
Reuters
Beirut
L
A pile of garbage is seen in an area of Beirut yesterday.
ebanon’s cabinet yesterday agreed to export the
country’s waste in a move
that could end a crisis that
led to a wave of protests and
threatened the downfall of the
government.
The government has awarded two foreign companies
18-month contracts to transport
Lebanon’s waste by sea in a plan
that should start to be carried
out this month when the firms
complete agreed financial obligations.
Prime Minister Tamam Salam
had previously expressed frus-
tration at the failings of his cabinet, which struggled to resolve
the garbage problem after the
closure of Beirut’s main rubbish
tip in July.
“This was a catastrophe
that was a result of years and
years of neglect,” Salam said on
Monday after a cabinet meeting convened to discuss the
problem.
He had threatened to resign
as protests calling for a solution to the rubbish crisis turned
into calls for the cabinet to step
down.
“We hope to have closed this
chapter of an affair in the shadow of disruptions the country
has endured and in the context
of a tense political situation,”
Salam said at a press conference.
The protests that began this
summer had been organised independently of the main sectarian parties, posing a challenge to
their influence.
The rubbish crisis echoes
wider problems facing Lebanon.
The weak state has long been
criticised for failing to develop
the country and its infrastructure. Beirut still suffers daily
power cuts 25 years after the end
of the 1975-1990 civil war.
But government has been particularly poor since the eruption
of the war in neighbouring Syria.
That war has worsened Lebanon’s political divisions, often
along sectarian lines that reflect
the Syrian conflict.
12
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
AFRICA
US wildlife agency gives legal protection to African lions
Reuters
Dakar
A
US agency on Monday
listed two lion subspecies under the Endangered Species Act, offering
them legal protection that will
make it harder for hunters to
import trophies into the country.
The US Fish & Wildlife Service listed lions found mostly in
West and Central Africa as “en-
dangered” and lions in eastern
and southern Africa as “threatened” and said it would withhold permits from violators.
The measures, enacted under the world’s most powerful
animal protection law, will take
effect in January 2016. They
follow the extension of protection to African elephants and
cheetahs.
The two groups of lions covered by the listing once roamed
the continent in the tens of
thousands but populations
have been decimated by loss of
prey and habitat and killings by
hunters, including many from
local communities.
Several African countries
such as Zimbabwe and Burkina
Faso still allow tourists to hunt
their lions, saying it provides
an important source of revenue
and helps support conservation.
But many condemn trophy
hunting and contest its benefits. American dentist Walter
Palmer sparked intense glo-
bal controversy in July when
he killed a rare black-maned
lion named Cecil in Zimbabwe.
Hunters like Palmer regularly
import salt-packed skulls and
skins of lions into the US.
The US Fish & Wildlife Service said at the time it was deeply
concerned about the killing,
which prompted a group of
Democrats to press the agency
for the listing, initially proposed by petition in 2011.
On Monday, a spokesperson
for the agency denied that the
Buhari
vows to
increase
spending
ports of a rare subspecies found
in west and central Africa and
in smaller numbers in India will
“generally be prohibited,” the
agency said, except where licencees can show they enhance
the survival of the species.
Only around 1,400 of this
type of lion remain and conservationists have warned it is
threatened with extinction.
Permits are required for lions
found elsewhere on the continent and only from countries
“with established conservation
programs and well-managed
lion populations”, the agency
said.
Apart from the Endangered
Species Act, hunters are barred
under America’s Lacey Act
from importing wildlife or parts
of animals that have been illegally killed, transported or sold.
France’s environment ministry also said last month that no
more permits to import trophy
lions would be issued. Australia
has also passed similar measures.
Boko Haram
keeping 1mn
children out of
school: Unicef
AFP
Abuja
P
resident
Muhammadu
Buhari yesterday unveiled
a budget that triples investment spending in a bid to
stimulate growth and lower the
dependence of Africa’s largest
economy on oil.
Despite the plunging price
of oil, Nigeria’s main revenue
source, Buhari vowed to increase
spending by about 20% from
this year to 6.08tn naira (around
$30bn).
Investment will be a major
beneficiary, more than tripling
to account for 30% of total
spending.
“We believe that this budget,
while helping industry, commerce and investment to pick
up, will as a matter of urgency,
addresses the immediate problems of youth unemployment
and the terrible living conditions
of the extremely poor and vulnerable Nigerians,” Buhari told
the joint session of the National
Assembly in Abuja.
He said that critical infrastructure like power and housing
would get 433.4bn naira, while
transport was allocated 202bn.
Investments in security and
defence are also to be stepped
up as the country fights Boko
Haram militants in the north of
the country.
“These investments in infrastructure and security are meant
to support our reforms in the
agriculture, solid minerals and
other core job creating sectors of
our economy,” Buhari said.
The plunge in global oil prices
by more than 60% since last
year has pummelled Nigeria, the
continent’s largest oil exporter.
Economic growth will slow
to 4% this year according to an
IMF forecast, down from 6.3%
last year.
new measures were linked to
Cecil’s killing, which is being
investigated separately.
Conservationists said the
listing was significant since
Americans make up around
two-thirds of trophy hunters.
“The hunting industry says
all the time that trophy hunting helps conservation. Now
they are being asked to prove
it,” said Luke Hunter, president
of Panthera, the global wild cat
conservation organisation.
Under the new measures, im-
Nigeria will have to
contend with social
turmoil stemming from a
generation of children who
have not gone to class
Agencies
Johannesburg
T
President Muhammadu Buhari lays a copy of the 2016 Nigeria budget on the table at the National
Assembly in Abuja yesterday.
he Boko Haram insurgency has kept more
than 1mn children out
of school, the UN children’s
agency reported yesterday,
highlighting fears that a lack of
education will fuel further radicalism in and around Nigeria.
Over 2,000 schools are
closed across Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger, while
hundreds of others have been
attacked, looted, or set on fire
by Boko Haram militants in
their quest to create an independent Islamic state, said
Unicef.
The number of children
missing out on their education because of conflict adds
to the estimated 11mn pupils of
primary school age who were
already out of school in these
countries before the onset of
the crisis.
Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari has given his military commanders until the end
of the month to end the Boko
Haram insurgency, but even
if victory is possible analysts
say his government will have
to contend with social turmoil
stemming from a generation of
children who have not gone to
class.
“The longer they stay out of
school, the greater the risks of
being abused, abducted and
recruited by armed groups,”
said Manuel Fontaine, Unicef
regional director of West and
Central Africa.
Boko
Haram
fighters
stormed a school in the remote
northeastern Nigerian town of
Chibok on April 14, 2014, seizing 276 girls who were preparing for end-of-year exams in
an abduction that shocked the
world.
Since starting to wage war
on the Nigerian government
in 2009, Boko Haram - whose
name means “Western education is forbidden” - has targeted schools, students and
teachers.
“It fulfils their initial mandate, which is to topple Nigeria’s secular government
and the Western tenants which
underpinned that governance
structure,” said Ryan Cummings, security analyst at
Red24, a risk consultancy firm.
Between bloody raids and
incessant suicide bombings,
Boko Haram has severely damaged what little infrastructure
existed in Nigeria’s impoverished northeast at a time when
the commodity dependant
country is facing a cash crunch
thanks to plunging oil prices.
In the northeastern state
of Borno, militants destroyed
$1bn of infrastructure, including hospitals, bridges, roads
and homes, reported Governor
Kashim Shettima in September.
The amount of “funds required for the rehabilitation,
reconstruction and resettlement of our people is so enormous,” Shettima said.
Many classrooms are severely overcrowded in northeastern Nigeria as some school
buildings are still being used to
house the large numbers of displaced persons seeking shelter
from the conflict, the organisation said.
In these areas, some displaced teachers, who themselves have fled the fighting,
are involved in the schooling
and classes are often given on
a “double shift” basis to help
more children attend school.
In other areas, however, insecurity, fear of violence and
attacks are preventing many
teachers from resuming classes
and discouraging parents from
sending their children back to
school.
In Nigeria alone, approximately 600 teachers have been
killed since the start of the
Boko Haram insurgency, according to Unicef.
Eradicating Boko Haram will
not solve the education issue in
the region, said Yan St-Pierre,
terrorism analyst at Modern
Security Consulting Group.
Seven civilians killed, scores wounded in Djibouti clashes, says foreign minister
AFP
Djibouiti
A
t least seven civilians
were killed and scores of
people wounded in clashes in Djibouti, the foreign minister said yesterday, insisting the
situation was now under control
a day after the unrest.
Violence flared before dawn
on Monday when police broke up
a traditional religious ceremony
in Buldhoqo district, close to
the capital Djibouti, trying to
move the people to a better site,
Foreign Minister Mahamoud Ali
Youssouf said.
“There were hundreds of peo-
ple who gathered there, carrying
arms like knives and machetes,
and also two of them had Kalashnikovs,” Youssouf said.
“Reinforcements of police
and the army came and people
refused to move and the clashes
started.”
The opposition Union for National Salvation (USN) party has
claimed 19 people died.
But Youssouf said the statement was false and the opposition
was exaggerating the violence.
“Medical authorities recorded
seven people dead,” including six
men killed by machete cuts and
one young girl killed by a bullet,
Youssouf said.
At least 23 civilians and 50 po-
lice officers were wounded, he
added. Nine civilians remain in
hospital as well as eight policemen, two of the police with bullet wounds.
“The shots were coming from
the people at the site,” he said. “Investigations have been launched
and inquiry still going on as to how
this incident happened.”
Interior Minister Hassan
Omar has reported the “arrest
of several people involved in the
violence.”
Djibouti, a strategic port on
the Gulf of Aden with a key position on one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, hosts several
foreign military bases, including
from the US, France and Japan.
Many of the naval vessels tasked with combating
Somali piracy in the region
also use the country’s port to
dock.
It is also a contributor of
troops to the African Union force
in neighbouring Somalia, battling Al Qaeda-linked Shebab
militants.
Tanzania president suspends rail chief
Reuters
Dar Es Salaam
T
anzanian
President
John
Magufuli has suspended a
senior rail official and ordered
an investigation into possible irregularities in the awarding of a tender to
build a standard gauge railway line,
his office said yesterday.
Tanzania said in March it plans to
spend $14.2bn to construct a new
standard gauge rail network in the
next five years, to be financed with
commercial loans as the country
aims to become a regional transport
hub.
The suspension of Benhadard Tito,
the director general of the Reli Assets Holding Company (RAHCO), the
state railway assets holding firm, will
“pave way for a thorough investigation into gross violations of procurement procedures” for the construc-
tion of the rail line, Magufuli’s office
said.
Magufuli, who took office last
month, has pledged to root out corruption and inefficiency in Tanzania
and has already sacked several senior
officials.
Tanzania, like its neighbour Kenya,
wants to profit from its long coastline
and upgrade existing rickety railways
and roads to serve growing economies in the heart of Africa.
Magufuli also disbanded the board
of directors of RAHCO and the
state-run Tanzania Railways Limited
(TRL), the operator of the country’s
railway, for failing to take action on
irregularities in the railway tender,
his office said.
Last week, the president dismissed the head of the government’s
anti-graft body for failing to tackle
high-level corruption. He has also
sacked the head of Tanzania’s port
authority and the chief tax collector
as part of his anti-graft campaign.
The railway projects planned by
the government include construction of a 2,561km standard gauge
railway connecting the port at the
commercial capital of Dar es Salaam
to Tanzania’s land-locked neighbours, Rwanda and Burundi, at a cost
of $7.6bn.
Two additional lines, to cost
$6.6bn, would connect Dar es Salaam to the coal, iron ore and soda
ash mining areas in the south and
northern parts of the country.
The statement from the Tanzanian
presidency did not give details on the
irregularities in the railway tender
process.
Gas finds in Tanzania as well as
oil discoveries in Kenya and Uganda,
have turned East Africa into an exploration hotspot for oil firms, but
transport infrastructure in those
countries has suffered from decades
of under-investment.
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
13
AMERICAS
Star Wars forces Jurassic World off global debut pedestal
AFP
Los Angeles
T
he new Star Wars movie
has set a global opening
weekend record, smashing
past the previous record holder
Jurassic World to rake in $529mn,
Disney said on Monday.
“With final numbers now in,
Man
charged
in Kung
Fu Panda
fraud case
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
rose above estimates to post an
all-time industry-high $248mn
domestically plus $281mn internationally for an all-time record
global debut of $529mn since
opening December 16,” the company said in a statement.
It said the figure does not include box office receipts from India and Greece, where the movie
opens this week, or from China,
the world’s second biggest film
market, where it opens on January 9.
Jurassic World previously held
the record for global launch with
$524.9mn.
“Our sole focus has been creating a film that delivers that
one-of-a-kind Star Wars experience, and director JJ Abrams,
sales on Friday with $120.5mn.
Harry Potter and the Deathly
Hallows: Part 2, previously held
both records at $43.5mn for an
opening night and $91mn for a
first day.
As far as all-time box office
sales, two films by James Cameron hold the record – Avatar
($2.78bn) and Titanic ($2.18bn),
and it is expected that The Force
Awakens might unseat both.
“Star Wars is officially the
biggest thing to happen in the
known box office universe now
that it has taken the best debuts
records – domestic and worldwide – from Jurassic World,” said
Jeff Bock, box office analyst at
Exhibitor Relations.
“The industry is expecting
amazing holds this upcoming
weekend and through the holidays, and if that happens, Avatar
and its records may be the next
thing to fall in the face of the
power of the Force.”
Disney said the success of the
movie has already enabled the
company to cross the $5bn mark
in global box office receipts in a
calendar year for the first time
ever.
Trump gets vulgar in his
latest attack on Clinton
Reuters
Boston
AFP/Reuters
Washington
A
epublican
frontrunner
Donald Trump found
himself accused of sexism
again yesterday after he coined a
vulgar new term of abuse while
attacking rival Hillary Clinton.
Trump’s off-colour comments about the Democratic
front-runner at a campaign appearance on Monday night came
a day after he called Clinton a
liar for saying his proposal to
ban entry of all foreign Muslims
to the United States aided the Islamic State’s propaganda efforts.
Whipping up a raucous crowd
of supporters in Michigan,
Trump’s scorn for his democratic rival took a sexually graphic
and personal turn.
Recalling the 2008 presidential race, in which Hillary lost
out to Barack Obama in the battle for the Democratic nomination, Trump appeared to reach
for a Yiddish term.
“She was favoured to win and
she got schlonged. She lost, I
mean she lost,” he said, apparently turning the noun “schlong” – referring to male genitalia– into a verb meaning “to
beat”.
Then, with the partisan crowd
cheering him on, he turned to
an incident on Saturday when
Clinton returned late to a televised debate after a bathroom
break.
“I thought she gave up,”
Trump said. “Where did she go?
Where did Hillary go? They had
to start the debate without her.
Phase II. I know where she went.
It’s disgusting. I don’t want to
talk about it.”
News reports after the debate
said the women’s bathroom was
farther from the stage than the
men’s room.
This was not the first time
during the campaign that the
thrice-married billionaire real
estate mogul has expressed dis-
Massachusetts man who
sued DreamWorks Animation SKG Incorporated, claiming that he had invented the title character in the 2008
film Kung Fu Panda, committed
fraud by back-dating drawings
he relied on as evidence, US federal prosecutors said on Monday.
Federal prosecutors in Boston
charged Jayme Gordon, 51, of
Randolph, Massachusetts, with
wire fraud and perjury, asserting that he lied in a 2011 lawsuit
against the Hollywood studio by
claiming the high-kicking bear
named Po infringed on characters he had developed in the
1990s.
“Mr Gordon went to great
lengths to orchestrate and maintain this fraudulent scheme, trying to take credit for ideas he did
not come up with,” said Harold
Shaw, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s special agent
in charge in Boston.
Prosecutors charged that Gordon back-dated drawings he
used to try to extract a $12mn
settlement from DreamWorks,
contending that he did so in early
2008 after seeing an early trailer
for the film.
Some of the drawings he relied
on had been traced from a colouring book featuring Walt Disney Company’s characters 1994
film The Lion King.
Gordon agreed to dismiss
his lawsuit after DreamWorks,
which also produced the Madagascar and How to Train Your
Dragon films, discovered the
tracing, though by that time the
company had spent some $3mn
defending against the litigation.
He could be sentenced to up to
20 years in prison if convicted of
the most serious charges.
Gordon could not be reached
for immediate comment.
Kung Fu Panda 3 is due to be
released in January.
Lucasfilm president Kathleen
Kennedy and the Lucasfilm team
have outdone themselves,” Disney chairman Alan Horn said.
The seventh installment of the
space saga has blazed a recordsetting trail since its domestic
debut last Thursday, taking the
prize for highest-grossing domestic opening night with $57mn
and biggest domestic single-day
R
Clinton: targeted for taking a longer bathroom break than her male
Democratic rivals.
Trump (left): (Clinton) was favoured to win (against Obama) and she
... lost.
taste for women’s bodily functions.
In August, Trump triggered
outrage when he insinuated that
Fox News host Megyn Kelly had
subjected him to sharp questioning because she may have
been menstruating.
Trump’s personal attacks on
women also extended to his rival for the Republican nomination, Carly Fiorina, of whom
he declared: “Look at that face!
Would anyone vote for that?”
Trump, 69, said last month
that Clinton, 68, did not have
strength or stamina to be president, and also has called her the
worst US secretary of state during her time in the post from
2009-2013.
He has frequently mocked his
rivals for the Republican nomination for their lower standing
in the polls, often focusing on
Jeb Bush, who he describes as
“low energy”.
His latest outburst against
Clinton drew predictable anger.
Liberal site Think Progress
dubbed it an “astonishingly sexist attack” and Slate magazine
called it “jaw-dropping” sexism.
Clinton’s team urged supporters to make their voices heard
and to denounce Trump and his
belittling remarks.
“We are not responding to
Trump but everyone who understands the humiliation this
degrading language inflicts on all
women should,” campaign communications director Jennifer
Palmieri said on Twitter.
Trump, a reality television
star turned White House candidate, has ridden out all the fury
directed his way after previous
outbursts.
His appearance on Monday
night was interrupted by hecklers who were ejected from the
event.
The real estate tycoon suggested the protesters might be
“drugged out” and chided another group for being “so weak”
they would not resist security
guards’ directions to leave.
Polls show the 69-year-old
New Yorker remains the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
Trump’s speeches are often
Trump beats Republicans, but not Clinton, in one-on-one matchups
Donald Trump would win a hypothetical head-to-head
contest against either of his two closest Republican
US presidential rivals, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, but
he would fall short of beating Democratic front-runner
Hillary Clinton if the election were held today, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll on Monday.
If the Republican primary featured a face-off between
Trump and Cruz, a Texas senator, Trump would win
the support of 41% of Republican and independent
voters, the poll showed.
Cruz would take 31%, while 28% said they would not
vote in a Cruz-Trump contest.
If Rubio, a Florida senator, were pitted against Trump,
the billionaire real-estate mogul would take 40% support of Republican and independent voters to Rubio’s
34%, according to the poll.
Twenty-seven per cent said they would not vote.
In this matchup, Trump’s lead over Rubio is within the
survey’s credibility interval.
unscripted, and his supporters
applaud him for what they see as
his authenticity and disdain for
political correctness.
A new survey, however, shows
that those voters who have not
been won over are turned off by
his bombast and belligerence.
Fifty per cent of registered US
Cruz and Rubio currently sit in second and fourth
place of all Republican candidates, respectively, in the
run-up to the November 2016 presidential election,
according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll on Friday.
Despite months of leading the Republican polls,
Trump would fall short in a general election competition held today against Clinton, the poll showed.
In a one-on-one match-up, the former secretary of
state would take 40% support of all voters to real
estate mogul Trump’s 29%.
Eight per cent of respondents said they did not know
which candidate they would support in a ClintonTrump competition.
Fourteen per cent said they would not vote for either
one, and another 9% said they would not vote at all.
The survey of 1,627 likely voters from all parties was
conducted between December 16 and December
21, with a credibility interval of 2.8 to 3.7 percentage
points.
voters said in a Quinnipiac poll
yesterday that they would be
“embarrassed” to have Trump as
president, compared to 23% who
said they would be proud.
If Clinton were elected, 33%
would be proud and 35% would
be embarrassed.
Quinnipiac has Trump lead-
ing the Republican field with
28% support, followed by Senator Ted Cruz at 24% and Senator
Marco Rubio at 12%.
Clinton tops the Democratic
race with 61% support, twice
the score of independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who trails on
30%.
New York detective among Quebec doctor-assisted dying law upheld
troops killed in Afghanistan
AFP
Montreal
A
Reuters
New York
A
New York City police detective volunteering for
his third deployment to
war zones was mourned yesterday, a day after he and five
other Americans were killed in a
suicide bombing in Afghanistan
near Bagram air base.
“Detective Joseph Lemm
epitomiszed the selflessness we
can only strive for: putting his
country and city first,” New York
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton
said in a statement.
Six American troops, including Lemm, a 15-year veteran of
the New York Police Department
(NYPD) who also volunteered in
the US Air National Guard, were
killed on Monday when a suicide
bomber on a motorbike struck
their patrol in the deadliest attack on US forces this year.
Bagram, around 40km (25
miles) north of Kabul, is one of
the main bases for the 9,800 US
troops left in Afghanistan after
international troops ended combat operations last year.
Mayor Bill de Blasio sent his
condolences early yesterday to
Lemm’s wife and two children,
saying in a statement that they
Lemm of the Bronx Warrant Squad is shown in this photo tweeted
by NYPD Midtown South yesterday. Lemm, a New York City police
detective volunteering for his third deployment to war zones, was
mourned yesterday, a day after he and five other Americans were
killed in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan near Bagram air base.
were among so many American families this holiday season
“who have an empty chair at the
dinner table because one of their
loved ones went off to defend our
country and never came back”.
Lemm was deployed twice to
Afghanistan and once to Iraq,
Bratton said.
The Taliban, which claimed
responsibility for the strike, remains resilient 14 years after the
start of US military engagement
in Afghanistan.
It has ramped up its attacks
this year, inflicting heavier casualties on Afghan security forces.
Just last week, the Pentagon
warned of deteriorating security
in Afghanistan and assessed the
performance of Afghan security
forces as “uneven and mixed”.
More than 2,300 US troops
have died in the Afghan war since
the 2001 invasion, but the pace of
US deaths has fallen off sharply
since the end of formal US combat and a drawdown of American
forces.
Pentagon data showed there
have been 10 so-called “hostile”
deaths of US service members in
Afghanistan this year.
There have been 10 non-hostile deaths, largely from aircraft
crashes.
Quebec court upheld
Canada’s first assisted
dying law yesterday, ruling against doctors who argued
it conflicts with federal criminal
law an could see doctors jailed
for helping someone die.
Opponents had asked for an
injunction to delay the law’s
roll-out until Ottawa amends
the nation’s Criminal Code, but
the Court of Appeal of Quebec
ruled that there is no conflict.
The
Quebec
legislation,
which outlines how terminally
ill patients can end their lives
with doctors’ help, was adopted
in June 2014 by the Quebec legislature in response to public
demand.
And in February, Canada’s
Supreme Court quashed a section of the national Criminal
Code prohibiting assisted suicide, effectively authorising it
for consenting adults with serious health problems.
But it suspended its ruling for
one year to allow parliamentarians an opportunity to enact new
rules surrounding the divisive
issue.
Court: govt cannot censor trademarks
A US appeals court has struck down a provision of a federal law that
barred the registration of offensive trademarks because it violates the
First Amendment of the US Constitution.
The decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in
Washington, DC, vacates the refusal by the US Patent and Trademark
Office to register the name of the Asian-American rock band, The
Slants.
It could also affect the decision by the agency to cancel the trademarks
of the National Football League’s Washington Redskins.
“We recognise that invalidating this provision may lead to the wider
registration of marks that offend vulnerable communities,” Circuit
Judge Kimberly Moore said in the opinion on behalf of the 12 judges
who took part in hearing the case. “Whatever our personal feelings
about the mark at issue here, or other disparaging marks, the First
Amendment forbids government regulators to deny registration
because they find the speech likely to offend others.”
The Portland, Oregon-based band appealed because the trademark
agency had rejected its name for a trademark twice since 2010 on the
grounds that it disparages Asians.
Canada’s new Liberal government has asked for a six-month
extension to consider the issue.
The Court of Appeal of Quebec said the Quebec law “does
not conflict with either the effect or the objectives of the
order” by Canada’s Supreme
Court invalidating related criminal law.
In fact, it said, “the suspension order is directed precisely
at allowing Parliament, and the
provincial legislatures who wish
to do so, to legislate with respect
to physician-assisted death
promptly and within their respective legislative spheres”.
The Supreme Court’s decision reversed its own 1993 ruling
in the case of Sue Rodriguez, a
pioneer in the fight for the right
to die in Canada.
At that time, the court had
expressed concern about protecting vulnerable persons, but
in its newer ruling pointed to
changed Canadian social values.
Recent polling shows a strong
majority of Canadians – 85% –
support the right to die.
Some form of physician-assisted dying is legal in Belgium,
Luxembourg, the Netherlands,
Switzerland and in a handful of
US states.
Hackers infiltrated computers at dam
Iranian hackers breached the control system of a dam near New York
City in 2013, an infiltration that raised concerns about the security
of the country’s infrastructure, the Wall Street Journal reported on
Monday, citing former and current US officials.
Two people familiar with the breach told the newspaper it occurred at
the Bowman Avenue Dam in Rye, New York.
The small structure about 20 miles from New York City is used for
flood control.
The hackers gained access to the dam through a cellular modem,
the Journal said, citing an unclassified Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) summary of the incident that did not specify the type
of infrastructure.
The dam is a 20-foot-tall concrete slab across Blind Brook, about five
miles from Long Island Sound.
“It’s very, very small,” Rye City Manager Marcus Serrano told the
newspaper.
He said Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents visited in 2013
to ask the city’s information-technology manager about a hacking
incident.
14
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
ASEAN
Captain of
sunken ferry
rescued as 70
still missing
AFP
Jakarta
T
File photo shows a cordon placed near a burnt area that translates as “Do not cross” by Indonesian officials from the Ministry of Environment
and Forestry during investigations in Rimbo Panjang, Riau province.
Indonesia punishes firms
over deadly forest fires
AFP
Jakarta
I
ndonesia is punishing more
than 20 companies in an
unprecedented move for
starting deadly forest fires that
killed 19 people, a government
official said yesterday.
Three companies have been
shut down permanently after
having their licences revoked
over their role in the blazes that
choked vast expanses of southeast Asia with acrid haze and
cost Indonesia $16bn.
It is the first time the government has revoked company
licences over forest fires, an
annual occurrence caused by
slash-and-burn land clearance.
The environment ministry
also froze the operations of 14
companies and said they face
closure if they do not meet the
government’s demands over
fire prevention.
Several other companies
have been given a strong warning and will be put under close
supervision.
“We have sanctioned 23
companies in total, ranging
from administrative sanctions
to license revocation, while 33
others are still in the process,
they could have their licenses
revoked too if they are found
guilty,” environment ministry
official Kemal Amas said.
The ministry has been investigating 276 companies in total
since the fires broke out in September. “We need firmer law
enforcement so that this catastrophe does not repeat itself,
it’s been going on for 18 years
but nobody has learnt their lesson,” Amas said.
Amas said the ministry was
also working hard to restore the
forests and farmland destroyed
in the fires.
Activists welcomed the government’s new commitment to
punish firms.
The Indonesian Forum for
Environment said it was unheard of for the government to
revoke licences, as many companies previously avoided facing trial.
“The minister has the courage to not only freeze the companies’ operation but also chase
the owners in a civil case, this is
great and this must be guarded
carefully,” Kurniawan said.
“In the past some people
were named suspects, but for
them to actually lose their licenses, this is the first time,” he
said.
More than half a million
people suffered acute respiratory infections in Indonesia because of the haze, while many
in neighbouring Singapore and
Malaysia also fell ill.
he captain of an Indonesian ferry that sank
in rough seas has been
rescued floating in a life jacket
two days after the accident but
more than 70 others remain
missing, officials said yesterday.
The national search and rescue agency has so far found 40
survivors including the captain
and four bodies off Sulawesi
island, out of the 118 on board.
The captain, identified only
as Asdar, was found floating
in a life jacket late Monday and
told rescuers what happened to
his boat the previous Saturday.
“The captain said before the
boat sank, five to seven metrehigh waves hit the boat and entered the engine room,” operations director Ivan Titus said.
“That would kill the engine,”
Titus added
Asdar said he told passengers
and crew to put on life jackets,
abandon ship and make for
the life rafts which had been
launched.
About 30 minutes later, the
boat sank. “At first they were
huddling near the life rafts, in
five, in ten, and in 15, but that
only lasted until midnight,” Titus said. People began to lose
their grip on one another and
some drowned because they
suffered cramps in the cold
water.
Asdar said he collected the
bodies and tried to stop them
drifting away by tying the life
jackets together, but waves kept
breaking the bodies apart.
He was being treated in hospital in Siwa, a small town which
An Indonesian member of a search and rescue team looks on during
the search for victims who were on board a boat carrying more than
100 people that went missing in central Indonesia, in Kolaka yesterday.
was the ferry’s intended destination.
A search team was deployed
yesterday to the location indicated by the captain but found
only several life jackets and a
life raft. But the search would
continue for several more days,
the search and rescue agency
said. There had been warnings
about strong winds and rough
seas in the area in the days before the accident.
The Indonesian archipelago
of more than 17,000 islands
is heavily dependent on ferry
services but fatal accidents are
common. Just this week a Danish cargo ship collided with
a tanker and sank in Indonesia’s west, with some crew still
missing.
ANTI-TERROR
Search continues
for militant leaders
after raid arrests
Counter-terrorism forces are
searching for the leaders of an
estimated 1,000 Islamic State
sympathisers across Indonesia
after a string of raids that led to
the arrest of several men suspected of planning bomb attacks,
police said yesterday. Nine people
were arrested and bomb-making
equipment was seized from towns
across the island of Java over the
weekend, heightening fears of
militant attacks by radicalised Indonesians returning from fighting
with Islamic State in Syria.
National Police spokesman Anton
Charliyan said authorities were
aware of plans to attack officials —
including President Joko Widodo
— government offices and public
landmarks. The sweep was reportedly prompted by intelligence
shared by the US Federal Bureau
of Investigation and the Australian
Federal Police.
CRIME
Aussie actress held
in Malaysia for
kidnapping son
An Australian actress is being
detained by Malaysian police for allegedly kidnapping her son while he
was with her separated partner at a
restaurant earlier this month. Eliza
Szonert was detained late Monday
and authorities are currently trying
to establish the whereabouts of
the boy, Kuala Lumpur police chief
Tajuddin Md Isa said yesterday. “We
will need her to assist in investigations to find out where the son is
and we need to find out the son’s
safety,” he said. Szonert, who had
acted in the popular Australian TV
soap opera “Neighbours”, is expected to be held in police detention at
least until Thursday. The Melbourne
actress is alleged to have abducted
her son from his father Ashley Crick,
a businessman now based in Malaysia, at a restaurant in a popular mall
in Kuala Lumpur on December 10.
Vietnam leadership
to be chosen at
January meeting
AFP
Hanoi
V
ietnam’s new leadership
will be chosen at a Communist Party Congress
in January, an official statement
said late Monday, as the country
struggles with economic reform
and strained relations with
its biggest trade partner and
neighbour China.
The key meeting, held every
five years, determines who will
be president and prime minister and sets the country’s policy
direction.
The ruling elite will choose a
successor to President Truong
Tan Sang, while Prime Minister
Nguyen Tan Dung is serving his
final term as premier, paving the
way for a changing of the guard.
There will be a symbolic vote
of approval from Vietnam’s
communist-controlled national assembly a few months later.
“The 12th national party
congress will officially open on
January 21 and ends on January
28th in Hanoi,” the Communist
Party of Vietnam (CPV) said in a
statement.
The meeting comes at a
pressing time for the country.
Since decades of war ended
in 1975, it has developed rapidly from an impoverished nation plagued by food shortages
to a middle-income country
and World Trade Organisation
member. Despite lingering issues in the banking and staterun sector, gross domestic
product (GDP) is growing faster
than expected this year and analysts say Vietnam is one of the
only countries in southeast Asia
with swiftly rising exports.
Planners are trying to reshape
massive state companies that
dominate many sectors but,
which experts say, hold back innovation and growth as well as
breed corruption.
POLITICS
Junta leader writes new song
Thailand’s junta leader released the lyrics to a new patriotic ballad
yesterday, the second song he has written since seizing power in
2014. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who as army chief led the
May 2014 coup, first wrote the song “Return Happiness to Thailand”,
which is played constantly on television and radio stations as part of
a public relations campaign by the junta to win over Thais.
The tune has racked up more than 1mn views on YouTube but has
been mocked by critics of the junta. His second song, Because You
Are Thailand, includes lyrics like “If we join hands ... the day we hope
for is not far away” and “Because you are Thailand, you will not let
anyone destroy you.” Prayuth told reporters the song was his New
Year present to the Thai people. The junta, or National Council for
Peace and Order, overthrew an elected government, putting an end
to months of protests in Bangkok led by the middle class and elite
who wanted to get rid of the civilian government of populist Prime
Minister Yingluck Shinawatra. A military government installed after
the coup has largely stifled dissent and has gone hard after critics.
Myanmar pair face verdict over
British murders on Thai island
AFP
Bangkok
T
wo Myanmar migrant
workers could face the
death penalty if convicted this week of murdering a
pair of British backpackers on a
Thai island, in a grim case that
stained the kingdom’s reputation as a tourist haven.
Zaw Lin and Win Zaw Tun
have pleaded not guilty to killing David Miller, 24, and the
rape and murder of Hannah
Witheridge, 23, on the diving
paradise of Koh Tao in southern
Thailand, with the defendants
insisting they are scapegoats for
a bungled inquiry.
The British pair were found
bludgeoned to death on a beach
on September 15, 2014 — a grisly
discovery that has troubled the
country’s vital tourism trade
and raised questions over the
Thai justice system.
Three judges on the nearby
island of Koh Samui are expected to deliver their verdict
on Christmas Eve (tomorrow)
after a trial that has dragged on
for several months.
The court has heard harrowing testimony of the murders,
while defence lawyers have accused the police of bungling
their investigation and using
the Myanmar pair as scapegoats.
Rights groups say low-paid
migrant workers from neighbouring countries, including
Myanmar, are often blamed for
crimes in Thailand where the
justice system is skewed towards those with money and
influence.
Miller was struck by a single
blow and left to drown in shal-
File photo shows Myanmar national Zaw Lin looking on as he arrives
in a prison transport van outside the court on the Thai resort
island of Koh Samui.
low surf while Witheridge had
been raped and then brutally
beaten to death with a garden
hoe. Prosecutors insist their
case against the men is watertight.
Their case pivots on DNA
found on Witheridge’s body and
around the crime scene as well
as the discovery of Miller’s mobile phone and sunglasses with
one of the suspects.
But the defence has disputed
the forensic evidence as flawed
and accused the police of torturing their clients into signing
confessions, which they later
retracted.
“The prosecution case is
marked by an absence of significant evidence needed to prove
the guilt of the accused for the
crimes they are charged with,”
the defence team said in a statement released ahead of the ver-
dict. In the days and weeks after
the murders, Thai police came
under intense pressure to solve
the case.
Junta chief Prayut ChanO-Cha ordered them to make
swift arrests and publicly aired
his own opinions about a case
that garnered global media attention. Investigators have also
struggled to shrug off accusations of incompetence.
Those were first voiced hours
after the bodies were discovered
when the crime scene was not
sealed off properly and gruesome pictures of the victims’
bodies emerged online.
Initial suspects ranged from a
backpacker seen drinking with
Miller and Witheridge on the
night they died, to the son of an
influential village headman.
Police eventually arrested
and charged Zaw Lin and Win
Zaw Tun, also known as Wai
Phyo. Within days of their arrest Thai police said the pair
had confessed.
But they soon retracted those
confessions, insisting they were
made under duress, a charge the
police deny.
During the trial, which family members of both victims
attended, often breaking down
in tears, the defence attacked
the police’s case saying key
forensic evidence was circumstantial.
Investigators were accused
of failing to properly collect
and preserve DNA samples
and declining to test key pieces of evidence, such as Witheridge’s clothes.
Neither of the two suspects’
DNA profiles were found on
the garden hoe but profiles of
other unknown people were,
the defence said.
Under Thai law the prosecution is under no obligation to offer the defence prior
discovery, making challenging
the evidence, or independently testing forensic data, very
difficult.
“What’s clear is that no
matter the verdict, the families of those two young people
brutally murdered will not be
sure they have received justice, or even the truth,” said
Sam Zarifi, regional director
of the International Commission of Jurists.
It is not yet clear whether the parents of Miller and
Witheridge will be present for
the verdict on December 24.
Christmas is not a public holiday in Thailand.
The defence team says the
mothers of the two accused are
expected to attend.
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
15
AUSTRALASIA/EAST ASIA
Japan spots cannon-like equipment on Chinese ship near disputed isles
AFP
Tokyo
J
apan said yesterday it had spotted
for the first time a Chinese coast
guard ship armed with cannon-like
equipment near disputed East China
Sea islands.
Japan and China have routinely
butted heads over ownership of the
uninhabited islets, as Chinese ships
-- mostly coast guard vessels -- and
aircraft have sometimes approached
them to back up Beijing’s claims and
test Japan’s response.
But this is the first time that Japan
has spotted a Chinese coast guard ship
with such equipment, a Japan Coast
Guard spokeswoman said.
It was one of four Chinese coast
guard vessels that entered Japan’s
Dozens still
missing after
landslide as
hopes fade
AFP
Shenzhen
R
escuers struggled to
claw away a massive
mound of mud engulfing an industrial district in
China yesterday in a desperate
bid to find survivors among
76 missing people following
a landslide that occurred despite multiple warnings.
Hopes for those still missing
in the mud were fading yesterday evening, almost three
days after the landslide, even
as heavy machinery raked
through thousands of tonnes
of soil and rubble that buried factories and residential
buildings.
The government revised
the number of missing down
from 81 to 76 after contacting
some of the unaccounted for,
officials said during a press
conference yesterday. A body
discovered the same morning
remained the first and only
confirmed death.
The latest in a series of fatal
accidents in the world’s most
populous country, the tragedy in Shenzhen came only
months after almost 200 people died in a massive chemical
blast in the port city of Tianjin. The mudslide was caused
by the improper storage of
waste soil from construction
sites, according to the official
newspaper of the Ministry of
Land and Resources.
Soil was illegally stored in
heaps 100 metres high at an
old quarry site and turned
to mud during rain Sunday
morning, according to the
Global Times, afflated with
Communist Party mouthpiece
People’s Daily.
Documents on the web site
of the Guangming New District, where the landslide occurred, show that authorities
were aware of problems with
the storage and had urged action as early as this July.
In an announcement dated
July 10, officials said that work
at the site was not being carried out according to approved
plans and ordered the Hongao
Construction Waste Dump to
“speed up” work to bring its
operations into line.
The government issued a
second warning in September,
noting that the dump’s permit
to receive waste had expired
and authorities had made it
clear that dumping should
cease.
The city had “pointed out
problems at the site and requested steps to correct them”,
the statement said.
Commenters on China’s
popular Weibo microgblogging voiced fury over the apparent failings.
“The lack of safety supervision and passive attitude in
taking precautions has caused
the whole nation to shake with
anger and shocked the world!”
user Xizidan wrote in a post that
was taken down by authorities,
but found on the censorship
tracking website Weiboscope.
The post said people were
angry over accidents including
the blasts at Tianjin in August,
the sinking of a ferry on the
Yangtze river in June that killed
more than 400, and a stampede
in Shanghai last New Year’s Eve
that left over 30 dead.
“Through man-made disasters, we’re continually using
other people’s lives to achieve
progress in society,” another
post said, echoing a common
complaint that China’s rapid
economic growth has been
achieved at the expense of
many of its people.
At the disaster zone, volunteers hoping to help search for
bodies said chances were slim
for survivors.
“I don’t think there will be a
chance (to save anybody), because it has been some time
(since the landslide), and it is
dirt and sand,” said one woman
who gave her name as Qin.
Emergency workers were
yesterday using diggers in an effort to clear the mud. Many had
spent the night on the site.
People who saw the Sunday
morning landslide described
“huge waves” of red earth and
mud racing towards the industrial park, burying or crushing
homes and factories.
contiguous waters yesterday near
the Senkaku Islands, the Japan Coast
Guard said in a statement, which included a photo of the Chinese ship.
Japan administers the uninhabited
islands under that name but China
also claims them and calls them the
Diaoyus.
“The ship is seen carrying four pieces of equipment, two at the front and
another set of two at the rear, which
each seem to have something similar to
a cannon,” the spokeswoman said.
Though the vessel did not enter
what Japan considers its territorial waters around the islands, government
officials saw the display of weaponry
as provocative and filed a protest with
China.
In November, Japan said it spotted a
Chinese naval intelligence ship operating near the disputed islands for the
first time. Relations between Japan and
China hit a low after Tokyo in September 2012 moved to increase its formal
control by nationalising some of the
islands.
But the countries — Asia’s two biggest economies— have taken steps over
the past year to improve ties.
They issued carefully worded statements on the dispute ahead of a summit in November last year in Beijing
between Chinese President Xi Jinping
and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe. The two sides acknowledged they
had different views on tensions emanating from the issue but agreed on the
need for keeping them under control.
Distrust, however, remains high as
China is wary of moves by Abe to raise
Japan’s military profile while Tokyo
frets about Beijing’s increasing regional and global assertiveness.
Getting ready for Ice and Snow festival
People visit ice sculptures illuminated by coloured lights during a trial operation of the upcoming Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival, in Harbin, Heilongjiang
province, China yesterday. The festival will officially kick off on January 5, 2016.
China rights lawyer gets
suspended prison term
AFP
Beijng
O
ne of China’s most celebrated human rights
lawyers was given a
three-year suspended prison
term yesterday in the latest
clampdown on critics of the ruling Communist Party.
Police and plainclothes security officials were out in force to
try to stop supporters and journalists reaching the court where
Pu Zhiqiang was sentenced for
“inciting ethnic hatred” and
“picking quarrels and provoking
trouble”.
The verdict is the latest episode in a widening crackdown
on civil society under President
Xi Jinping, with more than 200
lawyers and activists detained
or called in for questioning since
the summer.
Amnesty International called
it a “gross injustice” while the
EU said in a statement the verdict “sets a dangerous legal
precedent regarding freedom of
expression online and offline”.
Pu, who has represented labour camp victims and dissident
artist Ai Weiwei, was arrested a
year-and-a-half ago over posts
on social media between 2011
and 2014.
His secretive trial at Beijing’s
No 2 Intermediate People’s
Court ended yesterday with a
widely-anticipated guilty verdict, but with the sentence suspended for three years.
The ruling means Pu may be
sent to jail if he repeats his criticism or runs afoul of police-imposed rules.
“Pu will not have to immediately go to prison, but he is still
not a free man,” said his lawyer
Mo Shaoping.
“We are not satisfied with the
verdict because we maintain Pu
is innocent.”
There were angry scenes
around the courthouse, where
police set up a cordon to hold
back activists and reporters.
“Pu Zhiqiang is a good man!
So speaking for the common people is a crime?” yelled
one tearful woman as she was
roughly shoved into a police van
by uniformed officers and plainclothes officials.
“Stop putting on a play, stop
acting, there are foreign journalists here,” the officer told her.
Another woman stood alone
at the centre of a ring of dozens
of officers and plainclothes men
and shouted “I just won’t go! Pu
Zhiqiang is innocent!” before
being forcibly escorted away.
“China’s judicial authorities
have been dealing with these
cases according to law and the
person involved accepted the
verdict of the court,” Hong Lei,
a foreign ministry spokesman,
said at a regular briefing.
“Our judicial sovereignty and
the decision of the court will not
be affected by foreign forces.”
For the next three years Pu will
be subject to police monitoring
and will need permission to leave
Beijing. If he breaks the law or
any conditions of his release, he
will be sent to prison.
In the comments for which
he was tried, Pu said China did
not need Communist rule, writing: “Other than secrecy, cheating, passing the buck, delay, the
hammer and sickle, what kinds
of secrets of governance does
this party have?”
He also condemned government policy in the mainly Muslim
far-western region of Xinjiang as
“absurd”.
Ni Yulan, a wheelchair-bound
rights lawyer whose 2012 sentencing to nearly three years in
prison for “picking quarrels” and
“fraud” roused similar international outrage, appeared at the
courthouse to show her support.
She sat serenely with her legs
wrapped in a blue blanket against
the bitter winter cold as her husband Dong Jiqin, also sentenced
at the time to two years in prison
on similar charges, wheeled her
through a pushing crowd of police
and plainclothes men who swept
her away from reporters.
The state-run Xinhua news
agency called it a “light punishment”.
It said Pu had “stirred ethnic
hatred among Internet users, triggering an antagonistic mentality in many and creating a severe
social impact”. But rights groups
condemned the sentence.
“Clearly it is positive that Pu
Zhiqiang is unlikely to spend another night in jail, yet that cannot
hide the gross injustice against
him,” said William Nee, China
researcher at Amnesty International, in a statement.
“He is no criminal and this
guilty verdict effectively shackles
one of China’s bravest champions
of human rights from practising
law.”
LEGAL
Compensation for
fabricated spy case
in South Korea
A South Korean court has awarded
millions of dollars in compensation
to victims of a fabricated espionage
case that took place four decades
ago, a court spokesman said
yesterday.
The Seoul South District Court last
week ordered the government to
pay a total of 12.55bn won ($10.7mn)
to 72 complainants who are due to
receive between 4mn and 1bn won
each in connection with the 1974
Ulleungdo spy case.
At that time, a total of 47 people
were arrested across the country,
many of them residents from the
eastern remote island of Ulleungdo.
Under torture, they were forced
to make false confessions that
they had formed an underground
ring with the intention of starting
a popular uprising to topple the
government on orders from archenemy North Korea. Thirty-two of
the 47 were later indicted and three
were executed, four were sentenced
to life and the rest sentenced to
between one and 15 years in prison.
The events took place under then
authoritarian president Park ChungHee, father of the current president
Park Geun-Hye.
‘Hello Kitty’ fan site exposed,
but no data stolen: web host
Reuters
Singapore
M
ore than 3mn accounts of Hello
Kitty fans were left vulnerable
to theft by hackers, but there is
no evidence any data has been stolen, the
Hong Kong-based company hosting the
data said yesterday.
A spokesman for Sanrio Digital, partowned by Sanrio Co Ltd , the Japanese owner of the Hello Kitty brand, said it had fixed
the hole after being notified by security researcher Chris Vickery that personal information of its users was accessible.
Vickery told Reuters by e-mail that the
company had plugged the holes he had
found in three servers.
But he said the database had been exposed
for nearly a month, meaning that anyone
who knew its internet address could have
accessed it.
“It would have been extremely easy for a
bad guy to take the data,” he said. “Extremely easy. Almost as easy as downloading a web
page.”
File photo shows a visitor poses in front of
a mock telephone booth inside the “Kitty
Lab”, a simulated city environment of Hello
Kitty, to celebrate the character’s 35th
anniversary, in Hong Kong.
Sanrio Digital said in a statement that “at
this time we have no indication that any personal information was stolen.”
The spokesman said 3.3mn accounts had
been vulnerable, including the names, ages
and gender of fans. He said that the accounts
all belonged to users of the SanrioTown.com
website, a community for fans of Hello Kitty.
No credit card or other payment information was included in the vulnerable data,
and passwords “were securely encrypted,”
according to the statement.
The spokesman said while the company
technically doesn’t allow minors to sign up,
this was implemented through an honour
system, meaning that those younger than 13
could register by lying about their age.
News of the hole in the Sanrio Digitalhosted site follows last month’s breach of
another Hong Kong company, electronic toymaker VTech Holdings Ltdmns of
records of parents and children were compromised.
In that case the hacker who found the vulnerability stole the data but shared some of it
with a researcher and was reported as saying
he had no plans to sell it. UK police arrested
a 21-year old man last week in connection
with the hack.
US-based Vickery, who explores security
vulnerabilities in his spare time and reports
them to the affected companies, said the
hole in the Hello Kitty site was the result of a
simple misconfiguration of a database.
Snakes alive! Missing species
found off Australia coast
AFP
Sydney
A
ustralian scientists yesterday hailed the discovery of two sea
snake species feared to have become extinct years ago off the
Western Australia coast.
The short-nose sea snake and the leaf-scaled sea snake had not been
seen since disappearing from their only known habitat on Ashmore
Reef in the Timor Sea more than 15 years ago, James Cook University
researchers wrote in the Biological Conservation journal.
But they have since been “spotted alive and healthy” at Ningaloo
Reef (short-nose sea snake) and Shark Bay (leaf-scaled sea snake),
thousands of kilometres south. “This discovery is really exciting, we
get another chance to protect these two endemic Western Australian
sea snake species,” the study’s lead author Blanche D’Anastasi said in
a statement about the two species, listed by Australian authorities as
critically endangered. “But in order to succeed in protecting them, we
will need to monitor populations as well as undertake research into
understanding their biology and the threats they face.”
The university said the short-nose sea snake was identified after a
wildlife officer sent a photo of two of them to D’Anastasi in April 2013.
“What is even more exciting is that they were courting, suggesting
that they are members of a breeding population,” D’Anastasi added.
The scientists said it was a “real surprise” when they also discovered a “new and significant” population of the leaf-scaled sea snake in
the seagrass beds of Shark Bay. “The disappearance of sea snakes from
Ashmore Reef could not be attributed to trawling and remains unexplained,” said another researcher, Vimoksalehi Lukoschek.
16
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
BRITAIN/IRELAND
WEATHER
CLOSE CALL
CON
TRAVEL
DATA
Cumbria hit by
further flooding
Driver halts train in time
to avoid woman on tracks
Tourist left with £600 bill
for short rickshaw ride
Irish tourism
sees record year
Christmas Day workers
set to top 900,000
Communities in Cumbria have been flooded
again - some for the third time in less than a
month - following torrential rain and high winds.
Worst affected have been the Keswick, Kendal
and Glenridding areas, where river levels have
been rising. The Glenridding Hotel has flooded
for the third time this month. The Environment
Agency has issued 23 flood warnings across
England and Wales and 14 in the north west,
urging people to take immediate action.
Forecasters are predicting conditions to ease
today. The Environment Agency said the River
Eden had burst its banks at the Sands in Appleby
and was “getting closer” to properties.
A train driver managed to avoid hitting a
woman on the tracks by bringing his train to
a screeching halt. The woman, in her fifties,
was rescued from the tracks at Norbiton,
south London, just after 5am on Monday.
Witness Dom Hodges, 39, said: “I felt the
train braking extremely hard with horn fully
on, before coming into Norbiton station. The
driver must have managed to see her on the
tracks in the dark and reacted accordingly.
I saw the woman under the first carriage of
the train on the tracks as we were evacuated
off and she appeared to be sitting up with
eyes open.
A tourist whose rickshaw driver tried to charge
him £600 for a 30-minute journey in central
London yesterday said the experience had left
him feeling “sick”. Engin Isguzar, 36, said he and
a friend failed to agree a price before their ride
from Oxford Street on Friday afternoon and
although they refused to pay £600 ended up
handing over £250. The incident was branded
as “shocking” by Westminster council. After an
argument with the eastern European driver, part
of which was filmed by a bystander, the pair
paid £250. Isguzar said: “Later, we saw another
driver and he told us we were crazy for paying so
much. We felt very sick.”
Ireland attracted more tourists in the first 11
months of 2015 than in any year on record, official
data showed yesterday, as the European Union’s
fastest-growing economy reaped the benefit of
a weak euro. Five years after Ireland required an
international bailout, its economy could grow by
as much as 7% this year, a recovery that has been
increasingly boosted by improved consumer
spending and growth in labour-intensive areas
such as tourism. Tourist trips, mainly from Britain
and the US, increased by 14% year-on-year, the
central statistics office said, putting 2015 already
ahead of the 8mn people who visited Ireland in
2007 before its financial crisis struck.
More people are expected to work on Christmas
Day this year, with the total set to exceed 900,000,
a study shows. Research by the TUC suggested
that 42,000 more people will not have a day off
on December 25 compared with three years ago.
Nurses, doctors, chefs, bar staff, security guards,
police officers and clergy are among those who
will be on duty as normal. The TUC said the biggest
proportion of employees set to work on Christmas
Day are in the North East (one in 28), East Midlands
(one in 30) and South West (one in 31). TUC general
secretary Frances O’Grady said: “We should all
spare a thought for the people who will be hard at
work while we relax with our families.”
Apple hits
out at plans to
extend online
surveillance
Reuters
London
A
pple has warned that a
British plan to give intelligence agencies extra
online surveillance powers could
weaken the security of personal
data for millions of people and
paralyse the tech sector.
The government unveiled
proposals for new online powers last month that it said were
needed to keep the country safe
from criminals, fraudsters and
militants, including the right to
find out which websites people
visit.
Critics however say the Investigatory Powers Bill gives British spies authority beyond those
available in other Western countries, including the US, and that
it constitutes an assault on personal freedom.
“We believe it is wrong to
weaken security for hundreds of
millions of law-abiding customers so that it will also be weaker
for the very few who pose a
threat,” the iPhone maker said.
Apple submitted its response
to a British parliamentary committee that is scrutinising the
new bill in the latest clash between Western governments
seeking to monitor the threat
from militants and online companies working to maintain security.
Apple said the draft laws could
weaken data encryption, sanction interference with its products, force non-UK companies
to break the laws of their home
countries, and spark similar legislation in other countries that
could paralyse firms under the
weight of dozens of contradictory laws.
Lending support to Apple’s
view, Microsoft also said an international approach would keep
people more secure than competing measures from different
countries.
“The legislation must avoid
conflicts with the laws of oth-
er nations and contribute to a
system where likeminded governments work together, not
in competition, to keep people
more secure,” a spokeswoman
said.
Apple said in its submission an
attempt to force non-UK companies to take action that violated
the laws of their own countries
“would immobilise substantial
portions of the tech sector and
spark international conflicts”.
The
British
government,
which failed with a previous attempt to increase online surveillance dubbed the “snoopers’
charter”, has said the proposals
will not ban encryption or do anything to undermine the security
of people’s data.
But Apple said proposals in the
new bill would weaken encryption, such as the explicit obligation on service providers to help
intercept data and hack suspects’
devices.
The California-based company, which uses end-to-end
encryption on its FaceTime and
iMessage services, said the best
way to protect against increasingly sophisticated hacking
schemes and cyberattacks was
by putting into place increasingly stronger - not weaker- encryption.
“In this rapidly evolving cyber-threat environment, companies should remain free to
implement strong encryption to
protect customers,” it said.
As well as being able to carry
out bulk interception of communications data, the bill would
also allow the security services
to perform “equipment interference”, whereby spies take over
computers or smartphones to
access their data.
In its submission to the draft
bill, Apple criticised any such requirement to create “backdoors”
that could weaken the protections built into Apple products.
“A key left under the doormat
would not just be there for the
good guys,” it said. “The bad guys
would find it too.”
Help for fire-hit nursery
Staff at a London nursery who were left devastated by a fire that tore through its playground have been overwhelmed by strangers offering to replace burnt toys.
Thousands of pounds worth of its toys and play equipment had been destroyed in the blaze at Little Wrens Nursery School off Chertsey Road, Twickenham. Laura
Birdseye, who co-owns the school with business partner Penny Harman, started a campaign asking for help from the local community. She said scores of “kind” locals
had promised to help rebuild the shed in the new year and “loads” more had offered to donate new toys.
Blow for Osborne as
public borrowing rises
Reuters
London
P
ublic finances unexpectedly
deepened in November,
adding to Finance Minister
George Osborne’s already tough
challenge of hitting his budget
deficit target this year.
Headline public borrowing
rose to £14.2bn, 10% higher than
in the same month last year and
way above the median forecast of
£11.8bn in a Reuters poll of economists.
“Barring a Christmas miracle,
the chancellor looks extremely
unlikely to meet his borrowing
forecasts this year,” Capital Economics economist, Paul Hollingsworth, said.
Osborne is aiming to turn Britain’s budget deficit into a surplus
by the end of the decade which
would bolster his credentials as a
possible next prime minister and
allow for income tax cuts before
elections in 2020.
But he has struggled to make
headway in recent months, partly
reflecting a slowdown in Britain’s
strong economic recovery over
the past two years.
After yesterday’s data, the deficit in the first eight months of the
financial year was already close to
the full-year target.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the comparison
with November 2014 was distorted by about £1.1bn in fines
paid last year by financial institutions caught in a foreign currency trading scandal.
Also, Britain paid about £1bn
more to the European Union in
November this year than it did
in the same month last year and
it spent about the same amount
more on public investment, the
ONS said.
On the positive side for the
government, tax revenues continued to rise, part of an encouraging trend for Osborne after Britain’s economic recovery
Labour attacks PM over
‘soaring homelessness’
Agencies
London
S
oaring levels of homelessness since David Cameron
took the keys to No 10 have
left thousands more children
facing Christmas in hostels and
rough sleepers out on the streets,
Labour has warned.
The number of households
classed as homeless has risen
by more than a third in England
since 2010 - and is on course to
have nearly doubled by the next
general election, according to
analysis by the party.
Labour accused the prime
minister of presiding over a “crisis” in homelessness despite his
claims in opposition that it was
a “disgrace” that people were
forced to sleep on the streets.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
said there had been “ five years
of failure on homelessness under
this government”.
He added: “It’s a disgrace that
young and often vulnerable peo-
ple are among the hardest-hit
from the government’s cuts to
welfare - cuts that make it far
harder for people facing homelessness to get back on their feet.
“We must all fight for a society that is more decent, secure,
and fair, and where no one facing
homelessness is cast aside.”
According to Labour analysis of government figures, the
number of homeless households
will rise to around 75,000 by
2020 on current trends, up from
40,020 in the final financial year
of the last Labour government
and 54,430 in 2014-15.
Latest figures show that there
were 2,744 rough sleepers last
year, up from 1,768 in the year
the coalition was formed. That
is estimated to rise to just under
5,000 by 2020, the party said.
By the end of the parliament,
the number of children in temporary accommodation, such as
hostels, is predicted to rise to more
than 100,000, up from 80,603 in
2009-10 and 90,335 in 2014-15.
John Healey, shadow cabinet
minister for housing, said: “It’s
a scandal that after so much
progress was made on homelessness under Labour, we’ve gone
into reverse under the Tories.
“The result is thousands more
children stuck in hostels and
temporary accommodation this
Christmas, and more people
sleeping on the streets each year
since 2010.
“These five years of failure
weren’t inevitable - Labour
showed in government how
much progress can be made. Tory
ministers must now act to stop
the crisis of high homelessness
getting even worse.”
A department for communities and local government
spokesman said: “The reality is,
statutory homelessness is now
less than half the 2003-04 peak.
This government takes homelessness extremely seriously
and since 2010, we have made
£1bn available to prevent and
tackle the issue. This investment
has prevented nearly a million
households becoming homeless.”
failed initially to bring in much
more income tax.
For the first eight months of
this tax year, public sector net
borrowing was 8.9% lower than
between April and November
2014 at £66.9bn.
That was close to the Office for
Budget Responsibility’s (OBR)
target of £68.9bn for 2015-16
as a whole.
The OBR, Britain’s official
budget forecaster, said in
November it expected the
deficit to fall more sharply in the remainder of
the financial year
than it has done so
far.
Robert Chote, chairman of
the OBR, said he still thought
the pace of reducing the deficit would pick up, helped by
self-declared income tax payments which land in January and
spending cuts which have not yet
shown up in the numbers.
“We think there are a variety of
reasons to think that the fall in
the deficit is going to be faster
over the remainder of the year
than it has been to date,” he
told BBC radio.
Deutsche Bank economist,
George Buckley, said Osborne was likely to get
back closer to his target
in the months ahead.
Tenants face strain in
realty market squeeze
Agencies
London
T
Corbyn: Cameron presiding over a “crisis” in homelessness.
he rise in rental costs is expected to outpace house
price growth over the next
five years as landlords come under
pressure.
The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) predicts a
6% rise in house prices next year
- outpacing any rise in household
income - in its annual forecast
amid a squeeze on housing supply.
But it also sees a 3% increase in
private rents and that this sector
will come under increasing strain.
RICS members expect that
rents could be rising by an average
of 5% a year for the next five years,
against 4.7% for house prices.
It appears to suggest that as
the ambition of home ownership
becomes further out of reach for
many, renting will also become increasingly hard to afford.
The government has rolled out
initiatives such as Help To Buy
to spur home ownership. It also
recently announced plans to see
400,000 homes built in the pri-
vate sector. But George Osborne’s
Autumn Statement last month
saw the announcement of a 3%
stamp duty surcharge on buy-tolet property transactions. The
Association of Residential Letting
Agents has already described the
policy as “catastrophic”.
RICS chief economist Simon
Rubinsohn said: “Our principal
concern with the measures announced by the government is
that they are overly focused on
promoting home ownership at the
expense of other tenures.
“Discouraging buy-to-let could
see private rents take even more of
the strain.”
A 6% rate of house price growth
would represent an increase on
the 5.6% pace in the 12 months
to October reported by the Land
Registry.
RICS expects lack of housing
stock to be the main driver for the
rise, together with the persistence
of cheap credit conditions - with
interest rates still at their alltime low of 0.5%. It forecasts the
number of transactions to edge up
from 1.22mn this year to between
1.25mn and 1.3mn in 2016.
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
17
BRITAIN
Superbug crisis warning issued over antibiotics resistance
Agencies
London
I
t is “almost too late” to stop a
global superbug crisis caused
by the misuse of antibiotics, a
leading expert has warned.
Scientists have a “50-50”
chance of salvaging existing antibiotics from bacteria which has
become resistant to its effects, ac-
Restaurant
boss sorry
for fake
gun prank
cording to Dr David Brown.
The director at Antibiotic Research UK, whose discoveries
helped make more than $30bn in
pharmaceutical sales, said efforts
to find new antibiotics are “totally
failing” despite significant investment and research.
It comes after a gene was discovered which makes infectious bacteria resistant to the last line of antibiotic defence, colistin (polymyxins).
The resistance to the colistin
antibiotic is considered to be a
“major step” towards completely
untreatable infections and has
been found in animals and humans
in England and Wales.
Public Health England said the
risk posed to humans by the mcr1 gene was “low” but was being
monitored closely.
Performing surgery, treating infections and even travelling abroad
safely all rely to some extent on access to effective antibiotics.
It is feared the crisis could further penetrate Europe as displaced
migrants enter from a war-torn
Middle East, where countries such
as Syria have increasing levels of
antibiotic resistance.
Dr Brown said: “It is almost too
late. We needed to start research 10
years ago and we still have no global monitoring system in place.
Clowns in town for snow show
London Evening Standard
London
A
Chelsea restaurateur who
aimed a fake shotgun at
passers-by in King’s Road
after drinking champagne yesterday said it was the “biggest
mistake of my life”.
Richard Gladwin, 31, co-owner
of “wild food” restaurant Rabbit
was arrested along with his manager Fred Samengo-Turner, 27, in
August. The pair terrified pedestrians by brandishing the shotgun
outside the venue, a court heard.
They admitted charges of carrying a firearm in a public place
and affray at Isleworth crown
court.
Originally the pair were charged
with possessing a firearm with intent to cause violence, which had
been denied at an earlier hearing.
Kate Blumgart, prosecuting,
agreed to an amendment of the
charges as the defendants were
willing to admit that they had
taken the actions described in the
original charge but that the weapon was not a real gun.
The restaurant owner had been
seen drinking before the incident.
Gladwin, who announced last
month he and his brother were
launching an urban foraging society, told the Standard: “I accept
that this is the biggest mistake of
my life and I am already paying the
price for it.
“I regret that this ever happened and apologise for any distress my actions caused. This was
completely out of character and it
is my intention to now move on
having learnt a valuable lesson
from this all.” Neil Sandys, representing Gladwin, admitted that
their actions had been “appalling”.
Judge Richard McGregor-Johnson released them both on unconditional bail but told them: “It is a
pretty stupid piece of behaviour
this. For those who were on the
receiving end it would have been
very frightening. I appreciate that
this was not a real gun but they did
not know that.”
Rabbit opened last year. The
restaurant is run by Gladwin, who
is front of house, and his younger
brothers Oliver, a chef, and Gregory, who grows produce on the
farm.
B
The multi-award winning Slava’s Snowshow, led by Slava Polunin, artistic director of the St
Petersburg Circus, is performing till January 3, 2016, at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre.
The show has been seen by more than 3mn spectators in 30 countries.
N
HS hospital trusts have
been accused of levying
a “tax on sick people”
after it was revealed some are
making more than £3mn a year
from car parking charges.
Year on year, hospitals across
England are raising increasing
amounts of money from staff,
patients and visitors, including
those who are disabled, Freedom
of Information requests show.
It has also been revealed that
hospitals are giving millions of
pounds to private companies
to run their car parks for them,
and allowing some to profit from
parking fines.
The investigation by the Press
Association found others are
tied into private finance initiative (PFI) contracts, where all the
money raised from charging patients, staff and visitors goes to
private companies under longterm contracts.
Of the more than 90 trusts that
replied to the FoI request, half are
making at least £1mn a year. Seven trusts earned more than £3mn
in 2014-15, a further eight made
more than £2mn a year, while another 33 took in more than £1mn
a year. Almost half of the trusts
charged disabled people to park
in some or all of their disabled
spaces.
Katherine Murphy, chief executive of the Patients Association, said the fees were “morally
wrong”.
She said: “Why is it that patients in Wales and Scotland do
not have to pay to park? It is a
postcode lottery and a tax on sick
people who sometimes struggle
to pay.”
Many of the trusts defended
the charges, saying some or all
of the money was reinvested into
patient care or spent on maintaining car parks or grounds.
Others said their size and the
fact that they serve busy areas
meant they took more in revenue.
The NHS trusts that made the
most from parking included:
z University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust:
£3,876,314 in 2014-15 (£1,206,836
of which was from staff)
z Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust:
£3,728,000 net in 2014-15, of
which £2,957,000 was listed as
“costs”, such as running the car
park office, security and legal fees
z The Heart of England NHS
Foundation Trust: £3,413,413 in
2014-15 (down from the previous
year, but up on the £2,788,293 in
2011-12)
z Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust:
£3,160,913 in 2014-15 (up from
£2,977,109 in 2013-14)
z University Hospitals of
Leicester NHS Trust: £3,127,108
in 2014-15 (up from £3,002,865
in 2013-14)
A department of health
spokeswoman said: “We expect
all NHS organisations to follow
our guidelines on car parking,
including offering discounts to
disabled people.
“Patients and families shouldn’t
have to deal with the added stress
of unfair parking charges and our
guidance rightly helps the public
hold the NHS to account for any
unfair charges or practices.”
grown due to colistin being heavily
used in pockets of the agricultural
industries, particularly in China,
often to increase the physical size
of livestock.
Worldwide, the demand for colistin in agriculture was expected
to reach almost 12,000 tonnes per
year by the end of this year, rising
to 16,500 tonnes by 2021.
In the UK, nearly half of all antibiotics used are in farming, ac-
cording to reports, although the
use of it as a growth agent has been
banned in the EU since 2006.
The unnecessary prescription
and use of antibiotics as a form of
treatment is also believed to be an
aggravating factor.
Although the imminent threat
of the resistant bacteria spreading
throughout the UK remains small,
it could worsen in Europe next
year, Dr Brown added.
58% of Brits
‘back arming
officers to
tackle terror’
London Evening Standard
London
Hospitals accused of ‘tax
on sick’ over parking
Agencies
London
“The issue is people have tried
to find new antibiotics but it is
totally failing - there has been no
new chemical class of drug to treat
gram-negative infections for more
than 40 years.
“I think we have got a 50-50
chance of salvaging the most important antibiotics but we need
to stop agriculture from ruining it
again.”
Resistance is thought to have
ritons want thousands
of armed police deployed on the streets to
protect against a terror attack.
A poll has found that 58%
believe officers should be routinely armed, a move which
would radically change the
face of British policing.
The BMG Research results,
which exclude “don’t knows”,
showed that 42% were against
ditching the long-held tradition of beat officers not carrying guns.
More worryingly, two thirds
of the public voicing a view
believe the police and security forces are not sufficiently
ready to respond to a Parisstyle attack in London or another part of the UK. This
stark finding was almost double the 34% who think they
are.
“Across all ages, and the entire country, the vast majority
of residents feel that officers
are not suitably prepared for
an attack similar to that seen
in Paris,” said Michael Turner,
research director at BMG Research.
“Consequently, the results
also show strong support for
officers to be routinely armed
in a way that is perhaps most
commonly seen by Britons in
continental Europe.”
Those aged 25 to 44, a group
more likely to have young
families, are significantly
more supportive of arming officers, the poll suggested.
Women seemed to harbour
Artwork
more doubts than men over
whether the police, military
and intelligence services are
ready to counter a marauding
terrorist attack here.
Following the Paris massacre
in which at least 130 died, Met
police commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe increased
the number of armed officers
on patrol in London by a third.
He also signalled that this
number could rise while
stressing his “confidence”
that the force could respond
well to a multiple-site terror
strike even though “it would
be a great challenge”.
“Across all ages, and the
entire country, the vast
majority of residents
feel that officers are not
suitably prepared for an
attack similar to that seen
in Paris”
He believes London is a safe
city and has warned against a
“knee jerk towards a new type
of policing where everyone is
armed”.
Widespread arming of the
police may be seen as a defeat
in the battle to protect British
values in the face of the threat
from Islamic State and other
terror groups.
But if more officers were
armed, then those deployed
first to incidents like the recent knife attack at Leytonstone Tube station could be
carrying weapons.
Sir Bernard, though, defended the “fantastic” response by officers who used
Tasers to resolve the situation
in around a dozen minutes.
Cyanide plotter
detained indefinitely
Agencies
London
A
British artist Arabella Dorman poses with her art installation
entitled “Flight” - a capsized boat, complete with life jackets, used
by refugees to get to the Greek island of Lesbos - suspended in
the nave of St. James’s Church in London.
The Met’s strategy is to
respond to alerts with welltrained officers for specific
threats, who will arrive in
numbers if necessary and be
mobile to deal with a moving
threat.
Just under a fifth of respondents to the question
about arming the police replied “don’t know”, so if they
are included in the results the
breakdown is 47% in favour of
doing so and 34% against.
On being ready to deal with
a Paris-style attack, 23% said
“don’t know”, with 51% believing the police and security
forces are not and 26% that
they are.
The terror threat level in
the UK is currently at severe
meaning an attack is highly
likely. Britain is seen as less
vulnerable than Paris, Brussels and other European cities
because of the expertise of the
police and security services
and as it does not have a land
border firearms are more difficult to obtain.
However, David Cameron
recently stated that there have
been seven foiled terror plots
in 12 months. He has also ordered a review of the law to
ensure officers using firearms
have the necessary legal backing when they make “split
second” decisions to shoot.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was hit by a backlash
last month after speaking out
against “shooting to kill” terrorists carrying out attacks in
Britain. He later said that he
supported any “strictly necessary force” needed to protect the UK in such situations.
man who fantasised
about “putting a bullet
in Prince Charles’ head”
has been detained indefinitely.
Mark Colborne, 37, of Southampton, was found guilty in
September of plotting a mass
cyanide attack from his bedroom
after a retrial.
Jurors heard he had felt “belittled” for being a white, gingerhaired male and had wanted
to seek revenge. He was found
guilty of possessing handwritten
notes and books related to making recipes for lethal poisons.
The Old Bailey heard how
Colborne had written about assassinating Prince Charles in order for Prince Harry to become
king.
Prosecutor Annabel Darlow
said Colborne’s notes also expressed admiration for rightwing extremists such as Anders
Breivik and hatred for “nonAryans” whom he referred to as
“blacks and Caucasian idiots”.
“I’m looking for major retribution, a mass terrorist attack
which will bring to the attention
our pain not just mine but my
brothers around the world,” he
wrote.
Colborne bought ingredients
over the internet, and stockpiled
dust masks, metal filter funnels,
plastic syringes and latex gloves
at his home in Butts Road, jurors
were told.
He was cleared of intending to
use the chemicals and paraphernalia as part of the terror plot.
Colborne’s half-brother and
mother uncovered the chemicals
and handwritten papers stashed
in his bedroom, which led to his
arrest on June 3 last year.
Sentencing Colborne under
the Mental Health Act, Judge
John Bevan QC said he was
“clearly dangerous” and his “extraordinarily violent fantasies”
were “seriously concerning”.
“You have been consumed
with rage at disparate individuals and groups and you write in
graphic terms of bombing and
butchery,” he said.
“You are, I regret to say, a
warped individual who in the
past has held views of your fellow man which were repugnant
to right-thinking people.”
18
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
EUROPE
Spain’s Socialists
face hard choices
in poll aftermath
Reuters
Madrid
S
pain’s Socialists face a
tough choice of allying
with a rival party or triggering a new ballot after an inconclusive election on Sunday
plunged the country into political uncertainty.
Neither option is attractive
because linking up with antiausterity Podemos (“We Can”)
could divide the Socialists
while they could be accused of
destabilising Spain if they are
blamed for forcing new elections.
Prime Minister Mariano
Rajoy’s centre-right People’s
Party (PP) won most votes in
Sunday’s election but fell way
short of a majority as left-wing
Podemos and another newcomer, centrist Ciudadanos
(Citizens), ate into the support
of the PP and the Socialists,
who between them have ruled
Spain for most of the four decades since the end of the Franco
dictatorship.
The result leaves Spain facing weeks of difficult talks to
try to form a government and
has unsettled financial markets.
Rajoy, who has the first
chance to form a new government, has limited options.
It is virtually impossible for
him to stay in power without
the support of the Socialists,
or at least their abstention, in
a parliamentary vote on a new
government.
In a clear appeal to the Socialists, but without naming
them, Rajoy said on Monday
that he would talk to parties
that shared some of the aims
and values of the PP.
“Spain cannot allow itself a
period of political uncertainty
that squanders the progress
that ... has been achieved in
the last two years,” Rajoy said,
referring to Spain’s recovery
from a deep recession and financial crisis.
A prominent Socialist leader,
Susana Diaz, rejected his overture yesterday, saying the party
must keep its word and vote
“emphatically no” to a new PP
government.
Allowing the PP to stay in
power could alienate left-wing
voters who oppose austerity
measures introduced by the PP
in response to the financial crisis.
The Socialists, already hemorrhaging support to Podemos, are well aware of what
happened in Greece, where
the once powerful centre-left
party Pasok was damaged by
joining a coalition led by the
centre-right New Democracy
in 2012 and saw its support
plunge, while left-wing Syriza
got into power.
“We think (the Socialists)
will keep in mind what happened to the centre-left in
Greece,” Deutsche Bank analysts said in a note, saying such
a “grand coalition” was unlikely.
Business-friendly
Ciudadanos has said it would abstain in a parliamentary vote,
allowing the PP to govern, but
that would not be enough for
the PP.
That leaves the Socialists
with two options – trying to
form a left-wing coalition with
Podemos and Catalan nation-
France reveals attack
plot foiled last week
AFP
Paris
A
Sanchez: under pressure.
alists or admitting defeat and
consigning Spain to new elections.
The Socialists, who last held
power from 2004 to 2011, have
kept silent about what they
would do if Rajoy fails to form
a new government.
Their leader Pedro Sanchez,
under pressure because of the
1.5mn voters who have abandoned the Socialists since 2011,
was the only one of the main
party leaders who did not speak
to media on Monday.
But Podemos leader Pablo
Iglesias is insisting on a Catalan independence referendum
as a condition for a deal, which
would be difficult for the Socialists to agree to.
Carlos Barrera, a politics
professor at Navarre University, said that the Socialists
would face opposition, especially from within the party,
no matter which option they
chose.
If the Socialists ally with
Podemos, they run the risk of
being gobbled up by the fastgrowing new party and losing
leadership of the left, he told
Reuters.
If, on the other hand, the Socialists allowed a minority PP
government to stay in power,
it would run counter to their
campaign message of forming a
government of change, he said.
Pro-independence parties
in Catalonia struck a deal yesterday to form a government,
reviving a separatist drive just
as Spain faces weeks of uncertainty at a national level following the inconclusive general
election.
Parties favouring a split between Spain and Catalonia
won a majority of seats in a
September regional ballot, but
divisions between the various
movements had undermined
their prospect of pushing forward with an independence
drive.
After initial opposition, Catalan anti-capitalist party CUP
said it could now back the head
of the regional government,
Artur Mas, allowing him to stay
on as leader.
The deal, which also contemplates an economic plan
and a so-called 18-month
roadmap to independence, will
however have to be rubberstamped by CUP members in
an assembly on Sunday.
With Spain’s political parties
facing weeks of negotiations to
form a government, the Catalan issue is now set to come into
play again.
“Sunday’s results do not
change our roadmap, which remains valid,” said Raul Romeva,
from the main coalition of separatists Junts pel Si’ (‘Together
Yes’).
jihadist plot was foiled last
week in the French region
of Orleans, southwest of
Paris, Interior Minister Bernard
Cazeneuve said yesterday as the
government prepared constitutional changes to enshrine emergency police powers.
“A planned attack targeting
representatives of state forces in
the Orleans region was foiled last
week by the DGSI (France’s internal intelligence agency),” Cazeneuve said.
Two French citizens aged 20
and 24 were arrested on December 19, he said. The older has a
police record for petty crime.
A police source told AFP that
one was originally from Morocco
and the other from Togo.
They were “in contact with a
French jihadist in Syria and the
investigation ought to establish if
he ordered the attacks that one of
the two arrested men has admit-
ted they were planning to carry
out against soldiers, police and
representatives of the state”, Cazeneuve said.
“These arrests are the result
of meticulous work by our intelligence services and bring the
number of attacks foiled on the
national territory since 2013 to
10,” he added.
He also said that 3,414 people had been turned away from
France’s borders since a state of
emergency was introduced in the
wake of last month’s Paris attacks, which left 130 people dead.
They were refused entry “due
to the risk they present to security and public order”, Cazeneuve
said.
France took back control of
its national borders on the night
of the attacks on November 13,
which is permitted under European rules in special circumstances.
Police also announced plans
yesterday to hold a special recruitment drive and exams in
March that will help meet the
Cazeneuve takes part in a visit at a police station in Toulouse
yesterday. An attack plot was foiled and two men arrested last week
near the central French city of Orleans, Cazeneuve said.
government’s goal of appointing
an additional 5,000 trainees in
the coming year.
The announcements came a
day before the government was
due to present reforms aiming
to inscribe emergency security
powers in the constitution.
Emergency policing powers
used under the state of emergency – such as house arrests and
the right to raid houses without
El Gordo trumps politics as
lottery fever grips Spaniards
Reuters
Madrid
L
ottery fever gripped Spain
yesterday as thousands
celebrated wins in the El
Gordo draw with prizes totalling €2.24bn ($2.45bn), offering a
welcome distraction from political concerns after an inconclusive election.
Winners from across the country flocked to local retail outlets
to toast their good fortune with
bottles of sparkling cava in the
traditional Christmas lottery, the
world’s largest.
This year’s top prize – the
eponymous El Gordo, or The Fat
One – went to the coastal tourist
town of Roquetas de Mar, in the
southern province of Almeria,
where a group of residents will
share at least €452mn ($496mn).
Every year millions of Spaniards club together with friends,
family or co-workers to each buy
fractions of the same ticket in the
over 200-year-old lottery which,
on winning numbers, pays out
€400,000 for every €20 wagered.
This year’s lottery draw, like
others a huge collective affair,
provided a welcome distraction
from Sunday’s national election,
which plunged the country into a
political stalemate and ended almost four decades of two-party
rule.
Laujar, another Almeria town
of 1,600 people, won €320mn.
“Almost everyone in the town
has a share, and even if it’s split
between everybody, it will go to
working people, to those that
need the money a lot,” its mayor told Europa Press as people
danced in the street.
Spaniards spent close to
€2.6bn on tickets this year, according to the government agency that runs the draw, with some
waiting for hours in queues that
snaked around city blocks.
Many then stayed glued to
TV screens for hours more as
schoolchildren plucked lottery
balls from a rotating drum, singing out the resulting numbers
in a chant that filled offices and
homes.
Ticket sales were higher than
last year, suggesting a loosening
of the purse strings in a country
that is rebounding from an economic crisis that left nearly one
in four workers out of a job.
People hold a placard showing the first prize winning number, 79140, of Spain’s Christmas Lottery ‘El
Gordo’ (The Fat One) as they celebrate in Villanueva de la Concepcion, near Malaga, Spain.
Martian gullies likely contain ‘no water’: study
AFP
Paris
M
onths after scientists
have announced “the
strongest
evidence
yet” of liquid water on Mars, a
study said on Monday that there
was none, at least in the valleys
carved into numerous Red Planet
slopes.
Rather than water flows like
those on Earth, these Martian
gullies were likely created by dry
ice defrosting, a duo of French
scientists wrote in the journal
Nature Geoscience.
“The role of liquid water in
gully formation should ... be reconsidered, raising the question
of the importance of its occurrence in Mars’ recent past,” wrote
Francois Forget and Cedric Pilorget of the French national research institute CNRS.
They said their findings held
no implications for the headlinemaking announcement in September that dark lines running
down slopes in the tropics of
Mars in summer, may be streaks
of super-salty brine – hinting at
the presence of life-sustaining
water.
Monday’s paper dealt with
unrelated geological features
in a different part of the planet,
mainly in the mid-latitude range
between 30 and 60 degrees, on
pole-facing cold slopes, said the
French team.
They had set out to explain the
origins of small channels carved
into crater walls, hills and other
Martian protrusions.
When first discovered, these
gullies were interpreted as runoff from melting water ice or
groundwater leaks that occurred
hundreds of thousands of years
ago.
Then, in recent years, it was
discovered that gully formation
was ongoing, in spite of Mars being too cold for liquid water to
exist.
Pilorget and Forget looked for
answers in a thin layer of frozen
carbon dioxide (CO2) observed to
be present in periods that gullies
were being formed.
They used computer simulations to show that thawed and
trapped CO2 gas building up beneath the surface ice layer would
eventually break through the soil
and trigger flows of gas and debris.
No similar processes are
known to occur on Earth.
Pilorget, an astrophysicist,
said dry ice melt may not be responsible for all gully formation
on Mars, but in cold areas with
very young gullies, the gassy theory “must be favoured”.
Nothing could be excluded,
though, and “other complimentary processes may be at work”,
he said.
“For example, gullies have
been detected in regions closer
to the equator which are probably created by different mechanisms,” he told AFP.
In September, scientists said
seasonal streaks on Mars dubbed
“recurring slope linaea” may be
briny flows.
They found evidence of hydrated salt minerals in the lines,
which they said implied liquid
water was present, even as others cautioned against reading too
much into the results.
“Our study has no link to the
announcements made in September,” said Forget, a planetologist. “Our findings show that at
least some gullies, maybe all, do
not have liquid water and that the
areas where they are found are
not conducive to hosting liquid
water, or life.”
It is widely accepted that the
Red Planet once had plentiful
water in liquid form, and still has
some today – albeit frozen in ice
underground.
Earlier this year, Nasa said
almost half of Mars’ northern
hemisphere had once been an
ocean, reaching depths greater
than 1.6km.
judicial oversight – are currently
based on a simple law, which can
be challenged at the constitutional court.
An environmental activist
has already challenged the right
to the house arrests, although
the court ruled yesterday that
they were allowed under state of
emergency rules.
President Francois Hollande
has called for the powers to be
protected from further litigation
by placing them in the constitution.
But there have been criticisms
over the violence of police raids,
cases of mistaken identity and
people losing their jobs because
they were under house arrest.
More than 3,000 raids have
taken place since the Paris attacks, leading to 360 house arrests and 51 people jailed.
The government said yesterday that it will not seek to enshrine the right to remove an
individual’s French nationality
if he or she is convicted of a terrorist offence, which can be used
only against people with a second
nationality.
There were fears that this
would lead to discrimination
against people with dual nationalities.
Several sources have told AFP
that there may be a return of the
“national unworthiness” sentences that were used against
Nazi collaborators after World
War II.
Scientists: Centaurs
may threaten Earth
AFP
Paris
P
lanet Earth could be at
higher risk of a space
rock impact than widely
thought, according to astronomers who have suggested
keeping a closer eye on distant
giant comets.
Most studies of potential Earth-smashers focus on
objects in the asteroid belt
roughly between Mars, Earth’s
outside neighbour, and Jupiter
on its other flank, said the researchers.
But they noted that the discovery in the last two decades
of hundreds of giant comets
dubbed centaurs, albeit with
much larger orbits, requires
expanding the list of potential
hazards.
These balls of ice and dust,
typically 50-100km (31-62
miles) wide, have unstable,
elliptical orbits that start way
beyond Neptune, the most distant planet from the Sun.
Their paths cross those of
the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune,
whose gravity fields occasionally deflect a comet towards
Earth – once about every
40,000-100,000 years.
As they draw closer to the
Sun, the comets would gradually break up, which is what
causes the trademark cometary debris tail – “making impacts on our planet inevitable”.
“The disintegration of such
giant comets would produce
intermittent but prolonged periods of bombardment lasting
up to 100,000 years,” the research team wrote in the Royal
Astronomical Society journal,
Astronomy and Geophysics.
And they argued that “assessment of the extraterrestrial impact risk based solely
on near-Earth asteroid counts,
underestimates its nature and
magnitude”.
They noted that a single
centaur contains more mass
than the entire population of
Earth-crossing asteroids discovered to date.
“In the last three decades,
we have invested a lot of effort in tracking and analysing
the risk of a collision between
the Earth and an asteroid,” said
A Nasa /JPL-Caltech/Space
Science handout image
received via the Royal
Astronomical Society
yesterday and obtained by the
Cassini space probe orbiting
Saturn shows Saturn’s 200km
moon Phoebe, that seems
likely to be a giant comet or a
centaur that was captured by
that planet’s gravity at some
time in the past.
co-author Bill Napier of the
University of Buckingham.
“Our work suggests we need
to look beyond our immediate
neighbourhood too, and look
out beyond the orbit of Jupiter
to find centaurs.
“If we are right, then these
distant comets could be a serious hazard, and it’s time to understand them better.”
Scientists believe a comet
bombardment may have kickstarted life on Earth by bringing water and organic molecules.
A comet strike is also a leading contender for having ended the reign of the dinosaurs
65mn years ago.
The team said no risk was
“known to be imminent”, although cometary encounters
were largely unpredictable.
“A centaur arrival carries
the risk of injecting, into the
atmosphere ... a mass of dust
and smoke comparable to that
assumed in nuclear winter
studies,” wrote the researchers, referring to the hypothesised climate effects from the
soot that would be released by
firestorms caused in an atomic
war.
“Thus, in terms of magnitude, its ranking among natural existential risks appears to
be high,” they said.
Police raid offices of Putin critic
Armed Russian police raided yesterday the offices of a prodemocracy movement founded by outspoken Kremlin critic
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a move they said was part of a criminal
investigation into the former tycoon and his associates.
Khodorkovsky, whom police accused this month of organising a
contract killing in 1998, interpreted the latest pressure on him as
payback for his criticism of President Vladimir Putin.
“Searches at the Open Russia (movement) after my meeting with
journalists,” the 52-year-old wrote on his official Twitter feed. “A
repeat of 2003. Putin has become predictable.”
Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia movement, which says it unites
groups and individuals who want Russia to change, said police had
also searched some of its staff members’ apartments in Moscow
and Saint Petersburg and taken away documents.
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
19
EUROPE
Forged passports
spark security fear
in Germany: report
AFP
Berlin
A
bout a dozen migrants
may have entered Germany on forged Syrian
passports like those used by
two Paris suicide bombers, according to a news report yesterday, which authorities did
not confirm.
Bild newspaper, citing unnamed government sources,
said that the passports bore the
“same forgery characteristics”
as those carried by two men
involved in the November 13
France attacks claimed by the
Islamic State (IS) group.
The passports were stolen
blanks issued by the Syrian
government, but filled in by
forgers with the personal details of people who then joined
tens of thousands on the refugee trail to Europe, according
to Bild.
The report said that German
authorities did not know where
the “about one dozen” arrivals
were now, having entered the
country before November 13,
and that no fingerprints had
been taken of them.
Germany’s Office for Migration and Refugees now only
had copies of the passports,
which Bild said had been issued
in 2013 in Raqqa, now IS’s de
facto Syrian capital.
The German interior ministry, contacted by AFP, declined
to comment on the claims “for
tactical reasons”, but stressed
that it was aware of the risk
criminals and extremists could
use forged Syrian passports.
German newspaper Welt am
Sonntag, citing Western intelligence sources, reported on
Sunday that the Islamic State
may have stolen “tens of thousands” of blank passports in
Syria, Iraq and Libya that it
could use to smuggle its fighters into Europe.
The two unidentified Stade
de France attackers in Paris
appear to have used fake Syrian passports to enter Europe
along the migrant trail.
Germany is Europe’s top
destination for migrants, most
of whom travel through Turkey
and the Balkans, and expects
more than 1mn this year.
Europe’s biggest economic
power has to date maintained
an open-door policy for Syrians escaping their country’s
bloodshed, giving them “primary protection” – the highest
status for refugees.
A deputy leader of Angela
Merkel’s Christian Democrats,
Julia Kloeckner, demanded
yesterday that Germany tighten its controls and immediately
re-introduce personal interviews of all asylum seekers arriving in Germany.
Migrants to Europe
exceed 1mn in 2015
Reuters/AFP
Geneva
M
ore than 1mn refugees
and migrants came to
the European Union
this year, while almost 3,700 died
or went missing in perilous journeys which reaped huge profit for
smugglers, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM)
said yesterday.
“This is three to four times
as many migrants and refugees
coming north as we had in 2014,
and the deaths have already far
surpassed the deaths last year,”
IOM chief William Lacy Swing
told Reuters.
Almost all those arriving came
across the Mediterranean or the
Aegean Seas, and half were Syrians fleeing the war.
Another 20% were Afghans,
and 7% were Iraqis, the IOM and
the UN refugee agency UNHCR
said in a joint statement.
People smuggling operations probably accounted for the
majority of journeys and likely
earned at least $1bn, Swing said,
taking “anywhere from $2,000 to
maybe $6,000 depending on how
many members of the family and
depending on which smuggling
ring it is”.
The IOM estimates people
smugglers in Europe have made
$10bn or more since 2000, maybe much more.
“They are certainly getting
very well paid for their services,”
Swing said.
Out of a total of 1,005,504 arrivals to Greece, Bulgaria, Italy,
Spain, Malta and Cyprus by
December 21, the vast majority – 816,752 – arrived by sea in
Greece, the IOM said.
At certain points over the last
12 months upwards of 5,000
people were landing in the Greek
islands each day.
But the rate of arrivals in
Greece has eased slightly since
November, partly due to increased maritime patrols by Turkey and partly because of colder
weather.
IOM spokesman Joel Millman
said it was impossible to forecast
how the flow of migrants would
evolve in 2016.
“So much is in the balance,
the resolution of the Syrian war,
and the disposition of the European border protection moves
that are being contemplated,” he
said. “We never thought it would
reach this level. We just hope
people are treated with dignity.”
The record movement of people into Europe is a symptom of a
record level of disruption around
the globe, with numbers of refugees and internally displaced
people far surpassing 60mn, the
E
leven migrants bound
for EU member Greece,
including three children,
drowned off the Turkish coast
yesterday when their boat
sank in the latest tragedy in
the Aegean Sea, the state-run
Anatolia news agency said.
Seven people were rescued
in the incident off Turkey’s
Aegean Sea resort of Kusadasi but coastguards found the
bodies of 11 people, including
three children, it added.
The migrants appeared to
have been trying to reach the
Greek island of Samos which
lies opposite Kusadasi.
The disaster happened as
the UN refugee agency and the
International Organisation for
Migration (IOM) announced
more than 1mn migrants
reached Europe this year.
The vast majority of people
– 821,008 – landed in Greece,
according to the figures.
Turkey, which is already
hosting at least 2.2mn migrants
from the war in Syria, has
emerged as the major hub for
refugees and migrants seeking
to go to Europe.
The EU and Turkey agreed
a deal for Ankara to step up its
work to stop migrants heading
to Europe in return for a package of EU financial help.
But even with the bad
weather of winter starting,
there has so far been no obvious halt to the flow of migrants
and deadly disasters are still
regularly reported every week.
Eighteen people drowned
off Turkey overnight Friday to
Saturday when their boat sank
in the Aegean Sea as it was
heading for the Greek island of
Kalymnos.
A report from Luxembourg,
which currently holds the EU’s
presidency, said last week that
the much-touted EU-Turkey
deal had done little to dent the
migration pattern, with around
4,000 people landing daily this
month in Greece.
Online purchase of laser sights leads
customs officers to weapons cache
Tracing the purchase of illegal laser sights led German customs
officers to a large cache of weapons and explosives, prosecutors in
the western city of Karlsruhe said yesterday.
When the customs officers descended on the house of a 48-year-old
man near the city they found several illegal weapons, a machine
pistol, 3,000 rounds of ammunition, 150kg of explosive and 5km of
detonating cord.
The suspect had twice ordered banned laser sights from abroad,
prosecutors said.
This had set customs investigation officers on his trail at the
beginning of December.
The munitions in the house, where two children live as well, were
freely accessible, the investigators said.
They expressed particular concern about 150kg of pyrotechnics of
the most dangerous category. The explosives were to some extent
stacked on top of each other and had become chemically unstable.
Reuters
Diyarbakir
T
A Kurdish woman and her son watch demonstrators from their window during a protest yesterday in Sirnak
against security operations in the southeastern Turkey cities of Cizre and Silopi.
Tajikistan bans trees,
decorations in schools
AFP
Dushanbe
T
ajikistan has tightened restrictions on celebrations
of the traditional festive
season in schools in the Central
Asian country, banning Christmas trees and gift-giving.
This year’s restrictions are the
toughest yet implemented by the
former Soviet country, which has
been toning down celebrations
of the New Year holiday for some
time, notably banning Russia’s
version of Father Christmas from
television screens in 2013.
A decree by the education
ministry prohibits “the use of
fireworks, festive meals, giftgiving and raising money” for
New Year celebrations as well as
“the installation of a Christmas
tree either living (felled wood) or
artificial” in schools and universities.
While other ex-Soviet states
have been busy setting up big
festive trees on the main squares
of major cities, a tree will only
appear briefly before New Year
in Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe
and is expected to be removed
early in 2016.
The
December-January
holiday season is contested in
Tajikistan, a majority-Muslim
but secular republic where the
population is divided over the
benefits of Soviet and Russian
influences in society.
On New Year’s night in 20112012, a man dressed in the red
robes worn by Father Christmas
and his Russian equivalent “Father Frost” was stabbed to death
by unknown assailants outside
the home of relatives in Dushanbe.
While the man’s family
claimed the attack had religious
motives, police refuted the account and said that the three attackers were intoxicated at the
time.
Days before the murder, the
country’s leading cleric had
urged Muslims not to observe
New Year traditions.
Professor jailed over plot to blow up parliament
AFP
Warsaw
A
Polish court on Monday sentenced a former
chemistry professor to
13 years in prison over a plot to
blow up parliament with a massive car-load of explosives.
Brunon Kwiecien, 48, who
was said to have had a fascination with Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik,
was convicted of planning to
assassinate the president, the
prime minister and lawmakers
in 2012.
The former professor at Krakow’s University of Agriculture
in southern Poland had hidden
four tonnes of explosives in a car
which he planned to use during a parliamentary debate to
be attended by then-president
Bronislaw Komorowski among
others.
“If Brunon Kwiecien hadn’t
been stopped, we would be talking amid the ruins of the state
today,” said judge Aleksandra
Almert as she delivered the verdict in a Krakow court. “All steps
taken by Brunon Kwiecien related to the attack on parliament
were driven by his wish to lead a
revolution, to kill the president,
cabinet ministers and lawmakers.”
Donald Tusk, then prime
trying to reach Europe until there
is a fundamental change in the
factors that are pushing them to
leave,” Guterres told the UN security council on Monday.
Guterres said there was need
for a “New Deal” between the
international community, especially Europe, and Syria’s neighbours who have borne the brunt
of the refugee influx caused by
the civil war.
Reflecting on the last 12
months, the UNHCR criticised
the “initial chaotic reaction” in
parts of Europe to the flood of
migrants, but applauded signs
that a more co-ordinated response was now emerging.
But a unified EU positon remains elusive, with Hungary and
Slovakia having made threats of
legal action against the bloc’s
controversial plan to distribute
160,000 refugees across member
states.
Turkish tanks pound
Kurdish positions in
week-long campaign
11 drown off coast of
Turkey, says report
AFP
Ankara
UNHCR said last week.
Swing said the war in Syria was
only one among many causes,
including Ebola and Boko Haram
in West Africa, an earthquake in
Nepal, conflicts in Libya, Yemen,
South Sudan, Central African
Republic and Afghanistan and
Iraq.
“No wonder you have such a
large flux coming north. This is
an unprecedented scale of simultaneous complex protracted
disasters from the western bulge
of Africa to the Himalayas, with
very few stable, peaceful spots in
between.”
UN refugee chief Antonio
Guterres called on Friday for a
“massive resettlement” of Syrian and other refugees within
Europe, to distribute many hundreds of thousands of people before the continent’s asylum system crumbles.
“We know Syrians will go on
minister and now EU chief, said
at that time that Kwiecien “did
not conceal his fascination with
Breivik”, the right-wing extremist who killed 77 people in a
bombing and shooting rampage
in Norway in July 2011.
Kwiecien, a nationalist without any obvious links to any political groups or extremists, was
arrested in November 2012 after
what the media said was a tipoff by his wife.
He was found to be in possession of TNT, gunpowder
and other explosives as well as
firearms, military helmets, bullet proof vests and fake drivers’
licences.
Throughout the hearing, Kw-
iecien insisted he had fallen victim to “provocation” by Polish
intelligence agents who had
forced him to act.
But Kwiecien, who has the
right to appeal the verdict, never
denied having planned the attack, for which he tried to recruit two of his students.
“We cannot speak about
provocation. It’s enough to hear
the accused and collect evidence. He was the mastermind
behind every element of the attack,” said Almert.
The case – reminiscent of a
plot to blow up parliament in
Britain in 1605 – was the first of
its kind in ex-communist Poland.
Most Germans do not
plan to be in church
for Christmas
Just over a quarter of Germans
plan to attend a church service
over the Christmas period,
against a large majority who do
not intend to do so, according to
a survey published days before
the event.
The representative YouGov poll
found that 28% intended to go
to church, while 61% said they
had no intention of doing so.
Eleven per cent said they were
not sure or declined to answer.
About 10% of those without religious beliefs said they planned
to attend a service.
Figures as high as 40% were recorded among Roman Catholics
and Evangelicals.
Asked about church attendance
in general over 2015, 62% said
they had not been once, while
just 2% said they had gone to
church at least once a week.
Other holidays perceived as
alien to Tajikistan’s culture have
come under pressure in recent
years.
In 2013 and 2014, fancy dress
zombies and vampires were reportedly detained by police as
the government opposed any
Halloween celebrations.
urkish
tanks
have
pounded
Kurdistan
Workers Party (PKK)
targets in Cizre, a southeastern
town at the heart of a largescale military operation by the
government, which the army
said has killed 127 Kurdish militants in a week.
Black smoke rose from
buildings in the town after
shelling from hilltops, Reuters
TV footage showed, and the
pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said at least
23 civilians had been killed.
The fighting forced tens of
thousands of people to leave
their homes in Sur, a historical
district of the region’s largest
city Diyarbakir under curfew
for three weeks, CNN Turk said
citing a report prepared by the
opposition party.
Turkish security forces
launched a new offensive in
the mainly Kurdish region last
week, backed by tanks and
thousands of troops, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
pledged to root out militants.
The southeastern towns of
Cizre and Silopi, bordering
Iraq and Syria, have been the
focus of the military campaign.
Images on state media from
Sur have shown Turkish troops
patrolling in rubble-strewn
streets among buildings riddled by bullet holes.
A two-year ceasefire between the PKK and Ankara fell
apart in July, shattering peace
talks and reviving a conflict
that has afflicted the mainly
Kurdish southeast for three
decades, killing more than
40,000 people.
The PKK, which launched
its insurgency in 1984, is designated as a terrorist group by
Turkey, the United States and
the European Union.
Traditionally rooted in the
countryside, it has shifted its
focus in recent years to southeastern towns, setting up barricades and digging trenches to
keep security forces away.
Selahattin Demirtas, coleader of the HDP, told a news
conference that the campaign
was targeting locals who were
presented as “terrorists”.
“We stand by our people
who resist the tanks and shelling,” he said before leaving for
Moscow on a visit criticised
by Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. Turkey and Russia
have been at odds since Ankara downed a Russian jet last
month saying it violated its
airspace.
Many towns were under
curfew and electricity was
cut in many Silopi districts as
transformers were damaged.
Food and water was running
scarce in some Diyarbakir districts, while shopkeepers kept
shutters closed in protest at
operations, residents said.
Ferhat Encu, an HDP lawmaker for Sirnak, said on
Twitter that the bodies of
those killed in clashes in Silopi
were being kept in houses due
to the curfew.
Islamist Kurdish party Huda-Par, usually sympathetic to
the ruling AK Party, said that
security forces were taking
position inside civilian houses
including two party members,
against the residents’ will,
therefore making them a target.
“Due to the curfew our
members and their families can
not leave their house and move
to safer place and therefore
have become targets for bullets,” a party statement said.
It added that entering people’s homes by force, whether
by the state or the PKK, was
trespassing and “unacceptable”.
Yesterday one Turkish soldier was killed in clashes in
Bitlis, the army said, in an
operation that killed two PKK
militants.
Bosnia arrests 11 in anti-terror raid
AFP
Sarajevo
B
osnian
police
have
launched an anti-terror
raid in the capital Sarajevo
and arrested 11 people suspected
of having links to the Islamic
State group, officials said.
“Eleven people were arrested.
They are suspected of terrorism, financing and preparing a
terrorist act as well as inciting
candidates (for jihad) to go to
the battlefields abroad,” a police
spokesman told AFP.
According to state-run FTV
television, one of the leaders of
Bosnia’s Islamist movement,
Muric Kemal, was among those
arrested.
“The objective of this major operation was to track down
some 15 people who ... are close
to radical groups and structures
of the Islamic State, as well as
people who are on the battlefields in Syria or Iraq,” national
prosecutors in charge of terrorism said in a statement.
Searches were conducted at
two places of prayer as well as at
several homes used by the suspects, it said. “Physical evidence
of the links with the Islamic State
group structures were seized.”
The operation was conducted
in several Sarajevo districts, including in Rajlovac, where two
members of Bosnia’s armed forces were killed in November in a
suspected terror attack by a man
who then blew himself up.
Out of some 200 Bosnian
nationals who joined militant
groups in Syria and Iraq in 2012
and 2013, at least 26 have died
while about 50 have returned to
the Balkan country.
Last year Bosnia adopted a new
law providing for jail sentences of
up to 20 years for militants and
their recruiters, since when the
number leaving for the Middle
East appears to have dropped off.
Around 40% of Bosnia’s population of 3.8mn people are Muslim, who overwhelmingly follow
a moderate form of Islam.
20
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
INDIA
CHARITY
POLITICS
EDUCATION
PLAN
TELECOM
NRI helps widow
in mid-day meal row
BJP was trying to
foment trouble: Khan
Odisha seeks funds to
set up medical colleges
Reliance Life launches
new insurance policy
RCOM, Aircel in merger
talks for wireless business
A non-resident Indian has come to the help
of a widow who was barred by villagers
from cooking mid-day meals at a school in
Bihar’s Gopalganj district, a senior official said
yesterday. Satpal Sharma, the NRI based in
Canada, deposited money into the woman’s
bank account, Gopalganj District Magistrate
Rahul Kumar said. Last week, it was reported
that villagers prohibited children from eating the
meals cooked by the woman at the governmentrun school. After the woman complained to
Rahul Kumar, he visited the school and ate the
food prepared by the woman. The woman is
now back cooking food for the school children.
Failure on all fronts forced the Bharatiya Janata
Party to fall back on the temple issue, Uttar
Pradesh Urban Development Minister Azam Khan
said yesterday. He claimed the BJP was trying to
foment trouble and disrupt communal harmony
in the state ahead of the 2017 Uttar Pradesh
assembly polls, adding that the state government
will maintain peace at all costs. “The issue of Ram
Mandir-Babri Masjid in Ayodhya is before the
Supreme Court and all stakeholders should wait
for its verdict,” Khan said in Rampur, his legislative
constituency. Any attempt to disturb peace by
raking up the contentious issue again will harm the
secular fabric of the nation, the minister warned.
Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik yesterday
urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to release
the central government’s share of funds for
setting up five new medical colleges in the state.
“A revised estimate of Rs2,450 crore (Rs24.5bn)
for the five proposed medical colleges has been
submitted to the ministry of health for capital
expenditure, equipment and manpower. The
response of the ministry is awaited,” Patnaik
said in a letter to Modi. Five new government
medical colleges are being set up in Odisha
under a centrally-sponsored scheme at a
cost of Rs1.89bn each. The central and state
governments would share the cost in 75:25.
Private life insurer Reliance Life Insurance
Company yesterday announced the launch
of a new policy called ‘Reliance Lifelong
Savings Plan’. The new policy is a non-linked,
participating endowment-cum-whole life plan
which aims at savers who are goal-oriented
while offering protection, the company said in
a statement. “The plan is aimed at providing
goal-based long-term financial planning, while
providing flexibility to deal with unforeseen life
events. Its unique feature offers lifelong cover,
bonus, and two-sum assured, one at maturity
and one at death,” Manoranjan Sahoo, chief
agency officer, was quoted as saying.
Industrialist Anil Ambani-led Reliance
Communications (RCOM) yesterday said
it has initiated talks with the promoters of
Aircel to combine the wireless business of the
two companies, with synergies in investments
and returns. A pact for 90-day exclusive
talks has been initiated with Aircel’s majority
owner, Malaysia’s Maxis Communications,
and Sindya Securities and Investments
for the potential merger, RCOM said in a
statement. “The potential combination will
exclude RCOM’s towers and optical fibre
infrastructure, for which RCOM is proceeding
with an asset sale,” the statement said.
Ten killed
as BSF jet
crashes near
Delhi airport
PM defends
Jaitley, says
graft charges
are baseless
Agencies
New Delhi
A
small paramilitary jet
crashed soon after takeoff
near the airport in Delhi
yesterday, killing all 10 people on
board, officials said.
The twin-engine turboprop
aircraft belonging to the Border
Security Force went down after
hitting a wall outside the airport
and burst into flames.
“All the crew on board have
died in the crash,” Civil Aviation
Minister Mahesh Sharma said.
“It’s a matter of grave concern
that the plane crashed soon after
takeoff. I am extremely sad to say
that all 10 people including the
pilot have died,” Sharma told reporters. The aircraft hit the wall
of a sewage treatment plant just
outside the airport boundary, a
member of the fire services on
the scene said.
“It is not clear yet what caused
the accident. We have ordered an
inquiry,” he added. The plane
was over 20 years old.
There were two pilots and
eight technicians, all men, on
board. The plane was due to fly
from Delhi to the eastern city of
Ranchi. The technicians were to
repair a helicopter in Ranchi.
Images on television channels
showed flames and thick black
smoke rising from the debris.
The crash site is about 500m
from the airstrip used by security
forces, that is in the same complex as the city’s main international airport. “We saw the plane
spiralling and crashing down
near the wall where some labourers were working. A labourer was
injured,” local resident Rohit
Saini told news channels.
This was the second accident
in and around Indian airports
yesterday. Early in the day, a
shuttle bus crashed into an Air
India passenger plane parked at
Kolkata airport but no one was
injured, NDTV reported.
The finance minister will
come out with flying colours
in the same manner as
Advani did in the hawala
case, says Modi
IANS
New Delhi
P
Rescue operations underway after a chartered plane carrying BSF troopers crashed in Delhi yesterday.
rime Minister Narendra
Modi yesterday defended
Finance Minister Arun
Jaitley, saying corruption charges against him over the Delhi
cricket association were false
and baseless.
“Jaitley will come out with
flying colours in the same manner as (Bharatiya Janata Party
leader) L K Advani did in the
hawala case,” Parliamentary Affairs Minister M Venkaiah Naidu
quoted Modi as telling a BJP parliamentary party meeting.
“The Congress tried to implicate Advani in the hawala case
but it boomeranged on it,” Modi
added.
The prime minister said the
Congress was not able to digest
its electoral defeats since the
2014 Lok Sabha polls and was
raking up manufactured allegations to defame his government.
He said the Congress did the
same with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Chief
Ministers Vasundhara Raje of
Rajasthan and Shivraj Singh
Chouhan of Madhya Pradesh.
Swaraj and Raje were targeted
by the opposition over their alleged links with former IPL
chairman Lalit Modi. Chauhan
was blamed for what came to be
known as the Vyapam scam.
The prime minister’s comments came a day after BJP
president Amit Shah described
Jaitley as a man of honesty, after
the finance minister filed a defamation suit against Delhi Chief
Minister Arvind Kejriwal and
other Aam Aadmi Party leaders.
Modi said BJP MPs have been
asked to go to the people after
the end of parliament’s winter session on December 23 and
highlight all the work done by
the central government.
“The prime minister asked
party MPs to spend a night in
each assembly segment in their
constituencies in January and
visit neighbouring constituencies in February to expose the
disinformation carried out by
the Congress,” Naidu said.
“Rajya Sabha MPs were asked
to visit such constituencies where
there are no BJP MPs,” he added.
BJP MP Kirti Azad, who was
the first to make the corruption
charges against Jaitley regarding
the Delhi and District Cricket
Association (DDCA), did not
attend the parliamentary party
meeting.
Azad told reporters he had
“prior engagement” and clarified that he had not boycotted
the meeting.
Jaitley has denied the corruption charges. Jaitley headed the
DDCA for 13 years till 2013.
In a related development, the
Delhi High Court issued a notice
to Kejriwal and five other AAP
leaders over Jaitley’s defamation
suit.
Joint Registrar K Venugopal
sought replies from Kejriwal,
Kumar Vishwas, Raghav Chadha, Ashutosh, Sanjay Singh and
Deepak Bajpai by February 5.
The court said: “They have to
file written statements within
three weeks and, thereafter, in
two weeks’ time the plaintiff
(Jaitley) will file replication.”
While Chadha, Ashutosh,
Sanjay Singh and Bajpai were
present in the court, Kejriwal
and Vishwas were not.
The court also asked Kejriwal
and other leaders to file original
documents relating to the allegations. Also yesterday the Delhi
government tabled a resolution
to set up a Commission of Inquiry to probe the alleged corruption in the DDCA.
Tabling the resolution, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said gross irregularities had
taken place in the DDCA.
He said the Delhi assembly
was concerned over the “massive
corruption” in the cricket body.
Reputations don’t matter much to Kejriwal
E
ven his bitterest rivals
will concede that when it
comes to articulation, be it
in English or in Hindi, there are
few peers for Finance Minister
Arun Jaitley. His many speeches
in the Rajya Sabha have kept the
entire House in rapt attention,
except of course when the opposition was in no mood to listen
to anybody, including the Chair,
as had been witnessed over these
past two weeks. Jaitley’s blogs
- and he is quite prolific at it are widely read and commented
upon, most of it in the affirmative.
Some economists even within
the ruling dispensation are not
exactly comfortable with Jaitley’s handling of the finance
portfolio but even they agree his
understanding of the nuances of
the law is second to none. Politicians cutting across party lines
know that taking on Jaitley could
be a hazardous proposition because more often than not the
force of the argument is with
him.
But Delhi Chief Minister
Arvind Kejriwal is not the kind
of person to be swayed by such
considerations. Over the past
three years he has mastered
the art of “shoot and scoot”, so
reputations don’t matter to him
much. He will throw mud at
whoever he chooses in the hope
that some of it will stick. But no
issue if it doesn’t either because
he would have already moved on
to his next target. Sharad Pawar,
Salman Kurshid, Shiela Dixit,
Kapil Sibal, Smriti Irani, Ni-
tin Gadkari, Delhi LieutenantGovernor Najeeb Jung and Delhi
police chief Bhim Sain Bassi are
only some of the people who
would endorse this.
So when sleuths of the Central
Bureau of Investigation (CBI)
raided the office of the chief
minister’s principal secretary,
Rajendra Kumar, in search of
documents connected with allegations of corruption against
the officer, Kejriwal immediately
resorted to his favourite pastime.
He first called Prime Minister
Narendra Modi a “coward” and
a “psychopath” alleging that the
raid was carried out at his behest.
When the reaction to his outburst elicited immediate allround condemnation, Kejriwal
started throwing dirt at Jaitley.
Everyone felt, nay knew, that
it was not going to stick. Jaitley himself rubbished Kejriwal’s
statement saying he would only
reply to specific charges. So the
next day Kejriwal got his lieutenants to make those specific
charges.
All those charges related to the
Delhi and District Cricket Association (DDCA) of which Jaitley
was the president for 13 years
from 1999. Apart from “huge
financial bungling”, Kejriwal’s
Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) spokespersons also found fault with
the selection process for Delhi’s
cricket team apparently hinting
Jaitley also had a hand in it.
Fact is, almost each one of
these charges has been already
raised several times before,
Delhi Diary
By A K B Krishnan
Gulf Times Correspondent
none more than Bharatiya Janata Party MP Kirti Azad, and
the Congress-led government
of prime minister Manmohan
Singh had even got the Serious Fraud Investigation Office
(SFIO) to probe the matter. “Old
whines in new AAP bottles,” is
how Hindustan Times headlined
the Kejriwal ‘expose’.
While SFIO did find “23 instances of serious financial irregularities”, it did not point the
finger at Jaitley because it found
the president of the association
was a non-executive, decorative
post and he did not have any role
in day-to-day running of the
club. In his blog Jaitley wrote:
“No personal allegation was ever
made against me nor did I ever
feel the need of contradicting it.”
But the Kejriwal attack was
too much for Jaitley to bear.
He has now gone to court with
civil and criminal defamation
charges against Kejriwal and five
of his minions. The civil case is
for monetary compensation of
Rs100mn and the criminal one
attracts imprisonment up to
two years. (Jaitley however did
not drag party colleague Azad to
court but left it to party presi-
dent Amit Shah to handle him.)
Be that as it may, while Jaitley
answered most of the charges
thrown at him by the AAP, it still
left many wondering how a man
of such sagacity could have presided over a club for such a long
period with so much bungling
and impropriety taking place
without his knowledge. In comparison to the multi-billion rupee scams that shook the previous Congress regime these may
look miniscule but Jaitley could
possibly be kicking himself now
for not keeping a tighter leash on
the affairs of DDCA.
There are at least five serious
charges against Rajendra Kumar
but Kejriwal’s contention was
that the CBI was raiding his office in search of files related to
DDCA and that Kumar was just
an excuse. Within a couple of
hours Jaitley told the Rajya Sabha that the chief minister’s office was neither entered into nor
searched.
Jaitley knew what he was talking because he had already got
confirmation on this fact from
the CBI which said all searches
were conducted in the presence
of independent witnesses who
could vouch for the veracity of
its claim. But it is not in AAP’s
DNA to withdraw and apologise. In fact it went a step further demanding a privilege motion against Jaitley for trying to
“mislead” the House.
The Congress Party, faced
with corruption charges of its
own against its top leadership,
joined issue with Jaitley and demanded a probe by a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) and
wanted Jaitley to step down till
this panel cleared his name. But
Jaitley kept his cool saying he
shall answer in parliament any
issue raised in parliament and
that he was ready to fight the
political and legal battles separately outside.
There was talk that the CBI
had not only videographed the
raid but also had added corroboration from the CCTV in the corridors outside Kejriwal’s office
that its officers had not entered
the chief minister’s office. So
both the AAP and the Congress
quietly dropped their respective demands. Congress probably had more than one reason to
stay quiet because it feared other
skeletons may tumble out of the
cricket cupboard making its already imperilled life still more
difficult.
But Kejriwal had not yet finished though. He tweeted that
a CBI officer had told him the
agency had been asked by Modi
to target opposition leaders in a
bid to malign their reputations.
Now if this is not skullduggery,
then what is?
There was no way anyone
could verify this statement.
Even if Kejriwal were to make
the name of the officer public
(as demanded by the CBI), there
was no chance he would admit
he said so. And what was the
method of communication from
Modi? Surely the prime minister
would not have written to the
CBI director to do his bidding!
And how senior is this unknown
officer who confided in Kejriwal
to have known what transpired
between the PMO and the CBI, if
at all anything?
Was Kejriwal trying to deflect the focus from the alleged
wrongdoings of his secretary by
throwing wild charges, as Jaitley
claimed? In this Kejriwal’s track
record as chief minister tends to
add weight to Jaitley’s contention. It is fine to defend relatives, friends, colleagues and
subordinates if you find them
being wronged. Any normal
person would do it. But Kejriwal
wanted to prove he is more than
normal, in a sense of course, by
defending anyone within his
fold without bothering to check
if he/she was being falsely challenged. He had to eat his own
words not once or twice but on
three occasions when cases involving senior members/ministers of his party led to their
resignations.
Rajendra Kumar, an Indian
Administrative Service (IAS)
officer of 1989 vintage, is also
Kejriwal’s batch-mate at IIT,
Kharagpur some 25 years ago.
Standing by the side of an old
friend is expected of anyone.
But according to the CBI Kumar
is facing charges of conspiracy,
criminal misconduct and abuse
of official position. Raids were
conducted in 14 places where
Kumar apparently had connections. One of them was his office
which happened to be adjacent
to the one occupied by the Delhi
chief minister.
In fact the first complaint
against Kumar was filed by none
other than an AAP volunteer, Om
Prakash Chauhan, who in 2013
charged the officer had floated
proxy companies and given them
government contracts without
tenders or verification. Earlier
this year Transparency International wrote to several senior
government functionaries, Kejriwal included, that Kumar’s
record may be tainted. Kejriwal’s
former friends and fellow-travellers like Prashant Bhushan and
Yogendra Yadav had also flagged
the issue. But for reasons known
to few Kejriwal went ahead and
appointed him his principal secretary.
The CBI believes it has an
iron-clad case against the officer. If so, indictment of Kumar
is certain. But those who think it
might be one more blow to Kejriwal will probably have to think
again because by then he would
have other shadows to chase. But
if after all this churning there
is improved administration of
cricket, for which there is a crying need, perhaps Kejriwal can
rightly claim to have contributed
his bit.
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
21
INDIA
Assam’s border farmers fenced in by changing climate conditions
Reuters
Dhubri, Assam
G
olok Das, a farmer in
the northeast Assam, is
happy with the harvest
produced by his main 6-hectare
farm. But he’d love to sell another 4-hectare plot, just half a
kilometre away, even though it’s
equally fertile.
Why? It sits on the other side
of a barbed-wire fence marking
the Bangladesh border, and that
means he can’t irrigate it.
The fence was built in 1987 to
prevent illegal migration from
Bangladesh to India. It traces a
line about 150 yards inside the
actual border, on Indian land,
since no treaty agreement al-
lowed a fence to be built on the
border itself.
Large tracts of Indian land, including some villages, were left
on the far side of the fence. In the
Golokganj sector of Dhubri district, more than 8,000 farmers
struggle with a fence between
their homes and their land. They
are allowed to cross though the
fence each day to work their
holdings, but only at set hours.
Now changing climatic conditions in the region for the first
time require farmers to irrigate
their land frequently to get a
good crop - but legal and bureaucratic obstacles make it hard
to invest in irrigation on the far
side of the fence, meaning harvests there are two-thirds lower
than those on the Indian side.
“With climate change, there
has been a change in the rainfall
pattern and also the flood intensity, which is making agriculture
difficult in many areas in the
state,” said Girin Chetia of the
non-profit North East Affected
Areas Development Society.
Those changes mean farmer
Safikul Islam now wants to get
rid of his 5 hectares of land on
the wrong side of the fence, and
next to Das’ plot.
Both farmers say their land
on the Indian side of the fence
yields nearly 1,500kg of rice a
year, while an equivalent area on
the Bangladesh side produces no
more than 500kg.
“The land on both sides is
equally fertile, however we suffer as we don’t have any irrigation
facilities there. This takes a major
toll on our land on the other side of
the border,” said Das.
“We have been traditionally dependent on the rainwater
for our cultivation (for) generations, but now as the rainfall
has become unpredictable, it is
not possible,” said Munin Das, a
52-year-old farmer who owes 4
hectares of land on the Bangladeshi side of the fence.
“We need irrigation facilities
to be able to cultivate our land
and get good yields,” he said.
By law, construction of any
concrete or permanent structure
is forbidden near the fence, local
people say.
“Even the idea of building
any small irrigation project or
building any project for water
harvesting does not arise,” said
Dinesh Kumar Sarkar, a former
legislator from Dhubri who also
owes agricultural land on the
other side of the fence.
Sarkar said that even taking
tractors onto the land requires a
lengthy bureaucratic process.
Local people worry they will
have to give up farming on the
Bangladeshi side of the fence as
a result of the weather changes,
and complain that neither the
district administration nor the
Indian government’s Border
Security Force (BSF) have been
sympathetic to their problems.
Gates to cross the border are
open from 8am to 4pm, Sarkar
said, and outside these times no
Indian citizen is allowed to work
on land on the Bangladesh side.
The problem is that “farming
cannot be done within a fixed
timeframe,” Sarkar said. In particular, the fixed crossing hours
“create a lot of problems for the
farmers, as the farmer needs to
reach his field very early in the
morning”, he said.
In addition, he said, people
living on the Bangladeshi side
of the border sometimes damage Indian-owned crops or harvest them, leaving Indian growers with no produce to show for
their labour.
Farmers and civil society groups
have long urged India’s government to purchase their land on the
other side of the fence.
Members of Nagarik Unnayan
Mancha, a civil society group,
say they plan to file a petition
on the issue in the Gauhati High
Court.
“Our demands have been ignored for years, and now we are
planning to send a delegation
to (explain) our situation before
the Assam chief minister and the
country’s prime minister,” said
Sarkar.
The state government, however, says that it cannot act alone
on a matter affecting the country’s border.
“This is an international issue
and Bangladesh must also be involved, and this could be done only
through the Ministry of External
Affairs,” said Bhumidhar Barman,
Assam’s revenue minister.
He said he would take up the
issue with the central government.
Son chops up
father’s killer
in revenge
attack in UP
Agencies
Lucknow
T
he son of a murder victim has confessed to
stabbing his father’s
killer to death and chopping
his body into 12 pieces, one for
every year since his father was
slain, media reported yesterday.
Alam Khan was aged 12
when he saw his father being
murdered by a family friend in
2003. He had secretly planned
his revenge ever since and finally seized his chance last
week when he invited the killer over for a drink.
After getting Mohamed Rais
drunk at his home in Uttar
Pradesh, Khan knifed him to
death before using a hammer
and hacksaw to dismember
the body, he told reporters on
Monday after his arrest.
He and an accomplice
then packed the body parts
into plastic bags which they
threw into a river. When the
bags washed up on the river’s
banks, police were only able
to identify Rais from a surgery
scar on his torso.
Khan was arrested after
witnesses recounted how Rais
had last been seen visiting his
home, and made a full confession.
“I played some music
at full volume and cut his
body into 12 pieces,” Khan
was quoted as saying by the
Times of India.
Khan had never told anyone about the identity of his
father’s killer and had instead
waited for 12 years to “realise
his dream” of taking revenge.
He was “happy it was now
done”.
Police Superintendent Ram
Suresh Yadav told the newspaper Khan had confessed to
his crime with an “utter lack
of remorse”.
The murder weapons, including the hammer and hacksaw, had been recovered from
Khan’s home in the district of
Moradabad, Yadav added.
In another macabre incident, a man who was depressed after failing to clear
civil services exams, went on
a stabbing spree yesterday injuring 24 people, before police
shot him dead.
The incident took place in
Karimnagar town of Telangana.
According to the police,
25-year-old Balvinder Singh
attacked his parents with a
sword following an argument
at home.
Singh, who works for a software firm in Bengaluru, then
stepped out to attack passersby, leading to panic among
people. Some pedestrians, two
bikers and an auto-rickshaw
driver were injured.
Police, who swung into action after learning about the
incident, also came under attack. A constable who tried
to snatch the sword from the
man sustained injuries.
As the situation slipped out
of control, police officer Vijay
Sarathi opened fire to disarm
the man. A critically injured
Singh was taken to a hospital
where he died.
Singh’s parents and others
who received grievous injuries
are under treatment.
According to family members, Singh was a meritorious student since his school
days. He stood sixth in the
engineering, agriculture and
medical common entrance
test (EAMCET) in the district.
After getting a degree in
electronics, he got a job in
Bengaluru and was earning
Rs1.8mn a year.
Singh had a dream of passing the civil services exams.
However, he failed to qualify
and as a result went into depression.
The man apparently lost his
mental balance and was having frequent fights with his
parents.
The parents of the Delhi gang-rape victim arrive at the Parliament House in New Delhi yesterday. They were present in the visitors’ gallery as the Rajya Sabha took up the
bill for discussion.
Harsher punishments
for juveniles approved
Parliament passes bill to try
16-18 year-olds as adults
Agencies
New Delhi
L
awmakers
yesterday
passed a bill allowing
harsher punishments for
juveniles aged 16-18 after an
outcry over the release of a young
rapist who served three years in a
detention facility for his part in a
notorious gang-rape in 2012.
“I think the ayes have it, the
ayes have it, the ayes have it. The
bill has been passed,” P J Kurien,
deputy chairman of the Rajya
Sabha, the upper house of parliament, said after a day-long
debate on the bill.
The Lok Sabha or lower house
of parliament had in May passed
the bill to reform the 2000 Juvenile Justice Act that fixed the
minimum age for trial as an adult
at 18. It now needs only rubberstamping by the president.
The release two days ago of
the youngest convict in the case
of the fatal gang-rape of physiotherapy student Jyoti Singh in
December 2012 triggered widespread calls for amendments to
the existing law.
The changes to the law will allow minors aged 16-18 to be sentenced to at least seven years in
young offenders’ institutions if
convicted of “heinous crimes”
including rape and murder.
However, they will not face
the death penalty.
Members of the communist
parties walked out of the Rajya
Sabha before the bill was passed,
demanding that it be sent to a
select committee of the house.
Asha Devi and Badrinath, parents of the 23-year-old student
were present in the visitors’ gallery as the Rajya Sabha took up
the bill for discussion.
“#JuvenileJusticeBill
attempts to bring balance between
rights of the child and need to
deter heinous juvenile crimes,
esp. against women,” Women
and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi posted on
Twitter soon after the bill was
cleared.
Giving details of the the bill
Gandhi said ‘borstals’ - a custodial institution for young offenders - would be set up under
the proposed law to house juveniles accused of heinous crimes.
I
n a dramatic twist in the double murder of artist Hema
Upadhyay and her lawyer
Harish Bhambhani, police early
yesterday arrested the woman’s
estranged husband Chintan
Upadhyay, an officer said.
He was summoned by Kandivali police late on Monday,
questioned and finally arrested
around daybreak.
A well-know artist himself,
Chintan was earlier questioned by
police several times in connection
with the murder in which four
people have already been arrested
from Mumbai and Varanasi.
The victims’ relatives, including Hema’s brother brother-inlaw Deepak Prasad, have pointed
fingers at Chintan who had allegedly threatened his wife with
death a few years ago.
A magistrate’s court remanded Chintan in police custody till
January 1.
He was produced before the
Borivali magistrate.
Last week, police arrested
Satyaprakash alias Sadhu Rajbhar, Pradip Rajbhar, Azad Rajbhar and Vijay Rajbhar in connection with the double murder.
Another suspect Vidyadhar
Rajbhar is on the run.
Police believe that the four
Rajbhars helped Vidyadhar in
committing the murders and in
disposing off the victims’ bodies
in a Mumbai suburb’s drain last
weekend.
The barely-clothed bodies
of Hema and Bhambhani were
packed in cardboard boxes,
wrapped in plastic sheets and
thrown in a large open drain near
Dahanukarwadi in Kandivali
West, a suburb in north-west
Mumbai.
The boxes with the bodies,
recovered on December 13, were
transported in a tempo from
Juhu to Kandivali, police said.
The motive behind the murders is still not clear, but police
said Hema and her husband who
got married in 1998, were in a
divorce battle for the past five
years.
which means it will not be applicable on the rape convict who
has already been freed.
Members from the Nationalist
Congress Party (NCP) and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam also
questioned the hurry in passing
the bill, suggesting that it may be
sent to a select committee.
The mother of the victim, who
met Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas
Naqvi in the morning, said if the
bill had been passed earlier, the
juvenile convict would not have
walked free.
“He would not have been released if this bill had been passed
six months ago. Though it has
been delayed, we want this bill
to be passed in parliament at the
earliest,” Asha Devi told reporters.
Mammootty visits
SmartCity Kochi
Husband arrested over
murder of wife, lawyer
IANS
Mumbai
She said juvenile crime was
being encouraged by the existing law.
“Juveniles’ involvement in
crime is increasing the fastest. Children walk into police
stations and say we have murdered... send us to a juvenile
home,” she said.
Congress Party leader Ghulam
Nabi Azad said juvenile convicts
should not be kept in jail with
“hardened criminals” and there
should be a separate place for
them.
Parliamentary Affairs Minister
M Venkaiah Naidu, meanwhile,
said the government had listed the
bill several times in the monsoon
as well as the winter sessions but
it could not be taken up.
“This law will not be applicable in retrospective,” he said,
By Ashraf Padanna
Gulf Times Correspondent
Kochi
M
Actor Mammootty poses before the entrance of SmartCity Kochi
yesterday. Among others are Baju George, a board member and
CEO-interim and Paul Ninan, project consultant.
alayalam
superstar
Mammootty
yesterday visited SmartCity Kochi, the second offshore
business hub of Dubai’s Tecom
Investments after Malta which
is awaiting the visit of Sheikh
Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, Vice President and Prime
Minister of the United Arab
Emirates (UAE), and ruler of Dubai, for its official launch.
The actor termed it a courtesy
visit and promised full support
when the media cluster starts
operation.
“I’m here as a Kerala native
and a friend of Dubai to know
more about the prestigious
IT project being developed in
our state by SmartCity Dubai,”
Mammooty said.
Kerala government chief
secretary Jiji Thomson meanwhile said the inauguration of
the phase-I and the launch of
phase-II of the project will be
held in January, and the date will
be finalised after confirming the
visit of Sheikh Mohammed bin
Rashid.
“We are working out on the
protocols to facilitate his visit
directly to Kochi, instead of
coming via New Delhi. The construction of the first IT tower is
almost complete. The finishing
touches, including landscaping,
are being given,” Thomson said.
Coming up on 246 acres near
here, SmartCity Kochi is a joint
venture between Dubai Holdings
and the Kerala government.
22
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
LATIN AMERICA
LAW AND ORDER
WILDLIFE
CORPORATE
COMMENT
MUSIC
Argentine police break
up airport protest
Shark attacks diver
off Brazilian island
BHP reviewing asset freeze
ruling after dam disaster
Nicaragua, Costa Rica hail
pope’s call for better ties
Morrissey salutes Peru
with Andean folk tune
Argentine police used water cannon yesterday
to break up a protest by poultry workers facing
layoffs who blocked access to the country’s main
international airport. The workers, who threw
stones at the riot police, said at least 10 members
of their group were wounded in the clashes. The
former employees of bankrupt poultry company
Cresta Roja had blocked the road to Ezeiza airport
outside Buenos Aires since last week, forcing some
passengers to drag their suitcases for 2kms to
catch their flights. They are demanding new jobs
and the wages they say they are still owed. Their
spokesman, Cristian Villalba, blamed new President
Mauricio Macri for the “brutal” crackdown.
A shark ripped off a Brazilian diver’s forearm as he
swam off the tropical archipelago of Fernando de
Noronha, the first such attack to hit the Unesco
world heritage site, authorities said yesterday.
The 33-year-old scuba enthusiast was vacationing
in the protected marine reserve off Brazil’s
northeastern coast when the shark attacked him
Monday during a diving excursion gone horribly
wrong. He underwent surgery yesterday at a
hospital in Recife, on the mainland, and is currently
in stable condition, the hospital said. It was the
first shark attack ever recorded in Fernando de
Noronha, a pristine national park famous for its
turquoise water and rich marine life.
BHP Billiton said it was reviewing a judge’s
decision to freeze its Brazilian assets to ensure
reparations are paid for a deadly toxic dam burst,
after fellow miner Vale vowed to appeal the ruling.
The Anglo-American mining giant and Brazil’s
Vale are co-owners of Samarco, the operator of an
iron ore mine in Minas Gerais state where a wastewater dam collapsed in early November, killing 17.
“We are reviewing the decision and considering
options, including any grounds for appealing the
decision,” a BHP spokesman said in a statement
about the ruling to put on hold BHP’s and Vale’s
Brazilian assets. Vale said on Monday it would
appeal the Friday ruling, calling it “baseless”.
Nicaragua and Costa Rica, which have butted
heads on a number of issues, publicly welcomed a
call by Pope Francis that they strive for “reciprocal
co-operation.” But neither country looked ready
to take the first step. The pontiff’s call was aimed
at overcoming simmering resentment between
the two over border disputes and an impasse over
thousands of stranded Cuban migrants. “We are
fully ready for dialogue,” Nicaraguan government
spokeswoman Rosario Murillo said. Costa Rica’s
government “thanked” the pope for his appeal but
stressed that “renewed collaboration should be
expressed through concrete and effective actions
that show solidarity between the countries.”
British music icon Morrissey delighted an audience
in Peru with a cover of Andean folk tune “El Condor
Pasa” as he closed an extensive tour of Latin
America. The former Smiths frontman, whose
biting commentary on the human condition has
won him a global fan base, played before 5,000
fans in the Park of the Exposition in downtown
Lima. Early in the set, Morrissey performed “El
Condor Pasa” (“The Condor Passes”), which was
written in 1913 by the Peruvian composer Daniel
Alomia Robles based on a traditional instrumental
melody in Peru. Morrissey’s show capped a 14-date
tour of Latin America, where the singer has found
an especially avid fan base.
Amazon
tribes change
ancestral ways
to save forest
AFP
Gareno, Ecuador
T
he indigenous peoples of
the Amazon are far removed from the Paris
conference rooms where politicians and technocrats in dark
suits hashed out a historic deal
on curbing climate change to
close out the year.
But they are taking bold action
of a different kind to save the rich
biodiversity of the planet’s largest rainforest, whose survival is
essential to limit global warming.
In Ecuador, one tribe has
swapped hunting for growing cocoa. Another in Brazil has
started managing its fish stocks.
And one in Peru set up an indigenous local government to protect
its environment from oil, mining
and logging companies.
The Waorani barely seem to
notice the stifling tropical heat
in Gareno, a hamlet of wooden
huts in the middle of the Ecuadoran jungle.
Every morning, they chant a
ritual work song in their native
language, Waotededo, before
heading out to their fields for the
day.
Keen to preserve their environment, in 2010 they gave up
hunting, their traditional livelihood, and replaced it with farming cocoa.
The Waorani had noticed the
game they hunted was increasingly hard to find.
To combat the problem, an
indigenous women’s group, the
Association of Waorani Women of the Ecuadoran Amazon
(AMWAE), created a programme
that gives cocoa trees to local
women if their husbands stop
hunting.
“They gave up hunting wild
animals, and we took up farming without cutting down the
forest,” said AMWAE president
Patricia Nenquihui.
Ten indigenous communities
are participating in the project
- 70 families who farm 25 hectares in the eastern provinces of
Pastaza and Napo.
The association buys their
crop from them for $1.25 a pound
- 45 cents above the market price
- and sends it to the capital, Quito, to be made into chocolate.
At first, the men were “upset”
over the programme, said Nenquihui. But the older generations
admitted that hunters had to walk
up to one full day through the
jungle to hunt the animals they
sold to provide for their families.
“We opened our eyes,” said
Ligia Enomenga, a 26-year-old
widow who is raising her six
children thanks to the money she
earns growing cocoa.
“Before, (the men) hunted a
lot. Now they have joined the
cocoa project and stopped killing animals,” she said.
“We hunted a lot... Monkeys,
toucans. Sometimes we brought
out five or six quintals,” said
Moises Enomenga, whose wife
now farms cocoa instead.
In Brazil, home to most of the
region’s 6mnn square kms of
forest, the Paumari people are
taking a similar approach to save
the pirarucu, an enormous fish
that can reach up to 4.5 meters
(15 feet) long.
Pirarucu fishing was banned
when the enormous gray and
hot-pink river monsters began
to disappear.
But after seven years of work
with a conservation group called
the Native Amazon Operation
(Opan), the Paumari successfully lobbied to re-legalise sustainable fishing practices.
“It goes far beyond marketing
the fish. It’s about strengthening
community groups, strengthening fish stocks and generating income. Those are the main
sources of revenue for this community,” said Gustavo Silveira, a
co-ordinator at Opan.
“The management and control they have over their territory
is a fantastic thing.”
Students protest
Students clash with riot police during a protest against the government to demand universal free education and changes in the education system in Valparaiso, Chile, yesterday.
Haiti presidential
run-off vote delayed
AFP
Port-au-Prince
O
n the heels of alleged
electoral irregularities,
Haiti has pushed back
next week’s presidential runoff,
election officials said, without
immediately announcing a new
date.
The runoff vote had been
scheduled for December 27, after an October 25 first-round
vote marred by allegations of
massive voter fraud across the
Caribbean nation.
The runoff was to pit Jovenel Moise - backed by outgoing president Michel Martelly
$1bn ‘linked to Venezuela
energy contracts fraud’
Reuters
Washington
U
S authorities have traced
over $1bn to a conspiracy
involving a Venezuelan magnate who allegedly paid
bribes to obtain contracts from
Venezuelan state oil company
PDVSA, according to US court
papers made public.
The details came a day after the US justice department
confirmed that authorities had
arrested Roberto Rincon, a Venezuelan citizen who is president
of Texas-based Tradequip Services & Marine.
According to an indictment
made public, Rincon and Venezuelan businessman Abraham
Jose Shiera Bastidas conspired
to pay bribes to officials to secure contracts from Petroleos de
Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), Venezuela’s state-owned oil company.
The indictment said five PDVSA officials, whom it did not
name, received hundreds of
thousands of dollars in bribes
made principally in the form of
wire transfers but also through
mortgage payments, airlines
tickets and, in one case, whiskey.
The bribes also included a
$14,502 reservation for a PDVSA
official at the luxury Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, the indictment said.
According to a court order
in the case, from 2009 to 2014,
more than $1bn was traced to
the conspiracy, $750mn of which
was traced to Rincon, who lives
in Texas. To one official alone,
Rincon paid $2.5mn in bribes,
the order said.
The indictment charges that
Rincon, 55, and Shiera, 52, violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and conspired to launder money.
“Rincon denies the allegations made against him in the
indictment and looks forward to
the opportunity to challenge the
government’s case,” said Samuel
Louis, his lawyer.
A lawyer for Shiera, who resides in Florida, did not respond
to a request for comment. Shiera
is the manager of Vertix Instru-
mentos, a Venezuelan supplier to
the oil sector.
Both men were arrested on
December 16 and have been held
without bail.
In an order by US magistrate
Nancy Johnson in Houston detailing why she denied Rincon bail, she noted Rincon has
a “close personal friendship”
with retired Venezuelan General
Hugo Carvajal.
Carvajal, Venezuela’s former
military intelligence chief, was
arrested in 2014 in Aruba on US
drug trafficking charges, but
Aruba authorities declined to
extradite him. Carvajal had been
arrested on Rincon’s privatelyowned airplane, according to
Johnson’s order.
It remains unclear if the case
against Rincon and Shiera relates
to Tradequip, which describes
itself as an oil field supply company. The firm on its website
lists PDVSA as a client, and it is
registered on Venezuela’s national contractors registry.
Tradequip has declined comment. PDVSA did not respond to
an e-mail seeking comment.
and the ruling party - against
Jude Celestin, the second-place
vote-getter from more than 50
contenders in the first round of
balloting.
The October presidential
election was the latest attempt
in the Americas’ poorest country to shed chronic political
instability and work toward development.
But reporting of the election
results - and now, the staging
of the runoff vote - has been
plagued with delays and beset
by protests alleging official corruption. Moise won 32.8% of
the first-round balloting and
Celestin took 25.3%, the federal
election commission said.
Martelly, who is banned by
the constitution from serving
two consecutive terms, said
that on Thursday an electoral
evaluation committee would
be set up to determine the way
forward.
“No new date has been officially set,” electoral council
spokesman Roudy Stanley Penn
said. “We are awaiting the findings of the electoral evaluation
committee to follow its direction.”
Celestin meanwhile called
the delay “a step in the right
direction” in terms of allowing room for any doubts about
fraud to be addressed.
Some supporters of candidates
Blaze at Brazil museum
other than Moise have called for
an independent committee since
they do not trust the work of the
electoral council indirectly under
Martelly’s authority.
Moise is a businessman and
political novice who until now
worked in agriculture, mainly
growing bananas. His nickname
during the campaign was “the
banana man.”
Celestin, making his second
bid for the Haitian presidency,
was disqualified from the second round in the 2010 election
vote following a recount by
the Organisation of American
States. This time, he had been
considered the frontrunner.
The first round of voting was
Court orders detention
of Panama ex-president
Reuters
Panama City
P
A large fire tore through the Museum of the Portuguese
Language in Sao Paulo, Brazil, partly destroying the historic
building but apparently claiming no victims, Brazilian authorities
said. Flames engulfed the third floor of the museum.
relatively peaceful, in contrast
to violence during August legislative elections that left two
people dead.
Haiti is still struggling to recover from a devastating 2010
earthquake that killed more
than 250,000 people and crippled the nation’s infrastructure.
Legislative elections were
held in two rounds, on August 9
and October 25. The parliament
had been dissolved on January 13
after lawmakers’ terms expired
in the absence of elections.
Haiti’s 5.8mn voters were
tasked with choosing two thirds
of their senators, or 20 posts,
and all the 119 members in the
chamber of deputies.
anama’s top court has
ordered the detention of
former president Ricardo Martinelli who is alleged
to have used public money to
spy on more than 150 people
illegally, one of several accusations he faces.
After more than four hours
deliberating, Supreme Court
judges voted for the provisional
detention of the multimillionaire supermarket tycoon who
ruled the Central American
country from 2009 to 2014.
Martinelli responded to the
ruling on his Twitter feed, saying this was the first round of a
political trial.
Martinelli, who oversaw a
public works boom and Latin
America’s fastest economic
growth in recent years, fled
Panama in January and is believed to be living in Miami.
Despite his initial popularity,
his administration was tainted
by allegations of corruption.
He now faces half a dozen
different investigations in-
cluding into alleged misuse of
public funds, financial crimes,
taking bribes and giving illegal
pardons. He was stripped of the
immunity he enjoys as head of a
political party in several cases.
In the spying case, prosecutors say that Martinelli, 63,
used taxpayer money and government employees to listen to
calls, read messages and have
activists, politicians, union
members, lawyers, doctors and
other civil groups followed.
Two of Martinelli’s former
security chiefs have been arrested in the case and are awaiting trial.
In a letter posted on his Twitter feed this month, Martinelli
said the accusations against
him are part of a revenge campaign spearheaded by current
President Juan Carlos Varela.
Varela, of the centre-right
Panamenista Party (PP), helped
Martinelli win the presidency
in 2009 before the two fell out.
Defence lawyer Rogelio Cruz
said in October Martinelli was
innocent of all charges, describing a provisional indictment as
“crazy” and calling the process
against him “Kafkaesque.”
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
23
PAKISTAN/AFGHANISTAN
Pakistan, India trying to cut deal on thorny issues
Internews
Islamabad
P
akistan and India are targeting next year’s summit
of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation
(Saarc) for ‘major announcements’ to improve their relations
that witnessed a thaw in recent
weeks after months of brinkmanship.
Earlier this month, the two
nuclear-armed
neighbours
agreed to revive their moribund
peace process with a new name
- Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue - to discuss all issues bedevilling their ties, including the
long-running dispute over the
Himalayan state of Kashmir.
The foreign secretaries of the
two countries are set to meet
next month in order to chalk out
a roadmap for a series of meetings
between officials of the two countries on a range of issues - from
terrorism to Jammu and Kashmir.
The two countries are aiming
at completing the first round of
talks before the Saarc summit
that Pakistan will host in November 2016. Indian Prime Min-
ister Narendra Modi, along with
heads of government or states of
Saarc members, will attend the
two-day summit.
An Indian diplomat said that
efforts were being made to have
an agreement on some of the issues before the two prime ministers meet on the side-lines of the
Saarc summit.
“We expect positive movement on some of the issues before the summit so the two prime
ministers have something good
to show when they meet,” said
the diplomat, who did not wish
to be named in the report.
However, the diplomat did not
elaborate on which issues the
countries could strike a deal.
“We expect positive
movement on some of the
issues before the summit
so the two prime ministers
have something good to
show when they meet”
Under the comprehensive
dialogue, there are at least 10
subjects, including Kashmir,
terrorism, trade and commerce,
CBMs, Siachen, Sir Creek,
people-to-people contacts, hu-
manitarian issues and religious
tourism.
While a breakthrough on the
Kashmir conflict may not be
possible anytime soon, progress
can be made on some other issues such as CBMs (confidence
building measures), people-topeople contacts and trade on the
eve of Saarc summit.
“Ideally, we would like to have
discussions on all these subjects
before the Saarc summit and
see where we can find common
ground,” said a Pakistani official.
“If this happens, it would certainly lay the groundwork for the
British troops deployed
in Helmand province
C
hina and Pakistan have
signed a financing
agreement on a coal
power project located in the
Thar Coalfield in Pakistan’s
Sindh province.
The project will cost in excess of $2bn, including the
exploitation of a 3.8mn-tonne
coal mine and the construction
of a 660,000-kilowatt power
station near the mine, China’s
Xinhua News Agency reported.
China
will
contribute
$800mn to the financing,
M
and Nawaz on November 30.
Their informal chat led to the
previously unannounced talks
between the national security
advisers in Bangkok and then
an agreement in Islamabad to
resume the composite dialogue
during the Indian foreign minister’s visit to Pakistan for the
Heart of Asia-Istanbul ministerial conference.
The Indian diplomat said
Pakistan-India relations historically had seen many ups and
downs. “What we need to do
now is to ensure there are more
ups than downs,” he added.
China, Pakistan
sign pact on coal
power project
Agencies
Beijing
AFP
Kabul
ilitary planes yesterday
dropped food and ammunition to besieged
Afghan forces in Sangin after
Taliban insurgents captured
large swathes of the opiumgrowing southern district, as
British military advisers were
deployed to the region.
The Islamists broke through
the frontlines of the strategic
district on Sunday after days of
fierce clashes, tightening their
grip on the volatile province of
Helmand.
Fleeing local residents reported bloody gunfights as the
Taliban advanced on the district
centre, highlighting a worsening security situation across
Afghanistan a year after Nato
formally ended its combat operations.
“We are air-dropping food
supplies, military equipment
and ammunition to support our
forces in Sangin,” defence ministry spokesman Mohamed Radmanesh said.
“Sporadic fighting is going on
around the district,” he said, rejecting reports of high military
casualties and asserting that
the district had not fallen to the
Taliban.
A resident who fled Sangin
said that insurgents had publicly
executed at least three security
officials after storming government buildings.
“The Taliban dragged two intelligence officials and a local
police commander from their
homes and shot them dead,” Haji
Abdul Qader said.
“Only the governor’s compound and the police headquarters are under government control. The rest have been overrun
by the Taliban.”
Qader said he fled to the Hel-
meeting between Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his Indian
counterpart Narendra Modi.”
The official said there was a desire and sincerity from both sides
to move forward and enter into
more co-operative relationship.
“If we would have hung on to
our respective positions, then
it was impossible to move forward,” the official added explaining that flexibility shown
by the two sides helped break the
ice in talks recently.
The apparent breakthrough
was achieved during a ‘chance’
meeting in Paris between Modi
while the Pakistani partners
will provide $500mns, mainly
through China Development
Bank and Habib Bank.
The project is expected to be
completed by the end of 2017,
and it will be the first such
project in the China-Pakistan
Economic Corridor.
The corridor will be a
3,000km network of roads,
railways and energy infrastructure, between the ports
of Gwadar in Pakistan and
Kashgar in Xinjiang. It was established to help lift Pakistan
out of its economic slumber
and boost growth for the Chinese border economy.
Bomb attacks kill 3 people in Pakistan
Afghan National Army soldiers prepare for combat during an ongoing battle with Taliban militants in the Nad Ali district of Helmand yesterday.
mand provincial capital Lashkar
Gah after a mortar bomb landed
on his house, wounding his infant son and daughter.
His testimony bore chilling
similarities to the situation in
Kunduz after the Taliban briefly
captured the northern city in
September — their most spectacular victory in 14 years of war.
Taliban death squads were accused of summary executions,
rape and plundering Kunduz
as Nato-backed Afghan forces
struggled for two weeks to evict
them.
Highlighting the gravity of the
situation in Sangin, long seen
as a hornet’s nest of insurgent
activity, Britain yesterday said
its troops had been deployed in
Helmand.
A statement from the British
defence ministry did not specify
the number deployed, but insisted they would not be engaged
in combat.
US special forces were also
recently dispatched to Helmand
to assist Afghan forces, a senior
Western official said earlier this
week.
The deployments come a year
after the US-led Nato formally
ended its combat mission in Afghanistan, adopting a training
and advisory role to local forces.
Sangin, at the centre of Af-
ghanistan’s lucrative opium
trade that funds the insurgency, has been the scene of fierce
fighting for years between the
Taliban and Nato forces.
British troops fought deadly
battles in Sangin for four years to
little effect, before US marines replaced them in late 2010 and finally themselves pulled out last year.
The latest unrest in Helmand
comes as President Ashraf Ghani
has made a diplomatic outreach
to Pakistan — the Taliban’s historic backers — aimed at restarting peace talks with the insurgents.
Pakistan hosted a first round
of negotiations in July but the
talks stalled when the Taliban
belatedly confirmed the death of
longtime leader Mullah Omar.
A security official in Islamabad said that Pakistan army chief
Raheel Sharif would travel to Kabul in the coming days, in what
appears to be a renewed push to
jumpstart talks.
But, said Kabul-based analyst Haroon Mir, the escalating
war in Helmand suggests “the
Taliban are not as willing as the
Afghan government to sit on the
negotiating table”.
“Or they want to make more
military gains and win new territory to eventually join talks in a
position of strength,” he said.
Two separate bomb attacks killed three people and wounded two
others, including a senior Pakistani army officer, in a restive tribal
region near the Afghan border, officials said yesterday.
The incidents took place on Monday in the Mohmand tribal area,
one of the seven such semi-autonomous districts where the
military has been battling Al Qaeda and Taliban-linked militants for
over a decade.
“An improvised explosive device (IED) planted along the roadside
in Baizai area went off as a vehicle passed by it killing three people:
a tribal policeman, a foreman and a tribesman,” senior local
administration official Waqar Khan said.
No group has so far claimed responsibility for the incident, but
Khan said authorities were investigating whether the deceased
were associated with a local anti-Taliban militia.
Another IED planted on a roadside in the same district meanwhile
struck a military vehicle wounding a Lieutenant Colonel and a
soldier, Khan said.
Local intelligence officials confirmed the two incidents.
The army has intensified its offensives in the tribal regions since
the Taliban’s massacre of 153 people, 134 of them children, in a
school in Peshawar last December.
Pakistan yet to join Saudi-led alliance
Adviser to Pakistan Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs, Sartaj Aziz
said on Monday that only an announcement of a 34-state alliance,
including Pakistan, was made by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is
awaiting further details to reach a decision in this regard.
Aziz said Pakistan wants a political solution to the Yemen crisis,
adding that the present government has been strictly following
the policy of non-interference in other countries, The News
International reported.
Taliban treated alongside angry soldiers in Afghan hospital
AFP
Kabul
T
he injured Taliban fighter
stands shackled, with his
face covered by a ski mask
and wearing a helmet to block
out noise so that, for security
reasons, he cannot tell where he
is.
The insurgent was wounded
while battling the Afghan army
and is now flanked by soldiers
throughout his medical treatment at the nation’s largest military hospital.
He is cared for alongside the
very men whose comrades he
once faced in battle, and the
troops are furious about the arrangement at Kabul’s Sardar
Mohamed Daoud Khan hospital.
“We are treated in the same
place, it’s very strange but there
is nothing I can do,” says Mohammed, a soldier with a bullet
wound to the leg who is just two
rooms away from his enemy.
“Senior people make these
decisions for us. It’s appalling,”
he added. The Taliban “have no
dignity... they don’t have enough
courage to be soldiers so they destroy our country and kill”.
The policy to treat Taliban
fighters who have waged a decade-long insurgency in Afghanistan is a sore point at a time
when casualties among security
forces are soaring.
More than 4,000 Afghan soldiers and police were killed and
over 8,000 wounded in the first
half of the year, compared to
5,000 who lost their lives in the
whole of 2014, and the loss of life
continues.
The issue was brought sharply
into the spotlight in October,
when 30 people were killed in a
US air strike on a hospital run by
French charity Doctors Without
Borders (MSF) in the northern
city of Kunduz.
Afghan authorities have long
criticised the charity for treating
Taliban fighters as well as soldiers inside its walls.
The US military put the
bombing down to “human error”, while MSF has branded it a
war crime and demanded an independent probe into the strike.
With some 400 beds, the
Sardar Mohammed Daoud Khan
facility is the jewel in the crown
of the Afghan health service
and it receives dozens of soldiers every day who have been
wounded fighting the Taliban, as
well as insurgents.
“Where does it hurt?” one
doctor asks the wounded militant, a prisoner at the military
jail in Bagram, north of Kabul.
“Here and there,” replies the
man, pointing to his chest.
Wounded Afghan National Army soldiers sit on beds on a ward at Sardar Mohamed Daoud Khan Military Hospital in Kabul.
A senior hospital official said
he has only been brought “to the
hospital for a few hours, the time
it takes for a consultation”.
Kabul has played down the
thorny subject, only quietly admitting that Taliban fighters are
indeed treated.
“It’s true, but we don’t talk
publicly about it,” said a gov-
ernment source on condition of
anonymity.
The American head of the
Nato mission in Afghanistan declined to speak about the prac-
tice, despite repeated requests
for comment by AFP.
That US funds could be paying
to treat Taliban fighters is potentially embarrassing for Washing-
ton, which spent at least $185mn
on Afghanistan’s military health
system between 2002 and 2011.
Officials at the hospital say
they are abiding by laws enshrined in the Geneva conventions, which says those involved
in conflict should not be left
without medical treatment regardless of race, political opinion, religion or gender.
“We respect international
law and we want that, when the
Taliban are released, they tell
the other fighters that we acted
like good Muslims,” said a senior
hospital official who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivities surrounding the issue.
“The more violent the fighting, the more patients we receive,” said hospital doctor Nasruddin Amin.
But that care has not yet extended to Islamic State fighters,
who control swathes of territory
in Syria and Iraq under their own
brutal interpretation of Shariah law and have been gaining
ground in Afghanistan.
For now, the official said there
are no Islamic State fighters in
the Mohamed Daoud Khan military hospital.
But, when the time comes, Dr
Amin said he would treat them
like any other who enters his care.
“I am a doctor, I am not a state
prosecutor,” he said.
24
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
PHILIPPINES
Binay regains top spot
in race for presidency
By Joel M Sy Egco
Manila Times
V
ice President Jejomar
Binay and Sen. Francis “Chiz” Escudero
emerged as the most likely winners if the voting for president
and vice president were held today, according to the latest poll
by Pulse Asia.
Binay, who tailed his rivals in
previous surveys owing largely
to the controversies that surrounded him, pulled off a surprise by getting the approval
of 33% of respondents in the
survey conducted December 4
to 11.
Binay’s political spokesman,
Rico Quicho, said the results
only encourage the vice president to work harder in the campaign trail.
“We thank our people for
their continued trust (in) and
support to the vice president.
The recent survey results encourage the vice president to
double his effort of directly
telling our people of his plans
to uplift their lives and make
the government relevant in
solving poverty, unemployment and lingering social ills.
Jejomar Binay: poll boost.
We remain steadfast and focused on the task at hand,” he
added in a statement.
Pulse Asia said the 1,800 respondents are registered voters aged 18 and above. They
come from different parts of
the country. Escudero got the
top position with 29%, just
ahead of another favourite and
fellow lawmaker, Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who got 23%.
In second place for president was Davao City Mayor
Court acquits ex-mayor
over policeman’s death
By Jomar Canlas
Manila Times
T
he Supreme Court (SC)
has acquitted the former
mayor of Amadeo, Cavite and five others who were
found guilty by the Sandiganbayan in connection with the
killing of a policeman and his
relative in 2004.
Exonerated by the SC Third
Division was Albert Ambagan
Jr, and five others who acted as
his bodyguards identified as Alberto Angcanan, Juanito Loyola,
Melanio Bayot, Flor Amparo
and Rosendo Causaren.
The accused were cleared on
two counts of homicide “for
failure of the prosecution to
prove their guilt beyond reasonable doubt,” according to the
high tribunal decision dated October 14,2015 but was released
only to the media recently.
The SC’s ruling stemmed
from the anti-graft court decision sentencing Ambagan
and five others to a maximum
of 12 years imprisonment each
for two counts of homicide for
the death of Senior Police Officer 2 Reynaldo Santos and his
relative identified as Domingo
Bawalan.
Records showed that Reynaldo Santos, then head of the
Intelligence and Investigation
Division of the Cavite Provincial
Mobile Group, accosted Ambagan’s men who were carrying
firearms in Barangay Tamacan,
Amadeo on July 5, 2004.
Ambagan was then the incumbent town mayor and the
five accused were reportedly
among his security escorts.
Informed of the incident,
Ambagan allegedly requested
Santos to settle the problem,
which the policeman rejected.
This prompted Ambagan to
have allegedly ordered his men
to finish off the victims.
Ambagan and his men were
subsequently charged with two
counts of homicide before the
Sandiganbayan.
However, in its ruling on
Ambagan’s appeal, the High
Court held that “the scant evidence for the prosecution casts
serious doubts as to the guilt of
petitioner as principal by inducement.”
It pointed out that it was
not convincingly established,
beyond reasonable doubt, that
the former mayor indeed ordered his men to open fire at
Santos and Bawalan. “The evidence offered against him in
court does not pass the test of
moral certainty and is insufficient to rebut the presumption
of innocence that petitioner
is entitled to under the Bill of
Rights,” the verdict read.
The SC added, “… where
there is reasonable doubt as to
the guilt of an accused, he must
be acquitted even though his
innocence may be questioned,
for it is not sufficient for the
proof to establish a probability,
even though strong, that the
fact charged is more likely to
be true than the contrary. Proof
beyond reasonable doubt, more
than mere likelihood, requires
moral certainty —a certainty
that convinces and satisfies the
reason and conscience of those
who are to act upon it.”
Rodrigo Duterte with 23%, followed by Escudero’s presidential running mate, Sen. Grace
Poe with 21%.
Tailing the pack were Liberal Party standard-bearer,
Manuel “Mar” Roxas who garnered 17% and Sen. Miriam
Defensor-Santiago with 4%.
Pulse Asia said the respondents were asked: “Of the persons on this list, who will you
vote for as president of the
Philippines if the 2016 elections are held today and they
are candidates for the post?”
The candidates’ names
were picked from certificates
of canvass submitted to the
Commission on Elections last
October 12 to 16, 2015.
Rizalito David, Poe’s principal “persecutor,” got “zero,”
alongside Leo Cadion, Justino
Padiernos, Camilo Sabio, Roy
Seneres, Augusto Syjuco Jr and
Juanita Trocenio.
When told about his dismal
showing in the Pulse Asia survey, Roxas issued a statement
indicating that he has not lost
faith in the electorate.
“Like what I always say,
what is most important is
the voting in May 2016. It is
still chaotic at present: Last
month, it was Grace as No 1.
Last week, it was Duterte. Now
it is Binay. In the next survey,
it could be me as the topnotcher,” he said.
What is important, Roxas
added, is that he has a clean
record and clear platform.
In the vice presidential race,
Escudero and Marcos were followed by fellow senator Alan
Peter Cayetano with 18% and
Camarines Sur Rep. Leni Robredo, Roxas’ running mate,
14%.
Meanwhile, Binay’s running
mate, Sen. Gregorio Honasan,
got 9% followed by Sen. Antonio Trillanes with 4%.
Other candidates included
in the list were Albert Alba,
0.3%; Vicente Camilon Jr,
0.2%; Daniel Aldea, 0.1%; Ted
Malangen (0.04%) and Jesus
Zosimo Paredes, 0%.
Pulse Asia reported that
only 1% of Filipino registered
voters were either not inclined
to support any of the presidential candidates included in
the survey or still do not know
whom they will vote as president in May 2016.
Less than 1%, meanwhile,
refused to identify their preferred presidential bet.
Palace denies presence
of IS training camps
By Catherine S Valente
Manila Times
M
alacanang
yesterday
belied reports that
there are jihadist training camps in the country, particularly in Mindanao.
Quoting National Security
Adviser Cesar Garcia, Communications Secretary Herminio
Coloma Jr said “ISIS has no
training camps in the Philippines,” referring to the so-called
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
“What ISIS-linked personalities have done is to try to link
up with local jihadist/terrorist
groups,” Coloma told reporters.
“Some of these ISIS-linked
personalities, who are really few
in number, have also sought refuge in the base areas of these local terrorist groups,” he said.
Earlier, the Daily Mail Online reported that a propaganda
video purportedly released by
the terror group shows a training
camp has been set up in a Philippine jungle.
The video surfaced a month
after eight members of an ISISinspired group were killed in a
clash with the Philippine military in Sultan Kudarat in southern Mindanao.
Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) chief of staff, Gen.
Hernando Iriberri, had said
members of the Ansar al-Khilafah Philippines or AKP,with
which the AFP clashed, killing
eight of its members including an Indonesian, has no connection with ISIS. The military
and the police conducted a law
enforcement operation on November 26 against AKP on complaints of criminal activities in
Sultan Kudarat.
The AFP guarantees that it
is exerting all efforts together
with other security forces to
neutralise lawless elements in
the country.
UNREST
Rebels attack Philippine military truck
Rebels yesterday attacked a military truck being used for typhoon relief
operations in the central Philippines, killing one soldier and wounding two
others, the army said. Six soldiers were on board the truck heading to
communities hit by Typhoon Melor last week, when they were ambushed
by New People’s Army (NPA) rebels in Las Navas town in Northern
Samar province. The attack led to a 15-minute firefight. The military truck
was transporting equipment including hammers, steel tubes, and other
materials to help rebuild houses damaged by the storm, the army said.“It
is a clear indication that the NPA is not at all serious about respecting the
spirit of Christmas and peace,” the military said in a statement.
Festive decoration
Visitors take pictures outside a house decorated with Christmas lights in Mandaluyong city, Metro Manila.
Miss Universe winner traverses a tough road for glory
Manila Times
Manila
T
he whole world is now
watching Pia Alonzo
Wurtzbach after she was
crowned Miss Universe 2015 on
Sunday night at Las Vegas.
But before she achieved her
life’s greatest dream, while
bringing joy and pride to the nation, Wurtzbach’s journey toward the crown had been long
and challenging.
Pia was born on September
24, 1989 in Stuttgart, Germany,
but grew up in Carmen, Cagayan de Oro City, where her German father and Filipina mother
initially decided to settle. She
completed her kindergarten and
elementary education there at
Kong Hua School and Corpus
Christi, respectively, even as she
had to move house several times
during her childhood.
For a while, Wurtzbach also
lived in Iligan City with her maternal grandparents, and very
often took trips to Germany
with her younger sister and parents for vacation.
When her parents separated,
Wurtzbach moved to Malabon,
Metro Manila, with her mother.
She was immediately spotted for
her good looks and at 11 years of
age landed a modelling job with
an international, direct-selling
company.
In 2002, the 13-year-old
beauty had her first break in
show business when she was
signed on as a talent of ABSCBN’s Star Magic. Under the
screen name Pia Romer, she
starred alongside Bea Alonzo
and Shaina Magdayao in a teenoriented series called K2BU.
More TV projects came her
way including a stint in noontime variety show, ASAP and
a drama series with Piolo Pascual, but for some reason, she
was always cast in minor roles.
By 2006, she decided to put her
acting career on hold and pursue
higher education.
Wurtzbach eventually finished a professional culinary
course at the Centre for Asian
Culinary Studies.
Again, the young talent returned to TV and the big screen
from 2011 to 2012, but it was
only in 2013 that the public took
a closer look at how Wurtzbach
blossomed to beauty-queen
material when she joined Binibining Pilipinas for the first time.
She finished first runner-up
in her “debut,” and tried her
luck again the following year,
but only made it to the top 15 finalists. Nevertheless, she made
a memorable appearance at her
second foray in the Binibining
Pilipinas pageant when Sen.
Juan Edgardo Angara asked her a
question in the vernacular during the question-answer session. While Wurtzbach gave her
answer also in Filipino, fans believed that doing so spoiled her
chances of winning the competition because she did not have
enough time translating it for
the benefit of the foreign judges.
Giving up, however, was never in Wurzbach’s vocabulary as
she entered the same competition for the last time in 2014 at
26-years-old—the age limit for
Binibining Pilipinas aspirants.
As fate would have it, she was
finally hailed Binibining Pilipinas-Universe,
immediately
earning her the chance to compete in the world’s most prestigious beauty pageant.
Since then, Wurtzbach gave
her heart and soul in training for
the Miss Universe pageant.
Her manager and pageant
mentor Jonas Gaffud took control of her preparations, having
had much experience and success with his previous wards,
Venus Raj, Shamcey Supsup,
Janine Tugonon and MJ Lastimosa—all former Binibining
Pilipinas titleholders who made
it to Miss Universe Top 5 in 2010,
2011, 2012 and 2014, respectively.
Also the man behind model-
ling agency Mercator, Gaffud
joined Bb. Pilipinas Charities
Inc chairman Stella Marquez
Araneta in accompanying and
supporting Wurtzbach in the
preliminaries up until Sunday’s
coronation night at Las Vegas.
For Wurtzbach, she only has
gratitude for her supporters and
even her “challengers.”
Before the finals, she did not
forget to thank all of them as
she wrote in her Instagram account, “Thank you to everyone
who has trained me, took care
of me and helped me. I’d also
like to say thank you to those
who challenged me. Deciding
to join Binibining Pilipinas was
the best decision I’ve ever made.
And wow, what an honour it is
to represent our country in the
most prestigious pageant ever.”
Looking back at her road to
Miss Universe, she said, “I started training in November 2012
and now it’s December 2015. It
took so long for me to earn this
sash with three attempts in Miss
Philippines. It was quite a journey and tomorrow it all ends on
this one big night.”
And as someone who always
gives a tough fight, Wurtzback
ended, “Never give up on your
dreams and believe that dreams
do come true! No one should
surrender! The Filipino is a
fighter!”
Miss Philippines Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach reacts after being crowned Miss Universe 2015 in Las Vegas.
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
25
SRI LANKA/BANGLADESH/NEPAL
Zia’s BNP demands army
deployment in civic polls
By Mizan Rahman
Dhaka
T
he
main
opposition
Bangladesh
Nationalist Party (BNP) yesterday placed its demand with the
election commission (EC) for
deployment of army in elections
to 235 municipalities set for
December 30.
A BNP delegation, led by
party standing committee
member Abdul Moyeen Khan,
met with chief election commissioner (CEC) Kazi Rakib
Uddin Ahmad to place their
demand officially.
Talking to reporters after the
meeting, Khan said, “The deployment of army is very crucial for creating a level-playing
field. Voters won’t be able to
exercise their franchise without
any fear unless the army is not
engaged in the polls.”
Accusing the ruling party
workers of attacking and harassing BNP candidates and their
supporters across the country,
he said, “There’s no alternative to army deployment in
the polls to ensure a congenial
atmosphere.”
The BNP delegation went to
the EC with the demand, a day
after party chief Khaleda Zia
called for army deployment in
the polls.
On Monday, Khaleda said,
“Army deployment is a must to
hold credible municipal polls.
We can expect a fair election
to some extent if the army is
there.”
The former prime minister said her party is supported
by the war veterans who had
fought on the battleground.
She also renewed her demand
for a ‘transparent’ war crimes
trial of ‘international standards’.
“Those who are real Raza-
kars (collaborators of Pakistani
force), who actually harassed,
tortured and killed innocent
people during the war, will
have to be tried and punished,”
Zia said.
The BNP chief accused the
Awami League of ‘patronising’
war criminals by giving them
freedom-fighter tags.
“Those who did not fight the
war but helped the (war) criminals are now very close to the
Awami League. There are many
such examples,” she said.
She alleged the Awami League
made war criminals ministers an accusation she herself faces.
“There are many Razakars in
their party, but they do not see
them or take steps against them.
Zia also alleged that the government has been harassing AK
Khandker, who was the deputy
chief of staff of the Bangladesh Armed Forces during
the war, after he wrote a book
BNP chairperson Khaleda Zia during a party meeting in Dhaka.
on the ‘true’ history of the war.
Earlier, former home minister and BNP leader Altaf Hossain Chowdhury’s motorcade
came under attack by unidentified persons during electioneering for the upcoming municipal polls at Rahmatpur in
Kalapara sub-district in southern
Patuakhali district yesterday.
The attackers hurled brickbats and stones at his motorcade
as he was going to Rahmatpur to
address a rally in favour of BNPsupported mayoral candidate
Haji Humayun Shikder. Seven
people, including the BNP leader’s wife Suraiya Akter Chowd-
hury and two journalists, were
injured in the attack.
The attackers also vandalised
six microbuses of the motorcade. Altaf Hossain Chowdhury
escaped unhurt.
Additional police were deployed to avert further trouble in
the area.
Peruvian tourist
beaten, robbed
A Peruvian tourist, Jerry
Victor, 31, has been admitted
to a hospital after a group of
unidentified men beat him up
severely before taking away his
personal effects in Barisal city of
Bangladesh.
The victim is a businessman and
a resident of Peruvian capital of
Lima, police said.
He was left unconscious in
Charkawa area on the bank of
Kirtankhola river opposite to
Barisal port from where locals
took him to the hospital.
Shah Sab, sub-inspector of
Bandar police station, said
primarily they learnt that the
victim entered Bangladesh
through Indian border with a
tourist visa 19 days ago.
He reached Barisal by waterways
to visit a friend in Sharshi.
However, the group targeted him
at the ship and assured taking
him to his friend’s house.
They took him to Charkawa, beat
him up, and looted all valuables
including bag, money, travel
documents, passport and left him
unconscious on the road.
Shamim Ahmed, attending
physician of the hospital,
said the patient’s condition is
improving.
Bangladesh is preparing to flag
off a year-long celebration for
attracting tourists on January 1
but law and order situation might
shatter the plan, feared a private
tour operator.
US urged to grant asylum India-Bangladesh
to Bangladesh bloggers
border talks begin
Reuters
Washington
A
coalition of human rights
groups has called on the
United States to grant
temporary visas to secular writers from Bangladesh after a series of bloody attacks by Islamist
militants.
Five bloggers and a publisher
were killed by Islamists in Bangladesh this year, including an
American citizen of Bangladeshi
origin. The rights groups, led by
the PEN American Center, which
advocates freedom of expression,
on Monday said at least four
others had been attacked.
In a letter to US Secretary
of State John Kerry, the eight
groups, including Freedom
House, Human Rights Watch
and Reporters Without Borders,
said the writers were in “urgent
danger.”
Karin
Deutsch
Karlekar,
PEN’s director of free expression programmes, said dozens of
Bangladeshi writers were living
in hiding and seeking “protections their own government is
unwilling or unable to provide.”
“Bloggers and writers in Bangladesh have nowhere left to turn,
as they face both death threats
by extremist groups and fear of
arrest on charges of blasphemy
by government officials seeking
to appease religious authorities,”
she said in a statement.
Suzanne Nossel, executive
director of PEN America, said
the writers were “terrified,” and
should be allowed to enter the
United States under a system
known as humanitarian parole,
which grants visas to individuals
at risk who would otherwise be
inadmissible.
“Having championed global
efforts to defend Internet freedom and fend off threats to religious liberty, the United States
should take the lead to save the
lives of these bloggers who face
the very real risk of being murdered for the crime of expressing
their views online,” Nossel said.
Bonfire
IANS
New Delhi
T
he annual director general-level talks between
India’s Border Security Force (BSF) and the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB)
started yesterday, an official
statement said.
The six-day talks will be held
in Bangladesh capital Dhaka
between December 22 and 27.
A 20-member BSF delegation
will take part in the talks.
“The bi-annual DG-level
talks between BSF chief D K
Pathak and BGB head Major General Aziz Ahmed will
start from December 22,” the
statement said.
“Issues like trans-border
crimes, smuggling of fake Indian
currency notes, activities of Indian insurgent groups based in
Bangladesh, prevention of illegal
migration and trafficking of wom-
en and children will be raised in
the talks,” the statement said.
The meeting will also deliberate on the co-ordinated
border
management
plan
(CBMP) and various confidence
building measures.
The Indian border delegation, including officials from
the Union home ministry and
other border enforcement
agencies, is expected to discuss
measures to further enhance
security along the border and
brief the BGB about measures
put in place to completely stop
instances of cattle smuggling
and other illegal substances
across the border.
Union Home Minister Rajnath
Singh, during BSF’s 50th Raising
Day on December 1 in New Delhi,
had urged the border guarding
force to ensure a total clampdown
on cross-border animal smuggling along this 4,096km-long
porous and difficult terrain dotted by hilly and riverine areas.
The BGB, sources said, is
expected to raise the issue of
bringing about a complete halt
on border killing incidents and
suggest enforcement of some
strict security protocols by both
the sides to achieve this goal.
“A host of other issues related to activities of Indian insurgent groups suspected to be
operating from the other side,
smuggling of fake Indian currency, drugs and other banned
items will be discussed. Some
new measures to enhance operational efficiency between the
two sides will also be discussed
by the two sides,” they said.
BSF and BGB are also expected to firm up plans for holding
the first-ever joint exercise between the two sides in the Sunderbans in West Bengal next
month, they said.
The last time the two sides
met was in August this year
when BGB travelled to India for
the talks.
Man held for smuggling gold bars
Aisha Gani, GNS
Colombo
S
Slum dwellers in Dhaka burn a fire to keep themselves warm as a mild cold wave swept across the northern part of Bangladesh, bringing
the temperature down several notches yesterday.
ri Lankan authorities
have arrested a man at
an airport in Colombo
for allegedly trying to smuggle
gold bars hidden in his rectum.
Officers at Bandaranaike international airport had noticed
he was walking suspiciously, a
spokesman said. Gold weighing 400g, worth about 2mn Sri
Lankan rupees ($14,000), was
found hidden inside the suspect’s rectal cavity, a customs
spokesman told the BBC.
The 42-year-old suspect
Madhesis vow more charter protests
AFP
Kathmandu
E
thnic minority protesters
in Nepal vowed yesterday
to continue their border
blockade over a new constitution, rejecting an “incomplete”
government proposal designed
to end the impasse, and dashing
hopes of resolving a monthslong political crisis.
More than 50 people have
been killed in clashes between
police and people protesting
against the Himalayan nation’s
new charter, which was introduced in September after a
devastating earthquake pushed
warring political parties to
reach an agreement.
Demonstrators from the
Madhesi ethnic minority, mainly from Nepal’s southern plains,
have been blockading the main
Birgunj border crossing with
India, saying the constitution
and its federal design leaves
them politically marginalised.
The protesters want lawmakers to amend the country’s
internal borders laid out in the
constitution which they say will
leave them under-represented
in the national parliament.
In a bid to bring the United
Democratic Madhesi Front
(UDMF) - an alliance of protesting parties -on board, the
government on Monday said it
had agreed to support a constitutional amendment bill that
would increase the commu-
nity’s presence in government
bodies through proportional
representation.
“We cannot withdraw
our protests just on the
basis of such a proposal.
The government needs
to settle these issues
with us first”
The government also announced it would revise the
borders through a “political mechanism”, which would
study the issue and submit
recommendations within three
months.
But the UDMF yesterday dismissed the proposal, calling it
“incomplete” and “unclear”.
“The protests will continue
as they are until... the federal
demarcation is corrected,” the
UDMF said in a statement.
Sarbendra Nath Shukla of
the Tarai Madhesh Democratic Party said: “The government’s proposal is incomplete and does not address our
demands.”
Shukla added: “We cannot
withdraw our protests just on
the basis of such a proposal.
The government needs to settle
these issues with us first.”
Landlocked Nepal is heavily dependent on India for fuel
and other supplies, but little
cargo has crossed the border
since the protests broke out,
prompting Kathmandu to accuse New Delhi—which has
criticised the new constitu-
tion—of imposing an “unofficial blockade”.
New Delhi has denied the
charge and urged Nepal to hold
talks with the Madhesis, who
share close cultural, linguistic
and family links with Indians
living across the border.
India has welcomed the
Nepali government’s latest
proposal, hailing the move as
a “positive step that (will) help
create the basis for a resolution of the current impasse in
Nepal”.
The constitution was meant
to end years of inequality and
cement peace, marking the final stage in a peace process that
began when Maoist rebels laid
down their arms in 2006 after a
decade-long insurgency.
claimed in custody that he
worked for a Sri Lankan government ministry, according
to Sri Lankan news website the
Nation.
The latest apparent smuggling attempt follows a series of
other incidents this year where
smugglers have concealed gold
in their bodies. Officials said
more than 70 people have been
arrested this year for smuggling gold in Sri Lanka.
Smugglers typically buy gold
from places where the precious
metal is relatively cheap and
where there are fewer trade restrictions, such as from Dubai
and Singapore, aiming to sell
it on in India – the largest gold
consumer in the world. The import duty for gold in India is high:
currently 10% for a 100g bar.
Overall consumption was at
642 tonnes in India this year.
Chinese consumption stood
at 579 tonnes, according to the
Thomson Reuters GMFS gold
survey.
Earlier this year Indian police
said they had made the single
biggest seizure of gold smuggled into the country after arresting six people attempting
to leave an airport with 60kg of
the metal flown in from Dubai.
In India, smugglers risk a jail
term of up to seven years.
Building homes
Men work to break stones to build houses after the earthquake
earlier this year in Solukhumbu District, also known as the
Everest region.
26
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
COMMENT
Chairman: Abdullah bin Khalifa al-Attiyah
Editor-in-Chief : Darwish S Ahmed
Production Editor: C P Ravindran
P.O.Box 2888
Doha, Qatar
[email protected]
Telephone 44350478 (news),
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GULF TIMES
Between life-death:
profiteering blocks
access to drugs
A biotech stock short-seller and drug market
profiteer acquires the right of a decades-old lifesaving drug and jacks up its price by 5,500% in just
a few months! Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical
CEO who was arrested on securities fraud charges
last week, may have made drug price increases
notorious in the US. But his strategy of finding an
old drug, raising its price, and taking the profit is
increasingly common among a new breed of mainly US
drugmakers.
Despising a business model dependent on expensive
research and development, companies like Shkreli’s
Turing Pharmaceuticals, Valeant Pharmaceuticals
International, Rodelis Therapeutics and others have
taken advantage of loopholes in the US healthcare
system. Old drugs can be sold at much higher prices
if the owner is willing to push the boundaries in the
market. Turing took Daraprim, a potentially lifesaving treatment that first came on the market back in
1953 for some children and people with HIV, and raised
the price to $750 a pill from just $13.50.
“Shkreli has become the Wolf of Pharma Street
- he’s basically come to represent everything that
was bad and wrong with pharma,” said Art Caplan,
a medical ethicist at New York University. “He’s
not doing anything in terms of prices that other
companies haven’t
done.”
Like Shkreli, Valeant
chief executive officer
Mike Pearson has
excelled at finding
cheap drugs, boosting
their price and reaping
the windfall. The
company took two
heart drugs, Nitropress
and Isuprel, and raised their prices by 212% and 525%,
respectively. Rodelis boosted a tuberculosis treatment
to $360 a pill from $20.
The drug industry’s lobby group, Pharmaceutical
Research and Manufacturers of America, said in
September that Turing doesn’t represent its values.
Yet price increases are common across the industry,
from big players such as Pfizer and Merck to generic
drugmakers. In October a price survey of more than
21,000 generic drugs for Bloomberg News found that
more than 3,500 have doubled or more since late 2007,
ranging from basic chemotherapy medicines to old
antibiotics.
The Big Pharma, by some estimates, spends up to
$3bn to take a costly drug to the prescription table.
And to be fair enough, market equations can mostly
account for the quest of the industry to protect its
bottom line and the interest of the investors. But the
Turing scandal has shown just how vulnerable drug
pricing is to the rent-seeking (increasing profits not by
adding any real value for customers, but by exploiting
loopholes) designs in the drugs industry.
There’s an argument that higher drug prices in the
US reflect the cost premium for innovation. But in
many cases – Turing is an egregious example - higher
prices do not explain investments in R&D.
When profiteering stands between life and death, the
drugs industry loses its credibility and moral standing.
Shkreli, for sure, is being reviled for cold-blooded greed
and callous indifference. The real problem, however, is
not the man but the system that has let him thrive.
Big Pharma
spends $3bn
to take a costly
drug to the
prescription
table
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Political row may become a
humanitarian crisis in Nepal
By Jared Ferrie
Phnom Penh
E
ight months after a huge
earthquake in Nepal killed
almost 9,000 people
and caused widespread
devastation, an import-crippling
border blockade provoked by a
political dispute has sent prices
skyrocketing and is stalling efforts to
rebuild. If left unresolved, hundreds of
thousands of quake survivors, many
of them still living without proper
shelter, could suffer shortages this
winter.
Nepal’s parliament is set to begin
debating amendments to a new and
controversial constitution that could
help resolve tensions and head off a
humanitarian crisis.
After almost 10 years of political
deadlock that followed a decadelong civil war, the constitution was
pushed through quickly in the wake
of the two earthquakes in April and
May this year. The constitution was
approved on September 20 – and it
was hoped that doing so would free
up the government to concentrate on
reconstruction – but it was met with
resistance from the start.
Members of the ethnic Madhesi
and Tharu minorities oppose the
constitution. Among other points,
they say the size and shape of the
seven new provinces created will
reduce their political representation.
The Madhesi live in the lowlands
of mostly-mountainous Nepal, on
the Terai plains, as well as across
the border in India. Many of them
have – with quiet backing from
Delhi – shown their displeasure with
the constitution by mounting mass
protests that have blocked goods
coming into Nepal. India is by far
the largest source of imports to the
landlocked nation, and the blockade
has crippled the economy and severely
impaired efforts to rebuild since the
earthquakes.
Nepal’s parliament has tabled a bill
that could amend the constitution
to change the electoral make-up and
the representation of various groups
in political bodies. But it’s unclear if
the amendments – even if they were
made – would be enough satisfy the
protestors. The United Democratic
Madhesi Front, which has been
leading the protest movement and
negotiating with the government, says
the language of the bill is too vague
and needs to be changed.
“If it passed through parliament
as is, it will not address the demands
of the movement,” Upendra Yadaf,
a UDMF leader, told IRIN over the
phone from the Nepali capital,
Kathmandu.
Using near identical language in
separate statements, major donors
from Germany, Britain and South
Korea, as well as UN agencies and UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, have
urged “all sides to address restrictions
on imports”.
So far, negotiations between the
government and the UDMF have come
to naught and tensions remain high.
More than 40 people have been killed
Distributing relief supplies to remote districts will become even harder as snow blocks off mountain passes.
since the protests began, including
one who was shot by police on Sunday.
As civil unrest continues on the
border, and discussions proceed in
Kathmandu, the situation for most
people in the country is only getting
worse.
“WFP urges all sides to once again
allow the free flow of food items across
the border to ensure that Nepalis,
especially those who struggle on a
day-to-day basis to feed their families
are not the ones who bear the burden
of this protracted political standoff,”
Seetashma Thapa, of the World Food
Programme in Nepal, said.
Even as Nepal struggles to rebuild
after the quakes that destroyed or
damaged almost a million homes, aid
agencies warn of another looming
humanitarian crisis. Fuel shortages are
preventing shipments of emergency
supplies like blankets and tarpaulins
to remote communities, and time is
running short, as winter snows begin
to block access roads and trails.
Cooking gas has shot up in price by
as much as 630% since the blockade
began, while the cost of rice has
doubled and commodities like cooking
gas and lentils have risen sharply
as well, according to WFP. The fuel
shortage has caused “severe delays” in
the organisation’s ability to get food to
more than 224,000 people.
Unicef has warned that more than
3mn children under the age of five
are in danger of death or disease
this winter if the bottleneck on
imports continues. The government
has already run out of tuberculosis
vaccines, it said, while stocks of other
vaccines and antibiotics are critically
low.
The organisation’s chief of health in
Nepal, Doctor Hendrikus Raaijmakers,
said that two thirds of medicines are
out of stock at primary healthcare
facilities throughout the country, and
Unicef plans to fly in $1.5mn worth
of antibiotics and other drugs. “The
health facilities, regional medical
stores and pharmacies warn of
dire impact if the current situation
continues for a month or more,” he
said.
It’s unclear how or when the border
unrest will abate, allowing goods to
begin flowing freely again. A polarised
constitutional debate continues,
and protests periodically explode in
violence with different sides blaming
each other.
On Sunday, police shot and killed
one protester in the town of Gaur,
according to both the government and
the UDMF.
That is about the only fact they
agree on.
Yadaf of the UDMF said the protests
were peaceful and that people only
started throwing stones after police
fired into the crowd to disperse them.
He said a student protestor was shot
and injured as he was fleeing and was
subsequently killed by police. Yadaf
said the killing was only the latest in a
string of violent abuses of civilians by
the security forces.
Laxmi Prasad Dhakel, spokesman
for the Home Affairs Ministry, accused
protesters of attacking a police station.
“They have been throwing petrol bombs
and stones,” he said. “Police were forced
to fire, and at that moment a protestor
was shot and he died.”
Dhakel dismissed reports by human
rights organisations that implicate
security forces in abuses and killings,
saying that police have only responded
with violence when attacked.
In a October 16 report, Human
Rights Watch documented the killing
of 25 people between August 24 and
September 11 during protests against
the constitution that began before it
was approved by parliament. Nine of
those killed were police officers, eight
of whom were encircled by a mob on
August 24 and “viciously attacked”
with homemade weapons.
The police have reacted equally
viciously, according to Human Rights
Watch, which documented the
shooting deaths of 15 people, including
six who witnesses said were not taking
part in protests. Witnesses said they
saw police kill protesters who were
lying on the ground after being shot.
One 14-year-old victim was dragged
from some bushes where he had been
hiding and shot point blank in the
face, according to the report.
Human Rights Watch noted that
while opinions differ on whether
the new constitution is inclusive
enough, grievances held by the
protesters are underscored by: “a
longstanding history of discrimination
by successive governments, which
remains dominated by traditional
social elites from Nepal’s hilly regions,
against marginalised groups including
Madhesis and Tharus.”
Nepali politicians have accused
India of backing the protests and
imposing a blockade along the
border. Indian officials have sent
mixed messages, denying any official
blockade but warning that Nepal
must resolve the political crisis, which
would allow goods to move again.
Madhesis live in both countries
and analysts say India is concerned
that the protest movement, now in
its fourth month, could spiral out of
control and destabilise communities
within its own borders.
“If you don’t address the moderate
democratic demands, there is a danger
of the movement intensifying,” said
Prashant Jha, an editor at the Delhibased Hindustan Times newspaper
who has spent time on the border.
“The movement could become
secessionist,” he said. “It’s a scenario
that India wants to prevent at all costs.”
It’s impossible to know exactly
what India is hoping to achieve by at
least tacitly backing the blockade, the
Nepali Times newspaper observed in
an editorial this week. But the paper
also accused the Nepali government
of shifting the blame for the crisis
to India while failing to address the
issues being raised by the Madhesi
and Tharu as it fast-tracked the
constitution.
The Nepali Times listed a litany
of government failures, including
political wrangling that has delayed
the formation of a Reconstruction
Authority to oversee efforts to rebuild
after the earthquakes. The body would
allow the government to access more
than $4bn that international donors
have pledged.
“We don’t really need India to wreck
our country,” the editorial concluded.
“Nepal’s politicians are doing it just
fine.” - IRIN
China’s planning addiction
By Koichi Hamada
Tokyo
I
n early September, I visited China
for the first time in nearly 10
years. With so much time having
passed since my last visit, it was
easy to see where China has prospered
– and where it continues to struggle.
China’s major cities embody
the extraordinary success of the
development policies that Deng
Xiaoping initiated in the 1980s. They
are home to most of the hundreds of
millions of Chinese who have been
lifted out of extreme poverty in just a
few decades. Beijing and Shanghai are
almost overwhelming in their scale
and energy, lined with shimmering
skyscrapers, adorned with bright neon
lights, and teeming with increasingly
cosmopolitan citizens.
Standing on the streets of one of
these vibrant cities, one gains a deeper
appreciation of recent data on China’s
rising domestic consumption. People
are using the latest technologies
and toting shopping bags bearing
the names of international luxury
brands. Their rising prosperity is also
reflected in the retail sectors of Tokyo
and Seoul, where increasingly wealthy
Chinese tourists engage in “binge
shopping.”
But the impression I had of a
modern, capitalist economy was soon
tarnished by an improperly working
phone in a first-class Beijing hotel.
An American friend suspected that
it was tapped, probably because of
my role as an adviser to the Japanese
government.
Such claims are, of course, difficult
to confirm, to say the least. What is
not open to dispute is that a week
after my trip ended, the number of
the credit card that I had used for
shopping in Beijing was used to make
purchases at a Chinese supermarket
in New York City. While identity theft
is by no means exclusively a Chinese
problem, such experiences create
the impression that technological
modernisation in China may be
outpacing regulation and datasecurity infrastructure.
Then there is the air quality. This
year, Beijing has experienced repeated
bouts of severe air pollution, with
two smog “red alerts” having been
issued this month. When I visited
Beijing in 2005, immediately after
the commemorations of the 60th
anniversary of the end of World War
II, the sky was clear.
Of course, air pollution was already
a problem for China a decade ago.
But, before the commemorations,
the government had prohibited many
cars from driving (based on their
licence-plate numbers), stopped
selected factories from operating,
and forced some firms to move out of
the city temporarily. This approach –
which could be pursued only within
a centrally planned economy like
China’s – provided temporary relief.
But ultimately it did little good; in
fact, by obscuring the problem, it
might have delayed effective action.
This was hardly the first or only
time that China has used central
planning to implement short-term
solutions that fail to bring about
– or, in some cases, even impede –
long-term progress. For example,
this summer’s stock-market crash
was widely viewed as a natural
correction, because equity prices
– driven largely by government
interventions – had risen over
the previous year far above what
economic fundamentals merited.
Nonetheless, when prices collapsed,
the government moved fast,
suspending trading of a substantial
number of stocks and pursuing pricekeeping operations that resembled
those pursued by Japan in the 1990s.
In this manner, China’s government
managed to stop a rout, seemingly
reinforcing the Marxist view that
economic and financial crises do
not occur in controlled economies.
Indeed, China’s leaders seem
convinced that price-keeping
operations amount to an effective
mechanism for manipulating stock
prices in whatever way they see fit. As
an adviser to the Chinese government
said on my recent trip, “movements
in the stock-price index are totally
unrelated to the real state of the
economy.”
What Chinese policymakers
don’t seem to recognise is that such
interventions carry serious long-term
costs. Few want to invest in a market
where the government can change the
rules at any moment.
China’s recent intervention
in the currency market also sent
mixed signals. For years, the
authorities tended to support the
renminbi, as they pursued renminbi
internationalisation – an effort that
culminated in the International
Monetary Fund’s recent decision to
add the renminbi to the basket of
currencies that compose its reserve
asset, so-called Special Drawing
Rights.
Not long after the stock-market
crash, however, the authorities
allowed the currency to depreciate.
China should continue along
this path, pursuing the kind of
monetary-policy approach – aimed
at securing the right combination
of prices and employment – that
prevails in free-market economies.
Continued currency depreciation
would provide a much-needed
boost to the slowing economy, just
as depreciation of the yen through
Abenomics has helped to lift Japan
out of a protracted recession.
As 2015 closes, China’s leaders
find themselves at a crossroads. They
must decide whether to continue
trying to control the economy or to
follow through on their promise to
build a genuinely market-oriented
system. For China’s sake, and that of
its neighbours, one hopes they stick
to the free-market plan. - Project
Syndicate
zKoichi Hamada, Special Economic
Adviser to Japanese Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe, is Professor Emeritus of
Economics at Yale University and at the
University of Tokyo.
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
27
COMMENT
Political effects of financial crises
Politics seems set to remain a
difficult trade for some time.
And the bankers and
financiers will remain in the
sin bin for a while
By Howard Davies
London
I
may not be the only finance
professor who, when setting
essay topics for his or her
students, has resorted to a
question along the following lines:
“In your view, was the global financial
crisis caused primarily by too much
government intervention in financial
markets, or by too little?” When
confronted with this either/or
question, my most recent class split
three ways.
Roughly a third, mesmerised by the
meretricious appeal of the Efficient
Market Hypothesis, argued that
governments were the original sinners.
Their ill-conceived interventions
– notably the US-backed mortgage
underwriters Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac, as well as the Community
Reinvestment Act – distorted market
incentives. Some even embraced the
argument of the US libertarian Ron
Paul, blaming the very existence of
the Federal Reserve as a lender of last
resort.
Another third, at the opposite end of
the political spectrum, saw former Fed
Chairman Alan Greenspan as the villain.
It was Greenspan’s notorious reluctance
to intervene in financial markets, even
when leverage was growing dramatically
and asset prices seemed to have lost
touch with reality, that created the
problem. More broadly, Western
governments, with their light-touch
approach to regulation, allowed markets
to career out of control in the early years
of this century.
The remaining third tried to have it
both ways, arguing that governments
intervened too much in some areas,
and too little in others. Avoiding the
question as put is not a sound testtaking strategy; but the students may
have been onto something.
Now that the crisis is seven years
behind us, how have governments and
voters in Europe and North America
answered this important question?
Have they shown, by their actions,
that they think financial markets
need tighter controls or that, on the
contrary, the state should repudiate
bailouts and leave financial firms to
face the full consequences of their
own mistakes?
From their rhetoric and regulatory
policies, it would appear that most
governments have ended up in the
third, fence-sitting camp. Yes, they
have implemented a plethora of
detailed controls, scrutinising banks’
books with unprecedented intensity
and insisting on approving cash
distributions, the appointment of key
directors, and even job descriptions
for board members.
But they have ruled out any future
government or central-bank support
for ailing financial institutions. Banks
must now produce “living wills”
showing how they can be wound down
without the authorities’ support. The
government will wash its hands of
them if they run into trouble: the era
of “too big to fail” is over.
Perhaps this two-track approach
was inevitable, though it would be
good to know the desired end-point. Is
it a system in which market discipline
again dominates, or will regulators sit
on the shoulders of management for
the foreseeable future?
But what have voters concluded? In
the first wave of post-crisis elections,
the message was clear in one sense,
and clouded in another. Whichever
government was in power when
the crisis hit, whether left or right,
was booted out and replaced by a
government of the opposite political
persuasion.
That was not universally true
– see Germany’s Angela Merkel
– but it certainly was true in the
US, the United Kingdom, France,
and elsewhere. France moved from
right to left, and the UK went from
left to right. But voters’ verdict on
their governments was more or less
identical: things went wrong on your
watch, so out you go.
But now we can see a more
consistent trend developing. Three
German economists, Manuel Funke,
Moritz Schularik, and Christoph
Trebesch, have just produced a
fascinating assessment based on
more than 800 elections in Western
countries over the last 150 years, the
results of which they mapped against
100 financial crises. Their headline
conclusion is stark: “politics takes
a hard right turn following financial
crises. On average, far-right votes
increase by about a third in the five
years following systemic banking
distress.”
The Great Depression of the 1930s,
which followed the Wall Street crash
of 1929, is the most obvious and
Patriotism in the age of globalisation
By Bill Emmott
London
T
he new fault line in politics,
according to Marine Le
Pen, leader of France’s
far-right National Front,
is between globalists and patriots.
It is an argument similar to those
being made by eurosceptics in the
United Kingdom and Republican
presidential candidate Donald
Trump in the United States. It is,
however, as false as it is dangerous.
Judging by the results of the second
and final round of France’s regional
elections on December 13, it is also an
argument that French voters, at least,
roundly rejected. They cast 73% of
their ballots for the National Front’s
rivals, depriving the party of even a
single victory.
Le Pen accused the mainstream
parties of ganging up on her,
describing their co-operation as a
denial of democracy. Her argument
is, of course, a classic example of
sour grapes; the entire point of a
two-round voting system is to force
parties and their supporters to seek
a consensus and form partnerships.
Unless and until the National Front
finds a way to win allies, it will not
achieve an electoral breakthrough.
(The same is likely to prove true about
Trump.)
That is not to say that Le Pen’s claim
– that those who vote for her party
are the only true patriots – should be
casually dismissed. She has homed
in on a powerful message, one with
the potential to attract supporters
from other parties. That’s why it
must be rebutted, both in France and
elsewhere. The assumption underlying
such nationalist bombast – that a
country’s interests are better served
by being closed rather than open – is
extremely dangerous.
The belief that openness is treason
and closure is patriotic is a rejection
of the entire post-1945 framework of
politics and policy in the developed
world. It is an attempt to turn back
the clock to the interwar period,
when the focus was on closing off:
imposing onerous trade restrictions
and persecuting or expelling minority
groups. This was true even in the
United States, which enacted the most
restrictive immigration laws since the
country’s founding.
The postwar years marked a
complete change of direction, as
countries opened up, allowing freer
flows of trade, capital, ideas, and
people. This process became known
as globalisation only after China and
India joined in during the 1980s,
but it had started long before. It was
globalisation, after all, that created
what in France became known as Les
Trente Glorieuses – the 30 glorious
years of rapidly rising living standards
following the end of WWII.
Le Pen and her fellow populists
claim that globalisation was either an
act of foolish generosity that helped
the rest of the world at the expense
of the nation, or a phenomenon that
benefited only the elites and not
ordinary people. For them, patriotism
means being harder-headed about
protecting the national interest and
adopting more democratic policies
that help the working masses, not jetsetting fat cats.
The second part of this argument –
that the interests of ordinary people
have been subordinated to those of the
elite – must be heard and responded
to. A democracy in which a majority
feels neglected or exploited is not
sustainable. Either the government or
the entire system will be overturned.
Elected officials clearly need to
find answers to high unemployment
and declining living standards. What
mainstream parties need to be make
clear, however, is that the answers to
those problems do not lie in closing
borders or minds. There is no example,
anywhere in history, of a society or an
economy that has prospered over the
long term by rejecting globalism.
Moreover, though openness may
not guarantee prosperity, it has
always been a prerequisite for growth.
To be sure, the optimal amount
of openness is a matter of debate.
But the bigger, more productive
arguments are about how to shape
education, labour markets, scientific
research, and social-welfare policies
in order to help societies adapt to the
world around them. The patriotic
choice – the national interest – has
always consisted in crafting domestic
policies that best take advantage of
globalisation.
For mainstream parties in France,
the Conservatives in the UK, and
Trump’s more internationally minded
Republican rivals in the US, there is
nothing to be gained from copying
the arguments of their extremist
counterparts. Doing so would yield
crucial ground in the political battle
over how best to serve the country
and its people. Mainstream parties
must reclaim the mantle of patriotism
and redefine the national interest
accordingly. In today’s world, the
national interest lies in managing
openness – not in throwing it away. –
Project Syndicate
worrying example that comes to mind,
but the trend can be observed even in
the Scandinavian countries, following
banking crises there in the early
1990s. So seeking to explain, say, the
rise of the National Front in France in
terms of President François Hollande’s
personal and political unpopularity is
not sensible. There are greater forces
at work than his exotic private life and
inability to connect with voters.
The second major conclusion that
Funke, Schularik, and Trebesch draw
is that governing becomes harder
after financial crises, for two reasons.
The rise of the far right lies alongside
a political landscape that is typically
fragmented, with more parties, and
a lower share of the vote going to the
governing party, whether of the left or
the right. So decisive legislative action
becomes more challenging.
At the same time, a surge of extraparliamentary mobilisation occurs:
more and longer strikes and more
and larger demonstrations. Control
of the streets by government is not as
secure. The average number of antigovernment demonstrations triples,
the frequency of violent riots doubles,
and general strikes increase by at least
a third. Greece has boosted those
numbers recently.
The only comforting conclusion
that the three economists reach is
that these effects gradually peter
out. The data tell us that after five
years, the worst is over. That does not
seem to be the way things are moving
now in Europe, if we look at France’s
recent election scare, not to mention
Finland and Poland, where right-wing
populists have now come to power.
Maybe the answer is that the clock
starts ticking on the five years when
the crisis is fully over, which is not yet
true in Europe.
So politics seems set to remain a
difficult trade for some time. And
the bankers and financiers who are
widely blamed for the crisis will
remain in the sin bin for a while
yet, until voters’ expectations of
economic and financial stability are
more consistently satisfied. - Project
Syndicate
zHoward Davies, the first chairman
of the United Kingdom’s Financial
Services Authority (1997-2003),
is Chairman of the Royal Bank of
Scotland. He was Director of the
London School of Economics (200311) and served as Deputy Governor of
the Bank of England and DirectorGeneral of the Confederation of British
Industry.
Weather report
Three-day forecast
TODAY
High: 24 C
Low : 17 C
Slight dust with some scattered
clouds
THURSDAY
High: 24 C
Low : 20 C
M Sunny
FRIDAY
High: 23 C
Low : 18 C
Showers
Fishermen’s forecast
OFFSHORE DOHA
Wind: NW-NE 05-15 KT
Waves: 3-5 Feet
INSHORE DOHA
Wind: NW-NE 05-15 KT
Waves: 1-3 Feet
Around the region
Abu Dhabi
Baghdad
Dubai
Kuwait City
Manama
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Tehran
Weather
today
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M Sunny
Sunny
Rain
P Cloudy
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P Cloudy
Sunny
Max/min
28/16
16/06
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20/12
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Weather
tomorrow
M Sunny
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M Sunny
Rain
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Showers
M Cloudy
Max/min
29/18
16/05
28/20
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27/19
20/12
08/01
Weather
tomorrow
Sunny
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P Cloudy
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P Cloudy
M Sunny
P Cloudy
Cloudy
P Cloudy
P Cloudy
Sunny
Rain
P Cloudy
Cloudy
Sunny
S Showers
Showers
P Cloudy
P Cloudy
T Storms
P Cloudy
Rain
Max/min
19/08
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07/-3
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14/06
zBill Emmott is a former editor-inchief of The Economist.
Live issues
Diabetes: overtesting reaps negative rewards
Tribune News Service
Rochester, Minnesota
I
n a study released online
earlier this month in The BMJ,
researchers from Mayo Clinic
report a national trend toward
overtesting glycated hemoglobin
(HbA1C) levels in adult patients with
Type 2 diabetes.
Overtesting causes redundancy
and waste, says the study team,
adding unnecessary costs and time
burden for patients and providers. In
addition, excessive testing can result
in overtreatment with hypoglycemic
drugs, adding additional cost and
potential health complications.
Type 2 diabetes monitoring and
treatment protocols are not well
defined by professional societies
and regulatory bodies. While lower
thresholds of testing frequencies often
are discussed, the upper boundaries
are rarely mentioned. Yet, most agree
that for adult patients who are not
using insulin, have stable glycemic
control within the recommended
targets and have no history of severe
hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia,
checking once or twice a year should
suffice. Yet, in practice, there is a
much higher prevalence of excess
testing.
“Our findings are concerning,
especially as we focus more on
improving the value of care we deliver
to our patients - not only ensuring
maximal benefit, but also being
mindful of waste, patient burden
and health care costs,” says Rozalina
McCoy, MD, a Mayo Clinic primary
care physician and endocrinologist,
and the study’s lead investigator. “As
providers, we must be ever vigilant
to provide the right testing and
treatment to our patients at the right
times - both for their well-being
and to ensure the best value in the
healthcare we provide.”
The investigators believe this study
provides definitive evidence of such
excess testing, examining a national
cohort of 31,545 nonpregnant adults
with controlled noninsulin-treated
Type 2 diabetes. Approximately 55%
of patients in this cohort achieved
and maintained the recommended
less than 7% HbA1C level and were
tested three or four times a year. Six
per cent were tested five or more
times. The patient cohort examined
was derived from the OptumLabs
Data Warehouse (OLDW) using deidentified administrative, pharmacy
and laboratory data from 2001 to 2011.
McCoy notes that there are a
number of potential reasons for
frequent testing - some of which are
failings in the healthcare system.
“Potential reasons for more
frequent testing include clinical
uncertainty; misunderstanding of
the nature of the test - that is, not
realising that HbA1C represents a
three-month average of glycemic
control; or a desire for diagnostic and
management thoroughness,” she says.
“Other times, it may be the result
of fragmentation of care (more than
one unconnected provider); the need
to fulfil regulatory demands, such
as public reporting of performance
metrics; or internal tracking of
performance.
“Because our culture often thinks
that more is better,” she says that
patients and providers may favour
additional testing due to a desire for
comprehensive care.
The researchers found that
excessive testing increased the
odds of overtreatment with one or
more drugs, despite normal HbA1C
levels. They also found that among
patients receiving bundled testing
(i.e., cholesterol, creatinine and
HbA1C tests in the same day), rates of
overtesting were lower.
“My colleagues and I recognise we
still have work to do,” says McCoy,
“And, we hope that these findings
will help inform decision-making
for healthcare providers and patients
everywhere.”
This research is a result of the
ongoing commitment of Mayo Clinic
to improve health and enhance the
way patients experience the delivery
of healthcare. Through the Mayo
Clinic Robert D. and Patricia E. Kern
Center for the Science of Health Care
Delivery and its collaborations across
Mayo and around the world, Mayo’s
vision is borne out.
Around the world
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Berlin
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Colombo
Dhaka
Hong Kong
Istanbul
Jakarta
Karachi
London
Manila
Moscow
New Delhi
New York
Paris
Sao Paulo
Seoul
Singapore
Sydney
Tokyo
Weather
today
Sunny
Sunny
P Cloudy
P Cloudy
M Sunny
Sunny
Sunny
Sunny
P Cloudy
P Cloudy
P Cloudy
Sunny
M Sunny
M Sunny
Cloudy
Sunny
Rain
P Cloudy
I T Storms
P Cloudy
T Storms
P Cloudy
Cloudy
Max/min
19/09
19/12
33/26
13/04
22/11
26/18
33/23
26/15
23/20
12/05
34/23
28/12
11/09
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05/05
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13/09
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11/-3
32/26
21/17
10/05
28
Gulf Times
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
QATAR
Dr al-Kuwari greeting a patient with a gift.
Dr al-Kuwari presenting a gift to a child.
A child riding a horse.
HMC marks
National Day
H
amad Medical Corporation (HMC) celebrated
Qatar National Day
(QND) throughout its hospitals
and departments, along with
staff, patients and their families.
Dr Hanan al-Kuwari, managing director, HMC, attended the
National Day celebrations at Al
Wakra Hospital (AWH), Bone
and Joint Centre, department of
transport and human resources
department.
Dr al-Kuwari said: “National
Day is an opportunity to renew
our loyalty, determination and
efforts to promote the country
and to support the process of
development and overall renaissance, especially in the light
of the tremendous achievements that have contributed to
strengthening the country’s position on both the regional and
the international stage.”
The department of transport
had set up a heritage tent to re-
ceive guests. National Day videos and songs were played and
folk dances performed on the
occasion.
At the Bone and Joint Centre, a traditional tent was set up
to welcome guests and visitors,
serving popular food and Arabic
coffee. Patriotic songs were sung
and Ardha dance was presented.
A tent was also erected on
the grounds of Al Wakra Hospital. Fun games were provided
for children with gifts and traditional food distributed to attendees. The events included
the presentation of videos and
patriotic songs and a marching band from the Emiri Guard
playing patriotic song.
All of HMC’s hospitals made
a significant effort to celebrate
the Qatar National Day with the
participation of all staff and patients by offering a number of
awareness activities and health
tips and information.
At the Women’s Hospital, a
traditional tent was set up in
the main entrance to welcome
guests and participants with
Arabic coffee. The hospital also
presented special gifts of car
seats to the first 33 children born
on the day.
Celebration events were also
held at the Rumailah Hospital,
Heart Hospital, National Centre
for Cancer Care and Research,
Enaya Continuing Care Centre
– Muaither 2 and HMC Medical
Education Centre.
Celebrations at Al Khor Hospital and Cuban Hospital included an Arabic tent to welcome visitors and participants
to the celebration. Arabian
coffee and traditional sweets
were served.
At Hamad Bin Khalifa Medical City, an event was held in
the central garden with the participation of staff and long-term
care patients.
Some of the HMC staff during the event.
A traditional performance at one of the HMC centres.
Some of the participants at one of the events.
Over 159,750 visit health tent at Darb Al Saai
H
A clinician conducting a health check on a visitor.
amad Medical Corporation (HMC) joined
the Supreme Council
of Health (SCH) and the Primary Health Care Corporation
(PHCC) in the Seha Tent activities held from December 18 to
20 at Darb Al Saai in celebration
of Qatar National Day. A total of 159,756 people visited the
health tent.
The presence of HMC in the
Darb Al Saai events offered the
visitors, especially families and
children, the opportunity to
learn about HMC’s healthcare
services as well as benefit from
the training and education initiatives provides for the general
public.
“A team of professionals
from HMC was present at the
health tent to provide free medical check-ups, including blood
Festive season boosts
sale of decorative items
pressure test, eye test, diabetes
and dental check-up. The team
also provided information on
maintaining a healthy diet and
lifestyle. HMC also held a variety of activities for the families
and children, providing an educational, entertaining and interactive experience,” said Aisha
al-Khulaifi, head of Corporate
Social Responsibility at HMC
and supervisor of HMC’s activities for this year’s celebrations.
Al-Khulaifi explained that the
activities organised for children
aimed at educating them on how
to do physical and sports exercises, provide tips on maintaining a healthy diet, and the value
of practicing good oral and body
hygiene.
HMC’s blood donation centre participated in the activities through a blood donation
campaign aimed at promoting
a culture of voluntary blood
donation in Qatar.
“We arranged an interactive programme and distributed
pamphlets, booklets and posters featuring the importance of
blood donation and its health
benefits. We familiarised visitors
with HMC’s blood transfusion
services, given that the Blood
Donation Centre is the principal
blood donor centre in Qatar and
is responsible for providing the
nation with safe and adequate
blood supplies,” said Siddiqa
al-Mahmoudi, medical director,
HMC’s Blood Donor Centre.
Al-Mahmoudi said 442 people donated blood during the
Darb Al Saai events, adding that
donation helped the blood bank
to maintain its stock.
A number of students from
Schoolchildren being briefed by Ambulance Service paramedic.
preparatory and intermediate
schools showed great interest
and attention during the staff ’s
explanation of the phlebotomy
process. The students learned
about the work of the blood do-
nor team and the latest technology used for blood transfusion
and phlebotomy at HMC, and
expressed a desire to become
voluntary blood donors in the
future.
Special event by Al Jaber Opticians
W
ith Christmas around
the corner, stores in
Doha are doing brisk
business as the demand for festive goodies and gifts peaks.
A wide variety of decorative items are on display at hypermarkets across the city and
business has been particularly
good over the past fortnight, say
sources.
The rush of shoppers looking for Christmas-related items
increases during the weekend,
when families visit hypermarkets and malls in large numbers.
Exclusive counters selling
products related to the festive
season could be found in many
hypermarkets. A number of the
items sold there are imported
from China.
The products on offer cater to
different budgets, say shop staff.
“We have trees starting from as
low as QR20 to QR299, depending upon the size and quality,”
said an employee of a popular shopping centre in Doha.
Al Jaber Opticians celebrated Qatar National Day with a special event recently. Al Jaber family members and employees participated
in the event.
Qatar attends social development co-operation meet
A Christmas counter at a store in Doha.
The outlet features an exclusive
Christmas counter on its first
floor.
Christmas trees are available
in a number of colours, such as
orange and red, this year in addition to the usual green.
Besides China, several items
are also imported from India, including stars and cakes.
“We are importing such cakes
to cater to the requirements of
our Indian customers,” said a
salesman at a city retail shop.
Sources said special toffees and
chocolates that are usually sold
only during the Christmas season
in European countries have been
entering the local market over the
past three-four years.
Qatar participated in the
second meeting of the working
team on co-operation in the
field of social development
between Gulf Co-operation
Council (GCC) and Jordan.
The meeting is being held in
Jordanian capital Amman.
The meeting reviewed social
development programmes
and activities for this year,
and discussed a proposal
by the General Secretariat
on the establishment of a
database for the exchange of
experiences and expertise in
the field of social development
between the GCC and Jordan.
It also discussed programmes
of field visits to learn about
Jordanian experience in
the juvenile centres and the
centres for the protection of
women from violence.
Qatar was represented at
the meeting by Salwa Salem
al-Obaidly, director, Family
Development Department at
the Ministry of Labour and
Social Affairs.
Forum on Housing and
Urban: Qatar has participated
in the First Arab Ministerial
Forum on Housing and Urban
Development and the 32nd
session of the Arab Ministers
of Housing and Construction
Council which concluded in
Cairo yesterday.
Qatar’s delegation was led by
HE the Minister of Labour and
Social Affairs Dr Abdullah bin
Saleh al-Khulaifi.
The forum, which coincided
with the 32nd session of the
Arab Ministers of Housing
and Construction Council
discussed innovative solutions
and mechanisms to face
current and future challenges
in the Arab world.
Community
house at
embassy
T
he monthly community house at the Indian
embassy will be held on
December 25 (Friday), according to an embassy statement.
It is scheduled from 5.30pm to
6.30pm.