Business | 21 Sport | 30 PM calls for more private sector role Josoor Institute launched [email protected]| [email protected]Editorial: 4455 7741 | Advertising: 4455 7837 / 4455 7780 www.thepeninsulaqatar.com Wednesday 11 December 2013 7 Safar 1435 - Volume 18 Number 5910 Price: QR2 CERTIFIED NEWSPAPER ISO 9001:2008 Project to map genetic code of citizens Sheikha Moza unveils Qatar Genome Injured boy’s mother to sue circus DOHA: The mother of the Qatari boy who was attacked by a leopard at a circus recently and remains hospitalised, has decided to press charges against the circus, its organis- ers and the owners of the venue for negligence and lack of safety measures. The mother has appointed a group of lawyers to prepare a law- suit, local Arabic daily Al Watan reported yesterday. Umm Khalid, the mother, said the circus had offered her com- pensation but she had declined it. “I want all of those who are responsible for the incident (the circus, its organisers and the owners of the venue) punished.” She said she would be petition- ing that the circus and its crew not be allowed to leave Doha until the case is decided. Umm Khalid said she usually didn’t take her child, Fahad, out, but on the fateful day his school- mates were going to the circus at Hyatt Plaza so she took him there. “We reached there at 6pm and the circus was to begin at 6.30. At the very entrance of the circus there was this enclosure where the leopard was.” It wasn’t a cage. There were iron railings around the animal and they weren’t high enough, she said. There was, however, a Russian woman trainer near the enclosure. Many children were touching the animal and taking pictures with it. “The leopard wasn’t reacting at all as though it were injected with anaesthetic.” Continued on page 8 THE PENINSULA DOHA: H H Sheikha Moza bint Nasser yesterday launched Qatar’s human genome project, a groundbreaking initiative to map the genetic code of citizens for better diagnoses and treat- ment of various diseases. She announced the project, Qatar Genome, while addressing the opening session of the first World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH 2013) at Qatar National Convention Centre. “As a result of the integration of scientific research and clinical realities, I am pleased to announce the project ‘Qatar Genome,’ a project that consists of a future road map for personalised medi- cine,’’ said Sheikha Moza. ‘Qatar Genome’ will be imple- mented in three phases: collecting samples, analysing them, and then working on tailored medicine. It will aim at understanding the dis- eases that affect Qataris. The human genome project internationally serves as a source of detailed information about the structure, organisation and func- tion of the complete set of human genes (genome). This informa- tion is considered the basic set of “instructions” for the development and function of a human being. Genome studies are moving from analysing the personal DNA code of individuals for research purposes to clinical applications such as treatments tailored to the genetic make-up of cancers. Understanding of genetics will also allow safer drug prescription, and more effective treatment of diseases and conditions that affect the patient. Some of the world’s most press- ing healthcare challenges, includ- ing obesity, mental health, and road traffic injuries, are the main focus of WISH 2013. “During this conference we aim to provide the ideal environ- ment for intellectual interchange of ideas and to benefit from our shared experiences in the search for comprehensive, pioneering solutions that cover the neces- sities of each specialty,’’ Sheikha Moza said. WISH 2013 has brought together more than 500 global health innovators, including heads of state, ministers, senior govern- ment officials, academics and influential business leaders. Over two days, these key figures will discuss practical, sustainable and innovative ways to address some of the big global health challenges. Continued on page 6 THE PENINSULA Emir attends GCC Summit The Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani with leaders of the other GCC countries during the annual GCC Summit in Kuwait yesterday. Addressing the summit, the Emir of Kuwait H H Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Jaber Al Sabah regretted the failure of the UN Security Council to address the Syrian conflict. Report on page 13 Antarctica spot coldest on Earth WASHINGTON: The coldest place on Earth is a high ridge on the East Antarctic Plateau where temperatures fell to a record minus 93.2 degrees Celsius on August 10, 2010, Nasa has said. The previous record was a bracing minus 53.6 degrees Celsius, set in 1983 at the Russian Vostok Research Station, also in East Antarctica, Nasa said. “We had a suspicion this Antarctic ridge was likely to be extremely cold, and colder than Vostok because it’s higher up the hill,” said Ted Scambos, lead scien- tist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. REUTERS Leaders praise Mandela SOWETO: There were presi- dents and prime ministers, tens of thousands of people and an endless torrent of words. Nearly a hundred heads of state had travelled from all corners of the world to remember Nelson Mandela, who died last week aged 95, at what had been billed as the biggest funeral ever seen. See also page 14 Man United win MANCHESTER: Manchester United overcame Shakhtar Donetsk 1-0 at Old Trafford yesterday to secure top spot in Champions League Group A. United survived near-misses against the Ukrainian champi- ons before prevailing through a second-half goal from Phil Jones. AGENCIES
Project to map genetic code of citizensSheikha Moza unveils Qatar Genome
Injured boy’s mother to sue circusDOHA: The mother of the Qatari boy who was attacked by a leopard at a circus recently and remains hospitalised, has decided to press charges against the circus, its organis-ers and the owners of the venue for negligence and lack of safety measures.
The mother has appointed a group of lawyers to prepare a law-suit, local Arabic daily Al Watan reported yesterday.
Umm Khalid, the mother, said the circus had offered her com-pensation but she had declined
it. “I want all of those who are responsible for the incident (the circus, its organisers and the owners of the venue) punished.”
She said she would be petition-ing that the circus and its crew not be allowed to leave Doha until the case is decided.
Umm Khalid said she usually didn’t take her child, Fahad, out, but on the fateful day his school-mates were going to the circus at Hyatt Plaza so she took him there.
“We reached there at 6pm and the circus was to begin at 6.30. At
the very entrance of the circus there was this enclosure where the leopard was.”
It wasn’t a cage. There were iron railings around the animal and they weren’t high enough, she said. There was, however, a Russian woman trainer near the enclosure.
Many children were touching the animal and taking pictures with it. “The leopard wasn’t reacting at all as though it were injected with anaesthetic.”
Continued on page 8
THE PENINSULA
DOHA: H H Sheikha Moza bint Nasser yesterday launched Qatar’s human genome project, a groundbreaking initiative to map the genetic code of citizens for better diagnoses and treat-ment of various diseases.
She announced the project, Qatar Genome, while addressing the opening session of the first World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH 2013) at Qatar National Convention Centre.
“As a result of the integration of scientific research and clinical realities, I am pleased to announce the project ‘Qatar Genome,’ a project that consists of a future road map for personalised medi-cine,’’ said Sheikha Moza.
‘Qatar Genome’ will be imple-mented in three phases: collecting samples, analysing them, and then working on tailored medicine. It will aim at understanding the dis-eases that affect Qataris.
The human genome project internationally serves as a source of detailed information about the structure, organisation and func-tion of the complete set of human genes (genome). This informa-tion is considered the basic set of “instructions” for the development and function of a human being.
Genome studies are moving
from analysing the personal DNA code of individuals for research purposes to clinical applications such as treatments tailored to the genetic make-up of cancers.
Understanding of genetics will also allow safer drug prescription, and more effective treatment of diseases and conditions that affect the patient.
Some of the world’s most press-ing healthcare challenges, includ-ing obesity, mental health, and road traffic injuries, are the main focus of WISH 2013.
“During this conference we aim to provide the ideal environ-ment for intellectual interchange of ideas and to benefit from our shared experiences in the search for comprehensive, pioneering solutions that cover the neces-sities of each specialty,’’ Sheikha Moza said.
WISH 2013 has brought together more than 500 global health innovators, including heads of state, ministers, senior govern-ment officials, academics and influential business leaders. Over two days, these key figures will discuss practical, sustainable and innovative ways to address some of the big global health challenges.
Continued on page 6
THE PENINSULA
Emir attends GCC Summit
The Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani with leaders of the other GCC countries during the annual GCC Summit in Kuwait yesterday. Addressing the summit, the Emir of Kuwait H H Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Jaber Al Sabah regretted the failure of the UN Security Council to address the Syrian conflict. Report on page 13
Antarctica spot coldest on EarthWASHINGTON: The coldest place on Earth is a high ridge on the East Antarctic Plateau where temperatures fell to a record minus 93.2 degrees Celsius on August 10, 2010, Nasa has said.
The previous record was a bracing minus 53.6 degrees Celsius, set in 1983 at the Russian Vostok Research Station, also in East Antarctica, Nasa said.
“We had a suspicion this Antarctic ridge was likely to be extremely cold, and colder than Vostok because it’s higher up the hill,” said Ted Scambos, lead scien-tist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.
REUTERS
Leaders praise Mandela SOWETO: There were presi-dents and prime ministers, tens of thousands of people and an endless torrent of words.
Nearly a hundred heads of state had travelled from all corners of the world to remember Nelson Mandela, who died last week aged 95, at what had been billed as the biggest funeral ever seen.
See also page 14
Man United winMANCHESTER: Manchester United overcame Shakhtar Donetsk 1-0 at Old Trafford yesterday to secure top spot in Champions League Group A.
United survived near-misses against the Ukrainian champi-ons before prevailing through a second-half goal from Phil Jones.
AGENCIES
DOHA: The Minister of Energy and Industry H E Dr Mohammed bin Saleh Al Sada said more efforts should be exerted in terms of strategic planning to meet the expected increase in demand for elec-tricity and water arising out of the urban expansion as well as hosting the World Cup 2022 and other global events.
Dr Al Sada said this while inaugurating the annual Business Planning Forum of Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation (Kahramaa) yesterday. The
two-day event is chaired by Kahramaa President, Essa bin Hilal Al Kuwari, under the theme “Strategic Transformation in Performance”.
The forum is meant to review department plans from 2014 to 2018. The forum will set the road map for the next five years for electricity, water and customer services sectors in the country.
“This theme is just to the point as it reflects Kahramaa interest in Qatar National Vision (QNV). For the success of this transfor-mation, Kahramaa mission and
values should be updated to cope with the Qatar vision,” Dr Al Sada said. The Minister also reviewed perform-ance indicators of this year pinpoint-ing the achieve-ments of electricity and water sectors, saying, “they shows balanced economic growth”.
The Minister hailed the national campaign for the con-servation and efficient use of water and electricity launched by Kahramaa under the patronage of the Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
Al Kuwari hailed the achieve-ments and high performance of Kahramaa, where it managed to meet electricity and water demand as per the highest inter-national quality standards and the requirements of GCC inter-connection grid.
“Kahramaa has to be ready to meet the challenges in electricity and water sectors by adopting the strategic planning to achieve the QNV objectives and Kahramaa ambitions,” he said.
Al Kuwari announced the update of mission, objectives, and values of Kahramaa, where it will be officially launched later.
The two-day forum hosts Kahramaa directors, managers, and head of sections to review department plans and projects.
THE PENINSULA
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Qatar, US renew defence pact
The Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani with US Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel at Al Bahr Palace yesterday. Qatar and the US renewed the Defence Cooperation Agreement which governs interactions includ-ing training, exercises and other joint activities, said a statement.
Demand for electricity, water rising: Al SadaUrban expansion, Fifa World Cup may put pressure
The Minister of Energy and Industry H E Dr Mohammed bin Saleh Al Sada (left) and Kahramaa President, Essa bin Hilal Al Kuwari, during the annual Business Planning Forum of Kahramaa yesterday.
DOHA: A sudden drop in tem-perature accompanied by strong northwesterly winds from chilly regions of Europe has made the weather colder in Qatar.
Day temperatures could drop to 20 degrees Celsius in places like Ruwais today, while the night will be the coldest in Al Khor, with mercury dipping to 12 degrees C.
In Doha, the day temperature forecast is 24°C, while the night
will be chilly, with the tempera-ture dropping to 16°C.
Al Wakra and Messaid are to have relatively colder day and night with temperatures between 23°C and 14°C.
The wind, with speeds of five to 15 knots, will be northwesterly but the direction will gradually change to northeasterly. The wind will, though, lose its intensity after dusk.
A senior official from the Department of Meteorology said a decrease in temperature was expected between December 15 and 21, with temperatures between 17°C and 25°C.
This is normally the weather this time of the year.
“You can say this is the onset of the winter season,” said the official.
THE PENINSULA
Mercury set to plunge today
Visa exemption for Qataris from Kyrgyzstan DOHA: An official source at the Consular Affairs Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has announced that Kyrgyzstan will exempt Qatari citi-zens of advance visa and allow them to stay for 60 days.
In case of they wish to stay for longer, an application should be provided to any of the Kyrgyzstan diplomatic missions abroad or should inform the visa section at Manas International Airport on arrival to get the. They should then report to the consular service department at the Kyrgyzstan Foreign Ministry to get the approval for the required period. QNA
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DOHA: Obesity, one of the pressing challenges being dis-cussed at the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) 2013, is raising a lot of concerns as the leading cause of diabetes and heart disease, say experts.
Professor Abdul Badi Abou-Samra, Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) said: “The increasing prevalence of obesity and diabetes in Qatar is very concerning, especially as the rates are already very high.”
Qatar is thought to have the sixth highest rate of obesity and the fourth highest rate of diabetes worldwide. Diabetes is a complex condition which can lead to debil-itating long-term complications and acute illnesses. The disease has reached epidemic proportion in Qatar and it is estimated that as many as one third of diabetics are not aware of their illness.
“Science has proven the link between obesity and diabetes. Obesity has been found to be a major risk factor for Type-2 diabetes, accelerating its onset in a person’s life,” said Prof Abou-Samra.
“Diabetes is a very serious dis-ease that creates a lot of social and economic burdens on the country. Nearly 16.7 percent of Qatar’s adult population suffers from this disease, which is very high compared to the global rate of seven percent to eight percent.”
“We are now also seeing dia-betes cases in young children. Twenty years ago this was a dis-ease of the old; the shift is hap-pening because of the rising rate
of obesity among children,” said Prof Abou-Samra. “Some people say that this is happening because of gene mutation; in my opinion it is not our genes that have been mutated, it is our lifestyle.”
“If we don’t intervene and change the lifestyle habits of the country, obesity and diabetes rates will continue to rise and this can have some very serious consequences,” he added.
Changing lifestyles is however a challenging process, he explained.
“To become healthy, people need to reduce their consumption of calorie-dense food and imbed physical activity in their daily routine, for example by walking when possible instead of driving.”
There are however simple and effective ways to incorporate physical activity into one’s daily routine, even for those with office jobs.
“Research has shown that spending one hour a day stand-ing while doing office work can prevent obesity and is healthier for the joints and blood circula-tion,” said Prof Abou-amra.
“Taking the stairs instead of using elevators and choosing a parking spot that is further away from the entrance are also good tips.”
In addition to proactively treat-ing obesity and diabetes, Prof Abou-Samra also emphasised HMC’s commitment to helping reverse the epidemic by actively looking at ways to address the metabolic problems of the popu-lation, including obesity, diabetes, hypertension and dyslipid.
THE PENINSULA
DOHA: The Myanmarese Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi yesterday urged experts to sup-port re-building her country’s healthcare system.
Delivering a keynote speech at the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) 2013 at the Qatar National Convention Centre, Suu Kyi asked the experts present to change the health sector in Myanmar.
“I hope those who present in this summit interested support to change healthcare of Myanmar,” she said in her speech, which received a standing ovation by the audiences.
She explained that Myanmar inherited healthcare system from colonials who ruled the country for 60 years, and best healthcare was built after independ-ence. But after the military regime came to power in 1960, the healthcare system destroyed and now Myanmar has poor healthcare facilities.
However, work to renovate the Yangon General Hospital, the largest healthcare facility in Myanmar, has commenced with the support of Professor the Lord Darzi of Denham, Chairman for the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London and Executive Chair of WISH.
“We are working to renovate it, redesign it and turn it as a flagship hospital for people who are struggling to put up life politically, socially and economically,” said Suu Kyi.
She also made suggestions on changes which could be introduced for better healthcare systems which could function with a more emphasis on spirituality.
With reference to the WISH’s aims on introducing innovation in healthcare she said,” We also need the spiritual balance for a healthy society. The kind of innovative healthcare is one rooted in human values,”
“Please look at the spiritual aspect of health, spir-itual health is also important as physical and mental health. This is something all of us can participate,” said Suu Kyi. Making a special reference to public healthcare she said, “Without care, health can be nothing more than a perfunctory system of medicines and treatments.” THE PENINSULA
H H Sheikha Moza bint Nasser taking part in a panel session during the opening of WISH 2013 yesterday. AR AL BAKER
16.7pc of Qatar adults suffer from diabetesObesity rate sixth highest in the world
The Chair of the Dept of Internal Medicine at HMC, Prof Abdul Badi Abou-Samra
Continued from page 1
In an opening discussion Sheikha Moza, Princess Lalla Salma of Morocco, the Duke of York KG, Professor the Lord Darzi of Denham, the Chairman for the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London and Executive Chair of WISH, and Sir Donald Tsang of Hong Kong shared their expe-rience and views on enhancing healthcare.
Lord Darzi said, “We must embrace the innovation we need
to secure the health we want. Better health for all of us, who-ever we are and wherever we live. Yet, too often, policy plays catch up with innovation rather than supporting and making it. This summit is about getting one step ahead. Our ambition is to lead our health systems to a better future by learning from each other and by embracing innovation.”
The summit’s forums, chaired by experts, seek to stimulate discussion and encourage the
uptake of innovative approaches for dealing with obesity, men-tal health, road traffic injuries, accountable care, antimicrobial resistance, end-of-life, patient engagement, and big data and healthcare.
Drawing on the most exciting innovations in these fields from around the world, the forums will identify practical options for policymakers which have the potential to positively impact upon these pressing challenges and improve healthcare for all.
Simon Stevens, president of Global health division at the United Health Group delivered the keynote address on the importance of innovation.
WISH will today unveil a Global Innovation Diffusion Study, the first of its kind, to assess eight countries in terms of how their systems contribute toward transformative change — whether through innovation in technology, processes or business models.
THE PENINSULA
Top dignitaries share experience at WISH
Help build Myanmar’s healthcare system: Suu Kyi
Aung San Suu Kyi delivers a keynote speech during the World Innovation Summit for Health at Qatar National Convention Centre in Doha yesterday.
H R H Princess Lalla Salma of Morocco signing the visitor’s book at Qatar Foundation (QF) yesterday. A committee led by Engineer Saad Al Muhannadi, President of QF, received the wife of the King of Morocco Mohammed VI, at QF’s Visitors Centre.
08 HOMEWEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
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Celebrations
The Chairman of the Administrative Control and Transparency Authority H E Abdullah bin Hamad Al Attiyah (centre) cutting the cake with Minister of Environment H E Ahmed Amer Mohamed Al Humaidi (right) and Japanese Ambassador Shingo Tsuda on the 80th birthday of the Emperor of Japan at the Japanese ambas-sador’s residence yesterday. ABDUL BASIT
National Day events at West End ParkThousands of expatriates to converge to express their affinity with Qatar through ‘One Love’ programmes
DOHA: The newly opened West End Park in the Industrial Area is all set to welcome thousands of expatriate workers and fami-lies on National Day - December 18 - with a rich mix of cultural, sports and entertainment events.
The Committee of Associated Programmes for Qatar National Day is working with a number of expatriate schools and organisa-tions to make the celebrations a big success.
The programmes themed ‘One Love’ will embody the love and affinity of expatriate communi-ties to the country they live in and its people.
A work group meeting was held on Monday to assess the preparations in the presence of the director of Public Relations Department of the Ministry of Interior Col Abdullah Khalifa Al Muftah and Mana Ibrahim Al Mana, officials from the Committee of Associated Programmes.
Lt Col Sultan Mohammed Al Kaabi, head of community polic-ing section at Rayyan Security Department, president of Indian Cultural Centre Tarun Basu, representative of Sri Lankan community Tariq Kassim, coordi-nators from MES Indian School, Pak Shama, Noble International School and Sri Lankan school attended the meeting.
Officers from Internal Security Force (Lekhwiya), commu-nity policing section of Rayyan Security Department and Civil Defence and representative of Red Crescent and heads of vari-ous sub committees were also present.
The meeting evaluated the
arrangements, programme sched-ules, parking facilities and mecha-nisms of controlling the entry and exit of the public.
Programmes at West End Park will start with the Qatari national anthem at 8am by school students and will be followed by a parade of students from the four partici-pating schools. The seven-minute parade will highlight Qatari traditions.
A music competition and a the-matic song competition will be held between the schools before different Asian communities start performing a variety of cultural and entertainment shows on the stage.
In the morning session, Indian community teams will be show-casing their traditional art forms such as Melam by Doha KSCA, Maharasthra folk dance by Maharashtra Mandal, Tamil folk dance by Varadrajan and team and songs in Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil.
A Sri Lankan team will per-form Sinhala, Tamil, English and Baila songs and stage dances of Kandyan, Heritage and Malay styles led by Denu.
The afternoon session will start with performances by Indian teams including a Bengali Folk dance by Bangiya Parishat, Dasara festival dance by Karnataka Sangha and Duff muttu – Kerala traditional performance – by Jalil and team .They will be followed by songs by a Sri Lankan troupe in Sinhala, English and Baila.
There will be a dance competi-tion for the participating schools followed by a thematic show on Qatar where each school will present a 10-minute skit featur-ing Qatar.
Evening programmes beginning at 6pm will include songs in dif-ferent languages as well as shows such as Maharashtra lejime led by Nayanawagh and team, Oppana — Kerala traditional performance, Gujarati Garba — Gujarat Samaj,
Sri Lankan stage dances of herit-age style and songs by expatriate singers.
Apart from songs in Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Sinhala, Telugu and English, there will be a south Indian fusion dance by Indian Culture Center and Odissi group dance by Utkalika.
A Harley-Davidson motor bike show, display of driving simulator and seat belt convincer and com-petition focusing on traffic for the public with gifts for winners will also be part of the celebrations.
The West End Park open thea-tre which can accommodate over 14,000 will host a Nepalese musi-cal show on December 17 (4pm to 10pm), Indian and Pakistani musical show on December 18
(8pm to 11pm) and Philippines musical show on December 19 (4pm to 10pm). Entry to the musical concert is restricted by tickets.
The West End Park cricket sta-dium with 12,000 seating capac-ity will witness a cricket match between Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi com-munity teams on December 18. The matches will be managed by Lagan Cricket Club headed by Azeem Abbas.
Free blood and sugar checking will be held in collaboration with the Supreme Council of Health, Hamad Medical Corporation, Qatar Red Crescent, Aster Medical Centre and Naseem Al Rabeeu Medical Centre. A blood
donation camp by HMC and first aid training by Qatar Red Crescent will also be held.
The venue is provided with pray areas, resting areas for families, restaurants, emergency medical services, community Bazar and other necessary services for the public.
More than 130 volunteers will work for the smooth running of the events from 6am to 10pm. A lost-and-found office managed by Community Policing Section will distribute tags among the chil-dren accompanying the families to help them identify missing children. Two hotline numbers (5589 9682/5548 3466) have also been allocated for this purpose.
THE PENINSULA
The sprawling West End Park in the Industrial Area.
DOHA: Online application for the Electronic Visa Waiver (EVW) for citizens of Qatar, the UAE and Oman intending to visit the UK can be submit-ted up to three months before travel.
The EVW being introduced from January 1 allows citizens of these countries to travel to the UK for tourism, business or study purposes without a visa, for up to six months.
An EVW form can be com-pleted online from anywhere in the world. It is free of charge and quicker than applying for a visa. There is no need to provide bio-metric information (photo and fingerprints), attend a visa appli-cation centre or hand in the pass-port in advance of travel.
Those intending to study or stay in the UK for more than six months, work, get married or register a civil partnership in the
UK are not allowed to travel with an EVW.
An EVW can be completed up to three months before the travel date and must be completed at least 48 hours before departure to the UK. Each traveller must present a paper copy of their EVW at the departure port (air, sea or train) and again on arrival in the UK. Electronic copies on phones, tablets or personal com-puters will not be accepted. Each EVW document is only valid for a single entry to the UK.
An EVW form can be filled at Visa4UK, the country’s online applications system. The web site provides with an option of apply-ing for a visa or an EVW if the applicant is eligible.
The applicant must provide details on port of departure, including time, date and plane/train/ship number; arrival in the UK, including time and date; and
departure from the UK includ-ing time, date and plane/train/ship number.
The personal details on the EVW form must exactly match those shown in the passport .
If the applicant is visiting the UK as part of a multi-leg trip, he should include details of the last leg of the journey to the UK. If the person leaves the UK and want to re-enter, he will need a separate EVW for that journey.
Once an EVW form is suc-cessfully submitted, the appli-cant must complete the signature and declaration sections. He will receive confirmation that the form has been submitted by email which contains a link to the EVW document. It can be saved and printed immediately or at a later date. The EVW document will replace the requirement to com-plete a landing card on arrival.
THE PENINSULA
DOHA: The Corniche Road will be closed for four hours from 5am on Saturday for rehersals of the National Day parade. Commuters have been advised to take alternative routes.
Some 70 buses will be conducting shuttle services to the Corniche on the National Day to transport people attending the day-long cel-ebrations, a local Arabic daily reported yesterday, quoting a senior official of the organising committee.
People can catch the buses at parking spots near the Central Post Office, Qatar Petroleum building, Souq Waqif and the Qatar Sports Club.
Special booths have been set up at the venue to provide informa-tion to the public about the National Day programmes. Visitors can also report about their lost items at these booths.
THE PENINSULA
Corniche Road to close on Saturday for four hours
Continued from page 1
“My son also wanted to be photographed with the animal, so I took out my camera. But the trainer stopped me. She said I could take pictures with the mobile phone but if I needed to use a camera I must pay.”
“I handed her a QR500 note and asked her to return the change.”
The trainer, according to Umm Khalid, asked her to leave her son near the enclosure and go and occupy her seat in the circus.
“However, as soon as I turned to leave, the leopard attacked my son. I got back instantly and saw him lying on the ground and the animal had buried his teeth in his neck.”
“I tried to pull the leopard away
but in vain. Two men, a Qatari and an Egyptian, rushed and pulled the animal’s jaws apart with force. They eventually suc-ceeded in getting my son out of the animal’s grip.”
“My son was bleeding profusely. The children standing around were shocked and hysterical. I was screaming for an ambulance.”
Even after all this no one from Hyatt Plaza administration turned up. There were no security personnel to be seen anywhere around, Umm Khalid claimed.
“A fellow Qatari woman informed the ambulance service but it arrived late. We got in and I asked the driver to speed up as my son was bleeding, but the driver wouldn’t listen. The ambu-lance had no siren as well.”
Umm Khalid said that for the first five days in the hospital Fahad was not able to speak.
“He would simply cry looking at people. He began speaking only later.” His condition is now stable but he hasn’t fully recovered since the leopard had buried his teeth deep in his neck and his windpipe is affected, she said.
She said one of the reasons for her deciding to file a lawsuit was to make sure that such incidents did not occur here in future.
Umm Khalid, incidentally, holds a master’s degree in social science and has written a book, which has been translated into French and English. It is part of the school curriculum in Lebanon, said Al Watan.
THE PENINSULA
Online applications for UK’s E-Visa Waiver from January 1
DOHA: Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF), show-cased its support for interna-tional research cooperation by hosting the Global Research Council (GRC) regional meet-ing, a two day event which con-cluded on Sunday.
Following a bidding process, QNRF was selected to host the GRC regional meeting by the National Science Foundation (NSF), a governing board for GRC. QNRF is a leading fund-ing agency in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region.
Representatives from the local and international science and research community from 12 countries attended the productive sessions, furthering GRC’s objec-tive of advancing research and development excellence by ena-bling the exchange of knowledge.
In his opening address, Dr Abdul Sattar Al Taie, Executive Director of QNRF, said: “At QNRF, we have always been inspired by the tremendous potential that research has for growth, security and prosperity. Research is defining our future.
It is a tool that crafts tomorrow’s progress. In Qatar, research is essential to achieving the nation’s mission and transformation into a knowledge based economy.”
Eminent researchers from across the Mena region shed light on their respective country’s efforts to address these themes.
As a result of the QNRF hosted regional discussions, a feedback
document will be updated and addressed at the GRC’s third Annual Meeting which will be held in Beijing, China next year.
Dr Graham Harrison, Programme Officer in the Office of International and Integrative Activities at the NSF, explained GRC’s origins, mission and developments.
THE PENINSULA
QNRF showcases support for global research
The Executive Director of QNRF Dr Abdul Sattar Al Taie during his address.
HOME 09WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
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BY MOHAMMAD SHOEB
DOHA: Qatar Railways Company (Qatar Rail) yes-terday reiterated that health, safety and wellbeing of all con-struction workers, associated with its different projects, are among the top priorities of the company.
Abdulla Abdulaziz Al Subaie, Board Member and Chairman of Executive Committee of RAIL said: “We have categorically con-veyed to all the concerned com-panies associated with different projects of Qatar Rail to practice highest standards of safety and wellbeing for the construction workers.”
“We are constantly monitor-ing to ensure that all the labour camps must meet the necessary conditions such as adequate bed space, dining space, sanitation and quality food as per the pref-erence of workers,” he said.
Al Subaie, who is also the Managing Director of Qatar Rail, was speaking at a press meeting
called to inform the media about the progress on its various projects and their importance in providing a modern and effi-cient transportation network in Qatar. Present were several sen-ior officials of Qatar Rail, includ-ing Saad Ahmed Al Muhannadi, CEO and Hamad Ibrahim Al Bishri, Deputy CEO/Acting Chief Programme Officer.
After the press conference, members of the media were taken to the construction sites of Lusail Light Rail Transit (LRT), to show the safety train-ing facilities and one of the LRT’s underground stations located at Energy City, whose civil work is 100 percent complete and ready for MEP (Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing) installations.
Speaking about the safety of construction workers, Al Bishri said: “Every individual worker, irrespective of his designation and previous experience, has to go through necessary trainings on simulators before starting their job… We take all possible
precautionary measures to ensure worker’s safety, for instance, newly arrived workers are given blue coloured helmets so that extra care is given to them.”
Asked if a worker does not find the given working condi-tions suitable, what is done in such cases, he said: “They are free to leave the country without facing any hassle. The concerned company will clear his dues and provide return ticket to his home country.”
Qatar Rail is overseeing the construction of integrated rail-way network, including the LRT, Doha Metro and Long Distance Passenger and Freight Rail which will be connected to rail networks of other GCC countries.
According to reports, the esti-mated cost of the integrated rail project is nearly $40bn (QR145bn). So far Qatar Rail has signed several agreements worth over QR32bn ($8.8bn), to proceed with the preliminary works for the Doha Metro and the LRT, whereby work for the
Safety of workers prime concern, says Qatar Rail All employees go through training on simulators
One of Lusail Light Rail Transit’s underground stations at Energy City, whose civil work is 100 percent complete and ready for mechanical, electrical, and plumbing installations. SHAIVAL DALAL
metro projects is moving along as scheduled, and that for the LRT has reached advanced stages.
The LRT will work in full inte-gration to connect Qatar’s key areas with each other and with their vital extensions — whereby the Doha Metro will link the capital’s inner and outer areas such as the ambitious Lusail City,
the new Hamad International Airport, the Education City, and the West Bay area.
With regards to the LRT, Al Muhannadi revealed that Qatar Rail has finalised the tunnelling works for the project, and com-pleted over 60 percent of the structure for drilling works for its stations, and in addition, 50
percent of the structure of the bridge overseeing Al Khor and the LRT. The project is slated to be officially delivered by 2017.
The LRT is composed of four lines extending to 30.5km in total, among which are 19km at ground level, 10km underground, and 1.5km at grade.
THE PENINSULA
DOHA: Lulu is set to make his-tory with a highly innovative Half Pay Back Promotion on televisions today, to celebrate the turn of unique calendar day of 11-12-13.
This unique calendar day will be repeated only after 90 years. Customers are entitled to get a gift voucher worth QR500 on every purchase of a television worth QR1,000. The customers
are also benefited by adding another 10 percent to their sav-ings if they do their purchase on Lulu-Doha Bank Credit Card, which means that a customer who is buying the television worth QR1,000 using this credit card will have a saving of 60 percent.
Customers who do cash pur-chases of televisions will get a direct savings of 50 percent on their purchase.
This promotion is aimed at supporting expatriates who are constrained to remit the customs duty at the airports while carry-ing televisions for their domestic use back at home, a press release from Lulu said yesterday.
Lulu Hypermarket Group also started its Winter Sale of gar-ments yesterday which will con-tinue till December 31.
THE PENINSULA
Lulu to mark 11.12.13 with TV promotion
BY RAYNALD C RIVERA
DOHA: Children in Qatar enjoy most of their free time playing compared to children in other GCC countries, a recent study has found.
According to a study on play-ing behaviour of children in the GCC, children in Qatar spend 33 percent of their free time in play-related activities compared to Bahrain (26), the UAE (21) and Oman (21) where the research was done.
The Children’s Play Index (CPI) 2013 was announced by Fun Ville, a play area under the Landmark Leisure at a press event yesterday at Ezdan Mall.
TNS, a global research organi-sation, conducted the study in September this year in the four GCC countries where Fun Ville is present.
“This kind of information was never before available in the region,” Odisseas Trikaliotis, TNS Senior Group Account Director, told The Peninsula after his presentation.
He revealed the four GCC countries had a combined index score of 25 which means children from these countries appear to have a good balance between play and other activities during their daily routine spending 25 percent of their total free time in play-related activities.
The research which focused on children aged 2 to 12 also found close to 40 percent of them pre-ferred spending time on games played on personal devices. This preference was highest in Qatar at 50 percent and lowest in Oman at 29 percent.
In the age group of 9 to 12, this preference increases to 50 percent. Seventy percent of the parents surveyed depend on these games to keep their children entertained. Thirty percent of them are not aware of the games played by their children on these devices. Qatar also scored high on the average number of electronic devices owned which was 7 com-pared to the UAE (4), Oman (3) and Bahrain (3).
Children in Qatar spend most of their free time playing: Study
The Marketing Manager of Landmark Group, Rajgopal R, Marketing Manager of Fun City, Kunal Harisinghani, and TNS Senior Group Account Director, Odisseas Trikaliotis, after a presentation on GCC Children’s Play Index at Ezdan Mall yesterday. SALIM MATRAMKOT
Among the activities children do during their free time, eating scored the highest at 25 percent while reading was lowest at 0.5 percent. Qatar had higher than the average as children spent 27.7 percent of their free time on eat-ing while least on creative time (1.8). The study also found chil-dren engaged more on passive (14) than active activities (11) and that mothers (27) were more involved in their children’s activities than fathers (7).
Asian children spent less time playing compared to local Arab and Western and other expatriate children, the study revealed.
Fun Ville Children’s Play Index is a survey conducted among 1,000 family respondents from different nationalities with children in the four GCC countries.
The index defines the share of playing time among other daily activities excluding the time
children spend at school. “Fun Ville’s Children Play Index is our effort to bring widespread aware-ness for a well-balanced growth and development of children in the region through a fair split of time spent between academic and play related activities during the day,” said Silvio Liedtke, Chief Operating Officer, Landmark Leisure.
Kunal Harisinghani, Marketing Manager, Fun City said the study would be of great help in schools, the government and policymakers in Qatar and the entire GCC.
“Many schools are visiting our facilities and we are actually sharing the results with them so they can design their timetables accordingly.”
Parents can also compute their child’s play index using Fun Ville Play Index Calculator available at www.funville.ae.
THE PENINSULA
DOHA: An exhibition dedicated to basketball will open today at Katara, held in parallel with the ongoing FIBA 3x3 All Stars event here.
On display until Saturday, the “Basketball4all” exhibition is being organised by QMA’s Qatar Olympic & Sports Museum (QOSM).
It displays the history of basketball from its invention by Canadian American James Naismith in 1891, when he wrote the first rules for this new game, and showcases the growing popularity of the game played by millions around the globe today.
Historical footage and original objects from the International Basketball Federation (FIBA)
collection as well as the collection of the QOSM narrate the history of FIBA and the development of the FIBA World Championships for both men and women.
“We recommend everyone to visit this exhibi-tion which features a Michael Jordan signed jer-sey from the NBA All Star Game 1988 as well as documents and trophies highlighting the history of basketball,” said QOSM Director Dr Christian Wacker.
In addition, one section is dedicated to the FIBA 3x3 basketball, a version of the game in which the teams play with one basket. THE PENINSULA
Cartoon Arts International / The New York Times Syndicate
BY JONATHAN POWER
IN THE days when Mikhail Gorbachev was president of the Soviet Union, engaged in his policy
of Glasnost and disarmament, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize, he used to have a feisty press secretary who, asked about the deteriorating economic situa-tion, replied that his boss didn’t win the Nobel for Economics.
Could he have said the same about Nelson Mandela? Yes and no. Yes, when Mandela first came out of jail, he talked of the need for massive nationalisation and forcible wealth redistribution. No, when president, having learnt a thing or two about what had been going on in Africa, he began to preach another
message. He saw that most of black Africa had adapted “African socialism”. This, together with dictatorships and maladministra-tion, had led to decades of rising poverty. Even in Tanzania, where the benign lead-ership of the sage-like, incor-ruptible, Julius Nyerere, gave the country a spirited sense of emanci-pation, the econ-omy eventually lost momentum
as Nyerere pushed socialist shibboleths.Mandela told the African Union that
“the fault lay not in our stars but in ourselves”. Now president of a multi-racial state, he realised that old-school, top-down socialism could not work if his country was to progress.
Around the same time, other African countries got the message too. Today Africa has some of the fastest growing economies in the world. Mobile phone sales — a useful indicator — are growing much faster than in any other continent.
When Mandela became president he took over a country that had been bat-tered by sanctions. The rate of economic growth for years under white rule had been mediocre and inflation was a high 14pc a year, the budget deficit was 8pc and interest rates were 16pc — busi-nesses could not afford to borrow.
Quite quickly he and his economic advisers got the economy going. Inflation fell to 5pc over the next decade. The deficit fell to to 1.5pc and interest rates dropped to under 9pc. Foreign invest-ment rushed in.
Under apartheid, exports had been a very modest 10pc of total output. They are now up to 25pc. The economy has doubled in size since the onset of black rule, growing at an average of 3.2pc a year compared with 1.6pc a year in the last eighteen years of white government.
Thanks to the pace of economic growth, tax revenues have doubled and the Mandela government knew where to spend it. The government went into high gear to bring electricity, drinking water, sewerage, primary schools and health clinics to much of the massive shanty town population. The propor-tion of Africans living on the UN mini-mum income of $2 a day fell from 12pc to 5pc.
But there were a number of impor-tant things that Mandela and his succes-sors failed to make much progress on. A majority of workers in jobs have seen their incomes and spending power rise but workers in the most menial and unskilled jobs have done badly. High youth unem-ployment is the most worrying failure.
A country that long has had one of the world’s worst distributions of equal-ity has seen no improvement. Indeed, some economists say it has worsened. A black elite has been created, partly because of Mandela’s policy of “black empowerment”, when the white busi-ness sector was pressured to give a few thousand blacks a cut of its pie, putting them on the board of compa-nies and giving them shares at knock down prices. Besides that, many blacks, pulling at their own bootstraps, have heaved themselves into a comfortable
middle class life, joining the whites in their posh, well-protected suburbs and driving the same luxury cars. Is it sur-prising that among the poor there has developed a “culture of envy”?
Growing income disparities have worked to justify crime. Seeing or at least knowing about the lifestyle of the white and black middle class, young men in particular work to grab what they cannot earn. The murder rate shot up. (It is now coming steadily down.)
At the same time, to Mandela’s dis-may, corruption spread its tentacles — too raw a capitalism engenders this. Top office holders in the ruling party, the African National Congress, have a finger in all sorts of scams and deals.
Last but not the least of the problems is the paucity of progress in land reform. Given the right backup — as was done in Taiwan and South Korea — this could transform the livelihood of large num-bers of rural poor.
The South African economy is work in progress. It is not doing as well as other African countries, like Tanzania and Nigeria. It has been hit by trou-bles in the mining industry — declining metals’ prices and severe labour unrest. Today, the political leadership is not good. Nevertheless, compared with the pre-Mandela days, an enormous amount of progress has been made. That is a part of his extraordinary legacy.
THE PENINSULA
US Vice-President Joe Biden and Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel went out with the same mission: To convey
to the allies that Washington was there to assist them but was not in a position to alter the status quo. That is what Biden categorically told Tokyo and Seoul, advising them not to read too much into the new air defence zone of China and to keep their cool. At the same time, Washington came down hard on Beijing, criticising it for opening a Pandora’s box by delimiting the skies. Biden, however, was unsuccessful in preventing Seoul from reacting to
the Chinese air defence zone. Now South Korea has come up with its own expanded air zone boundaries. The response from Tokyo has also not been one of quiet acquiescence with the government not ready to submit meekly to Beijing’s assertiveness. The political and security authorities in Japan are considering the possibility of amending the constitution and reviewing the nuclear programme.
This has put the US in a dilemma, caught between its allies and China. There is little that the Americans can do in terms of limiting Chinese influ-ence. Similarly, in South Asia, Hagel
is in a dilemma as he rubs shoulders with the Pakistani authorities. This is the first high-profile visit by a senior official from the US security establish-ment since the last four years. The rising political storm in Pakistan over US drone attacks, which has led to the suspension of Nato supplies to landlocked Afghanistan via Pakistan, will not be easy to address until and unless Pentagon officially commits itself to halting the flying sorties. This impasse comes close on the heels of an upset in Kabul where President Hamid Karzai is resisting a bilateral security arrangement with Washington
until his preconditions are met.All this boils down to an equation
wherein the US is not in a comfortable position either to commit or retreat while responding to the needs and aspirations of its allies. The situation is reminiscent of the Monroe Doctrine, wherein the then US president James Monroe pledged that the US would not interfere in European matters and Europe too should not seek to colonise South or North America. It is anybody’s guess if Biden and Hagel will bring back a similar message to President Barack Obama.
Khaleej Times
How Mandela’s economic policies brought change
There are too many leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba’s struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people.
Quote ofthe day
Barack ObamaUS President
The other side
A majority of workers in jobs have seen their incomes and spending power rise but workers in the most menial and unskilled jobs have done badly.
Growing income disparities have worked to justify crime. Seeing or at least knowing about the lifestyle of the white and black middle class, young men in particular work to grab what they cannot earn.
RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin has reacted with alacrity after Canada staked a claim on the North Pole. The North Pole has been in the international glare for a few years with the Arctic rim nations claiming the
riches, mainly oil and gas, under the sea. It is estimated that the North Pole continental shelf has 13 percent of oil reserves and 30 percent of hidden natural gas reserves. Increasing reliance on energy and a projected exponential rise in demand for hydrocarbon products have kept the region on tenterhooks for the last few years. Russia’s Gazprom is the Big Brother among the entities exploring the region for the product that is seen to influence the dynamics of geopolitics and geostrategy. A defiant Putin yesterday asked his troops to bolster their presence in the Arctic. Weeks ago, Putin had 30 Greenpeace protesters, including some journalists, arrested for trying to board an oil platform owned by the energy giant Gazprom. Last year, senior members of the international environmental advocacy group had boarded the platform and flown the flag without meeting much resistance.
Canada says that an undersea mountain range called the Lomonosov Ridge is an extension of its territory in the Arctic. Russia, it seems, is trying to pre-empt the move by other Pacific Rim nations to hover on the strategic wealth of the Arctic.
With Ukraine burning in its neighbourhood and the volatile Caucuses behaving like quicksand for Russian foreign policy, Putin’s move to boost security presence reeks of desperation.
The Kremlin has not come out of the Cold War disposition of asserting its presence even in the face of excruciatingly difficult circumstances which make its response look preposterous and pugnacious. Putin’s announcement comes in the wake of the government dissolving the RIA Novosti, the Russian news agency. He declared plans to form a news agency called Rossia Segodnaya or Russia Today, which is to be headed by a notorious news anchor known for his anti-Western and non-progressive views.
Putin has tried to straddle the Arctic by throwing around the weight of the Russian nation or whatever has been left of it. From Kaliningrad to Vladivostok, the country of Leo Tolstoy, who wrote War and Peace, is engaged in an exercise to assert its presence in the region by means as far from righteousness as can be.
The move to dissolve the news agency smacks of a tendency to engage in propaganda. Similarly, arm-twisting the Caucasus nations and virtually coercing Ukraine to join a customs union instead of letting it get closer to the European Union are an extension of Moscow’s highly flawed policy towards its neighbours. Canada is no Ukraine or Georgia.
The North American nation belongs to the select club of countries known for its progressive and liberal outlook combined with a propensity for welfare measures for its population. In taking on Canada, Putin is committing a strategic error for which Russia may have to pay dearly in the long run •
Arctic heat
Canada’s claim to the Arctic has set the cat among the pigeons in the Kremlin, and an alarmed Putin is likely to commit foreign policy errors.
Editorial
10 VIEWS WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
www.thepeninsulaqatar.com
The alignment puzzle
BY VICTOR D CHA
China’s not-so-blue skies were the primary topic of conver-sation during Vice-President Joe Biden’s recent trip to East Asia. The issue, of course, was
not climate change but Beijing’s decla-ration last month of a new air defence identification zone that requires aircraft flying through the area to identify them-selves and to file a flight plan.
Although the declaration of such zones is the sovereign right of states, the inter-national norm is that countries do not unilaterally declare zones that overlap with other countries’ airspace and with disputed territory.
In this case, China did both. Half of its new zone duplicates Japan’s over the disputed territory of a Japanese-owned island chain (which the Japanese call Senkakus and the Chinese call Diaoyu). The Chinese also declared control of airspace over a piece of South Korean-claimed territory that includes an oceanic research lab.
Biden’s uncharacteristically stern and sober press availability after his meet-ing with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday gave a sense of how hard the US and Japan have pushed back against China’s attempt to expand its footprint in the region.
That expansion is a challenge to President Barack Obama’s “pivot” to Asia, but it is not clear what the US can do in response. Asking Beijing for prior consultation before it declares such zones
and agreement on future rules of engage-ment in contested airspace is like telling a reckless driver to be more careful the next time he is on the road. It is hardly a full-throated rejection of China’s uni-lateral action. Demanding a retraction of the zone, however, contravenes China’s sovereign rights; that Biden’s toughly worded demarches stopped short of call-ing for China’s claims to be rescinded is tacit acknowledgment of this fact.
There is no international regulatory body to submit grievances about such identification zones, yet these overlap-ping demarcations are certain to lead to accidents or miscalculation between Chinese, Japanese, South Korean and even US aircraft at some point.
Chinese actions reflect Beijing’s view that the US must accede to China’s expanding sphere of influence in Asia. It is hard to see a “win” for Washington out of this. But the Obama administra-tion can still make lemonade out of this lemon. If China’s long-term goal is to delegitimise US leadership in Asia, uni-lateral actions such as declaring an air defence identification zone only undercut that effort and create greater receptivity among Asian nations for sustained US leadership.
To capitalise on this opportunity, the Obama administration must respond accordingly.
First, Washington should encourage a coordinated message with key allies affected by Chinese actions, in particular Japan and South Korea, whose relation-ship has deteriorated over the past year.
The Koreans, for example, are likely to announce their own newly expanded air defence identification zone in response to China’s play, and this is likely to also overlap with Japan’s airspace.
Washington must handle such actions in ways that minimise alliance friction and maximise unity. While each ally has its own airspace grievance with Beijing, no one should cut a side deal to address its concerns at the expense of others.
That sort of “divide and conquer” strategy plays right into Beijing’s hands and may result in China wielding inordi-nate influence in the region. Second, even
as China makes new claims of airspace in the Yellow Sea and the South China Sea, the US should maintain, or even increase, the tempo of military exercises and oper-ations in the region, including those with allies, to convey a clear and consistent message that America still underwrites the region’s stability and security.
Finally, Washington could use the controversy over the air defence zone to press Beijing into agreeing to some form of crisis-management mechanism among four countries in northeast Asia. Currently, there is no established appara-tus to respond to the collision of planes or
other accidents. The impending creation of National Security Council-type deci-sion-making organs in China and Japan — such a body already exists in South Korea — could further facilitate a mecha-nism for multilateral crisis management.
The recent Chinese muscle-flexing makes the US pivot only more welcome in Asia.
China may win the battle over its right to an air defence identification zone, but if Washington responds shrewdly, Beijing stands to lose the longer-term contest for leadership.
WP-BLOOMBERG
US Vice-President Joe Biden (left) with his Chinese counterpart Li Yuanchao at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing last week.
Australians should take pride in achievements, learn from errors, and strive to show the rest of the world that bills and charters of rights are superfluous.BY MARK FLETCHER
Human rights legislation is flourish-ing around the world, growing out of the fear of unrestrained state power. This expansion is usually
celebrated - as it is today, on International Human Rights Day. Australia, being the only western democracy that lacks rigorous protec-tions of individual liberty, provides a clear les-son to the rest of the world about the benefits and drawbacks of rights legislation.
When the threat of communism loomed in the 1950s, the US saw the rise of McCarthyism. The state began a lengthy witch hunt into the bureaucracy, unions, and Hollywood. Despite the first amendment expressly protecting free-dom of speech, the supreme court had already found that it didn’t apply to communists.
It took the better part of a decade before the courts found anti-communist campaigns vio-lated other rights, such as the right to silence.
In Australia, the government enacted the Communist Party Dissolution Act, which sought to “provide for the dissolution of the Australian communist Party and of other communist organisations, [and] to disqualify communists from holding certain offices”.
Although we lack an explicit freedom of expression in Australia, the act was challenged the day it received royal assent. Less than five months later, the high court ruled that the Commonwealth lacked the power to declare the guilt of the communist party, rendering the act invalid.
Our lack of freedom of speech also means there is nothing preventing the government from enacting legislation like the Tobacco Plain Packaging Act 2011, which bans adver-tising and promotion on tobacco products.
If the government of Canada pursued a sim-ilar policy, it would be blocked by the charter of rights and freedoms.
In RJR-MacDonald Inc vs Canada, the supreme court also found that the charter prevented the government mandating unat-tributed health warnings on tobacco packag-ing. Without that right existing in Australia, the tobacco industry’s case against the laws was doomed to failure.
Our constitution also fails to defend religious
freedom. In Snyder vs Phelps, SCOTUS dis-covered this right protected the Westboro Baptist church’s right to protests at military funerals.
Our deficiency has meant Australian courts might consider other priorities, such as the welfare of children. In a 1978 case called The Marriage of Paisio, the family court found that “certain practices, albeit given a veneer of religious justification, are in fact so positively harmful to the welfare of the children that they must be removed from the influence of those who advocate such practices.”
International Human Rights Day celebrates the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN in 1948 – it is a good opportunity to challenge the all too common assumption that Australia is in need of a bill or a charter of rights.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s professor Howard Schweber has taken this view to the extreme, arguing that Australia’s lack of explicit rights guarantees means that Australia does not have a genuine constitution.
Australians should not feel ashamed that we lack cumbersome rights protections. When our constitution was crafted, it was the envy of the world. In 1901, an international com-mentator said it was “more democratic than in the US, because there both the states and the union are fettered by many constitutional restrictions”.
Today, unburdened by archaic, absolutist rights legislation, we can have genuine debates about rights, tweaking, updating, and refining them to achieve the sort of society that we want – not the sort of society that people who died in the 18th century wanted.
This approach doesn’t always succeed and Australia has a history of failing to uphold the best political virtues. Last week, Australia’s
attorney-general authorised a raid on the office of a lawyer who was representing a wit-ness in the Timorese espionage case against Australia. There are ongoing debates about the Queensland government’s legislation which inhibits free association.
And governments from both sides of poli-tics have restricted asylum seekers’ access to lawyers. Critics assume that these situa-tions are possible only because we lack a rigid human rights framework, but the longevity of McCarthyism calls that into question.
When society lost interest in upholding the lofty rhetoric of rights, the First Amendment didn’t come to the aid of the heretics. A Bill of Rights has not stopped the US trying to find a new definition of pain and suffering in the belly of offshore detention centres.
Conversely, when the Australian Government sought a referendum to acquire the power to pass anti-Communist legislation, Australians voted it down. The best rights pro-tection will always be an engaged and critical electorate, not a parliament with rusted on training wheels.
So let other countries puff their chests with empty slogans about rights. Let them use International Human Rights Day to reaffirm their ideological commitment to the inalien-ability and irrefutability of whichever rights happen to suit them most.
Let their restrictions on legislative capabil-ity be a testament to their fear that parlia-ment is forever tempted to commit atrocities.
Instead of trying to emulate these medio-cre, antiquated, constipated ways of other jurisdictions, Australians should take pride in our achievements, learn from our errors, and strive to show the rest of the world that bills and charters of rights are superfluous.
THE GUARDIAN
Former Australian premier Julia Gillard speaking during the launch of Australian Multicultural Council.
President Obama and politics of inequalityBY CHARLES LANE
As a difficult first year of his second term winds down, President Obama is recasting his mission and that of his party. Increasing inequality and decreasing social mobility, he declared in a December 4 address, present “the defining
challenge of our time.” Therefore, “making sure our economy works for every working American” would be a central task of his remaining time in office.
The facts underlying the president’s claim are clear enough. According to economist Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley, the top 10 percent of US earners claimed about half of all before-tax income in 2012, including capital gains. As the president noted, the top decile’s share has been increasing since the late 1970s; it is higher than at any time since just before the Great Depression, Saez’s data show. But it is unclear whether denouncing inequality and promising to do more about it are likely to help Obama and his fellow Democrats win elections.
Economic populism is the hardy perennial recommendation of liberal pollsters and labour-union political directors. It keeps coming back, even though election results have never quite borne it out. Deeply invested in the individualistic “American dream,” and deeply divided by race, ethnicity and religion, Americans have proven less susceptible to class-based economic appeals than voters in other nations.
Still, with the 2014 elections less than a year away, many Democrats hope that the Great Recession and the prospect of lingering economic stagnation have changed attitudes.
Raising the minimum wage, for example, is a populistic theme that 76 percent of Americans support, including a solid majority of Republicans, a November Gallup poll found.
Small wonder that Obama devoted a section of his speech to advo-cating a higher minimum wage — and condemning Republican resist-ance. Labour-backed minimum-wage supporters are promoting ballot initiatives in Alaska, Arkansas and South Dakota, red states where Democratic Senate seats are at risk, National Journal reported last week. Of course, before it fizzled out, the Occupy movement was supposed to revolutionise American politics. But US public opinion remains relatively indifferent to income inequality, even after the Great Recession’s harsh lessons for the middle class about economic insecurity.
Fewer than half of Americans (47 percent) consider inequality a “very big” problem, the 2013 Pew Research Survey of Global Attitudes found. Among developed nations, only Canadians, Japanese and Australians were less concerned. This contrasts with 65 percent of French respond-ents calling inequality a ‘very big’ problem in their society.
Obama acknowledged that his crusade against inequality must account for the fact that Americans “admire folks who start new busi-nesses, create jobs and invent the products that enrich our lives. And we expect them to be rewarded handsomely for it.” This is less true in Europe. Europeans consider health insurance and income support obvious roles for government, whereas the US welfare state emphasises ‘earned’ benefits, such as Social Security and Medicare in retirement, health insurance linked to a job, or aid to veterans.
The very aspect of Obamacare that made it such a no-brainer for liberal Democrats — health care for all, whether or not you “earn” it — turns out to be one of its political weaknesses.
Still, the populist trend in Democratic ranks is strong, as evidenced by such events as Bill DeBlasio’s recent win in the New York mayoral election. What this thinking underestimates is data such as the Pew finding that only 17 percent of Americans want the government’s top priority to be fighting inequality.
By contrast, 41 percent said that job creation should be priority No. 1 — followed by reducing the national debt (28 percent).
Create jobs, slash debt, then worry about equality. Isn’t that the Republican pitch? WP-BLOOMBERG
Australia not afflicted with human rights law
VIEWS 11WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
www.thepeninsulaqatar.com
China’s ambition creates holes US can exploitWashington could use the controversy over the air defence zone to press Beijing into agreeing to some form of crisis-management mechanism among four countries in northeast Asia.
12 MIDDLE EASTWEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
www.thepeninsulaqatar.com
JERUSALEM: A senior Palestinian official said the United States was asking Palestinians to make security concessions in peace talks with Israel in order to silence the Jewish state’s criticism of world power diplomacy over Iran’s nuclear program.
The accusations by Yasser Abed Rabbo, who joined Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in a meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry last week, fur-ther clouded hopes of achieving a negotiated accord by an April target date.
Kerry, who will return to Israel and the Palestinian territories this week, presented both sides with suggestions on Thursday about how Israel might fend off future threats from a Palestinian state envisaged in West Bank land it now occupies.
Israel has long demanded that under any eventual accord it retain swathes of Jewish
settlements in the West Bank, as well as military control of the territory’s eastern Jordan Valley — effectively, the prospective Palestine’s border with Jordan.
But Abed Rabbo told Voice of Palestine radio that Kerry had plunged the process into crisis by seeking to “appease Israel through agreeing to its expansion
demands in the (Jordan) Valley under the pretext of security.”
US acquiescence to Israel’s security demands was aimed at “silencing the Israelis over the
deal with Iran and achieving a fake progress in the Palestinian-Israeli track at our expense”, he said. Abed Rabbo was referring to the November 24 interim accord
reached in Geneva between world powers and Iran, whereby it agreed to some curbs on its disputed nuclear programme in exchange for the easing of inter-national sanctions.
Dan Shapiro, the US ambas-sador to Israel, said on Monday there was no quid pro quo between the Iran and Palestine talks.
“These two issues concern both Israel’s security and our security and the interests of all the Middle East, that it be a more quiet and stable region. But we do not see any linkage in which we seek to give on one issue and receive on the other,” Shapiro told Israel’s Army Radio.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially condemned Geneva as an “his-toric mistake” that risked help-ing Iran’s limping economy, while leaving it with the means to make a nuclear bomb. Iran says its nuclear drive is peaceful.
REUTERS
Palestinians say US appeasing Israel over Iran at their expense
WASHINGTON: Secretary of State John Kerry will return to Israel and the West Bank this week just days after his last visit, a US official said, deny-ing he was only focused on an interim Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
Amid intense diplomatic activ-ity, Kerry will leave again for Israel today, five days after he landed back from Jerusalem and after spending most of the week-end meeting in Washington with Israeli leaders.
“This is an important time in the negotiations, and he felt
it was important to return to the region,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters, adding Kerry would spend two days in Israel and Ramallah for talks.
But she denied reports that Kerry and the administration of President Barack Obama were seeking some kind of interim framework ahead of a full accord.
“Just to be absolutely clear, we are not focused on an interim deal, we are focused on a final deal,” Psaki told reporters, while adding “there of course will be a process to getting there.”
All sides remained “commit-ted to a nine-month timeframe” set out earlier this year when Kerry succeeded in bringing the two sides back to the negotiat-ing table after a three-year stale-mate. Kerry will leave today for his ninth overnight stay in Israel since he became secretary of state in February, on a trip which will also take him to Vietnam and the Philippines.
Psaki refused however to lay out “all the steps that could be possible to get to a final status agreement, and I’m not going to lay out what the options are.”
Obama and Kerry both addressed the Saban Forum organised by the Brookings Institution over the weekend in Washington which gathered some of Israel’s top leaders.
“It is essential, in my judg-ment, to reach for a full agree-ment and to have a framework within which we can try to work for that,” Kerry told the forum.
Such a “basic framework will have to address all the core issues — borders, security, refugees, Jerusalem, mutual recognition, and an end of claims.
AFP
Kerry jetting back to Israel and West Bank
TEHRAN: Iran yesterday dismissed an offer from Israel’s president to meet his Iranian counterpart as a propaganda ploy to ease Israeli isolation over a nuclear accord between Tehran and world powers.
“This propaganda to help the regime out of isolation will prove fruitless,” foreign min-istry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham told reporters. She said President Shimon Peres’s offer was aimed at helping Iran’s arch-foe Israel out of its isolation after its outspoken opposition to the nuclear deal clinched last month in Geneva. Asked on Sunday about a possible meeting with Iran’s President Hassan Rowhani, Peres said: “Why not? I don’t have enemies. It’s not a question of personalities but of policies.”
“The aim is to transform enemies into
friends,” said the president, whose role in Israel is symbolic and ceremonial. But the foreign ministry spokeswoman said her
country would never recognise the Jewish state or change its stand.
“There has not been nor will there be any change on Iran’s stance and views regarding the Zionist regime” in Israel, Afkham said. “Iran does not recognise Israel. Our position regarding this oppressive and occupationist regime — which is completely illegitimate and has been created to occupy the lands of the Palestinians — is clear,” she added.
Israel, the sole if undeclared nuclear power in the Middle East, accuses Iran of working to develop a nuclear bomb, a charge denied by the Islamic republic. Tehran has a long history of belligerent statements towards Israel and supports its foes, the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas and Lebanon’s Shia militant group Hezbollah. AFP
GENEVA: The United Nations’ first relief airlift to Syria from Iraq will deliver food and winter supplies to the mostly Kurdish northeast this week with the permission of both govern-ments, the UNHCR refugee agency said yesterday.
The airbridge, using Ilyushin-76 commercial cargo planes to Hassakeh from Arbil in northern Iraq, will begin tomorrow. Up to 12 flights are scheduled through Sunday, said Amin Awad, direc-tor of UNHCR’s Middle East and North Africa Bureau.
UN agencies have ferried lim-ited aid supplies into Syria from Iraq and Lebanon, but not via Turkey because of objections from President Bashar Al Assad’s government.
“This is the first time aid goes through Iraq,” Awad said. Syria gave permission about two weeks ago for the cross-border UN operation from Iraq into Syrian Kurdish areas of Hassakeh prov-ince, which had initially envisaged truck convoys via the Yarubiya
border crossing, a cheaper option, he said. “As the situation was very complicated, negotiating with many factions, we shifted to an airlift,” Awad said, noting that one main Kurdish group in the area was pro-Syrian government and the other pro-Turkish.
The cities of Hassakeh and Qamishli are to receive food and relief items as a harsh winter sets in, he said. The cargo will also include blankets, kitchen sets, plastic tarpaulins for shel-ter, sleeping mats, and jerry cans.
“The number of vulnerable people in Hassakeh is estimated at 50,000-60,000 but we are still doing assessments. Hassakeh has been out of reach for a long time,” Awad said. Awad said the United Nations was still “lining up air-lines that are willing to fly into that part of the country”.
Well over 100,000 people have been killed in the conflict in Syria, which began with peaceful pro-tests against Assad in March 2011. The UNHCR says about 6.5 mil-lion people have fled their homes
Kidnappers free Dutch couple in YemenSANA’A: A Dutch couple kid-napped in Yemen six months ago have been freed in the capi-tal Sana’a, the two countries announced yesterday.
The couple, in good health, will be flown back home today, they said, without giving details on the abductors or how the pair’s release was secured. “Dutch journalist Judith Spiegel and her partner Boudewijn Berendsen, abducted since June 8, have been freed,” a security official said, quoted by Yemen’s state news agency Saba.
“The kidnappers freed the Dutch couple in an area near the embassy of the Netherlands and they are in a good health condi-tion,” Saba reported, without giving details. The Dutch ambassador in Sanaa, Jeroen Verheul, wrote on Twitter: “Happy to confirm that Judith and Boudewijn have been released safe and sound.”
Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia hold dam talksKHARTOUM: Water minis-ters from Addis Ababa, Cairo and Khartoum “successfully” held talks on an Ethiopian dam project, Sudan’s minister said, after Egypt’s objections delayed formation of a committee to implement expert advice.
“We have addressed a signifi-cant part of the issues on the fol-low-up of the implementation of the recommendations of the inter-national panel of experts,” Sudan’s Water Resources and Electricity Minister, Muattaz Musa Abdallah Salim, said in a brief statement to reporters after the talks which lasted several hours.
Saudi, Pakistani beheadedRIYADH: Saudi authorities yesterday beheaded a man con-victed of incest in the south of the kingdom, the interior min-istry said. Hasan Ghazwani, a Saudi national, was executed in the city of Jizan, the ministry said in a statement carried by SPA state news agency.
It said Ghazwani’s affair had led to a pregnancy but did not disclose their family relationship or whether the woman had deliv-ered. A Pakistani man was also executed yesterday for smuggling drugs into the kingdom, it said in a separate statement. He was executed in the capital Riyadh.
Suicide bomber kills 11 in IraqBAGHDAD: A suicide bomber killed 11 people and wounded 20 at a Shia funeral in a city northeast of Baghdad yester-day. The bombing took place in Baquba, 65km from the capital at a funeral for a group of Shia shepherds who had been killed by unidentified gunmen outside the city. AGENCIES
Iran rejects Peres’ offer to meet Rowhani
Shimon Peres Hassan Rowhani
UN to airlift aid from Iraq to Syria Rebel-held town under pressure
Precaution
Fishing boats are being removed from the ancient port of Sidon on the southern coast of Lebanon, 40km south of the capital Beirut, ahead of a winter storm expected to bring high winds and heavy rain to the east Mediterranean region.
AMMAN: Radical Muslim cleric Abu Qatada told a Jordanian court yesterday he was not guilty of terrorism charges and he challenged its authority to try him under the terms of his deportation from Britain.
Appearing in court in brown prison fatigues, Abu Qatada said the presence of a military judge in the panel of three violated the agreement under which he was flown back to Jordan in July after many years of legal battles in Britain.
The Islamist cleric had already been sentenced in absentia by a Jordanian court to life imprison-ment for conspiracy to carry out Al Qaeda-style attacks against US and other targets inside Jordan.
He is now being retried, with
the prosecution arguing he was a mentor to jihadist cells in Jordan while he was in Britain, provid-ing both spiritual and material support to a campaign of vio-lence during the late 1990s inside Jordan, whose pro-Western poli-cies made it an Al Qaeda target.
“I have been prevented from defending myself for a long period, and God knows that I am inno-cent,” said Abu Qatada, saying that the charges against him were fabricated.
“There has been a betrayal of the agreement under which I have come. There is now a mili-tary judge...I have come to be tried by civilian judges.” “This court is a betrayal of the agreement and I don’t recognise it,” said Abu Qatada, whose real name is Mahmoud Othman. REUTERS
Abu Qatada challenges Jordanian court authority
Smoke rises while residents run after shelling from forces loyal to President Bashar Al Assad on a fuel vendor in Al Shaar area in Aleppo yesterday.
Croatia may take part in Syria arsenal destructionZAGREB: Croatia might take part in Syrian chemical arse-nal’s destruction by allowing its Adriatic ports to be used to load it onto US ships, Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said yesterday.
Milanovic said that Nato and EU member Croatia has been involved in consultations on a possible transport of “precur-sors” — ingredients for chemical weapons — from Syria through Mediterranean, state news agency Hina reported.
AFP
within Syria and 2.3 million have sought refuge abroad. “Winter is here. This is one of the harshest winters according to any forecast that you may get hold of, prob-ably in the last 100 years,” Awad told a news briefing. Meanwhile, army yesterday turned its sights
to the town of Yabrud, the last rebel stronghold in the strategic Qalamoun region near Lebanon’s border, after a string of battlefield victories. The town is believed to be where a group of nuns from the historic Christian hamlet of Maalula have been transferred,
reportedly in the hands of jihadist rebels from Al Nusra Front.
In Spain, meanwhile, El Mundo newspaper announced that two Spanish journalists, Javier Espinosa and Ricardo Garcia Vilanova, have gone missing in northern Syria. AFP
MIDDLE EAST 13WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
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GAZA CITY: The Palestinian Hamas movement has “resumed” relations with Iran after a temporary falling out over the Syrian conflict, a senior member of the Islamist movement said yesterday.
“Relations between Hamas and Iran have resumed,” Mahmud Al Zahar told report-ers at a news conference in Gaza, the Palestinian enclave ruled by Hamas since 2007.
Ties had been “affected by the Syria situation, and Hamas has withdrawn from Syria so that it can’t be identified with this or that side,” he said.
“We’ve confirmed we are not interfering in the Syrian case, or in any other Arab country.”
Iran had long supported the Sunni Hamas against their shared enemy Israel.
But exiled Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal left his base in Damascus after the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, criticis-ing President Bashar Al Assad, a key ally of Iran, and moving to the Sunni Gulf state of Qatar.
Subsequent reports that Hamas was supporting the Sunni-led rebels in Syria against
Iran-backed Shia supporters of Assad, such as the Lebanese movement Hezbollah, led to a decrease in crucial Iranian funding of Hamas, according to media reports.
But Zahar denied there had been a complete severing of ties.
“Our relations with Iran were not cut, and we don’t wish to cut ties with any Arab countries either, even those that are fight-ing against us,” he said in refer-ence to Egypt, which has taken a hard line against the Islamist group since the military over-throw of president Mohamed Mursi in July.
Hamas is the Palestinian affiliate of Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood, which has been the target of a massive crack-down in Egypt in recent months that has seen hundreds of Morsi supporters killed and more than 2,000 arrested.
Zahar said there was still cooperation with Egypt on get-ting supplies, including fuel, into the Gaza Strip, but “there is no political contact, because the current (Egyptian) regime is against it.”
AFP
Hamas says it has resumed Iran ties
KUWAIT CITY: Kuwait’s Emir H H Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah opened an annual Gulf summit yesterday with a call for an end to the “human catastrophe” in Syria.
He issued the plea as Ahmad Jarba, leader of Syria’s main opo-sition National Coalition, attended the opening of the summit and delivered a speech in which he appealed for urgent help from the wealthy Gulf states.
“The human catastrophe is still ongoing in Syria which calls on us to double efforts and work with the international commu-nity, especially the UN Security Council which has remained una-ble to put an end to this human
tragedy,” Sheikh Sabah said.The leaders of the oil-rich
Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states are due to discuss during the two-day summit a range of issues including the situation in Syria, ties with Iran and boost-ing economic cooperation between their member states.
Only three leaders are attend-ing, the rulers of Qatar, Bahrain and host country Kuwait.
The Saudi crown prince is representing the ailing King Abdullah, while Oman is rep-resented by the deputy premier and the United Arab Emirates by its vice-president and prime minister.
Ties between Sunni-ruled
GCC states and neighbouring Shia Iran have come under the spotlight after a landmark deal was reached last month between Tehran and world powers over its disputed nuclear programme.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif last week toured four GCC countries, but not Saudi Arabia or Bahrain.
Zarif tried to assure Gulf states the nuclear deal was not at their expense and called for a new page in relations, although Saudi Arabia in particular appears to remain sceptical.
In his speech, Sheikh Sabah said the Gulf states had “expressed their satisfaction with the interim Geneva deal... hoping it would
succeed and lead to an everlast-ing agreement that would keep tension away from the region”.
This year’s summit is being staged amid differences over a Saudi proposal to upgrade the GCC into a confederation, a move Oman has publicly rejected.
Omani Foreign Minister Yussef bin Alawi threatened at the week-end that Muscat would pull out of the loose alliance if a union was announced, while Saudi Arabia, solidly backed by Bahrain, insisted it was time to move ahead.
Kuwait’s State Minister for Cabinet Affairs Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah Al Sabah told reporters talks over the union were still ongoing. AFP
Rights groups demand Egypt to probe killings of Mursi backersCAIRO: Rights groups urged Egypt’s army-backed govern-ment to investigate mass kill-ings of protesters by security forces during the dispersal of Muslim Brotherhood sit-ins in August after Islamist president Mohamed Mursi was deposed.
Interim authorities have pressed the crackdown on dis-sent since then, jailing thousands of Mursi supporters and outlaw-ing the Islamist movement that propelled him to power last year in Egypt’s first freely contested presidential election.
The army ousted Mursi after mass protests against his rule.
An alliance of 13 human rights groups said the state prosecutor had yet to investigate and hold members of the security forces accountable “for excessive and unjustified use of lethal force” on August 14, when the police and army broke up two Cairo sit-ins by Mursi supporters.
“There can be no hope for the rule of law and political stability in Egypt ... without accountability for what may be the single biggest incident of mass killing in Egypt’s recent history on August 14,” said Gasser Abdel-Razek, associate
director at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.
August 14 marked the bloodi-est day in a state swoop on the Muslim Brotherhood following Mursi’s overthrow on July 3.
The alliance of human rights organisations included Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Their statement was issued to coincide with interna-tional Human Rights Day.
In the run-up to the secu-rity clampdown, thousands of Brotherhood supporters were camped out at the two Cairo sit-ins. The biggest encampment was based around Rabaa Al Adawiya mosque in the northeast of the city. “A small minority of protest-ers used firearms that day, but the police responded excessively by shooting recklessly, going far beyond what is permitted under international law,” the rights groups said in their statement.
“The killing of seven police officers during the dispersal of the Rabaa sit-in does not justify the kind of collective punish-ment of hundreds of protesters and disproportionate use of lethal force that we saw that day,” said Bahey Al Din Hassan, head of the
Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. The government should set up a fact-finding committee as a first step towards account-ability, the statement said.
The Interior Ministry has said the Brotherhood was storing weapons at the protest camps, something the group denied. An Interior Ministry official said the authorities had not used excessive force to scatter the camps and that Mursi’s supporters fired first, forcing the police to strike back.
Besides the August 14 incident, the statement listed four other mass killings of Mursi support-ers following his downfall. It gave a death toll of 333 in those incidents, saying three members of the security forces were also killed. Police brutality fuelled the 2011 uprising against then-long-time President Hosni Mubarak, and reform of the security serv-ices has been a longstanding demand among activists. “For almost three years now, succes-sive Egyptian governments have ignored calls for justice, as police brutality and the accompanying death toll continue to mount with each incident,” Abdel-Razek said in the statement. REUTERS
Turkish MP takes oath after freed in coup plot caseANKARA: Turkish journalist Mustafa Balbay took his oath of office as a member of parlia-ment yesterday after his release from nearly five years in prison on security charges, raising hope among other jailed depu-ties that they could follow in his footsteps.
He was among 275 defendants including an ex-military chief, retired officers, academics, jour-nalists and politicians jailed in August over an alleged plot to overthrow Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted government.
Balbay, sentenced to almost 35 years in prison, was freed pending appeal by an Istanbul court after the Constitutional Court ruled his pre-trial detention period of more than four years had violated his rights. Balbay’s wife and two children, seated in the spectators’ gallery in the parliament, smiled and clapped as he read the oath. Many opposition MPs gave Balbay a standing ovation.
Turkey charges 255 over protestsISTANBUL: Turkish prosecu-tors said they have charged 255 protesters, including seven for-eigners, over mass demonstra-tions that swept the country in June. Those indicted face a range of charges including vio-lating laws on demonstrations, damaging a place of worship and protecting criminals, as well as injuring civil servants and hijack-ing public transport vehicles, a statement from the Istanbul pub-lic prosecutor’s office said.
It did not disclose the nationali-ties of the foreigners. At least six people died and 8,000 people were injured in anti-government unrest that posed the biggest challenge to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule yet. AFP
JERUSALEM: Israel’s parlia-ment has approved a law which allows illegal immigrants from Africa to be detained for up to a year without trial, MPs announced yesterday.
The government-backed bill amends earlier legislation from 2012 under which illegal immi-grants could be held for three years without trial that was overturned by the Supreme Court in September. The new bill passed by 30 votes in favour to 15
against during a late-night vote in the 120-member parliament, or Knesset.
It was the latest in a series of measures aimed at cracking down on the numbers of Africans enter-ing the country illegally, which Israel says poses a threat to the state’s Jewish character.
Last year, Israel launched a crackdown on what it said were 60,000 illegal African immi-grants, rounding up and deporting 3,920 by the end of the year, and
building a hi-tech fence along the border with Egypt.
On November 24, the cabinet approved measures aimed at tackling the question of illegal immigrants, including a crack-down on employers and financial incentives for those agreeing to return to their country of origin.
It has also invested in the con-struction of a sprawling deten-tion facility for illegals arriving in Israel and for immigrants already in the country who “disturb the
public order,” the premier’s office said.
The facility, to be inaugurated on December 12 and run by the Israel Prisons Services, will be open during the day but locked at night, and it will initially house up to 3,300 people, Haaretz news-paper reported.
It said capacity could be expanded to hold up to 11,000.
Hardliners from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud party praised the new legislation, with
Interior Minister Gideon Saar saying it would “allow us to keep illegals away from our cities.”
And MP Miri Regev said Israel should “send them all back to their countries.”
But not everyone welcomed the legislation.
“Would you also have placed Nelson Mandela in a closed detention centre?” asked Tamar Zandberg from the leftwing Meretz party.
AFP
A tear gas canister flies towards Cairo University students, who are supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Mursi, during a clash with security forces in front of the university, yesterday.
East Libya separatists set Dec 15 deadline for oil dealTRIPOLI: Leaders of a movement seeking autonomy for Libya’s eastern Cyrenaica region said they could allow oil exports to resume on December 15 from several ports if Tripoli meets their demands and allows the region to take its share of crude.
The heavily armed tribal movement, which has blocked the ports to demand a bigger share of Libya’s oil wealth and autonomy for Cyrenaica, will sell crude on its own if the government does not come through, the leaders said.
There was no immediate reaction from Tripoli, which has so refused to recognize a self-declared eastern government after the movement seized the Es-Sider and Ras Lanuf ports and other facilities in the oil-rich east. The movement is made up of tribesmen and fighters who helped topple Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and now demand a federal system that would share power between the Cyrenaica, the west and southern Fezzan similar to the political system in the kingdom before Gaddafi. REUTERS
Israel passes law to hold illegal African immigrants
CLOCK-WISE FROM TOP LEFT: Saudi Crown Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz, UAE Vice-President Sheikh Muhammed bin Rashid Al Makthoum, Omani Deputy Premier Fahd bin Mahmud Al Said and the King of Bahrain H M Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa at the summit.
The Ruler of Kuwait H H Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah receives the Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani at the 34th GCC summit at Al Bayan Palace in Kuwait City yesterday.
Call to end massacre in SyriaEconomic cooperation and Iran ties on agenda of two-day GCC summit
14 INTERNATIONALWEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
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KIEV: President Viktor Yanukovych yesterday held talks with his three predeces-sors and the EU foreign policy chief to seek a way out of an explosive standoff with protest-ers, warning that opposition calls for a revolution were a threat to national security.
With thousands still defying sub-freezing temperatures to pro-test Yanukovych’s rejection of an EU pact under Russian pressure, the president met EU foreign pol-icy supremo Catherine Ashton in Kiev, his office said.
“Substantial meeting (with) President Yanukovych, all rel-evant issues discussed,” Ashton’s spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic added on Twitter, saying the talks lasted three and a half hours but giving no further details.
In a sign of Europe’s support for the demonstrators, Ashton later visited the epicentre of the protests on Independence Square in Kiev.
Yanukovych had earlier con-vened Ukraine’s ex-leaders Leonid Kuchma, Leonid Kravchuk and Viktor Yushchenko for an unprec-edented meeting at the presiden-tial administration.
The meeting with the veteran presidents appeared to yield no immediate breakthrough, with Yanukovych issuing a warning while also trying to show signs of goodwill to the protestors.
“Calls for a revolution pose a threat to national security,” Yanukovych said in comments broadcast on national television. “I want that this dark page is turned and is never allowed to happen again.”
Yanukovych also said a del-egation would likely be flying to Brussels to renew negotiations on
key political and free trade agree-ments today.
He added that Ukraine would seek to decide on the EU deals by March when it is set to hold a summit with the bloc.
Yanukovych’s decision to scrap key trade and political agreements with the EU under pressure from Russia and police violence against protesters have plunged the ex-Soviet country into its most acute political crisis since the Orange Revolution in 2004.
Protests have gone into a third week, with both the authorities and the opposition showing few signs of compromise.
Police moved protesters away from government buildings on Monday after a weeklong block-ade but the demonstrators are still occupying Independence Square and the Kiev city hall.
Yanukovych incensed the oppo-sition further by meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin for secret talks on Friday.
Opposition leaders said they would not negotiate with Yanukovych until he sacked the government of Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, released arrested demonstrators and punished riot police accused of crushing a pro-test on November 30.
Ex-presidents Kuchma and Kravchuk pointedly noted dur-ing the meeting that prime min-isters had stepped down before, and indicated that Azarov could do the same.
“Civil society is now await-ing a signal from the presi-dent,” said Kuchma, Ukraine’s president between 1994 and 2004. Yanukovych made no pub-lic comment on the fate of the government.
AFP
Putin orders military to boost Arctic presenceMOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s military yesterday to step up its pres-ence in the Arctic after Canada signalled it planned to claim the North Pole and surrounding waters.
The tough and rapid response to Canada’s announcement reflected Russia’s desire to protect its oil and natural gas interests in the pristine but energy-rich region amid competing claims there by countries that also include Norway and Denmark.
Putin told an expanded defence ministry meeting that Russia’s national interests and security lay in a bolstered Arctic presence after a brief post-Soviet retreat.
“I would like you to devote special attention to deploying infrastructure and military units in the Arctic,” the Kremlin chief said in televised remarks.
Canada last week filed a claim with the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf concerning the outer limits of its continental shelf in the Atlantic Ocean.
Foreign Minister John Baird said the submission included Canada’s stake on the North Pole.
Russia has an overlapping claim to both the North Pole as well as large swathes of the Arctic that the US Geological Survey thinks could hold 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and up to 30 percent of its hidden natural gas reserves.
A government-sponsored diving team in 2007 planted a Russian flag under the North Pole, and the Kremlin has long mulled plans to deploy a large military presence in the region.
Putin told Tuesday’s defence ministry meeting that “next year, we have to complete the forma-tion of new large units and mili-tary divisions” in the Arctic that remain on constant combat alert.
The Kremlin chief added that Russia must possess “all the levers necessary for protecting its security and national interests” in the area.
AFP
Obama leads tributes at Mandela memorialSOWETO: US President Barack Obama led world tributes yesterday to Nelson Mandela, hailing him as “a giant of his-tory” at a rain-soaked memorial attended by tens of thousands of South Africans united in proud, noisy celebration.
Obama was one of nearly 100 world leaders at the event in Soweto’s World Cup stadium, where songs of praise and rebel-lion, many harking back to the apartheid era that Mandela helped condemn to history, echoed down from the dancing crowds in the stands.
“It is hard to eulogise any man ... how much harder to do so for a giant of history, who moved a nation towards justice,” Obama said, after being introduced to wild cheers.
“He showed us the power of action, of taking risks on behalf of our ideals,” Obama said of the prisoner-turned-president whose life story earned uncommon uni-versal respect.
In a nod to Mandela’s extraordi-nary global reach, popularity and influence, the Indian, Brazilian, Cuban and Namibian presidents all delivered eulogies extolling his
courage and moral leadership.But it was Obama’s impas-
sioned tribute that really galva-nised the crowd, which at times became impatient with the long roster of speakers and a poor sound system that dampened the spontaneity of the occasion.
The four-hour event began at midday with a stirring rendition of the national anthem, Nkosi
Sikelel’ iAfrika (God Bless Africa), led by a mass choir and picked up by the rest of the stadium.
Some 80,000 had been expected, but the venue was two-thirds full as the ceremony got under way under a curtain of rain.
The mood was upbeat, with peo-ple determined to celebrate the memory of one of the 20th cen-tury’s towering political figures.
In his tribute, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon noted that Mandela had managed to unite people in death, much as he had in life. “Look around this stage ... we see leaders representing many points of view ... all here, all united,” he said.
Before taking to the lectern, Obama shook hands with Raul Castro, leader of long-time Cold War rival Cuba.
Mandela’s widow, Graca Machel, received a huge ovation as she took her seat on the main stage erected at one end of the pitch.
In his tribute, Obama took a swipe at authoritarian rulers who spoke of embracing Mandela’s legacy without acting on it.
“There are too many lead-ers who claim solidarity with Madiba’s struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people,” he said.
South African President Jacob Zuma, who was roundly booed by sections of the crowd in a reflec-tion of growing public dissatisfac-tion with the current generation of ANC leaders, hailed Mandela as a “fearless freedom fighter.”
AFP
Yanukovych slams calls for ‘revolution’Ukraine president holds crisis talks
Troops of the multinational African force FOMAC take control of a street in the Combattant neighbourhood of Bangui.
Violence continues in CARBANGUI: Crowds attacked a mosque, looted houses and torched cars in Central African Republic’s capital yesterday, hours before French President Francois Hollande was due to visit.
Two French soldiers were killed overnight in an attack by gunmen in the capital, France’s first casualties in an operation to restore stability in its former colony, which is racked by fighting between Muslims and Christians.
Major gun battes have ended with the French deployment but French troops have traded gunfire with gunmen in the capital, where religious tension is simmering.
Several lynchings were reported by residents overnight, adding to the toll of 465 been killed since Thursday.
The country has been gripped by chaos since mainly Muslim Seleka rebels seized power in March. Months of looting, rap-ing and killing since has brought reprisals by Christian militias and allies of ousted President Francois Bozize.
Michel Djotodia, rebel leader-turned interim president, has largely lost control of his loose band of fighters, which includes many gunmen from Sudan and Chad.
Christians fled reprisals by Seleka gunmen following a failed offensive on Bangui last week but the French move to disarm all fighters has subsequently weak-ened Seleka’s influence in the capital, leading to counterattacks.
In the Fouh neighbourhood yes-terday, a correspondent saw civil-ians armed with wooden clubs and machetes attack a mosque and nearby houses.
“We found arms in their mosque. We don’t want to see Djotodia and his Muslims here any more,” said one man at the scene, who wielded a large knife and refused to give his name.
At least six people were lynched overnight, mainly during violence targeting Muslims, according to residents in Benz-vi and Miskine, Bangui neighbourhoods.
“Three of those stoned to death were Seleka fighters who had been
disarmed and a fourth killed was a Muslim whose relatives were part of Seleka,” said Hilaire Ouakanga, a resident of Benz-vi.
The UN refugee agency UNHCR said about 100,000 peo-ple had fled their homes in Bangui in the past few days, bringing to more than half a million the number of displaced countrywide since the crisis began a year ago.
The French presence on Bangui’s streets was lighter than on Monday, when disarmament operations were launched.
The 1,600-strong French force has exchanged gunfire with gun-men several times since Monday when it began an operation to dis-arm rival Muslim and Christian fighters, but the deaths over-night were the first confirmed casualties.
The two French soldiers, marine paratroopers from the 8th Regiment based in Castres, died after coming under attack at close range from five or six unidentified lightly-armed men, the army said.
REUTERS
Snow blankets US EastWASHINGTON: Fresh winter snow moved into the US mid-Atlantic region yesterday, shutting schools and offices in the nation’s capital and elsewhere as the mid-section of the country remained in the grip of Arctic air that showed no signs of easing.
From 5.1 cm to 20.3 cm of snow was forecast to fall from north-ern Virginia, across Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware and into southern New England.
Treacherous traffic and power outages forced many government offices and schools to close.
About 1,000 flights were cancelled nationwide yesterday, accord-ing to tracking website Flightaware.com. Thousands of homes and businesses were without power on Monday night.
French troops kill 19 IslamistsBAMAKO: French troops killed 19 Islamist militants during an army operation in Mali’s rebel-infested northern desert yester-day, a French military source said, as the country prepared to stage nationwide elections.
The violence comes with Malians due to vote on Sunday in a sec-ond round of parliamentary polls supposed to mark the west African nation’s first steps to recovery after it was plunged into chaos by a military coup in March last year.
“The French troops haven’t reported any deaths or injuries. We are in control of the situation,” a source said, without specifying which Islamist group the militants were part of.
Founder of implant firm jailedMARSEILLE: The founder of a French firm whose faulty breast implants sparked a global health scare was sentenced to four years in jail yesterday after being convicted of fraud.
Four other former executives of the now-defunct Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) were also convicted over a scandal that reverberated around the world.
PIP was revealed two years ago to have been systematically using industrial-grade rather than medically approved silicone in its breast implants in order to cut costs and boost profits.
The Marseille court sentenced PIP founder Jean-Claude Mas to four years in prison, fined him €75,000 and banned him permanently from working in medical services or running a company.
The 74-year-old, who says he is insolvent, was also ordered to compensate more than 4,000 plaintiffs up to €13,000 each for the anxiety he had caused them and, in some cases, the physical trauma of having the implants removed.
Ortega could be in power for yearsMANAGUA: Nicaragua’s national assembly yesterday approved a constitutional change to remove presidential term limits, which could allow incumbent Daniel Ortega stay in power for years and raises concerns about democracy in the country.
Approval of the plan put forward last month by Ortega’s ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front must now be ratified by the assembly next year before it can take effect.
The 68-year-old Ortega has yet to say publicly whether he wants to run again for the presidency in 2016. Nicaragua’s law had set a two-term limit for presidents but that was overridden by a Supreme Court ruling that allowed Ortega to run for office again in 2011.
AGENCIES
US President Barack Obama addresses the crowd during a memorial service for Nelson Mandela at FNB Stadium in Johannesburg yesterday.
Writers want limits to state snoopingLONDON: More than 500 authors, including J M Coetzee and Gunter Grass, have signed a petition to the United Nations published yesterday which claims mass state surveillance is violating basic freedoms.
The signatories called for a new international bill of digital rights to curb what they claimed was the abuse of democracy through widespread Internet snooping.
The letter comes the day after eight leading US-based technology companies called on Washington to overhaul its sur-veillance laws following the recent
revelations of online eavesdrop-ping from fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden.
The Writers Against Mass Surveillance petition, signed by 562 authors from more than 80 countries, was published in around 30 newspapers world-wide, including The Guardian in Britain.
The signatories were led by five winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature: South African writer Coetzee, German novel-ist Grass, Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek, Swedish poet Tomas Transtroemer and
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk.It was also signed by Booker
Prize winners Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, John Berger, Roddy Doyle, Kazuo Ishiguro, Thomas Keneally, Yann Martel, Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje and Arundhati Roy.
Others included Peter Hoeg, Colm Toibin, Martin Amis, Lionel Shriver, Louis de Bernieres and Irvine Welsh.
“A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democ-racy,” the petition said.
AFP
Canada spies on behalf of USMONTREAL: Canada has spied abroad on behalf of the US National Security Agency, according to a classified docu-ment cited by public broad-caster CBC yesterday.
Ottawa opened espionage posts overseas at the request of the US agency, CBC said, citing an NSA briefing paper leaked by fugitive former US government contrac-tor Edward Snowden. It worked with the NSA in “approximately 20 high-priority countries.”
AFP
ASIA 15WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
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BANGKOK: Her eyes swelling with tears, Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra pleaded for anti-government protest-ers to clear the streets after she called a snap election, but protests leaders said she should step down within 24 hours.
After weeks of sometimes vio-lent street rallies, protesters dis-missed her call on Monday for a general election and said she should be replaced by an unelected ‘people’s council’, which has stoked concern that Southeast Asia’s sec-ond-biggest economy may abandon the democratic process.
Yingluck insisted she would not step down and said she would continue her duties as caretaker prime minister until the election, which is set for February 2.
“Now that the government has dissolved parliament, I ask that you stop protesting and that all sides work towards elections,” Yingluck told reporters as she went into a cabinet meeting held at an army club. “I have backed down to the point where I don’t know how to back down any further.”
Tears briefly formed in her eyes as she spoke, before she quickly composed herself - perhaps a glimpse of the emotional toll of weeks of protests.
Aligned with Bangkok’s royalist elite, the protesters want to oust Yingluck and erase the influence of her brother, former premier Thaksin Shinawatra,
Thaksin was convicted in absentia of graft in 2008 but he
dismissed the charges as politi-cally motivated. He is widely seen as the power behind Yingluck’s government, sometimes holding meetings with the cabinet by webcam.
Yingluck had no political expe-rience before entering a 2011 election she won by a landslide thanks to votes from the coun-tryside, where Thaksin built up a devoted following with policies to help the poor.
Protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban gave Yingluck 24 hours to step down. “We want the government to step aside to create a power vacuum in order to create a people’s council,” said Akanat Promphan, a spokesman for the protest group.
REUTERS
N Korea’s reign of terror worries South
Japan official calls for talks with ChinaTOKYO: Japan’s Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida has stressed the need for security talks with China to avert the risk of an incident in China’s new air defence identification zone in the East China Sea. Kishida told reporters yesterday Japan cannot accept China’s uni-lateral attempt to change the status quo, and that it will not agree to talks premised on the move, according to Japan’s (NHK WORLD) website. But Kishida also noted the impor-tance of avoiding an unex-pected incident. The Japanese official called for a resump-tion of bilateral talks within existing frameworks of stra-tegic and security discussions to smooth out communication with the Chinese side.
Stuffed toy icon of protest in HKHONG KONG: A stuffed toy wolf has sold out at Hong Kong’s IKEA stores, the Swedish furniture giant said yesterday, after it became a symbol of opposition to the city’s unpopular government. Hundreds of toys, called Lufsig, flew off the shelves within hours on Monday and yesterday, days after a protester threw it at the city’s leader Leung Chun-ying during a public meet-ing. “Lufsig has been sold out at all IKEA stores this morning,” a spokeswoman said, adding that there were queues before the store opened. The innocent-looking toy depicts the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood”, and can be seen holding a stuffed toy resembling the grandmother. IKEA said owners can use the toy -- which has a Chinese name similar to a profanity in the Cantonese dialect -- to recreate the fairy tale by res-cuing the grandmother from the wolf ’s belly. AGENCIES
PHNOM PENH: Thousands of Cambodian opposition sup-porters and activists, includ-ing Buddhist monks, took to the streets yesterday to mark Human Rights Day and call for improvements in the kingdom’s rights record.
Opposition leader Sam Rainsy led a crowd of some 6,000 support-ers -- many waving Cambodian flags and holding banners that read “Long Live Democracy” -- through Phnom Penh.
Chanting the party’s slogan of “Change! Change!” and “Step Down!” -- a reference to opposi-tion demand that Prime Minister Hun Sen resign -- the crowd gath-ered at a park in the city centre.
“Now, the state of human rights in our country is going down. We must struggle for the full and
proper respect of human rights,” Rainsy told the crowd.
Cambodians have lost their rights due to “corruption and dic-tatorship”, the opposition leader said, repeating his claim that Hun Sen won July’s national election due to widespread voting fraud.
He raised the recent death of South Africa’s anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, saying: “We will walk the same path as Nelson Mandela and we will be success-ful like him.”
Several hundred land rights activists and some Buddhist monks marched to parliament.
Thousands of garment work-ers and government officials also attended separate rallies to mark the United Nations-backed Human Rights Day.
Hundreds of riot police were
deployed outside Hun Sen’s house and at other key locations.
Activists say land conflicts are Cambodia’s most pressing human rights issue.
There have also been a series of recent protests by garment work-ers over poor conditions and low pay in factories, some of which have ended in violent crackdowns by security forces.
Last month a woman was shot dead and several injured after riot police used live ammunition and tear gas to break up a garment worker demonstration.
The government has faced mounting criticism from rights groups for alleged crackdowns on dissidents and protesters, in cases that are often linked to high-pro-file land disputes.
AFP
Cambodians mark Human Rights Day
Wet Christmas
A diver dressed in Santa Claus costume swims with sardines during a promotional event for “Sardines Feeding Show with Santa Claus” at the Coex Aquarium in Seoul yesterday.
SINGAPORE: Singapore’s first major riot in four decades is forcing the wealthy island to confront a stubborn but vexing question: how to treat low-paid foreign workers whose muscle underpins much of the economy but whose presence increasingly riles its citizens.
Images of rioters overturning police cars, throwing garbage bins and burning an ambu-lance in Singapore’s Little India on Sunday night shocked the orderly Southeast Asian nation and stirred debate over whether foreign workers should be better integrated or see their numbers reduced.
“This is just a tip of the ice-berg,” said Gayathiri, 30, an engi-neer who lives near the scene of the riots and goes by one name. “I hope the government will take it as a wake-up call. We need for-eigners to boost our economy, but not at the expense of our secu-rity,” she added, echoing a widely held sentiment.
Police charged 24 Indian nation-als with rioting, which carries a maximum penalty of seven years’
prison and caning. They were among an estimated 400 people who rampaged after a private bus fatally struck construction worker Sakthivel Kumaravelu, 33. The number of arrests could rise. The government has urged people not to jump to conclusions but many Singaporeans blame an overabundance of migrant work-ers and could use the riots to intensify a push for tighter immi-gration curbs - a step that could hurt the economy.
The dominant People’s Action Party (PAP) that has ruled Singapore for more than half a century was already facing pres-sure over Singapore’s high cost of living and its reliance on foreign workers on the island of nearly 5.4 million people.
Founded by Lee Kuan Yew, the father of the current prime min-ister, the PAP is credited with transforming Singapore from a colonial outpost in the 1960s into a global financial hub with world-class infrastructure, safe streets, an efficient civil service and the world’s highest concentration of millionaires. REUTERS
Riot a wake-up call for Singaporean officials
SEOUL: North Korea is engaged in a purge amounting to a “reign of terror” that has claimed the scalp of the coun-try’s second most powerful man and risks further damag-ing relations with the South, President Park Geun-hye said yesterday.
Park took office in Seoul ear-lier this year as North Korea conducted its third nuclear test, enraging world public opinion, and threatened to engulf its southern neighbour and its ally, the United States, in a war. The isolated state shelled a South Korean island in 2010 and is widely believed to have sunk a South Korean naval vessel in the same year.
“North Korea is currently carrying out a reign of terror, undertaking a large-scale purge in order to strengthen Kim Jong
Un’s power,” Park told a cabinet meeting, part of which was broad-cast on television.
“From now on, South-North Korea relations may become more unstable.”
In her usual carefully scripted manner, the president called for vigilance to safeguard the wealthy South’s achievements.
“In times like these, I think it is a nation’s duty and politicians’ job to keep people safe and free democracy strong,” she told the meeting.
State media said Jang Song-Thaek, the uncle of North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un, had been dis-missed from his posts for “criminal acts” ranging from mismanage-ment, corruption and leading a “dissolute and depraved life.”
Television in the tightly control-led and impoverished state showed
him being frogmarched by uni-formed personnel out of a meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party.
South Korean officials dis-counted media reports that a close associate of Jang who man-aged his funds had requested asylum and was under the pro-tection of South Korean officials in China.
“I understand there was no request” Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho Tae-young told a briefing. The South’s unification minister also told lawmakers no such application had been made.
South Korea’s intelligence serv-ice last week said two of Jang’s close entourage were executed for corruption and two of his relatives serving in embassies overseas had been recalled.
Although experts expect fur-ther reprisals against Jang’s allies,
no firm evidence has emerged of mass punishments. And they say China, North Korea’s only ally, generally resists allowing defec-tors from the North to seek asy-lum elsewhere.
Members of the South’s par-liament, however, said last week that Kim Jong Un was resorting to fear to cement his leadership.
“Kim Jong Un is strengthening the reign of terror... Last year 17 people were publicly executed, but this year there were about 40,” Cho Won-jin told journalists after a briefing by the NIS intelligence agency. It was the NIS that first broke news last week that Jang had been dismissed.
Cho also said authorities were enforcing harsher rules on vid-eos being imported illegally into North Korea.
REUTERS
South Korean President Park Geun-hye speaks during a Cabinet meeting at the Presidential Blue House in Seoul yesterday.
Thai PM urges protesters to vote
South-North Korea relations may become more unstable, says Park
16 PHILIPPINESWEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
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MANILA: The Philippine Supreme Court announced steps yesterday to speed up the trial of members of a powerful clan accused of murdering 58 people in the country’s worst political massacre.
Four years after the shoot-ings in the southern province of Maguindanao, there are concerns that it could take years to finish the trial of 108 detained suspects led by senior members of the Ampatuan political clan.
Another 88 suspects are still at large.
“At the rate we were going it would have taken 16 years to fully hear the Maguindanao massacre case,” Gilbert Andres, a lawyer for a group of victims’ relatives said, welcoming the Supreme Court announcement.
Maguindanao’s provincial kingpin, Andal Ampatuan Snr, two sons and several family
members are on trial for the November 2009 murder of 58 victims -- 32 journalists as well as relatives of their local political rival. The Muslim clan allegedly ordered the massa-cre to stop its political rival, Esmael Mangudadatu, from running against one of its mem-bers for the governorship of Maguindanao, a poor farming province.
A Supreme Court resolution yesterday said it will now allow state witnesses to submit writ-ten testimony to the lower court handling the case, so that they will only have to take the stand to answer questions by defence lawyers. It will also instruct the lower court to pass verdicts on each defendant once all the evi-dence against him has been heard, instead of waiting for all the evi-dence against all the accused to be presented.
The Supreme Court said it will also assign a third “assist-ing judge” on top of two others appointed earlier this year, so that presiding judge, Jocelyn Reyes, can concentrate on hearing the evidence. It said the third assist-ing judge will be instructed to handle a raft of motions, mainly filed by the defendants according to the lower court.
Andres, the private prosecutor, said these motions had burdened Reyes and impeded her from hearing the actual murder cases.
Marlo Guillano, the officer-in-charge of Judge Reyes’ adminis-trative office, said 104 of the 108 detained massacre suspects are now on trial.
State prosecutors are still pre-senting their witnesses in twice-weekly hearings on the case, with a third day each week devoted to hearing motions and petitions.
TACLOBAN: Pop megastar Justin Bieber hugged, sang to, danced and played with young survivors of the Philippines’ deadliest typhoon yesterday, bringing cheer to the disas-ter zone amid an international relief effort.
Bieber flew unannounced to the central city of Tacloban just over a month after it was devastated by Super Typhoon Haiyan and sang Christmas carols to children at a
heavily damaged local school amid tight security. “He sang ‘Holy Night’ for the children,” said Kate Donovan, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), one of three aid agencies expected to benefit from Bieber’s charity work.
During the performance, a boy hopped on the improvised stage and danced to the 19-year-old Canadian superstar’s lead.
Bieber also played basketball
at an improvised sandlot court with some of the young boys, later hugging some of them and posing for photos. “Most touching trip of my life,” the singer said on Twitter, also describing the per-formance as the last stop and “the most important one” of his global “Believe” tour.
“I saw the devastation first hand today. They need our help,” he added. Prior to visiting the Philippines, Bieber had posted a
message on fund raising website Prizeo.com urging his millions of fans to donate to the victims of the typhoon, the strongest to ever hit land.
“Unicef is very pleased that Justin Bieber wanted to visit Tacloban, and stopped by City Central Elementary School which has suffered a great deal of structural damage,” UNICEF emergency coordinator Angela Kearney said. AFP
Pop star Bieber brings cheer in Tacloban City
WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State John Kerry is to make his first visit to the Philippines since taking office to see first-hand the damage left by last month’s typhoon, and will also tour Vietnam where he fought during the war.
Kerry’s next trip from December 11 to 18 will start today, his 70th birthday, when he flies to Israel and Ramallah. But he will then travel to Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, before heading to Manila, and the storm-hit city of Tacloban, a US official said Monday.
Since becoming the top US diplomat in February, Kerry has dreamed of returning once again to the country where his political activism was forged in the horrors of the Vietnam War. He had also planned to visit the Philippines back in October, but the trip had to be cancelled at the last minute as Tropical Storm Nari bore down on the Southeast Asian nation.
“Within the Asia-Pacific rebalance, Southeast Asia holds special importance, and the sec-retary’s travel to Vietnam and the Philippines demonstrates the enduring US commitment... to the region,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.
It will be Kerry’s fourth trip to Asia while in office.
In Ho Chi Minh, the city once known as Saigon which fell to the communist North Vietnam forces in April 1975, Kerry will “under-score the growth of our bilateral
trade relationship and the empow-ering role of education.”
He would also visit the Mekong Delta to show how “Americans and Vietnamese can work together on critical issues such as climate change and renewable energy,” Psaki said.
During the war, Kerry served with the US Navy as a naval lieutenant and Swift Boat skip-per patrolling the rivers of the Mekong Delta, for which he was decorated with three Purple Hearts. It was on his return that Kerry became a fierce campaigner against the war.
“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” he agonized in a 1971 Senate hearing.
Kerry will also hold talks with senior Vietnamese leaders in Hanoi, before travelling on to long-time US ally the Philippines, still struggling to recover after Typhoon Hiayan hit on November 8. The typhoon swept through the nation’s central islands, leaving more than 7,500 dead or miss-ing and devastating whole towns including popular hotels, beach resorts, surfing and dive sites.
After talks in Manila, Kerry plans to tour the storm-hit city of Tacloban “to witness first-hand the recovery efforts that are tak-ing place there and discuss how the United States to continue to contribute to the relief and recon-struction work,” Psaki said.
AFP
Kerry to visit areas hit by typhoon‘Asia is important to Washington’
Activists burn an effigy of President Benigno Aquino III during a protest marking International Human Rights Day in Manila yesterday. They called for an end to extra-judicial killings of cause-oriented group leaders, an end to police and military harassment of labour unions, and speedy justice for victims of human rights violations.
Human rights protest
A Filipina lights a candle after putting flowers in front of a portrait of former South African president Nelson Mandela at the lobby of the South African Embassy in Manila yesterday. People gathered in cities and South African embassies around the world to pay tributes to him.
Tributes to Mandela
MNLF chief not at OIC meetingMANILA: Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) founding chairman Nur Misuari was not seen yester-day attending the 40th session of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Conakry, Republic of New Guinea.
Department of Foreign Affairs spokesman Raul Hernandez responded to questions about Misuari’s supposed attendance at the OIC meeting where the Philippine government is rep-resented by officials led by DFA Undersecretary Rafael Seguis.
“I just talked to Usec Seguis who is now in Conakry, Guinea attending the OIC meetings. He said he and other delegates have not seen Misuari in the meetings, on its second day now,” Hernandez said.
The military said that Misuari is still hiding somewhere in Sulu. Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) public affairs chief Lt Col Ramon Zagala issued the state-ment amid reports that Misuari would attend the OIC meeting in Conakry from December 9 to 11.
Zagala, however, declined to comment on questions whether the OIC would hand over Misuari to the Philippine government, considering he is a fugitive.
THE PHILIPPINE STAR
Congress revives budget oversightMANILA: Lawmakers may have lost their discretion over billions of pesos in lump sum public funds, but they will con-tinue to have a big say in the utilization of people’s money.
The Senate and the House of Representatives have revived the joint congressional oversight com-mittee on government expenditures to monitor disbursements from the P2.268tr 2014 national budget. Davao City Rep Isidro Ungab, chairman of the House appropria-tions committee, said the panel was revived after the Supreme Court declared the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) or pork barrel unconstitutional. “It’s clear: the executive branch implements the law, the legislative branch leg-islates and conducts oversight,” Ungab said.
THE PHILIPPINE STAR
17WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
www.thepeninsulaqatar.comPAKISTAN
Karzai rebuffs US pressure to sign dealPARIS: Afghan President Hamid Karzai has criticised what he said was pressure from the United States to accept a security agreement, accusing Washington of behaving like a colonial power.
Karzai has thrown the pact shaping the US military presence post-2014 into doubt in the past by saying that he would only sign if new conditions were met and then only after elections in April.
In an interview with French newspaper Le Monde, Karzai said the special United States envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, James Dobbins, had effectively told him
during a recent visit to Kabul that without a security agreement there would be no peace.
Karzai said that could be inter-preted as meaning: “If you don’t sign the agreement, we will pro-voke fighting in your country, we will cause trouble.”
In the absence of a deal, Washington says it will consider pulling its entire military pres-ence out of Afghanistan, which remains gripped by the Islamist Taliban’s insurgency.
“Even if they are serious, they can’t push us up against the wall,” Karzai said. “What I’ve been hearing in recent days and
heard in the past is classic colo-nial exploitation,” Karzai added. “Afghans will not submit, they have already fought colonial mas-ters, they don’t accept it.”
United States troops first went into Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US to oust the Taliban government, which provided refuge to Osama bin Laden. Twelve years later, 47,000 US troops are still there.
The United States has been in discussions with Afghan officials about keeping a residual force of about 8,000 troops after the end of the Nato combat mission next year. REUTERS
Father of Taliban backspolio vaccine in PakistanPESHAWAR: A radical Pakistani religious scholar known as the ‘Father of the Taliban’ has issued a fatwa urg-ing parents to immunise their children against polio and other fatal diseases, adding that vac-cinations comply with Islamic law.
The edict by Maulana Sami-ul-Haq, who heads the hardline Dar-ul-Uloom Haqqania seminary, comes more than a year after the Pakistani Taliban banned polio immunisation following a fake CIA vaccination programme meant to help track Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
The ban has led to a surge
in polio cases in Pakistan that threatens worldwide efforts to eradicate the infectious crippling disease.
Taliban fighters have launched regular attacks on medical work-ers and security personnel result-ing in at least 25 deaths since the June 2012 prohibition on inocula-tion. But according to a statement signed by Haq and dated October 30, parents should disregard the militants’ warnings.
“According to Sharia there is no harm in using vaccines which medical experts recommend to save children against deadly dis-eases,” the statement seen yes-terday said. AFP
Without agreement there will be no peace: US envoy
Woman rescued from stoningKABUL: Police in a remote northern Afghan village res-cued a woman from being stoned to death after she was condemned by the Taliban for allegedly cheating on her hus-band, officials said yesterday.
Taliban militants, who often run informal justice systems in rural Afghanistan, handed down the death penalty on the woman after her husband accused her of having an affair.
“When police rescued her, she was locked in a room in a com-pound that was used as a Taliban base,” Sayed Sarwar Hussaini, police spokesman for Kunduz province said.
The husband handed her over to the militants on Friday.
AFP
18 INDIAWEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
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LPG cylinder price hikedby Rs3.46NEW DELHI: The govern-ment yesterday announced a Rs3.46 hike in the price of a 14.2kg domestic cook-ing gas (LPG) cylinder after it increased the com-mission paid to dealers by a like amount. “The com-mission paid to dealers has been increased by Rs3.46 per 14.2kg cylinder to Rs40.71. Consequently, the retail sell-ing price of domestic LPG cylinder has been increased by the same amount,” a petroleum ministry offi-cial said here. The increase, effective immediately, means that the 14.2kg LPG cylin-der will now be available at Rs413.96 as against the pre-vious Rs410.50. The dealer’s commission on a 5kg LPG bottle has been increased by Rs1.73 to Rs20.36. The 5kg bottle presently costs Rs353 in Delhi. LPG prices were last revised in October 2012.
Mysore Wodeyar prince no moreBANGALORE: Srikanta-datta Narasimharaja Wode-yar, the 60-year-old last prince of Mysore’s Wodeyar dynasty, died yesterday following a cardiac arrest at a private hospital, an official said. The scion was rushed to the hos-pital around 2pm in a critical condition when he collapsed after lunch in his sprawl-ing Bangalore Palace in the city centre. The prince leaves behind his widow Pramoda Devi and two elder sisters, who stay in the Bangalore pal-ace with their families. The young prince succeeded as the head of royal dynasty in September 1974 following his father’s death.
Hazare launches indefinite fast R A L E G A N - S I D D H I : Veteran activist Anna Hazare launched an indefinite hun-ger strike in his village here to press for the passage of the Jan Lokpal Bill by parlia-ment. In the chilly 6 degree Celsius temperature sweeping Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district, Hazare went on his usual morning walk and then started his hunger strike near the Yadavbaba temple in the village, under the banner of his new organisation, Jantantra Morcha. The Jan Lokpal Bill, also referred to as the Citizen’s Ombudsman Bill, is an anti-corruption legislation drafted by civil society activists, seek-ing appointment of an inde-pendent panel to investigate cases of corruption.
7-year-old girl stabbed to death HYDERABAD: A seven-year-old girl was yester-day stabbed to death by a youth described as a maniac by police at Secunderabad Railway Station here. The shocking incident took place on platform number 10 when Priyadarshini, along with her father and grandmother, was waiting to board a train to Maharashtra’s Solapur to attend a marriage. As her father Srinivas went to buy the tickets, a youth appeared and attacked the girl with the knife. Passengers caught hold of the youth, thrashed him before handing him over to railway police. IANS
Vasundhara to take oath on FridayJAIPUR: Vasundhara Raje, the BJP’s chief minister-elect in Rajasthan, will be sworn-in on December 13. She met Governor Margaret Alva yesterday and staked claim to form the government in the state. This would be sec-ond time that Raje is to be the chief minister of the state. Her first chief ministerial stint in the desert state was from 2003 to 2008. IANS
NEW DELHI: The Congress yesterday indicated that it might give unconditional support to the Aam Adami Party (AAP) to form a government in Delhi even as the AAP pledged to neither give nor take legislative backing from anyone and the BJP said it was ready for fresh elections.
As uncertainty over govern-ment formation continued after elections threw up a hung assem-bly, the Congress — which won only eight seats — appeared wary of another election which could devastate it further in the city.
In contrast, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the single largest group in the 70-seat house with 31 members, and the AAP, which won 28 seats in its very first elec-tion, remained defiant, refusing to form a government.
“Considering the present situ-ation, we are not in a position to form the government. We are ready for re-election,” BJP’s chief ministerial candidate Harsh Vardhan said. A party source said: “Even the possibility of forming a minority government seems bleak.”
Former BJP president Nitin Gadkari told the newly-elected legislators to prepare for fresh polls, party sources said. Delhi BJP president Vijay Goel added: “Instead of trying form a coali-tion, we would rather sit in the opposition.”
AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal made it clear that his party won’t prop up the BJP in Delhi. Speaking a day after senior col-league Prashant Bhushan sug-gested giving issue-based support to the BJP, Kejriwal said: “Neither we will take support nor give support (to form a government). There is no question.”
Kejriwal instead advised the BJP to take the help of the Congress to form a government. “Let the BJP and Congress join hands... Both indulge in corruption.”
“AAP would neither support nor take support from any party
BJP ready for fresh polls; AAP defiantCong hints may back AAP in Delhi
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court yesterday said that red beacon lights with or without flashers would be used only on the vehicles of high constitu-tional dignitaries and blue or multi-coloured beacon lights will be used only on emergency services and police vehicles.
The Court said that though the use of signs and symbols of authority such as red lights, etc., is contrary to the constitutional ethos and the basic feature of republicanism, but it felt that it was not for it to exclude the constitutional functionaries from the ambit of “high dignitaries” as framers of the constitution felt so.
A bench of Justice G S Singhvi and Justice C Nagappan said: “The term ‘high dignitaries’ used in proviso (iii) to Rule 108(1) of the Central Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989 takes within its fold the holders of various posts, positions and offices specified in the Constitution.”
The motor vehicles carrying “high dignitaries” specified by the central and state governments
may be fitted with red light with or without flashers which would be used only while the specified high dignitary is on duty and not otherwise, the order said.
The court however stressed that the “use of red lights on the vehicles carrying the holders of constitutional posts will in no manner compromise with the dignity of other citizens and indi-viduals or embolden them (consti-tutional authorities) to think that they are superior to other people, more so, because this distinction would be available to them only while on duty and would be co-terminus with their tenure”.
Pronouncing the order, Justice Singhvi said: “The contemptuous disregard to the prohibition by people in power, holders of public offices, civil servants and even ordi-nary citizens is again reflective of ‘Raj Mentality’ and is antithesis of the concept of a republic.”
Pointing out that there was an “abysmal failure on the part of the concerned authorities and agencies” to check misuse of the
vehicles with red lights on their top, the court said that “a large number of persons are using red lights on their vehicles for com-mitting crimes in different parts of the country and they do so with impunity because the police offi-cials are mostly scared of check-ing vehicles with red lights, what to say of imposing fine or penalty”.
The court further said that multi-toned horns would only be used on the emergency services ambulances and fire tenders and police vehicles. No motor vehicles except ambulances, fire-fighting vehicles, those engaged in sal-vage operation, operators of con-struction equipment vehicles or those used by police and officials of Motor Vehicles Department would be fitted with multi-toned horns, the court ordered.
The court said that all the vehi-cles which are not permitted to have multi-toned horns under the Central Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989, “shall, within a period of one month from today, remove the multi-toned horns”. IANS
PETA initiative
Protest for pension
A supporter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), wearing an elephant costume, protesting against maltreatment of ani-mals in circuses, outside the Great Apollo Circus, in Amritsar yesterday.
An elderly man takes part in a protest for a universal old age monthly pension of Rs2,000 for people over 60, in New Delhi yesterday. According to the current government outline, people aged over 60 receive Rs200 per month. Pension Parishad and 150 other organisations have given support to the protesters.
NEW DELHI: The govern-ment got temporary relief yesterday as a no-confidence motion by six Congress and four TDP lawmakers against crea-tion of a separate Telangana state could not be taken up in the Lok Sabha due to chaos in the house.
The six Congress and four Telugu Desam Party (TDP) mem-bers on Monday gave separate notices to Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar for a no-trust motion over the government’s move to carve out Telangana from Andhra Pradesh.
The Speaker told the House that she had received the notices. She was about to give her ruling during zero hour but could not do so as chaos broke out in the house. The speaker adjourned the Lok Sabha for the day after treasury benches raised a ruckus when she said she has received the notices
for a no-confidence motion.While the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) said it was too early to comment on the issue, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) said the notice was not required. “It is early to comment, let the motion come. Certain majority is needed even for introducing the no-confidence motion,” said BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad.
All the six Congress MPs are from Seemandhra region, com-prising the coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema areas of the state. Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde the MPs could face disci-plinary action.
The union cabinet has already approved the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh. The motion for this is expected to be sent soon for the consideration of the state assembly by President Pranab Mukherjee. IANS
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: A police team is actively work-ing to get to the bottom of how three under-trial prisoners lodged in Kozhikode jail became very active on social network-ing site (Facebook), said Kerala Home Minister Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan yesterday.
Speaking to the media here, Radhakrishnan said: “You please wait a little more when the entire details of the use of mobile phones by those active on Facebook would come out. Nothing will be left to chance as the team will come out with what has happened inside the jail.”
The first fallout of this serious lapse was that Alexander Jacob, director general of police (jails), was moved out from his post last week for his remarks on the T P Chandrasekheran murder, that took place last year.
The three, whose pictures appeared on TV channels, are the prime accused in the high profile murder case as the victim was a firebrand CPI-M leader who was expelled from the party a few years back. “See, he (Jacob), in his letter to me, admitted he committed a mistake through his statement at a press conference,” said Radhakrishnan.
The minister also said that what occurred in the jail has been a lesson learnt and from now on there will be very strict checks and balances as far as prisons are concerned.
“More CCTVs will be installed and there would be frequent checks by various agencies in jails,” said Radhakrishnan. Meanwhile, seven mobile phones were recov-ered from the Kozhikode jail yes-terday. IANS
NEW DELHI: Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar yesterday refuted media reports which quoted BJP’s Yashwant Sinha as saying that she did not allow him to discuss the report of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on 2G spec-trum before it was presented to the house by committee chairman P.C. Chacko.
“There is no rule allowing any discussion or raising of objections before presentation of the report. It is mandatory for the chairman to present duly adopted report to the house as per the terms of reference of the JPC,” said a statement from the Speaker’s office.
“It is clarified a report is not actually
available before the house for a discussion unless it is presented to the house,” it said.
The Speaker had rejected notices for debate by Sinha and CPI-M’s Basudeb Acharia. “Speaker did not allow us to raise points of order. MPs have rights to raise points of order under specific rules but she overruled it. It was unprecedented. The manner in which the report was finalised was in violation of rules and norms of the house,” Sinha said on Monday.
According to the statement from the Lok Sabha secretariat: “Once the report has been duly adopted, it has to be presented to the house.”
“The committee adopted the report by a 16-11 majority in a meeting held on September 27 in which Sinha was also present,” it said. According to the state-ment, Sinha, in a letter dated December 6, requested the Speaker to permit him to raise objections before the presentation of the report to the house in regard to viola-tion of certain rules during deliberations in the committee.
The Lok Sabha secretariat said the deci-sion of the Speaker cannot be challenged. “No point of order can be raised after the Speaker has given a ruling on a subject as every ruling is final in the matter,” it said.
The Lok Sabha on Monday adopted the JPC report on 2G scam exonerating Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P Chidambaram of any wrongdo-ing, while blaming former telecom minister A Raja for the faulty allocation of spectrum.
The report disagreed with the Comptroller and Auditor General’s finding the 2G scam caused a loss of Rs1.76 lakh crore to the exchequer. It also charged the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government (1998-2004) of causing losses worth of Rs40,000 crore because of the telecom policy it pursued while allocating spectrum.
IANS
Red beacons only for holders of high statutory offices: SC
to form the government,” his col-league Manish Sisodia said.
With indications that this situ-ation could lead to another elec-tion, Congress general secretary Shakeel Ahmad said: “There is a feeling in the party in Delhi to extend support unconditionally to AAP. “But we need to take the opinion of (our) MLAs in Delhi and then we will approach the party high command.” He said the reason for this was that the Congress wanted to keep “com-munal forces at bay”.
Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda said that the Congress should give “uncon-ditional support” to the AAP to form a government in Delhi.
Meanwhile, a snap poll said most people in Delhi want the one-year-old AAP, which took birth following the anti-corrup-tion campaign of Gandhian Anna Hazare, to form a government.
Of the 600 people polled, the ABP News-Ipsos Snap Poll showed that 66 percent favour AAP in power although it is only the second largest group in the assembly. Only 29 percent felt the same way for the BJP. At the same time, 64 percent people in Delhi “are open to another elec-tion as no party has got a com-plete majority”. IANS
Kerala police team probing prisoners’ role on Facebook
Chaos in House saves govt from no-trust motion
War of words between Speaker, BJP over 2G JPC report
WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
www.thepeninsulaqatar.comINDIA 19
JOHANNESBERG: For India, the passing away of former South African presi-dent and anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela represents the departure of a venerated elder and a great soul, India’s President Pranab Mukherjee said yesterday.
“For India, the passing of Nelson Mandela represents the departure of a venerated elder, a great soul. We pray for his eternal peace,” the President said here.
He was speaking at a memo-rial service organised at the jam-packed FNB Stadium at Soweto for the former South African president and global statesman who died on December 6 at the age of 95. Mandela, fondly called Madiba, his Xhosa clan name, was admired in India, said the President.
“Madiba lived a life of sacrifice and privation as he pursued a seemingly impossible goal for his people — and the world is richer for his legacy. We, in India, have long admired him — and all that he stood for — and we will always cherish his friendship and love for our people,” Mukherjee said.
Noting that Mandela was a visionary, the President said he inspired all. “To us, Nelson Mandela was a visionary. He epit-omised an uncommon humane-ness that inspired all of mankind. He was an icon of irreversible social and economic change - the kind of transformation and eman-cipation that his people had only dreamt of,” he said.
“He guided his nation, bruised by decades of apartheid and vio-lence, to embrace his simple mes-sage of tolerance and harmonious co-existence,” the president said while terming Mandela as “a
Pranab: We will cherish Mandela’s friendshipAnti-apartheid icon ‘a venerated elder, a great soul’
towering personality of great compassion and wisdom”.
“Indeed, his life and struggles — which represented ‘hope’ for the downtrodden in South Africa and all over the world — remind us of the principles that the Father of our Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, stood for,” he said.
According to the President, in the face of the severest persecu-tion, punishment and relentless oppression, Mandela continued his non-violent struggle “with dignity and pride, refusing to be intimidated”.
“He never diminished his com-mitment to his kind of satyagraha against injustice and inequality. His stoic determination, patience and magnanimity reminded us, in India, of the revolutionary meth-ods of Mahatma Gandhi,” he said.
India was honoured to confer
its highest civilian honour Bharat Ratna on Mandela, Mukherjee said. “It was an honour for Indians to confer upon Madiba our high-est civilian award, the Bharat Ratna when he visited India in 1990,” he said.
“In 1995, when Mandela vis-ited India as the first president of post-apartheid South Africa, he visited Gandhiji’s Sabarmati Ashram and said that it was for him a homecoming, a pilgrimage,” Mukherjee recalled.
“We, on our part, associate South Africa with the first chap-ter of Mahatma Gandhi’s freedom movement. Gandhiji had staked his career as a budding lawyer in South Africa to resist segre-gation and inequality — before he embarked for India and took up, in India, the same cause,” the Indian president said. IANS
A screen grab taken from the South African Broadcasting Corporation live feed shows President Pranab Mukherjee delivering a speech during the memorial service for the late South African president Nelson Mandela at Soccer City Stadium in Johannesburg yesterday.
Engineers work in the Avionic Bay of an Eurofighter Typhoon while setting up all component parts of an Eurofighter at the headquarters of Military Air Systems Centre Cassidian in Manching near Ingolstadt, south-ern Germany. Airbus parent EADS risked a collision with unions and European politicians by unveiling plans yesterday to cut defence and space jobs.
PM calls for more private sector roleEuromoney Qatar Conference beginsDOHA: The Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani has called for an active participation of private sector in Qatar’s ongoing economic diversification process.
After taking effective action during the global economic crisis to ensure stability and sustain-able development, Qatar is now embarking on a new phase of sus-tainable development. The focus of this new phase is the diversi-fication of the national economy and expansion of non-oil and gas sectors. We are looking for the active participation of the pri-vate sector to encourage positive competition and to support the employment, training and devel-opment of young people, he said while opening the two-day “The Euromoney Qatar Conference” here yesterday.
The Prime Minister reiterated Qatar’s commitment to continue the development process to trans-fer the state into a modern state and enabling it to interact posi-tively with the requirements of the times .
The state enters a new stage of the comprehensive develop-ment process aiming at building institutions based on the latest effective methods for admin-istering resources. The oil and gas sector has been the main driver of Qatari economy for long. The new phase requires the government to focus more on diversification of the sources of the economy supporting the development and expansion in non-oil sectors.
Sheikh Abdullah noted that the government is working to prepare citizens to participate effectively in the production and development process by provid-ing the educational and health services in the state , which are considered the best way to achieve comprehensive and
sustainable development in the country.
The Prime Minister’s state-ment was reinforced by H E Ali Sherif Al Emadi, Minister of Finance, who spoke on the role of the financial sector in sup-porting stability and ensuring the achievement of the Qatar National Vision 2030.
“Financial stability requires sound fiscal policies and the development of a financial sys-tem that can cope with risks and boost the capacity of the national economic system to absorb risks. The next phase of development in Qatar will be driven by large-scale infrastructure projects, which will require the input and support of the private sector, and which will deliver a major contribution to the welfare of the citizens of Qatar,” he said.
H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Saoud Al Thani, Governor of the Qatar Central Bank, highlighted the measures taken by the bank to date, and also indicated the strong plans in place to ensure long-term sustainable development.
“Qatar Central Bank has launched initiatives to promote the effectiveness of the finance sector in reducing risk, developing capital markets, and increasing the stability of financial processes. Just recently, we have launched a strategy for the development of capital markets with other minis-tries, based on the Qatar National Vision 2030,” he said.
The Governor noted the com-bined assets of Qatar’s commer-cial banks grew by 10 percent to QR898.5bn in November 2013, compared to QR817bn at the end of 2012. The deposit to the com-mercial banks grew 20.8 per-cent to QR504bn in November 2013, compared to QR417bn in December 2012. The loan book grew 10.6 percent in November 2013 reaching QR527.4bn.
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FROM LEFT: The Prime Minister and Interior Minister, H E Sheikh Abdulla bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Minister of Finance, H E Ali Shareef Al Emadi and Governor of Qatar Central Bank, H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Saoud Al Thani, arrive for the 2nd Euromoney Qatar Conference at Ritz Carlton yesterday. (SHAIVAL DALAL)
Strengthening local talent key for Qatar: IMFDOHA: Getting away with hydrocarbon sector and groom-ing local talents are the twin challenges that Qatar face in its long-term sustainable devel-opment journey, a top IMF Executive said here yesterday.
Attending a panel discus-sion on the opening day of “The Euromoney Qatar Conference”, Ananthakrishnan Prasad (pic-tured), Deputy Division Chief, Middle East and Central Asia Department, IMF, said Qatar should empower its own people instead of attracting foreign tal-ents and avoid the demographic imbalance. Strengthening of local talents is key for Qatar. “For Qatar, economic diversification means nothing but reducing its reliance on hydrocarbon and how to empower its youth by creating jobs”, he emphasised.
Joannes Mongardini, Head of Economics, Qatar National Bank said Qatar is expected to receive 300,000 people in the next few years to fill up 250,000 new
vacancies. In 2012 non-hydrocar-bon sector accounted for 42 per-cent of the total GDP. By 2015, non-hydrocarbon sector would contribute nearly half of Qatar’s total GDP.
Addressing various sessions, experts noted that Qatar would emerge as a financial hub, despite the strong presence of Dubai. Of course, Dubai is an interesting place in terms of connectivity. But the fund companies in Europe and Asia are increasingly looking for pools of liquidity in Qatar. Qatar can be a major financial hub. The liquidity in the market is pretty good. The regulations are improv-ing. The unification of regulation makes added sense, they said.
Qatar Exchange has been growing leaps and bounds since 2007. With more foreign insti-tutions expected to come in, QE will become a “jewel in the Emerging Market Crown”, said Nicholas Wilson, Chairman, Qatar Investment Fund, earlier in the day in an interview.
Qatar’s capital market is expected to attract huge liquidity. The Emerging Market status will give the market more depth. The move to Emerging Market will have huge implication on longer term for Qatar capital market, he said.
On the IPO drought in the region, he said there are huge prospects for IPO in the pipeline. IPO activities will pick up in the next couple of years. “Government must actively encourage IPOs. It should actively encourage family businesses and state businesses too to go for IPO, he said.
Nicholas noted that there is a huge room for fund expansion in Qatar. The market sentiments are strong in terms of capital raise as an estimated $243bn worth infra-structure project is going to effect the economy. He said the fund companies in Europe and Asia are increasingly looking for pools of liquidity in Qatar. The regulations are improving. The unification of regulation makes added sense
However, Ahmad Anani,
Partner, Latham & Watkins LLP said Qatar’s legal infrastructure in terms of financial regulations of Islamic Finance are not quite strong.. There are gaps in the laws, it should be looked into.
“The regulations have still problems in supporting the growth in Islamic Finance. There has to be a collective will to regu-late this sector in a better way for the overall growth of Qatari economy”.
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No plan to issue debt in foreign markets: MinisterDOHA: Qatar has no plans to issue debt on international mar-kets next year and will adjust as necessary its hitherto fixed offer-ings of local currency debt, the finance minister said yesterday.
Asked if Qatar planned to issue debt on the international markets next year, H E Ali Sherif Al Emadi said on the sidelines of a financial conference in Doha: “No, nothing.”
“We are going to focus on the local market and it will be used for monetary purposes. It is only for monetary and liquidity man-agement. That’s about it,” he said in his first public comments since his appointment in June.
The Opec member last came to the international market with a $4bn three-tranche sukuk issue in July 2012, which attracted an order book worth more than $25bn.
Its central bank has conducted monthly auctions of 91-, 182- and 273-day T-bills since 2011, consistently draining the same amount of QR4bn ($1.1bn) despite
build-ups of excess liquidity as well as a recent fall in demand linked to geopolitical tensions over a civil war in Syria.
In March, the central bank launched debt sales worth a total QR4bn in three- and five-year local currency government bonds and sukuk in quarterly issues allocated directly to banks.
But Emadi said the volumes drained from the market through local debt issues may be changed flexibly in the coming months, ech-oing April remarks by Central Bank Governor H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Saoud Al Thani. “We are very much dynamic, comparing the models. We always look at the market and if it is required we will be flexible when we need to,” he said.
Qatar may need more active liquidity management in coming years as it plans to spend some $140bn on infrastructure building, partly in preparation for hosting the 2022 World Cup.
REUTERS
Oil back to $110 after biggest fall in five weeksLONDON: Brent crude oil rose to around $110 a barrel yester-day, recouping some of the pre-vious session’s sharp losses as the US dollar weakened.
The US currency hit a six-week low against the euro, increasing the purchasing power for European consumers who have to buy oil in dollars on international markets.
Brent for January was up 80 cents at $110.19 a barrel by 1210 GMT, having risen briefly by more than $1 to a high of $110.45. Brent dropped two percent on Monday, its biggest loss in five weeks, fol-lowing mixed economic data from Germany.
US crude oil futures, were up $1.11 at $98.45 a barrel, their highest in six weeks, after their first decline in seven sessions on Monday. “The poor day yesterday (for Brent) was (due to) the mixed German data, which called into question the European recovery,” said Gareth Lewis-Davies, senior energy strategist at BNP Paribas.
REUTERS
IMF chief in Brussels
International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde (centre) arrives for a debate of the European Economic and Social Committee at the EU Parliament in Brussels.
BUSINESS22WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
www.thepeninsulaqatar.com
QDB to launch programme to boost exportsTasdeer hosts AMAN Union MeetingBY MOHAMMAD SHOEB
DOHA: Qatar Development Bank (QDB) yesterday said that it will launch a tailor-made pro-gramme to promote exports of Qatari goods, in second quarter of 2014. The programme intends to help improve the quality and competitive advantage of local products (non-hydrocarbon) produced by export-oriented small and mid-sized companies.
Abdulaziz bin Nasser Al Khalifa (pictured), CEO of QDB, said: “We are in the process of developing a programmes in cooperation with Qatar Chamber to raise the qual-ity standards of Qatari products which will help promote exports.”
“We will provide all need-ful supports and training serv-ices to local entrepreneurs and employees of Qatari companies so that they can enhance the com-petitiveness of their products in international market.
“We are focusing at micro-level to build a cluster of non-hydro-carbon companies with high com-petitive advantage. This is in line of Qatar National Vision 2030 aiming at achieving economic diversification... I have found that most of the export-oriented Qatari companies are in a good position,” he said.
He was speaking to The Peninsula on the sidelines of 4th Annual AMAN Union Meeting hosted by QDB’s export arm, Tasdeer. The three-day meeting opened here yesterday at Renaissance Doha City Centre Hotel.
Tasdeer provides private sector exporters with financial solutions, credit insurances and advisory services, in addition to support-ing businesses in developing their
export capabilities through partic-ipating in a wide range of events and activities across the world.
The event has brought together AMAN Union members and experts from a number of related sectors, including credit and political risk insurance, reinsur-ance, banking and credit infor-mation, to discuss the importance of promoting and developing the credit and political risks insur-ance industry through the export development processes.
It also witnessed the launch of the AMAN Union Database, the first of its kind, established for the benefit of national export credit insurance agencies in the Arab and Islamic Countries.
The Database will enable the subscribers to share and purchase credit information reports, credit opinions on entities worldwide and to exchange their underwriting experience on buyers and banks.
Dr Abdel Rahman EI Tayeb Taha, Secretary General of the Union and also the CEO of Islamic Corporation for the insurance of Investment and Export Credit Insurance (lClEC), said: “We are happy that Qatar witnesses the official launching of the AMAN Union Database, which we are confident that it will help solving the issue of reliability of credit information in the region.”
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Officials during a discussion at the 2nd Annual Middle East Smart Cities Summit yesterday.
150 delegates attend Middle East Smart Cities SummitDOHA: The 2nd Annual Middle East Smart Cities Summit, which was organised under the theme ‘Gateway to a Smart and Sustainable Future’, came to a close yesterday as around 150 delegates and participants from across the region attended the two-day session.
The summit saw discussions and exchange of information on the latest advancements in methods, systems and technologies related to sustainable developments for a Smart City transformation.
The summit was organised by Fleming Gulf, one of the leading providers of business intelligence through industry specific confer-ences, and was held in associa-tion with the Gulf Organisation for Research & Development
(GORD) and supported by Qatar Rail Company and the National Transport Authority (NTA), United Arab Emirates.
“These past two days have proven to be extremely informative even for acknowledged experts in this field,” said Dr Yousef Al Horr, Founding Chairman, GORD. “With our aim of coming up with the most viable, cost-efficient yet most effec-tive solutions of achieving regional and even global sustainable devel-opment objectives, the discussions have undoubtedly contributed in an extremely positive way towards our journey to such goals.
The summit also witnessed an keynote presentations by Dr Abdul Aziz Abdullah Al Khudairi, Deputy Governor and Undersecretary, Makkah
Province, Saudi Arabia, who spoke about ‘Smart Cities and the Strategic Challenges’.
Daniel Leckel, Chief Technical Officer from Qatar Rail presented the Smart City planning for Doha Metro in line with the Qatar’s National Vision 2030.
“Qatar has been at the forefront of sustainable development with the Lusail City project – Qatar’s first sustainable city and largest sustainable development in the region,” said Hussain Naimi, CEO‘s Advisor for Smart City, Lusail Real Estate Development Company.
The summit main sponsors and partners included Vodafone Qatar, Huawei, COBA Middle East, PwC Qatar and Qatar Project Management.
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Iran, India meeting to discuss oil exportsNEW DELHI: Indian and Iranian officials are meeting this week to discuss how to unlock the first oil payments to Iran since the United States and other world powers eased sanc-tions last month in exchange for curbs to Tehran’s nuclear programme.
Last month six world powers and Tehran reached an interim deal that provided limited relief to Iran from economic sanctions, opening the way for some oil pay-ments to resume.
The deal is a chance for Iran’s new leadership to revive the country’s economy, plagued
with high inflation and a weak-ened currency since being cut off from the global financial system after sanctions were imposed in 2012.
The West believes Iran is try-ing to make a nuclear bomb, while the Middle Eastern nation says its nuclear programme is for power generation.
India and Iran are to discuss how to restart oil payments in foreign currencies, including a plan to process partial payments for oil in euros through a Turkish bank, two government sources said.
REUTERS
Poland seeks investments from QatarDOHA: Qatar and Poland yesterday explored opportuni-ties to continue cooperation in various areas and boost bilat-eral trade ties between the two countries.
Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, who was on a two-day visit to Qatar, met with officials from Qatar Chamber yesterday along with repre-sentatives of the Polish business delegation.
The president also called Qatar’s businessmen to invest in his country, Europe’s sixth largest economy. He said Poland is expe-riencing an annual growth rate of three percent after emerging from the slowdown triggered by the global financial crisis.
The Polish delegation is explor-ing business partnerships in Qatar particularly in sports infra-structure for the 2022 World Cup.
Komorowski highlighted his country’s experience in organizing sports events such as the 2012 UEFA European Championship.
The President also said that Poland would start the process of importing natural gas from Qatar. This would balance its energy needs and open doors for more cooperation between the two countries, which have become stronger in the recent times.
The chamber has assured assistance for the delegation to provide them with suitable part-ners and investment opportuni-ties in both countries.
Michel named Total’s Mideast E&P presidentD O H A :Total, one of the largest i n t e g r a t e d oil and gas c o m p a n i e s in the world, a p p o i n t e d S t e p h a n e Michel (pic-t u r e d ) as President, Middle East, Exploration & Production (E&P) Division. The appoint-ment is effective from January 1, 2014.
Michel has been the Managing Director of Total, E&P, Qatar since mid-2011. He will report to Arnaud Breuillac, President, E&P at Total.
Michel was the Managing Director of Total E&P Libye after being responsible for Total E&P Qatar joint venture and business development from 2008 to 2010.
He joined the Total Group in 2005 as Business Development Manager for Total Dowstream Asia, based in Singapore. He was energy advisor to the French Finance Minister between 2002 and 2004.
A graduate of Ecole Polytechnique (1994) and Ecole des Mines de Paris (1997), Michel is an Engineer of the Corps des Mines.
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Alitalia secures emergency cash, heads to union meetingMILAN: Alitalia finally secured the ¤300m ($412m) it needs to keep flying over Christmas, a source said yesterday, conclud-ing a drawn-out capital raising that showed how much work the airline has to convince investors it can survive.
Italy’s national carrier, having pocketed cash that analysts esti-mate will last it six months, now goes straight to its next challenge: A meeting with unions where sources said it will try to persuade them to sign up to thousands of job cuts.
The cash call was part of a big-ger government-engineered res-cue to keep Alitalia going while it searches for a new partner willing to invest in revamping its fleet and making it profitable in the longer term. The scale of that task was illustrated by the airline’s difficulty in persuad-ing shareholders to sign up for fresh investment — many aired doubts over its proposed business plan or wanted to see tougher
restructuring of the airline’s debt.The source said Italy’s state-
owned postal service, which had been lined up to commit up to ¤75m for any unsubscribed shares, had to participate in the cash call in the end, although to what extent was not yet known.
“Including subscriptions by existing shareholders, new inves-tors and the investment by the postal service, the 300 million euro target has been reached,” the source said.
At the same time, Alitalia’s management is due to meet trade unions to present details of a revised industrial plan, which sources said could include up to 2,600 job cuts out of the airline’s total workforce of 14,000 people.
Unions say they are gearing up for a battle should layoffs at the airline be announced. Any tough restructuring of the airline to suit a foreign investor would also weigh on the already fragile coali-tion government of Enrico Letta.
REUTERS
Masraf Al Rayan sponsors Euromoney Qatar ConferenceDOHA: Masraf Al Rayan (MAR) announced its sponsorship of the two days Euromoney Qatar Conference 2013, which opened at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Doha yester under the patronage of H E Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani, Prime Minister Interior Minister, in the presence of H E Ali Sharif Al Emadi, the Minister of Finance, and H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Saoud Al Thani, Qatar’s Central Bank Governor.
The conference, which is held in collaboration with the QCB, will focus on financing fair sustained growth, and also on the impending role of financial markets and tradi-tional Islamic capital in the process.
Dr Hussain Al Abdulla, Chairman and Managing Director at Masraf Al Rayan, said “I hope that this congregation of great professionals and experts will out-line future strategies to develop effective solutions to key issues facing the global economy and strengthen the role of Islamic banks in the economic process.”
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23BUSINESS WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
www.thepeninsulaqatar.com
Indonesian car market
An employee works on a Chevrolet Spin MPV at a General Motors plant in Bekasi, on the outskirts of Jakarta. General Motors Co, the world’s second-biggest car maker, is trying to break the Japanese stranglehold of the popular family car market in Indonesia.
Valiant first Swiss bank to agree US dealDeadline for tax deal is year-endZURICH: Valiant has become the first Swiss firm to agree to crack down on wealthy Americans evading taxes and as many as a third of the country’s banks are expected to follow in the latest step in a long-running dispute with the United States.
The deal between the United States and Switzerland, agreed in August, is part of a US drive to lift the veil of Swiss bank secrecy. In 2009, this led to UBS paying $780m in a settlement where the bank agreed to hand over US client names with secret Swiss accounts.
The US pursuit of tax dollars sheltered in offshore accounts has piled pressure on Switzerland, the world’s largest offshore finance centre with more than $2 trillion in assets.
The Swiss government in June bowed to repeated attacks on banking secrecy, deeply embedded in the country’s culture, and will share data on foreign depositors if a global standard is established.
Under the latest US deal, Swiss banks were given until Monday by their regulator to say whether they would take part in the gov-ernment-brokered programme open to a host of second-tier Swiss banks.
The programme, which lapses at year-end, requires the banks to hand out some previously hidden information and face penalties of up to 50 percent of assets they managed on behalf of wealthy Americans. If the banks shun the US offer, individual firms and sen-ior staff risk criminal prosecution.
The regulator FINMA said yes-terday that most had done so, and that it expected several more to do so shortly, without disclosing what the banks had decided.
Valiant Holding and Berner Kantonalbank, two mainly retail
banks, said they would come clean on any past transgressions and face up to fines.
The fines are scaled to reflect how egregiously the banks acted in their dealings with US custom-ers. Fines would have to be dis-closed to investors because they could have an impact on share prices.
A third — Zurich-based private bank and securities firm Vontobel Holding AG — said it would also participate, but declared itself free of hidden US client funds. The bank began transferring business with wealthy Americans into an entity registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2008, when the crackdown on Switzerland’s banks intensified.
How many of Switzerland’s 300-plus private banks come forward under the programme is also key for banks facing criminal inves-tigations, which includes some of Switzerland’s biggest banks such as Credit Suisse and Julius Baer and Pictet & Cie.
A host of listed private banks such as EFG International and Banque Cantonale de Geneve said they had yet to make a decision. St. Galler Kantonalbank, which owns private bank Hyposwiss, said it had informed the Swiss regulator of intention, but would only tell investors what it had decided when it had been formal-ised by its board.
These publicly-listed banks, which are subject to disclosure rules, give the first indication of how many firms will cooperate with the US authorities under the plan.
But most Switzerland’s private banks are not listed and under no obligation to make their decision public.
REUTERS
IMF cuts Russia growth forecastMOSCOW: The International Monetary Fund slashed Russia’s 2014 growth forecast yesterday while warning that faster expansion would be hard to achieve without a change in the energy-rich country’s eco-nomic model.
An IMF team said after con-cluding a regular mission to Moscow that it was cutting its 2014 growth forecast to two per-cent from the three percent last expected in October.
It added that growth was likely to reach 1.5 percent this year — slightly higher than the 1.4 percent expansion rate Russian Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev predicted at the start of the month.
“Structural reforms should be a critical element of any plan to enhance Russia’s growth poten-tial,” the IMF team said in a state-ment. “Inadequate infrastructure, constraints on access to finance for many firms — especially small- and medium-sized enter-prises — and skill mismatches in the labour market appear as key obstacles.”
The fund in October encour-aged Russia “to embrace a new growth model” that relied less on its oil and natural gas exports.
Russia’s slowdown has sur-prised both the government and economists who have been forced to lower their projections for the year several times.
President Vladimir Putin
had initially sought five-percent growth for the year that would mark another step in Russia’s comeback from an economic implosion suffered during the 2008-2009 global financial crisis.
The government has since con-ceded that Russia was on track for its worst economic perform-ance in four years. The economy ministry last month further warned that negligible growth was likely for many years to come.
The IMF also said that infla-tion was running above target and urged against monetary easing steps because they were both dan-gerous and could prove ineffective since the economy was operating “close to its full capacity”.
AFP
Portugal central bank expects return to growth in 2014LISBON: Portugal should return to growth next year, following more than two years of recession, with the recovery pulled by exports, the Bank of Portugal said yesterday.
The country is due to exit next year from a ¤78bn ($107bn) eco-nomic bailout by the International Monetary Fund and European Union granted it in 2011 and begin to finance itself on the markets, but despite reforms has yet to plug its deficit and growth has been weak.
Portugal emerged from a two-and-a-half-year recession in the second quarter of 2013, but for the year as a whole the Bank of Portugal expects the economy to contract by 1.5 percent.
Over the period of crisis (2011-2013) the country’s economy con-tracted by six percent, according to the central bank’s calculations.
For 2015, the Bank of Portugal sees growth picking up to 1.3 per-cent due to increases in exports and a recovery in domestic demand after years in which households have cut back on consumption.
The central bank empha-sised the importance of exports to recovery, but data released Tuesday by the national statistics institute INE showed that export growth slowed in October.
Exports rose by 4.6 percent in October to ¤4.21bn after having grown by 9.9 percent in September, said INE.
AFP
‘Warp speed’ risk for UK house price, rate hike off radarLONDON: Expectations of future British house price rises have hit a 14-year high just as central bank chief Mark Carney signalled monetary policy would remain exceptionally loose despite the potential for them to jump at ‘warp speed’.
Britain is growing faster than many other big rich economies although it has still not passed its pre-crisis peak. There are some concerns, however, that it is a housing-led recovery - and a potential bubble - spurred by government stimulus.
The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) said yesterday that 59 percent of surveyors in November forecast
prices would rise over the next three months, the highest reading since September 1999.
Speaking in New York ahead of the survey, Carney signalled that monetary policy was not about to be tightened even though there were potential dangers in the housing market.
“We’re concerned about poten-tial developments in the housing market,” Carney said. He said activity in the housing sector was lower than before the finan-cial crisis, and bank underwriting standards had been “substantially transformed”.
“But there is a history of things shifting in the UK and the hous-ing market of moving from stall
speed to warp speed and under-writing standards slipping. So we want to avoid that,” Carney said.
The RICS measure of house prices hit +58 in November, edg-ing up from October to an 11-year high as government incentives and more optimism on the econ-omy helped spur demand.
Economists in a poll had pre-dicted the price index would rise to +60. Positive readings mean more members reported price rises rather than falls in the pre-ceding three months.
Prices rose for a second con-secutive month in every area of Britain, while the average number of homes sold per chartered sur-veyor grew to 20.6, up from 15.9
in the same period of 2012.But RICS warned again of a
lack of homes available to buy.“If there is not a meaningful
increase in new homes, the like-lihood is that prices, and for that matter rents, will continue to push upwards, making the cost of shelter ever more unaffordable,” said Simon Rubinsohn, RICS’s chief economist.
In an upbeat message before the Christmas season, Carney said Britain’s recovery was show-ing signs it can reach self-sustain-ing momentum but no tightening was on the horizon.
“The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come suggests that it is unlikely that equilibrium interest rates
will return to historically normal levels any time soon,” Carney said.
“This prospect puts a premium on macro-prudential policies and financial reforms to manage the associated risks without aban-doning the need to keep interest rates in line with the equilibrium level.”
The Bank of England has held interest rates at 0.5 percent since 2009, bought 375 billion pounds’ worth of government debt and undertaken other stimulus meas-ures to spur the recovery.
RICS forecast house prices would increase by 3 percent next year and by almost 5 percent a year over the next five years.
REUTERS
China industrial output slows downBEIJING: China’s indus-trial production growth slowed in November but retail sales expanded at a faster pace, official figures showed yesterday, sug-gesting a mixed picture for the world’s second-largest economy.
Industrial output, which measures production at facto-ries, workshops and mines, rose 10 percent in November year-on-year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced.
That was a slowdown from the 10.3 percent expansion recorded in October, but matched the median forecast of 11 economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires.
Retail sales, a key indicator of consumer spending, rose 13.7 percent in November from the year before — an acceleration from the 13.3 percent registered in October.
“Today’s data could be either market neutral or slightly positive,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch economists Lu Ting, Zhi Xiaojia
and others wrote in a report.They added the figures might
raise expectations for stronger growth in the current fourth quarter, while “the structure of the economy seems to be improved towards consumption”.
The data for November came after strong export and benign inflation figures for the month as China’s economy shows signs of strength after a slump in the first half of the year.
Gross domestic product (GDP) expanded 7.8 percent in July-September, snapping a two-quar-ter slowdown, with data for the final three months of the year so far suggesting a steady outlook.
Figures on Monday showed Chinese inflation slowed to three percent in November, after two months of acceleration in consumer prices, well under the government’s target for the year of 3.5 percent.
“With a muted inflation and a pace of GDP growth in line with China’s potential, we expect the
government to maintain neutral monetary and fiscal policies in the next couple of quarters while increasing their efforts on drafting and carrying out structural reforms,” the Bank of America Merrill Lynch econo-mists wrote.
China’s ruling party vowed last month to pursue a range of reforms, including encouraging a bigger role for the private sector, further interest rate liberalisation and loosened currency controls.
On Sunday, the General Administration of Customs said exports accelerated 12.7 percent year-on-year in November while import growth weakened, fuelling the country’s biggest trade sur-plus in nearly five years.
But the strong export figure led some economists to won-der whether companies had returned to over-invoicing their overseas sales to camouflage capital flows.
AFP
S hoppers standing by decorations for the upcoming festivals in Beijing. Chinese inflation slowed to three percent in November.
German boat show
The sailing yacht ‘Oyster 575’ is lifted out of the Rhine in Duesseldorf, Germany, yesterday. The British yacht - 18 metres long - will be shown on the boat fair ‘Boot’ from January 18 to 26.
BUSINESS24WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
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Morocco Govt 4.5% 10/5/2020 EUR 102.13 4.14 % NR BBB-
Industries push QE index up 62.79 pointsSaudi rallies ahead of budgetDOHA: Qatar Exchange index gained 62.79 points, or 0.60 per-cent, yesterday to advance to 10,496.89 points from 10,434.10 on Monday.
The volume of the shares traded was up at 16,944,431 from 15,203,063 on Monday and the value of shares increased to QR672,204,715.85 from QR517,661,189.35 on Monday.
Among the top gainers were Qatar National Bank which was up 1.69 percent to QR174.30, Commercial Bank of Qatar gained 1.57 percent to QR71.10, Industries Qatar added 1.15 per-cent to QR167.80 and Vodafone Qatar up by 0.87 percent to QR11.60.
The Banking and Financial sec-tor index added 0.76 points while Consumer Goods and Services sector index lost 0.04 points. The Industrial sector gained 0.92 points while insurance sector rose 0.04 points.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s bourse rose for a fifth consecutive session yesterday and approached the year’s peak as investors bought shares ahead of the 2014 budget announcement expected later this month. Regional shares were mixed with few catalysts.
Saudi Arabia’s index climbed 0.5 percent to 8,399 points, its highest since November 18’s 2013 intraday peak of 8,425.
“The market has to break with confidence the 8,400 area on good turnover and it could very well do it as we are gearing up for the budget announcement later in the month,” said John Sfakianakis,
chief investment strategist at Saudi investment firm MASIC. “Also, Q4 profits are in inves-tors’ minds and that seems to be a positive driver for the market.”
Saudi Arabia tends to set record budgets every year, which are conservative numbers com-pared to actual spending. The announcement is expected in the second half of December.
Petrochemical shares gained as oil prices recovered recent losses. Brent crude climbed 0.8 percent to $110.23 per barrel at 1215 GMT. Saudi Basic Industries Corp (Sabic) added 1.1 percent and National Industrialisation (Tasnee) rose 1.6 percent.
Saudi petrochemical stocks tend to track oil prices, with crude impacting their bottom line. Oil is also seen as a proxy for global economic activity and therefore demand for petrochem-ical products.
Elsewhere, Cairo’s benchmark index slipped 0.1 percent, its sec-ond decline since Sunday’s 18-day high.
The market was little moved after a government minister said a referendum on a new constitu-tion would be held in mid-January.
“People were expecting the vote to be held in early January but it was slightly delayed - the ref-erendum was mostly priced in,” said Islam Batrawy, a Cairo-based trader.
Heavyweight Commercial International Bank declined 0.7 percent, its second loss since Sunday’s all-time high.
AGENCIES
Mary Barra to be first female CEO of General MotorsNEW YORK: General Motors yesterday announced that company veteran Mary Barra would succeed Dan Akerson as chief executive, becoming the first woman to lead the largest US automaker.
Barra, 51, currently executive vice president for global product development, purchasing and supply chain, will assume the post on January 15.
The announcement came just one day after the US Treasury sold its last shares in General Motors, closing the books on a 2008 bailout executed amid the financial crisis. GM and fellow US automakers Ford and Chrysler have gained on surging auto sales throughout 2013.
Barra has worked at GM for 33 years, rising through a series of manufacturing, engineering and senior staff positions. GM, in a statement, called her “a leader in the company’s ongoing turnaround.”
An engineer by training, Barra has also served as vice-president of global human resources, where she was credited with shaking up a corporate culture that had depressed profits and innovation.
Her GM-heavy background con-trasts with Akerson, who joined GM as chief executive in 2010 after working on buyouts for investment firm The Carlyle Group.
Yesterday’s announcement unveiled a series of other signifi-cant executive changes, includ-ing news that board member Theodore Solso would succeed Akerson as chairman.
Dan Ammann, currently exec-utive vice president and chief financial officer, will become pres-ident and assume responsiblity for regional operations around the world. The global Chevrolet and Cadillac brands will report to him. A replacement as CFO will be named later.
Akerson, 65, accelerated the succession plan by several months after his wife was recently diag-nosed with “an advanced stage of cancer,” the company said.
GM shares were off 0.4 percent in early trade. Shares have risen steadily over the last 12 months.
AFP
Greece’s creditors to return todayATHENS: International audi-tors are due back in Athens this week to assess Greece’s progress in implementing reforms in exchange for loans, a Greek official said yesterday, clearing up earlier confusion over their return.
“The auditors will meet with the finance minister on Wednesday afternoon,” said a source at the office of Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras.
The meeting is expected to be closely watched for any hints of disagreements between the Greek government and the country’s so-called troika of creditors — the European Union, International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank.
On Saturday, the European Commission said the creditors would delay their next visit until
January, “after the authorities have made further progress in implementation” of reforms.
Stournaras described this announcement as “unfortunate” during a meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels late Monday.
He also insisted that officials would work with the troika mis-sion chiefs to close as many pend-ing issues as possible before the Christmas break.
An agreement with the troika is necessary to unblock a tranche of financial aid worth one-billion-euro ($1.4 billion) pending since June.
It is believed that the two sides will aim to at least reach agree-ment over the privatisation of troubled Greek defence contrac-tor EAS.
Athens has been keen to wrap
the talks before it assumes the rotating EU presidency in January.
The international creditors and Athens disagree on the level of a forecasted financing gap for 2014 and the measures that need to be taken to cover it.
The troika predicts the 2014 financing gap will exceed ¤1.5bn, while the Greek government esti-mates the sum to be slightly more than ¤500bn.
Discussions are reportedly stumbling on the issue of a new property tax, debtor property auctions, layoffs in the state sector and the slow pace of privatisation.
Athens yesterday also raised ¤1.625bn ($2.23bn) in six-month treasury bills at a steady interest rate of 4.15 percent.
AFP
Turkey grows 4.4pc in Q3ANKARA: The Turkish econ-omy grew by a stronger-than-expected 4.4 percent in the third quarter of 2013, official data showed yesterday.
The figure, which compares with the same quarter of 2012, was higher than the market con-sensus of around four percent.
Growth for the first nine months of the year was four per-cent which the government said was “in line with its growth pre-dictions for 2013”. The govern-ment is forecasting growth of just 3.6 percent for this year and four percent for 2014, down from a peak of 8.9 percent in 2010.
Turkey along with other emerging economies has been buffeted by market turmoil in anticipation of a withdrawal of US monetary stimulus, which saw the local currency take a tumble in the summer, and effective official interest rates rise sharply.
William Jackson, emerging markets economist at Capital Economics in London, said that growth of Turkish gross domestic product had held up “relatively well” in the third quarter in spite of the turmoil in the financial markets and a substantial tight-ening of monetary policy.
But he said this was made pos-sible by a rapid expansion of credit and coincided with a renewed widening of the current account deficit, which makes the economy vulnerable to external risks.
“Looking further ahead, given the country’s external vulnerabili-ties and the risks stemming from the recent credit boom, we think growth is likely to be more volatile and weaker than most expect over the next year or so,” Jackson said.
Gokce Celik, an economist at Finansbank in Istanbul, also suggested that costlier external finance would “pose the main downside risk on next year’s growth outlook”, predicting 3.7 percent growth for next year.
But the government dismissed the concerns, with Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek talk-ing of “balanced and moderate” growth in 2013.
Simsek told the parliament that the Turkish economy “performed well given the global conjecture and a tightening in financial con-ditions”, adding that the latest
figures showed the government would easily achieve its growth forecasts.
AFP
25 BUSINESS VIEWS WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
www.thepeninsulaqatar.com
Cartoon Arts International / The New York Times Syndicate
BY ADITYA CHAKRABORTTY
Elite economic debate boils down to this: a man in a tie stands at a dispatch box and reads out some numbers for the years ahead, along with a few micro-measures
he’ll take to improve those projections. His opposite number scoffs at the forecasts and promises his tweaks would be far superior. For a few hours, perhaps even a couple of days, afterwards, commentators discuss What It All Means.
Whether Blair or Brown or Cameron, successive prime ministers and their chan-cellors pretend that progress is largely a matter of trims and tweaks – of capping business rates and funding the A14 to Felixstowe. Yet those Treasury supplemen-tary tables and fan charts are no match for the mass of inconvenient facts provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the WEF or simply by going for a wander. Sift through the evi-dence and a different picture emerges: Britain’s economy is no longer zooming along unchallenged in the fast lane, but an increasingly clapped-out motor regularly overtaken by Asian Tigers such as South Korea and Taiwan.
Gender equality? The WEF ranks us behind Nicaragua and Lesotho. Investment by business? The Economist thinks we are struggling to keep up with Mali.
Let me put it more broadly, Britain is a rich country accruing many of the stere-otypical bad habits of a developing country.
Briefly, the story goes like this: Osborne
funnelled a few tens of millions into research on the substance. It’s the kind of public-sector kickstart that might work in a manufacturing economy such as Germany – but which in Britain, with its hollowed-out industry and busted supply chains, has proved the equivalent of pour-ing money down a hole. One university physicist described how this was part of a familiar pattern of generating innovations for the rest of the world to capitalise on, then sighed: “One day, we’ll stop thinking of ourselves as a major economic power, and realise we’re more like South Korea in the early 60s.” South Korea, by way of compari-son, has already put in over 20 times as many graphene patents as the country that discovered it.
How can any nation that came up with the BBC and the NHS be considered in the same breath as India or China? Let me refer you to one of the first lines of The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor, in which a wise old man warns International Monetary Fund officials and foreign dignitaries: “India is not, as people keep calling it, an underde-veloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.”
Stop thinking of development as a proc-ess that only goes in one direction, or which affects a nation’s people equally, and it becomes much easier to see how Britain is going backwards.
In Britain, we have become used to hav-ing our resources skimmed off by a small cadre of the international elite, who often don’t feel obliged to leave much behind for
our tax officials. An Africa specialist could look at the City and recognise in it a 21st
-century version of a resource curse: some-thing generating oodles of money for a tiny group of people, often foreign, yet whose demands distort the rest of the economy. Sure, Britain has iPads and broadband – but it also has oversubscribed foodbanks. And the concept of the working poor that has dominated political debate since the crash is also something straight out of develop-ment textbooks.
When it comes to social mobility, Britain now has the worst record of all advanced countries – and will soon be overtaken by the newly rich countries of east Asia.
And it’s when wealth is concentrated in too few hands that the forces of law and order get used as a militia for the elite – and peaceful dissent gets stamped upon. That’s why police are now a presence on our business-friendly university campuses; it also explains why Theresa May had the front to try to deport Trenton Oldfield for disrupting a student rowing competition (sorry, the Boat Race).
This isn’t a sub-Rhodesian moan about Britain going to the dogs. But as my col-league Larry Elliott said in his most recent book, Going South, the sooner we puncture our own complacency at having created a rich economy for the few, and think of our-selves as in dire need of a proper economic development plan, the better.
Otherwise, we’re well set to corner the world market in pig semen. The United Kingdom of spoink.
THE GUARDIAN
BY GEORGE MONBIOT
That they are crass, brash and trashy goes without saying. But there is something in the pictures posted on Rich Kids of Instagram that inspires more than the usual revulsion towards crude displays of opulence. There is a
shadow in these photos – photos of a young man wearing all four of his Rolex watches, a youth posing in front of his helicopter, endless pictures of cars, yachts, shoes, mansions, swimming pools and spoilt white boys throwing gangster poses in private jets – of something worse: something that, after you have seen a few dozen, becomes disorienting, even distressing.
The pictures are, of course, intended to incite envy. They reek instead of desperation. The young men and women seem lost in their designer clothes, dwarfed and dehumanised by their pos-sessions, as if ownership has gone into reverse.
Perhaps I’m projecting my prejudices. But an impressive body of psychological research seems to support these feelings. It sug-gests that materialism, a trait that can afflict both rich and poor, and which the researchers define as “a value system that is pre-occupied with possessions and the social image they project”, is both socially destructive and self-destructive. There has long been a correlation observed between materialism, a lack of empathy and engagement with others, and unhappiness. But research conducted over the past few years seems to show causation.
In one study, the researchers tested a group of 18-year-olds, then re-tested them 12 years later. They were asked to rank the importance of different goals – jobs, money and status on one side, and self-acceptance, fellow feeling and belonging on the other. They were then given a standard diagnostic test to identify men-tal health problems. At the ages of both 18 and 30, materialistic people were more susceptible to disorders. But if in that period they became less materialistic, they became happier.
In another study, the psychologists followed Icelanders weather-ing their country’s economic collapse. Some people became more focused on materialism, in the hope of regaining lost ground. Others responded by becoming less interested in money and turn-ing their attention to family and community life. The first group reported lower levels of wellbeing, the second group higher levels.
These studies, while suggestive, demonstrate only correlation. But the researchers then put a group of adolescents through a church programme designed to steer children away from spending and towards sharing and saving. The self-esteem of materialistic children on the programme rose significantly, while that of mate-rialistic children in the control group fell.
Another paper, published in Psychological Science, found that people in a controlled experiment who were repeatedly exposed to images of luxury goods, to messages that cast them as consum-ers rather than citizens and to words associated with material-ism, experienced immediate but temporary increases in material aspirations, anxiety and depression. A third paper, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, studied 2,500 people for six years. It found a two-way relationship between materialism and loneliness: materialism fosters social isolation; isolation fosters materialism. The two varieties of materialism that have this effect – using possessions as a yardstick of success and seeking happiness through acquisition – are the varieties that seem to be on display on Rich Kids of Instagram. It was only after reading this paper that I understood why those photos distressed me: they look like a kind of social self-mutilation.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons an economic model based on perpetual growth continues on its own terms to succeed, though it may leave a trail of unpayable debts, mental illness and smashed relationships. Social atomisation may be the best sales strategy ever devised, and continuous marketing looks like an unbeatable programme for atomisation. Materialism forces us into compari-son with the possessions of others, a race both cruelly illustrated and crudely propelled by that toxic website. There is no end to it. If you have four Rolexes while another has five, you are a Rolex short of contentment. The material pursuit of self-esteem reduces your self-esteem.
I should emphasise that this is not about differences between rich and poor: the poor can be as susceptible to materialism as the rich. It is a general social affliction, visited upon us by government policy, corporate strategy, the collapse of communities and civic life, and our acquiescence in a system that is eating us from the inside out.
This is the dreadful mistake we are making: allowing ourselves to believe that having more money and more stuff enhances our wellbeing, a belief possessed not only by those poor deluded people in the pictures, but by almost every member of almost every gov-ernment. Worldly ambition, material aspiration, perpetual growth: these are a formula for mass unhappiness. THE GUARDIAN
Materialism eats us from inside out
Let’s admit it: Britain isnow a developing country
Iran a decade or more from becoming major gas exporterBY DANIEL FINEREN
The world’s largest gas reserves may tempt some energy com-panies back to Iran if sanctions are lifted, but Tehran is unlikely
to become a significant gas supplier to Europe or Asia for at least a decade.
European companies with the technol-ogy to fully exploit Iran’s vast South Pars field under the Gulf abandoned it in the late 2000s, under US pressure, dashing its hopes of following Qatar’s meteoric rise up the global gas exporters’ league.
Last month’s nuclear deal between the West and the new Iranian government has ignited hopes that its oil produc-tion could bounce back if Washington and the European Union relax controls on exports. But Iran has little chance of becoming a significant gas exporter for at least a decade because of high domestic demand and internal obstacles to devel-oping reserves, which were a problem long before sanctions forced foreigners out.
The lifting of sanctions on Iran “could potentially have a huge impact on exports over the longer term, but it will take years for things to get moving,” Laurent Ruseckas, senior adviser on the Global Gas team at consultants IHS, said.
In the short term, it makes more eco-nomic sense for Iran to use gas to satisfy
domestic demand for power generation and industry and for re-injection into ageing oilfields to maintain production, Ruseckas said.
Oilfield re-injection is a higher-value use for gas than exports, because oil sells for much more on the global market and does not require billions of dollars in capi-tal investment in gas export projects that take years to pay back.
Over 1 trillion cubic feet (tcf), or over 28 billion cubic metres (bcm), of gas was re-injected to help boost oil production in 2011, according to the US Energy Information Administration, and some estimates indicate that over 8bcf/d (around 83bcm/year) will be needed within a decade.
Iran’s marketed gas production, excluding flared and reinjected gas, has more than doubled to 160.5bcm in 2012 from 75bcm in 2002.
But Tehran has looked on while Qatar has become one of the world’s richest countries after western energy compa-nies built multi-billion-dollar plants over the last decade that turned the tiny Gulf state into the world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter.
The two countries share the world’s largest gas field, which Iran calls South Pars and Qatar the North Field. It straddles their offshore Gulf border and accounts for nearly all of Qatar’s gas
production and around 35 percent of Iran’s.
An abundance of condensate and natu-ral gas liquids in the field means it can produce enough income to cover drilling costs before pumping out gas.
That makes Iranian LNG export projects potentially highly competitive, even as supply swells due to US shale gas and big finds off East Africa.
Phase 12 of the South Pars develop-ment, which is expected to start up next year, could boost supplies by as much as 28bcm/year when it is fully operational.
According to figures from the Pars Oil and Gas Company, which manages the whole project, phases 13 to 24 could add up to 142bcm/year of capacity by 2019, if completed on time.
Iran already produces more gas than Qatar. The difference is that Qatar, with a population of less than 2 million, uses just 26bcm of it, leaving 125bcm free for export, according to data from BP.
Iran has used nearly all the gas it pro-duces to supply its 77 million people with heat, electricity and fuel.
Domestic demand has risen to 156bcm in 2012 from 79bcm in 2002, according to BP figures, which exclude gas used for re-injection.
Even if its domestic consumption rises at only the half annual growth rate seen over the past decade, that implies
increases of 8bcm-9bcm every year over the next five years. That would take Iran’s gas consumption to around 200bcm/year in 2018, not counting its rising use for re-injection.
Iran has been a net importer for most of the past decade, and this year asked Turkmenistan for more supplies to help ease shortages that are forcing Iranian power plants to burn billions of dollars of pricey and polluting oil products.
Iran faces a 30bcm shortfall in supplies this year and serious supply shortfalls over the next two years because South Pars has not been developed quickly enough.
Iranian gas projects have a record of falling far behind schedule.
Phase 13 suffered a big setback when one of its offshore platforms sank to the bottom of the Gulf during an installation attempt in January. Compressor prob-lems with phases 17 and 18 might need the expertise of foreign companies to fix, Iranian news agency Shana reported last week.
The head of Iran’s gas export company said over the weekend that it would pipe around 7mcm/day to Iraq from next July, with flows rising to 25mcm/day in 2015 and 40mcm/day by the early 2020s.
If sanctions are lifted, Pakistan would probably be next in line for any spare gas, because Iran has spent hundreds of
millions of dollars on building a 22bcm/year pipeline, and the two countries say they will redouble efforts to finish the long-delayed project soon.
Iran has also agreed to pipe around 10bcm/year to Oman within a few years and has built a pipeline to the United Arab Emirates designed to carry 10bcm/year.
“Iran could export some more gas by 2025 but will not export in the range of 50bcm/year before at least the 2030s,” David Ramin Jalilvand said in a study published by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies in June. Iran is already courting European energy giants in the hope they will swoop back in as soon as bans on investment are lifted.
Three large Gulf gas discoveries announced by Iran in 2011 - Kayyam, Farouz and Madar - are potential projects, and their exploitation could be a big boost to Iran’s export hopes.
But building big LNG plants that take years to complete in a country that has had a tense relationship with the West for decades will be a daunting prospect for many energy companies, particularly at a time that the US shale gas boom allows them to be picky over projects.
“There is something between zero to no chance of us going back into Iran,” a western energy company executive said of Iran’s gas sector. REUTERS
Pakistan captain Hafeez eyes Twenty20 top spotSri Lanka to take on Pakistan in first T20 match in Dubai today DUBAI: Sri Lanka and Pakistan will use their two-match series in Dubai start-ing today to size each other up ahead of the World Twenty20 in three months’ time.
Pakistan, fourth in the Twenty20 rankings, are also aim-ing to topple Sri Lanka from the top of the standings by winning both matches, the second of which takes place on Friday.
“Sri Lanka are a top side so this is in itself a motivation to beat the number one side and if we win both it will lift us to the top of the world,” Pakistan captain Mohammad Hafeez (pictured) said.
If the series is a 1-1 draw the teams will maintain their current rankings while a 2-0 loss would push Hafeez’s team down to fifth.
Pakistan go into the matches well prepared after playing four Twenty20 games against South Africa last month.
They also overcame tough resistance from minnows Afghanistan by six wickets in a last ball thriller in Sharjah on Sunday -- the first Twenty20 between the two countries.
Pakistan will be at full strength and boosted by the return of magi-cian off-spinner Saeed Ajmal, who skipped Sunday’s game to rest back home.
“We leaked quite a few runs against Afghanistan so we will have to be at our best to beat Sri Lanka and Ajmal’s return will help that,” said Hafeez, who was Man-of-the-Match against Afghanistan for his 42 not out.
Sri Lanka, led by Dinesh Chandimal, will have to over-come rustiness after most of their recent matches at home were ruined by rain.
Last month they beat New Zealand 1-0 with the other match abandoned because of inclement weather.
“The advantage Pakistan’s got is that they have played a lot of international cricket in the last six-eight months, whereas, unfor-tunately we haven’t played nearly as much because of weather and
various other things,” said coach Graham Ford.
Sri Lanka are hoping their bat-ting will see them through with the experienced Tillakaratne Dilshan and Kumar Sangakkara providing a contrast to Pakistan’s fragile and unpredictable batsmen.
Ajantha Mendis and Sachithra Senanayake are the two specialist spinners in the bowling depart-ment which is spearheaded by paceman Lasith Malinga.
Pakistan finished runners-up in the first World Twenty20 held in South Africa in 2007 before winning the title in England two years later.
Pakistan defeated Sri Lanka in the final at Lord’s -- a defeat which Sri Lanka avenged by winning the semi-final in Colombo on their way to finishing runners-up in the fourth edition last
year.The fifth edition will be held
in Bangladesh from March 16 to April 6.
Pakistan’s selectors added 19 year-old left-arm paceman Usman Shinwari to the squad after his impressive performance at domestic level.
Shinwari took 5-9 in National Twenty20 championship final on December 3 in Lahore, which also included Pakistan’s one-day and Test captain Misbah-ul Haq’s scalp.
Pakistan: Mohammad Hafeez (captain), Ahmed Shehzad, Sharjeel Khan, Sohaib Maqsood, Umar Amin, Umar Akmal, Shahid Afridi, Zulfiqar Babar, Bilawal Bhatti, Junaid Khan, Sohail Tanvir, Anwar Ali, Saeed Ajmal, Haris Sohail, Usman Shinwari. AFP
England need greatest fightback ever: Prior SYDNEY: England are “in a dark place” after two “hor-rendous” Ashes thrashings but are capable of achieving one of the greatest fightbacks ever, wicketkeeper Matt Prior said.
After losing to Australia by 218 runs in Adelaide to slip 2-0 behind in the five-match series, a performance Prior labelled “embarrassing”, England’s chances of retaining the Ashes are fading fast.
With team manager Andy Flower calling for the squad’s senior players to stand up, Prior said this week’s third Test in Perth will be the ultimate test of their resolve.
“How tough are we?” Prior said in his column in the Daily Telegraph yesterday. “We always ask those questions in the dress-ing room and in meetings.
“Now we have to prove it in the real world. We cannot run away from what is ahead of us.
“We know what we are up against. We like doing it the hard way and it does not come any harder for an English crick-eter than having to go to Perth and win. But if we manage to come back it will be one of the best fightbacks ever.”
Prior said some of the flak flying England’s way has been hurtful, but admitted it was justified.
“People are questioning our desire and hunger and that really hurts because it means we have been giving the wrong impression but nobody wants to win the Ashes more than us,” he said.
“The first innings collapse at Adelaide was as embarrassing a performance I’ve been involved in with England.
“We were horrendous and there have been honest chats and words spoken. Everyone in
this dressing room has been in a dark place and knows the feeling of walking out to bat thinking: ‘I don’t know what is going on’. But you have to work hard and have faith it will change around.”
Prior’s fighting 69 and Kevin Pietersen’s 53 in the second innings at Adelaide were the kind of performances Flower wants more of from his senior players.
“In these sorts of contests and series where the intensity levels are high, you do need your more experienced players, players who have been through similar situations in the past, to come through tough periods and play match-defining innings or produce pressure to create chances with the ball,” Flower told reporters in Adelaide.
Joe Root, who will turn 23 at the end of this month, currently averages the highest among batsmen while senior bowlers James Anderson and Graeme Swann have been largely off-colour in the first two Tests.
“We’ve been outplayed in these two Tests, very obviously, and the Australians have outplayed us in all three facets,” Flower said of the crushing defeats in Brisbane and Adelaide. We haven’t been skilful enough for long enough to get into better positions in the matches. That’s the crux there.”
England need a quick response in Perth where Australian pace-man Mitchell Johnson will again be the dangerman, having ripped England’s batting apart so far.
“I wouldn’t say scared,” Flower told reporters when asked about the effect that Johnson has had on the batsmen’s minds.
Spinner Swann said Johnson had been the main difference between the sides so far.
“He has struck a purple patch and is bowling very fast,” Swann told The Sun. “He might not be the most skilful bowler with what he does with the ball but he has that raw pace and is causing us problems.” REUTERS
England’s Matt Prior England’s Matt Prior walks off the field walks off the field after his dismissal after his dismissal
during the fifth day’s during the fifth day’s play in the second play in the second Ashes Test against Ashes Test against
Australia at the Australia at the Adelaide Oval on Adelaide Oval on
December 9.December 9.
WELLINGTON: West Indies captain Darren Sammy had lit-tle hesitation in asking Brendon McCullum to bat in the first Test in Dunedin and would waste even less time in insert-ing New Zealand if he wins the toss for the second Test at the Basin Reserve.
“I thought it was like the indoors here actually,” Sammy said yesterday, pointing to the vibrant green matting in the indoor nets at the Basin Reserve in central Wellington.
“I don’t think the guys have played on a surface so green before,” he added of a pitch that is expected to favour the quick bowlers following today’s toss.
“If you look at a wicket like that, 99 percent of the time you will bowl, so I hope it doesn’t trick us.
“And hopefully I win the toss,” he added laughing.
Sammy’s bowlers wasted first use of a green pitch at University Oval in Dunedin, bowling too short and not allowing the ball to swing or seam and the home side racked up 609 for nine declared.
New Zealand were poised to win the game before rain inter-vened on the final day, with the hosts 33 runs short of their first Test victory under captain McCullum.
Sammy was keen to emphasise that his side had taken more out of the first Test than McCullum’s,
West Indies keen to bowl first on green Basin pitch
West Indies’ Kieran Powell is seen on a
segway during practice ahead of the second Test
match today.
given West Indies had been forced to follow on and after some stoic second innings batting managed to draw, albeit with the help of the rain.
“I think we left Dunedin with a bit of confidence behind us know-ing that we didn’t play our best cricket but we still salvaged a draw,” Sammy said.
“It gave the individual play-ers a lot of confidence that they had been put under some serious pressure.
“We were always under pres-sure and we have managed to come through it and gives us con-fidence coming into the his test match.
“We are looking to improve on the last performance.”
Sammy expected to make few, if any, changes from their first Test line-up though question marks surround right arm fast bowler Shannon Gabriel, who finished the match in Dunedin with figures of none for 164 from
32.5 overs. “We try to support our players ... the first Test match he did look rusty but chances are we will back him up again and give him some confidence, especially if what we see out there in the middle,” Sammy said of Gabriel’s likely inclusion.
The only likely change would be whether they added an additional bowler after Sammy was injured in the first test.
The 29-year-old did not bowl in the second innings and was limping while batting after he suffered a strain at the top of his hamstring.
Sammy had a fitness test yesterday and will test the injury while bowling in the nets.
“I am feeling very confident about it,” he said.
“Everything is good. It’s probably just bowling out there in the middle and the nets. Everything looks pretty good.” REUTERS
Aussie media write off England ahead of Perth SYDNEY: Australia’s media revelled in their team’s humbling of hapless England yesterday, writing off the tourists ahead of the third Test in Perth where the Ashes could be decided.
Australia took a 2-0 lead in the five-Test series with a 218-run trouncing of England in the Adelaide Test on Monday and will retrieve the urn they lost to their arch rivals in 2009 if they win in Perth.
The Sydney Morning Herald splashed a picture of a gravestone on its back page, looking ahead to the game that begins Friday and suggesting that England are dead and buried.
“In Affectionate Remembrance of English Cricket, which died at the WACA on 17th December, 2013. RIP,” the inscription read, referring to the Perth ground and the date the third Test is due to end.
The newspaper’s chief sports writer Andrew Webster said England’s dismal performance in the Ashes so far was surprising.
“Notwithstanding the very fact that Australia might have regained the urn by this time next week, what astonishes most about this Ashes series is how meekly England seem prepared to hand it back,” he wrote.
The Sydney Daily Telegraph rubbed salt into English wounds, running a picture of a laughing Michael Clarke jokingly asking Shane Watson: “Hey Watto, did you hear the one about the Englishmen who have to face Mitch Johnson at the WACA?”
“It’s about to get a whole lot worse for the struggling Poms,” the tabloid said.
“Down 2-0 in the Ashes series after yesterday’s capitulation in Adelaide, they must now face Aussie firebrand Mitchell Johnson on his blisteringly fast home track in Perth.”
After England convincingly won the Ashes series 3-0 on home soil earlier this year, Telegraph columnist Richard Hinds said hubris is the only explanation for the side’s catastrophic decline.
“The hard work and pursuit of excellence that had created a mini golden age was lost in transit, while arrogance and entitlement clearly made it through customs,” he said. AFP
McCown shines as Bears maul Cowboys CHICAGO: Chicago quar-terback Josh McCown made a strong case to become the team’s permanent starter after he dominated Dallas in a 45-28 win yesterday that vaulted the Bears into joint first place in the NFC North.
Making his fourth straight start in place of the injured Jay Cutler, McCown warmed up the home crowd in freezing condi-tions by passing for 348 yards, four touchdowns and running for another score.
The 34-year-old McCown has been stellar all season and now has 13 touchdown passes and just one interception. His latest out-put helped Chicago (7-6) tie with Detroit (7-6) in the divisional race.
But despite McCown’s strong form, Cutler is expected to return from injury soon and regain his place.
“There’s no change in the plan. We’ll see where Jay is this week,” Bears coach Marc Trestman told reporters of the stated plan to start Cutler when he’s cleared medically.
“I thought (McCown) played an excellent game.”
Matt Forte rushed for 99 yards and added 73 receiving yards and a score for the Bears in a shoot-out victory that did not include a turnover by either team.
Dallas (7-6) fell one game behind first-place Philadelphia (8-5) in the NFC East with the loss.
The Cowboys managed to keep pace early and tied the game 14-14 late in the second quarter, but McCown caught fire and never looked back.
Chicago’s backup quarterback led two quick drives just before halftime, resulting in a field goal and a 25-yard touchdown pass to Alshon Jeffery as the Bears scored 28 points without reply to put the game out of reach.
McCown’s pass to Jeffery fea-tured a spectacular grab in the back corner of the end zone where the receiver leaped above a defender.
“You want to put a ball where a guy can catch it but not put the ball in jeopardy, so to speak,” McCown said. “My part was rela-tively easy. His part was unreal.”
Dallas tallied two fourth-quar-ter touchdowns to trim the final deficit.
Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo threw for three scores but only 104 yards while running back DeMarco Murray picked up 146 yards on the ground. REUTERS
Boxing: British travel ban floors Tyson LONDON: Former world heav-yweight champion boxer Mike Tyson has been forced to can-cel appearances in London after discovering he is banned from entering Britain.
Tyson, a convicted rapist, had been scheduled to be in London this week as he continues a pro-motional tour for his new autobi-ography Undisputed Truth, which included a photocall with journal-ists and a book signing.
His publishers Waterstone said recent changes to British immi-gration laws meant he was unable to travel to the country and has been re-routed to Paris instead.
Tweets posted on 47-year-old Tyson’s official Twitter account as recently as Friday suggest the boxer was unaware he would be hit by the changes. AFP
NHL ResultsOttawa 5 Philadelphia 4
Pittsburgh 2 Columbus 1
Vancouver 2 Carolina 0
Anaheim 5 NY Islanders 2
NBA ResultsCharlotte 115 Golden State 111
LA Clippers 94 Philadelphia 83
Denver 75 Washington 74
Memphis 94 Orlando 85
Portland 105 Utah 94
Sacramento 112 Dallas 97
England Squad for Australia series ODI squad: Alastair Cook (captain), Gary Ballance, Ian Bell, Ravi Bopara, Tim Bresnan, Danny
Briggs, Stuart Broad, Jos Buttler, Michael Carberry, Steven Finn, Chris Jordan, Eoin Morgan, Boyd Rankin, Joe Root, Ben Stokes, James Tredwell.
T20 squad: Stuart Broad (captain), Ravi Bopara, Tim Bresnan, Danny Briggs, Jos Buttler, Jade Dernbach, Steven Finn, Alex Hales, Michael Lumb, Eoin Morgan, Boyd Rankin, Joe Root, Ben
Stokes, James Tredwell, Luke Wright.
SPORT28WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
www.thepeninsulaqatar.com
Vettel slams new double points rule BERLIN: Red Bull’s four-times world champion Sebastian Vettel has branded as ‘absurd’ a rule change to award double points at the final race of the Formula One season from next year.
The 26-year-old, winner of the last four championships, told Germany’s Sport Bild yester-day that he saw no merit in the change.
“You can hardly imagine that on the last match of the Bundesliga season, (soccer) matches are suddenly worth twice as many points,” said the German.
“It’s absurd and it punishes the drivers who have worked hard through the whole season. I value the old traditions in Formula One and don’t understand this rule,” he was quoted as saying.
The controversial change, announced by the International Automobile Federation (FIA) on Monday after a meeting with the sport’s new F1 strategy group that is made up of six teams including champions Red Bull, has been roundly criticised by fans on social media.
“F1 demeans itself with dou-ble points gimmick,” declared a headline on the F1 Fanatic web-site, whose poll of more than 700 members showed 90 percent opposed to the idea.
Sport Bild quoted Red Bull motorsport consultant Helmut Marko as saying his team had been against the change but were overruled.
REUTERS
Doha Team, FC Barcelona to clash today at KataraThe two teams to play exhibition match ahead of 3x3 All Stars event
QBF signs deals with Al Kass, Gulf Crafts DOHA: An exhibition match between Doha Team and FC Barcelona will take place today as Qatar prepare to host the FIBA 3x3 All Stars competition tomorrow.
The match will take place at 4.00pm at Katara Beach, with the hosts being represented by Khalid Suliman Abdi, Mohammed Seleem Abdulla, Yaseen Musa and Boney Watson. The Spanish squad consists of Manel Bosch Rodrigo, De La Fuente, Roger Esteller and Ferran Martinez.
Today’s exhibition match, including the matches tomorrow, will be shown live on Al Kass, who signed a deal with Qatar Basketball Federation (QBF) yes-terday. The channel is set to have 10 cameras installed at the venue to offer the best possible coverage.
Speaking of the deal with QBF, Al Kass Sports Channel Programme Director Abdulla Muairfi said: “We are are very glad to have signed this deal with Qatar Basketball Federation. We enjoy having this long-term part-nership and we are ready to sup-port Qatar Basketball Federation and other sports under Qatar Olympic Committee.”
A studio will also be installed
and will begin broadcasting at 3.30pm.
Besides the Al Kass deal, QBF also joined hands with Gulf Crafts, who have made the win-ning trophy.
Vikain Demirjyan, General Manager, said the winning tro-phy is made of gold and copper and symbolises the sport.
Demirjyan said: “We are very happy to do this project with Qatar Basketball Federation. We as a company can offer any material and can make any type of trophy. The trophy is made with some elements of gold and copper.”
Saadoun Al Kuwari, the Tournament Director, explained the reasons why QBF wanted a particular trophy design.
Al Kuwari said: “The theme is a change. The trophy has a ring, a net, and ball which are important parts of basketball. It is totally different and Gulf Crafts will produce all trophies for Qatar Basketball Federation (QBF) competitions.
Ahead of the exhibition match, Doha Team and FC Barcelona will visit Newton School, who will showcase some skills of basket-ball. THE PENINSULA
FROM LEFT: Saadoun Al Kuwari, Executive Director of Qatar Basketball Federation (QBF) and Tournament Director of 3x3 All Stars competition, Mohammed Ali Al Hobash, Secretary-General of QBF, Vikain Demirjyan, General Manager of Gulf Crafts and Ammar Zaghal, Director of Gulf Crafts pose with the 3x3 All Stars tourna-ment trophy after a press conference at Qatar Olympic Committee (QOC) headquarters in Doha, yesterday. QBF signed deal s with Gulf Crafts and Al Kass channel yesterday. Al Kass will broadcast all the 3x3 All Stars matches live.
Dewar, Guevel win QGL Ammico Trophy
FROM LEFT: Manoj Megchiani, Albert Dalton, Valerie Dalton, Pavan Singh, PK Mathew, Fazal Kazi, Jamal Nasir, Serge Guevel, CK Krishnan, Steve Dewar, Khalid Ansari and Sanjay Jain pose for a picture after the Ammico Trophy tournament at Doha Golf Club. Dewar teamed up with Guevel to win the Ammico Trophy tournament organised by Qatar Golf Lovers (QGL) which saw the participation of 84 golfers. Singh and Daley duo came second in the tournament which was sponsored by Sal Contracting Company. Sheji Valiyakath won the ‘longest putt’, Mathew triumphed in the ‘closest to pin’ category, Adrian Usher came first in the ‘longest drive’, and Krishnan won the ‘closest to rope’ prizes. Special prizes were won by Ansari, Michael Saretsky, Kazi and Joe Conway.
Qatar’s Carella, Torrente eye world title in season-finale SHARJAH, UAE: The Qatar Team’s Shaun Torrente and Alex Carella will be in the thick of the drama in what promises to be the most exciting ever fin-ishes in the history of the UIM F1 H2O World Championship at Friday’s 15th Grand Prix of Sharjah in the UAE.
The Qatar Team duo heads to Khalid Lagoon in the United Arab Emirates knowing that outright victory would give either of them the world title in the final round.
Finland’s double world cham-pion Sami Selio holds a two-point lead in the title race over Torrente and Carella is a further two adrift but, with 20 on offer for first overall and only 15 for second, it’s ‘winner-takes-all’ in the Sharjah showdown.
The Qatar Team has already won the UIM F1 H2O Teams’ Championship.
“I have been working hard all season to put myself in this posi-tion to win it all on Friday,” said Torrente.
He added: “Despite some bad breaks, we are still a flicker away from the title. This is my time and my place in history to do it.”
Shaun Torrente (left) and Alex Carella of Qatar Team celebrate after finishing in the top two places in the qualifying session at the 19th Grand Prix of China in this file photo. The two pilots have a chance of winning the UIM F1 H20 World Championship title at the Grand Prix of Sharjah on Friday.
Carella wants to win a third championship in as many years.
He said: “I want this for me and the team because it would give me something that has not been done for 10 years and that is three straight world titles. I’ve never won in Sharjah and I want to go out there and show everyone that I can take the pressure and win it.”
Khalid bin Arhama Al Kuwari,
head of formula racing at the Qatar Marine Sports Federation (QMSF), which runs under the presidency of Sheikh Hassan bin Jabor Al Thani, is relishing the prospect of the thrilling finale to the season, but is also mindful that it is not guaranteed that the Qatar Team will collect a third successive world title.
“There is definitely pressure this time,” admitted Al Kuwari.
He added: “It’s not like the last two years where we managed to win the title with Alex in Abu Dhabi. This is going to be a fight to the end and, insha’allah, we will get the third title in a row for the QMSF.
“Shaun and Alex have to be careful. They need to drive hard, but be safe to win it. But, they also have to remember that this is a team effort and everyone has worked so hard to put them in this position and hopefully make this happen,” he explained.
Al Kuwari is delighted that the boats are in tip-tip condition for the final race of the season and Brendan Power and the team have got to the bottom of the engine issues that plagued them in recent outings.
“Qualifying on Thursday will be so very important,” said Al Kuwari.
He added: “I think that Q3 and getting pole position is almost 80 percent of winning the race.”
Frenchman Phillipe Chiappe is also in with a chance of claiming a maiden world championship. THE PENINSULA
UNESCO, ICSS join hands PARIS: In a major step forward in the battle to protect integrity in sport, UNESCO has concluded a strategic partnership agree-ment with the International Centre for Sport Security (ICSS) to address corruption and match-fixing on a global level.
The partnership will see the organisations work together across a range of initiatives including:
Developing international and national capacities to prevent and fight the manipulation of sport competition.
This will encompass methodologies for sport integrity standards and good practice, mechanisms for enhanced cooperation and information sharing, and educational programmes, executive training and public awareness raising
Support for the implementation of outcomes from the 5th UNESCO World Conference of Sport Ministers (MINEPS V), the Declaration of Berlin on ‘Preserving the Integrity of Sport’, which was adopted in Germany earlier this year.
This will include the promotion of actions by governments, the sport movement, intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations, law enforcement agencies, the betting industry and athletes in line with the Berlin Declaration
The collaboration will also seek to mobilise government support for the development of guiding principles in the field of sport integrity, building on the current work developed by the ICSS and University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne.
Alexander Schischlik, Team Leader of UNESCO’s Anti-Doping and Sport Programme, said: “Individual nations can’t prevent international threats to sport integrity but collectively they can. With its interna-tional expertise, the ICSS is a strategic partner for UNESCO in the area of manipulation of sport competitions. Together we can enhance our scientific, multi-stakeholder approach to this problem.”
Mohammed Hanzab, President of the ICSS, said: “This is a historical moment for the ICSS and the UNESCO-ICSS partnership will enable us to drive forward the sport integrity agenda. This agreement is being developed for the benefit of sport.”
He added: “Through UNESCO’s intergovernmental man-date and influence, the ICSS’s ongoing work for and commitment to the eradication of corruption in sport now takes a significant step forward.”
THE PENINSULA
Murray to miss BBC awards ceremony LONDON: Wimbledon cham-pion Andy Murray (pic-tured) has decided not to attend Sunday’s BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year awards ceremony despite being the hot favourite to take the top prize.
The Scot was installed as the front-runner for the prestigious award immediately following his historic win over Novak Djokovic in July made him the first British men’s singles victor at Wimbledon since Fred Perry in 1936.
Murray had considered being present at the hugely popular cer-emony in Leeds, but in the end decided to stay at his training base in Miami where he is work-ing his way back to fitness after an operation on his lower back in September.
Instead the 26-year-old Murray will link up with the show live by video from Florida, as he did last year, when he was presented with the third-placed trophy by boxer Lennox Lewis.
The world number four intends to train every day up to and including Christmas Day before flying to Abu Dhabi, where he is due to begin his season on December 26 with a match against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.
Murray does not want his deci-sion to be seen as a snub to the award or the BBC, who he writes a column for during Wimbledon and with whom he collaborated on a documentary ahead of this year’s Championships.
The Scot only began playing points in practice last week and, although his recovery is said to be
broadly on track, he feels he still has a lot of work to do.
Murray is renowned as one of the tour’s hardest trainers and knowing he has done everything possible to prepare himself for big events is central to his approach.
After the exhibition tourna-ment in Abu Dhabi, which also features Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, Murray will return to the ATP Tour in Doha the fol-lowing week.
The world number four has yet to confirm his participation at the Australian Open, but his desire to be in the best shape possible for the first grand slam of the sea-son is the main reason behind his decision not to fly back to Britain.
A BBC spokesperson said of Murray’s absence: “We are of course disappointed that Andy Murray cannot be in Leeds in person but are very much looking forward to him join-ing us live on the night via link-up.” AFP
29SPORT WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
www.thepeninsulaqatar.com
Event Competition Time Channel
Al Kharitiyat vs Al Khor Qatar Stars League 16:00 +4
Al Ahli vs Al Wakra Qatar Stars League 16:00 HD3
Al Sadd vs Lekhwiya Qatar Stars League 17:30 +2
Raja Casablanca vs Auckland FIFA Club World Cup 21:30 HD4
Barcelona vs Celtic UEFA Champions League 22:00 HD6
Schalke vs Basel UEFA Champions League 22:45 .TV
Milan vs Ajax UEFA Champions League 22:45 .TV
Atletico vs Porto UEFA Champions League 22:45 .TV
Austria Wien vs Zenit UEFA Champions League 22:45 .TV
Chelsea vs Steaua UEFA Champions League 22:45 .TV
Napoli vs Arsenal UEFA Champions League 22:45 .TV
Marseille vs Dortmund UEFA Champions League 22:45 +3
Your TV guide for live matches today
Al Rayyan hand Eljaish their second straight lossQSL: Al Arabi beat Al Gharafa 2-0; Al Sailiya thrash Muaither 4-1
Qatar’s Al Rayyan and Al Sadd learn group stage fates in ACLKUALA LUMPUR: Qatar Stars League (QSL) champions Al Sadd have been drawn with Al Ahli, Al Hilal and Sepahan for the 2014 Asian Champions League (ACL) this season.
Qatar’s other representative - Al Rayyan who qualified for the tournament after beating Al Sadd in the Emir Cup final in May, face Esteghlal, Al Jazira and Al Shabab in Group A.
Hussein Amute’s side, who won the competition in 2011, will make trips to UAE, Saudi Arabia and to Iran.
Al Rayyan will also travel to Iran, UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, China’s Guangzhou Evergrande were kept guessing over the group opponents for their title defence when they were drawn with two still unknown teams.
Marcello Lippi’s team were matched with 2006 champi-ons Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors, the eventual winners of Japan’s Emperor’s Cup and the survi-vors of a play-off series involving Australia’s Melbourne Victory in Group G.
The draw leaves World Cup-winning coach Lippi, who is lead-ing his team at the Club World Cup in Morocco this week, wait-ing to see if Guangzhou are fac-ing a “group of death”, a stroll to the knock-outs or something in between.
Lippi’s Guangzhou will defend their first Asian title without talismanic midfielder Dario Conca, who is leaving the club along with his reportedly huge salary to return to Brazil’s Fluminense.
Australia’s Western Sydney Wanderers, making their debut just a year after being formed, were bracketed with China’s Guizhou Renhe, Japan’s Yokohama Marinos and 2012 winners Ulsan Hyundai of South Korea in Group H.
J-League winners Sanfrecce Hiroshima were pitted against this year’s AFC runners-up FC
Seoul and Australian champions Central Coast Mariners in Group F.
Thailand’s Buriram United will look to build on their bat-tling run to this year’s quarter-finals when they take on former champions Pohang Steelers, China’s Shandong Luneng and J-League team Kawasaki Frontale in Group E.
In Group C Saudi giants Al Ittihad, two-time winners of the AFC Champions League, were drawn with fellow former cham-pions Al Ain of UAE and Iran’s Tractorsazi Tabriz.
Under new Asian Football Confederation (AFC) rules, West and East Asian teams will be kept apart until the semi-finals. East Asian sides have dominated in recent years, winning seven of the last eight titles.
AFP/THE PENINSULA
A) Qatar’s Al Sadd player Lee Jung Soo (left) celebrates with team-mate Wisam Rizq after scoring against Uzbekistan’s PFC Pakhtakor Tashkent during their AFC Champions League match at Al Sadd Stadium in this file photo. B) Qatar’s Al Rayyan Rodrigo Tabata cel-ebrates after scoring against Uzbekistan’s Nasaf during their AFC Champions League match in this file photo.
Fixing not ‘big issue’, says FA’s Horne LONDON: Match-fixing and spot-fixing are not a “big issue” in English soc-cer despite six people being arrested as part of a National Crime Agency (NCA) inves-tigation this week, according to Football Association gen-eral secretary Alex Horne.
Horne was one of several senior officials from various sports summoned to a meeting with the Department of Media Culture and Sport yesterday as the fall-out from a sting set up by The Sun on Sunday newspa-per continued.
Former Premier League striker DJ Campbell, now playing for Blackburn Rovers in the Championship, was con-firmed by his club as one of the people arrested.
“The general consensus around the room was that this is not a big issue,” Horne, who was joined by officials from tennis, rugby union, cricket and horse racing, told Sky Sports News after leaving the meeting.
“The intelligence we have says this isn’t widescale at the moment but we don’t want to be complacent and don’t want to see this in our sport. We are doing everything we can; we are looking at all measures.”
Cricket, snooker, tennis and horse racing have all taken a lead in anti-corruption meas-ures following high-profile cases.
“We are never complacent on this issue and there is a lot we can learn from other sports,” Horne said.
“Some of the education programmes put in place by cricket are very far advanced and the integrity unit the BHA (British Horseracing Authority) have in place is very advanced.”
The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) was the first domestic national govern-ing body to set up its own anti-corruption unit (ACCESS) in 2010 after Essex fast bowler Mervyn Westfield admitted spot-fixing during a Pro40 one-day game.
Westfield was subsequently banned for five years and given a four-month prison sentence while team mate Danish Kaneria was banned from English cricket for life after Westfield named him as the alleged instigator of the spot-fixing.
All players competing in English domestic cricket, including those from overseas, must agree to an anti-corrup-tion code while they can also report any approaches from unregulated bookmakers or betting syndicates via a con-fidential phone line.
While the FA’s Horne appeared to play down con-cerns about corruption, the ECB said the fight was ongoing.
“Our view is that we can never be complacent about this and that we have got to remain extremely vigilant at all times,” ECB spokesman Andrew Walpole said.
“It’s something we are very concerned about and that’s why we have been so pro-active in setting up this unit.”
REUTERS
Chelsea are outsiders for Champions League, saysMourinho LONDON: Jose Mourinho (pic-tured) admits he does not con-sider Chelsea to be among the favourites to win the Champions League.
T h e P r e m i e r League club have already qualified for the knockout stages and will qualify at the head of Group E if they beat Steaua Bucharest at Stamford Bridge in their final group game.
That will move Chelsea man-ager Mourinho one step closer to becoming the first manager to win the competition with three differ-ent clubs have lifted the trophy with FC Porto an Inter Milan.
But the Portuguese insists Bayern Munich, Barcelona and Real Madrid are the leading con-tenders this season with his own club one of a number who he con-siders to be outsiders.
“I think our chances, this sea-son, which is my first season, are not comparable with the chances other clubs have,” said Mourinho.
“I think other clubs have com-pletely different stability, squads, evolution of the team to be con-sidered the favourites to win the competition.
“We have reached the last 16. If we reach the quarter-final, which is the next step, every team in the quarter-final has a chance to win it.
“But in my analysis, I think we are not considered one of the favourites to win the competition.
“In my opinion, my favourites are Bayern - European cham-pions and a top club, with the same players and a new manager, same team and team, unbelievable stability.
“They won it last year, were in the final the year before, in a final in 2010. Fantastic stability in this level. Barcelona. Real Madrid. And these three teams are, clearly in terms of potential and respon-sibilities, in front.”
Mourinho added: “But I could say other teams are very strong. And one of these teams arrive in the last eight, anything can hap-pen. These teams are obviously Manchester City, Man United, Atletico Madrid, Chelsea... there is a group of teams that arrive in there.
“But we are still in the first phase. The last 16, we will find some difficult matches because some important teams will finish second.”
Chelsea will face Steaua on the back of a 3-2 defeat at Stoke City and having conceded six goals in their last two games. AFP
DOHA: An early first-half strike from Al Rayyan’s Rodrigo Tabata was enough to condemn Eljaish to their sec-ond straight defeat in the Qatar Stars League (QSL) yesterday.
The attacking midfielder nod-ded Nilmar’s cross in the 9th minute of the match to give new coach Manolo Jimenez all three points in the 1-0 win at Al Rayyan Stadium.
The result is only the third win of the season for Al Rayyan while Eljaish, who had topped the standings before their first defeat last week remain in sec-ond position behind points leaders Al Sadd.
Al Sadd play their match in hand against former champions Lekhwiya today.
In other results yesterday, Al Sailiya thrashed Muaither 4-1, and Qatar Sports Club picked up three points against Umm Salal in their 2-0 victory.
Al Arabi won 2-0 against Al Gharafa. THE PENINSULA
Asian Champions League draw
KUALA LUMPUR: Draw for the 2014 Asian Champions League made in Kuala Lumpur
yesterday:
Group A
Esteghlal (IRI)
Al Rayyan (QAT)
Al Jazira (UAE)
Al Shabab (KSA)
Group B
Al Fateh (KSA)
Foolad Khuzestan (IRI)
Winners of West playoff series one
Bunyodkor (UZB)
Group C
Al Ain (UAE)
Al Ittihad (KSA)
Tractorsazi Tabriz (IRI)
Winners of West play-off series two
Group D
Al Sadd (QAT)
Al Ahli (UAE)
Al Hilal (KSA)
Sepahan (IRI)
Group E
Pohang Steelers (KOR)
Buriram United (THA)
Shandong Luneng (CHN)
Kawasaki Frontale (JPN)
Group F
Sanfrecce Hiroshima (JPN)
Central Coast Mariners (AUS)
FC Seoul (KOR)
Winners of East play-off series one
Group G
Guangzhou Evergrande (CHN)
Emperor’s Cup Winners (JPN)
Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors (KOR)
Winner of East play-off series two
Group H
Western Sydney Wanderers (AUS)
Guizhou Renhe (CHN)
Yokohama Marinos (JPN)
Ulsan Hyundai (KOR)
Yesterday’s ResultsUmm Salal 0 Qatar SC 2
Al Sailiya 4 Muaither 1
Al Rayyan 1 Eljaish 0
Al Arabi 2 Al Gharafa 0
Today’s Fixtures
Al Ahli vs Al Wakra, 4.00pm at Al Arabi Stadium
Al Kharaitiyiat vs Al Khor, 4.00pm at Al Khor Stadium
Al Sadd vs Lekhwiya, 6.30pm at Al Sadd Stadium
A
B
A) Eljaish’s Wagner Ribeiro vies for
the ball during his side’s Qatar Stars
League (QSL) match against Al Rayyan at Al Rayyan Stadium in Doha yesterday. B) Action during the same match.
C) Action between Qatar Sports Club and Umm Salal at Qatar Sports Club Stadium in Doha.
A
C B
SPORT30 WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
www.thepeninsulaqatar.com
Josoor Institute launched in DohaCentre of excellence designed to give world-class education to sports professionalsDOHA: The Josoor Institute, a centre of excellence designed to give world-class education and training facilities to the people of Qatar, the Middle East and North Africa, was unveiled yes-terday by Hassan Al Thawadi, Secretary-General of the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee, dur-ing the second annual Doha Goals Forum.
The Josoor Institute will train many of the people who will play an integral role in Qatar’s host-ing of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, individuals who will then have the knowledge to deliver large-scale sporting and non-sporting events across the region long after 2022.
The Josoor Institute will teach courses on a range of topics from running major events and the business of football to creating a culture of volunteering.
Courses at the Josoor Institute will combine classroom-based theory with practical learning in a variety of ways.
Short courses, Outreach Days and Programme Pathways are some of the courses which the insititute aim to conduct.
Outreach Days, according to Jossor Insititute officials, will provide university students with the information they need to shape their careers, whilst learn-ing about the opportunities of working in the sports and events industries;
The Short Courses, targeted at professionals who wish to develop new skills and gain an aware-ness of new career opportuni-ties within the sports and event industries.
Programme Pathways is a range of professional certificate and diploma programmes providing both academic and work-based experience. These courses aim to prepare graduates for manage-rial and leadership positions in the sports and event industries.
The Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee is a founding part-ner of the Josoor Institute and is working alongside some of the world’s leading universities, mar-keting agencies, media outlets and
events and sports management companies to develop and deliver the programmes and courses.
More than 1,000 participants are expected to attend the Josoor Institute in the first full opera-tional year beginning in October 2014. Georgetown University is working with the Institute to provide an academic framework and endorsement for coursework.
Although the Josoor Institute is still in development, the first outreach course took place on Monday.
Over the next two days a fur-ther 100 participants from coun-tries including Kuwait, Libya, Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Iran, Bahrain, Oman and Sudan will take part in two, short courses on the Business of Football and an Introduction to Running Major Events.
These courses will be delivered by leading specialists in their field, ranging from a former Chief Executive of the Premier League, to those responsible for deliver-ing the Olympic and Paralympic Games and the Rugby World Cup.
H E Salah bin Ghanem bin Nasser Al Ali, Minister of Youth and Sport, said: “Increasing edu-cational opportunities is central to Qatar’s achieving the ambi-tious goals set out in the Qatar National Vision 2030. We in Qatar firmly believe that access to edu-cation and enabling the trans-fer of knowledge are key to the advancement of societies across the Middle East.
“We believe that learning inspires young people and pro-vides a clear means to improve their lives. That is why we aim to make sport a way of life in Qatar. Participation in sport has the power to broaden the horizons of our youth, inspiring new ways of thinking and easing the path to obtaining new knowledge and skills.
“I strongly believe that the Josoor Institute creates an excep-tional opportunity for our region. It will provide young people with
FROM LEFT: Ivan Bravo, Director General of Aspire Academy, Paul Tagliabue, Sheikh Saud bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, General-Secretary of Qatar Olympic Committee, H E Salah bin Ghanem bin Nasser Al Ali, Qatar’s Minister of Youth and Sports, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Thani, President of Qatar Football Association, Sheikh Abdulla bin Ali Al Thani, Hassan Al Thawadi, General-Secretary of the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee attend the launch of the Josoor Institute, a centre of excellence designed to give world-class education and training facilities to the people of Qatar, the Middle East and North Africa in Doha, yesterday. The Josoor Institute was launched yesterday by Hassan Al Thawadi, during the annual Doha Goals Forum. The Josoor Institute will train many of the people who will play an integral role in Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 FIFA World Cup and leave a long term legacy of individuals fully trained to deliver large scale sporting and non-sporting events across the region.
new opportunities to learn in and outside of the classroom and enhance our ability to host major sporting events. The new knowl-edge it will create has the power to inspire our young people, pro-viding them with the means to become leaders in their communi-ties and societies.”
The minister said the institute will have a crucial role to play in 2022.
“I am certain that the Josoor Institute will play an impor-tant role in Qatar, by preparing Qatari youth to assist in our great
nation’s hosting of a truly amaz-ing 2022 FIFA World Cup.”
Hassan Al Thawadi, Secretary General of the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee said: “The Josoor Institute will provide the people of Qatar, the Middle East and North Africa with the educa-tional opportunities necessary to realise their dreams of a career in the sports and events indus-tries. The next eight years and beyond are an exciting time for our region and I believe that the Josoor Institute will play a key role in establishing us as pioneers
in these industries.” In the first quarter of 2014,
the Josoor Institute will host a further series of invitation-only short courses. Individuals and organisations interested in learn-ing more about these courses and upcoming programme pathways should email [email protected] or visit www.josoorinstitute.qa
Josoor Institute has part-nered several organisations: The Founding Partners are Aspire Academy, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee, Qatar Football
Deloitte , Georgetown University, IMG, the International Centre for Sport Security (ICSS), Qatar Stars League, are the Institutional Partners.
The Programme & Course Partners are Beyond Sport, Leeds Metropolitan University, Rushmans, Wasserman.
The Associate Partners are College of North Atlantic Qatar.
THE PENINSULA
Aspire Academy and La Liga sign agreement
DOHA: Aspire Academy yes-terday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Liga BBVA, Spanish football’s premier league, to cooperate closely in exchanging know-how in sporting development.
Under the terms of the agree-ment, Qatar will be positioned as a global football centre. A planned Under-15 La Liga tournament with the participation of Aspire teams will provide the centrepiece of the partnership, with 12 teams competing at Aspire Academy in Doha during April 2014.
Signed at the opening cer-emony of the Doha Goals Forum in Aspire Academy Dome, the MoU also seeks to form the basis of a longer-term relationship between Aspire Academy and La Liga through the fostering of mentorships between professional footballers and future stars of the game.
Ivan Bravo, Director General of Aspire Academy, said: “We are delighted to be working closely with La Liga in promoting the development of the beautiful game, both here in Qatar and fur-ther afield. Liga BBVA is widely recognised as one of the world’s
H E Nassir Abdulaziz Al
Nasser, UN High Representative for the Alliance of Civilisations Qatar talks dur-ing the official opening cer-emony of the Doha Goals
forum in Doha, yesterday.
The two-day forum opened
at Aspire Dome yesterday.
Former Brazil international and coach of Al Gharafa Zico (standing, third right) poses for a picture along with Mikael Silvestre (standing, second right), former Manchester United, Arsenal and French national team player during the Doha Goals Football Challenge at Aspire Dome on Monday. Aboubakar Sidiki ‘Titi’ Camara, former Minister of Sport and former Liverpool and Guinea player, along with Trevor Steven (standing, third left) former England, Everton, Olympique de Marseille and Glasgow Rangers player and currently a TV analyst took part in the informal football tournament.
Ivan Bravo, Director General of Aspire Academy, speaking during the agreement signing ceremony at Aspire Dome in Doha yester-day. Also seen is Javier Tebas,
President of La Liga, the Spanish Football Professional League.
Aspire Academy yesterday signed a Memorandum of Understanding
(MoU) with Liga BBVA, Spanish Football Premier League, to coop-erate closely in exchanging know-
how in sporting development.
Aboubakar Sidiki ‘Titi’ Camara (right) former Al Sailiyah and Liverpool striker playing football at Doha Goals Football
Challenge in Doha. RIGHT: A delegate
speaking during one of the think tank session of
Doha Goals forum.
greatest football competitions and, as our Academy students continue their pursuit of excel-lence, they will undoubtedly be motivated by the example set by some of the game’s most accom-plished players. We sincerely hope that this Memorandum of Understanding heralds the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship which contributes to the development of world-class players.”
In response, Javier Tebas, President of La Liga – the Spanish Football Professional League said: “The Middle East and North Africa region, with over 23 markets, holds over 128 million La Liga fans. Thus, the agreement takes us one step closer to our fan-base. “In the past, we have engaged local football leagues, clubs and play-ers through Spanish talent and direct engagement. Now, we want
to further strengthen that rela-tionship,” Tebas added.
Accompanied by Fernando Sanz Durán, La Liga’s Middle East and North Africa General Director, Tebas held several meetings in the Qatar during their participa-tion at Doha Goals Forum. Such meetings are aimed at eventually seeing the Spanish league further establish precedents in Qatar and the region. Sanz, a former Real Madrid and Malaga defender, and former owner and president of the Malaga team, indicated that he is here to stay in the Middle East and facilitate exchanges of knowledge, skill sets and technical prowess that La Liga has.
“Our plans for the MENA region are long-term,” explained Sanz. “However, in the short-term, we intend to bring events, friendly games, and famous play-ers to share their experiences with local talent and leagues, as well as
organise football clinics and road shows. We will be involved with football associations, share our knowledge with the local leagues and provide strategic input and insight into the game here.”
The Under-15 tournament is set to take place between April 11 and 14 next year. It will feature an array of Spain’s top youth sides together with two teams from Aspire Academy, and showcase the emerging talents of players who will be at the height of their powers when Qatar hosts the FIFA 2022 World Cup finals.
By embarking upon a relation-ship with a league that features the supreme skills of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, widely recognised as the greatest play-ers in the world, Aspire Academy seeks to inspire its students to achieve greatness by working hard to maximise their innate ability. THE PENINSULA
31SPORT WEDNESDAY 11 DECEMBER 2013
www.thepeninsulaqatar.com
Doha Goals launches four new initiativesGabon, Palestine, Afghanistan to benefit from the projectDOHA: Four life-changing ini-tiatives were announced at the launch of Doha Goals 2013 here yesterday.
A Sport Fields Initiative, a pro-gramme to give children around the world access to prosthetics, a fund ‘from the athletes to the ath-letes’ and an international U-15s football championships were some of the initiatives which got the nod.
The initiatives were inspired by some of the 456 ideas put for-ward by members of the Forum last year.
Sheikh Faisal bin Mubarak Al Thani, Executive Director of Doha Goals, and Richard Attias, Executive Producer of Doha Goals, made the announcement in front of more than 1,000 participants during the inaugural session of the two-day event which kicked off with the formal opening.
Doha Goals is a call to action for policymakers, NGOs, corpo-rations and athlete’s alike taking place at the Aspire Dome.
In the Sport Fields Initiative, Doha Goals, in partnership with local authorities, will build foot-ball and basketball fields in dif-ferent cities around the world in order to provide free access to sport facilities for local communi-ties, particularly underprivileged youth.
The first beneficiaries of the sports fields project will be Port Gentil (Gabon), Nablus (Palestine), Mazar-e-Sharif (Afghanistan).
Doha Goals officials informed that an MoU has been signed with the three cities and also with NGOs and institutions who will administer and maintain the fields and create community pro-grams for the local youth.
Under the second project, Doha Goals Prosthetics Programme, children around the world will be provided with good quality prosthetics.
“Quality prosthetics are expen-sive and a lack of mobility impedes participation in sports and in the community and isolates amputees
Today’s ProgrammeOpening Speech
Khalid Al Sulaiteen, acting president, Aspire Zone Foundation 09:00 - 09.10
Time Out
Burcu Çetinkaya, TV presenter, champion rally driver and Red Bull athlete (Turkey)
Moderated by Rachel Bourlier, TV Presenter and Journalist (France) at 09:10 - 09.30
Mega Events: Who Can Afford To Host Them?
Moderated by Lord Mandelson, Chairman, Global Counsel (UK)at 09:30 – 10:20
The Future Of Athletics
Michael Johnson, four-time Olympic champion and eight-time world champion sprinter, and
Founder, Michael Johnson Performance (USA)
Kelly Holmes, double Olympic champion, 1500m and 800m and Founder, DKH Legacy Trust (UK)
In conversation with Jonathan Edwards, Chair, Athletes’ Commission, London 2012 and world record holder, triple jump (UK) at 10:20 – 10.50
Redistributing The Wealth 11:20 – 12:00
Moderated by Simon Chadwick, Professor of Sport Business Strategy, Coventry University (UK) at 11:20 – 12:00
Sports Medicine
The Engineered Athlete: New Advances In Sports Medicine And Sports Sciences
Stéphane Bermon, sports physician and exercise physiologist, Monaco Institute of Sports Medicine and Surgery (Monaco) at 12.00 – 12:40
Discussion: Sport’s Role In Medicine
Moderator: Jonathan Edwards, Chair, Athletes’ Commission, London 2012 and world-record
holder, triple jump (UK) at 12:10 - 12:40
Time Out
Moderated by: Paul Fadel, Senior Presenter, Al Jazeera Sport channel (Qatar) at 12:10 - 12:40
Putting Job Creation Top Of The Sports Agenda
Moderated by Simon Chadwick, Professor of Sport Business Strategy, Coventry University (UK)
Integrating Sports As Part Of Children’s Lifestyles
Moderated by Mori Taheripour, Senior Advisor, Sport for Development, USAID (USA)
The Fight To Eliminate Prejudice In Sport
Moderated by Bonnie Morris, Professor of Women’s Sports History, Georgetown University (USA)
Sport’s Role In Urban Regeneration
Moderated by Alexis Lyras, HM King Abdullah II of Jordan Generations for Peace Fellow,
Georgetown University (Qatar)
Taxation Of Athletes And Clubs
Facilitated by Sajid Khan, international tax partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers (Qatar)
Closing Session: 16:10– 19:00
Speech by H E Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, UN High Representative for the Alliance of Civilisations (Qatar)
Official Keynote Address by H E Sheikh Ahmed Al-Fahad Al-Sabah, President, Olympic Council of Asia (Kuwait)
Time Out
Zico, manager of Al Gharafa club in Qatar, and Brazilian footballing superstar (Brazil)
In conversation with Paul Fadel, senior presenter, Al Jazeera Sport (Qatar) at 16.25 - 16.35
Tony Hawk, 12-time world champion skateboarder and Founder, Tony Hawk Foundation (USA)
In conversation with Paul Fadel, senior presenter, Al Jazeera Sport (Qatar)
Extreme Sports: Are They The Future?
Moderated by Paul Fadel, senior presenter, Al Jazeera Sport (Qatar)
Time Out
Ilie Nastase, former world No.1 professional tennis player (Romania)
In conversation with Paul Fadel, senior presenter, Al Jazeera Sport (Qatar)
Summations From Doha Goals 2013
H E Sheikh Faisal Al Thani, Executive Director, Doha GOALS (Qatar)
Richard Attias, Executive Chairman, Richard Attias & Associates and Executive Producer, Doha
Goals (USA)
Your Sport, Your World
Moderated by Richard Attias, Executive Chairman, Richard Attias & Associates and Executive
Producer, Doha GOALS (USA) and Jonathan Edwards, Chair, Athletes’ Commission, London 2012 and world record-holder, triple jump (UK)
Michael Johnson, four-time Olympic champion and eight-time world champion sprinter, and Founder of Michael Johnson Performance, speaking at Doha Goals Forum. TOP: Germany’s Katarina Witt, a dou-ble Olympic winner and four-time World Champion for figure skating, talks during the official opening ceremony of the Doha Goals Forum. The Forum aims to create initiatives for global progress through sports will end today.
Sheikh Faisal bin Mubarak Al Thani (second right), Executive Director of Doha Goals, and Richard Attias (right), Executive Producer of Doha Goals, are seen along with Ghassan W Shakaa, Mayor of Nablus Municipality, Gabriel Ntougou, Adviser to President of the Republic of Gabon and Mohammad Jan, Deputy Mayor of Mazar-e-Sharif after the contract signing ceremony in Doha yesterday.
in these countries working with the Katarina Witt Foundation, Doha Goals will be given pros-thetics,” Doha Goals officials said.
Current French and US Open Wheelchair Tennis champion Stephane Houdet and three-time Chinese Paralympic gold medal-list Hou Bin are the ambassadors supporting the programme.
The third initiative which has got chosen is the Sport Solidarity Fund.
Under it a multimillion-dollar Fund will be set up ‘from the ath-letes to the athletes’ to support athletes and their families while they are suffering from injuries as well as during post-retirement .
The focus will be on four areas namely: The fund will provide funding for counselling and consulting services for current professional athletes and their families to prepare them for retirement.
Post career angel fund will
finance business ideas and ven-tures for retiring athletes. Private sector partnerships will create internships and training pro-grammes for retired athletes.
A health fund will take care of the rehabilitation services for injured athletes and the educa-tion fund will give scholarships for educational programs for retired athletes and opportunities for mentorship.
The fourth initiaitve is the International U-15 Championships which will take place in Doha. The tournament will take place from April 11 to 14 next year at the Aspire Zone and will be supported by Doha Goals and will feature 10 football teams from the top clubs in Europe and two Qatari teams, it was revealed.
Following the announcements, the official signing of the Doha Goals Sport Fields Initiative took place. Officials from Afghanistan, Gabon and Palestine were present
in doah to sing the agreement with Doha Goals. Sheikh Faisal bin Mubarak Al Thani, Richard Attias, Ghassan W Shakaa, Mayor of Nablus Municipality, Gabriel Ntougou – Advisor, President of the Republic of Gabon and Mohammad Jan – Deputy Mayor of Mazar-e-Sharif, were some of the officials prestn for the signing ceremony.
On Monday, the Ministers of Sport and representatives of sports bodies from over 20 coun-tries gathered in Doha to discuss the important role played by sport to promote innovation, economic growth, social inclusion and cohe-sion for the Doha Goals Sports Ministers Summit.
Yesterday, Sir Ronald Flanagan, Chairman of the International Cricket Council’s Anti-Corruption Unit, and INTERPOL Secretary General Ronald Noble took part in an expert panel discussing cor-ruption in sport.
THE PENINSULA
Bolt has rewritten the sprinting rules: BoldonBY ARMSTRONG VAS
DOHA: Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt - widely regarded as the fastest person ever - has ‘rewritten the sprinting rules’ but there is always a chance that his records will be broken in the coming years, says four-time Olympic medal winner, Ato Boldon of Trinidad and Tobago.
The 40-year-old one of the 15 fastest men in history ran 9.86 in the straight and won four Olympic medals, but could not lay hands on the gold medal.
“There are no limits to human performance. Usain Bolt has rewritten the sprinting rules but you cannot tell what will happen in ten or 15 years time.
“Bolt has shown what is pos-sible and close to him is Yohan
Blake, for his age he has been faster than Bolt,” he added.
Boldon, who is in Doha for the Doha Goals, said when Michael Johnson broke the 200 metres record no one thought it will be broken.
“It takes me to the race where I competed against Johnson, he ran the 200 meters in 19.32 in Atlanta 1996 and everyone said that the record will not be broken in the next 50 years. It did not last even 15 years,” said Bolton.
He has shown what is possible and near it is Yohan Blake, at his age has been faster than Bolt.
Bolt hold both the 100 metres and 200 metres world records and along with his team-mates, also holds the world record in the 4 x 100 metres relay.
Boldon, who is now a televi-sion commentator on ESPN and NBC said mixed races might happen in the near future taking into account TV viewership into account.
“The future of athletics, I believe, will be to include mixed races. In my time there was talk of facing a man against a woman, but that did not happen. But with the rapid strisdes in tecnhol-ogy I’m talking about men and women competing against each other. People are demanding that we use some technology in broad-casting and connect the wires to the athletes.”
Boldon said the Doha Goals Forum is the best time of his life.
“I regret that they didn’t invite me last year. It is fantastic. Sport is all about leaving a legacy. Even people like Nelson Mandela, even though he was a prisoner, felt that sport was a tool to unite a country and people.” THE PENINSULA
Nada Zeidan from Qatar, presenter with Al Jazeera Sports, and the first female GCC rally driver and archer at two Asian Games speaking during one of the sessions at Doha Goals Forum yesterday.
Trinidad and Tobago’s Ato Boldon, former world champion sprinter and a former senator, talks during the Doha Goals Forum.
All to play for as Napoli face Arsenal in deciderDestiny in Dortmund’s hands for Marseille clash MILAN: Napoli striker Gonzalo Higuain is hoping to avoid the “horrible” situation of beating Arsenal but still failing to advance to the last 16 of the Champions League when the sides meet today.
A 3-1 defeat away to Borussia Dortmund a fortnight ago has left Rafael Benitez’s Napoli third in Group F on nine points, the same as the second-placed Bundesliga side and three adrift of leaders Arsenal.
It means Arsenal, Dortmund and Napoli still have everything to play for, and there will be as much attention paid to proceed-ings in Marseille as Napoli’s San Paolo stadium.
While Arsenal need only a draw to go through as leaders, Napoli need to beat the Gunners to have any chance of securing a runner-up spot which Dortmund could hold on to with victory in France.
If both Napoli and Dortmund win, all three teams would finish on 12 points and the standings would be decided by head-to-head clashes and goal difference.
If, however, Marseille upset the form book and beat Dortmund a draw would be enough for Benitez’s Serie A title challengers to secure the runner-up spot and follow Arsenal into the knockout phase.
Yet the stark reality is that Napoli could finish on 12 points and still finish third and out of the competition -- a scenario Argentinian striker Higuain can-not come to terms with.
“I’ve never seen a side elimi-nated from the competition with nine or 12 points - it’s a horrible situation to be in,” Higuain told Sky Sport 24.
“All we can do is focus on win-ning our match. If we win and still go out with 12 points, then there’s not much we can do.”
Napoli’s Macedonian forward Goran Pandev attends a press confer-ence on the eve of the UEFA Champions League Group F match against Arsenal at the San Paolo Stadium in Naples, yesterday.
Arsenal, who drew 1-1 with Everton at the weekend but still hold a five-point lead over Liverpool in the Premier League, head to the San Paolo as slight favourites.
Although a welcome state of affairs, Arsenal midfielder Mathieu Flamini admits the Gunners face a “busy” spell with trips to Manchester City and Chelsea all on the horizon.
“It is going to be a busy period for us and we just have to focus,” said Flamini, who rejoined Arsenal on a free transfer in the summer after being released by AC Milan.
“What would be good for us will be three victories, but we know it is not going to be easy because
we will be playing three big teams with a lot of quality.”
Right-back Carl Jenkinson looks set to again stand in for Bacary Sagna, who is sidelined by a hamstring problem, and the 21-year-old says it will be key for Arsenal to play to their potential.
“When we play to our peak, I think we can beat anyone so it is important that we go and do that on Wednesday,” said Jenkinson.
“It is going to be a tough game - they are going to be battling because they want to qualify just as much as us.
“But we will work hard and go out there with the confidence that we have from our recent results and hopefully come back with the result we want.” AFP
Who can qualify?Group E
Chelsea are already through, with the key match in the group between Schalke and
Basel.
The winners of that match in Gelsenkirchen will qualify with Jose Mourinho’s side. Basel
only need a point to progress and send Schalke to the Europa League.
Chelsea must beat already eliminated Steaua Bucharest in their last game to be
sure of finishing group winners.
Group F
Despite winning four out of their five games in the group so far, Arsenal are still just short of securing their place in the next stage. The Gunners will progress so long as they avoid a three-goal defeat against Napoli in their
final game. If Borussia Dortmund fail to beat Marseille even even a heavy loss cannot
eliminate the English side.
Napoli, currently level with Borussia Dortmund, need to finish on a greater points total than the German side to finish above
them as they trail 4-3 in a hypothetical aggregate score from their two group
meetings.
Group G
Atletico Madrid have already won Group G after victories in their first four games.
Zenit St Petersburg lead Porto in their head-to-head meetings, so the Portuguese
side’s hopes of progressing depend on them beating Atletico in their final game and Zenit failing to do the same against Austria
Vienna.
Group H
With Barcelona already qualified, AC Milan host Ajax in a winner-takes-all match.
Seven-time winners Milan only need a point to qualify and leave Ajax, four-time European
champions, in the Europa League.
Nadal comeback ‘unbelievable’, says Becker
Former tennis player Boris Becker of
Germany talks during the
official opening ceremony of the
Doha GOALS Forum in Doha yesterday. The forum aims to
create initiatives for global
progress through sports. It will end
today.
BY ARMSTRONG VAS
DOHA: Three-time Wimbledon champion Boris Becker says current world number one Rafael Nadal (pictured right) ‘unbelievable comeback’ from injury has amazed him.
The German who is here for the Doha goals said: “For some-body seriously injured for eight months, coming back and winning titles and reaching No. 1 again you cannot write a book like that. He’s an unbelievable character.”
Terming his style was differ-ent to that of Nadal he said the thing common between him and the Spaniard was both of them will never give up without a fight and the foot work.
“I rate him as the biggest com-petitor out there, with the biggest heart. On my day, I was like that, yes. My footwork wasn’t as good and clay court expertise wasn’t as good, but I was similar in that I was one of the biggest competitor, never giving up
Regarding Roger Federer’s chances of winning a Grand Slam in the near future he said it is going to be tough for the Swiss
great. “It is going to be difficult for Roger to win another Grand Slam as long as he keeps playing there’s a chance, but it’s going to be tough,” added Becker who is also an avid football fan.
Becker foresees the chance of Nadal overtaking Federer’s tally of 17 Grand Slams.
“You are judged by the number of tournaments you have won, how many major titles you have won. Nadal is four away from Roger and it’s possible he can sur-pass him (Federer),” said Becker.
His first venture to Doha was 20 years back.
He was one of the few big names to take part in the first –ever Qatar Open, just two years after the end of the Gulf War
Stefan Edberg and Goran Ivanisevic were some of the top players who were taking part along with Becker.
“I was ranked No.2 when I went I came here to Qatar,” who beat both the former Wimbledon champion to triumph.
“Nobody knew anything about Doha or Qatar back then. Nobody could see some 20 years ago how much it would grow. Nobody could imagine that it would be getting really serious in the world of eco-nomics, business and sports,” he added.
THE PENINSULA
Rio has no time to lose, says IOC boss LAUSANNE, SWTIZERLAND: Organisers of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics have no time to lose with the International Olympic Committee president flying into the country in the com-ing weeks to monitor progress, the IOC said yesterday.
“We have to realise that there is not a single moment to lose, that every effort has to be made every day to bring the construction of Olympic sites and infrastructure forward,” said IOC president Thomas Bach.
Rio Games organisers have been repeatedly urged to speed up progress as the country struggles to prepare for the world’s two biggest sports events - the 2014 soccer World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Bach said he was planning to visit Brazil before February and would meet Brazil President Dilma Rousseff to help improve work between the government and organisers.
“What will be essential and crucial for the success of Rio will be a seamless cooperation and coordination among different levels of government and the organising committee,” Bach told reporters.
“To ensure this I will most likely travel with the (IOC) delegation to Rio and Brasilia even before the Sochi Games (in February) to speak with the president of Brazil and speak with other levels of government and the organising committee in such a way to ensure this... because this is definitely needed to have successful Games and to meet the schedules.”
With the country already struggling to meet deadlines for next year’s World Cup, Games organisers have yet to finalise the overall budget less than three years before the event while also dropping behind in constructing the venues. Bach said the IOC’s Olympic Games executive director Gilbert Felli, who is retiring in August, will only deal with Rio progress after the Sochi Olympics and will continue to do so even after his retirement in an effort to speed up work.
“We have had a request on behalf of the Rio organising commit-tee to put Mr Felli at the disposal of the organising committee,” said Bach.
“After Sochi Mr Felli’s top priority will be close cooperation with the Rio organising committee and even after his retirement at the end of August he will continue to work closely with Rio 2016.” REUTERS
International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach (left) and outgoing IOC president Jacques Rogge cut the ribbon during the reopening of the newly renovated Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, yesterday.
