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Walkathon organised to observe World Kidney Day People taking part in the walkathon on Doha Corniche organised by Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) to mark the World Kidney Day, yesterday, under the theme of “Kidneys and Women’s Health”. Residents from all walks of life took part in various activities to raise awareness about kidney diseases and how to prevent them. The World Kidney Day was marked on March 8. PIC: SALIM MATRAMKOT / THE PENINSULA

Qatar condemns mosque explosion in Afghan capitalQNA

DOHA: The State of Qatar expressed strong condem-nation and denunciation over the explosion that targeted a mosque in the Afghani capital of Kabul and left a number of people killed and wounded.

In a statement issued yes-terday, the Foreign Ministry reiterated Qatar’s firm stance in rejection of violence and ter-rorism no matter what the motives and reasons were.

The statement stressed Qatar’s absolute rejection of targeting places of worship and intimidating innocents. It expressed Qatar’s condolences to the families of victims as well as the government and people of Afghanistan. It also expressed Qatar’s wishes of speedy recovery to the injured.

Fishing boat kidnapped by UAE, Qatar informs UNSCQNA

NEW YORK: The State of Qatar informed the United Nations Security Council and the UN Secretary-General that Qatari marine surveillance saw yesterday (January 19, 2018) a United Arab Emirate (UAE) naval ship unloading a boat into the Qatari economic zone.

The boat then obstructed and kidnapped a Qatari fishing boat that had seven fishermen and a captain on board, all of whom were Indian nationals.

The fishermen were forced

at gunpoint to enter the UAE economic zone.

This came in a message by the Permanent Representative of the State of Qatar to the United Nations H E Sheikha Alya Ahmed bin Saif Al Thani to the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Security Council President for March, Karel van Oosterom.

The message said that the incident constituted a kid-napping and is a dangerous precedent and a severe violation of international norms.

In the message, the State of

Qatar expressed condemnation and rejection of UAE’s actions, which was a violation of the international law and related international agreements.

The message also said that the UAE was fully responsible for the safety of the members of the Qatari fishing boat.

The message called on the international community to pressure the UAE into respecting the international agreements and to free the fishermen, as well as to return the boat and any other possessions they seized.

‘Fun run’ held to mark Women’s Month

DOHA: Underlining women’s crucial role in the society, Inter-national Women’s Month Fun Run was held yesterday morning at the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) Park which saw more than 300 participants, mostly Filipino women.

Every year, the Philippines celebrates the month of March as National Women’s Month with many events as part of the global observance of Interna-tional Women’s Day.

Here in Doha, the Filipino International Triathletes Qatar (FITQ) and the Association of Nursing Service Administrators of the Philippines Inc. Qatar Chapter (ANSAP-Qatar) jointly organised the Fun Run in coor-dination with the Philippine Embassy and the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) to mark this significant occasion.

“We want to emphasise the important role of women in the society through this event. We started this last year and we plan

on holding this every year,” Vice-Consul Kristine Bautista, who also heads the Cultural, Community and Public Infor-mation arm of the Embassy, told local media.

Philippine Ambassador to Qatar Alan L. Timbayan along with other embassy officials were among those who attended yesterday’s Fun Run.

“This is the first time that we have partnered with MIA Park and they have been very accom-modating so we hope to do this again next year,” Bautista added.

Jaynald Canaria, President of FITQ, was happy with the increase in the turnout com-pared to the inaugural edition of the event.

“There were around 310 who

registered online in addition to walk-in participants, which was more than last year. We are very happy that MIA said yes to us and we are using the MIA Park as venue this year,” Canaria said.

“We are looking forward to organising this as an annual event in celebration of Interna-tional Women’s Month,” he added.

Established in 2015, FITQ is a non-profit sport organisation in Qatar which is a chapter of FIT - a global organization with presence in the Philippines, GCC, and Australia among other countries.

“The main objective of FITQ is to encourage the whole com-munity to be engaged in healthy living through the sport of tria-thlon which involves three dis-ciplines including swimming, biking and running,” explained Canaria.

Since its founding, FITQ’s membership has grown to more than 100 active members and over 1,000 followers who also include other nationalities, he added.

Some of the participants of the International Women’s Month Fun Run pose for a photograph at Museum of Islamic Art Park, yesterday. PIC: RAYNALD C RIVERA/THE PENINSULA

RAYNALD C RIVERA THE PENINSULA

Al Jazeera wins UNWFPA’s ‘Awareness Award’THE PENINSULA

NEW YORK: Al Jazeera Media Network has been awarded the UN Women for Peace Association “Awareness Award” for its focus on critical women’s issues in the media network’s programmes and news output, including the role its documentaries have had in promoting under-standing and awareness of the plight of women and girls around the world. The award was given by the UNWFPA on International Women’s day, to coincide with a panel discussion at the UN head-quarters on role of media in empowering women.

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End to siege violations top priority: NHRC THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Qatar’s highest priority is to end human rights viola-tions committed by the block-ading countries, compensate the affectees and make those responsible for the violations accountable, Dr Ali bin Smaikh Al Marri, Chairman of Qatar National Human Rights Committee (QNHRC) said yesterday.

Al Marri said QNHRC is not calling on human rights officials and international organisations to take sides with any party of the Gulf crisis because Qatar has managed to overcome the siege politically and economi-cally; but rather it is calling for them to stand with the victims of the blockade considering the impact of the siege on the people and the human rights violations.

He said that all the citi-zens and residents of the Gulf countries have been affected and their rights have been vio-lated because of the measures taken by the siege countries.

This came during the meet-ings Dr Al Marri held with the Belgian Foreign Ministry and the European Union including Johan Verkammen, Director of the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) Department and Roberto Storce, Chairman of the Working Group on Mena at the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Colin Scicluna, Deputy Manag-ing Director, Mena Division, and Helen De Bock, Deputy Direc-tor, Human Rights Department in the European Union.

“There is no loser in this cri-sis except the people in the Gulf

region. People have been suf-fering for 10 months from the violations of their human rights and their hope is to regain their legitimate rights and return to their normal life as before the siege,” he said.

He said that the policy of indifference adopted by the siege countries with regard to the cri-sis and its impact on the lives of people confirms that human value has no place with their other objectives. “We believe that the highest priority is to end these violations and make those responsible for the vio-lations accountable,” he said.

Al Marri stressed at the same time that states and govern-ments can always provide the necessary alternatives in cases of siege and imposition of isola-tion and continued: but when it comes to violation of the rights of individuals such as reunifica-tion of families and maintaining the unity of the social fabric, the people always seek for support of international organisations and human rights institutions to protect their rights.

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All the citizens and residents of the Gulf countries have been affected and their rights have been violated because of the measures taken by the siege countries, said Dr Al Marri.

Qatar spent QR1.2bn on medicines last yearTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: The State of Qatar spent about QR 1.2 billions on medi-cines during the past year and Hamad Medical Corporation and the Primary Health Care alone take out 14,500 prescrip-tions per day, up to 40,000 medical items per day, while outpatient clinics alone have more than 12,000 prescriptions, said an official.

This came during the phar-maceutical sector conference, organised by Qatar University under the theme of “Medication Sector in Qatar: Hand in Hand Facing the Blockade”, which got under way yesterday.

The conference is being attended by more than 150 pharmacists, specialists from the pharmaceutical field, expertise from pharmaceutical industries and representatives from the health sector of the State of Qatar.

The conference covers three main themes represented

by medication management and accessibility to medication in Qatar, building pharmaceu-tical industry and innovation in Qatar and building human capacity in Qatar.

In his opening remarks, President of the Qatar Uni-versity Dr Hassan Rashid Al Derham stressed the impor-tance of the conference in raising awareness among members of the health sector on how to confront the siege and reduce its repercussions on this sector, especially with regard to the pharmaceutical aspect.

He expressed his confi-dence that this conference, with a number of prominent intel-lectual and academic figures involved, will be able to make constructive and effective rec-ommendations and proposals that would enable the health sector to overcome the current challenges.

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02 SATURDAY 10 MARCH 2018HOME

HMC announces lineup of visiting consultants THE PENINSULA

THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Hamad Medical Corpo-ration (HMC) will welcome a number of visiting consultants from various medical specialties during the months of March and April.

The visiting consultants are Dr. Michel Onimus, a French Orthopedic Surgery Specialist and faculty member at the Department of Pediatric Ortho-pedics, Franche Comté Uni-versity, Besançon, France, will visit from 8 to 12 March. Dr Onimus has regularly visited HMC since 1999;

Dr . Ahmad Hafez Mohammed Nassar, a laparo-scopic surgery specialist and Director of Laparoscopic Surgery Ltd. in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, will visit from 10 to 16 March;

Dr. Nicholas Barrett, a critical care medicine consultant at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London, England, UK, will visit from 12 to 14 March and again from 27 to 29 March; Dr. Gideon Hir-schfield, Senior Lecturer and Consultant Hepatologist with the University Hospitals Bir-mingham, Birmingham, UK, and a specialist in the field of gas-troenterology, including

autoimmune liver disease, will visit from 31 March to 6 April.

Dr. Claudio Vicini, a spe-cialist in otorhinolaryngology, audiology, and neurology and a Professor of Otolaryngology,

Head, and Neck Surgery who is based in Forlì Cesena, Italy, will visit from 15 to 19 April;

Dr. Filippo Montevecchi, a specialist with expertise in otolaryngology, head, and neck surgery who is based in Forlì Cesena, Italy, will visit from 15 to 19 April; and

Dr. Jeffrey Marks, a general surgery specialist and Program Director, General Surgery at UH Cleveland Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, will visit from 26 to 29 April.

Other experts are scheduled to visit throughout the year as part of HMC’s focus on hosting highly-respected physicians and surgeons from around the world. Hosting visiting interna-tional consultants who are experts in their field is in line with HMC’s commitment to pro-viding specialized medical services to the people of Qatar.

Members of the public wishing to book an appointment with one of the visiting con-sultants are advised to discuss this option with their physician. If your doctor agrees that an appointment with a visiting con-sultant is appropriate, they will provide a referral. For more information, and the full listing of visiting consultants, visit www.hamad.qa.

Dr Gideon Hirschfield, Senior Lecturer and Consultant Hepatologist with the University Hospitals Birmingham, in Birmingham, UK, will visit HMC from March 31 until April 6.

Attorney General meets Geneva State Council PresidentGENEVA: Attorney General Dr Ali bin Fetais Al Marri met yesterday with the President of the State Council of Geneva, Francois Longchamp. During the meeting, the two sides reviewed a number of issues of mutual interest.

Ministry of Economy and Commerce seizes 68 violationsDOHA: The Ministry of Economy and Commerce has seized 68 violations in February during intensive inspection campaigns to monitor the compliance of suppliers (shops) with their obli-gations under Law No. (8) of 2008 on consumer protection.

The campaigns came within the framework of the Ministry’s keenness to monitor the markets and commercial activities in the country with the aim of controlling prices and detecting violations in a bid to protect the rights of consumers.

The inspection campaigns resulted in spotting 68 different violations, ranging from failing to issue invoices in Arabic, failing to clearly include all information related to the displayed product, using false and deceptive information when describing, advertising or displaying a product, among others.

Fines issued by the Ministry to the violating outlets included closures and financial penalties ranging from QR5,000 to QR30,000, in accordance with the laws and regulations of the Consumer Protection Anti-Commercial Fraud Department.

Kahramaa to stop paper for power outage notificationTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Qatar General Elec-tricity & Water Corporation (Kahramaa) has announced that from April 1, 2018, the Corporation will no longer issue paper notices for power outage. The notification will be sent via SMS.

It comes within Kah-ramaa endeavor to provide high quality smart services as per the highest quality standards. With the new service, customers will receive SMS on their regis-tered mobiles in case of power outage, due to oper-ation or planned mainte-nance, including outage date and expected duration. No stickers will be placed.

Kahramaa invites all cus-tomers to register and update their data via Kahramaa website km.qa or mobile application to receive the power outage notification via sms. Paper stickers will be no longer issued as of April 1st 2018.

Customers can update their personal data via Kah-ramaa website km.qa, mobile application, or call center 991. Information update allows

better communication which customers where they can avail of range of services and receive Kahramaa updates and SMS for power outage, monthly electricity, and water consumption rate and bills, alert in case of exceeding the regular con-sumption, and more.

Power outage notifica-tions via sms comes within Kahramaa plans to stop dealing with paper in order to protect the environment as part of its commitment to achieve sustainable environ-mental development as per

Qatar National Vision 2030. It also reflects its endeavor to achieve its corporate objective to “Increase Social Advocacy and Environmental Compliance.”

Kahramaa services comes within the continual improvement to provide high quality smart services as per the highest quality standards and increase customer satisfaction. It highlights Kahramaa smart transformation plan. Kahramaa previously announced trans-formation into smart corpo-ration where all services are provided online.

Dr Ali bin Smaikh Al Marri, Chairman of Qatar National Human Rights Committee (QNHRC), with Johan Verkammen, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Belgium, in Brussels, yesterday.

End to siege violations top priority: NHRCCONTINUED FROM PAGE 1The Qatar National Human

Rights Committee (NHRC) Chairman added continuation of the crisis does not serve the people of the Gulf countries, in particular those who have been directly affected by the siege measures.

“We believe that they are in dire need of ending the crisis, especially those who have social and family ties with Qataris and residents.”

Dr Al Marri called for further action “whenever the leaders of the siege countries prolong the crisis and not end the arbitrary measures they have taken, the world must move fast to redress the victims and stand by them.

This is true to the record of the Belgian Foreign Ministry and the European Union, which is active in advocating, protecting, respecting and promoting human rights in the world.

Al Marri said that the siege

imposed on Qatar by the quartet since June 5 last year lacks inter-national legitimacy and is based on demands that violate con-ventions and charters of inter-national law, human rights and freedom of opinion and expression.

He added that these coun-tries have violated the rights of the citizens of the State of Qatar and the residents in an unac-ceptable manner of law and morality.

Guidelines for transfer of teachers for 2018-2019 issuedDOHA: The Department of Teachers Affairs (DTA) at the Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MEHE) issued guidelines for the transfer of teachers for the academic year 2018/2019 in order to meet teachers’ satisfaction and ensure stability.

Teachers willing to transfer from one school to another are advised to apply between March 11 to April 1, 2018, for academic 2018/2019 ,said DTA at the Ministry.

The applications will be answered by the end of June, said the Ministry noting that no appli-cations will be received after the deadline.

According to official circular

No (1/2018) issued Thursday, the Ministry said that DTA, in accordance to a decision of the competent authorities, has the right to transfer a teacher from one school to another in light of public interest.

The distribution of qualified teachers is aimed to meet the requirements of schools, fill vacant posts in all disciplines and provide schools with competent teachers to help them develop the educational process according to the standards and requirements set by the Ministry.

As required by law and public interest DTA shall have the right to transfer teachers according to the recommen-dation of competent authorities of any school whether he/she

applied for voluntary transfer or not.

In the event of a transfer decision, the school adminis-tration is obliged to implement the regulations and clear the teacher of any duties.

A s f o r m a n d a t o r y transfers, the aim is to redis-tribute teachers between schools according to the eval-uation or the study made to keep balance of competencies between schools in a way not

affecting their academic performance.

Mandatory transfer of teachers also takes place according to decisions and rec-ommendations of the committee of teachers’ affairs in schools or for reasons expressed by man-agement. This is done in coordi-nation with the departments of educational guidance and early education and the administration of teachers’ affairs.

With regard to optional

transfer of teachers, the Department said that the transfer request is considered in line with the availability of a vacancy in the school where the teacher is transferred, according to his/her specialization and subject taught, and the transition to the same teaching position as much as possible. There are five condi-tions given to the teacher in the optional transfer request and he/she stays at school if one of these is not met. These conditions include geographical location and school distance.

Teachers who are entitled to one of the following types of leave are not allowed to apply for transportation unless he resumes his work for a full semester or a teacher who is either on “accompanying leave,

education leave, or traveled aboard for treatment, unpaid leave and maternity leave”.

Teachers are allowed to apply for transfer only once every three years as a minimum and the newly hired employee cannot apply for transportation during the pro-bationary period.

The priority of transfer is for Qatari teachers in addition to years of actual service within the current school and the annual evaluation (the last three years and the priority is for the highest evaluation). The circular also explained the steps and proce-dures of teacher transfer and how to apply. The applications are submitted through the Min-istry of Education website teachers’ services.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1The panel consisted of leading figures including Joan

Lunden, award-winning journalist and author, Sherwin Bryce-Pease, President of the UN Correspondents Asso-ciation, Joanna Coles, Chief Content Officer of Hearst Mag-azines, Edie Falco, actress, Cicely Tyson, actress, and Cyma Zarghami, President of Viacom Inc.’s Nickelodeon Group.

Barbara Winston, President of UNWFPA, said, “In our inaugural year of the UNWFPA Awareness Award, it is my distinct pleasure to give the award to Al Jazeera for their extensive work on women’s and girls issues across the planet. The programming on Al Jazeera on women and girls issues is exemplary and we’re happy for the work that Al Jazeera has done and continues to do. Often going into dangerous war zones to get their stories, Al Jazeera journalists, many of whom are women themselves, risk their lives to bring to the world the stories that matter”.

Abdulla Al Najjar, Al Jazeera’s Executive Director of Global Brand and Communications, stated that Al Jazeera’s commitment to covering women’s issues is part of the core mission of the Network. “Throughout its history, Al Jazeera has been committed to covering issues that affect women from all backgrounds, faiths, and regions of the world. Women are so often victims of violence, abuse and persecution, and media needs to be courageous in cov-ering their stories. We are very grateful to the UNWFPA for this honor, and are committed to continuing telling women’s stories from around the globe.” Accepting the award for the network were Al Jazeera’s Washington cor-respondent Patty Culhane, and Malika Bilal, co-host and digital producer of Al Jazeera’s ‘The Stream’.

The United Nations has a series of events to mark Interna-tional Women’s day, focused on accelerating the 2030 targets to ensure equal access to education for boys and girls around the world, to end discrimination against women and to elim-inate all forms of violence and harmful practices against girls and women worldwide. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called gender equality and the empowerment of women “the greatest human rights challenge in our world”.

Al Jazeera wins UN’s ‘Awareness Award’

Teachers willing to transfer from one school to another are advised to apply between March 11 to April 1, 2018, for academic year 2018-2019, said the Department of Teachers Affairs (DTA) at the Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MEHE) at the Ministry.

03SATURDAY 10 MARCH 2018 HOME

Indonesian Embassy holds Islamic lecturesTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Indonesian Embassy in Qatar in collaboration with its community Asso-ciation in Qatar (Permiqa), Akhyar TV, Indonesian Muslim Society in Qatar (IMSQA) and Messaid and Wakrah Indo-nesian Community (MESRA) held Islamic lecture programmes in Qatar recently. Indonesian muslim scholar, Ustadz Adi Hidayat, Lc, M A performed three days of safari lecture in Doha, Al Khor, Messaid and Wakrah.

Indonesian Ambassador to Qatar, Air Marshal (Ret) Muhammad Basri Sidehabi urged the community in Qatar to take advantage of the lecture in order to strengthen their spiritual knowledge. The Envoy appreciates the role of Indonesian Diaspora Community under the aegis the Permiqa chaired by Edwin Kurniawan to promote socio cultural activities by arranging various lectures.

According to the Envoy, Permiqa

plays an important role for enhancing and strengthening the relationship between the muslim scholar (ulama) and National Leaders (Umaroh) for the bet-terment of the countries as well as in promoting cordial and brotherly relations between Indonesia and Qatar, particu-larly in socio-cultural activities through lecture series at a gathering held in Doha recently.

The participants of the lectures were

not only from Indonesian community but also from Asean member countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei who comes from all parts of Qatar. According to Edwin Kurniawan, by holding these lectures, he wish the par-ticipants would improve their Islamic knowledge and enhance their taqwa to the Almighty Allah and in the end to be better person.

According to Indonesia Embassy’s official Boy Dharmawan, as represent-atives of the Indonesian people and its government, the envoy keeps urging All Indonesia fellow citizens residing in Qatar are advised to respect the law and tradition of the host country, to contribute in further strengthening Indonesia - Qatar friendly relations.

Ustad Adi Hidayat who is also the

founder of Akhyar TV, always pointed out the importance of unity the among muslim community as well as the need of offering prayers for the leaders to the leaders for crucial role in governing the countries and also urged the need of keeping unity among the people. The lectures were also in collaboration with Indonesian television and live telecast through live streaming via internet.

Indonesian Ambassador to Qatar, Air Marshal (Ret) Muhammad Basri Sidehabi speaking during the lecture programme.

The Indonesian envoy appreciates the role of Indonesian Diaspora Community under the aegis the Permiqa chaired by Edwin Kurniawan to promote socio cultural activities by arranging various lectures.

Fourth edition of Qumra opensDOHA: The fourth edition of Qumra, the annual industry event by the Doha Film Institute (DFI), has opened in Qatar, bringing together more than 150 acclaimed filmmakers, industry professionals and experts to nurture 34 Qumra Projects by first and second-time film-makers from 25 countries that are in various stages of develop-ment.

The six-day event is held at Souq Waqif and the Museum of Islamic Art.

Fatma Al Remaihi, Chief Executive Officer of the DFI, said: “Qumra is founded upon a com-mitment to the mentorship and creative development of emerging filmmakers from across the world. As in earlier editions, the Qumra Projects by young filmmakers present com-pelling stories that need to be heard, especially at a time when

film and story-telling are used to distort reality and negatively impact the world. We believe that while films are a source of entertainment, they are also a powerful tool to build empathy and bring people together. That further underlines the need to support new voices in cinema, as storytelling is both an art-form and a growing responsi-bility. If we do not tell our sto-ries, others will, in a manner that suits them.”

She added: “The young film-makers at Qumra will benefit from the deep experience of our Qumra Masters and industry experts who guide them to take their projects to a global level. Over the past editions, Qumra has helped push the boundaries of first and second-time film-makers, who may otherwise do not have the opportunity to tell their bold tales with conviction and integrity, and have enabled them to gain international

acclaim for their films. We are confident that the Qumra talents this year too will emerge from this six-day event with stronger insights on the industry. This is our humble contribution to the world of cinema – to invest in new talents and to watch them grow.”

This year, Qumra is head-lined by six modern legends in cinema mentoring the young filmmakers in their role as Qumra Masters. They are Oscar® winning actor Tilda Swinton; Sandy Powell, Order of the British Empire (OBE), Oscar® winning British cos-tume designer; Oscar® nomi-nated director Bennett Miller; Venice Golden Lion winning Russian director and writer Andrey Zvyagintsev; Cannes Palme d’Or winning Thai film-maker and visual artist Api-chatpong Weerasethakul; and the only documentary director to win the Berlinale Golden

Bear, Italian director Gian-franco Rosi.

There is also an exciting showcase for the public, who can watch the Modern Masters screenings of films by Qumra Masters and the New Voices in Cinema screenings by young talents, including Qatari direc-tors. They can also attend the Masterclasses by the Qumra Masters and take part in Qumra Talks, a series of insightful dis-cussions led by acclaimed pho-tographer Brigitte Lacombe, renowned artist Simon Wilkinson, and new media expert Jon Kamen.

The fourth edition of Qumra started off on an inspiring note with the first Modern Masters screening on Thursday of Okja directed by Bong Joon-ho, fea-turing Tilda Swinton. Inter-acting with the audience after the screening, Swinton dis-cussed the making of the film and shared her views on the

compelling narratives that it puts forth – on human compas-sion, nature, corporate profit-eering and more.

“A true master in her craft, the diversity and range of Swin-ton’s work is inspirational to both audiences and filmmakers alike,” said Fatma Al Remaihi. “The par-ticipation of our Masters is inte-gral to Qumra. While very

different in their approach to making films, each are renowned for their innovative approach to their craft, and are an inspira-tion to us all.”

Yesterday, Swinton held the first Qumra Masterclass this year, moderated by Cameron Bailey, Artistic Director of the Toronto International Film Festival.

THE PENINSULA

First Modern Masters screening on Thursday of Okja directed by Bong Joon-ho, featured Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton (second left).

Bulgaria asks siege countries to solve issues through dialogueDOHA: The Ambassador of the State of Qatar to the Republic of Bulgaria Rashid bin Ali Al Khater, said that the government of Bulgaria asks Qatar and the siege countries to solve all issues between them through dialogue.

Regarding the issue of the crisis, he said during an inter-view with Qatar TV that “The government of Bulgaria asks all the countries to find solution which satisfies all countries

involved in the issue through dialogue”.

On the visit of Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to Bulgaria, he said that it aims to enhance relations in all sides, and it coincided with Bul-garia’s presidency of the Euro-pean Council.

“Qatar is keen to enhance its relations and cooperation with Bulgaria in all sides either in politics, education,

defence, tourism and invest-ment”, he said.

The Emir recently visited Bulgaria, met the President of Bulgaria Rumen Radev. and held bilateral meeting at the Presi-dential Palace. During the meeting, they discussed ways of strengthening bilateral relations and prospects for their devel-opment at various levels, espe-cially political, cultural, eco-nomic and investment.

Qatar spent QR1.2bn on medicines last year

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1The Qatar University Presi-

dent said that the country’s health sector is an important element in building society, adding that the State of Qatar, through its full awareness of the importance of this sector, is working to provide the best level of health care and provide health services to all its inhab-itants. He also pointed to a report by the Oxford Business Group which says that Qatar tops the Middle East countries in terms of the health sector expenditure relative to GDP.

Dr Al Derham touched on the national health strategy (2017-2022) of the Qatar National Vision (QNV) 2030, which states that healthy pop-ulation is critical to Qatar’s future success, stressing that the State of Qatar has succeeded, thanks to its capabilities, poten-tials, plans and strategies to overcome the challenges and difficulties arising from the cur-rent siege and to turn them into opportunities that contribute to capacity-building and sustain-able development.

He added that the sudden siege imposed on the State of Qatar contravenes all interna-tional legislation guaranteeing the patient’s right to health care and treatment. “The blockade was intended to affect the normal course of life in the state, but Qatar has been able to over-come this challenge.”

He stressed that the state worked tirelessly to support the

future plans and the promising QNV 2030, of which the health sector is part, as it is keen on this sector and considers it a priority.

Dean of College of Phar-macy Dr Mohammad Diab said the conference provides a plat-form for all stakeholders in the medical sector in Qatar to dis-cuss and exchange ideas, share the initiatives of the various institutions, and coordinate between them to ensure the security of this important sector and ensure its optimal progress.

For his part, chairman of the medicines committee at Hamad Medical Corporation Abdullatif Al Khal made a presentation on the performance of pharmaceu-tical sector in the State of Qatar, the repercussions of the siege on this sector and the successful efforts exerted by the State to ensure medicines security.

For his part, Dr. Abdul Latif Al Khalid, Chairman of the Med-ical Committee of Hamad Med-ical Corporation, said that the State of Qatar has succeeded in overcoming the impact of the siege on the pharmaceutical sector and it is working hard to strengthen this sector through carefully studied measures.

Dr Abdullatif Al Khall, told reporters on the sidelines of the conference that the State of Qatar has spent about Qr 1.2b on medicines during the past year, “which are used by Hamad Med-ical Corporation and Primary Health Care Corporation”, reflecting its keenness to

provide health services and medical care to citizens and the residents.

He pointed out that the National Health Strategy ensures the provision of high-quality health care free of charge for cit-izens and semi-free to residents in Qatar .. He said that govern-ment health institutions receive daily tens of thousands of patients who receive high-quality medical care and the best medicines available in the world.

Hamad Medical Corporation and the Primary Health Care alone take out 14,500 prescrip-tions per day, up to 40,000 medical items per day, while outpatient clinics alone have m o r e t h a n 1 2 , 0 0 0 prescriptions.

Dr Abdul Latif Al-Khall pointed to the repercussions of the siege on the pharmaceu-tical sector and the successful efforts of the state in con-fronting these repercussions and its plans to strengthen this vital sector.

He pointed out that there is a new strategy to ensure the provision of sufficient medical stocks for at least 12 months instead of 6 months before the blockade .. reassured citizens and residents and everyone living on this land that the pharmaceutical sector is strong and that all measures taken by the State succeeded in securing this sector “to provide Medi-cines at the same pace before the siege and even better. “

Qatar stresses commitment to enhancing women’s statusNEW YORK: The State of Qatar stressed yesterday that it is continuing its long history of enhancing the status of women, this time by estab-lishing the Group of Friends of the UN for Gender Parity.

This came during the speech of the Permanent Representative of Qatar to the United Nations Ambassador Sheikha Alya Ahmed bin Saif Al Thani in a ceremony held by Qatar’s permanent delega-tion to the UN along that of Colombia in celebration of Inter-national Women’s Day. the Ambassador said that the cele-bration serves as renewal of the call for gender parity in the inter-national organization, as well as enhancing international peace and development efforts.

The ceremony is the first of its kind in the history of the United Nations, it had pictures

of the first letter read by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1946 in the first meeting on women in the United Nations, entitled “Open Letter to the Women of the World”.

The ceremony was attended by current President of the United

Nations General Assembly for the 72nd session Miroslav Lajcak, Deputy Secretary-General. Amina Mohammed, in addition to perma-nent representatives at the UN and delegations participating in the UN meetings on women’s status.

Permanent Representative of Qatar to the United Nations, H E Sheikha Alya Ahmed bin Saif Al Thani speaking at the event in New York, yesterday.

04 SATURDAY 10 MARCH 2018MIDDLE EAST / AFRICA

AP

BENGHAZI, LIBYA: A military spokesman says a car bomb explosion has killed at least three secu-rity personnel at a check-point south of the north-eastern Libyan town of Ajdabiya. Faisal Ahbale said yesterday’s attack took place at the town’s southern entrance. No group immediately claimed responsibility but Ahbale said he believes it was carried out by IS. Ajdabiya is situated west of Benghazi and has been under the control of the Libyan National Army.

AFP

KANO, NIGERIA: Rural communities in Taraba state, eastern Nigeria, were yesterday on indef-inite lockdown as the authorities tried to contain mounting violence between cattle herders and farmers.

Police spokesman David Misal said a round-the-clock curfew has been imposed in affected areas “due to the escalation of violence between Fulani and Mambilla ethnic groups”. Nigeria has been gripped since the start of the year with an increase in clashes between the largely nomadic herders and farmers over land, water and grazing rights. At least 10 people were killed in several days of violence in Taraba last week into the weekend, while some 24 lost their lives in the central state of Benue in the last few days.Misal said there were reports that the vio-lence was spreading but gave no further details.

NEWS BYTES3 dead in car bomb explosion in Libya’s east: Official

Fresh air strikes risk aid delivery in GhoutaAFP

DOUMA: Fresh shelling of Eastern Ghouta endangered a vital aid delivery yesterday, nearly three weeks into a blis-tering Syrian regime offensive that has seized more than half of the rebel enclave.

More than 940 civilians have been killed since Russia-backed government forces launched an assault on the last opposition bastion near Damascus on Feb-ruary 18.

A charity called for desper-ately needed medical supplies to be allowed into the enclave, where exhausted doctors and nurses have been struggling to treat hundreds of wounded with very little equipment.

Early yesterday, the air strikes stopped briefly, with the area seeing its calmest night in more than a week, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observ-atory for Human Rights moni-toring group.

Taking advantage of the rel-ative quiet, 13 trucks loaded with 2,400 food parcels entered Eastern Ghouta, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.

But air strikes and shelling resumed near the enclave’s main town of Douma after the trucks from the joint ICRC, Syrian Arab Red Crescent and United Nations convoy drove in.

“Shelling in proximity of Douma, east Ghouta today, is putting the UN, ICRC and SARC convoy at risk, despite assur-ances of safety from parties including the Russian Federa-tion,” the UN humanitarian coor-dinator in Syria, Ali al Zaatari, said in a statement.

“The UN calls for a cessation of hostilities in the area and for calm throughout Syria so that aid can be safely delivered to people in need,” Zaatari said.

There were no medical sup-plies on board yesterday’s convoy, which was carrying food that aid workers were unable to distribute on Monday.

The enclave’s 400,000 inhabitants have been living under government siege since 2013, with food and medicines in very short supply even before the latest assault.

The renewed artillery fire came as representatives of Damascus and businessmen pressed negotiations on a solu-tion that would allow civilians or fighters to leave the enclave, the Observatory said.

Syrian state news agency SANA said dozens of civilians were expected to leave Eastern Ghouta yesterday.

The air and ground assault has left exhausted medical staff struggling to cope with hundreds of wounded civilians pouring in to hospitals covered in blood and dust.

Doctors and nurses in the beleaguered enclave have run out of several life-saving items and a massive medical re-supply is critically urgent, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said.

“The need for a massive medical re-supply, without life-saving items being removed, is increasingly urgent with each passing hour,” MSF said in a statement.

The Paris-based charity urged the warring parties to pause the bombing and shelling to allow for the evacuation of critically sick or wounded patients.

More than a week ago, the United Nations said those already numbered more than 700.

MSF said doctors inside the

enclave were exhausted. “Daily, we hear of an increasing sense of hopelessness and despair, as our medical colleagues reach the limits of what a person can be expected to do,” MSF director general Meinie Nicolai said.

The charity said 15 of the 20 medical facilities it supports in Eastern Ghouta have been hit by air strikes or shelling.

Regime forces have advanced rapidly through farm-land in the enclave since last week, according to the Observ-atory, taking control of more than half of the territory from the armed opposition.

They are now seeking to cut off Douma from rebel-held ter-ritory further south, Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.

On Monday, 46 trucks entered the area in the first aid provision since the new offen-sive against the enclave began on February 18 - but they had to cut their deliveries short and leave due to heavy bombardment.

Nearly half of the food aid could not be delivered while the UN said Syrian authorities removed some medical and health supplies from the trucks.

More than 340,000 people

have been killed since Syria’s war started in 2011 with a brutal crackdown on anti-government protests.

Numerous rounds of UN-backed peace talks have failed to bring an end to the conflict, and a nationwide ceasefire called for by the UN Security Council last month has not been implemented.

The council is to meet on Monday to hear a report from UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and try to plod on with a bid to turn the ceasefire voted in New York into a reality on the ground.

Erdogan: Turkey can enter Afrin centre ‘at any moment’AFP

ANKARA: President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday said Turkish forces and allied rebels could enter the centre of the Kurdish-held Syrian town of Afrin “at any moment”, a day after the capture of another key strategic town.

“Now our objective is Afrin... As of now, we have Afrin encir-cled. We can enter Afrin at any moment, God willing,” Erdogan told his ruling party in Ankara, a

day after Turkish forces took control of the town of Jandairis west of Afrin.

“The operations in Afrin will continue until this swamp of terror is dried,” he warned.

Ankara on January 20 launched operation “Olive Branch” in the Afrin region of northern Syria against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia who control the area but Turkey regards as a terror group.

Despite encountering fierce

resistance - which has seen 42 Turkish troops lose their lives - the Turkish military and its Syrian allies appear to have gained new momentum in the last weeks.

The capture of Jandairis - one of the key centres in the region other than Afrin itself - was seen by analysts as giving Ankara a clear path towards its main target.

But the operation has ratch-eted up tensions with the United States, pitting Turkey’s army

against a militia force allied with its fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) member in the battle against Islamic State (IS) militants.

Erdogan also reaffirmed his previous vows that Turkey would not limit itself to clearing the Afrin region of the YPG, saying it wanted to carry on to the town of Manbij to the east and then to the Iraqi border.

“Today we are in Afrin and tomorrow we will be in Manbij. And the next day we will ensure

that terrorists are cleared east of the Euphrates River up to the Iraqi border,” he said.

Manbij is regarded as a par-ticularly delicate issue as the United States - unlike in Afrin - has a presence there, raising the prospect of a direct clash with Turkey.

On a visit to Ankara last month, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that Turkey and the US had to solve the tensions surrounding Manbij as a “priority”.

Kenya’s president, opposition leader pledge to unify countryREUTERS

NAIROBI: Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga promised yesterday to unite the country after elections last year in which around 100 people were killed mainly in clashes between opposition supporters and secu-rity forces.

The surprise announcement is likely to lower political ten-sion in a country that is East Africa’s richest economy and a

key regional hub for security, diplomacy and trade.

In a live television address with Kenyatta on the steps of the president’s office, Odinga said the time had come to resolve their differences. It was the first joint public appearance of its kind by the two politicians since 2013.

Kenyatta said: “We have a responsibility as leaders to find solutions. Elections come and go but Kenya remains.” They said in a statement they have

agreed to establish a new office staffed by advisers to tackle the divisions ranging from opposi-tion complaints over the elec-tion to tensions between ethnic groups and corruption.

Kenyatta was sworn in last November for a second term after winning a repeat presiden-tial election last October 26 that Odinga boycotted.

The Supreme Court earlier nullified an August presidential poll and order the October re-run.

Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta (left) and NASA coalition opposition leader, Raila Odinga address a joint news conference in Nairobi, yesterday.

Activist abduction ‘dark shadow’ on Zimbabwe: Western envoysAFP

HARARE: Dozens of Zimba-bweans protested yesterday as Harare-based Western diplo-mats called on the new govern-ment to investigate the abduc-tion three years ago of a rights activist and firebrand critic of ex-ruler Robert Mugabe. Itai Dzamara, who was also a jour-nalist, was kidnapped by five men as he left a barbershop near his home in Harare in 2015. He has not been seen since then.

In a statement, European Union and top US diplomats said on the anniversary of Dza-mara’s abduction: “The new administration to ensure that human rights violations are tackled decisively and trans-parently, to shed light on Dza-mara’s fate and to serve justice. His disappearance remains a dark shadow on the new horizon for Zimbabwe.”

He had led anti-govern-ment protests in a public park in the capital, overlooking par-liament, vowing to not stop until Mugabe stepped down.

During one of the protests he was beaten by ruling ZANU-PF party members and left bleeding on a pavement. Dozens of activists gathered yesterday in the same park where Dzamara used to stage he protests, demanding his return, “dead or alive”.

“We are drawing a line in the sand that never again shall we have abductions,” Dzamara’s young brother Patson said. “Itai’s abduction was overseen by the ZANU-PF government... by the military intelligence,” he claimed. “Enough is enough on abduc-tions. Itai must be the last person to be abducted,” he said vowing to step up pressure on the new government of Emmerson Mnangagwa.

Clad in t-shirts emblazoned with portraits of the missing Dza-mara and quotes from his speeches, the activists carried placards written #BringBackItai. A protestor and fellow activist Dirk Frey, described his compa-triot as brave and courageous. “He gave us the courage even when we were beaten, arrested and tortured. He wanted a free, fair and just Zimbabwe,” Frey said. “We and our children deserve a just Zimbabwe. It will not be handed on a silver platter, we must fight for it.”

The government has denied involvement in Dzamara’s dis-appearance and has said it had no information on his fate. The global rights watchdog Amnesty International called on authori-ties in Zimbabwe to scale up the search for Dzamara. “People don’t just vanish into thin air. Someone out there knows what happened to Itai,” said Deprose Muchena, regional director for Amnesty in Southern Africa.

A charity called for desperately needed medical supplies to be allowed into the enclave, where exhausted doctors and nurses have been struggling to treat hundreds of wounded with very little equipment.

A Syrian man carries a sack on his shoulder while walking past vehicles of the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delivering humanitarian aid in the town of Douma in the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta, yesterday.

Curfew in Nigeria over herder-farmers violence

05SATURDAY 10 MARCH 2018 ASIA

Riding through wallAn Indian army soldier member of the ‘Tornadoes’ motorcycle display team rides through a wall of bricks during a combined display at an officer training academy in Chennai, yesterday.

SC allows passive euthanasia for terminally illIANS

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court yesterday said a person has the “right to die with dignity” and can make an advance “living will” authorising the withdrawal of life support system if in medical view he or she has reached an irreversible stage of terminal illness.

In the historic decision, the top court said right to lead a healthy life also includes “leaving the world in a peaceful and dig-nified manner” and an adult “has right to refuse medical treatment including withdrawal from life saving devices”.

While allowing adults “who are of a sound and healthy state of mind” to make the advance directive or living will, a five-judge Constitution Bench,

headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, however, attached strict conditions and framed guidelines to be followed for executing

these. A living will is a written document by way of which a patient can give instructions that his or her life should not be pro-longed with an artificial support system when he or she has reached a irreversible stage of terminal illness.

Passive euthanasia is a con-dition where there is withdrawal of medical treatment with the deliberate intention to hasten the death of a terminally-ill patient.

The bench, also including judges A.K. Sikri, A.M. Khanwilkar, D.Y. Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan, laid down guidelines on who would exe-cute the will and how the nod for passive euthanasia would be granted by the medical board.

“To deprive an individual of dignity towards the end of life is to deprive the individual of a

meaningful existence,” said Jus-tice Chandrachud.

He said the reason which has impelled the court to recognise passive euthanasia and advance directives is that both bear a close association to the human urge to “live with dignity”.

“The right to a dignified existence, the liberty to make decisions and choices and the autonomy of the individual are central to the quest to live a meaningful life. Liberty, dignity and autonomy are essential to the pursuit of happiness and to find meaning in human exist-ence.” The court said the life sup-port can be removed only after the statutory medical board declares the patient to be incurable.

The bench said its guidelines and directives should remain in

force till Parliament makes leg-islation on this issue.

The bench clearly specified that for executing the living will, the person has to be in a position to communicate, relate and com-prehend the purpose and con-sequences of executing the document.

It “must be voluntarily exe-cuted” and “without any coer-cion or inducement or compul-sion and after having full knowledge or information”.

The living will shall be “clearly stating as to when med-ical treatment may be with-drawn” or no specific medical treatment shall be given which will only have the effect of delaying the process of death that may otherwise cause him or her pain, anguish and suffering and further put him or her in a

state of indignity, said the bench.The bench said it should also

mention that the “executor may revoke the instructions or authority at any time”.

The living will should be signed by the executor in the presence of two attesting wit-nesses, preferably independent, and countersigned by the juris-dictional Judicial Magistrate of First Class (JMFC) so designated by the concerned District Judge.

Quoting the philosophy of Swamy Vivekananda on life and death, Justice Misra said Vivekananda expects one to understand that life is the lamp that is constantly burning out and suggests that if one wants to have life, one has to die every moment for it. The judges pronounced four separate but concurring judgements.

While allowing adults “who are of a sound and healthy state of mind” to make the advance directive or living will, a five-judge Constitution Bench, headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, however, attached strict conditions and framed guidelines to be followed for executing these.

IANS

NEW DELHI: The CISF plans to deploy an aircraft-centric model of security at small airports across the country, CISF Additional Director General M.A. Ganpathy said yesterday.

Ganpathy, who is incharge of airport security, said the Cen-tral Industrial Security Force (CISF) would take charge of security of small airports for a short period as per the new model.

“The CISF will take over the security aspect at small airports for around two hours prior to plane arrival. During this period, its officials will frisk passengers and perform other security procedures.”

The CISF team deputed for security at such airports would be relieved of duty after the plane departure, said Ganpathy, adding that further security of these airports would be handed over to police or other security agencies. According to him, the new model will help reduce the number of CISF personnel assigned security duty by over 3,000, and small airport oper-ators will not incur huge expenses on security apparatuses.

The CISF officer said the

proposal on the new security model was suggested to the Ministry of Civil Aviation, in keeping with the government’s low-cost flying scheme “Udan” for regional connectivity.

The 1.5-lakh strong para-military force, which is man-dated to guards 59 civil airports across the country, is said to be struggling to get cleared dues of over Rs 750 crore in security fee pending with various air-port operators, of which about Rs 737 crore is pending with DIAL (Delhi International Air-port Limited) that operates the Indira Gandhi International Air-port here.

“On the instructions of the Civil Aviation Ministry, the CISF will look into the records of DIAL to resolve the long-pending issue. While the total dues from all the airports has touched nearly Rs 750 crore, the amount pending against DIAL is Rs 737 crore,” Ganpathy said. On the CISF’s manpower issues at the airports, Ganpathy said the strength augmentation proposal was pending in the Home Ministry.“Right now, yes, it (schedule of personnel) is tight, the shifts have to be extended and it is not an ideal situation. But despite that, we are managing it very well,” the officer said.

Aircraft-centric security model at small airports

IANS

New DELHI: The Union Ministry of Finance yesterday said more than 870 million bank accounts have been linked with the 12-digit unique identity number Aadhaar in the country till early March. The deadline for linking Aadhaar to bank accounts is March 31.

“As on March 2, more than 877.9 million current and sav-ings accounts have been linked with Aadhaar,” said Minister of

State Shiv Pratap Shukla in a written reply in the Lok Sabha. More than 166.5 million income-tax permanent account numbers (PAN) have also been linked with Aadhaar till March 5, he said.

On security features related to Aadhaar-linked financial transactions, Shukla said Aad-haar-linked financial transac-tions pass through multi-entity check-points, such as bank (AUA - authentication user agency), NPCI (ASA - authentication service agency) and UIDAI

(authentication/ biometric data custodian).

“The connectivity between bank, NPCI and UIDAI is through secured encrypted private net-work,” he added.

On measures taken by the government to ensure that Aad-haar data is not leaked from organisations handling it, the Minister said sharing of infor-mation or seeding of Aadhaar information with the authorised agencies is governed by the Aad-haar Act.

870m bank accounts linked with Aadhaar

Buddhist monks denounce anti-Muslim riots in Sri LankaAFP

COLOMBO: Hundreds of Buddhist monks and activists staged a demonstration in the Sri Lankan capital yesterday to condemn anti-Muslim riots that have killed three people and forced the government to declare a nationwide state of emergency.

The National Bhikku Front said they organised the silent protest against what they called “communal clashes destroying national unity.” Moderate Buddhist leaders have also denounced the riots concentrated in the central city of Kandy, 115 kil-ometres (72 miles) east of the capital Colombo.

Several Sri Lankan users also posted photos on Twitter of Buddhist monks visiting mosques during Friday prayers to express solidarity.

Sinhalese and Muslim civil society groups had staged a joint protest in Colombo Thursday calling for tough action against the per-petrators of the riots.

Violence erupted on Monday after a Sinhalese man died of injuries suffered during an attack last week by four Muslim men. Tensions escalated when the body of a Muslim man was found in a burnt out building in the Kandy district on Tuesday.

China rejects Sweden’s ‘groundless’ accusations over detained publisherAFP

BEIJING: China yesterday rejected “groundless” accusations by Sweden over detained book publisher Gui Minhai after Stock-holm demanded medical access to the Swedish citizen.

Chinese-born Gui was arrested on a train to Beijing in January while travelling with two Swedish diplomats - the second time he has vanished into Chinese custody in murky circumstances.

Sweden has called for his release and on Thursday Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom denounced Beijing’s refusal to allow a Swedish doctor to visit the Hong Kong-based bookseller.

“China’s action is unacceptable and violates previous promises that our citizens would have the oppor-tunity to consult a Swedish doctor,” said Wallstrom. In response, China said Gui was in a “good physical state” and that authorities had already arranged a check-up for Gui. “He expressed that at present he doesn’t wish to see a Swedish

doctor,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters.

“We’ve already expressed his wishes to the Swedish side, and hope that the Swedish side can respect them. As for the groundless accusations from the Swedish side, the Chinese side will not accept that,” he added.

Gui was seized while travelling to Beijing from the eastern city of Ningbo on the way to see a Swedish specialist over fears he had the neu-rological disease ALS.

Gui - one of five Hong Kong-based booksellers known for pub-lishing gossipy titles about Chinese political leaders - first disappeared in 2015 and resurfaced in mainland China. No public explanation for this arrest has been given by Chi-nese authorities.

He was on holiday in Thailand at the time of his first arrest and eventually surfaced at an undis-closed location in China, confessing to involvement in a fatal traffic accident and smuggling illegal books into the mainland.

Chinese hostesses throw their hats for a picture during the second plenary session of the first session of the 13th National People’s Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, yesterday.

Hats off to NPC

Myanmar probes shallow graveREUTERS

YANGON: Myanmar author-ities yesterday visited a suspected shallow grave as part of investigation in the country’s north that residents said contained the bodies of two ethnic minority men who

were detained by soldiers in January, a police officer and a community leader said. The missing men had been living in camps for people displaced by conflict. More than 100,000 people have been forced from their homes since a ceasefire between Myan-

mar’s armed forces and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) broke down in 2011.

The conflict is separate to the Rohingya crisis in the west of the country, but security forces are similarly accused of committing frequent abuses against civilians.

IANS

NEW DELHI: India yesterday welcomed North Korea’s offer to hold talks with the US and Washington’s positive response in this regard and said it hoped that will pave the way for lasting peace and reconciliation in the Korean peninsula.

“We have noted the com-ments of the senior official of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) regarding DPRK’s (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or North Korea) proposal to hold talks with the US and the positive response from the US,” External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar told the media here.

“We welcome these developments. India supports all efforts to bring about peace and stability in the Korean peninsula through dialogue and diplomacy,” Kumar said.

US President Donald Trump on Thursday agreed to meet with Kim Jong-un.

India welcomes North Korea’s talks with US

06 SATURDAY 10 MARCH 2018ASIA

Height of frustration

Pakistan calls for talks between Afghan govt, TalibanINTERNEWS

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has called on both Afghan parties - the government and the Taliban - to seize fresh opportunity for peace by entering into talks aimed at ending the prolonged conflict to usher in durable peace in Afghanistan.

Speaking in the UN Security Council yesterday, Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi said that amid deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, President Ashraf Ghani had made a dignified pro-posal for talks without precon-ditions with the Taliban, offering an opportunity to advance a credible peace process.

The international commu-nity too had endorsed the goal of a negotiated settlement through an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned process.

Pakistan would play its part in fostering such a dignified process, she said, renewing the call for the Taliban to renounce violence and join the peace talks.

But the Pakistani envoy also cautioned against the “complex and delicate” task ahead in the war-torn country.

“Seizing this opportunity requires an understanding that the simultaneous resort to more kinetic actions “the escalation of military force to ‘shape the battlefield’ “ will evoke an

escalation of attacks by the insurgents and erode rather than advance the prospect of initiating the envisaged political process,” Ambassador Lodhi said, adding that both the Afghan government and its Coa-lition allies as well as the Tal-iban should have now learnt that neither can impose a military victory on the other.

“The renewed escalation of force will impose further suf-fering on Afghanistan’s innocent civilian population,” she said.

Friday’s meeting on the sit-uation in Afghanistan, organized by the Netherlands, the Council President this month, was held on International Women’s Day.

In her remarks, the Paki-stani envoy said, while the peace talks would be Afghan-led and Afghan owned, the other

parties involved, including the US, will need to be engaged in the negotiating process.

Also, she said the interna-tional community must oppose any efforts by “some regional powers and Afghan parties” to derail the peace process out-lined by President Ashraf.

The Pakistani envoy voiced serious concern about the rapid rise of the presence of Da’esh in Afghanistan, citing recent report that the Afghan Government controls only 18 per cent of the country’s districts, and has influ-ence in an additional 38 per cent, while the rest was ungoverned.

“The elimination of Da’esh and its affiliates must be accorded a high priority in the endeavor to achieve durable peace in the region,” she said, pointing to their presence in ungoverned and contested spaces in Afghanistan’s North and the East. The Pakistani envoy also called on the Afghan government and its interna-tional partners to break the nexus between drug production and terrorism.

On its part, Ambassador Lodhi said Pakistan has success-fully turned the tide against ter-rorism by conducting the largest and most sustained anti-ter-rorism campaign anywhere in the world with the deployment of over 200,000 troops.

Ghulam Khan crossing between Pakistan, Afghanistan reopensANATOLIA

KARACHI: Pakistan yesterday reopened a key trade route with neighbouring Afghanistan after a gap of three years - a move that was warmly welcomed by the country’s business commu-nity.

Ghulam Khan Crossing - one of the 18 border crossings between the two countries that connects Pakistan’s north-western North Waziristan tribal region with northeastern Khost province of Afghanistan - was closed in 2014 following mili-tary operations against the Tal-iban and affiliated armed groups in the region.

In a statement, the political administration of North Waziristan tribal agency said the first trade convoy had been dispatched to Afghanistan after a lapse of three years.

“Restoration of trade activ-ities via Ghulam Khan border is not only in the national interest but it will open new economic opportunities for the people of North Waziristan,” the statement said. “This is also a message of peace and friend-ship between the two brotherly countries.” The move came after a nearly 50 percent reported decrease -- from $2.7 billion to $1.4 billion - in bilat-eral trade between the two countries in the last two years. Authorities said the road

between Miranshah -- the cap-ital of North Waziristan - and Ghulam Khan town, which sits near Afghanistan border, has also been reopened for trans-portation of trade goods between the two countries.

North Waziristan is one of Pakistan’s seven semi-auton-omous tribal regions, which had been a stronghold of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a consortium of sev-eral militant groups in the country before the launch of a full-scale military onslaught in 2014. Pakistan army claims that 95 percent of the area has been cleared of militants.

Escalating diplomatic ten-sions and frequent border clo-sures have had a chilling effect on Pakistan-Afghanistan trade in recent years.

The volume of trade between landlocked Afghani-stan and its southern neighbor have been mostly affected by terrorist attacks in Pakistan that Islamabad blames on Afghanistan-based militants, which in turn led to the closure of border crossings. North-western Torkham, and south-western Chaman, two key bor-ders which respectively connect northeastern and southern Afghanistan, had remained closed for several months at different times since 2014.

Pakistani rescuers (right) engage with a man (left), who climbed a high tension pylon to commit suicide attempt as a protest for not receiving justice over the murder of his father, in Islamabad yesterday. According to police the 22-year-old Hafiz Rizwan Younas wanted to commit suicide as he had given up on his family’s efforts to seek justice over his father’s murder in 2006.

AP

PESHAWAR: Pakistani police say they have arrested a key suspect sought for inciting the lynching of a university student who was falsely accused of blas-phemy in the country’s north-west.

District Police Chief Saeed Khan said yesterday that the

man, identified as Arif Khan, had been in hiding since April 2016, after a mob killed 23-year-old Mohammad Mashal Khan at his university campus in the town of Mardan over unfounded rumors that he shared blasphe-mous content on social media.

The arrest came after an appellate court suspended three-year prison terms handed

down last month to 25 suspects over the student’s slaying.

In February, an anti-ter-rorism court sentenced one man to death and five others to life imprisonment. Those sentences are still unchanged.

According to official infor-mation, blasphemy against Islam is punishable by death in Pakistan.

Key suspect in student’s lynching held

Afghan security personnels stand guard near the site where a suicide attacker blew himself up in a Shia area of Kabul, yesterday.

Nine dead in Kabul suicide bomb attack; 16 dead in Taliban attackAP

KABUL: An Islamic State suicide bomber targeted Afghanistan’s ethnic Hazaras yesterday, blowing himself up at a police checkpoint near a gathering of the minority Shiites in western Kabul, killing nine people and wounding 18, officials said.

In northern Afghanistan, the Taliban assaulted an army out-post overnight in an hours-long firefight, and ambushed policemen sent to help the troops, killing six soldiers and

10 members of the local police.The attacks underscore the

difficulties President Ashraf Ghani’s government is facing as it battles a revamped Taliban insurgency and struggles to rein in the Islamic State group, whose affiliate in Afghanistan has grown stronger since it emerged in 2014.

Kabul has recently seen a spate of large-scale militant attacks by the Taliban and also IS. In late January, a Taliban attacker drove an ambulance filled with explosives into the heart of the city, killing at least

103 people and wounding as many as 235. In yesterday’s attack, Basir Mujahid, spokesman for the Kabul police chief, said the bomber was on foot and was trying to make his way to a compound where the Hazaras had gathered to com-memorate the 1995 death of their leader, Abdul Ali Mazari, who was killed by the Taliban. The bomber came as close to the gathering as he could and detonated his explosives at the checkpoint outside, the spokesman said. One policeman was among the dead.

UN rights chief: Duterte should undergo checksAP

GENEVA: The United Nations’ human rights chief suggested yesterday that Philippine Pres-ident Rodrigo Duterte “needs to submit himself to some sort of psychiatric evaluation” over his “unacceptable” remarks about some top human rights defenders.

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein demanded that the Human Rights Council, which counts the

Philippines among its 47 member countries, “must take a strong position” on the issue, and insisted “these attacks cannot go unanswered.”

The rights chief referred to a court petition filed last month by Duterte’s government accusing the UN rapporteur on indigenous peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, and others of being members of a key com-munist rebel group.Human Rights Watch says the

allegations, which Tauli-Corpuz has denied, have put her and some 600 other people in danger.

The Filipino leader also has repeatedly insulted the U.N. expert on extrajudicial killings, Agnes Callamard, lashing out at her for raising alarm over the thousands of suspects killed under his anti-drug crackdown. He has also taken aim at Inter-national Criminal Court prose-cutor Fatou Bensouda, who

announced last month that she was opening a preliminary examination into alleged extra-judicial drug killings.

In a speech Wednesday, Duterte insulted the interna-tional court’s justices as “dumb” and “evil,” and said Callamard w a s “ t h i n ” a n d “undernourished.”

Philippine Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano blasted Zeid’s remarks as “irresponsible and disrespectful” and said the

“unmeasured outburst” demeaned the Philippine pres-ident and should not be repeated. He said Tauli-Corpuz and the others were named in the court petition “because of their membership in or associ-ation with the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army as reported over the years” by the Philippine police and mil-itary. If they are innocent, it is a chance to prove their innocence in court, he added.

Taliban chief’s son dead in drone strikeAP

PAKISTAN: The spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban says the son of their chief, Mullah Fazlullah, was among 21 “holy warriors” killed this week when missiles fired by a US drone struck a seminary in Afghanistan.

Mohammad Khurasani, a spokesman for the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, in a state-ment yesterday identified Fazlullah’s son only as Abdullah. His confirmation came a day after officials said the drone targeted a com-pound, and Khurasani said those killed in the strike were seminary students.

Khurasani had earlier said 21 students were killed in Wednesday’s drone strike on the seminary near the Pakistan’s Bajur tribal region, based on a tip from Pakistani intelligence. Khurasani warned that they will launch retaliatory attacks soon.

Fazlullah is the leader of Pakistani Taliban and is believed to be hiding in Afghanistan.

IS suspect won’t be freed: Manila AP

MANILA: A Philippine police official says an alleged former commander of the IS group in Syria who was arrested recently in Manila will not be freed even after a prosecutor dropped criminal complaints of illegal possession of explo-sives against him.

Metropolitan Manila police director Oscar Albay-alde said yesterday that Fehmi Lassoued, who had a fake Tunisian passport when arrested in his Manila apart-ment last month, was too dangerous to be let loose and would continue to be detained for violating immi-gration laws.

Ambassador Lodhi said Pakistan has successfully turned the tide against terrorism by conducting the largest and most sustained anti-terrorism campaign anywhere in the world with the deployment of over 200,000 troops.

07SATURDAY 10 MARCH 2018 ASIA

‘Illuminated wonderland’

World leaders welcome Trump-Kim talks REUTERS

SEOUL: World leaders welcomed prospects for a possible thaw in the long standoff over North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme yesterday after US President Donald Trump said he was prepared to hold an unprecedented meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Trump and Kim prompted jitters around the world last year as they exchanged bellicose insults over the North’s attempts to develop a nuclear weapon capable of hitting the United States, which it has pursued in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

But tension eased around last month’s Winter Olympics in South Korea, laying the ground-work for what would be the first meeting between leaders from North Korea and the United States, and the biggest foreign policy gamble for Trump since he took office in January last year.

Xi said he “hopes the United States and North Korea start con-tacts and dialogue as soon as possible and strive to reach pos-itive results,” the report said.

China is North Korea’s

largest trading partner and sole major ally, though overall trade has fallen in recent months as U.N. economic sanctions take effect. Trump has frequently tried to enlist Xi’s help to rein in Pyongyang.

The head of South orea’s National Security Office, Chung Eui-yong, speaking in Wash-ington on Thursday after briefing Trump about a meeting South Korean officials held with Kim this week, said Trump had agreed to meet the North Korean leader by May in response to Kim’s invitation.

Kim had “committed to denuclearization” and to sus-pending nuclear and missile tests, Chung said.

The talks will take some weeks to arrange, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said. A venue was not announced but neutral Switzerland, which often hosts summits, said it was ready to facilitate the meeting.

A meeting between Trump and Kim would be a major turn-around after a year in which North Korea has carried out a battery of missile tests that Washington sees as provocative and after a barrage of insults between the two leaders.

U.S.-based experts say North

Korea appeared to show last November that it has succeeded in developing a missile capable of delivering a nuclear weapon anywhere in the United States.

Trump has derided Kim as a “maniac,” referred to him as “little rocket man” and threat-ened in a speech last year to “totally destroy” North Korea, a country of 26 million people, if it attacked the United States or one of its allies.

Kim responded by calling Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.”

Russia, which has joined years of on-again, off-again six-party talks, along with the United States, the two Koreas and Japan, aimed at ending the standoff, welcomed the new, positive signals.

The Japanese government, however, remained cautious.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Trump, in a call on Thursday, promised to con-tinue to enforce sanctions until Pyongyang took “tangible steps ... toward denuclearization,” the White House said in a statement.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said news of the possible meeting gave reasons to be hopeful about Korea.

“Regarding North and South Korea and also the possibility of a meeting with the president of the United States, you can see that a cohesive international position, including sanctions, can lead to glimmers of hope,” she said.

A leading Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives said the Republican president would need help from others in the U.S. government if he is to go head-to-head with Kim over such a complex issue as nuclear weapons and geostrategy.

South Korean President Moon Jae-In, who led the pur-suit of detente with North Korea during his country’s hosting of the Winter Olympics, said the summit would set a course for denuclearization, according to a presidential spokesman.

People watch a television news report showing pictures of US President Donald Trump (left) and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at a railway station in Seoul, yesterday.

US vows no let-up of pressure on N Korea AFP

WASHINGTON: The United States vowed yesterday there would be no let-up of pressure on North Korea until it takes concrete steps to end its nuclear program after Donald Trump agreed to meet Kim Jong Un in a stunning diplomatic gamble.

Trump has previously ridi-culed Kim as “Little Rocket Man”, slapping wideranging bilateral sanctions on the Pyongyang regime and also leading a drive for international sanctions through the UN.

“North Korea’s desire to meet to discuss denuclearization -- while suspending all ballistic missile and nuclear testing -- is evidence that President Trump’s strategy to isolate the Kim regime is working,” Pence said in a statement.

The North Koreans “are coming to the table despite the United States making zero con-cessions and, in close coordina-tion with our allies, we have con-sistently increased the pressure on the Kim regime.

“Our resolve is undeterred and our policy remains the same:

all sanctions remain in place and the maximum pressure cam-paign will continue until North Korea takes concrete, perma-nent, and verifiable steps to end their nuclear program.”

Standing in front of the White House on Thursday night, Moon’s National Security Advisor Chung Eui-yong announced the first ever meeting between a US president and a North Korean leader would take place by May.

Chung had recently returned from Pyongyang, where he met Kim who, he said, “expressed his eagerness to meet President

Trump as soon as possible.” In a notably restrained

tweet, Trump hailed “great progress” in the push to persuade Pyongyang to end its nuclear weapons program, adding that “sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached.”

Trump then threatened “fire and fury” if Pyongyang con-tinued to threaten the United States only for North Korea to carry out its sixth nuclear test while Kim derided Trump as “mentally deranged”.

The United States and North Korea were foes throughout the

Cold War and fought on oppo-site sides of a bloody war in the 1950s.

In the last two decades, they have been engaged in what is perhaps the world’s most dan-gerous nuclear standoff, with 30,000 US military personnel stationed just over the border in the South.

On multiple occasions, Kim’s father Kim Jong Il dangled the prospect of talks and denuclear-ization as a means of buying time, easing sanctions and dividing South Korea from its allies.

Official linked to scandal dead: Japan AP

TOKYO: A Finance Ministry official linked to a scandal involving the wife of Japan’s Prime Minister has been found dead, the ministry confirmed yesterday, and a second official resigned.

The death and resignation rattled Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government. Opposi-tion lawmakers said they would further scrutinize the scandal.

The body of the uniden-tified ministry official, who was in charge of state prop-erty transactions in western Japan, was found in his home this week, the ministry and media reports said. The min-istry declined to provide additional details. Local media said the man killed himself.Finance Minister Taro Aso announced the resigna-tion of National Tax Agency chief Nobuhisa Sagawa, who previously headed a ministry department in charge of state property deals.

Aso said Sagawa resigned to take responsibility for his handling of the scandal. Sagawa was frequently sum-moned to parliament last year to explain the government’s handling of the scandal, and his blunt and impatient responses sparked public criticism. Sagawa later acknowledged destroying some documents related to the scandal, triggering an investigation by authorities.

The scandal involves the questionable sale in 2016 of state land to an ultra-nation-alist school operator at one-seventh of its appraised price.

Indonesia seizes illegally logged wood from PapuaAP

JAKARTA: Indonesian author-ities foiled the shipment of 21 containers of prized ironwood from Papua, highlighting what environmentalists say is a rampant illegal trade in the country’s easternmost region.

The Forestry and Environ-ment Ministry’s law enforce-ment agency said the wood from the Kaimana tropical forest was processed and ready for shipment to Surabaya when seized. The city has a major port and is a center of Indonesia’s wood furniture manufacturing and export industry on the island of Java.

Greenpeace Indonesia said the confiscation, which was made Tuesday and announced Thursday, is small compared with long-standing smuggling from Papua where no “big actors” have been prosecuted. The region has Indonesia’s largest remaining tropical for-ests and is seen by logging and palm oil companies as a new frontier for exploitation after the stripping of most of Java, Sumatra and Borneo of natural forests.

Indonesia was admitted in 2016 to an EU arrangement that makes it easier for Indonesian wood producers to export to the bloc if they’ve been certified by Indonesia’s new Timber Veri-fication and Legality System, known by its local acronym SVLK.Some environmental and

civil society groups have said the system, meant to provide certainty about the origin of wood, could easily become a conduit for illegal timber from a country where tropical for-ests have been cut down at an epic rate.

The ministry said investi-gations by police and its staff in Papua revealed a scheme for transporting and processing the wood and then shipping it once the desired quantity had been accumulated in warehouses at a West Papua port. Apparently falsified documents were to be used for the transport of the illegal wood.

It said police have arrested a suspect, who is a director of one of the companies involved, who could face up to 15 years in prison and a fine of up to $140,000.

Ironwood is prized for its beauty and strength and is used as flooring and in joinery.

Greenpeace Indonesia for-ests campaigner Charles Tawaru said weak supervision is one factor why the illegal timber trade continues to flourish in Papua and a signif-icant amount of wood is shipped out without verification.

On the ground, oversight through the timber verification and legality system had weak-ened because of the absorption of the district forestry service into the larger provincial appa-ratus, he said.

Malaysia oppn pledges to axe tax, investigate scandalAP

MALAYSIA: Malaysia’s opposi-tion coalition has pledged to axe an unpopular good and services tax and reopen investigations into a multibillion-dollar finan-cial scandal linked to Prime Minister Najib Razak if it wins the next elections.

The Hope Alliance, led by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, also promised to clip the powers of the prime min-ister, revive fuel subsidies and a

slew of economic reforms as part of its manifesto for polls due by August but widely expected in the second quarter.

In announcing the coalition’s manifesto late Thursday, Mahathir said the opposition has been labelled “government-in-waiting” as he rallied supporters to unite to oust the coalition that has ruled since independence.

“This book contains so many promises that we will fulfil once we get to Putrajaya,” said Mahathir, who led Malaysia for

22 years before he stepped down in 2003. “Some are now calling us a government in waiting ... but that won’t happen if we don’t work for it.”

At 92, Mahathir will be the world’s oldest prime minister if the opposition wins but he promised to hand over the reins once his former deputy Anwar Ibrahim is released from prison in June and able to take over. Analysts say the opposition faces an uphill battle due to party infighting, unfavorable

electoral boundary changes and strong support for the govern-ment from rural ethnic Malays.

Support for Najib’s ruling National Front coalition has dwindled in the last two elec-tions as he struggled with an epic corruption scandal that involved hundreds of millions of dollars believed linked to the 1MDB state fund passing through his bank accounts. In 2013, the coalition lost the national popular vote for the first time to the opposition.

View of iconic Merlion statue projected with visual lights installation showcasing “Elements of Life” by Flex Chew of Malaysia displayed during the i-light Marina Bay 2018 festival in Singapore yesterday. Singapore’s iconic Marina Bay was transform into an illuminated wonderland with enthralling light art installations for i Light Marina Bay 2018 festival.

Qatar’s strategic partnerships with Nato is a significant step in the wake of the illegal blockade imposed since last June by four nations led by Saudi Arabia and UAE.

CHAIRMANSHEIKH THANI BIN ABDULLAH AL THANI

EDITOR-IN-CHIEFDR. KHALID BIN MUBARAK AL-SHAFIeditorinchief@pen.com.qa

ACTING MANAGING EDITORMOHAMMED SALIM MOHAMEDm.salim@pen.com.qa

08 SATURDAY 10 MARCH 2018VIEWS

EDITORIAL

The recent visit by the Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to Belgium and Bulgaria focusing Qatar’s relationship with the international community through strategic partnerships is a

significant step in the wake of the illegal blockade imposed since last June by four nations led by Saudi Arabia and UAE.

The signing of an agreement on cooperation in military and security with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato), at its headquarters in Brussels, in the presence of the Emir and the Secretary-General of the Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, is a global recognition for Qatar as it affirms the country’s role as a strategic partner in the fight against terrorism and in the consolidation of security and peace in the region.

The Emir, after signing the agreement tweeted: “Qatar and Nato have laid the foundations of military cooperation. The agreement signed by the two sides is one of strategic significance that will help better respond to peace and security challenges regionally and world-wide.”

It is worth mentioning that the Nato Secretary-General has expressed his appreciation to the Emir for the role of Qatar and its efforts in the fight against terrorism and its cooperation with Nato in this area, especially through Al Udeid Air Base.

Qatar had signed a security agreement with Nato in January. But this latest agreement aims to strengthen the relations between Qatar and Nato in joint cooperation, especially in military and security matters, to face the current political developments and the challenges the region and

the world are facing. It is also a blow to the siege countries as it refutes their false allegations and fabrications of terrorism against Qatar.

Besides meeting senior officials of the Belgian government and Nato Secretary-General, the Emir also held discussions with EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini and President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, affirming the strength of Qatari-European relations and the success of Qatari diplomacy in creating broad strategic partnerships with

various countries and institutions.Since the blockade was imposed on Qatar, this is the

fourth foreign visit by the Emir. If the previous three trips to countries in Europe, Asia and Africa gave additional motivations to Qatar in international relations, the latest visit has cemented relations with the European Union at all levels, especially in the signing of Cooperation Arrangements between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the European Union External Action Service.

This agreement will serve as a basis for an enhanced political dialogue and strengthened cooperation on sectoral areas of mutual interest, notably private sector development and research and innovation. EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini has also voiced the European Union’s support for the Kuwaiti mediation to achieve Gulf reconciliation and its readiness to assist. During the Emir’s visit, Qatar has also signed MoUs in the field of youth and sports and energy and an MoU between Qatar University and Sofia University. The Emir’s visit has reflected Qatar’s leading role to strengthen political, economic and military relations with Europe that affirms the prestigious stand held by the country in the region and the world.

Emir’s European visit

QUOTE OF THE DAYWhat we’re saying

is...there are strong suspicions, yes, that acts

of genocide may well have taken place in Myanmar. But only a court, having

heard all the arguments, will confirm this.

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein UN Rights Chief

The ‘American Century’ officially died in Syria

FOR anyone who thought that the winding down of the campaign against the Islamic State would cause the Syrian civil war to

recede from the headlines, the last few weeks have been a rude awakening. Far from abating, the Syrian conflict is intensifying, with a brutal assault —reportedly involving chemical weapons -- by the Syrian government on rebel-held areas near Damascus, sharp aerial

clashes between Israeli, Iranian and Syrian forces, and a bloody and one-sided confrontation between American airpower and Russian “mercenaries.”

These events do more than simply demonstrate that the Syrian conflict remains an appalling humanitarian catastrophe. More significantly, Syria is the nexus for the

destabilizing trends that are thrusting the entire global order into crisis.

That order was originally created after World War II, but it reached its full flowering and ambition after the fall of the Soviet Union. The post-Cold War era was characterized by widespread hopes that the forces of order and civilization were finally defeating those of aggression and inhumanity; that democracy was becoming truly universal; that great-power competition had vanished; and that the danger of major war was receding further than ever before. Nearly three decades later, however, the heady optimism of that period has given way to a darker set of trends, all of which are at work in Syria.

Begin with the obvious: Syria represents an assault on the very idea of moral progress. But it’s not alone. Around the globe, longstanding legal and ethical norms are being eroded, and the world is being dragged back to a more ruthless, less-enlightened age. China, which may have a ruler-for-life, is chipping away at freedom of navigation in the Western Pacific; Russia has shattered the taboo against wars of aggression and conquest in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Yet Syria is where the erosion is most advanced and the consequences most horrific. The regime’s continued use of starvation sieges, barrel bombs and illegal weapons against the civilian population -- and the international

community’s inability or unwillingness to bring the slaughter to an end -- demonstrates more painfully than anything else that the moral gains the world seemed to have achieved are now being rolled back, and the rules of conduct it seemed to have established are now being transgressed. Neither the Barack Obama administration, with its “red-line” fiasco of 2013, nor the Donald Trump administration, with its diplomatic disengagement from the conflict, has had an answer to this challenge.

The Syrian war also reveals a second unsettling feature of global politics today: the return of ideological conflict. This is not to say that the civil war is a clash between entrenched authoritarians and aspiring democrats. Many Syrians who initially protested and fought against the regime in 2011 and 2012 wanted a transition to a more pluralistic system, but most of those moderates have now been killed, radicalized or otherwise driven from the field.

Nonetheless, the Syrian conflict reflects the broader authoritarian resurgence at work. President Bashar Assad offers the most brutal and ruthless example of how the world’s remaining dictators have not meekly succumbed to the forces of liberalization, but have instead become tougher and more tenacious in clinging to power.

Moreover, the war shows how ideological differences are again driving global politics. Most of the Western democracies have insisted -- rhetorically, at least--that the killing must stop and Assad must go. Yet the world’s leading autocracies -- China, Russia and Iran -- have rejected the idea of foreign-imposed regime change and provided various forms of assistance to keep a fellow autocrat in power. The competition between authoritarianism and democracy has been renewed, and nowhere has that competition been sharper than in Syria.

Meanwhile, intense geopolitical competition has also returned, and here too, Syria is ground zero. Iran and Israel are maneuvering -- often violently -- for advantage, as part of their broader regional struggle. More strikingly still, Syria has become an arena for renewed great-power rivalry between the U.S. and Russia. The once and current adversaries do not simply disagree over Assad’s fate; they are using their military power to carve out competing spheres of influence and stake their respective claims to leadership in Syria and the broader Middle East.

Russia in particular is using Syria as a proving ground for the advanced weapons systems and hybrid-warfare tactics it might well employ in a future conflict with the West, as well as to make itself a player in Middle Eastern geopolitics. From Ukraine to the South China Sea, great-power frictions are again the global norm, and Syria has as good a claim as any location to be the cockpit of the rivalry.

This relates to a final way in which Syria illustrates the growing crisis of global order -- through the surging risk

that it might set off a much larger military conflict. Across Eurasia, the danger of major war is rising, as geopolitical rivals arm themselves, refine their war plans, and brush up against one another in increasingly incendiary ways. And in the last month alone, the Syrian civil war has occasioned two separate incidents that might have served as the spark.

The recent clashes between Israeli, Iranian and Syrian regime forces -- which started with an Iranian drone intruding into Israeli airspace, and culminated in a significant Israeli attack on Syrian air defenses -- might easily have spiraled into something bigger. Had an Israeli F-16 downed by Syrian air defenses in early February not made it back across the Israeli border before its crew ejected, for instance, an aerial skirmish could have turned into a fight involving ground forces.

Last month’s combat between U.S. forces and Russian mercenaries was even more dangerous. The Russian decision to use hybrid forces to attack a base at which U.S. troops were present demonstrates how bold Moscow is becoming. The punishing U.S. airstrikes that reportedly killed around 200 Russian personnel show the potential for great-power rivalry in Syria to rapidly escalate into something more deadly. If one is looking for evidence that the relative international peace of the post-Cold War era is crumbling, look no further than the U.S.-Russian quasi-war occurring in Syria today.

Some wars are ultimately remembered less for appalling harm inflicted on participants and bystanders than for what they revealed about the larger state of the world. We now see the Spanish Civil War, for instance, not just as a tragic episode in the history of that country, but for what it demonstrated about an international system under strain. Today, our own international system is fraying at the edges. If that process continues, we may one day look back on Syria as the crisis that foretold the greater unraveling to come.

We now see the Spanish Civil War, for instance, not just as a tragic episode in the history of that country, but for what it demonstrated about an international system under strain. Today, our own international system is fraying at the edges. If that process continues, we may one day look back on Syria as the crisis that foretold the greater unraveling to come.

ESTABLISHED IN 1996

Syria represents an assault on the very idea of moral progress. But it’s not alone. Around the globe, longstanding legal and ethical norms are being eroded, and the world is being dragged back to a more ruthless, less-enlightened age.

HAL BRANDS BLOOMBERG

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Trump’s hard line against Pyongyang, after decades of less forceful US effort, played a significant role in moving one of the world’s most vexing and threatening problems in a potentially positive direction.

KAREN DEYOUNG THE WASHINGTON POST

FOR the moment, at least, it appears to be a clear-cut victory - the biggest foreign policy

win of his young administration. President Donald Trump has brought his arch-nemesis, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a.k.a “Little Rocket Man,” to the table to negotiate away his nuclear arsenal.

Optimists declared a major breakthrough. Even pessimists acknowledged that Trump’s hard line against Pyongyang, after decades of less forceful US effort, played a significant role in moving one of the world’s most vexing and threatening problems in a potentially posi-tive direction.

But in the afterglow of the surprise announcement - hinted by Trump in a teasing visit to the White House press room and soon confirmed by South Korea’s national security adviser, standing in the West Wing driveway - questions were fast and furious.

Were direct talks between Kim and Trump, two notably volatile leaders who have traded public insults for more than a year, the best way to start what are sure to be com-plicated negotiations? Was the administration, whose thin bench of experienced experts seems to be growing slimmer by the day, ready to face those wily and untrustworthy North Koreans? The talks, US and South Korean officials said, would take place before the end of May. By some assess-ments, this is really a victory for Kim, who for years has sought proof of his status and North Korea’s power by dangling the offer of leader-to-leader talks with the United States.

Some analysts said it remains unclear what Trump is prepared to put on the table opposite Kim’s apparent offer to stop testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles and dis-cuss denuclearization. “Sanctions? Normalization? Peace treaty?” tweeted Victor

Cha, the expert who was once Trump’s choice as ambassador to South Korea, before he voiced concern that the White House was contemplating a pre-emptive military strike against Pyongyang.

According to a senior administration official, who briefed reporters on the condi-tion of anonymity, the answer is not very much.

There would be no reward for talks themselves, the official said. Trump would expect a dis-mantled nuclear weapons program, with complete “verifi-cation,” and “will settle for nothing less.”

But “President Trump has a reputation for making deals,” the official added. “Kim Jong Un is the one person able to make decisions in their uniquely total-itarian system and so it made sense to accept the invitation with the one person who can make decisions instead of repeating the long slog of the past.” Trump has a vibrant track record of surprise announce-ments that have distracted attention, at least temporarily, from concern over tariffs and border walls and the growing threat to his presidency posed by the special counsel investiga-tion into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

At the same time, he has claimed a long string of suc-cesses over the past 14 months that others have challenged as lacking a strategy for long-term sustainability, from the cur-rently robust economy to the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The North Korea gambit may be his highest-wire act of all. “A Trump-Kim summit is a major diplomatic gamble,” tweeted Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for New American Security. “But let’s see if it actually comes off. Recall that yesterday, we were set to impose steel tariffs on Canada.” Among experts, there were widely divergent views of what had happened, and why, and what the risks were.

“Beyond the initial shock value of the invitation from Kim Jong Un to Trump,” and Trump’s acceptance, “I think the real underlying questions are still what are they going to negotiate,” said Lisa Collins, a fellow with the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Two months doesn’t give working-level officials much time to pull things together.”

“It’s certainly the start of talks. Whether or not it’s a true breakthrough in terms of change in North Korea’s calcu-lus, I’m still a little skeptical,” she said. “I tend to be more of a pessimist. Adam Mount, a sen-ior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, said it was “absolutely right to extend the nuclear and missile test pause” declared by Pyongyang during talks last week with the Seoul government. “It will help repair ties with South Korea and keeps us back from the brink of war.”

“Unfortunately,” Mount said, “denuclearization is a dis-tant fantasy.” The administration “has not

equipped itself for success. They have not laid the ground-work for credibility in talks [and] lack leadership with experience in international negotiation. . . . In accepting the invitation outright, Trump has already lost much of his lever-age over the terms and agenda of the talks.”

The “better play,” he said, “is to start by offering a credible plan to stabilize the peninsula and halt nuclear and missile tests sustainably, and then build out to a more ambitious agreement.”

Others were less skeptical. Robert Carlin, who led numer-ous US delegations to North Korea and served in various senior intelligence and diplo-matic roles during previous outreaches to Pyongyang, cited North Korean statements over the years that indicated its nuclear weapons program was largely developed as leverage to gain economic stability.

In a seminal statement in March 2013, Carlin recalled, Kim said that North Korea’s nuclear policy would proceed rapidly to “blunt the American threat and create a peaceful environment so that we can concentrate on the economy,” he said. “This is his victory. It’s really important for him and they probably believe it.”

“We can’t push them around. They do have nuclear weapons,” Carlin said. But “they do have a leader who wants to pivot to the economy. Let’s test that. Let’s see if we can use [Kim’s] own momentum, like jujitsu, to help accomplish what we want.”

MARCH 4, 2018, is a date that will go down in European history books. The results of the Italian general elections

seem to have marked the absolute victory of nationalist, anti-Europeanist, and anti-establishment parties. Together, they won over 50 percent of the vote. Are we witnessing the definitive end of the European dream? Or is this result of a final wake-up call for the European Union, one of the last opportunities it should not miss?

Certainly, the results, especially seen in a European context, are not reassuring. We are witnessing the gradual spread (in geographical and numerical terms) of nationalist, xenophobic political parties.

In the 2016 elections in the Netherlands, the nationalist party of Geert Wilders won 13 percent of the votes, a year later Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front rose to nearly 21 percent in France. Last October, Germany’s AfD won more than 12 percent of the votes, and in Austria, the leader of the conservative-populist party OVP formed an alliance with the far-right FPO. Due to the electoral system in France, Le Pen’s results were put in check by the vic-tory of Emmanuel Macron. In Germany, the grand coalition of CDU, CSU and SPD provided a solution, albeit temporary. But in Italy, it seems difficult, if not impossi-ble, to find such remedies.

In Italy, former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s centre-left Partito Democratico (PD) suffered a landmark defeat (exacer-bating the overall decrease of social-democrat adherence in Europe); former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s party, which is classified as moderate (oh, beautiful irony!) also ended up losing. The undisputed winners of the election were the so-called populists.

The Five Star Movement received 32 percent of the votes all by itself. The politi-cal movement, which was founded by comedian Beppe Grillo, is seen as a hodge-podge of different, uncontrollable voices brought together only by anger towards institutions and the dominant system.

Meanwhile, the Lega of Matteo Salvini, a xenophobic and anti-Europeanist party,

received over 17 percent of the vote. Sal-vini entered the election in coalition with Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia as well as the neofascist Fratelli d’Italia, and the three parties together got nearly 36 percent of the vote.

The Lega and the Five Star Movement both boast anti-establishment resentment and aim to “give a voice to the people”. Moreover, certain parts of the Five Star Movement expressed support for exiting the European Union and have shared the anti-immigration stance of the Lega. But, despite these similarities, these two politi-cal forces should not be hastily classified along the same lines. In fact, it is extremely unlikely that they will unite to govern together. It is important to empha-sise the differences between them, because within these differences there lies a new path, albeit a narrow and risky one, but nonetheless a path that could lead to a constructive shift in Italy, and even in Europe as a whole.

Looking at the geographical distribu-tion of the seats assigned to each region, one immediately notes that Italy is divided between the north and south. This is an ancient division, even older than the unifi-cation of Italy in 1861. As is often lamented of the EU, the process of Italian national unification was also seen as an imposition from above by the powerful elite that did not take popular will into account. From that moment, a certain mistrust has per-sisted in Italy to this day towards the state and its institutions. They are seen as a cor-rupt machine driven only by a desire for power, estranged from the interests of the public. In this respect, the ancient popular expression “Piove, governo ladro!” [It’s raining, blame the government!] seems symptomatic. The expression pokes fun at the Italian tendency to blame the govern-ment for anything and everything - even rain. Never before has this irony been taken as seriously as it is today, both by the Lega and the Five Star Movement, though in different ways.

The Lega, in fact, was born as a regional movement pushing for the sepa-ration of the northern regions of Italy, among the most “industrious” and rich in Europe, from the less developed regions of the south, in which unemployment, mafia, and corruption were, if not more present, at least more visible. The state (“Rome, thief”) was seen as an external element, depriving the north and passing its riches on to the south. To reach its objectives, however, the Lega had to “broaden its horizons”, and instead of looking for independence from the south of Italy, it pointed its finger towards immigrants and refugees. For this reason, the Lega goes hand in hand with its nationalist and xenophobic European

cousins, like Le Pen and Wilders. Now the Lega does not blame Rome any more for the rain, but the EU.

The young Five Star Movement was born in 2009 as a party of protest. Its founder, the comic Beppe Grillo, has always pointed his finger at what - for him - are the true parasites of the general population: corrupt politicians and the apparatus of the state. To bridge the gap between institutions and people, the Movement has relied on a form of so-called direct democracy that is, in a sense, visionary and revolutionary - using the web as a means for the expression of the popular will. But, over the years, this presumed form of direct democracy has revealed itself to be far from immune to power games. Despite its leaders’ lack of political experience, the movement has, in the recent elections, conquered nearly all the seats in southern Italy. In doing so, it merged a great portion of formerly left-wing votes with those of other disappointed voters. A big part of the electorate chose to cast a “vote of protest”, devoting themselves to what has become the catalysing force of a hybrid, multiform political category, thirsty for hope and radical change.

Luigi di Maio himself, the 31-year-old leading the Movement, described Five Star as “neither right-wing nor left-wing”. Because of the impossibility of interpret-ing it using typical political categories, and the accusations against it of political dilettantism, the movement has been a source of fear and worry for both the EU and global financial markets.

Yet it is clear to all that the election results show a need for change. This out-cry comes from all sides of the Italian population, reinforced by currents that have come together from all directions and have no intention of being reined in by external dams, constructed hurriedly by political institutions and forces defend-ing the status quo of the reigning system.

In Italy, distrust in institutions, eco-nomic depression, and certainly also the crisis of identity brought by globalisation have come together, and not only in a pop-ulist, xenophobic party of the right wing like the Lega. The Italian case has also given birth to the Five Star Movement. Beyond its specific proposals and its highly debatable results, it is destabilising, and appropriately so: its postmodern, post-ide-ological being, the contradictions of contrasting forces that feed it, joined to the bitter experience and anger of its crude condition, make it a time bomb, capable of exploding at the wrong moment and destroying itself and everything around it. It is up to the institutions, and especially the political parties who will work with them, to try and (finally) enter into a dia-logue with those who have felt marginalised and excluded for too long.

Trump’s bellicosity secures a diplomatic coup — for now

Italy’s election should be a wake up call for the EU

SILVIA MAZZINI AL JAZEERA

09SATURDAY 10 MARCH 2018 OPINION

The Five Star Movement received 32 percent of the votes all by itself. The political movement, which was founded by comedian Beppe Grillo, is seen as a hodgepodge of different, uncontrollable voices brought together only by anger towards institutions and the dominant system.

10 SATURDAY 10 MARCH 2018EUROPE

UK troops to probe Russian spy attackAFP

LONDON: British police requested military assistance in investigating a nerve agent attack on a former Russian double agent as speculation mounted yesterday about how London could respond if a state actor were to blame.

Police extended the cordon around the modest suburban home of Sergei Skripal in Salis-bury, the quiet city in south-western England where he and his daughter Yulia were found slumped on a bench on Sunday.

The pair remain unconscious in a critical but stable condition, while Nick Bailey, one of the first police officers on the scene, is now sitting up and talking after initially being admitted to inten-sive care.

With police also hurt in the attack, pressure is intensifying on Prime Minister Theresa May to find and punish the culprits.

The involvement of “a British citizen, especially a policeman, requires the immediate and strong involvement of the British authorities,” Chatham House analyst Mathieu Boulegue said.

Around 21 people have been treated, according to Kier Pritchard, chief constable for Wiltshire Police.

“A number of those have been through the hospital

treatment process, they’re having blood tests, they’re having treat-ment in terms of support and advice,” he said.

Authorities are racing to find the source of the nerve agent used against 66-year-old Skripal, who came to Britain in 2010 as part of a spy swap, as politicians warned it bore the hallmarks of an attack by Russia.

National counter-terrorism police, who are leading the investigation, announced yes-terday that they had requested assistance from the military “to remove a number of vehicles and objects from the scene”.

“Military assistance will con-tinue as necessary during this investigation,” they added, with media reporting 108 personnel may be involved, including Royal Marines and chemical speicliasts.

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said the armed forces

“have the right people with the right skills” to deal with the “cru-cial inquiry”.

During a visit to the site yes-terday, Interior Minister Amber Rudd called the attack “outra-geous” but urged people to “give the police the space they need to really go through the area care-fully, to do their investigation”.

In response to questions over Russia’s possible involvement, May has said that “if action needs to be taken then the government will do that”.

Possible responses include the expulsion of some of Russia’s 58 diplomats, some kind of boy-cott of the 2018 football World Cup or an increased British mil-itary presence in eastern Europe.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson floated the idea of deep-ening sanctions against Russian officials, but Britain would have to persuade its international partners.

Moscow has reacted angrily to the accusations it was involved, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday dis-missing them as baseless “propaganda”.

On Wednesday, however, Russian state TV presenter Kirill Kleimyonov had appeared to deliver a veiled warning, saying: “Don’t choose England as your future country of residence... whether you are a professional

traitor to the motherland or whether you hate your country in your spare time.”

Analyst Boulegue said it would be “extremely difficult” to pinpoint who committed the

attack, and that the response could be a lot more complicated if it turned out that internal fac-tions were responsible.

“It is possible that it is related to the elections in Russia or that it is part of a battle between the elites within the security serv-ices, to send messages either to the English or to the Russian elites,” he said.

Police have cordoned off the bench where the pair were found, as well as an Italian res-taurant and a pub they visited before their collapse.

The also sealed off the grave of Skripal’s wife, Liudmila, who died in 2012 from cancer, as well as the memorial stone of his son, Alexander, who was cremated last year after reportedly dying of liver problems.

The Times newspaper said police were probing whether Skripal’s daughter, who arrived in Britain from Moscow last week, may have inadvertently brought in the nerve agent as a gift.

Skripal was a former colonel in Russian military intelligence who was jailed in his country for betraying agents to Britain’s MI6 secret service.

He was pardoned in 2010 before being flown to Britain as part of a high-profile spy swap involving Russia and the United States.

Hundreds trapped as flooding hits Northern AlbaniaAGENCIES

TIRANA: The military has been deployed in northern Albania to help hundreds of people trapped by floods following heavy rainfall, authorities said yesterday.

Albanian authorities said a large area in the northwest of the country has been flooded after two rivers and a lake exceeded or approached critical levels.

More than 9,230 hectares (22,800 acres) of agricultural land and grasslands are underwater in the Shkodra region, including villages where the only means of transport is by boat, the defence ministry said yesterday.

Army personnel are evac-uating residents and securing food supplies in the affected areas, 100km (60 miles) north of the capital, Tirana.

The rain has also forced the Albanian authorities to release excess water from a hydroelectric plant, which has added to the flooding in northern areas of the country.

Roads and bridges have been damaged by landslides. Army emergency forces have distributed food and drinking water for people and cattle in isolated areas.

Weather forecasters said the rain is likely to ease from today.

Possible UK responses include the expulsion of some of Russia’s 58 diplomats, some kind of boycott of the 2018 football World Cup or an increased British military presence in eastern Europe.

Court rejects appeal to free Catalan govt candidateAFP

MADRID: Spain’s Supreme Court yesterday turned down a request from Catalan separatist leader Jordi Sanchez to be released from jail so he could be sworn in as the region’s new president next week.

Sanchez was remanded in custody in October pending charges of sedition over last year’s Catalan independence bid.

The court’s decision means it is unlikely that the Catalan par-liament will convene on Monday

as planned to appoint a new regional president since Sanchez was the only candidate.

The president of the Catalan parliament, Roger Torrent, has not yet reacted to the move.

In a written ruling Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena said there was a risk that Sanchez - the former head of the Catalan National Assembly, a powerful pro-independence civil group - would again commit an offence if he were released.

Sanchez’s name was put for-ward after former Catalan

president Carles Puigdemont dropped his candidacy last week.

Puigdemont, living in self-exile in Belgium and wanted in Spain, announced on March 1 that he was abandoning his bid to return as regional president in an attempt to unblock Cata-lonia’s political crisis.

Puigdemont faces arrest if he returns to Spain on charges of sedition, rebellion and misuse of public funds over his role in Catalonia’s separatist push.

Sanchez’s lawyers on Tuesday had asked the Supreme

Court, which is overseeing his case, to let him out of prison to go to parliament next week to be voted in as president.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s conservative government has vowed to resist any bid to break the region away from Spain and called on Catalan sep-aratist parties to appoint a can-didate for president who does not face prosecution.

“A person who is remanded in custody is not in a situation to exercise the duties required of the president of Catalonia,”

government spokesman Inigo Mendez de Vigo said yesterday when asked about the court’s ruling.

Rajoy dissolved Catalonia’s parliament, called the early election and imposed direct rule over the region after Cata-lonia’s assembly on October 27 u n i l a t e r a l l y d e c l a r e d independence.

But in a blow to the central government Catalan separatist parties once again won an abso-lute majority of seats in the 135-seat Catalan parliament.

Britain’s Home Secretary Amber Rudd, accompanied by Temporary Chief Constable Kier Pritchard, leaves the Guildhall, in Salisbury, Britain, yesterday.

EU plans to increase Ukraine aidREUTERS

KIEV: The European Commis-sion plans a further $1.23bn of financial aid for Ukraine, it said yesterday, with disbursement conditional on Kiev making progress on reforms.

The European Union has been one of Ukraine’s biggest backers since the country’s 2013 to 2014 pro-European uprising ousted its Moscow-backed president. The 28-nation bloc has provided 2.8 billion euros of direct loans as well as other support.

Nevertheless, Kiev’s patchy

progress in fighting corruption and overhauling its justice system has concerned its Western backers, who have urged Ukraine’s leaders not to renege on reform promises.

European Commission Vice-President Valdis Dom-brovskis said the decision to provide further financing dem-onstrated the EU’s commitment to Ukraine.

“This solidarity must go hand in hand with a continued commitment from the Ukrainian authorities to an ambitious reform agenda to ensure a stable and prosperous

Ukraine,” he said in a statement.

The decision comes ahead of a visit by the EU’s top dip-lomat, Federica Mogherini, to Kiev in the coming days.

Ukraine failed to meet all the conditions for the disburse-ment of a final tranche of loans worth 600 million euros under the previous aid programme, which expired in January.

The Commission’s proposal for a fourth macro-financial aid programme to Ukraine still needs to be approved by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU.

Ukraine negotiator charged over plot to assassinate PoroshenkoAFP

KIEV: Ukraine yesterday charged a prisoner swap nego-tiator with plotting to assassi-nate President Petro Porosh-enko and other senior officials by attacking their homes and offices with mortar fire and grenades.

Volodymyr Ruban was detained on Thursday with a haul of firearms and ammuni-tion in his vehicle while crossing the “grey zone” splitting Rus-sian-backed eastern insurgents from the rest of Ukraine.

The 50-year-old Ukrainian national is known to have organised several prisoner

exchanges between the two sides during four years of fighting, in which more than 10,000 have died.

“Ruban is suspected of pre-paring armed attacks against senior government officials,” the presiding judge in Kiev was quoted as saying by Interfax-Ukraine news agency.

The charge sheet accused Ruban of planning to use “mortar guns, grenade launchers, light weapons and explosive devices” to attack the homes of Poroshenko and other officials.

These included Interior Min-ister Arsen Avakov and National Security and Defence Council

chief Oleksandr Turchynov, along with former premier Arseniy Yatsenyuk and other undisclosed officials.

The judge said Ruban’s aim was to “create chaos... and help Russia launch a full-scale offen-sive” that would put the sepa-ratist region under its perma-nent control.

Ukrainian media had previ-ously accused Ruban of har-bouring pro-Russian sentiment and being supportive of the insurgents.

Ruban told the court he did not know that the vehicle he was detained in was carrying weapons, and accused the authorities of framing him.

Volodymyr Ruban (inside defendant’s cage), a former informal negotiator in Donbass prisoner swaps, attends a hearing in Kiev district court, yesterday.

Slovakia prepares new mass rally over journalist’s murderREUTERS

BRATISLAVA: Thousands of Slovaks are expected to join the second mass protest in a week over the murder of a journalist that has rocked the small central European nation and threatens to wreck Prime Minister Robert Fico’s coalition government.

Investigative reporter Jan Kuciak, who was shot dead with his girlfriend late last month by an unknown gunman, had cov-ered fraud cases involving politically-connected busi-nessmen. His last unfinished story looked at Italian busi-nessmen with suspected mafia links operating in Slovakia

President Andrej Kiska, a

political rival of Fico, has said Slovakia is suffering a crisis of trust and has called for a revamp of the three-party coa-lition or an early election.

Kiska, Fico and parliamen-tary speaker Andrej Danko - the country’s three highest officials - failed in talks on Friday to agree a planned written decla-ration to help defuse tensions.

The demonstration was due to start at 1600 GMT. Some schools let students out early and one of the country’s largest banks, Slovenska Sporitelna of the Austrian group Erste Bank, said it would allow employees to leave work early to take part.

The protest organisers are demanding a thorough inves-tigation of Kuciak’s death.

11SATURDAY 10 MARCH 2018 EUROPE

Merkel completes cabinet line-upAFP

BERLIN: Germany’s second biggest party, the Social Demo-crats, yesterday named their ministers in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s next government, completing a cabinet lineup in which they snatched the trophy finance and foreign affairs port-folios.

Olaf Scholz, 59, the interim leader of the Social Democrats (SPD), will take over the pow-erful finance ministry which in recent years was led by fiscal hawk Wolfgang Schaeuble of Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU).

Heiko Maas, the SPD’s out-going justice minister, will take the prestigious post of running the foreign ministry, according to the party’s designated next leader Andrea Nahles.

Both Merkel’s conservative CDU/CSU bloc and the SPD, the two mainstream parties in Europe’s biggest economy, lost millions of votes to far-right pop-ulists in last September’s election.

This has forced them, after six months of torturous negoti-ations involving multiple parties, into another unhappy marriage of convenience dubbed a grand

coalition or “GroKo”.Merkel, aged 63 and in power

for 12 years, is due to formally launch her fourth-term govern-ment next Wednesday.

But unrest is brewing within her party following a historically poor election result and Merkel’s decision to give up key cabinet posts as the price of holding onto power.

Given the mutual distrust between the two big parties, “it’s possible that this coalition won’t last four years,” one senior CDU source has said. “Unlike in the past, I’m not sure this time.”

The SPD, demoralised by plummeting poll figures and damaging infighting, yesterday celebrated rare good news -- the key ministries they have wrested from Merkel’s team in tough coa-lition haggling.

Scholz said the SPD’s minis-ters, three men and three women, were “a good team of people with a high level of exper-tise and the ability to run large organisations”.

Nahles then formally announced that Scholz, the mayor of the city-state of Ham-burg, would take over the finance ministry, which has been led in recent months by Merkel’s deputy Peter Altmaier, 59.

She said Scholz had led the wealthy river port “with a keen eye on finances, with budgetary discipline on the one hand and future-oriented investments in education, research and infra-structure on the other”.

Nahles then introduced incoming foreign minister Maas, 51, praising his “endurance” as a triathlete and the “diplomatic finesse, backbone and clear stance against racism” he had shown as justice minister.

She said this would help Maas, who has little international experience, in a job where Ger-many increasingly acted “as a mediator in a disorderly world”.

Taking over the justice port-folio will be Katarina Barley, 49, a former judge, while Hubertus Heil, 45, becomes labour min-ister and Berlin local politician

Svenja Schulze, 49, takes on the environment post at a time Ger-many is on course to miss its ambitious climate targets.

Absent from the SPD line-up were the two men who have dominated the party in its tumul-tuous past year -- election loser Martin Schulz, who bowed out weeks ago, and outgoing top dip-lomat Sigmar Gabriel, whose go-it-alone style has long angered Scholz and Nahles.

Nahles -- soon to become the 153-year-old labour party’s first female leader -- has shown, by sending her nemesis Gabriel to

the backbenches, that she knows “revenge is a dish best served cold”, judged Spiegel Online.

Among Merkel’s conserva-tives, Ursula von der Leyen, 59, stays on in the defence ministry and the chancellor’s loyal right-hand man Altmaier is rewarded with the economy and energy ministry.

In a nod to a new genera-tion, outspoken Merkel critic Jens Spahn, 37, becomes health min-ister while two women, Julia Kloeckner, 45, and Anja Kar-liczek, 46, take over the agricul-ture and education portfolios

respectively.Andreas Scheuer, 43, of Mer-

kel’s conservative Bavarian sister party the CSU, will become transport minister, wresting with Germany’s auto pollution scandal, while Gerd Mueller, 62, stays on as development minister.

Crucially, the embattled out-going CSU chief Horst Seehofer, 68, as Germany’s next interior minister in charge of security takes over a rebranded “home-land” ministry in a bid to answer the challenge of the new far-right.

The combination of pictures shows German Chancellor Angela Merkel (right) and politicians named to become ministers in the new cabinet, (CLOCKWISE:) designated Chief of Staff Helge Braun; designated Minister for Food and Agriculture Julia Kloeckner; designated Health Minister Jens Spahn; designated Finance Minister and vice-chancellor Olaf Scholz; designated Foreign Minister Heiko Maas; designated Family Minister Franziska Giffey; designated Labour Minister Hubertus Heil; designated Minister for Education and Research Anja Karliczek; designated Economy Minister Peter Altmaier; designated Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen, designated Economy Minister Peter Altmaier; designated Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer; German Justice Minister Katarina Barley; designated Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, designated Development Minister Gerd Muelle and designated Environment Minister Svenja Schulze.

One senior CDU source said, given the mutual distrust between the two big parties, “it’s possible that this coalition won’t last four years. Unlike in the past, I’m not sure this time.”

AP

BERLIN: Prosecutors are demanding a life sentence for an Afghan migrant on trial in Germany for the rape and killing of a 19-year-old medical student in October 2016.

Chief prosecutor Eckart Berger told Freiburg’s regional court yesterday that the defendant should also be imprisoned beyond the usual 15-year life term in Germany.

Hussein K, whose last name was withheld in line with German privacy laws, told the court last year that he pulled Maria Ladenburger from her bicycle, raped her and dumped her unconscious in the Dreisam river, where she drowned.

K, who entered Germany in 2015, claimed he was 18 at the time of the crime. An expert report and witness statements put his age at 22 - old enough for an adult life sentence.

AFP

LONDON: A bomb on a London Underground train last year that injured 30 people but failed to detonate fully could have been fatal, an explosives expert said yesterday at the alleged attack-er’s trial.

The device, which went off during morning rush hour on September 15, contained nails and knives, packed with 400 grammes of TATP, an unstable high explosive often used in

jihadist attacks. “400 grammes of TATP has

the potential to cause damage to property and harm or seri-ously to those in closest prox-imity which could potentially be lethal,” expert Sarah Wilson told the court.

Asked why the device had failed to function, Wilson said the bomb may have been wet or not built correctly. But she agreed that it contained “all the elements necessary” for a viable bomb.

Ahmed Hassan Mohammed Ali, an 18-year-old Iraqi who had been living with a foster family in Sunbury, southwest of London, is accused of attempted murder and causing an explo-sion. He denies the charges.

Hassan arrived in Britain in October 2015. He told authori-ties he was in fear of the IS mil-itants and that it had taken him by force and trained him “how to kill” when he was in Iraq.

Prosecutors said the suspect used $28 that he won in a school

prize to go on Amazon to buy the main component for the bomb, which he built in his foster fam-ily’s kitchen.

Victims of the attack on Thursday described the “fireball” that tore through the train carriage.

Having got off one stop before, Hassan fled to Dover in Kent where he was picked up by police the following day.

The attack, claimed by IS, was the fifth time Britain had been targeted in six months.

Pope to visit three Baltic nations in September AP

VATICAN CITY: The Vatican said Pope Francis will visit Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia on September 22 to 25 as the three Baltic nations celebrate their 100th anniversaries.

The Vatican confirmed the trip yesterday, saying Francis would visit Vilnius and Kaunas in Lithuania; Riga and Aglona in Latvia, and Tallinn in Estonia.

Lithuania has the largest Catholic community in the Baltics, accounting for more than 75 percent of the nation’s nearly 3 million inhabitants.

The three Baltic nations declared their independence from Russia in 1918 but were incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940 and remained part of it until 1991.

Francis has only one other confirmed trip for the rest of 2018, to Geneva in June. He is widely expected to go to Ire-land in August for the World Meeting of Families.

Explosives expert testify in London tube bomb trial

Italians queue for free cash promised by M5S

German prosecutors seek life sentence for murder suspect

AFP

ROME: Dozens of Italians have been queueing at tax offices to claim money promised by the anti-establishment Five Star Movement in the weekend elec-tion - even though the party is not yet in power.

A key election pledge of the Five Star Movement (M5S) was to provide a universal basic income for the unemployed ranging from $860 to $3,695.

The party scooped up 33 percent of the national vote in Sunday’s ballot, becoming the country’s biggest single party, but it did not win as many votes a rightwing coalition, so both camps are in the process of finding allies to form a parlia-mentary majority.

However, the political stale-mate has not stopped voters in southern Italy from already demanding that the M5S make good on its election pledge.

“The Five Star Movement has won. Give us the forms to get the universal income,” people told employees at a local tax office in the Giovinazzo, near the city of Bari, Italian media reported.

Since the start of the week, at least 50 people have shown up at another tax office in Bari itself to obtain information about the scheme, according to an official.

“For all those who come to ask if the forms are already

ready, we have prepared a... response saying that for now there are no measures in place for such a document,” the unnamed official told La Repub-blica newspaper.

Meanwhile, a tax centre in the city of Palermo even put up a sign reading: “We don’t offer universal basic income.”

The Five Star Movement’s scheme -- which comes with certain conditions -- has proven particularly popular with young

voters in a country where unem-ployment for those aged 25 to 34 runs at 17 percent.

However, the plan has drawn stinging criticism from the other political parties, with opponents slamming it as a reward for laziness.

According to media esti-mates, the measure would cost the Italian state some 15 billion euros per year -- a heavy burden on the heavily indebted EU member.

May 68 in 500 posters

People walk in front of a fence where posters of May 68 are displayed during an exhibition entitled “Mai 68 en 500 affiches” (May 68 in 500 posters) gathered by collector Laurent Storch for sale by the Artcurial auction house, in Paris, yesterday. France will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the events that took place during May 68. The sale will take place on March 13.

REUTERS

BUCHAREST: The leader of Romania’s ruling Social Demo-crats and speaker of its lower house of parliament, Liviu Dragnea, is under investiga-tion in Brazil on suspicion of money laundering, a Brazilian prosecutor was quoted yesterday as saying.

An online investigative reporting platform, Rise Project, quoted Brazilian federal prose-cutor Carlos Wagner Barbosa Guimaraes as saying Brazilian authorities were investigating whether Dragnea and others had used ill-gotten funds to buy beach properties in the country through third parties.

Asked about the report, Dragnea, who keeps a tight grip on his party and is seen as effectively in charge of

Romania’s government, said it was false.

“We talked about this topic in 2017. They (Rise Project) have reheated the soup, but I am not eating it,” said Dragnea, who is barred from becoming Romania’s prime minister by a suspended jail sentence imposed on him in a vote rig-ging case.

Rise Project also quoted Barbosa Guimaraes as saying the Brazilian investigation had started after Romanian pros-ecutors had asked for help in mid-2017.

Dragnea is currently on trial in Romania in an abuse of office case and is also under investigation in a separate case on suspicion of forming a criminal group to siphon off cash from state projects, some of them EU-funded.

Brazil probes Romanian politician for laundering

12 SATURDAY 10 MARCH 2018AMERICAS

Women’s DayA group of women attend a rally and march to mark International Women’s Day, in New York City, yesterday. Around the world, thousands of women are occupying the streets, refusing to work and boycotting domestic tasks in a response to a call for a global women’s strike.

American union sues Trump administrationAP

HOUSTON: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a class-action lawsuit yesterday accusing the US government of broadly separating immigrant families seeking asylum.

The lawsuit follows action the ACLU took in the case of a Congolese woman and her 7-year-old daughter, who the group said was taken from her mother “screaming and crying” and placed in a Chicago facility. While the woman was released Tuesday from a San Diego deten-tion center, the girl remains in the facility 3,200km away.

Immigrant advocates said the mother and daughter’s case is emblematic of the approach taken by President Donald Trump’s administration.

The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in San Diego, asks a judge to declare family

separation unlawful and says hundreds of families have been spl i t by immigrat ion authorities.

The lawsuit also raises the case of a Brazilian woman who the ACLU says was separated from her 14-year-old son after they sought asylum in August. The ACLU says the woman was given a roughly 25-day sentence jail sentence for illegally entering the country and then placed in immigration detention facilities

in West Texas, while her son was taken to a Chicago facility.

The US Department of Homeland Security has not announced a formal policy to hold adult asylum seekers sep-arately from their children. But administration officials have said they are considering separating parents and children to deter others from trying to enter the US.

The department declined to comment on the lawsuit.

DHS acting press secretary Tyler Houlton, in an earlier state-ment on the case of the Congo-lese woman and her daughter, said government officials have to verify that children entering the US are not victims of traf-fickers and that the adult accom-panying them is actually their parent.

In separate court papers filed on Wednesday, the US govern-ment said it is awaiting the

results of DNA testing to confirm the woman is the girl’s mother.

“We ask that members of the public and media view advocacy group claims that we are sepa-rating women and children for reasons other than to protect the child with the level of skepticism they deserve,” Houlton said.

It’s hard to determine how often parents and children are placed in separate facilities after they seek asylum, which is granted to people who have a credible fear of persecution if they are forced to return to their home country.

Different government agen-cies are responsible for holding adults and children. US Immigra-tion and Customs Enforcement detains adults accused of immi-gration violations, while the US Department of Health and Human Services cares for unac-companied immigrant children.

Immigration advocates

criticised President Barack Obama’s administration for opening new family detention facilities in Texas and called for parents and children to be released.

The two Texas facilities that it opened were found by a fed-eral judge in 2015 to violate a long-standing 1997 settlement requiring children be released or otherwise held in the “least restrictive setting” available.

That settlement set other standards for the detention of children. The Trump adminis-tration has called for ending the settlement as part of its demands for changes to immigration laws.

Top administration officials have said they believe the asylum process is overwhelmed and challenged by people making frivolous claims. Advocates have also accused border agents of unlawfully turning away people who are seeking asylum at the

US-Mexico border.Michelle Brané, director of

the migrant rights and justice program for the Women’s Ref-ugee Commission, said that through attorneys and social service organisations, she had identified at least 426 immigrant adults and children who had been separated by authorities since President Donald Trump took office in January 2017.

Brané said she did not have a comparable figure for Obama’s administration.

But Brané said since the new administration began, her office has received far more reports of adults being held in ICE facilities without knowing where their children are.

“A lot of these kids are already afraid because they’re fleeing something and they know they’re fleeing something. And to have them pulled away, that can be devastating for a parent.”

The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in San Diego, asks a judge to declare family separation unlawful and says hundreds of families have been split by immigration authorities.

Trump pardons sailor who took ‘illegal’ photosAP

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump has pardoned a Navy sailor who took photographs of the classified areas of a military submarine.

Kristian Saucier pleaded guilty last year for taking the photos inside the USS Alex-andria in 2009. He’s served a 12-month prison sentence for the crime.

Trump referenced Sauci-er’s case often on the campaign trail as he criticised his Dem-ocratic rival Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. Federal prosecutors said he was a disgruntled sailor who compromised national secu-rity and then obstructed the investigation by destroying a laptop and camera.

REUTERS

WASHINGTON: Democrats on a congressional committee investigating the White House’s security clearance procedures yesterday urged the panel’s Republican chairman to compel the Trump administration to turn over records they said were being withheld.

In a letter to US House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, Repre-sentative Elijah Cummings, the

panel’s top Democrat, asked that a subpoena be issued to force the White House to turn over the security clearance documents.

“Last night, we received a completely inadequate response from the White House regarding our committee’s request for information about security clear-ances,” Cummings said in the letter he released.

Gowdy had asked the White House and Federal Bureau Investigation in mid-February to provide the committee with information about how an

interim security clearance was issued to Robert Porter, a former staff secretary to US President Donald Trump who left the White House last month after two former wives said he had physically abused them.

Gowdy later sent the White House a broader request asking about the extent to which offi-cials had been working for extended periods with only tem-porary security clearances.

The White House responded to the queries on Thursday in a letter from Marc Short, an

assistant to the president, which Cummings released yesterday. But the White House turned over none of the records Gowdy had requested.

In its letter, the White House said it would “update” the com-mittee at an “appropriate time” on the progress an Executive Branch working group has made to review and improve security clearance procedure.

Cummings called the White House response an “affront to our responsibilities under the Constitution.”

Amanda Gonzalez, a spokes-woman for Gowdy, did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the White House letter and Cummings’ request that the committee issue a sub-poena for administration records.

On Monday, Gonzalez said that the White House had been in “consistent contact with the committee” about its requests for security clearance documents. She said “the committee antici-pates a productive response shortly.”

MPs seek subpoenas for US security clearance data

Obama in talks with Netflix over TV seriesAFP

SAN FRANCISCO: Former US President Barack Obama is in negotiations with Netflix about producing a series of shows for the online streaming giant, according to US media reports.

Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama would provide Netflix with exclusive content, with the format and number of shows yet to be determined, The New York Times reported citing people familiar with the matter.

Netflix declined to comment.

As the world’s leading on-demand internet television service, Netflix would offer Obama a global platform to delve into topics that marked his presidency, such as health care, immigration, foreign policy, and fighting climate change.

His wife, Michelle, would also have a stage to explore subjects she was passionate about while first lady, such as nutrition.

The format could include talk-show-style or documen-tary productions. Obama does not plan to use shows to respond directly to Presi-dent Donald Trump or other critics, but instead to show-case inspirational stories, according to the Times.

Netflix said it ended last year with about 117 million users, including more than 110 million paid subscribers.

Florida governor signs school safety billAP

TALLAHASSEE: Flanked by family members of students who were killed during a mass shooting just over three weeks ago, Florida Gov Rick Scott yesterday signed a $400m school safety bill in response to the tragedy that killed 17 people at a high school.

He said the bill, which was written since the shooting, bal-ances “our individual rights with need for public safety.”

“It’s an example to the entire country that government can and has, moved fast.”

The bill isn’t what many of the shooting’s survivors, or the school’s students, wanted - they said it doesn’t go far enough.

It also marks Scott’s break with the National Rifle Associ-ation, and the group’s powerful

lobbyist called the bill “a dis-play of bullying and coercion” that would violate Second Amendment rights and punish law-abiding citizens.

It raises the minimum age to buy rifles from 18 to 21 and creates a waiting period on sales of the weapons.

It also creates a so-called “guardian” program that ena-bles teachers and other school employees in participating dis-tricts to carry handguns if they complete law enforcement training.

“I’m glad however, the plan in this bill is not mandatory,” he said, adding that the program will be up to local officials to implement. “If counties don’t want to do this, they can simply say no.”

He said he’s signing the leg-islation because it makes schools safer.

Call for protest against Venezuelan elections REUTERS

CARACAS: Venezuela’s oppo-sition is calling for a national protest later this month against a “fraudulent” election it says is stacked in favour of President Nicolas Maduro, the first major mobilization since last year’s wave of street protests.A recently-formed umbrella group called the Broad Front For A Free Venezuela, which includes opposition parties as well as students, union activists and university professors, called for the March 17 demonstration at a Thursday gathering.

The country’s main opposi-tion parties, which are boy-cotting the May 20 vote, stopped calling protests last year after four months of street clashes with security forces left more than 120 people dead but failed to force Maduro’s resignation.

“We announce the protest against fraud for March 17,” said Victor Marquez, president of the Association of University Profes-sors, one of the organisations in the umbrella group. He called the May 20 vote an effort to “pre-vent the change of president and the socio-political model that causes misery.”

Most opposition parties are boycotting the election on the grounds that it does not provide conditions for a fair vote.

They note that the two most popular opposition leaders are barred from holding public office, various parties have been outlawed and the election board has consistently favored the ruling Socialist Party.

However, former opposition governor Henri Falcon is run-ning in defiance of the boycott, spurring criticism that he is a Trojan horse for Maduro. Falcon

insists he will win and denies that he is colluding with the government.

Venezuela is suffering an unprecedented crisis as its socialist economic system

collapses, leading hundreds of thousands to flee the country as hyperinflation and chronic shortages leave citizens unable to eat or get medical attention.

Maduro says international media are exaggerating the sit-uation and his country is the victim of an “economic war” led by the opposition with the sup-port of Washington.

Venezuelan opposition presidential candidate, Henri Falcon, of the Avanzada Progresista party, with party’s general-secretary, Luis Romero, before offering a press conference, in Caracas, yesterday.

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Note: Programme is subject to change without prior notice.

LANDMARK

ROXY

AL KHOR

ASIAN TOWN

Death Wish 10:00, 10:30am, 12:00noon, 12:15, 12:45, 2:30, 2:45, 3:00, 4:45, 5:15, 5:30, 7:00, 7:30, 8:15, 9:15, 9:45, 11:00, 11:30pm & 12:00amBlack Panther (2D/Action) 10:00am, 12:45, 3:30, 6:15, 9:00 & 11:45pm The Oddsockeaters (2D) 10:00am, 2:00, 6:00 & 10:00pmBullet Head (2D) 12:00noon, 4:00, 8:00pm & 12:00midnight Hangman (2D) 10:00am, 2:00, 6:00 & 10:00pm Hostile (2D) 12:00noon, 4:00, 8:00pm & 12:00midnight First Born (2D) 10:00am, 2:10, 6:20 & 10:45pm Borg Vs McEncore (2D) 12:00noon, 4:10 & 8:20pm Gnome Night (2D/Animation) 12:00noon, 4:00, 8:00 & 12:00am Game Night (2D/Action) 10:00am, 12:00noon, 2:00, 4:00, 6:00, 8:00, 10:00pm & 12:00midnight Talq Sena3Y (2D/Arabic) 10:00am, 2:00, 6:00 & 10:00pm Okdat Al Kawja 12:00noon, 4:00, 8:00pm & 12:00amBlack Panther (3D IMAX/Action) 11:00am, 2:00, 5:00, 8:00 & 11:00pm

Black Panther (2D/Action) 2:00 & 5:30pm Kaly (2D/Malayalam) 3:00 & 11:15pm Hate Story 4 (2D/Hindi) 3:00 & 11:30pm The Oddsockeaters (2D/Animation) 4:30 & 6:00pm Bullet Head (2D/Thriller) 6:00 & 9:30pm Hangman (2D/Thriller) 7:45 & 11:30pm 3 Storeys (2D/Hindi) 7:30pm First Born (2D/Horror) 9:30pm Borg Vs McEncore (2D/Drama) 8:00pm Hostile (2D/Horror) 10:00pm

ROYAL PLAZA

Black Panther (2D/Action) 2:30, 9:00 & 11:00pm The Oddsockeaters (2D/Animation) 2:30, 4:00, 5:30 & 7:30pm Kaly (2D/Malayalam) 3:00 & 11:15pm Hostile (2D/Horror) 6:00pm Bullet Head (2D/Thriller) 7:00pmDeath Wish (Action) 5:00pm Hangman (2D/Thriller) 7:00 & 11:30pm First Born (2D/Horror) 9:00pm Borg Vs McEncore (2D/Drama) 9:15pm

The Oddsockeaters (2D/Animation) 2:30, 4:15 & 5:45pmBlack Panther (Action) 2:30pm Kaly (2D/Malayalam) 2:30, 5:00 & 11:15pm Death Wish (Action) 5:30pm Bullet Head (2D/Thriller) 7:15 & 11:30pm Borg Vs McEncore (2D/Drama) 7:30 & 9:30pm Hangman (2D/Thriller) 8:00 & 11:15pm Hostile (2D/Horror) 9:45pm First Born (Horror) 9:30pm

Maya Nadhi (Malayalam) 1:00, 4:00, 7:45 & 9:45pm Captain (Malayalam) 1:00, 3:15, 4:00, 7:00 & 10:00pm Kaly (Malayalam) 12:30, 3:15, 6:00, 8:30, 8:45, 11:15 & 11:30pm Hate Story 4 (Hindi) 12:30, 6:00 & 11:15pm

Coco 10:30am, 4:00 & 9:30pmDarkest Hour 10:45am, 3:45 & 8:45pmThe Post 11:45am, 4:30, & 9:15pm Kaly (Malayalam) 12:45, 6:15 & 11:45pm Three Billboards 1:15, 6:15 & 11:15pm Hangman 2:15, 7:00 & 11:45pm

The Oddsockeaters 10:30am, 12:30 & 6:30pm Hangman (Thriller) 10:30am, 12:40, 4:40, 6:50, 9:00 & 11:10pm Gringo (Action) 10:30am, 12:50, 3:10, 5:30 & 10:40pm Gnome Alone (Animation) 2:30 & 4:30pm Black Panther (Action) 2:30 & 4:30pm Dil Jungle (Hindi) 2:50, 7:50 & 10:40pm

Juliette, a lone survivor of an apocalyptic era, fights to survive against hunger, thirst, a broken leg and strange, disturbing creatures that only come out at nighttime.

BULLET HEAD

FLIK MirqabAami 11:50am, 3:10, 6:30 & 9:50pmBlack Panther 11:20am, 12:20, 2:00, 4:40, 6:30, 7:25, 8:05, 9:10pm & 12:00midnight 3D 3:00, 5:40, 8:20 & 11:00pm Bullet Head (Action) 10:35am, 12:35, 2:35, 4:35, 6:35, 8:00, 10:40pm 12:40am Death Wish (Action) 10:00am & 5:25pm Early Man 2:20 & 5:25pm Ferdinand 10:30am & 1:35pm First Born 9:45, 11:45 & 12:15pm Game Night 11:25am, 1:30, 7:20 & 8:35pm Gnome Alone (Animation) 12:45, 3:35, 4:35 & 6:00pm Hang Man 11:30am, 7:40 9:25, 11:30pm Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle 3:05pm Odd Socketers 11:25am, 1:15 & 4:10pm

Yestserday’s answer

DOHA: The Qatar-Finland International School (QFIS) in association with Tulukoota, a volunteer organisation under the Indian Embassy, celebrated the Qatar National Environ-ment Day at the QFIS premises recently.

The volunteers and the Tulukoota association members, along with the student council members of QFIS, planted sap-lings with overwhelming enthu-siasm. Tulukoota donated the fertilizers and the plants for the school.

School’s senior management members were present: Jani saarvo, General Manager; Hanne andTarja; School Principals.

From Tulukoota, Asmath

Ali,President;Ravi Shetty, Patron; Divakar Poojary, Seetharam, Ramchandra Shetty, former presidents and many others were present.

The school and Tulukoota have been taking initiatives and collaborating towards making the campus greener in recent weeks.

QFIS celebrates Qatar environment day

DOHA: Bazm-E-Sadaf Interna-tional organised a beautiful evening for Urdu lovers recently, in which all prominent Urdu scholars of Doha and different organisations’ heads participated.Prominent Fiction Urdu writer Naushaba Khatoon was the Chief Guest and London based Poet Dr. Javed Nadeem Jilani was the Guest of Honour.

Chairman Bazm-E-Sadaf gave memento to the Chief G u e s t a n d described the activities of Bazm-e-Sadaf in 2017 as success and requested the members to con-tinue the same support.

Ahmad pro-posed its mission for 2018 and described the itin-erary of proposed

plan. He said, “our aim is to pro-vide a platform for advance-ment of literary, social and cul-tural activities for the entire world.”

Firdoush Shaikh, Joint Sec-retary Doha Chapter, expressed appreciation to the works Naushaba Khatoon.

The programme was beau-tifully anchored by Ahmad Ash-faque, Programme Director, Bazm-e-Sadaf (Abroad).

Birla Public School honours grandparentsDOHA: Grandparents are fun to be around; not only they spill pearls of wisdom, but also fill our lives with cuddles and kisses, treats and laughs and abundance of love and care.

Yet, another initiative by Birla Public School (BPS) to honour and pay respect to the Grandparents of the Tiny Tots, the first time ever event was organised at the BPS Main Campus.

It was attended by grandpar-ents, some even coming all the way from India, to spend spe-cial t ime with their grandchildren.

A P Sharma, School Prin-cipal, said: “Interest is dearer than the Principle”, wherein the grandchild is the interest the grandparent has earned through their children.

Suja Tharoor the Kinder-garten Coordinator welcomed the gathering.

George Edison, Vice-Prin-cipal, addressed the gathering

with some anecdotes from his own childhood experiences with his grandparents.

It was memory recreated when the grandparents along with their grandchild exhibited their long forgotten talents. For-getting their inhibitions, they sang duets to the tune of ever-green numbers.

Stories which they had told

their own children were recalled as they were lovingly retold to their grandchild. Grandparents were interviewed by the kindergarteners, asking them questions which made them reminiscence their long lost dreams and ambitions as they were busy bringing up their own children. Many sportingly wore their dancing shoes and

tapped away to the best melo-dies of the previous years.

Many a grandparent recalled nostalgic memories of their prime days, the fun filled era, which many said were a taboo to this generation.

One even said, they were living a second innings of their life because they could see the world again through the eyes of their grandchildren.

Together with their grand-child they imprinted a memory on a card, by dipping their palms in paint to create the symbol of LOVE which they knew, they would cherish forever.

Sr Vice-Principal, Shirley Rappai felicitated the event with a vote of thanks, with a beau-tiful message saying, a minute here and there, a kind word now and then, is the only need of a Grandparent, which we owe them, because we are where we are, only because of their unconditional love.

DPS-MIS helps students learn dignity of labourDOHA: “Everyone works together as a community to share ideas and create the find product. When we work together the job is easier and better.”

The students of Nursery at DPS-MIS presented their last

special assembly for the aca-demic year 2017 to 2018 which was on the theme of commu-nity helpers and good manners.

Who are community helpers and how do they help us in the

society? How should we behave at home and school and what are the benefits of good man-ners? These are the thoughts that the children put across through this assembly.

Some of the children came dressed as doctors, nurses, policemen, bakers, teachers, firefighters and spoke of their role in the community and pre-sented a rhyme for the same.

Lastly, the children per-formed a g dance on good man-ners and the advantages of the golden words being said.

The assembly concluded with tokens of gratitude being given by children to the School Principal and the community helpers who selflessly help one another to work as a team.

Bazm-e-Sadaf organises event for Urdu scholars

16 SATURDAY 10 MARCH 2018MORNING BREAK

FAJRSHOROOK

04.33 am05.49 am

ZUHRASR

11.44 am03.08 pm

MAGHRIBISHA

05.42 pm07.12 pm

PRAYER TIMINGS

HIGH TIDE 09:15 – 12:00 LOW TIDE 06:30 – 16:30

Misty at places at first becomes relatively

hot daytime with slight dust at times and

some clouds.

WEATHER TODAY

COURTESY: Qatar Meteorology Department

Minimum Maximum22oC 31oC

Krill a secret weapon in ocean plastics battleAFP

SYDNEY: They might be at the bottom of the food chain, but krill could prove to be a secret weapon in the fight against the growing threat of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans.

New research yesterday showed the tiny zooplankton are capable of digesting microplastics — under five millimetres (0.2 inches) — before excreting them back into the environ-ment in an even smaller form.

Study author Amanda Dawson stumbled on the finding while working on a project involving microbeads — polyethylene plastic often used in cos-metics such as face scrubs — at the Australian Antarctic Division’s krill aquarium to check the toxic effects of pollution. “We realised that krill actu-ally break up plastic, it was amazing,” the researcher from Australia’s Grif-fith University told AFP.

“It’s difficult to know exactly what the implications of this could be, but the theory is that because plastics in the ocean are already degraded and more fragile, they would be even easier for krill to break up.” The problem of plastic pollution is widespread, and

rapidly getting worse.Every year, more than eight mil-

lion tons ends up in the ocean, costing billions of dollars in damage to marine ecosystems and killing an estimated one million sea birds, 100,000 sea mammals and untold numbers of fish, studies have shown.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres last year cited one study that showed plastic could outweigh fish in 2050 if nothing was done.

Australian Antarctic Division krill biologist and study co-author So Kawaguchi said this was the first time scientists had examined microplastics digested by the crustaceans.

Published in Nature Communica-tions, it found the fragments excreted were, on average, 78 percent smaller than the original beads with some reduced by 94 percent.

“It’s a new pathway for microplas-tics to interact with the ecosystem”, Kawaguchi said. He added that the research suggested other zooplankton with similar digestive systems may also be able to break down microplastics.

But Dawson cautioned the finding could also be a double-edged sword, citing the potential for toxins to be

passed down the food chain as the smaller excreted particles became available to organisms that would not be able to ingest larger ones.

“We’ve barely scratched the sur-face and more work is needed,” she

said. Krill are zooplankton inverte-brates that float in huge swarms in oceans all over the world. Barely the size of a paper-clip, they can live for 10 years and are one of the most abun-dant animal species.

Researchers pours krill back into the ocean from the Australian Antarctic Division’s (AAD) krill aquarium in Hobart, Tasmania.

Marvel man Jon Favreau to direct ‘Star Wars’ seriesAFP

LOS ANGELES: Veteran filmmaker Jon Favreau (pictured) is to write and executive produce a live-action series based on the “Star Wars” films for Disney’s forthcoming streaming service, execu-tives said.

Disney, which owns “Star Wars” production house Lucasfilm, has a decade-long history with the 51-year-old, who has directed, produced or appeared in several super-hero movies made by another of the entertain-ment giant’s businesses, Marvel Studios.

“I couldn’t be more excited about Jon coming on board to produce and write for the new direct-to-con-sumer platform,” said Lucasfilm president Kath-leen Kennedy in a statement.

“Jon brings the perfect mix of producing and writing talent, combined with a fluency in the ‘Star Wars’ universe. This series

will allow Jon the chance to work with a diverse group of writers and directors and give Lucasfilm the opportu-nity to build a robust talent base.”

Favreau directed and appeared in “Iron Man,” the film that set the tone and began cultivating the audi-ence for the Marvel Cine-matic Universe series of films, which has made $14.4 billion worldwide.

He also directed and produced the 2016 adapta-tion of “The Jungle Book” and is working on a live-action version of “The Lion King.”

Favreau is no stranger to the “Star Wars” galaxy either, having played roles in both the “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” animated series and in the upcoming “Solo: A Star Wars Story.”

“If you told me at 11 years old that I would be getting to tell stories in the ‘Star Wars’ universe, I wouldn’t have believed you. I can’t wait to embark upon this exciting adventure,” he said. The untitled “Star Wars” live-action series does not yet have a release date but the streaming service is expected to launch by the end of 2019.

Geometric clusters churn over Jupiter’s polesAP

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA: Jupi-ter’s poles are blanketed by geometric clusters of cyclones and its atmosphere is deeper than scientists suspected.

These are just some of the discoveries reported by four international research teams Wednesday, based on observa-tions by NASA’s Juno spacecraft circling Jupiter.

One group uncovered a con-stellation of nine cyclones over Jupiter’s north pole and six over the south pole. The wind speeds exceed Category 5 hurricane strength in places, reaching 220 mph (350 kph).

The massive storms haven’t changed position much - or merged - since observations began.

Team leader Alberto Adriani of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome was sur-prised to find such complex structures. Scientists thought they’d find something similar to the six-sided cloud system spin-ning over Saturn’s north pole.

“We were wrong about it,” he said via email.

Instead, they found an octagon-shaped grouping over the north pole, with eight

cyclones surrounding one in the middle, and a pentagon-shaped batch over the south pole. Each cyclone measures several thou-sand miles (kilometers) across.

The fifth planet from our sun, gas giant Jupiter is by far the largest planet in our solar system. Launched in 2011, Juno has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016 and peering beneath the thick ammonia clouds. It’s only the second spacecraft to circle the planet; Galileo did it from 1995 to 2003.

Another of the studies in this week’s journal Nature finds that Jupiter’s crisscrossing east-west jet streams actually penetrate thousands of miles (kilometers) beneath the visible cloud tops.

Refined measurements of Jupi-ter’s uneven gravity field ena-bled the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Yohai Kaspi in Rehovot, Israel, and his col-leagues to calculate the depth of the jet streams at about 3,000 kilometers, or 1,865 miles.

“The result is a surprise because this indicates that the atmosphere of Jupiter is massive and extends much deeper than we previously expected,” Kaspi said in an email.

By better understanding these strong jet streams and the gravity field, Kaspi said scien-tists can better decipher the core of Jupiter. A similar situation may be occurring at other big gas planets like Saturn, where the

atmosphere could be even deeper than Jupi-ter’s, he said.

Jonathan Fortney of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the research, called t h e f i n d i n g s “extremely robust” and said they show “high-precision measure-ments of a planet’s gravitational field can be used to answer questions of deep

planetary dynamics.”Using similar techniques,

Juno could help scientists deter-mine the depth of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a colossal swirling storm, Fortney said in a com-panion article in the journal.

Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Labo-ratory researchers Glenn Orton and Fachreddin Tabataba-Vakili, who both took part in the cyclone study, said all these new discoveries “show Jupiter from a new perspective” unseen before Juno.

“We cannot say how many mysteries are left to uncover,” they wrote in an email. “We are already finding way more fasci-nating results than we ever expected!”

IANS

New YORK: False news on poli-tics travel farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth on Twitter because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it, finds a study led by three Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scholars.

Social media has created a boom in the spread of informa-tion, although little is known about how it has facilitated the spread of false information.

The researchers also settled on the term “false news” as their object of study, as distinct from the now ubiquitous term “fake news”, which involves multiple broad meanings.

“Twitter became our main source of news,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a postdoctoral stu-dent at the varsity.

But in the aftermath of the tragic events, “I realised that ... a good chunk of what I was reading on social media was rumours; it was false news”, Vosoughi added.

To understand the mecha-nism detailed in the journal Sci-ence, the team analysed roughly 126,000 stories

tweeted by three million people more than 4.5 million times.

Falsehoods were 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than the truth. It also takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people.

When it comes to Twitter’s “cascades”, or unbroken retweet chains, falsehoods reach a cascade depth of 10 about 20 times faster than facts.

“We found that falsehood defuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude,” explained Sinan Aral, Professor at the MIT.

“False news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information,” Aral added, explaining why people tend to share more false news.

It is because people can gain attention by being the first to share a previously unknown (but possibly false) information. Thus, “people who share novel information are seen as being in the know”, Aral said.

A view of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

‘False news travel faster than truth on Twitter’

John Sulston, who decoded human genome, diesAP

LONDON: John Sulston (pictured), a Nobel Prize-winning British scientist who helped decode the human genome, has died. He was 75.

The Wellcome Sanger Insti-tute, the successor to the cut-ting-edge genomic research center he once founded and directed, confirmed Friday that Sulston had died but did not say when or give the cause of death.

Sulston shared the prize in 2002 for his contribution to work unraveling how genes control cell division. He traced the adult nematode worm, C. elegans, to decipher how cells divide and create something new - findings the Sanger Insti-tute said were key to under-standing how cancers develop.

“He had a burning and unrelenting commitment to making genome data open to all without restriction and his leadership in this regard is in large part responsible for the free access now enjoyed,” Mike Stratton, the institute’s director,

said. “We all feel the loss today of a great scientific visionary and leader who made historic, landmark contributions to knowledge of the living world, and established a mission and agenda that defines 21st cen-tury science,” Stratton added.

Sulston was fascinated from an early age with the mechan-ical workings of organisms.

He graduated from Cam-bridge University in 1963, and did postdoctoral research in California before joining Sydney Brenner’s group at the Cambridge University molec-ular biology lab, where the structure of DNA was first iden-tified. They published the gene map of the nematode worm in 1990.In 1992, Sulston was appointed director of the Sanger Center, established at Cambridge to spearhead the British contribution to the inter-national Human Genome Project.