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Palestinians take cover from a water cannon being fired by Israeli security forces during clashes at the Qalandia checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem, yesterday, as Israeli authorities banned men under 45 from accessing the Al Aqsa Mosque compound for Friday prayers.

Clashes in Jerusalem

SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016 • 27 RAMADAN 1437 • Volume 21 • Number 6845 thepeninsulaqatar @peninsulaqatar @peninsula_qatar

RAMADAN

TIMING

Today’s Iftar 6 : 31 pmTomorrow’s Imsak 3 : 08 am

QUARTER FINAL

MATCH

Germany vs Italy 10pm

Emir greets Governor

General of Canada

DOHA: Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani has sent a cable of congratulations to the Governor General of Canada, David Lloyd Johnston, on the occa-sion of his country’s National Day.

Muslims urged to look

for Shawwal moon

DOHA: The Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs has urged all Muslims to look for the cres-cent moon (Shawwal) on Monday evening.

Anyone who sees the moon is advised to report it to the Moon Sighting Committee at the head-quarters of the Ministry located at Tower area and give testimony before the panel.

The committee will hold a meeting on the same day after Maghrib (sunset) prayer to announce Eid day, Qatar News Agency reports.

AP

UNITED NATIONS: International mediators trying to promote Mideast peace warned in a highly antici-pated report yesterday that Israel’s settlement expansion is eroding the viability of a Palestinian state and raises “legitimate questions” about its commitment to a two-state solution.

Without urgent action, the medi-ators warned that “a one-state reality of perpetual occupation and conflict” will become entrenched which “is incompatible with realis-ing the national aspirations of both peoples.”

The Quartet, which is supposed to guide the two parties to peace, had been sidelined in peacemaking

efforts which the United States has led. But following Secretary of State John Kerry’s failure to broker a peace agreement in April 2014, the Quartet is now trying to take on a bigger role and give efforts to reach a peace deal much broader international backing.

In a statement released with the report, the Quartet invited Israel and the Palestinians “to engage with it on implementing its recommenda-tions and creating the conditions for the resumption of meaningful nego-tiations that resolve all final status issues.” Palestinian official Saeb Erekat said the report on first read-ing “does not meet our expectations” because “it attempts to equalise responsibilities between a people under occupation and a foreign mil-itary occupier.”

→ See also page 4

By Fazeena Saleem

The Peninsula

DOHA: Airfares to several destina-tions from Doha has surged by 80 to 100 percent due to Eid rush and beginning of summer vacation.

Air tickets have soared for des-tinations like Colombo, Cairo and the Indian cities of Chennai, Mum-bai and Kozhikode, said industry sources.

Most Asian expatriates prefer to spend the Eid holidays and school summer breaks in their native coun-tries while some travel to Europe and the Far East.

Although this is not a peak sea-son to Katmandu and Manila, the airfares have seen a slight increase than usual days. Nepal peak season is starting from first week of Octo-ber to end of September. Manila’s peak season is in December and January.

The peak season in Doha started around June 25 and will be until Sep-tember 15 — from the day school vacation starts till the end of Eid Al Adha in September. Within this peak season, the first week of July sees the highest demand.

According to industry sources, f lights to destinations like the Egyptian capital Cairo, Sri Lankan capital Colombo, and South Indian cities, including Chennai and cit-ies in Kerala, would cost 75 percent to 100 percent more than the nor-mal fare.

A round trip to Cairo on regular days would cost QR800, it will be QR1,350 to Colombo, and a similar trip to Kozhikode will cost QR1,400 and it will be QR1,250. A return trip to Katmandu would cost approxi-mately QR1,300 and one to Manila QR2,200.

There is around 30 percent fall in ticket fares during off season compared to last year, said indus-try sources.

→ Continued on page 2

QNA

DOHA: A major milestone has been achieved at Khalifa International Stadium with the installation of the last segment of the venue’s emblem-atic arch. The achievement marks the start of the countdown towards the completion of the renovation and upgrade works at the stadium as a proposed host venue for the

2022 FIFA World Cup Qatar matches through to the quarterfinals.

The last segment to be placed was a 22-metre piece installed at a height of 120 metres. However, prior to lifting, the segment was tilted to the required angle at the ground level using a smaller crane. Other major elements such as bottom, top com-pression rings and column segments were pre-assembled at site also using smaller crawler cranes.

“The successful installation of the

last piece of the arch at Khalifa Inter-national Stadium shows that progress is well underway with the renovation of the stadium. The next step will be the installation of the roof. We have been able to achieve this thanks to the productive cooperation of all parties involved,” Mansoor Al Muhannadi, Khalifa International Stadium project manager at Aspire Zone Foundation, said.

Mohemed Elamin Ahmed, Supreme Committee for Delivery

and Legacy (SC) project manager for Khalifa International Stadium and Al Bayt Stadium in Al Khor City said the milestone will allow the start of the installation of the roof membrane.

All materials used were made of steel and fabricated locally at Ever-sendai’s factories in Qatar and in UAE. Due to the size of all the pieces to be assembled in to the top ring of the arch, the materials were delivered on site by 18-metre trailers and unloaded using 100- and 250-tonne mobile cranes.

Airfares soar amid Eid and vacation rush

By Sidi Mohamed

The Peninsula

DOHA: The cases of stunt driving and drifting see huge spike during the Holy Ramadan. These drifters and stunt drivers usually come out on roads at night between 3am and 7am, creating nuisance and noise for people in residential area.

Many people have complained about drifting and have asked police to increase campaigns and patrols against such drivers who put lives of other drivers at risk.

“The cases of stunt driving and

drifting rise during Ramadan. We do not have any specific campaign for such drivers but we keep check on them by regular campaigns,” Major Jaber Mohamed Rashid Odaiba, Assistant Director of Media & Traf-fic Awareness Department, told The Peninsula.

“Such drivers can be seen in the streets between 3am before Fajr prayer till 7am. This is the time when people take rest at their homes. They should respect oth-ers and should not create problem for people who are fasting. Eve-ryone can see the marks of their drifting tyres in intersections and

roundabout,” he added“The month of Ramadan is a time

for calmness. People need to take rest at their homes, but these riders cre-ating such sounds disturb our sleep at night,” said a resident in Al Wakra. “The authorities should have a spe-cific campaign to stop this nuisance of stunt driving,” he said.

The police patrols are in the street to monitor such things espe-cially in residential areas, and anyone caught drifting doing such prohibited things will be violated depending on the act.

→ Continued on page 2

Stunt drivers disturb residents

Qatar 2022: Arch installed at Khalifa Stadium

Mediators question Israel’s commitment to two states

QNA

DOHA: Qatar has strongly con-demned the criminal bombing which targeted Bahrain’s East Al Eker killing a woman and injur-ing three children.

The Foreign Ministry, in a state-ment, said while Qatar condemns this criminal act which aims to ter-rorise people contrary to all human values, principles and teachings of Islamic Shariah, it emphasises its solidarity and keenness on standing alongside brothers in the Kingdom of Bahrain. The statement expressed government’s sincere condolences to the government and the broth-erly people of Bahrain and to the families of the victims.

Airfares have surged by 80 to 100 percent due to Eid rush as most Asian expatriates prefer to spend Eid holidays and school summer breaks in their native countries.

Skid marks are seen on a new road in Doha. Pic: Abdul B / The Peninsula

Qatar condemns bomb attack in Bahrain

IS takes hostages in Dhaka cafeDHAKA: Gunmen stormed a res-taurant popular with expatriates in the diplomatic quarter of the Bang-ladeshi capital last night and took about 20 people hostage, includ-ing several foreigners, in an attack claimed by Islamic State.

→ See also page 5

Faithful attending the last Jumua prayer of the Holy moth of Ramadan at the crowded Abu Bakr Al Siddiq Masjid in Doha. Pic: Baher A/The Peninsula

Last Friday in Ramadan

HOME02 SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

Deputy Emir sends

greetings to Governor

General of Canada

DOHA: The Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani has sent a cable of congrat-ulations to the Governor General of Canada, David Lloyd Johnston, on the occasion of his country’s National Day.

The Prime Minister and Inte-rior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani has sent a similar cable to the Gover-nor General of Canada, David Lloyd Johnston, on the occasion of his country’s National Day.

By Mohammad Shoeb

The Peninsula

DOHA: The general monthly Producer Price Index (PPI) of Qatar’s Industrial Sector for April 2016 was estimated at 43.8 points, showing an increase of 1.6 percent compared to the PPI index of March this year, data released by the Ministry of Development Planning and Sta-tistics show.

The surge in the index was largely due to improvement in the performance of “Mining” sector (which includes crude oil and natural gas), and “Manufacturing” sector.

The PPI, like other price indices, measures the average changes in the prices of industrial goods received by domestic producers for their output. The index covers goods relating to Min-ing sector (weight:72.7 percent), Electricity and Water (0.5 percent) , and Manufacturing sec-tor (weight:26.8 percent).

The Mining sector PPI of April, 2016 showed a rise of 1.1 percent compared the PPI of March

2016. The rise in the index was primarily attributed to the increased in prices of “Crude petroleum and natural gas” by 1.3 percent.

However, on year-on-year (Y-o-Y) basis, the PPI of April 2016, witnessed a significant fall of 35.2 percent compared to the counter-part index of April 2015.

Manufacturing sector index registered an increase of 2.4 percent in April, 2016, compared to the previous month’s (March). Increase in prices were noticed in “Other chemical prod-ucts” by 5.2 percent, “Refined Petroleum Products” by 3.9 percent, “Rubber and plas-tics products” by 3.1 percent, “Beverages” by 1.1 percent, ”Basic Metals” by 0.9 percent, “Juices” by 0.4 percent, “Basic chemicals” and “Cement and other non-metallic products” by 0.3 per-cent each.

However, a decline in prices were seen in “Dairy products” by 0.6 percent and “Grain mill products” by 0.2 percent. The prices of “Paper and Paper Products” remained unchanged.

Comparing with the index of counterpart in the previous year (April 2015), “Manufacturing” PPI of April, 2016 showed a sharp decline of 17.9 percent. The major groups which explain this price fall were “Refined Petroleum Products” by 22.6 percent, ”Basic Metals” by 19.7 percent, “Basic chemicals” by 10.9 percent, “Dairy prod-ucts” by 1.8 percent. However, prices rise were also noticed in “Juices” by 10.1 percent, “Cement and other non-metallic products” by 8.1 per-cent, “Other chemical products” by 4 percent, and “Beverages” by 1.7 percent.

The PPI of Electricity and Water showed a decrease of 1.6 percent compared to March 2016, resulting from a decline in “Water” by 4.8 percent, while a rise in “Electricity” by 0.8 percent. When compared the PPI of April, 2016 to the PPI of April, 2015 showed an increase (Y-o-Y) of 2.1 percent, resulting from the price rising in “Water” by 2.7 percent and “Electric-ity” by 1.5 percent.

Qatar’s industrial sector indexincreases in April

→ Continued from page 1

However, during peak season (July) , fares are almost double of aver-age rate and a round trip to Cairo will cost QR1,500, to Colombo QR2,500, to Kozhikode QR2,950 and QR2,600 to Mumbai.

Even budget airlines’ fares have jumped by 75 percent and flights to most south Asian destinations are fully booked. Industry experts say that airfares increase during the holiday season mainly because airlines make changes based on demand.

“Airlines remove the lowest price from the system, so obviously the fare begins at a higher price. It is a very common practice among

airlines,” said a source.Meanwhile, European cities like

London and Paris remain the favour-ite holiday destinations of most Qataris while Dubai is the main shop-ping stop, according to travel industry experts. Fares to these destinations have also gone up. “Europe remains the favourite Eid holiday destination for Qataris, some have a special pref-erence for London. There are several others who travel to Dubai for shop-ping during Ramadan,” said a travel consultant.

A return trip to London in econ-omy class would cost about QR4000, and the fare can go up to QR7000. A similar trip to Paris would cost a simi-lar amount. A return trip to Dubai can

cost between QR1,580 and QR3,200.However, travel agents say that

the airfares are subject to fluctua-tion depending on the date of travel.

“Air ticket prices are always high when it comes to peak season. But, there is no fare as the current price. It always depends on the date of travel and date of purchase,” said a another travel adviser.

Passengers who booked tickets before three or four months, have a comparatively affordable aver-age fare. “For example if a passenger booked tickets by end of March to travel during the first week of July, he would have paid around 40 per-cent less than the present ticket fare,” he said.

→ Continued from page 1The violations vary from seizure of the vehicle for one to three months,

and some cases are transferred to the public prosecution if the motorist has repeated the violations multiple times or if he has hurt or damaged the public property. Erring motorists are fined around QR3,000 depending on the violations type.

“If the motorist has exposed people’s life’s to danger, his vehicle will be booked and will be transfer to public prosecution,” said Major Odaiba.

He said drifting by cars is more dangerous than drifting in bikes because of comparatively bigger size and also the noise from cars is more loud than that of bikes.

The problem of dealing with such people that they move to another area, creating annoying sounds when we start a patrolling in that area.

The Ministry of Interior urged families to take care of children, who tend to play outside their home when parents are busy praying or preparing for Eid. Playing outside on the roads late at nights will expose them to traffic accidents due to harsh driving.

Parents should only allow their children to play in designated areas and not play on internal roads in residential area. The ministry also advised motorists to be cautious on its official facebook account./

QTA inspects Ramadan tents and hotelsDOHA: Throughout the holy month of Ramadan, a specially trained team from Qatar Tour-ism Authority (QTA)paid visits to Ramadan tents, hotels and other tourism establishments to assess quality of their tourism experi-ence offering and compliance with QTA’s guidelines for the holy month. Thirteen venues were issued citations for violationsof these guidelines.

During their visits,inspectors ensured hotel and tourism estab-lishments abided by the guidelines set for Ramadan event market-ing efforts. QTA representatives also evaluatedthe quality of food, the diversity of dishes and their presentations at Iftar and Suhour. Décor, lighting and qual-ity of Ramadan activitiesas well as how heavily popular local dishes feature on the menu was also surveyed.

Checks to ensure that all Ramadan activities held in hotel establishments had received the required licensing from govern-ment authorities and adherence to QTA’s instructions were also per-formed by the team.

The Peninsula

DOHA: On the occasion of Ramadan Qatar Fuel (WOQOD) continued the CSR Project named ‘Gratitude for Gas Station Attendants. This was in cooperation with group of volun-teered ladies and with members of Woqod PR team.

The project aimed to show Grat-itude for gas station attendants in Qatar, for their hard work and ded-ication by gifting them with a small bag of essential items. Primarily the campaign targeted fuel pump attend-ants and this year efforts were made to reach attendants of all gas stations in Qatar.

A gratitude bag with essential items like T-shirt and a cap, packaged disposable razor, deodorant, tooth-brush and toothpaste, small hand towel, antibacterial soap and sham-poo, hair comb, sun protection lotion and a sunglass were packed with a “Thank You” card written in English and Hindi that says “Dear Brother, Please accept our humble gift in appreciation for all the hard work you do for us and for our country, Best Regards from WOQOD team”.

The campaign aims to encour-age public during the holy month of Ramadan to distribute gratitude bags as gifts with basic essential items to

attendants at petrol stations. We urge people to come forward in the ‘Gratitude for Gas Station Attend-ants’ project by filling reusable bag with essential items, while hand-ing over, the public is encouraged to post pictures on Instagram and other social media channels with the hashtag #Gratitude For Gas Sta-tion Attendants, to raise awareness

and encourage good deeds. Other Ramadan CSR initiatives of

Qatar Fuel (WOQOD) included distri-bution of 4000 Iftar boxes through WOQOD petrol stations, sponsor-ing of Charity Iftar – RAF Mobile Iftar, distribution of Garangao bags through WOQOD petrol stations and donation to Qatar Foundation for Eld-erly Care.

Woqod gives gift bags to station attendants

Woqod officials with gift bags.

Families urged to take care of kids Fares of budget airlines jump by 75%

The Peninsula

DOHA: World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) facilitated a collab-oration between Libraries Without Borders and eduTechnoz to help Syr-ian children in Jordan benefit from Arabic lessons.

The two organizations, which are supported by the WISE Accelerator Program, are now able to provide technologically innovative materi-als for Syrian children in Jordan to learn Arabic and gain increased lit-eracy skills.

Libraries Without Borders developed the Ideas Box, a porta-ble multi-media toolkit facilitating and strengthening access to non-formal education for vulnerable communities such as refugees; while eduTechnoz offered the game-based educational online resources for chil-dren to learn Arabic.

The collaboration facilitated by WISE, part of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Commu-nity Development (QF), means the resources of both companies have now been deployed in Jordan: one

in Azraq refugee camp and one in a community center in Hashmi Shamali, Amman. Since the end of March 2016, children aged 6-10 have been able to access eduTech-noz educational content, monitor their progress and collect badges through the Ideas Box.

Long-term crises, such as the conflict in Syria, have put the educa-tion of entire generations in danger, diminishing human capital crucial to rebuilding a war-torn country.

Children who experience vio-lence and uncertainty at a young age must be given the means to obtain a sense of normality and happiness in their lives. For these reasons, innova-tive, game-based education caters to both the educational and emotional needs of refugee children.

Libraries Without Borders and eduTechnoz decided to work together after their representatives met within the framework of the WISE Accelerator Program, which offers opportunities for innovative educa-tion projects to scale-up and extend their services. The WISE facilitated project is now generating a mean-ingful impact for the most vulnerable children in need of help.

Giving children, especially those living in refugee camps or war zones, an opportunity to learn Arabic has been a priority for eduTechnoz, but the organization has faced challenges in providing proper tablets and a reli-able Internet connection.

Partnering with Libraries With-out Borders provided a unique chance to bring children tangi-ble education opportunities and to better serve disadvantaged and vulnerable children in Jordanian refugee camps and eventually elsewhere in the region. This part-nership combines the innovative Arab learning pedagogy of eduTechnoz with access to the latest technologies avail-able on the education market provided by the Ideas Box.

“This partnership would not be possible if it was not for the Accel-erator Program organized by WISE. Thanks to such an opportunity, eduTechnoz and Libraries Without borders found a way to combine their expertise and learn from each other through building a collabora-tion that will support Syrian refugee children’s educational experiences,” said eduTechnoz Founder and CEO Diana Al Dajani.

WISE creates learning opportunities for Syrian refugees in Jordan

Strong winds likely todayDOHA: Residents in Qatar are likely to face windy day today as Qatar Meteor-ology Department has forecast strong wind across the country. Strong winds will lead to poor visibility and blow-ing of dust. “ Strong wind over all areas and poor visibility is expected at places due to blowing dust,” said the Depart-ment in a weather forecast for today.

The Department, on Wednesday, had issued a statement forecasting a windy days on Saturday and Sunday due to the extension of Indian mon-soon seasonal low over the region.

The Department has urged all residents to be cautious and to avoid ven-turing into sea during periods of strong winds as well as to follow latest updates.

The surge in the index was largely due to improvement in the performance of Mining and Manufacturing sectors, data released by the Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics show.

03SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

RamadanRamadanThoughts Thoughts

By Habib Alli

Oliver Goldsmith, the Irish poet, once said: “Where wealth accumulates, men decay.” Phi-lanthropy is more than just a monetary gift-love of mankind shown by practical kindness and

helpfulness to humanity is its dictionary meaning.Zakat is the third pillar of Islam; it is hard

to translate the word or find its closest mean-ing in English. In Arabic, the word is derived from the root, “z-k-a.” The verb, zakka, “to purify,” also means, “to make something grow and develop.” Zakat is commonly known as “almsgiving.” This translation is not accurate if we consider the philosophy behind that pillar. There is a difference between almsgiv-ing-Sadaqa-and Zakat. Sadaqa is a voluntary service of any kind that is given from one per-son to another.

The Blessed Prophet (peace be upon him) encourages everyone to give sadaqa, also known as khairat. A smile, words of sympathy, even giving half a date can be sadaqa. Whatever the words-differentiated for juristic reasons-the spirit is to alleviate humanity’s sufferings. Such was the example of Caliph ‘Umar, who sat watching children play after he had per-sonally brought food to their poor family. Yet how blessed and reminiscent is the Western Social Security system that there is a sense of monetary security, however lacking, for people akin to zakat recipients: the sickly, unemployed, invalid, divorcee, the disaster struck victim, etc. Aren’t they a breakdown of the Quranic miskeen and fuqara-the destitute and needy?

Alms are for the poor and the needy, and those employed to ad- minister the (funds); for those whose hearts have been (recently) rec-onciled (to Truth) ;for those in bondage and in debt; in the cause of Allah; and for the way-farer: (thus is it) ordained by Allah, and Allah

is full of knowledge arid wisdom. (9:60)Have you thought how intertwined char-

ity is in our life? E-mails begging for orphans of a disaster; money needed for a new coun-cilor’s campaign; help wanted in building a new mosque or school; the fundraising walk for the homeless; chocolate sales for support of a school; remembering a poor relative back home and wanting our fitra and zakat counted in the Ramadan drive for the homeless locally. It goes like the swirling waterway of a deep brook. It touches different soils of need and embellishes various roots of humanity as it meanders into the wide ocean of Allah’s mercy harvested in the Hereafter.

The parable of those who spend their sub-stance in the way of Allah is that of a grain of corn: it grows seven ears and each ear Hath 100 grains. Allah gives manifold increase to whom He pleased: And Allah cares for all and He knows all things. (2:261)

Zakat is the right of the needy. By selfishly leaving it sitting in your account to grow, you would only cause self-ruin and malaise.

And in their wealth and possessions (was remembered) the right of the (needy), him who asked, and him who (for some reason) was prevented (from asking). (51:19)

Purifying our souls from greed and check-ing our humanity is what giving zakat every year does-calculated best by spending some of it throughout the year on appropriate projects. The tax deductibles are just a returned gift and do not rob us of our re- wards. If you wish to give that away too, such uninhibited generos-ity will smack of true Companion-style giving. They gave until it hurt. Yet they were unhurt.

Let the man of means spend according to

his means: and the man whose resources are restricted, let him spend according to what Allah has given him. Allah puts no burden on any person beyond what He has given him. After a difficulty, Allah will soon grant relief. (65:7)

Consequence for not-paying ZakatThe person who has some wealth and still

does not take zakat from it is regarded as a great sinner in the sight of Allah and will be severely punished on the Day of Judgment. According to hadith, “The person who possesses gold and silver and does not give zakat for it, then on the Day of Judgment, slabs of fire will be made for him. These slabs will be heated in the fire of Hell and his sides, forehead and back will be branded with them. When these slabs become cool, they will be re-heated and the entire process will be repeated.” Also, “The person who has been given wealth by Allah and despite this does not give zakat for it, then on the Day of Judgment, this wealth of his will be turned into a huge poison-ous snake that will encircle his neck. It will then tear the sides of his mouth apart and tell him: ‘I am your wealth and I am your treasures.’ ”

We seek refuge in Allah. Let us not fear man and ensure that our debts and taxes are never missed, nor do we ever forget God for His small kindnesses to His creatures!

Islam considers rich people’s proper-ties not absolutely theirs. Unless they pay the rights of the poor, Zakat, they are considered transgressors. Zakat is also a yearly reminder that what we earn and what we have is not really ours. It is a gift from God. The reward is such that an entire economic system rests on it-balancing the haves and have-nots with modest cognizance of one another’s rights and

natures-not like the monsters that consume everything in the name of globalization or the selfish who relegate us to food stamps in the name of anti-capitalism.

Allah has blighted usury and made almsgiving fruitful. (2:276)

Sadaqa is for everyone. During Ramadan, for example, Muslims may send Ramadan hampers to local food banks. Hunger has no religion. Zakat was originally a tax on pos-sessions with the proceeds going mostly to aid the poor (though the money might also be spent for other purposes, such as ransom-ing captives of war). The word, however, now more commonly refers to almsgiving. Are we aware of our own local needs before we trol-ley off huge sums to favourite faraway spots?

Although in the past Islamic States would have organized their collection and disburse-ment, today, in the absence of such ideal situations (and allowing that some spurious organizations send their administrative over-heads sky high, forgetting the real needy), we should revamp our efforts to see that zakat carries with it the true emblem of voluntary philanthropy. Say: “My Lord hath commanded justice; and that ye set your whole selves (to Him) at every time and place of prayer, and call upon Him, making your devotion sincere as in His sight: such as He created you in the beginning, so shall ye return.” (7:29)

It is nearly impossible for every individ-ual, from the filthy rich to the common man, to pay zakat in the prescribed way and for it to reach the deserving people. Meanwhile, an increasing number of Muslims would be fall-ing below the poverty line every day.

Economics professor Timur Kuran takes

full advantage of our flip-flop approach toward Islam. He writes in his book Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism ” (2004): The system has 1 mil-lion beneficiaries, which represent about 10 percent of the Pakistanis situated below the country’s poverty line. An official report notes in this connection that in its eight years of operation, Pakistan’s state-administered zakat system has had little visible impact on inequality. There has been no noticeable decline, it says, in the number of beggars and no discernible alleviation of poverty. Under the circumstances, people are losing faith not only in the system, but also in the belief that Islam offers a better economic order.

The Caliph ‘Umar, on seeing an old Jew begging, brought him to his house. He gave him some cash and told the treasury officer that such people who could not earn their liv-ing should be granted stipends from the public treasury. Once, seeing some non-Muslim lep-ers on his way back from a journey, he issued orders that they should be provided mainte-nance from state funds. In a letter addressed to Adi ibn Artah, ‘Umar ibn ‘Abdal- ‘Aziz wrote: “Be kind towards dhimmis (free non-Mus-lim sub- ject of the Islamic State). If you find some of them old or help- less, give mainte-nance to them.”

So keep your duty to Allah and fear Him as much as you can; listen and obey; and spend in charity, that is better for your- selves. And whosoever is saved from his own covetous-ness, and then they are the successful ones. (64:16)

www.islamcity.org

Philanthropy and Zakat

BY MUHAMMAD FATHI

The most blessed time of Ramadan has come. The showers of mercy and blessings are heaped on the believers during the last ten nights of Ramadan.

It is time to put more effort and be more ded-icated. It is a golden chance for those who were careless in the past days of Ramadan to make up and get a great share of the Ram-adan’s reward. And it is a long awaited season for the devoted to get closer to Allah and to ascend in higher ranks of dedication. Fol-lowing is a collection of the Prophet’s ahadith that shed light on the privileges of these nights and how the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) spent them:

Aishah (May Allah be pleased with her) reported: When the last ten nights (of Ram-adan) would begin, the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) would keep awake at night (for prayer and devo-tion), awaken his family and prepare himself to be more diligent in worship. (Bukhari and Muslim)

Aishah also reported: The Messenger of Allah (PBUH) used to strive more in worship during Ramadan than he strove in any other time of the year; and he would devote him-self more (in the worship of Allah) in the last ten nights of Ramadan than he strove in ear-lier part of the month. (Muslim).

NIGHT OF REWARD AND GOODNESS Anas ibn Malik (may Allah be pleased with

him) reported that one year, when the month of Ramadan started, the Prophet said: This month (of Ramadan) has begun and there is a night in it better than one thousand month. So, any one deprived of its blessings is actually deprived of all goodness. Indeed, He is truly deprived who is kept away from its good. (Ibn Majah and authenticated by Albani)

IN SEARCH OF LAYLAT AL QADR Aishah (May Allah be pleased with her)

reported: The Messenger of Allah (PBUH) said: “Seek Lailat Al Qadr (Night of Decree) in the odd nights out of the last ten nights of Ram-adan.’’ (Bukhari)

I’TIKAF: THE SPIRITUAL RECHARGE Aishah (May Allah be pleased with her)

reported: The Prophet (PBUH) used to engage himself in I’tikaf (seclusion for worship in the mosque) during the last ten nights of Ram-adan till he passed away; his wives followed this practice after him. (Bukhari and Muslim)

Abu Hurairah (May Allah be pleased with him) reported: The Prophet (PBUH) used to observe I’tikaf every year (during Ram-adan) for ten days; in the year in which he passed away, he observed I’tikaf for twenty days. (Bukhari)

WHAT TO DO IN LAYLAT ALQADRAbu Hurairah (May Allah be pleased

with him) reported: The Prophet (PBUH) said: “Whosoever performs Qiyam (night vigil prayer) during Lailat Al Qadr (Night of Decree), with faith and being hopeful of Allah’s reward, will have his former sins for-given.’’ (Bukhari and Muslim)

Aishah (May Allah be pleased with her) reported: I asked: “O Messenger of Allah! If I realise Lailat Al Qadr (The Night of Decree), what should I supplicate in it?’’ The Prophet replied, “You should supplicate: Allahumma innaka afuwun, tuhibbul afwa, fa’fu anni (O Allah, You are Most Forgiving, and You love forgiveness; so forgive me).’’ (Tirmidhi)

Aishah (May Allah be pleased with her) reported: The Prophet kept standing in prayer so long that the skin of his feet would crack. I asked him: “Why do you do this, while you have been forgiven of your former and latter sins?’’ He said, “Should I not be a grateful serv-ant of Allah?’’ (Bukhari and Muslim)

Abu Hurairah (May Allah be pleased with him) reported: The Messenger of Allah (PBUH) said, “The best month for observing fasting after Ramadan is Allah’s month of Muharram, and the best Salah after the prescribed Salah is Salah at night.’’ (Muslim)

FAMILY DEVOTION Abu Hurairah (May Allah be pleased

with him) reported: The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) said: “May Allah show mercy to a man who gets up dur-ing the night and performs Salat, awakens

his wife to pray and if she refuses, he sprin-kles water on her face (to make her get up). May Allah show mercy to a woman who gets up during the night and performs Salat, awak-ens her husband for the same purpose; and if he refuses, she sprinkles water on his face.’’ (Abu Dawud)

Abu Sa’id and Abu Hurairah (May Allah be pleased with them) reported: The Mes-senger of Allah (PBUH) said, “When a man awakens his wife during the night and they both perform two-Rak`ah prayer together, they

are recorded among the men and women who celebrate remembrance of Allah.’’ (Abu Dawud)

SEIZING THE VALUABLE MOMENT Jabir (May Allah be pleased with him)

reported: I heard the Messenger of Allah (PBUH) saying, “Every night there is a spe-cial time during which whatever a Muslim asks Allah of any good relating to this life or the Hereafter, it will be granted to him; and this moment comes every night.’’ (Muslim).

www.onislam.net

The excellence of prayer at night

Islam considers rich people’s properties not absolutely theirs. Unless they pay the rights of the poor, Zakat, they are considered transgressors. Zakat is also a yearly reminder that what we earn and what we have is not really ours. It is a gift from God.

MIDDLE EAST04 SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

Reuters

UNITED NATIONS: Israel should stop building settlements, denying Palestinian development and desig-nating land for exclusive Israeli use that Palestinians seek for a future state, the Middle East peace “Quar-tet” recommended in a draft of an eagerly awaited report.

The draft report by the Quar-tet countries sponsoring the stalled peace process — the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations — said the Israeli pol-icy “is steadily eroding the viability of the two state solution”.

“This raises legitimate questions about Israel’s long term intentions which are compounded by the state-ments of some Israeli ministers that there should never be a Palestinian state,” according to the draft report.

The day before Israeli elections in March 2015, Israeli Prime Minis-ter Benjamin Netanyahu said there would never be a Palestinian state on his watch, only to reverse him-self days later and recommit to the objective of a two-state solution.

UN Middle East envoy Nickolay Mladenov briefed the UN Security

Council on Thursday on the Quar-tet report, which he told reporters had been submitted to the Quartet members for final approval and was likely to be released soon.

Diplomatic sources said the report carries significant politi-cal weight as it has the backing of close Israeli ally the United States, which has struggled to revive the peace talks amid tensions between Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama. Relations between the right-ist Israeli leader and the Democratic president have yet to recover from their bitter feud over last year’s US-led international nuclear deal with Israel’s foe Iran.

The draft report said Israel had taken for its exclusive use some 70 percent of Area C, which makes up 60 percent of the occupied West Bank and includes the majority of agricultural lands, natural resources and land reserves.

“The transfer of greater powers and responsibilities to Palestinian civil authority in Area C, contem-plated by commitments in prior agreements, has effectively been stopped and in some ways reversed and should be resumed to advance the two state solution and prevent a one state reality from taking hold,” the draft Quartet report said.

The draft report said that at least 570,000 Israelis are living in the settlements, which most countries deem illegal. “Israel should cease the policy of settlement construc-tion and expansion, designating land for exclusive Israeli use and denying Palestinian development,” the draft report recommends.

It said that only one permit for Palestinian housing construction in Area C was reportedly approved in 2014, while there did not appear to have been any approved in 2015.

Mladenov said the report con-cluded that continuing violence, terrorism and incitement; Israeli settlement expansion and a lack of control of Gaza by the Palestinian Authority “severely undermine hope for peace”.

AFP

JERUSALEM: Israel yesterday announced a lockdown on the West Bank city of Hebron and cuts in monthly tax payments made to the Palestinian Authority, after a wave of deadly attacks.

The measures, including increas-ing Israel’s military presence in the West Bank and described as “the most substantial” in two years, come after a surge in nine months of vio-lence and as Muslims near the end of fasting month of Ramadan.

An Israeli man was killed and three close relatives were wounded yesterday when a suspected Pal-estinian fired on their car south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, the army said. He was identified as Michael Mark, 48, from the nearby Otniel settlement. His wife and two children were taken to hospital.

On Thursday, a 19-year-old Pal-estinian fatally stabbed 13-year-old

US-Israeli national Hallel Yaffa Ariel in her home at the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba adjoining Hebron. Spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner said the army was imposing a closure on and around Hebron and deploying two additional battalions to the area.

Lerner noted that approximately 80 attacks by Palestinians against Israeli civilians and security forces over the past nine months “originated in the Hebron area”. The measures were decided upon by Defence Min-ister Avigdor Lieberman and the military, Lerner said. He could not say how long the closure on Hebron, the largest West Bank city, would last. But Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan said it should stay in place “for an extended period of time”.

As the security measures were announced, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered that the amount of tax funds transferred monthly to the Palestinian Authority be cut by the equivalent of the fiscal support paid to militants’ families.

Israel transfers around $127m in customs duties levied on goods des-tined for Palestinian markets that transit through Israeli ports monthly. Netanyahu’s office accused the PA of supporting the families of militants with funds transferred “by various laundering methods”.

Earlier, a young Palestinian woman was killed at a security checkpoint at the Hebron shrine known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque and to Jews as the Cave of the Patriarchs. After arousing sus-picions she was taken aside for a “thorough check” and “suddenly drew a knife and tried to stab the policewoman who was searching her”, a police statement read. Another officer shot her dead.

Palestinian officials named her as Sarah Tarayra, 27, a relative of Mohammed Nasser Tarayra, 19, who on Thursday fatally stabbed 13-year-old US-Israeli national Hallel Yaffa Ariel in her bedroom at the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba adjoining Hebron.

AFP

BEIRUT: Islamist rebels captured and killed a Syrian air force pilot after his plane crashed near Damas-cus yesterday, the army said.

A monitoring group, the Syr-ian Observatory for Human Rights, said earlier that the plane went down in the mountainous region of Qalamun, northwest of the capital.

The pilot ejected and landed near the town of Jayrud, 60km northeast of Damascus. The army, quoted by state news agency SANA, said the pilot landed in an area controlled by Jaish Al Islam rebels after his plane developed “a tech-nical problem during an exercise”.

“This crime committed by the terrorists of Jaish Al Islam will not go unpunished,” it said. The Saudi-backed rebel group claimed it had hit the plane — identified as a Rus-sian-made Sukhoi Su-22 — and captured the pilot.

Jaish Al Islam’s spokesman, Islam Alloush, posted a photo and a video of the pilot on his Twitter account, saying he belonged to the Alawite sect of President Bashar Al Assad. He said that a jihadist with Al Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda’s affili-ate in Syria, had executed the pilot.

Israel must stop settlements: Quartet reportThe draft report said Israel had taken for its exclusive use some 70 percent of Area C, which makes up 60 percent of the occupied West Bank and includes the majority of agricultural lands, natural resources and land reserves.

Israel slaps security and cash curbs

on Palestinians after attacks

Rebels capture and kill Syrian pilot: Army

TRIPOLI: Libyan pro-unity gov-ernment forces said they seized a key central district of the Islamic State jihadist group’s coastal bas-tion of Sirte yesterday.

Fighters allied to the Gov-ernment of National Accord took control of a residential area called the “700 housing units” near Ibn Sina hospital and the city’s Oua-gadougou conference centre, the GNA’s forces said on social media. They said the jihadists were also coming under air strikes.

A field commander, Siraj Daw, said that fighting was getting closer to the Ouagadougou cen-tre which IS has been using as its field headquarters. “The resistance has been fierce but we have dealt with the (IS) snipers and wiped them out... We’ve captured many vehicles and weapons,” he told reporters. “They have many dead,” he said, without giving figures.

AFP

ISTANBUL: The suicide attackers who launched the deadly Istanbul airport assault were planning to take dozens of passengers hostage, Turkish media reported yesterday, as CCTV of the bombers’ faces emerged.

Turkish officials have pointed blame at the Islamic State jihadist group for Tuesday night’s gun and bomb spree at Ataturk airport, which left 44 people dead including 19 for-eigners. “They say they are doing this in the name of Islam,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on a visit to Istanbul. “That has nothing to do with Islam. Their place is in hell.”

State-run news agency Anadolu said 24 people had been detained in Istanbul in a string of raids over the attack over the past two days, includ-ing 15 foreigners. Nine other suspected jihadists were rounded up in the west-ern port city of Izmir, but officials declined to confirm a link with the bloodshed in Istanbul.

Officials say the three men who carried out the latest in a series of deadly attacks to hit Turkey were a Russian, an Uzbek and a Kyrgyz national. Turkish media identified the strike’s organiser as Akhmet Chatayev, the Chechen leader of an IS cell in Istanbul who reportedly found accommodation for the bombers.

Chatayev allegedly organised two deadly bombings this year in the heart of the city’s Sultanahmet tourist dis-trict and the busy Istiklal shopping street, the Hurriyet newspaper said.

Michael McCaul, chairman of the US House Committee on Home-land Security, described Chatayev as “probably the number one enemy in the Northern Caucasus region of Rus-sia”. “He’s travelled to Syria on many

Istanbul bombers ‘planned hostage-taking’

occasions and became one of the top lieutenants for the minister of war for ISIS operations,” McCaul told CNN.

The pro-government Sabah newspaper reported that the attack-ers scouted the scene and planned to take dozens of passengers hostage inside before carrying out a massacre.

But they began the assault early after attracting suspicion, Sabah said. CCTV images released by police show the three alleged attackers arriving, wearing dark coats over their suicide vests — clothing that was much too heavy for a hot summer night.

More images show a plainclothes police officer confronting one of the men by an elevator and asking to see his identification. The attacker pulls out a gun and shoots him.

Turkey has been rocked by a

series of attacks in the past year blamed on either IS jihadists or Kurd-ish rebels. The latest assault sparked global condemnation, with con-suls from a dozen countries around Europe and beyond gathering at the airport yesterday to lay flowers in memory of the victims.

Hundreds of mourners also gath-ered in Istanbul on Thursday for the funeral of popular 28-year-old teacher Huseyin Tunc, who was at the airport to welcome a friend. “We still can’t believe it,” one of his pupils, Batuhan Karabey, said. “He was more than a teacher to us — he was like a big brother, helping us a lot. Really, I can’t believe it’s true.”

The Hurriyet newspaper reported that the bombers had rented a flat in Istanbul’s Fatih district, home to many

Syrians and other Arabs, and paid 24,000 Turkish lira ($8,300) in advance for a year’s rent. The police raided the apartment after the attack, accord-ing to an upstairs neighbour, who said the men kept the curtains closed. She never saw the attackers, but she heard them, and complained to neighbour-hood officials about a strange smell. “A very weird, chemical smell,” she said. “Police came after the bombing... I lived on top of the bomb.”

Hurriyet also quoted a local plumber, identified only by his initials E.S., who says one of the attackers came to his shop to ask if he could fix their tap. “He spoke in broken Turkish. He took me home,” the plumber said. “I changed the tap. I saw three people inside. They looked like bandits — one of them always stood by me.”

AFP

BEIRUT: The International Committee of the Red Cross has started collecting DNA samples to help identify thou-sands of people who disappeared during Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war, the ICRC said yesterday.

The ICRC called on the Leba-nese authorities to create a “national mechanism” to help match victims’ bodies with their families. The war, which started on April 13, 1975 and lasted 15 years, officially left 150,000 dead and 17,000 missing, dozens of them allegedly still detained by the Syrian government, a key player in the conflict.

“It is more than 40 years since the events took place and we are still asking ourselves how we are going to give answers to the families,” said Fabrizzio Carboni, the ICRC’s chief in Lebanon. “We know that there are graves all around the country, and that at one stage we will have to match the DNA of these mortal remains with ones of the families.”

Carboni spoke at a press con-ference held to announce that the ICRC would start taking saliva sam-ples from relatives of the missing.

Several Lebanese with missing relatives attended the press confer-ence and some were unable to hold back tears. The Lebanese government in 2000 acknowledged the existence of mass graves in Beirut, but it has made no effort to identify the bodies.

“Several hundred families” have already given DNA samples to the

ICRC, Carboni said. He estimated that 4,000 families in Lebanon have missing relatives. Carboni said the ICRC’s aim was to reach every one of the 4,000 families over the next two or three years.

This is the second phase of a project launched by the ICRC in Leb-anon in 2012 to set up a database of information about each missing person — down to where they went missing and what they were wearing. So far, 2,300 families have taken part.

In 2014, the ICRC called on the Lebanese police to help collect bio-logical data. “Two years later, we still haven’t had a response,” said Carboni.

He also called for “the creation of a national mechanism which one day will deal with the opening of the graves and mass graves and will do the work of matching and give answers to the families”. Carboni said it was time to “to remind the Lebanese authorities of their responsibilities”.

Wadad Halawani, who has had no news of her husband for 30 years, heads an organisation for families of the disappeared. “All the people who committed crimes are in power,” she said. “They still hold important posi-tions in the government.”

Ahmed Assaad Ajam, 76, said he hoped to find out about his son Jamal. Pinned on his chest was a black-and-white picture of the young man who disappeared in 1982. “I’m waiting to see my son. Even dead, even if they only bring me a bone, I’ll finally be able to relax,” he said. “I still hold out hope. I hope one day to have the slightest information” on what happened to Jamal.

ICRC collects DNA to identify Lebanon’s civil war dead

Libya forces seize key

sector in IS bastion

Members of the Israeli police and emergency personnel inspect the scene where an Israeli died and three of his relatives were wounded after a suspected Palestinian gunman opened fire at their car on route 60, near the Al Fawar refugee camp, south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, yesterday.

Turkish anti-riot police officers stand guard as people walk nearby the explosion site at the Ataturk International Airport terminal yesterday.

Two children

dead as Nepal

school collapsesKATHMANDU: Heavy mon-soon rains caused parts of a school to collapse in Nepal’s capital yester-day, killing two pupils and injuring 24 others, police said. Police said that the pupils, who were aged nine and 10 and were in the third grade, had sat down for a lesson when one of the walls of the classroom came crashing down, burying them.

“Two students were killed and 24 others suf-fered injuries after the wall collapsed,” said local police chief, Pitambar Adhikari.

The injured are receiv-ing treatment at hospitals in Lalitpur, a densely populated district in Kath-mandu valley, Adhikari said.

Rescued

orangutans

released backJAKARTA: Three oran-gutans rescued when forest fires destroyed their Indonesian rain-forest habitats were returned to the wild on Borneo island Karmele Llano Sanche, Interna-tional Animal Rescue programme director in Indonesia, made a three-day journey through the forest to release the ani-mals in Bukit Baka Bukit Raya National Park.

“You know, it’s amaz-ing to see a big orangutan like that moving across the forest, this is home back home,” Sanche said.

Sabtu, 25, was saved in March 2015 from a village near the IAR sanc-tuary in Ketapang, West Kalimantan province, one of the areas most affected by the fires last year. Butan and Marsela, both around seven and eight years old, were also rescued by IAR when their home was destroyed by fires.

Abu Sayyaf bomb

expert captured

ZAMBOANGA CITY: The Philippines’ military announced yesterday that a bomb-maker from a Daesh-affiliated militant group was captured in a majority Muslim southern island province.

Soldiers and police nabbed Abu Sayyaf sub-leader Mudzrih Abih Adjalan -- alias “Idol” -- and a suspected follower, identified as Yasin, during a joint operation around dawn in Ungkaya Pukan town in Basilan.

ASIA / PHILIPPINES 05SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

AFP

MANILA: Philippine President Rod-rigo Duterte (pictured) yesterday urged communist rebels to start kill-ing drug traffickers, adding another layer to a controversial war on crime in which he has warned thousands will die.

Duterte won May’s election in a landslide after a campaign dom-inated by his pledge to end crime within six months, promising to do so by unleashing security forces with shoot-to-kill orders. In his

inauguration speech on Thursday, Duterte insisted his adherence to the

rule of law was “uncompromising”, apparently seeking to assuage con-cerns from human rights groups that he planned to orchestrate mass extra-judicial killings. But yesterday, Duterte called on communist rebels waging one of Asia’s longest insurgencies to hold their own guerrilla court hear-ings and then carry out executions.

“Drugs have reached the hinter-lands... what if you use your kangaroo courts to kill them to speed up the solution to our problem,” Duterte, a lawyer and former city prosecutor, said in a speech before the military’s top brass in Manila.

The communists’ armed wing, the

4,000-strong New People’s Army, is known for assassinating civilians deemed to have committed so-called crimes against the people.

However its courts and summary executions are illegal. In a late-night

speech on Thursday to a slum com-munity in Manila attended by only a few journalists, Duterte called on ordinary Filipinos to kill drug addicts, which is also illegal.

“If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself,” Duterte told a crowd of about 500 people.

Duterte also vowed to kill drug traffickers, using foul language he promised in recent weeks to “tone down” as president.

“They are destroying our children. I warn you, don’t go into that, even if you’re a policeman, because I will really kill you,” said Duterte, 71. Before dawn yesterday a bullet-riddled body

was found in a Manila slum with a sign on it saying: “I am a Chinese drug lord”, local police said.

The murder bore all the hallmarks of an extrajudicial killing, which would make it the first of Duterte’s presidency.

Manila police district deputy director for operations Marcelino Pedroso told AFP the death was being considered a summary execution because the victim was apparently killed due to alleged involvement in drugs. He said there were no suspects.

With Duterte’s encouragement, police had already killed dozens of alleged or suspected drug traffickers .

AFP

BEIJING: China will never compro-mise on sovereignty, President Xi Jinping said yesterday ahead of an international tribunal ruling over Beijing’s maritime claims, as he cel-ebrated the Communist Party’s 95th anniversary.

The ruling party must main-tain absolute power in the country, strengthen its military and enhance its role on the world stage, Xi told

serried ranks of top officials in Bei-jing’s Great Hall of the People, to rapturous applause.

“No foreign country... should expect us to swallow the bitter pill of harm to our national sovereignty, security or development interests,” Xi said, adding: “We are not afraid of trouble.” His remarks come as regional tensions rise over Beijing’s claims to nearly all of the South China Sea, with the US sending naval patrols close to artificial islands Beijing has built in the disputed waters.

Xi took an apparent stab at the US,

saying: “We will not show up at other people’s front doors to flex our mus-cles. That does not show strength or scare anyone.” An international tribu-nal in The Hague will rule on July 12 in a case brought by the Philippines challenging China’s claims in the stra-tegic waterway. Beijing insists that the Permanent Court of Arbitration has no jurisdiction over the issue and has boycotted the proceedings.

Since assuming the party’s top post in 2012, Xi has rapidly consol-idated power while overseeing a more assertive foreign policy and a

tighter authoritarian stance at home. Xi heaped praise on the ruling party and vowed to maintain the country’s centralised political system.

“All party comrades must remem-ber what we are constructing is socialism with Chinese characteris-tics, and not any other ideology,” he said. The Communist party, which had some 88.7 million members at the end of last year, must maintain “abso-lute leadership,” he said. Xi has won popularity with a much-publicised anti-corruption campaign that has claimed the scalps of several former

top-ranked officials. “The biggest threat to our ruling party is corrup-tion,” he said, calling for a “complete purification of the party’s political environment”.

He credited the Communist party with expelling “imperialism” from Chinese soil, and stressed the country’s economic growth in recent decades. He stressed the need for “Mao Zedong thought” but did not refer to the tens of millions killed in famines and political campaigns launched by the founder of the Peo-ple’s Republic.

Duterte urges communists to kill criminalsDuterte called on communist rebels waging one of Asia’s longest insurgencies to hold their own guerrilla court hearings and then carry out executions.

Cafe owner fixes a cake featuring a portrait of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte inside Quim’s Cafe in Quezon city, Metro Manila, yesterday.

Delicious portrait

Agencies

DHAKA: As many as nine gunmen attacked a restaurant popular with foreigners in a diplomatic zone of the Bangladeshi capital yesterday night, taking dozens of hostages and exchanging gunfire with security forces, authorities and a witness said.

One police officer died of his wounds at a hospital, according to his nephew Mishu Hasan. Author-ities had not yet reported the death.

A huge contingent of secu-rity forces cordoned off the area around the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka’s Gulshan area. Several other wounded police officers were hospitalised after security forces exchanged fire with the attack-ers inside the restaurant who also hurled bombs. A local resident Lut-ful Amin said that he heard several explosions, the last of which went off around 10:45pm.

The head of the elite anti-crime force, Rapid Action Battalion, said reporters yesterday night that they were working to save the lives of the people trapped inside the restaurant. Authorities The hostages included an unknown number of foreigners.

“Some derailed youths have entered the restaurant and launched the attack,” Benazir Ahmed said. “We have talked to some of the peo-ple who fled the restaurant after the attack. We want to resolve this peacefully. We are trying to talk to the attackers, we want to listen to them about what they want.”

“Some of our people have been injured. Our first priority is to save

the lives of the people trapped inside,” Ahmed said. He would not say how many people were trapped inside. At least 35 people, including about 20 foreigners, were still trapped inside the restaurant, according to kitchen staffer, Sumon Reza, who was among more than 10 people who managed to run to the rooftop and escape.

He said the attackers chanted God is Great as they launched the attack around 9:20pm yesterday, ini-tially opening fire with blanks.

In Washington, State Department spokesman John Kirby told report-ers: “We are aware of reports of what appears to a hostage situation in the Gulshan neighborhood of Dhaka.”

Kirby said that all American cit-izens that are under the authority of the diplomatic chief of mission in Dhaka were accounted for and were not involved in the incident, but the department is still checking on pri-vate American citizens who may have been in the area

He said it was too early to say who was involved in the assault and their motivation. Bangladesh, a tra-ditionally moderate Muslim-majority nation, has recently seen an upsurge in militant violence.

AFP

YANGON: Myanmar’s new civilian government should prioritise end-ing deep discrimination against the Rohingya and other Muslims in res-tive Rakhine state, a United Nations envoy said yesterday.

Yanghee Lee, the UN Spe-cial Rapporteur on Myanmar, was speaking after a nearly two-week visit to the Buddhist-majority nation, her first since Aung San Suu Kyi’s pro-democracy party took office several months ago, ending five dec-ades of military rule.

Suu Kyi, a globally celebrated champion for human rights, has faced criticism for not taking a stronger stance on the Rohingya’s plight as she leads her country into a new era.

Lee’s visit included a trip to strife-torn Rakhine, a western region scarred by bouts of religious bloodshed between Buddhists and Muslims in 2012. The state has since been almost completely divided on religious grounds, with Muslim communities trapped in camps or isolated communities and subject to a range of restrictions on their move-ments and access to basic services and employment.

“My visit to Rakhine State unfor-tunately confirmed that the situation on the ground has yet to significantly change,” Lee told a press conference in Yangon, describing overcrowding, dilapidated shelters and poor san-itation in the camps. She stressed that putting an end to “institutional-ised discrimination against Muslim communities in state” must be “an urgent priority”.

“The continuing restrictions on the freedom of movement of the Rohingya and Kaman communities cannot be justified on any grounds of security or maintaining stability,” Lee added.

While Kaman Muslims are recognised by the government as an official ethnic minority, the Rohingya are not. Many in Myanmar reject the term Rohingya and insist the group are illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh, despite their deep roots in the coun-try. Suu Kyi’s government ordered officials ahead of Lee’s visit to refer to the group simply as “people who believe in Islam” rather than Rohingya -- a term whose use has in the past set off protests by Bud-dhist nationalists.

The Nobel peace prize win-ner has asked for “space” while her administration seeks to build trust between religious communities.

AP

HANOI: Vietnam’s government said toxic discharges from a Tai-wanese-owned steel plant were responsible for massive fish deaths that have decimated tourism and fishing in four provinces and high-lighted the risks of rapid growth in foreign investment. An estimated 70 tons of dead fish washed ashore along more than 200km of Viet-nam’s central coastline in early April, sparking rare protests across the country when authorities could not initially pinpoint the cause.

A government minister, Mai Tien Dung, told reporters on Thursday that Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Corp., a subsidiary of Tai-wan’s Formosa Plastics Group, admitted it had caused the envi-ronmental disaster and has pledged $500m to clean up the environment and compensate affected people, including helping fisherman to find new jobs. Dung said waste water containing toxins such as cyanide and carbolic acids was released into the sea during a test run of the plant. Formo-sa’s $10.6bn steel complex, which includes a steel plant, a power plant and a deep sea port, is one of the largest foreign investments in Vietnam.

Xi talks tough ahead of tribunal ruling over maritime row

Myanmar must protect

Rohingya Muslims: UN

Taiwan firm

caused fish

deaths: Vietnam

Bangladeshi security personnel stand guard after gunmen stormed a restaurant in Dhaka’s high-security diplomatic district early today.

Attackers storm Dhaka

hotel; take hostages

IS claims responsibility

DHAKA: The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the gun attack on a restaurant in Bangladesh’s capital popular with foreigners that sparked a deadly firefight with police, an IS-linked news agency reported.

Meet to decide

future of MH370

search on July 19

KUALA LUMPUR: Malay-sia announced yesterday that a ministerial meeting with China and Australia to determine how to pro-ceed with the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will be held July 19 in capital Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysian Trans-port Minister Liow Tiong Lai said that the meet-ing with his counterparts will deliberate on the next series of action regarding the search for the air-craft that vanished from military radar March 8, 2014 with 239 people on board.

Gunmen ambush

bus in Kenya;

six dead NAIROBI: Six people were killed yesterday when sus-pected Islamist gunmen fired on two buses in Ken-ya’s far northeast close to the Somalia border, police said.

“Police on the scene have found six persons shot dead,” said police chief Joseph Boinnet. “The hunt for the terror-ists is under way.”

Boinnet said two peo-ple were also injured. It was unclear whether the casualties were civilians or police officer guards aboard the buses.

The early morning ambush happened near El Wak in Mandera county, an impoverished rural part of the country where similar deadly attacks in the past have been claimed by the Somali-led Al Qaeda group, the Shabaab.

Ten dead in

China landslideBEIJING: Heavy rain caused a landslide in southwestern China yes-terday that killed at least ten and left 12 others missing, local officials said.

The landslide hit early morning and buried 29 people in the village of Pianpo, in the province of Guizhou, the official Xin-hua news agency said, citing the county govern-ment. 17 had been pulled from the rubble as of early Friday evening -- ten of whom were pronounced dead at the scene, it said. Rescue efforts were con-tinuing with some 800 soldiers and relief workers on-site, according a state-ment from the province’s civil affairs department on its official social media account. Flooding is com-mon during the summer monsoon season in south-ern China.

ASIA / AFRICA06 SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

AFP

BAMA: Nigeria has pledged to do more to tackle food shortages among people made homeless by Boko Haram, as the United Nations warned some 50,000 children could starve to death this year in one northeast-ern state alone.

Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has also warned “a cat-astrophic humanitarian emergency”

was unfolding at the camp for inter-nally displaced people (IDPs) in Bama, Borno state.

At least 188 people died between May 23 and June 22, mainly from diar-rhoea and malnutrition, while more than 1,200 graves, many of them for children, had been dug near the camp in the last year, MSF said last week.

A Nigerian government delegation visited Bama on Thursday to see con-ditions for the 25,000 people living there. Maryam Uwais, special advi-sor to President Muhammadu Buhari

for social protection, described it as “an overwhelming situation for any government to handle”.

“The state government has done its best. We came to see things for ourselves. We will go back and make reports and soonest there will be some relief, more relief coming this way.” Domestic and international aid agencies rely on the military to drive the 70km from the state capital Mai-duguri to Bama, which was liberated in March last year.

Roads in to and out of Maiduguri

are nominally open but vehicles are still vulnerable to attack from the Islamist militants, who have been pushed into the bush by the military since January 2015.

Many displaced people from in and around Bama are currently stay-ing in camps and host communities in Maiduguri.

MSF’s claims angered the Nige-rian government and Borno state health commissioner Haruna Mshe-lia dismissed reports of severe acute malnutrition at the Bama camp as

exaggerated. But he said some 1,800 of the most vulnerable had been evacuated to Maiduguri for special treatment and feeding. The United Nations said in a statement Thursday its agencies and partners in northeast Nigeria were “reporting high levels of severe malnutrition and desper-ate conditions” in recently liberated areas.

“Improving security has enabled humanitarians to access areas that were previously cut off,” said act-ing UN humanitarian coordinator

for Nigeria Munir Safieldin. “The conditions we are seeing there are devastating,” he added, urging “a much faster and wider response”.

More people in urgent need of assistance are being found as hard-to-reach remote locations are opened up and Unicef Nigeria representative Jean Gough had a stark warning if nothing was done. “We estimate that there will be almost a quarter of a million children under five suffering from severe acute malnutrition in Borno this year,” she said in a statement.

AFP

TAIPEI: A Taiwanese warship mistak-enly launched a supersonic “aircraft carrier killer” missile towards China yesterday, hitting a fishing boat and killing one person, the navy said, as ties between the island and its once bitter rival deteriorate.

The Hsiung-feng III (Brave Wind) missile flew about 75km before hitting the trawler in waters off Penghu, a Taiwanese-administered island group in the Taiwan Strait. The skipper on the Taiwanese 60-tonne trawler was killed and three other crew on board,

including a Vietnamese and a Filipino, were injured. “An initial investigation showed that the incident has caused

the death of the skipper,” Taiwan’s defence ministry spokesman Chen Chung-chi told reporters.

“We apologise to the family of the skipper and would like to convey our condolences to them.”

The missile was fired during a drill at around 8:10am from a 500-tonne missile ship docked at a naval base in the southern city of Tsoying and flew in the direction of China.

The navy said the missile, which has a range of 300km, went through the trawler, but did not explode, nor did it sink the fishing vessel. Televi-sion images showed the upper part of the cabin, where the capitan was when the boat was hit, scorched and

destroyed. The navy said that the staff sergeant who launched the missile had accidentally chosen “war mode” and “missile loading mode” during the practice drill.

“Our initial investigation found that the operation was not done in accordance with normal procedure,” Vice Admiral Mei Chia-shu said.

Helicopters and navy ships were sent to search for the missile, Mei said, adding that the military had reported the mistake to the island’s top security body, the National Security Confer-ence. The accident has prompted angry calls from members of par-liament for the defence minister to resign. Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs

Council, which handles China pol-icy, said it had notified Beijing of the incident through a quasi-official body.

Official communications between the council and its Chinese counter-part have effectively been frozen by Beijing over Taiwan’s new government refusing to recognise the “one China” concept, agreed by Beijing and Tai-wan’s then-ruling Nationalists in 1992.

“At a time when the mainland repeatedly stressed it wants to sustain peaceful development of the cross-strait ties on the political foundation of ‘92 consensus’, I felt the influence from the event could be very severe,” said the head of China’s Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing Zhang Zhijun.

Reuters

HONG KONG: Thousands of Hong Kong residents marched in pro-test on the 19th anniversary of the financial hub’s return to Chinese rule on yesterday as tensions sim-mer against Chinese authorities over the abductions of several Hong Kong booksellers.

Some waved banners criticis-ing Beijing for the cross-border abductions as acts of a “totalitar-ian” regime, as well as calling for the release of leading dissidents.

“This is a very grave threat to the safety of Hong Kong residents that an unknown force is spying on peo-ple,” said pro-democracy lawmaker Cyd Ho at the rally. “The Hong Kong government has to follow up with the central government on what’s really happening behind the scenes.”

The city has been unnerved over the past year by the disappearances of five booksellers who specialised in works critical of Chinese lead-ers. One of the men, Lam Wing-kee, who was detained for eight months by Chinese agents and released last month, criticised Beijing for “violating Hong Kong’s rights” through illegal

cross-border enforcement opera-tions. The tactics have raised fears of Communist Party rulers in Beijing eroding the so-called “one country, two systems” formula, granting Hong Kong a high degree of freedom and autonomy since its 1997 return from British to Chinese rule.

China has denied wrongdoing.Lam, who had been due to lead

the July 1 march that each year draws thousands, pulled out, citing safety concerns after being followed by two unknown strangers, a lawmaker said.

“He feels increasingly concerned about his own personal safety,” said pro-democracy lawmaker Albert Ho.

Taiwan misfires missile towards China

AFP

SYDNEY: Australia’s leaders made last-gasp pitches yesterday to woo voters on the eve of elections as polls pointed to a cliffhanger and the media swung behind “reformer” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Liberal Turnbull and Labour opposition leader Bill Shorten both campaigned in Sydney on their final day on the hustings as a poll in The Sydney Morning Herald showed them locked in a dead heat on a two-party basis. But the survey of 1,377 people also said that when all candidates were included, 27 per-cent planned to vote for the Greens or other minor parties and inde-pendents, raising the prospect of a hung parliament where no side commands a majority in the 150-seat lower house. Turnbull, who has capitalised on the instability sparked by Britain’s decision to exit the Euro-pean Union, said the uncertainty of a hung parliament would be a dis-aster as he appealed for voters not to go down that road.

“We have seen that film before. It’s not a pretty one,” he said, refer-ring to the 2010 elections where a similar scenario occurred after Julia Gillard failed to win majority rule.

“Right now, Australia needs strong majority government, a clear national economic plan. That’s the

economic leadership only the coa-lition can deliver.” He added that the alternative was “chaos, uncertainty, dysfunction, higher deficits, higher debt, higher taxes, less investment, less jobs”. “That’s what Labor and the Greens and independents are offer-ing,” he said.

Economic management has been a key election battleground with last week’s shock decision by Brit-ain stoking anxiety about pressures facing Australia’s economy.

Ex-union chief Shorten has campaigned on improving health and education while pledging more renewable energy and a fairer tax system, and remained upbeat that Labor could cause an upset.

“I am talking to millions of Aus-tralians who want to see Labor lunge with every inch of energy towards the finishing line,” he said.

“I say to these people, we do not give up and we are confident and we believe there’s a good chance we can win the election.” Another poll in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph has Turnbull’s conservatives 51-49 per-cent in front on a two-party basis, as the country’s major newspapers also rallied behind the ruling party, with News Corp Australia and Fair-fax Media mastheads citing the need for stability. Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian said Turnbull offered “a path to national economic success”, a stance backed by its tabloid stable-mate The Daily Telegraph.

Indonesian policemen patrol as people wait their train for making their way back to their hometowns to celebrate Eid Al Fitr at Senen Train Station in Jakarta, yesterday.

On way home

AFP

NEW DELHI: A Hindu temple worker was hacked to death in west-ern Bangladesh yesterday, police said, the latest in a series of attacks on religious minorities by suspected Islamists. Three men on a motorcy-cle attacked Shyamananda Das as he walked along a road near the tem-ple early in the morning, police said.

“They hacked him on his neck three times and there was one stabbing mark in his head,” dep-uty district police chief Gopinath Kanjilal said. “He died after he was brought to hospital.” Police said the 50-year-old, also known as Babaji, was a volunteer who helped conduct prayers at temples. “He was an itin-erant temple volunteer who travels

from one temple to another to serve the Hindu devotees. He came to this temple only yesterday,” said local police chief inspector Hasan Hafi-zur Rahman.

“He was attacked as he walked outside the temple to collect flow-ers for prayer services,” he told AFP.

No group has claimed respon-sibility for the attack, but police said it bore the hallmarks of recent murders of religious minorities by suspected homegrown Islamist mil-itants. Last month a Hindu priest, 70-year-old Ananda Gopal Ganguly, was hacked to death in the same dis-trict.Days later, a Hindu monastery worker was murdered in the same way in a northwestern district.

An activist with the student wing of the country’s largest Islam-ist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, had been arrested over the attack.

Australian elections

likely to be a cliffhanger

Pro-democracy rally draws thousands

Temple worker hacked

to death in Bangladesh

UN warns over malnutrition deaths in northeast Nigeria

The navy said that the staff sergeant who launched the missile had accidentally chosen “war mode” and “missile loading mode” during the practice drill.

Protesters march along a road during a pro-democracy rally in Hong Kong, yesterday.

People offer Jummat-ul-Vida, the last congregational Friday prayers in Ramadan, at the Data Darbar Mosque in Lahore, yesterday.

Congregational prayers

People take bath in a stream to cool off from the heat on a hot summer day in Islamabad.

Beating the heat

PAKISTAN 07SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

The closure of schools is part of Civil Secretariat FATA’s ‘rationalisation plan’.

Internews

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif (pictured) has forbidden party leaders from hosting a grand wel-come back event in his honour when he returns from London after Eidul Fitr.

In a statement, titled ‘The prime minister’s message to party workers and people of Pakistan’, Sharif appre-ciated tremendous love and affection that workers had sent his way during his stay in hospital.

In the message, Sharif notes it’s because of people’s love and good wishes that he had a successful ‘sensitive operation’ and is now fast

recovering. “I appreciate concern you have shown for me, which is a great asset for the party as well.”“I have come to know that you are planning to throw a grand reception upon my arrival,” he notes, but warns “instead of planning festivities to celebrate my homecoming, in a few days the great occasion of Eid is coming, hence, you should concentrate on celebrating it with full religious and traditional fervour.”

He advised the party’s rank and file to keep in their prayers all those Pakistanis who lost their lives dur-ing recent terrorist attacks.

Many in senior party leaders, at conclusion of budget session last week, were of the view that party should organise a special welcome

get-together for the prime minister.Some even suggested a series of

functions in major cities to welcome Sharif, as a response to the anti-government rallies PPP and PTI are planning after Eid.

Internews

PESHAWAR: As a campaign for access to education is going on around the world, authorities in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan are going in the opposite direction by closing down 497 schools in the region.

The closure of a large number of schools, majority of them primary schools both for boys and girls, is part of Civil Secretariat FATA’s ‘rationalisation plan’ prepared in November 2015.

The list obtained from the Direc-torate of Education FATA shows that 13 schools have been closed down in Bajaur Agency, 105 in Mohm-and Agency, 86 in Orakzai Agency, 58 in Kurram Agency, 28 in Khyber Agency, 23 in Frontier Region (FR) Kohat, 11 in FR Bannu, five in FR Lakki Marwat, 101 in FR Tank and 67 in FR Dera Ismail Kahn. North Waziristan and South Waziristan agencies have been exempted due to militancy although Orakzai Agency and parts of Khyber Agency were also badly affected by militancy.

The self-perceived rationale behind the policy is that students

and resources of the schools with less than 70 boys and 65 girls will be shifted to nearest schools in the area in a bid to improve their standard.

“Instead of wasting resources at a school having low enrollment, we have decided to shift funds and teaching staff of those schools to another government-run schools which will ultimately boost quality of education in those schools,” said an official of Directorate of Educa-tion, who deals with the plan.

“Some critics in the secretariat calling it an irrational plan,” said the government should hold accountable all those officials, who had approved such ‘infeasible scheme.’

Zar Ali Afridi, a rights activ-ist from Fata, said the government should take that policy back because it was against children’s rights.

He argued that the terrain, the local culture and tribal rivalries demanded that if the government had the resources, it would be ideal to have a school on every doorstep.“Instead of closing down schools, there is need to increase enrollment of more children in schools,” he said.

Interestingly, implementation of the ‘rationalisation plan’ has coin-cided with announcement of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor, the chief executive Fata, vis-à-vis edu-cation emergency, having the sole objective to enroll around 400,000 out-of-school children in the next three years.

The enrollment drive was launched in April last and 45,000 students were enrolled against the set target of 150,000 out-of-school children.

Heavy rains

forecast

from todayInternews

LAHORE: As the plains of Pakistan reeled under the stifling heat again yesterday, the Pakistan Meteoro-logical Department warned the government agencies to gird up their loin to handle widespread rain that might be heavy at isolated places, generating urban and flash flooding from today to Monday.

The urban flooding was likely in big cities and flash flooding in vulnerable areas of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Rain and the glacier-melt water could also burst some glacial lakes in Chitral, Gilgit, Ghizer and Shigar areas, the department said in its monsoon forecast yesterday.

The three-day spell would be caused due to strong monsoon currents likely to penetrate in upper parts of the country in the next 48 hours, and an approaching fresh westerly wave. The depart-ment forecast that upper Punjab (Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Lahore, Sargodha, Faisalabad divisions) and Islamabad will receive wide-spread rain-thundershowers with isolated heavy rain accompanied by strong gusty winds. Scattered rain-thundershowers with isolated heavy rains are also expected in central and South Punjab (Multan, Sahiwal, D G Khan, Bahawalpur divisions) during the period.

The system will cover Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (Malakand, Hazara, Peshawar, Mardan, Kohat, Bannu, Dera Ismail Khan divisions) and Kashmir (Muzaffarabad, Mirpur, Poonch divisions) and FATA (Kur-ram, Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai, North and South Agen-cies).Scattered rain-thunderstorm is also expected in Gilgit-Baltistan from today to Monday. Meanwhile, the energy sapping high temper-ature and humidity continued to pester people across the country.

AFP

ISLAMABAD: A teenager allegedly burned alive for refusing a marriage offer actually committed suicide, police said yesterday, in a statement slammed by a prominent rights activ-ist and the girl’s father.

The death of 19-year-old Maria Sadaqat made international head-lines after claims she was tortured then set alight in the conservative northeast for refusing the proposal.

Hundreds of women are mur-dered by their relatives in Pakistan each year on the pretext of defending what is seen as family honour.

Sadaqat was said to have been attacked by a group of people near the summer hill resort of Murree, outside the capital Islamabad, in

late May, and died several days later.At the time police said she gave

a statement before she died naming the man who had allegedly proposed, as well as his father, among others as her attackers.

But yesterday police discounted her dying words, claiming Sadaqat and the man had been in a “relation-ship” for years and that in thousands of text messages exchanged between the pair she had begged him to marry her. She had also warned in a text mes-sage that he would be held responsible for her suicide, officials said.

The petrol used to set her ablaze, police added, came from her father’s workshop, and no forensic evidence supported the claim she had been attacked. Investigation head Abubakar Khudabaksh confirmed the report.

But the girl’s father accused police of manipulating the probe.

“This is very disturbing and shocking that police are changing the facts and manipulating the investiga-tion in the favour of accused party,” Sadaqat Hussain told reporters.

Prominent women’s rights activ-ist and lawyer Asma Jehangir, who has formed a committee to examine the incident, also rejected the report.

“This case does not appear to be a suicide. (The) girl’s hands were not burned,” she said.

“And if she wanted to commit suicide she would have swallowed some poison or shot herself instead of putting herself in such pain and agony,” Jehangir continued.

“Also, there is the dying declara-tion of the girl,” she said, pointing out that some of the accused men had gone on the run after the incident rather than coming forward to say Sadaqat’s statement was false.

€6m Germany

grant to monitor

melting glaciers

Internews

ISLAMABAD: Germany has approved grant of €6m to monitor 5,000 melting glaciers in Pakistan.

The German government through its KfW Development Bank will provide the amount to the Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda) for a project “Glacial monitoring for energy and water security in Pakistan” for telemetric equipment in lower stretches of glaciated areas.

Economic Affairs Division Secretary Tariq Bajwa, Wapda Member (Water) Shoaib Iqbal and KfW Country Director Wolfgang Möllers signed the grant financ-ing agreement.

Two s t a te - of- t he -a r t energy-efficient buildings will be constructed in Lahore and Skardu for housing the staff and the equipment.

Reuters

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s top foreign policy official warned yesterday that pushing too fast against all Islamist militants in the country could lead to “blowback” in the form of more terrorist attacks.

Sartaj Aziz (pictured) sought to deflect criticism that Pakistan has not done enough to crack down on the Haqqani network and that it still shelters Afghan Taliban lead-ers, highlighted by the US drone strike that killed Taliban chief Mul-lah Akhtar Mansour in May.

Aziz said he would defend Paki-stan’s record of fighting militants when meeting this weekend with a US congressional delegation headed by Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee.

“I think what we have achieved in these three years is quite remark-able,” he said, citing the ongoing military operation to destroy mil-itant hideouts in North Waziristan near the Afghan border.

“But there are risks involved of how far we can go and in what sequence we should go and in what scale we should go.”

The military operation in North Waziristan targetted loosely allied fighters, including the Pakistani branch of the Taliban—which fights to overthrow Pakistan’s government.

Also based in the area were ele-ments of the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network, which direct their attacks across the border to tar-get the US-backed government in Afghanistan.

Critics, particularly in the US Congress, say Pakistan has spared the militants that limit their attacks to inside Afghanistan.

Sartaj said the military acted

“without distinguishing between ‘good and bad’ Taliban” but sug-gested that seeking a large-scale crackdown on all at once would overstretch the armed forces and lead to more terrorist attacks.

“So we have to make sure that we move in a decisive way, but at a measured pace and according to our capacity, and ensuring that the blowback is manageable,” he said.

He also downplayed strained relations with the US following the May 21 US drone strike that killed Mansour and Congress’s blocking of financing for Pakistan to buy Amer-ican F-16 fighter jets.

“I don’t see the relations are tense at the moment,” Aziz said. “They are moving in the right direction and there are of course dif-ferences, but I don’t think there is any major crisis in the relationship.”

He also said Pakistan would continue to resist the US pressure to roll back development of short-range “tactical” nuclear weapons in response to regional rival India’s defence strategy.

“If India keeps expanding its nuclear arsenal and other arsenal, Pakistan cannot stay quiet. It has to achieve adequate deterrence,” he said.

Govt to review

NAB ordinance

Internews

ISLAMABAD: A five-member National Assembly subcommit-tee will propose amendments to National Accountability Bureau Ordinance-1999 after the gov-ernment agreed yesterday to completely review it.

“Under the Charter of Democ-racy, both PML-N and the PPP agreed to replace NAB with a more powerful and vibrant commission.

Instead of one or two amend-ments, NAB Ordinance-1999 should be reviewed in totality,” Federal Law Minister Zahid Hamid suggested to National Assembly standing commit-tee on law and justice. The committee met Virk to discuss four bills, seeking amendments to NAB laws.

Pushing fast against militants could lead to ‘blowback’: Aziz

Around 500 tribal area schools closed

Police rule suicide for teen burnt alive

Sharif tells party not to hold grand welcome ceremony

VIEWS08 SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

Bangladesh is lurching deeper into crisis. Gunmen attacked a restaurant in the diplomatic quarter of the country’s capital yesterday and took an unknown number of people hostage, including foreigners. The attack follows a series of killings in the country by

Islamists targeting bloggers and members of religious minorities. Earlier in the day, a Hindu temple worker was hacked to death in the south-west of the country. But the attack at the diplomatic quarter shows the terrorists are accelerating their war on the state. Harming diplomats will have international repercussions and will put the government of Sheikh Hasina under intense pressure.

The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for yesterday’s attack. An IS-linked news agency claimed that “more than twenty people of different nationalities’ have been killed in the attack, while the CNN said 20 people were being held in the restaurant. But the government in Dhaka denies the involvement

of foreign militant organisations and blames two local groups for these acts of terrorism -- Ansar-al-Islam and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen.

The attacks in Bangladesh have a pattern and have invited international attention and condemnation due to the gruesome nature of these killings, the choice of targets and the regularity of these murders despite the government’s efforts to prevent them. The three-year murder spree has a broadened target base. First they came for bloggers, secularists and intellectuals, and then went for aid workers, members of minority groups and even Muslims who opposed the hate agenda. In a country which is known for social harmony,

peaceful coexistence and tolerance among different religious and ethnic groups, these terrorist acts have caused huge shock and dismay. It’s certain that the perpetrators have a bigger agenda than eliminating atheists and secularists from the country. The motive could be political -- an attempt to destabilise the government.

The police have surrounded the Holey Artisan Bakery cafe and are trying to ensure the hostages’ safety in a peaceful manner. The government can heave a sigh of relief if the police succeed in their mission, but if any foreigner is taken hostage or their lives are at risk, the consequences will be bigger than the government can manage and will spread to the economic and diplomatic fronts.

The attack at the diplomatic quarter in Dhaka sends a powerful message which the government can ignore only at its own peril. The government of Sheikh Hasina must crack down on extremists and bust their underground cells. This is a war which many countries are fighting, and Dhaka must be given all the support it needs.

Dhaka attack

The attack on a restaurant at the diplomatic quarter in Dhaka shows that the government must do more to root out terrorism.

Quote of the day

This country voted for change and I am going to deliver it.

Michael Gove Britain’s Justice Minister

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A FEW months after he started attend-ing meetings of a hardline Islamic community group in a poor Istanbul

suburb, 25-year-old Murat Kipcak stopped reading the Holy Quran and going to the mosque.

He accused his conservative Kurdish family of being infidels and said their murder would get the killer to heaven. Soon after, he sent word that he, his young child, and his wife had travelled to Iraq to join Islamic State, his father Tahir told Reuters at his home in Sultanbeyli, a district on the eastern outskirts of Turkey’s largest city.

“We gave the police phone numbers, names, car plates, we gave them everything. But noth-ing happened,” Tahir said, saying he had reported his son’s depar-ture to Iraq after the family grew increasingly concerned about his activities.

Murat’s story - a working class high school graduate turned rad-ical Sunni militant within months - highlights Turkey’s vulnerability as it tries to prevent Islamic State from carrying out further attacks like this week’s at Istanbul airport.

Three suicide bombers opened fire at the international terminal late on Tuesday before blowing themselves up, killing 44 people and wounding more than 200 in one of the world’s busiest avia-tion hubs - a symbol of Turkey’s global standing. The attackers are believed to have been Islamic State militants from Russia, Kyr-gyzstan and Uzbekistan, Turkish officials have said, but they appear to have relied on logistical support from Islamic State cells in Turkey.

Police have detained 24 peo-ple in two days of raids across Istanbul on suspicion of involve-ment in planning the bombing, some of them in Sultanbeyli. In Fatih, another district near the city’s historic heart, a resident was cleaning graffiti off a home thought to have been used by

Home grown radicals a weak spot in Turkey’s fight against IS

By Humeyra Pamuk

Reuters

the bombers. “We don’t want a mukhtar sheltering Islamic State,” the graffiti said, referring to the local elected official respon-sible for administration in the neighbourhood.

Turkey, part of the Nato mili-tary alliance and a member of the U.S.-led coalition which has been bombing Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, has been hit by at least half a dozen suicide attacks blamed on the group over the past year.

The deadliest was in the cap-ital Ankara last October, a double suicide bombing at a rally of pro-Kurdish activists that killed more than 100 people. Prior to the air-port attack, two in Istanbul this year have targeted foreign tourists, killing a total of 16 people, most of them German and Israeli.

Security forces have tightened controls on the Syrian border and deported or detained thousands of suspects in recent years, but intelligence experts say Turkey, like many European countries, is struggling to counter radical-isation at home and to adapt to the group’s new tactics. “Are we prepared for the next attack? Unfortunately not,” said Hilmi Demir, a researcher at Ankara-based think-tank TEPAV who specialises in extremist groups.

“A new set of strategies and tactics are needed and we need to understand why these people are radicalised ... Islamic State has very powerful ideological tools. You can’t fight such groups with military and counter-terrorism measures alone.”

Turkey’s experience in coun-tering militancy has been shaped by its fight against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which took up arms in 1984 demanding Kurd-ish autonomy in the southeast.

Until the launch in 2012 of a peace process, which has since collapsed, it was a largely mili-tary campaign. With Islamic State, the challenge is more complex. A minority of people in Turkey, whose population is largely Sunni Muslim, have sympathy for the group’s ideology, if not its meth-ods, several polls have shown.

Eight percent of Turks viewed Islamic State favourably, a study by US-based company Pew in 11 countries with significant Muslim populations showed last Novem-ber, with 19 percent saying they had no opinion. Turkey ranked fifth in terms of the highest levels of sympathy towards the group.

“A considerable part of the population in Turkey does not see groups like Islamic State or Al Nusra as terror groups. This shows how they can potentially find sup-port,” said Suleyman Ozeren, a terrorism expert and head of the Ankara-based Global Policy and Strategy Institute.

Murat Kipcak made no secret of his plans to go to Syria and join Islamic State, his father said, openly praising the group and socialising with others sympa-thetic to it. Like several other families contacted by Reuters, he said his warnings to the authori-ties went unheeded.

“The police say these peo-ple are going willingly and they have the freedom to travel, so it can’t stop them,” said a 25-year old resident of Bayrampasa, another working class Istanbul suburb, giving his name as Meh-met. He said his brother left to join Islamic State in Syria in 2013. The brother had since returned twice and last time left for Iraq, Meh-met said, declining to give his full name because his family is part of

a police investigation.Turkey was initially a reluctant

partner in the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State, arguing there could be no end to a war threatening regional stability without the departure of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and advocating for his ouster.

Critics say Ankara was too ready to back hardline Islamist groups fighting Assad, contrib-uting to the conditions which enabled Islamic State to take hold. Ankara denies such charges, say-ing it was quick to declare Islamic State a terrorist group and that Turkey has the most to lose from its rise. Turkish police have been monitoring the activities of sus-pected low-level Islamic State militants since as early as 2013, prosecution documents seen by Reuters show.

Aaron Stein, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said the authorities appeared not to inter-vene as part of a surveillance strategy to map out the network and target its leaders. “The lessons suggest counter-terror officials need to be far more aggressive in disrupting mid-level recruiters, working within different Turkish communities,” Stein said. Turkish officials declined to comment on intelligence operations.

In the wake of Tuesday night’s attack, police have stepped up their raids on suspected safe houses. But for Mehmet, whose brother has been incommuni-cado since 2015, it comes too late. “These people who become mil-itants in Syria are the boys of our neighbourhood. The police know them, where they hang out. But they say ‘gathering and talking about Islam is not a crime’,” Meh-met said. “And so it goes on.”

Tahir Kipcak shows photograph of his son Murat during an interview with Reuters in Istanbul, Turkey.

OPINION 09 SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

In Egypt, Sisi’s star fades as problems pile upBy Amina Ismail and Lin Noueihed

Reuters

It is a hot afternoon in the Mus-lim fasting month of Ramadan and the New Cairo club house is empty. Hisham Genena, Egypt’s erstwhile

corruption tsar, settles in a corner. “It’s quiet here,” he says. “We can speak freely.”

It has been a long way down for Genena, a former policeman and judge who was appointed to head Egypt’s cor-ruption watchdog in 2012 and is now on trial, accused of defaming the state by exaggerating the scale of public sector graft.

Genena says he has done nothing wrong and his case is being used to dis-courage others from speaking out in a country he says is increasingly in the grip of security agencies.

“I am keen on the success of any president because his success is our success... but the attitude I’m seeing of using a security grip or reproducing the police state will not be produc-tive,” he told Reuters.

“When political parties are absent, NGOs are absent, local media is being crushed, international media too... is that a sign of a healthy environment in which a country can flourish?”

Three years after general-turned-president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ousted the Muslim Brotherhood, a crackdown that first targeted opposition activists has now turned on establishment figures like Genena to TV presenters and street performers.

Judges who have opposed mass death sentences have been retired. The head of the Press Syndicate and his deputy are

standing trial for the first time in the insti-tution’s history.

And this week, citing alleged visa violations, police deported the British-Lebanese host of a talk show launched after the 2011 uprising which ended Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule and raised hopes of a new era of political openness and social justice.

A law requiring interior ministry go-ahead for any public gathering of more than 10 people is so strictly enforced that police on Monday dispersed hundreds of pupils protesting that their exams had been delayed because the questions were leaked. “Egypt’s past chasing its future,” one com-mentator tweeted, with a picture of riot police chasing secondary school children.

Critics, including Genena, say that state repression has gathered such momentum since Sisi took power that it can only be compared to the 1950s, when Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Free Offic-ers toppled the king, imposed military rule and silenced dissent. Genena fell foul of authorities when he told reporters last year that graft had cost the state 600 bil-lion Egyptian pounds ($68 billion) in four years—an estimate he says is based on official reports. A fact-finding committee

set up by Sisi said those numbers were misleading, according to government-owned Al Ahram.

The court has yet to rule on Genena’s case, but he lost his job as head of the Central Auditing Authority in March. “Cor-ruption is very dangerous,” Genena said. “Corruption fosters and creates a fertile environment for the growth of terrorism.”

Sisi has called Islamist militants an existential threat and has made security a priority for Egypt, a country of more than 80 million people in a region beset by con-flict in Libya, Syria, Iraq and beyond.

In a recent TV interview to mark his achievements in office, Sisi said the fight against graft was ongoing and unimpeded.

He said that unnamed evil-doers sought to harm Egypt but dismissed claims that Egypt’s jails were bulging with political detainees, saying 90 percent of inmates were criminals.

Sisi also said Egyptians were free to express themselves but urged more focus on rights to security, education and health.

NO ECONOMIC TURNAROUNDSisi seized power on the back of pro-

tests that began on June 30, 2013 and ended a divisive experiment in Brotherhood rule.

The Brotherhood won Egypt’s first free par-liamentary and presidential elections after the 2011 revolt but faced protests within a year amid power cuts, petrol shortages and resistance from state institutions. Its supporters see Sisi as a usurper. But a broad cross section of the public admired the stern general in dark sunglasses, who promised to restore stability.

Even after security forces killed hun-dreds of Brotherhood supporters in the street and detained thousands, shops sold out of cakes decorated with Sisi’s face. A year on, Sisi was elected president with 97 percent of the vote.

But Sisi’s star has faded as an economic renaissance has failed to mate-rialise; inflation has reached seven-year highs, hard currency is in short supply, the pound is under pressure and economic growth is slowing.

“Tell Sisi, tell the president, we can’t live like this,” said Mohamed Mahmoud, a baker in a poor area of Cairo. He says beleaguered customers have cut spend-ing and his profit is now about 50 pounds a day, not enough for the family of seven.

Economists have derided what they see as Sisi’s ill-conceived infrastructure mega-projects, crowned by the costly Suez

Canal extension, which have been rushed through under military supervision.

Sisi said in his TV interview that such projects were needed because of a leg-acy of underinvestment in infrastructure.

However, while they have shown rapid results, they have failed to create jobs for a rapidly growing population.

“What were the three main pillars that he promised? Stability, economic growth and security and he has failed on all three counts,” said Timothy Kaldas, non-resident fellow at the Tahrir Insti-tute for Middle East Policy.

“So they are doubling down... If they can get away with expanding their repression against high-level targets and keep people in line, why wouldn’t they?”

“NO ONE CARES”Without international pressure, say

activists, Sisi has little incentive to loosen his grip. France has sold Sisi’s Egypt bil-lions of dollars worth of arms and U.S. military aid has continued as Egypt bat-tles Islamic State militants in Sinai.

“Nobody is going to twist Egypt’s arm about this now. No one cares. They think it is the best they will get right now,” said Kaldas. “Another thing that helps them is that the population has had two uprisings, in their eyes anyway, and after both the situation did not improve. On the con-trary, it deteriorated.”

But with the country lurching from one crisis to the next, criticism has mounted on social media and burst into the once-fawning press, as Egyptians have begun to openly mock Sisi’s increasingly rambling speeches.

Early this year, videos appeared online in which a group of youths performed skits in the street satirising Egypt’s crackdown, mocking its foreign policy and skewer-ing its leader.

By early May, four members of Atfal Al Shawareh, or Street Children, were behind bars accused of trying to overturn the rul-ing order and undermine the state. A fifth is out on bail. Friends and family said they were shocked that a handful of videos by an unknown group could prompt such serious charges.

More than 200 people were detained in April in connection with protests against the government’s plan to hand over two Red Sea islands to Saudi Ara-bia—a subject that featured in Atfal al-Shawareh’s skits. Many have received jail terms or fines but most have since been acquitted.

“Can you imagine how it is to be a young person in medical college or any other college and be imprisoned for a year or two,” said Mohamed Sadat, who heads the human rights committee in parlia-ment. “Will they come out good citizens? Or people full of hatred... without loyalty or belonging to this country?”

Three years after general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al Sisi ousted the Muslim Brotherhood, a crackdown that first targeted opposition activists has now turned on establishment figures like TV presenters and street performers. Judges who have opposed mass death sentences have been retired. The head of the Press Syndicate and his deputy are standing trial for the first time in the institution’s history.

An August 14, 2013 file picture shows Egyptian security forces escorting detained supporters of ousted president Mohamed Mursi during an operation to dismantle a huge pro-Islamists protest camp near Rabaa Al Adawiya mosque in eastern Cairo. Three years after, democratic hopes have given way to a spiralling crackdown on freedoms in the name of stability.

Washington still gets it wrong on Islamic State

By Peter Van Buren Reuters

Tuesday’s attacks at Istanbul’s main airport, which appear at this time to be the work of Islamic State, are the lat-

est reminder that the United States should not downplay the group’s rudi-mentary - yet effective - tactics.

Since the wave of Islamic State suicide bombings in May - killing 522 people inside Baghdad, and 148 people inside Syria - American offi-cials have downplayed the strategy as defensive. Brett McGurk, the Spe-cial Presidential Envoy in the fight against Islamic State, said the group “returned to suicide bombing” as the area under its control shrank. The American strategy of focusing pri-marily on the “big picture” recapture of territory seems to push the suicide bombings to the side. “It’s their last

card,” stated an Iraqi spokesperson in response to the attacks.

The reality is just the opposite.A day after the June 26 liberation

of Fallujah, car bombs exploded in eastern and southern Baghdad. Two other suicide bombers were killed outside the city. An improvised explo-sive device exploded in southwest Baghdad a day earlier.

Washington should know bet-ter than to underestimate the power of small weapons to shape large events. After Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld labeled Iraqi insur-gents as “dead enders” in 2003, they began taking a deadly toll of Ameri-can forces via suicide bombs. It was the 2006 bombing of the Shi’ite al-Askari Golden Mosque that kicked the Iraqi civil war into high gear. It was improvised explosive devices and car bombs that kept American forces on the defensive through 2011.

To believe suicide bombings rep-resent a weakening of Islamic State is a near-total misunderstanding of the hybrid nature of the group; Islamic State melds elements of a conven-tional army and an insurgency. To “win,” one must defeat both versions.

Islamic State differs from a tra-ditional insurgency in that it seeks to hold territory. This separates it from al Qaeda, and most other radical groups, and falsely leads the United States to believe that retaking strategic cities like Fallujah from Islamic State is akin

to “defeating” it, as if it is World War Two again and we are watching blue arrows move across the map toward Berlin. Envoy McGurk, following Fal-lujah, even held a press conference announcing Islamic State has now lost 47 percent of its territory.

However, simultaneously with holding and losing territory, Islamic State uses terror and violence to achieve political ends.

Islamic State has no aircraft and no significant long-range weapons, making it a very weak conventional army when facing down the combined forces of the United States, Iran and Iraq in set piece battles. It can, how-ever, use suicide bombs to strike into the very heart of Shi’ite Baghdad (and Syria, Jordan, Yemen, and Turkey - as Tuesday’s bombing reminds us), acting as a strong transnational insurgency.

Why does such strength matter in the face of large-scale losses such as Fallujah?

Violence in the heart of Iraqi Shi’ite neighborhoods empowers hardliners to seek revenge. Core Sunni support for Islamic State grows out of the need for protection from a Shi’ite dominated military, which seeks to marginalize if not destroy the Sunnis. Reports of Shi’ite atrocities leaking out of the ruins of Sunni Fallujah are thus significant. Fallujah was largely destroyed in order to “save” it, gener-ating some 85,000 displaced persons, mirroring what happened in Ramadi.

Those actions remind many Sunnis of why they supported Islamic State (and al Qaeda before them) in the first place.

Suicide strikes reduce the confidence of the people in their gov-ernment’s ability to protect them. In Iraq, that sends Shi’ite militias into the streets, and raises questions about the value of civil institutions like the Iraqi National Police. Victories such as the retaking of Ramadi and Fallujah, and a promised assault on Mosul, mean little to people living at risk inside the nation’s capital.

American commanders have already had to talk the Iraqi gov-ernment out of pulling troops from the field to defend Baghdad, even as roughly half of all Iraqi security forces are already deployed there. This almost guarantees more Amer-ican soldiers will be needed to take up the slack.

Anything that pulls more Ameri-can troops into Iraq fits well with the anti-American Islamic State narrative. Few Iraqis are left who imagine the United States can be an honest broker in their country. A State Department report found that one-third of all Ira-qis believe the Americans are actually supporting Islamic State, while 40 percent are convinced that the United States is trying to destabilize Iraq for its own purposes.

In a country like Turkey, suicide bombings play out in a more complex

political environment. Turkey has effectively supported Islamic State with porous borders for transit in and out of Syria, and has facilitated the flow of oil out of Syria and Iraq that ultimately benefits the group. At the same time, however, Turkey opened its territory to American aircraft conducting bombing runs against Islamic State. Attacks in Tur-key may be in response to pressure on the nation to shift its strategy more in line with Western demands. Russia (no friend of Islamic State) and Turkey have also recently improved relations; the attack in Istanbul may have been a warning shot reminding Turkey not to get too close.

The suicide bombings - in Turkey and elsewhere - are not desper-ate or defensive moves. They are not inconsequential, even if their actual numbers decline. They are careful strategy, the well-thought out appli-cation of violence by Islamic State. The United States downplays them at great risk.

(Peter Van Buren, who served in the State Department for 24 years, is the author of “We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People,” a look at the waste and mismanagement of the Iraqi reconstruction. His latest book is “Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent.” The opinions expressed are his own.)

To believe suicide bombings represent a weakening of Islamic State is a near-total misunderstanding of the hybrid nature of the group; Islamic State melds elements of a conventional army and an insurgency. To “win,” one must defeat both versions.

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

Indrani Mukerjea

killed daughter:

Ex-driver

MUMBAI: Shyamvar Rai, a prime accused-turned-approver in the Sheena Bora murder case, yester-day revealed that it was Sheena’s mother Indrani Mukerjea who had pinned her down and strangu-lated her to death.

In his confessional recorded before a mag-istrate, Rai added that at the time, he had gagged Sheena, while Indrani’s former husband Sanjeev Khanna had held the vic-tim’s hands and hair.

The statement recorded last year before a magistrate under Crim-inal Procedure Code Section’s 164 was handed over to all the other co-accused in the case and the sealed envelope was opened by the Special CBI Court following the Bom-bay High Court directives on Thursday.

Rai further claimed that Indrani implicated him in the arms case by planting a gun on him shortly after Sheena’s murder. He said that after the murder in April 2012, Indrani handed over a packet and three months’ salary and asked him to go, and when he opened the packet he found a crude gun in it.

Modi to embark

on four-nation

African tourNEW DELHI: Prime Min-ister Narendra Modi will embark on a four-nation tour of Africa from July 7, it was announced yes-terday. Modi will be visiting Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Kenya from July 7 to 11, External Affairs Min-istry Spokesperson Vikas Swarup said in his weekly media briefing here.

The Prime Minister will first visit Mozambique on July 7 and will be in South Africa on July 8 and 9. He will be in Tanzania on July 10 and on July 11 he will be in Kenya.

Javadekar: PM’s

meeting was

not for reshuffleKOLKATA: Union Environ-ment Minister Prakash Javadekar yesterday clari-fied the meeting of Prime Minister Narendra Modi with his council of minis-ters was an “exercise of accountability” and had nothing to do with a cabi-net reshuffle.

“What we have achieved on Thursday is really an exercise of accountability as Modi takes a keen interest in accountability,” Javadekar said here.

INDIA10 SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

Reuters

NEW DELHI: India will push to get 90 new airports up and running over the next 12 months, under a govern-ment plan to service smaller cities that have missed out on the country’s air travel boom, officials said yesterday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to accelerate growth in the

world’s fastest expanding aviation market while encouraging airlines like IndiGo, SpiceJet and Jet Airways to fly more people to and from smaller, often poorer cities.

Scores of new airports have been built around the country but many are yet to open because airlines do not see sufficient demand as ticket prices are too high for the majority Indians.

That has raised worries the gov-ernment is building infrastructure few

can afford to use. Civil aviation minis-try officials, however, said yesterday that the government has identified 30 recently built airports, and another 60 nearing completion, that it says it can get airlines to start flying to at the earliest.

Individual states will offer free land and emergency service support to all newly built airports, while land-ing charges and taxes on aviation fuel will be kept at low levels, they said.

“Economic activity should grow to such an extent that these routes are economically viable,” Civil Avi-ation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju told reporters.

India’s aviation growth has been driven by flights between larger cities, catering to a growing middle class as the country enjoys economic growth of more than 7 percent a year.

But the government believes there is latent demand in smaller cities

where airports are too small or not yet built. In the western state of Rajas-than, a region the size of Germany, there are only a handful of airports currently open to commercial flights and new airports are not being used.

Last month the government approved a policy to cap air fares on services to smaller cities at Rs2,500 ($37) per hour of travel, with the gov-ernment providing part of the funding to make it viable.

Raju said yesterday that fund-ing for the scheme would be set at around 5bn rupees per annum, with states putting in up to 20 percent of the money, or 10 percent in the case of the remote northeast.

A small charge to be levied on air-lines on major trunk routes would also raise funds.

The draft policy has been put out for public consultation and the rules will be finalised within a month.

Reuters

NEW DELHI: India’s first locally-built combat aircraft officially took to the skies yesterday, 33 years after

it was cleared for development, marking a long-held goal of cutting expensive imports to build a domes-tic defence-industrial base.

India’s fighter aircraft fleet, made up of a mix of Russian, Brit-ish and French planes, is down to 33 squadrons as against the air force’s requirement of 45 to face Pakistan and China.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has nudged the mil-itary to accept the first version of the “Tejas” Light Combat Aircraft to make up for the shortfall while a more powerful subsequent model is under development.

Indian Air Force officers broke coconuts and priests held multi-faith ceremonies to mark the induction of two planes in the southern city of Bengaluru. Later, the aircraft took off in the colours of the air force as fire tenders sprayed water on he tar-mac in a military ritual.

“Moment of national pride.

Govt to extend air travel boom to smaller cities

First indigenous combat plane enters service India’s fighter aircraft fleet, made up of a mix of Russian, British and French planes, is down to 33 squadrons as against the air force’s requirement of 45 to face Pakistan and China.

A priest waits to perform prayers next to Tejas, India’s first locally-built Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), before its induction into the Indian Air Force at the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) Airport in Bengaluru, yesterday.

Indigenously developed Tejas fighter jet inducted into Air Force.

Tejas will take our air strength to new heights,” Defence Minister Mano-har Parrikar, who has led the driv0e for indigenisation, said in a Twitter post.

Early this month China said it is still testing its first stealth fighter, the J-20, but it would enter service soon.

The single-seat Indian fighter is considered superior to counterparts like the JF-17 aircraft jointly built by China and Pakistan.

Tejas has had no accident in 3,000 hours of flying and its use of compos-ites helps lower its radar signature, making it harder to detect early, air force officials said.

“The LCA is as good as any in the

world in its class,” said retired Air Vice Marshal Manmohan Bahadur now a fellow at the Centre for Air Power Stud-ies in New Delhi.

But the challenge for state-run Hin-dustan Aeronautics Limited, which is making the aircraft, will be to stick to the production schedule as the air force seeks to arrest the decline in the number of planes it can deploy, he said.

Police personnel prepare to throw stones towards Kashmiri protestors during clashes in Srinagar, yesterday. Forces killed two suspected rebels in the clash.

Two dead in Kashmir clashes

IANS

NEW DELHI: India and Pakistan yesterday exchanged lists of pris-oners, including civil prisoners and fishermen, lodged in jails of either country. Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Vikas Swarup said that the lists were handed over simulta-

neously in New Delhi and Islamabad through diplomatic channels.

While India’s list contained names of 505 prisoners, includ-ing 372 civilians and 133 fishermen, Pakistan has 518 names, including 55 civilians and 463 fishermen. The handing over of the lists is in line with the provisions of the Consular Access Agreement between Pakistan and

India signed on May 21, 2008, under which both countries are required to exchange lists of prisoners in each other’s custody twice a year on Jan-uary 1 and July 1. “India remains committed to addressing on priority with Pakistan humanitarian matters, including those pertaining to pris-oners and fishermen in each other’s country,” Swarup said.

IANS

DEHRADUN: At least 22 people were killed following cloudburst and landslides as heavy rains lashed Pithoragarh and Chamoli districts of Uttarakhand, officials said yesterday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Uttarakhand Chief Minister Har-ish Rawat have expressed their grief

over the loss of life. More than two dozen people remained untraced. NDRF teams have been rushed to the affected areas and additional teams have also been kept on alert.

“As many as 25 people have been trapped in the debris following landslides in Bastia village of Kanal-ichhina block in Pithoragarh district. Bodies of 13 persons have been recov-ered by the district administration team with the help of local people,” a police official said.

“In Chamoli district, nine people have died and six others are miss-ing,” he added. Chief Minister Harish Rawat has asked officials to camp in the affected areas and ensure that there is no dearth of ration. He also said that helicopters will be provided to ferry the injured to the hospitals.

“We are saddened by the news of the deaths. A compensation of Rs two lakh has been announced for the kin of each of the deceased,” Rawat said.

Meanwhile, Home Minister Singh

spoke to Rawat and took stock of the situation. “Spoke to CM U’khand Shri Harish Rawat regarding the situa-tion post the cloud burst in the state. Centre is providing all possible assist-ance,” Singh tweeted.

He said NDRF teams have been rushed to the areas affected by the cloudburst and additional teams of NDRF were on standby.

“I am deeply pained at loss of pre-cious lives in Uttarakhand due to flash floods. My heartfelt condolences to

the bereaved families,” he said.Flooding has been reported in

many areas of the state when the Alaknanda river rose above the dan-ger level-mark after rainfall of up to 54mm was received in the last 24 hours. Officials said a cloudburst in Pithoragarh led to severe inundation in the region, causing hardship to the people. Large tracts of agricultural fields were inundated in Suva village of Dharchula area and three bridges linking the village were washed away.

IANS

NEW DELHI: Four members of an international gang involved in cir-culating Fake Indian Currency Notes (FICN), pumped into India by Paki-stan via Bangladesh, have been arrested, police said yesterday.

Sheikh Fazullah, 25, Sheikh Seh-zad, 39, Habibur Rehman, 35, and Rehman, 42, were arrested from Delhi and Bihar in a series of raids conducted by Delhi Police this week.

“We were trailing the racket for more than last four months and managed to identify their names. We recovered FICN having face value of `10.25 lakh (in denominations of `1,000 and `500) from the posses-sion of the arrested persons,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) Sanjeev Yadav.

Sehzad and Fazullah, both belong to same village in Bihar’s Motihari district and currently resid-ing in Uttar Pradesh’ Meerut, were arrested on June 25 while exchang-ing a consignment of FICN near Wazirpur bus depot in north Delhi.

Rehman was arrested near east Delhi’s Dilshad Garden Metro Station on June 27 with FICN with face value of `25,000, while Habibur Rehman

was held Friday in Bihar where he had come to deliver a consignment of FICN with a face value of `6 lakh.

The officer said that the FICN was being pumped by Pakistan in India through Bangladesh.

“These fake notes are first smug-gled in Malda (West Bengal) through Bangladesh-India border and then handed over to FICN racketeers in various parts of the country includ-ing Delhi. The exchange of these fake notes also take place through Nepal border,” the officer said.

The arrested persons revealed police that the prevailing market rate is `40-50 for each `100 note of fake currency.

“As large transactions are still made in cash, hence, there is huge demand of fake currency in Delhi-NCR,” the officer said.

“The currency notes have most of the security features and it is impossible to differentiate with naked eyes. They further told that all the new security features intro-duced by the government are quickly updated in fake currency notes also,” the officer said. Sehzad, Fazullah and Rehman informed police that they used to receive FICN consign-ments from Bihar and then sold it to retail customers in smaller quanti-ties of `10,000 to `20,000.

22 people dead in heavy rains hit Uttarakhand

Govt exchanges lists of prisoners

International counterfeit

currency racket busted

Demonstrators hold placards reading “Epidemic does not know nationality”, “Will stop AIDS and tuberculosis together”, “Human rescue by medication but not promises”, in front of German embassy in Kiev, yesterday. The demonstration aimed at increasing donor countries funding for programmes to fight HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

Health woes

EUROPE 11SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

Justice Minister Michael Gove said he had “no expectation” that Article 50 would be invoked this year.

MOSCOW: Russia yester-day blasted the European Union for extending eco-nomic sanctions over the Ukraine crisis, insisting the punitive measures would not make Moscow change course.

The foreign ministry said it viewed the move as “a continuation of the short-sighted policy of Brussels” and that it was “absurd” to link them to a failure to make progress on a peace deal to end fighting in eastern Ukraine.

Four Hungarian

explosives experts

dead in blast

BUDAPEST: Four Hungar-ian army explosives experts were killed in eastern Hun-gary yesterday after a device on a former military shooting range detonated while being made safe.

A fifth soldier was seri-ously injured and was being treated in hospital, according to a statement by the defence ministry published by the Hungar-ian news agency MTI.

The incident took place in Hortobagy National Park close to the city of Debrecen.

Slovenian foreign

minister offers

to quit over scam

LJUBLJANA: Slovenia’s Foreign Minister, Karl Erjavec, said yesterday he had offered to resign over a scandal involving a leaked tape that led to a breakdown in the country’s international border arbi-tration with neighbouring Croatia.

Erjavec told report-ers he had offered to resign after the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague decided to continue its work on border issue though Croatia had with-drawn from the arbitration process last year.

Ukraine will join

EU within a

decade: PM

BERLIN: Ukraine will join the EU within the next decade, Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said yesterday, adding his coun-try still believed strongly in the bloc despite Britain’s vote to leave.

Groysman said Ukraine saw its future in the West and hailed an association agreement with the EU as a “driving force” behind reforms in Kiev.

Croatia receives

first group of

migrants

ZAGREB: Croatia yester-day received first group of migrants - four Eritreans arriving from Italy - under a European Union relo-cation scheme which has prompted criticism and resistance from some ex-communist member states of the bloc.

Croatia is due to receive 1,583 migrants under the relocation scheme agreed last September.

Russia slams EU

for extending

sanctions

AFP

LONDON: The favourites to succeed Prime Minister David Cameron, yes-terday pushed for a delay in initiating Britain’s talks to leave the EU as French President Francois Hollande insisted “Brexit” cannot be cancelled or delayed.

Britain has been plunged into extraordinary political turmoil since

Britons voted by 52 percent in favour of leaving the European Union, with the ruling Conservatives and opposi-tion Labour party in disarray and the country deeply polarised.

As he outlined his bid for Cam-eron’s job yesterday, top Brexit campaigner and Justice Minister Michael Gove said he had “no expec-tation” that Article 50— the formal procedure for leaving the EU—would be invoked this year.

He also said he would pull Brit-ain out of the single market, end free movement of people and impose a new immigration system favouring skilled workers.

Gove’s rival and current favour-ite in the race, Theresa May, had said that Article 50 “should not be invoked before the end of the year”.

EU leaders have called for a swift divorce however, fearful of the impact of Britain’s uncertain future

on economic growth and a potential domino effect in eurosceptic mem-ber states.

“The decision has been taken, it

cannot be delayed and it cannot be cancelled, now they have to face the consequences,” Hollande said on the sidelines of Battle of the Somme

centenary ceremonies in France.He said a speedy Brexit “would

avert all the uncertainties and insta-bility, especially in the economic and financial domains. The faster it goes, the better it will be for them”.

Interior minister May supported the “Remain” campaign but has assured “Leave” supporters she will respect the result, saying: “Brexit means Brexit”. Dozens of MPs have signed up to her campaign.

The winner of the vote to replace Cameron as Conservative leader and therefore prime minister—a switch that requires no new general elec-tion under the British system—will be named on September 9.

In the coming days, Conservative MPs will whittle down the candi-dates to two in a series of votes and the rivals will then tour the country to appeal to some 150,000 party mem-bers for their vote.

AFP

VIENNA: Austria’s Norbert Hofer yesterday won another shot at being elected the European Union’s first far-right president after a court dra-matically annulled May’s closely fought election result because of irregularities.

The Constitutional Court ruled that the May 22 runoff, which saw independent candidate Alexander van der Bellen beat Hofer of the Freedom Party (FPOe) by just 30,863 votes, must be held again.

“The challenge brought by Free-dom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache against the May 22 elec-tion... has been upheld,” court president Gerhart Holzinger said in an announcement live on national television.

Gun enthusiast Hofer, 45, came top in a first round in April but then lost in a runoff with the 72-year-old Van der Bellen, sparking relief among Europe’s centrist parties.

Preliminary results had given Hofer a narrow lead but after some 700,000 postal votes were counted, the Greens-backed Van der Bel-len was declared the winner of the largely ceremonial post the next day.

The FPOe, which is topping opin-ion polls ahead of the next scheduled general election in 2018 tapping rising unease about immigration, launched a legal challenge on June 8 claiming massive irregularities.

These included allegations that tens of thousands of votes were opened earlier than allowed under election rules and that some votes were counted by people not author-ised to do so.

As the court heard from dozens of witnesses, Van der Bellen’s law-yer had described the transgressions as having an “insignificant” impact

on the election result, but in vain.Yesterday’s ruling stops in its

tracks Van der Bellen’s planned inauguration on July 8. It is unclear when a new election will be held.

In the meantime, current Pres-ident Heinz Fischer will still step down as planned and will be replaced on an interim basis by three parliamentary officials—one of whom is Hofer.

The decision sets in motion what is likely to be a hard-fought and nail-biting new summer election battle between van der Bellen and Hofer.

It remains to be seen whether the FPOe’s success in getting the election held again will translate into getting Hofer into the Habsburg dynasty’s former imperial palace, the Hofburg.

It is possible that Britain’s ref-erendum decision on June 23 to become first member of the Euro-pean Union to leave the bloc could also turn Austria’s future member-ship into a key election issue.

Hofer, echoing French National Front leader Marine Le Pen, said after the Brexit bombshell he would be in favour of holding a referendum in Austria if EU fails to implement necessary reforms “within a year”.

“If (the EU) evolves in the wrong direction, then time has come to ask Austrians if they still want to be part of it,” Hofer told the Oesterreich tab-loid on June 26.

Chancellor Christian Kern of centre-left Social Democrats (SPOe), who in mid-May replaced Werner Faymann after he quit after his pres-idential candidate was knocked out in first round, has ruled out such a vote.

“It makes no sense... This is a time to learn lessons and dispel peo-ple’s doubts and fears,” he said.

Van der Bellen, is staunchly pro-EU. As Austrian president, he said he dreams of a border-free “United States of Europe” that defends the rights of minority groups

Russian sought

to bug Lithuanian

president’s home:

Prosecutors

AFP

VILNIUS: A Russian spy attempted to recruit Lithua-nian officials to bug the home of the Baltic Nato state’s president, prosecutors said yesterday.

The case is the latest in a string of Cold War-style espionage affairs involving Russians in eastern Nato member nations amid intensified East-West tensions.

Identified only as Russian FSB security service agent N F, the Russian citizen was charged with espionage, document forgery and illegally crossing the border, the prosecutors’ office said in a statement.

Recruitment efforts targetted security officials “in an attempt to install special listening devices” to bug President Dalia Grybauskaite at her home and office.

The Russian has been under arrest since April 2015 after being detained on his way to Belarus on a train from the Kaliningrad region, Russia’s westernmost outpost bor-dering Lithuania and Poland.

The announcement, came a week before a Nato summit set to endorse a military build-up in eastern Europe to deter Russia.

The efforts focus on four battalions in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland after Rus-sia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and meddling in eastern Ukraine.

Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin on Thursday accused the US-led alliance of tearing up the military balance in Europe, a claim strongly rejected by Lithuania’s Defence Minister Juozas Olekas.

“Nato presence restores the balance because for the last dec-ade Nato has reduced its defence resources while Russia increased capabilities(...) and attacked neigh-bours”, Olekas said yesterday.

Reuters

PRAGUE: Czech President Milos Zeman called for Czech Republic to hold a referendum on European Union and Nato membership follow-ing Britain’s shock vote to leave the EU, a suggestion quickly rebuffed by the government.

Zeman said he would back his country staying in the EU and Nato. He has no power to call a referen-dum but is an influential leader in a country where euroscepticism is widespread. The Czech Republic joined the bloc in 2004.

“I disagree with those who are for leaving the European Union,” Czech Radio quoted Zeman as say-ing at a meeting with citizens in the eastern town of Velke Mezirici late on Thursday.

“But I will do everything for them to have a referendum and be able to express themselves. And the same goes for a NATO exit too,” the centre-left president said.

The Czech government responded swiftly to Zeman’s sug-gestion. “Membership in these organisations is a guarantee of sta-bility and security,” Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka’s spokesman said in a statement.

AFP

THIEPVAL, FRANCE: Britain and France recalled horrors of the Battle of the Somme yesterday, 100 years after their troops fought and died together in one of the defining offen-sives of World War I.

Britain’s royal family, Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande took part in a commemoration at the Thi-epval Memorial in northern France to remember one million who were left dead, injured or missing in the 141-day battle.

Guards of honour, bagpipes and military bands accompanied the mov-ing ceremony in shadow of imposing memorial inscribed with names of 72,000 servicemen who went miss-ing in the surrounding fields.

However, modern political battles could not be ignored, and Hollande had a brief exchange with Cameron after the ceremony, a week after Brit-ain voted to leave the EU. “

The decision has been taken, it

cannot be delayed or cancelled,” said Hollande. He said a speedy Brexit “would avert all the uncertainties and instability, especially in the economic and financial domains. The faster it goes, the better it will be for them.”

“I want to recall it is the European idea which allowed us to overcome divisions and rivalries between states, and which has brought us peace for the past 70 years,” he said.

During the ceremony narrators, using old letters, poems and songs, took some 10,000 guests—who scrambled to pull on plastic ponchos as the clouds burst—through one of the deadliest battles of all time.

“There was high explosives, shrapnel, everything you can imag-ine. Terrific, hurtling death,” read a letter from Private Sean Fendley of the British Army of the first time sol-diers went “over the top” to face their German enemy.

The offensive was launched to ease pressure on French forces tak-ing a hammering at Verdun, and was preceded by the largest artillery bom-bardment in history, with some 1.5 million shells lobbed at the Germans.

However, this was not enough to break German defences, and of some 55,000 soldiers who scrambled out of

their trenches, 20,000 would be dead by the end of first day of fighting—the bloodiest in British military history.

Cameron’s ‘successors’ push for Brexit delay

Reuters

BUCHAREST: Romanians are offering a glimmer of hope for mil-lions of disappointed Britons who voted to remain in the European Union last week - adopting British ‘Remainians’ and providing them with symbolic identity papers.

“Dear Brits who believe in a

united Europe, leave the Brexiters, the quarrelling and the weather behind. Start a brand new life in a loving Romanian family,” an online campaign launched by the daily newspaper Gandul reads.

The campaign has attracted 15,000 Romanian volunteers, with more than 5,000 symbolic Roma-nian identity cards issued so far for British citizens, organisers said.

EU membership offer to ‘Remain-ian’ Brits

Austrian far-right gets poll defeat annulled

Czech govt rejects president’s

call for referendum on EU

Britain & France mark 100 years since Battle of Somme

FROM LEFT: French President Francois Hollande, Britain’s Prince William, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, Britain’s Princess Catherine, Britain’s Prince Harry and Britain’s Princess Camilla march towards the Thiepval Memorial to attend a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the World War I battle at the River Somme, yesterday.

Brazilian Navy members exercise security measures as part of defence manoeuvers against a possible terrorist attack along Rio de Janeiro coast, in view of the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games, in Rio de Janeiro.

On their toes

David “Tiger Wings and Things” Brunelli (right) and Molly Schuyler, who won by eating 28 burgers in 12 minutes, compete in the Zburger Independence Burger Eating Championship, in Washington, DC, yesterday.

Eating spree

AMERICAS12 SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

Lynch said she understood that her meeting with Clinton might be seen as compromising neutrality of investigation, even though she said the probe of Hillary Clinton was not discussed.

AP

WASHINGTON: The Obama admin-istration said yesterday that between 64 and 116 civilians have been killed by drone and other US strikes in Paki-stan, Yemen and Africa since President Barack Obama took office in 2009.

But the administration’s first such public assessment put civilian death toll significantly lower than estimates by various human rights groups. These range as high as 1,100 killed.

Seeking to create a precedent for his successor, Obama also signed an executive order that details US policies to limit civilian casualties and makes

protecting civilians a central element in US military operations planning.

The order requires an annual release of casualty estimates. It says the government should include “cred-ible reporting” by non-government groups when it reviews strikes to determine if civilians were killed.

But the directive won’t necessarily be binding on the next president, who could change the policy with an exec-utive order of his or her own.

While sketchy details often emerge about individual drone strikes, the full scope of US drone programme has long been shrouded from view. It is a key tool of Obama’s counterterrorism strategy.

The civilian casualties disclosed

do not reflect US air attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria, countries deemed “areas of active hostilities.”

Human rights groups have long claimed the administration under-counts civilian casualties and new information is unlikely to satisfy them entirely. London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, has estimated anywhere from 492 to about 1,100 civil-ians killed by drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2002.

Federico Borello, executive direc-tor of Center for Civilians in Conflict in Washington, applauded Obama for the executive order. He said his group probably would call on Congress to codify it into law so that future pres-idents cannot throw it out.

“This is something we’ve been working on for 10 years,” he said. Having civilian protections “in heart of military planning is a big deal.”

Reprieve, an international human rights organisation based in New York, says administration’s previous statements about the drone pro-gramme have been proven to be false by facts on the ground and US gov-ernment’s own internal documents.

“But more importantly, it has to be asked what bare numbers will mean if they omit even basic details such as the names of those killed and the areas, even the countries, they live in,” Reprieve said in a state-ment ahead of the administration’s announcement.

AP

WASHINGTON: Attorney General Loretta Lynch (pictured) acknowl-edged yesterday that her meeting with Bill Clinton while his wife is under federal investigation “cast a shadow” on the public’s perception of a case playing heavily into the presi-dential campaign.

“I certainly wouldn’t do it again,” Lynch said of the meeting, which created immediate bipartisan angst and underscored the political con-sequences of the FBI-led probe into the former secretary of state’s email.

Lynch hastened to add that she

would follow the recommendations of career prosecutors on whether to file criminal charges in the case, removing herself from that decision.

Her statements were aimed at tamping down concerns that the investigation could be politically tainted or that Lynch, an Obama administration appointee, might overrule the findings of agents and prosecutors who have spent months looking into the possible mishandling of classified information on the pri-vate email server Clinton used as secretary of state.

Lynch said she understood her private meeting with Clinton aboard her plane in Phoenix might be seen as compromising neutrality of the investigation, even though she said the probe of Hillary Clinton was not discussed.

Asked what she was thinking in permitting the meeting to occur, she said, “I completely get that question, and I think it is the question of the day.”

The outcome of investigation is bound to influence presidential cam-paign, whether to Clinton’s benefit if she emerges unscathed or Republican rival Donald Trump in the event that she or anyone close to her winds up prosecuted. Bill Clinton’s approach of attorney general also could reinforce suspicions that the Clintons play by different rules and aggravate ques-tions of trust that already hang over Hillary Clinton in the minds of some voters — even if she’s never charged.

Trump tweeted that “Bill’s meet-ing was probably initiated and demanded by Hillary,” without offer-ing evidence of that. “Does anybody really believe that meeting was just a coincidence?” he asked. The Clin-ton campaign declined to comment on Lynch’s remarks.

Lynch said in Colorado that she had decided even before the meeting with Bill Clinton to heed the recom-mendations of a team of federal agents and career prosecutors who have been working on the case. But she acknowledged that the talk with Clinton, which occurred on her plane in Phoenix, had become a “painful” episode that reinforced the need for her to cede ultimate decision-mak-ing authority to others.

The encounter was especially sensitive given the repeated efforts by Lynch and FBI Director James Comey to stress that their investiga-tion is being done independently and without regard for politics.

Reuters

WASHINGTON: The Repub-lican-controlled US House of Representatives, under mounting pressure to advance gun-control legislation, will vote next week on a measure to keep guns out of the hands of people on government ter-rorism watch lists.

House Speaker Paul Ryan announced the plan in a conference call with lawmakers, a week after Democrats staged a 25-hour sit-in on the House floor to push for gun control following mass shooting in Orlando.

Democrats, who have vowed to keep pushing for tighter gun restric-tions when Congress returns from its US Independence Day break next week, warned if Republican lead-ers opt for a watered-down measure backed by the National Rifle Associ-ation, they will not accept it.

Republican leadership aides declined to provide details. One said the package was still being worked out. Following the June 12 shoot-ing that killed 49 people at a club in Orlando, gun-control proponents ratcheted up pressure for legislation.

“We are going to get something done this year, I predict,” Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid told reporters. “I think we’re going to take a bite out of the NRA.”

Reid said he was hopeful for a bill introduced by Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, and a bipar-tisan House companion bill backed by Republicans including Represent-ative Carlos Curbelo of Florida, to prevent gun sales to anyone on the

government’s “No Fly List” for ter-rorism suspects or the “Selectee List” for extra airport screening.

A source on Ryan’s conference call said the speaker said the House would act next week on a gun meas-ure as part of a larger terrorism package, calling the gun restriction “just common sense.”

Before the announcement, Rep-resentative Bob Dold of Illinois, a Republican backer of Curbelo bill, urged Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to opt for bipartisan measure.

Alternatively, Republican lead-ers could choose a Republican bill by Representative Lee Zeldin of New York as a companion to a Sen-ate measure from Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn of Texas. The Cornyn measure failed in the Senate last week in the face of opposition from Democrats who claim the measure was written by the NRA.

“House Democrats will keep up our efforts to push for the majority to allow a vote on gun violence legisla-tion, but bringing up a bill authored by the NRA just isn’t going to cut it,” said Drew Hammill, an aide to House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.

The Cornyn-Zeldin measure would give officials three days to decide whether a gun sale should be blocked. Democrats argue the timetable is insufficient, and that the government would have to per-suade a court that a would-be buyer “has committed or will commit an act of terrorism” before it could block a gun sale.

Under the Collins and Curbelo bills, a court would have 14 days to decide on appeals.

Judge grants new

trial for Serial murderer

AFP

NEW YORK: A US judge ordered a new trial for a man convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend, whose case was turned into a global sen-sation by a hit podcast.

Adnan Syed, 35, son of Paki-stani immigrants, was sentenced to life imprisonment 16 years ago for murder of Hae Min Lee in suburban Baltimore. The case was largely ignored in the media until it was taken up by weekly podcast Serial and turned into a blockbuster when an American journalist revisited the story and cast doubt on Syed’s guilt.

Judge Martin Welch granted Syed’s request for a new trial in a court document. “We won a new trial for Adnan Syed,” tweeted his defence lawyer Justin Brown.

Reuters

WASHINGTON: Republican Donald Trump said that if elected president on November 8, he would be open to drawing Nato forces into the fight against Islamic State (IS) militants in a new mission for an alliance he has called obsolete.

Trump made the comments in an interview with ABC News. The presumptive Republican presiden-tial nominee has for months raised questions about the money the United States pours into Nato, which he says needs to be reconfigured to take account of today’s threats.

“I like the idea of using Nato and also neighbours that aren’t in Nato and take them out. You

gotta take them out,” Trump said.Under President Barack Obama,

the United States has relied heavily on US airstrikes to attack IS targets in Syria and Iraq. Republicans have criticised this policy as not enough to stop the militants.

Trump said the idea of using the Cold War-era alliance would be to ease the load on American forces.

“I don’t want to get too much

of ours involved. I want Nato to be involved,” Trump said. “We spend a tremendous amount of money on Nato. We take care of countries that frankly should be taking care of themselves in terms of economically.”

Trump’s comments came amid an uproar over a meeting between former President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch at a time when Clinton’s wife, Democratic

presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, is under federal investigation.

Trump told radio talk show host Mike Gallagher the meeting was proof of his charge the US political system is “rigged” in favour of political elites.

“It’s unheard of,” Trump told ABC News. “You have this massive inves-tigation on emails and they’d have a meeting like this.”

Obama is preparing to campaign

with Hillary Clinton for the first time in her 2016 White House bid. They are to appear together in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Tuesday. A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week showed Clinton 11 points ahead of Trump.

At the White House, spokesman Josh Earnest made clear that Obama believes an impartial investigation is crucial and noted that Lynch had said the conversation was benign.

AP

MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE: Four young children in suburban Memphis were fatally stabbed yesterday and their mother was taken into custody.

Deputies were called to an apart-ment shortly before 1 pm yesterday, said Shelby County Sheriff Bill Old-ham, who did not allege that the mother had stabbed the children.

“This is an egregious act of evil

that has shocked us to our core,” Old-ham said. “I will never understand how anyone can do this.”

The investigation is in a very preliminary stage and investiga-tors do not know if the mother had any mental health issues, Oldham said. He said authorities are work-ing to notify the next of kin and won’t release names before that.

“One of the most difficult ques-tions in any investigation is always, ‘Why did this happen?’” he said.

The apartment where the

stabbing occurred is in a gated com-munity with a golf course called The Greens at Irene. Yesterday afternoon, deputies were standing at the gate house questioning motorists as they tried to drive into the neighbourhood.

Neighbour Patricia Johnson said she wasn’t allowed to leave for two hours as deputies investigated the scene. Oldham said district attor-ney general’s special victims’ unit has been called in and Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell has promised all resources necessary for investigation.

Attorney General regrets meeting with Bill Clinton

4 children fatally stabbed in Memphis

US: Up to 116 civilians dead in drone & other air raids US House reignites gun control debate with planned vote

Trump floats idea of using Nato in fight against IS

Yesterday’s answer

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Reuters

CAPE CANAVERAL: Nasa’s Juno spacecraft hurtled closer toward Jupiter yesterday headed for a July 4 leap into polar orbit around the solar system’s largest planet to analyze how it formed and helped set the stage for life on Earth.

During a 20-month study, Juno is expected to circle the gas giant in 37 egg-shaped orbits to measure microwaves radiating from inside the planet’s thick atmosphere, map its massive magnetic field and conduct other experiments.

Scientists are particularly keen to learn how much water Jupiter contains, a key to unlocking the origins of the largest celestial body in the solar system after the sun.

Jupiter currently orbits the sun at a distance about five times farther away than Earth, but it may have formed in a different location and migrated, gravitationally elbowing aside other planets along the way.

“Something happens that allows a star to be born and then afterwards the planets ... That eventually leads to us,” said the mission’s lead scientist, Scott Bolton, a space physicist with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.

More than half of the material left over from the formation of the sun 4.6 billion years ago ended up in Jupiter, which has a circumfer-ence nearly 11 times bigger than Earth’s and is itself orbited by 67 known moons.

Jupiter is made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, the two simplest and most abundant ele-ments in the universe, but the planet’s enormous mass gener-ates such high pressure that the

materials behave in unexpected and unknown ways.

“We’re working in a new envi-ronment,” said Frances Bagenal, a planetary scientist with the University of Colorado in Boul-der. “We don’t know the physics of how things work at these high pressures.” From vantage points as close as 3,000 miles (4,800km) from the planet’s cloud tops, the spacecraft is to not only search for water but assess whether Jupiter possesses a dense core beneath its atmosphere.

“We’re about to embark on an incredible journey,” Bolton said during a news conference from the Jet Propulsion Labora-tory in Pasadena, California. Juno, careening toward Jupiter at more than 160,000 miles per hour, over 200 times the speed of sound, has been programmed to fire its brak-ing rocket at 11:18 p.m. EDT on Monday (0318 GMT on Tuesday) in order to slow its course.

The rocket must be precisely positioned and burn for 35 min-utes to reduce its speed enough to allow it to be captured by Jupiter’s gravity and swing into orbit.

“If that doesn’t all go just right, we fly past Jupiter,” Bolton said.

Only one other spacecraft, Nasa’s Galileo space probe, has orbited Jupiter, circling the planet for eight years before colliding with the gas giant in 2003. The first spacecraft to fly past Jupi-ter was Nasa’s Pioneer 10 in 1973.

Juno, which will arrive at Jupi-ter after a journey of five years and nearly 2 billion miles (3.2 billion km), is expected to end its mission as the Galileo probe did, crashing itself into the planet to avoid possible contam-ination of Jupiter’s ocean-bearing moon, Europa, with any microbes carried by the spacecraft.

AFP

ROME: The first phase of a multi-million-euro makeover of Rome’s Colosseum was completed yester-day with Prime Minister Matteo Renzi pledging cash would be made avail-able to spruce up other crumbling historic sites.

In a project largely funded by fashion and shoewear group Tod’s, the amphitheatre where gladiators once jousted with lions has been water-sprayed to remove centuries of encrusted dirt and grime.

Works to strengthen the arched structures of the northern and south-ern facades and replace metal gates and barriers in the ground level arches have also been completed.

Tod’s, whose billionaire owner Diego Della Valle reportedly put up €25m for the works, said it was proud to have been part of the restoration of “a true historical symbol of Italy.”

The Colosseum is the latest in a string of famous Italian monuments to have been renovated with funds from private donors, often from the luxury sector. Roman fashion house Fendi paid for a 16-month clean-up of the Trevi fountain which has been acclaimed by visitors. And upmarket jeweller Bulgari is behind the ongoing renovation of the Spanish steps, also located in the capital’s historic centre.

Renzi’s government has promised €18m for a second phase of renova-tion of the Colosseum which will involve rebuilding the arena floor and make it capable of hosting concerts

and other cultural events, including re-enactments of some of the kind of shows the ancient Romans enjoyed.

The floor was removed by exca-vators in the late 19th century while the bits of the exterior structure that are missing were mostly removed for other construction projects in the city, including the underground.

There are also plans for a new vis-itor centre and the renovation of the underground vaults where wild ani-mals and prisoners destined for public execution were kept ahead of their appearances before the Roman crowds.

Completed in 80 AD, the Colos-seum was the biggest amphitheatre built during the Roman empire. It stands 159 feet high and was capable of hosting 80,000 spectators. It now wel-comes over six million visitors a year.

Nasa space probe to lift veil on Jupiter

Sources: NASA; Southwest Research Institute *Solar arrays deployed. † 17 unconfirmed.

C. Inton, 01/07/2016

LiquidMetallicHydrogen

Molecular Hydrogen

Atmosphere

Earth to scale

NASA’s Juno spacecraft hurtled closer toward Jupiter on Friday headed for a July 4 leap into polar orbit around the solar system’s largest planet to analyze how it formed and helped set the stage for life on Earth.

Mission to Jupiter

Diameter: 142,984 km | Mass: 317.8 EarthsVolume: 1,321 Earths | Moons: 67†

Distance from sun: 778 million km

Named after the goddess-sister-wife of the Roman god Jupiter

GravityScience

MicrowaveRadiometer

Jovian AuroralDistributionsExperiment (JADE)

Plasma WavesInstrument

Jovian Infrared AuroralMapper (JIRAM)

Junocam

(Obverse view)

UltravioletSpectograph

Magnetometer(MAG)Diameter: 20 m*

Height: 3.5 mMission cost: ~$1.1 bln

Jupiter Energetic-particle DetectorInstrument (JEDI)

Trajectory

Juno

Will investigate Jupiter’s origin, interior structure, deep atmosphere and magnetosphere

Will be the first solar array-powered spacecraft to go this deep into space

JupiterarrivalJuly 4, 2016

Juno launchAug. 5, 2011

Earth flybyOct. 9, 2013

Juno will orbit Jupiter 33 times, skimming to within 5,000 kilometers above the planet's cloud tops, for about one year

Great Red Spot

Composed primarily of gaseous and liquid matter, its core is often described as rocky but its exact composition is still unknown

Jupiter

Rome’s Colosseum gets makeover

AFP

BANGKOK: Komol Panyasophonlert struggles to string an English sen-tence together, but the 31-year-old Thai computer programmer is still hoping to be crowned champion of the wordsmith’s favourite boardgame, Scrabble, this week.

Komol, the world Number Three, is one of several top-ranked Thais hoping to showcase their talents in the King’s Cup tournament, which kicked off in Bangkok on Thursday.

While he claims to have mem-orised “more than 90 percent of the dictionary” in English, he can only tell you what a few of those words mean. “I memorise small words first, then big words later,” he explained in Thai, add-ing that he tries to spend at least half an hour each day hitting the books.

With some 6,000 players set to attend, the King’s Cup is the globe’s biggest Scrabble competition and an indication of its wide popularity in Thailand. The game is a favourite among schoolteachers who use it as a language-learning tool, and the king-dom is the only Asian country to field world champions, despite its notori-ously low levels of English proficiency.

Amnuay Ploysangngam, who founded Thailand’s first Scrabble association in the 80s and is credited with popularising the game, said today nearly three-quarters of schools have Scrabble clubs. “We never expected that one day we would become world champions,” he said.

Yet the success of Komol and other elite Thai players — none of

Men of letters: Thais master Scrabble without English

Participants playing games of Scrabble during the King’s Cup tournament — the globe’s biggest Scrabble competition — in Bangkok.

whom is a fluent English speaker—is testament to what really drives victories in the top tier: an analyt-ical mind.

“At the highest level Scrabble is a math game. It’s like poker. It’s all about probabilities and managing a rack (of tiles),” said John Williams a former director of the US’s National Scrabble Association. “You don’t have to know the definitions,” he added.

With players at the King’s Cup laying down words like “ZOOTY,” — a synonym for flashy — and “VUGS” — a small rock cavity — even native English speakers could be forgiven for failing to recognise their own language on the board. The world’s best Scrabble players commit up to 100,000 words to memory, a figure more than double the lexicon of an average English-speaking adult.

“What makes (the Thais) extraor-dinary is they have no context and

are starting at a 40,000 word defi-cit,” said Williams. Despite the Thais’ home advantage, this year’s King’s Cup title is expected to go to Nigel Richards, the famously shy New Zea-lander who dominates the field and is considered the best player in the game’s history.

The three-time world champion has won the King’s Cup 11 times and stunned the francophone world last July when he also won the French championship. He doesn’t speak the language and only spent nine weeks studying the official French Scrab-ble dictionary.

Thailand’s Komol, who lost to Richards in the 2013 world champi-onship, still remembers his favourite word from that match — GAZUMPED — meaning “to swindle”.

Not that Komol will be using it much. “I already forget what it means,” he said. A view of the Colosseum after the latest stage of restoration by luxury goods firm Tod’s in Rome, Italy.

Ashghal opens new bridge at Izghawa interchangefor commuters heading to Doha via north road

Qatar Airways said to weigh raising stake in British Air owner

New bridge at IzghawaInterchange opens

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PAGE | 18 PAGE | 19

EU should give UK a quick and

fair exit deal

www.thepeninsulaqatar.com

SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016 • 27 RAMADAN 1437 @peninsulaqatar @peninsula_qatarthepeninsulaqatar

Reuters

LONDON: A week after Britons voted themselves out of the Euro-pean Union, many London-based bankers and their employers face two options if they are to secure their futures: lobby or leave.

Some investment banks, anxious not to stir speculation of an exodus from the historic City of London and its modern counterpart at Canary Wharf, have given out “business as usual” messages since last week’s shock referendum result.

But beyond the soothing words the wider industry is hastily organ-ising a lobbying effort in the hope London can keep selling financial services across Europe, a right to which it has become accustomed but may lapse when Britain finally exits the 28-nation bloc.

The alternative for banks and bankers, growing increasingly inse-cure in an information vacuum that has developed since the June 23 vote, is to get out.

Headhunters report a level of anxious calls they haven’t seen since the 2008 global crisis, with bankers asking about prospects in rival financial centres that remain

in the EU, or those in Asia and the United States.

Banks and other financial firms have rallied together, forming a group to devise a strategy for protecting the turf of an industry that is Brit-ain’s biggest exporter and accounts for more than 10 percent of its tax revenues.

Even Britain’s biggest lenders are relying on the group - led by Shriti Vadera, chairwoman of the UK arm of Spain’s Banco Santander who is also a former business minister - for guidance in such uncertain times.

“We are looking to them to have an intelligent response,” Barclays chairman John McFarlane told an industry event on Thursday. “We nei-ther know the shape or direction of things to come. It’s far from certain what we might be able to secure from discussions with the EU.”

With the British government in disarray, European politicians are threatening to clip the wings of the London financial centre that is home to more than 250 foreign banks and more than three-quarters of the EU’s capital markets activity.

French President Francois Hol-lande has backed calls for London, the world’s biggest currency trading centre, to lose its right to clear deals

denominated in euros. Likewise, the right of banks based in Brit-ain to operate across the EU under the bloc’s financial “passporting” arrangement could also go if it loses access to the single European market.

Britain has yet even to say when it will formally inform the EU of its intention to leave, a move that will start two years of divorce negotia-tions. Prime Minister David Cameron has said he will resign, but left the formal exit notification to his suc-cessor who is unlikely to be installed until September.

Leading “Leave” campaigners have also yet to say precisely what they want, beyond stating their desire to control the right of EU citizens to work in Britain - something Brus-sels says is impossible if the country wants to stay in the single market.

So while the financial sector is poised to lobby, it has little idea of whom it must present its case to on the British side.

“We are ready to talk, but we don’t know who we should be talk-ing to,” said a senior banking industry source involved in the discussions. “No-one has defined ‘leave’, so we don’t know what it is that we’re deal-ing with ... September feels a very long way off.”

World stocks rise in post-Brexit recovery

London bankers now face Brexit choice: Lobby or leave

AFP

LONDON: Global stocks rose yeste-day, with the London market now in a much better place than before the outcome of Britain’s shock EU vote, and others were firmly on the road to recovery.

Asian stocks led the way, end-ing the week with another rally on optimism that central banks globally will step up to support growth in the face of uncertainty caused by Brit-ain’s vote.

Wall Street was also higher as attention focused away from Brexit and towards solid US manufacturing data and auto sales.

After the shock of the referendum result sent world markets into initial free fall last Friday, they have surged over the past week as authorities moved to soothe concerns another rout was imminent.

“A massive increase in risk aver-sion in the aftermath of the UK vote was followed by encouraging signs of

recovery,” analysts at UniCredit said.The benchmark London FTSE-

100 index stood 1.1 higher at 6,577.83 at the close, representing a jump of over seven percent over the week, and well above its 6,338.10 level on June 23, before the British result was published.

The Paris and Frankfurt stock markets were also higher, but remained below their pre-Brexit vote highs.

On Thursday, Bank of England boss Mark Carney became the lat-est to provide assurances, indicating policymakers could embark on fresh monetary easing -- raising the possi-bility of a cut in rates.

Carney, who had urged Britain to vote to stay in the EU, said “the eco-nomic outlook has deteriorated and some monetary policy easing will likely be required over the summer”, although he said there were limits to what the

bank could do. His comments sent the pound tumbling Thursday, but provided the equity market with what Hewson called a “Carney bounce”.

Yesterday, sterling slipped a tad more against the dollar, while the euro clawed back some of the week’s losses against the US currency.

Analysts warned that although the initial Brexit fear factor has subsided, markets are still on edge.

“The Brexit shock wave is not

totally digested yet and the uncer-tainty into which markets have been thrown remains a great source of worry for coming weeks and even months,” economists at Saxo Banque in Paris said.

Yesterday, Tokyo ended 0.7 per-cent higher despite data showing weak confidence among Japanese businesses, while consumer prices dropped for a third straight month in June. Sydney added 0.3 percent and Seoul 0.9 percent. Shanghai climbed 0.1 percent, with dealers unmoved by figures showing China’s manufactur-ing sector contracted last month.

“The mood for more easing is likely to spread around the world, and stock prices are headed up,” Juichi Wako, a senior strategist with Nomura Securities Co, said.

“It’s not to say that the crisis has now turned into a blessing, but the heightened sense of urgency among authorities will allow market-favour-able policy responses to continue.”

While markets are on the rise, analysts remain cautious about the long-term effects of Britain’s exit from a four-decade partnership with one of the world’s biggest trading blocs.

The International Monetary Fund described the Brexit as a major threat to world growth and Stand-ard & Poor’s cut its credit rating for the EU by one notch to AA, its third highest level.

Eurozone unemployment fell to a near five-year low in May, official data said on Friday, in a rare positive sign for a sluggish European economy struggling to return to solid growth.

Wall Street was also higher as attention focused away from Brexit and towards solid US manufacturing data and auto sales.

London property market coolsAFP

LONDON: The Brexit vote could cool London’s superheated property mar-ket, with some professionals already noting signs of a slowdown, though Gulf investors have signalled their interest is so far undimmed.

After a slump in 2008 during the global financial crisis, the sector recovered, first tentatively and then at full pelt, with average prices this year reaching 54 percent higher than their pre-crisis peak.

The growth was fuelled by pop-ulation pressure, a desire by Britain’s wealthier classes to put their savings into bricks and mortar, and the deci-sion by mangates from the Gulf and Russia that London property was a safe place to park their fortunes.

But cracks were already start-ing to appear before Britain’s shock vote on June 23 to leave the Euro-pean Union, and these are now being magnified by fears of the economic fall-out and uncertainty that follows.

“Housing market activity and prices now look to be at very serious risk of an extended, marked down-turn following the UK’s vote to leave the EU,” said Howard Archer, chief UK and European economist at IHS Global Insight.

The process of Britain’s exit remains unclear, but Archer said the vote was likely to weigh down

economic activity and consumer confidence. He also warned unem-ployment may rise in the coming months.

Given these factors, IHS predicts that British property prices will fall by five percent in the second half of the year, and by another five to seven percent in 2017.

Other analysts are more cautious, saying that the extent of any eco-nomic slowdown has yet to become clear, making it too early to predict the impact on the property market.

Monica Malik, chief economist at Abu Dhabi Commercial bank, said that with so much invested it would take more than the Brexit vote to shake Gulf confidence in the London property market. “In the near term, there will be a sentiment of cautious-ness but we do not expect a marked sell-off,” she said.

“A knee-jerk reaction or panic is unlikely,” she said.

“Property in the UK is very attractive and has been a well-per-forming asset class. The underlying foreign demand is expected to remain strong once the uncertainties subside.”

But some property professionals in London have already seen buyers hesitate in the stifling atmosphere that descended following the June 23 referendum.

“People are cautious to say the least. They will take more time, the

market will be much quieter,” said Ibby Aziz, a partner at Unsworth Rose solicitors in the upmarket area of Primrose Hill, near Regent’s Park.

He has seen deals that had been agreed in principle before the ref-erendum, only for the buyers to demand a 20 percent reduction in price afterwards. Many sellers would be unlikely to proceed in those cir-cumstances, he told AFP.

Emphasising the uncertainty, a top Singapore bank, United Overseas Bank (UOB), said Thursday that it has suspended loans to anyone wanting to buy property in London.

“As the aftermath of the UK ref-erendum is still unfolding and given the uncertainties, we need to ensure our customers are cautious with their London property investments,” it said.

Property development, notably the construction of so-called “ice-berg” basements that add several new floors below traditional Victo-rian homes, is expected to be an early casualty of the market’s new fragility.

John Foldes has been planning a large extension on his house in Clap-ham, in southwest London, but said he was reconsidering his plans after the Brexit vote.

“We may decide to make one less bathroom and make the setting a little bit simpler,” he told AFP, add-ing that he was trying to reduce the budget by 20 percent.

UK may miss 2020 budget surplus target AFP

LONDON: British finance min-ister George Osborne (pictured) warned yesterday he would scrap the government’s promise for a budget surplus by 2020 owing to fallout from Brexit, sparking fore-casts of more austerity pain.

The Conservative government of Prime Minister David Cameron who resigned last week after los-ing a referendum on Britain’s EU membership, had previously vowed to eliminate the budget def-icit by the 2019/2020 financial year in a key austerity pledge.

“We will continue to be tough on the deficit, but we must be real-istic about achieving a surplus by the end of this decade,” Osborne told business leaders in Manches-ter, northern England.

“This is precisely the flexibil-ity that our rules provide for. And we need to reduce uncertainty by moving as quickly as possible to a new relationship with Europe and being super competitive, open for business and free trading. That’s the plan and we must set to it.”

Traders work at their desks in front of the German share price index, DAX board, at the stock exchange in Frankfurt, yesterday.

QE 9,885.22 +07.47 PTS

DOW 17,939.95 +9.96 PTS

FTSE100 6,577.83 +73.50 PTS

BRENT $49.01 _$0.68

Chinese workers assemble toy cars at a toy factory in Jinjiang, southeast China’s Fujian province, yesterday. Activity in Chinese factories suffered its sharpest deterioration for four months in June, figures showed yesterday, as weak demand and industrial overcapacity weighed on the world’s second-largest economy.

Chinese factory growth slows

BUSINESS18 SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

Reuters

NEW YORK: Hershey Co said it had rejected a $23bn takeover bid by Mon-delez International Inc that would seek to expand the latter’s limited US footprint and create the world’s larg-est confectioner.

The snub underscores the chal-lenges Mondelez Chief Executive Irene Rosenfeld faces in wooing Her-shey’s controlling shareholder, the Hershey Trust, a $12bn charity cre-ated by the eponymous company’s

founder a century ago. The maker of Hershey’s Kisses and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups saw its shares trade above Mondelez’s bid of $107 per share in cash and stock, indicating investors expected a new offer.

A merger of two of the world’s top five candy makers would add Hershey’s strong US business to Mon-delez’s global footprint.

Earlier, a source said that Mondelez had sought to provide assurances to Hershey that it would keep its name and preserve jobs. Mon-delez sees little antitrust risk given the limited geographic overlap of the two companies’ businesses, the source added.

“The board of directors of the company unanimously rejected the indication of interest and determined that it provided no basis for further discussion between Mondelez and the company,” Hershey said in a statement.

Hershey shares ended trading on Thursday up 16.8 percent at $113.49, while Mondelez rose 5.9 percent to $45.51.

Mondelez, the maker of Oreos cookies, is the second-largest con-fectionary company globally, while

Hershey ranks number five. Their merger would put them in the top place at 18 percent of the market, according to market research firm Euromonitor International Ltd. The combined company would leapfrog Mars Inc, which has 13.3 percent of the global market.

A fusion of the two would give Mondelez control over the production and distribution of Cadbury brand chocolates in the United States, which Hershey currently holds the license to produce, paying royalties to Mondelez.

It would also give Mondelez the US production and distribution rights for Kit Kat, one of the most popular chocolate brands in the world, which industry sources said would be a sig-nificant boost to Mondelez. Nestle SA manufactures Kit Kat worldwide, but Hershey has the rights in the United States, paying Nestle royalties from sales. Mondelez’s bid could put pres-sure on Nestle to consider its own bid for Hershey.

Upon change of control at Her-shey, the license would revert back to Nestle for free, depriving value for a potential acquirer.

The bid pits Deerfield, Illinois-based Mondelez against the Hershey

Trust, one of Pennsylvania’s wealth-iest charities. The trust has about 81 percent of Hershey’s voting rights and in 2002 prevented the Hershey, Penn-sylvania-based company from being acquired by Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co for $12bn. Pennsylvania’s attorney gen-eral also sued to block the Wrigley deal, arguing it would hurt the local community.

Created by Hershey founder

Milton Hershey to provide for the Mil-ton Hershey School, a private school for children from low-income fami-lies, the trust has been the subject of an investigation recently by Pennsyl-vania’s attorney general over conflicts of interest and mismanagement.

The trust’s chief compliance officer was put on leave last month after a leaked memo showed the board had spent nearly $4m

investigating conflicts of interest and insider-trading accusations against board members. A top trust official was also sacked in May and pled guilty to wire fraud.

Tigress Financial Partners LLC analyst Philip Van Deusen said he expected the offer price to increase, given the rise in Hershey’s shares.

“I think ($107) is a good starting place,” he said.

Hershey rejects $23bn Mondelez takeover offerA merger of two of the world’s top five candy makers would add Hershey’s strong US business to Mondelez’s global footprint.

Hershey’s chocolate bars for sale in Chicago, Illinois.

Bloomberg

NEW YORK: US taxpayers who entered into an IRS program that made it easier to disclose their hid-den offshore bank accounts may have thought they put their legal troubles behind them. Instead, pros-ecutors may try to put some of them in jail for not telling all.

Since 2012, 30,000 Americans avoided stiff tax penalties by declar-ing they had innocent reasons for failing to disclose offshore hold-ings. But under the program they received no guarantees that they wouldn’t be prosecuted in the future. And now the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service are combing through thousands of secret records obtained from 80 Swiss banks to determine whether the taxpayers were truthful.

We’re “taking all of that data and scrubbing it for leads,” Nanette Davis, a trial attorney in the Justice Depart-ment’s tax division, said at the New York University Tax Controversy Forum last week. The effort has been fruitful already, she said. With some taxpayers, “we say ‘we could indict this case tomorrow,”’ said Davis, who is overseeing the review.

he US government got a trove of data from Swiss banks under settle-ments in which they disclosed how they helped Americans evade taxes. The banks handed over account information, as permitted by Swiss secrecy law, and recordings of phone calls with US clients. In exchange for the cooperation, the US agreed not to prosecute those banks, which paid penalties totaling $1.37bn.

The risk of being scrutinized falls on those taxpayers who came forward under the government’s so-called streamlined program. Those living in the US paid penalties of 5 percent

of their undisclosed offshore assets, while overseas residents paid none.

Another 54,000 Americans took a more arduous route in voluntarily disclosing their offshore accounts to the IRS since 2009, including their dealings with bankers and advis-ers. They were hit with penalties of as much as 27.5 percent of their assets, in addition to the total of $8bn in back taxes and other penalties. But the government agreed to never prosecute these taxpayers over the disclosures. Some tax lawyers were critical of Davis’s warnings about possible prosecutions.

Those statements might have “a chilling effect” on people consider-ing using the streamlined program, said tax attorney Barbara Kaplan, of Greenberg Traurig. That “under-mines the IRS interest in bringing as many people as possible” into tax compliance, she said.

But attorney Jeremy Temkin said it’s been clear to tax advisers for the last year that the Justice Department might prosecute people who lied in their declarations. His advice: Clients should disclose any bad facts to the IRS. “It is important to present both the positive and negative facts and let the IRS decide,” said Temkin of Morvillo Abramowitz Grand Iason & Anello PC.

IRS trial attorney John C. McDou-gal suggested at the conference that the review of the streamlined sub-missions isn’t as dire as Davis made it sound because they’re being looked at in the same way as other tax returns. The IRS has begun for-mal examinations in some of the cases, he said. Still, the threats to taxpayers who lied may be mount-ing as more financial institutions step forward. Davis said offshore entities not yet under investigation are voluntarily approaching the US to cooperate.

Surge in Japanese land values attributed to touristsBloomberg

TOKYO: This year’s land value fig-ures, released yesterday by the National Tax Agency, rose sharply in sightseeing areas and on busy streets across the country, thanks to devel-opment projects and the opening of new stores to attract foreign tourists.

The number of foreign travelers to the country hit a record high of 19.73 million last year, but the trend

could be adversely affected if the yen becomes stronger due to Brit-ain’s decision to leave the European Union. Real estate agents say the rate of increase in these regional land val-ues could slacken.

In the Niseko area in Hokkaido, whose popular ski resorts spread across Kutchan and two other towns, accommodation facility operators have been enjoying brisk business. At a company that manages rental cottages in the town, a 32-year-old woman in charge of sales promotion

happily said their cottages “are already fully booked for the Decem-ber to early January period, and most of the reservations have been made by foreigners.”

Land values along the Niseko Kogen Hirafu-sen street of a Hokkaido prefectural road in Kutchan rose 50 percent from the previ-ous year, making it the largest leap in major areas of the country. The Niseko area has been popular for about 10 years, especially among Aus-tralian skiers. These days, it also is

visited by a larger number of tourists from the United States as well as Asian and European countries. In the nearby areas, vacation homes are under con-struction while the US luxury hotel chain Park Hyatt plans to open a hotel there as well.

Many foreigners have purchased vacation houses for investments, with a local real estate agent saying demand “has been spreading among foreigners from a variety of regions.”

The rate of increase in land val-ues at Shinsaibashi-Suji 2 on the

Shinsaibashi-Suji shopping street in Chuo Ward, Osaka, was 39.6 percent, the second highest rate in the coun-try. Along with the Ginza district in Tokyo, the shopping street is known for Chinese tourists’ “bakugai,” or bulk product purchases. At Kyoto’s Shijodori, near the popular Yasaka Shrine in Higashiyama Ward, the rate of increase stood at 21.6 percent.

The Dotonbori Hotel near Shinsai-bashi shopping district has a total of 116 rooms, all fully booked until the end of this year.

EU should give UK a quick and fair exit deal: Bundesbank

Reuters

FRANKFURT: The European Union should give Britain a quick and fair exit deal to minimise the economic cost and not hinder the process for the sake of setting a political example, Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann (pic-tured) said yesterday.

“Neither side has an inter-est in putting up trade barriers,” Weidmann, who also sits on the European Central Bank’s Govern-ing Council, said in a speech. “But the EU should also not give the UK a better treatment than it does to Switzerland and Norway.”

He also said that while Brexit will weigh on euro zone growth and further dampen bank earn-ings, it is ultimately a political crisis so there is no need for more European Central Bank stimulus.

Britain’s referendum sent mar-kets into a tailspin, weighing on currencies and depressing bank shares, raising market expecta-tion for more ECB stimulus to prop up growth.

“Monetary policy is already expansionary and I’m doubtful that an even more expansionary stance would have stimulatory effect at all,” Weidmann said. “This is a political crisis which must be solved politically.”

Weidmann said Britain was making a mistake by leaving the EU but that it was an opportunity for Frankfurt to become an even bigger financial hub. The German government should step up efforts to attract firms.

“For the Frankfurt financial centre, new opportunities could arise,” Weidmann said. “This will require political backing but we should welcome businesses relo-cating to Frankfurt from London.

The European Central Bank, Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank and the Bundesbank are all head-quartered in Frankfurt, making the Germany city a key financial hub on the continent. Though markets have calmed since the vote, Wei-dmann warned that heightened uncertainty is still possible.

China cement deal collapses AFP

BEIJING: A deal for China’s largest cement maker to take over a major rival collapsed after failing to gain government approval, the company said yesterday, in a blow to Beijing’s pledges to tackle oversupply.

Anhui Conch Cement offered nearly $600m for a controlling stake in struggling West China Cement late last year, but China’s commerce authorities failed to approve it by the June 30 deadline, scuttling the deal, Anhui Conch said on its website.

Rumours the deal was in dan-ger saw West China Cement shares plunge 33 percent in Hong Kong on

Tuesday before they were suspended from trading.

The companies said in a joint statement Thursday to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange that they would “con-tinue to explore future opportunities for business collaboration in differ-ent structures or manners”.

China’s government has repeat-edly pledged to tackle overcapacity, which is rife in its inefficient, largely state-owned heavy industry.

But most major industrial firms have powerful political backers, mak-ing efforts to shutter or merge them particularly challenging in the face of vested interests.

China’s cement industry boomed during the country’s three decades of massive investment in highways, airports, apartment buildings, and

office blocks, bloating to more than 3,300 firms. Beijing has said it wants to reorient the economy away from relying on such debt-fuelled spend-ing to boost growth and towards a consumer-driven model, but the transition has proven challenging.

Anhui Conch is a state-owned enterprise (SOE) controlled by the government of China’s eastern prov-ince of Anhui.

Analysts said its easier access to financing as an SOE would have boosted highly-indebted West China Cement’s ability to borrow after it posted losses of 309 million yuan ($46m) last year.

In recent months the stock had rallied as investors expected the deal to go through due to govern-ment commitments to cut oversupply.

America’s offshore tax cheats are feeling the heat once again

An employee holds bank notes at a fast food restaurant in Minsk yesterday. Belarus is slashing four zeros from banknotes in a move authorities hope will curb inflation. New banknotes, ranging from 5 to 500 Belarusian ruble notes, were put in circulation yesterday. The Belarussian ruble - which currently stands at close to 20,200 to the US dollar - has suffered heavily from inflation in recent years together with the nation’s centralised economy.

Belarus cuts 4 zeroes from banknotes

BUSINESS 19SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

Reuters

NEW YORK: After long consider-ing Argentina’s equities, Manning & Napier Inc portfolio manager Ben Rozin was finally motivated to buy late last year, taking a stake in agri-culture company Adecoagro SA.

Rozin is one of several fund managers encouraged by last year’s election of market-friendly Presi-dent Mauricio Macri. But as Manning & Napier has sought to broaden its exposure to Argentina, a one-time market pariah, it has been hindered by a lack of publicly-traded Argen-tine companies.

Argentina’s recent deal with “hold-out” hedge funds — who for years battled former President Cris-tina Fernandez de Kirchner — has thrown the doors open to buyers of

the South American country’s debt. Investors scooped up $16.5bn of its multi-tranche sovereign bonds, and another $4bn from its provinces and assorted corporations.

Another US dollar bond sale was announced on Thursday. But equi-ties remain problematic. “The biggest issue is that there aren’t a lot of com-panies listed,” said Rozin, one of several investors who had interest in buying stocks after Macri’s election, but have struggled to do so.

Argentina’s benchmark Merval index, which has rallied 29 percent this year after a 36-percent rise last year, comprises only 15 stocks. The overwhelming majority are regu-lated utilities like Pampa Energia or commodity-dependent, like oil com-pany YPF.

“The banks and the utilities present a large amount of the market cap, but for us, due to the regulatory

issues and also the inflationary issues that a lot of the banks are dealing with, we just have not had a posi-tive outlook on either the banks or the utilities.” Portfolio managers say the country’s capital controls and restrictions had long kept them from investing in Argentine stocks or add-ing to existing positions.

Macri’s reforms have included removing capital controls, relaxing reserve and deposit requirements and cutting the country’s holding period on foreign investment — though he has not removed it entirely.

But he has yet to tackle some of the biggest impediments to invest-ment: the government’s requirement that investors physically be in Argen-tina to purchase stocks and that they buy stocks in pesos, which remain dif-ficult to exchange for dollars.

Those have often sent investors in search of other more accessible assets,

said Belkis Rodriguez, Vice President of Equity Trading, Latin America at market maker INTL FCStone Finan-cial Inc.

“Because of all the hurdles of settling a trade locally, it’s very expensive,” Rodriguez said. “And few brokers know the process or even want to deal with that.”

Investing in countries like Bra-zil, Chile and Colombia requires that investors have local registration or work with broker-dealers in the country, Rodriguez added, but it is a dramatically simpler process than in Argentina.

“There’s so many things that the government has to do,” she said. “We’d like to see progress made on the equi-ties side, but I don’t know how long that’s going to take.”

The government is aware of the issues foreign buyers face, said a source within Argentina’s stock

market regulator with direct knowl-edge of efforts to increase investment. But it is more focused on a proposed tax amnesty for residents with unde-clared funds.

“For now (the stock ownership issue) is being studied but there is nothing certain,” said the source, who asked not to be named due to the sen-sitivity of the matter.

As a result of the roadblocks, those interested in buying Argentine equi-ties have typically had to buy ADRs, which are essentially surrogate stocks issued by a US bank and traded on a US exchange.

“I wish we had more oppor-tunities, more choices to invest in Argentina,” said Luiz Ribeiro, senior equities portfolio manager for Deut-sche Bank’s Latin America Equity Fund, which owns American depos-itary receipts (ADRs) in Supervielle. The financial group raised around

pesos 3bn ($201m) in May in the coun-try’s first initial public offering since 2010.

Argentina’s stock markets are so opaque that even the Global X MSCI Argentina ETF, which has seen $43m in inflows this year, roughly dou-bling its size, does not invest in actual Argentine stocks. It is made up mostly of ADRs, with other stocks that have exposure to Argentina or have oper-ations there.

“If capital controls remain lifted for a while and foreign investors become more comfortable invest-ing in the local securities, what you could see is the need to invest in ADRs becomes lower,” said Jay Jacobs, director of research at Global X, which operates the fund. The Argentina ETF is based on a benchmark set by index compiler MSCI, which has said it will consider reclassifying Argentina to an emerging market next year.

Investors encouraged by Argentina’s market, but can’t find stocks

AFP

WASHINGTON: The US manufac-turing sector shifted into higher gear in June, picking up momentum in the fourth straight month of growth, a private survey showed yesterday. The Institute for Supply Manage-ment said its purchasing managers index for manufacturing rose to 53.2 in June from 51.3 in May.

The nearly two-point jump on the PMI index was unexpected. The consensus estimate was for a mar-ginal increase to 51.4. A 50 reading marks the boundary between growth and contraction.

“The manufacturing slowdown is over,” said Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics. “The headline index is now at a 16-month high, though it remains well below the peaks seen before oil prices rolled over” and battered the oil sec-tor’s capital spending, he said.

The June gain was broad-based. Growth in production, new orders and new export orders accelerated. Price gains rose at a slower pace and the backlog of orders switched into

growth from contraction. Shepherdson pointed out the

boost from stronger export orders, which rose a percentage point to 53.5, the highest level since Novem-ber 2014, reflecting the rebound in import demand from China.

“This follows the clear upturn in China’s PMI imports index, which also has now been sustained for a few months,” he noted. Some man-ufacturers reported slower growth, but others said growth was steady.

A survey respondent in the pri-mary metals sector said that orders from China were slowing, while American customers were “still steady.” “Demand continues to be robust,” said a person from the plas-tics and rubber products sector.

Shepherdson forecast the ISM figure would rise to a solid reading near 55 by the end of August.

“Talk of a manufacturing reces-sion never made much sense, in our view, and we now expect it to fade rapidly,” he said.

Buoyed by robust demand from US consumers for crossover SUVs and trucks, automakers reported strong June sales in those catego-ries yesterday, while overall sales figures were a mixed picture.

Nissan, Ford, Fiat Chrysler’s US unit and Honda all reported sales increases, while GM, Toyota and Volkswagen fell short.

GM, the largest US automaker, struggled again as it pivots away from sales to businesses, such as rental fleets, to focus on retail sales. The automaker said June sales fell 1.6 percent from a year ago to 255,210 vehicles, after they fell 13.4 percent in May.

EasyJet demands EU flights certificate after BrexitAFP

LONDON: British no-frills air-line EasyJet said yesterday it had applied for a European Union licence to keep flying throughout the bloc even after Brexit, becom-ing the first carrier to activate a contingency plan.

The carrier said it had begun a formal procedure to obtain an air operator certificate (AOC) to keep the status quo after Brit-ain’s vote last week to quit the European Union cast doubts over airline routes.

“EasyJet is lobbying the UK government and the EU to ensure the continuation of a fully liberal and deregulated aviation market within the UK and Europe,” it said in a statement.

“This would mean that EasyJet and all European airlines can con-tinue to operate as they do today.

“As part of EasyJet’s con-tingency planning before the referendum we had informal discussions with a number of European aviation regulators about the establishment of an AOC in an European country to enable easyJet to fly across Europe as we do today.

“EasyJet has now started a for-mal process to acquire an AOC,” it said.

EasyJet stressed that it had no plans to move from Luton, which lies north of the British capital and where the airline has been based for two decades. Britain’s airline industry has soared over the last two decades under the EU’s Single European Sky system, which lifted trade restrictions on EU airlines whose headquarters are located within the EU.

Unless British negotiators manage to secure preferential conditions, British airlines will lose this status once the coun-try leaves the EU. This will mean they no longer enjoy rights includ-ing being able to freely set airfares, and to launch any route in Europe without getting prior authorisation.

In concrete terms, passengers leaving or arriving in the United Kingdom will face new taxes, while British airlines will be slower to develop new routes.

Since the June 23 referen-dum, both EasyJet and British Airways owner IAG have issued profit warnings, as the pound has plunged against the euro on financial markets. EasyJet said on Monday that the surprise vote would create uncertainty in the economy and among consumers, impacting its second-half per-formance that ends in September.

“Britain being in Europe is the best thing for Britain,” EasyJet chief executive Carolyn McCall told AFP a few months before Thursday’s referendum.

“That is based on the fact that deregulation of aviation has been a fantastic benefit to consumers,” she said, noting that it had reduced fares by 40 percent and increased routes by 170 percent.

Airlines are among the indus-tries in Britain, in addition to banks, to have been left especially exposed by the shock Brexit vote.

BMW teams up with Intel and Mobileye for self-driving carsAFP

FRANKFURT: German top-of-the-range car maker BMW announced yesterday that it is joining forces with US computer chip giant Intel and the Israeli technology firm Mobileye to develop self-driving cars.

The three companies “are collab-orating to bring solutions for highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021,” they said in a joint statement.

The news comes amid growing interest in self-driving cars follow-ing tests over the past few years by Google and research by several major automakers. “BMW, Intel and Mobi-leye are convinced that automated

driving technologies will make travel safer and easier,” they said.

The aim of the collaboration was to develop solutions that would enable drivers not only to take their hands off the steering wheel, but also reach a stage where they could also take their eyes of the road and ulti-mately their mind off driving, the statement continued.

The final stage would then be “driver off”, or without a human driver inside.

“This establishes the opportunity for self-driving fleets by 2021 and lays the foundation for entirely new busi-ness models in a connected, mobile world,” the partners said.

While the auto industry sees self-driving cars as the way for-ward, US electric car company

Tesla announced earlier that a driver was killed in a car crash in Florida in May while using the “autopilot” self-driving mechanism on one of its models.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it had opened a “preliminary eval-uation” into the performance of the autopilot function in the wake of the crash.

BMW, Intel and Mobileye insisted that “the future of automated driving promises to change lives and socie-ties for the better.”

Nevertheless, “the path to get to a fully autonomous world is complex and will require end-to-end solutions that integrate intelligence across the network, from door locks to the data centre,” they said.

India’s Iran oil imports surge 39% in JuneReuters

NEW DELHI: India’s Iran oil imports rose about 39 percent in June year on year, preliminary data obtained by Reuters shows. In the first half of 2016 India’s Iran oil imports surged by about 58 percent to about 342,000 bpd, the data showed, in comparison with 216,500 bpd in the same period last year.

HPCL-Mittal Energy, majority owned by state refiner Hindustan Petroleum Corp, halted oil imports from Iran in November 2012 under pressure from Western sanctions over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. HPCL-Mittal Energy Ltd (HMEL), partly owned by steel tycoon Lakshmi N. Mittal, took a cargo from Tehran after a three-and-a-half year break.

Last month HMEL took a million barrels of Iranian oil, according to preliminary tanker arrival data from trade sources and ship-tracking

services on the Thomson Reu-ters terminal. Indian refiners took in about 381,500 barrels per day (bpd)of Iranian oil in June, the data showed.

The June shipments were about 0.6 percent higher from Iranian vol-umes in May, the data showed. In June last year India shipped in about 274,800 bpd oil from Iran. India’s oil imports from Iran are set to surge to a seven-year high in the year that began April 1, with the nation’s state-owned and private refiners together buying at least 400,000 bpd.

In April-June, the first quarter of the current fiscal year, India’s Iran oil purchases rose 25.6 percent to 384,500 bpd from about 306,000 bpd in the same year ago period, the data showed. Private refiner, Essar Oil, was the top Indian client of Iran in June, importing about 180,600 bpd, followed by Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd with about 69,000 bpd, and Reliance Industries Ltd with about 64,000 bpd.

FROM LEFT: Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, Harald Krueger, CEO of German car maker BMW and Amnon Shashua, co-founder, chairman and CTO Mobileye NV, pose after a press conference in Munich yesterday.

Manufacturingsector shifts into high gear in USGrowth in production, new orders and new export orders accelerated.

BUSINESS VIEWS20 SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

How MTN sliced billions off its Nigerian telecoms fineBy Joe Brock and Ulf Laessing Reuters

TELECOMS firm MTN hired former US attorney general Eric Holder in January to help it reduce a $3.9bn fine imposed in Nigeria over unreg-istered SIM cards. Five months later,

it struck a deal to pay less than half of that.The entrance of Holder, who stood down as

attorney general last year after presiding over some of the largest corporate settlements in American history, marked a change of strat-egy for the South African company.

MTN dropped a three-month legal challenge against the fine and, according to government sources and letters seen by Reuters, asked Nige-rian Attorney General Abubakar Malami to put forward a proposal for a reduced fine to the communications regulator, the official author-ity in the dispute.

The regulator, the Nigerian Communica-tions Commission (NCC), rejected the proposal as unjustifiable, documents show, but three months later it accepted a broadly similar deal. Reuters was unable to determine the role, if

any, that Holder played in the change of heart.MTN, Holder, Malami and the NCC all

declined to comment on the negotiation process.There is no indication that any individ-

uals acted improperly, and companies have often reached settlements with regulators in Nigeria. Lawmakers have however criticised the opaque nature of the settlement process, saying it set a precedent for other firms deal-ing with Nigerian authorities.

The 780bn naira fine - $3.9bn at the exchange rate at the time - was set by the NCC in December over MTN’s failure to deactivate more than 5 million SIM cards not registered by customers. Nigeria has been trying to halt the use of unregistered cards over concerns they are being used for criminal activity, includ-ing by Islamist militant group Boko Haram.

MTN, Africa’s biggest telecoms company, ini-tially launched a high court challenge against the fine, arguing the watchdog had no legal grounds to order it. The law states that the NCC does have the right to impose such a penalty. In Febru-ary, however, MTN withdrew the lawsuit and paid a “good faith” payment of 50 billion naira to the government which it said was part of efforts to reach an amicable settlement and would go towards the eventual fine agreed.

The NCC said at the time that it had not agreed to enter into any talks with MTN and that it stood by the 780bn naira penalty. Rather than dealing directly with the regulator, Holder approached Malami to help broker a settle-ment, according to the government sources and letters seen by Reuters.

In a letter dated the same day MTN announced it was dropping its court challenge - February 24 - Holder wrote to Malami on behalf of the company offering to pay 300 billion naira and list MTN’s local unit on the Nigerian stock exchange to end the dispute. Under the Nigerian constitution, the attorney general can mediate in a dispute involving a state body after the matter has been taken to court. Malami asked NCC to review the MTN offer but the regulator was not impressed.

“The proposal to pay the sum of 300bn naira ... is not supported by any verifiable jus-tification,” NCC Chief Executive Umar Garba Danbatta said in a March 1 letter to Malami.

Nor was the NCC convinced by MTN’s sweetener of a local listing. “This is a business decision absolutely within MTN’s prerogative and primarily to its benefit. There is no justi-fication for bringing this along in discussing the present issue,” Danbatta said.

But when MTN announced on June 10 that it reached a deal with the government to pay a fine of 330bn naira - just 30bn naira more - the NCC appeared to have altered its view, notifying parliament in a letter dated the same day of a “full and final” settlement.

“It was never about the money it was about making clear the rules are the rules,” NCC spokesman Tony Ojobo told Reuters on June 13. “The MTN listing is a big positive for Nigeria and will benefit the country.” When asked about the March 1 letter and what had changed the NCC’s view, Ojobo said he would not discuss the negotiations.

A parliamentary committee on telecom-munications is reviewing the deal and the negotiations that led to it. Such reviews by lawmakers are standard practice after big cor-porate settlements and are aimed at ensuring that there has been no wrongdoing by any party involved and that the public interest has been served. The deal has exposed divisions within the Nigerian government; officials within Pres-ident Muhammadu Buhari’s team were also unhappy with Malami’s plans to strike a deal with MTN which they considered too gener-ous, leading to heated discussions between the two camps, two government sources said.

By Fergus Jensen

Reuters

THOUSANDS of mines are closing in Indonesia’s tropical coal belt as prices languish and seams run dry. But

almost none of the companies have paid their share of billions of dollars owed to repair the badly scarred land-scape they have left behind.

Abandoned mine pits dot the bare, treeless hillsides in Samarinda, the capital of East Kalimantan province on Indo-nesia’s part of Borneo island. It is ground zero for a coal boom that made Indonesia the world’s biggest exporter of the mineral that fuels power plants. Abandoned mining pits have now become death traps for children who swim in them, and their acidic water is killing nearby rice paddies.

Indonesia has tried, mostly in vain, to get mining companies to keep their promises to clean up the ravaged landscape. But it doesn’t even have basic data on who holds the many thousands of min-ing licenses that were handed out during the boom days, officials say.

“Nobody was in control,” said Dian Patria, who works on natural resources at the country’s Corrup-tion Eradication Commission (KPK). Patria estimated that 90 percent of the more than 10,000 mining license holders had not paid the reclamation funds they owe by law. One-third are for coal.

Even if they wanted to, many companies now lack the cash. The same large banks that leant billions during the boom have now pulled out of coal, wary of the sector’s commercial outlook and contri-bution to climate change.

The problem is not unique to Indonesia. As mineral prices lan-guish, even major global miners are trying to avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in increasingly hefty clo-sure costs, mostly by selling off pits.

After pro-democracy protest-ers swept Indonesia’s authoritarian president Suharto from power in 1998, the Jakarta government gave towns and districts control of natu-ral resources as part of far-reaching decentralisation reforms aimed at preventing the archipelago from fracturing.

Newly empowered local lead-ers handed out thousands of mining licenses, many of them to small operators, as coal prices leapt from around $40 per tonne in 2005 to nearly $200 at their peak in 2008. In East Kalimantan alone, around half the province was covered in coal mining permits.

Under President Joko Widodo,

elected in 2014, Indonesia has promised to turn around its dis-mal environmental record. The administration has also wrested control over natural resources away from local leaders, giving it to pro-vincial governors instead.

Awang Faroek Ishak, East Kali-mantan’s governor, has issued a moratorium on new licenses. He is threatening to punish mining com-panies that have failed to restore the land, he said in an interview. But the data on mining compa-nies and funds for rehabilitation are missing, he said.

“How can we look into this if we don’t have the documents,” he complained. Greenpeace activist Kiki Taufik says governors do, how-ever, have the authority to freeze permits and operations while they investigate. “The governors have authority, but they never use this authority.”

Most of the mining licenses went to small firms, many of which have gone bankrupt or simply abandoned their opera-tions, mining industry officials say.

“For now, it’s really difficult not to lose money,” said Budi Situmo-rang, a mining engineer at small coal miner CV Arjuna. “All we can really do is hold on. Looking at the 56 mines in Samarinda, no more than 10 are still active.”

The mining companies them-selves are supposed to restore the land from money they paid into accounts held at state banks and supervised by local officials.

“That’s what you’re supposed to do, but in practice very few people do it,” except for the major min-ing firms, the head of Indonesia’s Coal Mining Association, Pandu Sjahrir, told Reuters.

The central government has had a list since 2011 of nearly 4,000 licenses that have failed to meet their requirements. It expects to be able to revoke the problematic permits only by January 2017.

Patria’s team at the anti-cor-ruption agency is pushing for the national government’s Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) to investigate miners - including over unpaid rehabilitation funds estimated in the hundreds of millions.

Even that is only a fraction of the cash that would actually be required, says Merah Johansyah from the Mining Advocacy Net-work (JATAM).

Pressure from campaigners is increasing as mine closures reach a peak by 2020, according to some industry estimates. One set of 2,272 coal permits and contracts, com-piled by mining consultancy SMGC and reviewed by Reuters, showed the average expiry date of the per-mit is October 2017.

Indonesia faces

environmental time

bomb after coal bust

Even in crisis, EU not a lead actor in world oil

By Libby George and Ron Bousso Reuters

THE European Union’s crisis holds political and economic leaders transfixed, but for the oil market it merely underlines the region’s established role as only a sec-ondary engine to global energy

demand. Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and strikes that crippled France’s energy industry in May, elicited barely a lasting rip-ple on global energy markets.

“In terms of oil, it’s the best place to have an economic slowdown without having a big impact on demand growth,” said Chris Main, oil strategist with Citi Group. “Euro-pean industry just doesn’t contribute much to global demand growth.”

In oil demand growth, and in refining, the spotlight has for long shifted to developing mar-kets in Asia, the Middle East and even the United States, where drivers hit-ting the road in record numbers are fuelling a resurgence in demand growth. Oil traders are accustomed to seeing the EU as a market with barely any potential to use more motor fuel.

“GDP in the UK and Europe is not energy intensive, and indeed oil

demand has been in decline (more or less) since 2007,” Jefferies analysts wrote in a note. Jef-feries estimates that the impact on oil demand from changes to GDP in emerging markets is some five times what it is in Europe - “a far greater risk factor.”

The International Monetary Fund warned that Britain’s vote could set back its growth by 1.4 to 5.6 percent by 2019, and said it could also lower the growth forecast for Germany, the bloc’s largest economy.

Typically during economic crises, fears over a drop in consumption stoke oil price declines. But Europe’s withered oil demand growth due to energy efficiency and a shift away from heavy industry has cut its impor-tance to the world’s demand growth.

Because most European economies are no longer industrially focused, even the slip into recession that some economists warned could hit Britain has failed to create signifi-cant oil demand loss fear on the global level.

According to the International Energy Agency, demand growth in Europe accounted for 180,000 barrels per day (b/d) in the first quarter of the year, dwarfed by the 956,000 b/d growth in Asia’s developing countries.

Risk consultancy Eurasia Group said that Europe’s 13.7m b/d of total demand is only about 14 percent of the global total. It added that every 1 percent change in GDP would knock roughly 70,000 b/d off oil demand growth, a small figure compared with the group’s demand growth forecast of 1.5m b/d in 2016 and 1.1m b/d in 2017.

Amid fading demand, pressure on refiner profits forced the closure of more than 2m b/d in European refining capacity over the

last decade.This has limited the continent’s impor-

tance in producing the diesel, petrol and jet fuel that flow through global markets.

In France, strikes in May closed nearly half its refineries, as well as its main ports, forc-ing it to tap strategic crude and fuel stocks to keep running. The shock boosted diesel profits, and led to hopes that a rush to restock would further support refining. When similar strikes hit the country six years ago, global oil prices spiked as it scrambled to restock.

Instead, French refiner demand has been subdued as they slowly unloaded the roughly 19 million barrels of crude that was stranded on tankers during the strikes, and strategic stock agencies also gave companies three months to return what they took during the industrial action.

The impact on diesel was blunted as well by the fact that refinery hubs have shifted out of Europe since the last strikes.

Two French refineries have closed since 2012, while the Middle East has developed into a refining mega centre with massive, die-sel-heavy units helping to pump a growing excess in European storage tanks. This has kept prices across crude and refined oil prod-ucts from spiking, as it did following the last widespread French strikes in 2012.

“The Middle East was not supplying as much distillates as they are now, and Rus-sia is exporting more distillates,” said KBC principal consultant Ehsan Ul-Haq of the changed market. “A few years ago�the impact was much bigger,” Ul-Haq said of the strikes, adding that now, “producers have more than enough diesel”.

Europe’s 13.7m b/d of total demand is only about 14 percent of the global total.

The entrance of Eric Holder, who stood down as attorney general last year after presiding over some of the largest corporate settlements in American history, marked a change of strategy for the South African company.

21SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

Bolt storms into semis

at Jamaica trials Reuters

KINGSTON: Usain Bolt negotiated a series of delays and a false start in his own race before easily winning his quarter-final of the 100m in 10.15 seconds at Jamaica’s national championships. Although sluggish from the blocks, the world record holder sepa-rated from the field after 40 metres before cruising across the line with the quarter-finals’ joint second fastest time.

The six-time Olympic gold medallist, however, was upset at the amount of time he had to wait before getting to run after a succes-sion of false starts in other races.

“It’s just the whole system which bothers me, you know I was out there too long,” Bolt said after warming down.

“They (organisers) just sent everybody out and a whole lot of false starts and I was in the last heat and I kind of got cold so I didn’t feel as fluent as I wanted to and that’s what I was really annoyed about.

“If I can get through that then I’ll be fine.”Nickel Ashmeade, who win the third of the four quarter-finals,

was the fastest qualifier in a time of 10.07 seconds. Asafa Pow-ell clocked 10.17, while Yohan Blake and Kemar Bailey-Cole both recorded 10.26.

Two-time Olympic champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce (11.38), Simone Facey (11.31), Elaine Thompson (11.38) and Veronica Camp-bell-Brown won their heats in the women’s 100 to move into the semi-finals.

Beaten Rudisha named in Kenya Olympic teamReuters

ELDORET: Olympic and world 800m champion David Rudisha (pic-tured) scraped into the Kenyan team for the Rio Olympics after finishing third in the east African nation’s tri-als yesterday.

Rudisha, enduring a poor sea-son, was passed on the final bend by youngster Ferguson Rotich and sur-prise winner Alfred Kipketer.

Rudisha, also the world record holder, finished third in 1:44.23 after getting boxed in. Kipketer’s time was 1:43.73 and Rotich ran 1:44.05.

World half-marathon cham-pion Geoffrey Kamworor and Bedan Karoki were named in the Olympic team at 10,000 metres despite both failing to finish the race at the trials. Kamworor had a stomach upset and Karoki as injured. Paul Tanui won the race ahead of Charles Yossei and both were named in the team for Rio. World 400 metres hurdles champion Nicholas Bett, who did not run in the trials, was also named in the Games team along with African champion

Boniface Mucheru. The second and final day of the trials produced other upsets. Former world 800m cham-pion Eunice Sum was beaten into second place by Margaret Nyairera to second place with the winner tim-ing 1:58.27 and Sum 1:59.63.

Defending Olympic 3,000 metres steeplechase champion Ezekiel Kemboi toyed with the field, deliberately slowing down as he approached the finish line and allowing 2008 Olympic cham-pion Brimin Kipruto and Conseslus Kipruto to pass him. World jave-lin champion Julius Yego produced a throw of 81.04 metres to win the event.

Rosberg tops rain-hit practice, Vettel spins

AFP

SPIELBERG, Austria: Nico Ros-berg dominated an incident-filled opening day of practice for this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix, narrowly topping the times in both sessions ahead of frustrated Mer-cedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton.

The German, who turned 31 on Monday, clocked the fastest lap in both the dry and the wet after a downpour interrupted the action in the afternoon when Hamilton, tenacious and fast as ever, was only 0.019 seconds adrift.

Rosberg recorded a best lap in one minute and 7.967 seconds to pip his British rival at the Red Bull Ring, in the Styrian Alps, where he seeks to complete a hat-trick of

successive victories in tomorrow’s race and take clear control of the drivers’ championship,.

Nico Hulkenberg was third fast-est for Force India, six-tenths of a second behind the two Mercedes men, ahead of Sebastian Vettel of Ferrari.

Vettel spun his car in the final minutes, losing control ahead of Turn Two, where he ended up “beached” in a gravel trap and caused the deployment of a Virtual Safety Car to conclude the session.

Australian Daniel Ricciardo was fifth fastest in the leading Red Bull on the team’s home circuit, ahead of Carlos Sainz for Toro Rosso.

Hamilton, never one to hide his feelings and trailing Rosberg by 24 points in the championship, admitted he was frustrated in try-ing to unlock the extra pace he felt he possessed.

“It’s there,” he said. “It’s in me, but I don’t know if I can find it and use it...

“There are some circuits that just feel right and good and, for me, this one is not one like that.

“It’s not the track and it’s not the car. It’s just me. I have to find the extra pace from inside me.”

Vettel’s spectacular spin at the end of the session was caused, he said later, by a problem with the brakes of his car. He will face a five-place grid penalty for the race after Ferrari decided to change his car’s gearbox.

“We had an issue with the brake distribution,” said Vettel. “It caught me by surprise, but it didn’t matter too much as, fortunately, nothing happened. I lost a couple of minutes so it didn’t make a big difference.

“We had a decent day and we are not entirely clear where we are, in competitive terms, because we didn’t have much running in the afternoon. I think we should be ok.”

Vettel’s problems were nothing compared to those of Dutch teenager Max Verstappen, who was involved in two incidents in the morning that damaged his Red Bull.

One came at Turn Eight and the other at Turn Five, the second resulting in a premature end to his

involvement after running over new -- and controversial -- yellow kerbs dubbed “baguettes” by the teams.

“I understand we have to respect the track limits,” he said. “But it’s better to put a wall there. I mean, I destroyed two front wings and a front suspension today and, yeah, I think it’s too high.

“I try to avoid them, but at Turn One

I think it would be better just to have one straight kerb rather than several small ones. They are hard for the car - harder than I expected.”

Looking ahead to qualifying and the race, Verstappen admitted he was hop-ing the wet weather would return.

“I hope it rains, with storms,” he said. “That would be good for us.”

Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team British driver Lewis Hamilton (front) and Germany’s Nico Rosberg drive during the second practice session of the Formula One Grand Prix of Austria at the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg, Austria yesterday.

Hamilton second in both sessions as rain interrupts afternoon session

FORMULA ONE: AUSTRIAN GRAND PRIX

Tour lab able

to detect

micro-doping,

says report

AFP

SAINT-LO, FRANCE: A French laboratory testing doping sam-ples at the Tour de France is now able to detect micro doses of EPO, French sports newspa-per l’Equipe said yesterday, as cycling battles to mend its dam-aged reputation.

Many cyclists, such as disgraced American Lance Armstrong, have been banned for using the blood-booster EPO, but there were fears that riders had taken to using micro-doses that were unde-tectable to anti-doping testers.

Micro doses of just 500 units “injected before 11pm will still be detectable at 6am the next day and even after the sample has been diluted by excess hydration”, said the lab-oratory in a statement quoted by l’Equipe.

Tour director Chris-tian Prudhomme hailed the progress made in the anti-dop-ing fight.

The research is progressing on all sides,” he said. “The fight continues.”

EPO became the cheat’s drug of choice during the 1990s due to the huge boost it gave to an athletes endurance.

The hormone produces extra red blood cells, thus carrying greater amounts of oxygen around a person’s blood and to their muscles.

That and blood transfu-sions were the methods that cheats such as Armstrong used to make huge improvements in their performances.

Armstrong’s sordid past finally caught up with him when in 2014 he admitted in an interview on American tel-evision that he had cheated throughout his career.

By then the evidence against him had already been mounting and he was stripped of his record seven Tour titles in a row from 1999-2005.

His compatriot Floyd Landis, a former team-mate, had his victory in 2006 over-turned due to doping.

Other Tour winners such as Dane Bjarne Riis (1996), Jan Ullrich of Germany (1997) and Italian Marco Pantani (1998) eventually either admitted to using EPO or tested positive for the substance retroactively.

Magnificent McIlroy grabs share of French Open lead Agencies

SAINT-QUENTIN-EN-YVELINES: Rory McIlroy fired a brilliant five-under-par 66 to surge into a share of the lead after his sec-ond round of the 100th French Open at Golf National yesterday.

The Northern Irishman is in a five-way tie at the top of the leaderboard heading into the third day.

Finn Mikko Ilonen, South African Brandon Stone, Thailand’s Thongchai Jaidee and South Korean Jeunghun Wang are all level with McIlroy on five under par overall.

The world number four struggled with swing trouble in his opening 71, but he had no such problems on Friday.

McIlroy dropped his only shot of the day on the 18th hole when he hit his tee shot into the water and took a bogey five.

Birdies at the third, sixth and seventh holes got McIlroy off to a quick start, and a four on the par-five ninth pulled him to within one of the leading mark.

Two further birdies on the back nine gave him sole possession of the lead, and it could have been even better for the four-time major champion if not for narrow misses for birdie on the 10th and 16th greens, and that wobble at the last.

Nevertheless, after the disappointment of missing the US Open cut at Oakmont less than a fortnight ago, McIlroy was delighted to find himself firmly in contention ahead of the weekend.

“I played very well, I didn’t really put a foot wrong until the 18th,” he said.

“I’m really happy with how I played out there. I’m still con-tinuing to work hard and think hard on my golf swing, but it seems to be working so far this week, so I’ll continue to do that.”

“It was disappointing to make five at the last, but it won’t be the only bogey I make this week.”

Meanwhile, Tiger Woods has withdrawn from this month’s British Open, organisers the Royal & Ancient Golf Club said yesterday.

The news was merely a formality as there was never any indi-cation that Woods would be healthy enough to play in the July 14-17 event at Royal Troon in Scotland.

The 40-year-old has not competed in almost 11 months and has offered no timetable on a possible return to action after under-going back surgery last September.

He has won the British Open three times -- at St Andrews in 2000 and 2005 and at Royal Liverpool in 2006.

Woods tied for ninth the last time the Open was held at Troon in 2004. Australian Marcus Fraser replaces American Woods in the Open field.

Northern Ireland’s

Rory McIlroy in action at French Golf

Open on Thursday in Guyancourt.

FRENCH OPEN SCORES137 Rory McIlroy 71-66, Brandon Stone (RSA) 69-68, Mikko Ilonen

(FIN) 69-68, Thongchai Jaidee (THA) 67-70, Jeunghun Wang

(KOR) 71-66

138 Bernd Wiesberger (AUT) 67-71, Anders Hansen (DEN) 70-68,

Nicolas Colsaerts (BEL) 70-68

139 Joost Luiten (NED) 69-70, Thomas Pieters (BEL) 67-72, Francesco

Molinari (ITA) 68-71, Andy Sullivan 69-70

140 Adrien Saddier (FRA) 70-70, Matthew Southgate 70-70, Lucas

Bjerregaard (DEN) 66-74, Alex Noren (SWE) 72-68, Lasse Jensen

(DEN) 69-71

Qatar’s weightlifter, Faris Ibrahim confidently booked place in the Olympic Games 2016 to be held from August 5 to 21 in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. The Qatari star secured his spot in Rio Olympic Games after winning two bronze medals at the IWF Junior World Weightlifting Championships taking place in Georgia, according Qatar Olympic Committee’s website.

Qatar’s Faris books Rio berth

SPORT22 SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

Sri Lanka’s Maharoof hopes for ‘perfect game’ against England AFP

LONDON: Sri Lanka all-rounder Farveez Maharoof says the tour-ists need to play the “perfect game” if they are to defeat England in the fifth and final one-day international in Cardiff today.

Maharoof’s team have yet to win a match in England this tour, with two drawn warm-up games preced-ing a 2-0 loss in a three-Test series that ended in a rain-affected draw at Lord’s.

Sri Lanka did win their two one-dayers in Ireland but they now find themselves 2-0 down with one to play in a five-match ODI campaign against England.

Although they cannot win the series, victory in Cardiff would

see Sri Lanka stay above England in the International Cricket Coun-cil ODI rankings and give them a morale boost ahead of Tuesday’s lone Twenty20 in Southampton -- their final match of this tour.

And a one-day win in the Welsh capital would be timely given Sri Lanka will return to Cardiff during next year’s Champions Trophy -- a tournament for the world’s top eight ODI teams.

“It’s been a tough tour, losing the Test series as well as the one-day-ers, but we just have to go again,” said Maharoof in Cardiff on Friday.

“It’s one more game and up to us to showcase our talent and willing-ness to win. The boys are up for it, and we hope we can give it a good show.”

He added: “We just have to play a perfect game and get back the

momentum which has been lacking.England chased down a revised

Duckworth/Lewis target of 308 in 42 overs with 11 balls to spare to win Wednesday’s fourth ODI at The Oval after opener Jason Roy made 162 on his Surrey home ground.

Maharoof said that while England had batted well, Sri Lanka’s attack should have been able to defend a total of 305 for five.

“The batsmen have done a decent job up to now,” Maharoof said. “It was a good score in the last game -- it’s just as a bowling unit we couldn’t hit our straps.”

However, Sri Lanka have looked some way short of that standard against England and Maharoof said: “It’s been tough work.

“The guys are putting in a lot of hard work, and I’m sure it will pay off one day.”

Ibrahimovic reunited with Mourinho at United

AFP

MANCHESTER: Swedish superstar striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic completed his free transfer to Manchester United yesterday, with coach Jose Mourinho declaring: “He needs no introduction.”

The 34-year-old – who left French champions Paris Saint Ger-main at the end of last season having scored 156 goals in 180 appearances – is reunited with Mourinho, under whom he played at Inter Milan.

Ibrahimovic is Mourinho’s sec-ond signing of the summer after highly rated Ivory Coast centre-back Eric Bailly from the Spanish outfit Villarreal.

“I am absolutely delighted to be joining Manchester United and am looking forward to playing in the Premier League,” said Ibrahimovic, who will help bring back some much-needed swagger to Old Trafford, along with Mourinho.

“It goes without saying that I can-not wait to work with Jose Mourinho once again. He is a fantastic manager and I am ready for this new and excit-ing challenge.

“I have thoroughly enjoyed my career so far and have some great memories. I am now ready to create more special memories in England.”

Ibrahimovic, who has won 11

domestic league titles but never the Champions League, will not only be a crowd pleaser but also help the development of younger players, said Mourinho.

“Zlatan needs no introduction. The statistics speak for themselves. Ibra is one of the best strikers in the world and a player who always gives 100 percent,” said Mourinho, who along with Ibrahimovic shares an antipathy towards Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola. “He has won the most important league champion-ships in the world of football, now he has the opportunity to play in the best league in the world and I know he will grasp this opportunity and will work hard to help the team win titles.

“I am certain that his talent will

delight fans at Old Trafford next sea-son and that his experience will be invaluable in helping to develop the younger players in the squad.”

Mourinho has been tasked with making United realistic title contend-ers again after barren years under first David Moyes and then Louis van Gaal, who was sacked having delivered the FA Cup but crucially not Champions League football for next season.

Ibrahimovic, who hit 62 goals in 116 appearances for Sweden before retiring after a miserable Euro 2016, couldn’t resist leaving France without a trademark burst of frank speaking.

“I wasn’t expecting very much of Ligue 1 when I signed for PSG,” he told Sport & Style, a supplement to

L’Equipe magazine. “Ligue 1 wasn’t up to my level nor of the clubs where I’d played before.

“Its the simple truth. So there was clearly a risk to me, for my value, for my image,” added Ibrahimovic.

The blunt Swede, who aside from PSG and Inter Milan also played for AC Milan, Juventus, Barcelona and Ajax, said he had entered the unknown by joining a French league that lacked the passion and the glam-our of Serie A.

He rounded the interview off with a typical flourish.

“I symbolised for a while Paris’s image,” said Ibrahimovic, who had a poor Euro 2016, failing to score and quitting after Sweden’s first-round elimination.

This file photo taken on February 17, 2015 shows Paris Saint-Germain’s Swedish striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic speaking with Chelsea’s Portuguese manager Jose Mourinho (right) at the end of the UEFA Champions League round of 16 match between Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) and Chelsea in Paris.

I am absolutely delighted to be joining Manchester United and am looking forward to playing in the Premier League, says Swedish superstar

Resurgent Ben Arfa makes

‘dream’ move to PSG

AFP

PARIS: France international mid-fielder Hatem Ben Arfa has signed a two-year deal with Paris Saint-Germain from Ligue 1 rivals Nice, the French champions announced yesterday.

“Paris Saint-Germain is happy to announce the signing of Hatem Ben Arfa’s contract until June 30, 2018,” the club said on its Twitter account.

The former Lyon, Marseille and Newcastle winger becomes the club’s first recruit since new Spanish coach Unai Emery replaced Laurent Blanc this week.

Both Emery and the gifted Ben Arfa will be officially presented by the club at their Parc des Princes ground on Monday by the club’s Qatari backer Nasser al-Khelaifi.

The 29-year-old Ben Arfa, who missed out on Didier Deschamps’ Euro 2016 squad, is available on a free transfer after his contract with Nice expired this summer.

“Paris Saint-Germain has always had a special place in my heart and wearing this jersey at the Parc des Princes is a childhood dream,” said Ben Arfa, who comes from Clamart on the outskirts of Paris.

“I’d like to thank Nice, who ena-bled me to refind pleasure in playing football and to show the French public what I’m capable of on the

pitch,” he added on PSG’s website. Ben Arfa moves to the French cap-ital after a 17-goal haul last term which inspired Nice into a club-best third in the table. At Nice, under the south coast club’s then coach Claude Puel, he shed his sometimes badboy image forged by various run-ins with former coaches.

He had a largely disappointing spell in England with Newcastle and a loan spell with Hull City fol-lowed by six months out of the game in 2015 before his career-boosting move to Nice.

His arrival came the day after PSG’s out of contract Swedish super-star Zlatan Ibrahimovic announced he was joining Manchester United.

Ben Arfa is the first signing of new coach Emery, who was named Tuesday as the man to finally achieve PSG’s long quest for Champions League success.

Emery terminated his contract with Sevilla this month, having guided the Spanish side to three suc-cessive Europa League titles.

Ben Arfa signed for the four-time French champions after reported interest from Barcelona, Sevilla, and one of his former teams, Lyon.

He made his debut for Lyon at just 17-years-old in 2004 and went on to play 91 times for the club, win-ning four straight Ligue 1 titles.

He moved from there to Marseille in 2008, switching to New-castle three years later.

This file photo taken on November 10,

2015 shows France’s forward Hatem Ben Arfa arriving for a

press conference in Clairefontaine-en-Yvelines, outside

Paris.

Djokovic facing Wimbledon humiliation as Serena, Venus survive AFP

LONDON: World number one and defending champion Novak Djoko-vic was facing Wimbledon humiliation yesterday before rain saved him from his worst defeat at the tournament since 2008.

The three-time champion, who is already halfway to the first calen-dar Grand Slam in 47 years, dropped the first two sets of his third round clash against American 28th seed Sam Querrey 7-6 (8/6), 6-1.

But after just 73 minutes of action, rain sent them running for cover off Court One, giving 12-time major win-ner Djokovic welcome sanctuary before play was called off for the day

on the outside courts. By that stage, only 17 of the scheduled 32 ties had been completed.

Djokovic, who has an 8-1 record over Querrey, has made at least the quarter-finals on his last seven visits to Wimbledon since losing to Marat Safin in the second round eight years ago.

He has also made the last eight of each of the last 28 Grand Slams since losing to Philipp Kohlschreiber in the third round of the 2009 French Open.

Meanwhile, Serena and Venus Williams survived marathon duels as the rain, which has plagued the tour-nament, forced organisers to consider playing on the middle Sunday for the first time since 2004.

World number one and defend-ing champion Serena defeated US

compatriot Christina McHale 6-7 (7/9), 6-2, 6-4 on Centre Court, only just avoiding what would have been her earliest-ever Wimbledon defeat.

The six-time Wimbledon cham-pion will face Germany’s Annika Beck for a place in the last 16.

“It was a really good match. She played great and she always plays great against me,” Williams said after seeing off the world number 65.

“I know mentally no-one can break me. I knew, down a break in the third, that I was going to have to put my mind in it and that’s what I did.”

Serena was far from her best, even picking up a code violation for smashing her racquet into the turf at one stage.

Five-time champion Venus reached the last-16, seeing off Russian

teenager Daria Kasatkina 7-5, 4-6, 10-8 in a tie featuring a rain stoppage when she held match point.

Williams, 36, was 7-6, 40-30 up on Kasatkina’s serve in the final set on Court One when play was halted.

Seventy-five minutes later, the players returned with Kasatkina saving the match point, the second of the day.

But Williams eventually tri-umphed at the third time of asking when the 19-year-old dumped a fore-hand into the net.

Williams, the eighth seed, goes on to face Spain’s Carla Suarez Navarro for a place in the quarter-finals.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever played a 10-8 set. That was pretty intense. All you can think is ‘hold serve’. Easier said than done,” said the American.

Serena Williams celebrates her win

against Christina McHale during their women’s singles second round

match at Wimbledon at The All England Lawn Tennis Club, yesterday.

SPORT 23SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016

AFP

ANNECY: The jokes have been doing the rounds on social media since Ice-land’s stunning 2-1 victory over England put them in the Euro 2016 quarter-finals.

Kolbeinn Sigporsson’s winning goal made him a hero in Iceland while the last 16 defeat signalled the end of Roy Hodgson’s career as England manager.

“Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, We’re out of the Euros, And out of the EU #engice,” quipped one England fan after Monday’s defeat and the Brexit referendum.

Now hosts France are the next big name hoping to avoid being made laughing stocks by the Nordic minnows in tomorrow’s quarter-final in Paris.

A big chunk of Iceland’s population of 330,000 is in France to support their team and the island is going nuts for football.

The mood in the Iceland camp is relaxed.

There are lots of jokes in their press conferences alongside a confident air of determination.

“This is the biggest game in our his-tory,” said midfielder Birkir Bjarnason.

“I don’t think any team is going to underestimate us after the England result.”

Unusually, the team has two coaches -- Heimir Hallgrimsson, who works as a part-time dentist, alongside Sweden’s Lars Lagerback.

“We’re the team behind the team,” said Lagerback.

The duo have shared the duties since 2014, but this is their last joint venture and Hallgrimsson, 49, will take over after Euro 2016 as head coach.

Media interest in the smallest nation to qualify for a major tourna-ment has exploded since the England win.

“Things went a bit crazy,” said press officer Omar Smarason.

Journalists want to know the secret behind Iceland’s success, but the simple answer is hard work -- and not being “sloppy”.

“We have set guidelines to work within, it’s about creating a standard both on and off the pitch,” explained Lagerback.

“For example, standards were a lit-tle sloppy and in the euphoria of the win (over England), a few of the guys were late to dinner the day after.

“Normally we’re flexible, but that was one of the details we brought up.

“’Don’t think you are over the hill just because you beat England - keep the standard’

“I think the best way to challenge a footballer is to ask if he is 100 percent professional.”

There was nothing sloppy about how Iceland qualified for France.

They made the football world take notice by beating the Netherlands home and away. Before that, Iceland almost qualified for the 2014 World Cup before losing a play-off to Croatia.

Iceland had finished second-bot-tom of their group in the Euro 2008 and Euro 2012 qualifying campaigns.

Iceland’s success in France is the fruit of a decision made by their national football association (KSI) fifteen years ago to invest in indoor football arenas and improve coaching.

Lagerback has also been important.Before he started to work with Ice-

land in 2011, the 67-year-old had taken his native Sweden to five major finals and coached Nigeria at the 2010 World Cup.

“His contribution has been price-less,” said Hallgrimsson.

“You have to realise that Iceland is a very small country, the coaches there are amateurs.

“So to have a guy come in, with all his international experience, was a big deal,” added Hallgrimsson.

Results in France have put Iceland on the footballing map, but Hall-grimsson says the challenge is to carry the success into the 2018 World Cup qualifiers.

Iceland shirt is Euro 2016’s must-have item

AFP

ANNECY: Iceland’s march to the Euro 2016 quarter-finals has caught the football world by surprise - and left new-found fans struggling to get their hands on a replica shirt.

Iceland’s eye-catching blue playing shirt has become the tournament’s must-have item after their shock 2-1 win over England in the last 16 thanks to Kolbeinn Sigthorsson’s win-ning goal.

Because of the Nordic nation’s European Cham-pionship success in beating England demand for the shirts has been almost 2,000 percent higher than expected, Iceland team press officer Omar Smar-ason said yesterday.

Poland exit ‘not the end’ for Nawalka AFP

M ARSEILLE: Poland’s heartbreaking Euro 2016 quar-ter-final exit to Portugal on penalties should not dampen optimism of great things to come, insisted coach Adam Nawalka.

Jakub Blaszczykowski’s spot-kick was saved by Rui Patricio as Portugal prevailed 5-3 in the shootout after Ren-ato Sanches had cancelled out Robert Lewandowski’s quick-fire opener in Marseille.

Poland were unbeaten in their five games in France and Nawalka believes there is cause to look forward to the World Cup in Russia in two years time with plenty of hope.

“I hope this is the begin-ning not the end. We are still making progress,” he said.

“This tournament has proven that, both in the group stage and the knockout stage.”

Germany desperate to snap out of Italy nightmare

Reuters

BORDEAUX: Title contenders Ger-many will come face to face with their ultimate tournament night-mare when they take on Italy in their Euro 2016 quarter-final in Bor-deaux today.

The world champions have lost every single tournament knockout

game to the Italians going back almost half a century but are con-fident they can end a streak that includes one World Cup final and two semi-finals and the Euro 2012 last four.

There are signs that it be Ger-many’s turn to smile today, with the 2014 World Cup winners having yet to concede a goal in the tournament.

After topping Group C with two wins and a draw, they quickly dis-posed of Slovakia 3-0 in the round of 16 with an impressive perform-ance in which their frontline burst into life after three below-par performances.

Forward Mario Gomez, ini-tially left on the bench, has now struck once in each of their last two matches and looks set to spearhead their attack again.

“We know that everything will be demanded from us,” said team

manager Oliver Bierhoff. “This is a new game, maybe the Italians are even stronger than in 2012 and we have been warned.

But the game will start from zero for both teams and the past does not interest us.”

Coach Joachim Loew will have a full squad to choose from with Jonas Hector having recovered from the flu and captain Bastian Schwein-steiger fully fit after playing only a minor role so far following a long-term injury.

“I feel Bastian is ready now. He belongs to the players that Loew can now count on 100 percent,” Bierhoff said.

Antonio Conte’s Italy lack the big names of the past but were among four teams unbeaten in qualifying for the tournament and have kept their momentum going in France, conceding just one goal in their four

matches. Their so-called three-man BBC defence, led by Giorgio Chiellini playing alongside Juven-tus teammates Andrea Barzagli and Leonardo Bonucci, has been key to their success.

“We have the Juve trio who guide us, they’ve not been winning for five years for nothing,” said fel-low defender Mattia De Sciglio.

Conte will likely be without midfielder Daniele De Rossi, who picked up a thigh injury in Monday’s 2-0 win over holders Spain. Thi-ago Motta, his usual replacement, is missing through suspension.

That is unlikely to deter the Ital-ians, according to De Sciglio.

“Conte would be on the pitch with us if he could be,” he said. “He has taught us to fight for every inch. Fighting for every ball is our strength as we do not possess superstars.”

Iceland’s success is no laughing matter

Ronaldo’s ‘dream’ still alive after shootout winAFP

MARSEILLE: Cristiano Ronaldo took his “dream” of an international title another step closer when Portugal beat Poland in a penalty shootout to reach the European Championship semi-finals.

Robert Lewandowski scored barely 100 seconds into the latest night of Euro 2016 drama before Portugal unleashed the player who many say could lead the country’s post-Ron-aldo era.

Making his first start at Euro 2016, Renato Sanches, a powerful 18-year-old and already a 35 million euro ($38 million) player, smashed home a 25 metre drive to equalise the match that went into extra time and then penalties.

Sanches followed Ronaldo in hit-ting home his spot kick as Portugal won 5-3, having again failed to win a game in the alloted 90 minutes. That did not prevent relieved Portuguese celebrations.

Ronaldo said it had been an “unfor-getable” night as Portugal had reached their target of a semi-final place. “Eve-ryone should be congratulated.”

But the Real Madrid star acknowl-edged again that the prize he really

cherishes is a world or European title. And at 31, he knows time is running out.

“The dream is getting closer and anything can happen now. I’m not missing anything (in honours) and even if my career finished today I would still feel privileged,” said the Real Madrid star.

“But I’ve always said, and I don’t hide it, that I would love to win a title with the national team. We’re on the right road.”

Poland started strongly, with Rob-ert Lewandowski scoring his first goal of Euro 2016 before the stadium had settled. Kamil Grosicki hurried past Southampton right-back Cedric Soares to deliver a great cross for Lewand-owski to drive past a flailing Rui Patricio as Poland made a flying start.

It was the Polish striker’s first goal of the competition, after hitting a record 13 in qualifying.

Sanches, his new teammate at Bay-ern Munich, came to Portugal’s rescue.

German referee Felix Brych waved away Ronaldo’s claims for a penalty on 31 minutes despite replays suggesting the Real Madrid star was bundled over by centre-back Michal Pazdan as he went to meet a cross.

Two minutes later, Sanches col-lected Nani’s cutback from the right

side of the area and hit a fierce shot that deflected off Grzegorz Krychowiak and beat Lukasz Fabianski at his near post.

Portugal should have hit the win-ner on 85 minutes, but after sneaking behind Pazan to meet a high ball from substitute Joao Moutinho, Ronaldo’s left foot failed to connect with what looked like a simple chance.

Goalkeeper Rui Patricio and Ricardo Quaresma were Portugal’s shootout heroes. Patricio dived left to save Jakub Blaszczykowski’s tame fourth shot for the Poles, who had reached the quarter-finals for the first time. Quaresma was next up for Por-tugal and made no mistake firing high into the net to beat Fabianski.

Ronaldo looked vulnerable, but Portugal coach Fernando Santos hailed his performance as “amazing”.

“People focus on Ronaldo because he has to score, but he played amaz-ing, he is a great captain.”

Poland were disconsolate.“It hurts and it will hurt for a

long time,” Lewandowski said as he watched Ronaldo celebrate.

Portugal play Belgium or Wales.The final two quarter finals are

between Germany and Italy today, followed by France against underdogs Iceland tomorrow.

Portugal’s defender Fonte and skipper Cristiano Ronaldo celebrate after winning the Euro 2016 quarter-final match against Poland at the Stade Velodrome in Marseille on Thursday.

German players warm up during a training session at the team’s training grounds in Evian yesterday, on the eve of their Euro 2016 quarter-final match between against Italy.

World champions yet to concede a goal in the tournament and confident despite poor record against Azzurri

Ronaldo’s ‘dream’ still alive after shootout win

PAGE | 22 PAGE | 23

Ibrahimovic reunited with Mourinho

at United

SATURDAY 2 JULY 2016 • 27 RAMADAN 1437

www.thepeninsulaqatar.com

@peninsulaqatar @peninsula_qatarthepeninsulaqatar

Ibrah

Rampant Wales outplay Belgium, reach semis

AFP

LILLE: Hal Robson-Kanu scored a sensational goal as Wales came from behind to stun Belgium 3-1 in yester-day’s Euro 2016 quarter-final in Lille and reach their first major tourna-ment semi-final.

Radja Nainggolan gave Belgium a 13th-minute lead, but Ashley Wil-liams equalised before a dazzling strike from Robson-Kanu, whose contract with English second-tier club Reading expired on Thurs-day, and a late header by substitute Sam Vokes earned Wales a historic victory.

Wales talisman Gareth Bale will now go head-to-head with his Real Madrid team-mate Cristiano Ronaldo when the tournament’s last British representatives face Portugal in Lyon on Wednesday.

In beating Belgium, who they also defeated in qualifying, Chris Coleman’s men surpassed the Wales greats of 1958, whose quarter-final showing at that year’s World Cup in Sweden had been the country’s best previous achievement.

But they will have to do without both Ben Davies and Aaron Ramsey, who set up two of the Wales goals, after they received bookings that ruled them out of the semi-final.

Belgium coach Marc Wilmots will face difficult questions about his fail-ure to achieve more with one of his nation’s finest collections of football-ers, who also fell in the last eight at the 2014 World Cup.

He was missing three of his four first-choice defenders - Vin-cent Kompany and Jan Vertonghen through injury, Thomas Vermaelen through suspension - but with no

other previous tournament-winners in this half of the draw, defeat repre-sented a massive missed opportunity.

Heavy pre-match downpours in Lille heightened fears about the pitch, which was relaid just a week ago, but the slick playing surface held firm and provided the platform for an electrifying game.

In the 13th minute Belgium went ahead when Nainggolan met Hazard’s lay-off with a blistering 30-yard shot that whistled into the top-left corner.

Welsh indiscipline at the back was costing them as Davies, James Chester and Chris Gunter all picked up bookings, the former’s yellow card ruling him out of the semi-final.

But their reaction to falling behind was exemplary and after Neil Taylor had been denied by Thibaut Courtois, Williams met Ramsey’s right-wing corner with a thumping downward header to equalise.

The goal seemed to unsettle Belgium and Wales ended the first half on top, with Williams heading another Ramsey corner over the bar

and Courtois fielding Bale’s low shot and a Robson-Kanu header.

Wilmots stiffened his midfield at half-time, sending on Marouane Fel-laini for Carrasco, and his side made a flying start to the second period, with Lukaku, De Bruyne and Haz-ard all narrowly missing the target.

But it was Wales who scored next with a 55th-minute goal that lit up the tournament. Ramsey’s lofted cross from the right found Robson-Kanu, who took Thomas Meunier, Fellaini and Jason Denayer out of the game with a sublime Cruyff turn before planting a shot past Courtois.

In a taut finish to the game, Fel-laini and Ramsey also received suspension-incurring bookings, the latter tarnishing perhaps his best ever Wales performance with a needless handball.

Belgium huffed and puffed, Fellaini heading wide and Wil-liams being very fortunate to avoid conceding a penalty for catching Nainggolan, before Vokes delivered the coup de grace with a stunning header from Gunter’s cross.

Sagna warns France to avoid last-minuteheroicsAFP

CLAIREFONTAINE-EN-YVE-LINES, France: France risk being “punished” if they keep on win-ning Euro 2016 games at the last minute, defender Bacary Sagna warned yesterday.

The Manchester City star said that Iceland - France’s quarter-final opponents tomorrow- are the Leicester City of the European Championship and France’s status as a favourite could be a handicap in the match.

“We are the hosts and maybe we have put extra pressure on our-selves by taking time to get into it,” Sagna told a press conference at the French team base.

“There have been a lot of matches where we have made the difference in the final minutes and one day we will be punished,” he added.

Late goals saw France to group wins over Romania and Albania and they drew their last game against Switzerland 0-0.

Coach Didier Deschamps had to read a half-time riot act to get the French to step up the pace against the Republic of Ireland in the last 16.

“We have got to be active from the warm-up and not wait for half-time to talk to each other and get into it,” said Sagna.

The veteran defender said France needed to concentrate from the start.

“When we meet a more com-pact team that handles the end of matches better, it will not work,” he warned of France’s trend of scor-ing last-gasp winners.

Sagna hailed Iceland’s per-formance in slaying England to reach the quarter-finals.

“They are kind of the Leices-ter of Euro 2016,” he said.

“They deserve to be there. They showed in the qualifying tournament that they could beat the big teams like Netherlands and Czech Republic.

“It is a quality team and you must not underestimate them. The danger is that it is Iceland and us,” said Sagna.

“We are capable of being the best, but we have a status and we have to live up to it. We want to do too well and sometimes that holds us back.”

“We have to be ready and grab the match from the start.”

Sagna said that France have to start against Iceland like they finished against the Irish, in com-plete control.

While Iceland have been enjoying their newfound star sta-tus, France have been cloistered away from the press for most of the past two weeks by Deschamps.

Sagna said this had brought “serenity” to the team.

“We need to be together. The public fever in France is unimag-inable and it is good for the team but it does us good as well to work together in calm.

Sagna said he had “grown in maturity” by watching the chaotic events in the team camp in South Africa after Nicolas Anelka was sent home.

To lose in the quarter-final or semi-final would be “a failure”, he declared.

“I am not thinking about defeat today. I am not thinking about going on holiday anytime soon.”

Saevarsson wants max focus for France AFP

ANNECY: Birkir Mar Saevarsson says Iceland can not afford to lose concentration for a second against hosts France in tomor-row’s Euro 2016 quarter-final if they want another upset result.

Iceland made the footballing world sit up by dumping England out of the European Champi-onship finals with a shock 2-1 win in the last 16 to set up Sun-day’s quarterfinal at the Stade de France.

France will be “better and more cohesive” than England, said right-back Saevarsson who ensured England’s left winger Raheem Sterling had a quiet game in Nice.

“We expect a different game to the one against England, the French play at a higher tempo, but they also have dangerous individuals. They are better and more cohesive than England,” said the 31-year-old defender.

Saevarsson plies his trade for Swedish side Hammarby and is preparing for the biggest game of his career at the sold-out Stade de France.

He described the differ-ence to playing at a Euro finals compared to Swedish league football.

“The players here are bet-ter and quicker, they have more technique, so you must keep your concentration or you get punished,” he said.

Italy must be extraordinary to beat Germany: Conte Reuters

BORDEAUX: Having eliminated holders Spain, Italy coach Antonio Conte (pictured) is quietly confi-dent his side can pull off another major victory in today’s quarter-final against old nemesis Germany, a team he considers to be the world’s best.

Despite being considered before the tournament as having one of the weakest Italy teams in years, Conte has forged a cohesive unit and mas-terminded a run to the last eight after topping Group E and ousting the European titleholders 2-0.

However, they will have their

work cut out to overcome world champions Germany, who are yet to concede a goal at Euro 2016 and thumped Slovakia 3-0 in the round of 16.

Nonetheless, Conte is qui-etly confident that Italy can again prove the doubters wrong and top-ple a side he considers to be the best on the planet.

“We did something extraor-dinary against Spain,” Conte told reporters on Friday, “and tomor-row we have to do something even more extraordinary. We have a lot of respect for Germany, they are the number one side in the world, but we will try and play our hand as we did against Spain. We are well aware of our strengths and those of

our opposition,” he added. “If you can bring together talent and organ-isation like they have, you have a heady mix.

“It’s no surprise they’re world champions. They are the best team in the world.”

Despite gloomy pre-tourna-ment forecasts, Italy have emerged as genuine title contenders after silencing their critics.

“When we started our jour-ney we had little credibility in the eyes of the Italian press and the international media,” Conte said. “Everyone thought it was the dark days regarding talent in the Ital-ian game.

“We’ve shown that through hard work, organisation and having 23

top players willing to work hard, we can overcome obstacles that appear difficult from the start.”

Italy have an enviable record against Germany at major tourna-ments, having won all four of their knockout stage meetings, includ-ing the Euro 2012 semi-final against Joachim Lowe’s much fancied side in Warsaw.

“There are a number of par-allels between tomorrow’s match and the previous Euros,” said goal-keeper Gianluigi Buffon.

“On paper, the gap between the two sides could be even greater considering they’ve won the World Cup in the meantime.”

“We know there will be diffi-culties,” added Conte.

Robson-Kanu spearheads historic 3-1 win to book Portugal meeting

Wales’ Sam Vokes scores their third goal against Belgium during the Euro 2016 Quarter-final played at Stade Pierre-Mauroy in Lille, France yesterday.