Pacquiao plans to fight again this year: Promoter

BUSINESS | 17 SPORT | 21

Nakilat posts QR501m net profit

for first half

www.thepeninsulaqatar.com

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II welcomes Theresa May at the start of an audience in Buckingham Palace, where she invited May to take over as Prime Minister, in London yesterday. → Report on page 11

A long line of vehicles seen around noon on Abu Hamour Road in the Industrial Area yesterday. The traffic snarl continued for a couple of hours. Pic: Abdul B / The Peninsula

Traffic jam

THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016 • 9 SHAWWAL 1437 • Volume 21 • Number 6857 thepeninsulaqatar @peninsulaqatar @peninsula_qatar 2 Riyals

By Mohammad Shoeb The Peninsula

DOHA: With British pound plum-meting after the Brexit vote, the UK has become one of the most pre-ferred holiday destinations of Qatari citizens this season.

Holidaying in the UK has not only become cheaper, for the first time, the cost of living in the UK for visitors and tourists is now less compared to the US, say some fre-quent Qatari travellers.

The pound has declined nearly 14 percent against the US dollar to which the Qatari riyal is pegged due to selling pressure after Britons voted to leave the European Union in a referendum held on June 23.

A weaker pound means every traveller to the UK from Doha will now be required to pay fewer riyals for expenses such as accommoda-tion, transport and food in the UK.

“The recent fall in the value of British currency will definitely have a positive impact on the cost of liv-ing in the UK as travellers will get extra pounds in exchange of dol-lars or riyals compared to what they used to pre-Brexit. In fact, a few people who had booked for Turkey recently came back and changed their bookings to the UK. But those who travel to the UK fre-quently do not care much about their expenses,” said a senior offi-cial of Kanoo Travel Agency.

Ali Sabri, Director of Milano Travel Agency, said: “In Europe, the UK (London) and Switzerland are the most preferred destinations for Qataris every year, especially during summer. But in the region, Dubai, Makkah, Muscat and Salalah are preferred destinations of Qatari citizens and residents throughout the year.

“Hotel tariffs this year are more or less the same compared to last year, but ticket fares are rela-tively cheaper (except during Eid holidays), understandably due to lower fuel prices and economic slowdown.”

“The UK has always been the most favourite destination for travel, business and investment for Qataris. But with the fall of the pound ster-ling, people are travelling more frequently and staying there for longer periods,” said Khalifa Saleh Haroon, a prominent Qatari citizen.

→ Continued on page 4

The Peninsula

DOHA: Over 1.5 million people benefitted from Ramadan projects launched by Sheikh Eid Charitable Foundation (Eid Charity) in Qatar and outside, at a cost of QR22m.

In Qatar, Some 400,000 peo-ple were served Iftar meals at 63 places, including Doha, Al Wakra, Al Khor and Al Shahaniya. The QR8m project was funded by phi-lanthropists in Qatar. Over 8,000 expatriates from Indian community were provided with Iftar meals at two places on one day, QNA reports.

Some 700 Iftar meals were distributed to poor families in Abu Hamour, Muithir and Madinat Kha-lifa. A total of 21,000 meals were provided during Ramadan.

Eid Charity provided Iftar meals to over 1.2 million people in 25 coun-tries at a cost of over QR14m. The amount was raised through dona-tions from people in Qatar and the project was implemented in collab-oration with partners of Eid Charity. More than 10,000 Syrian internally displaced people and those shel-tering in neighbouring countries — totalling about 300,000 people — benefitted from Iftar meals daily

→ Continued on page 2

Eid Charity’s

Ramadan projects

benefit 1.5 million

people worldwide

AFP

JERUSALEM: A major crossing point between Gaza and Israel is set to reopen for the first time in nine years, the Israeli government announced yesterday.

“The Erez crossing point will again be open to goods entering Gaza from Thurs-day”, said a spokesman for COGAT, the defence ministry body responsible for

implementing government policies in the Palestinian territories. “This measure has been taken to facilitate the work of Pales-tinian importers and thus help the economy of the Gaza Strip,” he added.

Since 2007, Erez has been restricted to individuals, with goods going through Kerem Shalom in southern Gaza.

Located in the northern Gaza Strip, Erez is nearer to major Israeli cities than Kerem Shalom and could make bring-ing goods from Israeli port cities such as

Ashdod easier. Israel has imposed a block-ade on Gaza for a decade, which it says is necessary to prevent the Islamist move-ment Hamas, which runs the Strip, from rebuilding its military forces and positions.

According to the World Bank and the UN, the blockade has killed virtually all exports from Gaza, as well as bringing the economy of the small enclave to the brink.

Around 1.9 million Palestinians live in Gaza, wedged between Egypt, Israel and the Mediterranean.

UK draws more Qataris after pound’s plunge

Reuters

TUNIS: Tunisia’s prime minister has refused to resign and wants parlia-ment to decide his fate, creating a political deadlock over President Beji Caid Essebsi’s plan to form a new unity government.

Habib Essid stood his ground a

few weeks after Essebsi called for negotiations on a unity govern-ment he believes would overcome coalition tensions that have blocked headway towards much-needed eco-nomic reforms.

“Prime Minister Habib Essid has chosen to go to parliament,” Essebsi said in a speech yesterday after the premier insisted on leaving a deci-sion on his future to lawmakers.

The ruling coalition has strug-gled to generate more growth and jobs since Islamist militant attacks gutted the North African state’s tourism industry. Essebsi earlier said Tunisia needed a bolder, more determined government to carry out reforms. “It is time for a change, and for audacity. We need a more cou-rageous alternative that can apply the law and fight unemployment.”

Ticket relatively cheaper this year — except during Eid holidays due to lower fuel prices and economic slowdown, says a travel agent.

Gaza crossing set to open for first time in 9 years

Families from across Qatar gathered at Qatar Foundation’s (QF) National Reading Campaign booth at City Center during Eid Al-Fitr holidays to take part in educational activities. The campaign strives to cultivate a love for reading from an early age, fostering a life-long pursuit of knowledge. Held in collaboration with Al Faisal Social Responsibility Centre during Ramadan and Eid, activities included storytelling sessions and educational and entertaining games.

QF hosts National Reading Campaign

The Peninsula

DOHA: The Ministry of Public Health yes-terday said it has formed a committee of experts to investigate the death of a Qatari woman during delivery in May at the Wom-en’s Hospital.

The death of Shroq Al Sulaiti during deliv-ery of her second child had gone viral in the social media following a news published about the case in an Arabic daily two days ago.

Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) has

completed the investigation procedures like the formation of a committee which will have local as well as foreign experts. The commit-tee will report to the concerned officials at the HMC after which a report will be sub-mitted to the Ministry. The initial report was presented to Healthcare Practitioners Regis-tration & Licensing Committee of the Ministry of Health yesterday.

The Ministry also pointed out that the Qatar Council of Healthcare Practitioners (QCHP) is also investigating the case.

→ Continued on page 3

Saudi soldier dies in Yemen border mine blast

Tunisia’s Premier refuses to quit

Ministry panel to probe woman’s death

Emir greets new British PremierDOHA: Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani yesterday sent a cable of congratulations to Theresa May on assuming the post of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. QNA

QNA & AFP

RIYADH: A landmine killed a Saudi soldier patrolling the southern border with Yemen, the interior ministry said yesterday. The blast struck a Border Guard patrol at 7am on Tuesday in the kingdom’s Jazan region, the ministry said in a statement.

About 100 Saudi soldiers and civilians have died from shelling, skirmishes and mines in the border region since a Saudi-led coalition in March last year began a military intervention in Yemen.

Yesterday, the coalition air force yesterday waged intensive air strike on posts of the Houthi and Salih militias in Al Jawf Governorate in eastern Yemen.

Sources said the coalition targeted militia posts, killing many and destroying vehicles and gained con-trol of Gold Mountain and its surroundings.

→ See also page 4

Queen Elizabeth II meets new PM

HOME02 THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

By Mohammed Osman

DOHA: France fully supports Qatar in hosting FIFA World Cup 2022, said Eric Chevallier, French Ambassa-dor to Qatar. He said both countries are in continuous cooperation and coordination in various areas like economy, politics, education, secu-rity and development projects and in fighting terrorism.

“We are providing full support to FIFA World Cup 2022 and there is full cooperation with Qatar in areas of construction and security and more than 40 experts visited France to see Euro 2016 from the security point of view in order to prepare for 2022,” said Chevallier.

Talking to local reporters at the French embassy in Doha, on the occasion of French National Day (14 July), he said there are more than 40 companies called French Team for Sports actively taking part in infrastructure and World Cup 2022

projects including in construction, ticketing, smart innovations and security. France has also partnered with Qatar to train Qatari judges to deal with major sport events.

He said the standards devel-oped by the key stakeholders like the Supreme Committee for Deliv-ery and Legacy, Qatar Foundation and Q-Rail for protection of labour rights is a positive step towards the improvement in the living condition of low-income workers in Qatar. It is a joint responsibility of companies, countries of origin, and the entire community to improve the condi-tion of workers.

The Ambassador reassured Qataris and other visitors to France that they can travel safely in France, pointing out that recently many Qataris travelled to France to watch the final of the prestigious football tournament at the Stade De France.

“The successful hosting of the Euro 2016 proved that it is safe to travel to France, which is one of the preferred tourism destinations for

Qataris, especially in summer,” he stressed. “We are working very seri-ously to ensure the safety of visitors travelling to France from various countries including Qatar and other GCC countries. Before the start of Euro in May and June, many people were saying do not go to France it will be risky and there will be problems but we ended the Euro 2016 in a very good way,” he stressed.

He added France is working with Qatar to tackle terrorism at the bilat-eral level and within the framework

of international community mech-anisms. These areas of cooperation cover three major elements like secu-rity, terrorism financing, and cultural dimension.

The visit of Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdul-lah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani to France last November was highly appreciated by France because the visit came at a “very impor-tant moment after only three days of the two terrible terrorist attacks. His Excellency carried a very strong message of solidarity and determi-nation from H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani to jointly tackle ter-rorism, said Eric.

He highlighted that when terror-ists commit crimes, “their main aim is to divide our societies and create a divide between a certain soci-ety and provoke tension”. Fighting Islamophobia is an important joint responsibility and we must avoid falling into this trap, he emphasised. “The issue of terrorism must be seen from different perspectives and this

is an area we are working on jointly with Qatar,” he said.

Relations between Qatar and France are built on solid ground and are deeply rooted but Eric feels that there is a need for further develop-ment although it currently covers a wide range of areas.

France and Qatar are working together on a lot of regional crises trying to find ways for political solu-tions to achieve peace and stability, especially in Syria, Libya and Yemen.

He emphasised that there is no change in France’s position regarding the situation in Syria and his country believes there is a need for transition that respects the will of the Syrian people -- a real political transition without Bashar Al Assad being part of the future of Syria but a transition that does not destroy the institutions in Syria. He explained that France and Qatar support the UN-backed unity government led by the Prime Minister Fayez Al Seraj who was received in Doha by Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.

The Peninsula

DOHA: Qatar Red Crescent Society (QRCS) distributed gifts to the children admitted in Al Khor Hospital during Eid Al-Fitr to bring smiles on their faces.

A team of QRCS’s branch in Al Shamal visited the pediatrics department of Al Khor Hospital to distribute gifts and toys to the children, said a release.

At least ten children

benefited from the initiative that was lauded by Hospital management.

QRCS also distributed food baskets to 230 low-income fam-ilies in Al Khor and neighboring districts, during the holy month of Ramadan.

The baskets include rice, sugar, vegetable oil, and milk. The beneficiaries thanked QRCS for extending helping hands, which represent a form of humanitarian solidarity with vulnerable groups of society.

The branch also offered free medical checkup for worshi-pers free at mosques medical. The initiative launched in col-laboration with the Mosques Management Department of the Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs.

The initiative includes med-ical consultations and tests for sugar and blood pressure. At least 300 men and women were informed about the ben-efits of fasting and how to avoid unhealthy practices,

Deputy Emir and PM greet new UK PremierDOHA: Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani yesterday sent a cable of con-gratulations to Theresa May on assuming the post of prime min-ister of the United Kingdom.

Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani sent a similar cable to Premier May.

Continued from page 1

Some 150,000 people in Pales-tine, 133,00 in Yemen, 50,000 each in Sudan and Iraq and 20,000 each in India, Somalia and Mauritania, and 10,000 in Mali and thousands in other countries benefited from the initiative.

Qatari donors who financed to build mosques worldwide offered Iftar meals at the mosques in 21 countries.

Iftar meals offered

at mosques in

21 countries

QNA

KATHMANDU: Nepalese Dep-uty Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Kamal Thapa, met H E Qatar’s Ambassador to Nepal, Ahmed Jassim Al Hamar, on the occasion of ending his tenure.

The meeting reviewed bilat-eral relations. The Nepalese deputy prime minister wished success to HE the ambassador in his future posts.

Nepal Deputy PM

meets Qatari

Ambassador

France ‘fully supports Qatar for FIFA World Cup’

QRCS distributes gifts to

kids at Al Khor Hospital

A child with a gift pack at Al Khor Hospital provided by Qatar Red Crescent Society (QRCS) during Eid Al-Fitr.

HOME 03 THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

The Peninsula

DOHA: The Public Works Authority (Ashghal) will imple-ment a temporary traffic diversion on Leatooriya Road, abouty 2km to the east of the Camel Racing Track.

The diversion starts tomor-row and lasts six months, in coordination with the Traf-fic Department. Road users travelling in both directions on Leatooriya Road will be diverted to two single-lane 500-metre parallel diver-sion routes before rejoining

Leatooriya Road, as shown in the map.

Road users travelling northbound towards Leatoor-iya to access the Camel Racing Track or return to Al Shee-haniya will be able to take a U-turn soon after the existing roundaboutp.

The diversion is required to enable the demolition and reconstruction of the round-about leading to Leatooriya Road and the Camel Racing Track. Ashghal will install road signs advising road users of the diversion and has urged them to abide by 50kmph speed limit and follow signs for safety.

Leatooriya Road diversion from tomorrow

The Perninsula

DOHA: Ooredoo has announced the launch of a Direct Carrier Billing service with Google to make it easier for Android users to purchase apps, games and digital content on their devices.

Customers can now perform any online purchase transaction through Google Play Store by paying for their purchases via their mobile phone balance without the need of using their credit cards. Direct Carrier Billing allows users of select mobile operators to pay for digital content on Google Play by billing purchases to their mobile accounts; post-paid or prepaid.

Once the payment option is set-up, customers are able to charge application and content purchases from the Play Store directly to their mobile accounts.

The Google Play store is the official application store for Android smartphones and tablets. Google makes software applications, music, movies and books available for purchase and download through the store.

The Google Play store, which comes pre-installed on Android devices, allows users to purchase, download and install applications from Google and third-party developers. For details about the service, visit the Ooredoo website at www.ooredoo.qa.

The Peninsula

DOHA: Hamad Medical Cor-poration’s (HMC) Diabetes Care Programme cares for more than 1,200 diabetic children, making it one of the largest centres in the region dedicated to the treatment and study of diabetes in children.

The prevalence of diabetes in Qatar is continuing to increase. Recent statistics indicate that about 17 percent of the Qatari adult popu-lation is thought to have the chronic disease and an additional 11 percent of the population is pre-diabetic.

About 85 percent of the diabetic children treated at Hamad General Hospital (HGH) have type 1 diabetes.

Type 1 diabetes is usually first diagnosed in children and young adults, although it can occur at any age.

It is believed to result from autoimmune destruction of the insulin-producing beta cells of the

pancreas, leading to increased blood glucose.

Type 2 diabetes occurs when there is a deficiency in insulin, or when the body does not respond correctly to insulin and is caused by factors such as family history and genetics, low activity level, unhealthy diet and excess body weight.

Children with type 1 diabetes are normally diagnosed in the paediat-ric emergency department. They are transferred to the Paediatric Diabe-tes Care Programme at HGH within hours of arriving at the emergency department. The need for treat-ment is almost always immediate and many parents and caregivers will experience denial upon hear-ing the diagnosis.

Dr. Fawziya Ali Khalaf A Al Khalaf, Head of the programme, and Senior Consultant, Paediatric Endocrinology/Diabetes section at HGH, says caring for diabetic chil-dren is a balancing act that parents must master.

“Parents and caregivers need to understand the severity of their child’s condition, but the multi-dis-ciplinary team must be sensitive and ensure they don’t scare or over-whelm the family with information. Educating the entire family is a key component to treating children with diabetes,” she stressed.

“Family support is an integral part of well-managed diabetes care and the diagnosis of diabetes in a child may change the entire family dynamic. The first step in treating the child is building a relationship

with their family, or primary car-egivers, to ensure they are receptive to receiving information they will need to care for the child,” said Dr. Al Khalaf.

“The first explanation a parent or caregiver is given is that if they adhere to the treatment plan, the life of a child with diabetes can be normal. They are told that diabe-tes should not keep the child from achieving their highest goals. Fam-ily support and understanding can make all the difference,” explained Dr. Al Khalaf.

“We often need to educate people that diabetes isn’t a transient disease. Ensuring that family members are educated on appropriate diabetes management is the key to develop-ing a management routine,” said Dr. Al Khalaf.

“Our multi-disciplinary team will teach the parent or caregiver about diabetes. We help families create and use a diabetes manage-ment plan.”

Type 1 diabetes demands a life-long commitment that requires blood sugar monitoring, insulin, healthy eating and regular exer-cise. As a child grows and changes, so must his or her diabetes manage-ment plan.

“Being told that your child is dia-betic can be stressful. The diagnosis can lead to strong emotions. The goal of diabetes management is to help children live long, healthy and pro-ductive lives. We focus on educating the entire family and our treatment protocol addresses the body and the mind,” added Dr. Al Khalaf.

The Peninsula

DOHA: Fourteen Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) students have returned from a rigorous 10-day trip to Oman, Zanzibar and Tanzania.

The students of GU-Q’s Zones of Conflict, Zones of Peace (ZCZP) programme explored the history, politics, and reconciliation efforts that continue in the wake of the 1964 revolution in Zanzibar.

In each destination coun-tries, students, accompanied by a faculty member, a researcher and three GU-Q staff, met key actors, including politicians, journalists, community organ-isers and other change-makers, to understand their perspec-tives of the ethnic conflict.

“Omanis had been living in Zanzibar for about 150 years before the revolution. Through ZCZP, which focuses on stud-ying a specific conflict and learning about how a society rebuilds afterwards, we took our students to Muscat to meet people who grew up in Zanzi-bar before moving to Oman.

“We also went to Zanzi-bar to meet Arabs who stayed following the revolution,” said Jacqui Snell, Educational Enrichment Manager and Pro-gramme Organiser, GU-Q.

“The meetings and visits spurred students to contem-plate whether the conflict was a genocide or revolution, and learn how genocide is con-structed and labelled in the international community.”

Preparation for the trip began with 25 hours of in-depth class work led by an expert on the Indian Ocean, Dr Rogaia Abusharaf, Associate Profes-sor of Anthropology, GU-Q.

For participating jun-ior Mariam Diefallah (SFS-Q ’17), ZCZP was an eye opening experience.

“I think very few people are given the opportunity to

see and verify for themselves the knowledge they gain from books and articles.

“I gained a lot of knowl-edge on a conflict that very few people know about. This knowledge was enriched during the trip as we met scholars, academics and sur-vivors, which gave the conflict a human aspect added to the aca-demic one. This is why I think the programme is essential for students,” she explained.

Leveraging the benefits of Georgetown’s top-tier faculty base, ZCZP asks faculty mem-bers to propose locations and conflicts to study. “This was the

second time our faculty pro-posed a topic, which is great because it means they bring expertise to the programme,” said Snell.

In 1698, Zanzibar became part of the overseas holdings of Oman under the control of the Sultan of Oman. Following centuries of control by empires, Oman’s monarchical rule was overthrown in January 1964.

The island became a part of Tanzania following an upris-ing that saw several thousand unarmed ethnic Arab and Indian civilians killed and thousands arrested or expelled from the country.

The Peninsula

DOHA: The World Innovation Sum-mit for Education (WISE) took part in the International Economic Forum of the Americas (IEFA) in Montreal, Canada. The three-day gathering brought together 4,000 international leaders under the theme ‘Shaping a New Era of Prosperity’.

More than 200 speakers pre-sented insights on major global economic issues, discussing their social, cultural and political impacts.

In a roundtable discussion on technology and innovation in edu-cation, Stavros N Yiannouka, CEO, WISE, noted the dramatic potential of emerging technologies in extend-ing education access to the most vulnerable and marginalised.

He said technology could reach

its full potential through strong teaching and leaders committed to transforming school systems.

Yiannouka praised economic and leadership opportunities that creative projects and organisations are bringing to women and young people in vulnerable regions and called for a wider recognition of the need for creativity and innovation in education management.

Representatives of two WISE Award winning projects also took part — Cecilia D’Oliveira, Associate Dean, Digital Learning, Massachu-setts Institute of Technology (MIT), who led a team that developed the MIT OpenCourseWare, which shares freely teaching course materials that reach over 150 million peo-ple worldwide; and Mike Feerick, Founder, ALISON courses, provid-ing an online learning platform that enables worldwide users to

gain employability skills. Robert Beauchemin, CEO, KnowledgeOne, which provides training and devel-opment solutions for businesses; and Alan Shepard, President and Vice-Chancellor, Concordia University, Montreal, also took part.

In a separate gathering at IEFA, Yiannouka called for a renewed commitment among global leaders to empowerment through education at all levels. “Education is likely the most effective investment societies can make to tear down the walls of ignorance, fear and demagoguery wherever they may arise,” he said.

WISE is an initiative of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF).

The IEFA event served an oppor-tunity for WISE to bring its global work as an international educa-tion organisation before a wider audience.

Ooredoo launches Direct Carrier Billing with Google

Experts taking part at International Economic Forum of the Americas (IEFA) in Montreal, Canada.

WISE focuses on EdTech and innovation

HMC takes cares of over 1,200 diabetic childrenAbout 17 percent of the Qatari adult population is thought to have the chronic disease and an additional 11 percent is pre-diabetic.

GU-Q team studies Zanzibar’s revolution

GU-Q students with officials during a visit to Zanzibar.

Continued from page 1

The family of the deceased will be informed about the outcome of the investi-gation and the decisions taken.

The Ministry extended its condolence to the family of the deceased, praying to Allah to bless her soul and forgive her and giver her family patience and solace.

Many nationals showed strong sympathy

with the family and urged the authorities con-cerned to investigate the incident and publish the results as quickly as possible. Many called for action to avoid such incidents in future at the HMC.

“We are the richest country, but why we have no empty beds for patients in the hospi-tal, why death occurs during delivery and why people prefer treatment abroad?” asked one of the commentators.

QNA

THE HAGUE: Qatar has reiterated its unlimited support to the convention on the prohibition of chemical weapons (Chemi-cal Weapons Convention), saying that this support emanates from its firm policy aim-ing at the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction and the prohibition of their acquisition. Qatar also highlighted the importance of this Convention and the seri-ous threats posed by such weapons, looking forward to the day when the universality of the Convention is realized.

The State of Qatar also condemned in the strongest terms the use of the chemical weapons by any party under any circum-stances as it is reprehensible and contrary to the rules of international law, pointing to the Security Council resolution No. 2209 of

2015 which stresses that those responsible for any use of chemical weapons must be held accountable and that any future use will lead to measures under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations. This came in a speech delivered by HE Lieutenant Major (Air) Has-san Saleh Hassan Al Nisf, deputy head of the National Committee for the Prohibition of Weapons, on the occasion of the 82nd session of the Executive Council of the Organiza-tion for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague. While stressing on the firm position of the State of Qatar over the years which strongly supports full and complete disarmament of chemical weap-ons, he said that Qatar shares the concern of the international community regarding the continued presence of stockpiles of chemi-cal weapons, and strongly emphasizes that the full destruction of chemical weapons is a main pillar of the Convention.

Qatar supports chemical weapons prohibition

Call to avoid fatalities at HMC in future

Syria & Iraq vital

in anti-terror

fight: Yildirim

ANKARA: Turkey must develop good relations with Syria and Iraq for efforts to fight terrorism to succeed, Prime Min-ister Binali Yildirim said yesterday.

Yildirim said Turkey would “enlarge its circle of friendship as much as possible” in remarks sug-gesting renewed ties in the region to replicate the recent rapprochement with Israel and Russia.

“It is our greatest and irrevocable goal -- devel-oping good relations with Syria and Iraq and all our neighbors that surround the Mediterranean and the Black Sea,” the prime minister said at a meeting in Ankara.

12 dead in

Baghdad bombings BAGHDAD: Three bomb-ings in Iraq’s capital yesterday killed at least 12 people, including a suicide bombing in a mainly Shia neighbourhood that had been attacked the day before, Iraqi officials said.

Six civilians and two policemen were killed when the bomber rammed his explo-sives-laden car into the checkpoint in the al-Rashidiya district, a police officer said. Up to 23 other people were wounded, he added.

On Tuesday, at least 12 people were killed in a suicide car bombing in Al-Rashidiya.

MIDDLE EAST04 THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

AFP

ADEN: After the death of 44 peo-ple in Yemen fighting, the UN’s peace envoy arrived in the capi-tal to meet rebels, yesterday.

The UN’s mediator, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, landed at Sanaa airport yesterday after-noon ahead of meetings with Houthi and Saleh representatives.

The envoy met this week with President Abedrabbo Man-sour Hadi in the Saudi capital to prepare for a resumption of talks between the two sides in Kuwait on Friday. Kuwait City has already hosted more than two months of UN-backed negotiations that have failed to make any real headway.

The talks, aimed at ending a war that the United Nations says has killed more than 6,400 people since March 2015, were suspended at the end of June.

Reuters

PARIS: Iran is assessing whether to apply for associate membership of the ITER multi-national nuclear fusion project, its director said yes-terday, just a year after Tehran struck a deal with six world powers to curb its own atomic programme.

The International Thermonu-clear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, which was launched 10

years ago by Europe, United States, China, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea, aims to build the world’s largest experimental reactor, or tokamak.

It would generate energy through nuclear fusion, rather than the fission process currently used in nuclear power stations around the world.

Fusion could prove cleaner, safer and more efficient. The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi, visited ITER’s

headquarters in southern France this month and Iranian media quoted officials as saying that there was a “general agreement” for coopera-tion on ITER.

But in an interview with Reuters, ITER Director General Bernard Bigot said the purpose of the visit had been just to understand the project.

“After that they told us they had a long-standing interest in fusion and they would like to consider how to join the ITER project, but clearly not as a full member,” he said.

Continued from page 1

The Qatari joined hands with the promoters of the “Visit Britain” campaign in Qatar.

He added: “For the first time, holidaying in the UK has become relatively cheaper than the US. A lot of my friends are opting to go to London instead of other places in Europe. And some are even buying properties in the UK, while others are expecting the pound to fall further if the gov-ernment finally decides to exit the EU.”

Khalifa also said that with the fall of the currency, education in the UK has also become more affordable for Qatari nationals.

“The UK is one of the most preferred destinations of Gulf nationals, including Qataris. They travel to the coun-try every year, and some even visit twice or thrice a year,” said a senior executive of a UAE-based airline, who didn’t want to be named.

He added: “Many people from the GCC have their own houses and apartments in the UK and many, especially those who prefer to stay there for 2-3 months, prefer to negotiate for special tariffs with hotels. We have 10 daily flights from the UAE to the UK (each with a capacity of over 600 passengers) and all of them operate at full capacity during this season.”

With a rising number of tourists visiting the UK, Qatar Airways (QA) recently expanded its services to the UK adding Birmingham as the fourth gateway of the Qatar’s national carrier to the UK (in addition to London, Manches-ter and Edinburgh) taking the total weekly frequencies to the UK to about 74.

According to a senior official of QA, London has been the focal point of its concentrations, and it has been consist-ently increasing frequencies and investing more resources to enhance the services.

It operates over six daily flights to London with state-of-the-art aircraft.

Given the pleasant weather conditions between April and September, it is the peak season to travel to the UK. During this season, the country has a lineup of events, like the London Marathon, Chelsea Flower Show, Royal Ascot, Grand Prix Silverstone, Wimbledon Tennis Championship and London Fashion Week, among others.

AFP

TEHRAN: Iran has summoned the French ambassa-dor and lodged a formal protest over a rally outside Paris held by an exiled opposition group last week-end, a diplomatic source said yesterday.

The National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), which includes the former rebel People’s Mujahe-deen of Iran (MEK), claimed that 100,000 Iranians attended the annual rally at Le Bourget, near Paris.

“The holding of this rally by those whose hands are stained with the blood of the Iranian people... is unacceptable,” said the message handed to French ambassador Francois Senemaud.

Iran yet to decide on N-project: ITER Education in UK becomes

affordable for Qataris

AFP

JUBA: The United Nations warned yesterday of the risk of fresh fighting in South Sudan after days of deadly gun battles that have sent thousands of people fleeing and prompted the urgent evacuation of foreign nation-als. Fears of a humanitarian crisis were growing with aid agencies -- themselves forced to restrict their work because of the security situa-tion -- saying there were shortages of food and water.

Meanwhile, the US President Barack Obama announced the deployment of 47 troops to crisis-ridden South Sudan to protect the US embassy and its staff.

In a letter to Congress released by the White House, Obama also said that 130 more personnel were

prepositioned in Djibouti and ready to deploy if necessary.

A fragile ceasefire nevertheless appeared to be holding in the cap-ital Juba for the second day after a sudden flare-up in fighting last week that threatened to drive the world’s newest country back into all-out civil war.

As the guns remained silent, President Salva Kiir said he was granting an amnesty, with effect from yesterday, to the ex-rebels loyal to longtime rival Riek Machar who battled government troops in Juba over four days. But the situation remains precarious, UN peacekeep-ing chief Herve Ladsous told the Security Council.

Thousands of South Sudanese were clamouring to cross the bor-der into Uganda, while Germany and Italy said they were evacuating their nationals and other foreign-ers, although commercial flights were not expected to resume until Thursday.

Around 200 people, including the hundred or so Germans living in South Sudan, were evacuated to Uganda by the German air force, the foreign ministry in Berlin said.

Residents from Britain, France Australia, the US, Poland and else-where were also on the German flights, as well as three Chinese UN peacekeepers.

The United Nations said around 36,000 people had fled their homes for the perceived safety of UN bases, churches and aid agency com-pounds since the unrest erupted on Friday.

UN warns of new S Sudan fighting Fears of a humanitarian crisis were growing with aid agencies themselves forced to restrict their work because of the security situation, saying there were shortages of food and water.

Smokes billows after a strike by pro-Syrian government forces in Shefounieh, near Douma, a rebel-held town east of the capital Damascus, yesterday. Fierce bombardment of two opposition-held Syrian towns killed at least 31 civilians including children, yesterday.

31 civilians dead in Syria

AFP

WASHINGTON: The United States will welcome 10,000 Syrian refu-gees this fiscal year as promised by President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry announced, yesterday. Washington has been criticised by some activists for moving too slowly to settle those fleeing the conflict, while Obama’s opponents warn their number may include terrorists.

But Kerry said the United States is now on course to admit 10,000 vulnerable refugees, chosen from UN camps and vetted by US security and intelligence agencies.

“It’s also representing six-fold increase over what we did the year

before,” Kerry said, referring to the US fiscal year, which runs from October 1 to September 30.

“I’m proud to say that the United States is by far the largest contrib-utor of emergency aid, but we all recognize that still more needs to be done,” he said. Kerry made the remarks at a dinner in Washington to mark last week’s Muslim hol-iday of Eid al-Fitr, shortly before he was due to set off on a tour of European capitals. This journey was to take him Thursday to Mos-cow, where he is set to meet with President Vladimir Putin and lobby Russia to do more to help end Syria’s five-year-old conflict. Syria is in the grip of what Kerry called the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II, and more than 4.8 million people have fled the country.

US to welcome 10,000

Syria refugees: Kerry

Iran calls French envoy

UN seeks talks with

Yemeni rebels

ASIA / AFRICA 05THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

Mali protesters call for govt resignations

Reuters

BAMAKO: Protesters in Mali’s northern city of Gao yesterday called for the resignation of the region’s governor and the national security minister a day after three people were killed when security forces opened fire on a demonstra-tion there.

The government has promised to open an inquiry into the inci-dent, which saw at least 31 others injured and exposed the fragility of efforts to implement a year-old peace deal and stabilise the West African nation’s troubled north.

The protesters, some of whom

burned tyres and threw stones at police, were angered by the intro-duction of a new interim authorities who are due to take charge of the region tomorrow in line with the terms of the peace agreement.

After initially attempting to disperse the crowd with teargas, security forces shot at the protest-ers, witnesses said.

“We’re calling for the immediate departure of the governor (of Gao), the security minister and the heads of the police, the gendarmes and the army in Gao,” said Amadou Sarr, a leader of a local vigilante group who helped organise the demonstration.

The government in the capital Bamako announced late on Tues-day that it would send a delegation including the ministers of defence, internal security, justice and territo-rial administration to Gao yesterday.

“The government exhorts the population of Gao to remain calm and remember that dialogue and consultation must guide all par-ties,” it said in a statement.

Reuters

JAKARTA: Indonesia plans to execute this year at least two foreign convicts, one from Nigeria and another from Zimbabwe, the attorney general said yesterday.

President Joko Widodo has pledged to increase the number of executions this year and next as part of his crackdown on drugs.

Asked if there were any for-eigners on the list of convicts to be executed, Attorney General H M Prasetyo said: “We have foreigners,

among them from Nigeria and Zimbabwe.”

He did not elaborate on the crimes of which they were convicted.

Prasetyo added that no convicts from the US, Europe or Australia were on the list to be executed this year.

A 59-year-old British women,

Lindsay Sandiford, was sentenced to death after being convicted in 2013 of trying to smuggle cocaine worth $2.5m into the country.

A Philippine maid, Mary Jane Veloso, got a last-minute reprieve last year in response to a request from Manila after an employment

recruiter, whom Veloso had accused of planting drugs in her luggage, gave herself up to police in the Philippines.

Last year Indonesia executed 14 people. Prasetyo previously said at least 16 prisoners would be executed this year and more than double that number next year.

Former Burundi minister shot deadAFP

NAIROBI: Former Burundian gov-ernment minister and spokeswoman Hafsa Mossi was shot dead in the capital Bujumbura yesterday, police said.

“Honourable Mossi assassinated (yesterday) 10.30 in Gihosha”, in the east of Bujumbura by, “two crimi-nals in a vehicle,” police spokesman

Pierre Nkurikiye said on Twitter.Mossi was Burundi’s information

minister and government spokes-woman between 2005-2007, and was, at the time of her death, a mem-ber of the East African Legislative Assembly, a regional parliament.

Mossi, a former journalist in her 50s, was a member of President Pierre Nkurunziza’s ruling CNDD-FDD party.

Nkurunziza’s controversial but

ultimately successful bid for a third term last year triggered a deadly crisis that has killed more than 500 people and driven around 270,000 to leave the country.

Several senior military offic-ers close to the president have been assassinated since the start of the crisis in April 2015, but Mossi, who was not regarded as a party hard-liner, is the first senior politician to be killed.

Indonesia to execute convicts from Nigeria and Zimbabwe

HARARE: Supporters of Zimbabwe protest leader Evan Mawarire rallied outside the court where he was set to appear after being arrested dur-ing a surge of unrest against President Robert Mugabe’s government.

Mawarire, a pastor who has been charged with inciting public vio-lence, was an organiser of a one-day nationwide shutdown last week when offices, shops, schools and some government departments stayed closed.

Zimbabwe pastor

due in court as

strike falters

Fears for two

Bangladesh

hostage survivors

DHAKA: Families and rights groups yester-day expressed fears for two survivors of a deadly siege at a Bangladesh cafe who are missing after being grilled by police over the attack.

Amnesty International has asked the authori-ties to establish “the fate and whereabouts” of Hasnat Karim who sur-vived the attack and has been missing since being taken in for questioning 11 days ago.

Suspected Islamist militants killed 20 diners.

Burundi police officers inspect the vehicle of former minister Hafsa Mossi after she was killed yesterday.

Seoul confirms anti-missile system siteAFP

SEOUL: Seoul said yesterday an advanced US missile defence sys-tem will be deployed in a remote southern county and will have the capacity to protect two thirds of the country against feared attacks from the North.

The plan to deploy the power-ful system, which fires projectiles to smash into enemy missiles, came last week after the United States placed North Korea’s “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong-Un on its sanctions black-list for the first time.

The move prompted objections from Russia and China, who accused Washington of flexing its military muscle in the region.

Tensions have soared since Pyongyang carried out its fourth nuclear test in January, followed by a series of missile launches that ana-lysts say show the North is making

progress toward being able to strike the US mainland.

The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, will be deployed in Seongju county about 200km southeast of Seoul, as agreed by US Secretary of Defence Ash Carter and his South Korean coun-terpart Han Min-Koo, according to the defence ministry in Seoul.

The deployment will be com-pleted by the end of next year and will be able to cover up to two thirds of South Korea from North Korean missiles. It will also protect key industrial facilities, including nuclear power plants and oil depots, the ministry added.

US military bases in the South will also be protected by the missile system, but Seoul and its surround-ing areas will be left out. This could mean the military deploying more US Patriot anti-air and missile defence systems in these areas, Yon-hap news agency reported.

There have been protests about the system’s location, with residents fearing harmful economic and envi-ronmental effects.

“We hope the people and resi-dents in Seongju... render support” for the decision, the ministry said.

But thousands took to the streets Wednesday in Seongju town, carry-ing banners reading “We absolutely oppose THAAD deployment”, Yon-hap news agency reported.

The head of the county Kim Hang-Gon and some 10 others staged a hunger strike, cut their fin-gers and wrote slogans in blood on banners at the yesterday’s rally.

“The THAAD deployment threat-ens the livelihood of the country’s 45,000 residents, 60 percent of whom are engaged in watermelon agriculture”, a group said.

The US and South Korea began talks on deploying the THAAD sys-tem to the Korean peninsula in February.

South Korea’s Seongju County government head Kim Hang-Gon (right) and other protesters write slogans with blood reading “We absolutely oppose THAAD deployment” during a rally against the planned deployment of THAAD, in Seongju town, yesterday.

Demonstrators were angered by the introduction of a new interim authorities.

Mitama festival

PHNOM PENH: A Cam-bodian court yesterday charged a man with murdering a prominent political analyst in a bra-zen daylight shooting in the capital.

Police accuse a 43-year-old man, Oueth Ang, of gunning down pro-democracy cam-paigner Kem Ley at a Phnom Penh cof-fee shop on Sunday morning.

But in a bizarre twist to the case, prosecu-tors say the alleged killer insists he is called Chuob Samlab, an unlikely Khmer name meaning ‘meet to kill’ and is in fact aged 38.

Man charged over

shooting of

Cambodian critic

ASIA / PHILIPPINES06 THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

Anatolia

ZAMBOANGA CITY: The Philip-pines’ one-time largest Muslim rebel group has agreed to coordinate plans with the government to combat the scourge of illegal drugs in areas for-merly under its control.

The agreement -- signed by the government and Moro Islamic Liber-ation Front officials at a hotel in the southern city of Davao on Tuesday

-- strengthens President Rodrigo Duterte’s “hardline policy on drugs”, which has seen over 100 suspects killed in the seven weeks since his election.

Under the deal, all government agencies have been given the pri-mary responsibility to implement anti-illegal drugs programmes in MILF-controlled areas, accord-ing to the Philippine News Agency yesterday.

Last year, the former rebel group,

which is engaged in an ongoing peace process with the govern-ment in southern Mindanao island, launched its own “war on drugs” under which thousands of drug push-ers were identified.

In 2016, however -- expressing alarm over the growing incidence of illegal drugs, yet warmed by the elec-tion of Mindanao resident Duterte and his drug policy -- the MILF cen-tral committee passed a resolution to take immediate action.

According to state media, the agreement provides mechanisms and procedures to be observed by both sides in the conduct of law enforcement operation in the MILF-controlled areas.

“The anti-illegal drug campaign includes conduct of information drive on the ill-effects of illegal drugs in coordination with the barangay [village], municipal, city or provin-cial anti-drug abuse councils,” the report said.

AP

BEIJING: China warned other coun-tries yesterday against threatening its interests in the South China Sea while at the same time extending an olive branch to the new Philippine government, after an international tribunal handed Manila a victory by saying Beijing had no legal basis for its expansive claims there.

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said Beijing could declare an air defence identification zone over the waters if it felt threatened, a move that would sharply escalate tensions.

The Philippines, under a UN treaty governing the seas, sought arbitration from an international

tribunal on several issues related to its long-running territorial disputes with China.

The tribunal in The Hague, Neth-erlands, rejected China’s claims in a landmark ruling that also found the country had aggravated the seeth-ing regional dispute and violated the Philippines’ maritime rights by build-ing up artificial islands that destroyed coral reefs and by disrupting fishing and oil exploration.

While introducing a policy paper in response to the ruling, Liu said the islands in the South China Sea were China’s “inherent territory” and blamed the Philippines for stirring up trouble. “If our security is being threatened, of course we have the right to demarcate a zone. This would depend on our overall assessment,” Liu said in a briefing.

“We hope that other countries will not take this opportunity to threaten China and work with China to protect the peace and stability of the South China Sea, and not let it become the origin of a war.”

In 2013, China set up an air defense identification zone over

disputed islands in the East China Sea, requiring all aircraft entering the area to notify Chinese authori-ties or be subjected to “emergency military measures” if they disobey orders from Beijing. The US and oth-ers refuse to recognise the zone.

While blaming the previous Phil-ippine government for complicating the dispute by seeking arbitration, Liu also sought to strike a concilia-tory note with the Southeast Asian nation’s new leadership.

Liu said China remains com-mitted to negotiations with the Philippines and noting new Phil-ippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s positive remarks on the issue.

“After the storm of this arbitra-tion has passed, and the sky has cleared, we hope this day (of negotia-tions) will come quickly, but whether it can come, we still have to wait,” Liu said, adding that China believed that cooperation would also bring Filipi-nos “tangible benefits.”

He said, however, that China hoped the new government would not use the arbitration results — which China has declared null and

void — as a basis for negotiations. China believes cooperation with other South China Sea neighbours, whether in fishing or in exploiting oil and gas resources in the waters,

could be achieved by negotiations, he added.

Duterte has not directly responded to China’s overtures since the ruling was issued on Tuesday.

China threatens to declare air zone over islands

AFP

YANGON: A firebrand monk slammed Aung San Suu Kyi as a “dictator” yesterday, accusing Myanmar’s civilian-led government of trying to destroy an ultra-nation-alist Buddhist group blamed for a surge in sectarian violence across the country.

The attack came after the body representing Myanmar’s top monks distanced itself from the hardline Ma Ba Tha movement, a blow to its clerical legitimacy.

The Ma Ba Tha is a noisy, monk-led group at the forefront of virulently anti-Muslim protests in Myanmar in the three years since it was founded.

Wirathu, the movement’s most prominent figure, posted his scath-ing remarks on Facebook.

“I have seen that the ruling party and the new civilian government is stepping forward to target me as ‘Enemy Number One’ to destroy the whole Ma Ba Tha group to the end,” he wrote.

He also described the admin-istration as “a woman dictator’s government which is going to put me in prison”.

Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won a landslide vic-tory at last November’s national elections.

Wirathu’s comments came after the Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, which represents the upper echelons of the clergy in the overwhelmingly Buddhist coun-try, issued a statement late Tuesday

saying it had never endorsed Ma Ba Tha.

The ultra-nationalist group recently said it was established under the committee’s rules, a claim refuted by the country’s top monks, putting clear water between the mainstream Buddhist clergy and the hardline group for the first time.

The statement came hours ahead of a two-day gathering of around 50 of Myanmar’s top monks inside a man-made cave on the out-skirts of Yangon at which Ma Ba Tha is expected to be discussed.

In his Facebook post Wirathu suggested the Sangha was being controlled by the government because it was “part of the state’s religious ministry” and “has to carry out the will of the government.”

The Ma Ba Tha emerged as a potent political force under the former military-backed govern-ment, successfully lobbying for a series of laws that rights groups say discriminate against women and religious minorities.

Scores of people have been killed in sectarian riots that have billowed out in step with their protests.

But the organisation lost out in the November elections that saw their allies in the ruling party trounced by Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD).

It has since been trying to claw back ground, in recent weeks reviv-ing its vitriolic rhetoric that portrays Islam as a threat to Buddhism.

Last month two mosques were destroyed by Buddhist mobs in the centre and north of the country.

Philippine rebels join Duterte’s war on drugs Hardline Myanmar monk

blasts ‘dictator’ Suu Kyi

Japan emperor intends to

abdicate ‘in a few years’Reuters

TOKYO: Japanese Emperor Aki-hito, who has spent much of his time on the throne trying to heal the wounds of World War Two, intends to abdicate in a few years, public broadcaster NHK said yesterday, a step that would be unprecedented in modern Japan.

The 82-year-old monarch, who has had heart surgery and been treated for prostate cancer in recent years, expressed his inten-tion to the Imperial Household Agency, NHK said. It did not cite a reason and officials at the agency could not immediately be reached for comment.

Born in 1933, Akihito was heir to Emperor Hirohito, in whose name Japan fought World War Two.

The soft-spoken Akihito marked the 70th anniversary of World War Two’s end last year with an expres-sion of “deep remorse”, a departure from his previous remarks seen by

some as an effort to cement a leg-acy of pacifism under threat from conservative Japanese nationalists.

“Looking back at the past, together with deep remorse over the war, I pray that this tragedy of war will not be repeated and together with the people express my deep condolences for those who fell in battle and in the ravages of war,” he said.

Indonesian child

murderer escapes

jail in veil

JAKARTA: An Indone-sian child murderer has escaped from jail by putting on a woman’s Muslim veil, make-up and sunglasses and walking out past unsuspecting guards, an official said.

Anwar bin Kim An, who raped and murdered a schoolgirl, made the bold breakout from a Jakarta prison by quietly changing into a woman’s outfit alleg-edly smuggled in by his wife when she visited dur-ing the Muslim Eid holiday.

“The wife gave him the woman’s cloth-ing and he just changed his clothes in the meet-ing room where all the inmates meet with their families,” Jakarta police spokesman said.

Philippine national flag flutters on a part of a fishing boat with anti-China protest signs, as demonstrators march towards the Chinese Consulate, over the South China Sea disputes, in Makati City, Philippines.

Taiwan sends warship to S China SeaAFP

TAIPEI: A Taiwanese warship set sail for the South China Sea yesterday “to defend Tai-wan’s maritime territory”, a day after an international tribunal ruled China has no historic rights in the water-way and undermined Taipei’s claims to islands there.

President Tsai Ing-wen rallied troops on the deck of the frigate, saying Taiwanese were determined to “defend their country’s rights”, before the warship headed for Tai-wan-controlled Taiping island in the Spratly island chain from the southern city of Kaohsiung.

Wellington tightens ‘trust laws’AFP

WELLINGTON: New Zealand announced it was tightening rules surrounding foreign trusts yester-day after numerous documents in the Panama Papers leak referenced the South Pacific nation.

Officials in Wellington said the changes would improve the dis-closure and registration of foreign trusts, as well as strengthening anti-money laundering rules.

“The changes to the foreign trust rules are a matter that the govern-ment intends to move quickly on,” Finance Minister Bill English said.

Prime Minister John Key initially dismissed any concerns, saying the Organisation for Economic Co-oper-ation and Development (OECD) gave New Zealand’s tax laws “a clean bill of health” in 2013.

However, he ordered a review a few days later after coming under increasing pressure.

The review, released last month, found it was “reasonable to conclude that illicit funds are being hidden inNew Zealand foreign trusts”.

It said that while it was inaccu-rate to describe New Zealand as a tax haven, tightening the rules would help maintain the country’s reputa-tion for probity.

Under the changes, a database will be set up allowing police and tax officials to search for details of for-eign trusts and their beneficiaries.

The opposition Labour Party wel-comed what it termed a U-turn on disclosure by Key but said the data-base should also be open to the public and New Zealand’s tax partners.

“This does nothing to assist for-eign tax authorities uncover fraud or tax evasion from the global mega-rich using New Zealand foreign trust structures,” Labour finance spokes-man Grant Robertson said.

New Zealand is part of a 36-nation taskforce set up to share intelligence on combating tax avoidance.

The taskforce met over the weekend in Paris and said in a statement it had made “excellent progress” in identifying taxpay-ers and their advisers for further investigation.

The Panama Papers are 11.5

million leaked documents that detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities.

The leaked documents were cre-ated by Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider Mos-sack Fonseca; some date back to the 1970s.

The leaked documents illustrate how wealthy individuals and public officials are able to keep personal financial information private.

While offshore business enti-ties are often not illegal, reporters found that some of the Mossack Fon-seca shell corporations were used for illegal purposes, including fraud, kleptocracy, tax evasion, and evad-ing international sanctions.

New Zealand was referenced more than 60,000 times in the doc-uments, according to local media given access to the material before it was made public.

“John Doe”, the whistleblower who leaked the documents to Ger-man newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, remains anonymous, even to the journalists on the investigation.

A family wearing a traditional Nebuta dance costume looks at thousands of paper lanterns, which were displayed and lit up the precincts of the shrine where more than 2.4 million war-dead are enshrined, during the Mitama Festival at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, Japan, yesterday.

Beijing blames Philippines for stirring up trouble.

Japanese Emperor Akihito

PAKISTAN 07THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

Pakistani rebels accuse New Delhi of ‘genocide’

AFP

MUZAFFARABAD: Militants in Paki-stan-administered Kashmir accused New Delhi of “genocide” yesterday, after days of clashes left 32 people dead and hundreds wounded on the Indian side of the heavily-militarised frontier.

Up to 3,000 people gathered at a rally in the Pakistani Kashmir capital Muzaffarabad, where militant leaders vowed to launch a civil disobedience

campaign on the Indian side of the contested territory.

Violence broke out there Fri-day after a Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) commander named Burhan Wani -- a 22-year-old poster boy for the region’s biggest rebel group -- was killed in a gun battle with govern-ment forces.

HM chief Sayed Salahuddin con-demned the clashes, which are the worst in Kashmir since 2010.

If India’s “occupation” troops continue “with the genocide of Kash-miris then along with armed struggle we will also start a civil disobedience movement in occupied Kashmir,” Salahuddin said, amid calls for jihad.

“People on both sides will have to march and trample that bloody line that divides them,” he said refer-ring to the de facto Kashmir border between India and Pakistan, known as the Line of Control.

Salahuddin, who also heads the umbrella group the United Jihad

Council, which is widely believed to have close links to the Pakistani military, called on Islamabad to raise the issue with the international community.

Islamabad summoned New Del-hi’s envoy on Monday and conveyed Pakistan’s “serious concern” over the recent killings in the disputed Hima-layan state.

Police said most of those who died were protesters killed by gun-shot wounds as Indian government troops fired live ammunition and tear gas to try to enforce a curfew imposed across the Kashmir Valley.

Those at the rally offered funeral prayers for Wani, while around 150 HM fighters donned commando-style uniforms with headbands inscribed with the words “Freedom of Martyrdom”.

HM is one of several homegrown militant groups that have for decades been fighting around half a million Indian troops deployed in the region,

calling for independence or a merger with Pakistan.

Kashmir has been divided between the two nations since their

independence from Britain in 1947, but both claim the territory in its entirety.

Hizbul Mujahideen is designated

a terrorist organisation by India,the European Union and the US, active in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir since 1989.

Internews

ISLAMABAD: The slain Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden considered Pakistan an enemy and made every effort to harm the country and its people, says Pakistani Ambassador Jalil Abbas Jilani.

In a letter to a Republican congressman, Ted Poe, Jilani informed the lawmaker that his country was “a victim” and not the perpetrator of terrorism, as Poe claimed.

Poe, who is known in Washington for his strong anti-Pakistan views, is holding a provocative hearing “Pakistan: Friend or foe” on Capitol Hill, which seeks to highlight the country’s alleged support for terrorist groups.

In his letter to Poe, the Paki-stani envoy in Washington, however, focused on a recent article the congressman wrote in The US News regarding Paki-stan’s role in the fight against terrorism.

Jilani wrote that the views expressed in the article were based on incorrect informa-tion and speculative media

reports that have been consist-ently proven false over a period of time.

He pointed out that since the killing of Osama bin Laden five years ago, “it has been estab-lished beyond doubt” that he was hiding in Pakistan with-out information or any help by the state.

“No evidence to the con-trary has ever surfaced and the

US leadership involved in the specific operation at that time has clearly rejected any insin-uation of Pakistan’s complicity.”

He also mentioned a state-ment by Admiral William McRaven, who supervised the US operation to kill Osama bin Laden, and later said that there was no evidence that Pakistani government knew about Osa-ma’s whereabouts.

He noted that last year, the White House once again debunked media accusa-tions that sought to implicate Pakistan.

“Documents collected from the Osama bin Laden’s compound tell another story.

A brochure ‘Jihad in Pakistan’ reportedly written by bin Laden and released by office of US Director National Intelligence in March this year lists the reasons why bin Laden considered Paki-stan as an enemy and outlines Al Qaeda’s elaborate strategy to destroy Pakistan,” the ambassa-dor wrote.

Jilani said that Congressman Poe’s another claim that Paki-stan poisoned a CIA station chief in Islamabad was also based on unsubstantiated and sensational media reporting.

“This claim is as fictional as it is ridiculous,” said Jilani, add-ing that Pakistan had raised this matter with the US government as well.

The ambassador reminded Poe that Pakistan had helped the United States capture key operatives involved in the tragic 9/11 episode. These included the mastermind of 9/11, Muhammad Khalid Sheikh, and alleged 9/11 organiser, Ramzi Binalshibh.

During the last two years, Pakistan has also cleared a vast swath of a territory that was previously used by many mil-itant networks, including the Haqqani network, Jilani wrote.

Internews

KARACHI: Philanthropist Abdul Sat-tar Edhi’s son, Faisal, fears that the Edhi Foundation may see a decline in dona-tions because some people have been maligning his late father and spreading rumours about him.

“There is a risk of lack of donations for the organisation because an active cam-paign is run against the Edhi Foundation every year,” said Faisal Edhi in an inter-view with BBC Urdu on Monday.

“Many people contribute to the foun-dation because of Edhi’s personality and his work,” he said, adding that there were many rumours in Ramazan that he had already passed away.

This, he explained, led certain ele-ments to spread negative propaganda and rumours in order to keep people from donating to the foundation.

According to Edhi’s eldest son, the rumours were spread by “people who are backward, reactionary and hold extremist views”. He said that maulvis and capital-ists had always detested his father.

“In their Friday sermons, many mul-lahs called him Ahmadi, sometimes a kaafir, or an Ismaili and urged people not to donate or give charity to the foun-dation,” he said, adding that he failed to understand what the motivation behind this propaganda was as the organisation always had less in donations as compared to mosques and seminaries.

Now, Faisal said, the only thing he could do was pray and request others to forgive him and let his father be. “He is dead now,” he said, adding that there was no point in issuing fatwas against him.

Edhi passed away at the age of 88 in Karachi last week. A state funeral was held for the philanthropist at the National Stadium Karachi amid tight security.

Edhi Foundation fears drop in

donations due to campaignSlain Al Qaeda leader sought

to destroy Pakistan: Envoy

Reuters

PESHAWAR: The alleged master-mind of the 2014 attack on a school in Pakistan in which more than 150 people died, most of them children, has been killed in an American drone

strike in Afghanistan, the Pakistan military and sources in the Pakistani Taliban said.

General Asim Bajwa, director general of the Pakistani army’s media division, reported the death of Umar Narai, also known as Khalifa Umar Mansoor or Khalid

Khurasani, in a message on Twitter.In Kabul, the US military

confirmed it had conducted a coun-terterrorism strike in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar on Sunday but gave no details.

The Pakistani Taliban made no official comment. One senior

member of the group said the move-ment had decided not to comment on the death until a successor had been chosen.

”It’s a huge loss to the small but most effective Taliban faction of Kha-lifa Umar Mansoor,” the commander said.

“There is no such promi-nent figure of his status to run his organisation.”

The strike was the second in the space of two months against a senior insurgent leader close to the fron-tier between the Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Top militant dead in US drone strike in Afghanistan

KARACHI: With a fresh warning about a new weather system entering the province, the gov-ernment of Pakistan’s southern Sindh prov-ince has alerted all the relevant ministries from relief to local government departments to be ready to implement the con-tingency plans they had prepared in advance for the monsoon season, offi-cials said.

The ministries, local government and relief departments have been put on alert.

Sindh province on

alert to face new

spell of rains

No doctor in 284

basic health units

in Punjab

ISLAMABAD: Despite slight improvement in health facilities, at least 284 Basic Health Units (BHU) are operating with-out doctors in only 13 districts of Pakistan’s largely populated prov-ince of Punjab, official figures revealed.

Around 72% BHUs in neighbouring district of Nankana Sahib are work-ing without doctors. The district with 1.5 mil-lion people has 48 BHUs but only 13 have doctors available.

Pakistani Ambassador Jalil Abbas Jilani

Pakistan observes huge drop

in terror incidents in 2016

Internews

PESHAWAR: As many as 99 terror incidents were reported in the first half of the current year, recording a considerable decrease compared to the last four years.

Briefing Inspector General of Police (IGP) Nasir Khan Durrani at the Central Police Office, Additional IGP Counter-Terrorism Department Salahuddin Khan said that 65%t decrease had been reported in ter-rorist attacks in 2016 compared to 2013. He said the ratio of decease in terror incidents was 26 per cent compared to 2015.

As per the statistics, 99 incidents of terrorism were reported in the first half of 2016 compared to 281 incidents in same period in 2013, 292 in 2014 and 134 in 2015. The modus operandi wise break-up of the terror incidents revealed that the terrorists and miscreants had adopted various methods to carry out acts of subversion.

Militant leaders vow to launch a civil disobedience campaign on the Indian side of contested territory.

Head of the militant group of Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), Sayed Salahuddin (centre), arrives at a protest rally against the killings in India-administered Kashmir, in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, yesterday.

VIEWS08 THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

Theresa May is taking over as British Prime Minister when the country is going through one of its worst crises. And there are two ways how she will go down in history – as a prime minister who successfully steered her country through the disruptive Brexit

process, by uniting the nation and regaining the glory it has lost, or as a prime minister who bungled at the most crucial time, a victim of the forces she had no control of.

May, 59, assumed office after an audience with Queen Elizabeth and drove straight to her new office of 10 Downing Street, vacated hours earlier by David Cameron. It was an unexpected and uncomplicated rise to the top for May, who was left as the only contender standing after withdrawal from the race by Andrea Leadsom, who faced criticism for suggesting she was more qualified to be prime minister because she had children.

Cameron chose to quit after Britons rejected his pleas and voted to leave the EU in the referendum last month. And he has

an advice to his successor. “My advice to my successor, who is a brilliant negotiator, is that we should try to be as close to the European Union as we can be for the benefits of trade, cooperation and of security,”

he told parliament in his last appearance before resigning. May herself had wanted Britain to remain in the UK, but has promised to work vigorously for an exit and make Brexit a success. Brexit means Brexit, she said.

May now has the extremely onerous task of negotiating Britain’s exit from the EU, every step of which will be dissected and scrutinized by the media and the people. She will have to limit the damage to British trade and investments as she unties

the relationship with the EU and renegotiates the relations with the bloc’s 27 partners. Secondly, she will have to unite a nation that remains deeply divided, the most important of which will be keeping Scotland in the union and reassure Europeans and others living in the UK that they are as welcome as before. It’s a tough road ahead filled with gaping holes, and she will require all the skills she has mastered and much more.

May is now being called the Angela Merkel of Britain. She also has the unique honour of being Britain’s second female prime minister after Margaret Thatcher, and that too after a long gap of 27 years.

At the same time, expectations must be realistic about what the new prime minister can do.

PM Theresa May

Birtain’s new Prime Minister has the onerous task of negotiating Britain’s exit from the EU with least damage.

Quote of the day

As we leave the EU we will forge a bold new positive role for ourselves in the world, and we will make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us.

Theresa May British Prime Minister

E S TA B L I S H E D I N 1996

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Even as it launches waves of terrorist attacks around the globe, the Islamic State is quietly prepar-

ing its followers for the eventual collapse of the caliphate it pro-claimed with great fanfare two years ago.

In public messages and in recent actions in Syria, the group’s leaders are acknowledg-ing the terrorist organisation’s declining fortunes on the bat-tlefield while bracing for the possibility that its remaining strongholds could fall.

At the same time, the group is vowing to press on with its recent campaign of violence, even if the terrorists themselves are driven underground. US coun-terterrorism experts believe the masscasualty attacks in Istanbul and Baghdad in the past month were largely a response to mil-itary reversals in Iraq and Syria.

Such terrorist acts are likely to continue and even intensify, at least initially, analysts say, as the group evolves from a quasi-state with territorial holdings to a shadowy and diffuse network with branches and cells on at least three continents.

Indeed, while the loss of a physical sanctuary would con-stitute a major blow to the Islamic State — severely lim-iting, for example, its ability to

raise money, train recruits or plan complex terrorist operations - the group’s highly decentralized nature ensures that it will remain dangerous for some time to come, according to current and former US officials and terrorism experts.

“Where Al-Qaeda was hierar-chical and somewhat controlled, these guys are not. They have all the energy and unpredictabil-ity of a populist movement,” said Michael Hayden, the retired Air Force general who headed the CIA from 2006 to 2009.

Islamic State officials, in pub-lic statements and in interviews, insist that the group’s “caliphate” project remains viable while also acknowledging that military set-backs have forced a change in strategy.

“While we see our core struc-ture in Iraq and Syria under attack, we have been able to expand and have shifted some of our command, media and wealth structure to different countries,” a longtime Islamic State operative, speaking through an Internet-based audio service, said in an interview.

“We do have, every day, people reaching out and tell-ing us they want to come to the caliphate,” said the operative, who agreed to speak to a West-ern journalist on the condition that his name and physical loca-tion not be revealed.

“But we tell them to stay in their countries and rather wait to do something there.” But signs of desperation are mount-ing weekly inside the caliphate, which shrank by another 12 per-cent in the first six months of 2016, according to according to a report last week by IHS Inc., an analysis and consulting firm.

A series of communiques issued in the Islamic State’s Syr-ian enclave last month closed down Internet cafes in one prov-ince and ordered the destruction of TVs and satellite dishes in another. The orders, billed as an effort to eliminate a tool for “disseminating infidel beliefs,” effectively cut off access to news from the outside world.

More signals of a coming downfall are contained in state-ments issued by Islamic State officials over the past six weeks,

a period that saw the group’s fighters retreating across multi-ple fronts, from Fallujah in central Iraq to the Syrian-Turkish border.

A remarkable editorial last month in al-Naba, the Islamic State’s weekly Arabic newslet-ter, offered a gloomy assessment of the caliphate’s prospects, acknowledging the possibility that all its territorial holdings could ultimately be lost.

Just two years ago, jihadist leaders heralded the start of a glorious new epoch in the world’s history with the establishment of their Islamic “caliphate,” which at the time encompassed most of eastern Syria and a vast swath of northern and western Iraq, a combined territory roughly the size of Great Britain.

The editorial, titled, “The Crusaders’ Illusions in the Age of the Caliphate,” sought to rally the group’s followers by insist-ing that the Islamic State would continue to survive, even if all its cities fell to the advancing “cru-saders” — the separate Western — and Russian-backed forces arrayed against them.

“The crusaders and their apostate clients are under the illusion that . . . they will be able to eliminate all of the Islamic State’s provinces at once, such that it will be completely wiped out and no trace of it will be left,” the arti-cle states. In reality, the group’s foes “will not be able to eliminate it by destroying one of its cities or besieging another of them, or by killing a soldier, an emir or an imam,” it says.

The editorial asserts that the “whole world . . . has changed” with the creation of a theocratic enclave that has “shown all of mankind what the true Islamic state is like.” “If they want to achieve true victory — they will not, God willing — they will have to wait a long time: until an entire generation of Muslims that was witness to the establishment of the Islamic State and the return of the caliphate . . . is wiped out.”

The same themes were repeated in an otherwise upbeat sermon by the Islamic State’s offi-cial spokesman, Abu Muhammad Al-Adnani, marking the start of Ramadan observances. Adnani’s missive attracted international attention because of its call for a global terrorism campaign during the Muslim holy month. But Adnani also appeared to be preparing his followers for heavy losses.

At one point he evoked one of the darkest chapters in the Islamic State’s history, when the group — then known as the Islamic State of Iraq — was all but destroyed in 2008 by a

combination of forces, including the US troop surge and the “Anbar Awakening,” a revolt against the Islamists by Sunni Arab tribes.

“Were we defeated when we lost the cities in Iraq and were in the desert without any city or land? And would we be defeated and you be victorious if you were to take Mosul, Sirte or Raqqa, or even take all the cities?” asked Adnani, referring to the Islamic State’s primary strongholds in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

“Certainly not!” The group’s near-defeat in 2008 also has been cited multiple times in recent weeks in social-media accounts, suggesting to some analysts that its leaders are trying to limit the inevitable damage to the Islamic State’s reputation among jihadists as an unstoppable military and moral force.

“They don’t want to lose territory,” said Cole Bunzel, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University’s Near Eastern stud-ies department who provided a translation and commentary on the Al-Naba editorial in the blog Jihadica. “But they’re trying to remind people that the group has a long history and they’re going to persist, just as they did in ear-lier times.”

The deadly attacks against Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport and Baghdad’s Karrada shopping district — both relatively easy targets for terrorists concerned only with massive numbers of civilian casualties — were prob-ably also part of the same effort to reassure followers of the Islamic State’s vitality, said Will McCants, a Brookings Institution researcher and author of the 2015 book “ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strat-egy and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State.”

“The successful attacks abroad are an indication of deep worry at home,” McCants said. After years of boasting of the group’s invincibility, leaders such as Adnani are beginning to acknowledge battlefield losses while attempting to depict them in the most positive light, he said.

Absent from the group’s state-ments is any acknowledgment of strategic and tactical errors that contributed to the Islamic State’s current predicament, fighting alone against a broad array of forces that includes the major Western powers, Sunni and Shi-ite Muslims, Russians and Kurds, McCants said.

“They’re not trying to be clever about it,” he said, “but they’re really trying to prepare their followers to cope with a ‘caliphate’ that is no longer a caliphate.”

Islamic State readies for fall of ‘caliphate’

By Joby Warrick and Souad Mekhennet The Washington Post

The group’s leaders are acknowledging the terrorist organisation’s declining fortunes on the battlefield while bracing for the possibility that its remaining strongholds could fall.

OPINION 09 THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

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.

Law can’t solve the South China Sea conflict

By Paul GewirtzThe Washington Post

The authoritative voice of law has now spoken clearly and decisively on a South China Sea churning dangerously with military maneuvers and

heated rhetoric. But law’s effects on the conflict are highly uncertain.

On Tuesday, a tribunal at the Perma-nent Court of Arbitration in The Hague announced a sweeping victory for the Philippines that found unlawful a broad range of Chinese claims and actions regarding the sea.

The tribunal’s words vindicate the Obama administration’s admirable search for law- and rules-based answers to foreign policy disputes. Regarding the South China Sea, President Obama has emphasised our commitment to resolv-ing the dangerous conflicts “peacefully, through legal means, such as the upcom-ing arbitration ruling under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.”

While this ruling offers a significant positive contribution, law cannot solve all the conflicts in the South China Sea. Tuesday’s decision underscores the limits of law in resolving these disputes in prac-tice, as well as the urgent need to move ahead with negotiations, supported by prudent power politics.

The tribunal’s headline conclusion limits the legal scope of China’s notori-ous “nine-dash line.” At most, the tribunal said, this line can be a claim to sover-eignty over the islands inside the line and maritime rights deriving from those land features as provided under the Law of the

Sea Convention. Any pretense that the sea is a Chinese lake has been rejected, though sovereignty issues remain unre-solved. Justas significant, and potentially creating more immediate tensions, are the tribunal’s decisions that certain Chinese land reclamations unlawfully infringe on the Philippines’ rights and the Law of the SeaConvention’s environmen-tal rules.

These are major legal conclusions, but they will produce no immediate resolution to the conflict. Despite being a signatory to the convention, China refused to participate in the arbitration and has denounced the decision as “null and void.” China is clearly wrong. But its sweeping rejection reveals the practical limits of law in this context because the tribunal has no enforcement powers - no police force, no sanctions system, no ability to levy fines.

Another fundamental limit is that the tribunal lacks legal power to resolve underlying and potentially explosive con-flicts regarding sovereignty over land features, such as the dangerously con-tested Scarborough Shoal, and disputes over maritime boundaries. And of course no court’s decision can fully address the core geopolitical issues at stake: China’s

enormous new capacities, widespread uncertainty about China’s regional inten-tions, and whether China and the United States can find terms of coexistence in the Asia-Pacific.

So what is the path forward? The United States and other countries should strongly support the tribunal’s judgment as a binding decision in words and deeds. The United States should criticise China’s statements that it will not comply with the tribunal’s conclusions. And it should continue regular freedom-of- navigation operations, taking advantage of any addi-tional navigation rights produced by the tribunal’s decision.

But the Obama administration also must guard against escalation and reach out to other countries for quiet diplomatic discussions of our options. We cannot yet predict China’s range of responses to the tribunal.

The possibility exists that a rebuked China will launch new provocations, leading to a crisis that serves no one’s interests — and the United States and its allies must be ready if China seeks to use force to get its way.

Additionally, a legally empowered Philippines might ask the United States to use its military to enforce what the

tribunal cannot enforce, which would itself create major risks.

Instead, the United States should encourage our Filipino allies — with their legal victory in hand — to pursue direct negotiations with China as the best next step in looking for real-world, peace-ful solutions. China has long demanded negotiations, so this is the testing hour for China’s good faith.

Neither country should insist on pre-conditions to such talks. China should not insist that the Philippines renounce the arbitration award, and the Philippines should not insist that China accept the legal rights awarded by the tribunal. Such demands would doom negotiations before they started.

The path of negotiations will be uncertain and difficult. But the Phil-ippines’ position will be significantly strengthened by the tribunal’s award. Negotiations should begin with a focus on lowering tensions, looking for trade-offs and pursuing common development projects, even if ultimate questions of sovereignty are temporarily set aside.

The tribunal ruling will also be wind in the sails of other claimants in the South China Sea. Over time, China might con-ceivably accept terms similar to those it

now denounces if they are the product of negotiations rather than a third-party tribunal. These are all potential contri-butions of legal rules even when legal judgments are not formally enforceable. Negotiating an enforceable, rules-based code of conduct among the ASEAN nations and China should also be a top priority.

Since the United States has not rati-fied the Law of the Sea Convention, it is in an awkward position in demanding Chi-nese compliance. The US Senate should advance ratification as an urgent national security priority. For now, we should try to speak and act jointly with countries that have ratified the convention.

But we have our own national inter-ests and alliances at stake in the South China Sea, and we need to exercise our power and demonstrate our resolve in advancing those.

On these fronts, as on others, law will have a role to play, albeit a limited one. Diplomacy backed by power and law is still our best means of helping to shape the future of the Asia-Pacific.

Gewirtz is a professor of constitutional law and the director of the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School.

The tribunal’s words vindicate the Obama administration’s admirable search for law- and rules-based answers to foreign policy disputes. Regarding the South China Sea, President Obama has emphasised our commitment to resolving the dangerous conflicts “peacefully, through legal means.

The Japanese Coast Guard ship PLH02 Tsugaru (background) is seen with a Philippine Coast Guard boat (centre) during their annual joint anti-piracy exercise in the waters off Manila Bay yesterday, a day after a UN-backed tribunal declared China has no “historic rights” in the South China Sea.

Focus on police shootings misses larger story

By Leonid BershidskyBloomberg

A new study shows that blacks and Hispanics in the US are more than twice as likely as

whites to “experience some form of force in interactions with police,” but no more likely to experience the most “extreme use of force — officer-involved shootings.” That finding can be important to de-escalating the kind of violence that culminated with the tragedy in Dallas last week.

Roland G Fryer, a Harvard econo-mist, says his anger about the killings of blacks by police drove him to look into the data. The resulting paper, unsurprisingly, showed that blacks and Hispanics have more vio-lent interactions with police: being grabbed, pushed into a wall or onto the ground, having a gun pointed at

them. The study looked at more than 1,000 shootings in 10 major police departments, and found that even after correcting for various circum-stances of the encounters — such as the crime rate in the areas where they occurred — the race effect remains. And non-whites are likely to be subjected to force even when they are compliant with police requests.

Fryer, however, was surprised to discover that lethal force is more infrequently applied to blacks and Hispanics than to whites. Using a data set from Houston, he calcu-lated that blacks were 23.8 percent less likely to be fired upon by police than whites. “Partitioning the data in myriad ways, we find no evidence of racial discrimination in officer-involved shootings,” he wrote.

The study has some qualifications — it’s geographically limited, and the police departments themselves pro-vided the data, so it’s possible that in other cities, where police may be more racially biased, the results wouldn’t hold up. In addition, Fryer said the results came out differently when he explored the data on police violence from the point of view of civilians.

But taking the analysis at face value, Fryer suggested an explana-tion: Police face far higher costs for the lethal use of force than for exces-sive non-lethal violence. There’s a

chance of being fired or even con-victed for killing a suspect, and there’s potential for public outrage and riots. Just pushing someone to the ground or hitting them with a baton is not even likely to come to light.

Many black Americans, includ-ing Fryer himself, have had tense run-ins with police. It’s easy to assume that violence is applied to blacks more frequently at every level, and every death confirms that gut feeling — even if it is not borne out statistically.

The lack of reliable data won’t do much to change the perception among black Americans that inter-actions with police are fraught with danger. It’s that feeling that needs to be addressed.

Fryer is not a criminologist, but he is echoing an idea that Tom Tyler of Yale University has been writing about for years. He found that the key element that ensures the legitimacy of law enforcement and makes peo-ple willing to cooperate with police is something called “procedural justice.”

That includes the “quality of deci-sion-making” — such as when the police let a suspect have his say with-out interruption — and the “quality of treatment,” or the respect for a per-son’s dignity.

People don’t generally cooper-ate with the police out of a fear of

retribution, according to Tyler, but rather because their sense of “pro-cedural justice” is satisfied.

Based on that concept, it’s easy to explain why Russia, where people perceive the police to be unfair and feel little obligation to obey officers, has a much higher crime rate than Denmark, where people report the strongest obligation to obey the police among European countries.

Fryer’s recommendation is an economist’s take on Tyler’s idea: “Increase the expected price of excessive force on lower level uses of force.” The Harvard professor wrote:

“The appealing feature of this type of policy experiment is that it does not require officers to change their behavior in extremely high-stakes environments.

Many arguments about police reform fall victim to the “my life ver-sus theirs, us versus them” mantra. Holding officers accountable for the misuse of hands or pushing individ-uals to the ground is not likely a life or death situation and, as such, may be more amenable to policy change.”

It’s much easier, however, to raise the price of using a gun — movements such as “Black Lives Matters” do so by increasing pres-sure on police departments — than to fix the problem of lower-level vio-lence. It’s a matter of cop skills as much as motivation. Karl Klockars

of the University of Delaware wrote: “Force certainly need not result in serious physical or mental injury to be deemed excessive. Moreover, it need not (and usually will not) be the product of malicious or sadis-tic behaviour.

It can spring from good inten-tions as well as bad, mistakes and misperceptions, lack of experience, overconfidence, momentary inat-tention, physical and mental fatigue, experimentation, inadequate or improper training, prejudice, passion, an urge to do justice or demonstrate bravery, misplaced trust, boredom, illness, a specific incompetence, or a hundred other factors that might influence an officer to behave in a particular situation in a less than expert way.

Excessive force should be defined as the use of more force than a highly skilled police officer would find necessary to use in that particular situation.”

Increasing the cost of non-lethal force is not likely to fix the problem, because the “hundreds of factors” won’t disappear overnight. Achiev-ing lower levels of violence means changing how cops are trained, and perhaps the entire philosophy of how police officers obtain compliance.

The writer is a Bloomberg View contributor, is a Berlin-based writer.

The resulting paper, unsurprisingly, showed that blacks and Hispanics have more violent interactions with police: being grabbed, pushed into a wall or onto the ground, having a gun pointed at them.

INDIA10 THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

IANS

NEW DELHI: In a major setback to the Centre, the Supreme Court yesterday restored ousted Con-gress Chief Minister Nabam Tuki in Arunachal Pradesh, elating the opposition, which hailed the ver-dict as a victory for democracy.

In an unanimous verdict, a Constitution bench of Justices J.S. Khehar, Dipak Misra, Madan B. Lokur, Pinaki Chandra Ghosh and N.V. Ramana directed the restoration of the status quo ante as it existed on December 15, 2015, effectively bring-ing Tuki back as Chief Minister.

The court quashed President’s Rule imposed in the state and all the decisions taken by Governor J.P. Rajkhowa leading to its imposition.

On December 16, the Nabam Tuki government was dismissed in an Assembly session called by the Gov-ernor. The bench called the actions of Governor Rajkhowa as “illegal” and violative of the Constitutional

provisions. In Guwahati, Chief Min-ister Kalikho Pul maintained that there was “no threat” to his gov-ernment and he will file a review petition in the Supreme Court.

He said a floor test would prove the numbers backing his gov-ernment. “The government runs only with numbers. There is no threat to our government. That will be decided on the floor of the Assembly.”

A visibly pleased Tuki described the Supreme Court judgment as a “historic verdict” and said the rul-ing would help protect “healthy democracy” in the country. “This is a historic and remarkable judgment.”

“According to the judgment, our government has been restored,” Tuki said. “I’ll go to the state and talk to all the 47 Congress MLAs. We will call a meeting.” It is the second such ruling by the Supreme Court since May when it similarly restored the ousted government of Chief Minister and Congress leader Harish Rawat .

SC restores Congress rule in ArunachalThe court quashed President’s Rule imposed in the state and all the decisions taken by Governor J P Rajkhowa leading to its imposition.

Coal firm violates rights: AmnestyAFP

NEW DELHI: India’s state-control-led coal firm routinely violates the rights of local communities in the rush to open new mines to meet the country’s growing demand for power, Amnesty International said yesterday.

A report from the human rights group said Coal India, the world’s largest coal producer, had failed to consult the indigenous communi-ties living near mines in central and eastern India on acquiring the land, or the environmental impact.

In some cases, it found, local communities did not even know that their land was being acquired for mining purposes until it happened.

“Both the company and central and state governments don’t seem to care to speak or listen to vulnerable Adivasi (indigenous) communities whose lands are acquired and for-ests destroyed for coal mining,” said Aakar Patel, head of Amnesty Inter-national India.

India’s indigenous communities form more than eight percent of the country’s 1.2 billion people, accord-ing to the latest census of 2011.

Many are illiterate and live in extreme poverty, relying on the land for food.

The report said the central government had acquired land in all three Coal India mines its investigators examined, without directly informing affected fami-lies, or consulting them about their resettlement.

One interviewee said he only discovered the land was being acquired after the deal was signed.

A Coal India official dismissed the findings of the report, saying it was “next to impossible” to blatantly

flout rules and regulations in place for such communities that are often protected by various agencies, including state governments.

“CIL (Coal India Limited) can-not forcibly evict people for projects. There are too many laws, rules, stat-utory stipulations in place to check such violations,” the official told AFP on the condition of anonymity.

“In fact, we compare with the best rehabilitation and resettlement policies in the country, and in many cases, we are better. It is only when these communities’ aspirations are understood and consent is taken that we can acquire their land. Other-wise, it just can’t be done,” he added.

Amnesty, however, says Coal India followed rules superficially only to show on paper and failed to genuinely enforce them on the ground, citing cases of authorities spending barely minutes to explain impacts of mining or government

panels hardly raising the communi-ties’ concerns at approval meetings.

“Authorities and compa-nies appear to have seen public hearings more as a bureaucratic hurdle to overcome than a genuine opportunity to hear and address community concerns,” said Aruna Chandrasekhar, a senior researcher at Amnesty International India.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing government is seeking to double coal production by 2020 to one billion tonnes annually to meet the needs of its burgeoning economy.

Modi, who stormed to power in 2014, wants to fulfil an election promise to end crippling black-outs and bring power to more than 300 million Indians living without electricity.

India sits on the world’s fifth largest coal reserves and already relies on coal for 60 percent of its power.

Miners haul baskets full of coal as they load a truck at a roadside coal depot near Rymbai village in the northeastern state of Meghalaya.

Schoolchildren travel to school on a packed auto-rickshaw in Ahmedabad, yesterday.

Back to school

IANS

NEW DELHI: Two IAF C-17 Globe-masters will take off for Juba in South Sudan today to evacuate around 500 Indian nationals from the violence-hit African nation, the MEA said, yesterday.

Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh is to lead the evacu-ation. “Two C-17s proceeding to Juba

tomorrow with @Gen_VKSingh lead-ing evacuation from South Sudan,” Ministry of External Affairs spokes-person Vikas Swarup tweeted.

Embassies and aid organisa-tions in South Sudan are moving to evacuate staff from the capital, Juba, amid a tenuous ceasefire declared on Monday night after days of fight-ing between forces loyal to longtime rivals Vice President Riek Machar and President Salva Kiir.

South Sudan’s government has said at least 272 have been killed, including 33 civilians, in five days of fighting that has raised fears of a return to civil war.

The Indian embassy in Juba in a statement said the flight is expected to reach Juba at 11 am local time and Indian nationals with valid travel documents will be allowed to board.

The flight will be only up to New Delhi, the statement said.

IANS

SRINAGAR: The restive Kashmir Valley, battling the deadliest spell of violence in years, appeared calm but tense yesterday amid sporadic inci-dents of stone-pelting clashes even as large areas continued to be under strict curfew for the fifth day.

Two more persons wounded in street fighting in the past four days died here early yesterday, taking the death toll to 36 in the violence

triggered by the death of a top mili-tant on July 8.

Life remained paralysed almost across the valley due to the restric-tion and separatist called shutdown. South Kashmir - the worst hit in the latest bout of unrest - was virtually cut off from the rest of the state amid snapped private cellphone services and strict prohibitory orders.

However, the state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) cellphone network was functional.

The Jammu-Srinagar highway, the only all-weather motorable link

to the valley that passes through south Kashmir, was blocked due to continuous curfew. Private traffic to and from Srinagar on the highway is allowed only at night, officials said.

In Srinagar, roads were deserted while shops and other businesses, banks and private offices were closed. There was a thin presence of employees in the government secretariat. People in the old city complained of hardships as supplies of essentials had begun to dry up in the five days of curfew.

Yesterday, a police spokesman

said here, passed off peacefully amid fears that separatist leaders may stoke trouble.

They had called for a protest march to observe “MartyrsÂ’ Day” in remembrance of Kashmiris killed in police firing on protesters against the Dogra rule on July 13, 1931.

Top separatists Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Syed Ali Shah Geelani, in house detention for five days, defied the restrictions and tried to walk towards the martyrsÂ’ grave-yard in curfew-bound old Srinagar. Police detained them briefly.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minis-ter Mehbooba Mufti, however, visited the graveyard under a heavy secu-rity cover with her senior cabinet colleagues.

She paid tributes to the 1931 mar-tyrs and made a fresh appeal for calm in the valley where at least 35 civil-ians and a policeman have been killed in clashes between security forces and protesters since the killing of the militant commander, Burhan Wani. More than 1,500 people have been injured.

“I appeal to everybody to restore

calm and peace so that further loss of lives is avoided,” the Chief Minis-ter said.

Mehbooba Mufti said “the loss of precious lives” in firing by security forces was “regretted but nothing can bring them back.

“While I am deeply grieved, my grief cannot match that of the fami-lies who have lost their near and dear ones,” she said. Her Peoples Demo-cratic Party has its political base in the worst-hit south Kashmir.

The region has witnessed 33 of the 36 deaths.

IANS

SHILLONG: Ministers, policy mak-ers, experts, academics and senior officials from India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Bhutan and Nepal will meet in the Meghalaya capital tomorrow for the first river festi-val, called NADI 2016, that aims to foster connectivity, culture, tourism, trade links and sharing of environ-mental issues.

The Asian Confluence, a local think tank, in association with the Meghalaya government and Kolk-ata-based Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies (MAKAI) is organising the two-day event on July 15-16.

“The focus of NADI 2016 is to celebrate the spirit of common-ality between the resource-rich northeast India and its neighbours through the rivers of the region,” said Sabyasachi Dutta, director of the Asian Confluence.

He said: “The rivers of the region had for long been the treas-ured highways of culture and unison among the people and the fragile ecology they sustain.

“The extended aim is to explore the possibilities of enhancing cul-tural conviviality and amplifying the creative use of riverine connec-tivity by catalysing environment friendly trade and tourism between

northeast India and her immediate neighbours.”

The Asian Confluence has been promoting an open space for cul-tural and intellectual exchanges towards creating a better under-standing of the northeastern region in the larger context of India as an emerging power in East-Asian geopolitics.

Datta said NADI 2016 aims to offer participants a great net-working platform with access to intellectual as well as entertain-ment events.

“Being a first of its kind, spe-cial focus would be on the shared borders with immediate neighbour Bangladesh,” he added.

Besides policy dialogue and stakeholder meetings, other highlights of the meet include, exhi-bitions, cultural programs, crafts bazaar, live exhibition of yarns and dyes and rare performing arts of the border areas.

Railway Minister Suresh Pra-bhu, Bangladesh Minister of Tourism and Civil Aviation Rashed Khan Menon, Bangladesh Min-ister of State for Foreign Affairs Shahriar Alam, Meghalaya Chief Minister Mukul Sangma, his Mizo-ram counterpart Lal Thanhawla, representatives and experts from Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, and parliamentarians from across the northeastern region would take part in the event.

IANS

PATNA: Ruby Rai, an accused in Bihar toppers’ scam, was denied bail by a juvenile court here yes-terday, a government lawyer said.

Ruby had pleaded that she should be granted bail as she is a minor.

Last week, she was shifted from Beur jail to a remand home after the court accepted Ruby’s age on the basis of her matricu-lation certificate stating her date of birth as November 15, 1998.

Ruby had topped the class 12 examination conducted by the Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB), in humanities stream.

She got into trouble after after a sting by a news channel showed her giving ludicrous answers to basic questions related to her subjects.

Class 12 science stream top-per Saurabh Shreshtha was also caught giving wrong answers to basic science questions on camera.

The sting suggested that the toppers might have used cheating and fraud to achieve the top ranks.

Both Ruby and Saurabh belonged to V.R. College in Vaishali district.

The Special Investigation Team (SIT) of Bihar Police then lodged an FIR against Ruby, Sau-rabh and two other toppers.

Kashmir still tense as two more die; toll at 36

Sonia welcomes

ruling NEW DELHI: Sonia Gandhi (pictured) yesterday hoped the ruling would deter the central govern-ment from further misusing its power.

“The verdict will deter the Union government from any further misuse of power. Those who had trampled upon constitutional propri-ety and democratic norms have been defeated,” she said. “We will continue our fight to strengthen democ-racy and safeguard the federal structure of our country.”

Move to evacuate Indians from S Sudan

Rubi Rai denied

bail in Bihar

toppers’ scam

River fest to boost

link with neighbours

SC verdict no setback for us: BJP

NEW DELHI: The BJP said yesterday said that the Supreme Court verdict restoring the Congress government in Arunachal Pradesh was not a setback to it.

“This is not a setback for the BJP. The crisis (in Arunachal) was due to the internal differences within the Congress in the state,” Bharatiya Janata Party leader Srikant Sharma said.

“A group within the Congress fell out with the party leader-ship. The BJP has nothing to do with (what happened).

“It clearly shows that there is a leadership crisis in the Con-gress. It will be wrong to hold the BJP responsible for the crisis in Arunachal Pradesh,” he added.

The Hermione boat, a replica of the French frigate that transported General La Fayette to America in 1780 to rally US rebels battling for independence, arrived at the port of Brest, western France, yesterday, on the first day of the Brest 2016 Maritime feast.

For Maritime feast

EUROPE 11THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

CAREER GRAPH OFDAVID CAMERON AND THERESA MAY

AFP

LONDON: Theresa May took over as Britain’s new prime minister yesterday, promising a “bold, new, positive role” for the country less than three weeks after its seismic vote to leave the EU.

May, the former interior minister who succeeds David Cameron after seeing off several rivals for leader of the Conservative Party, becomes Britain’s second female leader after Margaret Thatcher.

After formally being invited to form a government in a meeting with Queen Elizabeth II at Buck-ingham Palace, May arrived at her new Downing Street residence with a promise to lead a government that would tackle “burning injustice”.

“Following the referendum we

face a time of great national change. And I know because we’re Great Brit-ain that we will rise to the challenge,” she told reporters, flanked by her husband, Philip.

“As we leave the European Union we will forge a bold new positive role for ourselves in the world.

“And we will make Britain a country that works not for a privi-leged few but for everyone of us.”

As Scotland mulls moves that could eventually see it break away, following the referendum in which most Scots voted to stay in the EU but England and Wales voted to leave, May said keeping the “precious” king-dom together was a priority.

EU leaders are pressing for a swift divorce following the vote to leave the bloc on June 23. European Commis-sion president Jean-Claude Juncker was among the first to congratulate May, and said he hoped they would meet “in the near future”.

“The outcome of the United King-dom’s referendum has created a new situation which the United Kingdom and the European Union will have to address soon,” he said.

May campaigned for Britain to remain in the EU but has stressed she will honour the popular vote, saying repeatedly that “Brexit means Brexit”.

However, she has refused to be rushed on the timetable.

Earlier, Cameron made his final statement in Downing Street flanked by his wife Samantha and three children, where he wished Britain “continued success”.

“It’s not been an easy journey and, of course, we’ve not got every decision right but I do believe today our country is much stronger,” the 49-year-old said. He later made the short drive to the palace, where the queen accepted his resignation after six years in office.

In his final question and answer session in the House of Commons yesterday, Cameron echoed a line he had once used to taunt former Labour premier Tony Blair. “As I once said, I was the future, once,” he said.

He urged his successor, “a bril-liant negotiator”, to “try to be as close to the European Union as we can be, for the benefits of trade, of co-oper-ation and of security”.

May campaigned for the leader-ship as a safe pair of hands, who has spent six years as home secretary, one of the toughest jobs in British politics.

The daughter of a Church of Eng-land pastor, she is cricket fan with a sober demeanour who lists her hob-bies as cooking and walking.

She has been MP for Maiden-head, the well-to-do commuter town west of London, since 1997

and was previously chairman of the Conservative party.

May is something of an unknown quantity internationally, but Euro-pean Council president Donald Tusk said he looked forward to a “fruitful working relationship” with her.

Her continental peers have said they expect her to move quickly to implement the referendum result.

Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Francois Hollande and Italy’s Matteo Renzi announced yesterday that they will hold a

summit in August on the matter.Women are expected to secure

several top jobs in May’s cabinet, including current Energy Minister Amber Rudd and international devel-opment minister Justine Greening, sources said.

AP

BRUSSELS: Nato and Rus-sia remain at loggerheads over Ukraine but will consider a pro-posal to reduce the risk of an accidental military confrontation in Baltic airspace, Nato’s chief said yesterday.

Alliance Secretary-Gen-eral Jens Stoltenberg (pictured) briefed reporters following a meeting of the Nato -Russia Council at Nato headquarters in Brussels. Stoltenberg said Nato ambassadors briefed Rus-sian counterparts on decisions made at Nato’s July 8-9 summit in Warsaw.

On Ukraine, “there was not a meeting of the minds today,” Stoltenberg said.

However, he said the Russians made suggestions on risk reduc-tion moves in Baltic airspace involving the use of warplanes’ transponders. He said “allies will study this proposal carefully,” but want more details.

The meeting at Nato’s Brussels headquarters followed last week’s gathering of alliance heads of state and government in Warsaw. Among other things, US President Barack Obama and the other Nato leaders ordered reinforcements for allies closest to Russia with four new multinational battalions for Poland and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

The initial reaction from Mos-cow has been negative. But both sides welcomed a Finnish idea on turn on warplanes’ transponders to reduce chances of an incident between Nato and Russian war-planes in the Baltic Sea region. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also embraced the Finnish proposal.

Dutch Nato Ambassador Marjanne de Kwaasteniet said yesterday’s session of the Nato -Russia Council, the first since April, was meant to “keep dia-logue with Russia open, despite differences.”

In a joint declaration, Obama and the other leaders in Warsaw sternly accused Russia of “desta-bilising actions and politics,” including the 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and what they called provocative activi-ties near Nato borders, including repeated violations of Nato coun-tries’ airspace.

Moscow has accused Nato of beefing up its forces near Russia and vowed to do what’s needed to defend its territory and inter-ests. On Sunday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused Nato of engaging in the “demonisation” of Russia.

Nato’s supreme commander, US Army General Curtis M Scaparrotti, told reporters in Warsaw he’d like to speak reg-ularly with Russian generals to defuse tensions, but hasn’t been able to establish contact since he assumed his command in May.

“We’ve said we’re transpar-ent and we’re willing to talk, but we’ve not had that reach-out from them yet,” Scaparrotti said.

Foreign ministers from Nato’s 28 member countries wanted a meeting of the Nato -Russia Council before the July 8-9 sum-mit in Warsaw, but the alliance wasn’t able to reach consensus with the Russians on the agenda and timing. The council was founded as a forum for consul-tation and cooperation in 2002 when relations between Moscow and the West were much warmer, but didn’t convene for nearly two years following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

The council’s April 20 meet-ing, the first since the Crimean crisis, failed to bridge Nato’s “profound and persistent disa-greements” with the Kremlin, Stoltenberg said.

AFP

BERLIN: Germany yesterday pledged to assume a greater role in global security, pointing to the stra-tegic threat posed by Russia and other looming dangers.

In its first big-picture defence paper in a decade, Europe’s top econ-omy said it would work with EU and Nato allies to tackle cross-border challenges from Islamist terrorism to climate change and migrant flows.

“Germany is a globally highly connected country—due to its eco-nomic, political and military weight, but also in view of its own vulnera-bility—has a responsibility to actively help shape the world order,” says the so-called White Paper.

Germany is ready to “help meet current and future security and humanitarian challenges,” said the roadmap approved by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet and to be presented later by Defence Minis-ter Ursula von der Leyen.

The strategic outlook is seen as a milestone for a country, burdened by guilt about Nazi terror and the Hol-ocaust, for decades stepped softly on the world stage and only joined peacekeeping missions in the 1990s in the Balkans.

More recently, Germany has deployed troops to Afghanistan, Mali and elsewhere, and backed multi-national alliance against the IS by arming Kurdish fighters in Iraq and flying surveillance missions over Syria.

Merkel has taken a key role in seeking to defuse the West’s conflict

with Russia over Ukraine crisis, but last week also pledged troops to bol-ster Nato in eastern Europe from next year. The paper points out “Russia is turning away from a close partner-ship with the West and emphasising strategic rivalry” and unless it changes course, it “will for the foreseeable future represent a challenge to secu-rity on our continent”.

It also lists dynamic and inter-connected challenges in a world where emerging powers in Asia and South America are assuming a greater role and an “arch of insta-bility” stretches through much of northern Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

The “most immediate threat” for Germany is that of a major terrorist attack of the kind from which it has been spared so far, the paper said.

Hungary faces

workforce shortage

AFP

BUDAPEST: A population slump in Hungary is presenting Prime Minis-ter Viktor Orban’s anti-immigration government with a headache: how to plug labour supply shortages with-out turning to foreigners.

Hungary, an EU member since 2004, has seen 400,000 people leave the country since 2008, and 850,000 over the past 35 years.

In addition, since the 1980s, the country has had one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, bringing the overall population below 10-million mark. As a result, at least a quarter of Hungarian firms are experiencing problems find-ing workers, said the Confederation of Hungarian Employers and Indus-trialists (MGYOSZ) in a recent study.

“The Hungarian economic train can’t get out of the station because there are no wheels,” said the report.

Call centre employee Mark Stern and his teacher wife Rita, about to move to Ireland with their toddler Marci, are among the latest to join the exodus.

“We have friends in Ireland, we speak English and there are lots of opportunities for people there who want to work,” Rita, said.

Orban has attempted to redress the situation with a raft of measures aimed at getting Hungarians to have more babies or return from abroad.

Since June 2015, Hungarians returning have been able to bene-fit from a welcome-back present of €3,000 euros ($3,330) as well as help finding work and accommodation. Only 105 people have taken up the offer, however.

Theresa May takes over as Britain’s new PM

Staff applaud as new British Prime Minister Theresa May and her husband Philip John walk into 10 Downing Street in London, yesterday.

May, the former interior minister, becomes Britain’s second female Prime Minister after Margaret Thatcher.

Nato and Russia remain at loggerheads over Ukraine

Germany pledges for greater global security role

A tiger laps up a block of ice holding lumps of meat at the Bioparco, a zoo in Rome, to cool off in the searing heat, yesterday.

Cooling off

A wildfire broke out near Hotel Aldiana in the seaside resort of Alcaidesa, near Sotogrande, province of Cadiz Spain. About 420 guests staying at the hotel, mostly German and British, were forced to take shelter at a nearby sports complex.

Fire forces evacuation in Spain

EUROPE12 THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

The changes will create a genuine common asylum procedure, said EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos.

Reuters

BRUSSELS: The European Com-mission proposed more unified EU asylum rules yesterday, to stop people waiting for refugee status moving around the bloc and dis-rupting its passport-free zone.

In an unprecedented wave of migration last year, 1.3 million people reached the EU and most ignored legal restrictions, trekking from Mediterranean coast to apply for asylum in Germany, prompting some EU countries to suspend the

Schengen system that allows free passage between most EU states.

“The changes will create a gen-uine common asylum procedure,” said EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos. “At the same time, we set clear obligations and duties for asylum seekers to prevent secondary movements and abuse of procedures.”

The proposal would standardise refugee reception facilities across the bloc and unify level of state sup-port they can get, setting common rules on residence permits, travel papers, access to jobs, schools, social welfare and healthcare.

It would grant prospective ref-ugees swifter rights to work but also put more obligations on them, meaning if they do not cooperate with the authorities or head to an EU state, their asylum application could be jeopardised.

The five-year waiting period after which refugees are eligible for long-term residence would be restarted if they move from their designated country, the Commis-sion said.

The plan, which will now be reviewed by national governments and the European Parliament,

comes after the Commission pro-posed in May a system for distributing asylum seekers around the bloc, an idea that angered eastern EU states which refuse to take in refugees.

Only 3,056 people have so far been relocated under the scheme that was meant for 160,000 people, the Com-mission said. Hungary and Slovakia have challenged the quotas for receiv-ing asylum-seekers in the courts.

Asked whether Brussels would punish countries, that also include Poland and the Czech Republic, for

not complying with the relocation quotas, Avramopoulos said: “Were not here to punish, we are here to per-suade. But if this persuasion doesn’t succeed, then yes, we’re thinking of doing that. But we’re not there yet.”

Last year’s record arrivals trig-gered bitter political disputes in the EU, where the wealthier states that ended up hosting most of the people accused the newer members in the east of showing no solidarity.

A deal with Turkey in March has cut the arrivals to Greece to a trickle. .

The Commission wants to draw up lists of “safe countries” outside the bloc, which would help EU states return people, after Athens’ refusal to recognise Turkey as such a place hindered deportations from the Greek islands back to Turkey.

To discourage chaotic flows by facilitating legal migration, the Commission also proposed an EU-wide system for resettlement directly from refugee camps. It said Brussels would pay €10,000 for each person EU states bring in.

Paramedics escort refugees after being rescued at the port of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, Greece, yesterday.

Hungary flayed

for ‘cruel’

treatment to

migrants

AFP

BUDAPEST: Human Rights Watch accused Hungary yesterday of “cruel and violent treatment” of migrants, accusing police and soldiers of beating up people before forcibly expelling them back into Serbia.

“Migrants at Hungary’s border are forced back to Serbia, in some cases with cruel and violent treat-ment, without consideration of their claims for protection,” the rights group said on its website.

The new report by New York-based non-governmental organisation included testimony from interviews it made in April and May with 12 migrants who said they were bru-tally beaten and abused by officials and then pushed back to Serbia.

“I haven’t even seen such beating in the movies,” said one man cited in the report. “They deliberately gave us bad injuries”. Hungary is “breaking all the rules” and “dismissing claims” by asylum seekers crossing Serbia, said Lydia Gall, a HRW researcher.

“People who cross into Hungary without permission have been beaten and forced back across the border,” she said. Around 400,000 migrants and refugees passed through Hun-gary in 2015 before the government sealed off its southern borders with razor wire and fences in the autumn.

France shuts

missions in

Turkey until

further noticeAFP

ANKARA, TURKEY: France yesterday said it had closed its embassy in the Turkish capi-tal Ankara and its consulate in Istanbul until further notice for security reasons, after cancelling events to mark the July 14 Bastille Day holiday.

“The Embassy of France in Ankara, as well as the Consulate General in Istanbul will be closed from July 13, 1pm (1000 GMT), until further notice,” the embassy said in a statement after scrapping the July 14 receptions at the mis-sions on security grounds.

It did not give any further details on how the closure would be implemented.

France’s consulate in Istanbul, its embassy in Ankara and its mis-sion in the Aegean city of Izmir were all to have held celebrations marking the July 14 Bastille Day.

French consul to Istanbul Muriel Domenach wrote on Twitter the events in all three cities had been cancelled “for security reasons” and France was in touch with the Turkish authorities.

Earlier, the Istanbul consu-late had sent an email message to French citizens in Turkey saying there had been “concurring infor-mation of a serious threat against the organisation of the July 14 cel-ebrations in Turkey”.

It said the decision had been taken in coordination with the Turkish authorities.

Turkey is on a high security alert following the June 28 attack on Istanbul’s main airport which was blamed on Islamic State (IS) jihadists and killed 47 people.

Thirty-seven suspects have been placed under arrest over suspicion of involvement in the attacks. Of these, 15 are Turks and 22 foreigners, according to offi-cial media.

Authorities have said a number of citizens of ex-Soviet republics are among the suspects, raising concerns over the threat to Turkey from Islamist militancy in the Central Asia and the Northern Caucasus.

But of seven suspects arrested earlier this week, three are Alge-rian, two Tunisian and two Egyptian, the state-run Anadolu Agency said.

Reuters

MADRID: Spanish Socialist leader reaffirmed yesterday his party’s intention to vote against a gov-ernment led by the conservative People’s Party (PP), potentially extending a seven-month political deadlock.

The PP won the most votes in a June 26 election, the second in six months, but fell short of a major-ity, leaving acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy with the task of con-vincing other parties to join it or at least abstain from blocking it in forming a government.

“We will vote against (Mari-ano) Rajoy as a prime ministerial candidate,” Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez said after a nearly hour-and-a-half meeting with the acting prime minister.

Sanchez also ruled out a “grand coalition” of the left and right, as has happened in some other Euro-pean countries such as Germany, though he added he would do any-thing to avoid forcing Spain into a third election.

Sanchez’s party has repeatedly said it would vote against a repeat of the PP government, although many analysts believe it could change its mind to avoid sending Spaniards back to the polls for a third time after two inconclusive elections.

Spanish liberal party Ciu-dadanos had earlier raised

pressure on the Socialists after saying it would abstain in a con-fidence vote for a conservative government. Ciudadanos placed fourth in the June election.

The PP gained only 137 seats in the 350-strong assembly, failing to break a stalemate that has ham-strung Spanish politics since the first election in December, which produced a similarly inconclusive result.

“We have to find some way of unblocking this situation and we think a technical abstention is bet-ter than ... having a third election,” Ciudadanos leader Albert Rivera, whose party won 32 seats, told reporters.

“I hope other parties can do what we have done today.”

If only Ciudadanos abstained, Rajoy would still have to win the support of 23 lawmakers from other parties to secure a parliamentary majority.

If the Socialists, who came sec-ond in the election, also abstained, the PP would be in a position to form a government.

It is not clear when a first par-liamentary investiture vote could take place. Rajoy reiterated yes-terday that he was aiming to organise it by the end of July or beginning of August to try and form a government.

If he were to lose the vote, a two-month deadline would be trig-gered to form a government or call a third election.

AFP

ANDRIA, ITALY: Relatives of victims of one of Italy’s worst rail accidents gathered yesterday to identify their dead, as rescuers searched for miss-ing bodies from the wreckage of a head-on collision. The authorities confirmed death toll to 25 from the earlier 22.

As the country grieved, investi-gators were trying to establish the cause of high-speed crash between two busy passenger trains in the Puglia region of southern Italy.

Shell-shocked families at the Policlinico hospital morgue in Bari were being called in turns to search among the coffins for their loved ones after Tuesday’s tragedy.

The civil protection agency said 25 bodies had been recovered, two people were missing and 50 people had been injured.

Red Cross workers asked for details to help identify the most badly mutilated bodies, from tattoos to scars and clothing colour.

One girl was reportedly identi-fied by her engagement ring.

“We can’t rule out finding other people in the wreck. It’s slow work,” said Luca Cari, spokesman for the firefighter department, as

emergency services used a crane and diggers to clear crumpled carriages from the track near the town of Andria. Sniffer dogs were being used to search through the wreckage.

Officials said they had recov-ered the black box from one of the trains which investigators hope will throw light on the collision, which happened on a stretch of single track in open countryside, slinging some carriages into bordering olive groves.

One of the drivers was con-firmed dead, with rescue workers recovering a hand and a leg from the mangled mess of his cabin.

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi visited the site late Tuesday, say-ing it was “a time to cry, be close to the families, show humanity in our pain,” and vowing to “throw light on what happened and who is responsible”.

Investigators said at least one of the trains had been travelling very fast, and it was possible the collision was caused by human error.

One of the four-carriage trains was supposed to have waited at a station to let the other train through, before heading down the track between the towns of Corato and Andria. The go-ahead to proceed is given by the station managers by telephone.

According to La Stampa, the line

dates to 1965. It said a call for tenders to modernise the security system and lay a second track had been scheduled to open later this month.

About 55 percent of the rail net-work in Italy is single track. A pot of €150m allocated by the Euro-pean Regional Development Fund in the 2007-2013 budget to add sec-ond tracks went largely unused, the newspaper said.

Only five of the victims had identity documents on their per-son, the rest presumably in wallets or bags sent flying across carriages on impact, making it more difficult for authorities to name the dead.

University students, farm work-ers and office employees were on the trains, as well as grandparents and children. The bodies of a mother and child were pulled from the wreck-age, while a trapped six-year old boy was found alive, next to his dead grandmother.

The trains were operated by private railway company Ferro-tramviaria—just one of the 30 or so private companies which run on small lines criss-crossing Italy in areas not covered by national oper-ator Trenitalia.

Ferrotramviaria said it was not possible to say how many people had been on board, as many passengers had season tickets.

EU proposesnew asylum rules for refugees

Spain’s Socialists say ‘no’ to conservative govt

Mourners identify dead in Italy train crash as toll rises to 25

Colombian truck drivers clash with riot police on the Tunja-Diutama road, Boyaca Department, Colombia. The violence grew as part of a strike of truckers in Colombia, which began more than one month ago leaving several wounded, including a governor, as well as complaints about the death of a protester.

Violent protest

AMERICAS 13THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

Six of the eight stolen firearms have been recovered, authorities said.

AP

BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA: Calling it a “substantial, credible threat” to police, authorities in Louisiana have arrested three suspects accused of stealing at least eight handguns in an alleged plot to harm police officers in the Baton Rouge area.

The arrests in Louisiana’s capital city come amid heightened tensions following the deadly police shoot-ings of black men in Baton Rouge and Minnesota and the killings of five police officers in Dallas last week.

Authorities discovered the alleged plot while responding to a weekend burglary at a pawn shop, Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie said at a news conference Tuesday.

The chief said the first suspect arrested told police that “the reason

the burglary was being done was to harm police officers.” He said the suspect didn’t give any details about when or where a possible plot would be carried out.

State Police Colonel Mike Edmon-son called it a “substantial credible threat” to police.

All of the suspects are from Baton Rouge and all are black. They face charges including burglary, simple burglary, and theft of a fire-arm; they have not been arrested on any charges related to plotting to

kill police, the police said.Six of the eight stolen firearms

have been recovered and two are still at large, authorities said.

“We have been questioned repeatedly over the last several days about our show of force and why we have the tactics that we have. Well, this is the reason, because we had credible threats against the lives of law enforcement in this city,” Dabadie said.

In a statement, police said sur-veillance video showed the suspects using a ladder to climb the roof of the building to get in early. Eight hand-guns and one airsoft BB gun were missing from the store.

Authorities said they arrested one suspect — Antonio Thomas, 17 — at the scene with a handgun and a BB gun. Another suspect, Malik Bridge-water, 20, was apprehended and a third suspect — a 13-year-old boy

— was apprehended on a street. They called on a fourth suspect to turn himself in. Another man was arrested for allegedly purchasing two of the stolen guns, but he hasn’t been linked to the alleged plot, a police spokes-man said.

It wasn’t immediately known if those arrested had attorneys.

In the first few days after 37-year-old Alton Sterling was shot and killed after being pinned down by two white police officers in Baton Rouge, police took a reserved approach to enforcement, keeping a low profile as hundreds gathered outside the con-venience store where Sterling died.

But tensions escalated during weekend protests that moved away from the store and into other parts of the city, marked by a show of force by law enforcement that included police wielding batons, carrying long guns and wearing shields. Over

a three-day period, police arrested about 200 protesters and came under criticism for the tactics used to deal with the demonstrations.

Earlier, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards defended the police response. He said the riot gear and weaponry were appropriate.

“We’ve had a police officer with teeth knocked out of his face because of a rock. If you don’t have on riot gear, you have no defense against that sort of thing,” the Democratic governor said.

“In light of what happened in Dallas, understanding that just one gunman can change the situation entirely, how do you in good con-science put police officers on the street without the ability to defend themselves?” he added.

Protests have spread around the country as people expressed outrage over the recent death in Baton Rouge

and of a second black man, Phi-lando Castile, at the hands of police in Minnesota last week. The Justice Department has opened a federal civil rights investigation into Ster-ling’s shooting. Community leaders in Baton Rouge have sought to defuse the tension.

State Representative Ted James, a black lawyer who grew up near where Sterling was shot, and Cleve Dunn Junior, a prominent black busi-nessman, met with local Republican leaders at a public luncheon to dis-cuss the shooting. The two also have showed up at protests, urging calm.

“I truly believe that we can have parallel conversations about respect for police officers, making sure that they’re safe, but also have a parallel conversation about the things that are happening with African-Amer-ican males across the country,” James said.

AFP

DALLAS: Funerals were held yesterday for two of the five offic-ers killed in last week’s sniper shooting in Dallas, one day after President Barack Obama addressed a public memorial serv-ice honoring the slain police.

Onlookers paused to pay their respects to Lorne Ahrens of the Dal-las Police Department and Brent Thompson, an officer with Dal-las Area Rapid Transit, as public funeral processions snaked along area roads.

A mass was held for a third officer, Michael Smith, whose funeral is planned for today.

The men were among five offic-ers shot to death last week during an ambush by a black gunman who said he was acting in revenge for recent shootings of black Ameri-cans by white police officers.

During the funeral service at the cavernous Prestonwood Bap-tist Church in Plano, Texas, fellow

officer Debbie Taylor described Ahrens, 48, as a “gentle giant” who “strived to be the best, most knowl-edgeable officer.”

Police comprised most of the audience at the suburban Dallas church, which seats 7,000.

Eddie Coffey, who studied at the police academy at the same time as Ahrens, recalled his tattooed friend’s love of heavy-metal music.

At a concurrent service attended by about 3,000 people at the Pot-ter’s House Church in Dallas, slain officer Brent Thompson, 43, was remembered as a “family man” and practical joker.

Police believe Thompson died trying to save Ahrens during the shootout. “I would have done any-thing in my power to have been there with Brent in those final moments, even if the outcome would have been the same,” fellow officer Joseph Kyser said.

Funeral services have not yet been held for two other slain offic-ers, Patricio Zamarippa, 32, to be buried on Saturday, and Michael Krol, for whom services are still pending.

Reuters

NEW YORK: For the first time, a fed-eral judge has suppressed evidence obtained without a warrant by US law enforcement using a stingray, a surveillance device that can trick suspects’ cell phones into revealing their locations.

US District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan ruled that defendant Raymond Lambis’ rights were vio-lated when the US Drug Enforcement Administration used such a device without a warrant to find his Wash-ington Heights apartment.

The DEA had used a stingray to identify Lambis’ apartment as the most likely location of a cell phone identified during a drug-trafficking probe. Pauley said doing so consti-tuted an unreasonable search.

“Absent a search warrant, the

government may not turn a citizen’s cell phone into a tracking device,” Pauley wrote. The ruling marked the first time a federal judge had suppressed evidence obtained using a stingray, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which like other privacy advocacy groups has criticized law enforcement’s use of such devices.

“This opinion strongly reinforces the strength of our constitutional privacy rights in the digital age,” ACLU attorney Nathan Freed Wessler said in a statement.

It was unclear whether pros-ecutors would seek to appeal. A spokeswoman for Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara, whose office was prosecuting the case, declined to comment.

Stingrays, also known as “cell site simulators,” mimic cell phone towers in order to force cell phones in the area to transmit “pings” back to the devices, enabling law

enforcement to track a suspect’s phone and pinpoint its location.

Critics of the technology call it invasive and say it has been regu-larly used in secret to catch suspect in violation of their rights under the US Constitution.

The ACLU has counted 66 agen-cies in 24 states and the District of Columbia that own stingrays but said that figure underrepresents the actual number of devices in use given what it called secrecy sur-rounding their purchases.

A Maryland appeals court in March became what the ACLU said was the first state appellate court to order evidence obtained using a stingray suppressed. Pauley’s deci-sion was the first at the federal level.

The US Justice Department in September changed its internal poli-cies and required government agents to obtain a warrant before using a cell site simulator.

US Capitol briefly

locked down

AP

WASHINGTON: The US Capi-tol and its office buildings were briefly locked down on Tuesday, the second time in a week amid nervousness over recent shootings.

The lockdown was lifted after District of Columbia police stopped a car about two blocks from the Capitol and made two arrests, police said.

District police spokesman Dus-tin Sternbeck said officers were alerted to a man with a gun near Fort McNair in Washington, about a mile and a half south of the Cap-itol. Officers then stopped a car at the intersection of 1st and D streets, which is two blocks from the Capitol and outside the Labour Depart-ment, Sternbeck said.

Police recovered a gun from the car and arrested two people, Sternbeck said.

AFP

MEXICO CITY: Ten inmates escaped in Mexico’s Caribbean beach resort of Cancun by jumping the prison wall, in the latest jailbreak to hit the country’s scandal-plagued penitentiary system.

The inmates beat a guard and jumped the wall, the Quintana Roo state government said in a statement. It cited witnesses as saying at least three of the escapees fled in a taxi in which they changed their clothes.

“Personnel from all of the security agencies of the state are conducting an intense operation to catch the prisoners,” state Governor Roberto Borge said.

A state public security spokes-woman said on condition of anonymity the escape took place at around 9:10 pm and that some of the inmates are considered “highly dangerous.” The city is a popular des-tination for American tourists but the prison is away from the hotel district. It is located in a densely populated residential area, with one wall fac-ing a busy road.

The government said security was stepped up around the prison as well as on highways and at taxi stands and bus stations.

Local media reported that the convicts belong to two drug gangs and that they took advantage of con-fusion during a prison fight to escape.

Two other prisoners escaped

from the Cancun penitentiary in October 2015 while a fight left four injured in June.

But Cancun has been spared from the drug cartel violence that has plagued other parts of the country.

Mexican prisons are notoriously overcrowded, violent and often con-trolled by gangs.

A report by the National Human Rights Commission found that inmates govern themselves in 71 state prisons across the country.

In February, 49 inmates were killed in a massive brawl in the northern city of Monterrey.

Mass prison breaks are not uncommon.

Last month, three inmates escaped during a riot and fire in a

prison just outside Mexico City that left several prisoners and police officers injured.

The biggest escape took place in September 2012 in a prison in the northern border town of Piedras Negras, when 131 inmates bolted through the front door.

In November 2013, seven inmates escaped from a prison in the north-ern state of Tamaulipas after six prisoners were killed during a fight.

But the most famous jailbreak was perpetrated by one man, Sinaloa drug cartel kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who escaped from the country’s top security prison near Mexico City in July 2015 through a 1.5-km tunnel built by his henchmen.

AP

MEXICO CITY: Mexico’s ruling party chose Enrique Ochoa, the former head of the country’s electric-ity agency and an ally of President Enrique Pena Nieto, as its new leader.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party said Ochoa was the only one to meet all requirements ahead of the deadline and hours later swore him in as party president.

The appointment doesn’t mean Ochoa will be the PRI’s can-didate in the 2018 presidential election but it puts him in con-tention to be.

Ochoa, who recently resigned from the Federal Electricity Com-mission, replaces Manlio Fabio Beltrones, who stepped down fol-lowing the party’s dismal showing in state elections in June.

The PRI governed Mexico for more than seven decades until 2000. It regained the presidency in 2012 with the election of Pena Nieto.

His government has been

battered by criticism over corrup-tion, insecurity and human rights issues.

Ochoa is a lawyer and economist with a doctorate in political science from Columbia University.

Analysts said Ochoa was cho-sen by Pena Nieto to run the party in a practice called the “dedazo,”

or “tap of the finger,” in which the current president has a heavy influence within the party.

“It was a ‘dedazo.’ It was a move-ment by President Enrique Pena Nieto who needs to move the pieces on the table to prepare for the 2018 election,” said Ivonne Acuna, a political analyst at Mexico’s Iberoamericana University.

Three arrested in alleged plot to harm officers

Funerals begin for slain Dallas cops

An honour guard escorts the casket of officer Brent Thompson, at the Potter’s House, in Dallas, yesterday.

10 prison inmates escape in Mexico beach resort

In first, US judge throws out cell phone ‘stingray’ evidence

Ochoa named leader of Mexico’s ruling party

Enrique Ochoa holds the certificate of election as the new chairman of PRI next to members of the National Political Council of the PRI, in Mexico City.

Awful smelling algae is seen along the St Lucie River in Stuart, Florida. The algae which is considered to be coming from Lake Okeechobee, has fouled coastal waterways, angered the locals, closed beaches and has an economic impact as tourists are driven away by the smell and inability to enjoy some of the waterways.

Environmental concern

AMERICAS14 THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

The Republican presidential candidate met Indiana Governor Mike Pence, heightening speculation that Pence could emerge as his choice for vice-presidential running mate.

Agencies

WASHINGTON: Donald Trump yesterday called for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to resign for saying publicly that she feels he is unfit to be president. Lashing out, Trump said the 83-year-old justice’s “mind is shot.”

“Justice Ginsburg of the US Supreme Court has embarrassed all by making very dumb political state-ments about me,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee wrote in an early morning tweet on @realDonaldTrump. “Her mind is shot — resign!”

Ginsburg said in an interview last week that she didn’t want to think about the possibility that Trump would be president and pre-dicted that Democrat Hillary Clinton

will win and have a few appoint-ments to make to the Supreme Court.

It is highly unusual for a sitting justice to weigh in so publicly on a political campaign, though Ginsburg is known for speaking her mind on other issues and is celebrated as a liberal icon.

In a subsequent interview with The New York Times, she joked about moving to New Zealand if Trump is elected. She escalated her criticism, telling CNN that Trump is a “faker” and questioning how he has “gotten away with not turning over his tax returns.” “He has no consistency about him,” she said.

A Supreme Court spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s criticism.

On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said it was “totally inappropriate” for Ginsburg to criticise Trump. He said mem-bers of the Supreme Court shouldn’t weigh in on American elections.

House Speaker Paul Ryan told CNN that Ginsburg’s comments “shows bias to me.”

Former Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, said he agrees with Ginsburg’s remarks.

The Vermont senator declined to say whether it is appropriate for a sitting Supreme Court justice to openly criticise a White House contender. But he told ABC’s Good Morning America that he agrees Trump is a “total opportunist” and said “the record is quite clear that he lies just a whole lot of the time.”

Meanwhile, Trump yesterday

met Indiana Governor Mike Pence, heightening speculation that Pence could emerge as the Republican presidential candidate’s choice for vice presidential running mate.

Trump was joined at the gov-ernor’s residence for breakfast in Indianapolis by his daughter, Ivanka; son-in-law Jared Kushner; and sons Donald Trump Junior and Eric Trump.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee and Pence had campaigned together at a rally in Westfield, Indiana.

Trump is expected to announce his choice on Friday. Republicans close to the campaign said they believed the New York businessman had narrowed his short list to Pence, former US House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich and New Jer-sey Governor Chris Christie.

Pence, 57, a former congress-man who has flirted in the past with a presidential run of his own, would be perhaps the safest choice for Trump given his popularity among conservatives and his experience in government.

Trump, a New York businessman who only got into politics a year ago, is looking for an experienced pol-itician to round out his ticket, and Pence, Christie and Gingrich have the necessary experience.

“Throughout history vice pres-idential selections seldom make much difference in the election. Because Trump has never held office and people are anxious to see how he would assemble a gov-ernment, this pick might get more

attention than usual,” said Republi-can strategist Charlie Black.

“Pence would be a very good pick from the standpoint of hav-ing federal and state government experience, and also he has been a card-carrying member of the con-servative movement his whole life,” Black said.

Trump has campaigned with Pence, Christie and Gingrich in recent days as he girds for perhaps the most con-sequential decision of his campaign ahead of the November 8 election.

Pence introduced Trump at the campaign rally in Westfield, and during his speech, Trump teased the possibility of picking Pence.

“I don’t know if he’s going to be your governor or your vice president,” Trump told the rally.

Trump is to be formally nom-inated at the Republican National Convention next week in Cleveland. Traditionally, the vice presidential running mate choice is used to build enthusiasm among party loyalists.

Trump knows Pence less

personally than Gingrich and Christie. If Trump settled on Pence, both Gin-grich and Christie would likely end up with senior positions in a Trump administration.

Pence has had his share of prob-lems as Indiana’s governor. He was forced to abandon plans last year to create a state-run, taxpayer-funded news service in his state after coming under criticism for the move.

He also drew fire last year for signing the Religious Freedom Res-toration Act.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets Indiana Governor Mike Pence at the Grand Park Events Centre, in Westfield.

AP

WASHINGTON: Russian authorities briefly detained and then deported chief of the board that oversees US government broadcasting overseas, including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the agency said yester-day.

The Broadcasting Board of Gov-ernors said in a statement that its chairman, Jeff Shell, was denied entry into Russia on arriving at Mos-cow’s main international airport on

late Tuesday despite having a valid US passport and Russian visa. He was detained in a locked room for several hours before being escorted onto a flight to Amsterdam.

The statement said Russian authorities did not explain the expulsion. But it said that Shell told colleagues travelling with him that airport security officials told him he was subject to a lifetime ban on entering Russia.

Shell is a presidential appointee who serves part-time as chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Gov-ernors and is also the chairman of

NBCUniversal’s Filmed Entertain-ment Division. The board said it had been in touch with both the US Embassy in Moscow and the State Department about the incident and thanked them “for their urgent atten-tion to the matter.”

There was no immediate com-ment from the State Department or the Russian government.

Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to arrive in Moscow today to discuss conflicts in Syria, Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

But the expulsion of the US broadcasting executive also takes place amid a spike in other tensions between the US and Russia, including a tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats from both nations last week related to an altercation between an Ameri-can diplomat and a Russian security guard outside the US Embassy in Moscow. The US had earlier com-plained that American officials in Russia have been increasingly har-assed by Russian security services, including home break-ins, for the past two years. Russia has however, denied the allegations.

AP

LITCHFIELD, MINNESOTA: At least two people died in flooding caused by powerful storms that damaged homes, washed out roads and stranded motorists in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan.

In northern Wisconsin, an 84-year-old Illinois man died when his vehicle submerged in a flooded ditch, according to Bayfield County sheriff’s officials, who identified the victim as Delmar Johnson of Tower Lakes, Illinois. A firefighter was able to rescue the man’s wife, also 84, who was a passenger. The firefighter went back in the water and pulled Delmar Johnson from the vehicle, but couldn’t resusci-tate him, officials said.

Also in Wisconsin, the Iron County Sheriff Tony Furyk said yesterday that Montreal firefighter Mitchell Koski died in the flooding, but the sheriff declined to provide details. Furyk said Koski was also a former county board member and was once mayor of Montreal, a city of about 800 near Hurley.

In southern Michigan, a woman and her two-year-old son were rescued early yesterday in Jackson after lightning struck and toppled a tree onto their car, trapping them for about an hour. Storms that hit the state f looded roads and left several thousand homes and businesses without power in Jackson County. The Michigan Emergency Operations

Center was activated to provide assistance to those affected by the storms.

In Minnesota, Governor Mark Dayton planned to travel to Litch-field and Watkins, where tornadoes flattened homes and uprooted trees. No serious injuries were reported.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker declared a state of emer-gency in eight northern counties, including Bayfield and Iron, where sections of major highways and sec-ondary roads remained flooded. The governor instructed the Wisconsin National Guard and all state agen-cies to help those affected by the storms.

Also in Bayfield County, sher-iff’s officials said a deputy’s vehicle fell into a washed out section of roadway and was carried along by the powerful current. The deputy was able to get out of the vehi-cle and clung to a tree for more than two hours before he was res-cued, authorities said. The deputy is hospitalised and is in good con-dition, according to the sheriff’s department.

The National Weather Serv-ice is forecasting another round of thunderstorms for northern Wis-consin and Minnesota, and says more flooding is likely in north-ern Wisconsin, where rivers and creeks will continue to rise over the next two days. Thirty-two people, mainly campers, were safely evac-uated after being briefly trapped on Michigan Island in Lake Superior, Wisconsin Emergency Management spokesman Tod Pritchard said.

Burglary suspect

dies after officers

used stun gun

AP

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA: A home burglary suspect died after police used a stun gun on him, authorities said, adding the sus-pect resisted officers who found him wrapped in material that looked like it came from house air conditioner ducts.

Birmingham Police Lieutenant Sean Edwards said a homeowner in that Alabama city called police early Tuesday to report hearing glass breaking and someone yell-ing and growling in his basement.

A police statement said arriv-ing officers told the homeowner to go next door for his safety while they checked out the home.

“As officers walked around the house they observed several windows broken,” the statement emailed by Edwards said. “They entered the home and observed a white male in shorts only wrapped up in material that looked like the air conditioner duct work.”

Edwards said the suspect didn’t comply with verbal orders of officers, and they used a stun gun several times as he continued to resist them. The officers then “closed in on him” and handcuffed him, taking him from the home.

The unidentified suspect was later pronounced dead at a hos-pital. according to police. Neither police nor the county coroner had released the name of the dead man yesterday morning.

AP

ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO: The nation’s highest court will likely have to settle a dispute between Texas and New Mexico over manage-ment of water from the Rio Grande.

Officials in both states have been waiting for nearly a year for a rec-ommendation on handling of the case that could dramatically curb groundwater pumping in some of

New Mexico’s most fertile valleys and force the state to pay as much as $1bn in damages.

Now, a special master assigned by the US Supreme Court is rec-ommending rejection of a motion by New Mexico to dismiss the case, meaning it can move forward as long as the high court agrees.

Texas sued in 2013, claiming New Mexico failed to deliver water as required under a decades-old com-pact involving the river that serves more than 6 million people in several

major cities and irrigates more than 3,100 square miles of farmland in the US and Mexico.

New Mexico state Senator Joe Cervantes, said the special master’s recommendation was not a sur-prise, and he and a small group of lawmakers have been warning about potentially dire outcomes if Texas gains upper hand in the legal battle.

Cervantes said the recommenda-tion to let the case proceed seems to support demands by Texas for more water from the Rio Grande.

“A great deal more water deliv-ered to Texas to make up for historic shortfalls seems to be a clear direc-tion he’s going,” Cervantes said of the special master. “And since water won’t make up for all of the short-falls, we’re looking at the risk of large financial damages.”

The parties have a chance to respond to the special master before the Supreme Court weighs in on what is the latest legal battle over water to pit states against one another. Connecticut and Massachusetts,

Nebraska and Wyoming, and New York and New Jersey all have been embroiled in water disputes over the decades.

The federal government has weighed in on the New Mexico-Texas case, arguing that pumping north of the border is tapping a shallow aqui-fer that would otherwise drain back into the Rio Grande and flow to Texas and eventually to Mexico.

Officials in Texas made similar claims about water shortages under the compact more than a decade ago.

Trump demands Ginsburg to resign for flaying him

2 dead in Wisconsin floods: Officials

Russia briefly detains & deports US broadcasting chief

Supreme Court to consider report on Rio Grande case

Yesterday’s answer

Yesterday’s answer

MEDIUM SUDOKU

CROSSWORD

TEL: 444933989 / 444517001

SHOWING ATVILLAGGIO & CITY CENTER

Hoy en la HistoriaJuly 14, 1789

1957: Rawya Ateya became the first female parliamentarian in the Arab world when she took her seat in the National Assembly of Egypt1976: The Tanzam railway, linking Zambia and Tanzania, was finished2015: The New Horizons space probe performed the first flyby of Pluto2015: Iran agreed a historic deal to limit its ability to produce nuclear weapons in exchange for the lifting of crippling economic sanctions

Citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille prison, a hated symbol of the monarchy, at the start of the French Revolution. Bastille Day is now a public holiday in France

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ROYAL PLAZAALL IN THE MIND

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08:00 News08:30 Fault Lines09:00 The Caliph10:30 Inside Story11:00 News11:30 Talk To Al Jazeera 12:00 News12:30 TechKnow13:00 NEWSHOUR14:00 News14:30 Inside Story15:00 Al Jazeera World16:00 NEWSHOUR17:00 News17:30 Walls of Shame18:00 NEWSHOUR19:00 News19:30 101 East 20:00 News20:30 Inside Story21:00 NEWSHOUR22:00 News22:30 Talk To Al Jazeera 23:00 The People’s

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Rani18:00 KumKum Bhagya 18:30 Vishkanya19:00 Tashn E Ishq19:30 Kaala Teeka20:00 Meri Saasu Maa20:30 Yeh Vadaa Raha21:00 Ek Tha Raja Ek Thi

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Masters

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Tim Faulkner

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Conceptis Sudoku: Conceptis Sudoku is a number-placing puzzle

based on a 9×9 grid. The object is to place the numbers 1 to 9 in

the empty squares so that each row, each column and each 3×3 box

contains the same number only once.

Hell In India (2D/Comedy) 11:00am, 1:10, 3:20, 5:30, 7:40, 9:50pm & 12:00midnightGhostbusters (3D/Action) 10:00am, 2:40 & 7:20pm 2D 12:20, 5:00, 9:40pm & 12:00midnight30 Years Ago (2D/Arabic) 10:00am & 6:00pmAbu Shanab (2D/Arabic) 1:00 & 8:50pmNow You See Me 2 (2D/Comedy) 3:30 & 11:30pmIndependence Day: Resurgence (Action) 10:00am, 2:40, 7:20pm & 12:00midnightTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles(Action) 12:20, 5:00 & 9:40pmFinding Dory (2D/Animation) 11:00am, 1:00, 3:00, 5:00, 7:00, 9:00 & 11:00pm Space Dogs Adventure (2D/Animation) 10:00, 11:30am, 12:00noon & 1:30pmMarauders (2D/Action) 3:00, 5:10, 7:20, 9:40 & 11:40pmCentral Intelligence (2D/Comedy) 10:30, 11:30am, 12:40, 2:50, 4:30, 5:00, 7:10, 9:20 & 11:30pmTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles(3D IMAX/Action) 11:00am, 1:20 & 3:50pm Independence Day: Resurgence (3D IMAX/Action) 6:10, 8:40 & 11:00pmHell In India (2D/Comedy) 2:00, 7:00 & 11:40pm

Shahjahan (2D/Malayalam) 11:00am & 11:00pm; Swalef Tafash Khaleeji (2D/Comedy) 1:30 & 3:30pm; Central Intelligence (2D/Action) 11:00am, 5:30 & 9:30pmMarauders (2D/Action) 12:00noon, 10:00pm & 12:00midnightSultan (2D/Hindi) 1:00 & 6:00pm Hell In India (2D/Arabic) 9:00pm

Finding Dory (2D/Animation) 2:00 & 4:00pmGhostbusters (2D/Action) 4:00, 6:00 & 8:00pmThe Achy Breaky Hearts (2D/Comedy) 7:15pmDhilluku Dhuddu (Tamil) 11:30pm

Shahjahan (Malayalam) 12:30, 3:15, 6:15, 8:30, 9:00pm,12:00& 01:00am

Happy Wedding(Malayalam)12:30, 3:00,5:30,8:00 &10:30pm

Sultan (Hindi) 12:30, 3:30, 6:30pm & 12:15am

Dhilluku Dhuddu (Tamil) 12:45, 6:00, 9:45 & 11:30pm

BREAK TIME 17THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016 15

Central Intelligence (Action) 10:30am, 12:45, 3:00, 5:15, 7:30, 9:45pm & 12:00midnightFinding Dory (Animation) 10:30am, 12:30am & 2:45pmSultan (Hindi) 5:00, 8:15 & 11:30pm

Shahjahan (Malayalam)12:45, 3:30, 6:15, 9:00 & 11:45pm

Finding Dory (2D/Animation) 11:00am, 1:00 & 3:00pm Marauders (2D/Action) 11:00am, 9:15 & 11:30pmSwalef Tafash Khaleeji (2D/Comedy) 11:30am & 3:00pm Sultan (2D/Hindi) 1:30 & 11:00pmTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2D/Action) 1:30pmGhostbusters(2D/Action) 5:00 & 9:00pm Abu Shanab(2D/Arabic)7:00pm30 Years Ago (2D/Arabic) 4:45pmHell In India (2D/Arabic) 5:00 & 11:15pm

The Achy Breaky Hearts (2D/Comedy) 7:00pmCentral Intelligence (2D/Action) 7:30 & 9:30pm

Qatar Airways wins ‘World’s Best Business Class’ at Skytrax awards

Qatar students shine in US schools contest

Qatar ‘invests $30bn a year on infrastructure’

1

2

3

A pigeon quenching it’s thirst beside a road to beat the heat of scorching sun. Photo by Kammutty V P / The Peninsula

With the summer heat gaining its peak, animals are left with no option except cooling themselves off in various ways. Here is a view of a pigeon watches ducks swimming at the Aspire Lake in Qatar to stay cool on a hot day.

Cooling off

The Peninsula

DOHA: Experts and stakeholders from Hospitality and Hotels, Restaurants and Cafes (HORECA) sectors are set to attend ‘Hospitality Qatar 2016’ exhibition which will begin from October 18 this year.

The three-day long exhibition, taking place at Doha Exhibition and Conven-tion Center (DECC), will be under the patronage of Minister of Economy and Commerce, H E Sheikh Ahmed bin Jas-sim Al Thani.

The show, licensed by the Qatar Tour-ism Authority (QTA), will be one of the premier hospitality-related events in the region, as it features all aspects of the hotel and franchise market in the Gulf region.

The exposition is designed to build a strong platform for local, regional and international HORECA suppliers to meet hospitality professionals from around the region. It will also allow franchise brands, hotel groups, developers, bankers and consultants to network and build new business opportunities with hotels and franchise investors.

Due, in part, to the massive build-up required for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the markets for Food and Beverage, HORECA supply, and hotel construction are peaking.

“There has been a tremendous response from exhibitors, especially those that participated in last year’s success-ful Hospitality Qatar show. Companies have cited the rapid growth of the hos-pitality and HORECA sectors in Qatar as a reason for vying to be part of this year’s exposition. With obvious business drivers such as the FIFA 2022 World Cup and the Qatar National Vision 2030, we are expecting a record turnout by exhib-itors and attendees, alike,” said Rawad Sleem, Project Manager of the show. “We are very pleased with the high level of international interest from suppliers out-side of Qatar, such as: China, Germany, India, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, Philip-pines, Romania, Turkey, etc. On the heels of last year’s success, it has become clear that HORECA suppliers from around the world have chosen Qatar as a go-to point to participate in the local market boom,” he added.

The last few years have seen a swift expansion in the number of hotels and other tourism facilities in Qatar, as the government has invested in transform-ing the country into a luxury, sports and business destination. Through Qatar’s National Tourism Sector Strategy 2030, Qatar has adopted a comprehensive approach to addressing sustainability in all aspects of the tourism industry, with a special focus on creating a thriving hos-pitality sector in the country.

The Peninsula

DOHA: Qatar Foundation Research and Development (QFR&D) recently held a high-level event exploring pathways for developing human capi-tal, essential in building a sustainable knowledge-based future for Qatar.

Representatives from ministries, research institutes and universities discussed existing initiatives and pro-grammes designed to widen Qatar’s R&D talent pool in the Workshop.

The event, held at the Qatar Foundation (QF) headquarters, also examined the key challenges and priorities for this area, and poten-tial solutions and enhancements.

The workshop addressed the need for the continuing develop-ment of Qatar’s human capital in research and development, one of the primary objectives of the Qatar National Research Strategy (QNRS).

By bringing together entities and

institutions with a diverse research and education scope and shared goals, the event aimed to identify common areas of interest and focus in order to address gaps in capac-ity-building provision, nurture and retain high-calibre researchers and scientists, and bolster Qatar’s workforce and the nation’s research culture.

Participating stakeholders included the Ministry of Education and Higher Education; the Minis-try of Administrative Development, Labor & Social Affairs; Hamad bin Khalifa University, a member of QF, and its research institutes: Qatar Bio-medical Research Institute, Qatar Computing Research Institute, and Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute; Qatar Univer-sity; Hamad Medical Corporation; the Anti-Doping Laboratory Qatar; QF partner universities: Weill Cor-nell Medicine-Qatar and Texas A&M University at Qatar; and QF member Qatar Biobank.

In a roundtable discussion, stakeholders outlined their capac-ity-building programmes, initiatives, insights and suggestions. The work-shop provided an overview of Qatar Research Leadership Program – a unique QF R&D initiative dedicated to developing homegrown scientific research and research management talent in Qatar – and the capacity-building sponsorship programmes of Qatar National Research Fund, also part of QF R&D.

“By providing a forum for key stakeholders to discuss education and training needs relating to the development of human capacity in Qatar, Qatar Foundation Research and Development aims to enhance understanding of the landscape of provision in this area, so that gaps can be identified and addressed,” said Dr Dirar Khoury, Executive Director, Research Coordination and Special Initiatives, and Acting Executive Director, Education, Training, and Development, QF R&D.

It emphasised the need for con-tinued investment in the development of human capacity in research and development to underpin Qatar’s economic growth and diversification and build the high-calibre work-force required to sustain a successful knowledge-based society. Partici-pants highlighted certain perceptions of research careers, and the retention of talent, as key challenges.

“Through this workshop, QF R&D has provided a valuable opportunity for stakeholders to share knowledge, exchange ideas and perspectives, and develop a comprehensive and holistic understanding of our capacity-build-ing status and needs,” said Dr Khaled Al Horr, Director of the Higher Edu-cation Institute, Ministry of Education and Higher Education.

Reem Al Sada, Scholarship Coor-dinator, Government Scholarship Department, Ministry of Administra-tive Development, Labor and Social Affairs, commented: “Workshops such as this have an essential role in

ensuring young Qataris gain the qual-ifications and expertise they require to serve the nation in the field of research and development, supporting the

activation of scientific research, and emphasising its importance to achiev-ing the objectives of the pillars of the Qatar National Vision 2030.”

QNA

DOHA: H E Dr. Hamad bin Abdul Aziz Al Kawari, Adviser at the Emiri Diwan and Qatar’s candidate for Unesco director-general, left for Nairobi, Kenya, yesterday.

Dr. Al Kawari, also President of the 13th United Nations Con-ference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), will hand over the presidency of the 14th session of UNCTAD to Kenya’s Minister of For-eign Affairs Amina C Mohamed. Kenya is scheduled to take over the presidency of UNCTAD during the opening of the 14th session con-ference. Dr Al Kawari will address the session to highlight the most important achievements during Qatar’s presidency of UNCTAD.

He will also meet several officials to introduce his election pro-gramme for the advancement of Unesco.

The Peninsula

DOHA: Under the patronage of H E Sheikha Hind bint Hamad Al Thani, Founder and Chairperson, Teach For Qatar celebrated the gradua-tion of the first cohort of Fellows who completed their Fellowship, or Leadership Journey during the 2014-2016 academic years.

The ceremony at Museum of Islamic Art was attended by Nasser Al Jaber, CEO, Teach For Qatar, school principals, alumni honou-rees and their families.

Sheikha Hind said: “This hon-ouring ceremony reflects Teach for Qatar’s continued efforts and com-mitment to enhance the educational system throughout Independent schools in the state. It also marks an important milestone in our jour-ney to achieve our mission to work as part of the solution to help solve some of the challenges Qatar’s stu-dents face.

“Today, as our Fellows set off on their path to serve and elevate their nation, they will take on the role of ambassadors of education, promoting a culture of excellence in education, regardless of their career choices,” she added.

On behalf of graduates, Sara Fayyad said: “All of us leave today with deep sense of gratitude towards our teachers and a greater

appreciation for the teaching pro-fession in general. We have a greater love for our students and co-work-ers, and are motivated to work hard to improve education in Qatar.”

Each graduate was awarded a certificate of appreciation by a stu-dent who they individually selected for being an inspiration and play-ing an instrumental role in shaping their journey.

Throughout their leadership journey, graduates contributed to the educational development of more than 1,200 students in nine schools

in Qatar. Focusing on self-develop-ment and leadership, the Leadership Journey, which is a two-year teach-ing and leadership development programme, enabled Fellows to take ownership of their personal growth and become effective lead-ers, providing them with a greater understanding of their role in con-tributing to positive change in their communities.

Teach For Qatar team and grad-uates while attending the graduation ceremony of Teach for Qatar’s first cohort of Fellows.

Teach for Qatar honours first cohort

Teach For Qatar team and graduates while attending the graduation ceremony of Teach for Qatar’s first cohort of Fellows.

QF R&D’s event stresses the need to develop Qatar’s human potential

Representatives from government ministries, research entities and universities during the workshop organised by Qatar Foundation Research and Development’s Human Capacity Development at its headquarters, yesterday.

‘Hospitality Qatar

2016’ to begin

on October 18

Dr. Al Kawari leaves for Kenya

MORNING BREAK16 THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

FAJR

SHOROOK

ZUHR

ASR

MAGHRIB

ISHA

03.24 am04.52 am

11.40 am03.04 pm

06.29 pm07.59 pm

Minimum: 34o C Maximum: 44o C

HIGH TIDE 14:30 - 23:30LOW TIDE 06:30 - 19:15

Hot daytime with slight dust at places and some

clouds becomes humid to hazy by night.

PRAYER TIMINGS WEATHER

ONLINE CHART BUST

MOST READ

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INSTAGRAM OF THE DAY

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Ooredoo’s CMSP offers Cisco-powered solutions

PAGE | 18 PAGE | 20GIB Capital

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www.thepeninsulaqatar.com

THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016 • 9 SHAWWAL 1437 @peninsulaqatar @peninsula_qatarthepeninsulaqatar

By Satish Kanady The Peninsula

DOHA: Oil output from the Middle East rose to a record high in June, with production rising above 31 million barrels per day for the third month running. High pumping rates in the Middle East and recovering flows in Nigeria has consolidated Opec market share, International Energy Agency (IEA) noted in its July Oil Market Report (OMR) yesterday.

The Middle East’s market share of global oil supplies rose to 35 per-cent, the highest since the late 1970s and reminded that even when US shale production does resume its growth, older producers will remain essential for oil markets.

“Saudi Arabia ramped up to a near-record rate of 10.45 mb/d and Nigerian flows partially recovered. Middle East producers sustained record pumping rates, consolidat-ing market share and pushing Opec’s total output 510 kb/d above one year ago”, IEA said.

According to the report, glo-bal oil supplies rose by 0.6 mb/d in June, to 96 mb/d, after outages curbed Opec and non-Opec sup-plies in May, while production was 750 kb/d below as higher Opec out-put only partially offset non-Opec declines. Non-Opec supplies are set to decline by 0.9 mb/d in 2016, to 56.5 mb/d, before rising 0.2 mb/d in 2017.

Robust European demand sup-ported second quarter 2016 global demand growth at around 1.4 mb/d year-on-year, momentum that will

be roughly matched through the year as a whole. A modest deceleration is foreseen in 2017, as growth eases to 1.3 mb/d taking average deliveries up to 97.4 mb/d.

Crude oil prices eased from an early June peak above $52/bbl, but traded within a $45-$50/bbl range. Growing uncertainty over the glo-bal economy and the related dollar strength weighed, but the downside was limited by further declines in US production and inventories.

Opec crude output rose by 400 kb/d in June to an eight-year high of 33.21 mb/d, including newly re-joined Gabon.

OECD commercial inventories built by 13.5mb in May to end the month at a record 3 074 mb. Prelim-inary information for June suggest that OECD stocks added a further 0.9 mb while floating storage has con-tinued to build, reaching its highest level since 2009.

May global refinery through-put plunged by almost 1 mb/d from April, to 1.5 mb/d year-on-year, as heavy outages took their toll in many

regions. This lowered the second quarter estimate for global refinery intake to 78.54 mb/d — the first year-on-year drop in three years. The forecast for third quarter through-put is more steady at 80.95 mb/d.

On the investment side, the

report noted: “ Chevron’s announce-ment that it is moving ahead with a $37bn expansion of the Tengiz field in Kazakhstan is good news, but the fact that the project will partly uti-lise existing infrastructure is key to making it viable at today’s oil

prices. There is still an ominous investment gap building up in the oil industry that might, depending on how quickly today’s record high oil stocks are eroded, create the con-ditions for sharply higher prices over the medium term.”

Mideast’s record output consolidates Opec shareThe Middle East’s market share of global oil supplies rose to 35%, the highest since late 1970s: IEA report

Machinery & Equipment Price Index declines by 0.78%By Mohammad Shoeb The Peninsula

DOHA: The Machinery & Equipment Price Index (MEPI) for the first six months of 2016 (first half), which reached 101.4 points, has declined marginally 0.78 percent compared to second half of 2015, as well as the first half of 2015, data released by the Ministry of Development Planning & Statistics show.

The MEPI index is the new indi-cator which added to the current products of indicators produced by the Ministry. This indicator is calcu-lated semi-annual basis.

A comparative analysis (on half-yearly basis) of MEPI of the first half of this year shows that all of the main groups have decreased namely: “Special-purpose machines” group by 1.16 percent, which was attributed to the decline in prices of Under-ground Rock Cutters and Tunneling Machinery,

“Office, Accounting and Comput-ing Machinery” group decreased by 0.88 percent, “Transport Equipment” group by 0.77 percent , due to a price drop in Motor vehicles and trailer vehicles. Slight decline in “Machin-ery and Electrical Appliances” group by 0.19 percent .

A comparison of the Machinery & Equipment Price Index on year-on-year basis, shows that the index decreased by 0.78 percent affected by price decrease in several other groups namely: “Special-Purpose

Machines” and “Transport Equip-ment” by 0.97 percent each, “Office, Accounting and Computing machin-ery” declined by 0.88 percent . On the other hand, “Machinery and Electrical Appliances” also declined by 0.19 percent .

Within the “special-purpose machines” group (which witnessed 0.97 percent decline in prices in the first half, 2016) the prices of ‘Mov-ing, grading, leveling, scrapping, excavating, tamping’ equipment, including bulldozers, by 1.06 per-cent, both on half-yearly as well as

year-on-year basis.The Prices of ‘portable automatic

data processing machines’, such as laptops and other machines’, which is under the “Office, Accounting and Computing Machinery” group has witnessed the highest decline of 1.67 percent, both on half-yearly as well as year-on-year basis.

While the prices of ‘motorcycles and other light transport’ vehicles and ‘Other transport equipment and parts’, have remained unchanged, both on half-yearly as well as year-on-year basis.

Nakilat posts QR501m net profit for first half

The Peninsula

DOHA: Nakilat, the shipping arm of Qatar’s liquefied natu-ral gas (LNG) sector, recorded a net profit of QR501m in the first half of this year, up 2 per-cent compared to the QR491m for the same period last year .

The increase in the compa-ny’s profits reflects the strong growth of Nakilat’s operating activities in transporting liq-uefied natural gas (LNG), and better performance of its lique-fied petroleum gas (LPG) vessels.

Nakilat Managing Director

Abdullah Fadhalah Al Sulaiti (pictured) said, “Nakilat’s half-year financial results are a clear indicator of the strength and stability of the company’s financial position, which has been achieved through sound growth and developmental strategies over the years. We are also continually assessing cur-rent investments in relation to profitability in order to address any risk involved for the com-pany and its shareholders.”

Al Sulaiti added, “Our LNG joint venture operations con-tinue to underpin Nakilat’s financial results, enabling us to value-add to our shareholders.”

Tesla cuts prices

again as sales

miss targets

Reuters

DETROIT: Tesla Motors Inc has cut the starting price of its Model X crossover, the second time this year the electric vehicle maker has lowered prices after missing sales targets.

Tesla said yesterday a new version of the Model X cross-over, the 60D, will be priced from $74,000, $9,000 less than the Model X 75D. Equipped with a 60kWh battery, the 60D has less torque and a shorter range between charges than the 75D.

Tesla, one of the world’s best known electric vehicle makers, has been facing problems on sev-eral fronts. US safety regulators have demanded that it hand over detailed information about the design, operation and testing of its Autopilot technology follow-ing a May 7 fatal crash in which the system was in use.

Analysts and investors also have questioned the wisdom of Tesla’s proposed $2.8bn takeo-ver offer for SolarCity.

Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk is a major shareholder in both companies.

On Sunday, Musk tweeted that he planned soon to publish part two of his “top secret Tesla mas-terplan,” prompting widespread speculation that he might reveal more details about a possible Tesla-SolarCity merger.

QE 10,319.74 +178.95 PTS

DOW 18,346.68 -0.99 PTS

FTSE100 6,670.40 -10.29 PTS

BRENT $44.81 -$1.99

QE Index 10,319.74 1.76 %

QE Total Return Index 16,696.65 1.76 %

QE Al Rayan Islamic Index 3,945.71 1.42 %

QE All Share Index 2,861.15 1.48 %

QE All Share Banks & Financial Services 2,794.8 1.16 %

QE All Share Industrials 3,117.5 0.94 %

QE All Share Transportation 2,528.31 0.67 %

QE All Share Real Estate 2,601.97 2.42 %

QE All Share Insurance 4,239.15 3.85 %

QE All Share Telecoms 1,155.34 2.32 %

QE All Share Consumer Goods & Services 6,509.34 0.17 %

QE INDICES SUMMARY QATAR STOCK EXCHANGE

QE MARKET SUMMARY COMPARISON

GOLD AND SILVER

WORLD STOCK INDICES

13-07-2016 Today 12-07-2016 Previous dayIndex 10,319.74 10,140.79

Change 178.95 35.27

% 1.76 0.35

YTD% 1.05 2.77

Volume 7,093,848 4,695,409

Value (QAR) 270,795,942.97 142,642,104.21

Trades 4,189 2,953

Up 31 | Down 09| Unchanged 03

GOLD QR158.2328 per grammeSILVER QR2.3942 per gramme

Index Day’s Close Pt Chg % Chg Year High Year LowAll Ordinaries 5433.216 15.675 0.29 5489.8 4762.1

Cac 40 Index/D 4329.93 65.4 1.53 4607.69 3892.46

Dj Indu Average 18226.93 80.19 0.44 18283.9 15370.3

Hang Seng Inde/D 21224.74 344.24 1.65 21794.84 18278.8

Iseq Overall/D 5723.7 34.77 0.61 6791.68 5286.65

Karachi 100 In/D 39031.62 663.66 1.73 39039.67 29785

Nikkei 225 Index 16095.65 386.83 2.46 18951.12 14864.01

S&P 500 Index/D 0 0 0 2143.16 1810.1

EXCHANGE RATECurrency Buying Selling

US$ QR 3.6305 QR 3.6500

UK QR 4.8144 QR 4.8848

Euro QR 3.9929 QR 4.0737

CA$ QR 2.7599 QR 2.8227

Swiss Fr QR 3.6471 QR 3.7395

Yen QR 0.0345 QR 0.0354

Aus$ QR 2.7368 QR 2.8063

Ind Re QR 0.0534 QR 0.05465

Pak Re QR 0.0344 QR 0.0351

Peso QR 0.0758 QR 0.0782

SL Re QR 0.0247 QR 0.0254

Taka QR 0.0460 QR 0.0469

Nep Re QR 0.0336 QR 0.0343

SA Rand QR 0.2521 QR 0.2572

INTERNATIONAL MARKETS - A LIST OF SHARES FROM THE WORLD

A C C-A/D 1618.75 5.6 32498

Aarti Drugs-B/D 493.75 -4.3 8553

Aban Offs-A/D 231.65 1.25 442350

Aegis Logis-B/D 125.1 -0.75 31229

Alembic-B/D 38.6 -0.7 38998

Alok Indus-A/D 4.16 -0.22 4080964

Apollo Tyre-A/D 156.1 3.15 843222

Asahi I Glass-/D 164.4 -0.7 29785

Ashok Leyland-/D 93.55 0.2 1745954

Ballarpur In-B/D 15.75 0.05 305465

Banaras Bead-B/D 43.75 0.6 3265

Bata India-A/D 568.25 10.45 43270

Beml Ltd-A/D 886.5 -6.6 21619

Bh Electronic-/D 1260 0.7 11672

Bhansali Eng-T/D 21.65 0.35 104814

Bharat Bijle-B/D 960.6 -7.5 4416

Bharatgears-B/D 94.3 -4.15 170948

Bhartiya Int-B/D 500.25 -7.6 6460

Bhel-A/D 138.3 -0.95 519415

Bhuwalka Stl-T/D 7.59 -0.39 1000

Bom.Burmah-B/D 413.25 1 8296

Bombay Dyeing-/D 47.9 -0.5 312074

Camph.& All-B/D 514 -5.1 1381

Canfin Homes-B/D 1228.65 8.3 2765

Caprihans-Xc/D 97.85 1.45 19110

Castrol India-/D 404.85 2.95 75410

Century Enka-B/D 215.65 -2.65 9400

Century Text-A/D 691.1 2.35 102905

Chambal Fert-B/D 68.9 0.55 102159

Chola Invest-A/D 957.8 4.45 780600

Chowgule St-T/D 15.2 -0.15 8760

Cimmco-B/D 74.6 0.05 6530

Cipla-A/D 516.2 -5.15 267987

City Union Bk-/D 119.95 0.95 31224

Colgate-A/D 932.35 -11.15 117140

Container Cor-/D 1425 -26.75 19993

Dai-Tichi Kar-/D 411 6.4 4361

Dcm Shram Ind-/D 174.75 5 35373

Dhampur Sugar-/D 119.7 0.95 134526

Dr. Reddy-A/D 3591.3 -24.8 20398

E I H-B/D 110.75 -0.55 10650

E.I.D Parry-A/D 240.7 -2.3 79311

Eicher Motor-A/D 19668.6 118.6 3248

Eimco Elecon-T/D 490 4.25 2353

Electrosteel-B/D 19.6 0.35 174394

Emco-B/D 27.5 -0.15 18786

Escorts Fin-B/D 4.78 -0.11 23654

Escorts-A/D 226 6.05 517839

Eveready Indu-/D 280 3.5 242641

F D C-B/D 190.1 -2.95 3338

Federal Bank-A/D 62.5 1.05 1560405

Ferro Alloys-B/D 5.9 0 37003

Finolex-A/D 455.1 4.1 20553

Forbes-B/D 1274.7 19.05 7094

Gail-A/D 378.45 -0.15 53469

Galada Power-B/D 21.6 3.6 294603

Gammon India-T/D 17.55 0.3 434412

Gangotri Tex-B/D 1.33 -0.06 1000

Garden P -B/D 37.3 -0.75 29498

Godfrey Phil-B/D 1054.4 82.9 119923

Goodricke-B/D 179.15 4.05 74454

Goodyear I -B/D 527.3 0.75 2079

Hcl Infosys-B/D 41.05 -0.4 327489

Him.Fut.Comm-T/D 18.4 -0.2 880642

Himat Seide-B/D 271.65 6.85 131851

Hind Motors-T/D 4.84 -0.06 135178

Hind Org Chem-/D 18.9 0.3 35745

Hind Unilever-/D 922.9 -5.3 80307

Hind.Petrol-A/D 1065.55 9.5 216459

Hindalco-A/D 135.3 6.25 2225919

Hous Dev Fin-A/D 1332.75 19.75 64111

I F C I-A/D 28.85 0.9 2922775

Idbi-A/D 76.05 -0.15 595021

Ifb Ind.Ltd.-B/D 370.95 6.2 15125

India Cement-A/D 117.3 -1.15 393486

India Glycol-B/D 99.45 -2.65 26513

Indian Card-B/D 248.6 -9.9 2465

Indian Hotel-A/D 130.5 0.1 52337

Indo-Tcount-T/D 989.45 -1.4 3465

Indusind-A/D 1124.4 0.45 81883

J.B.Chemical-B/D 259.7 0.85 20197

Jagatjit Ind-X/D 80.1 3.1 12361

Jagson Phar-B/D 40.35 -0.2 13825

Jamnaauto-B/D 172.2 0.35 49030

Jbf Indu-B/D 207.5 -3.25 16170

Jct Ltd-B/D 5.91 -0.32 981080

Jenson&Nich.-B/D 8.15 -0.36 26223

Jik Indust-B/D 0.7 -0.03 3551

Jindal Drill-B/D 186.75 -1.4 12365

Jktyre&Ind-A/D 90.5 -1.45 240541

Jmc Projects-T/D 243.6 -8.4 1203

Kabra Extr-B/D 115 -0.55 2433

Kajaria Cer-A/D 1218.1 -5.65 6651

Kakatiya Cem-B/D 424.8 -0.7 19605

Kalpat Power-B/D 264 -0.75 8710

Kalyani Stel-T/D 192.5 6.3 65453

Kanoria Chem-B/D 71.1 0.6 28916

Kg Denim-B/D 77 -1.35 15865

Kilburnengg-Xd/D 57.6 -0.5 9650

Kinetic Eng-B/D 78.7 -0.5 5165

Kopran-B/D 52.2 -0.7 32821

Lakshmi Elec-B/D 464 11.8 13705

Lgb Broth-B/D 496.55 -8.7 3403

Lloyd Metal-B/D 30 1.65 592260

Lok.Hous&Con-T/D 6.09 -0.13 73923

Lumax Ind-B/D 697.5 -3.75 1254

Lupin-A/D 1672.05 3.1 79978

Lyka Labs-T/D 71.15 -3.25 58603

Mafatlal Ind-B/D 323.8 7.35 4819

Mah.Seamless-B/D 233.85 -3.15 1685

Maha Scooter-B/D 1440 -19.35 3953

Mangalam Cem-B/D 306.1 -3.5 12414

Maral Overs-B/D 35.3 0.2 24559

Mastek-B/D 138.05 1.5 37824

Max Financial-/D 508.45 3.9 55260

Mrpl-A/D 68.25 -0.15 110774

Nagreeka Ex-B/D 38.6 -1.05 4046

Nagreeka Ex-B/D 38.6 -1.05 4046

Nahar Spg.-B/D 127.1 -1.3 49254

Nation Alum -A/D 50.15 5.9 2366820

Navneet Edu-B/D 99.25 -1.25 20992

Nepc India-T/D 1.62 0.07 7540

Neuland Lab-B/D 947 17.25 9471

Nrb Bearings-B/D 113.45 -1.55 6199

O N G C-A/D 227.75 2.7 326411

Oil Country-B/D 31.55 -0.7 5198

Onward Tech-B/D 72 -2 1485

Orchid Pharm-B/D 41.35 -0.75 133387

Orient Hotel-T/D 26.4 0.05 12862

Orient.Carb.-T/D 581 -10.6 4165

Orient.Carb.-T/D 581 -10.6 4165

Oudh Sugar-B/D 138.05 0.45 50738

Patspin India-/D 11.44 0.07 38568

Punjab Chem.-B/D 203.85 -5.95 5706

Radico Khait-B/D 93.1 -1.6 30018

Rallis India-A/D 210.25 1.4 26825

Rallis India-A/D 210.25 1.4 26825

Reliance Indus/D 440.15 -0.8 98158

Ruchi Soya-B/D 23 -0.25 59956

S Bk Bikaner-B/D 682.7 -0.55 40601

Salora Inter-B/D 44.4 -0.35 1454

Saur.Cem-B/D 69.5 -0.35 45757

Savita Oil-B/D 585 -13.65 1419

Thirumalai-B/D 321.9 -10.75 26440

Til Ltd.-T/D 265.45 11.9 3045

Timexgroup-T/D 38.3 1.15 67983

Tinplate-B/D 82.6 -0.55 72801

Ucal Fuel-B/D 114.5 -1.5 7589

Ultramarine-B/D 137.25 -1.85 7923

Unitech P -A/D 7.91 0.96 43004818

Univcable-B/D 82.75 1.5 44440

Uppergsugar-T/D 460.25 7.35 190483

3I Group/D 580.5 9 606029

Assoc.Br.Foods/D 2831 -13 340571

Barclays/D 150.4 4.95 35835045

Bp/D 459.505 0.6 16173661

Brit Am Tobacc/D 4834.5 -85 1361001

Bt Group/D 406.35 8.8 7235554

Centrica/D 228.5 -3.4 7503726

Gkn/D 285.6 6.2 1543749

Hsbc Holdings/D 475.25 -3.7 14335716

Kingfisher/D 323.3 2.6 4054649

Land Secs Grou/D 1047 -10 2082407

Legal & Genera/D 188.8 5.2 12165273

Lloyds Bnk Grp/D 56.71 1.86 147603735

Marks & Sp./D 331.1 1.7 5512542

Next/D 5180 90 338931

Pearson/D 968.5 4 1882964

Prudential/D 1274 32 3290965

Rank Group/D 230.3 3.4 41599

Rentokil Initi/D 205.5 -4.7 1589485

Rolls Royce Pl/D 714.5 -9 3538791

Rsa Insrance G/D 495.4 3.8 835133

Sainsbury(J)/D 229.8 2.5 4214654

Schroders/D 2549 48 190453

Severn Trent/D 2437 -20 213217

Smith&Nephew/D 1297 -7 1040528

Smiths Group/D 1212 27 1166686

Standrd Chart /D 600.7 8.3 4107787

Tate & Lyle/D 691.5 -17 1394485

Tesco/D 168.05 2.75 14970581

Unilever/D 3604 -52 1480841

United Util Gr/D 1020 -12 487345

Vodafone Group/D 226.4411 -3.55 28879847

Whitbread/D 3714 26 373888

COMPANY CLOSE NET VOLUME

NAME CHG TRADED

COMPANY CLOSE NET VOLUME

NAME CHG TRADED

COMPANY CLOSE NET VOLUME

NAME CHG TRADED

COMPANY CLOSE NET VOLUME

NAME CHG TRADED

LONDON

BUSINESS18 THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

The Peninsula

DOHA: Gulf International Bank (GIB) has announced the appoint-ment of Osamah Mohammed Shaker (pictured) as the new Chief Executive Officer of GIB

Capital LLC, a wholly owned sub-sidiary of GIB, effective since 29 June 2016.

Shaker comes with substan-tial banking experience in both international and domestic finan-cial institutions within Saudi Arabia. Most recently, Shaker held the position of Director General of Banking Control overseeing and regulating all the commercial banks in Saudi Arabia and Senior Advisor to the Deputy Governor for Supervision at the Saudi Ara-bian Monetary Agency (SAMA).

Prior to that, Shaker gained over 16 years of banking and investment experience in the Kingdom with the Saudi British Bank and HSBC Saudi Arabia. During his time at HSBC Saudi Arabia, Shaker held executive

level positions as Managing Director — Head of Investments, and subsequently Managing Director — Head of Financial Markets.

GIB’s Chief Executive Officer, Abdulaziz A Al Helaissi, com-mented on the appointment: “I am delighted to welcome Osa-mah to GIB. We are fortunate to have a man of his experience lead our investment banking serv-ices. He will play a pivotal role in realising GIB Capital’s strate-gic development.”

Shaker is a holder of a Bach-elor of Administrative Sciences Degree in Quantitative Meth-ods from King Saud University, Riyadh and a Master of Sci-ence Degree in Statistics from Colorado State University, Fort

Collins, Colorado, USA. Shaker also worked at the Institute of Public Administration, teaching statistics and providing statisti-cal consultation.

GIB Capital is a wholly-owned subsidiary of GIB, owned by the six Gulf Cooperation Coun-cil countries. With more than 10 years of experience in the invest-ment banking services, GIB through GIB Capital continues to offer a comprehensive range of investment banking products and services which are designed to provide innovative, custom-ised financial and investment solutions for clients. GIB Cap-ital provides a full spectrum of investment banking services including equity placements (ini-tial public offerings and private placements), mergers, disposals and acquisitions, privatisations, debt capital market products and services, strategic debt advisory and asset management.

Shaker comes with substantial banking experience in both international and domestic financial institutions.

GIB Capital appoints new Chief Executive Officer

Reuters

DUBAI: Gulf stock indexes benefited from fund inflows into emerging markets yesterday, with all advancing for a second day, as central banks in major global markets signalled the prospect of further economic stimulus.

The Bank of England is due to have its first post-Brexit policy meeting today, where analysts are expecting the central bank to cut UK interest rates to calm markets. In Japan, there are also expectations of further economic stimulus this month.

“The lower-for-longer interest rate environment and the positive knock-on effect on emerging mar-kets is clearly seen through the sizeable foreign inflows that regional equities are currently enjoying,” said Mohamed El Jamal, managing director of capital mar-kets at Abu Dhabi’s Waha Capital.

The first slew of second quarter earnings also lifted Gulf investor confidence, bucking expectations of cor-porate weakness this period because of low oil prices.

“While still early days, second-quarter earning sea-son has kicked off, and we so far had earnings come out from Saudi, Qatar and Oman, most of which came slightly ahead of market expectations and have been supportive,” El Jamal said.

Saudi Arabia’s index rose 1 percent, recording a fourth day of gains since it resumed trading after the Eid al-Fitr holiday. The benchmark’s advance was sup-ported by Banque Saudi Fransi , which rose 3.4 percent. The lender, part-owned by Credit Agricole, announced an estimate-beating 3.2 percent jump in quarterly profit and plans for a higher first-half dividend than it paid in the same period last year.

In the United Arab Emirates, Dubai’s bourse gained 1.4 percent, as investors built up positions in banking stocks. Dubai Islamic Bank jumped 3.4 percent, while Emirates NBD gained 1.8 percent. Abu Dhabi’s index rose 0.7 percent, lifted by telecommunications firm Etisalat whose shares rose 3.7 percent.

Oman’s index was driven by Bank Muscat, with both climbing 1.1 percent. The marginal increase in quarterly profit, which beat the forecast of analysts, lifted other banking stocks in the sultanate.

Egypt’s index advanced 1.4 percent. Global Telecom Holding gained 1.1 percent, its eighth straight sessions of gains to hit a 16-month high.

Gulf stocks benefit from EM inflows ahead of stimulus

A woman browses her smartphone as she walks and shops inside a shopping mall in Beijing yesterday. China’s growth slipped to a new seven-year low of 6.6 percent in the second quarter, according to a survey of economists, despite government efforts to spur activity.

China’s growth slips to 6.6%

BUSINESS20 THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

The Peninsula

DOHA: Cisco recently awarded Oore-doo with a highly-regarded service provider’s certification. The Cloud

and Managed Services Certification (CMSP) confirms Ooredoo’s ability to offer Cisco-powered solutions of the highest standards to business custom-ers across Qatar.

Since signing two significant agreements at the Mobile World Con-gress in Barcelona in February 2016, Ooredoo and Cisco have continued to work together to build a diverse portfolio of strategic solutions for businesses in Qatar. The awarding of the new certification is a sign of the strengthening partnership, Ooredoo said in a statement yesterday.

Following the award, Sheikh Nasser bin Hamad bin Nasser Al Thani, Ooredoo’s Chief New Business Officer, and Mohammad Hammoudi, Qatar General Manager, Cisco, met

in Qatar for a strategic planning dis-cussion. The meeting outlined plans for an exciting calendar of upcom-ing events and agreed a template to support the launch of new technolo-gies, including an ambitious push to build Ooredoo’s position as an enabler of “smart city” technologies in Qatar.

Over the first six months of 2016, Ooredoo and Cisco have announced a range of long-term strategic agree-ments, including the launch of Cisco’s Virtual Managed Services (VMS) suite, and a service that enables Ooredoo’s enterprise customers to lease Cisco technology from Ooredoo, providing them with easy access to cutting-edge technology. The companies have also co-hosted several success-ful networking events for businesses,

Nissan Motor Vice-President Kimiyasu Nakamura gestures as he introduces the company’s all-new minivan Serena during a press conference at their headquarters in Yokohama, suburban Tokyo, yesterday.

Qatar stocks jumps 1.76% on earning expectationsBy Satish Kanady The Peninsula

DOHA: Qatar stocks surged 1.76 percent, or 178.95 points, yesterday after companies have started deliv-ering financial results for the first half. Banking and real estate stocks lifted the benchmark index to close the market at 10,319.74 points.

The Qatar earning season got under way on Tuesday with the QNB delivering solid results. The region’s

leading lender recorded 12 percent increase in its net profit. Commer-cial bank, Gulf Warehousing, Ezdan Holdings and Qatar National Cement are expected to announce their results in the coming weeks.

QNB stocks jumped 1.83 percent yesterday to lift the banking sector to 1.16 percent. QIB rose 1.60 percent, while Doha Bank and Commercial Bank edged 1.25 percent and 1.06 percent, respectively.

The real estate sector index advanced 2.42 percent, with Ezdan gaining the most by n 2.72 percent.

Telecom sector rose 2.32 percent.Trading volume reached 7.09 mil-lion compared to 4.7 million shares exchanged on Tuesday at QR142.6m. Qatar First Bank led the volume with 1.1 million shares.

Meanwhile, analysts yesterday noted Qatari companies’ aggregate profit expected to decline by 8 per-cent YoY as one of the major company in the industrial sector is forecasted to report a 47 percent YoY decline in profit, due to lower product prices and higher feedstock prices. Qatari Banks aggregate profit is expected

to grow by 1 percent. Qatar Islamic Bank’s profit is forecasted to increase by 6 percent YoY.

The Q2, 16 consensus estimates of GCC equities released by the SICO Investment Bank indicate a 8 per-cent YoY decline in GCC companies’ profits in 2Q16. Saudi’s earnings are estimated to drop 11 percent YoY and UAE companies’ results to be 4 percent lower YoY. However, 2Q16 consensus earnings are estimated to grow by 11 percent on a QoQ basis .

Saudi companies’ profits are forecasted to go down by 11 percent

YoY in 2Q16. Aggregate Saudi Petro-chemicals earnings are expected to decline by 39 percent, led by lower product prices and rising feedstock cost after listing of energy subsidies. SABIC’s results are estimated to be 37 percent lower YoY while SAF-CO’s earnings are expected to drop 51 percent due to lower Urea prices. Aggregate Saudi Banks’ profit is fore-casted to decline by 3 percent.

In the UAE, analysts expect a 4 percnet YoY decrease in 2Q16 earnings, mainly due to earnings contraction across most banks.

Production cut not to drive A380 into redReuters

FARNBOROUGH: Airbus’s decision to cut production of the world’s big-gest passenger jet, the A380, will not drive the programme massively into the red, the European planemaker’s group chief executive said yesterday.

Tom Enders added that Air-bus remains optimistic about the long-term prospects of the double-decker, 544-seat A380, and hopes to return to higher levels of output in the years ahead. “I hope that this is only a year or two and then we can raise production rates again,” he told reporters at the Farnbor-ough show.

Enders was speaking a day after Airbus cut its target for A380 deliv-eries to 12 a year from 2018, from 27 in 2015 and well below its cur-rent break-even point, due to weak demand.

The reduction deals a blow to one of Europe’s biggest and most expensive industrial projects.

Airbus and US rival Boeing have enjoyed years of booming sales, driven by rising air travel and demand for new fuel-efficient planes. But risks to the global econ-omy, from slowing growth in China to Britain’s decision to leave the Euro-pean Union, have caused sales to dry up and analysts are worried some of the industry’s record order backlog could be deferred or cancelled.

So far at the Farnborough air-show, the industry’s showcase event, Airbus and Boeing have announced combined business worth a little more than $50bn, including deals that confirmed preliminary agree-ments. That is less than half of the business closed at last year’s sister event in Paris.

Each A380 is worth $432.6m at list prices, but after discounts it would sell for significantly less.

Ooredoo’s CMSP offers Cisco-powered solutions

Google says

anti-piracy

effort has

delivered $2bn

AFP

WASHINGTON: Google said yesterday its efforts to fight online piracy have yielded $2bn paid out to copyright holders whose content is shown on its YouTube plat-form. The US online giant, updating its anti-piracy efforts, said its system has been generating income for copyright holders when con-tent is posted to YouTube.

At the same time, Google is also offering “more convenient, legitimate alternatives” that allow con-sumers to buy music, films and other content, accord-ing to a statement.

“We take protecting cre-ativity online seriously, and we’re doing more to help battle copyright-infringing activity than ever before,” said a blog post from senior policy counsel Katie Oyama.

Google and YouTube have been using a system called ContentID, where a copyright holder can notify the company if its music or other content is being shown on YouTube. The copyright owners have an option to remove the content or leave it up and reap advertising revenue from it, and 95 per-cent of music owners choose the latter option.

Ooredoo’s Chief New Business Officer Sheikh Nasser bin Hamad bin Nasser Al Thani (right) and Cisco Qatar General Manager Mohammad Hammoudi during the meeting in Qatar.

The awarding of the new certification is a sign of the strengthening partnership between Ooredoo and Cisco.

demonstrating the enhanced range of cloud solutions and services avail-able for companies in Qatar, as well as dedicated seminars for small

businesses on the best way to enhance their performance by deploying best-in-class solutions.

For full details of the solutions

available with Ooredoo, businesses customers can arrange a meeting with their Account Manager or ring the business team on 8008000.

Nissan launches auto drive features different from hands-free drivingReuters

YOKOSUKA: Nissan Motor Co Ltd launched a suite of semi-autonomous driving functions yesterday stressing they were intended to assist and not replace drivers, just two weeks after similar technology in another mak-er’s car was involved in a fatal crash.

Japan’s second-ranked carmaker by vehicle sales said its ProPilot can drive a vehicle on single-lane motor-ways and navigate congestion. It said the feature will first appear on a Ser-ena minivan model on sale in Japan from next month.

As global automakers race to develop self-driving cars, the safety of current automated systems was called into question by US investiga-tors saying a driver died in a crash while the autopilot of his Tesla Motors Inc Model S was engaged.

While Nissan declined to com-ment directly on that incident,

Executive Vice-President Hideyuki Sakamoto said it was important driv-ers did not overestimate the purpose and capabilities of automated driving functions. “These functions are meant to support drivers, and are not meant as self-driving capabilities” which let drivers take their eyes off the road, he said. “These are two very differ-ent things.”

Pushing a button on the steering wheel activates ProPilot, which keeps the vehicle a fixed distance from the car in front without requiring the driver to control the steering, accel-erator or brake.

Like Tesla’s similar technology, ProPilot requires drivers to keep their hands on the wheel.

A warning sign flashes if the wheel is released for more than around four seconds, and an alarm sounds after 10 seconds.

General Manager Tetsuya Iijima at Nissan’s Advanced Technology Devel-opment department said it was up to automakers to educate drivers about

the capability of automated driving functions to prevent misuse that could lead to accidents.

“Naturally, there are limitations to the system, and our job is to com-municate what those limitations are,” he told reporters.

With ProPilot, Nissan joins many automakers including Tesla, BMW and Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz in marketing adaptive cruise control and traffic jam assistance.

Nissan will sell its ProPilot-equipped Serena for under 3m yen ($28,758), making it one of few mid-priced vehicles with autopilot features more common among luxury cars.

The automaker also plans to add ProPilot to Qashqai sport utility vehicle crossover models in coming months, and introduce the feature in the United States and China.

Nissan continues to aim for autonomous multiple-lane driving, including lane changes, by 2018, and functions for full urban driving, including intersection turns, by 2020.

Dustin will betough to beat,says Day

PAGE | 23 PAGE | 24

All eyes on pacer Amir as Pakistan

return to Lord’s

THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016 • 9 SHAWWAL 1437

www.thepeninsulaqatar.com

@peninsulaqatar @peninsula_qatarthepeninsulaqatar

Pacquiao plans to fight again this year: Promoter

AFP

LOS ANGELES: Filipino boxing star Manny Pacquiao plans to come out of retirement to fight, his promoter said on Tuesday, though the boxer said no fight has yet been set.

Bob Arum told Ameri-can sports broadcaster ESPN that the former welterweight champion plans to fight on either October 29 or Novem-ber 5 as a main event bout in Las Vegas as long as it doesn’t clash with his senate duties in the Phil-ippines. No opponent has been named thus far.

“Manny wants to come back,” Arum said. “The problem is he can

only come back if it doesn’t interfere with his senate duties.”

Arum had previously planned an October 15 fight in Mandalay Bay Events Center, but scrapped it due to upcoming votes in the senate in Pac-quiao’s native Philippines.

“The question is building avail-ability because we want to do the fight in Las Vegas,” Arum said about

the new dates. Arum said the most difficult part of setting up a fight is working around the boxer’s busy political schedule.

“He now has given us the go-ahead to shop for a venue and an opponent and see if we can do it on a particular date or dates,” Arum said.

“We’ve been trying to work out a date that doesn’t interfere with his senatorial responsibilities and his ability to train.”

But in a statement, Pacquiao, who has a record of 58-6-2 with

38 knockouts, denied any firm plans on a fight. “There is no

truth to media reports that I’m planning to take a leave from my senate duties just to fight again atop the ring. I want to make it clear -- my priority is my legislative works,” he said.

“My next fight has not yet been discussed. Should there be any, I’ll make sure it will not interfere with my senate duties.”

The boxer said all his training would take place in the

Philippines so that he can keep participating in senate proceed-ings. Pacquiao typically spends

half his time training in the Philip-pines and the other half in the US.

“Boxing is my only means of live-lihood to support my family and to help those who are in need. Politics, to me, is a vocation not a means to eke out a living. I want to maintain that belief. I want to keep my dignity intact while in public service,” he said.

The 37-year-old Pacquiao last fought in April, when he won a unan-imous decision over Timothy Bradley. Pacquiao said at the time that the bout would be his last. Pacquiao’s advi-sor Michael Koncz told ESPN that he working with both Arum and Pac-quiao on fight plans.

“Manny’s primary concern and obligation is to fulfill his senatorial duties,” Koncz said.

“But he misses (boxing). He misses the training. He misses being in the gym. You can see when he trains it’s like a stress reliever for him. So I am working with Bob and Manny is working closely with the senate pres-ident to make sure the dates are OK. We are doing this properly.”

Adrien Broner (32-2, 24 KOs) was being considered as a possible opponent, but Arum said that would not happen because Broner wanted too much money for the fight. Other potential opponents could be unde-feated Terence Crawford or Viktor Postol, who meet in a July 23 fight.

The Filipino boxing star plans to come out of retirement but Senate duties will remain first priority

AFP

LOS ANGELES: Filipino boxingstar Manny Pacquiao plans tocome out of retirement to fight, his promoter said on Tuesday,though the boxer said no fight has yet been set.

Bob Arum told Ameri-can sports broadcaster ESPNthat the former welterweight champion plans to fight oneither October 29 or Novem-ber 5 as a main event bout in LasVegas as long as it doesn’t clash with his senate duties in the Phil-ippines. No opponent has been named thus far.

“Manny wants to come back,”Arum said. “The problem is he can

senatorial responsibilities and his ability to train.”

But in a statement, Pacquiao,who has a record of 58-6-2 with

38 knockouts, denied any firmplans on a fight. “There is no

truth to media reports thatI’m planning to take a leavefrom my senate duties justto fight again atop the ring.I want to make it clear -- my priority is my legislativeworks,” he said.

“My next fight has not yet been discussed. Should there be any, I’ll make sure it will not interfere with my senate duties.”

The boxer said all his training would take place in the

Philippines so that he can keep participating in senate proceed-ings. Pacquiao typically spends

fought in April, when he won a unan-imous decision over Timothy Bradley. Pacquiao said at the time that the boutwould be his last. Pacquiao’s advi-sor Michael Koncz told ESPN that heworking with both Arum and Pac-quiao on fight plans.

“Manny’s primary concern andobligation is to fulfill his senatorialduties,” Koncz said.

“But he misses (boxing). He misses the training. He misses being in thegym. You can see when he trainsit’s like a stress reliever for him. So I am working with Bob and Manny isworking closely with the senate pres-ident to make sure the dates are OK.We are doing this properly.”

Adrien Broner (32-2, 24 KOs)was being considered as a possible opponent, but Arum said that would not happen because Broner wanted too much money for the fight. Other potential opponents could be unde-feated Terence Crawford or Viktor Postol, who meet in a July 23 fight.

Qatar continue winning streak in Davis Cup The Peninsula

TEHRAN: The Qatari tennis team continued its winning streak in the Asia/Oceania Zone Group III of Davis Cup with a convincing 3-0 win against Cambodia on Tuesday.

The event takes place at Enghe-lab Sports Complex in Tehran, Iran and will conclude on Saturday.

In their first match against Cam-bodia, Qatar’s Mousa Shanan beat Nysan Tan of Cambodia 2-6 6-4 6-3. In the second , then Mubarak Shan-nan outclassed Kenny Bun 6-3 6-4.

In the doubles tie, Jabor Al Mutawa and Mousa Shanan

outplayed Samneang Long and Phalkun Mam 7-5 7-5.

Qatar will take on Syria next. The Qatari squad includes

Mubarak Shanan, Mousa Shanan, Abdullah Shanan, Essa Shanan and Jabor Mohammed Ali Mutawa.

The Qatari team plays in Pool B alongside Lebanon, Syria, Sin-gapore, and Cambodia meanwhile Iran, Turkmenistan, Hong Kong and Pacific Oceania compete in Pool A.

The winner of Pool A will com-pete against the runner-up of Pool B while the winner of Pool B will play against the runner-up of Pool A to determine which two nations will advance to Asia/Oceania Zone Group II in 2017.

A victorious Qatari tennis player gestures after winning a game against a Cambodian player at the Enghelab Sports Complex in Tehran, Iran on Tuesday.

Rio goes with collection of 13 official posters AP

RIO DE JANEIRO: Most Olympics have only one official poster. The Rio de Janeiro Games will have 13, a collection meant to showcase the diversity of Latin America’s largest country.

The collection, composed by 12 Bra-zilian artists and a Colombian, went on display on Tuesday at the Museum of Tomorrow, the modernist ship-like build-ing designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and set in Rio’s renovated port

area. Carla Camurati, director of culture for the Rio Olympics, said the posters were meant to highlight the variations in a country of 200 million that is made up former African slaves, native peoples, Europeans from Portugal and across Europe, Japanese — and mixtures of many more.

“It’s really hard for us in Brazil to choose one artist to represent the Olym-pic Games, or represent the official posters,” Camurati said at the unveiling. “The important thing for us and the Olym-pic Games is to show Brazil as it is, with the colors, with the brightness, with the

beauty of the mixture of people that we have here; the mixture of roots that we have.”

The posters — mostly in hues of bright yellow, green, red and blue — focus on some of Rio’s classic images: a muscled runner on Copacabana Beach, a dark-skinned youth in a Rio favela — or slum — and motifs tied to fish, nature and the sea.

Others show off the Olympics images — the five rings and the torch. Several are pure abstractions playing with swirls of colors. One looks at the varied grids of sports fields, and another is merely white

specks sprayed across a black background.The Colombian artist is Olga Amaral.

Brazilians include the street artist Kobra, the painter Juarez Machado and artist-architect Gringo Cardia.

Camurati said the posters will remain in the museum until July 22. They go then to Deodoro in northern Rio, the second-largest cluster of Olympic venues. After that, they’ll find permanent homes in area schools.

“What we have here is a collection,” Camurati said. “One for each taste. One for each person. One for each part of the country.”

The official collection of posters for the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games, made by 12 Brazilian artists and one Colombian, is presented at the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Tuesday.

Golfers’ withdrawals

have ‘frustrated’ squash,

says PSA chief

Reuters

LONDON: The growing number of leading golfers with-drawing from the Rio Olympics has disappointed the sport of squash, Professional Squash Association (PSA) chief executive Alex Gough has said.

Squash was among the sports short-listed for pos-sible inclusion at the 2020 Olympics but failed to make the final list of five, with golf selected to feature at the Games in Tokyo.

The world’s top four players -- Jason Day, Dustin Johnson, Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy -- have pulled out of the Games citing health concerns from the mos-quito-born Zika virus.

Australia’s Adam Scott, who will also skip the Games, told Reuters a year ago he considered Olym-pic golf to be an “exhibition” event, with other sports much more deserving of Games exposure.

“It has been intensely frustrating. Quite honestly, it was almost predictable. Very early on Adam Scott said Olympic golf was, in his words, going to be an exhi-bition event,” Gough told British media on Tuesday.

“That basically showed everyone else that it was not held in as high esteem by the top players as it should be. You’ve got guys saying it won’t count as their pin-nacle, and that’s the most disappointing thing to the squash-playing community.”

Rio will mark the return of golf to the Olympic fold for the first time since 1904.

Squash, played in more than 185 countries, has made great strides in modernising the sport.

Manny Pacqu iao celebrates after defeating Timothy Bradley Jr. by unanimous decision in their welterweight fight at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada in this April 9, 2016 file photo.

The Peninsula

DOHA: Al Gharafa, coached by the Pedro Caixinha have decided to have a traning camp in Portu-gal ahead of the new Qatar Stars League season.

Caixinha team will play a friendly match next Saturday against Al Karama, an amateur team, as the Cheetahs prepare for next season.

The match with Al Karama will be 48 hours before Al Gharafa travel

to Portugal to engage in a training camp there.

The camp will continue until August 7.

Pedro Caixinha led the team drills for the first time on Tuesday in the presence of a large number of players.

Al Gharafa will leave on July 18 to the Portuguese camp and will play several friendly matches while at the camp.

Meanwhile, Al Arabi started its training yesterday evening at their stadium, amid the presence of a

large number of players. The exer-cises were held under the supervision of their new assistant coach, Yusuf Adam.

The exercises took place amid the presence of 17 players.

Jirado Biloso, Al Arabi’s new coach will arrive to Doha today and is set to take over the responsibil-ity of leading the technical team as

he replaces Gianfranco Zola. Yusuf Adam initially gave a lecture to the players in the middle of the pitch in which he talked about the first phase of preparations for the new season, which will continue until July 30.

He also talked about the pre-paratory in the German city of Nuremberg, which runs until August 26 and will see the team participate in a number of friendly matches.

The players are expected to go through more physical training as they return from a long break fol-lowing the end of last season.

Elsewhere, Abdul Rahman Mohammed returns to Lekhwiya at the start of the current season after his loan spell ended with Al Wakra.

Abdul Rahman started train-ing with his team, which started last Sunday and left at dawn Wednesday with Lekhwiya to the Austrian train-ing camp.

Abdul Rahman Mohammed moved to Al Wakra early last sea-son on loan, which expired at the end of the season and now the player returns to Lekhwiya.

GEARING UP FOR NEW SEASON

SPORT22 THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

Al Gharafa players training in Doha under coach Pedro Caixinha’s guidance for upcoming new season. Al Gharafa will leave on July 18 for Portugal and will play several friendly matches while at the camp. RIGHT: Al Arabi players training in Doha under the supervision of their new assistant coach, Yusuf Adam.

Al Gharafa to hold training camp in Portugal

FA sounds out Allardyce over England job

AFP

LONDON: Sam Allardyce (pic-tured) looks to be in pole position to become the next England manager after his club Sunderland revealed yesterday they granted at his request permission to speak to the Football Association.

The 61-year-old Englishman, who was interviewed for the England job 10 years ago but lost out to Steve McClaren, spoke with the three-man FA panel on Tuesday about succeed-ing Roy Hodgson, who resigned after England were beaten by Iceland in the Euro 2016 last-16 clash.

Sunderland, who Allardyce saved from relegation last term, made clear they wished the situation to be resolved as quickly as possible so

they can prepare for another tough campaign in the Premier League.

“The Football Association con-tacted Sunderland AFC to seek permission to speak with our man-ager as part of what was supposed to be a confidential discussion proc-ess with potential candidates for the position of England manager,” read a statement from Sunderland.

“At Sam Allardyce’s request, we agreed to this.

“Sam is very much key to our plans. After what was an extremely challenging season, we are keen to see a period of stability, both on and off the field, and we want him to remain as manager of our foot-ball club.

“The ongoing speculation over Sam’s position is extremely damag-ing to Sunderland AFC, particularly at this crucial time of the season and we urge the FA to respect the dis-ruption that this process is causing and bring about a swift resolution to the matter.”

Allardyce, who apart from an Irish championship with Limerick City in 1992 has never won a major domestic trophy, is one of several names who have been linked with one of the trickiest jobs in the sport.

A fellow former no-nonsense central defender Steve Bruce, now manager of Hull, Arsenal’s veteran

handler Arsene Wenger, the United States’ German coach Jurgen Klins-mann and young Englishman Eddie Howe, who has impressed at Bournemouth, have all figured in talk about the job.

Allardyce, though, is the odds on favourite with English book-maker William Hill for, despite not winning anything significant in his managerial career with among oth-ers Bolton, Newcastle, Blackburn and West Ham, he generally engenders respect and is seen as a great moti-vator of players. His remarks of 10 years ago which fell on stoney ground that England was head-ing into an ‘abyss’ may have been ignored by the FA then, but reso-nate now after successive failures at major championships.

Since Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson guided England to the 2006 World Cup quarter-finals, losing to Portugal on penalties, they have either failed to qualify for a championships -- Euro 2008 which cost McClaren his job -- or failed to get past the first knock-out stage in the subsequent two Euros and two World Cups under the autocratic Fabio Capello and then Hodgson.

Allardyce’s remark after he lost out to McClaren sounds even more propitious: “The problem isn’t now, the problem is in the future.”

Celtic crash to Gibraltar part-timers LincolnAFP

PARIS: Scottish giants Celtic crashed to a 1-0 Champions League defeat to Lincoln Red Imps on Tuesday with the goal scored by Lee Casciaro, a policeman in his day job.

Manager Brendan Rodg-ers’ first competitive match in charge was a humiliating affair, with 34-year-old Casciaro inflict-ing the hammer blow in the 48th minute.

“Surreal, it’s what people dream about, beating a big club like Celtic, we’ve done it here,” the match winner told Sky Sports.

“Getting the winning goal is something that will be with me for the rest of my life,” he added.

“Historic result for our club tonight. A brave performance by our lads has delivered a dream result. Well done to all!” Lincoln tweeted.

This was one of 1967 Euro-pean champions’ Celtic’s worst ever defeats in the competition, and it left the Hoops counting on turning this second qualifying tie around in the return leg at Park-head next week.

For Rodgers it was the worst possible start to his Celtic career, the former Liverpool boss having replaced Ronny Deila in May.

Celtic turned up in Gibraltar for their first competitive fixture of the season as overwhelming favourites against their semi-professional opponents who also included a taxi driver, a fireman in their line-up.

“It’s (football) like a hobby for us,” Casciaro said.

Named in honour of English lower-league club Lincoln City, Gibraltar’s Red Imps have domi-nated the domestic game in recent times, much like Celtic, winning the last 14 league championships.

Casciaro, who works for the Gibraltar Defence Police, scored the decisive goal in Lincoln’s 2-1 win over Andorran outfit Santa Coloma in the first qualifying round last week. Celtic struggled in the heat and then got caught out by Casciaro, scorer of Gibraltar’s first international goal against Scotland at Hampden in 2015, who scored from 12 yards.

The visitor’s Leigh Griffiths hit the woodwork twice and French striker Moussa Dembele, mak-ing his competitive debut on his 20th birthday, had a goal disal-lowed after the half hour mark.

Celtic, aiming to return to the Champions League group stages for the first time since 2013/2014, had arrived at the Victoria Sta-dium unbeaten in their four warm-up matches.

But despite sustained late pressure Lincoln held out for a famous victory. Rodgers tried to inject a sense of realism to the topsy turvy outcome.

“There is no embarrassment,” he said.

“It was a tough game in tough conditions. We didn’t take our chances, they took their chance.

“We have seen enough to see that we can get through in the second leg. Of course you are dis-appointed to lose.

“The result here complicates it a bit for us. We move on to next week.”

On his appointment in May Rodgers had listed one of his objectives at Celtic as “making an impact on European football” - Tuesday’s result certainly did that, but not in the way he had ever envisaged.

Celtic, who have lost in the final play-off round for the past two seasons, will still fancy res-cuing he tie on home soil.

But Casciaro for one is not rul-ing out another upset in Glasgow.

“We know it’s going to be com-pletely different at Celtic Park, with 50-60,000 people, but hope-fully we can make an upset over there.”

Sunderland manager likely to succeed Hodgson, who resigned after England were beaten by Iceland in the Euro 2016 last-16 clash

Time for Balotelli to move on, says KloppReuters

LONDON: Manager Juergen Klopp has told Mario Balotelli that with so much competition for places up front at Liverpool he should look for another club.

Balotelli has returned for pre-season training following an unsuccessful loan spell at AC Milan but is well down the pecking order at Liverpool, who also have Daniel Sturridge, Christian Benteke, Divock Origi and Danny Ings on the books.

“I have spoken to him about this,” the manager told reporters. “He’s not at the stage of his career where he should be battling with four or five other players for one or two positions... so it’s clear we need a solution.“There will be a

club around who would be happy to have the new Mario Balotelli. I have spoken clearly to the player about that.”

Sampdoria have expressed their interest in the player, with president Massimo Ferrero saying they would be the perfect club for him to revive his career after scoring just three goals in 23 appearances for Milan last season.

Another player who is unlikely to be lining up for Liverpool for their Premier League opener against Arsenal on August 14 is defender Mamadou Sakho, who underwent treatment for a long-standing Achilles problem.

The France international has not played since April after being informed by European football’s governing body that he had failed a dope test.

Giggs signs up for Indian futsal leagueAFP

NEW DELHI: Welsh football legend Ryan Giggs (pictured) will return to the pitch as a player in the inaugu-ral Premier Futsal starting in India this week, the organisers announced yesterday.

Brazilian star Ronaldinho and former AC Milan striker Hernan Cre-spo have also signed up for the event beginning in Chennai on Friday.

Giggs, 42, recently left his assist-ant manager’s role at Old Trafford following the arrival of former Chel-sea boss Jose Mourinho.

“History waiting to be written! Ryan Giggs, Ronaldinho and Crespo are now part of the Premier Fut-sal family!” the organisers tweeted yesterday.

The tournament, which is the latest franchise-based sporting com-petition in India, will see six teams with five players each lock horns in the indoor competition. Each team

will be led by a marquee player with Giggs helming Mumbai and England great Paul Scholes, who was signed up last month, leading Bangalore. Giggs enjoyed a remarkable career with Manchester United between 1990 and 2014, netting 168 goals in 963 appearances.

The Futsal has run foul of India’s national football body, which runs its

own Indian Super League and has advised domestic players to keep away from the event.Futsal organis-ers insist it is a private league and does not require any authorisation from the All India Football Federation.

Meanwhile, Manchester Unit-ed’s pre-season tour of China this month, when they face Manchester City and Borussia Dortmund, will give the players an opportunity to forge a close bond, manager Jose Mourinho has said.

United’s first game under Mour-inho will be against last season’s Bundesliga runners-up Dortmund in the International Champions Cup in Shanghai on July 22.

The 53-year-old Portuguese manager will also renew hostilities with old adversary Pep Guardiola, who replaced Manuel Pellegrini as City’s manager, on June 25.

“I hope to see a group, from an emotional point of view, coming together and getting to know each other better and understanding each other better,” Mourinho said.

SPORT 23THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

All eyes on pacer Amir as Pakistan return to Lord’s

AFP

LONDON: Pakistan’s Mohammad Amir will hope to put the 2010 spot-fixing scandal behind him once and for all when he returns to the scene of the crime in today’s first Test against England at Lord’s.

Six years ago, during a Lord’s Test against England, Amir and Pakistan new-ball partner Mohammad Asif deliberately bowled no-balls on the instructions of captain Salman Butt as part of a sting operation carried out by a tab-loid newspaper.

All three received five-year bans from cricket and, together with sports agent Maz-har Majeed, jail terms.

Such was the impact of the controversy, the fact teenage sensation Amir took six for 84 in the first innings of that match has largely been forgotten.

For all his time out of cricket, the 24-year-old retains the ability to swing the ball late at sharp pace, as he showed with a first-innings haul of three for 36 in Pakistan’s tour opener against Somerset.

It means an England side missing all-time leading injured wicket-taker James Anderson and sidelined all-rounder Ben Stokes, should not have things all their own way as they did in the preceding 2-0 home series win over Sri Lanka.

While the likes of former Pakistan

batsman Ramiz Raja have expressed doubts about the wisdom of letting Amir back into international cricket, players on both sides have accepted the situation.

“We could talk or moan about it and have our opinions but the fact is it is not going to change him opening the bowling at us on Thursday (today) or playing against us throughout this (four-match) series,” said England batsman Joe Root.

Amir is far from the only threat in a Paki-stan bowling line-up also featuring fellow left-armer Wahab Riaz, Sohail Khan and leg-spinner Yasir Shah. The key to the four-match series could lie with both teams’ top-order batsmen.

England were repeatedly bailed out of early collapses against Sri Lanka by in-form middle-order batsman Jonny Bairstow.

Pakistan have a strong middle order in skipper Misbah-ul-Haq fellow veteran Younis Khan and the in-form Asad Shafiq.

But doubts persist over openers Moham-mad Hafeez and Shan Masood, just as there are concerns as to whether Alex Hales, yet to score a Test hundred, is the right man to partner skipper Alastair Cook at the top of England’s order.

The combative Riaz is looking to tar-get Root, now promoted to number three by England.

For the Yorkshireman, that was just pre-series “trash talk” but Riaz said of Root: “He is the backbone of the England team and get-ting him out early will put the pressure on England.

“If he thinks it is just trash talk then hats off to him.”

Turning to Amir, Riaz added: “He is a very intelligent bowler and he is a very strong lad...He is eager to perform.”

England will have to decide whether to give a debut to either Jake Ball or fellow pace-man Toby Roland-Jones, wo plays at Lord’s for Middlesex, as the fourth-placed team begin

their bid to leapfrog Pakistan (third) in the world Test rankings. The match will also mark the return to Test cricket of England batsman Gary Ballance after he was dropped last year.

But an unconcerned Riaz said: “We are not worried about what England has picked or they haven’t picked.

“The only thing we know is that England is a good team in their home conditions.”

For Riaz, and many Pakistanis, there is more riding on this match than just the raw result.

“Under the captaincy of Misbah this team is much more united,” he said.

“We have seen the hard time of Pakistan cricket...We have managed to make the peo-ple all over the world believe that Pakistan is a good Test team.

“The Pakistan team are a strong team and can always give you a hard time.”

Being without Anderson is blow for England.

However, when he was ruled out of last year’s fourth Test, fellow quick Stuart Broad took eight for 15 on his Trent Bridge home ground, as Australia were skittled out for 60, to set up an Ashes-clinching win.

Misbah’s team to go in the first Test against England with attacking bowlers as batsmen tipped to hold the key in four-match series

Pakistan’s Mohammad Amir during nets on

the eve of the first Test against England at Lord’s

in London, yesterday.

Riaz warns England no one

‘ruder’ than a Pakistani

AFP

LONDON: Wahab Riaz (pictured) has warned any England cricket-ers who ‘sledge’ or verbally abuse their Pakistani opponents during the upcoming Test series may get more than they bargained for.

Thursday sees England and Pakistan meet at Lord’s for the opening Test in a four-match series.

It will be Pakistan’s first series in England since their infamous 2010 tour.

That saw bowlers Moham-mad Amir and Mohammad Asif, together with the then captain Sal-man Butt given five-year bans an jail sentences for their roles in delib-erately bowling no-balls during that year’s Lord’s Test as part of a spot-fixing ‘sting’ operation by a tabloid newspaper.

Later that tour, when the teams returned to Lord’s for a one-day international, fast bowler Riaz and England batsman Jonathan Trott had to be separated in the nets after an angry exchange of words.

Riaz, recalling the incident, told reporters at Lord’s on Tuesday. “He was a bit rude and when it comes to being rude you can never beat the Pakistanis on it. We are the most rude when it comes to it. We are nice but if somebody is rude we won’t spare it.”

The fast bowler added: “He was a bit rude, he was angry, he was not scoring runs, he was getting out early in the ODIs - he was doing well in the Tests. It was a frustration he tried to take out on me.”

Ballance aims to make his mark AFP

LONDON: Gary Ballance has scored two Test hundreds at Lord’s, but that still did not stop him being prevented from entering the Pavilion last year.

Now, as the England batsman prepares to return to Test duty at the ‘home of cricket’ in this week’s series opener against Pakistan, he hopes his credentials won’t be called into question again.

Ballance, after a run of 15 Tests in which he scored nearly 1200 runs at a very respectable average of just under 48, including four hundreds, was dropped by England last year after losing form midway through the Ashes.

But the 26-year-old Zimbabwe-born Yorkshire left-hander is now back in the team following Nick Compton’s decision to take time out of cricket.

Ballance’s previous Test at Lord’s was not a happy occasion, with scores of one and nought – part of a sequence of just one fifty in his last 10 Test innings – against New Zea-land last year.

As if that wasn’t enough, he was

then refused entry when he returned to the Pavilion after close of play.

“I’m not very recognisable, am I?” said a smiling Ballance at an event staged by series sponsors Investec at Lord’s on Tuesday.

“I had to get a few of the England security down to let me in.

“I was coming back in to get a bag...wearing full England (train-ing) kit.

“But the lady at the desk was like ‘not today, you’re not coming in with-out a tie.’”

He added: “It didn’t bother me one bit...it happens at Headingley all the time!” Ballance comes into the match following a hundred for county champions Yorkshire against Middlesex.

Shortly before he was dropped, numerous pundits expressed

concerns regarding Ballance’s back-foot, deep in the crease technique.

But while taking some of those points on board, Ballance has resisted making wholesale alterations.

“If you’re not scoring runs you’re going to get criticised,” he said.

“I’m big enough to accept criti-cism, work on stuff and hope to get better from it.

“I know it’s not perfect, and I need to adjust and work on a few things, but you have to do what you think is best for yourself – and if not’s good enough, so be it.”

Nevertheless the pain of being dropped hit Ballance hard..

“I was absolutely gutted, of course...at times last year I was so uptight and found it a massive pres-sure. You question your ability for a while.”

That made it all the sweeter when national selector James Whitaker called Ballance to tell him he was back in the England squad.

“The phone call was a great feel-ing,” Ballance said.

“I’ve been on the end of a few saying ‘you’re not involved this time around’ -- so to get the good news was great.”

England’s Gary Ballance during nets at Lord’s yesterday.

Tendulkar calls for more help from pitches for bowlers Reuters

LONDON: Cricket pitches need to be more bowler-friendly if the rising imbalance between bat and ball is to be addressed, Indian batting great Sachin Tendulkar (pictured) has said.

The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) world cricket committee on Tuesday recommended limitations on the thickness and depth of bats amid concerns that the sport has tilted

heavily in favour of the batsmen in recent years.

A report commissioned by the MCC, the guardian of the game’s laws, in 2014 found the thickness of bats had marginally increased in the last century and that edges had broadened by 300 percent, meaning even mistimed shots could still find the boundary.

Tendulkar, who quit interna-tional cricket in 2013 as the game’s most prolific batsman both in Tests and the 50-over format, demanded

more assistance for the bowlers from the playing surface. “The wickets need to change; they need to be more helpful for bowlers,” Tendulkar said before adding: “In T20s, the greatest of bowlers are being reverse-swept. Three-hundred is no longer compet-itive in ODIs.

“So there should be at least one

format where bowlers have a bet-ter chance of executing their skills and making it more interesting for spectators.

“I don’t think it’s got much to do with bats, but I’m sure people on the (relevant) panel will be able to look into it.”

Tendulkar was part of the panel that recommended Anil Kumble for the India coach’s job and he expects the team to benefit from the vast experience of the former leg-spinner.

“A fabulous player, a hard

competitor and will not make any compromises on the field,” Tendulkar told ESPNcricinfo.

“He will be out there to win each and every moment. He played for almost 20 years, so there is plenty to share. I’ll just tell the players to grasp as much information from Anil as possible.”

Kumble, who came out to bowl with a bandaged jaw in a 2002 Anti-gua Test, can also teach the players how to handle adversity, said Tendulkar.

DEBATE ON IMBALANCE BETWEEN BAT & BALL

TEAMSEngland: Alastair Cook (capt), Alex Hales, Joe Root, James Vince, Gary Ballance, Jonny Bairstow (wkt), Moeen Ali, Chris Woakes, Stuart Broad, Steven Finn, Jake Ball

Pakistan (probable): Mohammad Hafeez, Shan Masood, Azhar Ali, Younis Khan, Misbah-ul-Haq (capt), Asad Shafiq, Sarfraz Ahmed (wkt), Wahab Riaz, Mohammad Amir, Sohail Khan, Yasir ShahUmpires: Kumar Dharmasena (SRI); Joel Wilson (WIS); TV umpire: Rod Tucker (AUS);

Match referee: Richie Richardson (WIS)

24 THURSDAY 14 JULY 2016

Dustin will be toughto beat, says Day

Reuters

TROON, Scotland: The last six British Opens held at Royal Troon have been won by Amer-icans and Dustin Johnson, the hottest player in golf, looks like he has all the credentials to send the US into seventh heaven this week.

Not only did the big-hitting 32-year-old follow up his vic-tory at last month’s US Open by capturing the prestigious WGC-Bridgestone Invitational title in Ohio, he also has a good record to boast about in the world’s oldest major.

Johnson has finished in the top 14 in four of his seven trips to the British Open and came within a whisker of landing the coveted Claret Jug in 2011 when he wound up in a tie for second place behind North-ern Ireland’s Darren Clarke.

“He has a lot of spotlight on him this week because he has won the last two events he’s played and they’ve been pretty big events,” world number one Jason Day told reporters on the windswept Ayrshire coastline.

“He’s typically played pretty well in the Open cham-pionship so he’s obviously going to be a very tough guy to beat.”

Johnson’s surge to sec-ond in the world rankings has come as a surprise to some. His namesake Zach Johnson, however, believes it was always destined to happen.

“He’s a supreme athlete and it just so happens that his sport for all of us, unfortunately, is golf,” said British Open title holder Zach. “Not many guys can do what he does.”

Day’s form has also been pretty spectacular, having tri-umphed seven times in the past 12 months to rise to the summit of the rankings.

The Australian suffered a near-miss last year when he ended up in a share of fourth place at St Andrews.

Winning a first British Open is clearly number one on

Day’s list of immedi-ate priorities but hanging

on to top spot in the rankings comes a close second.

“I think the stress of being number one in the world is a motivating factor for me just because I don’t want to lose it. It’s really important for me to make sure I stick to my proc-esses and do all the hard work I can to try to stay there for as long as I can.”

Jordan Spieth won the US Masters and US Open in 2015 and is almost certain to fig-ure prominently on the Troon leaderboard.

The 22-year-old American, however, has been the subject of intense scrutiny this week following his decision on Mon-day to opt out of next month’s Rio Olympics due to health concerns.

With the benefit of hind-sight, Spieth clearly would have made his announcement before Monday’s Games deadline.

“I wish I could have made it as early as possible, not only for myself but also for Olympic

golf, USA Golf,” said the world number three.

“I certainly was not trying to wait until the last minute. I just couldn’t make a decision and ... I was very indecisive with it.”

The other member of the so-called ‘Big Four’ of world golf, Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy, is pleased to be back at his home Open after being sidelined last year because of an injury he sustained while playing a friendly game of soccer.

“I guess it’s the start of a new chapter for me in the Open championship,” said the 2014 winner.

“It was very disappointing to miss last year but I’m deter-mined not to miss any more for the foreseeable future and it’s great to be back and have another chance to win another Claret Jug,” added world number four McIlroy.

The year’s third major begins today.

American League pull off All-Star Game victory AFP

LOS ANGELES: Kansas City’s Eric Hosmer and Salva-dor Perez blasted home runs as the American League claimed home field advantage in the World Series with a 4-2 win on Tuesday over the National League in the annual all-star game.

Hosmer, who was selected game MVP, and Perez combined to drive in all the runs for the winning team by hitting homers in a three-run second inning at Petco Park in San Diego. Hosmer also had an RBI single in the third.

Hosmer became the first Royals player to be named MVP of Major League Baseball’s mid-summer classic since Bo Jackson in 1989.

Hosmer said the focus for the AL players in Tues-day night’s close contest was on securing home field advantage for the championship series.

“That was the message from everyone in the club-house,” he said. “It is such a huge advantage to have home field advantage. I don’t know who it is going to be but we wanted to bring it back to the American League.”

The game, in front of a crowd of 42,386, featured a moment of controversy during the performance of the Canadian national anthem.

One member of the Canadian group The Tenors caused a kerfuffle by inserting “All Lives Matter” into the lyrics of the song and holding up a sign with the slogan.

The group later apologized on its Twitter account.The NL was leading 1-0 thanks to a Kris Bryant

homer in the first inning when Hosmer tied it with a one-out homer off NL starter Johnny Cueto.

“I put a good swing on one,” he said of the 389-foot drive into the left field stands. “I was just smiling all the way around the bases. It is fun when you can play this game and feel like a kid again.”

Two batters later, Perez connected for a two-run, 373-foot shot into the left field stands off Cueto.

Hosmer finished two-for-three with two RBIs.Cleveland right-hander Corey Kluber was the win-

ning pitcher and Baltimore left-hander Zach Britton collected the save. Cueto suffered the loss.

The NL stranded 10 runners and left the bases loaded in the eighth when Houston right-hander Will Harris threw a called third strike pitch past pinch-hit-ter Aldemys Diaz.

Boston designated hitter David Ortiz, who has said he will retire, drew a one-out walk and received an ovation from the crowd and hugs from the AL team bench when he came out for pinch-runner Edwin Encarnacion of the Toronto Blue Jays.

“Something that I will never forget,” Ortiz said of the cheers.

The 10-time all-star announced his intention to retire after his 20th season.

Harrison denies doping claims Agencies

PITTSBURGH: Pittsburgh Steel-ers linebacker James Harrison has denied ever taking perform-ance-enhancing drugs and said he never has met or had communica-tion with Charles Sly.

In a sworn affidavit submit-ted to the NFL by the NFL Players Association, Harrison refuted allegations made in an Al Jazeera America documentary, “The Dark Side,” which said he used PEDs supplied by Sly, an intern pharmacist.

“As a professional athlete, I have met thousands of people dur-ing my career,” Harrison wrote in the affidavit, “but to the best of my knowledge and recollection, I have never met with the individual who is apparently named Charles Sly. ...”

Cleveland Browns running back Isaiah Crowell called the city’s chief of police and apologized for an Instagram post last week that sent shock waves through the Browns’ organization.

Crowell’s Instagram post showed an illustration of a police officer having his throat slashed by a hooded figure.

The Green Bay Packers signed rookie running back Brandon Ross on Tuesday.

Ross was not drafted after playing at Maryland. The Minne-sota Vikings signed him and then released him on May 23 after just three weeks.

Shane Doan, who is the long-est serving team captain in the National Hockey League at 13 years, has signed a one year con-tract to remain with the Arizona Coyotes, the US media reported.

Doan, of Canada, signed a con-tract is worth $2.5 million but it could increase to $5 million with bonuses. The 39-year-old is enter-ing his 21st season in the NHL. He earned the nickname ‘Captain Canada’ for his commitment and role as captain of the national team, winning two gold medals and three silver at the World Ice Hockey Championships.

He won gold at the 2007 and 2003 Worlds and silver in 2009, 2008 and 2005.

American League infielder Eric Hosmer of the Kansas City Royals holds the MVP trophy after the 2016 MLB All Star Game at Petco Park on Tuesday.

American League catcher Salvador Perez of the Kansas City Royals hits a two-run home run during the 2016 MLB All Star Game.

Froome on the attack again, Sagan takes another stageReuters

MONTPELLIER: Chris Froome showed again he will attack his rivals on every terrain as the Briton extended his overall lead in the Tour de France with a surprising move in yester-day’s 11th stage, which was won with panache by world champion Peter Sagan.

Froome who represents Team Sky, along with his lieutenant Geraint Thomas, jumped into the wheel of Sagan when the Slovak broke away from the bunch 12km from the finish with his Tinkoff team mate Maciej Bod-nar of Poland.

The four built an advantage of about 20 seconds until the sprinters’ teams started their effort, but they could not catch the late fugitives.

Sagan, already a stage winner in Cher-bourg, outsprinted Froome to take the day’s laurels and deliver an almost final blow to Mark Cavendish in the green jersey race after the Briton was left behind in the finale because of a mechanical problem.

Sagan, Froome and Bodnar finished six seconds ahead of the pack. This also means that the defending Tour champion has extended his overall lead by 12 seconds as he collected six bonus seconds for his second place ahead of today’s much-feared 12th stage which will end up Mont Ventoux.

Froome had already taken his oppo-nents by surprise when he attacked in the final descent of the eighth stage last Saturday.

He now leads fellow Briton Adam Yates (Orica-Bike Exchange) by 28 seconds and

Ireland’s Dan Martin (Etixx-Quick Step) by 31 while last year’s runner-up Nairo Quintana (Movistar) of Colombia lies fourth 35 seconds off the pace.

Spain’s Joaquim Rodriguez, tipped as potential podium finisher, ended up 1:090 behind Sagan after being trapped behind fol-lowing a bunch split on a windy day.

TOUR DE FRANCE STAGE 11 RESULTSCarcassonne - Montpellier, 162.5 km

1. Peter Sagan (Slovakia / Tinkoff) 3:26:23”

2. Chris Froome (Britain / Team Sky) ST

3. Maciej Bodnar (Poland / Tinkoff)

4. Alexander Kristoff (Norway / Katusha) +6”

5. Christophe Laporte (France / Cofidis)

6. Jasper Stuyven (Belgium / Trek)

7. Edvald Boasson Hagen (Norway / Dimension Data)

8. Andre Greipel (Germany / Lotto)

9. Sondre Enger (Norway / IAM Cycling)

10. Oliver Naesen (Belgium / IAM Cycling)

OVERALL STANDINGS

1. Chris Froome (GBR/Sky) 52hrs 34min 37sec

2. Adam Yates (GBR/ORI) at 0:28.

3. Daniel Martin (IRL/ETI) 0:31.

4. Nairo Quintana (COL/MOV) 0:35.

5. Bauke Mollema (NED/TRE) 0:56.

6. Romain Bardet (FRA/ALM) 0:56.

7. Sergio Henao (COL/SKY) 0:56.

8. Alejandro Valverde (ESP/MOV) 1:13.

9. Tejay Van Garderen (USA/BMC) 1:13.

10. Roman Kreuziger (CZE/TIN) 1:28.

Tinkoff team rider Peter Sagan (centre) of Slovakia wins the 11th Stage of Tour de France cycling race in Montpellier, France yesterday.

Jason Day of Australia reads his putt on the 18th green during the second round of the 2016 RBC Heritage in South Carolina in this file photo.

World number one admits the American has a lot of spotlight on him at this week’s British Open

Dustin Johnson of the US plays his tee shot on the third hole during a practice round at Royal Troon in Scotland yesterday.