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TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016 • 24 MOHARRAM 1438 • Volume 21 • Number 6960 thepeninsulaqatar @peninsulaqatar @peninsula_qatar 2 Riyals

The Peninsula

DOHA: Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and the Father Emir H H Sheikh Hamad bin Kha-lifa Al Thani yesterday received at Al Wajba Palace scores of mourners paying tribute to H H Grandfather Emir Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani, who died on Sunday.

The Emir and Father Emir per-formed the funeral prayers for the late Sheikh Khalifa at Imam Mohammed bin Abdulwahab Mosque in Doha yesterday.

Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdul-lah bin Hamad Al Thani, H E Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad Al Thani, H E Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad Al Thani, H E Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Khalifa Al Thani, H H Sheikh Jas-sim bin Hamad Al Thani, Personal Representative of the Emir; H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalifa Al Thani, H H Sheikh Mohammed bin Khalifa Al Thani, H E Sheikh Jas-sim bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Prime Minister and Minister of Interior, H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani; Speaker of the Advisory Council, H E Moham-med bin Mubarak Al Khulaifi, and sons of the Father Emir also took part in the prayer which was per-formed after Asr prayers.

Many other members of the royal family, ministers, senior state officials, dignitaries and citizens also attended the prayer.

The Emir and Father Emir also received members of the royal fam-ily, ministers and citizens, praying for Allah to bestow mercy on the soul of the Grandfather Emir and make his residence paradise.

Emir and Father Emir will receive condolences from mourn-ers at Al Wajbah Palace today and tomorrow from 9am until Zuhr (noon) prayer and after Asr prayer until Isha prayers, the Emiri Diwan announced yesterday.

Condolences were pouring in

for the ruling family, as Grandfa-ther Emir H H Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani, was laid to rest yesterday.

President of Pakistan, Mamnoon Hussain, who was on a visit to Qatar, conveyed a condolence message.

“The people of Pakistan share the grief and stand with our Qatari brothers and sisters in this hour of grief. With the passing away of Sheikh Khalifa, Pakistan has lost a true friend. Pakistan will always remember His Highness with grat-itude, for laying the foundation and strengthening Pakistan-Qatar relations. Sheikh Khalifa was a visionary leader, who served the people of Qatar with great sincer-ity. His contribution to the welfare and development of people of Qatar will always be remembered. My thoughts and prayers are with Your Highnesses, Your family, and we pray, Allah Almighty to give you the strength and fortitude to bear this irreparable loss,” he said.

Emir received telephone calls from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Sudanese Presi-dent Omar Hassan Al Bashir, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, and Djibouti President Ismail Omar Guelleh, King Mohammed VI of the Kingdom of Morocco and Prince Moulay Rachid of Morocco.

President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro expressed his condolences on the death of Grandfather Emir during a phone call.

US Ambassador to Qatar, Dana Shell Smith said in a condolence message, “I was saddened to learn of the passing of the Grandfather Emir H H Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani yesterday. I offer my deep condolences to Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the Father Emir H H Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Al Thani fam-ily, and the Qatari government and people. May he rest in peace.”

→See also pages 2, 4 & 10

Sheikh Khalifa laid to restEmir, Father Emir take part in funeral of H H Grandfather Emir

Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Father Emir H H Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani during the funeral prayers for H H Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani, at Imam Mohammed bin Abdulwahab Mosque in Doha, yesterday.

Emir and Father Emir receive condolences

from Saudi King and Bahrain King

QNA

DOHA: Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Father Emir H H Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani met at Al Wajba Palace yes-terday with Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia who expressed his condolences on the death of the Grandfather Emir H H Sheikh Kha-lifa bin Hamad Al Thani.

The Deputy Emir H H Sheikh

Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani was also present along with H E Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad Al Thani, H E Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Khalifa Al Thani, Personal Representative of the Emir H H Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Khal-ifa Al Thani, H H Sheikh Mohamed bin Khalifa Al Thani, H E Sheikh Jassim bin Khalifa Al Thani, Prime Minis-ter and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani and a number of Their Excel-lencies sons of the Father Emir.

Custodian of the Two Holy

Mosques was accompanied during the audience by H H Prince Khalid bin Fahad bin Khalid bin Moham-med Al Saud, Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Prince Man-sour bin Saud bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Prince Talal bin Saud bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, and a number of Their Royal Highnesses Princes who offered their condolences.

Emir and Father Emir also met at Al Wajba Palace with H M King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bah-rain, who offered condolences on the demise of late Grandfather

Emir. Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Thani was also present along with H E Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Khalifa Al Thani, H H Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, Personal Representative of the Emir; H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalifa Al Thani, H H Sheikh Mohamed bin Khalifa Al Thani, H E Sheikh Jassim bin Khalifa Al Thani, Prime Minister and Interior Minis-ter H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani and a number of Their Excellencies sons of the Father Emir.

Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and Father Emir H H Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani with the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia (left), and H M King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain, in Doha, yesterday.

HOME 02 TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

Final prayers for the departed leader

HOME04 TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

Emir and Father Emir receive condolences

The Peninsula

DOHA: Sheikh Thani bin Abdul-lah Foundation for Humanitarian Services (RAF) has created fresh educational opportunities for 500 displaced children who dropped out of schools due to unrest in Al Ram-adi city of Iraq.

The project, implemented at a cost of QR2m, was financed by the Endowment Fund of Sheikh Thani bin Abdullah Al Thani. It is being implemented in areas housing poor displaced families in Al Ramadi and Kirkuk. The areas which have ben-efited are Banja Ali, Maskar Khalid

and Al Wasti.The initiative is part of the ongo-

ing project ‘Al Ghaza W Al Nur (Food and Light)’ being executed by RAF, in collaboration with Unicef and the UN World Food Program (WFP). The local partner of RAF in Ramadi is Help the Needy Charitable Trust (AAN).

The plan is to provide basic food items to needy families on a monthly basis so that they could send their children to school.

The RAF provided food baskets, school supplies including bags, sta-tioneries and uniforms to children and their families. More than 400 displaced families were provided

basic foodstuffs so they could let their children go to schools.

The project also aims to build two primary schools in Al Ram-adi comprising 12 classrooms with a capacity of 50 students per classroom. The project will meet the growing demands for seats in schools. There is a severe shortage of school facilities because almost all primary schools were destroyed in this area.

Most displaced people are fighting for survival. They do not have the basic needs so it is hard for them to send their children to school. In addition, most of the schools were destroyed and those left behind needed support for run-ning classes.

“Food & Light” initiative provides needy families with basic food items on a monthly basis for one year so they could send their children to school.

Hundreds of small development projects will also be launched to pro-vide livelihood for needy families.

RAF had allocated QR60m from its Endowment Fund of Sheikh Thani bin Abdullah Al Thani for its “Food & Light” initiative. The project would contribute to the education of 45,000 children in 15,000 families from 20 of the poorest countries based on UN reports and researches. These countries include: Mali, Niger, Sudan, Afghanistan, Chad, Pakistan, Sen-egal, Guinea, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Mauritania, Togo, Kenya, Nigeria and Liberia.

The Peninsula

DOHA: Sheikh Thani bin Abdullah Foundation for Humanitarian Serv-ices (RAF) has come to the rescue of 150 Syrian orphan children and their families sheltering in Turkey.

The Foundation is creating opportunities for them to reduce their suffering and make them happy. They were given gifts and cash in a programme organised by RAF in Al Rayhania city of Turkey to bring smiles on their faces.

The event was attended by Dr Mohamad Salah Ibrahim, Deputy General Manager of RAF, Ahmad

Yousuf Al Fakhro, Head of Financial Resources and Media Department at RAF, among other officials.

Representatives from a Turkish humanitarian organisation IHH, the local partner of RAF, also par-ticipated in the programme.

“RAF is holding such pro-grammes every now and then, especially when a delegation visits Turkey to honour some orphans and their families to bring smiles on their faces”, said Ahmad Yousuf Al Fakhro.

The programmes include cul-tural activities like reciting poetry and quiz competition.

“We came from Qatar, a coun-try supporting you and your issues at every international forum”,

said Ahmad Al Fakhro in a speech addressing the orphans in the programme.

“They are ambassadors of mercy from RAF. They are visiting you to know your situation and the needs. We love and care you like our chil-dren anbd we are happy to see you happy,” said Fakhro.

At the end of the programmes, the orphans were given gifts and cash for their families and those caring them.

The participants appreciated the role of Qatar and philanthropists in the country- citizens and expatriates -- for supporting Syrian refugees in Turkey and other neighbouring countries.

RAF helps educate 500 children in Al Ramadi

Temporary classrooms built in Al Ramadi city of Iraq.

Syrian orphans receive aidA Syrian child receiving gifts from RAF officials.

HOME06 TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

HOME08 TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

By Sanaullah Ataullah

The Peninsula

DOHA: With high power con-sumption in Qatar and other GCC countries, Doha will be hosting the GCC POWER 2016 Conference & Exhibition under the theme of ‘Towards Energy Efficiency’ from November 8 until 10.

Qatar produces 8,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity of which it con-sumes 5,300MW during peak hours, according to the press release issued by the organizers.

The GCC power sector will require about $50bn of investments in new power generating capacity. The GCC alone will add 76.8 giga-watts (GW) of capacity for power generation between 2016 and 2020, said the release.

The event will be organised by GCC-CIGRE in collaboration with the Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation (Kahramaa).

CIGRE is Doha-based GCC organ-isation, which encourages and develops scientific researches and studies in the field of electricity sys-tem for member countries.

“Qatar has been supporting CIGRE for long in a bid to develop power sector in the GCC,” said Ahmed Naser Al Nasr, Head of Technical Affairs Department at Kahramaa at a press conference held yesterday to announce the event.

“CIGRE’s job is to prepare the scientific basis to rationalize the consumption of electricity in mem-ber countries to preserve the natural resources. It also helps to increase the efficiency of electric system and reduce the cost of operation for power plants,” said Al Nasr.

“GCC-CIGRE focuses on eas-ing and encouraging exchange of technical data regarding power sys-tem and networks between the GCC countries,” said Fatima Al Foora Al Shamsi, Chairman of GCC-CIGRE. It set up technical committees and

holds workshops and conferences to achieve its goals, she added.

“More than 300 papers from 30 countries have been received for the forthcoming conference. The techni-cal committee has selected the best 50 papers for the conference,” said Al Shamsi.

“The theme of the conference ‘Towards Energy Efficiency’ is very important for the power sector of GCC countries,” said Ahmad Ali Ibrahim, Head of the Technical Com-mittee for GCC-CIGRE.

“The member countries launched programmes to rationalise power consumption for better use of its natural resources. Per capita annual power consumption of GCC is 9,650 gigawatt in an hour. However, the international per capita power rate is 2,782 gigawatt in an hour. The power consumption rate of Middle East is 3,384 in an hour”.

“The high rate of power con-sumption of GCC countries might show industrial and commercial growth as the power consump-

tion rate of the advanced countries l ike Europe, North America and Japan is 6,284, 13,985 and 8,063

in an hour respectively. But there is still big potential to reduce the consumption of power in the GCC,” said Ibrahim.

The opening session of the con-ference will be held on energy efficiency in which GCC leaders and

decision makers will address on the programmes adopted by their countries for power conservation and bring about new and renewa-ble energy to increase the efficiency.

The programme of the confer-ence includes ten sessions during

three days. Every session will dis-cuss four to seven papers provided by the research departments of the GCC, Arab and international power com-panies, operators and power plants in addition to research academies from all over the world.

Doha to host GCC Power 2016 conference and exhibition

Eng Ahmed Ali Al Ebrahim, Chairman, Technical Committee, GCC CIGRE; Eng Fatima Al Foora Al Shamsi, Chairman, Board of Directors, GCC CIGRE; Eng Ahmed Al Nassar, Steering Committee member, Kahramaa; and Eng Abdulaziz A Al Hammadi, Secretary General, GCC CIGRE, at a press conference to announce the GCC Power 2016 Conference, at the Sheraton Grand Doha Resort and Convention Centre. Pic: Salim Matramkot / The Peninsula

Sixth industrial security course opensThe Peninsula

DOHA: The sixth industrial security course for officers from GCC countries started on Sunday at the Officers Club in the Civil Defence Department.

The course came in the framework of cooperation and security coordination in industrial security field among GCC countries, and will continue for two weeks.

“The course comes at a time when the world, spe-cially the GCC countries, is witnessing several security challenges, which oblige us to create new strategies to enhance and protect our interests and economy,” said Khalifa Mohammed Al Attiyah, Assistant General Direc-tor for General Directorate for Industrial Security, at the opening of the course.

Participants at the Industrial Security Course.

By Fazeena Saleem

The Peninsula

DOHA: The Doha International Acad-emy for Organ Donation (DIAOD) was launched on Sunday with the aim of promoting education and research in organ donation in Qatar and inter-nationally.

The virtual academy was offi-cially launched during the Doha International Forum for Organ Dona-tion organized by the Qatar Organ Donation Center at Hamad Medi-cal Corporation (HMC). DIAOD is the world’s first international academy on organ donation.

The Academy will function under the umbrella of HMC as an additional activity of the Qatar Organ Donation Centre (Hiba) and will also support Qatar to achieve self-sufficiency in organ donation and transplant.

The new academy aims eventu-ally to become a hub for resources

and training required to assist other countries to establish their own pro-grammes. Qatar’s organ donation programme, with a unified national waiting list, has become a model for other countries to follow, said H E Dr Hanan Mohamed Al Kuwari, Minis-ter of Public Health.

“Qatar’s national strategy for organ transplantation is not only world-leading in terms of the clini-cal and ethical standards it applies,

but also one that is appropriate to the healthcare needs of our growing country and our diverse popula-tion…….With fairness and equity at its heart, our program has been recog-nized internationally and is something we can be proud of,” she said.

Dr Al Kuwari along with senior officials at the HMC honoured sev-eral living organ donors and families of diseased donors during the launch of DIAOD at Sharq Village and Spa.

DIAOD will be managed by a steering committee including an international advisory panel and HMC stakeholders. The launch of DIAOD also saw a group of six international leaders in organ donation and trans-plantation pledge their support for the Academy and further support for HMC’s goal to achieve self-sufficiency in organ donation.

They included Dr Dominique Mar-tin, Senior Lecturer in Health Ethics at

Deakin University in Australia, Pro-fessor Gabriel Danovitch from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and Dr Mirela Busic, an expert on organ donation from Croatia.

Since 2011 the Hiba and the Qatar Center of Organ Transplantation has worked to implement the Doha Donation Accord known as the ‘Doha Model’ of organ donation.

“Since its launch in 2011 the ‘Doha Model’ of Organ Donation

has achieved remarkable success in changing the attitudes of Qatar’s mul-ticultural society and we have also seen an increase in donors,” said Dr Riadh Fadhil, Director, Hiba.

“As of now we 170,000 people have pledged their willingness to donate their organs after death and hope it would reach up to 200,000 by end of the year,” he added.

Over the last three decades, Qatar has developed a robust deceased donation program, liver transplan-tation program and pediatric kidney transplantation program. The waiting list for kidney and liver transplant has reduced during recent years as well as the number of people travelling abroad for commercial transplanta-tion has dropped significantly.

“We have successfully increased the number of transplantation and decrease the number of patients who are traveling abroad for commercial transplantation by 70 percent,” said said Dr Yousef Al Maslamani, Medical Director of Hamad General Hospital.

Also plans are underway to intro-duce new organ transplant programs.

“Last year we launched our bone marrow transplantation program and currently we are at the final stage of preparation to launch pancreas transplantation and islet cell trans-plantation,” said Dr Al Maslamani. He, however, said that organ shortage still remains as a challenge that needs to be addressed by promoting deceased and live organ donations.

International academy for organ donation launchedQatar’s organ donation programme, with a unified national waiting list, has become a model for other countries.

Several organ donors and families of donors were honoured by Minister of Public Health H E Dr Hanan Mohamed Al Kuwari, and senior officials at the Hamad Medical Corporation on Sunday during the Doha International Forum for Organ Donation held at the Sharq Village and Spa. Pic: Kammutty VP / The Peninsula

HOME10 TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

Mourners at Al Wajba Palace to pay condolences on the demise of H H the Grandfather Emir Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani.

Paying last respectsPlan to set up fish farms to raise produce

By Sidi Mohamed

The Peninsula

DOHA: The Fisheries Resources Department at the Ministry of Municipality and Environment has announced that a number of sites will be allocated for the set-ting up of fish farms according to international specifications, a sen-ior official at the Ministry has said.

The project is aimed at enhanc-ing food security and supporting investment. It will be presented to investors and tenders will be invited.

“Such a project will increase local fish production and will offer all types of fish that the local market needs at any time. We have com-pleted the technical specifications and conditions related to the ten-der in collaboration with Ministry of Economy and Commerce and expect the project to start soon,” said Mohamed Mahmoud Al Abdal-lah, head of fish farming section at the Ministry in a recent interview

with Al Rayyan Channel (Taraheeb programme).

Qatar has an annual fish pro-duction of 14,000 tonnes, which covers 80 percent of local con-sumption. This project will cover the remaining 20 percent.

There will be three sites in the sea, each with an area of 900 hectares. Each site is expected to produce 2,000 tonnes annually.

There is also a project for shrimp farm on the coast in Al Shamal. “We will provide the small fishes to investors through Ras Matbakh project which is concerned with farming fish, and also supports marine research. The Ras Matbakh project can produce 10 million small fish, said Al Abdallah.

“Such a project will offer food security. The world now depends for 60 percent of its need on fish farms because of challenges faced in the sea, and because of decrease in production and higher demand. In Qatar, there is an increase in population and there is more demand for fish. These fish farms can offer any type of fish at any time regardless of the weather,” he added.

Replying a question on fish export, he said: “There is a special team responsible for exporting fish in case of surplus, but currently there is high demand for fish and export stopped a long time ago,” he added.

Three sites at sea with an area of 900 hectare each identified.

By Raynald C Rivera The Peninsula

DOHA: The story behind iconic Italian brands told in visual aesthetics will be featured in the “Branding Evolution” exhibition to be held from November 6 to 20 at City Centre Rotana.

This is the first time the exhibition will travel to the Middle East after receiving acclaim in European countries including Sweden, Swit-zerland, Belgium, Turkey and Italy.

“We are excited to bring this one-of-a-kind exhibition to Qatar for people to enjoy. The artistic and visual journey it creates will guide visitors through the evolution of some of Italy’s most famous and loved brands, such as Ferrari, Lamborghini, Versace, Fendi and Piaggio, among many more,” said Essa Ahmed, CEO, Rosso Italiano, organisers of the event.

Maurizio di Somma and Raffaele Fon-tanella, curators and owners of Museo del Marchio Italiano, expressed happiness having Qatar as the first stop of the expo in the region saying “Doha is not only the gate to the Mid-dle East, it’s indeed the artistic capital of the entire Gulf.”

“From an aesthetic and conceptual point of view, the exhibition offers insights of great interest that we are sure a refined and cultured

public like that of Qatar will appreciate. We are confident that the public will enjoy this fas-cinating journey and also many students of design and communication will be attracted by the real icons of Made in Italy,” they said.

Italy has been known for high qual-ity products and world-renowned brands in cars, apparel, furniture and food and bever-age which will be featured at the exhibition lasting for two weeks.

The event will also highlight a celebration of the ties between Italy and Qatar in various spheres, said Italian Ambassador Guido De Sanctis.

“The blend of tradition and modernisation is something that Italy and Qatar share. We love to present our countries as modern while keeping our traditions alive,” said De Sanc-tis, stressing an interesting aspect of Italian history will be shared through the exhibition which embodies a mix of the traditional and the modern.

Speaking at a press conference yesterday at City Centre Rotana, the ambassador said the event will also be a showcase of a combination of Italian opera and Qatari songs as well as the cuisine of both countries.

“Platinum award-winning and Grammy-nominated American singer Amii Stewart will be performing her most famous repertoire Incanto Quartet. Four renowned sopranos will

pay homage to great Italian opera while the first time and with the support of popular Qatari singer Ali Shaheen, they will combine an Ital-ian opera of Rossini with a memorable Qatari song,” said Laura Somma, Managing Director, Rosso Italiano.

Shaheen expressed happiness in being part of the event saying collaborating with

four famous Italian soparanos will be one of the highlights of his singing career.

Ali Al Haj, Chief Operating Officer, Rosso Italiano yesterday announced the establish-ment of a Rosso Italiano annual award which will recognize local personalities in various fields who contribute to the growth and devel-opment of the country.

NU-Q kicks off initiative to promote researchThe Peninsula

DOHA: Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) kicked-off a week-long initiative to promote research oppor-tunities for its students.

Faculty and students at NU-Q engage in pioneering research in var-ious areas including analysing the news and media industries in MENA countries, trends of media use, health communication studies and strat-egies, the media’s role for national identity, digital literacy, and more.

At the start of NU-Q’s Research Week, students attended an

orientation session to learn about, for example, the importance of research in creating a knowledge-based econ-omy, the procedures to become involved as student researchers and the types of grants available to them.

“Research is at the very heart of NU-Q’s student learning expe-rience. We take after the tradition of our home campus in Evanston, one of America’s leading private research universities, to continu-ously produce scholarly studies that investigate some of the most preva-lent topics in the region. Our faculty and students have been involved in numerous research projects that

have won awards, grants, and been regionally acclaimed for their impor-tant findings,” said Everette E Dennis, dean and CEO.

Research skills are an indis-pensable part of an academic education, and NU-Q takes a system-atic approach to encourage student inquiry and investigation. The NU-Q Research Office regularly discusses research interests and opportunities with students, and provides them with various services to facilitate the research process, help them apply for grants, and to attend research conferences.

“Students at NU-Q will have the

opportunity to assist with research project development, acquiring skills in data-gathering, analysis and inter-pretation. They have a great chance to learn about the different phases of a research project, and the differ-ent methods of gathering relevant information--an asset that will help them in both their personal and career development,” said Klaus Sch-oenbach, NU-Q’s associate dean of research.

Students can apply for sev-eral different types of funding, including undergraduate language grants to travel and study a foreign language.

Ambassadors from Qatar Airways’ Al Darb Qatarisation Programme at the airline’s stall in the seventh Qatar International Universities Fair.

QA’s Al Darb in focus at Universities FairThe Peninsula

DOHA: Qatar Airways recently participated in the seventh Qatar International Universities Fair, which took place from October 17 to 19, 2016, at the Qatar National Convention Center, Doha.

Ambassadors from Qatar Airways’ Al Darb Qatarisation Pro-gramme took part in the annual event to introduce young Qataris to the diverse number of career opportunities available through the national airline. The airline show-cased its development opportunities for ambitious students and gradu-ates, and former graduates were on hand to share their expertise and answer questions about the programme.

Qatar Airways Senior Vice Pres-ident, Human Resources, Nabeela

Fakhri, said: “Recognised as one of the leading organisations for the development of local talent, Qatar Airways’ Al Darb Qatarisation Pro-gramme was created to help build a strong workforce and create future leaders across the country. We were pleased to once again participate in the International Universities Fair and to present the opportu-nities that Qatar Airways’ Al Darb Qatarisation Programme can offer to develop local talent. Through the Al Darb Qatarisation Programme our goal is to mentor young Qataris to become global ambassadors of the country.”

Now in its fourth year, the Al Darb Qatarisation Programme sup-ports eight development strands and 35 different majors, to offer increased opportunities, and to encourage nationals with different professions to join Qatar Airways.

Exhibition to narrate story behind iconic Italian brands

Italian Ambassador to Qatar Guido De Sanctis (centre) addressing a press conference to announce the launch of ‘Branding Evolution’ at City Centre Rotana in Doha yesterday. Pic: Salim Matramkot/ The Peninsula

Conference

discusses

cost-effective

design strategies

The Peninsula

DOHA: The latest, sustainable and cost-effective design strategies for developing Qatar’s future public realm were highlighted in the third Annual Future Landscape & Public Realm Qatar conference held yesterday.

The first day of Future Land-scape & Public Realm Qatar conference created the perfect platform for attendees to build relations, exchange ideas and seize business opportunities throughout the “ACMi+” interface that allowed for many networking breaks which created a dynamic, efficient and relevant learning environment.

Future Landscape Qatar is the event to attend, to stay up to date with the latest in landscape, and to network with all stakehold-ers involved in the field. “A must attend conference that is not to be missed,” said Dar Al Handasah, a senior landscape architect.

The conference started with a keynote address delivered by Prof Ali A Alraouf from the Ministry of Municipality & Environment, and was followed by sessions on the quality of urban public spaces in Doha by Sheikh Saoud Al Thani form ASTAD, green spaces in urban ecology by Sara Abdul Majid from Richer Environments and Dr Cynthia Skelhorn from Qatar Green Building Council, the landscape of Islamic Gar-dens by Mohammed M Hassona from Qatar Foundation, a case study on Sheraton Park West Bay Project’s Water features by Johan Winters from SALFO and Associ-ates, and the landscape and urban design for South Doha by Walter Bone from Dynamic Engineering Consultants.

“It’s a vital source of inspi-ration for the young architects,” said an architect from Al Baker Architects. Solution providers like Nakheel, Ghesa, KDF, Watermas-ter, ansglobal, Gebal, Kinley, Qatar Paving Stones, Consent, show-cased their newest technologies and solutions.

HOME12 TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, left Doha yesterday. He was seen off at Hamad International Airport by Minister of Economy and Commerce H E Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani and the Charge d’ Affaires at Venezuela’s Embassy in Doha, Fatima Majzoub El Majzoub.

Venezuela President leaves Doha

Adolescent-friendly services open at three health centres

By Huda NV

The Peninsula

DOHA: The Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC) has introduced adolescent-friendly health services in selected health centres to improve health outcome of the youth in Qatar. The new services at Al Rayyan, West Bay and Madinat Khalifa health centres will focus on prevention and management of identified risk factors such as accidents, Non-Communica-ble Diseases (NCDs), risky behaviours, mental health and adolescent reproductive health.

The new service will bridge a major gap in continuous healthcare provision in the country. There is clear evidence that many health prob-lems begin at a young age and then continue into adult life. Obese teens are likely to become obese adults and around half of people with lifetime mental health problems experience their first symptoms by the age of 14. A number of phys-ical and mental health issues are encountered during childhood and teenage years, and lack of attention to this age group may lead to life-long consequences. Due to these reasons, good health services for this age group are important.

Currently, there is a dire lack in organ-ised health promotion and preventive services for the adolescent age group here. The new PHCC services will provide high quality serv-ices ensuring effective assessment, treatment and support, for them and their families

The adolescent-friendly health service is among the priorities of the National Primary Health Care Strategy (NPHCS). The services will help the young population here to cope with physical and mental health changes they are going through, and help them build

a successful future.“The programme aims at detecting health-

related problems among adolescents at an early stage,” said Dr Sadriya Al Kohji, Head of Child and Adolescent Health, PHCC.

“The detection of health-related prob-lems among adolescents is done through the assessment of health status, measurement of the growth standards, clinical examination, vision screening and anaemia. It will also include an assessment of difficulties faced by the adolescent at home within the fam-ily environment, problems within the school setting, and learning difficulties. Moreover, risky behaviours, such as overuse or misuse of social media, and mental illnesses, includ-ing depression, hyperactivity, autism, anorexia nervosa, addiction, violence, will be assessed, along with sexual and reproductive health. The service promotes healthy behaviour and inter-action between adolescents and their parents or guardians, according to evidence-based best practices,” Dr Al Khoji said.

All adolescents accessing the health cen-tres with new service for any medical concern will be given subsequent appointments at the adolescent-friendly service. Health care providers within PHCC will obtain parental consent prior to the appointment and the pro-vision of the service.

Adolescents are likely to only require a visit every two years, with a total of three visits between the ages of 10 and 18; the second and third of which will be booked by the adoles-cent’s guardians at the health centre. Should the first assessment indicate the need for addi-tional care, the adolescent will either be given another appointment with the same doctor or referred to other parties, with the guardi-an’s knowledge.

“Family and community are the key pil-lars in an adolescent’s life. Adolescents depend on their families, the surrounding environ-ment, schools, health services to acquire a wide range of important skills that can help them deal successfully with the challenges they face in the transition from childhood to adulthood,” he said.

Move to detect physical and mental health issues at an early age.

Baladiya app a hit with plant-lovers By Irfan Bukhari

The Peninsula

DOHA: As planting season in Qatar has begun with the fall of mercury, many residents are relying on the multi-service app launched by the Ministry of Municipality and Environ-ment last year, for buying plants online at low prices.

With winter approaching, sales at different plant outlets and nurseries have also surged. The “Baladiya app” is offering a convenient purchase option to flora lovers.

The user has to simply download the app available both on Apple and Android devices and click the category “Services” to reach sub-cate-gory “plant nurseries”.

It takes a few minutes, after signing in by entering the Qatari

ID and mobile number, to place an order for the plants as the interested customer selects from a long catalogue of plants enlisted with names, pictures and prices.

Once a buyer has selected the plants in the basket and places the order, he gets an SMS on his cell phone ask-ing him to collect the selected plants within 72 hours from the Department of Public Parks at the Ministry. If the customer does not turn up to purchase the plant, the order is cancelled.

Along with “plant nurser-ies”, other services available on the app include “remove sew-age”, “pest control”, “cut trees”, “abandoned car”, “worker’s housing”, “remove rain water” and “unclog drainage”.

There exists a long list of flower plants and fruit trees making it easy for potential buyers to satisfy their personal

choices. The plants available on the app include jatropha, ocinum, jasminum sambac, jasminum grandi flora, set-creasea, hibiscus, bauhinia alba, ficus carica, washingto-nia filifera, morus alba, nerium oleander, plumeria acutifolia, tecoma stan, punica granatum, lowsania, bougainvillea glabra, ruellia, canna indica, gazania rigens and many others.

Apart from the easy pur-chase mode, prices of plants too are attracting residents. A flower plant is being sold at QR2 while the price of a fruit sapling is QR5.

“It is a good service through which one can buy his favourite plants without any procrastina-tion. Otherwise, people would continue making plans to visit a plant nursery to buy seeds, sap-lings which they actually do not execute due to their laxity,” said Anwar Hossain, a Bangladeshi expatriate. With the change in

weather, other plant nurser-ies are also experiencing rush of customers with the major-ity interested in buying flower plants and vegetable seeds. Traders say this trend will fur-ther escalate in the days to come. They say the planting season in Qatar would continue until March. Also, a plantation drive is under way in green areas and parks in Doha.

Chandramohan, another resident who recently utilised the Baladiya app said he was satisfied with the service and in particular with the prices .

He felt that the sales of plants might grow many times if there is a home delivery service. He said after using the serv-ice, he told a number of friends about it. “If the Department of Public Parks starts selling plant pots along with the plants, it will be more convenient for the customers,” he said.

MoI workshop on dealing with mediaThe Peninsula

DOHA: The Human Resources Department in collaboration with National Command Centre at the Ministry of Interior is holding a workshop on “art of dealing with media” for the officers of differ-ent departments of the Ministry of Interior.

Brigadier Abdullah Khalifa Al Muftah, Director of the Pub-lic Relations Department gave the introductory presentation on “security media and their impact on strengthening relationship between police and the public”.

The one-week course which comes in line with the Training Strategy of MOI-2016 will cover topics on types of media and methods of dealing with them.Ministry of Interior officers attending the workshop on “art of dealing with media.”

Qatar Charity uses Microsoft cloud services to gain edgeThe Peninsula

DOHA: As part of its Microsoft Philanthropies division and its ‘Modern Non-profit’ cam-paign, Microsoft has announced that it will be making its cloud: Microsoft Azure available for eligible non-profit and non-governmental organisations. This offer adds to the exist-ing comprehensive suite of Microsoft cloud services that are available to non-profits to empower their missions.

Microsoft Azure’s cloud services help organisations accelerate innovation with integrated intelligence that powers insights and decision-making, supports a broad selection of operating systems, and provides industry-leading security.

“We are committed to helping non-profit groups to use cloud computing to solve basic human challenges. One of our ambitions for Microsoft Philanthropies is to partner with these groups and ensure that cloud comput-ing is accessible to a greater number of people

and meets the widest range of societal needs,” said Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer of Microsoft.

Through this campaign, NGOs can access Microsoft data centres around the world, as well as its computing and storage power, to develop and run their applications and to manage relationships with donors, volun-teers and beneficiaries. They can also manage all of their devices, applications and data on a cross-platform basis.

“At Qatar Charity, we aim to fight global

poverty through innovative solutions focus-ing on Education and empowerment,” Said Salman Kaladari, Executive director for local development, Qatar Charity.

“Availing Microsoft cloud services for free allows charities to understand the secrets contained in the data in such a way as to create new opportunities and improve the services that we offer. We do understand the importance of offering such advanced technologies to allow NGOs manage their day-to-day campaigns and move from

outputs to outcomes. “Measuring the success by figures Qatar

charity managed to jump from around 20,000 thousand orphans sponsored in 2012 to more than 100,000K as for today. Dona-tions also raised from 250 million Qatari riyals in 2012 to over a billion in 2016.

“That is why we are joining hand with Microsoft to showcase the impact of tech-nology on every aspect of NGO operations, which we will be delivered through a public event next March” Salman added.

VIEWS14 TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

The Calais refugee camp is a symbol of the migrant crisis in France, and, in Europe. The camp, known as the ‘Jungle’, has been often in the news – where thousands of immigrants from Africa and countries like Syria, Afghanistan, stayed in a single patch of

land, in squalid and unhealthy conditions, looking for a better future, but a source of worry and tension for the host country, and a camp which is an example of all that is wrong with the European migration policies, and finally, a stick for the rightwing, virulently anti-immigrant parties in France to beat the government with and garner votes. Calais is an example of Europe’s failure to respond to the migration crisis as countries quarrel over who should take in those fleeing war and poverty.

It’s understandable that a camp like this cannot continue forever. France yesterday began the difficult task of clearing the sprawling Jungle. After initial, sporadic resistance, the

migrants chose to be relocated to other parts of France while the government decided on their asylum applications. For migrants, the forced evacuation represented a demolition of their dream as hundreds of them had wanted to, and still want to, cross into Britain, their final destination. “They’ll have to force us to leave. We want to go to Britain,” a young Afghan said.

French officials are happy that the relocation is going on smoothly. Calais is home to 6,500 migrants who will be relocated to 450 centres across France. But what’s worrisome is the fate of about 1,300 unaccompanied child migrants. There are fears that

they could end up in the hands of people traffickers. France is also holding talks with Britain on taking some of these children. Britain has already taken in nearly 200 child refugees out of 1, and is expected to take dozens more.

Also, there are fears that the camp could form again as migrants would disappear into neighbouring areas to regroup again. Anti-immigrant sentiments are very high in France and Britain, with the French election and Brexit fanning flames of hatred and xenophobia. Parties are only expected to harden their stance as public gets increasingly uneasy as more immigrants try to get citizenship and economic opportunities dwindle.

More than one million people fleeing conflict and poverty have flooded into Europe last year, triggering deep divisions across the 28-nation bloc and causing an unprecedented crisis in several member countries and fuelling the rise of far-right parties. The mood in the continent has changed from an initial sympathy and willingness to accommodate to outright apathy and anger. This is a crisis for which there is no easy solution.

Closing Calais

As France clears the ‘Jungle’ migrant camp, migrants in Europe are facing an uncertain future.

Quote of the day

If we want Syrian refugees to return to their country one day, then we must do everything we can to stop this massacre.

Jean-Marc AyraultFrench Foreign Minister

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

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEFDR. KHALID BIN MUBARAK AL-SHAFI

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ACTING MANAGING EDITORMOHAMMED SALIM MOHAMED

msalim@pen.com.qa

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As US President Barack Obama and his national security team huddle about deciding what to do

in Syria, a simple but necessary act can be done to save the lives of Syrian refugees without the use of military power.

The battle of Aleppo and other parts of Syria is being fought by proxy powers, especially the Russian air force and to a lesser degree Syrian fighter planes. These planes are causing the biggest damage among civilians because they are able to act with impunity in Syria, leaving a daily carnage of civilians.

Pushing for a no-fly zone might be the best way to stop this carnage but short of bombing the Syrian runways and controlling the skies, the attacks from the air are unlikely to stop.

But there is something that the US and Nato can do to save lives from air bombardment without resorting to any mili-tary measures.

Many lives could be saved if Nato would be willing to share information they have from the sky regarding the timing and movements of Russian and Syr-ian warplanes.

In any war that includes fighter planes, or even rockets, a national plan is usually in place to warn the public and to allow them to take refuge.

Sophisticated satellite and other hi-tech equipment in the possession of the US military can easily detect fighters planning to bomb Aleppo or other Syrian cit-ies enough time before the bombs hit the ground.

Such sophisticated technol-ogy provides sensitive time-based information that can mean the difference between life and death. All that is needed is to make this time-sensitive information avail-able to the people who are on the ground.

Creative Syrian activists popularly called “rasideen” (mon-itors) have been trying to do this using unsophisticated methods.

Young people in differ-ent locations physically eye the planes and try to make out their general direction and then call a network of their friends with the hope of avoiding the brunt of the bombings.

Mobile phones don’t operate in areas not under the control of the Syrian regime, which means that only people with satellite phones can know about the com-ing bombers from the sky.

In any war that includes fighter planes, or even rockets, a national plan is usually in place to warn the public and to allow them to take refugees.

Naturally such a man-ual effort has limited results because it can’t reach the entire population.

A more successful effort can

be done if physical sirens are placed in populated areas to be connected somehow with those with the information of the com-ing flights and can sound out the siren in time for people to try to take refuge.

It is true that in most Syr-ian homes no safe room or underground shelter exists, but real-time knowledge of a com-ing bomber can provide civilians with a chance to make do with whatever make shift safety loca-tion they can find.

The violence in Syria has become one of the deadliest conflicts in the world towards civilians. All parties to the con-flict, including the Russian and Syrians, regularly claim that they are not targeting civilians.

The idea of the UN or Nato sharing information about Rus-sian and Syrian flight patterns might be considered an act of war because it weakens the sur-prise factor. But this non-violent form of protecting civilians can-not be compared to the more direct operational military actions.

The US can’t simply shirk their responsibility for what is happening to civilians in Syria. Words and threats are not enough to stop the bombings.

If the US is not willing to use

its military power to stop these attacks and to get a no-fly zone, then the very least they can do is to ensure that civilians living in Syrian cities that are daily being bombed, get the information already available to Nato.

Providing sirens and feed-ing local communities with this information is a small step to help ease the damage. It will not stop the war or end the suffering but in a small way, it can save lives.

Even if one civilian life is saved by the sirens, this would be better than giving powerful speeches or making an inter-vention in the United Nations Security Council.

How Nato can help Syrian civilians

By Daoud Kuttab & Hazm

Almazouni

Al Jazeera

In any war that includes fighter planes, or even rockets, a national plan is usually in place to warn the public and to allow them to take refugees.

Civil defence volunteers searching for victims amid the rubble of destroyed buildings hit by air strikes in rebel-held town of Kafar Takharim, in Idlib province of Syria, yesterday.

OPINION 15TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

Battle for Mosul can shape or break IraqBy Samia Nakhoul, Michael Georgy

and Stephen Kalin

Reuters

It has taken two years of training a demoralised army, and the backing of the air cover and special forces of the world’s greatest powers, for Iraq

to mount an offensive to recapture Mosul from Islamic State.

Almost a week into the US-led onslaught, many of those running the campaign say the battle to retake the city could be long and hard. But they have also identified what they think is a chink in the jihad-ists’ armour.

If local fighters in Mosul can be per-suaded to drop their allegiance to Islamic State, there is a chance that the battle can be brought to a more speedy conclusion, and that could have major implications for the future of Iraq.

Against a background of splits and rebellions in the Islamic State ranks in Mosul, some opposing commanders believe that a successful attempt to win over those local fighters could mean the battle will last only weeks rather than months.

Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city, is where IS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi declared his Sunni caliphate in 2014, after his alliance between millenarian Islamists and veteran officers from the disbanded army of Saddam Hussein roared back into Iraq from bases they set up in Syria. Five Iraqi army divisions melted away in the face of a few hundred jihadists.

Now the battle to retake Mosul pits an unwieldy coalition of a 30,000-strong Iraqi regular force backed by the United States and European powers, alongside Kurd-ish and Shi’ite militias, against jihadists who have exploited the Sunni commu-nity’s sense of dispossession in Iraq and betrayal in Syria. The political sensitiv-ity with which the battle is handled could determine the future of Islamic State and of Sunni extremism, as well as the shape of this part of the Middle East, which is being shattered into sectarian fragments.

Islamic State fighters, estimated at between 4,000 and 8,000, have rigged the city with explosives, mined and booby-trapped roads, built oil-filled moats they can set alight, dug tunnels and trenches, and have shown every willingness to use some of Mosul’s 1.5 million civilians as human shields.

Islamic State seems to have a plenti-ful supply of suicide bombers, launching them in explosives-laden trucks against Kurdish Peshmerga fighters converging on Mosul from the east and northeast, and against Iraqi forces, spearheaded by coun-ter-terrorism units, advancing from the south and southwest.

“Mosul will be a multi-month endeav-our. This is going to take a long time,” a

senior US official said in Iraq.Karim Sinjari, Interior Minister in the

self-governing Kurdistan Regional Govern-ment (KRG) of northern Iraq, said IS would put up a fierce fight because of Mosul’s symbolic value as capital of its self-pro-claimed Islamic caliphate.

“If Mosul is finished, the caliphate they announced is finished. If they lose in Mosul, they will have no place, just Raqqa (in Syria),” Sinjari said.

IS is adept at exploiting divisions among its enemies, and last Friday’s dawn assault by its fighters on Kirkuk, for example, was not just an attempt to divert Iraqi and Kurd-ish forces and relieve pressure on the main front. It was also intended to galvanise Sunni Arab opinion against the Kurds, whose Iraqi Peshmerga and Syrian Kurd-ish militia are the most effective ground forces deployed against IS.

That is why many of those involved in the battle for Mosul stress the need to break the cohesion of IS and the allegiance it has won or coerced among alienated Sunnis, in Mosul and beyond.

The opportunity is there, they say.They believe that while foreign jihadists

will fight to the finish to protect their last stronghold in Iraq, the Iraqi fighters, many from Mosul itself, may lay down their arms.

“Most of the (IS) fighters now are local tribal fighters. They have some foreign fighters, they have some people from other parts of Iraq and Syria, but the majority are local fighters,” says a senior Kurdish military intelligence chief.

“If we can take this away from them, the liberation of Mosul is a job of a week or two weeks.”

Fissures are widening inside the IS camp, with Iraqi, Kurdish and Western sources reporting resistance in Mosul and a spate of attacks on the group’s leaders.

Sinjari, also the KRG’s acting defence minister, says there is growing resentment against IS brutality.

“There is information that many peo-ple are revolting and carrying out attacks against IS. A number of Daesh members were killed on the streets at night,” Sinjari said. This was confirmed by the US official but could not be independently verified.

But it fits with accounts of a recent abor-tive uprising against IS, led by a former aide to Baghdadi, that ended with the execu-tion of 58 Daesh dissidents.

Crucially, more than half IS’s fighting strength comes from Sunni tribes who were initially relieved they were being freed from sectarian persecution at the hands of a Shi’ite-dominated government in Bagh-dad and a corrupt and brutal army.

Some strategists believe those tribes could turn against the brutality of IS rule - just as the Sunni tribal fighters of the Sahwa or Awakening turned against Al Qaeda in Iraq a decade ago - if Baghdad guaran-tees their lives and livelihoods.

In Mosul, there are Iraqi tribal people in IS who pledged allegiance when the group arrived, a Kurdish intelligence chief said.

“If the Iraqis send a message and reas-sure these Sunni Iraqis that they will be given a second chance, I think it is wise to do so, because if they put their weap-ons down you are definitely taking out 60 percent of their (IS) fighting force.”

The official emphasised the need for the coalition’s close involvement in Mosul, especially after the experience of the recap-ture of Falluja, Ramadi and Tikrit, IS-held cities where refugees and local Sunnis suf-fered at the hands of Shi’ite militias.

In the battle for Mosul, it has supposedly been agreed that neither Shi’ite fighters nor Kurdish Peshmerga will enter the city when it falls to avoid stoking a sectarian

backlash.While the anti-IS coalition has gained

momentum, military strategists and intel-ligence officials say the closer the Iraqi forces get to Mosul, the harder it will be.

“If they decide to defend the city then it will be more difficult and the process will slow down,” the intelligence chief said.

Once inside Mosul, Iraqi special forces would have to go from street to street to clear explosives and booby traps set up by Islamic State.

“The roads are very narrow. You can’t use vehicles or tanks, so it will be a fight, person by person,” Sinjari said.

Until now, it has been easy for the coa-lition to hit IS positions in deserted villages around Mosul, but the air strikes will slow down once Iraqi forces get into the city.

Islamic State, Iraqi commanders say, has succeeded in the past in blocking army troops from moving against it by staging suicide attacks and rigging explosives.

But they say that would no longer be an obstacle in Mosul as the Iraqi army has recently received an effective guided mis-sile system that destroys explosives-packed vehicles. The Iraqi commanders say their tactic now would be to cut Islamic State fighters off from the hinterland of sup-porting villages and then split the city into different neighbourhoods.

Brigadier Haider Abdul Muhsin Al Dar-raji, from the army’s 10th division, said military units would launch simultane-ous attacks from multiple fronts on Mosul and divide the city into sectors to isolate IS fighters. With the coalition launching air strikes, the jihadists will have little chance of getting reinforcements from the western side of the city, which has been left open to encourage their departure towards Syria.

The difficulty is how to hit IS targets inside Mosul without causing massive

civilian casualties.“It’s just like a tough surgery to remove

a brain tumour,” Darraji said.Colonel Mahdi Ameer, from the 9th

Iraqi army division fighting south of Mosul, said Islamic State had “deliberately blocked residents from leaving the city to use them as human shields and prolong the battle”.

Islamic State’s enemies do not underes-timate the group’s strength, which depends on experienced former senior Baathist officers and Islamist radicals willing to blow themselves up to defend their Sunni heartland.

“They are much more organised than the Peshmerga and others. They have good administration, a good support system and enough weapons and ammunitions,” said the Kurdish official.

The Mosul offensive will be the most important battle fought in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003. What happens next will shape or break an already frac-tured Iraq.

“There are growing concerns about fixing the ... peace the day after liberating Mosul,” said Hoshyar Zebari, a top Iraqi politician and former finance minister.

“How will this multi-ethnic, multi-sec-tarian city ... be governed and run without communal conflict, without revenge kill-ing, without a large displacement of people? That needs some political planning on how the city will be governed,” he said.

Zebari said there should be “strong rep-resentative governance” in Mosul.

But the battle against radical Islam-ists in the region would not end with the liberation of Mosul.

“Mosul will not be the end of Islamic State or the end of extremism in this region. They will go back to more asymmetric warfare. We will see suicide attacks inside Kurdistan, inside Iraqi cities and elsewhere.”

Islamic State fighters, estimated at between 4,000 and 8,000, have rigged the city with explosives, mined and booby-trapped roads, built oil-filled moats they can set alight, dug tunnels and trenches, and have shown every willingness to use some of Mosul’s 1.5 million civilians as human shields.

A member of the Iraqi forces holding a position at the Al Shura area, south of Mosul, yesterday.

Widows of victims of Nigeria’s Boko Haram say aid overdueBy Haruna Umar

AP

After her husband was killed by a Boko Haram suicide bomber late last year, Hajjagana Mbasaru

was forced to pull her children from school and rely on friends to feed them. Like other widows of civilians fight-ing the Islamic extremists in northern Nigeria, she spent long months waiting for any kind of government support.

Finally, last week, officials in north-eastern Borno state stepped up with a small handout: two bags of rice and some beans. Though modest, Mba-saru said it was a welcome change from months of being ignored.

“I am indeed very happy that, for once, the government has remem-bered me,” Mbasaru said.

During its seven-year uprising, Boko Haram extremists have killed more than 20,000 people and dis-placed more than 2.6 million in Nigeria and neighbouring Cameroon, Niger and Chad. Frustrated by the ineffec-tive military response, thousands of ordinary residents in northeastern Nigeria joined local militias.

In Borno, most signed up for the same one as Mbasaru’s husband, the “Civilian JTF,” a play on the acronym used to describe the joint military and police taskforce in the region.

Often armed with only machetes, iron bars and batons, the men worked to round up suspected Boko Haram fighters and intercept suicide bomb-ers. They soon became targets, and since 2013 nearly 700 have been killed, according to Jibrin Gunda, legal adviser to Civilian JTF.

While praising the sacrifice of the

fighters, the government has done very little to help their families adjust to life without them, Gunda said. “Many of them had wives and many children. They had their aged parents who were part of their dependents, and who are now bereaved,” Gunda said.

Last week’s distribution of food is part of a broader program intended to make up for that neglect, said Satomi Ahmad, executive chairman of Borno*s emergency management agency. More than 150 widows such as Mbasaru were selected to be part of the first round of beneficiaries, and more will be included in the weeks to come, he said.

It was not clear whether families would get just one distribution of food or be able to receive the handouts mul-tiple times.

The idea originated with current vigilante fighters who pleaded for

support for the families of their fallen comrades, Ahmad said. “We imme-diately welcomed the idea because these are youth who volunteered to sacrifice their lives in safeguarding the territorial integrity and internal security of our nation. And the major-ity of them were breadwinners for their families,” he said.

That was the case for Hauwa Li’s husband, a businessman who died fighting Boko Haram last year.

“He joined the militia because, at the time, Boko Haram were just killing everyone,” Li said. “About 20 months ago, when they set out for the bush, he didn*t come back alive. They brought his corpse alongside others who were killed.”

Li, a 30-year-old homemaker, was left alone to support six children under 12. She has worked to find odd jobs to help her family, but she often falls

short. “The days we sleep with hunger are more than the days we have our stomachs filled up,” she said.

Though they were surprised not to have received any state aid earlier, the widows who picked up food last week said their families are grateful for the help.

Fadi Ali, a 41-year-old widow with 10 children, held back tears as she looked at the bags of food that had been placed at her feet. “God has made provisions for every mouth that needs to eat,” she said.

In addition to helping these fam-ilies, Ahmad said officials hoped the food distribution programme will motivate the civilian defense fight-ers who are still battling the extremists: “We believe it will help to boost the morale of those who are still active in the ongoing war against terrorism.”

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.

Though they were surprised not to have received any state aid earlier, the widows who picked up food last week said their families are grateful for the help.

MIDDLE EAST16 TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

AFP

ABU DHABI: An Emirati court yesterday jailed a Sudanese man for 10 years for planning a bomb attack aimed at killing foreigners in the Gulf country, local media reported.

The Federal Supreme Court also convicted the defendant on charges of supporting the Islamic State group on social media, The National daily reported.

“Prosecutors said he was inspired by the terrorist group’s ideology,” the Abu Dhabi news-paper added on its website.

The official Wam news agency confirmed that an “Arab national was convicted of planning a ter-rorist act and creating online accounts to promote Daesh (IS)” and was jailed for 10 years.

Another daily, Gulf News, reported that the same court yes-terday sentenced a Pakistani man to 10 years in prison for “financing the terrorist organisations Daesh and Al Qaeda”.

The United Arab Emirates is a member of the US-led coalition that has been bombing IS militants in Iraq and Syria since Septem-ber 2014.

Authorities in the Gulf state have enacted anti-terror legisla-tion, including the death penalty and harsher jail terms for crimes linked to religious hatred and extremist groups. The UAE, where jihadist-linked attacks are rare, is home to millions of foreigners.

Hamas activist dead in Gaza tunnel collapseGAZA CITY: A Hamas militant was killed yesterday when a tun-nel collapsed in the Gaza Strip, the group’s military wing said in a statement.

The Ezzedine Al Qassam Bri-gades named the man as Amir Jaber Abu Taimeh and said the accident occurred in the town of Khan Yunes. It gave no further details.

Over the past few months at least 16 militants have died in tun-nel accidents in the strip.

Another Al Qassam Brigades member was killed in a collapse near Al Maghazi in the central Gaza Strip on Saturday.

Israel accuses Gaza mil-itants of building tunnels for use in attacks against the Jew-ish state, and destroyed several during the devastating 2014 war with Hamas.

AFP

KUWAIT CITY: Kuwait still needs to do more to combat the financing of jihadists, a top Kuwaiti official said yesterday at a meeting aimed at choking off funding for the Islamic State group. “We still have a lot to do,

though we are satisfied with what we have done so far,” Deputy For-eign Minister Khaled Al Jarallah told reporters on the sideline of a meeting of the Counter-ISIL Finance Group (CIFG) in Kuwait City.

“We are ready to cooperate with our brothers and friends,” he said, responding to US criticism of Kuwait and Qatar over their steps to cut the financing of jihadists. Formed early last year, CIFG is led by the United States, Italy and Saudi Arabia and is made up of over 35 countries and four international bodies.

Jarallah said Kuwait has come a long way in introducing legislation that controls the collection of (char-ity) donations, a suspected channel of funding extremists.

The CIFG takes a global approach to undermining the flow of funds to the jihadist group, according to Adam Szubin, US Treasury’s acting Under Secretary on Countering the

Financing of Terrorism.Szubin said last week that the

meeting in Kuwait City aims “to share information and continue developing and coordinating countermeasures against ISIL’s (IS) financial activity worldwide”. He said the Treasury

was working closely with Kuwait and Qatar in particular to strengthen the technical side of the fight against ter-rorism finance, but there is room for improvement.

Szubin said the effort to choke off funding was showing some success.

IS fighters had been abandoning the fight “as their pay and benefits have been cut and delayed, in what ISIL members in Mosul are call-ing a recession”, he said, referring to Iraq’s battle to recapture the city from jihadists.

AFP

UNITED NATIONS: The United Nations yesterday blamed all sides in Syria after it failed to secure agree-ment to evacuate critically injured and sick Syrians from Aleppo.

UN aid agencies, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, the Red Cross and other medical groups held days of negotiations to try to secure safe passage for the sick and wounded, but the effort came to a halt when fighting resumed.

“It is deeply regrettable that no patients or accompanying fam-ily members could be moved,” said Stephen O’Brien, the UN’s humani-tarian aid coordinator.

“The evacuat ions were obstructed by various factors, includ-ing delays in receiving the necessary approvals from local authorities in eastern Aleppo,” he said.

Armed groups imposed condi-tions to guarantee the safety of the evacuation operation while the Syr-ian government refused to allow medical and other aid supplies into the rebel-held east of the city, O’Brien added.

Russia, Syria’s main ally in the war against opposition rebels and jihadists, last week declared a

humanitarian pause in the assault on eastern Aleppo, where more than

250,000 civilians have been trapped.“After three days of lull, parties

to the conflict have still not agreed, military operations have resumed

and violence is now escalating,” said O’Brien in a statement. “The political and military paths are trumping basic humanity once again in Syria.”

Yesterday, Russia ruled out a renewal of the ceasefire and blamed rebel groups for blocking the medi-cal evacuation.

“Over the last three days, what was needed did not happen,” said Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov.

In order to renew the pause, “our opponents must ensure appropriate behavior by the anti-government groups that in particular sabotaged the medical evacuation that was intended during the humanitarian pause,” he said.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last week said nearly 500 people had been killed and about 2,000 injured during the nearly month-long bombing raids in Aleppo.

No UN aid convoy has entered Aleppo since July 7 and food rations will run out by the end of October, he warned.

More than 300,000 people have been killed in Syria and more than half of the country’s population dis-placed since the conflict began in March 2011 with anti-government protests.

AFP

IDLIB, SYRIA: Sixteen civilians, including three children, were killed on Monday in heavy bombard-ment across rebel-held Idlib province in northwest Syria, a monitoring group said.

In Khan Sheikhun, a town in the province’s south, air strikes killed seven people, including two women and a child, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The Britain-based Observatory said the raids were carried out by either Syrian or Rus-sian aircraft.

Another seven people, including four women and two children, were killed in raids on Kafr Takharim, further north in the province. Those raids hit three residential buildings, a local govern-ment building, and a stadium, shortly after midnight, In the morning, rescue workers were still trying to pull bodies out of the rubble. “My sister’s house was standing right here. She and her daughter are dead, along with another family,” Abu Mohammad said.

AFP

JERUSALEM: Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said yester-day that Israel’s next war with Gaza militants would be their last “because we will completely destroy them,” but added he remains committed to a two-state solution.

Lieberman, speaking in an interview with Palestinian news-paper Al Quds, said however, that he did not want another war in Gaza, which would be the fourth since 2008.

The outspoken former for-eign minister urged Palestinians to pressure Hamas, the Islam-ist movement that runs the Gaza Strip, to “stop your crazy policies”.

“As minister of defence, I would like to clarify that we have no intention of starting a new war against our neighbours in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, Lebanon or Syria,” he told the Jerusalem-based newspaper.

“But in Gaza, like the Iranians, they intend to eliminate the state of Israel... If they impose the next war on Israel, it will be their last. I would like to emphasise again: It will be their last confronta-tion because we will completely destroy them.”

Lieberman is part of what is seen as the most right-wing gov-ernment in Israeli history, with several prominent members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netan-yahu’s coalition openly opposing a Palestinian state.

But while he lives in a West Bank settlement and is known as a security-minded hardliner, Lie-berman believes in a two-state solution to the conflict based on land swaps.

He reiterated that position in the interview, saying he sees the main settlement blocks in the occupied West Bank remaining part of Israel under a final peace deal.

He raised the possibility of trading Arab areas of Israel on the edge of the northern West Bank, such as the city of Umm Al Fahm, in exchange for settlements.

Land swaps have long been part of proposals to resolve the decades-old conflict, but the two sides remain far apart on issues such as the status of Jerusalem and the return of Palestinian refugees.

Peace efforts have been at a complete standstill since a US-led initiative collapsed in April 2014.

“Today, I think the major-it y of our people do not believe it is possible to reach any agreement regarding the

final status solution, and the same with the Palestinians,” said Lieberman.

“The first step would be con-vincing the people it is possible by making serious improvements in the state of the economy and fighting unemployment, poverty and misery among the Palestin-ians. And for Israelis, provide security without terrorism or bloodshed for a while.”

He spoke of a period of three years without violence and with economic improve-ment in t he Pa lest in ian territories as being capable of leading to progress.

Lieberman, who took office in May, also criticised Palestin-ian president Mahmud Abbas, accusing him of failing to make compromises.

He predicted Abbas would lose if elections were held, with polls showing most Palestini-ans would like the 81-year-old to resign.

Such elections could lead to Hamas taking power in the West Bank, where Abbas’s sec-ular Fatah party dominates, but Lieberman said he believed a dif-ferent outcome was possible.

“There are enough sensible people in the (Palestinian Author-ity) who understand the situation and know if there is a choice to make between Hamas and Israel,

they think partnering with Israel will be better for them,” said the leader of the hardline national-ist Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home) party.

Lieberman has recently spoken of trying to bypass Pal-estinian leaders and reach out directly to communities, and his interview appeared to be part of that effort.

Al Quds, the top-selling paper in the Palestinian territories, was heavily criticised on social media by Palestinians who say it should not have agreed to the interview as it amounted to sanctioning “normalisation” with an occu-pying power.

The Palestinian foreign ministry accused Lieberman of “promoting a bunch of sermons and lies that contradict signed agreements and violate interna-tional law.”

Before taking over as defence minister, Lieberman made a series of controver-sial statements, including one directed at Ismail Haniya, Hamas’s Gaza leader.

Lieberman said he would give Haniya 48 hours to hand over two detained Israeli civilians and the bodies of soldiers killed in a 2014 war “or you’re dead”.

He has since backed off and said he is committed to “respon-sible, reasonable policy”.

Reuters

BEIRUT: Lebanon’s Parliament Speaker, Nabih Berri, believes that even if Michel Aoun is elected pres-ident next week after a vacancy of more than two years forming a government will take from five to six months, he was quoted as saying in a newspa-per on Monday.

Berri, one of the most enduring figures in Leba-nese politics, is one of Aoun’s main political opponents.

While Aoun might not secure the two-thirds majority of members of parliament needed for elec-tion in a first round of voting, sources say he could probably win by a simple majority in a second round.

Lebanon has been without a president for more than two years, part of a political crisis that has resulted in a breakdown in many basic services and concerns about the country’s stability.

Members of parliament will vote on a president on Oct 31 after former prime minister Saad al-Hariri said on Thursday he would back Aoun as president, part of a deal in which he is expected to again be appointed as prime minister. Lebanon’s dominant movement, Shia Muslim Hezbollah, is allied to Aoun and its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said on Sun-day his members of parliament would vote for him in the election.

In Lebanon, after a president is elected he or she must consult with the members of parliament before appointing a prime minister tasked with forming a government, something that the speaker, Berri, said he believed would take months.

UN blames all sides after Syria evacuation plan fails

Emirati court jails Sudanese for plot to kill expats

Representatives at the meeting of the counter-ISIL finance group (CIFG), in Kuwait City, yesterday.

Kuwait: Need to do more against IS funding

Israel’s next Gaza war will be ‘last’: Minister16 dead in heavy

bombardment

on Syria’s Idlib

Lebanon Speaker sees six months for forming govt

Syrians who were living in the rebel-held side of Aleppo are seen inside an ambulance after nearly 50 people fled the rebel held eastern districts of the battered city into the government-controlled west, yesterday.

Formed early last year, CIFG is led by the United States, Italy and Saudi Arabia and is made up of over 35 countries and four international bodies.

MIDDLE EAST 17TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

AP

CAIRO: Egypt’s interior minister warned in comments published yesterday that the country faced “unprecedented challenges” that require a decisive response by security forces, accusing the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood of inciting chaos.

The minister’s comments was the latest sign of alarm by President Abdel-Fattah Al Sisi’s government over possible unrest in a backlash against rising prices and tough eco-nomic reforms

Interior Minister Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar, who is in charge of the police, said the Broth-erhood was seeking through “conspiratorial schemes to incite chaos and confusion with the aim of creating skepticism over the abil-ity of the state and its institutions to satisfy popular expectations.”

“The security forces will not, under any circumstances, tolerate any attempt to repeat the scenes of chaos and sabotage at a time when the country is moving forward with firm steps toward a promising future, God will-ing,» he said in a ministry statement run in state newspapers yesterday.

Abdel-Ghaffar did not elaborate, but appeared to be alluding to the 2011 popular uprising that toppled longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak. Egypt›s police force largely melted away on the fourth day of the 18-day uprising, when police stations were stormed and thou-sands of inmates broke out from a number of prisons.

His comments, however, are the latest warning by officials and pro-government media against what they say are calls by the Brotherhood for street demonstrations on November 11 to protest against prices rises and other economic woes.

There has been no reliable evidence that the Brotherhood was specifically behind the call for protests next month, although the group has consistently encouraged anti-government protests by its supporters since senior Brotherhood official Mohammed Mursi, Egypt’s first freely elected but divisive presi-dent, was ousted in July 2013, by the military, then led by Al Sisi.

In an October 14 statement posted on its website, the Brotherhood urges Egyptians to rise up and topple Al Sisi’s government, but gives no specific date for the demonstra-tions it is calling for. Al Sisi appeared to refer to these planned protests when, in a meet-ing with government leaders on Saturday, he urged authorities to be on high alert and beef up the defence of vital state installations.

The meeting came just hours after a sen-ior Egyptian army officer was gunned down outside his home in an eastern Cairo suburb. A little-known group claimed responsibility for the brazen daylight attack.

Al Sisi’s government has already shown sensitivity to signs of a popular backlash over the economy. The presidency has

issued near-daily statements saying Al Sisi is instructing ministers to ensure the avail-ability of basic staples at affordable prices and to prosecute any merchants found to be hoarding food supplies.

The Egypt-based polling agency Baseera, one of the few that conducts polls in the coun-try, said its latest survey this month showed 68 percent of respondents approve of his per-formance, down from 79 percent in April and 85 percent in November. The poll surveyed 1,520 people above the age of 18 with a mar-gin of error of 3 percent.

The perceived fears of a popular back-lash over the economy come as shortages and rising food prices are feeding discontent among Egyptians, who are also enduring

new taxes and a hike in utility bills. The government must also introduce a package of economic reforms that would further hike prices, including the devaluation of the pound and lifting fuel subsidies, to secure a $12bn loan from the International Monetary Fund to bail out Egypt’s ailing economy.

Egypt is suffering an acute foreign cur-rency shortage because of the decimation of its lucrative tourism industry, a fall in Suez Canal revenues and reduced remit-tances from Egyptian expatriates. It also suffers from double digit rates of inflation and unemployment.

Its economic crisis comes as Egypt’s secu-rity forces are battling an Islamic militant insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula.

Egypt braces for crackdown against protesters

AP

QAY YA R A H, IR AQ: Bayda Muhammad Khalaf followed the gov-ernment’s advice to stay in her home with her husband and seven chil-dren as Iraqi troops advanced near their remote village outside militant-held Mosul. But after the Islamic State fighters fled and Iraqi troops didn’t appear, their tiny supply of food quickly ran out, and the family had to flee to search for territory firmly under government control.

When the Mosul offensive began a week ago, departing IS fighters warned villagers to stay off the roads and surrounding fields, which the mil-itants had mined. So Khalaf waited until she saw a passing shepherd, and then she and her family made the eight-hour walk out of no man’s land behind a herd of sheep.

“We were starving,” she said. They had watched the start of the offensive on TV and thought Iraqi forces were on the way, but the troops’ progress has been slow, and Mosul’s south-ern approach is littered with dozens of villages, some with no more than 20 homes.

Eventually, Khalaf couldn’t pro-duce enough breast milk for her infant daughter. “I started giving her goat’s milk, but then the goat died,” she said.

Mosul, the largest city control-led by the Islamic State group, is still home to more than 1 million civilians. The government and international aid groups fear that a sudden mass exo-dus will overwhelm the few camps set up on its outskirts.

The massive offensive is expected to take weeks, if not months, and with

supply routes cut off by the fighting, many civilians may not be able to stay in place for long. Driven by fear or hunger, many are already putting themselves in grave danger and are complicating the campaign to expel the militants from the city, which fell to IS in 2014.

More than 5,600 people have already fled areas near Mosul, according to the International Organization for Migration, with most heading through IS-run terri-tory toward the Syrian border, rather than in the direction of the advanc-ing troops, who are converging from the north, east and south.

Camps have been set up to accom-modate 60,000 people, but about 200,000 are expected to be displaced in the first weeks of the offensive, according to the Norwegian Refu-gee Council.

Both the Iraqi government and Kurdish authorities are mired in an economic crisis brought on by low

oil prices and say they do not have the resources to care for such a large number of displaced people. So they have urged everyone to stay put.

“We have a comprehensive plan for the evacuation of the civilians,” said Maj. Gen. Qassim al-Maliki, the head of the Iraqi army’s 9th Division. “The plan is to keep them in their houses until it becomes safer.”

That means huddling indoors, often with no electricity or running water, as explosions and gunfire echo outside. Those living near the front lines are often out of reach of aid groups.

Those who somehow manage to cross the battle lines, like Khalaf’s family, face other challenges.

The Kurds have taken in hundreds of thousands of people, but Sunni Arabs, who make up most of Mosul’s population, are viewed with suspi-cion. When IS militants attacked the Kurdish-controlled city of Kirkuk last week, a senior Kurdish commander

immediately speculated the attack-ers had infiltrated the city disguised as fleeing civilians.

“Many of (the displaced civilians), I’m sure they are working with ISIS,” said Kemal Kerkuki, a commander with the Kurdish forces, known as peshmerga. He said his forces arrested one recently who confessed to being part of a sleeper cell.

“I have told the authorities many

times to open a big camp and put all of (the people fleeing IS) there so we can control them,” he said.

In past operations against IS, Iraqi security forces have been accused of abuses of civilians fleeing militant-held territory. Iraqi armed groups “have committed serious human rights violations, including war crimes, by torturing, arbitrarily detaining, forcibly disappearing and

extrajudicially executing thousands of civilians,” the human rights group Amnesty International reported this month.

Fatima Abdullah, whose husband was detained for security screening at the Dibaga Camp this month after they fled their village near Mosul, said she understands the need for a vetting process. “I don’t blame them, it’s their right,” she said.

Reuters

NAIROBI: More than 75,000 people have fled their homes and 18 have been killed during three weeks of clashes in Somalia, the United Nations said yesterday, warning that women and children sleeping in the open will suffer as the rainy season looms.

Clashes erupted on Saturday and yesterday between forces loyal to the two semi-autonomous regions of Puntland and Galmudug in the town of Galkayo, it said.

“The fear that the conflict may last longer than anticipated is driving more people out of their homes,” the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humani-tarian Affairs said in an update.

Most of the displaced are women, chil-dren and the elderly who were already living in camps and have now fled for a second time to the outskirts of town, it said.

“The onset of the rainy season is likely to affect the displaced especially those spending nights in the open,” it said.

Somalis hope that the Dehr rains, which fall between October and January, will alleviate drought which has left five million people short of food.

Galkayo, which is the capital of the north-central Mudug region of Somalia, is divided between clan militias loyal to the two regions.

The federal government is working to restore peace, the U.N. said.

Somalia has been at civil war for 25 years and clashes between the clan-based militias who control much of the country are common. In the south, forces loyal to the weak U.N.-backed government are also battling Islamist insurgents.

There are 1.1 million displaced peo-ple in Somalia, around one in ten people, often living in dire conditions.

Iraqis on edge of Mosul face deadly dilemma

People buying subsidised sugar from a government truck, in Cairo, Egypt, yesterday.

Families, who were displaced by the ongoing operation by Iraqi forces against militants of the Islamic State

TEHRAN: Iran said yes Turkey should get permission from Iraq’s gov-ernment to participate in the operation to take back Mosul from ISIS - a state-ment with which Tehran waded into a dispute over the presence of Turkish troops in northern Iraq.

“It is not acceptable at all if a country, under the pretext of com-bating terrorism or any other crimes, tries to violate the sovereignty” of another country, Iranian For-eign Ministry spokesman Bahram

Ghasemi said.Some 500 Turkish troops sta-

tioned at a base near Mosul are training Iraqi Sunni and Kurdish forces that are taking part in the offensive, which began a week ago.

The Shiite-led government in Baghdad says the Turks are there without permission and has ordered them out. Turkey has refused, insist-ing it play a role in the offensive to retake Mosul, a Sunni-majority city. Shiite-majority Iran is a close ally of

the Baghdad government.Meanwhile, Iraq’s joint opera-

tions command on Monday denied Turkey was participating in military operations to retake the northern city of Mosul from ISIS.

“The spokesman of the Joint Operations Command denies Turkish participation of any kind in opera-tions for the liberation of Nineveh,” a statement said, referring to the Iraqi province of which Mosul is the cap-ital. Turkish Prime Minister Binali

Yildirim told reporters on Sunday that Turkish troops stationed out-side Mosul had provided support “with artillery, tanks and howit-zers” following a request by Kurdish peshmerga forces. Thousands of peshmerga forces are currently involved in a massive push in the Bashiqa area northeast of Mosul, where Turkey has a military base.

The forces of the autonomous Kurdish region, whose leader has close ties with Turkey, have

complained recently that the US-led coalition’s air support as insufficient.

Turkey had repeatedly stated it wanted a part in the massive opera-tion to retake Mosul, ISIS’s last major stronghold in Iraq.

In Syria, meanwhile, Turkey’s military struck dozens of ISIS and Kurdish YPG militia targets over the last 24 hours, depriving both groups of the ability to move around, the army said on Monday, as its opera-tion there entered a third month.

Iran sides with Iraq in dispute with Turkey

IS seizes Iraqi town of RutbaBAGHDAD: The Islamic State (IS) took full control yesterday of a town in the western province of Al Anbar as thousands of troops try to expel its fighters from Mosul, a city 700km north. IS fighters stormed Rutba fol-lowing territorial losses in Mosul, the group’s last major urban bastion in Iraq. Seeking to distract attention, the fighters have attempted to hit back with attacks elsewhere in Iraq.

More than 5,600 people have already fled areas near Mosul, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Clashes in Somalia

displace 75,000

as rains loom

ASIA / AFRICA18 TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

Protesters in Bangui urge UN troops to leaveAFP

BANGUI: UN troops fired warning shots yesterday as angry protesters marched through the Central African Republic capital, Bangui, demanding that “passive” United Nations peace-keepers be sent home for failing to do their job.

Shops and banks in several Ban-gui districts remained shut as irate residents threw up roadblocks in response to an upsurge of militia violence across the country in recent weeks.

Angered by the flare-up, a coali-tion of civil society groups had called for a one-day strike in the city of one million to press demands for a pullout

of the UN’s 12,000-strong MINUSCA force.

As the protesters marched on MINUSCA headquarters at midday, peacekeepers fired warning shots into the air to hold them back, wit-nesses said.

CAR has been in chaos since early 2013 when longtime president Fran-cois Bozize, a Christian, was ousted by a mainly Muslim Seleka rebel group -- triggering revenge attacks and a spiral of atrocities in which thousands were slaughtered.

Fears of a sectarian blood-bath led to the dispatch of UN

peacekeepers the following year.“By staying home the popula-

tion will show its support towards civil society demands for MINUSCA’s withdrawal and its outrage over the killings that are taking place across almost all of the country,” said the civil society coalition’s coordinator Gervais Lakosso.

MINUSCA had a clear mandate to stamp out militia groups “but wherever the UN forces go there is violence,” he said.

“Civil society believes MINUSCA has shown passivity and complicity.”

Rejecting the allegations, UN

spokesman Vladimir Monteiro said “you can’t lie to Central Africans and say there are (national) armed forces that can defend them.”

It would also be misleading to “just focus on the problems and for-get the action undertaken,” he added on Radio Ndeke Luka.

Dozens of people have been killed in recent weeks however, prompting severe criticism of the peacekeepers.

The violence between Christian and Muslim groups has displaced one in 10 of the country’s 4.5 mil-lion people.

Park proposes multiple-term presidencyReuters

SEOUL: South Korean President Park Geun-hye yesterday proposed amending the constitution to allow presidents to serve multiple terms or to establish a parliamentary system, saying the single-term presidency has served its purpose after nearly 30 years.

The South Korean presidency was limited to a single five-year term in the 1987 constitutional amendment that ended the coun-try’s military dictatorship.

South Korean presidents serv-ing a single five-year term typically

become lame ducks in the second half of their tenure, limiting their effectiveness.

Park herself would not be able to serve a second term.

“Through the single-term pres-idency, it is difficult to maintain policy continuance, see results of policy and engage in unified for-eign policy,” she said.

Critics of the presidency believe a parliamentary system in which the executive branch centred on a prime minister and the cabinet would allow for more stable policymaking and ensure greater accountability.

Park, the first woman president of South Korea, is in the fourth year of a term which ends in 2018.

A Realmetre poll released in June found 70 percent of South Kore-ans think the existing constitution should be revised and 40 percent say allowing a president to serve two four-year terms would be preferable.

Park asked parliament to form a special committee to discuss revis-ing the constitution, calling for the change to be completed before her term ends.

In South Korea, the president or parliament can propose a constitu-tional amendment, which must be approved by a two-thirds majority in the single-chamber assembly and then by a majority in a national ref-erendum in which more than half of eligible voters participate.

Reuters

BEIJING: China said yesterday that “diehard” independence support-ers in Taiwan and Hong Kong were seeking to link up to hatch separa-tist plots, but that they would never succeed.

Dozens of pro-Beijing law-makers walked out of the Hong Kong legislature last Wednesday to prevent the swearing-in of two pro-independence activists, setting the scene for a new constitutional cri-sis in the Chinese-controlled city.

Asked about the case the fol-lowing day, Chiu Chui-Cheng, spokesman for Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, said the two had been directly elected and called on China and Hong Kong to respect the will of the public.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said yesterday that the “one country, two systems” model for Hong Kong had been fully implemented since the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997, receiving widespread support in Hong Kong and internationally.

“We resolutely oppose the Tai-wan authority meddling in and interfering with Hong Kong’s

implementation of ‘one country, two systems’ and words and actions that damage Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability,” it said in a statement.

“Diehard Taiwan independence elements on the island and Hong Kong independence elements are colluding with each other, making futile attempts to split the country.”

“This will certainly be opposed by compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait and in Hong Kong and cannot succeed.”

Ray Wong of the “localist” group Hong Kong Indigenous also visited Taiwan last week. The topic of inde-pendence has long been taboo in Hong Kong.

China considers self-ruled Tai-wan a wayward province and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its con-trol after defeated Nationalist forces fled there at the end of a civil war with the Communists in 1949.

Relations between China and Taiwan have worsened since the election of Tsai Ing-wen from the pro-independence Democratic Pro-gressive Party as Taiwan president in January.

“Taiwan, China” had been unambiguous from 1945 to 1949, when only one “China” existed, namely the Republic of China.

One dead & 18 injured in Pattani bombing

Business plea for Gordhan

echoes rifts in ANC party

AFP

PATTANI: One person was killed and 18 others were wounded, some of them critically, when a bomb exploded outside a noodle shop in Thailand’s far south, police and wit-nesses said yesterday.

The attack coincided with the anniversary of the death of dozens of local Muslims at the hands of Thai security forces, an event that kicked off the current insurgency more than a decade ago.

The bomb tore through a noo-dle shop around 7pm in downtown Pattani, a town in Thailand’s Malay-speaking Muslim south.

“One woman was killed, a Thai Buddhist and 18 were injured,” Yut-thakarn Chitmanee, an officer at Muang Pattani police station said yesterday.

A photographer on the scene saw multiple casualties, some of them with what looked like life-threat-ening injuries.

The noodle shop was left a twisted wreck by the blast.

The kingdom’s Muslim-major-ity “deep south”, an area bordering Malaysia, has seen near daily bomb-ings and shootings since the most recent wave of rebellion erupted in 2004.

Late October often sees a spike

in attacks to mark the anniversary of the insurgency’s start.

Thailand’s ruling junta says it has tried to restart peace talks with the Muslim militants since it took power in 2014.

But the negotiations have failed to gain traction, while attacks con-tinue to strike across the region, although the attrition rate is down on

previous years. The rebels are widely believed to be behind an unprece-dented string of bomb blasts on tourist towns outside their conflict zone in August, killing four people and wounding dozens, including foreigners.

Thai police say the perpetra-tors are from the south. But they have so far publicly denied a link

to the southern insurgency, fearful of a backlash on the crucial tour-ist trade.

Both sides have been accused of human rights violations and target-ing civilians.

No member of the Thai secu-rity forces has ever been jailed for extrajudicial killings or torture in the restive ‘deep south’.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye leaves after delivering her speech on the 2017 budget bill during a plenary session at the National Assembly in Seoul, yesterday.

As the protesters marched, peacekeepers fired warning shots into the air to hold them back: Witnesses

Burundi govt drops

permits from rights

group and NGOs

Reuters

NAIROBI: Burundi’s govern-ment has withdrawn permits from a prominent human rights organisation and several other non-profit groups, accusing them of stirring up hatred and tarnish-ing the nation’s image, an order issued by the Interior Ministry said.

Not-for-profit and non-gov-ernmental organisations (NGOs) have often been accused of taking sides against the government in a political crisis that has rumbled on since last year over President Pierre Nkurunziza’s election for a third term.

Among those whose per-mits were withdrawn was the Association for the Protection of Human Rights and Detained Per-sons (APRODH), run by prominent activist Pierre Claver Mbonimpa, who survived an assassination attempt by unidentified gunmen last year and then left for Europe where he remains.

Mbonimpa and other activ-ists have criticised the president for seeking a third term, accusing him of violating the constitution and a peace deal that ended civil war in 2005.

They have accused the state and security forces of rights abuses.

The government cites a ruling by the constitutional court saying the president could seek another term.

It also dismisses allegations of abuses.

“In spite of the multiple warnings the associations ... have deviated from their objec-tives as written in the statute and keeps on tarnishing the country’s image and sowing hatred and divisions among the Burundian people,” according to the order signed by Interior Minister Pas-cal Barandagiye.

Reuters

JOHANNESBURG: At least 80 heads of top South African firms includ-ing Anglo American, Barclays Africa Group and Naspers want fraud charges against Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan to be dropped.

The top executives of mostly-listed firms in Africa’s most industrialised country - rang-ing from mining, media, retail and banking - said in a newspa-per advertisement on Sunday that political wrangling was damaging an already stalling economy at a time the country faced a sovereign credit downgrade.

The calls by corporate South Africa echo those in the political realm, after a senior official in the ruling African National Congress (ANC) called for the party’s leader-ship to quit over the alleged political persecution of Gordhan.

The rifts are the latest sign of rising political tension as the ANC grapples with waning support since losing control of three key cities in the August municipal elections.

“We stand as one for the rule of law and against the decision to prosecute the Minister of Finance on charges that are, according to the preponderance of expert legal opinion, without factual or legal foundation,” the business leaders declared in their statement.

The charges say Gordhan, while running the tax agency, fraudu-lently approved early retirement for a deputy commissioner and re-hired him as a consultant, costing the tax agency around $79,000.

Gordhan, who is due in court on Nov. 2, has dismissed these as polit-ically motivated.

Zuma has said he is not in con-flict with Gordhan and the country’s top prosecutor has denied any polit-ical motivation. Gordhan said last week his relations with Zuma were very good.

On the same day as the business leaders’ ad hit the newsstands, Jack-son Mthembu, the ANC chief whip in parliament, urged Zuma to lead senior party officials in quitting their posts, saying fraud charges against Gordhan reflected an abuse of power to settle internal political scores.

Kenya commutes death penalty for 2,747 convicts

AFP

NAIROBI: Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta yesterday com-muted the sentences of 2,747 death row inmates, who will now serve life in prison.

Kenyatta signed documents commuting the sentences during a

ceremony at his official residence and also pardoned the 102 convicts who were serving long jail terms.

Amnesty International wel-comed the move, and urged Kenya to officially abolish the death sentence.

Kenya has not carried out an execution since 1987.

“The decision to commute death sentences brings Kenya

closer to the growing community of nations that have abolished this cruel and inhuman form of pun-ishment,” Muthoni Wanyeki, the rights group’s regional director, said recently.

In the year 2009, former pres-ident Mwai Kibaki commuted sentences of more than 4,000 prisoners on death row to life imprisonment.

Taiwan and HK activists

‘hatch’ separatist plots

An injured woman is brought to a hospital after a bombing in southern Thai province of Pattani, yesterday.

US raises concerns over Duterte’s crime war

AFP

MANILA: Philippine President Rod-rigo Duterte’s fiery rhetoric and deadly crime war are becoming a growing concern around the world, the top US envoy for Asia warned yes-terday in Manila.

US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Russel met the Philippines’ defence and foreign ministers yesterday, after Duterte last week announced his nation’s “separation” from the United States.

Duterte quickly walked back from the statement, saying he did not plan to sever their seven-decade alliance. But Russel signalled many people around the world were becoming increasingly worried about the Phil-ippine president’s repeated tirades.

“The succession of controver-sial statements, comments and a real climate of uncertainty about the Philippines’ intentions have created consternation in a number of coun-tries,” Russel said.

“Not only in mine and not only among governments, but also grow-ing concern in other communities, in the expat Filipino community, in cor-porate boardrooms as well. This is not a positive trend.”

Russel said he also directly con-veyed to Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay American concerns about Duterte’s war on crime, which has claimed about 3,700 lives in less than four months and raised fears about mass extrajudicial killings.

“I also reiterated the importance

that we place and that others place on due process and respect for the rights of citizens as an important part of protecting our communities as well,” Russel said. “And the grow-ing uncertainty about this and other issues is bad for business as well.”

US Secretary of State John Kerry phoned Yasay yesterday to discuss the alliance, Russel said.

In a briefing to local media posted live on the US embassy’s website yes-terday afternoon, Russel indicated President Duterte’s ‘insults’ was being

taken personally in Washington.“It is hurtful and mystifing to be

called names by a close friend, to be called names by the leader of a won-derful democracy,” Russel said, adding such comments could impact ties.

“The series of statements that are controversial, sometimes shocking, sometimes distressing, sometimes confusing, do sometimes factor in the equation.”

Nevertheless, the Philippines on Monday accepted a second-hand American C-130 transport plane at a

handover ceremony in Manila.“This will certainly boost our air

transport facilities. The importance of this aircraft cannot be over-emphasised,” Defence Secretary

Delfin Lorenzana said recently.The plane was the second deliv-

ered this year under an agreement in which the Philippines buys surplus American military hardware.

China slams US envoy’s visit to disputed borderUS holds ‘unofficial’

talks with North KoreaAFP

SEOUL: A group of former US dip-lomats held closed door talks at the weekend with senior Pyongyang officials, even as international efforts gather pace to further isolate North Korea, diplomatically and econom-ically.

The two-day meeting in Kuala Lumpur, which was confirmed by the South Korean and US govern-ments, was the latest in a series of unofficial talks commonly referred to as Track 2 that are closely moni-tored in the absence of any official contact between Washington and Pyongyang.

In July, the North cut off its only remaining official channel of dip-lomatic communications with the US in retaliation for American sanc-tions against its leader, Kim Jong-Un.

The so-called “New York chan-nel” had previously served as a key point of contact between North Korean and US diplomats at the UN.

American participants at the talks in the Malaysian capital included Robert Gallucci, who had led the US negotiating team that bro-kered a 1994 deal with Pyongyang

on freezing its nuclear weapons programme.

Among those on the North Korean side was vice foreign min-ister Han Song-Ryol, who previously served as deputy ambassador to UN.

The meeting came after North Korea on Thursday test-fired a pow-erful new medium-range missile and Leon Sigal, an academic specialis-ing in the Koreas who attended the talks, said the North’s nuclear weap-ons programme had dominated the discussion.

Sigal told Yonhap news agency that the North had reiterated the need to sign a peace treaty with the US before moving on its weapons programme. The US side stressed that the moves to scrap the nuclear programme had to come first.

Under President Barack Obama, the United States has eschewed an official dialogue with the North, but with a looming change in the White House, there is growing speculation as to whether a new administration might adopt a different track.

Critics of the current policy say sanctions and non-engagement have done nothing to prevent the North’s accelerated drive towards a credible nuclear deterrent that could directly threaten the US mainland.

US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Russell (centre) walks after meeting with Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs Perfecto Yasay at the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) headquarters in Pasay City, Metro Manila, yesterday.

Rights activists urge junta to drop charges against lawyerReuters

BANGKOK: Human rights activ-ists yesterday called on Thailand’s junta to drop sedition charges against a rights lawyer in the first such case against an attorney since the military took power in a 2014 coup.

Sirikan Charoensiri was charged with sedition and with disobeying authorities on Sat-urday after she refused to hand over the mobile phones of her cli-ents, 14 student activists who were arrested following a protest against the junta last year.

Since taking power, the junta has moved to silence critics and has come under sharp criticism from the international commu-nity for trying civilians in military courts, arresting dissidents and detaining some critics, including political activists, journalists and students, at military facilities for days before releasing them.

The International Commis-sion of Jurists (ICJ), a Geneva-based non-governmental organisation made up of judges from around the world, called for the charges against Sirikan to be dropped.

“She was targeted for the job of representing her client,” Sam Zarifi, Bangkok-based regional director of the ICJ said.

“The junta are using her as an example to frighten other lawyers and activists.”

Police hunt for escaped drug addicts in VietnamAFP

HANOI: Vietnamese police hunted yesterday for hundreds of drug addicts who escaped from a com-pulsory rehabilitation centre, with some using sticks and fire extinguish-ers to break out.

The communist government decrees up to two years of forced rehabilitation at government cen-tres to try to reduce drug use. Rights groups have denounced poor con-ditions at the facilities and mass escapes occur periodically.

More than 500 addicts broke out of a centre in the southern province of Dong Nai late Sunday, leaving the centre in a shambles after smashing

through concrete walls and windows and breaking down doors.

The escapees flooded onto nearby roads, according to footage in local media, prompting officials to urge residents to stay indoors and lock their homes.

By yesterday morning, 300 addicts were still at large and police were searching nearby communities.

“We are still hunting them in fields and surrounding areas. Many have caught taxis and left the prov-ince,” said a police officer who gave his name as Thanh, without provid-ing his surname.

“The people here are still very worried.”

The Dong Nai rehab centre houses 1,500 people, which reports say is double its capacity. It houses

both voluntary residents and addicts who have been ordered into the facility.

There are more than 200,000 addicts in the country, where heroin use is rampant, with about 13,000 in treatment centres, according to offi-cial figures.

Drug addicts can also undergo voluntary treatment at both state-owned and private establishments.

Human Rights Watch has denounced the conditions in Viet-nam’s rehab centres and a UN expert has recommended they be closed.

In April this year, 450 addicts fled a rehab centre in the southern prov-ince of Ba Ria Vung Tau.

This followed a similar escape in 2014 when 400 broke out of a facil-ity in Haiphong.

Anti-Vietnam War activist dies at 76AFP

WASHINGTON: Peace activist Tom Hayden, whose radical views were at the forefront of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 1960s, has died. He was 76.

Hayden’s wife, Canadian actress and author Barbara Wil-liams, said that he died late Sunday at the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, California, from complications related to a 2015 stroke.

On Twitter, his official account hailed him as a “1960s radical who became a champion of lib-eral causes.”

Hayden was a member of the “Chicago 7” convicted on federal charges of conspiracy and incite-ment to riot over anti-Vietnam War protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The convic-tion was overturned on appeal.

As an ideological leader of the influential Students for a Dem-ocratic Society, he authored its Port Huron statement, a vision-ary document that still inspires

anti-authoritarian and pro-democ-racy movements today.

“We are people of this gen-eration, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universi-ties, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit,” reads the docu-ment’s first line.

He later served for almost two decades as a California state law-maker, both in the State Assembly and the Senate, and was married to actress and fellow activist Jane Fonda from 1973 to 1990. The cou-ple had a son, Troy Garity. He also had a son, Liam, with Williams.

Reuters

BEIJING: China admonished the US yesterday for sending its ambassador in India to a contested stretch of land on the India-China border, warning that a third party’s meddling would only complicate the dispute between Beijing and New Delhi.

China claims more than 90,000sq km of territory disputed by India in

the eastern sector of the Himalayas. Much of that forms the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China calls South Tibet.

US Ambassador to India Richard Verma posted photos on his Twitter account on October 21 of his recent trip to Arunachal Pradesh, thank-ing Indian officials for their “warm hospitality” and calling the region a “magical place”.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokes-man Lu Kang said China was “firmly

opposed” to the US diplomat’s actions, which he said would “damage the hard-earned peace and tranquillity of the China-India border region”.

“Any responsible third party should respect efforts by China and India to seek peaceful and stable rec-onciliation, and not the opposite,” Lu said.

“We urge the United States to stop getting involved in the China-India territorial dispute and do more to benefit this region’s peace and

tranquillity,” he said, adding that China and India were handling the matter appropriately through talks.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs described Verma’s visit as “nothing unusual”. “The US Ambassador vis-ited Arunachal Pradesh, a state which is an integral part of the country to which he is accredited,” MEA spokes-man Vikas Swarup said in response to the Chinese statement.

No comment was available from the US Embassy in New Delhi.

Authorities lead drug addicts from the back of a truck after they were rearrested following a break-out from a compulsory drug rehabilitation centre, in southern Vietnamese province of Dong Nai, early yesterday.

I reiterated the importance that we place and that others place on due process and respect for the rights of citizens as an important part of protecting our communities as well: Russel

Police plan new face in drug war

Reuters

MANILA: Signalling a shift in strat-egy in its blood-soaked war against drugs, Philippines police aim to reduce the killing of suspects and put more resources into arresting prominent people tied to the trade, two sources with knowledge of the matter said.

Project Double Barrel Alpha will put a stronger focus on arresting

politicians, military, police, gov-ernment officials and celebrities allegedly involved in narcotics, the sources said.

The new approach will be out-lined today at a meeting of police chiefs from each of the Philippines’ 18 regions at Camp Crame, Philip-pines National Police spokesman Dionardo Carlos said.

The operation will be launched within days, Carlos said, adding he did not have further details of the new operation.

Philippine Defence Secretary Delfin Lorenzana and US Ambassador to the Philippines, Philip Goldber pose for a photo with Filipino military officials during the hand-over ceremony at a military base in Manila, yesterday.

ASIA / PHILIPPINES 19TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

A Pakistani health worker administers polio vaccine drops to a child during a door-to-door polio campaign in Karachi yesterday. Pakistan is one of only three countries in the world where polio remains endemic.

Fighting disease

PAKISTAN20 TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

Govt vows to block shutdown of Islamabad

Reuters

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s govern-ment yesterday vowed to block protests in Islamabad if opposition leader Imran Khan pushes ahead with plans to shut down the gov-ernment and transport in the capital from November 2.

The threatened protest has prompted worries of a repeat of a crippling occupation of Islama-bad that Khan led in 2014 after he rejected Prime Minister Nawaz Shar-if’s election win.

Khan has demanded that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif resign over the Panama Papers data leak that linked the premier’s family to off-shore wealth. Sharif’s family denies any wrongdoing.

The opposition leader has seized on the Panama Papers scandal as a fresh opportunity to try to unseat Sharif.

However, government spokes-man Pervaiz Rashid said yesterday there would be no repeat of 2014, as Khan vowed the same day that a million people would protest.

“It is the government’s respon-sibility to ensure that life in the capital goes on as normal,” Rashid told a press conference in Islamabad.

“The law will take its course against elements trying to shut down Islamabad.”

Rashid was not explicit how the government would thwart the protests.

A former cricketing hero, Khan said the protests would force the closure of schools, public offices, roads into the capital, and the air-port, until Sharif resigned or agreed to be investigated.

“No police can stop one million people,” Khan told a rally yesterday.

“Nawaz Sharif ... for seven months you have neither agreed to being investigated nor resigned,” Khan added. “Now you can’t run away from November 2.”

Leaked documents from the Panama-based Mossack Fonseca law firm appeared to show that Sharif’s daughter and two sons own offshore holding companies registered in the British Virgin Islands. Sharif’s fam-ily deny wrongdoing.

Holding offshore companies is not illegal in Pakistan, but Khan has implied the money was gained by corruption.

Members of Sharif’s cabinet addressed a press conference on Saturday and accused Khan him-self of money laundering and tax evasion. His party did not respond to calls seeking comment.

The allegations follow Khan’s acknowledgement in May that he used an off-shore company to legally avoid paying British tax on a Lon-don property sale. The admission temporarily eased the pressure on Sharif’s government but the opposi-tion is once again using the Panama Papers to try and unseat Sharif.

No police can stop one million people, says Imran Khan.

File picture of Imran Khan (centre), Chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) political party, addressing supporters in Islamabad.

IS claims gunning down of intelligence officerAFP

PESHAWAR: Two gunmen on a motorcycle shot dead an intelligence officer in northwest Pakistan yester-day, police said, in an attack claimed by the Islamic State group.

Akbar Ali, an intelligence sub-inspector, was on his way to work and waiting at a bus stop near his home in Charsadda district when the gunmen opened fire, Suhail Khalid, district police chief, told AFP.

“Akbar Ali was hit by four bullets

from the front and was killed on the spot,” he said, adding that the attack-ers used a 9mm pistol and fled the scene. The attack was later claimed by the Islamic State group in a short statement posted on Amaq, its affili-ated news agency.

“Islamic State fighters have killed a Pakistan intelligence agent in the Sardaryab region... of Pakistan,” it said, referring to the local area.

Pakistan’s military last month admitted for the first time that the Islamic State group had a pres-ence in the country but said it had detained hundreds of its militants

and prevented them from carrying out major attacks.

The army’s spokesman said its forces had foiled planned attacks by IS on embassies and Islamabad air-port, but denied the group was behind an August attack on a hospital that killed 73, as it had claimed.

IS, which has struggled for traction in Pakistan in the face of competition from well-established groups, gained its first toehold in Jan-uary 2015 when six Pakistani Taliban leaders switched their allegiance from Al Qaeda.

An attack on a bus in Karachi in

May 2015 that killed 46 people was the first major incident officially claimed by IS in Pakistan.

Pakistan has been battling an Islamist insurgency since shortly after it decided to ally with the US following its invasion of Afghani-stan in 2001. Violence has declined in recent years following a series of military offensives in the northwest border areas as well as concerted efforts to block the militants’ sources of funding. But the remnants of mili-tant groups are still able to carry out periodic bloody attacks, particularly in the northwest.

Kabul police try to reduce car theft by deflating tyresAFP

KABUL: Police patrol the Afghan capital on a warm Sunday, but not to hunt extremists.

Instead, they are deflating the tyres of parked cars — a theft pre-vention tactic that is raising eyebrows as the country struggles to contain the growing menace of petty crime.

Kabul and its estimated five mil-lion inhabitants are at war, a prime target for Taliban-led insurgent attacks as well as assaults by a nas-cent Islamic State.

The capital’s fledgling police force are under pressure to pre-vent atrocities, so — short on time and resources — they have taken a scorched earth approach when it comes to tackling more routine petty crime.

The logic is indisputable: if the car cannot be moved, it cannot be stolen. “Police politely ask the res-idents to not park their cars in the open... but when they prefer to pay no heed, then police may move in to remove the air nozzles as a last meas-ure,” says Feraidoon Obaidi, chief of Kabul police’s criminal investigation department.

“We can protect people from both the thieves and the terrorists,” he says. “But they should know how much energy we have to put in to stop terrorists in the city. By leaving their cars in the open, they are invit-ing thieves.”

A series of attacks have ripped across Kabul in recent months,

jihadists armed with bombs and guns killing dozens of people, including the assault targeting Shias during the Ashura festival earlier in October that left 14 people dead.

Most have been carried out by the resurgent Taliban, including attacks on a global charity and a university as well as twin blasts in September that killed 41 people.

The Ashura attack was claimed by Islamic State. In July, the Mid-dle East jihadist group, which is struggling to gain a foothold in Afghanistan, claimed bombings that tore through minority Shia Hazara protesters in Kabul, killing 84 people in the deadliest attack in the capital since 2001.

Official data shows up to 300 cars were stolen in Kabul’s streets

from March to July — slightly down from last year, but still frustrating for police. “In some cases they work in gangs, while others work individu-ally snatching cars, especially (the ones) that can easily be unlocked,” says Kabir Ahmad Barmak, chief of Kabul’s eleventh district police.

“They snatch cars parked in vacant streets especially at night, and sometimes turn them into spare parts.”

“When you see these thieves lurking in dark and people reck-lessly leaving their cars in the open, it makes you think, best way to protect is to damage the tyres,” says another officer in the district, who requested anonymity.

“It is working,” he adds with a tri-umphant smile.

An Afghan policeman deflates the tyre of a car at Khair Khana in Kabul.

Landmark coalition

on media reforms

established

Internews

NATHIAGALI: Any changes to the media laws currently in force in Pakistan will have to be linked to larger policy reforms, if they are to succeed. Trends can be changed, but policies would need to be grad-ually reformed.

This was the gist of discussion at a two-day consultation among journalists, media practition-ers, members of civil society and legal experts on media reforms, held in the scenic hill station over the weekend. The consultation also resulted in the establishment of a landmark Pakistan Coa-lition on Media Legal Reforms (PCMLR), a forum designed to focus ongoing media reform and development initiatives as well as facilitating initiatives, activities and programmes to support and strengthen media reforms.

AP

QUETTA: Unknown gunmen shot and killed two customs officers and wounded a third one yesterday in the restive southwestern province of Balochistan, police said.

The customs officers were targeted near the town of Surab by gun-men riding on a motorcycle, said Zainullah Baloch, a spokesman for the local police. Baloch said two officers died on the spot and the injured was taken to the hospital in critical condition. Sorab is some 145km south of Quetta, the capital of Balochistan.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. Balochistan is the scene of on an ongoing low-intensity insurgency by Baloch sep-aratist groups, who have claimed such hit-and-run attacks on security forces and government officials in the recent past.

Islamic militants also have presence in the province bordering Afghan-istan. Pakistan has carried out military operations against militants in tribal areas near Afghanistan and in cities across Pakistan, but extrem-ists are still capable of staging regular attacks.

Motorbike-borne assailants

shoot dead two customs officers

National plan to cut natural disaster risk for schools Reuters

SAJAWAL: When seven hours of non-stop rain led to a flash flood that swept through his village school, leaving it heavily damaged, science teacher Ali Zamin Samejo had to be hospitalised for shock.

“I passed out in a matter of sec-onds in the morning, seeing my school knocked down by the devastating

flood,” remembers the 35-year-old, fighting back tears.

What worried him most about the 2010 flood in Ghorabari, about 200km from Karachi, was whether his 22 students would be able to con-tinue their education, he said.

Six years later, he’s still teaching in the village - only now classes take place under a tree, as the school has not yet been rebuilt.

Schools in flood-prone Pakistan

are proving particularly vulnerable to worsening extreme weather and shifting rainfall patterns linked to cli-mate change, officials say.

According to the country’s National Disaster Management Authority, about 10,000 educa-tional institutions were damaged or destroyed in mega-floods that affected a fourth of Pakistan in 2010.

Since then another 10,000 schools

have been damaged in subsequent floods through 2015, the authority said.

But a new national plan, set to be put into action next year, aims to reduce the risk schools, teach-ers and students face by improving construction standards for schools, creating disaster management plans, holding evacuation drills, and rais-ing awareness of the risks through things like speaking competitions

and painting exhibitions.Disaster risk reduction will also

become a focus in school curriculums, according to the plan.

“We have already received applause from the federal education ministry and provincial education departments for framing the plan, and we feel really proud of it,” said Major-General Asghar Nawaz, chairman of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA).

KP braces for

adverse effects

of climate change

Internews

PESHAWAR: Pakistan’s north-west Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) provincial agriculture suffers from very low productivity, with risks of crop failures owing to persist-ent weather anomalies.

The Climate Change Centre at the University of Agriculture, Peshawar, has warned the provin-cial government that the surging temperature will make the land unsuitable for cultivating wheat, maize and sugarcane.

The most alarming side of the centre’s study is that higher tem-peratures are expected to promote the growth of fungus and pests in the province. Currently, of the two crops, wheat occupies over 45pc and maize, the second important cereal crop grown, about 30pc of the cultivated area.

The total cultivable area of the province is 6.55m acres but irri-gation facility is only available for 2.277m acres, hardly 32pc of the cultivable area. Thus 68pc, or 4.43m acres, are arid.

A delay in timely rains exposes a large rural population to weather risks.

Given the agricultural land-scape of the province, farmers suffer from low productivity. Nearly 80pc of the KP population lives in rural and peri-urban areas, whereas about 85pc, directly or indirectly, earn their livelihood from farming. However, agricul-ture contributes a mere 14pc to the provincial income; far below its potential.

Deputy Director and Associate Professor at the Climate Change Centre, Dr Inamullah Khan says an increase of just one degree Celsius might cause a rapid increase in the population of insects which will have a devastating effect on crops. The study established a direct link between rising temperatures and falling crop areas.

In the past decade, the increase in temperature was between 0.46 and 0.69 degrees Celsius. In D I Khan, sugarcane will not be able to grow because of depletion of the water table.

NEW DELHI: Women dev-otees will have access up to the sanctum sancto-rum of Sufi saint Haji Ali in Mumbai, the Haji Ali Dargah Trust yesterday informed the Supreme Court. The trust told the apex court that it is going to create a separate way to facilitate women dev-otees’ access to the Dargah.

As senior coun-sel Gopal Subramaniam appearing for the Haji Ali Dargah Trust sought two weeks’ time to create the way, the bench of Chief Justice T S Thakur, Jus-tice DY Chandrachud and Justice L Nageswara Rao, describing the develop-ment as positive.

Women to get

access to Haji Ali

shrine in Mumbai

24 Maoists dead in encounter on Andhra border

IANS

BHUBANESWAR: As many as 24 Maoists, including eight women, were killed by security forces in a gunbattle which also left a Grey-hounds commando dead near the Andhra-Odisha border yesterday, police said.

Acting on intelligence inputs, a combined team of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha Police carried out the operation in the Bejjangi forest in Odisha’s Malkangiri district early in the day.

“A total 24 Maoists have been killed in the encounter and a jawan

succumbed to his injuries,” Malkangiri Superintendent of Police Mitrabhanu Mohapatra said.

He, however, said the dead Mao-ists would be identified only after the bodies reached the district police.

The Maoists belonged to the outlawed Communist Party of India-Maoist.

Of the two personnel of Grey-hounds — an anti-Naxalite force of the Andhra Pradesh — injured and flown to the King George Hospital in Visakhapatnam for treatment, Md Abu Bakar succumbed to his injuries.

Mohapatra said they had got the information about the presence of around 40 Maoists in the area.

Top Maoist cadre Ramakrishna alias RK is said to have managed to escape during the fighting. Ram-akrishna’s son Munna is believed to be among the slain Maoists. Munna recently joined the CPI-Maoist.

The dead also believed to include some other top leaders of the Maoist outfit from Telugu states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

“We had information about the gathering of members of Andhra-Odi-sha Border Special Zone Committee,” Odisha Police chief K B Singh said. Police increase

reward for missing

JNU student

NEW DELHI: Delhi Police yesterday increased the reward amount from Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh for information about miss-ing JNU student Najeeb Ahmed, 10 days after his disappearance follow-ing an altercation with some ABVP activists. In a fresh order, the police said any information or clue regarding the miss-ing/abducted Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student could be given to the Vasant Kunj North police station in charge.

“A cash reward of Rs 1 lakh would be given to anyone who provides information regarding Ahmed’s whereabouts,” Additional Deputy Com-missioner of Police Nupur Prasad said.

Maoists taking part in a training camp in a forest area of Bijapur District in the central state of Chhattisgarh recently.

IANS

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Kerala Police Crime Branch will investigate a complaint by Vigilance Department chief Jacob Thomas that his phone is being tapped and emails snooped into, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said here yesterday.

Vijayan said this in the state assembly when former state Home Minister Thiruvanchoor Rad-hakrishnan sought to move an adjournment motion to discuss the grave chaos prevailing among the top brass of the state police force.

“Never before has such a situ-ation prevailed in the police force, like now when there is total dishar-mony among the top brass in the state police. There is either a deep-rooted

conspiracy against Thomas or the DGP is trying to clamour for some cheap publicity,” Radhakrishnan said.

“The need of the hour is an Intel-ligence Bureau probe by the Centre to get to the bottom of the truth,” demanded Radhakrishnan.

Thomas, who holds the rank of the Director General of Police, on Friday filed a complaint with Kerala Police chief (law and order) Loknath Behra and demanded that a probe be initiated after a newspaper reported that his mobile is being tapped and emails snooped into.

Thomas was appointed Vigilance & Anti-Corruption Bureau (VACB) director by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on May 25 — the very day Vijayan was sworn-in — and ever since the official has been the cen-tre of attention.

IANS

GUWAHATI: Thousands of mem-bers of the All Bodo Students Union (ABSU) and other Bodo groups went on a 10-hour rail blockade in Bodo districts of Assam yesterday, badly hitting train services in the state.

The blockade, to press for reviv-ing the demand for a separate Bodoland, began at 5 a.m. It hit train traffic as most trains entering and exiting the Northeast have to pass through Bodo-dominated districts of Assam.

According to Railways officials, more than 22 trains, including Rajd-hani express connecting Northeast to Delhi, were hit. Many local trains had to be halted till the agitation got over around 3pm. The rail blockade hit two places - Chirang and Udalguri districts - the most.

Bodoland activists declared the rail blockade last week accusing the BJP of backing out of its poll-time assurance to discuss the issue of Bod-oland if it comes to power.

Bodo community is the biggest tribe of Assam and they have been demanding a separate state for the last five decades.

Pramod Bodo, President of All Bodo Students Union, in a message yesterday appealed to Government of India to “come forward with a prag-matic policy decision” on Bodoland and said that almost half a century had elapsed in agitations for state-hood, claiming 5,000 lives. He said the movement will continue till the Centre concedes their demand.

Assam Additional Director Gen-eral of Police and in charge of Bodo areas L.R. Bishnoi said that frequent bandhs cause “gigantic inconven-ience” to common people. “Today

thousands of passengers were stranded at various railway stations and faced tremendous difficulties. Bandh culture should not raise its ugly head as it keeps all of us on tenterhooks. Massive police mobili-sation is required to maintain peace and order,” he said.

Among other demands of Bodo groups are ensuring political right to Bodos living outside the proposed Bodoland Area.

Apart from ABSU, the agita-tion was also supported by People’s Joint Action Committee for Bodoland Movement and National Democratic Front of Bodoland (P), which is led by rebel leader Gobinda Basuma-tary. The group is now in ceasefire with the government and is holding peace talks. According to Bodo, only a separate Bodoland would protect, preserve and safeguard the identity of the Bodo people.

Mulayam-Akhilesh-Shivpal feud fails to break impasseIANS

LUCKNOW: Uttar Pradesh’s ruling Samajwadi Party was in turmoil yes-terday as party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav (pictured) publicly pulled up his son and Chief Min-ister Akhilesh Yadav at a meeting which ended on a fiery note with sacked minister Shivpal Yadav call-ing Akhilesh a “liar”.

The Shivpal and Akhilesh fac-tions within the once united party came to blows ahead of the meet-ing called by Mulayam Singh, who made it clear that he would never let go either his brother Shivpal Yadav or long-time aide Amar Singh, who the Chief Minister cannot stand.

On two occasions during the marathon meeting attended by Samajwadi Party leaders, Mulayam Singh, 76, shouted his son down, once asking him to shut up and later asking

“tumari haisiyat hi kya hai?” (Who the hell are you?)

The yesterday meeting was a desperate attempt by Mulayam Singh to stamp his authority on the Samajwadi Party ahead of crucial assembly elections early next year but it could not do away with the bit-terness within.

Indeed, in the evening, an MLC loyal to Mulayam Singh and Shiv-pal Yadav was thrashed by an MLA close to Akhilesh Yadav at the lat-ter’s residence. But later, as Mulayam Singh fell ill, both Shivpal Yadav and the Chief Minister drove in the same year to enquire about the patriarch’s health.

Earlier, while defending Amar Singh and Shivpal Yadav, who was sacked on Sunday from the cabinet by Akhilesh Yadav with three other ministers, Mulayam Singh made it clear that Akhilesh Yadav would remain the state’s Chief Minister.

He also warned that if the party failed to overcome its cracks, the ugly unprecedented faction fighting would help the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to return to power in the country’s most populous state.

As the meeting ended, Mulayam Singh shouted at MLC Ashu Malik, a Shivpal backer, for branding Akhilesh Yadav an “Aurangazeb”. Shivpal Yadav himself reportedly raised his voice: “Your Chief Minister is a liar.”

At the meeting, Akhilesh Yadav said in a choking voice that his father was his “guru” and he would never split the Samajwadi Party. He said he was ready to quit if his father asked him -- to end the turmoil in the party.

The 43-year-old, however, alleged a conspiracy against him and that Shivpal Yadav was a part of it.

Shivpal Yadav then launched a scathing attack on Akhilesh Yadav, accusing him of trying to form a new party or stitch an alliance with

another party.He alleged that officials refused

to listen to him at the behest of the Chief Minister. “We have been beaten by police, have been to jail, pedalled cycles for hundreds of kilometers to bring the party to this situation,” he pointed out.

Mulayam Singh, who threw his lot behind his brother, the party’s new state unit chief, said he won’t even hear a word against him. “Nobdoy can become a big leader without hav-ing a big heart.”

Minor boy & BSF jawan dead in Pakistani firingIANS

JAMMU: An eight-year-old boy and a BSF trooper were killed in fresh Pakistani firing early yesterday that also damaged at least 50 villages in Jammu region, officials said.

The Border Security Force (BSF) retaliated and the exchange of fire continued for hours. Intermittent exchange of fire was on till Monday evening at various places along the 230-km border in Jammu district of Jammu and Kashmir.

Police said the mortars from Pakistan Rangers landed in residen-tial areas damaging at least a dozen houses, crops and livestock in the border areas. A police station and a police vehicle were also damaged.

“A BSF trooper, Sushil Kumar, and an eight-year-old boy were killed in heavy shelling and auto-matic gunfire by Pakistan Rangers,” a police spokesperson said here. Another BSF trooper and seven

civilians were injured.“Over a dozen residential houses

were damaged by mortar shells fired by Pakistan troops. A large number of shells landed in agricultural fields in the affected villages damaging standing crops and vegetables.”

The firing by Pakistani border guards was the latest in a series of violations of the 2003 ceasefire agreement with India, the spokes-person said.

He alleged that the Pakistani side resorted to unprovoked shelling from 2 a.m. in the R S Pura, Parg-wal and Kanachak sectors. But the Pakistan military alleged that the Indian border guards killed two civilians, including a year-old girl, in unprovoked firing early yesterday. A statement from Pakistan’s military media wing, the Inter-Services Pub-lic Relations (ISPR), said the firing from the Indian side left a civil-ian, Mohammed Latif, and a minor, Haniya, dead. Seven civilians were injured.

Bodo rail blockade hits train services

Ensure justice for Muslim women: PremierIANS

MAHOBA (UTTAR PRADESH): In his first comments on the controver-sial issue, Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday said the government and society should ensure justice to Muslim women and not let their lives be destroyed by triple talaq.

Modi at the same time also con-demned the prevalence of female foeticide in Hindu society.

Addressing a public rally here, Modi said it was not fair for a man to say “talaq” thrice over the phone to

ruin a Muslim woman’s life.“This issue should not be polit-

icised. Female foeticide is a sin. So what if the sinner is a Hindu. He will have to go to jail for such an act. My government has taken a number of steps to stop female foeticide.

Religion and sect should not be allowed to come in the way when such matters arise. Daughters, mothers, sisters should be pro-tected. Mothers and sisters should be respected. We have raised the issue firmly,” he said.

“Elections and politics have their own place. But to give justice to

Muslim women and that too accord-ing to the Constitution is the responsibility of the government and the society.”

The Prime Minister also urged people not to make triple talaq a Hindu-Muslim issue and said it was for this reason that his government has told the Supreme Court that ine-quality cannot be allowed in the name of religion.

“We have told the Supreme Court that there should not be injustice to Muslim women. There should not be discrimination on the basis of reli-gion,” Modi said. Modi came down

heavily on political parties who he said were politicising the issue.

“I am surprised that some polit-ical parties want to keep Muslim women bereft of their natural rights in the hunger for vote bank politics and that too in the 21st century. What kind of justice is this?” Modi said.

Modi also asked the gathering whether Muslim sisters deserved equal rights or not. “Should they get justice or not. Should they be defended or not?” he asked.

“Debates are going on in the media... I urge people not to make it a government-opposition issue.

Crime Branch to probe

DGP’s phone tapping

Acting on intelligence inputs, a combined team of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha Police carried out the operation in the Bejjangi forest.

An resident of Gajansoo border village pointing out damage to property from cross border firing in Kanachak sector, about 25km from Jammu, yesterday.

INDIA 21TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

EUROPE22 TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

Autumn leaves are reflected in the water of Loch Faskally, in Pitlochry, Scotland, yesterday.

Reflections

AFP

PARIS: Whether cheating on taxes or one’s lover, the little lies we tell can quickly escalate into big ones, according to a study released yes-terday that describes dishonesty as a “slippery slope”.

Serial untruths, moreover, register a diminishing emotional response in the brain, researchers reported in Nature Neuroscience.

Indeed, the biochemical link is so strong that scientists could accu-rately predict in experiments how big a lie someone was about to tell just by looking at the brain scan of their previous prevarications.

“This study is the first empirical evidence that dishonest behaviour escalates when it is repeated,” said lead author Neil Garret, a researcher in the Department of Experimen-tal Psychology at University College London.

Understanding how people grad-uate from white lies to whoppers despite the social norms or morals that discourage mendacity is of more than academic interest, the authors argue.

Whether it is “infidelity, doping in sports, making up data in science, or financial fraud, the deceivers often recall that small acts of dishon-esty snowballed over time,” noted co-author Tali Sharot, also of Uni-versity College London.

“They suddenly found them-selves committing quite large crimes.”

In the experiments, some 80 volunteers were asked to individu-ally assess high-resolution photos of glass jars filled with different amounts of pennies.

Then, via a computer, they were instructed to advise a remote partner looking at a poor-quality image of the same jar as to how much money it contained.

These partners were in fact actors working with the scientists, but the volunteers did not know that.

In the first test, the volunteers were given an incentive to be honest.

“They were told that the more accurate their partner’s estimate, the more money they would both receive,” Garrett explained in a press briefing.

This set a benchmark for other scenarios in which volunteers were given an incentive to lie.

In one experiment, a deliber-ate falsehood resulted in gains for both advisor and advised. In another, the volunteer understood that a self-interested lie would come at the expense of the partner.

“People lie the most when it is good for them and for the other per-son,” said Sharot.

“When it is only good for them, but hurts someone else, they lie less.”

Participants differed sharply on how far they wandered from the truth, and the rate at which

their dishonesty escalated.And those identified beforehand

in questionnaires as less forthright were also more likely to lie during the experiment.

But most volunteers not only easily slipped into a pattern of dis-sembling; they also ramped up the intensity of their lies over time.

Twenty-five of the participants underwent functional MRIs — brain scans — during the experiments.

The part of the brain that proc-esses emotions, the amygdala, responded strongly when lying occurred.

At least it did so at first. But even as the lies grew bolder,

the amygdala lit up less and less, a process the researchers called “emo-tional adaptation.”

“The first time you cheat on your taxes, for example, you might feel quite bad about it,” Sharot said. “That bad feeling curbs your dishonesty.”

“But the next time you cheat, you have already adapted, and there is less of a negative reaction to hold you back.”

Whether the reduced activity in the brain’s emotional command centre helped drive the slide towards dishonesty, or was simply a reflec-tion of it, remains unclear.

But one conclusion from the study does seem inescapable: the more you lie, the better you get at it. “If emotional arousal goes down, it is possible that people are less likely to catch you in a lie,” said Sharot.

AFP

LONDON: Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon warned yesterday that she would not watch her coun-try “driven off a hard Brexit cliff” as she voiced frustration at her lat-est talks with British Prime Minister Theresa May.

“Large parts of the meeting were deeply frustrating,” she said after talks with May and the first min-isters of the UK’s other devolved administrations, Wales and North-ern Ireland, in Downing Street.

“I don’t know any more now about the UK government’s approach to the EU negotiations than I did before I went in to the meeting,” she told Sky News.

The nationalist leader has threatened a second vote on inde-pendence for Scotland if it does not have continued access to Europe’s single market after Britain leaves the European Union.

Sturgeon said she would “try to be reasonable” but warned: “What I’m not prepared to do is to stand back and watch Scotland thrown off a hard Brexit cliff edge.”

May has promised EU leaders that she will start the formal nego-tiations on Brexit by the end of March, but has refused to set out her strategy beyond saying she would prioritise cutting immigration.

There are fears that this would

inevitably mean leaving the sin-gle market, a move opposed by businesses and the government in Scotland, where a majority voted in the June referendum to stay in the EU. Earlier, May’s spokeswoman said she was determined to secure a “united approach” to Brexit and rejected the idea of a separate arrangement for Scotland.

“A single UK position is vital to protect the UK’s interests as a whole. We need to be sure we are not putting up barriers to trade within the UK,” the spokeswoman said.

After Scottish ministers visited Brussels to try to secure support for their case, the spokeswoman warned against working to “under-mine” Britain’s strategy.

But Sturgeon retorted: “I can’t undermine something that doesn’t exist. It doesn’t appear to me that there is a negotiating strategy.”

Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones dismissed the idea of a sepa-rate deal for Scotland, but he is also pressing for continued access to the single market for all of the UK.

“The scale of the challenge is truly gigantic. Nobody has any details yet as to what happens next,” he said. The first ministers are also pushing for each of the devolved parliaments to vote on the government’s plans.

May has refused to allow the British parliament a vote before she triggers Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon treaty, starting a two-year count-down to withdrawal. However, MPs are likely to vote on the final deal.

In a statement after the two-hour meeting, May said: “The country is facing a negotiation of tremendous importance and it is imperative that the devolved administrations play their part in making it work.”

The talks were also attended by First Minister Arlene Foster and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, who share power in Northern Ireland. Many in the prov-ince — which like Scotland voted to stay in the EU, unlike England and Wales — fear the effect of Brexit on the fragile peace process, notably the introduction of a hard border with EU member Ireland.

AFP

VALLETTA: An unmarked recon-naissance plane working for France’s defence ministry crashed at Mal-ta’s international airport yesterday, killing all five people on board and sparking questions about what the privately-chartered plane was doing.

The aircraft plummeted into the ground nose-first and exploded in a ball of flames shortly after taking off for an undisclosed surveillance mis-sion. Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat told parliament that human error or a mechanical fault was the most likely cause of the incident.

He denied the plane was involved in covert military intel-ligence work over conflict-torn Libya, which is just 350km south of the island. “It is clear there was no bomb on the aircraft and no explo-sion happened before the aircraft crashed to the ground,” Muscat said.

“Aviation experts have so far indicated that there was no foul play... although at this stage noth-ing could be ruled out.”

Muscat insisted that the plane had been on a “customs” mission,

monitoring people, drugs and arms trafficking in the waters around Malta — with the island govern-ment’s full blessing.

The French defence ministry contradicted Malta’s initial portrayal of the victims as customs officials by confirming that the plane had been working on its behalf, carry-ing out “reconnaissance missions in the Mediterranean”.

Three of those who died were employees of the defence ministry, it said. The two others were pilots employed by CAE Aviation, a pri-vate company based in Luxembourg which specialises in aerial surveil-lance and works regularly with European military.

CAE aviation said the plane “was being flown by an experienced crew with no technical issues reported on previous flights.” France has been a significant player in Libya in recent years. Under former President Nicolas Sarkozy, it led the 2011 Western mil-itary intervention which led to the overthrow and death of former dic-tator Moamer Kadhafi and plunged the country into a state of chaos from which it has never recovered.

Paris confirmed in July that its special forces were operating inside

the conflict-torn north African state after three of its troops died in a hel-icopter crash.

The wrecked plane was a twin-prop Fairchild Metroliner Mark III registered in the United States and leased to CAE aviation.

It took off around 7:20am. Shortly afterwards it tilted abruptly to the right and was seen plunging nose-first towards the ground, finally explod-ing into a ball of flames on a road that rings the main runway, damaging the perimeter wall and fence.

“Official information, footage and eyewitnesses, including three mem-bers of the Armed Forces of Malta at the nearby barracks, and two com-mercial airline pilots, clearly indicate that there was no explosion prior to impact,” a government statement said.

“The flight was part of a French customs surveillance operation which has been taking place for the past five months, with the aim of tracing routes of illicit traffick-ing of all sorts, including human and drug trafficking amongst others,” the statement said. “The flight was reg-istered with the Malta Air Traffic Services as a local flight and was to return to Malta within hours without landing in third countries.”

Reuters

LONDON: Prime Minister Theresa May is set to end decades of inde-cision by backing the expansion of Britain and Europe’s busiest air-port, Heathrow, finally kickstarting a project made more pressing by the vote to leave the EU.

May and a small team of min-isters will meet today to choose between expanding Heathrow, to the west of London, or Gatwick, to the south - making a decision on airport expansion after more than 25 years of debate.

Key opponents of Heathrow expansion such as Foreign Sec-retary Boris Johnson, who as then London mayor said last year it would not solve capacity issues and the scheme was doomed to fail, will not be present.

Both airports are running at close to full capacity and big busi-ness argues that Britain needs a new runway to build trade ties and better compete with Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

While there are three options on the table — a new runway at Heathrow, lengthening one of its existing two runways, or a new runway at Gatwick - the govern-ment has indicated it will opt for a new Heathrow runway - the more ambitious and expensive option.

In 2015, a three-year inde-pendent inquiry set up by the government recommended that option, subject to a list of condi-tions over night flights, noise and air quality.

Last week May took the rare step of promising colleagues who oppose the decision that they would be allowed to publicly air their views, interpreted by the media as a strong signal it would be Heathrow as there are no high profile ministers who oppose Gat-wick expansion.

The airports decision will be one of May’s biggest moves since she became prime minister in July, and would contrast with the delaying tactics of her pred-ecessor, who failed to act after having withdrawn a previous government’s approval to expand Heathrow in 2010.

Scottish leader frustrated at Brexit talks The nationalist leader has threatened a second vote on independence for Scotland if it does not have continued access to Europe’s single market after Britain leaves the European Union.

Mystery as French surveillance plane crashes in Malta; 5 dead

Slippery slope: The more we lie, the easier it gets

AFP

MOSCOW: A Moscow nanny yester-day pleaded guilty to murdering the four-year-old disabled child in her charge after brandishing the child’s severed head on the street.

“I plead guilty; that’s what she said,” an interpreter said as Uzbek national Gyulchekhra Bobokulova

went on trial, Interfax news agency reported. In a chilling case, Boboku-lova was arrested in February as she waved the severed head of four-year-old Anastasia outside a Moscow metro station. The girl’s headless body was later found in the fami-ly’s flat, which had been set on fire.

The prosecutor at Moscow’s Khoroshevsky district court read out the charges that 39-year-old Boboku-lova had strangled Anastasia, who had

cerebral palsy, and then beheaded her. She then overturned an oil lamp that set the apartment ablaze and went outside carrying the child’s head.

Witnesses said that the nanny paced for around 20 minutes on the street dressed in black, waving the severed head and threatening to blow herself up.

Bobokulova is being held in cus-tody at a psychiatric hospital within Moscow’s ageing Butyrka jail.

UK set to back new Heathrow runway

Nanny admits beheading disabled child

Fire trucks aiming their hoses at the burning wreckage of a small plane which crashed at the edge of the runway at the airport in Valletta, Malta, yesterday.

EUROPE 23TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

Polish women sign a pro-choice petition during a women’s rights rally in Warsaw, yesterday. Polish women have again donned black and taken to the streets, launching another round of protests against efforts by the nation’s conservative leaders to tighten Poland’s abortion law.

Fighting for rights

AFP

VILNIUS: A party of political outsid-ers fronted by a former police chief pulled off a stunning election victory in Lithuania on Sunday on the back of promises to deliver much-needed eco-nomic growth to curb a labour exodus.

After the weekend run-off vote, which followed a first round on October 9, the centrist Lithuanian Peasants and Green Union party (LPGU) ended up with 54 seats in the

141-member parliament. It previ-ously had just one seat.

“Iron Lady” President Dalia Grybauskaite said yesterday that the election result “confirmed that people want major changes”.

“New faces replaced political old-timers in many constituencies—this means changes on Lithuania’s political map,” she added.

The conservative Homeland Union, which had been tipped to win, came a distant second with 31 seats, while the governing Social Democrats were, as expected,

relegated to the opposition, with just 17 seats.

Grybauskaite formally invited the LPGU to “form a transparent and responsible majority” government after holding exploratory coalition talks with other party leaders.

She said it was “crucial to restore ruined confidence in the parliament and government”. The LPGU has said it is open to talks with all par-ties. Popular in the countryside, the LPGU’s official leader is Ramunas Karbauskis, an industrial farming tycoon and land owner.

AFP

PALERMO: More than 1,000 migrants sang hymns, danced and clapped as they sailed into Palermo yesterday, along with the corpses of 17 people who did not survive another series of tragedy-tainted rescues in the Mediterranean.

Starting with the sick, women and children, several hundred of the mainly African group were dis-embarked from the Siem Pilot, a Norwegian ship working for the European borders agency Frontex’s Operation Triton.

In scenes being played out at a number of Italian ports after a busy weekend in waters off Libya, the rest were to stay on board overnight to ease the pressure on pier-side staff processing the new arrivals.

Among those arriving in Sic-ily were survivors of an incident on Friday morning when a rubber din-ghy was attacked by men in a Libyan coastguard speedboat.

The attack, aimed at stealing or reclaiming the outboard engine of the dinghy, resulted in most of the passengers jumping into the water and the dinghy partially deflating. An unknown number, possibly as many as 25, drowned.

In a separate incident at least 10 people including four children drowned on Saturday morning dur-ing a rescue by the Doctors without Borders (MSF) charity’s boat, Dig-nity One.

Alhaji Kutubu Sankoh, from

Sierra Leone, said the dinghy he had been travelling on had also had its engine taken off it by unknown assailants.

“We don’t know who has taken our machine. So we are on the water, everybody is crying, we just thought everything is over for us, but with God’s grace your people rescued us,” he said.

Sankoh, 20, said he had left his home and begun the perilous jour-ney over land and sea to Europe after his father died of Ebola.

“People stigmatise us so much, our family,” he said while admitting that he would not advise anyone else to make the same journey.

“I wouldn’t allow any of my fam-ily to use this road to be honest. It’s not easy, it’s very tough.”

An MSF psychological team waited on land to provide counsel-ling for the survivors from the most traumatic incidents at sea. “Their stories give us nightmares,” the char-ity said in a Tweet.

EXHAUSTION AND HUNGERExhaustion and hunger were the

most pressing concerns for most on the Siem Pilot.

Despite the fatigue, they were still able to raise a great cheer when informed by the crew that they were within an hour of the Sicilian port.

Modoulamin Camara, 24, said he had left his native Gambia in July and travelled by car to Senegal, then by bus through the vast expanses of Mali and Niger.

“My brother then sent me money and I paid to go to Tripoli (the Libyan

capital) in a pick-up truck with 26 other people,” he said.

In Tripoli he paid around $700 for the to get on the leaky boat with more than 150 other people.

“We suffered a lot, there were women in pain who had to be carried off. We left at 7am in the morning and were rescued at 5pm. I thank God I’m alive because too much pain,” he said. “I was beaten from Niger to Libya. I want to stay in Italy. I’m a carpenter but my dream is to play football professionally. I’m really good!”

Buba Ceesaoi, 17, also described himself as a carpenter from the Gambia, said he had embarked on a boat after two months under the guard of Libyan former policemen in “a big hall” in the town of Sabratha.

“I started working at nine years old, but there is no work so I had to leave,” he said.

The latest arrivals to be proc-essed lifted to more than 153,000 the total number landing in Italy in 2016 — equalling 2015’s full-year tally but still behind a total of around 170,000 registered in 2014.

While the numbers have remained broadly stable, the cross-ing has become more dangerous, with some 3,700 people known to have died in the Mediterranean this year, according to the UN, the bulk of them on the Italy-Libya route.

The number of unaccompanied children has also risen sharply and pressure has grown on Italy’s over-whelmed reception centres as a result of the country’s neighbours tightening their border controls.

AFP

CALAIS: Over 1,000 migrants rode buses out of the Calais “Jungle” yes-terday as French authorities kicked off an operation to dismantle the notorious camp that has become a symbol of Europe’s refugee crisis.

“Bye Bye, Jungle!” one group of migrants shouted as they hauled luggage through the muddy lanes of the shantytown where thousands of mainly Afghans, Sudanese and Eri-treans had holed up, desperate to sneak into Britain.

Around 1,200 police officers — some in riot gear — were on hand as several hundred migrants queued to be put on coaches for shelters across France.

“We don’t know yet where we are going, but it will obviously be better than the Jungle, which was made for animals not humans,” said Wahid, a 23-year-old Afghan.

The first coachload carrying 50 Sudanese left at about 8:45 am (0645 GMT), heading for the Burgundy region of east-central France.

By early afternoon, 25 buses were on their way with a total of 1,051 people aboard. Police at one point intervened to break up a scuffle but Interior Min-ister Bernard Cazeneuve said the operation was proceeding in a gener-ally “calm and orderly manner.”

The Jungle’s hundreds of unac-companied minors have been the main focus of NGOs’ concerns. In an 11th-hour gesture on their behalf, Britain has taken in nearly 200 teen-agers over the past week, mostly children with relatives in Britain, but the transfers were on hold yesterday.

Hundreds more have been interviewed by British immigration officials and many are still awaiting a reply.

They will be provisionally housed with other minors in containers in a part of the Jungle where families had been living.

Today, demolition crews will move in to start tearing down the slum, one of the biggest in Europe

where 6,000 to 8,000 people — among them an estimated 1,300 children — have been living in dire conditions.

Officials said they were on target to move 2,000 people yesterday. The operation is set to continue through Wednesday. Christian Salome, head of the Auberge des Migrants (Migrants’ Hostel) charity, said the process was “working well because

these are people who were waiting impatiently to leave.”

“I’m much more concerned about later in the week when the only ones remaining are those who do not want to leave, who still want to reach England,” he said, estimating their number at around 2,000. The inte-rior ministry dismissed that figure as exaggerated.

On Sunday night, the police fired

tear gas during sporadic skirmishes with migrants around the camp.

Riots erupted when the author-ities razed the southern half of the settlement in March.

Located on wasteland next to the port of Calais, the four-square-kilo-metre Jungle has become a symbol of Europe’s failure to resolve an unprec-edented migrant influx.

More than one million people fleeing war and poverty in the Mid-dle East, Asia and Africa poured into Europe last year, sowing divisions across the 28-nation bloc and fuelling the rise of far-right parties, including France’s own National Front.

Those seeking to smuggle into Britain, believing it to offer better chances of work and integration than France, have been converging on Cal-ais for well over a decade. The first makeshift camp on the site of the Jun-gle dates back to 2002.

Over the past year, police in the northern town have been battling near nightly attempts by migrants to climb onto trucks heading across the Channel.

Fresh graffiti on the walls of Jun-gle shelters and shops reflected the fears of some that Britain may be slipping out of reach.

“I lost my hope,” read one tag. “Is this justice? No,” read another.

Karhazi, a young Afghan, sounded a defiant note: “They’ll have to force us to leave. We want to go to Britain.” The redistribution of the migrants is a risky enterprise for Socialist Pres-ident Francois Hollande, coming six months before national elections in which migration is a key issue.

Some French people have opposed plans to resettle asylum-seekers in their midst. French authorities say those who agree to be relocated can apply for asylum in France. Those who resist face possible deportation. Jean-Marc Puissesseau, chief executive of Calais port where migrants in Janu-ary briefly occupied a ferry, told BBC radio he was “a very, very happy man.”

“It’s for us really the D-Day,” he said, hailing an end to the “constant stress” of drivers fearful of being ambushed by migrants. Dozens of youths have been killed on the road or trying up to jump onto passing trains.

Puissesseau warned that new camps would sprout up around Cal-ais unless police remained vigilant.

A Syrian man said he had decamped from the Jungle at the weekend to another site about 12km away, along with dozens of other migrants. A total of 145 buses have been laid on over the three days to take adults and families to 451 shel-ters nationwide.

Migrants carrying their luggages embark from buses to leave the ‘Jungle’ camp in Calais, yesterday. RIGHT: Ethiopian migrants, members of the Oromo community, react as they leave the camp.

Thousands of migrants stream out of Calais ‘Jungle’The Jungle’s hundreds of unaccompanied minors have been the main focus of NGOs’ concerns.

Migrants arrive by bus from the “Jungle” to a shelter in Lyon, south-eastern France, yesterday.

Cheers and tears as migrant survivors make it to Italy

Lithuania opts for change in poll upset

AMERICAS24 TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

Obama turns focus to Congress

Reuters

LAS VEGAS: President Barack Obama campaigned in the battle-ground state of Nevada for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate he wants to succeed him in the White House — but he spent most of his time talking about the state’s Sen-ate race.

Democrats badly want to get back control of the Republican-controlled Senate in the November 8 election, and are sending Obama, Michelle Obama and Joe Biden to states where close races could tip the balance.

In Nevada, Obama reserved most of his firepower for mocking three-term Republican US Representative Joe Heck, who had supported his party’s presidential candidate until earlier this month when Donald Trump’s campaign went into cri-sis mode by the release of a video in which he lewdly bragged about grop-ing and kissing women.

“I understand Joe Heck now wishes he never said those things about Donald Trump, but they’re on tape, they’re on the record,” Obama said, using Heck’s earlier praise of Trump against him.

It’s not just the Senate. Obama wants to capitalise on his high

approval rating to help elect more Democrats to the House of Repre-sentatives, and has also endorsed about 150 candidates in state legis-lative races.

At an intimate fundraising din-ner in La Jolla, California, on Sunday evening, where tickets started at $10,000, Obama urged about 60 guests to help elect Democratic congressional candidate Doug Applegate, a former Marine colo-nel who is challenging Republican incumbent Darrell Issa. “As far as I can tell, (Darrell) Issa’s primary contribution to the United States Congress has been to obstruct and to waste taxpayer dollars on trumped-up investigations that have led nowhere,” Obama said.

Issa, the former head of the House Oversight Committee, led a series of headline-grabbing investi-gations into Obama’s administration — but has featured a photo of Obama signing legislation on a campaign brochure. “Now that is the defini-tion of chutzpah!” Obama said.

Last week, Obama excoriated Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida — who has a narrow lead over Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy, a congressman — for fail-ing to repudiate Trump.

In Las Vegas, Obama was intro-duced by the Democratic Senate candidate Catherine Cortez Masto, a two-term Nevada attorney general, who would be the first Latina elected to the US Senate if she wins.

“We can’t elect Hillary and then saddle her with a Congress that is do-nothing, won’t even try to do something,” Obama said.

The Nevada Senate seat is the only Senate race this year that Republicans could flip to their con-trol. The seat has long been held by Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, who is retiring.

Cortez Masto currently has a slim 2.3 percentage point lead in an average of polls tracked by Real-ClearPolitics over Heck.

Obama won Nevada in 2008 and

2012. Polls show Clinton with a 4.2 percentage point lead at 45.4 per-cent support to Trump’s 41.3 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics average.

US President Barack Obama speaks during a campaign rally for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton at Cheyenne High School in North Las Vegas, Nevada.

Democrats badly want to get back control of the Republican-controlled Senate in the November 8 election.

Negative tone of

White House race

sours young votersReuters

BOSTON: The exceptionally neg-ative tone of this year’s race for the White House is souring young Americans, turning some away from the democratic process just as the millennial generation has become as large a potential bloc of voters as the baby boomers.

Reuters/Ipsos polling shows that Americans aged 18 to 34 are slightly less likely to vote for president this year than their comparably aged peers were in 2012. Some political scientists worry that this election could scar a generation of voters, making them less likely to cast bal-lots in the future.

Young Americans on the left and right have found reasons to be dissatisfied with their choices this year. Senator Bernie Sanders had an enthusiastic following of younger people before he lost the Democratic primary race to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. On the Republican side, some are unwilling to vote for Donald Trump, citing the New York businessman’s sometimes insulting rhetoric on women, minorities and immigrants.

Brandon Epstein, who turned 18 yesterday, had looked forward ear-lier in the year to casting his first vote for Sanders.

Now, the resident of suburban Suffolk County, New York, plans to sit out the vote on Election Day, November 8.

“It’s because of the selection of the candidates. I find them to be not just sub-par, but unusually sub-par,” said Epstein, a student at the Massa-chusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Some-thing’s gone terribly wrong.”

That sentiment is broadly reflected in poll data that show that young Americans are less enthusiastic about their choices in November than they were four years ago when Democratic President Barack Obama faced a re-election challenge from Republican Mitt Romney.

Some 52.2 percent of respond-ents aged 18 to 34 told Reuters/Ipsos they were certain or almost certain to vote, compared with 56.1 percent who reported that level of certainty at the same point in 2012.

The national tracking poll was conducted online in English in all 50 states. It included 3,088 people between 18-34 years old who took the survey from October 1 to 17, and 2,141 18-34 year olds who took the poll on the same days in 2012. It has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 2 percentage points for both groups.

For at least the past half cen-tury, young Americans have voted at lower rates than their elders. But this year’s decline in enthusiasm is of particular concern because it comes as the millennial generation — people born from 1981 through 1997 — has become as large a bloc of eligible voters as the baby boom-ers — born between 1946 and 1964.

Hillary set to conquer early voting in swing state battlegroundsAFP

WASHINGTON: Hillary Clinton sought yesterday to cement her lead over Republican White House rival Don-ald Trump, looking to conquer swing states including Florida and Ohio where early voting has already begun.

With barely two weeks before Election Day, Clinton and Trump are blitzing the nation’s crucial battle-grounds where the race will be won or lost November 8. But voters in Chi-cago, Charlotte, Miami, Cleveland and Las Vegas are already going to polling stations to cast ballots —with initial indications suggesting a surge in early voting among Clinton’s Dem-ocrats. No less than 37 of the 50 states provide in-person voting in advance of the big day, and all offer some form of absentee ballots by mail.

“We’ve got to get people turning out. That’s the most important thing we can do,” Clinton said Monday on WZAK radio station in Cleveland.

In 2012, fully a third of all ballots were cast in advance, according to the Census Bureau. The Clinton cam-paign is counting on an even larger early turnout this year, as it expands its efforts to mobilize committed and undecided voters alike, particularly in swing states Florida, Nevada and North Carolina.

“It is possible, because there is so much access to early voting, that we could build an insurmountable lead in those keys states before elec-tion day,” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said this month.

Some six million Americans have already voted, according to election expert and University of Florida pro-fessor Michael McDonald.

“Nothing can go wrong now. My vote’s in,” Hannah Widlus, 61, told AFP after casting her ballot for Clinton at a Chicago polling station crowded with morning voters.

Normally she would not vote early, but Widlus said she was eager to do so in part because of “the cir-cumstances of the current election,”

which she said “has been made a mockery of this year.”

Early ballots are not counted until Election Day, but a look at who is requesting or casting them shows gains for Clinton, particularly in Nevada, where her ground game is prodigious, and in Florida, where

Republicans usually dominate early voting. “At a comparable time in 2012, registered Republicans had a lead of 5.3 percentage points over Democrats in returned mail ballots” in Florida, McDonald wrote in Huffington Post.

“As of Saturday, the Republican lead was 1.6 percentage points.”

Campaigning for Clinton in Las Vegas at the weekend, President Barack Obama drove the advance voting message home: “Everybody has got to vote early,” he said. “That’s how we won in ‘08. That’s how we won in 2012. That’s how we’re going to win in 2016.”

US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton holds a campaign rally with Senator Elizabeth Warren (right) and New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan (left), yesterday at Saint Anselm College in Manchester.

13 dead in

California

bus accident

AFP

LOS ANGELES: Thirteen people were killed and 31 injured on Sun-day when their tour bus collided with a truck on a major highway in southern California.

“They believe everyone was asleep on the bus,” an emotional California Highway Police chief Jim Abele said, giving condo-lences to families of the victims, who were believed to have been visiting casinos.

The front of the bus was a mangled mass of metal after apparently plowing into the back of the large truck, news photo-graphs showed.

“Because of the impact where the bus entered the back of the big rig, the majority of the people who were killed were in the front section of the bus,” Abele said. Although it was not known what caused the deadly crash, the bus was traveling fast —faster than the truck it rammed, he added.

Hollywood star Ruffalo calls Obama ‘immoral’ at climate rallyAFP

LOS ANGELES: Hollywood star Mark Ruffalo accused US President Barack Obama on Sun-day of hypocrisy for allowing fracking and other fossil fuel extraction while presenting himself as a green president.

The Oscar-nominated “Spotlight” and “Avengers” actor spoke out at a rally in Los Angeles protesting against man-made climate change and, in particular, the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, the site of escalating protests in recent weeks.

“President Obama, it is immoral for you to keep drilling in our state lands, in our fed-eral lands, off our federal waters, while at the same time calling yourself a climate change leader,” he said.

Ruffalo, 48, recently narrated and pro-duced “Dear President Obama: The Clean

Energy Revolution Is Now,” a critical doc-umentary on the outgoing head-of-state’s environmental legacy.

He was joined on stage by actresses Shailene Woodley, 24, and Susan Sarandon, 70, for a five-hour event featuring music and speeches in front of around 800 people at MacArthur Park in downtown LA.

The heavens opened as Grammy-nom-inated singer-songwriter Antonique Smith started playing Beatles hit “Here Comes the Sun,” and a prolonged downpour, rare in drought-hit Southern California, delighted the crowd.

Woodley, who stars in Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden” and the “Divergent” film fran-chise, was arrested at the Dakota Access Pipeline earlier this month. She was charged with criminal trespass and engaging in a riot, and is due in court.

“Indigenous people, for the most part, and marginalized communities, are the first

communities to get compromised and get taken out by the fossil fuel industry,” she said.

“Their lands are flooded from dams being built, their fish are taken and put in other countries, their mountains are compromised without any regard to their sacred ancestry and their traditions.”

Protests have drawn thousands of people to the area where Texas-based Energy Trans-fer Partners is trying to complete a 1,172-mile (1,886-kilometer) pipeline from a vast under-ground deposit in North Dakota southwards into Illinois.

More than 220 people have been arrested since demonstrations began in August.

Protesters say the $3.8bn pipeline will damage the environment and affect histori-cally significant Native American tribal land.

The Standing Rock Sioux tribe, whose res-ervation in North Dakota is near the pipeline route, says the project would destroy some of their sacred sites.

Actor Mark Ruffalo addresses the crowd during a climate change rally in solidarity with protests of the pipeline in North Dakota at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles.

AMERICAS26 TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

Venezuela Congress presses for Maduro trial

Reuters

CARACAS: Venezuela’s opposition-led National Assembly in a rowdy session pressed to put Nicolas Maduro on trial for violating democracy, days after authorities nixed a recall refer-endum against the unpopular leftist president.

The measure is unlikely to get traction as the government and the Supreme Court have systemat-ically undermined the legislature on grounds it is illegitimate until it removes three lawmakers accused of vote-buying. But it marked a fur-ther escalation of political tensions in the crisis-hit Opec nation.

“It is a political and legal trial against President Nicolas Maduro to see what responsibility he has in the constitutional rupture that has broken democracy, human rights, and the future of the country,” said opposition majority leader Julio Borges during a special congres-sional meeting.

The session was briefly inter-rupted when around 100 apparently pro-government protesters stormed in, brandishing Socialist Party signs and shouting “The Assembly will fall!” before officials herded them out.

Opposition lawmakers said there were injuries and tweeted photos of two men receiving care after alleged blows to the head. There were also reports some journalists had been robbed of their camera and flak jackets.

“The Socialist Party is showing what it has left. There are no ideas or arguments, only violence!” said opposition leader and two-time pres-idential candidate Henrique Capriles.

The opposition coalition, seek-ing to end 17 years of socialism in the South American nation, says Thurs-day’s suspension of its drive for a plebiscite against Maduro shows Ven-ezuela has abandoned democracy.

Ruling party officials accuse the opposition of fraud in their signature drive and say the coalition is seeking a coup to gain control of Venezue-la’s vast crude reserves, the world’s largest.

Despite that oil wealth, Venezuela has plunged into an unprecedented economic crisis, with many people skipping meals due to shortages and soaring prices.

Many Venezuelans fear prevent-ing the referendum increases chances of social unrest in the already vola-tile and violent country.

The opposition coalition has called for a major peaceful protest tomorrow, dubbed “The takeover of Venezuela”.

In Sunday’s raucous session, law-makers also traded barbs, with ruling party politicians showing photos of late leader Hugo Chavez while oppo-sition congressmen chanted “The people are hungry and want a recall!”

Likening Maduro to former Chil-ean dictator Augusto Pinochet and Peru’s authoritarian ex-president Alberto Fujimori, opposition law-makers also vowed to replace deans

at the electoral council and judges on the Supreme Court, though that too is unlikely to see the light of day.

Congress concluded the session by declaring that Maduro’s govern-ment had staged a coup by axing the referendum. And lawmakers unearthed an old accusation, that Maduro was actually Colombian and so is ineligible to be president, though they had yet to offer any proof.

“Stop being ridiculous,” said ruling party lawmaker Hector Rod-riguez, slamming the session as a “bad circus”.

“What you want to do is stage a coup, like in Paraguay, like in Hon-duras, and like in Brazil. We’re not Honduras, nor Paraguay, nor Brazil.”

It was not immediately clear how Congress, which will hold another special session today, might seek to put Maduro on trial.

The opposition had indeed largely rejoiced when the senate of neighbor-ing Brazil ousted leftist leader Dilma Rousseff last month. Recent shifts to the right in Argentina and Peru have also given the opposition hope of pil-ing regional pressure on Maduro.

Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader, is currently on a four-day foreign trip to seek consensus on supporting oil prices.

He has seen his popularity tum-ble as the recession worsens three years on from the death of his men-tor Chavez.

Even former ‘Chavista’ strong-holds in the slums have turned against Maduro, and the opposition frequently claims discontent runs deep among some in the top brass.

“None of you brought even a single photo of Maduro!” opposi-tion lawmaker Luis Emilio Rondon taunted, as his peers chanted “You don’t love Maduro!”

Opposition coalition has called for a major peaceful protest tomorrow, dubbed “The takeover of Venezuela”.

Demonstrators clash with riot police during a student rally demanding a referendum to remove President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas yesterday.

Students protest as standoff worsensReuters

SAN CRISTOBAL: Masked youths burned rubbish and set up roadblocks in a volatile Venezuelan border city yesterday, witnesses said, in the lat-est protest over the suspension of a referendum drive to remove social-ist President Nicolas Maduro.

Several hundred students held demonstrations in San Cristobal, near Colombia. The city, a hotbed of anti-Maduro sentiment, was the site of the worst violence during protests two

years ago that led to 43 deaths around the nation. “We want freedom!” chanted the protesters, who closed several roads under the watch of police and troops. Students held scat-tered protests in other places around Venezuela, including the capital Caracas, but mainstream opposition leaders were holding fire for nation-wide rallies planned tomorrow.

The political polarisation is impeding solutions to Venezuela’s punishing economic crisis. In the third year of a recession, many people must skip meals due to widespread food shortages and spiraling prices.

Foes say Maduro, 53, has veered openly into dictatorship by side-lining the opposition-led congress, jailing opponents and then leaning on compliant judicial and electoral authorities to stop the referendum.

Officials say a frustrated and violent opposition is seeking a coup to end 17 years of socialist rule and get their hands back on the coun-try’s oil wealth. Many of Venezuela’s 30 million people fear the standoff will create more unrest in a nation already exhausted by political con-frontation, a plunging economy and rampant crime.

Brazil plans to

waive visas for

visitors from

US and Japan

Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet and Guyana’s President David Arthur Granger meet at the government house in Santiago, Chile, yesterday.

Chile’s opposition wins local pollsReuters

SANTIAGO: Chile’s right snatched dozens of mayoralties from the governing center-left coalition, in a boost to former leader Sebastian Pinera, the front-runner to lead the conservative coalition in next year’s presidential election.

With over 99 percent of results counted on Sunday night in local elections, the right-leaning Chile Vamos pact emerged as the big

winner. It won slightly more votes than President Michelle Bachelet’s left-leaning Nueva Mayoria coali-tion, despite the left going into the vote with a massive incumbent advantage.

Conservative candidates won the majority of key swing cities, includ-ing central Santiago, a municipality inside the capital that is considered an electoral bellwether.

“This reflects that residents are tired of incomplete promises,” the conservative mayor-elect of cen-tral Santiago, Felipe Alessandri, said.

“Citizens have made their annoyance at the old practices of politicians clear, and they have made clear that they expect to be listened to.”

Voters have turned sour on Bachelet’s government after a series of corruption scandals, an ambi-tious reform drive that fell flat with many Chileans, and weak economic growth. The results should benefit Pinera, a conservative politician and businessman who served as pres-ident from 2010 to 2014 between Bachelet’s two terms and is widely expected to seek a return to office.

Haiti storm victims

suffer in various campsAFP

JÉRÉMIE: Rickety structures made of sheet metal and scrap wood are clustered along the road to the Haitian city of Jeremie, which still hasn’t seen any aid nearly three weeks after Hurricane Matthew.

In a scene that is eerily similar to the devastation in Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake, when hundreds of thousands of survivors had to cram into every available space, families are living in make-shift camps.

In one such camp on the side of the road, Dominique Pierre-Louis is trying to start a motorcycle covered in mud. “I fixed it so I can try to earn a little money by driving a motorcy-cle taxi,” said the 42-year-old, who normally works as a bricklayer. “I just want a job, I don’t need any charity. I’m a professional, I can help myself.”

Before the hurricane swept over Haiti, leaving hundreds dead, Pierre-Louis and his family lived outside Jeremie. But after days of not receiving any aid, he moved his wife and eight children to this muddy roadside camp.

In the past two weeks, convoys carrying humanitarian relief have driven by, but none has stopped.

The family is now living in a small space made of sheet metal and tarps. Pierre-Louis’s wife Dieula,

who has asthma and has been ill, rests on wooden planks covered by a sheet while their children scram-ble naked in the mud.

“I was in the hospital for eight days, I was better but the fever came back yesterday,” she said, her face covered in sweat. “I should go back but I can’t afford it.”

Aside from a cholera treatment centre set up on the grounds of Jer-emie’s partially damaged public hospital, there is no free medical care in this city, which bore the brunt of Matthew’s might.

At night, Pierre-Louis sleeps sit-ting up in a plastic chair, the only possession they were able to save from their home. Two of the younger children sleep on his lap.

His sick wife shares their makeshift bed with their six other children. But Dieula doesn’t com-plain too much about her situation.

“The solidarity that usually binds Haitians has been ruptured — there are too many homes destroyed, too many losses. The state can’t do anything, it’s too much,” she said.

A few meters away, Filton Jan-vier is more angry, and refuses to accept that the international com-munity has abandoned him. “We’re just on the side of the road. Author-ities go by, the mayor just passed by, and even the president was here. But no one came to ask us how we were doing,” the 39-year-old said, seeth-ing with rage.

Reuters

BRASILIA: Brazil’s government is considering waiving visas for visitors from the United States, Japan, Canada and Australia to boost tourism, and could even-tually extend the plan to include China, a tourism ministry spokes-man said yesterday.

The proposal by new Tour-ism Minister Marx Beltrão would extend for a 12-month trial period a visa-waiver programme adopted for visitors from the four countries during the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro this year.

Brazil’s President Michel Temer is keen to draw more for-eign investment and visitors to Brazil to help pull Latin Ameri-ca’s largest nation from its worst recession since the 1930s Great Depression.

In 2015, 575.800 US citizens visited Brazil, less than 10 percent of the total number of visitors to the South American nation. Mean-while, the number of Brazilians visiting the United States soared in recent years to 2.6 million vis-itors in 2014.

The visa exemptions would become permanent if the number of tourists rises significantly and the governments of the four coun-tries reciprocate by removing visa requirements for Brazilians vis-itors, the spokesman said. The minister’s proposal still needs approval by other departments of the Brazilian government, particularly the foreign ministry which issues the visas and has demanded reciprocity to exempt US citizens from needing visas.

Visitors from most Latin American and European Union nations, and Russia, do not need visas to travel to Brazil, but US travelers have to cough up $160 for a visa to visit Brazil, an iden-tical fee charged to Brazilians for visas to visit the United States.

The Brazilian fee was lev-ied in retaliation for exclusion of Brazil from the US visa waiver programme.

Triple homicide shocks Argentina reeling from women’s deathsAFP

BUENOS AIRES: A martial arts instructor killed his ex-girlfriend, her sister and her grandmother in Argentina on Sunday, authorities said, days after a mass protest against a brutal series of women’s killings.

Armed with a gun and a knife, the 30-year-old man went on a bloody rampage at his ex-girlfriend’s home in the western town of Godoy Cruz, killing the

three women and badly wound-ing a seven-month-old girl and an 11-year-old boy, investiga-tors said. The man then opened the home’s gas burners and lit a candle, but authorities arrived before an explosion ocurred, said the security minister for the province of Mendoza, Gianni Venier.

The triple homicide comes after thousands of Argentines dressed in black protested Wednesday against the brutal rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl, the latest in more than a

year of mass marches to protest violence against women.

In Argentina, domestic vio-lence kills one woman every 36 hours, according to government figures. The man accused of the killings has been arrested, said local police chief Roberto Munoz.

His victims were his ex-girl-friend, also 30 years old; her sister, 45; and their bedridden grandmother, 80, said Venier. A nine-year-old boy who hid to protect himself, was the only one unharmed; he phoned a relative to say his father had killed his

mother. The injured older boy, who had been stabbed repeat-edly, including in the stomach, and the baby girl, who had mul-tiple bullet wounds, were rushed to a pediatric hospital.

“This psychopath was then searching for the boy who was hiding,” Venier said.

The children are in “serious” condition, hospital director Raul Rufeil told TV channel C5N. “The boy has multiple stab wounds, the most serious one in the abdomen, and is in the operat-ing theater” he said.

Daniel Zalazar is seen detained at the police station in Godoy Cruz yesterday.

MORNING BREAK28 TUESDAY 25 OCTOBER 2016

FAJR

SHOROOK

ZUHR

ASR

MAGHRIB

ISHA

04.20 am05.37 am

11.18 am02.33 pm

05.01 pm06.31 pm

Minimum: 25o C Maximum: 33o C

HIGH TIDE 01:45 - 13:00LOW TIDE 05:30 - 20:30

Hazy to misty/foggy at places at first becomes

mild daytime with some local clouds.

PRAYER TIMINGS WEATHER

ONLINE CHART BUST

Reuters

STOCKHOLM: Many writers might give their right arm to be paid almost $1m to deliver a lec-ture. But Bob Dylan’s silence since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature might mean he never sees the award money.

The American singer-song-writer, a cultural icon of dissent and protest from the 1960s onward, has said nothing about the award announced two weeks ago. But under Nobel rules, the winner must give one lecture on literature — or in Dylan’s case even a concert — within six months to receive the $900,000 prize money.

Per Wastberg, a member of Swedish Academy that presents the award, has said that Dylan’s silence is “rude and arrogant”. The Nobel Foundation does not accept any rejections of the prize - Dylan’s name will be listed as the winner in 2016 whatever he says. But the award money is a different matter.

As a condition, Dylan must give a lecture on a subject “rele-vant to the work for which the prize has been awarded” no later than 6 months after December 10, the anniversary of dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel’s death. “That is what we ask for in return,” said Jonna

Petterson, spokeswoman for the Nobel Foundation, adding Dylan could also opt to give a concert instead of a lecture. “Yes, we are trying to find an arrangement that suits the laureate (Dylan).”

The lecture need not be delivered in Stockholm. When British novel-ist Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel literature prize in 2007, she was too ill to travel. Instead, she composed a lecture and sent it to her Swedish publisher, who read it out at a ceremony in the Swedish capital.

The Academy honoured the 75-year-old Dylan for “having cre-ated new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

Dylan’s songs, such as “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, “Subterra-nean Homesick Blues” and “Like a Rolling Stone” captured the rebellious and anti-war spirit of the 1960s generation and moved many young people later as well. The Swedish Academy’s choice of Dylan drew some controversy with many questioning whether his work qualifies as literature.

Over the years, only six laureates has declined the prize. One of them was French existentialist author Jean-Paul Sartre in 1964. After Sartre fell on hard times a few years later his lawyer wrote the Nobel founda-tion asking them to send Sartre the money. They refused.

The $900,000 question

behind Dylan’s Nobel prize

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The Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani and the Father Emir H H Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani performed the funeral prayers of the late Grandfather Emir H H Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad Al-Thani at Imam Moham-med bin Abdulwahab Mosque in Doha on Monday.