QNADoha

The Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) reported yesterday 302 new con-

fi rmed cases of coronavirus (Covid-19) - 210 of these were from community cases and 92 from travellers returning from abroad. The MoPH recorded 719 recoveries from the virus during the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of cases recovered in Qatar to 207,796. The minis-try announced two new deaths aged 34 and 78, one of whom was chronically ill, and had received the necessary medical care.

Vaccination data2,073,354 Covid-19 vaccine

doses have been administered since the start of the programme.

37,879 Covid-19 vaccine doses have been administered in the past 24 hours.

53.2% of the eligible popula-tion has now received at least one dose of the vaccine.

89% of over 60s (the most vul-nerable population group) have been vaccinated with at least one dose, while 83.3% have received both doses.

QATARGulf Times Tuesday, May 18, 20212

Qatar Charity allocates $5mn aid for PalestineQatar Charity (QC),

through its relief teams in Palestine, continues

to provide urgent aid to aff ected families in co-operation with the Ministry of Social Develop-ment, aiming to contribute to meeting their urgent humani-tarian needs in light of their cur-rent challenging conditions.

The aid comes as part of the relief campaign launched by Qatar Charity last week in re-sponse to the tough humanitar-ian events currently unfolding

in Palestine. QC has announced the allocation of $5mn within the framework of the relief drive to support the aff ected and dis-placed in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and Jerusalem.

As part of the relief drive, Qatar Charity seeks to focus on providing urgent food and health aid, distributing personal hy-giene kits in light of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and reha-bilitating and equipping health centres and hospitals to ac-commodate the largest number

of patients possible and the in-jured. QC has urged the benevo-lent people of Qatar to support the relief campaign meant for Palestine to enable it to pro-vide aid to the largest number of displaced and aff ected peo-ple possible to meet their urgent humanitarian needs and alle-viate their suff ering. Benefac-tors can donate through Qatar Charity’s website, app, branches and collection points across the country, in addition to dialling 44667711.

In a statement, Qatar Char-ity thanked the generous donors who supported the drive as well as the institutions, companies, restaurants and café that allo-cated part of their sales profi t for the campaign.

As of the beginning of this week, QC began providing ur-gent relief aid to help the people of the Gaza Strip by distribut-ing blankets, pillows and mat-tresses. Mohamed Abu Haloub, director of QC’s offi ce in the Gaza Strip, confi rmed that Qatar Charity would implement many projects in support of various sectors, especially health, not-ing that medicines and medical supplies would be provided.

He also indicated that, in the coming days, QC would sup-

port other sectors, especially food security, for the benefi t of the aff ected families. He also noted that support would be ex-tended to the displaced whose houses were destroyed by pro-viding rent, indicating that Qa-tar Charity would spare no eff ort in supporting the people of the Gaza Strip who have been af-fected by the current events.

He also thanked the people of Qatar for supporting the people of Palestine in these challenging circumstances.

QC relief drive will support the aff ected and displaced in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and Jerusalem.

The aid comes as part of the relief campaign launched by Qatar Charity last week in response to the tough humanitarian events currently unfolding in Palestine

QRCS provides critical aid in GazaQNADoha

Qatar Red Crescent Soci-ety (QRCS) said its fi eld teams, via its representa-

tive mission in the Gaza Strip, continue assessing the situa-tion, the damage, and humani-tarian needs, after visiting the destroyed sites due to the Israeli occupation bombing and follow-ing up the cases of the injured in the Palestinian hospitals in Gaza.

The QRCS team donated blood at the Central Blood Bank at the Shifa Medical Center in the Gaza Strip in response to the Minis-try of Health and its hospitals requesting the need to support health staff .

Also, QRCS secured free psy-chological counselling sessions with specialised doctors to sup-port those aff ected and provide psychological services.

In co-operation with the Palestinian Red Crescent Soci-ety, the eight ambulances pre-viously donated by QRCS via previous projects to their Pal-estinian counterpart, support medical personnel and emer-gency teams and transport the wounded and injured in the West Bank.

Also, the private ambulance and motorcycle ambulance,

which have been secured to op-erate inside the corridors and al-leys of the Old City of Jerusalem and the Al Aqsa Mosque, are sup-porting the medical teams. QRCS has allocated US$1mn as an ini-tial move and an urgent response to secure the necessary needs via the provision of medicines and medical consumables to keep

pace with the acute consumption of these materials in the current situation.

The aid will also provide am-bulances, medical equipment to hospitals, materials to prevent the spread of the coronavirus (Covid-19), food and non-food items, and partial repair of dam-aged homes.

QRCS field team in Gaza.

The QRCS team donated blood at the Central Blood Bank in Gaza.

QRCS aid will provide medical equipment to hospitals and materials to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

MoPH reports 302 new Covid-19 cases

Qatar has expressed its strong condemnation of the Israeli occupation’s bombing of the Qatar Red Crescent Society (QRCS) building in the besieged Gaza Strip, which resulted in several deaths and injuries, the off icial QNA reported yesterday. Parallel to the attack on the Red Crescent, another operation caused damage to and destruction of parts of Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani Hospital for Rehabilitation and Prosthetics, as a result of the continuous attacks on buildings surrounding the hospital, the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs (MoFA) said in a statement.

QRCS building attacked in Gaza

613 face prosecution for fl outing Covid measures

The designated authorities referred 613 people to the prosecution for violating the preventive and precautionary measures enforced by the country to contain the spread of Covid-19, the Ministry of Interior (MoI) said yesterday.Among them, 522 people were referred to the prosecution for not wearing masks in places where they are mandatory, 48 for not maintaining safe physi-cal distancing, 32 for gathering in closed places, seven for gathering at parks and the Corniche, and four persons for not installing the Ehteraz app. The measure is in line with the Cabinet decision, Decree Law No 17 of 1990 on infectious diseases, and the precaution-ary measures in force in the country to contain the spread of Covid-19. The designated authorities have called on the public to adhere to the precau-tionary measures in place to ensure their safety and that of others.

QATAR/REGION/ARAB WORLD3Gulf Times

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Qatar stresses on international community’s role in ending Israeli attacksQNADoha

Qatar stressed yesterday the importance of having the international com-

munity move urgently to stop the continued Israeli aggression to-wards the Palestinian people and Al Aqsa Mosque.

Qatar renewed its condem-nation of the Israeli occupation forces’ storming into Al Aqsa Mosque and its attack on wor-shippers, saying it provoked the feelings of millions of Muslims around the world and consti-tuted a severe violation of human

rights and international conven-tions.

This came in Qatar’s speech given by HE the Director of the International Organisations De-partment at the Ministry of For-eign Aff airs Yousef Sultan Larem at the extraordinary meeting at

the level of foreign ministers of member states at the Organisa-tion of Islamic Co-operation (OIC).

HE Larem saluted the Pales-tinian people at the occupied Al Quds for their legendary un-armed struggle against the occu-

pation’s bullets, and their mar-tyrdom for their cause and their right to establish an independ-ent state with East Al Quds as its capital.

He noted that the occupied Al Quds and Al Aqsa Mosque are witnessing an unprecedented es-calation in tensions by the Israeli occupation’s forces, refl ected in the increased rate of Judaisation and settlements to a level that can only be described as ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and all that is not Jewish by settlers who admitted on camera that they were stealing from Palestinian homes with the Israeli occupa-tion forces watching on, high-

lighting that a lot of these attacks can be categorised as war crimes. He added that the arbitrary Is-raeli bombing of Gaza has led to civilian deaths that included women and children, describ-ing it as a criminal attack that is condemned and rejected, and plays a role in the deterioration of the situation in the occupied Al Quds.

HE Larem renewed Qatar’s fi rm position of supporting the Palestinian cause, and the rights of the Palestinian people in prac-tising their religious rights and establishing an independent state based on the borders of 1967 with East Al Quds as its capital.

HE the Director of the International Organisations Department at the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs Yousef Sultan Larem.

HE Larem renewed Qatar’s firm position of supporting the Palestinian cause, and the rights of the Palestinian people in practising their religious rights and establishing an independent state based on the borders of 1967 with East Al Quds as its capital

Yemeni demonstrators take part in a protest to express solidarity with Palestinians in the capital Sanaa yesterday.

Yemenis rally for Palestine

Pandemic and confl ict: Gaza’s hospitals strained on two frontsReutersGaza

Gaza’s hospitals were al-ready struggling to cope with the Covid-19 pan-

demic before the confl ict with Israel erupted last week. Now, medics say, they are being stretched further.

“The Ministry of Health is fi ghting on two fronts in the Gaza Strip - the coronavirus front and the other front, which is more diffi cult, is the injuries and the wounded,” said Marwan Abu Sada, the director of surgery in Gaza’s main Shifa hospital.

More than a week into fi ght-ing, with Palestinians pounded night and day by airstrikes and Israelis racing for refuge from rockets as sirens wail, Gaza’s doctors are battling to keep pace. At Shifa, the biggest health facil-ity among the 13 hospitals and 54 clinics serving the crowded en-clave’s 2mn people, the number of intensive care beds has been doubled to 32 as the toll of those wounded from the confl ict mounts.

Like the rest of the system, the 750-bed hospital faced shortages of medicines and equipment be-fore fi ghting erupted on May 10 - blamed by medics on a blockade led by Israel. “The list of essential medications and medical dispos-ables suff ered an acute short-age,” Abu Sada said. It’s not just medicines in short supply. Fuel for generators that power Gaza’s hospitals - with main’s power too intermittent to be relied on - is also running out.

Israel says its blockade does not aim to stop medicines or other humanitarian supplies, and any shortages are the result of actions by Hamas, the group that has run Gaza since 2007, when the blockade was imposed.

Palestinians say 201 people have been killed in Gaza since the fi ghting started, with hun-dreds more hurt, including those wounded by shrapnel or injured

by collapsing buildings.Sacha Bootsma, the head of

the World Health Organisation in Gaza, said Covid-19 had strained the enclave’s struggling system. “Before Covid, the health system could be categorised as fragile because it has very old equip-ment, old buildings, a shortage of properly trained health staff and, of course, a chronic shortage of essential medicines,” she said.

Gaza has reported about 106,000 cases of Covid-19, or about 5.3% of the population, with 986 deaths, health offi cial say.

While Israel has rolled out one of the fastest vaccination pro-grammes in the world, fully in-oculating about 55% of its 9.3mn people, Gaza received about 110,000 doses, or enough for 55,000 people, health offi cials say, to be distributed among one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

One ward at Shifa, still marked “Corona Isolation Department”, has had to be turned into an in-

tensive care unit for those injured in the confl ict. “We require more urgent support from interna-tional and relief institutions,” said Ashraf al-Qidra, spokesman for the ministry of health, calling for medicines and ambulances. For those living near Shifa hos-pital, the sound of ambulances wears on their already shattered

nerves. “As long as we hear si-rens we know it is not over yet,” said Karam Badr, 57. Yet, health-care workers keep the creaking medical facilities going. WHO’s Bootsma said scarce resources were still reaching those most in need. “The resilience of the health system is remarkable,” she said.

Palestinian doctor Abu Sada works in Shifa hospital in Gaza City.

A child is being treated in Shifa hospital in Gaza City.

Temperature to touch 47C in coming days: MetThe maximum temperature may go up to 47C in the country in the coming days, according to the Qatar Met department. “Hot weather will continue in the country in the coming days with a gradual rise in temperature, especially on Wednesday and Thursday,” the department said in a tweet yesterday. “The maximum temperature will range between 37C and 47C in diff erent areas of the country.”

Iran’s oil minister says to retire in few monthsAFPTehran

Iran’s veteran Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh has said he plans to retire when President

Hassan Rouhani’s term ends in August following June elections, the ministry’s offi cial website re-ported. Iran holds a presidential election on June 18 and under the constitution Rouhani is barred from running for a third consecu-tive term.

Asked by reporters if he would be part of the next administra-tion, Zanganeh said: “I won’t accept even if they off er me the presidency,” according to the oil ministry’s offi cial news website

SHANA. “I will retire from public service but I will stay in politics,” he added.

Zanganeh has been at the helm of the oil ministry for a total of

almost 16 years since 1997. But he has had a long public service record stretching back to the start of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and headed other ministries, with local media calling him “sheikh of ministers”.

Iran is a founding member of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) and over the decades Zanganeh has played a crucial role in the cartel’s decisions.

The June poll comes as Iran is engaged in talks with world pow-ers in Vienna to revive a 2015 nu-clear deal from which former US president Donald Trump pulled out unilaterally in 2018. Trump also reimposed punishing sanc-tions on Tehran, including pre-

venting it from selling oil and de-priving it of a key revenue for its ailing economy.

As head of the oil ministry under Rouhani since 2013, Zan-ganeh sought to increase foreign investment in Iran’s oil sector following the lifting of interna-tional sanctions under the nu-clear accord. But Washington’s withdrawal from the deal scuttled those plans, forcing Zanganeh to rely on domestic companies and co-ordinate oil exports through “unconventional” means.

Iran sits on the world’s 4th largest proven oil reserves and was the 8th producing nation last year with 3,535 barrels per day, ac-cording to the latest BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

Iran Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh.

Qatar reiterates commitment to support Sudan at Paris meetingQNAParis

Qatar affi rmed that it will continue to support Su-dan and continue to fulfi l

its previous pledges and prepare to continue this support, in addi-tion to using various investment tools to examine opportunities in the various economic sectors in Sudan. This came in Qatar’s speech delivered by HE the Min-ister of State for Foreign Aff airs Sultan bin Saad al-Muraikhi at the International Conference on Sudan.

HE al-Muraikhi thanked French President Emmanuel Ma-cron and the people and govern-ment of France for hosting this important conference, which aims to support Sudan in light of the great political and economic challenges it is going through.

He added that these condi-tions add to the importance of this conference, which creates an important opportunity to explore investment opportuni-ties and creating the appropriate environment to enhance and de-velop investment.

Al-Muraikhi added that the broad participation of the inter-national community in the con-ference refl ects the great posi-tion that Sudan occupies in the

regional and international sur-roundings and the attention that the countries of the world attach to it due to the huge investment opportunities it enjoys in light of the eff orts made by the Sudanese government to achieve security, stability and development for the Sudanese people, which doubles hopes for the outcomes of the conference deepens optimism in achieving its desired goals.

He also said that, despite Qa-tar’s conviction of the great po-tential of Sudan and the ability of its economy to grow and face crises, improving the perform-ance of the economy and reach-ing sustainable growth has be-come a necessity more than ever before, as Sudan has the neces-sary ingredients for the success of any investment which requires developing legislation encourag-ing foreign investment, further improving the business environ-ment and economic openness, and creating an appropriate en-vironment for that.

HE the minister emphasised that peace is the main pillar of stability, without which all ef-forts are lost. He highlighted the experience of Qatar in establish-ing peace in Darfur, highlighting that Qatar supported peace in the region and hosted talks that last-ed more than a year and yielded the Doha Document for Peace.

He said that the eff orts helped establish peace in the entire re-gion, and helped make it rela-tively stable. He added that the time has come to establish full and sustainable peace in Darfur and other parts of Sudan.

He noted that Qatar continues to honour the pledges it made in the Doha Donors Conference held in April 2013, highlighting Qatar’s experience in building 15 model villages, with each village having a capacity of 100,00 peo-ple returning from refugee camps and provided them with drinking water, educational institutions, healthcare, among other facili-ties.

HE al-Muraikhi said that Qa-tar provided government aid to Sudan that exceeded $500mn, from the period of 2010-2020. Non-governmental aid crossed the $250mn mark.

He stressed that Qatar will continue supporting Sudan and honouring its previous pledges, in addition to using a wide vari-ety of investment tools to exam-ine the opportunities in diff erent sectors.

HE the Minister of State for Foreign Aff airs thanked the French president again for host-ing the conference and the good reception, wishing the confer-ence success in meeting the as-pirations of the Sudanese people.

The Qatari delegation at the International Conference on Sudan in Paris.

AMERICA

Gulf TimesTuesday, May 18, 20214

Pfi zer, Moderna vaccines eff ective against Indian variants: studyAFP Washington

The Pfi zer and Moderna Covid vaccines should remain highly eff ective against two corona-

virus variants fi rst identifi ed in India, according to new research carried out by US scientists.

The lab-based study was carried out by the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and NYU Langone Center and is considered preliminary because it has not yet been published in a peer-

reviewed journal. “What we found is that the vaccine’s antibodies are a lit-tle bit weaker against the variants, but not enough that we think it would have much of an eff ect on the protective ability of the vaccines,” senior author Nathaniel “Ned” Landau said yester-day.

The researchers fi rst took blood from people who were vaccinated with either of the two shots, which are pre-dominant in the United States and have been given to more than 150mn Ameri-cans.

They then exposed these samples

in a lab to engineered pseudovirus particles that contained mutations in the “spike” region of the coronavirus, which were particular to either the B.1.617 or B.1.618 variants, fi rst found in India.

Finally, that mixture was exposed to lab-grown cells, to see how many would become infected. The engi-neered pseudovirus particles con-tained an enzyme called luciferase, which fi refl ies use to light up.

Adding it to the pseudovirus makes it possible to tell how many cells are in-fected, based on light measurements.

Overall, for B.1.617 they found an almost four-fold reduction in the amount of neutralizing antibodies — Y-shaped proteins the immune system creates to stop pathogens from invad-ing cells.

For B.1.618, the reduction was around three-fold.

“In other words, some of the an-tibodies now don’t work anymore against the variants, but you still have a lot of antibodies that do work against the variants,” said Landau.

“There’s enough that do work that we believe that the vaccines will be

highly protective,” he added, because the overall levels remain well above those found in samples taken from people who recovered from infection with earlier unmutated virus.

But this kind of lab investigation cannot predict what the real world efficacy might look like — that will have to be investigated through other studies.

The coronavirus is known to latch on to a particular receptor on human cells called ACE2, which it uses to force its entry.

Landau’s team showed the In-

dian variants were able to bind more tightly to this receptor, like other variants of concern.

This might be linked to its in-creased transmissibility compared to the original strain.“Our results lend confidence that current vaccines will provide protection against variants identified to date,” the team conclud-ed. However, they do not preclude the possibility that newer variants that are more resistant to vaccines will emerge — highlighting the im-portance of widespread vaccination at the global level.

Biden to send 20mn doses of US vaccines abroad for fi rst timeReutersWashington

President Joe Biden will send at least 20mn more Covid-19 vaccine doses

abroad by the end of June, mark-ing the fi rst time the United States is sharing vaccines au-thorised for domestic use.

The move marks a notable pivot from the White House as the administration seeks to use the country’s vaccine supply as a diplomatic tool with the pan-demic outlook brightening at home.

Biden announced yesterday that his administration will send doses of the Pfi zer Inc/BioNTech SE, Moderna Inc and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, on top of 60mn AstraZeneca Plc doses he had already planned to give to other countries.

Unlike the others, AstraZene-ca’s shot is not yet authorized for use in the United States.

“Just as in World War Two America was the arsenal of de-mocracy, in the battle against Covid-19 pandemic our nation is going to be the arsenal of vac-cines,” Biden said.

The president has been un-der pressure to share vaccines to help contain worsening epidem-ics from India to Brazil, where

health experts fear new, more contagious coronavirus variants could undermine the eff ective-ness of available shots.

Biden noted that no other country will send more vaccines abroad than the United States. So far, the United Stages has sent

a few mn AstraZeneca doses to Canada and Mexico.

“We want to lead the world with our values with this dem-onstration of our innovation, ingenuity, and the fundamental decency of American people,” Biden said.

The White House has not pro-vided any details about what countries will receive the shots. Biden said that Jeff Zients, who heads the US vaccine eff orts, will now also lead the global vaccine push.

The United States has ad-ministered more than 272mn Covid-19 vaccine doses and dis-tributed more than 340mn, ac-cording to federal data updated yesterday morning.

With more and more Ameri-cans vaccinated, US deaths from Covid-19 last week fell to their lowest in nearly 14 months, while the number of new cases declined for a fi fth consecutive week, according to a Reuters analysis of state and county data.

Biden warned that those who do not get vaccinated “will end up paying the price” as he la-mented that “we’re still losing too many Americans” despite the signifi cant progress.

Bill Gates left Microsoft board ‘amid probe into relationship’AFP Washington

Bill Gates left the Micro-soft board in 2020 as the board pursued an

investigation into the billion-aire’s romantic relationship with a female employee, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

The founder and former head of the US technology gi-ant stepped down as board chair in March 2020.

“Microsoft Corp board members decided that Bill Gates needed to step down from its board in 2020 as they pursued an investigation into the billionaire’s prior roman-tic relationship with a female Microsoft employee that was deemed inappropriate,” the Journal reported, citing people close to the matter.

This was “an aff air almost 20 years ago which ended amicably,” a spokeswoman for Gates told the Journal.

According to the spokes-woman, Gates left Microsoft to focus more on his philan-thropic organisation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Founda-tion.

Gates and his wife Melinda, who co-founded their charity two decades ago to battle glo-bal poverty and disease, an-

nounced their divorce on May 3 after 27 years of marriage.

A spokesperson for Micro-soft said that the company was alerted in the second half of 2019 that “Bill Gates sought to initiate an intimate relation-ship with a company employee in the year 2000. A committee of the Board reviewed the con-cern, aided by an outside law fi rm, to conduct a thorough investigation.”

The employee, an engineer, claimed in a letter to have had a physical relationship with Gates “over years,” the

Journal reported. Accord-ing to the Journal, some board members also asked about links between Gates and dis-graced fi nancier Jeff rey Ep-stein, who killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial for allegedly traffi cking minors.

Gates’ team assured the board the Microsoft founder had met Epstein for “philan-thropic reasons” and “regret-ted doing so,” the Journal said.

Gates, who founded Micro-soft in 1975, stepped down as the company’s CEO in 2000, saying he wanted to focus on his foundation.

He left his full-time role at Microsoft in 2008. His seat as board director, which he left in March 2020, was the last posi-tion that offi cially linked him to the company.

US President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the Covid-19 response and the vaccination programme in the East Room at the White House in Washington, DC, yesterday.

NY ends virus mask requirements for vaccinated residentsReutersNew York

New York state will no longer require people who are fully vaccinated

against Covid-19 to wear masks in many public spaces, adopt-ing the new guidance issued last week by federal health offi cials, New York Governor Andrew

Cuomo said yesterday. “Unvac-cinated people should continue to wear a mask,” the governor said. Masks will still be required on public transit, in schools and in some other communal set-tings, even among the vaccinat-ed, the governor said.

He also said private business-es could still impose their own masking rules on customers and other visitors. People walk past a subway stop sign as the subway returns to 24-hour service, in New York City, yesterday.

Bill Gates: new revelations

People await chorus of huge, 17-year cicada hatch

ReutersWashington

Remember what was hap-pening 17 years ago? The Motorola fl ip phone was

high-tech, Facebook was brand new, George W Bush was presi-dent, and, in some parts of the United States, people could hear a symphony of the cicadas.

Much has changed since then.But once again, billions of the

red-eyed cicadas are beginning to crawl their way above ground again in portions of the eastern United States. The cicadas, known as Brood X or Brood 10, have be-gun emerging from the earth in dramatic fashion in Washington, DC and 15 states, from Georgia to New York, and west to Indiana and Illinois.

“This is just a spectacular event. I mean, there’s nothing else

like this on the entire planet Earth, even in the entire universe,” said Dr Michael Raupp, a cicada en-thusiast and Professor Emeritus of Entomology at the University of Maryland.

“This is the only place any-where that we have 13 and 17-year cicadas emerging by the billions,

if not trillions,” Raupp said. The 1-1/2 inch-long (3.8cm) black in-sects with iridescent wings and bright red eyes live above ground as adults for about three weeks — just long enough to reproduce before dying.

Raupp said they are found in larger numbers in areas where

there are more mature trees, and where the insects were plentiful in previous cicada cycles.

They tend to thrive in sunlit forest edges, which often provide the warmer weather and younger trees most ideal for them to lay their young. Periodical cica-das burrow into the ground after hatching, some digging as far as 8 feet (2.4m) below ground.

While underground, the nymphs suck the sap from tree roots for nourishment and after 17 years, they emerge and climb trees and shrubs, where they shed their crunchy skins and harden into maturity. The males make a cacophony of sounds in the tree tops as they look to mate. Once the cicadas mate, the females cut slits into tree branches, where they de-posit 400-600 eggs.

The adults quickly die, but the eggs hatch a few weeks later to re-start the cycle.

A cicada from Brood X clings to a flower after emerging from its 17 years underground to join the trillions of cicadas that will surface in eastern states in the coming weeks, in Falls Church, Virginia, yesterday.

Supreme Court limits police power to enter homes with no warrant

Reuters Washington

The US Supreme Court yesterday refused to make it easier for police to enter a home without a warrant for reasons of health or

public safety, throwing out a lower court’s de-cision to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a Rhode Island man after offi cers entered his home and confi scated his guns.

The 9-0 ruling directed the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider Ed-ward Caniglia’s lawsuit accusing police of violat-ing his constitutional rights by bringing him to a hospital for a mental health evaluation and taking away his guns without a warrant after a 2015 ar-gument with his wife.

Lower courts had ruled that police in the Rhode Island city of Cranston did not violate the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment ban on un-reasonable searches and seizures.

The case centered on a legal doctrine that gives

offi cers leeway to engage in “community care-taking” to ensure public safety.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court, which has previously applied this doctrine to vehicles, said it does not apply to the home as well.

“What is reasonable for vehicles is diff er-ent from what is reasonable for homes,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court.

In ruling against Caniglia, the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that even if his case did not involve an emergency, the police conduct was justifi ed under the commu-nity caretaking doctrine.

There has been heightened concern over po-lice conduct, including how authorities deal with mentally ill people, in the wake of protests in many cities last year against racism and police brutality. President Joe Biden’s administration backed police in the case.

A Justice Department lawyer told the justices that offi cers should not be required to obtain warrants in situations in which people could be seriously harmed.

WORLD5Gulf Times

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Thailand Covid-19 cases soar with prison clustersAFPBangkok

Thailand reported a new daily high of nearly 10,000 coronavirus cases

yesterday, more than two-thirds of them in prisons, as the king-dom battles its third wave of the pandemic.

The kingdom’s Covid-19 task force reported 9,635 new cases,

6,853 of which were among pris-oners.

Nearly half of 24,000 inmates tested at eight prisons, mainly in Bangkok and its suburbs, in-cluding several where prominent democracy activists have been detained, were found to have the virus.

Until last month, the kingdom had kept coronavirus infections low, through draconian restric-tions on people entering the

country and swift action to iso-late confi rmed cases.

But now it is struggling to contain a third wave that began in a Bangkok nightlife district and has seen total infections soar from around 30,000 in late March to over 111,000 yester-day.

The high infection rates in prisons came to light last week when an activist at the forefront of Thailand’s democracy move-

ment announced she had tested positive fi ve days after being released from a Bangkok jail on bail. The Corrections Depart-ment has said it plans to test all of the country’s prisoners – more than 310,000 detain-ees held in 143 jails around the country. Justice Minister Som-sak Thepsuthin said he may have to consider special probation for inmates if the prison clusters are not brought under control.

This handout from Thailand’s Department of Corrections received yesterday shows inmates who tested positive with the coronavirus being quarantined in a field hospital set up by the department in Bangkok.

New delay in graftcase for SA’s ZumaAFPPietermaritzburg

The corruption trial of South Africa’s scandal-tainted Jacob Zuma was

postponed once again yesterday, this time to May 26, as backers of the former president staged a boisterous show of support.

Zuma faces 16 charges of fraud, graft and racketeering relating to a 1999 purchase of fi ghter jets, patrol boats and military gear from fi ve European arms fi rms for 30bn rand, then the equivalent of nearly $5bn.

The 79-year-old Zuma, who was president Thabo Mbeki’s deputy at the time, is accused of accepting bribes totalling 4mn rand from one of the fi rms, French defence giant Thales.

The case has been postponed numerous times as Zuma, who has described the trial as a “political witch hunt”, lodged a string of motions to have the charges dropped.

In the latest snag last month, all of Zuma’s lawyers quit without explanation.

The ruling African National Congress (ANC) forced Zuma to resign in 2018 after a mount-ing series of scandals.

Zuma struck a defiant note after yesterday’s postpone-ment, telling supporters out-side the courthouse: “If I were to reveal the things I know

about other people, it would be a disaster.” Zuma was the feared intelligence chief of Nelson Mandela’s ANC during the party’s years in exile under apartheid, hunting down trai-tors and informers.

Zuma also spent 10 years on Robben Island as a political prisoner.

He has constantly played cat-and-mouse with the anti-corruption commission that he himself set up in early 2018 in an abortive bid to convince the

country that he had nothing to hide.

At yesterday’s brief hearing, nearly everyone rose as Zuma, dressed in a dark blue suit, entered the wood-panelled courtroom at the Pietermaritz-burg High Court.

In response, he clasped his hands in front of his chest.

A man sitting in the pub-lic gallery chanted “Long live Jacob Zuma, long live!”

Outside, dozens of support-ers wearing military fatigues,

some dancing, formed an hon-our guard as Zuma left the court building.

Zuma said he was “ready for trial and waiting for the law to take its course”, while warning he would “fight if the laws are bent”. The state has lined up around 200 witnesses in the case, in which Thales is also in the dock.

Patricia De Lille, who blew the whistle on the arms deal and is now public works minis-ter, had been due to be the first witness yesterday.

She spoke of “boxes and box-es of evidence,” telling journal-ists: “Finally this evidence will be disclosed by the state”. The opposition politician said she blew the whistle to help “root out the bad apples within the ANC, (but) the response...was vicious”.

“We were vilified, ridiculed,” she said.

Carl Niehaus, a fervent Zuma supporter and former spokes-man for Mandela, said he was anxious for the trial to end because “our leader cannot be persecuted any further”.

For his part, ANC lawmaker Supra Mahumapelo said Zuma, “at his advanced age...should be allowed to go into obscurity and we to move forward as a society.”

Zuma’s successor Cyril Ram-aphosa has vowed to root out corruption.

Tutu gets vaccine as govt launches large-scale rolloutAFPJohannesburg

Nobel Peace Prize laure-ate and retired arch-bishop Desmond Tutu

was among South Africa’s fi rst seniors to receive jabs yester-day as the country launched a massive immunisation drive for over-60s.

The 89-year-old anti-apart-heid icon and his wife Leah emerged from Cape Town’s Brooklyn Chest Hospital in wheelchairs after getting their shots.

After much delay and on the cusp of a third wave of Covid-19 infections, South Af-rica fi nally rolled out the much anticipated campaign, which aims to vaccinate around fi ve million people aged over 60 by the end of June.

Health Minister Zweli Mkhize visited an elder care facility in the mining town of Krugersdorp, around 30 kilo-metres, west of Johannesburg where he looked on as nurses administered jabs.

Despite being Africa’s worst virus-hit country, register-ing more than 1.6mn cases in-cluding 55,210 deaths, South Africa has vaccinated fewer than 480,000 people or just one % of its population, mainly healthcare workers.

The drive started in Febru-ary when South Africa became the fi rst country in the world to administer inoculations by US pharma group Johnson & John-son, but it has moved slowly.

The government, which has been widely criticised for the sluggish pace of the campaign, says it has ordered enough dos-es to vaccinate at least 45 mn of the estimated 59mn popula-tion.

“Five million senior citizens are targeted to be completed by the end of June, provided that the supply of vaccines fl ow as anticipated,” Mkhize said.

He said the country expects to have received 4.5mn doses of Pfi zer and 2mn J&J doses in the next six weeks, and that 16.5mn people should be vaccinated by October.

South Africa and India are leading a global campaign to waive intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines so that any country can produce them, as poor lag behind in the vaccination race.

Last week, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa de-plored the shortfall.

“A situation in which the populations of advanced, rich countries are safely inoculated while millions in poorer coun-tries die in the queue would be tantamount to vaccine apart-heid,” he said.

South Africa earlier this year purchased AstraZeneca vac-cines, but then sold them to other African countries over fears that they would be less ef-fective.

Then, after it started inocu-lating healthcare workers with the J&J jabs, it had to pause for two weeks in mid-April to vet

risks over blood clots that had been reported in the US.

The “phase two” rollout is being conducted at 87 vac-cination sites using the Pfi zer formula.

Mkhize said the vaccinations would start “fairly slowly” be-fore being ramped up towards the end of the month “because we are starting off with a new vaccine we have never used be-fore”. At a vaccination centre in Johannesburg’s district of Germiston, retiree Asha Naran, 61, was relieved to fi nally get a shot.

“I’m very happy that we’re getting the vaccine and we’re moving forward... everywhere else they’re getting it. Our fam-ily in India already got it twice.

So they’re quite ahead of us so we would like this thing to go faster,” she said after receiving her jab.

After a brief lull, infections in South Africa climbed by as much as 46% between the last week of April and the fi rst week of May. Some experts blame the jump in cases on the delayed jab campaign.

Activists and SA govt lock horns over coal pollution

South Africa’s former president Jacob Zuma, who faces fraud and corruption charges, speaks to supporters after appearing at the High Court in Pietermaritzburg, yesterday.

Desmond Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus and Nobel Peace Laureate, greets wellwishers as he is wheeled out of the Brooklyn Chest Hospital, after being vaccinated against Covid-19, in Cape Town, yesterday.

China has banned attempts to scale Everest from its side of the world’s highest peak, as Beijing takes its unflinching Covid-19 controls to the Roof of the World. The block on climb-ing was announced over concerns of the risk of Covid-19 infection by climbers starting out in Nepal, where the pandemic is raging.China was the first country hit by the pan-demic in late 2019, but has since largely con-tained the disease with strict border controls.Beijing fears a rebound of infections could emerge from abroad. With borders all but

closed since March 2020, China is now wor-ried about risks at the snow-capped summit, which it shares with Nepal at 8,848 meters above sea level, as the spring climbing season roars to life. Nepal, India’s neighbour, has been hit hard by a second wave of the epidemic, just as the Himalayan state was planning to revive its tourism this summer after a wiped-out 2020 season. In recent weeks the corona-virus has been recorded at base camp on the Nepalese side of the climb. Given the health situation, “all climbing activities are cancelled”,

state media said Friday, referring to the Tibetan name of the peak. The agency said the decision was made by the China Sports Administration. It was not clear how long the edict would be in place for.Earlier last week, China said it would set up a “separation line” at the summit of Everest to protect against coronavirus from mingling with Nepal-side climbers. But Beijing did not specify how it intended to mark its territory on the narrow summit of the world’s highest mountain, where only a few climbers can fit at a time.

China takes virus controls to Everest with climber ban

Reuters Pretoria

South Africa’s failure to tackle toxic levels of air pollution produced by

burning coal is a violation its post-apartheid constitution, activists and a UN rights expert said in court yesterday.

Campaigners are suing the South African government in the High Court, hoping to force tougher action against heavy polluters such as state power company Eskom and liquid fuel producer Sasol.

The campaigners say tougher action is required to enforce a constitutional guarantee of the right to an environment not harmful to health.

Environment Minister Bar-bara Creecy acknowledges that air pollution is a problem, but her submission to the court says the constitution does not require the ministry to impose stiff er rules.

Using the constitution to try to force the minister’s hand vio-lates the separation of powers, she argues.

The ministry says that en-vironmental concerns con-flict with economic consid-erations: the need to generate power, nearly 90% of which comes from coal, but also jobs in a coal belt with high poverty rates.

A spokesman for the Depart-

ment of Environmental Affairs said he could not comment while the matter was before the court.

The hearing is virtual, but a few dozen singing activ-ists gathered outside the High Court in the capital Pretoria to protest against the coal in-

dustry, waving banners with slogans such as “coal kills” and “united against deadly air”.

“We’re asking for account-ability from government for its failure so far to...implement its own plan. We view the levels of unsafe air pollution as a public health crisis,” Tim Lloyd, law-

yer for the Centre for Environ-mental Rights, told Reuters in a videocall.

A 2012 South African gov-ernment plan set goals to ad-dress air pollution in the High-veld. Representatives of Eskom and Sasol had yet to respond to requests for comment sent on Friday.

Activist groups includ-ing Groundwork say there are “dangerous levels of air pollu-tion” in the Highveld Priority Area, which comprises parts of Gauteng, the province in and around Johannesburg, and Mpumalanga, where coal is mined and burned to generate electricity.

The activists’ submission to the court cites a South Afri-can Air Quality Management Systems report covering 2015 to 2018. The report shows that air quality at monitoring sta-tions in the Highveld exceeded the lower of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) guide-line for smaller particulate matter on most days and its guideline for bigger particu-lates on more than half of the days monitored.

Tanzania’s new coronavirus taskforce recommended yesterday that the government resume publishing figures about the disease’s spread in the Covid-sceptic country, some 13 months after it stopped providing such data. Under its late leader John Magufuli, who downplayed the pandemic and shunned masks for the healing power of prayer, Tanzania stopped releasing Covid-19 data in April 2020 when it last showed 509 infections and 16 fatali-ties. But since Magufuli’s death earlier this year, his successor Samia Suluhu Hassan has taken a diff erent approach, creating an expert taskforce to advise her government about how to best proceed with managing the pandemic. Their list of policy recommendations was formally presented to Hassan, who unlike her predecessor has taken to wearing a mask at public functions. “The government should provide accurate statistics on Covid-19 to the public and to the World Health Organisation for the citizens to get correct informa-tion about the disease, as well as respecting international agreements,” the taskforce said. It said Tanzania had endured two serious waves of the disease and faced a possible third, and advised the government to off er WHO-approved vaccines to vulnerable citizens who wish to be inoculated.

Uganda said yesterday it had agreed with neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to share intelligence and co-ordinate a new push by Kinshasa to combat rebels blamed for worsening violence in Congo’s east. The move came a week after Congolese off icials said the two countries would set up an operations centre in Eastern Congo to fight the rebels, known as the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).“Definitely, there will be co-ordination, sharing intelligence, sharing information and all sorts of security nature kind of activities,” Brigadier Flavia Byekwaso, spokeswoman for the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF), told Reuters. The commander of UPDF’s Mountain Brigade, Maj.Gen. Kayanja Muhanga, had in recent days met security off icials in the eastern Congo town of Beni to discuss co-ordinating on anti-ADF opera-tions, Byekwaso said. However, Uganda did not intend to deploy forces in Congo, Byekwaso said.

Tanzania government told to resume publishing data on coronavirus

Uganda, Congo to share intelligence

POLICY

AGREEMENT

Protesters gather outside court as a case gets underway concerning South Africa’s failure to tackle toxic levels of air pollution produced by burning coal, in Pretoria, yesterday.

India’s Covid-19 cases fall, WHOwarns over highpositive testsReutersNew Delhi

India reported a further de-cline in new coronavirus cas-es yesterday but daily deaths

remained above 4,000 and ex-perts said the data was unreliable due to a lack of testing in rural areas where the virus is spread-ing fast.

For months now, nowhere in the world has been hit harder than India by the pandemic, as a new strain of the virus fuelled a surge in infections that has risen to more than 400,000 daily.

Even with a downturn over the past few days, experts said there was no certainty that infections had peaked, with alarm growing both at home and abroad over the highly contagious B.1.617 variant fi rst found in India.

“There are still many parts of the country which have not yet experienced the peak, they are still going up,” World Health Organisation chief scientist Sou-mya Swaminathan was quoted as saying in the Hindu newspaper.

Swaminathan pointed to the “very high” national positivity rate, at about 20% of tests con-ducted, as a sign that there could be worse to come.

“Testing is still inadequate in a large number of states. And when you see high test positivity rates, clearly we are not testing enough.

“And so the absolute num-bers actually don’t mean any-thing when they are taken just by themselves; they have to be taken in the context of how much testing is done, and test positiv-ity rate.”

Having begun to decline last week, new infections over the past 24 hours were put at 281,386 by the health ministry yesterday, dropping below 300,000 for the fi rst time since April 21.

The daily death count stood at 4,106.

At the current rate, India’s to-tal caseload since the epidemic began a year ago should pass the 25mn mark in the next couple of days.

Total deaths were put at 274,390.

Hospitals have had to turn pa-tients away while mortuaries and crematoriums have been unable to cope with bodies piling up.

Photographs and television images of funeral pyres burn-ing in parking lots and corpses washing up on the banks of the Ganges river have fuelled im-patience with the government’s handling of the crisis.

It is widely accepted that the offi cial fi gures grossly underesti-mate the real impact of the epi-demic, with some experts say-ing actual infections and deaths could be fi ve to 10 times higher.

Whereas the fi rst wave of the epidemic in India, which peaked in September, was concentrated in urban areas, where testing was introduced faster, the second wave that erupted in February is rampaging through rural towns and villages, where about two-thirds of the country’s 1.35bn people live, and testing in those places is very patchy.

“This drop in confi rmed Covid cases in India is an illusion,” S Vincent Rajkumar, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in the US, said on Twitter.

“First, due to limited testing, the total number of cases is a huge un-derestimate. Second, confi rmed cases can only occur where you can confi rm: the urban areas. Ru-ral areas are not getting counted.”

While lockdowns have helped limit cases in parts of the coun-try hit during an initial surge of infections in February and April, such as Maharashtra and Delhi, rural areas and some states are dealing with fresh surges.

The government issued de-tailed guidelines on Sunday for monitoring Covid-19 cases, with the health ministry asking vil-lages to look out for people with fl u-like illness and get them test-ed for the coronavirus.

Modi has come under fi re for his messaging to the public, a decision to leave key decisions on lockdowns to states, and the slow rollout of an immunisation campaign in the world’s biggest vaccine producer.

Havoc as monster cyclonemakes landfall in India

New Zealand to cut ‘low-skill’ immigration, refocus on wealthy

AFPMahuva, India

A deadly cyclone blasted ashore in western India late yesterday with fi erce

winds and drenching rains that turned streets into rivers, dis-rupting the country’s response to its devastating Covid-19 out-break.

Cyclone Tauktae, which lo-cal press reports called the big-gest to hit the area in 30 years, has unleashed heavy weather since the weekend that killed at least 20 people in its approach to land.

It made landfall in Gujarat just after 8.30pm local time as an ex-tremely severe cyclonic storm packing winds of 155-165km per

hour, gusting up to 185kph, the Indian Meteorological Depart-ment said.

One woman died after high winds knocked over an electric-ity poll in the city of Patan in northern Gujarat, offi cials said.

Sea levels swelled as high as 10 feet along the coast, said local weather offi cials in the coastal town of Diu, which reported wind speeds of 133kph.

The colossal swirling system visible from space has exac-erbated India’s embattled re-sponse to a coronavirus surge that is killing at least 4,000 peo-ple daily and pushing hospitals to their breaking point.

In waterlogged and wind-swept Mumbai, where authori-ties on Monday closed the air-port and urged people to stay

indoors, authorities shifted 580 Covid patients “to safer loca-tions” from three fi eld hospitals.

Six people died and nine were injured as the storm lashed Ma-harashtrae, of which Mumbai is the capital, the chief minister’s offi ce said.

Two navy ships were deployed to assist in search and rescue op-erations for a barge carrying 273 people “adrift” off Mumbai’s coast, with 28 picked up so far, the defence ministry said late yesterday.

Seven people died and nearly 1,500 houses were damaged in Kerala state, Chief Minister Pi-narayi Vijayan tweeted late yes-terday.

Around 200,000 people were evacuated in Gujarat, where all Covid-19 patients in hospitals

within 5kms of the coast were also moved.

Authorities there scrambled to ensure there would be no power cuts in the nearly 400 designated Covid hospitals and 41 oxygen plants in 12 coastal districts.

Chief Minister Vijay Rupani told reporters that over 1,000 Covid hospitals in coastal towns have been provided with gen-erators and power backups, with 744 health teams deployed along with 174 ICUs on wheels and 600 ambulances.

“Besides the daily require-ment of 1,000 tonnes of oxygen in Gujarat per day, an additional stock of 1,700 tonnes has been secured and could be used in case of emergency,” Rupani said.

Virus safety protocols such as wearing masks, social distancing and the use of sanitisers would be observed in the shelters for evacuees, offi cials added.

The state also suspended vac-cinations for two days.

Mumbai did the same for one day.

Thousands of disaster re-sponse personnel have been deployed, while units from the coast guard, navy, army and air force have been placed on stand-by.

Maharashtra evacuated around 12,500 people from coastal areas.

Four people died on Saturday as rain and winds battered Kar-nataka state, while two died in Goa as winds hit power supplies and uprooted trees.

Guardian News and MediaWellington

New Zealand has become an increasingly appeal-ing destination for those

seeking a haven – from Covid-19, economic recession or chaotic international politics.

In recent years, the country gained a reputation for “billion-

aires’ boltholes”, as mega-rich speculators including Peter Thiel bought up remote properties in scenic, isolated regions.

But in a post-Covid world, the emigration dream will be less ac-cessible – at least for those who don’t fall into the mega-rich cat-egory.

The New Zealand government yesterday announced it would be narrowing pathways for those

hoping to migrate and work in the country, particularly those it classed as “low-skill” and low-wage workers.

It simultaneously announced new measures to attract rich in-vestors.

“When our borders fully open again, we can’t aff ord to simply turn on the tap to the previous immigration settings,” the Tour-ism Minister, Stuart Nash, said

in a speech yesterday evening, which signalled sweeping chang-es ahead for immigration.

“Covid-19 has starkly high-lighted our reliance on migrant labour – particularly temporary migrant labour. The pressure we have seen on housing and infra-structure in recent years means we need to get ahead of popula-tion growth,” he said.

High levels of migration have

contributed to 30% of New Zea-land’s total population growth since the early 1990s, Nash said.

New Zealand’s dependency on temporary workers – the high-est in the OECD – “means busi-nesses have been able to rely on lower-skilled labour and sup-press wages rather than investing capital in productivity-enhanc-ing plant and machinery, or em-ploying and upskilling New Zea-

landers into work”, he said.Initial changes would be fo-

cused on the temporary and skilled migrant worker immigra-tion categories.

The minister’s speech was light on the precise details of how those visa categories would be changed, but he said the gov-ernment would “strengthen both the minimum employer require-ments and labour market test to

be met before a migrant can be hired”. The government would “encourage employers to hire, train and upskill more New Zea-landers to fi ll skill shortages”, Nash said.

The proposals are part of a wider suite of changes to immi-gration in New Zealand.

The government also an-nounced new strategies to target wealthy investors.

US, allies impose sanctions on Myanmar’s juntaReutersWashington

The US, United Kingdom and Canada yesterday imposed new sanctions

targeting Myanmar’s junta, in-creasing pressure on the military in the latest in a series of punitive actions since it took power in a February 1 coup.

The US targeted the govern-ing State Administrative Council (SAC) and 13 offi cials, the move freezing any US assets of those listed and generally bars Ameri-cans from dealing with them.

Canada said it imposed addi-tional sanctions on individuals and entities tied to the Myan-mar armed forces, while Britain announced sanctions against state-owned enterprise Myan-mar Gems Enterprise which was included in previous US sanc-tions.

The Southeast Asian country has been in crisis since the mili-

tary seized power from Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government, with near daily protests and a crackdown by the junta in which hundreds of people have been killed.

Western nations have led con-demnation of the junta and ap-plied limited sanctions.

The junta’s allegations of ir-regularities in an election won by Suu Kyi’s party in November were rejected by the electoral commission.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the junta had made no attempt to restore Myanmar’s path to democracy, and called on all countries to consider meas-ures such as arms embargos and ending commercial cooperation with military-owned entities.

He also urged the military to immediately co-operate with the United Nations and Members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) to imple-ment a fi ve-point plan reached by consensus last month, which

includes an end to violence and dialogue between the military and its opponents.

“Our actions today under-score our resolve and that of our partners to apply political and fi nancial pressure on the regime as long as it fails to stop violence and take meaningful action to respect the will of the people,” Blinken said in a statement.

The US treasury department in a statement accused the SAC, formed a day after the coup, of being created by Myanmar’s military to support it’s “unlaw-ful overthrow of the democrati-cally elected civilian govern-ment”.

The US sanctions list included four members of the SAC and nine other offi cials the Treasury said were key members of My-anmar’s military government, including the governor of the central bank and the chairman of the military-appointed electoral body, the Union Election Com-mission.

Duterte gags cabinetover China sea rowReutersManila

Philippine President Ro-drigo Duterte yesterday barred his cabinet from

talking about the South China Sea in public after weeks of strong rebukes by his ministers against China’s conduct in the contested waters.

Tensions between the Philip-pines and its giant neighbour have escalated since March, with Manila fi ling daily diplomatic protests over the presence of hundreds of Chinese fi shing ves-sels in disputed portions of the South China Sea.

“This is my order now to the cabinet, and to all and sundry talking for the government, to refrain from discussing the West Philippine Sea with anybody,” Duterte said in a televised na-tional address.

Manila refers to the South China Sea as the West Philippine Sea.

“If we talk, we talk but just

among us,” he said. Beijing claims almost the entire South China Sea, where about $3 tn worth of ship-borne trade passes each year.

But in 2016, an arbitration tri-bunal in The Hague ruled that that claim, which China bases on old maps, was inconsistent with international law.

Since taking offi ce in 2016, Duterte has pursued warmer ties with China, setting aside the ter-ritorial spat in exchange for Bei-jing’s promise of billions of dol-lars in loans, aid and investment, much of which are forthcoming.

Duterte’s defence and foreign ministers and his legal adviser have taken strong positions against Beijing over the presence of hundreds of Chinese vessels within Manila’s 200-mile exclu-sive economic zone.

The Philippines believes the Chinese vessels are manned by militia, describing their presence as “swarming and threatening” as it continues to demand for the fl otilla to be withdrawn immedi-ately.

Waves lash the coastline following cyclone Tauktae at the Gateway of India in Mumbai yesterday.

A man is vaccinated against the coronavirus disease with the AstraZeneca vaccine in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines, yesterday.

Vaccination drive

6 Gulf TimesTuesday, May 18, 2021

WORLD

Diana’s brother hits outas BBC shelves exposeDaily MailLondon

Princess Diana’s brother lambasted the BBC after its director-general shelved

the bombshell Panorama probe into the scandal over her famous interview. Tim Davie dramati-cally pulled the plug on Friday, around the time he was handed a potentially devastating report by former judge Lord Dyson into how journalist Martin Bashir se-cured the 1995 chat.

On the same afternoon, it was announced Bashir, who had been on sick leave from his role as reli-gion editor, had resigned from the corporation to ‘focus on his health’.

Earl Spencer tweeted: ‘Well, there’s a surprise. What’s next? My guess: a rush by the BBC director-general to get Lord Dys-on’s report out, before its expect-ed publication date on Friday, so he can claim, with apparent re-gret: ‘sadly this Panorama is now no longer relevant”.’

Both the programme and the report are expected to expose failings at the highest levels of the corporation, which is ac-cused of a cynical cover-up.

The BBC has been plunged into fresh turmoil over the mess left 26 years ago by Bashir’s inter-view with Diana, in which she fa-mously declared “there are three of us in this marriage”.

After the Daily Mail revealed last November that Bashir alleg-edly spun a web of lies to trick the Princess of Wales into doing the interview, the BBC launched two inquiries.

It commissioned former Mas-ter of the Rolls Lord Dyson to conduct an investigation.

And it asked veteran reporter John Ware to make a programme for Panorama – in eff ect, the fl agship current aff airs show in-vestigating itself.

On Friday at 6pm, almost six months on, Lord Dyson delivered his fi ndings to BBC top brass. They will be published later this week.

Shortly before, Davie held a video conference call with the production team and senior ex-ecutives in which it was decided to “postpone” the programme.

The Mail has been told that during the meeting, it was point-ed out to the director-general that he had agreed to let the Pan-orama be broadcast in advance of the Dyson report. He allegedly replied: “Really, guys?”

Amid questions over whether it will ever be aired, Lord Spen-cer – who is said to have given testimony to the camera that is “utterly devastating for the BBC” – has told friends he intends to wait and see what Lord Dyson says in his report, and “weigh up his options”.

One source said: “As far as Charles Spencer is concerned, he has faith in Lord Dyson. He has none whatsoever in Tim Davie doing the right thing. Apart from anything else, Spencer has evi-dence of senior fi gures in the BBC briefi ng against him even very recently.”

E-scooter hire schemesto begin in LondonGuardian News and MediaLondon

Londoners can legally use e-scooters on public roads next month – but only slowly.

E-scooters will be limited to a maximum of 12.5mph, 3mph slower than in the rest of the UK, when rental scheme trials start on June 7.

The schemes will only operate in a few parts of central, south and west London as the capital prioritises safety.

Three operators – Tier, Lime and Dott – have been chosen by Transport for London (TfL) to run the trial service.

As well as having a lower speed limit, the scooters will also have lights permanently on, and use geofencing to prevent them be-ing used in areas including the royal parks. Users will also have to complete a safety lesson be-fore their fi rst rental.

The 12-month trial will run in Canary Wharf, the City of London and boroughs including Kensington and Chelsea, Ealing, Richmond upon Thames and

Hammersmith. Only about 60-120 scooters will be available in each borough at the start of the trial – a relatively small number given the intense interest from operators in winning the tender.

Prices will be set by each op-erator.

As throughout the UK, e-scooters will be barred from pavements, and privately owned e-scooters remain illegal, despite their widespread daily use.

Helen Sharp, TfL’s e-scooter trial lead, said: “We’re doing all we can to support London’s safe and sustainable recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and it’s clear that e-scooters could act as an innovative, greener al-ternative to car trips.

“Safety remains our number one priority and we will work closely with the e-scooter op-erators, London Councils and the boroughs to ensure rigorous standards are consistently met.”

Sharp said TfL was working with its independent disability advisory group “to ensure that the trial meets the needs of eve-rybody living in, working in and visiting the trial areas”.

Cases of Indiavariant doubledin four days,says HancockGuardian News and MediaLondon

The number of confi rmed UK cases of the Covid variant fi rst detected in India has

almost doubled in four days, Matt Hancock said, as experts warned it could become the dominant type of the virus imminently.

Speaking on the day indoor hospitality and other venues were allowed to reopen, Hancock told MPs that 2,323 cases of the variant known as B.1.617.2 had been con-fi rmed, up from 1,313 on Thursday, with 483 of those in the outbreaks in Bolton and Blackburn.

Speaking of a “race between the virus and the vaccine”, the health secretary rejected calls from Labour to consider a push to vaccinate all adults in the most aff ected areas, saying that surge testing was the best remedy.

Hancock confi rmed that evi-dence indicated the variant was more transmissible than others seen so far, though it was not known by how much.

He said 35,000 more tests had been distributed or collected in Bolton and Blackburn, along with a push to target those eligi-ble for vaccinations, with 6,200 jabs carried out in Bolton alone over the weekend.

Of 19 people currently in hos-pital in Bolton with Covid, most were eligible for a vaccine but had not had one, Hancock said. “Vaccines save lives, they protect you, they protect your loved ones and they will help us all get out of this pandemic,” he said, add-ing that from today, those aged 37 would also be invited for vac-cinations.

The emergence of the vari-ant has prompted questions over whether India should have been

added sooner to the “red list” of countries, arrivals from which most arrivals to the UK are banned.

It has also raised concerns about the impact of reopening measures.

Responding in the Commons, Labour’s shadow health secre-tary, Jonathan Ashworth, con-demned what he said was too long a delay in stopping interna-tional arrivals from India: “Our borders have been as secure as a sieve. The delay in adding India to the red list surely now stands as a catastrophic misstep.”

As well as the reopening of many indoor venues yesterday, the bulk of distancing rules are due to be scrapped on June 21, although Downing Street is refusing to say whether this will now happen.

Also yesterday, the Royal Sta-tistical Society called for the government to swiftly publish the data behind its decision to go ahead with the latest stage of reopening, despite the presence of the B.1.617.2 variant.

The extent and speed of its spread was highlighted in data

from the Wellcome Sanger Insti-tute’s Covid-19 genomic surveil-lance. This showed that almost 30% of Covid samples analysed in the week ending May 8 were found to contain the variant.

The fi gure comes from analy-sis of the data by Prof Christina Pagel, director of the Clinical Operational Research Unit at University College London and a member of the Independent Sage group of experts, and suggests instances of the variant are rising rapidly.

“Data shows continued rapid increase of this new variant up to May 8, with no sign so far that containment eff orts are hav-ing much eff ect. Increases in the north-west are particularly concerning and do seem driven by areas where B.1.617.2 is domi-nant,” said Pagel.

Paul Hunter, professor in med-icine at the University of East Anglia, said the situation was worrying. “There is no evidence that the recent rapid rise in cases of the B.1.617.2 variant shows any signs in slowing,” he said.

Guardian News and MediaLondon

A number of long-term Brit-ish citizens have expressed alarm at receiving letters

from the Home Offi ce telling them they risk losing the right to work, benefi ts and free healthcare unless they apply for UK immigration status in the next six weeks.

Campaigners said they were concerned that the “scatter-gun” mailshot, which was sent out to thousands of people in-structing them to apply for EU settled status before the end of June, revealed weaknesses in the Home Offi ce’s databases, and a lack of bureaucratic clarity about who has the right to live in the UK.

The letter, which was wrong-

ly sent to numerous people who have lived in the UK for over 40 years, states: “The United Kingdom has left the European Union, so to carry on living in the UK after June 30, 2021, you and your family members need to have a UK immigration sta-tus,” the letter states.

Among those who received the letter were several people with dual citizenship, including

retired nurse Marianne Howard, 82, originally from Germany, who has been a British citizen for over 50 years; retired structural engineer Geoge Smid, who was born in what was then Czecho-slovakia and became a British citizen in 1987; Isabella Moore, originally from Poland, who has had citizenship for over 40 years and spent 33 years working as an NHS doctor; academic Jan Culik,

who holds a Czech passport and naturalised in the UK 36 years ago; and architect Eva Apollo-Crawshaw, originally from Po-land, who has been a British citi-zen for 40 years.

Several expressed their un-ease about the insensitivity of the letter’s wording, which highlighted that urgent action was required if the recipient and their family were to con-

tinue to be eligible for benefi ts, free healthcare and the right to work in the UK. Some, but not all, versions of the letter in-clude a paragraph on the second page, telling recipients to ignore the notifi cation if they already have citizenship. Anyone con-fused by the letter was invited to call a helpline, and several of those who tried to do so over the weekend and yesterday were

directed to an answerphone message which stated: “We are experiencing a high demand for our services and currently have no more space in our call queue.”

Some recipients said they were disturbed to discover that they remain classifi ed as for-eigners on internal Home Offi ce databases, despite having been British for decades.

Home Offi ce letter wrongly tells UK citizens to apply for settled status

Visitors queue to enter The National Gallery as Covid-19 restrictions continue to ease in London, Britain, yesterday.

Covid tocost Britain£372bn,says NAOGuardian News and MediaLondon

The government’s bill for tackling Covid-19 has risen by £100bn since the

start of the year and now stands at £372bn, according to the in-dependent watchdog that over-sees Whitehall spending.

Figures from the National Audit Offi ce (NAO) highlighted the fi nancial impact of the lock-down imposed to cope with the winter surge in cases of the pan-demic and brought a stark warn-ing from the MP who chairs the Commons committee of public accounts.

Amid reports of widespread fraud and contracts going to Conservative party support-ers, Labour’s Meg Hillier said: “The government expects to spend an eye-watering £372bn in response to the pandemic, and public accountability has never been more important.”

The NAO’s cost tracker found that almost half the £372bn had been earmarked for support for businesses, including spending on the coronavirus job retention scheme and bounce-back loans.

Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, had originally planned to phase out the furlough scheme last autumn, but new waves of the virus forced the Treasury to extend wage subsi-dies, fi rst until April this year and then until the end of September.

The next biggest item of ex-penditure has been health and social care, where the test-and-trace and vaccine programmes will cost the state £97bn.

Support for individuals – pri-marily via the self-employment income support scheme – is estimated to have a price tag of £55bn, while support for other public services and emergency responses is put at £65bn.

The rest of the money – £3.5bn – is being spent on other support and operational expenditure.

The NAO said that according to available data, £172bn of the budgeted £372bn had already been spent. The remainder in-cludes £92bn of government-guaranteed loans, of which the latest estimates suggest £26bn will eventually be written off .

Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, plants a tree in the grounds of Windsor Castle, to launch The Queen’s Green Canopy (QGC) tree-planting initiative created to mark Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022.

Tree-planting initiative

NHS app acts as ‘vaccine passport’A change to the NHS app brought in yesterday allows people to prove whether they have had the Covid jab – eff ectively making it a vaccine passport. The update for users in England has been brought in with little fanfare but MPs and privacy campaigners have voiced fears that any such system could be discriminatory and a breach of human rights. The app, which is separate to the NHS Covid-19 app for contact tracing, can already be used to request repeat prescriptions, book doctor appointments and view medical

records. The update coincides with Step 3 of the government’s roadmap, which lifts the ban on foreign travel. The NHS Digital website reads: ‘From May 17, peo-ple in England who have had a full course of the Covid-19 vaccine can demonstrate their Covid-19 vaccination status for international travel. “People can prove their vac-cination status in the NHS app or by ringing 119 to get a letter.”A No 10 source said the updated app was designed to allow people to meet foreign countries’ require-ments for visitors.

BRITAIN7Gulf Times

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

LATIN AMERICA

Gulf TimesTuesday, May 18, 20218

Miss Mexico crowned Miss Universe 2021AFPWashington

Miss Mexico was crowned Miss Uni-verse on Sunday in

Florida, after fellow contest-ant Miss Myanmar used her stage time to draw attention to the bloody military coup in her country.

Sunday night marked the Miss Universe competition’s return to television, after the pageant was cancelled in 2020 for the fi rst time due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Andrea Meza, 26, fi nished fi rst ahead of the Brazilian and Peruvian fi nalists in a fl ashy tel-evised event, hosted by Ameri-can actor Mario Lopez and tele-vision personality Olivia Culpo.

Former Miss Universe con-testants Cheslie Kryst, Paulina Vega and Demi-Leigh Tebow (who won the title in 2017) served as competition analysts and commentators, and a pan-el of eight women determined the winner.

Dressed in a sparkling red evening gown, Meza tearfully walked the catwalk as Miss Universe for the fi rst time, be-fore rushing back for a group hug with the other competi-tors. Meza beat more than 70 contestants from around the globe in the 69th instalment of Miss Universe, which was held at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida.

In the days leading up to the fi nal competition, Miss Myan-mar Thuzar Wint Lwin, who made the top 21, made waves when she used her time in the spotlight to bring attention to the coup in her country.

“Our people are dying and being shot by the military every day,” she said during her biographical video, which showed photos of her taking part in the anti-coup protests.

“Therefore I would like to urge everyone to speak out about Myanmar.” She also won

the award for best national costume: during that compe-tition segment on Thursday, she wore an outfi t beaded in traditional Burmese patterns and held up a sign that said, “Pray for Myanmar.”

Myanmar has been in up-roar since February 1, when the army ousted civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi. At least 796 people have been killed by security forces since then, according to a local monitor-ing group, while nearly 4,000 people are behind bars.

Miss Singapore Bernadette Belle Ong— who did not make the top 21 — also used the national costume portion to make a political statement.

Dressed in a glittering red bodysuit and matching thigh-high boots, she turned around to reveal her cape — in the col-ours of the Singaporean fl ag — was painted with the words “Stop Asian Hate.”

“What is this platform for if I can’t use it to send a strong message of resistance against prejudice and violence?” she wrote on Instagram alongside pictures of her outfi t.

The United States in partic-ular has seen a surge in anti-Asian violence in the past year, which activists have blamed on former president Donald Trump’s rhetoric, especially his repeated description of Covid-19 as the “China virus.”

The pageant has also drawn criticism in the past for ob-jectifying the contestants. In recent years, the competition has shifted image, focusing more on female empowerment and activism.

Miss Mexico Andrea Meza was crowned Miss Universe 2021 onstage at the Pageant at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida.

Chileans elect left-leaning body to draft post-Pinochet constitutionAFP Santiago

Chileans leaned left but turned their backs on traditional political par-

ties in electing a 155-member body over the weekend to re-write the country’s conserva-tive, dictatorship-era consti-tution.

A new constitution was a key demand of 2019 protests that left several dozen dead but gave rise to what has been labelled Chile’s most important elec-tion since its return to democ-racy 31 years ago.

Chile’s existing Magna Carta limits the role of the state and bolsters private enterprise.

It is blamed by many for the deep-rooted gulf between rich and poor, but hailed by others for the country’s many decades of economic growth.

Fewer than half of the coun-try’s 14.9mn eligible voters turned out on Saturday and Sunday to elect a “constitu-tional convention” that will be

tasked with drawing up a new founding law for a new Chile.

Almost half of voters opted for independent candidates, most of them left-leaning, in a symbolic vote interpreted as a rebuke of the ruling right and of traditional political parties more broadly.

It showed, said Chile’s Presi-dent Sebastian Pinera, that his government and parties were not “attuned to the demands and aspirations of citizens.”

With 99.9% of the vote counted by yesterday morning, candidates representing tradi-tional parties were in the mi-nority, with over 46% of votes having gone to independents, the biggest single block.

Candidates aligned to left-ists parties, which broadly proposed a profound consti-tutional rehaul to guarantee greater state control of natu-ral resources and more social spending, received a third of the votes cast.

The right, which defends the constitution’s capitalist, free-market guarantees, garnered

just over 20%. Many of the independent candidates — an assortment of teachers, writ-ers, journalists, lawyers and activists — were involved in or inspired by the 2019 uprisings and campaigned with promises of social change.

Political scientist Clau-dio Fuentes said most of them have leftist political affinities, meaning that the right finds itself isolated on the new con-stitution-writing body.

The Santiago stock exchange opened 9.6% lower yesterday on the back of the weekend vote, while the peso retreated 2.1% against the US dollar.

Chile’s constitution dates from 1980, enacted at the height of dictator Augusto Pin-ochet’s 1973-1990 rule.

It promotes private en-terprise in all sectors of the economy — including educa-tion, health and pensions — in a country ranked as one of the most unequal among advanced economies.

This inequality was one of the main drivers of the Octo-

ber 2019 protests that resulted in the government agreeing a month later to a referendum on a new constitution.

On October 25 last year, 80% voted for a new constitution to be drawn up by a body of elect-ed members.

The 155-member drafting group, which will have nine months to come up with a pro-posed new founding law for Chile, is composed of 78 wom-en and 77 men, with 17 seats reserved for representatives of indigenous communities.

The product of their work must be approved or rejected in a mandatory national vote next year.

Chile has the highest per capita income and the third-most multimillionaires in Latin America.

But the working and even upper-middle classes are heav-ily indebted, often to pay for schooling and private pensions. There is low satisfaction with the quality of life.

Voters also chose regional governors, mayors and local

councillors in a litmus test for presidential elections due in November. The vote was held

over two days to reduce crowd-ing during a Covid-19 outbreak that has resulted in more than

1.2mn recorded cases and near-ly 30,000 reported deaths in the country of 19mn people.

Investors keen on Brazil, but jury still out on BolsonaroAFP Brasília

President Jair Bolsonaro boasts he has restored in-vestor confi dence in Bra-

zil, but analysts and executives say he still has a long way to go to deliver his promised economic reforms.

Still reeling from the corona-virus pandemic, Latin America’s biggest economy got some good news last month with a major series of infrastructure auctions that raised far more than ex-pected.

First, Brazil raked in $600mn for concessions to operate 22 airports, fi ve port terminals and a railroad, plus around triple that amount in investment commit-ments over 30 years.

Then it raised $4.2bn for con-cessions to operate the Rio de

Janeiro water and sewer system, plus another $5.6bn in invest-ment commitments over 35 years. “This moment will mark our history and our economy,” Bolsonaro said at the time, boasting that Brazil had regained investors’ confi dence.

Not so fast, say some in the business world, still waiting for the far-right leader to follow through on most of his 2018 cam-paign promises of economic re-forms and privatisations.

Now eyeing re-election in Oc-tober next year — and potentially facing a heavyweight opponent in leftist ex-president Luiz Ina-cio Lula da Silva, who leads in the polls — Bolsonaro is racing to push through around 100 more privati-sations this year, for some $84bn.

Another 85 are on the calendar for 2022.

There are certainly things to lure investors: the massive size of

the market in the sprawling coun-try of 212mn people, its huge need for infrastructure and the rela-tively cheap price tag, given the depreciation of the Brazilian real during the pandemic.

But there are also risks: Brazil is being hammered by Covid-19, with accusations that Bolsonaro’s chaotic management is to blame.

And investors are still waiting to see whether he delivers his prom-ised fi scal, administrative and tax reforms.

“It’s still very early to say whether the investment environ-ment in Brazil has improved,” said Eliel Lins, investment adviser at Mundo Investimentos.

“Without those reforms, the

market is apprehensive, because we’re approaching Bolsonaro’s last year in offi ce,” he said.

Bolsonaro’s sliding popular-ity and a Senate inquiry into his government’s pandemic response have meanwhile created political uncertainty.

“Those risks just cloud the pic-ture,” said Lins.

Brazil was seen as an emerging-market dynamo in the 2000s. But it was knocked off its pedestal by twin political and economic crises in 2015-16.

Bolsonaro won the business sector’s backing by naming ultra-liberal economist Paulo Guedes as his economy minister and prom-ising him free rein to implement sweeping reforms to cut down government bloat and relaunch the economy.

Bolsonaro and Guedes scored an early win with a major pen-sion reform in 2019. But then the

pandemic arrived, causing Brazil’s economy to shrink 4.1% last year and largely pushing the reform agenda to the back burner.

The administration is also fi ghting resistance to the reforms in Congress. But investors say following through is vital to re-duce the “Brazil premium,” the high cost of doing business in the country.

“That includes extremely high taxation rates, the cost of waste due to poor infrastructure, the cost of bureaucracy — everything that makes the business environ-ment worse,” said economist Alex Agostini of consulting fi rm Austin Rating.

Increasingly, foreign fi rms are also insisting their local partners in Brazil have sound environ-mental records — a weak spot for Bolsonaro, who is accused of gut-ting environmental protection programs and has presided over a

surge of deforestation in the Ama-zon rainforest.

Upcoming plans include pri-vatising Latin America’s biggest electric utility, Eletrobras, and the Brazilian postal service.

Infrastructure concessions due on the auction block include air-ports in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, a highway between the two cities, and a trans-Amazonian railroad — not to mention a ten-der to develop Brazil’s 5G mobile network.

The Bolsonaro administration will be hoping to woo investors looking to play the long game.

“Long-term investors never lost confi dence in Brazil, because they can take a step back from the short-term volatility,” said lawyer Massami Uyeda Jr, who specialises in infrastructure deals.

“They see reforms as important and necessary, but not the decid-ing factor on whether to invest.”

Picture released by Aton Chile shows Iraci Hassler, of the Communist Party, celebrating after winning Santiago’s Mayoralty, in the Chilean capital, yesterday.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Dressed in a

sparkling red

evening gown, Meza

tearfully walked

the catwalk as Miss

Universe for the first

time, before rushing

back for a group

hug with the other

competitors

Mexican govt apologises for 1911 massacre of ChineseReutersMonterrey

Mexican President An-dres Manuel Lopez Obrador issued a for-

mal apology yesterday for the 1911 massacre of 303 Chinese in the northern city of Torreon.

“The Mexican state will not allow, ever again, racism, dis-crimination, and xenophobia,” the president said during the ceremony in Torreon.

The massacre, from May 13-15, 1911, occurred in the midst of the Mexican Revolution, as rebels fighting under Francis-co I. Madero seized control of the city of Torreon.

During the massacre, over 300 Chinese were killed and their homes and businesses were burned. Yesterday’s event was attended by Chi-

nese Ambassador to Mexico Zhu Qingqiao, as well as high-

level Mexican officials, in-cluding the heads of the army

and navy, and the foreign and interior ministers.

Rising Amazon rivers leave Manaus fl oodedReutersManaus

Heavy rains in the Amazon rainfor-est have caused rivers to rise to near record levels, fl ooding small Brazil-

ian towns and threatening the state capital Manaus with another disaster after it was severely struck by the coronavirus pan-demic.

Across the state of Amazonas, more than 400,000 people have been aff ected by fl ooding, said the state’s Civil Defence

service, many of whom were evacuated as water levels climbed.

The Rio Negro river was rising by about 3cm a day and yesterday streets in the cen-tre of Manaus were already under water, ac-cording to city hall.

“The water level is... the third highest in the history of the city. If it continues like this, it will pass the record 2012 fl ood,” said mayoral spokesman Emerson Quaresma.

While rainfall varies from year to year, climate change has brought particularly heavy rainy years and also very dry years that hurt farming, said Philip Fearnside, an

ecologist at the National Institute of Ama-zonian Research in Manaus. Amazon defor-estation may also contribute to long-term changes but does not impact rainfall year to year, he said.

Access to the Manaus market on the edge of the Rio Negro is underwater and the city has built raised wooden walkways for pe-destrians.

Up the Amazon River, small riverside towns such as Anama, population 12,700, have been totally fl ooded, forcing residents to raise the fl oor levels of their wooden houses or evacuate.

Chinese ambassador to Mexico Zhu Qingqiao and Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador take part in an event where the Mexican government apologised for killing Chinese residents 110 years ago, in Torreon, in Coahuila state, yesterday.

EUROPE9Gulf Times

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

G7 and EU nations can af-ford to donate more than 150mn vaccines to coun-

tries in need without compro-mising their own objectives, the Unicef said yesterday.

The Group of Seven (G7) in-dustrialised powers and the European Union could help close the world’s vaccine gap by sharing just 20% of their June, July and August stocks with the Covax jab scheme for poorer nations, a study by British fi rm Airfi nity showed.

“And they could do this while still fulfi lling their vaccination

commitments to their own pop-ulations,” Unief director Henri-etta Fore said.

The Unicef, the United Na-tions Children’s Emergency Fund, is fl ying Covax doses to poorer countries due to its ex-pertise in vaccine logistics.

Britain is due to host its fellow G7 members Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States for a summit in June.

By that time, the Unicef said the Covax programme – co-led by Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, along with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Coalition for Epidemic Prepar-edness Innovations – will fi nd itself 190mn doses short of what

it had planned to distribute.The programme’s aim of en-

suring the vaccination of 20% of populations in all countries by the end of this year “is at risk”, Bruce Aylward, the WHO lead on Covax, acknowledged yesterday.

It was possible to make up for the delays if countries in a posi-tion to do so could donate doses, he told reporters.

“We determine our future right now,” he added.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus agreed.

“We need high-income coun-tries that have contracted much of the immediate global supply of vaccines to share them now,” he told reporters.

He insisted that “Covax

works”, pointing out that the programme had delivered some 65mn doses to 124 countries so far. “But it is dependent on countries and manufacturers honouring their commitments.”

The current shortfall is in part due to a devastating fl are-up of the virus in India.

While the country had been due to manufacture and export the majority of Covax doses, it is now putting them to use at home instead.

With additional shortages in supplies and funding, the Unicef statement called for swift action until more sustainable produc-tion models were within reach.

“Sharing immediately avail-able excess doses is a minimum,

essential and emergency stop-gap measure, and it is needed right now,” it read.

The United States has 60mn AstraZeneca doses it could share, while France has pledged 500,000 doses and Sweden 1mn, with Switzerland considering a similar donation.

Some 43% of the 1.4bn doses of Covid-19 vaccines so far in-jected around the world have been administered in high-in-come countries accounting for 16% of the global population.

Just 0.3% have been admin-istered in the 29 lowest-income countries, home to 9% of the world’s population.

That yawning gap spurred Tedros to ask vaccine-wealthy

nations last Friday to refrain from giving jabs to children and adolescents and instead donate those doses to Covax.

The urgency stems from more than mere fairness: wherever the virus continues to circulate it could give rise to more con-tagious or more deadly variants that could threaten progress to-ward immunity.

“We are concerned that the deadly spike in India is a precur-sor to what will happen if those warnings remain unheeded,” said the Unicef.

“Cases are exploding and health systems are struggling,” it said, in countries like Nepal, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Argentina, and Brazil.

Rich nations can aff ord to donate Covax jabs: UnicefAFPGeneva

British holidaymakers re-turned to Portugal yester-day as the country seeks

to revive its battered tourism industry after lifting travel re-strictions that had been im-posed to curb the spread of the coronavirus (Covid-19).

Britons are the biggest con-tingent of tourists in Portugal, a country whose economy relies heavily on foreign visitors.

Portugal imposed a strict, two-month confi nement earlier this year to control a new wave of coronavirus infections.

It lifted restrictions on visi-tors from Britain and most Euro-pean Union countries yesterday.

“It’s nice to get away and be

back here,” said Barry Thomp-son, a 63-year-old retired police offi cer from Manchester who landed in the southern town of Faro with his wife and 11-year-old son.

“We’re very excited,” Thomp-son said, 11 years after his fi rst visit to the coastal region of Al-garve.

Some 30 fl ights from the UK were expected in Portugal yes-terday alone, including 17 taking around 5,500 passengers to Faro.

“We were desperate to come back. It’s fantastic,” said Diane Healy, who owns a property in Lagos, a coastal town west of Faro. “I’m over the moon. It’s wonderful to be back.”

The lifting of restrictions came after London placed Por-tugal on its “green list” of coun-tries to visit without having to

self-isolate on returning home.Britons can now visit Portugal

as long as they show a negative PCR test result for Covid-19 at most 72 hours before boarding the plane.

Portugal and Britain currently have two of the lowest virus rates in Europe.

Tourism plunged in Portugal last year.

The country saw 16.4mn tourists before the pandemic, and only a quarter of that in 2020.

The Algarve region, home to 500,000 people, greeted 3.6mn foreign tourists in 2019 alone, a third of them from Britain.

“Today is a special day be-cause we are restarting the en-gine of our economy,” the head of tourism for the region, Joao Fernandes, told AFP.

Portugal greets fi rst UK tourists as travel restrictions are liftedAFPFaro, Portugal

People watch a Faro Airport arrivals screen display information on the first day that Britons are allowed to enter the country without needing to quarantine, in Faro, Portugal.

Italy to shorten Covid-19 curfew, ease other curbsReutersRome

Italy’s ruling parties have agreed to shorten a nightly curfew to 11pm from 10pm

with immediate eff ect and ease other coronavirus curbs in areas where infections are low, gov-ernment sources said.

Speaking after a meeting of medical advisers to Mario Draghi’s government and coali-tion representatives, the sources said in these areas the curfew will begin at midnight from June 7, and be abolished altogether from June 21.

Italy, which has the second-highest coronavirus (Covid-19) death toll in Europe after the United Kingdom, is gradually loosening restrictions on busi-ness and people’s freedom of movement as daily deaths and cases decline, and more people are vaccinated.

As of yesterday, some 8.6mn Italians, or 14.5% of the popula-tion, have been fully vaccinated, while slightly over 30% have received at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine.

Italy has registered more than 124,000 deaths linked to Cov-id-19 since its outbreak emerged in February last year.

But the daily toll has steadily fallen in recent weeks, with less than 100 fatalities reported on Sunday for the fi rst time since October.

There was an increase yester-day to 140 deaths.

Late last month the federal government reinstated a four-tier colour-coded system, from white to red, to calibrate restric-tions in its 20 regions, allowing nightspots and restaurants to serve clients at outside tables in the low-risk yellow and white areas.

Some 19 out of 20 Italian re-gions are currently yellow and one, the tiny Valle d’Aosta, is orange.

None are currently deemed high-risk red.

Six regions – including the northern Veneto around Venice – will become white by the end of the fi rst week of June, govern-ment sources said.

In low-risk white regions no curfew will be imposed and only face masks and social distancing will remain compulsory.

A two-month-old Span-ish girl was saved by pi-oneering surgery when

doctors transplanted a small heart that had stopped beating from a donor with a diff erent

blood type, Hospital Gregorio Maranon said yesterday.

“It was twice the magic,” said Juan Miguel Gil Jaurena, head of children’s cardiac surgery at the Madrid hospital, explaining that such techniques did not exist for young children three years ago and had never before been used on a baby so small.

The operation was compli-cated because the donor was at a hospital in a diff erent Span-ish region and the heart had stopped beating for a few min-utes.

The hospital did not disclose details about the donor.

The baby girl, Naiara, had been diagnosed with a con-

genital heart disease before she was born and weighed only 3.2kg when the surgery was performed.

“She is the smallest baby we’ve had for a heart trans-plant, and 24 hours before the surgery her condition worsened a lot. Had she not got a heart (transplant), she would prob-

ably not be here,” said Manuela Camino, head of the children’s cardiac transplant unit.

With 37.4 donors per million people, Spain last year was the world leader in transplants, ac-cording to the global database on donation and transplanta-tion of the World Health Or-ganisation (WHO).

Two-month-old saved by pioneering heart transplantReutersMadrid

A Russian court has post-poned the beginning of an “extremism” hearing

against the political network of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, part of a campaign to sideline opposition to President Vladimir Putin.

As the proceedings got un-derway, prosecutors submitted additional documents pushing the start date of the trial to June 9, lawyers representing Nav-alny’s organisations said.

The proceedings, which are being held behind closed doors, are part of a sweeping crack-down on Putin’s most promi-nent critic who was jailed this year and survived a poisoning attack in August.

As part of the eff ort – which comes a few months before par-liamentary elections – the lower house is set to begin debating a bill banning members of “ex-tremist” organisations from be-ing elected lawmakers.

Navalny’s network is being represented by lawyers of Team 29, a St Petersburg-based group that specialises in freedom of speech and treason cases.

The lawyers said it was not clear why yesterday’s hearing was closed to the public or why some of the case fi les were la-belled secret.

An aide to Navalny, Ivan Zh-danov, speculated on Twitter that it was an attempt to conceal the “absurdity of what is hap-pening”.

Prosecutors in April request-ed that Navalny’s regional net-work and his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) be designated “extremist” organisations, ac-cusing them of plotting to stage a Western-backed uprising in Russia.

Such a ruling would put Na-valny, his supporters and fi nan-cial backers on par with the Is-lamic State group and Al Qaeda, threatening them with long prison sentences.

“The opposition will be crushed,” Abbas Gallyamov, an independent political analyst and former Kremlin speech-writer, told AFP.

But “by destroying the oppo-sition, they are destroying their own legitimacy”, he added, re-ferring to authorities.

Navalny emerged as an op-position fi gurehead a decade ago, leading huge anti-Kremlin rallies sparked by claims of elec-toral fraud in 2011.

Established in 2011, the An-ti-Corruption Foundation has published numerous investiga-tions into the lavish lifestyles of Russia’s elite.

While authorities had for years tolerated Navalny’s politi-cal movement, analysts say that the Kremlin is willing to take no chances ahead of parliamentary elections in September as public fatigue is growing with Putin’s two-decade rule.

A Team 29 lawyer said yester-day that the crackdown on Na-valny’s groups was linked to the upcoming elections.

“Members of FBK are now the

most popular candidates,” Ilya Novikov told journalists outside the court.

For the authorities, “it’s very important to stop these candi-dates”, he added.

Navalny, who is currently in a penal colony outside Moscow, said in a recent Instagram post that Russia was “sliding into darkness”.

“But those who are pushing the country backwards are his-torically doomed.”

Ahead of yesterday’s court hearing, Russia’s fi nancial mon-itoring service Rosfi nmonitor-ing added Navalny’s political network to its database of ter-rorist and extremist organisa-tions.

Navalny’s network had dis-banded ahead of the listing to shield its members and support-ers from possible prosecution.

Lawmakers also proposed legislation that would apply ret-roactively and ban Navalny’s al-lies from running in parliamen-tary elections for several years.

The legislation could aff ect senior members and activists of Navalny’s political network and also tens of thousands of Rus-sians who supported its work with donations.

Navalny was arrested in Janu-ary upon returning from Ger-many after recovering from a poisoning attack he says was or-chestrated by the Kremlin.

The Kremlin denies the alle-gation.

He is serving two-and-a-half years on embezzlement charges in a penal colony about 100km (62 miles) east of Moscow.

Court postpones Navalny extremism hearingAFPMoscow

Navalny: serving two-and-a-half years on embezzlement charges in a penal colony.

Russia partially halted a punitive slowdown of Twitter yesterday after

the latter deleted a large por-tion of content deemed illegal by Moscow, but warned other US Internet platforms to com-ply with local legislation or face similar penalties.

State communications watchdog Roskomnadzor has since March impeded the speed of Twitter for not re-moving banned content quick-ly enough, and threatened to block it entirely, part of a wider drive by Moscow to tighten its control over the internet.

Yesterday, however, the watchdog said it no longer planned to block the service and the slowdown would only remain on mobile devices.

A Twitter spokesperson welcomed the decision not to block its service.

“We remain deeply com-mitted to off ering a safe serv-ice to account holders around the world – including those in Russia,” the spokesperson said, adding that Twitter would continue to talk with Roskom-nadzor.

Roskomnadzor said it had identifi ed other Internet plat-forms, including Facebook

and Alphabet Incorporated’s YouTube, as having posted il-legal material.

“If these platforms fail to take appropriate action, they may face similar sanctions,” Roskomnadzor said in a state-ment.

Facebook and YouTube did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Roskomnadzor, which had set May 15 as a deadline for Twitter to delete what it said was banned content, says that it wants the US social media platform to delete posts that contain child pornography, drug abuse information, or calls for minors to commit sui-cide.

Twitter denies allowing its platform to be used to promote illegal behaviour, and insists that it has a zero-tolerance policy for child sexual ex-ploitation, and prohibits the promotion of suicide or self-harm.

Roskomnadzor said that Twitter had removed 91% of banned content since March, with 563 items now accessi-ble, down from almost 6,000 in total.

It said Twitter needed to remove all banned items and in future delete illegal posts within 24 hours, as demanded by Russian law, for all restric-tions to be lifted.

Russian watchdog partially halts punitive Twitter slowdown

ReutersMoscow

Nato assures

Serbia over

Croatian

troops in

Kosovo

ReutersBrussels

Nato sought yesterday to assuage Serbian con-cerns over the deploy-

ment of Croatian troops to Ko-sovo, stressing that they were bound by exactly the same rules as all other troops of the alli-ance’s KFOR peacekeeping force in the Balkan country.

“All troops provided by Nato allies and partner countries to our operation in Kosovo oper-ate under ... a well-established framework, which is set out by the UN resolution 1244,” Nato Secretary-General Jens Stolten-berg told reporters after meeting Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in Brussels.

Vucic has been dismayed over an announcement by Croatia to deploy more troops to Kosovo as part of KFOR.

Serbia and Croatia were war-time foes during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

Albanian dominated Kosovo declared independence in 2008, almost a decade after Nato air strikes wrestled control of the territory away from Belgrade to end a counter-insurgency cam-paign by Serbian security forces.

Vucic called the meeting with Stoltenberg at the North Atlan-tic Treaty Organisation (Nato)’s Brussels headquarters reassur-ing.

“Everything that has been done so far under the mandate of the United Nations and done by Nato forces was pretty much supported by all sides, and hope-fully that will remain so,” he said.

Stoltenberg stressed that there were no changes planned to the KFOR mission, which numbers some 3,500 troops.

By Moustafa Bayoumi

On Saturday, an Israeli air strike killed 10 people from the same extended family after missiles hit

the family’s house in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza.

A fi ve-month-old baby, the sole survivor, was pulled out alive from the rubble, having been trapped next to his deceased mother.

At least 180 Palestinians have so far been killed in Gaza, including 52 children.

Ten Israelis have also been killed, including two children.

All the innocents slain, whether Palestinian or Israeli, must be mourned, and it’s beyond distressing to know that the number of deaths will only rise as the days go on.

What will remain steady, however, is this morbidly lopsided ratio of death.

Many more innocent Palestinians will be killed than Israelis.

That fact, along with over 70 years of continued Palestinian dispossession (of which the Sheikh Jarrah evictions are a part), has galvanized global opposition to Israel’s latest actions.

Popular demonstrations have broken out around the world in support of Palestinian rights.

Since the US provides the key fi nancial, military and diplomatic backing to Israel, one wonders where Joe Biden and his administration are during this crucial moment.

Not out front and leading, would be a kind way of putting it.

Calling Biden’s attitude to Middle East diplomacy a “stand-back approach”, the New York Times noted how his administration has so far done little and accomplished less.“Muted” is how National Public Radio described it.

In fact, it’s much worse.This administration’s reaction has

not only been relatively quiet; it has also been callous, predictable and nothing short of a disgrace.

Consider Biden’s own response when reporters asked him on Thursday if the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was doing enough “to stop this violence there from escalating”.

Biden answered that “thus far there has not been a signifi cant overreaction” from the Israelis.

Considering the massive asymmetry of death and destruction, one can only wonder, in absolute horror, what Biden would consider “a signifi cant overreaction”.

The Biden administration also twice blocked UN Security Council statements on the crisis this past week, and was alone in opposing the Security Council from holding an open meeting on the issue on Friday.

Last week, a state department spokesman, when pressed, couldn’t even get himself to say that the right of self-defence extends to the Palestinian people.

A US envoy also didn’t arrive in the region until Saturday, and the Biden administration hasn’t even named a nominee for US ambassador to Israel.

So while the administration claims to be working “behind the scenes” to solve this latest crisis, that argument is looking more and more like an alibi for being both unprepared for the tough demands of foreign policy while simultaneously adopting a nihilistic

business-as-usual approach to cover for Israel’s aggressive policies.

If that’s the case, both the Palestinians and the American people stand to lose, the former obviously losing dozens if not hundreds more lives, the latter losing important prestige and infl uence.

And who gains? None other than Netanyahu, who just over a week ago, was about to be ousted as prime minister after his repeated failures to form a coalition government – Israel has had four elections in two years – while simultaneously facing corruption charges.

But here’s the deal, as Joe Biden would say.

The president’s deference to Israel’s wishes – long the American refl ex – may no longer represent the political consensus in his party.

The US is changing, and so is the Democratic party, with cracks emerging in the wall that has historically separated any criticism of Israel from American politics.

That change was bravely – and movingly – evident on the floor of the House of Representatives last week.

“The US must acknowledge its role in the injustice and human rights violations of Palestinians,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated during a Special Order hour organised by Representatives Marc Pocan and Marie Newman. “This is not about both sides,” she continued. “This is about an imbalance of power.” She was hardly alone.

Calling Netanyahu a “far-right ethnonationalist” on the fl oor of the House, Representative Ilhan Omar asked how the American government can “pay lip service to a Palestinian

state, yet do absolutely nothing to make that state a reality, while the Israeli government we fund tries to make it impossible?”

Representative Rashida Tlaib rose and affi rmed that “I am the only Palestinian American member of Congress now, and my mere existence has disrupted the status quo. I am a reminder to colleagues that Palestinians do indeed exist, that we are human, that we are allowed to dream.”

Her voice breaking after quoting a Gazan mother’s fears of losing her children to Israeli bombs, Tlaib said: “We must condition aid to Israel on compliance with international human rights and end the apartheid.”

Representative Ayanna Presley proclaimed: “Palestinians are being told the same thing as black folks in America. There is no acceptable form of resistance. We are bearing witness to egregious human rights violations.

“The pain, trauma and terror that Palestinians are facing is not just the result of this week’s escalation, but the consequences of years of military occupation.”

And Representative Cori Bush, who is also African American, explained on the House fl oor how “the same equipment that they use to brutalise us is the same equipment that we send to the Israeli military to police and brutalise Palestinians”.

The Congress has probably never have seen such a powerful display of support for Palestinian lives.

But what’s important is not just the support but the way it was articulated.

When Ocasio-Cortez spoke, she drew a personal connection from Puerto Rico to Palestine.

Presley stated that, as a Black

woman, she too was no stranger to the sorts of police brutality and state-sanctioned violence that Palestinians suffer.

Bush tweeted: “The Black and Palestinian struggles for liberation are interconnected, and we will not let up until all of us are free.”

Omar connected her refugee experiences to surviving warfare.

And Tlaib talked about being raised Palestinian “in Detroit, the most beautiful, blackest cities in America, a city where movements for civil rights and social justice are birthed”.

Each woman made the struggle for Palestinian liberation into something deeply personal, like they were all meeting at the intersection of their collective lives.

For too long, Palestinians have been seen as problems to be solved or bombed.

Once they’re seen as people and as a people, however, and once their struggle is both understood and identifi ed with, everything changes.

That was the change that was heard on the US House fl oor last week.

It was an embrace of empathy for Palestine. In its own way, the change is earth shaking.

These are the voices in American politics demanding something diff erent, a new way of looking at Palestine and Palestinians.

Unlike what this administration is off ering, that demand can be called leadership.

And it’s a demand that must, and will, be heard.

(Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America)

Gulf Times Tuesday, May 18, 2021

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CHAIRMANAbdullah bin Khalifa al-Attiyah

EDITOR-IN-CHIEFFaisal Abdulhameed al-Mudahka

Deputy Managing Editor

K T Chacko

Caution, confusionmark UK premier’sapproach to liftingCovid lockdown

On what should have been a day of celebration, UK cabinet ministers have come across distinctly uneasy at the latest phase of the lifting of lockdown in England, Wales and parts of Scotland, which allows the reopening of indoor hospitality, hugging, overnight stays with other households and foreign travel.

Boris Johnson’s message was not for people to get out and support their local business, but instead for them to exercise a “heavy dose of caution”.

The contrast with last year’s great reopening – which saw a maskless Rishi Sunak cheerily serve diners at a London riverside branch of Wagamama, where the chancellor exhorted the public to “eat out to help out” – was stark.

Yesterday, there were no pictures of Johnson giving a thumbs-up or enjoying a fry-up, though his new health regime may have prohibited both in any event.

Matt Hancock told broadcasters that he would be hugging his parents – but he would stay outside, where the risk is lower.

The tone was more reminiscent of the confused public messaging at the start of the pandemic, parodied by Matt Lucas in his viral “go to work, don’t go to work” tweet.

“You can now travel abroad without being fined, but you shouldn’t travel abroad,” No 10 said yesterday.

It was unable to answer the question of why travel to amber list countries – those where home quarantine is still mandatory – was allowed at all if people were being strongly discouraged

from doing so.You can hug your

vaccinated parents – but you should consider not doing so.

You can eat indoors in a restaurant, but Sage scientists queued up on broadcasters to suggest that they would not do that themselves.

Just one, Graham Medley, professor of infectious disease modelling at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said

he would risk it – and only in a far-fetched set of conditions, telling LBC he would go indoors “in an area of low prevalence and the clientele was very old (and therefore likely to be vaccinated)”.

The awkwardness surrounding this stage of unlocking – largely because nobody knows the potential impact of the new variant of coronavirus first detected in India – risks very mixed public health messaging.

It is not possible to overstate how unwelcome any delay to the roadmap would be in Downing Street.

Johnson himself was won over, and in turn won over Sunak and his restive backbenchers, by the case that the slower the reopening goes, the more likely it will be permanent.

Johnson has resisted entreaties from his MPs to speed up unlocking. He is desperate to be proved right and to show that caution equals permanence.

To reverse now would be extremely difficult.And Downing Street, even with all its domestic caution, is not

blameless for the current situation. It delayed putting India on the red list for 17 days after its neighbours Pakistan and Bangladesh, while Johnson was slated for a visit to Delhi during that period.

The final test will be the hardest – whether to proceed with “freedom day” on June 21.

There is much riding on that, from weddings and festivals to the profi ts of restaurants that are desperate to ditch social distancing.

Even before then, Johnson will face difficult calls from the travel industry to start opening up quarantine-free travel to holiday hotspots such as Spain and Greece.

Johnson was a late convert to the concept that cautious unlocking when case rates are at rock bottom is ultimately the best way of protecting the economy, rather than a rush to freedom. The question now is: can he hold his nerve? – Guardian News and Media

Johnson’s message was not for people to get out and support their local business, but instead for them to exercise a 'heavy dose of caution'

Biden’s silence in the face ofIsraeli violence is a disgrace

Lebanese students fi ght fees hikeBy Timour Azhari Beirut

When the American University of Beirut (AUB) said the cost of study at Lebanon’s top school

would more than double, 21-year-old Ali Slim felt his dream career in medicine might be over before it had even began.

Like most Lebanese, his parents are paid in local currency, which has tumbled in value against the dollar due to the country’s fi nancial collapse, rendering them wholly unable to meet what is in eff ect a 160% tuition increase for their son.

The AUB has boosted fi nancial aid for students, but it said the crisis had made the hike in fees unavoidable.

Another top school – the Lebanese American University (LAU) – soon followed suit, prompting fears that thousands of students like Slim could be priced out of private higher education in a country with only a single, under-funded, public alternative.

So the students got together and vowed to act.

Along with scores of fellow students, Slim mounted a legal action in February to pay fees at the offi cial rate of 1,500 Lebanese pounds per dollar, rather than the semi-offi cial rate of 3,900 pounds

per greenback used by the universities.“It’s not just a fi ght for education, it’s

a fi ght for what’s right and to try to get the judicial system to protect the most vulnerable,” Slim said.

When students began paying at the offi cial rate, the AUB rejected their payments and said they would need to pay the new rate – or be dropped from class.

Students then fi led two suits: one affi rming their right to pay fees at the offi cial exchange rate, the other asking for a stay on all payments until the fi rst case is settled.

An urgent matters court ruled in their favour on the second case, saying the AUB could not exclude the students until there was a fi nal ruling on whether their payment was legal.

The AUB’s offi ce of communications said no students had left due to the hike and that more than 99% had paid their fees.

Education Minister Tarek Majzoub did not respond to a request for comment.

As other universities ponder similar hikes, the court’s ruling could have far-reaching implications for tens of thousands of students nationwide.

“We’re basically looking to secure a social safety net that protects students most at risk. That doesn’t exist right now,” said Jad Hani, a 20-year-old

economics senior at the AUB.Following the price hike, annual

tuition fees for an arts or sciences degree have risen from about 35mn pounds to about 90mn pounds.

The minimum wage in Lebanon is 675,000 pounds per month, equivalent to 8.1mn pounds per year.

As the crisis decimates household incomes, an unusually large number of students appear to be opting for the publicly funded Lebanese University (LU) over private institutions – a change its president, Fouad Ayoub, linked to “economic factors”.

Some 5,000 students joined this year, after the price hikes were announced, he said, far more than its average intake and swelling the overall student body to 87,000.

The university cannot meet such demand, Ayoub said, since its budget is unchanged but its spending power has crashed in tandem with the local currency.

It has struggled to buy even the basics – lab supplies, electronics and books – as suppliers held off bidding on contracts for fear of the volatile exchange rate, Ayoub said.

“We are rationing the use of paper. The situation is very diffi cult,” he said.

The LU is not alone in being crippled by issues that are ultimately tied to the

increasingly bankrupt Lebanese state.The AUB said it was owed some

$150mn by the state, making its dire situation still worse.

“AUB, like the rest of the country, is having to cope through a crisis not of its own making and without any support,” the university said in written comments.

Still, it has ramped up fi nancial support leading to reductions in tuition costs, helping some 4,000 students – almost one in two – enrolled this academic year.

To ensure it can survive another 150 years, the institution said it had no choice but to up the exchange rate, insisting the new semi-offi cial rate – used for transactions at commercial banks – was anyway still far below the volatile market rate.

With no end in sight to the country’s fi nancial collapse, students said they felt compelled to help each other.

Razane Hishi, a 19-year-old software engineering junior at the AUB, said she chose to join the exchange rate legal fi ght out of solidarity, rather than need.

“It’s a moral obligation for me to help protect others that may need this now,” Hishi said. “If the trend keeps going, how are any of us supposed to aff ord an education in the future?” – Thomson Reuters Foundation

Palestinan families take shelter at a United Nations (UN) school in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip yesterday, as Israeli air strikes continue.

WORLD11Gulf Times

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Around 1,000 migrants, a third of them minors, reached Spain’s North Af-

rican enclave of Ceuta yesterday, Spanish offi cials said, describing it as a “record” number in a sin-gle day.

The move comes at a point of diplomatic tension between Ma-drid and Rabat over the presence of a Western Sahara independ-ence leader in Spain, which could aff ect the two countries’ joint

eff orts to battle illegal immigra-tion.

A spokesman for the Spanish government delegation in Ceuta told AFP that the migrants had reached the enclave by swim-ming or walking at low tide from beaches in neighbouring Mo-rocco.

Among them were 300 minors, he added.

Earlier, during the morning, the delegation put the number at 100 arrivals, saying that they were mostly young men but also included children and some women who had used infl atable

swimming rings and rubber din-ghies.

Others were able to almost walk there when the tide went out, the spokesman told AFP, with the numbers climbing rap-idly throughout the day.

After being checked by the Red Cross, the migrants were taken to a migrant reception centre.

During the last weekend of April, around 100 migrants swam to Ceuta in groups of 20 to 30.

Most were deported back to Morocco.

Ceuta, together with Melilla – Spain’s other North African

enclave – have the European Union’s only land borders with Africa, making them popular en-try points for migrants seeking a better life in Europe.

Migrants try to reach the en-claves either by swimming along the coast or climbing the tall border fences that separate them from Morocco.

Figures published by Spain’s interior ministry show that be-tween January 1 and May 15, 475 migrants reached Ceuta by land or sea, more than double the 203 that arrived in the same period last year.

The wave of migrant arrivals comes at a point of diplomatic tension between Madrid and Ra-bat after it emerged that Polisario Front leader Brahim Ghali arrived in northern Spain in mid-April and is being treated in hospi-tal after being infected with the coronavirus (Covid-19).

The Polisario Front has long fought for the independence of Western Sahara from Morocco, and analysts have warned the spat could threaten bilateral co-operation between Madrid and Rabat in the fi ght against illegal immigration.

Record 1,000 migrants reach Spanish enclaveAFPMadrid

A Spanish Civil guard observes migrants who swam to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta from neighbouring Morocco.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has warned Western countries against

staking claims in the Arctic, as global warming makes the region more accessible and a site of glo-bal competition.

His comments came ahead of a ministerial meeting of the Arctic Council that comprises Russia, the United States, Canada, Nor-way, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland tomorrow and on Thursday in Reykjavik.

“It has been absolutely clear for everyone for a long time that this is our territory, this is our land,” Lavrov said at a press con-ference in Moscow. “We are re-sponsible for ensuring our Arctic coast is safe.”

As climate change makes the Arctic more accessible, global in-terest in the region’s natural re-sources, its navigation routes and its strategic position has grown among members of the Arctic Council as well as China.

In a speech last month, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that Russia “is exploiting this change to try to exert con-trol over new space”, including

through modernising bases, and also pointed to a growing pres-ence of China.

Yesterday he welcomed Den-mark’s plans to boost its mili-tary presence in Greenland and the North Atlantic with $245mn worth of investments into sur-veillance drones and a radar sta-tion on the Faroe Islands.

President Vladimir Putin in recent years has made Russia’s Arctic region a strategic priority and ordered investment in mili-tary infrastructure and mineral extraction, exacerbating tensions with Arctic Council members.

The United States, for its part, has pushed back against what it considers Russian and Chinese “aggressivity” in the region.

In 2018, the US Navy deployed an aircraft carrier in the Norwe-gian Sea for the fi rst time since the 1980s.

And in February, Washington sent strategic bombers to train in Norway as part of Western ef-forts to bolster its military pres-ence in the region.

Lavrov said yesterday that he is emphasising “once again – this is our land and our waters”.

“When the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) tries to justify its advance into the Arctic, this is probably a slightly

diff erent situation and here we have questions for our neigh-bours like Norway who are try-ing to justify the need for Nato to come into the Arctic,” he said.

The Russian foreign minis-ter said “we will talk about this frankly” at the eight-country ministerial meeting, and sug-gested resuming a regular dia-logue between military chiefs of member countries.

“It would be perfectly logical to re-establish these relations between military offi cials who

understand each other better than politicians,” said Russian political analyst Fyodor Luky-anov, editor-in-chief of the jour-nal Russia in Global Aff airs.

“Even if this measure would confi rm a return to the Cold War, it would still be a step forward in this situation,” he told AFP.

The Council is expected to is-sue a fi nal communique and a common strategic plan for the next decade at the end of the meeting.

As ice cover in the Arctic de-

creases, Russia is hoping to make use of the Northern Sea Route shipping channel to export oil and gas to overseas markets.

Russia has invested heavily to develop the route, which allows ships to cut the journey to Asian ports by 15 days compared with using the traditional Suez Canal route.

In August 2017, the fi rst ves-sel travelled along the Northern Sea Route without the use of ice breakers.

Moscow has also beefed up its military presence in the region, reopening and modernising sev-eral bases and airfi elds aban-doned since the end of the Soviet era and deploying its S-400 air defence systems.

In March, Russia launched massive Arctic manoeuvres, with Putin praising the exercises and a retired admiral saying they were to send a “signal to our foreign friends – the Americans”.

In Reykjavik this week, Lavrov will also meet with his US coun-terpart Blinken in a test of Mos-cow’s strained relationship with Washington.

Despite mounting tensions, Russia and the United States during climate negotiations ear-lier this year noted the Arctic as an area of co-operation.

Russia warns West against Arctic encroachment ahead of negotiationsAFPMoscow

Lavrov: (The Arctic) is our territory, this is our land.

Kyrgyzstan’s have parlia-ment voted in favour of a plan to seize the coun-

try’s largest gold mine after the Canada-based operator said it was taking the government to an international court.

The poor, mountainous country in former Soviet Cen-tral Asia has few natural re-sources, and regularly accuses Centerra Gold of shortchang-ing it over the giant Kumtor gold mine.

Centerra Gold is a Toronto Stock Exchange-listed compa-ny of which Kyrgyzstan owns more than a quarter.

The high-altitude mine accounted for 12.5% of Kyr-gyzstan’s economy last year.

But struggles over the facil-ity entered unchartered terri-tory this month when Presi-dent Sadyr Japarov signed a law allowing the government to temporarily take over opera-tions to remedy what he said were environmental and safety violations.

The head of a state commis-sion investigating wrongdo-ing at the mine suggested the

temporary “external manage-ment” period could last around three months.

Lawmakers balloted unani-mously yesterday for the plans in a non-binding vote, which should now be considered by the government.

The law came the same month that a court fi ned Centerra’s Kyrgyz subsidiary Kumtor Gold Company (KGC) over $3bn for dumping mining waste on glaciers at the mine 4,000m above sea level and a state commission alleged that KGC owed over $1bn in unpaid taxes.

Centerra has called Kyr-gyzstan’s actions “wrongful and illegal”, and on Sunday said it had “initiated binding arbi-tration to enforce (Centerra’s) rights under longstanding in-vestment agreements with the Government”.

It also accused Kyrgyz law enforcement of intimidation “including police visits to the homes of several senior KGC managers and a raid of KGC’s offi ce in Bishkek on May 15”.

Canada, Britain and the Eu-ropean Bank of Reconstruc-tion and Development (EBRD) have all criticised Kyrgyzstan’s moves against Centerra.

Kyrgyz lawmakers back seizure of Canadian-run mineAFPBishkek

Cooling offYouths (right) play in the waters of the Arabian Sea in the port city of Karachi. Meanwhile, volunteers from the Edhi Foundation (below) help a man cool off along the roadside on a hot summer day, yesterday in Karachi.

More than three months after regional elections, Catalonia’s two main

separatist parties said yesterday that they had reached agreement on forming a ruling coalition, heading off the looming threat of another vote.

Although the wealthy north-eastern region’s pro-independ-ence parties boosted their show-ing in the February 14 elections, the main factions were unable to agree on a government due to deep disagreements over strat-egy.

The pact between the leftist ERC and the hardline “Together for Catalonia” (JxC), which have ruled in a regional coalition since 2015, emerged ahead of a May 26 deadline for appointing a new re-gional leader.

“We have managed to avoid a repeat election that nobody wanted and to reach a good agreement on forming a strong, unifi ed government,” said ERC leader Pere Aragones, who will serve as president of the region of 7.8mn people.

“We are beginning a new stage with this agreement on a pro-independence government ... in which we can again move forward towards a Catalan republic,” he

told a news conference.This time around, the coalition

will be led by ERC as it won one more seat than JxC in the election in which the separatist parties secured 52% of the vote, hand-ing them 74 of the parliament’s 135 seats.

ERC has advocated a more moderate approach to independ-ence based on negotiation with Madrid, and Aragones, who has served as acting Catalan presi-dent since September, said this approach would continue.

With ERC’s 33 mandates and the 32 held by JxC, the coalition will hold 65 of the parliament’s 135 seats but will be backed in parliament by its smaller separa-

tist ally the far-left, anti-capital-ist CUP, which holds nine seats.

In October 2017, Catalonia’s separatist government staged an illegal referendum then made a short-lived declaration of in-dependence, triggering Spain’s worst political crisis in decades and the exile or jailing of the main independence leaders.

Since then, the issue of dia-logue with Madrid has been a huge point of friction, particu-larly for JxC whose leader Carles Puigdemont, who was Catalan president at the time, fl ed into exile in Belgium after the failed breakaway bid.

JxC, which dominated the pre-vious coalition, has been very

wary of ERC for distancing itself from plans to stage another break from Spain and seeking talks on a negotiated solution with Madrid.

“Dialogue (with Madrid) is not our strategy,” JxC’s secretary-general Jordi Sanchez recently insisted.

An initial bid to have Aragones appointed at the end of March collapsed when he won just 42 votes, falling far short of the 68 needed for an absolute majority.

However, yesterday Sanchez said the agreement “brings to-gether the two main outlooks of pro-independence movement”.

And Aragones said the new government would make “a clear commitment to enter a phase of

negotiation”, the results of which would be evaluated in two years.

At that point, a decision would be taken on whether to continue talking or “to keep moving to-wards a Catalan republic” he said, without giving further de-tails.

Yesterday’s announcement followed a weekend poll showing slipping support for the separa-tist movement, over which the region remains deeply divided.

In Madrid, government spokeswoman Maria Jesus Montero urged the separatist parties to “abandon the way of unilateralism”, expressing the leadership’s willingness to renew talks.

In January 2020, Prime Minis-ter Pedro Sanchez agreed to open talks with Catalonia’s regional leaders as part of a deal to win ERC’s support in the national parliament for his government.

Although the talks never got off the ground because of the coronavirus pandemic, they are due to begin once a new Catalan administration is in place.

Their positions, however, are far apart with the separatists demanding a legally-binding independence referendum and amnesty for their exiled or jailed leaders.

Both options have been round-ly rejected by Sanchez’s govern-ment.

Separatist parties agree on new Catalan government, months after electionsAFPBarcelona

The European Union’s am-bition to go carbon-neu-tral by 2050 means slic-

ing greenhouse emissions from shipping by 90% as part of a far-reaching plan to shake up the maritime economy, the EU ex-ecutive said yesterday.

“We must change tack and de-velop a sustainable blue economy where environmental protection and economic activities go hand in hand,” the European Commis-sion’s vice-president in charge of the EU’s Green Deal, Frans Tim-mermans, said.

Maritime transport accounts for 2.5% of greenhouse gas emis-sions globally and 13% of emis-sions from the EU’s transport sector, the Commission said.

A recovery in big economies from the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic this year and next means seaborne freight – han-dling 80% of the volume of the world’s trade in goods – is start-ing to expand rapidly.

The European Commission hopes to counter the increase in emissions with a plan to encour-age the EU’s 27 member states and the bloc’s neighbours to in-vest in sustainable solutions, such as more effi cient propul-sion systems, slow steaming and weather routing.

By doing so, it hopes to grab the initiative from the UN’s Interna-tional Maritime Organisation, whose own global plan along the same lines is perceived as too slow and inadequate to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

“We have an opportunity to

start afresh, and we want to make sure that the recovery shifts the focus from mere exploitation to sustainability and resilience,” said the EU’s commissioner for maritime aff airs, Virginijus Sinkevicius.

The European Union’s ap-proach covers also other “blue economy” sectors, including ports, fi sheries, coastal tourism, and greatly increasing renew-able ocean energy sources such as wind, waves and tides.

Together, they all represent some 4.5mn direct jobs in the EU and about €650bn ($789bn) in revenue.

Financing for the transition will come from the Commission and the European Investment Bank Group, which is made up of the European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund.

EU targets shipping emissionsAFPBrussels

QATARGulf Times Tuesday, May 18, 202112

The Ras Bu Abboud Beach Devel-opment Project is expected to completed by the fourth quar-

ter of 2021, according to information available on the Public Works Authority (Ashghal) website.

The project aims to turn the beach into a tourist and family destination, “especially as it is located in a distin-guished area that qualifi es it to be one of the main tourist attractions in Qatar”, according to Ashghal.

The project is being implemented on an area of 260,000sq m along a stretch of 2.2km as part of the works of the Su-pervisory Committee of Beautifi cation of Roads and Public Places in Qatar.

The project envisages preparing the beach to become a suitable recreational destination for practising activities such as swimming as well as just relax-ing, and includes an area designated for sports activities.

The project features the construction of pedestrian and cycling paths in addi-

tion to providing bike racks to make it easier for beach visitors to exercise, jog and cycle.

There will be landscaping on 11,500sq m, and 469 trees will be planted in order to provide a suitable healthy environ-ment to further add to the beauty of the beach.

Further, the project will comprise buildings and service booths in four separate areas, including restaurants, cafes, and toilets.

It will also off er seating areas, um-brellas and beach showers to serve visi-tors.

A distinctive and high-tech lighting network will be put in place, along with surveillance cameras and Wi-Fi devices, to enhance safety on the beach and en-able its users to benefi t from it at night.

Parking lots will be available at the project site, including parking for per-sons with special needs, while also pro-viding slopes and paths that lead direct-ly to the pedestrian and cycling paths.

The project includes the construction and development of relevant infrastruc-ture, such as drinking water, irrigation and electricity networks, surveillance cameras and a network to provide Wi-Fi service.

The Supervisory Committee’s projects aim to create a sustainable en-vironment by implementing several tasks that include building central pub-lic parks, providing pedestrian and cycle paths, providing street furniture and some decorative lighting, developing the Doha Corniche and some beaches, in addition to developing the Central Doha area by reviving some internal public roads, vital places, residential areas and plazas.

The committee also aims to contrib-ute to creating a social environment with a distinct identity through the participation of community members in co-ordination with several ministries and government agencies in the coun-try.

Ras Bu Abboud beach project to be complete later this yearThe beach project will comprise buildings and service booths in four separate areas, including restaurants and cafes.

The Indian Cultural Centre (ICC) Qatar observed International Nurses Day 2021 in recogni-

tion of the role of nurses as well as of health and safety.

This special day, marked on May 12 every year worldwide, commemorates the birth of Florence Nightingale, so-cial reformer, statistician and the founder of modern nursing.

The theme for International Nurse Day 2021 is A Voice to Lead – A Vision for Future Healthcare.

“The coronavirus (Covid-19) pan-demic has shown the importance of healthcare and investments in health-care,” the ICC said in a statement. “In addition, it has proved that if health-care was not robust, all other sectors would suff er.”

India’s ambassador to Qatar Dr Deepak Mittal, chief guest at the ICC International Nurses Day celebration, addressed the virtual event.

He appreciated nurses “for their re-lentless dedication not just during the pandemic but also making themselves available at the forefront for genera-tions”.

The envoy also acknowledged the support provided by the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) during the pandemic to Qatar’s citizens as well as residents.

Dr Mohan Thomas, president of the Indian Sports Centre, delivered the keynote address, highlighting the signifi cance of the day and expressing gratitude towards nurses.

Mariam Nooh al-Mutawa, guest of honour at the event and acting deputy chief nursing offi cer at Hamad Medi-cal Corporation, supported the event and appreciated Indian nurses in Qa-tar for their solidarity towards the healthcare industry as a team.

She concluded her statement by saying: “Save one life, you are a hero; save 100 lives you are a nurse.”

The event started with a welcome note by Sudhir R Gupta, joint secre-tary of the ICC.

ICC president P N Baburaj presided over the meeting by sharing his views and stressing support for frontline heroes from the healthcare sector as they continued to provide care, espe-cially during the pandemic.

Azim Abbas, president of the Indi-an Business and Professionals Coun-cil, and Dr Joel J Mathew, president of

Indian Doctors Club, addressed the gathering and supported the event.

Nursing associations and bodies such as the Federation of Indian Nurs-es, Qatar (FINQ) and United Nurses of India, Qatar (UNIQ) also contributed towards the success of the event.

FINQ president Bijoy Chacko and Mini Siby, president of UNIQ, ex-pressed gratitude for nurses and sup-ported the event.

The event concluded with a vote of thanks by ICC managing committee member Anish George Mathew.

Elizabeth Varghese anchored the event.

Cultural programmes, short fi lms and video presentations, highlight-ing the skills and talent of healthcare professionals as well as support from their family, were also part of the event.

ICC marks International Nurses DaySome screenshots of the virtual gathering that was organised by the Indian Cultural Centre (ICC) to observe International Nurses Day 2021, which was held on the theme of A Voice to Lead – A Vision for Future Healthcare.

The Toyota Motor Corpo-ration (Toyota) has an-nounced that it is devel-

oping a new hydrogen engine, “underlining its commitment to achieving a carbon-neutral mo-bility society”.

The engine has been installed on a racing vehicle based on Toy-ota’s Corolla Sport, which will participate in competitive mot-orsports under the ORC ROOKIE Racing banner.

The vehicle is powered by a

1.6-litre in-line three-cylinder turbo engine that uses com-pressed hydrogen as its fuel source.

Its fi rst race event will be the Round 3 NAPAC Fuji Super TEC 24 Hours Race, which takes place from May 21-23 as part of the Su-per Taikyu Series 2021 Powered by Hankook.

By honing its hydrogen engine in the challenging environment of motorsports, Toyota aims to contribute to the realisation of

a sustainable and prosperous mobility society, according to a press statement issued in Doha by Abdullah Abdulghani & Bros Co (AAB), the exclusive distribu-tor of Toyota and Lexus vehicles in Qatar.

“We are excited to put our new hydrogen engine technologies to the test during this year’s Super Taikyu Series,” said Kei Fujita, chief representative at Toyota’s Middle East and Central Asia Representative Offi ce. “Our par-ticipation underlines Toyota’s commitment to achieving car-bon-neutral mobility by explor-

ing diverse technology options.“I am especially excited as I

believe there is a huge opportu-nity for the uptake of hydrogen in the Middle East.

“The region has a strong po-tential to produce clean hydrogen from both renewable energy and fossil fuel through the technol-ogy of Carbon Capture, Utilisa-tion and Storage (CCUS).”

Fuel Cell Electrifi ed Vehicles (FCEVs) such as Toyota’s Mirai use a fuel cell in which hydrogen chemically reacts with oxygen in the air to produce electricity that powers the motor.

Meanwhile, hydrogen engines generate power through the combustion of hydrogen using fuel supply and injection systems that have been modifi ed from those used with gasoline engines, emitting zero CO2 in the process.

Combustion in hydrogen en-gines occurs at a faster rate than in gasoline engines, resulting in a characteristic of good respon-siveness.

While having excellent envi-ronmental performance, hydro-gen engines also have the poten-tial to relay the fun of driving, including through sounds and

vibrations, the statement notes.“Toyota has long engaged in

the innovation of engine tech-nology and is applying the tech-nologies that it has continued to refi ne through its participation in motorsports in production vehi-cles, with the GR Yaris launched last September being one exam-ple,” the statement says.

“In addition, Toyota intends to apply the safety technologies and know-how that it has accumu-lated through the development of fuel cell vehicles and the com-mercialisation of the Mirai.”

The hydrogen-powered race

vehicle will be fuelled using hy-drogen produced at the Fuku-shima Hydrogen Energy Research Field in Namie Town in Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture.

Toyota has been strengthening its eff orts toward carbon neu-trality by promoting the use of hydrogen through the populari-sation of FCEVs and numerous other fuel-cell-powered prod-ucts.

“By further refi ning its hydro-gen-engine technologies through motorsports, Toyota is targeting the realisation of an even better hydrogen-based society.”

Toyota spurs new engine technologyThe Toyota Corolla Sport with a hydrogen engine.

The Toyota hydrogen engine.

Toyota is honing its new hydrogen engine technology through the challenging environment of motorsports