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Ship hijacked near Libya rescued Valletta

Migrants hijacked a cargo ship in Libyan waters yesterday and forced the crew to redirect the vessel north to Europe,

according to Italian and Maltese authorities.As the vessel headed in a direction leading

to the island nation of Malta and Italy’s shores, both countries vowed to keep the hijacked ship out of their territorial waters.

Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini iden-tified the ship as the Turkish oil tanker El Hiblu 1 and said the crew had earlier rescued migrants in the Mediterranean Sea.

He put the number of migrants on board at around 120 and described what was happening

as “the first act of piracy on the high seas with migrants that hijacked” a cargo ship.

“Poor castaways, who hijack a merchant ship that saved them because they want to decide the route of the cruise,” Italian news agency ANSA quoted Salvini saying with sarcasm.

02Celebrating the Kingdom as the land of coexistence

04Grand Prix village set to welcome F1 fans

05Court orders three-year jail for ex-minister in dud cheque case

8

India shoots down satellite in space 6WORLD

OP-EDC E L E B S

Tessa Thompson confirmed for ‘Avengers: Endgame’Tessa Thompson will be seen in the much-await-ed “Avengers: Endgame”, Marvel has announced. The actor plays Valkyrie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and first appeared in 2017’s “Thor: Ragnarok”. P14

THURSDAYMARCH 2019

200 FILS ISSUE NO. 8064

Trump and conscience in the age of demagogues

Working with Bryan Singer was unpleasant: Sophie Turner 14 CELEBS

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Bahraini-Indian relations ‘a model of fruitful co-operation’ • HRH the Prime Minister reviewed Bahraini-Indian relations and ways of bolstering them in various fields.

Manama

His Royal Highness Prime Minister Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa

lauded solid ties of friendship and co-operation binding Bah-rain and India.

He praised the long history of civilisational, cultural and trade exchange between both countries, describing bilater-al relations as a distinguished model of fruitful co-operation

that is based on mutual respect, common visions and goals and keenness to achieve common

interests.HRH the Premier was speak-

ing as he received at Gudaibiya

Palace yesterday former Chief Minister of Rajasthan of the Re-public of India Vasundhara Raje.

The meeting was held in the presence of Indian Ambassador to Bahrain Alok Kumar Sinha.

HRH the Prime Minister re-viewed Bahraini-Indian relations and ways of bolstering them in various fields.

He also discussed regional and international developments, lauding growing relations be-tween Bahrain and India, thanks to common visions and efforts to bolster them.

He pointed out the sound eco-nomic and investment climate in both countries, stressing keen-ness of the leaderships and gov-ernments to promote investment and encourage the private sector to set up joint ventures.

HRH the Premier praised In-dia’s development and its growing international influence, voicing Bahrain’s keenness to continue boosting bilateral co-operation to achieve common interests.

He also lauded the role of the Indian community in the King-dom’s development process.

On her part, the former Chief Minister of Rajasthan voiced her country’s appreciation of solid ties binding Bahrain and India and common keenness to further cement them for the interest of both countries and peoples.

She also hailed the efforts of HRH the Premier to strengthen relations between the two friend-ly countries. She praised the Kingdom’s pioneering achieve-ments, stressing Bahrain’s stra-tegic importance in the region.

HRH the Premier receives Ms Raje.

Best businesses HRH Princess Sabeeka awards Arab families for running successful businesses

• HRH Princess Sabeeka commended the quality of the projects launched by Bahrain productive families.

Manama

Her Royal Highness Prin-cess Sabeeka bint Ibra-him Al Khalifa, Wife

of His Majesty the King and Supreme Council for Women (SCW) President, stressed Bah-rain’s keenness on launching ini-tiatives to increase families’ rev-enues, strengthen their stability and consolidate their contribu-tion to the national economy.

She underlined continuous efforts to develop programmes and projects targeting produc-tive families to ensure their sustainability, development and competitiveness.

She made the statement yes-

terday as she distributed prizes to the winners of the 12th edi-tion of HRH Princess Sabeeka’s Award for Productive Families.

The prize-distribution cere-mony was held at the Sharifa Al Awadhi Club for Children and Youth in Riffa.

The family of Essam Abdulla Mohammed Hadi, who are spe-cialised in making luxury coffee blends won the Best Productive Family Prize. At the Arab lev-el, the Best Productive Fami-ly Prize, went to the Family of Zahra Nadhr Al Shatti (Kuwait), which specialises in producing exquisite perfumes.

The Best Product Prize was awarded, at the Arab level, to Egyptian Mariam Azmi Azer for leather products. The same prize went to Bahraini Manal Mohammed Ali Mohammed who is an expert in innovative home farming.

Dar Al Atta’a Society (Oman) and Jordan’s Ministry of Social Development were the co-win-

ners of the Best Productive Fam-ilies Sponsor Award on the Arab level.

At the local level, the Small and Medium Enterprises So-ciety was awarded the prize as the best sponsor of productive families in Bahrain.

HRH Princess Sabeeka then opened an exhibition showcas-ing the products of Bahraini Pro-

ductive Families, which aims at encouraging low-income house-holds to launch small projects, encourage talents and hone their skills.

She was briefed about out-standing projects, encompass-ing textiles and heritage-based industries, in addition to local dishes and sweets. Other Arab projects are also showcased at the exhibition.

HRH Princess Sabeeka com-mended the quality of the projects launched by Bahrain productive families, which in-tegrate modern technologies to market their items online and promote them in Bahrain and abroad.

She lauded the dedicated ef-forts exerted by the Ministry of Labour and Social Development to promote Bahraini productive families, launch quality training programmes, provide them with venues and develop partner-ships with the private sector to market their products.

HRH Princess Sabeeka honours one of the award winners.

Businesses should integrate latest

technologies to market their products in

Bahrain and abroad. HRH PRINCESS SABEEKA

The ship was heading to Libya to drop off rescued migrants when it was seized six miles from the Libyan coast.

Palestinian killed by Israeli fire Ramallah

A Palestinian was killed by Israeli forces in the

occupied West Bank yester-day, the Palestinian health ministry said, adding he was working as a volunteer medic at the time.

The health ministry re-ported Sajid Muzher, 17, was killed after clashes in the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem in the southern West Bank. He was shot by Israeli forces while working as a volunteer medic, a health ministry spokesman said.

The Israeli army did not immediately respond to a re-quest for comment.

Aramco agrees $69bn SABIC purchaseJeddah

Saudi Aramco has agreed a $69.1 billion deal to acquire

a majority stake in SABIC, the region’s biggest petrochem-ical company. It is part of a plan by the world’s largest national oil company to di-versify away from pumping crude oil to generating more of its profits from high-value petrochemicals. And it paves the way for the much-awaited IPO of Saudi Aramco, which is expected in 2021.

Under the deal announced on Wednesday, Saudi Aram-co will acquire a 70 per cent majority stake in Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SAB-IC) from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).

“A combined Saudi Aram-co-SABIC entity would allow truly global reach and mar-ket-leading positions across a strong vertically integrated portfolio of oil-to-chem-icals,” Steve Zinger, senior vice-president for petro-chemicals at Wood Mac-kenzie, said.

02THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019

New business model reaps success for Gulf Air TDT | Manama Abhitab Kumar

Gulf Air is really flying high, both in terms of its business model and Bah-

rainisation, according to the man at the helm of affairs.

In an interaction with mem-bers of the media, Chief Exec-utive Kresimir Kucko said Gulf Air carried a record 478,959 pas-sengers last month.

The ‘Year of Change’ initiative was a big success as the airlines witnessed a huge improvement in its passenger numbers, Mr Kucko pointed out.

“The boutique strategy, which was launched in January 2019 is starting to show results and the airline is extremely proud of these numbers.

“With the growth of capacity and increased number of desti-nations, frequencies and fleet, the February/March 2019 results show Gulf Air’s strategic expan-

sion vision. With greater capacity and

number of seats, it was chal-

lenging to hit the best seat load factors however the airline man-aged to achieve this goal.”

The airlines has also achieved its best February results in six years with the highest seat load factor for February since 2014, which stood at 75.7 per cent.

“The new strategy will not ne-glect any segment of passengers. Every segment is of great signif-icance to us. However, there will be more focus on the premium sector.”

Our customers are becoming more loyal and we see return-

ing customers since the launch of our new fleet products the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner and the Airbus 320neo, he said.

Mr Kucko said that the $1.1 billion Airport Modernisation Programme will have a positive effect on implementing the air-line’s strategies.

“The airport modernisation programme is of great impor-tance to us. We would like the new terminal to become the fastest connecting airport in the region.”

Compared to other regional airlines, Gulf Air has the highest percentage of nationals working as pilots for the airline.

“We have achieved great levels of Bahrainisation. Over 70 per cent of our pilots are Bahrain na-tionals. We are closely working with Tamkeen and are grateful for their support.”

Gulf Air has the highest percentage of nationals working as pilots among regional airlines.

Mr Kucko

The airport modernisation

programme is of great importance to us. We

would like the new terminal to become

the fastest connecting airport in the region.

MR KUCKO

478,959passengers were carried by Gulf Air last month,

which is a record number.

TDT | Manama Harpreet Kaur

His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa yes-terday deputised HM the

King’s Personal Representative, HH Shaikh Abdulla bin Hamad Al Khalifa, to attend the ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the Shree Krishna Hindu Temple in Bahrain.

HRH Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, Shura Council Chair-man, Ali Saleh Al Saleh, Foreign Affairs Minister, Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed Mohammed Al Khal-ifa, Justice, Islamic Affairs and Endowments Minister, Shaikh Khalid bin Ali Al Khalifa, former Chief Minister of Rajasthan of the Republic of India, Vasundhara Raje, ambassadors and senior state officials also attended the

grand celebration, co-organised by the King Hamad Global Centre for Peaceful Coexistence and the “This Is Bahrain” Society.

HH Shaikh Abdulla bin Hamad conveyed HM the King’s greetings and appreciation to all the partici-pants in the celebration, as well as HM’s pride in the great role they have played in the Kingdom’s pro-gress in various fields.

HM the King’s Personal Repre-

sentative stressed that holding a ceremony to commemorate 200 years since the existence of the temple in the Kingdom proves the depth of the deep-rooted Bah-raini-Indian relations, noting that the iconic temple is an excellent example of the feature of co-ex-istence among civilisations and religions that has prevailed in the Kingdom for centuries.

It also reflects Bahrain’s histor-

ical dimension in the region as a country of peace, love, tolerance, as well as religious and cultural diversity, he said.

HH Shaikh Abdulla bin Ham-ad said that the warm welcome accorded to him upon arrival, the speeches made in love and praise of Bahrain and the massive attendance of the event by sen-ior religious figures and officials from brotherly and friendly coun-

tries, the officials of the temple and the expatriate communities testify to the participants’ great and sincere love for Bahrain –King, government and people, as the land of peace, love and reli-gious and cultural tolerance.

HH Shaikh Abdulla bin Ham-ad asserted that, during HM the King’s prosperous era, the king-dom remains the land of progress, civilisations and cultures and is

Celebrating the Kingdom as the land of coexistence Special ceremony marks the 200th anniversary of Hindu Temple in the Kingdom Hindu Temple was built during the era of HH Shaikh Salman bin Ahmed Al Fateh

HRH Prince Andrew lights the traditional lamp in the presence of HH Shaikh Abdulla and other dignitaries. Royal Family members, ministers, envoys and dignitaries attended the event.


Celebrating the Kingdom as the land of coexistence Special ceremony marks the 200th anniversary of Hindu Temple in the Kingdom Hindu Temple was built during the era of HH Shaikh Salman bin Ahmed Al Fateh

proud of the love of its expatri-ate communities, some of whose members came to Bahrain long ago thanks to the Kingdom’s dis-tinguished geographical local, in addition to its citizens’ tolerance and commitment to co-existence.

HH Shaikh Abdulla bin Hamad toured the Temple, and lauded the keenness of its officials to pre-serve the building for many years in the heart of Manama.

He also lauded the good organ-isation of the festivities and its noble goals aimed at promoting the values of peace and tolerance within the framework of co-ex-istence.

The Hindu Temple was built in 1819, during the era of the late HH Shaikh Salman bin Ahmed Al Fateh, and was expanded in 1869, during the era of the late HH Shaikh Isa bin Ali Al Khalifa.

Speaking to Tribune, Jan Figel, special envoy for the promotion of freedom of religion and be-lief outside the EU, told Tribune: “The EU was born from the ashes of the world war, genocide, divi-sion and it is also an example of how we can transform our rela-tions from animosities and atroci-ties to friendship, coexistence and further work with like-minded people who are willing to work

with us and we hope to do more Bahrain.”

Bhagavan Asarpota, the Vice-Chairman of the the That-tai (Bhatia) Hindu Community said, “The temple, which was es-tablished in 1817 by the Thattai (Bhatia) Hindu Community with the blessings of the Royal Family holds the distinction of being the first and oldest Temple in the Gulf countries and has been catering

to the needs of the large Hin-du expatriate community since centuries. Moreover, we want to thank our High Priest Goswami Vishal Bawa Sahab for gracing us with his presence.”

United Nations Resident Co-ordinator Amin El Sharkawi, pointed out, “We are very much honoured to be celebrating the 200 years since the establishment of the temple.”

The iconic temple is an excellent example

of co-existence among civilisations and religions that

has prevailed in the Kingdom for centuries.

HH SHAIKH ABDULLA

Ms Raje speaks at the event. The event highlighted the Kingdom’s existence as a country of peace, love and tolerance.

Pitch@Palace Bahrain finale held Manama

Under the patronage of His Royal Highness

Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Crown Prince, Deputy Supreme Com-mander and Chairman of the Economic Development Board and His Royal High-ness Prince Andrew Duke of York, the finale of the 2nd Bahrain edition of the Pitch@Palace competition was held yesterday at the Four Seasons Hotel.

Shaikh Mohammed bin Isa Al Khalifa, Chairman of Tamkeen greeted Prince Andrew Duke of York upon his arrival at the venue.

In his speech to the audi-ence, the Duke of York said, “Pitch@Palace’s partner-ship with Bahrain matters and we are able to do great things. Our Partnership with Tamkeen is key to this and together we are able to make introductions for En-trepreneurs from Bahrain to the rest of the world and bring Entrepreneurs here to Bahrain.

“”Every single person here tonight can make a sig-nificant difference to these businesses helping them with their Asks.”

Shaikh Mohammed de-livered the event’s opening speech, in which he com-mended the competition as an exemplary initiative which works on the global level to promote the entre-preneurial culture and spirit and support tomorrow’s en-trepreneurs across the var-ious growth stages of their budding ventures.

PICS BY SANURAJ


Grand Prix village set to welcome F1 fans

Limitless fun, excitement and memories await motor-sport fans at F1 village

• The BIC’s wide variety of attractions also include massive carnival rides and games, a haunted house, a kids’ activity zone and an army of roaming performers.

• The Ferris Wheel is 42 metres in height and it boasts 27 gondolas.

TDT | ManamaMohammed Zafran

Bahrain International Cir-cuit will start welcoming the public at the F1 Village

vending area today evening. This is the first time that the or-

ganisers are allowing the public early access to the F1 Village to en-joy off-track entertainment. Gates are scheduled to be open from 4pm until 7pm today.

BIC Chief Executive Shaikh Sal-man bin Isa Al Khalifa commented: “Our array of family entertainment has something to offer for all ages.

It promises to be an unforgettable weekend.

“Indeed, our slogan for this year’s race is ‘Limitless’ and we hope to offer fans a limitless level of fun, excitement and memories.”

“Demand for tickets for this weekend has been amazing, with the main grandstand already sold out. I would therefore urge fans to book quickly to avoid disappoint-ment,” he said.

The BIC’s wide variety of attrac-tions also include massive carnival rides and games, a haunted house, a kids’ activity zone and an army of roaming performers, plus so much more.

“One of the highlights of Thurs-day’s line-up of activities will take fans away from the vending area into the heart of all the racing in the Formula 1 Pit Lane.

“All those with tickets to watch the three days of competitive ac-tion from Friday to Sunday will be able to join the hugely popular Formula 1 Pit Lane Walk.

“This is one of the most sought-after activities for the pub-lic at the Grand Prix each year. It offers a chance for fans to get a close-up look at the Formula 1 teams hard at work in their garages.

“They may possibly even spot one of the sport’s star drivers lend-ing a hand as they prepare their cars for the start of the weekend’s racing the next day,” the BIC said in a statement.

The Ferris Wheel and Star Flyer are firsts for the Grand Prix week-end. The Ferris Wheel is 42 metres in height and it boasts 27 gondolas. The Star Flyer towers 60 metres high and it has 16 gondolas.

Meanwhile, a team of roaming performers will also be present. The roaming performers include the Circolo Stilt-Walkers, The Dans, Dr Bubbles, Rainbow Bal-let, Tri-Colour Walkabout, Circus Parade, the Batucada Timba mu-sicians, Steam Dancers, Men Alien, Walking Funfair, Rainbow Carnival and Steve and Tom Cir-cus entertainment.The BIC has endless fun and excitement to offer F1 fans.

Demand for tickets for this weekend has been amazing, with the main grandstand already sold

out. SHAIKH SALMAN

Information Committee holds meetingManama

The National Informa-tion Committee con-

vened yesterday under the chairmanship of Cabinet Affairs Minister Moham-med Al Mutawa.

The meeting, held at His Royal Highness the Prime Minister’s Court, was at-tended by members of the committee from various government institutions.

Discussions focused on issues enlisted on the meet-ing ’s agenda, including mainly determining priori-ties to link the Government Action Plan to the sustain-able development goals (SDGs).

The Cabinet Affairs Min-ister stressed the need to continue the efforts of im-plementing the SDGs by de-termining national priori-ties and going ahead with their implementation in tune with the Government Action Plan.

He underlined the im-portance of monitoring sta-tistics and indices on the level of progress in various sectors.

He also hailed the efforts made to prepare an elec-tronic system to serve as the kingdom’s portal for local and international parties to get informed about Bah-rain’s progress in achieving SDGs.

The Cabinet Affairs Min-ister thanked all concerned parties for their cooperation with the National Informa-tion Committee.

Al Namal and VKL Group Chairman Dr Varghese Kurian and Romeo Belloli, Chairman of the Metallurgical Invest Ltd, a UK-based company, has signed an agreement to develop a multi-storeyed building in the Hidd area.

Agreement signed

The Capital Governorate has achieved a significant milestone at the regional level by winning the Arab Government Shield Award for the year 2019. The shield is awarded by the Arab Centre for Intelligent Services and Innovative Technology to the governments and official organisations of Arab countries that foster internet applications and technologies that are in line with global standards for official websites. Capital Governor Shaikh Hisham bin Abdulrahman Al Khalifa received the award.

Special honour

Sellers warned after inspectors find more than 100 faulty weighing scales TDT | ManamaMohammed Zafran

More than 100 weighing scales in the market failed to meet the re-

quired standards, potentially giv-ing wrong readings, it emerged.

An inspection campaign by the authorities revealed that nine per cent of the weighing scales in the market were not meeting the standards.

The inspection efforts by Standards and Metrology Direc-torate of the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, howev-er, revealed that there has been an improvement when compared to previous years.

“The Standards and Metrology Directorate recently completed its inspection campaign at the major markets in Bahrain to ver-

ify if the weighing and measure-ment devices used by the sellers were in line with the standards set by the directorate.

“Inspection campaigns were

carried out during popular exhi-bitions such as the Autumn Fair and Jewellery Arabia,” a ministry representative said.

Inspections in central markets

in Manama, Muharraq, Jedhafs, Souq Waqif and other markets were covered in about a month.

Ninety-one per cent of the weighing tools inspected con-

formed to the approved tech-nical requirements while 9pc of them failed to meet the re-quirement.

The ministry called on the sellers to always make sure that their weighing tools are up to the right standard.

“It is in the best interest of sellers as well as the buyer for the weighing tools function cor-

rectly. Incorrect readings could lead to loss to one of the parties.”

Many of the weighing tools found to be not up to standards were because of the wear and tear it experienced.

The Ministry of Works, Mu-nicipalities Affairs and Urban Planning has also collaborated for the success of the campaign.

An initiative to help Small and Medium Enterprises in Bah-rain implementing international standards for their products was launched recently.

The Bahrain Standards and Metrology Directorate (BSMD) of the Ministry of Industry, Com-merce and Tourism in collabora-tion with United Nations Indus-trial Development Organisation have been helping the SMEs im-prove the implementation of the standardisation practices.

The Standards and Metrology Directorate officials carry out inspection.

91per cent of the weighing

scales subjected to inspection conformed to the approved technical

requirements.


Final Dividends Distribution2018 Annoucement

th

Bahrain Telecommunications Company (Batelco) B.S.C

Following the Annual Meeting of the Shareholders of Batelco B.S.C. held on the 27th March 2019, we are pleased to inform you that the distribution of final dividends for the fiscal year 2018 will start on Thursday 4th April 2019.

Eligible shareholders who are listed in the share register as at 27th March 2019, should contact Karvy Computershare W.L.L. at the below:

Karvy Computershare W.L.L.

Office No. 7 ,74 floor, Zamil Tower

Government Road, Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain

Tel: 17215080 Fax: 17212055

Email: [email protected]

Abdulla bin Khalifa Al Khalifa Chairman

[email protected]

Court orders three-year jail for ex-minister in dud cheque case

Ex-minister accused of issuing a dud cheque to an Arab businessman for BD160,000

• The Public Prosecution accused the defendant of intentionally issuing a dud cheque to the victim.

TDT | Manama

The Minor Criminal Court yesterday sentenced an ex-minister to three years

of imprisonment after finding him guilty of issuing a dud cheque for BD160,000.

Several verdicts that varied be-

tween fines and jail terms were issued against the former official in similar cases recently, accord-ing to prosecutors.

The details of the case show that the Anti-corruption, Eco-

nomic and Electronic Security Directorate in Interior Minis-try received a complaint from an Arab businessman against the defendant, accusing him of cheating him in a land deal.

The victim told the prosecutors that he had agreed with the former minister on buying a land, which the latter claimed to own, for a price of BD160, 000.

The victim also informed that he paid the amount in cheque and received a cheque of the same amount from the defendant in guar-antee until the paperwork

and formalities for the owner-ship transfer are completed.

However, the victim claimed that he discovered that the land could not be sold as per a land attachment order issued by the court against the defendant.

The man told the inter-rogators that the defendant would deny the deal reached between them and repeatedly avoid him.

The victim also said he was informed by the bank that the

defendant’s account was sus-pended, when he attempted to cash the cheque.

In April 18, 2018, the Public Prosecution accused the de-fendant of intentionally issuing a dud cheque to the victim.

Representative of HM the King for Charity Works and Youth Affairs, Chairman of the Supreme Council for Youth and Sports and Chairman of Royal Charity Organisation, HH Shaikh Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa, yesterday received a delegation from the Hindu temple in the Kingdom of Bahrain marking its 200th establishment anniversary in the Kingdom. Minister of Justice, Islamic affairs and Endowments, Shaikh Khalid bin Ali Al Khalifa and a number of ambassadors to Bahrain were present. HH Shaikh Nasser bin Hamad affirmed Bahrain’s drive to lead the world to achieve universal peaceful coexistence, highlighting the initiatives of HM King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa to promote the values of peaceful coexistence and to foster tolerance and dialogue among all religions and cultures.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Khalifa, yesterday received former Chief Minister of Rajasthan of the Republic of India, Vasundhara Raje, in the presence of the Undersecretary of the Gulf Division in the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, Dr T V Nagendra Prasad, who are currently on a visit to the Kingdom. The Minister of Foreign Affairs hailed the historic friendly relations between the Kingdom and the Republic of India, noting their continuous development in various fields. He also highlighted the contributions of the Indian community to the development process in the Kingdom.

10 years jail for Asian drug peddlerTDT | Manama

The First High Criminal Court yesterday sen-tenced an Asian to 10

years imprisonment along with a fine of BD5,000 for his involve-ment in drug peddling.

The court ordered to imprison

two others, who were with him at the time of arrest, to one year each and to pay a fine of BD1,000.

All defendants were ordered to be deported after completing their sentences.

The first defendant confessed during the interrogation that he

regularly bought large quantities of heroin from a fellow Asian dealer and later sold it.

The Public Prosecution ac-cused the first defendant of possessing, abusing and selling heroin, while the other two were accused of consuming drugs.

Arab salesman accused of laundering BD163,000

TDT | Manama

An Arab national employ-ee laundered BD163,000 in collaboration with a

Filipino woman, the High Ap-

peals Court heard. The defendant is said to have

been working as a salesman and he exploited his post to embez-zle money from his company during his four-year tenure.

He was assisted by the Fil-ipino woman, who received the money from him and trans-ferred to her bank account in the Philippines.

Investigations found that the defendant had managed to buy many land plots in his country and he had several bank ac-counts.

The crimes occurred during 2010-2014 period before the company dis-covered his wrongdoing.

He, along with the Filipino woman were tried on the grounds of embezzlement, forgery and dishonesty.

They were sentenced to three years behind bars each.

Several verdicts that varied between fines and jail terms were issued against the

former official. PROSECUTORS

06

world

THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019

Boeing 737 MAX makes emergency landing during US transfer: FAAWashington, United States

A Boeing 737 MAX aircraft operated by Southwest

Airlines made an emergency landing Tuesday after experi-encing an engine problem as it was being ferried from Florida to California, the US Federal Aviation Agency said.

“The aircraft returned and landed safely in Orlando,” the FAA said in a statement, add-ing that no passengers were on board the aircraft, which was being transferred to Vic-torville, California for storage.

“The FAA is investigating,” added the agency, which grounded the Boeing 737 MAX on March 13 following two deadly accidents involving Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air but continues to allow the planes to be ferried from air-port to airport.

Southwest said the plane ex-perienced an engine problem “shortly after takeoff.”

“The crew followed pro-tocol and safely landed back at the airport” around 3:00 pm (1900 GMT), spokesman Chris Mainz said.

“ T h e Boeing 737

MAX 8 will be moved to our Orlando maintenance facility for a review.”

It was the latest setback for Boeing’s flagship narrow-body plane following October’s Lion Air crash and the Ethiopian Airlines accident earlier this month, which together killed 346 people.

The accidents, which shared similarities, led authorities across the world to ground the aircraft.

Boeing has since conducted test flights of its 737 MAX to evaluate a fix for the MCAS stall prevention system targeted as a potential cause for the deadly crashes, two sources familiar with the matter said.

A Senate Commerce Com-mittee panel will hold a hear-ing Wednesday to question FAA Acting Administration Daniel Elwell and Transpor-tation Department Inspector General Calvin Scovel

The officials are expected to face questions from lawmak-ers on the FAA’s certification of the 737 MAX and whether regulators have become too cozy with the company, and fast-tracked some ap-

provals.

A Boeing 737 MAX 8 airliner takes off from Renton Municipal Airport near the company’s factory

India shoots down satellite in space

AFP | New Delhi, India

India said yesterday it shot down a low-orbiting sat-ellite in a missile test that

proved the nation was among the world’s most advanced space superpowers.

In a rare address to the na-tion just weeks out from a na-tional election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India had joined the United States, Russia and China in accomplishing the feat.

A missile fired from a testing facility in Odisha, eastern In-dia, downed the live satellite in orbit at around 300 kilometres (185 miles) in “a difficult oper-ation” that lasted around three minutes, the prime minister said.

“This is a proud moment for India,” the prime minister said, in his first televised national address since late 2016.

“India has registered its name in the list of space superpowers. Until now, only three countries had achieved this feat.”

Modi said the missile test against the satellite was peace-ful, and not designed to create “an atmosphere of war”.

“I want to assure the world community that the new ca-pability is not against anyone. This is to secure and defend the fast-growing India.”

The United States and former Soviet Union carried out their first successful anti-satellite missile tests in 1985, and China

in 2007.All are now said to be work-

ing on so-called Star Wars laser arms to destroy satellites.

With satellites increasing-ly important because of their intelligence gathering role -- and major nations seeking to gain a foothold in space -- the United States in 2014 rejected a Russian-Chinese proposal for a treaty to ban weapons in space, saying it was “funda-mentally flawed” because of the lack of weapons verification measures.

In a statement released after Modi’s announcement, the for-eign ministry said India “has no intention of entering into an arms race in outer space”.

“We have always maintained that space must be used only for peaceful purposes,” the minis-try said.

Modi said the test did not violate any international trea-ties and was for the betterment and safety of India’s 1.3 billion people.

This is a proud moment for India.

India has registered its name in the list of space superpowers.

Until now, only three countries had achieved this feat

NARENDRA MODI

An Indian man watches the live broadcast of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi address to the nation on televisions displayed in an electronic store, in Amritsar

School bus hijack children to get Italian nationality

Rome, Italy

Foreign children on the school bus hijacked near

Milan last week are to be awarded Italian nationality, far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said Wednes-day after a week-long debate.

The dramatic police rescue of 51 children on the bus hi-jacked by their driver of Sene-

galese origin on March 20 has gripped Italy and rekindled debate about its citizenship laws.

“If there are children who are not Italian citizens, we have studied this question and we will complete the process so that they can become Ital-ian,” Salvini said after meeting five of the children and some of the police who saved them in Rome.

AXA Insurance (Gulf) B.S.C. (c)

Summary Financial Information

CONDENSED STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL POSITION At At 31-Dec-18 31-Dec-17 BD 000s BD 000s (Audited) (Audited) ASSETS

Property and equipment 5,700 8,965 Investment in property 505 529 Deferred policy acquisition costs 13,549 12,829 Investment in associate 14,477 14,477 Investment in subsidiary 31 31 Financial assests 117,576 102,909 Insurance and reinsurance receivables 58,771 49,523 Prepayments and other receivables 10,891 6,425 Reinsurance assets 65,788 48,172 Cash and cash equivalents 99,102 94,357 TOTAL ASSETS 386,390 338,217

EQUITY AND LIABILITIES Equity Share capital 15,000 15,000 Statutory reserve 15,000 15,000 Fair value reserve (2,391) 1,594 Contingency reserve 5,675 5,508 Capital reserve 9,792 9,792 Share based payments 460 368 Proposed dividend 7,540 - Retained earnings 54,122 49,987 Total Equity 105,198 97,249

Liabilities

Insurance liabilities 233,539 194,698 Accruals and other liabilities 17,324 17,223 Reinsurance balances payable 25,412 24,011 Deferred reinsurance commission 315 349 Employees’ end of service benefits 2,556 2,787 Taxation payable 2,046 1,900

Total Liabilities 281,192 240,968 TOTAL LIABILITIES AND EQUITY 386,390 338,217

The Financial information as above has been extracted from the financial statements which has been audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers

CONDENSED STATEMENT OF INCOME

Period ended Period ended 31-Dec-18 31-Dec-17 BD 000s BD 000s (Audited) (Audited)

Insurance premiums earned - Gross 190,031 193,101 Reinsurers' share of insurance premium earned (27,894) (35,942) Insurance premiums earned - Net 162,137 157,159

Claims incurred - Gross (147,553) (131,725) Reinsurers' share of claims incurred 45,594 29,277 Claims incurred - Net (101,959) (102,448) Other technical reserve (253) (993)

59,925 53,718

Staff costs (21,211) (23,438) General and administration expenses (14,409) (13,322) Amortisation of acquisition costs (18,868) (16,153) Commissions on reinsurance ceded 1,359 1,256

(53,129) (51,657)

Underwriting results 6,796 2,061 Income from investments in financial assets 7,040 6,447 Realised gain on sale of available for sale investments 258 323 Impairment of available for sale investments (1,339) (331) Profit before taxation 12,755 8,500

Income tax (913) (970)

PROFIT FOR THE YEAR 11,842 7,530

Other comprehensive loss for the year (3,985) (135)

Total comprehensive income for the year 7,857 7,395

Fawzi Kanoo Cedric Charpentier Chairman Director

For more information contact: AXA Insurance (Gulf) BSC (c) - Regional Office 2nd Floor, Kanoo Building, Abu Obeidah Avenue P.O.Box 45, Manama Kingdom of Bahrain Tel: + 973 17 210778

Seven Thai parties form coalition to thwart juntaBangkok, Thailand

Seven political parties formed a coalition in

Thailand yesterday, vowing to thwart a military-backed proxy in a bid to end years of junta rule following the country’s first election since a 2014 coup.

A junta-aligned party and its main rival have both claimed the right to govern the country after Sunday’s vote, prompting a political standoff.

Questions over irregular-ities are swirling following invalidated ballots and ac-cusations of skewed num-bers.

Pheu Thai, affiliated with self-exiled former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, joined forces with six other par-ties in a bid to halt mili-tary-backed factions from leading the country.“We want to stop the regime from hanging onto power,” Pheu Thai’s prime minis-terial candidate Sudarat Keyuraphan told reporters.

Thailand has been ruled by a junta since a 2014 putsch led by General Prayut Chan-O-Cha, the prime ministerial candidate for the Phalang Pracharat Party. But Phalang Pracha-rat stunned the pro-de-mocracy camp by winning the popular vote on Sunday with 7.6 million ballots.

Its main rival Pheu Thai got 400,000 fewer votes, but is now aiming to take the majority of seats in the lower house.

(FromL) Niccolo, Fabio, Aurora, Adam and Rami, the five children who helped to save other children during the March 20 Milan bus attack, pose with their medals handovered by Italian Deputy Premier and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini in Rome


This needs to stop... The administration should stop using

our service members as a political tool and instead focus

on building military capabilities and

readiness and areas where we should focus our defense

resources

ADAM SMITHCOMMITTEE CHAIRMAN

‘Ugly’ prosthetics get French design treatmentBriec, France

Fre n c h m a n -ufacturers of

prosthetics are breaking from tra-dition to develop fashionable artifi-

cial limbs with patterns and colour so that wearers don’t mind showing off some leg.

Two com-panies, Algo

O r t h o p e d i e a n d U - Ex i st , have taken the lead in France

and are trying t o r e d e f i n e the image of replacement limbs, which are manufac-t u r e d f r o m plastic resin

a n d a r e usually

skin-coloured.“A prosthetic worn with your

granny’s stocking is just ugly,” said Alain Le Guen, an orthope-dic surgeon and manager of Algo Orthopedie, which was created in 2004 in Brittany in north-western France.

“It has to be a bit of a work of art,” he added, so that “people aren’t shy about showing their leg.” Le Guen believes that col-ourful prosthetics can help users accept their disability.

His company has seen rapid growth in the past few years, with production increasing from just a dozen designer limbs in 2016 to around 50 now.

Each limb costs between 25-26,000 euros (28,000 dollars) and is normally covered by the French public health system.

Users of Algo’s prosthetic limbs seem to take pride in them.

Bruno Paul, 55, sports an artificial left leg with a yel-low-and-orange diamond motif.

Former metal-worker Paul lost his leg in 2016, nearly 20 years after an accident in a foundry which led to around 20 operations to try to prevent an amputation.

“I don’t have my leg anymore, so why pretend to still have one,” Paul said. “I might as well accept my disability

along with some colour.”Evelyne Briand, a 56-year-

old who had her leg ampu-

tated in 2007, chose a striped blue-and-white design.

“The way people look at you changes when you have a colour-ed prosthetic,” she said. “I’ve got another one in leather to go with my black dress.”

She had her leg amputated in 2007 after rupturing cruciate ligaments in her knee during a tennis match at the age of 25, which led to more than 40 failed operations.

Throwing out the rulesAnother company, U-Exist,

joined the competition in 2014 and trains prosthetic design-ers -- between 150 and 200 an-nually -- as well as manufac-turing its own line of stylish limbs.

“A prosthetic created to mim-ic the human body is frankly deceptive for the mind, not to mention that the appearance of a false limb can be troubling to other people,” said Simon Colin, founder and director of U-Exist.

Colin, whose interest in de-signs for prosthetics dates back to research as a student on the impact of personalised pros-thetics, is a fervent believer in what he considers a form of art therapy.

Around 250,000 people use a prosthetic limb in France and around 160,000 of them are built each year, according to Colin.

A technician uses a dryer to finalize a coated tibia prosthesis in a workshop at ALGO

Customised prosthesis displayed at ALGO, a firm specialized in prosthesis in Brest, western France.

US Lawmakers challenge Pentagon’s $1bn for wallWashington, United States

A Democrat-led congres-sional committee chal-lenged Tuesday the Pen-

tagon’s plan to divert $1 billion to support President Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.

Less than one day after acting Pentagon chief Patrick Shan-ahan authorized moving the funds from existing Defense Department projects to border construction, the House Armed Services Committee said this move was not permitted.

It was the newest challenge to Trump’s February 15 decla-ration of a “national emergency” at the border in order to obtain more than $5 billion to build a frontier wall to keep out illegal immigrants and drug smugglers, after Congress denied him the funds.

The Defense Department “is attempting to circumvent Con-gress and the American people’s opposition to using taxpayer money for the construction of an unnecessary wall, and the military is paying the cost,” said committee Chairman Adam Smith. “This needs to stop... The administration should stop us-ing our service members as a political tool and instead focus on building military capabilities and readiness and areas where we should focus our defense resources.”

“Congress will act as neces-sary to defend its Constitutional prerogatives,” Smith warned in a statement.

Late Monday, Shanahan said he had authorized the move of

the funds to help the Homeland Security Department build 57 miles (92 kilometers) of 18-foot (5.5-meter) fencing, to construct and improve roads, and install lighting to support Trump’s emergency declaration.

Addressing concerns that the US military was straying out of its mission into domestic civil-ian operations, Shanahan cited US law that authorizes the mili-tary to support the counterdrug activities of other federal agen-cies. For two years, Trump has battled Congress for as much as $25 billion in funds to fortify the Mexico border with a mas-sive wall.

After Congress voted earlier this month to nullify the emer-

gency declaration, Trump ve-toed it, allowing the Pentagon to reallocate billions of dollars to the border “emergency.”

Smith said some limited amount of “reprogramming” of Pentagon funds for emergency needs without congressional approval is normally allowed.

But the shift of $1 billion, he said, is “a violation of that trust.”

The House of Representatives narrowly failed to override the veto as it did not reach the re-quired two thirds of votes (288), falling short at 248.

“Thank you to the House Re-publicans for sticking together and the BIG WIN today on the Border,” Trump said in response on Twitter.

Aerial view of the wall prototypes at the US-Mexico border after they were torn down, and the new second line fencing, as seen from Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico

500 evacuated as fire hits Singapore hotel

Singapore, Singapore

About 500 people were evacuated Wednesday af-

ter a fire at a luxury hotel in downtown Singapore but there were no injuries, emergency services officials said.

Television footage showed thick black smoke billowing from the Grand Hyatt Hotel near the Orchard Road shop-ping district, but the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) said the fire was quickly put out.

The blaze involved a kitchen stove and an exhaust duct in a restaurant on the second floor, the SCDF said, adding it was ex-tinguished by water sprinklers before firefighters arrived.

“There were no reported in-juries. The cause of the fire is under investigation,” it said.

“The smoke was really ter-rible ... it got into my throat. I think it was quite thick,” Nadi-ah Yayoh, 40, who works at a boutique in the hotel, told AFP.

“Usually we have fire drills and normal evacuations, as well as fire practice ... This is a lesson learnt not to take it

lightly.”An AFP reporter on the scene

said guests were still check-ing in around two hours after the blaze, but a burning smell lingered at the lobby and the second floor was dark.

It was the second luxury ho-tel fire in Singapore this year.

About 1,000 guests were evacuated due to a fire at the downtown Carlton Hotel on February 14, but no injuries were also reported.

Screen grab from a video posted by Channel News Asia showing smoke billows out of the Grand Hyatt at Scotts Road

Evacuation progress at Grand Hyatt Hotel (Courtesy of Channel News Asia)


Hon. Chairman Najeb Yacob Alhamer | Editor-in-Chief Mahmood AI Mahmood | Deputy Editor-in-Chief Ahdeya Ahmed | Chairman & Managing Director P Unnikrishnan | Advertisement: Update Media W.L.L | Tel: 38444692, Email: [email protected] | Newsroom: Tel: 38444680, Email: [email protected] & circulation: Tel: 38444698/17579877 | Email:[email protected] | Website: www.newsofbahrain.com | Printed and published by Al Ayam Publishing

ROGER COHEN

His name is Isadore Greenbaum. He’s a Jew, a plumber’s helper

from Brooklyn. He rushes onto the stage, beneath a portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. He tries to accost the Nazi who is denouncing the “Jew-ish-controlled press” and calling for a “white gentile-ruled” United States. Uniformed storm troopers beat him. Police officers drag him from the stage, pants ripped, arms raised in desperate entreaty. The mob howls in delight.

It’s Feb 20, 1939, more than 20,000 Nazi sympathisers are packed into Madison Square Garden as Greenbaum attempts to silence Fritz Kuhn, Bundes-führer (so-called) of the German American Bund. Greenbaum has been enraged by Kuhn’s demand

that the country be delivered from Jewish clutches and “returned to the American people who found-ed it.”

The 26-year-old Jew is brought before a magistrate who, accord-ing to an account in The New York Times, tells him that “innocent people might have been killed.” To which Greenbaum retorts, “Do you realise that plenty of Jewish people might be killed with their persecution up there?”

“Plenty” is an inadequate word for six million, but that was 1939 and human beings tend not to im-agine the unimaginable. The pale, dismayed face of the young Jew-ish boy, arms raised, being round-ed up in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 is well known. Greenbaum’s expression of terrorised anguish in New York City presages it.

All this is caught in Marshall Curry’s remarkable Oscar-nom-inated documentary short, “A Night at the Garden,” composed of footage from the time. Attacks on the press; the take-back-our-country cry; hymns to the true American (or German): There’s not much new, as Curry notes,

about fascism.The movie brings to mind a

phrase of Hannah Arendt’s that has haunted me about how most people will comply under condi-tions of terror but some will not: “No more is required,” she wrote, “and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”

Think the “Tank Man” of Ti-ananmen Square. Think Anton Schmid, the sergeant in Hitler’s army who helped Jews in the Vilnius ghetto and was executed in 1942. Think Ron Ridenhour, the helicopter gunner in Vietnam spurred by conscience to gather information that led to the offi-cial investigation into the My Lai Massacre. Think Isadore Green-baum. It is of the essence of such gestures that they appear futile, yet have the power to redeem hu-manity.

Our age, too, is one of dema-gogues. What are we to make of our “ivory-gold colossus” — James Lasdun’s phrase in his brilliant new novel of the #MeToo era, “Af-ternoon of a Faun”? This colossus “at once menacing and cosmical-

ly aggrieved” who for two hours perorates before the Conservative

Political Action Conference (only would-be or actual dictators af-

flicted with narcissistic disorders talk for that long) and declares:

“I’m in love, and you’re in love. We’re all in love together.”

Who, for President Donald Trump, are his people in love? They are “our people.” Now, “our people” are not synonymous with the American people. This president, unlike his predeces-sors, has never seen himself as the president of all Americans.

No, they are the CPAC crowd, his fans. They are the “tough people,” the people who could make things “very bad” if nec-essary — police and military and bikers who, the president claimed in an interview with Breitbart News this month, sup-port him. He needs people in his thrall, like that Madison Square Garden crowd. As Lasdun wrote, “Nothing short of dominion over the entire universe could com-pensate for the wrongs done to him.”

The wrongs, that is, of journal-ists, judges and Hollywood di-rectors — anyone who thinks the president might just be a danger-ous white nationalist charlatan. Why think that? Because Trump, from Day 1, has maligned brown

EDUCATION IS NOT JUST ABOUT GOING TO SCHOOL AND GETTING A DEGREE. IT’S ABOUT WIDENING YOUR KNOWLEDGE AND ABSORBING THE TRUTH ABOUT LIFE. SHAKUNTALA DEVI

QUOTE OF THE DAY

SAM BYERS

Recently, in the comfort-ing gloom of a half-empty cinema, I found myself

subjected to an advertisement for the country in which I live. A series of Britain’s cultural and sporting great and good, inter-spersed with “normal” people, rode in taxis, strode through the airport and squeezed themselves into economy class. “Dear Brit-ain,” they said, taking turns with the lines while stowing their luggage and settling into their seats. “Dear old Britain. We love you … The way you pick your-self up when things get tough. … How you follow your own path. … How you tell it like it is (po-litely, of course!). … You’ve led revolutions of all kinds, yet you won’t shout about it, it’s just not in your nature. Instead, you’ll quietly make history.” At the end, cozily occupying the sweet spot between the roundly unifying and the vapidly uncontrover-sial, Olivia Colman, who recently won an Oscar for playing Queen Anne, said something about tea.

As an ad celebrating British Airways, an international airline, it’s strikingly devoid of inter-nationalism. As a hymn to the solipsistic backwater we’ve be-come, it’s painfully apt. If Britain were an airline, we’d be very much like the one British Air-

ways gives us in its ad — idling on the runway, sipping our tea and mumbling our self-congrat-ulatory eulogies, revelling in our isolation because all sense of a destination has disappeared.

The ad speaks to the experi-ence of living in Britain at this moment. It’s not just our polit-ical life that feels suffused with the toxicity of Brexit, but also our cultural and even personal lives, too. At dinner with friends and family, on our couches in front of the television, even in our attempts at cinematic es-cape, there is only one subject of conversation: our departure from the European Union, the need to either oppose it or enact it. As we walk the supermar-ket aisles, speculating as to the continuing availability of our favourite foods, as we sit with our European loved ones and try to convince ourselves of the security of their stay, as we lay out the day’s medicines and fret about the continuing viability of their procurement, Brexit is inescapable.

But something else is ines-capable, too, because Brexit is so bound up with “Britishness” — that never-quite-defined and often nebulous shared culture that has become as impossible to avoid. Brexit is not just an event, it is a feeling — suffocating and dispiriting and freighted with gloom. With no refuge from that feeling, we seek solace in anoth-er: national pride.

March 29 was supposed to be the date Britain exited the Eu-ropean Union. In the 33 months

since our narrow decision to do that, our political paralysis around the terms of our depar-ture has reached a terminal, pos-sibly fatal state. The deal that Prime Minister Theresa May negotiated with Brussels was robustly defeated in Parliament — twice. Yet now, she must bring it back for a third time. If the deal cannot be agreed upon, we very well might, after a derisory extension of two weeks, leave without a deal at all — an eventu-ality that Parliament has already rejected as too calamitous.

So we’re all agreed: In our bid to “quietly make history,” we would prefer a deal that does not in fact exist and for which there is no time left to negotiate be-cause we’ve spent all of our time getting a deal we don’t want, meaning that now we’re read-ying ourselves to sidestep the humiliation of a deal we don’t like by accepting the ruin of a non-deal we don’t like either. We are, in almost every sense, on a plane to nowhere, and be-cause we have nowhere to go, we have to convince ourselves that nowhere is exactly where we wish to be.

With nothing meaningful to say about our future, we’ve re-treated into the falsehoods of the past, painting over the absence of certainty at our core with a whitewash of poisonous nos-talgia. The result is that Britain has entered a haunted dreams-cape of collective dementia — a half-waking state in which the previous day or hour is swiftly erased and the fantasies of the

previous century leap vividly to the fore. Turning on the televi-sion or opening Twitter, we find people who have no memory of the Second World War invok-ing a kind of blitz spirit, or suc-cumbing to fits of self-righteous fury because someone has dared to impugn the legacy of Winston Churchill.

At the same time, in our deter-mination to rekindle the embers of our cooling significance, we seem perfectly happy to burn the future of our young for fuel. Efforts by students to counter the colonial arrogance that has been our ruin by decoloniz-ing the curriculum have been met with sputtering, insecure outrage. Recently, a group of

students (and future voters) protesting the government’s hopeless stance on climate change were dismissed as mere truants by a leading member of the Conservative Party. We’re so obsessed with our past that we cannot, any longer, even coun-tenance a future. To protect that past, we seem prepared to aban-don the future entirely, to tell ourselves that there is no future, just as to British Airways there are apparently no countries to fly to.

The problem with all this self-deluding preservation of the past isn’t just that it’s re-gressive, or alienating for those of us who don’t spend our time musing on Churchill’s legacy or

swelling with pride at our good fortune to accidentally be born British; it’s that it pollutes and stagnates even the discourse that ought to oppose it.

We’re the world’s fifth-larg-est economy and likely to sink to seventh this year. Industry and finance are falling over themselves to flee. Nor am I convinced that anyone should be “rightly proud” of a coun-try in which, according to the homelessness charity Crisis, the number of people sleeping on the streets has risen 140 per cent since 2010; in which over a mil-lion emergency food packages were given to those struggling financially in the 2017-18 finan-cial year; in which over 4 million

children are living in poverty; and in which local councils in England face an £8 billion finan-cial black hole by 2025, endan-gering not only their upkeep of communal spaces, but also their ability to provide adequate care for children, the elderly and people with disabilities.

Indeed, when the United Na-tions special rapporteur on ex-treme poverty and human rights visited Britain last year, his ver-dict was damning, depicting not a nation “picking itself up when things get tough” and “quietly making history” but a society in which, as he put it, “British compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited and often callous approach.” We are even, in point of fact, going off tea.

Our inability to state difficult truths without first offering some reassuring patriotism ac-counts, in some ways, for the failure of the “remain” argu-ment. In making a negative case against leaving the European Union — that it will cause ir-reparable harm to the econo-my, that vital flows of food and medicine may be disrupted, that we will consign ourselves to bit-part status on the global stage — Remainers’ concerns have been dismissed as traitorous fantasy, the manipulative cata-strophising of what Brexiteers call “Project Fear.”

And so, all too often, Remain-ers reach for the same dreamy jingoism as those who would have us violently depart the Eu-

Trump and conscience in the age of demagoguesPresident Trump, unlike his predecessors, has never seen himself as the president of all Americans

Britain is drowning itself in nostalgiaBrexit has exposed my country as a solipsistic backwater



ROGER COHEN

His name is Isadore Greenbaum. He’s a Jew, a plumber’s helper

from Brooklyn. He rushes onto the stage, beneath a portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. He tries to accost the Nazi who is denouncing the “Jew-ish-controlled press” and calling for a “white gentile-ruled” United States. Uniformed storm troopers beat him. Police officers drag him from the stage, pants ripped, arms raised in desperate entreaty. The mob howls in delight.

It’s Feb 20, 1939, more than 20,000 Nazi sympathisers are packed into Madison Square Garden as Greenbaum attempts to silence Fritz Kuhn, Bundes-führer (so-called) of the German American Bund. Greenbaum has been enraged by Kuhn’s demand

that the country be delivered from Jewish clutches and “returned to the American people who found-ed it.”

The 26-year-old Jew is brought before a magistrate who, accord-ing to an account in The New York Times, tells him that “innocent people might have been killed.” To which Greenbaum retorts, “Do you realise that plenty of Jewish people might be killed with their persecution up there?”

“Plenty” is an inadequate word for six million, but that was 1939 and human beings tend not to im-agine the unimaginable. The pale, dismayed face of the young Jew-ish boy, arms raised, being round-ed up in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 is well known. Greenbaum’s expression of terrorised anguish in New York City presages it.

All this is caught in Marshall Curry’s remarkable Oscar-nom-inated documentary short, “A Night at the Garden,” composed of footage from the time. Attacks on the press; the take-back-our-country cry; hymns to the true American (or German): There’s not much new, as Curry notes,

about fascism.The movie brings to mind a

phrase of Hannah Arendt’s that has haunted me about how most people will comply under condi-tions of terror but some will not: “No more is required,” she wrote, “and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”

Think the “Tank Man” of Ti-ananmen Square. Think Anton Schmid, the sergeant in Hitler’s army who helped Jews in the Vilnius ghetto and was executed in 1942. Think Ron Ridenhour, the helicopter gunner in Vietnam spurred by conscience to gather information that led to the offi-cial investigation into the My Lai Massacre. Think Isadore Green-baum. It is of the essence of such gestures that they appear futile, yet have the power to redeem hu-manity.

Our age, too, is one of dema-gogues. What are we to make of our “ivory-gold colossus” — James Lasdun’s phrase in his brilliant new novel of the #MeToo era, “Af-ternoon of a Faun”? This colossus “at once menacing and cosmical-

ly aggrieved” who for two hours perorates before the Conservative

Political Action Conference (only would-be or actual dictators af-

flicted with narcissistic disorders talk for that long) and declares:





EDUCATION IS NOT JUST ABOUT GOING TO SCHOOL AND GETTING A DEGREE. IT’S ABOUT WIDENING YOUR KNOWLEDGE AND ABSORBING THE TRUTH ABOUT LIFE. SHAKUNTALA DEVI

QUOTE OF THE DAY

SAM BYERS

Recently, in the comfort-ing gloom of a half-empty cinema, I found myself

subjected to an advertisement for the country in which I live. A series of Britain’s cultural and sporting great and good, inter-spersed with “normal” people, rode in taxis, strode through the airport and squeezed themselves into economy class. “Dear Brit-ain,” they said, taking turns with the lines while stowing their luggage and settling into their seats. “Dear old Britain. We love you … The way you pick your-self up when things get tough. … How you follow your own path. … How you tell it like it is (po-litely, of course!). … You’ve led revolutions of all kinds, yet you won’t shout about it, it’s just not in your nature. Instead, you’ll quietly make history.” At the end, cozily occupying the sweet spot between the roundly unifying and the vapidly uncontrover-sial, Olivia Colman, who recently won an Oscar for playing Queen Anne, said something about tea.

As an ad celebrating British Airways, an international airline, it’s strikingly devoid of inter-nationalism. As a hymn to the solipsistic backwater we’ve be-come, it’s painfully apt. If Britain were an airline, we’d be very much like the one British Air-

ways gives us in its ad — idling on the runway, sipping our tea and mumbling our self-congrat-ulatory eulogies, revelling in our isolation because all sense of a destination has disappeared.

The ad speaks to the experi-ence of living in Britain at this moment. It’s not just our polit-ical life that feels suffused with the toxicity of Brexit, but also our cultural and even personal lives, too. At dinner with friends and family, on our couches in front of the television, even in our attempts at cinematic es-cape, there is only one subject of conversation: our departure from the European Union, the need to either oppose it or enact it. As we walk the supermar-ket aisles, speculating as to the continuing availability of our favourite foods, as we sit with our European loved ones and try to convince ourselves of the security of their stay, as we lay out the day’s medicines and fret about the continuing viability of their procurement, Brexit is inescapable.

But something else is ines-capable, too, because Brexit is so bound up with “Britishness” — that never-quite-defined and often nebulous shared culture that has become as impossible to avoid. Brexit is not just an event, it is a feeling — suffocating and dispiriting and freighted with gloom. With no refuge from that feeling, we seek solace in anoth-er: national pride.

March 29 was supposed to be the date Britain exited the Eu-ropean Union. In the 33 months

since our narrow decision to do that, our political paralysis around the terms of our depar-ture has reached a terminal, pos-sibly fatal state. The deal that Prime Minister Theresa May negotiated with Brussels was robustly defeated in Parliament — twice. Yet now, she must bring it back for a third time. If the deal cannot be agreed upon, we very well might, after a derisory extension of two weeks, leave without a deal at all — an eventu-ality that Parliament has already rejected as too calamitous.

So we’re all agreed: In our bid to “quietly make history,” we would prefer a deal that does not in fact exist and for which there is no time left to negotiate be-cause we’ve spent all of our time getting a deal we don’t want, meaning that now we’re read-ying ourselves to sidestep the humiliation of a deal we don’t like by accepting the ruin of a non-deal we don’t like either. We are, in almost every sense, on a plane to nowhere, and be-cause we have nowhere to go, we have to convince ourselves that nowhere is exactly where we wish to be.

With nothing meaningful to say about our future, we’ve re-treated into the falsehoods of the past, painting over the absence of certainty at our core with a whitewash of poisonous nos-talgia. The result is that Britain has entered a haunted dreams-cape of collective dementia — a half-waking state in which the previous day or hour is swiftly erased and the fantasies of the

previous century leap vividly to the fore. Turning on the televi-sion or opening Twitter, we find people who have no memory of the Second World War invok-ing a kind of blitz spirit, or suc-cumbing to fits of self-righteous fury because someone has dared to impugn the legacy of Winston Churchill.

At the same time, in our deter-mination to rekindle the embers of our cooling significance, we seem perfectly happy to burn the future of our young for fuel. Efforts by students to counter the colonial arrogance that has been our ruin by decoloniz-ing the curriculum have been met with sputtering, insecure outrage. Recently, a group of

students (and future voters) protesting the government’s hopeless stance on climate change were dismissed as mere truants by a leading member of the Conservative Party. We’re so obsessed with our past that we cannot, any longer, even coun-tenance a future. To protect that past, we seem prepared to aban-don the future entirely, to tell ourselves that there is no future, just as to British Airways there are apparently no countries to fly to.

The problem with all this self-deluding preservation of the past isn’t just that it’s re-gressive, or alienating for those of us who don’t spend our time musing on Churchill’s legacy or

swelling with pride at our good fortune to accidentally be born British; it’s that it pollutes and stagnates even the discourse that ought to oppose it.

We’re the world’s fifth-larg-est economy and likely to sink to seventh this year. Industry and finance are falling over themselves to flee. Nor am I convinced that anyone should be “rightly proud” of a coun-try in which, according to the homelessness charity Crisis, the number of people sleeping on the streets has risen 140 per cent since 2010; in which over a mil-lion emergency food packages were given to those struggling financially in the 2017-18 finan-cial year; in which over 4 million







China will continue to

implement a management system of pre-establishment

national treatment plus a negative list.

We will release a newly revised

negative list, which will become

shorter.


TOP

4TWEETS

04

02

03

01

Dear PM, I’m happy for DRDO’s achievement

in space. Now can we dis-cuss about a technology to eradicate manual scaveng-ing? Oh sorry, I forgot that Gujarat stands second in sewer deaths. Achievement indeed. #MissionShakti

@jigneshmevani80

In the journey of every nation there are mo-

ments that bring utmost pride and have a historic impact on generations to come. One such moment is today.India has suc-cessfully tested the An-ti-Satellite (ASAT) Mis-sile. Congratulations to everyone on the success of #MissionShakti.

@narendramodi

No Budget = No Agenda. Democrats have spent

all of their time on phony conspiracy theories and pointless investigations mo-tivated by their personal ha-tred of @realDonaldTrump. It’s time they stop wasting their majority and get seri-ous about actually helping American families.

@SteveScalise

A historical achieve-ment and a proud

moment for our country. We are now one of only 4 Space Super Power countries in the world. A big salute to Hon PM @narendramodi ji, the @DRDO_India scientists and everyone else in-volved in the success of #MissionShakti. Jai hind

@DeepaAthlete

Disclaimer: (Views expressed by columnists are personal and need not necessarily reflect our

editorial stances)





people and Muslims; and, as pres-ident, he saw “very fine people on both sides” at the 2017 Charlottes-ville rally where white nationalists chanted “Jews will not replace us” and a woman who protested, Heather Heyer, was killed.

I am not suggesting Trump re-sembles Hitler. That should be obvious — but not so obvious that I will refrain from writing this column. The white nationalist mass murderer of Muslims in New Zealand was not out of his

mind in seeing Trump as a sym-bol of “renewed white identity and common purpose.” Trump’s love affair is with revanchist white people who don’t like the demographic look of the 21st century.

It’s not that Trump could be dangerous. He is dangerous. Peo-ple die because the worst leaders know they enjoy the American president’s connivance. The de-bate on whether Trump is harm-less, whether we should laugh away his grotesquerie, is mis-placed. I have no doubt that the worst is yet to come. In his own mind, whatever the Mueller re-port contains, Trump cannot lose.

Greenbaum and his wife moved to Southern California. A fisherman at Newport Pier, Greenbaum died in 1997. There was, as Philip Bump observed in The Washington Post, “a brief mention of his passing in the lo-cal news.”

(Roger Cohen is a columnist with The New York Times.)

(In collaboration with New York Times)

1969Greek poet and Nobel Prize laureate Giorgos Seferis makes a famous statement on the BBC World Service opposing the junta in Greece.

1979The British House of Commons passes a vote of no confidence against James Callaghan’s government by 1 vote, precipitating a general election.

1988Atlantic Airways, Faroe Islands’ national airline, carries out their first commercial flight between Vágar Airport and Copenhagen Airport.

1990United States President George H. W. Bush posthumously awards Jesse Owens the Congressional Gold Medal.

TODAY DAY IN

HISTORY

China will further deepen reform

and open up

HE ANWAER

In the year of 2018, under the strong leadership of the CPC Central Committee

with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core and guided by Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chi-nese Characteristics for a New Era, people across China made united efforts to advance the sup-ply-side structural reforms, and we achieved a 6.6 percent GDP growth, which was no mean feat. Against the backdrop of growing trade protectionism in the inter-national environment, China’s GDP aggregate reached 90 trillion RMB yuan. Our projected target for GDP growth in 2019 is 6-6.5 percent. It will be a growth on top of a very large base figure.

China now has over 100 million market ent i t ies. When their vitality is fully unleashed, the energies that could be created would be incalcu-lable. We must keep our policies stable and ensure their continuity. We will continue to cut tax-es and fees, stream-line administration, foster new drivers of growth, broaden market access and level the playing field for all market players. In this way, we will be able to lift the curbs on the market, free up space for companies and resolve concerns for our people. We will gener-ate tremendous creativity in this process. And this will also put us in a strong position to keep major economic indicators with-in a proper range and achieve high-quality development.

Facing new circumstances, we will stay firmly grounded in Chi-na’s realities and take a long-term view. China will do our best to keep economic growth stable and maintain the sound momentum of the economic development for the long run. China’s economy will remain an anchor of stability for the global economy.

Through 40 years of reform and opening-up, China has made remarkable achievements, deliv-ering benefits to its entire popu-lation. We intend to stay on this path and will pursue our reform at greater depth and breadth. We will continue to develop our socialist market economy, and pursue market-oriented reforms.

The government will continue to move forward these reforms in accordance with market princi-ples and the law, to ensure that concrete outcomes will be deliv-ered through specific actions. In carrying out reform, the govern-

ment must create an enabling en-vironment for the market to play its decisive role in allocating re-sources. Over the years, through the reform of government func-tions, China have made substan-tial progress in improving our business environment. We must listen closely to the views ex-pressed by market players and do our level best to foster a better business environment to unlock market vitality and creativity of the people. When improving the business environment, efforts will be made in both deregula-tion and oversight. We must put in place effective institutional arrangements for both deregu-lation and oversight. It can be said that the tax and fee cuts, together with administrative streamlining and impartial reg-ulation, are two very important parts of our measures to counter the downward economic pres-sure and boost market vitality.

The purpose is to ensure steady and sustained growth of the Chinese econo-my, and make it full of vigor and vitality.

T h e j u s t c o n -cluded NPC Ses-sion adopted the Foreign Investment Law. This piece of legislation is de-signed to better protect and attract foreign investment through legislative means. This law will also regulate g ove r n m e n t b e -haviors, requiring the government to perform its func-tions in accordance with the law. The government will

introduce a series of matching regulations and directives to protect the rights and interests of foreign investors, such as on working mechanisms for han-dling complaints filed by for-eign-invested enterprises. These will be the important things for the government to do in the fol-lowing weeks and months to see that this law will be truly operable.

China will continue to im-plement a management system of pre-establishment national treatment plus a negative list. We will release a newly revised negative list, which will become shorter. And going forward, we will further shorten our nega-tive list, which means that more areas will be opened up for for-eign investment. China will also enhance the protection of intel-lectual property. In this respect, we will make revisions to the laws on IPR protection and in-troduce a mechanism of puni-tive compensation to ensure that all infringements of intellectual property will be seriously dealt with and have nowhere to hide. In a word, China will further open up.

(HE Anwaer, Ambassador of the Peo-ple’s Republic of China to the Kingdom

of Bahrain)





ropean Union with no terms in place. There is no patriotic argument for “remain” because Brexit itself is a cautionary ar-gument against blind national pride. It’s precisely this empty, hopeless paradox that in June 2016 led to Prime Minister Da-vid Cameron, in a last-ditch ef-fort to persuade voters to side with the European Union, tell-ing us, pathetically, that “Brits don’t quit.” It’s also, one as-sumes, why in January a group of German political leaders and prominent figures encourag-ing Britain to stay in the Union wrote an open letter not to make a case for Brussels but to appeal to our beverage-sipping sense of self, writing that if we left, they would miss “going to the pub after work hours to drink an ale” and “tea with milk and driving on the left-hand side of the road” — a gale of pure wind with all the meaninglessness of a British Airways ad.

So here we are, facing more delays and uncertainty. The Defence Ministry reportedly is hunkering down in a nuclear bunker, preparing for “no deal,” a crash headlong into a future from which we mistakenly thought our past would protect us. We are pathologically unable to say what needs to be said: that nostalgia, exceptionalism and a xenophobic failure of the col-lective imagination have undone us. This is not a time of national pride, it is a moment of deep and lasting national shame. We are unable to lead yet determined never to follow. We have nothing of note to say and yet still refuse to listen. The very forces that have shored up our self-regard and poisoned our place in his-tory are about to erode us from within, and unless we find in ourselves the humility we’ve always abhorred, we face a bru-tal and potentially permanent humbling.

Cups of tea will neither turn back time nor show us, in their cold and increasingly bitter leaves, the future we’ve failed to imagine: a future in which what limited achievements we might have been proud of — our system of social care, our commitment to protecting the people least able to protect themselves — lie in ruins, and all we can do is sit in the dark, paying our favour-ite celebrities to chant to us, over and over again, our tattered mantra of virtue.

(Sam Byers is the author, most recently, of the novel “Perfidious

Albion”.)

The Brexiteers aren’t alone in wanting to turn

back time and behave as if certain significant events

never happened.


It’s not that Trump could be dangerous. He is dangerous.

People die because the worst leaders know

they enjoy the American president’s connivance.


10

business


Batelco AGM okays BD45.7 m cash dividend TDT | Manama

Batelco Group (BATELCO) shareholders yesterday approved a recommen-

dation to distribute a full year cash dividend of BD45.7 million (US$121.2m), at a value of 27.5 fils per share.

A statement released said that 10 fils per share of the ap-proved dividend has already been paid during the third quar-ter of 2018 with the remaining 17.5 fils to be paid in the coming weeks.

The approval was given dur-ing Batelco’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) held at its Hama-la headquarters.

Speaking on the occasion, Batelco Chairman Shaikh Ab-dulla bin Khalifa Al Khalifa said: “We are delighted to announce 7 per cent year over year growth

to reach our highest revenues since Batelco’s inception of BD405.9m (US$1,076.7) with the revenues positively bolstered by continued strong performance at Batelco Bahrain. EBITDA for

2018 increased by 15pc over 2017 to reach BD142.8m (US$378.8m) w i t h E D I T D A m a r g i n of 35pc.”

Batelco Group CEO Ihab Hin-nawi said that 2018 was a turna-

round year for the Batelco Group supported by the ongoing rollout of the Group’s transformation strategy and key investments in targeted services, leading to a significant increase in share-

holder return.“We are very pleased to note

that diversifying our revenues has paid back, with particular positive impact achieved by the acceleration of fibre imple-

mentation and data penetration. Our efforts resulted in signif-icant improvement for Fixed Broadband, Datacom services and for digital services in our markets of operation.”

Batelco board members and top officials during its Annual General Meeting held at the company’s Hamala headquarters

AUB ‘best in Bahrain’TDT | Manama

Ahli United Bank has been named ‘Best Bank in Bah-

rain, 2019’ by Global Finance, in recognition of the bank’s strong financial performance and track record in deliver-ing superior banking services and solutions to customers in Bahrain.

This is the 14th consecutive year AUB has won this award from this New York-based in-ternational finance publica-tion.

“What it takes to rank among the world’s best banks is in-creasingly difficult to deliver. Customer expectations of fi-nancial services providers has never been higher—tailored products delivered in real time with complete security,” said Joseph D. Giarraputo, pub-lisher and editorial director of Global Finance.

“To be recognised as Bah-rain’s top bank for the 14th year running is a distinct hon-our and accomplishment,” said Meshal Alothman, Chairman of Ahli United Bank.

Meshal Alothman, Chairman of Ahli United Bank

Alba successfully starts 25 per cent of Line 6 pots

TDT | Manama

Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) announced that it has suc-

cessfully started 106 pots in Line 6 on Tuesday. Line 6 comprises

424 pots which leave 318 pots left to start-up in the coming months.

Speaking on this occasion, the Chairman of Alba’s Board of Directors, Shaikh Daij Bin

Salman Bin Daij Al Khalifa, said: “We are pleased to have safely started 106 pots which equates to 25% of Line 6 ca-pacity. Our next milestone is to reach 50% by the end of

April and we expect full com-pletion of Line 6 in early Q3 2019.

I would like to thank all of our employees and contractors for taking Extreme Ownership on

Safety during the Line 6 start-up.”

Alba had announced in Febru-ary 2019 the successful testing and operation of 40 pots at Line 6 Smelter.

Alba officials and employees during a group photo session on the occasion of Alba celebrating its successful start in Line 6

KHCB adopts Token.io for open banking services

TDT | Manama

Kh a l e e j i C o m m e r -cial Bank (KHCB) an-

nounced it has partnered with Token.io, an Open Banking solution provid-er represented by “Tarabut Gateway” subsidiary of Al-moayed Technologies and licensed by the Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB).

This comes as part of the bank’s preparations to pro-vide open banking services in compliance with the new regulatory requirements as well as the bank’s strategy to embrace and partner with FinTech companies in line with the instructions of the CBB.

Mahdi Abdulnabi Mo-hammed, Deputy General Manager – Support Services in KHCB, commented: “To-ken.io system will assist us in providing the required safe infrastructure for the launch of open banking ser-vices, which will pave the way for many more services in the future, making the bank a preferred option for clients to seamlessly con-duct their banking trans-actions.”

Mahdi Abdulnabi Mohammed, Deputy General Manager – Support Services of KHCB

Cryptocurrency IPO shelvedHong Kong, China

The world’s largest maker of cryptocurrency mining

chips has shelved plans for an ambitious initial public offering in Hong Kong, becoming the latest victim of bitcoin’s price plunge.

Bitmain Technologies said Tuesday it has allowed its IPO application to lapse, six months after it was initially filed in Sep-tember aiming to raise up to $3 billion, according to Bloomberg News.

Under Hong Kong’s listing rules, applications expire half a year after filing.

“We do recognize that de-spite the huge potential of the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry, it remains a relatively young industry which is prov-ing its value,” the Beijing-based company said on its blog on Tuesday.

“The bear market at the end of 2018 brought both challenges and opportunities that Bitmain will work hard at addressing in 2019,” it said, adding it would restart its application “at an appropriate time in the future”.

Bitcoin experienced aston-ishing growth in 2017 to peak at a record US$19,500 by the end of that year.

But investors feared a spec-ulative bubble and it has since crashed to stand at about $3,980 per unit following months of volatile trading.

The virtual bubble burst -- followed by what has become the worst slump in years -- has made mining operations prac-tically unprofitable.

Bitmain’s co-founders Mi-cree Zhan and Jihan Wu be-came the richest cryptocurren-cy billionaires to appear on a list by Hurun Report last year

of China’s wealthiest people.The entrepreneurs have

stepped down from their roles as CEOs and were replaced by Haichao Wang, the statement said, but it added the pair would continue to guide the compa-ny’s strategic development as directors.

In addition to a leadership reshuffle, the announcement also alluded to layoffs made at the end of last year and de-scribed them as “a difficult but necessary decision”.

It did not say how many em-ployees were affected.

Other manufacturers have faced similar hurdles recently.

Bitmain’s rival Canaan saw its listing application expire in November.

Mining chip maker Ebang is still pursuing a Hong Kong IPO after refiling its application in December.


Treasurer of the Bahrain Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI) Aref Hejris with a Thai delegation headed by the president of Prince of Songkhla University Asst. Prof. Dr. Niwat Keawpradub. The delegation included top administrators from the university and deans of a number of faculties including the medicine, nursing, political science, and Islamic Studies, who met the members of the health committee of the chamber headed by Dr. Abdulmajeed Al Awadhi, and members of the education committee. The meeting probed cooperation in education and medicine

Key figures around 1640 GMTPound/dollar: at $1.3218 from $1.3212 on Tuesday

Euro/pound: at 85.21 pence from 85.32 pence

Euro/dollar: at $1.1253 from $1.1266

Dollar/yen: at 110.42 yen from 110.64 yen

London - FTSE 100: at 7,194.19 points (close)

Frankfurt - DAX 30: at 11,419.04 (close)

Paris - CAC 40: 0.1pc at 5,301.24 (close)

EURO STOXX 50: 0.1pc at 3,322.04

New York - DOW: 0.5pc to 25,523.40

Tokyo - Nikkei 225: 0.2pc at 21,378.73 (close)

Hong Kong - Hang Seng: 0.6pc at 28,728.25 (close)

Shanghai - Composite: 0.9pc at 3,022.72 (close)

Oil - Brent Crude: 53 cents at $66.90 per barrel

ABG, three units receive global finance awards TDT | Manama

Al Baraka Banking Group (ABG) and three of its sub-

sidiary banking units will re-ceive the “World’s Best Islamic Financial Institution” Award for 2019, in various categories.

The award was announced by the Global Finance magazine as part of its annual awards for in-ternational banks and financial institutions.

Al Baraka Banking Group is the winner of the “Best Islamic Financial Institution in South Africa Award in the regional winners category, Al Baraka Bank Algeria, Al Baraka Bank Lebanon and Jordan Islamic Bank, all are winners in the “World’s Best Islamic Financial Institution 2019 in the Country

category, in Algeria, Lebanon and Jordan, respectively.

The winning of these awards by ABG and its three subsidiary banking units are for the sev-enth successive year.

The awards will be formal-ly presented at their annu-al awards ceremony during the IMF World Bank annual meetings, which will be held this year in Washington, DC at the National Press Club on the morning of October 19, 2019.

Board Member and President & Chief Executive of Al Baraka Banking Group Adnan Ahmed Yousif stated, “We are very happy with the achievement of ABG and its three subsidiary banking units in winning this international award for the sev-enth successive year.”

Adnan Ahmed Yousif

Markets eye Brexit drama• Asian equities mostly rose

• Brussels has given London a new extended deadline of April 12

London, United Kingdom

The British pound rose to hold well above $1.32 yes-

terday and also posted gains against the euro as investors eyed receding no-deal risks on another day of high drama in the long-running Brexit saga.

A budding recovery in Eu-rope’s stock markets was cut short abruptly when Wall Street turned lower as growth worries returned to the fore.

“Though not quite as bad as the Dow, the European indices were nevertheless led lower by that red start to trading across the pond,” said Spreadex ana-lyst Connor Campbell.

Earlier, Asian equities mostly rose but traders remain on edge about the global economic out-look, while Brexit continues to hog the headlines.

Britain’s parliament will hold a series of so-called “indicative” votes in the European evening to seek an alternative Brexit solution as pressure mounts on Prime Minister Theresa May to resign if she wants her own unpopular plan approved.

Sterling had rallied Tuesday on fresh hope that May would avoid a chaotic no-deal depar-ture from the European Union. Yet risks remained as Wednes-day’s “Brexit horror-show/soap opera”, as Societe Generale an-alyst Kit Juckes called it, un-folded.

‘As uncertain as ever’“What happens next is as un-

certain as ever and one thing is clear -- the foreign exchange market... is still seeing risk and positions taken off the table,” Juckes said.

MPs will now choose whether to cancel Brexit, hold anoth-er referendum, vote for a deal including a customs union and single market membership, or leave the EU without a deal, though the government is not

bound by law to implement the decision. In a fresh twist, May’s twice-rejected divorce plan could be revived after Brexit hardliner Jacob Rees-Mogg -- one of her most vociferous and high-profile critics -- said he would back it, while another, Boris Johnson, hinted that he also could.

“Though Wednesday is an-other... big day in the Brexit process, the indicative votes likely won’t actually take place until 7:00 pm (1900 GMT) this evening, meaning any reaction to the results will have to wait until Thursday morning,” said Campbell at Spreadex.

Alphabet soup“Most investors’ atten-

tion (is) on Westminster and an alphabet soup of parlia-mentary motions that could shape the future direction of the Brexit grid lock,” said CMC Markets analyst Michael Hewson.

Brussels has given London a new extended deadline of April 12 to get May’s deal ratified or find a new way out. That re-placed the previous Brexit date

of March 29.“Though avoiding a swift but

hard Brexit is good news for the pound, going into a protracted period of uncertainty would continue to damage domestic industries and the currency,” said City Index analyst Fiona Cincotta.

Europe’s banking sector escaped the subdued mood on the continent ’s bours-es thanks to ECB chief Mario Draghi saying that the central bank could mitigate the side effects of negative interest rates which have hurt banks.Oil prices reversed an earlier firm trend to trade lower in late European business as growth worries took their toll on the commodity.

Determined May puts job on line• May’s legacy from her previous role as interior minister has also been called into question in recent months

• May has in the past won praise for her determination and ability to survive


Faced with losing all con-trol over the Brexit pro-cess, British Prime Minis-

ter Theresa May has made one final, desperate move: hinting she will step down if MPs ap-prove her Brexit deal.

T h e C o n -s e r v a t i v e

leader has faced growing calls to resign over the political cri-sis that has gripped Britain for months, and which forced her to ask the EU last week to delay Brexit by a fortnight.

With many MPs now pressing for a longer extension or even to reverse the whole process, May has made one last attempt to secure support for the di-vorce deal she has struck with Brussels. She told MPs in her party on Wednesday evening that she would not “stand in the way” of new leadership for the “second phase of Brexit ne-gotiations” -- without spelling out when exactly this would be.

‘Time to move on’May has in the past won

praise for her determination and ability to survive an ex-traordinary period of political turmoil since the Brexit vote.

But her approach to the end-game -- refusing to accept that

MPs did not like her deal and delaying Brexit to keep try-ing to push it through -- has prompted frustration and anger on all sides.

She has all but lost control of her government, with

ministers from both the pro- and anti-Brex-

it camps joining scores of Con-

servative MPs in defying the government in parliamenta-ry votes.

T h i s weekend, after an-o t h e r h u m i l -i a t i n g

Brussels summit, British news-papers were full of reports of moves by her colleagues to oust her.

The Conservative-supporting Spectator magazine suggested May was the “worst prime min-ister in our history”, condemn-ing her “lack of imagination, inability to lead a team or solve complex problems”.

Her former director of com-munications, Katie Perrior, wrote in The Times newspa-per that May was “a passenger at the time when the country needed a rally driver”.

Top selling tabloid The Sun praised May’s “remarkable re-silience in the face of repeated humiliations”, but said it was “time to move on”.

‘Maybot’Despite having campaigned

to stay in the EU, May embraced the cause once she took office with the mantra “Brexit means Brexit”.

Her promise to leave the EU’s institutions and end free movement of workers delighted eurosceptic MPs, but caused dismay among many pro-Eu-ropeans.

The splits in her Conservative party became a serious problem after a disastrous snap election in June 2017, when May lost her parliamentary majority.

She was forced to strike a deal with Northern Ireland’s pro-Brexit Democratic Union-ist Party (DUP), and since then has struggled to keep her party and its allies together.

Naturally reserved and reli-ant on her husband Philip and a few close aides, May says she is just quietly “getting on with the job”.

But in the last election, she struggled to engage with voters and was dubbed the “Maybot” after churning out the same answers and speeches over and over again.

No unity candidateThe question now is whether

May’s gamble succeeds -- and who might succeed her.

May has faced repeated chal-lenges since taking office, with figures such as former foreign minister Boris Johnson con-stantly challenging her author-ity.

But she won a leadership challenge within her own par-ty in December, even if she had to promise to quit before the next scheduled election in 2022.


Treasurer of the Bahrain Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI) Aref Hejris with a Thai delegation headed by the president of Prince of Songkhla University Asst. Prof. Dr. Niwat Keawpradub. The delegation included top administrators from the university and deans of a number of faculties including the medicine, nursing, political science, and Islamic Studies, who met the members of the health committee of the chamber headed by Dr. Abdulmajeed Al Awadhi, and members of the education committee. The meeting probed cooperation in education and medicine

Key figures around 1640 GMTPound/dollar: at $1.3218 from $1.3212 on Tuesday

Euro/pound: at 85.21 pence from 85.32 pence

Euro/dollar: at $1.1253 from $1.1266

Dollar/yen: at 110.42 yen from 110.64 yen

London - FTSE 100: at 7,194.19 points (close)

Frankfurt - DAX 30: at 11,419.04 (close)

Paris - CAC 40: 0.1pc at 5,301.24 (close)

EURO STOXX 50: 0.1pc at 3,322.04

New York - DOW: 0.5pc to 25,523.40

Tokyo - Nikkei 225: 0.2pc at 21,378.73 (close)

Hong Kong - Hang Seng: 0.6pc at 28,728.25 (close)

Shanghai - Composite: 0.9pc at 3,022.72 (close)

Oil - Brent Crude: 53 cents at $66.90 per barrel

ABG, three units receive global finance awards TDT | Manama

Al Baraka Banking Group (ABG) and three of its sub-

sidiary banking units will re-ceive the “World’s Best Islamic Financial Institution” Award for 2019, in various categories.

The award was announced by the Global Finance magazine as part of its annual awards for in-ternational banks and financial institutions.

Al Baraka Banking Group is the winner of the “Best Islamic Financial Institution in South Africa Award in the regional winners category, Al Baraka Bank Algeria, Al Baraka Bank Lebanon and Jordan Islamic Bank, all are winners in the “World’s Best Islamic Financial Institution 2019 in the Country

category, in Algeria, Lebanon and Jordan, respectively.

The winning of these awards by ABG and its three subsidiary banking units are for the sev-enth successive year.

The awards will be formal-ly presented at their annu-al awards ceremony during the IMF World Bank annual meetings, which will be held this year in Washington, DC at the National Press Club on the morning of October 19, 2019.

Board Member and President & Chief Executive of Al Baraka Banking Group Adnan Ahmed Yousif stated, “We are very happy with the achievement of ABG and its three subsidiary banking units in winning this international award for the sev-enth successive year.”

Adnan Ahmed Yousif

Markets eye Brexit drama• Asian equities mostly rose

• Brussels has given London a new extended deadline of April 12


The British pound rose to hold well above $1.32 yes-

terday and also posted gains against the euro as investors eyed receding no-deal risks on another day of high drama in the long-running Brexit saga.

A budding recovery in Eu-rope’s stock markets was cut short abruptly when Wall Street turned lower as growth worries returned to the fore.

“Though not quite as bad as the Dow, the European indices were nevertheless led lower by that red start to trading across the pond,” said Spreadex ana-lyst Connor Campbell.

Earlier, Asian equities mostly rose but traders remain on edge about the global economic out-look, while Brexit continues to hog the headlines.

Britain’s parliament will hold a series of so-called “indicative” votes in the European evening to seek an alternative Brexit solution as pressure mounts on Prime Minister Theresa May to resign if she wants her own unpopular plan approved.

Sterling had rallied Tuesday on fresh hope that May would avoid a chaotic no-deal depar-ture from the European Union. Yet risks remained as Wednes-day’s “Brexit horror-show/soap opera”, as Societe Generale an-alyst Kit Juckes called it, un-folded.

‘As uncertain as ever’“What happens next is as un-

certain as ever and one thing is clear -- the foreign exchange market... is still seeing risk and positions taken off the table,” Juckes said.

MPs will now choose whether to cancel Brexit, hold anoth-er referendum, vote for a deal including a customs union and single market membership, or leave the EU without a deal, though the government is not

bound by law to implement the decision. In a fresh twist, May’s twice-rejected divorce plan could be revived after Brexit hardliner Jacob Rees-Mogg -- one of her most vociferous and high-profile critics -- said he would back it, while another, Boris Johnson, hinted that he also could.

“Though Wednesday is an-other... big day in the Brexit process, the indicative votes likely won’t actually take place until 7:00 pm (1900 GMT) this evening, meaning any reaction to the results will have to wait until Thursday morning,” said Campbell at Spreadex.

Alphabet soup“Most investors’ atten-

tion (is) on Westminster and an alphabet soup of parlia-mentary motions that could shape the future direction of the Brexit grid lock,” said CMC Markets analyst Michael Hewson.

Brussels has given London a new extended deadline of April 12 to get May’s deal ratified or find a new way out. That re-placed the previous Brexit date

of March 29.“Though avoiding a swift but

hard Brexit is good news for the pound, going into a protracted period of uncertainty would continue to damage domestic industries and the currency,” said City Index analyst Fiona Cincotta.

Europe’s banking sector escaped the subdued mood on the continent ’s bours-es thanks to ECB chief Mario Draghi saying that the central bank could mitigate the side effects of negative interest rates which have hurt banks.Oil prices reversed an earlier firm trend to trade lower in late European business as growth worries took their toll on the commodity.

Determined May puts job on line• May’s legacy from her previous role as interior minister has also been called into question in recent months

• May has in the past won praise for her determination and ability to survive


Faced with losing all con-trol over the Brexit pro-cess, British Prime Minis-

ter Theresa May has made one final, desperate move: hinting she will step down if MPs ap-prove her Brexit deal.

T h e C o n -s e r v a t i v e

leader has faced growing calls to resign over the political cri-sis that has gripped Britain for months, and which forced her to ask the EU last week to delay Brexit by a fortnight.

With many MPs now pressing for a longer extension or even to reverse the whole process, May has made one last attempt to secure support for the di-vorce deal she has struck with Brussels. She told MPs in her party on Wednesday evening that she would not “stand in the way” of new leadership for the “second phase of Brexit ne-gotiations” -- without spelling out when exactly this would be.

‘Time to move on’May has in the past won

praise for her determination and ability to survive an ex-traordinary period of political turmoil since the Brexit vote.

But her approach to the end-game -- refusing to accept that

MPs did not like her deal and delaying Brexit to keep try-ing to push it through -- has prompted frustration and anger on all sides.

She has all but lost control of her government, with

ministers from both the pro- and anti-Brex-

it camps joining scores of Con-

servative MPs in defying the government in parliamenta-ry votes.

T h i s weekend, after an-o t h e r h u m i l -i a t i n g

Brussels summit, British news-papers were full of reports of moves by her colleagues to oust her.

The Conservative-supporting Spectator magazine suggested May was the “worst prime min-ister in our history”, condemn-ing her “lack of imagination, inability to lead a team or solve complex problems”.

Her former director of com-munications, Katie Perrior, wrote in The Times newspa-per that May was “a passenger at the time when the country needed a rally driver”.

Top selling tabloid The Sun praised May’s “remarkable re-silience in the face of repeated humiliations”, but said it was “time to move on”.

‘Maybot’Despite having campaigned

to stay in the EU, May embraced the cause once she took office with the mantra “Brexit means Brexit”.

Her promise to leave the EU’s institutions and end free movement of workers delighted eurosceptic MPs, but caused dismay among many pro-Eu-ropeans.

The splits in her Conservative party became a serious problem after a disastrous snap election in June 2017, when May lost her parliamentary majority.

She was forced to strike a deal with Northern Ireland’s pro-Brexit Democratic Union-ist Party (DUP), and since then has struggled to keep her party and its allies together.

Naturally reserved and reli-ant on her husband Philip and a few close aides, May says she is just quietly “getting on with the job”.

But in the last election, she struggled to engage with voters and was dubbed the “Maybot” after churning out the same answers and speeches over and over again.

No unity candidateThe question now is whether

May’s gamble succeeds -- and who might succeed her.

May has faced repeated chal-lenges since taking office, with figures such as former foreign minister Boris Johnson con-stantly challenging her author-ity.

But she won a leadership challenge within her own par-ty in December, even if she had to promise to quit before the next scheduled election in 2022.


Closing BellSAUDI 1pc at 8,766 pts

ABU DHABI 0.3pc to 5,109 pts

DUBAI at 2,614 pts

QATAR 1.7pc to 10,105 pts

EGYPT 0.6pc at 14,555 pts

KUWAIT 0.9pc to 5,951 pts

OMAN 0.1pc to 4,047 pts

BAHRAIN 0.4pc to 1,413 pts

Banks boost Saudi market• Kingdom holding, Saudi Telecom gain after Careem deal

• Egypt’s GTH slides after extending maturity of credit facility

Reuters

Saudi Arabia stock market rose yesterday riding on the back of its banking

stocks.Saudi Arabia’s index added

1pc with Al Rajhi Bank gain-ing 2.3 per cent and National Commercial Bank, the country’s largest lender, rising 2.9pc.

Kingdom Holding and Saudi Telecom rose as they benefited from Uber’s deal to buy Middle East’s Careem.

Kingdom Holding increased 0.7pc after selling its stake in the ride-hailing app for 1.25 billion riyals ($333.31 million), while Saudi Telecom rose 0.4pc af-ter saying it expects to receive around $274 million from the deal. Last week, Saudi entered FTSE Russell’s emerging-market index, and this year will join the MSCI emerging market bench-mark.

Foreign investors in the Saudi market seem to have increased again as the first phase of its inclusion appeared to go seam-lessly and as foreign investor

concerns over locals oversup-plying the market appear to

have partially abated, Arqaam Capital said.

The Egyptian blue-chip index dropped 0.6pc, led by a 2.2pc decline in Egypt’s largest lender Commercial International Bank and a 4.5pc fall in El Sewedy Electric.

Global Telecom Holding fell 3.1pc. The telecom operator said its board extended maturity of its $100 million revolving credit facility from VEON.

Madinet Nasr slipped 2.8pc. The firm approved the sale of its non-residential land plot for

184.8 million Egyptian pounds ($10.69 million).

The Abu Dhabi index slipped 0.3pc with the country’s largest lender First Abu Dhabi Bank losing 0.8pc and Emirates Tel-ecommunications Group drop-ping 0.2pc.

Dubai’s index was flat, with its largest listed-developer Emaar Properties sliding 1.7pc.

The Qatar index rose 1.7pc, with 18 of 20 stocks increas-ing. Qatar Fuel added 4.2pc and Mesaieed Petrochemical was up 5.8pc.

Kuwaiti traders follow the stock market at the Kuwait Stock Exchange (KSE) in Kuwait City (file)

EU parliament approves ban on single use plasticsBrussels, Belgium

European lawmakers voted overwhelmingly yester-

day for an EU-wide ban on sin-gle-use plastic products such as the straws, cutlery and cot-ton buds that are clogging the world’s oceans.

The text had already been approved in negotiations with member states and EU offi-cials and it will now be rapidly approved into law. The ban comes into effect from 2021.

EU Commission Vice-Presi-dent Frans Timmermans said Europe was not the worst source of plastic pollution, but that the pioneering measure could serve as an example to the world.

“Asian countries are very much interested in what we’re doing. Latin American coun-tries too,” he said.

“Even though our share of the pollution is relatively limit-ed, our change of the economic model has a global impact.”

The law passed by 560 votes to 35 in the Strasbourg assem-bly.

Aside from the ban on a doz-en kinds of disposable prod-ucts for which alternatives exist, the EU will encourage member states to reduce the

use of plastic packaging and in-troduce stricter labelling rules.

The law sets a target that 90 percent of plastic bottles will be gathered for recycling by 2029 and that they should be produced with 25 percent recycled material by 2025, 30 percent by 2030.

Rules insisting that polluters pay the costs of a clean-up are strengthened, particularly for cigarette manufacturers, who will have to support the recy-cling of discarded filters.

According to the EU Com-mission, the products prohib-ited under the law represent 70 percent of the waste that pours into the world’s oceans, posing a threat to wildlife and fisheries.

EU Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans

Taking very seriously the situation around

canola and would continue to work with

(China) to resolve this dispute

JUSTIN TRUDEAU

PRIME MINISTER

China expands ban on Canadian canola imports to second firmAFP | Beijing, China

China has banned imports from a second Canadian

canola firm, its customs admin-istration said Tuesday, the latest escalation of a burgeoning row between the two countries.

Following the detection of harmful organisms in canola shipments from Viterra Inc., China’s customs authority has decided to revoke the firm’s company registration and suspend imports of its canola seeds, it said in an online state-ment.

China’s customs administra-tion will “continue to strength-en the on-site quarantine and laboratory testing and identi-fication of imported Canadian canola seeds”, it added.

At a press briefing Wednes-day, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang called the latest ban “normal quaran-tine safety precautions” that were “scientific and reasona-ble”, as well as in line with both Chinese laws and international practice.

The ban comes l e s s t h a n a month after Beijing re-moved the e x -

port permit of major Canadian canola firm Richardson Inter-national, which was blocked following the discovery of “haz-ardous pests” in its shipments.

Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland decried the decision, and said that were “no scientific reasons for this action”.

Prime Minister Justin

Trudeau also weighed in, say-ing on Tuesday that his govern-ment is “taking very seriously the situation around canola” and would “continue to work with (China) to resolve this dispute”.

He added that Ottawa is con-sidering sending a high-level delegation to China to press the issue.

China defended its ban as “completely reasonable and legal”, and said that it had to protect the health and safety of its citizens.

Canada exported more than Can$5 billion (US$3.75 billion) worth of canola last year, with almost half of it -- or about five million tonnes -- going to China, according to industry figures.

Relations between Ottawa and Beijing have been thrown into crisis by the December arrest in Vancouver of Meng Wanzhou -- the chief finan-cial officer of telecoms giant Huawei -- at the request of the

United States.

Representative picture (Courtesy of CBC)

European Parliament agrees cut to emissions from new carsStrasbourg, France

The European Parlia-ment on Monday ap-

proved a plan to slash car-bon dioxide emissions from new cars in Europe in an effort to jump start clean-er vehicles to fight climate change.

The law, which was pre-viously negotiated by EU member states, fixes a 37.5 percent carbon dioxide reduction target for 2030 compared with 2021.

Emissions from new vans will have to be 31 percent lower than in 2021.

With 521 votes, MEPs overwhelmingly voted in favour of the limit during a plenary session in the east-ern French city of Stras-bourg.

The final limit was a hard won compromise between parliament, which had originally asked for 40 per-cent in CO2 cuts, and Ger-man-backed member states that pushed for 35 percent.

“We achieved this legis-lation, despite fierce oppo-sition from the car industry and certain member states, which refused to acknowl-edge the opportunities that stem from a more ambitious target,” said MEP Miriam Dalli, who introduced the law.

The automobile industry had strongly rallied against the move warning that it could affect jobs.

Cathay Pacific to buy budget airline HK Express for $628 mn

Hong Kong, China

Hong Kong flag carri-er Cathay Pacific said

yesterday it will buy budget airline HK Express for more than US$600 million as it moves to counter competition from the increasing number of low-cost carriers in the region.

The move is its first foray into the budget sector and will leave Cathay controlling three of the four airlines at one of Asia’s busiest airports at a time of huge growth in the region’s air industry.

It comes weeks after the car-rier said it had swung back into the black in 2018 following two years of losses and will help ease concerns after an embarrassing data breach that dented the firm’s reputation and could prove costly.

“HK Express captures a unique market segment,” Ca-thay said in a statement. “This represents an attractive and practical way for the Cathay Group to support the long-term development and growth

of our aviation business and to enhance the competitiveness of the Hong Kong hub during a time of intense regional com-petition.”

Cathay wil l stump up HK$4.93 billion (US$628.15 million) for the airline in a deal that is expected to be complet-ed by December, according to a filing announcement.

The firm said it will con-tinue to operate HK Express as a “standalone airline using the low-cost carrier business model”.

“The transaction is expected to generate synergies as the businesses and business mod-els of Cathay Pacific and HKE are largely complementary,” it added.

Cathay shares rose almost three percent after the an-nouncement but later retreat-ed to end the day almost 2.5 percent lower at HK$13.34.

HK Express is the city’s sole budget carrier -- a sector that premium-focused Cathay has struggled to compete against despite rivals such as Singa-pore Airlines making inroads years ago.

A Hong Kong Express passenger plane takes off from Hong Kong’s international airport.

If you watch “We Die Young”—the new coming-of-age/gangster drama hy-

brid—it’ll probably be because Jean-Claude Van Damme is the film’s headlining star.

Sadly, Van Damme, the rare ‘80s action star who has (in recent years) given some thought to how he can age gracefully on-screen, is not in “We Die Young” a lot.

Granted, a bigger role might not have improved Van Damme’s enjoyably twitchy performance as the mute, Oxycontin-addicted ex-ma-rine, Daniel. But Daniel is the most compelling part of “We Die Young,” a familiar story about reluctant teenage gang member Lucas (Elijah Rodriguez) and his seeming-ly impossible quest to break away from Mara Salvatrucha (aka: MS-13), a gang of Central American criminals who, in real life, have been associated with drug-running and child

prostitution. Lucas’ story is also some-

times believable thanks to a strong performance by Da-vid Castañeda, who plays the brutal MS-13 gang leader Rin-con. But Castañeda and Van Damme’s scene-stealing per-formances don’t significantly improve writer/director Lior

Geller’s frequent reliance on racial stereotypes and gang-ster movie cliches.

You can tell that Geller doesn’t really care about his characters beyond a point just by watching his mov-ie’s sensationalistic opening scene: Lucas (14 years old) gives viewers an unsettling

tour of his corner of Washing-ton D.C., one that concludes with Rincon quoting Shake-speare’s Shylock—a very se-lective reading of his famous “If you prick us, do we not bleed” speech—right before he encourages his minions to beat a random debtor to a bloody pulp.

Lucas casually mentions (through voiceover narration) that his neighbourhood is just a 20-minute bike ride away from the White House, an otherwise unrelated factoid that gives “We Die Young” a superficial kind of political relevance.

M O V I E R E V I E W

13 THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019

CHANGE OF NAME

I,MARIYATH THERUVIN THAZHA KUNI D/o. ABDUL KAREEM CHETTA KANDIYIL, holding Indian Passport No. H2331950 dated 02-04-2009 issued at Bahrain having permanent residence at THANAKKOTTOOR P.O , PARAKKADAVU, KOZHIKODE DIST, KERALA. presently residing at VILLA NO.996, ROAD NO.2625 , BLOCK NO: 926, WEST RIFFA, BAHRAIN will henceforth be known as (Given Name) MARIYATH (Surname) THERUVIN THAZHA KUNI, Objection(s), if any, may be forwarded to Embassy of India, P.O. Box No. 26106, Bldg. 1090, Road 2819, Block 428, Al-Seef, Bahrain.

I, AHAMMED KABIR S/O KUNHABDULLA, holding Indian Passport No. N5201822, dated 24.07.2016 issued at BAHRAIN having permanent residence at (full address in India) KOTTAYIL VALAPPIL HOUSE, PO. MANIKOTH, KASARAGOD DT., KERALA – 671329, presently residing at (full address in Bahrain) BLDG – 1219, ROAD- 2833, BLOCK- 328, AL SUQAYYAH, MANAMA, will henceforth be known as (Given name) KABIR (Surname) AHAMMED. Objection(s) if any, may be forwarded to Embassy of India, P.O Box 26106, Bldg 1090, Road 2819, Block 428, Al Seef, Kingdom of Bahrain.

KNOW WHAT

Van Damme was born Jean-Claude Camille François Van Varen-

berg in Berchem-Sainte-Agathe,

Brussels, Belgium, to Eliana and Eugène

Van Varenberg, an accountant

OASIS JUFFAIR1-DUMBO (PG) (ADVENTURE/DRAMA/FAMILY) NEW

COLIN FARRELL, MICHAEL KEATON, DANNY DEVITODAILY AT (3D): 11.15 AM + 1.30 + 3.45 + 8.30 PM DAILY AT (KIDS CINEMA): 12.30 + 2.45 + 5.00 + 7.15 + 9.30 + 11.45 PM

2-NOTEBOOK (PG-15) (HINDI/DRAMA/ROMANTIC) NEW

PRANUTAN BAHL, ZAHEER IQBAL, MIR SARWARDAILY AT: 11.15 AM + 4.15 + 9.15 PM

3-JUNGLEE (PG-15) (HINDI/ACTION/DRAMA) NEW VIDYUT JAMMWAL, AKSHAY OBEROI, ASHA BHAT

DAILY AT: 1.45 + 6.45 + 11.45 PM

4-THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN (PG-15) (DRA-MA/BIOGRAPHY) NEW

MEL GIBSON, SEAN PENN, NATALIE DORMERDAILY AT (VIP): 10.30 AM + 3.30 + 8.30 PM

5- LUCIFER (PG-15) (MALAYALAM) NEW MOHANLAL, MANJU WARRIER, VIVEK OBEROI,

TOVINO THOMAS DAILY AT:11.00 AM + 2.00 + 5.00 + 8.00 + 11.00 PM

6- AIRAA (PG-15) (TAMIL) NEW NAYANTHARA, VIJAY, KALAIYARASAN, MS BHASKAR,

YOGI BABUDAILY AT: 10.30 AM + 3.45 + 9.00 PM

7- CAPTAIN MARVEL (PG-13) (ACTION/ADVENTURE) BRIE LARSON, GEMMA CHAN, SAMUEL L. JACKSON

DAILY AT: 1.15 + 6.30 + 11.45 PM DAILY AT (3D): 6.00 + 10.45 PM

8- US (15+) (HORROR/THRILLER) LUPITA NYONG’O, ELISABETH MOSS, ANNA DIOP

DAILY AT: 6.00 + 8.30 + 11.00 PMDAILY AT (VIP): 1.00 + 6.00 + 11.00 PM

9- WONDER PARK (PG) (ANIMATION/ADVENTURE/COMEDY)

BRIANNA DENSKI, JENNIER GARNER, KEN HUDSON CAMPBELL

DAILY AT: 12.00 + 2.00 + 4.00 PM DAILY AT (KIDS CINEMA): 10.30 AM

10- KESARI (15+) (HINDI/ACTION/DRAMA) AKSHAY KUMAR, PARINEETI CHOPRA, BHAGYASHREE

DAILY AT: 2.30 + 5.30 + 11.30 PM

11- BADLA (PG-15) (HINDI/THRILLER/CRIME) AMITABH BACHCHAN, TAPSEE PANNU, TONY LUKE

DAILY AT: 1.00 + 6.00 + 11.00 PM

12- TOTAL DHAMAAL (PG-13) (HINDI/COMEDY/AD-VENTURE)

AJAY DEVGN, MADHURI DIXIT, ANIL KAPOORDAILY AT: 10.30 AM + 3.30 + 8.30 PM

13-GULLY BOY (PG-15) (HINDI/DRAMA/MUSICAL) ALIA BHAT, RANVEER SINGH, SIDDHANT CHATURVEDI

DAILY AT: 11.30 AM + 8.30 PM

14- KUMBALANGI NIGHT (PG-13) (MALAYALAM) SHANE NIGAM, SOUBIN SHAHIR, FAHADH FAASIL

DAILY AT: 2.15 + 8.15 PM

15-KODATHI SMAKSHAM BALAN VAKEEL (PG-13) (MALAYALAM)

DILEEP, MAMTA MOHANDAS, PRIYA ANANDDAILY AT: 11.15 AM + 5.15 + 11.15 PM

CITYCENTRE1-DUMBO (PG) (ADVENTURE/DRAMA/FAMILY) NEW

COLIN FARRELL, MICHAEL KEATON, DANNY DEVITODAILY AT (ATMOS): 10.45 AM + 1.15 + 3.45 + 6.15 + 8.45 + 11.15 PM

DAILY AT (IMAX 3D): 12.15 + 2.45 + 5.15 + 7.45 + 10.15 PM DAILY AT (VIP I): 11.15 AM + 1.45 + 4.15 + 6.45 + 9.15 + 11.45 PM


PRANUTAN BAHL, ZAHEER IQBAL, MIR SARWARDAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 1.30 + 4.00 + 6.30 + 9.00 + 11.30 PM


DAILY AT: 10.45 AM + 1.15 + 3.45 + 6.15 + 8.45 + 11.15 PM


MEL GIBSON, SEAN PENN, NATALIE DORMERDAILY AT: 12.15 + 4.45 + 9.15 PM

5-WE DIE YOUNG (18+) (THRILLER/CRIME/GANGSTER) NEW

DAVID CATANEDA, JEAN-CLAUDE VAN DAMME, ELIJAH RODRIGUEZ

DAILY AT: 2.45 + 7.15 + 11.45 PM

6- LUCIFER (PG-15) (MALAYALAM) NEW MOHANLAL, MANJU WARRIER, VIVEK OBEROI,

TOVINO THOMAS DAILY AT: 12.00 + 3.00 + 6.00 + 9.00 + 12.00 MN


DAILY AT: 10.30 AM + 1.00 + 3.45 + 6.30 + 9.15 + 12.00 MN DAILY AT (3D): 12.00 + 2.45 + 5.30 + 8.15 + 11.00 PMDAILY AT (VIP II): 12.45 + 6.00 + 11.15 PMDAILY AT (IMAX): (12.45 MN THURS/FRI)


DAILY AT: 11.15 + 1.45 + 4.15 + 6.45 + 9.15 + 11.45 + (1.00 AM THURS / FRI)DAILY AT (VIP II): 10.30 AM + 3.30 + 8.45 PM



DAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 1.00 + 3.00 + 5.00 + 7.00 + 9.00 + 11.00 PMDAILY AT (ARABIC DUBBED): 11.45 AM + 4.30 + 9.15 PM

10- ESCAPE ROOM (PG-15) (THRILLER) TAYLOR RUSSELL, LOGAN MILLER, DEBORAH ANN WOLL

DAILY AT: 10.30 AM + 12.45 + 3.00 + 5.15 + 7.30 + 9.45 + 12.00 + (1.00 AM THURS / FRI)

11- COLD PURSUIT (15+) (ACTION/CRIME/DRAMA) LIAM NEESON, EMMY ROSSUM, LAURA DERN

DAILY AT: 11.30 AM + 2.00 + 4.30 + 7.00 + 9.30 + 12.00 MN

12-THE UPSIDE (PG-15) (COMEDY/DRAMA) KEVIN HART, BRYAN CRANSTON, NICOLE KIDMAN

DAILY AT: 12.30 + 3.00 + 5.30 + 8.00 + 10.30 PM

13- NADI ELREGAL EL SERI (PG-15) (ARABIC/COMEDY) KARIM ABDULAZIZ, GHADA ADEL, MAJDE ALKIDDAWI

DAILY AT: 12.15 + 2.30 + 4.45 + 7.00 + 9.15 + 11.30 PM

14- GLASS (PG-15) (THRILLER) JAMES MCAVOY, BRUCE WILLIS, SAMUEL L. JACKSON

DAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 1.30 + 4.00 + 6.30 + 9.00 + 11.30 PM

15- FIGHTING WITH MY FAMILY (15+) (DRAMA/COME-DY/BIOGRAPHY)

DWAYNE JOHNSON, FLORENCE PUGH, JACK LOWDENDAILY AT: 2.15 + 7.00 + 11.45 PM

16- HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD (PG) (ANIMATION/ACTION/ADVENTURE)

CATE BLANCHETT, JONAH HILL, GERARD BUTLERDAILY AT: 2.00 + 6.00 + 10.00 PM

17-JOHNNY ENGLISH STRIKES AGAIN (PG) (COMEDY/ACTION/ADVENTURE)

ROWAN ATKINSON, OLGA KURYLENKO, EMMA THOMPSON

DAILY AT: 12.00 + 4.00 + 8.00 + 12.00 MN

18-ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL (PG-15) (ACTION/ADVEN-TURE/ROMANTIC)

ROSA SALAZAR, CHRISTOPH WALTZ, JENNIFER CONNELLYDAILY AT: 11.45 AM + 4.30 + 9.15 PM

19- AQUAMAN (PG-15) (ACTION/ADVENTURE) JASON MOMOA, AMBER HEARD, NICOLE KIDMAN

DAILY AT: 1.45 + 6.30 + 11.15 PM

SEEF (II)1-DUMBO (PG) (ADVENTURE/DRAMA/FAMILY) NEW

COLIN FARRELL, MICHAEL KEATON, DANNY DEVITODAILY AT: 12.15 + 2.30 + 4.45 + 7.00 + 9.15 + 11.30 PM


DAILY AT: 11.30 AM + 2.00 + 4.30 + 7.00 + 9.30 PM + 12.00 MN + (1.00 AM THURS/FRI)


MEL GIBSON, SEAN PENN, NATALIE DORMERDAILY AT: 12.30 + 6.00 + 11.30 PM



DAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 1.00 + 3.00 + 5.00 + 7.00 + 9.00 + 11.00 PM

5- LAHON-W-HABS (PG-13) (ARABIC/COMEDY) NEW HICHAM HADDAD, JAD BOU KARAM, CHEF ANTOINE

DAILY AT: 12.45 + 4.45 + 8.45 PM

6- UNGLE NAJI (PG-13) (ACTION/COMEDY) NEW AHMED ZAIN, IBRAHIM ALMEIRASI, AHMED SAIF

DAILY AT: 10.45 AM + 2.45 + 6.45 + 10.45 PM

7- LUCIFER (PG-15) (MALAYALAM) NEW MOHANLAL, MANJU WARRIER, VIVEK OBEROI, TOVINO

THOMAS DAILY AT: (12.30 MN THURS/FRI)

8- CAPTAIN MARVEL (PG-13) (ACTION/ADVENTURE) *- BRIE LARSON, GEMMA CHAN, SAMUEL L. JACKSON

DAILY AT: 12.30 + 3.15 + 6.00 + 8.45 + 11.30 PM + (12.45MN THURS/FRI)


DAILY AT: 10.30 AM + 1.00 + 3.30 + 6.00 + 8.30 + 11.00 PM



DAILY AT: 10.30 AM + 12.30 + 2.30 + 4.30 + 6.30 + 8.30 + 10.30 PM DAILY AT (ARABIC DUBBED): 12.15 + 4.45 + 9.15 PM

11-COLD PURSUIT (15+) (ACTION/CRIME/DRAMA) LIAM NEESON, EMMY ROSSUM, LAURA DERN

DAILY AT: 2.15 + 6.45 + 11.15 PM

12-NADI ELREGAL EL SERI (PG-15) (ARABIC/COMEDY) KARIM ABDULAZIZ, GHADA ADEL, MAJDE ALKIDDAWI

DAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 3.15 + 7.30 + 11.45 PM

13-HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD (PG) (ANIMATION/ACTION/ADVENTURE)

CATE BLANCHETT, JONAH HILL, GERARD BUTLERDAILY AT: 1.15 + 5.30 + 9.45 PM

14- KUMBALANGI NIGHT (PG-13) (MALAYALAM) SHANE NIGAM, SOUBIN SHAHIR, FAHADH FAASIL

DAILY AT: 3.00 + 8.30 PM

SEEF (I) 1-NOTEBOOK (PG-15) (HINDI/ROMANTIC) NEW


2-SNOW QUEEN: MIRRORLANDS (G) (ANIMATION/ADVENTURE/COMEDY) NEW

DAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 1.00 + 3.00 + 5.00 PM

3- LUCIFER (PG-15) (MALAYALAM) NEW MOHANLAL, MANJU WARRIER, VIVEK OBEROI, TOVINO

THOMAS DAILY AT: 11.30 AM + 2.30 + 5.30 + 8.30 + 11.30 PM

4- AIRAA (PG-15) (TAMIL) NEW NAYANTHARA, VIJAY, KALAIYARASAN, MS BHASKAR, YOGI

BABUDAILY AT: 10.30 AM + 3.45 + 9.00 PM

5- ESCAPE ROOM (PG-15) (THRILLER) TAYLOR RUSSELL, LOGAN MILLER, DEBORAH ANN WOLL

DAILY AT: 2.30 + 7.00 + 11.30 PM

6- BADLA (PG-15) (HINDI/THRILLER/CRIME) AMITABH BACHCHAN, TAPSEE PANNU, TONY LUKE

DAILY AT: 7.00 + 9.30 PM + 12.00 MN

7-THE UPSIDE (PG-15) (COMEDY/DRAMA) KEVIN HART, BRYAN CRANSTON, NICOLE KIDMAN

DAILY AT: 12.00 + 4.30 + 9.00 PM

8- CAPHARNAUM (18+) (ARABIC/DRAMA) KAWTHAR AL HADDAD, NADINE LABAKY, FADI YOUSEF

DAILY AT: 1.15 + 6.30 + 11.45 PM

SAAR1-DUMBO (PG) (ADVENTURE/DRAMA/FAMILY) NEW

COLIN FARRELL, MICHAEL KEATON, DANNY DEVITODAILY AT: 11.30 AM + 1.45 + 4.00 + 6.15 + 8.30 + (10.45 PM THURS/FRI)


PRANUTAN BAHL, ZAHEER IQBAL, MIR SARWARDAILY AT: 10.30 AM + 1.00 + 6.00 + (11.00 PM THURS/FRI)


MEL GIBSON, SEAN PENN, NATALIE DORMERDAILY AT: 3.30 + 8.30 PM


DAILY AT: 1.45 + 6.30 + (11.15 PM THURS/FRI)


DAILY AT: 11.00 AM + 1.30 + 4.00 + 6.30 + 9.00 + (11.30 PM THURS/FRI)

6- FIVE FEET APART (PG-15) (DRAMA/ROMANTIC) HALEY LU RICHARDSON, COLE SPROUSE, MOISES ARIAS

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Patrick Schwarzenegger, Everett in sci-fi thrillerLos Angeles

Actors Patrick Schwarzenegger and Rupert Everett have joined the cast of sci-fi thriller “Warning”.

Others joining the movie, include Tomasz Kot, Kylie Bunbury and Garance Marillier, reports variety.com.

They join previously an-nounced cast members Alex Pettyfer, Alice Eve, Annabelle Wallis, Benedict Samuel, Char-lotte Le Bon and Thomas Jane.

William Sadler to reprise the role as Death in ‘Bill & Ted 3’Los Angeles

William Sadler will re-turn as Death in the

upcoming film “Bill and Ted Face The Music”, the makers have announced.

The film’s official Twitter account shared the news Monday.

“For those who have been ask-ing @Wm _ sadler will totally be reprising his role!” the post read.

Sadler played the Grim Reaper in the sec-ond film of the series “Bill and Ted Bogus Journey” (1991), where he posed a challenge to the titular time-travelling rockers in a number of games.

Last week, film’s leads Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter officially announced that they are coming back for the third installment as Theodore ‘Ted’ Logan and William ‘Bill’ S Preston Esq, respectively.

Paul Rudd has a dark heartLos Angeles

Actor Paul Rudd has quipped that his secret

to staying youthful is having “darkness” in his heart. He says he is actually “80 on the inside”.

Asked by people.com at the Chicago Comic and Entertain-ment Expo (C2E2), what keeps him so youthful, he said: “I’m 80 years old on the inside.”

He then pointed to his chest and joked: “In here, pure dark-ness. And a little moisturiser.”

Although the “Avengers: Endgame” actor looks youth-ful, he said last year that he used to constantly worry about having a mid-life crisis, and said he has been pondering life’s big questions since he was in his 20s.

He s a i d : “ I t h i n k that one of the great joys in life i s know-i n g t h a t everything ’s ahead of you -- the big ques-tions, such as: ‘I wonder what I’m going to do for a job when I grow up’; ‘I wonder who I’m going to marry’; ‘I wonder if I’ll have kids’; I wonder what their names will be’; I wonder where I’m going to live’.

“When I was younger, if everything got me down it didn’t matter because all that was ahead. I think that it’s sometimes harder in life when those questions have been an-swered and all of a sudden you think, ‘what do I have to look forward to?’

“In my 1920s I often thought I was casually strolling towards a mid-life crisis, and it started picking up speed all through-out my late 20s, 30s, 40s ... I joke, but then there’s truth in that.”

Working with Bryan Singer was unpleasant: Sophie TurnerLos Angeles

“X-Men: Apocalypse” star Sophie Turner is the latest actor to open up

about her “unpleasant” working ex-perience with director Bryan Singer, who is facing fresh allegations of sexual abuse by multiple men.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” star Rami Malek has previously spoken about his differences with Singer while

shooting for the Queen biopic.

The director was fired for alleged un-profession-al behav-

iour.Alluding to

Malek’s brief comment on the subject, Turn-er told Rolling Stone magazine, “Our time together was, like Rami said, unpleasant.”

Turner is all set to reprise her role as Jean Grey in Simon Kin-berg’s “Dark Phoenix”, which is slated to hit the screens on June 7.

Malek, who won the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury in the movie, addressed the trouble on the movie’s set in February.

Los Angeles

Tessa Thompson will be seen in the much-await-ed “Avengers: Endgame”,

Marvel has announced.The actor plays Valkyrie in the

Marvel Cinematic Universe and first appeared in 2017’s “Thor: Ragnarok”.

The studio made the reve-lation Tuesday through the 32 “Endgame” character posters.

“One Month. #AvengersEnd-game,” Thompson shared the still on Instagram.

Fans have long suspected Valkyrie’s appearance in the upcoming tentpole sequel as she was seen travelling to the “Endgame” set with Chris Hemsworth’s Thor.

Marvel successfully managed the suspense as neither the char-acter nor Thompson’s name was

included on the film’s official poster, which released earlier this month.

The character posters also in-clude those who did not survive Thanos’ finger snap in 2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War”.

Posters for the living ones such as Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr), Steve Rogers / Captain America (Chris Evans), and Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) are in colour, while the dead ones, Peter Parker / Spider-Man (Tom Holland), Wanda Maximoff / Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Ols-en), and Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) are in black-and-white.

The stills, with hashtag #AvengeTheFallen, also re-vealed that Letitia Wright’s Shuri did not survive the snap.

“Endgame” is set to hit the screens on April 26.

‘Game of Thrones’ final season refers back to first season, says Maisie WilliamsLos Angeles

Actor Maisie Williams, who plays Arya Stark in “Game of Thrones”, says

the first season of the show plays a huge role in what happens in the eighth and final season of the fantasy drama.

Details about the final season of the HBO series are few

and far between but the cast has teased a “bittersweet” ending.

In an interview with the Enter-tainment Weekly, Williams said she re-watched the first season.

“After reading the scripts I went back and watched season one again because so much

of it refers back to that season,” Williams said.“There are so many scenes that will look

similar. And also I watched just to remind myself of the arc I’ve taken already. I want-ed Arya to go full circle and try for some kind of normalcy like when she was younger, she added.

Williams said Arya will strive to find normalcy without letting go off her plan to kill Cersei.

Batman was Chris Evans’ childhood favourite superhero

Los Angeles

“Avengers” star Chris Evans has

revealed he was a Bat-man fan while growing up.

The actor, who plays fan favourite Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Uni-verse, said his revelation about arch-rival DC’s Dark Knight would land him in a soup.

“I wasn’t that cool I was more into cartoons like Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes, things like that.“I’ll say Batman. I

probably shouldn’t say that it’s DC, I’m gonna

get in trouble. But those Mi-chael Keaton movies, those were pretty big, so yeah I’ll say Batman,” Evans recalled when asked a fan question by The Hollywood Reporter.

Bryan Singer

Tessa Thompson confirmed for ‘Avengers: Endgame’

William Sadler

Chris Evans

Paul Rudd

Sophie Turner

TessaThompson

15

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KNOW

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This year’s Bahrain Grand Prix marks race no. 999 in the history

of the event

Quagliarella helps Italy run riot• Quagliarella becomes oldest Italy scorer in 6-0 Liechtenstein rout in Euro 2020 qualifiers

• Forward Fabio Quagliarella is back playing for Italy after nearly nine years on the sidelines

AFP | Udine, Italy

Fabio Quagliarella became the oldest ever player to score for Italy as the

36-year-old converted two pen-alties in a crushing 6-0 Euro 2020 qualifying win by the Azzurri over Liechtenstein on Tuesday.

Italy top Group J with six points after also beating Finland 2-0 in Udine on Saturday with goals from youngsters Nicolo Barella, 22, and 19-year-old Moi-se Kean.

Bosnia threw away a two-goal lead to draw 2-2 with Greece and both are behind Italy on four points followed by Finland on three.

Serie A top scorer Quagliarella has earned his recall to Rob-erto Mancini’s new-look Ita-ly thanks to his 21 goals in 28 league games, two more than Portuguese star Cristiano Ron-aldo has managed for Juventus.

And he marked his return for the Azzurri after nearly nine years by converting a penalty on 35 minutes, adding a second, also from the spot, just before the break.

The Sampdoria player be-comes the oldest player ever to score for Italy aged 36 years and 54 days, overtaking Christian Panucci, who scored aged 35 years in 2008.

“It’s a wonderful evening,” said Quagliarella.

“I want to thank my team-mates. After the two goals they encouraged me to get a third one

too, but it didn’t happen.“I thank Jorginho and (Leon-

ardo) Bonucci because they’re the penalty takers and they told

me to kick.“They said: ‘The evening is

yours, you kick it’.”Stefano Sensi had headed Italy

in front after 17 minutes with Marco Verratti adding a second after 32 minutes.

Kean, 19, nodded in his second Italy goal on 69 minutes with substitute Leonardo Pavoletti, 30, who got his first Italy start in the second half to replace Quagliarella, adding a sixth min-utes afterwards.

‘Mission accomplished’ Mancini made seven chang-

es to the side that beat Finland with defender Cristiano Pic-cini and forward Stephan El Shaarawy injured.

S e n s i a n d Q u a g l i a re l l a stepped in for Barella and Ciro Immobile, alongside Kean who was given his second Italy start.

The veteran striker was de-nied early before Leonardo Spinazzola set up Senzi to head in for his first senior Italy goal after 17 minutes.

Verratti broke through to curl in the second after 32 minutes for his second goal in the Azzur-ri jersey.

Italy were awarded a penalty for a Nicolas Hasler handball and Quagliarella made no mis-take.

A searing Kean effort clipped the bar before Liechtenstein’s Daniel Kaufmann was sent off for handling a Verratti clearance with Quagliarella taking the sec-ond penalty on 43 minutes.

Pavoletti got his senior Azzur-ri debut and Quagliarella re-ceived a standing ovation as he left the Stadio Tardini pitch.

“This standing ovation is a memory I will always cherish,” said Quagliarella.

“I also thank Mancini who gave me this opportunity.”

Four minutes later the Cagliari forward completed the rout off a rebound as Italy -- Europe-an champions in 1968 and run-ners-up in 2000 and 2012 -- kept their unbeaten run in qualifiers going back nearly 13 years.

Italy’s forward Fabio Quagliarella shoots to score his second penalty

36year-old Fabio

Quagliarella became the oldest ever player to

score for Italy

Shura Council role noted

TDT | Manama

Bahrain Olympic Com-mittee (BOC) secretary

general Mohammed Al Nu-suf affirmed the importance of the Shura Council role in boosting sports in the coun-try through its supervisory and legislative role.

This was announced at Al Nusuf meeting with Shura Council member and head of youth committee Reza Monfaradi at the committee offices in Seef.

Both parties had discus-sions on ways of developing sports march in Bahrain, as Al Nusuf noted the signifi-cant efforts of Monfaradi at the council and with mem-bers of the youth commit-tee.

Al Nusuf asserted his support to build bridges of cooperation and communi-cation with the legislative authority to coordinate and work together effectively and back all legislation and regulations that would con-tribute to the development of Bahraini sports.

The BOC secretary gen-eral also praised the Shura Council approval of profes-sionalism sports law as a historic step forward in the march of Bahraini sports, paving the way for a major transformation of sports on the administrative and tech-nical levels, and bringing more achievements to the Kingdom at various levels.

F1 brings international flavour to BIC TDT | Manama

The Formula 1 Gulf Air Bah-rain Grand Prix 2019 is set

to be a massive global spectacle, with countries from all over the world being represented on the grid at Bahrain Interna-tional Circuit (BIC) this Friday to Sunday.

A total 59 drivers will be fly-ing the flags of 30 nations in the three racing championships hitting the tarmac in Sakhir. They include the headlining FIA Formula 1 World Champion-ship, which is being supported by the FIA Formula 2 Cham-pionship and the Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge Middle East.

Formula 1 alone will have the world’s attention focused on its 20 racers coming from 15 dif-ferent countries. Many of these nations are also represented in Formula 2.

Meanwhile, the Porsche GT3 Cup is set to bring in a mix of in-ternational and Middle Eastern talent to the weekend’s racing. Drivers from various countries will be joined by Arabian Gulf

aces from Oman and hosts Bah-rain.

Only one day remains before the official start of racing action as the global motorsport spot-light shines on Bahrain.

More of Formula 1’s star driv-ers continued to arrive on the island ahead of the weekend.

Amongst the latest Formula 1 competitors spotted at Bah-rain International Airport were Mercedes ace and wining driver from the Australian Grand Prix nearly a fortnight ago Valtteri Bottas, Red Bull Racing star Max Verstappen, McLaren’s Carlos Sainz, the Toro Rosso pair of Daniil Kvyat and Alex-ander Albon, and Alfa Romeo Racing’s Antonio Giovinazzi.

They, along with officials from Formula 1, the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), and the other participat-ing bodies have touched down

in the Kingdom of Bahrain.They were received upon

reaching the country by the warm and welcoming team members of BIC’s Meet and Greet Staff.

Things were not only busy at the airport. It was the same at the BIC premises, with set-up work across the circuit virtually complete ahead of the start of racing on Friday.

The unpacking of cargo weighing over 600 tonnes has been done and things have tak-en shape in BIC’s Formula 1 Pit Lane and the Paddock, with the team garages and bases being put up.

BIC’s 5.412-kilometre Grand Prix track had already under-gone its regular scrubbing, hy-dro-blasting, power washing and painting, as have the cano-pies along the grandstands and the individual seats.

Valtteri Bottas arrives at Bahrain Internaional Airport

BIC all set to welcome public in F1 Village today TDT | Manama

Bahrain International Cir-cuit’s (BIC) Formula 1 Vil-

lage vending area is all set to begin welcoming race fans from today for the Formula 1 Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix 2019.

For the first time in the 15-year history of the desert rac-ing spectacle, BIC is opening its doors to the general public for an additional day of “Lim-itless” fun and thrills, as tick-et-holders can start enjoying all the off-track entertainment on offer at “The Home of Mo-torsport in the Middle East”.

Gates are scheduled to be open from 4pm until 7pm on Thursday night.

BIC Chief Executive Shaikh Salman bin Isa Al Khalifa com-mented: “Our array of family entertainment has something

to offer for all ages. It promises to be an unforgettable week-end.

“Indeed, our slogan for this year’s race is ‘Limitless’ and we hope to offer fans a limitless level of fun, excitement and memories.”

BIC’s wide variety of attrac-tions also include massive car-nival rides and games, a haunt-ed house, a kids’ activity zone and an army of roaming per-formers, plus so much more.

One of the highlights of Thursday’s line-up of activi-ties takes fans away from the vending area and into the heart of all the racing in the Formula 1 Pit Lane.

All those with tickets to watch the three days of com-petitive action from Friday to Sunday will be able to join the hugely popular Formula 1 Pit Lane Walk.

Asian Shooting Federation president Shaikh Ali bin Abdulla Al Khalifa with other delegates during the inauguration of 12th Asian Airgun Championships in Taipei. The event, which will continue until April 2, will see some of the finest shooting athletes from around Asia compete for the gold. Shaikh Ali met minister of sports and education affairs in Taipei, in presence of Kuwait Shooting Association president Daij Al Otaibi

Manchester United to face Spurs in Shanghai pre-season match

AFP | London

Manchester United will play Premier League

top-four rivals Tottenham in a pre-season glamour friendly in Shanghai, the Old Trafford club said yes-terday.

At least six major English clubs will visit China this summer, with Manchester City, Newcastle, West Ham and Wolves taking part in Premier League Asia Tro-phy on July 17 in Nanjing and July 20 in Shanghai.

United will face Mauricio Pochettino’s Spurs on July 25 in Shanghai, by which time the future of interim manager Ole Gunnar Solsk-jaer will be resolved.


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Bautista Agut stuns Djokovic • Novak Djokovic lost the match despite dominating the opening set

• Barty topples Kvitova in Miami Open

AFP | Miami

Novak Djokovic’s pur-suit of a record seventh Miami Open ATP title

ended in dramatic fashion on Tuesday as Roberto Bautista Agut superbly recovered from a first set destruction to win 1-6, 7-5, 6-3 and book a place in the quarter-finals.

And the top seeds kept falling as women’s world number two Petra Kvitova slumped to a sur-prise 7-6 (8/6), 3-6, 6-2 defeat to Australian Ashleigh Barty.

Bautista Agut, 30, may have beaten Djokovic on the way to winning the title in Doha earli-er this year but 15-time Grand Slam champion Djokovic start-ed like a train in this last 16 en-counter before being amazingly reined back in.

After just 25 minutes, Djok-ovic was 5-0 ahead and on cruise control, Bautista Agut severely struggling to keep the Serbian at bay.

A short rain delay late in the second set allowed Bautista

Agut to regroup, however.He returned a completely

different player and at the end of an absorbing two hours and 29 minutes, it was the number 22 seed who will now meet de-fending champion John Isner for a place in the semi-finals.

“I played more aggressive,” said Bautista Agut who began to noticeably step inside and force Djokovic onto the back foot. “I tried to miss less balls, to really concentrate on the beginning of the point with my serve, with my return.”

With Roger Federer’s match with Daniil Medvedev post-poned after a spell of heavy rain forced tournament officials into a reshuffle, all the focus remained on Djokovic’s shock exit.

The reigning Wimbledon, US Open and Australian Open champion left court and headed straight to a press conference to try and explain this most remarkable of turnarounds at Hard Rock Stadium.

Big-serving Isner moved into the last eight with a 7-6 (7/5), 7-6 (7/3) triumph over Great Britain’s world number 22 Kyle Edmund.

Elsewhere there was a bril-liant win for 18 year-old Felix Auger-Aliassime, the Canadian who came through qualifying, who beat Georgia’s Nikoloz Basilashvili 7-6 (7-4), 6-4.

Auger-Aliassime, who is set to become the first player born in the 2000s to break into the top 50 when the rankings are updated next week, plays Borna Coric after the Croatian beat Nick Kyrgios 4-6, 6-3, 6-2.

In the women’s draw, Barty, who beat Kvitova for the first time having gone into the clash 0-4, will play Anett Kontaveit for a place in Saturday’s final af-ter the Estonian brought an end to Hsieh Su-Wei’s impressive run with a 3-6, 6-2, 7-5 victory to reach the last four in South Florida for the first time.

Roberto Bautista Agut of Spain in action against Novak Djokovic of Serbia

Vettel seeks Ferrari boost in BahrainReuters | Manama

Sebastian Vettel will be aim-ing for his third successive

Bahrain Grand Prix win on Sunday as Ferrari seek to show their lack of pace in Formula One’s Australian season opener was a one-off.

Tipped as pre-season fa-vourites, the German and new team mate Charles Leclerc fin-ished fourth and fifth in Mel-bourne, nearly a minute behind the dominant race-winning Mercedes of Valtteri Bottas.

Albert Park can be seen as something of an outlier but Fer-rari hope the more tradition-al layout of Bahrain’s 5.4-km Sakhir desert track will allow them to unlock the full poten-tial of the SF90 car.

The most successful team in Bahrain, with six wins overall, can draw encouragement from last year when Mercedes were faster in Australia only for Fer-rari to turn the tables with a front-row lockout and victory for Vettel.

That also started a streak of three straight pole positions for the German.

“In Bahrain, we expect to see the effect of the corrections we have made ...,” said prin-cipal Mattia Binotto, who re-placed Maurizio Arrivabene at the helm before the start of the season.

“We are well aware that our competitors will once again be very strong. With that in mind, we are keen to get back on track and face up to them.”

Bottas, having driven what he described as the race of his life in Australia to finish more than 20 seconds ahead of team mate Lewis Hamilton in second place, will be keen to serve up a thriller under the floodlights.

Having come within a second of snatching victory from Vet-tel last year, Bottas has some unfinished business on Sunday while Hamilton, who has taken two of Mercedes’ three wins in Bahrain, will be keen to reassert his supremacy.

Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff said nothing was won or lost at Albert Park.

“Whatever the Melbourne result says, our mindset hasn’t changed since then,” he said.

“We’ve seen the potential of Ferrari’s package in Barcelona (testing), so we expect them to come back strong in Bah-rain, with Red Bull in the mix as well.”

McLaren, which counts Bahrain’s Mumtalakat Hold-ing Company among its major shareholders, will be looking for their first points after Lando Norris finished 12th and Carlos Sainz retired in Australia.

Bahrain will also mark the start of the Formula Two Cham-pionship with Mick Schumach-er, son of seven-times Formula One champion Michael and nephew of Ralf, making his de-but in the support category.

Ferrari’s German driver Sebastian Vettel kisses his trophy after winning last year’s Bahrain Formula One Grand Prix

In Bahrain, we expect to see the effect of the corrections we

have made ...SEBASTIAN VETTEL

celebs 8 @newsofbahrain op-ed trump and conscience in the ... · op-ed celebs tessa thompson...

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