emir holds talks with bahrain crown prince · 2017/03/05 · labour law. workers can lodge job-...
TRANSCRIPT
Fossati names Qatar squad for friendlies, World Cup qualifiers
Qatar Petroleum honours
long-serving staff
www.thepeninsulaqatar.com
BUSINESS | 22 SPORT | 28
Volume 21 | Number 7092 | 2 RiyalsMonday 6 March 2017 | 7 Jumada II 1438
MONDAY F CUS
Parents resent use of toys to sell fast food→ Page 5
C
Emir holds talks with Bahrain Crown PrinceThe Peninsula
Qatar accorded a warm welcome to the Crown Prince, Dep-
uty Supreme Commander and First Deputy Prime Minister of Bahrain, Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Kha-lifa, who arrived here yesterday on a two-day visit.
Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani led well wishers to receive Prince Salman and his delegation on their arrival at Hamad Interna-tional Airport.
Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani later received the Crown Prince of Bahrain at the Emiri Diwan. They discussed the deep fraternal relations between the two countries and means of enhancing them in all fields to better serve the common interest of the two countries.→ Continued on page 2
Workers urged to report rights abuse
Mohammed Osman The Peninsula
The Ministry ofAdministrative Devel-opment, Labour and Social Affairs has urged expatriate
workers to report to the Minis-try in case of any violation or abuse of their rights guaranteed by the labour law.
The Labour Relations Department at the Ministry has launched an online awareness campaign to raise awareness among the workers about their rights and duties under the new labour law.
Workers can lodge job-related complaints online or by visiting the Ministry’s head-quarters or its branch in the Industrial Area Street No 13, the Ministry said on its Twitter account yesterday.
The worker needs to fill in a special from for complaints, sign it, attach a copy of his ID and submit it to the employee
concerned at the Ministry’s office.
The employee will first check whether the complaint is within the jurisdiction of the Ministry or not.
If the complaint is lodged online then the Labour Rela-tions Department will send an SMS to the representative of the company requesting him/her to attend to the Ministry’s office and a copy of the request is also sent to the complainant.
The complaint is always discussed in the presence of the two parties ( employee and the employer) and if not set-tled amicably it can be referred for further investiga-tion or transferred to the competent court with approval from the head of the dispute settlement section at the Ministry.
The Minister of Administra-tive Development, Labour and Social Affairs H E Dr Issa bin Saad Al Jafali Al Nuaimi dis-closed last December that the Ministry has installed 11 self service machines operating in 11 languages in government services complexes to help workers file complaints against their employers, in addition to a hot l ine operat ing round-the-clock.
He said that the Ministry has plans to increase the number of these machines to 100 that will be installed in labour camps.
The Ministry in its tweet explained that under the labour law, employees are entitled to get two weeks sick leave every year with full payment and the next four weeks with half salary.
→ Continued on page 8
Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani with the Crown Prince, Deputy Supreme Commander and First Deputy Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Bahrain, Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, at the Emiri Diwan yesterday.
Phase I of Motor City this yearThe Peninsula
Barwa Real Estate Company is preparing to open phase one of the Motor City and
other major projects this year, a senior official said yesterday.
Mohammed Abd Al Aziz Saad Al Saad, Deputy Chairman of the company said that sev-eral new projects will begin this year and many more projects that were under study are in the final stage of completion.
Al Saad was speaking at the annual general assembly of Barwa yesterday.
The Motor City will house used car showrooms, garages, an auction area for sale of used cars, labour camps for workers of these facilities, entertainment facilities and a racing track.
The phase-1 project has
been built on 215,677sqm. The facility includes 60 showrooms for used cars, 176 housing apart-ments and 10 commercial shops and workshops.
The infrastructure develop-ments of the project includes three sub-power-stations, inter-nal roads, networks for drinking water, fire, irrigation and rainy water, drainage and CCTV cam-eras among other services on an area of 34,066sqm. Qatar Fuel (Woqood) will build a petrol sta-tion with complete services at the facility.
Details about all projects will be provided in due time. It was also decided to obtain all neces-sary permission to start projects to develop plots of land owned by the company in Saudi Arabia. The land measuring 2.2 million sqm was purchased in 2016.
Work continues to improve the performances of the companies under Barwa, said Al Saad.
All issues mentioned in the agenda of the meeting was dis-cussed and approved. The AGM approved the board of directors’ proposal to issue cash dividend of QR2.5 per share that is equal to 25 percent of nominal value per share.
Barwa floated tenders for its projects worth about QR3bn this year, said Salman Mohamad Ahmad Al Hassan Al Muhannadi, Group CEO of Barwa.
Regarding the Lusail Golf project, Al Muhannadi said that the project was redesigned to build housing units in place of Golf playground. However, Barwa is waiting to obtain approval from Qatari Diar on new design of the project.
Online complaints
Workers can lodge job-related complaints online or by visiting the Ministry’s headquarters or its branch in the Industrial Area Street No 13.
The employee will first check whether the complaint is within the jurisdiction of the Ministry or not.
Environmental violations at 79 last monthThe Peninsula
Seventy-nine environ-mental violations were recorded last month by
the Environmental Protec-tion, Nature Reserves and Wildlife Department at the Ministry of Municipality and Environment. The Depart-ment also issued 63 warning notices to violators.
Among the major envi-ronmental violations was entering protected green areas, camel grazing in pro-hibited areas, violations of hunting law, especially the use of bird-whistles for attracting birds to catch them.
Other violations included throwing waste in non-des-ignated places and cutting trees. The environmental patrols and other authorities concerned made their efforts to curb violations in order to protect environment.
The department last month distributed 1,500 wild seedlings to winter campers and animal farms under the “plant it” campaign which aims at increasing vegetation by supporting campers and animal farms. In January of this year, 800 seedlings were distributed.
→ Continued on page 8
Firms asked to abide by amended lawThe Peninsula
The Ministry of Economy and Com-merce has asked public and private joint stock companies with
branches operating under different names with a different activity to strictly abide by the provisions of the amended law regulating commercial register.
Companies can get their status rec-tified by visiting the Ministry's headquarters on the second floor of Tower B in Lusail City, from today until April 30 during which they will be exempted from fees.
The Ministry said that if the branch name is different from the main com-pany’s name, public and private joint stock companies wishing to separate the branch and incorporate another inde-pendent company should submit a memo by the company's chairman, his deputy or an authorised representative requesting the deletion of the branch
name, along with a copy of the board of directors’ decision in this regard.
The chairman or an authorised rep-resentative should also sign a notation on the commercial registration form that can be obtained from the Ministry’s web-site www.mec.gov.qa, along with a copy of their personal ID.
In the case of a financial institution, the applicant should obtain an approval from Qatar Central Bank and meet the legal requirements for the incorporation of a new company depending on its legal structure. If the branch is operating under a different name or conducting activities other than the activities of the main company, public and private joint stock companies should submit a letter by the company's chairman, his deputy or an authorised representative request-ing the amendment of the branch name to match that of the main company and conform with its activities.
→ Continued on page 8
15
40
19QR975m
100
Woqod expansion plan
new petrol stations across Qatar in the current year.
Qatar Fuel (Woqod) is planning to open
Negotiation with the government for
plots of land
Target is to reach
The company opened 19 new stations including mobile terminals in different parts of the country in 2016
The net profit for the year for the Group has exceeded
petrol stationsby 2020
→ See also page 21
Continued from page 1
The two sides also exchanged views on regional and interna-tional issues of concern for both countries and the Gulf Cooper-ation Council (GCC) member states as well as the latest devel-opments in the region. The meeting was attended by Dep-uty Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani; H H Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, Per-sonal Representative of the Emir; H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani, Prime Min-ister and Interior Minister, along with a number of ministers and other senior officials.
On the Bahraini side, the meeting was attended by Sheikh Mohammed bin Mubarak Al Kha-lifa, Deputy Prime Minister; Sheikh Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Representative of His Majesty the King of Bahrain for Charity and Youth Affairs, Pres-ident of the Supreme Council for Youth and Sports and President of the Bahrain Olympic Commit-tee, Lieutenant-General Sheikh
Rashid bin Abdullah Al Khalifa, Interior Minister, and Sheikh Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Kha-lifa, Minister of Finance, along with a number of other minis-ters and members of the official delegation.
The Emir later hosted a luncheon banquet at the Emiri Diwan in honour of Prince Sal-man and his delegation.
Meanwhile, the Bahrain Crown Prince stressed that bilat-eral relations between Qatar and Bahrain have both a historic and social dimensions through gen-erations and they are complementing with the Gulf, Arab and Islamic joint working frameworks.
In a statement on arrival in Doha, the Bahraini Crown Prince said, “I am pleased to pay this official visit to the sisterly State of Qatar to meet my brother the Emir HH Sheikh Tamim bin
Hamad Al Thani," pointing out that the visit comes as part of HM King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain's keenness to promote joint action with the brothers in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Member States.
The exchange of visits between the leaders of the coun-tries has a pivotal impact on enhancing cooperation and coordination on all political, development and economic lev-els and economic, as well as the formulation of understandings about how to deal effectively with any challenges or circum-stances facing the region, he added.
HRH Bahraini Crown Prince said this visit comes days after Prime Minister of Bahrain, HRH Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa' s visit to Doha, which confirms the strong bilateral relations and joint keenness to
enhance cooperation and coor-dination for the benefit of both countries and people, as well as to support the blessed path of the GCC Member States, asking "Allah the Almighty to grant all success and progress for the ben-efit of both countries and their people," he said.
Later, Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Thani and HRH Prince Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, the Crown Prince toured the Hamad Inter-national Airport (HIA).
The Deputy Emir and HRH Crown Prince of Bahrain inspected the airport where they were briefed on its sections such as first-class terminal, the busi-ness class terminal and the passenger terminal.
They also listened to a pres-entation on HIA's capacity, future plans and its utilities as well as the security systems and air navigation.
Their Highnesses were accompanied by a number of ministers along with members of the official delegation accom-panying HRH Crown Prince of Bahrain.
Bilateral relations
The exchange of visits between the leaders of the countries has a pivotal impact on enhancing cooperation and coordination at all political and economic levels as well as in the formulation of understanding about how to deal effectively with challenges or circumstances facing the region.
Togo Prime Minister supportsQatar's Unesco candidateLome
QNA
Prime Minister of Togo Komi Selom Klassou has expressed his country's
support for H E Dr Hamad bin Abdulaziz Al Kawari, Cultural Adviser at the Emiri Diwan and Qatar's candidate for the post of Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).
This came after a discussion of Al Kawari's programme for the advancement of Unesco dur-ing a meeting with the Prime Minister of Togo in the capital Lome last night.
Togo's Premier praised the deeply-rooted Qatari -Togolese relations. Dr Klassou highly appreciated the Qatari candi-date's keenness to meet with African officials, present his vision and listen to their aspira-tions to contribute in restoring the Unesco's image.
He stressed that Togo and Africa recognise the noble mis-sion of Unesco in the education, culture and science fields, add-ing that the State of Togo after studying the nomination has been satisfied over the effi-ciently and rich experience of the Qatari candidate and see him as the right person at this important phase of the Unesco's march.
In this context, he said that Togo and Qatar are leading coordination at vote in interna-tional organizations.
For his part, Dr Hamad bin Abdulaziz Al Kuwari thanked the Togolese Prime Minister for pro-viding him with the opportunity to explain his vision for the advancement of Unesco and dis-cuss his electoral programme under the theme "Towards a New Start for Unesco."
He said that Africa has been always a priority for Unesco, stressing his ongoing efforts aimed at enhancing its position
in the future along with conduct-ing permanent consultations with African leaders and its
representatives to achieve such a goal and take the organisation to greater heights.
H E Dr Hamad bin Abdulaziz Al Kawari with Prime Minister of Togo Komi Selom Klassou in Lome.
HSE campaign: Qafco holds appreciation ceremony The Peninsula
Qafco organised a cere-mony to appreciate the different entities and
personnel who participated in the company's Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) awareness programme which took place between January 18-20 2017, at Al-Banush Club, Mesaieed.
The governmental and semi-governmental represent-atives who represented their entities on the HSE awareness programme and exhibition attended the ceremony. The entities that participated in the event were Ministry of Interior directorates represented by the General Directorate of Traffic; the General Directorate of Civil Defense; the General Directo-rate of Industrial Security Department; the Establish-ments and Missions Security Department; the Public Rela-tions Department; the
Permanent Committee for Drugs and Alcohol Affairs; the Security Systems Department, and the Community Policing Department. That is in addition to Hamad Medical Corporation, Tarsheed and Qatar Biobank.
Dr Hamed Al-Marwani, Chief Administration Officer (Qafco) said, "We are thankful all those who participated with us on of our health, safety and environment awareness pro-gram and contributed immensely to its success. We also recognize the important role shared by these entities continuously toward achieving the objectives the program targeted.
The Qafco HSE awareness programme had witnessed huge turnout of around 6,000 people. During the event, many shows and exhibits related to security and safety were exhibited apart from the many guidance and educational brochures that were distributed to the visitors.
Qatar and Bahrain relations have 'historic dimensions'
02 MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017HOME
03MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017 HOME
PHASE 2 SALES LAUNCHING SOON!
Call +974 4409 5155 or email us at [email protected]
thepearlqatar.com
Al Mutahidah Towers
Al Mutahidah Towers
PHASE 1 UNITS ARE SOLD OUT
THANK YOU
04 MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017HOME
Foreign Minister H E Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani with New Zealand's Foreign Minister Murray McCully in Doha yesterday. The Foreign Minister expressed his appreciation of New Zealand's role during its presidency of the Security Council last year to stop Israeli settlements on the Palestinian land and its role in persuading members of the Security Council to show leadership over the crisis in Syria. New Zealand's FM praised Qatar's efforts to find a political solution to the crisis in Syria and its constant support to the Palestinian cause.
FM meets New Zealand counterpart
Khartoum
QNA
Deputy Prime Minis-ter and Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs H E Ahmed bin Abdullah bin
Zaid Al Mahmoud met here yes-terday with Sudanese Vice-President Hassabo Mohamed Abdel Rahman.
Talks during the meeting dealt with bilateral relations and means of enhancing them.
The two sides also discussed the peace process in Darfur and the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur and its achievements at the levels of security, peace and stability.
The meeting reviewed the progress in reconstruction and development projects in Darfur within the framework of the Doha Document for Peace and various projects that have been
implemented in this context for the benefit of citizens of Darfur, which reflects positively on the peace and stability process.
Sudan's Vice-President hailed the outstanding role being played by the State of Qatar in bringing sustainable peace, development and stability not only in Darfur but also in Sudan.
Al Mahmoud told reporters that the meeting with the Suda-nese Vice-President was "constructive" and "fruitful", adding they discussed a number of issues along with the agenda of the two meetings to be held in Khartoum today on the recon-struction and development in Darfur and the Monitoring Com-mittee of the Implementation of Doha Document for Peace in Darfur and the relevant recon-struction and development projects as well as the path of peace in Darfur and Sudan.
Al Mahmoud said: "We lis-tened to a number of points that we will take into account in our way to achieving peace and sta-bility in Darfur."
Talks during the meeting also dealt with bilateral rela-tions between the State of Qatar and the Republic of Sudan, the positive atmosphere witnessed by Sudan and the region as well
as means of using it for the good of Sudan and the region.
The Deputy Prime Min-ister and Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs also met with Sudanese Presidential Envoy for Diplomatic Contact and Negotiation for Darfur Dr Amin Hassan Omar and Head of the Darfur Peace Office Majdi Khalafallah.
The meeting reviewed
the peace process in Darfur and the positive steps and achieve-ments made in the framework of the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur.
The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Cabi-net Affairs arrived in the Sudanese capital on Saturday for a visit during which he is presiding over the Fourth Meet-ing of the Darfur Reconstruction Board of Directors and the Sec-ond Meeting of the Monitoring
Committee of the Implementa-tion of Doha Document for Peace in Darfur.
He was welcomed upon arrival at Khartoum Interna-tional Airport by Cabinet Affairs Minister, Ahmed Saad Omer, and Qatar's Ambassador to Sudan, Rashid bin Abdulrahman Al Nuaimi, along with a number of Ministers and heads of political parties and movements that have joined the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur.
The Fourth Meeting of the Darfur Reconstruction Board of Directors will review reconstruc-tion and development operations in various states of Darfur after the establishment of security and stability and development projects for the next stage. The 12th Meeting of the Second Meet-ing of the Monitoring Committee will discuss the peace process in Darfur since the signing of the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur in 2011 until now.
Deputy PM reviews peace progress in DarfurQatar praised
Deputy PM presides over second meeting of the monitoring committee for the implementation of Darfur peace.
Sudan's VP praises the outstanding role being played by Qatar in bringing peace to Sudan.
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs H E Ahmed bin Abdullah bin Zaid Al Mahmoud with Sudanese Vice-President Hassabo Mohamed Abdel Rahman in Khartoum yesterday.
Qatar attendsArab Leaguemeeting
The Arab League meet-ing at the level of permanent representa-
tives in its 147th session started yesterday under Alge-ria's presidency at the headquarters of the Arab League General Secretariat to prepare for the Arab Foreign Ministers meeting scheduled for Tuesday.
Qatar's Ambassador to Egypt and Permanent Repre-sentative to the Arab League Saif bin Muqaddam Al Buain-ain headed the Qatari delegation at the meeting.
The meeting agenda cov-ers 28 topics like the report of the Arab League Secretary General on the procedures for implementing the decisions taken by the League in the 146th and 147th sessions. The meeting discussed the devel-opments in Palestine.
HMC lines up events to mark World Kidney Day The Peninsula
Hamad Medical Corpo-rat ion’s (HMC) Nephrology Division,
in collaboration with the Cor-porate Communications Department, is organising a series of events to mark World Kidney Day.
Held on March 9, the glo-bal theme for World Kidney Day 2017 is ‘Kidney Disease – A Healthy Lifestyle for Healthy Kidneys’. This year, HMC events will focus on the impact obesity, a sedentary lifestyle and poor dietary choices can have on the kidneys.
Dr Hassan Al Malki, Head of Nephrology at HMC, said: “Around 10 percent of the world’s population is affected by chronic kidney disease and it is estimated that the disease affects 13 percent of Qatar’s population.”
Dr Al Malki said that obes-ity is one of the risk factors in the development of kidney dis-ease. “Obesity increases the
risk of developing major risk factors for Chronic Kidney Dis-ease (CKD), like diabetes and hypertension, and it has a direct impact on the develop-ment of CKD and end-stage renal disease (ESRD). ”
This year’s World Kidney Day activities demonstrate HMC’s commitment to pro-moting health in the community. A series of events aimed at getting families involved in fun, educational activities that highlight the importance of an active life-style in maintaining kidney health have been planned.
Between 5 and 12 March, HMC’s clinical and support staff will hold events at schools, Qatar University, HMC hospitals, Primary Health Care Centers and in popular public locations.
On March 10, HMC will hold its annual walkathon and World Kidney Day cele-brations at Katara to spread the message about the impor-tance of kidney health and create awareness.
05MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017 HOME
Sanaullah AtaullahThe Peninsula
With the Ministry of Pub-lic Health set to curb unhealthy food mar-
keting practices to promote healthy eating, parents have raised concern over free toys and other giveaways along with chil-dren’s meal. The Ministry is mulling a ban on use of toys for promoting unhealthy food by various fast food restaurants.
“A ministerial decision is being prepared for fast food res-taurants to curb use of toys to market children’s meals,” Al Sharq said in a recent report quoting Dr Sheikha Al Anoud bint Mohammed Al Thani, Director of Health Promotion and Non-Communicable Diseases.
In a vast majority of restau-rants, children’s meals do not meet nutrition standards. Often, restaurant toys or premiums are tied to cartoon characters and this practice has been shown to affect children’s food choices and preferences.
Marketing aimed at children puts their long-term health at risk by enticing them to eat food items that are low in nutrition, and also unhealthy. Parents who shared their concerns with The Peninsula demanded a ban on meals packed with toys and to stop other activities at fast-food-restaurants like play-area in a bid to discourage unhealthy eat-ing habits.
“Parents often have to listen to the pleading of children to stop by at a local fast food restaurant for a meal because of the toy being offered. In marketing,
children are the easiest targets and that is why we have a good number of advertisements fea-turing children. Hence,this is one of the strongest marketing tools these outlets use,” said a parent who specialises in marketing.
One of the most powerful marketing tools that fast food restaurants use is the promise of a toy with the purchase of any kids' meal. The food inside the meal is far less important to most of the children than the toy that comes along with it.
“My four-year-old daughter is very fond of fast food, espe-cially those which have toys. She insists on going to fast food res-taurants frequently and at times make me promise to take her to such places on weekends,” said Mohamad Mustaqim, father of two children.
“Usually, as soon as she enters the restaurant, she goes to the board showcasing the toy
of the week and those coming over the following weeks. I have also noted that my daughter loves to go to the soft play-area at her favourite restaurant. She thinks that weekend celebration is incomplete without visiting her favourite resultant, and getting a toy from there,” said Mustaqeem.
When fast food restaurants offer versions of the most pop-ular toys in the market, children want to eat the food so they can get the toy. However, most of the time, the toy is not the issue but the lack of nutrients in the food causes the concern. Important nutrients as vitamins and min-erals are missing in these food items that are often fatty and sugary.
“Many fast food restaurants go so far as to offer a character aimed toward girls and a differ-ent character aimed toward boys. Banning toys for marketing unhealthy foods among children would help discourage such meals. With increasing health awareness in the community, people have started avoiding fast food,” said a Qatari woman.
“The fast food culture is much prevalent in the local com-munity. Parents who grew up by eating fast food would find it dif-ficult to cut these food items from the family meals altogether, unless and until they get some serious health issues,” the Qatari woman added.
Meanwhile, some parents have urged the authorities to ban chocolates and candies that are marketed offering free toys.
“If we take a harsh stand, we might be able to avoid fast food
and stop visiting such facilities. But what about these candies and chocolates that are packed with toys to attract the children?” asked John, a European, who has three children.
“How can we avoid such products that are available in almost all the groceries and other shopping facilities? Thanks to the good advertisements in the media, my son is much addicted to an egg-shaped chocolate that comes with a toy inside. He buys it just to assemble the pieces and then leaves it after a few min-utes. The chocolate that used to buy it just to assemble some small pieces and he throws the toy within few minutes,” he said.
These kinds of toys contained in chocolates and other candies have been banned in a number of countries, mainly out of fear that children might mistake the toys for food and swallow them.
“The marketing tactics of fast
food restaurants like offering free toys in meal packs, colour-ful balloons, soft play areas, bouncing castles, arrangements of birthday parties on very attractive prices all hook children to these facilities,” said Abu Abdullah, an Arab national.
“Most of the children find it difficult to stay long in public parks and open playgrounds. My children force me to take them to fast food restaurants after spending a few hours in public parks during weekends,” he said.
Meanwhile, unfavourable weather conditions here often force parents to take their chil-dren to fast-food-restaurants offering free soft-play-areas, said another father.
The World Health Organiza-tion warns that the push to market fast food to children has been “disastrously effective” and has ultimately contributed to the global obesity epidemic. Hence,
WHO has developed a set of 12 recommendations, endorsed by the World Health Assembly, aimed at reducing the impact of marketing foods high in satu-rated fats, trans-fatty acids, free sugars or salt, to children.
“Advertising and other forms of food and beverage marketing to children are widespread across the world and are influ-encing children’s food preferences, purchase requests and consumption patterns. A sig-nificant amount of this marketing is for products with a high con-tent of fat, sugars or salt, consumption of which may increase the risk of overweight, obesity or certain noncommu-nicable diseases,” WHO states.
Hence Qatari government’s move to curb unhealthy food marketing practices, would help to reduce and prevent childhood overweight and obesity, if the ministerial decision is approved.
The Peninsula
Agricultural Research Department at the Minis-try of Municipality and
Environment organised an awareness programme about artificial liquid pollination of date palm.
A number of farmers and agricultural experts partici-pated in the one-day event, which was held at the Agricul-
tural Research Station.“The Ministry is keen to help
farmers by sharing knowledge about this new technique. Farm-ers get to know about the latest developments in this field so that they can increase produc-tion and reduce cost and efforts,” Hassan Ibrahim Al Asmakh, an official at the min-istry said.
“This programme is one of the important projects focusing
on increasing palm tree produc-tion in GCC in collaboration with International Center for Agri-cultural Research in the Dry Areas,” he added.
A number of field experi-ments were conducted by researchers before organising the awareness day. This tech-nology will reduce cost for farmers and increase produc-tion, while developing good quality dates.
Officials and farmers during an awareness programme about artificial liquid pollination of date palm.
Workshop on pollination of date palm
Parents resent use of
toys to sell fast food
The Peninsula
The Ministry of Economy and Commerce, in collab-oration with Nasser Bin
Khaled Automobiles, the dealer of Mercedes Benz vehicles in Qatar, has announced the recall of Mercedes-Benz E Class 2017 model because the seat frame
may damage the wiring to the fuel system control unit.
The Ministry said the recall campaign comes within the framework of its ongoing efforts to protect consumers and ensure that car dealers follow up on vehicle defects and repairs.
The Ministry said that it will coordinate with the dealer to
follow up on the maintenance and repair works and will com-municate with customers to ensure that the necessary repairs are carried out.
The Ministry has urged all customers to report any viola-tions to its Consumer Protection and Anti-Commercial Fraud Department.
Mercedes-Benz E Class 2017 model recalled
Marketing aimed at children puts their long-term health at risk by enticing them to eat food items that are low in nutrition, and also unhealthy.
MONDAY F CUS
Fazeena Saleem The Peninsula
Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC) encourages people above the age of 50 to undergo regular
screening for bowel cancer as its helps early detection and saves lives. Early screening can detect cancer before it develops into later stages that are harder to treat, says Dr Shaikha Abu Shaikha, Cancer Programme Manager at the PHCC.
“Your choices can make an impact on your health — and
bring peace of mind to you and your family. Even if you have no obvious symptoms, if you are aged between 50 and 74, we rec-ommend you undertake bowel cancer screening on an annual basis, and now, you do not even need to make an appointment to see a health specialist, test-ing can be performed in the privacy of your own home,” Dr Shaikha told The Peninsula.
“You can collect a fecal immunochemical test (FIT) kit with full instructions on how to collect a specimen that can then be returned to your nearest PHCC lab for testing,” she added.
The kit detects small amounts of blood hidden in the stool which may indicate polyps or cancer in the bowel.
March is International Bowel Cancer Awareness Month and bowel cancer refers to cancers found in the colon, rectum, small bowl or anus. According to the Colon Cancer Alliance, the survival rate from bowel cancer rises to 90 percent when caught at an early stage. According to the Ministry of Public Health In Qatar, among the incidence of
cancer in Qatar, bowel cancer accounts for 10.55 percent.
Dr Shaikha also insists that it is important to know the symptoms of bowel cancer as well as to discuss about it with a physician.
“While bowel cancer can develop without any discernible symptoms, it is important to pay attention to the signs and dis-
cuss your issues with your healthcare provider,” she
said. “It is important that the
conversation about bowel cancer and other forms of the disease becomes part of everyday life so that the detection and treatment can take place as early as possible,” she added.
Symptoms for bowel cancer will include blood in stool or rec-tal bleeding, a change like such as diarrhea or constipation, in bowel habits lasting two weeks or more, persistent cramps, gas, or pain, feeling that your bowel won’t empty completely, unex-plained iron deficiency aneamia, progressive, unintentional weight loss, weakness or fatigue and nausea or vomiting.
Meanwhile, the PHCC is leading a month-long awareness drive across the country titled 'Ask Me About Bowel Cancer Screening’ with aim to highlight the importance of bowel cancer screening to coincide with Inter-national Bowel Cancer Awareness Month.
As part the campaign PHCC’s National Breast and Bowel Screening Program ‘Screen For Life’ throughout March will edu-cate the public about benefits of early detection and encourage eli-gible men and women to take a bowel cancer screening.
Also the PHCC call center provides an opportunity for peo-ple to talk with trained staff and ask questions about the screen-ing program and ways to book an appointment.
06 MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017HOME
PHCC advises regular bowel cancer testsKnow symptoms
People aged between 50 and 74 advised to do bowel cancer screening every year even if they have no obvious symptoms.
It is important to know the symptoms of bowel cancer as well as discuss it with a physician: Expert
Symptoms for bowel cancer will include blood in stool or rectal bleeding, a change like such as diarrhea or constipation, in bowel habits lasting two weeks or more, persistent cramps, gas, or pain, feeling that your bowel won’t empty completely,
Qatar's envoy to Austria submits credentials Vienna
QNA
President of the Federal Republic of Austria, Dr Alexander Van der Bel-
len, has received the credentials of Sheikh Ali bin Jassim Thani Al Thani as Qatar's Ambassador Extraor-dinary and Plenipotentiary to Austria.
The Ambassador con-veyed the greetings of the Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to the Pres-ident and best wishes of good health and happiness, and further progress and prosper-ity for the people of Austria.
The President of Austria entrusted the Ambassador to convey his greetings to the Emir, wishing him good health and happiness and for the State of Qatar further progress, development and prosperity. He also wished the Ambassador all the success in his mission, stressing full support to develop bilateral relations.
An emblem with a blue-coloured ribbon folded into a loop emphasising the awareness about bowel/colon cancer.
Forum on healthcare opens online registrationThe Peninsula
The Middle East Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare, organised by
Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) in collaboration with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), has opened its online registration for this year’s leading quality improve-ment conference.
The Forum will take place from May 5 to May 7 at Qatar National Convention Center and the programme will fea-ture a wide variety of sessions and is available for attendees to select the workshops, lec-tures, and speakers they would most like to see.
The theme for the confer-ence is, ‘Adding Value in
Healthcare’ and all the work-shops, lectures and sessions will centre on the three main strands related to this: providing a bet-ter patient experience, improving overall health and increasing cost and resource efficiency.
HMC’s Deputy Chief Medi-cal Officer and Director of Medical Education, Dr Abdul-latif Al Khal, who co-chairs the Middle East Forum Planning Group, said the Forum has grown significantly each year and is established for building quality improvement capacity and capability among local and regional healthcare workers.
“The Middle East Forum has become an important event for healthcare professionals in Qatar and in the region, and given the huge interest it has generated, I
recommend that inter-
ested attendees register early in order to ensure they can select the sessions that most interest them. Many of the workshop ses-sions are designed to be interactive and consequently, spaces are limited,” he said.
The quality improvement poster exhibition and competi-tion is also ready to accept submissions. Open to any health-care professionals interested in sharing information on their quality and safety improvement projects with international experts and other peers, the poster exhibition and competi-tion offers an ideal platform for doctors, nurses and allied health professionals to showcase excel-lent illustrations of practical, real-life examples of quality improvement projects. Posters should reflect the main confer-ence theme.
Submission criteria are available on the conference website, http://ihimeforum.hamad.qa, and the deadline for entering a submission is March 16. Submissions will be peer-reviewed by a panel of expert judges, and posters that com-ply with the stringent acceptance criteria will be entered into the competition. The top posters will be recog-nized at an awards ceremony during the Forum and featured on the conference website. Authors of accepted posters are eligible for the discounted reg-istration fee.
The programme for the Middle East Forum 2017 also focuses on improvement initi-atives that have provided a transformative approach to improving healthcare delivery by inspiring innovation.
07MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017 HOME
Assistant Undersecretary for Information Technology Affairs in the Ministry of Transport and Communications, Hassan Al Sayed, and other officials at the two-day 19th GCC e-Government Executive Committee meeting in Doha yesterday.
GCC e-Government meetingQ-CERT enhances efforts on cyber security systemRaynald C Rivera The Peninsula
The Ministry of Trans-p o r t a n d C o m m u n i c a t i o n s through the Qatar Computer Emergency
Response Team (Q-CERT) spares no effort to ensuring the country’s cyber security amid global cyber threats and attacks which are becoming more advanced.
“Qatar Computer Emer-gency Response Team, Q-CERT, works tirelessly to maintain our cyber security against world-wide threats that might affect us and remains vigilant to ensure an electronic environment free of hacking that might hinder the way we use and benefit from technology. The Ministry also provides support for all entities in this domain countrywide,” said Eng. Khalid Al Hashmi (pic-tured), Assistant Undersecretary of Cyber Security at the Ministry.
“The Ministry also holds reg-ular national training programmes and cyber drills to further enhance State institutions’ response and readiness effi-ciency,” said Al Hashmi at the fifth regional Cyber Drill for Arab countries, organised by the ITU-Arab Regional Cybersecurity Center (ARCC) in collaboration with the ITU Arab Regional Office.
Hosted by Qatar and repre-sented by the Ministry of Transport and Communications, the workshop brings together the Arab region’s cyber security operation centres and private information security emergency centres. “The Ministry of Trans-port and Communications has been embracing the strategies and plans that help contribute to maximising the benefits
gained from the latest world technologies on the path of bol-stering our ICT sector,” he noted.
The workshop aims to boost communication capabilities, team building, and cyber threat response capabilities, aiming to maintain the ongoing efforts that Arab computer emergency response teams (CERTs) exert for combating cyber threats. It also works as a platform for fur-ther cooperation and discussions on current cyberse-curity challenges.
This workshop aims to con-solidate the capabilities in addressing and responding to cyber attacks through simulation of different attacks so as to take the necessary steps to address and respond to these attacks and this workshop will give us the opportunity to exchange expe-riences and information to consolidate cooperation between member countries.
“The modern society is reli-ant on ICT with the increasing internet use among world pop-ulation which has a strong economic impact on different countries. Yet this development will result to a number of risks and challenges that require to be met at national and interna-tional levels. Cyber attacks have become more frequent and complex which affect crucial
sectors such as health, energy, transport and finance, among others,” said Ebrahim Al Haddad, Regional Director, ITU Arab Regional Office.
Cyber security, being an important element in human activity and due to its complex-ity, requires concerted efforts at virtual and real situations by all key stakeholders in public and private sectors, civil societies and NGOs and at an interna-tional level, stressed Al Haddad.
He highlighted the major role UN plays as “a facilitator and that calls all countries to collaborate in order to discuss and implement solutions to build an open and at the same time trustworthy cyberspace.”
Badar Al Salehi, Head of ITU-ARCC, underscored the centre’s keenness in helping enhance the capabilities of dif-ferent countries in the region amid meteoric rise in cyber attacks which have shown advancement based on reports.
The workshop runs until Thursday at the Four Seasons Doha Hotel.
Q-CERT works tirelessly to maintain our cyber security against worldwide threats that might affect us and remains vigilant to ensure an electronic environment free of hacking that might hinder the way we use and benefit from technology, says Eng. Khalid Al Hashmi
Ministry holds environmental lecture The Peninsula
The public Relations Department at the Min-istry of Municipality and Environment organized environmental lecture at Mariam
bint Imran Primary School for Girls under the theme “The role of women in protecting environment”.
The lecture focused more on mothers’ role to educate children on proper way of cleaning either at home or on the street. The lecture also empha-sised mothers must also educate them to take care of green areas and not cut trees.
It also mentioned the need to reduce the con-sumption of manufactured goods and refrain from buying more than what they need to avoid wastes. About 30 students participated in the event.
The municipality also con-ducted a training programme about “Health and environmen-tal safety” to 11 students from College of the North Atlantic-Qatar.
Qatar to take part in UN Statistical Commission meetThe Peninsula
The State of Qatar is going to participate in the 48th ses-sion of the United Nations
Statistical Commission measur-ing member countries progress towards achieving the economi-cal, social and environmental goals of Sustainable Development Agenda.
The meeting will be held at the UN headquarters in New York city from tomorrow till Friday. The Qatari delegation will be headed by H E Dr Saleh Mohamed Salem Al Nabit, Minister of Devel-opment Planning and Statistics.
On the sidelines of the 48th session, Minister Al Nabit will meet the director of the United Nations Statistics Division and the director of the UN Transforma-tive Agenda for Official Statistics to consult and agree on the start date of the implementation of the project of official statistics
transformation in Qatar, which is expected to be launched by next April.
Dr Al Nabit will also meet a number of heads of regional and international statistical agencies to discuss the latest updates on upgrading the statistical process, as well as exchange experiences and share successful lessons.
This project is based on the request of the UN to the State of Qatar to join the project of Trans-formative Agenda for Official Statistics being a leading state in this field.
The Qatari delegation to the meeting will discuss the proposed mechanisms to upgrade the national statistical systems and methodologies, to articulate effective statistical policies that take into consideration the national and international needs of the sustainable development process in order to benefit from the technical support provided by
the UN and its organisations.By participating in the 48th
session, Qatar aims to learn about the latest developments related to the Sustainable Development Agenda and the indicators approved by the UN Statistical Commission said the Ministry of Development Planning and Sta-tistics yesterday in statement.
The session agenda covers several important topics related to the role of statistical data in the sustainable development proc-ess, the development of statistical data methodologies and sources, and methods of dissemination and access to users in a timely manner. The meeting will discuss several important issues such as the quality assurance in the glo-bal statistical system, and will shed light on the basic principles of official statistics and prepare for the next round of household surveys, as well as discuss several other related topics.
08 MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017HOME / GULF
DOHA: Qatar Postal Serv-ices Company (Q-Post) yesterday announced that it has extended the period given for renewal of post box licences till end of March, 2017.
Q-Post urged cus-tomers to renew their subscription before the deadline to avoid can-cellation of the post boxes. Q-Post has the right to cancel the sub-scription if nor renewed by the above deadline said in a brief statement.
Q-Post extends period given for renewal of post box licences
The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, with Brunei's Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah at Istana Nurul Iman Palace in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei, on Saturday.
King Salman in Brunei
The Peninsula
Qatar Museums (QM) is gearing up to open a major retrospective by the cele-
brated French artist, JR. With only a couple of days
to go until the grand opening, JR - Répertoire will feature some of the key series that have made the artist famous around the world, as well as a video lounge where selected video works can be viewed.
JR is a world-renowned art-ist that combines art and engaged actions through large-scale outdoor installations, films, photographs and videos, using the streetscape as his canvas and his inspiration, which he claims as the largest art gallery in the world.
The exhibition will be on view at QM Gallery, Building 10, Katara from March 9 until May 31.
Qatar Museums to open JR retrospective
People getting ready for the opening of the retrospective by the celebrated French artist, JR, at QM Gallery in Katara.
Continued from page 1
If the sick leave is extended to more than six weeks it is con-sidered unpaid leave until he resumes work, resign or be ter-minated on health grounds. However, the sick leave must be approved by an authorised doctor and the employer.
In case of a worksite acci-dent, the law stipulates that the worker shall receive full wage during treatment or the period of six months whichever is shorter.
He is entitled to receive proper medical treatment at the cost of the employer in accord-ance with the decision of the
competent medical authority.The Ministry has asked all
companies to submit the employee a copy of the job con-tract which must be certified by the competent department at the ministry.
Workers have been advised to do the work agreed on with honesty and dedication, not to disclose trade secrets of the company and respect the laws of the country and local customs.
The Ministry has urged expatriate workers not to engage in paid or not paid work with other employers without a written approval from the original employer.
Sick leave must be approved by a doctor
Cass Art opens branch at Doha Fire StationThe Peninsula
The UK’s leading inde-pendent art supplies retailer, Cass Art, has opened a branch at the Doha Fire Station,
home to Qatar Musuems’ (QM) A r t i s t i n R e s i d e n c e programme.
The Fire Station: Artist in Residence programme, which started in September 2015, is a nine-month residency, in which artists across all disciplines receive production support, mentorships and curatorial advice, enabling them to develop their artistic talent.
Cass Art at the Fire Station will support QM’s vision of cre-ating a platform for innovative art and design, by providing art-ists with an unrivalled choice of top quality art materials from renowned heritage brands.
This initiative demonstrates
QM’s commitment to nurturing emerging talent and builds on a longer tradition of QM’s patron-age to the arts, as well as its passion for supporting the development of artistic talent in Qatar We hope that this initia-tive helps to support a vibrant local art scene and gives young
and emerging artists the neces-sary supplies to experiment, create, grow and flourish."
Philip Lawrie, Chief Com-mercial Officer at QM, said:“At QM, we are committed to our promise of inspiring an indige-nous culture of creativity and innovation, as well as nurturing young artists. This includes pro-viding artists and the general public in Qatar with world-class art supplies that will support their creative inspirations, which is also part of our long-standing commitment to enrich the lives of all those who live in and visit Qatar.”
Cass Art sells top quality art supplies from the world’s lead-ing brands like Winsor & Newton, Faber-Castell and Daler Rowney. From oil paint to watercolour, acrylic paint, pens, pencils and sketchbooks, they stock a full range of artist sup-plies that are suitable for all
ages. As with all Cass Art stores, the interior was designed by leading d e s i g n a g e n c y Pentagram.
“When we were approached by Qatar Museums about opening a Cass Art at the Fire Sta-tion, we were deeply impressed by their vision to develop art and artists in their local community and beyond,” said Mark Cass, CEO and Founder of Cass Art.
“Our ethos has always been to encour-age creativity at every level, wherever it may be, and to inspire people to discover the power of art. We look forward to helping local talent grow.”
Financial institution should obtain QCB approval
Continued from page 1The applicant should also
provide a copy of the board of directors’ decision in this regard.
The chairman or an author-ised representative should also complete and sign a notation for commercial registration form that can be obtained from the ministry’s website.
In the case of a financial institution, the applicant should obtain an approval from Qatar Central Bank.
The Ministry of Economy and Commerce stressed that in all cases, the main company and branches’ activities must conform with the purpose of the company as stated in its statute.
The new outlet.
Continued from page 1Meanwhile, Al Rayyan Municipality last year removed 737
abandoned vehicles and porta cabins.The municipality also registered 108 violations, issued 490
warnings and seven cases were referred to security agencies.About 24 boxes of imported fish unfit for human consumption
were destroyed at central market by the Health Monitoring Sec-tion at the Doha Municipality.
737 abandoned vehicles removed
Cass Art at the Fire Station will support QM’s vision of creating a platform for innovative art and design, by providing artists with an unrivalled choice of top quality art materials from renowned heritage brands.
Qatari film talents highlight Qumra’s role in opening new doors of opportunity The Peninsula
Talents based in Qatar yesterday high-lighted the role that Qumra, the industry event by the Doha Film
Institute, plays in opening new doors of opportunity for their projects, especially in facilitating networking opportunities with international film experts.
At a special session, directors and producers of projects by Qataris and those who call Qatar home, applauded the initiative for making a tangible dif-ference to their projects covering all aspects of film production — from script consultation to networking and inter-national film festival outreach.
The third edition of Qumra
has chosen 12 projects by Qatar-based talent including five feature narratives and seven shorts that are currently in development. The line-up includes three projects supported through the Insti-tute’s Qatari Film Fund.
Additionally, five films by Qatari directors were screened in the New Voices Shorts programme of Qumra, all of which were also supported by the DFI through year-round initiatives. These included: Kashta by A.J. Al Thani; I Have Been Watching You All Along by Rawda Al-Thani; Turtles Are Always Home by Rawane Nassif; RED by Kholood Mohammed Al-Ali and Our Time Is Run-ning Out by Meriem Mesraoua.
Fatma Al Remaihi, Chief Executive
Officer of the Doha Film Institute, said: “I am exceptionally delighted with the projects by our talented emerging film-makers in Qatar. These films represent the voices of our community by our com-munity. They present different perspectives – and highlight the creative evolution and growth of our filmmaking community. “In many ways, the screen-ings exemplify the Doha Film institute’s work year-round in nurturing emerging talents from Qatar and the wider region. We are setting the platform for a credi-ble, strong and sustainable regional film industry, through training and develop-ment programmes, film financing initiatives including Qatar Film Fund and DFI Grants and film exhibition platforms
of Ajyal Youth Film Festival and Qumra.”Rawda Al Thani’s short Reem
Planted a Flower is a Qumra Project; she said: “It is amazing to have this opportunity to develop my film through Qumra. The workshops and Master classes helped me have better under-standing on filmmaking.”
Reem Planted a Flower by Rawda Al Thani (Qatar) depicts a textbook exam-ple of a well-behaved schoolgirl who defies the omnipresent voice of the nar-rator to play with a dog. Another short by Rawda, I Have Been Watching You All Along was also screened in the New Voices Shorts programme at Qumra.
Mahdi Ali Ali’s Feature Narrative project under development, iPhone
Memory, presents three stories that intersect in Paris – about a Frenchman, who battles cancer while his wife wants an abortion. He said: “The support from DFI and Qumra is very important to make a film of high standards. Qumra is a rare chance to have the mentorship of such experts to help you move to the next level.”
Fahad Al Kuwari, who is making a short film Angels, Spiders and other Mis-erable Creatures, said: “It is very important for us as filmmakers to interact with experts and industry professionals. Qumra serves as a productive time spent with all colleagues as we share insights and expe-riences. Thanks to Qumra, we are now able to curate our projects in a better way.”
Mosul
AFP
Iraqi forces attacked four jihadist-held areas in Mosul yesterday, the latest push in a battle for the city’s west that has dis-
placed more than 45,000 people since it began.
Iraqi forces have recaptured several areas in west Mosul since launching the push to retake it on February 19, but their pace slowed recently amid several days of bad weather, which muddies streets and makes air support more difficult.
West Mosul is the largest urban population centre still held by the Islamic State group, followed by the city of Raqa in Syria and the town of Tal Afar, which is located between Mosul and the Syrian border.
The fall of west Mosul would effectively mark the demise of IS’s cross-border “caliphate,” which its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced from a mosque in the city in 2014, but the threat posed by the jihadists would still be far from over.
Black smoke billowed over west Mosul yesterday as Iraqi forces battled IS in a fight marked by explosions and con-tinual automatic weapons fire.
“Federal police and Rapid Response Division forces are attacking Al-Dindan and Al-Dawasa neighbourhoods,” Iraq’s Joint Operations Command (JOC) said.
Al-Dawasa includes Nineveh
governor’s headquarters and other government buildings. Mosul is capital of Nineveh prov-ince. “Counter-Terrorism Service forces are attacking Al-Sumood and Tal Al Ruman neighbourhoods, and the advance is still ongoing,” the JOC said. The Counter-Terrorism Service and Rapid Response are two special forces units that have spearheaded operations in Mosul area, while federal police are a paramilitary police unit.
The Iraqi army is also taking part in the fight for west Mosul, with the 9th Armoured Division advancing through the desert sur-rounding the city, aiming to cut if off from the IS-held town of Tal Afar, farther west.
More than 45,000 people have fled west Mosul since the
push to retake it began, while over 200,000 are currently dis-placed as a result of the battle to retake the city, which was launched on October 17, accord-ing to the International Organisation for Migration.
The IOM figures indicate the number of people who came from west Mosul to sites for the displaced from February 25, when the arrivals began, through yesterday.
More than 17,000 people arrived from west Mosul on Feb-ruary 28 alone, while over 13,000 came on March 3, according to the IOM.
On Saturday, Iraq’s minis-ter of displacement and migration publicly criticised United Nations-led efforts to aid those displaced by the west Mosul fighting, while the UN said that such assistance is the “top priority.”
“Unfortunately, there is a clear shortfall in the work of these (UN) organisations,” Jas-sem Mohammed Al-Jaff said in a statement.
The UN, which has been providing shelter, food and other assistance to Iraqis who have fled Mosul during the nearly five-month-long battle, said it is working as fast as pos-sible to help those displaced.
“The top priority for human-itarians is to make sure that there is sufficient capacity at emergency sites to deal with the number of civilians who are fleeing western Mosul,” said Lise Grande, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Iraq.
Mosul
AFP
Tens of thousands of civilians have fled offensives against the Islamic State group in
Iraq and Syria, where the jihad-ists are battling to keep what remains of their territory, the UN said yesterday.
IS overran large areas of both countries in 2014, declar-ing a “caliphate” in territory it controlled, but the jihadist group has since lost ground to Iraqi forces and faced advances from
different groups in Syria.Amid intense fighting in
recent days, the thousands of dis-placed have been seen arriving in areas outside IS control, many hungry and terrified after years under jihadist rule.
In Iraq, the offensive by US-backed Iraqi forces to retake west Mosul from IS has displaced more than 45,000 people in little more than a week, the UN migration agency said.
In neighbouring Syria, more than 26,000 people have been forced to flee fighting in the
country’s north in the same period from February 25, UN humanitarian agency OCHA said, yesterday.
Before the battle for Mosul was launched in October, a mil-lion-plus civilians were thought to still live inside Iraq’s second city, which is IS’s last major bas-tion in the country.
Iraqi forces backed by US air strikes in January retook the east-ern side of the city, which is divided by the river Tigris, before setting their sights on its smaller but more densely populated west.
Iraq forces attack four IS-held areas in Mosul
A man cries as he carries his daughter while walking from an Islamic State-controlled part of Mosul towards Iraqi special forces soldiers during a battle, yesterday.
UN says thousands flee anti-IS offensives in Iraq and Syria
Women wave Turkish national flags during a pro-government women meeting, in Istanbul, yesterday.
Women rally in favour of Erdogan
09MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017 MIDDLE EAST / AFRICA
Istanbul
Reuters
A Syrian air force pilot who bailed out as his warplane crashed on Turk-ish territory has been found by a
Turkish rescue team and is being treated at a hospital in Hatay region, a hospital spokeswoman said on yesterday.
Dogan news agency said the pilot, who crashed his plane yesterday, had been found around 40km from the wreckage.
He was first taken to a gendarmerie base and then to hospital.
The 56-year-old pilot was identified as Mehmet Sufhan by medical staff and they said he was not in critical condition despite some fractures in his spine.
Television footage showed security measures had been taken around and inside the hospital. Syrian state television quoted an army source on Saturday saying the air force had lost contact with a fighter jet on a mission near Turkish border.
Istanbul
AFP
Thousands of pro-government women filled an Istanbul arena yesterday in support of a “Yes”
vote in next month’s referendum on boosting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s powers.
Waving Turkish flags, women shouted “Of course, Yes!” ahead of the April 16 vote on constitutional changes that would give Turkey an executive presidency similar to political systems in France or the United States.
Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Devel-opment Party (AKP) is running the “Yes” campaign, saying the changes would bring political stability. The vote is widely seen as a referendum on Erdogan himself because the proposed plan could see him stay in power until 2029.
Opponents however say the changes that would grant sweeping new powers to the head of state would make parliament dysfunctional and promote a one-man model.
Pro-government supporters gath-ered at the 12,500 capacity sports complex, known as Abdi Ipekci Arena,
outside Istanbul’s ancient city walls, with campaign theme: “Yes! If women are there, democracy is there.”
Erdogan himself, together with his wife Emine, showed up for the event organised by pro-government Women and Democracy Association (KADEM), whose deputy chair is Erdogan’s younger
daughter Sumeyye Erdogan Bayraktar. “For survival of our country, it is
very important decision,” said AKP supporter Ayse Gurcan, who came to the rally from Erzurum province.
“We must make our choice in a healthy way and I believe that everyone will say ‘Yes’,” she said
Johannesburg
Reuters
The government will continue paying millions of South Africa’s most vulnerable
people social security payments on April 1, despite not signing a new deal with an existing serv-ice-provider, the minister of social development said yesterday.
The South African Social Secu-rity Agency (SASSA) is scrambling to ensure that as many as 17 mil-lion people continue to receive their money, despite concerns that retaining the existing service pro-vider is both unlawful and costly.
For millions of South Africa’s
most vulnerable, SASSA money is often the difference between an empty or a full belly.
“We will continue paying social grants beyond March 31 when the contract with the cur-rent service provider comes to an end,” Minister of Social Develop-ment Bathabile Dlamini told the media here yesterday.
“As has been the case in the past no one will go unpaid,” he added.
Dlamini said the South Afri-can Post Office’s more than 2,600 outlets will be used as one of the payment services for social secu-rity in the transition and future phases.
Millions of S Africans will be paid benefits on April 1
Syrian pilot whose plane crashed in Turkey found
Fight continues
Black smoke billowed over west Mosul yesterday as Iraqi forces battled IS in a fight marked by explosions and continual automatic weapons fire.
Federal police and Rapid Response Division forces are attacking Al-Dindan and Al-Dawasa neighbourhoods, Iraq’s Joint Operations Command said.
After triggering sound and fury over banning people from seven countries from entering the United States, and sounding peeved at the court revoking that order, US President Donald Trump has triggered another
controversy. This time he has targeted former president Barack Obama with his infamous tweeting habit. Probably, the real estate baron-turned president derives sadistic pleasure in triggering controversies with his tweets. Using intemperate language for his predecessor, Trump alleged that Obama had ordered his phone to be tapped in the month before last year’s election.
The indignant tweet sent out by Trump says: How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!
The president, just 45 days into office, claims that the wiretapping took place in his Trump Tower office and apartment building in New York, but there was “nothing found.”
Obama’s spokesperson hit back saying that the former US leader did not order any American citizen’s phone to be tapped. It is surprising that Obama himself has not come out with a statement about Trump’s claims. Understandably, Obama would have been outraged at the allegations that have come after the new US president took numerous digs at his administration and its policies, a number
of which Trump has vowed to overturn.
It is surprising though that despite making it clear where the snooping was done, Trump has not substantiated his claims with evidence. If he is so confident that his conversations were eavesdropped on at Obama’s orders, he should have, at least perfunctorily, come out with proof. In the absence of evidence, Trump’s allegations sound
contrived and seem to be a product of his mercurial temperament rather than thoughtful action.
To make things worse, the White House yesterday asked the Congress to probe if the Obama administration abused its investigative authority, as part the ongoing Congressional probe into Russia’s meddling into the US presidential elections.
Trump’s latest bundle of controversial slurs could be aimed at making the congressional probe less focused on alleged Russian misadventures by letting it divert into what Obama purportedly did against Trump.
Trump has been vacillating between the sane and the controversial for quite some time now. After triggering a series of controversies following his swearing in, his speech to the Congress came as reconciliatory. However, the Tweet against Obama put paid to any efforts at redemption.
True or not, Trump’s latest allegations have roiled the already vitriolic waters of American politics. So far, his comments and actions have led to the international community’s erosion of faith in American politics. The allegations will work to fortify that impression.
10 MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017VIEWS
E S T A B L I S H E D I N 1 9 9 6
CHAIRMANSHEIKH THANI BIN ABDULLAH AL THANI
EDITOR-IN-CHIEFDR. KHALID BIN MUBARAK AL-SHAFI
ACTING MANAGING EDITORMOHAMMED SALIM MOHAMED
Tweeting from the hip
QUOTE OF THE DAY
I regard my job ... as making sure that our economy isresilient, that we have got reserves in the tank.
Philip Hammond Britain’s Finance Minister
Trump’s allegation that Obama ordered the wiretapping of his phone adds to the chaos that US politics has become infamous for.
The election of Donald Trump was eagerly greeted by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Coming after a rocky eight years in US-Israel relations under President
Barack Obama, their recent meeting in Wash-ington, DC, was intended to signal a “reset” in relations between the two sides.
For Netanyahu, this also offered an occa-sion to move the United States away from the two-state solution and bury what was left of future prospects of Palestinian statehood. The Israeli prime minister may well have suc-ceeded in this, but his victory brings with it new problems.
Winning is not a win for NetanyahuIsrael-US relations have indeed got off to
a good start. As anticipated, the US president indicated a willingness to roll-back his coun-try’s long-standing commitment to the two-state.
With his almost casual remarks Trump seemed to have given Netanyahu enough political space to finally legitimise what the Israeli leader wrote in his 1993 book A Place Among Nations, that was meant to launch him as Likud leader and eventually prime minister. In it he envisaged Israel controlling the whole area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river, while allowing the Pal-estinians some control over their major population centres and giving them “eco-nomic peace”.
But Netanyahu’s opposition to two states does not make him a one-stater. In fact, he has at times been quite open about his vision for solving the Palestinian conflict through the creation of Palestinian “state minus”.
In many ways, this dream of his had already come true well before Trump’s elec-tion. As he wrote in 1993, the Palestinian territories are already an archipelago of semi-autonomous cities in a sea of Israeli security control. Later in his political career, Netan-yahu explained that if the Palestinians wanted to call this archipelago of semi-autonomous cities a state, have their flag and sing their anthem, then so be it.
The Israeli prime minister’s ability to real-ise his vision for the Palestinians was made possible thanks to the 1993 Oslo accords. These have underpinned most of his political career and created a system in which Israel has control over the West Bank but no responsibility for the wellbeing or even the stability of its Palestinian inhabitants.
A mix of US and European money and security assistance provides for that, and in doing so, relieved Israel of the financial and military burden of controlling the Palestinian population, along with its responsibilities under international law as an occupying power.
But maintaining this reality has depended on the semblance of a diplomatic process to ensure a modicum of stability in the Palestin-ian territories and deflect international criticism over Israeli actions.
This has also been vital in maintaining the illusion that Israel intends its control over the territories to be only temporary, despite evi-dence to the contrary.
In many ways, the political space created
Has Benjamin Netanyahu won?by Trump’s shift on the Palestinian issue and his rupturing of the “Middle East Peace Process” myth might there-fore become a problem for Netanyahu’s long-standing strategy of maintaining an ambiguity over the future of the occupied territories.
Losing the cover of the two-state solutionIt is hard to see how Palestinian
leaders would be willing to forgo sover-eignty and basic freedoms that perpetual Israeli security control would entail as preconditions to enter peace talks.
Such a vision would be at odds with Palestinian aspirations to fulfil their right to self-determination through an end to Isra-el’s occupation, and put
the Palestinian Authority in an unsus-tainable position.
Without the prospect of statehood, the PA would find it difficult to shake their image as the administrators of Isra-el’s occupation, something that would further aggravate their current crisis of domestic legitimacy at a time when President Mahmoud Abbas’ succession is feeding political and security instability.
For Israel’s relations with Arab part-ners, the waning of a viable independent Palestinian state poses more problems. The prospect of a two-state solution has acted as important cover for Israel’s backdoor normalisation of relations with Arab states — some of which do not offi-cially recognise it.
Removing the possibility of future Pal-estinian sovereignty from the table would complicate this process and frustrate Isra-el’s ability to find common ground with regional partners on issues outside its con-flict with the Palestinians, particularly on containing Iranian regional influence. It
would also be strongly resisted by neigh-bouring states, not least since they would be faced with the prospect of having to integrate or indefinitely segregate hun-dreds of thousands of Palestinians within their population, either of which would risk of further destabilisation. Losing the cover of the two-state solution could pose additional challenges for Israeli relations with the outside world, in particular Europe, whose policy of differentiating between Israel and the settlements would clash head on with a more openly annexa-tionist Israel.
Closer to home, a US shift away from the two-state solution could empower political rivals on Netanyahu’s right flank calling for the formal annexation of Palestinian territory, and those on his left warning of the dangers of the emerg-ing one state reality. It is an irony that many of these politicians started off their careers under Netanyahu.
What kind of a one-state solution?Moreover, the demise of the two-
state solution leaves a vacuum that will increasingly be filled by advocates of a one-state solution that encompasses both Israel and the Palestinian territo-ries. Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin has long advocated granting Palestini-ans full rights within a Jewish state, although in practice the emphasis on “Jewish identity” would sit difficultly with what would be a majority Pales-tinian population.
For their part, growing numbers of Palestinians are discussing equal rights within a binational state. President Trump’s apparent openness to a one-state solution will lend further weight to these voices.
Trump could, therefore, have inadvert-ently done something past US presidents have struggled to do. By effectively, though unintentionally, calling Netanyahu’s bluff, he has fed an Israeli debate on the alterna-tives to a two-state solution and the potential consequences of Israel’s current trajectory in the occupied territories.
In hindsight, Netanyahu may con-clude that he could have done with a less accommodating US president, perhaps even reminding Trump of his famous remarks on the campaign trail: “Mr Pres-ident, we can’t take it any more … we’re winning too much!”
Moreover, the demise of the two-state solution leaves a vacuum that will increasingly be filled by advocates of a one-state solution that encompasses both Israel and the Palestinian territories.
ED ITOR IAL
Mattia Toaldo & Hugh LovattAl Jazeera
This photo shows part of the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, east of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank.
11MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017 OPINION
that Kalanick’s rough-and-tumble ethos was proba-bly necessary as the company fought regulators and the taxi monopolies in one city after another. And its first-mover advantage remains powerful: Uber has nearly achieved the status of Xerox — its name sig-nifies not just a company but an activity.
Besides, companies are rarely punished by consumers for the sins of their executives. That Henry Ford was a bigot who owned an anti-Semitic newspaper didn’t much matter to buyers of Ford cars. Some years ago, the Allentown Morn-ing Call revealed that Jeff Bezos’s Amazon didn’t install air conditioners in its warehouses; instead, it kept ambulances parked outside to revive work-ers who collapsed due to heat. Amazon’s revenue kept rising. So long as Uber’s technology worked — and it did, beautifully — nobody was going to dwell on either Kalanick’s or the company’s immaturity.
But this time it feels different. It feels a little like the final scene in Ian McEwan’s comic novel, “Solar,” in which all the bad things the protagonist has done throughout the course of the book come back to bite him all at once.
It began when Kalanick joined an economic council formed to give business advice to President Donald Trump. He quickly resigned after employees and customer howled in protest. When taxi drivers at JFK Airport in New York went on an hour-long strike to protest Trump’s ban on travel from seven mostly-Muslim countries, Uber tweeted that it was dropping surge pricing at the airport, infuriating both the taxi drivers and the protesters.
The hashtag #deleteuber began trending; it’s since become a catch-all for Uber critics.
And even that spate of impressively bad news was overshadowed after a former Uber engineer, Susan J. Fowler, wrote an utterly convincing account of her experience facing sexual harass-ment, and then indifference and outright hostility when she tried to get the company to do some-thing about it.
Then came the coup de grace: the video showing Kalanick arguing with a driver who complained that his business had been hurt by Uber’s price reduc-tions. “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit,” Kalanick says. Ugh.
Do these recent black eyes have the potential to harm Uber in a way that previous problems have not? I think the answer is yes, for three reasons.
Beijing looks for edges on cooperation with Trump
On February 28, China’s top diplomatic envoy, Yang Jiechi, visited the White House and met top US officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, National Security Adviser HR McMaster and sen-
ior adviser Jared Kushner.Yang is China’s State Councillor and a longtime
key player in Sino-US ties, with former posts as for-eign minister and ambassador to the United States. A statement from the White House indicated that Yang had a brief courtesy call with President Don-ald Trump.
According to Chinese state media, the visit allowed a space for Beijing and Washington to dis-cuss areas of common interest and for China to ask for mutual respect on “core interests” — a clear sig-nal that Beijing will not walk softly on areas it considers to be sovereignty matters, such as Taiwan and tensions in the East and South China Seas.
Finding areas of common groundThe top-level exchange comes only weeks after
an ice-breaking phone call between Trump and Chi-nese leader Xi Jinping, which eased a mini-diplomatic stalemate caused by the White House’s intentional ambiguity over its adherence to the long-standing “one China” policy.
During the phone call, Trump relented on his ear-lier insistence that the “one China” policy was vulnerable and dependent on Chinese actions.
Beijing reportedly was so irate at Trump’s loose talk on Taiwan that it was prepared to freeze out high-level exchanges until he could come back - at least in principle — to the status-quo regarding cross-strait ties with Taipei.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration seemed to brush-off talk that it backed down to Chinese
pressure and Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, insisted that the “president always gets something” for a concession such as this.
Since that Xi-Trump call, though, China has been sending signals to the Trump administration that it is willing to make a deal and find areas of common ground.
Indeed, diplomatic moves have been coming quickly since that point, and there was a meeting last month between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
Moreover, Beijing announced last month that it would endeavour to suspend all imports of coal from North Korea, effective immediately, for the rest of the year.
To give a sense of the magnitude of this, in 2016, North Korea exported 22 million metric tonnes of coal to China, netting nearly $1.2bn in cash for the Kim regime. Beijing is — by far — the North’s largest export market for coal, and Pyongyang depends on China as a trading lifeline, with nearly 90 percent of its trade going through Beijing.
Trump has long railed against China’s lack of genuine effort to rein in North Korea, insisting that he will hit back on other areas, such as trade, if Bei-jing continues to obstruct Washington’s strategic interests on the Korean peninsula.
On the surface, China’s move on the coal suspen-sion might seem like a significant breakthrough with Beijing finally acquiescing to US pressure to tighten the
screws on Pyongyang, which has been consistently and incrementally improving its missile and nuclear programmes over the past few years in defiance of numerous UN Security Council sanctions.
The reality, however, is less definitive and we should be cautious before praising Beijing’s benevo-lence or Chinese efforts to “constrain” North Korea.
Compartmentalised cooperationWhile compartmentalised cooperation is likely -
and indeed prudent — the notion of a grand bargain between the US and China is doubtful for a number of reasons.
First, the range of strategic differences between Beijing and Washington is so wide-ranging and deeply ingrained, that it continues to be difficult to acknowledge and acquiesce to each other’s “core interests”.
Second, many of Washington’s most important allies and friends in the region — including Japan and South Korea - are wary of the notion that Trump might be willing to make a compromise on security interests in the region for a selection of economic sweeteners that Beijing might propose to curry favour with Washington. Indeed, it seems dubious to think that Trump might take a lighter touch on these matters and recent evidence suggests the opposite.
Last month, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Trump had a very successful summit and doubled down on their security alliance with an even firmer
“This is the first time I’ve been willing to admit that I need leadership help and I intend to get it,” wrote Travis Kalanick,
the chief executive of Uber, in an email to his staff the other day.
In that same email, which he sent out after Bloomberg published a video show-ing him berating an Uber driver, the 40-year-old CEO also said that the inci-dent reminded him that he “must fundamentally change as a leader and grow up.”
To which the only proper response is: What took you so long, bro?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Kalanick is a first-class jerk. And the com-pany he founded — and, to give him his due, built into a ride-hauling juggernaut — pretty much takes its cues from the boss.
Remember when Kalanick gave an interview to GQ magazine and said the company might as well be called “Boob-er” because he was now so desirable to women? Or how about the way the Uber staff used to mess with its chief competitor Lyft by calling for Lyft rides and then can-celing them? Or the time an Uber executive used its technology to track a Buzzfeed reporter’s ride without permission?
Peter Thiel has called Uber “the most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley,” and while he’s hardly an unbiased observer (he’s an investor in Lyft), I’ve heard plenty of other people in Silicon Valley say he same thing.
For the most part, Uber’s stumbles haven’t slowed it down. Indeed, my Bloomberg colleague Brad Stone, the author of “The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb and the New Killer Companies of Silicon Valley Are Changing the World,” told me
Uber needs more than ‘leadership help’ for its boss
A combination photo showing US President Donald Trump with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
• Even though Uber is the biggest brand, ride-hauling has become commoditized. A rider who opts for Lyft over Uber will find little difference in the service. And while Lyft remains a distant second, it’s in plenty of cities; indeed, many drivers contract with both services. So people disgusted with Uber can easily switch. “I’ve heard ‘I’m calling a Lyft’ more times in the past week than in the past six months,” says Lise Buyer, a partner with the Class V Group, a technology advi-sory firm. For its part, Lyft is trying to take advantage of the moment by raising a new round of capital.
• The election of Trump has made this an unusually heated political moment, with Americans taking sides as never before. For instance: the decision by Nordstrom to eliminate Ivanka Trump’s merchandise from its stores became instantly controversial, with some customers applauding and others threatening a boycott. (Never mind that Nordstrom says it made the move for the most uncontro-versial of reasons: the stuff wasn’t selling.) Fairly or not, Uber is now viewed as having taken several “pro-Trump” actions. In addition, sexual misconduct has become a galvanizing issue that can also cause people to shun a company. (Just ask Baylor University.) If the #deleteuber campaign gains trac-tion, it has the potential to cost Uber the urban, upscale - and heavily Democratic - riders the service depends on.
• The big surprise in Fowler’s blog post was not the sexual harassment allegations - did one really expect anything dif-ferent from a “baller” culture, as Kalanick describes life inside Uber? No, it was all the other ways that Uber’s culture is dysfunctional. She makes Uber sound like Game of Thrones — a comparison she makes explicitly. Executives openly undermining their supervisors in the hope of replacing them. That sort of thing. The result, writes Fowler, is that “nobody knew what our organizational priorities would be from one day to the next and very little got done.”
Would you want to work in a place like that? A company that combines that cutthroat culture with rampant sexual harassment is going to start having problems attracting tal-ented people.
“Information about the work environment that is seeping (or gushing) into the real world now will undoubtedly have some impact” on job candidates, Buyer told me. “There are plenty of other well-funded, super-interesting places to work. And hey, if your interest is automotive, Lyft is just a few blocks away.”
It’s pretty obvious what needs to happen. Kalanick doesn’t just need “leadership help”; he needs to bring in an actual leader, someone who knows how to run the sizeable company that Uber has become. He can talk all he wants about needing to grow up, but he’s run out of time, and out of chances.
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OFFICETEL: 4455 7741 / 767FAX: +974 4455 7758
MANAGING EDITORTEL: 4462 7505
DEPUTY MANAGING EDITORTEL: 4455 7769
LOCAL NEWS SECTION TEL: 4455 7743
BUSINESS NEWS SECTION TEL: 4462 7535
SPORT NEWS SECTION TEL: 4455 7745
ONLINE SECTION TEL: 4462 [email protected]
PUBLIC RELATIONSTEL: 4455 [email protected]
ADVERTISING DEPARTMENTTEL: 4455 7837 / 780FAX: 4455 7870 [email protected]
CLASSIFIED DEPARTMENTTEL: 4455 [email protected]
SUBSCRIPTION & DISTRIBUTIONTEL: 4455 7809 / 839FAX: [email protected]
D-RING ROADPOST BOX: 3488DOHA - [email protected]
All thoughts and views expressed in these columns are those of the writers, not of the newspaper.
All correspondence regarding Views and Opinion pages should be mailed to the [email protected]
commitment to the Senkaku islands — claimed by China as the Diaoyu Islands — in the East China Sea.
Washington also elevated its extended deterrence guarantees to Japan through explicit mention of its willingness to use nuclear weap-ons to defend Japan if needed.
Likewise, the Trump adminis-tration has made strong commitments to South Korea and remains committed to deploying the Terminal High Altitude Air Defence (THAAD) anti-missile sys-tem there by the end of this year.
The THAAD commitment con-tinues despite Chinese anger over the deployment, which it sees as antithetical to its security interests in the region.
Trump has alarmed Beijing through his recent announcement of a significant 10 percent increase in military spending and his mainte-nance of the Obama administration’s approach to freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea.
This will probably lead to a sce-nario over the coming months in which Beijing looks to play at the edges with Washington on a number of key issues — including North Korea and trade — but stand unwaveringly on other issues where it will not compromise, such as the territorial disputes. This makes an appreciable improve-ment of Sino-US ties doubtful in the near term.
The writer is the director of the Coun-cil on International Policy and is a fellow on East Asia for the EastWest Institute.
J Berkshire MillerAl Jazeera
While compartmentalised cooperation [between the US and China] is likely — and indeed prudent — the notion of a grand bargain between the US and China is doubtful for a number of reasons.
Joe NoceraBloomberg
12 MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017ASIA
Abe to run for another termTokyo
AP
Japan's ruling party approved a change in party rules yesterday that could pave the way for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to become the country's longest-serving leader in the post-
World War II era.It is a remarkable turnaround for Abe,
who lasted only a year during an earlier stint as prime minister, and in a country that had six prime ministers in the six years before Abe returned to office in December 2012.
Analysts say that Japan's 62-year-old leader learned from his first term in office, when he focused on divisive issues such as constitutional revision and patriotic education that contributed to his early downfall. This time, he has made an expansionary economic policy with a catchy name, "Abenomics," front and cen-tre at election time. "The interesting thing is that formerly Abe did not seem to be interested in economic policy," said Yu Uchiyama, a professor of politics at Tokyo University. He said that Abe, a conserva-tive, had been more interested in things like constitutional change. "But right after
he got power for the second time, he did not put forth such a right-wing agenda. Instead he introduced and emphasized the economic issue."
That doesn't mean Abe has given up on goals such as revising the constitution, which was drafted by a US-led occupa-tion force after World War II. However, Abe needs to win over a reluctant public — any amendment requires approval by two-thirds of the legislature and a national referendum — and that will take time.
"The constitution represents the shape of our country, and it should describe Japan's ideal future," Abe told the annual
convention of his Liberal Democratic Party. He said the LDP will take the lead in promoting discussion over details of a revision.
The party yesterday rubber stamped a decision by its leaders last fall to allow the head of the party to run for a third 3-year term, rather than be limited to two. In Japan's parliamentary system, the rul-ing party leader generally becomes the prime minister. The change would allow Abe to stay until 2021, if he can maintain the support of his party and voters, rather than step down in September 2018.
Abe, now in his fifth year in office, is Japan's sixth longest serving prime min-ister since 1945. The record-holder is Eisaku Sato, who led the country for more than seven years from 1964 to 1972. He is also the brother of Abe's grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who was prime minister from 1957 to 1960. If Abe can hold on, he would surpass Sato in August 2020.
Uchiyama said that Abe has main-tained his hold on power in part by taking advantage of electoral and administra-tive reforms that strengthened the prime minister's control of both his party and the bureaucracy.
Jeff Kingston, a Japan expert at Tem-ple University's Japan campus in Tokyo, called Abe the most powerful prime min-ister in the postwar era. "There has been an incredible con-centration and centralisation of power in the prime minister's office under Abe, unlike his predecessors, where power was widely distributed and the prime minister was one among many," he said. Still, given public opinion, King-ston gave Abe only a 50-50 chance of achieving constitu-tional revision: "Polls suggest he has got a long battle to get the public with him."
Japan's Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko bid farewell as they depart from the Phu Bai airport in the central city of Hue in Vietnam for Thailand, ending their six-day long royal visit in the Southeast communist country, yesterday.
Japan's Emperor pays respects to Thailand's late kingBangkok
AP
Japanese Emperor Akihito paid his respects to the late Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej yesterday,
arriving in Bangkok following a weeklong trip to Vietnam aimed at winning support against Chinese expansionism.
The monarchies — two of a handful remaining in Asia — have maintained close ties. Bhumibol first visited Japan in 1963, touching off a decades-long friendship with numerous visits back and forth, most recently a visit by Akihito to Thailand in 2006.
Akihito, accompanied by his wife, Empress Michiko, laid wreathes and signed a condolence book at the Grand Palace in Bang-kok. He later met with King Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebaya-varangkun, who ascended the throne after the death of his widely revered father in October.
The emperor's two-day visit to Bangkok comes as Thailand tilts closer to China, Japan's main rival in East Asia. Thailand and Japan have traditionally enjoyed close relations, unburdened by the leg-acy of World War II that has complicated Japan's relations with other Asian countries.
After a brief struggle, Thailand formally became Japan's ally through much of the war, suffering little of the destruction wrought on
others like China, Myanmar and the Philippines.
But following a 2014 coup, Thailand's Western allies cut back on assistance, pushing the coun-try's ruling military junta closer to Beijing.
"The visit is symbolic of Japan's interest in boosting Japanese-Thai relations at a time when China seems to enjoy favour in Bangkok," said Paul Chambers, research director at the Institute of South-east Asian Affairs.
China frightens many in South-east Asia with expansionist policies in the South China Sea. But China's claims do not clash with Thai ter-ritorial waters, paving the way for friendly relations.
The 83-year-old emperor is Japan's constitutional head of state, a role symbolic rather than politi-cal. However, his trips often serve to bolster relations with nations friendly to Tokyo.
The emperor's itinerary has been packed with visits across Southeast Asia, a move aimed at shoring up a regional bulwark against China.
Vietnam, which has sparred with China over territorial waters, rolled out the red carpet for Akihi-to's visit last week. In January 2016, the Japanese imperial family vis-ited the Philippines, which also has disputes with China, paying its respects at a World War II memorial.
Japan's Prime Minister and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party President Shinzo Abe (centre) and his party members take Banzai cheers at the end of their annual convention in Tokyo yesterday.
Manila
AFP
One person was killed and 41 injured yesterday when a powerful after-
shock hit a southern Philippine city still recovering from a quake last month, authorities said.
The 5.9-magnitude quake struck the southern city of Suri-gao and surrounding areas, causing two houses and several walls to collapse, government seismologists and civil defence officers said. A 65-year-old woman died of a heart attack while 41 people were treated for injuries mostly caused by falling objects, civil defence officials said. The quake also knocked out power for several hours in the city of 152,000 people.
It was just one of over a hun-dred aftershocks to hit Surigao City on Mindanao island since a
6.5-magnitude quake on Febru-ary 10 left eight dead and over 250 injured.
Its epicentre was outside Surigao City in the same area as
the epicentre of last month's tremor, the government seismol-ogy office said.
The Philippines lies on the so-called Ring of Fire, a vast
Pacific Ocean region where many of the world's earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur.
Before the February 10 quake, the last lethal one to hit
the country was a 7.1-magnitude tremor that left over 220 people dead and destroyed historic churches when it struck the cen-tral islands in October 2013.
Powerful aftershock hits quake-stricken Philippine city
Philippine marines find remains of beheaded German hostageManila
AP
Philippine troops have found the remains of a German hostage who
was beheaded by Abu Sayyaf militants in the country's south after a ransom dead-line lapsed, officials said yesterday.
Marines dug up the head and body of Juergen Gustav Kantner late Saturday in the mountainous hinterlands of Indanan town in Sulu province, where the ransom-seeking
militants are holding at least 31 other foreign and Filipino hos-tages, said regional military commander Maj. Gen. Carlito Galvez Jr.
The 70-year-old Kantner was seized from his yacht, Rockall, with his female Ger-man companion off Malaysia's Sabah state in November. Kantner's companion was fatally shot on the yacht, which was later found in the southern Philippines. The cou-ple had survived a kidnapping ordeal off Somalia in 2008.
"Once again, the
command is sending its deep regrets to the family for not being able to rescue Kantner on time," Galvez said, and repeated a pledge to rescue other hostages and crush the Abu Sayyaf. The Abu Sayyaf circulated a video of the beheading online.
President Rodrigo Duterte apologised to Germany and Kantner's family after gov-ernment forces failed to rescue him in his nearly four months of captivity in Sulu, a poor Muslim province 950km south of Manila.
A house is seen partially damaged after an earthquake struck Surigao City in the southern island of Mindanao yesterday. RIGHT: Patients from the Surigao Medical Center sit outside after being evacuated from the building following the earthquake.
TOKYO: A rescue hel-icopter carrying nine people crashed in snow-covered mountains in central Japan during a training flight yes-terday, leaving at least three people dead and four missing.
Nagano prefectural police said three men pulled from the crash site were airlifted to nearby hospitals but pronounced dead, and two others found later were unconscious. Police said they believed the remaining four were still trapped underneath the debris from the helicopter.
TV footage showed the mangled aircraft sit-ting belly-up in the snow-covered forest on the side of Mount Hachi-buse, about 250km northwest of Tokyo.
Police said the search effort, hampered by deep snow, was sus-pended for the night and would resume today morning. The cause of the crash was under investigation. Police said the helicopter, carrying seven firefighters, an engineer and the pilot, lost contact during mountain rescue train-i n g y e s t e r d a y afternoon.
3 dead in Japan as helicopter crashes
Longer term
The party yesterday rubber stamped a decision by its leaders last fall to allow the head of the party to run for a third 3-year term.
The change would allow Abe to stay until 2021, rather than step down in September 2018.
13MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017 ASIA
KABUL: At least five members of the Afghan security forces were killed yesterday when their checkpoint came under an insurgent attack in northeastern Kunduz province, an Afghan offi-cial said.
Gen. Abdul Hamid Hamid, provincial police chief in Kunduz, said a large group of Taliban fighters attacked the post near the city of Kunduz.
Meanwhile, 18 insur-gents were killed by airstrikes in the Imam Sahib district of Kunduz province, according to a statement released by the Interior Ministry. Three others were wounded while five vehicles and an ammu-nition stockpile were destroyed, the statement added.
"The key terrorists killed in the operation were involved in plan-ning and implementing several terror attacks in Kunduz province," said the statement.
ISLAMABAD: Spending spree in a few sectors has pushed up the funds utili-sation ratio of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province government in Pakistan to 36 per cent for the first six months of the fiscal year 2016-17.
Figures show that the government depart-ments had managed to utilise about 36 per cent of the total allocation in 36 sectors during the first six months of the current fiscal against 29 per cent in the corresponding period of the fiscal year 2015-16.
Officials in the Plan-ning and Development (P and D) Department, which has been strug-gling with low utilisation of development funds during the first three years of the PTI-led gov-ernment, view the spending trajectory as optimistic.
Five policemen dead in Afghan Taliban attack
Utilisation of funds in KP goes up
Pakistan to toughen university hiring rulesIslamabad
Internews
The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has directed all pub-lic and private sector universities to ensure
the implementation of the new qualification criteria for the appointment of lecturers and assistant professors.
Under the new criteria, the minimum qualification for the appointment of a lecturer would be an MPhil, MS or an equiva-lent degree or a master’s degree from a foreign university.
For the hiring of an assist-ant professor, the candidate should be a PhD degree holder. The universities have been given one year — up to January 2018 — to ensure the recruitment of the PhD degree holders as assistant professors. For the
implementation of the new qualification for lecturers, the deadline is June 30, 2017.
In a letter dated January 26,
which was recently circulated to the universities, the HEC said those institutions which were yet to raise the qualifications for the appointment of lecturers should ensure the implementa-tion of the commission’s decision by June 30. “The review of statistics of PhD faculty and scholars, especially in remote institutions and districts or less-developed areas, be submitted to the commission for a review and decision,” the letter added.
In 2012, the HEC decided to raise the qualifications of lec-tures and assistant professors and fixed Jan 1, 2015, as the deadline for the appointment of lecturers with the new criteria and Jan 1, 2016, for the appoint-ment of assistant professors.
However, sources said a large number of universities could not implement the decision.
Seoul to up reward to N Korean defectors Seoul
AFP
South Korea will award up to 1bn ($860,000) to defectors from the North
with classified information about the reclusive state, reports said yesterday.
The government currently offers up to $217,000 to defec-tors from the North with sensitive information but this would be the first increase in reward money in two decades.
The rewards would go to "people who provide intelli-gence and knowledge that can enhance South Korea's secu-rity," Yonhap news agency reported.
The sums paid would be determined on the basis of the
importance of the intelligence, Yonhap said.
The cash incentive is aimed at encouraging more members of the North's elite to flee to the South, it added.
"One of the biggest reasons why North Koreans are hesi-tant about defecting is because they are fearful of [how they will make a living] after they come to South Korea," Yonhap cited a ministry official as saying.
High profile defectors have served as a vital source of intel-ligence about the reclusive Pyongyang government over the years.
In August 2016, North Korea's former deputy ambas-sador to Britain Thae Yong-Ho became one of the highest-ranking defectors.
Members of the media wait outside the North Korean embassy in Kuala Lumpur yesterday. North Korea's embassy in Kuala Lumpur has become ground zero for a high-profile diplomatic spat with Malaysia over the murder of Kim Jong-Nam, providing a rare glimpse into the reclusive regime.
Ground zero
Malaysia arrests 7 for suspected links to militantsKuala Lumpur Reuters
Malaysia has arrested six foreigners and one Malaysian for suspected
links to militant groups includ-ing Islamic State, the police chief said yesterday.
The Southeast Asian nation has been on high alert since sui-cide bombers and gunmen
linked to Islamic State launched multiple attacks in Jakarta, the capital of neighbouring Indone-sia, in January 2016.
A grenade attack on a bar on the outskirts of the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, in June last year wounded eight people. Islamic State claimed responsi-bility for the attacks, the first of such attacks on Malaysian soil.
Malaysia has arrested
hundreds over the last few years for suspected links to militant groups.
In the latest arrests made between February 21 and Feb-ruary 26, one Malaysian and one Indonesian were detained for planning to launch a large-scale car bomb attack using a "vehi-cle borne improvised explosive device," before leaving to join IS in Syria, Inspector-General of
Police Khalid Abu Bakar said in a statement.
The two were part of an Islamic State cell that received instructions from Muhammad Wanndy Muhammad Jedi — a known Malaysian IS fighter in Syria.
One East Asian, with a fake student visa, had connections to an East Asian militant group that sends its members to Malaysia
before heading to Syria to join Islamic State, Khalid said.
Four Yemenis arrested were suspected of being part of a Yemeni insurgent group. They were also part of a syndicate forging travel documents.
Police seized multiple inter-national passports and 270,000 ringgit ($60,650) in cash in different currencies from the four.
A flying display comprised of PAC CT-4 (left) and vintage CA-25 Winjeel (right) trainer aircraft from the Royal Australian Air Force Museum fly in formation during the Australian International Airshow in Melbourne yesterday. The annual event sees 180,000 visitors over the three-day public event held at the Avalon Airfield some 80km south-west of Melbourne.
Australian International AirshowJakarta governor race to be decided in AprilJakarta
AFP
The race for governor of Jakarta will be decided in a run-off, election
authorities said, after incum-bent Basuki Tjahaja Purnama failed to cross the 50 percent threshold.
Purnama, who is on trial for blasphemy, topped the first round with 43 percent and will go head-to-head with Anies Baswedan who came second with 40 percent.
Stakes in the vote have been raised by allegations that Purnama — the city's first non-Muslim governor for half a century and its first ethnic Chinese leader — insulted the
Holy Quran. The claims drew hundreds of thousands of con-servative Muslims onto the streets of Jakarta in major pro-tests last year, but the case has been criticised as unfair and politically motivated.
Basuki Tjahaja Purnama will face former education minister Baswedan on April 19.
Jakarta election commis-sion head Sumarno, who goes by one name, said a run-off would be held because no candidate "reached more than 50 percent of votes".
Agus Yudhoyono, the son of the former president, trailed the first round with just 17 percent and must now drop out.
Indonesia's Minister of Foreign Affairs Retno Marsudi (right) talks with her Australian counterpart Julie Bishop during a meeting on the sidelines of the India Ocean Rim Association (IORA) meetings in Jakarta yesterday. The IORA will be celebrating its 20th anniversary this month. Indonesia, the current Chair of IORA, will host the first ever IORA Leaders' Summit tomorrow in Jakarta.
India Ocean Rim Association meeting
New regulations
Under the new criteria, the minimum qualification for the appointment of a lecturer would be an MPhil, MS or an equivalent degree or a master’s degree from a foreign university.
For the hiring of an assistant professor, the candidate should be a PhD degree holder.
14 MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017ASIA
Participants swimming during the annual two-mile sea swimming competition in Colombo, yesterday.
Sea swimming
New Delhi
IANS
A Sikh man was injured when a masked gunman opened fire at him in front of his house in
Washington after telling him "Go back to your own country."
The victim, who was hit in the arm, survived the Friday night attack, the third shooting of an Indian national in the last 10 days in the US. The attacks have claimed two lives and shocked the nation.
The US embassy here yes-terday condemned the attack on a Sikh man who was injured in firing by a gunman in Washington.
"Saddened by the shooting in Washington. Wishes for quick and full recovery. As @POTUS (President of the US) said, we condemn 'hate and evil in all its forms'," MaryKay Loss Carlson, Chargé d'Affaires at US Embassy, tweeted.
The 39-year-old Sikh, who has not been identified by name, was working on his car in front of his house in Kent city of Washington state when the gun-man described as white, who had his face partially covered, opened fire at him, police said.
"We're early on in our
investigation," the Seattle Times quoted Kent Police chief Ken Thomas as saying on Saturday morning. "We are treating this as a very serious incident."
According to KING5 TV, the incident was being investigated as a possible hate crime and police had reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for help.
In the recent spate of attacks, Harnish Patel of Lan-caster in South Carolina, was killed on Thursday, and Srini-vas Kuchibhotla was murdered on February 22 in Olathe, Kan-sas. Another Indian, Alok Madasani, who was injured in the Olathe attack, survived.
Satwinder Kaur, a candidate
for Kent City Council, said on Facebook that the latest victim "wishes to remain anonymous at this time. So as a community we should respect that". She said Kent Mayor Suzette Cooke has reached out to him.
"This incident is such a big deal because hate crimes to this extent do not happen in our community," Kaur said. Sikh community leader Jasmit Singh said that the 39-year-old was released from the hospital.
"He is just very shaken up, both him and his family," Singh said. "We're all kind of at a loss in terms of what's going on right now. This is just bringing it home. The climate of hate that has been created doesn't distin-guish between anyone."
According to Singh, Sikh men in area around Seattle have experienced "a kind of preju-dice, a kind of xenophobia that is nothing that we've seen in the recent past".
Before the Kent attack, the Sikh Coalition had released an advisory asking the community members to report instances of people "saying hateful things about your Sikh identity".
In the aftermath of the Kan-sas attack, the coalition said: "We should not wait until some-one gets hurt or killed to report hate incidents."
China's Prime Minister Li Keqiang speaking at the opening session of the National People's Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, yesterday.
Beijing
AFP
China will firmly oppose Taiwan "separatism", Pre-mier Li Keqiang declared
yesterday, following tension with US President Donald Trump over the island, and said Hong Kong independence moves would "lead nowhere".
"We will resolutely oppose and contain separatist activities for Taiwan independence," Li said in a speech opening the annual session of China's rubber-stamp National People's Congress.
"We will never tolerate any activity, in any form or name, which attempts to separate Tai-
wan from the motherland."Trump raised eyebrows fol-
lowing his November election victory with a protocol-busting telephone conversation with Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen. He later threw doubt on the "One China" policy -- a tacit acknowledgement of China's claim to the self-ruled island -- suggesting that the decades-old diplomatic formulation was up for negotiation, which drew pro-tests from China.
Li, however, extended the usual cautious olive branch across the Taiwan Strait, saying China would continue efforts to increase linkages with the island, which have included
rising cross-strait investment, daily direct flights and increased tourism between the two territories.
"People on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should keep in mind the greater interests of the nation", and work towards the "reunification of China".
In Hong Kong, fears have grown that Beijing is increas-ingly interfering in the governance of the semi-auton-omous financial hub, sparking calls by some activists for self-determination or even independence.
Such calls have riled Beijing, and Li shut down any hope of Hong Kong independence.
Dhaka
AFP
Bangladesh yesterday outlawed a group which claims links to Al Qaeda
and is blamed for the machete murders of nearly a dozen atheist bloggers, foreigners and rights activists.
"The government thinks the activities of Ansar al Islam, a militant group and organisation, is detrimental to the country's peace and order," the home ministry said in a statement.
"The organisation is banned in Bangladesh as its activities are considered a threat to public security."
The group, which claims to be a Bangladesh branch of Al Qaeda in the Indian Sub-continent, took credit through social media for a spate of gruesome murders that sparked a fierce security crackdown on extremists.
In February 2015 the group claimed responsibility for the stabbing murder of Avijit Roy, an American athe-ist author of Bangladeshi origin, outside a book fair in Dhaka. Last April the group butchered two leading gay rights activists at an apart-ment in the capital.
Kathmandu
IANS
Three Indians were arrested, in two separate incidents, with a huge
cache of drugs in Nepal's Het-auda city yesterday, police said. The cache of hashish and mar-ijuana are said to be valued millions in market.
Police in Hetauda, while conducting a regular security check up yesterday, discovered 125 kg hashish, packed in 217 plastic packets, in the roof of an Indian-registered vehicle. The vehicle's occupants, Merja Shah and Mithlesh Sahani, both Indian nationals, were arrested.
Both the Indian nationals took approval to visit Nepal for
three days but were returning within a day after loading the hashish. Superintendent of Police Basanta Kumar Lama said they were tipped off about the consignment, which was loaded on the vehicle in Dhad-ing district, close to the capital, and reached Hetauda to its way to India's Raxaul.
"The discovered hashish is valued at (Indian) Rs3.1m in market," said Lama.
In the other incident, 62 kg of marijuana was found in an another Indian truck also head-ing back to Raxaul and driver Manoj Kumar Yadav arrested. Yadav, in his statement to police, has admitted of loading the mar-ijuana on the way to Hetauda to smuggle it into India.
Colombo
AFP
Sri Lankan President Maithri-pala Sirisena has rejected a fresh appeal from the
United Nations to allow interna-tional judges to investigate alleged war-era atrocities, vow-ing to not prosecute soldiers.
"I am not going to allow
non-governmental organisations to dictate how to run my government.
I will not listen to their calls to prosecute my troops," the pres-ident said in remarks distributed by his office yesterday.
The UN on Friday criticised Sri Lanka's "worryingly slow" progress in addressing its war-time past, urging the government
to adopt laws allowing for spe-cial hybrid courts to try war criminals.
In his first remarks since the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva handed down a new scorecard on Sri Lanka, Sirisena rebuffed calls for international judges to probe abuses commit-ted during the island's 37-year civil war.
Sri Lanka has resisted calls to establish a special court to investigate allegations that gov-ernment forces killed up to 40,000 Tamil civilians in the final months of fighting, which ended in May 2009. Sirisena, a member of the majority Sinhalese community, received the support of the Tamil minority after prom-ising accountability for excesses
carried out by the largely Sin-halese military. He had agreed to a UN Human Rights Council res-olution in October 2015 which called for special tribunals and reparations for victims and gave Sri Lanka 18 months to establish credible investigations.
But the deadline lapsed with-out those commitments being met.
Srinagar
AFP
A police officer and two sus-pected militants were killed in Kashmir during
a fierce 15-hour gunfight over-night, an official said yesterday, triggering clashes between pro-testers and government forces.
The firefight erupted late Saturday when Indian soldiers and counter-insurgency police, acting on a tip-off, surrounded a home believed to be occupied by militants in southern Nazneenpora village.
S o l d i e r s d e t o n a t e d
explosives during the siege, which stretched into the early hours as both sides exchanged heavy gunfire.
"Two militants were killed in the encounter. We also lost a boy of SOG," director general of police S P Vaid said, referring to the slain officer from the Special Operations Group.
A Major was also critically wounded in the battle, an army officer said, speaking on condi-tion of anonymity as he was not authorised to talk to the press.
Defying orders to stay indoors as the skirmish esca-lated, hundreds of villagers
descended on the scene, throw-ing rocks at government forces in a bid to aid the besieged mil-itants, a police officer said.
The clashes resumed yester-day as protesters chanting pro-freedom slogans descended near the scene of the firefight, said the officer who asked to remain anonymous.
Police and the Indian army routinely complain that civilians assist militants during clashes with armed forces, a frequent occurrence in the divided and volatile state.
For decades rebel groups have fought the roughly
500,000 Indian troops deployed in the region, demanding inde-pendence or a merger with Pakistan for the majority Mus-lim region.
Kashmir has been split between India and Pakistan since the end of British rule in 1947. Both claim the territory in its entirety. The fighting has left tens of thousands, mostly civil-ians, dead.
A house used up by the mil-itants as a fortified bunker was demolished by the security forces with improvised explo-sive devices (IEDs), the police said.
Sri Lanka rejects UN call for foreign judges in war probe
Sikh man wounded in latest US shooting
China rules out Taiwan & HK independence
Three Indians arrested in Nepal with drugs
Bangladesh bans
group behind
blogger murders
3 dead during 15-hour gunfight in Kashmir
Smoke billows from the residential house in which suspected militants were holed up during a gunfight, in Srinagar, yesterday.
Probe begins
The US embassy in New Delhi condemned the attack on a Sikh man who was injured in firing by a gunman in Washington.
"We're early on in our investigation. We are treating this as a very serious incident." the Kent Police chief Ken Thomas said.
15MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017 EUROPE
Scandal
The French conservative presidential candidate told a crowd of tens of thousands near the Eiffel Tower that he had made a mistake by employing his wife Penelope as his parliamentary assistant.
Thousands of people take part in a street carnival in Santa Cruz de Tenerife on the Spanish Canary island of Tenerife, Spain, yesterday. The over a month long carnival on the Canary Islands sees orchestras playing Caribbean and Brazilian rhythms throughout the festivities that range from elections for the Carnival Queen, satirical street bands and dance groups to performances on the streets.
Street carnival
Paris
AFP
Un d e r - p r e s s u r e French conserva-tive Francois Fillon apologised to his supporters yester-
day for the fake jobs scandal that threatens to sink his presiden-tial bid but said he was sure he would be proved innocent.
In a speech closely watched for signs he could abandon his campaign, Fillon told a crowd of tens of thousands near the Eiffel Tower that he had made a “mistake” by employing his wife Penelope as his parliamen-tary assistant.
Fillon, who is to be charged this month over claims he paid British-born Penelope and their children nearly €900,000 ($950,000) of public funds for doing little work, said he was convinced he would eventually be found not guilty.
“The problem is that by then it will be too late, the election will have been skewed,” 63-year-old Fillon said, as Brit-ish-born Penelope watched him from the stage.
Some senior lawmakers in his Republicans party have called for Fillon to be replaced immediately, with polls cur-rently suggesting he would be eliminated in the first round of
the election on April 23.Polls show far-right leader
Marine Le Pen and 39-year-old centrist Emmanuel Macron would progress to the runoff on May 7.
Former prime minister Alain Juppe, 71, has indicated to a sec-tion of media through his entourage that he could be ready to replace Fillon as the rightwing candidate. The Republicans party leadership is to meet today in the evening.
Addressing his words to them at the rally, he said: “I have examined my conscience, now it is time for you to examine yours.”
Fillon is to appear live on French television today. His team had earlier cancelled the interview before saying it would go ahead after all.
The danger for the conserv-atives is that an election they once expected to win easily could slip away if Fillon remains in place.
Fillon had been leading the race until Le Canard Enchaine newspaper made the fake jobs allegations in mid-January. His support has slipped considera-bly since then.
Fillon told the crowd, who were drenched by rain at one point, that he had been “attacked by everyone”.
But he admitted he bore some responsibility if his cam-paign “was confronted by such formidable obstacles”.
He apologised to his sup-porters, saying that among the judicial investigation “you have been forgotten”.
French lawmakers are allowed to employ family mem-bers, but investigators are looking into what work Pene-lope did after it was claimed she did not have a pass for the National Assembly building.
Francois Fillon has claimed the accusations are politically motivated, even suggesting he believes the ruling Socialist gov-ernment is behind the investigation.
Pressure grew on Fillon after police had raided his country manor house near Le Mans on Friday. His Paris apartment was
searched on Thursday.Fillon was a surprise winner
of the conservative nominating contest in November, campaign-ing as a “Mr Clean” unsullied by his opponents’ legal difficulties and pledging to slash 500,000 civil servants’ jobs.
But the claims about his expenses have led to barbs that his moral authority has been undermined. Fillon is to meet investigating magistrates on March 15 and be charged. His wife is also to face charges.
His foreign affairs point man and spokesman have quit his campaign and the leader of the small centrist UDI party said it was withdrawing its backing.
Juppe, who is more centrist than Fillon, was given a sus-pended jail sentence in 2004 over a party funding scandal.
He lost the primary to Fillon, but a poll on Friday showed he would vault into the lead if he stood.
The financial accusations have added to an already unpre-
dictable race in the country. Le Pen, 48, campaigning on
an anti-immigration and anti-EU platform, has sought to capital-ise on the anti-establishment sentiment that propelled US Pres-ident Donald Trump to power and led to Britain’s vote to leave the European Union.
Polls currently show however that National Front leader Le Pen will be beaten in the second round by either the fast-rising Macron or the conservative candidate
French presidential candidate for the Les Republicains party Francois Fillon (centre), flanked by French lawmaker Luc Chatel (right), addressing a rally under the rain at the place du Trocadero, in Paris, yesterday.
Fillon admits errors; says he is innocent
Paris
Agencies
The wife of scandal-hit French conservative pres-idential candidate Francois
Fillon broke her silence yester-day over the “fake jobs” scandal that threatens to engulf his bid for power.
In her first interview since the allegations of nearly €900,000 ($950,000) in pay, Penelope Fillon (pictured) told Le Journal du Dimanche she had carried out “a lot of different tasks” for her husband during his lengthy political career.
She had also urged him to “keep going to the end” but said only he could make the decision to stay in the race.
Fillon, who turned 63 on Sat-urday, was once the frontrunner
in an election in which Marine Le Pen is attempting to steer the far-right into power in a major European country.
But Fillon’s support plum-meted after the financial claims were made and he is now poll-ing third behind Le Pen and 39-year-old centrist Emmanuel Macron.
“He needed someone to do a lot of different tasks, and if it wasn’t for me, he would have paid someone to do it, so we decided it would be me,” Pene-lope told the paper.
The former prime minister has claimed the accusations are politically motivated, even sug-gesting he believes the ruling Socialist government is behind the investigation.
He told supporters on Satur-day that their opponents were
trying to “intimidate” them.The danger for the conserv-
ative Republicans party is that an election that they once expected to win handily could slip away if Fillon remains their
candidate.Polls currently show he could
be eliminated in the first round of the two-stage contest on April 23, leaving Le Pen and Macron to contest the May 7 runoff.
The Republicans’ decision-making body is to meet today—a day earlier than planned—“to evaluate the situation”, the party said Saturday.
Pressure grew on Fillon after it emerged police had raided his country manor house near Le Mans on Friday looking for evi-dence. His Paris apartment was searched on Thursday.
With some members of his party urging him to drop out, Sunday’s rally on the Trocadero plaza opposite the Eiffel Tower—heavy rain is forecast—will be a test of how much confidence remains.
On Wednesday, Fillon revealed he would meet inves-tigating magistrates on March 15 and be charged. His wife is also to face charges.
Meanwhile, a senior politi-cian from Fillon’s conservative camp said yesterday that several party heavyweights were about to issue a statement calling for prime minister Alain Juppe to replace him.
“In the coming hours, we will propose an initiative,” Chris-tian Estrosi, a close ally of former President Nicolas Sarkozy, told BFM TV, adding that it would be before today morning.
“We do not have the time to debate who has the most tal-ent. I don’t think any of the forty-somethings in our polit-ical movement, who have the talent, can take on the role to
bring us together,” he saidHe said the initiative would
come in the form of a statement led by himself and other party heavyweights including Xavier Bertrand and Valerie Pecresse.
“The easiest thing obviously ... is the person who came sec-ond in the primaries and that quite simply is Alain Juppe,” he said.
Jean-Christophe Lagarde, the head of the centre-right UDI party, which has an alliance with the Republicans, warned on Europe 1 radio that sticking with Fillon would lead to “certain fail-ure” and called for Juppe to step in.
“In the Olympics when the gold medal winner is disquali-fied then it’s the silver medal holder that takes over,” Lagarde said.
Brussels
Reuters
The leader of centre-right bloc in the European Par-liament threatened
yesterday to expel a Polish poli-tician who has been nominated by Warsaw to replace fellow-Pole Donald Tusk as chair of European Union summit meetings.
In a sign of mounting frus-tration among fellow Europeans with the right-wing government in Warsaw, Manfred Weber said the conservative EPP, the big-gest group in EU legislature, would expel Jacek Saryusz-Wol-ski if he did not drop the bid to replace Tusk, which many dip-lomats see as farcical.
EU leaders are expected to give Tusk, a former Polish prime minister from the centre-right Civic Platform (PO), a second 30-month term as president of their European Council during a summit in Brussels on Thursday.
Until Saturday, no other
candidate had emerged. By tra-dition any challenger would be expected to be a sitting or recently retired government leader. All members except Poland have backed Tusk.
However, the current War-saw government run by Tusk’s right-wing opponents, the Law and Justice party (PiS) headed by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has insisted Tusk should not be reappointed. On Saturday, it nominated Saryusz-Wolski, a PO lawmaker who sits in the European Parliament in Weber’s EPP group.
Weber, an ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said on Sunday that the EPP contin-ued to back Tusk, also an EPP member, and said it would expel Saryusz-Wolski if he did not drop out.
“Donald Tusk ... enjoys unanimous support from the entire EPP party family,” Weber said in a statement. “It is symp-tomatic that the Polish government once again pursues
only a Polish domestic policy agenda and has completely abandoned any constructive ambition at European level. Every further attack on Donald Tusk will only jeopardise Polish interests in Europe.”
Under PiS, Poland, by far the biggest ex-Communist country in the EU, has been criticised by Brussels for attempting to curb the powers of the constitutional court and the media.
Diplomats said the dispute over Tusk was unwelcome for nearly every other government. The chances of them naming another Pole to succeed him are virtually zero. Even putting that aside, few see the little known Saryusz-Wolski as credible.
Nonetheless, Kaczynski’s attack on Tusk creates a diplo-matic embarrassment at a time when the EU is struggling to reaffirm its unity and credibil-ity after Britain’s vote to quit.
Legally, no state has a veto. Tusk’s reappointment can be confirmed by a majority vote.
Fillon’s wife breaks silence over ‘fake jobs’ scandal
EU conservatives turn fury on Poland over Tusk challenge
16 MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017EUROPE
Tough talk
British people have a great fighting spirit and we will fight back. We will forge new trade deals around the world, said the British Finance Minister.
A participant wearing a cosplay costume attends the “Made in Asia” fair in Brussels, Belgium, yesterday.
Scary af-fair
London
AFP
Britain will “fight back” if the EU will not strike an acceptable deal on Brexit, Finance Minister
Philip Hammond said yesterday. He said Britain would “do what-ever we need to do” to be competitive if the country left the European Union without con-cluding a trade agreement.
“If there is anybody in the European Union who thinks that if we don’t do a deal with the European Union, if we don’t continue to work closely together, Britain will simply slink off as a wounded animal, that is not going to happen,” he told BBC television.
“British people have a great fighting spirit and we will fight back. We will forge new trade deals around the world.
“We will do whatever we need to do to make the British economy competitive and to make sure that this country has a great and successful future.”
Hammond, the chancellor of the Exchequer, refused to be drawn on whether that meant Britain would cut its corpora-tion tax, set to fall to 19 percent on April 1 from 20 percent, in a bid to attract investment away from Europe.
“We expect to be able to achieve a comprehensive free trade deal with our European Union partners, but they should know that the alternative isn’t Britain just slinking away into a corner,” he said.
Britain is one of the largest
net contributors to the EU budget, along with Germany, France and Italy, and the issue of outstand-ing payments will be a priority for Brussels in the Brexit talks.
Britain’s former ambassa-dor to the EU has said the bloc is set to demand up to €60bn ($64bn) from Britain, a figure that other EU sources have con-firmed to a section of media.
A committee in the British parliament’s upper House of Lords said Saturday that the UK could legally leave the EU with-out settling its accounts.
But Hammond indicated that Britain would pay any bills it owed to the EU.
“This is a piece of negotiat-ing strategy that we are seeing in Brussels,” he said.
“We are a nation that hon-ours its obligations and if we do have any bills that fall to be paid we will obviously deal with them in the proper way.”
Prime Minister Theresa May intends to trigger Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty by the end of March. This starts a two-year withdrawal process, after which Britain will leave the union whether or not it has struck a deal on its future ties with the bloc.
Glasgow
AFP
Scotland’s opposition leader insisted there should be no second referendum on Scot-
tish independence, urging the governing nationalists to concen-trate on making the best of Brexit rather than exploiting it for another secession push.
Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson told party’s con-ference in Glasgow that First Minister Nicola Sturgeon of Scot-tish National Party (SNP) was trying to bounce the country into a new referendum.
Scotland voted to stay in the United Kingdom by 55 percent in the 2014 vote.
She has said Brexit makes a
second independence referen-dum “highly likely.”
Many in her left-wing seces-sionist party hope she will announce a fresh bid at the SNP conference on March 17-18, with Britain set to trigger two years of divorce talks with the EU by the end of the month.
Davidson, leader of the sec-ond-biggest party in the semi-autonomous Scottish Par-liament, reaffirmed her opposition to independence.
“Scotland said no to inde-pendence. Scotland is saying: stop trying to bounce us into another referendum,” she told her cen-tre-right party.
“The Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party will never waver in our determination to
stand up for the decision we made as a country. We will fight you every step of the way.
“We said ‘no,’ we meant it. Are you listening, Nicola? No sec-ond referendum.
“We deserve a Scottish gov-ernment that is focused on helping Team UK get the best Brexit deal for all of us, not using it to revive its independence obsession.”
Outside the conference, around 200 nationalists gathered to protest, chanting “Tory scum” and waving banners calling for another referendum.
Susan McGilvray, 41, an SNP member from East Ayrshire on Scotland’s west coast, told report-ers: “I would love to see the call for a second referendum.”
London
Reuters
THE British government should make a unilateral decision now to protect the post-Brexit rights of European Union nationals liv-ing in Britain, a committee of lawmakers said in a report pub-lished yesterday.
Prime Minister Theresa May has said she wants the issue to be dealt with as a priority in upcom-ing Brexit negotiations but is not prepared to offer a guarantee until other EU states agree to a recipro-cal deal for Britons living abroad.
“They did not have a vote in the referendum, but the result has left them living under a cloud of uncertainty,” Hilary Benn, an opposition Labour lawmaker and chair of the Exiting the EU Com-mittee, said in a statement.
“They do not want to be used as bargaining chips. Although the government has said it wants EU citizens to be able to remain, this has not offered sufficient reas-surance that the rights and status that they have enjoyed will be guaranteed. It should now do so.”
Parliament’s upper house inflicted a defeat on May this week, voting for a change to her Brexit plan that says she can only trigger formal divorce talks with the European Union if she prom-ises to protect the rights of EU citizens living in Britain.
May is hoping to overturn that change when the legislation returns to the lower house of parliament.
The Exiting the EU commit-tee, made up of lawmakers from all the main political parties, also said the current process by which EU nationals can apply for per-manent residence was not fit for purpose and should be streamlined.
Helsinki
Reuters
Finnish Foreign Minister Timo Soini said yesterday he would step down as
leader of the nationalist and eurosceptic Finns party in June, a move which could challenge the future of the country’s three-party government.
The departure of Soini paves the way for a more hard-line leadership, surveys have sug-gested, as many of its core voters bridled at compromises he made as part of an austerity-focused government that has cut workers’ benefits while cater-
ing for an influx of migrants.Analysts say the move could
even bring down the coalition, which includes Centre Party and conservative NCP, at a time of tough reforms aimed at fixing a stagnant economy.
“I will not seek a new term from the party congress in June. It is time for something else,” Soini wrote in a blog. “This was not an easy decision.”
He said he would like to stay on as foreign minister if the party remains in the government.
Soini has led the party he co-founded for 20 years, dragging it out from obscurity and into the mainstream when its opposition
to the European Union’s sover-eign bailouts spooked financial markets in 2011.
But the party has seen its sup-port drop due to compromises it has made in government, which it joined in 2015. Once the second-biggest in the parliament, the party now ranks fifth in the polls with support of about 9 percent.
A survey by Lannen Media in January showed the most popu-lar successor for Soini among active party members would be Jussi Halla-aho, currently a member of European parliament who is known for his tough stance against immigration and the European Union.
“Personally, I tend to think that a membership in the EU is not in Finland’s strategic national interest,” Halla-aho told Iltale-hti newspaper last month.
Halla-aho has also proposed sanctions against organisations that rescue refugees and immi-grants from Mediterranean, saying it encourages movement from Africa to Europe.
Halla-aho said he will likely run for party presidency in June. He was not available for comment.
“This (Soini’s announcement) can have dramatic conse-quences... I don’t see the Finns could continue in the
Vienna
Reuters
Austrian opposition parties setting up a parliamentary inquiry into state’s order
for Eurofighter Typhoon jets 14 years ago have said they will seek to determine whether any kick-backs were paid to win the contract and to identify any offi-cials who might have profited.
The parliamentary inquiry formally announced by the Greens and far-right Freedom Party (FPO) comes after Austrian prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into allegations of fraud against Airbus and the Eurofighter consortium, based on a complaint by the defence ministry.
The four-nation Eurofighter
consortium comprises BAE Sys-tems, Italy’s Leonardo and Airbus, which represents Ger-many and Spain’s industrial interests in the project.
The defence ministry has alleged that in 2003 Airbus and Eurofighter consortium illegally charged nearly 10 percent of the purchase price of €1.96bn for so-called offset deals. Such deals, which involve work being given to local companies, were part of the agreement, but their cost should have been reported separately, the ministry has said.
Airbus has denied the accu-sations. “All skeletons in the closet will be brought out,” FPO leader Heinz-Christian Strache said at a news conference in Vienna. “It is our job to clarify political responsibilities.”
All of the country’s leading parties have been involved in the Eurofighter deal’s long his-tory. The initial contract was first agreed under a coalition between the conservative Peo-ple’s Party and the FPO, and then modified under a Social Democratic chancellor.
The latest parliamentary probe is the second to investi-gate the circumstances of the original order for 18 aircraft, with opponents saying that other makes of aircraft could have been bought for much less money.
The first commission of inquiry, set up under Social Democratic Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer in 2006, explicitly sought for reasons to cancel the contract.
Hammond: UK will fight back if no EU deal
An anti-Brexit billboard errected by the stopthesilence campaign following a fund raising campaign is seen in London. Giant billboards showing a poster attacking the government’s handling of Brexit have appeared in towns and cities across Britain.
Scottish opposition insists no new independence vote
UK must protect rights of EU citizens: Lawmakers
Austria’s Greens & far-right join forces to probe Eurofighter deal
Finland eurosceptic party leader to step down
Leader of Finns Party Timo Soini, addresses a press conference at the Helsinki International airport in Vantaa, yesterday.
government if Halla-aho gets elected. That could lead to a gov-ernment crisis,” said Kimmo Gronholm, professor of political science at Abo Akademi.
The government, led by Prime Minister Juha Sipila, has faced demonstrations and strikes over its austerity programme aimed to kick-start the economy.
Call for unity
A collective EU response to prevent such campaign events would make sense so that individual countries don’t end up being pressured by Turkey, Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern said.
17MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017 EUROPE
Controversy
Some 200 people representing a broad coalition against racism in The Netherlands gathered at the central Al-Kabir mosque, saying they were deeply worried about the rise of discrimination against Muslims.
Russian communist party supporters queue to place flowers on tomb of late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin during a memorial ceremony to mark his 64th death at Moscow’s Red Square, yesterday.
Paying tribute
London Mayor Sadiq Khan joins women including Annie Lennox, Bianca Jagger and refugees for the 'March4Women', in London, yesterday,
Extending support
Amsterdam
AFP
Hundreds of Dutch citizens met at an Amsterdam mosque yesterday to show solidarity with the
country’s Muslim population, as an anti-Islam MP again vowed to shut mosques should he win upcoming elections.
Some 200 people represent-ing a broad coalition against racism in The Netherlands gath-ered at the central Al-Kabir mosque, saying they were deeply worried about the rise of dis-crimination against Muslims in the European country.
“It’s very important that we make our voice heard. We as a Muslim community pose no dan-ger whatsoever to society,” said
Najem Ouladali, one of the organisers of the meeting.
“In fact, we are victims too of Islamic extremism,” added another speaker, Abdou Menebhi, who chairs a Moroccan organisa-tion in The Netherlands.
Various estimates put The Netherlands’ Muslim population between 840,000 to 960,000 people, or around 5.0 percent out of a population of some 17 mil-lion people. Most Muslims are from Turkish or Moroccan descent, according to the Dutch central statistics office.
Talk during the meeting con-stantly returned to Dutch firebrand far-right MP Geert Wilders, who is campaigning ahead of elections on an anti-Islam ticket.
Wilders has courted contro-versy with his hardline anti-Islam, anti-immigrant stance and his incendiary insults against Moroc-cans and Turks.
He has vowed in his party’s one-page manifesto that if elected he would ban the sale of Korans, close mosques and Islamic schools, shut Dutch bor-
ders and ban Muslim migrants.Support however for Wilders
and his extreme stance seems to have withered in recent days according to the latest polls.
“We believe that what Wilders is doing is very danger-ous to our society,” Ouladali told reportersafter the mosque meet-ing, speaking in Dutch.
Ineke van der Valk, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam told the meeting that incidents of hate crimes against Muslims were on the rise in The Netherlands.
Since 2015 incidents involv-ing discrimination have almost doubled and there were at least 54 incidents involving mosques—like threatening letters displaying Nazi symbols she said.
“There has been a worrisome rise in this kind of activity in our
country,” Van der Valk said. Meanwhile the firebrand
Wilders again vowed to close mosques, should he become prime minister after the vote, seen as a key litmus test of the rise of populist and far-right par-ties ahead of other national elections to be held across Europe later this year.
“Closing mosques may be more difficult but you can do it,” Wilders told journalists in an industrial suburb of Amsterdam earlier at a press meeting.
“You have to change the Constitution. It takes time, cer-tainly in Holland... but I am a lawmaker and if anyone can change the constitution and pro-pose this, it’s me,” Wilders said.
Just 10 days before elections Wilders and his Freedom Party (PVV) appears to have slipped
into second place behind the Lib-eral party of incumbent Prime Minister Mark Rutte after months of leading the opinion polls.
“I am confident we will all have excellent results,” Wilders told journalists, referring also to France’s far-right presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen.
“Even if that will not be the case, the genie will not go back into the bottle... certainly things will change in Europe,” he insisted.
Boosted by polarising debate over immigration, and initially by victory of Donald Trump in the US race, Wilders had been leading polls since late last year.
But the latest collated polls by Dutch website Peilingwijzer from seven different agencies showed Rutte’s VVD party would now win 23 to 27 seats in the 150-seat lower house of parliament.
Berlin
Reuters
Germany opposes a pro-posal by France and Italy to use bonds to finance a
new €5bn European Union defence research fund, saying it would not be a viable way to finance European military projects, according to the Han-delsblatt newspaper.
Such a plan would “violate the basic principles of good budget practices and therefore is not a viable option for financ-ing European defence efforts,” the paper quoted a German government paper as saying in its Monday edition.
Germany also argued in the paper that it would be unac-ceptable to view national contributions to the fund, which
was first proposed in Novem-ber, as one-time measures to obtain exemptions from Euro-pean stability and growth requirements.
The European Commission first proposed the fund in late November as a way of allow-ing European governments to lower costs by joining forces to buy new helicopters and planes.
Paris and Rome back a pro-posal from the commission that would allow money for the fund to be raised on capital markets, underwritten by capital or gov-ernmental guarantees, but Germany is strongly opposed, the newspaper reported.
It said Berlin could block any agreement to move in that direction. The German defence ministry referred questions to the finance ministry.
Marseille
AFP
A FOUR-YEAR-OLD girl is dead and her eight-year-old sister missing after both were swept out to sea by a large wave in the southern French port of Marseille, a source close to the case said yesterday.
The girls’ father was also submerged by the stormy seas but survived after quickly being rescued by nearby fishermen.
According to officials of the maritime department, the wave struck the family on Saturday around 1700 GMT near the southern edge of the city.
The four-year-old was recovered on Saturday and taken to a nearby hospital suffering from cardiac arrest. She died during the night, according to the source.
Her sister has still not been found and rescue efforts resumed yesterday.
Water temperatures Sat-urday night hovered at 12 degrees Celsius (53 degrees Fahrenheit), while waves rose to 2.5 metres.
“Immediately, a number of measures were taken to man a search,” authorities said, including using a rescue vessel, the city’s naval fire-fighters, and a rescue helicopter.
Eleven departments in the Bouches-du-Rhone region had been placed on orange alert on Saturday morning for strong winds—but it was lifted after weather conditions improved.
Frankfurt am Main
AFP
Turkish politicians should be banned from political cam-paigning across the
European Union, Austrian Chan-cellor Christian Kern said yesterday.
“A collective EU response to prevent such campaign events would make sense so that indi-vidual countries like Germany where appearances are forbid-den don’t end up being pressured by Turkey,” Kern told German newspaper Welt am Sonntag.
Ankara is wooing voters among Germany’s three-million-strong population of Turkish
origin—the largest outside Tur-key—to support expanding President Recep Tayyip Erdog-an’s powers in an April 16 referendum.
Several German towns pre-vented appearances by Erdogan’s ministers last week, citing security and safety concerns.
The cancellations have angered the Turkish govern-ment, which accused Berlin of seeking to undermine its refer-endum campaign.
Defying local authorities’ block on a referendum rally, economy minister Nihat Zey-bekci is to speak at two private events organised by Turkish
groups in Cologne and nearby Leverkusen.
Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday called Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim to smooth the troubled waters, and the two countries’ foreign min-isters are set to meet later this week.
Berlin would “certainly not end our criticism of develop-ments in Turkey,” German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel said yesterday in a guest article for newspaper Bild am Sonntag.
Gabriel insisted Germany would stand up for the rule of law, freedom of opinion, human rights and democracy.
And he rejected Turkey’s arrest of Die Welt newspaper journalist Deniz Yucel last Mon-day on terror charges as “wrong and disproportionate”.
But “along with all the nec-essary criticism, we won’t fall for
those who want to vent their political spleen on Turkish-Ger-man relations,” Gabriel went on.
“The German-Turkish friendship is deeper than the diplomatic tensions we’re living through now.”
Austrian leader Kern told the Welt am Sonntag that long-run-ning EU accession negotiations with Turkey should be aban-doned in response to Erdogan’s “trampling on human rights and basic democratic rights”.
“We can’t continue negoti-ating about membership with a country that has been distanc-ing itself from democratic norms and rule-of-law principles for years,” Kern said.
Budapest
AFP
A group of young Hungar-ian activists who forced Prime Minister Viktor
Orban’s government into a rare retreat announced a new polit-ical party yesterday and said they plan to run for parliament next year.
Leaders of the new party, called Momentum Movement, said it builds on success of a recent signature drive it organ-ised to demand a referendum be held on Budapest’s bid to host the Olympic Games in 2024.
Last month the group of activists, who are mostly in their 20s and 30s, said they collected more than enough signatures to
hold the ballot, but the govern-ment announced soon after it had withdrawn its backing for the candidacy.
The Momentum Movement plans to run candidates in all of Hungary’s 106 constituencies at the next parliamentary election, scheduled to be held in the first half of next year.
While it is yet to set out an election programme, the party’s leaders have told local media its policies will include better coop-eration with other EU members on migration policy, in contrast to Orban, long known for his go-it-alone approach.
They have also criticised Orban's cosy relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The party faces a daunting
task in its challenge to Orban however as, according to recent opinion polls, the popularity of his ruling party Fidesz, has hardly been dented by its Olym-pics bid setback.
“Although changing the gov-ernment in 2018 seems unrealistic to many people, many people also thought that collecting more than 100,000 signatures would be impossible for us,” Anna Orosz, a Momen-tum leader, told local media.
The party has said it wants to bring an end the squabbling between left and the right-wing. “The left-wing and right-wing since the turn of the century have only been capable of divid-ing the country,” reads a post on the party’s Facebook page.
Dutch citizens show solidarity with Muslims
Germany, Italy & France at odds over EU defence fund
Two girls swept out to sea in Marseille
Austria calls for EU-wide ban on Turkish campaign events
Hungary activists form party after anti-Olympic bid drive
18 MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017AMERICAS
Poll wiretapping
Trump contended that the wiretapping occurred in October at Trump Tower, the New York skyscraper where he ran his campaign and transition. He also maintains a residence there.
Presidents cannot legally order wiretaps against US citizens.
Palm Beach AP
The White House demanded yesterday that Congress inves-tigate whether former president Barack
Obama abused his executive powers in connection with the 2016 presidential election.
President Donald Trump lev-eled that claim on Saturday when he accused his predecessor of tapping telephones at Trump Tower. But Trump offered no sup-porting evidence, a spokesman for Obama denied the claim as “simply false” and lawmakers in both parties asked for proof.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that reports “concerning potentially politi-cally motivated investigations immediately ahead of the 2016 election are very troubling”.
“President Donald J Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activ-ity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their over-sight authority to determine whether executive branch inves-tigative powers were abused in 2016,” Spicer said.
It was unclear what reports Spicer was referring to, and what prompted Trump to make the allegation. Spicer ended the statement by saying that neither the White House nor Trump will comment further “until such oversight is conducted”.
In a series of morning tweets on Saturday, Trump suggested Obama was behind a politically motivated plot to upend his cam-paign. He compared the alleged events to “Nixon/Watergate” and “McCarthyism!” And he called
Congress urged to probe Obama ‘power abuse’
Obama a “Bad (or sick) guy.”The Watergate break-in dur-
ing the Nixon administration led to President Richard Nixon’s res-ignation and the conviction of several aides. Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy’s reckless and unsup-ported charges of communist infiltration in federal government during the 1950s gave rise to the term “McCarthyism.”
After Trump’s well-received speech to Congress on Tuesday, the tweets reflected the presi-dent’s growing frustration with the swirling allegations about his advisers’ ties to Russia, which are under FBI investigation, and his team’s inability to overcome them. Trump lashed out at his senior team during an Oval Office meeting Friday, according to one White House official.
Presidents cannot legally order wiretaps against US citi-zens. Obtaining wiretaps would require officials at the Justice Department to seek permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is shrouded in secrecy.
Trump said in the tweets that he had “just found out” the information, though it was unclear whether he was refer-ring to a briefing, a conversation or a media report. The president has in the past tweeted about unsubstantiated and provoca-tive reports he reads on blogs or conservative websites.
Trump contended that the wiretapping occurred in Octo-ber at Trump Tower, the New York skyscraper where he ran his campaign and transition. He also maintains a residence there.
Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis said a “cardinal rule” of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered in Justice Department investigations, which are sup-posed to be conducted free of political influence.
“As part of that practice, nei-ther president Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any US citizen,” Lewis said, adding that “any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”
Rep. Adam Schiff of Califor-nia, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that Trump was making “the most outlandish and destructive claims without pro-viding a scintilla of evidence to support them.”
Trump has been trailed for months by questions about his campaign’s ties to Russia. The questions have been com-pounded by US intelligence agencies’ assessment that Rus-sia interfered with the election to help Trump triumph over Hil-lary Clinton, along with disclosures about his aides’ con-tacts with a Russian official.
Toronto
Reuters
Canada will not tighten its border to deter migrants crossing illegally from the
United States in the wake of a US immigration crackdown because the numbers are not big enough to cause alarm, a gov-ernment minister said.
Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said the issue had not risen to a scale that required hindering the flow of goods and people moving across the world’s longest undefended bor-der. Hundreds of people, mainly from Africa and the Middle East, have defied winter conditions and walked across the border, seeking asylum.
It is not common to have so many asylum seekers in the United States looking for refuge
in Canada over such a short period. The influx poses a polit-ical risk for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who faces pressure from the left, which wants more let in, and from the right, which fears an increased security risk.
“We are concerned and we will deal properly with the extra hundreds (crossing illegally),” Goodale told reporters at a tel-evised news conference in Emerson, Manitoba. “But the full border deals with 400,000 peo-ple moving in both directions every day. It also handles C$2.5 billion in trade every day.
“It is critically important for us to make sure that it is strong and secure. At the same time, it needs to be efficient and expe-ditious.” Emerson, on the North Dakota border, has been over-whelmed by the migration and appealed for more government
help to handle the influx. Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Manitoba say 183 people have walked across that border in sub-zero temperatures since January 1. Goodale said the pace has picked up in recent weeks.
Canadian and US officials are working on a plan to tackle asylum seekers crossing into Canada illegally, with American officials keen to discover how they entered the United States in the first place. US Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly is to visit Canada this month for talks on the border.
Goodale said it was impor-tant for both countries to have the same data and information about the migrants “to fully appreciate where the flow began and all of the factors – and it’s not just one factor – that are contributing to the migration”.
A family crosses the US-Canada border leading into Hemmingford, Quebec, Canada, yesterday.
Canada: No plans to clamp down at border to deter migrants
19MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017 AMERICAS
Poll findings
About 65 percent of Democrats said a mix of global cultures was extremely or very important to American identity, compared with 35 percent of Republicans.
Among the areas seen as the greatest threats to the American way of life, most Republicans point to illegal immigration as a top concern.
A demonstrator supporting US President Donald Trump (left) holds a shield as a group of men punch a counter demonstrator during a "People 4 Trump" rally in Berkeley, California. At a park in Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco, protesters from both sides struck one another over the head with wooden sticks and Trump supporters fired pepper spray as police in riot gear stood at a distance. An elderly Trump supporter was struck in the head and kicked on the ground.
California march turns violent
New York AP
Add one more to the list of things dividing left and right in this country: We can’t even agree what it
means to be an American. A new survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds Republi-cans are far more likely to cite a culture grounded in Christian beliefs and the traditions of early European immigrants as essen-tial to US identity.
Democrats are more apt to point to the country’s history of mixing of people from around the globe and a tradition of offering refuge to the persecuted. While there’s disagreement on what makes up the American identity, 7 in 10 people — regardless of party — say the country is losing that identity.
“It’s such stark divisions,” said Lynele Jones, a 65-year-old accountant in Boulder, Colorado. Like many Democrats, Jones pointed to diversity and open-ness to refugees and other immigrants as central compo-nents of being American.
“There’s so much turmoil in the American political situation right now. People’s ideas of what is America’s place in the world are so different from one end of the spectrum to the other,” Jones said.
There are some points of resounding agreement among Democrats, Republicans and independents about what makes up the country’s identity. Among them: A fair judicial system and rule of law, the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution, and the ability to get good jobs and achieve the American dream.
Big gulfs emerged between the left and right on other char-acteristics seen as inherent to America. About 65 percent of Democrats said a mix of global cultures was extremely or very important to American identity, compared with 35 percent of Republicans. Twenty-nine per-cent of Democrats saw Christianity as that important, compared with 57 percent of Republicans.
Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to say that the ability of people to come to escape violence and persecu-tion is very important, 74 percent
New York
AFP
Facing a White House which has been unrelenting in its attacks on the media, news
organisations are struggling to find the right balance in cover-ing President Donald Trump’s administration.
Reporters and media groups are increasingly finding they are part of the story, after Trump’s denunciation of “fake news” and his branding of media groups as “the enemy of the people.”
Most news organizations have promised to fulfill their responsibility to report aggres-sively, without being vindictive. “The goal is to be tough, but to be fair. The fairness part is an important part of the equation,” said Richard Benedetto, an adjunct professor of journalism at American University who was a White House correspondent for USA Today.
The White House may have some justification for claiming the press is unfair: an NBC sur-vey last month found 53 percent of Americans believed the media was exaggerating problems in
the Trump administration. “There seems to be a lack of
concern about being fair,” Bene-detto said. “It’s become kind of personal.” Before Trump’s inau-guration, Politico writer Jack Shafer said the press “ought to start thinking of covering Trump’s Washington like a war zone, where conflict follows con-flict, where the fog prevents the collection of reliable information directly from the combatants, where the assignment is a mat-ter of life or death.”
Reuters editor-in-chief Steve Adler said the news agency planned to do its job in Washington as it does in other countries where governments are hostile to the press.
The agency responds to dif-ficult conditions “by doing our best to protect our journalists, by recommitting ourselves to reporting fairly and honestly, by doggedly gathering hard-to-get information—and by remaining impartial,” Adler said in a Jan-uary memo to staff.
Karen North, a professor at the University of Southern Cal-ifornia’s Annenberg School, said objectivity has become
complicated as more journalists feel a need to connect with readers by offering personal thoughts on social media. North said some reporters feel a need to rebut the president on his favorite platform, Twitter.
“We have the president speaking directly to the people through Twitter,” North said.
In the fast-paced Twitter-sphere, she said, reporters are not just churning out facts but “they’re also putting out their opinion through social media.”
North noted that news organizations are also struggling for ways to keep the attention of their viewers and readers. “Especially with the internet, with digital media, news has to compete with entertainment,” she said. “So there’s a huge man-date now for news to be entertaining or at least to be engaging in a way that draws attention.”
New York Times public edi-tor Liz Spayd acknowledged that some reporters in their Twitter messages during the campaign may have gone “over the line” and cast doubt on their objectivity.
NEWS BYTES
Trump expected to sign revised travel ban todayWASHINGTON: President Donald Trump is expected to sign a revised travel ban today, just over a month after his origi-nal decree sowed controversy across the United States and chaos at airports, US media reported. The president will sign the new executive order at the Department of Homeland Security, according to Politico, which cited senior govern-ment officials. It was unclear what changes Trump planned to make, according to the publication. Trump’s original Jan-uary 27 order was widely criticised as amounting to a ban on Muslims, and also for being rolled out sloppily — with virtu-ally no warning to the public or preparation of the agencies tasked with enforcing it. The order, which temporarily barred people from seven Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the United States for 90 days, as well as all refugees for 120 days and Syrian refugees permanently — triggered world-wide outrage as well as protests in the United States.
27 airspace violations near Trump’s Florida estateFORT LAUDERDALE: Federal officials say more than two dozen aircraft have violated airspace restrictions near Pres-ident Donald Trump’s estate in Florida. The Sun Sentinel reports that last month, the Federal Aviation Administration reported 27 violations of the airspace restrictions near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach. In one instance, Air Force jets speeding to intercept an aircraft caused a sonic boom that rattled Palm Beach and Broward counties. The names of the pilots who received the violations weren’t released. Agency officials told the newspaper they’re investigating each case. The FAA said it will reach out to South Florida pilots to educate them about the restrictions activated within 30 miles of the estate when Trump visits. The agency recently held briefings for pilots at airports in Boca Raton and Palm Beach.
Louisiana woman arrested in critical burning of nieceJENNINGS: A 29-year-old woman is in custody a month after her 4-year-old niece was critically burned while in her care. Brant Thompson, the Louisiana State Fire Marshal’s chief deputy, said that Gail Marie Brown was arrested on Friday on five charges including negligent injuring, obstruction of justice and prostitution. She’s being held at the Jeff Davis Par-ish jail. Bond has not yet been set. It was unknown if Brown has an attorney. Thompson said Brown lied about how the child was burned. She initially told investigators a young boy at a park in Jennings, about 95 miles west of Baton Rouge, ignited the child’s clothing on January 22 when in fact the girl and her cousin, Brown’s 6-year-old daughter, were left alone in a vehicle and the older child used a lighter to set the younger girl’s clothes on fire. The child remains hospitalized at a pedi-atric burn unit in Galveston, Texas.
Mexican police free 31 CubansMEXICO CITY: Federal police in Mexico’s Riviera Maya resort area freed 31 Cubans being held by gunmen in a house, author-ities said. The Cuban migrants said masked gunmen held them in the home near the Caribbean coast demanding money the Cubans did not have. Police received multiple reports on the situation before moving in to free the 22 Cuban men and nine Cuban women, said Mexico’s National Public Safety Board. The Cubans, who did not have Mexican residency, were taken by state authorities for health checks.
Divided Americans fret country losing identity
to 55 percent. Also, 25 percent of Democrats said the culture of the country’s early European immi-grants very important, versus 46 percent of Republicans.
Reggie Lawrence, a 44-year-old Republican in Midland, Texas, who runs a business serv-icing oil fields, said the country and its Constitution were shaped by Christian values. As those slip away, he said, so does
the structure of families, and ultimately, the country’s iden-tity. “If you lose your identity,” Lawrence said, “What are we? We’re not a country anymore.”
Patrick Miller, a political science professor at the Uni-versity of Kansas who studies partisanship and polling, said the results reflect long-stand-ing differences in the US between one camp’s desire for openness and diversity and another’s vision of the country grounded in the white, English-speaking, Protestant traditions of its early settlers.
Those factions have seen their competing visions of Amer-ican identity brought to a boil at points throughout history, such as when lawmakers barred Chi-nese immigration beginning in the 1880s or when bias against Catholic immigrants and their descendants bubbled up through a long stretch of the 20th century.
The starkness of the divide and the continuing questions over what it means to be Amer-ican are a natural byproduct, Miller said, not just of US history, but the current political climate and the rancor of today’s debates
over immigration and the wel-coming of refugees. “Our sense of identity is almost inseparable from the subject of immigration because it’s how we were built,” he said. “Given what we are and how we’ve come about, it’s a very natural debate.”
The poll found Democrats were nearly three times as likely as Republicans to say the US should be a country made up of many cultures and values that change as new people arrive, with far more Republicans say-ing there should be an essential American culture that immi-grants adopt.
Republicans overwhelmingly viewed immigrants who arrived in the past decade as having retained their own cultures and values rather than adopting American ones. Among the areas seen as the greatest threats to the American way of life, Democrats coalesce around a fear of the country’s political leaders, polit-ical polarization and economic inequality. Most Republicans point instead to illegal immigra-tion as a top concern.
Perhaps surprisingly, fear of influence from foreign govern-ments was roughly the same on
the left and right at a time when calls for an investigation into President Donald Trump’s pos-sible ties to Russia have largely come from Democrats. About 4 in 10 Democrats and Republi-cans alike viewed the issue as extremely or very threatening.
Two questions, also posed during the presidential cam-paign, offered insight into how Trump’s election may have changed partisans’ views.
The poll found about 52 per-cent of Republicans now regard the US as the single greatest country in the world, up signif-icantly from 35 percent when the question was asked last June. Some 22 percent of Democrats expressed that view, essentially unchanged from the earlier poll.
Democrats appear to be reinforcing their belief that the country’s range of races, reli-gions and backgrounds make the country stronger. About 80 percent made that assessment in the new poll, compared with 68 percent eight months ear-lier. About 51 percent of Republicans held that view, similar to the percentage who said so in the previous poll.
Lansing, Michigan AP
Faced with the threat that Asian carp could enter the Great Lakes, Michi-
gan is turning to the public for new ideas and plans to offer a prize to whoever comes up with a way to stop the vora-cious fish.
Michigan’s global search challenge comes after the U.S. government and others have spent hundreds of millions searching for a solution to stop the carp from entering the world’s largest freshwa-ter system.
If they aren’t stopped, offi-cials fear the aggressive fish will crowd out prize native fish and hamper recreational boating in large sections of the lakes, which stretch from Min-nesota, Wisconsin and Michigan in the west to New York and Pennsylvania in the east and from Ontario, Can-ada, in the north to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio in the south.
“I think in the fight against Asian carp, there aren’t really any bad ideas,” said Molly Flanagan, vice president of policy for the Alliance for the Great Lakes. “We have to try a bunch of different things.”
Michigan alone has a $38 billion tourism industry, much of it focused on the outdoors, and the Great Lakes region has a $7bn fishing industry. Asian carp have been spotted 45 miles from Lake Michigan. If the fish make it into that lake, they could make their way into the other Great Lakes. Details on how much prize money will be offered are still being worked out. Officials also haven’t determined how many winners might be chosen.
The Michigan Legislature and Gov Rick Snyder allo-cated $1 million to develop the challenge. Most of the money will go toward a prize for an idea or ideas that are deemed feasible, Michigan Department of Natural Resources spokeswoman Joanne Foreman said. The rest will be used to create the challenge, which includes working with InnoCentive, a company that will host the event online.
Michigan to offer prize in fight against Asian carp
Media struggles for balance in covering hostile Trump
20 MONDAY 6 MARCH 2017MORNING BREAK
Courtesy: Qatar Meteorology Department
Rider Jeff Dahl races down Harrison Avenue while skier and son Greg Dahl airs out off the final jump of the Leadville skijoring course during the 68th annual Leadville Skijoring weekend competition, yesterday in Colorado. Skijoring, which has its origins as a competitive sport in Scandinavia, has been adapted over the years to include a team made up of a rider and skier who must navigate jumps, slalom gates, and the spearing of rings for points.
Galloping traffic
FAJRSHOROOK
04.37 am
05.53 am
ZUHRASR
11.45 am
03.07 pm
MAGHRIBISHA
05.40 pm
07.10pm
PRAYER TIMINGS
Fashion designers turn to secondhand shopsParis
AFP
It is a humdrum secondhand clothing store in one of the most down-at-heel dis-
tricts of the French capital.But for designer Francisco
Terra and other rising stars of the Paris catwalk, the shop stuffed with shirts and skirts that sell for the price of a cof-fee is "a temple of fashion research".
Terra loves the place so much he held his Paris fash-ion week show in the store, the flagship "friperie" of the Guerrisol chain.
"It is not just people who don't have much money who shop here," the creator behind the Neith Nyer label said, "but all the stylists of the big labels who come to do their homework."
His show comes only six weeks after hip brand AVOC presented their menswear
collection in another more upmarket vintage store.
With high street chains going hell for leather for throwaway fashion, those in the know are embracing bet-ter quality vintage clothing while designers are turning to secondhand and charity shops for inspiration.
Parisian friperies where the poor still buy pre-owned shoes and suits are now the haunt of hipsters and fashion-istas looking for clothes that help them stand out.
Putting together "a look is all about the exclusivity of the piece", said Brazilian-born Terra, who worked for Givenchy and Carven before striking out on his own.
"Today with mass market fast fashion, you can only find that in vintage of secondhand shops," he added.
Influenced by Margiela and Jean Paul Gaultier, two fashion houses who have
long embraced the art of recycling, 34-year-old Terra began to repurpose clothes for his own brand, which he named after his Austrian grandmother.
His new show is set in a fictional future Tokyo in 2083. Faced with a chaotic econ-omy, young people are forced to patching their ancestors' old clothes together to create their new styles. The storyline was inspired by the Japanese
capital's thriving secondhand stores, Terra said, which often rework old clothes.
Upcycling, as remaking existing clothes is called, has long been the trademark of a number of Paris labels, includ-ing streetwear brand Andrea Crews.
Upcycled jeans made from cut up old Levi's were also one of the things that helped make French brand Vetements the label of the moment.
Vintage is also a major theme at a trade fair running alongside Paris fashion week, which this year con-tains a shop bringing together some of the capi-tal's "pre-worn" designer stores and the online luxury secondhand site Vestiaire Collective.
Amnaye Nhas, a manager of one such luxury Paris store, Thanx God I'm a VIP, said sales rocket during the run-way shows, particularly when
labels revisit historic looks for coats and aviator jackets.
V i n t a g e c a n b e reassuring
Her store only sells cloth-ing from the very top designer labels. They refuse to handle anything in syn-thetic fibre and outfits have to be in perfect condition, she said.
With prices ranging from ¤40 to ¤2,000, Nhas said their clients are demanding and know what they want.
A green toned Leonard silk jacket is on sale for ¤995, while a 1978 Burberry coat is priced at ¤450.
"Some customers are real sticklers" for designer labels, she said, "but others would normally shop in high street stores like Zara and just want to find something original to wear with that."
Fashion historian Manuel Charpy said vintage mania is nothing new.
Parisian friperies where the poor still buy pre-owned shoes and suits are now the haunt of hipsters and fashionistas looking for clothes that help them stand out.
Emma Watson rails at critics of mag photo Los Angeles
Reuters
British actress Emma Watson hit back at crit-ics who said she
betrayed her feminist ideals by posing for a picture in Van-ity Fair magazine where parts of her body were exposed.
Watson, the “Harry Pot-ter” movie series co-star and pioneer of the HeForShe campaign to make men advo-cate for feminism, talked about the photo shoot for the magazine while promoting her latest film, the Disney live action “Beauty and the Beast.”
“It just always reveals to me how many misconcep-tions and what a misunderstanding there is about what feminism is,” she said in an interview.
“Feminism is about giv-ing women choice. Feminism is not a stick with which to beat other women with. It’s about freedom, it’s about lib-eration, it’s about equality. It’s very confusing. “I’m confused. Most people are confused. No, I’m just always just quietly stunned,” she said.
Mercury to go on opposite side of the Sun for 10 daysThe Peninsula
Tomorrow, the innermost planet of the Solar system, Mercury, will reach on the
opposite side of the Sun from the Earth at 3:08am.
During the phenomenon, called superior conjunction, the sun will be in between Mercury and Earth, and Mercury will pass very close to the Sun in the sky as its orbit carries it around the far side of the solar system from the Earth. However, Mercury will not be visible while in con-junction with the Sun, though within the next week or so the planet will reappear on the east side of the Sun and start becom-ing visible over the western horizon at sunset.
“The superior conjunction
of Mercury is very important astronomical phenomena because it is an indicator to Mer-cury transition from the dawn sky (eastern horizon) to an evening sky (Western horizon),” said a statement issued yester-day by Dr Mohammed Al Ansari and Dr Beshir Marzouk of Qatar Calendar House.
The superior conjunction occurs once in every synodic cycle of the planet Mercury
which is 116 days, and hence the phenomenon will be repeated on June 21, 2017, while it will be at next inferior conjunction on April 20, 2017.
People in Qatar and the region will be able to observe Mercury over the western hori-zon after 10 days from the superior conjunction day in a clear sky. Mercury will rise over the Qatar sky tomorrow at the same time as sunrise, and both the heavenly bodies will set together. “The conjunction is divided into superior conjunc-tion and inferior conjunction, where an inferior conjunction only happens for Mercury and Venus because they orbits are inside the Earth's orbit, while superior conjunction happens for all planets,” the experts added.
Filmmakers urged to go localThe Peninsula
Qumra Master Bruno Dumont (pictured), deliv-ering his Master Class at
the third edition of Qumra, the industry event by the Doha Film Institute, urged emerging film-makers to push the boundaries of reality, reminding them that the ‘more localised’ their stories, the ‘more universal’ they become.
In a talk defined by the intense philosophical and spir-itual outlooks that have shaped the avant-garde French film-maker’s life and works, Dumont emphasised that studying phi-losophy (Greek and German) enables him as a filmmaker as ‘it is the reason and rationale, based on which we separate things.”
By shaping the dimensions of ‘being’ and ‘non-being,’ phi-losophy drives him in his character sketches, as
“philosophers are people who have probed human nature.” That is why he sees the role of cinema as a “spiritual experi-ence’ and film as a “natural art.”
He believes in the intercon-nection of landscape and human beings, and uses nature as a real tool in his filmmaking. “When you apply the characters in a landscape, a scene comes along; that is why I seek a landscape that I can tell a story about,
because it helps to present the ghostly expression of good and evil, of mystique and mystery.” Dumont had an eager audience at Qumra, emerging talents who have been passionately follow-ing his films, and who tossed at him questions ranging from his notions of philosophy to specific ‘behind-the-scenes’ of some of his landmark films.
They also probed him on his work with professional actors of late, having earlier preferred to work with non-trained peo-ple. Dumont says the key in working with professional actors is to ‘dehumanise them and make them look deep into themselves to become real char-acters. Direct them, always, as non-professionals and you get excellent results,” he told the audience.
To a question on political influence in his cinema, Dumont said that politics is not his speciality.
HIGH TIDE 10:00 LOW TIDE 06:00 - 16:45
Expected strong wind during day-
time at places. Partly cloudy at times
with chance of scattered rain at first
becomes mild daytime and relatively
cold by night.
WEATHER TODAY
Minimum Maximum18oC 25oC