more than 60% of over 70-year-olds vaccinated against covid-19 · 2021. 3. 2. · amir h h sheikh...
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WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021 www.thepeninsula.qa19 RAJAB - 1442 VOLUME 25 NUMBER 8550
Sport | 12
Nakilat deliverssustained
operational excellence
in 2020
Amir Cup: Al Duhail, Al Rayyan enter semi-final
Business | 01
2 RIYALS
Deputy PM meets US Special Envoy for YemenDeputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Defence Affairs H E Dr. Khalid bin Mohammed Al Attiyah met yesterday with US Special Envoy for Yemen, H E Timothy Lenderking. During the meeting, they reviewed bilateral cooperation and relations between the two countries and the latest developments in the region.
FM receives call
from UN chiefQNA — DOHA
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, H E Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, received yesterday a phone call from Secretary-General of the United Nations, H E Antonio Guterres.
They reviewed the coop-eration and ties between the Qatar and the UN, and the efforts of the State of Qatar to help revive the nuclear agreement signed between Iran and the major countries in 2015. The UN chief wel-comed Al-Ula Declaration.
FM holds phone
call with Blinken
QNA — DOHA
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, H E Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, held yesterday a phone call with the US Secretary of State, H E Antony Blinken.
They reviewed bilateral cooperation and relations, and ways to enhance them, espe-cially in the political and eco-nomic fields, in addition to developments in Libya, Yemen, Iran, and Iraq, as well as the Palestinian elections. The Foreign Minister wished Blinken success in performing his duties.
More than 60% of over 70-year-olds vaccinated against COVID-19THE PENINSULA — DOHA
The Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) has announced that 61 percent of people over 70 years of age have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose since the start of Qatar’s National COVID-19 Vaccination Program.
“I encourage our elders and all those eligible at this time not to delay starting their vacci-nation process. The sooner you start, the sooner you will be protected,” said the Minister of Public Health, H E Dr. Hanan Mohamed Al Kuwari.
National Health Strategy 2018-2022 Lead for Healthy Ageing, Dr. Hanadi Al Hamad, explained that older people are at increased risk from COVID-19. “It is incredibly pleasing to know that six out of ten people over 70 years of age have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. Every day, more and more older people in Qatar are receiving their second vaccine dose and building their protection against COVID-19.”
The protective effects of one vaccine dose have been sup-ported by a recent study in the
United Kingdom which found the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine to be very effective at pre-venting hospitalisations and ICU admission due to COVID-19 in people over 80 years of age
after one dose. “People of all ages and
health conditions can become infected with COVID-19, but since the start of the pandemic it has been clear that older
people are more vulnerable to severe complications from the virus. This means that older people are more likely to require hospitalisation, including admission to intensive care units for life-saving treatment, than the younger age groups,” said Dr. Al Hamad.
The majority of Qatar’s vac-cinated elderly population have been vaccinated at one of the 27 Primary Health Care Corpo-ration's health centers. The PHCC is continuing to contact older people directly to schedule them for their appointments. Any citizen or
resident over 60 years of age who has not yet been vacci-nated and requires an appointment can call PHCC on 4027 7077.
“In addition to elderly patients being vaccinated at health centers, more than 90 percent of elderly Hamad Medical Corporation inpatients have received their first vaccine dose and every day, our Home HealthCare Service teams are visiting elderly housebound patients in the comfort and safety of their homes to admin-ister vaccines,” explained Dr. Al Hamad. �P3
GCO launches labour laws information service on WhatsApp in six languagesQNA — DOHA
The Government Communica-tions Office (GCO) of the State of Qatar, in cooperation with the Ministry of Administrative Development, Labour and Social Affairs, yesterday launched a service to provide information regarding Qatar labour laws and regulations on
WhatsApp.The new, free service is a
helpful source of up-to-date, reliable information for employers and expatriate workers about their rights, Qatar Visa Centres, and answers to the most frequently asked questions about labour laws.
This 24-hour information
service is an automated chatbot and is available in six lan-guages: Arabic, English, Urdu, Hindi, Nepali and Malayalam.
People can subscribe to this free service by adding the number +974 6006 0601 in their phone contacts, and then sending a WhatsApp message in any of the six available lan-guages to get started.
Establishment Card, other services to be provided electronically SIDI MOHAMEDTHE PENINSULA
The General Directorate of Passports of the Ministry of Interior (MoI) has said that the work is underway to convert the remaining paper services into electronic ones, including Establishment Card (Computer Card).
“Studies have been pre-pared in this regard and are almost ready. Therefore, this service will soon be available online and on Metrash2 app. Once service is available online, a person can easily renew the Establishment Card (Computer Card),” said Lt. Col. Tariq Issa Al Aqidi, an officer from the Public Relations and Infor-mation Office at the General Directorate of Passports.
Speaking to Qatar Radio, he explained that the problem is that this service is linked with many other bodies such as the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. “There are some other services still not provided elec-tronically but the work is going on to make them available online to facilitate the people.”
In line with the precau-tionary measures to limit the spread of the coronavirus, the MoI announced last year that the Establishment Card (Com-puter Card) of all entities will
be renewed automatically without any need of approaching the directorate.
Lt. Col. Al Aqidi also stated that the new building for the Passport Department will be opened in the coming months.
“The new building is ready and only fixtures, equipment installation remains. We expect it to be opened in the coming months,” he said.
He also stressed that the service of delivering documents by Qatar Post is still continuing in light of the pandemic. �P3
Drive-through vaccination centre toserve people for second dose onlyFAZEENA SALEEM THE PENINSULA
Only people receiving second dose of vaccine are eligible to visit the new COVID-19 drive-through vaccination centre in Lusail, the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) has clarified.
Those scheduled to receive their second dose can go directly to the drive-through centre on their scheduled day, without the need for an appointment.
The Ministry said that teams at Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC) will schedule eligible people for their second dose at the drive-through centre, at the time of their first dose appointment at health centres.
The drive-through centre is behind the Lusail Multipurpose Hall,
open from 11am to 10pm every day. People will be seen on a first-come-first-seen basis and last entrance to the centre will be at 9pm.
Visitors to the centre will undergo a pre-vaccination assessment and be asked to wait in their vehicle in a designated obser-vation area after receiving the vaccine to ensure they do not have a reaction to the vaccine. Paramedic
teams will be on site in the unlikely event that anyone has a reaction requiring emergency medical support.
The drive-through centre opened on Monday. Operated by HMC, in collaboration with PHCC, the centre will provide a significant boost to the vaccination programme and admin-ister second doses to eligible people. �P3
QA holds annual aircraft recovery drill Qatar Airways Group Chief Executive, H E Akbar Al Baker, and other officials during a disabled aircraft recovery exercise at Doha International Airport. Qatar Airways held its 12th annual simulated Disabled Aircraft Recovery (QDAR) Exercise on a grounded Airbus A340-600 aircraft, using the airline’s state-of-the-art Aircraft Recovery Kit, from February 28 to March 4, 2021. �Story on P3
MoI official says Establishment Card service will be available on Metrash2 app soon.Work under way to convert all remaining paper services to online.Ministry continues the service to deliver documents through Qatar Post.
Those scheduled to receive their second dose can go directly to the drive-through centre on their scheduled day, without the need for an appointment.
Six out of every ten people over 70 years of age have received at least first dose of the vaccine. Over 90% of elderly HMC inpatients have also received their first vaccine dose.
QNA — DOHA
The National Human Rights Committee (NHRC), represented by President Dr. Ali bin Sumaikh Al Marri, signed yesterday via video conference a memo-randum on joint cooperation with the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the Russian Federation, represented in the Commissioner for Human Rights Tatyana Moskalkova.
The memorandum aims to enhance cooperation in the field of protecting human rights, in addition to coordinating and partnering in the field of pro-tecting human rights to promote its culture in the two countries.
The memorandum also aims to strengthen the close
relations between the two parties in the areas of dissemi-nating and protecting the culture of human rights, as well as cooperating on the
development of the human rights system, strategies and action plans of each side, in addition to the benefit from the exchange of technical expertise.
The memorandum of understanding stipulated that the cooperation between the two sides includes the exchange of expertise and information related to com-plaints procedures and any other activities of the two parties, including any infor-mation on legislative activities,
and any important decisions issued by each country in accordance with their national regulations, in addition to mutual reporting and assistance in cases of violation of human rights and freedoms of Russian citizens in Qatar or of Qatari citizens in Russia, if they occur.
Cooperation also includes a provision on mutual assistance in the promotion and protection of the human rights and freedoms of citizens of both parties, within the limits of their powers. It also includes provi-sions on invitations to confer-ences, workshops, meetings and other activities within the scope of the promotion and protection of human rights, and any other topics related to the powers of the national human rights insti-tutions organized by the two parties.
Dr. Al Marri and Moskalkova both gave a brief overview on their respective organizations and their efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, during the signing of the memorandum.
02 WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021HOME
The memorandum also aims to strengthen the close
relations between the two parties in the areas of
disseminating and protecting the culture of human
rights, as well as cooperating on the development of
the human rights system, strategies and action plans
of each side, in addition to the benefit from the
exchange of technical expertise.
Amir receives message from President of Ghana
Foreign Minister meets US Special Envoy for Yemen
Amir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani has received a written message from President of the Republic of Ghana, H E Nana Akufo-Addo, pertaining to bilateral relations and ways of enhancing and developing them. Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, H E Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, received the message during a meeting yesterday with Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration of the Republic of Ghana, H E Shirley Ayorkor Botchway.
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, H E Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani met yesterday with US Special Envoy for Yemen, H E Timothy Lenderking. They reviewed bilateral cooperation relations and the latest developments in the region, especially in Yemen. The Minister of Foreign Affairs reaffirmed that the only way to solve the Yemeni crisis is through negotiation between the Yemenis according to the outcomes of the National Dialogue, the Gulf initiative, and the relevant Security Council resolutions, especially Resolution No. 2216, stressing Qatar’s firm position on Yemen’s unity and territorial integrity.
Chief of Staff meets
Turkish counterpartQNA — DOHA
Chief of Staff of Qatari Armed Forces H E Lieutenant General (Pilot) Ghanem bin Shaheen Al Ghanim met yesterday with Chief of the General Staff of the Turkish Armed Forces, H E General Yasar Guler, who is visiting the country.
During the meeting, they reviewed bilateral military relations between the two friendly countries, and means of enhancing them.
After the meeting, the Chief of Staff of Qatari Armed Forces and his Turkish counterpart participated in the meeting of the Qatari-Turkish Higher Joint Mil-itary Committee, which concluded its work today. The committee held its meetings over a period of three days.
The preparatory meetings of the com-mittee were chaired by President of the
Qatar's envoy to
Germany highlights
opportunities to
strengthen
partnershipQNA — BERLIN
Ambassador of the State of Qatar to the Federal Republic of Germany H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Mohammed Al Thani gave a lecture at a symposium at the invitation of the German Near and Middle East Association (NUMOV), with the partici-pation of H E Abdullah bin Hamad Al Attiyah, former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy and Industry, and H E Daniela de Ridder, a Member of the German Bundestag and Deputy Chairperson of the Bundestag Committee on Foreign Affairs.
During the lecture, the Qatar's Ambassador affirmed the strong and deep-rooted relations between the State of Qatar and the Federal Republic of Germany, and highlighted the role of the Qatari investments in pro-moting and enhancing the bilateral relations being stra-tegic and long-term investment.
The Ambassador noted that the State of Qatar is determined to increase its investments in the German economy, especially in Small and medium-sized com-panies, and praised the role carried out by the German companies in Qatar and their contribution to strengthening the relations between the two countries.
Ambassador Sheikh Abdullah bin Mohammed Al Thani gave a full explanation of the investment envi-ronment, the infrastructure and the logistics offered by the State of Qatar, in addition to the tax exemptions that make Qatar the best investment climate in the region.
He indicated that the rela-tions between Qatar and Germany are not limited to the political and economic domains, rather extend to cul-tural, scientific and health fields.
NHRC, Russian rights body sign cooperation agreement
Education Excellence Award gives great motivation: WinnersSANAULLAH ATAULLAH THE PENINSULA
The winners of 14th Education Excellence Award have expressed their happiness and pride to be honoured by Amir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
They said that the award will provide great motivation for them to make more achieve-ments in their educational and practical life enabling them to contribute in taking Qatar to new heights.
The winners also thanked to Award Organising Com-mittee, schools, their parents and family members for sup-porting to submit the entries for the award during this excep-tional situation amid pandemic.
A special ceremony was held on Monday at Sheraton Hotel to honour 71 winners of 14th Education Excellence Award. The award honours out-standing Qatari students and individuals in various fields to promote a culture of creativity and excellence among the Qatari society.
It aims to push students to more excellence and out-s t a n d i n g e d u c a t i o n a l attainment, and promote inte-gration between individual and institutional efforts to improve
scholarly outputs and bring them to global standards.
Speaking to The Peninsula, Abdullah Hilal Al Mohannadi, a student of Qatar Academy at Al Khor said: “I am happy to win a platinum medal. First, I would like to thank Allah then my parents and school who spared no efforts in supporting me to get this prestigious award.”
He competed in Excellent Student Primary School Cat-egory of the award. “I worked hard to submit my entry to get the award which is a great achievement for me. My ambition is to make the name of Qatar in international forum through my achievements,” said Al Mohannadi.
Speaking about the
importance of award, he said that the award played key role in promoting the culture of excellence among the students.
Another winner, a student of grade 6 from Al Bayan Primary School for Girls, Aisha Ali Al Khu-laifi, who received a gold medal, said that her entry was about sci-entific research, school activities and extra curriculum activities from grade 3 to 5.
“My parents helped me in preparing the entry and sub-mitting for the award. They also supported me in taking work-shops related to the award. The award is very important for me. I am very happy and proud to win this great award,” said Al Khulaifi. Sheikha Zaid Hasan Al
Ajmi, a student of Al Bayan Primary School for Girls who won a gold medal said: “I am proud to be honoured by H H the Amir. My entry was about projects, facing challenges and travels inside Qatar and outside of the country. I worked on my file for three years. My mother and school supported me to preparing and submitting my entry for the award.”
She said that the award encouraged students to do hard work for excellence which will take the country to new heights.
CEO of Education Excel-lence Award, Dr. Hamda Hassan Al Sulaiti, said that 71 winners of the award have been hon-oured. She said that outstanding people are deserved to be
hanoured because of their hard works in all fields.
“The contestants obtained high marks. A total of 374 can-didates competed for the 14th edition of the award,” said Dr. Al Sulaiti. She asked the con-testants whose luck did not favour for this year to apply for next edition with better preparation.
“The Organising Committee will begin preparation for next edition during coming period,” said Dr. Al Sulaiti. In a message to the winners, Dr. Al Sulaiti said that obtaining the ward should not be only target but it should be taken as a tool to lead the life in the pattern of excellence to serve the country in a better way.
FROM LEFT: CEO of Education Excellence Award Dr. Hamda Hassan Al Sulaiti, award winners Sheikha Zaid Hasan Al Ajmi, Aisha Ali Al Khulaifi and Abdullah Hilal Al Mohannadi. PICS: SALIM MATRAMKOT/THE PENINSULA
National Human Rights Committee (NHRC) President Dr. Ali bin Sumaikh Al Marri (left) and High Commissioner for Human Rights of the Russian Federation, Tatyana Moskalkova.
International Military Cooperation Authority Brigadier General Abdulaziz Saleh Al Sulaiti from the Qatari side, and from the Turkish side by Chief of the Foreign Relations Division Brig-
adier General Hakan Canli. The committee meetings discussed
bilateral cooperation plans between the two sides and ways to enhance them. The closing day of the
committee’s meetings witnessed the signing of several bilateral cooperation agreements, in the presence of a number of senior officers from the Qatari and Turkish Armed Forces.
Chief of Staff of Qatari Armed Forces H E Lieutenant General (Pilot) Ghanem bin Shaheen Al Ghanim and Chief of the General Staff of the Turkish Armed Forces, H E General Yasar Guler, posing with other officials after Qatari-Turkish Higher Joint Military Committee meeting.
03WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021 HOME
“As the only airline to own
and operate an Aircraft
Recovery Kit in the Middle
East and Africa regions
within IATP group, this
innovative technology is an
asset not only for Qatar
Airways and the entire
commercial aviation industry
throughout the region and
beyond,” said H E Akbar
Al Baker, Qatar Airways
Group Chief Executive.
Education Ministry participates in activities of Gulf Day for Giftedness and CreativityQNA — DOHA
The Ministry of Education and Higher Education’s Special Education and Gifted Care Department participated in a virtual meeting organised by the Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf States (ABEGS) in Riyadh, on giftedness and creativity within the activities of the Gulf Day for Giftedness and Creativity.
The Ministry gave a presen-tation reviewing its efforts in nur-turing talented students in Qatar.
In her presentation, Director of Special Education and Gifted Care Department at the Ministry of Education and Higher Education Hanadi Mansour Al Khater affirmed that the Ministry established a framework for
identifying, supporting and nur-turing talent in different aca-demic stages, including discov-ering gifted students and pre-paring development plans to nurture them and follow up to ensure their continuity.
She added that the Ministry engaged gifted students in virtual and interactive programs that encourage creativity in schools, especially under the circum-stances of COVID-19 pandemic, pointing out electronic teams were created in public schools to nurture gifted students via the Microsoft Teams program, in order to continuously follow up with their development, improve their performance and develop their creativity.
Al Khater also highlighted
the efforts of the Ministry of Education and Higher Edu-cation in enhancing community partnerships at the local com-munity level to nurture gifted students, in addition to strengthening external partner-ships and exchanging experi-ences at both regional and international levels.
On local prizes and competi-tions that enhance giftedness, she emphasised the significance of the Education Excellence Award that honours academically outstanding Qatari students in various fields in order to promote the culture of creativity and excellence in the Qatari community and encourage students to excel and increase out-standing education a l accomplishment.
Transport Minister
leads Qatar in
second Maritime
India Summit
THE PENINSULA — DOHA
Minister of Transport and Communications H E Jassim Saif Ahmed Al Sulaiti yesterday headed the Qatari delegation participating in the 2nd edition of Maritime India Summit, which India’s Prime Minister H E Narendra Modi inaugurated.
The virtual Summit, which ends tomorrow, is attended by several ministers and decision-makers representing the mar-itime industry, CEOs and chairmen of Indian and inter-national maritime companies, as well as several global financial organisations that eye investment in maritime industry. It is also attended by multiple maritime industry enterprise and SMEs owners, academia and researchers.
The 2nd edition of MIS will
discuss latest and future trends in maritime industry in the post-pandemic COVID-19 world, attracting potential global investors and exploring opportunities of cooperation between officials, representa-tives and delegations of the participating countries, aiming for the best use of the potential of the maritime industry around the world.
The Minister also partici-pated in the Ministerial Session, which discussed developing the maritime industry, ports and hot topics on environment and sustainability.
The Qatari delegation includes representatives from the Ministry of Transport and Communications, Mwani Qatar, Qatar Navigation (Milaha) and QTerminals.
Minister of Transport and Communications H E Jassim Saif Ahmed Al Sulaiti attending the virtual summit.
Qatar Airways holds 12th annual Disabled Aircraft Recovery ExerciseTHE PENINSULA — DOHA
Qatar Airways has held its 12th annual simulated Disabled Aircraft Recovery (QDAR) Exercise on a grounded Airbus A340-600 aircraft using the airline’s state-of-the-art Aircraft Recovery Kit, at Doha International Airport.
The award-winning airline is the only airline in the Middle East and Africa to operate the equipment, and one of just 12 International Airlines Technical Pool (IATP) member global air-lines to operate the kit which is capable of lifting the equivalent weight of up to Airbus A380, one of the largest commercial passenger aircraft in existence. Manufactured by Dutch rescue and recovery equipment pro-vider, Resqtec, the innovative Aircraft Recovery Kit complies with ICAO IATA rules and reg-ulations and uses a complex system of airbags, slings and jacks to winch a disabled air-craft to safety following an emergency inscident.
The Qatar Airways kit has already been used in one regional aircraft recovery to date and annual simulation exercise ensures that the skillset of the QDAR team, which is pri-marily made up of members of
the airline’s Technical department and ground services subsidiary, Qatar Avi-ation Services (QAS) remain current in the event of a crisis.
Qatar Airways Group Chief Executive, H E Akbar Al Baker, said: “Qatar Airways is at the forefront of enhancing global aviation safety with our com-mitment to investing in the highest standards of recovery equipment and comprehensive training for industry professionals.
“As the only airline to own and operate an Aircraft Recovery Kit in the Middle East and Africa regions within IATP group, this innovative
technology is an asset not only for Qatar Airways and the entire commercial aviation industry throughout the region and beyond.”
Qatar Airways has become the first global airline in the world to achieve the prestigious 5-Star COVID-19 Airline Safety Rating by international air transport rating organisation, Skytrax. This follows HIA’s recent success as the first and only airport in the Middle East and Asia to be awarded a Skytrax 5-Star COVID-19 Airport Safety Rating.
These recognitions provide assurance to passengers across the world that airline health and safety standards are subject to the highest possible standards of professional, independent scrutiny and assessment. For full details of all the measures that have been implemented onboard and in HIA, please visit qatarairways.com/safety.
The national carrier of the State of Qatar continues to rebuild its network, which cur-rently stands at over 130 desti-nations. With more frequencies being added to key hubs, Qatar Airways offers unrivalled con-nectivity to passengers, making it easy for them to travel when they need to.
Disabled Aircraft Recovery Exercise on a grounded Airbus A340-600 aircraft using the airline’s state-of-the-art Aircraft Recovery Kit, at Doha International Airport.
MoPH reports
463 new cases,
359 recoveries
THE PENINSULA — DOHA
The Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) yesterday announced the registration of 463 new confirmed COVID-19. Among them 42 were travelers returning from abroad.
Also 359 people have recovered from the virus, bringing the total number of recovered cases in Qatar to 146,910. All new cases have been introduced to isolation and are receiving necessary healthcare according to their health status.
304 people referred
to Public Prosecution
for violating
COVID-19 measures
QNA — DOHA
The designated authorities yesterday referred 304 people to the Public Prosecution for violating the preventive and precautionary measures enforced by the country to curb the spread of the corona-virus (COVID-19).
Among them, 266 people were referred to the Public Pros-ecution for not wearing masks in places where they are man-datory, while 25 were found vio-lating the maximum number of four people allowed in a vehicle including the driver, except when they are members of one family, 5 others did not comply with quarantine, and 8 people were also referred to the Public Pros-ecution for not installing Ehteraz app on their mobile phones.
International diploma program in stadium security in preparation for Qatar 2022 beginsQNA — DOHA
The first round of the Interna-tional Diploma Program in Stadium Security and Sports Fans’ safety began yesterday, which is supervised by the Safety and Security Operations Committee (SSOC) of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, as part
of the State of Qatar’s prepa-ration for this major event.
The 9-month program aims to raise the level of the partic-ipants of the silver level leaders from the various units of the committee. Experts from the “Stadium” institution, in cooperation with the interna-tional accreditation body,
“Highfield” organization, which specializes in awarding credits in British and European stadiums, are giving lectures during the event.
The Director of the Rehabil-itation and Training Department Lt. Col. Fahd Al Subaie explained that this diploma of Level IV is a h i g h - l e v e l
training and educational program consisting of several training courses and actual participation in international sporting events, in addition to individual evaluation and development sessions up to the diploma certificate, which is the highest certificate in the field of security and safety
management in international sporting events.
The content of the courses comprises many topics, including the public safety plan in sporting events, the man-agement of the security and safety of the fans, the devel-opment, implementation and review of safety and security
policies and procedures in sporting events, risk man-agement in crowded places, the initial response to major acci-dents, resilience planning, mon-itoring and resolving public problems, identifying and eval-uating opportunities for inno-vation and improvement, and other topics.
Joaan bin Jassim Joint
Command and Staff
College hosts Minister of
Commerce and Industry
QNA — DOHA
The Joaan bin Jassim Joint Command and Staff College hosted HE Minister of Commerce and Industry Ali bin Ahmed Al Kuwari, as part of the curriculum for the National Defense (1) course.
The Minister of Commerce and Industry delivered a lecture to the par-ticipants in the session, including senior employees of the various state minis-tries and institutions and security agencies, entitled the national economy and its role in supporting the defense effort, followed by a dis-cussion session that dealt with the themes of the lecture, in the presence of Chief of Staff of Qatari Armed Forces H E Lieutenant General (Pilot) Ghanem bin Shaheen Al Ghanim.
Drive-through centre to serve people for second dose onlyFROM PAGE 1
Chair of the National Health Strategic Group on COVID-19 and Head of Infectious Diseases at HMC, Dr. Abdullatif Al Khal, earlier said that drive-through vaccination centre has been designed to provide a convenient way for people to receive their vaccinations.
He added that the vac-cines are administered in a discreet manner within a dedicated vaccination lane which cars can drive through, while the vaccine recipient remains in the comfort of their own vehicle.
According to Dr. Al Khal, the new centre will boost the vaccination pro-gramme and enable the
vaccination of a high number of people.
Individuals who have received the full course of the given COVID-19 vaccination — two doses of the vaccine —will have it displayed on their Ehteraz app 7 days after the last dose was administered.
The new status will
appear on the health status page of the app as a golden frame around the QR code, and a vaccinated stamp image.
The QR code may still be any of the four colours depending on the individ-ual’s status, but will be surrounded by the golden f r a m e i f f u l l y vaccinated.
Establishment Card, other services to be provided electronically
FROM PAGE 1
He pointed out that the General Directorate of Passports has provided the residency renewal service through two options: Qatar Post or collecting from department’s centres.
“We provided such service for the safety of visitors to reduce their physical attendance and most of them preferred the postal option instead of visiting the department,” he said.
Colonel Al Aqidi noted that the General Directorate of Pass-ports building contains a special place to receive the elderly and people with special needs to provide them with services urgently.
More than 7 million transactions were completed through the Metrash2 app last year, a Ministry official had said earlier. The number of Metrash2 users has reached 2 million. The Metrash2 app offers more than 220 active services available in 6 languages — Arabic, English, French, Malayalam, Urdu, and Spanish. It guarantees safe and encrypted services and supports most smart devices, which con-tributes to reaching the largest possible segment of users.
More than 60% of over
70-year-olds vaccinated FROM PAGE 1
“Due to the recent increase in COVID-19 cases in Qatar, it is vitally important that people over 60 years of age get vaccinated as soon as possible. More than 200 million vaccine doses have now been given to people across the world and the vaccine has displayed very high levels of safety and efficacy. People should not be worried about having the vaccine, they should only be worried about getting the virus,” added Dr. Al Hamad.
New batch of Qatari real estate brokers obtain licenceQNA — DOHA
A new batch of licensed Qatari real estate brokers took the legal oath before the Real Estate Brokers Affairs Committee at the Ministry of Justice. The batch consisted of 20 brokers, taking the number of licensed brokers since the new law entered into force to 120.
The licensing of this batch comes within the framework of the implementation procedures of the provisions of the law, and pushing the real estate brokerage business towards an organized legal environment prepared to keep pace with the economic and urban renaissance witnessed by the country and the great expansion in the real estate sector.
THE PENINSULA – DOHA
Qatar University’s (QU) Gulf Studies Center (GSC) has developed rapidly in just a few years as it aims to advance in-depth knowledge of issues related to the Gulf region.
The center works on fos-tering thoughtful dialogue among students, scholars, and practitioners of Gulf affairs. It facilitates the free flow of ideas and knowledge, thus promoting scholarly interest in the region. It aims to achieve this by offering mult idiscipl inary post-graduate academic programs and innovative research.
In the past three years, the center’s expansion included much-needed positions, and in return, the center improved its overall performance. The center boasts a diversity of students and faculty members of more than 30 nationalities, which helps diversify the center and its activities.
GSC Director, Associate Professor, Dr. Mahjoob Zweiri, said, “We engage in outreach activities with a wide range of local, regional, and international partners. The center is keen on recruiting faculty who are experts in the field and staff with experiences that will
help enrich the vision and mission of the center.
“Most importantly, our research center and our graduate program work as a unity. The center is committed to offering the faculty and stu-dents a rare opportunity to be exposed to academic research from the field, closely linking both the center and the program. This healthy rela-tionship has proven its effec-tiveness and its ability to i n c r e a s e r e s e a r c h productivity.”
The center’s greatest pride is the book series with the
international and world-renowned publisher Springer, who released the first compre-hensive book on the 2017 Gulf Crisis.
As part of the Gulf Studies series, Springer launched a new volume titled ‘The 2017 Gulf Crisis: An Interdisci-plinary Approach,’ edited by Mahjoob Zweiri, Mizanur Rahman, and Arwa Kamal. The book brings together 23 top-level social scientists, including six Qatari scholars.
Currently, the GSC has about three to five main books in the pipeline, including
‘Contemporary Qatar: An Examination of State and Society’ edited by Dr. Mahjoob Zweiri and Farah Al Qawasmi, in addition to more books in this field.
“We work towards catering to Qatar National Vision 2030 and keeping in mind the National Priorities Research Program (NPRP). Members of our center are encouraged to apply for NPRP funding in line with the research priorities,” Dr. Mahjoob noted.
One of the main NPRP funded projects is ‘Economic, Political and Security aspects of Sanctions and Blockades from a Target Country Per-spective: Policy Lessons for Qatar and other Target
Countries’ 2020-2022 by Dr. Mahjoob Zweiri.
Speaking on upcoming events, Dr, Mahjoob said, “The Gulf Studies Center’s annual conference will be on the topic of politics and security. Every year, the annual conference tackles a major element in one of our three central pillars. In addition to that, we will be hosting two major workshops, one in economics and energy and one in culture and society. Furthermore, we will be hosting several minor events parallel with our research agenda and research priorities.”
Despite the pandemic, the center hosted thirteen virtual events in 2020 with local and international participants. Besides, the center’s faculty members continued to partic-ipate in external events r e g i o n a l l y a n d internationally.
Speaking on the center’s achievements recently, Dr. Mahjoob said, “I am pleased to witness and take part in numerous positive transfor-mations in the past few years. These transformations include faculty, staff, student growth and diversity, a significant rise in productivity and outreach, and remarkable center efficiency.”
04 WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021HOME
In the past three years,
the center’s expansion
included much-needed
positions, and in return,
the centre improved its
overall performance. The
center boasts a diversity
of students and faculty
members of more than 30
nationalities, which helps
diversify the center and its
activities.
QU’s GSC boasts fast progress in recent years
Director of Gulf Studies Center, Associate Professor Dr. Mahjoob Zweiri
Registration begins in private schools, preschoolsTHE PENINSULA – DOHA
Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MoEHE) has announced that the regis-tration in private schools and preschools began yesterday.
Hamad Al Ghali, Director of Private Schools Licensing Department (PSLD,) said that according to the circular sent to private schools and pre-schools, early registration opened on March 1 and will run through October 14, 2021.
“Registration of overseas students, however, will remain open until the end of January 2022. Each school shall determine and announce its mechanism for registration following the Ministry’s laws and regulations in this regard,” said Al Ghali.
He added that admission age in all academic stages is determined as per the tables attached to the circular, noting that these tables determine the maximum and minimum age for admission.
Al Ghali said Qatar has over 325 private schools and preschools offering 30 dif-ferent curricula, which provide a wide variety of options for parents. He also called on the parents to avail
the online services that the Ministry provides for the private education sector on its Public Services Portal.
Al Ghali pointed out that parents can access the portal to obtain up-to-date guidance and information related to Qatar’s private schools and preschools.
He added that the Minis-try’s website allows parents to access a list of private schools and preschools of different classifications. They can also conduct any search by school name, curricula, geographic area, location, academic level, annual tuition fees, and contact information.
Concerning the education vouchers, the PSLD director said that the list of private insti-tutions that accept education vouchers during 2021-22
includes 107 schools and pre-schools. He added that vouchers are offered to all Qatari students registered in the nationally-accredited private schools. The education vouchers are the amount of money granted by the state to cover part or all of the tuition fees.
Regarding new school license applications for the next year, Al Ghali said that the PSLD received some 38 applications to open new private educational facilities for the 2021-22 academic year. Of those, 21 applica-tions were submitted for facilities teaching the British curriculum, 11 for the American curriculum, three for the Indian curriculum, two for the national cur-riculum, and one for the Tunisian curriculum.
PISQ participates
in 2nd Qatar
Secondary School
Debate League
THE PENINSULA – DOHA
Pakistan International School Qatar (PISQ) has participated in the 2nd Qatar Secondary School Debate League (QSDL) 2021.
The tournament was held online on a platform called ‘Discord.’ Two teams of senior debaters from the senior girls’ wing participated in the Tournament on Feb-ruary 13.
Total 46 Debate Teams from 27 Institutes partici-pated in the contest. Based on the entire team wins and each school’s total team scores in 1st and 2nd QSDL, PISQ has qualified to QSDL Nationals 2021.
PISQ Teams comprised Fatima Yousaf, Hafsa Farhan, Maha Atif, Dua Fatima, Joanna Johnson, and Mishal Fazil. Hafsa Farhan was placed among the top ten speakers out of 136 speakers. Riffat Tahir coached debaters, whereas Naheed Nadeem contributed to the event as an adjudicator.
Principal Pakistan Inter-national School Qatar Nargis Raza Otho congratulated the debaters on their brilliant success. She appreciated the debaters and the teachers for taking the challenges of time constraints and debating online in the current COVID-19 Pandemic. She asked the debaters and their mentors to keep up their commitment, enthusiasm, and hard work for Nationals.
‘Consult Me’service to offerpsychologicalsupport forthe elderly
QNA – DOHA
Center for Empowerment and Elderly Care (Ehsan), one of the centers under the Q a t a r S o c i a l W o r k Foundation umbrel la , announced the activation of ‘Shawerni’ (Consult Me) service as part of the psychological support services provided by the center for the elderly, their families and their caregivers, to enhance the mental health of the elderly.
The center has designated three communicat ion channels, either by phone that allows the elderly and their families to contact specialists during the morning and evening periods, WhatsApp or through the Ehsan Center website.
The ‘Consult Me’ service enhances the center’s efforts towards providing high-quality services to the elderly in the country, especially in l ight of the current circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides counseling and psychological support services to follow up on the mental health of the elderly or provide advice and assistance to their families or their caregivers.
The service also offers online video conferencing by calling the designated phone number or by visiting the center’s website.
The phone calls would be answered by psychological specialists from the center who has experience in listening and communication skills and methodologies and techniques for providing psychological counseling and dealing with the elderly.
In some cases, they will be directed to the specialized government hotlines that suit their health condition.
Ehsan launched the ‘Consult Me’ service in 2020 to enhance the mental health of the elderly. The center also affirms the privacy and confidentiality of all calls.
THE PENINSULA - DOHA
Qatar Museums and Aspire Zone Foundation (AZF) have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to promote sports culture and history through shared facil-ities, community programmes and events.
Through the agreement, Qatar Museums’ 3-2-1 Qatar
Olympic Sports Museums (QOSM) and AZF will work together to nurture a high-level sports environment in the country.
QOSM, located at AZF’s Khalifa International Stadium, will demonstrate to the world that sport and Qatar are intrin-sically linked. The museum will feature interactive exhibits,
inspiring objects and unique activity areas that inspire a spirit of participation.
Commenting on the agreement, Ahmad Musa Al Namla, CEO, Qatar Museums, said: “With this agreement we are pleased to jointly promote sports culture and history. The part-nership will further enhance the positive value of sport through its facilities. We are confident that this mutual collaboration will have a positive impact on the two parties and our community in Qatar to encourage active lifestyle.”
Al Namla added that the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum will showcase the origins, devel-opment and significance of sports culture within Qatar and beyond.
Mohammed Khalifa Al Suwaidi, CEO of Aspire Zone Foundation, said: “We are pleased to sign this MoU between our foundation and Qatar Museums as this partnership is a cultural entity and sporting history to build a high level of sport environment.”
“We are proud of this unique collaboration, as Khalifa Inter-national Stadium is considered one of the oldest stadiums in the country. Qatar Museums’ 3-2-1 Qatar Olympic Sports will be a valuable legacy for future generations,” Al Suwaidi added.
Through the agreement,
Qatar Museums’ 3-2-1
Qatar Olympic Sports
Museums (QOSM) and AZF
will work together to
nurture a high-level
sports environment in the
country.
05WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021 HOME
Qumra Talks to explore film, photography and musicTHE PENINSULA - DOHA
Legendary French photog-rapher Brigitte Lacombe and groundbreaking Middle Eastern singer Yasmine Hamdan will headline Qumra Talks for the 2021 online edition of Qumra, Doha Film Institute’s event dedicated to supporting important emerging voices from the Arab and world cinema.
Qumra 2021’s virtual format allows film lovers from across the globe to participate in diverse programmes through the purchase of the Qumra Pass, including fascinating Master Classes with luminaries in con-temporary cinema, inspiring talks with distinguished artists, and a selection of screeningsfor audiences in the MENA region-showcasing works of new and seasoned Arab film talent sup-ported by the Doha Film Institute.
To buy the Qumra Pass, view the entire programme and ticket details please visit: www.dohafilminstitute.com/qumra/
qumrapass. Fatma Hassan Alremaihi,
CEO of Doha Film Institute, said, “Through the diverse subjects and the unique insights shared by international experts, Qumra Talks adds tremendous value to the overall experience by delving into the many varying perspectives shaping the global creative landscape. Our treasured relationships with both Brigitte and Yasmine go back many years, and we are thankful for their continued support of the Institute. Their sessions will inspire and enlighten participants about their unique creative processes and the lasting legacies they are creating in contemporary society through their art.”
“Audiences across the region now have an opportunity to par-ticipate in the sessions virtually and get the most from their Qumra experience with the Qumra Pass package that pro-vides access to our entire pro-gramme. We are excited to bring the world this innovative virtual format of Qumra that makes it
possible for lovers of art, film and music to gain an intimate glimpse into the lives of legends across the global creative community.”
‘On Music and Film’ scheduled on March 13 will see Lebanese singer-songwriter Yasmine Hamdan share her per-sonal, contemporary approach to Arabic pop that has won her fans across the world, with film-maker and video artist Rania Stephan. Often crossing genres and blending traditional bound-aries, she has worked with
visionary artists from all disci-plines including filmmakers Jim Jarmusch and Elia Suleiman, as well as theatre productions at the Comédie-Française. In this inspirational Qumra Talk, Yasmine will take the audience on a journey of discovery, exploring her creative process and discussing her unique col-laborations across mediums and disciplines.
Renowned for her crisp black-and-white portraits of global legends, Brigitte Lacombe will feature in a session on
March 14 titled ‘The Art of Ground-breaking Photography’ where she will showcase her acclaimed body of work and discuss her experiences and inspirations.
This intimate conversation with journalist and blogger E. Nina Rothe will span Brigitte’s illustrious career in the world of cinema, working with some of the film industry’s most famous names including Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Mike Nichols, Lynne Ramsay, David Mamet, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino.
Qumra 21 will host master classes with legendary French auteur Claire Denis, BAFTA and Academy Award nomi-nated cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, inter-nationally celebrated director and Cannes veteran James Gray, Silver Lion winning film director and screenwriter Jessica Hausner and Academy Award winning sound designer Mark Mangini.
Qatar Museums, Aspire Zone Foundation sign MoU
Ta’allum Academies hosts ‘Virtual Book Fair’
THE PENINSULA - DOHA
Ta’allum Academies have organised a ground-breaking ‘Virtual Book Fair’ event in conjunction with Lusail Publishing from February 28 until March 4, the first event of its kind for schools.
The Virtual Book Fair sup-ports Ta’allum’s priority focus on reading and use of tech-nology to support learning, despite the challenges imposed by the pandemic.
The Fair showcases latest technological and digital developments to facilitate innovative access to infor-mation and resources. It fea-tures 2D and 3D designs to display books, which are suitable for all school age groups and interests. There are books in both Arabic and English from three hundred publishing houses within and outside Qatar which are represented.
Virtual visitors can search and select books according to their categories using a logical classification system.
Ta’allum’s Director of Edu-cation, Dr. Mohammed Saefan said: “The impetus for the Virtual Book Fair emerged from Ta’allum’s belief in the importance of a reading habit for our students, families and staff. Students who grow up surrounded by books, and encouraged to read from an early age, will thrive in their learning throughout their time in school. Through this Fair, families can enhance their home libraries and share the joy of reading with their children.”
The book fair, which runs 24 hours throughout the week exhibits and sells books accommodating a variety of reading interests and age groups.
Yasmine HamdanBrigitte Lacombe
Ooredoo donates 4 million Nojoom Points to QCS THE PENINSULA- DOHA
Ooredoo has announced the conclusion of its Nojoom Points Donation Drive, with a phenomenal 4,085,392 Nojoom Points donated to Qatar Cancer Society in honour of World Cancer Day 2021.
Ooredoo organised the drive to encourage Nojoom members to donate their Nojoom Points to Qatar Cancer Society to help the organization continue its inval-uable work within Qatar’s communities.
Qatar Cancer Society actively seeks to raise awareness of the disease, educate communities, promote early detection, and support those with cancer and their families.
The organisation’s campaign for World Cancer Day 2021 was
‘I am, I will’, recognising that each individual’s commitment to act will lead to powerful progress in reducing the global impact of cancer and that actions – whether big or small – will lead to lasting, positive change.
To encourage as many Nojoom members to donate their points as possible, Ooredoo set
an ambitious target of a total donation of 2 million Nojoom Points. Members could donate via the Ooredoo App or the Ooredoo website and track progress towards the target via the dedi-cated Donation Meter page. The initial target was exceeded long before the drive’s conclusion, with organisers delighted to see
it more than doubled by the time the campaign ended.
Director PR at Ooredoo Sabah Rabiah Al Kuwari said: “We have a longstanding part-nership with Qatar Cancer Society, and we were proud to work with the organisation on this charitable initiative. Their work within the community is invaluable, and we’re honoured to support them in any way we can. We were overwhelmed by the generosity of our Nojoom members, and we’d like to extend our heartfelt thanks to every member who so gener-ously donated their Nojoom Points to this worthwhile cause, enabling Qatar Cancer Society to continue to help those affected by cancer, their fam-ilies and our wider communities.”
CMU-Q graduates recognised for excellence in education THE PENINSULA - DOHA
Six graduates from Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q), a Qatar Foundation partner university, were awarded the Education Excellence Day Award 2021 by The Amir H H Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani, in a ceremony on March 1. They are among only 19 university-level students nationwide who received this year’s award.
All six award recipients are members of the CMU-Q Class of 2020. Haya Rashid Al Kaabi was named a platinum medal winner, and Sara Khalid M.M. AlDarwish, Albandari Mohamed A.A. Al Mana, Taimaa Ahmed Al Mohanadi, Maha Omar M. I. Al Tamimi and Fatima Adel Mustafawi were named gold medal winners.
Michael Trick, dean of CMU-Q, praised the hard work and resilience of the award winners: “The Class of 2020 completed their uni-versity studies during a very challenging time for the entire world. On behalf of the entire CMU-Q community, I congratulate these accom-plished young women for all of their achievements.”
Platinum medal recipient, Haya Al Kaabi, noted that the support she received at CMU-Q has given her the confidence to succeed: “CMU-Q provided me with great professors and tutors who helped me reach my best academic performance, espe-cially Dr. Nesrine Affara who taught me and supported me through my research.”
The annual Education Excellence Day Awards, which are organized by the Ministry of Education and Higher Education, celebrate the achievement and schol-arship of Qatari students from primary school through to the doctoral level. In the last five years, 15 graduates from CMU-Q have received the award.
New children’s book unveiled by HBKU PressTHE PENINSULA - DOHA
Hamad Bin Khalifa University Press (HBKU Press) has recently released The Adventures of Angie series in Arabic by first-time author Hala Abu Saad, and illustrated by Ali Elzeny. This compelling new collection of books addresses difficult topics like degenerative disease, differences in ability, and depression in a compassionate and age-appropriate way for kids.
“One of our core editorial aims at HBKU Press is to make sure that children have literary
resources available that help shape their understanding of the world around them,” explains Rima Ismail, Special Projects and Outreach Manager at HBKU Press.
“Kids are people too, and this series aims to tackle tough subjects in a suitable way that allows for mean-ingful conversations and growth to happen. The books are tailored to our audience and address these issues among the local background to incorporate details unique to the region. The idea is that when children see themselves
and their culture reflected back to them in the pages of a book, they are more willing to accept the message and learn from it.”Abu Saad, inspired to pen her stories by her mother’s knack for sto-rytelling, wrote the series to honor her niece, Angela, who tragically passed away in 2015 in a car accident.
The Adventures of Angie series launches today delivered to locations in Qatar from the Rafeeq, Snoonu and Purplebox applications (available to download from the Apple Store and Google Play).
06 WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021 MIDDLE EAST
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a meeting to unveil the Human Rights Action Plan in Ankara, yesterday.
Erdogan outlines human rights action planANADOLU — ANKARA
Turkey’s groundbreaking new Human Rights Action Plan is a response to the wants and needs of the Turkish public, the nation’s president said yesterday.
“The main determinants in drawing up Turkey’s Human Rights Action Plan were the needs and demands of the people,” said Recep Tayyip Erdogan, unveiling the main 11 principles of the plan, set to be carried out over the course of two years.
Speaking at the Bestepe National Congress and Culture Center in the capital Ankara, Erdogan stressed that the plan is the fruit of broad-based con-sultation with the Turkish public. “The action plan we will explain today is an example of our will for change and reform that continues and will con-tinue,” he said, stressing that the necessary steps for the plan’s implementation will be taken with determination and that they will share an economic reform programme with the nation next week.
“We will continue to stand by the citizens against all kinds of threats to the dignity, belief, values, and life of the people,”
he added, saying that the new plan includes nine main goals, 50 targets, and 393 actions.
He listed the principles that form the state’s irrevocable commitments to the nation as follows:
1. People enjoy inalienable rights given by birth, and it is the state’s duty to protect and develop these rights.
2. Human dignity, as the essence of all rights, is under the effective protection of the law.
3. Everyone is equal before the law, without any discrimi-nation on the basis of language, religion, race, colour, gender, political opinion, philosophical belief, sect, or similar factors.
4. Providing public service to everyone equally, impar-tially, and honestly is the main feature of all administrative activities.
5. The laws must lay out express, clear, understandable, and predictable rules without causing hesitation, and public authorities must implement these rules without compro-mising the principle
Giving more details of the new plan, he said: “We aim to boost the effectiveness of the system of individual applica-tions to the Constitutional Court.” Under the plan, lawyers
will be able to electronically file individual applications to the Constitutional Court, and administrative courts will be required to release full written decisions within 30 days of rulings, explained Erdogan.
To strengthen democratic participation, he added, the country will start compre-hensive work to revise the political parties and electoral laws. A new Human Rights Compensation Commission will cover the financial burden of long trials without the need to apply to the Constitutional Court, said Erdogan.
He also pledged that an independent Human Rights Monitoring Commission for Penal Institutions will be formed, including members from both bar associations and universities.
A new investment ombuds-man’s office will be set up to settle disputes between the
administration and investors, he said. Turkey will also provide open access to the decisions of the ombudsman and human rights and equality institutions while also protecting personal data privacy, he said.
He stressed that in order to boost the standards of freedom of expression and the press, Turkey is developing measures to facilitate journalists’ profes-sional activities.
Turning to the rights of
non-Muslims in Turkey, a state that has long embraced people of all faiths and backgrounds, Erdogan said: “Turkey is revising the Foundations Law on the establishment and election of board of directors of non-Muslim community asso-ciations.” Moreover, public and private sector staff and students will be allowed to take leave for the religious holidays that they observe, regardless of their faith.
Yemen: UN donor conference raises ‘disappointing’ $1.7bnAP — CAIRO
A United Nations appeal for aid to Yemen to alleviate the world’s worst humanitarian disaster raised some $1.7bn on Monday — a result the UN chief called “disappointing.” At a virtual pledging conference co-hosted by Sweden and Swit-zerland, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had appealed for $3.85bn this year to address the impoverished Arab coun-try’s dire needs.
The amount raised, however, was less than what the UN received last year, and a billion dollars short of what was pledged in the 2019 con-ference, he said.
Guterres called for countries to “consider again what they can do to help stave off the worst famine the world has
seen in decades.” From the outset, it was unlikely that donors would meet the UN’s goal given the coronavirus pan-demic and its devastating con-sequences for economies around the globe. Corruption allegations in Yemen aid oper-ations were also a factor.
The conflict has killed some 130,000 people, spawned the world’s worst humanitarian dis-aster and reversed development gains by 20 years, according to the UN Development Program.
Half of Yemen’s health facil-ities are shuttered or destroyed and 4 million Yemenis have been driven from their homes. The pandemic, cholera epi-demics and severe malnutrition among children have led to thousands of additional deaths.
The UN Office for the Coor-dination of Humanitarian
Affairs warned that more than 16 million people in Yemen will go hungry this year, with some half a million already living in famine-like conditions.
Guterres called for a nationwide cease-fire and UN-led negotiations to end the war. “In the end, the only path to peace is through an imme-diate, nationwide cease-fire... There is no other solution,” he said.
Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who is on a week-long visit to Yemen, also called the outcome of the con-ference “disappointing,” warning that the lack of funding would cause massive cuts to Yemen aid.
“The shortfall in humani-tarian aid will be measured in lives lost,” he said.
Saudi Arabia, which leads the coalition fighting the Houthis, announced it would donate $430m in aid for Yemen this year to be funnelled through the UN and related agencies. Saudi Arabia had pledged half a billion dollars in 2020, the largest amount pledged by any country.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken led the US del-egation to the conference, which took place amid efforts by President Joe Biden’s admin-istration to bring an end to the conflict.
He said the US would donate $191 million for Yemen this year, a decrease of about $35 million from the amount it announced in the 2020 pledging conference.
He said the US was donating $191 million for Yemen, bringing
the US total to more than $350 million so far in fiscal year 2021.
He called for a cease-fire and for warring parties to halt their interference in aid oper-ations and “allow assistance to reach the innocent women, children, and men.” “We can only end the humanitarian crisis in Yemen by ending the war in Yemen. And so the United States is reinvigorating our diplomatic efforts to end the war,” Blinken said. Other major pledges came from Germany ($241m), the United Arab Emirates ($230m), the United Kingdom ($123.23m) and the European Union ( $116.2m).
Several speakers at the con-ference called for the Houthis to stop their offensive on the central province of Marib and their increasing cross-border attacks on Saudi Arabia.
Iraq launches vaccine drive with China dosesAP — BAGHDAD
Iraq launched its coronavirus inoculation programme yesterday just hours after the first doses of vaccine arrived from China, a Health Ministry spokesman said.
The programme kicked off as Iraq comes to grips with a second wave of the coronavirus.
At dawn, a C-130 military plane arrived in Baghdad with 50,000 Sinopharm vaccine doses gifted by China. More were expected as Iraq’s gov-ernment has allocated funds to secure 1.5 million vaccines from Pfizer and signed a contract for 2 million more from AstraZeneca.
Health Minister Hasan Al Tamimi was the first to receive the vaccine. He was followed by other ministry staff and essential frontline health care workers, said ministry spokesman Saif Al Badr.
A health centre close to Al Mustansiriya University will provide vaccines to the elderly, Al Badr said.
This week, the Health Min-istry also made available elec-tronic forms online for Iraqis to make an appointment to
receive the vaccine.Health care worker
Mohammed Khudeir was among the first to receive a jab yesterday in Baghdad’s Al Qif hospital.
“We were the first who were vaccinated and after half
an hour I am still in good health,” he said. “I am calling upon the citizens not to be afraid of this vaccine.” Some Iraqis have expressed mistrust of the vaccines, their pro-curement and their effectiveness.
Rollout will unfold similar to programs in other countries and prioritise the elderly and those with chronic diseases first, according to the ministry.
Iraqi officials are in a race against time as the country grapples with a second wave of the virus, spurred by the more infectious strain first discovered in the United Kingdom.
Yesterday, Iraq recorded over 4,600 new cases over the previous 24 hours, inching closer to a September peak of over 5,000 new infections within a 24-hour period. A total of 703,000 Iraqis have been infected and 13,450 have died of the virus.
A man waves the Iraqi flag from an aircraft carrying the first batch of doses of COVID-19 vaccine after it arrived at Baghdad International Airport, yesterday.
In dire straitsA Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her house, near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, yesterday.
Israeli occupation forces detain 22 Palestinians in West BankQNA — OCCUPIED JERUSALEM
Israeli occupation forces overnight detained at least 22 Palestinians from various parts of the West Bank, according to the Palestine Prisoner’s Society (PPS) and security sources.
They confirmed that Israeli forces rounded up three Palestinians after storming their families’ houses in Ram-allah district.
In the southern West Bank, Israeli forces detained two Palestinians, including a former prisoner, from Al Khader town, south of Bethlehem city.
Confrontations erupted in the vicinity of Solomons Pools on the Jeru-salem-Hebron Road during which sol-diers opened fire towards protestors. No injuries were reported though.
In Hebron district, soldiers ran-
sacked a house and detained a Pales-tinian from Ein Sarah neighbourhood. In Nablus district, PPS confirmed an Israeli military raid in Tell village, southwest of the city, resulting in the detention of a Palestinian.
It said Israeli troops also conducted a raid in the Nablus city neighbourhood of Rafidia, resulting in the detention of another resident of Tell village.
Soldiers also barged their way into Balata, east of Nablus city, where they rounded up another.
Furthermore, PPS confirmed that six others were detained in multiple raids across Tulkarm district.
Sources elaborated that Israeli sol-diers forced their way into Shweika neighbourhood, north of the city, where they rounded up four Pales-tinians, including a former prisoner.
Kuwait to
strengthen ties
with Oman
and India
QNA — KUWAIT
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Kuwait Sheikh Dr. Ahmad Nasser Al Mohammad Al Sabah, received two phone calls yesterday from his Omani counterparts, Sayyid Badr bin Hamad bin Hamood Al Busaidi, and from Indian Minister of Foreign Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.
Kuwait News Agency stated that during the two calls, ways to strengthen and develop relations between Kuwait, the Sultanate of Oman and India in various fields were discussed, in addition to discussing current regional a n d i n t e r n a t i o n a l developments.
Syrian victims
of chemical
attacks file case
in FranceREUTERS — PARIS
Lawyers representing survivors of a chemical weapons attack in 2013 in Syria have filed a criminal complaint against Syrian offi-cials whom they blame for the deaths of hundreds of civilians in a rebel-held area.
France is home to thou-sands of Syrian refugees, and its investigating judges have a mandate to determine whether crimes against humanity were committed anywhere in the world.
The case, which about a dozen people have joined, follows a similar one opened in Germany last year. It offers a rare legal avenue for action against the government of President Bashar Al Assad.
Attempts by Western powers to set up an interna-tional tribunal for Syria have been blocked by Russia and China at the UN Security Council.
“This is important so that the victims have the possibility to see those responsible being brought to justice and held accountable,” Mazen Darwish, who heads the Paris-based Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), told Reuters.
The SCM filed the com-plaint along with two other NGOs: the Open Society Foun-dation’s Justice Initiative and Syrian Archive.
France’s intelligence services concluded in 2013 that a sarin gas attack on the Eastern Ghouta region just south east of Damascas that killed 1,400 people had been carried out by Syrian gov-ernment forces.
The Syrian government denies it has used chemical weapons against its own civilians. The complaint is based on what the lawyers say is the most comprehensive body of evidence on the use of substances such as sarin gas in Syria. They include testi-monies from survivors and defectors, an analysis of the Syrian military chain of command, and hundreds of items of documentary evi-dence, including photos and videos. “We have compiled extensive evidence estab-lishing exactly who is respon-sible for these attacks on Douma and Eastern Ghouta, whose horrific effects continue to impact survivors,” said Hadi Al Khatib, founder and director of Syrian Archive. A UN-com-missioned investigation to identify those behind chemical weapons attacks in Syria con-cluded in 2016 that Syrian gov-ernment forces had used chlorine and sarin gas.
Five injured in
Baghdad protest
REUTERS — BAGHDAD
At least five people were injured on Monday when Iraqi security forces wielding clubs broke up a street protest in Baghdad’s central Tahrir Square, security and hospital sources said.
Dozens protested in Tahrir Square in a reaction to security force violence against pro-testers in the southern city of Nassiriya on Friday that left at least eight demonstrators dead and some 250 injured.
A security official who spoke on condition of ano-nymity said that the protesters in Tahrir numbered no more than 60 and they were dis-persed within half an hour.
Several hundred people also rallied in the southern port city of Basra on Monday in solidarity with the Nassiriya protesters, a witness said. Street clashes in Nassiriya erupted on February 2 and continued for about a week as security forces fired to dis-perse protesters trying to storm the provincial gov-ernment building using rocks and Molotov cocktails. Pro-testers were demanding the removal of the governor and justice for the killings of pro-testers since a wave of popular unrest began in 2019.
Turkish President said the
country will start
comprehensive work to
revise the political parties
and electoral laws.
07WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021 AFRICA
Joy in Nigeria after 279abducted schoolgirls freedAP — GUSAU, NIGERIA
Hundreds of Nigerian girls abducted last week from a boarding school in the country’s northwest have been released, a state governor said yesterday, as the West African nation faces a spate of school kidnappings.
The girls, ages 10 and up, dressed in light blue hijabs and barefoot, packed into Zamfara state’s Government House con-ference room. They appeared calm, chatting to one another as they sat in long rows while journalists photographed them. They will receive a medical checkup before being returned to their parents.
Zamfara Governor Bello Matawalle said that 279 girls had been freed after being abducted from the Government Girls Junior Secondary School in Jangebe town on Friday. The government last week said 317 had been kidnapped. It was not clear if the higher number was an error or if some girls were still missing.
“Alhamdulillah! (God be
praised!) It gladdens my heart to announce the release of the abducted students,” Matawalle said in a post on Twitter early yesterday. “I enjoin all well-meaning Nigerians to rejoice with us as our daughters are now safe.” Officials said “bandits” were behind the abduction, referring to the groups of armed men who operate in Zamfara state and kidnap for money or to push for the release of their members from jail.
At the time of the attack, one resident said the gunmen also attacked a nearby military camp and checkpoint, preventing sol-diers from responding to the school.
Nigeria has seen several such attacks and kidnappings
in recent years, the most noto-rious in 2014, when 276 girls were abducted by the insur-gents of Boko Haram from the secondary school in Chibok in Borno state. More than 100 of those girls are still missing.
Boko Haram is opposed to western education and its fighters often target schools. But most attacks in the northwest are perpetrated by armed criminal groups with no such ideology.
Police and the military have been trying to rescue the girls from the Zamfara abduction, which caused international outrage. Officials did not say if a ransom had been paid for their release.
“We have been in discussion since Friday with the abductors and reached agreement on Monday,” the governor said, adding that he would ensure additional security at all schools in the state.
President Muhammadu Buhari expressed “over-whelming joy” over the release of the girls.
“I join the families and people of Zamfara state in wel-coming and celebrating the release of these traumatized female students,” he said in a statement. “Being held in cap-tivity is an agonizing experience not only for the victims, but also their families and all of us.” The president called for greater vig-ilance to prevent bandits from carrying out such attacks — but warned that paying money for the release of victims would only result in more assaults.
Ernest Ereke, of the Uni-versity of Abuja, agreed that
ransoms are allowing criminal groups to buy more arms and expand their power.
And the Nigerian state increasingly looks too weak to respond, he said.
“It is a lucrative venture in a country where a lot of young people are impoverished, jobless and hungry,” he said. “The state, which should con-front these criminals, is ena-bling them by always pandering to their dictates. It should be the other way round, that is, the criminals should be scared of the state, but, in this case, it is
the state that is scared of crim-inals.” “If the state is not able to crush them,” he added, “it means something is wrong with the Nigerian state.”
On Saturday, 24 students, six staff and eight relatives were released after being abducted on February 17 from the Gov-ernment Science College Kagara in Niger state. In December, more than 300 schoolboys from a sec-ondary school in Kankara, in northwestern Nigeria, were taken and later released. The gov-ernment has said no ransom was paid for the students’ release.
Girls who were kidnapped from a boarding school in the northwest Nigerian state of Zamfara are seen after their release in Zamfara, Nigeria, yesterday.
Three workers for foreign media arrested in Tigray regionREUTERS — NAIROBI
A BBC reporter and two trans-lators working with journalists from the Financial Times and AFP news agency have been detained in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, according to their employers.
Fitsum Berhane was arrested at his home in the regional capital Mekelle on Friday after working for an AFP team for three days, the agency said in a statement.
Alula Akalu, who was working with the Financial Times, was arrested at a res-taurant in the same city on Sat-urday, the newspaper reported.
Girmay Gebru, a reporter with the BBC’s Tigrinya lan-guage service, was taken from a cafe in Mekelle along with four others, the broadcaster reported, without saying when.
AFP and the FT said they had government permission to report in Tigray. Until this month, the region had been off limits to most international media since fighting erupted in November between the military and the region’s former gov-erning party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
Asked about the arrests, Mulu Nega, head of Tigray’s interim administration, said yesterday that the three were
still under investigation, but gave no more details.
AFP said it had not been informed of any charges against Fitsum. “His collaboration with a media outlet should not be a motive for his arrest,” said global news director Phil Chetwynd.
A Financial Times repre-sentative said it was working to secure the two translators’ release and understand the reason for the arrests. The BBC said it had yet to establish the reason for Girmay’s detention but had expressed concern to authorities. The head of the government’s task force on Tigray did not immediately
respond to requests for comment.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has overseen sweeping reforms since taking office in 2018, including the unbanning of more than 250 media outlets and release of dozens of jour-nalists. However, rights groups say press freedom has eroded as the government faced out-breaks of deadly violence including the Tigray conflict.
“The scarcity of inde-pendent reporting coming out of Tigray during this conflict was already deeply alarming,” the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in a statement calling for the
three Ethiopians’ release.“Now, the Ethiopian mili-
tary’s arrests of journalists and media workers wi l l undoubtedly lead to fear and self-censorship,” added the CPJ’s sub-Saharan Africa rep-resentative, Muthoki Mumo.
Daniel Bekele, head of the government-appointed Ethi-opian Human Rights Com-mission, said that while misin-formation was a challenge, arresting journalists was a dis-proportionate response. “Bring credible charges or release,” he tweeted.
Watchdogs reported the arrests of at least 13 journalists in Ethiopia last year.
South Africa vaccine programme to get $33m boostBLOOMBERG
The Solidarity Fund, set up to mobilise money to help South Africa fight the COVID-19 pandemic, plans to spend 500 million rand ($33m) to boost the country’s vaccine-rollout program.
The fund will use 250 million rand from its own account and an equal amount raised from donors, Chief Exec-utive Officer Tandi Nzimande said in an emailed response to questions yesterday.
South Africa started admin-istering coronavirus vaccines on February 17, with health-care workers receiving the first single-shot doses developed by
Johnson & Johnson. The gov-ernment aims to inoculate two-thirds of the population by year-end and says it’s secured enough vaccines to meet that goal.
The support will help take pressure off a government trying to contain spending after a surge in debt and an economic contraction because of lock-downs to contain the pandemic.
The National Treasury has set aside 10.3 billion rand for vaccines for the next three years, with another 9 billion available in an emergency fund.
The Solidarity Fund is in talks with the health ministry
and other parties to identify what else can be done to
accelerate the rollout of vac-cines, Nzimande said.
South Africa’s Deputy President David Mabuza gestures during a visit to a COVID-19 vaccine storage facility in Johannesburg, yesterday.
Nigeria gets 4 million vaccine doses from COVAXAP — DAKAR, SENEGAL Nearly 4 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have arrived in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, the third and largest delivery so far to an African country by the global COVAX initiative, which was created to ensure that low- and middle-income countries have fair access to vaccines.
The COVAX programme shipped 3.94 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine man-ufactured by the Serum Institute of India, from Mumbai to Abuja, according to a joint statement from Uniced, which is working in partnership with the WHO, GAVI, which is an international vaccine alliance, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
Nigeria is Africa’s most pop-ulous nation, with more than 200 million residents, and it recently experienced a surge of COVID-19 cases. As of yes-terday, the West African nation has recorded a cumulative total of 156,017 cases, including 1,915 deaths.
Yesterday’s delivery is part of a first wave of vaccines arriving in Nigeria that will con-tinue in the coming days and weeks, the statement said.
“After a year of disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic,
today we celebrate the efforts being made in getting the vaccine to Nigeria. With more than 150,000 Nigerians infected with the virus and over 1,800 lives lost, the path to recovery for the people of Nigeria can finally begin,” said Peter Hawkins, Unicef Nigeria Country Representative.
“This is a very significant occasion — the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccines into Nigeria is critical in curbing the pan-demic. The only way out of this crisis is to ensure that vaccina-tions are available to all.” The COVAX programme is expected to deliver around 90 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to Africa in the first quarter of 2021, in the largest
vaccine procurement and supply operation in history, according to the WHO and Unicef. Nigeria is among 92 countries worldwide that will receive vaccines for free through the COVAX initiative. Another 90 countries and eight territories have agreed to pay for doses.
The COVAX initiative, however, has been hampered by the severely limited global supply of doses as well as logis-tical problems that delayed the global distribution of the vaccines.
The long-awaited program has fallen short of hopes it would quickly ensure vaccines to the world’s most vulnerable people.
Workers offload boxes of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines as the country receives its first batch of COVID-19 vaccines under COVAX scheme, at the international airport of Abuja, Nigeria, yesterday.
Morocco freezes
ties with German
Embassy amid
Sahara tensionAP — RABAT, MOROCCO Morocco’s Foreign Ministry has suspended ties with the German Embassy because of “deep misunderstandings,” notably related to the disputed Western Sahara.
The move this week comes amid diplomatic tension around Western Sahara since the US under Donald Trump took the unusual move in December of recognising Morocco’s sovereignty over the territory.
A letter leaked online from Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita to the rest of the Moroccan government orders officials to suspend “all contact, interaction and coop-eration” with the German Embassy and embassy-related activities. A senior Moroccan government official confirmed to yesterday that the letter was authentic, but said it was not meant to be made public.
The official, who was not authorized to be publicly named, said the decision has to do with Germany’s recent stance on the Sahara issue, especially in the aftermath of the US decision. The official also noted the appearance of a flag of the pro-independence Polisario Front outside the state assembly in the northern German city of Bremen.
Germany’s Foreign Min-istry said it was aware of media reports about the letter, but had no further comment.
The Algeria-backed Polisario Front fought for independence for Western Sahara after Morocco annexed the former Spanish colony in 1975. UN peacekeepers now monitor a 30-year-old cease-fire between Moroccan forces and Polisario supporters. The UN has expressed concern that Trump’s decision could thwart negotiation efforts in the long-running Western Sahara con-flict. Many countries, including Germany, support a UN-bro-kered political solution.
Egypt, Sudan
seek mediation
in Ethiopia
dam talks
BLOOMBERG Egypt and Sudan yesterday warned anew against any unilateral move by Ethiopia in filling its Nile River dam and urged more outside support to revive negotiations.
Describing Ethiopia’s decision to move forward with a second phase of filling the Renaissance Dam as a clear violation of earlier agree-ments, the foreign ministers of Egypt and Sudan called on the United Nations, European Union and the US to agree to a proposal that they help mediate talks under the stew-ardship of Democratic Republic of Congo President Felix Tshisekedi, the current head of the African Union.
In a joint press conference in Cairo, the two ministers voiced optimism about restarting the talks, but also warned of the outcome if an equitable and legally binding agreement wasn’t reached.
Talks and unilateral action with regard to the dam can’t occur simultaneously, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said. His Sudanese counterpart, Mariam Al Mahdi, warned that the dispute over the dam can’t be allowed to escalate and take the region in the wrong direction.
Amnesty says Mozambiqueinsurgents and Armycommitted war crimesBLOOMBERG
Insurgents, security forces and a private military company contracted by the government have killed hundreds of civilians in Mozambique’s northern Cabo Delgado province, according to Amnesty International.
“The people of Cabo Delgado are caught between the Mozambican security forces, the private militia fighting alongside the gov-ernment and the armed oppo-sition group locally known as ‘Al Shabaab’ — none of which respect their right to life, or the rules of war,” Deprose Muchena, Amnesty Interna-tional’s regional director for east and southern Africa, said in a statement on the organi-zation’s website yesterday.
“All three have committed war crimes, causing the deaths of hundreds of civilians.” The report, based on interviews with scores of people displaced by the violence, focuses pri-marily on the impact of increased fighting in Cabo Delgado since a major attack by the insurgents on Mocímboa
da Praia in March 2020.The insurgency, which
began in the natural gas-rich region in October 2017, has left more than 2,500 people dead and forced an estimated 668,000 others to flee their homes. At the turn of the year, Total SE suspended onshore work on a $20bn project to export the fuel after attacks close to its site.
The insurgents don’t have any known connections to the Somali group with a similar name. In 2018, it pledged alle-giance to rival group Islamic State, which has claimed dozens of their attacks. However, the strength of links between the Mozambican militia and Islamic State is a “matter for debate,” according to the report. Amnesty accused the insurgents of brutal vio-lence, including beheadings and kidnapping teenage girls who are forced into marriage. Boys as young as 15 years are abducted to become soldiers, it said. Mozambique’s armed forces committed extra-judicial killings and failed to protect civilians, according to the report.
Officials said “bandits”
were behind the
abduction. They did not
say if a ransom had been
paid for their release.
Its 2021-2025 economic and social development plan is expected to reinforce a strong signal to Chinese industry to move away from fossil fuels and is likely to mean national emissions start falling within five years, predicted Li Shuo, a senior policy advisor for Greenpeace East Asia.
08 WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021VIEWS
CHAIRMANDR. KHALID BIN THANI AL THANI
EDITOR-IN-CHIEFDR. KHALID BIN MUBARAK AL-SHAFI
ACTING MANAGING EDITORMOHAMMED SALIM MOHAMED
DEPUTY MANAGING EDITORMOHAMMED OSMAN ALI [email protected]
EDITORIAL
FRENCH rider Kevin Staut, who won one of the premier show jumping events of the Commerical Bank CHI Al Shaqab that ended on Saturday, applauded Qatar’s initiative to bring back sports delight for the fans in what are essentially tough times because of the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the globe. Said Staut: “I want to thank the organisers here because it’s so difficult (to host events) right now. To organise this event at the highest level is fantastic.”
Grand Prix winner Chrsian Ahlmann from Germany said on Saturday: “I am proud to be here. Al Shaqab made it happen in these difficult times. We feel very good and safe here in Qatar.”
That was the opinion also shared by the fans who turned up to watch competitions in show jumping, dressage and para dressage. Drawing 10 percent of fans as per safety and health protocols adopted in letter and spirit at the Longines Arena at Al Shaqab, Qatar truly won hearts and minds of the fans by putting together the three-day championship that starts with a massive under-taking of transporting horses from all corners of the globe.
With global television audience in millions, CHI Al Shaqab was watched live by fans around the world over the three days of action. With the first part of the championship over, the same venue and the same set of organisers now get set for another blockbuster show jumping event – the opening round of the Longines Global Champions Tour (LGCT) from March 4 to 6. The LGCT will open its new season at the Longines Arena at Al Shaqab where world’s premier riders and teams will compete for handsome prizes including Ahlmann and Staut.
Al Shaqab, a member of Qatar Foundation, deserves high praise for hosting two back-to-back premier events at a time when championships are still getting spiked off the regular sports calendar. Khalifa Al Attiya, Vice-Chairman, Supreme Organ-izing Committee Commercial Bank CHI Al Shaqab Presented by Longines, said after the event: “I thank all those who contributed to the success of the Com-mercial Bank CHI Al Shaqab. We get great support for this championship. We have achieved high standards that are well appreciated by all those who participate in our events. Achieving high hosting standards makes this championship a distinct event on the international stage.” The global equestrian family can’t thank enough Qatar for helping them stage CSI5 * events that the riders and equestrian fans crave for.
Riders, fans thank Qatar
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Quote of the day
Improving freedom of expression, organisation
and religion...is the goal we have so far worked
the hardest on.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan , President of Turkey
Workers walking at a solar power station in Tongchuan, Shaanxi province.
China, which long targeted rapid industrial growth despite its environmental consequences, now aims to become the global leader in “low-carbon tech for a carbon-constrained world” as it unveils its new five-year plan this week, China analysts said.
That shift is likely to include an accelerated pullback from its role as a major financier of new coal-fired power plants at home and abroad, Isabel Hilton, founder of China Dialogue, a nonprofit news organisation, told an online event on Monday.
China is today the world’s largest emitter of planet-heating gases, responsible for about 28 percent of total global emissions.
Its 2021-2025 economic and social development plan is expected to reinforce a strong signal to Chinese industry to move away from fossil fuels and is likely to mean national emissions start falling within five years, predicted Li Shuo, a senior policy advisor for Greenpeace East Asia.
In a country that normally sets targets it can achieve or over-achieve, major indus-tries this year must deliver plans on how they will cut emissions in line with China’s commitment last year to become “carbon neutral” by 2060, Li said.
But shifting rapidly from a focus on dirty industry to greener tech is a challenge everywhere - and China is no exception, said Dimitri de Boer of the China office of Cli-entEarth, an environmental law charity.
He described a “very active tug of war” between China’s environment and energy agencies, with uncertainty about whether nearly 37 giga-watts (GW) of coal-fired power capacity approved in 2020 will still go ahead.
That, combined with the 38GW of new coal power capacity put into operation in 2020 and other projects in the pipeline, is enough to power all of Germany, international researchers said this month.
Still, De Boer noted “prom-ising signals” China wants to decarbonise, particularly its controversial investments overseas, with an announcement possible before the delayed COP26 U.N. climate negotiations, now set for November in Glasgow. Bernice Lee, founding director of think-tank Chatham House’s Hoffmann Centre for Sustainable Resource
Economy, said the increasing bad publicity China has received for financing expansion of coal power around the world is forcing a rethink.
The Chinese model for development spending abroad “is under re-evalu-ation”, she said, with scien-tists saying use of coal for energy must rapidly end to prevent the worst impacts of climate change.
In particular, many projects in the Belt and Road Initiative, a Chinese-backed infrastructure development push in nearly 70 countries - including significant spending on coal plants - have received no new finance since 2019, she said.
But Andrew Norton, head of the London-based Interna-tional Institute for Envi-ronment and Development (IIED), said China had yet to present a “comprehensive plan” to green its overseas investments.
Policy ‘legitimacy’Yunnan Chen, a devel-
opment finance researcher at the London-based Overseas Development Institute, said the expected green shift in China’s new five-year plan, due out Friday, was driven in part by its desire to appear to be doing the right thing, both at home and abroad.
“There’s really a desire for legitimacy. That’s a constant theme,” she told a separate
online event on Monday run by IIED.
Focusing on the envi-ronment is also “no longer seen as part of a Western imperialist agenda”, Sam Geall, acting head of China Dialogue, said during the same event.
China has framed its coming green push around the idea of achieving an “eco-logical civilisation” - a term now part of the title of a major planned international biodi-versity summit China is scheduled to host later this year, he said.
With strong public demand to continue battling China’s choking air pollution, some green policies also are likely to be popular at home and reduce social pressure the government sees as a threat, analysts said.
China sees ramping up green investment in things like renewable power, electric vehicles and battery storage as a chance to seize the lead in a growing global industry, they added.
As the Asian economic powerhouse tries to identify the technology of the future, it wants “to be a supplier of low-carbon tech for a carbon-constrained world”, said Hilton of China Dialogue.
“Whatever the policy is in the next three to four years, it’s not going to look at all like it did three years ago,” she added.
THE WASHINGTON POST
The military junta that seized power in Myanmar last month demonstrated on Sunday that it is prepared to massacre the country’s citizens in order to sustain its coup. According to the United Nations, at least 18 people were killed when troops opened fire with live ammu-nition on protests in Yangon and five other cities. The bloodshed revealed the regime’s criminality - but also its weakness. The generals appear to be panicking in the face of mass resistance far beyond what they expected.
After a slow start, demon-strations and strikes in protest of the Feb. 1 coup have been gathering momentum. Last week, a national strike shut down the country, also known as Burma. Hundreds of thou-sands have been taking to the streets daily. Supporters of the National League for
Democracy, which had gov-erned the country since 2016 and overwhelmingly won elections in November, have been joined by most of Myanmar’s ethnic minority parties, leaving the military isolated. The shootings do not appear to have deterred the protesters, who have begun digging in. The Wash-ington Post described one neighborhood in Yangon where roads have been bar-ricaded and strewn with spikes and diesel slicks.
The regime has also encountered stiffer interna-tional resistance than it probably counted on. The United States has been vocal in condemning the coup and subsequent repression - Sec-retary of State Antony Blinken denounced the “abhorrent violence” on Sunday - and has sanctioned several senior officials. Facebook has banned the military from its platforms, which are practically synon-ymous with the Internet in
Myanmar. Even China has expressed unease: Its ambas-sador said the situation is “absolutely not what China wants to see.”
On Friday, the U.N. General Assembly witnessed an extraordinary act of courage by Myanmar’s ambassador, Kyaw Moe Tun, who gave a speech calling for the “strongest possible action from the international community to immediately end the mil-itary coup, to stop oppressing the innocent people, to return the state power to the people and to restore the democracy.” That ought to galvanize further action by the United States, European Union, and other democracies.
More U.S. sanctions against individuals are said to be coming. But the Biden administration should embrace more robust steps to cut off the revenue funding the regime. It can do so, in part, by leveraging joint ven-tures that Myanmar com-panies have with Western
multinationals to extract and export gas, minerals such as jade, and timber. If the U.S. Treasury Department sanc-tions the Myanmar com-panies, their Western partners and banks could be blocked from remitting funds to them. U.S. officials should look for ways to supply the resistance with cash and other aid. And U.S. diplomats should insist on observing the court proceedings underway against NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi and ousted president Win Myint, who were hit with more fab-ricated charges Monday.
Myanmar’s military sup-pressed opposition to its rule in 1988 and 2007 by gunning down protesters in the streets. But the country has changed considerably in the past decade as it has opened to the world. The United States and other nations have the means to bring crushing economic pressure to bear on the generals. They should not hesitate to use it.
China expected to favour green tech over coal in new five-year plan
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Myanmar coup leaders turn to massacres. US response must be forceful
Established in 1996
LAURIE GOERING REUTERS
09WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021 OPINION
Biden’s bill would provide only 10,000 Heartland Visas. That small pilot program won’t be nearly enough to make a difference to US regions. But it will allow us to verify that the program works, that both immigrants and the towns that recruit them are happy with the new arrangement, and that people don’t just head for the coasts as soon as they get a green card. If it works, we can scale it up.
SAMAH SABAWI & NICK RIEMER AL JAZEERA
When we circulated an open letter calling on Australian Professor Alison Bashford to reconsider accepting Israel’s Dan David Prize, we expected there would be overwhelming support for our call from academics around the world. We were right. More than 300 academics and researchers have signed so far and the list of signatories keeps growing.
Bashford is one of seven recipients of the prize, which this year was given out for scholarly contributions to the fields of public health and medicine. The award’s $3m windfall will be shared among the seven: $1m going to Anthony Fauci, the prominent infectious disease expert and US presidential adviser; $1m being shared by three scien-tists for contributions to molecular medicine; and $1m being shared between Bashford, who studies the history of medicine and health as they relate to global and environmental history, Keith Wailoo, who works on race, science and health equity in the US, and Katherine Park, who studies Medieval and Renaissance medicine.
The arguments against accepting the prize money apply to all seven recipients – but, as Australian researchers, we felt we had a particular obligation and opportunity to appeal to Bashford.
Announcing the prize, the Dan David Foundation chair-person, Itamar Rabinovich, a
former Israeli ambassador to the US, said that the choice of scientific fields had been influenced by the impact of the pandemic on all aspects of life. The prize comes at a time when Israel is celebrating its remarkable progress in inoc-ulating its population. The country ranks first in the world in terms of the per-centage of the population that has been vaccinated. The gov-ernment has recently said that approximately half of Israel’s citizens have taken the first dose and 35 percent the second.
But, as with other scientific achievements Israel has cele-brated, this one comes against the backdrop of Palestinian oppression. As the Israeli gov-ernment is already boasting about a sharp drop in COVID-19 cases, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, they are skyrocketing. Palestinians there are going into yet another lockdown in an attempt to control the outbreak, as there has been no steady supply of vaccines for them.
For months, Israel has been refusing to vaccinate Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, even though this is its legal responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Con-vention. In March 2020, UN special rapporteur for the sit-uation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian Ter-ritory, Michael Lynk, reminded Israel in a statement that “The legal duty, anchored in Article 56 of the Fourth Geneva Con-vention, requires that Israel,
the occupying power, must ensure that all the necessary preventive means available to it are utilized to ‘combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics’”.
Yet not only is Israel actively blocking the delivery of vaccines to the Palestinians but it is actually sending surplus doses to countries like Honduras, the Czech Republic and Hungary, as a reward for political favours, like their pledges to relocate their embassies to Jerusalem or open embassy branches there.
Perhaps in the excitement of having won such a sub-stantial amount of money and idealistic celebrations of human advancement, it was easy to forget the five million Palestinians under full Israeli
occupation, having no signif-icant protection against the pandemic and permanently subject to the severe dispos-session, arbitrary impris-onment, extrajudicial killing, exile, bereavement and repression that Israel imposes on them.
But nothing obliges any of the Dan David laureates to accept the prize. In fact, doing so is in direct violation of the Palestinian call for the boycott both of Israeli academic insti-tutions and of cultural activ-ities that obscure Israel’s apartheid policies.
Tel Aviv University, where the prize is administered and headquartered is a significant contributor to Israel’s per-manent war effort against Palestinians, through its structural ties to Israel’s mil-itary and political archi-tecture, including fee-waivers and scholarships for Israeli soldiers, and its complicity in the violent occupation of Pal-estinian land.
There is already a prec-edent for rejecting the award. In 2018, British historian Catherine Hall declined the prize in what she described as “an independent political choice” – a choice that, to many, seemed admirably consistent with her pro-gressive academic work on gender history, race and slavery.
There are those who argue that academic boycotts violate “academic freedom” and must therefore be rejected. But as many have repeatedly argued, including both of us, the obligation to boycott those who violate human rights or those who are part of a system that vio-lates human rights, entirely justifies researchers making the moral and political choice not to associate with them.
Having said that, what is striking about the Dan David Prize is the fact that it falls outside of any argument for “academic freedom”. No one’s academic freedom is violated by not accepting prize money. As a result, there simply is no principled reason for aca-demics not to do as their Pal-estinian colleagues continue to ask, and turn down the prize.
This is even more the case when we look at conclusions some of the laureates have made in their own research.
In his 2014 book, Pain: A Political History, for instance, Wailoo discusses how people in pain have often “watched as their particular com-plaints… became swept into and defined by the broader political controversies of the time”. He deplores the fact
that people in pain become “props” in a “political theatre”.
Palestinians would agree. Americans “have a cultural problem understanding other people’s pain”, Wailoo says, emphasising the need to look “critically and closely” at those who judge the pain of others.
Yet, despite the empathy with suffering he expresses in his book, Wailoo still feels able to accept a prize from the heart of the very political and academic establishment that brutally represses Pales-tinians, and is now using a global pandemic to pursue the ethnic cleansing of an entire people.
Accepting the prize also seems to contradict what Bashford has written and said as a scholar. Her research examines, among other things, the segregation of populations, for instance through quarantine, a measure she describes in her 2003 book, Imperial Hygiene, “as both hygienic – that is, as part of public health – and racial – as part of the systems and cultures of race man-agement”. In view of this, one has to wonder how Bashford would see the vaccine apartheid that Israel is cur-rently practising.
In a 2003 essay co-authored with Carolyn Strange, Bashford noted that “it is difficult to imagine the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, for example, without the chorus of interna-tional calls to release high-profile political prisoners on Robben Island”. When it comes to participating in a call for the end of apartheid in Israel, however, Bashford appears to have forgotten her own lesson.
There is no doubt Israel’s academic institutions are powerful pillars upon which the state’s oppression stands. Israeli universities provide the state with the science, military technology, and strategic and ideological tools that strengthen and justify its occu-pation regime and apartheid.
Accepting the award no doubt yields financial gains, but the moral cost will be too high, as it places the recip-ients on the wrong side of history, supporting and whitewashing a system of oppression, injustice and tyranny.
Samah Sabawi is a Pal-estinian writer and Policy Adviser to Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian policy network.
Nick Riemer is a lecturer at the English and Linguistics Departments at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Israel’s Dan David Prize and vaccine apartheid
President Joe Biden’s big immigration bill includes a small pilot program for a very interesting idea: A visa that would send foreign workers to specific downtrodden places in the US When people first started suggesting this approach, I was opposed to it, but now I’m a wholehearted supporter.
Over the past few years, the Heartland Visa concept (named thus because more of the declining areas are in the middle of the country) has rocketed out of think-tank land and into the public policy discussion. The US Con-ference of Mayors has embraced it. So have prom-inent chief executive officers. The Trump era convinced many people that something needs to be done about regional inequality and decline, and skilled immi-gration is an easy place to start.
The reason I was initially
skeptical of place-based visas was that it seemed like a restriction on freedom of movement. Americans have always prided ourselves on our ability to move across the country seeking to better our situations. To tie immigrants to a specific location felt alien and authoritarian - remi-niscent of the hukou system in China, or even the internal passport system in the old Soviet Union.
I changed my mind when I learned the details of how Canada’s provincial visa system works. It isn’t like China or Soviet Russia at all. Canada’s Provincial Nominee Program gives work visas to foreigners who say that they want to settle in a certain province. While they are on that visa, they must work in that province (though they can of course travel anywhere in the country). After they get permanent residency, however - the equivalent of a US green card - they are free to move anywhere in the country.
That’s not unlike the H-1B worker visa. Though H-1B holders are nominally tied to a specific employer, they can transfer to another company if they find one willing to sponsor them. Similarly, workers on a Heartland Visa
could transfer to another location if they find someone willing to sponsor them. Or they could presumably switch to an H-1B if one is available, and move wherever that company is. And once they get a green card, of course, they could move anywhere they want; this is explicitly stipu-lated in the proposal for Heartland Visas, written by the Economic Innovation Group (a think tank).
So a Heartland Visa program wouldn’t restrict mobility any more than the visa system we already have. Instead of being tied to a region, what would really happen is that visa workers would be nudged to live there. If they really wanted to spend a few years in Youngstown, Ohio, and then abscond for the bright lights of New York City as soon as they got their green cards, then fine; the country would certainly be no worse off as a result. But as the EIG proposal notes, during their initial years, visa holders “would build social networks and put down roots in their host communities.” That would result in some durable increase in population and local talent for places that need it badly.
And many places do need that talent, very badly.
Though a small handful of big coastal cities are experiencing problems with gentrification and displacement, a far larger number are in decline from population loss and declining investment.
As economic activity has become more concentrated in the superstar cities and college towns, many places have seen their talented young people move away. And when half the young people leave, towns across America get hollowed out, dotted with half-empty neighbourhoods and vacant boarded-up businesses, saddled with roads and sewage systems and electrical grids that they no longer have the tax revenue to maintain. And because the people who leave are often the most tal-ented, the problem is com-pounded; in the age of knowledge industries, com-panies don’t want to invest in places without talent.
This is why government policy needs to help places, not just companies and indi-viduals. Proposals for doing this have included ideas such as moving government offices out of Washington. But the most powerful engine of local economic activity is private investment, and private investment tends to
go where the workers are. This is why college towns are so successful. As the EIG report points out, skilled immigrants tend to be espe-cially innovative and suc-cessful. If they can be nudged to locate en masse in declining regions, it will give companies an incentive to put their offices and research labs there. That investment, combined with cheap housing costs, might draw talented native-born people back from the cities as well, sparking a virtuous cycle of local revitalization. The shift to remote work could accel-erate this trend.
Biden’s bill would provide only 10,000 Heartland Visas. That small pilot program won’t be nearly enough to make a difference to US regions. But it will allow us to verify that the program works, that both immigrants and the towns that recruit them are happy with the new arrangement, and that people don’t just head for the coasts as soon as they get a green card. If it works, we can scale it up.
Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion col-umnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.
Why I changed my mind about heartland worker visas
NOAH SMITH BLOOMBERG
Accepting the award no doubt yields financial gains, but the moral cost will be too high, as it places the recipients on the wrong side of history, supporting and whitewashing a system of oppression, injustice and tyranny.
Announcing the prize, the Dan David Foundation chairperson, Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the US, said that the choice of scientific fields had been influenced by the impact of the pandemic on all aspects of life. The prize comes at a time when Israel is celebrating its remarkable progress in inoculating its population. The country ranks first in the world in terms of the percentage of the population that has been vaccinated.
Palestinian workers unloading the first shipment of COVID-19 vaccines, in the southern Gaza Strip, on February 17, 2021.
10 WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021ASIA
Asean countries pressarmy to free Suu KyiREUTERS — YANGON
Myanmar’s neighbours pressed its ruling military yesterday to release ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi and cease what Singapore called the disastrous use of lethal force against oppo-nents of their February 1 coup and work out a solution to the crisis.
The calls from fellow members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) came as Myanmar police again opened fire to disperse crowds after weeks of demonstrations against military rule. Several people were wounded, witnesses said.
Asean foreign ministers held talks with a representative of the junta in a video call two days after the bloodiest day of unrest since the military overthrew Suu Kyi’s elected government.
At least 21 people have been killed since the coup, which Sin-gapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in an interview with the BBC was a “tragic” step back for Myanmar. The foreign min-ister of Indonesia, which has been pushing a regional diplomatic effort, urged Myanmar to “open its doors” to the Asean bloc to resolve the escalating tension.
Speaking to reporters in Jakarta, the minister, Retno Marsudi, called for the release of
political detainees and for the restoration of democracy, while pledging that Asean countries would not break their pledge of not interfering in each other’s affairs.
“Restoring democracy back on track must be pursued,” Retno said.
“Indonesia underlines that the will, the interest and the voices of the people of Myanmar must be respected.” Asean groups Myanmar, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam.
The bloc’s effort to engage with Myanmar’s military has been criticised by supporters of democracy, with a committee of ousted Myanmar lawmakers declaring the junta a terrorist
group and saying Asean’s engagement would give it legit-imacy. Sa Sa, the committee’s anointed envoy to the United Nations, said Asean should have no dealings with “this illegitimate military-led regime”.
The coup halted Myanmar’s tentative steps towards democracy after nearly 50 years of military rule and has drawn condemnation and sanctions from the United States and other Western countries.
Singapore’s Lee said sanc-tions would not affect the junta but hurt the people and the way forward was to free Suu Kyi and work out a solution.
“To have to go back and have the military take over again... it is an enormous tragic step back for them. Because there is no future that way,” Lee said in the interview, according to a transcript.
“To use lethal force against civilians and unarmed demon-strators, I think it is just not acceptable. That is disastrous not just internationally, but disas-trous domestically.” Malaysian Foreign Minister Hishammuddin Hussein called for the immediate release of Suu Kyi and other detainees, adding that if the sit-uation worsened, it would be a setback for regional peace, sta-bility and prosperity.
Hundreds of protesters, many
wearing hard hats and clutching makeshift shields, gathered earlier behind barricades in dif-ferent parts of Myanmar’s main city of Yangon to chant slogans before police moved in firing stun grenades.
There were no reports of injuries in Yangon but four people were wounded in the northwestern town of Kale, where police fired live ammu-nition to disperse a crowd after protesters threw objects at advancing police, witnesses said.
“They were acting like they were in a war zone,” a teacher at
the protest said of the police.The teacher, who declined to
be identified, and other witnesses said that as well as the four wounded by live ammunition, several people were hurt by rubber bullets.
Hospitals and police in the area could not be reached for comment. Military spokesmen did not answer telephone calls.
The military justified the coup saying its complaints of fraud in a November election won by Suu Kyi’s party were ignored. The election commission said the vote was fair.
Junta leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, in remarks read on state television by a news-caster, said protest leaders and “instigators” would be punished.
Min Aung Hlaing has pledged to hold new elections and hand power to the winner but has given no time frame.
Suu Kyi, 75, appeared at a court hearing via video confer-encing on Monday and looked in good health, one of her lawyers said. Two more charges were added to those filed against her after the coup, the lawyer said.
People participate in a protest against the military coup in Yangon, Myanmar, yesterday.
Thailand court
approves arrest
warrant for
anti-govt activist
REUTERS — BANGKOK
A Thai criminal court yesterday approved an arrest warrant for an anti-government activist accused of burning a portrait of the country’s king over the weekend.
Police said activist Chaiamorn Kaewwiboonpan was responsible for setting fire to a portrait of King Maha Vaji-ralongkorn in front of a prison in Bangkok on Saturday.
Chaiamorn faced charges of insulting the king under Thailand’s tough lese majeste law, an offense punishable by up to 15 years in prison, arson and trespassing on gov-ernment sites, police said.
“The court has approved the warrant for Chaiamorn,” Piya Tavichai, deputy head of Bangkok police, said.
Sri Lanka approves new port development with India and JapanAP — COLOMBO
Sri Lanka’s government said yesterday it will allow India and Japan to develop a new container terminal at the coun-try’s main port, several weeks after scrapping a deal with the two countries to develop one of the key terminals at the same port.
Sri Lanka halted the 2019 agreement for India and Japan to develop and operate the crucial East Container Terminal at Colombo Port after weeks of
protests by trade unions and opposition parties. It said the terminal will be fully owned and developed instead by the state-run Ports Authority.
Japan said it regretted the Sri Lankan decision, while India urged that the 2019 agreement be implemented.
Sri Lanka announced yes-terday that it would develop another terminal — West Con-tainer Terminal — at the same port with India and Japan.
Government spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella said the
Cabinet approved the project, to be run as a public-private company with the Ports Authority and companies selected by the governments of India and Japan.
India has selected Adani ports, which was earlier chosen to invest in the East Container Terminal. Japan has not yet named its investor in the project, which will be operated on a build, operate and transfer basis for 35 years.
Rambukwella said the gov-ernment was offering foreign
participation in the West ter-minal because it requires a large investment to be developed, while the East terminal is com-pleted and requires little addi-tional money.
India was particularly inter-ested in the East terminal because it contributes about 66% of the re-exports from that terminal. India, which considers the Indian ocean region to be its strategic backyard, has for years been worried by rival China’s growing economic and political influence over neigh-
boring Sri Lanka.China considers Sri Lanka
to be a critical link in its massive “Belt and Road” global infra-structure building initiative and has provided billions of dollars in loans for Sri Lankan projects over the past decade. The projects include a seaport, airport, port city, highways and power stations.
China already operates the Colombo International Con-tainer Terminal as a joint venture with the Ports Authority.
China to give
more doses of
COVID-19
vaccine to Nepal
REUTERS — KATHMANDU
China will give 800,000 shots of coronavirus vaccine to Nepal, its ambassador said, up from half a million promised earlier.
The gift is to support Nepal’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, Hou Yanqi said in a Twitter post late on Monday.
“Let us join hands to achieve the victory at an early date!” she said.
Supplies have not yet started and Hou did not provide any delivery times.
India has already gifted a million shots of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine that it makes to help its Himalayan neighbour kick off its immu-nisation programme in January.
Nepal also procured one million shots in a commercial deal with the Serum Institute of India that is making the vaccine.
India and China have been giving away COVID-19 vac-cines as part of a diplomatic push to strengthen ties with neighbours and countries further afield.
Nepal granted emergency-use approval of a vaccine developed by an affiliate of China’s Sinopharm only last month.
India’s next phase of virus crisis likely to be localised outbreaksREUTERS — NEW DELHI
Experts say that the relatively low hospitalisation and fatality rates in India suggest the coro-navirus pandemic is approaching its next phase - largely manageable local outbreaks.
Although a handful of states are reporting a spurt in infec-tions, for a country of 1.35 billion people with limited health facil-ities and where the practice of wearing masks and social dis-tancing is falling off, the positive trend, if it holds, will be a respite.
It could also help India keep its economy open without any national lockdown.
At more than 11 million, India has reported the highest number of cases in the world after the United States. A government survey suggests its actual cases may be around 300 million, as many young people showed no symptoms.
The death toll stands at 157,248.
Recorded cases have fall continuously since a mid-Sep-tember peak, before again rising since early February.
Eight of 10 recent infections have been reported by five states, mainly Maharashtra and
Kerala. Since a multi-month low in cases and deaths on Feb. 9, India’s case count has gone up but the fatality rate has fallen from 0.856% to 0.683% on Monday.
The overall rate for India is 1.4% and 2.2% for the world.
Rajib Dasgupta, an epidemi-ologist and professor of com-munity health at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, said India was witnessing a phase of “multiple epidemics within a country” where the entire population is not equally susceptible.
“In this phase, the emphasis has to be a lot more local, a lot of local capacities will be put to test,” he said.
“The positive thing - what’s being seen in Europe - is that as subsequent surges come, as the knowledge has improved, the management is better, both in terms of public health man-agement as well as clinical care, and actually deaths go down.” Dasgupta said the aim now should be to try and contain the virus within local clusters, instead of measures like inter-state curbs on travellers.
Government health official Vinod Kumar Paul told a news conference yesterday that India
was nowhere close to attaining herd immunity through natural infection or vaccination, requiring states to continue their surveillance. India has so far inoculated more than 12 million people. The health ministry, however, said 19 of India’s three dozen states and federal terri-tories had not reported any deaths in the past 24 hours.
“It’s quite possible that we will be now seeing the pandemic transforming into smaller kinds of outbreaks, or endemicity is likely to take place,” said Subhash Salunke, a former WHO official who advises Maharashtra on its COVID-19 strategy.
Hospitalisation rates have come down, especially in Maharashtra and Kerala that together account for three-quarters of India’s 168,627 active cases. The number of people hospitalised in Kerala each day due to COVID-19 averaged 830 last week, while daily new cases averaged nearly 3,500.
The hospitalisation figure for seven days in mid-September, after the Onam festival which saw increased public gatherings in Kerala, was 2,940, compared with new cases of 3,973 in the same period. Maharashtra’s health department told Reuters only 14% of its 77,000 active
patients were in oxygen or intensive-care beds. More than 80% of such beds are now unoc-cupied, compared with a shortage a few months ago.
Health authorities must, however, remain vigilant, espe-cially in the big cities, the experts said “There will likely be another wave — likely will not be as big as the first wave because a lot of people got infected in the first round itself — so I think most metros should be ready for a second wave,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, founder of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy in New Delhi.
A man receiving a dose of COVID-19 vaccine in New Delhi, on Monday.
Philippines: Vaccine advisers nix early shots for ‘influencers’BLOOMBERG — MANILA
The Philippines has rejected a proposal to have 50 so-called “influencers” undergo public COVID-19 vaccinations.
The plan from the Philip-pines’ Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases to have public officials, media and movie personalities get coronavirus shots in order to
boost the public’s vaccine con-fidence wasn’t approved, pres-idential spokesman Harry Roque said yesterday. The advisory group for the country’s inocu-lation program maintained that health care workers should be the priority, he said in a televised briefing.
The push to inoculate influ-encers comes as some govern-ments around the world shift
their focus from ensuring they have enough vaccine supplies on hand to getting citizens to take them, amid widespread skepticism toward the shots.
In the US, Joe Biden’s admin-istration is working to increase confidence in Johnson & John-son’s new single-shot vaccine. China, which saw success cor-ralling the virus, has had a slower than expected vaccine
rollout due to its population’s hesitation, including concerns about safety and protection level of protection promised by local vaccines. Indonesia is requiring eligible people to get the vac-cines -- or face punishments including fines.
The Philippines, which has Southeast Asia’s second-worst outbreak, started its inoculation drive on Monday using
China-donated vaccines made by Sinovac Biotech Ltd. Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said 756 individuals were vaccinated as of Monday.
There appears to be pent-up demand for the shots in the Phil-ippines, which like India is allowing private purchases of COVID-19 vaccines, while Indo-nesia has sanctioned private distribution.
The calls from fellow
members of the Asean
came as Myanmar police
again opened fire to
disperse crowds after
weeks of demonstrations
against military rule.
Several people were
wounded, witnesses
said.
11WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021 ASIA
China aims to vaccinate 40% of population by JuneAP — TAIPEI
Health experts in China say their country is lagging in its coronavirus vaccination rollout because it has the disease largely under control, but plans to inoculate 40% of its popu-lation by June.
Zhong Nanshan, the leader of a group of experts attached to the National Health Com-mission, said the country has delivered 52.52 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines as of Feb. 28. He was speaking Monday at an online forum between US and Chinese medical experts
hosted by the Brookings Insti-tution and Tsinghua University.
The target is the first China has offered publicly since it began its mass immunisation campaign for key groups in mid-December.
China has been slow to vac-cinate its people relative to other countries, inoculating only 3.56% of its population of 1.4 billion so far, according to Zhong.
Ranked first in the world in terms of percentage of popu-lation is Israel, which has vac-cinated over 90% of its people.
The US has vaccinated about 22% of its population.
Chinese health experts say the country has enough vaccine supply for its population, although the country has pledged to provide close to half a billion doses abroad, roughly 10 times the number it has delivered at home.
“The current vaccination pace is very low due to outbreak control (being) so good in China, but I think the capacity is enough,” said Zhang Wenhong, an infectious diseases expert based in Shanghai who also spoke on the panel.
Developers of China’s four currently approved vaccines have said they could manu-facture up to 2.6 billion doses by the end of this year. Still, vac-cinating China’s massive
population will be a daunting task.
Even at the rate of vacci-nating 10 million people a day, it would take roughly seven months to vaccinate 70% of its population, Zhang noted.
The experts all acknowl-edged the complex task of vac-cinating the world’s population, pointing to the slowness in the global rollout of vaccines.
“Demand will outstrip supply for many months, and unless there is more manufac-turing, … for years,” said Tom Frieden, the former director of the US Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.They also cautioned against
expecting a quick return to normal.
The head of China’s Center for Disease Control, Gao Fu, predicted that life could return to an “approximate normal” in summer next year. Gao, along with Zhong and other Chinese health experts, urged more US-China cooperation. Gao specif-ically called on the US and China to cooperate on COVAX, an ini-tiative to distribute vaccines more fairly across the devel-oping world. “Let’s work together,” he said.
HK court adjourns hearing for democracy activists charged with subversionREUTERS — HONG KONG
A Hong Kong court adjourned a second hearing yesterday of 47 pro-democracy activists charged with conspiracy to commit subversion, a case that has stoked global concern that Beijing is using a national security law to crush the city’s opposition.
Lawyers for the defendants are challenging a prosecution bid to deny them bail and keep them in custody for up to three months while police investigate further.
The charges are the most sweeping use yet of the national security law that Beijing imposed on its freest city last June, drawing international condemnation.
After a marathon session the previous day that stretched into the early hours of yesterday, the judge adjourned the case after one defendant fell ill and was taken to hospital. Three others were taken to hospital after the case was adjourned.
The hearing resumed around 11.30am local time (0330 GMT), with many of the defendants appearing exhausted. The case resumes today.
The activists are accused of
organising and participating in an unofficial primary poll last July that authorities said was part of a plan to “overthrow” the government.
The election was aimed at selecting the strongest candi-dates for a legislative council election that the government later postponed, citing the coronavirus.
Human Rights Watch said the charges demonstrate “utter disregard for democratic political processes.” “Beijing is on track to smother the remaining vestiges of democracy in Hong Kong,” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at the group.
Hong Kong’s Department of Justice said in a statement no one should interfere with inde-pendent prosecutorial deci-sions, adding it “undermines the rule of law.” Among those charged were the organiser of the primary election and former law professor Benny Tai, as well as prominent activists Lester Shum, Joshua Wong and Owen Chow.
The charges are the latest blow to the city’s opposition camp, which has seen some leg-islators disqualified, scores arrested and others flee overseas for fear of being
detained under Beijing’s national security law.
Foreign diplomats and rights groups are closely mon-itoring the court case amid mounting concerns over the independence of the former British colony’s once-vaunted judicial system that is seen as crucial for its role as a global financial centre.
On Monday, about 1,000 supporters defied social gath-ering rules to curb coronavirus and rallied outside the West Kowloon courthouse as the defendants appeared to face charges following their arrest over the weekend.
The crowd chanted slogans such as “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of our times” and with many dressed in black, the images were reminiscent of scenes during anti-government demonstrations that roiled the city in 2019.
The detentions have been fiercely criticised by govern-ments in the West, including in Britain and the United States.
US State Department spokesman Ned Price said on Monday Washington had called on Hong Kong authorities to release those still held and drop charges against them.
Beijing has said the security
law, which punishes what it broadly defines as secession, subversion, terrorism and col-lusion with foreign forces with up to life in prison, is necessary to restore stability in Hong Kong.
More than 10,000 were arrested in the demonstrations, while 99 have been arrested under the national security law.
At a parliamentary session in Beijing starting this week, China is expected to dramati-cally reform Hong Kong’s elec-toral system, upending the ter-ritory’s political scene, more than a dozen politicians from across the spectrum said.
Pro-democracy activists Joshua Wong and Wu Chi-wai walk to a prison van to head to court over national security law charges, in Hong Kong, yesterday.
Hong Kong investigates deathof man who received vaccine
AP — HONG KONG
Hong Kong authorities yesterday reported the death of a chronically ill man, two days after he received a COVID-19 vaccine and said that it is too early to conclude whether the vaccine was related to his death.
The man’s death happened less than a week after Hong Kong began its vaccination program for priority and at-risk groups in the city.
The 63-year-old man was inoculated with the COVID-19 vaccine on February 26 at a government-designated vac-cination site and developed shortness of breath two days later on February 28. The man then admitted himself to a hos-pital, but died the same day, according to a statement from health authorities late yes-
terday night.While the statement did not
specify which vaccine the man was inoculated with, the vac-cination program in Hong Kong currently only uses shots from Chinese biopharmaceutical company Sinovac.
Hong Kong health author-ities said that the man’s death is under investigation.
“At the moment, the causal relationship with the vacci-nation could not be ascer-tained,” the statement said.
The patient was suffering from chronic and respiratory diseases, according to a statement by the Queen Eliz-abeth Hospital in Hong Kong, where he was admitted after receiving the vaccination.
An expert panel will look into the matter and its findings will be released “in a timely manner,” authorities said.
China to gift
half a million
more vaccine
doses to Pakistan
ANADOLU — ISLAMABAD
Pakistan will receive another half a million doses of COVID-19 vaccine from China as a gift, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said yesterday.
Speaking to reporters fol-lowing the formal launch of activities to celebrate 70 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries, Qureshi said Beijing has always helped Islamabad in difficult times.
“Today, on this occasion, China has offered another gift to the Pakistani nation and will send us 500,000 more doses of Sinopharm vaccine,” he said.
On February 1, Pakistan received the first batch of 500,000 doses of the vaccine as a gift from its longtime ally.
The country has already begun a much-awaited vacci-nation campaign. In the first phase, frontline health workers and those over age 65 are being inoculated. The government announced before it has secured 17 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine through the UN-led COVAX initiative. The country’s drug regulator has approved the emergency use of China’s Sinopharm and CanSino, Oxford-AstraZeneca, and Rus-sia’s Sputnik V vaccines.
China says door to Xinjiang ‘always open’ REUTERS — GENEVAChina said yesterday that it was discussing a visit to its Xinjiang region by United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet, but that she should not set out with the aim of condemning its policies.
Bachelet said on Friday that reports about arbitrary detention, ill-treatment, sexual violence and forced labour in Xinjiang necessitated a thorough and independent assessment of the situation.
“The door to Xinjiang is always open, and we welcome the High Commissioner to visit Xinjiang. Communication is
kept up between the two sides, but the aim of the visit is to provide exchanges and coop-eration rather than... so-called investigation based on ‘guilty before proven’,” China’s del-egate Jiang Duan told the UN Human Rights Council.
China opposed the “polit-icisation” of human rights and interference in its internal affairs, he said, also rejecting concerns raised by Australia, Sweden and the United States at the Geneva forum.
“We also find it regrettable the High Commissioner made unsubstantiated accusations against China based on
misinformation and political pressure,” said Jiang.
People of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang and the Tibetan region enjoy wide-ranging freedoms, including religious and cultural harmony, he said.
Bachelet said on Friday that she hoped to clinch agreement with Chinese offi-cials about a visit. Louise Arbour was the last UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit China, in Sep-tember 2005.
Activists remain sceptical about the prospects for a meaningful visit with unfet-tered access in China.
Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch, said in a tweet on Tuesday: “Of course #China statement that “the aim of the #Xinjiang visit is to provide exchanges and cooperation” says it all, doesn’t it? That ‘door’ is firmly closed.”
Sarah Brooks of the Inter-national Service for Human Rights said: “After more than two years of spinning their wheels on a visit, the High Commissioner and her team, and the governments at the Human Rights Council, need to shift gears to take decisive action”.
South Korea allows pulling
extra from vaccine vialsREUTERS — SEOUL
A decision by South Korean health authorities to allow more doses to be extracted from coro-navirus vaccine vials sparked controversy yesterday as the country ramped up its vaccina-tions of healthcare workers and the elderly.
The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) had allowed healthcare workers to use the remaining doses if they can squeeze more out of each vial with low dead space syringes, which minimize the amount of vaccine left in the syringe after use.
While offering discretion over the use of remaining doses, KDCA made clear the authorities will not make the extraction of the extra doses a new standard
or mandatory as it can burden the healthcare workers on site.
Experts were divided about the decision for permitting up to seven doses to be extracted from Pfizer vaccine vials which are made to contain only six using the low dead space syringes, and up to 12 doses from Astra-Zeneca’s vaccine, which would otherwise inoculate 10 people with normal syringes.
Eom Joong-sik, professor of infectious diseases at Gachon University Gil Medical Center, warned of the risk of contami-nation during inaccurate extraction of the extra seventh dose.
A worker trying to combine leftovers from two vials to make a full dose could lead to such problems, Eom said in a Facebook post.
Indonesia identifies two cases of COVID-19 variant
REUTERS — JAKARTA
Indonesia has detected two cases of the more infectious COVID-19 variant first discovered in Britain, officials said yesterday, marking a potential new complication for the country as it tries to contain one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in Asia.
Dante Saksono Harbuwono, the deputy health minister, said the discovery of the variant represented a new challenge.
“We’ll be facing this pandemic with a higher degree of difficulty,” he told a streamed conference.
Indonesia’s COVID-19 task force also confirmed cases of the variant, known as B117, had been found but declined further comment. Since Indonesia announced its first cases of COVID-19 a year ago it has reported more than 1.3 million infections and 36,000 deaths, though daily infec-tions have been falling recently after peaking in January and early February.
The British variant has also been found in other countries in Southeast Asia including Vietnam and the Philippines.
Riza Putranto, a genomics researcher in Jakarta, called for increased genomic
surveillance in Indonesia and adherence of health protocols in order to combat the variant. “We would need a compre-hensive collaboration from many stake-holders to minimize the impact of this new variant in Indonesia,” he said.
While daily cases have been falling, the positivity rate — or the percentage of people tested who are found to have the virus - in the past week has still been hov-ering around 20%.
The World Health Organization has said a positivity rate of less than 5% is required to indicate that an epidemic is under control.
The world’s fourth most populous country aims to vaccinate more than 181 million people in a bid to reach herd immunity. It launched a mass inoculation programme in January starting with medical workers, civil servants and the elderly.
People wearing protective masks wait to receive a dose of COVID-19 vaccine during a mass vaccination for elderly people, in Jakarta yesterday.
China has been slow to
vaccinate its people
relative to other
countries, inoculating
only 3.56% of its
population of 1.4 billion
so far.
12 WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021EUROPE
Chancellor Angela
Merkel is due to
address lockdown and
easing options with
the 16 state
government heads
today with
coronavirus cases in
Europe’s most
populous country and
largest economy up to
more than 2.4 million.
Germany to ease somecurbs from next weekREUTERS — BERLIN
Germany will start easing some coronavirus restrictions from next week, according to draft plans to be discussed by national and state government leaders today, amid mounting public frustration over lock-downs and pressure to revive the economy.
The easing will be tentative, given that while months of lock-downs have pushed down infection and death rates, new daily cases have begun creeping up again in recent days as more contagious variants of the virus spread in Germany while the country’s roll-out of vaccines has been sluggish.
Chancellor Angela Merkel is due to address lockdown and easing options with the 16 state government heads today with coronavirus cases in Europe’s most populous country and largest economy up to more than 2.4 million.
The draft document, seen by Reuters, states that starting from March 8 a maximum of five people from two households, excluding children younger than 14, will be allowed to meet, up from a maximum of two people under current rules.
Armin Laschet, leader of Merkel’s Christian Democrats
and premier of Germany’s largest state, said it should be possible to agree to ease the rules based on a strategy of more testing for COVID-19 and faster vaccinations.
“Test, test, test is the message for the coming months,” Laschet said.
The number of confirmed cases rose by 3,943 to 2,451,011 yesterday, while the reported death toll rose by 358 to 70,463. The number of cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days fell slightly to 65.7 from 65.8 the previous day.
Restaurants and enter-tainment venues in Germany have been shut since early November. A stricter lockdown from mid-December forced non-essential shops, services and schools to close too. Factories and offices have remained open.
Flower shops, book stores and garden centres will also be allowed to reopen on March 8, according to the draft plan.
German retail sales tumbled more than expected in January as the lockdown and the with-drawal of a temporary cut in sales tax hit consumer spending, data showed yesterday.
Merkel and state leaders
will need to decide at which rate of infection per 100,000 people certain measures could be either toughened or relaxed. The document cited 35 and 50 per 100,000 as two possible thresholds.
With Easter nearing, the draft agreement also appeals to Germans to avoid domestic and foreign travel. It adds, however, that limited visits to relatives will be allowed over the festive period.
North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) State Premier Armin Laschet visiting the COVID-19 quick antigen test production of “nal von minden” in Moers, Germany, yesterday.
A man stands by a closed-down business due to COVID-19 pandemic, in central Madrid, Spain, yesterday.
REUTERS — LONDON
Meghan (pictured), Britain’s Duchess of Sussex, was awarded £450,000 ($630,000) yesterday as a provisional payment towards her legal costs after she won a privacy claim against the Mail on Sunday which had printed extracts of a letter she wrote to her father.
Last month, a judge at London’s High Court ruled the tabloid had breached her privacy and infringed her copyright by publishing parts of the five-page letter she wrote to her father, Thomas Markle, who she fell out with on the eve of her wedding to Queen Elizabeth’s grandson, Prince Harry.
Judge Mark Warby ruled in her favour without holding a trial, saying the articles were a clear breach of privacy after the paper argued the Duchess had intended the letter’s con-tents to become public and it formed part of a media strategy.
At a hearing yesterday, Warby refused the paper per-mission to appeal that decision, saying he saw “no real prospect” that the Court of Appeal would reach a dif-ferent conclusion. However, the paper is able to apply directly to the court.
The court was told Meg-han’s legal team was seeking more than £1.5m in legal fees, with half the amount to be paid within 14 days, a sum the paper described as “disproportionate”.
Warby agreed to make an interim costs order of £450,000, saying the final sum “may well be consid-erably more than that” after other outstanding issues were resolved at later hearings. Meghan’s legal team also demanded the paper hands over any copies it has of the letter, and called for the judge to order the paper to publish
a statement on its front page stating she had won her case, with a notice also placed on the MailOnline’s home page for “not less than 6 months” to act as a deterrent.
Warby said he would not make an order for the delivery or destruction of any copies of the letter yet.
Her lawyer Ian Mill told the hearing that they were not seeking to punish the paper, and would accept nominal damages based on the profits the Mail made from its articles, saying this was a “proportionate” way forward.
In its written submissions, the paper’s lawyers wrote: “No purpose would be served by a hearing to determine the precise amount, which by def-inition is not relevant. It is sug-gested that 1 pound, 2 pounds or 5 pounds would do.”
Meghan, 39, and husband Harry, 36, have regularly appeared on the front pages of Britain’s newspapers in the last month, having announced they were expecting their second child, followed by news of their final split with the royal family following their decision to move to Cal-ifornia last year.
On Sunday, a highly antic-ipated in-depth interview they have given to US chat show queen Oprah Winfrey will be aired.
Meghan awarded £450,000 in costs after court privacy win
BLOOMBERG — LONDON
Almost a third of Londoners would test positive for COVID-19 antibodies, highlighting the rapid spread of the UK strain of the disease last month.
More than 29% of people in the capital are estimated to have the antibodies, the highest rate of any region in the UK, according to esti-mates from the Office for National Statistics. The findings for cover the 28 days up to Feb-ruary 11 and compare with one in five people in the city who would have tested positive in January.
The UK suffered one of the highest death
tolls from the virus and is now rapidly rolling out vaccines. More than 20 million people have received at least one dose so far. Public health officials are concerned that cases of the Bra-zilian variant were found in Britain, prompting warnings that the strain may respond less well to the jabs.
Deaths in England and Wales were 18.8% above the five-year average in the week ending Feb. 19. Mortalities where the death certificate mentions the virus fell 28% to 4,079 in the period compared with a week earlier. The total UK death toll from the disease now stands at about 123,000, government data show.
Spain to buy
17 million more
doses of Moderna
vaccine as part of
EU contractREUTERS — MADRID
Spain will buy 17 million more doses of the coronavirus vaccine made by Moderna as part of a new contract nego-tiated by the European Union, government spokeswoman Maria Jesus Montero said yesterday.
The government intends to have 70% of the 47 million population vaccinated by the summer, she reiterated, adding that 1.3 million people in Spain were fully vaccinated so far.
Italy reports 343 coronavirus deaths; 17,083 new casesREUTERS — MILAN
Italy reported 343 coronavirus-related deaths yesterday against 246 the day before, the health ministry said, while the daily tally of new infections rose to 17,083 from 13,114 the day before.
Some 335,983 tests for COVID-19 were carried out in the past day, compared with a previous 170,633, the health ministry said.
Italy has registered 98,288 deaths linked to COVID-19 since its outbreak emerged in February last year, the second-highest toll in Europe after Britain and the seventh-highest in the world. The country has
reported 2.95 million cases to date.
Patients in hospital with COVID-19 — not including those in intensive care — stood at 19,570 yesterday, up from 19,112 a day earlier.
There were 222 new admissions to intensive care units, up from 171 on Monday. The total number of intensive care patients increased to 2,327 from a previous 2,289.
When Italy’s second wave of the epidemic was acceler-ating quickly in the first half of November, hospital admissions were rising by about 1,000 per day, while intensive care occu-pancy was increasing by about 100 per day.
Contagious Brazil variant evades immunity: ScientistsREUTERS — LONDON
A highly transmissible COVID-19 variant that emerged in Brazil and has now been found in at least 20 countries can re-infect people who previ-ously recovered from the disease, scientists said yesterday.
In a study of the mutant virus’s emergence and its spread in the Amazon jungle city of Manaus, the scientists said the variant — known as P.1 —has a “unique constellation of mutations” and had very rapidly become the dominant variant circulating there.
Out of 100 people in Manaus who had previously recovered from infection with the coronavirus, “somewhere between 25 and 61 of them are susceptible to re-infection with P.1,” said Nuno Faria, a virus expert at Imperial College London, who co-led the research which has not yet been peer reviewed.
The scientists estimated that P.1 was 1.4 to 2.2 times more transmissible than the initial
form of the virus.Speaking to a media
briefing about the findings, Nuno said it was too early to say whether the variant’s ability to evade immunity from previous infections meant that vaccines also would offer reduced pro-tection against it.
“There’s no concluding evi-dence really to suggest at this point that the current vaccines won’t work against P.1,” Faria
said. “I think the vaccines will at least protect us against disease, and possibly also against infection.”
Scientists around the world are on guard against new mutated forms of the corona-virus that could spread more easily, or be harder to fend off with existing vaccines.
The research, conducted with scientists at Brazil’s São Paulo and Britain’s Oxford
universities, suggested that the P.1 variant had probably emerged in Manaus in early November 2020.
The first infection with it was identified on December 6, Faria said.
“We then looked at how rapidly P.1 overtook other lin-eages, and we found that the proportion of P.1 grew from zero to 87% in about eight weeks.”
Virus antibodies found in 29% of London residents
Popularity of Italy’s Five Star surges with Conte’s frontman role
BLOOMBERG — ROME
Italy’s Five Star Movement could get a popularity boost with former prime minister Giuseppe Conte as its leader, according to a new poll.
The party has been hemorrhaging support in recent months and has been polling at around 15% in recent surveys, but it could gain about 6% more votes if Conte were to lead it, an SWG poll shows. Conte, a 56-year-old lawyer and academic, has led two Italian government coalitions without any official party affiliation.
As one of the country’s most popular politicians, Conte is now positioning himself for a new career within Five Star and has been discussing a plan to overhaul it with party leaders. A rise in popularity would give Five Star—already the biggest force within parliament — a shot at once again becoming Italy’s largest party, over-taking Matteo Salvini’s struggling League.
France uses only a quarter ofAstraZeneca vaccine dosesREUTERS — PARIS
France has used only a quarter of its AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine doses, a health ministry official indi-cated yesterday, saying its utilisation rate stood at 24% as of Feb. 28, well below a target set at 80-85%.
This compares with 82% for vaccines made by Pfizer/BioNTech and 37% for those made by Moderna. “It is true that we are facing issues with AstraZeneca vaccines,” the official said without elaborating.
Health authorities in some European countries — including France and Germany—are facing resistance to the AZ’s shot
after side-effects including fever and muscle pain led some front-line workers to call in sick, putting extra strain on already-stretched health services.
“Now, there has been recent positive news around the AstraZeneca vaccine and we are confident it will find its place,” the official added.
Results published last week of a study conducted in Scotland covering 5.4 million people showed both the Pfizer-BioNtech and Oxford-AstraZeneca shots were highly effective in preventing severe infections. Another study conducted by Public Health England reached similar conclusions.
On Monday, French health minister Olivier Veran said France would allow people under 75 with existing health problems to get the AstraZeneca vaccine, departing from an earlier stance that the jab should be for the under-65s only. Many opponents to the French government have criticized authorities in recent weeks for being both slow and inefficient in rolling out vaccination.
As of Saturday, 4.55 million people had received at least one shot of an Astra-Zeneca, Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine. The number stood at 6.17 million in Germany and up to 20.9 million in Britain.
13WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021 EUROPE
REUTERS — KIEV
A Belarusian court sentenced a journalist to six months in prison yesterday for divulging medical secrets, after she had contradicted official statements about the death of a protester who the authorities suggested was drunk at the time.
Katerina Borisevich from the local news outlet TUT.BY had reported that there was no alcohol in the bloodstream of protester Roman Bondarenko when he died. Officials said he
had suffered fatal injuries in a drunken brawl while his allies said he had been beaten by security forces.
Artyom Sorokin, the doctor who had shared Bondarenko’s medical report with Borisevich, was given a suspended sentence.
The death of the 31-year-old became a flashpoint in months of mass protests against veteran P r e s i d e n t A l e x a n d e r Lukashenko, who launched a violent crackdown that has trig-gered Western sanctions on
Minsk but support from Russia.The authorities said that
revealing information about Bondarenko posed a threat to public safety.
“The only fair verdict in this case would be a complete acquittal ... Neither Katya nor Artyom committed any crimes,” Marina Zolotova, TUT.BY’s editor-in-chief, told Euroradio, a Belarus-focused radio station based in Poland.
Supporters of Borisevich, 36, shouted “We love you, Katya!” as she was led away
after the trial, footage shared on social media showed.
In November, Bondarenko was detained by police after a clash with unidentified people who were removing red and white ribbons — symbols of the opposition against Lukashenko — from a fence in a courtyard in Minsk.
A few hours later, Bond-arenko was taken unconscious from the police station to an emergency hospital, where police and medics said he died the next day due to beatings
inflicted by unidentified people.Authorities denied any
police involvement in his death.There have been several
recent trials of opposition figures and journalists. In Feb-ruary, two journalists were jailed for filming protests.
Yesterday, the Belarusian authorities said they were seeking the extradition of oppo-sition figure Sviatlana Tsikha-nouskaya, who fled to Lithuania after challenging Lukashenko in a disputed election last August.
Serbia donates AstraZeneca shots to Bosnia
BLOOMBERG — SARAJEVO
Serbia donated 5,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to neighbouring Bosnia-Herze-govina, a rare show of solidarity in a region where ethnic tensions continue to snarl rela-tions three decades after the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia.
Serbian President Ale-ksandar Vucic personally flew the shots to the capital Sarajevo in a government jet after Bosnia expressed frustration that it had received nothing from the
European Union or the multi-national Covax initiative to supply poorer countries’ inoc-ulation campaigns.
“We need each other,” Vucic said, upon being greeted by top officials representing Bosnia’s Muslim, Croat and Serb ethnic groups. “We live next to each other and we have no one closer than each other.”
While the EU’s vaccination drive has stumbled, non-member Serbia has one of the highest inoculation rates in Europe, with more than 21
doses given per 100 people.It has imported more than
2 million vaccines in direct deals with four suppliers and agreed to share some with neighbors including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and North Macedonia. Serbia may donate more in the future, Vucic said.
Last month, Serbia shipped 2,000 Russian-made vaccines to the Serb entity. The latest delivery is the first half of 10,000 shots for the other half of the country, Vucic said.
Boxes containing COVID-19 vaccines donated by Serbia President Aleksandar Vucic are unloaded from a plane at Sarajevo International Airport, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, yesterday.
EU envoy urges Kosovo to resume talks with SerbiaAP — PRISTINA
The European Union’s special envoy yesterday called on Kosovo and Serbia to resume talks on normalizing their ties.
Miroslav Lajcak is on a three-day visit to Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, before going to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia.
The bloc and the United States “expect the continuation of the process of the dialogue” which “is dealing with issues that are important for every citizen of Kosovo and, of course, is inevitable for Kos-ovo’s European path.”
Kosovo declared inde-pendence from Serbia in 2008, a decade after a brutal 1998-1999 war between separatist ethnic Albanian rebels and Serb forces.
Most Western nations have recognised Kosovo’s inde-pendence, but Serbia and its allies Russia and China have not.
After a White House summit and talks in Brussels in September, the dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo has stalled.
Lajcak on Monday had “a constructive meeting” with Albin Kurti, who is expected to become Kosovo’s new prime minister after his Self-Determination Movement Party won the February 14 parliamentary election.
The dialogue could be concluded in months if Pristina and Belgrade were willing to, Lajcak said at a news conference after meeting with acting President Vjosa Osmani.
“We definitely don’t need another 10 years, not even five years, not even three years, if there is commitment, if there is willingness of the parties,” he said.
For Osmani, the final goal of the dialogue would be both Kosovo and Serbia becoming EU members.
Sweden heading into third wave of pandemic, warns health czarREUTERS — STOCKHOLM
Sweden appeared headed into a third wave of the pandemic, the Health Agency said yesterday, as it tightened crowd restrictions for shops amid a recent rise in new COVID-19 cases and a rapid spread of
virus variants considered more infectious.
Sweden, which has shunned lockdowns throughout the pan-demic, registered 11,804 new coronavirus cases since Friday, health agency statistics showed yesterday, an increase on the 10,933 cases reported during
the corresponding period last week.
“It certainly looks like we’re heading into a third wave,” Chief Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell told a news conference. “It’s starting to have an impact on intensive care. We don’t see a dramatic increase but not the
decrease we had for a time.”The Health Agency recom-
mended that crowds at shops be limited to 500 people, adding to a string of new restrictions in recent week, such as limited opening hours for cafes and res-taurants and stricter rules for wearing face masks.
Tegnell, the architect of Sweden’s pandemic strategy, also said recent studies pointed to AstraZenenca COVID-19 vaccine being effective for people over 65 and that Sweden was looking into changing its recommendation of not admin-istering it to elderly.
EU court: Poland’s judicial rules could violate lawAP — WARSAW
The European Union’s top court ruled yesterday that Poland’s new regulations for appointing judges to the Supreme Court could violate EU law.
The ruling obliges Poland’s right-wing government to dis-continue these regulations and observe the principles of judicial independence and the right to judicial protection.
The EU has been strongly criticising Poland’s conserv-ative government for the changes it has introduced to the judiciary since it won power in 2015, saying they undermine the country’s rule of law.
In a decision that could have a powerful effect on future court verdicts regarding judicial appointments, the ruling also allows Poland’s courts to refrain from applying the gov-ernment regulations introduced in 2018 and 2019.
The legislation in Poland strengthened political influence over a top judicial body, the National Council of the Judi-ciary, and the body’s procedure of appointments to the Supreme Court. It also curbed the right to appeal the council’s decisions.
The regulations “which have the effect of removing effective judicial review of that council’s decisions ... (pro-posing) candidates for the office of judge at the Supreme Court — are liable to infringe EU law,”
the European Court of Justice said in its ruling.
Many members of Poland’s judiciary welcomed the decision.
“The (EU) court has put limits on political power,” said attorney Marcjanna Debska. “It refers not only to the regula-tions but also to the political sit-uation and that means that the court can clearly see what is going on in Poland.”
But a member of the ruling Law and Justice party, lawyer Krystyna Pawlowicz, criticised the verdict, saying it has “no legal basis and goes against Poland’s legal system.”
The ruling was in response to a query by Poland’s top administrative court to the European court regarding a complaint by some judges. The Polish judges said the new reg-ulations stripped them of the right to appeal a decision rejecting them as candidates for the Supreme Court.
Based on yesterday’s ruling, Poland’s Supreme Administrative Court can now review the appeals by the five judges, who are not gov-ernment loyalists. In the process, it is likely to rule that the entire appointment pro-cedure was flawed and ineffective.
Some said the court’s decision backed up several pre-vious warnings from EU bodies to Poland about following the bloc’s rule of law.
US matches EU, UK sanctions on RussiaBLOOMBERG — WASHINGTON
The Biden administration announced its first sanctions against Russia yesterday, punishing the Kremlin for the poisoning and jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a sign of deepening tensions between the nuclear powers.
The penalties — like those adopted by the European Union— target senior Russian law enforcement officials, as well as matching sanctions the EU and the UK imposed earlier on other Rus-sians allied with President Vladimir Putin in response to the attempted murder of Navalny.
The sanctions will help set the tone for Joe Biden’s relationship with Putin, whom the new US president has said he will treat as more of an adversary than his predecessor, Donald Trump, did.
The US demands the release of Navalny, his allies and others wrong-fully detained in Russia and an end to the persecution of his supporters, one senior administration official told reporters in a briefing.
Viktor Zolotov, the head of Russia’s National Guard; Igor Krasnov, the coun-try’s prosecutor general; Alexander Kalashnikov, the Federal Penitentiary Service chief; and Alexander Bastrykin, who leads the country’s Investigative Committee, are the targets of the EU’s latest penalties, according to Peter Stano, foreign affairs spokesman for the EU.
The 27 EU member states formally adopted the sanctions yesterday, Stano said. The measures will be published in
the afternoon, he said.“The EU has been clear and con-
sistent in its condemnation of the con-tinuous deterioration of the human rights situation in Russia in general and the arbitrary arrest, prosecution and sen-tencing of Mr Navalny in particular,” Stano said in an email. “A strong and united reaction from our international partners sharing the same values as the EU can only reinforce the effectiveness of our actions and help reach the desired result.”
The US measures will involve the State, Treasury and Commerce Depart-ments, a senior administration official said in the briefing.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia would “definitely respond” to the new restrictions, though he didn’t elaborate.
The targets of EU and UK asset freezes and travel bans in October were Aleksandr Bortnikov, leader of Russia’s domestic spy agency; Sergei Kiriyenko, first deputy chief of staff in the presi-dential administration; Andrei Yarin, head of the presidential administration’s domestic policy directorate; Aleksei
Krivoruchko and Pavel Popov, two deputy ministers of defense; and Sergei Menyaylo, Putin’s envoy to the Siberian Federal District.
The bloc and the UK also froze the assets of one Russian entity: the State Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology.
Navalny returned to Russia in
January after being treated in Germany for a nerve agent attack. He was detained shortly after landing at Moscow’s Sher-emetyevo airport. Western governments and Navalny have accused the Kremlin of being behind the attempted assassi-nation. Russia denies that and has said that Navalny’s imprisonment is an internal matter.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny attends a hearing to consider an appeal against an earlier court decision to change his suspended sentence to a real prison term, in Moscow, recently.
The US demands the release of Navalny, his allies and others wrongfully detained in Russia and an end to the persecution of his supporters, an official said.
Belarus journalist jailed for report on protester’s death
Ukraine President takes vaccine to reassure scepticsREUTERS — KIEV
Ukrainian President Volo-dymyr Zelenskiy had a coro-navirus vaccine shot during a visit to the frontline in the eastern Donbass region yesterday, hoping to reassure sceptics that the vaccine is safe and effective.
Lagging behind the rest of Europe, Ukraine has only just started vaccinating its 41 million people after receiving its first batch of 500,000 Indian-made AstraZeneca shots last month, prioritising frontline healthcare workers and the military.
But the government faces a battle against vaccine scep-ticism and has cited data showing 47 percent of the pop-ulation did not want to take it.
“Got vaccinated against #COVID19. Did this on the frontline with our soldiers as Supreme C-in-C [Commander in Chief],” Zelenskiy said in a tweet that was accompanied with a picture of the shirtless president taking the shot.
“The same Oxford/Astra-Zeneca (Covishield) from India, which was delivered 1st to UA (Ukraine) & received by millions of people in the world. Vaccine will let us live without restrictions again.”
Zelenskiy, whose gov-ernment has blocked the use of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, has urged European Union leaders to send vaccines to Ukraine and other countries on the periphery of the EU as a gesture of solidarity, and as a matter of “politics and geopolitics”.
Ukraine has registered 1.3 million cases with more than 26,000 deaths from COVID-19.
He was accompanied by European Council President Charles Michel who, in tele-vised remarks, reiterated the need for Kiev to tackle corruption.
14 WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021AMERICAS
Colombia to get vaccinesfrom COVAX initiativeAP — BOGOTA
Colombia on Monday became the first country in the Americas to receive a shipment of coro-navirus vaccines from the United Nations-backed COVAX initiative, a program meant to ensure that the world’s most vulnerable people are inocu-lated but that has so far struggled to assist nations around the globe.
The arrival of 117,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to the South American coun-try’s capital, Bogota, came a few days after the anniversary of the first case of COVID-19 found in the region.
The Pan American Health Organisation said it expects to increase vaccine access in the region through the COVAX effort each month, with plans to bring about 280 million vac-cines to the Americas and the Caribbean by the end of the year.
But the initiative, formed to ensure fair access to vaccines by low- and middle-income countries, has been hampered by the severely limited global supply of doses and logistical problems. Although it aims to deliver 2 billion shots this year, it currently has legally binding agreements only for several hundred million shots.
The organisation said in a news release Monday that 36 countries in the region will receive vaccines through the initiative. Of those, 26 will do so through their own funds while 10 will receive the vac-cines for free.
“The arrival means that more health workers and
high-risk populations can begin to be vaccinated,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.
“The COVID-19 pandemic can only end if vaccination occurs in an equitable way, and I am truly delighted to see vaccine doses in South America and other regions begin to be rolled out this week through COVAX.”
COVAX is only planning to provide enough vaccine for 20 percent to 30 percent of the people in poorer countries — a figure that will still leave those nations vulnerable to corona-virus outbreaks.
Experts estimate that at least 70 percent of a population needs to be protected against COVID-19 to prevent future epidemics.
Colombia, the third largest country in Latin America by population, had already begun COVID-19 inoculations,
receiving its first shipment of vaccines February 15. The gov-ernment has said it aims to vac-cinate 35 million people this year, including hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants and refugees who are currently living in the country.
The country of 50 million people has recorded more than 2.25 million cases and over 59,700 deaths of COVID-19. Its government expects to get 20 million doses of vaccines through the COVAX initiative this year.
“Today marks a very important milestone, today COVAX makes its first delivery in the Western Hemisphere, and the first country to receive it is Colombia,” President Iván Duque said during an event to announce the vaccine arrival.
He added that the delivery makes clear “COVAX is active and works,” and called on “all of us to accelerate the distri-bution of vaccines through COVAX in the Americas.”
The Pan American Health Organization on Monday said all countries in the region are expected to receive initial doses of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vac-cines starting this month if they meet all conditions.
In addition, Peru, El Sal-vador and Bolivia will also receive Pfizer/BioNTech vac-cines soon once administrative, legal and regulatory require-ments are met.
Last week, Ghana was the first country in the world to receive vaccines through the COVAX initiative. The West African country received 600,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines
Mexico President Manuel Lopez Obrador smiles from the National Palace in Mexico City, Mexico, during a virtual bilateral meeting with US President Joe Biden, who is in Washington, DC, on Monday.
Meeting with Biden friendly and positive: Mexico PresidentAP — MEXICO CITY
Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said yesterday that he had no differ-ences with US President Joe Biden in their first bilateral meeting a day earlier and that his American counterpart was open to exploring his proposals on a temporary worker program and helping Mexico obtain more vaccine.
López Obrador charac-terized the meeting as “friendly, respectful and with a lot of emphasis on cooperation for development.” He said he didn’t come away with a deal for the US to help Mexico obtain more COVID-19 vaccine, but said he wasn’t denied either.
“Teams from both countries
are going to explore all possi-bilities for cooperation in this area” to see “what is possible and when,” López Obrador said.
Ahead of the meeting, White House officials reiterated that Biden remained focused on first vaccinating US citizens before turning his attention to assisting other nations. López Obrador acknowledged Biden may have to first vaccinate most of the US population, but said there was an openness to the subject.
There were questions ahead of the meeting about how the two leaders would get along. López Obrador had a surpris-ingly warm relationship with former President Donald Trump that revolved almost exclusively around Mexico’s
efforts to stop migrants from reaching the US border.
But López Obrador said Tuesday there was a lot of laughter in the one hour and 15-minute conversation with Biden that covered nearly all of the main issues in the bilateral relationship.
“There were not any differ-ences, I’m telling you categor-ically, not a single one,” López Obrador said.
On immigration, López Obrador said he proposed the US analyse how many workers its economy requires and then design a plan for temporary worker visas that would allow Mexicans and Central Amer-icans to migrate legally for work. “And it’s going to be studied,” he said.
Ecuador links
prison riots to
transnational
crime groups
REUTERS — QUITO
Ecuadoran officials said yesterday prison riots that left 79 inmates dead last week were linked to organised tran-snational crime, and said the situation in its penitentiary system remained “tense.”
Last Tuesday’s riots, which left an additional 19 people wounded, were among the bloodiest incidents in the history of the Andean country’s penitentiary system and under-scored the problems of over-crowding and underfunding that plagued the system.
Authorities initially attributed the riots to rivalries between local gangs. Testifying in front of the National Assembly, Interior Minister Patricio Pazmino said on Monday that those rivalries were linked to international groups disputing for control over drug trade.
“We are not talking about a simple fight between criminal groups in prisons,” Pazmino said. “We are talking about a confrontation between criminal groups with international con-tacts over illegal markets in the country.” Without naming spe-cific groups, Pazmino said rivalries between local groups took on an increasingly inter-national dimension in 2017, after the demobilisation of the FARC rebel group in Colombia through a peace deal with the government put an end to decades of civil war.
Brazil health officials call for curfews as virus cases soarAP — SAO PAULO
Brazil’s state health secretaries yesterday called for lockdowns and curfews in many parts of the country because hospitals are running short of intensive care unit beds as COVID-19 daily kills more than 1,000 people nationwide.
Brazil’s National Council of Health Secretaries said in an open letter that there should be “restriction at the maximum level” in regions where more than 85 percent of hospital beds are occupied and trending up
so as “to avoid the imminent national collapse of the public and private health care networks.”
“The return of the pandemic in several states is making their private and their public assistance networks collapse and has brought imminent risk of spreading it to all regions of Brazil,” the council said, adding that the nation is experiencing its worst moment since the pan-demic began.
It also cited the slow pace of the vaccination program.
Last week was Brazil’s
deadliest since the beginning of the pandemic, with 8,244 con-firmed deaths from the virus.
The letter from the council, which represents the nation’s 27 health secretaries, suggested lockdowns in cities where no ICU beds are available and curfews between 8pm and 6am in the rest.
The council also said there is a “lack of coherent and unified national leadership in the reaction to the pandemic,” and suggests the halt of all activities held in person, including reli-gious ceremonies.
Despite the warning, Sao Paulo Gov. João Doria decided also on Monday that religious gatherings are to be considered essential activities in Brazil’s most populous state. Doria is a former ally turned foe of Bra-zilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, entered a two-week lockdown on Sunday, and at least eight states adopted curfews over the past week due to the rise in cases and deaths from the virus. On Monday, hundreds protested near the country’s presidential palace, carrying banners that
read “We want to work.” The governor of the Federal District, where Brasilia lies, is an ally of Bolsonaro.
In several Brazilian cities, owners of private schools also protested against stricter social distancing measures. They argued children are not major spreaders of the disease.
Less than four percent of Brazil’s population has been vaccinated against COVID-19. Almost 260,000 people are confirmed to have died from the disease in the South American country.
Unrest in SantiagoDemonstrators clash with riot police during a protest against Chile government and the reopening of schools, in Santiago, Chile, on Monday.
Chile’s new constitution likely to be agreed upon by moderatesBLOOMBERG — SANTIAGO
Chile’s Constitutional Assembly is shaping up to be far from the radical hotbed some investors had feared, as a split political left increases the odds that fringe candidates will be shut out from the rewrite of the nation’s charter.
Parties open to changing the nation’s economic rules failed to coalesce behind one list of candidates for the body that will draft the constitution. Meanwhile, center-right aspirants opposed to a major overhaul have done just that, according to the final list of contenders published by Chile’s electoral office on Saturday, creating a path to obtaining over one-third of seats and the power to block major reforms.
Chileans will head to the polls on April 11 to select the 155-member body that will draft the new constitution. Investors are hoping the assembly will keep the eco-nomic pillars that have given the nation the best credit rating among Latin American coun-tries. Many citizens say those rules do nothing more than entrench inequalities, and instead are demanding better public services from health care to pensions.
“The most probable outlook has the political right and center-left each obtaining about 40 percent of assembly
seats,” said Mauricio Morales, a professor of political science at the Universidad de Talca. “The new constitution will be product of an agreement between moderates.”
The body that will write the constitution over the course of a year will consist of newly-elected officials, have gender parity, and reserve 17 seats for indigenous communities. To be included in the charter, each article will need to be approved by two-thirds of its members, thus creating the need for consensus.
Assembly representatives will be chosen through what is known as the D’Hondt method. Under that model, citizens will vote for specific candidates that form part of larger lists in each district.
Electoral officials will then tally the total number of votes that each list receives and then divide the seats proportionally. The number of seats in each district is based on its population.
“The D’Hondt model rewards those who form alli-ances and punish those who remain fragmented,” said Rodrigo Arellano, Vice Dean of the School of Government at the Universidad del Desarrollo. “If you want to have your voice heard, you need to have at least a third of the seats. The political right has them locked up.”
Caribbean seeks vaccines to revive economyAP — SAN JUAN
The Caribbean is hunting for visitors and vaccines to jump-start the stalled economy in one of the world’s most tourism-dependent regions.
Clear waters and warm sand attracted a record 31.5 million tourists to the Caribbean in 2019, but visits plummeted by an estimated 60 percent to 80 percent as the pandemic hit last year. That’s devastating for a region whose countries depend heavily on visitors for income.
“Many countries prefer hur-ricanes compared to what has happened with the pandemic,” said Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace, a former Bahamian tourism minister who also led the Caribbean Tourism Organization.
Tens of thousands of tourism-related jobs were lost, including those held by Nadia Kidd and her mother in Jamaica. Kidd, 31, was a waitress at a resort and her mother worked at a guest house. Kidd, like many other workers, has yet to receive her severance pay and
now runs a tiny grocery store out of her home to support her mother and daughter.
“Everything is all on me,” said Kidd, who worked at the Meliá Braco Village resort in Trelawny. “I have loans to pay, light bill and Internet (that I) have to pay because my daughter has to go to school online.”
Desperate to create safe conditions for tourism, the Car-ibbean is turning to India and China for vaccines at a time when global supplies are strained and richer nations are ahead of them in line for shots
from other sources. A few have been fortunate to get quick shipments, while others could wait weeks, if not months.
The Caribbean saw COVID-19 levels rising in November, along with variants feared to be more contagious. More than 522,000 cases and more than 7,500 deaths have been reported in 35 of the region’s countries and territories.
“The rate of increase has been alarming,” said Dr. Joy St John, executive director of the Trinidad-based Caribbean Public Health Agency.
The Pan American Health Organisation said it expects to increase vaccine access in the region through the COVAX effort each month, with plans to bring about 280 million vaccines to the Americas and the Caribbean by the end of the year.
15WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021 AMERICAS
No proof rioters linked to left extremists: FBIREUTERS — WASHINGTON
FBI Director Chris Wray yesterday debunked conspiracy theories promoted by right-wing supporters of former Pres-ident Donald Trump, saying there was no evidence that leftist extremists disguised themselves as Trump supporters to storm the US Capitol.
In testimony to the US Senate Judiciary Committee, Wray also told lawmakers that the Federal Bureau of Investi-gation views the actions of the rioters on January 6 as “domestic terrorism,” and vowed to hold them accountable.
“We have not to date seen any evidence of any anarchist violent extremists or people subscribing to antifa in con-nection with the 6th,” he tes-tified, referring to the loosely organised ant i-fascist movement.
“That doesn’t mean we’re not looking and we’ll continue to look, but at the moment, we have not seen that.”
Yesterday was Wray’s first testimony in Congress since the attack, a failed bid to block Con-gress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s November election
victory. The attack occurred immediately after Republican Trump, in a speech near the White House, exhorted his sup-porters to march to the Capitol, having repeated his false claims that the election was stolen from him.
The Justice Department has charged more than 300 people with crimes ranging from con-spiracy to attacking police and obstructing Congress. The rioting left five dead.
At least 18 people asso-ciated with the far-right Proud Boys have been charged and nine people tied to the anti-gov-ernment militia known as the Oath Keepers are facing charges
they conspired as far back as November to storm the Capitol to prevent Biden from becoming president.
Biden took office on January 20.
Supporters of Trump have repeatedly made unsubstan-tiated claims the rioters were actually fake Trump supporters who belong to antifa. But Wray told lawmakers yesterday this narrative was false.
To the contrary, he said, a number of the rioters belong to far-right militia movements, or were motivated by racial ideol-ogies — but none to date appear to belong to any left-wing groups. The anti-government militia extremists, he noted, appears to be the “biggest bucket” that is trending as the FBI examines the backgrounds of the rioters.
He added that the FBI has also seen instances of “foreign adversaries” who have been “leveraging the events of Jan. 6 to amplify their own narratives” and push propaganda.
The FBI has yet to arrest any suspects in the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sic-knick, or for pipe bombs that were discovered outside the headquarters of both the Republican and Democratic national committees.
The FBI has obtained a video that shows a suspect spraying bear spray on police officers, including Sicknick, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation.
The suspect has yet to be identified by name, and it is still unclear if the bear spray con-tributed to Sicknick’s death.
Wray said he cannot dis-close a cause of death, and Sic-knick’s death is still under investigation.
In a newly unsealed search warrant, investigators say
rioters carried weapons inside the Capitol including tire irons, sledge hammers, tasers, bear spray and, in at least one case, a handgun with an extended magazine. Investigators including the FBI have come under scrutiny over why more was not done to protect the Capitol ahead of the attack.
The day before, the FBI’s Norfolk, Virginia, office dis-tributed a raw, unverified intel-ligence report which warned that violent extremists intended to disrupt Congress.
Wray told lawmakers the intelligence was shared with other law enforcement agencies three different ways, but acknowledged he personally did not see the report until a few days later. As to why other top law enforcement officials did not see it, Wray said: “I don’t have a good answer to that.”
Senator Richard Blu-menthal, a Democrat, said to Wray: “What I don’t understand is why this... raw intelligence didn’t prompt a stronger warning and alarm.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the January 6th insurrection, in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, yesterday.
Civil rights activist Vernon Jordan dies aged 85AP — ATLANTA
Vernon Jordan (pictured), who rose from humble beginnings in the segregated South to become a champion of civil rights before reinventing himself as a Washington insider and corporate influencer, has died, according to a statement from his daughter. He was 85.
“My father passed away last night around 10pm surrounded by loved ones his wife and daughter by his side,” Jordan’s daughter, Vickee Jordan Adams, said in a statement released yesterday to CBS News.
After stints as field secretary for the Georgia NAACP and executive director of the United Negro College Fund, he became head of the National Urban League, becoming the face of Black America’s modern struggle for jobs and justice for more than a decade. He was nearly killed by a racist’s bullet
in 1980 before transitioning to business and politics.
His friendship with Bill Clinton took them both to the White House. Jordan was an unofficial Clinton aide, drawing him into controversy during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Jordan’s death comes months after the deaths of two other civil rights icons: US Representative John Lewis and C T Vivian.
After growing up in the Jim Crow South and living much of his life in a segregated America, Jordan took a strategic view of race issues.
“My view on all this business about race is never to get angry, no, but to get even,” Jordan said in a July 2000 New York Times interview. “You don’t take it out in anger; you take it out in achievement.” Jordan was the first lawyer to head the Urban League, which had traditionally been led by social workers. Under Jordan’s leadership, the
Urban League added 17 more chapters and its budget swelled to more than $100m. The organization also broadened its focus to include voter regis-tration drives and conflict res-olution between Blacks and law enforcement.
He resigned from the Urban League in 1982 to become a partner at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld.
Jordan was a key campaign adviser to Clinton during his first presidential campaign and co-chaired Clinton’s transition team. He was the first Black to be assigned such a role.
Clinton’s Health and Human Services director, Donna Shalala, called Jordan a great friend who was “larger than life.” “A wise counselor, a patriot and generous citizen,” Shalala said yesterday on Twitter. “His star will never be diminished.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
said yesterday on Twitter that “Jordan’s leadership took our nation closer to its Founding promise: all are created equal.” His friendship with Clinton, which began in the 1970s, evolved into a partnership and political alliance. He met Clinton as a young politician in Arkansas, and the two con-nected over their Southern roots and poor upbringings.
Cuomo hires lawyer in nursing home probeREUTERS — NEW YORK
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has retained a prom-inent white-collar criminal defence lawyer to represent his office in a federal investigation into the state’s misreporting of COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents, a spokesman said on Monday.
Cuomo has come under fire in recent weeks over his office’s role in reporting the official count of coronavirus fatalities among patients of nursing and extended-care facilities, as well as for allegations of sexual har-assment levelled against him.
Elkan Abramowitz, a former federal prosecutor now working in private practice in New York City, was hired to represent Cuomo’s “executive chamber” — consisting of the governor and his immediate staff — in the US Justice Department inquiry into the COVID-19 nursing home deaths, senior advisor Rich Azzopardi said in a text message.
Azzopardi earlier told the Wall Street Journal, which first reported Abramowitz’s appointment, that Cuomo had not hired a lawyer in con-nection with the sexual har-assment probe.
Cuomo, one of the nation’s best-known Democratic poli-ticians, has been accused by two former aides of engaging in a series of unwanted, sex-ually suggestive comments, and in one case an unsolicited kiss.
On Sunday, he apologised if any of his remarks or behaviour were misinterpreted as flirtatious and said he never tried to make anyone feel uncomfortable. He said he never physically touched anyone.
New York Attorney General Letitia James on Monday said she had accepted the gover-nor’s formal referral of the
matter to her office, clearing the way for appointment of an outside counsel to conduct an investigation into the accounts of both women — Lindsey Boylan and Charlotte Bennett.
Late on Monday, a third woman, Anna Ruch, came forward in an interview pub-lished by the New York Times to accuse the governor of inap-propriate conduct at a Sep-tember 2019 wedding reception.
As reported by the Times, Ruch recounted the governor first put his hand on her bare lower back, then when she brushed his hand away, called her “aggressive” and placed his hands on her cheeks and asked her if he could kiss her.
Ruch, according to the Times, said she pulled away and the encounter left her feeling “confused and shocked and embarrassed.” The moment was caught in a cell-phone photo Ruch said was taken by a friend and published by the Times with the article.
Attempts to reach her were unsuccessful. A representative for Cuomo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The New York governor’s brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo, told viewers late on Monday he could not cover stories surrounding the allega-tions on the governor due their relation.
“Obviously, I’m aware of what’s going on with my brother,” the CNN host said on Monday. “Obviously, I cannot cover it because he is my brother. Now, of course CNN has to cover it. They have covered it extensively and they will continue to do so.”
The often outspoken gov-ernor has stayed mostly out of the public eye since the sexual harassment scandal started gaining traction last week.
COVID-19 Victims and Survivors Memorial Day vigil
People attend a drive-in coronavirus disease Victims and Survivors Memorial Day vigil in a parking lot of the Tacoma Dome in Tacoma, Washington, DC, yesterday.
Pandemic loan programme at high risk for fraud, auditor findsAP — WASHINGTON
Emergency loans made to small businesses during the corona-virus pandemic have been added to a list of government programs considered at high risk of waste, fraud or misman-agement.
The most common of those emergency loans, PPP loans, are provided at a low interest rate and are fully forgivable under conditions that include spending a certain percentage on payroll costs. The loans were created by Congress and have proven exceedingly popular as
shops, restaurants and other small businesses try to survive the pandemic.
The Government Account-ability Office said yesterday that millions of small businesses benefitted from the emergency loans, but the speed with which the relief programs were set up limited safeguards necessary to identify risks, “including sus-ceptibility to improper pay-ments and potential fraud.”
The Small Business Admin-istration made or guaranteed more than 14.7 million loans and grants totaling about $744bn between March and
December. Congress approved an additional $304bn in emer-gency loans in December.
The GAO said in the report that, as of January, it continues to experience delays in obtaining key information about the loans, including detailed oversight plans and documentation for estimating improper payments.
“There’s no doubt they’ve had a positive impact. However, the management of these programs needs to be dramatically improved,” US Comptroller General Gene L Dodaro told reporters in previewing the report.
Government auditors release a high-risk list near the beginning of every new Congress. The list is designed to increase attention on the shortfalls cited by the GAO, and to prompt action that can often save taxpayer dollars and i m p r o v e g o v e r n m e n t operations.
Auditors also added the government’s efforts to prevent drug misuse to the high-risk list. The GAO had warned as the pandemic began that it would be doing so. At the time, it noted that the pan-demic could fuel the condi-tions that contribute to drug
m i s u s e , s u c h a s unemployment.
In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Pre-vention reported the largest ever increase of drug overdose deaths during a 12-month period that ended the previous May. The CDC noted a particular acceleration in drug overdose deaths as widespread mitigation measures kicked in.
“This is heartbreaking,” said Senator Rob Portman. Portman said that the country and his home state had finally seen a drop in overdose deaths in 2018 for the first time in decades.
Toronto vaccinates
police officers
before those
aged 80 or above
AP — TORONTO
Canada’s largest city has started vaccinating police officers ahead of people 80 years of age and older.
A Toronto police spokes-person said on Monday police constables and sergeants who respond to emergency calls where medical assistance may be required have been moved to the current phase by Ontario’s provincial government.
A police spokesperson said 2,250 of Toronto’s nearly 5,000 officers are eligible.
Stephen Warner, a spokesman for Ontario’s Solicitor General, said phase one of the province’s vaccination roll-out has always included front-line personnel who provide direct health care services where there is an increased risk of exposure to COVID-19.
“Last week, clarity was pro-vided that certain front-line police officers, similar to certain front-line firefighters, fit into this category,” Warner said.
The Ontario provincial government has said those 80 and above in the general public will start getting vacci-nated in the third week of March, but some regions of the province have already started vaccinating those residents while the province sets up a website to make appoint-ments. York region has set up a website allowing for online bookings and Halton, a suburb to the west of Toronto, is also about to do so.
“We have not to date seen any evidence of any anarchist violent extremists or people subscribing to antifa in connection with the 6th,” Chris Wray testified, referring to the loosely organised anti-fascist movement.
16WEDNESDAY 3 MARCH 2021
W ALRUWAIS : 20o → 21o W ALKHOR : 18o → 26o W DUKHAN : 19o → 23o W WAKRAH : 20o → 27o W MESAIEED : 20o → 27o W ABUSAMRA : 17o → 21o
Moderate temperature daytime with scattered clouds to partly cloudy, relatively cold by night.
Minimum Maximum20oC 25oC
WEATHER TODAY
LOW TIDE 01:57 – 14:42
HIGH TIDE 06:49– 19:37
PRAYER TIMINGSPPPPRAYRRRAAAYARA MMMMIINNNNNNNNNGGGGGGMMMMMMMMMIIINNNNNNGGGGNNNNGGGIINNNNGNNNNNNNNN
PRAYERTIMINGS
FAJRSUNRISE
04.38 am 05.55 am
DHUHR 11.46 am
ISHA 07.09 pmMAGHRIBASR 03.07 pm
05.39 pm
Study of ‘Little Foot’ fossil sheds light on human originsREUTERS — LONDON
Sophisticated scanning tech-nology is revealing intriguing secrets about Little Foot, the remarkable fossil of an early human forerunner that inhabited South Africa 3.67 million years ago during a critical juncture in our evolu-tionary history.
Scientists said yesterday they examined key parts of the nearly complete and well-pre-served fossil at Britain’s national synchrotron facility, Diamond Light Source. The scanning focused upon Little Foot’s cranial vault — the upper part of her braincase — and her lower jaw, or mandible.
The researchers gained insight not only into the biology of Little Foot’s species but also into the hardships that this indi-vidual, an adult female, encountered during her life.
Little Foot’s species blended ape-like and human-like traits and is considered a possible direct ancestor of humans.
University of the Witwatersrand paleoanthropologist Ron Clarke, who unearthed the fossil in the 1990s in the Sterk-fontein Caves northwest of Johannesburg and is a co-author of the new study, has identified the species as Aus-tralopithecus prometheus.
“In the cranial vault, we could identify the vascular canals in the spongious bone that are probably involved in brain thermoregulation - how the brain cools down,” said Uni-versity of Cambridge paleoan-thropologist Amélie Beaudet, who led the study published in the journal e-Life.
“This is very interesting as we did not have much infor-mation about that system,” Beaudet added, noting that it likely played a key role in the threefold brain size increase from Australopithecus to modern humans.
Little Foot’s teeth also were revealing.
“The dental tissues are really well preserved. She was
relatively old since her teeth are quite worn,” Beaudet said, though Little Foot’s precise age has not yet been determined.
The researchers spotted defects in the tooth enamel indicative of two childhood bouts of physiological stress such as disease or malnutrition.
“There is still a lot to learn about early hominin biology,”
said study co-author Thomas Connolley, principal beamline scientist at Diamond, using a term encompassing modern humans and certain extinct members of the human evolu-tionary lineage.
“Synchrotron X-ray imaging enables examination of fossil specimens in a similar way to a hospital X-ray CT-scan of a patient, but in much greater detail.”
Little Foot, whose moniker reflects the small foot bones that were among the first ele-ments of the skeleton found, stood roughly 4-foot-3-inch tall. Little Foot has been com-pared in importance to the fossil called Lucy that is about 3.2 million years old and less complete.
Both are species of the genus Australopithecus but pos-sessed different biological traits, just as modern humans and Neanderthals are species of the same genus — Homo — but had different characteristics. Lucy’s species is called Australop-
ithecus afarensis.“Australopithecus could be
the direct ancestor of Homo - humans - and we really need to learn more about the dif-ferent species of Australop-ithecus to be able to decide which one would be the best candidate to be our direct ancestor,” Beaudet said.
Our own species, Homo sapiens, first appeared roughly 300,000 years ago.
The synchrotron findings build on previous research on Little Foot. The species was able to walk fully upright, but had traits suggesting it also still climbed trees, perhaps sleeping there to avoid large predators. It had gorilla-like facial features and powerful hands for climbing. Its legs were longer than its arms, as in modern humans, making this the most-ancient hominin definitively known to have that trait.
“All previous Australop-ithecus skeletal remains have been partial and fragmentary,” Clarke said.
Festival gives Sudanese film lovers drive-in cinemaREUTERS — KHARTOUM
Sudanese moviegoers are enjoying what organisers are saying is their first drive-in cinema after a festival show-casing the country’s resurgent, post-uprising film scene moved outdoors this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
About 100 vehicles gathered in a Khartoum parking lot across from giant screens showing Sudanese and European films on Friday, the start of a week-long festival organized by the British Council.
“We’re watching films from our cars, and that’s something that has never happened before in Sudan,” said Asmaa, among festival attendees sitting inside, next to, and on top of their cars for the nighttime screenings.
Once heavily regulated by the regime of former President Omar Al Bashir, who was toppled in 2019, public spaces in Sudan are being slowly reclaimed, helped by a re-ignited art scene.
Films from Sudan’s small cinema industry have won awards at major festivals, and
Sudan submitted its first film, ‘You Will Die at Twenty’, to the Academy Awards in 2020.
This week’s festival expanded to include Sudanese films in 2018, said British Council country director Bruce Davis, but precautions against COVID-19 prompted a change of format.
“I’m so happy that the fes-tival has Sudanese films, and we encourage all the creatives and young people to produce movies,” said Rabab al-Haj, another moviegoer. “We need programmes like this in Sudan.”
Women sit in a car as they watch a screening of the Sudanese European Film Festival at an outdoor, drive-through cinema for visitors, in Khartoum, Sudan.
Japanese theatre offers new viewing experienceREUTERS — TOKYO
The lights dim, as at the start of any theatre performance, and the audience leans forward to look through a letter-box slot or peephole in the door in front of them as the performers break out into dance.
Japanese dance company Moonlight Mobile Theater has come up with a novel way of bringing people back to their avant-garde performances while maintaining social distancing.
Audience members sit on stools in separated cubicles sur-rounding the stage, each with its own door and letter-drop slots through which they can watch the dancers.
“We intentionally created small holes and slots resembling mailbox slots,” said Nobuyoshi Asai, the theatre’s artistic director and choreographer, explaining how limiting the scope of
viewing allows the audience to become more absorbed in the performance. The theatre company began this peephole viewing in December after can-celling most of its shows last year because of the pandemic. Since December, all 12 of the peephole performances have sold out.
Though this response has been encouraging, only 30 people are allowed in the audience at each show.
This does not cover the cost of the performance, including additional safety measures such as disinfecting the venue. Gov-ernment subsidies barely help the company make ends meet.
While acknowledging the difficulties, Asai is steadfast in the advantages of this idea.
“If we don’t do it, artists will lose opportunities to dance and act,” he said. “We want to propose this as a model to bring audiences back to theatres.”
People watch the Moonlight Mobile Theatre’s dance performance through peepholes at a shopping mall in Nagoya, Japan.
Mount Sinabung volcano spews ash into sky
REUTERS — JAKARTA
Indonesia’s Mount Sinabung volcano sent a cloud of hot ash as high as 5km yesterday, in its first big eruption since August last year, the country’s volcanology centre said.
Mount Sinabung’s activity has increased since last year and the alert for the volcano in North Sumatra province has been placed at the second-highest level.
No casualties were
reported, but an official had earlier urged people to stay at least 3km from the crater, Indonesia’s Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation Centre said.
Videos on social media showed little panic among residents over the eruption, which sent a column of white ash into the blue sky.
Wirda Br Sitepu, a 20-year-old resident, said that the situation had calmed and said “the mountain is not
erupting, and the ash has decreased.” Indonesia straddles the so-called “Pacific Ring of Fire”, a highly seismi-cally active zone, where dif-ferent plates on the earth’s crust meet and create a large number of earthquakes and volcanoes.
Indonesia has nearly 130 active volcanoes, more than any other country.
Sinabung had been inactive for centuries before it erupted again in 2010.
Mount Sinabung volcano erupts as seen from Kuta Rakyat village in Karo, North Sumatra Province, Indonesia, yesterday.
Fears for children’s privacy as Delhi schools install facial recognitionREUTERS — NEW DELHI
Facial recognition technologies installed in at least a dozen government-funded schools in Delhi are an “overreach” by Indian authorities and an invasion of children’s privacy, digital rights advocates said yesterday.
The move to introduce facial recognition technology follows a 2019 decision by the Delhi city government to mount closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras in more than 700 public schools to ensure the safety of students.
The facial recognition systems
are being installed without laws to regulate the collection and use of data, which is particularly wor-rying for children, said Anushka Jain, an associate counsel at Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights group that became aware of the rollout last week.
“CCTV is already a violation of children’s privacy, even though some parents had supported it for the safety of their children... but the use of facial recognition tech-nology is an overreach and is completely unjustified,” Jain said.
“Its use for children is
particularly problematic because the accuracy rate is so low - so in the event of a crime, you could have children being misiden-tified,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Parents were unlikely to be aware of the risks related to potential data breaches and misuse, she added.
Facial recognition technology is being increasingly deployed in airports, railway stations and cafes across India, with plans for a nationwide system to modernise the police force and its
information gathering and criminal identification processes.
But analysts say its benefits are not clear, and that it could breach people’s privacy or lead to greater surveillance, with few safeguards and little clarity on how the technology works, how the data is stored, and who can access it.
A personal data protection law is being drafted by Indian lawmakers.
Delhi authorities did not respond to requests for comment,
but previously said that CCTV had reduced truancy in schools.
“CCTV in schools is extremely important to ensure safety of stu-dents and bring transparency and accountability in the system,” Arvind Kejriwal, chief minister of Delhi, said at the time.
Facial recognition systems are often rolled out without a privacy policy or consent from guardians to collect and process the data of minors, said Prasanth Sugathan, legal director at Software Freedom Law Centre, a digital rights nonprofit.
Twitter cracks
down on
vaccine
misinformation
AP — SAN FRANCISCO
Twitter says it has begun labelling tweets that include misleading information about COVID-19 vaccines and using a “strike system” to even-tually remove accounts that repeatedly violate its rules.
The company said Monday that it has started using human reviewers to assess whether tweets violate its policy against COVID vaccine misinformation. Eventually, the work will be done by a combination of humans and automation, it said.
Twitter had already banned some COVID-related misinformation in December, including falsehoods about how the virus spreads, whether masks are effective and the risk of infection and death.
“Through the use of the strike system, we hope to educate people on why certain content breaks our rules so they have the oppor-tunity to further consider their behaviour and their impact on the public conver-sation,” Twitter said in a blog post on Monday.
People with one vio-lation — or strike — will see no action. Two strikes will lead to an account being locked for 12 hours. Five or more will get a user perma-nently banned from Twitter.
Facebook has also stepped up its vaccine mis-information fight after years of half-hearted enforcement. It announced an expanded policy last month that includes all vaccines — not just those against COVID-19.
San Francisco-based Twitter did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on whether it also plans to include broader anti-vax misinformation in its policies.
Little Foot, whose
moniker reflects the
small foot bones that
were among the first
elements of the skeleton
found, stood roughly
4-foot-3-inch tall. Little
Foot has been compared
in importance to the
fossil called Lucy that is
about 3.2 million years
old and less complete.