Gutsy Qatar down Malaysia to enter semis

QFB revenues rise; improves

profitability

Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani has received a written message from President of the Republic of Sudan, Omar Hassan Al Bashir, pertaining to bilateral relations and ways of enhancing them. Director of the Sudanese President's Office, Lt Gen Taha Osman Al Hussein, handed over the message when the Emir met him at Emiri Diwan yesterday.

Emir receives message from Sudanese President

BUSINESS | 23 SPORT | 28

Volume 22 | Number 7144 | 2 RiyalsThursday 27 April 2017 | 1 Sha'baan 1438 www.thepeninsulaqatar.com

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The Peninsula

CLOSE on the heels of the United Arab Emirates ban-ning import of fruits and vegetables from five Middle East countries due to high pesticide levels, Qatar has imposed stringent measures to ensure safety of imported food products.

In a circular addressed to the officials at all ports in the country, the Ministry of Pub-lic Health has asked all agricultural produce con-signments from Lebanon, Oman, Egypt and Jordan to be released only after pesti-cide analysis.

Samples of fruits and vegetables will be taken to analyse the presence of pes-ticide residues in them. → Continued on page 6

Sanaullah Ataullah The Peninsula

The Ministry of Municipal-ity and Environment has asked the decades old

wholesale supermarkets oper-ating in Abu Hamour Central Market to close their business by June 30.

The move follows the closure of fish market and fresh chicken

outlets operating in the vicinity, which were shifted to Umm Salal Central Market on April 9. Ten-ants have been asked to move out to make way for development and renovation works in the area. The business owners have urged the authorities concerned to pro-vide alternative shops in new central markets or give them more time to shift and thus help reduce their financial losses.

A circular dated April 16, 2017 issued by Doha Municipal-ity to these supermarkets reads, “since the works for development and renovation of Abu Hamour Central Market is about to start, we would like to inform you that it was decided that the last work-ing day for all wholesale supermarkets at Central Market will be June 30, 2017.”

→ Continued on page 5

Wholesale shops in Abu Hamour to shut

Sidi Mohamed The Peninsula

The Hamad Interna-tional Airport (HIA) has emerged as one of the most secure and safest airports in

the world thanks to state-of-the-art technology and devices introduced in the airport, a sen-ior official said yesterday.

HIA is gearing up to imple-ment its ambitious smart traveler system that will allow passen-gers to complete all procedures electronically. International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) recently ranked Qatar as one of the world's top countries in implementing civil aviation secu-rity standards.

Of the six million people who travelled through the Hamad International Airport (HIA) in the first quarter of this year, about 850,000 passengers used the e-gate service, which is now

available for citizens and expa-triates free of charge.

“There is an increase in the number of passengers who used e- gates during the first quarter of this year, which reg-istered 850,000 passengers, that was achieved by the great efforts exerted by all bodies working at the airport,” Col. Muhammad Rashid Al Mazroui, Director of Airport Passports Department said in a press conference yesterday.

“The Department now has the latest systems in the process of checking the travel docu-ments, through sophisticated devices which can identify any fraud attempts, including tech-nological devices with high capabilities.

→ Continued on page 3

Included with today’s edition is a special supplement

THURSDAY 27, APRIL 2017

nbloom ngton Post

've ever found bliss in a bite hocolate or smiled when eone offered you a french then you know food can e you happy. But while it's that your favorite treat may rief emotional lift, sustained ting brain power can only a consistent supply of ods.

zing the difference between of cookie-fueled joy and the ects of long-term nutrition

health is important. are taking a closer look at

an impact your mood and tive function, and they are what you eat does make a

a mountain of evidence to t the well-researched an diet can help reduce the

art disease, cancer and nd good news! That very is also associated with

mood and a reduced risk of and cognitive decline.to the Mediterranean eating

mphasize vegetables, fruits, whole grains, olive oil and n, while reducing ultra-fried and sugary foods.

t the real stuff, and cut back d.g a collection of nourishing

diet is the brain-healthy MIND Diet (Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay), which is based on the same foods but adds extra emphasis on eating berries, leafy greens and nuts. Researchers have found that people following the MIND diet have

one singular food that has the most powerful effect on brain health. Translation: There's no specific superfood that will make you happy or improve cognition. Instead, aim for a healthy eating plan with a variety of nutritious foods. Here are some brain-

chemicals that affect mood. Low levels of B-12 are linked to depression.

Probiotics: Whether from supplements or foods, these good bacteria are beneficial for more than digestive health. People who take probiotics see improvements in their

depression and anxiety. In additionyour greens, add magnesium-ripumpkin seeds, Brazil nuts, chickpeand beans to your meals.

Blueberries: With a high conteof antioxidants known as flavonoidblueberries help activate brapathways associated with bettcognition and less cellular aginBlueberries and blueberry juice aassociated with having a more positimood.

Oysters: This seafood delicacyhigh in zinc, a mineral that's not storby the body and must be consumdaily. Being deficient in zinc is linkto depression. Other good sourceszinc include crab, beef, beanchickpeas and cashews.

Chocolate: Results from systemareviews indicate cocoa can shake bad moods, and may be protectiagainst depression. And sippiantioxidant-rich hot cocoa increasfeelings of contentment and puts peopin a happy mood. But since too musugar is negatively associated wbrain health, choose dark chocolate akeep portions to a square or two a da

While many foods provide positibrain fuel, there are some edibles thhave the opposite effect. In contrastthe Mediterranean-style plan, typicunhealthy Western diets that incluexcessive amounts of sugar, sasnacks, processed and fried foods habeen associated with worsening symptoms of depression, and

Foods to eat for a mood boost

Fruits and vegetables to be monitored

Smart traveller system at HIA will allow passengers to complete all procedures electronically.

Qatar tops ICAO security ranking

e-gate users surpass 850,000 in first quarter of this year.

02 THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017HOME

Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani met with CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, Ben van Beurden, and his accompanying delegation in Doha yesterday. The meeting reviewed cooperation and means of enhancing them.

Emir meets CEO of Royal Dutch Shell Emir greets President of TanzaniaQNA

Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani sent yesterday a cable

of congratulations to Presi-dent of the United Republic of Tanzania John Pombe Magufuli on the occasion of his country's National Day.

Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani and Prime Minister and Inte-rior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Kha-lifa Al Thani also sent congratulations to President of the United Republic of Tan-zania John Pombe Magufuli on the occasion of his coun-try's National Day.

The Peninsula

The Cultural Village Foun-dation-Katara has bagged the Arab Tourism Oscar

award at the ninth Arab Tour-ism Media summit held in Dubai.

Katara General Manager Dr Khalid bin Ibrahim Al Sulaiti received the award and was also granted the title ‘First Government leader’ that supports Arab tour-ism. Al Sulaiti, said: “The award is a tribute to the ongoing efforts towards excellence which is at the core of all the projects done by the distinguished national team that work at Katara."

Since its establishment, each of Katara’s successes can be attributed collectively to the administrative, management and intellectual efforts to implement our strategy, that is in alignment

with the institutional frameworks that come under Qatar’s National Vision 2030.”

“Our pride in the cultural successes that the State of Qatar has achieved so far reflects our pride in its heritage, identity and prosperity as well, none of which would have been possible with-out the comprehensive vision of the Emir of the State of Qatar, H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani who has spared no effort to support our heritage while reaching out and welcoming cul-tures and practices from other countries,” he added.

The President of the Arab Centre for Tourism Media, Hus-sein Al-Mannai, said that Qatar’s victory, which is represented by the success of Katara, is a source of delight for everyone, given the fact that Katara has become a

renowned cultural and touristic destination within the Gulf

region synonymous with excellence.

The Peninsula

The State Cabinet approved a draft law on corporate bank-ruptcy and prevention at an ordinary session

chaired by Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani yesterday.

The Ministry of Economy and Commerce prepared the draft law aiming at improving the investment environment in the state.

The law aims at developing a detailed regulation of the pro-visions of corporate bankruptcy and prevention, taking into account international standards in this regard.

The Cabinet also approved a draft law regulating compe-tition and its draft executive regulation.

The draft law was prepared to replace Law No. (19) of 2006 on the protection of competition and the prevention of monopo-listic practices, as part of the modernization of legislation to keep pace with developments.

Following the meeting, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs H E Ahmed bin Abdul-lah bin Zaid Al Mahmoud stated that the Cabinet expressed its sincere thanks and apprecia-tion to the Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani for his huge efforts and sound guidance which resulted in releasing the Qatari citizens kidnapped in Iraq and their safe

return to homeland. Then, the Cabinet reviewed

topics on the meeting's agenda.The Cabinet approved to

accede to the Charter of Con-ference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA).

Meanwhile, the Cabinet approved a draft MoU for coop-eration in the field of youth between the Government of the State of Qatar and the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a draft MoU for cooperation in exchanging financial investiga-tion between Qatar Financial Information Unit and the Financial Intelligence Unit of Sri Lanka.

The Cabinet reviewed a let-ter of the Minister of Economy and Commerce on the results of the first session of the Qatari-Kyrgyz Joint Committee for Economic, Commercial and Technical Cooperation (Doha, March 2017).

Cabinet nod for draft law onbankruptcy

Katara bags Arab Tourism Oscar award

Katara General Manager Dr Khalid bin Ibrahim Al Sulaiti receiving the award.

Investment rules

The draft law is aimed at creating regulations to improve the investment environment in Qatar.

Cabinet welcomes release of Qatari citizens kidnapped in Iraq and their safe return to homeland.

03THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017 HOME

Continued from page 1Also the database of the

devices is constantly updated to keep pace with passports of all types and forms,” Col. Muham-mad Rashid Al Mazroui, Director of Airport Passports Department added.

Airport Security Department Director Brigadier Essa Arrar Al Rumaihi said that the Airport Security Department is working to complete its new vision by implementing the smart travel-ler system in cooperation with the authority of Hamad Interna-tional Airport and the Airport Passports Department.

Once this system is imple-mented, the traveller will be able to complete all procedures elec-tronically without the interference of any human ele-ment like passing the inspection devices, completion of travel procedures , weighing bags, issu-ance of boarding pass, use of e-gates and then boarding the plane. Passengers’ security checks will be completed with-out the presence of security staffs.

“This system will make eas-ier for the traveller to complete the travel procedures in a healthy atmosphere through sophisticated electronic meth-ods,” said the official.

He said Qatar has made a significant leap in the field of civil aviation security through the efforts of Airport Security Department, which has intro-duced a number of new inspection devices inside the airport.

These devices have contrib-uted to enhancing the security aspects inside the airport by facilitating the movement of passengers eliminating queues. They are being used for the first time in the world at HIA and are meant for screening and

luggage searches and are linked to cameras to detect any obstructions with passengers. The airport security personnel were also trained on how to use and benefit from them, said Al Rumaihi.

He added that department has so far trained more than

1,000 security personnel to learn all the security tasks inside the airport. It has also attracted Qatari citizens holding second-ary school certificate and enrolled them in various courses of foundation, specialization and advancement.

The press conference was

held to announce results of a report released by International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which ranked Qatar as one of the World's top countries in implementing civil aviation security standards.

Chairman of Qatar Aviation Authority Abdullah bin Nasser

Turki Al-Subaiei, Airport Secu-rity Department Director Brigadier Essa Arrar Al Rumaihi, and HIA Chief Operating Officer Engineer Badr Muhammad Al Meer were also present.

The results showed that Qatar scored 99.1 percent in applying the guidelines of annex 17 on Safeguarding International Civil Aviation against Acts of Unlawful Interference. Qatar also scored 96.76 percent in implementing safety manage-ment and a 100 percent in annex 9 on facilitation.

Al Subaiei commended the great support that the civil avi-ation system in Qatar receives from the Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khal-ifa Al Than and Minister of Transport and Communica-tions, H E Jassim bin Saif Al Sulaiti which has made great impact on achieving noticea-ble position in the world that reflected in the results of the ICAO Universal Security Audit released in last February.

HIA to get smart traveller system

FROM LEFT: Col Muhammad Rashid Al Mazroui, Director of Airport Passports Department; Abdullah Nasser Turki Al Subaie, Chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority; Brig Essa Arar Al Rumaihi, Director, Airport Security Department; and Badr Mohammed Al Meer, Chief Operating Officer, Hamad International Airport (HIA), addressing the media at a news conference at HIA yesterday. Pic: Salim Matramkot/The Peninsula

Passengers pass through security screening at Hamad International Airport.

The Peninsula

Qatar Airways is proud to announce its sponsor-ship of the Aspire First

International Kite Festival, which started yesterday at Aspire Park and hosted by Aspire Zone Foundation. Teams of professional kite fly-ers from 13 countries will be participating in the event showcasing skilful choreogra-phies. Visitors can enter a photo competition using the hashtags the #AspireKiteFest #Aspire to capture the dynamic beauty of the Aspire First Inter-national Kite Festival.

Qatar Airways Senior Vice-President Marketing and Corporate Communications, Salam Al Shawa said: “It is with great pleasure and pride that Qatar Airways is sponsor-ing the first-ever International Kite Festival in Doha. Contrib-uting to events for the local community promoting edu-cation, creativity and family time is crucial for Qatar Air-ways, and reflects our core brand values of Going Places Together. The skies of Doha are often filled with the iconic Qatar Airways aircraft jetting off to one of our over 150 des-tinations worldwide, and we greatly look forward to seeing these now filled with amazing kite choreography. We hope that this type of event will bring even more people to explore the wonders of Qatar.”

Kholoud Al Hail, CEO of Aspire Katara Hospitality, said: “An event of this magnitude, scale and significance requires the backing and support of a wide range of organisations across the country.

QA sponsors Aspire First International Kite Festival

04 THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017HOME

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs H E Ahmed bin Abdullah bin Zaid Al Mahmoud met with Nicholas Kay, UK Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa and UN Special Representative for Somalia, yesterday. They discussed the London Somalia Conference to be held in London in May. They also reviewed bilateral cooperation relations between Qatar and the UK as well as ways to strengthen and develop them in various fields.

Deputy PM meets UK special envoy for Horn of Africa

Centrepoint pilot ‘Store Of The Future’ opensThe Peninsula

Centrepoint, the Middle East’s largest fashion retailer, heralds the

future of its retail stores with the opening of its re-designed concept format at Doha Festi-val City. The new store opened amid high anticipation from customers on April 5. It is one

of the cornerstones of the shopping mall with a retail space of 58,092 sqft split on 2 levels making it the

fourth-largest retail offering in Doha Festival City.

The flagship store houses a Café near future, Kids’ Enter-tainment area, and customer-centric shopping environment, where the future-focused retailer has striven to enhance the digital experience at its store for the visually-driven millennials and younger families that it is increasingly catering to. Inter-active tablets are placed in the store prompt customers on star products and on-going deals in-store. There will also be free Wifi in the store for customers.

Service is a key element of the new store, with attention paid to the inclusion of greet-ers at the store front and an increase in Arab speaking assistants, and digital naviga-tion consoles to guide customers to various sections of the store. Interactive iPads are available to allow Shukran card members to easily assess the status of their points and fitting rooms are equipped with bells to provide immedi-ate assistance to customers in identifying the right size and fit of garments.

Centrepoint has identified ease of check out as being a major factor in the in-store experience and the pilot store provides mobile POS in key areas in-store for customers to shop instantly without waiting in the queue.

“Centrepoint new store design is part of our vision to bring shoppers in the region the best-in-class retail experi-ence. Our store in Doha Festival City is a step towards a format for future success and is part of a dynamic process towards increasing customer satisfaction and driving sales,” said Simon Cooper, Head of Centrepoint. “Customers have responded enthusiastically to the new store format, and we anticipate successful sales results and a more satisfying customer experience from this pilot store.”

The new store format has been developed by FITCH, one of the world's leading retail and brand consultancy firms. “We were excited by Centrepoint’s brief and are thrilled to see the new format come to life. The Centrepoint team had a clear mandate to transform the consumer experience within their stores and accelerate business suc-cess. Their forward-thinking attitude and evolution as a digitally focused brand was strategically aligned to our vision for our clients and we are proud to have been cho-sen to work on Centrepoint’s new store,” says David Blair, CEO, EMEIA at FITCH.

The new Centrepoint store is on the Ground and First level of Doha Festival City, near the South West parking. A full-range of the brand’s Spring Summer 2017 collection is being showcased in-store. The move marks the opening of Centrepoint’s 6th store in Qatar and the brand is scheduled to open one more store in the country in 2017.

Minister of State for Defence Affairs, H E Dr Khalid bin Mohamed Al Attiyah, met Australian Minister of Defence, Marise Payne, yesterday. They reviewed bilateral relations between both countries especially in the military cooperation field as well as ways to strengthen and develop them. The meeting was attended by a number of ranking officials of Qatari Armed Forces.

Al Attiyah meets Australian Defence Minister

Mohammed Osman The Peninsula

A round-table discussion focusing on liability of arbitrators and arbi-trary institutions and immunity of arbitra-

tors under the new Qatari arbitration law took place yesterday.

The aim of organising the one-day meeting is to highlight the positive aspects the new arbitra-tion law and how Qatar could become attractive centre for arbi-tration in the region, said Rashid Al Saad, senior partner of Sharq Law Firm. Following issuance of the arbitration law (in last Febru-ary) Qatar has emerged as a potential destination to compete and has a share in the regional and global market, he added.

Qatar is heading on the right track and the new law is expected to make it a hub of commercial arbitration in the region, and to achieve this aim there will be con-tinuous updating and amendments in the rules and laws regulating arbitration aspects.

Qatar Financial Center is strong quality addition along the Qatar International Center for Conciliation and Arbitration (QICCA) will diversify and increase the options for arbitrators and cus-tomers in Qatar more than before, Al Saad outlined.

He added, another round-table in mid of May will discuss the selection of arbitrators in light of the provision of the new law, as such gathering afforded partici-pants a wonderful opportunity to network and discuss important issues in commercial arbitration

in light of the new law. Arab and International Arbitrators (AIA) gatherings round-table on liabil-ity of arbitrators and arbitral institutions under the new arbi-tration law discussed a paper

presented by Dr Ehab Maher Elsonbaty, senior legal counsel at Qatar Investment Authority, enti-tled “overview on Arbitration in Qatar insight from the new arbi-tration law. In his paper Elsonbaty

highlighted that article 11 of the New Arbitration Law imposes, arbitrators have been granted a general immunity with exception in cases where they conduct their functions in bad faith, collusion or negligence has been confirmed.

Arbitrators under the new law are required to observe the prin-ciples of impartiality and equality between the parties. Some of the participant considered the immu-nity to practitioners provide some comfort to arbitrators and foreign arbitrators and investors while some others thought that the Qatari law put arbitrator’s works under judiciary monitoring.

Participants also discussed cases arbitrators exposed to crim-inal sanctions in certain circumstances, appointing arbi-trators whether they have to be from law firms and law specialist

or from the business sector under tribunal.

Asked about what makes Qatar hub for arbitration in the region and advantages that Qatar enjoy to become hub of arbitra-tion in the region Rashid Al Asaad pointed out that Qatar’s geograph-ical location, high quality facilities and services and easy air trans-port and easy to access, in addition to well established legal system. Qatar is currently one of the most preferred destinations for business and implementing mega infra-structure projects including sport, education and other activities, he added.

Issues like the effect of misun-derstanding the scope of the arbitrator’s liability on the use of arbitration and the future of arbi-tration in the region were also discussed.

Round-table on new arbitration law held

FROM LEFT: Dr Hissam Al Talhuni, Dr Ehab Elsonbaty and Claudine Helan during the meeting, yesterday. Pic: Baher Amin / The Peninsula

05THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017 HOME

Woqod to open three more vehicle inspection centresThe Peninsula

Qatar Fuel (Woqod) said yesterday that it will soon open three Fahes vehicle inspection centres in Al Shahaniya, Al Khor, Al Wukair,

which are pending final approval. There are currently four other centres in allo-

cation and approval stage in Mazroaa, Al Shamal City, Al Wajba and Mesaimeer areas.

Announcing Woqod’s financial results, Chief Executive Officer Saad Rashid Al Muhannadi said that Woqod is currently working on more than 22 new petrol station projects under construction, tendering, designing and approval stages.

Work is currently going on eight other sta-tions Al Khor, Al Oqla, Wadi Basalil, Hamad International Airport East, New Slatah, Al Thu-mama, Lusail City (Jabal Thaileb) and Old Slatah. All these projects are expected to open this year. The tender and awarding procedures for six new stations are currently in progress in the following areas: West Bay 2, Umm Qarn, Al Mawateer City, Rawdat Al Hamama 2, Al Khuraitiyat and Azghwa. These projects are expected to be completed within a year .

There are eight projects in the design and approval phase in the following areas: Education City, Ras Laffan, Al Thumamah, Al Riffaa (Al Froush), Al Wakrah, Al Ghuwairiya and Mesaimeer South.

There are 28 sites in the process of allocation for petrol stations. There are four projects completed and 5 other projects underway in the areas of: Man-asir / Muaither, West Bay, Wadi Al Banat, Al Seiliya and Mesaimeer East. These projects are expected to be completed during the current year 2017.

LPG sales (refilling and new) during the period grew by 14.4%. The sale of metallic cylinders declined to 750000 whereas Shaffaf cylinders (6 and 12 Kg) sales increased to more than 1.5 mil-lion cylinders as a result of the promotional campaign to replace metallic cylinders with Shaf-faf cylinders. Woqod introduced the electronic payment system Woqod in January 2016. The sys-tem works through an electronic RFID chip tag fitted in the vehicle’s fuel tank. The number of tags installed during the first quarter of 2017 exceeded 11,672, an increase of 8% over the fourth quarter of 2016, bringing the total number of tags installed to 47,487 since the introduction of the service.

Al Jazeera wins several medals at New York Festivals

The Peninsula

Lulu Hypermarkets have set the stage to host South African Food Festival with a view to discover

the uniqueness of South African food and food habits; and to promote the South African food products in the Middle East. This festival was organ-ised by the Lulu Hypermarket Group in line with their ongoing Food Fiesta’2017 and was jointly inaugu-rated yesterday at Lulu Hypermarket, Al Gharrafa by Prof Shirish Soni, the Ambassador of South Africa to Qatar, in the presence of Embassy officials, various dignitaries and senior execu-tives from the retail industry.

Lulu Hypermarket Group has been organising the Food Fiesta since the year 2002 and they are hosting the African Food Festival for several years. Like last year, this year as well it has been organised in a big way. Accord-ing to the Lulu management, last year

they had received overwhelming response for the African Food Festi-val from the expatriates as well as from the local community. This year the festival will continue until May 2.

South African cuisines such as Chakalaka Salad, Pap, Braai and other popular dishes will be prepared by the eminent executive chefs from South Africa. In general, the South African food rewards an unforgettable gas-tronomic experience to the food-lovers due to its range and unique variety of ingredients that goes in to the meal.

A well-designed array of South African food products ranging from South African meat and meat prod-ucts, white grapes, green/golden apple, pears rosemary, vermonte beauty pears, yam, avocados, satsuma orange, kaka fruit, fine beans, grilled fish peri peri, chicken kebab, grilled chicken peri peri, Libbys fruit cocktail, Pep-paddew Pickle, Nando’s Sauces, Ina

Paarman’s Seasoning & Masalas, Oryx Condiments, Ceres juices and Bose Ice Tea etc. are on display.

Lulu Hypermarket Group has long-lasting trade relations with South Africa, and they are regularly promot-ing almost all major South African food products in the Middle East through their hypermarkets.

Lulu has set up buying houses many years back at various locations in the African continent namely Kenya and Tanzania etc. and they also have regular bulk import of vast range of food products from all African countries.

As a major retail chain in the Mid-dle East, Egypt, India, Malaysia and Indonesia is currently operating 133 Hypermarkets and 15 shopping malls with an annual turnover of $6.9bn glo-bally. The Group has a vast organisational structure of over 41,000 employees comprising of 37 different nationalities.

→ Continued from page 1“So you are required to visit

the revenue department at Cen-tral Market for the settlement of your financial liabilities by June 30, 2017 and vacate all wholesale supermarkets in a bid to hando-ver it on July 1, 2017,” said the circular. A group of shopkeepers submitted a request in writing to Doha Municipality seeking exten-sion of the grace period given to vacate the facility.

According to the shopkeep-ers, two months grace period is not enough for vacating the shops and renting another shop. So they will have to coordinate with the Ministry of Economy and Com-merce (MEC) for allotment of shops in the new market.

Many supermarkets

are having commodities worth millions, so a quick shift will cause big financial loss if the given grace period is not extended.

Markets in Doha do not have enough space to accommodate the wholesale shops operating in Abu Hamour Central Market. The high demand for spaces could encourage property owners to

increase the rents exorbitantly, say the traders. According to some shopkeepers MEC promised to provide shops on rent in the new Central Market. Tenants have also asked for an extension of grace period, in case authorities are unable to provide alternative shops. “About 88 wholesale-supermarkets operating at Abu Hamour Central Market were given notice last week to vacate the facilities,” a shopkeeper told The Peninsula.

“Shifting to a new place will have a negative impact on our business. If we are allotted shops in new central market, it could be of some help, but we will lose our loyal customers who have been visiting to buy large stocks of gro-cery," he added.

Prof. Shirish Soni (centre), Ambassador of South Africa to Qatar, cutting a cake with South African students and officials of Lulu Group at the opening of South African Food Festival at Lulu Hypermarket in Al Gharrafa, yesterday. Pic: Abdul Basit / The Peninsula

Lulu hosts South African Food Festival

The Peninsula

Al Jazeera Media Network has won a total of five Gold World Medals, 14 Silver World Med-als and seven Bronze Medals at the prestigious New York Fes-

tivals awards. A special award of Broadcaster of the year was also awarded to Al Jazeera English, as the channel bagged three Gold, twelve Silver, five Bronze and 10 Finalist Certificates for various content on news, programmes and online. Al Jazeera's Investigative Directorate picked up two Gold, two Silver, two Bronze and one Finalist Certificate for a variety of investigations which were aired across the

network. 101 East won one Gold World Medal for Good Morning Pakistan in the Best Public Affairs Programme category. Afghanistan: Medics Under Fire and Too Young to Wed both won Silver World Med-als, while Guns, Goons and the Presidency, Hong Kong: Aged and Abandoned and India's Miracle Babies all were awarded Bronze World Medals. South Korean Hang-over and The Orangutan Whisperer both picked up Finalist Certificates.

Foundation, an episode in The Caliph series picked up a Gold World Award in Religious Programs category, while the epi-sode Division from the Caliph series won a Silver World Medal. ISIL and the Taliban won a Gold World Medal for the Best

Television-Documentary on Social Issues category and a Bronze World Medal in the Television-Documentary/ National/Inter-national Affairs category.

People and Power picked up two Sil-ver World Medals for Syria: Under Russia's Fist and Borderless: Undercover with the People Smugglers was also awarded a Bronze World Medal.

Witness were awarded two Silver World Medals for Syria's White Helmets and Kisulu: The Climate Diaries. Syria's White Helmets along with China's Fake Boyfriends were also awarded Finalist Cer-tificates as well. Al Jazeera English also picked up three more Silver World Med-als were awarded to the The Stream, My Nigeria — Sandra Aguebo: Lady Mechanic and the People's Health: Thailand's Remote Lifesavers. The episode of UpFront -Islam and Democracy: What's the Problem? Women Make Change - Going Places: Girls' Education in Ghana and Al Jazeera Corre-spondent - Off the Rails - A Journey Through Japan all picked up Finalist Certificates.

Al Jazeera English news was awarded a Silver World Medal and a Finalist Certif-icate in the Breaking News Story category for the coverage of the Turkey Failed Coup. Senegal: The Continuous Cycle of FGM picked up a Silver World Award Medal and a Finalist Certificate which gave Al Jazeera English a total of three Gold World Med-als, Twelve Silver World Medals, five Bronze World Medals and ten Finalist Certificates.

This year's tally of 27 World Medals from the New York Festivals awards are significantly higher than the total of 19 which the network won in 2016.

Meanwhile, Al Jazeera Media Network’s studio 14 was awarded Best TV Studio for 2016 (Set of the year), by NewscastStudio; the international trade publication for tel-evision creative professionals.

Shopkeepers seek extension of grace period

A row of trophies won by Al Jazeera Media Network.

Wholesale-supermarkets at Abu Hamour Central Market notified to shutdown.

06 THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017HOME

US academic team visits KataraThe Peninsula

As part of ongoing efforts to build strategic part-n e r s h i p s w i t h

international cultural institu-tions, the General Manager of the Cultural Village Founda-tion-Katara, Dr Khalid bin Ibrahim Al Sulaiti met with cul-tural representatives and academic delegation from the National Council on American-Arab Relations.

The delegation is visiting Qatar to tour prominent herit-age sites in the country and to observe the major achieve-ments completed in all sectors. The visit also aims at honour-ing the Cultural Village while identifying the major achieve-ments of Katara that consist of annual events, workshops, exhibitions and festivals.

The delegates expressed

keenness to take part in the cel-ebrations held on the occasion of the second edition of Katara’s award for Prophet’s Poets festival.

Al Sulaiti, said that the del-egation consists of professors and students from various cul-tural and academic institutions in the United States of America. The visit seeks to complement efforts in building communica-tion bridges between people from all walks of life, especially between Arabs and American citizens.

The head of the delegation stressed on the fact that the Cul-tural Village is a prominent cultural edifice and a renowned symbol of excellence in the pro-motion of fine arts across the Middle East and North Africa, and of late, successfully attract-ing artists and talents from across the globe.

LG introduces NeoChef microwave oven with Smart Inverter TechnologyThe Peninsula

Combining a convenience-enhancing design with a touch of subtle minimal-

ism and the latest Smart Inverter technology from LG Electronics (LG), the new NeoChef takes culi-nary and microwave ovens to a new level.

Now available in Qatar in nine different models, the micro-wave is both minimalistic and accessible, instantly bringing a touch of class to any kitchen. The ergonomic NeoChef sports fea-tures a simplified intuitive control interface to streamline operation and a range of hygiene-enhancing features such as Anti-Bacterial EasyClean that

help users keep their ovens as clean as possible.

The elegant LG NeoChef eliminates trim and parting lines with its sleek, unified tempered glass front. This minimalist, glossy front combines with a refined matte exterior to allow the NeoChef to seamlessly blend in with the decor of any kitchen.

The exquisite contrast between the microwave’s uni-fied tempered glass and metal give it a distinguished, refined look. The ergonomically designed rounded pocket-style handle and diamond cut dial weds form to function to deliver the ultimate in precision and user-convenience. The NeoChef extends its usability enhancing

features into input with its sim-ple intuitive sliding touch control which simplifies operation. The advanced microwave has received multiple world-renowned design awards including the 2015 PIN UP Design Award and the 2015 Good Design Award.

“With a minimalist design

that appeals to consumers of all stripes, LG’s striking new micro-wave oven represents the company’s dedication to creat-ing appliances that can add both functionality and class to any kitchen,” said Yong Geun Choi, President of LG Electronics Gulf. “Powered by LG’s unique Smart I n v e r t e r t e c h n o l o g y ,

the microwave efficiently and effectively reheats and defrosts food, decreases cooking times and makes it easier than ever for users to prepare delicious, highly-nutritious meals.”

Equipped with LG’s unique Smart Inverter, there’s no cook-ing job the NeoChef can’t handle. Using linear power control

between 300 to 1,200 watts to evenly cook or defrost food all the way through, the Smart Inverter effectively preserves nutrients while locking in fla-vour. The Smart Inverter also boosts efficiency, as its 1200-watt maximum power output gives the NeoChef the ability to cook dishes more quickly than conventional models.

In addition, the NeoChef can be used for melting ingredients such as chocolate or cheese and precisely preparing a variety of foods with its specialised set-tings. LG’s advanced microwave can even be used to make healthy, lactobacilli-infused yogurt more quickly than most home yogurt makers.

QCDC opens Career VillageFazeena Saleem The Peninsula

Qatar Career Develop-ment Center (QCDC)’s Career Village opened yesterday with an aim to introduce high

school students to academic spe-cialities and career opportunities in the offering.

The event has brought together representatives from leading government and private organisations and institutions spanning numerous sectors including health, education, banking energy, media and com-munications, environment, media and military.

Beside the conventional

career guidance and participat-ing institutions showcase simulations of the work environ-ment for better understanding of the students in the Career Vil-lage being held at the Hamad Bin Khalifa University's student cen-

tre in the Education City. “This is a very important

event and we want our students to know about the career oppor-tunities the national organisations provide. We have invited high school students because it’s the right time for them to start think-ing and decide their career,” Abdulla Al Mansoori, director, QCDC told The Peninsula.

“We can’t take these stu-dents to all companies and show the work environment. So the Career Village is not only to cre-ating interactions between students and employers, but the companies run some sort of sim-ulations of the work environment,” he added.

The Career Village was open

for male students yesterday while female students will be wel-comed today. Parents as well as career and academic counsellors from independent schools, inter-national schools and schools under the Qatar Foundation are invited to the event.

Organisations participating in Career Village include Qatar Airways, Qatar Rail, Qatar News Agency, National Bank of Qatar, Hamad Medical Corporation, RasGas, Center for Geographic Information Systems at the Min-istry of Municipality and Environment, Qatar Media Cor-poration, Ministry of Interior, General Authority of Customs, Ooredoo Telecom Company, Texas A&M University at Qatar, College of the North Atlantic-Qatar, Qatar Biobank, Career Services Center at Qatar Univer-sity, INJAZ Qatar, Permanent Committee for Drugs and Alco-hol Affairs, Qatar Scientific Club and Total.

The Career Village is one of several initiatives organised by QCDC, a member of Qatar Foun-dation, to guide Qatari youth into making informed decisions that reflect positively on their aca-demic and professional future.

“We have the two week career camp to find the skills and competencies of the students then we try to make the match-ing between their skills and suitable professions. We keep a tracking of these students for like two years. But in future will be introducing a platform where these students will register and we will keep a track on their career development through-out,” said Al Mansoori.

Simulations of the work environment of different organisations are being showcased at the Career Village. Pic: Abdul Basit / The Peninsula

Qatar Career Development Center opened Career Village with an aim to introduce high school students to academic specialities and career opportunities in the offering.

Safety of imported vegetables and fruits assured

→ Continued from page 1The products on the scrutiny list includes all varieties of

pepper (chilly) from Egypt; pepper, cabbage, cauliflower, lettuce, squash (koosa), beans and eggplant from Jordan; apples from Lebanon; and sweet melon, carrots and water-cress (jirjir/ rocket salad)from Oman.

Meanwhile, Ministry of Public Health stressed, in a state-ment issued yesterday, that all necessary measures to ensure the safety of imported vegetables and fruits are being taken. This is done in cooperation with the Ministry of Municipal-ity and Environment and all relevant bodies through the Joint Human Food Control Committee. The ministry stated that some 510 samples of vegetables and fruits samples were analysed to verify the presence of pesticide residues, in the first quarter of 2017. Of this, 67 samples from various coun-tries were rejected.

The ministry also stated that the methods used in the country for the analysis of pesticide residues on food prod-ucts, are among the best and most sensitive . Hence the system assures high accuracy even in detecting low pres-ence of pesticide residues.

Meanwhile, retailers in Qatar are expecting price vari-ation and slight shortage of fruits and vegetables with the stricter controls placed in Qatar and ban placed on them in UAE. “Jordan is the leading supplier of aubergine and let-tuce in Qatari market, so this ruling could have some effect on pricing. Also, most of the fruits to Qatar come through UAE, and so this ban could affect the pricing of the fruits,” said an official at one of the oldest retail chains in Qatar.

Some retail chains here stressed that delay in certifica-tion and inspections would affect the quality of the vegetables and fruits.

General Manager of the Cultural Village Foundation-Katara, Dr Khalid bin Ibrahim Al Sulaiti, with cultural representatives and academic delegation from the National Council on American-Arab Relations.

07THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017 HOME

AAB Treasure Hunt to promote public parks and road safetyThe Peninsula

Abdullah Abdulghani & Bros. Co. (AAB), the exclusive distributor of Toyota and

Lexus, is holding the first AAB Treasure Hunt in collaboration with the Public Parks Department of the Ministry of Municipality and Environment (PPD-MME) on Friday, May 5.

AAB Treasure Hunt is a CSR initiative aiming to promote the public parks in Qatar and remind about road safety practices.

To date, the Ministry has ren-ovated existing parks and has added new locations across Qatar. These parks serve as a family hub providing ample space for fami-lies to enjoy nature as well as for children to have safe play areas. The Ministry recognises the need

for children to go out and play for a more balanced and healthier development. By providing these leisure parks for families, the public parks are also the Minis-try’s way of creating a “Green” Qatar. Contributing towards a Green environment and encour-aging Work Life Balance is part of AAB’s internal sustainable

practices and corporate culture, hence the collaboration with the Ministry on select activities.

The AAB Treasure Hunt is not a race. Participants are reminded to observe road safety practices while enjoying the scenery and the public parks.

Winners will be judged according to the lowest amount of time spent in completing the Park Challenges at the designated public parks around Qatar.

The participating teams will be required to visit several parks across Qatar for the Treasure Hunt. It is hoped that the AAB Treasure Hunt will be truly a fun event for all the participants.

Participants for the Treasure Hunt are selected from the appli-cation entries through AAB Qatar on Facebook and Instagram. The

public is encouraged to follow AAB Qatar’s social media accounts and #mytreasureaab to get more details about the event.

Last day for the applications to be received and pre-qualified is on 12 midnight of Friday, April 28. AAB is committed to building and

developing sustainable commu-nities through its CSR initiatives that promote and support Qatar National Vision 2030.

Officials at the conference announcing AAB Treasure Hunt.

The AAB Treasure Hunt is not a race. Participants are reminded to observe road safety practices while enjoying the scenery and the public parks.

Vaccination awareness among public to be raisedThe Peninsula

In line with the World Immunization Week, the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) and the

Primary Health Care Corpora-tion (PHCC), are raising awareness among the public of the importance of updating vac-cines for diseases that can be vaccinated against.

The theme for World Immu-nization Week this year is ‘#VaccineWorks’.

The three organisations are also advising those planning to perform the rites of Umrah or Haj this year to begin

the vaccination process for infectious viruses like pneumo-coccal, seasonal flu and meningococcal now, stating that they should not wait until ten days prior to travel.

Dr Abdullatif Al Khal,

Deputy Chief Medical Officer at HMC said immunisation is the process whereby a person is made immune or resistant to an infectious disease, typically by the administration of a vaccine. “Vaccines stimulate the body’s own immune system to protect the person against subsequent infection or disease,” he said.

“Immunisation prevents ill-ness, disability, and death from vaccine-preventable diseases including cervical cancer, diph-theria, hepatitis B, measles, mumps, pertussis (whooping cough), pneumonia, polio, rota-virus, diarrhea, rubella and tetanus,” he said.

He added that all babies

born in Qatar receive scheduled immunisation against diseases to ensure they are adequately protected.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are 19.4 million unvacci-nated and under-vaccinated children in the world.

Each year, over 1.4 million children die from diseases that could be prevented with read-ily available vaccines.

Dr Hamad Eid Al Romaihi, Health Protection and Commu-nicable Diseases Manager at the MoPH, said: “We are urging those who are vulnerable to infectious diseases such as chil-dren, pregnant women and the

elderly, and those with chronic illnesses, to learn about vaccine-preventable diseases and make sure their vaccinations are updated according to WHO recommendations.”

Dr. Samya Al Abdulla, Exec-utive Director of the PHCC’s Operation Department, said: “The PHCC aims to deliver the best healthcare to the popula-tion. Part of this is ensuring disease prevention by provid-ing scheduled vaccinations for all babies born in Qatar and ensuring access (to vaccines) for those who are not born here. Most vaccines are available free of charge across all of our pri-mary health centres and can be

accessed from 7am to 1pm and 4pm to 11pm, between Sunday and Thursday.”

World Immunization Week – recognised during the last week of April each year – aims to promote the use of vaccines to protect people of all ages against disease.

The year 2017 marks the halfway point in the Global Vac-cine Action Plan (GVAP) – endorsed by 194 Member States of the World Health Assembly in May 2012. The ini-tiative aims to prevent millions of deaths from vaccine-prevent-able diseases by 2020 through u n i v e r s a l a c c e s s t o immunisation.

Protecting people

World Immunization Week – recognised during the last week of April each year – aims to promote the use of vaccines to protect people of all ages against disease.

08 THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017HOME

The Peninsula

Sheikh Thani bin Abdul-lah Foundation for Humanitarian Services (RAF) has begun imple-menting a massive

health project at a cost of QR4m to fight blindness in 13 poor Afri-can countries.

More than 6,000 poor patients are expected to benefit from the project. They are being provided complete health serv-ices including treatments, surgeries and medicines.

The project will be com-pleted within two years. Twenty-one medical camps are being set up to conduct eye tests on 4,000 patients. As per the plan, 400 patients will undergo eye surgeries. Patients will be

provided 1,600 medical glasses and medicines.

Medical camps are being set up in 13 most deserving African countries for treating eye-related diseases. They are Nigeria, Mau-ritania, Eritrea, Sudan, Congo Zaire, Congo Brazzaville, Kenya, Morocco, Gambia, Burundi, Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Chad.

The project is financed by peo-ple from Qatar through donations. The medical camps are being run in collaboration with Al Basar International Foundation, an NGO working in the field of prevention of blindness.

RAF is waging a campaign against blindness and to save people from eye-related diseases especially from “white water” cataract. The project is also meant to provide treatments to

eye patients from the weaker sections of the community so that they can come back to work and lead a normal life.

The project also creates awareness about eye diseases and covers maximum number of people in areas lacking basic health services.

“The project will help poor people suffering from eye-dis-eases that spread in many African countries,” said Dr Ziyad Al Suwaydan, from Al Basar International Foundation.

The project is very important because about 90 percent of patients with eye problems are from poor countries as per the statistics of World Health Organ-ization (WHO).

Eighty-two percent of those suffering from blindness are

aged 50 years and above. Cata-ract is the main reason for

weakness of eyesight that leads to blindness in low and middle

income countries as per WHO report.

RAF launches QR4m project in Africa to fight blindness

Patients with eye problems waiting to see doctors at the Sydi Othman medical camp set up by RAF in Morocco.

Aid sent to more than 6,000 drought-hit people in EthiopiaThe Peninsula

Sheikh Thani Bin Abdullah Foundation for Humanitar-ian Services (RAF) has

provided humanitarian aid to 6,000 drought-affected people in Ethiopia.

The aid includes distribution of food baskets in several remote

villages across the country as part of the Horn of Africa relief campaign.

The project was imple-mented in cooperation with the Irshad Association for Coopera-tion and Development, the RAF’s local partner in Ethiopia.

The association conducted a field survey in the most needy

areas to register the beneficiary families and assess their needs before beginning the distribution process. Priority was given to families with no breadwinners, orphans, and people with disa-bilities, the elderly, the sick and those unable to earn enough for daily life.

About 1,100 food baskets

were distributed, which con-tained enough food like rice, flour, pasta and edible oil for a family comprising five to six members for a month, at least.

The aid was provided within RAF's humanitarian efforts to help and rescue Ethiopians in drought-affected areas, whose number exceeds six million. It also came in response to the humanitarian appeal made by the Ethiopian government to humanitarian institutions to res-cue those affected by famine.

According to the report of International Food Programme, more than 10 million people

need urgent humanitarian aid. And the need has increased three times since 2015 due to drought that destroyed crops and killed animals.

RAF came forward with a plan to provide food baskets to the drought-affected people who were unable to buy foods for them.

In mid-March, RAF launched a relief campaign for the Horn of Africa, aimed at raising QR5m in funds for the relief of those affected by drought that hit sev-eral African countries, threatening famine and allocated QR2m to provide urgent help to those affected by drought.

RAF has also dispatched urgent aid for drought-hit peo-ple to several areas in Somalia. The campaign launched under “Kun Sababan Lilhayat” (be a cause of life) focused on foods, health and drinking water.

A group of people from the ambassadors of mercy unit of RAF visited to the tents for shel-tering displaced people in Mogadishu to supervise the implementation of the project –food supply and medical caravan. They also inaugurated several water projects to provide drinking water to thousands drought-hit people.

The Peninsula

Sheikh Thani bin Abdullah Foundation for Humanitar-ian Services (RAF)

dispatched medical aid to flood-hit areas in Java, an island of Indonesia. The project was financed by a Qatari woman. More than 500 families bene-fitted from the health services provided by a medical team. The beneficiaries were provided free checkups and medicines.

The medical team comprised two physicians, four nurses and four volunteers. The project was implemented in collaboration with Al Sela Charity organization, the local partner of RAF in Indo-nesia, and the local authorities.

A survey was conducted to find out the most affected areas, the type of diseases in the

targeted areas after the flood and the medicines needed.

Several lectures were also given to create awareness about first aid and deal with the patients, especially children. “The

medical aid helped poor people, created awareness and curbed the spread of fatal diseases caused by the flood,” said Ali Al Sadi, Chairman of Al Sela char-ity organisation.

A man receiving food basket at a distribution centre set up by RAF in Ethiopia.

Medical aid for flood-hit in Java

Patients at a medical camp in Java, Indonesia.

09THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017 HOME / MIDEAST / AFRICA

A soldier, with a rocket propelled grenade (RPG), patrols on the outskirt of the town of Damasak in North East Nigeria yesterday, as thousands of Nigerians, who were freed in 2016 by the army from Boko Haram insurgents, are returning to their homes.

Safe return

DUBAI: A US Navy guided-missile destroyer fired a warning flare toward an Iranian Revolutionary Guard vessel coming near it in the Arabian Gulf, an American official said yesterday, the lat-est tense naval encounter between the two countries. The incident happened Monday as the vessel attempted to draw closer to the USS Mahan despite the destroyer trying to turn away from it, said Lt Ian McConnaughey, a spokesman for the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet.

The "Mahan made several attempts to contact the Iranian vessel by bridge-to-bridge radio, issuing warning messages and twice sounding the inter-nationally recognised danger signal of five short blasts with the ship's whistle, as well as deploying a flare to determine the Iranian vessel's intentions," McCon-naughey said in a statement to The Associated Press.

US Navy fires warning flare at Iran vessel

Cape Town

Reuters

A South African pact with Russia’s Rosatom to build nuclear reactors

was deemed unlawful by a High Court, casting fresh doubt over the country’s energy plans.

Operator of Africa’s only nuclear power station, Eskom wants to add 9,600 megawatts (MW) of nuclear capacity - equiv-alent to up to 10 nuclear reactors - to help wean the economy off of polluting coal in what could one of the world’s biggest nuclear contracts in decades.

South Africa and Russia signed an Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) in 2014 that

sealed a cooperation pact between state-owned nuclear group Rosatom and state-owned utility Eskom. Judge Lee Bozalek said any request for information to kickstart the pro-curement process was set aside as was the cooperation pact. The deal had included a favourable tax regime for Russia and placed heavy financial obligations on South Africa, Bozalek said.

“The IGA stands well outside the category of a broad nuclear cooperation agreement, and at the very least, sets the parties well on their way to a binding, exclusive agreement in relation to the procurement of new reac-tor plants from that particular country,” Bozalek said.

SA court declares nuclear plan with Russia unlawful

Turkey's main oppn to appeal at European courtANKARA: After being turned back by the Council of State, Turkey’s main opposition party will appeal the results of the April 16 referendum at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the party announced in Ankara yesterday.

Speaking to reporters at Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) headquarters in the capital Ankara, spokeswoman Selin Sayek Boke said, “We faced illegal referendum results after seeing an unver-ified election. Our priority is standing up for the legal rights of all citizens. Thus, we would like to announce that we will soon apply to the ECHR” to annul the referen-dum result.

Istanbul

AFP

Turkey yesterday detained more than 1,000 people in a huge new crackdown against alleged sup-

porters of a cleric accused of orchestrating the coup bid against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The dawn raids across the country — seeking more than 3,000 suspects — come just over a week after Erdogan narrowly won a referendum on ramping up his powers.

They are the latest indication Turkey intends no let-up in the fight against its perceived ene-mies after the vote, with fighter jets Tuesday pounding Kurdish militant targets in Iraq and

northern Syria.A total of 1,120 suspects have

so far been detained, the official Anadolu news agency said.

Anadolu said 4,672 suspects were sought — of whom 1,448 are already in jail — meaning that a total of 3,224 arrest war-rants were issued.

About 8,500 police officers were involved in the nationwide operation, Anadolu reported, adding that arrest warrants had been issued for 390 suspects in Istanbul alone.

Turkish authorities blame US-based Muslim cleric Fethul-lah Gulen for masterminding the July 2016 failed military coup that aimed to oust Erdogan from power but he denies the charges.

Ankara accuses the Hizmet (Service) movement Gulen leads

of being a "terror organisation", although the group insists it is a peaceful organisation promot-ing moderate Islam.

The government has repeat-edly asked the United States to extradite Gulen, who has been living in exile there since 1999.

About 47,000 people have already been arrested in Turkey under a nine-month state of emergency in place since the coup bid, a crackdown whose magnitude has raised alarm in the West. The Turkish parlia-ment just ahead of the referendum extended the state of emergency by another three months to July 19.

After the latest sweep, Ger-man foreign ministry spokesman Sebastian Fischer said Berlin "has taken note of the mass detentions with concern", urg-

ing respect for rule of law.The Hurriyet newspaper

reported that arrest warrants had been issued against a total of 7,000 suspects across Turkey, citing unidentified sources.

The suspects are so-called "secret imams" of Gulen sus-pected of infiltrating themselves into the police or other state institutions, it reported.

Erdogan has repeatedly said he will wipe out the "virus" of Gulen from state institutions after the failed coup. The vast operation targeted big cities such as Istanbul as well as Izmir in western Turkey and Konya in the Anatolian heartland.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim had hinted in a televi-sion interview this month that a new anti-Gulen crackdown had been in the pipeline.

The 'Yes' camp won 51.41 per-cent of the vote in the April 16 referendum on creating a presi-dential system in Turkey but opponents claim the result would have been reversed in a fair poll.

The main opposition Repub-lican People's Party (CHP) said Wednesday it would challenge last-minute changes to voting rules in the referendum at the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights.

Analysts have said Erdogan, after his poll win, can choose between new confrontation or reconciliation with the West but in recent days tensions have risen further.

Turkish warplanes killed more than two dozen Kurdish fighters Tuesday in strikes in Syria and Iraq, angering the United States.

Over 1,000 detained in anti-Gulen crackdown

Irfan BukhariThe Peninsula

Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Qatar Dr Bahia Tahzib-Lie has said that Dutch

companies are “big investors” in Qatar and fully committed to Qatar National Vision 2030.

She was talking to The Peninsula on the eve of National Day of the Netherlands which was marked yesterday. The embassy celebrated the National Day of the Kingdom of the Neth-erlands in Doha, on the occasion of the 50th birthday of King Wil-lem Alexander.

The function was attended by Minister of Municipality and Environment H E Mohammed bin Abdullah Al Rumaihi.

“In the Netherlands, his birthday (27 April) is a national holiday called King’s Day. It is a day when everyone goes out on the streets dressed in orange out-fits. There are fun festivities for children on the streets and many concerts in public spaces.”

This year, the King’s Day was marked in Doha with a special theme “Flowers and Art”. “Flow-ers and art form an important part of our cultural identity and herit-age. We Dutch are passionate about sharing our flowers and art with everyone,” the ambassador said when asked about the reason behind the selection of theme.

She said that it was a pride for Netherlands to host one of the world’s largest flower gardens – the Keukenhof – and being the world’s leading supplier of flow-ers, plants and trees.

The ambassador said the Dutch government wanted to promote the interest of Dutch businesses abroad through eco-nomic diplomacy. “Qatar aims to diversify the country’s

economy by creating a balance between an oil-based and a knowledge-based economy. Dutch companies in Qatar have a diversified presence in differ-ent business sectors such as education, healthcare, energy, engineering & architecture, mar-itime, logistics, agriculture, horticulture and several kinds of consultancy services.”

Tahzib-Lie said that bilateral trade relations reached around €1bn during 2015. “Dutch exports amount to €440m which is increasing gradually and the Dutch imports are worth €556m which is mostly related to LNG.”

She said that there are a number of Qatari companies oper-ating in the Netherlands: Muntajat BV (marketing and sales of petro-chemicals), Qatar Petroleum International BV’s, Lusail BV in Valkenswaard at Jan Tops (eques-trian), Qatar Holding etc.

MORE COOPERATIONThe ambassador sees huge

scope for cooperation in health-care between the two countries. “Qatar has the fastest growing healthcare market in the region. Qatar National Vision 2030 is to ensure comprehensive world-class health care systems for the whole population. The

Netherlands is a major player in the global life sciences health industry with a strong techno-logical position in molecular imaging, medical informatics, biopharmaceuticals, human and veterinary vaccines, regenera-tive medicine, biomaterials, medical technology, and health infrastructure. The Dutch sector is in a position to collaborate, cooperate and form coalition with Qatari counterparts.”

Tahzib-Lie thinks Qatar and the Netherlands have some “striking similarities”. “Both countries are relatively small in size but with great ambitions, open to the sea, outward-look-ing and share an unstoppable drive for innovation.”

Moreover, she observed, both Qatar and the Netherlands were open to diversity. “In the Neth-erlands, we stand for a multi-colour, multi-cultural, multi-religious society. For example, our cities Amsterdam and Rotterdam are home to

about 180 nationalities.”“It’s great to see that Qatar and

the Netherlands connect, inspire and complement each other across a wide range of sectors like energy, infrastructure, sports, edu-cation, and health-care. Dutch companies are big investors in Qatar and fully committed to Qatar National Vision 2030.”

SUSTAINABILITYSustainability, she said, was

an integral part of many Dutch companies. “In Qatar, several companies are actively contrib-uting to developing sustainable technologies and more efficient use of resources – including the use of water – like Arcadis and Shell.”

“Healthy and nutritious food as well as clean water will be more important than ever. The Dutch have a centuries-old reputation for producing high-quality food and clean drinking water. The Netherlands is the world’s 2nd largest agri-food exporter and a

global leader in sustainable water supply solutions. One specific example is the ‘Mega Reservoir Project’ by Dutch company Arcadis. The project intends to increase water storage and secu-rity while providing seven days of strategic water storage to fulfill the need and demand for water across Qatar due to the country's rapid and continuous growth and devel-opment,” she said.

With a palpable sense of national pride, she said that in Qatar, Dutch artists were active too. “A Dutch architect has designed the Qatar National Library building and the head-quarters of Qatar Foundation. A Dutch designer designed the exquisite interior of the soon to be opened Mondrian hotel in Doha. And the Sheikh Faisal Museum has a Dutch Director.”

Also in the field of peace and international justice, she said, the Netherlands valued the partner-ship with Qatar. “Our two countries work well together in

international fora, including the UN, to advance the international legal order.”

Citing an example, the ambas-sador said: “The Netherlands is an active supporter of the initiative of Qatar (and Liechtenstein) within the UN to establish the new data-base to collect evidence of the most serious crimes committed in Syria, with the aim to ensure accountability in the future.” She said that the Netherlands had also announced a contribution of €1m right after the resolution on this UN database was passed.

“In 2018, the Netherlands will have a seat in the UN Secu-rity Council. We will be motivated and committed to continue working towards peace and justice with Qatar and other international partners.”

EDUCATIONRegarding cooperation in edu-

cation sector, she said that several MoUs had been signed between Qatar Universities and Dutch Uni-versities. “The latest one was between The Hague Institute for Global Justice and the Hamad Bin Khalifa University. The coopera-tion will be on issues for which The Hague Institute is known for: rule of law, global governance and conflict prevention.”

The Dutch ambassador said that Stenden University, estab-lished in Qatar in partnership with Faisal Holding, was provid-ing international business, tourism and hospitality manage-ment degrees with more than 500 Alumni graduates.

She said that number of Qatari tourists visiting the Neth-erlands was on a steady rise with every passing year. “As many as 1,967 visas were issued in 2015, 2,430 visas were issued in 2016 and in the first quarter of 2017, the number of visas issued has touched 1,042.”

Dutch companies 'big investors' in Qatar: EnvoySimilarities

Embassy celebrated the National Day of the Netherlands on the occasion of the 50th birthday of King Willem Alexander.

Qatar and the Netherlands have some 'striking similarities', says Ambassador.

Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Qatar, Dr Bahia Tahzib-Lie, on King's Day with kids dressed in traditional Dutch outfits.

Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s assertions that his forces didn’t use chemical agents in the attacks on the town of Khan Sheikhun this month didn’t stand the test of reason from the beginning. But

scientific proof has emerged now that he did use poisonous gas. French intelligence has identified the chemical ‘signature’ of the Syrian government at the site of the attack.

According to reports, samples from the site showed chemical components that were the hallmark of Assad’s sarin manufacturing process and matched samples collected from an earlier attack sites. “Based on this overall evaluation and on reliable and consistent intelligence collected by our services, France assesses that the Syrian armed forces and security services perpetrated a chemical attack using sarin against civilians,” the report says.

More than 80 people were killed in the attack on April 4 and hundreds injured, triggering an international outcry which led to the missile attacks on Syria by the US. But Assad has persistently maintained that he didn’t use the chemical agents though the international community didn’t believe him except his allies.

The French intelligence report adds to an existing body of evidence showing that Assad’s forces had used sarin. Tests conducted in Turkey on victims of

the attack found isopropyl methylphosphonic acid, a chemical that sarin transforms into, in the blood and urine samples. The US government had reached the same conclusion based on its own intelligence data.

The question that the world, especially the West, has to be asking now is how to stop Assad from using chemical weapons against his people again. In the last four years, numerous cases of use of chlorine gas use by the

government have been reported, though casualties have been small. The Khan Sheikhun attack was the largest mass casualty incident involving chemical weapons since the Ghouta massacre of 2013 by Assad’s forces, which killed more than 1,400 people in the opposition territory near Damascus.

The Trump administration has sent a powerful message to Assad with the missile attacks in response to the Khan Sheikhun incident. Assad might think twice before launching another gas attack, but the Syrian crisis should not be reduced to action against Assad for the use of chemical attacks. Assad must be made to quit to pave the way for a permanent solution to the crisis. Peace talks initiated at various levels are moving at a snail’s pace and are getting bogged down in details before even approaching the core issues.

10 THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017VIEWS

E S T A B L I S H E D I N 1 9 9 6

CHAIRMANSHEIKH THANI BIN ABDULLAH AL THANI

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

editorinchief@pen.com.qa

ACTING MANAGING EDITORMOHAMMED SALIM MOHAMED

msalim@pen.com.qa

More proof

QUOTE OF THE DAY

There is no doubt about the responsibility of the Syrian regime given the way that the sarin used was produced. This production method bears the regime‘s hallmarks and allows us to determine its responsibility for this attack

Jean-Marc AyraultFrench Foreign Minister

French intelligence has unearthed more evidence to prove that Assad’s forces used chemical weapons in the April 4 attack.

The United Kingdom Independence Party, whose activism and election-eering just led Britain out of the European Union, is now lost without a cause. Close to four million Britons

voted for UKIP at the last general election, for which the party returned only one Member of Parliament.

UKIP had two enormous boons for their cause: a hugely charismatic leader, probably the most capable and cynical politician of his generation, Nigel Farage; and a singular enemy, the European Union.

The party was therefore able to pull off the political coup of the century. UKIP brought the EU, an issue which was barely a priority to most UK households, to the fore. Then they up-ended the European status quo in place since the World War II, by leading Britain out of the Union.

Now, with their guru Farage busy photo-graphing himself beside the crass Donald Trump, stubbornly low polling, and the EU already in the rear view mirror, UKIP is floating on the seas of political oblivion. It faces one question from the electorate — what is UKIP now for?

UKIP members were infamously derided by former Prime Minister David Cameron as “fruit-cakes”, yet it was these fruitcakes that forced No 10 into holding a referendum on Europe. UKIP’s logo was and still is an outdated yellow pound sign against a purple backdrop — as if the battle for whether Britain should join the eurozone, which was launched in the late 1990s, was still being fought today.

As many a bored political reporter can attest to, UKIP party conferences are famously attended almost exclusively by old-age pen-sioners. It was always easy to laugh at UKIP.

Nevertheless, the party is clearly the most impactful in Britain since the World War II. What other party can claim to have pulled off such a significant national change, with such profound international ramifications, as Brexit?

A week ago, Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap general election for June. In response, UKIP delivered a weekend policy salvo of blistering religious prejudice.

‘Burqas and sharia’It has now become clear that UKIP is sim-

ply a party of rebels against any cause — so long as they regard it as foreign. They are now putting their heads together to vilify not just distant Eurocrats and a generalised conception of immi-gration, but a specific religious minority. In the 1930s, those kind of people would have targeted Jews. Now, they target Muslims.

UKIP wants to “pass a law against the wear-ing of face veils,” ignoring that only a tiny minority of British Muslim women wear these and that, albeit anecdotally, as no official sta-tistics are collected, this number appears to be low.

UKIP members also wants to “explicitly ban” what they call “sharia”, which they have failed to define. Nevertheless the party claims sharia “undermines women’s rights”. UKIP undermines

Islamophobia can make UKIP relevant againAlastair SloanAl Jazeera

women’s rights, too — the right of Muslim women to use their own divorce courts, a right that UKIP wants to strip.

UKIP was asked over the weekend whether it wants to ban Jewish courts as well. The party’s leader, Paul Nuttall, replied that “The Orthodox Jewish popu-lation is falling, it’s about a quarter of a million now. The issue surrounding sharia is that the Muslim population is doubling decade on decade.” He then said that “this isn’t an attack specifically on Muslims,” claiming instead, “it’s all about integration.”

Nuttall also wants a “moratorium on new Islamic faith schools until substantial progress has been demonstrated in inte-grating Muslims into mainstream British society.” UKIP ignores the fact that nearly 20 percent of the top performing 50 schools in the UK are Islamic faith schools.

Only in January, two Islamic faith schools came first and third for the best examination results in the country. Curiously, UKIP had no

problem with the 48 Jewish faith school-sin Britain, nearly twice as many as Muslim faith schools, nor the 11 Sikh schools nor the five Hindu schools. It was just the Muslim schools UKIP cared about — even if those schools appear rather good at what they do.

‘The integration agenda’Yet still, the party’s new leader denies

they have an anti-Muslim policy. A paper copy of his manifesto, handed out to polit-ical journalists with UKIP’s still dated “pound-sign” branding, came with an Orwellian title. They called their anti-Mus-lim manifesto “The Integration Agenda”.

What is happening here is clear. UKIP, the ultimate Brexit party of post-Brexit Britain, has lost its raison d’etre. Nobody knows what UKIP is for any more.

Now, UKIP does. Again, it is about pop-ulism — the potent mixture of popular but sometimes illogical policies.

Make no mistake — by a margin of two to one, the populace of Britain back a ban of the niqab, even if banning veils runs coun-ter to the elected right-wing governments policy of “mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs”.

Likewise, nearly half of Britons sup-port a Donald-Trump-style Muslim ban, another policy a UKIP patron expressed support for over the weekend.

Perhaps the public fear it because, the latest available official statistics suggest, more than half of those charged with ter-rorist offences in Britain are self-identified Muslims, and because the British media seem obsessed with Muslim above far-right or Northern Irish killings.

The question is whether UKIP-style policies — telling Muslim women what to wear, shutting down high-performing schools, or focusing party strategy on “the other” — will really help.

The party’s manifesto is not one that will ride UKIP into power and government, or perhaps even return them a single MP. The pressure that UKIP is about to place on British Muslims from the sidelines— in much the way they crowed from the side-lines to force through Brexit — is still worth taking very seriously indeed.

The writer covers international affairs, politics

and human rights for a variety of British news-

papers and magazines.

What is happening is clear. UKIP, the ultimate Brexit party of post-Brexit Britain, has lost its raison d’etre. Nobody knows what UKIP is for any more.

ED ITOR IAL

People rally in London to protest against Islamophobia and racism.

11THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017 OPINION

of going out into the streets. Old and young fear stepping out of their homes, participating in peace-ful demonstrations, complaining about what it is like to try and survive here.

If you do go out and exercise your human right to speak your mind, you might be tear gassed (including from helicopters), beaten, locked up in jail for years without due process or even shot by one of the paramilitary groups that, although unac-knowledged by the authorities, are now running amok across Venezuela.

Violence by some protesters has been cleverly used by the authorities to justify widespread repres-sion and perpetuate the “us vs them” discourse that has done so much harm to our country. You only need to step outside to breathe this climate of fear.

Repression and violence during protests are not new to Venezuela — in 2014, more than 40 people, including at least six members of the security forces, were killed. More than 650 people were injured and more than 2,000 detained. Impunity has been rife.

Many, perhaps naively, thought these events were a one-off. We thought the country would learn from its recent history. But over the past few weeks, a cloud of uncertainty and violence has cast a new dark shadow over Venezuela. Day after day, we wake up with news of fresh protests followed by the frightening images of violent confrontations between protesters and security forces.

Since this new wave of demonstrations began on April 4, tensions have escalated daily. People looked like they had nothing to lose. Many of them don’t. What began as ordinary protests against the political and humanitarian situation in the country and against the - since-overturned - supreme court’s ruling to “ban” the National Assembly, quickly turned into something else, something much more worrying.

By the third day, we found ourselves giving shelter to injured demonstrators in the hall of the building where I live, my family and I giving first aid to bruised and battered men and women, frustrated

Future of European Union integration process is at risk

The European Union seems to be going through its worst years over the last dec-ade. The EU integration process, which began as the most promising peace project the world had ever seen, has of late been in

comatose. The security producing dynamics of the integration process seem to have come to a standstill.

The majorities across the continent have been seriously questioning the post-modern, multicul-tural, global, federalist, secular and liberal characteristics of the deepening process of EU’s inte-gration whereas the external factors, most notably the revisionist Russia and the emerging anarchic environment in the wider Middle East, have already posed existential challenges to the post-war era’s European security order.

Anti-integrationist, anti-immigrant, anti-federal-ist and anti-globalist populist movements, both from the right and left, have gained prominence in domes-tic politics across the continent. Let alone further enlarge to new members, the British withdrawal from the membership, the so-called Brexit, has already eaten away at EU’s power of attraction the world over.

It is becoming more difficult with each passing day the outsiders view of the EU as the most legiti-mate role model to follow in domestic and foreign policies. The way of doing things inside the EU no longer attracts penchant followers around the globe.

As of today, the continuation of neither the deep-ening nor the widening processes of EU’s integration can be taken for granted. The foundations of the European peace project have come under serious challenges by the confluence of internal and external factors. It is now the case that both the hard and soft power capabilities of the European Union are at risk.

At a time when the US under Donald Trump’s presidency has been deeply questioning the rele-vance of the transatlantic security relations, and when the most pro-Atlanticist EU member state has been in the process of departing the EU once and for all, the number one challenge facing the union, par-ticularly the two engines of the integration process, namely Germany and France, is to come up with

innovative solutions that would ensure the continua-tion of the integration process, uninterruptedly, and guarantee Europe’s security against external threats of various kind.

The EU’s future now depends on the election of pro-European and pro-integrationist leaders to gov-erning positions in their countries, particularly in France and Germany, and their success in bridging the democracy deficit at the European level while providing long-term security to their people on a daily basis.

The good news is that there are some positive developments to note of late. The marginal increases in the defense budgets of the EU members following the stern warnings of the Americans that the Euro-pean allies should no longer take the security commitment provided by the United States for granted; the verbal commitment of the high-level American decision makers, particularly nested in Pentagon and National Security Council, to NATO’s persistence in the face of Russian revisionism and rising great power tension across the globe; the defeat of populist figures in the latest elections held in Austria and the Netherlands; and the strong possi-bility of centrist political figures being elected to governing positions in French presidential and Ger-man parliamentary elections seem to augur well for the future.

The elites at the European and national levels appear to be aware of the challenges confronting the EU integration process. The latest white paper issued by the European Commission should be considered as a serious attempt at salvaging the future of the EU integration process in a sustainable manner.

Despite such promising developments as men-tioned above, it is the humble opinion of this writer that some structural factors will likely stymie the pro-integrationist efforts in the short to medium terms.

Firstly, it is difficult to speak about the existence of common threat and security perceptions in the EU of 27 members. This is quite evident in the positions that different EU members adopted vis-a-vis Russia

in recent years.While Russia is the number one existential threat

in the eyes of EU’s Baltic and eastern European members, it would not be wrong to argue that the end of the sanctions put on Russia in the wake of its belligerence in Crimea and eastern Ukraine would make many Europeans living in the western and southern shores of the continent feel relaxed and happy.

The Russian leadership seems to be quite aware of such schism inside the union and spends huge sums of money to help manufacture pro-Russian constituencies all around Europe through various strategies, of which cyber disinformation campaigns stand out.

Likewise, the threats emanating from the grow-ing anarchy in the wider Middle East are not felt to the same degree across member states. The EU members where sizable Muslim communities live have had to deal with the negative consequences of ongoing immigration in their midst as well as having to come up with long-term solutions to the failure of multiculturalism.

The difficulty of adopting a common European position on the problem of immigration has been made quite evident by the strong reactions to Ger-many’s “welcoming culture” approach of western and eastern European members.

Secondly, given the British withdrawal from the membership and eroding American commitment to transatlantic security community, it remains a big unknown whether Germany would take up a hegem-onic position in European politics and were this to occur how other EU members, notably France, would respond to this.

It is the case that German leaders and people alike still see the continuation of EU integration process in Germany’s national interests. However, what is new is that tying of Germany to European institutions will likely be redefined more on German than European terms in the years to come. Given France’s structural economic and political weak-nesses in sharing the podium of leadership with

The seemingly endless crisis in Venezuela appears to have entered a new, dark and alarm-ing chapter. As if coming off the pages of a terrifying thriller, a

crisis that seemed to have reached its worst point in recent months, has actually escalated further after weeks of pro-testssparked by growing anger and frustration around what looks like a never-ending catalogue of problems.

President Nicolas Maduroordered the military onto the streets, two days before planned peaceful protests across the coun-try on 19 April. He said the military would be “marching in defence of morality” and “against those who betray the homeland”. Amid one of the largest demonstrations in recent months, this “call to arms” by the government was disastrous: at least two people died in suspicious circumstances, hundreds more were injured and detained — adding to the more than sixteen deaths reported during protests over recent weeks. Evidence grew that groups of armed vigi-lantes are taking the law into their own hands. Further demonstrations have been called for the coming days.

I thought that living (or surviving) in Venezuela had prepared the population here for anything. The endless strategies to find two kilos of rice, get hold of anticon-vulsants or high blood pressure medicine has made us all experts in the art of mak-ing do.

Now, people also face the utter terror

The art of surviving a Venezuela on the brinkand exhausted by the realities of daily life in Venezuela.

I watched as tear gas canisters were thrown from heli-copters while President Maduro, speaking from Cuba, tried to reassure the population, saying that “Venezuela is at peace, except for a few pockets of violence that are being dealt with.” This contrasted starkly with the reality on the ground - in just over a fortnight, at least seven people died during the protests and hundreds were injured.

A few days after the initial wave of protests, the Venezue-lan Public Ministry announced an investigation to find those responsible for the killings. But this effort towards justice and accountability must not be just for show. Instead, it must be a genuine commitment to the full respect and protection of human rights, one where those who think differently from the government are not portrayed as enemies and where those who violate human rights are brought to justice.

The tragic contrast between the Venezuela portrayed by the authorities and the one we live in is so deep it’s hard to explain. The country President Maduro speaks about is at peace. People are handed food donations from government-sponsored trucks. Children happily study in school, none of them fainting in class because they have nothing to eat at home. Hospitals are fully stocked, providing their patients with the best care available.

But this is mere fiction - following in the celebrated Latin American tradition of magical realism.

In contrast, the Venezuela I - and millions of others - wake up to every day is a real-life labyrinth where buying the most essential items has become a nearly impossible strug-gle. “How do people in Venezuela survive?” many ask me. I still have not been able to find an answer.

But one thing is certain. The Venezuelan authorities’ “see no evil, hear no evil” attitude to the crisis does not cut it any-more. Hiding behind a veil of propaganda and playing victim to some shadowy international plan to destabilise the country is not helping anyone in Venezuela to eat and stay healthy. The time has come for all state institutions to fulfil their duties and work on behalf of all the people in the country.

How much longer we can go on like this is anybody’s guess, but the fact remains that something can, and must, be done to prevent our country from falling into an abyss with no return.

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Germany, let alone France acting as a global power, Germany will be in a much better position to German-ize Europe in future.

The conditions that have long ensured the Europeanization of Germany are steadily eroding. At stake here is the rise of German Europe, rather than the persistence of European Germany, which will likely arouse geopolitical fears, not only in Europe but also across the globe. The moment European nations begin to feel the fever of traditional geopolitical security anxieties in their relations with each other, and non-European powers begin to worry about the specter of the European continent coming under the hegemonic rule of one particular country, then it would not be wrong to say that the EU integration process as defined as a peace project has come to an end.

Whether or not the EU integra-tion process unfolds in a multi-speed fashion and whether the principled differentiated mem-bership is enshrined in official European documents, the future of the EU hinges on the peaceful cohabitation of France and Ger-many. In the presence of Brexit and weakening American security com-mitment, the continuation of the EU seems to be closely related to France and Germany’s ability to provide a joint leadership through which France takes the lead in security and defense integration while Germany shining as the major source of EU’s civilian-eco-nomic and normative power identity.

Tarik OguzluAnatolia

It is becoming more difficult with each passing day the outsiders view of the EU as the most legitimate role model to follow in domestic and foreign policies. The way of doing things inside the EU no longer attracts penchant followers around the globe.

Marcos GomezAl Jazeera

12 THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017ASIA

New Delhi IANS

Riding on a Modi wave and defeating anti-incumbency, the BJP yesterday retained with a sweeping

majority its 10-year hold on the capital's three civic bodies, rout-ing the city's ruling AAP which blamed rigged EVMs for its poor show in the municipal polls.

The BJP won 181 of the 270 wards that polled on Sunday, way above the halfway mark to secure control of all the three Municipal Corporations of Delhi - North, South and East. The BJP won 64 of 103 wards in North, 70 of 104 in South and 47 of 63 in East.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) led by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal could manage wins in just 48 wards and the Congress was way behind with 30 seats. The Bahujan Samaj Party won three wards, Indian National Lok Dal and Sama-jwadi Party one each and independents won six wards.

A jubilant BJP credited its continued electoral success to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who tweeted his thanks to the people of Delhi for retaining their faith in the party. "I laud the hardwork of (Delhi BJP) team which made the resound-ing MCD win possible."

BJP President Amit Shah, who is in West Bengal, said the election results, coming close on the heels of the party's suc-cesses in the assembly polls in

Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur, have taken forward the "Modi and BJP juggernaut".

Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari, the brain behind the party's "AAP se na ho ga" (AAP can't do it) campaign, also cred-ited the victory to Modi and his developmental policies.

Tiwari called for Kejriwal's resignation, saying "the people of Delhi have exercised their right to recall" by voting against the AAP, which rode to power more than two years ago, win-ning 67 of the 70 legislative seats in the Delhi Assembly polls.

The poor showing is seen as a setback for Kejriwal, as the civic elections were largely viewed as a referendum on his two-year-old rule. Kejriwal congratulated the BJP, and said he is looking "forward to work-ing with MCDs for the betterment of Delhi".

Wins all 3 bodies

BJP won 181 of the 270 wards that polled on Sunday, way above the halfway mark to secure control of all the three Municipal Corporations of Delhi - North, South and East. The BJP won 64 of 103 wards in North, 70 of 104 in South and 47 of 63 in East.

BJP sweeps Delhi civic elections

New Delhi IANS

Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday discussed a range of bilateral issues

and matters of mutual concern with visiting Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe here. Following the talks, an agreement on cooperation in economic projects between India and Sri Lanka was signed.

"Held comprehensive talks with PM Ranil Wickremesinghe on ways to strengthen India-Sri Lanka ties for the benefit of our citizens," Modi tweeted after the meeting held at Hyderabad House.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, Home Minister Rajnath Singh, and Road, Trans-port, Highways and Shipping Minister Nitin Gadkari also called on the visiting dignitary.

"The discussions of the Indian leadership with the vis-iting dignitary provided both sides an opportunity to review

the progress in implementation of the decisions taken during various high-level exchanges in the past two years or so, includ-ing the visit of the Prime Minister to Sri Lanka in March 2015 and the visits of the Pres-ident and the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka to India since Febru-ary 2015," the External Affairs Ministry said in a statement.

"The two sides expressed their satisfaction at the progress in implementation of the out-comes of these exchanges, which further strengthened the historically close and friendly relations between the two coun-tries," it said.

The ministry said that the Indian side reiterated India's commitment to promoting pros-perity in the neighbourhood and affirmed the continued support of India for realising the vision of the Sri Lankan leadership for a stable, peaceful and prosper-ous Sri Lanka.

The leaders welcomed the memorandum of understanding

(MoU) on cooperation in eco-nomic projects that was signed after the meeting between Modi and Wickremesinghe.

The MoU outlines the agenda for bilateral economic cooperation with both sides expressing their commitment to ensuring that this mutually ben-eficial agenda is expeditiously implemented.

The ministry statement said that both sides also expressed the hope for early conclusion of the ongoing negotiations on the economic and technology coop-eration agreement.

"Pointing out that India had welcomed Sri Lanka co-spon-soring the Resolution 'Promoting Reconciliation, Accountability and Human Rights in Sri Lanka' at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) last month, the Indian leadership expressed the earnest hope that recommendations on the rec-onciliation would be completed within the stipulated timeframe of two years," it said.

NEWS BYTES

NEW DELHI: Indian carrier Jet Airways said yesterday it had suspended a foreign pilot from flying duty over allega-tions that he assaulted a woman and hurled racist abuse at another passenger on a domestic flight. The Mumbai-based airline confirmed the incident took place on April 3 on a Chan-digarh-Mumbai flight, adding the pilot in question had been taken off the flying roster soon after and an apology had been extended to the victim. "As regards the said incident, Jet Air-ways has noted guest feedback with concern and regrets the incident," Jet Airways said in a statement yesterday.

Airline suspends pilot over racism

Prime Minister Narendra Modi meeting with Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in New Delhi, yesterday.

Modi & Sri Lankan PM hold talks

Srinagar

AFP

Authorities in Kashmir yes-terday ordered internet service providers to block

popular social media services including Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp after an upsurge in violence in the region.

The local government said the services were "being misused by anti-national and anti-social elements" and should be blocked for one month or until further notice "in the interest of main-tenance of public order".

It is the first time the govern-ment has taken such a step, although it regularly blocks the mobile internet signal in the vol-atile Kashmir valley.

Kashmir has been tense

since April 9, when eight people including seven students were killed by police and paramili-taries during by-election violence.

Anti-India sentiment runs deep in the Kashmir valley, one of the world's most heavily mil-itarised spots where most people favour independence or a merger with mainly Muslim Pakistan. Clashes between rebels and gov-ernment forces have become more frequent since the killing of a popular rebel leader, Burhan Wani, by security forces last July sparked widespread unrest.

Authorities responded by imposing a curfew, suspending mobile networks in large parts of the territory and seizing newspapers to try to quell pro-tests. They say social media are

being used increasingly fre-quently to rally crowds which then attack government forces, often by throwing rocks at them.

Social media are also being used by both sides in the conflict to spread images and video foot-age in a growing war of information. A video released on social media sites earlier this month showed a man tied to a jeep being used as a human shield against stone-throwers by soldiers in Kashmir.

The 11-second clip went viral and has sparked outrage and heated debate about the role of the military.

Rights activists say Indian forces in Kashmir have been using human shields since the late 1980s, when an armed insurgency against Indian rule

erupted across the territory.Roughly 500,000 Indian

soldiers are deployed in the region, which has been divided between India and Pakistan since the end of British rule in 1947. Both claim the territory in its entirety.

Yesterday student protest-ers took to the streets, clashing with government forces who used shotguns to disperse them. Students have staged almost daily protests in recent weeks, chanting slogans demanding freedom from India and throw-ing rocks at police.

They were angered by a raid earlier this month on a college in the southern district of Pul-wama in which police tried to detain the alleged ringleaders of earlier protests.

New Delhi IANS

The mother of alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav has filed an appeal with

Pakistan seeking Islamabad's intervention for the release of her son who has been sentenced to death and expressed a desire to meet him.

The appeal was handed over by Indian High Commissioner in Pakistan, Gautam Bambawale, during his meeting with Paki-stan Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua, during which India sought consular access to Jad-hav, a former Indian navy official, for the 16th time.

Bambawale handed over a petition by Jadhav's mother to

the Pakistan government and also an appeal by her to the Court of Appeal, on behalf of Jadhav, "who continues to be in detention in Pakistan on con-cocted charges", said an official statement.

"She requested the interven-tion of the Federal Government of Pakistan for his release and has expressed the desire to meet him," the statement said.

Pakistan was also requested to facilitate the visas for the mother and father of Jadhav, who have expressed a wish to travel to Pakistan to meet him and to personally file the peti-tion and the appeal. They have applied for visas with the Paki-stan High Commission in New Delhi.

Indian Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar had also met the High Commissioner of Pakistan to India on Tuesday and made sim-ilar points, the statement said.

Jadhav was arrested in Balo-chistan in March 2016. Pakistan has accused him of being a spy. A military court sentenced him to death on April 10.

India has sought consular access 15 times but Pakistan has denied this every time.

Indian authorities say they have not been informed about the whereabouts of Jadhav or the condition he is in. India has said if the death sentence is carried out, it would be considered a case of pre-meditated murder.

Child marriage annulled after 18 yearsAJMER: A family court in Ajmer, Rajasthan, yesterday annulled a child marriage that was held about 18 years ago when the girl was only two and a half years old. Kavita Gujar, originally from Alwar and presently studying in Ajmer, was married off to Sub-ash, son of Hardaan Singh Gujar, of Kotputli town around 18 years ago. Kavita filed a petition in the family court to annul her child marriage with the assistance of Kriti Bharti, rehabil-itation psychologist and Managing Trustee of Saarthi Trust of Jodhpur, an NGO. "Kavita did not want to remain in the knots of child marriage," Kriti Bharti said.

2 dead as trainer aircraft crashesMUMBAI : A trainer aircraft crashed on the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh border yesterday, killing the pilot and a trainee, after the craft got entangled in wires, officials said. Pilot Ranjan Gunta and student pilot Himani died when the National Flying Training Institute (NFTI) aircraft crashed around 9.30 a.m into the Vainganga river. Balaghat district Khairlanji police station in-charge Amit Jadhav, who reached the site of the accident, told IANS that the four-seater craft left Birsi airport in Gondia, Maharashtra, in the morning. The trainer aircraft, while flying over the river, got entangled in wires spread across it to measure the water level, the official said.

New Delhi IANS

The government yester-day appointed senior IPS officer Rajiv Rai

Bhatnagar as new chief of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), two days after the force lost 25 troopers in a deadly Maoist attack in S u k m a d i s t r i c t o f Chhattisgarh.

Bhatnagar, a 1983 batch officer of Uttar Pradesh cadre, was appointed to the post nearly two months after the retirement of previous incum-bent K. Durga Prasad on February 28. Additional Direc-tor General Sudeep Lakhtakia, a 1984 batch Telangana cadre Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, was handling addi-tional charge as CRPF Director General since March 1.

Prasad, a 1981 batch IPS officer, headed the force as its chief for one year from March 1, 2016 to February 28, 2017. Bhatnagar is currently serving as Director General of the Narcotics Control Bureau - an ADG rank post which has temporarily been upgraded to a Special Direc-tor General rank. He has earlier served as Additional Director General of the CISF.

Sources said the Appoint-ments Committee of the Cabinet headed by Prime Min-ister Narendra Modi selected Bhatnagar considering his seniority. The Home Ministry had earlier recommended the name of another IPS of 1983 batch R K Pachnanda but it was apparently turned down by the PM's Office.

Rajiv Rai Bhatnagar appointed CRPF chief

Kashmir blocks social media after clashes

Kulbhushan Jadhav's mother appeals for son's release

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Even as Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan continues to publicly defend his party and Cabinet colleague Power Minister M M Mani, the state secre-tariat of CPI-M yesterday decided to publicly censure Mani for his "curt remarks" on women plantation workers. In a party press release issued here, it said the party had decided to pub-licly censure Mani for his curt remarks which had caused a dent to the image of the party. While addressing a public meeting in Idukki district on April 22, Mani had said that the women plan-tation workers were into "drinks and much else". Mani has been facing flak from various quarters for his controversial remarks.

Kerala CPI-M to publicly censure Mani

Mumbai students protesting against the death sentence given to Kulbhushan Jadhav by a Pakistani military court.

13THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017 ASIA

Seoul

Reuters

The US military started moving parts of an anti-missile defence system to a deployment site in South Korea yesterday,

triggering protests from villagers and criticism from China, amid tension over North Korea's weap-ons development.

The earlier-than-expected steps to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system was also denounced by the frontrunner in South Korea's presidential election on May 9.

South Korea's defence min-istry said elements of THAAD were moved to deployment site, on what had been a golf course, about 250km south of Seoul.

"South Korea and the US have been working to secure an early operational capability of the THAAD system in response to North Korea's advancing nuclear and missile threat," the ministry said in a statement.

"The battery was expected to be operational by the end of the year".

"China strongly urges the

United States and South Korea to stop actions that worsen regional tensions and harm Chi-na's strategic security interests and cancel the deployment of the THAAD system and withdraw the equipment," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a briefing recently.

"China will resolutely take necessary steps to defend its interests," Geng said.

China is North Korea's sole major ally and is seen as crucial to US-led efforts to rein in its bel-licose, isolated neighbour.

The United States began moving the first elements of the system to South Korea in March after the North tested four bal-listic missiles.

South Korea has accused China of discriminating against some South Korean companies operating in China because of the deployment.

The liberal politician expected to win South Korea's election, Moon Jae-in, has called for a delay in the deployment,

saying the new administration should make a decision after gathering public opinion and more talks with Washington.

A spokesman for Moon said moving the parts to the site "ignored public opinion and due process" and demanded it be suspended.

THAAD installation begins in South KoreaSaudi to fund 560 mosques in BangladeshDhaka

AFP

BANGLADESH has approved a project to build hundreds of mosques with almost $1bn from Saudi Arabia, an offi-cial said yesterday.

The government plans to construct 560 mosques -- one in every town in Bangladesh -- as the secular administra-tion woos Islamist groups before elections.

"Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina sought the funds from Saudi Arabia, which will pro-vide the lion's share of the $1.07bn cost, during a visit to the oil-rich state last year," said planning minister Mus-tofa Kamal.

The centres of worship -- equipped with research facilities, libraries and cultural centres -- would be a "model" for worshippers in Muslim-majority country," said Shamim Afzal, head of the s t a t e - r u n I s l a m i c Foundation.

"It is a perfect idea of spreading the true knowledge of Islam."

Hong Kong AP

Hong Kong police yester-day arrested two pro-independence law-

makers who were disqualified in a dispute over their oaths, in the latest round of legal action against activists involved in the Chinese territory's pro-democ-racy movement.

Sixtus Leung and Yau Wai-ching of the Youngspiration party were arrested and ques-tioned at a police station for several hours before being released on bail.

They said they were charged with unlawful assem-bly and attempted forcible entry and must report to court tomorrow.

The two activists angered

Hong Kong's Beijing-backed government when they used their swearing-in ceremony in October to stage an apparent protest by inserting anti-China insults into their oaths.

Their attempts to enter the legislature during subsequent sessions to take their oaths properly descended into chaos when they were barred from the chamber while awaiting a court ruling, which later dis-qualified them from office.

Leung and Yau were part of a new wave of lawmakers advocating greater separation from the mainland who were newly elected to office last year amid a rising tide of anti-China sentiment in Hong Kong, where fears are rising that Beijing is tightening its grip on the sem-iautonomous city.

Hong Kong arrests two disqualified lawmakers Boy dead after

alleged abuse at religious school Kuala Lumpur AFP

A Malaysian boy who was allegedly beaten so severely with a hosepipe at an Islamic school that his legs were ampu-tated has died in hospital, a family member said yesterday.

Mohamad Thaqif, 10, had attended the private Maahad Eahfiz al-Jauhar school in the southern state of Johor.

His aunt said he had com-plained to his mother about the beatings, which were allegedly inflicted by the school's assistant warden.

The cause of his death is not yet known and a post-mortem is due to be carried out later yesterday.

Local police chief Rahmat Othman said a 29-year-old suspect was in custody in rela-tion to the alleged beatings.

"A water hose was seized. The man had previously been jailed for 30 months in 2014 for theft," he said.

Local media said the boy had recorded the alleged abuse in a notebook.

"Dear Allah, please open my parents' heart to allow me to transfer to another school because I cannot stand it any more. Please Allah, make my wish come true," the Malay Mail newspaper quoted one notebook entry as saying.

The school's head, Mohammad Afdhaluddin, said he could not comment on the alleged beatings since the case was being investigated.

Missing hiker rescued after 47 daysKathmandu

AFP

Rescuers yesterday found two Taiwanese trekkers who went missing in a

remote mountainous part of Nepal seven weeks ago, but only one survived the ordeal.

Liu Chen-chun, 19, died just three days before the res-cue team located the couple in northwest Nepal, but her boyfriend managed to survive despite running out of food.

Liang Sheng-yueh, 21, is being treated in hospital in Kathmandu where he was air-lifted after being rescued from the steep slope where the cou-ple had been trapped for over a month.

"He was sleeping when we

found them," one of the res-cuers Madhav Basnyat said.

"He woke up after he heard us. We were very sur-prised to find him alive. He said that the girl died three days earlier."

Basnyat said that the two had followed a river downhill in the hope of finding a village but became stuck when they reached the edge of a water-fall and were unable to climb back up.

"They had been trapped there for 47 days when we reached," he said.

Speaking haltingly and in broken English as he sipped hot soup, Liang said it had been "very cold" on the moun-tain, and difficult to sleep.

Doctors treating Liang

said that he had lost 30 kilos and maggots had infested his right leg.

"When he was brought in he had maggots and was starved because he hadn't eaten," Sanjay Karki, his doc-tor said.

The couple survived on potatoes and noodles until they ran out of food and had to keep going on water alone.

Liang's father had trav-elled to Nepal after the couple went missing and chartered a helicopter to search for them.

Spring is peak season in Nepal's snow-capped peaks, a popular hiking destination with around 150,000 trekkers visiting the Annapurna and Everest regions every year.

A US military vehicle which is a part of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system arrives in Seongju, South Korea, yesterday.

Disqualified lawmakers Baggio Leung (left) and Yau Wai-ching outside a police station in Hong Kong, yesterday.

Jiranuch Trirat (left) looking at her 11-month-old daughter after picking her body at the morgue in Phuket, yesterday.

Sri Lanka reverses ban on adopting elephantsColombo

AFP

Sri LANKA said yesterday it was overturning a ban on adopting baby elephants,

drawing sharp criticism from the animal protection lobby.

Elephants are revered as holy in the mainly Buddhist nation, where the high-maintenance beasts have become a status sym-bol for wealthy elite.

The animals are also kept by temples for use in religious cer-emonies, and the ban had led to worries there would not be enough tame elephants for Bud-dhist pageants.

"Wildlife conservation is good but we also need to con-serve our cultural pageants," said government spokesman Rajitha Senaratne after the cabinet over-turned the ban on adoptions.

Senaratne said the govern-ment decision had been motivated partly by overcrowd-ing at Pinnawala, a 27 hectare coconut grove that was originally set up as an elephant orphanage and now also runs a successful breeding programme.

He said strict conditions would be put in place to ensure the animals' welfare. Individu-als would have to pay $66,000 for an elephant, although tem-

ples would get them for free.But Asian elephant expert

Jayantha Jayewardene said the decision was "ill thought out and totally irresponsible" and accused the government of sell-ing animals to raise revenue.

He said the move could jeop-ardise baby elephants that were taken to Pinnawala after they were seized from wealthy Sri Lankans accused of keeping them illegally.

Capturing wild elephants is illegal in Sri Lanka but there have been cases of young ani-mals being taken from their parents to be sold on the black market.

"We are very surprised by the decision to give back these ele-phants," Jayewardene said. "It is a sad day for conservation."

There has also been contro-versy over the separation of elephant calves whose parents are still alive.

Earlier this month a group of wildlife enthusiasts went to court to stop an elephant calf, which was given to New Zealand during a visit by the then-prime minister John Key, from being taken away from its mother.

Last year, Sri Lanka unveiled tougher laws, including a ban on using young elephants for log-ging and other physical work.

Thai media slammed over baby murder footageBangkok

AFP

Thai media came under fire yesterday for publishing images of a man killing his

infant daughter in a Facebook Live video, a case that sparked outrage and raised fears of cop-ycat killings.

The video, filmed Monday on the southern resort island of Phuket, showed Wuttisan Won-gtalay hang his 11-month daughter Natalie from an aban-doned building before taking his own life, according to police.

The footage was online for around 24 hours before it was

removed on Tuesday, prompt-ing cries for Facebook to move more swiftly to take down clips of grisly crimes and killings.

A Thai media body also slammed news outlets that showed graphic images of the crime.

At least one major daily printed an image of the murder-suicide on its front page Tuesday, while several TV chan-nels aired segments of the video.

"The News Broadcasting Council of Thailand received complaints about reporting on a man who killed his child and himself via Facebook Live," the organisation said in statement.

"Those reports were inap-propriate," it added, warning channels and newspapers against giving graphic coverage to similar crimes because they "may lead to copycats".

Thai newspaper front pages are often splashed with bloody and lurid imagery. But netizens expressed horror over the kill-ing and said this time the coverage had gone too far.

"It was a news story, not a horror movie. Was it really nec-essary to release the soundbite?" one commentator wrote in the online forum Pantip, referring to audio played by some media from the Facebook Live stream.

Getting ready

The battery was expected to be operational by the end of the year: Ministry.

China strongly urges the US and South Korea to stop actions that worsen regional tensions and harm China's strategic security interests and cancel the deployment of the THAAD system and withdraw the equipment: Official

14 THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017ASIA

Asean Summit meetings begin in ManilaZamboanga City

Anatolia

The 30th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) Sum-mit began yesterday in the capital, Manila

amid tight security.The summit started with

preparatory meetings at Philip-pine International Convention Center (PICC) that will continue till tomorrow.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte would chair the sum-mit on Saturday.

The leaders of 10 member nations would discuss issues including regional security, piracy, cross-border kidnap-pings and the South China Sea dispute.

The host country battles mil-itants who have invaded a tourist island province in the archipelago’s central region last week, raising a nationwide

security alarm.As many as 41,000 security

forces were deployed in the cap-ital to secure 1,800 delegates from 10 member nations.

Philippine army’s Chief of Staff General Eduardo Ano said there is no specific terror threat

that could disrupt the summit. However, he added the mil-

itary is not leaving anything to chance and that “everything is covered” security-wise.

The military said the secu-rity issues in the tourist island of Bohol, which was attacked by Daesh-linked Abu Sayyaf mili-tants, have already been addressed.Since 1991, Abu Sayyaf carried out bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and extortion in a self-determined fight for an independent prov-ince in the Philippines.

“We value the time that you wish to rest so please do not cancel your reservations in these tourist areas and go out enjoy yourself. Have the sabbatical you most urgently need and we will ensure that you will be able to do that unhampered and well secured,” Padilla said.

The Philippine Navy has deployed 20 ships to secure Manila Bay.

Afghanistan arrests 35 soldiers after attack on baseKabul

AFP

AUTHORITIES have arrested 35 soldiers who served on an army base in northern Afghan-istan where the Taliban staged a deadly attack last week, offi-cials said yesterday, as fears grew they had inside help.

The defence ministry released its official toll of 135 recruits killed in the assault on the sprawling base, home to the 209th Army Corps, out-side the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in Balkh province on Friday.

Gunmen in military trucks and wearing suicide vests stormed the base, kill-ing unarmed young recruits as they ate lunch in the din-ing hall and prayed in the mosque.

The gunmen were dressed in army uniforms, multiple sources have said, fuelling suspicions of com-plicity on the 30,000-strong base, where Western instruc-tors are sometimes called on as part of Nato's training, assistance and advisory mission.

They also carried valid passes to the base, a senior security source has said.

"So far 35 people have been detained and are being questioned in connection with the attack," said 209th Corps spokesman Abdul Qahar Aram, adding that they ranked from foot soldiers to colonel.

Militant reveals Kabul supporting Taliban groupKarachi

Anatolia

Revelations made by an under detention Pakistani Taliban member that

Kabul provided support to the group for launching terror attacks on Pakistan will be taken up with Afghanistan, a senior Pakistani official said yesterday.

Pakistan army yesterday released a video of Ehsanullah Ehsan, a former spokesman for

Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan -- a consortium of several militant groups in the country -- who can be seen confessing to not only his role in terrorism in the country, but also alleged that Kabul provided bases and logis-tics to militants for carrying out terrorist attacks inside Pakistan.

Ehsan, who had reportedly surrendered to Pakistani secu-rity forces earlier this month, also accused the Afghan and Indian intelligence agencies of

forging a nexus against Islam-abad, and coordinating their attacks on Pakistan.

In remarks made to broad-caster Dunya TV yesterday, Foreign Affairs Adviser Sartaj Aziz said: “His [Ehsan] confes-sional statement is crucial. Pakistan will raise [revelation made in] his confessions with the Afghan government.”

Army spokesman Maj-Gen Asif Ghafoor tweeted: “Ehsan-ullah Ehsan exposes hostile foreign agenda and their designs

to destabilise Pakistan.”Recent terrorist attacks in

both countries have put a fur-ther strain on already icy relations between Kabul and Islamabad, which accuse each other of harboring militants.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan rejected all allegations.

Dawa Khan Menapal, Afghan deputy presidential spokesman, said the allegations leveled by the TTP spokesman in Pakistani army’s custody were baseless and mere propaganda.

"The world knows we have never harbored terrorists, never differentiated between the good and the bad terrorists, and never used terrorism as a tool for political gains; all these are associated with Pakistan," Menapal said.

He added that Afghanistan for decades had been the vic-tim of terrorism and it was Pakistan that needed to “cor-rect its path”, and work positively to eliminate the men-ace of terrorism from the region.

Tight security

The summit started with preparatory meetings at Philippine International Convention Center (PICC) that will continue till tomorrow.

As many as 41,000 security forces were deployed in the capital to secure 1,800 delegates from 10 member nations.

Marines adjust the position of their anti-aircraft gun placed near the venue of the Asean Summit, in Manila, yesterday.

China assures detained activist in good healthBeijing

Reuters

THE Chinese government said yesterday that a Taiwan rights activist detained on suspicion of endangering national secu-rity was in good health, and had reassured his family in a letter.

The detention has put a strain on ties between Taiwan and China, which have cooled since Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen took power last year, because she refuses to con-cede that the self-ruled island is part of China.

The activist, Li Ming-che, is a community college worker known for support-ing human rights. He went missing in China, which views neighbouring Taiwan as a renegade province, on March 19, and China later confirmed his detention.

"At present, Li Ming-che's health is good, and there are no concerns about medical care. He has clearly explained the relevant situation to his family in a letter," Ma said.

Li's family and the Taiwan government have been frus-trated at not being told where Li is being held, and Ma did not answer when asked his location or give further details of the charges Li could face.

Li's wife was barred from travelling to China this month after saying she received the letter through unofficial channels and that she could not verify the letter was from her husband.

A potential diplomatic confrontation between China and Taiwan was averted last week, after a Chinese activ-ist who had reportedly intended to seek asylum in Taiwan flew back home.

US appeals Singapore blogger's asylum caseChicago

AP

US government attor-neys are appealing a Chicago immigration

judge's decision to grant asy-lum to a teenage blogger from Singapore.

That means 18-year-old Amos Yee remains in US. custody.

The judge concluded in March that Yee had a "well-founded fear" of being persecuted upon return to Singapore.

Yee's online posts mock-ing and criticising the city-state's government twice

landed him in a Singapore jail. He was first detained by

US immigration authorities in December at O'Hare Interna-tional Airport.

Yee's attorney Chris Keeler said that the case is now before the Board of Immigration Appeals.

A final decision could take months.

The Department of Homeland Security declined comment on Tuesday.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn't immedi-ately have comment.

An ICE online database shows Yee is detained at a Wisconsin jail.

China launches first home-built aircraft carrierBeijing

AP

China has launched its first aircraft carrier built entirely on its own, in a

demonstration of the growing technical sophistication of its defence industries and determi-nation to safeguard its maritime territorial claims and crucial trade routes.

"The 50,000-tonne carrier was towed from its dockyard just after 9am yesterday following a ceremony in the northern port city of Dalian, where its prede-cessor, the Soviet-built Liaoning, also underwent extensive refur-bishing before being commissioned in 2012," the Min-istry of National Defence said.

Development of the new carrier began in 2013 and con-struction in late 2015.

It's expected to be formally commissioned sometime before

2020, after sea trials and the arrival of its full air complement. Like the 60,000-tonnes

Liaoning, the new carrier is based on the Soviet Kuznetsov class design, with a ski

jump-style deck for taking off and a conventional oil-fueled steam turbine power plant.

Pakistan roadside bomb toll rises Peshawar

AFP

The death toll from a road-side bomb targeting a passenger vehicle in Paki-

stan's northwest rose to 13 yesterday after three critically injured people died overnight in hospital, officials said.

The incident, which occurred in the Godar area of Kurram tribal district early Tuesday, has been claimed by both the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA) faction of the Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic State group (IS).

"Three women, a six-year-old girl and a boy aged nine were among the dead," Baseer Khan, a top government official in Kurram tribal district, said, adding that the passengers were targeted because they belonged to the Shia religious minority.

The Kurram tribal district is known for sectarian clashes between Sunnis and Shias, who make up roughly 20 percent of Pakistan's population of 200 million. JuA pledged allegiance to IS in 2014, but a year later said it had rejoined the Pakistani Tal-iban -- which in turn is allied to Al Qaeda, a foe of IS.

However since 2016 JuA and

IS have both laid claim to sev-eral attacks, notably a suicide bombing at a hospital in the southwestern city of Quetta last year that killed 73 people.

The joint claims have raised the possibility they are collud-ing -- or that JuA, which has foot soldiers on the ground, is allow-ing IS also to take credit to achieve propaganda goals.

Yesterday, the army released a video showing a con-fessional statement by JuA's former spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan, in which he called on the Taliban to lay down their arms and urged young people to steer clear of extremism.

The army announced last week that Ehsan, who was spokesman for the main Paki-stani Taliban group before JuA broke away, had given himself up to the military.

China's first domestically built aircraft carrier during its launching ceremony in Dalian, Liaoning province, yesterday.

Joint claims

The incident, which occurred in the Godar area of Kurram tribal district early Tuesday, has been claimed by both the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA) faction of the Pakistani Taliban and the IS group.

15THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017 EUROPE

Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen at the captain's bridge onboard the Twin City Liner river ship on the river Danube near Bratislava, Slovakia, yesterday. Van der Bellen was on a day's visit to Slovakia.

Statesman's gaze

Workers boo Macron in Le Pen territory

Amiens

Reuters

Striking workers jeered France’s front-running presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron yesterday when he

showed up at a northern French factory after being publicly trumped by far-right rival Marine Le Pen.

Setting a public relations trap for centrist Macron in a region that staunchly supports her National Front, Le Pen unexpectedly showed up at the tumble-drier Whirlpool factory in Amiens while he was meet-ing union representatives on the other side of town.

Le Pen whipped up pas-sions among workers who have been striking against plans to close the US factory in favour of increased production in Poland, saying they were vic-tims of globalisation. She accused Macron of showing “contempt” towards them by not coming to see them.

She portrayed him as

cuddling up to bosses rather than workers. “Emmanuel Macron is with the oligarchs, with the Medef (the employers’ association) ... I am with the French workers,” Le Pen said in comments broadcast by French news channels.

When he finally made it there later in the day, Macron was met by angry heckling and jostling from crowds of work-ers, a rare scene for a French presidential candidate, which was broadcast live on news channels and drew much com-ment on social media.

A Reuters photographer at the scene reported that some National Front activists mingled in the crowd. Tyres were set ablaze in protest.

Macron stood his ground for more than an hour putting his case to the workers and things gradually calmed during an encounter that was broadcast live. He shook hands cordially with several of them when he left.

The 39-year-old Macron, who is widely expected to beat Le Pen by a comfortable mar-gin in the May 7 vote, had over the past days been accused by potential allies and some media of complacency and acting as if victory was in the bag since he came first in an initial round of voting on April 23.

Le Pen, arriving at Whirl-pool’s strike site, said: “When I heard that Emmanuel Macron was coming here and did not plan to meet the workers, did not plan to come to the picket line but would shelter himself who knows where in the cham-ber of commerce ... I considered it was such a sign of contempt for the Whirlpool workers that I decided to ... come here and see you.”

Over half of Russians want PM Medvedev to quit: PollMoscow

Reuters

Nearly half of Russians want Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to

quit, an opinion poll showed yesterday, suggesting corrup-tion allegations levelled against him by political oppo-nents have taken a toll.

Opposition politician Alexei Navalny released a video last month accusing Medvedev of owning a sprawling portfolio of luxury homes and of amassing a for-tune that outstripped his salary. It has been watched more than 20 million times on YouTube and helped spark recent protests across Russia.

Medvedev, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, has dismissed the allegations as politically motivated “non-sense”, suggesting they were designed to stir up trouble ahead of a presidential elec-tion next year which Putin is expected to contest.

Yesterday, the Levada Center, a pollster which casts itself as independent, released the results of a survey show-ing that 52 percent of Russians did not trust Medvedev, up from 42 per-cent in March 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea.

LEFT: Emmanuel Macron, candidate for the French election, uses a megaphone to talk to Whirlpool employees in front of the company plant in Amiens, France, yesterday. ABOVE: Front National (FN) party leader Marine Le Pen at the same factory, yesterday.

Sarkozy party eyes power-sharingParis

Reuters

France’s centre-right party, seeking to rebound after the defeat of its presiden-

tial candidate, said yesterday it could share power with Emmanuel Macron if he is elected, as pollsters predict, on May 7.

Macron, a 39-year-old cen-trist, is tipped to comfortably win a runoff vote against far-right leader Marine Le Pen, but the political movement he created a year ago faces a huge challenge in the follow-up legislative elec-tion in June.

With Macron and his “En Marche!” movement at risk of being in a minority in parlia-ment, the centre-right party, The Republicans, hopes to secure enough National Assembly seats to demand a government role despite the defeat of its presi-dential contender Francois Fillon, eliminated in a first-round vote on April 23.

Francois Baroin, who served

as a finance minister for former president Nicolas Sarkozy, yes-terday publicly stated he was ready to work as prime minis-ter in a “cohabitation” arrangement with Macron.

Baroin, 51 and a rising star within The Republicans, said in an interview on CNews televi-sion: “I will be available to ... head the government according to the will of the French people.”

Any power-sharing deal between Macron and a right-wing prime minister, like that suggested by Baroin, would likely impose big constraints on him in pursuing economic pol-icies that seek to balance state protection and pro-business reforms.

Before his exit, Fillon derided Macron’s stated aim of being nei-ther left- nor right-wing, pointing to the ex-banker’s time as economy minister in the Socialist government of outgo-ing President Francois Hollande.

This judgment of Macron is

still strongly felt among many of the Sarkozy-faction on the right-wing of The Republicans though others, loosely repre-sented by more moderate ex-prime minister Alain Juppe, have suggested they may choose to join in a majority of support for Macron.

Baroin told CNews he would vote for Macron on May 7 with-out hesitation but that he would not join in helping his campaign. He said he would throw his energy into campaigning for The Republicans in the June parlia-mentary election.

The last time France had a cohabitation arrangement between the Elysee and the gov-ernment was from 1997 and 2002 when right-wing presi-dent Jacques Chirac had to work with a Socialist government under Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.

The arrangement curbed Chirac’s day-to-day control over the direction of the economy, reducing him largely to looking after foreign policy and defence.

World leaders call for 'banishing' chemical weapons The Hague AFP

World leaders yesterday urged all nations to help "banish forever

the evil of chemical weapons," as the global watchdog warned decades of progress towards eliminating them was under threat.

UN chief Antonio Guterres led praise at a solemn ceremony in The Hague for the work of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)

to mark its 20th anniversary.So far some 95 percent of the

world's declared stockpiles of such arms have been destroyed by the OPCW.

And its dangerous, painstak-ing work to implement the April 1997 Chemical Weapons Con-vention won it the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013.

But amid reports of sarin, mustard and chlorine gas attacks unleashed during the bitter civil war in Syria, Guterres warned that despite "two decades of suc-cess... progress is under threat."

"In the Middle East, belliger-ents are breaking the norm against chemical weapons. The recent attack in Syria was a hor-rific reminder of this threat. There can be no impunity for these crimes," he said in a video message to the ceremony.

"For 20 years we have been allies in this cause. Now let us resolve to consign these diabolic weapons to the pages of history."

The ceremony was also attended by Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Sweden's Princess

Victoria, as well as ambassadors from OPCW-member nations.

Despite the celebrations, "we cannot ignore the black cloud hanging over us", said Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders, referring especially to the April 4 suspected sarin gas attack in the Syrian rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhun, the latest in sev-eral attacks.

The continued use of such weapons underscored that the OPCW as an independent, neu-tral body was needed "more than ever before," Koenders added.

In an unprecedented step in November, the OPCW's execu-tive council condemned Syria's use of toxic weapons — its first public condemnation of any of the 192 members of the convention.

Syria joined the OPCW in 2013 after denying for years that it had toxic arms. And while 100 percent of its declared stockpile has been destroyed in an opera-tion involving some 30 countries, there are growing fears that the Syrian regime did not reveal the true extent of its armoury.

Campaign heats up

Setting a public relations trap for centrist Macron in a region that staunchly supports her National Front, Le Pen unexpectedly showed up at the tumble-drier Whirlpool factory in Amiens while he was meeting union representatives on the other side of town.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy at an event in Paris recently.

Vienna

Reuters

Airbus was plunged deeper into legal wran-gling over past business

dealings yesterday when V i e n n a p r o s e c u t o r s announced a fraud investiga-tion into its chief executive in connection with a $2bn fighter order over a decade ago.

Airbus called the accusa-tions against CEO Tom Enders “completely unsubstantiated” after Reuters exclusively revealed the investigation, which came to light in corre-spondence seen by the news

agency and confirmed by Vienna prosecutors.

For the second time in two months, Airbus seemed taken aback by the latest develop-ments in a longstanding row over the Eurofighter deal, which has spawned numer-ous investigations that now coincide with separate probes in other countries of its pas-senger jet sales.

In February, Vienna pros-ecutors opened a criminal investigation into Airbus and the Eurofighter consortium after the defence ministry said it believed they had misled Austria about the price.

Airbus CEO to be probed for fraud

16 THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017EUROPE

An aerial view from Strasbourg in eastern France shows the new bridge across the Rhine River connecting the city with Kehl in Germany. The structure with a tramway on it, will be officially inaugurated tomorrow.

Call to halt Turkey's EU membership talksBrussels

Reuters

The European Union should formally sus-p e n d T u r k e y ’ s long-stalled talks on membership if it

adopts constitutional changes backed at a referendum last week, a leading member of the EU parliament responsible for dealings with Ankara said yesterday.

Kati Piri said ahead of a ple-nary debate on the matter that if President Recep Tayyip Erdogan implemented his new charter, giving him even more powers, Turkey would close the door on membership.

Erdogan said on Tuesday that Turkey would not wait for-ever to join the bloc, just a day after the EU executive’s top offi-cial for membership talks asked Europe’s foreign ministers to consider other types of ties with Turkey when they meet tomorrow.

Ties between EU states and their Nato ally Turkey soured in the aftermath of a failed coup last July as the bloc was taken aback by Erdogan’s sweeping security crackdown that followed.

Austria has long called for aborting Turkey’s EU bid alto-gether but other EU states have been more cautious, highlight-ing that the bloc depends on

Ankara to keep a lid on the flow of refugees from the Middle East.

Erdogan’s accusations around this month’s constitu-tional vote that Germany and the Netherlands act like Nazis have taken the relationship to new lows. Piri, a Dutch centre-left European lawmaker, said, “As Turkey with such a consti-tution cannot become a member of the EU, it also doesn’t make sense to continue the discussion on integration with the current government,”

“The EU should officially suspend the accession talks if the constitutional changes are implemented unchanged,” she told reporters, after the legisla-ture last year passed a non-binding resolution calling for such a move.

Piri said any suspension should only come if and when the “authoritarian constitution”

is enacted, which would hap-pen after Turkey holds the next election, now due in late 2019.

She said Erdogan could bring them forward to swiftly assume more powers, though the Turkish leader said that was not on the agenda now.

Piri stressed, however, the process should be suspended rather than ended altogether: “I don’t want to take that perspec-tive away from the Turkish population.”

“Turkey should remain a candidate country but we’re negotiating with the govern-ment. It’s become clear over the last two years that this govern-ment doesn’t want to meet criteria.”

She said she expected the EU’s foreign ministers this Fri-day would ask the bloc’s executive for a formal assess-ment of where Turkey stands on fulfilling these. Based on that, EU leaders could make further deci-sions when they next meet in June.

One tangible effect of sus-pending the process would be freezing the annual payments of some 600 million euros ($650 million) of EU pre-accession funds to Turkey.

Like Hahn, Piri said Brussels could instead step up talks on enhancing the customs union which Turkey already has with the EU, a process she said could take the next two to three years.

Merkel tries to paper over Ivanka's odd momentBerlin

Bloomberg

German Chancellor Angela Merkel made amends for a Berlin audience that

gave Ivanka Trump a rough reception, telling the US presi-dent’s daughter she was grateful for her visit.

Merkel’s comment at a gala dinner in the German capital sought to end Ivanka Trump’s first day overseas as a presiden-tial adviser with an upbeat gesture. The chancellor, who presides over Europe’s biggest economy, is among foreign lead-ers reaching out to President Donald Trump’s oldest daugh-ter to try to moderate his views on matters such as global trade and defence spending.

“I’m very glad that you braved this trip to Germany,”

Merkel said in a video excerpt posted on Twitter by her chief spokesman, Steffen Seibert. “I hope we were a good audience for you and that you’ll take some new ideas home with you.”

The German leader thanked Trump’s daughter for proposing a global fund to promote women entrepreneurs in poorer coun-tries and said she’ll “spare no effort” to persuade fellow lead-ers of Group of 20 countries to back it. Merkel will be hosting the US president as part of a G-20 summit in Hamburg in July.

While a small group of pro-testers held up anti-Ivanka Trump signs outside the venue, news photos from the dinner at Deutsche Bank AG’s Berlin offices on Tuesday showed Mer-kel and the president’s daughter sitting next to each other engrossed in conversation.

That contrasted with the frosty moment at a conference on women’s empowerment ear-lier Tuesday, where the president’s daughter drew groans for calling her father “a tremendous champion of sup-porting families.” Noting the audience reaction, the modera-tor followed up with a question about the president’s attitude toward women.

Ivanka Trump complimented Merkel in an interview with Ger-man public broadcaster ZDF aired yesterday, saying “every-one can learn something from the chancellor.” Trump and Merkel “got along incredibly well — despite differences” when they met in Washington in March, the president’s daughter said, adding that she hopes it’ll be the start of a “warm” relationship that “hope-fully will continue to grow.”

Berlin

AFP

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said yesterday it was

"regrettable" that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denied her for-eign minister a meeting after the diplomat held talks with rights groups.

Merkel's spokesman said that talks with non-g o v e r n m e n t a l organisations were com-mon during foreign travel and should not set off a rift between allies.

"The chancellor finds it regrettable that a meet-ing between Foreign Minister (Sigmar) Gabriel and Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Netan-yahu did not take place," he told reporters at a reg-ular government briefing. "It should not be problem-atic for foreign visitors to meet with critical repre-sentatives of civil society."

Netanyahu called off the planned meeting Tues-day with Gabriel after the German diplomat decided to go ahead with talks with Israeli rights groups Breaking The Silence and B'Tselem.

Netanyahu's rare move marked an affront against one of Israel's clos-e s t i n t e r n a t i o n a l partners.

Due to its historical responsibility as the per-petrator of the Holocaust that killed six million Jews, Germany has not only been a staunch ally of Israel but has also been cautious about openly criticising the Jewish state.

31st anniversary of Chernobyl markedKiev

AFP

The presidents of Ukraine and Belarus toured yester-day the site of the

Chernobyl plant to mark 31 years since the "unhealing wound" of the world's worst civil nuclear accident spewed radi-ation across Europe.

The station's fourth reactor in the north of former Soviet Ukraine exploded in 1986 after a safety test went horribly wrong at 1:23am on April 26.

Around 30 people were killed on site and several thou-sand more are feared to have died in the years that followed from radiation poisoning across Ukraine as well as its northern neighbour Belarus and Russia to the east.

The exact number of victims remains a subject of intense debate because the Soviet

authorities kept most of the information about the disaster hidden.

Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from the area around the disaster site and an exclusion zone was set up that has now become a ghostly uninhabited region.

Ukraine placed a mammoth ¤2.1bn metal dome over the remnants of the Chernobyl plant last year in a bid to stop future leaks and ensure the safety of Europeans for generations.

More than 200 tonnes of uranium remain buried inside the crippled reactor that leaked radiation across three quarters of Europe.

"Perhaps more than anyone else, the Chernobyl tragedy affected our Belarussian broth-ers," Poroshenko said at a joint appearance with his Belarussian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko.

Director of ChNPP, Ihor Gramotkin, (left) speaks to Belarus' President Alexander Lukashenko (second left) and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in front of the New Safe Confinement over the fourth block of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, yesterday.

Sofia

Reuters

Bulgaria has decided to start talks with Sweden to acquire eight new

Gripen combat jets made by SAAB, interim deputy prime minister Stefan Yanev said yesterday, as the Balkan coun-try seeks to replace its ageing Soviet-designed MiG-29s.

The Balkan country has picked the Swedish offer in preference to an offer from Portugal of secondhand US F-16s equipped with US weaponry and an offer from Italy of secondhand Eurofighter Typhoon fighters. A deal is estimated to be worth about ¤1.5bn levs.

A special commission for the negotiations is expected to be set up within a week, Yanev said. The talks with Sweden will be held by Bul-garia’s next government, which is expected to take office next week.

“Sweden’s offer is ranked first, followed by Portugal and Italy,” interim Defence Minis-ter Yanev said. “It is normal that talks start with the first-ranked country.” Last year Bulgaria’s parliament approved a plan to acquire eight new or secondhand fighter jets between 2018 and 2020 to improve the country’s compliance with Nato stand-ards and replace its MiG-29s.

Charter change

The EU official said any suspension should only come if and when the “authoritarian constitution” is enacted, which would happen after Turkey holds the next election, now due in late 2019.

Bulgaria to buy eight Gripen fighter jets from Sweden

Ivanka Trump Angela Merkel

Germany finds Israel's Gabriel snub regrettable

Straddling the Rhine

17THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017 EUROPE

EU seeks improved social benefits as populism risesBrussels

Reuters

The European Commission proposed yesterday to strengthen social protec-

tion across the bloc as the European Union struggles with a wave of populism triggered by globalisation and a migration crisis.

Its most concrete proposals focused on creating a better work-life balance with new EU-wide standards for more generous parental and paternity leave rules, guaranteed carers’ leave to tend to ailing family members and flexible working arrangements.

The proposals came less

than two weeks before the sec-ond round of presidential elections in socially-minded France, whose vote is seen as decisive for the future of the EU after Britain decided to leave the 28-nation bloc last year.

Marianne Thyssen, the com-missioner for employment and social affairs, said she was pleased the proposals were made now.

“I hope that this is taken up in the campaigns because it shows that social is at the heart of the European policy,” she told a news conference.

“We realise that many peo-ple are afraid of being the losers of the changes we see due to dig-

italisation and globalisation.”Debate on these ideas will

also take place during the cam-paign for the September 24 parliamentary election in Ger-many, the EU’s largest member

and strongest economy. The Commission hopes its proposals will be endorsed by EU leaders by December.

Anti-EU movements have taken root across the bloc as groups of voters feel left out by Brussels. Even if they do not win a majority, as the Brexit camp did in Britain last year, their resent-ment has become a political factor to be reckoned with.

CONCRETE PROPOSALSAmong its concrete propos-

als, the Commission wants fathers in all EU countries to be able to take 10 days of leave when their child is born, paid at the level of sick benefits.

While various countries have

their own laws on this, there are no such pan-EU standards at the moment.

All EU workers would also have the right to five days of car-ers’ leave per year to take care of seriously ill or dependent rel-atives, paid as sick leave.

Again, no such minimum standards exist in the whole EU now.

Finally, in an extension of existing laws, all working par-ents of children up to 12 and carers with dependent relatives would have the right to request reduced or flexible working hours, and possibly choose where they work.

BusinessEurope, an employ-ers organisation, said extending

parental leave rights beyond existing laws was too expensive, especially at a time when the Commission was also urging member states to ensure their public f inances were sustainable.

“Many Member States sim-ply cannot afford to grant sickness pay levels to people tak-ing parenta l leave ,” BusinessEurope President Emma Marcegaglia said.

The Commission also pro-posed a review of workers’ contracts with employers’ organ-isations and trade unions “to ensure that people in all forms of employment have adequate access to social protection and employment services.”

EU starts legal action against HungaryBrussels

AFP

The EU launched legal action against Hungary yesterday setting up a

major confrontation with Prime Minister Viktor Orban (pictured) who accused Brussels of back-ing US billionaire investor George Soros instead of his country.

Orban has sparked deep unease over legislation that could force the closure of the highly regarded Central Euro-pean University in Budapest, founded by Soros.

The tough step by the Euro-pean Commission came the same day that the rightwing pre-mier addressed the European parliament to defend his law and his country's rights record overall.

"We are not as big and pow-erful as you are, and not as big as powerful as George Soros, the American financial speculator attacking Hungary," Orban told MEPs in Brussels.

Soros, the Hungarian born financier, "has destroyed the lives of millions of Europeans with his financial speculations". Yet he "is still warmly regarded here and warmly received at the highest level", he said.

'Legal action' The firebrand PM, and ally

of Russia's Vladimir Putin, made his accusation one day before

Soros was to meet European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker in Brussels.

The commission chose to make its announcement on legal action just hours ahead of Orban's address to parliament.

"We have decided to take legal action on the higher edu-cation law by sending a letter of formal notice to the Hungarian government," European Com-mission Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis said at a news conference.

The decision was based on an "in-depth legal assessment" and involved alleged breaches of fundamental EU laws govern-ing the freedom to set up businesses and services as part of the internal market, Dom-brovskis said. Hungary has a month to respond, the commis-sion said.

The announcement began the EU's so-called "infringement proceeding" that starts with Brussels writing to national

governments to demand legal explanations over certain issues.

It can then refer them to the European Court of Justice, which can impose stiff financial pen-alties if member states fail to comply.

'People worried' The announcement marks

a new low in the tense relations between Brussels and Budapest over the government's rights record.

The EU expressed deep con-cern over Hungarian plans to tighten government control over academic freedoms, migrants and nongovernmental organisations.

The key issue in recent weeks has been the Central European University, often seen as a beacon of the liberal EU val-ues so often derided by Orban.

"Recent developments in Hungary have got many people worried in the EU but also in the outside world. We share those worries and concerns," said European Commission's Vice- President Frans Timmermans, who also addressed the parlia-ment session. Timmermans described the university as the "pearl in the crown" of post-communist Europe. Orban's government has also handed out a questionnaire entitled "Let's stop Brussels!" asking house-holds how to deal with EU policies that it says threaten Hungary's independence.

May has Thatcher-like lead: PollLondon

Reuters

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conserva-tives have almost twice as

much voter support as the oppo-sition Labour Party ahead of a June 8 election, a lead equal to that commanded by Margaret Thatcher before her 1983 land-slide victory, Ipsos MORI said.

Since May surprised rivals and financial markets by call-ing a snap election, opinion polls have shown May has far greater support than Labour leader Jer-emy Corbyn and that she is likely to win a big majority in

the 650-seat Lower House of parliament.

An Ipsos MORI telephone poll of 1,004 adults conducted on April 21-25 put the Conserv-ative lead at 23 percentage points, while a Panelbase online poll of 1,026 people on April 20-24 put their lead on 22 per-centage points.

“The Conservatives are starting the campaign matching the biggest lead we have ever recorded for them during an election campaign - which was back in 1983 ahead of Thatch-er’s victory,” Gideon Skinner, head of political research at Ipsos MORI, said.

Thatcher, riding a wave of popularity after the Falklands War against Argentina, won a 144-seat majority in that elec-tion against Labour’s Michael Foot, whose left-wing socialist manifesto was branded by a party colleague as “the longest suicide note in history”.

May’s predecessor, David Cameron, won a majority of 12 seats in a 2015 election, the first overall Conservative victory since Thatcher’s successor, John Major, won in 1992.

May is betting that the weakness of Labour leader Cor-byn will bolster her majority in parliament.

May huddles with major EU Brexit officials London

AFP

British Prime Minister Theresa May yesterday was holding her first talks

with key EU Brexit negotiators, as the bloc hardens its position ahead of a summit to lay down its "red lines".

May hosted European Com-mission President Jean-Claude Juncker and chief negotiator Michel Barnier at Downing Street for the first face-to-face talks since she triggered the two-year process of withdrawing from the European Union.

The encounter over dinner comes as the EU has toughened its strategy, making new demands over financial services, immigration and the bills Brit-ain must settle before ending its 44-year-old membership in the bloc.

The latest draft negotiating guidelines, agreed on Monday by Barnier and European diplo-mats, point to months of difficult talks ahead as the EU seeks to ensure Britain does not get a

better deal outside the bloc than inside.

According to the document, seen by AFP, the other 27 EU countries will seek to hold Brit-ain liable for the bloc's costs for at least a year after it leaves in 2019 — longer than was previ-ously proposed.

Britain will also be required to give EU citizens permanent residency after living there for five years, in a challenge for May's Conservative government, which has vowed to limit immigration.

And the guidelines recom-mend that Britain's dominant

finance industry will not neces-sarily be tied to any future trade deal with the EU and that it must also stick to the bloc's rules if it wants easy access to EU markets.

May has committed to pull-ing Britain out of Europe's single market to end free movement of

EU citizens into Britain, but says she wants to form a new part-nership with the bloc.

"We will have difficult issues to confront. Compromises will be necessary on both sides. We know all this," Brexit minister David Davis said in a speech in London yesterday .

But he added: "The UK has a very good reason to feel optimistic."

After starting the Article 50 process of leaving the EU last month, May is seeking to shore up her mandate for the Brexit talks in a snap election on June 8, with polls suggesting her Con-servatives will return with an increased majority.

In recent weeks, she has held talks with senior EU figures, including European Parliament President Antonio Tajani and European Council chief Donald Tusk, who visited Downing Street on April 6.

The leaders of the other 27 EU nations will meet on April 29 to set down the bloc's red lines, though the talks will not begin until June.

Rome

AFP

Two railway mainte-nance workers died and three others were

injured in an overnight acci-dent that temporarily closed a 10-kilometre section of Ita-ly's main rail line to Austria.

The accident happened near Bressanone, close to the Brenner pass that links the two countries in the Alps.

A giant tamping machine slipped off its breaks and col-lided with another piece of heavy equipment, causing a powerful explosion.

The line was shut between Bressanone and Fortezza to the north to allow inspectors to assess what happened. Passengers were being transferred to buses for that part of their journeys.

It took hours for normal traffic to be restored, Italian railways said.

Among its concrete proposals, the Commission wants fathers in all EU countries to be able to take 10 days of leave when their child is born, paid at the level of sick benefits.

Britain's opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn listens through a stethoscope with Haroon, 2, while meeting with nurses and other medical staff in London, yesterday.

British Prime Minister Theresa May attending the final Prime Ministers Questions session of the Parliament before the June 8 general election, yesterday.

Two die as mishap closes railway line

18 THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017AMERICAS

An iceberg floats in Flatrock Cove in Flatrock, Newfoundland, Canada. Icebergs break off from Baffin Island and Greenland every Spring and drift down the stretch of water along the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador known as Iceberg Alley.

Iceberg Alley

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos (left) and French Ambassador to Colombia Jean-Marc Laforet attend the opening of 30th International Book Fair of Bogota, in Bogota, yesterday.

Literary bonanza

Caracas

AP

Venezuela is threat-ening to pull out of the Organisation of American States as the socialist govern-

ment’s response to political unrest that has been blamed for 26 deaths in recent weeks draws rebuke from the hemisphere’s major powers.

Foreign Minister Delcy Rod-riguez said on state TV early yesterday that she had been instructed by President Nicolas Maduro to initiate country’s withdrawal from the Washing-ton-based OAS if the region’s foreign ministers hold a meet-ing on country’s crisis without his administration’s backing.

“We’re not going to continue allowing legal and institutional violations that are arbitrary and surpass any moral, ethical and licit boundary that nations in this regional organisation should respect,” Rodriguez said.

Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have flooded streets to demand an end to Maduro’s presidency. The pro-tests have frequently ended in

violent confrontations with secu-rity forces.

The unrest shows no sign of slowing down. Another demon-stration was called in which Maduro’s opponents planned to try again to march downtown to deliver a message to nation’s ombudsman, whose job is to stand up for citizens’ rights but who the opposition has tagged the “defender of the dictator.”

Venezuela’s chief prosecutor, Luisa Ortega Diaz, put a spotlight on extent of violence, saying more than 400 people had been injured

and nearly 1,300 detained since the protests began in response to a Supreme Court ruling last month that stripped opposition-control-led congress of much of its powers.

In an unusual move, Ortega Diaz broke with the government in the immediate days after the decision to denounce it as a “rupture” of constitutional order. The ruling was later partially reversed amid a storm of inter-national criticism. Ever since, the prosecutor once criticized by the opposition has become an unlikely bulwark against further government repression, show-ing little sympathy for abuses committed by security forces and protesters alike.

“I want to express my firm-est rejection to violence as an arm of political action. Politics should not lead us to war,” she said yesterday in calling for both sides to constrain their confron-tational tactics.

In the majority of cases involving detentions tied to the unrest, police have not pro-vided sufficient information to prosecute, so those arrested would have to be freed, Ortega Diaz said.

Opposition leaders have blamed armed pro-government militias known as “colectivos” for a number of the deaths, while government officials have accused the opposition of work-ing with criminal gangs to

foment unrest.“Right-wing terrorists have

once again left Venezuelan fam-ilies grieving in their continuous spiral of violence,” Interior Min-ister Nestor Reverol said in a nationwide broadcast.

California

AP

An unarmed Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballis-tic missile has been

launched from a US Air Force Base in California on a flight to a target in the Pacific Ocean.

The missile lifted off at 12:03am yesterday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, 130 miles of Los Angeles.

An Air Force statement said the mission was part of a pro-gramme to test effectiveness, readiness, and accuracy of the weapon system. The 30th Space Wing commander, Colonel John Moss, said Minuteman launches are essential to verify the sta-tus of the US nuclear force and

to demonstrate the national nuclear capabilities.

In a Minuteman test, a so-called re-entry vehicle travels more than 4,000 miles down-range to a target at Kwajalein Atoll near Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

“Team V is once again ready to work with Air Force Global Strike Command to successfully launch another Minuteman III missile,” Moss said. “These Minuteman launches are essen-tial to verify status of our national nuclear force and to demonstrate our national nuclear capabilities. We are proud of our long history in partnering with the men and women of the 576th Flight Test Squadron to execute these mis-sions for the nation.”

Toronto

AP

A WOMAN who was stuck on the top part of a construction crane in downtown Toronto for hours was rescued yester-day after being strapped to a rappelling firefighter and lowered to the ground.

The woman had been perched on a gently swaying large pulley device for at least four hours and was clinging to a steel cable when a res-cuer reached her.

Toronto Fire Chief Mat-thew Pegg said his crew had never seen an incident like this before. “It’s an outstand-ing success,” Pegg said of the operation. “We train for this, although we’ve never seen one like this before.”

He added, “She was brought down safely, she didn’t appear to be in any dis-tress. This was a very technical, very complex rescue.”

Pegg said crew members were called to the scene at a construction site at about 4 am. A rescue worker began climbing up the crane around 6 am and rappelled down to the woman on the pulley device around 8 am, Pegg said.

The firefighter then care-fully strapped himself to the woman and the pair were slowly lowered to the ground about half an hour later.

Streets in the area were blocked off and bystanders packed nearby sidewalks to watch the dramatic operation unfold. Cheers erupted from the crowd as the firefighter successfully landed on the ground with the woman.

The woman, believed to be in her 20s, was then hand-cuffed by police and handed over to paramedics.

Toronto police said the woman faces a mischief charge. Fire crew said there was no immediate indication of why the woman climbed onto the crane in the middle of the night.

Denver

AP

A federal court yesterday removed an obstacle to the US government’s plan

to release more endangered wolves in New Mexico over state’s objections, but it was not clear whether additional animals would be reintroduced under the Trump administration.

Denver-based 10th US Cir-cuit Court of Appeals lifted a

temporary order issued by a lower court that stopped US Fish and Wildlife Service from releas-ing more Mexican gray wolves after New Mexico refused to agree to the plan. The state Game and Fish Department is disap-pointed, but it will keep pursuing the case in a court in New Mex-ico, where it was originally filed, spokesman Lance Cherry said.

Fish and Wildlife spokesman Jeff Humphrey said the agency was reviewing the decision.

Despite the ruling, it wasn’t immediately known whether wolf releases would resume. President Donald Trump has slowed or reversed other envi-ronmental initiatives since taking office in January, when appeals court was considering wolf case.

And many Republicans in con-trol of Congress have long objected to parts of Endangered Species Act, which is legal authority for re-establishing the Mexican gray wolf and other animals.

Protected status under the act usually brings restrictions on ranching, mining and other activities.

Only about 110 Mexican gray wolves live in the wild. They nearly disappeared in the 1970s, and the government added them to the endangered species list in 1976. The Fish and Wildlife Serv-ice began reintroducing them to parts of their original range in New Mexico and Arizona in 1998.

New Mexico has complaints

about the way the programme is managed, and in 2015 it refused to issue a permit to Fish and Wild-life to release more of predators.

The agency decided to release them anyway, citing an urgent need to expand the wild population to prevent inbreed-ing. New Mexico officials went to court, and a judge temporar-ily blocked further releases last year while dispute is resolved.

The government appealed. The 10th Circuit says New

Mexico failed to show that the state would suffer irreparable harm if more wolves were released — a requirement for such an order.

“Irreparable harm comes to ranchers and people of New Mex-ico,” said Caren Cowan, executive director of New Mexico Cattle Growers Association. “It saddens me to think the court doesn’t understand how much harm is coming to our ranching families and their livelihood,” she said.

Seattle

AP

Soggy Seattle has broken another rainfall record, and Portland is inching closer

to smashing its own record.Seattle measured 44.7

inches (114 cms) of rain between October and April, making it wettest such period since records began in 1895, National Weather Service in Seattle said.

It marks second year in the row the city has topped historic rainfall record for that period.

With several days left to go this month, this year’s record will likely be padded some more, said Mike McFarland, a meteorologist with service in Seattle.

“This has been a terrible winter. It was just wet. There’s no way around that,” he said yesterday. While many Seat-tleites have grumbled about the relentless rain, longtime resident Meghan Shepard revels in it.

“It’s soothing. I like the col-our of the sky when it rains. It’s this beautiful green. I like being out there,” said the retired 77-year-old. She has lived all over the US, but prefers the rainy Northwest.

Portland residents are weathering a winter that’s sim-ilarly bleak.

The National Weather Serv-ice has measured 45.5 inches (116 cms) of rain at Portland Interna-tional Airport since October 1,

making it second-wettest winter in the city in more than 75 years of record-keeping.

The city has also had most days of rain ever, with 145 days of the wet stuff since October 1, said Colby Neuman, a meteor-ologist for the agency in Portland. This year’s February was also wettest on record with 10.356 inches (26 cms) of rain.

Those are numbers Olga Vargas can vouch for. The native of Puerto Rico moved to Portland four years ago and said typically rainy winters didn’t bother her much — until this year. Mudslides earlier in the winter cut off roads that she uses for her morning commute, she said.

Firefighters rescue woman from crane in Toronto

US Air Force tests unarmed missile

Court removes obstacle to release wolves in New Mexico

Seattle breaks rainfall record

Caracas

AFP

An outbreak of violence between rival gangs at a prison in eastern Vene-

zuela has left 12 dead and 11 injured, the government said yesterday.

A spokesman for the min-istry of penitentiary affairs, who gave the toll of dead and wounded, said nine of those killed died of gunshot wounds.

The deadly clashes erupted in the eastern city of Barcelona at Jose Antonio Anzoategui prison, considered one of coun-try’s most violent.

The prison had been undergoing reforms aimed in part at disarming inmates but “there are still arms there and there are prisoners who rebelled,” the ministry spokes-man said.

“At this moment, an inves-tigation is underway, and those responsible will be brought before the courts.”

Estimates of country’s prison population range from nearly 55,000 to 88,000, many of them in overcrowded jails awaiting prosecution. The gov-ernment provides no official f i g u r e s o n i n m a t e populations.

Venezuela threatens to exit OAS 12 dead and 11 injured in prison violence

Tough talk

Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez said she had been instructed by President Nicolas Maduro to initiate country’s withdrawal from the Washington-based organisation if the region’s foreign ministers hold a meeting on country’s crisis without his administration’s backing.

19THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017 AMERICAS

Economic growth

The move comes as part of Trump’s effort to reverse a slew of environmental protections ushered in by former President Barack Obama that he said were hobbling economic growth.

Employees destroy replica toys, seized in various illegal markets for their similarities to real firearms which did not comply with the Official Mexican Standard, in Mexico City, Mexico, yesterday.

Washington

Reuters

US President Donald Trump signed an executive order yesterday to iden-t i fy nat ional

monuments that can be rescinded or resized - part of a broader push to open up more federal lands to drilling, min-ing and other development.

The move comes as part of Trump’s effort to reverse a slew of environmental protections ushered in by former President Barack Obama that he said were hobbling economic growth - an agenda that is cheering industry but enraging conservationists.

Trump signed the order at Interior Department in Wash-ington, saying his predecessors’ use of 1906 Antiquities Act to create monuments marked an “egregious abuse of federal power.” He said the order would give “power back to the states” to decide what areas of land should be protected and which should remain open for development.

The monuments covered by the review will range from the Grand Staircase created by President Bill Clinton in 1996 to the Bears Ears created by Pres-ident Barack Obama in December 2016, both in Utah.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told reporters that Trump’s order would require him to con-duct review of around 30 national monuments created over past two decades, and rec-ommend which designations should be lifted or altered.

Zinke said he would seek local feedback before making his recommendations, and added any move by Trump to ultimately reverse a monument

designation could be tricky. “It is untested, as you know, whether the president can do that,” Zinke said.

President Woodrow Wilson reduced the size of Washington state’s Mount Olympus National Monument in 1915, arguing there was an urgent need for timber at the time, one of the few examples of the size of national monuments being changed.

Zinke will review the Bears Ears monument first, he said, and will make a recommendation to

the president in 45 days.Obama’s administration cre-

ated the Bears Ears monument in the final days of his administra-tion, arguing that it would protect the cultural legacy of Native American tribes and preserve “ s c e n i c a n d h i s t o r i c landscapes.”

But Utah’s governor and the state’s congressional delegation opposed the designation, saying it went against the wishes of cit-izens eager for development.

Utah Governor Gary Herbert,

and Senators Mike Lee and Orin Hatch stood beside Trump as he signed the order.

The Bears Ears area lies near where EOG Resources — a Texas-based company — had been approved to drill.

Conservation and tribal groups slammed the order.

“With this review, the Trump Administration is walking into a legal, political and moral mine-field,” said Kate Kelly, public lands director for the Center for American Progress.

Washington

Reuters

US President Donald Trump yes-terday attacked a federal judge’s ruling that blocked his executive order seeking to withhold funds from “sanctuary cities” for illegal immigrants, vowing to appeal it to the US Supreme Court.

The ruling by US District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco was latest blow to Trump’s efforts to toughen immigration enforce-ment. Federal courts have also blocked his two travel bans on cit-izens of mostly Muslim nations.

“First the Ninth Circuit rules against the ban & now it hits again on sanctuary cities-both ridicu-lous rulings. See you in the Supreme Court!” Trump said in a tweet, referring to the San Fran-cisco-based federal appeals court and its judicial district.

Trump administration has targeted sanctuary cities, which generally offer safe harbour to illegal immigrants and often do not use municipal funds or resources to advance the enforce-ment of federal immigration laws.

Critics say authorities endan-ger public safety when they decline to hand over for deportation ille-gal immigrants arrested for crimes, while supporters argue that enlist-ing police cooperation to round up immigrants for removal under-mines trust in local police, particularly among Latinos.

Washington

AFP

The Trump administration pledged yesterday to slash corporate rates to 15 per-

cent as it prepared to unveil a long-awaited reform it touts as the “biggest tax cut” in US history.

But the plan could face stiff opposition in Congress, includ-ing from some Republicans, with lawmakers sharply divided over the prospect of fueling already-rising deficits.

“This is going to be the

biggest tax cut and the largest tax reform in the history of our country,” Treasury Secretary Ste-ven Mnuchin said at a discussion about the proposal.

Slashing taxes on income and business was a key part of Donald Trump’s election platform, and the Republican billionaire is seeking to deliver on that pledge as his presidency nears the symbolic 100-day mark this weekend.

Mnuchin will outline details of the plan at the White House, but confirmed press reports that “the business tax is going to be 15 percent.”

He said the administration hopes to push the reform through the Republican-controlled Con-gress as quickly as possible, but declined to set a deadline.

Trump had initially hoped to drive through tax reform before the summer, but that ambition evaporated amid a failed push to repeal Barack Obama’s signa-ture health care law.

“We’re working hard to get it done quickly,” Mnuchin said. “This is part of his big impact for the first 100 days.”

“We have fundamental agreement on what we’re trying

to do and the details of tax reform are still to be worked out.”

The tax plan’s impact on the deficit and debt will be key to winning backing on Capitol Hill.

House Speaker Paul Ryan hailed the reform, even though Mnuchin signalled it would not include a tax on imports, some-thing Ryan had lobbied for among fellow Republicans.

The party had been drafting plans for the so-called border adjustment tax for months.

Nevertheless Ryan praised the new plan as “progress.”

“It’s basically along exactly the same lines that we want to go,” he told reporters. The over-haul is likely to face stiff opposition from Democrats.

“I can tell you this: If the pres-ident’s plan is to give a massive tax break to very wealthy in this coun-try, a plan that will mostly benefit people and businesses like Presi-dent Trump’s, that won’t pass muster with we Democrats,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor.

He also warned that a plan that shrinks tax revenues would “explode the deficit.”

Analysts have said cutting top marginal corporate tax rate by 20 percentage points could add a whopping $2trillion or more to deficit over a decade.

The administration has said its tax cuts will spur growth — its goal is three percent — thus bringing in tax revenues to make up differ-ence, a calculation known as “dynamic scoring” which the Trump administration supports.

“The difference between 1.6 percent, 1.8 percent GDP and three percent is staggering,” Mnuchin said. “It’s trillions of dollars of rev-enues. It’s tons of jobs.”

Winnipeg, Manitoba

Reuters

Canadian police said yes-terday they are investigating whether a

beating captured on video, reported to have been distrib-uted through social networking site Facebook Inc, may be con-nected to a young woman’s murder.

Facebook did not immedi-ately respond to a request for comment. The video is the lat-est example of Facebook being used to document violent crimes, a pattern that has led the company to re-evaluate some of its policies.

Thailand police yesterday said they would consider how to quickly remove inappropri-ate online content after a man broadcast himself killing his 11-month-old daughter on Facebook.

Last week, the company said it was reviewing how it monitored violent footage after a posting of a fatal shooting in Cleveland, Ohio was visible for two hours.

The Canadian video showed someone kicking a woman in the face while a second person held back her arm from

defending herself, according to Winnipeg Free Press, and was shared through Facebook, according to several media reports.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Sergeant. Paul Manaigre said it may have been shared directly between peo-ple on Facebook, not posted for public viewing.

RCMP are reviewing the video to determine whether it is linked to a weekend murder at Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba, Manaigre told reporters.

“To me, the video is shock-ing, that someone can stand there and watch it and not assist,” Manaigre said.

Those who film crimes without aiding a victim could be charged in Canada with being an accessory, but the act of posting such videos is not illegal, he said.

Police have charged two girls, ages 16 and 17, with the second-degree murder of a 19-year-old woman in Sag-keeng, an aboriginal community 100 km northeast of Winnipeg.

Sagkeeng Chief Derrick Henderson could not be imme-diately reached for comment.

Washington

Reuters

Former US President George H.W. Bush has recovered from pneumonia but will

remain in a Houston-area med-ical center until the end of the week while he is treated for chronic bronchitis, the hospital said yesterday.

Bush, 92, was admitted to

Houston Methodist Hospital on April 14 for a cough that was later diagnosed as a mild case of pneumonia. The hospital said earlier this week he would remain there another few days.

“While President Bush has recovered from pneumonia, he continues to deal with effects of chronic bronchitis, which is a condition more prevalent with age,” the hospital said in a writ-

ten statement.The hospital said staff there

would continue to monitor Bush and expected to discharge him by the end of the week.

Bush, who served in the White House from 1989 to 1993, spent more than two weeks at Houston Methodist in January, much of it in the intensive care unit, during a bout of pneumonia.

Trump order allows resizing of monuments

Trump slams court ruling on ‘sanctuary cities’

US President vows to slash corporate tax to 15%

Canadian cops probe Facebook beating video in murder case

Brasilia

Reuters

INDIGENOUS people and police clashed in Brazil’s cap-ital city yesterday, as officers fired rubber bullets and tear gas while tribe members shot arrows in return during a pro-test against farmers’ e n c r o a c h m e n t o n reservations.

The demonstration was peaceful until police blocked some of the indigenous peo-ple, their bodies painted and wearing colourful head-dresses, from climbing a ramp that led into congressional building. The clashes ended around dusk. Some indige-nous people suffered light injuries.

Dozens of indigenous people are killed each year in Brazil in fights with farmers and ranchers over land, often in the relatively lawless Ama-zon region, where hired gunmen have been used to push the indigenous off resource-rich reserves.

Sonia Guajajara, a coor-dinator for the march, said some 4,000 indigenous peo-ple and supporters took part in the protest.

Protest over land rights turns violent in Brazil

Former president Bush still in hospital

US President Donald Trump signs an executive order to review the Antiquities Act at the US Department of Interior in Washington, DC, yesterday.

Protecting originals

20 THURSDAY 27 APRIL 2017HOME

ONLINE CHART BUSTwww.thepeninsulaqatar.com

FAJRSHOROOK

03.40 am

05.01 am

ZUHRASR

11.32 am

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MAGHRIBISHA

06.04 pm

07.34 pm

PRAYER TIMINGS

HIGH TIDE 05:00 - 18:00 LOW TIDE 11:15

Hot daytime with slight dust at

places and some clouds.

WEATHER TODAY

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28oC 38oC

Raynald C Rivera The Peninsula

Women are currently at the forefront of the bur-g e o n i n g

Middle Eastern arts and cul-ture landscape, said organisers of “Currents”, an all-female exhibition which opened on Tuesday at W Doha’s Art 29.

In its Doha debut, Emer-geast-a pioneering online art gallery exclusively for Middle Eastern artists and art collec-tors-presents 32 artworks by eight female artists.

“We have 75 artists, but we are exhibiting in Doha eight female artists for the first time. We brought them together to highlight the status quo of our art landscape right now - how women are at the forefront of the development of arts and culture scene,” Dima Abdul Kader, Emergeast co-founder, told The Peninsula at the open-ing night attended by dozens of Doha’s art enthusiasts.

From Dubai and Abu Dhabi to Sharjah and Doha, women have carved their own niche in the region’s art and culture scene, playing crucial role in its development and the exhibition is a gesture of sup-port for them, added Dima.

Established in 2014 as the first online gallery to support emerging Middle Eastern art-ists and provide aspiring

collectors art at an affordable price, Emergeast serves as an important platform to make the artists accessible interna-tionally which is otherwise challenging in a traditional art market paradigm.

“There are many emerging artists in the region, that’s why there can never be enough enti-ties or foundations to support them all. For this reason, we decided to launch an online gal-lery to be able to bring on artists and not be limited to the four walls of the gallery,” said co-founder Nikki Meftah.

The exhibition features works by Ghada Al Muham-medi, Lulu M, PegahLari, Rabee Baghshani, Roxana Manoucheri, Shadi Talaei, Per-ryhan El Ashmawi and Bouthayna Al Muftah in vary-ing forms and mediums from traditional forms to new media, including silk screen, resin on canvas, digital collage

and mixed media on paper. The highlight of the show

is a new series by Bouthayna Al Muftah-one of the fast ris-ing Qatari artists.

Titled “Yeebhom” (Bring them back), the eight-piece never-before-seen collection derives inspiration from tra-ditional Qatari song Toub Toub Ya Bahar! sung by women along the shore waiting for safe return of their loved ones from pearl diving.

“The series is about women and how they sing these songs as their husbands, sons and brothers used to go out for pearl diving, not knowing who will be coming back. They sing pas-sionately to sea demanding it to keep its waters calm, to bring them home safely,” said Bouthayna. The exhibition is open to the public from 9am to 7pm every day until May 20 at the at Art 29 at W Doha Hotel and Residences.

All-women exhibition showcases 32 artworks

Visitors looking at the art works at the Currents exhibition.

The Peninsula

Qatar Airways Cargo will commence its fourth Pharma Express freighter service operating from Basel, effec-tive May 8. The additional freighter brings total

Pharma Express flights to 10 each week, providing dedi-cated uplift for pharmaceuticals and healthcare products.The award-winning cargo carrier recently increased its Pharma Express flights from both Basel and Brussels in February this year.

Ulrich Ogiermann, Chief Officer Cargo said, “There is a growing demand worldwide for safe and reliable trans-portation of pharmaceuticals. By increasing capacity from Basel, the hub of Swiss pharmaceutical industry, we are able to provide increased uplift to our customers as well as a seamless cool-chain for pharmaceutical exports out of Basel through our GDP-compliant hub in Doha. Our glo-bal customers benefit from additional capacity to import medicines and healthcare products from major pharma-ceutical hub to markets where they are required swiftly, via Qatar Airways scheduled or charter services.”

Qatar Airways Cargo pioneered innovative and indus-try-leading Pharma Express flights in 2015, which currently operate from Brussels, Basel, Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad. The routes are served by Airbus A330 freighter aircraft, offering 65 to 68 tonnes of capacity each way. A ded-icated hub operations team monitors climate-control on all temperature-sensitive shipments to ensure temperature-controlled process is seamless. Qatar Airways also engages in regular external audits by shippers and forwarders to main-tain highest standards of compliance and service quality.

Qatar Airways Cargo has invested continuously in prod-uct development since introduction of QR Pharma solution. QR Pharma, specialised air freight solution for time and tem-perature-sensitive pharmaceuticals and healthcare products, is airline’s fastest growing product. The product offers active and passive transportation for customers. Both solutions have a high loading and handling priority, including late cut-off times and prioritised destination delivery for QR Pharma shipments. As required by product specifications, pharma-ceutical shipments are stored, transported and handled under strict monitored conditions in a climate-controlled environ-ment, during every stage of transportation.

QA Cargo to commence fourth Pharma Express flight from Basel