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Volume 23 | Number 7481 | 2 RiyalsFriday 30 March 2018 | 13 Rajab I 1439 www.thepeninsula.qa

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QP, partners win 4 exploration blocks offshore BrazilTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Qatar Petroleum has won exploration rights in four offshore blocks in Brazil, as part of two bidding consortia.

The winning bids were announced by Brazil ’s N a t i o n a l A g e n c y o f Petroleum, Natural Gas, and Biofuels (ANP) at a public bidding session held yes-terday in Rio de Janeiro. Competing bids were sub-mitted to the ANP and the winners were announced throughout the course of public session.

We are pleased with the outcome of the bid round, which has enabled an expansion of our footprint in Brazil, in one of the most pro-spective basins in the world. This successful result is the second in six months, and con-stitutes an important achievement in executing our strategy of creating a large scale, value-adding interna-tional portfolio, while pursuing Latin America as an important core area for Qatar Petroleum,” said Saad Sherida Al Kaabi, the President & CEO of Qatar Petroleum.

“I would like to take this opportunity to thank

the Brazilian authorities for promoting a transparent and efficient process, and our con-sortia partners Petrobras and ExxonMobil for excellent col-laboration on this opportunity. We look forward to working with our partners to create long-term, sustainable eco-nomic value for the project stakeholders,” Al Kaabi concluded.

The exploration blocks were offered as part of the Brazil Exploration Bid Round 15, which covered 70 blocks across a wide range of geo-logical basins of which the key areas of interest to QP were the proven, prolific Santos and Campos basins.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

Saad Sherida Al Kaabi, the President and CEO of Qatar Petroleum.

Qatar Airways and Formula E mark partnership with head-to-head raceTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Qatar Airways yesterday released a breathtaking exclusive video of a head-to-head race between the Formula E Spark SRT-01E race car and the airline’s latest generation Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A350 aircraft, at the airline’s home and hub, Hamad International Airport (HIA), to celebrate its partnership with the electric street racing series.

The head-to-head race, showcased in the video to the amazement of fans of the World’s Best Airline around the globe, first shows a race between the state-of-the-art Airbus A350 upon takeoff alongside the latest-gen-eration electronic Forumla E series race car. This is swiftly fol-lowed by a second spectacular race as a Boeing 787 Dreamliner touches down at HIA, which was

just last week ranked the fifth Best Airport in the World by the inter-national Skytrax World Airport Awards 2018.

Qatar Airways Group Chief Executive, Akbar Al Baker, said: “Qatar Airways strives to always be ahead of the curve when it comes to its environmental cre-dentials and flying one of the most modern fleets in the sky. For our sporting partnerships, this is as important to us when represented as a sponsor, which is why we have chosen the future of motor racing and Formula E with their latest environmentally friendly technology, which they combine into this exciting sport. We trust that our loyal pas-sengers and fans of Formula E around the world will enjoy watching this race, in antici-pation of finding out exactly who will win this thrilling event.”

Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Formula-E, Alejandro Agag, said: “It is great to be working with a partner who shares our values in sustaina-bility, and Qatar Airways is a global brand who is leading this

charge. This breathtaking video demonstrates our shared passion to strive for excellence. Formula E races take place in the heart of some of the world’s greatest cities, such as Paris and New York, with the support

of Qatar Airways to help us in going places together.”

Each of the exciting races were driven with Formula E and DRAGON driver Jerome D’Ambrosio, during which the first race commenced with a fixed start line and ended with the aircraft taking off into the skies above the State of Qatar.

Earlier this year Qatar Airways and Formula E announced the enhancement of their partnership at a press con-ference held in Doha, where Qatar Airways was named as the Official Title Sponsor of both the Paris E-Prix taking place in April and the New York City E-Prix which will take place in July, as well as naming Qatar Airways as the Official Airline for both the Rome and Berlin races taking place in April and May of this year consecutively.

No plans to move airbase from Qatar: US General QNA

DOHA: There are no plans to move the US airbase from the State of Qatar, Commander of US Central Command Gen Joseph Votel said.

“We have no plans to depart the airbase in Qatar and I am aware of some of these reports, I don’t know where they come from,” Gen. Votel said.

He expressed thanks to the State of Qatar for sup-porting the efforts of the international coalition against terrorism, pointing out that US is looking forward to continue rela-tionship with Qatar.

Gen Votel stressed that Qatar has been a good partner to the US in the region, hoping that some of the tensions are addressed and they will not have an impact on security.

He added that the US continues its partnership with Qatar in order to protect the region and its stability. The US Commander also stressed that Turkey is a major supporter of the Inter-national Coalition’s opera-tions against terrorism, denying closing Incirlik Airbase in Turkey.

He said that Incirlik Airbase supports them in the war against ISIS and that the US will continue operations from there.

Regarding the Turkish operations in the north of Syria, he said that this issue is under discussion between the US and Turkish govern-ments and that discussions are continuing at the diplo-matic level.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

MoI: Don’t send work-related information via social mediaSANAULLAH ATAULLAH THE PENINSULA

DOHA: The Ministry of Interior has warned against sending work-related information through social media by government employees.

It is risky to send work related information through social media, especially “WhatsApp” by staff and employees in government departments, said Brigadier Jamal Al Kaabi, Director of the Criminal Invest igat ion Department.

Al Kaabi was speaking in a conference on law of combating cybercrime organised by the Ministry of Interior yesterday.

He urged media and social media influencers to spread awareness about the dangers of using social networks at work, and to raise awareness among

public about the dangers of these networks. He advised public not to send or dissem-inate any personal information, photos or films through social media and to monitor children dealing with these media networks.

Al Kaabi said that although it is easy to reach criminals in most cases, many of these crimes are perpetrated outside the country which creates dif-ficulty in tracking them.

Al Kaabi added that these crimes can be checked by raising awareness of the dangers, impact of these crimes and regulations about cyber crimes.

This conference comes within the Ministry of Interior’s keenness to maintain the security and safety of the com-munity and to ensure the safe use of the Internet.

He pointed out that

traditional crimes were easy to deal with, but electronic crime, that also includes extortion, is one of the most serious crimes in modern times that requires a more efforts to curb them. He added that conventional crime has declined comparing to cyber crime, describing cyber crimes as dangerous because of its psy-chological repercussions on the victim.

Captain Engineer Medawi Saeed Al Qahtani, head of the Department of Economic and Electronic Crimes Department at Criminal Investigation Department, stressed on the need to educate the public and encourage them not to publish their personal information and not to over-portray their daily life events or to use social media networks at work.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

PM attends Lekhwiya military paradeQNA

DOHA: Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani yesterday attended a military parade featuring all the tasks and duties of Lekhwiya force as well as a practical imple-mentation of the graduates of a number of major training courses that Lekhwiya recently held.

The parade, which took place at Lekhwiya force camp, started with infantry entourage carried out by participants in the training course for infantry and weapons trainers as well as the founda-tional course of new entrants, then the descent of force per-sonnel from the tower using ropes, and the performance of a combat skills show, martial arts and a special scenario for the release of hostages. The parade also included a variety of acted out operations for the protection of dignitaries and riot control.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 2The military parade by Lekhwiya at the Lekhwiya force camp, yesterday.

The winning bids were announced by Brazil’s National Agency of Petroleum, Natural Gas, and Biofuels (ANP) at a public bidding session held yesterday in Rio de Janeiro.

The video released by Qatar Airways.

02 FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018HOME

A rare treat for musicophiles tonight at Katara RAYNALD C RIVERA THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra has a rare treat for musicophiles tonight at Katara Opera House playing a profusion of masterpieces by 10 of the best European composers in “A Tour of Europe” concert.

Under the baton of maestro Yordan Kamdzhalov, the 101-piece orchestra will take the audience on an epic journey across the continent through the music of Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Richard Wagner, Johann Strauss Jr., Manuel De Falla, Bedřich Smetana, Giuseppe Verdi, Dimitar Nenov, Franz Liszt, Georges Enesco and Igor Stravinsky.

The concert commences with Prelude from Te Deum by French composer Char-pentier and culminates with Stravinsky’s Suite from The Firebird.

Completing the rich repertoire are Wagner’s Prelude to Act I from Die

Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Strauss’ Overture to Die Fledermaus, De Falla’s Ritual Firedance, Smetana’s Vltava (The Moldau), Verdi’s Overture to La forza del destino, Nenov’s Toccata, Liszt’s Les preludes, and Enesco’s Rumanian Rhapsody.

Hailed as “a philosopher among con-ductors,” Bulgarian conductor Kam-dzhalov has a stellar international career working with more than 50 orchestras around the world and numerous acco-lades under his belt including the most prestigious German music prize Echo Klassik for Concerto Recording of the Year, Best Opera Conductor of the Year by Deutschlandradio in and Musician of the Year by The Bulgarian National Radio, to name a few. In 2014, NASA and the International Astronomical Union named a planetary body after him.

Sponsored by the Bulgarian Embassy in Qatar, the concert is held to mark Europe Day, an annual celebration of

peace and unity in Europe. There are two separate designations of Europe Day: May 5 for the Council of Europe and May 9 for the European Union.

The Council of Europe’s day reflects its own establishment in 1949, while the European Union’s day is also known as Schuman Day and celebrates the historical declaration by French foreign minister Robert Schuman in 1950.

Concert-goers can look forward to Qatar Philharmonic’s next concert on April 13 featuring performances by the winners of the first-ever Qatar National Music Competition. With Elias Grandy as conductor, this concert will feature young musicians Prama Yudhistra and Mia Park-Torchinsky on piano and Tricia Enlin Ng on violin

More upcoming shows slated for this season are Elgar’s Enigma Variations on April 28, Brahms’ Second Symphony on May 5, Brahms’ Violin Concerto on May 9, and Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 on May 14.

Concert tickets are available at http://qatarphilharmonicorchestra.org/concerts/purchase_tickets.

Yordan Kamdzhalov.

Festival of healthy food opens at Al Mazrouha Farmers’ MarketTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: A two-day festival of healthy food under a theme of ‘conscious youth for better health’ was opened at farmers’ market Al Mazrouha, Umm Salal yesterday.

The festival is being organised by the Ministry of Municipality and Environment, represented by the Department of Agriculture Affairs in cooperation with the Com-munity College of Qatar (CCQ).

Many students from CCQ showcased their innovative projects on healthy food. Healthy food meals are being distributed to visitors, said the Ministry in a statement.

Many individuals, including women and housewives, partici-pated in the festival. The visitors were briefed on innovative ideas for healthy diets with an emphasis on promoting a healthy food

culture, and raising public awareness about healthy nutrition.

The festival aims at educating people about proper nutrition and healthy food free of chemicals, organic products and their ben-efits. The event aims at creating awareness among people about healthy foods free from chemical calling consumers to select healthy food items, said Yousef Al Khu-laifi, Director of Agricultural Affairs Department at the Ministry.

He said that more students

participated to the festival this year making if special compared to the previous year.

The purpose of the festival is to educate people about healthy food and to encourage farmers to produce organic agricultural products, said Al Kulaifi.

He said that the festival is being held in second year in a row with intention to expand in coming years, adding that plans are afoot to hold healthy food fes-tival in all farmers’ markets

Community College of Qatar participated the festival to educate students about basics of the nutrition and healthy foods to make them healthy and fit , said Dr Majid Ibrahim, Professor of Nutrition at the College.

He said that the students pre-pared projects based on their innovative ideas about healthy foods and diets.

Yousef Al Khulaifi (third left), Director of Agricultural Affairs Department and Abdul Rahman Al Sulaiti (second left), General Supervisor, Farmers’ Markets, at a stall in the Healthy Food Festival at Al Mazrouha Farmers’ Market, yesterday.

Qatar, Oman discuss ways to boost education tiesQNA

DOHA: An educational dele-gation from Sultanate of Oman discussed with officials from the Ministry of Education and Higher Education the electronic appli-cations in the education field and the importance of both parties to benefit from modern technol-ogies in these sectors.

The delegation presented the experience of Oman’s Ministry of Education in the applications related to job shifting, employment and electronic exams for teachers and school administrators.

The delegation also spoke about the ministry’s experience in employment secondment,

contracting in educational entities, and other matters such as marking and electronic surveys.

Director of the Department of Services at the Ministry of Education and Higher Education, Mohamed Malfi Al Hajri, said the Omani delegation’s visit to Qatar comes within the educational cooperation between both coun-tries, especially that both edu-cation ministries are interested in electronic applications in the educational field. He added that the visit is also an opportunity to be briefed on their experience in this field and to benefit from the

best experiences of countries that are developed in the edu-cation field.

He added that the Omani delegation explained their coun-try’s developed expertise in employment, human resources, electronic education and methods to move teachers between cities.

For his part, Director-General of the Directorate-General of Administrative Affairs at the Omani Ministry of Edu-cation, Khalfan bin Abdullah Al Ghaithi, said both sides discussed some of the technical systems used in the directorate on the

internal and external exchange program for teachers and fac-ulty-related functions such as the applied electronic employment program, in addition to some systems related to administrative issues and electronic exams held of teachers through presenting the components of Oman’s e-portal.

He added that the delegation was also introduced to some of the electronic systems used by Qatar’s ministry, noting that the visit achieved great mutual benefit through the exchange of ideas and experiences in the mentioned areas.

Lekhwiya force personnel attending a parade at Lekhwiya force camp as well as a practical implementation of the graduates of a number of major training courses that Lekhwiya recently held. Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani attended the parade.

The delegation presented the experience of Oman’s Ministry of Education in the applications related to job shifting, employment and electronic exams for teachers and school administrators.

Health Ministry intensifies drive on glaucoma awarenessQNA

DOHA: The Ministry of Public Health, in cooperation with Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) and Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC) organized a number of activ-ities during the World Glaucoma Week 2018 (WGW), which was held under the theme “Go Get Your Eyes Tested for Glaucoma, Save Your Sight”.

The ministry’s Director of Health Promotion and Non-communicable Diseases, Dr. Sheikha Al Anoud bint Mohammed Al Thani, said that WGW is held annually to raise awareness among community members about eye diseases that cause blindness, especially glaucoma. She said Qatar’s keen attention to holding awareness-raising activities stems from the fact that glaucoma is the first cause of blindness among the country’s population over the age of 50.

The Head of Non Commu-nicable Diseases Department, Dr Khuloud Al Ateeq Al Mutawa, stressed the impor-tance of early detection, which plays a key role in reducing the impact on visual ability and preventing the development of the disease to the stage of visual disability or blindness, noting that many people with glaucoma do not notice it until the disease develops to reach advanced stages and sight sig-nificantly and permanently deteriorates.

The festival aims at educating people about proper nutrition and healthy food free of chemicals, organic products and their benefits.

Prime Minister attends Lekhwiya military paradeCONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

The military parade, in which trainees from the fraternal State of Kuwait took part, demonstrated the readiness of force personnel and the skills they obtained through constant training. In its training programs, Lekhwiya is keen to design them according to scientific basis that guar-antees that the training is related to the surroundings. It also seeks to provide the best levels of internal and external training, achieve all the tasks and duties, in addition to executing, fol-lowing up on and assessing all the courses and programs at the highest level of proficiency and efficiency.

HE Public Security Director-General, Staff Major General Saad bin Jassim Al Khulaifi, attended the parade along with Lekhwiya group leaders, a number of Ministry of Interior department directors, representatives of the Qatari armed forces and the assistant military attache at the embassy of the fraternal State of Kuwait to the State of Qatar.

03FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018 HOME

QU showcases research initiatives at ARC ’18THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Qatar University (QU) participated in the Qatar Foun-dation Annual Research Conference (ARC ’18), which was held on March 19 and 20 at the Qatar National Convention Center (QNCC), under the theme “Research and Development: Focusing on Priorities and Deliv-ering Impact”.

QU VP for Research and Graduate Studies, Prof Mariam Al Maadeed, gave a presentation on QU’s innovative role in the field of sciences and technology and in promoting advanced research in line with the goals of Qatar National Vision 2030.

She said: “We have several initiatives in the field of research such as identifying research pri-orities based on existing QU research assets and compe-tencies, providing support and enhancing quality of research approaches and outputs of research in humanities and social sciences to maximize their impact on Qatar, and introducing new high-quality graduate programs”.

Additionally, a number of

faculty and researchers from QU presented papers at the con-ference. They were Research Associate at QU College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) Kira Schipper, Post-Doctoral Researcher at VP Office for Research and Graduate Studies (VPRGS) Dr Maan Rachid, Assistant Research Professor at QU College of Engineering (CENG) Dr Abdullatif Shikfa, research assistants at VPRGS Naram Mhaisen, Hassan Tariq and Dr Hamza Djelouat, Senior Researcher at CENG Mohamed Kharbeche, Associate Professor of Architecture at CENG Dr Hatem Ibrahim, Dr Ashraf Galal, Research Professor at Social and Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI) Dr Salma Mawfek Khaled, and SESRI Researcher Mohammad Al Ansari.

An exhibition, on the sideline of the event, featured booths presented by local and

international institutions. QU representatives were on hand at the QU booth to brief the large number of local and interna-tional delegates and other vis-itors on the organisation’s vision and mission, degree programs, research, scholarships and

academic grants, accreditation, and its campus facilities and resources.

Additionally, Qatar Uni-versity researchers presented posters on various topics such as “A high Carbohydrate diet increased adiposity and

compromised vasodilation in rats”, “Enhanced structural and functional analyses of zebrafish cardiovascular systems”, and “Initial Results from a Study on Greywater Reuse: Economic Benefits and Public Opinions”.

QU VP for Research and Graduate Studies, Prof Mariam Al Maadeed giving a presentation at the ARC ’18.

KPMG honoured as CSR Leader by Qatar CSR ReportTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Qatar University (QU) hosted a ceremony to launch the 6th edition of Qatar CSR Report and the second CSR exhibition under the theme “Citi-zenship” on March 26. During the ceremony, KPMG was honoured as CSR Leader in recognition of its role in the development of CSR in Qatar, especially in the education sector and its commitment to the UN Global Compact’s 10 principles.

The ceremony was attended by Minister of Economy and Commerce, H E Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani, QU President Dr Hassan Al Derham, the Ambassadors of Spain, India and Korea, in addition to business and community leaders.

Ahmed Abu Sharkh, Country Senior Partner, rep-resented KPMG in the ceremony and received the CSR leadership Award from QU President. “We are proud to receive this prestigious award from Qatar University. Being responsible corporate citizens is at the heart of what we do and we are committed to giving back to society, in recognition of the oppor-tunities and support we have experienced in Qatar over the past 40 years,” said Abu Sharkh. “As part of our CSR efforts, we believe in developing local talent and have entered into agreements with some of the country’s biggest businesses to provide val-uable work experience for many young Qatari’s who

are keen to gain exposure in the private sector and broaden their understanding of International organ-izations. We have also employed dozens of interns and graduates each year from local universities and our commitment to their development includes ongoing technical training and providing hands-on experience, working on projects under the guidance and mentorship of our professional staff,” he said.

Ahmed Abu Sharkh receiving the award.

QNA

DOHA: A training course organised by Qatar News Agency (QNA) on “Field Journalism Investigation” concluded Thursday at QNA headquarters.

About 20 journalists from QNA and various media departments in the country participated in the five-day course.

QNA Director General Youssef Ibrahim Al Malki distributed certificates to the participants.

The training course, which was addressed by the media advisory at QNA Khalid Abdullah Zeyara, included several topics that d e a l t w i t h p r e s s investigation.

The course also provided information on the sources of journalism investigation which depends on the dif-ferent views of the journalist and his or others experi-ences, the use of various research, reports, leaflets and documents and the writing of the investigative report.

The course comes as an implementation of an Emiri Decision that entrusted QNA with holding training courses for Qatari jour-nalists in order to develop their capacities.

QNA holds training on ‘Field Journalism Investigation’

The dignitaries at the seminar on anti-cybercrime law held at the Department of Criminal Investigation, yesterday. PIC: BAHER AMIN / THE PENINSULA

A number of faculty and researchers from QU presented papers at the conference.

MoI warns against sending work-related info via social mediaCONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

The Assistant professor of law at Ahmed bin Mohammed Military College Dr Anwar Sidqi Al Moussada, called on all sectors of the society to get aware about the law on com-bating cyber crimes, so that everyone is fully aware of the nature of these crimes and the types and penalties of these acts, pointing out that igno-rance of law does not exempt from punishment.

Dr Al Moussada explained that the penalties in the elec-tronic crimes act are very

strict. He said that the pen-alties stipulated in law may reach up to three years imprisonment and a fine of QR 500,000 stressing that there are cases where the penalty has been increased.

Mohammed Abu Zeid from Criminal Invest igat ion Department alerted about frauds and their types on social networking sites.

He added cyber criminals use many methods to perpe-trate crimes and phishing is one of the most serious way o f s t e a l i n g p r i v a t e information.

Nepal’s FM, Qatar’s envoy discuss ties

Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, Pradeep Gyawali, with the State of Qatar’s Ambassador to Nepal, H E Yusuf bin Mohamed Al Hail. During the meeting, they discussed bilateral relations between the two countries, means of boosting and developing them in addition to matters of mutual interest.

Deputy PM, Uganda Minister discuss tiesQNA

DOHA: Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister H E Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani met yesterday with Minister of Presidency in the Republic of Uganda, Esther Mbulakubuza Mbayo, who is currently visiting Doha.

The meeting dealt with bilateral relations and means to develop and promote them in addition to a number of regional and international issues of common concern.

Al Attiyah, Hoke explore topics of interest

QNA

DOHA: Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Defence Affairs H E Dr Khalid bin Mohammed Al Attiyah met with Chief Exec-utive Officer (CEO) of Airbus Defence and Space Dirk Hoke. Discussions during the meeting dealt with a number of topics and projects of mutual interest.

QP, partners win 4 exploration blocks offshore Brazil

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1Qatar Petroleum won the explo-

ration rights for blocks 789 and 753 in the Campos basin as part of a con-sortium comprising affiliates of Exx-onMobil (Operator with a 40 percent interest), Petrobras (30 percent interest), and Qatar Petroleum (30 percent interest).

Qatar Petroleum also won the exploration rights for blocks 536 and 647 in the Santos basin as part of a consortium comprising affiliates of ExxonMobil (Operator with a 64 percent interest), and Qatar Petroleum (36 percent interest).

The relevant legal agreements, including the concession agreements, are expected to be signed between the Brazilian authorities and the con-sortia members by November this year. This is the second winning Qatar Petroleum bid in Brazil. In October 2017, Qatar Petroleum was part of a winning consortium with Shell, and China National Offshore Oil Corpo-ration for exploration in the Alto de Cabo Frio-Oeste block in the prolific Santos hydrocarbon basin offshore Brazil. The block was offered as part of Brazil’s 3rd production sharing bidding round, which covered 4 blocks located in the “pre-salt polygon” region in the Santos and Campos basins: Pau Brasil, Peroba, Alto de Cabo Frio-Oeste, and Alto de Cabo Frio-Central.

US General: No plans to move airbase from QatarCONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Commander of US Central Command Gen Joseph Votel said that he visited several countries during his recent tour of the region which included Afghanistan, Oman, Iraq, Syria, the United Kingdom and others, in order to look at how mil-itary preparations implement the new pol-icies and strategies, expressing pleasure with the latest progress made, especially in the focusing on some consultations and assistance operations in Afghanistan and the discussions of the ongoing efforts of the coalition.

Moreover, the Commander of US Central Command underlined that Iraq

has successfully liberated its territory from ISIS organization and it is now moving to a new phase.

About his short visit to Syria, Gen. Votel explained that the goal of the visit was to meet some allied forces there and effectively assess the situation through their own views, adding that the United States takes threats of the use of chemical weapons in Syria seriously. He pointed out that there is strict supervision over the use of such weapons, especially if there are civilian targets. He also affirmed that the main task of the coalition forces is to defeat ISIS organization, pointing out that with the complex situation in Syria, the

intention is to focus on other ISIS elements that must be dealt with. Gen. Votel called on concerned parties to implement ceasefire, take into consideration the humanitarian situation and find diplo-matic efforts to bring about diplomatic change instead of military option.

On the role of the international coa-lition forces to combat terrorism in the Egyptian region of Sinai, he said that the coalition forces do not directly participate in the operations of the Egyptian army in Sinai, adding that they have good com-munication with their partners in Egypt and they recognize the operations that are launched there.

04 FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018 MIDDLE EAST / AFRICA

Gazans pitch protest tents on border as tensions mountAFP

GAZA CITY: Palestinians in Gaza pitched tents near the volatile border with Israel yesterday ahead of a six-week protest camp under the gaze of wary Israeli soldiers.

The exceptional protest is dubbed “The Great March of Return” and has the backing of the Gaza Strip’s Islamist rulers Hamas. The protest comes amid rising tensions as the United States prepares to move its Israel embassy to Jerusalem.

Organisers said it would be peaceful but Israeli officials are wary of a fresh flare-up along the enclave’s border.

Armed forces chief Lieu-tenant General Gadi Eisenkot has warned of escalating tensions along Israel’s borders, “especially among the Palestinians”.

Eisenkot said reinforcements, including more than 100 special forces snipers, had been deployed to the Gaza frontier and the army was prepared for all scenarios. “We won’t allow mass infiltration into Israel” or damage to the border barrier, he told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper. “The instructions are to use a lot of force.”

The first protest will kick off

today when Palestinians worldwide mark Land Day, com-memorating the killing of six unarmed Arab protesters in Israel in 1976. Camping and protests in Gaza are expected to continue until mid-May, around the time the US is set to inaugurate its con-troversial new embassy in Jerusalem.

Mid-May will also mark the anniversary of the Nakba, or catastrophe, which saw hundreds of thousands flee their homes in the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel.

According to the United

Nations, some 1.3 million of Gaza’s 1.9 million residents are refugees or their descendants.

Khaled Al Batsh, part of the committee planning the protest, said tents would be located 500 metres (yards) from the border, just outside the buffer zone between Gaza and Israel.

Water facilities were being installed and medical teams deployed to allow people to stay for long periods.

Organisers said tens of thou-sands of people would attend Fri-day’s protest, although it was not clear how the estimate was reached. Batsh said protestors were calling for Palestinians to be allowed to return to land that is now inside Israel.

“70 years ago we left and today we have decided to return to our country,” he told AFP.

But senior Hamas figure Salah Bardawil said that while protesters might breach the border, they were not planning to do so. Hamas officials say they will monitor the area beyond the camp sites to prevent protesters going too close to the frontier, at least during the initial days of the protest.

Five main camp sites have been set up, spanning the length of the coastal territory from near

the Erez border crossing in the north to Rafah in the far south, near Egypt.

Campers will be within sight of the border, frequently patrolled by Israeli soldiers.

On Thursday, around 20 family tents were pitched at a site near Erez, alongside two larger community tents for per-formances including the tradi-tional Palestinian “dabke” dance.

At another site, young men were putting the finishing touches on dozens of wooden toilets, while large generators

whirred into life. Another organiser, Tahir Sawirki, said Palestinians would gather today in groups representing the towns they left in 1948. He said tens of thousands of meals would be prepared for more than 100,000 expected participants.

The White House’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, in a break with decades of international diplomacy, infuriated much of the Arab world.

Palestinians claim the city’s Israeli-annexed eastern sector

as the capital of their future state. The Palestinian leadership cut ties with the administration of President Donald Trump after he announced the move.

On Wednesday, Israeli tanks fired at Hamas positions in Gaza after heavy gunfire from the enclave, roadside bombs tar-geting border patrols and an incursion by three armed Pal-estinians, who penetrated some 20km into Israel before being captured. Two more Pales-tinians armed with knifes were detained after sneaking across the border, the Israeli army said.

A family walks past tents pitched by Palestinians on the Gaza border with Israel, east of Jabalia, yesterday, ahead of a six-week protest camp.

Idlib at heart of tense Russia-Turkey faceoffAFP

BEIRUT: The fate of Syria’s Idlib will depend on Turkey’s ability to keep a lid on the jihadist-dominated tinderbox and prevent an explosive Russian-backed government offensive on its doorstep, analysts say.

Largely outside government control since 2015, the northwestern province is home to some 2.5 million people, including many rebels evacuated there after being defeated in other areas by President Bashar Al Assad’s forces.

“Assad’s fiercest foes are being gathered in Idlib, and there would be great temptation for Russia to green light a regime offensive on the province,” Syria expert Nicholas Heras said.

But “Turkey needs Idlib to serve as a buffer against the war,” said Heras, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Since it erupted in 2011, Syria’s conflict had drawn in myriad foreign forces, including Russia’s air force and Iranian-backed militias on Assad’s behalf, and Turkey in support of rebels.

The conflict has killed more than 350,000 people and displaced more than half the population, including more than three million across the border to Turkey.

Already overwhelmed, Ankara is determined to prevent more Syrians from fleeing into its territory and even says it wants to create conditions for mass

refugee returns. “Turkey needs Idlib to serve as a buffer against the war. If Assad tried to seize Idlib, at a bare minimum hundreds of thousands of people would be displaced, and they would have few places to run to,” Heras said.

The incentive is clear for Turkey to prevent the chaos that would result from a regime assault -- but to do so, it will have to rein in the province’s powerful

jihadists. Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS), a group led by Al-Qaeda’s former Syrian affiliate, dominates Idlib’s military scene and civilian infrastructure.

Unless Ankara decides otherwise, analysts say, the group will probably retain influence in the province, where a myriad of jihadist and other rebels have vied for power since 2015.

But chinks have recently begun

appearing in HTS’s armour, starting with its loss of dozens of areas to a government offensive in Idlib’s southeast.

In the meantime, former allies Ahrar Al Sham and Nureddine Al Zinki banded together against HTS to form the Turkey-backed Syria Liberation Front.

The new alliance a few weeks ago launched an assault against the jihadists’ positions, taking back several areas including the towns of Ariha and Maaret Al Numan.

But even as HTS control of Idlib has dwindled to around 60 percent, it has retained control of key political and eco-nomic assets, says Sam Heller, an analyst at the International Crisis Group.

“It lost areas in the southern coun-tryside of Idlib but it retained the Bab al-Hawa border crossing (with Turkey) and control over the provincial capital Idlib city,” he said.

A civilian body that acts in the jihadist-led group’s interests has long levied taxes from shopkeepers, and has tried to impose its will on local councils in the province.

Syria analyst Haid Haid says recent territorial losses have dented HTS’s standing.

They have “broken its military aura” as “a power that cannot be vanquished, which had helped it scare off the other factions,” said the research fellow at King’s College London.

Kenya court fines minister and police chief in new showdownAFP

NAIROBI: A Kenyan court fined the interior minister and police chief yesterday after they defied orders to produce an opposition politician in court, who was instead deported for the second time in two months.

A prominent but unelected politician with the National Super Alliance (NASA), Miguna Miguna was thrust into the spot-light after his deportation last month, and his attempted return to Kenya this week has seen the nation gripped by political theatrics.

As Miguna was held at the airport for two days over the immigration spat, the high court twice ordered Interior Minister Fred Matiangi, Police Chief Joseph Boinnet and a top immi-gration official to produce him in court.

Both orders were disre-garded and Miguna was put on a flight to Dubai late Wednesday.

High Court Judge George Odunga fined the three men $2,000 (1,600 euros) each, saying they had “violated the constitution for failing to obey the rule of law and court orders.”

A growing battle between government and the judiciary -- since the Supreme Court annulled President Uhuru Ken-yatta’s election victory last year -- has seen authorities ignore several court orders.

Miguna’s first expulsion came after he was arrested for treason for taking part in the mock swearing-in of opposition leader Raila Odinga, who insisted he was the rightful victor of last year’s elections.

The interior ministry said Miguna had forfeited his Kenyan

citizenship by obtaining Canadian citizenship several years ago -- at a time when dual citizenship was not allowed.

In February a court ordered authorities to allow Miguna’s return, and issue him with a travel document or allow him to enter on his Canadian passport, pending the hearing of a petition he had filed to defend his Kenyan citizenship.

However, when Miguna arrived on Monday, he refused to apply for a six-month visa, enter on his Canadian passport or fill out forms to regularise his nationality.

“He declined to sign entry documents and tore them (up). He stayed here for two days and each time they were taken to him he shouted back that he is a Kenyan,” an immigration official said on condition of anonymity.

Israel rejects resistance icon’s conditional releaseANATOLIA

JERUSALEM: An Israeli court yesterday rejected a request for the “conditional release” of Raed Salah, the jailed leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, according to Salah’s lawyer.

“Based on an appeal filed by the Israeli Public Prosecution against a decision by the Magistrates Court to release Salah, the Haifa District Court today rejected [the request for] his release,” Khaled Zbarqa said. Zbarqa attributed the decision to “political interference” in the case, saying that Israeli Internal Security Minister Gilad Arad had personally called for keeping Salah behind bars.

Two weeks ago, the Magistrates Court preliminarily approved Salah’s conditional release. The “conditions” included a ban on entering Salah’s hometown of Umm Al Fahm and other restric-tions on his movement. Last summer, Israeli police arrested Salah in Umm Al Fahm — a Palestinian town in northern Israel — before convicting him of “inciting violence” and throwing him into sol-itary confinement. In February, a court in the southern city of Beersheba slapped the prominent resistance icon with a further six months in isolation.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has slammed remarks by US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman in which he said that if Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was not willing to resume peace talks with Israel, “someone else” would. “Friedman’s com-ments constitute flagrant interference in palestine's internal affairs,” PA spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh said in a Thursday statement. “The Palestinian people will not allow anyone to decide their fate,” he said.

The first protest will kick off today when Palestinians worldwide mark Land Day, commemorating the killing of six unarmed Arab protesters in Israel in 1976. Camping and protests in Gaza are expected to continue until mid-May, around the time the US is set to inaugurate its controversial new embassy in Jerusalem.

The destroyed buildings in Harasta nearly a week after the regime forces retook the town from the rebels, in Eastern Ghouta on the outskirts of the capital Damascus, yesterday.

Six arrested in Kosovo over Gulen links extradited to TurkeyREUTERS

ISTANBUL/PRISTINA: SIX Turkish nationals arrested in Kosovo over links to schools financed by the Fethullah Gulen movement that Ankara blames for a failed 2016 coup have been extradited to Turkey, Turkish state-run news agency Anadolu said yesterday.

Kosovo’s Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj said he was not informed about the operation to deport the six, which he said was carried out by the secret service agency and police. Local media have dubbed the move a “kidnapping.”

The Kosovo Interior Min-istry said the residence permits of the six had been revoked after their arrest for “security reasons,” but it did not elaborate. Anadolu said the six were now in Turkish custody. It identified them as Cihan Ozkan, Kahraman Demirez, Hasan Huseyin Gunakan, Mustafa Erdem, Osman Karakaya and Yusuf Karabina, and it said all were “senior members” of Gulen’s network.

It said the six were responsible for recruitment in Gulen’s network and helping those in Turkey leave the country amid a security crackdown in which tens of thousands of people have been sacked or jailed over alleged Gulen links.

Ankara accuses Gulen, a US-based Muslim cleric, of orchestrating the July 15, 2016 coup attempt, and has declared his movement a ter-rorist organisation. He denies any connection with the abortive putsch.

At its peak, the Gulen movement operated schools in 160 countries, from Afghanistan to the United States. Since the coup attempt, Turkey has pres-sured allies to shut down Gulen-run establishments.

“We have been facing enormous pressure from the Turkish authorities in the past weeks to take actions against Gulen schools and their staff,” a Kosovo government senior official said in condition of anonymity.

05FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018 ISLAM

The treaties of Prophet MuhammadBARBARA CASTLETON

According to Jewish and Christian tradition, a thousand years after Abraham, the Jewish people were

slaves, locked in perpetual servitude in Egypt before being led to freedom by Moses (peace be upon him). On their epic trek to Palestine, Moses broke the journey in the area around Mount Sinai. It was at its peak that Moses received from God a set of covenants, or laws, etched into clay tablets. These 10 Com-mandments became the foundation for a moral existence.

Over 1,000 years later, in 2 AH or 624 CE, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) wrote and granted a dif-ferent covenant to the monks at the Monastery of St Catherine, a 60-year-old Christian abbey at the base of Mount Sinai. Though not commanding the recipients to honour their mother and father or desist in the creation of idols, the covenant from the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) did something unheard of in the annals of history — it promised to protect the Christian monks and residents of the region from any incursions, attacks, or efforts to take over the Christian pilgrimage site. It swore to protect the monks singularly and as a group wherever they were. Further, the contract vowed to allow all inhabitants to keep the religion of their choice. The handwritten words on parchment, signed with the Prophet’s (PBUH) hand-print bound the Islamic nation to honour these promises “for all time, even unto the Day of Judgment and the end of the world.”

Dr John A Morrow, academic, researcher, scholar, teacher, a member of the Canadian Métis community, and an activist, reverted to Islam at the age of 16, while a high school student in his native Canada. Still a teen, Morrow con-tinued to research Islam through dozens of texts, and he came across an 18th-century text written by Richard Pococke which described and translated parts of the treaty the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) had initiated with the Monks of Mount Sinai.

In one section of the document, the text reads, “That whenever any of the monks in his travels shall happen to settle upon any mountain, hill, village, or other habitable place, on the sea, or in deserts, or in any convent, church, or house of prayer, I shall be in the midst of them, as the preserver and protector of them, their goods and effects, with my soul, aid, and protection…” These sentiments and others like them

anchored Morrow’s attachment to the demonstrated compassion and teachings of Islam.

Thirty years, several academic degrees, and dozens of publications later, Dr. Morrow’s most recent work, The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) with the Christians of his Time, is shaking up both the Islamic and Christian worlds. Whether intentionally or circumstantially, the treaty with the monks of Mt. Sinai and over a dozen other, similar documents, had receded from religious con-sciousness over the centuries and were squirreled away amid thousands of other papers in libraries scattered around Europe and the Middle East. With their virtual burial, a message of peace, inclusiveness, and tolerance was lost.

“No fear shall be upon them, nor shall they grieve.” This verse from the Holy Quran (2:62) refers to all the monotheists of the Prophet’s time, Jews, Christians, and Sabeans, and promises that these groups, being righteous in action, and aligned with Muslims in their belief in one God, would be protected. The above divine revelation, an edict transmitted to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) from God, guaranteed a future of unity and safety. Nevertheless, as an essential feature of his nation-building efforts, the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)went even further, creating documents meant to serve vast populations living under Islamic rule as long as “the sea wets the shells on the shore.”

Due to those covenants, newly explored by Dr. Morrow, Muslims now

have an additional rigorously authen-ticated religious resource — the detailed Ashtiname — peace letters or covenants spoken by the Prophet and written down verbatim.

Through dictation and diplomacy, the Muhammad formulated treaties with most of the religious commu-nities on the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. Some of the major covenants include:

The Covenant of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) with the Monks of Mount Sinai

The Covenant with the Christians of Najran

The Covenant with the Christians of the World I

The Covenant with the Christians of the World II

The Covenant with the Assyrian Christians

The Covenant with the Christians of Persia

The Covenant with the Armenian Christians

The Covenant with the Jews of Maqna

The Covenant with the Yemenite Jews

The Covenant with the Zoroastrians

The Covenant with the Coptic Chris-tians of Egypt

The Covenant with the Syriac Orthodox Christians

The Covenant with the SamaritansThe Covenant with the

ZoroastriansOver just a few years, the Islamic

Ummah, or nation, expanded widely, until it gradually encompassed territory

that included peoples of various sects. As Dr. Morrow suggests in his book, “A visionary long-term planner, the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) understood that the spread of Islam could take cen-turies. What he sought to create were the conditions under which the seeds of Islam could be planted and watered, thus enabling Muslim seeds to sprout, grow, and spread. If a population pre-ferred to remain heathen, Christian or Jewish, they were entitled to do so as long as they entered into a covenant with the Islamic State as protected people.” Thus, rather than initiate any conflict with those populations, groups who had largely lived in harmony for generations, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) resolved to ensure that they con-tinued to feel connected and protected by detailing the mutuality of the support each provided, first from the Prophet, the Islamic Nation, and his designated successors or Caliphs, and then from the group specified in the treaty.

Beyond protection, these covenants outlined forbidden actions, that is acts which the Muslims in these areas were prohibited from initiating. The rights and privileges granted to the Christians of Najran, a place in what is now southern Saudi Arabia where Christianity took root in the 4th century, are mirrored in most of the other treaties as well:

“To the Christians of Najran and its neighbouring territories, God’s pro-tection and the pledge of His Prophet extend to their lives, their religion, and their property. It applies to those who are present as well as those who are absent. There shall be no interference with the practice of their faith or their

religious observances. There will be no change to their rights and privileges. No bishop shall be removed from his bish-opric; no monk from his monastery, and no priest from his parish. They shall all continue to enjoy everything they pre-viously enjoyed great or small. No image or cross shall be destroyed. They will not oppress or be oppressed.”

In a place and time where religion and pagan beliefs were a major driver of conflict and almost perpetual warfare, the covenants of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) provided an umbrella of safety and freedom for hun-dreds of communities. In covenants written for general societies, unlike the abbey on Mount Sinai which was an exclusively male population, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) added previously unheard-of rights for women:

“Christians must not be subjected to suffer, by abuse, on the subject of mar-riages which they do not desire. Muslims should not take Christian girls in mar-riage against the will of their parents nor should they oppress their families in the event that they refused their offers of engagement and marriage. Such mar-riages should not take place without their desire and agreement and without their approval and consent. If a Muslim takes a Christian woman as a wife, he must respect her Christian beliefs. He will give her freedom to listen to her [clerical] superiors as she desires and to follow the path of her own religion.”

By bringing the Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) to light in an age that sorely needs models of tol-erance, compassion, and community, Dr Morrow hopes to reach and influence Muslims who may not be aware of the more global and far-reaching intentions of the Prophet (PBUH) and Christians who may have relied too heavily on the one-faceted view of Islam promulgated by the media. Invited to speak at con-ferences, churches, mosques, and insti-tutions from Dubai to California, Dr. Morrow seeks to restore the trajectory of benevolent statecraft instituted by the Prophet Muhammed (PBUH) over 1400 years ago.

Barbara Castleton, MA, is a professor of

English at South Seattle College. She is the

co-author of Arabic, Islam, and the Allah

Lexicon: How Language Shapes Our Con-

ception of God and has published several

articles on Arabic sociolinguistics in peer-

reviewed journals.

www.aboutislam.net

How to understand the Quran correctlySADAF FAROOQI

Even though the Quran is undoubtedly a glorious, unpar-alleled book of guidance,

mercy, healing, and spirituality, why do so many people, both Muslims and non-Muslims, misinterpret its verses and do not get guided towards Islam, i.e. towards submitting themselves humbly to Allah, even after reading it and perusing it deeply and analyt-ically, numerous times?

The state and purity of the heart of a person greatly determines how fast and how much they will receive guidance from the Quran once they start to read, study and ponder upon it.

It is the intention inside their hearts with which they approach the Quran, which becomes the crucial determining factor of whether this Glo-rious book becomes a source of Divine guidance for them, or embodies merely a written piece of text that they read to glean information about Islam, Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and poignant events in Islamic history.

In the Quran itself, Allah has described how the Quran guides only those whose hearts are humble, sub-missive, and receptive to being guided: Verily, in this is a Message for anyone who has a heart, or who gives ear, and earnestly witnesses (the truth (50:37)

In essence, the light of guidance of the Quran does not enter a hard, blackened heart that does not believe in Allah or does not seek to be guided towards Him, i.e. a heart that does not harbor the burning desire to be guided towards God, nor has the sub-missive humility that is

characteristic of a powerless slave before its all-powerful master.

According to the Quran itself, it is a source of guidance, yes, but only for a person who believes in Allah and becomes conscious of obeying or disobeying Him i.e. the person possesses taqwa:

This is the Book; in it is guidance sure, without doubt, for those who are conscious of Allah. (2:2)

The Quran becomes a source of peace, guidance and mercy for anyone who seeks to become closer to Allah, but it is all the more so for those with a broken soul and a shattered will who want to turn back towards Allah in repentance and submission after they have endured hardship, loss, grief or calamity in life.

Many a people come back towards Allah after they encounter and endure extremely distressful and difficult sit-uations and events in life, which they did not have the strength to bear except with the strong helping hand of Allah that they sought to grasp by picking up the Quran and endeavoring to decipher it.

Nevertheless, although reading the translation of the Arabic text of the Quran, and reflecting upon its meanings alone, in privacy, is very beneficial for the believer who is new to the world of Islam and who does not yet possess greater, more in-depth knowledge of Islam yet,- it is only the tip of the iceberg.

There comes a point in the life of every student of Islamic knowledge, young or old, when reading the translations of the Quran (and hadiths) is just not enough for them. They start pining to understand the language of the Quran directly.

That is because they begin to realise that they are reaching out to Allah via the work of His creation, i.e. by reading the meanings of its text in another language that was a human effort to decode the spoken word (kalam) of their Lord.

Although they are a great contri-bution towards da’wah to non-Muslims, and were a monumental stepping stone in the history of Islam that helped spread the message of the Quran far and wide, translations of the Quran cannot impart that unparalleled, soul-reaching, moving effect that the kalam(audible words) of the Arabic recitation of the Quran can have on a believer’s heart.

It is at this point that the ardent student of knowledge, who seeks to interpret and ponder upon the Quran more deeply, begins to seek ways to be able to understand the language of the Quran – Arabic – directly.

And this he or she can only do when they enroll in a proper course under a teacher, i.e. attend in-person, one-on-one classes under a more learned person or scholar, which deliver Islamic knowledge via formal, structured instruction.

This traditional method of seeking knowledge i.e. ta’leem, is one of the most reliable, effective, and surefire routes that a sincere student of the Quran can acquire in their quest to become closer to Allah via deep reflection of His Book, the Quran.

The last thing that I want to point out as a very important factor that one must give heed to while endeavouring to reflect upon and understand the Quran, is the absolute necessity of steering completely clear of any mis-interpretations of its verses and

distorted meanings derived from its text. One must acknowledge and be wary of the devils among jinn and mankind who are working day and night to mislead humankind from the Right Path. They never tire in their efforts to keep humans astray and devoid of Divine guidance.

However, it is easy for these devils to mislead those humans who are still far away from the Quran. It is with the religious Muslims that shaitan (satan) employs more devious shenanigans in order to deviate them.

One of the strongest plots that the armies of Iblis use to mislead reli-giously inclined people, i.e. those who study and propagate the Quran, is to make them glean unauthentic and baseless interpretations of the Quran text; to keep them involved in innovations; and to involve them in useless, time-wasting arguments with each other regarding the meanings of the Quran.

The one who seeks to gain deeper understanding of the Quran must always remember that Allah has taken it upon Himself to protect the Quran from deliberate distortion, which all the previous Scriptures were subjected to by human beings, for personal gains.

Therefore, when seeking to reflect deeper into the meanings of the Quran, it is important to bear in mind that this is the only Book of Allah that has remained free from deliberate errors or manipulations.

Keeping a strict check on one’s aqeedah (belief); joining the circles of knowledge of only those scholars, teachers and du’at who are correct in their belief and ideology;

continuing to recite and study the Quran in solitude with deep reflections and ponder; and steering clear of the company, writings and propaganda of the devils among the jinn and mankind who are striving to lead mankind astray with their anti-Quran efforts (such as anti-Islamic/Islamophobic atheists, agnostics, sec-ularists, liberals, humanists, and apostates), are all necessary steps that someone needs to undertake as part of a holistic approach towards understanding the Quran correctly in order to become close to Allah.

Say: “If the whole of mankind and Jinns were to gather together to produce the like of this Quran, they could not produce the like thereof, even if they backed up each other with help and support. (17:88)

Rather than initiate any conflict with those populations, groups who had largely lived in harmony for generations, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) resolved to ensure that they continued to feel connected and protected by detailing the mutuality of the support each provided, first from the Prophet, the Islamic Nation, and his designated successors or Caliphs, and then from the group specified in the treaty.

06 FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018ASIA

Anna Hazare breaks fast after govt assuranceIANS

NEW DELHI: Social activist Anna Hazare yesterday called off his hunger strike after the Central government “in prin-ciple” agreed to his demands but refrained from providing a roadmap on the implementation in a time-bound manner.

Hazare, who had earlier demanded the timeline along with the action plan, said the Narendra Modi government assured him that promises would be fulfilled “soon” even as he warned the government of another agitation if the action is not taken in the six months’ time. A delegation of Ministers led by Maharashtra Chief Min-ister Devendra Fadnavis met Hazare yesterday and informed him that the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) was “positive” about the demands of setting up of a Lokpal at the Centre and Lokayuktas in the states, imple-mentation of the M.S. Swami-nathan Committee report for fair crop prices and new electoral reforms.

Subsequently, Hazare broke his seven-day long fast with a glass of juice in presence of Fad-navis, Union Minister of State for Agriculture, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Maharashtra Min-ister Girish Mahajan among others. “The government has agreed to give 1.5 times the input cost (for agricultural produce). Also, government has said the Lokpal would be appointed

soon. It says the electoral reforms come under the Election Commission’s jurisdiction,” Hazare told the gathering of around 3,000 protestors at the iconic Ramlila Maidan.

“The government has said that the promises would be ful-filled soon. I will wait for six months. If the government fails to do it till then, I will start agi-tation in September. However, Fadnavis says it will not even take six months. Let us see.” Fad-navis said the Prime Minister’s Office had in letter to Hazare conveyed which components would be considered while fixing Minimum Support Price (MSP) for agriculture produce.

“The central government has been positive about Anna ji’s demands. We have explained to him the factors to be considered while fixing MSP. Also, a com-mittee has been constituted in accordance with his demand of more autonomy to the Com-mission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP),” he said.

Govt feels heat of CBSE leakIANS

NEW DELHI: A day after the CBSE paper leak surfaced, Union Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar faced a barrage of questions from the media, which was not satisfied with the comforting words of the Minister.

“I can assure you that the culprits behind the leak won’t be spared. The police is already on the job and just like it nabbed four people in the SSC scam, I am sure it will soon catch the culprits in this case, too,” he said.

“Besides, we have also con-stituted an internal inquiry to find out who leaked the papers,” the Minister told the reporters before he was charged with another volley of questions. “I think the honourable minister

has given a comprehensive statement...,” intervened Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, who was also addressing the press on Cabinet’s decision taken on Wednesday, but he too was cut short for questions on stu-dents’ protest across the city.

Even as the Minister responded to the media queries, students in considerable numbers exhibited their anger in the form of protest at Jantar Mantar and raised slogans against CBSE.

“This is not right, CBSE should think of the students who didn’t have anything to do with the leak, before conducting a re-examination,” Aman, a Class 12 student of a government school at Gandhi Nagar, said.

“Not just on social media, people were seen selling the

question paper outside a school at Kailash Nagar (Gandhi Nagar) for Rs8,000,” he said.

Another student of Class 12 said paper were leaked for other subjects also.

“Biology and Chemistry papers were also leaked. I got to know of people who were offering question papers for Rs16,000 if you wanted it a night before and for Rs3,000 if you wanted it on the morning of the examination day,” the student of KIIT World School in Pita-mpura said.

“CBSE chief should be sacked. Why is my money, a tax-payer’s money, being spent on the re-examination? Is this the only way to make it just for all? There should be some other way. Let’s not make it easy for the politicians,” a furious mother of

two girl students said at the protest.

It is said that question papers for Maths of Class 10 and Eco-nomics of Class 12 -- examina-tions for which were conducted on Monday and Wednesday, respectively, this week -- were in circulation for days before they came to be acknowledged as “leaks” by the board.

A flagrant act of recklessness on the part of board was also observed when it went ahead with Class 10 Maths examination on Wednesday despite being aware of the leak of Economics paper and even filed an FIR on Tuesday.

An Special Investigation Team (SIT) was formed on Wednesday after the CBSE reg-istered two cases with the Crime Branch.

Japan’s Foreign Minister Taro Kono (right) and his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj attending a joint press announcement in Tokyo, yesterday.

India’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV-F08) carrying GSAT-6A communication satellite, that would provide mobile communication facilities, blasts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, yesterday.

India successfully launches GSAT-6A communication satellite

India and Japan call for stable, free & prosperous Indo-PacificIANS

TOKYO: India and Japan on Thursday called for a peaceful, stable, free and prosperous Indo-Pacific region following the Ninth India-Japan Strategic Dialogue co-chaired by Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono here.

“Our Special Strategic and Global Partnership has acquired a broader significance in the current global context,” Sushma Swaraj said while jointly addressing the media with Kono.

“Our growing convergence on economic and strategic issues is important for peace, stability and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region,” she said.

Kono said India was Japan’s most important partner in its Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy.

“Our Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy and India’s Act East Policy should be further merged,” he said. The remarks assume significance given China’s belligerence in the South China Sea and attempts to increase its footprint in the Indo-Pacific region. India and Japan, along with the US and Australia, are also part of the recently revived quad that seeks to work for peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific.

In her address, Sushma Swaraj said that in Thursday’s Strategic Dialogue, she and Kono discussed bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest.

Stating that India has

emerged as the fastest-growing large economy in the world, she said that under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is strongly committed to improving the “ease of doing business” and has “set into motion many far-reaching changes to build infrastructure, reform the business environment and promote education, skills and economic development”.

“In my discussions with Foreign Minister Kono, I empha-sized that in India’s transforma-tional journey, we regard Japan as a natural partner.” Sushma Swaraj said that India welcomes Japanese entrepreneurs with new opportunities in flagship initia-tives such as Smart City, Digital India, Start-Up India and many others.

Sri Lanka prison chief arrested over 2012 massacreAFP

COLOMBO: Sri Lankan police arrested a top prison official over a massacre of 27 inmates that became an icon of grave rights abuses under former president Mahinda Rajapakse.

Prisons Commissioner Emil Lamahewage was arrested in connection with the November 2012 bloodbath at the Welikada high security prison in Colombo, police said.

A police inspector was arrested on Wednesday for involvement in the killings at Welikada which happened when Lamahewage was the prison superintendent.

The arrests followed a reopening of the case in July last year following media reports that the killings were ordered by senior members of the former regime.

Trouble erupted inside the prison when police con-ducted a sweep for drugs and allegedly faced off with inmates trying to grab their weapons.

Armed troops called in to restore order opened fire killing 27 prisoners. Witnesses have said they were killed execution-style after calling them out by name.

The killings escalated international condemnation of Rajapakse, whose regime had sanctions imposed for rights abuses in the final years of Sri Lanka’s 37-year-long ethnic war that ended in 2009.

Some of the inmates killed were being held in custody over robberies at Sri Lanka’s national museum and a temple, crimes allegedly linked to senior members of Rajapakse’s regime.

Amal Clooney to defend scribes held in MyanmarAFP

NEW YORK: British-Lebanese human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, wife of Hollywood A-lister George, announced she will represent two Reuters journalists detained in Myanmar in a case that has incensed global opinion.

Myanmar reporters Wa Lone, 31, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 27, were arrested last December and have been charged under the Official Secrets Act, which could see them jailed up to 14 years. They had been investi-gating the killing by security forces and ethnic Rakhine locals of 10 unarmed Rohingya Muslim men in the country’s crisis-hit northern Rakhine State. “Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo are being prosecuted simply because they reported the news. I have reviewed the case file and it is clear beyond doubt that the two journalists are innocent and should be released immediately,” Clooney said.

A delegation led by Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis met Hazare and informed him that the Prime Minister’s Office was “positive” about the demands.

South China Sea drills routine: ChinaREUTERS

BEIJING: China’s Defence Ministry said the military was carrying out routine training in the South China Sea, but would not comment on the presence of China’s sole oper-ational aircraft carrier there.

Dozens of Chinese naval vessels are exercising this week with an aircraft carrier in a large show of force off China’s Hainan island in the South China Sea, satellite images show.

The images, provided by Planet Labs Inc, confirmed a Chinese carrier group had entered the important trade waterway as part of what the Chinese navy earlier described as combat drills that were part of routine annual exercises.

The Liaoning carrier group last week traversed the Taiwan Strait, according to the Taiwan defence ministry.

Chinese Defence Ministry spokesman Ren Guoqiang, asked about the pictures of the ships in the South China Sea at a regular monthly news briefing, said the military was conducting routine drills in line with annual plans which were not aimed at any country.

“It’s aim is to test the training capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army and enhance their training capa-bilities. It is also aimed at improving combat abilities of the whole military,” Ren said.

Over 25 million apply for Indian railway jobsREUTERS

NEW DELHI: More than 25 million people, a number greater than Australia’s popu-lation, have applied for about 90,000 positions on India’s state-run railways, underlining the challenge Prime Minister Narendra Modi faces in providing millions of jobs ahead of an election in 2019.

Modi’s flagship “Make in India” initiative to lift the share of manufacturing in India’s $2 trillion economy to 25 percent from about 17 percent and create 100 million jobs by 2022 has so far failed to deliver on its promise. The railway, which currently employs 1.3 million people, said it was filling up tens of thousands of vacant positions for engine drivers, technicians, carpenters, track

inspection crews and other roles related to improving safety in the world’s fourth-largest network.

“We’ve not been recruiting for the last couple of years and attrition is already there. And so we require people,” Ashwani Lohani, chairman of the railways board, said.

The Railway Recruitment Board advertised for the posi-tions last month and since then 25 million people have filed online applications from around the country, Lohani said. The closing date is tomorrow. The recruitment drive would be the largest con-ducted by a state-run organi-sation since Modi took office four years ago, struggling to find jobs for an estimated 1 million young people that enter the labour force each month.

07FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018 ASIA

Malala makes first visit to Pakistan since Taliban attackAFP

ISLAMABAD: Nobel peace laureate Malala Yousafzai returned to Pakistan yesterday, saying tearfully that it was “a dream” to come home for the first time since she was airlifted to Britain after being shot in the head by a Taliban gunman more than five years ago.

The 20-year-old was overcome with emotion as she made a televised speech from the Prime Minister’s House in Islamabad, breaking down in tears as she spoke of the beauty of her native Swat valley and how she imagines the streets of Pakistan from London and New York. “Always it has been my dream that I should go to Pakistan and there, in peace and without any fear, I can move on streets, I can meet people, I can talk to people. And I think that it’s my old home again... so it is actually happening, and I am grateful to all of you.”

She added: “I don’t cry much, I don’t know why today.” The activist had arrived unannounced with her parents under tight security overnight. Pakistanis awakening to the news she was back in the country flooded social media with messages of welcome, with many hailing her bravery — but others accusing her of a con-spiracy to foment dissent. Malala is widely respected internationally as a global icon for girls’ education, but opinion is divided in Pakistan, where some conservatives view her as a Western agent on a mission to shame her country.

Residents of Swat said they were happy to see her return.

“Parents who were scared in 2012 are not scared in 2018, and Malala has played a great role in this,” said Shaista Hakeem, a student at Swat University, who credited her academic career to Malala’s influence over families in the region. Malala became a global symbol for human rights after a gunman boarded her school van in Swat on October 9, 2012, asked “Who is Malala?” and shot her.

The Pakistani Taliban accused her of “anti-Islamic” activities and of “smearing” the militant group in statements released after the attack. She was treated for her injuries in the British city of Bir-mingham, where she also com-pleted her schooling.

The youngest-ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, she has continued to be a vocal advocate for girls’ education while pursuing her studies at Oxford University. Malala met with Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and later took questions from an audience after her televised speech, in which she also called for Pakistani unity and female empowerment.

She said Pakistan must invest

in its children’s education, adding that the Malala Fund has already put more than $6 million into girls’ education in the country.

Earlier this month, a school opened in Swat that was con-structed and funded with part of her Nobel Prize money.

“I hope that we can all join hands in this mission for the bet-terment of Pakistan,” she said.

But among the messages of welcome are pockets of intense criticism from some Pakistanis, including hardline Islamists as well as members of the conserv-ative middle class who support education for girls but object to airing the country’s problems abroad. One leading Pakistani journalist, Hamid Mir, issued a plea for restraint when talking about her visit, warning that neg-ative reactions “will damage Paki-stan’s image”.

Other Pakistanis echoed his concerns on social media.

“Dear Pakistanis! Malala is not your enemy. Your enemies were those monsters who shot her point blank on her way to school,” wrote Twitter user Shahira Lashari.

Her schedule for the four-day trip is being closely guarded.

“She will be meeting several

people here but her itinerary is not being disclosed due to security reasons,” foreign ministry spokesman Muhammad Faisal.

Malala began her campaign aged just 11, when she started writing a blog — under a pseu-donym — for the BBC’s Urdu service in 2009 about life under the Taliban in Swat, which they took over in 2007.

Opponents were murdered, people were publicly flogged for supposed breaches of sharia law, women were banned from going to market, and girls were stopped

from going to school. But it was only after the shooting, and a sub-sequent near-miraculous recovery, that she became a truly global figure. As for the militants who attacked her: the man sus-pected of actually firing the gun at Malala, named by officials as Ataullah Khan, has long been believed to be on the run in Afghanistan, along with Pakistani Taliban chief Mullah Fazlullah, who ordered the attack. In 2015, it was reported that eight of 10 men who had been convicted over the attack had been cleared.

Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi (second left) with activist and Nobel peace laureate Malala Yousafzai (left) and her parents at the Prime Minister’s Office during her visit to Islamabad.

The 20-year-old was overcome with emotion as she made a televised speech from the Prime Minister’s House in Islamabad, breaking down in tears as she spoke of the beauty of her native Swat valley and how she imagines the streets of Pakistan from London and New York.

US lawmakers call for continuing ties with PakistanINTERNEWS

WASHINGTON: Even as Pakistan faces some hostility in the United States’ capital, there are lawmakers who suggest continuing a rela-tionship with Islamabad to encourage it to cooperate with Washington in the war against terrorism.

Congressman Brad Sherman, who met Prime Min-ister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi in Washington earlier this month, says that as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Com-mittee, he knows “the signifi-cance of US-Pakistan rela-tionship and the importance of both the friendship between our two countries and our countries’ history of cooper-ation”. “During his recent visit to Washington, I had the opportunity to meet with Prime Minister Abbasi, and I look forward to continuing my work to bridge divides and strengthen our relationship.”

Sherman is among 35 US lawmakers who sent messages of support on the Pakistan Day, each underlining the impor-tance of a continued engagement with Pakistan and appreciating the contributions of the Pakistani-American community to their adopted homeland.

Senator Bob Casey, a member of the US Senate Finance Committee, says that the bilateral relationship also “continues to be critical to the security and stability of the South Asian region”.

Secrecy, delays surrounded Kim’s slow train to ChinaREUTERS

SHANGHAI/BEIJING: For a regime obsessed with secrecy, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un’s decision to travel to Beijing on a distinctive green armoured train was an all-but-dead giveaway that he was making his first journey abroad since assuming power in 2011.

The historic visit sent officials scram-bling to obscure the identity of the 21-car train and its occupants as it meandered across roughly 1,100km of track through northeast China, causing rare delays along the way and triggering a growing frenzy of speculation as it neared the Chinese capital.

The train arrived at Beijing Station on Monday afternoon and left the following afternoon, with the identity of its occu-pants only announced on Wednesday morning — after it had crossed back into North Korea at the city of Sinuiju.

Clues that something unusual was afoot emerged in the border city of Dandong, just across the Yalu River from North Korea and linked to the isolated country by the Sino-Korea Friendship Bridge. That bridge bears a single rail track which, it turned out, carried Kim’s train into China late on Sunday.

The Daily NK, a Seoul-based website staffed by North Korean defectors, reported that boards supported by

scaffolding had been set up on the platform at Dandong’s train station, blocking what is ordinarily an open view, before two trains passed through the station between 10:20 and 10:40pm on Sunday night.

Yao Jun, who sells car parts in Dandong, said the station was locked down again on Tuesday night, an unusual occurrence. Kim returned to North Korea in the early hours of Wednesday. “Now

we know for next time — if the train station is in lockdown then that means Kim Jong Un has come to China,” Yao said.

At least one Dandong hotel was told by Chinese authorities not to book rooms facing the bridge, while tours from China into the North were cancelled on Sunday, a source familiar with the matter said. A local resident said that a wedding party along the river on Sunday had been told not to set off firecrackers.

By Monday morning sighting rumours and pictures were making the rounds on Chinese social media, before being blocked or deleted by censors, while railway bureaus began warning travellers to expect delays or cancellations on Monday and Tuesday.

The disruptions were noteworthy in a country with a vast rail network that prides itself on its efficiency, with 98.8 percent of trains departing on time in 2016 and 95.4 percent arriving on schedule, and prompted complaints online.

Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jia-otong University who researches the country’s railway system, said Kim’s train travelled on the regular track network, rather than on the tracks used by the country’s high-speed trains. “Passenger and freight traffic would have been affected,” he said.

A person answering the official phone line at Dandong station yesterday stressed that everything had been “normal” this week, and asked, “who told you the station was closed?”

China has not disclosed the route taken by Kim in the train — green with a yellow stripe resembling one used by his late father, Kim Jong Il, on his last visit to China in 2011. Based on photos from the elder Kim’s visit, the only visible difference between the two trains was a licence plate. The younger Kim’s licence plate showed

DF0002; the plate on the train used by his father displayed DF0001.

North Korean state media showed Kim and his entourage, including his wife Ri Sol Ju, seated on stuffed pink sofas inside the train carriage with Song Tao, the head of the Chinese Communist Party’s international affairs department, during their inbound stop in Dandong.

There are at least two likely rail routes between Dandong and Beijing, and an ordinary service takes at least 14 hours, according to Chinese railway timetables. The route is also covered by China’s high-speed trains, which travel on separate tracks, in just over six hours.

But social media posts made by local railway bureaus and ordinary users on social media suggest a surge in delays around the route from Dandong that heads north to Shenyang, in the region previously known as Manchuria. The route then snakes west along the Hebei province coast towards Beijing.

On Tuesday evening, a Twitter user with the handle “2018you333” posted a grainy video of a train with a single hor-izontal stripe hurtling across an empty car underpass, which the user said was taken at the Shanhai Pass area, 300 km east of Beijing and a major pass in the Great Wall of China.

“Let’s guess where this distinguished guest is coming from!”, the post said.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un meets with the head of the Chinese Communist Party’s international affairs department Song Tao as Kim’s wife Ri Sol Ju looks on, on a train in Dandong, China.

16 years prison for Indonesian politician soughtAP

JAKARTA: Prosecutors demanded 16 years in prison for a senior Indonesian poli-tician accused of playing a key role in the theft by offi-cials of $170m of public money.

Prosecutors also called for fines and the seizure of Setya Novanto’s assets if he fails to return $7.4m including a $135,000 luxury “Richard Mille” watch that he allegedly received as part of the conspiracy.

Novanto was the former speaker of Indonesia’s par-liament and senior member of the Golkar party.

Malaysia cuts proposed fine for fake newsAP

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia’s government cut the proposed punishment in a bill prohib-iting fake news from 10 to six years in prison following an outcry from rights groups and opposition lawmakers who say it aims to silence dissent ahead of a general election.

The anti-fake news bill, presented in parliament on Monday, is being debated by lawmakers and is expected to be approved next week. In addition to imprisonment, it also calls for a fine of up to 500,000 ringgit ($128,000).

Filipino extremist blamed for bombings surrendersAP

ZAMBOANGA: A senior commander of the Abu Sayyaf extremist group blamed for bombings and kidnappings has surrendered in the southern Philippines, the defense chief said, expressing hope it would bring the “eventual collapse” of a key militant stronghold.

Nurhassan Jamiri surren-dered with 13 of his men to army forces in southern Basilan province on Wednesday. They handed over 10 assault rifles and a large cache of ammu-nition and were undergoing questioning, military officials said.

Defense Secretary Delfin

Lorenzana said Jamiri’s sur-render, which came after nego-tiations with authorities, “will hopefully bring the eventual collapse of the Abu Sayyaf group in Basilan,” the birthplace of the small but violent group, “and bring justice to the deaths of thousands of soldiers.”

Emerging in the late 1980s as an offshoot of the decades-long Muslim separatist rebellion in the south, the Abu Sayyaf lost its top commanders early in combat and descended on a bloody path toward terrorism and criminality.

The United States and the Philippines have blacklisted the Abu Sayyaf as a terrorist organisation.

Pakistan plans to double water storage capacityINTERNEWS

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan will double its water storage capacity to at least 28 million acre feet (MAF) of water from existing 14 MAF, increasing the storage capacity from 10 to 20 percent of total water flows.

This is revealed in the draft document of National Water Policy (NWP) tabled in Common Council of Interests (CCI) meeting that met with Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi in the chair here this week. The CCI was attended by chief ministers of Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and the

finance minister of Punjab who deliberated the draft of the policy in detail. It was decided that the draft with more inputs from fed-erating units will be brought in the next meeting for approval.

As per the copy of draft of the policy, the authorities in Pakistan will also carve out the plan of reduction of 33 percent in 46 million cares feet river flows that are lost in conveyance. The decision makers will also come up with the plan to increase at least 30 per cent in the efficiency of water use by produce more crop per drop ensuring the gradual replacement and refur-bishing of irrigation system.

Many important international bodies like the International Labour Organization (ILO) and International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) have praised Qatar for the policies that have been introduced for the benefit of workers, especially for those involved in the construction of 2022 World Cup facilities.

H E Speaker of Advisory Council stressed that Qatar has surpassed the siege imposed on it, but Qatar is concerned about the humanitarian issues between families, because in the Gulf there are mixed marriages (husband from a country and wife from a siege country) and they are brothers and sisters to the Qataris and Qatar does not want any harm happen to them, stressing the keenness of the State of Qatar on the security and stability of their countries and the entire region, because what happens to them affects it.

08 FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018VIEWS

CHAIRMANSHEIKH THANI BIN ABDULLAH AL THANI

EDITOR-IN-CHIEFDR. KHALID BIN MUBARAK AL-SHAFIeditorinchief@pen.com.qa

ACTING MANAGING EDITORMOHAMMED SALIM MOHAMEDm.salim@pen.com.qa

ESTABLISHED IN 1996

EDITORIAL

Beacon for the region

Qatar has been showing the way for other countries in the region on how to bring in progressive labour reforms and bolster the

rights of workers. The concerned authorities have been working tirelessly on these reforms for some time now and tangible results can be seen on the ground.

Many important international bodies like the International Labour Organization (ILO) and Inter-national Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) have praised Qatar for the policies that have been intro-duced for the benefit of workers, especially for those involved in the construction of 2022 World Cup facilities.

Now the British Parliament has voiced its appre-ciation regarding the steps taken by Qatar for the benefit of labourers. A British Minister in a comment inside the parliament said that “Qatar is working very hard to make sure it produces a good World Cup and a safe World Cup.”

Another MP, Alex Norris, as part of a question, said in parliament that signif-icant positive progress made by Qatar in areas relating to workers’ rights should be spread to neighbouring states.

The Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy (SC), who are responsible for deliv-ering the infrastructure required for Qatar 2022 World Cup, has been introducing many initiatives for workers welfare and is also keeping a hawk’s eye on all contractors and sub-contractors working on their project to make sure they are all following the strict policies and procedures put in place for the benefit of every worker on their projects.

They have also launched a website recently, which is dedicated to workers’ welfare. The site chronicles the various initiatives introduced by the SC.

SC has implemented a range of measures to safeguard workers involved in its projects, including appointing an external monitor, signing agreement with global trade union bodies, introducing nutrition programme to educate workers about the importance of a healthy lifestyle among others.

All this effort is seen by concerned bodies and they appreciate the progress like ILO did at its 331st Session, where the governing body recognized the progress made by Qatar and “welcomed its com-mitment to ensuring fundamental principles and rights at work for all workers.”

While International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) welcomed the steps taken by Qatar to reim-burse the recruitment fees of 30,000 workers, which is a path breaking move in the region.

Doha has proved that they mean action and in the process has become a beacon for the countries in the region to follow.

Advisory Council Speaker reviews Gulf crisis repercussions on sidelines of IPU meetings

The Speaker of the Advisory (Shura) Council H E Ahmed bin Abdullah bin Zaid Al Mahmoud has met with the

heads of the (12+) parliaments, including European countries as well as Australia and Canada, and the heads of parliaments of Latin American and Caribbean countries on the sidelines of the 138th General Assembly meeting of the Inter-Par-liamentary Union.

His Excellency also met sepa-rately with head of the delegation of the People’s Republic of China Wu Heng, and a number of members of the Japanese delegation participating in the meetings of the General Assembly of the Union.

During the meetings which were attended by a number of members of the Shura Council, H E Ahmed bin Abdullah bin Zaid Al Mahmoud pre-sented a detailed explanation to the participants about the Gulf crisis since June 5, 2017, which started by the hacking of the Qatar News Agency (QNA) website and publishing fabricated statements attributed to the Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and the State of Qatar denying these false accusations

and clarify its position, followed by the siege countries severing dip-lomatic rela-tions with Qatar accusing it of terrorism and imposing a blockade on it .

He explained that “despite the request of the State of Qatar from those countries to provide an evidence to H H the Emir of the State of Kuwait, the mediator in resolving the crisis on accusing Qatar of ter-rorism, but they did not submit any.”

He pointed out

that after the pressure from the inter-national community, the siege coun-tries submitted 13 demands to the Kuwaiti mediator, “which are unrea-sonable and inconsistent with the sovereignty and independence of the State.” He said that “these demands have been rejected, including the closure of Al Jazeera and other media.”

“Such demands mean the confis-cation of freedom of expression and the restriction of press freedom, which is unacceptable to the State,” he added. He also referred to their demand to close the Iranian embassy in Doha and cut off military relations with Turkey, “which were also rejected”, referring to the call of the State of Qatar to these countries for dialogue and without preconditions.

H E the Speaker of the Shura Council reviewed some other examples of violations of human rights and freedom of expression, including the issuance by the four countries of laws that criminalise cit-izens and residents of their countries who sympathise with the State of Qatar. The penalties included 15 years’ imprisonment for anyone sympathetic to Qatar, as well as asking their citizens to leave Qatar within 15 days, and Qatari nationals to leave their countries with the same period.

H E Al Mahmoud said during the meetings that the arbitrary measures of the siege countries included the expulsion of Qatari students from schools and universities and from Makkah during the performance of Umrah in Ramadan, where they were ordered to leave Saudi Arabia.

He added that the siege countries refused to accept payment of cur-rency and credit cards from Qatari banks, which led to the need to some citizens to borrow from others to be able to pay their hotel bills.

He said that these violations included preventing citizens from movement between countries.

The violations were documented in a report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which visited Doha, pointing out that the animals also suffered violations as many of them died of thirst on the border after being taken out, HE Al Mahmoud said.

H E Speaker of Advisory Council Ahmed bin Abdullah bin Zaid Al Mahmoud said that the State of Qatar has not taken similar measures, in accordance with the directives of H H the Emir to ensure the dignity of resi-dents in the State of Qatar.

H E Al Mahmoud said that if Qatar wanted to do the same, there are 250,000 Egyptians in Qatar, and if they were similarly treated and expelled, a crisis would occur in Egypt, however they were treated with respect and the decision of their departure from Qatar was left to the directives of their government or at their own will and not by a decision of the Government of Qatar.

His Excellency also pointed out that the State of Qatar is still exporting gas to the UAE and if Qatar had stopped it one-third of Dubai and one-third of Abu Dhabi would be in total darkness, which will nega-tively affect ordinary people, adding although this is Qatar’s right under the conditions of the siege, Qatar is determined not to harm ordinary people, and its belief to resolve the dispute through dialogue and respect.

H E Speaker of Advisory Council stressed that Qatar has surpassed the siege imposed on it, but Qatar is con-cerned about the humanitarian issues between families, because in the Gulf there are mixed marriages (husband from a country and wife from a siege country) and they are brothers and sisters to the Qataris and Qatar does not want any harm happen to them, stressing the keenness of the State of Qatar on the security and stability of their countries and the entire region, because what happens to them affects it.

His Excellency noted that Qatar has become stronger after the siege, as the growth rate in Qatar is now the highest in the region despite the siege imposed on it.

H E Al Mahmoud spoke about

Qatar’s relationship with Hamas and the Taliban, and said the State of Qatar hosted Hamas at the request of the United States to establish a political dialogue during the Pales-tinian legislative elections won by Hamas, and hosted the Taliban at the request of the United States and opened an office for Taliban in Qatar to facilitate dialogue between them.

In response to a question con-cerning the continuation of Qatari-Iranian relations, H E Speaker of Advisory Council said that Iran is Qatar’s neighbor who opened the air-space and marine area for the Qatari movement, or Qatar wouldn’t have been able to get out of its territory, and this requires in the future that States consider what if others decided to close their airspace, land, and marine to any State without a decision by the Security Council or the United Nations.

He stressed that what happened in the Gulf region is illogical, the purpose of the siege was the impo-sition of guardianship of Qatar and deprivation of sovereignty as well as economic tightening.

His Excellency also answered another question concerning the World Cup projects and the rights of expatriate workers in the State of Qatar, where he pointed out that international organisations were invited to visit the State to see the sit-uation of workers, stressing that what the media of the siege countries report on the workers situation in Qatar is incorrect.

As for the deaths among workers, H E Al Mahmoud stressed that the high figures that are mentioned are incorrect, referring to an agreement signed between the State of Qatar and the International Labor Organi-zation last November, and that the International Labor Organization has asked the Gulf countries to follow the example of Qatar as a model in the treatment of expatriate workers. He also pointed to the abolition of the sponsorship system in Qatar.

In a related context, H E Speaker of Advisory Council pointed out to his meeting with a delegation of Canadian parliamentarians who recently visited Qatar. He said that the discussion with the Canadian del-egation was fruitful and that the Canadian independent civil society commission published a report after visiting the State of Qatar on the imposed siege and its consequences, considering it illegal and contrary to human rights and injustice.

He noted that the Canadian dele-gation hailed the workers situation in Qatar, while a parliamentary committee from the British par-liament recently visited Qatar and published a positive report on the workers status, in addition, criti-cizing the siege and its effects on the State of Qatar and demanded the lifting of it.

About Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 World Cup, H E Speaker of Advisory Council said that there is a desire from some that the State of Qatar give up hosting this event, as an official in one of the siege countries said that if Qatar waived hosting the World Cup in 2022, the siege will be lifted.

For their part, the heads of parlia-ments of the two groups, the head of the Chinese delegation and members of the Japanese delegation expressed their understanding of the position of the State of Qatar.

QNA

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Turkey’s fight against terrorism in the Middle

East, in Syria and in Iraq not only secures

our own citizen, it also prevents an influx

of refugees into the Balkans and in Europe

as well as terrorist activities.

Binali YildirimTurkey’s Prime Minister

“Food Security” while the first has the strength to ignite the aspiration of nations. I think achieving balance is the key solving for several environmental issues; bal-ancing in food production while conserving the environment, as the ecology itself means the balance between different envi-ronmental bodies.

Utilization is important factor in food security that covers a range of aspects that lie on individual’s understanding of what foods to choose and how to prepare and store them. Unfortunately, the political power is important player in this issue, as social conflict and civil strife can seriously affect food production and lead to the loss of livestock which threats the global food security. Therefore, mixing social conflicts and using the food production as a political power can lead to a dangerous path with dire consequences for a future food security.

The writer is Environmental Scientist graduated from the University of Nottingham.

Utilization is important factor in food security that covers a range of aspects that lie on individual’s understanding of what foods to choose and how to prepare and store them.

09FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018 OPINION

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Black lives do notmatter in Israel

The cost of shifting from food security to food sovereignty

DAVID SHEEN AL JAZEERA

MOHAMMED AL-SULAITI

Comments made by Israel’s top political and religious leaders earlier this month are a dismal reminder of how little black

lives matter in the country, and how African refugees remain in mortal danger, whether or not the government’s plan to deport them is temporarily suspended.

On March 17, one of Israel’s two chief rabbis, Yitzhak Yosef, called black people “monkeys” and the Hebrew equivalent of the N-word in his weekly sermon. It is highly unlikely that Yosef will face any real repercussions for his racist com-ments. He was not demoted after saying

in a similar sermon exactly two years ago that all non-Jews - Africans, Arabs, or otherwise — could only live in Israel if they agree to serve the country’s Jewish population.

It’s unclear if Yosef’s recent com-ments were directly connected to the Israeli government’s impending expulsion of approximately 40,000 African refugees, mainly Christians and Muslims from Eritrea and Sudan. The government has already coerced more than a third of the African refugee com-munity in Israel, over 20,000 souls, to return to Africa. Israeli journalists have revealed in recent months that the gov-ernment’s promises to secure status for them in Rwanda or Uganda were only a ruse, devised to deport them back into a stateless existence- with their ostensible acquiescence.

To be fair, racist comments from state-paid rabbis aren’t exactly a rarity in Israel. Israel’s other chief rabbi, Yisrael Lau, used the N-word to describe Black athletes on his very first day in office in July 2013. But another anti-African comment made last week, by Israel’s most powerful politician, was almost certainly timed to coincide with the gov-ernment’s efforts to ethnically cleanse the country of the refugees.

On March 19, Prime Minister Ben-jamin Netanyahu said in a public speech that the arrival of non-Jewish African refugees was “much worse” for Israel than “severe attacks by Sinai terrorists”. Netanyahu’s comments come as citizens across the country have been publicly

expressing reservations to his expulsion plan. Since the start of the calendar year, Israelis from all walks of life have regis-tered their adamant opposition to the planned deportations, scheduled to begin on April 1: doctors and artists, pro-fessors and pilots, students andsurvivors of the Holocaust. On Saturday night, a pro-refugee protest in Tel Aviv drewover 20,000 thousand people opposed to the expulsion.

But Netanyahu need not worry about amassing support for the deportation plan. True, a recent poll proved that the majority of the Israelis that live in prox-imity to the African refugees - in the Greater Tel Aviv area generally, and in the slums of South Tel Aviv specifically — oppose the expulsions. But outside of that liberal bubble, Netanyahu has easily secured support for his plan.

Netanyahu might not be losing sleep over local opposition to the deportations, but he is most certainly concerned by Jewish communities outside of Israel starting to kick up a fuss. As news of Netan-yahu’s cruel decree reaches the main-stream media outside of Israel, American Jewish leaders are unable to ignore the issue any longer. Even some of the most adamant defenders of the Israeli state and its dispossession of the Palestinian people have spoken out against the plan, calling it racist, and practically pleading with the Israeli government to scrap it.

Some rabbis are vowing to thwart the expulsion plan by hiding African ref-ugees in their homes, evoking the memory of Anne Frank, the iconic chronicler of the horrors of the Holo-caust. In Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, Frank and her family temporarily avoided being deported to the death camps by hiding with the help of

non-Jews.This week, Israel’s High Court will

consider a petition by pro-refugee activists to permanently halt the depor-tations. So with his plan in possible peril, Netanyahu described the refugees as worse than terrorists, in an obvious attempt to smear them as enemies of the state, in order to justify their impending expulsion. The last time that Netanyahu associated African refugees with ter-rorists was at another very critical moment, when the fate of these refugees hung in the balance.

In September 2014, Israel’s High Court deemed Netanyahu’s anti-refugee policies unconstitutional, and ordered the closure of the Holot desert detention centre the government had already rounded thou-sands of African men into. Determined to prevent the closure of the camp, a key component of Israeli efforts to pressure refugees to leave the country, Netanyahu’s ministers raced against time to draw up another version of the same racist law that would pass the muster of the High Court.

In the month after the court ruling, Netanyahu associated refugees with ter-rorists, when he announced special screenings for visitors arriving from Africa. The new policy, he explained, was intended to prevent the entry of the ebola virus, but was also “part of Israel’s general efforts to protect our borders from illegal infiltrators and terror”. “Infil-trators” is the derogatory term used for years by Israeli officials to dehumanise the African refugees.

Needless to say, not a single African asylum-seeker in Israel has ever been charged with any terrorism offenses. The baseless smear is intended to demonise the refugees, and to rally up support for their expulsion.

While world population growth poses a grand challenge, food security issue became an

important article in each national development plan. Knowing our current variables can help us to address food security issues. I will begin this article by reminding you of very important readings and specula-tions that have driven us to consider food security as a grand challenge. The current world population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, while world population pro-jected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 according to demographic reports. So, in front of this vast population growth, it is imperative to expand the food availability network. There is no doubt that it is our responsibility dealing with food security issues centralise in our duty to study the whole food systems wisely. The most important elements in the food security lie on: availability, accessibility, utilization and stability.

Availability is the first element in food security. If we put this element in a clearer context, we can abstract that availability in food security means the

amount of food that is present in a country or area through all forms of domestic production, imports, food stocks and food aid, in fact, this is exactly how world food program has defined availability as an important element of food security. As for me, I have replaced this term with the word “assets” of each country. In order to address food secu-rity issue, it is highly important to seek how to increase assets, more importantly, to diversify assets as the second can faster the first. As nations, our way of thinking should be shifted to how countries can be the sustainable source of food. In this context, cer-tainly there are ideas should be diminished and excluded such as food import. I do not criticise here the idea of food import, as sometimes food import can be the ideal solution. I here insist on change our way of thinking to achieve the food sovereignty.

Secondly, accessibility is a con-troversial term in food security. Despite the introduction of accessi-bility concept by Amaryta Sen in the early 1980s, unfortunately, accessi-bility is still not commonly accepted as an influencing element of food security. Generally speaking, accessi-bility is seen from three different dimensions including physical, eco-nomic and social access.

Physical dimension can be illus-trated if food is available in one part of a country with limited transport where that food cannot be delivered to some areas suffering from a lack of food. While the economic dimension can be summarised in a situation when people can afford sufficient food, nevertheless, the idea that food insecurity arises when food is available but people are unable to afford it.

The last part in the accessibility

element is the socio-cultural dimension which arises if we suppose that the food is physically available and the potential costumer has enough money to buy the food while conversely a member of a par-ticular social group or gender is pre-vented from having this food due to religious and cultural reasons. The ethical element of equality is important too when we address food security issues.

The third element of food security is utilization. Utilization in food security is defined in the World Food Summit’s as the safe and nutritious food which meets peoples’ dietary needs. The previous two elements on their own are not enough to consider when think about food sovereignty, people have the right to be assured of safe and nutritious food.

An important criterion of nutri-tious food is to provide sufficient energy to enable individuals to carry out routine physical activities. Utili-zation also lies on ensuring safe water and adequate sanitary facilities to avoid epidemic as well as aware-ness of food preparation and storage procedures.

The last element in food security is stability. The stability is the important timeline in food security where the food must present at all times in terms of availability, accessi-bility and utilization. Regardless of condition, it is the most important right for the individual to have a stable market.

To conclude, the cost of shifting to food sovereignty is by fully under-standing the previous elements and deal with them consciously. Here I suggest some recommendations which may hold an amount of accuracy.

The logo of “Food Sovereignty” should be promoted as same as

Needless to say, not a single African asylum-seeker in Israel has ever been charged with any terrorism offenses. The baseless smear is intended to demonise the refugees, and to rally up support for their expulsion.

Yulia Skripal came out of critical care yesterday following a swift improvement in her health. The 33-year-old daughter of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal is “improving rapidly and is no longer in a critical condition.

10 FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018EUROPE

Russia facing ‘global wave of revulsion’AFP

LONDON: Moscow is facing a “global wave of revulsion” in response to the nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said.

His intervention came after British counter-terror police on Wednesday said Sergei Skripal and his daughter first came into contact with a nerve agent at their home address in Britain — with the highest concentration on the front door.

The March 4 attack on the Skripals in the English city of Salisbury has been met with a major response that has seen more than 150 Russian diplomats expelled from countries around the world.

British authorities have blamed Moscow, which denies any involvement, and said a Soviet-designed nerve agent dubbed Novichok was used in the poisoning. “The Kremlin underestimated the strength of global feeling,” Johnson said at a speech in London.

“These expulsions represent a moment when a feeling has suddenly crystallised. “When years of vexation and provo-cation have worn the collective patience to breaking point, and when across the world — across

three continents — there are countries who are willing to say enough is enough.”

British police said around 250 counter-terrorism detectives are working on the case, which could continue for months. Around 500 witnesses have been identified and police are looking through more than 5,000 hours of security camera footage.

“We believe the Skripals first came into contact with the nerve agent from their front door,” said Dean Haydon, Britain’s counter-terror police chief. “Traces of the nerve agent have been found at some of the other scenes detec-tives have been working at over the past few weeks, but at lower concentrations to that found at the home address.”

Investigators had sealed off

the bench where the Skripals were found, a pub and restaurant the pair visited, and the grave of the former spy’s wife.

The Daily Telegraph said yesterday the disclosure would “intensify the manhunt for the would-be assassins” and “heap further pressure on the Kremlin” for putting at risk anyone who visited the house.

The BBC’s security corre-spondent Gordon Corera said the highest concentration was found on the Skripals’ door handle and could have been administered through a “gloopy substance which could have been smeared on”. It would explain why the nerve agent may have been found on the Skripals’ car or the res-taurant in which they had eaten, he added. Haydon said the risk to the general public was low.

Yulia Skripal came out of critical care yesterday following a swift improvement in her health. The 33-year-old daughter of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal is “improving rapidly and is no longer in a critical condition. Her condition is now stable”, said the hospital treating the pair since the March 4 attack. Sergei Skripal, 66, remains in a critical but stable condition, Salisbury District Hos-pital’s board said.

A court last week heard that,

The Embassy of US, France, Belgium, Romania, Netherlands, Lithuania, Germany, Sweden and Britain are seen in Moscow, Russia yesterday. The countries that are to expel Russian diplomats along with the numbers are as follows: France (4), Germany (4), Poland (4), Czech Republic (3), Lithuania (3), Denmark (2), Italy (2), the Netherlands (2), Spain (2), Croatia (1), Romania (1), Estonia (1), Finland (1), Hungary (1), Latvia (1) and Sweden (1).

at that stage, she could not com-municate in any meaningful way, while her father could not com-municate at all. International experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons arrived in Salisbury on March 20 to verify Britain’s findings. Russia’s foreign min-istry said Britain’s handling of the attack “suggests a possible involvement of the UK intelli-gence services”, accusing London of a campaign against Moscow.

Britain has been backed by Nato along with the US, 18 European Union nations and other countries in expelling Russian diplomats over the attack. Moscow has already ordered 23 British diplomats to leave Russia in response to the same move by London.

Meanwhile, over £880m of British property claimed to have been bought by Russians with suspect money is to be investi-gated by a parliamentary inquiry. The Treasury Select Committee

said it will probe the scale of eco-nomic crime in Britain following claims the country -- in particular the London property market -- has become the “destination of choice” to launder money. It follows recent figures from the Transparency International group estimating that £4.4bn worth of British properties may have been bought with suspicious wealth — with more than a fifth, or £880m — of these purchased by Russians.

Dutch voters say ‘no’ to new spy lawAFP

THE HAGUE: Dutch voters narrowly rejected a new law giving security services greater powers to spy on emails and online data, the electoral council announced yesterday, unveiling final referendum results.

More than six million Dutch citizens out of some 13 million eligible voters cast ballots in the national refer-endum last week on the con-troversial legislation, set to come into effect on May 1.

After a 51.5 percent turnout — enough to validate the refer-endum’s results — 49.4 percent voted down the law, while 46.5 percent were in favour.

“The referendum’s outcome therefore is a rejection of the information and security services law,” council chairman Jan-Kees Wiebenga said.

“This means the gov-ernment will have to reconsider the law. However, it’s not a binding referendum,” he told a press conference in The Hague.

The referendum, triggered by a group of Amsterdam stu-dents as a citizens initiative, was held on March 21 alongside municipal elections across 380 Dutch local councils.

The students were angered by what they saw as a bid by authorities to grab over-arching powers but proponents say it will give security services

greater ability to monitor dan-gerous groups such as jihadist organisations.

Although it is non-binding, Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who supports the legislation, has vowed he will take the results of the referendum seriously.

Vice Prime Minister Kajsa Ollongren however said Thursday that the cabinet would take its time to consider the results, the ANP news agency said.

It is also likely the last ref-erendum in the Netherlands as legislation to repeal the laws under which they can be organised are set to be passed by the upper house of par-liament soon.

The Dutch results come amid a world-wide firestorm over the online hijacking of per-sonal data including on social media giant Facebook.

The US company has met fierce criticism after it was revealed that the personal data of tens of millions of users was harvested by a British firm linked to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Last week’s referendum went hand-in-hand with municipal elections in the Netherlands in which results were fractured, with local parties doing well, as well as the eco-friendly leftist party GroenLinks, which emerged as the largest in several major cities.

French varsity dean suspendedAFP

MONTPELLIER: The dean of a university in the southern French city of Montpellier was suspended yesterday after being accused of abetting a violent attack on students protesting education reforms that have sparked demonstrations at campuses around the country.

In the past few weeks, pro-testers have shut down or severely disrupted classes at

several universities over more stringent university entrance requirements introduced by President Emmanuel Macron.

Universities in Paris, Montpellier, Toulouse, Bor-deaux, Nantes and Nancy have all been affected to various degrees. The situation escalated sharply in Montpellier, where hooded men armed with bats stormed a lecture theatre to dis-lodge students staging a sit-in.

Videos shared on Facebook

showed several men, their faces concealed, hitting students in the theatre of the law faculty with sticks and bats.

Three people were injured in the skirmish. On Wednesday, the university dean Philippe Petel was arrested along with a professor on Wednesday, on suspicion of abetting or partic-ipating in the eviction.

Several students claimed they recognised several pro-fessors among the attackers.

Italy parties meet, but obstacles to govt deal aboundREUTERS

ROME: Italy’s political parties met yesterday to try to find common ground on forming a government in the wake of this month’s inconclusive election, ahead of formal consultations with the president next week.

The anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, which won most votes at the March 4 election, organised meetings in parliament with the far-right

League, its more moderate ally Forza Italia (Go Italy!) and the left-wing Free and Equal party.

The 5-Star’s Senate leader Danilo Toninelli said the talks had been “constructive” and had focused on policies that could win broad support in parliament, such as measures to combat poverty, rather than on gov-ernment posts. Forza Italia’s rep-resentative Anna Maria Bernini also said the meeting had been “useful”, but beyond the

cautiously positive tones there are major obstacles in the way of forming a ruling coalition.

The 5-Star and the League each claim the right to name the prime minister and lead a gov-ernment — the former as the largest single party and the latter as the leading party in a conserv-ative coalition that won most par-liamentary seats. After their leaders, 5-Star’s Luigi Di Maio and the League’s Matteo Salvini, joined forces to elect the speakers of the

two houses of parliament last week many commentators saw the deal as paving the way to a 5-Star/League government.

However this solution, which would alarm Brussels and investors because of both parties’ hostility to EU budget rules, now looks threatened by mutual vetoes. The first involves the leadership: Salvini said this week it is not vital that he should be prime minister, but Di Maio is less flexible. He said on Tuesday

that it was the “people’s will” that he should get the job because 5-Star, with 33 percent of the vote, got twice the support of the League, on 17 percent.

Another stumbling block is the role of Forza Italia and its leader, four-times prime min-ister Silvio Berlusconi. 5-Star is fiercely hostile to Berlusconi, who has a conviction for tax fraud and is on trial in another case for allegedly bribing witnesses.

Military exerciseFrench Defence Minister Florence Parly rides in a speedboat as she attends a military exercise at the Fusiller-Marins base, in Lanester, western France, yesterday.

Paris suspect Abdeslam’s trial verdict next monthAFP

BRUSSELS: Belgian judges will hand down their verdict in April in the trial of Salah Abdeslam, the last surviving suspect in the Paris Islamist attacks, over a shootout in Brussels that led to his capture.

The court in Brussels announced that it will deliver the judgement on April 23, two months after Abdeslam stood trial on charges of the attempted murder of police officers. He is being held in a prison near Paris but was transported to the court for part of the hearing in Feb-ruary, during which he pro-claimed he would only put his “trust in Allah”.

The court made the announcement after hearing an application from Belgian terror victims to be named as civil parties in the case against Abdeslam over the March 2016 gun battle. “The verdict will be handed down on April 23,” presiding judge Marie-France Keutgen told the Brussels court.

Islamist gunman Rad-ouane Lakdim, who shot dead four people last week in southern France, including a policeman killed after taking the place of a hostage, said during the siege he was acting on behalf of the Islamic State group and demanded the release of Abdeslam.

Prosecutors have recom-mended a maximum of 20 years in prison for Abdeslam, 28, and Soufiane Ayari, his 24-year-old co-defendant.

The pair are being tried on terrorist-related charges of attempted murder and possession of banned weapons over the shootout on March 15, 2016. Seven days later, suicide bombers from a cell linked to the November 2015 Paris attacks killed 32 people and wounded hundreds more at Brussels airport and a metro station in the Belgian capital.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is embroiled in several criminal investigations, denies any wrongdoing and has vowed to have all cases dismissed. His lawyers said they would appeal yesterday’s decision to try him.

11FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018 EUROPE

Sarkozy to face trial for influence peddlingREUTERS

PARIS: Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was ordered yesterday to stand trial for influence peddling over accusa-tions he offered to help a prose-cutor get promoted in return for leaked information about a separate criminal inquiry.

Sarkozy, who is embroiled in several criminal investiga-tions, denies any wrongdoing and has vowed to have all cases dismissed. His lawyers said they would appeal yesterday’s decision to try him.

“Nicolas Sarkozy will... calmly wait for the result of the motion for a declaration of inva-lidity. He does not doubt that once again the truth will triumph,” his lawyers said in a statement. His appeal will be heard on June 25, it said.

The case came about after investigators used phone-taps to examine separate allegations that late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi funded Sarkozy’s cam-paign. The investigators began to suspect the former president had kept tabs on a separate case through a network of informants.

Yesterday’s development came just over a week after Sarkozy, 63, was told he was being formally treated as a suspect in the election campaign investigation.

Sarkozy was president from 2007 to 2012 but was defeated by Socialist Francois Hollande when he ran for re-election. He has since faced a series of inves-tigations into alleged corruption, fraud, favoritism and campaign-funding irregularities.

Under French law, a suspect is not formally charged with a

crime unless he is sent to trial.Sarkozy’s lawyers had pre-

viously argued that magistrates investigating the alleged secret Libyan funding exceeded their powers and went on a “fishing expedition” by tapping his con-versations between September

2013 and March 2014, breaching lawyer-client privilege. He used the mobile phone account under the alias “Paul Bismuth” only for calls with lawyer Thierry Herzog.

Based on the intercepts, Sarkozy, who still had political influence at the time despite having left office, is accused of having discussed offering a pro-motion to a prosecutor in return for tip-offs on another campaign funding probe.

That investigation, into accu-sations that Sarkozy’s former party treasurer Eric Woerth and others exploited the mental frailty of France’s richest woman, Liliane Bettencourt, to extract political donations, was dropped without charges.

A source close to the inves-tigation said that along with Sarkozy, Herzog, and the pros-ecutor would also face trial on

the same charges. Influence-peddling can be punished in France by up to five years in prison and a fine of €500,000 ($682,000). Sarkozy lost presi-dential immunity from legal prosecution a month after he left office in June 2012.

Sarkozy, who was called “president bling bling” by many due to his flashy style, has been dogged for years by accusations of wrongdoing, but none has led to a conviction. He is challenging an earlier order to stand trial on charges of illicit spending overruns during his failed 2012 campaign.

After being put under inves-tigation over the Libya probe, Sarkozy went on prime time tel-evision to reject those accusa-tions, which he said were making his life “hell”.

Sarkozy and his Republicans party have repeatedly called

investigations into him politically motivated. “All this energy wasted on ridiculous matters at a time when all our legal means should be dedicated to fighting terrorism,” Olivier Marleix, Republicans lawmaker and long-time supporter of Sarkozy, said.

One of the many factors that played in 40-year-old Emmanuel Macron’s presidential election win in May 2017 was a promise of a clean break with traditional French politics, often marred by accusations of corruption.

Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, was convicted in 2011, after his retirement, of misusing public funds to keep political allies in phantom jobs. That made the now ailing Chirac the first French head of state convicted since Nazi col-laborator Marshal Philippe Petain in 1945.

Royal visitBritain’s Queen Elizabeth holds a bouquet after attending the Royal Maundy service at St George’s Chapel in Windsor, yesterday.

Driver tries to ram soldiers as France mourns terror victimsAFP

VARCES-ALLIÈRES-ET-RISSET: A man driving a car with fake licence plates tried to ram a group of soldiers out jogging in southeast France yesterday, security sources said, sparking fears of a new attempted attack as the country mourns the victims of an Islamist shooting spree last week.

Speaking French and Arabic, the man first threatened a group of soldiers at 8am in Varces-Allieres-et-Risset, near Grenoble, and then tried to run down another group returning to their barracks from a jog, the sources added.

“The soldiers managed to get up onto the pavement without being hit,” army spokesman Colonel Benoit Brulon said. The driver of the small Peugeot 208 hatchback, who was accom-panied by a woman, sped off without causing any injuries.

Prosecutors in Grenoble, a town in the foothills of the French Alps, said the incident was not being treated as a ter-rorist attack for the moment and the motive remained unclear. One security source initially said that the driver was among two people arrested around lunchtime in Grenoble, but others later contradicted this as the investigation continued.

The incident comes with France on edge after a jihadist rampage in the towns of Car-cassonne and Trebes last week where a 25-year-old gunman killed four people, including a policeman who took the place of a hostage in a super-market siege.

The people of Trebes paid an emotional farewell to three local victims at a ceremony in

the square of the sleepy town yesterday, held a day after a national tribute to officer Arnaud Beltrame in Paris led by Pres-ident Emmanuel Macron.

“You fell under the bullets of terrorism and took with you the insouciance of a little town in Occitanie where no one expected to ever experience such happenings,” Trebes Mayor Eric Menassi told mourners at the gathering attended by Prime Minister Edouard Philippe.

Security forces have been repeatedly targeted during the string of jihadist attacks that have claimed the lives of over 240 people around France in the past three years. At least six security force members have been killed during that period.

In last week’s attack, Moroccan-born Radouane Lakdim fired at a group of policemen returning from a jog before storming the Super U store and shooting dead two people. He also killed the pas-senger of a car he hijacked in Carcassonne.

Beltrame intervened during the supermarket siege to take the place of a cashier Lakdim was using as a human shield.

But after three hours of negotiations the gunman, who claimed allegiance to the Islamic State group, slit Bel-trame’s throat before himself being shot dead by police.

Paying tribute to Beltrame at a national ceremony in Paris, President Emmanuel Macron said his act of self-sacrifice would “remain etched in French hearts”. Other deadly assaults on police include the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris in January 2015.

UK Labour Party plunges into crisisAFP

LONDON: A high-profile resig-nation in Britain’s main oppo-sition Labour over its handling of multiple anti-Semitism alle-gations pitched the party into crisis yesterday on an issue that has stalked its hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn ever since he took charge.

The resignation of Christine Shawcroft, the official in charge of cracking down on anti-Semitism in the party, was the latest twist in a row that came to a head this week when Jewish cam-paigners held an unprecedented protest outside parliament.

Scores of party members have been suspended, expelled or forced to resign for making anti-Semitic statements since Corbyn became party leader in 2015, but he and his far-left

supporters have been accused of a “complacent” approach to the problem.

Corbyn started the week with an apology for “pockets” of anti-Semitism in the party that was quickly rebuffed by British Jewish leaders who accused him of siding with anti-Semites. They called a protest on Monday, saying “enough is enough”.

Around 500 demonstrators gathered outside the parliament in London, where they were met with counter-protests by Jewish Corbyn supporters, leading to heated exchanges and minor physical confrontations.

Members of the main rally shouted “shame on you” and “scum” at the group of around 50 Corbyn supporters, who claim that the accusations lev-elled at Labour are politically motivated.

Immediately after the victory he was forced on the defensive for having once referred to Hamas and Hezbollah — groups that deny Israel’s right to exist -- as “friends” at a discussion about the prospects for peace in the Middle East.

The latest crisis began last week when Corbyn was forced to apologise over a Facebook post he wrote in 2012 in support of a street artist whose mural, fea-turing clear anti-Semitic sym-bolism, was due to be removed following complaints.

Corbyn made a latest attempt to quell the crisis by giving a long interview to Jewish News. Corbyn revealed that there had been 300 internal party referrals for anti-Semitism since 2015. Of that number, he said 150 were either expelled or resigned.

Italy arrests five in Berlin market attack investigationAFP

ROME: Italian police yesterday arrested five people as part of an anti-terror raid linked to a Tunisian who staged a deadly attack on a Berlin Christmas market in 2016, Italian media reported.

Anis Amri, a rejected asylum seeker, had rammed a stolen truck into the crowded square, killing 12 people and wounding about 100 others. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack on December 19, 2016 -- its deadliest ever carried out in Germany.

Amri, who had previously lived in Italy, was killed four days after the assault by police in a Milan suburb. The five detained yesterday are accused of activities linked to “international terrorism” and procuring false documents for migrants, the Italian AGI news agency reported.

The suspects included a Tunisian national from the city of Latina, south of Rome, who had allegedly planned to provide Amri with fake identity papers to help him flee abroad, investigators told AGI.

The raids were carried out in several cities including Rome, Latina, and Naples.

Amri, who was 24 when he was shot dead by police, landed on the Mediter-ranean island of Lampedusa in 2011 and spent four years in prison in Sicily for burning down a school.

In the aftermath of the Berlin attack, Italian police raided several homes where Amri had reportedly stayed in 2015 in an agricultural region southeast of Rome.

An aerial view taken with a drone yesterday shows people visiting a makeshift memorial in tribute to the victims of a shopping mall fire in the industrial city of Kemerovo in western Siberia.

Kin of Siberia blaze dead flay ‘inaction’AFP

KEMEROVO: Relatives of some of the 64 people who died in the Kemerovo shopping centre fire in Siberia have lodged complaints with prosecutors alleging inaction by firefighters at the scene as new details emerged of the tragedy.

Several people have submitted complaints “against emergency services and law enforcement officers,” a spokesman for regional prosecutors told Interfax news agency yesterday.

“In their view, due to the inaction of firefighters and police, people were killed; they lacked the necessary equipment and skills,” the spokesman said.

Forty-one of the dead in the

shopping mall were children. “The prosecutors received these complaints and are working on them. Now they will question rel-atives of the dead and establish the timeline of events,” a local activist, Maxim Uchvatov, said.

Investigators will look into the firefighting equipment and the timing of events, using cell phone records, said Uchvatov, who had lost distant relatives in the fire.

Among those to complain were couple Nadezhda Vos-trikova and Igor Sabadash, who lost a daughter, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren in the blaze, reported RBK daily.

Vostrikova wrote that her daughter Alyona phoned to say that they were locked in the

cinema, the lights had gone out and a fire had started. She said that she ran to the top floor of the mall, where the cinema was located and found four firefighters who said they could not go in.

“I fell on my knees and started begging: ‘Guys, save my children,’ to which they answered indifferently: ‘We can’t help you at all. We’re waiting for a brigade of rescuers,” she wrote in her complaint.

Previously investigators said the cinema doors had been locked, apparently to keep out those without tickets.

Vostrikov said most cinema-goers ran out but his family and others were slower and when they reached the exit, the cor-ridor was full of thick smoke.

Venezuela’s prisons suffer from dire overcrowding and a shortage of basic supplies, struggling under the deepening economic crisis that is gripping the once-wealthy country.

12 FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018AMERICAS

Venezuela jailbreak bid sparks blaze, 68 deadAFP

CARACAS: A total of 68 people died during an attempted jail-break in Venezuela after a fire engulfed police holding cells in one of the worst tragedies in years in a notoriously violent and overcrowded prison system.

Attorney General Tarek William Saab gave the death toll in the pre-dawn mayhem at the police headquarters in northern Carabobo state, blaming a fire thought to have been started deliberately.

Carlos Nieto, head of a pris-oners’ rights group called Una Ventana a la Libertad (A Window on Freedom), said that some pris-oners burned to death and others choked after setting fire to mat-tresses and stealing a guard’s gun in an attempt to break out.

The dead included two women who were visiting the jail, the attorney general said, adding that four prosecutors

have been named to investigate. Photos taken by Nieto’s group showed the body of a man with burns and firefighters trying to put out flames.

Relatives of those being kept in the detention center tried to force their way in. After one officer was injured by a tossed stone, the crowd was dispersed by police firing tear gas.

A video posted on Twitter showed dozens of people demanding information in front of police guarding the site. Women were seen crying.

“I am a desperate mother. My son has been here a week. They have not given any information,” Dora Blanco told local media.

Local news correspondents wrote on Twitter that the facility was tense Wednesday night.

Venezuela’s prisons suffer from dire overcrowding and a shortage of basic supplies, strug-gling under the deepening eco-nomic crisis that is gripping the once-wealthy country.

Because of the lack of space in penitentiaries, convicts are often sent to police holding cells like the ones in Carabobo, meant to be used as temporary pens for suspects facing charges or court hearings, where detainees are supposed to spend a maximum of 48 hours.

Nieto’s association estimated that the temporary detention centers were overfilled by five times their capacity. And what happened late on Wednesday in Carabobo is not an isolated

Relatives of inmates at the General Command of the Carabobo Police waiting outside the prison in Valencia, Venezuela.

incident, he added. “All the police stations in Venezuela are facing similar or worse conditions of overcrowding, lack of food and disease,” he said.

The association said 65 people died last year in the holding cells due to violence, malnutrition or tuberculosis.

Two weeks ago, 58 detainees escaped holding cells on Mar-garita Island after punching a hole in their facility’s wall. They were all soon recaptured.

In August 2017, a riot left 37 dead and 14 wounded in police cells in the southern state of Amazonas, while an April 2017

clash between rival gangs left 12 dead and 11 injured in the Puente Ayala prison in the eastern city of Barcelona. A month before that, the remains of 14 people were found in a mass grave in the General Penitentiary of Ven-ezuela, in San Juan de Los Morros in the country’s center.

Trump ousts Veterans Affairs chief, taps WH doctor to replace himAFP

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump shook up his cabinet once again, sacking embattled Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin and nominating White House doctor Ronny Jackson as his successor.

“I am pleased to announce that I intend to nominate highly respected Admiral Ronny L. Jackson, MD, as the new Sec-retary of Veterans Affairs,” said Trump, who has also replaced his secretary of state and national security advisor in the last month.

“I am thankful for Dr. David Shulkin’s service to our country and to our GREAT VETERANS!” he said on Twitter.

Pentagon official Robert Wilkie would serve as interim department chief until Jackson receives Congressional approval, the president added.

Shulkin’s sacking had been widely predicted after he was accused of spending $122,000 on a nine-day trip to Europe with his wife, which included sight-seeing at castles and taking in professional tennis matches.

He was one of the few senior officials in the Trump adminis-tration who had also served during the presidency of Barack Obama. Jackson’s stock with Trump rose after he pronounced in January that the 71-year-old president was in “excellent” health.

After releasing the results

from Trump’s physical, Jackson said “he has incredible genes and that’s the way God made him.” VoteVets, a progressive organi-zation, urged Senators to “ask him blunt, direct questions about how the VA works” during his confirmation hearing.

“We are concerned about his readiness to assume control,” the group wrote on Twitter.

AMVETS Executive Director Joe Chenelly questioned whether Jackson, who has no experience in management, is qualified to run a $200bn a year bureaucracy, the second largest agency in the US government.

“With an official bio that does not seem to contain any indication that he’s held a

command, is the president’s nominee fully prepared to lead such a massive bureaucracy?,” Chenelly asked in a statement.

Shulkin’s departure caps a dizzying month of changes to the Trump cabinet, most notably the sacking of Rex Tillerson as sec-retary of state on March 13.

Trump’s top economic advisor Gary Cohn also exited the White House after the pres-ident announced plans to impose tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum, a policy Cohn did not endorse.

And National Security Advisor HR McMaster was axed only six days ago, replaced by the hardline Fox News pundit and former UN ambassador John Bolton.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is the largest federal agency after the Pentagon, employing 360,000 people.

Lack of funding has weakened the hospital network specifically dedicated to the health of veterans -- a key con-stituency for Trump.

And the system has come under criticism from many vet-erans and organizations for falling short, particularly in terms of psychiatric care.

Hundreds of thousands of veterans, many who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

The 58-year-old Shulkin had served as undersecretary of vet-erans affairs for health under Obama.

TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is shown in this conceptual illustration.

Nasa resuming search for planets orbiting stars beyond solar systemREUTERS

WASHINGTON: The search for world’s circling stars far beyond our solar system will resume in the coming weeks with Nasa’s launch of a spacecraft scientists hope will enlarge the known catalog of so-called exoplanets believed capable of supporting life.

Nasa plans to send the Tran-siting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, into orbit from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket set for blast-off between April 16 and June on a two-year, $337m mission.

The latest Nasa astrophysics endeavor is designed to build on the work of its predecessor, the Kepler space telescope, which discovered the bulk of some 3,500 exoplanets documented

during the past 20 years, revo-lutionizing one of the newest fields in space science.

Nasa expects TESS to detect thousands more previously unknown worlds, perhaps hundreds of them Earth-sized or “super-Earth”-sized -- no larger than twice as big as our home planet.

Such worlds are believed to stand the greatest chance of having rocky surfaces or oceans, and are thus con-sidered the most promising candidates for the evolution of life, as opposed to gas giants similar to Jupiter or Neptune.

Astronomers hope to end up with anywhere from 10 to 30 more rocky exoplanets for further study. The new probe will take about 60 days to attain its highly elliptical, first-of-a-kind orbit that will loop TESS

between Earth and the moon every two and a half weeks.

Kepler’s positioning system broke down in 2013, about four years after its launch, and it has nearly run out of fuel.

“So it’s perfect timing that we’ll be launching TESS to con-tinue the great activity of looking for planets around stars other than our sun and thinking about what it might mean for life in the universe,” Paul Hertz, NASA’s director of astrophysics, told reporters at a news briefing in Washington on Wednesday.

TESS, roughly the size of a refrigerator with solar-panel wings, is equipped with four special cameras to survey 200,000 stars that are rela-tively near the sun and thus among the brightest in the sky, seeking out those with planets of their own.

Approval rating of Trump on the riseAFP

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump’s approval rating has ticked up, according to two recent polls — an increase that could be due to rosier US economic data — but the Republican leader’s popularity still remains below that of his predecessors.

Trump’s rating moved up from 35 percent to 42 percent from February to March, according to CNN’s monthly opinion poll and another study jointly conducted by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The two polls have a margin of error of 3.7-4.2 percentage points.

Management of the world’s largest economy remains the strong point for the real estate mogul-turned-president -- more Americans (48 percent) now approve of how he is handling the economy than disapprove (45 percent), according to the CNN poll.

The sweeping tax cuts adopted by Congress in December are also a high point for Trump: 46 percent of Americans polled approve of the president’s fiscal policy, the AP-NORC study reveals. On the negative side, Trump earns lower marks for his trade policy and an attitude towards Russia that is seen as “too easy,” the CNN poll says.

Lula denounces violence on poll campaign trailAFP

CURITIBA: Brazil’s former leftist leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva denounced violent protesters during his presi-dential campaign tour and vowed he’d return to power anyway.

In a day that laid bare the raw divisions in Brazil ahead of October presidential elections, Lula angrily told a crowd of several thousand in the southern city of Curitiba that all along his 10-day bus tour of the region he had been dogged by anti-democratic opponents.

Late on Tuesday, his convoy was shot at, he said, with three bullets hitting two buses, although no one was injured. Earlier, people had thrown stones and eggs at his buses and while he was on stage. “I only know that they’re not democrats. They’re more fascists and Nazis than anything else,” he said.

Even as Lula spoke to his red-shirted supporters, oppo-nents positioned in buildings overlooking the square tried to drown him out by banging pots and letting off fireworks. Large numbers of police stood by, separating the rally from a smaller counter-protest held by a right-wing group.

Lula — who easily leads in the polls despite fighting to avoid having to serve a 12-year prison sentence for corruption — was defiant. “Save your rockets for January 1, when I am sworn in,” he said.

Hours earlier, his closest rival, right-wing former army captain Jair Bolsonaro, met

nearby with several hundred cheering supporters in Curitiba.

Denouncing Lula as a “scoundrel,” Bolsonaro told the crowd: “We can’t accept elec-tions without Lula being locked up.” Bolsonaro, who has praised torture and Brazil’s two-decade-long military dicta-torship, didn’t mention Tues-day’s shooting incident. Instead he repeated his campaign promise to loosen gun laws and get tough on crime. “I want a... police that shoots to kill,” he said.

However, many other major politicians denounced the apparent attack on Lula.

Center-right President Michel Temer expressed “regret” and said: “We need to reunite Brazilians. We need to pacify the country. This wave of violence, this climate of ‘us against them,’ cannot continue.” For 27-year-old university professor Leticia Mreuz, who turned out in Curitiba to hear Lula speak, the harassment during his campaign swing spelled trouble.

“I think Lula is the victim of political persecution. This is a time of fear,” she said.

When Lula left office after two terms at the start of 2011, he was Brazil’s most popular president on record, having presided over a commodities-fueled economic boom and winning plaudits for his social policies. However, he inspires equally passionate opposition and is blamed by the right and many in the center for Brazil’s slide into the mammoth “Car Wash” corruption scandal that has shaken the country over the last four years.

US President greets RoseanneAFP

NEW York: The return of hit sitcom “Roseanne” was a ratings triumph for its Trump-voting star and the US pres-ident is also apparently a fan, calling to congratulate the show’s actress on her success.

The first two episodes, broadcast on ABC on Tuesday after a 21-year-old hiatus, averaged more than 18 million viewers, reportedly making it the highest-rated sitcom broadcast in more than three years. Actress Roseanne Barr said the Republican called personally to congratulate her.

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Tomb Raider (2D/Action) 11:30am, 2:00, 4:30, 7:00, 9:30pm & 12:00midnight Real Player One 10:00am, 12:00noon, 12:45, 3:30, 5:15, 6:15, 9:00, 11:10 & 11:45pm Hurricane Heist (2D) 10:00am, 12:00noon, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 6:00, 8:00, 8:15, 10:00, 11:00pm & 12:00midnight Acrimony (2D) 10:15am, 2:45, 7:15 & 11:45pm Etlouly Barra (2D/Arabic) 12:45, 5:15 & 9:45pm Baaghi 2 (2D/Hindi) 10:00am, 3:00 & 8:00pm 7 Days In Entebbe (2D) 12:50, 5:50 & 11:00pm Talq Sena3y (2D/Arabic) 10:00am, 2:30 & 11:00pm Pacific Rim: Uprising (2D/Action) 12:00noon, 4:30 & 9:00pm Black Panther (2D/Action) 10:00am & 12:45pm Red Sparrow (2D/Action) 3:30, 6:15, 9:00 & 11:45pm Ready Player One (3D/IMAX) 11:00AM, 2:00, 5:00, 8:00 & 11:00PM

Baaghi 2 (Hindi) 11:30am, 9:30 & 11:30pm Peter Rabbit (2D/Animation) 4:15 & 6:00pm Poomaram (Malayalam) 2:00pm Cake 2:00pm Rangastalam(Telugu) 4:30pmMy Perfect You (Tagalog) 7:30pm Maan Jao Naa 4:45 & 11:30pm Hurricane Heist (2D/Action) 7:45 & 9:45pm 7 Days In Entebbe (2D/Thriller) 9:30pm Ready Player One (2D/Action) 2:15, 7:00pm & 12:00midnight

ROYAL PLAZA

Rangastalam(Telugu) 2:00pmPoomaram (Malayalam) 2:00pm Baaghi 2 (Hindi) 5:00 & 11:30pm Peter Rabbit (2D/Animation) 2:15, 4:00 & 5:45pmReady Player One (2D/Action) 7:30 & 11:15pm Maan Jao Naa 4:30 & 9:15pm 7 Days In Entebbe (Thriller) 7:30pm My Perfect You (Tagalog) 7:00 & 11:30pm Etlouly Barra 10:00pm Hurricane Heist (2D/Action) 9:30pm

Baaghi 2 (Hindi) 2:30 & 11:30pmPeter Rabbit (2D/Animation) 1:45, 3:30 & 5:15pmReady Player One (2D/Action) 2:30 & 9:00pmMaan Jao Naa 5:00 & 9:30pm7 Days In Entebbe (2D/Thriller) 5:00 & 11:45pm My Perfect You (Tagalog) 7:00 & 9:15pm Hurricane Heist (2D/Action) 7:15pm Etlouly Barra 7:00pm Poomaram (Malayalam) 11:30pm

Baghi 2 (Hindi) 1:00, 3:45, 6:30, 9:15pm, 12:00midnight & 01:00am Poomaram (Malayalam) 12:30, 3:15, 6:00, 8:45, 11:30pm & 02:00am IRA (Malayalam) 3:45 & 9:15pm

Rangastalam(Telugu)12:15,12:30, 3:30, 6:45, 10:00pm& 01:00am

Peter Rabbit (Animation) 10:30am, 1:15 & 3:15pm Ready Player One (Action) 10:30am, 6:00 & 11:30pm Pacific Rim (Action) 10:30am My Perfect You (Tagalog) 5:15 & 10:00pmBaaghi 2 (Hindi) 12:30, 3:30, 6:15, 9:15pm & 12:00midnight The Hurricane Heist 1:00, 7:45pm & 12:30am Poomaram (Malayalam) 3:15 & 8:45pm

Peter Rabbit (Animation) 10:30am, 12:30, 2:30 & 4:30pm Baaghi 2 (Hindi) 10:30am, 1:20, 4:10, 7:00 &9:50pm Ready Player One (Action) 10:30am, 1:20, 4:10, 7:00 & 9:50pm The Hurricane Heist (Action) 10:30am, 12:45, 3:00, 5:15, 7:30 & 9:45pm Pacific Rim (Action) 6:30, 9:50 & 11:10pm

When the creator of a virtual reality world called the OASIS dies, he releases a video in which he challenges all OASIS users to find his Easter Egg, which will givethe finder his fortune.

FLIK Mirqab7 Days In Entebbe 8:40pmBaaghi 2 6:20pm & 12:20amBlack Panther 4:00pm Etlouly Heist 2:20 & 6:40pm Hurricane Heist 5:30, 9:10 & 11:15pm Pacific Rim: Uprising 4:20, 9:25 & 11:50pm My Perfect You 7:35 & 10:50pm Peter Rabbit 2:30, 3:30, 4:30, 6:30, 7:05 & 4:25pm Poomaram 5:15 & 9:15pm Ready One Player 1:30, 4:35, 7:40 & 10:45pm 3D 3:25, 6:30, 9:35pm & 12:35amRed Sparrow 6:40 & 10:00pm Sherlock Gnomes 1:50 & 5:00pm Tomb Raider 12:00noon,2:40, 8:30 & 11:00pm

READY PLAYER ONE

Yestserday’s answer

Aspetar provides medical support to Samla Race 2018THE PENINSULA

DOHA: For the fourth consecutive year, Aspetar, the orthopaedic and sports medicine hospital in Qatar, is providing round-the-clock medical support to the 200 athletes competing in this year’s Samla Race 2018; a Desert Extreme Trek for athletes with an adventurous spirit.

The race, which began yes-terday and runs until April 1, involves a series of challenges over a 200km trek that begins in Zekreet and ends in Zubara Castle. The challenges include running, shooting, swimming, cycling and kayaking.

Aspetar’s multidisciplinary medical team consists of three

doctors, three physiotherapists, three nurses and one massage therapist. These experts are split into three cars running alongside contestants to ensure all medical care is readily available throughout the non-stop race.

Aspetar has also positioned a movable clinic and ice bath along the course to treat injuries. A team of ambulances is also on standby to transfer patients in an emergency.

In the weeks leading up to the main race, Aspetar experts have organised workshops to educate participants about the health risks they will face during the race, sharing tips on how to stay hydrated and well-supplemented with nutrients. The Samla Race is

a challenging event organised to test participants’ physical and mental strengths, individual skills and overall fitness. The race trek extends across Qatar’s vast desert spaces.

Supporting such events cements Aspetar’s leading role in the treatment and prevention of local, regional and interna-tional athletes’ injuries across all sports. Aspetar’s experts have a wealth of experience in sup-porting athletes taking part in major tournaments in Qatar and abroad, including the 24th Men’s Handball World Cham-pionship in 2015, the 2015 AIBA World Boxing Championships, and the 2016 UCI Road World Championships. Aspetar’s medical team in Samla Race 2018.

‘Student’s Book Bank’ inauguratedTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Students India Qatar chapter has opened its blossoming voluntary program “Student’s Book Bank” for the new academic year. The function held in Youth Forum office at Hilal was inau-grauted by Youth Forum president Jamshid Ibarhim. Students India president Osama presided over the function.

Programme conveners Thoufeeq Mambad, Mohammed Shabeer (Vice President, Youth Forum), Haris Puthukol (General Secretary, Youth Forum) and Students India representative Aamir addressed the gathering.

Students Book Bank is the voluntary service conducted by the Students India in coordination with Youth Forum,where used academic text books and guides are collected from students of different schools and are distributed systemati-cally to the needy. Students can donate as well as collect new sets of books from student’s Book Bank.

Parents and students actively participated in donating books during the collection which com-menced from March 23 and concluded on March 27. Book Bank now has a large bundle of academic books from classes I-XII of all Indian schools.

Distribution of the books began on March 28

and ends on March 31, officials said. Students/parents can collect the used books from 7pm till 10pm, at Youth Forum Office, Hilal (C-ring Road). For location related information and queries, contact 66739213, 30485351 and 44439319.

Youth Forum President Jamsheed Ibrahim inaugurating the “Student’s Book Bank”. BELOW: Student volunteers collecting the books.

‘Chaliyar Doha’ celebrates World Water Day THE PENINSULA

DOHA: World Water Day, held on March 22 every year, is about focusing attention on the impor-tance of water. The theme for World Water Day 2018 is ‘Nature for Water’ – exploring nature-based solutions to the water challenges we face in the 21st century.

Chaliyar Doha, a well-known environmental organisation in Qatar, conducted discussion ses-sions on significance of preserving water for a better future. The meeting stressed about impor-tance of water and its conservation. The session expressed concern about the “Day Zero” situation of Cape Town and reminded that other cities in the world is in process of following Cape Town.

ICC general secretary Jutas Paul inaugurated program. All participants in the function took the pledge to conserve and protect water by reducing the usage and spreading the awareness.

Chaliyar Doha president VCI Mashood lead the oath. Hyder Chungathara presided over the function.Chaliyar Doha general secretary Abdul Latif Faroke, Ashraf Chirakkal, Siddeeque Vazhakkad and Basheer Kuniyil delivered speeches. Layis Kuniyil welcomed the gathering and Basheer Manikkadav delivered vote of thanks. Chaliyar Doha office bearers Manaf Edavanna, Ajmal Areekode, Kesavadas Nilamboor,Haseeb Akkode, Zameel Chaliyam, Shanavas CP, Sidhiq CT, Jabir Beypore, Sunil Mathur, EA Nasser and Abi Chun-gathara organized the program sessions.

“The sound that is generated when one cracks his or her knuckles is due to the partial collapse of a cavitation bubble that’s in the fluid in the joint,” explained Abdul Barakat, a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique. So far, knuckle-cracking has not been shown to be beneficial or harmful. Contrary to popular belief, medics say it does not cause arthritis.

16 FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018MORNING BREAK

FAJRSHOROOK

04. 11 AM

05. 28 AM

11. 39 AM

03. 07PM

05. 51 PM

07. 21 PM

ZUHRASR

MAGHRIBISHA

PRAYER TIMINGS

HIGH TIDE 04:00 – 16:30 LOW TIDE 10:45 – 22:15

Misty to foggy at places at first becomes

relatively hot daytime with some scattered

clouds and dustyby night.

WEATHER TODAY

Courtesy: Qatar Meteorology Department

Minimum Maximum 24oC 35oC

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Chocolate sculptures of a koala, elephant, eagle and a gorilla are seen during the chocolate sculpture festival in Durbuy, Belgium yesterday.

Huge chocolate statues spring up in BelgiumREUTERS

DURBUY: It sounds like a choc-oholic’s dreamland - giant sculp-tures of elephants and flamingos all crafted from Belgian chocolate.

The animal creations, up to 3 metres tall, are the centrepiece of an exhibition in Belgium of around 50 chocolate pieces by 40 international artists. The Choco-Palace festival, in the small city of Durbuy, southeast of Brussels, also features a chocolate river and stalls selling macaroons and choc-olate drinks.

The festival has already attracted more than 30,000 vis-itors and is set to draw in plenty more over the holiday weekend until it closes on April 8.

Durbuy, with a population of around 10,000, light-heartedly bills itself as “the smallest city in the world”, and attracts sightseers from nearby Brussels and Lux-embourg. “The idea was to bring the biggest chocolate sculpture festival in the world to the smallest city in the world,” said Laura Trommelen, from PLG, the advertising group that has organised the festival.

Cracked it! Experts find answer to the knuckle-popping puzzleAFP

PARIS: It has puzzled scientists for over 100 years but now they appear to have cracked it: what, exactly, is it that causes that wince-inducing sound when you pop your knuckles? Love it or loathe it, knuckle-cracking is very common.

Earlier studies have established that not all joints can be cracked, and that — for that those that can — the act can’t be repeated for another 20 minutes.

But the source of the sound remained a mystery. And “popping”, it turns out, is exactly what it is, researchers said yes-terday after finding that the distinctive cracking sound was caused by the col-lapse of microscopic bubbles of joint fluid in the hand.

Using a mathematical model alongside a geometrical representation of the joint, experts from Paris’ Ecole Polytechnique and Stanford University in the United States simulated the events leading up to the crack.

“The sound that is generated when one cracks his or her knuckles is due to the partial collapse of a cavitation bubble that’s in the fluid in the joint,” explained Abdul Barakat, a professor at the Ecole

Polytechnique. “It could be multiple bubbles, but we showed that the collapse of a single bubble is sufficient to give you the signature sound you get,” he said.

Although experts had initially linked the sound to the collapse of knuckle bubbles back in 1971, their findings were thrown into question after further studies showed there were still bubbles left in the fluid after the knuckles had been cracked.

But the mathematical model appears to resolve this apparent contradiction by showing the sound can be produced by partial collapse, the researchers said.

Earlier studies using ultrasound had reached a similar conclusion linking the sound to changes in pressure in the joint fluid. A 2015 paper suggesting it was actually the formation of a bubble rather than its collapse which caused the dis-tinctive crack.

“We wanted to look at it mathemat-ically because all the previous work was based on observation or imaging, so we tried to build a mathematical model that described the physical phenomena that governed this,” Barakat said.

“We showed that the collapse gave you the right signature sound.” Although it may not settle the debate once and for all, the research is sure to trigger a spon-taneous bout of knuckle-popping.

“After publishing this paper, my daughter tried it out and now she cracks her knuckles,” said Barakat, himself a knuckle-cracker.

So far, knuckle-cracking has not been shown to be beneficial or harmful. Contrary to popular belief, medics say it does not cause arthritis.

New frog species found in Venezuela and ColombiaAFP

CARACAS: Venezuelan and Colombian scientists have identified a new species of frog in the Perija mountain range shared by both countries that is home to unusual species like this small amphibian.

With multi-colored skin and a distinctive song, the Hyloscirtus japreria was dis-covered during expeditions over the past decade living in rivers and cascades at alti-tudes above 3,280 feet.

It was named in honor of the Japreria, a disappearing indigenous ethnic group in the Perija in the northwestern Venezuelan state of Zulia.

The frog’s discovery — published in February in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Zootaxa — brings to 37 the number of species identified as belonging to the Hyloscirtus genus.

Small in size, the males measure between 2.8 and 3.2 centimeters (up to 1.25 inches) in length and the females from 3.5 to 3.9 centimeters. The journey that led to their discovery began in 2008.

“Several years went by before we found enough evi-dence that it was a new species,” biologist Fernando Rojas-Runjaic, the coordi-nator of the study, said.

Once they determined it was a “stream frog, we had to verify that it wasn’t a Hylo-scirtus platydactylus, another species found in the Perija in 1994,” he added, The scien-tists recorded the find with cameras and high-definition sound recorders to capture its distinctive coloring and analyze its song.

The sounds emitted by the frog, which can be heard from 15 meters (yards) away, is one of its most distinctive characteristics, said expe-dition member Edwin Infante.

The H. japreria is also characterized by a pale yellow dorsal area with tiny dark brown spots and small reddish brown smudges.

It also has whitish stripes in certain parts of its eyes, ears, thighs and feet. The frog’s iris is grey with a slender black reticulation.

Working with Rojas-Runjaic, of the Caracas-based La Salle Natural History Museum, were Colombian biologist Fabio Meza-Joya and Venezuelans Infante and Patricia Salerno.

The galaxy named NGC 1052-DF2, a large fuzzy-looking galaxy so diffused that astronomers call it a ‘see-through’ galaxy because its missing most, if not all of its dark matter, is shown in this photo obtained from Nasa.

Astronomers find a galaxy without dark matterAFP

PARIS: Stupefied astronomers unveiled the first and only known galaxy without dark matter, the invisible and poorly-understood substance thought to make up a quarter of the Universe.

The discovery could revise or even upend theories of how galaxies are formed, they reported in the journal Nature.

“This is really bizarre,” said co-author Roberto Abraham, an astronomer at the Uni-versity of Toronto. “For a galaxy this size, it should have 30 times as much dark matter as regular matter,” he said. “What we found is that there is no dark matter at all.” “That shouldn’t be possible,” he added.

There are 200 billion observable galaxies, perhaps more, astronomers estimate. Some 65 million light-years from Earth, NGC1052-DF2 — “DF2” for short — is about the same size as our Milky Way, but has 100 to 1,000 times fewer stars.

Dark matter’s existence is inferred from the motion of objects affected by its gravita-tional pull. “It is conventionally believed to be an integral part of all galaxies, the glue that holds them together and the underlying scaf-folding on which they are built,” said co-author Allison Merritt from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, in Germany.

So-called ordinary matter — including stars, gases, dust, planets and everything on them — accounts for only five percent of all content in the Universe. Dark matter and dark energy com-prise the rest, and scientists have yet to directly observe either.

The discovery was made with a new kind of telescope developed by Abraham and lead author Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University. Unlike mirror-based devices, the mobile Dragonfly Telescope Array is composed entirely of nano-coated lenses, 48 in all. “Conventional tel-escopes are good at finding small, faint objects. Ours is really good at finding large ones,” said Abraham.

Indeed, over the last few years Dokkum and Abraham have used it to uncover a whole new category of sparsely populated “ultra diffuse galaxies” — and sparked a

cottage industry as astronomers struggle to explain their strange properties. “Eve-rything about them is a surprise, starting with the very fact they exist,” Abraham said. Up to now, the analysis of galaxies has shown a fairly tight ratio of dark to ordinary matter. But this new class “is breaking all the rules,” he said.

The first anomalies discovered were galaxies almost entirely composed of dark matter. That was odd enough. But the real shocker was DF2, which has virtually none at all. DF2 was first identified by Russian astronomers conducting a

photographic survey, but it’s uniqueness didn’t come to light until later. Dokkum’s team used the Keck telescopes in Hawaii to track the motion of several star clusters — each with about 100,000 stars — within the galaxy.

The clusters, they found, travelled at the same speed as the galaxy, itself moving through the Universe. Had there been dark matter, the clusters would be moving slower or faster.

Abrahams recalls seeing the graphic plot showing the motion of DF2’s constellations for the first time, and wondering if something was amiss. “We asked ourselves where we had screwed up, if the measure-ments were wrong,” he said.

“Then I suddenly realised the implications. That’s as close to an ‘Oh My God’ moment as I got.” A galaxy entirely bereft of dark matter raises vexing questions that, so far, have stumped astronomers. “It challenges the standard ideas of how we think galaxies work,” said Dokkum.

Figuring out how something as big as a galaxy is held together without dark matter will be difficult, but understanding how it formed in the first place will be even harder, he said. Whatever the explanation, a galaxy with no dark matter poses an ironic challenge to astronomers who question the very existence of the substances, according to the study.

When compared to previous quarter (Q3 of 2017) revised estimate of QR152.21bn, an increase of 5.7 percent was noticed

BUSINESSFriday 30 March 2018

PAGE | 20PAGE | 18 QSE listed firms post QR38.56bnnet profit in 2017

8,573.99+20.85 pts0.24%

7,056.61+11.87 pts0.17%

24,272.48+424.06 pts1.78%

$64.79+0.41

Germany’s unemploymenthits record lows

QSE FTSE100 DOW BRENT

Qatari-Omani business cooperation recognisedThe members of Qatari business delegation posing for a group photo with their Omani counterparts after being honoured at Economic Vision Awards ceremony in Muscat, yesterday. The Qatari delegation included Mohammed bin Ahmed bin Towar Al Kuwari, Vice-Chairman of Qatar Chamber, Saad bin Ahmed Al Mohannadi, Chairman of the Public Works Authority, Dr Ali bin Hamed Al Mulla, and Sayed Omar bin Hussain Al Fardan, CEO of Alfardan Group and others.

Nominal GDP in Q4 up by 9.4% at QR160.88bnTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Qatar’s quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) at current prices (nominal) for the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2017 was estimated at QR160.88bn, registering a year-on-year increase of 9.4 percent compared to QR147.04bn, the estimate of Q4 of 2016.

When compared to pre-vious quarter (Q3 of 2017) revised estimate of QR152.21bn, an increase of 5.7 percent was noticed, preliminary estimates released by the Ministry of Development Planning and Sta-tistics show.

The quarterly GDP at con-stant prices of 2013 (the real GDP) in Q4 of 2017 QR204.22bn shows a growth of 1.8 percent compared to QR200.69bn, the estimate of Q4 of 2016. However, compared to the pre-vious quarter (Q3 of 2017) revised estimate of QR209bn a decrease of 2.3 percent was recorded.

The nominal Gross Value Added (GVA) estimate of Mining and Quarrying activities was estimated at QR53.44bn in Q4 2017, which shows an increase of 15.2 percent over the estimate of Q4 2016 placed at QR46.37bn. Compared to the previous quarter (Q3 of 2017) revised estimate, there has been an increase of 7.1 percent in the GVA of this sector.

The real GVA of these activ-ities in Q4 2017 was estimated

at QR95.67bn, which showed a decrease of 0.4 percent over the estimate of Q4 2016 (QR96.04bn). However, com-pared to Q3 2017 revised estimate, there has been a decrease of 6.4 percent in the real GVA of this sector.

The nominal GVA estimate of Non-Mining and Quarrying activities was estimated at QR107.44bn in Q4 2017, which showed an increase of 6.7 percent over the estimate of Q4 2016 QR100.67bn. Compared to the previous quarter (Q3 of 2017) revised estimate, an increase of 5 percent has been recorded.

The real GVA of these activ-ities totaled QR108.55bn in Q4 2017, which shows a growth of 3.7 percent over the estimate of the corresponding quarter in 2016 QR104.65bn.

However, compared to Q3 2017 revised estimate, the real GVA of Non-Mining and Quar-rying activities have increased by 1.6 percent.

QFMA & QFCRA sign MoU for cooperationTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: The Qatar Financial Markets Authority (QFMA) and the Qatar Financial Centre Regu-latory Authority (QFCRA) announced yesterday that they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) relating to investment management of investment funds established in the State or in the Qatar Financial Centre (QFC).

The MoU was signed by Nasser Ahmad Al Shaibi, Chief Executive Officer of the QFMA and Michael Ryan, Chief Exec-

utive Officer of the QFC Regu-latory Authority.

Under the MoU, the QFMA and the QFCRA have established a basis for cooperation on matters relating to the licensing, regulation and supervision of investment management for funds established in the State and the Qatar Financial Centre (QFC).

Under the MoU, companies that are licensed by the QFMA or authorised by the QFCRA will be permitted to conduct investment management activ-ities for investment funds

without being required to obtain any additional licence or an authorisation from the other regulator.

Under the MoU, an investment manager licensed by the QFMA will be permitted to manage the investment of an investment fund established in the QFC without being required to obtain a second authorisation from the QFCRA, however only by being registered at the QFMA. The same arrangement will apply to an investment manager authorised by the QFCRA, who under the MoU, will be permitted

to provide investment man-agement services for any investment fund established in the State, including funds listed on the Qatar Exchange, without being required to obtain a second license from the QFMA, however, only by being regis-tered at the QFCRA. The new arrangement between the QFMA and the QFCRA will streamline licensing requirements, make clear the regulatory require-ments applicable to investment managers, and accelerate the development of asset man-agement in Qatar.

Canadian firms establish council to boost economic tiesTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Aiming to boost economic and trade relations between Qatar and Canada, a new business era has dawned in Qatar with the registration of the recently-established Canadian Business Council Qatar (CBCQ) with the Qatar Financial Centre (QFC).

The Council’s goal is to provide a forum for Canadian Business Executives and other invited members in Qatar to identify, discuss and pursue common interests regarding their activities. The CBCQ also aims to provide a forum for members to network and exchange information and experiences and pro-mote commercial, economic, tech-nical, sport and cultural rela-tionships as well as bi-lateral trade and investment between

Canada and Qatar. Attending the public launch

of the CBCQ on Wednesday 28 March 2018, at an event held at the Intercontinental Doha the City Hotel, were Founding

Members from Doha Bank, College of the North Atlantic-Qatar (CNA-Q),The Look Company, Stantec, Multiplex, and Apparel Qatar.

Among those present at the

event were Adrian Norfolk, Ambassador of Canada to Qatar, Youssef Mohamed Al Jaidah, Chief Executive Officer of the QFC, and Dr R Seetharaman, Chief Executive Officer of Doha

Bank. “It has taken years of hard work to get us to this point,” said CBCQ Board of Directors Secretary and CNA-Q Chair of Business Studies, Brenda Lockyer. “However, this is just the beginning. The formation of the CBCQ means visibility and prominence in the Qatar business sector.”

“The Embassy of Canada is looking forward to working with the CBCQ to raise Canada’s profile and further develop our brand here in Qatar,” said Canadian Ambassador.

“At this time, with the still ongoing adaptations to the changed economic geography that the country has faced since June 5th last year, there con-tinue to be considerable oppor-tunities and potential for Canadian and Qatari partnerships.”

Adrian Norfolk (second left), Ambassador of Canada to Qatar, Youssef Mohamed Al Jaidah (second right), CEO of the QFC, and other officials at the launch of CBCQ in Doha on Wednesday.

Oil prices slip as US supply growth offsets Opec supportLONDON: Oil prices slipped yesterday as another rise in US inventories and production outweighed the prospect of Opec sticking to its output curbs for the rest of the year.

Brent crude, the inter-national benchmark, touched $71 a barrel on Tuesday, near its high for the year, but has dipped since then. June Brent crude futures were down 35 cents at $68.41 by 1310 GMT, while the May contract expiring on Thursday was down 25 cents at $69.28. WTI crude futures fell 11 cents to $64.27.

18 FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018BUSINESS

China warns US not to unleash trade ills on worldREUTERS

BEIJING: China warned the United States yesterday not to open Pandora’s Box and spark a flurry of protectionist practices across the globe, even as Beijing pointed to US goods that it could target in a deep-ening Sino-US trade dispute.

China could target a broad range of US businesses from agriculture to aircraft, autos, semiconductors and even services if the trade conflict escalates, the official China Daily newspaper said in an edi-torial yesterday.

President Donald Trump’s move last week to slap up to $60bn in tariffs on some Chinese imports has since provoked a warning from Beijing that it could retaliate with duties of up to $3bn of US imports.

China’s biggest US imports are air-craft and related equipment, soybeans and autos, with the total bill about $40bn last year.

“The malicious practices of the United States are like opening Pandora’s Box, and there is a danger of triggering a chain reaction that will spread the virus of trade protectionism across the globe,” a com-merce ministry spokesman said.

The official line from China continues to be stern even as Beijing says it is all for

dialogue and negotiations. The feedback from US and Chinese officials on the nature and extent of trade talks remains mixed, media reports show.

The Financial Times reported only on Monday that China had offered to buy more US micro-chips and move more quickly to finalise rules allowing foreign firms to take majority stakes in Chinese securities firms, citing people briefed on the negotiations.

Chinese customs data shows the US accounted for just $2.6bn, or 1 percent, of China’s total semiconductor imports last year by value, with suppliers in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan commanding a bigger share.

But a source in the US semiconductor industry said US companies have slightly more than 50 percent of China’s market for chips, though export data does not

reflect that because much of the product is sent offshore for low value added processing.

The source said the US semiconductor industry had not asked the Trump admin-istration to urge China to buy more US chips and had been told by senior US offi-cials that the US government had not made such a request to Beijing.

“We don’t need China to buy more chips,” the source said, adding that US industry was concerned about being tar-geted by Chinese non-tariff barriers.

“It’s more about (Chinese) subsidies, IP protection, and cyber rules,” the source said, referring to concerns over Chinese retaliation.

China has long said it would like to import more US high-tech goods, including high-end chips, but has been stymied by US export controls set on national security grounds. The Trump administration is accusing Chinese firms of stealing intellectual property and forcing US firms to share commercial secrets - allegations that China denies.

Yesterday, China’s State Council, or cabinet, said transfers of Chinese intel-lectual property rights to foreign investors will be reviewed if national security is determined to be at stake, or if core tech-nological innovations are involved.

Government approval will also be needed for intellectual property transfers involving semiconductors, software and agriculture. China’s commerce ministry

said on ThUSay the US approach to trade could trigger a domino effect and US trade protectionism will only hurt US consumers.

The feedback from US & Chinese officials on the nature & extent of trade talks remains mixed, media reports show.

Japan’s aluminium industry calls for US to scrap import tariffs

TOKYO: Japan’s aluminium industry yesterday called for the United States to scrap import tariffs on aluminium, claiming that they are against interna-tional rules and pose a serious problem for the industry and global trade and economic growth.

Last week, US President Donald Trump temporarily excluded six coun-tries, including Canada and Mexico, and the countries of the European Union from higher US import duties on steel and aluminium that went into effect on Friday. The exclusion included most US allies, but not Japan.

“We will ask the Japanese gov-ernment to continue seeking a country exemption from the new US tariffs,” Mitsuru Okada, chairman of the Japan

Aluminium Association told a news conference, adding that Japanese makers will also seek product exemptions.

Japan’s production of rolled and extruded aluminium is estimated to be 2.06 million tonnes in the year to March 31, according to association data. Exports to the US are estimated to be 31,000 tonnes out of total exports of 203,853 tonnes. “We are also worried that aluminium products that are shut out by the United States may flood the Asian market,” Okada said.

The association also issued its outlook for the metal in Japan in the business year starting April, predicting demand for rolled and extruded alu-minium to fall 0.1 percent from the current year to 2.05 million tonnes.

REUTERS

iQiyi’s celebrates its IPOYu Gong (centre), Founder and CEO of China-based iQiyi (IQ), rings the Opening Bell at Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square with employees and investors in celebration of its initial public offering (IPO) yesterday in New York City.

GKN shareholders

accept £8.1bn

takeover offer

from Melrose

AFP

LONDON: Shareholders in British engineering group GKN, a historic company that made Spitfires and tanks during World War II, yesterday accepted an £8.1bn (¤9.2bn, $11.4bn) takeover offer from investment firm Melrose. Melrose said it had received majority support from GKN shareholders for its final offer following a hostile takeover battle that has lasted for over two months and ignited a political debate over the tactics used by the turna-round specialist.

“We are delighted and grateful to have received support from GKN share-holders for our plan to create a UK industrial powerhouse,” Melrose chairman Christopher Miller said in a statement.

Business Secretary Greg Clark has come under pressure to intervene in the deal amid concern expressed by MPs over asset stripping that could harm national security given GKN’s defence industry role.

Clark has called for ‘binding’ agreements over Melrose’s proposal for the future of GKN. Melrose has already committed to keep GKN listed in London and headquartered in Britain as part of a five-year pledge.

US exchange giant CME Group buys British operator NEX for £3.9bnAFP

LONDON: US exchange giant CME Group has agreed to buy British operator NEX for about £3.9bn in a deal aimed at cost-cutting and diversifying their busi-nesses, it said yesterday.

The cash-and-shares takeover offer, worth $5.4bn or ¤4.4bn, valued each NEX share at £10, Chicago-based CME announced in a statement.

NEX will shift headquarters to Chicago, but the combined company will keep its European headquarters in London in a Brexit boost to Britain’s financial services sector.

“The boards of CME and NEX are pleased to announce that they have reached agreement on the terms of a recommended acqui-sition,” the pair said in a statement

issued in London. CME Group, which owns the Chicago Mer-cantile Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade and the New York Mercantile Exchange, added that there was a ‘compelling strategic and financial rationale’ for the deal.

“At a time when market par-ticipants are seeking ways to lower trading costs and manage risk more effectively, the acqui-sition will allow us to create sig-nificant value and efficiencies for our clients globally,” added CME Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Terry Duffy.

“As one organisation, we will be able to employ the comple-mentary strengths of each company, while diversifying our combined businesses across futures, cash and OTC (over-the-counter) products and post-trade

services.” NEX Chief Executive Michael Spencer added the move to maintain CME’s European base in London was a ‘tremendous’ boost to the sector, which con-tinues to face uncertainty before Britain’s departure from the European Union in one year’s time.

“CME’s decision to choose London as its European head-quarters is also a signal of tre-mendous support for Britain’s financial services sector,” Spencer said.

He added: “The combination of NEX and CME will be an industry-changing transaction.

“Bringing together cash and futures products and OTC services will be unique, offering clients improved access to trading, greater financial efficiencies and highly valuable data sets.”

France prepares ¤1.5bn push to foster artificial intelligence researchAFP

PARIS: President Emmanuel Macron is to unveil yesterday a bold plan to make France a centre of reference for artificial intelli-gence research, aimed at drawing homegrown and foreign talent in a field dominated by US and Chinese players.

The proposals, which Macron’s office said would be backed by ¤1.5bn ($1.85bn) in public funds, follow months of interviews with AI experts worldwide by star mathematician Cedric Villani, now a lawmaker in Macron’s Republic On The Move (LREM) party.

Villani’s report, presented Wednesday, calls for doubling the pay of young researchers and engineers, and tripling the number of students specialising in artificial intelligence over the next three years. Macron hosted a dinner Wednesday for about a dozen AI

specialists and industry leaders convened as part of a conference held in Paris yesterday, at which he was to outline his priorities.

Both Fujitsu of Japan and South Korean giant Samsung announced Wednesday that they would set up AI research centres in France, while Google said it would sponsor a dedicated AI chair at the country’s elite Poly-technique engineering school.

Microsoft said it would invest

$30m in France, including at its Microsoft AI school opened this month, which is targeting 400,000 students over the next three years.

Macron’s dinner guests included Yann LeCun, the New York-based Frenchman who until recently ran the AI research lab at Facebook. Also attending was Demis Hassabis of Britain’s DeepMind -- creator of the AlphaGo system that in 2016 beat an elite human player of the Chinese game ‘Go’ -- which will open in France its first European research centre.

“Much of the discussion centred on the best way to accompany the huge changes made possible by artificial intelli-gence and their ethical implica-tions, and to ensure they are ben-eficial to humanity,” said Marie-Paule Cani (pictured), who will hold Google’s new AI chair, of the evening’s exchanges.

Trump assails Amazon on taxes & retail competitionAFP

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump (pictured) took aim yesterday at Amazon, claiming the US online giant pays too little in taxes and hurts other retailers.

“I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election,” Trump tweeted.

“Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local govern-ments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing

tremendous loss to the US), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!” The comments came a day after a report by the news site Axios that Trump was ‘obsessed’ with Amazon, believing the tech giant fails to pay enough taxes and gets preferential treatment from the US Postal Service.

The report said Trump’s wealthy friends complain that Amazon is killing shopping malls and brick-and-mortar retailers.

Trump has long been at odds with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, a vocal opponent of the Repub-lican in the 2016 election cam-paign. Bezos is also the owner of the Washington Post, a frequent target of Trump over its news coverage.

On Wednesday, a White House official declined to comment spe-cifically on the report but com-mented that the president ‘has said he’s always looking to create a level playing field for

all businesses’. During the 2016 campaign, Trump said the US online giant could have ‘a huge antitrust problem’ if he were elected, and suggested Bezos bought the daily newspaper as a move to protect Amazon ‘so that they don’t have to pay taxes and don’t get sued for monopolistic tendencies’.

Bezos responded by offering to send the Republican candidate to space with his Blue Origin space exploration firm.

QSE listed companies post QR38.56bn net profit in 2017THE PENINSULA

DOHA: The 45 listed companies at Qatar Stock Exchange (QSE) have disclosed their financial results for the year ended December 31, 2017, posting a combined net profit of QR38.56bn for that period versus QR38.14bn for the corresponding period in 2016, an increase of 1.10 percent, QSE said in a statement yesterday.

Vodafone Qatar’s financial year changed from March 31 to December 31.

Therefore, the financial information represents only a nine-month period.

The financial statements for all listed companies can be found on Qatar Stock Exchange website, the statement added.

Meanwhile, the QSE main index gained 20.85 points, or 0.24 percent, when the bourse

closed trading at 8,573.99 points yesterday.

The volume of shares traded increased to 9.84 million from 8.15 million on Wednesday and the value of s h a r e s i n c r e a s e d t o QR299.75m from QR199.47m on Wednesday.

From the 45 companies listed on QSE, shares of 44 saw trading yesterday. From these, 25 companies gained and 19 closed lower, reports QNA.

Indices of two sectors ended in red and five sector ended in green yesterday. QSE Total Return Index gained 0.24 percent to 15,105.76 points and QSE Al Rayan Islamic Index increased 0.07 percent to 3,549.24 points.

QSE All Share Index added from 0.21 percent to 2,525.17 points.

19FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018 BUSINESS

QATAR STOCK EXCHANGE

QE Index 8,573.99 0.24 %

QE Total Return Index 15,105.76 0.24 %

QE Al Rayan Islamic Index

- Price 2,194.02 0.07 %

QE Al Rayan Islamic Index 3,549.24 0.07 %

QE All Share Index 2,525.17 0.21 %

QE All Share Banks & Financial

Services 2,796.74 0.07 %

QE All Share Industrials 2,886.66 0.13 %

QE All Share Transportation 1,807.12 0.42 %

QE All Share Real Estate 1,833.19 0.27 %

QE All Share Insurance 3,102.84 1.85 %

QE All Share Telecoms 1,091.30 1.08 %

QE All Share Consumer

Goods & Services 5,402.81 1.05 %

QE INDICES SUMMARY QE MARKET SUMMARY COMPARISON WORLD STOCK INDICES

GOLD AND SILVER

29-03-2018Index 8,573.99

Change 20.85

% 0.24

YTD% 0.59

Volume 9,846,448

Value (QAR) 299,751,498.28

Trades 4,734

Up 06 | Down 37 | Unchanged 128-03-2018Index 8,553.14

Change 140.84

% 1.62

YTD% 0.35

Volume 8,159,081

Value (QAR) 199,471,502.73

Trades 3,714

EXCHANGE RATE

GOLD QR155.6707 per grammeSILVER QR1.9121 per gramme

Index Day’s Close Pt Chg % Chg Year High Year Low

All Ordinaries 5868.9 -30.3 -0.51 6256.5 5881

Cac 40 Index/D 5159.21 28.77 0.56 5567.03 5038.12

Dj Indu Average 23848.42 -9.29 -0.04 26616.71 20379.55

Hang Seng Inde/D 30093.38 70.85 0.24 33484.08 29129.26

Iseq Overall/D 6598.84 49.63 0.76 7257.41 6410.26

Kse 100 Inx/D 45489.62 316.63 0.7 45494.52 40169.62

S&P 500 Index/D 2605 -7.62 -0.291661 2872.87 2532.69

Currency Buying SellingUS$ QR 3.6305 QR 3.6500

UK QR 5.0894 QR 5.1600

Euro QR 4.4595 QR 4.5214

CA$ QR 2.7963 QR 2.8514

Swiss Fr QR 3.7838 QR 3.8369

Yen QR 0.03388 QR 0.03454

Aus$ QR 2.7700 QR 2.8251

Ind Re QR 0.0554 QR 0.0565

Pak Re QR 0.0311 QR 0.0319

Peso QR 0.0691 QR 0.0705

SL Re QR 0.0232 QR 0.0237

Taka QR 0.0435 QR 0.0444

Nep Re QR 0.0346 QR 0.0353

SA Rand QR 0.3051 QR 0.3112

INTERNATIONAL MARKETS - A LIST OF SHARES FROM THE WORLD

Aarti Drugs-B/D 506 -7.35 2551

Aban Offs-A/D 159.25 -4 145957

Acc Ltd-A/D 1508.2 -16.3 12283

Aegis Logis-A/D 259.3 -2.45 9557

Alembic-B/D 53.3 -2.9 60688

Alok Indus-T/D 2.99 0.14 1900995

Apollo Tyre-A/D 275.4 0.75 148118

Asahi I Glass-/D 331 -1.55 1942

Ashok Leyland-/D 145.3 0.65 3678543

Bajaj Hold-A/D 2623.95 12.95 6857

Ballarpur In-B/D 12.48 -0.24 181127

Bata India-A/D 728 -11.35 44375

Bayer Crop-A/D 4200 47.8 20929

Beml Ltd-A/D 1044.15 -19.1 29005

Bhansali Eng-B/D 170.35 2.6 152813

Bharat Bijle-B/D 1495 -44.6 3391

Bharat Ele-A/D 142.05 -1.05 780226

Bharat Heavy-A/D 81.4 -1.35 364524

Bharatgears-B/D 169.95 -5.8 2393

Bhartiya Int-B/D 395.05 -13.5 1630

Bom.Burmah-X/D 1168.95 -7.25 20774

Bombay Dyeing-/D 239.35 -2.85 710134

Canfin Homes-A/D 485.05 -23.2 179054

Caprihans-X/D 87.7 1.35 4206

Castrol India-/D 205.1 2.75 64138

Century Enka-B/D 301 -0.8 4082

Century Text-A/D 1145.25 -9.2 22049

Chambal Fert-A/D 162.6 -1.3 23075

Chola Invest-A/D 1449.7 -17.15 10429

Chowgule St-Xt/D 12.2 -0.6 14089

Cimmco-T/D 78 0.15 12452

Cipla-A/D 543.25 0.25 53285

City Union Bk-/D 174.85 5.6 24473

Colgate-A/D 1056.75 13.45 10303

Container Cor-/D 1239.45 14.05 9737

Dcm Shram Ind-/D 196.05 -1.65 7146

Dhampur Sugar-/D 136.65 -2.4 66397

Dr. Reddy-A/D 2082.45 -19.7 18522

E I H-B/D 158 -1.95 18640

E.I.D Parry-A/D 276.45 -5.05 8420

Eicher Motor-A/D 28201.7 -210.9 1114

Electrosteel-B/D 24.4 -1.05 87860

Emco-B/D 10.3 -0.35 41752

Escorts Fin-Xt/D 4.63 0.22 5772

Escorts-A/D 818.35 -7.65 37132

Eveready Indu-/D 372.1 4 2853

F D C-B/D 256 2.6 7591

Federal Bank-A/D 89.35 -1.65 417434

Ferro Alloys-X/D 8.11 -0.4 147660

Finolex-A/D 650 2.1 2291

Forbes-B/D 3094.8 18.15 6746

Gail-A/D 328.6 7.6 782781

Garden P -B/D 32.3 -0.6 1820

Godfrey Phil-A/D 820.95 -6.4 14236

Goodricke-X/D 299.4 -12.2 11426

Goodyear I -B/D 1111.85 -24.65 5751

Hcl Infosys-A/D 51 -1.3 337022

Him.Fut.Comm-A/D 25.9 -0.7 966245

Himat Seide-X/D 349.8 6.9 15546

Hind Motors-T/D 7.05 -0.1 23017

Hind Org Chem-/D 23.15 -0.3 43790

Hind Unilever-/D 1335.9 3.4 95753

Hind.Petrol-A/D 344.15 -2.4 129004

Hindalco-A/D 214.2 -4.35 302176

Hous Dev Fin-A/D 1827 5.05 67435

Idbi-A/D 72.25 -4 9054856

Ifb Ind.Ltd.-B/D 1150 -14.35 1232

Ifci Ltd-A/D 19.75 -0.4 884162

India Cement-A/D 141.65 -1.85 170982

India Glycol-B/D 452.25 -7.3 15795

Indian Hotel-A/D 127.35 -2.3 301712

Indo-A/D 86.15 1.25 60854

Indusind-A/D 1795.6 7.7 40613

J.B.Chemical-B/D 309 4.05 3030

Jagatjit Ind-X/D 94.55 -4.95 5482

Jagson Phar-B/D 26.8 -0.4 851

Jamnaauto-B/D 78.65 -0.7 76568

Jbf Indu-B/D 84.25 -6.4 112959

Jct Ltd-X/D 2.77 -0.09 194978

Jik Indust-T/D 0 0 0

Jindal Drill-B/D 150.2 -2.45 14469

Jktyre&Ind-A/D 161.65 4.7 122219

Jmc Projects-B/D 547.4 -14.05 2502

Kabra Extr-B/D 117.9 -4.05 10261

Kajaria Cer-A/D 567.25 -12.1 22998

Kakatiya Cem-B/D 251.35 24.15 44364

Kalpat Power-B/D 481.45 5.6 11875

Kalyani Stel-B/D 296.55 0.25 24220

Kanoria Chem-B/D 66.25 -1.6 7151

Kg Denim-X/D 45.5 -2.65 23416

Kilburnengg-X/D 74.05 -0.55 9368

Kinetic Eng-Xt/D 68.7 -0.4 7863

Kopran-B/D 55.15 -2.55 53269

Lakshmi Mach-A/D 6872.9 113.55 1362

Lakshmi Mill-X/D 3210 -137.55 143

Laxmi Prcisn-B/D 39.85 0.55 2491

Lgb Broth-B/D 1056 -8.25 59

Lloyd Metal-X/D 15.95 0.25 493594

Lumax Ind-B/D 2159.5 -10.05 3108

Lupin-A/D 736.4 -11.7 99220

Lyka Labs-B/D 45.55 -0.75 8832

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Mah.Seamless-B/D 426.5 -1.35 1654

Maha Scooter-B/D 2290 -0.4 706

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Maral Overs-B/D 30.8 -0.95 5831

Mastek-B/D 528.55 -13.05 39344

Max Financial-/D 448.25 -16.35 29153

Mrpl-A/D 109.6 -1.75 41978

Nagreeka Ex-T/D 27.5 -0.45 16840

Nagreeka Ex-T/D 27.5 -0.45 16840

Nahar Spg.-B/D 86.5 -1.85 15804

Nation Alum -A/D 66.75 -0.85 588105

Navneet Edu-B/D 142.25 0.7 4297

Neuland Lab-B/D 707 -11.95 1165

Nrb Bearings-B/D 153.25 -1.65 4280

O N G C-A/D 177.8 -1.8 163343

Ocl India-B/D 1298.7 -28.45 1364

Oil Country-B/D 31.6 -1.2 8560

Onward Tech-B/D 87 -3.1 5340

Orchid Pharm-M/D 11.05 -0.55 59348

Orient Hotel-B/D 41.7 -0.45 9837

Orient.Carb.-B/D 1010 -27.85 1409

Orient.Carb.-B/D 1010 -27.85 1409

Patspin India-/D 13.5 -0.15 19653

Punjab Chem.-X/D 389 -9 799

Radico Khait-A/D 331.1 -10.5 131642

Rallis India-A/D 236.55 9.95 47069

Rallis India-A/D 236.55 9.95 47069

Reliance Indus/D 433.85 -4.4 70760

Ruchi Soya-B/D 16 -0.4 310279

Saur.Cem-X/D 69.95 -0.55 22345

Savita Oil-B/D 1411 12.75 180

Tanfac Indu-Xt/D 113.55 -2.55 2272

Tanfac Indu-Xt/D 113.55 -2.55 2272

Thirumalai-B/D 1718 -16.3 5142

Til Ltd.-B/D 443.05 -14.55 1528

Timexgroup-T/D 44.2 0.1 94168

Tinplate-B/D 187.65 -7.2 116893

Ucal Fuel-B/D 234.25 -6.65 16324

Ucal Fuel-B/D 234.25 -6.65 16324

Ultramarine-X/D 274 -5.2 16612

Unitech P -B/D 5.56 -0.17 4055278

Univcable-B/D 131.35 -0.05 4091

3I Group/D 869 0.4 435956

Assoc.Br.Foods/D 2491 -11 225219

Barclays/D 204.75 -1.25 9661238

Bp/D 479 7.6 9930052

Brit Am Tobacc/D 4112.5 28.5 1422708

Bt Group/D 230.6 4.85 8502382

Centrica/D 143.6 2.15 7741491

Gkn/D 425.5 2.5 1822190

Hsbc Holdings/D 666 -3.7 5263439

Kingfisher/D 293.3 2.8 3402459

Land Secs./D 941.4 6.4 467402

Legal & Genera/D 261.3 3.9 4939800

Lloyds Bnk Grp/D 64.88 -0.03 30708727

Marks & Sp./D 271.6 4.4 2409852

Next/D 4853 21 142836

Pearson/D 755.4 4 480670

Prudential/D 1802 -37 1220517

Rank Group/D 209.5 0 9141

Rentokil Initi/D 275.4 4.2 1696261

Rolls Royce Pl/D 875.4 2.6 560268

Rsa Insrance G/D 636.8 5.2 253406

Sainsbury(J)/D 238.9 4.4 3228639

Schroders/D 3213 26 58448

Severn Trent/D 1860 12 400249

Smith&Nephew/D 1337.5 -12 817474

Smiths Group/D 1519 7 480972

Standrd Chart /D 715.3 0.2 2071428

Tate & Lyle/D 537.8 -2.2 988099

Tesco/D 207.5 1.9 6518921

Unilever/D 3942 26.5 844855

United Util Gr/D 724.4 0.4 1288864

Vodafone Group/D 195.6 1.72 12240254

Whitbread/D 3708 -2 151928

COMPANY CLOSE NET VOLUME NAME CHG TRADED

COMPANY CLOSE NET VOLUME NAME CHG TRADED

COMPANY CLOSE NET VOLUME NAME CHG TRADED

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LONDON

20FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018 BUSINESS

‘The future is bright’ vows PM May on Britain’s tourREUTERS

LONDON: Prime Minister Theresa May promised Britain bright prospects outside the European Union yesterday as she toured a country still profoundly divided about its future as the countdown to Brexit enters its final 12 months.

Britain is on course to leave the European Union at 2300 GMT on March 29, 2019, severing ties that helped define its national identity, its laws, and its interna-tional stature over 46 years of integration with European neighbours.

The people of Britain, the world’s sixth-largest economy, caused a major global shock in 2016 by voting narrowly to quit the EU after a fevered refer-endum campaign that sharpened regional divisions, pitted young against old and exposed a deep distrust between voters and the political establishment.

In the 21 months since the referendum, May, who became Prime Minister in the resulting political chaos, has struggled to unite the country behind a single vision of Brexit.

Voters’ disparate views on leaving are entrenched, and few have any certainty about Britain’s long-term future.

May will meet voters in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on a whirlwind tour designed as a rallying cry for the union between the four

nations of the United Kingdom, and to paint a positive post-Brexit vision.

“I am determined that our future will be a bright one,” she said ahead of the roughly 1,280km trip ending in London.

Starting her tour in Scotland, May met workers in a textile factory, focusing on the future benefits she said Brexit could bring for trade.

“I believe that we can nego-tiate a good agreement which is tariff-free and as frictionless trade as possible, so we maintain those markets in the EU, but also that we open up market around the rest of the world. Brexit pro-vides us with opportunities,” she told broadcasters.

The EU maintains that by leaving its single market and customs union, Britain will be making trade more difficult.

EU Council President Donald Tusk has remarked that any trade deal with Britain would be the first in history to loosen economic

links rather than strengthen them.May, 61, has 12 months to plot

a successful course through dif-ficult political and economic terrain.

Brexiteers fret that the EU divorce is taking too long and could be reversed. Pro-EU cam-paigners still push for a less radical exit or a second referendum.

A ComRes opinion poll pub-lished yesterday showed 44 percent of people thought the government’s handling of the negotiations had been ‘a total shambles’. Only 29 percent were optimistic their households would be better off after Brexit.

Britain’s economy has defied pre-referendum predictions of a swift plunge into recession, buoyed in part by stronger global growth. But longer term forecasts show growth grinding lower over the next five years and lagging international rivals.

At home, May only has a small majority in parliament and must find a way to corral her Conservative Party, which is still split over the best Brexit plan, into backing legislation that will prepare Britain for life outside the bloc.

That task has so far swamped her government and its admin-istrative machine, leading to accusations she has taken the eye off the ball on domestic policy and given the socialist-led Labour Party a chance to build support ahead of a 2022 election.

Britain is on course to leave the EU on March 29, 2019, severing ties that helped define its national identity, its laws, & its international stature.

New York Auto ShowA 2018 GMC Sierra All Terrain X All Mountain concept vehicle is seen on display at the New York Auto Show in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, yesterday.

Tunisia must improve investment climate to help economy grow: OECDREUTERS

TUNIS: Tunisia must improve its business climate and cut red tape to attract more investment and create jobs, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said yesterday.

In its first report on the North African country’s economy, the Paris-based OECD said Tunisia had made progress on several fronts but that regulation, red tape

and lack of logistical services were hampering investment to boost the private sector. “Business investment has dropped by more than 5 percentage points of GDP since 2000, holding back the economy’s gains in productivity, job creation, growth and compet-itiveness,” the OECD said in the report.

Tunisia has been undertaking economic reforms agreed with the International Monetary Fund in return for loans to help cut its

budget deficit and turn around an economy hit by turmoil following the 2011 overthrow of autocrat El Abidine Ben Ali. The OECD said that to stimulate investment the number of licenses and permits needed to do business in Tunisia had to be reduced, as should state control of prices in some sectors. It forecast economic growth of 2.8 percent in 2018, roughly in line with the government’s own estimate, rising to 3.4 percent in 2019.

US consumer spending up slightly; jobless claims at 45-year lowREUTERS

WASHINGTON: US consumer spending rose marginally for a second straight month in February as households boosted savings, the latest indication that the economy lost momentum in the first quarter.

But the economy’s funda-mentals remain strong, with other data yesterday showing the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits dropping to more than a 45-year low last week. A tightening labour market is expected to start driving up wages by the second half of this year.

The Commerce Department said consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of US economic activity, increased 0.2 percent last month

after a similar gain in January. It was supported by a rebound in spending on long-lasting goods, such as motor vehicles, as was a rise in financial services and insurance expenditures.

The increase in consumer spending in February was in line with economists’ expectations.

There was also a moderation in monthly inflation readings after prices pushed higher in January. The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index excluding the volatile food and energy components rose 0.2 percent last month after advancing 0.3 percent in January.

That lifted the year-on-year increase in the so-called core PCE price index to 1.6 percent, the biggest gain since February 2017, from 1.5 percent in January. The core PCE index is the Federal

Reserve’s preferred inflation measure. It has been below the US central bank’s 2 percent target since mid-2012.

Economists believe the annual core PCE price index could accelerate to 1.9 percent in March as last year’s weak readings drop out of the calculation. The Fed raised interest rates last week and forecast at least two more rate hikes this year.

Prices of US Treasuries and US stock index futures held gains after the data. The dollar was little changed against a basket of currencies.

The steady rise in inflation last month also helped curb con-sumer spending. When adjusted for inflation, consumer spending was unchanged in February after falling 0.2 percent in the prior month. That suggests a sharp

slowdown in consumer spending in the first quarter after it surged at an eye-popping 4.0 percent annualised rate in the fourth quarter.

The tepid consumer spending added to data on trade, housing and business spending on equipment that have left econo-mists anticipating moderate eco-nomic growth in the first quarter.

The Atlanta Fed is currently forecasting GDP growth rising at a rate of 1.8 percent in the Jan-uary-March period. The economy grew at a 2.9 percent pace in the fourth quarter.

In February, personal income rose 0.4 percent, matching the increase of the previous two months. Wages increased 0.5 percent last month after climbing 0.6 percent in January.

Savings increased to $497.4bn

in February, the highest level since August 2017, from $471.3bn in the prior month. The saving rate rose to a six-month high of 3.4 percent from 3.2 percent in January.

Income growth could pick up as the labour market tightens further, which should help to support consumer spending.

In a separate report yes-terday, the Labour Department said initial claims for state unem-ployment benefits dropped 12,000 to a seasonally adjusted 215,000 for the week ended March 24, the lowest level since January 1973.

The labour market is con-sidered to be near or at full employment. The jobless rate is at a 17-year low of 4.1 percent, not too far from the Fed’s forecast of 3.8 percent by the end of this year.

Snap Inc said to

cut 100 employees

from advertisingBLOOMBERG

SAN FRANCISCO: Snap Inc is cutting another set of employees, focusing this time on the advertising side of the business after earlier trimming staff in engineering and content.

The cuts total around 100 workers, according to people familiar with the matter, and represent the final step in a restructuring process set in motion in the fourth quarter. The people didn’t want to be identified discussing internal details.

“Late last year we asked senior leaders across Snap to look closely at their teams to ensure they had the right resources and organisations to support their missions,’’ Imran Khan (pictured), Snap’s Chief Strategy Officer, said in a statement. “Tighter integration and closer collaboration between our teams is a critical component of sustainably growing our business”. Snap, which operates the Snapchat app, cut around 120 engineers earlier this month, saying it wanted to maintain a high technical bar, according to an internal memo distributed at the time. In January, the company let about two dozen employees go on the content side of its business. Those moves fuelled further uncer-tainty for staff at a company that’s lost key executives and released a widely criticised product redesign.

The rolling cuts are in part a response to over-hiring as Snap scrambled to build an advertising business and release new products.

Germany’s unemployment level hits record lowsREUTERS

BERLIN: Germany’s jobless total dropped more than expected in March and unemployment hit a record low, adding impetus to a labour market that has already become the linchpin of a consumer-led upswing.

Household spending has turned into the main source of growth in Europe’s biggest economy, propelled by rising employment, inflation-busting pay hikes and low borrowing costs.

Federal Labour Office data yesterday showed the seasonally adjusted jobless number fell by 19,000 on the month to 2.373 million, more than the 15,000 forecast in a Reuters poll.

Separately, data from the sta-tistics office showed that inflation accelerated more slowly than expected in March, suggesting that price pressures remain fairly moderate despite the broad-based upswing and unprecedented monetary stimulus.

Unemployment dropped to 5.3 percent last month from 5.4 percent in February, the lowest since Germany reunified in 1990.

Employment as measured by the International Labour Organ-isation climbed to a record 44.59

million in February, seasonally adjusted data from the Federal Statistics Office showed yesterday.

“The positive development of the labour market continued in March,” Labour Office Head Detlef Scheele said. He said companies created more jobs with full social benefits and were continuing to look for more staff.

The data showed that Ger-many’s prolonged upswing is now also pushing down the once stub-bornly high number of long-term unemployed, which fell by 9 percent on the year to 845,000.

Opposition parties have accused Chancellor Angela Merkel of neglecting the long-term

unemployed at a time when German firms are struggling with unprecedented labour shortages.

In the coalition deal signed this month, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) persuaded Mer-kel’s conservatives to help inte-grate the long-term unemployed by creating 150,000 subsidised jobs at a cost of ¤4bn ($4.9bn).

The rock-solid labour market is likely to further boost con-sumer confidence and household spending in Europe’s biggest economy, where domestic demand has taken over from exports as the main growth driver.

The government has forecast a 2.4 percent expansion for this

year, which would be the fastest rate since 2011. Consumer sen-timent rose unexpectedly heading into April, according to a GfK survey released on Wednesday, as shoppers became more upbeat about their income and were more willing to spend.

“Full order books and the strong growth of the global economy make it unlikely that the job boom will come to an end in spring,” KfW Chief Economist Joerg Zeuner said - though the threat of a trade dispute with the United States had made firms far less optimistic about future business.

“The losers of a spiral of pro-tectionism between the US and the EU would be consumers and employees on both sides of the Atlantic,” Zeuner said.

Household spending has also been helped by moderate inflation, which has broadly undercut average pay settle-ments to leave employees with more disposable income.

Yesterday’s preliminary inflation data showed consumer prices, harmonised to make them comparable with data from other European Union countries, rose 1.5 percent year-on-year after an increase of 1.2 percent in the previous month.

Labour Office Head, Detlef Scheele (left) and Chief Economist at KfW, Joerg Zeuner.

Vietnam’s economy

expands more than

7% in first quarter

BLOOMBERG

HANOI: Vietnam’s economy continued to post stellar growth in the first quarter, fueled by an export boom.

Gross domestic product rose 7.38 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, the General Statistics Office said in Hanoi yesterday.

Vietnam has outper-formed most of its Southeast Asian peers as export growth remained resilient on the back of a global trade recovery last year. And even though the trade outlook has turned more gloomy this year amid rising tensions between the US and China, the world’s two largest econ-omies, Vietnam expects to sustain growth of about 7 percent.

Other details of the GDP report: Exports increased 22 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, while imports rose 13.6 percent Consumer prices rose 2.66 percent in March from year earlier.

SPORTFriday 30 March 2018

Australian cricket coach quits, captainbreaks down in tears

Del Potro grinds down Raonic inMiami

PAGE | 22 PAGE | 23 PAGE | 24 Full-strength Al Sadd

prepare for Al Waslclash

Abdulla storms to fastest time in Abu Dhabi, confirms second spotTHE PENINSULA

ABU DHABI: Qatar’s Adel Abdulla confirmed second position in the T2 standings at the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge with the fastest time in the final 218.57km selective section from Hameem to the south of Abu Dhabi yesterday.

Driving a rented Nissan Safari Y61 in insipid heat, the Qatari and navigator Nasser Al Kuwari carded a stage-winning time of 3hrs 23min 22sec and managed to shave 11min 38sec off rival Ahmed Shegawi’s eventual winning margin of 45min 53.9sec.

The performance also earned Adel 12th in the overall standings – a particularly impressive result with a near-standard car on one of the toughest cross-country events in the world.

Adel said: “We pushed from the start today and decided to take a risk. Suddenly we saw Shegawi. I think he had a flat tyre or something. We pass him and I pushed very hard to the end of the stage.”

“I was pushing the maximum of the car. I didn’t even slow down when the engine temper-ature went a bit higher. Some sections today were open and fast and, maybe, that helped to cool the car down,” he added.

“The risk paid off because we won the stage today by over 11 minutes. This is fantastic for us. Second place is good with the sit-uation we had. We could not bring our car. I tried my best to do the race and collect maximum points. To collect 36 points is very important.

“Nasser, my co-driver, managed everything in the right

way. We were confident together in the car. The weather conditions were very hot,” he said.

“Today, the air temperature

was 37°C. It is too much in the dunes,” he added.

“I also say thank you to my team here on their good job and

to my sponsors, the Qatar Motor and Motorcycle Federation (QMMF) and Ooredoo Qatar and Nissan Qatar.”

The next stop in the FIA World Cup calendar will be the Qatar Cross-Country Rally in three weeks’ time.

1. Ahmed Al Shegawi (SAU)/Laurent Lichtleuchter (FRA) Toyota Land Cruiser 23hrs 17min 25.7sec

2. Adel Abdulla (QAT)/Nasser Al Kuwari (QAT) Nissan Patrol 24hrs 03min 19.6sec

3. Yuliya Khegay-Migunova (RUS)/Aldis Vilcans (LVA) Toyota LC 200 53hrs 21min 10.5sec

FIA World Cup for Cross-Country Rallies – T2 standings after round 3 1. Ahmed Al-Shegawi (SAU) 75pts

2. Adel Abdulla (QAT) 69pts

3. Yuliya Khegay-Migunova (RUS) 42pts

4. Alexey Titov (RUS) 25pts

ABU DHABI DESERT CHALLENGE – FINAL T2 POSITIONS AFTER SS5

Qatar’s Adel Abdulla (right) and navigator Nasser Al Kuwari celebrate after the final round yesterday.

Russia 2018: Al Marri set to become first Qatari referee to officiate at World CupRIZWAN REHMAT THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Qatar’s Taleb Saleh Al Marri (pictured) is set to become the first Qatari referee to officiate at the FIFA World Cup when he will serve as an assistant referee in Russia this summer.

Al Marri’s debut appearance in the 32-nation event was confirmed yes-terday after FIFA released the final list of referees and assistant referees who will be seen in action at the June 14 to July 15, 2018 event. He will join nine other assistant referees representing the Asian Football Confederation (AFC).

“I am proud to be the first referee to represent Qatar in a World Cup,” Al Marri tweeted yesterday.

Iran, Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia each will have two representatives in the list of 10 assistant referees. Other AFC assistant referees are from the Bahrain, the UAE and Japan.

Al Marri featured as an assistant referee in the matches of the 2016 FIFA World Club Cup held in Osaka in December that year.

FIFA also announced a full list of ref-erees who will feature in the 2018 World Cup.

Six referees are from Asia whereas a total of 10 will represent UEFA, the European football governing body.

In total, the FIFA Referees Com-mittee has selected 36 referees and 63 assistant referees, representing 46 dif-ferent countries, for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, details showed yesterday.

“The choice of the final group of match officials selected to officiate at the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia was based on each referee’s skills and per-sonality, as well as his level of under-standing of football and ability to read both the game and the various tactics

employed by teams,” FIFA said on its website yesterday.

“Over the last three years, prepar-atory seminars have taken place for ref-erees and assistant referees focusing on fair play, protecting players and the image of the game, as well as con-sistency and uniformity.

“The selected FIFA World Cup match officials will attend another dedicated seminar for two weeks in the second half of April at the technical centre of the Italian Football Association in Cov-erciano, Italy.”

The officials will be divided into two groups, which will also include video assistant referee (VAR) candidates,” FIFA added while announcing the list of referees.

I am proud to be the first referee to represent Qatar in a World Cup: Taleb Saleh Al Marri on Twitter

Three-way battle for QAL trophyTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Al Bidda, Al Nasr, and Al Matar will all have a thrilling close call today as they battle it out on the field of play to have a chance of lifting the much coveted Qatar Amateur League (QAL) trophy.

Al Bidda, who has so far col-lected 26 points and are currently ranked the second placed team, will face Al Khabayib, the seventh place team with 17 points, at 4pm at Al Arabi Stadium.

Al Matar, who currently earned 26 points making them the

third placed team will face Al Nasr who currently leads the league with 27 points, also today at 5:10pm.

In the first scenario where Al Nasr wins against Al Matar and collects three points, Al Nasr would be crowned QAL cham-pions regardless of the Al Bidda vs. Al Khabayib result.

In the second scenario where Al Bidda loses to Al Khabayib, and Al Matar and Al Nasr draw, Al Nasr would still be crowned QAL champions.

In the third scenario where Al

Bidda wins against Al Khabayib and collects three points, while Al Matar and Al Nasr draw and collect 1 point each, Al Bidda would be crowned QAL champions.

In the fourth scenario where Al Bidda loses against Al Khabayib, while Al Matar wins against Al Nasr and collects 3 point, Al Matar would be crowned QAL champions

In the fifth scenario where Al Bidda wins against Al Khabayib, and Al Matar wins against Al Nasr, Al Bidda and Al Nasr will have the

same number of points and ranking, and as per tournament regulations, a playoff will be organised at a later date to decide the champions of the QAL this year.

The 13 teams competing in this year’s QAL are Qatar University, Al Khabayib, Madinat Khalifa, The Pearl, Al Nasr, Lusail, Al Thakhira, Al Thumama, Al Maroona, Al Bidda, Al Aziziya, Al Matar, and Doha.

A total of 390 players regis-tered for this year’s edition, from which 130 are Qataris.

This file photo shows action during a Qatar Amateur League match.

ndsin

Fulp

22 FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018SPORT

Full-strength Al Sadd prepare for Al Wasl tieFAWAD HUSSAIN THE PENINSULA

DOHA: Looking to maintain top spot in their group at the AFC Champions League, Qatari giants Al Sadd will go all out for a win against UAE’s Al Wasl when the two teams meet in Doha next week.

The two teams will clash on April 2 at Jassim Bin Hamad Stadium and legend Xavi Her-nandez’s side will be targeting full points against their coun-terparts to continue to lead Group C.

‘The Wolves’ are ahead of Iran’s Persepolis FC on the basis of goal difference as both the sides have so far claimed 9 points from four matches.

The QNB Stars League (QSL) giants intensified their training for the battle with an extensive training session on Wednesday following the return of their key players, who were busy with Qatar national team for International Friendship Tournament in

Basra, Iraq last week. The session witnessed the return of six players including Saad Al Dosari, Hassan Al Haydos, Salem Al Hajri, Akram Afif, Pedro Miguel and Abdelkarim Hassan.

Five other players who returned after their partici-pation with the Qatar U23 team include Meshaal Barsham, Hatem Kamal, Hussain Bahzad, Meshaal Ibrahim and Hassan Ahmed) while Ahmed Suhail, Bahaa Ellithy, Yousuf Abdul-razaq, Mohammed Waad returned from U19 team duty.

The senior Qatar national t e a m h a d w o n

the International Friendship Tournament that took place in Basra, with the participation of Syria and hosts Iraq, between 21st and 27th of March. The U23 team played a friendly against Oman while the U19 team held friendlies during their camp in the UK, as part of the preparation for the upcoming AFC U-19 Championship.

Iranian international Morteza Pouraliganji also joined the squad for training after playing for his national team in preparatory friendlies ahead of this summer’s FIFA World Cup in Russia while

Algerian striker Baghdad Bounedjah will join the squad yesterday following his partic-ipation with the Algerian national team in friendly games against Tanzania and Iran.

During the session, the team trained intensely amidst an atmosphere of high spirits, as the team look to get the crucial win against Al Wasl, which could possibly take them closer to the next round of the AFC Champions League.

Meanwhile, Khoukhi Boualem has joined the team for training after his recovery from injury and the coaching staff have been keen to get him in top shape for the upcoming games.

Elsewhere, it was con-firmed that Pedro Miguel will be suspended for one domestic game, after the announcement from the QFA disciplinary committee following their review of the red card incident in the QNB Stars League game against Al Khor.

The two teams will clash on April 2 at Jassim Bin Hamad Stadium and Xavi’s side will be targeting full points against their counterparts to continue to leadGroup C of AFC Champions League.

Al Sadd’s players during a training session in Doha.

Riders are seen going through their paces during a training session yesterday ahead of the 10th round of the popular Hathab Series, organised by the Qatar Equestrian Federation (QEF) and Al Shaqab.Fans can see riders in showjumping and dressage competitions today and tomorrow at Al Shaqab Indoor Arena. Today, the action starts at 3:30pm while tomorrow riders will start competing at 10:00am.

Hathab Series: Round 10

Hat-trick hero Isco wants leading role at Real MadridAP

BARCELONA: After scoring his first hat trick for Spain, Fran-cisco “Isco” Alarcon (pictured) thought the time was right to send a message to Real Madrid coach Zinedine Zidane.

Isco wants to join Zidane’s untouchable group of first-choice players and regularly perform alongside Cristiano Ronaldo, Sergio Ramos, Marcelo and Luka Modric.

The 25-year-old midfielder said Spain coach Julen Lopetegui “gives him life”.

“When a footballer doesn’t feel like he has a leading role and consistent playing time with his club, the national team gives him life,” Isco said after starring in Spain’s 6-1 rout of Argentina in a friendly on Tuesday.

“I have the confidence of my coach here (with Spain). I still have the desire to keep working, to improve, to be a starter with my club and with the national side.” Zidane will decide whether to start Isco on Saturday when Madrid visits Las Palmas.

With Madrid trailing league leader Barcelona by 15 points, perhaps the best guide to Zidane’s plans for Isco will come next week when the team visits Juventus in the Cham-pions League quarter-finals.

Zidane won back-to-back Champions Leagues and last season’s Spanish league by relying on a core group who always start when fit.

The former France great has stuck by those players despite Madrid’s struggles in the Spanish league this season and an early exit from the Copa del Rey.

The best example is Karim Benzema, a player Zidane has remained loyal to despite paltry goal numbers.

There is also a second group of players the coach picks from depending on the opponent, individual form and on whether he needs a break. Isco, despite showing for several seasons he is one of Europe’s top play-makers, belongs to this latter

tier. Zidane has preferred Mateo Kovacic in two big games this season, the home “clasico” against Barcelona that ended in a 3-0 loss and a 2-1 victory at Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League last-16.

“At Madrid I don’t have the consistent playing time that a player needs but I know the problem is mine, that I haven’t been able to earn it,” Isco said. “I continue to work so I can show my coach he can count on me.” Zidane’s predecessors Rafa Benitez and Carlo Ance-lotti also failed to use Isco as a regular starter.

Lopetegui has been tight-lipped about his plans for the World Cup in June but the signs are good for Isco.

He started both recent friendlies. Following a 1-1 draw at world champion Germany on Friday, Isco was Spain’s best player against Argentina and his treble gave him 10 goals in 27 appearances for his country.

“The manager doesn’t place his trust in the player, it’s the player who has to place his trust in the coach,” Lopetegui said.

“I hope (Isco) is happy at his club over the next two months and then can come back and be with us.”

Wenger’s desire for success still ‘big’REUTERS

LONDON: Arsene Wenger’s appetite for success has not diminished and the Arsenal manager is doing a “great job” at the London club, his assistant Steve Bould has said.

Bould, speaking in place of an ill Wenger ahead of Sunday’s Premier League game against Stoke City, said the 68-year-old was a great manager.

Wenger has faced criticism in recent seasons for the club’s failure to mount a serious title

challenge. Arsenal are set to finish their 14th straight season without winning the league title and Wenger said recently that calls for him to step down had grown in the past few years because of prejudice against older managers.

Asked if Wenger’s desire was as strong as ever, Bould said: “Absolutely, he is remarkable. Behind closed doors I’ve never met anybody who is as hungry and determined to win football games. It’s as big as I’ve ever seen.”

Wenger took charge of Arsenal in 1996 and has led the club to three league titles and seven FA Cup triumphs but has failed to win in Europe.

Arsenal are sixth in the league with 48 points from 30 matches. Their hopes of sil-verware lie in the Europa League where they face CSKA Moscow in the quarter-finals next week.

“He’s doing a great job as far as I’m concerned and he’s done a great job for an awful long time,” former Arsenal defender

Bould added. “I admire him immensely. He takes unbe-lievable stick off an awful lot people and he’s just one of the great managers. It’s a pleasure for me to sit next to him,” he said.

Midfielder Jack Wilshere was training without any problem after missing England’s interna-tional friendlies against the Netherlands and Italy last week with a knee injury.

Striker Alexandre Lacazette is also back in full training after minor surgery on his left knee

Arsene Wenger

last month. Relegation-threatened Stoke are second from bottom with 27 points from 31

games. They beat Arsenal 1-0 in the reverse fixture earlier this season.

23FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018 SPORT

How the world reacted

Lehmann quits, Smith breaks down in tearsAFP

JOHANNESBURG: Australian cricket coach Darren Lehmann said yesterday he would quit after the final match of the scandal-tainted Test series in South Africa after the team’s former captain Steve Smith broke down in tears and accepted complete responsibility for the ball-tampering incident.

Smith was deeply emotional as the man at the centre of a storm that has rocked world cricket arrived back in Sydney from Johannesburg after being banned for a year from the sport.

“I take full responsibility, I made a serious error of judgement and I understand the consequences. It was a failure of leadership,” Smith said, choking back tears as he was comforted by his father Peter.

“I know I will regret this for the rest of my life. I am abso-lutely gutted. Cricket is my life and I hope it can be again. I’m sorry. I ’m absolutely devastated.”

Within hours, Lehmann said he was standing down despite Cricket Australia saying he had no knowledge of the plot to alter the condition of the ball in the third Test in Cape Town.

“This will be my last Test as head coach of the Australian cricket team,” Lehmann, who also had tears in his eyes, said.

“Saying goodbye to the players was the toughest thing I have ever had to do.”

Lehmann said “the feeling is that Australian cricket needs to move forward and this is the right thing to do”.

Even Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has con-demned the team, describing fielder Cameron Bancroft’s attempts to tamper with the ball by using sandpaper as a “shocking affront to Australia”.

Roughing up one side of the ball would have given Australian bowlers an advantage by pro-ducing more swing.

Cricket Australia have banned Smith and vice-captain David Warner from all interna-tional and domestic cricket for a year while Bancroft was exiled for nine months.

Smith’s fall from grace has been dramatic, and fast.

He was jeered as he made his way through Johannesburg airport on Wednesday sur-rounded by police and media with concerns over his mental state in the current heated climate.

Former Australia great Shane Warne, no stranger himself to controversy, offered the trio an olive branch despite

days of the Australian public baying for blood.

“What the public wants to see is change. They want to see you be a better person,” he wrote in a column for the Sydney Daily Telegraph. “They’ll support you if they see that, and they’ll forgive you.”

Warner, a divisive figure who was charged with devel-oping the plot and instructing Bancroft to carry it out, also broke his silence to say sorry and admitted his actions had been “a stain on the game”.

“Mistakes have been made which have damaged cricket,” he told his 1.6 million Instagram

followers. “I apologise for my part and take responsibility for it.”

In handing out their tough punishment, Australian cricket chiefs bowed to uproar at home where sportsmen and women are held in high esteem and expected to act in the best interests of the game.

CA’s response wasn’t enough to save an estimated Aus$20m (US$15m) partnership with naming rights sponsor Magellan which tore up its three-year con-tract yesterday after barely seven months.

The financial cost for the players is also growing with sporting goods company ASICS ending its relationship with Warner and Bancroft. Elec-tronics giant LG axed Warner on Wednesday, while Weet-Bix and Commonwealth Bank dumped Smith.

An emotional Bancroft said he was ashamed when he arrived back in Perth.

“All I can do in the short term is ask for forgiveness,” he said, while denying he had ever tam-pered with a ball before, in com-ments echoed by Smith.

“This is the first time I have seen this happen and it will never be happening again.”

Smith and Bancroft will not be considered for team lead-ership positions until a minimum of 12 months after the end of their suspensions, and Warner will never lead again.

Wicketkeeper Tim Paine will take over the Australian cap-taincy for the fourth and final Test starting in Johannesburg on Friday.

The International Cricket Council said it will review its punishment for ball-tampering in light of the Australia scandal, and warned the game is in danger unless decisive action is taken.

ICC chief executive David Richardson, a former South African wicketkeeper, said the affair had been an “eye-opener”.

Australia’s Steve Smith reacts during a press conference at the airport in Sydney yesterday, after returning from South Africa. The distraught cricketer yesterday accepted full responsibility for a ball-tampering scandal that has shaken the sport, saying he was devastated by his “big mistake”.

Head coach of the Australian cricket team Darren Lehmann reacts during a press conference in Johannesburg yesterday at which he announced his resignation after the forthcoming Test match against South Africa. Lehmann said he would quit after the final match of the scandal-tainted Test series in South Africa.

AFP

SYDNEY: When disgraced

Australian cricketer Steve

Smith faced the cameras in

Sydney yesterday with a

tearful apology for a ball-

tampering scandal, he

joined a small club of sports

stars who have very publicly

said sorry.

Athletes have played

the penitent for everything

from cheating at their sport

to cheating on a wife; from

pre-meditated assault on a

rival to simply losing.

Here are five high-

profile mea culpas:

GIANLUIGI BUFFON - 2017Fans reacted with

shock and disbelief last year

when Italy failed to qualify

for the football World Cup

for the first time since 1958

-- a failure dubbed an

“apocalypse” by the nation’s

press.

“I’m not sorry for myself

but all of Italian football,”

an inconsolable team

captain Gianluigi Buffon

said after the Azzuri missed

out on qualification for the

2018 edition in Russia. “We

failed at something which

also means something on a

social level. There’s regret

at finishing like that, not

because time passes.”

Buffon, one of the

greatest goalkeepers of the

modern era, a lso

announced his retirement

from international football

after Sweden went through

at Italy’s expense.

LANCE ARMSTRONG - 2013Cycling star Lance Arm-

strong admitted in a 2013

interview with Oprah

Winfrey that he took per-

formance-enhancing drugs

during his glittering career.

“I made my decisions.

They’re my mistake. And I’m

sitting here today to

acknowledge that and to

say I’m sorry for that,” the

seven-time Tour de France

winner told Winfrey.

The American cyclist

and cancer-survivor had all

his titles taken away over

the scandal, which shat-

tered his reputation as one

of the most widely-admired

athletes in the world for

both his sporting achieve-

ments and his philanthropic

work through the Lives-

trong Foundation.

TIGER WOODS - 2010

Golf superstar Tiger

Woods went on national

television in 2010 to apol-

ogise to his family after a

string of scandalous disclo-

sures about his private life,

including the revelation that

he was a serial cheat.

“I know I have severely

disappointed all of you. I

have made you question

who I am and how I have

done the things I did. I am

embarrassed that I have put

you in this position,” Woods

said. “For all that I have

done, I am so sorry. I have

a lot to atone for.”

MARION JONES - 2007 US sprinter Marion

Jones was sentenced to six

months in jail and banned

for two years for using per-

formance-enhancing drugs

before the 2000 Sydney

Games -- and lying to US

federal investigators.

“It is with a great amount

of shame that I stand before

you and tell you that I have

betrayed your trust,” a tearful

Jones said after pleading

guilty to the charges in

October 2007.

ICC to review punishment for ball-tamperingAFP

LONDON: The International Cricket Council will review its punishment for ball-tampering in light of the Australia cheating scandal, and warned the game is in danger unless decisive action is taken.

Cricket Australia has banned captain Steve Smith and vice-captain David Warner from international and domestic cricket for a year while opening batsman Cameron Bancroft was exiled for nine months over the incident during the third Test in South Africa.

Under its current code of conduct, the ICC was unable to impose more than a full-match fine and a one-Test ban on Smith, unlike the more stringent penalty since levied by Cricket Australia.

“We’ve come to realise that the

world -- not only Australia -- regards ball-tampering in a very serious light. It goes to the spirit of the game,” said chief executive David Richardson.

“I must admit this has been an eye-opener for me personally. We need to look at the penalty imposed, specific to ball-tampering.

“Around the world, ball-tam-pering is considered cheating... I think we need to look at it again, and this is what has prompted this review.”

The ICC review will look into player behaviour, the spirit in which the game is played and the code of conduct.

Richardson said the exercise, likely to be informed by respected former players such as Australia’s Allan Border, Indian Anil Kumble, Shaun Pollock of South Africa and West Indies’ Courtney Walsh, would be an opportunity to “draw a line in

the sand” and address fans’ concerns.

“The reaction all around the world shows us that if we neglect the way the game is played, cricket is itself in danger,” he said.

“We are going to ignore (that) at our peril... we don’t want to leave this lingering, and hope it will all go away.”

Richardson, a former South African wicketkeeper, said cricket had been blighted by bad behaviour in recent weeks including ugly incidents of sledging, dissent against umpires’ decisions and now the ball-tampering episode.

“This has been perhaps one of the worst periods in recent memory for consistently poor player behaviour and the global outcry in relation to the ball tampering is a clear message to cricket: enough is enough,” he wrote in a blog post on the ICC website.

I’m so sorry: Memorable sporting apologies

Australian cricketer David Warner talks to the media upon his arrival in Sydney yesterday. Warner apologised yesterday for his part in a cheating scandal.

Somerset ditch Bancroft AFP

LONDON: Somerset said yesterday that disgraced Australian batsman Cameron Bancroft would not be joining the English county side for the new season as the fallout from the cheating scandal gathers pace.

Bancroft was banned for nine months by Australia after being caught on camera using sandpaper to scratch the ball during the third Test against South Africa in Cape Town.

The 25-year-old opening batsman, who has played just eight Tests, has said he will regret the incident “for the rest of my life”.

Somerset director of cricket Andy Hurry said Ban-croft would not be the club’s overseas player for the 2018 season.

“We are currently under-taking the process to recruit a replacement overseas player that best fits our needs and will share an update in due course,” he said.

REUTERS

MATT PRIOR, former

England wicketkeeper

“Fair play Bancroft and Steve Smith taking it head on and fronting up. That was hard to watch and can’t imagine what they’re going through. People make mistakes but being able to own up and take responsibility takes guts.”

HERSCHELLE GIBBS, former

South Africa batsman

“Hard scenes watching the interviews with the 2 ozzie (sic) blokes. Having been through it all, take it on the chin and live with the consequences but remain true to yourself.”

KEVIN PIETERSEN, former

England batsman

“Just seen @stevesmith49’s press conference. As a parent, I’m gutted for him & his family! Shout me down if you want, but I’m speaking as a parent! It will get better mate!”

HARSHA BHOGLE, Indian

cricket commentator

“Haven’t Australia made enough of a spectacle of Steve Smith? I’m blown by what he is being put through.”

SPORT 24FRIDAY 30 MARCH 2018

I take full responsibility, I made a serious error of

judgement and I understand the consequences. It was a

failure of leadership

Steve SmithFormer Australian cricket captain on the ball-tampering incident

England vs New Zealand

2nd Test - Day 1

In Christchurch (22:00GMT-1d )

South Africa vs Australia

4th Test - Day 1

In Johannesburg (08:00GMT)

CRICKET CRICKET

TO

DAY

’SA

CTIO

N

Qatar juniors in semis of West Asia Regional Qualifying eventTHE PENINSULA

BEIRUT: The Qatar junior tennis team qualified for the semi-finals of the U12 West Asia Regional Qualifying event after beating Syria 2-1 on Wednesday.

The qualifying event is being held in Lebanon under the supervision of the Asian Tennis Federation and the International Tennis Federation until March 31.

Meshari Nawaf defeated Gheith Salim of Syria in the first singles match but his compa-triot Ghanim Al Sulaiti retired from the second match.

In the doubles, Qatar’s Meshari Nawaf and Nasser Al Khelaifi recorded a 6-0, 6-0 victory over Gheith Salim and Majd Assem of Syria.

The Qatari team began their

campaign in the tournament with a 2-1 victory over Yemen Tuesday.

As per the draw held recently, the Qatari team were pitted in group (A) alongside Iran, Syria and Yemen while Group (B) includes Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.

The Qatari juniors are coached by Anas Lamrani and Ibrahim Al Sheraim is in charge of the delegation at the event.

The two top teams in the qualifying event will quality to the 2018 ITF Asian U12 Teams Championships to be staged in Kazakhstan in November.

Qatar claimed the first place in the last year’s west Asian qualifying event held in Lebanon and took the second place in the ITF Asian U12 Team Championships held in Kazakhstan.

Qatar junior tennis players with coach Anas Lamrani.

Basketball legend Ismail inspires schoolchildrenTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Qatar’s 3x3 basketball World Champion Yaseen Ismail paid a surprise visit to Qatar International School (QIS) yesterday where he inspired the students.

The legendary basketball star shared his experiences and advised the Grade-seven students who have been working hard on an Olympic project in their English class for the past term.

Yaseen awarded prizes to the best student projects, before speaking to them about his achieve-ments in basketball, the benefits of participating in sport and what it takes to make it to the top. He then took them outside for a masterclass on how to perfect the basketball shooting technique, with every student having the opportunity to shoot a hoop and gain tips from Yaseen.

Speaking to the students, Yaseen

said: “When I was your age, I never played or liked basketball but from the age of 14 I tried and never stopped playing ever since. I would like to see you try the sport as well - come down to the Qatar Basketball Federation where I’m giving 3x3 basketball classes.”

“Sport is very important but balancing between studies and exercise is vital to any athletes’ success in life. Take advantage of the summer season - do not eat junk food, practice two hours a day and who knows you might become a professional player one day!,” Yaseen said.

The students were assigned to work in groups and come up with an advertising campaign for Qatar to host the Olympics. The students were required to use different types of persuasive and descriptive writing for their projects and come up with creative ideas for the Opening Cer-emony of the Games. The standard

of the projects was incredibly high, with the students encapsulating the true spirit of Qatar and of the Olympics in their campaigns.

Yaseen was a professional bas-ketball player for more than 20 years and helped Team Qatar win multiple World, Asian, Arab and Gulf titles. In 2014, he made history as part of the 3x3 team that became the Middle East’s first-ever World Champions. Other titles he owns with the team include Asian Cham-pions, Arab Champions, 8-time Gulf Champions and 8-time Emir Cup Champions.

The students were incredibly excited by Yaseen’s visit and inspired by his motivational words and basketball coaching and guidance. There were final oppor-tunities for selfies before he left so that the students could have their own memories from the day that a basketball legend came to school.

Qatari basketball legend Yaseen Ismail poses for a photograph with students during his surprise visit to Qatar International School (QIS) yesterday.

Table Tennis: Al Gharafa meet Al Shamal in Emir’s Cup openerTHE PENINSULA

DOHA: Al Gharafa will take on Al Shamal in the opening fixture of the Emir’s Table Tennis Cup 2018 on Friday, April 20.

The draw was revealed during a ceremony held at Ras Abu Aboud hall on Wednesday. In attendance were Mohammad Abdullah Saleh, Secretary General of the Qatar Table Tennis Asso-ciation (QTTA), Naji Al Aji, the QTTA Board Member, Mohammad Al Rumaihi, the QTTA Executive Director and Thani Al Zaraa, the QTTA Board Member. The tournament will conclude on April 26.

Del Potro streaks into Miami semis; Isner routs ChungREUTERS

MIAMI: Juan Martin del Potro remained on course for a rare Sunshine Double when he outlasted Milos Raonic 5-7, 7-6(1), 7-6(3) in a marathon quarter-final at the Miami Open on Wednesday.

Del Potro, who claimed the Indian Wells title earlier this month, fed off the energy of a raucous crowd that was firmly behind the Argentine, wearing down the 20th-seeded Canadian in a match lasting almost three hours.

The clock had just struck midnight on an unusually cool evening when fifth seed Del Potro finally dispatched Raonic.

The Canadian was defeated despite not facing a single break point in the first two sets, before the contest took a bizarre twist at the start of the decider when both players were broken twice in a row.

Order was soon restored as both men held for the next eight games, sending the contest to a deciding tiebreak, in which Raonic never recovered after double-faulting to fall 2-0 down.

The result continued Del Potro’s hot streak, after he won in California 10 days ago, beating Roger Federer in a compelling three-set final to claim a maiden Masters 1000 title.

The 2009 US Open champion is back to playing some of his best tennis in years after battling serious left wrist injuries that required three surgeries and threatened to curtail his career.

He advances to face another big server, American John Isner, who overwhelmed South Korean Chung Hyeon 6-1, 6-4 in an afternoon match.

A fired up Isner yelled “Come on” and pumped his fist when he broke Chung’s serve in the first set to race to a 3-1 lead, ending the Korean’s streak of 27 consecutive holds of serve.

The 14th-seeded Isner cruised through the remainder of the 25 minute opener, in which he fired seven of his 13 aces.

The hour-long contest was all but over once Chung sent a forehand long in the fifth game of the second set to hand Isner another break and a 3-2 lead. The 21-year-old was unable to find an answer to Isner’s booming serve in a match where he failed to convert his only break point opportunity and was himself broken four times.

Isner added that the hot and windy condi-tions in Miami, where the courts are not par-ticularly fast but cause the ball to bounce high, suit his first-strike approach to the game perfectly.

South African sixth seed Kevin Anderson faces Spanish 16th seed Pablo Carreno Busta in the afternoon, before an evening match between German fourth seed Alexander Zverev and Croatian 29th seed Borna Coric.

Juan Martin Del Potro of Argentina returns a shot against Milos Raonic of Canada during their quarter-final match of the Miami Open at Crandon Park Tennis Center on Wednesday in Key Biscayne, Florida.

WTA AND ATP MIAMI OPEN RESULTS MENQUARTER-FINALSJohn Isner (USA x14) bt Chung Hyeon (KOR x19) 6-1, 6-4Juan Martin del Potro (ARG x5) bt Milos Raonic (CAN x20) 5-7, 7-6 (7/1), 7-6 (7/3)WOMENQUARTER-FINALSJelena Ostapenko (LAT x6) bt Elina Svitolina (UKR x4) 7-6 (7/3), 7-6 (7/5)Danielle Collins (USA) bt Venus Williams (USA x8) 6-2, 6-3

Unheralded Collins stuns Venus in quartersAFP

MIAMI: Danielle Collins produced the performance of a lifetime and pulled off an almighty shock at the WTA Miami Open on Wednesday, sending Venus Williams crashing out 6-2, 6-3 to reach the semi-finals.

It was an amazing effort from a 24 year-old qualifier in just her second season as a professional and her debut appearance at Key Biscayne.

This was the first time in two attempts Collins has beaten a top 10 player, and even the crestfallen world number eight Williams would find it impossible to admit Collins didn’t deserve to seal a meeting with French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko.

The previously unher-alded Collins, a Florida native who ended 2017 ranked 167TH but came into this tournament as the 93rd best player in the world, is cer-tainly having a March to remember.

As a wildcard she reached the round of 16 in Indian Wells and has gone far better here with a fantastic run to the last four having come through qualifying.

That eclipsed the previous best result by a qualifier, when Marion Bartoli made the last eight in 2003.

Despite playing six matches to Williams’ three, Collins came into this encounter having spent 24 minutes less on court than her American opponent (6 hours 58 minutes for Collins and 7 hours 22 for Williams).